chapman e432 shakespeare spring 09

Home Page for English 432

2008-11-15T12:14:00.000-08:00

Welcome to E432, Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Romance Plays
Spring 2009 at Chapman University in Orange, California

This blog will offer posts on all of the plays on our syllabus. The notes are optional reading, but I encourage you to read the entries as your time permits. While not exact copies of my lecture notes, they should prove helpful in your engagement with the plays and in arriving at paper topics.

The editions used are Bevington, David, ed. Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Longman, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0-321-36628-3 and Bevington, David, ed. Shakespeare’s Romances and Poems. Longman, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0-321-36625-2. If you use a different edition, please use one that offers good notes on the language and context of the plays. (The Riverside Shakespeare is excellent, and the Arden and Folger paperback series are very good as well.)

A dedicated menu called E432 Spring at WWW.AJDRAKE.COM/WIKI contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course. When the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Here are offsite links to my notes on other Shakespeare plays: Richard III | Sonnets | The Taming of the Shrew | Richard II | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | The Merchant of Venice | I Henry IV | Much Ado about Nothing | Henry V | As You Like It | Twelfth Night | Measure for Measure | Cymbeline

Week 15, The Tempest

2008-11-15T12:13:00.000-08:00

Notes on Shakespeare’s The Tempest

General Notes on The Tempest

Northrop Frye says that the basis of tragic vision is Being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation. In the tragic vision death is not an incident in life or even the inevitable end of life, but the essential event that gives shape and form to life. Death is what defines the individual... (Fools of Time, 3). By contrast, if we take our cue from Frye, the romance pattern is cyclical, not linear; death does not define life but rather the characters in the romance will have a chance to redeem themselves and the order within which they function. The social order goes in cycles of regeneration, just as the seasons do.

But I make romance sound a little too much like comedy, whereas it seems to me that romance is somewhere between tragedy and comedy. Both comedy and romance depend partly on the renovation of a corrupt social order by temporary removal into a green world of nature where magic rules and people can turn things around. The ancient seasonal myth is very much a part of both comedy and romance, though it is even more pronounced in romance. What distinguishes romance from tragedy and comedy is probably its ambivalence—for example, although The Tempest has a happy ending and Prospero is a benevolent ruler both on his island and, we presume, when he returns to Milan , it is easy to see that he is potentially a tyrant and might or could misuse his powers. Death, disorder, and tyranny are real threats in The Tempest, even though things turn out for the best. The quest motif is very strong in romance—all you have to do is think of Spenser’s The Faery Queen, with its Knight in pursuit of a Lady. Love is a prominent theme of exploration, and the sense of magic and strangeness pervades the romance genre. Exploration in itself is matter for exploration, which explains why certain critics have seen Caliban’s circumstances as similar to those of native people colonized by Europeans. Shakespeare’s romances are Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Scene-by-Scene Notes on The Tempest

Act 1, Scene 1

The first thing we see is that authority is the matter in question—the boatswain is not interested in paying reverence to King Alonzo; he has more important things to do at the moment. Gonzalo already appears to be a philosopher—he keeps his council even in a crisis. The storm, therefore, functions as a great leveling influence, at least at this point in the play. Still, Shakespeare is not about to ratify anarchy; this is a romance play, and the basis of the social order is about to be scrutinized. The civil order has broken down and the characters have been compelled by Prospero to the island where things will be sorted out.

Act 1, Scene 2

In this scene, we see that there is need for a movement from ignorance to knowledge on the part of Miranda, Prospero’s 15-year-old daughter. She does not know that her father was the Duke of Milan, and they have been on this island since she was three years old. Miranda possesses sympathetic power of her own—she feels the suffering of those who have been shipwrecked. But Prospero says that no harm has been done and that the shipwreck was arranged for her sake. The question is, how to come by one’s legitimate identity? Miranda must learn about her former place in the social order and prepare for her future role.

As for the status of Prospero as a magician, we are being set up for an important consideration: Prospero has been stripped of civil power by his exile, and he has put on a different kind of power signified by his magic robe. What kind of power is it that he now possesses? What is the source of that power? We should not think that this power will ultimately be self-sufficient—a return to the civil order looms beyond the framework of the immediate dramatic situation.

Prospero is not entirely without blame for his own exile—he devoted himself to secret studies in the liberal arts, neglecting the needs of his own kingdom. That is why he gave Antonio his brother control. Antonio learned the ropes of governing and began to scheme against him. Prospero’s brother is a Machiavellian of the bad sort, but even so he stands for political realism. One of Shakespeare’s ideals is that a good King must be both magnanimous and active. In consequence, poet-rulers such as Richard II must be deposed as surely as evildoers like Richard III. Prospero wanted to lead the life contemplative or vita contemplativa to the neglect of the life active or vita activa. The relative merits of the two was the subject of much debate during the Renaissance, and is well memorialized in Thomas More’s Utopia. Renaissance education was intended to make a person fit for public life, for a life of active virtue—it was about developing one’s capacities to the fullest extent. Prospero seems to have sought knowledge for a much more personal and private reason, one not closely enough allied with the charitable exercise of power. Antonio at least understands that a ruler cannot simply keep the name of prince or king or duke and expect the authority to remain with it—that was one of King Lear’s mistakes, and it is also Prospero’s. To keep the title, you must exercise the power and others must know you are exercising it. To fail in that regard is to encourage disorder and wickedness. Antonio apparently schemed with Alonso the King of Naples to get rid of Prospero, which was more than enough wickedness to result in Prospero’s loss of authority in Milan.

Prospero is not an independent actor in his own chance at redemption—he admits that divine providence brought him ashore and that Gonzalo charitably furnished him with rich garments and the books he still values above his dukedom. Prospero will need to learn how to wield the knowledge in these books to get himself back to his former state and do some good for the people, just as he has used it to make life tolerable on the island.

Prospero admits that an accident or fortune has brought his enemies within his power. With this fortunate accident, he begins to operate on his own under an auspicious star. As always, “there is a tide in the affairs of men,” as Brutus says in Julius Caesar, and Prospero must act now or lose his chance forever. He is satisfied that the spirit Ariel has done his bidding, appearing as St. Elmo’s Fire (a natural phenomenon) and striking the crew of the King’s ship with madness during the storm. The aerial spirit has also dispersed the crew about the island, separating them into logical camps. Ferdinand, the King’s son, is alone, for he above all is to be tested as the future successor to Prospero’s kingdom.

Prospero reminds Ariel that he had been imprisoned by the witch Sycorax, who died and left him in a pine tree. Prospero has made a sort of contract with Ariel to free him from human control at the end of a certain time. Since Ariel seems to represent imagination or the finer and more sensitive of nature’s powers, we begin to see that the play is in part about how humanity is to maintain control over the natural forces within itself and beyond itself. Prospero threatens Ariel in a way that suggests potential tyranny: around line 295, he threatens to imprison the friendly spirit for another twelve years, just as Sycorax had done. This is not a democratic island—as always, Shakespeare is a good royalist. Ariel is much better (and much better off) than Caliban (Sycorax’s son and therefore the natural heir of this island kingdom), but both feel the power of Prospero.

Next we see Caliban at his best, cursing Prospero but submitting to him because, after all, he must eat his dinner. Caliban has sometimes been seen as a native set upon by white Europeans. Shakespeare’s was a great age of exploration, and European countries were busily colonizing and exploiting the New World . There is some sense in this view of Caliban, although I don’t think it’s appropriate to turn the play into an allegory about colonialism. Caliban says that the island is his to inherit from Sycorax. Prospero associates him with the devil, or perhaps with the unregenerate natural man. It is true that Caliban is controlled by his own appetites as much as by Prospero, but he is not without ability—notice that his complaints at times approach downright eloquence. As he says, Prospero has taught him how to curse. And he was good to Prospero in time of need. His crime was to try to violate Miranda’s honor—another natural impulse he does not regret. Caliban is not appreciative of the gift of civilization Prospero has supposedly given him. I would say that Prospero is somewhat unfair to Caliban—indeed, to say that Caliban is “capable of all ill” is to say something of him that is true of humanity in general. Caliban is not simply “malice,” as Prospero calls him. The things with which Prospero threatens him are entirely natural—pain and suffering—but Caliban is afraid of Prospero because he believes that the old man’s art can control even Sycorax’s God, Setebos. (Robert Browning’s poem “Caliban upon Setebos” is a fine character study of Caliban, covering his resentments and religious sentiments.)

Meanwhile, Ferdinand is enchanted by the music of Ariel and drawn on by it. Ariel sings that Ferdinand’s father has suffered a sea change into “something rich and strange.” Of course the song is not true since Alonso is not drowned, but the song signifies the transformation wrought by death. What is the point of bringing up such change here? Is it to distance him from his father’s death? Certainly Ferdinand must undergo his own transformation here on the island.

Ferdinand’s first question to Miranda is whether she is a virgin—that is certainly a question with institutional significance. He wants to make her his queen. But Prospero knows that the prize must not be won too easily and that Ferdinand has not yet earned the right to reenter the social order and succeed him. So he will test Ferdinand. He uses the same Machiavellian terms of political intrigue that got him exiled from Milan . He claims, that is, that Ferdinand wants to usurp power on the island.

As for Miranda, she still needs to learn the difference between appearance and reality since she says that the handsome prince Ferdinand could not possibly mean anyone harm. She will need to understand this lesson to become a good queen when the time comes. That she shows promise is obvious from line 498, where she says her father’s speech gives a false impression of his true gentility.

Act 2, Scene 1

Gonzalo is an honest old counselor, a quality which shows in his trust in providence. We must weigh our sorrow with our comfort, he tells his hearers. However, Gonzalo is surrounded by people such as Sebastian and Antonio, who do not necessarily appreciate his wisdom. The problem is that wisdom is separated from rank, whereas both are required to keep firm order. Gonzalo will offer his own utopian vision, but it will not equal Prospero’s magic and foresight. So this little group of stranded citizens of Milan doesn’t have all the answers. Perhaps Gonzalo is a little too ready to live within the confines of his natural surroundings rather than transforming them into something more civil. Sebastian makes fun of Gonzalo, ironically crediting him with the power to “carry this island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple,” as well as being able to bring forth more islands. Note also the reference to Amphion building the walls of Thebes with his musical instrument. Shakespeare may be poking fun of himself in these conversations filled with witty exchanges—Antonio, Alonso, and Gonzalo are spending a lot of time making puns and quibbles, and not getting anywhere. But Gonzalo is observant—he has at least noticed that their garments are strangely dry, and we are thereby reminded that a certain wizardry is necessary to the founding and maintenance of the social order.

Alonso despairs over the loss of his son Ferdinand, but Francisco tells him that the boy may be alive, recounting his heroic attempt to survive. Sebastian reproaches Alonso for having married off his daughter to the king of Carthage , an adventure that he considers responsible for the shipwreck.

Gonzalo’s utopia is a silly pre-technological communist fantasy; he would undo the punishment of original sin. No one needs to work, and there would be no sovereignty. Sebastian is right to point out that Gonzalo “would be King” nonetheless. Sebastian is encouraged by Antonio to usurp the place of his brother the king. What we are seeing in this camp of stranded Mariners is first of all a false utopia and then political intrigue. Antonio is quite certain that Ferdinand has drowned. Antonio, using as an example his own usurpation of the dukedom of Milan from Prospero, wants to seize the occasion of this shipwreck since Claribel, who should inherit the kingdom, is far away in Carthage and knows nothing about the wreck. Antonio sees only the operation of random chance in a storm, and does not of course understand that Prospero has used Ariel to generate the tempest. As always, the category of nature is not to be taken simply in Shakespeare—we are not dealing with an ordinary natural tempest; it is a thing of nature brought on by human and superhuman magic. It is even associated with providence since Prospero himself was steered after his own shipwreck by divine providence. Antonio mistakenly sees his friends and potential subjects as passive men just waiting to take orders, but his scheme is foiled by Ariel, who warns Gonzalo to awaken King Alonso. Now awake, they all set off to look for Ferdinand.

Act 2, Scene 2

Trinculo and Stefano have their own ideas about paradise—they assume everyone else has perished in a storm, so this island is theirs, so far as they know. Trinculo meets Caliban and later joins with Stefano to turn him into a willing subject on the basis of drink, which seems to be the god of this nascent kingdom. Liquor provides shelter for Stefano, just as an ordinary garment serves to clothe Trinculo. This section acts as a parody of the previous scene, which was about misguided intrigue. Caliban sees the arrival of these two drunkards as a chance for freedom. The scene had opened with Caliban describing his reaction at the torments Prospero visits upon him because of his misbehavior, and we get a chance to see how Caliban perceives the island’s order. On the whole, Act 2 is about false attempts to set up a new kingdom upon the wreck of the old, with Antonio and Sebastian trying to seize the opportunity to make their own “providence,” and Stefano and Trinculo (along with Caliban) trying to set up their own crazy government. Act 3 will transition to the more legitimate attempts at self-discovery on the part of Ferdinand and Miranda; this focus will, in turn, gesture towards a regenerated dukedom in Milan, even though the play ends with everyone still on the island.

Act 3, Scene 1

In the third act, the developing affection between Ferdinand and Miranda is central. Ferdinand performs his difficult labors mindful of Miranda and in hopes of better times. For him, love makes labor redemptive—it is not something to be avoided so one can set up a fool’s paradise. By his patience, Ferdinand shows the potential for nobility. The word Miranda means “she who is to be looked upon [with wonder].” Prospero’s daughter is virtuous, and her virtue is part of the island’s special quality. Like Adam in Paradise Lost, however, Ferdinand will need some warning not to be overly fond of Miranda’s charms. They have some negotiating to do, and must move from the language of innocent courtship to a permanently enduring union—after all, they are the future of the state, and cannot remain in paradise forever, if indeed one wants to say that’s where they are at present.

Prospero blesses the union to himself since he is apparently convinced that Ferdinand and Miranda will prove compatible. Still, he must not allow premature erotic relations between them. Language will prove essential to a proper match between the two lovers, and marriage is an institution, not a simple declaration. Prospero must go back to his books and work up an appropriate spell to delay this courtship.

Act 3, Scene 2

Caliban, meanwhile, is courting Stefano as his lord and master. Caliban is too easily won over to servitude. To him, government is essentially a protection racket. We notice that he describes itself rather like Prospero—as someone exiled by a tyrant and cheated of his inheritance by evil powers. Stefano, as usual, is spinning a storyline from his own base desires—once having seized Prospero’s books and murdered the man, he thinks, he will be free to marry Miranda. They all serve their bodily desires. Ariel is looking over them even as they make their plot. The would-be ruler ends up following Caliban, whom both Stefano and Trinculo call a monster.

Act 3, Scene 3

King Alonso is ready to give up the romance quest for his lost son Ferdinand. Nature seems to have won the battle. Again, Gonzalo sees that the island is much more than simple nature—though the inhabitants are monstrous, they are more gentle than many humans back in Naples . This comment of his follows the appearance of shapes Prospero has summoned to set up a banquet. The wonder of exploration is part of romance—as Antonio says, “travelers never did lie, though fools at home condemn them.” The banquet itself, and the appearance of Ariel as a harpy, has a classical precedent in Virgil’s Aeneid. Ariel has set them a fool’s banquet—and he explains sternly to them (some of whom attending are plotting against Alonso) that they have been driven here to be punished for their sins in exiling Prospero. They are threatened with “lingering perdition.” That would mean a futile repetition of the romance pattern, one stripped of meaning and redemptive quality. At present, they still think Ferdinand is dead, and Prospero has no intention of telling them otherwise just now. He goes off to see Ferdinand and Miranda. This decision in itself has a powerful effect—Alonso feels bitter remorse at the loss of his son.

Act 4, Scene 1

Prospero insists that Ferdinand should not behave like Caliban and spoil the honor of his daughter. There is much play here about the value of language—Prospero says Miranda will outstrip all praise, and then says that Ferdinand has spoken fairly and will have his daughter. Ceremony is important for the obvious reason: it is necessary to bless this socially and politically significant union. Marriage is part of the magic of civilization. Prospero bids Ariel bring the rabble (an important word here in terms of governance) so that he may give the young couple a demonstration of his powers. Iris and Ceres—the latter a fertility goddess—will provide the lovers a gift. Ceres offers the gift of regular seasonal change; that is, she offers abundance in perpetuity and, therefore, a secure future. Together, these goddesses call upon nymphs to celebrate the marriage contract.

Breaking in to this celebration is Prospero’s remembrance that Caliban and his new friends are plotting against him. But we still have unfinished business, so the celebration is a false ending in accordance with classical comic structure. Consider lines 148 and following—Prospero sums up what his wizardry has accomplished: he has demonstrated that we are “such stuff as dreams are made on.” This remark has sometimes been taken as Shakespeare’s farewell speech as a dramatist, even though The Tempest isn’t his last play. In any case, there is clearly a parallel between art and life to be drawn here: art has much to tell us about life, and it is a kind of magic. Then Prospero professes himself vexed and weak, an enfeebled old man, to get rid of Ferdinand and Miranda so he can deal with Caliban. The island is not paradise after all, and the consequences of human fallenness impend even here.

Act V

I must expand this section, but a main point is that in contrast with King Lear, insight doesn’t come in The Tempest at the cost of power. Prospero is able to give up his magic books and powers without losing his chance to recover the dukedom he lost. His concluding wishes are of interest in that what he really seems to desire is not so much to exercise great power again but instead to practice “the art of dying well.” The main promise of things to come is the impending marriage between Ferdinand and Miranda, who will, we may presume, carry on in a regenerated social and political environment.

Week 14, The Winter's Tale

2008-11-15T12:11:00.000-08:00

Notes on The Winter’s Tale

Act 1, Scenes 1-2

We start off hearing about how Polixenes of Bohemia and Leontes of Sicilia grew up together, and Hermione’s interaction with Polixenes is entirely innocent, just like Desdemona’s dalliance with Michael Cassio in Othello. She is simply behaving generously towards her husband’s dear friend. This idyllic scene at the edge of “forever after” is instantly shattered by Leontes’ abrupt passion or affectio: he sees Hermione holding hands, whispering, and so forth, with his old friend, and is stricken with a bout of insane jealousy. Jealousy stems from a disturbance in one person’s object-relation to another person; this powerful passion almost certainly inhabits, even haunts, intimate relationships. We treat affection like a scarce good, almost in an economic way. Rationing underlies even noble and charitable ideals. We transfix the other as something permanent, stable, unchangeable. There is no need for plot devices or serious actions to induce jealousy; it comes from nowhere. Jealousy becomes a filter for everything Leontes sees once the madness strikes him. Leontes’ jealousy causes him to misread and reinterpret everything Hermione does; he must see everything she does as evidence of her wickedness, and everything everyone else does as corroboration of that wickedness. Camillo is a “traitor” now, Mamillius must be illegitimate, and Hermione’s innocent words and actions are pure deception, etc. Leontes’ perceptual and interpretive apparatus become warped or “diseased” (to use Camillo’s term at line 297). He is his own Iago and shares Othello’s absoluteness and incapacity to deal with uncertainty: “Is whispering nothing?” (284) As Iago says in Othello 3.3, “ Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ. ” Hermione must be either a saint or a whore; there is nothing in between, and any uncertainty about the matter is unwelcome. Perhaps jealousy is always lurking at the heart of any intimate relationship. No matter what Portia tells us about mercy in The Merchant of Venice, the quality of some charitable affections is strained, or strainable and divisible. Cordelia’s understanding of love in King Lear may be brittle-sounding and cold, but it’s probably accurate; in a sense, we do ration love: more for one person may mean less for others. (Shakespeare’s Sonnets certainly explore this darker side of love.)

