The volume has, then, four main personae: the lovely boy, the dark woman, the poet, and the ruined maid. The volume explores love unsatisfied. Neither of the poet’s loves can be satisfied: the worship of the young man, because he is a man; the love of the woman, because it is lust. A Lover’s Complaint shows the predatory nature of sexual desire, a theme of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poems. The ‘Complaint’ completes the sequence in so schematic a way as to disable simple biographical interpretations. Neither of the poet’s loves has the normal end of sexual love, the procreation of children. Yet this unspoken orthodoxy makes sense of the insistent advice to ‘breed’ with which the sequence opens: ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’. But there is no increase.
Shake-speares Sonnets is a puzzling volume, and at first the series seems less than the sum of its parts; but the opposite is the truth. The Sonnets imply a story both complex and unhappy. This surprises those who know the anthology pieces - love’s sensuous appeal in ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ (18); the noble sentiments of ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ (116); the emotion of ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’ (30); the grandeur of ‘Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore’ (60); the melancholy of 73:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves or none or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
The appeal of such poems is not to be denied; compared with other sonneteers, Shakespeare writes a mightier line in a simpler rhyme-scheme, giving a more dramatic delivery. But these excessively beautiful poems, taken together, are rich not only in art and expression, but also in dramatic intelligence. Their generous idealism is gradually penetrated by an understanding of love’s illusions.
Sonnet 73 ends: ‘This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong/To love that well which thou must leave ere long.’ This compliments the young man for continuing to cherish the ageing poet. But this courteous acknowledgement of inequalities in age, rank and love also recognizes that such kind attentions cannot last. The end conceals a reproach: ‘well’ may be a play on the poet’s name, Will. Two later sonnets are entirely devoted to plays on ‘Will’ as Desire. Such signatures encourage us to take the ‘I’, the writer-speaker, as Shakespeare himself; yet the detectives identifying the poet’s loves and the rival poet are all in the dark. The sonnets move between the poles of autobiography and Sidneian romance. Although Shakespeare sounds as if he is speaking openly, the relationships are always dramatized, and they are menaced by rivalries which remain cryptic. ‘Will’ names itself and himself, but gives no names to his loves.
There is one area in which the dramatized voice may be personal. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ ends: ‘So long as men can breathe and eyes can see/So long lives this and this gives life to thee.’ The claim is that this poem will live to the end of time, or for as long as men read English verse aloud. The brag is Shakespeare’s. Yet the claim has to be surrendered. The poet concedes in 126 that the ‘lovely boy’ must be rendered by Nature to Time, the enemy of human love. Two Christian sonnets, 55 and 146, look beyond death and Doomsday, but the series is this-worldly. Shake-speares Sonnets may contain our finest love-poems, but the note is not often that of ‘the lark at break of day arising’. The sequence dramatises the misery of love in this world more than its splendours.
Tragedy
Julius Caesar is based on Thomas North’s 1579 version of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. It is a play of rhetorical power and unusual lucidity, if with a double focus. The murder of Caesar exemplified the medieval idea of tragedy: the
downfall of a great man. Dante had put the assassins Brutus and Cassius alongside Judas in the lowest circle of hell, for treason to one’s lord was then the worst sin. But Brutus is the other hero of the play, an honourable man who makes a tragic mistake. Reformers like John Knox (1513-72) justified tyrannicide. But the noble Brutus, for what seems to him a good reason, commits murder, and his murder and treason haunt him. He is, however, accorded the introspective soliloquies characteristic of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. More generally characteristic of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is the double dramatic focus on Caesar and Brutus. This doubleness, with implicit comparison and transfer of sympathy, was first seen in Richard II, is in many of the plays, and in the title of Antony and Cleopatra.
The four great tragedies - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth - do not conform strictly to a defined type, except that each ends in the death of the hero, just as the comedies end in marriage. Each finds the noble protagonist in an evil plight. Hamlet exclaims, ‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right.’ Such a mismatch is one basis of tragedy: Hamlet is a humanist prince in a Mafia family; Othello is a warrior in a world of love and intrigue; Coriolanus is a Homeric Achilles in modern politics. In the Britain of Lear, goodness has to go into exile or disguise if it is to survive. But Lear is partly responsible for his own tragedy, and Macbeth almost entirely so: it is he who disjoints the time.
