80-) English Literature
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s plays and poems
The
early plays
Shakespeare
arrived in London probably sometime in the late 1580s. He was in his mid-20s.
It is not known how he got started in the theatre or for what acting companies
he wrote his early plays, which are not easy to date. Indicating a time of
apprenticeship, these plays show a more direct debt to London dramatists of the
1580s and to Classical examples than do his later works. He learned a great
deal about writing plays by imitating the successes of the London theatre, as
any young poet and budding dramatist might do.
Titus
Andronicus
Titus
Andronicus (c. 1589–92) is a case in point. As Shakespeare’s first full-length
tragedy, it owes much of its theme, structure, and language to Thomas Kyd’s The
Spanish Tragedy, which was a huge success in the late 1580s. Kyd had hit on the
formula of adopting the dramaturgy of Seneca (the younger), the great Stoic
philosopher and statesman, to the needs of a burgeoning new London theatre. The
result was the revenge tragedy, an astonishingly successful genre that was to
be refigured in Hamlet and many other revenge plays. Shakespeare also borrowed
a leaf from his great contemporary Christopher Marlowe. The Vice-like
protagonist of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Barabas, may have inspired
Shakespeare in his depiction of the villainous Aaron the Moor in Titus
Andronicus, though other Vice figures were available to him as well.
The
Senecan model offered Kyd, and then Shakespeare, a story of bloody revenge,
occasioned originally by the murder or rape of a person whose near relatives
(fathers, sons, brothers) are bound by sacred oath to revenge the atrocity. The
avenger must proceed with caution, since his opponent is canny, secretive, and
ruthless. The avenger becomes mad or feigns madness to cover his intent. He
becomes more and more ruthless himself as he moves toward his goal of
vengeance. At the same time he is hesitant, being deeply distressed by ethical
considerations. An ethos of revenge is opposed to one of Christian forbearance.
The avenger may see the spirit of the person whose wrongful death he must
avenge. He employs the device of a play within the play in order to accomplish
his aims. The play ends in a bloodbath and a vindication of the avenger.
Evident in this model is the story of Titus Andronicus, whose sons are
butchered and whose daughter is raped and mutilated, as well as the story of
Hamlet and still others.
The
early romantic comedies
Other
than Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare did not experiment with formal tragedy in
his early years. (Though his English history plays from this period portrayed
tragic events, their theme was focused elsewhere.) The young playwright was
drawn more quickly into comedy, and with more immediate success. For this his
models include the dramatists Robert Greene and John Lyly, along with Thomas
Nashe. The result is a genre recognizably and distinctively Shakespearean, even
if he learned a lot from Greene and Lyly: the romantic comedy. As in the work
of his models, Shakespeare’s early comedies revel in stories of amorous
courtship in which a plucky and admirable young woman (played by a boy actor)
is paired off against her male wooer. Julia, one of two young heroines in The
Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590–94), disguises herself as a man in order to
follow her lover, Proteus, when he is sent from Verona to Milan. Proteus
(appropriately named for the changeable Proteus of Greek myth), she discovers,
is paying far too much attention to Sylvia, the beloved of Proteus’s best
friend, Valentine. Love and friendship thus do battle for the divided loyalties
of the erring male until the generosity of his friend and, most of all, the
enduring chaste loyalty of the two women bring Proteus to his senses. The motif
of the young woman disguised as a male was to prove invaluable to Shakespeare
in subsequent romantic comedies, including The Merchant of Venice, As You Like
It, and Twelfth Night. As is generally true of Shakespeare, he derived the
essentials of his plot from a narrative source, in this case a long Spanish
prose romance, the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor.
Shakespeare’s
most classically inspired early comedy is The Comedy of Errors (c.
1589–94). Here he turned particularly to Plautus’s farcical play called the
Menaechmi (Twins). The story of one twin (Antipholus) looking for his lost
brother, accompanied by a clever servant (Dromio) whose twin has also
disappeared, results in a farce of mistaken identities that also thoughtfully
explores issues of identity and self-knowing. The young women of the play, one
the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus (Adriana) and the other her sister (Luciana),
engage in meaningful dialogue on issues of wifely obedience and autonomy.
Marriage resolves these difficulties at the end, as is routinely the case in
Shakespearean romantic comedy, but not before the plot complications have
tested the characters’ needs to know who they are and what men and women ought
to expect from one another.
Shakespeare’s
early romantic comedy most indebted to John Lyly is Love’s Labour’s Lost (c.
1588–97), a confection set in the never-never land of Navarre where the King
and his companions are visited by the Princess of France and her
ladies-in-waiting on a diplomatic mission that soon devolves into a game of
courtship. As is often the case in Shakespearean romantic comedy, the young
women are sure of who they are and whom they intend to marry; one cannot be
certain that they ever really fall in love, since they begin by knowing what
they want. The young men, conversely, fall all over themselves in their
comically futile attempts to eschew romantic love in favour of more serious
pursuits. They perjure themselves, are shamed and put down, and are finally
forgiven their follies by the women. Shakespeare brilliantly portrays male
discomfiture and female self-assurance as he explores the treacherous but
desirable world of sexual attraction, while the verbal gymnastics of the play
emphasize the wonder and the delicious foolishness of falling in love.
In
The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590–94), Shakespeare employs a device of
multiple plotting that is to become a standard feature of his romantic
comedies. In one plot, derived from Ludovico Ariosto’s I suppositi (Supposes,
as it had been translated into English by George Gascoigne), a young woman
(Bianca) carries on a risky courtship with a young man who appears to be a
tutor, much to the dismay of her father, who hopes to marry her to a wealthy
suitor of his own choosing. Eventually the mistaken identities are straightened
out, establishing the presumed tutor as Lucentio, wealthy and suitable enough.
Simultaneously, Bianca’s shrewish sister Kate denounces (and terrorizes) all
men. Bianca’s suitors commission the self-assured Petruchio to pursue Kate so
that Bianca, the younger sister, will be free to wed. The wife-taming plot is
itself based on folktale and ballad tradition in which men assure their
ascendancy in the marriage relationship by beating their wives into submission.
Shakespeare transforms this raw, antifeminist material into a study of the
struggle for dominance in the marriage relationship. And, whereas he does opt
in this play for male triumph over the female, he gives to Kate a sense of
humour that enables her to see how she is to play the game to her own advantage
as well. She is, arguably, happy at the end with a relationship based on wit
and companionship, whereas her sister Bianca turns out to be simply spoiled.
The
early histories of William Shakespeare
In
Shakespeare’s explorations of English history, as in romantic comedy, he put
his distinctive mark on a genre and made it his. The genre was, moreover, an
unusual one. There was as yet no definition of an English history play, and
there were no aesthetic rules regarding its shaping. The ancient Classical
world had recognized two broad categories of genre, comedy and tragedy. (This
account leaves out more specialized genres like the satyr play.) Aristotle and
other critics, including Horace, had evolved, over centuries, Classical
definitions. Tragedy dealt with the disaster-struck lives of great persons, was
written in elevated verse, and took as its setting a mythological and ancient
world of gods and heroes: Agamemnon, Theseus, Oedipus, Medea, and the rest.
Pity and terror were the prevailing emotional responses in plays that sought to
understand, however imperfectly, the will of the supreme gods. Classical
comedy, conversely, dramatized the everyday. Its chief figures were citizens of
Athens and Rome—householders, courtesans, slaves, scoundrels, and so forth. The
humour was immediate, contemporary, topical; the lampooning was satirical, even
savage. Members of the audience were invited to look at mimetic representations
of their own daily lives and to laugh at greed and folly.
