Irony - A kind of humour resulting from the fact that the reader or audience knows that the 'real' meaning of a statement may not be the same as its literal meaning. In Othello, it is ironic that almost all the other characters call Iago 'honest Iago', when the audience knows from the very first scene that he is dishonest and proud of it!
Machiavelli - An Italian statesman and political theorist who wrote about statecraft during Shakespeare's lifetime. His ideas were widely discussed throughout Europe, and often appear in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. He was interested in the idea that 'the end justifies the means'. In other words, the effective use of power may have to involve unethical behaviour in order to achieve a desired result. In Othello, Iago is an example of a Machiavellian antihero. He will do anything in order to achieve his ends.
Metaphor- A comparison which is implicit or indirect rather than explicit. Two ideas or images are compared by using language appropriate to both of them within the same statement or line(s) of poetry. The effect is often complex and thought-provoking.
Oxymoron-A figure of speech in which contradictory terms are brought together in what is at first sight an impossible combination — such as 'living death'.
Plot -The order in which a play's storyline unfolds. Shakespeare often used existing stories for his plays, but he made his own decisions about the order in which the story would be revealed and sometimes changed the events in the story, too. For instance, in Othello, he used a basic storyline written by an Italian writer, Cinthio, but he made many alterations to the plot and completely changed both the beginning and the ending, making the story much more powerful and dramatic.
Protagonist- A character (usually the hero or heroine) who is important as an agent of change, influencing the events through which the plot unfolds.
Pun - A kind of joke which relies on a double meaning. A word or phrase has one obvious meaning, but the reader or audience is also aware of a second meaning, which is often rude or funny. We see examples when reading extract from the Tame of The Shrew.
Reliable and unreliable witnesses - A playwright often presents a character through the words and opinions of others. This is made more complex and interesting because of the fact that the audience will also have to work out whether these 'witnesses' are reliable or unreliable — in other words, can we trust what they have to say, or should we immediately suspect that the opposite is true? Shakespeare often used this technique to introduce major characters. In Othello, both Othello himself and Desdemona are introduced in this way. This creates intense curiosity as to their 'real' characteristics and encourages the audience to focus carefully on their first appearances on the stage.
Representation - The way in which an idea or a particular group of people are presented. For instance, in Othello Shakespeare offers interesting representations of women through the range of female characters. Attitudes towards race in Shakespeare's time are also explored through the representation of a black hero and the ways in which he is perceived and treated by the Venetians.
Rhyming couplet -Two consecutive lines which rhyme. These are often used at the end of a speech to sum up an idea or series of ideas. Rhyming couplets can also suggest witty humour or a trivial attitude.
Simile-A comparison between two ideas or images which is made explicit, often by using the words 'like' or 'as '.
Soliloquy - A speech in which a character shares his or her inner thoughts with the audience, as if thinking aloud. Even if there are other characters on the stage, the audience is encouraged to believe that they cannot hear what is being said in the soliloquy.
Tragedy- A drama in which the protagonist is in conflict with fate or a superior force, leading to an unhappy or disastrous conclusion. Often, a flaw in the protagonist's character brings about his or her downfall. In Othello, his tendency to experience jealousy makes the hero vulnerable to the forces of disorder represented by Iago.
Tragic flaw-A weakness within the character of the hero or heroine of a tragedy, which eventually leads to his or her downfall. In Greek tragedy, fate played the biggest part in bringing tragedy upon the characters. Shakespeare developed a more psychological version, in which the characters' actions and personalities interacted with aspects of earthly reality. Othello's tragic flaw could be said to be his jealousy.
Tragic hero -The main protagonist in a tragedy. Othello is one of Shakespeare's greatest tragic heroes.
Unities- In Greek tragedy, the intensity of the drama was heightened through observing the 'unities' of time and place.
This meant that the action had to occur within one location or setting, and within a short space of time, often one day. Although Shakespeare did not observe the unities strictly, he often confined the action of his tragedies to quite a considerable extent in order to create a feeling of claustrophobia and inevitability. In Othello, most of the action takes place in Cyprus and the final scenes are focused around Othello's lodgings in the citadel. This helps to create a claustrophobic atmosphere in which tragedy seems more and more inevitable. Shakespeare also contracts time during the play's middle section, making the rise of Othello's jealousy seem to occur at a terrifying pace.
Shakespeare
Shakespeare's life
The English poet and playwright (= writer of plays) William Shakespeare is often described as the greatest writer in the English language.
Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April 1564. He was the eldest son of a wealthy glove maker and wool merchant.
Little is known about his childhood, but he probably attended the local grammar school. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, and they had three children.
In 1588 Shakespeare moved to London and joined a leading theatre company called the Chamberlain's Men. He quickly established a reputation as a writer of plays for the company and appeared in his own dramas at the Globe Theatre. He also wrote many poems, the best known of which are The Sonnets, a series of love poems addressed to an unknown man and a dark lady. The poems are famous for their beautiful language and strong emotions.
Shakespeare returned to Stratford-upon-Avon in about 1611 and died there in 1616. Ben Jonson, a playwright and friend of Shakespeare, wrote of him: 'He was not of an age, but for all time.'
The plays
Shakespeare's most famous works are the 36 plays he wrote for the London stage. The comedies include The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. The most famous history plays are Richard II and Richard III, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2) and Henry V. Perhaps his greatest works are the tragedies, which include Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare's career as a playwright ended with two romances, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Some plays, such as The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, do not fit easily into any group.
The plays are written mainly in verse and are greatly admired for their poetic language, dramatic technique and literary style. Many people in Britain and the US study Shakespeare at school and learn whole speeches by heart. Among the most well-known lines are:
'To be, or not to be: that is the question
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?
To die: to sleep;
No more; and, by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause...'
Hamlet, Act III, Scene i
Some scholars have developed theories that the plays were created not by Shakespeare but by writers such as Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe. These theories generally attract little support, though it is possible that other writers may have contributed to some of the plays.
Shakespeare on the stage
Shakespeare's plays are regularly staged all over the world. In Britain they are often performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. At the new Globe Theatre, recently rebuilt near the site of the original theatre, plays are presented in conditions similar to those experienced by audiences in Shakespeare's time.
Many actors consider performing major roles such as Hamlet, Othello and Lady Macbeth to be the height of their stage careers. Among the greatest Shakespearean actors have been David Garrick, Edmund Kean, and Henry Irving and, more recently, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike, Peggy Ashcroft, Ian McKellen, Antony Sher and Kenneth Branagh.
The plays of Shakespeare are constantly being reinterpreted by new generations of theatre directors, who find different ways of making them relevant to modern audiences. It is common for the plays to be set in different historical periods, even though the actors continue to speak their lines in the original Elizabethan English. Some plays have been made into operas, musicals and films.
Shakespeare's plays and their dates
158990 Henry VI, Part 1
159092 Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3
159094 The Comedy of Errors
Titus Andronicus
Love's Labour's Lost
1592 The Taming of the Shrew
159293 Richard III
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
1595 A Midsummer Night's Dream
Richard II
159596 Romeo and Juliet
159597 King John
1596 Henry IV, Part 1
159698 The Merchant of Venice
1597 The Merry Wives of Windsor
Henry IV, Part 2
1598 Much Ado About Nothing
1599 Julius Caesar
Henry V
As You Like It
160001 Hamlet
160002 Twelfth Night
160102 Troilus and Cressida
160203 All's Well That Ends Well
1604 Othello
160405 Measure for Measure
160506 King Lear
Macbeth
160509 Timon of Athens
160607 Antony and Cleopatra
160708 Coriolanus
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
160910 Cymbeline
1611 The Winter's Tale
1613 Henry VIII
The Tempest
Comedy
Shakespeare’s early plays are mostly comedy and history, kinds of play more open and inclusive than tragedy. Comedy came easily to Shakespeare. Half of his dramatic output is comic, and his earlier critics, from Jonson to Johnson, preferred his comedy.
The writing in his earliest surviving play, Two Gentlemen of Verona, is already accomplished. It is a love-comedy with familiar ingredients: a duke, young rivals, a father called Antonio, a daughter who dresses as a boy to follow her lover, a ring, a glove, a friar’s cell, comic servants, a song (‘Who is Silvia?’). Plot is stronger in The Comedy of Errors, based on a Roman comedy by Plautus (c.254-184 BC) which Shakespeare would have studied at school, about identical twins with the same name, Antipholus. Shakespeare is confident enough to give the Antipholus twins identical twin servants called Dromio, and to manage the complications.
Comedy was easier to write than history: there was a repertory to hand in Roman comedy and medieval romance, and the humanist wit and polish of Lyly. To write a history, Shakespeare had to turn chronicle into drama, but in comedy he had a stock of devices already proven on the stage - disguise, mistaken identity, the contrasting perspectives on love of men and women, parents and children, masters and servants. Alternation of perspective, contrast and variety became a structural principle in all his plays.
