G. B. Harrison
Introducing Shakespeare
Third Edition: revised and expanded
Penguin Books, Paperback, 1977.
12mo. 232 pp. Preface by the author [9]. Index [225-32]. 34 b/w plates.
First published, 1939.
Reprinted, 1941, 1948.
Revised edition, 1954.
Reprinted, 1957, 1959, 1962, 1963.
Third edition (revised and expanded), 1966.
Reprinted, 1968, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1977.
1. Shakespeare’s Fame
No household in the English-speaking world is properly furnished unless it
contains copies of the Holy Bible and of The Works of William Shakespeare. It
is not always thought necessary that these books should be read in maturer
years, but they must be present as symbols of Religion and Culture.
Shakespeare has not always been so symbolic a figure. He was once an actor
and playwright, when neither actors nor stage-plays were regarded as
respectable or of any importance. The notion that he was the supreme Genius of
English-Speaking Races did not begin until he had been dead more than a
century: but since then it has become so firmly accepted that no schoolboy can
avoid a detailed study of at least one of his plays.
Nevertheless, the first public notice of Shakespeare was hostile and
unkind. In the autumn of 1592, Robert Greene, the most popular author of his
generation, lay penniless and dying. Greene was a Cambridge man who had written
several successful plays. The players had grown rich on the products of his
brain, and now he was deserted and alone. He wrote a letter to three of his
friends who had likewise helped to make the fortunes of the players, warning
them to avoid his misfortunes. ‘It is not strange, that I, to whom they all
have been beholding, is it not like you to whom they all have been beholding,
shall (were ye in that case as I am now) be both at once of them forsaken?’
There was a greater grievance. ‘Yes, trust them not,’ Greene went on, ‘for
there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s hide*,
supposes he is as well able to bombast a blank verse as the best of you: and
being an absolute Johannes factotum,
is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.’
*A parody of a striking line in III
Henry VI (i, iv, 137) – ‘Oh tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide.’
At this time Shakespeare was only a beginner. The Henry the Sixth plays, particularly the First Part (which was first
produced in March 1592) achieved considerable success, but none of the plays
which made him famous had yet been written.
Six years later, in 1598, an earnest young student named Francis Meres
produced a book called Palladis Tamia,
an elaborate volume of what he called ‘Similitudes’. It was an anthology of
specimens of fine writing culled from more than a hundred and fifty authors. To
this he added a chapter entitled ‘A Comparative Discourse of our English poets
with the Greek, Latin and Italian poets.’ Shakespeare was easily his favourite
among amongst English authors, praised as one of eight by whom ‘the English
tongue is mightily enriched, and gorgeously invested in rare ornaments and
resplendent habiliments.’ He was one of six who had raised monumentum aere perennius; one of five who excelled in lyric
poetry; one of thirteen ‘our best for tragedy’; one of seventeen ‘best for
comedy’. Moreover, Meres picked him out for special mention, not given to the
others:
As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so
the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued
Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis,
his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets
among his private friends, &c.
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and
Tragedy among the Latins: so Shakespeare among the English is the most
excellent in both kinds for the stage. For Comedy, witness his Gentlemen of
Verona, his Errors, his Love’s Labour Lost, his Love’s Labour Won*, his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of
Venice; for Tragedy, his Richard the
2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4,
King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo
and Juliet.
As Epius Stolo said, that the Muses would speak with Plautus’
tongue, if they would speak Latin; so I say that the Muses would speak with
Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase, if they would speak English.
*Love’s Labour Won – unless
another title for an existing play – has been lost.
Fourteen years later Shakespeare, now one of the older generation of
dramatists, had lost something of his popularity. When John Webster published
his play The White Devil (1612) he
wrote a preface in which, by the way, he praised
that full and heightened style of Master Chapman, the laboured
and understanding works of Master Jonson, the no less worthy composures of the
both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher, and lastly
(without wrong last to be named) the right happy and copious industry of M.
Shakespeare, M. Dekker, and M. Heywood.
In 1623 (seven years after Shakespeare’s death), appeared the First Folio –
the first collection of his plays in one volume. It was prefaced by various
tributes in verse, including a full-dress memorial Ode by Ben Jonson,
magnificently superlative. In his private conversation Jonson was more
critical. In the Discoveries, a
collection of notes and jottings, posthumously published in 1641, he recorded:
I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour
to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted
out line. My answer hath been, Would he had blotted a thousand. Which they
thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their
ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he
most faulted. And to justify mine own candour, (for I loved the man, and do
honour his memory (on this side of Idolatry) as much as any). He was (indeed)
honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent phantasy; brave
notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility, that
sometime it was necessary he should be stopped: Sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in
his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into
those things, could not escape laughter: As when he said in the person of
Caesar, one speaking to him: Caesar, thou
dost me wrong. He replied: Caesar did
never wrong, but with just cause:
and such like; which were ridiculous. But
he redeemed his vices, with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be
praised, than to be pardoned.
In Julius Caesar, the passage as
printed in the First Folio reads:
Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied.
Either Jonson misquoted, or more probably Shakespeare heeded Jonson’s
censure.
In 1668 Dryden published his famous critical dialogue, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy. Shakespeare had
now been dead fifty-two years, and during this time a second and a third
edition of the Folio appeared. He was no longer a modern but not yet a classic
whose perennial quality was finally established. Dryden’s estimate, expressed
in the dialogue, was:
To begin then with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Modern
and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the
Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously,
but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it
too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater
commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of Books
to read Nature: he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is
everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the
greatest of Mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his Comic wit degenerating
into clenches, his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is always great, when
some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit
subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of Poets,
Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.
The consideration of this made Mr Hales of Eaton say, That there was no
subject of which any Poet ever writ, but he would produce it much treated of in
Shakespeare; and however others are now generally preferred before him, yet the
Age wherein he lived, which had contemporaries with him Fletcher and Jonson,
never equalled them to him in their esteem: And in the last King’s Court, when
Ben’s reputation was at its highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the
greater part of the Courtiers, set our Shakespeare far above him.
Forty-one years later – in 1709 – Shakespeare was at length established as
a classic when Nicholas Rowe, a Restoration dramatist, brought out the firs
edited collection of his plays. Shakespeare was now sufficiently ancient for
the public to need some information about him, and the taste of readers of
plays had grown so much nicer than the earlier and simpler methods of printing
were unacceptable. Rowe added to his edition a short biographical introduction
and some commendations of the passages which he most admired. He also
considerably revised the text, adding place headings to the scenes and new
stage directions. He was largely responsible for the form in which
Shakespeare’s plays are normally printed.
After Rowe, complete editions of the plays followed each other quickly, the
most famous ones being those by Alexander Pope, 1723–5; Theobald, 1733; Hanmer,
1743–4; Dr Johnson, 1765; Edmund Malone, 1790. Between 1709 and 1799 no less
than sixty editions of the plays, of all kinds including reprints, appeared.
During this century Shakespeare’s reputation rapidly increased. Pope,
though he was severe on Shakespeare’s delinquencies – as he regarded them – was
enthusiastic:
If ever any Author deserved the name of an Original, it was
Shakespeare. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains
of Nature, it proceeded through Egyptian strainers and channels, and came to
him not without some tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, of
those before him. The Poetry of Shakespear was Inspiration indeed: he is not so
much an Imitator, as an Instrument, of Nature; and ‘tis not so just to say that
he speaks for her, as that she speaks through him.
His Characters are so much Nature her self, that ‘tis sort of
injury to call them by so distant a name as Copies of her. Those of other Poets
have a constant resemblance, which shows that they received them from one
another, and were but multipliers of the same image: each picture like a
mock-rainbow is but the reflection of a reflection. But every single character
in Shakespear is as much an Individual, as those in Life itself; it is as
impossible to find any two alike; and such as from their relation or affinity
in any respect appear most to be Twins, will upon comparison be found
remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of Character, we must add the
wonderful Preservation of it; which is such throughout his plays, that had all
the Speeches been printed without the very names of the Persons, I believe one
might have applied them with certainty to every speaker.
[...]
Dr Johnson wrote his famous Preface to Shakespeare in 1765. Johnson never
praised extravagantly, and he criticized freely. Shakespeare by this time was
indisputably a classic, or as Johnson sonorously put it –
The Poet, of whose works I have undertaken the revision, may
now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of
established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his century,
the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit. Whatever advantages he
might once derive from personal allusions, local customs, or temporary
opinions, have for many years been lost; and every topic of merriment or motive
of sorrow, which the modes of artificial life afforded him, now only obscure
the scenes which they once illuminated. The effects of favour and competition
are at an end; the tradition of his friendships and his enemies has perished;
his works support no opinion with arguments, nor supply any faction with
invectives; they can neither indulge vanity nor gratify malignity, but they are
read without any other reason than the desire of pleasure, and are therefore
praised only as pleasure is obtained; yet, thus unassisted by interest or
passion, they have passed through variations of taste and changes of manners,
and, as they devolved from one generation to another, have received new honours
at every transmission.
[...]
Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern
writers, poet of nature: the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful
mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs
of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the
peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers;
or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the
genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and
observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of
those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the
whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a
character is all too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is
commonly a species.
[...]
With the turn of the century, and that revolution of interest not always
very happily called the Romantic Revival, criticism of Shakespeare changed its
tone. Shakespeare was no longer a great English dramatist, a faulty genius; he
grew into a godlike figure. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was principally responsible
for this conception.
[...]
For a century after Coleridge it was still the fashion for those who spoke
of Shakespeare in public to adopt the hushed tone and heightened phrases
appropriate to a religious occasion.
To Coleridge Shakespeare was not so much a writer of plays as an emanation
of the Godhead. Not much had been added to the knowledge of Shakespeare’s
biography since Rowe’s day, and critics, romantically inclined, created their
own image of a suitable Shakespeare. To Thomas Carlyle, in his quest for
Heroes, Shakespeare was the Peasant Who Became a Prophet.
Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare may recognize
that he too was a Prophet, in his
way; of an insight analogous to the Prophetic, though he took it up in another
strain. Nature seemed to this man also divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven; ‘We are such stuff as Dreams
are made of!’ That scroll in Westminster Abbey, which few read with
understanding, is of the depth of any Seer...
Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be
Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of
Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to
him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account him a god, like Odin,
while he dwelt with us; – on which point there were much to be said. But I will
say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state Hero-worship now lies in,
consider what this Shakespeare has actually become among us. Which Englishman
we ever made, in this land of ours, which million of Englishmen, would we not
give up rather than the Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest
Dignitaries that we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing we have yet
done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to our English
Household, what item is there that we would not surrender rather than him?
Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your Indian Empire or your
Shakespeare, you English; never have had any Indian Empire, or never have had
any Shakespeare? Really it were a grave question. Official persons would answer
doubtless in official language; but we, for our part too, should not we be
forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without
Shakespeare! Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare
does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our Shakespeare.
This was written in 1840.
By 1875 the Great Figure had declined somewhat in stature. He was still
romantic, but at least human. Scholars had been at work on Shakespeare’s plays
and the order of their writing was fairly accurately established. In Shakespeare, His Mind and Art, Edward
Dowden made popular the notion that Shakespeare’s plays show the development of
his personality and reflect his private emotional life.
By the end of the century new materials for reconstructing Shakespeare’s biography
had accumulated, and were assembled in the Life
of William Shakespeare by Sidney Lee, which for thirty years was regarded
as the official biography. Lee had no romantic notions. He refused to believe
that the personality of Shakespeare could be deduced from his works, and so,
falling back on external facts of biography, he concluded that Shakespeare was
a fine specimen of the Industrious Boy Who Got On.
Lee’s Life of Shakespeare first
appeared in 1898. It was often reprinted and enlarged until it became a portly,
impressive volume; but the critical reader on closer study found that many of
his pronouncements were not statements of proved fact but guesses. After a
while an acute scepticism developed when on page after page confident
statements were qualified with ‘there is little room for doubt’, ‘it was
doubtless’, ‘it is possible’. Hence there arose a reaction against all
biographies of Shakespeare and a general feeling that, after all, nothing was
really known about him.
Lee’s Life was superseded in 1930
by E. K. Chambers’ two volumes, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts
and Problems. This work was not so much a
biography, as a monumental collection of every document, fact, and legend
connected with Shakespeare, and, with its four-volume predecessor, The Elizabethan Stage, gave students a set of invaluable reference books.
[...]
In the 1920s critics of Shakespeare were much affected by the new interest
in the Elizabethan theatre. His plays were now regarded less as masterpieces of
universal wisdom than as works to be performed in the peculiar conditions of
the Globe playhouse.
Of critics of this kind, by far the most important was Harley
Granville-Barker. Granville-Barker was uniquely equipped to write about
Shakespeare the dramatist. Early in the century as a young professional actor
he made his name in some of Shaw’s comedies; he wrote successful plays; and in
1911–13 he directed London productions of The
Winter’s Tale, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, and Twelfth Night which
revolutionized the staging of Shakespeare’s plays for a generation. Before that
time a Shakespearean play was usually staged with elaborate scenery and an
almost ritualistic kind of acting and diction, while the text was cut and
rearranged to suit the performance. Barker substituted a simple but beautiful
set so designed that the plays were acted rapidly and without cuts or
alterations; and he insisted that his actors bring out the full effect of the
poetry and the meaning of every word.
In the 1920s Barker turned critic and began a series of Prefaces in each of which he studied a
single play as a work to be produced on the stage – its total effect, the
nature of the characters and the interpretation of the part, the texture of the
poetry, and the harmony of the whole production. He thus stressed Shakespeare
the practical man of the theatre. Granville-Barker’s ten Prefaces are a rare combination of scholarship, intimate knowledge
of the theatre and the actor’s profession, and artistic intuition.
Other developments followed. In the 1930s there was a new zeal for a close
and detailed study of Shakespeare’s actual poetic technique. It varied from the
elaborate card-indexing of Shakespeare’s poetic imagery adopted by Caroline
Spurgeon in Shakespeare’s Imagery
(1934) to the personal and subjective essays of G. Wilson Knight in The Wheel of Fire, The Imperial Theme, and other volumes, a process which he calls
‘interpretation’.
This kind of study is primarily concerned with style as a revelation of
personality. Great poets are individuals both in personality and in expression.
Poetic style consists – apart from the content – largely of individual rhythms,
and more particularly of an individual use of myths, symbols, and images (which
used to be called ‘metaphors’ and ‘similes’). A poet’s metaphors spring from
his personality and experience. A bookish poet, such as Milton or Pope, draws
most of his images from the books that he has read: he and his readers take an
acute pleasure in these literary echoes. Less learned and more original poets
use images which spring from their own personal experience or, to quote
Caroline Spurgeon, the poet
may be, and in Shakespeare’s case is, almost entirely
objective in his dramatic characters and their views and opinions, yet , like
the man who under stress of emotion will show no sign of it in eye or face, but
will reveal it in some muscular tension, the poet unwittingly lays bare his own
innermost likes and dislikes, observations and interests, associations of
thought, attitudes of mind and beliefs, in and through the images, the verbal
pictures he draws to illuminate something quite different in the speech and
thought of his characters.
Caroline Spurgeon sought to display Shakespeare’s personality and her
method was to card-index, analyse, and tabulate all Shakespeare’s images, and,
as part of the process, to analyse the imagery used by other Elizabethan
dramatists. The result was to confirm certain impressions: that Shakespeare has
far more images drawn from sport than other dramatists, that Marlowe’s imagery
is predominantly drawn from the classics, and so forth. It is a fascinating
pastime, and one of the few forms of literary research that can be carried out
at home. One requires only a volume of Shakespeare’s plays and a number of
cards for the card-index.
The values and limitations of this kind of study lie in its being
objective. An absolutely mechanical scientific collection of such statistics
reveals many of the processes of the human mind which would escape notice
altogether in ordinary reading. It cannot be carried too far, for a poetic
image is not a simple or mechanical expression but, especially in Shakespeare’s
later period, a fusion of all kinds of sparkling ideas. Often it is quite
impossible to separate the particular images in a clot of images such as:
Come thick Night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, hold, hold.
In this passage neither knife nor
blanket can suitably be classified
under ‘Images drawn from domestic articles’.
Nevertheless, within reason, a study of imagery gives results similar to
chemical analysis. A study of Shakespeare’s imagery reveals many of his
experiences, but not how and when he came by them.
[...]
Unfortunately there are no notebooks for Shakespeare, and any deductions must
be largely guesswork. One cannot even tell whether an image is negative or
positive. A man may be full of images of sport either because he is himself a
great sportsman, or because he is feeble-bodied and admires those of better
physique. Sports writers are not necessarily expert sportsmen. Nor are those
who make a particular study of Shakespeare’s imagery agreed amongst themselves.
Once, having a private theory of my own, based on the fact that
Shakespeare’s images drawn from the sea and war indicated that at some time or
other he had seen war and the sea at first hand, I put it to two authorities*
on Shakespearean imagery. I asked each of them the same question: ‘Do you, from
your intensive study of Shakespeare’s imagery, gather that he had personal experience
of the sea?’ The one replied, ‘Of course’; and the other, ‘Certainly not’.
*G. Wilson Knight and Caroline Spurgeon.
From this one can deduce that, just as a poetic image from a poet’s
experience, which includes the books that he has read, so also the perception
of an image and of its significance by readers or hearers comes from their
experience. Unless the critic has known the same kind of experiences as the
author he will miss many images and their significance. Miss Spurgeon, for
instance, was unaware of many of the images recorded in Eric Partridge’s Shakespeare’s Bawdy.
[...]
In this kind of interpretation scholarship is important, for until the
reader himself has some knowledge of Elizabethan idiom – and this requires
considerable knowledge of the Elizabethan background – he cannot appreciate the
full meaning of many Elizabethan images. Macbeth, for instance, returning from
the murder of Duncan with his hands covered with blood, and dazed with horror
at what he has seen and done, murmurs:
One cried God bless us, and Amen the other,
As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands.
To a modern reader there is no reason why a hangman should have unclean
hands; it would show a lack of delicacy for him to exercise his sordid
profession unwashed. But to Shakespeare’s audience the phrase has a ghastly
significance; in executions for treason – and there had been several just
before Macbeth was written – it was
the hangman’s business to tear out the victim’s entrails before hacking the
body into quarters.
From her collections of images, Caroline Spurgeon was also able to
demonstrate that ‘clusters’ of significant images appear in different plays; Hamlet is full of images of ulcers and
diseases, Romeo and Juliet of images
of light, Macbeth of images of
clothing, ill-fitting and stolen, as if Macbeth had assumed garments which were
too big for him.
To a scientifically minded generation these discoveries were exciting.
Here, at first sight, had appeared a method for examining the plays and the
mental processes of this author which was objective, and based on verifiable
evidence. Critics, steeped in the newer psychological methods which ultimately
derived from the psychoanalytic school of Sigmund Freud, proceeded to
demonstrate all kinds of subconscious symbols, significances, and patterns of
thought and expression which would reveal Shakespeare’s soul. In this kind of
examination, one of the most successful was R. B. Heilman’s This Great Stage (1948), an elaborate
study of the ‘patterns’ in King Lear.
Shakespeare’s plays were thus once more removed from the Elizabethan stage
and brought back into the library (and the laboratory), for this intricate
relationship of images and ideas can only be perceived in leisurely study.
Shakespeare the poet and philosopher was once more exalted while Shakespeare
the practical actor-playwright was ignored. If Shakespeare was himself aware of
the patterns of imagery which his modern critics have discovered, and
deliberately used such symbolism as part of the dramatic structure of his
plays, it follows that the more intelligent members of his audiences must have
been acutely sensitive, for it is not easy to perceive such subtleties when
watching a play wherein the words are spoken rapidly and the action is quick,
vivid, and noisy. If so, it should increase our respect for the intelligence of
the Elizabethan theatre-goers.
In the last thirty years there has been such a mass of critical writing*
that no short account can be given of individual works, but the general reader
can find guidance in the annual summaries of the new work given in The Shakespeare Survey. Nor need he be
depressed at the thought that to read Shakespeare’s plays he must first study a
thousand works of scholarship and criticism. Indeed, he will be best advised to
begin by ignoring everything but the play itself. Only when he is entirely
familiar with a play can he find enlightenment in a critic. Later, his
understanding and delight may be increased by more specialized study, for
modern scholarship and criticism have become an affair for experts. Introducing Shakespeare aims rather at
giving that minimum of preparation which will help him towards an enjoyable
first reading.