The
English history play had no such ideal theoretical structure. It was an
existential invention: the dramatic treatment of recent English history. It
might be tragic or comic or, more commonly, a hybrid. Polonius’s list of
generic possibilities captures the ludicrous potential for endless
hybridizations: “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,” and so on (Hamlet, Act II, scene 2,
lines 397–399). (By “pastoral,” Polonius presumably means a play based on
romances telling of shepherds and rural life, as contrasted with the
corruptions of city and court.) Shakespeare’s history plays were so successful
in the 1590s’ London theatre that the editors of Shakespeare’s complete works,
in 1623, chose to group his dramatic output under three headings: comedies,
histories, and tragedies. The genre established itself by sheer force of its
compelling popularity.
Shakespeare
in 1590 or thereabouts had really only one viable model for the English history
play, an anonymous and sprawling drama called The Famous Victories of Henry the
Fifth (1583–88) that told the saga of Henry IV’s son, Prince Hal, from the days
of his adolescent rebellion down through his victory over the French at the
Battle of Agincourt in 1415—in other words, the material that Shakespeare would
later use in writing three major plays, Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and
Henry V. Shakespeare chose to start not with Prince Hal but with more recent
history in the reign of Henry V’s son Henry VI and with the civil wars that saw
the overthrow of Henry VI by Edward IV and then the accession to power in 1483
of Richard III. This material proved to be so rich in themes and dramatic
conflicts that he wrote four plays on it, a “tetralogy” extending from Henry
VI in three parts (c. 1589–93) to Richard III (c. 1592–94).
These
plays were immediately successful. Contemporary references indicate that
audiences of the early 1590s thrilled to the story (in Henry VI, Part 1) of the
brave Lord Talbot doing battle in France against the witch Joan of Arc and her
lover, the French Dauphin, but being undermined in his heroic effort by
effeminacy and corruption at home. Henry VI himself is, as Shakespeare portrays
him, a weak king, raised to the kingship by the early death of his father,
incapable of controlling factionalism in his court, and enervated personally by
his infatuation with a dangerous Frenchwoman, Margaret of Anjou. Henry VI is
cuckolded by his wife and her lover, the Duke of Suffolk, and (in Henry VI,
Part 2) proves unable to defend his virtuous uncle, the Duke of Gloucester,
against opportunistic enemies. The result is civil unrest, lower-class
rebellion (led by Jack Cade), and eventually all-out civil war between the
Lancastrian faction, nominally headed by Henry VI, and the Yorkist claimants
under the leadership of Edward IV and his brothers. Richard III completes the
saga with its account of the baleful rise of Richard of Gloucester through the
murdering of his brother the Duke of Clarence and of Edward IV’s two sons, who
were also Richard’s nephews. Richard’s tyrannical reign yields eventually and
inevitably to the newest and most successful claimant of the throne, Henry
Tudor, earl of Richmond. This is the man who becomes Henry VII, scion of the
Tudor dynasty and grandfather of Queen Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to
1603 and hence during the entire first decade and more of Shakespeare’s
productive career.
The
Shakespearean English history play told of the country’s history at a time when
the English nation was struggling with its own sense of national identity and
experiencing a new sense of power. Queen Elizabeth had brought stability and a
relative freedom from war to her decades of rule. She had held at bay the Roman
Catholic powers of the Continent, notably Philip II of Spain, and, with the
help of a storm at sea, had fought off Philip’s attempts to invade her kingdom
with the great Spanish Armada of 1588. In England the triumph of the nation was
viewed universally as a divine deliverance. The second edition of Holinshed’s
Chronicles was at hand as a vast source for Shakespeare’s historical
playwriting. It, too, celebrated the emergence of England as a major Protestant
power, led by a popular and astute monarch.
From
the perspective of the 1590s, the history of the 15th century also seemed newly
pertinent. England had emerged from a terrible civil war in 1485, with Henry
Tudor’s victory over Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. The chief personages
of these wars, known as the Wars of the Roses—Henry Tudor, Richard III, the
duke of Buckingham, Hastings, Rivers, Gray, and many more—were very familiar to
contemporary English readers.
Because
these historical plays of Shakespeare in the early 1590s were so intent on
telling the saga of emergent nationhood, they exhibit a strong tendency to
identify villains and heroes. Shakespeare is writing dramas, not schoolbook
texts, and he freely alters dates and facts and emphases. Lord Talbot in Henry VI,
Part 1 is a hero because he dies defending English interests against the
corrupt French. In Henry VI, Part 2 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, is cut down
by opportunists because he represents the best interests of the commoners and
the nation as a whole. Most of all, Richard of Gloucester is made out to be a
villain epitomizing the very worst features of a chaotic century of civil
strife. He foments strife, lies, and murders and makes outrageous promises he
has no intention of keeping. He is a brilliantly theatrical figure because he
is so inventive and clever, but he is also deeply threatening. Shakespeare
gives him every defect that popular tradition imagined: a hunchback, a baleful
glittering eye, a conspiratorial genius. The real Richard was no such villain,
it seems; at least, his politically inspired murders were no worse than the
systematic elimination of all opposition by his successor, the historical Henry
VII. The difference is that Henry VII lived to commission historians to tell
the story his way, whereas Richard lost everything through defeat. As founder
of the Tudor dynasty and grandfather of Queen Elizabeth, Henry VII could
command a respect that even Shakespeare was bound to honour, and accordingly
the Henry Tudor that he portrays at the end of Richard III is a God-fearing
patriot and loving husband of the Yorkist princess who is to give birth to the
next generation of Tudor monarchs.
Richard
III is a tremendous play, both in length and in the
bravura depiction of its titular protagonist. It is called a tragedy on its
original title page, as are other of these early English history plays.
Certainly they present us with brutal deaths and with instructive falls of
great men from positions of high authority to degradation and misery. Yet these
plays are not tragedies in the Classical sense of the term. They contain so
much else, and notably they end on a major key: the accession to power of the
Tudor dynasty that will give England its great years under Elizabeth. The story
line is one of suffering and of eventual salvation, of deliverance by mighty
forces of history and of divine oversight that will not allow England to
continue to suffer once she has returned to the true path of duty and decency.
In this important sense, the early history plays are like tragicomedies or
romances.
The
poems of William Shakespeare
Shakespeare
seems to have wanted to be a poet as much as he sought to succeed in the
theatre. His plays are wonderfully and poetically written, often in blank
verse. And when he experienced a pause in his theatrical career about 1592–94,
the plague having closed down much theatrical activity, he wrote poems. Venus
and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) are the only works that
Shakespeare seems to have shepherded through the printing process. Both owe a
good deal to Ovid, the Classical poet whose writings Shakespeare encountered
repeatedly in school. These two poems are the only works for which he wrote
dedicatory prefaces. Both are to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. This
young man, a favourite at court, seems to have encouraged Shakespeare and to
have served for a brief time at least as his sponsor. The dedication to the
second poem is measurably warmer than the first. An unreliable tradition
supposes that Southampton gave Shakespeare the stake he needed to buy into the
newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s acting company in 1594. Shakespeare became an
actor-sharer, one of the owners in a capitalist enterprise that shared the
risks and the gains among them. This company succeeded brilliantly; Shakespeare
and his colleagues, including Richard Burbage, John Heminge, Henry Condell, and
Will Sly, became wealthy through their dramatic presentations.
