e316 shakespeare fall 2010

Welcome to English 316

2010-09-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

Welcome to E316, Shakespeare’s Major Plays

This blog will offer posts on all of the plays on our syllabus as well as introductory material on comedy, history, and tragedy. I will post two kinds of notes: general and act/scene-by-scene. Both kinds are optional reading, but I encourage you to read the entries as your time permits. While they are not exactly the same as what I may choose to say during class sessions (i.e. these are not usually exact copies of my lecture notes), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the plays and in arriving at paper topics. The edition used is Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5.

A dedicated menu at my wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Introduction to Shakespeare

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Shakespeare the Man, 1564-1616.

William Shakespeare, born in April 1564 at a home in Warwickshire’s Stratford-upon-Avon, was the third child of John Shakespeare and Mary Elizabeth Arden; only four aside from William survived to adulthood, and only one, his sister Joan, outlived him—Joan lived to 77, and passed away in 1646, four years after the beginning of the English Civil War in 1642. He studied Latin grammar and possibly a bit of Greek (you can still view the popular grammar book by William Lily he would have used) at King Edward IV Grammar School in his hometown from 1571-78, but didn’t go to college like some other Elizabethan playwrights and authors such as the University Wits John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, and Thomas Middleton. Not much is known of the time between 1578-92, other than that William married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and that he had several children: Susanna (1583-1649) and in 1585 the twins Judith (died 1662) and Hamnet (died 1596).

But whatever he was up to in the so-called “lost years,” by 1592 he was in London and beginning his career as a playwright. Being part of stage life in London must have been exciting—the first theater was built there around 1576, and though there were predecessors to the stage such as the late medieval mystery cycles and morality plays like Everyman, the theater had an air of newness and played a significant part in the vibrant life of the great City. Shakespeare attracted considerable notice from the outset since University Wit Robert Greene refers to him in his September 20, 1592 posthumous pamphlet in the following scornful terms: “there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” (Now that is an Elizabethan snap, as we would call it today!) His Henry VI, Part I was performed at the Rose Theatre in March 1592 by Lord Strange’s Men. So his career as a poet and dramatist runs from around 1592 to 1610, when he moved back to a fine new home in Stratford, though he seems to have put in some London time even after that since his plays were still being performed to much acclaim. For poetry (the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece), he had an aristocratic patron in Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (1573-1624). Poetry was much more prestigious than life associated with the stage, so perhaps Shakespeare’s decision to go with drama was in part based on earnings potential. Associated for most of his career with the playing company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men when James I became monarch in 1603), Shakespeare produced an astonishing number of plays during his time as a dramatist—the posthumously gathered and printed First Folio of 1623 includes thirty-six plays, divided into comedies, tragedies, and histories. He even acted in some of them, perhaps taking the role of old Adam in As You Like It and the Ghost of Hamlet’s father in Hamlet. But his main players were the magnificent Richard Burbage for the tragic roles, and Will Kempe for comedy until 1599, after him coming the subtler Robert Armin. But there were others as listed in the Folio. Well before his death in 1616 from an illness of some sort, he had become a successful businessman (he owned part of the Globe Theatre that had been built in 1599 and the indoors Blackfriars Playhouse used from 1608 on during the winter, which yielded considerable revenue), and had interests in wheat and malt back home. There were some rough spots in Shakespeare’s life: his son Hamnet died at the age of 11, and later, to this personal tragedy was added a moment of political peril when the rebellious Earl of Essex almost sucked the playwright into a 1599 rebellion by commissioning a performance of Richard II. The performance enraged the savvy interpreter Queen Elizabeth, who got Essex’s point that she, like the king in the play, was a bad ruler who deserved to be deposed. But Shakespeare had of course written the play years before the rebellion, so he wasn’t blamed. It could be dangerous to write and stage plays during his time. But on the whole it was a remarkable and successful career. Shakespeare never cared to publish his work during his lifetime, though somewhat adulterated quarto copies circulated thanks to the lack of any copyright protection back then, but his fame was cemented in the memory of London playgoers and of course by the publication of the First Folio in 1623.

In politics Shakespeare seems to have been royalist enough (the relevant sovereigns are the Tudor Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603) and the Scottish Stuart James I (1603-25), and for the most part conservative in the sense that he consistently sides with the nobility over the rabble; the last years of his life were spent mainly in looking after his real estate holdings in Stratford. This outlook stems from his bourgeois roots and lifestyle—Shakespeare grew up in the Warwickshire countryside; his father had some local influence and wealth when William was young (he was a local official and a glover and moneylender), but he seems to have fallen on hard times later on. Shakespeare did pretty well for himself as a businessman, what with his excellent and crowd-pleasing playwright skills (he was also an actor), wise decisions about theater matters at the Globe from 1599 and later at the more intimate Blackfriars, and apparently in local side ventures like money-lending. People who have property and wealth tend to support stability in the social and political realms, and Shakespeare was no different from most in that regard.

In religion Shakespeare may, as biographers such as Peter Ackroyd suggest, have had Catholic leanings even though he conformed to the Anglican Church that took its inception from Henry VIII’s inability to get the Pope to grant him a divorce from his first Queen, Catherine of Aragon. So England joined the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther had begun in October 1517. But it’s expecting a lot to suppose everybody in the “reformed” countries would automatically go along with the program. Many English people tried to keep up the old faith, though they had to keep a lid on their activities since Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth in particular didn’t want their subjects reverting to Catholic forms and allegiances. Shakespeare seems to have had a few closet Papists in his family—quite possibly his father John—and he also seems to have had connections with powerful Catholics beyond his family.

Shakespeare was probably more or less a traditionalist, affable (if brilliant) Englishman, not some atheist radical like Christopher Marlowe or an irascible ruffian like Ben Jonson, even if he knew and liked such men. What does this biography mean for his poetics? It’s hard to say, really. John Keats wrote admiringly in his letters of the “chameleon poet” endowed with “negative capability” or the ability to explore a personality or a situation without need for immediate certainty in the moral or factual sense. I suppose Keats must have been thinking of Shakespeare when he wrote that. What besides “negative capability” and chameleonic tendencies would allow an artist so completely to enter into the mindset of a charming but thoroughly wicked character such as Richard III or Iago; or a flawed but noble one like the Roman general Coriolanus; or an all-purpose rogue like Jack Falstaff; or an intelligent, sensitive character like Macbeth whose ambition traps him in a downward spiral of preventive-strike murder and psychological “hardness,” to borrow a term from today’s hip-hop culture? You couldn’t generate so many wonderful characters if you were intent on propagating some stolid moral drawn from your politics or religion. Shakespeare disappears with remarkable ease into his multifarious characters, so that he really is what Samuel Johnson and others have called him: “a poet of nature” (human nature, animal nature, everything).

Shakespeare’s Era: Tudor and early Stuart England.

The Tudor Era begins with Henry VII (1485-1509), victor over the last Yorkist king, Richard III (1483-85); it continues through the reigns of Henry VIII (1509-47), Edward VI (1547-53), Mary (1553-58), and ends after Elizabeth I (1558-1603). The Stuart Era begins with the son of Mary Queen of Scots, James I (1603-25), his son Charles I (1625-49), and then after an interregnum period in which Cromwell and his Puritans ruled, is restored in the person of Charles II (1660-85). The Hanoverian line, by the way, begins with George I (1714-27); the name changed to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha when Victoria’s son Edward VII (1901-10, the Edwardian Period) by the German Prince Albert of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha reigned, and then changed again in the wake of WWI when that came to sound too Germanic, to the elegant “Windsor” with George V (1910-36) and stretches to today’s Elizabeth II, who has been Great Britain’s Queen since George VI died in 1952.

Henry VII put an end to the Wars of the Roses, a period of dynastic strife between the descendants of Edward III (1327-77) stretching from 1455 to Henry’s ascension and even a few years after that, to 1487. In essence, the throne was tossed back and forth between the Houses of Lancaster and York, with the incompetent Lancastrian Henry VI (son of Henry V, victor of Agincourt) ruling from 1422-61, and Yorkist Richard III getting rid of the heirs of his deceased brother and fellow Yorkist Edward IV (1461-83), who had defeated Henry VI, to rule in his own right for three fitful years. Finally, Henry, Earl of Richmond, an exiled member of the Welsh Tudor clan, married Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York to unite the two great houses. This Henry VII, of course, is the grandfather of that greatest of English rulers, Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabeth I. So the recent political past had been one of considerable strife and instability, with great nobles traversing England and at times treating the people with as little respect as foreign invaders might. Elizabeth’s Tudor reign was also a time of international danger, with the massive Catholic Spanish Armada sent by Philip II of Spain (Elizabeth’s half-sister!) sent on a mission in 1588 to crush the English navy and then invade England itself; the Armada failed, but the threat was real. This was a time of growing English nationalism, naval power, and exploration, with the Queen encouraging men such as Sir Walter Ralegh and Sir Francis Drake to set sail for the new world. Royal power had been much centralized from the time of feudalism and the Court was a great factor in English life during Tudor and Stuart times, but Queen Elizabeth and her successor James I were by no means unencumbered absolutists, however fond the latter was of the doctrine of the so-called “divine right of kings.” (In truth there was no coherent political philosophy in England until after the Restoration.) In particular, the growing commercial class in London began to feel its power as an important economic force in the life of the nation, and religious Puritans began to take issue with the authority of the Crown and the Church of England (or Anglican Church) that Henry VIII had turned into a nationalist instrument when Pope Paul III excommunicated him in 1534. The struggle between Puritans and the State intensified in the reigns of the Stuart James I and then of his son Charles I, who was executed in 1649 during the course of a bloody Civil War won by Oliver Cromwell and his faction, who were determined to establish the Rule of the Saints on English soil. These theater-closing, anti-pleasure Puritans ruled for only a decade or so, with Charles II returning from the Continent to initiate the Restoration of 1660, but the monarchy has never been as powerful since their regicidal Interregnum. Shakespeare, of course, didn’t live to see the Civil strife of the 1640s, though his sister Joan did, and so did his last descendant, granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Hall Barnard, who died childless in 1670, ten years after the Restoration.

London.

But let’s leave aside political and religious history and move on to consider briefly Shakespeare’s London. It was a thriving city of perhaps 200,000 people by his day, and the whole of England had perhaps five million inhabitants. The neoclassical critic Samuel Johnson later wrote proudly that “he that is tired of London is tired of life.” I don’t know if that eighteenth-century boast should be carried back to the late sixteenth century, but in any case the City must have been an exciting place to live, if not exactly a safe one. Many of the protections you and I take for granted now simply didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time. Safe food and good sanitation? Forget it. Health care? Not available—aside from perhaps some decent herbal remedies and advice to “take the waters” or avoid strenuous exertion, your physician was about as likely to kill you as cure you. Consider that the germ theory of disease was unknown (in fact it’s more or less a nineteenth-century development) and that the average lifespan seems to have been around 35 years. If you were very lucky and never contracted a serious illness or needed surgery, you might live to the biblical threescore and ten (70), but more likely you would go much sooner. And there was still the Bubonic Plague to deal with in both London and the countryside—read Daniel Defoe’s post-Restoration book Journal of the Plague Year if you want to see just how horrifying and deadly a prospect that was. Material life for London’s working class of servants and apprentices, etc., must have been rough, always a struggle. It had its guildsmen and prosperous merchants, too, but all were subject to the difficulties of life in a noisy, dirty, dangerous environment.

One thing to draw from this characterization is that life in early modern London retained some of the old uncertainties of medieval times, most particularly a profound sense of the tenuousness of existence itself—you never knew when you or someone you loved would be carried off by the plague or some other sickness, or by an accident thanks to unsafe conditions. Death was an acknowledged, if feared, part of everyday life—that makes for a very different sensibility from ours because our culture tends to distance us from the presence and processes of death. At the same time, London offered a new sense of possibility and liveliness, a sense of the larger world “out there,” the one beyond Europe being explored by Ralegh and Drake and others. London was becoming to some degree cosmopolitan, a place that invited the world in rather than excluding it.

The Theater.

The advent of the public theater in the 1580’s certainly testifies to a thriving intellectual climate in the City. The Victorian critic Matthew Arnold was surely right when he mentioned Elizabethan London in the same sentence as Classical Athens in this regard. Arnold wrote that Shakespeare didn’t need tremendous book-learning because a lot of his acumen came just from living in a culture that was truly alive to all that life had to offer in the early modern age. He grew up in this heady atmosphere, and his audiences were receptive to the secular imaginative spectacles he staged for them. So true was this that some acting companies performed up to twelve plays a week, so they had to foster a community spirit among the actors, who in truth didn’t seem to get much rehearsal time for their skilled performances. Many Londoners of all classes had at least some leisure time, and aside from their attendance at crude spectacles such as bear-baiting and public executions, they flocked in impressive numbers to the several theaters (the Rose, the Swan, and others even before the Globe’s opening in 1599). In Shakespeare’s Audiences, Alfred Harbage suggests that on any given day, several thousand inhabitants probably paid their penny or more to attend an afternoon theater performance, and the demand only went away when the Plague struck from time to time and closed the theaters down. Harbage also deals temperately with the question of audience composition: the most extreme characterizations of the London playgoers, to be sure, are the product of Puritan loathing. Not all of Shakespeare’s groundlings were prostitutes or pickpockets, though some of them were. The profession wasn’t exactly considered rock solid in terms of class status, and women were not allowed to become actors because it was not deemed a respectable craft for them to practice. Still, respectable people, male and female, attended the London theatres, which were a meeting ground for citizens from various stations and walks of life. For that matter, Shakespeare’s players strutted their stuff at times even before the nobility and monarchs, so drama was an interest that cut across large sections of Elizabethan and Stuart society. It was an impressive part of the life of a burgeoning early-modern nation.

Shakespeare’s Themes and Method of Composition.

We might expect an active playwright like Shakespeare to deal directly with the flow of modern life, but unlike Ben Jonson and some others of his time, for the most part he doesn’t do that. London’s mercantile class was increasing, and nationalism was beginning to flex its muscle. So why don’t we find London’s social structure “ripped from the headlines” in Shakespeare? He deals with courtly environments and characters, and often at some historical distance, spanning from ancient Greece and Rome to the late Middle Ages in Europe: he represents monarchs as nearly unconstrained, not as having to deal with Parliament as they did by his own day, and his treatment of rank reinforces this preference. Shakespeare concentrates on the parallel order of society and the grand cosmos, as in the Troilus and Cressida passage that runs “take but degree away . . . and hark what discord follows.” Kings and high nobles, not commoners, are the center of his tragedies and histories in particular, but the same statement holds to a great extent for his comic and romance plays. This may be due in part to what I called above a degree of conservatism in his approach to life and to his mid-level propertied station. There’s also the simple fact that censorship was a fact of life in England; a dramatist’s scripts had to be cleared by Elizabeth’s Master of Revels before they were performed, and it was safer not to try to deal with current political affairs or great personages.

Questions to Ask about Shakespeare’s Plays.

To what extent do the main characters step out as strong individuals?

-- Generally, in comedy we are dealing with characters who fit into some recognizable pattern or type,

but does that truism do justice to the play you’re studying?

What do the characters seek?

-- Consider the varieties of desire and objects of desire.

-- Characters seek not only love but also transcendence, security, understanding,

clarity, etc. (Evidently, there’s more to life than news, weather, and Cupid’s Arrow.)

What obstacles stand in the way of characters’ fulfilling their desires?

-- There are both internal and external hindrances.

-- That is, not everything is a matter of stern patriarchs getting in the way, etc.

How do the main characters react to the obstacles that stand in their way?

-- Reactions, as always, can tell us a lot about a character’s depth and understanding.

What is the disposition of time and chance?

-- Time is on the comic protagonist’s side, but what more is to be said in this regard

about the comic or romance or history play you are studying?

-- Are time and chance dealt with in a more or less realistic manner, or a fantastical

one? Why might the playwright be dealing with these things in such a way?

Method of Composition.

The plays fall loosely into four categories: comedy, history, tragedy, and romance (though this last category doesn’t appear in the 1623 First Folio edition). Shakespeare was clearly aware of basic theories about what a comedy or tragedy (the most “established” dramatic types) ought to be like, but he doesn’t seem to have spent much time worrying about whether he was conforming to such theories, and it’s extremely unlikely that he read Aristotle’s Poetics. As Coleridge says in a lecture on Shakespeare, “no work of genius dare want its appropriate form.” That’s downright romantic organicism, but when it comes to Shakespeare, I’ll pledge allegiance to it: I’ve long thought that Shakespeare, in spite of the occasional loosely constructed plot or reference to non-existent Bohemian seacoasts, anachronistic Roman chimney-tops, or silly devices like the criminal-minded “letter” Edmund the Bastard in King Lear ascribes to his brother “Legitimate Edgar” to fool their father Gloucester (why would you communicate by letter with someone you’re presently living with?), composed as something like a romantic poet. Although he rather unromantically started out by borrowing from some source or other (no one cared about absolute originality in his day) he saw all sorts of possibilities in that source material, and his plays took shape in accordance with the necessities of their own characters, events, and structure. You respond to a work of art as you create it, so that in a sense it “creates itself” processively. Form and meaning aren’t simply imposed upon one’s material in cookie-cutter fashion; they develop dynamically in accordance with the “inner laws” of the work itself. The romantic theorists and poets understood the creative process well, I think—imagine a sculptor facing his or her medium of blank stone: the first creative act is performed; the sculptor stands back and beholds the results in altered stone, which prompts another act, and on it goes in a ceaseless dialectic between mind and medium, until the demand for a “product” halts the process. Or consider Beethoven starting with those famous four initial notes of the Fifth Symphony. Well, he followed those notes where they just had to go—and where they had to go wasn’t always where you or I might have thought. Beethoven consistently surprises us in this way, and so does Shakespeare. None of this is to say that Shakespeare didn’t care a lick what his audiences wanted—of course he did; he wasn’t a “nightingale” singing alone in the woods like Shelley’s wan “unacknowledged legislator,” and he doesn’t seem to have assumed a deep chasm between art and the rest of life the way some of the romantic poets would later do. But what I’m talking about is the inner core of the compositional or creative process, and I think any great artist is something of a romantic in this regard. Jacques Diderot gives us a saucier, less dreamy way of describing literary creation: “my thoughts are my whores; they run, and I follow after.”

In practical terms for us as readers, this need not mean that we seek absolute coherency in the material; rather, it means we should be looking to tease out potential of whatever sort we find in one textual location and connect it to other locations in the same or other plays. Shakespeare is capable of logical precision, but that’s schoolboy stuff: what really drives his plays is the sympathetic, imaginative connections he makes between character and character, event and event, predicament and predicament. Above all, his brand of realism is psychological, not the realism of historical happening (though you can learn a lot about English history from his history plays).

Above all, it seems best not to superimpose some scheme or pattern on any Shakespeare play prematurely—the plays make sense, but the sense they make isn’t and shouldn’t always be immediately reducible to neat formulae or critical principles. Be especially mindful of this advice if you consult online materials like Sparknotes, etc. Some of this stuff is actually pretty good nowadays; it isn’t always churned out by illiterate fools for lame students the way it used to be. All the same, it comes at you saying “hey you, here are three key themes you can use to write a paper on The Merchant of Venice.” The themes identified may be worthwhile, but the more you allow yourself to be bound by them, the less room will there be for your own perhaps eccentric and more interesting interpretation of the play. Maybe you will notice something in Act 2, Scene 4 that relates to other things that happen in the play but aren’t really dealt with by the geniuses over at Spark Notes. And maybe that “something” is the thing you should really be writing about. Good critics are basically good storytellers: they tell interesting, compelling (and yes, informative) stories about other people’s stories. So if you use net-notes, use them to open up possibilities, not to reduce complex works of art to utter comprehensibility.

Shakespeare’s Language

Grammar and Rhetoric Issues (borrowed and slightly adapted from Shakespeare Resource Center’s Grammar Introduction.

A) Inverted syntax (word order): “John caught the ball” may be “John the ball caught.”

B) Rhetorical devices abounding:

alliteration: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought....” {Sonnet XXX})

metaphor: “Now is the winter of our discontent.” “My love is a red rose.”

metonymy: “Lend me your ears,” etc. (replacing a word with one closely related—here “ears” replaces “attention”); synechdoche substitutes the part for the whole, the general for the specifice, etc: “all hands on deck.” (hands for “sailors”)

Elliptical expressions: “And he to England shall [go] along with you.” Hamlet, III, iii}

and a host of other devices.

C) Grammar Irregularities:

Anthimeria. One part of speech is often substituted for another; this happens especially with nouns and verbs: Prospero says to Miranda in The Tempest: “What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” The word “backward” is an adverb, but it is used as a noun here, producing a verse that is both beautiful and strangely apt, considering that Prospero is asking his daughter Miranda to recall her remote childhood—something hazy and mysterious, yet intimate.

Pronoun irregularity: “Yes, you may have seen Cassio and she together.” Othello 4.2.3.

Omission of relative pronoun: “I have a brother [who, omitted] is condemn’d to die. Measure for Measure 2.2.34.

Verb #: “Three parts of him / Is ours already.” Julius Caesar 1.3.154-55.

Aside from these features identified by the Internet site, I should add the following point: Shakespearean verse is so powerful on the stage in part because of a key feature, antithesis. This is of course a rhetorical figure, which Hamlet is made to characterize generally as “setting the word against the word.” Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” The effect of antithesis (implied or outright) is to render an utterance emphatic. Consider the following part of Richard of Gloucester’s opening soliloquy in Richard III, which offers both alliteration and antithetical pairings to strengthen its appeal:

GLOUCESTER. Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visag'd war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front,

And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

This sort of oppositional pairing is partly what makes Shakespeare’s verse so memorable; the words are knit together by alliteration and by antithetical imagery and concepts. This is strong blank verse, the sort of stuff you can speak boldly without losing the sensitivity and psychological subtlety necessary for the successful representation of a complex character. Rhyme is another way of making verse memorable and comprehensible, though Shakespeare uses that device less and less as he matures in his art. The end of a scene is a good place to serve up a rhyme, as in Hamlet’s quip, “The play’s the thing, / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” or Claudius’ anguished ending to a prayer for absolution, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; / Words without thought never to heaven go.” Such rhymes, as in the latter example, often have something of the effect of medieval moral sayings known as sententiae, summings up of an ethical principle or lesson.

One other point worth making is that while we may sometimes agree with Anatole France, who said that “Shakespeare tried every style except simplicity,” it’s not quite fair to persist in that view because the more flowery or purple or difficult patches one finds in the plays are usually cast as they are to suit the mentality of a silly or pompous character, a word-mangler like Dogberry from Much Ado about Nothing, or someone speaking in regional or other dialect, like Kent or Edgar disguised as Poor Tom in King Lear. Under extreme pressure, too, a character’s speech may break down and become fragmented, as does Lear’s towards the end of King Lear. There is some fine simplicity in Shakespeare, just as there is some deliberately hollow eloquence, like that of Macbeth as his life winds down and his only remaining strategy is to deaden his soul to the evil he has done. He speaks beautifully, but the words seem to mean little to him and are cut off from a vital orientation towards action in the world, even if we find them moving. I’m sure we can find some passages that seem to us rather ornate for the purpose or the person, but that’s because we are moderns and revel less in the sheer beauty of speech than we demand from it a consistent level of utility. Keep that in mind (along with the situation and character’s mindset) when you hear a luxurious temporal description like the one Benvolio offers Lady Montague in Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet:

Madam, an hour before the worshipp'd sun

Peer'd forth the golden window of the East,

A troubled mind drave me to walk abroad;

Where, underneath the grove of sycamore

That westward rooteth from the city's side,

So early walking did I see your son.

In 2.4 of the same play, you’ll find the time described in a much lower register, when the rascal Mercutio scandalizes Juliet’s Nurse with the following classic: “the bawdy hand of the dial is now / upon the prick of noon.” Shakespeare wrote both descriptions, and wasn’t one to pass up a bawdy pun—such things pleased his audiences, whose sensibilities were by no means delicate.

Introduction to Comedy

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Introduction to Comedy.

Samuel Johnson tells us that Shakespeare was most comfortable when writing comic plays because they suited his genius best. Tragedy, according to Johnson, did not come naturally to Shakespeare, and there was always something a bit forced about his work in that vein. I don’t agree with him since I like the comedies, tragedies, histories, and romance plays equally, with a slight nod in favor of the tragedies.

Since Shakespeare wrote from ancient models, we should discuss ancient comedy at least briefly. It’s customary to distinguish between Greek Old Comedy like that of Aristophanes (circa 456-386 BCE) and the Greek New Comedy of Menander (circa 342-291 BCE) and other playwrights, such as his later Roman followers Plautus and Terence.

Old Comedy: If you’ve ever read or seen a comedy by Aristophanes (The Clouds, Lysistrata, The Birds, etc.), you know that it’s pretty rough stuff—mainly topical satire about famous politicians and philosophers. The Clouds, for example, is about Socrates as proprietor of the Thinkery or Think-Shop, where all sorts of ridiculously improbable notions are propagated for the benefit of fools. Outrageous, bawdy, bubbly humor is the essence of such plays, and they can pack a genuine political wallop as well: Lysistrata sets forth a plot in which Greek women withhold sexual favors from men until they agree to put an end to the ruinous Peloponnesian War. On the whole, characters are ridiculous in Old Comedy—a main subject is the perennial nature of human folly, selfishness, and vice.

New Comedy: The Greek Menander, and his much later Roman followers Plautus (circa 254-184 BCE) and Terence (circa 190-158 BCE), offer a different brand of comic play. The emphasis is on domestic matters rather than broad political issues. Love, or at least sexual desire treated sympathetically, is central to the action, and there’s also some concern for the relationship between the older generation and the younger, particularly between a father and his son, as well as some interest in relations between people of different status, such as masters and their clever slaves. Still, there’s plenty of fun at the expense of fools, dupes, lovers too old for the person they desire, etc. Stock characters are the order of the day in both kinds of ancient comedy, it seems. New Comedy is hardly rigorous in its morals: the characters who win out tend—surprise!—to be the ones the playwright reckons the audience will like. Sympathy trumps propriety. The popularity of comic mix-ups and disguises suggests that identities can be swapped at will, and because considerations such as wealth and social status are so important in structuring others’ perceptions of a given character, the new identity will be accepted long enough to get the job done.

The structure of Terentian drama is as follows: a) First comes the protasis, in which the basic characters and situation are established. This stage corresponds roughly to the first act of a modern five-act play. b) Then comes the epitasis in which events and characters are interwoven and complicated. This stage corresponds roughly to the second and third acts of a five-act play. c) Next comes the catastasis, in which the plot has just reached its high point, the action seems to be fully wound up, and starts to make its turn downhill, so to speak, towards the concluding event. For example, in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio asserts his power and marries Kate towards the end of Act 3. But of course that important event hardly concludes the story: Kate must still be “tamed,” which takes place partly during the trip back to Petruchio's lodgings. d) Last comes the final action, the catastrophe, which in comedy turns out to be a happy ending: errors are discovered, and situations become settled.

The modern situation comedy—Seinfeld would be a sophisticated example—is remarkably like New Comedy: a number of silly but mostly sympathetic characters get themselves into and out of preposterous scrapes from one episode to the next in a competitive world, and through it all they don’t change much. They get insulted, taken advantage of, take advantage of others (though not mean-spiritedly), fall in and out of love, misunderstand one another at every turn, get jobs and get fired from jobs, obtain pleasure and ease and then throw it all away on a whim or through error, and they’re ready for the next absurd thing life brings.

Comedy reminds us that we seldom learn as much as we should from our mistakes, but it also gives us credit for being optimists and opportunists in spite of the misfortunes life throws our way. There’s a bit of Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner in many a comic character: that fur-bearing evildoer Wiley Coyote isn’t going to keep the “poor little Roadrunner” from its appointed rounds (BeepBeep!), nor is Elmer Fudd going to stop Bugs from doing whatever the wascally wabbit wants to do. In comedy, desire is subject to deferral and detour, but not to permanent frustration. The comic orientation towards time is a favorable one: time and chance (accident) are on our side, at least if we are amongst the likeable or generous. In comedy, life is rich and full of opportunities—la vita è bella, as the Italians say. This attitude contrasts markedly with that of tragedy, where the world is stark and unforgiving, and our attention is riveted upon the thoughts and actions of a superior character in confrontation with that stark world

Shakespearian Comedy

Shakespeare borrows a fair amount from the ancients in terms of his plots, conventions, and character delineation. Especially in his more rollicking, semi-farcical comedies like The Taming of the Shrew, we encounter a generous heap of characters pursuing their desires in a competitive environment, which results in complicated plots. Such light fare can get confusing at times—as James Calderwood of UC Irvine used to say, you really have to work hard to keep all those Demetriuses (not to mention Hortensios, Lucentios, Gremios, Grumios and Tranios) straight in your head. And again in the lighter comedies, our seekers of pleasure, wealth, and ease tend to be stock characters rather than three-dimensional ones like those in the more substantive comedies. Shakespeare’s genius, it should be said, often pushes a character towards lifelikeness even when a cardboard cutout would have met the minimum standard for success. Petruchio may not be Hamlet, but he’s a clever, thoughtful fellow all the same—one of greater substance than you’ll find in most ancient comedy.

To a recollection of ancient conventions, we must add an understanding of the Christian context that informs Shakespeare’s plays. This is not to say that Shakespeare wears his religious beliefs (be they Protestant or crypto-Catholic, as some biographers claim) on his Elizabethan shirt-sleeve or that he aims to promote whatever religious views he may hold. It is only to say that Christian theology and customs inform his plays of all kinds and figure indirectly to an important extent.

As a main example, let’s consider the concept of charity. I mentioned likeability with respect to ancient comedy: sympathetic characters win. We might reinterpret this notion by applying the Christian opposition between generosity and selfishness or, to use more productive terminology, between charity (charitas) and cupidity (cupiditas). Charitas has to do with a generous outflowing of love for one’s fellow human beings—it is something that helps to unite not only individuals into couples but indeed entire communities into a functioning civil society. It enjoins forgiveness of wrongs and a bearing of optimism and faith in the teeth of adversity. Cupiditas, by contrast, has to do with individual selfishness—a cupiditous person seeks and accumulates riches and status more to lord it over others than really to enjoy what has been gained. Perhaps Jesus’ remark, “he that would save his life shall lose it” (Matthew 16:25) says it best: selfish, greedy, mean-spirited people are losers because they misunderstand the purpose of life, and lose all the more when they win on their own terms. Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge is a fine example of this “lose-by-winning” outlook.
As in ancient comedy, in Shakespeare the comic orientation towards time is favorable: time and chance are friendly, at least if a character is amongst the likeable and generous. Consider the following passage from the Hebrew scriptures, specifically Ecclesiastes 9:11-12, which I’ll copy from the Bishop’s Bible of 1568 that Shakespeare would have known:
11. So I turned me unto other thinges under the sunne, & I sawe that in running it helpeth not to be swift, in battell it helpeth not to be strong, to feeding it helpeth not to be wyse, to riches it helpeth not to be a man of muche understanding, to be had in favour it helpeth not to be cunning: but that all lieth in tyme and fortune. 12. For a man knoweth not his tyme: but like as the fishes are taken with the angle, and as the byrdes are caught with the snare: even so are men taken in the perillous time, when it commeth sodaynly upon them. (Studylight.org’s online Bishop’s Bible, Ecclesiastes 9:11-12.)
In comedy, the characters may want change to happen in just the ways they specify (so that they can obtain their heart’s desire, whatever that may be). They may even want things to stay the same, but that kind of wish is seldom, if ever, granted. Situations—accidents and “tyme” seem to get the better of even the most fervent resolutions, the most serious invocations of dignity. As the Bible says, “all lieth in tyme and fortune.” A generous or charitable character, as described above, will most likely respond to the coming-on of time and accident in an open-minded, open-hearted way and will thereby befriend change, at least implicitly. The best example I can think of in this vein is what the shipwrecked maiden Viola says near the beginning of Twelfth Night: neither giving in to despair about the possible loss of her brother nor worrying about the particulars of her new plan to serve a widowed Illyrian noblewoman (she ends up serving the Duke instead), she declares, “What else may hap, to time I will commit” (1.2.60). Viola will face whatever comes with a bold, open spirit. She is both a woman of substance and a comic optimist. And in at least some of Shakespeare’s comedies, there’s a hint of Providence about the patterns of human desire that drive the plays towards successful resolution.

It is possible to deepen comedy and concentrate on human beings’ potential to change and grow and to accept the limitations imposed upon them by the world. Shakespeare’s best comedies do just that. While his earliest comedies tend towards farce, his more mature work strays from the standard models of ancient comedy and explores characters and subjects at will. The structure of this deeper Shakespearean romantic comedy, according to Northrop Frye and M. H. Abrams, is as follows: several characters leave the corrupt city and go to the forest or some other magical green world, and at last when all is well they return to the city or are about to do so when the play ends. In As You Like It, for example, Rosalind and Celia head for the Forest of Arden when the usurping Duke Frederick banishes Rosalind. In the romance play The Tempest, the setting is a strange island to which fortune or Providence has led Prospero after his banishment as Duke of Milan. In Twelfth Night, Viola and her brother wash ashore in Illyria after a shipwreck.

The aim of romantic comedy is broadly social: the kingdom or other city space is at first badly ruled or in turmoil for some reason—perhaps the values and institutions of the citizens and/or rulers are in need of some re-examination. What is the basis of those values and institutions—can people live comfortably or at all within them? How does a given society preserve order and its values from one generation to the next? Political and social regeneration, continuity for the ruling order, are central. The main characters leave (willingly or otherwise) the city setting and wind up in the countryside, in a pastoral setting. This setting is an enchanted, magic space that allows for the necessary re-examination of values and social roles. Magical transformations occur; characters are put in situations that could not subsist in the city or the kingdom; the forest or countryside’s magic opens up new possibilities. After this reappraisal and readjustment period has been completed, the main characters come together—the young by marriage, the foundational institution of the civil order and its only hope for regeneration, and the path is clear for a return to the corrupt setting from which they came.

Introduction to Histories

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TIMELINE OF THE ENGLISH MONARCHY

Normandy: William I (1066-87), William II (1087-1100), Henry I (1100-35)

Blois: Stephen (1135-54)

Plantagenet: Henry II (1154-89 “Anjou”), Richard I (1189-99), John (1199-1216), Henry III (1216-72), Edward I (1272-1307), Edward II (1307-27), Edward III (1327-77), Richard II (1377-99, deposed by Bolingbroke, i.e. Henry IV)

Lancaster: Henry IV (1399-1413), Henry V (1413-22), Henry VI (1422-61)

York: Edward IV (1461-83), Edward V (1483), Richard III (1483-85, killed at Bosworth by Henry Tudor)

Tudor: Henry VII (1485-1509), Henry VIII (1509-47), Edward VI (1547-53), Mary (1553-58), Elizabeth I (1558-1603)

Stuart: James I (1603-25), Charles I (1625-49, beheaded by Cromwell’s forces, 1649)

Interregnum: Council of State (1649), Protectorate (1653), Oliver Cromwell (1653-58), Richard Cromwell (1658-59)

Stuart: Charles II (1660-85, the Restoration), James II (1685-88, abdicated and fled to the Continent), William III and Mary (1689-1702, the Glorious Revolution of 1688), Anne (1702-14)

Hanover: George I (1714-27), George II (1727-60), George III (1760-1820), George IV (1820-30), William IV (1830-37), Victoria (1837-1901)

Saxe-Coburg: Edward VII (1901-10)

Windsor: George V (1910-1936), Edward VIII (1936, abdicated), George VI (1936-52), Elizabeth II (1952-present)

Shakespeare’s Focus on Two Periods in the History Plays:

Setting the Stage for the Hero-King Henry V: Richard II / Henry IV Parts 1, 2 / Henry V.

Wars of the Roses, Setting the Stage for the Tudors: Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, 3 | Richard III.

