E316 TR Shakespeare

English 316 TR Home Page

2011-08-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

Welcome to E316 TR, Shakespeare’s Major Plays

This blog will offer posts on all of the plays on our Monday/Wednesday syllabus as well as introductory material on comedy, history, and tragedy. The posts 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, they should prove helpful in your engagement with the plays and in arriving at paper topics. The edition used is Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5.

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

Introduction to Shakespeare

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Shakespeare the Man, 1564-1616.

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

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare’s Era: Tudor and early Stuart England.

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

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

London.

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

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

The Theater.

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

Shakespeare’s Themes and Method of Composition.

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

Questions to Ask about Shakespeare’s Plays.

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

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

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

What do the characters seek?

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

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

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

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

-- There are both internal and external hindrances.

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

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

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

What is the disposition of time and chance?

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

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

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

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

Method of Composition.

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

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

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

Shakespeare’s Language

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

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

B) Rhetorical devices abounding:

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

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

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

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

and a host of other devices.

C) Grammar Irregularities:

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

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

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

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

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

GLOUCESTER. Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

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

And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

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

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

Madam, an hour before the worshipp'd sun

Peer'd forth the golden window of the East,

A troubled mind drave me to walk abroad;

Where, underneath the grove of sycamore

That westward rooteth from the city's side,

So early walking did I see your son.

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

Introduction to Comedy

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Introduction to Comedy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shakespearian Comedy

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

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

As a main example, let’s consider the concept of charity. I mentioned likeability with respect to ancient comedy: sympathetic characters win. We might reinterpret this notion by applying the Christian opposition between generosity and selfishness or, to use more productive terminology, between charity (charitas) and cupidity (cupiditas). Charitas has to do with a generous outflowing of love for one’s fellow human beings—it is something that helps to unite not only individuals into couples but indeed entire communities into a functioning civil society. It enjoins forgiveness of wrongs and a bearing of optimism and faith in the teeth of adversity. Cupiditas, by contrast, has to do with individual selfishness—a cupiditous person seeks and accumulates riches and status more to lord it over others than really to enjoy what has been gained. Perhaps Jesus’ remark, “he that would save his life shall lose it” (Matthew 16:25) says it best: selfish, greedy, mean-spirited people are losers because they misunderstand the purpose of life, and lose all the more when they win on their own terms. Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge is a fine example of this “lose-by-winning” outlook.

As in ancient comedy, in Shakespeare the comic orientation towards time is favorable: time and chance are friendly, at least if a character is amongst the likeable and generous. Consider the following passage from the Hebrew scriptures, specifically Ecclesiastes 9:11-12, which I’ll copy from the Bishop’s Bible of 1568 that Shakespeare would have known:

11. So I turned me unto other thinges under the sunne, & I sawe that in running it helpeth not to be swift, in battell it helpeth not to be strong, to feeding it helpeth not to be wyse, to riches it helpeth not to be a man of muche understanding, to be had in favour it helpeth not to be cunning: but that all lieth in tyme and fortune. 12. For a man knoweth not his tyme: but like as the fishes are taken with the angle, and as the byrdes are caught with the snare: even so are men taken in the perillous time, when it commeth sodaynly upon them. (Studylight.org’s online Bishop’s Bible, Ecclesiastes 9:11-12.)

In comedy, the characters may want change to happen in just the ways they specify (so that they can obtain their heart’s desire, whatever that may be). They may even want things to stay the same, but that kind of wish is seldom, if ever, granted. Situations—accidents and “tyme” seem to get the better of even the most fervent resolutions, the most serious invocations of dignity. As the Bible says, “all lieth in tyme and fortune.” A generous or charitable character, as described above, will most likely respond to the coming-on of time and accident in an open-minded, open-hearted way and will thereby befriend change, at least implicitly. The best example I can think of in this vein is what the shipwrecked maiden Viola says near the beginning of Twelfth Night: neither giving in to despair about the possible loss of her brother nor worrying about the particulars of her new plan to serve a widowed Illyrian noblewoman (she ends up serving the Duke instead), she declares, “What else may hap, to time I will commit” (1.2.60). Viola will face whatever comes with a bold, open spirit. She is both a woman of substance and a comic optimist. And in at least some of Shakespeare’s comedies, there’s a hint of Providence about the patterns of human desire that drive the plays towards successful resolution.

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

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

Introduction to Histories

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TIMELINE OF THE ENGLISH MONARCHY

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

Blois: Stephen (1135-54)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saxe-Coburg: Edward VII (1901-10)

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

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

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

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

General Aims of Shakespeare’s History Plays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction to Tragedy

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Introduction to Tragedy and Ancient Greek Theater

Books and Online Resources:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The theater had three parts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Midsummer Night's Dream

2011-08-20T19:26:00.002-07:00

NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE’S A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Merchant of Venice

2011-08-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

NOTES ON THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twelfth Night

2011-08-20T19:25:00.001-07:00

NOTES ON TWELFTH NIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All's Well That Ends Well

2011-08-20T19:24:00.002-07:00

NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE’S ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

Notes accord with the text in Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Comedies. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5. Document timestamp: 11/7/2011 8:28 AM

Act 1, Scene 1 (919-24, Elders’ hopes for the young; Helen’s idolatry of Bertram; Paroles)

The countess and Lafeu posit a balance in the young between inherited virtue and acquired grace and honor. The Countess says of Helen that she “derives her honesty and achieves her goodness” (920, 1.1.40), while the wish for Bertram is, “Thy blood and virtue / Contend for empire in thee” (920, 1.1.55-56). Helen, however, looks forward to her immediate future with the unsparing determination we find in Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” The tears she cries are not for her father, and her grief seems to be more pretense than sincere affection. The obstacle in her way is Bertram’s great rank. The affection she feels for this man amounts to the product of “idolatrous fancy” (921, 1.1.92), says Helen, especially since it is not reciprocated by Bertram: “’Twere all one / That I should love a bright particular star / And think to wed it, he is so above me” (921, 1.1.80-82).

Helen’s conversation with Paroles centers upon the concept of virginity, which of course this rascal dismisses out of hand as worthless, or at best a fashionable commodity to be sold to the highest bidder at the best time: “Off with’t while ‘tis vendible. Answer the time / of request. Virginity like an old courtier wears her cap out of fashion …” (922, 1.1.143-45). Helen’s regard for this parasite, whom she sees for what he is, stems from her admiration for Bertram. Nonetheless, she manages to get in some excellent barbs: “The wars hath so kept you under that you must needs be born under Mars” (923, 1.1.101).

Paroles dismissed after his pledge to “return perfect courtier” (923, 1.1.192), we see Helen’s faith in merit properly showcased over destiny and the handicaps such quality sometimes confronts: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven…. / … Who ever strove / To show her merit that did miss her love?” (923, 1.1.199-200, 209-10) Helen already has it in mind to pay the king a visit and try her father’s cure: “The King’s disease—my project may deceive me, / But my intents are fixed and will not leave me” (924, 1.1.211-12).

Act 1, Scene 2 (924-25, King welcomes Bertram, but praises Bertram’s father more)

In the second scene, there is still more praise amongst the elders when the king showers encomiums upon Bertram’s father: “He had the wit which can well observe / Today in our young lords, but they may jest / Till their own scorn return to them unnoted / Ere they can hide their levity in honour…” (924-25, 1.2.32-48). The Second Lord Dumaine suggests that young aristocrats need the exercise of war to keep them sharp and in line: though the king won’t send the Florentines any help directly because the Duke of Austria has asked him to refrain, some martial experience “well may serve / A nursery to our gentry, who are sick / For breathing and exploit” (924, 1.2.15-17). This advice no doubt plays to the aging king’s anxiety about the transference of deep qualities and proper forms from the old to a new generation. (We might question whether or not military experience does anything for Bertram, but that’s a question for later.)

The king reflects that Bertram’s father had said young people care for nothing but fashion, implying that the young inevitably exhaust their energy upon unworthy objects: “‘Let me not live’, quoth he, / ‘After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff / Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses / All but new things disdain, whose judgements are / Mere fathers of their garments, whose constancies / Expire before their fashions’” (925, 1.2.58-63). What’s in doubt here, as mentioned above, is the success of a process central to many of Shakespeare’s comedies: the transference of virtue from one generation to the next. Is there any continuity beyond the lowest common denominator, the shallowest patterns of conduct and belief? Yet this anxiety is set forth with becoming humility: of himself, the king says in response to the Second Lord Dumaine’s praise, “I fill a place, I know’t” (925, 1.2.69). Bertram exits after his warm reception by the king.

Act 1, Scene 3 (925-31, Lavatch the pragmatics, materialist; countess sides with Helen, who will go to court to try a cure)

Lavatch doesn’t pay much attention to the concept of virtue, whether inner or outer. Parodically recycling this play’s emphasis on organic imagery implying nourishment and growth, he even praises adultery: “He that / ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to in the / crop…. / He that comforts my wife is the cherisher of my flesh and blood …” (926, 1.3.38-41). This character is a naturalist who doesn’t suppose there is any way to escape from the world, the flesh, or the devil: as he says while explaining to the countess why he intends to marry, “My poor body, madam, requires it. I am driven on by / the flesh, and he must needs go that the devil drives” (926, 1.3.24-25).

When Reynaldo reports on Helen’s affection for Bertram (927-28, 1.3.94-98), the countess sides entirely with natural desire and quality in the person of Helen: “Even so it was with me when I was young” (928, 1.3.112-13). She is charitable where this young woman is concerned, and somewhat shocked when Helen seems afraid of the term “mother” (928, 1.3.139-40). Helen certainly shows her merit when she confesses her thoughts about Bertram to the countess, saying, “I follow him not / By any token of presumptuous suit, / Nor would I have him till I do deserve him …” (929, 1.3.181-83). She shows it too in her determination at this early point to risk her life in administering her father’s medicines to cure the king: “I’d venture / The well-lost life of mine on his grace’s cure …” (930, 1.3.233-34).

A key issue in the play is the propensity in individuals and entire societies to hollow out even their deepest values and become empty formalists. Bertram is such a formalist. No doubt Shakespeare’s Renaissance women liked a project. But is Bertram a project that can be redeemed from failure—is he worth the effort? That is a question to ask as we go through the play and see how things turn out.

At this point, I’ll just suggest that perhaps this play is not so much about the usual happy transition of a value system intact to a younger generation but instead about accommodation between old and young, and one young person and another by arrangement; it’s about mediating between the common lot of any rank and excellence so that a satisfactory solution can be obtained. The eventual marriage between Helen and Bertram may be nothing more than an excellent marriage of convenience backed by the power of a countess and a king. In a sense, the countess is doing what aristocrats eventually must do: invigorating her stock with new blood.

Act 2, Scene 1 (931-35, Paroles counsels Bertram to pay homage to military fashion; Helen succeeds in her pitch to the king)

In advising Bertram to show more regard for the Lords Dumaine, Paroles intimates that he’s always willing to fit in, to conform and follow the courtly and military fashions of great lords: “for they wear themselves / in the cap of the time” (932, 2.1.51-52). Belonging is his imperative, not merit.

Lafeu cajoles the king into admitting Helen: “… I have seen a medicine / That’s able to breathe life into a stone …” (932, 2.1.70-71). The king at first refuses Helen’s offer to cure him since he believes it would be indecorous and perhaps even undermine his dignity: he “may not be so credulous of cure, / When our most learned doctors leave us …” (933, 2.1.112-13). But in the end, Helen wins the argument by her boldness: “Oh heaven, not me, make an experiment” (934, 2.1.153). The young woman must venture her very life (935, 2.1.173) for this royal place-filler, but in return she will gain exemption from the charge of trying to rise beyond her place. There will be a suspension of the ordinary rules in this matter: “Then shalt thou give me with thy kingly hand / What husband in thy power I will command. / Exempted be from me the arrogance / To choose from forth the royal blood of France …” (2.1.192-95). Historically, the rules weren’t exactly rigid in the first place, and even illegitimacy wasn’t necessarily a bar to advancement if one had the right backing. But I leave that aside.

Act 2, Scene 2 (936-37, Lavatch’s courtly critique: “O Lord, sir!”)

Bantering with the countess, Lavatch utters his wonderful catch-phrase “O Lord, Sir!” (936, 2.2.36) redolent of courtly deception and evasion: it’s the kind of thing you’d say when you want to intimate that you can’t believe your interlocutor would be so naïve or impertinent as to ask such a question. This is the opposite of Helen’s bluntness in advancing her love for Bertram, even though she resorts to a species of sanctioned deception to complete the match. The countess drives home the play’s interest in youth and age in her manner of soliciting Lavatch to make good on his offer of courtly insight: “To be young again, if we could! I will be a fool in / question, hoping to be the wiser by your answer. I pray you, sir, / are you a courtier?” (936, 2.2.32-34)

Act 2, Scene 3 (937-43, King’s recovery; Bertram rejects Helen, overawed by king; Lafeu pegs Paroles; Bertram decides to escape Helen and France for the Florentine wars)

The king enters fully recovered, and even dancing: says Lafeu, “Why, he’s able to lead her a coranto” (938, 2.3.40), and again we see that the old in this play are not so irrelevant after all. They are not stage props. But when Helen chooses him out of an aristo-lineup with the formula, “I dare not say I take you, but I give / Me and my service ever whilst I live / Into your guiding power” (939, 2.3.98-100), Bertram rejects what is effectively the king’s choice and will not take Helen for his wife. This rejection is obviously understandable in purely human terms: Helen has said she will not force herself on the young man, but nonetheless she forcibly gives herself to him even though he does not want her. Under the circumstances, Bertram’s request, “In such a business give me leave to use / The help of mine own eyes” (939, 2.3.103-04) sounds reasonable. Still, reciprocity may not be the issue here: the king’s will is supreme in such a society as Shakespeare conjures, and Bertram is being disrespectful since he’s the king’s ward.

It’s clear that the king believes his authority has been impudently challenged by a subject. Part of his reasoning with Bertram lies in trying to explain to the brittle young man where “honor” comes from in the first place: “’Tis only title thou disdain’st in her, the which / I can build up” (939, 2.3.113-14) and “From lowest place when virtuous things proceed, / The place is dignified by th’doer’s deed” (940, 2.3.121-22). But when that logic fails, the king gets to the point: “My honour’s at the stake, which to defeat / I must produce my power” (940, 2.3.145-46). Overawed at last, Bertram makes a hollow submission: “I submit / My fancy to your eyes” (940, 2.3.163-64).

And then comes Paroles, who comically rejects the category of servitude to which Bertram has just offered unsuccessful battle. Lafeu is always needling Paroles, playing him like a fiddle: “Your lord and master did well to make his recantation,” offers Lafeu, to which Paroles replies, “Recantation? My lord? My master?” (941, 2.3.182-83). One wants to say of this character much the same thing Kent says about the corrupt servant Oswald in King Lear: “Nature disclaims in thee: / a tailor made thee” (Norton Tragedies, 762, 2.2.48). The clothes really do make this man, and he is not well-made. Lafeu’s put-down of Paroles is classic: “I did think thee for two ordinaries to be a pretty wise / fellow…. / Yet the scarves and the bannerets about thee did mani- / foldly dissuade me from believing thee a vessel of too great a / burden… (941, 2.3.195-199).