The merciful thing is that Leontes’ inner corruption seems unable to corrupt others: Camillo stays true to Hermione, and therefore to Leontes. He refuses to poison Polixenes, with whom he agrees regarding the destructive effects of jealousy—it is something to be avoided at all costs, as Polixenes says at the end of the second scene. The cure for the distrustful absolutist Leontes will be, as we shall see later on, to learn to see people once again as they really are, and stop allegorizing them as emblems of sin.

Act 2, Scene 1.

Hermione is shocked to hear Leontes’ disgraceful accusations, but as so often, the good are scarcely capable of defending themselves: they don’t have the same resources available to them as do those who have no tedious scruples about morality. Leontes is set upon publicly and willfully declaring his wife unfaithful, even trying to enlist Apollo’s oracle in his cause. Hermione’s claims of innocence stand no chance against her husband’s energetic performance.

Act 2, Scenes 2-3

Paulina is active and confrontational in dealing with Leontes. The other characters at court aren’t corrupt; they’re just passive. Hermione is unable to deal with Leontes’ madness because she is the bogus “cause” and object of it, so a third party like Paulina is vital. She will keep the clock ticking so that “romance time” can help things work out for the best. There will be time and opportunity and good will enough to avert tragedy. Leontes is determined to widen the circle of delusion: he has already declared Hermione a slut publicly, and now he means to put her on trial. Paulina won’t go along with this unjust scheme because she understands that the tyrant is insane and, like the emperor in the fable, naked. She bluntly tells him so, and his resistance to her truth-telling is rather comical: “Will you not push her out? [To Antigonus.] Give her the bastard” (2.3.74). As usual in comedy and romance, the threatening father is more or less a straw man. There must be at least the potential for a tragic turn. But Shakespeare is careful, I believe, not to push such prospects too hard. In this play, the tyrant can’t even handle one feisty woman. Consider also Duke Frederick in As You Like It, who threatens death and injury all around but ends up looking ridiculous and then changing suddenly in the Forest of Arden. Frederick exiles Rosalind (the daughter of the legitimate ruler he has banished) and even threatens to have her killed. But his threats aren’t very believable, and he seems more of an ill-tempered oaf than a murderer. As a contrast, there’s always King Lear, who in spite of his feebleness ends up partly responsible for ruining the life of his dearest child, Cordelia.

Still, there are some consequences to reckon with: Hermione will be tried and “convicted” (well, almost), and she is soon placed in a seeming state of suspended animation. Leontes will have only an image, a shrine, for years to come. His depraved obliviousness to Apollo’s truth-saying ensures this result. (See 3.2.140-41.) And as Leontes had already resolved, Perdita will be committed to chance and the healing powers of time. Leontes (like Lear and Cymbeline) has thrown away his identity. He can’t snap his fingers and regain his right mind. That he recognizes his error the instant Apollo’s wrath supposedly strikes down his son makes self-recovery and redemption possible. Paulina, in spite of her sometimes harsh words and attitude, will assist Leontes in his long time of penance, replete with frequent visits to the shrine of the woman he has wronged and who, so far as he knows, is lost to him forever.

Act 3, Scenes 1-2.

Apollo’s oracle tells Leontes that he is entirely wrong and that he must recover what he’s thrown away: “Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camilla a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten, and the King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found” (132-35). He tries to dismiss the oracle’s words, so his ears fail him just as his eyes did. The death of his son Mamillius snaps him out of his state of error as quickly as he fell into it, but he must live with the consequences until he can work his way out of them. Leontes has thrown away his identity along with Hermione and Perdita, who are both a part of him. Romance is partly about the reintegration of the self and then a going-out into the broad world, finally to return to a better version of oneself. Leontes must get Perdita back, but long penance is required. Paulina’s severity (which is calculated and at times almost comic) aims to keep Leontes from moving on and remarrying: he must take the time he needs to recover others and redeem himself.

Act 3, Scene 3.

Antigonus dreams of Hermione, who informs him that his end is near and gives him instructions on where to leave the child and what to name her. Antigonus is now convinced that Hermione is dead. He thereupon suffers the full consequences of his own failure to resist Leontes’ culpable behavior. Act 3 ends on a note of savagery and tempest: “Exit pursued by a bear.” The gold Antigonus has left behind will become “fairy gold” for the shepherd who discovers the “blossom” (46) Perdita, and a new world will open up for this rustic character. As we move into Acts 4-5, we will witness the power of romance temporality to heal rifts, clear up delusions, and make things right.

Act 4, Scene 1.

The Chorus player speaks in the character of “Time” to tell us that he is within his rights to turn the clock forwards some sixteen years, to the time when Perdita is no longer an infant but a beautiful young woman, supposed by all to be the daughter of the shepherd who found her and secretly courted by Polixenes’ son, Prince Florizel. The Choral pronouncement may remind some of Shakespeare’s use of old John Gower, his source for Pericles, Prince of Tyre, who says at the beginning of Act 4, “I carried winged time / Post [on] the lame feet of my rhyme, / Which never could I so convey, / Unless your thoughts went on my way” (Prologue lines 47-50).

Act 4, Scenes 2-4

Autolycus, who enters at 4.3 declaring himself at present “out of service” (14), is a human woozle—he’s a trickster, an opportunist, and a parasite on the generous psychic economy of the play’s rustics, whose festivities he invades with his commercialism and bawdiness in 4.4. But Autolycus also brings in the spring with his songs, flowers, and bright scarves. Perhaps he is also an alter ego for Florizel, who has been courting Perdita in a disguised but honorable fashion.

Autolycus, the play’s resident Lord of Misrule, is unable to corrupt anyone, even if he succeeds in cozening some. Autolycus’ ethos shows in the line, “I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive” (4.4.673-74). His antics set up yet another confrontation in Act 4, Scene 4 with a not-so-dreadful parent (in this case Polixenes), who has a point to make about the conduct of his son. Florizel’s disguising is done essentially for charitable reasons—he met Perdita by accident, and pursues her generously, but Polixenes resents the fact that he hasn’t been consulted in so important a dynastic matter. In this play, as a professor of mine at UC Irvine points out, the old need to be convinced of the worthiness of the new. This point holds true even though romance quests are about reintegration and renewal through marriage amongst the young. After all (and here Shakespeare departs from Greene’s Pandosto), this play centers on the reunification of Leontes and Hermione, the older generation. Polixenes feels that Florizel has cast off his identity, and the fourth act involves the future of Polixenes’ dynastic concerns.

Also in Act 4, Perdita and Polixenes engage in a “literary criticism” discussion about the emblematic significance of certain flowers (“streaked gillyvors,” or pansies) and ultimately about the respective merits of artifice and nature. I suppose Perdita herself is the “graft” that mends the rustic society surrounding her—she is a work of art rooted in nature’s processes. Polixenes insists that careful gardening is an “art that nature makes.” While Perdita wants only what’s available in her own rustic garden, he sees no problem with improving what nature offers freely. Artifice, that is, may fairly be described as a “natural” aspect of human nature: we are not “poor, bare, fork’d animals” but are always at our best when we are “accommodated man.” Perdita, ever the nature goddess-tending maiden, isn’t convinced, but Polixenes’ argument comes off as wise—or at least if would if he didn’t become enraged upon finding out that his son Florizel would have him mix the aristocratic with the common stock of his kingdom.

Perdita exudes healthy animality; ; she embodies a benevolent form of nature, unlike the bear that devoured Antigonus sixteen years back when he was abandoning Perdita on the harsh seacoast of Bohemia. Her grace is demonstrated by the effect her presence has on Florizel. Her own playful words give just a hint of Ovidian sportfulness around line 116-28, where she invokes Proserpina, but modesty at once makes her take it back. Florizel, however, sees nothing wrong with what Perdita has said, and he tells her at lines 140-41, “When you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’ th’ sea.” Perdita is a graceful, immediate presence, and everything she does is art; in her person, art and nature come together without strife. This harmony contrasts starkly with Leontes’ misprision of nature as something base and demonic. His ideal woman would not, at the play’s outset, be Hermione living (“too hot, too hot,” he had said of her in Act 1, Scene 2) or Perdita in motion. It would be a statue—something cold, chaste, and dead. Later, to see her “come alive” from an assumed state of stone is part of his penance, but also his reward for his long-suffering fidelity after the initial mistake. Perdita is the statue and the living being at the same time: she is artifice in motion, and is what Leontes must accept. That may mean we are flawed, but it’s just the way we are, and we must accept it. Leontes initially could not give Hermione so much credit as a fully human being.

Act 5, Scenes 1-3.

With Perdita at last discovered to be Leontes’ lost daughter, what remains to be achieved is the full recovery of Hermione. She must be recognized as the virtuous woman she was and still is. Paulina’s device is straight out of ancient literary theory: some may recall the famous argument about “the Grapes of Zeuxis” that were painted so realistically as to fool birds. Zeuxis’ opponent on the matter of pictorial realism, Parrhasius, knew that seeing was a matter of convention: we “see” what we look for.

The statue trick Paula carries out is a matter of affective staging: it will demonstrate to him again his error, and yet constitute his greatest reward. Now Leontes, whose crazy jealousy made him “see the object as in itself it really was not” (to adapt a line from Oscar Wilde) and who thereby stereotyped, objectified, even “killed” Hermione in a sense, must be reintroduced to the real woman, now sixteen years older. Hermione is not made of stone, but a living, breathing human being. She is subject to time and may whisper and touch the hand of a dear friend, even for her husband’s sake. Paulina’s deferral of Leontes’ desire for reunion is the last stage of his penance. The plastic arts device is, I believe, typical of Shakespeare’s references to the power of art to transform perception and passion and bring about reconciliation, and it seems particularly appropriate to the romance genre. The “art work” in this case is a living woman who has been liberated and who now frees Leontes from his sorrow. As Prof. Harold Toliver of UC Irvine said in a lecture years ago, the play’s solution lies in “re-establishing the truth of what one sees.” At last (through Paulina’s device) Leontes learns to see and accept Hermione directly: as she is, here and now, with those sixteen years added on. The play’s conclusion amounts to a romance triumph over death no less wonderful for all its trickery and “staginess”; Paulina’s artful and charitable application of Autolycus’ roguish shifts redeems such deception and turns it to account.

Week 13, Antony and Cleopatra

2008-11-15T12:10:00.000-08:00

Notes on Antony and Cleopatra.

Act 1, Scenes 1-2.

Antony and Cleopatra are introduced first by Antony’s friends, but almost at once we hear a dialogue between the two lovers. What is their image at this early point? How does the dialogue and presentation of Antony capture the dual impulse that runs through the man’s character? He is both a Roman and a man of the East. Antony is clearly aware of Cleopatra’s influence on him, and admires her whimsicality, excess, and sense for the absolutism of the dilatory moment as opposed to Roman thoughtfulness and adherence to necessity. Enobarbus is just as aware, and thinks women should not be so highly esteemed in proximity to great political and military matters. Antony’s response to his wife’s death is characteristically complex in that he’s riven by genuine sympathy and yet realizes that he had, after all, more or less wished this on her and that he is liberated.

Act 1, Scene 3.

Cleopatra explains how she manipulates Antony, admitting this even in part while talking to him. She calls him a dissembler and an actor when it comes to loyalty. To what extent does Cleopatra know how to speak the language of Roman honor? Around line 97, she takes on the strength to speak this language: “Your honor calls you hence,” she says to Antony, and to some extent seems actually to mean it: it’s time to “let Antony be Antony.”

Act 1, Scene 4.

Here and elsewhere, we should attend to Caesar’s (Octavius’) view of Antony’s conduct in the East. Caesar has complaints about Antony’s unseemly behavior, and suggests that he, at least (young as he is), knows how to wield power. Around line 55 and following, Caesar mentions Antony’s longstanding reputation for valor, and he feels that this reputation will shame him into returning to the field alongside Caesar. Antony’s admission of “neglect” doesn’t go over well with Caesar the Corporation Man, whose great model is Aeneas, with a twist of Machiavellian guile to produce the appearance of piety.

Act 1, Scene 5.

We see another side of Cleopatra here, the one that is truly in love with Antony. This is not simply a political alliance. Cleopatra’s motives may be complex, but her connection with Antony is one of the world’s grandest tragic loves. She muses fondly about Antony, and mentions her earlier affair with Julius Caesar. She has an extravagant sense of Antony’s worth, one that fits his sense of himself and that he repays with similar extravagance towards her. We may not see this Antony in action through most of the play, but the mutual representation is something that bonds them together.

Act 2, Scene 1.

The son of Pompey thinks the people love him, while he’s convinced that Caesar wins no hearts with his soulless efficiency and that Antony is wasting his strength with Cleopatra in Egypt.

Act 2, Scene 2.

Caesar and Antony confront each other, each bringing his own grievances and assumptions to the table. Agrippa helps resolve the tension between them, at least for the present, by proposing a match between Caesar’s sister Octavia and Antony. Dynastic obligation will bring these two men of very different character together. Enobarbus, around line 174 and following, talks with Agrippa and Maecenas, offering us a new image of the famous Cleopatra. He describes her almost as a goddess, as a woman beyond description (197-98). He also mentions how savvy she is, how well she plays her charms to her advantage. Cleopatra, he knows, exercises a strong hold over Antony’s imagination and passions. She instills a kind of desire that doesn’t lead to satiation (235ff), and sanctifies things that would otherwise be vile, beyond the strict Roman sense of appropriateness and inappropriateness. That capacity is a big part of her attraction—Cleopatra is charismatic and “larger than life.”

Act 2, Scene 3.

Antony speaks to a soothsayer, who tells him to stay away from Caesar because this opponent is bound to rise higher than Antony. Caesar is almost as much an “evil genius” for Antony as Julius Caesar was for Brutus on the plain at Philippi; in his presence, the great Roman is afraid, unmanned. Antony knows this, and says that the very dice obey Caesar—fortune seems to be on the younger man’s side, even though Antony is more of a “ladies’ man” and so ought to be on better terms with Lady Fortune. So Antony resolves to return to the East, where, he says, “my pleasure lies.”

Act 2, Scenes 4-5.

In the fifth scene, Cleopatra has fun at Antony’s expense, saying that he’s like a great fish she has caught. She seems to delight in stealing from him his masculine symbolic power (the sword with which he earned victory against the conspirators who killed his friend Julius) and donning it herself. She learns around line 55 that Antony will marry Octavia, and this causes her to strike the messenger. Pompeius makes a deal with Caesar in which he’s to take Sicily and Sardinia, but rid the seas of piracy and send wheat to Rome. He reconciles with Caesar and Antony. Enobarbus shrewdly observes that this fellow has thrown away his future, and he says further that the marriage with Octavia is purely a matter of convenience—Antony’s heart is in Egypt with Cleopatra, and that is where he will return.

Act 2, Scenes 6-7.

In the seventh scene, the weakest member of the second triumvirate (Octavian, Antony, and Marcus Lepidus, 43-31 BCE; the first triumvirate had consisted of Julius Caesar, Gnaius Pompeius, and Marcus Crassus from 60-53 BCE) is made drunk, and Antony makes sport of him by answering his silly questions about crocodiles with ludicrous tautologies. Sextus Pompeius shows himself to be so indebted to the concept of Roman honor that it prevents him from taking Menas’ advice—why not simply invite the triumvirs on board his ship and kill them? Pompeius says that the man ought to have done this without telling him about it. Menas loses faith in Pompeius because of this rigidity—such an opportunity, he knows, will not come again. Scene 7 shows the triumvirs’ attitude towards drinking. As the old saying goes, in vino veritas. We find out that Lepidus can’t hold his liquor (he lacks self-mastery, and is a follower, not a leader); Antony bows to nobody as a wassailer; and Caesar would just as well stay sober. It’s obvious that he is determined to keep his wits about him, more responsible in his relationship to power than Antony. Judgments are being made in this scene about who is a “real Roman” and who is most likely to succeed.

We have seen how other Romans accuse Antony of “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out,” to adapt a line from the 1960’s drug guru Timothy Leary. At this point in the play, Antony seems the strong master of revels; he seems beyond Roman austerity and severity. In his openness to experience, Antony is more of an Odyssean Greek than a Roman. But as T. S. Eliot writes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (to paraphrase), “only those who have a personality know what it is to want to escape from it.”

Act 3, Scene 1.

We might take the first few scenes as a commentary on Roman values. Ventidius in Syria has returned in triumph, having defeated the Parthians who had done so much harm to Roman armies. But he doesn’t pursue the Parthians simply because doing so would mean upstaging his commanding officer, Antony.

Act 3, Scene 2.

Octavia weeps, and Caesar is sad at parting. Enobarbus seems to undercut the notion put forth by Agrippa that Antony wept at the death of Julius Caesar. Shakespeare seems concerned to remind us that we are dealing with historical events that have become shaded over with mythology, and the view he prefers at some points is the “practical Roman” perspective we find in Agrippa’s clear-eyed statements.

Act 3, Scene 3.

Cleopatra finds out that Octavia isn’t as beautiful as she, and now rewards the messenger she had earlier struck.

Act 3, Scene 4.

War is brewing between Caesar and Antony. Antony agrees that she might be helpful as a go-between, and he seems genuine in his desire that she should follow her heart in choosing sides, if that should become necessary.

Act 3, Scene 5.

Lepidus and Caesar have warred with Pompeius, and then Caesar has arrested Lepidus. Caesar is outraged when Antony and Cleopatra crown themselves in Asiatic splendor. The Roman people already know of this, says Caesar, who also declares himself annoyed that Octavia has come to visit him without the appropriate ceremony. Well, he had agreed to the match readily enough in spite of his reservations about Antony’s character. Now he invites her to stay on his side, suggesting that Antony has abused and betrayed her.

Act 3, Scenes 6-7.

In the seventh scene, Enobarbus tells Cleopatra to stay out of the war, and she’s insulted at the suggestion. She will take part in Antony’s wars, declaring herself “the president of my kingdom.” She is a ruler and doesn’t accept the role of a “weak woman.” Antony now makes the disastrous decision to fight Caesar by sea because the latter has dared him to do so. Enobarbus is aghast at this “un-Roman” impracticality, at this preference for chance and hazard instead of security. Perhaps Antony is foolhardy, but he’s also honorable and noble; power sits lightly upon Antony’s shoulders. The hair of wise and responsible rulers turns gray quickly, but one senses that isn’t likely to happen to Mark Antony. He’s too reckless to be weighed down by the demands of power, and prefers an unstable alliance between honor and hazard to a more stable one of the sort Enobarbus would counsel, and Caesar would certainly maintain. At the end of the scene, Antony seems very surprised at just how briskly Caesar’s forces are moving into position. The men around Antony (Canidius in particular) feel that since he’s led by a woman, so are they.

Act 3, Scenes 8-10.

Caesar and Antony strategize; the former is all about maintaining control over events. By the tenth scene, we hear that the Egyptian fleet has cut and run; Scarus laments that Antony’s Romans have “kissed away kingdoms.” The charge is that Antony is irresponsible in his deployment of military power. He has allowed his love of Cleopatra to blind him to sound counsel. Incredibly, he has followed Cleopatra’s shameful retreat at the first sign of danger. Canidius decides that he might as well go over to Caesar since Antony has lost control over his own destiny. Enobarbus knows what Canidius knows, but still can’t bring himself to abandon his commander.

Act 3, Scene 11.

