LECTURE 04
THE AGE OF TENDER SONNETS (1576 1616)
4.1. . .
4.1.1. Sir Philip Sidney (15541586) is an English poet, courtier, and soldier, who in life was a model of the ideal Renaissance gentleman, and whose devotion to poetry served as an inspiration for the future of English verse.
A favorite of Elizabeth I, he was sent on several diplomatic missions. He retired from court for a time after incurring the queen's displeasure, but was restored to favor and knighted. He joined an expedition sent to aid the Netherlands against Spain. Sidney died of wounds received in a raid on a Spanish convoy in the Netherlands. None of Sidney's works was published during his lifetime; many of them, however, circulated in manuscript. The best known are Astrophel and Stella (1591), a sequence of 108 sonnets celebrating a hopeless love affair, and Arcadia (1590), a pastoral romance in verse linked by prose passages; the first considerable work in English in this form, it became a model for later pastoral poetry. Sidney's Defence of Poesie (1595) was a prose essay that described the nature of poetry and defended it against Puritan objections to imaginative literature.
4.4.2. Michael Drayton (1563-1631) is an English poet, born in Hartshill, Warwickshire. One of his works, a rendering of scriptural passages in verse, offended the archbishop of Canterbury and was publicly burned. Soon thereafter Drayton wrote Idea's Mirror (1594), a collection of love sonnets. Little is known about his life but several of his sonnets rank among the best creations of the period and are second only to Shakespeares ones.
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S ince there's no help, come let us kiss and part
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel ll our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now, if you would'st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.
4.2. ; . .
4.2.1. Edmund Spenser (15521599) is a great English poet, who bridged the medieval and Elizabethan periods, and who is most famous for his long allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene. Spenser was born in London. He went to Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, where he took a degree in 1576. He entered the service of the English courtier Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and met the English poet Sir Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicated his first major poem, The Shepheardes Calendar. This work demonstrates the great poetic flexibility of the English language. It is a series of 12 pastoral poems written in a variety of meters and employing a vocabulary of obsolete words and coined expressions to give a suggestion of antiquity.
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While residing with the Earl of Leicester in London, Spenser began to write The Faerie Queene. Thereafter, Spenser lived mostly in Ireland, near Cork, where he completed his great allegory. He was visited by the English poet, courtier, and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, who recognized the merit of the poem and brought Spenser to England to publish it and to make the poet known to Queen Elizabeth I. Spenser received an enthusiastic reception, and his poem was hailed on the publication of its first three books.
In 1594 Spenser married and celebrated the event in his Epithalamion, a wedding song, considered the most beautiful example of this genre in English literature. It was printed in the same volume as a group of love sonnets entitled The Amoretti. In October 1598 his castle was sacked and burned by Irish rebels, and Spenser fled to London, where he died on January 13, 1599.
* * *
O ne day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
'Vain man,' said she, 'thou do'st in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eek my name be wiped out likewise.'
'Not so,' quoth I, 'let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name,
Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.'
4.2.2. Spenser's reputation rests mainly on his skillful blending of religious and historical allegory with chivalric romance in The Faerie Queene. As originally planned, according to his introductory letter addressed to Raleigh, the work was to consist of 12 books, each made up of 12 cantos. Only 6 books were completed. As outlined in the introduction, Glorianna, the queen of Fairyland, represents both glory and Queen Elizabeth I, in whose honor 12 knights, who represented the qualities of the chivalric virtues, engage in a series of adventures. Throughout the narrative, the figure of Arthur, the perfect knight, also appears. The six completed books relate the adventures of the knights who represented the qualities of holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy.
4.3. . . .
4.3.1. The Elizabethan Age is considered to be the most glorious period in the development of English theatre. Apart from Shakespeare, there were many other playwrights who distinguished themselves in the field. They are, primarily, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) is an English playwright and poet, considered the first great English dramatist and the most important Elizabethan dramatist before William Shakespeare, although his entire activity as a playwright lasted only six years. Earlier playwrights had concentrated on comedy; Marlowe worked on tragedy and advanced it considerably as a dramatic medium. His masterpiece is The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.
