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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
by Michael Peverett
Edward III NEW
Love's
Labour's Lost (1593-94) NEW
Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) NEW
William
Shakespeare: Henry VI Part III (c. 1590)
Up until now I have only ever thought about this play as one station in a larger progress, the great theatrical chronicle that, so far as we can see, established Shakespeare’s reputation as an important player among players. (His earlier Taming of the Shrew seems not to have made much of a splash.)
But 3 Henry VI must have been performed, as it was first published, as a separate piece intended to captivate and satisfy an audience on the night. It has its own identity, and since it happens that I’m re-reading it in separation from its invariable fellows, this seems an opportunity to look at it in a different way.
It’s a packed chronicle, unflaggingly
vigorous and very fast-moving. In certain respects there’s a bludgeoning
repetition: In Act I Wakefield (
To view affairs in a coarser and more
sporting spirit, the Lancastrians’ eventual defeat depends on the fatal
weakness of their behaviour when they’re on top in Act IV – Edward needed to be
killed, not imprisoned. All the other battles end in some atrocity, but on this
occasion the Lancastrian side is without its reliable killers; Clifford is
already dead, and Margaret is still in
Nevertheless, the play ends in only formal triumph for the Yorkists. Edward’s closing lines are dramatically hollow. We have just seen the three brothers surround and slaughter Henry’s son; then we’ve seen Henry himself murdered by Richard. This is not a happy basis for triumph.
Besides, these brothers are now individualized in ways that create deep fault-lines. In Henry’s son’s words:
Lascivious Edward, and thou,
perjur’d George,
And thou, mis-shapen Dick...
They began as a loyal team, formidably assisting their father; they end as a crew.
In one respect, however, these glorious
suns of
Edward (
Lord Stafford’s father, Duke
of Buckingham,
Is either slain or wounded
dangerous:
I cleft his beaver with a
downright blow;
That this is true, father,
behold his blood.
Montague (
And, brother, here’s the
Earl of Wiltshire’s blood,
Whom I encounter’d as the
battles join’d.
Richard (
Speak thou for me and tell
them what I did.
[Throwing down the Duke of
Richard hath best deserved
of all my sons.
This last line must even in Shakespeare’s time have formed an ironic contrast with the barbarity of Richard’s coup de theâtre. But it acknowledges his pre-eminence. Richard is his father’s favourite, and more importantly the dramatist’s favourite.
The same three people, Edward, Richard and
their uncle, have another polite dispute in the second scene of the play. Who
is to urge
I took an oath that he
should quietly reign.
Edward:
But for a kingdom any oath
may be broken:
I’d break a thousand oaths
to reign one year.
Richard:
No; God forbid your grace
should be forsworn.
Richard sees, and we see, that Edward has
set out on a wrong course. I have spoken of “killers” in the play; but the
elder
These subtle emphases on Richard, however,
are not very disruptive. In the first two Acts his role is as a prominent team
member with notable talents. We need to believe in his loyalty to his own side,
to believe in his love for his father, his desire for Edward to be king, his
enthusiastic participation in the vision of the triple sun, his genuine desire
to take revenge on Clifford for the deaths of
In Act III Scene 2, Edward (now king) commands his brothers to go along with him on some trifling piece of business about Henry’s re-capture, and everyone troops off stage. Except that, for no accountable reason, we blink and – Richard’s still there, alone. It’s a great dramatic moment, and all the subtle emphases mentioned above suddenly coalesce into a feeling of expectation, exultation, liberation... And then follows Richard’s great soliloquy, his assertion of himself and his own agenda, and the marvellous image in which he imagines himself cutting through the complexities of historical process and emerging as a different kind of presence:
For many lives stand between
me and home,
And I, like one lost in a
thorny wood,
That rents the thorns and is
rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way and straying
from the way,
Not knowing how to find the
open air,
But toiling desperately to
find it out,
Torment myself to catch the
English crown:
And from that torment will I
free myself,
Or hew my way out with a bloody axe. (3.2.173-81)
Though Richard will still be part of the Yorkist team he has now definitively risen to a new dramatic sphere in which his only combatant (of sorts) is the other soliloquiser, Henry. (Yes, there are other soliloquies, York, Warwick and Clifford, but these all occur in the thick of battle and express reaction to events – the speakers are worn out or wounded. This is different.)
It is a curious achievement of Shakespeare’s that he manages to make Edward IV’s reign seem such an insignificant episode and to make all of us think only of Richard’s road to power. I must add that I think the thrilling emergence of Richard is best handled in this play – in fact, I think it’s the best of the tetralogy, the point where chronicle drama is held in strongest tension with another kind of drama in which individual character begins to dominate. In Richard III, I can’t help feeling that Richard begins to camp it up too much. The sense of seriousness in the account of national struggle is dimmed.
Richard’s soliloquy is only one of the
great moments in this play. Henry’s great, formal lament with the two pitiable
soldiers is another. The most powerful scene of all may be the one in which
*
Queen Margaret is as ruthless as Richard or Clifford, but not for herself. Everything she does is for her son. In this turmoiled struggle, survival revolves around the terrible arithmetic of children and killings, birth and death.
Shakespeare’s theatre was unable to bring
us the living presence of young children – those “babes” who are named in Macbeth
mainly to be killed. In The Winter’s
Tale the new-born Perdita is brought on stage as a mute doll; her doomed
brother Mamillius is, we must assume, around ten years old – as young as a
speaking part in Shakespeare can feasibly be (perhaps also the son and daughter
of Clarence who appear in Richard III 2.2). There remains, however, a fair period between
this and manhood. Shakespeare portrays a number of characters as boys, that is,
as males not yet able to play a full part in the business of mankind. There was
no shortage of boy-actors, after all. In 3 Henry VI, both
You have no children, butchers!
says Margaret after her own son has been slaughtered. In fact King Edward does have a sprinkle of illegitimate children, as he complacently admits in 3.2. Biology is important, but lineage is more so; it’s the legitimate children that are precious, vulnerable and dangerous, depending on how you look at it.
In view of her earlier treatment of
In contrast to Margaret, Henry is no parent – well, he is, literally, but he gives away his son’s inheritance - and Henry is therefore always seen as something less than a man. Henry’s impotence give him a certain status. It lifts him out of the quagmire of struggle, yet he carries with him an over-arching responsibility for the whole bloody spectacle, and his death sets a term on it, at least in this play. Having yielded up his active involvement in this life, his vatic powers look beyond it, and principally in the words he speaks over another young boy, Henry Richmond.
Throughout the three parts of Henry VI, Henry has acted with an infuriating lack of political nous. But when, during the battle of Towton, he shows no prejudice towards his own side and blankly says:
To whom God will,
there be the victory (2.5.15)
we understand that he does conceive his majesty as involving a sense of kinship with his whole nation, even when its parties are slaughtering each other. He speaks of “our striving houses” as if he has still not grasped that he is implicated in the fortunes of one of them. We might reasonably feel that Henry has no right to claim that his own sorrows are ten times worse than the soldiers who have mistakenly killed their loved ones, and we might also feel that to say
Oh that my death would
stay these ruthful deeds! (2.5.95)
represents a light dismissal of a course he should seriously consider if he really wants to be of some help.
But Henry is an easy target. Despite – or because of – his egocentricity, here and in 3.1 and in his death-scene 5.6, he alone offers a competing perspective to the mire of political involvement. For the other principals, the horrors of civil war seem to be invisible – they are too engaged in it. His imagination, above all in the lines
So many days my ewes
have been with young,
So many weeks ere the
poor fools will ean, (2.5.36-37)
and
His cold thin drink
out of his leather bottle (2.5.48)
reflects not only a foolish personal envy* but a broader feeling for the realities of common life. Henry’s career is a disastrous failure, but Shakespeare’s career would turn that broader feeling into something incalculably potent.
*(On the other hand Oliver Cromwell, we suppose, knew what he was
talking about when, in reply to
accusations of personal ambition re the Lord Protectorate, he said that he
hated the burden and wished he’d lived under a wood side and kept a flock of
sheep. Cromwell was referring to his own background as a gentleman-farmer, not
a landless shepherd. Yet though he meant it literally his remark illustrates
the sort of inevitability with which people’s thoughts align themselves with
available cultural expression. Cromwell ends up saying exactly the same sort of
thing as the whole line of European monarchy from Shakespeare’s Henry to Marie
Antoinette.)
*
Note 1 – on the texts.
All reader’s editions are based on the Folio text of 1623 (F), a text of
over 3000 lines, all in verse. An octavo version, entitled The true Tragedy
of Richard Duke of York, and the death of good King Henry the Sixth, had
appeared in 1595 (O). (F’s full title is The third Part of Henry the Sixth,
with the death of the Duke of
Though there are thousands of differences between O and F (O is about
900 lines shorter), the effect of these differences on the total dramatic image
is surprisingly minor. O contains every scene and virtually every character who
is remotely individualized. And 3 Henry VI has a great many of both.
The most detailed discussion of the relation between the texts is the
2nd
Thus, when Cairncross in the first scene intuits that Montague’s brief
part was originally intended for a different character from the chronicles,
Falconbridge, he changes the speech prefix. Suppose his intuition is right. But
even so, what is he actually trying to achieve here? It’s quite right that a
play such as this must have begun with some sort of manuscript by some sort of
author (Shakespeare, I’ve no doubt). Is the idea to get back to that? But is it
where we really want to get to? Perhaps
changes that arose subsequently, during rehearsal or performance, were
Shakespeare’s considered changes, originated by him or at any rate meeting with
his thorough approval. A significant part of the composing process may have
occurred during the early history of the play.
And do we really know that “Falconbridge” was the name in that first
manuscript? Perhaps it was something tried out and altered in draft, long
before the play first met the company’s eyes? In trying to “get back” to the
“original”, we may actually be overshooting it and disappearing into the
chaotic fog of ideas and influences that underlie any work of the
imagination.
So the 3rd
The Cairncross edition represents (and expands on) the tradition that
really began with Peter Alexander in 1929. Its conclusions are roughly as
follows:
F gives a fair representation of the play as first written, around
1590. It derives from copy that may be close to an authorial ms. ( - although
some use was made of later quarto editions of O. Compositors always preferred
printed copy to manuscript, even if this required a lot of emendation on the
page. But of course this practice led to mistakes, and some O readings
therefore sneaked into F, displacing authorial readings.)
The original (laying aside doubts about what exactly that ought to mean
– see above) was close to F, and closer still to the ms copy from which most of
F was set. O, in contrast, is derivative. It witnesses to purposive cutting
with the aim of producing a shorter play. The text is also corrupt in ways that
suggest memorial reconstruction – in other words, at some stage in the
reporting chain, someone did not have full access to original text.
Signs of memorial error and reconstruction include:
1. Lots of semi-metrical text in place of a metrical original. E.g. Sir
John Montgomery’s speech:
What talk you of debating?
In few words,
If you’ll not here proclaim
yourself our king,
I’ll leave you to your
fortune and be gone
To keep them back that come
to succour you.
Why shall we fight, if you
pretend no title? (F, 4.7.53-57)
What stand you on debating,
to be brief,
Except you presently
proclaim yourself our king,
I’ll hence again, and keep
them back that come to
Succour you, why should we
fight when
You pretend no title?
(O)
2. Mishearings, whether actually aural or apparently so:
O, ten times more than
tigers of Hyrcania. (F 1.4.155)
O ten times more than tigers
of
(Also “clamor” for “cannons”, “famous” for “foeman’s”, etc.)
3. Incomplete memory leading to text that makes less sense:
And that I love the tree
from whence thou sprangst,
Witness the loving kiss I
give the fruit. (F 5.7.31-32)
And that I love the fruit
from whence thou sprangst,
Witness the loving kiss I
give the child (O)
The Scales and Hungerford marriages (4.1.46ff.) are terribly confused
in O.
4. Fresh recourse to the
chronicles to locate details that were not exactly recalled. E.g. some of the
figures given for the size of armies are more accurate in O than in F – because
Shakespeare was creatively modifying throughout, but the producers of O took
their figures direct from Hall.
5. Recycling text, e.g
6. Phrases borrowed from other plays, e.g. from 1 Henry VI.
Details can be argued over (F’s “Is this our foeman’s face” (2.5.82) makes
much less sense than O’s “this is no famous face”.) But the cumulative case is
convincing, though what isn’t so clear to me is whether the purposive cutting
preceded the reconstruction (as Cairncross seems to assume) or accompanied it,
or came later.
Exactly why there is so much garbled reporting (or apparently garbled
reporting) in Elizabethan play-editions is still disturbingly unclear; one
senses that important aspects of the sociology of Shakespeare’s theatre remain
ungrasped . (A fairly cursory survey confirms the notion that the speeches of
Clifford,
There is some re-ordering in Act IV. The scenes 4.4 and 4.5 change
places in O, and 4.7 precedes the remnant of 4.6, which is effectively
amalgamated with 4.8. I think all of this is motivated by the intention to
drastically reduce 4.6 (dispensing with the role of the Lieutenant in the
process) and to yoke what little remains – chiefly, the prophecy about
Some of the other cutting seems to have had the intention of reducing
the number of separate speaking parts. The Watchmen are entirely omitted from
4.3 (leaving a trace of their presence in the text, in
But the majority of the cuts seem designed not to reduce the number of
roles but to speed up the action (and shorten the performance-time). The parts
most affected are those with long speeches, such as Margaret and Henry, who
lose more than 150 lines each.