*For the year 1965 alone the annual bibliography in The Shakespeare Quarterly recorded 1,807 items.
2. Materials for the Life of Shakespeare
To those who have never studied Elizabethan records at first hand it may
seem surprising and mysterious that there should be a dearth of intimate
information about Shakespeare: so famous an Englishman, and such an
unsatisfactory biography! Yet there is no mystery, for even in the lives of the
greatest and most spectacular persons of the time there are many gaps.
There have been many lives of Queen Elizabeth I, each giving a somewhat
different or even contradictory interpretation; but two of the most important
facts about her are unknown or disputable. She was certainly the daughter of
the Lady Anne Boleyn; but was her father Henry VIII (as is generally believed),
or was he – as her sister Mary declared – Mark Smeaton, the musician who was
afterwards executed on the charge of committing adultery with the Lady Anne? And
again, was Elizabeth indeed the Virgin Queen? or was she, as Ben Jonson
gossiped with William Drummond, one who tried many men for her pleasure? Unless
there is a certain answer to such questions, any attempt to write a biography
must in part at least be conjecture or historical fiction.
Nowadays it is easy to compile the biography of a modern dramatist. The
essential facts of his life, his birth, his progress at school, at the
university, and elsewhere, his marriage, and his death, are available in public
records. While he is alive a number of the facts of his life are given Who’s Who. His plays, as they come out,
are noticed in newspapers and periodicals, and a little research in the files
shows when the run of any particular play began and ended. He writes letters,
which are carefully preserved, for the letters of eminent authors are
commercially valuable. When he dies journalists and critics hasten to write to
obituary notices and to record their impressions of his personality. Enough
material is thus provided for anyone to write quite a considerable Life.
Little of this material remains for the biographer of dramatists of the
seventeenth century. The parish registers record the dates of baptism,
marriage, and burial, but many of the registers are lost. There were no
newspapers, very few diaries, and few individuals wrote chatty letters. Players
and dramatists were regarded as persons of dubious standing, about whom no one
was likely to be much interested unless they were concerned with some scandal
or were made the victims of some scurrilous joke.
Moreover, literary persons are seldom spectacular. The man who leads a life
of heroic action has neither the time, nor usually the desire, to express
himself in writing. Those who gallop down valleys of death seldom sing about
their experiences; they leave it to poets living placidly in country rectories
or suburban lodgings to write glorious and heroic ballads, as The Charge of the Light Brigade, or Ye Mariners of England. To be a great
writer a man must spend much of his time at a table in the laborious act of
writing, which is neither an exciting nor a spectacular occupation. Unless a
writer of former days leaves a diary, or (like Keats) writes many letters which his friends keep, or attracts a biographer
(as Dr Johnson attracted Boswell), or meets a note-taker (as Ben Jonson met
William Drummond of Hawthornden), or (like Christopher Marlowe) is in trouble
with the authorities, the interesting details of his life vanish as soon as
those who knew them die. Even today, when a literary man has news value, most
of his readers know little more of him than can be amply contained on a
postcard.
There is a special difficulty in trying to write a life of Shakespeare. For
the past hundred years and more a belief has been expressed by various
enthusiasts that Shakespeare’s plays were not really written by William
Shakespeare but by Francis Bacon, or by Christopher Marlowe, or by Edward de
Vere, Earl of Oxford, or by Queen Elizabeth, or by William Stanley, Earl of
Derby, or by some other. These agnostics usually call themselves ‘Anti-Stratfordians’.
It is, however, a fact that so far no reputable scholar with first-hand
knowledge of the Elizabethan Age and its literature has ever supported the
claim; but the argument has long been so highly charged with emotion that even
the driest of experts can hardly ignore the Anti-Stratfordians. An objective
account of what is really known about Shakespeare may, perhaps, dispel some
fancies and fallacies.
[...]
The town records of Stratford-on-Avon show that Shakespeare’s family was of
good middle-class stock. Shakespeare was neither a ‘peasant’, nor a ‘village
lad’, nor ‘the Stratford clown’. Stratford-on-Avon in the sixteenth century was
a small but important country town, and John Shakespeare, his father, was one
of the wealthiest citizens who held in turn the chief municipal offices of the
place.
[...]
There are no records of his boyhood; it would be surprising if there were.
A good education was available at the grammar school, of which the masters were
competent scholars from Oxford. Unfortunately the early school records have
perished. Nor were the better-class inhabitants of Stratford either bookless or
illiterate. Several of Shakespeare’s younger contemporaries and friends of the
family went up to Oxford University.
[...]
It is not until 1592 that Shakespeare emerges as a person at the centre of
English life. He was then aged 28. Nor is this ignorance confined to
Shakespeare. Very little is known of what was happening in the Elizabethan
theatres before 1592, although at this time there were three London theatres
and several London companies, who must between them have been producing at
least fifty new platys a year. Yet of the plays written for the professional
companies between 1560 and 1590 less than half a dozen have survived in print.
Hitherto no one thought that such plays were worth printing, reading, or
recording. Critics assume that in the public theatres plays were crude doggerel
until Christopher Marlowe first showed his fellows how to write blank verse in Tamburlaine; they assume that Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Greene’s Friar Bacon were quite new kinds. It may well be so, but there is no
evidence. Accounts of what happened in the Elizabethan theatre before 1592 are,
in fact, guesswork; but from this date onwards detailed records begin, and the
development of English drama, though there are many gaps, can be traced.
From 1592 to 1602 Henslowe’s Diary
gives a fairly complete picture of theatrical conditions and of the output of
the companies with which he was connected. Unfortunately the Lord Chamberlain’s
Company, in which Shakespeare became a sharer, did not act in Henslowe’s
theatres, nor indeed did it come into existence until 1594.
[...]
These are but a selection of actual records of various kinds which mention
Shakespeare by name. They show that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon,
after a youth and early manhood spent no one knows where, became a successful
dramatist some time before the autumn of 1592; that in the autumn of 1594 he
was a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company which became the King’s Company
in 1603; that he wrote plays for his Company which were popular; that he
prospered and made money which he invested in property at Stratford; and that
he died and was buried in his native town. From these beginnings it is not
impossible to build up a fairly full biography, for the life of the dramatist
was bound up with the Company to which he belonged and for which he wrote his
plays.
Nevertheless, though many of the main facts of Shakespeare’s life and career
are clearly and indisputably established, the intimate details which might have
been recorded in letters, anecdotes, and sayings are lost. We can only know
Shakespeare from the outside. Perhaps it is better so. Few great works of art
are made more admirable by a candid biography of the author.
3. The Scholarly Approach to Shakespeare
[...]
Modern scholars, in studying Shakespeare’s plays, are concerned with a wide
variety of interests, which may be subdivided into three main branches of
study.
(a) The first consideration is to recreate the historical environment in
which Shakespeare’s plays were written. A working dramatist is concerned with
entertaining his audience, and all acted drama directly or indirectly reflects
the interests, taste, and ideas of the time of its first production. The events
great and small that were happening around Shakespeare are therefore directly
or indirectly part of his material. The scholar must know something of current
notions and topics, of wars, excitements, depressions, panics, revolutions,
scandals and gossip, of passing feelings and literary fashions, for fashions in
literature changed even more quickly in Shakespeare’s time than today. He must
be familiar with ideas then current of literary criticism, science, psychology,
history, morals, religion, theological controversy, astrology. All these
affected Shakespeare immediately; they passed through the filter of his
personality and were largely the material of his drama; for he, no less than
other dramatists, supplied the audience with thoughts that were immediately
interesting and exciting.
(b) As important for the understanding of drama is a study of the
conditions of dramatic production; the details of the construction,
arrangement, and conventions of the Elizabethan stage; the organization,
finances, and history of the dramatic companies; the actors themselves, their
styles and personalities; the audience and theatre-going public, its tastes and
prejudices. These and other kindred matters affect the writing and acting of a
play. All are relevant even to a most elementary understanding of Shakespeare’s
plays; had he written for a modern stage, the form and manner of his plays
would have been quite different.
(c) Shakespeare’s plays survive as printed texts. The conditions of
publication are therefore important. The scholar must first study the history
of a play’s script, and how Elizabethan plays were in fact written. He must
examine the earliest text to see whether there are traces of revision or
collaboration. He must know something of the methods of a printing-house, the
habits of the reading public, the ways of the censor and how he worked. He must
study the history of each play from the time when the author first wrote it
until, having passed through stage performance, it appeared as a printed
Quarto; what happened between the printing of the Quarto of an individual play
and the time when it was printed with the rest of the plays in the Folio of
1623; the changes that have occurred between the first printing of the Folio
and the modern text. All these factors will affect the printed text which the
reader of today uses, and which also gives the actor his lines for a
performance on the stage.
Moreover words are constantly changing their meanings. It is obvious, for
instance, at first reading that many of Shakespeare’s words conveyed an
essentially different meaning from modern usage. Since Shakespeare’s birth, and
especially in the first century thereafter, not only have new words been
adapted into English, but words used by Shakespeare have changed their meaning
and connotations. A first reading of Lear produces many words which send the
reader to the dictionary or the footnotes for enlightenment, such as character (handwriting), engine (lever), subscription (allegiance, or a name written at the foot of a
document), addition (a title added to
a man’s name, so honour), latched
(lanced, wounded), tax (censure), favour (face), fancy (love). Sometimes all the words are familiar but the sense
seems quite alien. When we are told of Lear that he has been ‘confined to
exhibition’, it does not mean ‘put in a cage like monkey’ but ‘limited to an
allowance of pocket money’. Or again, ‘equalities are so weigh’d, that
curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety’ – what does it mean?
[...]
In another direction modern scholarship has been profoundly affected by a
renewed interest in the study of early texts. The most stimulating pioneer work
here was by A. W. Pollard. In Shakespeare’s
Fight with the Pirates (1917) he showed that some of the earliest of
Shakespeare’s texts were often set up directly from Shakespeare’s own
manuscript by a printer who followed his copy closely. This, at the time, was a
revolutionary idea, for when Bradley produced his lectures [1904] it was
generally felt that the Shakespearean text had been established and was
unalterable. Generations of editors from the early eighteenth century onwards
had edited Shakespeare’s texts, emending difficult passages and formalizing
them, so that the Globe [1864] and Cambridge text was regarded as the
‘authorized version’ of Shakespeare. Now the new and exact study of
bibliography, exemplified in McKerrow’s edition of Nashe [1904], showed that
there was a wealth of interest in the detailed comparison and examination of
early texts. The result was that when scholars again began to look at the early
Quarto and Folio texts with respectful interest, and not merely to despise them
as the semi-literate efforts of bungling printers, all kinds of new discoveries
were made.