The elderly Lafeu has the perspicacity to make this judgment after a few suppers’ talk with Paroles, a man whose words and decking-out don’t match his true qualities or deeds. Perhaps we had best not make too much of this species of wisdom since, after all, Bertram comes by it without too much of a struggle later in the play (Act 4), allowing the Lords Dumaine to demonstrate the true mettle of one Paroles, liar and coward.

In any case, Bertram huddles with Paroles after Lafeu is finished insulting the fop, and decides to leave France and Helen in favor of participating in the Florentine wars: “Wars is no strife / To the dark house and the detested wife” (943, 2.3.275-76).

Act 2, Scene 4 (943-44, Lavatch’s pessimism; Helen obeys Bertram’s wish through Paroles: leave the court)

Lavatch insists that the countess is not well for two simple reasons: “One, that she’s not in heaven …. / The other, that she’s in earth …” (943, 2.4.9-10). He is ever the pessimist, and as the Norton editors point out, he is echoing the ancient notion of Solon and later the Greek tragedian Sophocles in Oedipus Rex: count no one happy until he or she has died well. This insight gives way to a silly wit-match between Lavatch and Paroles (943-44, 2.4.15-34), and a simple declaration of obedience from Helen when she hears that Bertram wants her to take her leave from the king’s court and go home: “In everything / I wait upon his will” (944, 2.4.50-51). She will not keep to this declaration, we should note with approval.

Act 2, Scene 5 (944-46, Lafeu needles Paroles in Bertram’s presence; Bertram gives Helen a letter, refuses a parting kiss, prepares to leave France)

Lafeu continues to needle Paroles, hoping to disabuse Bertram of his admiration for this fool. “The soul of this man is in his clothes. / Trust him not in matter of heavy consequence” (945, 2.5.40-41). But it is too soon for Bertram to accept such a verdict against a man who is, after all, counseling him to do precisely what he wants to do. Bertram hands Helen a letter to be opened by his mother, rudely refuses his bride’s polite request for a kiss, and prepares to take his leave from France without bothering to visit the king as required (946, 2.5.65-82). It would be difficult for our opinion of Bertram to get any worse, but he will manage to do something in that regard later.

Act 3, Scenes 1-2 (946-50, Bertram’s letters to the countess and Helen: his impossible conditions for accepting Helen; Helen stricken with guilt, determines to depart)

The Duke of Florence prepares for battle in the first scene (946-47, 3.1.1-23), and the second scene takes us to the countess, Helen, and Lavatch in France. First comes Bertram’s letter explaining why he has run away to the wars, and this of course earns the countess’s disapproval (947, 3.2.19-25). In a separate letter to Helen, Bertram sets forth what he thinks are the impossible conditions for his acceptance of her: “When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never / shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that / I am father to, then call me husband …” (948, 3.2.55-57).

We learn Helen’s fearful reaction to this piece of news: she believes she has driven Bertram to this extreme and put him in deadly peril: “And is it I / That drive thee from the sportive court … / to be the mark / Of smoky muskets?” (949, 3.2.105-08) This is what determines her to leave Roussillon: “My being here it is that holds thee hence” (949, 3.2.123). Apparently, she has not yet conceived of her device to satisfy Bertram’s conditions.

Act 3, Scenes 3-4 (950-51, Bertram’s at the wars, Helen’s gone, the countess hopes for a reconciliation)

In the third scene, we learn that Bertram pays homage to drums of war, not thoughts of love: “Great Mars, I put myself into thy file” (950, 3.3.9), and in the fourth, Reynaldo informs the countess that Helen has supposedly decided to go on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James in Compostela, Spain. The countess still hopes for a reconciliation in the aftermath of this news, and finds that she can’t choose between them: “Which of them both / Is dearest to me I have no skill in sense / To make distinction” (951, 3.4.38-40).

Act 3, Scene 5 (951-53, Widow Capilet and Diana watch soldiers pass, Helen invites them to dinner)

The action now moves to Florence, where Widow Capilet and her daughter Diana (along with Mariana) are watching the soldiers file by below (951-52). Helen (who has apparently changed her plans from that visit to the shrine in Spain) finds out in talking to them that Paroles has been badmouthing her, and she is hardly surprised to hear it (952, 3.5.55-59). Helen invites the two women to supper (953, 3.5.95-96).

Act 3, Scene 6 (953-55, Lords Dumaine prevail upon Bertram to try Paroles’ mettle)

Bertram’s two friends, the first and second Lord Dumaine, are trying to disabuse him of his regard for Paroles (953-55). By now, Bertram is open to the idea of testing this detestable character, having heard his friends declare the man “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless / liar, an hourly promise-breaker …” (954, 3.6.10-11). The idea is to pretend to capture Paroles, and get him to betray everyone he knows to the enemy. As we shall see, Paroles will go them one better, insulting his comrades with abandon. But for the moment, all we have is the plan. The two lords are very good at predicting exactly what the rascal will do: he’s the sort of person who might escape condemnation for a week because he’s a good talker, but as the first Lord Dumaine says, “when you find him out, you have him ever after” (955, 3.6.84).

Act 3, Scene 7 (956-57, Helen enlists Widow Capilet’s Diana into her Bertram-scheme: bed trick)

Helen now draws the widow and her daughter into her device to win back Bertram: first she admits that she is his wife, and then instructs the daughter to consent to Bertram’s advances (956, 3.7.17-36). She is to demand of him the ancestral ring he wears, and then get out of the way so that Helen may occupy her place in bed with Bertram. Helen describes the virtue of this trick as “… wicked meaning in a lawful deed / And lawful meaning in a wicked act, / Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact” (957, 3.7.45-47). She admits, in other words, that she is practicing deception and that he is attempting adultery, but what they do will be legitimate. Thwarting Bertram’s will is entirely acceptable in this play.

Act 4, Scene 1 (957-59, Self-aware Paroles is trapped, baited by “barbarians” Dumaine & Co.; he offers to betray his own side)

Paroles opens up the gap between words and action, and (in his case, anyway) the infinite space between those realms terrifies him. He’s quite self-aware, which makes him interesting, knave though he is. In him we can hear the strains of self-disgust, and a proof, if one were needed, that Oscar Wilde’s quip about action making us puppets and slaves of mere necessity needs some glossing: certain kinds of talk is more likely than others to lead us into that trap, isn’t it? Here we catch Paroles narrating the story of himself to himself, so to speak. He doesn’t make sense to himself—why, oh why do I do it?he asks, and there’s no reason given why he’s pledged himself to a thing impossible: “What the devil should move me to undertake the / recovery of this drum …?” (957, 4.1.31-33) Shakespeare is interested in the power of the lie, the seeming groundlessness of human dishonesty at times. Queen Elizabeth’s sometime Lord Chancellor Sir Francis Bacon muses in his 1601 essay “Of Truth” the following, which is very relevant to us in trying to understand Paroles and other such rogues, and perhaps ourselves:

But it is not only the difficulty and labor, which men take in finding out of truth, nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men’s thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural, though corrupt love, of the lie itself. One of the later school of the Grecians, examineth the matter, and is at a stand, to think what should be in it, that men should love lies; where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for advantage, as with the merchant; but for the lie’s sake. But I cannot tell; this same truth, is a naked, and open day-light, that doth not show the masks, and mummeries, and triumphs, of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond, or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds, of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves? (public domain e-text source)

The lie, then, knits men together in a web of pleasurable, optimistic deceit, and makes them “pleasing to themselves.” The truth makes us feel common and limited, but the dim light of falsity shows us to ourselves and others as things precious. But Bacon’s essays deliberately never try to exhaust their subject matter, so there is more to it than this, we can be sure. And that “more to it” seems to be what troubles Paroles—that “corrupt love of the lie” to which Bacon alludes is something of a mystery, and perhaps all one can do to cover up the abyss of the thing is to point towards some concept like original sin or the inherent depravity of mankind. The Second Lord Dumaine suggests as much with his incredulous question, “Is it possible he should know / what he is, and be that he is?” (957, 4.1.39-40)

Shakespeare has some linguistic fun in this scene, with those nonsense fake-Russian phonemes or whatever they are—good old polyglot Europe! Their purpose, as the Second Lord Dumaine has already explained (957, 4.1.1-5), is not to be comprehensible, but instead to be ferocious and put up a wall between Paroles and his hopes for deliverance. They are the sauce to his plate of fear, and underlying that fear is Paroles’ own insight into his nature. Well, language is a surprisingly varied and effective means of miscommunication: “Oscorbidulchos volivorco!” (958, 4.1.74) Paroles, of course, offers his captors nothing less than total knowledge: “all the secrets of our camp I’ll show” (958, 4.1.79).

Act 4, Scene 2 (959-60, Diana procures Bertram’s ring as he tries to seduce her)

Bertram employs the rhetoric of youthful dalliance and passion, which we know as carpe diem talk. “If the quick fire of youth light not your mind,” he says to Diana, “You are not maiden but a monument” (959, 4.2.5-6). But Diana, whose very name reminds us of the most chaste goddess among the Greeks, is more than a match for Bertram’s seductive words, thanks to Helen’s assistance. Diana easily procures the ring from Bertram, doing her part in Helen’s scheme. She promises Bertram that she will give him a ring in turn along with her chastity (960, 4.2.55-66). Diana is very much a believer in the logic of the play’s title—all’s well that ends well: she has no plans to marry, but doesn’t mind helping Helen: “… in this disguise I think’t no sin / To cozen him that would unjustly win” (960, 4.2.76-77).

Act 4, Scene 3 (961-67, Bertram’s conscience awakens at false news of Helen’s death; Paroles is completely humiliated, unmasked as a liar and coward, but he’s resilient in knavery)

Does shallow Bertram now feel the sting of conscience? That seems to be what the second Lord Dumaine thinks at the beginning of the scene. Upon reading his mother’s letter, Bertram, we are told, “changed almost into another man” (961, 4.3.5). The first Lord Dumaine reports and apparently believes that Helen has passed away at the end of her pilgrimage to St. Jacques the grand. Bertram, as he tells us himself, has been extremely busy taking his leave of the Duke, burying his supposedly deceased wife, writing to his mother and planning to go home and visit her, and other things. He is still looking forward to Paroles’s unmasking. This trick of course parallels the trick that is being played upon Bertram himself, though he does not know that: a good example of dramatic irony since we, the audience, know something Bertram doesn’t.

Paroles is utterly humiliated in this scene (963-67), and infers the lesson from this experience for himself. He is drawn into insulting just about everyone he knows, including the brothers Dumaine, the Duke of Florence, and Bertram. He assails their virtue in every possible way, military and otherwise. And his response to this humiliating episode is priceless: “Who cannot be crushed with a plot?” (967, 4.3.302). The two key things he says to conclude the scene are as follows: “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live.” And again, “There’s place and means for every man alive” (967, 4.3.310-11, 316). He has been found out as a liar, a coward, and a knave, but there’s still a place for him in the saucy world—it’s big enough to accommodate a relatively harmless rascal like Paroles.

But as the Norton editors imply, he is not the kind of mover and shaker that Helen is. She puts her body behind her words, and Paroles is all talk and no action, no body, and ultimately nobody important. The editors describe Paroles’ method well when they suggest that he keeps introducing himself in ever-diminished ways into an environment that obviously has no love for him (917). The world is by no means perfect, but at least it can be patient. There is opportunity for many talents, not all of them honorable and Paroles, we might add, is useful as a touchstone against which to measure one’s own honor. Honor, we should remember from what the king has said about it in praising Bertram’s departed father (924-25, 1.2.32-48), has much to do with the willingness to speak chastely and modestly and to back up one’s words with actions.

Act 4, Scene 4 (967-68, Helen informs Diana of plan’s next step: to French court)

Helen fills in Diana and her mother about the next part of her plan—Diana must go to the French court—and tells her that “All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown / Whate’er the course, the end is the renown” (968, 4.4.35). We forget the hazy details that shape and conduce towards an action: what matters is the virtuous result. The chaos of youthful desire must give way to the order of responsible maturity. I believe that’s what Helen is implying here, at least indirectly.

Act 4, Scene 5 (968-70, Countess and Lafeu praise Lavatch; Lafeu’s daughter Maudlin set to marry “widower” Bertram)

Lafeu and the countess are still mourning the loss of Helen, or so they think. Lavatch lays claim to a kind of virtue we know he doesn’t possess: “… I am for the house with the narrow gate” (969, 4.5.40-44). Both the countess and Lafeu consider Lavatch’s bitter foolishness appropriate (969, 4.5.52-57). It seems appropriate to the time. Lafeu plans to have his own daughter marry Bertram now that the young man is supposedly a widower, and the countess finds the plan unobjectionable.

Act 5, Scene 1 (970-71, the king’s at Roussillon, so Helen gives her petition to a gentleman)

Helen proposes to petition the king in Marseille, but he is not there and has gone to Roussillon. She asks a traveling gentleman to convey her petition to that place (970-71, 5.1.32-37).
Act 5, Scene 2 (971-72, Paroles will have a place at Lafeu’s table: diminished but resilient)

Paroles enters and must ingratiate himself at Roussillon, and finds that Lafeu is more than tolerant: “Though you are a / fool and a knave, you shall eat” (972, 5.2.44-45).

Act 5, Scene 3 (972-79, Ring device explains all thanks to Diana and then Helen; Bertram professes love for Helen; “all’s well”: accommodation and/or true love?)

The king grieves for Helen, and informs the countess that he has “forgiven and forgotten all” with regard to Bertram (972, 5.3.9). The young man will be only “a stranger, not an offender” (972, 5.3.26). Should we believe Bertram when he says that now that Helen is gone, he sincerely loves her? (973, 5.3.45-56) The king holds it a decent thing to say, but it obviously does not altogether excuse Bertram’s conduct: “That thou didst love her strikes some scores away …” (973, 5.3.57).

In any case, it’s time for Bertram to get married to Lafeu’s daughter Maudlin. Now we are on to “the ring device” (973-end) by which the play’s contradictions will be resolved. Bertram gives Lafeu the ring that Diana, at the behest of Helen, had given him at their supposed tryst. Lafeu recognizes the very same ring as the one he saw on Helen’s finger before she left court (973-74, 5.3.80-82). The king, to make matters worse, takes a look at the ring and realizes it is the one he had given Helen as a token if she ever needed his help. He now suspects that Bertram has done away with Helen by foul play since she told him before she left the court that she would never part with the ring “Unless she gave it to yourself [Bertram] in bed” or “sent it us / Upon her great disaster” (974, 5.3.105-13). Bertram is promptly arrested.