General Aims of Shakespeare’s History Plays

Shakespeare didn’t invent the dramatic genre we call “history plays”; it was a phenomenon of the 1590s, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is one fine example. But there wasn’t a long theatrical tradition to draw from; a growing sentiment of nationalism in Early Modern England probably led to the flourishing of this genre – the English apparently wanted to see their history reflected back to them, and Shakespeare was happy to oblige. But we should give him his due: if he didn’t invent the history play, it’s still true that English history retains its fascination for us moderns in large part because certain lucky kings and queens had a great dramatist to help them strut their stuff.

Consider a modern example: while JFK was a complex, intelligent man whose presidency was already consequential by the time he was cut down in November 1963, does anybody think he would exercise the continuing fascination that he does without the “Camelot” legend woven around him by his family, his advisors, and above all by his wife Jackie? She is the one who made her husband’s funeral an unforgettable national event – something for the ages. The business of life in D.C. and of governing the country went on with cold dispatch almost from the moment John Kennedy’s body was flown back from Texas to the Capitol: Lyndon Johnson was sworn in on the plane. But the Camelot legend ensured that “JFK” won’t fade into history. In an older context, Abraham Lincoln was remarkable enough to have been remembered no matter what, but Walt Whitman cemented his status as an American symbol with the elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

That is what Shakespeare has done for English history – Great Britain is a sophisticated little island country nowadays, not a great power like America, but to this day they cast a huge shadow over us: who is going to forget Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V, or John of Gaunt, Buckingham, Clarence, and any number of other great nobles, now that they have been so well memorialized? America has a fine history, but as yet lacks the Brits’ long record of colorful rulers and events that Shakespeare borrowed for his history plays.

Are those plays history in the sense of “objectively true narration”? No. While there’s a factual basis for WS’s histories and they certainly render the grand sweep of English history, the playwright does a great deal of rearranging and telescoping of events, and the sources from which he drew (Holinshed’s Chronicles chief among them) were not objective in the first place – they read more like what Winston Churchill (himself a fine writer who penned A History of the English Speaking People) called the right kind of account: history as it ought to have been, not as it happened down to the last detail. There’s no proof, for instance, that Richard III really ordered those famous lads in the Tower snuffed out, but it’s logical to assume that either he or his high-ranking follower Buckingham were responsible since both wanted Edward IV’s heirs out of the way. Shakespeare’s play, in accordance with the Tudor bias against the Yorkist Richard III, casts this conviction as a moral imperative, an “ought.”

Aristotle sets the precedent in his Poetics that historians are at a disadvantage with respect to poets because they, unlike poets, are bound to represent the ugly and sometimes chaotic scenes of actual history. We know that sometimes the bad guys win and the good guys lose; things don’t always or even usually happen in an ethically satisfying or even coherent manner. History is the record of modern life, and it’s often a mess. Aristotle wisely points out that “the difference [between the historian and the poet] is that the former relates things that have happened, the latter things that may happen.” For that reason, he suggests, “poetry is a more philosophical and more serious thing than history; poetry tends to speak of universals, history of particulars” (1451b). So if we like that line of thinking, poets are free to give us an intelligible and, at least at times, morally satisfying representation of historical events and personages: they are at liberty to construct recognizable scenes from chaotic events, and to derive ethical and intellectual clarity from the welter of motivations that have driven the great men and women of history. Shakespeare’s history is at base teleological in that it leads us to the rightness of Queen Elizabeth I’s Tudor reign: all roads lead to Gloriana, the real-life Faery Queen celebrated by Edmund Spencer.

None of this is to say that Shakespeare gives us “history for dummies,” tales so black-and-white in their simplification that they insult our intelligence. In fact, if you read widely enough in his histories, what you’ll find is that the playwright manages to do two things at once: one, pay tribute to the muddiness of history and the complexity of historical agents, and two, give us a sense that it all still adds up to something, that there are some lessons to be learned about ethics and power from this pageant of people and deeds. This accomplishment is apparent in a few plays we don’t have time to study, but that are among Shakespeare’s best engagements with English history: let’s begin with some information about the Wars of the Roses and then briefly examine Richard III.

The Wars of the Roses Period: Setting the Tudor Stage with the Reign and Demise of Richard III

The Tudor Era begins with Henry VII (1485-1509), victor over the last Yorkist king, Richard III (1483-85) at Bosworth Field; it continues through the reigns of Henry VIII (1509-47), Edward VI (1547-53), Mary (1553-58), and ends with Elizabeth I (1558-1603).

Henry VII put an end to the Wars of the Roses, a period of late-feudal dynastic strife between the descendants of the Angevin Plantagenet line’s Edward III (1327-77) stretching from 1455 to Henry VII’s ascension and even a few years after that, to 1487. In essence, the throne was tossed back and forth between the Houses of Lancaster and York (branches of the old Plantagenet line), with the incompetent Lancastrian Henry VI (son of Henry V, victor of Agincourt in October, 1415) ruling from 1422-61, and Yorkist Richard III getting rid of the heirs of his deceased brother and fellow Yorkist Edward IV (1461-83), who had defeated Henry VI, to rule in his own right for three fitful years. Finally, Henry, Earl of Richmond, an exiled member of the Welsh Tudor clan, married Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York to unite the two great houses. This Henry VII is the grandfather of Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabeth I.

So the recent political past had been one of considerable strife and instability, with great nobles traversing England and at times treating the people with as little respect as foreign invaders might. The larger historical background places the English strife as the immediate aftermath of the European Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between the House of Anjou (the Plantagenets, that is) and the House of Valois for the throne of France with the extinction of the direct Capetian line after French kings Philip V (1316-22) and Charles IV (1322-28). The House of Valois, though at great cost, succeeded by 1453 in expelling the English claimants from France, so Henry V’s victory at Agincourt was short-lived and his son failed to hold the lands previously secured. The English couldn’t sustain their larger territorial ambitions on the Continent, and withdrew to their own island. From that territory they would eventually enter the world scene as an impressive naval and commercial empire.

Biography is the easiest way to learn about history – dry descriptions of battles and analyses of treaties aren’t exciting, but the people behind them are often fascinating. Shakespeare starts from that insight, and the best of his history plays are vehicles for the stellar personalities of the English monarchs. Richard III seems much more gripping in this regard than its early companion Wars of the Roses plays, 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI. Richard of Gloucester, at least as Shakespeare paints him (thereby melodramatizing the already biased narrations of the Tudor chroniclers), was a charismatic monster somewhat like our modern fictional predator and scourge of the free-range rude, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It’s this strange charm that Shakespeare makes the center of the play. Let’s watch a very brief segment from an excellent modern production in which Ian McKellen plays Richard of Gloucester and gets this quality just right. [SHOW CLIP – 1.2 in which Richard woos Anne Neville, wife of Henry VI’s heir Prince Edward]. As Richard himself asks, “Was ever woman in such humour woo’d?” Shakespeare, speaking through Richard’s boast, flaunts his own dramatic abilities in pulling off such a stunt worked up from the chronicles. The courtship scene is as unrealistic as anything we can imagine, but it works as drama: we can easily understand that the vulnerable Anne was buffeted about by ruthless dynastic forces, so seeking safety in a powerful man makes sense, and one can’t help but give Richard high marks for audacity in so enthusiastically seeking the hand of the woman whose princely husband he has just murdered. Her husband Edward was in fact killed at Tewkesbury in 1471, and Richard married Anne in mid-1472, so the remarriage happened quickly, but not practically the day Edward died, as Shakespeare represents it. There is still over a decade remaining in the reign of Richard’s brother Edward IV, too, so the play has greatly telescoped events originally spanning a few decades into what seems to theater-goers only months, or even weeks.

But Richard’s dynamic personality isn’t all the play gets right, at least in dramatic terms: there’s also the tangled web of relations and loyalties amongst the various characters to cover, and here there seems to be considerable historical truth in the portrayals. Shakespeare’s George, Duke of Clarence (Richard’s older brother) is given a sensitive, riveting speech about a nightmare he had – one that obliquely warns him that his brother Richard isn’t as friendly towards him as he pretends to be – but Shakespeare takes care to remind us that Clarence had once upon a time been a supporter of the embattled Henry VI and Warwick the Kingmaker against the current King Edward IV, before switching sides when that proved convenient. Neither do the other main characters escape critical portrayal – details aside, they appear as the men and women of fierce ambition, resentment, and divided loyalties that they were in life. To an extent, this is true even of the play’s Tudor hero, Richmond, who takes the crown from Richard in 1485 and becomes Henry VII, an icon of early English nationalism of the sort Queen Elizabeth I would come to depend on during her reign (1558-1603). Henry Earl of Richmond is certainly contrasted in a stark manner to the villainous Richard of Gloucester, but he’s still a human being, not a god or an angel. By Shakespeare’s own day, the chivalric ideals, the feudal loyalties, of older times had disappeared, but in Richard III the playwright brings them to life well at the point of their final disintegration. I’m suggesting by the above that in spite of the melodramatic quality of Richard III and its clear-cut contrast between hero Henry and rascal Richard, there’s no lack of sophistication or ambivalence, so in that broad sense the play is true to history. Shakespeare always gets human nature right, however much license he takes with the chronological unfolding of history.

But in the end, we must emphasize the both-and quality of the history plays and not insist too heavily on the tribute they pay to the maelstrom of historical confusion, as if Shakespeare were anachronistically channeling postmodern sentiments and expectations. Richard III’s mastery is short-lived, and the medieval-style moral pattern reinforced by this play is never in doubt. Richard’s own words suggest the reason for his speedy failure as a king: “I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. / Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye” (4.2.63-5). However courageous and crafty Richard may be, he has become the creature of his own evil deeds, doomed to repeat them with less and less control over the outcome, until disaster can no longer be kept at bay. Only his death at the hands of Henry Tudor, and Henry’s marriage as Henry VII to the Yorkist King Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth, will put an end to the bloody chaos of The Wars of the Roses. The lesson of Richard III seems starkly Augustinian: sin begets sin, and free will negates itself thereby, so that all of Richard’s cunning schemes and furious action come to nothing. Shakespeare’s “speaking picture” (Philip Sidney’s phrase) of incarnate evil, like all evil, ultimately has no substance, no staying power – those who try to harness evil as the vehicle of their own advancement end up destroying themselves. That’s why Richard III isn’t a true tragedy but is instead a brilliant melodrama looking back to the late medieval period of English history.

Back to an Earlier Time: Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V

If Richard III partly showed us a consummate Machiavellian ruler going about his murderous business, Richard II serves as a prime example of Shakespeare’s interest in what happens when those who are the center of the whirlwind that is English history don’t know how to use the power they have. Richard II, in Shakespeare’s casting, is a wicked man but also a doomed poet-king who philosophizes about and dramatizes his downfall even as it is happening to him. The following passage from 3.2 speaks for itself as an indicator of Richard Plantagenet’s mindset; Richard is in the midst of preparations for battle with Henry Bolingbroke, who has returned from the Continent with an army to claim first the rights he lost when Richard stripped him of his inheritance from his father John of Gaunt (the third son of Edward III), and then the throne itself:

AUMERLE. Where is the Duke my father with his power?

KING RICHARD. No matter where--of comfort no man speak.
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
…………………………………………

For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos'd, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd,
Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd,
All murder'd-for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?

CARLISLE. My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes,
But presently prevent the ways to wail.

Richard II is a master of words, but not a good ruler. As Carlisle tries to tell him, men in his position haven’t the luxury of sitting around and poeticizing: their task is to act quickly and resolutely. Chairman Mao famously said that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun.” That was largely true of the English monarchs in the time period Shakespeare covers – violence was never far from the throne, either in its getting or its defending. “Use it or lose it” is the first lesson of political power: if you are entrusted with authority and fail to use it, someone else will, whether their claim to wield that power is textbook legitimate or not. Legitimate is as legitimate does. (I suppose all the English rulers knew that primogeniture, legitimacy, and allied concepts were partly fictions.) I can’t do better than quote il brutto, Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, from the 1966 Sergio Leone classic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: “When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk.” Ultimately, what we can draw from Richard II is Shakespeare’s interest in the pitiless dynamics of royal power; his concern for the necessarily close relationship between rhetoric and political action; and the fundamental need of a ruler to understand his own people. Richard II failed in all three regards, and so he fell to the ruthless and efficient claim to the throne advanced by Henry Bolingbroke.

From 1 and 2 Henry IV, I have time only to mention that the plays show the comic, redemptive disposition of time we have discussed in relation to Twelfth Night. Henry Bolingbroke or Henry IV was a powerful and competent man, but in Shakespeare’s handling, he is a guilt-ridden stage-setter for his prodigal son Prince Hal, who will in Henry V be represented as a great warrior-king and an icon of early English nationalism. Much of the two plays is taken up with Shakespeare’s interest in the playful, redemptive development of Hal from his troubled youth to maturity. The young man has time enough to run with the jovial but morally dangerous Sir John Falstaff and his crowd, even turning the tables on the old knight when he robs Sir John of the spoils he himself had won during an earlier robbery at Gadshill. What Hal learns during that long interval is not only who he is but who his subjects are – unlike Richard II, he is not an alien in his own land, but the living symbol of England whose power comes from the fact that he understands the kingdom he must govern and lead to victory in war; Hal understands as well that while being a king involves game-playing or role-playing, this “play” is no joke: it’s done in a spirit of deadly earnestness. It’s hard to miss the emphasis on the burdens of kingship in the Henry IV and Henry V plays.

Ultimately, the comic spirit or pattern pervades this set, and in fact it applies to all of Shakespeare’s history plays – even the ones labeled “tragedies” like Richard II, Richard III, and 3 Henry VI. That’s because in the future lies the teleological endpoint of Elizabeth’s Tudor reign and the Stuart line of James I, the two rulers during whose time Shakespeare lived and wrote: all of the events the playwright represents, we might say, were necessary to make the present possible, and all of the rulers and the great nobles were in that sense actors in a pageant larger than they could have comprehended. It seems that true tragedy is only possible when the universe crumbles around the characters who fall to their ruin, or at least it is shaken and shown to be fundamentally indifferent or even hostile to human aspirations. With the felicitous Tudor/Stuart endpoint of Shakespeare’s own day always in an audience’s mind, the tragic dimension cannot have been the primary one in his history plays; those plays essentially represent a comic or happy swath of time.

Introduction to Tragedy

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Introduction to Tragedy and Ancient Greek Theater

Books and Online Resources:

Didaskalia: Ancient Theatre Today. http://www.didaskalia.net/index.html. 3-D theatre and mask reconstructions, excellent introductory material on Greek and Roman theatre and stagecraft.

Easterling, P. E. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kaufmann, Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Ley, Graham. A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1991.

McLeish, Kenneth. A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 2003.

Perseus Project. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/. Electronic texts (original languages and translations), critical studies, etc. An impressive resource for classicists.

Pomeroy, Sarah et al. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Religious Roots of Tragedy: The Festivals of Dionysus at Athens were called the City Dionysia, which was held in March or April, and the Lenaea, which was held in January. Though classical theater flourished mainly from 475-400 BCE, it developed earlier from choral religious ceremonies dedicated to Dionysus.

The God of Honor: Dionysus was an Olympian god, and the Greeks celebrated his rites in the dithyramb. In mythology, his followers were satyrs and mainades, or ecstatic females. We sometimes call him the god of ecstasy, and as Kenneth McLeish says, he “supervis[ed] the moment when human beings surrender to unstoppable, irrational feeling or impulse” (1-2). His agents are wine, song, and dance. Song and dance were important to Dionysian rites, and the participants apparently wore masks.

At the festivals, three tragic writers would compete and so would three or five comedic playwrights. The idea was that each tragedian would present three plays and a satyr play; sometimes the three plays were linked in a trilogy, like The Oresteia. So the audience had a great deal of play going to do during the festival seasons; the activities may have gone on for three or four days, with perhaps four or five plays per day. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival provides something like this pace.

Organization: How were the festivals organized? Well, the magistrate was chosen every year by lot—the archon. Then, dramatists would apply to the magistrate for a chorus, and if they obtained a chorus, that meant that they had been chosen as one of the three tragic playwrights. After that affair was settled, wealthy private citizens known as choregoi served as producers for each playwright. The state paid for the actors, and the choregos paid chorus’ training and costumes. So there was both state and private involvement in the production of a tragedy or comedy.

The Playwrights: Aeschylus 525-456 B.C. / Sophocles 496-406 B.C. / Euripides 485-406 B.C.

Aeschylus composed about 80 dramas, Sophocles about 120, Euripides perhaps about 90. Aristophanes probably wrote about 40 comedies. Dramatists who wrote tragedies did not compose comedies, and vice versa.

The playwright was called a didaskalos, a teacher or trainer because he trained the chorus who were to sing and dance. As drama developed, the playwright also took care of the scripts and the music. He was something like a modern director, and may at times have acted in his own plays, especially in the early stages of his career. A successful dramatist could win prizes, but generally, playwrights were able to support themselves independently by land-holdings. Sophocles, for example, was a prominent citizen—he served as a general and treasurer. Aeschylus was an esteemed soldier against the Persian Empire, and his tombstone is said to have recorded his military service, not his prowess as a playwright.

The Theater: The theater for the City Dionysia was located on the south slope of the citadel of Athens, the Acropolis. The Didaskalia Classics site offers 3-D images of a later reconstruction: http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/recreatingdionysus.html.

The theater had three parts:

1. Theatron: this was for seating around 14,000 spectators; it was probably at first of wood, but later it was of stone. 2. Orchestra: this was for the chorus to sing and dance in and for the actors, when their function was developed. 3. Skene: this was at first a tent-like structure that served as a scene-building, and it had a door for entrances and exits. The Oresteia requires one, though perhaps the earliest plays didn’t. Costume was important, too, because it could be used to determine factors like status, gender, and age.

The chorus remained important in drama, especially in Aeschylus. At some point, a choregos (legend says it was “Thespis,” hence actors are “thespians”) stepped forth and became the first actor, or answerer (hypocrites). So the composer was the first participant to turn choral celebration into what we call drama, with a plot and interaction between characters. Apparently Aeschylus or Sophocles added a third actor. The former’s early plays required only two actors, but even that was enough to make for interesting exchanges between the chorus and the actors and, to some extent, between the actors and each other. With three actors, of course, the possibilities for true dramatic dialogue and action are impressive.

Audience: Would have consisted mostly of male citizens—the ones who ran Athenian democracy by participating in the Assembly. There would probably have been very few, if any, slaves or women present, and perhaps some resident aliens or “metics” and visiting dignitaries. Drama was surely a male-centered affair, as was the political life of Athens. Public speaking was vital in democratic Athens—anyone who was someone in the legal/political system needed to know how to move and convince fairly large numbers of men. Theater and political life, as we shall see from Aeschylus, were in fact closely connected: the same skills were required, and the same class of people participated (male kyrioi, or heads of households who also performed military service). So while the stuff of tragedy seems almost always to have been the ancient myth cycles, the audience watching the plays would have felt themselves drawn in by the dramatists’ updating of their significance for the major concerns of the 5th-century B.C. present. And that present was, of course, the age of the great statesman Pericles (495-429 B.C.), who drove home the movement towards full Athenian democracy from 461 B.C. onwards and who at the same time furthered a disastrous course of imperial protection and aggression that had ensued from victory in the Persian Wars around 500 B.C. Greek tragedy grew to maturity in the period extending from the battles of Marathon on land in 490 B.C. and the naval engagement at Salamis in 480 B.C., on through the Second Peloponnesian War from 431-404 B.C., in which the Athenians lost to Sparta the empire they had gained during half a century of glory following the victories over Persia. Athens’ supremacy didn’t last long as such things go, but it burned brightly while it lasted, and festival drama, along with architecture, sculpture, and philosophy, was among its greatest accomplishments. So the dramas took place in one of the most exciting times in Western history—both heady and unsettling at the same time, shot through with violence, democratic and artistic flowering, victory, and great loss.

Tragic Masks: The masks tell us something about tragedy: with linen or clay masks, a single actor might play several roles, or wear several faces of the same character. (Visit Didaskalia’s interactive 3-D mask page at http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/visual_resources/images/masks/mask_mm/rotmask1.html.) Wilde said, “give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” His quip should remind us that masks don’t discourage expression—as Kenneth McLeish says, they had religious significance in the theater: participants in Dionysian rites offered up their personal identity to the god, and further, he continues:

“Wearing a mask does not inhibit or restrict the portrayal of character but enhances it, allowing more, not less, fluidity and suppleness of movement; and the character created by or embodied in the mask and the actor who wears it can feel as if it has an independent identity which is liberated at the moment of performance—an unsettlingly Dionysian experience” (9).

That emphasis on what we might call expression is important especially because—Aristotle’s claims about plot being the soul of tragedy notwithstanding—not much happens in many Greek tragedies. Instead, chorus members and characters “take up an attitude” towards the few well-packaged, exciting events that take place on or off the stage. The action is important, but the characters’ words and attitudes help us, in turn, gain perspective on the action. Perhaps when Aristotle emphasizes plot so much, he’s taking for granted the great power of the Dionysian mask to support the plot in driving the audience towards catharsis. Character, he says, will reveal itself in relation to the play’s action.

Aristotle’s Theory of Drama and Shakespeare’s Practice as a Dramatist

We will cover Aristotle briefly in our class, but if you would like to read something more detailed about his theory of drama, please see my Fall 2007 E491 Literary Theory blog (http://www.ajdrake.com/blogs/491_fall_07/), where (in the entry for Week 2) I cover The Poetics in some detail. In Aristotle’s view, a well constructed plot that follows probability and necessity will induce the proper tragic emotions (pity and fear or terror), with the result being “catharsis,” a medical term that may be interpreted as “purgation” (of emotion) and/or as “intellectual clarification.” I should think that the tragic emotions, once aroused, become the object of introspection; thereafter, the audience attains clarification about an issue of great importance—for instance, our relation to the gods, the nature of divine justice, etc.

Aristotle's theory of tragedy in The Poetics is simple in its essentials: the dramatist must craft a plot ("an arrangement of incidents") that follows the laws of necessity and probability and thereby represents a unified action. If the dramatist follows the precept that "plot is the soul of tragedy," the proper emotional effect should follow: the audience's pity and fear will lead them toward catharsis. The latter was a Greek medical term that had to do with purging the body by means of cutting a vein and "bleeding" the patient; it is usually interpreted to mean that a tragic play stirs up powerful feelings but also renders them harmless or puts them in the service of artistic reflection. To extrapolate broadly, we may leave the theater emotionally purified and much "clearer" intellectually about our own nature as human beings, our place in the universe, and our relationship with the gods. Aristotle was a scientist, and he considered the arts intellectually significant: he suggested that mimesis (imitation, representation) is one of the main ways we learn things from the time we are children onwards. Dramatic mimesis is a species of representation in general, so in that sense it's continuous with life beyond the theater. We find in Aristotle, then, a view that says carefully structured works of theatrical art open a window to an important emotional and intellectual experience, one that makes painful sights and stories worthwhile to see and reflect upon.

As for the precise nature of tragic insight, well, it varies from play to play. Aristotle knew that just saying a tragedy ends unhappily wasn't much of a description – what would we do then with Aeschylus' The Oresteia, a trilogy that ends in triumph for its remaining protagonist and glory for the city of Athens? But to take a prominent example of a play that really does end badly for its protagonist, what is the nature of the insight gained in Sophocles' Oedipus the King? Surely the lesson isn’t simply that you shouldn’t kill your father and then sleep with your mother. Those are primal taboos. Perhaps, then, we see the iron law of prophecy and divine sway brought home to us: Oedipus had tried to flee a prophecy, but the god’s words catch up with him anyway. Even this admirably clever character cannot outwit his own fate, and his very strengths (cleverness and determination, self-sufficiency in the face of hardship) become the engines of his destruction. Or perhaps we come to understand the painful process of gaining insight into the nature of things and of ourselves. Oedipus the King tells us something—to our discomfiture—about how we fit into a cosmic order presided over by difficult gods. Another example would be Sophocles’ Antigone—there are competing sets of laws and rights in the cosmos. Antigone asserts familial piety (she wants to bury her slain brother), while Creon asserts his prerogative to be obeyed as a king who had decreed it fitting to leave Antigone's brother unburied since the man had made himself an enemy to Thebes. Both are in their own context taking the moral high ground, so situation thereby yields us the Hegelian notion of tragedy that pits incompatible rights against each other.

There doesn't seem, then, to be any one thing to learn from ancient tragedy, except perhaps that the world never works they way we want it to but instead has its own ways. Greek tragedy teaches us that (contrary to what Protagoras said) man is not the measure of all things; humanity is certainly not the boss of the universe. We are caught up in nets of significance beyond our power to escape or perhaps even to understand fully, and the best we may be able to do is to seek clarity and maintain our dignity in the face of that harsh insight. But that's important, too: the Greeks cared a lot about how you faced up to a fate imposed upon you by forces beyond your control, about what attitude you struck up in the face of disaster and, sometimes, divine indifference or even hostility. In tragedy, as Northrop Frye and others have long said, it is death that gives meaning to life: which means that the art form pays homage to a kind of magnificent powerlessness: life only yields its full significance when we are on the verge of losing it. What good does "insight" do the protagonist (and us by implication) if consciousness is about to be extinguished and we won't be able to act upon our hard-won insight? Well, that's a very human question, one we might suppose tragedy to ask but not, I think, to answer to everyone's satisfaction. Maybe there's some value in not going to one's grave a dupe, an unwitting plaything of a hostile or uncaring universe: there's dignity in getting clear on things.

Of course, we need not suppose Shakespeare bothered much with literary theory; he almost surely never studied Aristotle's Poetics. He seems to have had a general (and not necessarily favorable) acquaintance with what would eventually become in eighteenth-century drama a rigid doctrine of the unities of action, time, and place, and of course he knew from any number of sources and influences (Horace, etc.) that art was a species of imitation. A dramatist or an actor "holds the mirror up to nature," as he makes Hamlet say. Aristotle offers us valuable insights in his own right, which can serve as a point of departure for thinking about Shakespeare's own idiosyncratic way of developing tragic plays. It's often said that the Renaissance's great minds drew from classical authors the courage they needed to step forth into the full development of their own humanity; that makes sense as a broad generalization, but there's another and more disturbing set of insights to be drawn from the Greeks and Romans all the way back to Homer, a poet often described as reassuring but who at least implicitly recognizes the "dark side" of Greek culture and thought: the stuff, that is, of Greek tragedy. This sense for the dark side, for the gap between knowledge and power, for the great distance between our need for intelligibility and security and the way the world and the gods treat us, may be what Shakespeare drew from the classical tradition.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

2010-09-14T11:46:00.001-07:00

NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE’S A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Updated to accord with the text in Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5.

Act 1, Scene 1 (377-82, T & Hyppolyta’s courtship, Egeus’ demand, Helena’s complaint, Lysander’s plan)

The play opens with a conversation between Theseus, Duke of Athens and the Amazon Queen he has conquered and is now set to marry. The archetypal “war between the sexes” has given way to the “pomp . . . triumph . . . [and] revelling” (378, 1.1.19) of a wedding ceremony. Theseus, though himself somewhat impatient, promises Hippolyta that violence and chaos will give way to marital decorum and an orderly society. But as Lysander soon says to Hermia, “The course of true love never did run smooth” (380, 1.1.134), and soon Egeus comes onto the scene to stir up trouble (378, 1.1.21-22). His daughter Hermia has refused the suitor named Demetrius that he has chosen for her, and now the father importunes the Duke to uphold the harsh law of Shakespeare’s Athens (378, 1.1.41-42). Hermia must assent to a life with Demetrius, or she will either forfeit her life or remain a virgin for the rest of her days. Such outlandishly cruel “laws” are useful in comedies and romances since they allow the playwright to deal with primal issues of life and death, to depict universal struggles in the starkest manner. The Terrible Father is a handy device in Shakespeare’s bag of drama-tricks, and here he serves as an obstacle in the path of the lovers Hermia and Lysander. The father is perhaps jealous, and he aligns himself with the symbolic power of absolute interdiction. He envisions a rival order to the one Theseus has staked out, one that allows no room for his daughter Hermia to pursue natural desire. The result is confusion, chaos, and vexation. Lysander has a plan, which is to take refuge in the woods not far from Athens, and then to travel to his aunt’s home, where Athenian law does not apply (380, 1.1.157-67). This plan will take the main couples off to one of Shakespeare’s most beloved green worlds, the fairy kingdom of Oberon and Titania.

Helena now enters—she is Hermia’s childhood friend, and has problems of her own to deal with. She is in love with her former suitor Demetrius, who now cares only for Helena. When Lysander tells her of his plan to steal away with Hermia into the forest, Helena decides to reveal this information to Demetrius for her own selfish benefit. A strain of jealousy against Hermia is evident in Helena’s comment, “Through Athens I am thought as fair as she” (382, 1.1.227). She puts much faith in the power of love even as she says this profound feeling involves neither judgment nor clarity of vision: “Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity” (382, 1.1.232-33). Perhaps it is not quality in the lover that we love, but rather what we ourselves project onto or into the beloved. Love is a thing of fantasy, and is not amenable to reason. The main question that the play poses has to do with the extent to which we can direct desire so that it guarantees order, social harmony and decorum.

Act 1, Scene 2 (382-84, Quince hands out roles; Bottom’s desire to play all of them)

This comic scene continues the theme of transformation introduced in Scene 1. Several workingmen have determined to compete for the honor of putting on a play in the presence of the Duke and Hippolyta. Their conversations give us some of Shakespeare’s most notable commentary on his chosen profession, if we may be so bold as to make such a connection. Peter Quince is the director of Pyramus and Thisbe, a tragic play about star-crossed lovers . Bottom the Weaver is to play the hero Pyramus (383, 1.2.16), but he wants to play everything else as well: “let me play Thisbe too” (383, 1.2.43) and “Let me play the lion too” (384, 1.2.58). To the latter request, he receives the answer that he would roar too loud and frighten the ladies – we will come across this concern about excessive realism again in Act 3, Scene 1 (394-95, 3.1.8-60), but for now, it’s easy to see that Nick Bottom is a delightful narcissist who wants to project himself into everything around him and that he is excited about the prospect of using art to escape everyday reality. The mechanicals are interested in maintaining the element of surprise, which is why they decide to go to the palace woods, lest interested parties find out about their play (384, 1.2.82-85).

Act 2, Scene 1 (384-90, Oberon and Titania quarrel; enter Robin Goodfellow)

We now meet the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania, whose lineage, I’ve read, goes all the way back to fifth-century Frankish Merovingian times. The fairy world in this play is one of Shakespeare’s “green worlds,” but it isn’t exactly remote from the human world and its concerns. (The same would be a fair statement about As You Like It’s Forest of Arden.) Magical transformations happen in this “palace wood,” but Oberon and Titania are beset by the same jealousies as foolish mortals: Puck and his fairy conversation partner tell us that these monarchs are at present separated over the custodianship of “A lovely boy stol’n from an Indian king” (385, 2.1.22), a changeling to whom Titania is particularly attached (since the boy’s mother was a votary of hers – a changeling is either a fairy child put in place of a stolen human child or, as in this case, the human child that has been taken), but whom Oberon wants for a “Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild” (385, 2.1.25). Perhaps we are also to understand that Titania would keep the boy just as he is, while Oberon would initiate him into maturity.

The unhappy couple sling accusations of infidelity (with the mortal king and his consort, no less) at each other (386, 2.1.63-76), and their squabbling has already, Titania reveals, resulted in natural disorders that cause trouble for lowly humans just trying to till the soil and raise their crops: “The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn / Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard” (386, 2.1.94-95).

Perhaps Titania is partly concerned to maintain her own sphere of authority by withholding from Oberon something he dearly covets, so the fairy monarchs have their own invisible war of the sexes going on: she refuses to surrender the boy: “His mother was a vot’ress of my order … / And for her sake do I rear up her boy; / And for her sake I will not part with him” (387, 2.1.123, 135-37).

Oberon decides on the spot to punish Titania for her obstinacy, so he summons Puck to find the magical flower with which to cast a spell on her: the pansy, which acquired its great property of inspiring love from the bolt of Cupid 387-88, 2.1.146-48, 165-74). The flower causes love at first sight, regardless of the object, so it serves as an emblem of the power that Hermia had invested in love itself. Oberon hopes by this device to extort the Indian boy from her in exchange for releasing her from whatever love relation the flower causes her to forge.

Puck, Oberon’s helper, is mischief in its lighter aspects—not the murderous Mischief invoked by Antony in Julius Caesar (the one that accords so well with “havoc” and “the dogs of war”; see Norton Tragedies 295, 3.1.276). Still, I suppose we could understand Robin Goodfellow, as his full name runs, to be the obverse of the chaste power that overlooks the entire play – namely, Diana, virgin goddess of the moon (377, 1.1.4).

Act 2, Scene 2 (390-94, Oberon be-pansies Titania; Puck mistakenly bewitches Lysander)

The transformations enjoined by Oberon are supposed to yield predictable results, but it’s hard to control such a magical power. Puck mistakenly sprinkles Lysander instead of Demetrius (392, 2.2.76-77), Lysander falls in love with Helena and out of love with Hermia. Puck can’t process the fact that Lysander and Helena are sleeping apart simply because they’re following the human custom of chastity before marriage, not because they are angry with each other: “Nay, good Lysander; for my sake, my dear, / Lie further off yet; do not lie so near” (391, 2.2.49-50). Puck is a natural creature, and cares nothings for customs of any sort. Helena is outraged at Lysander’s strange new affection (393, 2.2.129-40), and Hermia can scarcely believe Lysander isn’t near her side when she wakes up recounting her bad dream: “Methought a serpent ate my heart away” (393, 2.2.155), and decides to go off in search of him. Lysander claims to be following his reason in choosing Helena and rejecting Hermia (393, 2.2.126-28), but reason has nothing to do with it. Neither does his “will,” which he claims is being led by reason. Well, at least Oberon carried out his part of the plan properly—he began the scene by squeezing pansy juice onto Titania’s eyelids (391, 2.2.32). Another name for the pansy is “love-in-idleness,” which reminds us that love involves a narcissistic projection of qualities into a beloved object to bind it to us.

Act 3, Scene 1 (394-98, Quince & Co.’s artistic concerns; Bottom translated, charms Titania)

Our lowly actors are hard at work for the nobility’s viewing pleasure. Bottom continues to be determined to avoid excessive realism: “There are things in this comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe that will never please” (394, 3.1.8-11), he says, and finds the solution to this problem in a cunning prologue that will reassure the audience they are only watching a play. Snout worries about the lion, so Bottom decrees that he must show his humanity through his suit (394, 3.1.32-34). The issue of the moonlight must also be worked out (395, 3.1.51-55). Aside from the moonlight, the second difficulty is how to represent a wall, but Bottom has an ingenious strategy to deal with this: one of the actors will stand on the stage and create a crack with his hands held a certain way, which will signify the crack through which Pyramus and Thisbe will speak (395, 3.1.57-60). Bottom and others’ concerns (394-95, 3.1.8-60) about excessive realism and representational detail may indicate that they have trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy, so they think their betters have the same problem. Still, the first problem in particular is an important neoclassical concern: what is the moral impact of fictional representations? Can mere fantasies cause distress? Of course they can – and in fact, Helena had described the power of love similarly in the first act (382, 1.1.232-33). Anything that is worth something is probably also capable of causing distress when mishandled or misunderstood.