It is indeed a revelation to read a familiar play for the first time in a
Quarto or Folio text. The reader finds himself at once in the atmosphere of the
Globe Theatre. Most plays in the original texts have no scene divisions; many
even have no act divisions. There are none of those place headings which
editors have added – Act I, Scene i, A
Room in a Palace; Act IV, Scene iii, Another Part of the Field. These were
not noted in the original text because in the Elizabethan theatre there was no
scenery and little physical indication of a change of locality. The reader
realizes at once how editors have tampered with the original texts, sometimes
by brilliant guessing producing sense from corrupt passages, but more commonly
by erecting an eighteenth-century facade to an Elizabethan play.
Antony and Cleopatra is an extreme example of editorial method. The play is sometimes
criticized because there are too many scenes. Thus, in the Fourth Act there
are, according to the Globe text, no less than thirteen scenes:
i. Before Alexandria.
Caesar’s Camp.
ii. Alexandria. A Room
in the Palace.
iv. The Same. A room in
the Palace.
vi. Before Alexandria.
Caesar’s Camp.
vii. Field of Battle
between the Camps.
viii. Under the Walls of
Alexandria.
x. Between the two
Camps.
xi. Alexandria. A Room
in the Palace.
xii. The Same. Another
Room.
xiii. The Same. A
monument.
In the Folio text there are no scene divisions at all.
The old editorial principle was that when all characters have gone off the
stage a scene ends. A scene must take place somewhere. Therefore the place must
be indicated. But in Shakespeare’s play, as originally intended for the stage,
scenes were not place-scenes but rather person-scenes, and here at the crisis
of the fortunes of Antony, Caesar, and Cleopatra, Shakespeare shows how each
rises or declines at the supreme moment. In the Folio text there are therefore
no scene divisions, no place headings. The scenes, in fact, are concerned with
Caesar: Antony and Cleopatra: the common soldiers: Antony and Cleopatra:
Antony: Caesar: the battle: Antony and Cleopatra: Enobarbus: the defeat of
Antony: Cleopatra hearing the news: Antony’s attempt to stab himself:
Cleopatra’s distress: Antony’s death. Such a dramatic technique can be
understood only when we remember that the play is Elizabethan and written for
an Elizabethan stage. If Act IV is split into thirteen different localities,
then the attention of the reader or spectator is distracted from the persons to
the place, and the play becomes unreadable and unactable.
Another offence of editors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was
that they tampered with the punctuation and the arrangement of the lines. Often
they were justified, but their enthusiasm was excessive. Percy Simpson, in a
little book called Shakespearean
Punctuation (1911) first pointed out that the punctuation in the First
Folio was dramatic and not grammatical. In the Folio especially, and the
Quartos far more casually, the texts were punctuated for recitation. The
punctuation is not always consistent or sound, and it is very doubtful if
Shakespeare was responsible for it; but certainly the punctuation is contemporary
and inserted by those who knew and did their business well. Later editors, by
normalizing Shakespearean punctuation to modern grammatical usage, have wiped
out many of the original subtleties. In the best Folio texts we are not only in
imagination in the Globe Theatre but can also hear the speeches spoken as
Shakespeare’s actors delivered them.
Some examples will make this clear. The opening lines of Twelfth Night in
the accepted text are punctuated thus:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! It had a dying fall:
O! it came o’er mine ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.
In the Folio these lines are punctuated:
If Music be the food of Love, play on,
Give me excess of it: that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear, like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of Violets;
Stealing, and giving Odour.
Antony’s speech over Caesar’s corpse is punctuated in the accepted text:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious;
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest, –
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men, –
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept;
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious:
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it comes back to me.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious;
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest, –
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men, –
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept;
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious:
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it comes back to me.
In the Folio text the punctuation of the speech runs thus:
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears:
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him:
The evil that men do, lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar. The Noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was Ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus, and the rest
(For Brutus is an Honourable man,
So are they all; all Honourable men)
Come I to speak in Caesar’s Funeral.
He was my Friend, faithful, and just to me;
But Brutus says, he was Ambitious,
And Brutus is an Honourable man.
He hath brought many Captives home to Rome,
Whose Ransoms, did the general Coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem Ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff,
Yet Brutus says, he was Ambitious:
And Brutus is an Honourable man.
You all did see, that on the Lupercal,
I thrice presented him a Kingly Crown,
Which he did thrice refuse. Was this Ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was Ambitious:
And sure he is an Honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am, to speak what I do know;
You all did love him once, not without cause,
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O Judgement! thou art fled to brutish Beasts,
And Men have lost their Reason. Bear with me,
My heart is in the Coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause, till it comes back to me.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him:
The evil that men do, lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar. The Noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was Ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus, and the rest
(For Brutus is an Honourable man,
So are they all; all Honourable men)
Come I to speak in Caesar’s Funeral.
He was my Friend, faithful, and just to me;
But Brutus says, he was Ambitious,
And Brutus is an Honourable man.
He hath brought many Captives home to Rome,
Whose Ransoms, did the general Coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem Ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff,
Yet Brutus says, he was Ambitious:
And Brutus is an Honourable man.
You all did see, that on the Lupercal,
I thrice presented him a Kingly Crown,
Which he did thrice refuse. Was this Ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was Ambitious:
And sure he is an Honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am, to speak what I do know;
You all did love him once, not without cause,
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O Judgement! thou art fled to brutish Beasts,
And Men have lost their Reason. Bear with me,
My heart is in the Coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause, till it comes back to me.
The differences here are slight but subtle – just the difference between a
piece of music as played by an amateur and by a master.
The attitude of the scholar is, then, that Shakespeare was an Elizabethan
with the advantages and limitations of his age. His plays were subject to the
conditions of his times. He was, in short, a man who provided the plays for a
particular company of actors. It is a sound kind of study, revealing much and
vastly increasing the enjoyment of a play. Scholarship can be misused, and if
the scholar merely regards Shakespeare as an antiquity and forgets that he was
not much more than a man who wrote plays for an Elizabethan theatre, it is the
business of the critic and the director to correct that impression.
4. Shakespeare’s Age
Shakespeare was born in 1564, that is, five and a half years after
Elizabeth I became Queen. He belongs therefore to the third generation of the
Reformation in England. The Tudor dynasty, of which Elizabeth I was the last
and greatest, endured for 116 years. The Tudors, as we know realize, but as our
grandfathers did not, were totalitarian dictators of the kind so painfully
familiar in the history of the twentieth century. The first was Henry VII, the
final survivor of the bloody civil wars of the Roses which destroyed most of
the old medieval nobility in England (and which Shakespeare dramatized in his
series of History Plays from Richard the
Second to Richard the Third). In
1485 he won the English throne by contest, for he had small claim by birth. In
1509 he was succeeded by his eighteen-year-old son, Henry VIII, who was
responsible for the most far-reaching of all English revolutions – social,
religious, and economic, all inextricably mixed.
The religious revolution arose from Henry’s quarrel with the Pope. As a
young man, Henry had been married by special dispensation to Katherine of
Aragon. After seventeen years he was now tired of her and hotly in love with
the Lady Anne Boleyn. Henry demanded an annulment of his marriage. When, after
great delays it was clear that the Pope would not declare the marriage invalid,
Henry broke with Rome and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church in
England. Hereafter the Sovereign became the source of authority in all matters
of doctrine, interpretation of the Scriptures, discipline, and morals. Further,
he was persuaded by his then minister, Thomas Cromwell, to ‘dissolve’ (as the
historians euphemistically call it) the religious houses and to seize their vast
wealth. But the loot was not used for charitable purposes; the social
charities, such as schools and hospitals for the poor, mostly disappeared. Nor
was it used to strengthen the Crown. Most of it was acquired by the friends and
followers of Cromwell.
The changes caused by the upheaval were disastrous. The new rich were
demoralized by sudden chances of vast unearned wealth. The poor suffered most
because in the general grab they were victims of enclosures and exploitation.
It took several generations before a new stability was established. In many
ways, though the parallels should not be pushed too closely, the English
revolution of the first half of the sixteenth century was comparable to the
Nazi and Communist revolutions in the twentieth century.
[...]
The age of Shakespeare was thus uneasy, even if generous-minded historians
call it the ‘age of the “Renaissance”’, the ‘age of the emancipation of the
individual’ from ancient bondage. Individual Englishmen, however, were less
conscious of emancipation than of the dangers of failing to conform to the
official pattern of conduct and thought. Attendance of the services of the
Established Church of England was compulsory. Those who chose to obey their own
consciences – Catholics and to a lesser extent Puritans – were brutally
punished by fines, imprisonment, torture, and execution.
Moreover, the moral and psychological support once given by the Church was
destroyed. Before the Reformation, a man involved in personal and psychological
problems could find relief in confession and absolution. Now confession to a
priest was abolished – and psychiatry had not yet been established. Hamlet with
his broodings over man and the universe was a typical example of the
intellectual, trying to reconstruct from broken fragments a new moral order.
Nevertheless there was gain as well as loss. Having rejected the teaching
of the Church, the more enlightened of the reformers looked to education, which
meant the study of the classics of Greece and Rome, as the way of salvation.
Learning began with the training in languages given to boys in the grammar
schools, about which, as it happens, there is much information.
At Westminster, for instance, school started early. At six in the morning
the boys stood round their master repeating by heart eight or ten pages from
Lily’s Latin Grammar. They made
verses in Latin and Greek, extempore, on some given theme. They expounded some
passages from Cicero, Livy, Isocrates, Homer, Apollonius, Xenophon. After this
they adjourned for breakfast. At nine work prepared overnight was heard. Then
they practised dictamina – extempore
translation into Latin or Greek of some sentences (in the Elizabethan sense –
gems of wisdom or proverbs such as delighted the heart of Polonius). Next the
master himself expounded some part of a classic in prose or verse which the
boys were expected to be able to repeat in the afternoon when they went through
the passage, construing its grammatical parts, admiring the rhetorical figures,
or turning it from prose to verse or verse to prose. And, inevitably, they
learnt it by heart for regurgitation in the morning. The training was not all
so sterile or mechanical as it sounds, for if the tree is to be judged by its
fruits, then Shakespeare’s generation would seem to have profited by its
schooling. It taught a boy, and subsequently a man, to develop and use his
memory; it gave him a fine appreciation for language, read and heard.