Now the Florentine gentleman shows up with Diana’s petition and when the king reads it aloud (975, 5.3.141-47), it accuses Bertram of seducing her. She follows him to the court, she says, to obtain justice. Diana soon walks onto the scene (975, 5.3.161-62), and Bertram tries to dismiss the entire affair as the invention of “a fond and desperate / creature (976, 5.3.179). The countess is certain that Bertram has married Diana—the ring proves it (976, 5.3.200-01). Paroles is called in by Diana to witness the truth of her claims, and before he comes forward, Bertram is at least forced to admit that he knows Diana, but he insists that it is she who seduced him, not the other way around (976-77, 5.3.213-21). Paroles gives his turgid testimony: “He loved her, sir, and loved her not” (977, 5.3.249, see also 977-78, 5.3.257-63), and then Diana perplexes and enrages the king by refusing to clear up for him how she came by the ring in the first place. She states the central riddle of the recent action: Bertram is “guilty, and he is not guilty,” and she is both a maiden and not a maiden (978, 5.3.286-90, 292-301).

Helen enters and clears up everything at long last, pointing out to Bertram that his conditions have been fulfilled (979, 5.3.306-10). The astonished Bertram says only, “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly / I’ll love her dearly, ever ever dearly” (979, 5.3.312-13). I take it that “ever ever” means “always and very” rather than “very, very” (a phony double asseveration). Either way, is it sincere emotion, or hollow declamation to suit the king’s will, now that Bertram has learned what a bad move it is to run against that will?

The king pronounces the final variation on the play’s title: “All yet seems well; and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet” (979, 5.3.329-30). The question of ethics is addressed in the sense that deception has been turned to good ends; what Bertram thought he was doing was not in fact what he ends up having done. This forgotten or at least forgiven, the result is a livable accommodation between Bertram and Helen, and a rich dower for whomever Diana may choose to marry. Indeed, seldom outside of Nietzsche’s needling prose has the work of civilization been so sorely in need of that ruthless “forgetting” necessary to its perpetuation. The sweet puts us out of mind of the bitter, like a mellow glass of red wine at the end of a difficult day.

Titus Andronicus

2011-08-20T19:24:00.000-07:00

NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE’S TITUS ANDRONICUS

Act 1, Scene 1 (124-135, Bassianus & Saturninus advance their cause; Titus’ sons sacrifice Alarbus; Titus makes Saturninus emperor; Bassianus absconds with Lavinia, enraging Titus; Saturninus makes Tamora his empress; Tamora promises revenge against Andronici)

The play seems to be set late in the fourth century CE, and it depicts a Roman world turned upside down—one in which a Goth leader only recently brought to Rome in chains is elevated to nearly supreme power, and a valiant Roman is crushed by his rigid belief in an ancient code of honor that virtually no-one around him takes seriously. In the eventful first scene, Titus Andronicus, a soldier of forty years’ standing, returns to Rome with his trophy Goths Tamora and her sons, only to be confronted with the bickering of Saturninus and Bassianus over the imperial succession. While Saturninus proclaims his right as the first-born son of the late emperor, Bassianus advances his cause in the name of virtue: “suffer not dishonor to approach / The imperial seat” (125, 1.1.13-14), he pleads to the Tribunes, Senators, and his own followers.

Titus has just returned from ten years of fighting in Rome’s cause, and all ears await his sentence as to who should take the throne. The general’s speech to the assembled Romans is magnificent in its honest reckoning of the losses he has willingly borne for his country, and moving in its attention to the children he has lost: “Titus, unkind and careless of thine own, / Why suffer’st thou thy sons, unburied yet, / To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?” (126-27, 1.1.86-88) He is a Roman of the old school and a believer in strict pietas to family and state.

At his remaining sons’ request, therefore, Titus will sacrifice conquered Tamora’s eldest son. Titus’ sons explain clearly why they want to commit this act: “… so the shadows be not unappeas’d, / Nor we disturb’d with prodigies on earth” (127, 1.1.100-101). Titus agrees to this demand without hesitation, but Tamora is quick to see the affair as hypocrisy: “must my sons be slaughtered in the streets / For valiant doings in their country’s cause?” (127, 1.1.112-13) Her sons have only done what Titus’ would do in defense of their homeland. Tamora’s plea, “Thrice-noble Titus, spare my first-born son!” (127, 1.1.119) is revealing in that its numerical quality suggests a world in which everything can be quantified or accounted for: surely, this strange honor code in which Titus believes is expansive enough to allow for generosity towards the eldest son of a valiant, defeated queen! Titus is thrice noble, and ought to be magnanimous in victory. But Titus disagrees: the honor code is strict, and a demand by blood for blood cannot be refused without shame. It would, in fact, constitute an outrage against the memory of Titus’ dead sons. So Tamora’s individual heartache, her natural appeal as a mother, must be subordinated to Roman ritual: piety must be upheld, and the general tells her to “Patient” (127, 1.1.121) herself while this supposed act of Roman religiosity is accomplished. Tamora’s denunciation seems appropriate: “O cruel, irreligious piety!” (127, 1.1.130) Tamora may be a barbarian queen, but she is no fool. “Barbarism” is a worthy concept in Shakespeare’s play: the powerful Goths serve as a ground for the anxieties of a civilized people about their relationship to violence, their sense of identity, and the efficacy of their language. Tamora and her sons both do and do not understand Rome. The question is, how well does Rome understand them?

The aftermath of the deed done by Titus’ sons is announced with the words, “Alarbus’ limbs are lopped, / And entrails feed the sacrificing fire, / Whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky” (128. 1.1.143-45). The alliteration of the first line is deliciously absurd, and lets us in on the comic undertone of this otherwise tragic play: Titus Andronicus has an over-the-top quality, a tendency to revel in its scenes of violence and criminality, that mark it as a fine example of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. “Shakespeare was young when he wrote Titus,” as an old professor of mine used to suggest by way of accounting for the play’s exuberance and outright silliness (there are approximately 217 references to body parts in Titus Andronicus—surely no accident on Shakespeare’s part), but we might as well admit that it’s a masterpiece of its kind. The Elizabethans loved this kind of limb-hacking, blood-spattered spectacle, as the popularity of other plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy attests. Dexter Morgan, eat your heart out!

With Alarbus’ limbs duly lopped, Titus must return to public responsibility. Offered the throne in his own right, he magnanimously turns it down with the utterance, “Give me a staff of honor for mine age, / But not a scepter to control the world” (129, 1.1.198-99). As kingmaker he chooses the eldest son of the departed Caesar as the new emperor, and Saturninus promises to wed Lavinia out of gratitude for this service (130, 1.1.240).

But Bassianus, with the aid of Titus’ sons, escapes with his beloved Lavinia. Titus kills his son Mutius when the latter bars his way in pursuit of the absconders (131, 1.1.288), but Saturninus flies into a rage anyhow, and chooses Tamora for his empress in place of Lavinia.

The perverse nature of this choice is implied in Tamora’s promise to the young man: “If Saturnine advance the Queen of Goths, / She will a handmaid be to his desires, / A loving nurse, a mother to his youth” (132, 1.1.327-28). Titus has given control of great Rome to a man who seeks a mother in the “barbarian” woman who wants nothing more than to destroy it as a means of revenging her losses in battle and the slaughter of her child. As empress, Tamora deviously smooths things over for Titus (134, 1.1.428ff), who has been left to lament the betrayal by his sons of the reputation he held dear. As she explains to the inexperienced young emperor, she does this the better to crush Titus and his entire line when Saturninus is secure on the throne: “I’ll find a day to massacre them all …” (134, 1.1.447). And so the act ends with Saturninus’ offer of a double wedding, and Titus’ promise of fine hunting.

Act 2, Scenes 1-2 (135-39, Aaron exults in Tamora’s success; Aaron helps Chiron and Demetrius plot the rape of Lavinia)

Aaron is exultant at Tamora’s advancement because it means great rewards for him, not only in terms of wealth but also personal pride: he will “be bright, and shine in pearl and gold,” but more than that, he will “wanton with this queen” (136, 2.1.19, 21) who promises to be the ruin of the hated Romans and their emperor. Chiron and Demetrius scheme with Aaron’s aid to ravish Lavinia: says Aaron the strategist, “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull” (138, 2.1.129), and therefore they can absorb in silence the savage crime these young men desire to commit against Lavinia. They will all conspire with Tamora to refine the plot. Scene 2 tells us of the hunting party’s beginning.

Act 2, Scene 3 (139-46, Bassianus and Lavinia discover Tamora and insult her; Aaron brings in Chiron and Demetrius, who kill Bassianus and rape & mutilate Lavinia with Tamora’s approval; Saturninus is duped by Aaron into arresting Martius and Quintus)

Tamora and Aaron converse in the woods, with Aaron counseling sexual restraint while revenge is yet to be had: “Madam, though Venus govern your desires, / Saturn is dominator over mine” (140, 2.3.30-31). Then Bassianus and Lavinia discover Tamora and insult her at length (140-41, 2.3.55-87). Aaron brings back Chiron and Demetrius, who kill Bassianus and rape and mutilate Lavinia, with Tamora’s explicit and sadistic approval (142, 2.3.114); she mocks Lavinia’s appeals to feminine compassion, reminding all present of Titus’ utter lack of compassion for her own heartrending pleas in support of her son (143, 2.3.161-64), and admonishes her sons, “The worse to her, the better loved of me” (143, 2.3.167). Tamora goes off to enjoy herself with Aaron while the deed is done (143, 2.3.190-91). Saturnine is easily duped by Aaron’s forged letter and planted bag of gold into thinking that Titus’ sons Martius and Quintus are Bassianus’ murderers (145, 2.3.281-85). They are dragged from the pit into which they have fallen and brought to prison. Tamora pretends to Titus that she will yet again assist him (146, 2.3.304).

Act 2, Scene 4 (146-47, Marcus finds Lavinia, likens her to Philomel; Titus must be informed)

Titus’ brother Marcus finds Lavinia and wonders what has happened. Waxing poetical, he likens the scene to the story of Tereus and Philomel: “But sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee …” (146-47, 2.4.26-27). Worse yet, he says, the ravishers have improved upon the dastardly practice of the original: “… he hath cut those pretty fingers off / That could have better sewed than Philomel” (147, 2.4.41-43). Off they’ll go to afflict Titus with the sight of his ruined daughter, as if he hadn’t suffered enough already: as usual, the reference to suffering is harshly physical: “Come let us go, and make thy father blind …” (147, 2.4.52-53).

Act 3, Scene 1 (147-53, )

Everyone ignores Titus’ self-sacrifice of four decades, and the tribunes he implores are nowhere to be found, so he tells his “sorrows to the stones” instead (148, 3.1.36). His entire world view has crashed, and Rome seems “a wilderness of tigers” (148, 3.1.54) intent on devouring only Titus and his kin. Lucius has been banished for trying to assist his brothers. At this point, we pity Titus already, but now he is shown Lavinia to top off his grief: “But that which gives my soul the greatest spurn/Is dear Lavinia” (149, 3.1.101-02). Of course, pity has its limits when a man insists on serving up puns such as the one Titus offers Lavinia: “… what accursed hand / Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight?” (149, 3.1.66-67). Titus’s sacrifice of Tamora’s sons in the name of piety now appears worthless since piety is dead in Rome. To be “wondered at in time to come” (150, 3.1.135) for the intensity of his wretchedness now seems appropriate to Titus, and his thoughts turn to what they can do to bring this about, by any means necessary. Here Titus responds to unspeakable pain, both physical and mental. In 3.2, he will reach a point at which there are no more tears, only vengeance, but not in the present scene; he is still processing his raw grief.

Aaron enters and offers to lend the Andronici a hand—or rather take one, and Titus, who had already thought it appropriate to “chop off” (149, 3.1.72) the hands that had vainly defended Rome, falls for the ruse: in spite of all that’s happened, he still thinks that when a man has given his word, honor will bind him to it. Aaron’s pitch to any one of the Andronici is, “… chop off your hand / And send it to the King” (150, 3.1.153 -54). As for Aaron, he is as always the ultimate stage villain: “Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace, / Aaron will have his soul black like his face” (151, 3.1.203-04). Aaron’s cynical, selfish perspective is that codes exist only to get others to do what you want them to do. But the Moor also pledges allegiance to pure wickedness, and as we can see from his exultant comments when he is in great danger later on, he is almost religious in his devotion to evil. Titus’ rigidity in adhering to old Roman honor and morality has opened a window for Aaron’s excesses, and the man indulges his sadistic brand of individualism when Roman morality breaks down.

A messenger soon undeceives Titus (152, 3.1.233-39), and the absurd spectacle of “thy two sons’ heads, / Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here,” as Marcus describes the sight (152, 3.1.253-54), brings no more weeping from the old man but instead determination to plan the destruction of Tamora and the Emperor: “Why, I have not another tear to shed” (153, 3.1.265). This is a critical Senecan turning point in the play: Titus has turned from grief towards revenge and will not look back. Lucius is instructed to go to the Goths to raise an army (153, 3.1.284). Titus, Marcus and Lavinia continue the grotesque body parts motif by carting their dismembered kinsmen’s particulars off the stage: “Come, brother, take a head, / And in this hand the other I will bear …” (153, 3.1.278-81); even Lavinia is asked to pitch in and carry the severed hand of Titus.

Act 3, Scene 2 (153-55, banquet theme of hands, revenge against a fly: macabre interlude in preparation for revenge, but Titus is not insane)

Just when we thought the hand theme couldn’t be more over-the-top, along comes the second scene, with Titus and family seated at a banquet. When Marcus clumsily blurts out, “Fie, brother, fie, teach her not thus to lay / Such violent hands upon her tender life” (154, 3.2.21-22), Titus responds with the immortal lines, “O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none” (154, 3.2.29-30). Titus continues to think on revenge, connecting even Marcus’ killing of a fly to this imperative: the family is not yet so reduced, he says, “But that between us we can kill a fly / That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor” (155, 3.2.76-77). Marcus thinks Titus is out of his mind, but that doesn’t seem to be the case; I suppose it’s just that by now his overflowing pain and grief have been transformed into a macabre sense of humor. Titus and Lavinia soon go off to read “Sad stories chanced in the times of old” (155, 3.2.82). Titus doesn’t know yet how informative those stories will turn out to be, but Ovid is about to provide some enlightenment about Lavinia’s travails.

Act 4, Scene 1 (155-58, Lavinia uses Ovid to reveal the truth, spurring Titus to revenge)

An excited Lavinia explains what happened to her via Ovid’s tale in the Metamorphoses about Procne, Philomel, and the wicked Thracian King Tereus, which Titus recognizes easily: “This is the tragic tale of Philomel…” (156, 4.1.47), and she writes “Stuprum–Chiron–Demetrius” (157, 4.1.77). Stuprum means rape, as in the Latin phrase, per vim stuprum, “violation by main force.” Titus says he will be another Lucius Junius Brutus, this time expelling not Tarquins but Goths (157, 4.1.86-93), and he writes a note to be carried along with presents by the boy Lucius to Tamora’s sons at the palace (158, 4.1.113-15). As for Ovid’s “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela” from Book 6 of The Metamorphoses, a lot of the details from this story seem to be distributed amongst the revenging factions of Titus and Tamora—the wooded setting for the rape of Lavinia mirrors the forest setting of the Thracian King Tereus’ rape of his sister-in-law Philomela, and so forth. The strange disguises of Tamora and her sons evoke the Bacchanalian disguise in Procne and Philomela’s ruse against Tereus: he’s served the cannibal pie during the course of a Bacchanalian festival. Ovid’s Latin story is at least as deliciously barbarous—pun intended—in its details as anything Elizabethans such as Thomas Preston (Cambises, 1561) or John Pickering (Horestes, 1567) or Shakespeare himself ever wrote. The same might be said of the Stoic Seneca, author of such bloody plays as Thyestes, circa CE 60.