Shakespeare
may also have written at least some of his sonnets to Southampton, beginning in
these same years of 1593–94 and continuing on through the decade and later. The
question of autobiographical basis in the sonnets is much debated, but
Southampton at least fits the portrait of a young gentleman who is being urged
to marry and produce a family. (Southampton’s family was eager that he do just
this.) Whether the account of a strong, loving relationship between the poet
and his gentleman friend is autobiographical is more difficult still to
determine. As a narrative, the sonnet sequence tells of strong attachment, of
jealousy, of grief at separation, of joy at being together and sharing
beautiful experiences. The emphasis on the importance of poetry as a way of
eternizing human achievement and of creating a lasting memory for the poet
himself is appropriate to a friendship between a poet of modest social station
and a friend who is better-born. When the sonnet sequence introduces the
so-called “Dark Lady,” the narrative becomes one of painful and destructive
jealousy. Scholars do not know the order in which the sonnets were
composed—Shakespeare seems to have had no part in publishing them—but no order
other than the order of publication has been proposed, and, as the sonnets
stand, they tell a coherent and disturbing tale. The poet experiences sex as
something that fills him with revulsion and remorse, at least in the lustful
circumstances in which he encounters it. His attachment to the young man is a
love relationship that sustains him at times more than the love of the Dark
Lady can do, and yet this loving friendship also dooms the poet to
disappointment and self-hatred. Whether the sequence reflects any circumstances
in Shakespeare’s personal life, it certainly is told with an immediacy and
dramatic power that bespeak an extraordinary gift for seeing into the human
heart and its sorrows.
Plays
of the middle and late years
Romantic
comedies
In
the second half of the 1590s, Shakespeare brought to perfection the genre of
romantic comedy that he had helped to invent. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.
1595–96), one of the most successful of all his plays, displays the kind of
multiple plotting he had practiced in The Taming of the Shrew and other earlier
comedies. The overarching plot is of Duke Theseus of Athens and his impending
marriage to an Amazonian warrior, Hippolyta, whom Theseus has recently
conquered and brought back to Athens to be his bride. Their marriage ends the
play. They share this concluding ceremony with the four young lovers Hermia and
Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, who have fled into the forest nearby to escape
the Athenian law and to pursue one another, whereupon they are subjected to a
complicated series of mix-ups. Eventually all is righted by fairy magic, though
the fairies are no less at strife. Oberon, king of the fairies, quarrels with
his Queen Titania over a changeling boy and punishes her by causing her to fall
in love with an Athenian artisan who wears an ass’s head. The artisans are in
the forest to rehearse a play for the forthcoming marriage of Theseus and
Hippolyta. Thus four separate strands or plots interact with one another.
Despite the play’s brevity, it is a masterpiece of artful construction.
The
use of multiple plots encourages a varied treatment of the experiencing of
love. For the two young human couples, falling in love is quite hazardous; the
long-standing friendship between the two young women is threatened and almost
destroyed by the rivalries of heterosexual encounter. The eventual transition
to heterosexual marriage seems to them to have been a process of dreaming,
indeed of nightmare, from which they emerge miraculously restored to their best
selves. Meantime the marital strife of Oberon and Titania is, more
disturbingly, one in which the female is humiliated until she submits to the
will of her husband. Similarly, Hippolyta is an Amazon warrior queen who has
had to submit to the authority of a husband. Fathers and daughters are no less
at strife until, as in a dream, all is resolved by the magic of Puck and
Oberon. Love is ambivalently both an enduring ideal relationship and a struggle
for mastery in which the male has the upper hand.
The
Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97) uses a
double plot structure to contrast a tale of romantic wooing with one that comes
close to tragedy. Portia is a fine example of a romantic heroine in
Shakespeare’s mature comedies: she is witty, rich, exacting in what she expects
of men, and adept at putting herself in a male disguise to make her presence
felt. She is loyally obedient to her father’s will and yet determined that she
shall have Bassanio. She triumphantly resolves the murky legal affairs of
Venice when the men have all failed. Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, is at the
point of exacting a pound of flesh from Bassanio’s friend Antonio as payment
for a forfeited loan. Portia foils him in his attempt in a way that is both
clever and shystering. Sympathy is uneasily balanced in Shakespeare’s portrayal
of Shylock, who is both persecuted by his Christian opponents and all too ready
to demand an eye for an eye according to ancient law. Ultimately Portia
triumphs, not only with Shylock in the court of law but in her marriage with
Bassanio.
Much
Ado About Nothing (c. 1598–99) revisits
the issue of power struggles in courtship, again in a revealingly double plot.
The young heroine of the more conventional story, derived from Italianate
fiction, is wooed by a respectable young aristocrat named Claudio who has won
his spurs and now considers it his pleasant duty to take a wife. He knows so
little about Hero (as she is named) that he gullibly credits the contrived
evidence of the play’s villain, Don John, that she has had many lovers,
including one on the evening before the intended wedding. Other men as well,
including Claudio’s senior officer, Don Pedro, and Hero’s father, Leonato, are
all too ready to believe the slanderous accusation. Only comic circumstances
rescue Hero from her accusers and reveal to the men that they have been fools.
Meantime, Hero’s cousin, Beatrice, finds it hard to overcome her skepticism
about men, even when she is wooed by Benedick, who is also a skeptic about
marriage. Here the barriers to romantic understanding are inner and
psychological and must be defeated by the good-natured plotting of their
friends, who see that Beatrice and Benedick are truly made for one another in
their wit and candour if they can only overcome their fear of being outwitted
by each other. In what could be regarded as a brilliant rewriting of The Taming
of the Shrew, the witty battle of the sexes is no less amusing and complicated,
but the eventual accommodation finds something much closer to mutual respect
and equality between men and women.
Rosalind,
in As You Like It (c. 1598–1600), makes use of the by-now familiar
device of disguise as a young man in order to pursue the ends of promoting a rich
and substantial relationship between the sexes. As in other of these plays,
Rosalind is more emotionally stable and mature than her young man, Orlando. He
lacks formal education and is all rough edges, though fundamentally decent and
attractive. She is the daughter of the banished Duke who finds herself obliged,
in turn, to go into banishment with her dear cousin Celia and the court fool,
Touchstone. Although Rosalind’s male disguise is at first a means of survival
in a seemingly inhospitable forest, it soon serves a more interesting function.
As “Ganymede,” Rosalind befriends Orlando, offering him counseling in the
affairs of love. Orlando, much in need of such advice, readily accepts and
proceeds to woo his “Rosalind” (“Ganymede” playing her own self) as though she
were indeed a woman. Her wryly amusing perspectives on the follies of young
love helpfully puncture Orlando’s inflated and unrealistic “Petrarchan” stance
as the young lover who writes poems to his mistress and sticks them up on
trees. Once he has learned that love is not a fantasy of invented attitudes,
Orlando is ready to be the husband of the real young woman (actually a boy
actor, of course) who is presented to him as the transformed Ganymede-Rosalind.
Other figures in the play further an understanding of love’s glorious
foolishness by their various attitudes: Silvius, the pale-faced wooer out of
pastoral romance; Phoebe, the disdainful mistress whom he worships; William,
the country bumpkin, and Audrey, the country wench; and, surveying and
commenting on every imaginable kind of human folly, the clown Touchstone and
the malcontent traveler Jaques.
Twelfth
Night (c. 1600–02) pursues a similar motif of female
disguise. Viola, cast ashore in Illyria by a shipwreck and obliged to disguise
herself as a young man in order to gain a place in the court of Duke Orsino,
falls in love with the duke and uses her disguise as a cover for an educational
process not unlike that given by Rosalind to Orlando. Orsino is as unrealistic
a lover as one could hope to imagine; he pays fruitless court to the Countess
Olivia and seems content with the unproductive love melancholy in which he
wallows. Only Viola, as “Cesario,” is able to awaken in him a genuine feeling
for friendship and love. They become inseparable companions and then seeming
rivals for the hand of Olivia until the presto change of Shakespeare’s stage
magic is able to restore “Cesario” to her woman’s garments and thus present to
Orsino the flesh-and-blood woman whom he has only distantly imagined. The
transition from same-sex friendship to heterosexual union is a constant in
Shakespearean comedy. The woman is the self-knowing, constant, loyal one; the
man needs to learn a lot from the woman. As in the other plays as well, Twelfth
Night neatly plays off this courtship theme with a second plot, of Malvolio’s
self-deception that he is desired by Olivia—an illusion that can be addressed
only by the satirical devices of exposure and humiliation.