In comparison with Two Gentlemen, the Henry VI plays are elementary, though Richard III, like The Shrew, is a strong stage-play. But nothing in the first histories prepares us for the brilliance of Love’s Labour’s Lost and the maturity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, plays without direct sources for the plot. In Love’s Labour’s Lost the King of Navarre and three friends vow to forswear the company of women for three years while they pursue wisdom in a ‘little academe’. The Princess of France and three of her ladies arrive; the men fall in love but daren’t tell each other; the ladies disguise themselves and make the men look foolish. Their decision to break their vows and woo the ladies is rationalized by the witty Biron:
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire.
They are the books, the arts, the academes That show, contain and nourish all the world.
At an Interlude of the Nine Worthies, put on by characters from a comic subplot, news comes of the death of the Princess’s father. The comedy ends not in four weddings but in a funeral and a year’s mourning. The men’s efforts to continue their wooing are repulsed; Biron is reminded by his lady Rosaline that ‘A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear/Of him that hears it, never in the tongue/Of him that makes it.’ She sends him to do charitable work, and ‘jest a twelve-month in a hospital’. The play closes with the cuckoo’s song of Spring, answered by the owl’s song of Winter.
This ‘conceited comedy’ is carried off by a play of language and ideas so high-spirited that its sudden stop, the loss of love’s labour in death, is a shock. After the gallantry and laughter, the black clothes of the Messenger tell the Princess his news before he speaks. To make action comment upon words thus at the climax shows mastery of theatre. Death interrupts the interlude, and the dismissal of love’s labourers is followed by the cuckoo and the owl. Rosaline is the first typically Shakespearean heroine - a woman of sounder understanding than the man who swears love to her. Love is folly, but necessary folly; for foolish mistakes are the only way to learning. Biron: ‘Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves/Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.’
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare’s wit and complexity go even further in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play involving four marriages and ‘a most rare vision’. Duke Theseus of Athens is to wed the Amazon Queen, Hippolyta; two young Athenian couples (after much confusion in a wood near Athens) also marry. The King and Queen of the Fairies, Oberon and Titania, quarrel passionately over an Indian boy; Oberon makes Titania fall in love with Bottom, a weaver who is rehearsing (in another part of the wood) a play for the Duke’s wedding.
The source for the Athenian part of the story is Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale; Shakespeare adds to the triangle of young lovers a second woman, in love with a man who scorns her. (A foursome permits a happy ending without loss of life.) Puck, servant to the classical Oberon and Titania, is a creature from English folklore. Bottom and his friends, straight from the streets of Stratford, choose to play Pyramus and Thisbe, a love-tragedy from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. With great assurance, Shakespeare choreographs these disparate elements in an action on four levels: fairy king and queen, legendary hero and heroine, fashionable young lovers, and English tradesmen.
Puck adds supernatural confusion to the effects of love and midsummer moonlight. Directed by Oberon, he puts an ass’s head on Bottom, and squeezes the love-inducing juice of a magic herb onto Titania’s eyelid. She wakes and loves the first creature she sees - the asinine Bottom, whom she carries off to her bower. The love-juice causes operatic mayhem among the four young lovers in the wood. But Jack shall have Jill: Oberon makes Puck put everything right in time for the wedding. The wedding-eve of the Duke (and the lovers) is taken up with the play of Pyramus and Thisbe, lovers who, each convinced the other is dead, commit suicide. The innocent artisans’ efforts at tragedy are met by the laughter of the court, and audiences always laugh at the lovers’ suicide; ‘very tragical mirth’. It is a brilliantly unsuitable play for a wedding. Shakespeare used a similar tragedy of errors to end his next play, Romeo and Juliet.
If comedy is tragedy averted, it is often in Shakespeare averted narrowly. The passions of the lovers in the wood read conventionally, but this predictability and interchangeability is intended by Shakespeare - as is brought out in Benjamin
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Britten’s 1960 opera of the play, where the four voices sing duets of love and hate, which turn into a final harmonious ensemble. The fierce jealousy of the fairies is expressed in a sumptuously baroque poetry, while the irrationality of sexual possession is suggested only lightly in the love of the goddess Titanic for Bottom. The unimaginative Bottom says when he wakes up:
‘I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was - there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had - but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream”, because it hath no bottom...’