A variant in O that I like is Richard’s
To dry mine arm up like a
withered shrimp
(Compare F 3.2.156: To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub)
But it’s probably another memory of 1 Henry VI, where the
Countess describes Talbot as “this weak and writhled shrimp” (2.3.22). –
Cairncross supposes that the same (terrier-like?) actor played both Talbot and
Richard, which is certainly very likely since Talbot’s role ends in Part I and
Richard’s does not begin until Part 2. The other senior men’s roles (Henry,
York, Warwick) are carried through all three parts.
*
Note 2 – on the tetralogy.
If Cairncross’s detailed arguments are accepted, then Shakespeare, near
the beginning of his career as a writer, conceived and triumphantly delivered a
massive opus in the form of four plays, the whole sequence written in 1590-91.
Nothing like this had ever been written before. There only known chronicle play
before this date is the Famous Victories
of Henry V, which existed in some form by 1588 (the surviving text is later
and mutilated). The main inspiration, theatrically, can only have been the two
parts of Tamburlaine. The idea for a vast historical enterprise would
have arisen naturally enough from such works as Hall, Holinshed, and the Mirror
for Magistrates; Shakespeare had an audience who were intensely interested
in the history of the previous century. For the sheer ambition of Shakespeare’s
work, inspiration could have come from The Faerie Queene – Spenser had
just published the first three books of what was clearly going to be the
biggest English poem anyone had seen. Another factor, which it is hard to
weigh, was the continuing prominence of noble families in Shakespeare’s own
time. The Cobhams, Oldcastles, etc, were still significant parts of the
national landscape and they were interested enough in the portraits of their
own ancestors to have an impact on Shakespeare’s work, i.e. through censorship and
consequent re-writing. Clearly, the material of the tetralogy was not felt to
be “remote”.
A dramatic sequence on such a scale must arouse curiosity about how
such an ambitious project could ever come to fruition. Some company must have
had immense faith in the idea. If 1 Henry VI was originally in much the
same form as we know it from the Folio, then it was dramatically inconclusive
and pointed straight on to its successor (just like the second and third parts
do). Was it feasible to rehearse a company to perform the plays in rapid
succession, like Wagner’s Ring at
According to Nashe, 1 Henry VI attracted
huge audiences. And perhaps it was a collaboration. That might go some way to
explaining the sequels.
Like Wagner, Shakespeare was extravagant with his demands. The cast of
each of these plays is large. Big roles would seem to require top-quality
actors, yet look at how Shakespeare treats, e.g.
A similar profligacy affects the use of the actor who would play
Richard of Gloucester. He could have
played Talbot in 1 Henry VI (see above), but there is no obvious
role for him in the bulk of 2 Henry VI, and he may have just made a
brief, colourful splash as e.g. Jack Cade (I think this is how it worked out in
the ESC production). In short, if Shakespeare wrote his tetralogy with a
company in mind, he must have relied on a sufficiently large number of competent
actors to be able to rest his big hitters for large portions of some plays.
Shakespeare evidently had great faith in the boy-actors, too. They had
to act not only boys but all female ages from ten to eighty (e.g. Clarence’s
daughter and the Duchess of York in Richard III). They also had to bring
off the challenging ensemble scenes of Richard III, in which three or
four mature women compete in lamentation over their children and husbands.
These were not “boyish” roles of the Rosalind type, such as any fresh-faced
sixteen-year-old could make sexy just by being themselves. And some female
roles in the tetralogy, above all Margaret, would seem to call on the boy-actor
to make a very forceful impact. Perhaps this was realistically achievable only
if the style of acting was highly formal and did not venture on
naturalism.
[That tends to be confirmed by two things: first, that other plays of
this era - just prior to the closure of the playhouses - are also notable for
very large casts (compared to the plays that came later). Also, the sheer
number of plays that were performed. e.g. according to Henslowe, the Lord
Admiral's Men in 1594-95 performed 38 plays, of which 21 were new. That's a
staggering number of lines to learn, but it doesn't suggest much detailed
meditation of character-details and of how to play key moments in a scene -
more like the hasty preparation of a play-reading: your part requires you to be
kingly and solemn, or clownish and comic.]
The main practical analogy for handling this kind of multi-part
theatrical enterprise was the still-living memory of the mystery cycles. But
the actors in these spectacles were not professional, and a high level of
virtuosity was not required. If so, Richard III (following hard on Faustus)
set a new course, in which plays would showcase the talents of outstanding
individual actors.
*
Note 3
Stuart Hampton-Reeves’ Alarums and Defeats: Henry
VI on Tour speculates interestingly
on how far Henry VI and other plays of the time were designed in the
context of touring companies. He notes, for example, the interest that 3
Henry VI must have held for
audiences in York and in Coventry, both of whom saw performances (very likely,
he suggests, of this play) during the ill-fated tour of Pembroke’s Men in
1592-93.
It’s certainly a neglected context for Shakespeare’s early career – the
brilliant Warwickshire Induction of The Taming of the Shrew (complete
with touring players) is another place where this background is relevant.
Nevertheless, I’m not wholly convinced. London must have been where the
Henry VI plays achieved the fame that is attested by Greene’s well-known
attack; and London audiences may have appreciated the Parliament and Tower
scenes in 3 Henry VI just as much as the provincial audiences
appreciated the dramatic portrayal of their own cities. And while passages such
as
Besides, one must add that in respect of the very large number of
characters, the Henry VI plays are peculiarly unsuitable for
touring. With optimal doubling, the
sixty-seven roles in 3 Henry VI would require twenty-one adult actors (around
twelve of them with lines to speak) and at least four boys; around 16 speaking
parts in all. What is known of touring companies suggests they were generally
if not always smaller than that, but perhaps the Pembroke tour might have been
envisaged on a larger scale for the very reason that they planned on performing
Henry VI as a centrepiece. Perhaps that’s why it lost money.
What was indubitably true was the success of the ESC’s provincial tour
of the History cycle in the 1980s, which is the occasion for Hampton-Reeves’
essay. By a curious chance I not only saw all seven plays (Henry VI was
conflated into two), but I had also seen Terry Hands’ RSC production at
Note 4. – “Somerset”.
In the 3rd
Note 5. – Sanctuary.
There is a human right that was allowed to the most degraded members of
medieval society - criminals, refugees and homeless vagabonds - yet which is
denied to us. I am of course talking about sanctuary.
Well, I am probably idealizing. Sanctuary perhaps did not cut much ice
unless you were well-born. Superior force might not choose to recognize it. It
is said that at the battle of
Sanctuary had been recognized in pre-Christian times. In Euripides' Ion, Creusa takes sanctuary at Apollo's
altar after her plot to kill Ion has been discovered. The baffled Ion grumbles:
What a state of affairs!
How terrible it is when the laws the gods have made for men are made neither
well now wisely! The criminal should be driven from the altar, not granted its
protection. It is an offence that something holy should be touched by criminal
hands; only the just have this right. It is the victim of wrongdoing who should
receive the privilege of sanctuary; the good man and the bad when they seek
refuge should not be given equal treatment by the gods.
Ion's reasoning, as throughout the play, is fresh but naïve. The problem
is that to vengeful pursuers the supplicant is always going to be a criminal,
never a victim of wrongdoing. I suppose it would work if the gods actively
intervened (perhaps they could give the true criminals an electric shock), but
then their altars would no longer be sanctuaries as we understand them. In this
play, sanctuary does everyone a service, because Creusa and Ion are about to
find out that they are mother and son.
A pursuer determined to override the claims of sanctuary can always find
an argument. Buckingham, in Richard III,
comes up with the mirror image of Ion's.
You break not sanctuary in
seizing him;
The benefit thereof is
always granted
To those whose dealings
have deserv'd the place,
And those who have the wit
to claim the place.
This prince have neither
claimed it nor deserv'd it:
And therefore in mine
opinion cannot have it...
Yes, you heard it right. The young Duke of York, not having done
anything criminal, does not deserve sanctuary. Therefore the Cardinal will
commit no wrong by collecting him from his over-protective mother and bringing
him to us, by force if necessary (so we can later murder him).
Shakespeare found this argument in the chronicles. In a perverse way it
reflects the Christianization of sanctuary: the Christian God came into the
world to save sinners and not good men, therefore sanctuary applies
specifically to criminals, just the class of person that Ion thinks ought to be
excluded.
When I was at school, we still resorted, when finally cornered by some
tough person that we had annoyed, to saying Pax!
Pax! Pax! which was supposed to invoke the power of sanctuary or of being
"home" in a game of It. In my own agitation I not only cried Pax but also crossed my fingers on both
hands, with a confused hope that this action (primarily intended to nullify
vows) could magically release me from other unwelcome consequences, too.
[In
(2004, 2010)
This is a play which was published
anonymously in 1596 and never attributed to Shakespeare until its claims were
unveiled by Capell in 1760. In fact the play disappears from notice so abruptly
after its second quarto of 1599 that this requires some explanation regardless
of who wrote it - the likeliest is that its crude anti-Scottishness rendered it
unperformable and therefore unwanted after royal reproof in 1598. And of course
that might also explain its absence from the First Folio. For Shakespeare's
presence is pervasive - two rather different Shakespeares indeed. In much of
the play we are reminded of Shakespeare in his earliest period. But in certain
scenes a more mature Shakespeare seems to emerge, e.g. the Countess of
Salisbury scenes in Act II and the taunting scene before
There is at any rate enough of Shakespearian echoes (and no-one else's - the occasional Marlovianisms were mere common currency) to more than justify the play's inclusion in a canon that already includes other collaborative plays. Indeed the question is not so much whether Shakespeare was one of the authors as whether anyone else but Shakespeare was involved. (The latest computer study proposes Kyd.)
And yet, reading this some thirty years after I last experienced reading a Shakespeare play for the first time, I feel a reluctance to wholly give way to its claims; a reluctance that, evidently, scholars have felt too. A little of this - I think, a very little - might be down to the lack of attestation; more, probably, is down to the patina that the canonized plays have all accrued - we read a play, even such as the Henry VI plays, vaguely aware of sitting among an audience that spans the centuries and includes enthralled and wise and reflective and hotly engaged responders. But still, when all this is conceded some other reluctance remains that is down to Edward III itself.
Enter at one door
How is it with our sovereign and his peers?
Audley. 'Tis full a fortnight since I saw his
highness,
What time he sent me forth to muster men,
Which I accordingly have done, and bring them hither,
In fair array before his majesty.
What news, my lord of
Hath yielded to his highness general aid,
And makes our king lieutentant-general
In all his lands and large dominions;
Then via for
the spacious bounds of
There is verse as bare and functional as
this in Henry VI. What is different
is more a matter of stagecraft. What
King Edward. Robert of
From
King John. Now say, Chatillon, what would
King Richard. Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster,
Hast thou, according to thy oath and hand....
Soon enough, we are dealing with the matter of dynastic claims, just as in 3 Henry VI, King John, Henry V. Soon enough, we have the hurling of defiance, just as in those three plays. And yet, comparing these opening scenes, the overwhelming feeling is that Edward III gives less. It accomplishes all that one would have expected at the outset, no more.
But what grips us in the acknowledged
history plays is precisely that "more". We are not passively
following out the dutiful enactment of a chronicle, we are instantly involved,
piqued, engaged, in the drama's unexpected turns and anticipations. In King John, for example, we are hardly a
page into the familiar material before we are wondering about the king's
personality and the tension in his relationship with his mother, and we haven't
had a moment to take that on board before the scene switches direction
unpredictably with the appearance of the Bastard. The ending of the scene could
not have been anticipated in how it began. And this is about the least of the
scenes in question. Think how in 3 Henry
VI the fiery confrontation fizzles into a truce that no-one believes in,
then before we can catch our breath the king is facing the wrath of his queen.
Where will this lead us? Who are the major players? What of
But the end of the first scene of Edward III is merely rousing. There are no tensions within the English camp. No-one has any discernible personality, and the Prince ends it, to general consensus and without any foretaste of troubles ahead, with
Then cheerfully forward, each a several way,
In great affairs 'tis naught to use delay.
It is still (modestly) exciting to anticipate clashes with the Scots and the French, but that is all. So if you put this down to being Shakespeare's work in total, I think we must be looking at his first essay in the history genre (except for the revised scenes). It is not a satisfying solution - it is both complicated in terms of the play's genesis, and rather too easy to defend, since anything unShakespearian can be attributed to habits later outgrown. But it makes a certain amount of sense -
1. If the history play genre has its roots
in the patriotic mobilization of a nation at the time of the Armada, then Edward III seems closest to this model.
(and note the reference to
2. 1
Henry VI suggests an audience's prior familiarity not just with Henry V's
famous victories but with the earlier triumphs of Crécy and
3. A fundamental challenge for the patriotic play is how to deal with other, enemy nations; and you could see a development from Edward III's anti-Scottish lampooning to the treatment of La Pucelle in 1 Henry VI before such crude propaganda is outgrown.
Yet Edward
III is somewhat more than a mere precursor. The most difficult point of
honour is negotiated within the French camp,
i.e.