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Born in Canterbury on February 6, 1564, the son of a shoemaker, Marlowe was educated at the University of Cambridge. Going to London, he associated himself with the Admiral's Men, a company of actors for whom he wrote most of his plays. He was reputedly a secret agent for the government and numbered some prominent men, including Sir Walter Raleigh, among his friends, but he led an adventurous and dissolute life and held unorthodox religious views. He was denounced as a heretic; before any action could be taken against him, in May of that year he was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl at Deptford over payment of a dinner bill.
By revealing the possibilities for strength and variety of expression in blank verse, Marlowe helped to establish the verse form as the predominant form in English drama. He wrote four principal plays: the heroic dramatic epic Tamburlaine the Great, Part I (1587), about the 14th-century Mongol conqueror; The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588), one of the earliest dramatizations of the Faust legend; the tragedy The Jew of Malta (1589); and Edward II (1592), which was one of the earliest successful English historical dramas and a model for Shakespeare 's Richard II and Richard III. In each of these dramas one forceful protagonist with a single overriding passion dominates.
Some authorities believe Marlowe also wrote parts of several of Shakespeare's plays. Each of Marlowe's important plays has as a central character a passionate man doomed to destruction by an inordinate desire for power. The plays are further characterized by beautiful, sonorous language and emotional vitality, which is, however, at times unrestrained to the point of bombast. As a poet Marlowe is known for The Passionate Shepherd, which contains the lyric Come Live with Me and Be My Love. Marlowe also translated works of the ancient Latin poets Lucan and Ovid.
4.3.2. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) is an English dramatist and poet, whose classical learning, gift for satire, and brilliant style made him one of the great figures of English literature. Jonson was born in Westminster, educated at the Westminster School, and trained in his stepfather's trade of bricklaying. After serving briefly with the English army in Flanders, he joined the London theatrical company of Philip Henslowe as an actor and apprentice playwright, revising plays already in the repertory.
Jonson's first original play, Every Man in His Humour, was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Company with William Shakespeare in the cast. Later that year, Jonson killed a man in a duel and narrowly escaped execution. His next play was Every Man Out of His Humour. These two works were in the same vein. Jonson had invented a kind of topical comedy involving eccentric characters, each of whom represented a temperament, or humor, of humanity. During the next four years, Jonson also wrote a number of comedies. Later Jonson began to write masques for the entertainment of the court of King James I, apparently fulfilling the role of poet laureate from 1616. The masques displayed his erudition, wit, and versatility and contained some of his best lyric poetry.
At the same time that he was writing for the court, Jonson continued to write for the commercial theater. During this period he produced two historical tragedies and the four brilliant comedies upon which his reputation as a playwright primarily rests: Volpone, Epicene, or the Silent Woman, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. His many non-theatrical pieces, including epigrams, epistles, and lyrics, are collected in a book which includes his most famous song, "To Celia," which begins with the line, "Drink to me only with thine eyes.
Although Jonson's creative talents were many and varied, his considerable effect on English literature of the Jacobean and Carolinian periods was probably the result of his critical theories. He sought to advance English drama as a form of literature, attempting to make it a conscious art through adherence to classical forms and rules. He protested particularly against the mixing of tragedy and comedy. Jonson's importance today rests upon his comedies of manners and their witty, hilarious portrayal of contemporary London life.
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4.4. . . . . .
4.4.1. Roger Ascham (1515-68) is an English scholar and author, a major intellectual figure in Tudor England. At 35, he became the first professor of Greek at Cambridge. He published a popular treatise on archery called Toxophilus (1545). This work, which was a defense of physical recreation for scholars, was dedicated to King Henry VIII of England. The essay pleased the king, who granted the author an annual pension. Ascham was appointed tutor to Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth I, when she was 15. His instruction was at least partially responsible for her proficiency in Latin and Greek and her lifelong love of the classics. He became Latin secretary to the new queen, Mary I. Upon her death, he was appointed secretary to Queen Elizabeth, a post he held for the remainder of his life. He was the author of several scholarly writings, including The Scholemaster. The ideas put forward in it sound remarkable modern.