Marcus continues to believe that Titus has gone insane: “Marcus, attend him in his ecstasy” (158, 4.1.124), he says to himself, but it may not be so. Shakespeare has cleverly combined Ovid’s story from The Metamorphoses with the violent foundational myth of the Roman Republic: the rape and suicide of Lucretia. Below is the momentous tale from Titus Livius’ The History of Rome, in which Lucretia lets death attest to her adherence to the female married chastity necessary to preserve dynastic Roman bloodlines. The matron’s death allows her determined husband Collatinus, Lucius Junius Brutus, and others to use her outraged corpse as a prop for the expulsion of the Tarquin (Etruscan) King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. Lucretia, more insightful about the severe implications of the rigid Roman honor code than her own husband, provides the blood that spurs Roman valor into throwing off 244 years of Tarquin rule. Here’s a version of the story I have shortened from a public-domain copy of Titus Livius’ History of Rome, Book 1:

1.57: […] The royal princes sometimes spent their leisure hours in feasting and entertainments, and at a wine party given by Sextus Tarquinius at which Collatinus, the son of Egerius, was present, the conversation happened to turn upon their wives, and each began to speak of his own in terms of extraordinarily high praise. As the dispute became warm, Collatinus said that there was no need of words [….] “Why do we not,” he exclaimed, “[…] pay our wives a visit and find out their characters on the spot? [.…] Thence they proceeded to Collatia, where they found Lucretia very differently employed from the king’s daughters-in-law, whom they had seen passing their time in feasting and luxury with their acquaintances. She was sitting at her wool work in the hall, late at night, with her maids busy round her. The palm in this competition of wifely virtue was awarded to Lucretia…. Sextus Tarquin, inflamed by the beauty and exemplary purity of Lucretia, formed the vile project of effecting her dishonor [.…]

1.58: A few days afterwards Sextus Tarquin went, unknown to Collatinus, with one companion to Collatia. He was hospitably received by the household, who suspected nothing, and after supper was conducted to the bedroom set apart for guests. When all around seemed safe and everybody fast asleep, he went in the frenzy of his passion with a naked sword to the sleeping Lucretia, and placing his left hand on her breast, said, “Silence, Lucretia! I am Sextus Tarquin, and I have a sword in my hand; if you utter a word, you shall die.” [.…] When he saw that she was inflexible and not moved even by the fear of death, he threatened to disgrace her, declaring that he would lay the naked corpse of the slave by her dead body, so that it might be said that she had been slain in foul adultery. By this awful threat, his lust triumphed over her inflexible chastity, and Tarquin went off exulting in having successfully attacked her honour. Lucretia, overwhelmed with grief […] sent a messenger to her father at Rome and to her husband at Ardea, asking them to come to her [….] They found Lucretia sitting in her room prostrate with grief. As they entered, she burst into tears, and [said] …, “The marks of a stranger, Collatinus, are in your bed. But it is only the body that has been violated, the soul is pure; death shall bear witness to that. But pledge me your solemn word that the adulterer shall not go unpunished. [….] It is for you […] to see that he [Sextus Tarquinius] gets his deserts; although I acquit myself of the sin, I do not free myself from the penalty; no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example.” She had a knife concealed in her dress which she plunged into her heart, and fell dying on the floor [.…]

1.59: [….] Brutus drew the knife from Lucretia’s wound, and holding it, dripping with blood, in front of him, said, “By this blood-most pure before the outrage wrought by the king’s son-I swear, and you, O gods, I call to witness that I will drive hence Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, together with his cursed wife and his whole brood, with fire and sword and every means in my power, and I will not suffer them or any one else to reign in Rome.” [….]

1.60: When the news of these proceedings reached the camp, the king [.…] hurried to Rome to quell the outbreak [.…] Tarquin found the gates shut, and a decree of banishment passed against him; the Liberator of the City [L. J. Brutus] received a joyous welcome in the camp, and the king’s sons were expelled from it [.…] Lucius Tarquinius Superbus reigned twenty-five years. The whole duration of the regal government from the foundation of the City to its liberation was two hundred and forty-four years. Two consuls were then elected in the assembly [.…] They were Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. [End of Book 1] From The History of Rome, Vol. I, Titus Livius. Editor Ernest Rhys. Translator Rev. Canon Roberts. Everyman’s Library. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1912.

Act 4, Scene 2 (158-62, Aaron figures out Titus’ note to Chiron & Demetrius, and defends his child by Tamora fiercely, even killing the nurse: the boy is his future)

Titus’ note to Chiron and Demetrius reads “Integer vitae, scelerisque purus, / Non eget Mauri jaculis, nec arcu” (159, 4.2.20-21; [the man who’s] upright in his life and free of vices has no need of Moorish spears or bows”). But the boys aren’t good enough readers of Horace’s Odes to realize that Titus knows they conspired with the Moor. Aaron is clearly out for himself—he doesn’t even tell Tamora about this new information. The Empress delivers a child by Aaron, who protects his newborn son fiercely (160) when Chiron and Demetrius think to kill the infant, bearing him away to the Goths with the intention of raising the child as a warrior. Aaron kills the Nurse (161), horrifying even the wicked sons of Tamora. A countryman’s fair-skinned baby will be substituted and presented as Saturninus’ legitimate heir. What is the child to Aaron? He makes the point succinctly: “My mistress is my mistress, this myself … / … / This before all the world do I prefer” (161, 4.2.106-08). Rome and its politics can go hang; Aaron’s main concern is to take the portion of immortality that a child of one’s own promises.

Act 4, Scene 3 (162-65, Titus aims his arrows for justice to heaven, at Saturninus’ palace: how mad or sane is he at this point?)

Titus’ arrows bear messages soliciting the gods for justice nowhere to be found on earth: “sith there’s no justice in earth nor hell, / We will solicit heaven and move the gods …” (163, 4.3.50-51). The whole scene seems to show him both unhinged and yet canny: he tells Publius and Sempronius, “… when you come to Pluto’s region, / I pray you deliver him this petition” (163, 4.3.13-14). His stratagem, though, is to shoot arrows towards Saturninus’ palace, and thereby to unsettle the young Emperor. Titus also pays a rustic or “clown” to present Saturninus with a short speech and some pigeons (164, 4.3.91.4-5). But then, perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss the notion that there’s something insane about Titus’ behavior all through the play: if insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results, Titus is at times close to a madman: he keeps supposing that if somebody makes a promise, it must be kept; and if somebody is legally entitled to an office, he’ll do his duty rather than taking advantage of the situation. Such persistence in doing the honorable thing would make sense in a normal setting, but in decadent Rome it can only destroy the person who practices it.

Act 4, Scene 4 (165-67, Saturninus is angry at Titus, scared of Lucius: Tamora promises to neutralize the threat)

Saturninus is enraged before the Senate over Titus’ “blazoning our unjustice every where” (165, 4.4.18) and then has the clown hanged after reading the letter Titus wrote. Tamora thinks she has at last driven Titus off the deep end: “Titus, I have touched thee to the quick” (166, 4.4.36). The Emperor is frightened upon hearing that Lucius is headed for Rome with an army of Goths (166, 4.4.68-72), but he misunderstands Titus’ motive, which is revenge of a sort not reducible to politics. Titus doesn’t want to rule Rome—what good would that do his battered spirit and maimed body now? Tamora promises to soothe Titus’ anger, and thereby get him to separate Lucius from his invading force: “I will enchant the old Andronicus …” (167, 5.1.88-92).

Act 5, Scene 1 (167-71, The Goths will follow Lucius; Aaron recounts and exults in his allegedly numberless villainies; Lucius agrees to meet Saturninus at Andronici’s home)

The Goths swear loyalty to Lucius: “Be bold in us. We’ll follow where thou lead’st …” (168, 5.1.13). Aaron, captured with his child, is brought in. He did not know about this new development. Lucius threatens the child, so Aaron promises to reveal everything about his plots with Tamora and her sons, but Lucius must swear by the Christian god—for it seems that’s what Aaron attributes to Lucius by way of faith, based on his reference to Lucius’ ritualistic “popish tricks” (169, 5.1.76; see 74-85). This is obviously a strange moment in the play since the ritual sacrifice in Act 1 has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity or, indeed, with properly pagan Roman ritual. Well, all the plotting Aaron recounts (169-70, 5.1.87-120)—his getting a child by Tamora, the murder of Bassianus and the rape and mutilation of Lavinia that he inspired Chiron and Demetrius to do, and his own gleefully fraudulent taking of Titus’ hand -- is news to Lucius because he left to raise an army of Goths before Lavinia revealed exactly what had happened to her and who did it.

When asked if he’s sorry, Aaron outdoes himself with a flourish of supervillain rhetoric (170, 5.1.124-44). It would be hard to top the following claim for sheer malice: “Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves, / And set them upright at their dear friends’ door …” (170, 5.1.135-36; see 125-40). He seems dedicated not so much to the kind of violence that furthers his self-interest or ambition but rather to a code of evil for evil’s sake, perhaps in part out of hatred for the Romans he so evidently despises: friendship is the target of Aaron’s alleged stratagem here, and readers of classical history and culture will know that loyalty in the cause of amicitia was among the primary Roman virtues. More than that, Aaron asserts a fierce liberty in the face of a Roman culture that depends greatly upon the ties that bind people: ties of memory, friendship, and honor.

To round off the scene, Lucius hears that Saturninus “craves a parley at your father’s house” (171, 5.1.159), and agrees to hear the emperor out if proper pledges be given.

Act 5, Scene 2 (171-75, Tamora and sons try to fool Titus by dressing up as Revenge, Murder, Rapine; Titus slaughters Chiron and Demetrius)

Tamora and sons show up at Titus’ place dressed as Revenge, Murder, and Rapine (171-72). He doesn’t believe them, but they consider him mad in spite of the clues he lets slip. “Revenge” wants Titus to send for Lucius, and promises that when they are all at a banquet at Titus’ home, she will bring Tamora, Chiron, Demetrius, the Emperor and any other foes so that he may take revenge upon them (173, 5.2.114-20). Titus insists that Rapine and Murder stay with him (173, 5.1.34) and then kills them, though not before he fully informs them that they are literally on the banquet menu: “Hark, wretches, how I mean to martyr you.… / … / “I will grind your bones to dust, / And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste …” (174-75, 5.2.179, 185-86). Like the Thracian King Tereus in the legend Ovid recounts, Tamora will “swallow her own increase” (175, 5.2.190).

Act 5, Scene 3 (175-79, Titus serves up some C & D pie, kills Lavinia, is killed by Saturninus, who is then killed by Lucius, who will be emperor; Aaron is sentenced to starve, and Tamora to be food for the birds, refused a proper burial)

Titus enters dressed as a cook. The table is set and dinner is served (176, 5.3.25ff). Titus asks Saturninus if Virginius (a decemvir from 451-449 BCE) was right to kill his daughter for chastity’s sake (176, 5.3.36-38). (Appius had used legal trickery in an attempt to force himself on her, claiming that she was actually his slave; Virginius, disguised as a slave, killed her just after Appius’ co-conspirator Marcus Claudius judged in favor of Appius.) Titus then kills Lavinia, saying “Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee,” explaining to all present that Chiron and Demetrius had ravished her (176, 5.3.45ff). Asked where they are, he informs Tamora and Saturninus with an unforgettably gleeful rhyme: “Why, there they are, both bakèd in this pie / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred” (176-77, 5.3.59-61). Titus immediately stabs Tamora, and Saturninus kills him, whereupon Lucius kills Saturninus (177, 5.3.65).

Aemilius asks for a full account of all the misdeeds, and receives it from Lucius (177, 5.3.95-107), who is chosen emperor. Marcus asks all assembled if the Andronici have done wrong in exacting revenge; if they have, he offers that “The poor remainder of Andronici, / Will hand in hand all headlong hurl ourselves …” (178, 5.3.130-31). But there’s no such call.

Aaron is carried in and judgment is sought against him (179, 5.3.175-77). He is sentenced to starve while buried “breast-deep in earth” (179, 5.3.178), which seems like a spiteful way of denying him the sustenance that cannot be denied his child. Still, Aaron maintains his standing as the play’s most remorseless evildoer: “If one good deed in all my life I did, / I do repent it from my very soul” (179, 5.3.188-89). (In Julie Taymor’s adaptation, Aaron’s child is also brought in.) The savage irony of this punishment is that, as mentioned earlier, Aaron had set himself up as a free spirit, unbound and untouched by Roman customs or values. The Emperor will be properly buried, but Aaron will be pinned down to this lean fate and “that ravenous tiger, Tamora” (179, 5.3.194) will feast the birds.
All in all, the play is a delightfully outrageous, bloody instance of Elizabethan revenge tragedy in the tradition of Seneca and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, in which the protagonist Hieronymo seeks wild, violent justice for the vengeful murder of his son. Melodramatic as it may seem, Kyd’s early revenge tragedy is serious and philosophical. It considers life’s great questions, above all what constitutes justice in a wicked world, and is perhaps worthy of comparison with similar efforts by Aeschylus or Sophocles. Shakespeare’s play is sometimes dismissed as frivolous, and of course it isn’t exactly the metadramatic extravaganza that is Hamlet, but it has a serious dimension that repays study. Titus is no mere villain, and neither is Tamora. Only Aaron seems to be a thoroughgoing dastard, with Tamora’s foolish sons coming in a distant second—they lack Aaron’s cunning and brains.

Shakespeare’s genius leads him to employ the Romans versus Goths theme in a manner that confounds any simple opposition between Roman and Goth. Titus turns out to be more of a Goth than we might have thought: excessive, bloody, and barbarous in his revenge. Tamora is more than a cardboard or stage barbarian; her motive for revenge is at least legitimate, and she shows herself a skilled manipulator of Roman politics.

Aaron’s race adds yet another perspective on the Goth/Roman opposition: it’s true that the “villain plot” he drives sets itself up against the twin revenge plots of Titus and Tamora and in part displays the man’s dedication to wickedness, but Aaron shows considerable loyalty to his child as the image of himself, and exults in his blackness. Moreover, while Shakespeare may not be subjecting the revenge code to the kind of scrutiny it receives in Hamlet (where it’s understood that revenge is against God’s law), he seems quite interested in the complexities of Roman honor. The allusions he makes to the Lucretia story from Livy’s History of Rome and to the Philomela tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses allow him to explore the significance of those key Roman myths.

What is the play suggesting about moral codes? Perhaps that people must live by them and within them, but also that they must not be imprisoned by them altogether. Rigidity, failure to reflect on one’s values, allows cynicism and outrage to flourish: extremes beget counter-extremes. Titus is an “honorable man,” to be sure, but the play as a whole keeps iterating that claim in action until the iterated actions generate a Mark Antony effect: by the fourth and fifth acts, what’s needed isn’t more old-fashioned honor but a plan for revenge against the barbarous Goths and Moors who have taken advantage of Titus’ stiff morality.