Also, there are certain points where a refusal to dramatize and make character motivation is quite interesting. When Edward believes that his son is doomed, he makes the speech about working out his grief in revenge -
An hundred fifty towers shall burning blaze
While we bewail our valiant son's decease.
It would have been easy to place
A couple of other points go to
He that you fight for is your natural king,
He against whom you fight a foreigner;....
you feel that in a nationalistic context
(i.e. in Shakespeare's own time, and in a play that constantly makes a clash of
nations out of a dynastic quarrel) this is a very strong argument. What matter
the rights and wrongs of dynastic succession? To fight for Edward is clearly
not to fight for
From the above it is evident that Edward, though never quite a character, has a consistent fierceness that we don't simply cheer for. The fierceness is most overtly debated when Edward refuses to send aid to his imperilled son, who shares the fierceness too.
*
Edward III uses rhyme, chiefly though not always at the end of a speech, also throughout some speeches, e.g. the Countess's urging Edward to stay with her. It also has several passages where the same word or words reappear in successive lines.
If she did blush, 'twas tender modest shame,
Being in the sacred presence of a king;
If he did blush, 'twas red immodest shame,
To vail his eyes amiss, being a king.... (and it continues)
When we name a man,
His hand, his foot, his head hath several strengths,
And being all but one self instant strength,
Why all this many, Audley, is but one,
And we can call it all but one man's strength.
This can be compared with Henry VI's speech
in 3 Henry VI.
Switching speeches in mid-line is chiefly
prominent in the Countess scenes. Full stops in mid-line are a feature of the
scenes between the Prince and Audley at
(2009)
(first appeared in Intercapillary
Space)
Or I shall live your epitaph
to make,
Or you survive when I in
earth am rotten,
From hence your memory death
cannot take,
Although in me each part
will be forgotten.
Your name from hence
immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all
the world must die.
The earth can yield me but a
common grave
When you entombèd in men’s
eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my
gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created
shall o’er-read,
And tongues to be your being
shall rehearse
When all the breathers of this
world are dead.
You still shall live – such
virtue hath my pen –
Where breath most breathes,
even in the mouths of men.
By this stage in the sequence the general form of the argument is familiar: we have exulted in many such resounding claims for the life-giving power of the author’s verses – the theme emerges first in Sonnets 15-19. Yet there is a difference here. The author is, at this moment, somewhat annoyed with his friend: because of the encouragement given to those rival poets. He finds himself almost arguing: I grant this, I grant that... (79, 82); he conceives himself as a plain-speaking, “true-telling” friend; and in due course he comes out with a pretty sharp rebuke at the end of Sonnet 84. The general form of all the sonnets to the young man is “how very, very much I love you” but here we are quite a long way from the tranced ecstasy that you can see at its very height in, say, Sonnet 31.
In Sonnet 81 Shakespeare is not ready to voice his resentful feelings. But it’s no accident that the first line of Sonnet 81 uses a form of words that in a different context could easily be a threat; no accident, either, that he flings so grim an idea as “rotten” into the mix – his over-emphatic self-abnegation (Oh I, I’m nothing, I’m food for worms) is just the kind of thing you say when you intend your lover to receive it as an accusation. He’s upset.
And there is something blurry in the sonnet’s words. The phrase “from hence” begins line 3, and then recurs in line 5, but the reader trying to make the two phrases parallel belatedly discovers their disparity: take from is a regular English expression, but have from isn’t, so then you have to go back on yourself and reinterpret what’s being said. Later in the sonnet Shakespeare uses “breathers” to refer to people alive in 1595; two lines later he is speaking about breath in the context of people living in the distant future. Throughout the octet our general belief that Shakespeare is referring to his sonnets is troubled by uncertainty about whether in fact he might be talking about the friend’s yet-unwritten epitaph, the pompous yet-unbuilt tomb, or even the rhetorical praise of his rivals. Only in line 9,
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
is the expected statement perfectly explicit.
Explicit – but now problematized, as it never was in the mighty boast of Sonnet 19, nor in the frail hope of Sonnet 60. In these poems, as different as they are, we don’t really get involved in discussing the convention itself. Of course (we agree unthinkingly) verse confers immortality. Shakespeare’s verse does, anyway! But now we think: – Well, does it? What kind of immortality? How could it do that?
Line 5 says that the young man’s name will have immortal life. That’s one of the things that provokes uncertainty about what we’re talking about here. The Sonnets, of course, do not name any names – you never used real names when you were writing sonnets. Perhaps Shakespeare supposed that the identity of his friend would be well-known enough anyway. Simple readers have spent a lot of effort trying to clear this up. Then began a fashion of rebuking simple readers for this shameful interest, which no true lover of the sonnets should ever possess – I think Auden did this the most stridently, and with least pretence of an argument.
But let’s concede this much: that the kind of immortality of the name that is conferred by an epitaph or a tomb inscription is not the thing that Shakespeare hoped to give. There are plenty of poems from that time where the subjects are named: all those dedicatees, all those dusty nobilities with their manifold virtues who, for example, are forgettably roll-called in the poems of Jonson. I mean no slight to some brilliant poems, but, does Sir Lucius Cary “ever live young”? Or even the Countess of Pembroke?
Nor, probably, should we be thinking of that immortality conferred by biography: the initimate peculiarities of the famous. Sixteenth-century Lives evince no interest in those aspects of personality – though this particular author’s plays patently do exactly that. But the Sonnets do not tell us what the young man said or what he liked to wear or what time of day he got out of bed. It’s tempting, perhaps, to go to the other extreme: to understand the Sonnets’ promise of immortality as profoundly ironic in effect, to suggest the young man completely disappears, is reduced to a pure instrument for Shakespeare’s poetic virtuosity, the expression at most of the artist’s own feelings, a device for promoting the artist’s own immortality. The gazed-at as mere object, the gazer dominant and luxuriating in his own power – well, you’ve read it all before.
Shakespeare himself refers us not to a kind of literature that had hardly come into existence but on the contrary to a kind of literature that was already extinct, the Arthurian romances.
When in the chronicles of
wasted time
I see descriptions of the
fairest wights... (106)
Did he conceive of the young man immortalized in his verses somewhat like those ever-fresh faces of Galahad and Guy of Warwick? Perhaps he supposed Stella and Delia, in like manner, immortalized, as eternal images of incomparable beauty? Immortalized but not particularized: just as Shakespeare would pick up those expressions of an antique pen and transfer them – or it might be Adonis, or Helen (53) – to his own experience of the young man, so later lovers (as in Sonnet 55) would adapt his own verses to their own loves. A prophecy amply fulfilled in fact – but inasmuch as this is the poetic of the sonnets that is imaged within the sonnets themselves, it supplies a very reductive account of what the sonnets really achieve. And it doesn’t content me, because the author is much too stressed (for example, in Sonnet 81) about this matter of immortality, a stress that can’t be accounted for if the immortality is something that is a very well understood mechanism that a poet of Shakespeare’s mettle could hardly fail to deliver on.
“Fair, kind, and true”, the poet sums up in Sonnet 105, as the relationship moves towards a stasis after three years, and inevitably dims – enlarges – into serene generality. And we think: fair, definitely; kind, on the whole; true, you have to be joking. But the poet isn’t lying: he perceives as mature lovers do, celebrating a total image that is not refuted by instances of ugliness, cruelty and betrayal. It’s miraculous – the way writing is miraculous – but though we can’t get at the young man directly, we do know him. Not because Shakespeare describes him – a description is anyway always motivated, suspect, unverifiable – but because the Sonnets, at the very extreme of their creativity, are helplessly candid: This is what he made me write. In Sonnet 81 a Shakespeare with the cunning of low self-esteem speaks (in verse that is far from gentle) of “my gentle verse” – he means us to think, not rhetorical, not stately, not coloured; but since his verse has plenty of all those things, how does he differentiate himself from (if it’s them he means) Chapman and Marlowe? To me the gentleness is not about low-key emotion, far from it, but about total flexibility – more specifically, responsiveness to whatever is flying about. His faith in his verse – painfully insecure as it is – rests on brilliance of execution, yes, but also on the intimacy of his knowledge of the young man. And what is the relevance of intimacy? I mean, if we’re not talking about biographical details? I believe we are dealing with, that despised word, sincerity.
(2007)
A Note on: Thomas
P. Roche, "Shakespeare and the Sonnet Sequence" (1970, in the Sphere History of Literature in the English
Language: English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674, ed. Christopher Ricks).
Historically, this
elegant essay will be mainly remembered for its contribution (arguably, the key
one) to recognizing the shape of a "Delian" tradition in the 1609
volume. This was one of those big discoveries that still crop up, improbably,
in the most crowded sea-lanes of literature. The ultimate inspiration was a
throwaway remark by Edmond Malone that lay unattended for nearly two centuries.
After Roche, the theory was filled out by Katherine Duncan-Jones (RES, 1983) and was one of several things
that made John Kerrigan's 1986 edition for the New Penguin Shakespeare so
eye-opening.
But revelatory as
it is this discovery cannot be used to dispose of a biographical reading; the Sonnets are too different from their
predecessors, and specifically in being more dramatically personal. No-one
tries to read Delia in this way, nor The Rape of Lucrece. Trying to infer the
meaning of the Sonnets from a
generalized meaning of the sonnet tradition is unwise: as here, when Roche
claims: "Most of the sonnet sequences seem not merely to depict but to
comment on the love: Go and do not likewise". That simple moral is very
much a lowest common denominator, and not even the most important one. That it
is somewhat relevant to aspects of many sonnets, including Shakespeare's, was
already sufficiently clear; casting it into undue prominence (at the expense of all the more subtle play of
morality that overlays it) is a distortion, akin to those historical
etymologies that impede discussion of what a word means to those who use it.
Or Roche says:
"Our infatuation with our own experience makes us see 'beauty making
beautiful old rime/ In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights', but we do not
believe it except as an act of reading, a prefiguration in poetry but without
warmth." I don't want to overstate in the opposite direction, but I think
warmth is generally a good quality when it comes to reading poems such as the Sonnets; indeed I don't see how else we
are going to understand what's going on.
Roche comments
interestingly on some individual sonnets.
Poor soul, the
centre of my sinful earth,
[ ] these rebel powers that thee
array,
Of 146 with its
famous missing-two-syllables at the start of the second line, he argues that
the first two lines together ought to connect with line 9 (as the lines in the
sestet make successive replies to the preceding octet). That's not a certainty
but it does focus attention on the whole progression of the poem. The trouble
is that while the originally printed lines certainly conceal a problem
Poor soul, the
centre of my sinful earth,
my sinful earth
these rebel powers that thee array
it's impossible to
feel confident about where the patching ends and where good text begins. Is
"these", for example, really likely as part of the original text? I
feel it implies a dramatized context, as if line 2 would have to be a question
or an order, not a descriptive phrase as produced by most of the proposed
emendations ("Lord of", "Pressed by", etc).
Looking at the
rest of the sonnet and ignoring the first two lines, it strikes me as one of
the sonnets that works through an extended metaphor, a bit like Sonnet 4. And
this extended metaphor concerns a householder, a propertied gentleman, a lord
of the manor. You would expect this mini-narrative to begin in line 1 - but it
doesn't. And you wouldn't expect the "rebel powers" of line 2, which
introduce a civil-war metaphor of which the rest of the poem shows no
cognizance. What I'm suggesting, unwillingly, is that not much of the first two
lines are authentic at all.
Of Sonnet 73 Roche
says that the word "leave" in the last line should not be taken to
mean "forego" - that is, the end of the sonnet turns to consider not
the poet's mortality, but the young man's mortality. I think he's wrong, though
a better paraphrase would be "take leave of". The poet's decease is
continually the theme of 71-74, and all the metaphors in the first twelve lines
are about the poet's greater age. Roche has talked himself into this forced
reading because he's worried that the drift of those twelve lines, without some
corrective, are, no matter how poignant, "sentimental". Indeed he drifts
into biographical tendencies himself when he argues that the self-pitying
author, after all, must be no older than forty-five! (In all probability, about
thirty..) The problem is self-induced, really. The playfulness, obvious
generalizing power, and complexity of effect quite do away with any spectre of
"sentimentality", even were we to concede the unacceptableness of
that hard-to-pin-down quality.
Roche is
particularly unenthusiastic about the much-praised Sonnet 94 and I rather share
his frustration, though I don't agree that the problem is about abstractness of
diction. On the contrary, the poem flings out a sequence of brilliantly vivid
lines and images; but does not feel inclined to reconcile their contradictory
feelings; the poet is simultaneously bothered about the young man's cold
slowness to temptation and about him having very likely yielded to temptation,
about barren chastity and about inner corruption.
(2008)
William Shakespeare: Love's Labour's Lost (1593-94, revised 1597)
Perhaps this play has a shadowy existence for the general reader, though it is now staged rather often. As a child my only glancing contacts with it were practising how to say the word Honorificabilitudinitatibus and singing the incomparable Winter song about "Dick the shepherd blows his nail", which was probably added in the 1597 revision, most likely for the performance for Queen Elizabeth in Christmas 1597. (I am summarizing the most likely sequence of events, though none of these things is certain.)
