chapman e230 shakespeare introduction spring 10

Week 01, Course Introduction

2010-01-13T08:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to E23o, Introduction to Shakespeare

Spring 2010, Chapman University in Orange, California

This blog will offer posts on all of the plays on our syllabus as well as introductory material on comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. 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.

Week 14, The Tempest

2010-01-13T07:34:00.000-08:00

Notes on Shakespeare’s The Tempest

General Notes on The Tempest

Northrop Frye says that the basis of tragic vision is Being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation. In the tragic vision death is not an incident in life or even the inevitable end of life, but the essential event that gives shape and form to life. Death is what defines the individual... (Fools of Time, 3). By contrast, if we take our cue from Frye, the romance pattern is cyclical, not linear; death does not define life but rather the characters in the romance will have a chance to redeem themselves and the order within which they function. The social order goes in cycles of regeneration, just as the seasons do.

But I make romance sound a little too much like comedy, whereas it seems to me that romance is somewhere between tragedy and comedy. Both comedy and romance depend partly on the renovation of a corrupt social order by temporary removal into a green world of nature where magic rules and people can turn things around. The ancient seasonal myth is very much a part of both comedy and romance, though it is even more pronounced in romance. What distinguishes romance from tragedy and comedy is probably its ambivalence—for example, although The Tempest has a happy ending and Prospero is a benevolent ruler both on his island and, we presume, when he returns to Milan , it is easy to see that he is potentially a tyrant and might or could misuse his powers. Death, disorder, and tyranny are real threats in The Tempest, even though things turn out for the best. The quest motif is very strong in romance—all you have to do is think of Spenser’s The Faery Queen, with its Knight in pursuit of a Lady. Love is a prominent theme of exploration, and the sense of magic and strangeness pervades the romance genre. Exploration in itself is matter for exploration, which explains why certain critics have seen Caliban’s circumstances as similar to those of native people colonized by Europeans. Shakespeare’s romances are Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Scene-by-Scene Notes on The Tempest

Act 1, Scene 1

The first thing we see is that authority is the matter in question—the boatswain is not interested in paying reverence to King Alonzo; he has more important things to do at the moment. Gonzalo already appears to be a philosopher—he keeps his council even in a crisis. The storm, therefore, functions as a great leveling influence, at least at this point in the play. Still, Shakespeare is not about to ratify anarchy; this is a romance play, and the basis of the social order is about to be scrutinized. The civil order has broken down and the characters have been compelled by Prospero to the island where things will be sorted out.

Act 1, Scene 2

In this scene, we see that there is need for a movement from ignorance to knowledge on the part of Miranda, Prospero’s 15-year-old daughter. She does not know that her father was the Duke of Milan, and they have been on this island since she was three years old. Miranda possesses sympathetic power of her own—she feels the suffering of those who have been shipwrecked. But Prospero says that no harm has been done and that the shipwreck was arranged for her sake. The question is, how to come by one’s legitimate identity? Miranda must learn about her former place in the social order and prepare for her future role.

As for the status of Prospero as a magician, we are being set up for an important consideration: Prospero has been stripped of civil power by his exile, and he has put on a different kind of power signified by his magic robe. What kind of power is it that he now possesses? What is the source of that power? We should not think that this power will ultimately be self-sufficient—a return to the civil order looms beyond the framework of the immediate dramatic situation.

Prospero is not entirely without blame for his own exile—he devoted himself to secret studies in the liberal arts, neglecting the needs of his own kingdom. That is why he gave Antonio his brother control. Antonio learned the ropes of governing and began to scheme against him. Prospero’s brother is a Machiavellian of the bad sort, but even so he stands for political realism. One of Shakespeare’s ideals is that a good King must be both magnanimous and active. In consequence, poet-rulers such as Richard II must be deposed as surely as evildoers like Richard III. Prospero wanted to lead the life contemplative or vita contemplativa to the neglect of the life active or vita activa. The relative merits of the two was the subject of much debate during the Renaissance, and is well memorialized in Thomas More’s Utopia. Renaissance education was intended to make a person fit for public life, for a life of active virtue—it was about developing one’s capacities to the fullest extent. Prospero seems to have sought knowledge for a much more personal and private reason, one not closely enough allied with the charitable exercise of power. Antonio at least understands that a ruler cannot simply keep the name of prince or king or duke and expect the authority to remain with it—that was one of King Lear’s mistakes, and it is also Prospero’s. To keep the title, you must exercise the power and others must know you are exercising it. To fail in that regard is to encourage disorder and wickedness. Antonio apparently schemed with Alonso the King of Naples to get rid of Prospero, which was more than enough wickedness to result in Prospero’s loss of authority in Milan.

Prospero is not an independent actor in his own chance at redemption—he admits that divine providence brought him ashore and that Gonzalo charitably furnished him with rich garments and the books he still values above his dukedom. Prospero will need to learn how to wield the knowledge in these books to get himself back to his former state and do some good for the people, just as he has used it to make life tolerable on the island.

Prospero admits that an accident or fortune has brought his enemies within his power. With this fortunate accident, he begins to operate on his own under an auspicious star. As always, “there is a tide in the affairs of men,” as Brutus says in Julius Caesar, and Prospero must act now or lose his chance forever. He is satisfied that the spirit Ariel has done his bidding, appearing as St. Elmo’s Fire (a natural phenomenon) and striking the crew of the King’s ship with madness during the storm. The aerial spirit has also dispersed the crew about the island, separating them into logical camps. Ferdinand, the King’s son, is alone, for he above all is to be tested as the future successor to Prospero’s kingdom.

Prospero reminds Ariel that he had been imprisoned by the witch Sycorax, who died and left him in a pine tree. Prospero has made a sort of contract with Ariel to free him from human control at the end of a certain time. Since Ariel seems to represent imagination or the finer and more sensitive of nature’s powers, we begin to see that the play is in part about how humanity is to maintain control over the natural forces within itself and beyond itself. Prospero threatens Ariel in a way that suggests potential tyranny: around line 295, he threatens to imprison the friendly spirit for another twelve years, just as Sycorax had done. This is not a democratic island—as always, Shakespeare is a good royalist. Ariel is much better (and much better off) than Caliban (Sycorax’s son and therefore the natural heir of this island kingdom), but both feel the power of Prospero.

Next we see Caliban at his best, cursing Prospero but submitting to him because, after all, he must eat his dinner. Caliban has sometimes been seen as a native set upon by white Europeans. Shakespeare’s was a great age of exploration, and European countries were busily colonizing and exploiting the New World . There is some sense in this view of Caliban, although I don’t think it’s appropriate to turn the play into an allegory about colonialism. Caliban says that the island is his to inherit from Sycorax. Prospero associates him with the devil, or perhaps with the unregenerate natural man. It is true that Caliban is controlled by his own appetites as much as by Prospero, but he is not without ability—notice that his complaints at times approach downright eloquence. As he says, Prospero has taught him how to curse. And he was good to Prospero in time of need. His crime was to try to violate Miranda’s honor—another natural impulse he does not regret. Caliban is not appreciative of the gift of civilization Prospero has supposedly given him. I would say that Prospero is somewhat unfair to Caliban—indeed, to say that Caliban is “capable of all ill” is to say something of him that is true of humanity in general. Caliban is not simply “malice,” as Prospero calls him. The things with which Prospero threatens him are entirely natural—pain and suffering—but Caliban is afraid of Prospero because he believes that the old man’s art can control even Sycorax’s God, Setebos. (Robert Browning’s poem “Caliban upon Setebos” is a fine character study of Caliban, covering his resentments and religious sentiments.)

Meanwhile, Ferdinand is enchanted by the music of Ariel and drawn on by it. Ariel sings that Ferdinand’s father has suffered a sea change into “something rich and strange.” Of course the song is not true since Alonso is not drowned, but the song signifies the transformation wrought by death. What is the point of bringing up such change here? Is it to distance him from his father’s death? Certainly Ferdinand must undergo his own transformation here on the island.

Ferdinand’s first question to Miranda is whether she is a virgin—that is certainly a question with institutional significance. He wants to make her his queen. But Prospero knows that the prize must not be won too easily and that Ferdinand has not yet earned the right to reenter the social order and succeed him. So he will test Ferdinand. He uses the same Machiavellian terms of political intrigue that got him exiled from Milan . He claims, that is, that Ferdinand wants to usurp power on the island.

As for Miranda, she still needs to learn the difference between appearance and reality since she says that the handsome prince Ferdinand could not possibly mean anyone harm. She will need to understand this lesson to become a good queen when the time comes. That she shows promise is obvious from line 498, where she says her father’s speech gives a false impression of his true gentility.

Act 2, Scene 1

Gonzalo is an honest old counselor, a quality which shows in his trust in providence. We must weigh our sorrow with our comfort, he tells his hearers. However, Gonzalo is surrounded by people such as Sebastian and Antonio, who do not necessarily appreciate his wisdom. The problem is that wisdom is separated from rank, whereas both are required to keep firm order. Gonzalo will offer his own utopian vision, but it will not equal Prospero’s magic and foresight. So this little group of stranded citizens of Milan doesn’t have all the answers. Perhaps Gonzalo is a little too ready to live within the confines of his natural surroundings rather than transforming them into something more civil. Sebastian makes fun of Gonzalo, ironically crediting him with the power to “carry this island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple,” as well as being able to bring forth more islands. Note also the reference to Amphion building the walls of Thebes with his musical instrument. Shakespeare may be poking fun of himself in these conversations filled with witty exchanges—Antonio, Alonso, and Gonzalo are spending a lot of time making puns and quibbles, and not getting anywhere. But Gonzalo is observant—he has at least noticed that their garments are strangely dry, and we are thereby reminded that a certain wizardry is necessary to the founding and maintenance of the social order.

Alonso despairs over the loss of his son Ferdinand, but Francisco tells him that the boy may be alive, recounting his heroic attempt to survive. Sebastian reproaches Alonso for having married off his daughter to the king of Carthage , an adventure that he considers responsible for the shipwreck.

Gonzalo’s utopia is a silly pre-technological communist fantasy; he would undo the punishment of original sin. No one needs to work, and there would be no sovereignty. Sebastian is right to point out that Gonzalo “would be King” nonetheless. Sebastian is encouraged by Antonio to usurp the place of his brother the king. What we are seeing in this camp of stranded Mariners is first of all a false utopia and then political intrigue. Antonio is quite certain that Ferdinand has drowned. Antonio, using as an example his own usurpation of the dukedom of Milan from Prospero, wants to seize the occasion of this shipwreck since Claribel, who should inherit the kingdom, is far away in Carthage and knows nothing about the wreck. Antonio sees only the operation of random chance in a storm, and does not of course understand that Prospero has used Ariel to generate the tempest. As always, the category of nature is not to be taken simply in Shakespeare—we are not dealing with an ordinary natural tempest; it is a thing of nature brought on by human and superhuman magic. It is even associated with providence since Prospero himself was steered after his own shipwreck by divine providence. Antonio mistakenly sees his friends and potential subjects as passive men just waiting to take orders, but his scheme is foiled by Ariel, who warns Gonzalo to awaken King Alonso. Now awake, they all set off to look for Ferdinand.

Act 2, Scene 2

Trinculo and Stefano have their own ideas about paradise—they assume everyone else has perished in a storm, so this island is theirs, so far as they know. Trinculo meets Caliban and later joins with Stefano to turn him into a willing subject on the basis of drink, which seems to be the god of this nascent kingdom. Liquor provides shelter for Stefano, just as an ordinary garment serves to clothe Trinculo. This section acts as a parody of the previous scene, which was about misguided intrigue. Caliban sees the arrival of these two drunkards as a chance for freedom. The scene had opened with Caliban describing his reaction at the torments Prospero visits upon him because of his misbehavior, and we get a chance to see how Caliban perceives the island’s order. On the whole, Act 2 is about false attempts to set up a new kingdom upon the wreck of the old, with Antonio and Sebastian trying to seize the opportunity to make their own “providence,” and Stefano and Trinculo (along with Caliban) trying to set up their own crazy government. Act 3 will transition to the more legitimate attempts at self-discovery on the part of Ferdinand and Miranda; this focus will, in turn, gesture towards a regenerated dukedom in Milan, even though the play ends with everyone still on the island.

Act 3, Scene 1

In the third act, the developing affection between Ferdinand and Miranda is central. Ferdinand performs his difficult labors mindful of Miranda and in hopes of better times. For him, love makes labor redemptive—it is not something to be avoided so one can set up a fool’s paradise. By his patience, Ferdinand shows the potential for nobility. The word Miranda means “she who is to be looked upon [with wonder].” Prospero’s daughter is virtuous, and her virtue is part of the island’s special quality. Like Adam in Paradise Lost, however, Ferdinand will need some warning not to be overly fond of Miranda’s charms. They have some negotiating to do, and must move from the language of innocent courtship to a permanently enduring union—after all, they are the future of the state, and cannot remain in paradise forever, if indeed one wants to say that’s where they are at present.

Prospero blesses the union to himself since he is apparently convinced that Ferdinand and Miranda will prove compatible. Still, he must not allow premature erotic relations between them. Language will prove essential to a proper match between the two lovers, and marriage is an institution, not a simple declaration. Prospero must go back to his books and work up an appropriate spell to delay this courtship.

Act 3, Scene 2

Caliban, meanwhile, is courting Stefano as his lord and master. Caliban is too easily won over to servitude. To him, government is essentially a protection racket. We notice that he describes itself rather like Prospero—as someone exiled by a tyrant and cheated of his inheritance by evil powers. Stefano, as usual, is spinning a storyline from his own base desires—once having seized Prospero’s books and murdered the man, he thinks, he will be free to marry Miranda. They all serve their bodily desires. Ariel is looking over them even as they make their plot. The would-be ruler ends up following Caliban, whom both Stefano and Trinculo call a monster.

Act 3, Scene 3

King Alonso is ready to give up the romance quest for his lost son Ferdinand. Nature seems to have won the battle. Again, Gonzalo sees that the island is much more than simple nature—though the inhabitants are monstrous, they are more gentle than many humans back in Naples . This comment of his follows the appearance of shapes Prospero has summoned to set up a banquet. The wonder of exploration is part of romance—as Antonio says, “travelers never did lie, though fools at home condemn them.” The banquet itself, and the appearance of Ariel as a harpy, has a classical precedent in Virgil’s Aeneid. Ariel has set them a fool’s banquet—and he explains sternly to them (some of whom attending are plotting against Alonso) that they have been driven here to be punished for their sins in exiling Prospero. They are threatened with “lingering perdition.” That would mean a futile repetition of the romance pattern, one stripped of meaning and redemptive quality. At present, they still think Ferdinand is dead, and Prospero has no intention of telling them otherwise just now. He goes off to see Ferdinand and Miranda. This decision in itself has a powerful effect—Alonso feels bitter remorse at the loss of his son.