Antony is horrified—”I have fled myself,” he says, and knows that he has thrown everything he worked for away. What makes the situation even more intolerable is Caesar’s relative lack of martial skill and experience; Antony reminds us that it was he who killed his friend Julius’ assassins while the fledgling stood by. Antony is the one who has been a world-historical actor, and now his star is eclipsed by a lesser man, at least in his view. Antony is at first furious with Cleopatra, but reconciles with her almost immediately. When she asks pardon, he grants it, considering himself well repaid with a kiss. He evidently places her above victory on the battlefield.

Act 3, Scene 12.

Antony sends his schoolmaster to treat with Caesar. Cleopatra says she will submit to Caesar, who orders that the Queen be comforted and promised all she wants, so long as she either exiles or kills Antony. He supposes this shift will work because women, as far as he is concerned, are infinitely malleable under the pressure of circumstance.

Act 3, Scene 13.

Enobarbus won’t blame Cleopatra. He says Antony has made his will “lord of his reason.” Antony challenges Caesar to single combat, which is absolutely ridiculous. Enobarbus is stunned, and feels that Antony has been entirely bereft of sound judgment. Enobarbus continues to mull his relationship with Antony; he thinks his loyalty will earn him a place in the story books, so to speak: by sticking with Antony, he’ll “conquer” the man who defeated that noble Roman. This might be labeled a metadramatic concern because Shakespeare himself is clearly interested in how legends become enmeshed with history—much of this play (to borrow a phrase from the New Historians) is about a kind of “self-fashioning” that, if successful, becomes the narrative by which we know the boldest among the ancients. Even in Antony and Cleopatra’s own time, mythmaking was at work, and so were its critics.

Around line 55, Cleopatra seems to be going along with Caesar’s program, while her lover is still saying “I am Antony yet.” He wants to re-embrace his identity as a valorous Roman commander, and orders Caesar’s messenger soundly whipped. Around line 110, his anger again turns towards Cleopatra, whom he accuses of latching onto and manipulating famous Roman men like Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, and himself to enhance her own power, which rests on the different and most un-Roman basis of alliance with divine splendor and awe. Cleopatra is the leader of an ancient personality cult, and while her stylistic affinity with Antony’s grandiose dimension is obvious, he now professes to find the whole affair disgusting. Above all, he says, Cleopatra lacks “temperance.” But Antony’s anger also rages at Caesar for “harping on what I am, not what he knew I was.” Antony supposes that the reputation he has justly won entitles him to the continued respect and esteem of those who have overcome him. The scene’s conclusion shows Antony reconciling yet again with Cleopatra (who after all seems to represent a tendency within him), and regains his composure. He calls for a night of drinking and celebration on the eve of the final battle to recover his lost glory. He may yet win at Alexandria. This recovery is the last straw for Enobarbus—his captain’s “valor preys on reason,” and it’s time to desert him at the earliest opportunity.

Act 4, Scenes 1-6.

These brief scenes convey the contrasting attitudes and reactions on the part of Antony and Caesar to towards the coming battle. Antony is at times elegiac in tone—”Perchance tomorrow you’ll serve another master,” he tells his men, to the dismay of Enobarbus. In the third scene, a soldier takes a noise to be Hercules abandoning Antony. In the fourth scene, Antony seems resolute—he will bring the willing to the battle. In Scene 5, he learns that Enobarbus has deserted him, and realizes that his “fortunes have corrupted honest men.” In Scene 6, Caesar declares that “the time of universal peace is near,” yet without compunction he also betrays the true nature of this “new world order”: he advises his lieutenant to place units recently revolted from Antony at the forefront, so that in the first rounds of the battle, Antony will be killing his own men. Enobarbus has now come to realize that he has destroyed his self-image in abandoning Antony, and when the latter generously sends him his treasure from camp, the desolation of Enobarbus is complete. He resolves to die in the nearest ditch.

Act 4, Scenes 7-8.

So far, Antony’s desperate gambit shows signs of success.

Act 4, Scene 9.

Enobarbus dies, with Antony’s name the last word on his lips.

Act 4, Scenes 10-12.

Caesar will fight Antony on land, knowing that the man has put too much energy and time into his fleet. For the second time, the fleet deserts Antony, even going over to Caesar’s side. Upon seeing this betrayal, Antony declares Cleopatra a “triple-turned whore.”

Act 4, Scene 13.

Charmian advises Cleopatra to shut herself up in a monument, and send word of her death. The Queen agrees.

Act 4, Scene 14.

Antony continues to lament what he considers Cleopatra’s betrayal, admitting that he “made these wars” for no one but her. When he hears that she has supposedly committed suicide, however, he is again instantly reconciled. She has shown him the way in conquering herself, he thinks, and thereupon makes a botched attempt to fall on his sword after his servant Eros commits suicide rather than assist his master in dying. Nobody will help him finish the job, and at lines 112-13, Decretas even takes his sword as a token with which to ingratiate himself with Caesar.

Act 4, Scene 15.

Antony and Cleopatra are together for one final scene, and when he tries to get her to seek safety and honor in Caesar, she bravely points out that “honor” and “safety” don’t go together. That has long been the creed Antony has followed, for better or for worse. Antony falls back on the classical notion that glory is a matter of what your peers and descendants think of you. His wretched present, he trusts, will not blot out the glorious remembrance he has earned by his brave deeds in the past. Cleopatra says she, too, will die “in the high Roman fashion,” as a hero should.

Act 5, Scene 1.

When Decretas informs Caesar that Antony is dead, he seems genuinely saddened. Antony lived prodigiously, and yet his passing has been noted as if it were a thing of nothing, no ceremony. Caesar may not be much of a pageantry promoter, but he shows some regard for the rites due to honor. His sense of loss seems sincere, and he regrets what his need to maintain and increase his power has “forced” him to do. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that he wouldn’t do it again in a heartbeat. Caesar serves political expediency as his master, but this doesn’t give us the right to say he’s a mere hypocrite: it is not unreasonable to suggest that his strength consists partly in the attitude he takes up towards what his station as a public man leads him to do. His ruthless actions are taken in the name of “universal peace” and the greater glory of Rome. He sometimes deceives others about the nature of what he does, but he doesn’t deceive himself about the disjunction between his ideals and his deeds. At line 61-62, we see how he treats Cleopatra: he bids Proculeius to treat the Queen kindly and make her what promises he finds suitable, but this is only a shift to bring her in triumph to Rome, where she will be an object of mockery for the rabble.

Act 5, Scene 2.

Cleopatra is refashioning herself as heroic in the Roman style, as one determined to take her own life. We might suppose this is a matter of adopting a “style”; but then, Cleopatra takes style quite seriously, and her Pharaonic self-fashioning is no light matter. It wouldn’t be right to take that quality away from her. She is surrounded by Caesar’s soldiers, and now determines that she will not become the sport of the vulgar in Rome. From line 76 onwards, she refashions and aggrandizes Antony, saying, “I dreamt there was an emperor,” etc. Dolabella plays an honorable role, forewarning Cleopatra of the fate that awaits her in only three days. Caesar enters and plays both gracious conqueror and vicious threatener of Cleopatra’s progeny, if she should follow Antony’s self-destructive course. When Seleucis betrays her over her holding back some of her treasure from Caesar, she is shocked, which reaction suggests that she still doesn’t understand the dynamics of power: people obey those in whom they find real, actionable strength; they don’t long obey those who have only majesty and divine pomp to back their rule. She resents being “worded” by Caesar, and loathes the prospect of “some squeaking Cleopatra boy[ing] my greatness, in the posture of a whore.” She has always been an actor of sorts, but in her own proper sphere as Egyptian Queen, her “acting” the part of a goddess had been correlated with the exercise of power. But in Rome, what had been world-historical drama will be reduced to an entertaining farce for the multitude.

Around line 228, Cleopatra declares there will be a final meeting with Antony in death, one she will achieve by casting off the supposed weakness of her sex. And then comes the Clown, with his prayer that she may find “joy of the worm” or serpent he has brought her. It’s worth asking why Shakespeare has chosen to present Cleopatra with her death in this semi-comic, bizarre rustic. Caesar, whom Cleopatra now considers “an unpolicied ass” for allowing her to make away with herself, enters the scene after her death and declares it noble and an act of loyalty to Antony. He agrees to bury her next to Antony, apparently recognizing the high tragedy of their doomed love match, the “pity” of which equals the “glory” of his current status as military victor and his future as Rome’s sole ruler. There’s dignity in sublime failure, it seems, as well as in the establishment of peace and long-continued rule. Rome, Incorporated will have its shiny new CEO, and for Augustus Caesar, apotheosis to heaven can wait. Both Antony and Cleopatra and Octavius Caesar are great in their respective ways, but the former are crushed by the modern world in which Octavius moves more deftly, if not with the same tragic glory.

Antony and Cleopatra’s manner of dying, and Caesar’s of living and governing, show a clash of value systems, and a fissure in the concept of Romanness. I don’t think the play condemns either system, although it shows the consequences and historical import of both. We should bear in mind the strangeness of the final two acts’ tragic arc: Antony’s sudden condemnations and reconciliations, and Cleopatra’s dissembling and final adoption (at least in part) of Roman heroism. Cleopatra’s initial “fake” suicide teaches Antony to do the right thing in earnest. Moreover, Antony’s real suicide leads Cleopatra to marry her desire to avoid public humiliation with a desire to exit the world’s stage like the hybrid Egyptian Queen / Antique Roman she has become.

Weeks 11-12, King Lear

2008-11-15T12:09:00.000-08:00

Notes on The Tragedy of King Lear.

Act 1, Scene 1.

Kent and Gloucester agree that it seemed most likely the King would favor Albany over Cornwall. But now they aren’t so certain, so the play opens with a note of uncertainty that becomes ominous later when we realize how much better a person Albany is compared to Cornwall. This is a new, strange state of affairs, in which merit must demonstrate itself by means of rhetorical skill. Gloucester says his legal son is no dearer to him than the illegitimate Edmund. Lear enters at line 39, saying that he has decided to divide his kingdom into thirds, and “shake all cares and business” for the remainder of his life. His declared intention is to “prevent future strife” and to confer royal authority on “younger strengths” (40). He means to assist the process of generational renewal, passing on matters of state to younger and more energetic kin while “preventing future strife” and leaving himself the private space necessary to practice the art of dying well. Each daughter will receive a third; the only question is how opulent that portion will be (86).

The question of authority is a main item in King Lear. Kent may be responding in part to the King’s unwise disparagement of Cordelia on the spot, but his line “Reserve thy state / . . . check / This hideous rashness” (149-51) may owe something to his shock at the very notion of an absolute king’s decision to divest himself of his unitary power, keeping only the name and perks of authority. I don’t know that there’s really a coherent political theory during Shakespeare’s time; I would only suggest that Lear is confused because he goes off on a private mission while at the same time trying to retain symbols that he confuses with power itself. This is not to say that Shakespeare is criticizing monarchy per se, but I believe he’s always aware that no human system is perfect (not even one that claims divine ordination). The questions are, what are the consequences when things go wrong with social and political systems, and what happens when they go right?

It’s true that the King’s “natural body” is wearing down, and one can feel only empathy for him on that account, but what about the King’s political body, the one that isn’t capable of death? Can he actually abandon his responsibilities the way he does, without causing a disaster? What has he given up? He has given up the “power, / Pre-eminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty” (130-32). Another way of stating this is that he has ceded the “sway, revenue, execution of the rest” (137) aside from what he retains, which he specifies as “The name, and all th’ addition to a king” (136), which addition is to be embodied in the person of the stipulated “hundred knights” (133). He makes a distinction between the name and pomp of kingship and the executive, effectual power of a king. So we might ask, how does he expect to give away all his power and yet hold on to the “addition” of a king? Do the symbols and privileges and “name” really mean anything, apart from the power wielded by those who claim them?

With respect to Cordelia and Regan and Goneril, what does Lear want? He wants a public declaration of their affection for him as a loving father. The public and private in Renaissance kingship were of course inextricable; royal absolutism of King James’ sort always made hay of the idea that the King was “the father of his people,” and James’ model was the scriptural patriarchs. He believed that his subjects owed him the reverence due to such a father. In practice, as I’m sure Shakespeare understood, the intertwining of public and private in powerful families makes for a great deal of coldness, sterility, and alienation, even in settings beyond the monarchy: read biographies of some of our presidents and the modern royal family of Great Britain, and you’ll hear a tale that is at times painful to read: mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters for the most part looking on at the spectacle of one another’s lives, never knowing what to consider “acting” and what to accept as “real,” and finding it difficult to sort out personal loyalties from official duties and the demands of power.

Well, Lear has no trouble demanding in the form of public spectacle what would for most families be a purely private display of affection. Perhaps this isn’t entirely unreasonable on his part. Neither are Goneril and Regan necessarily to be blamed for giving the old man what he wants; they know his nature, and this is the sort of thing they have come to expect from him. The point is that he’s the king, and he finds this public display of affection necessary. Why can’t Cordelia do something even better than did Regan and Goneril, bearing with her father and making a generous allowance for his weaknesses? Isn’t it sometimes acceptable to be a little insincere when regard for another person’s feelings requires it? But she won’t work at it, and even if there’s an austere beauty in the figure of Cordelia speaking truth to power, it’s fair to suggest that she is in her way as brittle and abrupt or absolute in her temperament as her frail old father: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” (91-92). She can’t verbally express the genuine affection she feels for Lear. Cordelia isn’t capable of flattery; she lacks (to borrow from another play, I Henry IV) Prince Hal’s ability to say to a joker like Falstaff, “If a lie may do thee grace,” then let’s carry on with the lie, at least for a while. Learning to be a good ruler may involve a certain amount of play-acting and feigning to be what one is not. Cordelia sees both monarchy and marriage as consisting of specifiable bonds or reciprocal obligations. So when Lear demands that she declare her “love,” she understands the term in something like the sense of “obligation, duty, attention.” Obviously, a woman who marries must balance her duties as a wife with her duties as a loyal daughter; she cannot “love” her father altogether and spend all her time with him.

But it may be that Lear’s demand isn’t as all-encompassing as she supposes, and it’s fair to ask how someone like Cordelia could rule a kingdom if she is incapable of getting beyond the king’s simple request for a bit of affectionate flattery. As Regan later says, “‘Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself” (293-94), and Goneril chimes in with “The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash” (295-95); both daughters see that Lear is being somewhat absurd, but they aren’t surprised and are willing to gratify him, especially given the great reward he is offering for so little. But so as not to make them seem generous, which we know they aren’t, Goneril admits to knowing the King’s casting off of Cordelia is unfair; it shows, in her words, “poor judgment” (291). Rashness is a charge commonly made against Lear, one made by Kent and two of his daughters. And those two daughters correctly recognize, I think, that the King’s unkindness towards Cordelia represents a threat to them as well: “if our father carry authority with such dis- / position as he bears, this last surrender of his will but / offend us” (304-06). The King’s surrender, they understand, is not really a surrender but a shifting of responsibility, and he will continue to play the tyrant, taking his stand upon the privilege of majesty and great age.

As for the question of whether power can be divested and divided, well, I suppose a monarch can do these things, and there are historical precedents for it from ancient Rome onwards, but it seldom seems to work. Almost nothing goes the way Lear thinks it’s going to go, once he gives away what was formerly his power to wield alone: in the first place, he had thought Albany and Cornwall would be in charge of their respective thirds, but as it turns out, neither man can stand up to those two strong-willed daughters. It is Regan and Goneril who immediately take charge of state affairs, not their men. Moreover, Lear’s conduct after giving away power is anything but responsible: he charges about with his hundred knights behaving more or less like a “lord of misrule.” His presence with either daughter, it seems, would inevitably create a public perception that they are not in charge. Lear wants to retain far more authority than he has any business keeping, now that he has stepped aside to let those “younger strengths” do the hard work of governing and maintaining order.

Lear is partly a tragedy about the terrors of growing old, of feeling slighted, neglected, weak, and useless as you make way for the young. Knowing that you must do so doesn’t necessarily make doing it any easier. In this way, it’s true that in King Lear as in other of Shakespeare’s plays that involve monarchy, “a king is but a man.” This somewhat broader frame probably accounts for the fairy-tale quality of the play. We see the disintegration of a “foolish, fond old man” (4.7.59) who evidently doesn’t understand the nature of genuine affection or the nature of the power he has been wielding for many of his eighty or so years. Cordelia, too, may appear as something like a Cinderella figure: surrounded by a pair of evil sisters, she cannot make her inner virtue known to the powerful, shallow authorities who determine her fate. Well, at least the King of France is able to discern the purity of Cordelia’s virtue, discounting her lack of Machiavellian wiles.

Banished Kent will pursue his “old course in a country new” (187). As it turns out, the “country new” is Britain. Lear’s refusal of responsibility has created a new dispensation of power, radically transforming the nation into a cauldron of anarchy and the pursuit of selfish desire for satisfaction and advancement.

Act 1, Scene 2.

This scene begins with Edmund’s soliloquy from lines 1-22, the upshot of which is that Edmund believes he has all the right qualities to rule his own house, and lacks only “legitimacy”; by contrast, the King has given all his power away and expects to hang on to his legitimacy. He stands upon rank as if it in itself constituted inner virtue or fitness to rule, whereas Edmund sees this legitimacy as a function of mere custom, of “the curiosity of nations” (4). Yet as this same soliloquy reveals, Edmund is nearly obsessed with what others think of him; he repeats the word “legitimate” several times, and can’t seem to let it go. We will see that later on, his undoing will stem from this concern for that which he seems most to despise. A most unhealthy selfishness—”I grow; I prosper” (21)—also drives him on first to victory and then to destruction. Edmund demands that the gods ally themselves not with custom but rather with natural qualities and ripeness for rule. Old Gloucester his been taken aback by the King’s strange behavior, which to him seems unnatural—this view makes him susceptible to the scheming of his illegitimate son. In a world turned upside down, what could make more sense than that a man’s legitimate son and heir should betray him without compunction, all appearances of goodness and history of virtue between the two notwithstanding? Edmund declares his father’s belief in astrology “the excellent foppery of the world” (118) and insists, “All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit” (184). He will trust in his dark vision of nature as a place that rewards the most savage and cunning predator. Tennyson (who before composing In Memoriam had become acquainted with the work of Sir Charles Lyell and other pre-Darwinian natural scientists) described this kind of nature as “red in tooth and claw.” Edmund is a human predator, and thanks to King Lear, he now has an opportunity to use his predatory skill to remake a formerly stable, human order into one that suits him best. Lear hasn’t made him what he is, but he has given him an opening to thrive. If legitimate authority doesn’t know itself, this is what happens. Perhaps, in terms of political theory, Lear early in the play assumes too easily that there is an automatic connection or concordance between the two “bodies” of a king—the perishing and erring mortal one and the immortal and immaterial political or corporate one: he follows his desires, makes unwise decisions, and then is surprised to find that his decisions as an erring human being have deranged his kingdom. Others in this play see more clearly the Machiavellian point that the exercise of power generates an authority all its own.

Act 1, Scene 3.

Goneril is alarmed at the King’s disorderly conduct. At line six, she complains that “his knights grow riotous,” and devises a stratagem whereby Oswald will make the King feel the weakness of his position by slighting him. Goneril gets to the heart of Lear’s error when she calls him an “Idle old man, / That still would manage those authorities / That he hath given away! (16-18)

Act 1, Scene 4.