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

Finally, Titus Andronicus revels in gory violence, but the celebration is a response to the pain of life, a response to outrage and unfairness, a response to the simple fact of the tragic dimension of life: the world and human desire do not run parallel or accord with each other. We may remember the scene in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver where the antihero Travis Bickle forces himself to hold his hand over an open flame for as long as he can. This sort of grim endurance is the stuff of revenge tragedy, to which we should add a big heap of gallows humor and high-impact imagery (the Elizabethans, as Muriel Bradbrook would say, valued imagery and direct moral statement over narrative or characterization). I prefer this revenge-play response to some of the ways we have of handling violence and pain today: violence in songs and films that justifies itself not as concentrated spectacle or protest but instead as a low species of realism: how many rappers (I don’t mean all of them, by any means) have defended their music’s gender-based and ethnic insults and raw gangster violence on the simple basis of “telling it like it is”? I think art can do better than mindlessly perpetuate a sordid reality or claimed reality. There are at least two legitimate ways to achieve this goal: one is an understandable retreat into the world of art—you can’t “live in art,” as a friend of Lord Tennyson correctly reminded him, but you can go there frequently and draw something good from your experience. The other way is something more like an indirect, sophisticated exploration and even a protest with regard to the conditions of life, the human condition. Some modern people’s sensibilities may be too delicate to handle Elizabethan or Jacobean revenge tragedy, but the plays themselves are serious efforts in the tragic and philosophical Senecan mode, with the aim being to explore the limits of pain and injustice, the better to inure an audience to its own sufferings without resorting to despair.

Julius Caesar

2011-08-20T19:23:00.003-07:00

NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE’S JULIUS CAESAR

Notes when updated will accord with the text in Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Tragedies. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5. Document timestamp: 11/6/2011 3:41 PM

Act 1, Scene 1

At the beginning of the play, Shakespeare introduces a Roman world where all people should know their place. Why is the carpenter not wearing the clothing he should be wearing? The cobbler introduces another theme—the idea that something is broken and must be mended. This is a holiday time when the ordinary laws that restrain and govern people seem to have been suspended. The strongest Romans on the scene are certain that their moral pronouncements and symbolic acts will set things right again, but in this belief, we must already begin to sense, they are gravely mistaken. The common people would just as well forget the past and live entirely in the present.

Act 1, Scene 2

In this scene we get our first view of Julius Caesar himself. He seems a grand enough figure, ordering great men about in an intimate way. Still, what Julius says to Marc Antony reminds us that his wife is unable to have children. In a way that has profound political implications, Julius is alone in the middle of this admiring crowd, and he must depend upon Marc Antony. Caesar will not listen to the soothsayer. Immediately afterwards we are treated to the first conversation between Brutus and Cassius, a conversation that turns upon the issue of representation tied together with the all-important Roman preoccupation with honor. Simply put, Cassius wants Brutus to see himself through the eyes of others who expect him to save the Republic. The honest reply that Brutus gives reminds us how difficult it is for a person to be self-contained, self-defining. It is clear that Brutus has been thinking along the same lines as Cassius—he would not find it tolerable for Julius to become king. But Brutus is circumspect about speaking what he feels. Cassius obviously resents and envies Caesar, and seems to hold him in contempt. His reference to Virgil’s Aeneid puts Cassius in place of Aeneas and Julius Caesar in the place of that hero’s father, who, readers of Virgil will remember, did not make it all the way to Italy after the Trojan remnant had set sail from their burning city. Cassius does not so much seek justice as the opportunity to take power for himself. He also sees a deep disjunction between what ordinary people think Caesar is and what he actually is to those who know him best. We like to think of the Romans as thoroughly upstanding and ancient times as somehow simpler and more noble, but the fact is that Roman political culture was at least as sophisticated as ours is today: “spin” would hardly have been a foreign concept to Roman politicians. Cassius tries to stir similar resentment in the breast of Brutus, and connects him to his illustrious ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus, who helped drive out the last Tarquin King from Rome. Brutus seems naïve concerning the motives of his friend since he labels the speech something “high.” Brutus is an idealist who can’t help but transform everyone around him into something more noble and high-minded than is really the case.

Julius Caesar speaks to Marc Antony again, and makes it clear that he does not trust Cassius, finding in him an anxiety-provoking degree of pride. It is also manifest that Caesar surrounds himself with people willing to tell him what he wants to hear. He is always on stage, a quality that Casca’s comments reinforce.

Casca is scornful of Caesar’s “act” in the presence of the common people who would make him king. The “tag-rag” crowd seems like an ordinary Elizabethan rabble. They follow their own appetites and are greedy for emotional spectacle, which is exactly what they get when Caesar swoons in an epileptic fit.

At the end of the second scene, Cassius clarifies his scheme after Brutus makes his exit—the plan is to manipulate Brutus by taking advantage of his noble honesty. In this play, there are characters who stick to their ideals (or who idealize others), and there are cynical realists like Cassius.

Act 1, Scene 3

Cicero proves unwilling when he speaks to Casca to buy into all the high talk about prodigies and omens. Cicero believes what’s happening is all a matter of interpretation. Casca fears the omens, but Cassius is contemptuous, comparing Julius Caesar to such thunder and lightning. The man is fearful, and a Roman must confront his fears if he would be free. As far as Cassius is concerned, Caesar’s greatness is a mark of the people’s degeneracy. Of course, this comment shows the weakness in the entire conspiratorial plan: if Romans are in fact sheep, how are they supposed to maintain the virtuous Republic of old, even if an assassination restores that form of government? If they are fit only to be led, why then, someone must lead them. So the argument is really over who will dominate the populace. As Thomas Carlyle will later write, “In the long run, every government is the exact symbol of its people.” Democracies and republics die when the citizenry are no longer worthy of such noble experiments or capable of sustaining them. This is not to say that Shakespeare or his audience were sympathetic to republican arguments—monarchy was generally considered the best form of government in Shakespeare’s time. Both Casca and Cassius want to borrow Brutus’s connection to heroic Roman history, thinking to render their own bloody deeds noble and acceptable by reference to violent acts that helped found the Republic.

Act 2, Scene 1

Brutus says that he acts for the general good, not because he has anything in particular against Caesar, who has always been a friend to him and a man of reason. (As the introduction points out, Shakespeare brackets out the way Julius Caesar attained the level of power he held at the time of his murder. However, his bringing destruction to northern Europe’s tribes and crossing the Rubicon aside, it remains true that Caesar was a man of considerable merit—he was a cultivated man, not a brute.) The main argument Brutus makes is the abstract one that power would surely corrupt his friend, so it is necessary to extrapolate what that friend might do if given absolute power. A man who would be king is a serpent, and must be dealt with as such. Brutus himself is very much taken with the heroic past connected to his family name, and like many good Romans he is firmly wedded to the past.

At line 63, it becomes apparent how much of a toll taking part in a conspiracy has begun to exact upon Brutus: “Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.” When he is introduced to the conspirators, he finds it necessary to explain just how un-Roman it is to require an oath in such matters as they are about to undertake, and he makes haste to check the bloodiness of their intent. Protecting Marc Antony turns out to be a mistake, of course, but it shows Brutus’s nobility of mind all the same. It’s possible to attribute to Brutus some degree of less than high-minded strategizing when he says that Antony “can do no more than Caesar’s arm / When Caesar’s head is off” (182-83), but perhaps that would be ungenerous. Brutus seems quite naïve throughout this scene, nowhere more so than when he says of Caesar, “Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds” (173-74). As always, Brutus is most comfortable with theories and abstractions, and with ritual and ceremony rather than practical action: the conspirators are first and foremost “butchers,” whatever their intentions towards the state. Brutus recognizes that Caesar’s blood must be spilled, but it’s hard to see how his words connote recognition of the full horror in such a deed.

At line 233 and following, Portia shows herself to be perhaps the only character who understands Brutus, with the possible exception of Octavius, who treats him as a worthy opponent. She requests in strong terms that Brutus let her in on what is troubling him, and he promises to do so, although he is subsequently interrupted by Caius Ligarius. But he must tell her subsequently since later on she seems aware of what is afoot. In speaking to Caius Ligarius, Brutus again employs the metaphor of sickness and health—it seems he sees himself as a physician or a surgeon as well as a priest with respect to the body politic.

Act 2, Scene 2

When talking to his wife, Caesar seems genuinely magnificent in his disregard for death, but he also seems rather pompous in declaring himself more dangerous than danger itself. On the whole, he is a politician who has come to believe his own PR—always a dangerous thing to do because it unfits a person to exercise power in real-life, real-time situations. Because Decius Brutus understands this weakness in Caesar, he is able to use it to bring the man out to the Capitol, where he will meet his fate. I think Shakespeare follows the general line that the time had already come for Rome to turn imperial, but the fat and fond Julius Caesar he portrays is not the right man to wield such enormous power. None of this is to say that Caesar is to be portrayed as an old fool or a clown; rather, it seems likely that Shakespeare’s representation of this “great man” pays tribute to the difficulty of settling on any one image of such a colossal, polarizing figure as Julius Caesar. On display are certain physical and character weaknesses and a tendency towards exaggeration, but counter-balancing these traits, in almost any worthwhile production, will be the impressive pageantry, the sheer spectacle, surrounding Caesar’s every move.

Act 3, Scene 1

In the famous assassination scene, the conspirators crowd around Caesar, with the ostensible purpose of getting him to revoke his banishment of one Publius Cimber, brother of the conspirator Metellus Cimber. Caesar’s words make him seem grandiose and ungenerous, and he is instantly cut down. As in some ancient accounts, Caesar is most surprised to find Brutus amongst those who have betrayed him. (See http://www.livius.org/caa-can/caesar/caesar_t09.html for Suetonius’ highly regarded narrative of the murder, which has Caesar maintaining dignified silence.)

Both Cassius and Brutus make bold to consider the historic nature of what they have just done, treating it as if it were a piece of stagecraft for the ages. Brutus is particularly concerned to strike the right ceremonial note, telling his fellow conspirators to bathe their hands in the blood of the slain ruler and make their way to the marketplace, where they will proclaim “Peace, freedom, and liberty” (110) for all. But subsequent audiences, of course, know perfectly well how the whole affair turned out—the death of Julius Caesar brought not the restoration of republican ways, but rather the supremely competent imperial rule of Augustus after a period of civil strife. So when we see the conspirators on stage smearing themselves with the blood of the man they have just killed, we are likely to concentrate more on the viciousness of their deed than on the high-minded ideals that set Brutus, at least, in motion.

Act 3, Scene 2

Immediately after the assassination, Brutus makes the fatal mistake of trusting Marc Antony. Antony appears diabolically skillful throughout this scene, beginning with his earnest-seeming demand to know why Caesar deserved to die and his eerie willingness to shake hands with the blood-spattered killers before him, then proceeding to his obviously genuine and yet carefully stage-managed outbursts of feeling for the murdered Caesar and his request to pay his respects at the man’s funeral. Cassius suspects the worst, but Brutus will have none of it, and he brushes aside Cassius’s objections with the ridiculous stipulation that he himself will speak first and thereby provide sufficient explanation for what has been done. He has just agreed to serve as the warm-up act for a master rhetorician who does not mean him well, and we shall see what Antony makes of the demand that he not blame the “honorable” conspirators. Operating by the ancient code of revenge, Antony plans to “let slip the dogs of war” (273) after his stirring words have driven the conspirators out of Rome. The deed that these deluded men believed would bring order and liberty, Antony correctly understands as the harbinger of violence and chaos. For the moment, these are his elements, and with them he will set to work forging a new order with Octavius.

The speech that Brutus makes to the Roman mob, while noble, is also absurd because it issues a call to Romanness to people thoroughly incapable of any such thing. Brutus insists that he has placed love of country above love for his old friend Caesar, and he may indeed have done so. But the rogues and peasants to whom he speaks have no understanding of such idealism. They value persons over principles, favors over sacrifice. They are moved by Brutus’s words, but their instinct is to offer him the crown they had meant to offer Caesar.

Marc Antony’s speech is a masterpiece, full of power and deception, strong feeling and a call to personal loyalty. Casting himself as Caesar’s friend, Antony highlights the qualities of Julius in this capacity: friendship, or amicitia, was amongst the highest Roman virtues, and Brutus has betrayed a man who loved and honored him. (In The Divine Comedy, Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest section of the inferno for that reason: they are traitors to their lord.) If a man betrays his friend, you cannot believe anything he says or trust him in any action. ( Cicero wrote a fine treatise called De Amicitia, or “On Friendship,” and Seneca’s Letters deal with the concept insightfully.) He attacks the notion that Caesar was ambitious or selfish, and employs a species of repetition to savage effect respecting the word “honorable,” which comes to signify the opposite quality after its first few uses. In the end, Antony does what he promised Brutus not to do: he calls the conspirators traitors. He convinces his audience that they have lost a generous, unique benefactor at the hands of men who do not even understand that all-important Roman concept, “honor.” Honor consists in standing by your friends, which is exactly what Marc Antony tells the irrational, inflamed crowd to do now. Fortune favors those willing to ride the waves of passion that arise from great and terrible events, not those who, like Brutus, believe troubled human affairs can be set to rights by the dispassionate operations of reason. The latter assumption hardly seems a good bet in the third scene, when the rabble decide that it isn’t even worth distinguishing Cinna the poet from Cinna the assassin.

Act 4, Scene 1

Antony the man of feeling now shows another side of himself—the side that allows him to “lay honors” on his fellow Triumvir Lepidus and yet call the man an ass when he’s out of earshot. This brazen contempt for “a tried and valiant soldier” (28) surprises the youthful Octavius, but Antony won’t change a word of his dismissive pronouncement against Lepidus. It’s time to head for the wars Brutus and Cassius are stirring up.

Act 4, Scenes 2-3

Back at the camp, Brutus and Cassius become embroiled in a bitter argument about funding for their armies—Cassius’s corrupt favoritism has made him deny Brutus necessary pay for his men. Although the fight sounds like schoolboy squabbling, it has a serious side: Cassius’ offense is a dangerous one for the cause since a mutinous army is no help, and his charge of untenderness on the part of Brutus seems genuine, so it reinforces the play’s interest in the importance of Roman honor and friendship. “A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities” (86), pleads Cassius, and in the end he brings Brutus around. Shakespeare was capable of shredding cherished notions of classical chivalry, as he does in his later play Troilus and Cressida (1601-02), but here in Julius Caesar no such thoroughgoing cynicism seems to be afoot. When Cassius’s Thersites-like “cynic” struts onstage to offer his saucy rhymes, Brutus makes Cassius dismiss the fellow as untimely and impertinent.

