“Poor Naked Wretches: Shakespeare’s Working People” by Stephen Unwin

“Poor Naked Wretches: Shakespeare’s Working People” by Stephen Unwin, published by Reaktion Books

As Stephen Unwin acknowledges early in his introduction, “Shakespeare grants more space to the rich and powerful than to those who work for them”. Various reasons for this are listed: there existed, after all, conventions and practical imperatives that a commercial playwright could not ignore. But people from what we may term the “lower echelons of society” (though Unwin himself is careful not to use such terms) – that is, those who aren’t among the rich and powerful – also populate his plays; and while they are not Prince Hamlet, neither are they present merely to make up the numbers: Shakespeare’s insatiable curiosity into the natures of various kinds of humanity is always apparent, no matter what social rank he is depicting. It is these characters of the “lower echelons” on whom Unwin focuses: what part do they play in these dramas? What was Shakespeare’s view of the commonality, those non-royals and non-aristocrats, from whose ranks Shakespeare himself had emerged?

Unwin is, quite rightly, quick to dismiss the view that Shakespeare shared Hamlet’s contempt for the groundlings (“…who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb show and noise”), or that he sympathised with Coriolanus’ hatred of “the many-headed multitude”. It is, after all, foolish to take the words spoken by certain dramatic characters in certain dramatic situations as reflecting the author’s own position, though it is surprising how many have done just that. Unwin dismisses also the patronising view expressed even by a critic as perceptive as Bradley, who described the “poor and humble” in these plays as “almost without exception, sound and sweet at heart, faithful and pitiful”. Looking clearly at what the texts say, both the contempt and the sentimentality seem out of place: Shakespeare’s view of those on the lower ranks was considerably more penetrating, as, indeed, we should expect from a writer so endlessly fascinated by all aspects of humanity. These characters may not occupy central positions in these dramas, but nothing human was alien to Shakespeare’s ever-probing mind.

There follow after the introduction ten fascinating chapters in which Unwin considers, one by one, the various categories of such characters. Firstly, there are the servants, slaves, and messengers. (The distinction between servant and slave is not always clear in the plays: are the two Dromios, say, slaves or servants?) Then follow the tradesmen and craftsmen, labourers and rebels, grouped together, as the boundaries separating them are often porous. We move to the pastoral setting in the next chapter, as Unwin considers shepherds, peasants, and gardeners; and then, into the world of women, which examines Shakespeare’s depiction of maids, nurses, and, yes, of witches. Workers in inns, taverns and brothels follow – the boundaries between these categories, once again, being often far from clear; and the next chapter looks at Shakespeare’s depiction of those from his own profession – “the poor players”. This leads naturally on to a chapter on fools, clowns, and jesters, and then, on to the most literate of the working people – clerks and clergy. Despite the title of the book, not all the types examined are strictly “working people”: Unwin next considers murderers and thieves, outlaws and conmen. And finally, Unwin moves on soldiers, sailors, and men at arms.

In each of these ten chapters, Unwin, with a trademark clarity familiar to anyone who has seen his theatrical productions, trawls through the plays, considering the depiction of working people, both in terms of their presentation on stage, and also in relation to the very harsh social and economic conditions of the time. What emerges is a plurality, a multiplicity: no general rule can be formulated to cover all cases, because each of these characters is depicted as an individual. Some are indeed, as Bradley puts it, “sound and sweet at heart”: a few, like those tenants in King Lear who tend to the Earl of Gloucester, despite what they must have known would have been terrible consequences should their kindness be discovered, may even be described as heroic in their soundness and their sweetness. But Shakespeare, like Tolstoy after him, was fascinated by the sheer variety of human types: no two poor people are alike because no two people are alike, regardless of social status.

There are, inevitably, darker elements too. At the furthest extreme from the soundness and sweetness are those “murderers”, as they are referred to in the stage directions of Richard III and Macbeth. In the latter play, we are actually forced to witness the murder of a child on stage: there is no sweetening of the pill. And yet, even these murderers are not an undifferentiated mass: each is an individual. The two murderers sent to kill Clarence in Richard III, for distance, are very different people.

And even though they commit the most heinous of crimes, they are morally no worse than the rich and powerful who have commissioned them. Jack Cade and his followers commit the most terrible atrocities, but they are morally no worse than the nobles who, in pursuit of their own ambitions, plunge the entire nation into civil war; and Shakespeare highlights this parallel by juxtaposing Cade’s rebellion with the civil wars that follow. Or consider James Tyrrell, commissioned to carry out the murder of the Princes in the Tower: he can feel a compassion for his innocent victims that Richard III, who had commissioned him, cannot. But there is no sentimentality here either on Shakespeare’s part: for all Tyrrell’s compassion, he does what he had been ordered.

There are reasons why these people have become what they are, and Shakespeare is interested in what these reasons are. Nothing human, after all, is alien to him. And nothing is alien to humanity either. “If it be man’s work, I’ll do it,” says the captain in King Lear before he goes on to commit an act that no man should do. This implicitly raises the question “What is man’s work?” The extremes of good and bad, each seemingly unbelievable were it not that we know both to exist, are present in the poor and powerless as well as in the rich and powerful. There is no contempt on Shakespeare’s part of those on the lower rungs of the ladder, but no sentimentality either. He gave the poor and powerless the same perceptive gaze he gave the rich and powerful.

In between these two extremes, there is what seems like an infinite variety. The working people can be dim, like Francis the apprentice drawer in Henry IV, Part One; or they can be intelligent and quick-witted, like the first gravedigger in Hamlet. Francis has always struck me as an interesting case. He is not at all intelligent or articulate, and, through no fault of his own, is certainly not educated; and Prince Hal and his boozing crony Poins poke fun at Francis quite mercilessly. How exactly are we to take this? Are we to share in the joke? Unwin reminds us that there would have been many apprentices among the groundlings, and it is unlikely they would have enjoyed seeing one of their own number made fun of in so heartless a manner. He adds that there are many different ways of playing this scene, which makes me wish that he could have described at least some of them. However, this is not a book about interpretations in stage productions (although I do hope such a book will follow). Whenever I read this scene, or see it in production (although, I’m sorry to say, I missed Unwin’s own productions of the Henry IV plays), I must admit it leaves something of a sour taste in the mouth: I cannot join Hal and Poins in their laughing at someone so very far below them by any measure of social privilege. Perhaps that sour taste in the mouth is precisely what Shakespeare had intended.

But Shakespeare depicts also among working people a wit and quick intelligence. “The age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he gaffs his kibe,” says Hamlet of the gravedigger, but Hamlet is not being quite as generous as may at first sight appear: Hamlet’s pride may prevent him from acknowledging it, but, whether he admits to it or not, in their exchange, we had actually witnessed the gravedigger not just matching Hamlet, but getting the better of him. The peasant’s toe has done far more than merely come near the courtier’s heel. We’re a long way here from Hal casually mocking Francis’ inarticulacy and lack of education.

Throughout this book, there is a keen awareness of the tremendous social and economic pressures that have forced these people into the situations they’re in, and have made them what they are. Not that Unwin subscribes to social determinism, as such: a man so desperately poor as to agree to committing murder for money can nonetheless turn his back on the act, and refuse to do it. But the pressures are there all the same, and Shakespeare is aware of how great they are. In Henry VI Part Two, there is a scene that may at first sight seem extraneous, but, given that it is a part of a series of plays that sets out to depict the state of an entire nation, increasingly seems to me important. In this scene, a poor man claims to have been miraculously cured of blindness. The young king is impressed, but the more worldly-wise Duke of Gloucester isn’t: in questioning this man and his wife, he uncovers their deception, and then orders what seems, to modern audiences at least, the most disproportionate punishment. At this point, the man’s wife has a single line: “Alas! Sir, we did it for pure need.” And this single line casts an entirely new light upon what we have just seen: what had seemed, till now, mainly comic, turns suddenly into something far more poignant. Far from being an extraneous scene, it seems to me absolutely essential in what is, after all, a wider drama depicting the state of the nation.

This book focuses on an element often considered of secondary importance in dramas depicting the rich and the powerful, the kings and the queens, bishops and cardinals, senators and patricians. It focuses on the ordinary populace, the working people, the “poor naked wretches”, and these people are seen here, quite rightly, as more than mere background: as Unwin shows here, Shakespeare depicts them not with contempt or with sentimentality, but as individuals, with the same range of thought and of intelligence and of morality as their supposed betters. It is all presented with a clarity and a level-headedness that I have come to expect of him as a stage director, and I can only hope further books from Unwin will follow. (In particular, a book on interpretations in performance would be particularly fascinating.) While, naturally, I welcome studies by academics, there are, it seems to me, unique insights to be gained from those like Stephen Unwin who have experience of presenting these endlessly absorbing works in performance.

“Richard III” at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon

I am fast warming to the theory that the Henry VI – Richard III sequence of plays is not a tetralogy – as it is presented in the First Folio, and in most modern editions of the Complete Works – but, rather, a trilogy. As a tetralogy, the whole thing seems cumbersome and patchy; but presented as a trilogy – that is, consisting of the plays usually known as Henry VI Part 2 and Henry VI Part 3, along with Richard III – it becomes an enthralling piece of theatre. Of course, it can do with a bit of judicious cutting, but that’s the case with many Shakespeare plays. If Part 1 is ditched, we have a magnificent extended drama about a nation tearing itself part through rebellion, and then, through civil war; and, in the final episode, a monster emerging from the chaos to tyrannise an already battered populace. The whole thing has about it a theatrical vigour, and, especially in the final part, Richard III, a demonic energy.