Kent begins to serve the King, professing to the old man that he really is what he seems to be—a trusty middle-aged servant who knows authority when he sees it, which quality he says he “would fain call master” (27). Evidently he sees this quality in the visage of Lear, even if Lear has lost command of himself. The Fool, we are soon told, has “much pined away” since Cordelia went to France. He is Cordelia’s ally. Kent earns his keep by giving Oswald a rough education in rank, or “differences” (86). Lear’s own words begin to speak against him: he had said to Cordelia, “nothing will come of nothing,” and now the Fool responds to a similar utterance (“nothing can be made of nothing”), “so much the rent / of his land comes to” (134-35). Lear has given away not only the executive function of his office, but even the title, according to the Fool, and now retains only the title of “fool” that he was born with. At 160, the Fool says the King split his crown in two and gave it to his daughters; the implication of this remark is that power is indivisible and cannot be handled in this way. “Thou gavest them the rod and put down thine own breeches” (173-74), says the Fool, drawing a clear picture of Lear’s childishness. At 194, he applies the word “nothing” to the King, and this application may remind us of Hamlet’s similar mockery—”the king is a thing,” says Hamlet in 4.2, “of nothing.” Like Lear, too, Hamlet is confronted with the inevitable downward slide of even the greatest to what is most common: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,” as the Prince says at 5.1.213-14.

Around line 218, Lear begins to ask key questions about identity. ”Are you our daughter?” he asks Goneril, and she tells him to “put away / These dispositions which of late transport you / From what you rightly are” (220-22). Finally, the exasperated Lear asks, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (230) and is answered by the Fool with “Lear’s shadow” (231). When Goneril tells him he ought to be surrounded by men who sort well with his age-weakened condition, he swears her off altogether, and by line 266, Lear suggests that Cordelia’s brittle response to his demand for love has deprived him of his proper judgment. His judgment of Goneril that she should, as he does now, “feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child” (287-89) identifies what he believes to be the source of his troubles. But the question of proportion now comes into play because what Goneril has done far outstrips anything Cordelia may have done to offend the King.

The first mention of “plucking out eyes” occurs when Lear addresses Goneril as follows: “Old fond eyes, / Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out, / And cast you, with the waters that you loose, / To temper clay. Yea, is it come to this?” (301-04) Lear now transfers his stock to Regan, and threatens to reassume the majesty he has cast off. At 341, Goneril refers to her husband Albany’s “milky gentleness” as ill-suited to the times; his sententiae, such as “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well” (346), don’t bode well for his ability to manage power, as far as she is concerned. They seem more like passive judgments than active principles by which a kingdom such as Lear’s could be governed.

Act 1, Scene 5.

Lear sends Kent to Gloucester with letters. He begins to see that he has done Cordelia wrong, and his anger shifts to Goneril and her “Monster ingratitude” (39). The Fool points out something Goneril had said earlier: “ Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” (44). Lear is out of joint with the “seven ages of man”—he has never really attained to years of wise discretion and so is unprepared to practice the art of dying as he proclaimed at the play’s beginning. His kingdom is now paying the price.

Act 2, Scene 1.

Edmund practices his villainy on Edgar, and by the end of the scene, Gloucester has made Edmund his heir apparent. Regan insinuates that Edgar was associated with the “riotous knights” in Lear’s service, a claim that Edmund seconds. Cornwall takes a liking to Edmund for his “virtuous obedience” (113). The affinities of the wicked in this play are beginning to make themselves known, as if the bad characters come together by nature as well as by circumstance.

Act 2, Scene 2.

This is a counterpoint-style scene in which Kent recognizes Oswald for the knave he is, unlike Gloucester with his evil son Edmund. Kent’s putdown “Nature disclaims in thee: / a tailor made thee” (54-55) is a classic—Oswald is, after all, a man of artifice who gilds the ugly, base version of nature upheld by Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall. But Kent as “Caius” gets himself into a bad fix in this scene when he finds it impossible to explain his hatred for Oswald to Cornwall, who takes him for an arrogant and affected inferior, a man who has learned to get praise for his “saucy roughness” (97). At line 125, Cornwall for once takes the lead, ordering that the stocks be brought. While in the stocks, Kent mentions around lines 165-70 that he has a letter from Cordelia—she is aware of the King’s distress.

Act 2, Scene 3.

Here Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom the Bedlam Beggar, who will “ with presented nakedness outface / The winds and persecutions of the sky” (11-12). For this role, he says, “The country gives me proof and president ” (13). His model of the natural man comes from neglected humanity in the English countryside; it is hardly a mere invention on his part. Poor Tom is not a mere negation when he says, “Edgar I nothing am” (21), which means “I am no longer Edgar.” Poor Tom will be the “something” that rescues Edgar from the “nothing” forced upon him, and that serves as “president” (i.e. precedent) to King Lear in the storm.

Act 2, Scene 4.

King Lear is outraged when he sees Kent in the stocks, and becomes increasingly obsessed with this slight as the scene continues. He is sensitive to the shift in tone of his keepers—Gloucester’s ill-chosen remark that Cornwall has been “inform’d” of his demands drives him to an incredulous, “ Dost thou understand me, man?” (99) But his summons to Regan and Cornwall sounds pathetic by this point: “Bid them come forth and hear me, / Or at their chamber-door I’ll beat the drum / Till it cry sleep to death” (117-19). This intemperance earns him only the Fool’s mocking tale about the cockney woman’s attempt to quiet live eels as she made them into pie (122-26). Lear is at the mercy of his passions, which have no outlet in action. Suffering is inevitable, suggests the Fool’s wisdom.

Turning to Regan for comfort, Lear gets only the following counsel: O sir, you are old, / Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of his confine. You should be rul’d and led / By some discretion that discerns your state / Better than you yourself. Therefore I pray you / That to our sister you do make return” (146-51). It would be difficult to strip an elderly man of his dignity any more cruelly than this, and already we may begin to sense the change in attitude that marks a leap beyond “ordinary mean” to the “hard hearts” beyond anything we had thought possible in nature—the transition Lear asks about later, in Act 3, Scene 6. At 177, Lear still believes, apparently, that there is a world of difference between Regan and Goneril: “Thou better know’st / The offices of nature, bond of childhood, / Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude: / Thy half o’ th’ kingdom hast thou not forgot, / Wherein I thee endow’d” (177-81). The phrase “offices of nature” indicates that to Lear, nature is something civil and beneficent—it is to be identified with the properly functioning family unit.

But Regan’s request is along the same lines as her previous remark: “I pray you, father, being weak, seem so” (201). Then comes the reverse bidding war between Regan and Goneril over the number of knights Lear is to be allowed, ending at 264 with Regan’s question, “What need one?” Lear offers them a remarkable comeback: “O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s” (264-67). Humanity must not, he insists, be reduced to natural necessity; we are creatures of excess, artifice, and, symbol. Nature as a concept enfolds all of these qualities. It is not to be sundered from decorum, either. Then Lear offers a contradictory prayer to the gods, asking for both patience and anger. He is soon to rage in the storm (mentioned in the stage directions as “storm and tempest” at line 284), but for the moment he denounces his two present daughters as “unnatural hags” and declares almost comically, “ I will do such things— / What they are yet I know not; but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!” (280-82) Regan’s cruel sententia to worried Gloucester is her justification for exiling Lear into the storm: “O sir, to wilful men / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors” (302-04). It’s true enough that the unwise learn, if at all, only by sad experience—perhaps that is a fundamental point in Christian-based tragedy—but mere decency should have been enough to instruct Regan that this is not the time for such sententiousness. Her cruel excess (along with that of Edmund, Goneril, and Cornwall) is the demonic inverse of the generous excess Lear had invoked in exclaiming, “O, reason not the need!” The play affords scant opportunity for finding any middle ground between these two extremes—between that which is almost infinitely above nature and that which is a great deal more savage than nature. The “patience” and acceptance that Edgar will counsel Gloucester and that loyal Kent has been practicing with Lear goes some way towards building a bridge, but the outcome of their efforts is not heartening.

In Act 2, the families are sundered, and like affines itself with like, both indoors and out of doors. Lear has brought up the issue of the heavens—which side will the gods take in this great confrontation between house and house, between one group of sinners and another, far worse, group?

Act 3, Scene 1.

Kent’s question when Lear is abandoned to the “fretful elements” (4) isn’t about grand political theory or power, it is simply about who is attending the frail old man: he should not, thinks Kent, be left alone and at the mercy of the weather. The Gentleman informs him that only the Fool is with Lear, “labour[ing] to outjest / His heart-struck injuries” (16-17). That is a generous way of describing the Fool’s job in this play—we know him to be a teller of discomfiting truths, sometimes in a bitter way. But then, it isn’t comfort that brings characters insight in this play—that would not suit its tragic mode. Albany and Cornwall have fallen out by this time, and both are following events in France. At line 38, Kent excuses the King’s fall into madness unnatural, attributing it to the “bemadding sorrow” caused by the bad conduct of Lear’s two evil daughters.

Act 3, Scenes 2, 4, 6.

In 3.2 and 3.4, the storm is clearly a metaphor for Lear’s internal discord, for the howling madness in the king himself. As the Fool has told him, he has turned his daughters into domineering mothers, and in a sense he has done the opposite of what he declared he wanted to do—recall that he said he was dividing the kingdom in part so he could go off and practice the art of dying well. His daughters were to exercise power while Lear would be free to “crawl towards death.” But instead the old man clings to life, trying desperately to maintain control and clinging to his dearest daughter Cordelia. Even after he has cast them all off, he remains obsessed with them. What we have in King Lear is in part the “tragedy” of growing old and being unable to deal with the changes and the loss that must come since, as Claudius in Hamlet says, reason’s constant law is “death of fathers” (1.2.102-06) James Calderwood of UC Irvine, applying a philosophical thesis of Ernest Becker, wrote a book called Shakespeare and the Denial of Death. Lear is a death-denier in spite of his claims of willingness to accept his demise, and his daughters represent perpetuity to him. This denial may be in part what’s behind Lear’s raging in the storm, and even at the storm in a confused way:

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man;
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engender’d battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, ho! ‘tis foul” (3.2.16-24).

As his rage rolls onward and takes aim at the “great gods, / That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads” (3.2.49-50), his insight is summed up in the sentence, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning” (3.2.59-60). This broad realization seems to go beyond a specific grievance involving his treatment by Regan and Goneril; it sounds more like an indictment of the universe than anything else. With these words, Lear claims that he feels his “wits begin to turn” (67), and shows compassion enough for Poor Tom to accept the offer of shelter.

But as Lear’s angry conversation with the elements (as quoted above) suggests, the storm is also a natural phenomenon not entirely reducible to the King’s inner disharmony. In this capacity, it is beyond his control, just as the decay of his body is. He calls the storm the “physic” of pomp at 3.4, the only event and setting that allows him, as a half-naked octogenarian, to make contact with what is common to all human beings. He has learned something in this storm that exceeds his inward tempest: as is said in other Shakespeare plays, “a king is but a man,” no matter what the courtiers or the lore of kings or the theory of kingship may say. But Lear isn’t alone for long in the tempest—the Fool is with him for a time, as is Kent, and it’s the place where he meets “Poor Tom.” Such weather isn’t to be endured long. Nature is outdoing itself for ferocity.

In 3.4, Poor Tom plays a significant role with respect to Lear, who says to him, “Thou are the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art” (3.4.106-08), the very lowest level to which a man may sink. Poor Tom attests to the rightness of Lear’s baring himself to the effects of the storm, but it isn’t good for a human being to be “out in the storm” permanently—shelter must be sought, we must return to a more “accommodated” model of humanity where we can abide. Poor Tom has already learned this himself, and King Lear, when he calls Edgar “the thing itself,” is in fact looking at a man’s artistic construction, a willed madness that he has probably begun to cast off even by that point, as indeed we see him declare forcefully at the end of 3.6: “Tom, away!” Lear doesn’t seem to understand Tom’s situation fully, but he learns from this supposed madman nonetheless.

In 3.6. comes the great “trial scene,” with Lear, the Fool, and Poor Tom serving as judge and jury against some hapless joint stools enlisted to substitute for Regan and Goneril. The causes Lear derives for his misery, his lines are confused but also genuinely moving. He had been told he was no less than a god, and in the storm he has found that he’s just a miserable old man. He abandoned his only true identity when he cast off Cordelia. He keeps coming back to Regan and Goneril, those willful daughters who, he thinks, have done nothing but indulge their shameful lusts and follow their primal hunger for power. What sort of “justice” now prevails but a system of spiraling oppression and hypocrisy, one that he has loosed upon himself and others? Virtue at present is nothing more than a device to facilitate the evil now afoot. Lear’s horror at a degree of cruelty beyond what he had thought possible shows in the question that wells up from the bottom of his being towards the end of the mock trial: “Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?” (3.6.76-78) When we have renounced our limits, what, if anything, can reestablish them again, aside from exhaustion unto death?

Act 3, Scenes 3, 5.

Edmund had said earlier, “Now Gods, stand up for bastards.” He’s obsessed, understandably enough, with the distinction between baseness and legitimacy, between nature and convention. Now he seizes the opportunity Gloucester has given him for further betrayal—Edmund will tell Cornwall that Gloucester is going to help the king. Lear unleashed Edmund upon the kingdom by his unwise actions and irrationality—indeed, Edmund is inevitable since, thanks to Lear, there seems to be nothing between anarchy and the generosity and tact that maintain human dignity and shore up the frailty of our nature. Shakespeare is apparently aware that “human nature” is not a given—it is actually something we must work at and maintain, and if we sink beneath it, we are “worse” than any violent predator in the animal kingdom since such predators don’t add superfluous cruelty to their bloody actions. Edmund is in full throttle evildoer mode at present, but later he will find that he can’t permanently jettison the trappings of convention: security requires order, it requires something like a social contract.

Act 3, Scene 7.

In this scene, Gloucester is interrogated and then blinded. Gloucester’s bold justification of his secret trip to Dover in aid of the king is, “Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes.” To Gloucester, the phrase represents the worst thing he can imagine, and is purely metaphorical. Not so for Regan, who has been interrogating him, or for Goneril, who, in the presence of Regan, had already uttered her preference even before the current exchange: “Pluck out his eyes” (5). For them, the literal punishment seems entirely appropriate. Sophocles didn’t want his audience to see Oedipus blind himself with those pins from the dress of his wife Jocasta—it was reported to the audience, but not shown. Shakespeare, however, serves up the sickening spectacle along with the unforgettable lines, “Out, vild jelly! / Where is thy lustre now?” (83-84) This is the lowest point in the play, the nadir of cruelty into which Lear’s initial mistake made it possible for others to descend.

Act 4, Scene 1.

Blinded Gloucester has abandoned any notion of a just moral order rooted in nature (see pg. 1329); he has understandably lost patience, and declares, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport” (36-37). Edgar, who believes that the gods are just, must bring his father round to patience again, to acceptance of the predicament that his own foolishness has at least in part created.

Act 4, Scene 2.

At last Albany asserts his own virtuous will against Goneril and her evil compatriots, telling her that she isn’t worth “the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face” (30-31). But Goneril doesn’t care what he thinks—she is too busy thinking passionate thoughts about her lover Edmund, the newly created Gloucester. Albany is not to be gainsaid, however, and calls Goneril what she is: a “tiger” and a “fiend” rather than a human being; he realizes that the anarchic violence she and her sister are participating must either be stopped or destroy the kingdom altogether: “Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep” (48-49).

Act 4, Scenes 3-4.

Kent hears news from a Gentleman about Cordelia’s actions and frame of mind, and Kent asserts the traditional view that “The stars above us, govern our conditions” (33). Else how could such differences be between three sisters of the same king? Cordelia, meantime, is ready to take on the British whom she knows to be marching against her.

Act 4, Scene 5.

Regan shows her jealousy over Goneril’s desire for Edmund, and tries to enlist the fop Oswald on her side: “My lord is dead; Edmund and I have talk’d, / And more convenient is he for my hand / Than for your lady’s” (30-32). Oswald is also told that he should, if possible, put the old “traitor” Gloucester out of his misery, lest he incite the people to compassion against her and her allies.

Act 4, Scene 6.

Gloucester had abandoned his virtuous son Edgar at the bidding of a knave. He was too willing to suppose that the world had been turned upside down, and his fear of betrayal made him most susceptible to it. Now Gloucester’s attitude verges on unacceptable despair as he implores Edgar to lead him to a Dover cliff where he may end his life. Edgar, still disguised (though as a rustic, not a madman) does for him what Cordelia would not do for her father: he graces Gloucester’s way forwards with a lie, telling him, “You are now within a foot / Of th’ extreme verge” (25). Some may take Edgar’s long maintenance of his rustic disguise as somewhat excessive, but in this play, extreme actions are sometimes required as homeopathic remedy for states of extreme error. That’s the kind of “remedy” the king’s rash behavior has helped to make necessary, although we shouldn’t blame him too harshly for others’ downward spiral into utter depravity. Regan, Goneril, Cornwall, and their ilk are responsible for their own misdeeds. There is some comedy in this scene since, of course, Gloucester’s “fall” is only onto the bare planks of the stage. The old man’s fake descent turns out to be a “fortunate fall” since it persuades him to have patience even in his almost unbearable condition.

In this newfound patience, Gloucester is confronted with a flower-decked King Lear, who apparently hasn’t recovered his wits as well as he had thought. Edgar calls him “a side-piercing sight” (85), adding a Christ-like aura to our vision of Lear as a suffering, dying, universal man. Lear asks if Gloucester is “Goneril with a white beard” (96), and reproves his former ministers for their flattery: “they told me I was every thing. ‘Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof” (104-05). Everywhere he looks, Lear sees demonic sexuality as the base of things: “Let copulation thrive” (114), he bellows, and declares of women, “Down from the waist they are Centaurs” (125). This rant culminates in a dark vision of systemic injustice and hypocrisy:

[A] dog’s obeyed in office.
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back,
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.
Thorough tatter’d clothes [small] vices do appear;
Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. (159-64)

This is as strong a view as we find in William Blake’s “London”: “the chimney-sweeper's cry / Every blackening church appals, / And the hapless soldier's sigh / Runs in blood down palace-walls. He has finally accepted the Fool’s old offer of the title “fool,” and his eloquence peters out in an exhausted, enraged repetition of the word “kill”: “And when I have stol’n upon these son-in-laws, / Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” (186-87)

The sixth scene ends with Edgar putting an end to the rascal Oswald, who has stumbled upon Gloucester alone and tried to kill him for the prize Regan has offered. In Oswald’s purse he discovers Goneril’s treasonous letter to Edmund, imploring him to kill her virtuous husband Albany.

Act 4, Scene 7.

Lear recovers his wits, and says to Cordelia, “Pray do not mock me. / I am a very foolish fond old man. . . . Methinks I should know you” (59-63). He fully understands the wrong he has done her—something he had begun to sense earlier, even as far back as 1.5.24. Lear expects only hatred, but Cordelia mildly tells him there is “no cause” why she should hate him. Lear had to seek into the cause of his other daughters’ “hard hearts,” but for Cordelia’s loyalty, she is suggesting, he need not trouble himself to find the reason why. As Portia says in The Merchant of Venice, “The quality of mercy is not strained”—it is a thing divine and not to be sifted or parsed.

Act 5, Scene 1.

In this scene we find Edmund, Goneril, and Regan locked in a vicious struggle for supremacy in love even as they prepare to fight Cordelia’s invading Frenchmen. Edmund plans to use Albany as a front while the fighting is on, and then dispose of him afterwards as useless baggage and a bar to his advancement.

Act 5, Scene 2.

Edgar is disappointed to find his father abjectly depressed during the confusion of battle, and tells him, “Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither, / Ripeness is all” (9-11).

Act 5, Scene 3.