The
Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–1601) is an
interesting deviation from the usual Shakespearean romantic comedy in that it
is set not in some imagined far-off place like Illyria or Belmont or the forest
of Athens but in Windsor, a solidly bourgeois village near Windsor Castle in
the heart of England. Uncertain tradition has it that Queen Elizabeth wanted to
see Falstaff in love. There is little, however, in the way of romantic wooing
(the story of Anne Page and her suitor Fenton is rather buried in the midst of
so many other goings-on), but the play’s portrayal of women, and especially of
the two “merry wives,” Mistress Alice Ford and Mistress Margaret Page,
reaffirms what is so often true of women in these early plays, that they are
good-hearted, chastely loyal, and wittily self-possessed. Falstaff, a suitable
butt for their cleverness, is a scapegoat figure who must be publicly
humiliated as a way of transferring onto him the human frailties that Windsor
society wishes to expunge.
Completion
of the histories
Concurrent
with his writing of these fine romantic comedies, Shakespeare also brought to
completion (for the time being, at least) his project of writing 15th-century
English history. After having finished in 1589–94 the tetralogy about Henry VI,
Edward IV, and Richard III, bringing the story down to 1485, and then circa
1594–96 a play about John that deals with a chronological period (the 13th
century) that sets it quite apart from his other history plays, Shakespeare
turned to the late 14th and early 15th centuries and to the chronicle of
Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry’s legendary son Henry V. This inversion of
historical order in the two tetralogies allowed Shakespeare to finish his sweep
of late medieval English history with Henry V, a hero king in a way that
Richard III could never pretend to be.
Richard
II (c. 1595–96), written throughout in blank verse, is
a sombre play about political impasse. It contains almost no humour, other than
a wry scene in which the new king, Henry IV, must adjudicate the competing
claims of the Duke of York and his Duchess, the first of whom wishes to see his
son Aumerle executed for treason and the second of whom begs for mercy. Henry
is able to be merciful on this occasion, since he has now won the kingship, and
thus gives to this scene an upbeat movement. Earlier, however, the mood is
grim. Richard, installed at an early age into the kingship, proves
irresponsible as a ruler. He unfairly banishes his own first cousin, Henry
Bolingbroke (later to be Henry IV), whereas the king himself appears to be
guilty of ordering the murder of an uncle. When Richard keeps the dukedom of
Lancaster from Bolingbroke without proper legal authority, he manages to
alienate many nobles and to encourage Bolingbroke’s return from exile. That
return, too, is illegal, but it is a fact, and, when several of the nobles
(including York) come over to Bolingbroke’s side, Richard is forced to
abdicate. The rights and wrongs of this power struggle are masterfully
ambiguous. History proceeds without any sense of moral imperative. Henry IV is
a more capable ruler, but his authority is tarnished by his crimes (including
his seeming assent to the execution of Richard), and his own rebellion appears
to teach the barons to rebel against him in turn. Henry eventually dies a
disappointed man.
The
dying king Henry IV must turn royal authority over to young Hal, or Henry, now
Henry V. The prospect is dismal both to the dying king and to the members of
his court, for Prince Hal has distinguished himself to this point mainly by his
penchant for keeping company with the disreputable if engaging Falstaff. The
son’s attempts at reconciliation with the father succeed temporarily,
especially when Hal saves his father’s life at the battle of Shrewsbury, but
(especially in Henry IV, Part 2) his reputation as wastrel will not leave him.
Everyone expects from him a reign of irresponsible license, with Falstaff in an
influential position. It is for these reasons that the young king must publicly
repudiate his old companion of the tavern and the highway, however much that
repudiation tugs at his heart and the audience’s. Falstaff, for all his
debauchery and irresponsibility, is infectiously amusing and delightful; he
represents in Hal a spirit of youthful vitality that is left behind only with
the greatest of regret as the young man assumes manhood and the role of crown
prince. Hal manages all this with aplomb and goes on to defeat the French
mightily at the Battle of Agincourt. Even his high jinks are a part of what is
so attractive in him. Maturity and position come at a great personal cost: Hal
becomes less a frail human being and more the figure of royal authority.
Thus,
in his plays of the 1590s, the young Shakespeare concentrated to a remarkable
extent on romantic comedies and English history plays. The two genres are
nicely complementary: the one deals with courtship and marriage, while the
other examines the career of a young man growing up to be a worthy king. Only
at the end of the history plays does Henry V have any kind of romantic
relationship with a woman, and this one instance is quite unlike courtships in
the romantic comedies: Hal is given the Princess of France as his prize, his
reward for sturdy manhood. He takes the lead in the wooing scene in which he
invites her to join him in a political marriage. In both romantic comedies and
English history plays, a young man successfully negotiates the hazardous and
potentially rewarding paths of sexual and social maturation.
Romeo and Juliet
Apart
from the early Titus Andronicus, the only other play that Shakespeare wrote prior
to 1599 that is classified as a tragedy is Romeo and Juliet (c.
1594–96), which is quite untypical of the tragedies that are to follow. Written
more or less at the time when Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, Romeo and Juliet shares many of the characteristics of romantic comedy.
Romeo and Juliet are not persons of extraordinary social rank or position, like
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. They are the boy and girl next door,
interesting not for their philosophical ideas but for their appealing love for
each other. They are character types more suited to Classical comedy in that
they do not derive from the upper class. Their wealthy families are essentially
bourgeois. The eagerness with which Capulet and his wife court Count Paris as
their prospective son-in-law bespeaks their desire for social advancement.
Accordingly,
the first half of Romeo and Juliet is very funny, while its delight in verse
forms reminds us of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The bawdry of Mercutio and of
the Nurse is richly suited to the comic texture of the opening scenes. Romeo,
haplessly in love with a Rosaline whom we never meet, is a partly comic figure
like Silvius in As You Like It. The plucky and self-knowing Juliet is much like
the heroines of romantic comedies. She is able to instruct Romeo in the ways of
speaking candidly and unaffectedly about their love rather than in the frayed
cadences of the Petrarchan wooer.
The
play is ultimately a tragedy, of course, and indeed warns its audience at the
start that the lovers are “star-crossed.” Yet the tragic vision is not remotely
that of Hamlet or King Lear. Romeo and Juliet are unremarkable, nice young
people doomed by a host of considerations outside themselves: the enmity of
their two families, the misunderstandings that prevent Juliet from being able
to tell her parents whom it is that she has married, and even unfortunate
coincidence (such as the misdirection of the letter sent to Romeo to warn him
of the Friar’s plan for Juliet’s recovery from a deathlike sleep). Yet there is
the element of personal responsibility upon which most mature tragedy rests
when Romeo chooses to avenge the death of Mercutio by killing Tybalt, knowing
that this deed will undo the soft graces of forbearance that Juliet has taught
him. Romeo succumbs to the macho peer pressure of his male companions, and
tragedy results in part from this choice. Yet so much is at work that the
reader ultimately sees Romeo and Juliet as a love tragedy—celebrating the
exquisite brevity of young love, regretting an unfeeling world, and evoking an
emotional response that differs from that produced by the other tragedies.
Romeo and Juliet are, at last, “Poor sacrifices of our enmity” (Act V, scene 3,
line 304). The emotional response the play evokes is a strong one, but it is
not like the response called forth by the tragedies after 1599.