Brutus and Cassius disagree more civilly about military strategy around line 200. Brutus comes down in favor of marching out to meet the enemy rather than waiting: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries” (218-21). This is one of the most famous pronouncements in the play, but the “tide” metaphor is also revealing—although Brutus counsels heroic action, he still sees this action as a reaction, as a principled response to what the rhythm of life brings. Contrast this attitude with Marc Antony and Octavius. Antony in particular, at least in this play if not in Antony and Cleopatra, is closer to the view of Edmund in King Lear: “all’s meet with me that I can fashion fit.” We might argue that Brutus, for all his unrealistic idealism, is at crucial points more grounded in reality as something given that must be acknowledged than his adversaries are. Antony is a supreme opportunist, but his manner of handling the opportunity that comes to him as a gift from Brutus is masterful, active, and creative: a fine word-chef, he whips up a generous Julius bound to please the common people. By the end of Act 4, Brutus is afflicted with a second vision of Caesar as his “evil spirit” (281). Even the supernatural is arrayed against him; history is not on his side in the struggle between republican principles and monarchical rule.

Act 5, Scenes 1-3

Brutus and Cassius exchange angry words with Octavius and Marc Antony, and a bit later Brutus says to Cassius that he abhors the prospect of suicide—evidently, he assumes he will either be victorious or be killed in battle. But when the battle goes against his side, he must confront the suicide of his own friend Cassius, who requires his Parthian servant to stab him with the very sword he had used during the assassination of Caesar. Brutus sees this act as the work of Julius Caesar’s vengeful spirit.

Act 5, Scenes 4-5

In the end, Brutus decides to run upon his own sword rather than face capture. He leaves it to the people of the future and to history to judge his actions, expressing confidence in the outcome: “I shall have glory by this losing day / More than Octavius and Marc Antony” (36-37). Octavius and Antony are impressed with the end Brutus makes, and Antony declares him “the noblest Roman of them all” (5.5.68) He acted for the general good rather than for his own personal interest. On the whole, I think we find in Julius Caesar not so much a wholesale or cynical rejection of the principles enunciated by the noble Brutus as a complex, at times ambivalent exploration of those principles. Ideals seldom, if ever, match events on the ground: participation in almost any kind of politics compels even the best people to abandon or at least compromise their noblest aspirations and their customary civility. This is not to abandon politics since that really isn’t possible; it is to see things as they are without flinching or dissembling.

Antony and Cleopatra

2011-08-20T19:23:00.001-07:00

Alfred J. Drake's Notes on Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare

NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE’S ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Notes accord with the text in Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Tragedies. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5. Document timestamp: 11/20/2011 11:41 AM

Act 1, Scene 1 (890-91, Our first image of Antony with Cleopatra: he is both a Roman and a man of the east)

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: “Let Rome in Tiber melt ... / ... Here is my space” (890, 1.1.35-36). And what is he doing in this place of his? Well, he spends part of his time carousing and walking the streets to “note / The qualities of people” (891, 1.1.35-36).

Act 1, Scene 2 (891-96, Antony resolves to go back to Rome and deal with pressing matters; Enobarbus concurs about prioritizing war, politics over women)

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 he thinks women should not be so highly esteemed in proximity to great political and military matters: “Under a compelling occasion let women die” (894, 1.2.125, see 125-31). Antony’s response to the military movements of Labienus (Roman commander of a Parthian army) and to the death of his wife Fulvia is characteristically complex; with regard to the first issue, he says “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself in dotage” (894, 1.2.105-06). As for the second, Antony is riven by genuine sympathy for Fulvia and yet realizes that he had more or less wished this on her: “What our contempts doth often hurl from us / We wish it ours again” (894, 1.2.112-13). By the end of this scene, Antony is determined to make his way back to Rome. Amongst other things, there’s Sextus Pompeius to deal with since this son of Pompey the Great is menacing the triumvirate by sea (895, 1.2.167-69). He evidently feels he must get Cleopatra’s approval to take care of business, but he admits this freely (895, 1.2.161-63). But in truth, he won’t have too much trouble with her in getting that approval, a fact that is apparent from her insightful remark, “on the sudden / A Roman thought hath struck him” (893, 1.2.72-73). Antony is open to the pleasures and attractions of the east, but it’s just as certain that “Roman thoughts” will strike him when that becomes necessary.

Act 1, Scene 3 (896-98, Cleopatra manipulates Antony, but he understands her eastern self-fashioning; in the end his decision holds to return to Rome)

Cleopatra manipulates Antony, calling him a dissembler and an actor when it comes to loyalty: “Good now, play one scene / Of excellent dissembling, and let it look / Like perfect honor” (898, 1.3.77-80). And throughout this scene, we see him trying to justify his decision to return to Rome to deal with pressing matters. Cleopatra knows how to speak the language of Roman honor: “Your honor calls you hence” (898, 1.3.98) she says to Antony, and to some extent seems actually to mean it: it’s time to let Antony be Antony. This scene is subtle in its revelation of what the two lovers know about each other: when Cleopatra declares that her “oblivion is a very Antony, / And I am all forgotten” (898, 1.3.91-92), Antony’s response is, “But that your royalty / Holds idleness your subject, I should take you / For idleness itself” (898, 1.3.92-94). In other words, he understands that she is just as much an actor as she claims he is: the “eastern extravagance” pose is something that this female Ptolemy (i.e. a Greek) employs to her advantage, not something she can’t help but assume.

Act 1, Scene 4 (898-900, Octavius Caesar’s complaints about Antony’s “wassails” and neglect, but also confidence in the man)

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. Caesar references Antony’s longstanding reputation for valor, he feels that this reputation will shame him into returning to the field: “Leave thy lascivious wassails” (900, 1.4.56), he scolds the older man in absentia, and expresses confidence that Antony’s shame at abandoning his Roman manner will “Drive him to Rome” (900, 1.4.74). Antony’s later admission of “neglect” (in Act 2, Scene 2) won’t go over well with Caesar the corporation man, whose model is Aeneas, with a twist of Machiavellian guile to produce the appearance of piety.

Act 1, Scene 5 (900-02, Cleopatra’s love for Antony and extravagant view of him foregrounded while he’s away in Rome)

We see another side of Cleopatra here, the one that is truly in love with Antony and would just as well “sleep out this great gap of time” (900, 1.5.5) in his absence. Theirs is not simply a political alliance, it’s beyond that, and while Cleopatra’s motives are complex, her connection with Antony is one of the world’s grandest tragic loves. She muses fondly about him, and mentions her earlier affair with Julius Caesar, who, she is certain, considered her “A morsel for a monarch” (900, 1.5.31). Cleopatra has an extravagant sense of Antony’s worth, one that fits his sense of himself and that he repays with similar extravagance towards her. Nowhere is this more evident than when she calls him, “The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm / And burgonet of men” (901, 1.5.33-34). We may not see this godlike Antony in action through most of the play, but a genuinely admiring mutual representation bonds the two lovers together.

Act 2, Scene 1 (902-04, Sextus Pompeius finds fault with Caesar and Antony, feels confident in his victory)

Sextus Pompeius, the son of Pompey the Great, 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 (903, 2.1.9-16). Sextus has an illustrious father in the late Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus or “Pompey the Great,” a member of the unofficial first triumvirate from 59-53 BCE along with Julius Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus; the more official “second triumvirate” from 43-33 BCE and current in this play is composed of Marcus Antonius or “Antony,” Octavius (grand-nephew and adopted son and heir of Julius Caesar), and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.

Act 2, Scene 2 (904-10, Octavius confronts Antony over his shortcomings; Agrippa proposes a match between Antony and Octavia; Enobarbus describes Cleopatra grandly and pays tribute to her appeal for Antony)

Caesar and Antony confront each other, each bringing his own grievances and assumptions to the table. Caesar’s claims are very ponderous: he tasks Antony with the fact that Fulvia and Antony’s brother stirred up wars against him in Antony’s name (905, 2.2.46-48) and that Antony ignored his messengers while carousing in Alexandria (906, 2.2.75-78). But worst of all, says Caesar, in refusing to assist him with military supplies and money when required, he has broken faith (906, 2.2.85-87, 93-94). Antony’s admission that he “Neglected, rather” (906, 2.2.94) doesn’t go over well with Caesar as Rome’s ultra-steady, responsible corporation man, so to speak: his model is Virgil’s Aeneas, with a twist of Machiavellian guile to produce the appearance of piety. While Antony goes around behaving like a wild Greek or luxurious Egyptian, Octavius is a high-level antecedent of our modern 1950s “man in the gray flannel suit”: he thinks of Rome first and does what’s needed to keep the machinery of state running and the coffers full.

Enobarbus is mildly rebuked for trying to butt in, but Agrippa helps resolve the tension between them, at least for the present, by successfully proposing a match between Caesar’s sister Octavia and Antony: “Thou hast a sister by the mother’s side ...” (907, 2.2.124). Dynastic obligation will bring these two men of very different character together and keep them from tearing the country apart, or at least that’s the plan.

Enobarbus then talks with Agrippa and Maecenas, offering us a new image of the famous Cleopatra, one that Shakespeare has borrowed for him from the historian Plutarch’s Lives, specifically, “The Life of Julius Caesar,” which along with “The Life of Antony” is Shakespeare’s main source for the entire play. (Sources for Antony and Cleopatra.) He describes her almost as a goddess, as a woman beyond description: “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne / Burned on the water.... / … / For her own person, it beggared all description” (908-09, 2.2.197-98, 203-204; see 197-211). He also mentions how savvy she is, how well she plays her charms to her advantage, making Antony visit her rather than the other way around (909, 2.2.225-27). 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: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety” (909, 2.2.240-41). That capacity is a big part of her attraction—Cleopatra is charismatic and larger than life.

Act 2, Scene 3 (910-11, a soothsayer tells Antony to stay away from lucky Caesar; uneasy, Antony resolves to return to Egypt)

Antony speaks to a soothsayer, who tells him to stay away from Caesar because this opponent is bound to rise higher than Antony: “If thou dost play with him at any game / Thou art sure to lose…” (910, 2.3.23-24). Caesar is almost as much an “evil spirit” (Norton Tragedies, 311, 4.2.333) 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 (910, 2.3.31). Fortune seems to be on the younger man’s side, even though Antony is a ladies’ man and ought to be on better terms with Lady Fortune. Antony resolves to return to Egypt: “though I make this marriage for my peace, / I’th’ East my pleasure lies” (911, 2.5.37-38).

Act 2, Scenes 4-5 (911-14, Lepidus will be late to meet the triumvirs; Cleopatra teases absent Antony about their fishing trips, but is then stricken with jealousy when she hears about the match with Octavia: she strikes the messenger)

In the fourth scene, we learn that Lepidus will be late on his way to Misenum where the triumvirate will meet. No doubt we are to understand his lateness as symptomatic of his weak position within the second triumvirate (911, 2.4.1-10).

In the fifth scene, Cleopatra has fun at Antony’s expense, saying that he’s like the great fish she proposes to catch in the Nile: “I’ll think them every one an Antony” (911, 2.5.14; see lines 10-14). And Charmian reminds Cleopatra of the time when she tricked Antony while they were fishing together, hanging an already dead fish on his hook for him to haul in (911-12, 2.5.15-18). Cleopatra seems to delight in stealing from Antony his masculine symbolic power (the sword with which he earned victory against the conspirators Brutus and Cassius, who killed his friend Julius) and donning it herself: she recounts how she drank him to bed and then “put my tires and mantles on him whilst / I wore his sword Philippan” (912, 2.5.22-23).

Cleopatra soon learns that Antony will marry Octavia, and this causes her to strike the messenger (913, 2.5.61), but then invites him back so that he may inform her about Octavia’s looks (914, 2.5.112-14).

Act 2, Scene 6 (914-17, Sextus Pompeius reconciles with Caesar and Antony; Menas and Enobarbus trade wisdom on Sextus and Antony)

Sextus 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 (915, 2.6.34-39). He reconciles with Caesar and Antony, and Menas says to Enobarbus, “Pompey / doth this day laugh away his fortune” (917, 2.6.103-04). Enobarbus, for his part, says that Antony “will to his Egyptian dish again; then shall the sighs of / Octavia blow the fire up in Caesar” (917, 2.6.123-24; see 122-27). Enobarbus realizes 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, Scene 7 (918-21, Antony wins a drinking contest with Lepidus and Octavius; Sextus Pompeius puts honor before success and loses Menas’ respect)

Lepidus, the weakest member of the second triumvirate, is made quite drunk at the meeting between the three and their attendants at Misenum. Antony makes sport of him by answering his silly questions about crocodiles with ludicrous tautologies: he tells Lepidus, the crocodile “is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath / breadth” (919, 2.7.39-40).

Meanwhile, 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 (919, 2.7.67-70)? Pompeius says that the man ought to have done this without telling him about it (919, 2.7.70-74). Menas loses faith in Pompeius because of this rigidity—such an opportunity, he knows, will not come again: “Who seeks and will not take when once ‘tis offered, / Shall never find it more” (920, 2.7.78-79).

Scene 7 shows the triumvirs’ attitude towards drinking. As the saying goes, in vino veritas. We find out that Lepidus can’t hold his liquor, which suggests that 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 (920, 2.7.91-93, 96-97). It’s obvious that he is determined to keep his wits about him, and is 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 guru Timothy Leary. But at this point in the play, Antony seems the strong master of revels; his range of experience and his appeal to others extends 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 his 1921 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Act 3, Scene 1 (921-22, Ventidius explains the Roman political star system: subordinates don’t upstage their commanders)

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: “I have done enough. A lower place, note well, / May make too great an act” (921, 3.1.12-13). In a fiercely competitive Roman political universe, there is something like a star system in place: subordinates do not upstage their betters, if they know what’s good for them.

Act 3, Scene 2 (922-24, Octavia and Caesar are sad at parting; Enobarbus’ gloss of the historical Antony)

Octavia weeps, and Caesar is sad at parting (922, 3.2.3-6). Enobarbus undercuts the notion put forth by Agrippa that Antony wept without complication at the death of Julius Caesar: he says, “What willingly he did confound he wailed, / Believe’t, till I wept too” (923, 3.2.59-60). 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 Enobarbus’s clear-eyed statements. What Enobarbus is suggesting is that Antony’s grief over the death of Caesar was no doubt sincere but also that his political wheels were spinning all the while, and the subject to be determined was how, exactly, Antony was going to position himself in the wake of this sad event.

Act 3, Scene 3 (924-25, Cleopatra rewards the messenger for reporting that she’s better looking than Octavia)

Cleopatra finds out that Octavia isn’t as beautiful as she—in fact, interprets Cleopatra from what the messenger says, she is “Dull of tongue, and dwarfish” (924, 3.2.16). Cleopatra now rewards the messenger she had earlier struck (924-25).

Act 3, Scene 4 (925-26, War is brewing between Antony and Caesar)

War is brewing between Caesar and Antony, the latter of whom details his grievances to Octavia: Caesar, he says, has “waged / New wars ’gainst Pompey, made his will and read it / To public ear, spoke scantly of me …” (925, 3.4.3-5). Antony agrees that Octavia 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: “Make your soonest haste; / So your desires are yours” (926, 3.4.27-28, see 20-28).

Act 3, Scene 5 (926-27, Caesar has arrested Lepidus)

Lepidus and Caesar have warred with Pompeius, and then Caesar has arrested Lepidus (926, 3.5.10).