The quarto title-page describes itself as
“Newly corrected and augmented” and this seems to imply that there was an
earlier “bad” quarto. In the same manner, the good Q2 of Romeo and Juliet describes itself as "Newly corrected,
augmented, and amended", and Q2 of Hamlet
“Newly imprinted
and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and
perfect coppie.” That the hypothesized bad quarto of LLL is not extant is not especially disturbing: after all, the bad
quarto of Hamlet survives in only two
copies, and was not rediscovered until 1827. There is something oddly polite
about these good quarto references to their bad quarto predecessors. The Folio
roundly describes all its quarto
predecessors as "stol'n
and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of
injurious impostors". Given the Elizabethan taste for invective, you might
have expected the good quartos to make a good deal of their own authoritative
excellence and of their predecessors’ wicked incompetence: to describe themselves,
instead, merely as “corrected” is in some degree to legitimize the earlier
publications. Perhaps the former were not quite so illegitimate, or the latter not
quite so legitimate, as we might reasonably infer.
In the case of LLL the Folio merely reprints the surviving
Quarto. It’s a good text, but the revision mentioned above is attested by several happy accidents which result in the inclusion
of two versions of the same passage. Furthermore the spring song at the end
uses Gerard's Herball of 1597. But
the
The title refers to the ending of the play, to "Jack hath not Jill". I'm not sure what justifies the apostrophe in "Labour's" - this could as well, or more likely, be a plural. The Quarto merely calls it "Loues Labors Lost", a 1598 reference calls it "Loues Labour Lost". There is evidence for a play Love’s Labour’s Won that Shakespeare wrote soon afterwards and that was apparently published in quarto, but we don’t know anything else about it. The inference that it might have taken up the unresolved ending of LLL (and thus be a sequel in more than name) is obvious, perhaps a little too obvious. It would have been such an easy thing to resolve LLL in the first place, if that’s what Shakespeare had wanted to do. But everyone prefers LLL the way it is. The artificiality, playfulness, and lack of dramatic momentum are as it were redeemed by the unexpected bittersweetness of the close. An orderly working-out of artificial weddings between persons who for the most part are more like strophes than characters would be anodyne by comparison. On the other hand, you can see how the sudden change of mood first essayed in LLL connects with the emphatic reassertion of a tragic mode in Act III of Romeo and Juliet.
(2009)
- Ese problema… ¿no será el de “Romeo y Julieta”?
¿Es que sus familias no están de acuerdo en esa boda?
The “situation” in Romeo and Juliet is a formidable
statement, with the force of folktale, but it belongs to a much larger class of
stories of in which social forces stand in the way of a wished-for marriage
between two lovers. In most cultures parents have wished to have a say in their
child’s choice of a mate. Perhaps the most usual case in real life is when
there is some perceived difference in social class, when B is “beneath” what is
due to A’s family. In that respect Romeo and Juliet idealizes. Here, so far
as class goes (“both alike in dignity”) the pair could hardly be more eligible
for each other. They are perfectly matched in every respect but one, a historic
enmity whose details never concern us – an arbitrary enmity. This is difficult
for us to relate to, and Jerome Robbins was the visionary who in 1949 saw that
the story could be about a cultural and ethnic clash: originally, he imagined a
Roman Catholic Tony and a Jewish Maria, but as West Side Story developed the Jets became N. European-American and
the Sharks Puerto Rican. This is such a natural transformation of the story
that we tend to try and retro-fit it to Romeo
and Juliet, but Shakespeare follows Brooke in making both families entirely
Veronese (whatever unspecific thing this evoked for him) – though Tybalt does say,
intriguingly, “This by his voice should be a Montague”.
The enmity between the
Montagues and the Capulets lacks the drive of ethnic/cultural antipathy; it
also lacks an economic angle (such as we learnt to enjoy in that child of West Side Story, The Godfather). It certainly is true that the family hostility
imagined by Shakespeare is very unlike a feud or a vendetta, which would be
patriarchally driven and enforced as duty. On the contrary, old Capulet and
(probably) old Montague are in the main merely embarrassed by the legacy. The
hostility here is something that flourishes among the younger men and the
junior followers, far more like urban tribes than we might have expected. Some
have inferred conclusions from this that tend to disparage the actions of the
lovers and their unfortunate outcomes. This is to revert unexpectedly to the
moralistic stance of Brooke’s preface of 1562:
A coople of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves
to unhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and advise of parents and
frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and
superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instruments of unchastitie)
attemptyng all adventures of peryll, for thattayning of their wished lust,
usyng auriculer confession (the kay of whoredome, and treason) for furtheraunce
of theyr purpose, abusyng the honorable name of lawefull mariage, the cloke the
shame of stolne contractes, finallye, by all meanes of unhonest lyfe, hastyng
to most unhappye deathe.
This is not where
Brooke’s poem intends to leave us: he leaves a mixed impression, which
Shakespeare much more subtly achieves also. In Shakespeare’s play the dazzle of
summer energies produces a range of flowers, of which love is one and violence
another; it is truly about society but not in the same sort of way that West Side Story is.
In Act I Scene 2
Capulet advises
But no more deep will I endart mine eye
Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.
However, love is in
the air. The parents have in effect licensed it, and Juliet allows that license
to open her heart, though not in the direction that her parents plan. In Love’s
Labour’s Lost a similar seasonal, masquing impulse had caused all the young
men and young women to fall in love, very neatly into non-overlapping couples. Here,
however, an older set look back on
love: the Nurse, Lady Capulet, the worldly-wise Mercutio, Capulet sentimentally
(“’Tis gone, ‘tis gone…”). Everyone’s talking about it, but where, for this
pair of youths, is the real thing? Society, right down to the serving-men, is
busy with the apparatus of a setting for love. Tybalt understands the solemnity
as a distinctly family affair, a social ritual that a hostile outsider would
naturally scorn; in effect, he betrays his consciousness of its intimacy. But Romeo
sees himself, self-conscious lover, as different from the “light of heart” who
will enjoy a dance. Mercutio wittily discountenances Romeo’s foreboding dream.
So what happens to
Romeo and Juliet is the old old story, across a crowded room, love in the air,
all those clichés, but it is in contrast to the simulacra of love that the
story surrounds them with, this one is specific, it is love for a particular
person.
But love is a funny
thing because the person you care about doesn’t mean anything like the same to
the people around you. Unsurprisingly, we older readers (and most of us are
going to be older than Romeo and Juliet) end up, in a way, dissing the centre
of the story, them. We take more
interest in the other characters, we look elsewhere for our involvement,
because these lovers are set against this background of older people and of
society in motion. Some are more interested in the (entirely self-invented)
story of Romeo’s search for the lost father-figure/moral-authority Mercutio
than in Romeo’s current love interest – as if Juliet is just the new Rosaline
or whoever.
When Romeo says “He
jests at scars that never felt a wound”, we take it with a trace of irony
against the speaker, we think he does not know anything about other people’s
scars, and we note avuncularly the self-absorption of the young. We see him
instead as the exercise of the will in a particular phase of a larger, seasonal,
cosmic pattern:
The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb:
What is her burying grave, that is her womb;
Or
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs: grace and rude will;
Listening to Friar
Lawrence, we place Romeo among these generalities. When Mercutio ribs Romeo in
his social role merely as a devotee to Love, but indifferent to (and, in fact,
mistaking) the individual whom Romeo loves, then we see how this generalizing
becomes wrong and irrelevant.
It’s not like
any other love,
this one is
different, because it’s us.
Much of RJ is about carving out that space in an
indifferent society.
*
Or rather, failing to
carve it out; the lovers in the story are doomed, not so much by compelling
circumstance as by the pre-existence of the story, which ends with their
deaths. Most of Shakespeare’s plays have a source-text, but none follows its
source more closely than this one. And Brooke’s poem belongs to the mid-century
in spirit.
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
This is true. The sheer
bad luck of Romeo not receiving the vital message and of killing himself just
before Juliet wakes is heart-wrenching, because of our poignant awareness that
his soul trembles on the brink, if only Juliet would wake up now, of a bliss as seeming-miraculous as
Leontes’ when the statue of Hermione comes to life. Instead, the lovers are
united not in bliss but in despair, having the rare distinction of each being
able to die heart-broken for the other’s death.
However, this
extremity of woe and the prettily contrived situation that produces it belongs
to a literary taste that Shakespeare was fast outgrowing. Brilliantly as he
manages the final scene, you can detect a tension between Shakespeare and the
story, very easily of course in hindsight when ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes
hilarious mockery of this very artifice. We don’t quite believe that the deaths
of these young lovers would really heal up mutual distrust between two families
– it would be more likely to inflame it, each blaming the other.
Shakespeare’s main
addition to the plot of this final scene is Romeo’s killing of
*
As everyone knows,
youth and age are central themes in RJ,
and Shakespeare makes Brooke’s young Juliet two years younger still, to ensure
we take the point. To accuse these lovers of lack of judgment is inappropriate.
Nor do they have much to say to each other; or rather, they have a great deal,
but Shakespeare adapts for them a sonnet language which registers emotions and
does not pretend to be naturalistic. When it comes to talking about something the lovers revert flatly
to practicalities, they are not chockfull of learning or philosophy or small-talk.
They do not debate or discuss.
Hence the one time in
the play when they have something very serious to discuss, i.e. when Romeo has
just killed Juliet’s cousin, is actually skipped. The next time we see them
together (III V), they have already said whatever needed to be said, and now
are once more united in love and in suffering a parting. In fact their
conversation (which is really not the word for it) is remarkably restricted.
First, there are the 18
lines of their meeting in I V: trance-like, magical, formal.
Then, the great duet
when time seems to stand still in II II – 193 lines, of which 135 are actual
conversation, because the early part is Romeo hearing Juliet covertly. Third,
the brief meeting before their marriage in II VI, around 20 lines in Friar
Lawrence’s presence, of which only 11 involve directly speaking to each other.
And finally the too brief aubade of III V, which ends so swiftly and in such
painful contrast to the balcony scene – “Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu,
adieu” (III V 59). In all, less than 300
lines from a total of nearly 3,000. Obviously, the lovers find it hard to meet.
But besides, there is nothing they really have to say – not even that they love
each other, for that was manifest, as it sometimes is, just in the atmosphere
they inhabit when together. Shakespeare did not know the metaphors of
electricity or chemistry, but he knew what they referred to.
The long conversation
in II II is much concerned with the name Romeo, Romeo’s daring, Romeo’s danger.
Juliet manifests her love for Romeo in trustingly using his name; she thus
accepts him as a close presence in her life, as close as her family. Romeo on
the other hand does not call her by her name at all; that name is for
soliloquy. His awed respect instead comes out as “fair maid”, “Lady”, “love” –
even in that last, with a faint tincture of possession. When, about to be
married, he calls her “Juliet”, there is a slight awkwardness in the speech,
which she reacts to. In their final conversation, both already harrowed by
misfortune, their use of “love” to each other loses all sense of proprietary
ownership. They know themselves to be, though married, quite outside the social
structures of possession. They now seek only the security of companionship on a
dark journey that will not end in this world.
(2009)
William
Shakespeare: King John (1595?)
King John is
now about the least-performed of Shakespeare’s plays. I have read a review of a
college production at M.I.T.; but it’s a long time since Mrs Siddons and her
directors seized eagerly on the role of
R. L. Smallwood’s interpretation of the play (in the New Penguin Shakespeare, 1974) turns its back on all this to emphasise the centrality of the Bastard and Hubert as, eventually, decent bystanders. This reading is humane and detailed, but it has some scarcely acknowledged difficulties. (Despite the evidence of speech prefixes, I hardly accept Hubert as identical with the citizen on the walls of Angiers. The two roles have clearly defined functions and nothing but questions seems to be gained from assimilating them.)
One difficulty is that the Bastard’s outrageous (and nearly implemented) suggestion that Angiers be levelled first and argued over later must be regarded as a sort of sarcasm. The idea is proposed with considerable energy. Another is that the Bastard is not shown as being in possession of the facts, so far as John’s death warrant on Arthur is concerned. This matters if his decisions are to be regarded as morally normative.
If thou didst but
consent
To this most cruel
act, do but despair...
So he says to Hubert. But John did consent, and the Bastard, not knowing this, is not really put to the test.
A better approach to this rumbustious character is via his kinship with Richard Coeur de Lion. His impatience with treaties is a military and temperamental one. He is well positioned to make deflating criticisms but he is not at all suitable as a comprehensive guide to political and national behaviour. Pugnacity is a sort of behaviour that is occasionally useful.
It is perhaps with these issues in mind that someone else has proposed playing King John as a “black comedy”, i.e. (so I suppose) a play in which all the action is to some extent vain and there is no moral centre. “Black comedy” seems to me an anachronistic genre, I mean when applied to Shakespeare; it can glide over difficulties but not help us.
What everyone admits is the linguistic
exuberance. Tennyson even referred to “Aeschylean lines”, though I think this
too is unhelpful if put to the question. If I was directing (this is my
big-budget production on the “Infinite Culture Channel”), I would just want to
play each scene for all it’s worth – no interpretation, no worrying about
character consistency. This implies a reluctance to unify. The drama would be
of situation, rather than character development, somewhat resembling a soap
opera (for example currently, in
Now I have invoked a naturalistic genre; but the scenes before Angiers, in particular II.1, are choral, a development of the “Senecan” formality of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. II.1 is an ensemble scene (all the speakers are of equal importance) with a highly patterned architecture. It’s impossible to conceive a naturalistic presentation in which all sides are simultaneously within easy earshot, for they speak out of two opposed armies and from within a besieged town. Perhaps it was this that made me concede, after I’d read the play through fast, that yes, it was an unactable kind of a play, and no wonder it wasn’t bothered with. (More likely, the real reason is that as a result of the subtle devaluation of Shakespeare over the last half-century, we now like to take our history plays in batches. To just see one of them doesn’t feel sustaining enough.)