Shakespeare wrote as he did, not only because he was taught the arts of
language at school, but because he had audiences who keenly appreciated the
finest speech, prose and verse.
Nor was the Elizabethan training in Latin and Greek confined to the
language. No one can read the great classics – Virgil, Livy, Cicero, Homer,
Caesar, Sallust, Demosthenes, Thucydides, or Xenophon – without achieving some
kind of insight into history, moral law, philosophy, civics, psychology, and
sociology. The Elizabethans had the keenest interest in these matters which
were not first discovered in the twentieth century. They recognized, and
stressed, that history was the record of moral law at work. This is the grand
theme of Shakespeare’s History Plays; and here, as usual, he is not the unique
exception but the reflection of a common interest.
Shakespeare’s History Plays thus meant far more to his first audiences than
they can to us, for they dealt with events which were still important.
Moreover, when the totalitarian state suppresses free comment on the present,
the re-creation of the past can often be consoling. Elizabeth’s Privy Council
was hypersensitive about history, and so greatly embarrassed by certain
historical parallels which were being made, that in June 1599 – midway in
Shakespeare’s career – they forbade all plays of English History. It was
probably not a coincidence that Shakespeare’s next play was the Roman tragedy
of Julius Caesar.
The London theatre was the only place where the common man could hear
direct and honest comment on life. Players, said Hamlet, are the abstract and
brief chronicles of the time. That also was the view of Queen Elizabeth; and
the history of the theatres shows that every few months a sensitive Government
peremptorily commanded them to be shut. Too saucy a play got the author into
trouble. Ben Jonson was in trouble at least four times for taking liberties.
When Essex’s followers were plotting their rebellion in February 1601, they
bribed Shakespeare’s Company to play Richard the Second as part of their
propaganda, for that play showed how a Sovereign, who was surrounded by favourites,
was overthrown and deposed by one whom he had wronged. Two years later, when
the Queen was dying, the first step take to guard against disorder was to shut
the playhouses.
The Elizabethan therefore went to the theatre with his ears open and his
wits keen to detect hidden meanings.
[...]
Next to the sovereign in the social order came the nobility. Shakespeare
and his fellows had ample knowledge of the haughty insolence of noblemen, for
players depended for their existence on the favour of their Lord whose licence
was their sole protection against mayor and other enemies of the drama.
Noblemen were created as a special mark of favour by a patent bestowed by the
Sovereign and sealed with the Grand Seal of England. They were beings apart and
treated with a ceremony less but similar to that used toward the Queen. They
had great estates and many servants but also great responsibilities for they
were expected to serve the state at their own expense as ambassadors
extraordinary, generals in the field, members of the Upper House of the
Parliament, and – most expensive of all – as hosts to the Queen when she made
her summer progress. It is, however, false romanticism to regard the
Elizabethan nobility as all descended from those who came over with William the
Conqueror; many of them owed their position to speculations in monastic land
made by their fathers and grandfathers.
Next to the nobility in the chain of order came the knights and gentlemen.
A man was made knight by the Sovereign in person or by her deputy, such as the
general on a campaign. Queen Elizabeth was very sparing in her knighthoods; and
it was one of the major causes of her anger with Essex that he was far too
generous in bestowing knighthoods when he was in command of her armies. When
King James came to the English throne, he was so lavish with knighthoods – he
made 900 knights in his firs year – that the title became a joke.
Next came the gentlemen. Legally a gentleman was a man of good birth and
independent means who was not employed in a gainful profession. Accordingly he
was expected to serve his poorer neighbours with public duties, as magistrate,
member of Parliament, or on one of the many local committees. In theory also a
man who made his money in trade or by using his hands was not a gentleman
because he was concerned with enriching himself not with serving the community.
Officially, a gentleman was one to whom the College of Heralds had granted a
coat of arms; but in fact a sufficient income has always been the most
important mark of an English gentleman. Shakespeare himself qualified as a
gentleman when in 1596 a grant of arms was made to his father; but there were
some who sneered that players were not fit persons to be included in the ranks
of the gentlemen.
As for the unnumbered poor, they were very poor, and their standard of
living was very low. A skilled workman in the City of London earned 10d. to
14d. a day. Food at first sight was much cheaper; butter sold at 4d. a lb. and
eggs at 7 to 2d., but 2d. was the wage for 2 hours work. Clothing was far more
expensive. Rents were comparatively cheap and servants could be hired for very
low wages.
Family life was far more important than today. Most men and women lived and
died in the same town or village where they had been born. The father was the
head of the family and its ruler. His absolute right to dispose of his
daughters in marriage was indeed questioned but the picture of the Capulet
family is not far from the fact. In his own eyes Old Capulet is a considerate
father. When the question of Juliet marrying Paris is first discussed, he is
willing at least to let the girl have the choice of refusing; it is not until
she becomes impudent that he issues commands.
In Shakespeare’s plays there is little trace of any real understanding
between the generations or of family affection. Polonius and Brabantio have
small regard for their daughters. Even Prospero, though certainly fond of
Miranda, is hardly a companionable father; and Lear for all of his deep love for
Cordelia has to learn a bitter lesson before their love has any kind of
equality. Children were brought up to fear and respect their parents, and to
show it by their attitude. A son called his father ‘Sir’ and stood in his
presence. The power, might, and authority of the father were thus recognized as
part of the social order.
[...]
It is a mistake to suppose that every Elizabethan husband was a brute or a
cuckold, and every wife either a trodden worm, a wanton, or a shrew. History is
the record of the abnormal, not of the day-to-day decencies of home life, just
as drama to be dramatic portrays the unusual, even in comedy. Shakespeare’s
plays are seldom pictures of life as it was in the sixteenth century.
[...]
Many other matters affected Shakespeare’s audiences and are reflected in
his plays. There is a popular fallacy that the reign of Elizabeth I was, apart
from the Spanish Armada in 1588, a time of peace and smiling plenty. Actually
the first half of Shakespeare’s working life – from the beginning to Hamlet and Othello – was overshadowed by a war which seemed interminable.
[...]
Another Spanish Armada was reported at sea; but as in ’88 the storms were
too much for them and none of the ships reached England. It was at this time
that Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV was
first played to audiences largely of returned soldiers, and Falstaff and his
gang first appeared on the stage.
The war with Spain languished in 1598, but in Ireland the situation
suddenly became desperate. The Irish rose under Hugh O’Neil, Earl of Tyrone,
slaughtered most of the English garrison, and for a while it seemed that
Ireland would be lost. In this rising Edmund Spenser was forced to run for his
life; he died soon after of the hardships he had suffered.
In 1599 Essex was sent to Ireland with the largest and best-equipped army
that left England during the reign – an even to which Shakespeare refers in Henry V (v, Prologue, 30). Essex failed
miserably and by September he was back in England in disgrace. He never
recovered the favour of the Queen, and eighteen months later he made his futile
rebellion.
In 1600, there was war on two fronts. English troops were aiding the Dutch,
and in Ireland Lord Mountjoy was trying to restore order. The war was at its
worst in 1601, though at the end of the year the tide turned and decisive
victories in both fields offered some hope of an end to the troubles. The war
with Spain came finally to an end in 1603 when the old Queen died. Wars were
personal quarrels of sovereigns; and her successor, James of Scotland, was at
peace with Spain.
War thus touched everyone. There was a continual demand for soldiers from
the City and the counties, and money had to be raised by special taxes. Several
of the most famous writers had first-hand experience of campaigning. Donne, Spenser,
Campion, Lodge, Jonson all served at some time. Small wonder that there are so
many soldier characters in Shakespeare’s plays, and of all types and ranks. Generals
such as Othello, Henry V, and Coriolanus; commanders in plenty in the History
Plays; doughty fighters such as Hotspur and Hector; competent company
commanders such as Fluellen and Gower; and the unscrupulous rogues who pester
every army – Falstaff, Pistol, Parolles, Bardolph, and the rest. There is no
record that Shakespeare was ever a soldier in his earlier manhood; but he
certainly had a knowledge of soldiers and their ways which is far beyond that
which comes to most civilians.
Queen Elizabeth died in the early hours of 24 March 1603, having reigned 44
years and 5 months. ‘About 10 o’clock,’ noted the Lady Anne Clifford in her
diary, ‘King James was proclaimed in Cheapside by all the Council with great
joy and triumph. I went to see and hear. This peaceable coming in of the King
was unexpected of all sorts of people.’ Similarly Sir Roger Wilbraham recorded
the Queen’s death in his journal ‘whereupon the people both in city and
counties, finding the just fear of 40 years for want of a known successor
dissolved in a minute, did so rejoice as few wished the gracious Queen alive
again.’
The Queen’s death was in many ways the end of an age. Though it is
customary to regard Shakespeare as primarily an ‘Elizabethan’, actually the
greatest of his plays were written for the pleasure of King James I, who was a
far more enthusiastic patron of the drama than his predecessor.
The coming of the new King brought changes to others beside his new players
and his now unemployed soldiers. For the first time since Henry VIII, there was
a royal family at Court, and royal children – young Henry, the Hope of England,
Elizabeth, a real fairy princess who inherited the charm of her grandmother
Mary Queen of Scots, and little Charles, an undersized backward boy.
But James, though a man of considerable learning and real intelligence (for
which he seldom gets credit), was not well suited to play the part of God’s
Immediate Deputy on Earth. To be successful a dictator needs certain qualities:
a personal dignity, and a presence that inspires fear in his servants. James
did not possess these gifts and his Court life and public administration soon
degenerated. There had been scandals in the court of Elizabeth, but at least
there was outward decorum, and official salaries were punctually paid. Under
James the old restraints soon broke down and the scandals at Court were
unseemly and outrageous.
There is a famous account of the goings-on in the summer of 1606 when James
entertained his royal brother-in-law, the King of Denmark, on a state visit.
Hamlet had some hard remarks about the drunkenness of the Danes; that judgement
was amply demonstrated. The worst and most memorable occasion was when Robert
Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, entertained the two Kings at Theobalds with a
symbolic Masque of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon.