The problem is Part 1, of course. There are a couple of good scenes in it, but it is mainly quite tedious, and some parts – such as the rough humour that precedes the horrific burning at the stake of Joan la Pucelle (Jeanne d’Arc) – rather objectionable. One may put all this down to collaboration, or to a young dramatist still learning his trade, but I’m not sure either explanation will do. It isn’t that this sequence of plays gradually become better: rather, there is a very noticeable increase in quality as soon as Part 2 starts. This could be due to a number of possible reasons, of course, but the one I find most appealing is that Henry VI Part 2 and Henry VI Part 3 (as they’re listed in the Folio) are actually the first and second parts of a trilogy, and that the play listed as Henry VI Part 1 is merely a hurriedly cobbled work written to cash in on the popularity of the later plays. And while I appreciate this is merely wishful thinking on my part, I wouldn’t be surprised if Shakespeare didn’t have much to do with the wretched Part 1 – despite a few odd scenes that are worth saving.

Even apart from the step change in quality between Parts 2 and 3, it is possible to adduce other internal evidence to support this theory. Although there are references in Parts 2 and 3 to events that had taken place in Part 1, there is nothing we need to know about the back-story that isn’t clearly delineated; in contrast, there are many references in Richard III to past events that can only be properly understood if we had seen Parts 2 and 3 – e.g. the killing of Rutland, Clarence breaking his oath and changing sides at the Battle of Tewkesbury, and so on. There are also many strong links between Parts 2 and 3: the latter play clearly picks up from the point where the former play ends, and Shakespeare (and, presumably, his collaborators) do not bother spending much time introducing characters who had already been present in Part 2. And there are strong links also between Part 3 and Richard III: over the course of Part 3, Richard, slowly but surely, acquires greater prominence, and is given some striking monologues, quite obviously to prepare for what is still to come. Given this preparation, Part 3 ends with a sense of much unfinished business – a sense of issues that need still to be resolved.

There is some external evidence also to support the theory that this sequence of plays had been intended as a trilogy rather than as a tetralogy: the second, third and fourth plays of the tetralogy (should we choose to see it as such) had appeared in a number of Quarto editions within Shakespeare’s own lifetime; the first part appears only in the First Folio. And it is only from the First Folio that we have the rather boring titles Henry VI Part 1, Henry VI Part 2, and Henry VI Part 3: in the Quarto texts, the latter two plays had been titled The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster with the Death of the Good King Humphrey, and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, and the Good King Henry VI. However, since such long titles aren’t to modern taste, it’s the more prosaic titles from the Folio that have stuck; and with these titles, the necessity of presenting all three Henry VI plays, since it is hard to convince an audience to see Parts 2 and 3 if Part 1 is missing.

In the current season (2022), the Royal Shakespeare Company has made the decision to ditch Part 1 altogether. This is a sensible decision, both commercially (it would be hard to persuade people to return for the later parts if they’d been bored by the first), and also artistically. The Henry VI plays had to be renamed, of course, but that’s hardly a major problem. These two Henry VI plays I had reported on in my last post on this blog; and now, it’s the final and most famous play in the series – Richard III. This is usually performed as a standalone play, but it clearly gains from being seen in the context of its predecessors. Not only are there many references to events that only really make sense if we have seen the earlier plays, it’s also important to realise, I think, that hardly any of Richard’s victims are innocent. Seen out of context, Clarence appears merely a helpless victim; true, he has that magnificent speech shortly before he is murdered, where, in narrating his dream, he reveals with a startling immediacy the agonies of a guilt-tormented mind; but nonetheless, we needed to have witnessed that guilt to take in the full import of his dream. The narration itself is unforgettable:

… then came wandering by
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood; and he squeak’d out aloud,
‘Clarence is come; false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,
That stabb’d me in the field by Tewksbury;
Seize on him, Furies, take him to your torments!’
With that, methoughts, a legion of foul fiends
Environ’d me about, and howled in mine ears
Such hideous cries, that with the very noise
I trembling waked, and for a season after
Could not believe but that I was in hell.

Even now, after all these decades of acquaintance, I can feel a shiver run down my spine every time I encounter this passage.

As a play, Richard III has a greater dramatic power than its predecessors, mainly because, given its material, it has a powerful figure at its centre. In the previous two plays, we had been presented with a panoramic view, with a large cast of characters wandering in and out of the central spotlight. It had presented a compelling view of a nation tearing itself apart, but the focus had been spread across a range of characters. Even the impact of so potentially powerful a figure as Queen Margaret is diminished as a consequence. But in Richard III, we have one single figure dominating the play, and that figure is simply a gift for any actor with charisma and stage presence. There is a demonic energy to him, a flair and a vigour, that are utterly compelling.

It is easy comparing Richard to Macbeth: their trajectories are, in many ways, similar. They both rise to the top through murder, and once at the top, they both try to consolidate their power with further ruthless bloodshed; and both are finally defeated by a force invading the country in order to liberate it. But that’s just the arc of the plot: Macbeth is a drama about a soul damning itself in the full knowledge that it is damning itself, and the terror comes from Macbeth’s inability to stop, even when he knows what it is he is doing. But Richard, in contrast, has no inner life at all: there is not even the slightest awareness on his part that he even so much as has a soul. He has no feelings of gentleness or of tenderness, no sense of good and evil, nor even of basic right and wrong; and he is both amused and bemused that others should feel such things. He senses, as Iago does, that he is outside some bond that binds the rest of humanity together, but unlike Iago, he does not feel the need for such belonging: Iago resents Cassio because he can sense that Cassio “hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly”, but Richard has no such sense of “daily beauty” in anything: indeed, he would have found such a concept comical. Inside Richard is an utterly vacant and unfeeling brutality. He commits evil simply because he feels no need not to.

And the horror of this play, it seems to me, resides in the fact that he can do this; that he can find helpers and confederates, people happy to help him into power, to carry out his evil orders. It is a horrific picture of a great evil that is as unstoppable as it is apparent. And there seems no reason to explain this evil: how, after all, can evil be explained anyway? Yes, Richard refers a number of times to his physically mis-shapen form, that has, he feels, placed him outside the norms of humanity, but he is never clear on why his physical deformity should make him evil: the link is highly tenuous, to say the least, and won’t do for an explanation. The fact, I think, is that Richard is evil simply because he is; it is a brute fact for which there is no point even trying to look for a cause.

In the night before the fatal battle, Richard is haunted by the ghosts of those whom he had murdered (a nightmarish scene, superbly staged in this production), and on waking, he is terrified; but even then, he cannot understand what he is terrified of. After all, the only source of fear he is aware of is himself, but how could he be afraid of his own self?

What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by…

This is more, much more, than his essentially simple mind can take in.

The previous plays had been directed with tremendous theatrical vigour by Owen Horsley. They had communicated with a powerful immediacy the utter chaos into which the country had descended. For Richard III, RSC’s artistic director, Gregory Doran, takes up the directorial reins. The play opens with the war apparently at an end – the winter of our discontent seemingly turned into glorious summer – but so monstrous a trauma does not end so easily. There is a great evil lurking, waiting to assume power; and there is a fragile peace in which it is all to easy for such evil to triumph.

Richard III, more so than the previous plays, requires at its centre a commanding presence, and here it gets it from Arthur Hughes. His is not a larger-than-life performance, as those of Laurence Olivier or of Anthony Sher had been, but that really is an aspect of the horror – the idea that so seemingly ordinary and unprepossessing a character could nonetheless unleash such evil on so vast a scale. Arthur Hughes’ performance makes all this appear frighteningly credible: he speaks the verse beautifully, and conveys with terrifying intensity a sense of malice seemingly for its own sake – an evil unmotivated even by desire

And as the play progresses, he projects the character’s insecurity, and growing paranoia, until, by the end, he cowers in terror without even understanding what it is he is afraid of.

There are two scenes in particular that seem, on reading at least, difficult to render convincing. In the first, Richard woos Anne, whose husband (Prince Edward) and whose father-in-law (Henry VI) Richard had himself killed; and, even in the presence of the dead King Henry’s corpse, Richard wins her.

The second scene occurs later in the play; here, with his wife Anne disposed of (another of his victims), he convinces the widowed Queen Elizabeth, whose sons he had murdered (the notorious “Princes in the Tower”), to agree to her daughter marrying him – her own uncle.

I think in both these scenes there is a compression of time: what is presented as happening in some ten minutes or so on stage is a compression of what takes place over a much longer span. But whatever the lapse of time, what we see is shocking. How could Anne agree to marry a man who had murdered her own husband? How could Elizabeth agree to  her own daughter marrying her uncle – a man who had, moreover, murdered her two brothers? In this production, in both scenes, we get an impression of the wills of both Anne and of Elizabeth collapsing under the pressure: neither can stand up to the demonic will of the evil Richard. In the second scene especially, when Elizabeth agrees to the marriage of her daughter to her murderous brother-in-law, there were audible gasps of horror in the audience. This is as it should be: these scenes indeed are horrific, and they present in microcosm what the drama depicts on a larger scale – a pure, unmitigated evil imposing its will upon a people who seem unable to resist. There’s no point looking for reason: the horror resides in the very fact that there isn’t any. As Shakespeare knew right to the end of his artistic career – in The Winter’s Tale – there is no cause for evil: it just is.

Richard III is probably Shakespeare’s first great masterpiece, and is a worthy end to what we can now see as a magnificent trilogy. It finds here a production worthy of its greatness; the performances are irreproachable, and the central performance is one that I, for one, won’t forget in a hurry.

The Henry VI Plays at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon

Putting on Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays is always a tough challenge, but it has to be done – especially if you’re the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it’s your remit to focus on the Shakespeare canon. In the first place, very obviously, the entire work is in three parts. For most people, a night out at the theatre is a special occasion, and a pretty expensive one at that; putting on a work that requires not one, but two nights at the theatre is a bit of a tough sell; and putting on a work that requires three is virtually suicidal. Can you convince  enough people to attend all three performances to recoup the considerable costs of putting it on? Even the titles – Henry VI Part One, Henry VI Part Two, Henry VI Part Three – are such as to indicate that one must see all three to experience the drama properly. At least Wagner had the good sense to give different titles to the operas comprising the Ring Cycle, rather than call them The Ring Part One, The Ring Part Two, etc.