Act 3, Scene 6 (927-29, Caesar is angry at Antony’s outrageous Egyptian self-crowning and at his treatment of Octavia)

In the sixth scene, Caesar is outraged when Antony and Cleopatra crown themselves in Asiatic splendor (927, 3.6.3-5). The Roman people know of this, says Caesar (927, 3.6.21), who also declares himself annoyed that Octavia has come to visit him without the appropriate ceremony (928, 3.6.42-43). His contempt for Antony’s conduct shows most when he says of the man, “He hath given his empire / Up to a whore” (928, 3.6.66-67). Well, Caesar had agreed to the match between his rival and Octavia readily enough in spite of his reservations about Antony’s character. Now he invites Octavia to stay on his side, suggesting that Antony has betrayed her: “You are abused / Beyond the mark of thought” (929, 3.6.86-87).

Act 3, Scene 7 (929-31, Cleopatra takes offense at Enobarbus’ suggestion to stay out of the wars; Antony decides to fight Caesar by sea on a dare; Antony is surprised at the speed and efficiency of Caesar’s forces)

Enobarbus tells Cleopatra to stay out of the wars, and she’s insulted at the suggestion, especially his remark that her “presence needs must puzzle Antony” (929, 3.7.10). She will take part in Antony’s wars, declaring that she will, “as the president of my kingdom will / Appear there for a man” 929, 3.7.16-17). 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 (930, 3.7.34-39). Perhaps Antony is foolhardy, but he’s also honorable and noble; power sits lightly upon his shoulders. The hair of wise and responsible rulers turns gray quickly, but one senses that such a transformation isn’t likely to overtake 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 how briskly Caesar’s forces are moving into position (930, 3.5.56-60). The men around Antony (Camidius in particular) feel that since he’s led by a woman, so are they: “we are women’s men” (931, 3.7.).

Act 3, Scenes 8-10 (931-32, Antony and Cleopatra meet with disaster at sea; Camidius decides to desert, but Enobarbus stays on for the time being)

Caesar and Antony strategize; the former is all about maintaining control over events: “Strike not by land… / … Do not exceed / The prescript of this scroll” (931, 3.8.3-5). By the tenth scene, we hear that the Egyptian fleet has cut and run (931-932, 3.10.1-3). Scarus laments that Antony’s Romans have “kissed away / Kingdoms and provinces” (932, 3.10.7-8) 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, and Scarus laments, “Experience, manhood, honour, ne’er before / Did violate so itself” (932). Incredibly, Antony has followed Cleopatra’s shameful retreat at the first sign of danger. Camidius decides that he might as well go over to Caesar since Antony has lost control over his own destiny (932, 3.10.32-34). Enobarbus knows what Camidius knows, but still can’t bring himself to abandon his commander: “I’ll yet follow / The wounded chance of Antony, though my reason / Sits in the wind against me” (932, 3.10.34-36).

Act 3, Scene 11 (932-34, Antony recognizes his error and loss of identity; he is furious with Cleopatra, but pardons her for a kiss)

Antony is horrified—“I have fled myself…” (933, 3.11.7) and “I have offended reputation; / A most unnoble swerving” (933, 3.11.48-49), he says, understanding that he has thrown away everything he worked for. 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: “He at Philippi kept / His sword e’en like a dancer ...” (933, 3.11.35-36). Antony 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 (934, 3.11. 70-74). He evidently places Cleopatra above victory on the battlefield.

Act 3, Scene 12 (934-35, Cleopatra behaves submissively towards devious Caesar, who demands that she exile or kill Antony)

Antony sends his schoolmaster to treat with Caesar (935, 3.12. 7-10). Cleopatra says she will submit to Caesar and wishes only to remain Queen of Egypt, and while Caesar disregards Antony’s request to live in Egypt, he orders that the queen be comforted and promised all she wants, so long as she either exiles or kills Antony (935, 3.12. 20-24). 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 (935-40, Enobarbus blames Antony for the military disaster, but still can’t desert him; Antony offers Caesar an absurd challenge to single combat; Cleopatra cooperates with Caesar; Antony tries to recover what Caesar “knew I was” and rages at Cleopatra, though he again reconciles with her; Enobarbus finally decides to desert Antony)

Enobarbus won’t blame Cleopatra. He says Antony has made his will “Lord of his reason” (935, 3.13.4-5). Antony absurdly challenges Caesar to single combat (936, 3.13.24-27). Enobarbus is stunned, and feels that Antony has been entirely bereft of sound judgment: “Mine honesty and I begin to square” (936, 3.13.40). Enobarbus continues to mull his relationship with Antony, and 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. The loyal friend who does this, he suggests, “… earns a place i’th’ story” (936, 3.13.45; see 42-45). 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.

Cleopatra seems to be going along with Caesar’s program, flattering him with the words “He is a god, and knows / What is most right” (937, 3.13.60-61), while her lover is still saying “I am / Antony yet” (938, 3.13. 92-93). He wants to re-embrace his identity as a valorous Roman commander, and orders Caesar’s messenger soundly whipped (938, 3.13.93). Soon, his anger again turns towards Cleopatra in the memorable line, “You have been a boggler ever” (938, 3.13.111), 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. “I found you as a morsel cold upon / Dead Caesar’s trencher…” (938, 3.13.117-18), he scolds Cleopatra. The queen 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” and indeed that she doesn’t even know the meaning of the word (938, 3.13.122).

Antony’s anger also flows toward Caesar for “harping on what I am, / Not what he knew I was” (939, 3.13. 144-45). 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: “I am satisfied,” he declares (939, 3.13.170). Antony calls for a night of drinking and celebration on the eve of the final battle to recover his lost glory: “I and my sword will earn our chronicle. / There’s hope in’t yet” (940, 3.13.178-79). He may yet win at Alexandria.

This strange recovery on Antony’s part is the last straw for Enobarbus: “When valour preys on reason, / It eats the sword it fights with” (940, 3.13.201-02), says Enobarbus, and it’s time to desert his old commander at the earliest opportunity.

Act 4, Scenes 1-6 (940-44, Battle is coming on and true natures are reckoned: Antony is elegiac but resolute and is magnanimous towards Enobarbus the deserter; Caesar shows the nature of his new world order in his ruthless military arrangements; Enobarbus abhors himself and determines to die)

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, as in the second scene: “Perchance tomorrow / You’ll serve another master” (941, 4.2.27-28), he tells his men, and “I hope well of tomorrow…” (942, 4.2.42), to the dismay of Enobarbus.

In the third scene, a soldier takes a noise to be Hercules abandoning Antony (942, 4.3.14-15), which is especially significant since Antony’s family claimed descent from that demigod.

In the fourth scene, Antony seems resolute: he will bring the willing to the battle, and wishes Cleopatra could behold him in all his splendor: “That thou couldst see my wars today, and knew’st / The royal occupation!” (943, 4.4.15-17).

In the fifth scene, Antony learns that Enobarbus has deserted him, and realizes that his “fortunes have / Corrupted honest men” (944, 4.5.16-17). He says these words to Eros and not in soliloquy, but they seem heartfelt.

In the sixth scene, Caesar declares that “the time of universal peace is near” (944, 4.6.4), 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 (945, 4.6.8-10). Enobarbus has now come to realize that he has destroyed his self-image in abandoning Antony: “I am alone the villain of the earth …” (945, 4.6.30). When Antony generously sends him his treasure from camp, the desolation of Enobarbus is complete. He resolves to die as quickly and wretchedly as possible: “I will go seek / Some ditch wherein to die” (945, 4.6.37-38).

Act 4, Scenes 7-12 (945-48, Antony enjoys temporary success; Enobarbus dies; Caesar will fight Antony by sea)

So far, Antony’s desperate gambit shows signs of success since, as Agrippa says, Caesar seems to have overextended his forces (946, 4.9.1-3) and Eros is able to announce to Antony, “They are beaten, sir” (946, 4.8.8). For the moment, Caesar has been driven back to his camp, a fact that Antony trumpets in the ninth scene, with special instructions to inform the queen of this great feat (946, 4.9.1).

Enobarbus dies reasserting his admiration for Antony: “Forgive me in thine own particular, / But let the world rank me in register / A master-leaver and a fugitive,” he prays, and his beloved general’s name is the last word he utters. (4.10.19-21). Friendship or amicitia was among the highest Roman values, and it is this value that Enobarbus realizes he has sordidly betrayed.

In the twelfth scene, Caesar announces that he will fight Antony at sea one last time (948, 4.12.1-4).

Act 4, Scenes 13-14 (948-50, the fleet again deserts Antony, who becomes enraged with Cleopatra; Charmian advises Cleopatra to hide in a monument and play dead)

The fleet again deserts Antony (949, 4.13.3-4), even going over to Caesar’s side. Upon this betrayal, Antony declares Cleopatra a “Triple-turned whore” (949, 4.13.13) and himself betrayed and finished, defeated by a cowardly queen and a journeyman politician: “O sun, thy uprise shall I see no more. / Fortune and Antony part here” (949, 4.13.18-19). He is so infuriated with her that he seethes, “The witch shall die” (949, 4.13.47) and for a moment imagines her at the mercy of the Roman plebeians (949, 4.13.33-34).

Charmian advises Cleopatra to hide in a monument, and send false word of her death. The Queen agrees. (950, 4.14.3-4).

Act 4, Scene 15 (950-53, Antony believes Cleopatra has committed suicide, and botches an attempt at the same; Decretas takes his sword to give to Caesar)

Antony continues to lament what he considers Cleopatra’s betrayal, admitting that he “made these wars” for no one but Egypt and her (950, 4.15.15). When he hears that she has supposedly committed suicide, however, he is again instantly reconciled: “I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and / Weep for my pardon” (951, 4.15.44-45). She has shown him the way in conquering herself, he thinks (951, 4.15.59-62), and thereupon makes a botched attempt to fall on his sword after his servant Eros commits suicide rather than assist his master in dying (952, 4.15.92-105). Nobody will help Antony end his life, and Decretas even takes his sword as a token with which to ingratiate himself with Caesar (953, 4.15.111-12).

Act 4, Scene 16 (954-56, Antony and Cleopatra are together one last time, and as he is dying she plans to go out in the Roman way)

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 “honour” and “safety” don’t go together (955, 4.16.49). 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: “please your thoughts / In feeding them with those my former fortunes …” (955, 4.16. 54-55; see 53-61). Moments later, he dies. Cleopatra says that she and Charmian, too, will evade the clutches of Caesar; they will exit the world instead “after the high Roman fashion, / And make death proud to take us” (956, 4.16.89-90).

Act 5, Scene 1 (956-58, Caesar, though ruthless, is saddened by Antony’s death; he tells Proculeius to deceive Cleopatra and thereby preserve her for an eventual spot in his triumph)

When Decretas informs Caesar that Antony is dead, he seems genuinely saddened: “The breaking of so great a thing should make / A greater crack” (956, 5.1.14-15). 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 supposedly forced him to do (957, 5.1.35-48). 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.

We see all this in the way 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: “for her life in Rome / Would be eternal in our triumph” (957, 5.1. 65-66; see 61-68).

Act 5, Scene 2 (958-67, Cleopatra engages in final self-refashioning as a Roman hero, exalts Antony to the skies; Dolabella warns her of Caesar’s plan, and she determines to meet Antony in death; Caesar personally tries to deceive and threaten Cleopatra, but she succeeds in committing suicide; Caesar recognizes his opponents’ mettle after their deaths)

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: “Shall they hoist me up / And show me to the shouting varletry / Of censuring Rome?” (959, 5.2.54-56)

In the presence of Dolabella, Cleopatra refashions and aggrandizes Antony to the point of deification, musing, “I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony” and “His legs bestrid the ocean / his reared arm / Crested the world …” (960, 5.2.75, 81-82; see 81-91, 95-99). She has always shown this propensity to exalt the deeds and reputation of Antony, but now that death is closing in, her efforts intensify and take on heightened significance; this is the “Antony” to whom Cleopatra will soon attempt to return in Elysium, reunited there as a still grander couple than they were on earth.
Dolabella plays an honorable role, forewarning Cleopatra of the shameful fate that awaits her in only three days (960-61, 5.2.104-09).

Caesar enters and plays both gracious conqueror and vicious threatener of Cleopatra’s progeny, if she should follow Antony’s self-destructive course (961, 5.2.120-29). When Seleucis betrays Cleopatra over her holding back some treasure from Caesar (961, 5.2.144), she is shocked (962, 5.2.155-60), 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 (962, 5.2.187-88), and loathes the prospect of “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy[ing] my greatness, / I’th’ posture of a whore” (963, 5.2.216-17; see 203-17). 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. In Rome, what had been world-historical drama would be reduced to an entertaining farce for the multitude.

Cleopatra declares that there will be a final meeting with Antony in death: “I am again for Cydnus / To meet Mark Antony” (963, 5.2.224-25). It is noteworthy that the place name refers to her initial seduction of Antony in 41 BCE, when he summoned her to Tarsus and she floated down the river Cydnus on that famous barge we recall from Enobarbus’ description (908-09, 2.2.197-211). Cleopatra will achieve this meeting—essentially a return to an initial triumph—by casting off the supposed weakness of her sex: “I have nothing / Of woman in me” (964, 5.2.234-35).

In comes the Clown, with his prayer that Cleopatra may find “all joy of the worm” or Nile serpent he has brought her (964, 5.2.253). It’s worth considering why Shakespeare has chosen to present Cleopatra with her death in this semi-comic, bizarre rustic. Perhaps it has something to do with the utter strangeness of each person’s ending, at least to that person; perhaps, also, it has to do with the fact that as Cleopatra lived and risked all for an erotic affair, the Clown’s patently phallic references (his puns on “dying” as orgasm in particular at 964, 5.2.244-50) end up being as pertinent as they are indecorous and impertinent on his part. A third consideration is that the Clown presents the queen with one last challenge to her royal and wished-for divine dignity. Be that as it may, Cleopatra meets her death bravely, calling upon Antony to witness her courage, saying, “I have / Immortal longings in me,” and “I am fire and air; my other elements / I give to baser life” (965, 5.2.271-72, 280-81). She dies at (5.2.303), Iras having preceded her in passing just moments before.

Caesar, whom Cleopatra considers almost with her last breath an “ass / Unpolicied” (965, 5.2.298) 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 ratifies Charmian’s dying words that Cleopatra’s death is “well done, and fitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings” (966, 5.2.317-18), and 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 (967, 5.2.348-53). 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, together show a clash of value systems, 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: modern, material politics wins. We should bear in mind the strangeness of the final two acts’ tragic arc: Antony’s sudden condemnations and reconciliations, Cleopatra’s dissembling and final adoption of Roman heroism, Caesar’s recognition of the lasting narrative value of the great pair he has hounded to their demise. Throughout the play, Antony and Cleopatra have been both each other’s downfall and salvation: in the end, Cleopatra’s initial false suicide taught Antony to do the right thing in earnest, and that suicide, in turn, led Cleopatra to exit the world’s stage like the hybrid Egyptian Queen and antique Roman she had become.