The worst of the worst win the day, and Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner. Lear’s reconciliation with Cordelia is brief but supremely fine:

Come let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds I’ th’ cage;
When thou does ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon. (8-19)

The old king predicts that he and Cordelia will participate in God’s mysterious knowledge of all things, knowing the ins and outs of his secret dispensation of affairs and men. But all this eloquence is too much for Edmund, who ends Lear’s words with a harsh command: “Take them away.” Political and military events have outstripped the process whereby King Lear has discovered his mistakes and recovered his identity and his affiliation with Cordelia. It is simply too late for a reconciliation of more than a few minutes’ time, and in the worst of circumstances. Edmund’s blunt order completes the triumph of literalism and matter-of-fact depravity over legitimate power, virtue, and (here) prophetic rhetoric. Lear is rehumanized and endowed with new insight into what is right and wrong, what is human and what is not. But he and Cordelia are crushed because they are a threat to Edmund, and he determines that they must go.

But things aren’t so simple for Edmund. Albany has nothing but contempt for him, which bodes ill for his hopes to wield tremendous power in the new order of things. His presence in the army camp provokes a life-and-death struggle between Goneril and Regan for his hand, and Albany arrests him and Goneril for “capital treason” (83). No sooner is this declared than Edgar shows up and challenges him to single combat. Edmund, worshiper of animalistic nature and the “Regan Revolution” though he may be, is now trapped into securing his ill-gotten gains, his newfound legitimacy as bestowed upon him first by Gloucester and then by Cornwall after Gloucester’s blinding and exile. He must accept Edgar’s challenge, and ends up hearing the legitimate son’s pious declaration that “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us: / The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes” (171-74). Regan, meanwhile, has been poisoned by Goneril, who then takes her own life when she sees Edmund slain.

Edgar has found time to reclaim the honor of his title and to avenge Edmund’s betrayal of their father, and to some extent he has reasserted the principle of a divine moral order. But the Gloucester and Lear plots do not come together: Lear and Cordelia have run out of time, and not even Edmund’s surprising last-minute act of repentance can save Cordelia from being hanged or Lear from dying of grief over her lifeless body. Their only permanence is death.

In later-C17-18 versions such as that of Nahum Tate’s 1681 revival of the play (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/tatelear.html ), Cordelia actually thrives as Queen, married by a beaming Lear to Edgar. Neoclassical critics and audiences found the actual Shakespearean ending an intolerable violation of representational ethics: the good must be rewarded, and the wicked must be punished. Here is Dr. Johnson’s pronouncement on the matter in Rambler #4:

“In narratives where historical veracity has no place, I cannot discover why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue; of virtue not angelical, nor above probability, for what we cannot credit, we shall never imitate, but the highest and purest that humanity can reach, which, exercised in such trials as the various revolutions of things shall bring upon it, may, by conquering some calamities, and enduring others, teach us what we may hope, and what we can perform. Vice, for vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust; nor should the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, be so united with it, as to reconcile it to the mind. Wherever it appears, it should raise hatred by the malignity of its practices, and contempt by the meanness of its stratagems: for while it is supported by either parts or spirit, it will be seldom heartily abhorred. ”

In Cordelia’s death, the justice of the heavens is not at all apparent. It is true that vice is thoroughly disgusting in King Lear, but virtue is by no means shown triumphant. We must endure the old king’s “going hence” in unbearable agony and near incoherence, as he bewails Cordelia’s death and laments, “my poor fool is hang’d” (306), which may refer to our old friend the Fool, who disappeared at 3.5 with the line, “And I’ll go to bed at noon” (85). Nobody really wants to rule this blighted kingdom anymore: neither Albany nor Kent will take the reigns of power, and it seems as if all is left to Edgar. His concluding lines are oddly unsatisfying:

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.

If the play has been a quest for the restoration of authority, Edgar is hardly the quester who heals the Fisher King and makes the waters flow. But this play is, of course, a tragedy and not a romance. What it may have taught us, in the end, is that the deepest kind of insight into humanity does not accompany the workings of earthly power: as so often in tragedy, the cost of such insight is an untimely death. Edgar can’t do much more than repeat the stale “truism” of his father Gloucester: better days have been. There’s no easy accommodation, or magical reconciliation, no middle ground to occupy—just a pair of departed royal visionaries and a remnant of confused and disillusioned people repeating unconvincing truisms. Much of the play has been about trying different strategies of accommodation, recognizing the constrictions of nature, mortality, political power, and language, but no satisfying arrangements have emerged. No one has come to terms with what it means to be mortal and yet not identical with the workings of raw physical nature.

Finally, even though King Lear has pagan trappings, I treat it as tinged with Christian principles, and it seems that within this framework, tragedy is constituted by the enormous gap between wisdom and felicity. Much human suffering is preventable, but at the deepest level, sorrow and loss are the only true teachers. And at this level, even a great man like Lear is the “natural fool of fortune” (4.6.191). All along, the Fool had helped prevent Lear from falling into a hopeless state of self-pity, and had helped the audience from over-pitying the king. The Fool had stood for the possibility of artistic redemption, what with his playful songs and insouciance. He knew that Lear was at least willing to listen to him speak the truth in an eccentric form, unlike Regan and Goneril, whose stern authority he feared and whose disregard for his rhymes stemmed from their obscene literalism and savagery. But comfort is cold in this play—at a certain point, the Fool simply had to disappear, leaving Lear to face what he has done to Cordelia and the impossibility of setting things right.

Week 09, Macbeth

2008-11-15T12:08:00.000-08:00

NOTES ON MACBETH

Updated to accord with the text in Greenblatt, Stephen et al., eds. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd edition. Four-Volume Genre Paperback Set. Norton, 2008. OSBN-13: 978-0-393-93152-5. This course originally used the Riverside edition.

Act 1, Scene 2 (826-27, Macbeth’s warrior status)

Macbeth is already a hero when the play begins. Much of what is narrated in Scene 2 concerns his bravery during the battles against the rebel Macdonwald, Cawdor, and Norway. His martial valor exceeds that of everyone else in the field, and there’s an exuberant quality to his actions in the service of King Duncan: Macbeth, “Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel / Which smoked with bloody execution, / Like valour’s minion / Carved out his passage till he faced the slave [Macdonwald]…” (826, 2.17ff). So the pattern of the bold and loyal warrior is set, and Macbeth will be able to use it to his advantage against Duncan, just as the former Thane of Cawdor must have done.

Incidentally, on Shakespeare’s borrowing from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, as usual the poet plays fast and loose with his material—Duncan and Macbeth’s two reigns stretched from 1034-57, the time just before the Norman Conquest, but there’s a lot of conflation when it comes to the fighting. The idea of Macbeth’s being set on to the murder by his wife comes from the story of an earlier Scottish king, Duff, who was murdered by Donwald—that’s where the business of killing the chamberlains and blaming them comes from, for instance. Holinshed’s Banquo is a very bad fellow from the outset, and his Duncan is a weak young man, not a hallowed elder. Some of the references to witches can be found in Holinshed, and England’s Scottish-born King James I liked the subject of witchcraft and even wrote a book on it, entitled Daemonology. He traced his ancestry back to Banquo and Fleance, so he is part of the royal line that taunts Macbeth by stretching out “to the crack of doom.”

Act 1, Scenes 1 and 3 (825-26, 827-31, Witches prophesy, Macbeth’s first thoughts)

The classical Fates were Clotho the spinner, Atropos the “unturning” cutter, Lachesis the “allotter” or measurer, daughters all of Zeus and Themis. As the ancients sometimes saw it, the Fates or Moirai possessed a power over events independent even of the gods, who could not control them. But this conception of an externally imposed fate is impersonal and irrational; there’s no ultimate or ulterior meaning to it, and the Greek way of holding a person accountable for confronting a fate that can’t be altered is equally strange, if admirable. I’d say the witches in Macbeth are in a different category: they don’t possess deterministic power over mortals. The witches claim to know (and really seem to know) that Macbeth will first be Cawdor and then king, while Banquo will father many kings. But they don’t claim the direct power to alter events: note how one witch responds to an insult: she will plague the insulter’s husband, but can’t stop his ship from reaching port: “Though his barque cannot be lost, / Yet it shall be tempest-tossed” (828, 3.23-24). Neither do they force Macbeth to do what he subsequently does. He may seem almost hypnotized by the witches, but hypnotism only works because people secretly want to do the things they are supposedly commanded to do. That sounds like the correct way to describe the relationship between Macbeth and the witches. They can set forth a vision, but they can’t make Macbeth’s decisions for him. He understands that their bare statements don’t necessarily mean he ought to seize the crown by force. I suspect that what the witches know most intimately is Macbeth’s character. Their meeting with him isn’t an anonymous call or an accident; they know who he is and prepare to meet him at the end of the “hurly-burly” battle. (825, 1.3-4) They have given Macbeth the apparent certainty that he is to become king, and he will do exactly as he subsequently does. Perhaps the most important thing the witches know is that the measure of ambition in their man outweighs his conscience.

In his lectures, Coleridge says that the value of Shakespeare’s supernaturalism is to set an excited tone right away and thereby to prepare us for Macbeth’s central deed in Act 2. (He contrasts this movement with Hamlet, which starts out conversationally and moves to high rhetoric.) But the supernatural is more than a stage prop or plot device here: we are to understand the witches to be real. The witches (and the ghost of Banquo later) are more than a metaphor for states of mind. To use the romanticist framework, Shakespeare is an imaginative poet who brings together traditional beliefs and images in a more vital, dynamic way than a merely mechanical or fanciful poet. Such an imaginative poet will, suggests Coleridge, balance and reconcile “opposite and discordant qualities”: Macbeth’s ambition is material, and the supernatural forces are equally real. Neither cancels the other but instead both correlate or even mix in a way that leaves both Macbeth and us distinctly uneasy. The Norton editors make something like this point when they point out that the witches are never apprehended and punished once Macbeth is dead and Malcolm inherits and refer to the play’s “nebulous infection, a bleeding of the demonic into the secular and the secular into the demonic” (820).

The effect that the witches’ prophecies have upon Macbeth is profound and unsettling: “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good” and “My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, / Shakes so my single state of man that function / Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not” (830, 3.129-30, 138-41). All that Macbeth had formerly taken for granted is now in play, and Macbeth murderous thoughts coexist uneasily with his hope that “chance may crown me / Without my stir” (830, 3.142-43).

Act 1, Scene 4 (831-32, Malcolm heir, Macbeth chooses violent path, self-division)

Duncan is still shocked by the treachery of the now executed Thane of Cawdor, saying, “He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust” (831, 4.12). Duncan makes Malcolm Prince of Cumberland and heir to the throne, which galls Macbeth, who apparently thought the crown might come to him just as honorably as the honors he has won up to this point: Malcolm’s preeminence is “a step / On which I must fall down or else o’erleap” (832, 4.48ff), and it makes a division within him: “Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires….” (832, 4.50-51)

Act 1, Scene 5 (832-34, Lady Macbeth’s unsexing; anxieties about Macbeth)

Lady Macbeth’s receptivity and determination are on display: she is exhilarated at the news of the great change to come, and calls on the heavens to “unsex” her, to make her as steely and strong as a male warrior, stopping up all portals of sentiment and leaving room and capacity only for necessary action. (833, 5.38-52) She has no doubt that the witches’ prophecy will come true and that it will require violent setting-on, but her role is that of the cunning woman, the plotter and seducer—Macbeth must do the deed, which causes her great anxiety: “Yet do I fear thy nature. / It is too full o’th’ milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way” (833, 5.14-16). As in classical tragedy, when a woman tries to take on the attributes of a male hero, she will be sorely punished. As the play proceeds and Macbeth steps up to become the hardened king his wife had asked for, she will lose the “unsexed” quality of the first act, and with it the capacity to steer Macbeth by means of taunts and reproaches.

Act 1, Scenes 6-7 (834-38, Macbeth ponders ethics, Lady Macbeth brings him round)

Duncan unsuspectingly arrives at Macbeth’s castle, praising its location as “a pleasant seat” (834, 1.6.1). In Scene 7, Macbeth’s initial reflections remind us of the play’s Christian underpinnings: Duncan is his feudal lord, his guest, and a good man. (835 7.12-16) The prospective deed is all ways damnable, and Macbeth is in no doubt of its source in wicked ambition or the likelihood of retribution: “we but teach / Bloody instructions which, being taught, return / To plague the inventor” (835 7.8-10) and “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition…” (836, 7.25-27). As Robert Bridges asks, how could someone so horrified by the prospective crime actually commit it? The Norton editors point out that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most self-aware villain; unlike, say, Richard III, whom we can hardly imagine doing other than what he does, Macbeth has the capacity to do good or ill; we know that his choice is sincerely meditated and deeply felt, and he understands the true nature of what he’s about to do.

Nonetheless, Lady Macbeth brings him round to his longstanding code as a warrior: his masculine honor, she convinces him, calls for him to take the crown, not sit back and wait for it to be delivered to him by good fortune. The basic conflict between Christian sentiment and pagan heroism we will find in the revenge play Hamlet obtains in Macbeth: Macbeth’s bloody Senecan ambition can only be satisfied by violating Christian principle. Faced with competing codes since he will have it so, he must make a moral choice. He has made division within himself, and in consequence must carefully manage the yawning divide between what is and what seems to be: “Away, and mock the time with fairest show. / False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (837, 7.81-82).

Act 2, Scene 1 (837-38, Is this a dagger? Macbeth talks himself into the deed)

Macbeth utters some of the most famous lines in the Shakespearean canon: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. / Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation / Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?” (838, 1.33-39) What is the status of the dagger? There are no stage directions telling us that the ghostly knife is actually before Macbeth, and he tries to firm up his sanity by insisting that “It is the bloody business which informs / Thus to mine eyes” (838, 1.48-49). Even so, the dagger seems real enough to him and the very double of the actual blade he has drawn in preparation for killing Duncan, and Macbeth admits that it “marshals” (838, 1.42) him where he was going, that it concentrates and gathers up his spiritual and bodily forces. The dagger’s power may seem to take on the cast of fate or necessity, but it may be more accurate to suggest that it makes manifest the weirdness of the world through which Macbeth now walks: the very objects speak to him, and torment him with animistic pranks.

He prays for an easy, quiet kill that accords with the silence and deadness of nature itself: “Thou sure and firm-set earth, / Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear / Thy very stones prate of my whereabout” (838 1.56-58) and seems quite resolved, saying “I go, and it is done” (838, 1.62), but we know that such facility in dealing violent death cannot be.

Act 2, Scene 2 (839-40, Macbeth’s reaction to murder: no “out of sight, out of mind”)

Macbeth’s initial reaction to his bloody act is one of horror: why wasn’t anything heard? (839, 2.14) He is shaken by his inability to say amen in response to the grooms’ sleepy “God bless us” (839, 2.26-27), and reports to Lady Macbeth that after stabbing Duncan, “Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more, / Macbeth does murder sleep’…” (839, 2.33-34). He even has a touch of “Lady Macbeth’s disease,” as that later manifests in her: he asks, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” (840, 2. 58-59) the hand-washing in this scene is both practical since the evidence must be eliminated and ritually significant, an act of forgetting, if not of attaining forgiveness. But it gives no relief, which is an ominous sign for Macbeth and his wife, in spite of her seeming confidence that “A little water clears us of this deed” (840, 2.65). Getting rid of the deed’s effects will not put the murder out of mind. The knocking at the gate “appals” Macbeth (840, 2.56); by now, his sensibilities are both heightened and deranged. Macbeth’s final words in this scene point the way forward: “To know my deed ‘twere best not know myself “ (840, 2.71). Necessary now is the deadening of his own consciousness, and certainly of his conscience, which is yet raw. But for the moment, Lady Macbeth has had to grab the daggers from him and take care of insinuating the grooms’ guilt for Duncan’s murder. (840, 2.51) She is the “man” at this point; she has been unsexed just as she had asked.

Act 2, Scene 3 (841-44, Porter; Macduff discovers murder, Macbeth explains)

The Porter’s scene (841-42) links well with the revelation of Macbeth’s crime. Romantic-era critic Thomas DeQuincey wrote in “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” that the Porter scene captures the moment when a murderous act beyond civilized existence is just beginning to give way to the ordinary dimension of life, to the quotidian. That’s why, he explains, the scene is so effective, even startling. In part, it provides comic relief after the murder and initial reaction on the part of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and in part it heightens the tension of the next scene, in which the crime meets the light of day and Macbeth must explain to people not steeped in depravity and horrid intent his rash action in killing the grooms as they slept. But most significantly, I believe, the Porter’s comments teach us a lesson about desire: namely, ambition is like drunkenness. At first, it may seem as if the contrast is greater since drink “provokes the desire” but “takes away the performance” (841, 3.27-28). Macbeth the ambitious man doesn’t have much trouble acting on his ambition: he performs. But at a deeper level, he does run into trouble because he no longer controls his destiny. He “unmans” himself and becomes a violent fool; his boldest deeds are in truth passive reactions to necessity. Ultimately, then, ambition is a kind of madness, and it makes its indulgers lose free will and self-respect. In that way, then, ambition is perhaps as great an “equivocator” (841, 3.29) as “much drink.” Macbeth becomes as impotent as the drunken lecher of the Porter’s imagining, even as he hacks his way through the kingship he has wrongly won.

The other thing about the Porter’s interruption is that it widens the frame from the selfish little circle of Macbeth and his wicked wife. The old Porter couldn’t care less about the goings-on at the Castle. He has his own desires, his own problems, his own wisdom, and his play-acting as Satan’s gatekeeper cuts Macbeth’s role as “grand criminal” down to size, so that we may for a time see in it a damnably common act of betrayal, fueled by vile ambition and justified by knavish equivocation. This is a variation on the strategy we find in Lear, where the King is seldom left alone with his thoughts. Shakespeare wants to carry us along with Macbeth’s story, but he won’t let us merge our identity with that of the protagonist. Drama is a transpersonal form of poetic art: it stages and allows for the development of great personalities, but it doesn’t let them swallow up the stage. Shakespeare is interested to show how people respond to one another, how human behavior turns upon triangulations of desire and other basic elements of our nature. We don’t get from him the claim of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost that “the mind is its own place” (1.254) but rather John Donne’s statement, “No man is an island, entire unto itself” (Devotions, Meditation 17).

Seeming or appearing to be a certain kind of person is not necessarily to be that kind of person, and the cost of maintaining the gap is often ruinous, a form of slavery to one’s desires and deeds. This gap becomes still more apparent in Macbeth when Macduff discovers the murder (842, 3.59), and Macbeth, now returned to the world of normalcy, of forensic cause and effect, must justify his rash action: “I do repent me of my fury” (843, 3.103), he blurts out, but his words aren’t very convincing. Malcolm is inexperienced, but he’s a Machiavellian in the making: he heads for England. He and brother Donalbain are “the usual suspects,” and he knows somebody has a powerful interest in framing the two. But Donalbain gets the best summation of the state of affairs: “Where we are / There’s daggers in men’s smiles” (844, 3.135-36).