Of course, the titles of these plays, as we have them now, originate from the First Folio, and, according to the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare, Parts 2 and 3 were most probably written first, and had appeared before the Folio with the somewhat cumbersome titles The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster with the Death of the Good King Humphrey, and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, and the Good King Henry VI. What we now know as Henry VI Part One, the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare believe, was written afterwards as a sort of prequel. As with just about everything connected with these matters, I imagine this is contentious. But what this means for any company putting on these plays is that there is uncertainty over whether to perform two plays or three; and even over what to call them.

It gets worse. For the whole thing, as presented in the Folio at least, is not even a trilogy: it’s a tetralogy. Henry VI Part Three (to give it its less cumbersome title) clearly ends with unresolved issues, and these issues are taken up in Richard III, which may well be Shakespeare’s first great masterpiece. Since Richard III is too great a play to be performed only when all the other plays are also performed, it is usually presented as a standalone, but it benefits enormously when seen in context of the whole series. What we see in this play is a man utterly evil and remorseless, a man utterly unsuited to any kind of office, emerging from national turmoil and trauma to assume what is effectively absolute power; and the impact of such a drama is necessarily diminished when we do not actually see that national turmoil and trauma that gives rise to this evil. But if it is a difficult task to get sufficient numbers of people to attend three shows at the theatre, getting them to attend four becomes virtually impossible.

And then, there is the nature of the plays. The three Henry VI plays were early works of Shakespeare, and were almost certainly written in collaboration – although I do get the impression (and it is an impression only: I have no empirical evidence for this) that Shakespeare assumed greater editorial control as the series progressed. Richard III, to judge from its artistic unity, seems to me to be the work of a single dramatist, and, very clearly, whoever wrote Henry VI Part Three had the next play, Richard III, very much in mind. The collaborative nature of the three Henry VI plays makes, it seems to me, for an inconsistency of quality, a certain lack of dramatic focus, and an episodic and sometimes repetitive structure. Part One, whether or not it was written first or is, as the Oxford editors think, a prequel, is particularly weak. The scenes depicting the enmity between the Duke of Gloucester and the Bishop of Winchester are fine; also good is the Temple Garden scene where the seeds of the future Wars of the Roses are effectively planted. But the scenes depicting the war in France – which take up most of the play – seem to me an embarrassment. The English armies, led by the heroic Lord Talbot, are consistently noble, honourable, courageous; and the French counterparts are a treacherous, miserable, snivelling lot. Joan la Pucelle (Jeanne d’Arc) is presented as a wicked sorceress: when she is finally captured, her father is allowed to make an appearance, but she, clinging to her wicked ways, denies knowing him, and he ends up saying: “O burn her, burn her! Hanging is too good!” Even leaving aside the jingoism, Unalloyed Good vs Unalloyed Bad really isn’t the stuff of drama, and it is hard to see how any of this can hold any interest at all for a modern audience.

The latest productions of these plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company reduces the three Henry VI plays to two. It does this by jettisoning Part One altogether: gone, thankfully, are all the scenes of the war in France. Sadly, the Temple Garden scene had to be sacrificed as well: there, we had been presented various earls and dukes and the like aligning themselves to the Lancastrian or to the Yorkist cause by selecting a red rose or a white, and it is fascinating to see how much more convinced they become of their chosen cause once they have attached themselves to one or other of the symbols.

Also sacrificed is the long scene in II,v, where Mortimer, before his death, gives a long and detailed exposition of the complex genealogies of the Plantagenets, justifying the claims to the crown of Richard Plantagenet (later Duke of York): this excision I found a bit unfortunate, as it detracts from the later scene in Part Two which the rebel Jack Cade explains his own claim to the crown. The grotesque absurdity of Cade’s speech sheds on Mortimer’s speech in the earlier play a powerful satiric light, but with the earlier speech missing, this satiric aspect is obviously lost.

Also regrettable perhaps is the omission of the earlier scenes in Part One depicting the enmity between the Duke of Gloucester and the Bishop (later Cardinal) of Winchester – an enmity that culminates in a superb climactic few scenes in Act 3 of Part Two.  

But much though a Shakespeare nerd like myself may regret these losses, most people – myself included, if I am to be honest – would probably think these sacrifices worthwhile if they mean not having to sit through the war scenes in France.

The latest RSC productions start with Part Two, with the arrival of Queen Margaret to England, and, to make Parts Two and Three more or less self-contained, ends Part Two with the quelling of Jack Cade’s rebellion in Act 4. The last act of Part Two (which depicts the Battle of St Albans, which is, effectively, the start of the Wars of the Roses) is then incorporated into Part Three. And, instead of calling the two plays Henry VI Part Two and Henry VI Part Three, they retitle them Henry VI: Rebellion and The Wars of the Roses. All of which makes perfect sense to me.

There are a few cuts along the way, but given the episodic and repetitive nature of these plays, these cuts are nothing to complain about: the big scenes are all there, and are played with a marvellous theatrical gusto. This is an ensemble piece, of course (it’s reasonable to refer to these plays as a single unit, and, hence, in the singular); and the ensemble here is very strong. There is a wonderful fluidity about it all, as scenes follow each other without break, sometimes even overlapping; and it all moved, as it should, at an invigorating tempo. Shakespeare certainly achieved greater profundity in his later plays, but I don’t think he ever surpassed the quite exhilarating theatrical vigour that he and his collaborators (Marlowe most likely among them) achieved here.

One downside to all this is, perhaps, that one never gets to know any individual character too well. There are a number of characters who appear to take centre stage for a while – the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, Bishop of Winchester, Duke of York, Earl of Warwick, etc – but, given the nature of the drama, none of them command centre stage long enough for us to get to see much beyond the surface. Sometimes, of course, the surface is all there is: one doubts that Jack Cade, for instance, has an inner life worth investigating. But he is important not because of what he is, but rather, of what he represents: he is an ignorant buffoon filled with self-importance, and a buffoon who has enough charisma to attract a mass of followers: a comic figure, certainly, but the funnier he is, the more dangerous and the more sinister he appears. (Aaron Sidwell played him here with a strutting cockiness, as absurd as it is frightening.)

Two characters whom Shakespeare could probably have made more of here are Queen Margaret, and King Henry himself. Margaret is both predator and victim: she is, as the Duke of York describes her, a “tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide” (although it may be added that the Duke of York’s heart is no less tigerish); and, by the end, she is victim of the very evil that she herself had helped unleash, and in which she herself has taken part. It is not unreasonable, I think, to see in her an early prototype of Lady Macbeth.

Henry is mild and gentle, and while these qualities are admirable in a private man, they are less so in a king. Unable to stand up for himself, he can but look on helplessly as the country of which he is supposedly the ruler tears itself apart. He can see what is happening, and his heart grieves over it, but his very personality renders him powerless. By the end, he appears otherworldly and almost saintly, but perhaps we shouldn’t sentimentalise: a stronger man, perhaps, would not have allowed this to happen.

There is much to explore in both king and queen, but the nature of this drama does not allow Shakespeare enough space or time to expand upon them, as, I think, he may well have wanted to do. Minnie Gale and Mark Quartley give fine accounts of these two characters who, in a different drama, may have emerged as central.

But there is one character in particular who emerges quite ominously into the forefront – especially in Part Three (or The Wars of the Roses) – in whom Shakespeare seems particularly interested: he’s one of the sons of the Duke of York – Richard (later to become Richard III). In the final play of this series (Richard III), he does, of course, dominate, and there are strong intimations here of that dominance. Here, Shakespeare (and I am pretty sure it is Shakespeare here, and not one of his collaborators) seems fascinated by the amoral and undiluted evil of the man. He seems to have little inner life, if any; but there is something fascinating in the force of his will, and in his determination to impose his will. Such people do exist, and periods of turmoil and of uncertainty bring them to the fore. In the Henry VI plays, we see a country tear itself apart in a traumatic civil war, but although the wars seem to be at an end by the end, we know there is more trauma yet to come: Richard is still very much in the wings, waiting to take central stage. That’ll have to wait for the next play, of course (and I have a ticket for it in a few weeks’ time); and Arthur Hughes’ magnificent delivery of Richard’s monologue in Part Three certainly bodes well.

These are plays that, whatever their flaws, need to be performed – and not just because they have Shakespeare’s name attached to them. The Royal Shakespeare Company have done a marvellous job with them. These productions, directed by Owen Horsley, will no doubt be appearing on DVD shortly – and they can be strongly recommended to anyone who couldn’t get to see this on stage. And for those who would like to see the full plays, the BBC versions from the early 1980s of the entire tetralogy, directed by Jane Howell, really seem to me among the very best productions I have seen of Shakespeare on the screen, and as fine as anything the BBC has done. In the meantime, I still have Richard III to look forward to.

Revisiting “Timon of Athens”

Timon of Athens is not a play often revisited, and for rather obvious reasons. A bare outline of the plot, such as it is, seems most unpromising: a wealthy and generous Athenian hosts lavish feasts, and showers his friends, of whom there are many, with extravagant gifts, but when he is in financial trouble himself, his friends decide they aren’t his friends any more and turn their backs on him; and this prodigal Athenian, now disabused, leaves the city to live in the wilderness, cursing mankind till he meets his death, offstage, for reasons unspecified. It’s a rather simple morality tale, pointing to rather trite and simplistic morals: do not be a spendthrift; do not put too much trust in other people; humans are ungrateful by nature; and so on – nothing, one might have thought, to interest a major literary artist. And neither does the plot leave much space for character development: Timon is first one thing, and then its complete opposite. As Apemantus says to him:

The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends.

Instead of depicting the dynamic development of a character, we are presented with two contrasting tableaux, neither of which, being static, is particularly dramatic.

It is hard to determine when Shakespeare wrote this, as there is neither a record of a performance in Shakespeare’s own lifetime, nor any Quarto publication; nor even any documentation relating to it before it made its appearance in the First Folio. The themes and imagery that occur seem to suggest that this was written some time in the first decade of the 17^th century – a period when Shakespeare was writing some of his most highly regarded tragic masterpieces – that is, when he was at the height of his powers. So this raises the question: what did Shakespeare, at the height of his powers, see in so simplistic a story, devoid of any great dramatic interest, to think it suitable material for a play?