Shakespeare did not adhere to one model of tragedy, despite the continuing popularity of A. C. Bradley’s ‘tragic flaw’ theory. In his Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), Bradley famously proposed that each of the tragic heroes has such a flaw: ambition in Macbeth, jealousy in Othello. This misapplies the Poetics of Aristotle, who did not speak of the protagonist’s character except to say that he should be noble but not so noble that we cannot identify with him. Aristotle’s penetrating analysis was based on action, finding that tragedy proceeds from a tragic error - as when Oedipus marries his mother in ignorance - rather than a character-flaw such as jealousy. The tragedies can be understood without Aristotle, even if Shakespeare knew of Aristotle’s notion that a tragedy would inspire feelings of ‘pity and fear’ - as is suggested by the words ‘woe or wonder’ in Horatio’s lines at the end of Hamlet: ‘What is it you would see;/If aught of woe, or wonder, cease your search.’ Shakespeare does not exemplify Aristotle’s admired singleness of focus or unity of action: Hamlet is exceedingly complex, and in Gloucester and his sons King Lear has a secondary plot.
Hamlet
Whatever ideas he had of tragedy, Shakespeare learned the genre from the tragedies he saw when he came to London, such as the revenge plays of Thomas Kyd. These were influenced by the example of the ‘closet drama’ of the Roman Seneca, written to be read, not performed. Thomas Nashe wrote in 1589 that ‘English Seneca read by candlelight yields many good sentences as “Blood is a beggar”, and so forth: an if you intreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.’ Shakespeare’s Hamlet is such a handful, and it relies on familiarity with a previous play about Hamlet, probably by Kyd and now lost. Horatio’s final summary gives the recipe that made tragedy popular:
you shall hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fallen on th’inventors’ heads.
The world of Seneca and of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy is morally corrupt, their incident and language sensationalistic: malignant plotting, cunning death, madness. Hamlet has all this, and its complex plot is conducted with the usual dexterity. Yet it is an entirely new kind of play, for in his long soliloquies we are given unprecedented access to the thoughts and feelings of Hamlet, an admirable hero in a horrible world. The Prince is ‘the expectancy and rose of the fair state’, the ideal Renaissance prince lamented by Ophelia. The heir-apparent knows of the humanist ideal of human nature: ‘What a piece of work is a man!’ But in practice, in the prison of Denmark, ‘man delights not me’. Hamlet ponders, tests out the king’s guilt, outwits those set to watch him, and reproaches his mother, but does not act. His madness is feigned, but he is poisoned by the evil around him, mistreating Ophelia, sparing the life of Claudius when he finds him praying, in case Claudius should be saved from eternal punishment. (A reason for not taking revenge ‘too horrible to be read or uttered’ - Johnson.) Revenge tragedy is premised upon action, and action so extremely deferred increases suspense. Only when Hamlet is sent to England to be killed can he defend himself. He is relieved when he is challenged to a duel; once put out of his misery, he can act. The audience share his relief. The concatenation of deaths in the last scene of Hamlet also produces the strange aesthetic satisfaction peculiar to tragedy: if such dreadful things must be, this is how they should happen.
Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar are based on preceding plays or types of play. Shakespeare’s later tragedies are more original. By reason of its domestic focus, Othello may be for modern audiences the closest of the tragedies. Macbeth is the most intense, sudden, economical; Antony and Cleopatra the most expansive in language and sentiment. But there is space to discuss only Shakespeare’s starkest tragedy.