Act 4, Scene 1

Prospero insists that Ferdinand should not behave like Caliban and spoil the honor of his daughter. There is much play here about the value of language—Prospero says Miranda will outstrip all praise, and then says that Ferdinand has spoken fairly and will have his daughter. Ceremony is important for the obvious reason: it is necessary to bless this socially and politically significant union. Marriage is part of the magic of civilization. Prospero bids Ariel bring the rabble (an important word here in terms of governance) so that he may give the young couple a demonstration of his powers. Iris and Ceres—the latter a fertility goddess—will provide the lovers a gift. Ceres offers the gift of regular seasonal change; that is, she offers abundance in perpetuity and, therefore, a secure future. Together, these goddesses call upon nymphs to celebrate the marriage contract.

Breaking in to this celebration is Prospero’s remembrance that Caliban and his new friends are plotting against him. But we still have unfinished business, so the celebration is a false ending in accordance with classical comic structure. Consider lines 148 and following—Prospero sums up what his wizardry has accomplished: he has demonstrated that we are “such stuff as dreams are made on.” This remark has sometimes been taken as Shakespeare’s farewell speech as a dramatist, even though The Tempest isn’t his last play. In any case, there is clearly a parallel between art and life to be drawn here: art has much to tell us about life, and it is a kind of magic. Then Prospero professes himself vexed and weak, an enfeebled old man, to get rid of Ferdinand and Miranda so he can deal with Caliban. The island is not paradise after all, and the consequences of human fallenness impend even here.

Act V

I must expand this section, but a main point is that in contrast with King Lear, insight doesn’t come in The Tempest at the cost of power. Prospero is able to give up his magic books and powers without losing his chance to recover the dukedom he lost. His concluding wishes are of interest in that what he really seems to desire is not so much to exercise great power again but instead to practice “the art of dying well.” The main promise of things to come is the impending marriage between Ferdinand and Miranda, who will, we may presume, carry on in a regenerated social and political environment.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. (Folger Shakespeare Library.) Washington Square Press, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0743482837.

Week 13, Antony and Cleopatra

2010-01-13T07:33:00.000-08:00

Notes on Antony and Cleopatra.

Act 1, Scenes 1-2.

Antony and Cleopatra are introduced first by Antony’s friends, but almost at once we hear a dialogue between the two lovers. What is their image at this early point? How does the dialogue and presentation of Antony capture the dual impulse that runs through the man’s character? He is both a Roman and a man of the East. Antony is clearly aware of Cleopatra’s influence on him, and admires her whimsicality, excess, and sense for the absolutism of the dilatory moment as opposed to Roman thoughtfulness and adherence to necessity. Enobarbus is just as aware, and thinks women should not be so highly esteemed in proximity to great political and military matters. Antony’s response to his wife’s death is characteristically complex in that he’s riven by genuine sympathy and yet realizes that he had, after all, more or less wished this on her and that he is liberated.

Act 1, Scene 3.

Cleopatra explains how she manipulates Antony, admitting this even in part while talking to him. She calls him a dissembler and an actor when it comes to loyalty. To what extent does Cleopatra know how to speak the language of Roman honor? Around line 97, she takes on the strength to speak this language: “Your honor calls you hence,” she says to Antony, and to some extent seems actually to mean it: it’s time to “let Antony be Antony.”

Act 1, Scene 4.

Here and elsewhere, we should attend to Caesar’s (Octavius’) view of Antony’s conduct in the East. Caesar has complaints about Antony’s unseemly behavior, and suggests that he, at least (young as he is), knows how to wield power. Around line 55 and following, Caesar mentions Antony’s longstanding reputation for valor, and he feels that this reputation will shame him into returning to the field alongside Caesar. Antony’s admission of “neglect” doesn’t go over well with Caesar the Corporation Man, whose great model is Aeneas, with a twist of Machiavellian guile to produce the appearance of piety.

Act 1, Scene 5.

We see another side of Cleopatra here, the one that is truly in love with Antony. This is not simply a political alliance. Cleopatra’s motives may be complex, but her connection with Antony is one of the world’s grandest tragic loves. She muses fondly about Antony, and mentions her earlier affair with Julius Caesar. She has an extravagant sense of Antony’s worth, one that fits his sense of himself and that he repays with similar extravagance towards her. We may not see this Antony in action through most of the play, but the mutual representation is something that bonds them together.

Act 2, Scene 1.

The son of Pompey thinks the people love him, while he’s convinced that Caesar wins no hearts with his soulless efficiency and that Antony is wasting his strength with Cleopatra in Egypt.

Act 2, Scene 2.

Caesar and Antony confront each other, each bringing his own grievances and assumptions to the table. Agrippa helps resolve the tension between them, at least for the present, by proposing a match between Caesar’s sister Octavia and Antony. Dynastic obligation will bring these two men of very different character together. Enobarbus, around line 174 and following, talks with Agrippa and Maecenas, offering us a new image of the famous Cleopatra. He describes her almost as a goddess, as a woman beyond description (197-98). He also mentions how savvy she is, how well she plays her charms to her advantage. Cleopatra, he knows, exercises a strong hold over Antony’s imagination and passions. She instills a kind of desire that doesn’t lead to satiation (235ff), and sanctifies things that would otherwise be vile, beyond the strict Roman sense of appropriateness and inappropriateness. That capacity is a big part of her attraction—Cleopatra is charismatic and “larger than life.”

Act 2, Scene 3.

Antony speaks to a soothsayer, who tells him to stay away from Caesar because this opponent is bound to rise higher than Antony. Caesar is almost as much an “evil genius” for Antony as Julius Caesar was for Brutus on the plain at Philippi; in his presence, the great Roman is afraid, unmanned. Antony knows this, and says that the very dice obey Caesar—fortune seems to be on the younger man’s side, even though Antony is more of a “ladies’ man” and so ought to be on better terms with Lady Fortune. So Antony resolves to return to the East, where, he says, “my pleasure lies.”

Act 2, Scenes 4-5.

In the fifth scene, Cleopatra has fun at Antony’s expense, saying that he’s like a great fish she has caught. She seems to delight in stealing from him his masculine symbolic power (the sword with which he earned victory against the conspirators who killed his friend Julius) and donning it herself. She learns around line 55 that Antony will marry Octavia, and this causes her to strike the messenger. Pompeius makes a deal with Caesar in which he’s to take Sicily and Sardinia, but rid the seas of piracy and send wheat to Rome. He reconciles with Caesar and Antony. Enobarbus shrewdly observes that this fellow has thrown away his future, and he says further that the marriage with Octavia is purely a matter of convenience—Antony’s heart is in Egypt with Cleopatra, and that is where he will return.

Act 2, Scenes 6-7.

In the seventh scene, the weakest member of the second triumvirate (Octavian, Antony, and Marcus Lepidus, 43-31 BCE; the first triumvirate had consisted of Julius Caesar, Gnaius Pompeius, and Marcus Crassus from 60-53 BCE) is made drunk, and Antony makes sport of him by answering his silly questions about crocodiles with ludicrous tautologies. Sextus Pompeius shows himself to be so indebted to the concept of Roman honor that it prevents him from taking Menas’ advice—why not simply invite the triumvirs on board his ship and kill them? Pompeius says that the man ought to have done this without telling him about it. Menas loses faith in Pompeius because of this rigidity—such an opportunity, he knows, will not come again. Scene 7 shows the triumvirs’ attitude towards drinking. As the old saying goes, in vino veritas. We find out that Lepidus can’t hold his liquor (he lacks self-mastery, and is a follower, not a leader); Antony bows to nobody as a wassailer; and Caesar would just as well stay sober. It’s obvious that he is determined to keep his wits about him, more responsible in his relationship to power than Antony. Judgments are being made in this scene about who is a “real Roman” and who is most likely to succeed.

We have seen how other Romans accuse Antony of “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out,” to adapt a line from the 1960’s drug guru Timothy Leary. At this point in the play, Antony seems the strong master of revels; he seems beyond Roman austerity and severity. In his openness to experience, Antony is more of an Odyssean Greek than a Roman. But as T. S. Eliot writes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (to paraphrase), “only those who have a personality know what it is to want to escape from it.”

Act 3, Scene 1.

We might take the first few scenes as a commentary on Roman values. Ventidius in Syria has returned in triumph, having defeated the Parthians who had done so much harm to Roman armies. But he doesn’t pursue the Parthians simply because doing so would mean upstaging his commanding officer, Antony.

Act 3, Scene 2.

Octavia weeps, and Caesar is sad at parting. Enobarbus seems to undercut the notion put forth by Agrippa that Antony wept at the death of Julius Caesar. Shakespeare seems concerned to remind us that we are dealing with historical events that have become shaded over with mythology, and the view he prefers at some points is the “practical Roman” perspective we find in Agrippa’s clear-eyed statements.

Act 3, Scene 3.

Cleopatra finds out that Octavia isn’t as beautiful as she, and now rewards the messenger she had earlier struck.

Act 3, Scene 4.

War is brewing between Caesar and Antony. Antony agrees that she might be helpful as a go-between, and he seems genuine in his desire that she should follow her heart in choosing sides, if that should become necessary.

Act 3, Scene 5.

Lepidus and Caesar have warred with Pompeius, and then Caesar has arrested Lepidus. Caesar is outraged when Antony and Cleopatra crown themselves in Asiatic splendor. The Roman people already know of this, says Caesar, who also declares himself annoyed that Octavia has come to visit him without the appropriate ceremony. Well, he had agreed to the match readily enough in spite of his reservations about Antony’s character. Now he invites her to stay on his side, suggesting that Antony has abused and betrayed her.

Act 3, Scenes 6-7.

In the seventh scene, Enobarbus tells Cleopatra to stay out of the war, and she’s insulted at the suggestion. She will take part in Antony’s wars, declaring herself “the president of my kingdom.” She is a ruler and doesn’t accept the role of a “weak woman.” Antony now makes the disastrous decision to fight Caesar by sea because the latter has dared him to do so. Enobarbus is aghast at this “un-Roman” impracticality, at this preference for chance and hazard instead of security. Perhaps Antony is foolhardy, but he’s also honorable and noble; power sits lightly upon Antony’s shoulders. The hair of wise and responsible rulers turns gray quickly, but one senses that isn’t likely to happen to Mark Antony. He’s too reckless to be weighed down by the demands of power, and prefers an unstable alliance between honor and hazard to a more stable one of the sort Enobarbus would counsel, and Caesar would certainly maintain. At the end of the scene, Antony seems very surprised at just how briskly Caesar’s forces are moving into position. The men around Antony (Canidius in particular) feel that since he’s led by a woman, so are they.

Act 3, Scenes 8-10.

Caesar and Antony strategize; the former is all about maintaining control over events. By the tenth scene, we hear that the Egyptian fleet has cut and run; Scarus laments that Antony’s Romans have “kissed away kingdoms.” The charge is that Antony is irresponsible in his deployment of military power. He has allowed his love of Cleopatra to blind him to sound counsel. Incredibly, he has followed Cleopatra’s shameful retreat at the first sign of danger. Canidius decides that he might as well go over to Caesar since Antony has lost control over his own destiny. Enobarbus knows what Canidius knows, but still can’t bring himself to abandon his commander.

Act 3, Scene 11.

Antony is horrified—”I have fled myself,” he says, and knows that he has thrown everything he worked for away. What makes the situation even more intolerable is Caesar’s relative lack of martial skill and experience; Antony reminds us that it was he who killed his friend Julius’ assassins while the fledgling stood by. Antony is the one who has been a world-historical actor, and now his star is eclipsed by a lesser man, at least in his view. Antony is at first furious with Cleopatra, but reconciles with her almost immediately. When she asks pardon, he grants it, considering himself well repaid with a kiss. He evidently places her above victory on the battlefield.

Act 3, Scene 12.

Antony sends his schoolmaster to treat with Caesar. Cleopatra says she will submit to Caesar, who orders that the Queen be comforted and promised all she wants, so long as she either exiles or kills Antony. He supposes this shift will work because women, as far as he is concerned, are infinitely malleable under the pressure of circumstance.

Act 3, Scene 13.

Enobarbus won’t blame Cleopatra. He says Antony has made his will “lord of his reason.” Antony challenges Caesar to single combat, which is absolutely ridiculous. Enobarbus is stunned, and feels that Antony has been entirely bereft of sound judgment. Enobarbus continues to mull his relationship with Antony; he thinks his loyalty will earn him a place in the story books, so to speak: by sticking with Antony, he’ll “conquer” the man who defeated that noble Roman. This might be labeled a metadramatic concern because Shakespeare himself is clearly interested in how legends become enmeshed with history—much of this play (to borrow a phrase from the New Historians) is about a kind of “self-fashioning” that, if successful, becomes the narrative by which we know the boldest among the ancients. Even in Antony and Cleopatra’s own time, mythmaking was at work, and so were its critics.

Around line 55, Cleopatra seems to be going along with Caesar’s program, while her lover is still saying “I am Antony yet.” He wants to re-embrace his identity as a valorous Roman commander, and orders Caesar’s messenger soundly whipped. Around line 110, his anger again turns towards Cleopatra, whom he accuses of latching onto and manipulating famous Roman men like Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, and himself to enhance her own power, which rests on the different and most un-Roman basis of alliance with divine splendor and awe. Cleopatra is the leader of an ancient personality cult, and while her stylistic affinity with Antony’s grandiose dimension is obvious, he now professes to find the whole affair disgusting. Above all, he says, Cleopatra lacks “temperance.” But Antony’s anger also rages at Caesar for “harping on what I am, not what he knew I was.” Antony supposes that the reputation he has justly won entitles him to the continued respect and esteem of those who have overcome him. The scene’s conclusion shows Antony reconciling yet again with Cleopatra (who after all seems to represent a tendency within him), and regains his composure. He calls for a night of drinking and celebration on the eve of the final battle to recover his lost glory. He may yet win at Alexandria. This recovery is the last straw for Enobarbus—his captain’s “valor preys on reason,” and it’s time to desert him at the earliest opportunity.

Act 4, Scenes 1-6.