Act 2, Scene 4 (844-45, Nature’s first revenge: eclipse; Macbeth crowned)

An eclipse of the sun occurs, and an old man makes the connection: the eclipse is “unnatural, / Even like the deed that’s done” (844b, 3.10-11). The natural world will signify, it will have its revenge for the unnatural acts, the wicked artifice, just enacted by Macbeth and his wife. He will struggle with conscience and, at least for a time, will seem to have killed it altogether, along with fear. For the moment, he is a great success, and we hear that he has traveled to Scone to be crowned king. (845, 3.31)

Act 3, Scene 1 (845-49, “To be safely thus”: anxiety, seeking security)

Banquo’s ambition appears, but only as distrustful speculation of Macbeth: “Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all / As the weird women promised; and I fear / Thou played’st most foully for’t. Yet it was said / It should not stand in thy posterity…” (845, 1.1-4). Macbeth’s stronger and more ruthless ambition—this time “to be safely thus” (846, 1.50) dominates the scene; he engages some flunkies with a grudge to cut down Banquo and Fleance (847-48), whose continued existence is unbearable to him: “For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind, / For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered…” (847, 1.66-67). Macbeth is confronting the hollow man image that he will soon become: the witches promised him only “a barren scepter” (847, 1.63), and at the cost of his soul, the “eternal jewel” (847, 1.69) possessed by even the humblest of men, that barren scepter is all he presently has.

In general, much of Act 3 is taken up with immediate consequences, with the need for security in the wake of Duncan’s murder. The play deals with the relationship between spiritual error and its material and psychological consequences. Good film versions such as Roman Polanski’s (starring Jon Finch and Francesca Annis) or Philip Casson’s 1979 production starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench handle the transformation of Macbeth from outwardly loyal thane into murderous fiend with appropriate abruptness. Power hates a vacuum, and Macbeth must fill up the vacuum forthwith. We see a transition from the initially pensive Macbeth to “Macbeth 2.0,” hard, resolute and ruthless, a man willing to betray and strike down anyone who threatens him. His busy wickedness at present is the flip side of acedia or apathy.

Act 3, Scene 2 (849-50, Terrible dreams, resolutions, Banquo taken down)

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth reflect and strategize, and we see both the spiritual effects of the act and a determination to quell the psychological disturbance while at the same time continuing the trail of bloody securement: “But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, / Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep / In the affliction of these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly” (849, 2.18-21). The cost of keeping up the division between seeming and being shows again in this second scene: as Macbeth tells his queen, they must “make our faces visors to our hearts, / Disguising what they are” (849, 35-36): the face must not betray what the heart contains—Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both recognize this as an unsafe way to live, but they have no alternative if they want to keep the power they have falsely won.

“What’s to be done?” asks Lady Macbeth. (850, 2.45) She suspects that Macbeth will have Banquo killed, it seems, but he keeps this partly to himself. Why? We might ask, since the queen is already complicit in the worst that Macbeth has done. Still, the king is intent on keeping his precise plans to himself: “Come, seeling night, / Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, / And with thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond / Which keeps me pale” (850, 2.46-51). This is a hawking metaphor—the night (the falconer) will do the office of the falcon (day); the rational, humane day must give preference to the terror-laced opportunities of night. One bad deed calls for another: “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill” (850, 2.56). As yet, Macbeth doesn’t seem to realize that no security for him or his queen will ever emerge. No matter—Banquo is killed at 3.3.17, though Fleance escapes.

Act 3, Scene 4 (851-54, Banquo’s ghost, resolve: all action; tedium of bloody future)

Banquo’s ghost appears during a banquet, taking Macbeth’s place of honor, and the effect is immediate: “Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me” (852, 4.49-50). Macbeth’s guests see only a fit of madness that unmans the King. They don’t even know Banquo is dead, only that he’s missing. This scene directly undoes Macbeth’s attempt to play the smooth Machiavel—his behavior unsettles everyone around him; even his wife. His strange words pay tribute to the weirdness of the time: “The time has been / That, when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end. But now they rise again…” (853, 4.77-79). But when he recovers, he determines to find out the worst and thereby discover the most brutal and efficient means to maintain his power: “I will . . . to the weird sisters. / More they shall speak, for now I am bent to know / By the worst means the worst” (854, 4.132-34). There’s no need to hold back since he’s already deep in evil, haunted by the dark forces to which he has succumbed: “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (854, 4.135-37). He must now act so quickly that there’s no time left to analyze his actions beforehand. As quickly as the mind can conceive, the hand will act (854, 4.139). Macbeth’s words may remind us of Richard III’s resolution, “I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. / Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye” (4.2.64–67). It would be tiresome to Macbeth to retrace his steps, to be penitent; the only way is forward, wading through more blood. But that way forward may also now begin to seem tedious. In the remaining few scenes, Hecate mocks human pretensions to permanence and safety (855, 5.32-33), we hear that Malcolm has found refuge at the court of England’s Edward the Confessor, and that Macduff has followed him there to seek help from Edward against Macbeth. (857, 6.21ff)

Act 4, Scene 1 (857-61, Witches’ three visions, Banquo’s line; Macbeth’s resolve)

Macbeth meets for the second time with the weird sisters. Three visions tell him to beware Macduff, that no man of woman born can harm him, and that only when Birnam Wood comes to high Dunsinane Hill will he be defeated. (859-60) The first two of these prophecies actually reinforce each other, we later find out. The magic-mirror image of Banquo’s issue reigning forever unsettles Macbeth most: “What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?” (860, 1.133) Repetition is sin’s most savage punishment. Sin punishes itself, trapping unrepentant sinners in their wicked patterns of conduct and desire. This is a traditional idea: you can find it not only in Augustine’s Confessions but in Dante, Milton, Hopkins—just about any Christian literary artist. Macbeth considers his own life safe, but he is frustrated, perpetuity being like the fruit that turns to ashes when Satan and his legions, newly turned to serpents in hell, addict-like, cannot resist eating it (PL 10.538ff). He resolves to act his bloody deeds as soon as conceived: Macduff’s family to be slaughtered: “From this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand… / The Castle of Macduff I will surprise…” (861, 2.163-166).

Act 4, Scene 2 (861-63, Lady Macduff & kids murdered: their perspective)

Before they are cruelly murdered, Lady Macduff and her son give us yet another perspective on the great events that overtake them and afflict the kingdom of Scotland: the boy’s innocence strikes home when he says in response to Lady Macduff’s insistence that traitors must be hanged, “the liars and swearers are fools, for there / are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang / up them . (863, 2.56-58) We hear and see the private consequences of public disorder; plus an emphasis on the natural affective ties that bind people and reinforce charity and social order: the dimension of humanity that Macbeth and his queen have scorned. Why, by the way, did Macduff leave the family unprotected? He seems culpable there, almost a “traitor” in putting affairs of state before family; this makes sense in the patriarchal context of English royal politics in Shakespeare’s time.

Act 4, Scene 3 (864-69, Malcolm’s “confession”; Macduff’s grief; Scotland’s misery)

Malcolm confesses to Macduff what an awful villain he is—next to him, he says, Macbeth is an angel. (865, 3.51ff) But this claim is ridiculous—in Holinshed, Malcolm does this only to test Macduff, and that’s the implication here as well. It’s probably also the case that he’s showing the proper use of speculation—to shore up one’s sense of virtue. Malcolm’s ploy serves to emphasize the crime Macbeth committed in moving from thought to act, and reassures us that while human nature is corrupted, the corruption’s effects can be kept in check. Macbeth’s “throne of blood” need not become the universal, irresistible pattern of royal conduct, even though we saw in the previous scene what happens to the innocent when royalty does not resist: derangement and denaturation of the very landscape and destruction of life and property, as is well indicated by Ross when he says that in Scotland, “good men’s lives / Expire before the flowers in their caps, / Dying or ere they sicken” (867, 3 172-74).

Macduff is relieved to hear that Malcolm was only testing him, and there is much helpful news thanks to the help coming miserable Scotland’s way from England. (867-68) In his attempt to harness Macduff’s grief (869) after he hears from Ross about the death of his wife and children, Malcolm again shows his inexperience—he’s a young man filled with valorous words from some classical manual of rhetoric. As Macduff says, “He has no children” (869, 2.217) and can’t feel the loss of them as a man should. Macduff, unlike Macbeth, is still human, and does not subscribe to the “hardness” doctrine of masculinity set forth by the wicked usurping royal couple. Nature’s bonds of affection are still powerful within him, and Macduff, ever the warrior, comes round to Malcolm’s program of action.

Act 5, Scene 1 (869-70, Lady Macbeth’s madness)

By now, Lady Macbeth has been driven mad by her guilt, and has obsessive-compulsive disorder, in this case a hand-washing compulsion: “who would have thought the / old man to have had so much blood in him?” (870, 1.33-34) Well, an average human body contains about six quarts of blood (1½ gallons). The queen’s physical manifestation reveals a psychic derangement: she can’t expunge her guilt, which shows up as imaginary blood stains on her hands, and her physician can do nothing to help her: “More needs she the divine than the physician” (870, 1.64). What is the point of showing Lady Macbeth’s insanity, a physiological problem, when the supernatural agents are real enough? This is not a pure psychodrama, but the witches are not causes of human evil; they only assist those who would do wickedness. What affects Lady Macbeth in the private sphere and in purely mental terms plays out for Macbeth in the broader material, public sphere that belongs to him. Action, battles and machinations constitute his attempt to scrub his hands and conscience clean, but violence and betrayal accomplish no such thing. Repetition rules the day: wedded to his illegitimate power, Macbeth will repeat the same pattern to the bitter, desperate end.

Act 5, Scenes 2-3 (871-73, enemy approaches, Macbeth’s brittle resolutions)

Macbeth’s opponents are on the march towards Birnam, but the king has deluded himself by now—he had earlier denounced the witches for the visions afforded him—and thinks he still leads a charmed life, (871, 3.1ff) so he dismisses those who are abandoning him: “fly, false thanes, and mingle with the English epicures!” (871, 3.7) But his claims ring hollow, as he himself reveals: “My way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf, / And that which should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have…” (872, 3.23-27). The words are aesthetically pleasing, but hollow and not directly related to the realm of action: this man is tired of living. Macbeth resolves to steel himself in violence, saying, “I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked” (872, 3.33) and remains distant from his wife’s sufferings: he asks the doctor philosophically, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” (872, 3.42) and rejects physic altogether when the doctor cannot give him a positive answer. As for his own situation, the witches’ charms are better than any medicine: “I will not be afraid of death and bane / Till Birnam Forest come to Dunsinane” (873, 3.61-62).

Act 5, Scene 4 (873-73, Birnam’s boughs advance: appropriate weirdness of nature)

Malcolm orders the soldiers each to cut down a tree bough (873, 4.4-7) and use it to deceive Macbeth’s defenders about the advancing host’s numbers. So Birnam Wood is coming to Dunsinane, but we and Macbeth aren’t witnessing a violation of the laws of nature. Nature seems bizarre and uncanny to Macbeth because he himself has become unnatural. But this apparent weirdness in the behavior of nature serves as a way of giving him his desserts—he has betrayed his natural lord (his “father” in Jacobean political theory) and turned his marriage bond into a criminal partnership. In broad terms, the deployment of natural objects to pay Macbeth back stems from the fact that Shakespeare is working within a Christian framework where sin has deranged the entire Creation, just as it will later in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Eve “pluck’d, she ate, / Earth felt the wound” (9.781-82). Nature responds as by sympathetic magic to human error, reflecting that error back to us if we know how to interpret nature’s signs. The weird, the uncanny, is in this context a function of Providence, which makes use of whatever is at hand to punish those who transgress and fail to repent.

Act 5, Scene 5 (874-75, Lady Macbeth dies, Birnam comes to Dunsinane, life’s a “walking shadow”)

Even before he learns in the middle of this scene that Birnam Wood is on the move, Macbeth has begun to call for destruction and decreation; of the enemy, he says, “Here let them lie / Till famine and the ague eat them up” (874, 5.3-4). He pronounces his own spiritual death sentence with the line “I have almost forgot the taste of fears” (874, 5.9) and can’t find it in himself to bewail the death of the queen (874, 5.16-27), for “She should have died hereafter” (874, 5.17). Her passing only leads Macbeth to say that life is ultimately meaningless, pointless repetition: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (874, 5.23-27). After a messenger informs him about the moving forest, Macbeth explicitly invites general destruction: “I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun, / and wish th’estate o’th’ world were now undone” (875, 5.47-50).

Act 5, Scenes 6-11 (875-78, Macduff’s revenge against “hell-hound”; Malcolm king)

Macbeth confidently kills young Siward, and rejects classical honor-suicide, choosing to direct violence at others instead. But then in Scene 10, he is confronted by Macduff, who reveals that he was born by cesarean section: “Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” (877, 10.15-16). This new information causes Macbeth to lose his courage and momentarily drop his adamantine front, but he quickly recovers with curses against the witches on his lips—“be these juggling fiends no more believed, / That palter with us in a double sense” (877, 10.19-20), only to be slain by the resolute revenger Macduff. In the end, the terms he and others use to describe him are mostly non-human: a baited bear, a hell-hound, and Lady Macbeth is described as “fiend-like” (878, 11.35). Macduff has sworn revenge, and he gets it.

In the eleventh and final scene, while Macbeth and Lady Macbeth had tried to kill all sentiment and sentimentality within themselves, the end of the play isn’t at all sentimental. Old Siward rejects mourning over his son in battle, and Malcolm, in accepting the crown, promises to do all the necessaries in the proper way. The kingdom has been set right, and the emphasis is on order and ceremony, spare and fitting words coming in advance. This seems appropriate given the derangement of the kingdom and of the dead king and queen’s psyches.

Finally, we might concentrate on Macbeth’s concluding musings and resolutions in the last several scenes. Do they constitute a classical recognition scene or not? Coleridge says the play is “pure tragedy” rather than reflective as Hamlet. But that doesn’t mean there’s no introspection or understanding coming from Macbeth. His tragedy involves the process of desiring honors and attaining them by unjust means, of buying into the epistemological / moral ambiguity served up by the Weird Sisters. Does Macbeth learn anything by the end of the play? I think he understands what he has done and why it was wrong, but it doesn’t matter to him anymore. This play shows its great maturity in the quality of Macbeth’s final musings in Act 5: the language accorded the isolated, brittle King is some of the finest Shakespeare ever gave to any character: its mixture of high aesthetic perception and utter hollowness of spirit shows an intellect undebased, but constrained now to describing and coming to terms with a situation that would horrify anyone with normal sensibilities. Macbeth’s fine words are insightful, but they are hollow, as if he himself can’t feel them and finds no comfort in them. They are empty words, not a curative and certainly no better than the “physic” he had earlier cast to the dogs because the doctor couldn’t heal his wife’s disorder. As always in Shakespeare, some interest is taken in the way a given character handles the relationship between actions and words: the words spoken by Macbeth to explain his situation to himself and his actions to others provide no relief, for that is beyond the power of language in such cases, at least when it is not accompanied by sincere sentiment.

Shakespeare’s plays have various ways of dealing with the consequences of tragic mistakes, with respect to the ability to act. King Lear, for example, gains insight at the expense of being able to wield power. By the end of the play, he and his daughter Cordelia are at the mercy of others, so even if they have become “God’s spies,” they can’t act in the political realm anymore. Macbeth follows a different pattern—once he makes his choice, he must take on the ruthlessness of the tyrant who holds his throne by injustice. Blood draws on blood until, as Macbeth says, there’s no point in going back. He acts boldly and dies fighting, but such desperation hardly makes him a hero. Instead, he’s the puppet of actions that stem from his own perverted will. The witches shoot an arrow into the heart of Macbeth, but that is not to say they are ultimately responsible for his crimes. Ambition is a kind of madness, but it is a lucid madness: images present themselves to Macbeth, truth comes in presentiment, and ambition drives him to inhabit the vision. The consequences of his behavior are predictable, if strange. Shakespeare’s genius is to take what might have been a stage villain and make him a three-dimensional character, but a three-dimensional character who is nonetheless a stunning failure as a human being.

As for the play’s politics, I can’t see how some critics’ claims that Macbeth is tinged with nihilism can be correct given that the play was in part written for King James. Why would Shakespeare deal with kingship in such a manner when he wanted an absolutist monarch to enjoy the play? The older, and probably more tenable, view of the play’s moral arc is that sin punishes itself inexorably, even if the interval between commission and punishment is sometimes longer than most of us would like. I think it is true that anarchy lurks in this play, but only in a narrow manner—the king is human, after all, even though political doctrine says he has two bodies, one mortal and the other immortal and representative of kingship itself. Macbeth makes a bad but entirely free choice, and from that point onwards his bad choice entraps him in a vicious fate that generates real chaos for others who must abide in his realm. He himself marches in linear fashion to his death, behaves like a beast (losing his title to humanity), and dies fighting. The Christian point is that free will, misused, becomes the slave of so-called fate, or necessity. As Wilde said, when we act we become puppets—Shakespeare might add, “well, only when we act badly.” Apparent disorder on the ground does not necessarily imply disorder in the heavens, in the fundamental nature of things. Still, I take the point of the Norton editors about the strangeness and equivocal quality of the supernatural realm in this play—it seems accurate to suggest, as they do, that the secular and the demonic, the physical / material and the spiritual, are by no means easy to maintain in strict separation. The witches’ “equivocation” is a power stalking human desire and endeavor.

Document timestamp: 11/4/2011 8:15 PM

Week 08, Othello

2008-11-15T12:07:00.000-08:00

Notes on Othello (Updated 10/18/2011 for Norton Tragedies, E316 MW Fall 2011)

Act 1, Scene 1. (435-39: Iago’s resentment, Brabanzio’s rage at loss of daughter)

Iago may not be acting from world-historical outrage, but he sets forth two reasons for his hatred of Othello: first, his sense of injured merit because Othello has given the lieutenant’s job he coveted to Cassio (435, 1.1.19ff), and the possibility (stated in Act 1.3) that his wife has slept with Othello. Iago is a self-conscious Machiavel and a consummate actor (like Shakespeare’s Richard III or Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus). As he says to Roderigo, “I follow but myself” and “I am not what I am” (436-37, 1.1.42-65): he may be Othello’s trusted underling, but that isn’t how he sees himself “five years from now,” to borrow a phrase from the corporate interview playbook. Iago may be comfortable in his own skin, but he is not at peace with himself. There’s something impish about him, too, something of the downright evildoer—he seems to enjoy stirring up trouble for the hell of it, and he shows no regard for the destruction he brings to Desdemona, whom he knows to be innocent. He maneuvers with diabolical skill in the gap between what he seems to be and what he is, turning everything that happens to his own advantage. He and Roderigo regale Brabanzio with race-baiting taunts to find his secretly married daughter. (437, 1.1.88ff)

Act 1, Scene 2. (439-442, Othello willingly arrested, off to Venice)

Othello shows no fear of Roderigo or Brabanzio when they apprehend him: “Keep up your bright swords…” (441, 1.2.60ff). On the spot, Brabanzio accuses Othello of witchcraft: “thou has enchanted her” (441, 1.2.64), he tells the Moor; otherwise, he insists, the girl would never “Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou—to fear, not to delight!” (441, 1.2.71-72) He can’t even imagine the attraction of the foreign or the exotic, even though he’s been listening to Othello’s stories with admiration, too. To Brabanzio, Venice is the world. (He’s strangely provincial given that Venice is a cosmopolitan sea empire that had long since known how to cut a deal or two with Arabs and Turks.) Brabanzio immediately accepts Iago and Roderigo’s reductive, grotesquely abstract “devil” and bestial “ram” characterization of Othello. Othello hardly lacks charm, but the father welcomes Iago’s stereotypes.