King Lear
King Lear is larger than the other tragedies in its moral scope. It is a play of good and evil, a parable with little psychology of character. It begins like a fairy tale: the old king asks his three daughters to say which loves him best. His youngest, Cordelia, loves him but is not prepared to outbid her sisters to gain a richer portion of the kingdom. The subplot also has a fairy-tale ending, in which the good brother Edgar defeats the evil brother Edmund in single combat. Virtue triumphs here, but not in the main plot. This ends with a brief scene introduced by the stage direction: ‘Enter Lear, with Cordelia in his arms.’ Lear asks:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Samuel Johnson (1709-84) edited Shakespeare in his middle fifties. He relates that he was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death that ‘I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play’ - until he had to edit it. For ‘Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles.’ Johnson’s reaction was uncommon only in its strength; Nahum Tate had adapted Lear in 1681 to give it a happy ending in which Edgar marries Cordelia, and this version of the play held the stage until the early 19th century. Why does Shakespeare depart from his sources and have Cordelia hanged?
In this play Shakespeare seems to have wished to show the worst pain and the worst evil that could be felt and inflicted by human beings. As usual with him, this is put in terms of the family. What ‘the worst’ is is asked by Edgar, and when Lear carries the dead Cordelia onstage, Kent asks ‘Is this the promised end?’ - a reference to Doomsday. Evil persecutes good through most of the play. Lear’s sufferings when cast out into the storm by his daughters Goneril and Regan drive him mad. Lear’s son-in-law Cornwall puts out the eyes of the loyal Duke of Gloucester, sending him ‘to smell his way to Dover’. These elder daughters are monsters of cruelty and lust. Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, destroys his brother and his father. The tirades of Lear on the heath, his meeting with Gloucester on the beach, and the play’s last scene are terrible to read or to see. There is nothing in English to equal the scenes of Lear, the Fool and Edgar on the heath. Stretches of Lear reach a sublimity beyond anything in secular literature.
Virtue does not triumph in Lear, yet vice fails miserably. Cordelia, Kent and Edgar are as good as Goneril, Regan, Edmund and Cornwall are evil. After Cordelia is hanged, Lear dies and Kent is about to follow his master. Edgar is left to say the last lines:
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
We feel what Edgar says, having seen the most suffering that man can bear. Yet evil has lost: Edgar defeats Edmund; Goneril kills Regan and herself. Good at last prevails, at the cost of the lives of Gloucester, Lear, Cordelia and Kent. Much earlier the Duke of Cornwall suffered a mortal wound from a servant loyal to the Duke of Gloucester - who saw this with his then- remaining eye. Cruelly-treated children preserve the lives of their parents: Edgar succours his blinded father, Cordelia her mad father.
In his preface to Tess (1891), Thomas Hardy supposes that Shakespeare endorses the words of the blinded Gloucester: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’ But Gloucester speaks these words in the presence of his wronged son Edgar, who, disguised as a beggar, cares for his father, twice saving him from despair and suicide. He at last discloses himself to his father, whereat, on hearing the true story of his son’s conduct, Gloucester’s heart ‘burst smilingly’. This wincing paradox offers the audience a cue: not woe or wonder, but woe and wonder.
Earlier the maddened and exhausted Lear has been rescued, tended, allowed to sleep, washed, dressed in new garments, and, to the sound of music, brought back to life by his daughter. He feels unworthy and foolish and twice asks forgiveness. When they are recaptured by their enemies, and sent to prison together, Lear is delighted: ‘Come, let’s away to prison:/We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage:/When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down/And ask of thee forgiveness.’ He adds: ‘Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,/The gods themselves throw incense.’ Edgar had said to the defeated Edmund: ‘Let’s exchange charity.’ Johnson notes: ‘Our author by negligence gives his heathens the sentiments and practices of Christianity.’ Edmund repents - too late to save Cordelia. Lear thanks a man for undoing a button, and calls him Sir.
The play is a struggle between good and evil - a play rather than a tract, but one in which despair is resisted. Christianity does not pretend that goodness is rewarded in this world. Johnson says that the virtue of Cordelia perishes in a just cause: it would be truer to say that Cordelia perishes, but that her virtue does not. That is where Shakespeare leaves the argument, at the point of death, between this world and the next.
It is useful at this point to analyse the penultimate scene of Lear, a glimpse of Shakespeare at work. Before the battle between the army of Cordelia and Lear on the one hand and that of Cornwall, Goneril and Regan on the other, Edgar asks his father, Gloucester, to wait for him.