These brief scenes convey the contrasting attitudes and reactions on the part of Antony and Caesar to towards the coming battle. Antony is at times elegiac in tone—”Perchance tomorrow you’ll serve another master,” he tells his men, to the dismay of Enobarbus. In the third scene, a soldier takes a noise to be Hercules abandoning Antony. In the fourth scene, Antony seems resolute—he will bring the willing to the battle. In Scene 5, he learns that Enobarbus has deserted him, and realizes that his “fortunes have corrupted honest men.” In Scene 6, Caesar declares that “the time of universal peace is near,” yet without compunction he also betrays the true nature of this “new world order”: he advises his lieutenant to place units recently revolted from Antony at the forefront, so that in the first rounds of the battle, Antony will be killing his own men. Enobarbus has now come to realize that he has destroyed his self-image in abandoning Antony, and when the latter generously sends him his treasure from camp, the desolation of Enobarbus is complete. He resolves to die in the nearest ditch.

Act 4, Scenes 7-8.

So far, Antony’s desperate gambit shows signs of success.

Act 4, Scene 9.

Enobarbus dies, with Antony’s name the last word on his lips.

Act 4, Scenes 10-12.

Caesar will fight Antony on land, knowing that the man has put too much energy and time into his fleet. For the second time, the fleet deserts Antony, even going over to Caesar’s side. Upon seeing this betrayal, Antony declares Cleopatra a “triple-turned whore.”

Act 4, Scene 13.

Charmian advises Cleopatra to shut herself up in a monument, and send word of her death. The Queen agrees.

Act 4, Scene 14.

Antony continues to lament what he considers Cleopatra’s betrayal, admitting that he “made these wars” for no one but her. When he hears that she has supposedly committed suicide, however, he is again instantly reconciled. She has shown him the way in conquering herself, he thinks, and thereupon makes a botched attempt to fall on his sword after his servant Eros commits suicide rather than assist his master in dying. Nobody will help him finish the job, and at lines 112-13, Decretas even takes his sword as a token with which to ingratiate himself with Caesar.

Act 4, Scene 15.

Antony and Cleopatra are together for one final scene, and when he tries to get her to seek safety and honor in Caesar, she bravely points out that “honor” and “safety” don’t go together. That has long been the creed Antony has followed, for better or for worse. Antony falls back on the classical notion that glory is a matter of what your peers and descendants think of you. His wretched present, he trusts, will not blot out the glorious remembrance he has earned by his brave deeds in the past. Cleopatra says she, too, will die “in the high Roman fashion,” as a hero should.

Act 5, Scene 1.

When Decretas informs Caesar that Antony is dead, he seems genuinely saddened. Antony lived prodigiously, and yet his passing has been noted as if it were a thing of nothing, no ceremony. Caesar may not be much of a pageantry promoter, but he shows some regard for the rites due to honor. His sense of loss seems sincere, and he regrets what his need to maintain and increase his power has “forced” him to do. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that he wouldn’t do it again in a heartbeat. Caesar serves political expediency as his master, but this doesn’t give us the right to say he’s a mere hypocrite: it is not unreasonable to suggest that his strength consists partly in the attitude he takes up towards what his station as a public man leads him to do. His ruthless actions are taken in the name of “universal peace” and the greater glory of Rome. He sometimes deceives others about the nature of what he does, but he doesn’t deceive himself about the disjunction between his ideals and his deeds. At line 61-62, we see how he treats Cleopatra: he bids Proculeius to treat the Queen kindly and make her what promises he finds suitable, but this is only a shift to bring her in triumph to Rome, where she will be an object of mockery for the rabble.

Act 5, Scene 2.

Cleopatra is refashioning herself as heroic in the Roman style, as one determined to take her own life. We might suppose this is a matter of adopting a “style”; but then, Cleopatra takes style quite seriously, and her Pharaonic self-fashioning is no light matter. It wouldn’t be right to take that quality away from her. She is surrounded by Caesar’s soldiers, and now determines that she will not become the sport of the vulgar in Rome. From line 76 onwards, she refashions and aggrandizes Antony, saying, “I dreamt there was an emperor,” etc. Dolabella plays an honorable role, forewarning Cleopatra of the fate that awaits her in only three days. Caesar enters and plays both gracious conqueror and vicious threatener of Cleopatra’s progeny, if she should follow Antony’s self-destructive course. When Seleucis betrays her over her holding back some of her treasure from Caesar, she is shocked, which reaction suggests that she still doesn’t understand the dynamics of power: people obey those in whom they find real, actionable strength; they don’t long obey those who have only majesty and divine pomp to back their rule. She resents being “worded” by Caesar, and loathes the prospect of “some squeaking Cleopatra boy[ing] my greatness, in the posture of a whore.” She has always been an actor of sorts, but in her own proper sphere as Egyptian Queen, her “acting” the part of a goddess had been correlated with the exercise of power. But in Rome, what had been world-historical drama will be reduced to an entertaining farce for the multitude.

Around line 228, Cleopatra declares there will be a final meeting with Antony in death, one she will achieve by casting off the supposed weakness of her sex. And then comes the Clown, with his prayer that she may find “joy of the worm” or serpent he has brought her. It’s worth asking why Shakespeare has chosen to present Cleopatra with her death in this semi-comic, bizarre rustic. Caesar, whom Cleopatra now considers “an unpolicied ass” for allowing her to make away with herself, enters the scene after her death and declares it noble and an act of loyalty to Antony. He agrees to bury her next to Antony, apparently recognizing the high tragedy of their doomed love match, the “pity” of which equals the “glory” of his current status as military victor and his future as Rome’s sole ruler. There’s dignity in sublime failure, it seems, as well as in the establishment of peace and long-continued rule. Rome, Incorporated will have its shiny new CEO, and for Augustus Caesar, apotheosis to heaven can wait. Both Antony and Cleopatra and Octavius Caesar are great in their respective ways, but the former are crushed by the modern world in which Octavius moves more deftly, if not with the same tragic glory.

Antony and Cleopatra’s manner of dying, and Caesar’s of living and governing, show a clash of value systems, and a fissure in the concept of Romanness. I don’t think the play condemns either system, although it shows the consequences and historical import of both. We should bear in mind the strangeness of the final two acts’ tragic arc: Antony’s sudden condemnations and reconciliations, and Cleopatra’s dissembling and final adoption (at least in part) of Roman heroism. Cleopatra’s initial “fake” suicide teaches Antony to do the right thing in earnest. Moreover, Antony’s real suicide leads Cleopatra to marry her desire to avoid public humiliation with a desire to exit the world’s stage like the hybrid Egyptian Queen / Antique Roman she has become.

Week 11, King Lear

2010-01-13T07:32:00.000-08:00

Notes on The Tragedy of King Lear.

Act 1, Scene 1.

Kent and Gloucester agree that it seemed most likely the King would favor Albany over Cornwall. But now they aren’t so certain, so the play opens with a note of uncertainty that becomes ominous later when we realize how much better a person Albany is compared to Cornwall. This is a new, strange state of affairs, in which merit must demonstrate itself by means of rhetorical skill. Gloucester says his legal son is no dearer to him than the illegitimate Edmund. Lear enters at line 39, saying that he has decided to divide his kingdom into thirds, and “shake all cares and business” for the remainder of his life. His declared intention is to “prevent future strife” and to confer royal authority on “younger strengths” (40). He means to assist the process of generational renewal, passing on matters of state to younger and more energetic kin while “preventing future strife” and leaving himself the private space necessary to practice the art of dying well. Each daughter will receive a third; the only question is how opulent that portion will be (86).

The question of authority is a main item in King Lear. Kent may be responding in part to the King’s unwise disparagement of Cordelia on the spot, but his line “Reserve thy state / . . . check / This hideous rashness” (149-51) may owe something to his shock at the very notion of an absolute king’s decision to divest himself of his unitary power, keeping only the name and perks of authority. I don’t know that there’s really a coherent political theory during Shakespeare’s time; I would only suggest that Lear is confused because he goes off on a private mission while at the same time trying to retain symbols that he confuses with power itself. This is not to say that Shakespeare is criticizing monarchy per se, but I believe he’s always aware that no human system is perfect (not even one that claims divine ordination). The questions are, what are the consequences when things go wrong with social and political systems, and what happens when they go right?

It’s true that the King’s “natural body” is wearing down, and one can feel only empathy for him on that account, but what about the King’s political body, the one that isn’t capable of death? Can he actually abandon his responsibilities the way he does, without causing a disaster? What has he given up? He has given up the “power, / Pre-eminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty” (130-32). Another way of stating this is that he has ceded the “sway, revenue, execution of the rest” (137) aside from what he retains, which he specifies as “The name, and all th’ addition to a king” (136), which addition is to be embodied in the person of the stipulated “hundred knights” (133). He makes a distinction between the name and pomp of kingship and the executive, effectual power of a king. So we might ask, how does he expect to give away all his power and yet hold on to the “addition” of a king? Do the symbols and privileges and “name” really mean anything, apart from the power wielded by those who claim them?

With respect to Cordelia and Regan and Goneril, what does Lear want? He wants a public declaration of their affection for him as a loving father. The public and private in Renaissance kingship were of course inextricable; royal absolutism of King James’ sort always made hay of the idea that the King was “the father of his people,” and James’ model was the scriptural patriarchs. He believed that his subjects owed him the reverence due to such a father. In practice, as I’m sure Shakespeare understood, the intertwining of public and private in powerful families makes for a great deal of coldness, sterility, and alienation, even in settings beyond the monarchy: read biographies of some of our presidents and the modern royal family of Great Britain, and you’ll hear a tale that is at times painful to read: mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters for the most part looking on at the spectacle of one another’s lives, never knowing what to consider “acting” and what to accept as “real,” and finding it difficult to sort out personal loyalties from official duties and the demands of power.

Well, Lear has no trouble demanding in the form of public spectacle what would for most families be a purely private display of affection. Perhaps this isn’t entirely unreasonable on his part. Neither are Goneril and Regan necessarily to be blamed for giving the old man what he wants; they know his nature, and this is the sort of thing they have come to expect from him. The point is that he’s the king, and he finds this public display of affection necessary. Why can’t Cordelia do something even better than did Regan and Goneril, bearing with her father and making a generous allowance for his weaknesses? Isn’t it sometimes acceptable to be a little insincere when regard for another person’s feelings requires it? But she won’t work at it, and even if there’s an austere beauty in the figure of Cordelia speaking truth to power, it’s fair to suggest that she is in her way as brittle and abrupt or absolute in her temperament as her frail old father: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” (91-92). She can’t verbally express the genuine affection she feels for Lear. Cordelia isn’t capable of flattery; she lacks (to borrow from another play, I Henry IV) Prince Hal’s ability to say to a joker like Falstaff, “If a lie may do thee grace,” then let’s carry on with the lie, at least for a while. Learning to be a good ruler may involve a certain amount of play-acting and feigning to be what one is not. Cordelia sees both monarchy and marriage as consisting of specifiable bonds or reciprocal obligations. So when Lear demands that she declare her “love,” she understands the term in something like the sense of “obligation, duty, attention.” Obviously, a woman who marries must balance her duties as a wife with her duties as a loyal daughter; she cannot “love” her father altogether and spend all her time with him.

But it may be that Lear’s demand isn’t as all-encompassing as she supposes, and it’s fair to ask how someone like Cordelia could rule a kingdom if she is incapable of getting beyond the king’s simple request for a bit of affectionate flattery. As Regan later says, “‘Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself” (293-94), and Goneril chimes in with “The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash” (295-95); both daughters see that Lear is being somewhat absurd, but they aren’t surprised and are willing to gratify him, especially given the great reward he is offering for so little. But so as not to make them seem generous, which we know they aren’t, Goneril admits to knowing the King’s casting off of Cordelia is unfair; it shows, in her words, “poor judgment” (291). Rashness is a charge commonly made against Lear, one made by Kent and two of his daughters. And those two daughters correctly recognize, I think, that the King’s unkindness towards Cordelia represents a threat to them as well: “if our father carry authority with such dis- / position as he bears, this last surrender of his will but / offend us” (304-06). The King’s surrender, they understand, is not really a surrender but a shifting of responsibility, and he will continue to play the tyrant, taking his stand upon the privilege of majesty and great age.

As for the question of whether power can be divested and divided, well, I suppose a monarch can do these things, and there are historical precedents for it from ancient Rome onwards, but it seldom seems to work. Almost nothing goes the way Lear thinks it’s going to go, once he gives away what was formerly his power to wield alone: in the first place, he had thought Albany and Cornwall would be in charge of their respective thirds, but as it turns out, neither man can stand up to those two strong-willed daughters. It is Regan and Goneril who immediately take charge of state affairs, not their men. Moreover, Lear’s conduct after giving away power is anything but responsible: he charges about with his hundred knights behaving more or less like a “lord of misrule.” His presence with either daughter, it seems, would inevitably create a public perception that they are not in charge. Lear wants to retain far more authority than he has any business keeping, now that he has stepped aside to let those “younger strengths” do the hard work of governing and maintaining order.

Lear is partly a tragedy about the terrors of growing old, of feeling slighted, neglected, weak, and useless as you make way for the young. Knowing that you must do so doesn’t necessarily make doing it any easier. In this way, it’s true that in King Lear as in other of Shakespeare’s plays that involve monarchy, “a king is but a man.” This somewhat broader frame probably accounts for the fairy-tale quality of the play. We see the disintegration of a “foolish, fond old man” (4.7.59) who evidently doesn’t understand the nature of genuine affection or the nature of the power he has been wielding for many of his eighty or so years. Cordelia, too, may appear as something like a Cinderella figure: surrounded by a pair of evil sisters, she cannot make her inner virtue known to the powerful, shallow authorities who determine her fate. Well, at least the King of France is able to discern the purity of Cordelia’s virtue, discounting her lack of Machiavellian wiles.

Banished Kent will pursue his “old course in a country new” (187). As it turns out, the “country new” is Britain. Lear’s refusal of responsibility has created a new dispensation of power, radically transforming the nation into a cauldron of anarchy and the pursuit of selfish desire for satisfaction and advancement.

Act 1, Scene 2.