But it’s different when you read more slowly.
The Pyrenean and
the River
It draws toward supper
in conclusion so.
With slaughter’s
pencil, where revenge did paint
The fearful difference
of incensèd kings.
Grief fills the room
up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed,
And all the shrouds
wherewith my life should sail
Are turnèd to one
thread, one little hair;
At this pace it’s ridiculous to say that “the play is not a play of character”. These are plainly the words of fully-realized speakers, and the reading experience, though its effect is in a way accidental and unintended by Shakespeare, has a depth of realization that, because we have filled its gaps and spaces, exceeds the most detailed novel. The Victorian “Complete Shakespeare” thus supplied an unattainable vision for the novelists to aim at.
If most books in the canon are now read in circumstances remote from the author’s intended purposes, Shakespeare’s is a peculiarly obvious instance. (The way we now receive classical music, on personal audio systems, is an analogy that likewise calls into question the purpose of reviving an “authentic” presentation - it isn’t the promise of an enhanced engagement.)
And wild nature itself? Is that, too, comprehended with a special intensity as a result of its streaked and slender persistence in our developed environments? To long for a return to universal wildness, as I find myself doing, is to ask for I know not what. It is to give up most of what we think of as comprehension of nature (which originates in dissection and in use) – it is to make a demand that is not for our civilisation, but for its surrender. In practice the conservationist fails to achieve more than a slight, ornamental correction. But in principle the longing is distinctly anti-humanist.
(2002)
William
Shakespeare: The Merchant of
29/10/00 - Alone in the flat - I revert to atavistic behaviour - reading Shakespeare, whose plays I’ve neglected for ages. The last time it was The Merry Wives of Windsor - this time The Merchant of Venice - a better play, indeed intermittently gripping (I.3, IV.1). Questions unanswered: Why is Antonio sad (I.1)? Is Shylock’s speech supposed to sound “foreign”? What does “The quality of mercy is not strained” mean, exactly? Why does Portia deny Shylock his principal? (She has saved Antonio - what else matters?)
-----
Yes, there’s no doubt Shakespeare keeps us waiting in the Merchant - in fact, it’s our main posture. Hate and financial embarrassment are significantly more interesting than love in this play. So Act I builds with a dramatic force and logic like the swiftest tragedies. Portia appears as a lively prattler - her good sense is a benefit of economic independence - you can hardly foresee how instrumental she will become in the major plot.
In I.3 it must be said that Antonio behaves with dignity; his outburst of anger surely appeals to us as a principled rejection of usury. In fact we have only Shylock’s word for Antonio’s anti-Semitism, and if Antonio acts imprudently here it is from the practical and productive motives of love (Antonio not denying his previous bald rudeness, but not displaying it either). If his later explanation of Shylock’s hatred is countenanced, it seems that the play intends us to think that Shylock is morbidly over-sensitive. Which is how inconvenient oppressed minorities are usually described by their oppressors.
Whatever may be justly said in extenuation, I think the Merchant is seen most accurately as fundamentally anti-Semitic - an author working within the general climate of opinion. If Shakespeare for the most part restricts coarse racial insult to the lips of Graziano, that is more from manners than principle - Graziano is a great joker (so no harm done, then?) and is within the fold of the righteous - fit to marry Nerissa.
In the nine scenes of Act II the primary actions stand still - dramatic vigour is hijacked by the rumbustious yet disquieting elopement of Lorenzo and Jessica. In II.5 Shylock is portrayed, to our eyes, very sympathetically - the logic of the story places him in the position of one sadly deceived; not a monomaniac or domestic ogre, but one who militates against the festive values of comedy. Shakespeare allowed some sympathy, as he would for Malvolio, confident that prevailing anti-Semitism would keep this in check. For us, of course, the effect is quite different, not dissimilar to how we react to Beckmesser’s humiliation in Meistersinger. Yet perhaps it’s unfair to stain Shakespeare with Wagner. He must have more or less believed that to be a Christian meant salvation, to be a Jew damnation. For all his sympathy to Shylock’s racial/cultural sensitivities, Shakespeare probably accepted that his play showed the salvation of human beings (Jessica, then Shylock) rather than the degradation of Jews.
If that’s true, though, I have to admit that the speech “Hath not a Jew eyes?” proposes in its very universalism an entirely different (apparently modern) way of conceiving human existence - universalist in its living reality not its spiritual destiny. A dramatist who ranges through time and space for materials - who makes Cleopatra speak, Othello and Caliban - is perhaps likely to find himself developing a broader idea of humanity.
Yet these words are in the mouth of Shylock, not Portia. Perhaps she would respond - “Hath not a Jew an immortal soul in need of salvation?”
Act V gives me a curious sense of how the
graceful life of the economically emancipated can perhaps have a moral value
despite its roots in the murky labours of the
(2000)
William
Shakespeare: Measure for Measure (1604)
In short order and skyingly, Measure for Measure can now be enjoyed for what it is, a wonderful and serious romantic comedy that is more usefully seen in apposition to Twelfth Night than to the plays it’s more commonly linked with. It works by fleet-footed scenes (all, bar the final one, rather brief) and is not afraid to leave gaps and to make momentary, casual use of characters and situations in pursuit of its object. The play has in fact a formal brilliance that perhaps was a springboard for Shakespeare to leap beyond such perfection into the wild elongations of Lear and Antony and Cleopatra.
Measure for Measure was after Shakespeare’s death rather neglected for three centuries. The reasons, e.g. its bawdiness and the central place it gives to dubiously legal sex, no longer survive as “problems” and nor do the more recent concerns that have been expressed as moral doubts about the behaviour of (chiefly) the Duke and Isabella. Problematizing is not after all a once-for-all process; problems vanish sometimes, and to notice this is a necessary clarification that does not, as some people fear, make things less complex than they are; on the contrary, it just clears the deck for what now appear as the real complexities.
1.1
The scene is expository, but gives away only a portion of what the play is about. Shakespeare exposes the top of his hierarchy first (Duke, Escalus, Angelo), but he is not willing to tell us very much about them. It would be fatal to betray much about Angelo at this early stage; we should see three proper managers.
Heaven doth with us as we
with torches do
is a thrilling image of character in action. The play will indeed show us these fiery effluences, but we don’t yet know where they’ll come from. As it happens, Escalus will play no vital role in forwarding the action, but we mustn’t know this yet, and likewise must be allowed to suppose that the Duke will be no more than an absentee figurehead.
1.2
Lucio and the two gentlemen (who will
hereafter be dropped, as we don’t yet know) begin by prolonging the illusion
that the play will be about international politics, another potential route
that the first scene might have led on to. These casual commentators have no
conception, as yet, that the real matter of the play will be domestic affairs
that concern them right here in
The “sanctimonious pirate” will prove to exemplify a theme that is central to the play, namely the distinction between an ideal morality and how it can be worked out in a social setting that is already in place.
Or consider Pompey’s “you have worn your eyes almost out in the service”. Mistress Overdone’s trade may be unlawful, but the labour and dedication are real and cannot be wholly discounted. As with the pirate and as in most working lives there is a mess of conflicting codes; you do your best for the firm; what the firm does may be far from heaven’s best, but you do still do your best.
With Claudio’s arrest, first outlined and then shown, the play finally develops a solid core of narrative interest. Even so, Claudio and Lucio find themselves second-guessing, as the accused always do. Claudio’s sister, not yet named, is shadowed at the end. She sounds – well, a little too young to be of great importance.
The scene gives a glimpse of
1.3
Measure for Measure makes exceptional use of interlocutors that are not themselves dramatically significant – a sort of chiaroscuro drama where the focus of attention is displaced, e.g. towards absent potentialities rather than present event. It also makes exceptional use of single-scene characters. Some make a formidable effect (Barnardine), others are barely individualized, but the effect in either case is to suggest a spacious background, the opposite of a Racinian drama. The temptation to combine Friar Thomas with the Friar Peter of the play’s final phase should therefore be resisted.
It’s lunch-time. The two actors should either be eating or have just eaten – I think, soup and a roll. The Duke converses very freely with his inferiors. Here his conversation approves, but in a speculative way, the charms of severity; that’s one reason you know he has a full stomach. (The Duke’s “complete bosom” half-refers to this relaxed complacency, and he has an eye to the crusts when he reflects that Angelo will hardly admit “that his appetite / Is more to bread than stone”.)
1.4
Francisca is another single-scene character. Lucio arrives at the convent with the dazzlingly rude “Hail virgin, if you be...” – it highlights the unexpected rapport that emerges between Isabella and Lucio. Despite her opening remarks she is quite at ease in her brother’s world (“Oh, let him marry her”).
Isabella is the last of the major characters to appear. We learn that she is enthusiastic about her novitiate, but also fairly worldly. We understand that she has not yet found herself – our sympathy is (as e.g. Olivia) a critical sympathy, but not damagingly so. Shakespeare already prepares us for her eventual marriage.
The scene ends as if Isabella is intending to visit Angelo on her own. Shakespeare wants us to anticipate this and to feel not very confident in her powers. In fact, he means Lucio to play an important role in the meeting (2.2), but to announce this now would lower the tension.
2.1
Time in a sense has stood still – the debate between Escalus and Angelo can be regarded as having continued without pause from the end of 1.1.
Angelo remains present for a substantial part of the joyous scene between Elbow, Pompey, etc. and even participates in its comedy. A negative judgment on Angelo is withheld – in fact his response to Escalus’s timidity is impressive, and Escalus’ subsequent aside (“Heaven forgive him,” etc), reasonable as it no doubt is, lacks force.
Froth and the Justice are one-scene characters. Each makes his impact with the utmost economy. While this scene is proceeding we are thinking of the big scene that surely awaits Isabella. A curious resonance (and an assonance) arises from linking her, during this delay, with the non-narrative of Mistress Elbow, who likewise comes to a strange house to make a request, in this case for stewed prunes, and who suffers unspecified insults.
2.2
There is a vice that most I
do abhor...
Isabella has been criticized for the moral myopia of her singular abhorrence, but surely this is too credulous. She didn’t seem to manifest much abhorrence when she first heard of Claudio’s crime. Introducing herself to a man about whom the main thing she knows is that he detests sexual looseness, she is naturally keen to seek some common ground and at the same time to underline what it’s hoped will be her own strongest argument, namely her virginal purity.
Angelo. I will
not do’t.
Isabella. But can you if you would?
Angelo. Look
what I will not, that I cannot do.
These words could be dropped straight into the later scene between Isabella and Claudio – Angelo, too, is being asked to bend on a point of principle. (But Shakespeare, deviating from his source, doesn’t push Isabella into doing so.)
If he had been as you,
and you as he,
You would have slipped
like him.
Isabella does not intend this, but her words spark like a sexual proposal; murmured with a seductive smile, that’s exactly what they would be. Unwittingly she puts into Angelo’s mind, already attracted by her, the thought of slipping and getting away with it. The truth is, Lucio and Claudio are delicately eager for Isabella to use her feminine wiles (“Ay, touch him, there’s the vein”); she is necessarily put in a false position, which Angelo’s response will brutally expose. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand Isabella’s anger.
In Twelfth Night, a more humane sense of values than Malvolio’s is associated with “cakes and ale”. Measure for Measure probes a little further, associating divine mercy itself with sexual license. It’s Isabella who above all tries to resist this: “Lawful mercy is / nothing kin to foul redemption” (2.4.112-13), “Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd” (3.1.153). Shakespeare manages to drag his play away from the brink of this heterodoxy, but the underlying logic is there.
Angelo’s arguments for his “severe but just law” should be felt as formidable.
Condemn the fault, and not
the actor of it?
Why, every fault’s condemned
ere it be done.
Mine were the very cipher of
a function, ....etc
(...Yet show some pity.)
I show it most of all when I
show justice,
For then I pity those I do
not know, ... etc.
Unsympathetic as we are to the specifics of Angelo’s judgment, these arguments force our acknowledgement (a sort of internal ripple of applause). Shakespeare places them here, before Angelo has done anything to blot his record, so that we register them fully. In the final scene, Isabella’s plea for mercy needs to have the weight to counteract them.
2.3
The focus moves to the Duke (already, we feel, a saving grace) in the prison of the condemned. But Claudio is kept from us as his life hangs in the balance; instead, we have this little prelude with Juliet (another one-scene character).
I do repent me as it
is an evil,
And take the shame
with joy.
Juliet’s words would not pacify a more searching confessor; they can plainly be taken any way you want, and the word “joy” seems if anything more appropriate to love and fruition than to chaste penitence. And even if the words are taken in a purely religious sense, they disquietingly echo Isabella’s (imagined) ecstasies of martyrdom.
2.4
It’s the next day, but Angelo’s monologue continues directly from 2.2. As at the opening of 2.1, time seems to have stood still – a very simple instance of Shakespeare’s pervasive “double time”.
(Angelo.)