The obvious answer, I think, was that Shakespeare was experimenting. This shouldn’t surprise us: looking through his plays, Shakespeare was frequently experimenting. Those experiments that worked have entered the canon so firmly that we do not think of them as experiments: we tend to take Antony and Cleopatra, say, for granted, rather than see it for the outrageous experiment it is. But not all experiments, of course, are equally successful: it is in the nature of experimentation that some are bound to fail. Or, at least, only partly succeed. Earlier in his career, for instance, Shakespeare experimented in introducing dark and even tragic elements into his comedies, and it doesn’t seem to me that he was uniformly successful in this: Shylock, for instance, is a tragic figure of tremendous power, but he does, I think, overwhelm the comic elements of the play. But no matter: so powerful is the figure of Shylock that top Shakespearean actors queue up to play him rather than play any of the relatively insipid characters populating the more comic strands. It remains, though, an unbalanced play: this particular experiment, while giving us Shylock, was by no means a complete success. Shakespeare was more successful in welding together the brighter and darker elements in Much Ado About Nothing, and succeeded so triumphantly in this respect in Twelfth Night that it becomes impossible to pick the light and the shade apart, so seamless is the construction. But throughout, he was experimenting: his artistic temperament was such that it was attracted to trying out new things, even at the risk of failure.

And Timon of Athens too, I think, is an attempt to try out something new, although, in this instance, it doesn’t quite work – certainly not well enough to create a dramatic figure as powerful as Shylock to compensate for the shortcomings. For the text gives the impression not even so much of an unfinished project as of a project abandoned: true, there are some passages that are quite magnificent, and undoubtedly the work of a great visionary dramatic poet; but equally, there are other passages that seem to cry out for revision, or even for rewriting; and since this is (from the internal evidence of the text) unlikely to be a late work, the fact that Shakespeare left these passages in such a state; coupled with lack of evidence for any performance in Shakespeare’s own time; seems rather to indicate that he had given up on the project: it just wasn’t going well. I’d guess, given Shakespeare’s willingness to experiment, there were many other such abandoned works – experiments that didn’t work – but this one, unlike the others, somehow made it into the First Folio. And that leaves us with some fascinating questions: what was Shakespeare trying to achieve here? And why did he not succeed?

One can only really provide tentative answers to this, based on guesswork: it is, after all, pointless to speculate on what was going on in a mind such as Shakespeare’s, and impertinent to presume to point out where he went wrong. It seems to me that Shakespeare was trying out satire – not satire as an incidental feature of the drama, but one that occupies its very centre; and a satire very different from the kind his friend Ben Jonson was writing at possibly the same time. Shakespeare, I think, was trying to accomplish more than pointing out human folly, and laughing at it. What more he was attempting deserves, I think, some attention.

If pointing out human folly had been Shakespeare’s primary aim, the play could well have finished after Act 3. But it is Timon’s hatred of humanity that takes up the final two acts. These acts are not dramatic since Timon does not develop further, but the intensity of his imprecations against humanity are chilling. Here, for instance, are his words to an army poised to take Athens:

… let not thy sword skip one:
Pity not honour’d age for his white beard;
He is an usurer: strike me the counterfeit matron;
It is her habit only that is honest,
Herself’s a bawd: let not the virgin’s cheek
Make soft thy trenchant sword; for those milk-paps,
That through the window-bars bore at men’s eyes,
Are not within the leaf of pity writ,
But set them down horrible traitors: spare not the babe,
Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy;
Think it a bastard, whom the oracle
Hath doubtfully pronounced thy throat shall cut,
And mince it sans remorse …

And so on. These are not merely the words of a man disillusioned with humanity: these are the words of a man in the grips of a genocidal rage. However much we may have sympathised with Timon’s disgust with humanity, it does not seem to me credible that Shakespeare could have intended us to sympathise with speeches such as this. And here, I think, is where Shakespeare’s satire differs from Jonson’s: the object of his satire is not merely human folly, but also revulsion from that same folly. Having invited us to deprecate human behaviour, Shakespeare invites us to deprecate that deprecation. And the emotion imparted is more than mere amusement, or disapproval: lines such as those quoted above inspire in the audience, or in the reader, a sense of horror. We find ourselves revolted by Timon’s revulsion; and Timon’s is a revulsion from the very follies that we ourselves have been invited to find revolting.  

The problem Shakespeare encountered, I think, is that he couldn’t find for this a suitable dramatic form. Comedy he rejected as not an adequate vehicle for conveying such horror, but the tragic form also threw up problems: far from describing a dynamic dramatic arc, the material resolved itself into two static tableaux, the second merely presenting a picture that is a reversal of the first. Yes, there is horror suitable for a tragic work, but there is neither the sense of development nor the complexity of character that Shakespearean tragic drama ideally requires.

The theme of human folly inviting a revulsion that is itself the object of satire was taken up by authors in later generations. Molière took up the theme triumphantly in Le Misanthrope, but he steered clear of horror: he was careful not to transgress the bounds of comedy of manners. Whatever the implications of his drama, he does not stray from the confines of the drawing room. But it was not, I think, Shakespeare’s intention to stay within confines: his protagonist had to break away from the bounds of civic society, and move into the wilderness, as Lear was to do. It was Shakespeare’s intention to present directly the horror to which revulsion from our fellow humans leads us. And it was his intention too, I think, to implicate the audience in that horror.

One author from a later generation who did present this horror directly was, I think, Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s genocidal rage is quite clearly of the same nature as Timon’s. And like Timon’s, his rage too is a consequence of revulsion from humanity, of disgust of human follies. And in Gulliver’s Travels, we, the reader, are faced with the same dilemma that we are faced with in Timon of Athens: how can we simultaneously sympathise with and yet be revolted by such rage? But Gulliver’s Travels is a prose narration (some would say a “novel”) rather than a play: the problem Shakespeare didn’t solve was giving this theme a dramatic shape. The satire in his plays, both before and after Timon of Athens, was incidental rather than central.

But even the failed experiments of a great writer remain fascinating. It is fascinating trying to understand from what we have, abandoned though it no doubt is, what Shakespeare was, at least, trying to do. It may well be, as I’d conjecture, that there had been many other such failed attempts which are now lost to us: given the experimental nature of Shakespeare’s art, it would have been very surprising if there hadn’t. But I’m certainly glad we have, at least, Timon of Athens: some failures are worth more than any number of successes.

Comic errors, dark forebodings

The Comedy of Errors is a very early Shakespeare play, possibly even his first, but one need make no allowances: it is a fast-moving comedy, and still very funny. But it’s one of those early plays that tend, perhaps, to get overlooked – a bit like that other very early play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Neither is often revived, or, I suspect, often read. But whereas The Two Gentlemen of Verona is, to my mind at least, frankly tedious, The Comedy of Errors is never less than entertaining, and there are some elements to it that, on my recent re-reading, quite surprised me.

I had remembered little more than a light-hearted farce. And, for the most part, “light-hearted farce” sums it up well. It has formed the basis of a well-known musical (The Boys from Syracuse); the Royal Shakespeare Company have presented their own musical version of it; and even Laurel and Hardy made use of it, as the basis of their film Our Relations. As a light-hearted farce, it works well. There are two sets of twins who are, unwittingly, in the same town at the same time, and naturally, there are all sorts of comic misunderstandings. The plot, as I gather, is taken from the play Menaechmi by Plautus; but Shakespeare had increased the complexity of the plot by introducing two sets of twins rather than one; and he had also introduced to the characters a certain depth who, in Plautus’ play, existed only to serve the plot. (I make this latter observation somewhat gingerly since it is gleaned merely from various learned accounts I have read of Shakespeare’s play: I won’t pretend to have read Plautus’ play, tempting though it is to do so.) Shakespeare presents the complex plot with a clarity that bespeaks a technical skill quite astonishing for a novice playwright, and the pacing seems well nigh perfect. But what really surprised me on this reading was the sense of darkness and of violence lying just under the surface. This was not necessary for the plot to work: if the plot were Shakespeare’s sole interest, he need not even have hinted at anything at all under the surface, especially as the surface itself is more than sufficient to hold the audience’s attention. But that darkness, with its potential to break out and to take the play into more disturbing regions, is most certainly present.

This underlying sense of darkness looks forward to his later, tragic works in ways that Shakespeare himself was unlikely, so early in his career, to have foreseen. The chaos lying just below the surface is very apparent in Othello, say: as Othello himself knows, when he loves Desdemona not, “chaos is come again”. Of course, in The Comedy of Errors, we know that order will prevail in the end – not so much because the disorder we see is a consequence merely of misunderstanding (Othello’s tragedy, too, is a consequence merely of misunderstanding), but because we are assured, both by the title and by the general ambience, that what we are seeing (or reading) is a comedy, and we know comedies don’t end in disaster; but the intensity of the disorder that does break out, and almost prevails, goes well beyond what may have been expected from a farce.

Consider for instance these lines spoken by Antipholus of Ephesus to his wife:

Dissembling harlot, thou art false in all;
And art confederate with a damned pack
To make a loathsome abject scorn of me:
But with these nails I’ll pluck out these false eyes
That would behold in me this shameful sport.

He calls her a “harlot” for no reason (as Othello does Desdemona); and threatens even to pluck out her eyes – a horrific image that, famously, becomes all too real later in King Lear. Did Shakespeare really have to accentuate the potential violence, or, rather, Antipholus’ potential for violence, to such an extent in what is, after all, a light comedy? The other characters are sure he is mad, or perhaps possessed by some kind of evil spirit, and, if we make the concession of seeing this evil spirit possessing him as a metaphor, they aren’t wrong.