This scene begins with Edmund’s soliloquy from lines 1-22, the upshot of which is that Edmund believes he has all the right qualities to rule his own house, and lacks only “legitimacy”; by contrast, the King has given all his power away and expects to hang on to his legitimacy. He stands upon rank as if it in itself constituted inner virtue or fitness to rule, whereas Edmund sees this legitimacy as a function of mere custom, of “the curiosity of nations” (4). Yet as this same soliloquy reveals, Edmund is nearly obsessed with what others think of him; he repeats the word “legitimate” several times, and can’t seem to let it go. We will see that later on, his undoing will stem from this concern for that which he seems most to despise. A most unhealthy selfishness—”I grow; I prosper” (21)—also drives him on first to victory and then to destruction. Edmund demands that the gods ally themselves not with custom but rather with natural qualities and ripeness for rule. Old Gloucester his been taken aback by the King’s strange behavior, which to him seems unnatural—this view makes him susceptible to the scheming of his illegitimate son. In a world turned upside down, what could make more sense than that a man’s legitimate son and heir should betray him without compunction, all appearances of goodness and history of virtue between the two notwithstanding? Edmund declares his father’s belief in astrology “the excellent foppery of the world” (118) and insists, “All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit” (184). He will trust in his dark vision of nature as a place that rewards the most savage and cunning predator. Tennyson (who before composing In Memoriam had become acquainted with the work of Sir Charles Lyell and other pre-Darwinian natural scientists) described this kind of nature as “red in tooth and claw.” Edmund is a human predator, and thanks to King Lear, he now has an opportunity to use his predatory skill to remake a formerly stable, human order into one that suits him best. Lear hasn’t made him what he is, but he has given him an opening to thrive. If legitimate authority doesn’t know itself, this is what happens. Perhaps, in terms of political theory, Lear early in the play assumes too easily that there is an automatic connection or concordance between the two “bodies” of a king—the perishing and erring mortal one and the immortal and immaterial political or corporate one: he follows his desires, makes unwise decisions, and then is surprised to find that his decisions as an erring human being have deranged his kingdom. Others in this play see more clearly the Machiavellian point that the exercise of power generates an authority all its own.

Act 1, Scene 3.

Goneril is alarmed at the King’s disorderly conduct. At line six, she complains that “his knights grow riotous,” and devises a stratagem whereby Oswald will make the King feel the weakness of his position by slighting him. Goneril gets to the heart of Lear’s error when she calls him an “Idle old man, / That still would manage those authorities / That he hath given away! (16-18)

Act 1, Scene 4.

Kent begins to serve the King, professing to the old man that he really is what he seems to be—a trusty middle-aged servant who knows authority when he sees it, which quality he says he “would fain call master” (27). Evidently he sees this quality in the visage of Lear, even if Lear has lost command of himself. The Fool, we are soon told, has “much pined away” since Cordelia went to France. He is Cordelia’s ally. Kent earns his keep by giving Oswald a rough education in rank, or “differences” (86). Lear’s own words begin to speak against him: he had said to Cordelia, “nothing will come of nothing,” and now the Fool responds to a similar utterance (“nothing can be made of nothing”), “so much the rent / of his land comes to” (134-35). Lear has given away not only the executive function of his office, but even the title, according to the Fool, and now retains only the title of “fool” that he was born with. At 160, the Fool says the King split his crown in two and gave it to his daughters; the implication of this remark is that power is indivisible and cannot be handled in this way. “Thou gavest them the rod and put down thine own breeches” (173-74), says the Fool, drawing a clear picture of Lear’s childishness. At 194, he applies the word “nothing” to the King, and this application may remind us of Hamlet’s similar mockery—”the king is a thing,” says Hamlet in 4.2, “of nothing.” Like Lear, too, Hamlet is confronted with the inevitable downward slide of even the greatest to what is most common: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,” as the Prince says at 5.1.213-14.

Around line 218, Lear begins to ask key questions about identity. ”Are you our daughter?” he asks Goneril, and she tells him to “put away / These dispositions which of late transport you / From what you rightly are” (220-22). Finally, the exasperated Lear asks, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (230) and is answered by the Fool with “Lear’s shadow” (231). When Goneril tells him he ought to be surrounded by men who sort well with his age-weakened condition, he swears her off altogether, and by line 266, Lear suggests that Cordelia’s brittle response to his demand for love has deprived him of his proper judgment. His judgment of Goneril that she should, as he does now, “feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child” (287-89) identifies what he believes to be the source of his troubles. But the question of proportion now comes into play because what Goneril has done far outstrips anything Cordelia may have done to offend the King.

The first mention of “plucking out eyes” occurs when Lear addresses Goneril as follows: “Old fond eyes, / Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out, / And cast you, with the waters that you loose, / To temper clay. Yea, is it come to this?” (301-04) Lear now transfers his stock to Regan, and threatens to reassume the majesty he has cast off. At 341, Goneril refers to her husband Albany’s “milky gentleness” as ill-suited to the times; his sententiae, such as “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well” (346), don’t bode well for his ability to manage power, as far as she is concerned. They seem more like passive judgments than active principles by which a kingdom such as Lear’s could be governed.

Act 1, Scene 5.

Lear sends Kent to Gloucester with letters. He begins to see that he has done Cordelia wrong, and his anger shifts to Goneril and her “Monster ingratitude” (39). The Fool points out something Goneril had said earlier: “ Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” (44). Lear is out of joint with the “seven ages of man”—he has never really attained to years of wise discretion and so is unprepared to practice the art of dying as he proclaimed at the play’s beginning. His kingdom is now paying the price.

Act 2, Scene 1.

Edmund practices his villainy on Edgar, and by the end of the scene, Gloucester has made Edmund his heir apparent. Regan insinuates that Edgar was associated with the “riotous knights” in Lear’s service, a claim that Edmund seconds. Cornwall takes a liking to Edmund for his “virtuous obedience” (113). The affinities of the wicked in this play are beginning to make themselves known, as if the bad characters come together by nature as well as by circumstance.

Act 2, Scene 2.

This is a counterpoint-style scene in which Kent recognizes Oswald for the knave he is, unlike Gloucester with his evil son Edmund. Kent’s putdown “Nature disclaims in thee: / a tailor made thee” (54-55) is a classic—Oswald is, after all, a man of artifice who gilds the ugly, base version of nature upheld by Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall. But Kent as “Caius” gets himself into a bad fix in this scene when he finds it impossible to explain his hatred for Oswald to Cornwall, who takes him for an arrogant and affected inferior, a man who has learned to get praise for his “saucy roughness” (97). At line 125, Cornwall for once takes the lead, ordering that the stocks be brought. While in the stocks, Kent mentions around lines 165-70 that he has a letter from Cordelia—she is aware of the King’s distress.

Act 2, Scene 3.

Here Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom the Bedlam Beggar, who will “ with presented nakedness outface / The winds and persecutions of the sky” (11-12). For this role, he says, “The country gives me proof and president ” (13). His model of the natural man comes from neglected humanity in the English countryside; it is hardly a mere invention on his part. Poor Tom is not a mere negation when he says, “Edgar I nothing am” (21), which means “I am no longer Edgar.” Poor Tom will be the “something” that rescues Edgar from the “nothing” forced upon him, and that serves as “president” (i.e. precedent) to King Lear in the storm.

Act 2, Scene 4.

King Lear is outraged when he sees Kent in the stocks, and becomes increasingly obsessed with this slight as the scene continues. He is sensitive to the shift in tone of his keepers—Gloucester’s ill-chosen remark that Cornwall has been “inform’d” of his demands drives him to an incredulous, “ Dost thou understand me, man?” (99) But his summons to Regan and Cornwall sounds pathetic by this point: “Bid them come forth and hear me, / Or at their chamber-door I’ll beat the drum / Till it cry sleep to death” (117-19). This intemperance earns him only the Fool’s mocking tale about the cockney woman’s attempt to quiet live eels as she made them into pie (122-26). Lear is at the mercy of his passions, which have no outlet in action. Suffering is inevitable, suggests the Fool’s wisdom.

Turning to Regan for comfort, Lear gets only the following counsel: O sir, you are old, / Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of his confine. You should be rul’d and led / By some discretion that discerns your state / Better than you yourself. Therefore I pray you / That to our sister you do make return” (146-51). It would be difficult to strip an elderly man of his dignity any more cruelly than this, and already we may begin to sense the change in attitude that marks a leap beyond “ordinary mean” to the “hard hearts” beyond anything we had thought possible in nature—the transition Lear asks about later, in Act 3, Scene 6. At 177, Lear still believes, apparently, that there is a world of difference between Regan and Goneril: “Thou better know’st / The offices of nature, bond of childhood, / Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude: / Thy half o’ th’ kingdom hast thou not forgot, / Wherein I thee endow’d” (177-81). The phrase “offices of nature” indicates that to Lear, nature is something civil and beneficent—it is to be identified with the properly functioning family unit.

But Regan’s request is along the same lines as her previous remark: “I pray you, father, being weak, seem so” (201). Then comes the reverse bidding war between Regan and Goneril over the number of knights Lear is to be allowed, ending at 264 with Regan’s question, “What need one?” Lear offers them a remarkable comeback: “O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s” (264-67). Humanity must not, he insists, be reduced to natural necessity; we are creatures of excess, artifice, and, symbol. Nature as a concept enfolds all of these qualities. It is not to be sundered from decorum, either. Then Lear offers a contradictory prayer to the gods, asking for both patience and anger. He is soon to rage in the storm (mentioned in the stage directions as “storm and tempest” at line 284), but for the moment he denounces his two present daughters as “unnatural hags” and declares almost comically, “ I will do such things— / What they are yet I know not; but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!” (280-82) Regan’s cruel sententia to worried Gloucester is her justification for exiling Lear into the storm: “O sir, to wilful men / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors” (302-04). It’s true enough that the unwise learn, if at all, only by sad experience—perhaps that is a fundamental point in Christian-based tragedy—but mere decency should have been enough to instruct Regan that this is not the time for such sententiousness. Her cruel excess (along with that of Edmund, Goneril, and Cornwall) is the demonic inverse of the generous excess Lear had invoked in exclaiming, “O, reason not the need!” The play affords scant opportunity for finding any middle ground between these two extremes—between that which is almost infinitely above nature and that which is a great deal more savage than nature. The “patience” and acceptance that Edgar will counsel Gloucester and that loyal Kent has been practicing with Lear goes some way towards building a bridge, but the outcome of their efforts is not heartening.

In Act 2, the families are sundered, and like affines itself with like, both indoors and out of doors. Lear has brought up the issue of the heavens—which side will the gods take in this great confrontation between house and house, between one group of sinners and another, far worse, group?

Act 3, Scene 1.

Kent’s question when Lear is abandoned to the “fretful elements” (4) isn’t about grand political theory or power, it is simply about who is attending the frail old man: he should not, thinks Kent, be left alone and at the mercy of the weather. The Gentleman informs him that only the Fool is with Lear, “labour[ing] to outjest / His heart-struck injuries” (16-17). That is a generous way of describing the Fool’s job in this play—we know him to be a teller of discomfiting truths, sometimes in a bitter way. But then, it isn’t comfort that brings characters insight in this play—that would not suit its tragic mode. Albany and Cornwall have fallen out by this time, and both are following events in France. At line 38, Kent excuses the King’s fall into madness unnatural, attributing it to the “bemadding sorrow” caused by the bad conduct of Lear’s two evil daughters.

Act 3, Scenes 2, 4, 6.

In 3.2 and 3.4, the storm is clearly a metaphor for Lear’s internal discord, for the howling madness in the king himself. As the Fool has told him, he has turned his daughters into domineering mothers, and in a sense he has done the opposite of what he declared he wanted to do—recall that he said he was dividing the kingdom in part so he could go off and practice the art of dying well. His daughters were to exercise power while Lear would be free to “crawl towards death.” But instead the old man clings to life, trying desperately to maintain control and clinging to his dearest daughter Cordelia. Even after he has cast them all off, he remains obsessed with them. What we have in King Lear is in part the “tragedy” of growing old and being unable to deal with the changes and the loss that must come since, as Claudius in Hamlet says, reason’s constant law is “death of fathers” (1.2.102-06) James Calderwood of UC Irvine, applying a philosophical thesis of Ernest Becker, wrote a book called Shakespeare and the Denial of Death. Lear is a death-denier in spite of his claims of willingness to accept his demise, and his daughters represent perpetuity to him. This denial may be in part what’s behind Lear’s raging in the storm, and even at the storm in a confused way:

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man;
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engender’d battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, ho! ‘tis foul” (3.2.16-24).

As his rage rolls onward and takes aim at the “great gods, / That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads” (3.2.49-50), his insight is summed up in the sentence, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning” (3.2.59-60). This broad realization seems to go beyond a specific grievance involving his treatment by Regan and Goneril; it sounds more like an indictment of the universe than anything else. With these words, Lear claims that he feels his “wits begin to turn” (67), and shows compassion enough for Poor Tom to accept the offer of shelter.

But as Lear’s angry conversation with the elements (as quoted above) suggests, the storm is also a natural phenomenon not entirely reducible to the King’s inner disharmony. In this capacity, it is beyond his control, just as the decay of his body is. He calls the storm the “physic” of pomp at 3.4, the only event and setting that allows him, as a half-naked octogenarian, to make contact with what is common to all human beings. He has learned something in this storm that exceeds his inward tempest: as is said in other Shakespeare plays, “a king is but a man,” no matter what the courtiers or the lore of kings or the theory of kingship may say. But Lear isn’t alone for long in the tempest—the Fool is with him for a time, as is Kent, and it’s the place where he meets “Poor Tom.” Such weather isn’t to be endured long. Nature is outdoing itself for ferocity.

In 3.4, Poor Tom plays a significant role with respect to Lear, who says to him, “Thou are the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art” (3.4.106-08), the very lowest level to which a man may sink. Poor Tom attests to the rightness of Lear’s baring himself to the effects of the storm, but it isn’t good for a human being to be “out in the storm” permanently—shelter must be sought, we must return to a more “accommodated” model of humanity where we can abide. Poor Tom has already learned this himself, and King Lear, when he calls Edgar “the thing itself,” is in fact looking at a man’s artistic construction, a willed madness that he has probably begun to cast off even by that point, as indeed we see him declare forcefully at the end of 3.6: “Tom, away!” Lear doesn’t seem to understand Tom’s situation fully, but he learns from this supposed madman nonetheless.

In 3.6. comes the great “trial scene,” with Lear, the Fool, and Poor Tom serving as judge and jury against some hapless joint stools enlisted to substitute for Regan and Goneril. The causes Lear derives for his misery, his lines are confused but also genuinely moving. He had been told he was no less than a god, and in the storm he has found that he’s just a miserable old man. He abandoned his only true identity when he cast off Cordelia. He keeps coming back to Regan and Goneril, those willful daughters who, he thinks, have done nothing but indulge their shameful lusts and follow their primal hunger for power. What sort of “justice” now prevails but a system of spiraling oppression and hypocrisy, one that he has loosed upon himself and others? Virtue at present is nothing more than a device to facilitate the evil now afoot. Lear’s horror at a degree of cruelty beyond what he had thought possible shows in the question that wells up from the bottom of his being towards the end of the mock trial: “Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?” (3.6.76-78) When we have renounced our limits, what, if anything, can reestablish them again, aside from exhaustion unto death?