With regard to the second issue – that of representation’s basic limits (how realistic can and must our play be?), it is worth remembering that we take for granted today a host of cinematic special effects when we watch a film of Shakespeare—at least when we watch excellent Hollywood versions like Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice or Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, or Julie Taymor’s remarkable film Titus. When we go to watch an actual play, however, we are much closer to the possibilities of Shakespeare’s own day. One can only do so much by way of illusion on the stage, so we find Shakespeare often asking his audience to use their own imaginations, lest the play fall flat. One of the most famous instances occurs in Henry V, in which the prologue-speaker begins, “O for a muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention: / A kingdom for a stage, princes to act / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!” (Norton Histories 770, Prologue 1-4) The advice given the audience there is, “‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, / Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times, / Turning th’accomplishment of many years / Into an hourglass…” (770, Prologue 28-31). When it came to representing fairy kingdoms and the personages therein, Shakespeare must have known how similar any playwright’s efforts must be to those of Peter Quince and his actors. Still, his great clown Feste in Twelfth Night sums up the power of fiction when he sings at the end of the play, “But that’s all one, our play is done, / And we’ll strive to please you every day” (Norton Comedies 750, 5.1.394-95). You must leave the charmed circle of the theater when the performance ends, but you can return there again and again, so that in this sense, at least, art and life interweave perpetually. Perhaps Shakespeare thought the combined power of artistic representation and the audience’s fancy or imagination was impressive enough to void excessive concern over the limitations of his plays.

Puck determines that partially transforming Bottom into an ass will be his contribution to the play (395, 3.1.65-68), and all the other actors are frightened from the scene. Bottom suspects a plot on their part: “This is to make an ass of me, to / fright me, if they could; but I will not stir from this place, do / what they can” (396, 3.1.106-08). We now see another side to Bottom’s desire to transform himself into anything and everything: perhaps this desire indicates a degree of narcissism and a strong need to control his surroundings, not necessarily a healthy imagination. As mentioned earlier, some have said that Bottom’s over-concern about realism indicates a lack of imagination, not an excess of it. It may also be the case that Shakespeare is having fun at the expense of early neoclassical criticism, which insists that the audience falls prey to “dramatic illusion” and takes what it sees on the stage for the real thing. If all this is true, it seems comically appropriate that he should be “translated” (396, 3.1.105) into a stubborn, obtuse donkey. But Titania awakens to the sight of him, and the magic juice does its work: “thy fair virtue’s force perforce doth move me / On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee” (396, 3.1.124-25). She makes him an offer he can’t refuse, considering her powers and high state: “Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no” (397, 3.1.135). I would not be harsh with Bottom – if he cannot manage his fantasy projections, he isn’t alone in the play in not being able to do that. Narcissism and projection are part of love as well. How aware are most people of that fact?

Act 3, Scene 2 (398-407, Oberon bewitches Demetrius, orders Robin to fix his error; couples argue in the forest, both men pursuing Helena: chaos; Oberon’s desire for peace)

Puck relates how he transformed Bottom (398, 3.2.1-32), then in Oberon’s presence he discovers his error in having sprinkled pansy juice on Lysander rather than Demetrius: “This is the woman, but not this the man” (399, 3.2.42). Oberon is pleased that Titania has fallen in love with the transformed Bottom, but he is not pleased about Lysander’s situation, and sets about making things right. Oberon now bewitches Demetrius (400, 3.2.99) to turn his affections towards Helena, while Robin sees good sport in the coming fireworks amongst the couples (400, 3.2.111-15).

Helena continues to believe she is the butt of a cruel joke when Demetrius and Lysander vie for her attention: “You both are rivals and love Hermia, / And now both rivals to mock Helena” (401, 3.2.156-57). She laments to Hermia, “is all quite forgot? / All schooldays’ friendship, childhood innocence?” (402, 3.2.202-03). Hermia protests her innocence truthfully, but soon things turn ugly when her weak point is found: she fears being mocked for her short stature: “[Helena] … hath made compare / Between our statures; she hath urged her height …” (404, 3.2.291-92).

Demetrius and Lysander go off into the woods to fight a duel (405, 3.2.337-38), and Oberon orders Puck to follow them and keep anything untoward from happening. With the men and the women alike quarreling, we have reached the height of chaos in this play. The assumption Hermia makes is not so hard to fathom. The matter of attraction or the lack thereof strikes at the very heart of a person’s identity. Puck is ordered to fix his mistake with Lysander (405, 3.2.355-69), while Oberon himself will extort the Indian boy from Titania in exchange for releasing her from her love match with an ass. What Oberon the comic king seeks above all is harmony: “I will her charmèd eye release / From monster’s view, and all things shall be peace” (406, 3.2.375-78). The scene ends with both human couples fast asleep not far from one another.

Act 3, Scene 3 (407-08, Robin corrects his error with Lysander)

In the third scene, Robin Goodfellow finally corrects his earlier mistake: “Jack shall have Jill, / Naught shall go ill, / the man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well” (408, 3.3.45-47). Robin doesn’t sharply differentiate one human couple from another: to him, what matters is the coupling itself, the simple fact of union, and he doesn’t trouble himself with the choice of object.

Act 4, Scenes 1-2 (408-14, Robin corrects his error, Oberon unvexes Titania, they reconcile; Theseus and Hyppolita converse; Bottom recovers, waxes philosophical; play’s preferred!)

Bottom satisfies his nonhuman desires with some delicious hay, and then gives in to sleep while Titania lies next to him (409, 4.1.30-42). Oberon has succeeded in his plan to extort the Indian boy from Titania, so he tells Puck to turn Bottom back into a man (410, 4.1.80ff) while Oberon himself undoes his magic against Titania (409, 4.1.67), using now the antidote to the pansy, Dian’s bud. Then he tells us something about the nature of that word “dream” in the title of the play: the human couples will “to Athens back again repair, / And think no more of this night’s accidents / But as the fierce vexation of a dream” (409, 4.1.64-66). What we have been witnessing is a species of “vexation” in which nothing holds true about even those things in which we put most stock; everything is subject to whimsical magic and is beyond our control. But no lasting harm will come of this fitful state of agitation since all of the couples concerned will end up properly sorted by the end of the play and Bottom’s strange metamorphosis is only temporary; if, as some have said, there is an element of satire here, it is not particularly sharp-edged. The play deals with passion in a curiously dispassionate, bemused, moonstruck manner. This fairy-land perspective has already been captured when Puck says to Oberon in 3.2, “Shall we their fond pageant see? / Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (400, 3.2.114-15) We know that chaste goddess Diana is looking over the whole affair from her distant perch. The final task of the fairy king and queen will be to bless the wedding day and grounds for Theseus and the other mortals: strife and confusion will give way to courtly decorum and blessings (410, 4.1.84-89).

At the palace, Hippolyta still shows some of her old spirit, reminding Theseus that she has kept still better company than him—his hounds may be very fine, but she has heard the dogs of Hercules and Cadmus, and is dubious about Theseus’ claims of supreme tuneableness (411, 4.1.109-15). The tenor of this conversation is civil, and so a far cry from the violence that forged the union of Theseus and Hippolyta. Egeus does his best to ruin everything by remaining constant to his grinch-like principles, importuning Theseus for due severity: “I beg the law, the law upon his head” (411, 4.1.152). But Demetrius, Egeus’ favorite, robs him of the opportunity by declaring his renewed interest in Helena, which leaves Hermia free to marry Lysander. The Duke offers a triple wedding, and the happy couples decide to follow Theseus and tell about their forest dreams (412, 4.1.194-95).

Meanwhile, Bottom is waxing philosophical about his “vision”: “Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this / dream” (412, 4.1.201-02), says he, and then supposes that even though he can’t explain the dream itself, he might get it turned into an oddly unsettled “ballad” with Peter Quince’s help, and have it sung at the end of the play (413, 4.1.207-10). The others are waiting for him to make his appearance, lest they lose their shot at courtly patronage suitable to their lowly rank, but Bottom arrives just in time (413, 4.2.25-27), keeping mum about his great adventure with Titania. Of all the characters in the play and for a reason worth pondering, he alone has been privileged to see the fairies. Bottom doesn’t change even when he is transformed into a demi-donkey: perhaps his genius is to be unfazed by such strange events. He is at home in fairyland, at home in the dream-world from whence issues waking human desire. In this sense, Bottom has bragging rights– he is not “vexed” in the same way the other characters are, even though Oberon thinks he is. The rest of us live fitfully trying to negotiate the gap between waking and sleep, reality and fantasy, what is and what might be, but not Nick Bottom.

Act 5, Scene 1 (414-21, Theseus offers constructive art criticism, the Pyramus and Thisbe proceeds)

Theseus, as we see here, is having none of this day’s talk about fairyland “antique fables” (414, 5.1.2-3) such as the now-happy couples have related to them about their time in the woods. In his view, “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact” (414, 5.1.7-8), and he expounds further that the poet’s “imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown” and then his “pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” (414, 5.1.14-17). Imagination, he continues, is bound to provide causal agents for anything it treats: “in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear!” (414, 5.1.21-22) Theseus sounds politely dismissive of the arts, but he finds in them entertainment “To ease the anguish of a torturing hour” (414, 5.1.37). In other words, unlike Bottom and some of the mechanic players, the noble Theseus has no trouble making distinctions between the real and the purely fanciful; he will view the play from an “aesthetic distance” unavailable to the Bottoms of the world. But isn’t the joke on him, at least to some extent? Within the play, fairyland is as real as anything else, so all those strange transpositions of love objects and, of course, the “translation” of Bottom, really happened.

But we need not consider Theseus unappreciative—he is the most indulgent of critics with the ridiculous spectacle put on by the Pyramus and Thisbe crew. Theseus is able to laugh at the players’ infelicities and accept the honesty with which they set forth their representation, in spite of his master of revels Philostrate’s (or Egeus’, in our Norton text) contempt for them. Theseus associates glib illusionism with dishonesty, similar to the fair words of a selfish counselor: “I will hear that play; / For never anything can be amiss / When simpleness and duty tender it” (415, 5.1.81-83). When Hippolyta labels the play “the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (418, 5.1.207), Theseus sums up his critical acumen this way: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst / are no worse if imagination amend them” (418, 5.1.208-09). The representation onstage we might describe by saying that it is a framework or skeleton that the audience members must then bring to life with imaginative sympathy. The Pyramus and Thisbe production goes pretty much as planned, a mixture of preposterous ineptness and genuinely affecting drama (418-20).

One thing I enjoy about Shakespeare’s staging of the Pyramus and Thisbe play is how the aristocratic audience seems both genuinely engaged and yet capable of conversing amongst themselves, making jokes, and passing critical judgments. I think Shakespeare must have noticed this sort of behavior at large theaters where he staged his plays (the Globe opened in 1599, and after 1609 or so, he also put some plays on at the more intimate Blackfriars). A Shakespeare play in a big theater would have been spellbinding and yet quite a “social affair,” as I imagine it.

Act 5, Scene 2 and Epilogue (422-23, Fairies bless the weddings at the palace, Robin asks audience’s indulgence)

Oberon, Titania and the fairies blass the palace of Theseus and Hippolyta: “Hand in hand with fairy grace / Will we sing and bless this place” (422, 5.2.29-30). Puck’s epilogue is effective, as he leaves matters to the audience’s imagination: it is their prerogative to judge what they have seen, and their burden to perpetuate the play in their own minds or let it pass away. To some degree like love itself, the theater (“make-believe”) is a power in the world and one to be treated with due regard. A Midsummer Night’s Dream therefore begs indulgence for its excellent mockery of romantic desire as an irrational, chaos-inducing force in human affairs that nonetheless seems conducive to individual happiness and good social order: “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended: / That you have but slumbered here, / While these visions did appear …” (423, Epilogue 1-4).

Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5.

The Merchant of Venice

2010-09-14T11:45:00.001-07:00

NOTES ON THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

Updated to accord with the text in Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5.

Act 1, Scene 1 (435-39 Antonio as exemplar of generosity, charity; sorrow/betrayal shadow him, friendship with Bassanio)

Antonio sets himself up to play the willing victim: “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad” (435, 1.1.1). He seems certain only that his melancholia doesn’t stem from anxieties about commerce or love (436, 1.1.41-46) -- though the latter seems to us the obvious reason since modern directors tend to assert a deep bond between Antonio and Bassanio. Graziano and other Christians would prefer to play the fool and be merry, while Antonio luxuriates in his moodiness: “I hold the world but as the world, Graziano-- / A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one” (437, 1.1.77-79). He aligns himself with the dimension of Christian practice that has earned it a reputation as a “religion of sorrow.”

There seems to be an absolute trust between Antonio and Bassanio in this first scene. They engage in rather excessive oath-making and promising, a process Antonio begins. Informed of Bassanio’s quest, Antonio declares, “be assured / My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions” (438, 1.1.137-39). Bassanio first names Portia as “a lady richly left” and “fair” (439, 1.1.161-62), but his comparison of her to Brutus’ Portia also alludes to her moral excellence. Antonio ends the scene by hazarding all he has, as will Bassanio later on: “Try what my credit can in Venice do; / That shall be racked even to the uttermost / To furnish thee to Belmont, to fair Portia” (439, 1.1.180-82). The impulse here is generous, but the hyperbolic quality of the men’s oaths, we should note, will eventually cause them some trouble in this play.

Act 1, Scene 2 (439-41, Portia’s father’s plan for her; her strength to be exerted against limits.)

Portia is the active agent in this play; she is constrained but not a passive sufferer with respect to her departed father’s marriage arrangements for her. This is true in spite of her lament when we first meet her: “I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I / dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will / of a dead father” (440, 1.2.20-22). Along with Nerissa, Portia trusts her father’s wisdom: “I will die as chaste as Diana unless I be obtained by the manner of my father’s will” (441, 1.2.89-90), but she doesn’t leave aside her own judgment. Witness her snide but perceptive remarks about the men who are pursuing her (440, 1.2.35-83), all of whom are shallow poseurs, fools, or narcissists: the Neapolitan prince, County Palatine, Monsieur le Bon, the English nobleman Falconbridge, the Scottish lord, and the Duke of Saxony’s nephew hardly sound like great catches.

Act 1, Scene 3 (441-45, Shylock’s personal and collective grudges; his cunning, not generosity. Sympathy? Wager itself – literalist bond.)

The scene is partly about the different understanding of terms between Christians and Jews—to be a “good” man, in Shylock’s view, is to have sufficient funds; to “be assured” is to acquire the necessary information about a person’s finances: “My meaning in saying he is a good / man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient” (442, 1.3.13-14). The play’s Christians use these words mainly as moral terms. We see Shylock’s resentment almost from the outset: “How like a fawning Publican he looks. / I hate him for he is a Christian; / But more, for that in low simplicity / He lends out money gratis …” (442, 1.3.36-39). His “ancient grudge” (442, 1.3.42) is both individual and collective; the personal insults are insults to his “sacred nation” as well (442, 1.3.43). He considers it a duty not to forgive Antonio.

Around (443, 1.3.73ff), cunning appears to be Shylock’s main attribute when he alludes to the story in Genesis 30:25-43 of how Jacob (Esau’s brother, and son of Isaac and Rebekah and grandson of Abraham and Sarah; he was subsequently renamed by an angel “Israel” and is ancestor to the tribes of Israel) got the better of his uncle Laban, a man he served for seven years for the hand of Rachel, only to be given Leah instead and required to work another seven years for Rachel (who eventually gave birth to Joseph). At the end of his second service period, Laban asked Jacob to stay on, and Jacob asked as his wages Laban’s speckled, spotted sheep and goats, and the dark-colored lambs. These supposedly inferior creatures were to be his own flock. Then he took some poplar branches and peeled the bark to expose the white inside: he placed these in the animals’ watering troughs. To make a long story short, Jacob bred the stronger animals in the presence of these branches and their young were born spotted, so his flocks increased greatly. “And thrift is blessing,” says Shylock, “if men steal it not” (443, 1.3.86). Antonio finds the story inappropriate, and by no means a justification of Shylock’s moneylending practices: Jacob’s increase, insists Antonio, wasn’t really due to his own efforts but was “fashioned by the hand of heaven” (443, 1.3.89).

Be that as it may, Shylock wryly rehearses his grievances, reminding Antonio how poorly he has treated him in the past: “many a time and oft / In the Rialto you have rated me / About my moneys and my usances …” (444, 1.3.102-04) and “You call me misbeliever, cut-throat, dog, / And spit upon my Jewish gabardine” (444, 1.3.107-08). How can a Christian who is wont to speak that way ask a Jew for such a favor? But Shylock proceeds to accept his role as moneylender on his own terms: the infamous deal “Go with me to a notary …” (444, 1.3.140-47) is cast by Shylock as “a merry sport” and “friendship” (445, 1.3.164). A chance to injure Antonio has come his way, and he takes it up gleefully. This is a high-stakes wager, like Christian salvation. Antonio seems self-assured and dismissive, which may be hubristic. He has no doubts about his ability to pay his debts, so Shylock’s absurd conditions don’t trouble him: “The Hebrew will turn Christian; he grows kind” (445, 1.3.174). Those conditions certainly trouble Bassanio: “I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind” (445, 1.3.175), but Antonio dismisses the younger man’s worry. He should have listened, of course – the audience is better positioned to see the dark side of Shylock’s admission that “A pound of a man’s flesh taken from a man / Is not so estimable, profitable neither, / As flesh of muttons, beeves, or goats” (445, 1.3.161-63). Of course it isn’t – this is about revenge, not money.

Act 2, Scene 1 (445-46, Morocco makes his entrance)

Morocco joins Aaron from Titus Andronicus as one of Shakespeare’s “Moorish” characters, as will Othello in subsequent years. Morocco has none of the gravity of the other two: he’s a comic figure and cultural outsider who isn’t in a position to get the joke behind Portia’s polite dismissal: his exuberant “Mislike me not for my complexion” (445, 2.1.1) nets him only Portia’s agreement that the prince stands “as fair / As any comer I have looked on yet” (446, 2.1.20-21). Of course, we have already been acquainted with the wretched suitors who have already made their way to Belmont.

Act 2, Scene 1 (446-50, Lancelot decides to abandon Shylock; comic scene with his father Old Gobbo; Bassanio accepts Lancelot’s suit)

Servant Lancelot Gobbo accepts the “fiend’s” counsel (447, 2.2.24) to abandon Shylock, running against his own conscience. Should we therefore accept treatment of Shylock as comic raillery, something easy to do? Gobbo sees Shylock as a stock figure, “a kind of devil” (447, 2.2.19), but the play as a whole doesn’t reduce him to that. Consider the conversation between Lancelot Gobbo and his father, which alludes to the biblical story about Jacob stealing Esau’s birthright and tricking father Isaac into giving him Esau’s blessing as the first-born son (Genesis 25:29-34). “Give me your blessing” asks Lancelot towards the end of his talk with the half-blind father who doesn’t recognize him (448, 2.2.68). Lancelot’s father has brought a present for Shylock, but Gobbo wants the present to go to Bassanio (448, 2.2.96-98).

The comic spirit overcomes all, accomplishing something like “grace,” which at 150-51 Gobbo attributes to Bassanio: “you have the grace of God, sir, / and he hath enough” (449, 2.2.135-36). Bassanio cheerfully accepts Gobbo’s inept suit to become his servant 448, 2.2.137-40). In general, the process of abandoning Shylock begins right after the bargain of flesh has been struck. First Gobbo, then Jessica makes her decision in the next scene. What binds people? Well, the binding is supposed to be effected by generosity and love, but Shylock refuses these commands. In the Christian context of the play, abandoning him seems to be cast as the “natural” result of his refusal.

Act 2, Scenes 3-5 (450-53, Jessica’s anguish; Shylock’s isolation)

Jessica is torn about what she is about to do: “Alack, what heinous sin is it in me / To be ashamed to be my father’s child!” (451, 2.3.15-16) But she makes Lancelot carry a letter to Lorenzo, sighing to herself, “O Lorenzo, / If thou keep promise I shall end this strife, / Become a Christian and thy loving wife” (2.3.18-20).

In 2.4, we hear Lorenzo confiding his elopement plan to Graziano: “She hath directed / How I shall take her from her father’s house, / What gold and jewels she is furnished with, / What page’s suit she has in readiness …” (451, 2.4.29-32). The plot will take advantage of the disguise made possible by Christian festivities – Bassanio is holding a masque (a masked ball) that night, which Shylock takes for a reminder that it is indeed Carnival season in Venice, which occurs just before the austere, fasting forty days of Lent are ushered in and capped by Easter, which of course commemorates the resurrection of Christ after his crucifixion and death on Good Friday.

Lancelot had spoken of Shylock with contempt in Act 2, Scene 1, but in the fifth scene, Shylock’s interaction with his daughter doesn’t seem cruel: he tells her to keep the doors shut against Christian revelers: “Let not the sound of shallow fopp’ry enter / My sober house” (452, 2.5.34-35). Taking the dismissal of Lancelot as a good break, he winds his reflections up with a proverb: “Fast bind, fast find -- / A proverb never stale in thrifty mind” (453, 2.5.52-53) Shylock prefers to remain isolated and to maintain the purity of his household. Increasingly, he will be an isolated figure whose situation and attitude invite Christian characters’ mockery: tracing the intensification of that isolation is in large part the task of the play’s remaining acts, and Jessica to herself advances the process on the spot: “Farewell; and if my fortune be not crossed, / I have a father, you a daughter lost” (453, 2.5.54-55).

Act 2, Scene 6 (453-54, Jessica absconds with ducats; Christians free to change)

Shylock (not present in this scene) now loses both his daughter and a portion of his ducats. Graziano makes pleasantries about how people fail to meet their love obligations: “All things that are / Are with more spirit chasèd than enjoyed” (453, 2.6.12-13); this mention is a setup for the weightier wrangling between Portia and Nerissa later on. Jessica joins the Christians and absconds with some of Shylock’s wealth (454, 2.6.49-50). It’s comically grotesque that Shylock loses his daughter and money to Christian masquers, presumably, as mentioned earlier, during Venice’s carnival season: a time of liberty and temporary overturning of conventional morality. Freedom to change is the key here, and the quality to transform one’s identity in a felicitous way seems to be a Christian prerogative in this play. Shylock’s change will be forced upon him cruelly, and no doubt he will remain isolated ever after.

Act 2, Scenes 7-9 (454-59, Morocco’s choice; reports of Shylock’s confusion; Aragon’s choice; news that Bassanio is nearing Belmont)

Morocco chooses between desert, desire, and hazard. He chooses gold, what “many men desire,” on the assumption that outward appearances correspond to inward qualities (455, 2.7.37-38). In the next scene, Salerio and Solanio report and mock Shylock’s confused babbling about his daughter and his ducats: “I never heard a passion so confused, / So strange, outrageous, and so variable / As the dog Jew did utter in the streets. / ‘My daughter! O, my ducats! O, my daughter! …’” (2.8.12-15), in contrast to the generous relations between Antonio and Bassanio: “I think he only loves the world for him” (457, 2.8.50). Prideful, falsely self-sufficient Aragon (a stock Spanish nobleman) assumes silver “desert,” and is rewarded with the portrait of “a blinking idiot” (458-59, 2.9.50, 53). The scene closes with news that Bassanio is at Belmont’s gates.

Act 3, Scene 1 (460-62, Shylock teaches Christian hypocrites revenge)

Shylock assumes that Antonio, now bankrupt, will be easily isolated: the cash nexus is the only tie Shylock seems to recognize as binding, and the law will prevail: “let him look to his / bond” (460, 3.1.40-41). At lines 53-73, Shylock makes his noteworthy “Hath not a / Jew eyes?” declaration (461, 3.1.49-50): Jews are part of a common humanity, but he and his entire people have been scorned and mocked. Revenge is the law of his being: he will repay Christian injustice with “usury,” with increase. To Tubal (461, 3.1.67ff), Shylock constantly brings up money and expense along with his grief about losing his daughter. He is painfully confused about priorities. But for the last few hundred years, this scene has generally been played by most actors with sympathy. After all, some of Shylock’s lines are powerful, especially when you isolate them from the ones most concerned with money: “no satisfaction, no / revenge, nor no ill luck stirring but what lights o’ my shoulders, / no sighs but o’ my breathing, no tears but o’ my shedding” (461, 3.1.79-81). Today, it’s common knowledge that Jews were forced to take on the role of moneylenders thanks to Christian hypocrisy about the accumulation of interest on loans.

At this point, Shylock is more than a stage villain. He is a stage villain, but Shakespeare’s genius is that he can represent a villain as that and something more. When Tubal informs him about seeing a turquoise ring Jessica sold for a monkey, Shylock laments, “I would not / have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (462, 3.1.191-92). The line is comically grotesque, but given the context, how could it be played with anything less than deep feeling? Meditating on his revenge to come, Shylock tells us what part of Antonio’s flesh he has nominated: “I will have the heart / of him if he forfeit” (462, 3.1.105-06).

Act 3, Scene 2 (462-68, Bassanio chooses rightly; Portia declares her loyalty and promises to help Antonio)

Some strain shows between Portia and her departed father: “these naughty times / Puts bars between the owners and their rights” (462, 3.1.18-19). What does the song that follows mean? “Tell me where is fancy bred, / Or in the heart, or in the head? / How begot, how nourishèd?” (463, 3.2.63-65) We are told that “fancy dies / In the cradle where it lies” (463, 3.2.63-68-69). This may be a warning to Bassanio: love begins with the eyes, so we had better not trust them too much. Bassanio understands the warning, evidently: he chooses the threatening lead container rather than the attractive silver or golden one: “meagre lead, / Which rather threaten’st than dost promise aught, / Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence” (464, 3.2.104-06).

The correct choice made, Portia makes a fine speech about her qualities and shortcomings as “an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpractisèd” (465, 3.2.159), and offers a condition: she’s all his, unless he gives away the ring, in which case she will have the upper hand (465, 3.2.170-73). Bassanio admits that Portia’s words have all blended together for him (466, 3.2.177-83), but he seems to understand her words about the ring, and even takes things up a notch (again the excessive, exuberant rhetoric) by swearing that death will take him before he gives away the golden keepsake: “But when this ring / Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence. / O, then be bold to say Bassanio’s dead” (466, 3.2.183-85). Portia didn’t condemn him to death, just distrust!

Bassanio is soon informed by Salerio of Antonio’s disastrous commercial loss, and must admit to Portia that he is in a bind: “I have engaged myself to a dear friend, / Engaged my friend to his mere enemy, / To feed my means” (467, 3.2.260-62). Portia will take the part of Bassanio’s friend: “Pay him [Shylock] six thousand and deface the bond. / Double six thousand, and then treble that, / Before a friend of this description / Shall lose a hair thorough Bassanio’s fault” (468, 3.2.298-301). Bassanio, we note, uses the language of Roman honor in referring to Antonio’s friendship: Antonio is “one in whom / The ancient Roman honour more appears / Than any that draws breath in Italy” (468, 3.2.293-95). The two men somewhat over-talk their bond, as becomes increasingly apparent, but that’s not to disparage its genuine integrity.

Act 3, Scene 3 (469-69, Shylock stays implacable; Antonio near despair)

Here Shylock is implacable: “I’ll have my bond. I will not hear thee speak” (469, 3.3.12-13). Antonio says Shylock’s hatred stems from resentment of Christian interference in his harsh dealings with benighted creditors: “His reason well I know: / I oft delivered from his forfeitures / Many that have at times made moan to me” (469, 3.3.21-23). But that’s obviously not the whole story: it’s hard to sustain the notion that Shylock’s revenge is simply about money. Antonio also points out that Venice must take up an attitude that is nearly as hard-hearted as Shylock’s: a bargain struck is a bargain struck. Venice depends on the cash nexus, too: “The Duke cannot deny the course of law, / For the commodity that strangers have / With us in Venice, if it be denied, / Will much impeach the justice of the state” (469, 3.4.26-29). Antonio is a man exhausted; his commercial and other losses have wasted him almost to the bone, and he would rather suffer than fight: “Pray God Bassanio come / To see me pay his debt, and then I care not” (469, 3.4.35-36).

Act 3, Scene 4 (469-71, Portia devises her lawyerly scheme)

Portia is drawn to Antonio because friends are so much alike (470, 3.4.10-18), and then she springs her “lawyer’s clerk” scheme: with the assistance of her learned cousin Dr. Bellario, she will play the role of a male who can wield the weapon of law against Shylock and the Venetian commercial state. To accomplish this task, she must play fast and loose with her own gender, since a woman of Shakespeare’s time (leaving aside Queen Elizabeth) was in no position to take on such authority. She puts great faith in the power of disguise and cunning understanding of male imposture: “I have within my mind / A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks / Which I will practice” (471, 3.5.76-78).

Act 3, Scene 5 (471-73, Jessica and Gobbo argue wittily about salvation)

Jessica and Gobbo dispute comically over salvation and damnation; Jessica says to Lorenzo, “Lancelot and I are / out. He tells me flatly there’s no mercy for me in heaven / because I am a Jew’s daughter, and he says you are no good / member of the commonwealth, for in converting Jews to Chris- / tians you raise the price of pork” (472, 3.5.26-30). This quarrel is a precursor of a more serious argument during the trial about how mercy is granted, and to whom. Gobbo stands accused of egregious quibbling: “How every fool can play upon the word!” (472, 3.5.37) Lancelot Gobbo’s misstatements and quibbles are the light-hearted version of the play’s weightier regard for terminological and spiritual misinterpretation, equivocation, and hypocrisy. Here, Lancelot’s “wit” takes the place of Shylock’s literalism and cunning.

Act 4, Scenes 1-2 (473-83, Trial scene: Shylock’s literalism countered with “mercy” punished; Bassanio and Graziano give away their rings)

Antonio again appears resigned: why bother with a man the Duke calls a “stony adversary” (473, 4.1.3)? At this point, the anti-Jewish invective is severe. But Shylock shows great harshness in this scene, by Christian lights. He isn’t claiming to be better than his adversaries: “I give no reason, nor I will not, / More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing / I bear Antonio” (474, 4.1.58-60). We the audience may have some insight into what Shylock’s grounds for this hate are, but how is the play’s internal court audience to know that? Shylock has cunningly purchased the flesh of a Christian hypocrite at great personal cost, and he will not give it up: “The pound of flesh which I demand of him / Is dearly bought. ‘Tis mine, and I will have it. / If you deny me, fie upon your law: / There is no force in the decrees of Venice” (475, 4.1.98-101). Money isn’t the issue, though Venetian commercial interests make up part of his justification: the law he invokes can’t be ignored lest the republic’s status suffer with international merchants. Revenge personal and collective is Shylock’s issue, not the ducats Antonio owes him.

The Duke makes no headway with Shylock, and Antonio seems prepared to give up the ghost: “I am a tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death” (475, 4.1.113-14). That’s where Portia disguised as Balthasar comes in: the culmination of her moral argument is, “The quality of mercy is not strained. / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath” (477, 4.1.178-81). The very fact that Shylock had to ask, “On what compulsion must I?” show compassion condemns him (477, 4.1.178). But the state can’t help here, and Shylock, ever the literalist, protests that he has “an oath in heaven” (478, 4.1.223) to stick to the bond. Portia goes out of her way to demonstrate the callous attitude of Shylock: witness his refusal to keep a surgeon nearby because no such thing is mentioned in his contract with Antonio (478, 4.1.255-57).

Antonio is ready to go out with a reaffirmation of his love for Bassanio (478, 4.1.268-72), which leads Bassanio to make an extreme utterance, wishing his wife and goods to heaven to redeem the situation: “life itself, my wife, and all the world, / Are not with me esteemed above thy life, / I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all / Here to this devil, to deliver you” (479, 4.1.279-82). Even Shylock picks up on the outrageousness of this remark: “These be the Christian husbands” (479, 4.1.290).

Portia promptly insists that the bond must be read even more literally than Shylock can conceive. She has already advanced her moral argument and met with defiance: Shylock is ready to carve up his Christian rival. Now comes the legal argument: “This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood” (479, 4.1.301). The penalty for spilling Christian blood is forfeiture of one’s goods and property to the state (479, 4.1.314-15). Furthermore, says Portia, “If it be proved against an alien … / He seek the life of any citizen, / The party ’gainst the which he doth contrive / Shall seize one half his goods; the other half / Comes to the privy coffer of the state, / And the offender’s life lies in the mercy / Of the Duke” (480, 4.1.344-51). Shylock has sought the death of a Venetian citizen. The Duke pardons his life and Antonio asks the Duke to allow Shylock to keep half his wealth, willing it to his Christian son-in-law Lorenzo and his daughter Jessica (480-81, 4.1.363-65, 377-80).

Furthermore, he must convert to Christianity (481, 4.1.382). Shylock is forced to say that he is “content” with his lot (481, 4.1.389), now that he has been commanded to convert to Christianity and give away much of his fortune. The word can hardly mean what it usually would, given the context: he has simply given up, confronted as he is with the full power of Venice and a religion alien to him.

Portia (still disguised) responds to Bassanio’s offer of a gift that she wants his ring (482, 4.1.423), and to his rather feeble protest, she importunes, “if your wife be not a madwoman, / And know how well I have deserved this ring, / She would not hold out enemy for ever / For giving it to me” (482, 4.1.441-44). The point of this episode is that Portia will exercise mercy with respect to the decree she had previously issued. She didn’t mean the decree of faithfulness in the deadly fashion understood by Bassanio. She interprets her own words liberally rather than literally, and in Act 5 she will be generous enough to forgive Bassanio since at least he put up a struggle, however brief, over the loss of the ring. That doesn’t amount to full merit of pardon, but under Portia’s dispensation, perfection isn’t necessary. In the second scene, Nerissa says she will get her ring from Graziano (482-83, 4.2.13-14).

Act 5, Scene 1 (483-89, Lorenzo on sphere-music 483-85; Portia’s lecture on absol. oaths v. generosity -488; Shylock stays outcast, Antonio a charitable outsider)

Lorenzo and Jessica discuss faith and faithlessness by referencing disappointed lovers such as Troilus, Thisbe, and Dido (483, 5.1.3-12) and about the power of music to transform the soul: redemption and transformation are the theme here. Lorenzo says that music (even earthly music as opposed to the heavenly harmonies lost to us because of our sin-induced mortality will soften Jessica if she will only listen intently enough, and open herself to the experience: “There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st / But in his motion like an angel sings … / Such harmony is in immortal souls, / But whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it” (484, 5.1.59-64). The whole scene is in comic contrast to Shylock’s hard-heartedness, his inability to change, as Lorenzo may insinuate when he says, “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils” (485, 5.1.82-84).

Portia appreciates the fine music (485, 5.1.101-07), but at line 109 she makes it stop because she has another vehicle of transformation: the playfully stern lecture she’s about to deliver. The extremeness of Antonio and Bassanio’s oath-taking must be tempered. Mercy doesn’t like extremes: to swear excessively is to take one’s responsibilities lightly. Bassanio in particular has shown a willingness to break an oath to his intended wife to satisfy a male-centered demand—that of giving a gift to the “man” who helped Antonio win his case. He and Graziano trivialize the marriage bond when, after making such a show of their fidelity, they break their excessive oaths at will. So Bassanio must be schooled by Portia about his responsibilities towards her as a faithful husband. She asserts that this marriage bond entails reciprocity and generosity, an accommodation that he has not yet fully acknowledged: “If you had known the virtue of the ring, / Or half her worthiness that gave the ring …” (487, 5.1.198-205). Portia may be obedient to her father, but she is not a fool, a slave, or a child. In fact, her actions show her to be far more mature than most of the men in The Merchant of Venice.

Antonio finds out that he isn’t a pauper after all (489, 5.1.275-76), and we hear that Shylock, upon his death, will “gift” the remaining half of his estate to Lorenzo and Jessica (489, 5.1.290-92). Bassanio, with Antonio’s help, gets the chance to make a second affirmation of his constancy towards Portia: “Pardon this fault, and by my soul I swear / I never more will break an oath with thee” (489, 5.1.246-47). It’s probably worth noting that the oath is just as extreme as the previous ones he and Antonio have made. Even so, a generous understanding of speech and act is the essential contrast in the play between Christians and Jews. The former have the flexibility to transform and to be transformed, while Shylock remains implacable and experiences his enforced change as nothing short of torture; he remains outside the circle of happiness that concludes the play—this inference is represented very explicitly in Michael Radford’s production. But Antonio also remains outside that charmed comic circle, so I suppose his self-understanding is only ratified: his part in life is a sad one, just as he had said in the first act. Jessica, however, seems to hold out the possibility of redemption for all; she’s a Jewish woman whose free conversion for the sake of love stands in comic defiance against the spiteful Christian saying “till the Jews be converted” as a way of saying “never.”

Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5.

Document timestamp: 11/3/2011 9:32 PM

As You Like It

2010-09-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

Notes on As You Like It

Act 1, Scene 1

The bad characters in comedy tend to be stick figures whose villainous behavior seems rooted in insecurity and selfishness. We aren’t dealing with the ancient problem of evil here, at least not in a serious way. Oliver is jealous of his brother’s virtues, and holds to an “economy of scarcity” model of status and virtue: more love and honor for one person means less for him. On the whole, such men are more like absurd bogeymen than real, complex “evildoers.” Oliver is simply an uncharitable brother. Comedies don’t represent the social order or human nature as intractable—there would be no point in bothering with comedy if that were the cause. We don’t need to worry about providing compensation for insupportable loss, as in King Lear or Oedipus the King. The goal is instead to restore happiness to individuals and smooth functioning to the social order, and to allow people to hope for better things to come. A key concept is balance: how can we bring people together in such a way as to achieve happiness and harmony, even if perfection may be beyond our reach? Coleridge says that literary symbols can “balance or reconcile opposite or discordant qualities.” That’s more or less what comedy does: it reconciles and balances out people who might otherwise stay in conflict, and makes possible a dynamic but sustainable social order. In the first scene, Celia and Rosalind give us a fine example of true friendship that further condemns Oliver’s vicious dislike of his brother. Celia and Rosalind are cousins and not sisters, but their reciprocal generosity is no less complete for it. [7/18/2009: parallels, contrasts or antithesis]

Act 1, Scene 2

As for the attraction between Rosalind and Orlando, well, as Marlowe says in “Hero and Leander,” “Whoever loved, that loved not at first sight?” This notion is typical in comedy. The ancient idea is that love strikes people first through the eyes, as if the lovers had been struck with cupid’s arrow. Accordingly, the love between Rosalind and Orlando begins with sudden attraction. Orlando doesn’t yet know himself and can hardly speak to his new admirer, but Rosalind sees his integrity and potential. It is of course improbable for Orlando to win his match against the powerful Charles the Wrestler, but he is an important device in that Orlando’s desperation drives him to go forwards with the match, and thereby he wins Rosalind’s heart. The text doesn’t say exactly how Orlando defeats Charles, though the BBC version starring Helen Mirren as Rosalind makes Orlando’s victory a matter of clever strategy.

Act 1, Scene 3

Duke Frederick is a competitive, ill-spirited ruler. He obviously believes in an economy of scarcity when it comes to virtue: he tells Celia regarding her friend, “she robs thee of thy name, / And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous / When she is gone” (80-82). He is little more than a straw man, and his threat to Rosalind sounds awful, but rings hollow: “if that thou beest found / So near our public court as twenty miles, / Thou diest for it” (42-44).

Act 2, Scene 1

There are different perspectives to be heard about the Forest of Arden, and in this scene we hear the view of the banished Duke Senior, who considers it a place to gain spiritual insight, and seems to like living there for a time. It suits his contemplative nature, and in this he is almost a Renaissance Henry David Thoreau: “Sweet are the uses of adversity, / Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; / And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in every thing” (2.1.10-17). But his is not the only perspective, as we will find later in Act 2 and of course throughout the play.

Act 2, Scene 3

In this brief scene, Adam warns Orlando of his brother’s plot against him, and offers his life savings to help the young man escape: “fortune cannot recompense me better / Than to die well, and not my master’s debtor” (75-76).

Act 2, Scene 4

Silvius complains to Corin about his unrequited passion for Phebe, and moves Rosalind, who overhears him. Meeting the shepherds, she offers to buy the sheepfold and cottage, which, as Corin informs her, is for sale. That part of the Forest is for sale reminds us that while the place is a Green World, it isn’t exactly a paradise: there’s “winter and rough weather,” poverty, ignorance, and commerce. On the whole, the Forest of Arden is closer to Virgil’s reality-tinged pastoral locations in the Eclogues than to an earthly paradise. For the shepherd Corin, indeed, Arden is a rather harsh terrain where a man may eke out a living. (Country people often seem to regard the woods this way.) So while Amiens’ songs sometimes promote an idyllic image of Arden and the Duke is pleased with the “lessons” he learns from the woods, that isn’t the way all the characters regard Arden. Incidentally, there is a real Forest of Arden, and Shakespeare must have been familiar with it as a child growing up in Warwickshire.

Act 2, Scene 5

Jaques shows himself a melancholy-making machine, drawing his rather perverse sustenance even from Amiens’ more conventionally comforting songs: “Here shall he see / No enemy / But winter and rough weather” (6-8). Jaques turns this song into something quite different: “If it do come to pass / That any man turn ass, / Leaving his wealth and ease / A stubborn will to please . . .” (50-53).

Act 2, Scene 6

In this brief scene, Adam is on the point of perishing, and Orlando promises to help him. In terms of Christian symbolism, “old Adam” or unregenerate man is aided by his younger counterpart, the one who is poised to enjoy the benefits of regeneration in the Forest. But I wouldn’t lean too heavily on such symbolic interpretations; after all, Adam is a model of uprightness and faithful service, not a fool or sinner. 7/17/2009: And Orlando treats him tenderly, as a son should treat his elderly father.

Act 2, Scene 7

Jaques tells everyone how impressed he is with Touchstone, whose particular brand of foolery he seems to find attractively broad in comparison to his own narrower spectrum of observation. (Touchstone is free to draw out what’s valuable in people, but Jaques’ view is more limited; his insight is drawn through a filter.) Orlando bursts in on the bantering, and tries to commandeer some food for Adam. It soon turns out that there’s more civility in the Forest than he had thought possible, as Duke Senior promises him all he needs: “Your gentleness shall force, / More than your force move us to gentleness” (102-03). As for Jaques, he delivers his excellent variation on an old theme: the Seven Ages of Man: “All the world’s a stage,” he says, and all of us play our parts, which consist in the seven ages: infant, schoolboy, young lover, soldier, mature professional (“justice”), declining pantaloon, and, finally, second child, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing” (166). This is a hollowed-out conception of humanity, whereby even the most heartfelt passion is entirely scripted by one’s time of life. This kind of insight is, of course, part of the fun in comedy—what is Orlando but a stock lover when he scribbles his bad poems all over Arden’s trees? Still, individuation plays a more important role in comedy than in Jaques’ view, which insistently stresses dis-individuation. Comedy makes fun of us and our pretensions to uniqueness and high-serious significance, but it ultimately accepts us with our follies; Jaques’ melancholic outlook sees life as always being in the shadow of “mere oblivion” (165)

Jaques himself is a stock melancholy traveler. Melancholia was a popular subject in Elizabethan/Jacobean times and attained something like cultic status later in the 1600’s. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy attests to its significance in Shakespeare’s day. Depression was thought to be caused by an excess of black bile, and indeed the word “melancholy” comes from the Greek words melas (black) and kholē (bile). Jaques, as a melancholy traveler, goes around looking for things that accord with his sadness and isolation from others. So while his “Seven Ages of Man” speech in 2.7 is excellent, it consists of stock ideas and I don’t think we’re meant to agree with it—he reduces life too willingly to its bleakest and most hopeless level, and his simplistic view is promptly undercut by the entrance of the aged servant Adam, who remains cheerful and kindly disposed towards the younger generations. The scene ends with Duke Senior welcoming Orlando for the sake of his father, Sir Rowland de Boyes, and we find that civility, not the savagery Orlando had expected, reigns here in Arden.

Act 3, Scene 1

The usurping grinch Duke Frederick is at it again, booting Oliver out of the realm to search for Orlando, who has earned his ire by defeating Charles the Wrestler.

Act 3, Scene 2

Touchstone, who here engages in an epic battle of wits with Corin the Shepherd, is the play’s “all-licensed fool” who has great scope to offer his perspective. As such, he is a fine foil for Jaques as well as for the lovers. Touchstone employs a kind of schoolboy chop-logic against Corin. The whole argument should probably go to Corin “by a decision,” as they say in boxing. The old shepherd has the innate civility of a country fellow who knows his limitations but also his values, so he doesn’t take Touchstone seriously. Touchstone’s conflation of good manners with theological grace—“thy manners must be wicked, and wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation” (42-43), he tells him—seems ridiculous to Corin, who doesn’t share in his courtly understanding of the supposed affinity between moral goodness and fine appearance. (That there’s a close connection between physical beauty and moral goodness is a Neo-Platonist view that we can find in Castiglione’s The Courtier and other key Renaissance texts). Touchstone is also more interested in words than in action, even though he is (unlike Jaques) willing to take part in the play’s marriage festivities. Jaques wants no-one, but Touchstone will soon have Audrey to think of, silly as the match may be.

Also in this scene, Rosalind parries wits with Touchstone, who tries to reduce her love for Orlando to mere physical desire: “He that sweetest rose will find, / Must find love’s prick and Rosalind” (111-12). Meanwhile, Orlando, author of those poems that Touchstone calls “the very false gallop of verses” (113), meets up with an unadmiring Jaques and sends him on his way, dismissing his attempt to typecast the young man as a stock lover. And finally, Rosalind, disguised as Ganymed, meets Orlando and offers to school him in courting his beloved Rosalind—but I will reflect on their conversations in the Forest later.

Act 3, Scene 3

As is evident from his silly courtship of Audrey, Touchstone’s coming marriage to this country lass is more a thing of words, a cover for his lust, than a legitimate institutional act, or at least that’s how the clown at first wanted it—an attitude that shows in his desire to let the incompetent Oliver Martext perform the ceremony. Audrey, as we can see from their conversation in Scene 3, understands very little of what Touchstone says, so there’s no question of their being meet company. On the whole, Touchstone is what his name implies: a sharp stone of a wit who draws sparks and tests the quality of others. [7/17/2009: His verbal wit is his way of staying at the surface of things.] He will later join in the marriage rites, but does not much appreciate matrimony’s holier dimension—that key attitude for romantic comedy is left to other characters, most particularly to Rosalind and Orlando, and perhaps to Celia and the transformed Oliver. For Touchstone, marriage isn’t holy and steeped in honor—it is something a person does to keep up appearances and serve his or her own convenience. Shakespeare by no means condemns court life, but here in the attitude of Touchstone, he points out the courtly tendency to slide towards hollowness and ceremonialism. Well, at least Touchstone is honest about his limitations—he doesn’t pretend to be better than he is.

Act 3, Scenes 4-5

Rosalind, invited by Corin, eavesdrops on Phebe as she overplays her hand, while Silvius is loyal to her far beyond her desserts. Rosalind briskly reminds Phebe that she is “not for all markets” and that she ought, therefore, to sell while someone is still willing to buy (60). This match is hardly going to be perfect; Phebe, we may assume, will never love Silvius as much as he loves her, but that’s perhaps rather common: do two people generally love each other to precisely the same extent? I doubt it. Silvius and Phebe it will have to be—they are a match sufficient for civilization’s purposes. Silvius is a good example of the sort of stereotype that Orlando inhabits partly and for a limited time; even so, Silvius is a fine fellow in his way: decent and faithful. Even Phebe’s high ideals, while misplaced, are by no means contemptible. Of course, “Ganymed’s” sage counsel only makes her fall hopelessly in love with him, and we see that firmer guidance will be needed in her case.

Act 4, Scene 1

Rosalind’s deflation of Jaques at the scene’s beginning is decisive even if not devastating. He professes the goodness of his disposition, saying, “Why, ‘tis good to be sad and say nothing” (8), and Rosalind answers him, “Why then ‘tis good to be a post” (9). She ventures that it seems foolish to her to go about seeking experiences that make you sad: “and to travel for it too!” (39) With that remark, Rosalind is on to her pretend/real courtship with Orlando.

As for the value of their dialogue in 4.1, Shakespeare recognizes that for the most part people inhabit types and that a great deal depends on how they inhabit a given type, or how they inflect it. We are not dealing with romantic originality and uniqueness here, and not with the utilitarian-style “bourgeois self” concept of somewhat later times, even if there are perhaps touches of this sensibility in Shakespeare’s plays. There is always some Jaques-like way of describing our present stage of life. The question is, does the type swallow us up, or do we improve upon it or at least inhabit it competently? Orlando (what with pinning bad verses on trees) has played the lover’s type. The present scene, however, shows how the Forest allows both him and Rosalind the time and distance they need to play around with love’s lore and with gender typification. Both will emerge the better for their experimentation. The “masks” they wear for a time allow them to speak and act with frankness and a degree of detachment. Often, Shakespeare treats love as something like a game with its own rules and conventions that must be learned. Those rules turn out to be flexible, but they’re not altogether to be dismissed.

What do men and women say about and to one another? It is difficult for them to be honest in real-life situations, so the disguisings and conversations that occur in the Forest of Arden are valuable to Rosalind and Orlando as they move towards a more complete accommodation of each other’s desires. Rosalind’s characterizations of men and women are appropriately mocking: “men are April when they woo, December when they wed; maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives” (146-48).

“Give a man a mask,” says Oscar Wilde, “and he will tell you the truth.” Rosalind’s mask is “Ganymed,” so we have Rosalind pretending to be Ganymed pretending to be Rosalind: just the right degree of anonymity necessary for her to sort out Orlando’s qualities as a suitor. As for Orlando, those who believe most fully in the ideal vision of love most need distance from such idealism: “idealizing eroticism” is noble, but it has its risks, disillusionment and eventual cynicism being the most severe among them. Orlando needs to be tested: he must show some capacity to moderate and reflect upon his high passions since that is partly what makes a marriage successful. He plays his role as suitor to Ganymed-as-Rosalind with good cheer, putting up with his opposite’s whims and generally saying and doing the right things. As the play in its entirety shows, Orlando’s inner worth is greater than the silly stereotype he has temporarily inhabited: a successful comic hero, he plays a role without being completely reduced to it or permanently trapped by it.

Shakespeare writes perceptively about love as a potentially destructive experience because it threatens to obliterate a person’s boundaries. (“Sonnet 129” and Othello give us the darkest presentations of what love can do, while the comedies deal with the lighter and more uplifting dimension of love, with its civilizing and uniting power.) Distance and reflection seem appropriate as “preventative medicine,” given this tendency of love to strip us of our capacity to define, judge, and maintain our sense of who we are. The playfulness of Rosalind in particular allows her to keep some sense of an independent identity.

Act 4, Scene 3

Rosalind sees her opportunity to transform Phebe’s cruelty towards Silvius into acceptance, and, as Ganymed, orders the intransigent shepherdess to love Silvius instead. Oliver, rescued by his brother just when he is surrounded by two predators—a snake and a lioness—is suddenly transformed. We don’t need to see a painful, penance-driven process of transformation. He doesn’t for a moment believe that Ganymed is male, but goes along with the act nonetheless.

Act 5, Scenes 1-2

In the first scene, Touchstone gets a chance to impress Audrey by chasing away a rustic suitor. In the second scene, Oliver’s recent alteration is supplemented by his equally sudden love-struck decision to marry Celia as “Aliena.” This newest alteration may in part be a perspectival device whereby the brief courtship of one couple appears more credible in comparison to the even briefer one of another—one so brief that it really isn’t a courtship at all. Oliver even tells Orlando that he’s decided to give their father’s estate to him and “here live and die a shepherd” (12).

Act 5, Scenes 3-4

In the third scene, we witness the knotty situation that must shortly be untied: Phebe is in love with Ganymed, Orlando in love with Rosalind whom he sees nowhere around, and Rosalind pines “for no woman” (88). Two young pages crown the third scene with a song about the associations between spring and marriage rites, only to be dismissed by Touchstone’s criticism of their voices.

The fourth scene offers the pleasant interlude of Touchstone’s famous recounting of a courtly quarrel which, he claims, began when he professed to “dislike the cut of a certain courtier’s beard” (69-70). He sets forth a preposterously detailed series of insults and counter-insults between himself and the courtier with the disagreeable beard. But the whole thing begins and ends in words, and they “part company” without exchanging a single blow. The reason? Cowardice—neither of them ever had any intention of getting into an actual fight. So much, then, Touchstone suggests, for a great deal of masculine “honor.” This insight allies him with Sir John Falstaff from I and II Henry 4, and certain other of Shakespeare’s deflators of male puffery. This play is more tolerant of love-driven exaggerations and rituals than it is of honor-based ones.

Finally, Hymen the god of marriage does the honors after Rosalind enters in her own person and clears up the reigning confusion. Hyman is an urban god, so his presence is a reminder that most of the characters will soon return to the court. The right matches have been made, and in any case society demands not perfection but adequacy: it needs “country copulatives” and Touchstones and Audreys as much as it needs the near-perfect Rosalinds and Orlandos. The phrase “as you like it” seems to mean “follow your desire,” so long as your desire doesn’t impede the charitable disposition of things.

Jaques de Boys (the brother of Orlando and Oliver) informs everyone that Duke Frederick has been turned away from his wicked intentions in the Forest by an “old religious man,” and now intends to stay on in the Forest, where he will live a retired life of religious devotion. Jaques the Melancholy Traveler will follow this newly retired Duke Frederick; he did not join with the lovers in dancing to Hymen’s tune, and now prefers to remain in the Forest of Arden because he believes there’s more to learn there than at court. Jaques is the odd man out, but he only matters a little in this play. As You Like It doesn’t have the bittersweet quality of the romances, and in general seems satisfied with its sunny comic perspective on life. And comedy is, after all, not only a genre but a perspective on life, just as tragedy and romance are life-perspectives. Shakespeare’s comedies aren’t monolithic in tone or degree of optimism—they range from dark (Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice) to light fare such as the present play, which is perhaps the most perfect of its type in Shakespeare’s canon.

Now that all is done, what exactly might we say is the magic of the Forest of Arden? It’s appropriate to borrow the phrase “freedom and variety of situations” from Wilhelm von Humboldt. Arden has a power to transform people, to alter their perspectives, and set things between them to rights. It’s a liberating place where you can either find out over time who you are (like Rosalind and Orlando do by way of romantic experimentation), as well as a place where you can go and “just change,” as Oliver does. It is markedly different from the Court or cityscape, where competition and greed may hold sway. Of course there’s something of the seasonal cycle’s magic there, too: spring is the time of regeneration and hope. But “nature” is a very complex concept in Shakespeare, and his exploration of it varies from play to play. In King Lear, the King sees Edgar in the guise of Poor Tom the Bedlam Beggar, and declares him “the thing itself: a poor, bare, fork’d animal.” But that play as a whole surely doesn’t tell us we should reduce ourselves to such an extreme; we are not most authentically ourselves when stripped and “unaccommodated” by the arts and considerations of civic and family life. Artifice is part of our nature as human beings, it seems. The Forest of Arden encourages artifice and play, and its magic consists in the freedom to experiment with the styles and types that are undeniably part of life.

Twelfth Night

2010-09-14T11:41:00.000-07:00

NOTES ON TWELFTH NIGHT

Updated to accord with the text in Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5.

Act 1, Scene 1 (697-98, Orsino’s idealistic love, report of Olivia’s stylized mourning; my general comments on comic spirit)

The Duke and Olivia are both creatures of idealistic excess, determined to pursue their passions: he to love her, and she to mourn for her departed brother. Olivia, says Valentine in reporting back from her to Orsino, is determined in all she does for seven years “to season / A brother’s dead love, which she would keep fresh / And lasting in her sad remembrance” (698, 1.1.29-31). Orsino seems to understand that he and Olivia are kindred spirits. He claims at the beginning that he would surfeit himself with love to be rid of it, in the same way that overindulgence in food generates disgust with eating: “If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken and so die” (697, 1.1.1-3). But that hardly seems to be the effect of his attitude. Rather, he seems to be “in love with love,” and his desire is to live perpetually in a realm removed from time, chance, and change. This attitude entails risk in that if persisted in too long, it will become a trap. Those who stylize and extend natural human passions certainly run this risk, and there’s no shortage of warnings to heed: the advice given by Claudius and Gertrude to the brooding prince in Act 1, Scene 2 of Hamlet may come from compromised sources, but it is reasonable counsel: mourning has its temporal and emotional limits, and when those aren’t respected, sorrow goes from being duly “obsequious” to transgressive.

But then, Illyria is the rarefied realm in which the lover Orsino and the mourner Olivia aim to live, so as Anne Barton (an editor of the Riverside Shakespeare) says, there’s no need for the characters in Twelfth Night to remove themselves to a Green World or any other magical space. They are in one already, and the ordinary laws of life don’t fully apply: Illyria seems to run strangely parallel with the order of human desire. Still, the harmony isn’t complete: Feste almost continually reminds us that this order is not the only one with which we must reckon: he neither affirms that desire can run parallel with the world nor denies it altogether. Viola’s strategy rivals his in its wisdom in that she commits her cause to time, neither affirming nor denying any possibility at the outset of the play. Later, Malvolio will remind us of this problem in a much less tolerant manner, and even that lord of misrule Sir Toby will show some wisdom about the dangers of pursuing one’s pleasure without check.

Act 1, Scene 2 (698-99, Captain and Viola reflect on hopes that Sebastian survived shipwreck; Viola’s decision to serve Orsino, commit to time)

Viola and the Sea Captain converse after her shipwreck, and he gives her hope that her brother Sebastian may have made it to shore: “I saw your brother, / Most provident in peril, bind himself—/ … / To a strong mast that lived upon the sea …” (698, 1.2.10-13). Viola admires what the Captain says about Olivia’s constancy to a lost brother (699, 1.2.32-37) and would serve her, but instead she decides to disguise herself and serve Duke Orsino. Perhaps Viola takes Olivia’s grief as a model for her own, should her brother turn out not to have survived. But the more compelling reason she gives for deciding to disguise herself is that she “… might not be delivered to the world, / Till I had made mine own occasion mellow, / What my estate is” (699, 1.2.38-40). Others may be after a more permanent refuge, but Viola plans to use her musical abilities to recommend her service to the Duke as a page, and for the rest, she commits her cause to the fullness of time: “What else may hap, to time I will commit” (699, 1.2.56). That willingness to commit one’s hopes to the fullness of time and the buffetings of chance, it seems, is a key attitude for Shakespeare’s comic heroes and heroines: it requires wisdom and generosity of spirit, openness to what life brings. Selfish characters lack these qualities and spend most of their time trying to control everything and everyone around them, a strategy that seldom yields happy results, even in a comic play.

Act 1, Scene 3 (700-02, Sir Toby’s liberated views, grooming of Sir Andrew as suitor to Olivia)

Sir Toby Belch operates on a different principle, one that becomes evident when he expresses his impatience with his niece Olivia: “What a plague means my niece to take the death of / her brother thus? I am sure care’s an enemy to life” (700, 1.3.1-2). When Maria tells him, “confine yourself within the modest / limits of order” (700, 1.3.6-7) in Olivia’s household, Sir Toby scoffs: “Confine? I’ll confine myself no finer than I am. These / clothes are good enough to drink in, and so be these boots too …” (700, 1.3.8-9).

We should consider Sir Toby’s function in the play in a broad context: the “Twelfth Night” referenced in the play’s title is January 5th, the last day of Christmas celebrations that begin on December 25th. This day is followed by the Feast of Epiphany on January 6th, which commemorates the visit of the Magi or three wise men to see the infant Jesus. (See Matthew 2:1-12). During the Middle Ages, at least, one of the feasts that occurred during this twelve-day period was the Feast of Fools, which is associated with a feast in celebration of the Circumcision of the Lord, Jan. 1st. I believe both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I banned this Feast of Fools out of Protestant disdain for the licentiousness with which it had come to be associated (it drew a lot of criticism on the Continent during the medieval period, too; indeed, the title and tradition go back to pre-Christian times: a lord of misrule presided over a weeklong December Roman holiday called Saturnalia, instituted as early as the third century BCE). In any case, for the Feast of Fools, a lord of misrule would be chosen to preside over this time of merrymaking and reversal.

Sir Toby Belch functions much like a lord of misrule in Shakespeare’ play, keeping alive for contemporary Christmas festivities the memory of this ancient pagan and early Christian tradition. Critics like Mikhail Bakhtin have studied such goings-on under the heading of the carnivalesque, in which the otherwise binding social structures of everyday life are comically mocked and satirized for a limited time, and then things go back to normal. Sir Toby’s role is apparent from the earlier lines I quoted, and it becomes still clearer when we see him engaging in jesting conversation with Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

Toby wants to send the dupe Andrew in pursuit of Olivia for his own fun and profit. He doesn’t have much respect for Andrew, and he doesn’t take the other characters too seriously, either. But a further point is that as far as Toby is concerned, one love object is as good as another; he doesn’t share the exclusivity we find in Orsino or, later, in Viola. Sir Toby sets Andrew after Maria as practice for his future pursuit of Olivia, eliciting only Sir Andrew’s foolish mistake in thinking that the word “accost” is the lady’s name (701, 1.3.44). True, Sir Andrew goes out of his way to prove Toby wrong, repeatedly making a fool of himself when his benefactor would like to turn him into a rake, and make a decent profit from gulling him over his hopes for Olivia as well. Nonetheless, Toby stands for a generalized pursuit of happiness, for a rounding off and leveling of discrimination and judgment in choosing the object of one’s desires. Desire, for him, is the key component in a pleasure-yielding system: the point is simply to be part of the system. I think the Riverside editor is right to say that Sir Toby exists on his own time and that he has banished ordinary time from his life. But he’s also quite accepting of his own and others’ imperfections, and he insists that Sir Andrew ought not hide his talents as a dancer but should instead use them to the fullest extent: “Wherefore are these things hid?… / Is it a world to hide virtues in?” (702, 1.3.105-10)

Act 1, Scene 4 (702-03, Orsino commissions Viola/Cesario to woo Olivia for him: a trap for Viola)

Intimacy strikes up immediately between Duke Orsino and Viola (disguised as “Cesario”). He believes his suit will prosper if he carries it forwards with Viola/Cesario as his intermediary. The youth’s fresh appearance, he supposes, will redound to his credit: “It shall become thee well to act my woes – / She will attend it better in thy youth” (703, 1.4.25-26). Comically, Orsino adds a comment about Viola/Cesario’s feminine appearance: “Diana’s lip/Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe/Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound,/And all is semblative a woman’s part” (703 1.4.30-33). Viola realizes immediately what a trap her gender disguise has become: “I’ll do my best/To woo your lady – [aside] yet a barful strife –/Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (703, 1.4.39-41).

Act 1, Scene 5 (703-10, Feste proves Olivia a fool; Malvolio insults Feste; Olivia falls for proxy suitor Viola/Cesario)

We are introduced to the rest of the main characters: Olivia, Maria her maid, and Feste. Feste’s initial words are important because they show us yet another perspective on the sway of the passions and the imperfections to which human beings are liable: “God give them wisdom that have it; and those that / are fools, let them use their talents” (704, 1.5.13-14), he says to Maria, implying that a fool should strive to become even more foolish. But Feste’s foolery turns out be a species of wisdom, and wisdom sets a person apart, though not in hostility. We will find that other characters are more immediately subject to the vicissitudes of that biblical dynamic duo “time and chance” than is Feste, and they must shift as they can, while Feste himself remains a constant in the play. His wisdom consists partly in being able to formulate claims such as the one he offers Olivia in an attempt to prove she deserves his title: “Anything/ that’s mended is but patched. Virtue that transgresses is but/patched with sin, and sin that amends is but patched with vir-/tue. If that this simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not, what/remedy? As there is no true cuckold but calamity, so beauty’s a/flower” (704, 1.5.40-45). Feste considers Olivia a fellow fool because of her over-grieving for the loss of her brother. In her quest for a perfectly stylized kind of mourning, this lovely absolutist risks the passage of her beauty, in itself a remarkable if transient thing of perfection. Feste seems to understand that in this saucy world there is no permanent strategy to be found; there is only mending of virtues with vices and vice versa; there is accommodation and negotiation between one person and another, and (to use a modern term from economics) always one must consider the “opportunity cost” of one’s choices, one’s actions.

Malvolio soon comes on the scene as a Puritan killjoy: “I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren / rascal. I saw him put down the other day with an ordinary fool/that has no more brain than a stone” (705, 1.5.71-73), is his pronouncement to Olivia regarding Feste. Olivia shows that she understands Malvolio’s excessive reliance on rigid virtue: he is filled with self-love, she says, and his earnestness is a bore: “There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail; nor no railing in a known discreet man, though he do nothing but reprove” (705, 1.5.80-82).

Olivia also seems to be leading Orsino on: she’s curious to see what his next move as an importunate, fantastical suitor will be: “We’ll once more hear Orsino’s embassy” (707, 1.5.148). His new intermediary, Viola/Cesario, wins Olivia’s interest immediately and her love almost at first sight; she is struck with the youth’s beauty and graceful ways, in the classical manner of attraction: what happens to her is sudden and she has no control over it. As Malvolio says, Viola/Cesario is “in standing water between / boy and man” (706, 1.5.141-42). This liminality is probably in part what makes Viola/Cesario attractive to Olivia, as I suggested above. The outcome of the Duke’s comic miscalculation is predictable: Olivia goes for the “eye candy” Orsino has proffered and not for him. Orsino has given Viola/Cesario license to establish a sense of intimacy with Olivia, and it is just this intimacy that bonds people together and makes them apt to fall in love. What initially appeals to Olivia, I believe, is the freshness or the newness of Viola/Cesario: the fact that “he” still seems to be all potential, a being still to be determined. The Countess is open to something new, and the bond of intimacy is made very quickly, probably when Viola/Cesario says at the beginning of their conversation, “Good beauties, let me sustain no scorn; I am very / ‘countable, even to the least sinister usage” (707, 1.5.155-56).

The passage in which Olivia unveils her face at the request of Viola/Cesario is worth notice: “we will draw / the curtain and show you the picture,” says the Countess, and she goes on to describe her face as a portrait that will “endure wind and weather” (708, 1.5.204-05, 208). This is true enough, although it makes sense to hear Feste’s song at the play’s end as a comment on the limitations of such endurance: “the wind and the rain” (750, 5.1.377) are always at work, breaking down what seemed timeless, and we are put in mind of Feste’s earlier conversation with Olivia, in which he had said beauty is a perishing flower (704, 1.5.45).

As the conversation continues, Viola/Cesario’s rhetorical boldness shows Olivia the way to give in to her own passions: “If I did love you in my master’s flame, / With such a suff’ring, such a deadly life, / In your denial I would find no sense; / I would not understand it” (708, 1.5.233-36). By the end of the scene, Olivia will be madly in love, and unable to comprehend Viola/Cesario’s reluctance, so she will have to turn to the stratagem of the ring (709, 1.5.270-76) to ensure the future presence of this new object of her desire. Her sudden change of heart shows in her final lines of the scene: “Fate, show thy force. Ourselves we do not owe, / What is decreed must be; and be this so” (710, 1.5.280-81).

What keeps Olivia from loving the Duke anyway, aside from the rather flimsy one of dedication to her brother (which lasts about three minutes once she meets Viola/Cesario)? I don’t know that the play really explains her rejection of him, except perhaps that he’s too available and too obviously “after” her. All she says is that Duke Orsino is “A gracious person; but yet I cannot love him./He might have took his answer long ago” (708, 1.5.231-32). One theme of interest in Twelfth Night is its exploration of how we choose our erotic objects, or how they choose us. Discrimination and rejection are two main ways of eventually finding one’s favored object of desire, and I think we are given to understand that Olivia considers herself and Orsino too alike in their tendencies towards idealistic extremes to make a good match.

Act 2, Scene 1 (710-10, Antonio forges bond with Sebastian, will follow him to Orsino’s court)

Antonio, who had rescued Sebastian from the ocean earlier, instantly forms an unbreakable bond with him. Antonio insists he will follow Sebastian to the Duke’s Court, no matter what the danger to himself: “But come what may, I do adore thee so / That danger shall seem sport, and I will go” (710, 2.1.41-42).

Act 2, Scene 2 (711-11, Olivia’s ring sets Viola/Cesario thinking about gender, frailty, frustration)

By this time, Viola is in a state almost as extreme as that of Olivia and Duke Orsino since she loves the latter and is loved by the former in the guise of Cesario. I don’t know that Viola has any more control over the course of events than others in this play, but some advantage, it’s reasonable to suggest, stems from her disguise and the perspective it lends. This is by no means a comedy of the humors* but it is a comedy of our inevitable frailty in the presence of strong passions. First, Viola sees that her adoption of a gender disguise is a trap that’s leading her towards frustration: “Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much” (711, 2.2.25-26). Secondly, she is able to generalize from her own experience: “How easy is it for the proper false / In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms! / Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we, / For such as we are made of, such we be” (711, 2.2.27-30). The “we” here is “women,” but it isn’t hard to extend the point to capture a sense of the fragility and changeableness of general humanity.

This ability does not, however, make it possible for Viola to extricate herself from the difficult situation she is in: “O Time, thou must untangle this, not I; / It is too hard a knot for me t’ untie!” (40-41)

*Footnote: the theory of the humors traces back to the Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BCE): the four humors or bodily fluids are black bile (associated with the element earth), yellow bile (fire), phlegm (water), and blood (air). A balanced amount of these fluids in the body maintained health and good temperament, while an excess of the first-mentioned (black bile) could make a person depressed or irritable; excess of the second (yellow bile) angry, ill-tempered; excess of the third (phlegm) taciturn, unemotional; excess of the fourth (blood) amorous or bold to the point of lechery or foolhardiness.

Act 2, Scene 3 (711-15, Malvolio interrupts Toby & Co.’s reveling, Maria hatches letter-plot)

This is another comic scene between Toby, Andrew, and Feste. Toby has been drinking and jesting as usual. First comes a delightful parody of philosophical discourse: Toby: “To be / up after midnight and to go to bed then is early; so that to go / to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes. Does not our lives / consist of the four elements?” (712, 2.3.5-8) To which Andrew replies, “Faith, so they say, but I think it rather consists of / eating and drinking” (712, 2.3.9-10). Next comes a call for some music. Feste’s song suggests that love sees only the joy of the present, that deferral and indeed any attempt to banish time are of no account: “In delay there lies no plenty, / Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty. / Youth’s a stuff will not endure” (713, 2.3. to gain insight into the fragility of common humanity to gain insight into the fragility of common humanity 46-48). Feste sanctions neither prudence nor pastoral idylls such as Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”

Sir Toby, Maria, and Andrew are offended at Malvolio’s killjoy demands that they stop making so much merriment in Olivia’s home: “Do ye make an alehouse of my lady’s/house, that ye squeak out your coziers’ catches without any/mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place,/persons, nor time in you?” (713, 2.3.78-83). Toby’s put-down of Malvolio is a classic: “Art anymore/than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous there / shall be no more cakes and ale?” (713, 2.3.102-04) Sic Semper to all prigs! Maria’s letter scheme to get revenge against Malvolio wins the admiration of Toby and Andrew. Malvolio is easy prey because he is vain about his looks and seems to think he deserves a quick promotion to a higher social rank: he is in deadly and permanent earnest about the Twelfth Night license to change one’s rank. Maria says she will succeed because this puritan hypocrite is “so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his/grounds of faith that all that look on him love him; and on/that device in him will my revenge find notable cause to work” (714-15 2.3.134-36). Her plan is as follows: “I will drop in his way some obscure epistles of love,/wherein by the colour of his beard, the shape of his leg, the/manner of his gait, the expressure of his eye, forehead, and/complexion, he shall find himself most feelingly personated. I/can write very like my lady your niece …” (715, 2.3.138-42).

Andrew, however, is most concerned with his suit to Olivia failing and leaving him out of funds: “If I cannot recover your niece, I am a foul way/out” (715, 2.3.163-64). This makes Andrew easy prey for Sir Toby.