Or take the violence inherent in the master-servant relationships. It is not, indeed, clear whether the two Dromios are servants, as we would understand the term, or slaves. Dromio of Ephesus is specifically called “slave”, but we shouldn’t perhaps make too much of that, given “slave” was a common derogatory term, like “knave”, and not necessarily to be taken literally. However, Egeon, in his narrative in the first scene (which is surprisingly dark for a farce), clearly says that the twin brothers Dromio had been purchased at birth (“Those, for their parents were exceeding poor, I bought…”). We see both Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus beating their respective Dromios, and Shakespeare, happy even at so early a stage in his career to give voices to his downtrodden characters, gives Dromio of Ephesus a rather affecting speech expressing the misery of an existence in which he has to take beatings merely at the whim of his master. He goes so far as to imagine being driven out of door to become a beggar once, thanks to the beatings he takes, he is no longer capable of service:

I have served him from the hour of my nativity to this instant, and have nothing at his hands for my service but blows. When I am cold, he heats me with beating; when I am warm, he cools me with beating; I am waked with it when I sleep; raised with it when I sit; driven out of doors with it when I go from home; welcomed home with it when I return; nay, I bear it on my shoulders, as a beggar wont her brat; and, I think when he hath lamed me, I shall beg with it from door to door.

This is all way beyond the realms of light comedy. If light comedy were indeed Shakespeare’s primary purpose, he would have had masters and servants on gentler footing; or, at the very least, he would have suppressed a passage such as this. But he doesn’t, and we are free, I think, to ponder why.

None of this is to say that The Comedy of Errors is a tragic play: it isn’t. It is a light comedy, a farce, and it works superbly well as such. But there are, I think, intimations of the darkness of vision, of a disorder that spreads fast, and of a chaos that lies under the surface of our everyday lives, and of a cruelty and a violence in our everyday relationship, that seem to indicate that the seeds of his later tragic vision had always been present, even in a light farce such as this.

POSTSCRIPT: It was remiss of me not to provide a link to a post on this play in Di Nguyen’s blog. She provides a more detailed account of the characterisations, especially of the sisters Adriana and Luciana. So here it is.

Back to Shakespeare: my latest readings of “As You Like It” and “Richard II”

It’s pointless even trying to speculate what went on in that very strange mind of Shakespeare’s: he writes As You Like It, the sunniest and most lyrical of pastoral romantic comedies – a play that, one might think, would thrive on flights of fancy – mainly in prose; while Richard II, a historical and political drama unremitting in its seriousness, he writes entirely in verse, liberally throwing in large numbers of rhyming couplets for good measure. I know that in these posts on Shakespeare I pretend to have a modicum ofunderstanding of his plays – an author, even of blog posts, should, after all, have a claim to some degree of authority – but there are times when it is best to admit that I don’t really get what he was up to.

Yes, I’ve been reading Shakespeare again. And it’s been a surprisingly long time since I had last read one of his plays. Oh, I have dipped into them often enough, and browsed passages, but, apart from his two narrative poems, his verse is dramatic verse, and demands to be seen in the context of the drama. (Even the sonnets seem to me best regarded as dramatic monologues, with the speaker and the dramatic context left to the reader’s imagination.) I know there are some who think otherwise: I have even encountered those who claim not to care at all about the drama (which, apparently, is “stolen” anyway); and who, further, tell me quite seriously that the language is all that matters. But that really won’t do: literature is the least abstract of all the arts: its basic building blocks are words, and each word has a meaning (and often more than just a single meaning) beyond itself – that is, it has a significance beyond how it sounds, and how it looks when written. Language without context is nothing. And in Shakespeare, the context is dramatic. Those who look merely for “the language” may find it hard to account for the effects produced in King Lear by such lines as “World, world, O world!”, or “Never, never, never, never, never” – effects that are well beyond my powers of articulation to describe.

So it’s back to the plays. It’s Project Back-to-Shakespeare. Why have I left it so long? Because I have taken them for granted, I think. I know they’re there. And many of these plays, I know, reside permanently in my mind anyway. But that’s really not good enough: if I am to live with these plays, I have to re-read them regularly, and re-read them with as fresh a mind as is possible. So I have decided to be a bit more disciplined: once a month, whatever else I may be reading at the time (and I am still reading Clive James’ translation of Dante), I have promised myself to re-read a play by Shakespeare at least once every month. For familiarity all too often breeds indifference, and it would be sad if I were ever to become indifferent to these works which, I think, have meant to me more than any other work of literature I know of.

So, we’re now nearly two months into this year, and I have read two plays – which isn’t bad given how bad I am at keeping promises to myself: As You Like It, and Richard II – the comedy written mainly in prose and the tragic drama written entirely in verse.

As You Like It has always struck me as a strange play. Oh, it’s clearly a great masterpiece, no doubt about that – but it’s a play I don’t feel I’ve quite got to grips with – at least, not to my own satisfaction. Sometimes I think this is because it lacks drama, but that’s not the reason: Love’s Labour’s Lost similarly lacks drama, and I have always loved that. I think what puzzles me is that various dramas are set up in the first act, only to dissipate as we move into the second. Of course, this is clearly what Shakespeare had intended: the Forest of Arden is a magical forest – not like the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where real magic is involved, but a magical place all the same, where all who enter are cleansed of their evil intent, and are reconciled.

For there is much evil that needs cleansing. There’s a Duke who usurps his place, having unlawfully deposed his brother, the rightful Duke; there’s an elder brother who hates and mistreats his younger, and plots to have him killed; and so on. Indeed, the conflicts are laid out with such clear distinction between Good and Bad, we seem to be more in the realms of folktale rather than of anything claiming to be realistic drama. Even the rightful Duke, we are explicitly told, is living in the forest with a band of loyal followers “like the Old Robin Hood”.

I think I had previously underestimated just how important folklore is in Shakespeare’s dramatic output. It’s very apparent in those three late plays that it’s very tempting to describe as a trilogy (Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest): these, indeed, are fairy stories (albeit with Shakespeare’s own individual stamp on them). But I think Shakespeare’s fascination with folklore can be traced to many of his earlier plays too, where, even within an otherwise realistic context, he is happy to introduce plot devices that seem straight out of fairy tales. I don’t know, for instance, that one could make much sense of All’s Well That Ends Well (written during a period when Shakespeare was occupied mainly with tragic drama) without considering it as a sort of fairy tale. Both this play and Measure for Measure (also written during this period) feature the much-criticised “bed trick” – that is, a plot device whereby a man has sex with a woman thinking her to be someone else. Such a contrivance is, of course, more than a bit silly, but I think it becomes less so if we can consider it in the context of folklore, or of the fairy tale – that is, in the context of a semi-magical world where the unlikely becomes the everyday. In the late play Cymbeline, Shakespeare pushed this element of folklore to its utmost limit, thus ending up with a plot which, if considered in a strictly realistic mode, fully lives up (or down) to Johnson’s famous dismissal: “unresisting imbecility”. But the mistake isn’t Shakespeare’s, it is ours: it lies in considering the work in a strictly realistic mode, when really, it is Shakespeare’s variation on the story we now know as “Snow White”. Even the mainspring of King Lear, the most unbearably terror-stricken of all his tragedies, belongs to the world of fairy tales.

And so in As You Like It. The Robin Hood like existence of a merry band of outlaws living in the forest we have had before, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and it is pure folklore. The various conflicts laid out in the first act are all the stuff of fairy tales, the stuff of dreams, and, as Prospero is later to say, they vanish into thin air. As in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest here is a magical place where human wrongs are put right (albeit without the explicitly supernatural agents); but Shakespeare seems to insist here that it is the forest that is real, and the outside world with all its conflicts that is the dream. Reconciliation here is real: dissension isn’t.

The Forest of Arden is both Ovid’s Golden Age from Book 1 of the Metamorphoses, and also the Garden of Eden. But not quite. The forest harbours snakes and lions, there’s hardship, there are brambles and cold winds, there’s unrequited love, and the shepherd Corin speaks of masters of “churlish disposition”. And, further, there are question marks about the deposed Duke’s right – effectively – to set up in this forest his own surrogate dukedom.

Looking forward in Shakespeare’s career, there are clear parallels between this play and the much darker later play The Tempest. In both, a rightful duke, deposed by his brother, comes to an untamed land and effectively establishes his second dukedom there. And in both cases, people from his earlier dukedom come into his later one. Prospero’s right to his new dukedom is questioned in The Tempest, and the right of the deposed Duke in As You Like It doesn’t pass without question either, despite the benign and benevolent nature of this second dukedom. And this questioning comes from Jaques, who insists that it is the humans in the forest, including the deposed Duke, who are the usurpers of nature’s realm:

Thus most invectively he pierceth through
The body of the country, city, court,
Yea, and of this our life, swearing that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants and what’s worse,
To fright the animals and to kill them up
In their assign’d and native dwelling-place.

Even the good-natured Duke loses patience with Jaques, and at one point, has a quite surprising outburst:

For thou thyself hast been a libertine,
As sensual as the brutish sting itself;
And all the embossed sores and headed evils,
That thou with licence of free foot hast caught,
Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world.

Despite these lines, I have never seen Jaques played as a sort of monster with “embossed sores and headed evils”: I’d like to, as that would align him to Caliban (and also, intriguingly, to Thersites in Troilus and Cressida). Tony Tanner, in his Prefaces to Shakespeare, tells us that A. D. Nuttall says “it is not a waste of the imagination to consider Jaques as a Caliban who has been civilised”, although, since this otherwise excellent book lacks a bibliography, he doesn’t tell us where Nuttall says this. (It certainly isn’t in that quite superb volume Shakespeare the Thinker, the only work of Nuttall’s I have read, and I’m not enough of a Shakespeare scholar to know Nuttall’s other books.) But relating Jaques to Caliban strikes me as astute and illuminating, as they are both constant reminders of the deep flaws in our civilised states, and of how ripeness may shade into rottenness without our even noticing.