Act 3, Scenes 3, 5.

Edmund had said earlier, “Now Gods, stand up for bastards.” He’s obsessed, understandably enough, with the distinction between baseness and legitimacy, between nature and convention. Now he seizes the opportunity Gloucester has given him for further betrayal—Edmund will tell Cornwall that Gloucester is going to help the king. Lear unleashed Edmund upon the kingdom by his unwise actions and irrationality—indeed, Edmund is inevitable since, thanks to Lear, there seems to be nothing between anarchy and the generosity and tact that maintain human dignity and shore up the frailty of our nature. Shakespeare is apparently aware that “human nature” is not a given—it is actually something we must work at and maintain, and if we sink beneath it, we are “worse” than any violent predator in the animal kingdom since such predators don’t add superfluous cruelty to their bloody actions. Edmund is in full throttle evildoer mode at present, but later he will find that he can’t permanently jettison the trappings of convention: security requires order, it requires something like a social contract.

Act 3, Scene 7.

In this scene, Gloucester is interrogated and then blinded. Gloucester’s bold justification of his secret trip to Dover in aid of the king is, “Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes.” To Gloucester, the phrase represents the worst thing he can imagine, and is purely metaphorical. Not so for Regan, who has been interrogating him, or for Goneril, who, in the presence of Regan, had already uttered her preference even before the current exchange: “Pluck out his eyes” (5). For them, the literal punishment seems entirely appropriate. Sophocles didn’t want his audience to see Oedipus blind himself with those pins from the dress of his wife Jocasta—it was reported to the audience, but not shown. Shakespeare, however, serves up the sickening spectacle along with the unforgettable lines, “Out, vild jelly! / Where is thy lustre now?” (83-84) This is the lowest point in the play, the nadir of cruelty into which Lear’s initial mistake made it possible for others to descend.

Act 4, Scene 1.

Blinded Gloucester has abandoned any notion of a just moral order rooted in nature (see pg. 1329); he has understandably lost patience, and declares, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport” (36-37). Edgar, who believes that the gods are just, must bring his father round to patience again, to acceptance of the predicament that his own foolishness has at least in part created.

Act 4, Scene 2.

At last Albany asserts his own virtuous will against Goneril and her evil compatriots, telling her that she isn’t worth “the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face” (30-31). But Goneril doesn’t care what he thinks—she is too busy thinking passionate thoughts about her lover Edmund, the newly created Gloucester. Albany is not to be gainsaid, however, and calls Goneril what she is: a “tiger” and a “fiend” rather than a human being; he realizes that the anarchic violence she and her sister are participating must either be stopped or destroy the kingdom altogether: “Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep” (48-49).

Act 4, Scenes 3-4.

Kent hears news from a Gentleman about Cordelia’s actions and frame of mind, and Kent asserts the traditional view that “The stars above us, govern our conditions” (33). Else how could such differences be between three sisters of the same king? Cordelia, meantime, is ready to take on the British whom she knows to be marching against her.

Act 4, Scene 5.

Regan shows her jealousy over Goneril’s desire for Edmund, and tries to enlist the fop Oswald on her side: “My lord is dead; Edmund and I have talk’d, / And more convenient is he for my hand / Than for your lady’s” (30-32). Oswald is also told that he should, if possible, put the old “traitor” Gloucester out of his misery, lest he incite the people to compassion against her and her allies.

Act 4, Scene 6.

Gloucester had abandoned his virtuous son Edgar at the bidding of a knave. He was too willing to suppose that the world had been turned upside down, and his fear of betrayal made him most susceptible to it. Now Gloucester’s attitude verges on unacceptable despair as he implores Edgar to lead him to a Dover cliff where he may end his life. Edgar, still disguised (though as a rustic, not a madman) does for him what Cordelia would not do for her father: he graces Gloucester’s way forwards with a lie, telling him, “You are now within a foot / Of th’ extreme verge” (25). Some may take Edgar’s long maintenance of his rustic disguise as somewhat excessive, but in this play, extreme actions are sometimes required as homeopathic remedy for states of extreme error. That’s the kind of “remedy” the king’s rash behavior has helped to make necessary, although we shouldn’t blame him too harshly for others’ downward spiral into utter depravity. Regan, Goneril, Cornwall, and their ilk are responsible for their own misdeeds. There is some comedy in this scene since, of course, Gloucester’s “fall” is only onto the bare planks of the stage. The old man’s fake descent turns out to be a “fortunate fall” since it persuades him to have patience even in his almost unbearable condition.

In this newfound patience, Gloucester is confronted with a flower-decked King Lear, who apparently hasn’t recovered his wits as well as he had thought. Edgar calls him “a side-piercing sight” (85), adding a Christ-like aura to our vision of Lear as a suffering, dying, universal man. Lear asks if Gloucester is “Goneril with a white beard” (96), and reproves his former ministers for their flattery: “they told me I was every thing. ‘Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof” (104-05). Everywhere he looks, Lear sees demonic sexuality as the base of things: “Let copulation thrive” (114), he bellows, and declares of women, “Down from the waist they are Centaurs” (125). This rant culminates in a dark vision of systemic injustice and hypocrisy:

[A] dog’s obeyed in office.
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back,
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.
Thorough tatter’d clothes [small] vices do appear;
Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. (159-64)

This is as strong a view as we find in William Blake’s “London”: “the chimney-sweeper's cry / Every blackening church appals, / And the hapless soldier's sigh / Runs in blood down palace-walls. He has finally accepted the Fool’s old offer of the title “fool,” and his eloquence peters out in an exhausted, enraged repetition of the word “kill”: “And when I have stol’n upon these son-in-laws, / Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” (186-87)

The sixth scene ends with Edgar putting an end to the rascal Oswald, who has stumbled upon Gloucester alone and tried to kill him for the prize Regan has offered. In Oswald’s purse he discovers Goneril’s treasonous letter to Edmund, imploring him to kill her virtuous husband Albany.

Act 4, Scene 7.

Lear recovers his wits, and says to Cordelia, “Pray do not mock me. / I am a very foolish fond old man. . . . Methinks I should know you” (59-63). He fully understands the wrong he has done her—something he had begun to sense earlier, even as far back as 1.5.24. Lear expects only hatred, but Cordelia mildly tells him there is “no cause” why she should hate him. Lear had to seek into the cause of his other daughters’ “hard hearts,” but for Cordelia’s loyalty, she is suggesting, he need not trouble himself to find the reason why. As Portia says in The Merchant of Venice, “The quality of mercy is not strained”—it is a thing divine and not to be sifted or parsed.

Act 5, Scene 1.

In this scene we find Edmund, Goneril, and Regan locked in a vicious struggle for supremacy in love even as they prepare to fight Cordelia’s invading Frenchmen. Edmund plans to use Albany as a front while the fighting is on, and then dispose of him afterwards as useless baggage and a bar to his advancement.

Act 5, Scene 2.

Edgar is disappointed to find his father abjectly depressed during the confusion of battle, and tells him, “Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither, / Ripeness is all” (9-11).

Act 5, Scene 3.

The worst of the worst win the day, and Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner. Lear’s reconciliation with Cordelia is brief but supremely fine:

Come let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds I’ th’ cage;
When thou does ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon. (8-19)

The old king predicts that he and Cordelia will participate in God’s mysterious knowledge of all things, knowing the ins and outs of his secret dispensation of affairs and men. But all this eloquence is too much for Edmund, who ends Lear’s words with a harsh command: “Take them away.” Political and military events have outstripped the process whereby King Lear has discovered his mistakes and recovered his identity and his affiliation with Cordelia. It is simply too late for a reconciliation of more than a few minutes’ time, and in the worst of circumstances. Edmund’s blunt order completes the triumph of literalism and matter-of-fact depravity over legitimate power, virtue, and (here) prophetic rhetoric. Lear is rehumanized and endowed with new insight into what is right and wrong, what is human and what is not. But he and Cordelia are crushed because they are a threat to Edmund, and he determines that they must go.

But things aren’t so simple for Edmund. Albany has nothing but contempt for him, which bodes ill for his hopes to wield tremendous power in the new order of things. His presence in the army camp provokes a life-and-death struggle between Goneril and Regan for his hand, and Albany arrests him and Goneril for “capital treason” (83). No sooner is this declared than Edgar shows up and challenges him to single combat. Edmund, worshiper of animalistic nature and the “Regan Revolution” though he may be, is now trapped into securing his ill-gotten gains, his newfound legitimacy as bestowed upon him first by Gloucester and then by Cornwall after Gloucester’s blinding and exile. He must accept Edgar’s challenge, and ends up hearing the legitimate son’s pious declaration that “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us: / The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes” (171-74). Regan, meanwhile, has been poisoned by Goneril, who then takes her own life when she sees Edmund slain.

Edgar has found time to reclaim the honor of his title and to avenge Edmund’s betrayal of their father, and to some extent he has reasserted the principle of a divine moral order. But the Gloucester and Lear plots do not come together: Lear and Cordelia have run out of time, and not even Edmund’s surprising last-minute act of repentance can save Cordelia from being hanged or Lear from dying of grief over her lifeless body. Their only permanence is death.

In later-C17-18 versions such as that of Nahum Tate’s 1681 revival of the play (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/tatelear.html ), Cordelia actually thrives as Queen, married by a beaming Lear to Edgar. Neoclassical critics and audiences found the actual Shakespearean ending an intolerable violation of representational ethics: the good must be rewarded, and the wicked must be punished. Here is Dr. Johnson’s pronouncement on the matter in Rambler #4:

“In narratives where historical veracity has no place, I cannot discover why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue; of virtue not angelical, nor above probability, for what we cannot credit, we shall never imitate, but the highest and purest that humanity can reach, which, exercised in such trials as the various revolutions of things shall bring upon it, may, by conquering some calamities, and enduring others, teach us what we may hope, and what we can perform. Vice, for vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust; nor should the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, be so united with it, as to reconcile it to the mind. Wherever it appears, it should raise hatred by the malignity of its practices, and contempt by the meanness of its stratagems: for while it is supported by either parts or spirit, it will be seldom heartily abhorred. ”

In Cordelia’s death, the justice of the heavens is not at all apparent. It is true that vice is thoroughly disgusting in King Lear, but virtue is by no means shown triumphant. We must endure the old king’s “going hence” in unbearable agony and near incoherence, as he bewails Cordelia’s death and laments, “my poor fool is hang’d” (306), which may refer to our old friend the Fool, who disappeared at 3.5 with the line, “And I’ll go to bed at noon” (85). Nobody really wants to rule this blighted kingdom anymore: neither Albany nor Kent will take the reigns of power, and it seems as if all is left to Edgar. His concluding lines are oddly unsatisfying:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say:
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

If the play has been a quest for the restoration of authority, Edgar is hardly the quester who heals the Fisher King and makes the waters flow. But this play is, of course, a tragedy and not a romance. What it may have taught us, in the end, is that the deepest kind of insight into humanity does not accompany the workings of earthly power: as so often in tragedy, the cost of such insight is an untimely death. Edgar can’t do much more than repeat the stale “truism” of his father Gloucester: better days have been. There’s no easy accommodation, or magical reconciliation, no middle ground to occupy—just a pair of departed royal visionaries and a remnant of confused and disillusioned people repeating unconvincing truisms. Much of the play has been about trying different strategies of accommodation, recognizing the constrictions of nature, mortality, political power, and language, but no satisfying arrangements have emerged. No one has come to terms with what it means to be mortal and yet not identical with the workings of raw physical nature.

Finally, even though King Lear has pagan trappings, I treat it as tinged with Christian principles, and it seems that within this framework, tragedy is constituted by the enormous gap between wisdom and felicity. Much human suffering is preventable, but at the deepest level, sorrow and loss are the only true teachers. And at this level, even a great man like Lear is the “natural fool of fortune” (4.6.191). All along, the Fool had helped prevent Lear from falling into a hopeless state of self-pity, and had helped the audience from over-pitying the king. The Fool had stood for the possibility of artistic redemption, what with his playful songs and insouciance. He knew that Lear was at least willing to listen to him speak the truth in an eccentric form, unlike Regan and Goneril, whose stern authority he feared and whose disregard for his rhymes stemmed from their obscene literalism and savagery. But comfort is cold in this play—at a certain point, the Fool simply had to disappear, leaving Lear to face what he has done to Cordelia and the impossibility of setting things right.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. (Folger Shakespeare Library.) Washington Square Press, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0743482769.

Week 10, Hamlet

2010-01-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

General Notes on Hamlet

Theology. I n Christian terms, revenge amounts to usurpation of God’s providential prerogatives. But this interpretation of revenge clashes with a more ancient 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 nev er 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 is worth reading.) 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.

Week 07, Macbeth

2010-01-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

NOTES ON MACBETH

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

Act 1, Scene 2 (826-27, Macbeth’s warrior status)

Macbeth is already a hero when the play begins. Much of what is narrated in Scene 2 concerns his bravery during the battles against the rebel Macdonwald, Cawdor, and Norway. His martial valor exceeds that of everyone else in the field, and there’s an exuberant quality to his actions in the service of King Duncan: Macbeth, “Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel / Which smoked with bloody execution, / Like valour’s minion / Carved out his passage till he faced the slave [Macdonwald]…” (826, 2.17ff). So the pattern of the bold and loyal warrior is set, and Macbeth will be able to use it to his advantage against Duncan, just as the former Thane of Cawdor must have done.

Incidentally, on Shakespeare’s borrowing from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, as usual the poet plays fast and loose with his material—Duncan and Macbeth’s two reigns stretched from 1034-57, the time just before the Norman Conquest, but there’s a lot of conflation when it comes to the fighting. The idea of Macbeth’s being set on to the murder by his wife comes from the story of an earlier Scottish king, Duff, who was murdered by Donwald—that’s where the business of killing the chamberlains and blaming them comes from, for instance. Holinshed’s Banquo is a very bad fellow from the outset, and his Duncan is a weak young man, not a hallowed elder. Some of the references to witches can be found in Holinshed, and England’s Scottish-born King James I liked the subject of witchcraft and even wrote a book on it, entitled Daemonology. He traced his ancestry back to Banquo and Fleance, so he is part of the royal line that taunts Macbeth by stretching out “to the crack of doom.”