Act 2, Scene 4 (715-18, Orsino and Viola/Cesario debate male/female love; Feste sings of love/death)

Viola/Cesario and the Duke discuss love matters, and he opens up to her while Feste plays some music for them: Orsino admits that men’s love is less constant than women’s love: “Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,/More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,/Than women’s are” (716, 2.4.32-34). But the Duke is playing the importunate suitor, and his subsequent remarks are contradictory. He insists that no woman could possibly love as strongly as he loves Olivia: “There is no woman’s sides/Can bide the beating of so strong a passion” (717, 2.4.91-92). To this, Viola/Cesario alludes cryptically to her own love for Orsino, and insists that “We men may say more, swear more, but indeed/Our shows are more than will; for still we prove/Much in our vows, but little in our love” (718, 2.4.115-17).

In between this argument’s halves, Feste’s song connects love with death, the ultimate in consequences: “Come away, come away death,/And in sad cypress let me be laid./Fie away, fie away breath,/I am slain by a fair cruel maid” (716, 2.4.50-53), and he warns the Duke afterwards, “pleasure will be paid, one time or / another” (717, 2.4.69).

Act 2, Scene 5 (718-22, Malvolio finds Maria’s letter and takes the bait: his selfish delusions peak)

The conspirators turn Malvolio into a fool in a reverie. Maria is certain that the puritan will become “a contemplative idiot” once he gets wind of the letter (718, 2.5.16-17), and she isn’t disappointed. Even before he spies out the letter, Malvolio is waxing hopeful: “To be Count Malvolio!” (719, 2.5.30) and “to have the humour of state and …/telling them I know my place, as I/would they should do theirs …” (719, 2.5.47-49). Things go from absurd to more absurd once the letter comes into reading range: Malvolio muses on the inscription, “I may command where I adore,/But silence like a Lucrece knife/With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore./M.O.A.I. doth sway my life’ (720, 2.5.94-97) and goes on to ponder the significance of “Some are born great, some achieve / greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon’em” (721, 2.5.126-27). To succeed, Malvolio need only don yellow stockings and smile like a fool (721, 2.5.132-34, 152-53).

Sir Toby predicts that Malvolio, when finally disabused of his delusions of grandeur, will run mad (722, 2.5.168-69). This hyper-critical moralist has become just another foolish lover. He’s a minor comic version of Euripides’ Pentheus in The Bacchantes, to be destroyed by the Dionysian revelers whose fun he tried to tamp down. (Except that Pentheus didn’t get to wear cross-garters and yellow stockings.) Indeed, a hint of violence had entered the picture early with the mention of Lucretia: Malvolio recognized the letter as Olivia’s because the seal bore an impression of Lucrece, the famous Roman wife who killed herself after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the last Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus: “By your leave, / wax—soft, and the impressure her Lucrece, with which she / uses to seal—tis my lady” (720, 2.5.83-85). Malvolio is no Tarquin, but he is prideful, and he intends to move beyond his proper station in life (that of a steward) by means of a most improper and self-aggrandizing suit to his employer.

Malvolio has been convinced by Maria’s bogus letter that “greatness” has simply been “thrust upon him,” if only he will make the proper gestures and dress right. A darker impression might be that like so many deniers of life, Malvolio means to set up a rival order of perfection against the imperfect world around us all; what else is that but pride, a self-deluded desire for autonomy to cover one’s fear and emptiness?

Act 3, Scene 1 (722-26, Viola/Cesario assesses Feste’s wit, Olivia confesses her love to Viola/Cesario, who answers her with a gender-riddle)

In conversation with Viola/Cesario, Feste declares himself not the Countess Olivia’s fool but her “corrupter of words” (723, 3.1.31), and when he’s through making his jests, Viola points out that playing the role of fool requires much perceptiveness: “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, / And to do that well craves a kind of wit. / He must observe their mood on whom he jests, / The quality of persons, and the time …” (723, 3.1.53-56). In Feste, “folly” is appropriate: it’s his way of maintaining perspective in a strange and contradictory world and it allows him to do something like what a courtier must do: engage with various people at a level and in a manner that suits them and him. But in those who are wise in the usual way, folly and word-hashing may bring them into discredit.

Olivia continues to wear her passion on her skirt-sleeve. She admits to Viola/Cesario that the ring business was a device meant to augment a sense of intimacy between herself and the youth: “I did send, / After the last enchantment you did here, / A ring in chase of you” (724, 3.1.103-05), and asks, “Have you not set mine honour at the stake / …?” (725, 3.1.110) To Olivia’s confession that “Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide” (725, 3.1.143), Viola/Cesario can only speak in riddles thanks to the bind into which her gender-disguising has put her, giving only this frustrating response to love-stricken Olivia: “I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth, / And that no woman has, nor never none / Shall mistress be of it save I alone” (726, 3.1.149-51). Riverside editor Anne Barton is right to suggest that Viola’s disguise doesn’t exactly liberate her in the same way that, say, Rosalind’s disguise does in As You Like It. It buys her some time and affords her some perspective, but it isn’t exactly freedom to experiment at will that Viola gains in her disguise as “Cesario.”

Act 3, Scene 2 (726-27, Sir Toby eggs on Sir Andrew: reflections on male valor)

Fabian stirs up Sir Andrew (726, 3.2.15-16, 22-24), and Sir Toby shows his contempt for Sir Andrew’s lack of valor here, admitting that he’s taken him for a considerable sum already: to Fabian he says, “I have been dear to him, lad, some two thousand / strong or so” (727, 3.2.46-47). Andrew is more his quarry than his protégé. The following advice Toby gives Andrew is worth quoting: “Taunt him with the license of ink. If thou ‘thou’st’ him some / thrice, it shall not be amiss, and as many lies as will lie in thy / sheet of paper … / set ’em down. Go about it” (727, 3.2.37-40). We can find genuine exemplars of male heroism in Shakespeare (Prince Hal and Hotpur in I Henry IV, for instance, or Macduff in Macbeth), but here, as elsewhere, there’s strong awareness that male posturing is an ancient profession: the semblance of valor often substitutes successfully for the thing itself. Shakespeare’s is a world amply populated with what Rosalind in As You Like It calls “mannish cowards” who stare down the world until it blinks: they “outface it with their semblances” (642 Norton Comedies, 1.3.115-16).

Act 3, Scene 3 (727-28, Antonio in town to help Sebastian, gives him purse to guard)

Antonio remains a faithful friend to Sebastian, and has followed him to town save him from danger in spite of the peril to himself since, as he explains, “Once in a sea-fight ’gainst the Count his galleys / I did some service” (728, 3.3.26-27). Antonio gives his new friend his purse to guard (728, 3.3.38): another act indicative of a strong bond between the two.

Act 3, Scene 4 (729-736, Malvolio makes his pitch to Olivia; Sir Andrew spurred to duel with Viola/Cesario; Olivia confesses her love still more intensely to Viola/Cesario, Antonio assists Viola/Cesario and is arrested, betrayed; Viola takes heart at Antonio’s confused mention of Sebastian)

Malvolio, now drawn entirely beyond himself and vulnerable, makes his unintentionally comic pitch to Countess Olivia, which consists mainly of smiling bizarrely and mentioning with pride his yellow stockings (729-30), and will be carted off to a dark cell as a madman. Olivia professes the greatest concern for the poor lunatic’s welfare: “Good Maria, let this fellow be looked to…. / …. I would not have him miscarry for the half of my dowry” (730, 3.4.57-59). Oddly, though, she will forget about him until nearly the end of the play. Malvolio has no idea how much trouble he’s in, and believes his suit has been a fantastic success, thanks to Jove’s good will: “nothing that can be can come between me / and the full prospect of my hopes (730, 3.4.74-75).

At this point, Sir Toby thinks he can play out the jest at his own pace: “Come, we’ll have him in a dark room and bound. My / niece is already in the belief that he’s mad. We may carry it / thus for our pleasure and his penance till our very pastime, / tired out of breath, / prompt us to have mercy on him …” (731, 3.4.121-24).

Sir Andrew is now spurred on to challenge Viola/Cesario as a rival suitor. As so often, Shakespeare makes fun of masculine pretensions to high honor and mastery of violence: neither Sir Andrew nor Viola/Cesario is any kind of fighter, but at least the latter knows better than to suppose otherwise. Words take the place of violence. Sir Toby advises Andrew, “draw, as thou drawest, swear horrible; for it comes to pass / oft that a terrible oath, / with a swaggering accent sharply / twanged off, gives manhood more approbation than ever / proof itself would have earned him” (732, 3.4.158-61). Part of Sir Toby’s fun will be to cure the malady described by means of a homeopathic remedy: putting two pretenders together in a ridiculous duel. Sir Toby is enjoying himself, and devises to deliver Sir Andrew’s challenge in person (ignoring the letter) and thereby “drive the gentleman [Cesario] … / into a most hideous opinion of his rage, skill, fury, and / impetuosity. This will so fright them both that they will kill one / another by the look , like cockatrices” (732, 3.4.170-73). After practically begging Fabian and Sir Toby to mollify the fearsome Sir Andrew, Viola puns to herself, “Pray God defend me. A little thing would make / me tell them how much I lack of a man” (734, 3.4.268-69). Viola recognizes that her disguise is more than ever a trap: this situation can’t go on much longer.

While all this planning is going on, Olivia admits her fear to Viola/Cesario that she has “said too much unto a heart of stone, / And laid mine honour too unchary out” (732, 3.4.178-79). She has risked her honor, but perhaps more importantly, to speak this way is to risk being confronted with the reverberation of one’s own unrestrained passion as a kind of madness.

Antonio soon arrives and takes it upon himself to maintain Viola/Cesario’s part in the quarrel: “I for him defy you” (735, 3.4.279), whereupon he is challenged by an incredulous Sir Toby and then arrested for piracy by the Duke’s officers (735, 3.4.283-84, 291-92). Drawn into the craziness that is Illyria, Antonio believes Sebastian is betraying him because Viola/Cesario won’t hand over the purse Antonio had given Sebastian a while back, now that he needs the money in it for bail (735, 3.4.312). “Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame” is the only utterance Antonio can summon in his amazement (736, 3.4.330). Even so, the mention of Sebastian is useful to Viola, who now gains some hope that her lost brother has survived: “Prove true, imagination, O prove true, / That I, dear brother, be now ta’en for you!” (736, 3.4.339-40)

Act 4, Scene 1 (736-38, Sebastian is drawn into Illyrian topsy-turvy: Olivia invites him home)

Sebastian enters and Feste is surprised to hear him deny his identity as Cesario (736-37, 4.1.4-7). Sir Toby nearly comes to blows with Sebastian after Sir Andrew has struck the fellow, and is only stopped by Olivia, who dismisses Toby from the field (737, 4.1.39, 41). Olivia invites Sebastian to her house (738, 4.1.50), and with that invitation he is formally drawn into Illyria’s topsy-turvyness, just as Antonio was in the previous scene. His wonderment will only increase at the end of the third scene.

Act 4, Scene 2 (738-40, Feste sports as Sir Topas with confined Malvolio: Pythagoras and post-mortems; Sir Toby is worried about carrying the jest too far, risking Olivia’s anger)

Maria and Feste make more sport of the confine Malvolio. Feste joins the fun as an examiner of Malvolio, Sir Topas (a name probably borrowed from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). Feste is a fool by trade, so we are treated to a dialogue between a supposed madman and a fool, with the latter easily gaining the upper hand. Feste’s use of belief in Pythagorean transmigration as a touchstone for sanity is priceless: when Malvolio refuses to believe that “the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a / bird” (739, 4.2.45-46), Feste imperiously tells him, “Remain thou still in darkness. Thou shalt / hold th’ opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and / fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy gran- / dam” (739, 4.2.50-53). This makes sense because after all, Malvolio’s pride caused him to denigrate those below him in rank, and Pythagoras’ doctrine implies respect for all creatures great and small. We may add hypocrisy to Malvolio’s petty crimes since, as a denier of life and upholder of rigid notions about rank and propriety, he’s quick to jump at the chance to improve his own condition. Viola commits her cause to time and reaps a reward, but Malvolio’s ill-intentioned leap nets him only isolation and mockery. Finally, Feste taunts Malvolio with the view that he won’t believe anyone is or isn’t mad until he’s seen their exposed brains after death. For him, the jury is always out on a person’s sanity until that person dies (740, 4.2.107-08). It was a letter that got Malvolio in trouble in the first place, and Feste now honors an anguished call for “a candle, and pen, ink, and paper” (740, 4.2.75) that the prisoner may make his plight known to Olivia. Feste leaves Malvolio with a mocking song, “Adieu, goodman devil” (740, 4.2.122).

Sir Toby, however, is starting to worry about his niece’s good opinion. He says to Feste and Maria, “I would we were well rid of this / knavery. If he may be conveniently delivered, I would he were, / for I am now so far in offence with my niece that I cannot / pursue with any safety this sport to the upshot” (739, 4.2.60-63). Toby realizes that his term of office as lord of misrule has a limit, and he doesn’t want to lose his place with the countess. A jest too long continued becomes cruelty, not sport or sanctioned payback.

Act 4, Scene 3 (741-41, Olivia abruptly proposes and Sebastian abruptly accepts)

In the third scene, Sebastian abruptly agrees to marry Olivia after she abruptly and secretly proposes to him. He can hardly believe his good fortune, but accepts: “I am ready to distrust mine eyes / And wrangle with my reason that persuades me / To any other trust but that I am mad, / Or else the lady’s mad. Yet if ’twere so / She could not sway her house, command her followers …” (741, 4.3.13-17).

Act 5, Scene 1 (741-50, Viola/Sebastian reunite; Orsino/Viola, Sebastian/Olivia together; Toby/Maria; Malvolio rails, is upbraided, exits; Feste’s last song: wind and rain, fool’s perspective)

Antonio is trotted out before Duke Orsino as a prisoner, and this prisoner reproaches Viola/Cesario, whom of course he takes for Sebastian, over the bail money he supposedly withheld (743, 5.1.71-73). Orsino tells Antonio he must be insane since Viola/Cesario has been his page for three months (743, 5.1.94). Next, Olivia reproaches Viola/Cesario for her alleged failure to “keep promise” with the agreement she has come to with Sebastian (743, 5.1.98). The Duke is still upset with the obdurate Olivia: “Why should I not, had I the heart to do it, / Like to th’ Egyptian thief, at point of death / Kill what I love …” (744, 5.1.113-15) and even more upset with Viola/Cesario, whom he suspects has stolen Olivia from him altogether since she calls the youth “husband” (744, 5.1.138).

As if things couldn’t get any more confusing, in rushes Sir Andrew calling for a surgeon to treat Sir Toby, who has been slightly injured by Sebastian (745, 5.1.168ff). Now the play’s misrecognition dilemmas begin to resolve since Viola/Cesario is sincerely confused at the accusations Sir Andrew levels: “Why do you speak to me? I never hurt you” (745, 5.1.181). Sir Toby rails at Sir Andrew, calling him “an ass-head, and a coxcomb, and a / knave; a thin-faced knave, a gull” (746, 5.1.198-99), and then in comes Sebastian himself, solicitous of Olivia for his lateness considering their vows (746, 5.1.206-07). Orsino is astonished at the likeness between Viola/Cesario and Sebastian: “One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons, / A natural perspective, that is and is not” (746, 5.1.208-09). These two proceed to recognize each other for certain by means of recollections about their father from Messaline (746-47, 5.1.219-41). The reconciliation leaves Duke Orsino and Viola, and Olivia and Sebastian, free to marry.

But there’s one final matter to take care of: Malvolio. Feste and Fabian enter with the letter that Malvolio has penned and Feste reads it in the assembled company’s presence: “By the Lord, madam, you wrong me, and the / world shall know it…” (748, 5.1.292-99). At last, the man himself enters on a sour note, demanding to know why he has been so abused: “Why have you suffered me to be imprisoned, / Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest, / And made the most notorious geck and gull / That e’er invention played on? Tell me why?” (749, 5.1.330-33) The conspirators confess, with Feste invoking “the whirligig of time” that “brings in his revenges” (749, 5.1.364), and reminding Malvolio how he had slandered him to Olivia as “a barren rascal” (749, 5.1.363) even before the insults that sparked Maria’s letter-plot in Act 2, Scene 3. What he’s really invoking is something like what we today would generally call “bad karma,” or in a Christian context, the thriftiness of the economy of sin: ill thoughts and deeds, as Saint Augustine taught, establishes its own patterns; we end up with a bitter harvest from the bad seed we have sown. The conspirators are forgiven by everyone but Malvolio, who swears to be revenged on them all (749, 5.1.365), prompting Olivia to send after him to “entreat him to a peace” (749, 5.1.365). It’s not unusual in Shakespearian comedy to leave some character as the odd man out at play’s end. For example, the melancholy Monsieur Jacques in As You Like It can hardly be expected to transform into a carefree, upbeat character just because almost everyone else is happy at the play’s conclusion. But there’s no question of punishing Jacques. In sum, I don’t believe Twelfth Night is a problem comedy just because of Malvolio’s sour exit: the providence that seems to guide this play is hardly as rough-hewn as the one that we may see at work in Hamlet, where Polonius is killed by mishap, poor Ophelia runs mad and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “go to it” in England. We find out that Sir Toby has married Maria (749, 5.1.350). Viola agrees to wed the Duke, and Olivia has already made her vows with Sebastian.

Feste’s song ends the play (750, 5.1.376-95), and it would be worthwhile to consider the role his songs play in advancing or reflecting upon the action and characters in Twelfth Night. For now, I’ll just consider the way the final song sums up the play. “The rain it raineth every day,” sings Feste, and his lyrics invoke the increasing consequentiality even of “trifles” as a person grows to maturity. The “knaves and thieves” will find themselves left out in the wind and the rain, when men “shut their gate.” Feste’s role, that of a fool, is perhaps the only stable one in a world turned upside down; oftentimes, the fool alone is able to maintain and offer perspective. Others in this play risk more, and gain more—especially Olivia and Viola, most likely because they have sufficient inward value to begin with, and trial by experience proves and augments that value. (The shallow Sir Andrews of the play’s world end up worse off by the same trial.) Feste, however, remains the observant, wise man he already was: he is inside the play looking around, but also inside the play looking outward at us, the audience, and he seems almost to be one of us at times. The conclusion of Feste’s song brings in a note of metadrama: “we’ll strive to please you every day” (750, 5.1.395), he says. We can always come back to the theater, where, of course, the play-realm will mediate between its own freedom and the world of time and consequence, but Feste will remind us yet again that soon we must leave. Perhaps, then, theater is among the “patches” Feste had mentioned back in the first act (704, 1.5.40-45): what it offers by way of insight and refuge may be temporary and partial rather than permanent and absolute, but that doesn’t mean it’s of no value or not worth pursuing. The foolery in Shakespeare is seldom, to borrow a line from King Lear, “altogether fool.” Feste and his kind are excellent embodiments of the suppleness and playfulness that constitute a big part of the value in dramatic exploration.

The key concern of this play set during a time of merrymaking and reversal may be how we “fools of time” may gain perspective. (The phrase is from Sonnet 124: “To this I witness call the fools of time, / Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime”) There is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance,” as the preacher tells us in Ecclesiastes 3:4. Everything has its allotted time and purpose under heaven. We have encountered a number of forms of stylized or excessive passion in Twelfth Night: Sir Toby’s irresponsible mirth, Duke Orsino’s romantic grandiosity, Countess Olivia’s projected long period of mourning, Malvolio’s narrow-souled, extreme ambition and self-regard. Perhaps most or all of these approaches are attempts to deny or even annul time and consequentiality. Feste’s music and witty observations both invoke the inevitability of time and the sway of our foolish passions, and they’re probably as close to “another way” as we are going to find in Shakespeare: I mean they offer us a way to gain something like permanent right-side-up perspective outside the realms of time and passion. Theater, as noted in Feste’s epilogue, may be another way of attaining such perspective, and just as Feste reminds us of the coming and going of nature’s vast seasonal cycles (the wind and the rain keep up their activity through the ages, though men shut their doors against it), we are told that while we must pass from the theater, we can always return so long as we live. Theater has that regenerative power, though of course whether or not the result of our many returns is wisdom is another question. The play leaves the characters in the fantasy-bubble Illyria, a political order that has largely made good on our opening suspicion that it exists to serve its citizens’ fondest desires, and there’s no talk of their leaving.

Document timestamp: 11/4/2011 7:21 PM

King Richard III

2010-09-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

Notes on Richard III.

Recommended Reading: Kendall, Paul Murray. Richard the Third. New York: Norton, 1956.

I will comment scene by scene, but a few initial remarks seem appropriate. I mentioned in class that Shakespeare, as one of my old UC Irvine professors used to say, usually prefers to deal with the dynamics of royal power at some historical distance. By Shakespeare’s time, the chivalric ideals, the feudal loyalties, of older times had long since disappeared. We need only consider the Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York to see the truth of that statement: mid-C15 England was marked by savage infighting and betrayal between these two great branches of the Plantagenet line descended from Edward III. The modern courts of Elizabeth I and James Stuart are not generally Shakespeare’s subject. But the present play deals with an historical subject with which many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have been familiar, and he borrows his story in the main from the Tudor Chronicles that portray Richard III as a monster. If we read modern biographies of Richard, most notably the one by Paul Murray Kendall, we have access to a more objective analysis of Richard’s career. But my sense is that Shakespeare was quite capable of reading between the lines of his chroniclers, and seeing that almost everyone involved in the action was deeply imbued with divided loyalties and mixed, selfish motivations.

That quality of ambivalence surely emerges in the play we are reading, but Shakespeare’s need to generate sympathy in the audience for some of the doomed characters results, I think, in an almost schizophrenic quality at times. Some of the worst rascals in the play get genuinely moving passages—Clarence, for example, was not exactly a picture of loyalty to Edward IV, his brother, moving back and forth between Edward and Warwick with astonishing facility when those two men were engaged in their deadly feuds. Clarence would just as well have deposed Edward and taken the throne for himself if he could, but fortune did not favor him and he never had Edward’s highest regard, which seems to have gone to the younger brother Richard. (Kendall’s biography of Richard covers Clarence’s behavior in some detail.) But in the play, Clarence speaks remarkably beautiful lines on the eve of his murder, moving us to pity him. As for Queen Margaret of Anjou, when she was trying to get her husband Henry VI reinstalled on the throne, she treated England like a foreign country, allowing her armies to rape and pillage their way through conquered territories. She was no angel—Kendall describes her conduct as “savagely dynastic.” But in the play, she is a figure of at least some respect, and speaks with prophetic accuracy about the villainous end of others. What I’m suggesting is that Shakespeare freely reconfigures the historical characters with which he is dealing, making them suit the needs of a play designed, after all, first and foremost to please an audience. Thus, if anything but a black-and-white portrait of King Richard III as a villain was available to him, he chose not to make use of it. The Richard we see, with his vicious asides and grim humor, is much more exciting and suits Tudor mythology. Queen Elizabeth I, after all, was the daughter of Henry VIII, who was the heir of the Lancastrian-related Henry VII, the hero of this play who emerges as an icon of early English nationalism of the sort Queen Elizabeth I would come to depend on during her reign (1558-1603).

Act 1, Scene 1.

The thing that keeps this play from slipping into melodrama is the brilliance and exuberance of Richard’s language. I suppose Richard is one of those villains Samuel Johnson worries about—his good qualities do not keep us from condemning him, but they carry us along to a disturbing degree. Like Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Shakespeare’s Richard is always in the know, always ahead of the pack. No one likes to side with losers who are in the dark, who never have the right word for the right occasion, whom fortune seems to have abandoned. The Renaissance poets understood, as of course did the ancients from Homer onwards, that shunning the unlucky, although cruel, is often the safest course of action. Bad luck is contagious, and incompetence loves company. No wonder we often side with the villains, at least for a time: knowledge gives us a sense of power and immunity. As modern critic Stanley Fish says in discussing Paradise Lost, Christian poetry labors to “surprise” us at our own propensity towards sinfulness, at our seemingly endless capacity to get taken in by situations we should recognize as dangerous, and by the rhetoric and charming personalities of villains we know to be such.

In the first scene, Richard, still the Duke of Gloucester, makes his famous “winter of our discontent” speech. In the Ian McKellen film version, this speech is partly public rhetoric, but in the text, it is spoken as a soliloquy. Richard justifies his wicked ways by pointing to his crooked body. Like most villains, his evil is fueled by a sense of injured merit or a demand for compensation. He is part of the illustrious House of York, and his brother is no less than Edward IV, the present King of England. The real Richard of Gloucester, from what I have read, was remarkably loyal to his older brother Edward IV, but Shakespeare’s Richard, as the second part of his soliloquy makes clear, cannot truly be part of the “we” to which the first part of his speech refers. Others may enjoy the time, but his deformities and defects render that impossible for him. He was “stamped” in a certain unfortunate way, and so his course must be separate. Where others revel in strength and victory, he sees only a “weak piping time of peace” (1.1.24). He is a man “unfinished,” as he says, and just as his own physical elements seem to have been mixed up and confused from birth, his peculiar genius is to run with the tides of chaos, staying always ahead of everyone else. Richard lives in a time full of opportune chaos and confusion, and these things are his very elements, so he has no trouble working with them. That quality accounts for his ability to marshal “drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams” against his brothers Clarence and Edward IV, setting them off against each other. Another thing to notice about this soliloquy surfaces at its end—when Richard bids his thoughts to dive “down to my soul”; although Richard can do little about his ugly appearance, he is apparently a master of disguise when it comes to the various registers of language and moral sentiment. He is one of Shakespeare’s greatest “actor Kings.”

How does Richard play upon his brother Clarence? Well, his underlying assumption is that anyone close to power wants still more of it and therefore cannot be trusted. This assumption he applies to Queen Elizabeth, Edward’s wife. After all, she has two young sons by Edward who stand to inherit the throne. Historically, Elizabeth Woodville, whose first husband was Sir John Grey, seems to have been a Machiavellian upstart. She understood power and wanted to augment her family’s influence; Edward’s marriage to her, in fact, had already made her powerful enemies. Her family has been newly planted in the soil of English royalty, and its only real chance, as we can see from the vicissitudes of the great houses of York and Lancaster, is to grow quickly and strongly. That is the way Richard portrays her, for the most part. He makes witticisms at her expense, carrying forward the grudge between the Woodville faction and himself from the three parts of Henry VI. At line 94, Richard refers to what he considers the unseemly advancement of Elizabeth Woodville, and at line 93, he refers sarcastically to one of the king’s mistresses, Jane Shore.

Towards the end of the first scene, Richard tells us in good stage-villain fashion precisely what he plans to do. Clarence must be executed just before King Edward dies; with this elder brother out of the way, Richard will be free to marry Anne Neville, the daughter of the late famous kingmaker Warwick (Richard Neville) for political advancement.

Act 1, Scene 2.

In this second scene (Henry VI died, or rather was snuffed out, in 1471 after having been out of power for a decade, with one very brief restoration by Warwick), Anne protests a great deal, lamenting over Henry’s body and remembering the young Prince Edward. She makes the first of many references to Richard as poisonous and monstrous. And immediately she is confronted with the devil himself—Richard appears from nowhere to charm her. What follows is a contestation of absolutes, with the lady declaring her supreme disgust for Richard, and he playing up the absoluteness of her beauty and even claiming it spurred him on to kill the Prince and Henry VI. Anne has been dangerously left in the lurch by the death of these powerful men, so underlying the invective are the mechanics of power. Richard is offering her a place in the new order of things. He tries to make her believe in her own individual, personal charm as a moving force behind great events. Her tears, as he tells her following line 150, have moved him to weep when even the pitiful story of his father the Duke of York’s murder by Queen Margaret and her faction previously failed to do so.

Towards the end of the second act, Richard again speaks only to himself and the audience, expressing nothing short of disbelief at his success—or rather the success of his performance. (The word “shadow” bears as one of its connotations “actor.”) Does Richard believe the lady finds him “a marvelous proper man,” and that he has now become fashionable? Well, perhaps the fashionable thing is power, which, as Henry Kissinger says, is the greatest of all aphrodisiacs. I suppose the most generous way to construe Anne’s apparent fickleness is to acknowledge that she is little more than a pawn in a deadly dynastic chess game, so perhaps her sudden, incredible change of heart is Shakespeare’s way of characterizing the devastating effects of the dynastic violence that constituted the Wars of the Roses on even the deepest human feelings and loyalties. Richard seems to understand that Anne is incapable of taking action—thus, his gesture of offering her a blade with which to kill him may be less risky than it appears. Well, Richard is exuberant—and why not? He that is “not shaped for sportive tricks” and whose villainy is stamped, as he and everyone else says, into the very fabric of his body, now plays the rogue in precisely the guise he had said was forbidden to him: that of a lover. This is Richard at his best and worst: protean, ebullient, unpredictable, a rider of chaos in events and in the human heart. In the theater of power, the clever can represent themselves as they would be, and stand a good chance of carrying their “audience” with them.

Act 1, Scene 3.

In this scene, the royal family gather and bicker over old crimes and divided loyalties. Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry VI, puts in an appearance, serving as a horrible example of one who has held and lost great power and place. She herself is, of course, no angel, having been responsible for the death of Richard of Gloucester’s father the Duke of York when he tried to get himself crowned king. What we have at present is not so much a solution to the power struggle between the great houses of York and Lancaster as an uneasy truce. In any event, Queen Margaret’s prophecy regarding Elizabeth Woodville comes true later on. What do these people really want? we might ask, since it’s obvious that power does not bring security in its train. Their pursuit of ultimate power sometimes resembles the quest for sexual experience as described in Shakespeare’s famous sonnet: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action.” At the end of the scene, around line 324, Richard yet again steps in with a soliloquy explaining how he is behind the vicious maneuvering he ascribes to others.

Act 1, Scene 4.

This scene contains the famous dream vision of Clarence, and it illustrates well the multiple purposes a passage of this sort can serve in Shakespeare. One purpose is clearly to generate some sympathy for Clarence, who in historical terms doesn’t seem to have been a particularly warm and fuzzy character. In this speech, he is given sublimely beautiful poetry beginning around line 20. Such passages are so fine that they seem almost detachable from the plot. We may remember Shakespeare’s song in The Tempest, “Full fathom five thy father lies: / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes: / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange. / Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.”

Clarence dreams of “a sea-change into something rich and strange,” but here there is a more dreadful aspect to the vision. The Keeper may be injecting a little humor when he asks Clarence how he had time to notice so much detail while drowning in his vision. Well, the rest of the speech shows that Clarence is riddled with guilt over his betrayal of brother Edward IV in favor of Warwick , at least for a time. And we may see another meaning of that word “shadow” in this scene—the term invokes the ghosts still wandering about since the beginning of the bad blood between York and Lancaster with the 1399 deposition of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke (a Lancastrian with no great claim to the crown when closer descendents of Edward III were available; see Wikipedias’s Wars of the Roses entry. But Clarence never really sees to the bottom of his brother’s deceitful behavior—this is shielded from him even in his dream.

At line 84, two unnamed murderers enter to make away with Richard’s brother Clarence. They may remind us of characters from a medieval morality play in their anxious banter regarding a half-personified Conscience which, as Hamlet will later say, “does make cowards of us all.” These two men are operating at a much lower level than is Richard or the other noble characters in the play, and the inferior quality of their station renders them profoundly insecure. They show a spot of genuine moral conscience—something Richard of Gloucester seems to lack altogether, judging from his soliloquies so far.

Also on display in this part of the scene is Shakespeare’s typically macabre sense of humor; Clarence, about to be drowned in a cask of wine, says, “Give me a cup of wine” (164). Playing the penitent, Clarence tries to sweet-talk the two killers out of their plan, but as they point out, a man who has done such things as he has done has no business employing such religious rhetoric. I find it interesting how Shakespeare may be playing with our sympathies and his handling of Clarence—doubtless the beautiful poetry this character is given generates some sympathy for him, but Shakespeare at least partly undermines that sympathy with several mentions of the role that the historical Clarence played in the Wars of the Roses. That a man’s penitence is partly situational does not necessarily render it thoroughly false—perhaps penitence is almost always partly situational. But it certainly complicates matters, a thought we may carry forward when, at the beginning of Act 2, King Edward IV takes on the role of reconciler. It is difficult to put much stock in Edward’s pious declaration that he is, to borrow a phrase, “a uniter, not a divider.” The Wars of the Roses were all about insidious divisions between closely interrelated feudal houses.

Act 2, Scene 1.

This scene plays with some irony. Here we have Edward IV trying desperately, in the most unpromising of circumstances, to practice the art of dying well, and it comes off badly. He wants his factious relatives to embrace and to exchange loving words; he apparently even wants them actually to mean those words and gestures. Once again, Richard masterfully sows the seeds of chaos and discord, injecting at just the right point to deflate Edward’s piety the fact that Clarence is dead, supposedly by order of the King himself. Richard even insists that the pale visages of everyone around should be interpreted as an emblem of their guilt. The King’s penitence may be genuine, but it cannot prevent the consequences of past violence. It is a commonplace in Shakespeare that “blood draws on blood,” that violence and sin generate spirals of still more violence and sin. That is probably a lesson he learned from the Bible and from St. Augustine. We will come upon it often in his tragedies.

Act 2, Scenes 2-3.

Again, what seems to be genuine grief is undercut by a long history of unkindness and injustice. Richard’s mother, the old Duchess of York, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, and the children of murdered Clarence engage in a lamentation-fest. Exchanges of the sort we find around line 72 through line 78 are often said to be typical of early Shakespeare. That is surely true, and it seems that the form of the dialogue works very well in this case since the point seems to be to draw out the shallowness or inadequacy of the characters’ grief, the essentially self-centered and factional nature of it. The children will not weep for Elizabeth because she did not weep for the death of Clarence, while the Duchess insists that her grief is alone general while everyone else’s is merely particular. But I would not discount the genuine pathos of the scene—it probably functions at two heterodox levels.

It’s good to keep our eye on the fact that Shakespeare’s first goal must have been to please an audience; therefore, it is unlikely that he would completely undercut a good tearjerker scene like the present one. His audience were not historians, after all, though it would be an overstatement to claim they were unsophisticated peons. Many people in attendance were probably quite capable of catching the subtleties in Shakespeare’s handling of historical and emotional registers. And there’s always Richard, of course, with those mean-spirited asides of his, making it plain just how insincere he is when he trots out the moralistic rhetoric and protestations of good will. Shakespeare will often counterpoint statecraft, violence, and villainy on a grand scale with small-scale, intimate domestic scenes showing the consequences for the powerless—but we will have to wait for the fourth scene to witness anything of that sort. In the third scene, three citizens air their thoughts and anxieties about Edward’s death and what is to come. In this, they function like a chorus, and they sense that the great will not be able to restrain themselves from seeking still greater power. Dynastic and inter-dynastic change will come, but it is something to be feared.

Act 2, Scene 4. This scene rehearses the old Tudor propaganda about Richard’s monstrosity and hideous evil, the better to underscore the genuine pathos of Queen Elizabeth’s situation—if even a tough cookie like Margaret of Anjou (Henry VI’s widow) has been sidelined by the loss of her men, what will happen to Elizabeth and her children by Edward? She senses with dread that she and hers are caught up in the “bottled spider’s” web of intrigue and blood, and there’s no way out.

Act 3, Scene 1.