But neither the brambles and cold winds, nor the masters of churlish disposition, nor even Jaques’ latent Calibanism, can detract from this being the happiest, the sunniest of Shakespeare plays. Despite Jaques’ refusal to be part of the harmony that reigns at the end, the harmony does indeed exist: it is real, as is the reconciliation upon which it is based. A good friend of mine, and a lifelong Shakespeare lover, tells me that he imagines Heaven to be a bit like the Forest of Arden. I think he has hit it. Given our fallen human state, the Forest of Arden is indeed about as close to Heaven as it is possible to imagine. Human differences cannot be wished away, but, who knows, maybe there can be a reconciliation. True, by the time Shakespeare came round to writing The Tempest, even this hope for meaningful reconciliation had been dashed, but here it is still very much alive. I have, I admit, failed in the past to come to terms with this play, but the longer I spend immersed in its world, the more I find myself falling in love with it. At one point, Marlowe’s famous line “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” is approvingly quoted. Well, Marlowe was wrong, and Shakespeare was wrong in approving of it: I did not love this play at first sight, but I think I can honestly say that I love it now.

And then, last week, my second stop in my Back to Shakespeare project: Richard II, a play I have long admired, but have always found a bit difficult to love. And the problem, I think, is the central character. The flaw, I hasten to add, is not in the characterisation (which is brilliant), but in the character himself: Richard does not seem to have the stature to be at the centre of so immense a tragic drama. In As You Like It, Jaques had said that all the world is a stage, but he had meant that metaphorically: Richard appears to take it literally. All the world is a stage, and he, the king, is the star player, the actor constantly in the spotlight. Never does any protagonist in any Shakespeare play speak so much, and to so little purpose. Hamlet talks a lot, both to others and to himself, but that’s because he has much to say: his speech is often very concentrated, because so many ideas are packed into it; and often, his mind moves so quickly from one idea to another, it is difficult keeping up. That is never the case with Richard: his is never an active mind: all too often, especially in the latter part of the play, he seems content reflecting on what’s happening rather than directing it. Throughout, he has very little dialogue, but a great many speeches. If he is indeed an actor on a stage, he seems to be more of a Chorus than a protagonist.

There are effectively two Richards – one before going off to the wars against the Irish rebels (in what we would nowadays think of as a “colonial war”), and another when he returns. Historically, his Irish war was a success, but Shakespeare keeps quiet about that, presumably because he does not wish to show Richard in too active or too heroic a light. Before he goes, he is corrupt, venal, callous, in every way unfit to be king; and once he returns, and finds his kingdom invaded by the cousin Bolingbroke he had once banished, he is self-dramatising, self-pitying, and still in every way unfit to be king. It is hardly a surprise that he is deposed, but he speaks of deposition even before Bolingbroke has made clear his intention in that respect – even, indeed, as Bolingbroke is showing him the respect due to a reigning monarch. Of course, we may say Bolingbroke is dissembling, and that his intentions are very obvious; we may agree that the deposition is inevitable. But the truth is, I think, that Bolingbroke isn’t yet sure of his own intentions, or even of his own motivations. And there is, one might have thought, scope for resistance on Richard’s part. But Richard doesn’t show any. To begin with, his mood swings wildly from one speech to the next, but with a strange inevitability, he keeps returning to, and after a while settles upon, a melancholy contemplation of his own wretchedness. He moves from playing a reigning king to playing a deposed one. But is there any reality behind all this play-acting?

This, it seems to me, is what’s at the centre of this play. Of course, there are a great many other themes too: it’s a historical play about politics, about the divine right of kings, about loyalty and rebellion, about the conflict between keeping one’s oath (upon which one’s very souls depends) and doing what is right for one’s country. But the focal point of the drama is on the king’s identity. In the earlier acts, he had been King: a bad king, it is true, but King. That was his identity. He was God’s own anointed, God’s own minister, and whatever he did must, by definition, be God’s own wish. But once he is no longer king; even before that – once his status as King is questioned; then what is he? If his very identity is predicated entirely upon the fact of his kingship, then what is his identity once that kingship is no longer there?

Lear, in a later play, found himself facing the same question, but there, even as his own mind was falling apart, he started thinking, or trying to think at least, these question anew. Richard does not have the capacity to do this: all he can do is to pity himself. During the deposition scene in Act 4, Richard, solipsistic as ever, asks for a mirror; and, after examining his face – the face of one who is no longer a king – he dashes the mirror to the ground, shattering it in an overtly theatrical gesture. Bolingbroke, a man of fewer words, has a pointed rejoinder:

The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy’d
The shadow or your face.

The shadow of the face is obviously the reflection of the face, but what is the shadow of the sorrow? Bolingbroke had meant, I think, the dramatisation of the sorrow. As a man of few words but to the purpose, he has little time for his cousin Richard’s endless play-acting. But Richard seizes on this expression, and comes up with a quite different expression. Shadow of his sorrow? Yes, of course, it is! How can it be otherwise? What is inside us cannot find adequate expression in anything we can say or do, and so, whatever we say or do must be a shadow of the substance that is in us.

‘Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul

Bolingbroke, a pragmatic man living in a pragmatic world, has no time for that which cannot be expressed or perceived. And he may be right. However, it raises for us an important question: if something can neither be expressed nor perceived, how can we know what it is? How can we know if it exists at all? Is there a substance behind the shadow?

I imagine that Shakespeare, as a dramatist, must have pondered this point. In the earlier play Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare had pondered the question of language – the question of whether mastery of language (of which, he must have known, he was extravagantly possessed) depicts reality, or, whether it loses itself in its own virtuosity and becomes merely a game that hides reality from us. Here, Shakespeare ponders the question of shadow and substance: if there exists inside us a substance that cannot be adequately expressed by anything we may say or do, then how can he, a dramatist, depict that substance when what we say or do is all that can be depicted? If all the world’s a stage, it must follow that there can be nothing in that world beyond what can be shown on stage. Richard insists there is more, but is it not possible that his extended self-pity really is all there is? And that beyond it, there is nothing? Right to the end, Richard is haunted by the possibility of his own nothingness:

… and by and by
Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate’er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing. 

It is a wonderful play, but I doubt it will be too many people’s favourite, as As You Like It certainly is. Despite the various recurrent themes that one may find across the entire range of plays (A. B. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker is particularly good at teasing these out) these two plays are as different in themes and in treatment as is possible to imagine. It is hard to imagine them proceeding from the same mind. But then again, it was a very strange mind, and there is probably not much point trying to guess what went on inside. Maybe the plays and the poems that overwhelm us so are but the shadow of his genius, and the substance of that genius (should it exist of course) will always remain for us inaccessible.

What Shakespeare may (perhaps) have thought about

“Never trust the teller, trust the tale,” D. H. Lawrence famously said, adding, rather interestingly, that it was the critic’s job “to rescue the tale from the teller”. Given how far just about every major writer falls short of their creation – some, admittedly, more than others – I have always found this a useful thing to bear in mind: it’s the work we have to deal with, not the author, and if what we know of the author’s personal defects and shortcomings gets in the way of our appreciation of the work, it is indeed the critic’s job to focus the reader’s attention on what really matters.

But it is no more than natural curiosity to want to know something, at least, of the person who could create those works that we admire so much, and, when it comes to Shakespeare, we are for ever at a dead end. We have a few scraps of facts about his life, but nothing, really, that tells us what kind of person he was. And while part of me thinks that just as well, there’s another part that can’t help questioning what exactly was going on in that strange mind of his. And all we are reduced to on this point is, I think, conjecture.

Not that this has stopped people from making claims on this matter. I don’t think there’s a single religious or political or social orthodoxy, or, for that matter, heresy, that has not claimed Shakespeare as a fellow-traveller. Even leaving aside partisan accounts of Shakespeare’s ideologies (assuming he had any), there seems no shortage either of commentators who seem also to know for sure what Shakespeare had intended for his plays, as far as performance is concerned. He had, apparently, intended his plays to be seen and not read: that mantra is repeated with such tiresome frequency that I have now given up arguing against it: it is, in practice, simply an excuse not to read the plays. He had also, apparently, intended his texts to be no more than blueprints for performance, and had fully intended them to be adapted with more or less complete freedom. And if this means the kind of adaptation we seem to be witnessing all too frequently these days, with those long boring speeches cut out and long boring scenes cut and spliced together so as to accommodate audiences who find that sort of thing tedious, then, yes, Shakespeare had intended that also. The question “How do we know?” never seems to arise. We may, I suppose, point to historical evidence that suggests that adaptations, sometimes even radical adaptations, were common practice in the Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses, but I doubt even that takes us too far: for how can we tell whether Shakespeare had approved of such practice? If, as is generally agreed, Shakespeare had an extraordinary mind, is it not one of the attributes of extraordinary minds that they could look beyond the mores of their own time?

That is not to say that we slavishly follow the texts: we couldn’t even if we wanted to, as the existing texts, where they exist in more than one version, often vary quite considerably, and are, further, bedevilled with printing errors: all of this has kept armies of scholars busy for a few centuries now. Of course the texts are to be adapted for performance; but if certain kinds of adaptation turn what is a miracle of the human imagination into something that, frankly, isn’t, then the question “why bother?” most certainly comes to mind. Shakespeare may indeed, for all I know, have approved of such adaptations; but, then again, he may not. As ever, we can never know what was going on in his mind. We have to examine the texts ourselves, and use our own judgement. And, comparing the texts I read to some of the adaptations I have seen, I can’t help wondering what judgement would step from this to this.

But none of this answers the question that continues to press upon us: what did Shakespeare actually think about? While awareness of the cultural and political background of Shakespeare’s times certainly helps, we must, I think, rely primarily on the internal evidence of the plays themselves. In short, those dreaded texts. But here too we have problems: rather inconveniently, he was a dramatist, and spoke through different people, and we have no idea whether he used any of his characters as mouthpieces for his own views. There are the sonnets, of course, with which, Wordsworth claimed, Shakespeare unlocked his heart. Perhaps. But, given the endless interpretations and speculations regarding these sonnets, they seem to complicate rather than clarify matters. I personally tend to see most of the sonnets as, as it were, dramatic monologues, spoken by specific characters who may or may not be the poet himself, and the whole sequence, rather than a set of personal confessions, as more an extended and varied meditation on love, sex, and death. Such a way of looking at these sonnets may or may not have been what Shakespeare had intended, but, as ever, we can never know. The texts are there, and we interpret them as best we can; as to what they tell us about Shakespeare as a person – well, who knows?