There is just the hint of an imperfectly realized romance pattern in Antony and Cleopatra: we might say that this hint is to be found in the fourth act when the royal couple are forced to attempt a transition from the loss of supreme power to a more perfect union as lovers. It’s true that this play, in terms of Shakespeare’s chronology, is crafted at the tail end of his so-called dark period and on the cusp of the romance plays that round off his career. But romance entails selective survival; even as it provides second chances and near-miraculous reconciliations, instilling in us a sense that the world isn’t quite as harsh as we thought it was, romance requires us to accept the reality that recovery comes only with partial loss and the admission of alterations wrought by time and foolishness. The romance pattern can’t altogether annihilate time or decay, and it doesn’t seem to allow for straightforward exaltation or apotheosis to perfection. In the end, its miracles are profoundly human, and tinged with sorrow and mortality. The historical record in the case of Antony and Cleopatra, of course, makes the romance pattern impossible: that record tells us of the liquidation of a famous couple at the hands of a power-consolidating corporation man in Octavius. Shakespeare takes the two lovers in a different direction more consonant with tragedy. Their persistent, impressive self-mythologizing and image-projecting lends them a measure of larger-than-lifeness, and they place their love beyond any power that Caesar’s politics and armies can wield against them. The play remains firmly in the tragic camp since the relentless pursuit by Caesar at last yields the results he’s been aiming for: sole possession of the world’s first superpower, the Roman Empire. If there’s success for Antony and Cleopatra, it’s that audiences during and since Shakespeare’s time have probably found it difficult to decide between the romantic status of the two great lovers and the historical achievements of the enigmatic Octavius, thereafter to be known as Augustus Caesar.

What we are treated to, then, is not the bittersweet survival and renewal that we encounter in plays such as The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, but insteadAntony and Cleopatra's classical attempt by means of soaring words and exuberant perspectives to attain a new and marvelous love beyond the wreckage that was the end of the Roman Republic, with its proscriptions, assassinations, wars and internecine rivalries, and beyond even the birth of the Empire. This sounds like a classical apotheosis to the heavens after the manner of ancient Greek heroes who became demigods after their deaths; this apotheosis involves the transposition of a perfect love into another and diviner key: this attempted transformation, at least if we do not grant Cleopatra her metaphysical reunion with Antony, fits the tragic pattern, and we are left with the crushing of a magnificent couple’s last-minute attempts at projecting themselves to a perpetual match in the heavens and thereby escaping their failure in the material world dominated by Caesar.

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Macbeth

2011-08-20T19:22:00.002-07:00

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

Hamlet

2011-08-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

NOTES ON SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK

Updated to accord with the text in Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Tragedies. Norton, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5. Document timestamp: 11/6/2011 2:33 PM

Preliminary Notes on Hamlet

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

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

Recognition. At what point in the play does Hamlet attain clarity about the nature of his actions? He must have come round to the idea that he needs to let things shape up as they may. But exactly how he has come that far isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps his realization is due to a number of experiences (facing the shock of Ophelia’s death, meditating on that army going to its death “even for an eggshell,” bantering with the Gravedigger and encountering Yorick’s skull as an object of meditation, escaping from the ship that was taking him to his death in England, being ransomed by pirates at sea, his conflicted feelings about Ophelia and his mother, etc.)In The Poetics, Aristotle says that well-crafted tragedies turn upon the hero’s arriving at some fundamental insight (anagnorisis, recognition, “un-unknowing”) about the mistake he or she has made. Characterize Hamlet’s insight into his situation—what is the insight, and what has led him to it? Connect this question to the gravedigger scene.What finally makes the play’s resolution possible—is it that Hamlet has been unable to act and something now makes him able to act? (Oedipus Rex, for example, combines recognition with “reversal”—expecting good news from a messenger, Oedipus instead learns that the guilt lies squarely on his own shoulders.)

Specific Notes on Hamlet

Act 1, Scene 1. (336-40, Guesses about a ghost)

The watchmen and Horatio offer some surmises: Horatio suspects that the ghost’s appearance “bodes some strange eruption to our state” (338, 1.1.68). They’re on watch because young Fortinbras is planning to take back the territory his father had lost to Hamlet Sr. Barnardo 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” (339, 1.1.106.2-4). They feel foreboding, a sickness at heart; but they have only general knowledge, and Horatio’s idea (340, 1.1.150-52) 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. (340-46, Hamlet’s grief schooled, soliloquized; suspicions; ghost info!)

Hamlet’s grief seems impolitic, 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 “one auspicious, and one dropping eye” (341, 1.2.6-14), 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” (341, 1.2.20) 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 the new king is entitled to be annoyed with the excessive grief and surliness of Prince Hamlet. As Claudius points out, 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?” (342, 1.2.72-75)

Soon thereafter, Hamlet speaks his first soliloquy, lamenting that “the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” (343, 1.2.131-32), reproaching the general run of females in the person of Gertrude—“Frailty, thy name is woman!” (344, 1.2.146)—and profoundly disparaging Claudius in comparison with Hamlet, Sr. The latter was, says the Prince, “Hyperion” to Claudius’ “satyr” (344, 1.2.140), 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” (344, 1.2.135-36), one inhabited entirely by “things rank and gross in nature” (344, 1.2.136). 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” (344, 1.2.159). Privately, things are different: he already seems to suspect that “some foul play” (346, 1.2.255) 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” (346, 1.2.256-57). 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!” 344, 1.2.254) and essentially private thoughts about the suspicious loss of a dear father.

Act 1, Scene 3. (346-49, Laertes and Ophelia lecture each other about virtue)

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. (346-47, 1.3.5ff) 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. (347-48, 1.3.45ff) 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. (348, 1.3.88ff)

Act 1, Scene 4. (349-52, Ghost beckons to Hamlet)

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” (350, 1.4.18.2) 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” (350, 1.4.18.8) 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 . . . ?” (351, 1.4.32-34)

Act 1, Scene 5. (352-56, Ghost commands, Hamlet vows: resentment, strategy)

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!” (353, 1.5.41) 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 exists in the play-world, 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” (352, 1.5.29-31).

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” be redeemed from its current status as “A couch for luxury and damned incest” (353b, 1.5.82-83), 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” (353b, 1.5.85-86). 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” (354, 1.5.98-99, 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!” (356, 1.5.189-90). 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” (356, 1.5.172-73). 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. (356-59, Polonius gathers intelligence from Ophelia)

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 (356-57), 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” (358, 2.1.103) seems reasonable, based upon what Ophelia has told him about Hamlet’s bizarre sighing and strange state of undress.

Act 2, Scene 2. (359-72, C & G & Polonius ponder Hamlet’s behavior; Hamlet greets R & G, hears players rehearse; adapts Gonzago to trap Claudius)

Everybody’s favorite nobodies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make their first appearance in the play (359-60, 2.2.1-18), 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. (360-61, 2.2.60-79) Polonius’ insistence that he has “found / The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy” (360-62, 2.2.48-49) excites Claudius, who says, “O, speak of that, that do I long to hear!” (360, 2.2.50) 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. . .” (362, 2.2.163-64). 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” (363, 2.2.203-04).

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” (365, 2.2.284), 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 (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!” (365, 2.2.293-300) He says all this only to bring the whole “majestical roof” (365, 2.2.291) down on our heads, reminding us that we are but the most refined dust in the cosmos, a “quintessence of dust” (365, 2.2.298). 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. (366, 2.2.304-07)

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. (366, 2.2.331-51) 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. (369-70, 2.2.448-98) 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? (371, 2.2.536-39) 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” (372, 2.2.575-80). 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” (371, 2.2.566-69), he invests much hope in his augmentations to The Murder of Gonzago as a means of discovering certainty in the guilty visage of Claudius. (372, 2.2.571-75) 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. (372-76, Players! “To be …”; Hamlet breaks Ophelia’s heart)

The King tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to encourage this new business of the players’ coming to Elsinore. (372, 3.1.27-28) Perhaps it will draw out the reason for Hamlet’s eccentric behavior. He and Polonius will conceal themselves to hear Hamlet talk with Ophelia. (373, 3.1.45) 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. Hamlet denies that he ever established any relationship with Ophelia, that he ever made any promises. (374, 3.1.119-20) He asks Ophelia where her father is (375, 3.1.130), 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 he utters words that frighten Claudius: “I say we shall have no moe marriages, etc.” (375, 3.1.142-48) Claudius derives from this outburst the thought that Hamlet’s disturbed state of mind is “not like madness” (375, 3.1.163), so he must be watched even more closely. The Prince’s “melancholy,” says Claudius (whose guilt had already been spurred by Polonius’ unwitting words about “sugar[ing] o’er” (373, 3.1.50) the most damnable deeds with piousness), “sits on brood” (375, 3.1.164) over something still darker, and that is what he finds most troubling about the young man’s hostility towards him.

Act 3, Scene 2. (376-85, Hamlet lectures players; Gonzago & D-Show outs Claudius; Hamlet lashes out at R & G, anger flows against Gertrude)

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” (377, 3.1.14-40). 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. (378-82, 3.2.123-238) 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” (381, 3.2.214-15). 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. (378, 3.2.101-15) The dumb show soon follows (379, 3.2.122ff)—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!” (381, 3.2.202-03). 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!” (382, 3.2.247) 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 (384, 3.2.341), 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” (385, 3.2.360-62). 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” (385, 3.2.365-66).

Act 3, Scene 3. (385-87, Claudius decides to send Hamlet away; bootless prayer)

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 cease of majesty / Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw / What’s near it with it” (385, 3.3.15-17). 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” (385, 3.3.8-10). 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 kneels and tries to confront “the visage of offense” (386, 3.3.36-72), but he cannot because he won’t give up the crown, the effects of his sin. It’s doubtful if we are to understand this attempt at repentance as sincere—doesn’t it seem as if Claudius isn’t so much sorry for killing the king as determined to indulge himself in remorse? Is he just “feeling sorry for himself”? Most likely, to judge from the results of his kneeling prayer: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (387, 3.3.97-98).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” (387, 3.3.94-95). 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. (387-92, Polonius killed, Gertrude forced to look within)

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” (388, 3.4.27-28). She seems genuinely shocked at the suggestion. Hamlet has little time now for a “wretched, rash, intruding fool” (388, 3.4.30) 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” (389, 3.4.68-69). His efforts succeed without too much trouble since Gertrude cries, “Thou turn’st my [eyes into my very] soul” (389, 3.4.79). 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!” (389b-90, 3.4.82-84) The obsession is so deep that the Ghost must step in to admonish Hamlet about his “almost blunted purpose” (390, 3.4.101) 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” (391, 3.4.156-59). 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” (392, 3.4.185.4-8). This is an odd exclamation since Hamlet knows only that he’s being “marshal[ed] to knavery” (392, 3.4.185.4) of some sort; he can’t know the precise plan, but speaks with almost military precision, promising to turn their evil back upon them.

Act 4, Scene 1. (393-94, Claudius is dismayed about Hamlet’s conduct)

The King is by now “full of discord and dismay” (394, 4.1.40) at the turn of events; he knows Hamlet’s sword was meant for him.

Act 4, Scene 2. (394-94, Hamlet mocks R & G as instruments of Claudius)

Hamlet calls Rosencrantz a “sponge” (394, 4.2.11, 14-16) who “soaks up the King’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities” (15-16). As for Claudius, he is “a thing,” says Hamlet, “of nothing.” His odd remark that “The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body” (394, 4.2.25-28) most obviously refers to Polonius’ corpse, but 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. (394-96, Hamlet mocks Claudius, who has commanded his death)

Claudius realizes the desperate state in which he stands: “Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are reliev’d, / Or not at all” (395, 4.3.9-11). 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” (395, 4.3.30-31). 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.” Hamlet calls Claudius “dear mother” (396, 4.3.51), 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” (396, 4.3.66), Claudius says, “Do it, England, / For like the hectic in my blood he rages, / And thou must cure me” (396, 4.3.66-68). 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]” (396, 4.3.68-69).

Act 4, Scene 4. (396-98, Another resolution from Hamlet over Fortinbras’ march)

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” (397, 4.4.9.8-9). 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!” (398, 4.4.9.56) 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. (398-408, Ophelia’s madness and death; Laertes’ rage; Hamlet is back in Denmark; Claudius and Laertes plot revenge)

Ophelia brings dismay to the Court when she shows clear signs of madness. (398-99, 4.5.23-70) 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” (401-02, 4.5.163-179) 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” (399, 4.5.74-75), 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” (400-01, 4.5.120-22). Clearly, this truism afforded Hamlet, Sr. no protection from Claudius. Sailors pass a letter from Hamlet to Horatio, explaining how he managed to board a pirate ship that attacked the vessel bound for England. (403, 4.6.11-25)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. He temporizes: “I am guiltless of your father’s death” (401, 4.5.147). Hamlet’s letter to the King is ominous: “High and mighty, You shall know I am set / naked on your kingdom” (405, 4.7.42-43). 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” (406b, 4.7.98), and Claudius lays out the plot he has partly contrived (406, 4.7.84-88), only to find that Polonius is able to add a master stroke with the introduction of “an unction” (407, 4.7.113) 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. (407, 4.7.130-31)

The scene concludes with the news that Ophelia has drowned. Gertrude’s beautiful, ekphrastic description of Ophelia’s death (4.7.166-83) 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. (408-15, Gravedigger jests, Hamlet’s Yorick; Ophelia’s funeral)

The Gravedigger scene works as comic relief, but it also gives us and Hamlet a broader perspective on events up to this point. (408-12, 5.1.1-199) The Gravedigger calmly goes about his business in the face of death, and even makes jests about it—jests that, as the Riverside editors inform us, refer to an actual law case, that of Hale v. Petit. (The Shakespeare Law Library’s account of that case may be viewed at http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/Law/law6.htm#hale.) We will get no maudlin speeches or meditative musings over Yorick-skulls from him; he’s full of riddles about the sturdiness of the “houses” that gravediggers build. Hamlet appreciates by means of his experiences in this act (and in the fourth act) that the earthly prize of a kingdom, of reputation, of a patch of land, is a joke: “Imperial Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (412, 5.1.196). 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 is vital. (412, 5.1.171-80) 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” (412, 5.1.178-79). 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. (413-15, 5.1.200-84) 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. (415-24, Hamlet’s recognition, challenge, fight, death)

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 . . .” (415, 5.2.6-11). It seems that this speech refers to Hamlet’s insomnia-induced impatience to know the contents of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s letter. (415, 5.2.13ff) What exactly, he wants to know, is their “grand commission” (415, 5.2.19)? 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” (416, 5.2.58). 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?

Hamlet brings up a new motive (though in speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he had already hinted at 384, 3.2.311 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” (416, 5.2.66). 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 (417) 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” (419, 5.2.157-61). 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. Claudius’ plan is frustrated, and his union with Gertrude nullified when she drinks from the poisoned chalice: “I will, my Lord” (421, 5.2.234) 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 (423, 5.2.305), 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” (424, 5.2.324-29). 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.

To return to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (423, 5.2.313-15), 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. The play involves two levels of meaning: there’s something petty, intimate, and even sordid about the royal family, yet providence seems to guide Hamlet in carrying out his revenge. Hamlet is caught in the middle: a revenger whose nature and doctrine work against his mission.