The third act as a whole hinges upon the sense of pageantry shown by Richard and Buckingham; they advance Richard’s cause by means of sophistical arguments and shows of religious piety. Here in the first scene, Buckingham makes easy work of the Cardinal’s scruples about snatching the young Prince Edward out of sanctuary with his mother. The effect here is comic since it shows how simple a thing it is to take advantage of those who actually take the rules seriously. But of course Cardinals were by no means non-political figures, so another way to interpret the Cardinal’s complacence is that he knows which way the wind blows. Obviously, what everyone wants is the settled appearance of legitimacy, and they are likely to go along with the plans of whoever seems most likely to deliver it. Prince Edward particularly rankles Richard at this point because the child has the temerity to insist that the deep truth should live on from age to age, and that historical truth is not simply a matter of what has written down for posterity. Richard is, of course, right in the middle of staging his own inevitable accession to power in front of everyone who matters, certainly believing that so long as he can arrange the visual feast to everyone’s liking, the near-term historical record will break his way. By implication, perhaps, we are to understand that those who look on while Richard schemes his way to the kingship know what is really going on, and will one day find the courage to say so. Prince Edward also sets himself up as the future king who will wash away England’s humiliation over the loss of French territory originally procured by Edward III and Henry V. Towards the end of the first scene, Richard and Buckingham engage in an almost obscene exchange whereby Buckingham accedes to the murder of William Lord Hastings and may claim when Richard is King the Earldom of Hereford.

Act 3, Scene 2.

Lord Stanley has a fearful dream about Richard the boar and fears the separate councils by which decisions are being taken, but Hastings will have none of it. Perhaps more so than anyone else in the play, he seems incapable of discerning Richard’s true character. This is not to say that Hastings is an admirable or innocent man—any such notions are quickly rendered impossible by the way he takes the condemnation of his enemies in this scene. Hastings considers himself secure in Richard’s good graces; he supposes there is a place for him in the new order heralded by Richard. The way Shakespeare handles Hastings resembles something straight from The Mirror for Magistrates, or from an old morality play—prideful and triumphant one moment, humiliated and cut down the next. We notice that as so often, Shakespeare gives both sides of the argument regarding the validity of prophecy—on the whole, his plays give the nod to popular superstition, don’t they? It is mainly thorough villains like Edmund in King Lear who scorn such powers of prophecy, witchcraft, and the like. Throughout much of his career, Shakespeare wrote during the reign of James I, who was a great believer in witchcraft and even wrote a learned treatise on the subject.

Act 3, Scenes 3-4.

In these two scenes, Richard’s enemies meet their end. Informed that William Lord Hastings will not assent to shoving aside the young Prince in favor of his so-called Protector, Richard devises a delightfully ridiculous little piece of theater, which ends with the present death of Hastings. Anyone who doubts Richard’s claims about the malignant conspiracy of the Queen’s party against him is neatly aligned with them. The real purpose of this mini-drama is, as we can see, to force others in the room into a show of support. This is no time for bet-hedging, and even Lord Stanley must follow along in Richard’s train of sycophants.

Act 3, Scene 5.

Yet another delicious piece of theater is here—Buckingham and Richard nicely allay suspicion, taking in the Lord Mayor with their feigned alarm and specious claim that Hastings’s execution was untimely. The scene reminds me a little bit of the one in Macbeth where Macbeth has just killed the two servants who will falsely be blamed for Duncan’s murder. He claims to repent what he has done rashly. Many of Richard’s accusations seem to revolve around sexual innuendo, and we may suppose this topic is especially satisfying to him, if we recall his opening soliloquy. His character assassination of Edward IV is particularly vicious.

Act 3, Scene 6.

The Scrivener makes a point I mentioned earlier. He cannot believe that anyone else could possibly believe Richard’s transparent absurdities in justification of his conduct. But as he suggests, the problem is not that nobody perceives the truth; it is that no one dares to acknowledge it openly. Shakespeare’s contemporary John Harington puts the matter succinctly: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Had Richard succeeded as King, what record of him would have come down to Shakespeare’s time? Certainly not the one Shakespeare offers us here since, after all, he writes in defense of Elizabeth’s Tudor line, founded by the illustrious Lancastrian Henry VII.

Act 3, Scene 7.

Here Shakespeare has outdone himself in the representation of outrageous villainy: Buckingham’s quip about Richard’s role being that of a maid who must “still answer nay and take it” is followed by a little stagecraft in which he minces around with his bible, flanked by priests. By reverse logic, that taking of power is once again compared to an aggressive sexual act—the very thing Richard sounded so resentful about in his opening soliloquy. While Buckingham and Richard’s exchanges are often short to the point of stichomythia (one-line exchanges), the dialogue becomes fittingly prolix as the two rogues finish off the whole pageant in front of the Lord Mayor and some leading citizens. As so often, Shakespeare’s supposed prolixity turns out to be situational; it’s needed here because the characters must not say too frankly what they really mean, aside from blunt assertions about the Princes’ illegitimacy and Edward IV’s depraved dalliances.

Dynastic rivalry can be a nasty, root-and-branch extirpatory affair just as much as it can be a matter of delicate intermarriages and intricate understandings between rival houses. Here, it isn’t enough that Richard should succeed; he must appear holy while others are slimed beyond recognition and utterly destroyed. It isn’t only the living bodies of his rivals that he must deal with; their posthumous image and report must be altered for his benefit. How powerful an anxiety this business of popular image and report was for Richard is highlighted by ordinary people’s failure to respond to the lies fed them by Buckingham regarding Edward IV and the Princes. Story and spectacle are enormously significant accompaniments to the getting and maintaining of power, and Shakespeare, a great reader of Holinshed especially but also of some other chronicles of English royal history, must have understood how important a force popular images and “oral history” were as a potential threat to the official stories set forth by the monarchs and their supporters. They could result in direct rebellion on the part of the people themselves, or they could serve the interests of rival factions. Richard, a Machiavel before Machiavelli, is striving mightily to avoid becoming not simply feared rather than loved, but outright hated. Machiavelli, incidentally, is one of Shakespeare’s sources for analyzing the workings of political power, just as Montaigne’s philosophical skepticism seems to have struck a cord with him.

Act 4, Scene 1.

This act begins with a concentration on the misfortunes of the women in the play. (Richard married Anne Neville in 1472.) She declares that Richard’s “honey words” won her over on the spot, improbable as that may seem. See my comments on Act 1, scene 2. Elizabeth Woodville ends the scene with remarkably lyrical lines about the “tender babes” in the Tower of London—it was common speculation, of course, that Richard of Gloucester had them murdered when he became king, but there is no solid evidence to prove that he did. Certainly, he stood to benefit from the deed, but as Kendall points out in his biography of Richard (see Appendix 1), so did Henry Tudor, whose claim to the throne wasn’t rock-solid and who didn’t even advance the argument that Edward’s son was illegitimate. Or it might have been Buckingham presenting Richard with a fait accompli. The bodies were never discovered (at least not with any certainty—some remains were discovered in 1674), so the whole thing must remain a mystery.

Act 4, Scenes 2-3.

Richard compounds his wickedness as the pace of events picks up, broaching the need with Buckingham of doing away with the young Edward V, and fuming when Buckingham hesitates, no doubt to consider his own selfish interests. Then we are told that a certain James Tyrrel has contracted with his subordinates to effect the murders—this is “information” straight out of Thomas More’s study of Richard—and are treated to another of the play’s more lyrical passages about the piteous nature of the princes’ death. Richard also makes away with Anne his queen—again there’s no evidence in the historical record aside from popular suspicion and Tudor propaganda. But Shakespeare’s villain glosses his actions revealingly: always a major concern with Shakespeare is that those who fail to act instead of just talking and planning quickly end up on the sidelines, or worse. (Consider the fate of that most poetical ruler, Richard II.) It was a Renaissance commonplace that a well-born person’s formation should be oriented towards action. Richard III is a master of words and deeds; he isn’t one to be caught sitting on his hands when something needs doing. But Richard’s mastery is short-lived, and his own words suggest the reason Shakespeare proffers for his failure as a king of only a few years’ reign: “I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. / Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye” (4.2.63-5). However courageous and crafty Richard may be, he has become the creature of his own evil deeds, doomed to repeat them with less and less control over the outcome, until disaster can no longer be kept at bay. Only his death at the hands of Henry Tudor, and Henry’s marriage as Henry VII to the Yorkist King Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth, will put an end to the bloody chaos of The Wars of the Roses. This lesson seems to me starkly Augustinian: sin begets sin, and free will negates itself thereby, so that all of Richard’s cunning schemes and furious action come to naught. Shakespeare’s “speaking picture” (Sidney’s phrase) of incarnate evil, like all evil, ultimately has no substance, no staying power.

Act 4, Scenes 4-5.

The play’s women again congregate, this time with bitter effect: Queen Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s widow, is right there beside Elizabeth Woodville, widow of Edward IV, to sharpen the pangs of her grief over the death of her husband and the disappearance of her two sons by the king. Margaret feels Elizabeth’s pain, and feeds upon it: as she says, it will make her smile in France (erstwhile center of her hopes for power in England). The real Margaret died in August, 1482 in France, so she didn’t actually live to see Richard III’s demise, but Shakespeare situates her so as to sharpen our sense of the cruelty of the times, with their fierce dynastic rivalries and constant betrayals: the old feudal, chivalric order had long since begun the process of ripping itself apart, with the nobility casting aside all responsibility to their subjects and ravaging the land in a quest for individual and familial gain. It seems nobody in the disintegrating order Shakespeare describes here is willing to serve for the correct reasons; nobody’s place is acknowledged by anyone else as rightful and permanent—all is scheming and self-interest. Shakespeare is perfectly capable of idealizing the old order—consider his favorable treatment of Henry V, victor of Agincourt in 1412. But whatever the historical inaccuracies of the play and leaving aside its Tudor bias, the overall picture it presents of this final episode of The Wars of the Roses seems just.

Another thing to notice in this scene is the curious dilation of Richard’s rhetoric even as its effectiveness diminishes to nothing: after hearing his mother the Duchess of York’s terrible curse in a relatively short space (we notice that Elizabeth had sought to know more of this art of cursing from her nemesis Margaret) it takes him a good long time to convince Elizabeth of absolutely nothing. Their at times stichomythic, at times long-winded exchange amounts to wrangling over Richard’s desire to marry the widowed queen’s daughter, also named Elizabeth, lest the girl’s hand be given to Richmond, i.e. Henry Tudor. Richard ends up rather pathetically swearing by the future, when, of course, he will become as mild as mother’s milk. The almost tedious repetition of the words “myself” and “yourself” in this exchange play up, respectively, Elizabeth’s distrust of dynastic bloodline as a measure of safety (they portend peril as much or more than safety, in her experience; the language of fealty, honor, and birth has become a mere cipher), and Richard’s need for others to regard not his personal misconduct but the majesty of the king’s “other body,” the one that symbolizes or incarnates the whole people. Richard’s cynical way of expressing this doctrine of “the king’s two bodies” is to say, “be not peevish-fond in great designs” (4.4.417). He wants Elizabeth to act with regard for the imperatives of statecraft and policy—namely, his own safety as a dynast.

In the fifth scene that concludes Act 4, Richard receives mixed news on the impending battle, and pins down Lord Stanley, or so he thinks, by holding his young son hostage. (The real Stanley, by the way, seems to have been quite a slippery character, as evidenced by his dubious loyalties to both Edward IV and Warwick when those two feuded.)

Act 5, Scene 1.

Buckingham (Henry Stafford, Second Duke of Buckingham) goes to the block at last, with a morality-play-style flourish, Queen Margaret’s curses on his lips.

Act 5, Scenes 2-5.

The final act is an exercise in counterpoint—Richard’s tortured conscience rears, forcing him to confront the ghosts of all his victims in a nightmare and at least momentarily shaking his confidence, while Richmond’s apparently spotless mind is directed towards the battle at hand. Both men harangue their troops in set-piece style: Richmond’s is the language of moral right, spoken by a man who’s certain that Providence is on his side; Richard’s is that of insouciance, spoken by a desperate rogue—protect what’s yours, he tells his men, and “Let us to it pell-mell; / If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell” (5.3.312-13). One thing we can’t say of Richard is that he is a coward—Shakespeare grants him a king’s death, betrayed by many but hacking his way valiantly through a host of false Richmonds, until at last the real Henry Tudor cuts this last of the Plantagenet kings down, and proclaims the time of troubles at an end: he will marry princess Elizabeth, the deceased Yorkist King Edward IV’s daughter, and thereby unite the houses of Lancaster and York.

Titus Andronicus

2010-09-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

Notes on Titus Andronicus

Act 1, Scene 1

The play seems to be set in the fourth century CE, and it depicts a Roman world turned upside down—one in which a Goth leader only recently brought to Rome in chains is elevated to nearly supreme power, and a valiant Roman is crushed by his rigid belief in an ancient code of honor that virtually no-one around him takes seriously. In the eventful first scene, Titus Andronicus, a soldier of forty years’ standing, returns to Rome with his trophy Goths Tamora and her sons, only to be confronted with the bickering of Saturninus and Bassianus over the imperial succession. While Saturninus proclaims his right as the first-born son of the late emperor, Bassianus advances his cause in the name of virtue: “suffer not dishonor to approach / The imperial seat” (13-14), he pleads to the Tribunes, Senators, and his own followers. Titus has just returned from ten years of fighting in Rome’s cause, and all ears await his sentence as to who should take the throne. The general’s speech to the assembled Romans is magnificent in its honest reckoning of the losses he has willingly borne for his country, and moving in its attention to the children he has lost: “Titus, unkind and careless of thine own, / Why suffer’st thou thy sons, unburied yet, / To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?” (86-88) He is a Roman of the old school and a believer in strict pietas to family and state.

At his remaining sons’ request, therefore, he will sacrifice conquered Tamora’s eldest son. Titus’ sons explain clearly why they want to commit this act. They say to their father, “Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths, / That we may hew his limbs and on a pile / Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh . . . / That so the shadows be not unappeas’d, / Nor we disturb’d with prodigies on earth” (96-101). Titus agrees to this demand without hesitation, but Tamora is quick to see the affair as hypocrisy: “must my sons be slaughtered in the streets / For valiant doings in their country’s cause?” (112-13) Her sons have only done what Titus’ would do in defense of their homeland. Tamora’s plea, “Thrice-noble Titus, spare my first-born son!” (119) is revealing in that its numerical quality suggests a world in which everything can be quantified or accounted for: surely, this strange honor code in which Titus believes is expansive enough to allow for generosity towards the eldest son of a valiant, defeated queen! Titus isn’t simply noble; he is thrice noble, and ought to be magnanimous in victory. But Titus disagrees: the honor code is strict, and a demand by blood for blood cannot be refused without shame. It would, in fact, constitute an outrage against the memory of Titus’ dead sons. So Tamora’s individual heartache, her natural appeal as a mother, must be subordinated to the Roman ritual in such cases: piety must be upheld, and the general tells her to “patient” herself while this act of Roman religiosity is accomplished. Tamora’s denunciation seems appropriate: “O cruel, irreligious piety!” (130) The aftermath of the deed is announced with the words, “Alarbus’ limbs are lopp’d, / And entrails fee the sacrificing fire, / Whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky” (143-45). The alliteration of the first line is deliciously absurd, and lets us in on the comic undertone of this otherwise tragic play: Titus Andronicus has an over-the-top quality, a tendency to revel in its scenes of violence and criminality, that mark it as a fine example of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. “Shakespeare was young when he wrote Titus,” as an old professor of mine used to suggest as a way of accounting for the play’s exuberance and outright silliness (there are approximately 217 references to body parts in Titus Andronicus—surely no accident on Shakespeare’s part), but we might as well admit that it’s a masterpiece of its kind. The Elizabethans loved this kind of limb-hacking, blood-spattered spectacle, as the popularity of other plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy attests.

Well, with Alarbus’ limbs duly lopp’d, Titus must return to the public responsibility that awaits him. Offered the throne in his own right, he magnanimously turns it down with the utterance, “Give me a staff of honor for mine age, / But not a scepter to control the world” (198-99). As kingmaker he chooses the eldest son of the departed Caesar as the new emperor, and Saturninus promises to wed Lavinia out of gratitude for this service (240). But Bassianus, with the aid of Titus’ sons, escapes with his beloved Lavinia. Titus kills his son Mutius when the latter bars his way in pursuit of the absconders (291), but Saturninus flies into a rage all the same, and chooses Tamora to be his empress in place of Lavinia. The perverse nature of this choice is implied in Tamora’s promise to the young man: “If Saturnine advance the Queen of Goths, / She will a handmaid be to his desires, / A loving nurse, a mother to his youth” (330-32). Titus has given control of great Rome to a man who seeks a mother in the “barbarian” woman who wants nothing more than to destroy it as a means of revenging her losses in battle and the slaughter of her child. As empress, Tamora (at 428 and following) deviously smoothes things over for Titus, who has been left to lament the betrayal by his sons of the reputation he held dear. As she explains to the inexperienced young emperor, she does this the better to crush Titus and his entire line when Saturninus is secure on the throne: “let me alone, / I’ll find a day to massacre them all, / And rase their faction and their family, / The cruel father and his traitorous sons” (449-52). And so the act ends with Saturninus’ offer of a double wedding, and Titus’ promise of fine hunting.

Act 2, Scenes 1-2

Aaron is exultant at Tamora’s advancement because it means great rewards for him, not only in terms of wealth but also personal pride: he will “be bright, and shine in pearl and gold” (19), but more than that, he will “wanton with this queen” who promises to be the ruin of the hated Romans and their emperor. Chiron and Demetrius scheme with Aaron’s aid to ravish Lavinia: says Aaron the strategist, “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull” (128), and therefore they can absorb in silence the savage crime these young men desire to commit against Lavinia. They will all conspire with Tamora to refine the plot. Scene 2 tells us of the hunting scene’s beginning.

Act 2, Scene 3

Tamora and Aaron converse in the woods, and then Bassianus and Lavinia discover Tamora and insult her. Aaron brings back Chiron and Demetrius, who kill Bassianus and rape and mutilate Lavinia, with Tamora’s explicit and sadistic approval; she mocks Lavinia’s appeals to feminine compassion, reminding all present of Titus’ utter lack of compassion for her own heartrending pleas in support of her son. She goes off to enjoy herself with Aaron while the deed is done. Saturnine is easily duped by Aaron’s forged letter and planted bag of gold into thinking that Titus’ sons Martius and Quintus are Bassianus’ murderers. They are dragged from the pit into which they have fallen and brought to prison. Tamora pretends to Titus that she will yet again assist him.

Act 2, Scene 4

Titus’ brother Marcus finds Lavinia and wonders what has happened. Waxing poetical, he likens the scene to the story of Tereus and Philomel: “But sure some Tereus hath deflow’red thee, / And lest thou shouldst detect [him], cut thy tongue” (26-27). Worse yet, he says, the ravishers have improved upon the dastardly practice of the original: “A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met, / And he hath cut those pretty fingers off / That could have better sew’d than Philomel” (41-43). Off they’ll go to afflict poor Titus with the sight of his ruined daughter, as if he hadn’t suffered enough already: as usual, the reference to suffering is harshly physical: “Come let us go, and make thy father blind, / For such a sight will blind a father’s eye” (52-53).

Act 3, Scene 1

Everyone ignores Titus’ self-sacrifice of four decades, and the tribunes he implores are nowhere to be found, so he tells his sorrow to the stones instead. His entire world view has crashed, and Rome seems “a wilderness of tigers” (54) intent on devouring only Titus and his kin. Lucius has been banished for trying to assist his brothers. At this point, we pity Titus already, but now he is shown Lavinia to top off his grief. Of course, pity has its limits when a man insists on serving up puns such as, “Speak, Lavinia, what accursed hand / Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight?” (66-67) Titus’s sacrifice of Tamora’s sons in the name of piety now appears worthless since piety is dead in Rome. To be “wonder’d at in time to come” (135) now seems appropriate to Titus, and his thoughts turn to what they can do to bring this about.

Aaron enters at line 150 and offers to lend the Andronici a hand—or rather take one, and Titus (who had already thought it appropriate to “chop off” the hands that had vainly defended Rome) falls for the ruse: in spite of all that’s happened, he still thinks that when a man has given his word, honor will bind him to it. Aaron’s pitch is, “if thou love thy sons, / Let Marcus, Lucius, or thyself, old Titus, / Or any one of you, chop off your hand / And send it to the King” (151-54). As for Aaron, he is as always the ultimate stage villain: “Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace, / Aaron will have his soul black like his face” (204-05). Aaron’s cynical, selfish perspective is that codes exist only to get others to do what you want them to do. But the Moor also pledges allegiance to pure wickedness, and as we can see from his exultant comments when he is in great danger later on, he is almost religious in his devotion to evil. Titus’ rigidity in adhering to old Roman honor and morality has opened a window for Aaron’s excesses, and the man indulges his sadistic brand of individualism when Roman morality breaks down.

A messenger soon undeceives Titus, and the absurd spectacle of “thy two sons’ heads, / Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here” (254-56), brings no more tears from the old man but instead determination to plan the destruction of Tamora and the Emperor. Lucius will go to the Goths to raise an army. Titus, Marcus and Lavinia continue the grotesque “body parts” motif by carting their dismembered kinsmen’s particulars off the stage: “Come, brother, take a head, / And in this hand the other I will bear; / And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employ’d; / Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth” (279-82).

Act 3, Scene 2

Just when we thought the hand theme couldn’t be more over-the-top, along comes the second scene, with Titus and family seated at a banquet. When Marcus clumsily blurts out, “Fie, brother, fie, teach her not thus to lay / Such violent hands upon her tender life” (21-22), Titus responds with the immortal lines, “O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none” (29-30). Titus continues to think on revenge, connecting even Marcus’ killing of a fly to this imperative: “I think we are not brought so low, / But that between us we can kill a fly / That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor” (76-79). Marcus thinks Titus is out of his mind, but that doesn’t seem to be the case; I suppose it’s just that by now his overflowing grief has transformed itself into a macabre sense of humor. Titus and Lavinia soon go off to read “Sad stories chanced in the times of old” (83). He doesn’t know yet just how informative those stories will turn out to be, but it’s easy for us to guess that Ovid is about to provide some enlightenment about Lavinia’s predicament.

Act 4, Scene 1

An excited Lavinia explains via Ovid’s tale about Procne, Philomel, and the wicked Thracian King Tereus, and she writes Stuprum (as in the Latin phrase for rape, per vim stuprum, “violation by main force”) – Chiron – Demetrius. Titus says he will be another Lucius Junius Brutus, this time expelling not Tarquins but Goths, and he writes a note to be carried along with presents by the boy Lucius to Tamora’s sons at the palace. Shakespeare has cleverly combined Ovid’s story from The Metamorphoses with the violent foundational myth of the Roman Republic: the rape and suicide of Lucretia. Below is the momentous tale from Titus Livius’ The History of Rome, in which Lucretia, to ensure that “no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example,” lets death attest to her adherence to the female married chastity necessary to preserve dynastic Roman bloodlines. The matron’s death allows her determined husband Collatinus, Lucius Junius Brutus, and others to use her outraged corpse as a prop for the expulsion of the Tarquin (Etruscan) King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, father of Lucretia’s rapist, Sextus Tarquinius. Lucretia, then, more insightful about the severe implications of the rigid Roman honor code than her own husband and his male compatriots, provides the blood that spurs Roman valor into throwing off 244 years of Tarquin rule.

From Livy’s History of Rome, Book 1: The Earliest Legends

1.57: [....] The royal princes sometimes spent their leisure hours in feasting and entertainments, and at a wine party given by Sextus Tarquinius at which Collatinus, the son of Egerius, was present, the conversation happened to turn upon their wives, and each began to speak of his own in terms of extraordinarily high praise. As the dispute became warm, Collatinus said that there was no need of words, it could in a few hours be ascertained how far his Lucretia was superior to all the rest. “Why do we not,” he exclaimed, “if we have any youthful vigour about us, mount our horses and pay our wives a visit and find out their characters on the spot? What we see of the behaviour of each on the unexpected arrival of her husband, let that be the surest test.” They were heated with wine, and all shouted: “Good! Come on!” Setting spur to their horses they galloped off to Rome, where they arrived as darkness was beginning to close in. Thence they proceeded to Collatia, where they found Lucretia very differently employed from the king’s daughters-in-law, whom they had seen passing their time in feasting and luxury with their acquaintances. She was sitting at her wool work in the hall, late at night, with her maids busy round her. The palm in this competition of wifely virtue was awarded to Lucretia. She welcomed the arrival of her husband and the Tarquins, whilst her victorious spouse courteously invited the royal princes to remain as his guests. Sextus Tarquin, inflamed by the beauty and exemplary purity of Lucretia, formed the vile project of effecting her dishonour. After their youthful frolic they returned for the time to camp.

1.58: A few days afterwards Sextus Tarquin went, unknown to Collatinus, with one companion to Collatia. He was hospitably received by the household, who suspected nothing, and after supper was conducted to the bedroom set apart for guests. When all around seemed safe and everybody fast asleep, he went in the frenzy of his passion with a naked sword to the sleeping Lucretia, and placing his left hand on her breast, said, “Silence, Lucretia! I am Sextus Tarquin, and I have a sword in my hand; if you utter a word, you shall die.” When the woman, terrified out of her sleep, saw that no help was near, and instant death threatening her, Tarquin began to confess his passion, pleaded, used threats as well as entreaties, and employed every argument likely to influence a female heart. When he saw that she was inflexible and not moved even by the fear of death, he threatened to disgrace her, declaring that he would lay the naked corpse of the slave by her dead body, so that it might be said that she had been slain in foul adultery. By this awful threat, his lust triumphed over her inflexible chastity, and Tarquin went off exulting in having successfully attacked her honour. Lucretia, overwhelmed with grief at such a frightful outrage, sent a messenger to her father at Rome and to her husband at Ardea, asking them to come to her, each accompanied by one faithful friend; it was necessary to act, and to act promptly; a horrible thing had happened. Spurius Lucretius came with Publius Valerius, the son of Volesus; Collatinus with Lucius Junius Brutus, with whom he happened to be returning to Rome when he was met by his wife’s messenger. They found Lucretia sitting in her room prostrate with grief. As they entered, she burst into tears, and to her husband’s inquiry whether all was well, replied, “No! what can be well with a woman when her honour is lost? The marks of a stranger, Collatinus, are in your bed. But it is only the body that has been violated, the soul is pure; death shall bear witness to that. But pledge me your solemn word that the adulterer shall not go unpunished. It is Sextus Tarquin, who, coming as an enemy instead of a guest, forced from me last night by brutal violence a pleasure fatal to me, and, if you are men, fatal to him.” They all successively pledged their word, and tried to console the distracted woman by turning the guilt from the victim of the outrage to the perpetrator, and urging that it is the mind that sins, not the body, and where there has been no consent there is no guilt. “It is for you,” she said, “to see that he gets his deserts; although I acquit myself of the sin, I do not free myself from the penalty; no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example.” She had a knife concealed in her dress which she plunged into her heart, and fell dying on the floor. Her father and husband raised the death-cry.

1.59: Whilst they were absorbed in grief, Brutus drew the knife from Lucretia’s wound, and holding it, dripping with blood, in front of him, said, “By this blood-most pure before the outrage wrought by the king’s son-I swear, and you, O gods, I call to witness that I will drive hence Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, together with his cursed wife and his whole brood, with fire and sword and every means in my power, and I will not suffer them or any one else to reign in Rome.” Then he handed the knife to Collatinus and then to Lucretius and Valerius, who were all astounded at the marvel of the thing, wondering whence Brutus had acquired this new character. They swore as they were directed; all their grief changed to wrath, and they followed the lead of Brutus, who summoned them to abolish the monarchy forthwith. They carried the body of Lucretia from her home down to the Forum, where, owing to the unheard-of atrocity of the crime, they at once collected a crowd. Each had his own complaint to make of the wickedness and violence of the royal house. Whilst all were moved by the father’s deep distress, Brutus bade them stop their tears and idle laments, and urged them to act as men and Romans and take up arms against their insolent foes....

1.60: When the news of these proceedings reached the camp, the king, alarmed at the turn affairs were taking, hurried to Rome to quell the outbreak. Brutus, who was on the same road, had become aware of his approach, and to avoid meeting him took another route, so that he reached Ardea and Tarquin Rome almost at the same time, though by different ways. Tarquin found the gates shut, and a decree of banishment passed against him; the Liberator of the City received a joyous welcome in the camp, and the king’s sons were expelled from it. Two of them followed their father into exile amongst the Etruscans in Caere. Sextus Tarquin proceeded to Gabii, which he looked upon as his kingdom, but was killed in revenge for the old feuds he had kindled by his rapine and murders. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus reigned twenty-five years. The whole duration of the regal government from the foundation of the City to its liberation was two hundred and forty-four years. Two consuls were then elected in the assembly of centuries by the prefect of the City, in accordance with the regulations of Servius Tullius. They were Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. (End of Book 1)

From The History of Rome, Vol. I, Titus Livius. Editor Ernest Rhys. Translator Rev. Canon Roberts. Everyman’s Library. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1912.

Act 4, Scene 2

Titus’ note to Chiron and Demetrius reads “Integer vitae, scelerisque purus, / Non eget Mauri jaculis, nec arcu” (20-21). But the boys aren’t good enough readers of Horace’s Odes to realize that Titus knows they conspired with the Moor. Aaron is clearly out for himself—he doesn’t even tell Tamora about this new information. The Empress delivers a child by Aaron, who protects his newborn son fiercely when Chiron and Demetrius think to kill the infant, bearing him away to the Goths with the intention of raising the child as a warrior. Aaron kills the Nurse, horrifying even the wicked sons of Tamora. A countryman’s fair-skinned baby will be substituted and presented as Saturninus’ legitimate heir. What is the child to Aaron? He makes the point succinctly: “My mistress is my mistress, this myself, / The vigor and the picture of my youth: / This before all the world do I prefer” (107-09). Rome and its politics can go hang; Aaron’s main concern is to take the portion of immortality that a child of one’s own promises.

Act 4, Scene 3

Titus’ arrows bear messages soliciting the gods for justice nowhere to be found on earth. The whole scene seems to show him both unhinged and yet canny: he tells Publius and Sempronius, “’Tis you must dig with mattock and with spade, / And pierce the inmost centre of the earth; / Then when you come to Pluto’s region, / I pray you deliver him this petition” (11-14). His stratagem, though, is to shoot arrows towards Saturninus’ palace, and thereby to unsettle the young Emperor. Titus also pays a rustic or “clown” to present Saturninus with a short speech and some pigeons. But then, perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss the notion that there’s something insane about Titus’ behavior all through the play: if insanity is “doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results,” Titus is at times close to a madman: he keeps supposing that if somebody makes a promise, it must be kept; and if somebody is legally entitled to an office, he’ll do his duty rather than taking advantage of the situation. Such persistence in doing the honorable thing would make sense in a normal setting, but in decadent Rome it can only destroy him.

Act 4, Scene 4

Saturninus is enraged before the Senate over Titus’ “blazoning our unjustice every where” (18) and then has the clown hanged after reading the letter Titus wrote. Tamora thinks she has at last driven Titus off the deep end, and the Emperor is frightened upon hearing that Lucius is headed for Rome with an army of Goths, but he misunderstands Titus’ motive, which is revenge of a sort not reducible to politics. Titus doesn’t want to rule Rome—what good would that do his battered spirit and maimed body now? Tamora promises to sooth Titus’ anger, and thereby get him to separate Lucius from his invading force.

Act 5, Scene 1

The Goths swear loyalty to Lucius. Aaron, captured with his child, is brought in—he did not know about this new development. Lucius threatens the child, so Aaron promises to tattle everything about his plots with Tamora and her sons—but Lucius must swear by the Roman gods first. All this plotting is news to Lucius because he left to raise an army of Goths before Lavinia revealed exactly what had happened to her and who did it. When asked if he’s sorry, Aaron outdoes himself with a flourish of supervillain rhetoric from 124-44. It would be hard to top the following claim for sheer malice: “Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves, / And set them upright at their dear friends’ door, / Even when their sorrows always was forgot, / And on their skins, as on the bark of trees, / Have with my knife carved in Roman letters, / ‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead’” (135-40). He seems dedicated not so much to the kind of violence that furthers his self-interest or ambition but rather to a code of “evil for evil’s sake,” perhaps in part out of hatred for the Romans he so evidently despises: friendship is the target of Aaron’s alleged stratagem here, and readers of classical history and culture will know that loyalty in the cause of amicitia was among the primary Roman virtues. More than that, Aaron asserts a fierce liberty in the face of Roman culture, which seems to depend so much on “the ties that bind” people: ties of memory, friendship, and honor.

Act 5, Scene 2

Tamora and sons show up at Titus’ place dressed as Revenge, Murder, and Rapine. He doesn’t believe them, but they consider him mad in spite of the clues he lets slip. “Revenge” wants Titus to send for Lucius, and promises that when they are all at a banquet at Titus’ home, she will bring Tamora, Chiron, Demetrius, the Emperor and any other foes so that he may take revenge upon them. Titus insists that Rapine and Murder stay with him, and promptly kills them, fully informing them that they are literally on the banquet menu. Like the Thracian King Tereus in the legend, Tamora will “swallow her own increase” (192).

Act 5, Scene 3

Dinner is set and served. Titus asks if Virginius (a decemvir from 451-449 BCE) was right to kill his daughter for chastity’s sake. (Appius had used legal trickery in an attempt to force himself on her, claiming that she was actually his slave; Virginius, disguised as a slave, killed her just after Appius’ co-conspirator Marcus Claudius judged in favor of Appius.) He then kills Lavinia, explaining to all present that Chiron and Demetrius had ravished her. Asked where they are, he informs Tamora and Saturninus with an unforgettably gleeful rhyme: “Why, there they are, both baked in this pie; / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred” (60-62). Titus immediately stabs Tamora, and Saturninus kills him, whereupon Saturninus is killed by Lucius. Aemilius asks for a full account of all the misdeeds, and receives it from Lucius, who is chosen emperor. Aaron’s child is carried in. Aaron, who has also just been brought in, is sentenced to starve, but he maintains his standing as the play’s most remorseless evildoer: “If one good deed in all my life I did, / I do repent it from my very soul” (189-90). The savage irony of this punishment is that, as mentioned earlier, Aaron had set himself up as a free spirit, unbound and untouched by Roman customs or values. The Emperor will be properly buried, but Tamora will become food for the birds.

All in all, the play is a delightfully outrageous, bloody instance of Elizabethan revenge tragedy in the tradition of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, in which the protagonist Hieronymo seeks violent justice for the vengeful murder of his son. Melodramatic as it may seem, Kyd’s early revenge tragedy is serious and philosophical. It considers life’s great questions, above all what constitutes justice in a wicked world, and is perhaps worthy of comparison with similar efforts by Aeschylus or Sophocles. Shakespeare’s play is sometimes dismissed as frivolous, but it has a serious dimension that repays study. Titus is no mere villain, and neither is Tamora. Only Aaron seems to be an outright dastard, with Tamora’s foolish sons coming in a distant second—they lack the cunning and brains Aaron exhibits. Shakespeare’s genius leads him to employ the Romans versus Goths theme in a manner that confounds any simple opposition between Roman and Goth. Titus turns out to be more of a Goth than we might have thought: excessive, bloody, and barbarous in his revenge. Tamora is more than a cardboard or stage barbarian, and shows herself a skilled manipulator of Roman politics. Aaron’s race adds yet another perspective on the Goth/Roman opposition: it’s true that the “villain plot” he drives sets itself up against the twin revenge plots of Titus and Tamora and in part displays the man’s dedication to wickedness, but Aaron shows considerable loyalty to his child as the image of himself, and exults in his blackness. Moreover, while Shakespeare may not be subjecting the revenge code to the kind of scrutiny it receives in Hamlet (where it’s understood that revenge is against God’s law), he seems quite interested in the complexities of Roman honor, and the allusions he makes to the Lucretia story from Livy’s History of Rome and the Philomela tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses allow him to explore the significance of those key Roman myths. What is the play suggesting about moral codes? Perhaps that people must live by them and within them, but also that they must not be imprisoned by them altogether. Rigidity, failure to reflect on one’s values, allows cynicism and outrage to flourish: extremes beget counter-extremes. “Titus is an honorable man,” to be sure, but the play as a whole keeps iterating that claim until it generates a Mark Antony effect: by the fourth and fifth acts, what’s needed isn’t more old-fashioned honor but a good plan for revenge against the barbarous Goths and Moors who have taken advantage of Titus’ stiff morality.