Act 1, Scenes 1 and 3 (825-26, 827-31, Witches prophesy, Macbeth’s first thoughts)

The classical Fates were Clotho the spinner, Atropos the “unturning” cutter, Lachesis the “allotter” or measurer, daughters all of Zeus and Themis. As the ancients sometimes saw it, the Fates or Moirai possessed a power over events independent even of the gods, who could not control them. But this conception of an externally imposed fate is impersonal and irrational; there’s no ultimate or ulterior meaning to it, and the Greek way of holding a person accountable for confronting a fate that can’t be altered is equally strange, if admirable. I’d say the witches in Macbeth are in a different category: they don’t possess deterministic power over mortals. The witches claim to know (and really seem to know) that Macbeth will first be Cawdor and then king, while Banquo will father many kings. But they don’t claim the direct power to alter events: note how one witch responds to an insult: she will plague the insulter’s husband, but can’t stop his ship from reaching port: “Though his barque cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tossed” (828, 3.23-24). Neither do they force Macbeth to do what he subsequently does. He may seem almost hypnotized by the witches, but hypnotism only works because people secretly want to do the things they are supposedly commanded to do. That sounds like the correct way to describe the relationship between Macbeth and the witches. They can set forth a vision, but they can’t make Macbeth’s decisions for him. He understands that their bare statements don’t necessarily mean he ought to seize the crown by force. I suspect that what the witches know most intimately is Macbeth’s character. Their meeting with him isn’t an anonymous call or an accident; they know who he is and prepare to meet him at the end of the “hurly-burly” battle. (825, 1.3-4) They have given Macbeth the apparent certainty that he is to become king, and he will do exactly as he subsequently does. Perhaps the most important thing the witches know is that the measure of ambition in their man outweighs his conscience.

In his lectures, Coleridge says that the value of Shakespeare’s supernaturalism is to set an excited tone right away and thereby to prepare us for Macbeth’s central deed in Act 2. (He contrasts this movement with Hamlet, which starts out conversationally and moves to high rhetoric.) But the supernatural is more than a stage prop or plot device here: we are to understand the witches to be real. The witches (and the ghost of Banquo later) are more than a metaphor for states of mind. To use the romanticist framework, Shakespeare is an imaginative poet who brings together traditional beliefs and images in a more vital, dynamic way than a merely mechanical or fanciful poet. Such an imaginative poet will, suggests Coleridge, balance and reconcile “opposite and discordant qualities”: Macbeth’s ambition is material, and the supernatural forces are equally real. Neither cancels the other but instead both correlate or even mix in a way that leaves both Macbeth and us distinctly uneasy. The Norton editors make something like this point when they point out that the witches are never apprehended and punished once Macbeth is dead and Malcolm inherits and refer to the play’s “nebulous infection, a bleeding of the demonic into the secular and the secular into the demonic” (820).

The effect that the witches’ prophecies have upon Macbeth is profound and unsettling: “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good” and “My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, / Shakes so my single state of man that function / Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not” (830, 3.129-30, 138-41). All that Macbeth had formerly taken for granted is now in play, and Macbeth murderous thoughts coexist uneasily with his hope that “chance may crown me / Without my stir” (830, 3.142-43).

Act 1, Scene 4 (831-32, Malcolm heir, Macbeth chooses violent path, self-division)

Duncan is still shocked by the treachery of the now executed Thane of Cawdor, saying, “He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust” (831, 4.12). Duncan makes Malcolm Prince of Cumberland and heir to the throne, which galls Macbeth, who apparently thought the crown might come to him just as honorably as the honors he has won up to this point: Malcolm’s preeminence is “a step / On which I must fall down or else o’erleap” (832, 4.48ff), and it makes a division within him: “Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires….” (832, 4.50-51)

Act 1, Scene 5 (832-34, Lady Macbeth’s unsexing; anxieties about Macbeth)

Lady Macbeth’s receptivity and determination are on display: she is exhilarated at the news of the great change to come, and calls on the heavens to “unsex” her, to make her as steely and strong as a male warrior, stopping up all portals of sentiment and leaving room and capacity only for necessary action. (833, 5.38-52) She has no doubt that the witches’ prophecy will come true and that it will require violent setting-on, but her role is that of the cunning woman, the plotter and seducer—Macbeth must do the deed, which causes her great anxiety: “Yet do I fear thy nature. / It is too full o’th’ milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way” (833, 5.14-16). As in classical tragedy, when a woman tries to take on the attributes of a male hero, she will be sorely punished. As the play proceeds and Macbeth steps up to become the hardened king his wife had asked for, she will lose the “unsexed” quality of the first act, and with it the capacity to steer Macbeth by means of taunts and reproaches.

Act 1, Scenes 6-7 (834-38, Macbeth ponders ethics, Lady Macbeth brings him round)

Duncan unsuspectingly arrives at Macbeth’s castle, praising its location as “a pleasant seat” (834, 1.6.1). In Scene 7, Macbeth’s initial reflections remind us of the play’s Christian underpinnings: Duncan is his feudal lord, his guest, and a good man. (835 7.12-16) The prospective deed is all ways damnable, and Macbeth is in no doubt of its source in wicked ambition or the likelihood of retribution: “we but teach / Bloody instructions which, being taught, return / To plague the inventor” (835 7.8-10) and “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition…” (836, 7.25-27). As Robert Bridges asks, how could someone so horrified by the prospective crime actually commit it? The Norton editors point out that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most self-aware villain; unlike, say, Richard III, whom we can hardly imagine doing other than what he does, Macbeth has the capacity to do good or ill; we know that his choice is sincerely meditated and deeply felt, and he understands the true nature of what he’s about to do.

Nonetheless, Lady Macbeth brings him round to his longstanding code as a warrior: his masculine honor, she convinces him, calls for him to take the crown, not sit back and wait for it to be delivered to him by good fortune. The basic conflict between Christian sentiment and pagan heroism we will find in the revenge play Hamlet obtains in Macbeth: Macbeth’s bloody Senecan ambition can only be satisfied by violating Christian principle. Faced with competing codes since he will have it so, he must make a moral choice. He has made division within himself, and in consequence must carefully manage the yawning divide between what is and what seems to be: “Away, and mock the time with fairest show. / False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (837, 7.81-82).

Act 2, Scene 1 (837-38, Is this a dagger? Macbeth talks himself into the deed)

Macbeth utters some of the most famous lines in the Shakespearean canon: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. / Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation / Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?” (838, 1.33-39) What is the status of the dagger? There are no stage directions telling us that the ghostly knife is actually before Macbeth, and he tries to firm up his sanity by insisting that “It is the bloody business which informs / Thus to mine eyes” (838, 1.48-49). Even so, the dagger seems real enough to him and the very double of the actual blade he has drawn in preparation for killing Duncan, and Macbeth admits that it “marshals” (838, 1.42) him where he was going, that it concentrates and gathers up his spiritual and bodily forces. The dagger’s power may seem to take on the cast of fate or necessity, but it may be more accurate to suggest that it makes manifest the weirdness of the world through which Macbeth now walks: the very objects speak to him, and torment him with animistic pranks.

He prays for an easy, quiet kill that accords with the silence and deadness of nature itself: “Thou sure and firm-set earth, / Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear / Thy very stones prate of my whereabout” (838 1.56-58) and seems quite resolved, saying “I go, and it is done” (838, 1.62), but we know that such facility in dealing violent death cannot be.

Act 2, Scene 2 (839-40, Macbeth’s reaction to murder: no “out of sight, out of mind”)

Macbeth’s initial reaction to his bloody act is one of horror: why wasn’t anything heard? (839, 2.14) He is shaken by his inability to say amen in response to the grooms’ sleepy “God bless us” (839, 2.26-27), and reports to Lady Macbeth that after stabbing Duncan, “Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more, / Macbeth does murder sleep’…” (839, 2.33-34). He even has a touch of “Lady Macbeth’s disease,” as that later manifests in her: he asks, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” (840, 2. 58-59) the hand-washing in this scene is both practical since the evidence must be eliminated and ritually significant, an act of forgetting, if not of attaining forgiveness. But it gives no relief, which is an ominous sign for Macbeth and his wife, in spite of her seeming confidence that “A little water clears us of this deed” (840, 2.65). Getting rid of the deed’s effects will not put the murder out of mind. The knocking at the gate “appals” Macbeth (840, 2.56); by now, his sensibilities are both heightened and deranged. Macbeth’s final words in this scene point the way forward: “To know my deed ‘twere best not know myself “ (840, 2.71). Necessary now is the deadening of his own consciousness, and certainly of his conscience, which is yet raw. But for the moment, Lady Macbeth has had to grab the daggers from him and take care of insinuating the grooms’ guilt for Duncan’s murder. (840, 2.51) She is the “man” at this point; she has been unsexed just as she had asked.

Act 2, Scene 3 (841-44, Porter; Macduff discovers murder, Macbeth explains)

The Porter’s scene (841-42) links well with the revelation of Macbeth’s crime. Romantic-era critic Thomas DeQuincey wrote in “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” that the Porter scene captures the moment when a murderous act beyond civilized existence is just beginning to give way to the ordinary dimension of life, to the quotidian. That’s why, he explains, the scene is so effective, even startling. In part, it provides comic relief after the murder and initial reaction on the part of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and in part it heightens the tension of the next scene, in which the crime meets the light of day and Macbeth must explain to people not steeped in depravity and horrid intent his rash action in killing the grooms as they slept. But most significantly, I believe, the Porter’s comments teach us a lesson about desire: namely, ambition is like drunkenness. At first, it may seem as if the contrast is greater since drink “provokes the desire” but “takes away the performance” (841, 3.27-28). Macbeth the ambitious man doesn’t have much trouble acting on his ambition: he performs. But at a deeper level, he does run into trouble because he no longer controls his destiny. He “unmans” himself and becomes a violent fool; his boldest deeds are in truth passive reactions to necessity. Ultimately, then, ambition is a kind of madness, and it makes its indulgers lose free will and self-respect. In that way, then, ambition is perhaps as great an “equivocator” (841, 3.29) as “much drink.” Macbeth becomes as impotent as the drunken lecher of the Porter’s imagining, even as he hacks his way through the kingship he has wrongly won.

The other thing about the Porter’s interruption is that it widens the frame from the selfish little circle of Macbeth and his wicked wife. The old Porter couldn’t care less about the goings-on at the Castle. He has his own desires, his own problems, his own wisdom, and his play-acting as Satan’s gatekeeper cuts Macbeth’s role as “grand criminal” down to size, so that we may for a time see in it a damnably common act of betrayal, fueled by vile ambition and justified by knavish equivocation. This is a variation on the strategy we find in Lear, where the King is seldom left alone with his thoughts. Shakespeare wants to carry us along with Macbeth’s story, but he won’t let us merge our identity with that of the protagonist. Drama is a transpersonal form of poetic art: it stages and allows for the development of great personalities, but it doesn’t let them swallow up the stage. Shakespeare is interested to show how people respond to one another, how human behavior turns upon triangulations of desire and other basic elements of our nature. We don’t get from him the claim of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost that “the mind is its own place” (1.254) but rather John Donne’s statement, “No man is an island, entire unto itself” (Devotions, Meditation 17).

Seeming or appearing to be a certain kind of person is not necessarily to be that kind of person, and the cost of maintaining the gap is often ruinous, a form of slavery to one’s desires and deeds. This gap becomes still more apparent in Macbeth when Macduff discovers the murder (842, 3.59), and Macbeth, now returned to the world of normalcy, of forensic cause and effect, must justify his rash action: “I do repent me of my fury” (843, 3.103), he blurts out, but his words aren’t very convincing. Malcolm is inexperienced, but he’s a Machiavellian in the making: he heads for England. He and brother Donalbain are “the usual suspects,” and he knows somebody has a powerful interest in framing the two. But Donalbain gets the best summation of the state of affairs: “Where we are / There’s daggers in men’s smiles” (844, 3.135-36).

Act 2, Scene 4 (844-45, Nature’s first revenge: eclipse; Macbeth crowned)

An eclipse of the sun occurs, and an old man makes the connection: the eclipse is “unnatural, / Even like the deed that’s done” (844b, 3.10-11). The natural world will signify, it will have its revenge for the unnatural acts, the wicked artifice, just enacted by Macbeth and his wife. He will struggle with conscience and, at least for a time, will seem to have killed it altogether, along with fear. For the moment, he is a great success, and we hear that he has traveled to Scone to be crowned king. (845, 3.31)

Act 3, Scene 1 (845-49, “To be safely thus”: anxiety, seeking security)

Banquo’s ambition appears, but only as distrustful speculation of Macbeth: “Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all / As the weird women promised; and I fear / Thou played’st most foully for’t. Yet it was said / It should not stand in thy posterity…” (845, 1.1-4). Macbeth’s stronger and more ruthless ambition—this time “to be safely thus” (846, 1.50) dominates the scene; he engages some flunkies with a grudge to cut down Banquo and Fleance (847-48), whose continued existence is unbearable to him: “For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind, / For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered…” (847, 1.66-67). Macbeth is confronting the hollow man image that he will soon become: the witches promised him only “a barren scepter” (847, 1.63), and at the cost of his soul, the “eternal jewel” (847, 1.69) possessed by even the humblest of men, that barren scepter is all he presently has.

In general, much of Act 3 is taken up with immediate consequences, with the need for security in the wake of Duncan’s murder. The play deals with the relationship between spiritual error and its material and psychological consequences. Good film versions such as Roman Polanski’s (starring Jon Finch and Francesca Annis) or Philip Casson’s 1979 production starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench handle the transformation of Macbeth from outwardly loyal thane into murderous fiend with appropriate abruptness. Power hates a vacuum, and Macbeth must fill up the vacuum forthwith. We see a transition from the initially pensive Macbeth to “Macbeth 2.0,” hard, resolute and ruthless, a man willing to betray and strike down anyone who threatens him. His busy wickedness at present is the flip side of acedia or apathy.

Act 3, Scene 2 (849-50, Terrible dreams, resolutions, Banquo taken down)

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth reflect and strategize, and we see both the spiritual effects of the act and a determination to quell the psychological disturbance while at the same time continuing the trail of bloody securement: “But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, / Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep / In the affliction of these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly” (849, 2.18-21). The cost of keeping up the division between seeming and being shows again in this second scene: as Macbeth tells his queen, they must “make our faces visors to our hearts, / Disguising what they are” (849, 35-36): the face must not betray what the heart contains—Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both recognize this as an unsafe way to live, but they have no alternative if they want to keep the power they have falsely won.