F irst, let him [the schoolmaster] teach the child cheerfully and plainly the cause and matter of the letter; then, let hint construe it into English so oft, as the child may easily carry away the understanding of it; lastly, parse it over perfectly. This done thus, let the child, by and by, both construe and parse It over again; SO that it may appear, that the child doubteth in nothing that hid master taught him before. After this, the child must take a paper book, and sitting in some place, where no man shall prompt him, by himself, let him translate into English his former lesson. Then showing it to his master, let the master take from him his Latin book, and pausing an hour at the least then 1st the child translate his own English into Latin again in another paper book. When the child bringeth it turned into Latin, the master must compare it with Tully's book, and lay them both together; and where the child doth well, either in choosing or true placing of Tully's words, let the master praise him, and say, 'Here ye do well.' For I assure you, there is no such whetstone to sharpen a good wit, and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.
4.4.2. Its not unimportant to mention Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), French writer, who introduced the essay as a literary form thus producing a major impact on the developing of the genre in English and other European literatures. His essays, which range over a wide variety of topics, are characterized by a discursive style, a lively conversational tone, and the use of numerous quotations from classical writers.. The first two books of his Essais appearedwhen he was 47.
As a thinker Montaigne is noted for his investigation of institutions, opinions, and customs and for his opposition to all forms of dogmatism that have no rational basis. Montaigne observed life with philosophical skepticism; he emphasized the contradictions and incoherences inherent in human nature and behavior. His basic morality tended towards Epicureanism, however, revealing the attitudes of a scholar and humanist who refused to be enslaved by passions and desires.
In literature and philosophy he admired the ancient writers, and in politics he preferred monarchy as the form of government most likely to ensure peace and order. On education, Montaigne, who was interested in the training of the aristocrat, held that the pupil should be taught the art of living. This art is mastered through developing the powers of observation and conversation and through travel. Reading should serve to aid in arriving at correct judgments and not in merely improving the memory. Montaigne insisted on rigorous physical training as part of the development of the whole person, mind and body. Montaignes essays were first translated by the English lexicographer John Florio (1603).
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4.4.3. Another great figure of the English Renaissance is Francis Bacon (1561-1626), philosopher and statesman, one of the pioneers of modern scientific thought. Elected to the House of Commons at 23, he served there for over 30 years. He wrote letters of sound advice to Elizabeth I, queen of England, but his suggestions were never implemented, and he completely lost favor with the queen, when he opposed a bill for a royal subsidy. He regained the respect of the court, however, with the accession of James I to the English throne.
Bacon's writings fall into three categories: philosophical, purely literary, and professional. The best of his philosophical works are The Advancement of Learning, a review in English of the state of knowledge in his own time, and Novum Organum. Bacon's philosophy emphasized the belief that people are the servants and interpreters of nature, that truth is not derived from authority, and that knowledge is the fruit of experience.
Bacon is generally credited with having contributed to logic the method known as ampliative inference, a technique of inductive reasoning. Bacon successfully influenced the acceptance of accurate observation and experiment-tation in science. He maintained that all prejudices and preconceived attitudes, which he called idols, must be abandoned, whether they be the common property of the race due to common modes of thought (idols of the tribe), or the peculiar possession of the individual (idols of the cave); whether they arise from too great a dependence on language (idols of the marketplace), or from tradition (idols of the theater). Bacon's principles had an important influence on the subsequent development of empiricist thought.
Bacon's Essays are his chief contribution to literature. They were published at various times. They exhibit all the virtues of his style such as a sense of confidence and logic as well as his ability to reduce the complex area of human relations to a neat, schematic generalization. At the same time there is much which is rhetorical. Yet many of the quotations have become catchphrases and popular sayings.
LECTURE 05
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE SWEET SWAN OF AVON
(1564 1616)
5.1. .