Finally, Julie Taymor’s 2000 production Titus sets the play in a strangely neo-fascist Italy, with its futuristic architecture and art. Taymor’s choice makes sense because the 1920’s-40’s dictator and Hitler ally Benito Mussolini appropriated the ancient Roman symbols of power and tried to turn Italy into an empire. (For one thing, he invaded Ethiopia.) And even in ancient times, the image of Rome in its imperial phase was due at least partly to the well-oiled propaganda machine of Augustus Caesar and the wisest of those who followed him as rulers. Augustus promoted the idea that Rome’s anachronistic republican values were still operative, even though by his day, such values were probably more of a fashion statement than anything else. By Titus’ era, his Rome no longer exists, in spite of his stubborn (if stylized) adherence to it. Titus’ stylization, its earnestness aside, is itself decadent and not much more than an anachronistic fashion. Of course, fashion statements can have political implications and reflect political facts on the ground, whether sincere or not. Shakespeare would probably praise Taymor’s concentration on the role of fabrication and stylistic borrowing and recycling in politics and history, with the definition of “reality” as consisting significantly (though not necessarily entirely) in people’s perceptions of themselves rather than being reducible to some external standard.

Romeo and Juliet

2010-09-14T11:36:00.000-07:00

Notes on Romeo and Juliet

Prologue and Act 1, Scene 1

It has sometimes been said that Romeo and Juliet is not much of a tragedy because unfortunate accidents seem to be responsible for most of the bad things that happen. There is no prideful Oedipus the King in this play who brings about his own downfall, but I don’t believe Shakespeare follows any unitary model of tragedy—he constitutes his tragic intensities and ideals circumstantially, from one set of materials to the next. A notion of tragedy as broad as “a fall from good fortune to bad” probably serves him as a point of departure. What, then, is the stuff of tragedy in this play? We are dealing with a primal tragedy of youthful expectations and middle-aged fears, of existential rawness and fear of irretrievable loss. Sigmund Freud wrote that “it is monstrous to see one’s children die.” That is what happens to both houses. As for Romeo and Juliet, they are open to the intensities and extremes of passion that come with first love. Romeo in particular idealizes love and fidelity to an extent that cannot help but be perilous. He hasn’t had the experience to do otherwise. There is a medieval quality to this play so full of turnabouts and sudden emotional passages from mirth to despair.

The Prologue announces that this will be a tragedy not only of two lovers but also of two extended families, the Montagues and the Capulets. Antipathy has become habitual with them, and they have therefore embroiled the entire city of Verona in civil strife. The quibbling servants of the first scene show how trivial the feud has become, and Sampson’s obscene innuendos about Montague maidens suggests that the family feud is easily made to serve selfish purposes, base appetites. There is no nobility in such factional strife. Tybalt and Benvolio are as absurd in prosecuting the quarrel as the low-born servants. The Prince breaks up the current fighting, but it is clear from what he says that he has dealt leniently with such disorders in the past. As in Measure for Measure, the ruler has allowed his subjects’s petty desires to wreak havoc in his realm.

We first hear of Romeo when Lady Montague asks Benvolio where the young man has been hiding himself. He shuns company, and Benvolio soon learns from him that love is the cause. Romeo speaks with considerable wit, but his words are also full of Petrarchan extremes: “O heavy lightness, serious vanity,” and so forth. Benvolio, a somewhat less inexperienced young man, advises Romeo to look around him and compare as many beautiful women as possible with the one who seems to be giving him the trouble.

Act 1, Scene 2

Capulet is very pleased with the prospect of the Prince’s kinsman Paris marrying his daughter Juliet, and he invites the young man to a public feast that also presents Romeo with the opportunity Benvolio is pushing on him. Romeo is dubious, and maintains his distant Rosaline’s matchless quality.

Act 1, Scene 3

The Nurse apparently has been with Juliet from infancy onwards, and she sees the girl’s life as a whole. The bawdy joke made by her husband years ago, here repeated, implies that the Nurse has been preparing Juliet for this time from her childhood. Her words are poignant in that they remind us just how short is the time between carefree childhood and the consequential time of adulthood. Juliet is intrigued about Paris, but no more than that since he is no more than a name to her.

Act 1, Scene 4

Mercutio recounts the legend of Queen Mab to Romeo and others present. The substance of his speech is that this Queen inspires all sorts to follow their own particular desires—by implication, we don’t have a great deal of control when it comes to our emotions and desires. All of this is meant to deflate Romeo’s dream, but the deeper significance of Mercutio’s speech is to put everyone in the same condition as Romeo—a follower of idle dreams. Romeo is not in so light a mood after all—he says, “my mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night’s revels” (106-09).

Act 1, Scene 5

Benvolio’s plan doesn’t go quite as he had intended since Romeo, upon seeing Juliet, becomes just as smitten with her as he was with his former love. Old Montague and Capulet are willing enough to keep the peace, but the younger generation is always spoiling for trouble. Romeo’s forebodings are fulfilled when Tybalt conceives a hatred for him at the very moment when he falls in love with Juliet. The first meeting between Romeo and Juliet is one of the finest scenes Shakespeare ever wrote. Together they speak a sonnet; Romeo takes the lead while Juliet is both passionate and poised. Both are soon dispossessed of any notion that there is a clear path forwards for them.

Act 2, Scene 1

Ever the realist, Mercutio jokes with Benvolio about the supposed otherworldliness of Romeo’s new affection. Mercutio stands for the view that any “idealizing of eroticism” is downright silly and perhaps disingenuous, since raw sexuality is always at the bottom of any romantic pose a lover may strike up: of Juliet he can only say, “O that she were / An open[-arse], thou a pop’rin pear! / Romeo, good night, I’ll to my truckle-bed, / This field-bed is too cold for me to sleep” (37-40). He says this to Benvolio, however, and not to Romeo. Mercutio is frenetic and open-hearted in his way, but he’s not inclined to lie around in a chilly “field-bed” to keep watch over the passions of Romeo.

Act 2, Scene 2

Romeo’s romantic idealism is absolute up to this point, as is easy to see by remarks such as, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” (1-2). Juliet’s idealism, though strong, shows more regard for the narrow dynastic concerns that hem in the two lovers. Her famous lines, “That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (43-44) capture the dilemma of lovers right up to Shakespeare’s time: love is a universal passion and as such it ought to generate community, but this same passion is hindered by a host of social demands and expectations that are anything but charitable, so that it often creates rifts between individuals and the larger group, which we call “society.”

Juliet reveals her passion fully since at first she doesn’t know Romeo is listening, which spares both of them the awkward task of dissembling their love. Juliet’s language is tinged with realistic (if unfounded) concerns—in particular, she fears that Romeo’s propensity to swear by the moon may indicate rashness rather than constancy. But she is steadfast in her eagerness to marry him, whatever the obstacles. The language of falconry marks Juliet’s desire for Romeo: “O, for a falc’ner’s voice,” she says, “To lure this tassel-gentle back again!” (158-59). There is recognition in such language that desire is essentially a wild thing, not something safe and tame. We can find the same insight, though in a darker vein, in the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt and other Tudor poets preceding Shakespeare.

Act 2, Scene 3

Friar Lawrence’s pronouncement near the beginning of this scene is instructive: “Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, / And vice sometime by action dignified” (21-22). The Friar is collecting a basket with “baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers” (6) that will turn out to be useful—and harmful—in a way he doesn’t yet imagine. Shocked by Romeo’s sudden transference of his attentions from Rosaline to Juliet, he nonetheless agrees to perform the secret marriage rite Romeo wants, in hopes of ending Verona’s unrest. The Friar seems to think that the Montagues and Capulets will be charitable and reasonable once they realize two of their own have chosen to marry.

Act 2, Scene 4

Mercutio shows his awareness of how silly the feuding amongst the two houses (especially amongst the younger generation) is: he takes on the persona of a grandsire to denounce “fashion-mongers” like Tybalt (33). Mercutio is in on the hostilities, of course, but he isn’t entirely circumscribed or defined by them. Given the opportunity, he engages with Romeo in a battle of wits, and then takes bawdy aim at Juliet’s Nurse, who has come as the girl’s emissary. Nurse Angelica is not amused. Romeo promises he will arrive in good time to spend the night with Juliet after they are married.

Act 2, Scene 5

In his lectures on Shakespeare, Coleridge implies that while the Nurse is eccentric, she is at the same time a universal type of the caring, elderly nurse.* It’s easy to see that quality in her here—beset by the impatient Juliet, the Nurse holds her ground for a while, but finally gives the girl the information she wants. Angelica’s circumstances and pace are not the same as Juliet’s: “I am the drudge, and toil in your delight; / But you shall bear the burthen soon at night” (75-76). She is fond of Juliet almost to a fault, but always aware that the young girl is surrounded by a potentially hostile world of causes and effects, of limitations and consequences. Pleasure and idealism are not free.

*The quotation: The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakspeare to a direct borrowing from mere observation; and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class,—just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them,—so it is nearly as much so in old age. The generalization is done to the poet’s hand. Here you have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a long-trusted servant, whose sympathy with the mother’s affections gives her privileges and rank in the household; and observe the mode of connection by accidents of time and place, and the childlike fondness of repetition in a second childhood, and also that happy, humble, ducking under, yet constant resurgence against, the check of her superiors! (http://absoluteshakespeare.com/guides/essays/romeo_and_juliet_essay.htm )

Act 2, Scene 6

Friar Lawrence leads Romeo and Juliet off to perform the marriage ceremony; his advice to Romeo, “Therefore love moderately” (14) is strangely ineffectual, given the Friar’s willingness to facilitate such a hasty, secret wedding.

Act 3, Scene 1

Romeo’s attempt to get between Tybalt and Mercutio results in the latter’s death, and then Romeo is honor-bound to avenge his kinsman. Having slain Tybalt, he laments that he is now “fortune’s fool” (136). The Prince steps in and dispenses his characteristically tempered style of justice, banishing Romeo on pain of death. This decree is mild since, after all, Paris is the Prince’s own kinsman.

Act 3, Scene 2

Juliet is indulging herself in a little romantic idealism around the time of the deadly quarrel: “Give me my Romeo, and, when I 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” (21-24). But the Nurse soon brings her the bad news about Tybalt’s death (over which Juliet is genuinely aggrieved since he was her kinsman) and Romeo’s guilty flight. The Nurse also provides hope, for she knows Romeo is hiding with Friar Lawrence.

Act 3, Scene 3

Banished Romeo is unable to imagine a “world without Verona walls” (17), and when the Friar tries to show him the sunny side of the whole affair, Romeo says with some justice, “Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel” (64). Romeo’s willingness to kill himself if it will assuage Juliet’s grief over Tybalt shows the depth of this affection that the Friar, as a holy man, supposedly lacks. Friar Lawrence’s advice is that Romeo should make his way to Mantua.

Act 3, Scenes 4-5

Romeo and Juliet spend their first night together in the Capulet stronghold, and engage in a traditional “argument with the dawn” of Troubadour lineage. Juliet is filled with dread, and tells Romeo, “Methinks I see thee now, thou art so low, / As one dead in the bottom of a tomb” (55-56). When Lady Capulet professes her desire to poison Romeo in Mantua, Juliet pretends to share the same wish, but she can’t bring herself to pretend any joy in the prospect of marrying Count Paris, to whom her father has decided she should be wed “early next Thursday” (112). Old Capulet’s rebuke of Juliet is immediate and harsh—either she will marry Paris or he will disown her. Juliet is the Capulets’ only child, and in her stubbornness the father of the household sees his hopes of dynastic immortality frustrated. The Nurse angers Juliet by professing that it would be best to give in to her father’s wishes and marry Paris.

Act 4, Scene 1

Friar Lawrence sees that Juliet’s situation is desperate, and offers an equally desperate remedy—she will take a drug that induces death-like symptoms for forty-two hours, and then Romeo will come to the tomb of the Capulets and take her away with him to Mantua. This is a common motif in literature: cheating the Grim Reaper, or at least attempting to negotiate a better deal with him. Film students may recall Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in which a medieval man plays a game of chess with Death in hopes of gaining more earthly time. The Friar, for a holy man, has a flair for quick-thinking deception, and is able to put his earlier sententia about virtue and vice to good use.

Act 4, Scenes 2-4

Juliet shows remarkable courage and does not shrink from swallowing her potion, even when she conjures the ghost of Tybalt.

Act 4, Scene 5

This is one of the scenes that leaps from joy to despair in a heartbeat. The Capulet parents suffer (or rather think they suffer) an irretrievable loss of the sort all parents fear. As I mentioned at the beginning of this commentary, Freud’s remark that “it is monstrous to see one’s children die” is appropriate here. And there’s a strong medieval quality to the grotesque imagery here and elsewhere in the play: old Capulet says to Paris, “O son, the night before thy wedding-day / Hath Death lain with thy wife” (35-36). The scene ends with a comic exchange between some musicians who had been summoned earlier by the Capulets and the servant Peter. Together, they introduce a devil-may-care, self-interested attitude into the midst of unspeakable woe. These musicians have little to do with the goings-on of great houses—they are just “working-class stiffs,” as we would say, and they seek their own security and comfort, when the latter is to be had. The scene doesn’t reach the synthesized profundity and silliness of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, but it’s effective all the same.

Act 5, Scene 1

Romeo hears from Balthasar that Juliet’s body lies in the tomb of the Capulets, and, to borrow a phrase from Hamlet, he determines “with wings / As swift as meditation or the thoughts of love” to purchase a dram of deadly stuff from a poor apothecary (druggist), and die next to Juliet. The apothecary becomes a base-born “victim” of this noble tragedy, protesting, “My poverty, but not my will, consents” (75).

Act 5, Scene 2

Friar Lawrence learns to his discomfiture that Friar John was detained by townsmen concerned about the plague, so he wasn’t able to deliver his friend’s letter to Romeo.

Act 5, Scene 3

Romeo boldly confronts death and all its accoutrements: “Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, / Gorg’d with the dearest morsel of the earth, / Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open, / And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food” (45-48). The death-imagery in this play is quite ugly, and throughout it has underlain the graceful words and actions of the young hero and heroine like the grotesque underside of a fair medieval decorative panel or casket. Romeo also confronts the hapless Paris, and kills him, only to die after one last look at Juliet’s body. The “ensign” of Juliet’s beauty is still visible, but the already aggrieved Romeo isn’t able to process this fact in anything but an ultra-romantic way, so surrounded is she by the architecture and trappings of death.

When Juliet awakens, her only comfort is Friar Lawrence, and Romeo’s words in 3.3 about the Friar’s inability to enter into the deep passions of the two lovers ring true: at the critical moment, Lawrence is frightened away from the scene when he hears the watch coming, and leaves Juliet alone. The entirely conventional fate he had imagined for her—delivery to “a sisterhood of holy nuns” (157) is not for Juliet, who embraces Romeo’s dagger and dies, falling directly on his body.

Friar Lawrence (along with Balthasar) is called to give an account of what has happened, and is forgiven his less than wise or heroic interventions. As the Prologue promised, the “strife” of the Montagues and Capulets is “buried” by the death of their beloved son and daughter. This family that has dealt in hatred, says the Prince, is justly punished: “heaven finds means to kill your joys with love” (293), but neither does he exempt himself from blame since he has been guilty of “winking” (294) at the chaos the two families have long visited upon Verona. Love has indeed brought the warring houses together, but the price is the death of what they hold most dear.

Othello

2010-09-14T11:33:00.001-07:00

Notes on Othello (Updated 10/18/2011 for Norton Tragedies, E316 MW Fall 2011)

Act 1, Scene 1. (435-39: Iago’s resentment, Brabanzio’s rage at loss of daughter)

Iago may not be acting from world-historical outrage, but he sets forth two reasons for his hatred of Othello: first, his sense of injured merit because Othello has given the lieutenant’s job he coveted to Cassio (435, 1.1.19ff), and the possibility (stated in Act 1.3) that his wife has slept with Othello. Iago is a self-conscious Machiavel and a consummate actor (like Shakespeare’s Richard III or Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus). As he says to Roderigo, “I follow but myself” and “I am not what I am” (436-37, 1.1.42-65): he may be Othello’s trusted underling, but that isn’t how he sees himself “five years from now,” to borrow a phrase from the corporate interview playbook. Iago may be comfortable in his own skin, but he is not at peace with himself. There’s something impish about him, too, something of the downright evildoer—he seems to enjoy stirring up trouble for the hell of it, and he shows no regard for the destruction he brings to Desdemona, whom he knows to be innocent. He maneuvers with diabolical skill in the gap between what he seems to be and what he is, turning everything that happens to his own advantage. He and Roderigo regale Brabanzio with race-baiting taunts to find his secretly married daughter. (437, 1.1.88ff)

Act 1, Scene 2. (439-442, Othello willingly arrested, off to Venice)

Othello shows no fear of Roderigo or Brabanzio when they apprehend him: “Keep up your bright swords…” (441, 1.2.60ff). On the spot, Brabanzio accuses Othello of witchcraft: “thou has enchanted her” (441, 1.2.64), he tells the Moor; otherwise, he insists, the girl would never “Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou—to fear, not to delight!” (441, 1.2.71-72) He can’t even imagine the attraction of the foreign or the exotic, even though he’s been listening to Othello’s stories with admiration, too. To Brabanzio, Venice is the world. (He’s strangely provincial given that Venice is a cosmopolitan sea empire that had long since known how to cut a deal or two with Arabs and Turks.) Brabanzio immediately accepts Iago and Roderigo’s reductive, grotesquely abstract “devil” and bestial “ram” characterization of Othello. Othello hardly lacks charm, but the father welcomes Iago’s stereotypes.

Act 1, Scene 3. (442-50, Othello vindicated, Desdemona strong, Iago enlists Roderigo)

Othello carries the day when summoned to Venice because of his military bearing and chivalric eloquence. When the Italians accuse him of witchcraft, he promises to deliver a “round, unvarnished tale” (444, 1.3.90); but then he romances them with his beautiful, moving words. Othello cuts a dashing figure, and he is aware of his effect upon others. He is proud of his conquest, like a soldier who has won the prize fairly. The tale he delivers is anything but unvarnished. It is filled with romantic extravagance. Perhaps he has been sold into slavery, fought tremendous battles, and seen many remarkable sights. But did he really see “Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (445, 1.3.143-44)? No, these are tales he’s picked up and remembered the better to build up an image of himself as an adventurer. He exploits Desdemona’s interest in such stories, crafting from that propensity a contract-in-hand to “beguile her of her tears” and to “dilate” his life’s journey. What sanctifies Othello’s dilatory works of art? Well, the fact that he sincerely loves Desdemona—he means her only good, so it’s acceptable to incorporate some “make-believe” elements into an already exciting account of himself: “she loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them” (445, 1.3.166-67). Othello is rather like Sir Philip Sidney’s good Christian poet, whose “feigning” of “notable images” shouldn’t be condemned just because the images aren’t literally true. Othello isn’t a naïve other or a silent warrior but a poetical, confident man.

Perhaps his tragedy will be that he just can’t imagine anyone wielding such poetical power for anything but the good reasons that motivate him in his courtship of Desdemona, or in his speech to the Duke and Senators that frees them to return to considerations of State rather than dwelling on private grudges and love affairs. His way of “seeming” (i.e. embroidering his life story) is so pure that it’s folded into the essential goodness of his being. In a sense, all poets are liars—Plato tells us so, right?—but some feigning and pretending is nobly done and not engaged in as a means to do evil, as it is with Iago. Othello’s naivety, then, isn’t that he’s unable to speak anything but plain truth; it’s that he can’t conceive of a man who willfully spins lies for base purposes. A good man is free to gild the lily, but a wicked man ought to show himself for what he is. In this sense, it’s fair to say that Othello proves tragically unable to deal with the difference between seeming and being. Then, too, Othello may be poetical, but he’s not John Keats’ poet of “negative capability,” the kind who can throw himself into doubts and uncertainties as if they were his own proper element. Othello’s feigning seems more tactical and less supple, more task-oriented, than that of the Keatsian “chameleon poet” who wants to escape from his own skin.

Both the absolute otherness imposed on Othello by men such as Brabanzio (who can scarcely process the Moor at all) and the charismatic appeal of the man’s bearing and language are at work early in Othello. Perhaps both, taken together with the sad events later in the play, go a long way towards demonstrating how difficult mutual understanding between cultures can be. In spite of Othello’s wondrous gifts of bearing and speech, he is easily destroyed by Iago, a man with the sort of knowledge of Venetian society Othello lacks. Generalized virtues cannot permanently trump an intimate knowledge of local cultural practices, symbolism, and assumptions, at least not if someone is determined to use these specifics against an outsider. Othello is a classic tragedy in that a good man is destroyed by the virtues that have won him admiration—his inability to comprehend how devious and selfish others can be. It’s true that Othello has so far followed his personal desires, and we might suppose that he’s putting Venice at risk if a tumult ensues. But he deals so forthrightly with the Venetian authorities that the affair blows over, and he is free to return to his work for the general welfare. How, Othello might ask, could others be so petty as to damage the public good for purely private reasons, like those of Iago?

Our first glimpse of Desdemona shows us a strong-willed young woman who is not afraid to act boldly and speak her mind, even in the presence of her powerful father and Venetian statesmen. Her strength accords well with Othello’s soldierly virtue. (446-47, 1.3.180ff, 247ff) Later, Desdemona will be put in an impossible position—her considerable aplomb doesn’t translate into an ability to charm Othello out of his suspicions, so her goodness works against her. But with the devilish Othello out to destroy her, it’s hard to see how anything she says, no matter how skillful, would help. Terse protestations of virtue and fancy talk alike would fail to overcome the “ocular proof” by which Iago will falsely damn her.

Iago’s creed is worth noting. To Roderigo’s passive, faux-suicidal blubbering about the defects of his “virtue” (in this usage, it means “nature”), Iago blurts out “Virtue? A fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are / thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the / which our wills are gardeners…” (449, 1.3.316-18). In terms of Renaissance psychology, this means that while we are subject to the pull of our appetites (which belong to the “sensitive” part of human nature), we can control these appetites. We can let our choice-making power, our “will,” be informed by reason and thereby control the effects of appetite. (The elements of the rational part of human nature are “understanding” or reason and “will” or rational appetite, the inner power of motion that can incline towards God and reason or towards our lower appetites.) Iago is suggesting that while the body and the appetites may hold sway for a time in Desdemona, she is bound, in due time, to become sated with Othello, and then her rational element will lead her to despise this older man whose appearance and culture are so unlike hers. (449, 1.3.342ff; also 455, 2.1.228-29) Like will return to like. Well, Iago hardly puts Renaissance psychology to the noble uses of Pico della Mirandola, who implies that the grandest goal of humanity is to transcend itself for the greater glory of God, but he knows how to craft a cunning scheme from its premises: Roderigo need only “put money in his purse” and wait for Desdemona to turn again to Venice.

Here Iago’s second motive comes to light: he’s heard that Othello may have cuckolded him. And although he may be patient in devising his wicked schemes, he shares Othello’s disdain of long-continued suspicion: the mere supposition that Emilia may have cuckolded him demands payback; the matter must be resolved. (450, 1.3.367ff) He will wage a pre-emptive war against this man who has already frustrated his hopes of advancement and who may also have insulted his marriage. In some cold, calculating way, Iago himself is subject to the cat-like “green-eyed monster” jealousy, and his way of dealing with the discomfort it’s caused him is to pass it along. That there’s also something to the “baseless evil” charge often leveled against Iago, we may see from his brazen determination to “plume up” his will “in double knavery” (450, 1.3.376).

Act 2, Scenes 1-2. (450-57, Iago sets up Cassio, airs his own suspicions)

This scene turns on trifles: witty banter, smiles, and an innocently flirtatious kiss between Desdemona and Cassio: how easy it is to weave an unflattering tale, and take advantage of others’ insecurities. (454, 2.1.167ff) As Iago will say of the handkerchief in 3.3, “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ” (473, 3.3.326-28). In the second act generally, Cassio, who much values his martial reputation and is loyal, is easily typecast by Iago first as the genial soldier, then as the quarrelsome drunkard, and finally as the importunate suitor. Iago goes to work on Roderigo against Desdemona’s character (456, 2.1.243), and prevails upon Roderigo to assault Cassio and thereby anger Cyprus and Othello against the man. Iago again mentions his second reason for hating Othello, stating “nothing can or shall content my soul / Till I am evened with him, wife for wife” (457, 2.1.285-86). He even has the same suspicion of Cassio – “For I fear Cassio with my nightcap, too” (457, 2.1.294). An ambitious man, Iago envies and opposes anyone who stands above him. Perhaps that is the ultimate reason for his villainy.

Act 2, Scene 3. (457-65, Cassio dismissed, Iago moves forwards with his scheme)

Enter Othello the honor-absolutist to render judgment. Iago plays Othello like a fiddle, and the final lyrics are, “Cassio, I love thee, / But never more be officer of mine” (462, 2.3.231-32). Now Iago advances his diabolical scheme (463, 2.3.291ff) to advance Cassio’s suit by Desdemona’s pleading. Iago delights in his own equivocations, and triumphantly remarks, “So will I turn her virtue into pitch, / And out of her own goodness make the net / That shall enmesh them all” (464, 2.3.334-36).

Act 3, Scenes 1-2. (465-66, Desdemona takes Cassio’s part)

Emilia reports that Desdemona is making headway on Cassio’s suit: “The Moor replies / That he you hurt is of great fame in Cyprus… / But he protests he loves you… (466, 3.1.42-45).

Act 3, Scene 3. (466-77, Iago sows doubt, turns Othello against Desdemona)

While Iago and Othello look on from a distance, Desdemona promises to continue with Cassio’s suit to Othello (466-67, 3.3.20-22). She converses with Othello to great effect: “I will deny thee nothing” says Othello, and when she leaves, “Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul / But I do love thee, and when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again” (468, 3.3.77, 3.3.91-93). Chaos is Iago’s decreative aim, and he immediately begins to set doubts in Othello’s mind: “Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, / Know of your love?” (468, 3.3.96-97) Cassio’s earlier usefulness as go-between in Othello’s romancing of Desdemona now plays against him.

We should hear alarm bells in Othello’s admission of his great fondness for Desdemona: once Othello begins to suspect, he will be thrown off balance until the end. Iago makes the Moor draw “the truth” from him, and reinforces the Othello-principle that we must all be what we appear to be: “Men should be what they seem, / Or those that be not, would they might seem none!” (469, 3.3.132-33) Iago knows that Othello lacks (to borrow from Keats’ letters) “negative capability”—he can’t exist for an extended time in the midst of uncertainty. If there’s a problem, it must be dealt with presently, not left to fester. Othello is the kind of military man who insists on gathering hard evidence and rendering a firm decision, court-martial style, the way he judged Cassio. His lack of knowledge about Venetian mores and subtlety (an English stereotype for the Italians generally—subtle, devious, sly) makes him anxious, easy prey to the overblown trifles in which Iago trades, and very susceptible to the honest-sounding counsel his deceiver offers: “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy? / It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on” (470, 3.3.169-71). Othello insists his trust in Desdemona and in himself is great: “she had eyes and chose me. No, Iago / I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, proof; / And on the proof… / Away at once with love or jealousy” (470, 3.3.193-96).

But Othello is older than Desdemona, and he is black: facts Iago exploits brutally and masterfully (471, 3.3.233-43). Othello now seems uncertain that his charm and rhetorical skill can hold his wife’s loyalty. Iago has already told him, “In Venice they do let (God) see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands” (471, 3.3.206-09). Generalized virtues can’t trump knowledge of local culture, symbolism, and assumptions. Othello is classical tragedy: a good man is destroyed by his virtues. The play demonstrates how difficult mutual understanding between cultures can be. Othello comes round to a characteristically absolute statement: “If I do prove her haggard, / Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings / I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind / To prey at fortune” (472, 3.3.264-67). Othello can’t reconcile his honor-ideal with the messy, ethically dubious world of Venice.

Shakespeare explores this rigid idealism often in his plays, and I believe he considers it a trap. For example, Brutus in Julius Caesar, or the title character in Coriolanus (as well as Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, since his so-called eastern extravagance is the obverse of strict Roman honor, and disables him from combating Octavius’ machinations), or comic idealizers such as Orlando in As You Like It. There are many shades of gray, nuances, roles a man or woman must play, imperfections and exigencies to deal with. Idealism is noble, but it is a disabling quality in a saucy, ever-changing world.

The handkerchief device and marriage vignette (in which Othello and Iago kneel and vow revenge) mark the height of Iago’s villainy. Disturbed while talking with Desdemona, Othello drops his wife’s handkerchief (473, 3.3.290ff); from there Emilia finds it and gives it to Iago, who then resolves, “I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin, / And let him find it. Trifles light as air…” (473, 3.3.325-28). At next meeting, Othello is mad with jealous rage: “Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore” (474, 3.3.364-65). He demands absolute proof, as the uncertainty has become intolerable: “I think my wife be honest, and think she is not” (475, 3.3.389ff). So the fact that Cassio has been seen to “wipe his beard” (476, 3.3.444) with Desdemona’s handkerchief drives Othello to distraction. Iago kneels and swears undying fealty to Othello (476-77), and his damnation consists in swearing by Christian symbols to do the devil’s work. His words are pious, but his intentions transform them into the markers of a black mass. Perhaps there’s irony in his swearing by “yon marble heaven” (476, 3.3.463) since the audience may see him swear by a painted image of the sky. Iago has become Othello’s lieutenant, and is engaged to murder Cassio while Othello plans Desdemona’s demise.

Act 3, Scene 4. (477-81, The Handkerchief! Emilia and Desdemona ponder cause)

Othello expects the same romantic extravagance from Desdemona as he lavishes upon her: the handkerchief, he tells her, is an emblem of the romantic magic, the charm, that underlies his erotic fidelity. Its loss is catastrophic now that it has come to symbolize her chaste loyalty. (478, 3.4.53ff) Othello is a romantic idealist as well as a military idealist. A version of the handkerchief’s history: it was given him by his mother, who got it from a female Egyptian sorcerer, and its possession guarantees loyalty in love. Its fatal consequentiality is further underscored by the claim that it was “dyed in mummy, which the skilful / Conserved of maidens’ hearts” (478, 3.4.73-74; later, he will claim his father gave it to his mother: see 5.2.224.) Desdemona is forced to dissemble (479), while Othello’s vocabulary moves towards perfect accord with his obsession: “the handkerchief!” repeated several times. (479, 3.4.90ff) Desdemona and Emilia ponder this strange behavior on Othello’s part (480, 3.4.137ff). Michael Cassio closes the scene by asking his girlfriend Bianca to make a copy of the handkerchief because he likes it and once the pattern before he returns it to the owner.

Act 4, Scene 1. (481-88, Othello rages over Cassio and Iago’s talk, strikes Desdemona)

Othello, already driven into an epileptic fit at the loss of the handkerchief (482b, 4.1.41), will now be subjected to one further supposed proof: Iago engages Cassio in a conversation that Othello takes for lewd and contemptuous talk about Desdemona when in fact Cassio is only making jests about his relationship with Bianca (483, 4.1.79ff, 484-85). Bianca brings in the handkerchief (485, 4.1.143ff), making Othello think Cassio has given it to her out of contempt for Desdemona. Othello sees this spectacle and becomes deranged with contradictory impulses: “O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!” and “I will chop her into messes. Cuckold me!” (486, 4.1.186, 190) Iago comes up with the idea of strangling her in her “contaminated” bed. (486, 4.1.197-98) When he strikes Desdemona (487, 4.1.235ff), Lodovico, who has come with a letter announcing that Cassio has been installed in Othello’s place as commander in Cyprus, is there to see it. He assumes Othello is an abusive husband.

Act 4, Scene 2. (488-93, Desdemona tries to defend herself, Othello unmovable)

Although Desdemona has shown some Venetian subtlety, piety and honesty are the hallmarks of her character. But Othello has been warped into taking signs of virtue for their opposite: evidence of whoredom and cunning. From now on, everything she says “can and will be used against her”; she is under arrest without even knowing it. Her self-defense (489-90), while moving, is rather feeble: “By heaven, you do me wrong” and “No, as I am a Christian” (490, 4.2.83, 85). Simply being accused of certain offenses (such as adultery) so strips a person of others’ good opinion that it’s tantamount to conviction: guilty until proven innocent. (One thinks of Kafka’s The Trial or the trials of 1984—to come under suspicion is already to have no identity except that constituted by one’s presumed malefactions.) It’s common in Renaissance plays for virtuous characters to prove themselves helpless when abused by the wicked and the cunning. If your name is something like “Bonario,” as is the case for a good character in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, look out!

Emilia, Iago and Desdemona hash out the sorry state of affairs – Emilia’s enraged: “The Moor’s abused by some most villainous knave…” (491, 4.2.143ff), Iago unctuously in false accord, and Desdemona prayerful, saying, “If e’er my will did trespass ‘gainst his love … / Comfort forswear me” (491, 4.2.156ff).

Then Iago goes to work the already angry Roderigo, egging him on to murder Cassio and thereby keep Othello in Cyprus, along with Desdemona. (492-493)

Act 4, Scene 3. (493-95, Emilia’s strength, Desdemona’s loyalty)

While Desdemona can only sing a sad song of frustrated love (“Willow, willow” 494, 4.3.38ff), Emilia proves more capable. A fit opponent for her husband, Emilia tries to temper Desdemona’s moral absolutism, which rivals that of Othello: advocating female adultery, Emilia argues, “I do think it is their husbands’ faults / If wives do fall” (495, 4.3.84-85). Desdemona’s reply is a declaration of loyalty to Othello (495, 4.3.76-77), an attitude she will maintain even as Othello strangles her. Emilia’s bawdy pronouncements on gender relations are the stuff of Shakespearian comedy (one thinks of Portia and Nerissa’s “ring scheme” in The Merchant of Venice), but here they only deepen the sense of impending tragedy.

Innocence can seldom defend itself as eloquently or convincingly as evil can, even when the innocent person is as intelligent as Desdemona. One remembers Yeats’ line in “The Second Coming” that “the best lack all conviction” while “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” In Shakespeare, it isn’t usually true that the best people lack conviction—what they sometimes lack (consider Cordelia in King Lear as an example to set beside Desdemona) is the right phrase, the moxy to take advantage of opportunities to advance their good cause. And even if our good folks have considerable linguistic capacity and courage, the disposition we call “goodness” seldom, if ever, gains by rhetorical sleight—the problem seems intractable. Lear’s daughter Cordelia may be a bit stiff and clumsy as a speaker, but we all feel the rightness of her lament, “What shall poor Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.” Or consider Machiavelli’s characterization of the problem: to paraphrase what he writes in Il Principe, “those who try to be virtuous in all things must come to grief among so many who aren’t virtuous.”

Act 5, Scene 1. (495-98, Cassio wounded by Iago, who then silences Roderigo)

Iago arranges for Roderigo to kill Cassio, but the bungler only manages to wound Cassio in the leg, and Iago stabs Roderigo to death lest he blab the truth. (495-97) Othello applauds from above: “Thou teachest me. Minion, your dear lies dead, / And your unblessed fate hies” (496, 5.1.34-35). Iago insistently blames Bianca for the entire ruckus. (498)

Act 5, Scene 2. (498-507 end, Othello smothers Desdemona, dies on own terms)

Othello resolves to kill Desdemona softly: “I’ll not shed her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / …Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men” (498, 5.2.3-6). Desdemona attempts to defend herself from Othello’s crazed accusations and calls to beg forgiveness of God, but there’s no chance of success, and he smothers her (499-501) in two successive bouts. When Emilia enters, Desdemona’s dying words amount to an attempt to remove all blame from Othello: “Commend me to my kind lord” (501, 5.2.134).