The
“problem” plays
Whatever
his reasons, about 1599–1600 Shakespeare turned with unsparing intensity to the
exploration of darker issues such as revenge, sexual jealousy, aging, midlife
crisis, and death. Perhaps he saw that his own life was moving into a new phase
of more complex and vexing experiences. Perhaps he felt, or sensed, that he had
worked through the romantic comedy and history play and the emotional
trajectories of maturation that they encompassed. At any event, he began
writing not only his great tragedies but a group of plays that are hard to
classify in terms of genre. They are sometimes grouped today as “problem” plays
or “problem” comedies. An examination of these plays is crucial to
understanding this period of transition from 1599 to 1605.
The
three problem plays dating from these years are All’s Well That Ends Well,
Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. All’s Well is a comedy ending in
acceptance of marriage, but in a way that poses thorny ethical issues. Count
Bertram cannot initially accept his marriage to Helena, a woman of lower social
station who has grown up in his noble household and has won Bertram as her
husband by her seemingly miraculous cure of the French king. Bertram’s
reluctance to face the responsibilities of marriage is all the more dismaying
when he turns his amorous intentions to a Florentine maiden, Diana, whom he
wishes to seduce without marriage. Helena’s stratagem to resolve this
difficulty is the so-called bed trick, substituting herself in Bertram’s bed
for the arranged assignation and then calling her wayward husband to account
when she is pregnant with his child. Her ends are achieved by such morally
ambiguous means that marriage seems at best a precarious institution on which
to base the presumed reassurances of romantic comedy. The pathway toward
resolution and emotional maturity is not easy; Helena is a more ambiguous
heroine than Rosalind or Viola.
Measure
for Measure (c. 1603–04) similarly employs the bed trick, and
for a similar purpose, though in even murkier circumstances. Isabella, on the
verge of becoming a nun, learns that she has attracted the sexual desire of
Lord Angelo, the deputy ruler of Vienna serving in the mysterious absence of
the Duke. Her plea to Angelo for her brother’s life, when that brother
(Claudio) has been sentenced to die for fornication with his fiancée, is met
with a demand that she sleep with Angelo or forfeit Claudio’s life. This
ethical dilemma is resolved by a trick (devised by the Duke, in disguise) to
substitute for Isabella a woman (Mariana) whom Angelo was supposed to marry but
refused when she could produce no dowry. The Duke’s motivations in manipulating
these substitutions and false appearances are unclear, though arguably his wish
is to see what the various characters of this play will do when faced with
seemingly impossible choices. Angelo is revealed as a morally fallen man, a
would-be seducer and murderer who is nonetheless remorseful and ultimately glad
to have been prevented from carrying out his intended crimes; Claudio learns
that he is coward enough to wish to live by any means, including the emotional
and physical blackmail of his sister; and Isabella learns that she is capable
of bitterness and hatred, even if, crucially, she finally discovers that she
can and must forgive her enemy. Her charity, and the Duke’s stratagems, make
possible an ending in forgiveness and marriage, but in that process the nature
and meaning of marriage are severely tested.
Troilus
and Cressida (c. 1601–02) is the most experimental and puzzling
of these three plays. Simply in terms of genre, it is virtually unclassifiable.
It can hardly be a comedy, ending as it does in the deaths of Patroclus and
Hector and the looming defeat of the Trojans. Nor is the ending normative in
terms of romantic comedy: the lovers, Troilus and Cressida, are separated from
one another and embittered by the failure of their relationship. The play is a
history play in a sense, dealing as it does with the great Trojan War
celebrated in Homer’s Iliad, and yet its purpose is hardly that of telling the
story of the war. As a tragedy, it is perplexing in that the chief figures of
the play (apart from Hector) do not die at the end, and the mood is one of
desolation and even disgust rather than tragic catharsis. Perhaps the play
should be thought of as a satire; the choric observations of Thersites and
Pandarus serve throughout as a mordant commentary on the interconnectedness of
war and lechery. With fitting ambiguity, the play was placed in the Folio of
1623 between the histories and the tragedies, in a category all by itself.
Clearly, in these problem plays Shakespeare was opening up for himself a host
of new problems in terms of genre and human sexuality.
Julius
Caesar
Written
in 1599 (the same year as Henry V) or 1600, probably for the opening of the
Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames, Julius Caesar illustrates
similarly the transition in Shakespeare’s writing toward darker themes and
tragedy. It, too, is a history play in a sense, dealing with a non-Christian
civilization existing 16 centuries before Shakespeare wrote his plays. Roman
history opened up for Shakespeare a world in which divine purpose could not be
easily ascertained. (Click here for a video clip of Caesar’s well-known
speech.) The characters of Julius Caesar variously interpret the great event of
the assassination of Caesar as one in which the gods are angry or disinterested
or capricious or simply not there. The wise Cicero observes, “Men may construe
things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves”
(Act I, scene 3, lines 34–35).
Human
history in Julius Caesar seems to follow a pattern of rise and fall, in a way
that is cyclical rather than divinely purposeful. Caesar enjoys his days of
triumph, until he is cut down by the conspirators; Brutus and Cassius succeed
to power, but not for long. Brutus’s attempts to protect Roman republicanism
and the freedom of the city’s citizens to govern themselves through senatorial
tradition end up in the destruction of the very liberties he most cherished. He
and Cassius meet their destiny at the Battle of Philippi. They are truly tragic
figures, especially Brutus, in that their essential characters are their fate;
Brutus is a good man but also proud and stubborn, and these latter qualities
ultimately bring about his death. Shakespeare’s first major tragedy is Roman in
spirit and Classical in its notion of tragic character. It shows what Shakespeare
had to learn from Classical precedent as he set about looking for workable
models in tragedy.
The
tragedies
Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), on the other hand, chooses a tragic model
closer to that of Titus Andronicus and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. In form,
Hamlet is a revenge tragedy. It features characteristics found in Titus as
well: a protagonist charged with the responsibility of avenging a heinous crime
against the protagonist’s family, a cunning antagonist, the appearance of the
ghost of the murdered person, the feigning of madness to throw off the
villain’s suspicions, the play within the play as a means of testing the
villain, and still more.
Yet
to search out these comparisons is to highlight what is so extraordinary about
Hamlet, for it refuses to be merely a revenge tragedy. Shakespeare’s
protagonist is unique in the genre in his moral qualms, and most of all in his
finding a way to carry out his dread command without becoming a cold-blooded
murderer. Hamlet does act bloodily, especially when he kills Polonius, thinking
that the old man hidden in Gertrude’s chambers must be the King whom Hamlet is
commissioned to kill. The act seems plausible and strongly motivated, and yet
Hamlet sees at once that he has erred. He has killed the wrong man, even if
Polonius has brought this on himself with his incessant spying. Hamlet sees
that he has offended heaven and that he will have to pay for his act. When, at
the play’s end, Hamlet encounters his fate in a duel with Polonius’s son,
Laertes, Hamlet interprets his own tragic story as one that Providence has made
meaningful. By placing himself in the hands of Providence and believing
devoutly that “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we
will” (Act V, scene 2, lines 10–11), Hamlet finds himself ready for a death
that he has longed for. He also finds an opportunity for killing Claudius
almost unpremeditatedly, spontaneously, as an act of reprisal for all that
Claudius has done.
Hamlet
thus finds tragic meaning in his own story. More broadly, too, he has searched
for meaning in dilemmas of all sorts: his mother’s overhasty marriage,
Ophelia’s weak-willed succumbing to the will of her father and brother, his
being spied on by his erstwhile friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and much
more. His utterances are often despondent, relentlessly honest, and
philosophically profound, as he ponders the nature of friendship, memory,
romantic attachment, filial love, sensuous enslavement, corrupting habits
(drinking, sexual lust), and almost every phase of human experience.
One
remarkable aspect about Shakespeare’s great tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King
Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra most of all) is that they proceed
through such a staggering range of human emotions, and especially the emotions
that are appropriate to the mature years of the human cycle. Hamlet is 30, one
learns—an age when a person is apt to perceive that the world around him is “an
unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature / Possess
it merely” (Act I, scene 2, lines 135–137). Shakespeare was about 36 when he
wrote this play. Othello (c. 1603–04) centres on sexual jealousy in marriage.