So play the foolish throngs
with one that swoons,
Come all to help him, and so
stop the air
By which he should revive;
and even so
The general, subject to a
well-wished king,
Quit their own part, and in
obsequious fondness
Crowd to his presence, where
their untaught love
Must needs appear offence.
(2.4.24-30)
Angelo is speaking in contempt about the behaviour of his own blood at the announcement of Isabella; it neglects its useful business in the limbs and comes surging up to his heart, where it can only get in the way.
The “well-wished king” is conceived to be a compliment to James I, but if it is, is Angelo the best man to pay it, and doesn’t he by doing so coerce the king into Angelo’s – and earlier, the Duke’s – disdainful attitude to the acclaim of the people? This may indeed be exactly what James thought to himself at the time of his coronation, but in a time full of suspicion of a foreign sovereign and with everyone on their “best behaviour”, it hardly seems tactful to be emphasising it. We have, it seems, come a long way from Henry V.
That said, Angelo should not yet (if ever) be seen by us as an unprincipled villain. Claudio (1.2) speculates on whether Angelo’s principles are merely political, but these soliloquies assure us that the principles are real. Shakespeare weights the action of the play most delicately; to describe Angelo as caught in a honey-trap would be grossly partial but not entirely false.
The second interview between Angelo and Isabella does not repeat the first at all – Isabella has done with potent pleading, Angelo has done with embattled defense. Now he has his revenge on her, he becomes the aggressor. And badly as he acts, he should be masterful.
Plainly conceive, I love
you.
But there is a good deal of frustration, that is, of hate.
More than our
brother is our chastity.
Isabella is in a horrible position, and is deeply distressed. The switch to the plural is someone taking refuge in generality (she doesn’t dare to think “More than my brother is my chastity”). Her final words, “his soul’s rest”, should seem a desperately hopeful assertion; in sharp contrast to the patent unrest of her own soul.
3.1
(Duke, Claudio)
We have entered a phase of intimate dialogues between the major characters. We have just had Isabella/Angelo; it’s followed by Duke/Claudio, then Isabella/Claudio, then Duke/Isabella. Only in the last of these dialogues does the plot begin to move forward and the tension begins to subside. Then (3.2 in the traditional scene numbering) the focus begins to widen again and to permit a broader range of characters to divert us.
This scene between the Duke and Claudio forms a contrast to the high temperature of the preceding one. Though Claudio is under sentence of death, and the subject of their conversation is death, there is a sense of relaxation – you are in prison, there’s not much to do but talk.
The Duke’s motive for commending death is finally unclear. We know he is
not a real friar, and we suspect he will not permit Claudio to die, so this is an unserious parody of ghostly advice with a strong element of play. Or philosophy, if you like.
thine own bowels
Neither the Duke nor Claudio yet have any children. If the Duke does indeed intend to make either death or life the sweeter to Claudio, he probably succeeds, but only in the modest way that philosophy succeeds with imperfect human beings. This is not the way to make Claudio into a martyr, as will soon be dramatically apparent. The Duke possesses the supreme executive, and combines it with the additional power of a disguise that no-one penetrates, but this doesn’t make him omnicompetent in e.g. spiritual or social matters, and Shakespeare (unlike some producers) amiably makes that clear by exposing the Duke to a series of petty humiliations. No-one likes a deus ex machina, but the Duke is the most acceptable one I know.
for all thy
blessed youth
Becomes as agèd, and
doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld;
This must be in apposition to the second half of the sentence. I suppose it means: “When you’re in the prime of youth, you nevertheless have to behave as the agèd do, i.e. begging pitifully, because when you’re young and want to enjoy yourself the only way you can get any money in your pocket is to prostrate yourself before some withered (but wealthy) elder.” It’s very compressed, and the two images of age (a senile beggar, a wrinkled burgher) cross-contaminate each other.
3.1 continued (Isabella/Claudio)
Why does Isabella, in her agony at the end of 2.4, immediately think of going to see Claudio and (specifically) of telling him about Angelo’s proposal? If she has already made up her mind to reject it, what is the use of him knowing about it? The confused reason, I suggest, is that she has not made up her mind. She wants him to take the burden of that decision off her shoulders. If he says “Don’t even think about it – I’ll never permit it” then her agony is over.
Isabella’s optimism is assumed. Inwardly she fears what we fear, and what is thrillingly presented. Claudio realizes the dire significance of his death sentence for the first time; the play finds itself in a tragic mode; his plea to Isabella (instantly repented) is entirely natural and forgiveable – and Isabella’s anger should be, too. These are not the statement of considered opinions but the language of suffering. What provokes Isabella’s suffering is that now she really does have to face it. If she had already faced it she wouldn’t be so angry. Her decision is not already made, whatever she asserts, because (as she has already pointed out to Angelo) a decision is never final until the hour for revocation has actually gone by: “I that do speak a word / May call it back again” (2.2.57-58). She still has time to tell Angelo she’s changed her mind, and that’s in fact what she will do.
3.1 continued (Duke/Isabella)
But Isabella doesn’t have to face it, after all. The Duke’s interruption is performed with great tact, leaving Claudio with the salving impression of his sister’s “gracious denial”. (The stage direction that indicates that Isabella was already “Going” is an editorial interference – we don’t know how the scene might have continued, and the Duke evidently doesn’t want to know.) Isabella continues to breathe virtuous fire, but because the scene with her brother was interrupted in mid-flow this doesn’t mean much (a comic mode is re-asserted). No-one including Isabella herself takes her seriously when she swears she would not even bend down or say one word to save Claudio; she will almost immediately state the opposite. As for the question of whether she would really have gone to Angelo’s bed to save Claudio, I think Shakespeare (like the Duke) shelves it and we’ll never know.
The story of Mariana has some relevance to Isabella’s. Mariana has a brother who dies, and whose death precipitates her unhappiness. She is also a woman who is frankly in love, in love (what’s more) despite offence and despite injustice. Her story widens Isabella’s focus and takes us away from the sense of “the world crashing in” on Isabella and Claudio, a tension that has pushed the play towards an intimate drama of individual souls.
The scene is frankly expository and practical. In hindsight, one looks back curiously at the discourse of a pair who will later marry, but there’s nothing to find here except esteem. For the Duke (even in an aside) to express a personal interest in Isabella would of course risk profound ironies so soon after Angelo’s sexual ambush. In the end, Shakespeare’s concession to the “goodness” of Isabella’s beauty is to provide for her a match in which sexuality is exceptionally subdued.
3.2
Isabella, newly charged with energetic purpose, flies out of the prison and takes the plot with her. Shakespeare intends not to go with her, but he represents the energy by a noisy incursion of low-life characters.
The Duke however, remains on stage (primarily as an observer), and the scene seems (among much else) to represent his thought-processes; Shakespeare, however, is careful not to spell these out directly. In a general way the Duke’s thought turns on Angelo’s falling, which he does indeed wonder at (cf. 3.1.188); not unnaturally, he also finds himself drawn into thoughts about himself. What he makes of Elbow, Pompey, Lucio and Mistress Overdone is only partly explicit. Again in a general way, a contrast emerges between the absoluteness of Angelo’s justice and the complicated human material with which justice, seeking to be just, has to contend.
Why then, imprison him. If
imprisonment be the due of a bawd, why, ‘tis his right. Bawd is he doubtless,
and of antiquity too; bawd-born.
Lucio seems to be unsympathetic to Pompey, but his mode of discourse is so different from Angelo’s that it undermines the simple equation of “bawd means prison”. Pompey is so emphatically a bawd, Lucio says, that he was born into the profession – what else would he be? In Lucio’s eyes bawds are an inescapable fact of life, and Pompey is a bawd by nature. The implication is clear; this sudden outrage on the part of the authorities is made to look rather ridiculous. It’s a blatant case of management going through one of those periodic convulsions which are mainly concerned with being seen to take firm action, not with really putting anything right. This justice can do no preventive good if the vice is endemic, and can have no beneficial effect on the prisoner if he cannot imagine being other than he is.
Lucio’s hilarious blackening of the Duke’s character unsettles the Duke enough to prompt some cautious probing of Escalus. Lucio’s assertions are doubly mistaken, of course. It is the “motion generative” Angelo who is at that moment prostituting his principles so that he can deflower a virgin; while the philosophical Duke is employing his liberty in masquerading as a godly friar, a role for which he has clearly a certain affinity. At the same time who will say that Lucio’s account of Angelo’s absolutism is completely astray? And if it is grossly false that the Duke mouths with beggars, can we deny that the play does show him relishing the company of low life, an instinctive liberal whose government has undoubtedly been licentious?
4.1
We need to be shown Mariana because of her important role in the last scene. The Duke’s device is just, but it is clandestine and has something equivocal about it; twice in the scene there is a reference to “eyes”, those witnesses that are to be excluded from the “circummured” garden in the “heavy middle” of the night. Mariana impresses us with her seriousness. Her simple trust in the disguised Duke (who has “often” comforted her, an instance of double time) mollifies our vague disquiet that all the characters are having to traverse delicate territory, but the good manners that are such a feature of the scene confirm its delicacy.
This scene interrupts a long sequence that take place within the prison, but the contrast in setting is not acute. The prison of Measure for Measure is one of the more porous prisons in literature, not because people escape from it (Barnardine can’t be bothered to) but because of the tone set by its gracious Provost, because of unhindered comings and goings by those not under sentence, and also because the tendency of the play is to blur the distinction between the condemned and the free. Besides, Mariana in her “moated grange” is also felt to be in a kind of captivity of her own, and even Angelo in his circummured garden is entrammelled in his own devices. One’s sense is that Angelo by the severity of his government places the whole of his society under sentence, and by going too far undermines the significance of condemnation.
4.2
...And Pompey, himself a prisoner, is now employed in the prison’s functions. But the function in question, though undeniably legal, is scarcely more morally edifying than Pompey’s immemorial profession; in fact when Pompey questions Abhorson, it is Pompey with whom we identify ourselves, as a comparatively normal person. So the blurring continues.
The Duke is caught on the wrong foot by the unexpected nature of Angelo’s message. He has to improvise and is forced to take the Provost somewhat into his confidence. This night-scene is very beautiful; the two good men talking quietly while our minds are on what is happening elsewhere. Justice, we see, is something that is managed clandestinely and humanely, not by public edict.
4.3
Pompey, with his list of inmates, once again broadens the social scope of the prison and the play, and his part is then over. Barnardine is effectively a one-scene character (he makes a mute appearance in 5.1), and his impressive appearance marks a final complication to the apparently simple matter of condemning the guilty. He thoroughly discountenances the Duke, both as a holy confessor and as an engineer of crafty solutions; the Duke is in comic despair until sheer luck intervenes.
But I will keep her ignorant
of her good,
To make her heavenly comforts
of despair
When it is least expected.
In terms of common humanity the Duke’s behaviour cannot be defended, and the idea of “heavenly comforts of despair” is rather ridiculous, like his quasi-religious philosophizing to Claudio.
But considering the Duke as a governor there is a certain rightness (“I am directed by you”). The Duke intends Isabella to experience to the full the treachery that Angelo intended towards her (which she never would have done if he had said: “It’s OK, your brother’s in safe hands, though there were some unexpectedly tricky moments”). He supplies her with the motive, and then offers her the chance of vengeance; he will make Angelo’s life hang on the outcome.
Lucio’s brief return ends the scene. Shakespearian comedy is a rite as well as a narrative, and at this stage in the play the audience senses by various clues how we are hurrying towards its conclusion. From now on (and this applies to the rest of Act IV) all the scenes are focussed on a culmination in the Duke’s return – nothing looks beyond it, and after Barnardine there is no really new material. The appearance of Lucio allows a brief and somewhat grinçant reprise of his earlier rapport with Isabella, together with a much-abbreviated "slight return" of Lucio’s wild calumnies in 3.2. These scenes are akin to a marshalling of forces, an assurance and also a reminder to the audience, so that we have everything clear in our minds.
But they say the Duke will
be here tomorrow.
This is more part of the ritual set of the tide than directly relevant to Lucio. “But” seems to imply that the Duke’s return should be some sort of comfort to Isabella. If I was directing the scene, I’d want the distressed Lucio to say this distractedly, still characteristically rattling on and wanting to cheer her but with nothing to offer; the effect of the whole speech on Isabella should be painful, and Lucio’s remark should enforce our feeling that the Duke, offering her nothing but redress for what cannot be redressed, has dealt with her very roughly.
4.4
Angelo, whose deeds have been constantly in our mind, has not in fact been seen since 2.4. This scene is (see above) a “slight return” of the important visual impact of Angelo and Escalus co-governing, and it has a couple of important things to say.
In most uneven and
distracted manner. His actions show much like to madness.
This contributes to the comic rite – the Duke’s role is brought into a complex relationship with the festive Lord of Misrule.
It also shows that Angelo is sweating. Plainly accused in his own mind, he finds himself developing the psychological defence of positing madness in those who may do him harm – judge and accuser. (By a similar train of thought, the accused Claudio had earlier tried to come up with some less-defensible ulterior motive in Angelo than mere justice.) In the short term Angelo gains the faint comfort of hoping that the giddy Duke won’t even show up. And he also prepares on his tongue the counter-accusation he will later make against Isabella.
A deflowered maid,
And by an eminent body that
enforced
The law against it!