Act 1, Scene 3. (442-50, Othello vindicated, Desdemona strong, Iago enlists Roderigo)

Othello carries the day when summoned to Venice because of his military bearing and chivalric eloquence. When the Italians accuse him of witchcraft, he promises to deliver a “round, unvarnished tale” (444, 1.3.90); but then he romances them with his beautiful, moving words. Othello cuts a dashing figure, and he is aware of his effect upon others. He is proud of his conquest, like a soldier who has won the prize fairly. The tale he delivers is anything but unvarnished. It is filled with romantic extravagance. Perhaps he has been sold into slavery, fought tremendous battles, and seen many remarkable sights. But did he really see “Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (445, 1.3.143-44)? No, these are tales he’s picked up and remembered the better to build up an image of himself as an adventurer. He exploits Desdemona’s interest in such stories, crafting from that propensity a contract-in-hand to “beguile her of her tears” and to “dilate” his life’s journey. What sanctifies Othello’s dilatory works of art? Well, the fact that he sincerely loves Desdemona—he means her only good, so it’s acceptable to incorporate some “make-believe” elements into an already exciting account of himself: “she loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them” (445, 1.3.166-67). Othello is rather like Sir Philip Sidney’s good Christian poet, whose “feigning” of “notable images” shouldn’t be condemned just because the images aren’t literally true. Othello isn’t a naïve other or a silent warrior but a poetical, confident man.

Perhaps his tragedy will be that he just can’t imagine anyone wielding such poetical power for anything but the good reasons that motivate him in his courtship of Desdemona, or in his speech to the Duke and Senators that frees them to return to considerations of State rather than dwelling on private grudges and love affairs. His way of “seeming” (i.e. embroidering his life story) is so pure that it’s folded into the essential goodness of his being. In a sense, all poets are liars—Plato tells us so, right?—but some feigning and pretending is nobly done and not engaged in as a means to do evil, as it is with Iago. Othello’s naivety, then, isn’t that he’s unable to speak anything but plain truth; it’s that he can’t conceive of a man who willfully spins lies for base purposes. A good man is free to gild the lily, but a wicked man ought to show himself for what he is. In this sense, it’s fair to say that Othello proves tragically unable to deal with the difference between seeming and being. Then, too, Othello may be poetical, but he’s not John Keats’ poet of “negative capability,” the kind who can throw himself into doubts and uncertainties as if they were his own proper element. Othello’s feigning seems more tactical and less supple, more task-oriented, than that of the Keatsian “chameleon poet” who wants to escape from his own skin.

Both the absolute otherness imposed on Othello by men such as Brabanzio (who can scarcely process the Moor at all) and the charismatic appeal of the man’s bearing and language are at work early in Othello. Perhaps both, taken together with the sad events later in the play, go a long way towards demonstrating how difficult mutual understanding between cultures can be. In spite of Othello’s wondrous gifts of bearing and speech, he is easily destroyed by Iago, a man with the sort of knowledge of Venetian society Othello lacks. Generalized virtues cannot permanently trump an intimate knowledge of local cultural practices, symbolism, and assumptions, at least not if someone is determined to use these specifics against an outsider. Othello is a classic tragedy in that a good man is destroyed by the virtues that have won him admiration—his inability to comprehend how devious and selfish others can be. It’s true that Othello has so far followed his personal desires, and we might suppose that he’s putting Venice at risk if a tumult ensues. But he deals so forthrightly with the Venetian authorities that the affair blows over, and he is free to return to his work for the general welfare. How, Othello might ask, could others be so petty as to damage the public good for purely private reasons, like those of Iago?

Our first glimpse of Desdemona shows us a strong-willed young woman who is not afraid to act boldly and speak her mind, even in the presence of her powerful father and Venetian statesmen. Her strength accords well with Othello’s soldierly virtue. (446-47, 1.3.180ff, 247ff) Later, Desdemona will be put in an impossible position—her considerable aplomb doesn’t translate into an ability to charm Othello out of his suspicions, so her goodness works against her. But with the devilish Othello out to destroy her, it’s hard to see how anything she says, no matter how skillful, would help. Terse protestations of virtue and fancy talk alike would fail to overcome the “ocular proof” by which Iago will falsely damn her.

Iago’s creed is worth noting. To Roderigo’s passive, faux-suicidal blubbering about the defects of his “virtue” (in this usage, it means “nature”), Iago blurts out “Virtue? A fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are / thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the / which our wills are gardeners…” (449, 1.3.316-18). In terms of Renaissance psychology, this means that while we are subject to the pull of our appetites (which belong to the “sensitive” part of human nature), we can control these appetites. We can let our choice-making power, our “will,” be informed by reason and thereby control the effects of appetite. (The elements of the rational part of human nature are “understanding” or reason and “will” or rational appetite, the inner power of motion that can incline towards God and reason or towards our lower appetites.) Iago is suggesting that while the body and the appetites may hold sway for a time in Desdemona, she is bound, in due time, to become sated with Othello, and then her rational element will lead her to despise this older man whose appearance and culture are so unlike hers. (449, 1.3.342ff; also 455, 2.1.228-29) Like will return to like. Well, Iago hardly puts Renaissance psychology to the noble uses of Pico della Mirandola, who implies that the grandest goal of humanity is to transcend itself for the greater glory of God, but he knows how to craft a cunning scheme from its premises: Roderigo need only “put money in his purse” and wait for Desdemona to turn again to Venice.

Here Iago’s second motive comes to light: he’s heard that Othello may have cuckolded him. And although he may be patient in devising his wicked schemes, he shares Othello’s disdain of long-continued suspicion: the mere supposition that Emilia may have cuckolded him demands payback; the matter must be resolved. (450, 1.3.367ff) He will wage a pre-emptive war against this man who has already frustrated his hopes of advancement and who may also have insulted his marriage. In some cold, calculating way, Iago himself is subject to the cat-like “green-eyed monster” jealousy, and his way of dealing with the discomfort it’s caused him is to pass it along. That there’s also something to the “baseless evil” charge often leveled against Iago, we may see from his brazen determination to “plume up” his will “in double knavery” (450, 1.3.376).

Act 2, Scenes 1-2. (450-57, Iago sets up Cassio, airs his own suspicions)

This scene turns on trifles: witty banter, smiles, and an innocently flirtatious kiss between Desdemona and Cassio: how easy it is to weave an unflattering tale, and take advantage of others’ insecurities. (454, 2.1.167ff) As Iago will say of the handkerchief in 3.3, “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ” (473, 3.3.326-28). In the second act generally, Cassio, who much values his martial reputation and is loyal, is easily typecast by Iago first as the genial soldier, then as the quarrelsome drunkard, and finally as the importunate suitor. Iago goes to work on Roderigo against Desdemona’s character (456, 2.1.243), and prevails upon Roderigo to assault Cassio and thereby anger Cyprus and Othello against the man. Iago again mentions his second reason for hating Othello, stating “nothing can or shall content my soul / Till I am evened with him, wife for wife” (457, 2.1.285-86). He even has the same suspicion of Cassio – “For I fear Cassio with my nightcap, too” (457, 2.1.294). An ambitious man, Iago envies and opposes anyone who stands above him. Perhaps that is the ultimate reason for his villainy.

Act 2, Scene 3. (457-65, Cassio dismissed, Iago moves forwards with his scheme)

Enter Othello the honor-absolutist to render judgment. Iago plays Othello like a fiddle, and the final lyrics are, “Cassio, I love thee, / But never more be officer of mine” (462, 2.3.231-32). Now Iago advances his diabolical scheme (463, 2.3.291ff) to advance Cassio’s suit by Desdemona’s pleading. Iago delights in his own equivocations, and triumphantly remarks, “So will I turn her virtue into pitch, / And out of her own goodness make the net / That shall enmesh them all” (464, 2.3.334-36).

Act 3, Scenes 1-2. (465-66, Desdemona takes Cassio’s part)

Emilia reports that Desdemona is making headway on Cassio’s suit: “The Moor replies / That he you hurt is of great fame in Cyprus… / But he protests he loves you… (466, 3.1.42-45).

Act 3, Scene 3. (466-77, Iago sows doubt, turns Othello against Desdemona)

While Iago and Othello look on from a distance, Desdemona promises to continue with Cassio’s suit to Othello (466-67, 3.3.20-22). She converses with Othello to great effect: “I will deny thee nothing” says Othello, and when she leaves, “Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul / But I do love thee, and when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again” (468, 3.3.77, 3.3.91-93). Chaos is Iago’s decreative aim, and he immediately begins to set doubts in Othello’s mind: “Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, / Know of your love?” (468, 3.3.96-97) Cassio’s earlier usefulness as go-between in Othello’s romancing of Desdemona now plays against him.

We should hear alarm bells in Othello’s admission of his great fondness for Desdemona: once Othello begins to suspect, he will be thrown off balance until the end. Iago makes the Moor draw “the truth” from him, and reinforces the Othello-principle that we must all be what we appear to be: “Men should be what they seem, / Or those that be not, would they might seem none!” (469, 3.3.132-33) Iago knows that Othello lacks (to borrow from Keats’ letters) “negative capability”—he can’t exist for an extended time in the midst of uncertainty. If there’s a problem, it must be dealt with presently, not left to fester. Othello is the kind of military man who insists on gathering hard evidence and rendering a firm decision, court-martial style, the way he judged Cassio. His lack of knowledge about Venetian mores and subtlety (an English stereotype for the Italians generally—subtle, devious, sly) makes him anxious, easy prey to the overblown trifles in which Iago trades, and very susceptible to the honest-sounding counsel his deceiver offers: “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy? / It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on” (470, 3.3.169-71). Othello insists his trust in Desdemona and in himself is great: “she had eyes and chose me. No, Iago / I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, proof; / And on the proof… / Away at once with love or jealousy” (470, 3.3.193-96).

But Othello is older than Desdemona, and he is black: facts Iago exploits brutally and masterfully (471, 3.3.233-43). Othello now seems uncertain that his charm and rhetorical skill can hold his wife’s loyalty. Iago has already told him, “In Venice they do let (God) see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands” (471, 3.3.206-09). Generalized virtues can’t trump knowledge of local culture, symbolism, and assumptions. Othello is classical tragedy: a good man is destroyed by his virtues. The play demonstrates how difficult mutual understanding between cultures can be. Othello comes round to a characteristically absolute statement: “If I do prove her haggard, / Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings / I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind / To prey at fortune” (472, 3.3.264-67). Othello can’t reconcile his honor-ideal with the messy, ethically dubious world of Venice.

Shakespeare explores this rigid idealism often in his plays, and I believe he considers it a trap. For example, Brutus in Julius Caesar, or the title character in Coriolanus (as well as Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, since his so-called eastern extravagance is the obverse of strict Roman honor, and disables him from combating Octavius’ machinations), or comic idealizers such as Orlando in As You Like It. There are many shades of gray, nuances, roles a man or woman must play, imperfections and exigencies to deal with. Idealism is noble, but it is a disabling quality in a saucy, ever-changing world.

The handkerchief device and marriage vignette (in which Othello and Iago kneel and vow revenge) mark the height of Iago’s villainy. Disturbed while talking with Desdemona, Othello drops his wife’s handkerchief (473, 3.3.290ff); from there Emilia finds it and gives it to Iago, who then resolves, “I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin, / And let him find it. Trifles light as air…” (473, 3.3.325-28). At next meeting, Othello is mad with jealous rage: “Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore” (474, 3.3.364-65). He demands absolute proof, as the uncertainty has become intolerable: “I think my wife be honest, and think she is not” (475, 3.3.389ff). So the fact that Cassio has been seen to “wipe his beard” (476, 3.3.444) with Desdemona’s handkerchief drives Othello to distraction. Iago kneels and swears undying fealty to Othello (476-77), and his damnation consists in swearing by Christian symbols to do the devil’s work. His words are pious, but his intentions transform them into the markers of a black mass. Perhaps there’s irony in his swearing by “yon marble heaven” (476, 3.3.463) since the audience may see him swear by a painted image of the sky. Iago has become Othello’s lieutenant, and is engaged to murder Cassio while Othello plans Desdemona’s demise.

Act 3, Scene 4. (477-81, The Handkerchief! Emilia and Desdemona ponder cause)

Othello expects the same romantic extravagance from Desdemona as he lavishes upon her: the handkerchief, he tells her, is an emblem of the romantic magic, the charm, that underlies his erotic fidelity. Its loss is catastrophic now that it has come to symbolize her chaste loyalty. (478, 3.4.53ff) Othello is a romantic idealist as well as a military idealist. A version of the handkerchief’s history: it was given him by his mother, who got it from a female Egyptian sorcerer, and its possession guarantees loyalty in love. Its fatal consequentiality is further underscored by the claim that it was “dyed in mummy, which the skilful / Conserved of maidens’ hearts” (478, 3.4.73-74; later, he will claim his father gave it to his mother: see 5.2.224.) Desdemona is forced to dissemble (479), while Othello’s vocabulary moves towards perfect accord with his obsession: “the handkerchief!” repeated several times. (479, 3.4.90ff) Desdemona and Emilia ponder this strange behavior on Othello’s part (480, 3.4.137ff). Michael Cassio closes the scene by asking his girlfriend Bianca to make a copy of the handkerchief because he likes it and once the pattern before he returns it to the owner.

Act 4, Scene 1. (481-88, Othello rages over Cassio and Iago’s talk, strikes Desdemona)

Othello, already driven into an epileptic fit at the loss of the handkerchief (482b, 4.1.41), will now be subjected to one further supposed proof: Iago engages Cassio in a conversation that Othello takes for lewd and contemptuous talk about Desdemona when in fact Cassio is only making jests about his relationship with Bianca (483, 4.1.79ff, 484-85). Bianca brings in the handkerchief (485, 4.1.143ff), making Othello think Cassio has given it to her out of contempt for Desdemona. Othello sees this spectacle and becomes deranged with contradictory impulses: “O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!” and “I will chop her into messes. Cuckold me!” (486, 4.1.186, 190) Iago comes up with the idea of strangling her in her “contaminated” bed. (486, 4.1.197-98) When he strikes Desdemona (487, 4.1.235ff), Lodovico, who has come with a letter announcing that Cassio has been installed in Othello’s place as commander in Cyprus, is there to see it. He assumes Othello is an abusive husband.

Act 4, Scene 2. (488-93, Desdemona tries to defend herself, Othello unmovable)

Although Desdemona has shown some Venetian subtlety, piety and honesty are the hallmarks of her character. But Othello has been warped into taking signs of virtue for their opposite: evidence of whoredom and cunning. From now on, everything she says “can and will be used against her”; she is under arrest without even knowing it. Her self-defense (489-90), while moving, is rather feeble: “By heaven, you do me wrong” and “No, as I am a Christian” (490, 4.2.83, 85). Simply being accused of certain offenses (such as adultery) so strips a person of others’ good opinion that it’s tantamount to conviction: guilty until proven innocent. (One thinks of Kafka’s The Trial or the trials of 1984—to come under suspicion is already to have no identity except that constituted by one’s presumed malefactions.) It’s common in Renaissance plays for virtuous characters to prove themselves helpless when abused by the wicked and the cunning. If your name is something like “Bonario,” as is the case for a good character in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, look out!

Emilia, Iago and Desdemona hash out the sorry state of affairs – Emilia’s enraged: “The Moor’s abused by some most villainous knave…” (491, 4.2.143ff), Iago unctuously in false accord, and Desdemona prayerful, saying, “If e’er my will did trespass ‘gainst his love … / Comfort forswear me” (491, 4.2.156ff).

Then Iago goes to work the already angry Roderigo, egging him on to murder Cassio and thereby keep Othello in Cyprus, along with Desdemona. (492-493)

Act 4, Scene 3. (493-95, Emilia’s strength, Desdemona’s loyalty)

While Desdemona can only sing a sad song of frustrated love (“Willow, willow” 494, 4.3.38ff), Emilia proves more capable. A fit opponent for her husband, Emilia tries to temper Desdemona’s moral absolutism, which rivals that of Othello: advocating female adultery, Emilia argues, “I do think it is their husbands’ faults / If wives do fall” (495, 4.3.84-85). Desdemona’s reply is a declaration of loyalty to Othello (495, 4.3.76-77), an attitude she will maintain even as Othello strangles her. Emilia’s bawdy pronouncements on gender relations are the stuff of Shakespearian comedy (one thinks of Portia and Nerissa’s “ring scheme” in The Merchant of Venice), but here they only deepen the sense of impending tragedy.

Innocence can seldom defend itself as eloquently or convincingly as evil can, even when the innocent person is as intelligent as Desdemona. One remembers Yeats’ line in “The Second Coming” that “the best lack all conviction” while “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” In Shakespeare, it isn’t usually true that the best people lack conviction—what they sometimes lack (consider Cordelia in King Lear as an example to set beside Desdemona) is the right phrase, the moxy to take advantage of opportunities to advance their good cause. And even if our good folks have considerable linguistic capacity and courage, the disposition we call “goodness” seldom, if ever, gains by rhetorical sleight—the problem seems intractable. Lear’s daughter Cordelia may be a bit stiff and clumsy as a speaker, but we all feel the rightness of her lament, “What shall poor Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.” Or consider Machiavelli’s characterization of the problem: to paraphrase what he writes in Il Principe, “those who try to be virtuous in all things must come to grief among so many who aren’t virtuous.”

Act 5, Scene 1. (495-98, Cassio wounded by Iago, who then silences Roderigo)

Iago arranges for Roderigo to kill Cassio, but the bungler only manages to wound Cassio in the leg, and Iago stabs Roderigo to death lest he blab the truth. (495-97) Othello applauds from above: “Thou teachest me. Minion, your dear lies dead, / And your unblessed fate hies” (496, 5.1.34-35). Iago insistently blames Bianca for the entire ruckus. (498)

Act 5, Scene 2. (498-507 end, Othello smothers Desdemona, dies on own terms)

Othello resolves to kill Desdemona softly: “I’ll not shed her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / …Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men” (498, 5.2.3-6). Desdemona attempts to defend herself from Othello’s crazed accusations and calls to beg forgiveness of God, but there’s no chance of success, and he smothers her (499-501) in two successive bouts. When Emilia enters, Desdemona’s dying words amount to an attempt to remove all blame from Othello: “Commend me to my kind lord” (501, 5.2.134).

Othello initially wrangles with Emilia and engages in some waffling and denial: “You heard her say herself it was not I” (501, 5.2.136). But the truth comes out in short order, and Othello infuriates Emilia by accusing Desdemona of adultery, thanks to Iago’s information. (502, 5.2.148ff) Things move quickly: Iago mortally wounds Emilia for revealing the truth about that fatal handkerchief (504) and Othello wounds Iago, who will not speak further about his motives for working so much misery: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know” (505, 5.2.309). At last, with whatever small weapon remains to him – he had been stripped of his sword a bit earlier -- Othello makes himself an example in all strictness, preempting Venetian justice (In Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, Othello escapes, only to die shamefully later.) Othello bills himself extravagantly as a man who “loved not wisely but too well” (506, 5.2.353). His eloquence and elegance reassert themselves in his final struggle. Othello’s death seems right since his words and manner, as he understands, cannot make up for the destruction of a faithful wife. His epigrammatic self-description indicates a desire to control others’ interpretations of his downfall; perhaps that’s a tragic hero’s right (see Hamlet’s plea that Horatio should tell his story), but the ending remains disturbing. Othello had twice let loose the question, “Ha, ha, false to me?” (3.3.338, 4.1.190) as if especially incredulous that he should suffer the indignity of betrayal. My sympathy goes to Desdemona, not to Othello, in spite of his sincere horror at what Iago’s treachery has led him to do.

How should we assess Othello as a tragic hero? The moral quality of Shakespeare’s protagonists varies: Richard III is an effervescent villain, Macbeth an introspective man who appreciates from the outset the full evil of the path to power he contemplates; Brutus and Cassius betray dueling motives against Julius Caesar, noble and base; Romeo and Juliet die because of pitiable misunderstandings rather than grievous faults; King Lear is brought down in part by a fundamental confusion between his public and private selves; Hamlet the revenger undergoes strange alternations of stricken dawdling and rashness, Coriolanus isolates and debases himself in his patrician rage, etc.