Shakespeares plays communicate a profound knowledge of the wellsprings of human behavior, revealed through portrayals of a wide variety of characters. His use of poetic and dramatic means to create a unified aesthetic effect out of a multiplicity of vocal expressions and actions is recognized as a singular achievement, and his use of poetry within his plays to express the deepest levels of human motivation in individual, social, and universal situations is considered one of the greatest accomplishments in literary history.
One of the earliest appreciations of Shakespearean poetry is the sonnet by John Milton created a decade after the Bard's death.
* * *
W hat needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labor of an age in piled stones?
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What needst thou such weak witness of thy name?
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Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Has built thyself a livelong monument.
For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,
And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
5.2. . .
A complete, authoritative account of Shakespeares life is lacking, and thus much supposition surrounds relatively few facts. It is commonly accepted that he was born in 1564, and it is known that he was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. The third of eight children, he was probably educated at the local grammar school. As the eldest son, Shakespeare ordinarily would have been apprenticed to his fathers shop so that he could learn and eventually take over the business, but according to one account he was apprenticed to a butcher because of declines in his fathers financial situation. According to another account, he became a schoolmaster. In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a farmer. He is supposed to have left Stratford after he was caught poaching in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy, a local justice of the peace. Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway had a daughter in 1583 and twinsa boy and a girlin 1585. The boy did not survive.
Shakespeare apparently arrived in London about 1588 and by 1592 had attained success as an actor and a playwright. Shortly thereafter he secured the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. The publication of Shakespeares two fashionably erotic narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and of his Sonnets established his reputation as a gifted and popular poet of the Renaissance.
Shakespeares modern reputation, however, is based primarily on the 38 plays that he apparently wrote, modified, or collaborated on. Although generally popular in his time, these plays were frequently little esteemed by his educated contemporaries, who considered English plays of their own day to be only vulgar entertainment.
Shakespeares professional life in London was marked by a number of financially advantageous arrangements that permitted him to share in the profits of his acting company, the Chamberlains Men, later called the Kings Men, and its two theaters, the Globe Theatre and the Blackfriars. His plays were given special presentation at the courts of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I more frequently than those of any other contemporary dramatist. It is known that he risked losing royal favor only once, in 1599, when his company performed the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II at the request of a group of conspirators against Elizabeth. In the subsequent inquiry, Shakespeares company was absolved of complicity in the conspiracy.
After about 1608, Shakespeares dramatic production lessened and it seems that he spent more time in Stratford, where he had established his family in an imposing house called New Place and had become a leading local citizen. He died in 1616, and was buried in the Stratford church.
Although the precise date of many of Shakespeares plays is in doubt, his dramatic career is generally divided into four periods:
(1) the period up to 1594,
(2) the years from 1594 to 1600,
(3) the years from 1600 to 1608, and
(4) the period after 1608.
Because of the difficulty of dating Shakespeares plays and the lack of conclusive facts about his writings, these dates are approximate and can be used only as a convenient framework in which to discuss his development. In all periods, the plots of his plays were frequently drawn from chronicles, histories, or earlier fiction, as were the plays of other contemporary dramatists.
5.3. , - . ; . .
Shakespeares Sonnets were published in 1609, a pirate edition, but had been circulating previously in manuscript form beginning with the mid-1590s. The Sonnets describe the devotion of a character, often identified as the poet himself, to a young man whose beauty and virtue he praises and to a mysterious and faithless dark lady with whom the poet is infatuated. The ensuing triangular situation, resulting from the attraction of the poets friend to the dark lady, is treated with passionate intensity and psychological insight.
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
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Sonnet 66
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
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5.4. . .
Shakespeares first period was one of experimentation. His early plays, unlike his more mature work, are characterized to a degree by formal and rather obvious construction and by stylized verse. Chronicle history plays were a popular genre of the time, and four plays dramatizing the English civil strife of the 15th century are possibly Shakespeares earliest dramatic works. These plays, Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (1590-1592) and Richard III (1592-1593), deal with evil resulting from weak leadership and from national disunity fostered for selfish ends.