“What’s to be done?” asks Lady Macbeth. (850, 2.45) She suspects that Macbeth will have Banquo killed, it seems, but he keeps this partly to himself. Why? We might ask, since the queen is already complicit in the worst that Macbeth has done. Still, the king is intent on keeping his precise plans to himself: “Come, seeling night, / Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, / And with thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond / Which keeps me pale” (850, 2.46-51). This is a hawking metaphor—the night (the falconer) will do the office of the falcon (day); the rational, humane day must give preference to the terror-laced opportunities of night. One bad deed calls for another: “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill” (850, 2.56). As yet, Macbeth doesn’t seem to realize that no security for him or his queen will ever emerge. No matter—Banquo is killed at 3.3.17, though Fleance escapes.

Act 3, Scene 4 (851-54, Banquo’s ghost, resolve: all action; tedium of bloody future)

Banquo’s ghost appears during a banquet, taking Macbeth’s place of honor, and the effect is immediate: “Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me” (852, 4.49-50). Macbeth’s guests see only a fit of madness that unmans the King. They don’t even know Banquo is dead, only that he’s missing. This scene directly undoes Macbeth’s attempt to play the smooth Machiavel—his behavior unsettles everyone around him; even his wife. His strange words pay tribute to the weirdness of the time: “The time has been / That, when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end. But now they rise again…” (853, 4.77-79). But when he recovers, he determines to find out the worst and thereby discover the most brutal and efficient means to maintain his power: “I will . . . to the weird sisters. / More they shall speak, for now I am bent to know / By the worst means the worst” (854, 4.132-34). There’s no need to hold back since he’s already deep in evil, haunted by the dark forces to which he has succumbed: “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (854, 4.135-37). He must now act so quickly that there’s no time left to analyze his actions beforehand. As quickly as the mind can conceive, the hand will act (854, 4.139). Macbeth’s words may remind us of Richard III’s resolution, “I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. / Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye” (4.2.64–67). It would be tiresome to Macbeth to retrace his steps, to be penitent; the only way is forward, wading through more blood. But that way forward may also now begin to seem tedious. In the remaining few scenes, Hecate mocks human pretensions to permanence and safety (855, 5.32-33), we hear that Malcolm has found refuge at the court of England’s Edward the Confessor, and that Macduff has followed him there to seek help from Edward against Macbeth. (857, 6.21ff)

Act 4, Scene 1 (857-61, Witches’ three visions, Banquo’s line; Macbeth’s resolve)

Macbeth meets for the second time with the weird sisters. Three visions tell him to beware Macduff, that no man of woman born can harm him, and that only when Birnam Wood comes to high Dunsinane Hill will he be defeated. (859-60) The first two of these prophecies actually reinforce each other, we later find out. The magic-mirror image of Banquo’s issue reigning forever unsettles Macbeth most: “What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?” (860, 1.133) Repetition is sin’s most savage punishment. Sin punishes itself, trapping unrepentant sinners in their wicked patterns of conduct and desire. This is a traditional idea: you can find it not only in Augustine’s Confessions but in Dante, Milton, Hopkins—just about any Christian literary artist. Macbeth considers his own life safe, but he is frustrated, perpetuity being like the fruit that turns to ashes when Satan and his legions, newly turned to serpents in hell, addict-like, cannot resist eating it (PL 10.538ff). He resolves to act his bloody deeds as soon as conceived: Macduff’s family to be slaughtered: “From this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand… / The Castle of Macduff I will surprise…” (861, 2.163-166).

Act 4, Scene 2 (861-63, Lady Macduff & kids murdered: their perspective)

Before they are cruelly murdered, Lady Macduff and her son give us yet another perspective on the great events that overtake them and afflict the kingdom of Scotland: the boy’s innocence strikes home when he says in response to Lady Macduff’s insistence that traitors must be hanged, “the liars and swearers are fools, for there / are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang / up them . (863, 2.56-58) We hear and see the private consequences of public disorder; plus an emphasis on the natural affective ties that bind people and reinforce charity and social order: the dimension of humanity that Macbeth and his queen have scorned. Why, by the way, did Macduff leave the family unprotected? He seems culpable there, almost a “traitor” in putting affairs of state before family; this makes sense in the patriarchal context of English royal politics in Shakespeare’s time.

Act 4, Scene 3 (864-69, Malcolm’s “confession”; Macduff’s grief; Scotland’s misery)

Malcolm confesses to Macduff what an awful villain he is—next to him, he says, Macbeth is an angel. (865, 3.51ff) But this claim is ridiculous—in Holinshed, Malcolm does this only to test Macduff, and that’s the implication here as well. It’s probably also the case that he’s showing the proper use of speculation—to shore up one’s sense of virtue. Malcolm’s ploy serves to emphasize the crime Macbeth committed in moving from thought to act, and reassures us that while human nature is corrupted, the corruption’s effects can be kept in check. Macbeth’s “throne of blood” need not become the universal, irresistible pattern of royal conduct, even though we saw in the previous scene what happens to the innocent when royalty does not resist: derangement and denaturation of the very landscape and destruction of life and property, as is well indicated by Ross when he says that in Scotland, “good men’s lives / Expire before the flowers in their caps, / Dying or ere they sicken” (867, 3 172-74).

Macduff is relieved to hear that Malcolm was only testing him, and there is much helpful news thanks to the help coming miserable Scotland’s way from England. (867-68) In his attempt to harness Macduff’s grief (869) after he hears from Ross about the death of his wife and children, Malcolm again shows his inexperience—he’s a young man filled with valorous words from some classical manual of rhetoric. As Macduff says, “He has no children” (869, 2.217) and can’t feel the loss of them as a man should. Macduff, unlike Macbeth, is still human, and does not subscribe to the “hardness” doctrine of masculinity set forth by the wicked usurping royal couple. Nature’s bonds of affection are still powerful within him, and Macduff, ever the warrior, comes round to Malcolm’s program of action.

Act 5, Scene 1 (869-70, Lady Macbeth’s madness)

By now, Lady Macbeth has been driven mad by her guilt, and has obsessive-compulsive disorder, in this case a hand-washing compulsion: “who would have thought the / old man to have had so much blood in him?” (870, 1.33-34) Well, an average human body contains about six quarts of blood (1½ gallons). The queen’s physical manifestation reveals a psychic derangement: she can’t expunge her guilt, which shows up as imaginary blood stains on her hands, and her physician can do nothing to help her: “More needs she the divine than the physician” (870, 1.64). What is the point of showing Lady Macbeth’s insanity, a physiological problem, when the supernatural agents are real enough? This is not a pure psychodrama, but the witches are not causes of human evil; they only assist those who would do wickedness. What affects Lady Macbeth in the private sphere and in purely mental terms plays out for Macbeth in the broader material, public sphere that belongs to him. Action, battles and machinations constitute his attempt to scrub his hands and conscience clean, but violence and betrayal accomplish no such thing. Repetition rules the day: wedded to his illegitimate power, Macbeth will repeat the same pattern to the bitter, desperate end.

Act 5, Scenes 2-3 (871-73, enemy approaches, Macbeth’s brittle resolutions)

Macbeth’s opponents are on the march towards Birnam, but the king has deluded himself by now—he had earlier denounced the witches for the visions afforded him—and thinks he still leads a charmed life, (871, 3.1ff) so he dismisses those who are abandoning him: “fly, false thanes, and mingle with the English epicures!” (871, 3.7) But his claims ring hollow, as he himself reveals: “My way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf, / And that which should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have…” (872, 3.23-27). The words are aesthetically pleasing, but hollow and not directly related to the realm of action: this man is tired of living. Macbeth resolves to steel himself in violence, saying, “I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked” (872, 3.33) and remains distant from his wife’s sufferings: he asks the doctor philosophically, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” (872, 3.42) and rejects physic altogether when the doctor cannot give him a positive answer. As for his own situation, the witches’ charms are better than any medicine: “I will not be afraid of death and bane / Till Birnam Forest come to Dunsinane” (873, 3.61-62).

Act 5, Scene 4 (873-73, Birnam’s boughs advance: appropriate weirdness of nature)

Malcolm orders the soldiers each to cut down a tree bough (873, 4.4-7) and use it to deceive Macbeth’s defenders about the advancing host’s numbers. So Birnam Wood is coming to Dunsinane, but we and Macbeth aren’t witnessing a violation of the laws of nature. Nature seems bizarre and uncanny to Macbeth because he himself has become unnatural. But this apparent weirdness in the behavior of nature serves as a way of giving him his desserts—he has betrayed his natural lord (his “father” in Jacobean political theory) and turned his marriage bond into a criminal partnership. In broad terms, the deployment of natural objects to pay Macbeth back stems from the fact that Shakespeare is working within a Christian framework where sin has deranged the entire Creation, just as it will later in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Eve “pluck’d, she ate, / Earth felt the wound” (9.781-82). Nature responds as by sympathetic magic to human error, reflecting that error back to us if we know how to interpret nature’s signs. The weird, the uncanny, is in this context a function of Providence, which makes use of whatever is at hand to punish those who transgress and fail to repent.

Act 5, Scene 5 (874-75, Lady Macbeth dies, Birnam comes to Dunsinane, life’s a “walking shadow”)

Even before he learns in the middle of this scene that Birnam Wood is on the move, Macbeth has begun to call for destruction and decreation; of the enemy, he says, “Here let them lie / Till famine and the ague eat them up” (874, 5.3-4). He pronounces his own spiritual death sentence with the line “I have almost forgot the taste of fears” (874, 5.9) and can’t find it in himself to bewail the death of the queen (874, 5.16-27), for “She should have died hereafter” (874, 5.17). Her passing only leads Macbeth to say that life is ultimately meaningless, pointless repetition: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (874, 5.23-27). After a messenger informs him about the moving forest, Macbeth explicitly invites general destruction: “I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun, / and wish th’estate o’th’ world were now undone” (875, 5.47-50).

Act 5, Scenes 6-11 (875-78, Macduff’s revenge against “hell-hound”; Malcolm king)

Macbeth confidently kills young Siward, and rejects classical honor-suicide, choosing to direct violence at others instead. But then in Scene 10, he is confronted by Macduff, who reveals that he was born by cesarean section: “Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” (877, 10.15-16). This new information causes Macbeth to lose his courage and momentarily drop his adamantine front, but he quickly recovers with curses against the witches on his lips—“be these juggling fiends no more believed, / That palter with us in a double sense” (877, 10.19-20), only to be slain by the resolute revenger Macduff. In the end, the terms he and others use to describe him are mostly non-human: a baited bear, a hell-hound, and Lady Macbeth is described as “fiend-like” (878, 11.35). Macduff has sworn revenge, and he gets it.

In the eleventh and final scene, while Macbeth and Lady Macbeth had tried to kill all sentiment and sentimentality within themselves, the end of the play isn’t at all sentimental. Old Siward rejects mourning over his son in battle, and Malcolm, in accepting the crown, promises to do all the necessaries in the proper way. The kingdom has been set right, and the emphasis is on order and ceremony, spare and fitting words coming in advance. This seems appropriate given the derangement of the kingdom and of the dead king and queen’s psyches.

Finally, we might concentrate on Macbeth’s concluding musings and resolutions in the last several scenes. Do they constitute a classical recognition scene or not? Coleridge says the play is “pure tragedy” rather than reflective as Hamlet. But that doesn’t mean there’s no introspection or understanding coming from Macbeth. His tragedy involves the process of desiring honors and attaining them by unjust means, of buying into the epistemological / moral ambiguity served up by the Weird Sisters. Does Macbeth learn anything by the end of the play? I think he understands what he has done and why it was wrong, but it doesn’t matter to him anymore. This play shows its great maturity in the quality of Macbeth’s final musings in Act 5: the language accorded the isolated, brittle King is some of the finest Shakespeare ever gave to any character: its mixture of high aesthetic perception and utter hollowness of spirit shows an intellect undebased, but constrained now to describing and coming to terms with a situation that would horrify anyone with normal sensibilities. Macbeth’s fine words are insightful, but they are hollow, as if he himself can’t feel them and finds no comfort in them. They are empty words, not a curative and certainly no better than the “physic” he had earlier cast to the dogs because the doctor couldn’t heal his wife’s disorder. As always in Shakespeare, some interest is taken in the way a given character handles the relationship between actions and words: the words spoken by Macbeth to explain his situation to himself and his actions to others provide no relief, for that is beyond the power of language in such cases, at least when it is not accompanied by sincere sentiment.

Shakespeare’s plays have various ways of dealing with the consequences of tragic mistakes, with respect to the ability to act. King Lear, for example, gains insight at the expense of being able to wield power. By the end of the play, he and his daughter Cordelia are at the mercy of others, so even if they have become “God’s spies,” they can’t act in the political realm anymore. Macbeth follows a different pattern—once he makes his choice, he must take on the ruthlessness of the tyrant who holds his throne by injustice. Blood draws on blood until, as Macbeth says, there’s no point in going back. He acts boldly and dies fighting, but such desperation hardly makes him a hero. Instead, he’s the puppet of actions that stem from his own perverted will. The witches shoot an arrow into the heart of Macbeth, but that is not to say they are ultimately responsible for his crimes. Ambition is a kind of madness, but it is a lucid madness: images present themselves to Macbeth, truth comes in presentiment, and ambition drives him to inhabit the vision. The consequences of his behavior are predictable, if strange. Shakespeare’s genius is to take what might have been a stage villain and make him a three-dimensional character, but a three-dimensional character who is nonetheless a stunning failure as a human being.

As for the play’s politics, I can’t see how some critics’ claims that Macbeth is tinged with nihilism can be correct given that the play was in part written for King James. Why would Shakespeare deal with kingship in such a manner when he wanted an absolutist monarch to enjoy the play? The older, and probably more tenable, view of the play’s moral arc is that sin punishes itself inexorably, even if the interval between commission and punishment is sometimes longer than most of us would like. I think it is true that anarchy lurks in this play, but only in a narrow manner—the king is human, after all, even though political doctrine says he has two bodies, one mortal and the other immortal and representative of kingship itself. Macbeth makes a bad but entirely free choice, and from that point onwards his bad choice entraps him in a vicious fate that generates real chaos for others who must abide in his realm. He himself marches in linear fashion to his death, behaves like a beast (losing his title to humanity), and dies fighting. The Christian point is that free will, misused, becomes the slave of so-called fate, or necessity. As Wilde said, when we act we become puppets—Shakespeare might add, “well, only when we act badly.” Apparent disorder on the ground does not necessarily imply disorder in the heavens, in the fundamental nature of things. Still, I take the point of the Norton editors about the strangeness and equivocal quality of the supernatural realm in this play—it seems accurate to suggest, as they do, that the secular and the demonic, the physical / material and the spiritual, are by no means easy to maintain in strict separation. The witches’ “equivocation” is a power stalking human desire and endeavor.