There are, however, some points where Shakespeare clearly speaks as a poet. We know, for instance, that Shakespeare may well have felt constrained by censorship (“And art made tongue-tied by authority”, from Sonnet 66). And also that Shakespeare knew well just how good he was. For instance:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme…

(Opening lines of Sonnet 55)

That Shakespeare knew well the value of his writing does, incidentally, make it all the more unlikely that, as is sometimes contended, he wouldn’t have cared too much about how his works were adapted. But leaving that aside, these little glimpses tell us little of what kind of person he was, of what he actually thought. And this, I don’t think we can ever know. However, in observing the themes and motifs that recur in his work, we can, I think, reasonably infer at least some of the matters that preoccupied his mind.

He seemed, for some reason, to be taken with the idea of a guiltless woman falsely accused of infidelity. This occurs most spectacularly in Othello, of course, but it had also occurred earlier in Much Ado About Nothing, where it had drawn what had appeared till then to be a sunlit and happy play into a more tragic direction. It had appeared again in two of his very late plays, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. And it had appeared in a comic key in The Merry Wives of Windsor. That Shakespeare kept coming back to this does indicate that it was a matter of some importance to him, but when we wonder why, we, as ever, draw a blank.

Another of his favourite themes was that of brotherly hate – of brother overthrowing brother to take, or usurp, his place. We see this in Richard III, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest. But once again, when we ask ourselves why Shakespeare kept returning this matter, we run up into that brick wall: we simply don’t know, and there’s little point trying to conjecture.

There is a third recurring theme that I can spot, and here, enquiry is, perhaps, a bit more fruitful, and that is the theme of reconciliation, both in terms of people thought lost now restored, and, also, in terms of the healing of past breaches. One of his earliest plays, The Comedy of Errors, ends with people reconciled who had long been thought dead. Of course, reconciliation is the traditional end for a comedy, but Shakespeare, it seems to me, went much further than merely the demands of the comic form; in particular, even while depicting reconciliation, he depicted also its impossibility. What sort of reconciliation can there be when there are those who will not, cannot, be reconciled? Or when the breaches of the past are so vast that they cannot be healed? Shakespeare seemed to consider this matter so seriously that he would unbalance the harmony of comedy rather than be untruthful: the fall of Shylock in the fourth act of The Merchant of Venice is so seismic, that all else seems, to me at least, to become unsettled. For Shylock cannot be reconciled: the breaches made are too wide to be smoothed over, now or ever.

In his next comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare kept his villain, Don John, a relatively minor figure, and had him conveniently removed from the dramatic action before the end, so that his downfall is, in dramatic terms at least, off-stage, and not something that interferes greatly with the general reconciliation at the end. But this reconciliation remains problematic for different reasons. Can reconciliation really be complete given what has happened? Given how Claudio has behaved, even while under a misapprehension? Shakespeare parked this particular question for the while, but was to return to it again in The Winter’s Tale. In As You Like It, Jaques, the man who cannot be reconciled, withdraws voluntarily from the reconciliatory celebrations, thus avoiding the question; but there’s no evading the issue in Twelfth Night: Malvolio is urged to forget all that has happened, and when he refuses, Olivia sends after him to ask him to return; but the very fact that the characters on stage can’t see why a man who has been sexually humiliated in public cannot return tells us all we need to know about why reconciliation here is impossible. These characters on stage may be able to forget about Malvolio in time, but we, the audience, cannot.

This discrepancy between, on the one hand, our profound desire for reconciliation, and, on the other, the impossibility of achieving it, seems to be present just about everywhere one looks in Shakespeare. Prince Hal is reconciled with his father, but that reconciliation necessitates a breach with Hal’s other father, Falstaff: the drama ends not with reconciliation, but with the cruellest of rejections. Prince Hal’s more neurotic Danish cousin, Hamlet, is not reconciled to his father, much though he longs to be: his father had died while he had been at university in Wittenberg, and when he meets his father’s ghost, there seems to be no expression of love or of tenderness on either side. Hamlet is tormented with questioning that the meeting with his father’s spirit does nothing to allay, but he must learn to live with those questions unanswered. Even at the end, there is no answer to these questions, no resolution: once life has ebbed away, the rest is mere silence.

Othello does not even look for reconciliation by the end. Though Desdemona has miraculously forgiven him, seemingly even from beyond death, Othello cannot believe there can be any reconciliation given what he has done. His despair is not merely for this world:

… when we shall meet at compt,
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And fiends will snatch at it.

And even the reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia, ineffably moving though it is, is not beyond questioning. Lear imagines spending the rest of his life happily in prison with Cordelia: this may be fine for him, but hardly the life that Cordelia, for all her forgiving nature, may want for himself. And as Lear ecstatically describes the joy of spending the rest of their lives together in prison, Cordelia remains tantalisingly silent. But even Lear’s vision of happiness in a prison does not come to fruition. Lear dies knowing that Cordelia is gone, and will never come again – “never, never, never, never, never”: no reconciliation then, either in this world, or in the next.

This theme of reconciliation unmistakably comes up to the surface in the three plays often regarded (quite reasonably, I think) as Shakespeare’s last dramatic testament – Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest. Cymbeline is essentially a fairy-tale, and the ending, appropriately, is a fairy-tale like ending, with the good people united and happy, and the malefactors punished (and since these malefactors are mere fairy tale villains, their punishments don’t really cast any significant shadow over the happiness of others, as the fate of Shylock had done in the earlier play). But matters are considerably more complicated in the next two plays.

In the final scene of The WInter’s Tale, miraculous in all respects, we are given what is, essentially, a vision of the Resurrection itself. As with the reconciliation scene between brother and sister towards the end of Twelfth Night, time itself seem to stand still as those who had been thought dead are restored once again to life. I find it hard, even when reading it at home, not to feel here a sense of solemn awe. And yes, there is, indeed, forgiveness, as the play that had contained so much turbulence comes to a glowing and serene end. But what sort of reconciliation is this? It is very subdued. This is not the occasion for torchlit processions of triumph through the streets. Mamilius remains dead; the years of separation and of grieving cannot be called back; all losses aren’t restored, and neither do sorrows end. But this is the best we may hope for, even with the promised Resurrection: the breaches in nature we have made in the course of our lives cannot entirely be healed.

And in The Tempest, there is no reconciliation. Prospero “forgives” only in the sense that he decides not to punish: he has clearly not, nor cannot, forgive the man “whom to call brother would even infect my mouth”. And neither is there contrition on the other side: the evil has not been defeated, and nor can it be – it continues to exist, maybe to erupt again some later day. If this is the resolution of the tempest that had raged in Prospero’s mind, then the resolution is bleak. And if this is indeed, as is often claimed, Shakespeare’s final message for posterity, I can see nothing in that message in which we can take any kind of comfort.

So what kind of man was he? What did he think about? I’m not sure any of us is sufficiently qualified to answer such questions, not even the greatest of Shakespearean scholars. Even when we think we are familiar with his work, we find ourselves, on re-reading, taken quite unexpectedly into quite unfamiliar areas. At least, I do: I freely confess that I can’t keep pace with the workings of this man’s mind. But I do think that he pondered long and hard on the question of reconciliation, on whether the brokenness of life can ever be put right, either in this world or in the next. And, if his last plays are anything to go by, I don’t think he was too optimistic on that score. There is no assurance.

Or maybe there is, and we remain most ignorant of what we’re most assured. But if there is, such assurance is beyond even Shakespeare’s vision.

“Macbeth” in performance

Macbeth seems to me particularly difficult to bring off in performance. At least, I have never seen a version on stage that I have found satisfactory – even productions featuring renowned Shakespeareans in the principal roles have disappointed. Of course, I haven’t seen them all, and I am sure there have been many fine productions that I have missed, but limiting myself (as I must) to what I have seen, far from being overwhelmed, as I should be on seeing a great Shakespeare tragedy, I have all too frequently found myself barely whelmed at all. The film versions I have seen haven’t frankly been much better; and the BBC Shakespeare version (from the early 1980s), despite starring eminent actors Nicol Williamson and Jane Lapotaire in the principal roles, was distinctly disappointing.

I have often wondered why this is. After all, it is dramatically very compact (it’s one of Sheakespeare’s shortest plays), and is crammed full of murders and battles and witches and ghosts and all the rest of it. Part of it, I think, is to do with the pacing. The tension builds powerfully and unremittingly over the first two acts, but after that, although we get a series of extremely memorable scenes (the banquet scene, the sleepwalking scene, etc.), the tension can sag quite alarmingly in the scenes in between. (This is particularly true of the long scene in Act 4 set in England.) Of course, Shakespeare was, certainly by this stage of his career, a master of pacing, and the rather awkward pacing of this play rather inclines me to think that what we have is an edited version of a text that had initially been longer. Be that as it may, it does present some problems in performance.

Another problem, I think, lies in the dramatic content being too exciting. This may seem a rather perverse thing to say, but the “greatness” of any drama we think of as “great” (whatever we may mean by that) lies not so much in the plot – i.e. the sequence of events – but in matters that go deeper; but, with this play, the plot itself is so very exciting on the surface, it becomes difficult for a production to peer beneath that surface: all too often, we find ourselves horrified by what the Macbeths do to others, whereas the heart of the tragedy lies, I think, in what they do to themselves. And if a production fails to bring to the fore this particular horror, this terrible damnation of their souls that they inflict upon themselves, then, no matter how exciting the plot may be, I don’t know that the production can count as a total success. But piercing through the excitement of the plot to see the dark horror at the heart of things is not an easy thing to do. And this, I think, is why so many productions of this play have left me unmoved: the horror of what we see on the surface seems all too often to obscure the even greater horror beneath.