Richard III continues the story of Englands dynastic civil Wars of the Roses. The protagonist, Richard of Gloucester, is a Machiavellian villain: a hero who wins the crown by treachery and murder. Yet unlike playwright Christopher Marlowe's supermen, Richard is refined and developed into a more subtle character. Characteristically Shakespearean features are the presence of a nemesis that pursues and destroys Richard, and the subtle implication that Henry Tudor's victory over Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field, which initiated the Tudor dynasty, laid the foundation of the greatness and unity of England.
The four-play cycle closes with the death of Richard III and the ascent to the throne of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, to which Elizabeth belonged. In style and structure, these plays are related partly to medieval drama and partly to the works of earlier Elizabethan dramatists, especially in the bloodiness of many of their scenes and in their highly colored, bombastic language. Here is an example.
CATESBY
Rescue, my Lord of Norfolk, rescue, rescue!
The King enacts more wonders than a man,
Daring an opposite to every danger.
His horse is slain, and all on foot he fights,
Seeking for Richmond in the throat of death.
Rescue, fair lord, or else the day is lost!
[Alarums.] Enter [King] Richard.
KING RICHARD
A horse, a horse! my kingdom for a horse!
CATE.
Withdraw, my lord, I'll help you to a horse.
K. RICH.
Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain to-day in stead of him.
A horse, a horse! my kingdom for a horse!
[Exeunt.]
5.5. . . .
Shakespeares second period includes his most important plays concerned with English history, his so-called joyous comedies, and two of his major tragedies. In this period, his style and approach became highly individualized.
Outstanding among the comedies of the second period is A Midsummer Nights Dream (1595), which interweaves several plots involving two pairs of noble lovers, a group of bumbling and unconsciously comic townspeople, and members of the fairy realm, notably Puck, King Oberon, and Queen Titania.
Two major tragedies, differing considerably in nature, mark the beginning and the end of the second period. Romeo and Juliet (1595) is famous for its poetic treatment of the ecstasy of youthful love. It dramatizes the fate of two lovers victimized by the feuds of their elders and by their own hasty temperaments.
Jul. Ay me!
Rom. She speaks:
O! speak again, bright angel; for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o'er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned wond'ring eyes
Of mortals, that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds,
And sails upon the bosom of the air.
Jul. Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father, and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
Rom. [Aside. ] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?
Jul. Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
5.6. , , , .
Shakespeares third period includes his greatest tragedies and his so-called dark or bitter comedies. The tragedies of this period are considered the most profound of his works. In them he used his poetic idiom as an extremely supple dramatic instrument, capable of recording human thought and the many dimensions of given dramatic situations.
Hamlet (1601), perhaps his most famous play, exceeds by far most other tragedies of revenge in picturing the mingled sordidness and glory of the human condition. It is atragedy of revenge and probably written in 1601. Hamlet is generally considered the foremost tragedy in English drama. Numerous commentaries have been written analyzing every aspect of the play, and interpretation of Hamlets character and motivation continue to be subjects of considerable interest.
The story of Hamlet originated in Norse legend. The earliest written version is Books III and IV of Historia Danica (History of the Danes), written in Latin around 1200 by Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus. Shakespeare's source for Hamlet was either an adaptation of Saxo's tale, which appeared in Histoires Tragiques (1576) by Franois Belleforest, or a play, now lost, which was probably written by English dramatist Thomas Kyd. The lost play is referred to by scholars as Ur-Hamlet, meaning original Hamlet.
Hamlet opens at Elsinore castle in Denmark with the return of Prince Hamlet from the University of Wittenberg, in Germany. He finds that his father, the former king, has recently died and that his mother, Queen Gertrude, has subsequently married Claudius, his father's brother. Claudius has assumed the title of king of Denmark. Hamlets sense that something is rotten in the state of Denmark is intensified when his friend and fellow student Horatio informs him that a ghost resembling his dead father has been seen on the battlements of the castle. Hamlet confronts the ghost, who tells him that Claudius murdered him and makes Hamlet swear to avenge his death. In order to disguise his feelings, Hamlet declares that from now on he will demonstrate an antic disposition. His behavior appears to everyone but Claudius to be a form of madness.