Othello initially wrangles with Emilia and engages in some waffling and denial: “You heard her say herself it was not I” (501, 5.2.136). But the truth comes out in short order, and Othello infuriates Emilia by accusing Desdemona of adultery, thanks to Iago’s information. (502, 5.2.148ff) Things move quickly: Iago mortally wounds Emilia for revealing the truth about that fatal handkerchief (504) and Othello wounds Iago, who will not speak further about his motives for working so much misery: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know” (505, 5.2.309). At last, with whatever small weapon remains to him – he had been stripped of his sword a bit earlier -- Othello makes himself an example in all strictness, preempting Venetian justice (In Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, Othello escapes, only to die shamefully later.) Othello bills himself extravagantly as a man who “loved not wisely but too well” (506, 5.2.353). His eloquence and elegance reassert themselves in his final struggle. Othello’s death seems right since his words and manner, as he understands, cannot make up for the destruction of a faithful wife. His epigrammatic self-description indicates a desire to control others’ interpretations of his downfall; perhaps that’s a tragic hero’s right (see Hamlet’s plea that Horatio should tell his story), but the ending remains disturbing. Othello had twice let loose the question, “Ha, ha, false to me?” (3.3.338, 4.1.190) as if especially incredulous that he should suffer the indignity of betrayal. My sympathy goes to Desdemona, not to Othello, in spite of his sincere horror at what Iago’s treachery has led him to do.

How should we assess Othello as a tragic hero? The moral quality of Shakespeare’s protagonists varies: Richard III is an effervescent villain, Macbeth an introspective man who appreciates from the outset the full evil of the path to power he contemplates; Brutus and Cassius betray dueling motives against Julius Caesar, noble and base; Romeo and Juliet die because of pitiable misunderstandings rather than grievous faults; King Lear is brought down in part by a fundamental confusion between his public and private selves; Hamlet the revenger undergoes strange alternations of stricken dawdling and rashness, Coriolanus isolates and debases himself in his patrician rage, etc.

Othello takes his place alongside them all, a warrior who becomes the victim of his own deeply ingrained all-or-nothing attitude towards everything and everyone, an exotic other who is the victim of cultural misunderstandings that put him at the mercy of subtle Iago. As I mentioned earlier, Othello’s fall from grace seems classical in that he is laid low and commits his deadly errors because of his noblest qualities: a soldierly, unwavering commitment to right conduct, fidelity and truth. His absolute generosity of spirit towards Desdemona, once put in question by Iago, gives way to cruel resolution and a refusal even to hear “the accused’s” honest plea. It may be that what underlies Othello’s downfall is in part the basic fact that if we turn heroic absolutist values over and view their obverse, what we will find is an equally strong counter-sentiment or counter-anxiety against which the heroic code is posited. Only those who act from some level of awareness of this unsettling relationship have any real chance of success: they are not so likely as others to be trapped by the productions of their own heart and imagination. Othello, it seems to me, lacks that awareness and never – not even after the worst is known and all lies exposed before him – shows an ability to mediate between the ideal and the anxiety that both underwrites and threatens it. Ideals are necessary and noble, but they’re also potentially lethal: “handle with care,” this play seems to advise us.

Hamlet

2010-09-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

General Notes on Hamlet

Theology. In Christian terms, revenge amounts to usurpation of God’s providential prerogatives. But this interpretation of revenge clashes with a more ancient one that’s easily seen at work in Classical literature: in The Oresteia, for instance, Orestes would be wrong not to take vengeance on his father Agamemnon’s killer. How could Orestes not kill Clytemnestra? He and we know that such an act will bring the Furies down upon his head, but it must be done in spite of the penalty incurred. The Elizabethans love a good Senecan-style revenge tragedy, as the popularity of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy shows, but Shakespeare, who revels in the form just as much as anyone else (Titus Andronicus, anyone?) seems to face most squarely the theological dilemma it entails.

Skepticism. There is something to the idea that Hamlet is a man out of his time, someone not quite fit to be a tragic hero. That’s true even if his problem isn’t really “delay,” although he accuses himself of it. He makes his share of false assumptions and rash mistakes. I say only half in jest that the Prince’s problem may be that he has read Montaigne’s Essays and soaked in some of their epistemological skepticism. The play’s proddings towards revenge don’t seem solid to Hamlet: there is only a ghost who tells him what he wants to hear: Claudius is stealing his mother’s attention and his kingdom, so the man must be paid back.

Recognition. At what point in the play does Hamlet attain clarity about the nature of his actions? He must have come round to the idea that he needs to let things shape up as they may. But exactly how he has come that far isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps his realization is due to a number of experiences (facing the shock of Ophelia’s death, meditating on that army going to its death “even for an eggshell,” bantering with the Gravedigger and encountering Yorick’s skull as an object of meditation, escaping from the ship that was taking him to his death in England, being ransomed by pirates at sea, his conflicted feelings about Ophelia and his mother, etc.)

In The Poetics, Aristotle says that well-crafted tragedies turn upon the hero’s arriving at some fundamental insight (anagnorisis, recognition, “un-unknowing”) about the mistake he or she has made. Characterize Hamlet’s insight into his situation—what is the insight, and what has led him to it? Connect this question to the gravedigger scene.

What finally makes the play’s resolution possible—is it that Hamlet has been unable to act and something now makes him able to act? (Oedipus Rex, for example, combines recognition with “reversal”—expecting good news from a messenger, Oedipus instead learns that the guilt lies squarely on his own shoulders.)

Scene-by-Scene Notes on Hamlet.

Act 1, Scene 1.

The watchmen and Horatio offer some surmises; at line 69, Horatio suspects that the ghost’s appearance “bodes some strange eruption to our state.” They’re on watch because young Fortinbras is planning to take back the territory his father had lost to Hamlet Sr. Barnardo, too, supposes the same thing when he says, “Well may it sort that this portentous figure / Comes armed through our watch so like the King / That was and is the question of these wars” (109-11). They feel foreboding, a sickness at heart; but they have only general knowledge, and Horatio’s idea at 171 is to seek out Hamlet and have him interact with the ghost; it seems logical to him that the young Prince will be able to attain particular, intimate knowledge of the spirit’s purpose.

Act 1, Scene 2.

Hamlet’s grief seems unpolitic, self-indulgent, even prideful—at least to Claudius, who must govern. But Claudius’ rhetoric betrays a “schizoid” sense of his own conduct. He sees with “an auspicious, and a dropping eye” (11), which is of course unnatural and nearly impossible even to imagine. The new King’s grief over his brother’s death is pushed aside by his evil ambition to retain the crown he has unfairly won, and his scoffing at young Fortinbras’ supposition that Denmark is “disjoint and out of frame” (20) is ironic since, as we later find out, there’s nothing but disorder in Claudius’ realm. At this point, however, if we are a first-time audience, we don’t yet know that Claudius is a murderer, i.e. that the ghost’s story is true, so to some extent the new king is entitled to be annoyed with the excessive grief and surliness of Prince Hamlet. As Claudius points out at line 15, he has the backing of the citizenry, and Gertrude’s advice to her son is not without wisdom: “Thou know’st it is common, all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity. / … Why seems it so particular with thee?” (72-73, 75)

Soon thereafter, Hamlet speaks his first soliloquy, lamenting that “the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” (131-32), reproaching the general run of females in the person of Gertrude—”Frailty, thy name is woman!” (145)—and profoundly disparaging Claudius in comparison with Hamlet, Sr. The latter was, says the Prince, “Hyperion” to Claudius’ “satyr” (140), which makes Gertrude’s choice to remarry all the more contemptible. Hamlet’s imagination at this point, even before he hears the ghost’s damning information, seems morbid: he sees the whole world as “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed” (135-36), one inhabited entirely by “things rank and gross in nature” (136). Hamlet seems to play with the amount of time that has passed between the old king’s death and Gertrude’s marriage, and that she was apparently in genuine sorrow for her first husband only makes her subsequent conduct more unacceptable. Hamlet is already obsessed with the dark intimation that people are not what they seem: Gertrude is not the loyal wife she seemed, and Claudius is not the rightful successor the court and the people apparently believe he is. But Hamlet also knows that he must repress this obsession in public: “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (159). Privately, things are different: he already seems to suspect that “some foul play” (255) was involved in his father’s death or that “foul play” is now afoot, even though his questioning of Horatio about the ghost’s appearance indicates genuine uncertainty about its provenance and mission. The stage is set for Hamlet’s moral mission, if we call “revenge” a moral mission. Indeed, the question will trouble Hamlet as the play proceeds. But for now we hear the sententia, “[Foul] deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes” (256-57). To me, this line indicates that the “deeds” to which Hamlet refers have already been committed, in his estimation. There is an ambiguity in this last passage of Act 1, Scene 2, a bit of shuffling between matters of state (“My father’s spirit—in arms!” at 254) and essentially private thoughts about the suspicious loss of a dear father.

Act 1, Scene 3.

Laertes has evidently been taught well in the arts of windbaggery by his father Polonius since he lectures Ophelia sententiously about the dangers of giving in to the importunate suit of a lustful young man far above her station. This advice is sound enough as such things go—Hamlet is, after all, a Prince, so he is not free to love as he wishes without thought of Denmark; but as Gertrude later admits when Ophelia is dead, she had hoped the two lovers would in fact marry. But in any case, Ophelia holds her own, showing that while circumstances may constrain her, she is not lacking in understanding or the courage to speak her own mind. Polonius soon comes onto the scene and offers similar advice, accusing Ophelia of naivety about Hamlet’s intentions and showing that he reads the character of others as a function of stereotypes: Hamlet is a young, lusty bachelor, and is therefore not to be trusted, quite aside from his status as a prince.

Act 1, Scene 4.

At the beginning of Scene 4, Hamlet discusses the Court of Denmark’s fondness for alcohol, declaring that his country is “traduc’d and tax’d of other nations” (18) for this weakness. In his 1948 film adaptation of the play, Laurence Olivier chooses to quote directly from this passage and apply the words to the Prince himself, who by implication suffers from “a vicious mole of nature” (24) in that he simply cannot “make up his mind” (Olivier’s voiceover). But this is an overstatement, perhaps, since there is good reason to doubt the purposes of a ghost such as the one Hamlet sees here for the first time: “What may this mean, / That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel / Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon . . . ?” (51-53)

Act 1, Scene 5.

The Ghost then recounts in bloodcurdling detail exactly what happened to him and who is responsible for it, eliciting an excited “O my prophetic soul!” (40) from the Prince, as if he had suspected all along that Claudius had killed his father. The terms the Ghost uses to describe both Claudius and Gertrude are strongly reminiscent of the very ones Hamlet had used shortly before. I think we may be certain that the Ghost “actually exists,” but at the same time, it’s almost as if Prince Hamlet is talking to himself. He is utterly convinced at this point, begging the Ghost that he will, “Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge” (29-31).

There is a problem with the Ghost’s demand for vengeance, however: God says in Deuteronomy, “To me belongeth vengeance and recompense” (32:35). Why, then, should a soul in purgatory (a Catholic concept, by the way) be fixated on revenge? Revenge is an ancient pagan demand, and it seems petty. But Hamlet Sr. was a warrior king, so perhaps his demand that his son should punish Claudius seems reasonable in that context: the latter is a “traitor to his lord” and a dishonorable wretch who has corrupted the state. The Ghost insists that “the royal bed of Denmark” (82) be redeemed from its current status as “A couch for luxury and damned incest” (83), but his call still seems mostly a private affair. It strains the “fatherly king” framework, and would require the son to set himself against the current order of the State, most likely at the cost of his own life. The Ghost has laid upon the Prince an extremely difficult set of demands—not only must he kill the new king without damning himself, but he must deal with Gertrude in such as way as not to damn her: “Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught” (85-86). How is the young man to do these things? He was already “tainted” in his mind before he ever saw the Ghost, we might say, and what’s more, since the Ghost deals in the ancient imperative of revenge, it makes sense to remind ourselves that even the most righteous acts of revenge in ancient literature entailed pollution that had to be atoned for afterwards. One thinks of Odysseus purifying his great hall after the slaughter of those mannerless suitors who have beset Penelope, or the dreadful punishment incurred by Clytemnestra when she killed Agamemnon, or the penalty threatened against Orestes by the Erinyes after he in turn killed Clytemnestra. In either the pagan or the Christian context, to take revenge is to pollute oneself in the doing. Had Shakespeare written a mindlessly celebratory “revenge tragedy,” we wouldn’t need to think any of these things, but there seems to be a metageneric dimension in Hamlet that positively demands such consideration.

One might take the Ghost’s appearance as a general protest against Denmark’s rotten condition, but the Prince doesn’t seem certain of much yet, as we can see from his words and actions after the Ghost bids him farewell. On the one hand, we hear that Hamlet is determined to take revenge: “Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / . . . And thy commandement all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain” (98-99, 102-03). His wax-writing-tablet metaphor seems sincere, although it’s perhaps slightly comic in that Hamlet, a young man who has (accurately or otherwise) become a byword for deferral and delay, speaks of writing at the very instant when he’s most certain of his desire to act: “make a note to myself, take revenge,” so to speak. His indecisiveness or resentment at the task to which he has been called shows much more strongly, of course, in his concluding words during this scene: “The time is out of joint—O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” (188-89). That abrupt remark suggests anything but a determination to proceed “with wings as swift / As meditation” to a “sweep[ing]” revenge, the precise manner of which has been left to his own devising. One other useful thing to draw from Hamlet at this point is his remark to Horatio and the Watchmen that he may, at some points, “think meet / To put an antic disposition on” (171-72). He has already hit upon the strategy of feigning something like lunacy to accomplish his great task. It may be difficult to tell at some points just how much control Hamlet has over his speech and his actions, but here, at least, we see that he puts his wildness down to strategy.

Act 2, Scene 1.

Polonius is both an endearing character, full of well-intentioned, if comically delivered, advice to his children (and the royal couple) and a meddling intelligencer who deals with those same children in a sneaky, underhanded way. He sets spies on Laertes to find out if the young fellow is behaving, and, after having commanded Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet, he tethers her near him like a sacrificial goat to find out what’s eating him and inform Claudius and Gertrude of it. But at this point, Polonius’ assumption that the Prince’s distraction is “the very ecstasy of love” (99) seems reasonable, based upon what Ophelia has told him about Hamlet’s bizarre sighing and strange state of undress.

Act 2, Scene 2.

Everybody’s favorite nobodies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make their first appearance in the play, and Voltemand brings what seems to be good news about that troublesome issue of young Fortinbras “sharking up” an army of ruffians to take back what his father lost to the Danes—now the young blade wants only to use Denmark’s territory as a marching ground on his way to Poland, where he has other fighting to do. Polonius’ insistence that he has “found / The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy” (48-49) excites Claudius, who says, “O, speak of that, that do I long to hear” (50). Together these remarks suggest that Hamlet has been putting on a good show, taking up his “antic disposition” early in the game since “lunacy” would not be the right term with which to describe he initial surliness and melancholia in Act 1. The Prince must, we presume, act in such a manner as to draw Claudius beyond his semi-comfortable geniality towards Hamlet, and into the active agent’s circle of consequence and blood revenge. Polonius is certainly moved to act: he declares to the King and Queen, “I’ll loose my daughter to [Hamlet]. / Be you and I behind an arras then, / Mark the encounter. . .” (162-63). This determination is made stronger still when Hamlet wanders into the scene and Polonius engages him (sans Ophelia as yet) in a strange conversation that is afterwards carried on with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after Polonius exits. Not realizing the irony of his formalistic amazement at Hamlet’s “pregnant replies,” Polonius admiringly says, “Though this be madness, yet there is / method in’t” (205-06).

Hamlet kindly receives his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and he deftly, but rather gently, unmasks their dishonesty preparatory to his later, much harsher dealings with them. After the pair admit that they were indeed “sent for” (292), Hamlet suggests that the King and Queen are worried about his mopishness, nothing more, and he immediately utters one of the most famous invocations of Renaissance humanism and aliveness to the beauty of a world people were beginning to see afresh after centuries of otherworldliness (well, that’s the stereotype, anyway—the Middle Ages weren’t as drab as we like to suppose). “What a piece of work is a / man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in / form and moving, how express and admirable in / action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a / god!” (303-07) He says all this only to bring the whole “majestical roof” (301) down on our heads, reminding us that we are but the most refined dust in the cosmos, a “quintessence of dust” (308). The letdown is deepened by Rosencrantz’s dirty-minded interpretation of Hamlet’s words, and the whole thing leads directly to the announcement that a troupe of actors (“players”) is on the way to Elsinore.

Hamlet comments briefly on the state of late Elizabethan theater, saying that the mannerisms of child actors (he refers to the current craze for plays put on by children) have become an object of mockery—there’s too much affectation, too much pandering to the crowd, too much willingness to break the dramatic illusion. Denmark is disturbed as well; things aren’t what they seem, and the stage “chronicles” the age. Hamlet listens with rapt interest to the player’s interpretation of the tragic ending of the Trojan War. In The Aeneid, Book 2 (lines 675ff, Fagles translation) Achilles’ son Pyrrhus (called Neoptolemus in The Iliad and The Odyssey) has the simple task of revenging his father, and he proceeds with all swiftness to his bloody deed. (Odysseus’ brief account of the young man’s career in The Odyssey at 11.575ff has Neoptolemus behaving with great forthrightness throughout the War, too.) It is the Trojan Prince Aeneas who is filled with horror at the sight of his king Priam’s corpse because it puts him in mind of his wife Creusa and his father Anchises. Aeneas’ rage flows at once to perfidious Helen, and is only cooled by a vision of his mother Venus, who tells him to look to his family in their time of need. As for Hecuba’s grief at the murder of her husband, the player makes it seem so natural that even he gets worked up imitating it. Hamlet beholds the real article—he has a murdered father to avenge—so why doesn’t he act at once? Things are so much simpler in fiction; a noble lie or mere representation may allow us to perpetuate our highest ideals, but real life is weighed down with epistemological uncertainties, Machiavellian considerations, and “vicious mole[s] of nature” such as indecisiveness. Hamlet’s revenge imperative is hindered by Christian scruples and by doubts about the Ghost’s purpose and provenance, as his soliloquy from line 550 onwards shows: “The spirit that I have seen / May be a [dev’l], and the [dev’l] hath power / T’ assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps, / Out of my weakness and my melancholy, / . . . Abuses me to damn me” (598-603). Basing his plan on the literary gossip that “guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have by the very cunning of the scene / . . . proclaim’d their malefactions” (589-92), he invests much hope in his augmentations to The Murder of Gonzago as a means of discovering certainty in the guilty visage of one King Claudius. This plan does not give us license to despise fiction as the mere opposite of “real life”—in this instance, the public, political realm, the world of cold, hard reality and necessity, is exactly what allows Claudius to keep his murderous nature hidden from everyone but himself.

Act 3, Scene 1.

The King tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to encourage this new business of the players’ coming to Elsinore. Perhaps it will draw out the reason for Hamlet’s eccentric behavior. He and Polonius will conceal themselves to hear Hamlet talk with Ophelia. Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy, the main point of which is to state that our ignorance of what comes after death keeps us from acting on our resolutions in this life. Hamlet’s wild words to Ophelia concern mainly the impossibility of virtue maintaining itself in a corrupt world: “get thee to a nunnery” probably means just that—remove yourself from this wicked world, and seek shelter from the “arrant knaves” who go about in it. At 118, Hamlet denies that he ever established any relationship with Ophelia, that he ever made any promises. At line 129, Hamlet asks Ophelia where her father is, a line usually taken to indicate that he knows he’s being overheard. At line 142, Hamlet seems to lose his composure in a way that is not entirely “scripted,” and at 148 he utters the words that frighten Claudius: “I say we shall have no moe marriages, etc.” Claudius derives from this outburst the thought that Hamlet’s disturbed state of mind is “not like madness” (164), and so he must be watched even more closely. The Prince’s “melancholy,” says Claudius (whose guilt had already been spurred by Polonius’ unwitting words at 46-48 about “sugar[ing] o’er” the most damnable deeds with piousness), “sits on brood” (165) over something still darker, and that is what he finds most troubling about the young man’s hostility towards him.

Act 3, Scene 2.

Hamlet admonishes the players about their craft: his key bits of advice are that they “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (20) and make certain “to / hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue / her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (21-24). In part, this is a moral statement akin to what we may find in Samuel Johnson much later—actors should display virtue as it is, and force vice to confront itself head on. Hamlet means to do just that by means of his spectacle: simply showing and then speaking Claudius’ sin should make that sin’s effects register on his countenance. No embellishment is necessary for such a hideous sin as his. Hamlet’s words strike home when he tells the offended Claudius, “No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest—no offense i’ th’ world” (234-35). The King has consistently failed to take the measure of the consequences entailed by his evil conduct; his stability of mind depends on repressing consciousness of that conduct. Hamlet is cruelly merry with Ophelia in this scene—he seems to be baiting her, blaming her for the sins of his mother. The dumb show soon follows—it is an eerie scene that shows Claudius what he has done, no more, no less. But the dialogue also plays up the absolutely binding quality of the oath that Gertrude has violated, in Hamlet’s view: “Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife, / If once a widow, ever I be wife!” (222-23). That sort of language equates Gertrude with a villainess such as Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Forced to watch “himself” commit the same dark sin twice, Claudius howls out, “Give me some light. Away!” (269) With the King out of the scene, Hamlet’s anger turns first towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom he disabuses of any hope that they may “play upon” him like a musical instrument (364), and then to Gertrude, who is perhaps the main target of the whole scene, so savage is the representation of her role in the bloody affair. The Prince’s rejection of “instrumentality” is interesting in its own right—what Hamlet seems to need most of all, at this point, is to take control of events, and we will see that he must let go of this desire to control what happens around him before his revenge can be effected. But with respect to Gertrude, Hamlet’s words are even harsher than were those in The Murder of Gonzago; he says, “Now could I drink hot blood, / And do such [bitter business as the] day / Would quake to look on” (390-91). Perhaps this violent thought is directed towards Claudius only, but it’s hard to avoid supposing from what follows that it also applies to Gertrude: “Let me be cruel, not unnatural; / I will speak [daggers] to her, but use none” (395-96).

Act 3, Scene 3.

The King has decided in his anger that Hamlet must be off to England, and Rosencrantz speaks more truly than he knows when he says to Claudius, “The cess of majesty / Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw / What’s near it with it” (15-16). These two flatter the King that what he does is necessary to protect the welfare of the state and the people: “Most holy and religious fear it is / To keep those many bodies safe / That live and feed upon your Majesty” (8-10). The political realm is like an exoskeleton protecting Claudius from the ravages of introspection, and even from the guilt that comes when one knows one is putting off such inward-tending thoughts. This is the same sort of “tyrant’s plea” that accounts for the magnificent hollowness of Satan’s rhetoric in Paradise Lost. Confronting Adam and Eve in Book 4, Satan says, “. . . Melt, as I doe, yet public reason just, / Honour and Empire with revenge enlarg’d, / By conquering this new World, compels me now / To do what else though damnd I should abhorre.” At line 36 and following, Claudius tries to confront “the visage of offense” (47), but he cannot because he won’t give up the crown, the effects of his sin. It’s doubtful if we are to understand this attempt at repentance as sincere—doesn’t it seem as if Claudius isn’t so much sorry for killing the king as determined to indulge himself in remorse? Is he just “feeling sorry for himself”? Most likely, to judge from the results of his kneeling prayer: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (97-98). Hamlet looks almost as much the villain as the King at this point, when he reveals his earnestly un-Christian desire that Claudius’ soul at death “may be as damn’d and black / As hell, whereto it goes” (94-95). But just at this point, the King relieves Hamlet of the need to contrive such an outcome by showing that he is completely unable to repent for his mortal sin, or even to take the first necessary steps that would reclaim his chance at salvation.

Act 3, Scene 4.

After himself slaughtering the hidden Polonius, Hamlet goes so far as to accuse Gertrude of taking part in Claudius’ plot to murder Hamlet, Sr. when he blurts out, “A bloody deed! Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother” (28-29). She seems genuinely shocked at the suggestion. Hamlet has little time now for “wretched, rash, intruding fool[s]” (31) like Polonius, a man everyone else held in high regard and with whom they showed considerable patience, and he drives onward to make Gertrude confront her sinfulness as directly as he made Claudius behold his during the “Gonzago” scene. Hamlet suggests that Gertrude’s lust is not even excusable by reference to the heat of youth; at her age, he insists, “The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble, / And waits upon the judgment” (69-70). His efforts succeed without too much trouble since Gertrude cries, “Thou turn’st my [eyes into my very] soul” (89). At this point, Ernest Jones’ “Oedipal reading” of the play comes into its own, if it hadn’t already: Hamlet can scarcely stand to imagine—and yet can’t help but imagine—his mother in bed with Claudius, where they spend their time “honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty!” (93-94) The obsession is so deep that the Ghost must step in to admonish Hamlet about his “almost blunted purpose” (111) of taking revenge against Claudius.

As for Polonius, to the thought of whom Hamlet now returns, there is some remorse, but it’s quickly smoothed over with philosophizing: “For this same lord, / I do repent; but heaven hath pleas’d it so / To punish me with this, and this with me, / That I must be their scourge and minister” (172-75). Hamlet tells Gertrude not to let on that he’s not exactly insane, and he confides in her, at least to a degree, what he has in mind. Knowing he cannot trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he says nonetheless, “Let it work, / For ‘tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his own petar, an’t shall go hard / But I will delve one yard below their mines, / And blow them at the moon” (205-09). This is an odd exclamation since Hamlet knows only that he’s being “marshal[ed] to knavery” (205) of some sort; he can’t know the precise plan, but speaks with almost military precision, promising to delve “one yard below their mines” and turn their evil back upon them.

Act 4, Scene 1.

The King is by now “full of discord and dismay” (45) at the turn of events; he knows Hamlet’s sword was meant for him.

Act 4, Scene 2.

Hamlet calls Rosencrantz a “sponge” (12) who “soaks up the King’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities” (15-16). As for Claudius, he is “a thing,” says Hamlet, “of nothing” (28, 30). His odd remark that “The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body” (27-28) most obviously refers to Polonius’ corpse, but I suppose it might be interpreted along the lines of the longstanding political doctrine that the king has both a civil or corporate body (imperishable) and a natural, mortal one. In this sense, perhaps Hamlet is making an oblique threat against Claudius.

Act 4, Scene 3.

Claudius realizes the desperate state in which he stands: “Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are reliev’d, / Or not at all” (9-11). Then follows Hamlet’s quizzical “fishing” conversation with the King, which culminates with the fine demonstration that “a king may go / a progress through the guts of a beggar” (30-31). The adornment and aggrandizing of this decaying body, so easily inducted into the dark processiveness of nature, is what Claudius has traded his soul for, so in this respect he truly is “a thing . . . nothing.” At line 49, Hamlet calls Claudius “dear mother,” a slip-up that seems sincere since he has had trouble keeping the two apart in his mind. Claudius is increasingly disturbed by Hamlet’s presence, and even by his very existence: requesting “The present death of Hamlet” (65), Claudius says, “Do it, England, / For like the hectic in my blood he rages, / And thou must cure me” (65-67). But what the King seeks most of all is security: “Till I know ‘tis done, / Howe’er my haps, my joys [were] ne’er [begun]” (68-69).

Act 4, Scene 4.

Young Fortinbras seeks conveyance through Denmark on his way to Poland, and the Captain Hamlet speaks to doesn’t think much of his assignment: “We go to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name” (18-19). Hamlet takes the point to heart, making yet another resolution that his mind will contain only thoughts of vengeance from now on: “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (65-66) But this one is no more permanent than the ones he made earlier in the play—this is fundamentally not Hamlet’s “nature,” if we may endow a literary character with such a thing. Part of the interest in Hamlet is, of course, that not only is the time “out of joint,” but the hero himself is “out of joint,” not immediately adapted to the dreadful role he must play. In this way, I think the romantic reading of the tragedy, in which Hamlet is too aloof and philosophical to carry out such a task as revenging a murdered father briskly, is worthy of respect.

Act 4, Scenes 5-7.

Ophelia brings dismay to the Court when she shows clear signs of madness. Perhaps her condition should not be much of a surprise since she has been used as an agent against Hamlet, dangled before him like a piece of meat. A love match has been perverted by the general condition of Denmark, as embodied in the selfish behavior of Polonius and the King. As for Ophelia’s references to flowers, well, flowers are natural beauties, things we use to express a whole range of human experience and sentiment. Ophelia’s mind is disordered, and she registers the corruption all around her, trying pathetically to beautify it with floral symbolism and songs. She has lost her father, and Gertrude will wear her “rue with a difference” (183) because she has lost her son to England. Ophelia is the blighted “flower” of the kingdom, the beauty and innocence that has been sacrificed for the sake of its ambition and lust. Her demise shows the consequences of Denmark’s degeneracy even more clearly, perhaps, than all the play’s violence. Even Claudius seems genuinely stricken at this latest step in the march of events: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, / But in battalions” (78-79), he laments to Gertrude, and no sooner has he said it than Laertes bursts in with the common folk at his back, shouting him up for the new king. His main function is, of course, to present an obvious contrast with Hamlet—Laertes will, unlike the Prince, “sweep to his revenge” without much delay; he has no scruples about the concept. Claudius speaks with amazing irony when he promises Gertrude that Laertes will not harm him: “There’s such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would, / Acts little of his will” (124-26). Clearly, this truism afforded Hamlet, Sr. no protection from Claudius. In the sixth scene, sailors give a letter from Hamlet to Horatio, explaining how he managed to board a pirate ship that attacked the vessel bound for England. In Scene 7, the King explains to Laertes that so far, he has had to avoid confronting Hamlet because Gertrude and the people are fond of him. Hamlet’s letter to the King is ominous: “High and mighty, You shall know I am set / naked on your kingdom” (43-44). This tone is no less alarming for the promise Hamlet tenders to explain how he has returned.

The King has come to see in Laertes his earthly salvation; the young hothead promises that he would do no less to Hamlet than “cut his throat ‘i th’ church” (127), and Claudius lays out the plot he has partly contrived, only to find that Polonius is able to add a master stroke with the introduction of “an unction” (141) he bought from some itinerant medical charlatan, which he will use to envenom the tip of his rapier. As surety, Claudius will offer Hamlet a poisoned chalice during the fencing match.

The scene concludes with the news that Ophelia has drowned. Gertrude’s beautiful, ekphrastic description of Ophelia’s death from 166-83 honors her loss, but doesn’t redeem the faults that caused it. The death isn’t described as suicide, really; it seems that Ophelia simply stops resisting and is dragged down by her water-logged clothing. Another function of this episode is that it gives Hamlet space for the recognition that he must attain.

Act 5, Scene 1.

The Gravedigger scene works as comic relief, but it also gives us and Hamlet a broader perspective on events up to this point. The Gravedigger calmly goes about his business in the face of death, and even makes jests about it—jests that, as the Riverside editors inform us, refer to an actual law case, that of Hale v. Petit. (The Shakespeare Law Library’s account of that case may be viewed at http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/Law/law6.htm#hale.) We will get no maudlin speeches or meditative musings over Yorick-skulls from him; he’s full of riddles about the sturdiness of the “houses” that gravediggers build. Hamlet appreciates by means of his experiences in this act (and in the fourth act) that the earthly prize of a kingdom, of reputation, of a patch of land, is a joke: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (213-14). If the sought-for revenge is to be accomplished, it can only happen when Hamlet’s mind isn’t tainted by pride or earthly attachment, so his meditation on Yorick the Jester’s skull from 182-95 is vital. Why, indeed, should we cling to life? the skull seems to ask the Prince, who promptly aims this intuition at womankind: “Now get you / to my lady’s [chamber], and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that” (192-94). Soon follows the funeral procession of Ophelia, the quibbling of the Churchmen over what rites to accord a possible suicide, and the preposterous one-upmanship between Laertes and Hamlet in and on Ophelia’s uncovered grave. This is obviously not the way Hamlet had meant to reveal himself to the King, but events have gotten the better of him for the moment, and he vents his grief. It almost goes without saying that the two men have ruined Ophelia’s funeral altogether. It’s just one final, if unintended, insult to this long-suffering character.

Act 5, Scene 2.

Killing Polonius got Hamlet shipped off to England to face execution, but now he recounts to Horatio how on the ship he learned an important lesson: “Rashly— / And prais’d be rashness for it—let us know / Our indiscretion sometime serves us well / When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us / There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will . . .” (6-11). It seems that this speech refers to Hamlet’s insomnia-induced impatience to know the contents of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s letter. What exactly, he wants to know, is their “grand commission” (18)? This known, he forges a new commission purporting that his old pals R & G should be executed on the spot, once they make it to the English King’s presence. His justification of this rather harsh turnabout is simply, “[Why, man, they did make love to this employment,] / They are not near my conscience. . . . / ‘Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes / Between the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites” (57-62). Perhaps this as an injustice on Hamlet’s part, an act of disproportionate violence against men who know nothing of the evil Claudius has done, but it’s hard to feel much sympathy for them; perhaps our minds are too thoroughly poisoned by listening to Hamlet for that to be possible. They serve the interests of the King against their friend, they are “sponges” just looking for preferment, and to Hamlet they are utterly insignificant pawns in the deadly game of chess between himself and Claudius. Well, if they’ll just be patient for about four centuries, Tom Stoppard will make it up to them by writing that witty play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, so “all’s well that ends well,” right?

At line 65, Hamlet brings up a new motive (though in speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he had already hinted at it when he said, “I lack advancement”): he says that “He that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother” has also “Popp’d in between th’ election and my hopes” (64-65). In other words, Claudius’ hasty marriage with the Queen has deprived him for now of the succession. The Oedipal significance of this remark is not difficult to see. (On the theme of “inheritance,” see Anthony Burton’s “Further Aspects of Inheritance Law in Hamlet.”)

When the foppish Osric enters bearing the King and Laertes’ challenge, Hamlet calmly accepts it, overriding Laertes’ misgivings with the grand statement, “[W]e defy augury. There is special / providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be [now], / ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if / it be not now, yet it [will] come—the readiness is all” (219-22). This match is not of his making, but whatever happens, Hamlet accepts the outcome. This may be the insight or right attitude he has needed all along; he must become an instrument of God’s vengeance, which will turn the schemes of Claudius and Laertes against them. We might recall that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, although all too willing to prostitute themselves to the designs of earthly rulers, nonetheless go to their deaths as instruments of forces larger than they can imagine, so in this sense they show Hamlet the way. Well, in the end, Claudius’ plan is frustrated, and his union with Gertrude nullified without issue (i.e. children). As so often in Shakespeare, there’s a Christian lesson to be drawn: the wicked will ultimately will find a way to destroy themselves; they are remarkably consistent in the patterns of their evil. Hamlet gains no earthly reward but death. Young Fortinbras enters the kingdom almost by accident, in the wake of the old order’s self-destruction: he and other onlookers will hear from Horatio of “purposes mistook, / Fall’n on the inventors’ heads” (384-85). There’s really no question of Fortinbras’ being a better ruler than his predecessors, though Hamlet’s final thoughts commend him. He is simply an opportunist in the right time at the right place. This hardly amounts to a strong purification of the State, though it’s fair to say that that was never really the play’s emphasis anyhow.

To return to the dearly departed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, some critics see them as loose ends that Shakespeare has deliberately left hanging at the play’s conclusion—have they really deserved their harsh fate, considering that they are only minor players in a grand tragedy? Does their taking-off mean that God’s providential design is a bit “rough-hewn,” or at least that his justice is not self-evidently “just” to us? Perhaps, but in my view, this messy fact (along with Ophelia’s lamentable and unfair demise) doesn’t necessarily destroy the “providential” reading to which I have generally subscribed. At the least, Hamlet is a curious revenge play in that it ultimately denies agency to the very character who is most responsible for ensuring that the play’s villain gets what he deserves, and yet the revenge “gets itself accomplished” nonetheless, in the most hideously appropriate manner, as if Shakespeare’s God has much the same sense of “poetic justice” as Dante’s did.