King Lear (c. 1605–06) is about aging, generational conflict, and feelings of
ingratitude. Macbeth (c. 1606–07) explores ambition mad enough to kill a father
figure who stands in the way. Antony and Cleopatra, written about
1606–07 when Shakespeare was 42 or thereabouts, studies the exhilarating but
ultimately dismaying phenomenon of midlife crisis. Shakespeare moves his
readers vicariously through these life experiences while he himself struggles
to capture, in tragic form, their terrors and challenges.
These
plays are deeply concerned with domestic and family relationships. In Othello
Desdemona is the only daughter of Brabantio, an aging senator of Venice, who
dies heartbroken because his daughter has eloped with a dark-skinned man who is
her senior by many years and is of another culture. With Othello, Desdemona is
briefly happy, despite her filial disobedience, until a terrible sexual
jealousy is awakened in him, quite without cause other than his own fears and
susceptibility to Iago’s insinuations that it is only “natural” for Desdemona
to seek erotic pleasure with a young man who shares her background. Driven by
his own deeply irrational fear and hatred of women and seemingly mistrustful of
his own masculinity, Iago can assuage his own inner torment only by persuading
other men like Othello that their inevitable fate is to be cuckolded. As a
tragedy, the play adroitly exemplifies the traditional Classical model of a
good man brought to misfortune by hamartia, or tragic flaw; as Othello grieves,
he is one who has “loved not wisely, but too well” (Act V, scene 2, line 354).
It bears remembering, however, that Shakespeare owed no loyalty to this
Classical model. Hamlet, for one, is a play that does not work well in
Aristotelian terms. The search for an Aristotelian hamartia has led all too
often to the trite argument that Hamlet suffers from melancholia and a tragic
inability to act, whereas a more plausible reading of the play argues that
finding the right course of action is highly problematic for him and for
everyone. Hamlet sees examples on all sides of those whose forthright actions
lead to fatal mistakes or absurd ironies (Laertes, Fortinbras), and indeed his
own swift killing of the man he assumes to be Claudius hidden in his mother’s
chambers turns out to be a mistake for which he realizes heaven will hold him
accountable.
Daughters
and fathers are also at the heart of the major dilemma in King Lear. In this
configuration, Shakespeare does what he often does in his late plays: erase the
wife from the picture, so that father and daughter(s) are left to deal with one
another. (Compare Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, and
perhaps the circumstances of Shakespeare’s own life, in which his relations
with his daughter Susanna especially seem to have meant more to him than his
partly estranged marriage with Anne.) Lear’s banishing of his favourite
daughter, Cordelia, because of her laconic refusal to proclaim a love for him
as the essence of her being, brings upon this aging king the terrible
punishment of being belittled and rejected by his ungrateful daughters, Goneril
and Regan. Concurrently, in the play’s second plot, the Earl of Gloucester
makes a similar mistake with his good-hearted son, Edgar, and thereby delivers
himself into the hands of his scheming illegitimate son, Edmund. Both these
erring elderly fathers are ultimately nurtured by the loyal children they have
banished, but not before the play has tested to its absolute limit the
proposition that evil can flourish in a bad world.
The
gods seem indifferent, perhaps absent entirely; pleas to them for assistance go
unheeded while the storm of fortune rains down on the heads of those who have
trusted in conventional pieties. Part of what is so great in this play is that
its testing of the major characters requires them to seek out philosophical
answers that can arm the resolute heart against ingratitude and misfortune by
constantly pointing out that life owes one nothing. The consolations of
philosophy preciously found out by Edgar and Cordelia are those that rely not
on the suppositious gods but on an inner moral strength demanding that one be
charitable and honest because life is otherwise monstrous and subhuman. The
play exacts terrible prices of those who persevere in goodness, but it leaves
them and the reader, or audience, with the reassurance that it is simply better
to be a Cordelia than to be a Goneril, to be an Edgar than to be an Edmund.
Macbeth is in some ways Shakespeare’s most unsettling tragedy, because
it invites the intense examination of the heart of a man who is
well-intentioned in most ways but who discovers that he cannot resist the
temptation to achieve power at any cost. Macbeth is a sensitive, even poetic
person, and as such he understands with frightening clarity the stakes that are
involved in his contemplated deed of murder. Duncan is a virtuous king and his
guest. The deed is regicide and murder and a violation of the sacred
obligations of hospitality. Macbeth knows that Duncan’s virtues, like angels,
“trumpet-tongued,” will plead against “the deep damnation of his taking-off”
(Act I, scene 7, lines 19–20). The only factor weighing on the other side is
personal ambition, which Macbeth understands to be a moral failing. The
question of why he proceeds to murder is partly answered by the insidious
temptations of the three Weird Sisters, who sense Macbeth’s vulnerability to
their prophecies, and the terrifying strength of his wife, who drives him on to
the murder by describing his reluctance as unmanliness. Ultimately, though, the
responsibility lies with Macbeth. His collapse of moral integrity confronts the
audience and perhaps implicates it. The loyalty and decency of such characters
as Macduff hardly offset what is so painfully weak in the play’s protagonist.
Antony
and Cleopatra approaches human frailty in terms that are less spiritually
terrifying. The story of the lovers is certainly one of worldly failure.
Plutarch’s Lives gave to Shakespeare the object lesson of a brave general who
lost his reputation and sense of self-worth through his infatuation with an
admittedly attractive but nonetheless dangerous woman. Shakespeare changes none
of the circumstances: Antony hates himself for dallying in Egypt with
Cleopatra, agrees to marry with Octavius Caesar’s sister Octavia as a way of
recovering his status in the Roman triumvirate, cheats on Octavia eventually,
loses the battle of Actium because of his fatal attraction for Cleopatra, and
dies in Egypt a defeated, aging warrior. Shakespeare adds to this narrative a
compelling portrait of midlife crisis. Antony is deeply anxious about his loss
of sexual potency and position in the world of affairs. His amorous life in
Egypt is manifestly an attempt to affirm and recover his dwindling male power.
Yet
the Roman model is not in Shakespeare’s play the unassailably virtuous choice
that it is in Plutarch. In Antony and Cleopatra Roman behaviour does promote
attentiveness to duty and worldly achievement, but, as embodied in young
Octavius, it is also obsessively male and cynical about women. Octavius is
intent on capturing Cleopatra and leading her in triumph back to Rome—that is,
to cage the unruly woman and place her under male control. When Cleopatra
perceives that aim, she chooses a noble suicide rather than humiliation by a
patriarchal male. In her suicide, Cleopatra avers that she has called “great
Caesar ass / Unpolicied” (Act V, scene 2, lines 307–308). Vastly to be
preferred is the fleeting dream of greatness with Antony, both of them
unfettered, godlike, like Isis and Osiris, immortalized as heroic lovers even
if the actual circumstances of their lives were often disappointing and even
tawdry. The vision in this tragedy is deliberately unstable, but at its most
ethereal it encourages a vision of human greatness that is distant from the
soul-corrupting evil of Macbeth or King Lear.
Two
late tragedies also choose the ancient Classical world as their setting but do
so in a deeply dispiriting way. Shakespeare appears to have been much
preoccupied with ingratitude and human greed in these years. Timon of Athens
(c. 1605–08), probably an unfinished play and possibly never produced,
initially shows us a prosperous man fabled for his generosity. When he
discovers that he has exceeded his means, he turns to his seeming friends for
the kinds of assistance he has given them, only to discover that their memories
are short. Retiring to a bitter isolation, Timon rails against all humanity and
refuses every sort of consolation, even that of well-meant companionship and
sympathy from a former servant. He dies in isolation. The unrelieved bitterness
of this account is only partly ameliorated by the story of the military captain
Alcibiades, who has also been the subject of Athenian ingratitude and
forgetfulness but who manages to reassert his authority at the end. Alcibiades
resolves to make some accommodation with the wretched condition of humanity;
Timon will have none of it. Seldom has a more unrelievedly embittered play been
written.