The earthy Bottom puts his enjoyment of the fairy queen in terms that parody St Paul’s account of Heaven (1 Corinthians 2:9). Bottom’s bottomless dream is the subject of the play: love, moonlight and madness. Hippolyta observes: ‘’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.’ Theseus replies:
More strange than true. I never may believe These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact.
... And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name...
To the Athenian reason of Theseus, the story of the night is incredible; to Hippolyta it testifies to something real.
hippolyta: But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy.
They exchange roles in their reactions to the Interlude.
hippolyta: This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
THESEUS: The best in this kind are but shadows, and the shadows actors
worst are no worse if imagination amend them. hippolyta: It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs. theseus: If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, then they may pass for excellent men.
This pair of exchanges tells us much about Shakespearean drama. The play-within-a-play was a device he favoured: the players become spectators at a play; the playhouse audience are both godlike spectators and foolish shadows. Hippolyta, who found truth in dreams, cannot accept the play; whereas her rational lord lends his imagination to complete the inadequacy of the images. Are dream and play the same? Which can we trust?
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That all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, as Jaques says in As You Like It, was a common conceit. A poem by Ralegh puts it neatly:
What is our life? a play of passion, our mirth the musicke of division, our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are drest for this short Comedy,
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss, our graves that hide us from the searching sun,
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done,
Thus march we playing to our latest rest,
Only we die in earnest, that’s no jest.
At the last, in The Tempest Prospero predicts that the stage, ‘the great globe itself, will dissolve.
Shakespeare now produced a series of more mature comedies in which averted tragedy comes much closer, as in The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing. He wrote the love-tragedy Romeo and Juliet and the political tragedy Julius Caesar. Hamlet was written about 1600, as was As You Like It.
Twelfth Night, written in 1601, is discussed next as the example of a mature love comedy. In order of composition, there follow what late 19th-century critics called the ‘problem plays’, Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well, bittersweet love-comedies, and Troilus and Cressida, a harshly satirical version of Trojan love and Greek heroism. While most plays address a problem, the moral conundrums which these plays address are not resolved by the weddings with which they end; their spirit is satirical, baffling rather than comic.
Measure for Measure addresses sexual crime and punishment. Chastity is exemplified by the aspirant nun Isabella and the puritan magistrate Angelo, appointed to clean up the vices of Vienna. She pleads for the life of her brother Claudio, forfeit for having made his fiancée pregnant; the price Angelo asks is Isabella’s maidenhead. The Duke of Vienna disguised as a friar works a ‘bed-trick’, in which Angelo sleeps with his fiancée Mariana, thinking her Isabella; and a ‘head-trick’, in which a murderer is executed instead of Claudio. In the denouement the Duke unties the knot by tying four other knots, marrying Isabella himself. Marriage is better than convent or brothel: but the theatricality of the Duke’s measure points to the intractability of the issues. The tragedies that follow Hamlet also address intractable problems: the justifiability of tyrannicide; the corruption of personal honour by ambition and power; and the fate of goodness in the world.
Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night, which marks the mid-point of Shakespeare’s career, is a ripe love-comedy with a happy ending. Shipwrecked separately on the coast of Illyria are twins, Viola and Sebastian, each thinking the other drowned; each ends up marrying well.
As in most Shakespeare plays about love, the protagonist is a girl, Viola. She disguises herself as a boy (Cesario), to evade detection rather than to pursue a young man. Cesario (Viola) is employed by the young Duke Orsino to carry his love to the young Olivia. Both Olivia and Viola mourn a brother. Viola falls in love with Orsino,
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however, and Olivia falls for Cesario. Orsino’s opening words had announced the theme of longing:
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it that, surfeiting The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall.
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more,
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
This play is as much music as action: the players dance to a series of variations upon love. Orsino and Olivia overdo the love-sickness. When Orsino says that women’s hearts lack retention, Viola disagrees:
My father had a daughter loved a man As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman I should your lordship.
ORSINO: And what’s her history?
viola: A blank, my lord. She never told her love...