To satisfy his growing questions about whether Hamlet is feigning madness, Claudius makes three attempts to verify Hamlets sanity. In his endeavor he makes use of Ophelia, the daughter of the lord chamberlain, Polonius; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, university friends of Hamlet; and finally Polonius himself. Polonius, sure that Hamlet's madness is the result of disappointed love for Opheliafor Polonius has instructed her to keep aloof from the princearranges a chance encounter between the lovers that he and the king can overhear. Hamlet is not deceived. He bitterly rejects Ophelia and uses the occasion to utter what Claudius alone will recognize as a warning.
In the meantime, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have arrived at court. They talk about the company of players that has followed them to Elsinore. This suggests to Hamlet a means for eliminating all doubts about the king's guilt. He has the players perform a piece, The Murder of Gonzago, that reproduces the circumstances of his father's murder. Claudius interrupts the performance, and Hamlet and Horatio interpret this as a betrayal of his guilt.
Queen Gertrude, angered at what she considers Hamlet's rudeness at the play, summons him to her chamber. On his way Hamlet comes upon Claudius kneeling in prayer. Hamlet overhears the kings plea to heaven for forgiveness for the act that procured him his crown and his queen. No longer doubting the king's guilt, Hamlet still refrains from killing him. He reasons that the present circumstances seem too much like absolution and that he should reserve his revenge for some occasion when Claudius's death would be certain to be followed by damnation.
By the time Hamlet arrives at his mother's chamber, Polonius, with the complicity of both the king and the queen, has concealed himself behind a tapestry in the hope that Hamlet will reveal the cause of his odd behavior. The queen begins the interview in a challenging tone that infuriates Hamlet, who has long brooded over his mothers marriage to Claudius so soon after his father's death. Hamlets response is so violent that Gertrude screams, causing Polonius to cry out for help. Thinking it is the king, Hamlet thrusts his sword through the tapestry and kills Polonius.
Claudius then sends Hamlet to England, escorted by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, ostensibly for the prince's safety but in fact to have him executed on his arrival. During Hamlet's absence Laertes, the son of Polonius, returns from Paris, France, to avenge his father's death. Laertes finds that his sister Ophelia, grief stricken by her father's death at the hands of the man she loves, has gone mad. Her suicide by drowning increases Laertes's desire for revenge.
Meanwhile, Hamlet is attacked by sea pirates and persuades them to return him to Denmark. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however, continue on their way to England; Hamlet has replaced their written order for his execution with another naming them as the victims. When Hamlet returns unexpectedly to witness the funeral of Ophelia, the king suggests to the vengeful Laertes that he challenge Hamlet to a fencing match in which Laertes will use an unprotected foil tipped with poison.
As a backup, should Laertes's skill or nerve fail, the king prepares a poisoned cup of wine to offer Hamlet. In the excitement of the ensuing duel, the queen insists on drinking from the cup. Hamlet and Laertes are both mortally wounded, for in the violence of the bout the rapiers have changed hands. The dying queen warns Hamlet of the poison. Laertes points to the king as the chief instigator, and Hamlet at once stabs his uncle with the poisoned foil. With his last breath Hamlet exchanges forgiveness with Laertes and asks Horatio to make clear to the world the true story of his tragedy.
Fortinbras, a prince of Norway, appears on the scene. He had earlier been granted permission to lead the Norwegian army across Denmark to attack Poland and has now returned from his military campaign. With all of the claimants to the Danish throne dead, Fortinbras claims the crown.
Hamlets volatile character and ambivalent behavior have been the subject of much analysis. One major issue is the question of the hero's sanity. Most critics maintain that Hamlet only pretends madness and then only at certain times. They are supported by Hamlet's explicit avowal to Horatio after he has seen the ghost of his father that he plans to put an antic disposition on.
Many critics believe that Hamlet feigns insanity to conceal his real feelings and to divert attention from his task of revenge. Other critics assert that Hamlet hopes that Claudius, thinking him mad, will lower his guard and reveal his guilt in Hamlet's presence.