Coriolanus (c. 1608) similarly portrays the ungrateful responses of a city
toward its military hero. The problem is complicated by the fact that
Coriolanus, egged on by his mother and his conservative allies, undertakes a
political role in Rome for which he is not temperamentally fitted. His friends
urge him to hold off his intemperate speech until he is voted into office, but
Coriolanus is too plainspoken to be tactful in this way. His contempt for the
plebeians and their political leaders, the tribunes, is unsparing. His
political philosophy, while relentlessly aristocratic and snobbish, is
consistent and theoretically sophisticated; the citizens are, as he argues,
incapable of governing themselves judiciously. Yet his fury only makes matters
worse and leads to an exile from which he returns to conquer his own city, in
league with his old enemy and friend, Aufidius. When his mother comes out for
the city to plead for her life and that of other Romans, he relents and
thereupon falls into defeat as a kind of mother’s boy, unable to assert his own
sense of self. As a tragedy, Coriolanus is again bitter, satirical, ending in defeat
and humiliation. It is an immensely powerful play, and it captures a
philosophical mood of nihilism and bitterness that hovers over Shakespeare’s
writings throughout these years in the first decade of the 1600s.
The
romances
Concurrently,
nonetheless, and then in the years that followed, Shakespeare turned again to
the writing of comedy. The late comedies are usually called romances or
tragicomedies because they tell stories of wandering and separation leading
eventually to tearful and joyous reunion. They are suffused with a bittersweet
mood that seems eloquently appropriate to a writer who has explored with such
unsparing honesty the depths of human suffering and degradation in the great
tragedies.
Pericles, written perhaps in 1606–08 and based on the familiar tale of
Apollonius of Tyre, may involve some collaboration of authorship; the text is
unusually imperfect, and it did not appear in the Folio of 1623. It employs a
chorus figure, John Gower (author of an earlier version of this story), to
guide the reader or viewer around the Mediterranean on Pericles’ various
travels, as he avoids marriage with the daughter of the incestuous King
Antiochus of Antioch; marries Thaisa, the daughter of King Simonides of
Pentapolis; has a child by her; believes his wife to have died in childbirth
during a storm at sea and has her body thrown overboard to quiet the
superstitious fears of the sailors; puts his daughter Marina in the care of
Cleon of Tarsus and his wicked wife, Dionyza; and is eventually restored to his
wife and child after many years. The story is typical romance. Shakespeare adds
touching scenes of reunion and a perception that beneath the naive account of
travel lies a subtle dramatization of separation, loss, and recovery. Pericles
is deeply burdened by his loss and perhaps, too, a sense of guilt for having
consented to consign his wife’s body to the sea. He is recovered from his
despair only by the ministrations of a loving daughter, who is able to give him
a reason to live again and then to be reunited with his wife.
The
Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11) is in some ways a replaying of this
same story, in that King Leontes of Sicilia, smitten by an irrational jealousy
of his wife, Hermione, brings about the seeming death of that wife and the real
death of their son. The resulting guilt is unbearable for Leontes and yet
ultimately curative over a period of many years that are required for his only
daughter, Perdita (whom he has nearly killed also), to grow to maturity in
distant Bohemia. This story, too, is based on a prose romance, in this case
Robert Greene’s Pandosto. The reunion with daughter and then wife is deeply
touching as in Pericles, with the added magical touch that the audience does
not know that Hermione is alive and in fact has been told that she is dead. Her
wonderfully staged appearance as a statue coming to life is one of the great
theatrical coups in Shakespeare, playing as it does with favourite
Shakespearean themes in these late plays of the ministering daughter, the
guilt-ridden husband, and the miraculously recovered wife. The story is all the
more moving when one considers that Shakespeare may have had, or imagined, a
similar experience of attempting to recover a relationship with his wife, Anne,
whom he had left in Stratford during his many years in London.
In
Cymbeline (c. 1608–10) King Cymbeline drives his virtuous daughter
Imogen into exile by his opposition to her marriage with Posthumus Leonatus.
The wife in this case is Cymbeline’s baleful Queen, a stereotypical wicked stepmother
whose witless and lecherous son Cloten (Imogen’s half brother) is the
embodiment of everything that threatens and postpones the eventual happy ending
of this tale. Posthumus, too, fails Imogen by being irrationally jealous of
her, but he is eventually recovered to a belief in her goodness. The dark
portraiture of the Queen illustrates how ambivalent is Shakespeare’s view of
the mother in his late plays. This Queen is the wicked stepmother, like Dionyza
in Pericles; in her relentless desire for control, she also brings to mind Lady
Macbeth and the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, as well as Coriolanus’s mother,
Volumnia. The devouring mother is a forbidding presence in the late plays,
though she is counterbalanced by redeeming maternal figures such as Hermione in
The Winter’s Tale and Thaisa in Pericles.
The
Tempest (c. 1611) sums up much of what Shakespeare’s mature
art was all about. Once again we find a wifeless father with a daughter, in
this case on a deserted island where the father, Prospero, is entirely
responsible for his daughter’s education. He behaves like a dramatist in charge
of the whole play as well, arranging her life and that of the other characters.
He employs a storm at sea to bring young Ferdinand into the company of his
daughter; Ferdinand is Prospero’s choice, because such a marriage will resolve
the bitter dispute between Milan and Naples—arising after the latter supported
Prospero’s usurping brother Antonio in his claim to the dukedom of Milan—that
has led to Prospero’s banishment. At the same time, Ferdinand is certainly
Miranda’s choice as well; the two fall instantly in love, anticipating the
desired romantic happy ending. The ending will also mean an end to Prospero’s
career as artist and dramatist, for he is nearing retirement and senses that
his gift will not stay with him forever. The imprisoned spirit Ariel,
embodiment of that temporary and precious gift, must be freed in the play’s
closing moments. Caliban, too, must be freed, since Prospero has done what he
could to educate and civilize this Natural Man. Art can only go so far.
The
Tempest seems to have been intended as Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre.
It contains moving passages of reflection on what his powers as artist have
been able to accomplish, and valedictory themes of closure. As a comedy, it
demonstrates perfectly the way that Shakespeare was able to combine precise
artistic construction (the play chooses on this farewell occasion to observe
the Classical unities of time, place, and action) with his special flair for
stories that transcend the merely human and physical: The Tempest is peopled
with spirits, monsters, and drolleries. This, it seems, is Shakespeare’s
summation of his art as comic dramatist.
But
The Tempest proved not to be Shakespeare’s last play after all. Perhaps he
discovered, as many people do, that he was bored in retirement in 1613 or
thereabouts. No doubt his acting company was eager to have him back. He wrote a
history play titled Henry VIII (1613), which is extraordinary in a number of
ways: it relates historical events substantially later chronologically than
those of the 15th century that had been his subject in his earlier historical
plays; it is separated from the last of those plays by perhaps 14 years; and,
perhaps most significant, it is as much romance as history play. History in
this instance is really about the birth of Elizabeth I, who was to become
England’s great queen. The circumstances of Henry VIII’s troubled marital
affairs, his meeting with Anne Boleyn, his confrontation with the papacy, and
all the rest turn out to be the humanly unpredictable ways by which Providence
engineers the miracle of Elizabeth’s birth. The play ends with this great event
and sees in it a justification and necessity of all that has proceeded. Thus
history yields its providential meaning in the shape of a play that is both
history and romance.