Of course, I am sure there have been many very fine productions of Macbeth: it’s just that stagings of this particular play have disappointed me more often than that of any other major work by Shakespeare. It may, of course, be that I have been unlucky in the productions I have seen. But there is one production I have seen (sadly, not on stage) that seems to be one of the finest of any production I have seen, of any play. And this is the 1978 Royal Shakespeare Company production, directed by Trevor Nunn, and featuring Ian MacKellen and Judi Dench in the principal roles. Fortunately, we have a record of this: the production was filmed for television, and broadcast in 1979. And it is available nowadays on DVD. I saw it again a few days ago: and yes, it was every bit as powerful as I had remembered. Suddenly, all the reservations I have had about the pacing of this play seemed to vanish.

Ian MacKellen and Judi Dench as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

And this was done not through butchering the text: apart from the scene involving Hecate (which is almost certainly a later addition, and not written by Shakespeare), the text presented, a few minor cuts apart, was virtually complete. Even the scene featuring the witches speaking to each other about the latest spells they have cast – a scene all too often excised these days, as modern audiences aren’t taken in by all that superstition – was retained. But what impressed was the way the entire play was conceived.

Although it features battles, witches, murder, a state banquet, and all the rest of it, it eschews spectacle completely. It is staged throughout in a profound darkness, from which the characters emerge at times into a murky kind of light, and into which, their parts done, they vanish again. The lighting is extraordinary. I can but guess at what the effect must have been like live in performance, but, watching it on my television screen, it seemed like a production designed specifically with the screen in mind, rather than a straight filming of a stage production.

Most of the shots are in close-up: some in extreme close-up. The characters, brightly spotlit against a blanket of the dark, are all we can see on screen. Props are kept to a minimum: even in the banquet scene, they appear to be sitting on crates. All this creates a tremendous sense of claustrophobia. (The production was staged in a small theatre, rather in in the main RSC theatre in Stratford, thus ensuring the audience was close to the actors.) After a while, it starts to feel genuinely oppressive, as, indeed, it should.

Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth

None of this would have mattered, of course, if the cast weren’t up to it, but there’s no danger of that. The supporting cast (featuring two actors who were themselves notable Macbeths later in their careers – Bob Peck and Greg Hicks) is uniformly excellent; but in this play, it is the two principals who dominate. And here, Ian MacKellen and Judi Dench give performances that, even on repeated viewings, freeze the soul with terror. We see the most terrible things on stage, of course: at one point, a child is murdered before our very eyes. But at the heart of the tragedy is what these two people do to themselves. In the great banquet scene, Ian MacKellen presents Macbeth as a man who is already mentally unhinged: the sight of him literally foaming at the mouth in sheer terror is not something I’ll forget in a hurry. And in the sleepwalking scene, Judi Dench presents a Lady Macbeth who, while still on this bank and shoal of time, is already a damned soul suffering the torments of Hell. And we can’t but ask ourselves “What have these people done to their immortal souls?”

Ian Mackellen as Macbeth

I saw this production again last weekend, and it remains a nerve-racking experience. Somehow, not even the most frightening of horror films can quite match the intensity of horror projected here.

“Upon such sacrifices…”

The final scene of King Lear starts with Lear and Cordelia, defeated in battle, brought in as prisoners. Cordelia asks whether she can see her sisters, whose wickedness has brought her and her father so low. Lear’s response to this is extraordinary:

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

Magnificent though this is, I am not quite sure how I should take it. It is certainly all too easy simply to revel in the beauty of Shakespeare’s blank verse, in that verbal music he produces that is simultaneously both exquisite and sublime. And certainly, if Shakespeare has chosen – as he obviously has here – to burst into such splendour at this point, then clearly he intended dramatic significance of this splendour to register with the audience. And yet, this dramatic significance is troubling. Does Lear really imagine that he and his daughter could live out the rest of their lives happily in prison? Even if that were possible, would it be desirable? For Lear, possibly: he is an old man, has suffered unimaginable agonies, and would like nothing better than to withdraw from life; but it is hardly desirable for someone like Cordelia, who is still young. And indeed, Shakespeare soon confirms that the heaven Lear imagines for himself and his daughter is illusory: far from living happily in prison with Cordelia for the rest of his life, Lear enters towards the end of this same scene in the utmost despair, with Cordelia dead in his arms.

But if Lear’s glorious lyrical outburst here is simply the deluded imaginings of a man who has lost whatever grasp he had once had of reality, why does Shakespeare make the passage so ethereally beautiful? Is it merely to accentuate the horror when these illusions cruelly shattered? That is certainly one way of looking at it, but that has never seemed very satisfactory to me. The presentation of something so beautiful merely to highlight its pointlessness seems to me a sort of gloating cynicism, a scoffing nastiness, that are quite at odds with the very rich and complex emotions I experience when I see or read this play.

Certainly, immediately after Lear delivers this speech, Edmund brings us down to earth with a very curt “take them away” (these three words completing the line that, in terms of metre, Lear had left unfinished). But then, Lear comes out with the most extraordinary lines of all:

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense.

It is a remarkable idea. In a play that has shown us the extremes of human brutality, Lear now suggests that the gods themselves praise and worship certain aspects of humanity. The implication of this is that humans can rise to a level even higher than that of the gods; and further, that the gods themselves acknowledge this.

Now, if we consider these lines in their specific dramatic context, they are meaningless. It is not possible, even if it were desirable, to detach oneself from life in the manner Lear envisages, to wear out one’s years in a wall’d prison while packs and sects of great ones ebb and flow by the moon. But the very striking nature of these lines seems to me to demand that we also consider them beyond their immediate dramatic context. If regarded solely in the immediate context, the “sacrifices” Lear refers to relates to withdrawing from life; but if we try to see it in a wider context, if we try to see what these sacrifices may be that even the gods themselves acknowledge and worship, we may glimpse, at least, something that may, in some way, mitigate the horror – the horror both of what had happened before, and the horror of what is yet to come. This is not to say that it is wrong to see King Lear as, essentially, a nihilist work; but it is to say, I think, that, despite appearances, there may just be a possibility of redemption.

And if there is such a possibility, it comes not from the gods, but from humanity itself. Lear, earlier in his speech, speaks of being like “God’s spies”. (The play is set in pagan times, but, unless the existing texts are corrupt at this point, it is certainly God rather than the gods Lear refers to here.) There seem to me at least two ways of interpreting this. One is that we must set ourselves the task of spying on God – the implication here being that God is not trustworthy. The other one is that we should spy on God’s behalf, and the implication here is that God himself does not know all that is happening in his creation. Either way, the picture is presented of a God whose capabilities are limited – who is either not wholly good, or not wholly powerful. But when humanity itself can offer up such sacrifices, then the gods themselves (Shakespeare has, rather curiously, switched back to the pagan “gods” now) feel it worthy of worship.

But what are “such sacrifices”? It is clearly not a withdrawal from life that Lear speaks of. But one needn’t look too far. This play depicts, certainly, the most bestial atrocities of which humans are capable; but, in Edgar, in Kent, in Cordelia, and even in Gloucester, it depicts also a human goodness that is equally extraordinary. Are these the sacrifices upon which the gods themselves throw incense? Perhaps. If the gods exist at all, that is. But sadly, we have no assurance of that. This is a play that suggests everything, even redemption; but ultimately, it confirms nothing.

Journey’s end

Hamlet and Twelfth Night were written, it is believed, very close to each other, and, although one is a tragedy and the other a comedy, they often have very similar themes. One issue that seems central to both dramas is the question of how we should mourn our dead. How should we mourn so that we can honour those who have died, and honour also the lives the we, the survivors, must continue to live?

Twelfth Night is a play I love deeply, but one I find very elusive. More so even than the other plays, it never seems to be the same on any two readings: it seems to be made of that changeable taffeta that Feste recommends Orsino to wear. In one of my earlier posts on it, I made it out to be a very dark play – closer in spirit to Hamlet than to, say As You Like It. Perhaps I was going over the top there, but even in my less lugubrious moods, its darker notes seem to me undeniably present. In the few years after writing this play and Hamlet, Shakespeare went on to write a sequence of intensely tragic dramas the likes of which have not been seen since the ancient Athenians. And there seem to me strong connections between Twelfth Night and these dark, tragic dramas: as well as the thematic overlaps with Hamlet, a new verse of the song Feste sings at the end of Twelfth Night appears in, of all places, the storm scene of King Lear. And the final verse of Feste’s song (“A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain…”) is, as a Shakespearean friend of mine recently pointed out, about as desolate as anything in English literature. Has ever a comic drama ended like this?

Now, I wonder if there is also a correspondence between Twelfth Night and Othello – another of those great tragedies written in this period. In one of his other songs, Feste sings:

O Mistress mine where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further pretty sweeting.
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.

“Journeys end in lovers’ meeting.”

Now, Othello, at the most intense point of his tragedy, when he realises what it truly is that he has lost, says “here is my journey’s end”. Was Shakespeare, I wonder, thinking back here on Feste’s song, that he had written only about two years earlier? Of course, the “s” at the end of “journey” in Othello indicates possession, while in Twelfth Night it indicates plurality, but an ear as finely tuned as Shakespeare’s to the music of words would certainly have been aware of the echo. And if this echo was indeed intentional, it seems to me almost unbearably poignant. In Twelfth Night, however dark and melancholy we may take the play to be (and I know opinions vary on this matter), there was still the hope – the expectation, even – that lovers would be united at journey’s end. But Othello, at his journey’s end, has no such expectation: “When we shall meet at compt, this look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, and fiends will snatch at it.” He has lost not only Desdemona: he has lost his own soul, for ever. For what he has done, there can be no forgiveness, no atonement: nor does he even hope for it.

Whichever way I look at it, Twelfth Night foreshadows Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. Which is not to say Twelfth Night is itself a tragic play: it clearly isn’t. But it does seem to me to point towards a traumatic tragic journey, a journey that finds its end only with those mysterious and deeply ambiguous dramas Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – plays which, even after some forty and more years of acquaintance, I still feel I do not adequately understand.