Viola’s love is discreet, patient, unpossessive, undisclosed. Beneath the plangent strings there is a scherzo of wind instruments led by Sir Toby Belch, who sits up late guzzling the cakes and ale of his niece Olivia, and singing loud catches, to the disgust of Malvolio. Olivia’s steward, as his name suggests, is ‘sick of self-love’. He is tricked by a forged letter written by another servant, Maria, into thinking that his mistress wants him to woo her. In a very funny scene, Malvolio’s declarations convince Olivia he is mad. Olivia is herself tricked into marrying Viola’s lost twin Sebastian. Viola reveals herself to her restored Sebastian. Maria marries the undeserving Toby, and Viola her wonderful Orsino. The humiliated Malvolio is unmated; as is the clown Feste, who sings the songs, ‘O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?’, ‘Come away, come away death’ and ‘When that I was and a little tiny boy’.
Feste is one of Shakespeare’s best fools. Henry VIII and James I kept licensed fools; the Popes kept one until the 18th century. Shakespeare developed the jester into a choric figure. His fools joke and sing, and make fun of their betters - as did the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Feste’s songs are sad, and there is a balance in the play between those things which make romance and fairy tale - discoveries, recognitions, the promise of love fulfilled, the restoration of a lost twin - and a sense of a time-governed world in which these wished-for things do not happen. Viola and Sebastian are identical brother and sister; Shakespeare was the father of such twins, of whom the boy died, aged 11.
Sexual possessiveness is a theme of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado. It becomes more insistent in the ‘problem plays’ and Hamlet, King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, and is the subject of Othello and half of The Winter’s Tale. Among the many variations of love explored in Twelfth Night there is no jealousy; it is Shakespeare’s last innocent play.
The poems
What Shakespeare wrote before he was 28 does not survive. His best non-dramatic poems are found in the volume entitled Shake-speares Sonnets, published in 1609. His sonneteering began in 1593-4, the year in which he also published Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, longish verse- narratives of sexual passion, modelled on Ovid.
In a tale adapted from the Metamorphoses, Venus pursues the unwilling youth Adonis, who dies; sexual desire and love are exemplified and discussed. In a tragic episode from early Roman history, Tarquin rapes the noble matron Lucretia, who commits suicide. Shakespeare finds it difficult to take either story quite seriously throughout: playful erotic comedy is more successful in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander than in Venus and Adonis. In the Shakespeare poems, rhetoric calls attention to itself at the expense of narrative. Resistance to sexual passion is comic in Adonis, admirable in Lucrece, but the achievement of the poems lies less in the narrative than in the dramatic depiction of Tarquin’s mental state as he approaches his crime. ‘Tarquin’s ravishing strides’ are later applied to Macbeth.
The sonnet carried the medieval doctrines of love into modern European poetry; the first sonnet in English is found in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and sonnets appear in early Shakespeare plays as love-tokens. The dramatist followed the example of other sonneteers in composing his love-sonnets as a sequence. He had allowed some of them to circulate ‘among his private friends’ before 1598. Their apparently unauthorized publication in 1609 may not have been against his will.
Secrecy was part of the convention of sonneteering, and much in this unconventional sequence is not transparent; yet it projects an intelligible story. There are 126 sonnets to a fine young man, followed by 26 to a dark woman. The love-poems to the young lord at first beg him to have children so that his beauty will not die. The poet then claims that the lovely boy’s beauty will not die since these poems will keep him alive until the end of time. The man’s physical beauty, it emerges, is not matched by his conduct. The poet’s love is ideal and unselfish, but the addressee coolly exploits the devastating effect of his looks and his rank. The poet attempts to believe the best, but his unease grows and breaks out in disgust: ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’. In the twelve-line sonnet 126, the poet drops his claim that poetry will preserve youthful beauty - and unselfish love - against Time and death.
If it is a surprise to discover that the Sonnets express an ideal love for a beautiful man, it would have been more of a surprise for sonnet-readers to find that the poet’s mistress is neither fair, young, noble, chaste nor admirable. His love for the ‘woman coloured ill’ is sexual and obsessive. Her sexual favours make her ‘a bay where all men ride’, yet the poet’s illicit relation with her requires mutual pretences of love. Finally, in sonnet 144, ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’, the lovely boy and the dark woman come together in a sexual union which doubly betrays the poet. The sequence ends in humiliated revulsion, and is followed by two frigid epigrams on the burns inflicted by Cupid, and also a stanzaic narrative of 329 lines, A Lover’s Complaint, which
some now think to be by Shakespeare, and part of the design of the Sonnets volume. In it, a shepherdess complains of being seduced and abandoned by a young man of extraordinary beauty and eloquence. This anti-idyll clarifies the design and the theme of the Sonnets, for the ‘Lover’ is the chateau-bottled seducer of 1-126, as experienced by one of his victims.