The lady playing the Queen of Sheba was so drunk that in coming up to his
Danish Majesty she tripped over the stairs and upset a tray of wines, jellies,
and cream into the royal lap. When the King had been mopped up, he rose and
attempted to dance, but he fell down and was carried off to bed. Other ladies
enacting Faith, Hope, and Charity were in a like condition, and were led away
protesting to sleep, or to quarrel, or to vomit in the outer Hall.
Shakespeare and his Company were among those who contributed to the
entertainments, and they heard the disgusted comments of older courtiers. It is
hardly surprising that in the later plays of Shakespeare and others there
should be found a feeling, fairly often expressed, that Court life was
essentially rotten, and a nostalgic desire to escape into the country.
But an age should not be judged solely by its noisier scandals. In many
families there was a graciousness of living not seen before, and seldom since,
as in the home life of John Milton with his parents (but not, it may be added,
in the home life of Milton with his own wives or children), or of George
Herbert and his mother, or in the praises of childhood in the writings of
Vaughan, Traherne, or Earle, all of whom were raised in the first quarter of
the seventeenth century.
A knowledge and understanding of the social and historical background adds
vastly to the immediate and remote enjoyment of Shakespeare’s plays. We learn to
see and to read them with the understanding of a contemporary. It does more; it
adds to our understanding of humanity. There are many other ways of studying
Shakespeare. A great artist transcends his own generation. Nevertheless the
nearer we can come to Shakespeare in his own times, the fuller our enjoyment of
what he wrote.
8. The Development of Shakespeare’s Style
When Shakespeare began to write for the stage the standard of acting was
set by Edward Alleyn, and of plays by those who wrote for him, especially
Marlowe, Greene, and Kyd. Alleyn’s most popular plays were Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Jew of Malta, Greene’s Orlando
Furioso and Friar Bacon, and
Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy.
[...]
At first Shakespeare admired the current fashions. He revelled in mere
words, their sound, colour, and glitter. He was at his best in comedy and he
liked rhyme, for he often moved more freely within the restrains of rhyme than
in the freer blank verse. Comedy was still his natural outlet. It gave him the
chance of choosing words and phrases with an ease and subtlety which, though
this kind of cleverness has long passed out of fashion, no one else ever
touched. It is shown at its best in Love’s Labour Lost in such a speech as the
defence of ‘barbarism’ which he gave to Berowne, a bubbling, many-coloured
cascade of words. The thought is simple: that those who neglect everything for
the sake of learning and never fall in love, miss more than they gain by their
studies. In this speech he takes up the idea of light and darkness, to juggle
with them in dazzling display of verbal trickery:
Why! all delights are vain, and that most vain
Which with pain purchas’d, doth inherit pain,
As painfully to pore upon a book,
To seek the light of truth, while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look:
Light seeking light, doth light of light beguile:
So ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Study me how to please the eye indeed,
By fixing it upon a fairer eye,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed,
And give him light that it was blinded by.
Study is like the heaven’s glorious Sun,
That will not be deep-search’d with saucy looks:
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others’ books.
These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights,
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights,
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
Too much to know, is to know nought but fame:
And every godfather can give a name.
The four-fold ‘light’, each with a slightly different meaning, in
Light seeking light, doth light of light beguile,
is an amazingly clever trick.
The outburst is neither profound thought nor good drama, for everything
must stand still until Berowne has finished. It is the sheer exuberance of an
athlete who has discovered that he can play what game he likes with words. Yet
the speech itself is significant. It is the answer of the ‘upstart crow’, whose
Latin was little and Greek less, to those intellectual snobs who believed that
all learning lived in books. Shakespeare’s lack of book-learning was a blessing.
When he needed a simile or an image he found it in his own experience and not
in his reading.
[...]
Shakespeare’s earliest style is quite distinguishable. His rhythms are
regular; rhymes are common, used sometimes in alternate lines, more often in couplets.
Occasionally he even inserts a sonnet into the dialogue. In the comedies there
is much clever language, especially when young gentlemen are talking (which is
sometimes tedious, for wit changes fashion quickly), and an excessive
outpouring of ‘three-piled hyperboles’; imagery is often used for its own sake
and not to clarify or intensify a thought. In tragedy, and especially
historical tragedy, Shakespeare was often bombastic and speeches were more
heroic than suited the occasion. Shakespeare was still more interested in fine
writing than in drama.
The best and the worst traits of his immature style are to be seen in the
finest of his early plays, Romeo and
Juliet. Lady Capulet urges Juliet to fall in love with Count Paris in a
speech which for twelve lines plays with the far-fetched conceit that Paris is
a book:
Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face,
And find delight, writ there with beauty’s pen,
Examine every married lineament,
And see how one another lends content:
And what obscur’d in this fair volume lies,
Find written in the margent of his eyes.
This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
To beautify him, only lacks a cover:
The fish lives in the sea, and ‘tis much pride
For fair without, the fair within to hide:
That book in many’s eyes doth share the glory
That in gold clasps locks in the golden story:
So shall you share all that he doth possess,
By having him, making yourself no less.
This is tediously clever.
Later Juliet, impatiently waiting for night and Romeo, breaks out into a lyric
ecstasy which is just as elaborately poetical, but yet perfect:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus’ lodging, such a waggoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain love-performing night,
That runaway’s eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalk’d of and unseen,
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites,
By their own beauties, or if love be blind,
It best agrees with night: come civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match,
Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.
Hood my unmann’d blood bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle, till strange love grow bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty:
Come night, come Romeo, come thou day in night,
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night,
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back:
Come gentle night, come loving black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish Sun.
O I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possess’d it, and though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy’d, so tedious is this day,
As is the night before some festival,
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.
The early style disappeared rapidly as Shakespeare’s experiences grew and
with them his power of expression.
About two years later he wrote The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596). His
serious dialogue was now better than his comic. Shylock expressed his hatred
for Antonio plainly, clearly, and passionately, for Shakespeare has entered
into Shylock’s mind and felt his emotion:
Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
(For sufferance is the badge of all our Tribe).
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spet upon my Jewish gabardine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to then, you come to me, and you say,
Shylock, we would have moneys, you say so;
You that did void your rheum upon my beard,
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold, moneys is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say,
Hath a dog money? Is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats? or
Shall I bend low, and in a bondman’s key
With bated breath, and whisp’ring humbleness,
Say this: Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me dog: and for these courtesies
I'll lend you thus much moneys.
There is still just a trace of stiffness in the rhythm, a slight but
perceptible pause at the end of each line, but not a superfluous word or
unnecessary metaphor. Even Portia’s set speech on ‘Mercy’ in the Trial Scene is
appropriate in the occasion and the expression.
In the first part of Henry IV,
written perhaps nine months later, Shakespeare was first completely master of
his medium. This play has a wide range of very different characters, each
skilfully contrasted, but each speaks in a language which in phrase, structure,
and rhythm is entirely appropriate. The most brilliant example of the contrast
is in the scene where Hotspur, Glendower, Worcester, and Mortimer, compact
their alliance. Shakespeare gained much by deliberate contrast. Hotspur, out of
the ambition in his hot head, cries out:
By heaven methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac’d moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities;
But out upon this half-fac’d fellowship.
Falstaff, with the cynicism that comes from cold feet, grumbles:
‘Tis not due yet, I would be loath to pay him before his day, what need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ‘tis no matter, honour pricks me on; yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no, or an arm? no, or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? he that died a’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible then? yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it, therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon, and so ends my catechism.
The contrast enhances both speakers and speeches.
Between Henry IV and Hamlet Shakespeare’s technique developed
rather than changed. There is not much in the dialogue or poetry of Hamlet that
had not in some form appeared in earlier plays, but it is more competent, more
supple. Each character, in long speeches or in conversation, not only speaks
appropriately, but behind the words lies the whole compass of its particular
personality and experience. This is seen in the less as well as the more
important scenes. Thus, for instance, Hamlet having returned so dramatically to
Denmark tells Horatio of his adventures on the ship which was to take him to
England and to his destruction:
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf’d about me in the dark,
Grop’d I to find out them; had my desire,
Finger’d their packet, and in fine withdrew
To mine own room again, making so bold,
(My fears forgetting manners) to unseal
Their grand commission, where I found Horatio,
Oh royal knavery: an exact command,
Larded with many several sorts of reasons,
Importing Denmark’s health, and England’s too,
With hoo, such bugs and goblins in my life,
That on the supervise no leisure bated,
No not to say the grinding of the axe,
My head should be struck off.
HORATIO: Is’t possible?
HAMLET: Here’s the commission, read it at more leisure: But wilt thou hear
me how I did proceed?
HORATIO: I beseech you.
HAMLET: Being thus be-netted round with villains,
Or I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play. I sat me down,
Devis’d a new commission, wrote it fair,
I once did hold it as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair; and labour’d much
How to forget that learning: but sir now,
It did me yeoman’s service: wilt thou know
The effects of what I wrote?
HORATIO: Ay, good my lord.
HAMLET: An earnest conjuration from the King,
As England was his faithful tributary,
As love between them, as the palm should flourish,
As Peace should still her wheaten garland wear,
And stand a comma ‘tween their amities,
And many such-like As’es of great charge,
That on the view and know of these contents,
Without debatement further, more or less,
He should the bearers put to sudden death,
Not shriving-time allow’d.
In its place this speech is simply a piece of necessary information to
explain how Hamlet came back. The description is vivid, but it is purely
Hamlet’s; and, moreover, it shows a little more of Hamlet’s own personality and
experience: his youthful lessons in handwriting, the touch of conscious
snobbery, his sardonic relish of the flowery pomposities of formal
correspondence, his ruthlessness when roused.
The power of expression can be seen at its best in some of the soliloquies
in Hamlet. Soliloquy was an old device. In modern stage conditions it appears
artificial, but it was common and appropriate in the intimacy of the
Elizabethan playhouses.
In his earlier plays Shakespeare used soliloquy mainly for two purposes: to
give information, or an excuse for the recitation of a reflective poem. Thus
Richard of Gloucester naively tells the audience that he is not indeed what he
seems to others:
I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl.
The secret mischiefs that I set abroach,
I lay unto the grievous charge of others.