Another discussion issue is Hamlets delay in seeking revenge. The conventions of the age during which the play was written provide one possible explanation for Hamlets procrastination. In Elizabethan times, a ghost was generally believed to be a devil that had assumed the guise of a dead person. These ghosts sought to endanger the souls of those nearest the deceased through lies and other damnable behavior. In Hamlet, when the ghost first appears on the palace battlements, no one affirms that it is the spirit of Hamlet's father, only that it looks like him. Hamlet waits to be convinced that the ghost is indeed the spirit of his late father. When Hamlet decides to present The Murder of Gonzago before the king, he states as his motive:
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil; and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea and perhaps
Abuses me to damn me.
However, once he is convinced that the ghost is truly his father, Hamlet still appears to hesitate. Some critics have explained this by analyzing his situation. Because the murder of the late king took place secretly, the Danish court neither suspects nor disapproves of Claudius. His reaction to The Murder of Gonzago is significant only to Hamlet and Horatio, and Hamlet cannot kill the king before publicly proving him a murderer (as he is dying, Hamlet's main concern is that Denmark know his reasons for killing Claudius). Also, if Hamlet kills the king without supporters present to uphold the act, he himself might be immediately killed as a regicide. When Hamlet rushes at the king in the last scene, the whole court with one voice shouts, Treason! Treason! although Laertes has already exposed Claudius's villainy.
Like the Oedipus of Sophocles and Shakespeares own King Lear, Hamlet is a tragic hero and thus largely determines his own fate. Shakespeare portrays him as an extraordinarily complex young manbrilliant, sensitive, intuitive, noble, philosophic, and reckless. He is larger than life, a great repository of emotion and intellect. This unfocused excess of personality is the source of his tragedy. The emotional side of Hamlets nature is almost immediately evident: At the play's opening he is shown consumed by anguish and shock even before he sees the ghost. He has abandoned himself to melancholy; in his first soliloquy, he expresses the wish that suicide were permissible.
Hamlet's emotions occasionally impel him to act precipitously, often with disastrous consequences. During his encounter with Gertrude, for example, he becomes so angry that he does not wait to determine the eavesdroppers identity but immediately runs him through with his saber. Only after doing so does Hamlet ask, hopefully, Is it the king?
Hamlet's impetuosity is not the only factor that complicates an already intricate situation. Hamlet has a superb mind and is able to articulate his thoughts with great precision and wit. His soliloquies reveal that he is of a highly contemplative, generalizing nature, often given to periods of agonizing introspection. The great generalizing power of Hamlet's mind is dramatically revealed in the scene at Ophelia's grave. Instead of planning how best to kill Claudius, he broods over the just-discovered skull of his father's jester, Yorick:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy... Where
are your gibes now, your gambols, your songs?
His thoughts then wander to mortality in general and the futility of even the greatest human achievement:
To what base uses we may return Horatio! Why may
not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander
till he find it stopping a bung hole?...
This kind of imaginative but impractical mental activity helps ensure Hamlet's tragic destiny. A man who soon must pit his life against the fury of Laertes and the guile of Claudius simply does not have the leisure to philosophize about death.
Hamlet's impetuosity and emotionalism is also the source of his major weakness, impatience. In the To be or not to be soliloquy he asks if it is better to suffer and wait, or to put an end to doubts and scruples by acting at once:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
The greatest obstacle to direct action is his own complex personality, and as the soliloquies reveal, he is constantly impatient with himself:
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge... Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event...
I do not know... How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, and mother stained,
And let all sleep?
Hamlet's impatience often prevents appropriate planning, so that when he does act he does not achieve his desired results. In the final scene, anxious to get on with the duel, Hamlet fails to inspect the foils and thus to notice that Laertes's foil is not blunted. This final impatience costs him his life.
Hamlet is not only the most discussed but also the most quoted of Shakespeare's plays. Many of its lines have become well known. The following are among the most famous:
1 This above all: to thine own self be true...
2 There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
3 Brevity is the soul of wit.
4 What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty! in form and moving
how express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals!