The irony of Angelo still focussed on his
eminent self should not detract from the primary revelation, that he is truly
shocked by his own crimes. The full charge of the final scene will not ignite
unless we can simultaneously feel that Angelo thoroughly deserves to die and
yet that Isabella’s mercy is not a travesty. Angelo must be a sinner and not a
devil.
Angelo fears the cravers at the gate, but he takes comfort from the belief that Isabella will be too ashamed to accuse him. Isabella knows more than him, and the Duke knows more than Isabella – a characteristic structure of Shakespearian comedy, though the impact here has no hilarity in it.
4.5
The Duke has not been seen in his own attire since 1.3 – his appearance now is an assurance of authority. The Duke’s plan is evidently complex, and some parts of it (e.g. the role of the mute Varrius) are only sketched – they give a generalized impression of powers that have lain hidden. Seeing the Duke here, with two strangers, places a distance between him and his recent comrades – intentionally a slightly chilling one. He is to be seen now as a ruler, eminent over the Isabellas as well as the Pompeys. His love for Isabella should come as a complete surprise that sets off a process of re-evaluating what we have seen and not seen.
4.6
Isabella and Mariana are talking about Friar Peter; the Duke, though not yet known as the Duke, is already working through intermediaries. Isabella’s point is that she has been told to state publically that Angelo did deflower her; she naturally feels some reluctance. Both the women are anxious, not knowing how the forthcoming scene will develop. But Isabella, grief-stricken and vengeful, is ready to go through with it.
The trumpets ordered in 4.5 have already sounded twice. Dramatic time is hurtling to its resolution.
5.1
The final scene begins with a grouping that echoes the first, impressing us with the notion of “coming full circle”. The Duke speaks with warm courtesy, creating an image of settlement that he knows full well is about to be shattered.
an adulterous thief,
A hypocrite, a
virgin-violator
Isabella certainly can’t be accused, as at the time of her former plea, of being too cold. This is the real thing, not femininely seductive at all but passionate.
Nay, it is ten
times strange.
The Duke implies, sarcastically, that it’s a good deal too strange to be true. Isabella takes the hit and flings it back in his face.
No, my good lord,
Nor wished to hold my
peace.
Lucio’s “wished” could possibly mean “wished by someone else”, i.e. “I was not asked to hold my peace”, and that would be a rational rejoinder to “You were not bid to speak”. But impertinence seems more in Lucio’s character – I think he’s saying that he just felt like speaking up. The Duke, of course, takes up “wish” in its other sense. He is both nettled and amused, and almost turns comic himself with “That’s somewhat madly spoken”. But this is only a brief lightening of mood before Isabella continues with her accusations and meets with the Duke’s total rejection. Phase one, with its tragic accent, is over.
With Isabella under guard, the scene moves into its next phase; a virtuoso confusion that begins with Lucio (though warmly on Isabella’s side) speaking out against her mentor “Friar Lodowick” while Friar Peter springs to his defence at the same time as he refutes all of Isabella’s claims.
Do you not smile at this,
Lord Angelo?
The form of the question implies that Angelo is not smiling, and no wonder. He must be hard-pressed to imagine what disproof there can be of accusations that, as he thinks he knows, are all too true. But the Duke no doubt extorts from him the forced smile that Angelo refers to later. The Duke calls for seats as if for a rich entertainment; it verges on parody of the play scene in Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the comfortable laughter of its gentlefolk. Lucio, at any rate, enjoys it hugely.
Cucullus non facit monachum.
In some sense Lucio is right. Talking consistently with brain disengaged, he somehow intuits that the monk isn’t all he seems, and the Duke is indeed a duke of dark corners.
Where I have seen
corruption boil and bubble
The Duke speaking out against his own misgovernment is unexpected, and a further softening of his manipulativeness – he doesn’t spare himself. At any rate it sparks Angelo (who might agree with this bleak picture, and who has already identified the friar as his most dangerous enemy) into breaking his silence.
The next phase ends with Angelo seeing the Duke in the Friar. All at once he knows that the game is up, and the sentence death – he calls it upon himself, not so much in belated repentance (he has done all he can to get out of it) but because in his own proud professionalism he sees what the outcome must be.
I am still
Attorneyed at your
service.
..... dear maid
....... O most kind maid
The Duke, much moved, is trembling on the brink of his avowals: Claudio lives, and I love you... But he mustn’t make things easy on Isabella.
Look, if it please you, on
this man condemned
As if my brother lived.
The Duke has by his remarks stacked the dice against Angelo. He has even appealed to Isabella’s family pride, which should direct her (as it did before) to unpitying principle.
It’s the way in which Isabella pleads for Angelo’s life that perhaps more than anything else has made her seem an unattractive character. We think that she betrays what is due to her brother, firstly by naming him guilty and secondly by logic-chopping about Angelo’s attempt to coerce sex with her, as if that were Angelo’s principal offence. But her opening words should be understood in a second sense; the condemned Angelo appears as a double of the condemned Claudio, and when she pleads for Angelo she honours Claudio’s memory in a different way, not as a brother crying for vengeance but as a guilty man who too might have lived. It’s a challenge for the actress, I think.
If he be like
your brother, for his sake
Is he pardoned, and
for your lovely sake,
Give me your hand and
say you will be mine.
He is my brother too.
But fitter time for that.
By this Lord Angelo
perceives he’s safe;
Methinks I see a
quickening in his eye....
This is a challenge too. The business should be: Isabella goes straight to Claudio and falls into his arms. The Duke, overcome by her emotion, goes up to them, and manages to take her hand. The three stand together – the Duke takes Claudio’s hand too. Then, from the centre of this outbreak of joy, he looks over his shoulder and speaks to Angelo – with laughter in his eyes, but with a bitter taunt at how the man who has just craved death (ungenerously to his new wife) cannot help showing that he thinks he’s off the hook.
I find an apt
remission in myself....
The Duke is dealing out mercy all round, but these judgments spring from a flood of feeling now (and from being caught up in the play’s surprisingly festive ending).
I have confessed her and I
know her virtue.
This is the Duke speaking of Mariana, and
is a surprising concession to Angelo’s claim that the main reason he broke with
Mariana was that “her reputation was disvalued / In levity” (5.1.219-20). When
the matter was first discussed, the Duke spoke of Angelo “pretending in her
discoveries of dishonour”. Those discoveries were mistaken, but “pretending”
does not necessarily imply that Angelo never believed them. Given the character
of Angelo as we see it in the play, it does indeed seem more likely that he’d
dump Mariana because he was worried about a point of honour than merely because
he’d lost a dowry. (But the story of the loss of
Did the Duke intend that Angelo should live or die? The impersonal momentum of the comic ritual points to Angelo escaping death. To the extent that one regards the Duke as a benevolent deus ex machina and a master of the revels, a scene-master who manipulates the complexities of this long finale, one tends to assume that the Duke never intended Angelo’s death (just as earlier in the play he always intended to spare Claudio).
But this assumption should, I fancy, be resisted. If we give way to it, then the Duke’s role-playing will tend to be seen as a dearly-purchased prolongation of dramatic excitement, the duplicitous approach being cruel, and primarily at Isabella’s expense.
Though the Duke’s reserve is nearly complete, there is a chain of small indications that his personal intention when he sets up this scene is to finish Angelo off. He intends, certainly, to put Angelo through the psychological mill, hoist him by his own petard, and I think it should be seen that it is Isabella’s mercy, not the Duke’s, that saves Angelo.
These small indications include the excessive flattery at line 9ff (working up his anger), the dark irony of 27 and 165, the continuous awareness in everything the Duke says during his masquerade of how it is affecting Angelo (e.g. 59ff, 110ff), his care to show Angelo to Isabella in the worst possible light, the finality of his condemnation at 410, the bitterness of 491, and the residual bitterness against Lucio (496ff). Cumulatively they convey the Duke’s detestation of someone who perverts the image of himself as ruler (cf 122). The Duke has learnt the frustration of being on the other side of the fence, opposing the absolute power of the “eminent body”. He has also learnt the error of his own former reluctance to wield the sword of justice – an error he does not mean to repeat.
What I am suggesting is that in this scene as in the rest of the play, though the Duke holds the most powerful cards things do not entirely work out according his own agenda, and that in fact he has to swallow his own feelings (but he does it sincerely, in the end) in order that comedy may finally triumph. He joins the festivities.
*
This is a good example of how the play could once be taken, from Frederick D. Losey’s 1927 Introduction:
...To her brother’s weakness
she will bring her strength, and to his confusion and terror she will lend her
calm. But no; her character shivers to fragments under the test... From this
moment she becomes the tool of the foolish and shifty Duke who, disguised as a
Friar, has no difficulty in persuading her to bring about between Angelo and
Marianna exactly the same offence for which Claudio was sentenced to die. From
this point on the play strikes almost the level of farce. Isabella, who bade
Claudio perish, later pleads for the life of Angelo, supposedly her brother’s
murderer. Justice is blown to the winds and in its place is substituted a kind
of bastard mercy...
Such Victorian conceptions as the “test” (of a true woman’s character) and the “tool” (the ultimate insult in a code where gentlefolk are, by definition, not in service) trap Losey into taking up a position as fierce as Angelo’s, or indeed Isabella’s: if Isabella falls short of womanly sainthood then her existence is an offence and the whole play is a disfigurement. Nevertheless Losey by his own lights is making a true response to the underlying drift of the play, though much ruffled by its critique of idealistic principles – I quite like the insight of “bastard mercy”, though I feel differently about it.
The assertion that Angelo tries to commit murder has survived, e.g. into J. M. Nosworthy’s introduction (1969), but this is not self-evident. The charge originates with Isabella: “That Angelo’s a murderer, is’t not strange?” (5.1.39); however, she later retracts it: “My brother had but justice, / In that he did the thing for which he died” (5.1.445-46). When Angelo hastens the execution of a guilty man he does an evil thing because he breaks his word to Isabella, but this is treachery not murder. Perhaps the argument might run like this: because Angelo now knows himself to be guilty of Claudio’s sin, the validity of the judicial process has been cancelled, even in Angelo’s own eyes; therefore Claudio is no longer sentenced to death and executing him is murder.
*
“Power, Prison, and Peace with God” is the title of Jonathan Aitken’s current lecture tour. Disgraced before human justice, Christian mercy may be a way to steady the rocking soul.
(2005)
William Shakespeare:
King Lear (1605-06)
[Line references are to the Series 3 Arden
edition, ed. R.A. Foakes, 1997. This conflates the three scenes usually
numbered II.2-4 into one tremendous composite scene that begins at dawn and
ends at night (II.2).]
From The Faerie Queene, Bk II, Canto X:
27
Next him king Leyr in
happie peace long raind,
But had no issue male him to succeed,
But three faire daughters, which were well
vptraind,
In all that seemed fit for kingly seed:
Mongst whom his realme he equally decreed
To haue diuided. Tho when feeble age
Nigh to his vtmost date he saw proceed,
He cald his daughters; and with speeches sage
Inquyrd, which of them most
did loue her parentage.
28
The eldest Gonorill
gan to protest,
That she much more then her owne life him
lou’d:
And Regan greater loue to him profest,
Then all the world, when euer it were
proou’d;
But Cordeill said she lou’d him, as
behoou’d:
Whose simple answere, wanting colours faire
To paint it forth, him to displeasance
moou’d,
That in his crowne he counted her no haire,
But twixt the other twaine
his kingdome whole did shaire.
29
So wedded th’one to Maglan
king of Scots,
And th’other to the king of
And twixt them shayrd his realme by equall
lots:
But without dowre the wise Cordelia
Was sent to Aganip of Celtica.
Their aged Syre, thus eased of his crowne,
A private life led in
With Gonorill, long had in great
renowne,
That nought him grieu’d to
bene from rule deposed downe.
30
But true it is, that when
the oyle is spent,
The light goes out, and weeke is throwne
away;
So when he had resigned his regiment,
His daughter gan despise his drouping day,
And wearie waxe of his continuall stay.
Tho to his daughter Regan he repayrd,
Who him at first well vsed euery way;
But when of his departure she despayrd,
Her bountie she abated, and
his cheare empayrd.
31
The wretched man gan then
auise too late,
That loue is not, where most it is profest,
Too truely tryde in his extreamest state;
At last resolu’d likewise to proue the rest,
He to Cordelia him selfe addrest,
Who with entire affection him receau’d,
As for her Syre and king her seemed best;
And after all an army strong she leau’d,
To war on those, which him
had of his realme bereau’d.
32
So to his crowne she him
restor’d againe,
In which he dyde, made ripe for death by eld,
And after wild, it should to her remaine:
Who peaceably the same long time did weld:
And all mens harts in dew obedience held:
Till that her sisters children, woxen strong
Through proud ambition, against her rebeld,
And ouercommen kept in prison long,
Till wearie of that wretched
life, her selfe she hong.
33
Then gan the bloudie
brethren both to raine:
But fierce Cundah gan shortly to enuie
His brother Morgan, prickt with proud
disdaine,...
And so, with barely a ripple, Spenser’s chronicle proceeds; miraculous, haunting, powerful and infinitely distanced. The first three books of the Faerie Queene were published in 1590, and recognition was immediate.
Shakespeare knew the passage, and took “Cordelia” from it as his preferred version of the youngest daughter’s name; perhaps, too, the basic drift of Gonerill’s and Regan’s formal flatteries in the opening scene.