Clarence, whom I indeed have cast in darkness,
I do beweep to many simple gulls,
Namely, to Derby, Hastings, Buckingham;
And tell them, ‘tis the Queen, and her allies,
That stir the King against the Duke my Brother.
Now they believe it, and withal whet me,
To be reveng’d on Rivers, Dorset, Grey.
But then I sigh, and with a piece of Scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stolen forth of holy Writ,
And seem a Saint, when most I play the devil.
Thus Richard II, alone in his prison, soliloquizes leisurely on Life and
Time in a poetical ‘stream of consciousness’ of sixty lines.
Hamlet also soliloquizes; in general reflection, as in his broodings over
suicide – ‘To be or not to be’ – but more often in passages which reveal also
the movements of his mind, his perplexities and resolutions. At times this
revelation is so subtle that Shakespeare shows not only Hamlet’s mind working,
but even the subconscious thought beneath.
[...]
Othello, written some
months later, is the most perfectly constructed of all Shakespeare’s tragedies,
and may best be used to illustrate the four different kinds of dramatic speech:
lyric poetry, rhyme, blank verse, prose. All are used in Othello with the
greatest artistry and to gain particular effects of tone, mood, and atmosphere.
In Shakespeare’s plays, and in Elizabethan drama generally, the broad
distinction between the use of prose and the use of blank verse is clear and
simple. Prose dialogue keeps the scene down to the ordinary of every day. The
characters talk to each other with an easy naturalism. Blank verse heightens
the atmosphere, giving dignity and emotion to the speakers. Certain persons
naturally speak verse, others prose. Falstaff naturally speaks in prose,
Hotspur in verse, whilst Prince Hal speaks prose in the company of Falstaff and
verse to his father.
In Othello blank verse is the
natural speech of Othello himself. He is a heroic and dignified person. Iago,
on other hand, is a lower character altogether. He speaks mostly in prose, but
at times he breaks into verse, especially in his soliloquies when he is left to
himself. Other prose characters do not. When Benedick or Falstaff come to
soliloquize they speak in their natural medium, prose. But there is a distinct
purpose in every change in Iago’s speeches. They coincide with and express the
subtle changes of his mood. Iago, the jocular, simple ‘honest Iago’, speaks a
quick prose. But Iago feigning honest indignation or expressing real hate is an
emotional being; and verse, on the Elizabethan stage, is the natural expression
of emotion. At his first entry in the beginning of the play he is seething with
anger because Othello has rejected him and chosen Cassio. This is the real Iago
speaking from his heart. His hate jets out in spasms of indignant rhetoric:
Despise me
If I do not. Three Great-ones of the City
(In personal suit to make me his Lieutenant)
Off-capp’d to him: and by the faith of man
I know my price, I am worth no worse a place.
But he (as loving his own pride, and purposes)
Evades them, with a bumbast circumstance,
Horribly stuff’d with epithets of war,
And in conclusion,
Nonsuits my mediators. For certes, says he,
I have already chose my officer. And what was he?
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio, a Florentine,
(A fellow almost damn’d in a fair wife)
That never set a squadron in the field,
Nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster. Unless the bookish theoric:
Wherein the toged Consuls can propose
As masterly as he. Mere prattle (without practice)
Is all his soldiership. But he (Sir) had th’election;
And I (of whom his eyes had seen the proof
At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds,
Christen’d, and Heathen), must be be-lee’d, and calm’d
By debitor, and creditor. This counter-caster,
He (in good time) must his Lieutenant be,
And I (God bless the mark) his Moorship’s Ancient.
Nor does Iago regain self-control until Brabantio loses his temper. Then
once more he is outwardly the mocker, speaking prose. After further, but milder
expression of his anger he goes out. Next he appears in company with Othello. He
is now feigning indignation, and verse is the proper medium for his speech.
In the scene in the Council Chamber Iago says nothing, but watches. At the
end he is left alone with Roderigo. Again the mask is on and he speaks a
flippant, supple prose until Roderigo leaves him. Then once more he is left
alone and his real emotions break out in powerful passionate verse, as the idea
of his plot begins to grow:
How? How? Let’s see.
After some time, to abuse Othello’s ears,
That he is too familiar with his wife:
He hath a person, and a smooth dispose
To be suspected: fram’d to make women false.
The Moor is of a free, and open nature,
That thinks men honest, that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose
As asses are:
The rest of the line is silent, as the thought catches fire. Then with a
little cry of triumph:
I have’t: It is engender’d: Hell, and Night,
Must bring this monstrous birth, to the world’s light.
Thus by watching the speech used by Iago we have a subtle revelation of his
outward manner. With Iago prose shows that the mask is on, that he is
self-controlled, ‘honest’, and frank. With Othello a lapse into prose denotes
the opposite – a breakdown of control. Othello speaks prose only when he falls
into his apoplectic fit and when he sees the handkerchief in Cassio’s hand.
Another very good example of the different use of prose and verse occurs in
the conversation between Desdemona and Emilia towards the end of the play (IV,
iii). Othello has just gone out after his vile abuse of Desdemona. Suddenly she
asks:
Dost thou in conscience think (tell me, Emilia)
That there be women do abuse their husbands
In such gross kind?
EMILIA: There be some such, no question.
DESDEMONA: Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA: Why, would not you?
DESDEMONA: No, by this heavenly light!
EMILIA: Nor I neither, by this heavenly light:
I might do’t as well i’ th’ dark.
DESDEMONA: Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA: The world’s a huge thing:
It is a great price, for a small vice.
DESDEMONA: In troth, I think thou wouldst not.
EMILIA: In troth I think I should, and undo’t when I had done. Marry, I
would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns,
petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition. But for all the whole world: ‘uds
pity, who would not make her husband a cuckold, to make him a Monarch? I should
venture Purgatory for’t.
That there be women do abuse their husbands
In such gross kind?
EMILIA: There be some such, no question.
DESDEMONA: Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA: Why, would not you?
DESDEMONA: No, by this heavenly light!
EMILIA: Nor I neither, by this heavenly light:
I might do’t as well i’ th’ dark.
DESDEMONA: Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA: The world’s a huge thing:
It is a great price, for a small vice.
DESDEMONA: In troth, I think thou wouldst not.
EMILIA: In troth I think I should, and undo’t when I had done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition. But for all the whole world: ‘uds pity, who would not make her husband a cuckold, to make him a Monarch? I should venture Purgatory for’t.
Emilia for a moment is confused by Desdemona’s insistence and tries to turn
it off in a laugh, but as Desdemona still persists she evades her by regaining
her composure in indignant protestation – in rhetorical verse – against jealous
husbands:
But I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall: (Say, that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps;
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us: or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite)
Why we have galls: and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know,
Their wives have sense like them: They see, and smell,
And have their palates both for sweet, and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do,
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too. And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.
Shakespeare uses lyric verse to create a definite atmosphere. It is always
sung. There are two notable examples in Othello.
The first is in the drinking scene, where Iago sings:
And let me the canakin clink, clink:
And let me the canakin clink.
A soldier’s a man: Oh, man’s life but a span,
Why then let a soldier drink.
And:
King Stephen was and a worthy peer,
His breeches cost him but a crown,
He held them sixpence all too dear,
With that he call’d the tailor lown:
He was a wight of high renown,
And thou art but of low degree:
‘Tis pride that pulls the country down,
Then take thy auld cloak about thee.
His breeches cost him but a crown,
He held them sixpence all too dear,
With that he call’d the tailor lown:
He was a wight of high renown,
And thou art but of low degree:
‘Tis pride that pulls the country down,
Then take thy auld cloak about thee.
Both songs are sung loudly and create an atmosphere of rowdy merriment
which is the proper prelude and mood for Cassio’s drunkenness.
The second is the Willow Song. After the dreadful scene where Othello treats
Desdemona as a prostitute Shakespeare wishes to prepare our mood for the
murder. So Desdemona sings very softly:
The poor soul sat sighing, by a sycamore tree.
Sing all a green willow:
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow.
The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur’d her moans,
Sing willow, willow, willow.
Her salt tears fell from her, and soften’d the stones,
Sing willow, willow, willow.
Sing all a green willow must be my garland.
Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve.
I call’d my Love false Love: but what said he then?
Sing willow, willow, willow.
If I court mo women, you’ll couch with mo men!
The music has the same effect as a change of light in the modern theatre.
In Othello there is also a
notable instance of the use of rhyme. On the whole Shakespeare was sparing in
the use of rhyme in his later plays. The rhymed couplet at the end of a scene
was always liable to occur, but when he used rhyme within a scene it was with a
definite purpose. In the Council Chamber scene, after Brabantio has been
humiliated by Desdemona’s unexpected declaration of her love for Othello, the
Duke tries to comfort him by lapsing into proverbs, or ‘sentences’ as they were
called:
When remedies are past, the griefs are ended
By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended.
To mourn a mischief that is past and gone,
Is the next way to draw new mischief on.
What cannot be preserv’d, when Fortune takes:
Patience her injury a mock’ry makes.
The robb’d that smiles, steals something from the thief,
He robs himself, that spends a bootless grief.
Brabantio is irritated by these commonplaces, and retorts with a few
proverbs of his own. Then, to point the contrast of mood, the Duke resumes not
in blank verse, but in prose. Thus these two for the moment hold a kind of
duet. As blank verse heightens speech and infuses it with emotion, so rhymed
verse stiffens and gives it special emphasis. Here Shakespeare stressed the
easy condolence of the man who was not touched by the sorrow of the
inconsolable father. Then, as Brabantio goes out, he gives a parting message to
Othello, which is both warning, prophecy, an curse:
Look to her (Moor) if thou hast eyes to see:
She has deceiv’d her father, and may thee.
The rhymed couplet gives just the right touch of oracular pronouncement
necessary.
A few years later (1606) Shakespeare wrote Lear and Macbeth. To
those who are not familiar with Shakespeare’s language Lear is a difficult play to read because of its excessive
concentration of thought. It is not so much that he uses a strange vocabulary
or difficult words, as that he combines words and images to express thoughts
which are in themselves almost beyond expression. The play itself was in some
ways a new departure. He was concerned rather to show the significance of human
conduct than to tell a dramatic story. What he wished to say could no longer be
expressed in direct statement, but only by suggestion and flashes of meaning. As
in his earlier plays, he was again consciously experimenting with language, but
impatiently rather than joyously. He wrote speeches in great sweeps and not
line by line, and even the formal pattern of five stresses was submerged in the
rush of the whole. Moreover the imagery was no longer simple or direct but
exceedingly complex, suggesting a dozen different ideas and associations in a
sentence or two.