Othello (1604) portrays the growth of unjustified jealousy in the protagonist, Othello, a Moor serving as a general in the Venetian army. The innocent object of his jealousy is his wife, Desdemona. In this tragedy, Othellos evil lieutenant Iago draws him into mistaken jealousy in order to ruin him.
King Lea r (1605), conceived on a more epic scale, deals with the consequences of the irresponsibility and misjudgment of Lear, a ruler of early Britain, and of his councillor, the Duke of Gloucester. In the original English legend that King Lear is based upon, Lear, king of Britain, decides in his old age to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. He asks how much they each love him. The two elder daughters overwhelm him with expressions of their love, but the youngest daughter simply says that she loves him as a child should. Enraged at his youngest daughter's reply, Lear drives her into exile and divides the kingdom between the other two. After receiving their share of the kingdom, the ungrateful daughters treat King Lear so cruelly that he flees to the youngest, who in the meantime has married the king of France. This daughter returns to Britain with an army, defeats the wicked sisters, and places Lear again on the throne.
Shakespeare converted the legend of Lear into a great and terrible tragedy. The plays intensity is heightened by Shakespeares portrayals of the madness of Lear, brought on by the cruelty of his older daughters, Goneril and Regan; the murder of his youngest daughter, Cordelia; and the death of Lear with Cordelia's body in his arms. These aspects of the story are original to Shakespeares play, as is the character of the Fool, whose bitter jests bring home to Lear the folly of his action. Both Lear's madness and the Fool's wit raise the explicit theme of the playinhumanity in the form of filial ingratitudeto a higher level of philosophical meaning and resolution.
In Macbeth ( 1606), Shakespeare depicts the tragedy of a man who, led on by others and because of a defect in his own nature, succumbs to ambition. In securing the Scottish throne, Macbeth dulls his humanity to the point where he becomes capable of any amoral act.
5.7. ; ().
The fourth period of Shakespeares work includes his principal romantic tragicomedies. Toward the end of his career, Shakespeare created several plays that, through the intervention of magic, art, compassion, or grace, often suggest redemptive hope for the human condition. These plays are written with a grave quality differing considerably from Shakespeares earlier comedies, but they end happily with reunions or final reconciliation. The tragicomedies depend for part of their appeal upon the lure of a distant time or place, and all seem more obviously symbolic than most of Shakespeares earlier works. To many critics, the tragicomedies signify a final ripeness in Shakespeares own outlook, but other authorities believe that the change reflects only a change in fashion in the drama of the period.
Perhaps the most successful product of this particular vein of creativity, however, is what may be Shakespeares last complete play, The Tempest (1611), in which the resolution suggests the beneficial effects of the union of wisdom and power. The story of The Tempest a storm, a shipwreck, and the adventures of the shipwrecked party on an enchanted islandwas suggested to Shakespeare by reports received in London late in 1610 of the wreck of an English ship off the Bermuda Islands. The survival of the crew during a winter's sojourn in the islands provided a timely topic for a play, but little plot. Somewhere, however, in old stories and in Italian comedies Shakespeare picked up accounts of a banished prince who was also a wise magician. This prince had a fair daughter whom he contrived to marry to the son of a hostile king in order to end an old feud. Shakespeare set these characters and their story in an enchanted island after a shipwreck and the result was The Tempest.
The plot of The Tempest is alone among Shakespeare's plays in observing the unity of time. The play contains something for all tastes: exciting action; lovely songs; a stately masque with music and dancing; the farcical comedy of the monster Caliban, the drunken butler Stephano, and the clown Trinculo; the love story between Ferdinand and Miranda; and, controlling and directing all, the figure of the wise and benevolent magician Prospero. Such theatrical spectacles must have taxed the resources of the Blackfriars stage, the London theater where The Tempest was performed. Yet The Tempest is also a multi-layered, lyrical play, containing beautiful verse, wisdom of thought, and themes of repentance and reconciliation. Above all, there is the sense of finality. The famous lines given to Prospero, beginning with the words, Our revels now are ended," are interpreted by many to announce Shakespeare's retirement from the theater.
LECTURE 06