ACT V, SCENE 2: Alarum within. Enter with drum & colours Lear, Cordelia, & soldiers over the stage; Exeunt.
Enter Edgar disguised as a peasant, guiding the blind Duke of Gloucester.
Edgar: Here, father, take the shadow of this tree For your good host; pray that the right may thrive.
If ever I return to you again I’ll bring you comfort.
GLOUCESTER: Grace go with you, sir. Exit Edgar
Alarum and retreat within. Enter Edgar
Edgar: Away, old man. Give me your hand. Away.
King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta’en.
Gloc: No further, sir. A man may rot even here.
EDGAR: What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure Their going hence even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all. Come on.
GLOC: And that’s true too.
Exit Edgar guiding Gloucester
Edgar’s farewell in line 3 means that he will do or die. Yet the blind Gloucester’s prayers, if any, are not answered; Edgar brings him no comfort. Gloucester wishes to stay; he cares not if he is captured, like Lear. But Edgar will not let his father despair; he reminds him that men must be ready to die, not choose the moment of their death. The brunt of the scene is given in lines 5 and 10. But the tree adds much: the tree, linked with the words ‘rot’ and ‘ripeness’, raises the kindness of lines 1-4 and the wisdom of lines 8-9 to something consciously Christian. The tree helps Edgar remind us that men, like fruit, do not chose to enter the world; and that men must not choose to fall and rot, but be ready for the death God sends. With a tree and some simple words - and with no mention of trees in Eden or on Calvary - much can be done in ten lines.
Shakespeare went no deeper in tragedy than King Lear. Macbeth, Antony and Coriolanus are later, not darker. Although Macbeth’s vivid soliloquies take us so intensely into his mind, his evil is far graver than Lear’s arrogance, and the poetic justice refused at the end of Lear is inevitable in Macbeth.
National life from 1603 to 1660
We have already observed that, as Shakespeare's career suggests, there was no abrupt change in either life or literature at the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603; and in fact the Elizabethan period of literature is often made to include the reign of James I, 1603-1625 (the Jacobean period [Footnote: 'Jaco'bus' is the Latin form of 'James.']), or even, especially in the case of the drama, that of Charles I, 1625-1649 (the Carolean period). Certainly the drama of all three reigns forms a continuously developing whole, and should be discussed as such. None the less the spirit of the first half of the seventeenth century came gradually to be widely different from that of the preceding fifty years, and before going on to Shakespeare's successors we must stop to indicate briefly wherein the difference consists and for this purpose to speak of the determining events of the period. Before the end of Elizabeth's reign, indeed, there had been a perceptible change; as the queen grew old and morose the national life seemed also to lose its youth and freshness. Her successor and distant cousin, James of Scotland (James I of England), was a bigoted pedant, and under his rule the perennial Court corruption, striking in, became foul and noisome. The national Church, instead of protesting, steadily identified itself more closely with the Court party, and its ruling officials, on the whole, grew more and more worldly and intolerant. Little by little the nation found itself divided into two great factions; on the one hand the Cavaliers, the party of the Court, the nobles, and the Church, who continued to be largely dominated by the Renaissance zest for beauty and, especially, pleasure; and on the other hand the Puritans, comprising the bulk of the middle classes, controlled by the religious principles of the Reformation, often, in their opposition to Cavalier frivolity, stern and narrow, and more and more inclined to separate themselves from the English Church in denominations of their own. The breach steadily widened until in 1642, under the arbitrary rule of Charles I, the Civil War broke out. In three years the Puritan Parliament was victorious, and in 1649 the extreme minority of the Puritans, supported by the army, took the unprecedented step of putting King Charles to death, and declared England a Commonwealth. But in four years more the Parliamentary government, bigoted and inefficient, made itself impossible, and then for five years, until his death, Oliver Cromwell strongly ruled England as Protector. Another year and a half of chaos confirmed the nation in a natural reaction, and in 1660 the unworthy Stuart race was restored in the person of the base and frivolous Charles II. The general influence of the forces which produced these events shows clearly in the changing tone of the drama, the work of those dramatists who were Shakespeare's later contemporaries and successors.
Lesson 40. Test