Collaborations
and spurious attributions
The
Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1612–14) brought
Shakespeare into collaboration with John Fletcher, his successor as chief
playwright for the King’s Men. (Fletcher is thought to have helped Shakespeare
with Henry VIII, and the two playwrights also may well have written the
now-lost Cardenio in 1613, of which Double Falsehood, 1727, purports to be a
later adaptation.) The story, taken out of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, is
essentially another romance, in which two young gallants compete for the hand
of Emilia and in which deities preside over the choice. Shakespeare may have
had a hand earlier as well in Edward III, a history play of about 1590–95, and
he seems to have provided a scene or so for The Book of Sir Thomas More (c.
1593–1601) when that play encountered trouble with the censor. Collaborative
writing was common in the Renaissance English stage, and it is not surprising
that Shakespeare was called upon to do some of it. Nor is it surprising that,
given his towering reputation, he was credited with having written a number of
plays that he had nothing to do with, including those that were spuriously
added to the third edition of the Folio in 1664: Locrine (1591–95), Sir John
Oldcastle (1599–1600), Thomas Lord Cromwell (1599–1602), The London Prodigal
(1603–05), The Puritan (1606), and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1605–08). To a
remarkable extent, nonetheless, his corpus stands as a coherent body of his own
work. The shape of the career has a symmetry and internal beauty not unlike
that of the individual plays and poems.
Shakespeare’s
sources
With
a few exceptions, Shakespeare did not invent the plots of his plays. Sometimes
he used old stories (Hamlet, Pericles). Sometimes he worked from the stories of
comparatively recent Italian writers, such as Giovanni Boccaccio—using both
well-known stories (Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing) and little-known
ones (Othello). He used the popular prose fictions of his contemporaries in As
You Like It and The Winter’s Tale. In writing his historical plays, he drew
largely from Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble
Grecians and Romans for the Roman plays and the chronicles of Edward Hall and
Holinshed for the plays based upon English history. Some plays deal with rather
remote and legendary history (King Lear, Cymbeline, Macbeth). Earlier
dramatists had occasionally used the same material (there were, for example,
the earlier plays called The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth and King
Leir). But, because many plays of Shakespeare’s time have been lost, it is
impossible to be sure of the relation between an earlier, lost play and
Shakespeare’s surviving one: in the case of Hamlet it has been plausibly argued
that an “old play,” known to have existed, was merely an early version of
Shakespeare’s own.
Shakespeare
was probably too busy for prolonged study. He had to read what books he could,
when he needed them. His enormous vocabulary could only be derived from a mind
of great celerity, responding to the literary as well as the spoken language.
It is not known what libraries were available to him. The Huguenot family of
Mountjoys, with whom he lodged in London, presumably possessed French books.
Moreover, he seems to have enjoyed an interesting connection with the London
book trade. The Richard Field who published Shakespeare’s two poems Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, in 1593–94, seems to have been (as an
apprenticeship record describes him) the “son of Henry Field of
Stratford-upon-Avon in the County of Warwick, tanner.” When Henry Field the
tanner died in 1592, John Shakespeare the glover was one of the three appointed
to value his goods and chattels. Field’s son, bound apprentice in 1579, was
probably about the same age as Shakespeare. From 1587 he steadily established
himself as a printer of serious literature—notably of North’s translation of
Plutarch (1595, reprinted in 1603 and 1610). There is no direct evidence of any
close friendship between Field and Shakespeare. Still, it cannot escape notice
that one of the important printer-publishers in London at the time was an exact
contemporary of Shakespeare at Stratford, that he can hardly have been other
than a schoolmate, that he was the son of a close associate of John
Shakespeare, and that he published Shakespeare’s first poems. Clearly, a
considerable number of literary contacts were available to Shakespeare, and
many books were accessible.
That
Shakespeare’s plays had “sources” was already apparent in his own time. An
interesting contemporary description of a performance is to be found in the
diary of a young lawyer of the Middle Temple, John Manningham, who kept a
record of his experiences in 1602 and 1603. On February 2, 1602, he wrote:
At
our feast we had a play called Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, much like The
Comedy of Errors, or Menaechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that in
Italian called Inganni.
The
first collection of information about sources of Elizabethan plays was
published in the 17th century—Gerard Langbaine’s Account of the English
Dramatick Poets (1691) briefly indicated where Shakespeare found materials for
some plays. But, during the course of the 17th century, it came to be felt that
Shakespeare was an outstandingly “natural” writer, whose intellectual
background was of comparatively little significance: “he was naturally learn’d;
he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature,” wrote John Dryden in
1668. It was nevertheless obvious that the intellectual quality of
Shakespeare’s writings was high and revealed a remarkably perceptive mind. The
Roman plays, in particular, gave evidence of careful reconstruction of the
ancient world.
The
first collection of source materials, arranged so that they could be read and
closely compared with Shakespeare’s plays, was made by Charlotte Lennox in the
18th century. More complete collections appeared later, notably those of John
Payne Collier (Shakespeare’s Library, 1843; revised by W. Carew Hazlitt, 1875).
These earlier collections have been superseded by a seven-volume version edited
by Geoffrey Bullough as Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare
(1957–72).
It
has become steadily more possible to see what was original in Shakespeare’s
dramatic art. He achieved compression and economy by the exclusion of
undramatic material. He developed characters from brief suggestions in his
source (Mercutio, Touchstone, Falstaff, Pandarus), and he developed entirely
new characters (the Dromio brothers, Beatrice and Benedick, Sir Toby Belch,
Malvolio, Paulina, Roderigo, Lear’s fool). He rearranged the plot with a view
to more-effective contrasts of character, climaxes, and conclusions (Macbeth,
Othello, The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It). A wider philosophical outlook was
introduced (Hamlet, Coriolanus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and
Cressida). And everywhere an intensification of the dialogue and an altogether
higher level of imaginative writing transformed the older work.
But,
quite apart from evidence of the sources of his plays, it is not difficult to
get a fair impression of Shakespeare as a reader, feeding his own imagination
by a moderate acquaintance with the literary achievements of other men and of
other ages. He quotes his contemporary Christopher Marlowe in As You Like It.
He casually refers to the Aethiopica (“Ethiopian History”) of Heliodorus (which
had been translated by Thomas Underdown in 1569) in Twelfth Night. He read the
translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding, which went through seven
editions between 1567 and 1612. George Chapman’s vigorous translation of
Homer’s Iliad impressed him, though he used some of the material rather
sardonically in Troilus and Cressida. He derived the ironical account of an
ideal republic in The Tempest from one of Montaigne’s essays. He read (in part,
at least) Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostors and
remembered lively passages from it when he was writing King Lear. The beginning
lines of one sonnet (106) indicate that he had read Edmund Spenser’s poem The
Faerie Queene or comparable romantic literature.
He was acutely aware of the varieties of poetic style that characterized the work of other authors. A brilliant little poem he composed for Prince Hamlet (Act V, scene 2, line 115) shows how ironically he perceived the qualities of poetry in the last years of the 16th century, when poets such as John Donne were writing love poems uniting astronomical and cosmogenic imagery with skepticism and moral paradoxes. The eight-syllable lines in an archaic mode written for the 14th-century poet John Gower in Pericles show his reading of that poet’s Confessio amantis . The influence of the great figure of Sir Philip Sidney, whose Arcadia was first printed in 1590 and was widely read for generations, is frequently felt in Shakespeare’s writings. Finally, the importance of the Bible for Shakespeare’s style and range of allusion is not to be underestimated. His works show a pervasive familiarity with the passages appointed to be read in church on each Sunday throughout the year, and a large number of allusions to passages in Ecclesiasticus (Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach) indicates a personal interest in one of the deuterocanonical books.
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