Document timestamp: 11/4/2011 8:15 PM

Week 06, Henry V

2010-01-13T07:29:00.001-08:00

Shakespeare’s Henry V, Realism, and the Monarchy.

Shakespeare is not is a "realist" in the nineteenth-century novelist's sense. Although he sometimes includes ordinary people and knaves of various kinds (like Falstaff and his tavern-going friends), he is mainly interested in the dynamics of social and political power. Analyzing the causes of disequilibrium in these areas of life is a mainstay in his plays. If you want to find out much about, say, everyday life in London, you must go to the historians or to a playwright such as Ben Jonson (Bartholomew Fair, for instance). Shakespeare lived and wrote his plays during the reigns of two powerful sovereigns, Elizabeth (last of the Tudor line) and James I (the first Stuart king). While Elizabeth was a master politician and contemporizer, James tended to lean on the developing doctrine that a monarch rules by “divine right,” and therefore ought to wield almost absolute power. When his son Charles I got hold of such ideas, he drove the country’s landed gentry and some of the nobility—along with lots of regular folks who didn’t like Charles’ semi-Catholic High Anglican policies—into open rebellion during the 1640’s. The result was Cromwell’s Interregnum rule in the 1650’s and then a return to a chastened Stuart Charles II and, at last, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 wherein William and Mary came in from the Low Countries, acknowledged the limitations of their sovereignty, and satisfied the nation’s firmly Protestant sensibilities. From that point onwards, there was no talk of royal absolutism, and even the larger-than-life Queen Victoria reigned rather than ruled through much of the nineteenth century.

Shakespeare’s ideal sovereign seems to have been Queen Elizabeth (reigned 1558-1603), who had a strong sense of prerogative but also evidently felt deep responsibility for the well-being of her subjects. Elizabeth knew how to play politics like a true Machiavellian operator. Her reign was marked by what today we would call a shrewd concern for “public relations”—that is, for managing the Queen’s image and keeping the various subsections of the populace as favorable as possible towards her policies. The “Cult of the Virgin Queen” gradually encouraged by Elizabeth’s officials and courtiers proved a successful means of maintaining order. (She never married, partly because that would have meant diminished power for herself and an increase in dominion for her Continental Catholic suitors.)

Henry V and Tudor Pride.

But what about Henry V? Henry must have been high on the playwright’s list of proper kings, judging from the accolades he receives in the history play that bears his name. Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV after taking the crown from Richard II in 1399, was the son of the Duke of Lancaster, and so his son, upon ascending the throne in 1413 at the age of 26 as Henry V, continued the Lancastrian line. The fact that Henry V was a Lancastrian matters because the first Tudor King, Henry VII (who vanquished the Yorkist Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485), was himself head of that great house by his mother Margaret Beaufort. The Tudors, therefore, favor the Lancastrian side of English history, not the Yorkist side. It would be natural for Shakespeare (who in his history plays partly follows Raphael Holinshed’s Tudor-friendly Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland) to offer a flattering reconstruction of the Lancastrian Henry V, and I think that is pretty much what we get in the historical play Henry V.

Modern cultural materialist critics have offered a counter-reading that sees irony everywhere one looks in plays such as Henry V, but I am wary of such interpretations. Critics in any era recast their favorite author to suit their own ideological convictions—after all, every generation must reexamine the past to find out what is still valuable. It’s interesting to read The Tempest, for example, in part for what it has to say about how colonizing Europeans treat “others” like Caliban, and it’s worthwhile to read Othello for its engagement with early-modern European ideas about racial difference. I can sympathize with the excellent Regency period republican William Hazlitt when he criticizes Henry V for its willingness to applaud a king Hazlitt considers no better than a brute bent on imperial conquest. In a lecture, Hazlitt writes, “Henry, because he did not know how to govern his own kingdom, determined to make war upon his neighbours. Because his own title to the crown was doubtful, he laid claim to that of France.” That is a frank and authentic response to an attitude Hazlitt finds offensive in his countrymen. Still—and without meaning to sound like a naïve realist who thinks we can establish the one “true interpretation” about great events or literary texts—I believe critics ought to impose some limits on themselves when they work with centuries-old material. Claiming that Macbeth is practically a nihilist manifesto or that in Henry V Shakespeare is laughing up his ruffled sleeve at the principle of monarchy is unconvincing. Almost every line in the play tends in the opposite direction. It is hard to see how a man who headed up The King’s Players theater company for James I could possibly be anti-royalist in sentiment. No, I think Shakespeare is a believer in the Renaissance’s prime image of earthly order: the Great Chain of Being, wherein everything has its place and God sanctions the order of things. He is neither an anarchist nor a murmerer against the political order of Elizabeth Tudor or James Stuart. The human order draws its order from the providential order of God.

This is not to say that Shakespeare is a shameless mouthpiece for the powers that be. We can see from Henry V and other plays that he doesn’t support monarchy blindly—the strengths and weaknesses of his characters amount to something like a Mirror for Magistrates. He never tears the institution of kingship down, but in the end the advice Henry V himself gives in our play holds good: “the King is but a man.” And a “man,” in the view of Renaissance authors, is for the most part a collection of virtues and vices just like every other individual, high-born or not. There are plenty of vice-riddled or otherwise wrongheaded rulers in Shakespeare’s canon, and they never fare well. But this leads us to a consideration of Henry V as a character—romantic poets such as Coleridge, in his Lectures on Shakespeare, have written with much acumen about the way in which many of this playwright’s characters manage to be both strong individuals and yet representatives of a whole class of people. Coleridge says famously of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, “The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakespeare 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.”

This is an insightful statement—Coleridge seems to be suggesting that there is something generic about the Nurse’s eccentric behavior as an individual—she is an uneducated but good-hearted old woman, and all such people show similar tendencies in their speech and conduct. Coleridge has much to say in romantic fashion about how the “genius” of Shakespeare cannot be bound by external conventions about dramatic structure or the representation of character, but rather drives him to let his plays unfold and his characters develop according to the supposed inner laws of their nature—just as an acorn, to use the organic metaphor, must grow into an oak and nothing else. I have always like that romantic way of describing Shakespeare’s process, but my point here is that Henry V is the very type of a good king. He achieves this paradigmatic status not because Shakespeare is following some wooden rulebook on “how to be a great king” but rather because, over the course of no fewer than three plays (I and II Henry IV plus Henry V), he allows Prince Hal to transform himself from a rascal into a sovereign of iron will and implacable virtue, the burden of which is at times lightened by the sense of humor that comes from being kicked around by life enough to acknowledge one’s own limitations—amongst them spiritual error and mortality.

All the World’s a Stage.

What is Hal’s method for learning as much as he does? It is that of an actor—Prince Henry play-acts and workshops his way to glory, interacting with all manner of citizens from the common tavern to battlefields full of fiery nobility. His is not so much a romantic, unique, nameless, intimate self but is rather the product of trying out many different stations and styles on his way to appreciating his one true “office”—that medieval, relational term for defining a person by his or her role in life, entailing as it does certain responsibilities within the political and social order. If you’re going to be a king, you have to understand, in Shakespeare’s terms, that it is to play a role on the “stage” of life. That such a role means taking on grave burdens and enduring potentially harsh consequences in no way makes it less a role than if the person were simply strutting across the theatrical boards.

In I Henry IV, Hal’s father Henry IV at times shows disgust for his son’s prodigal ways. Hanging out with hard-drinking highwaymen like Sir John Falstaff and his friends, thinks the King, can lead to no good and violates the “public relations” principle that a great prince is more prized by making himself scarce than by mingling with low company. What the father doesn’t quite understand is that this “mingling” is Hal’s way of getting to know his subjects, the better to govern them. So in I Henry IV, Prince Hal tries out various roles, learning how the various subjects in his future kingdom think and live. In Act 1.2, Hal himself describes his antics in providential terms: “My reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault, / Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off. / I'll so offend to make offence a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will.” In other words, kingly virtue was always Hal’s redemptive final goal, whatever capers he may commit on his way to the throne. That may or may not have been true of the real Henry, but it seems true of Shakespeare’s character, who goes from “Hal” to the ultimate warrior-king Henry V, October 1415’s victor at Agincourt against an imposing French army.

Even when he becomes king and is about to undertake the greatest battle of his life at Agincourt, Henry V remains an actor and a learner. His groundedness and view of the big picture in morals and politics shows in the following prose exchange in Act 4, Scene 1 between the disguised King and one of his humbler subjects, Williams:

Williams. But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place'- some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.

Henry. [T]he King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death when they purpose their services…. Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own.

To a thorough philosophical materialist, this exchange would be pointless because both parties speak of “end things”; they speak of death and eternal judgment following the Resurrection of the Dead. But since they both accept this religious view of life, it’s easy to see whose argument is the better in such a context: the soul is more than the body, so the King can send his subjects off to fight in a foreign war without being held responsible for their physical demise, even if the cause should turn out to be unworthy. He neither wants them to be killed nor can answer for the state of their souls at the point of death—that is something only they can answer for. The point is that Henry can relate to his subjects at their own level, yet he retains the superior perspective of a man operating on a higher plane of experience and understanding. As Henry comes into his own, it becomes clear that his playful past has imbued him with the medieval and Renaissance truth that the king has not one body, but two—a natural body that desires, breathes, and dies, and a body political whose boundaries go well beyond the personal and the physical. The King is in part a walking “office” or set of duties, and this transpersonal aspect of him is what promises political continuity as well as (to borrow Thomas More’s term in Utopia) the “majesty” that comes with respect for whatever is larger than material affairs and ordinary humanity. (On the development of this theory, see Ernest Kantorowicz’s classic 1959 book, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology.)

Words, Words, Words.

I like Russ McDonald’s Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, and his introduction to Elizabethan/Jacobean rhetoric in particular. McDonald’s main advice is that in order to enjoy Shakespeare, we need to be patient with what seems to our modern, journalistic sensibilities overly verbose passages and drawn-out figures of speech. We apply the idea that “brevity’s the soul of wit” to just about every kind of writing and speaking, so it can be disconcerting when Romeo’s friend Benvolio describes the predawn period as “an hour before the worshipp'd sun / Peer'd forth the golden window of the East.” The French historian Guizot said that Shakespeare tried every style except simplicity, but it’s fair to add that the most verbose statements in Shakespeare’s plays usually go to the silliest characters. Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing and Polonius in Hamlet are fine examples.

On a more serious level, the key question to ask about seemingly “verbose” figures and long sentences in Shakespeare is, “are the words oriented towards action, or towards further rhetoric?” Henry V, for instance, gets many full speeches both in soliloquy and in dialogue with others, some of them rather exuberant. But because his words always appear to be spoken to some useful and necessary end—like plucking up his men’s courage just before a battle, or inwardly hashing out a difficult matter in monarch-theory or a point of conscience (4.1 “think not upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown! / I Richard's body have interred new…”), they pass the “blowhard” test. An example would be Act 3, scene 3’s longish harangue of the citizens of Harfleur—Henry seems to be revel at length in the horrors his men will inflict on the defenseless town, but his purpose is blunt and (arguably) even humane, as the concluding rhymed couplet of his speech makes clear: “What say you? Will you yield, and this avoid? / Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?” Henry is a talker, but he’s much more than that—he is a doer whose words suit his purposes and his actions. Similarly, Captain Fluellen is loquacious, has a comic Welsh accent, and even ends up talking sometimes while others are fighting. Even so, his vehemence (“look you, now”—“in your conscience”!) is as honorable as Henry’s occasional exuberance—Fluellen speaks as he does from an excess of uprightness and national pride, not from any unworthy motives, and his overfondness for “discoursing of the wars” stems from admirable erudition in military history.

Contrast Henry’s performance as a speaker with the Dauphin (the Crown Prince of France)—he is eager to defend his country, we quickly intuit, but his bravado and metaphorical flights are not grounded in prior experience. When he compares his horse to Pegasus—“ha! he bounds from the earth as if his entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus, chez les narines de feu! When I bestride him I soar, I am a hawk. He trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes”—the Constable quick tries to bring him back to earth: “Indeed, my lord, it is a most absolute and excellent horse.” A horse, that is, and nothing more. As the conversation proceeds, it becomes clear that the Dauphin’s older advisors have heard this nonsense before, and hold it in contempt. The man is a fine talker, but his career as a doer, while honorable, will be cut tragically short by Henry’s “band of brothers.”

Finally on the subject of linguistic styles, the matter is far more complex than I can do justice to here. We aren’t always dealing with straightforward contrasts indicating either perfect virtue or absolute vice. Even Plump Jack Falstaff, in the Henry IV plays, with his windy rhetoric and bad morals, has something of value about him—he’s a slippery, virtuoso rogue even if not a virtuous man, and he teaches the Prince a thing or two about what makes men such as himself tick. There are almost as many unflattering affinities as stark differences between the rascals and the royalty in the Henry IV-V trilogy. This is part of what Samuel Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare, warily acknowledges as the playwright’s genius—he is true to the complexities of character and life’s events, sometimes to the point of surrendering the uplifting moral for love of the tale that rings true to human nature. In 5.1 the lowly Pistol laments, “Old I do wax; and from my weary limbs / Honour is cudgell'd. Well, bawd I'll turn, / And something lean to cutpurse of quick hand. / To England will I steal, and there I'll steal….” The statement has a certain eloquence to it, and the pun on “steal” reinforces the pathos of this unheroic character’s probable future: King Henry said everyone who came back from the war in France would be remembered eternally, but that’s clearly not true for a man like Pistol—with no honorable role to play back home, he’s sure to meet some ignominious fate.

Week 04, The Merchant of Venice

2010-01-13T07:28:00.000-08:00

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

Week 03, Twelfth Night

2010-01-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

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

Week 02, A Midsummer Night's Dream

2010-01-13T07:26:00.000-08:00

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.

Introduction to Romances

2010-01-13T07:23:00.000-08:00

Will post as time permits....

Introduction to Tragedy

2010-01-13T07:22:00.000-08:00

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.

Introduction to Histories

2010-01-13T07:21:00.000-08:00

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 Comedy

2010-01-13T07:20:00.000-08:00

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.