Edgar, disguised as the lunatic beggar, pauses in his flight to reflect on
his own wretched state:
Yet better thus, and known to be contemn’d,
Than still contemn’d and flatter’d, to be worst:
The lowest and most dejected thing of Fortune,
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear:
The lamentable change is from the best,
The worst returns to laughter. Welcome then,
Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace:
The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst,
Owes nothing to thy blasts.
[He sees his father, now blinded and
in agony, led by an old man.]
But who comes here? My father poorly led?
World, world, O world!
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Lie would not yield to age.
Macbeth, shrinking from the murder of Duncan, soliloquizes:
If it were done, when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well,
It were done quickly: if th’ assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease, success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all, and the end-al. Here,
But here, upon this bank and shool of time,
We’ld jump the life to come. But in these cases,
We still have judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught, return
To plague th’ inventor. This even-handed Justice
Commends th’ ingredients of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips. He’s here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman, and his subject,
Strong both against the deed: then, as his host,
Who should against his murtherer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek: hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d against
The deep damnation of his taking-off:
And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or Heaven’s cherubim, hors’d
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting Ambition, which o’erleaps itself,
And falls on th’ other.
The imagery is too thickly clotted for paraphrase or analysis, but it
expresses very adequately the turmoil of Macbeth’s mind.
In Lear Shakespeare uses certain
words and ideas in all their meanings and associations to be, as it were, the
theme words of the story, two especially – nature
and nothing. Lear, in his foolish
optimism, regards the filial duty of affection as natural. When Cordelia
offends him he casts her out as ‘a wretch whom Nature is ashamed almost to
acknowledge hers’. Later, when Goneril offends him, he curses her, calling on
Nature to suspend her purpose: either to make Goneril childless, or, if she
must have a child, that it may be ‘a thwart disnatured torment to her’. Goneril
and Regan he regards as ‘unnatural hags’, but in the end Cordelia ‘redeems
Nature from the general curse’ that should follow her sisters’ deeds.
Edmund the Bastard, the ‘natural’ son of Gloucester begotten ‘in the lusty
stealth of Nature’, dedicates himself to her:
Thou Nature art my Goddess, to thy Law
My services are bound,
for Nature is the Goddess of ruthless selfishness. Loyal and natural boy’,
Gloucester calls him, with grim unconscious irony. Shakespeare uses ‘nature’,
‘natural’, ‘naturally’, forty-seven times in Lear. The words become a sinister echo throughout the play.
The word nothing likewise is
terribly significant. Cordelia, when her turn comes to praise her father and so
justify his favouritism, is tongue-tied and can utter only ‘Nothing, my Lord’.
‘Nothing?’ echoes Lear.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing will come of nothing, speak again.’
Lear is wrong, for from this nothing
comes everything. The word echoes in the parallel story of Gloucester, also
mistaking the loyalty of his children.
‘What paper were you reading?’ he asks, as Edmund ostentatiously conceals
the false letter which is to ruin Edgar.
He too replies, ‘Nothing, my Lord’, and again from ‘nothing’ follows
everything.
Antony and Cleopatra, if the accepted date (1607) is correct, followed Lear by some months. It lacks the vastness of Lear. Shakespeare was not so consciously experimenting with this
new technique of verse, but he had learnt much: he had developed new muscles. The
theme did not allow for the titanic treatment of Lear, but the story, as Plutarch told it, called up in him an
enthusiasm which he certainly had not felt in Julius Caesar, to which Antony
and Cleopatra was the sequel.
The verse of Antony and Cleopatra
has a kind of resonance which Shakespeare achieved nowhere else: a deep beauty
quite its own. This quality comes out again and again in some haunting phrase
or echo which exists in the sound of the words themselves, quite apart from
their context:
Oh, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten.
The exact meaning does not matter: it is a lovely sound in itself.
But poetry does not live by sound alone: it needs also perfect aptness of
meaning. The finest example in the play is the description of Antony’s first
meeting with Cleopatra, which Shakespeare, with superb instinct, put into the
mouth of cynic Enobarbus, when his friends at Rome are trying to get from him
the latest Cleopatra scandal. Here Shakespeare reverted to a piece of sheer
description of a kind that he had not allowed himself for years. His
imagination was obviously kindled to write it by the gorgeous original in
North’s Plutarch, which was in itself
a rich piece of prose. He held up the play that Enobarbus might describe the
event, and in such a way that it might explain what was otherwise inexplicable,
Cleopatra’s power of fascinating Antony.
I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d Throne
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails: and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick.
With them the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat, to follow faster;
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description, she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold, of tissue,
O’er-picturing that Venus, where we see
The fancy outwork Nature. On each side her,
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did...
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids tended her i’ th’ eyes,
And made their bends adornings. At the helm,
A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle,
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands,
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her: and Antony
Enthron’d i’ the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to th’ air: which but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature...
Upon her landing, Antony sent to her,
Invited her to supper: she replied,
It should be better, he became her guest:
Which she entreated, our courteous Antony,
Whom ne’er the word of no woman heard speak,
Being barber’d ten times o’er, goes to the feast;
And for his ordinary, pays his heart
For what his eyes eat only...
I saw her once
Hop forty paces through the public street,
And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted,
That she did make defect, perfection,
And breathless power breathe forth.
MECAENAS: Now Antony must leave her utterly.
ENOBARBUS: Never he will not:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies. For vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy Priests
Bless her, when she is riggish.
Apart from the sheer magnificence of the speech, it was not a mere bravery
– Shakespeare showing off his powers as in the Queen Mab speech in Romeo and
Juliet or Berowne’s speech in Love’s Labour Lost. Nor was it only an orchestral
setting for Cleopatra. It is, in anticipation, part of the music of Cleopatra’s
death; and it comes back at the end as an echo:
Show me my women like a Queen: go fetch
My best attires. I am again for Cydnus,
To meet Mark Antony
In death as in life
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety
And indeed the poetry of the play is full of echoes:
Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang’d Empire fall: here is my space.
Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life
Is to do thus: when such a mutual pair,
And such a twain can do’t, in which I bind
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless.
Thus Antony in his moment of triumphant love. And the echo comes back later
from Cleopatra, alone and deserted –
My desolation does begin to make
A better life: ‘tis paltry to be Caesar:
Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave,
A minister of her will: and it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change;
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung,
The beggar’s nurse, and Caesar’s.
And again, Antony nearing his end:
Unarm Eros, the long day’s task is done,
And we must sleep.
This is echoed by Iras to Cleopatra:
Finish good Lady, the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark.
It is an echo and a contrast. To Antony, the long meant work, and then
rest: to Cleopatra brilliance. She must shine or go out.
There is another note in the incomparable music of this play: its changes
of mood, tone, and pace. As a modern director gains effects of change and
contrast by lighting and music, so Shakespeare changed the atmosphere of his
scenes by contrasts of verse, tone, and speed. Act IV, Scene xii, is a scene of
battle. Antony is defeated. He enters raging against Cleopatra. She comes to
him. He drives her away with fury and cursing. She reappears for a moment and
runs off terrified by his wrath. And then, the fury exhausted and the passion
spent, Antony returns with his servant Eros:
ANTONY: Eros, thou yet behold’st me?
EROS: Ay noble Lord.
ANTONY: Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish,
A vapour sometime, like a bear, or lion,
A tower’d citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air.
Thou hast seen these signs,
They are black Vesper’s pageants.
EROS: Ay my Lord,
ANTONY: That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
Antony, like the swan, is dying to slow music:
All length is torture: since the torch is out,
Lie down and stray no farther. Now all labour
Mars what it does: yea, very force entangles
Itself with strength: seal then and all is done.
After Coriolanus (c. 1608-9) there
was apparently a period of a year or more during which Shakespeare wrote
nothing. Then 1610 and 1611 he wrote Cymbeline,
The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Cymbeline is seldom
whole-heartedly admired; Dr Johnson even called it ‘unresisting imbecility’;
and the plays is certainly overladen with familiar incidents, situations, and
stock characters of the kind known as ‘corny’. Yet the great set speeches –
more like arias in opera – are in Shakespeare’s maturest style, such as
Iachimo’s soliloquy in Imogen’s bed-chamber (II, ii, 14), or Posthumus’s
disgusting tirade against false wives (II, v), or Imogen’s wild defence of her
own honour (III, iv, 34).
Nor is the fine quality of The
Winter’s Tale always fully appreciated, but in few plays is character so
sensitively expressed in dramatic speeches, especially in those of neurotic,
ill-balanced King Leontes, as, for example, when he vainly tries to persuade
his minister Camillo that Hermione has committed adultery with Polixenes:
LEONTES: Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laugher, with a sigh? (a note infallible
Of breaking honesty) horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web, but theirs: theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?
Why then the World, and all that’s in’t, is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing. (I, ii, 284)
In The Tempest he achieved what
some competent critics regard as his final and greatest play. In its poetry
Shakespeare reached the farthest limits possible to the English language in
expression and solemn music. The thought is still packed, but no longer
obscure, the verse free but perfectly controlled. The English language, unlike
Latin, is not suited for precise utterance: it has too many little monosyllables
which are necessary to modify its meanings. A Roman could express in a single
word every mood and tense of love by conjugating ‘amo’. An Englishman must add this ‘I would’ or ‘I might have been’.
Shakespeare in The Tempest showed
what could be done, even with English.
In the later speeches he reached his final mastery over words. The meaning
is clear, the thought deep, the emotional music perfect:
You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort,
As if you were dismay’d: be cheerful sir,
Our revels now are ended: these our actors
(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And like the baseless fabric of this vision
The cloud-capp’d Towers, the gorgeous Palaces,
The solemn Temples, the great Globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind: we are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep: sir, I am vex’d,
Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled:
Be not disturb’d with my infirmity,
If you be pleas’d, retire into my cell,
And there repose: a turn or two, I'll walk
To still my beating mind. (IV, i, 146)
There will doubtless come a time when this prophecy is fulfilled; but until
the English language in its turn has perished, in The Tempest lies its greatest achievement.