He also took the detail of Cordelia dying by being hanged. The old play of Leir had followed the chronicles up to the point where the king is triumphantly restored, and no further. But the overarching tranquillity of Spenser’s chronicle involves the acceptance that all happiness is temporary; that dissolution follows achievement, dissension follows peace, tragedy rears up without warning and the best that can be hoped for is calm release. In short, Spenser denies the possibility of happy endings, and with Spenser in mind Shakespeare must have felt that the structure of Leir fell short of that insight. He wanted his protagonist to experience something yet chillier than the true worth of his daughters, with its relieved conclusion that one at least is a rock. The surprisingly desolate nature of Cordelia’s end, in Spenser’s version, suggested a way of making the play a tragedy.
Lear’s own death, at such an advanced age, wouldn’t be sufficient to make the play tragic. But the play had to be made tragic, or the power of Lear’s unhinged rhetoric would be seriously undercut by a vague sense that a silly old man makes a lot of pother about nothing, and it all comes out all right by the end. (Of course I am not suggesting that Shakespeare analysed his way to this, or conceived his dramatisation in these terms. More likely the whole thing fell into place at once.)
When we read Spenser the expanses of time are so great, and the events so isolated, that we don’t know the characters. An intelligent reader is bound to wonder what it felt like for Lear to be gradually disdained, or what sort of a person Cordelia was, but we can gain no sense of integrated personalities, and chronicle flows smoothly away. We, the readers, feel an imaginative impulse to stop and “bring it all to life”, but the materials of history are sparse. Shakespeare dwelt on the suffering implied in “Too truely tryde in his extreamest state”, and on what it must then have meant for Lear to be received at last “with entire affection”.
Shakespeare’s dramatisation of chronicle entails shortening long periods of time, both for practicality of staging and for dramatic tension. The suggestion of long time having passed is allowed to remain, and “double time” is the inevitable result; seen at its most blatant in Othello, where times and dates are critical to the plot, but really a basic methodology that Shakespeare uses everywhere. *
In Spenser’s chronicle the king spends a long time reigning, a long time contentedly with Gonerill, another long time contentedly with Regan, and finally a few years contented resumption of his rule. Shakespeare is ruthless with these periods of undramatic peace. Of Lear’s past reign we learn nothing; Shakespeare blanks it. He ends the first scene with Gonerill and Regan already making it clear that the king’s amiable plans are going to be severely modified; and before Lear reappears on stage Gonerill is pushing matters to a crisis (I.3). Regan smartly avoids entertaining Lear at all by not being at home (he is, of course, not yet due); by the time Lear meets with her he has a fair inkling of what to expect (II.2), and it will take no more than an animated conversation in a courtyard to propel him out into the storm. As for the contented resumption, it is eliminated by making Cordelia lose the battle (a reversal of Spenser, or rather, a conflation with her later defeat at the hands of her sisters' children) and meet her death while in custody.
All this hustling of the time-scheme produces a more concentrated anguish, as it did in the history plays. Someone once said that people commit suicide when three things go wrong on the same day. In Lear’s case, it leads convincingly to madness – to what we would call today, “some sort of breakdown”.
This is well prepared for. He is a man who
is already accustomed to “losing it” in an imperious sort of way, as he does in
the first scene. These volcanic tantrums are in fact part of how he does his
job. On his own account, he feels it’s time to slow down, but retirement does
not come easy to such a man. In fact he conceives his retirement not as an
unobtrusive slipping away but rather as a grand abdication ceremony in which he
majestically cedes kingdoms to his courtiers; a ceremony emphasizing his
God-like power. He had planned to spend his retirement thereafter with
Cordelia; Shakespeare presents the idea of a monthly progress between the other
daughters as an improvisation after his first plan is frustrated. All of his
daughters are new-married and leaving home for the first time; Lear seems to
need a daughter on hand, and does not think of maintaining his own household.
Nevertheless the improvised solution is a very bad idea, and it’s this as much
as the treatment of Cordelia that provokes
Reserve thy
state,
And in thy best
consideration check
This hideous rashness. (I.1.149-51)
No outrageous wickedness on the part of Gonerill and Regan is required for things to go wrong thereafter, as has often been remarked. The word “evil” is first applied to Lear.
I’ll tell thee thou dost
evil. (I.1.166)
But Cordelia soon enough tells us what her sisters are, and her condemnation is fresh in our minds as we listen to their subtle dialogue at the end of the scene.
Gonerill is the instigator of it. No doubt bothered by Lear’s announcement of the “hundred knights” and “The name and all th’addition to a king”**, she recognizes the need to circumscribe his authority; she also sees that this will only happen if the two sisters support each other. What she says is really unexceptionable, though clearly her comments on Lear’s “poor judgment” are designed to make a case. It is tough-minded and realistic, but that’s all; which is how wickedness generally does slip into existence. Regan hangs back; her first remark is coolly neutral:
That’s most certain, and
with you; next month with us. (I.1.287)
This is a sentence that is ready for anything. The next speech is barely more committed, since everyone would agree with it:
‘Tis the infirmity of his
age. Yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself. (I.1.292)
Everyone, that is, but Lear. With these words Regan denies her own formal speech of flattery, but only to the extent of admitting that she has common sense. The hanging back is suggestive. Gonerill has every reason to be optimistic, for the sisters are close (Regan’s flattering speech had actually paid a compliment to Gonerill’s); Regan’s hesitation at this juncture could be seen as a faint hint of their future enmity, but more likely it registers timidity. If Regan were a games theorist, she should consider a clever strategy here, which would be to encourage Gonerill to commit herself, and then to betray her by supporting the king. But Regan is not so calculating. Gonerill is a dominant elder sister, and Regan is somewhat in her shadow. She has less confidence, is less confrontational, and feels her way (II.4.287, for example, is a question as much as a statement; she is seeking approval from Gonerill). Sensing her own weakness, she likes to assert herself by interrupting her husband. Her manner is more “tender-hefted” than Gonerill’s (Lear is trying to persuade himself, but this must be based on the truth), and she wears gorgeous, feminine clothes that hardly keep her warm (II.2.459 – Lear must be addressing Regan, who arrived at dawn and has had time to change her clothes; Gonerill would still be cloaked). Some have speculated that Gonerill is good-looking (II.2.355), Regan rather less so (II.2.91-3), though to push this too far might rather spoil the Fool’s remark at I.5.15, which emphasizes the extent to which Regan duplicates her elder sister.
Regan discovers her own strength, however,
in the scene where
[I have not seen the following lines explained:
(Gl.) ... O
cruel! O you gods!
Reg. One side will mock another – th’other too.
Corn. If you see vengeance –
1 Serv. Hold your hand, my lord. (III.7.69-70)
But he’s interrupted by the servant, and
It was great ignorance,
To let him live. Where he
arrives he moves
All hearts against us. (IV.5.11-13)
No doubt it’s her late husband’s error that
she is moaning about. But “us” must mean Edmund, Gonerill and, chiefly,
herself; she being now (as Gonerill fearfully predicted) potentially the apex
of the triangle. There is also a hint of the royal “we”, which she certainly
does use a few lines later (IV.5.16, and again at V.1.1, 34, 36, V.3.61, 62,
63). Something has changed with the death of
At present Regan is only trying out this commanding tone on Gonerill’s servant, and there is some fumbling when she tries to turn him. But she has also met with Edmund, and something, not conclusive but nonetheless constructive, has been said (IV.5.32).
[The 3rd
In V.1 Regan’s manner jars on Gonerill, at least according to the quarto, and Regan tries to manipulate the movements of her sister, who sees through her at once. When she regally says “Tis most convenient; pray you go with us”, it’s a reversal of Gonerill’s dominance at the end of I.1. Gonerill appears to comply, but we know enough of her to doubt what this means. By the time Regan reappears in V.3, Gonerill has already poisoned her. I forget which sister Bradley regarded as the more detestable, but Regan remains the more uncertain one, the one who feels the need to assert herself. It is not inappropriate that she should also be the sister who goes furthest in the play’s most savage episode.
I've digressed a long way down a Bradleyan road to support the assertion that in the play Lear’s madness arises from his character, but I don’t regret the digression since it demonstrates Shakespeare’s consistent and subtle character-portrayal in a comparatively minor figure.
The growth of Lear’s madness is carefully portrayed, too. At I.4.69 he admits, fairly lightly, that he has been uneasy about his treatment, but has assumed it’s “just in his head”. And he doesn’t like people referring to Cordelia (I.4.74). This is fertile soil, but nothing unusual. From here up to the end of Act II the progress, at first slow, is remorseless; Lear never gets a breathing space in which to recover his equanimity. He blames his folly at first; that’s painful, and exposes a tension between the man and the king, but it still leaves his present poise unthreatened. At I.5.44-45 he identifies his internal adversary for the first time. The possibility of madness, at that moment, is viewed with terror. At various points in II.2 he registers its growing pressure to break out, and finally arrives at this:
You think I’ll weep,
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of
weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred
thousand flaws
Or e’er I’ll weep. O fool, I
shall go mad. (II.2.471-74)
This amounts to an acceptance of madness; sanity, which would mean sobbing in front of his daughters, has now become unendurable. It’s not a matter of dignity – it’s just that they aren’t his daughters any more.
Lear is now homeless and alienated from his family, states that perhaps have always been closely connected with mental instability. From a dramatic point of view Lear is no longer an agent and his grand speeches in the face of the storm are from one point of view a compensation; he grasps at a sort of universal agency. He also becomes politicized. At the same time his wits are turning, and though this is first clearly seen in his unhinged words to “Poor Tom” (III.4.48) it may be suspected earlier in the anti-climactic inconsequence of III.2.57-60.
That there is a problem of sorts with the middle scenes of the play has been often stated and as often denied. The dramatic movement of the first two Acts exemplifies Shakespeare doing what no-one has ever done better – taking the bare bones of a chronicle (as in Spenser’s verses) and by force of imagination turning them into a wholly vivid and astonishing portrayal of character in action. But in III.2, III.4, III.6 and IV.6 Shakespeare has arrived at a dramatic situation that lies outside the action, from which Lear has become detached. Those who want to regard these scenes as the heart of the play, like G.K. Hunter in his introduction to the New Penguin edition (1972), are forced into making rather unsatisfactory formulations such as “terrifying maelstrom of words.... a world of fragmentary reactions to the present, a world without a connected past and therefore without personal purpose.... bound together by the orchestration of the scene... In this unstructured and disparate world Lear comes to know things he (and we) could not know in sanity. The whirlpools of his obsession dredge up truths that are normally concealed... ‘The reader’s attention’ is meant to be prised loose from individual motives and actions, I suspect, and attached to a different but equally dramatic sense of man’s general status, rather than his individual destiny... the language of the play is not so much an imitation of the way people speak as an evocation of the realities behind what people say... This stupendous scene (IV.6).... (Lear) the master of a torrential vein of mad moral eloquence.... the free-wheeling phantasmagoric energy of Lear....” Inspiring as much of this commentary is, the wealth of metaphors, adjectives and italics also strikes me as insecure. Does the utmost pitch of human art require so much talking up?
From a dramatic point of view there are formidable difficulties with presenting scenes in which the characters have no urgent sense of time passing and in which, though they speak, they don’t listen. There are indeed moments when we are compelled to do so; Lear’s speech about the “poor, bare, forked animal”, or “None does offend, none, I say none”. These powerful generalities arise from the logic of the play with which I began; if Lear was to be tragic at all, it had to be a “supra-tragedy” that contemplated a universal suffering. (An analogy that must have occurred to many people is Euripides' Women of Troy.)
One way of giving the scenes a “thread”
might be to show them trying to contain Lear’s madness. The would-be containers
are (sometimes) Lear himself;
*Note on “Double Time”:
This was not Shakespeare’s invention, but is a potential device in any narrative. In unsophisticated fiction the present action is bound to be described one step after another: “and then... and then...” Time-pauses are uninteresting and apt to be elided by phrases such as “the next day”. But the implications of the imagined background are by definition not observed so attentively, and are open to manipulation. It actually takes more effort to maintain consistency than to flout it; I am thinking of those boring calculations of dates and logistics with which a novelist is familiar; the readers will never notice, but the novelist has to work out consistencies to be sure that all the narratives he does not actually recount are viable. Characters show a tendency to age at different speeds, a great deal happens to one person while another is in one of those vacant periods when their preoccupations have nothing to do with anything and even they can hardly remember afterwards what they were doing. Unless the teller deliberately focuses on the development of a community over time (as e.g. Zola), stories are so unlike the passing of real time – so selective, so heightened – that distortions such as double time are almost inevitable.
A notable earlier example is in Chrétien’s Li contes
**Note on “the name and all the addition to a king”
This use of “addition” appears (I think) 4 times in Lear and is
thematically important. It means – what exactly? It means honours, of a
sort, that Lear thinks important; to him they represent respect, but does it really amount to anything more
tangible than “honorific titles”? What
it does not mean, as Lear soon discovers, is power; as the Fool urges, what
Lear has really retained doesn't add up to very much. At one level Lear is
an examination, building on the earlier Richard II, of the nature of
majesty deprived of power. The debate was current, and would shortly lead on to
a quantified Divine Right of Kings that was then found to be much too tangible
to be acceptable.
(2003)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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