Othello takes his place alongside them all, a warrior who becomes the victim of his own deeply ingrained all-or-nothing attitude towards everything and everyone, an exotic other who is the victim of cultural misunderstandings that put him at the mercy of subtle Iago. As I mentioned earlier, Othello’s fall from grace seems classical in that he is laid low and commits his deadly errors because of his noblest qualities: a soldierly, unwavering commitment to right conduct, fidelity and truth. His absolute generosity of spirit towards Desdemona, once put in question by Iago, gives way to cruel resolution and a refusal even to hear “the accused’s” honest plea. It may be that what underlies Othello’s downfall is in part the basic fact that if we turn heroic absolutist values over and view their obverse, what we will find is an equally strong counter-sentiment or counter-anxiety against which the heroic code is posited. Only those who act from some level of awareness of this unsettling relationship have any real chance of success: they are not so likely as others to be trapped by the productions of their own heart and imagination. Othello, it seems to me, lacks that awareness and never – not even after the worst is known and all lies exposed before him – shows an ability to mediate between the ideal and the anxiety that both underwrites and threatens it. Ideals are necessary and noble, but they’re also potentially lethal: “handle with care,” this play seems to advise us.

Week 07, Troilus and Cressida

2008-11-15T12:06:00.000-08:00

Scene-by-Scene Notes on Troilus and Cressida.

Prologue and General Comments.

The prologue reminds us of the great Homeric backdrop to the play, and in the end, the Homeric version seems to win out since Ulysses’ cunning fails to draw Achilles into the battle; it’s the death of Patroclus that accomplishes this in Act 5, Scene 5-6. On the whole, the play shows the disillusionment that besets both love and war—activities that almost always begin with high ideals and unrealistic expectations, and, all too often, end in bitterness and frustration, even when the object is attained.

Act 1, Scene 1.

It’s seven years into the war, and Troilus is out of sync with the war’s imperatives; he sounds like a Petrarchan sonnet, with his sighing extremes—as in “I find no peace, but have no arms for war.” By the end of the play he will be furious at Diomedes, disillusionment over Cressida having given him his cause. But by then, Achilles has killed Hector and the Trojans are doomed. Pandarus is eager to spur Troilus on, increasing his lovesickness.

At 109, we hear that Paris has been slightly wounded by Menelaus. The play constantly undercuts the heroic version of the “great cause” that animates both Greeks and Trojans; it seems as if the play sides with Thersites, who puts it all down to stupidity and lechery and contemptible male pride. Love and war are intertwined, to the honor of neither.

Act 1, Scene 2.

Cressida’s servant Alexander tells her that Hector is ashamed of himself since Ajax has given him a good beating. Hector is spurred on by his shame to challenge any Greek to maintain his lady’s as good as Andromache. At line 136, Pandarus pursues his private interest of bringing Troilus and Cressida together. The girl seems worldly enough in her answers, at least until she meets Troilus later on. From line 177 onwards, there follows a pageant of Trojans—Aeneas, Hector, and others. Cressida opines that Troilus is “a sneaking fellow.” Well, as she explains to us, she must maintain her chastity. At 282ff, she gives in soliloquy the real reason for her standoffishness: she fears she will be lightly prized once she is no longer chaste. This is true, of course, but it doesn’t equate with wide-eyed innocence; she does not (to borrow a line from Polonius in Hamlet) “speak like a green girl.”

Act 1, Scene 3.

Agamemnon is trying to explain why seven years have passed with no victory; the joint argument from the King and Nestor is “trust us—this is wise policy beyond your devising.” Ulysses then tells everyone to listen to him, and Agamemnon says that given the source, they fully expect to hear wise counsel, and not the sort of nonsense Thersites spews. Ulysses says at 109ff, “Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows”; the world will “turn wolf universally.” From 142ff, Odysseus explains that respect for rank is at low ebb thanks to Achilles’ prideful refusal to do his part for the Greeks. (In The Iliad, the reason given is that Agamemnon arrogantly asserted his supremacy by demanding as his share of the spoils Achilles’ favorite concubine, Briseis.) Achilles and Patroclus mock Agamemnon, and this has spurred on Ajax (who is none too bright) to mock the King, too, and to make Thersites his agent for this purpose. Ajax ’s posturing, especially, is said to appeal to those who value nothing but stupid, brute force rather than shrewd policy. There are serious rifts between the leading Greeks. Well, it’s hard to see how Agamemnon’s “policy” amounts to much more than incompetence.

Aeneas visits Agamemnon to deliver Hector’s challenge. The Greeks consider Troy ’s men ceremonious courtiers rather than blunt fighters. This notion is in line with traditional portrayals of the Trojans as indulgent, over-civilized, proponents of the “luxurious state” later found so blameworthy by that Athenian lover of all things Spartan, Plato. Aeneas answers chivalrously that the Trojans are civil in time of peace, but deadly in war. Agamemnon’s reply at 287-88 shows how inextricable love and war prove in this play: all soldiers, he insists, are lovers or plan to be. Ulysses, however, has a scheme to take down Achilles a few pegs—Hector’s challenge is obviously aimed at Achilles, but Ulysses wants to arrange for Ajax to “happen” to win a lottery for that honor, thereby upstaging his rival attention-seeker Achilles.

Act 2, Scene 1.

Thersites and Ajax relate to each other in an interesting way; the first act went far towards undercutting the heroes’ claims to high honor. Throughout the play, Thersites will rail at the biggest targets for their lechery, double-dealing, stupidity, pride and enviousness, and he in turn will become the target for their sexually charged taunts of cowardice, effeminacy, and so forth (some of which he will heap right back on none other than Patroclus, of course). Thersites sees Ajax as nothing more than a blunt instrument for those who actually wield power; in a phrase, he is “Mars his idiot.” At line 92 and elsewhere, Thersites attacks the principle of rank; he doesn’t believe those who stand upon it are worthy of it. “I serve thee not,” he says to Ajax , who proceeds to beat him. Achilles is much more “civilized” in his dealings with Ajax , but nonetheless Thersites lumps him together with Ajax , and prefers Hector; Thersites has more regard for Ulysses and Nestor, and prefers the company of the intelligent. Agamemnon he despises as a pretender to honor and wise counsel.

Act 2, Scene 2.

Priam finds that his sons Helenus and Hector would gladly agree to hand over Helen to the Greeks, restoring her to Menelaus of Sparta and thereby saving a lot of bloodshed on both sides. Troilus (along with Paris) insists that the Trojans should be willing to fight over trifles if occasion bids them do it, but Hector doesn’t agree, and he points out to his youngest brother that determining Helen’s value is not the province of lone individuals; her value is what it is, and due regard must be shown for the impact any determination may have on the entire Greek host: “tis mad idolatry to make the service greater than the gods.” It won’t do to fetishize honor and war at the expense of practical consequences. The Riverside notes mention that neither the Greeks nor the Trojans has any claim to absolute righteousness in its quest: Paris went to Greece to make away with Helen because Hercules had absconded with Priam’s sister Hesione and then given her to Ajax ’s father Telamon, so we can’t really claim that “the Trojans started the trouble.” Troilus maintains chivalric idealism at this point, and his naïve idealism bids him recommend that the Trojans hold on to Helen at all costs. Hector, who has been doing much of the fighting, thinks otherwise. Nonetheless, his current challenge owes more to personal shame, most likely, than statecraft. War, in Shakespeare’s representation of it, is a great distorter of motives and words, and it often sunders words from deeds, or rather widens the gap always extant between them to begin with. Cassandra breaks in around line 97 and aligns herself with those who want to return Helen, knowing as she does that Troy is doomed. (It’s worth recalling that Cassandra, Apollo’s priestess, was cursed when she refused to sleep with him—she sees the future clearly, but no one will believe her, so her gift is wasted.) Around 118ff, Troilus and Paris show some contempt for “reality-based” decision-making. Nearly every Trojan soldier, he says, will defend the beautiful Helen, and will fight to the death for this icon and enabler of masculine valor and display. Around line 156, Hector makes the strongest case in favor of recognizing brute reality, admitting that Helen ought to be returned to Menelaus of Sparta, but then around 189, he accedes to Troilus’ cause: their “joint and several dignities” demand that they hang on to their stolen woman. She is a “theme of honor and renown.” While Troilus holds this position as a naïve young romantic, Hector takes it up in a different manner altogether—he has little personal regard for Helen, but public necessity dictates that the woman be defended and held for her symbolic, unifying value: war needs symbols as rallying points, or the cause flounders.

Act 2, Scene 3.

Thersites and the leading Greek warriors are opponents, but they need one another; Thersites’ railing observations feed upon the warriors’ stupidity and pretentiousness, and the warriors, in turn, in part define themselves by heaping insults on his head. Thus Patroclus’ entreaty at line 23, “Good Thersites, come in and rail,” and Achilles’ description of him as “my cheese, my digestion.” ( Ajax is upset at this juncture partly because Achilles has weaned his fool from him.) The cynical clown has found his proper object, and they have found the object of their scorn, too. He wishes venereal disease on the lot of these fools, all of them guilty of “warring for a placket” rather than the high honor they claim to uphold. This satirical connection between war and promiscuous, unworthy sexual pursuits is common in literature and film: consider, to give just one instance, Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, where that theme is managed hilariously: General Jack D. Ripper launches World War III because he’s been having some kind of problem like erectile dysfunction, which he calls “loss of essence.” (And of course there’s the good Nazi Party expatriate Doctor himself, with his “strange love” of atomic destruction.) Thersites finds that the war between Greek and Trojan is no better than a self-perpetuating, bloody pageant of lunatics and fools, begun by an act of whoredom and perpetuated by lust for wicked women and illusory honor. He suggests that the very walls of Troy would crumble to dust before the likes of Agamemnon or Ajax will ever batter them down. That turns out to be a false supposition, but it’s easy to see why he makes it in this seventh year of hostilities. His speeches also suggest that he’s aware of the intractable problem confronting anyone (especially men) who opposes a violent mass confrontation: charges of cowardice, effeminacy, carping, and treachery are bound to fly at their heads. Thersites’ attitude towards this hypermasculine vitriol is “bring it on”; it’s the very stuff he feeds upon and turns to satirical account. But for all his railing and undermining, the war will continue to bleed both sides: fools learn not by instruction but rather (if at all) by bitter experience; for Thersites, the proceedings make “good copy” and a pageant not to be missed.

Act 3, Scene 1.

Agamemnon and his subordinates butter up Ajax as a spur to Achilles’ pride—they need him back in the battle. Pandarus enlists Helen to keep Hector out of the individual combat, although this strategy fails. Helen is a worldly survivor, a wily woman.

Act 3, Scene 2.

Troilus is here in a state of agonized expectation, and he fears the loss of self-identity and autonomy that occurs when a person falls in love. He attributes the same sort of confounding or loss of identity with the shock of great hosts in battle. When Cressida is brought in by Pandar, she seems genuinely shy at first, and Troilus seems almost bereft of words. But soon the two (after a few long kisses) will recover their eloquence, and in this scene they go on to make extreme claims about how their faith (or lack thereof) will prove a byword for all others. As John Donne would say, “beg from above, a pattern of our love.” Pandarus stakes his own good name on the outcome of the love match—well, as is commonly said, “be careful what you wish for” since “pandering” is now invariably twinned with “pimping” in our lexicon of disrepute. Cressida now realizes she has perhaps said too much. She has admitted to loving Troilus at first sight and has engaged in comically Petrarchan declarations of fidelity. Behind this whole dialogue—especially Cressida’s part of it—is the understanding that love is a kind of game, a power exchange in which “secrecy” is to some extent necessary: “who shall be true when we are not secret to ourselves?” Self-revelation establishes intimacy, but it also breeds contempt and disloyalty. As an old professor of mine would say, “idealizing eroticism” is necessary, but also inherently risky because it relies on the perpetuation of illusions.

Act 3, Scene 3.

Calchas calls in a favor for his old defection from the Trojans to the Greeks, and the favor consists in the Greeks giving up Cressida to Diomedes in exchange for the captive Trojan Prince Antenor. Agamemnon agrees readily. Ulysses counsels the King to ignore Achilles for a while, and treat him with indifference. Achilles is easily gulled by this act, and worries that Ajax is stealing his thunder with present deeds of valor. Ulysses points out to Achilles that “emulation hath a thousand sons” all at the ready to tread their father down in the dust the moment he slows down or strays from the path of heroic example. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” says Ulysses in his key speech from lines 169-80: a desire for novelty, and a propensity to forget the past. (The eye is, as Wordsworth later reminds us, “the most tyrannical of the senses,” and we are easily taken in by what is before us.) When Achilles pleads private reasons, Ulysses points out that everybody knows about his Trojan girlfriend Polyxena anyhow. Well, Achilles says he’d like to gaze upon Hector in his own tent. He doesn’t explain exactly why, but we will soon find out. Thersites comes onto the scene and mocks the pride of Ajax , who has been peacocking around like Hercules in anticipation of his battle with Hector, disdaining speech and all manner of rank below his own godlike status. (This issue of rank and reputation links the present scene with the previous one; as always, Thersites’ view is “a plague of opinion,” and he goes on to mock Achilles and Patroclus as viciously as he takes down Ajax .) Ulysses’ advice has been that military renown is never entirely lost; one can always create it from scratch by performing worthy new actions in the public eye—to a centerless rogue like Achilles, that kind of counsel is appealing, especially if we remove that pesky term “worthy.” How different his attitude is from Troilus’, who supposes that honor once lost is gone forever.

Act 4, Scene 1.

Cressida will indeed be turned over to Diomedes and the Greeks, with whom Calchas the ex-Trojan priest now resides. Paris points out that the “bitter disposition of the time will have it so” demands this arrangement. (Diomedes doesn’t have a kind word to say about Helen, the object of the war from the outset.) Paris , at 76-77, jests that Diomedes is merely “dispraising the thing” the thing he “would buy,” but in fact just about everyone but Paris says such things in bitter earnest.

Act 4, Scenes 2-4.

In the aftermath of their love scene, Cressida re-experiences some of her prior fear of devaluation since Troilus and she must now part with the coming on of day; he has obtained his prize, she thinks, and so now he’s off to other things. But both soon find out that they are to be parted much more permanently than this brief “cursing of the dawn” scene suggests, and they exchange tokens of fidelity (a sleeve and a glove; a “sleeve” here means a piece of fabric that can be worn on a helmet or otherwise displayed). Pandarus fears that Troilus will go mad, and Cressida protests she won’t go. But Troilus dutifully turns her over for exchange, demanding several times that she remain faithful and promising to make his way across the Greek lines to visit her. Diomedes makes no promises and indeed treats the whole notion of female honor with scorn. He will use Cressida as he sees fit. All await the great event of Hector and Ajax ’s single combat.

Act 4, Scene 5.

Cressida is welcomed into the Greek camp with many kisses, and Ulysses condemns her as a flirt who is all too well suited to the times: an opportunist. Hector and Ajax fight, but Hector decides that since they are cousins, the battle should end happily with an embrace. Hector is invited to the Greek camp to see Agamemnon and Achilles. During the brief truce, the men all treat one another with the greatest civility, but this pleasantry is soon shattered when Achilles gazes long upon Hector’s body, and declares that he is just trying to determine where exactly he will strike him the mortal blow.

Act 5, Scene 1.

Thersites again rails at Achilles and calls Patroclus a male “varlot” or whore. Achilles, given a letter from Hecuba reminding him of a promise to Polyxena, for the sake of which vow he will yet again fail to take the field for the Greeks. Thersites mocks the absent Diomedes and Menelaus, the latter for being cuckolded by Helen, of course: “nothing but lechery” and incontinence, i.e. absence of self-restraint in martial and erotic affairs alike.

Act 5, Scene 2.

Troilus (dogged by Thersites and accompanied by Ulysses, who is perhaps set on embittering Troilus; in the background may lie the prophecy that Troy can’t be conquered if Troilus lives beyond his twentieth year) can barely restrain himself when he sees Cressida (at first reluctant) hand over the sleeve Troilus had given her, and promise to meet him. To herself she pleads the tyranny of the eye, and faults her sex in general rather than herself individually. What Ulysses had said about the general public with regard to martial reputation, it seems, applies equally well to the realm of love: only the present counts. At 146, the embittered Troilus says that “this is, and is not, Cressid.” He simply can’t credit the change he believes has taken place in her.

Act 5, Scene 3.

Hector, declaring that honor is more precious even than life, will not be persuaded by Cassandra, Priam, or Andromache. Troilus will fight, too, in spite of his youth—he will have his revenge on Diomedes (a private motive Hector doesn’t seem to be aware of). Pandarus, plagued with one or more of the time’s intractable venereal diseases (no doubt thanks to his own exploits), gives Troilus a fair-sounding letter from Cressida, but of course Troilus no longer believes such pledges of fidelity.

Act 5, Scene 4.

Thersites just wants to watch the whole pageant of foolery, and hopes to see Diomedes stripped of his newly won sleeve. Ajax , we hear, is refusing to fight, presumably in imitation of Achilles, and the Greek camp is overtaken by an anarchic mood. Diomedes and Troilus fight, and then a comic scene ensues in which Hector threatens Thersites, who escapes by dint of cowardice.

Act 5, Scenes 5-6.

Diomedes sends Troilus’ horse back to Cressida as a trophy. Patroclus (who in The Iliad puts on Achilles’ armor and is mistaken for him) is killed by Hector, and Agamemnon is in dismay at the state of affairs: Hector is like Mars himself, slaying Greeks left and right. Troilus has infuriated Ajax by killing a friend of his, and he and Ajax (along with Diomedes) fight inconclusively. Now comes the much-awaited match between Achilles and Hector, and the former bows out, pleading rustiness.

Act 5, Scene 7.

Thersites mocks Menelaus’ battle with Paris , but when the bastard Margarelon challenges him, again Thersites, reveling in his own similar status, escapes injury. It’s a fitting tribute to the play’s thoroughgoing smackdown of the heroic ideal that by this point, most of us probably revel in the frank cowardice of Thersites—at least the man is honest, which is worth something. He has no intention of losing his life in a contest he finds contemptible.

Act 5, Scene 8.

Achilles makes his Myrmidons hack to death the unarmed Hector, and then bids them tie the corpse to the tail of his horse. Unable to defeat the chivalrous Trojan in a fair fight, he does not hesitate to claim new glory by means of an outrageously cowardly act: “Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain!” Although Hector is noble and therefore naively expects Achilles to honor the chivalric laws of war, his death seems more pointless than heroic. After all, the play has already explicitly rejected the notion that the Trojan War is about honorable exploits and pure ideals. (It wasn’t that even in Homer, to be honest. But at the same time, it would almost certainly be wrong to suppose that the current play represents Shakespeare’s only view of military heroism—Henry V must be considered alongside Troilus and Cressida if we want a balanced view.) It is impossible to claim the status of catharsis-inducing hero when you are unceremoniously hacked to pieces at the instigation of a prating liar who has no more honor than Jack Falstaff. (See I Henry IV, 5.1.131-41: “ Can honor set to a leg? No. / Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? / No…. What / is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? / What is that honor? Air. A trim reckoning! / Who hath it? He that died a’ Wednesday…. / I’ll none of it, honor is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.”)

Act 5, Scenes 9-10.

Troilus, still spoiling for a fight, counsels a move back towards Troy and counsels mere revenge to “hide our inward woe.” The sick Pandarus, struck on the pate by Troilus, retreats, whinily bequeathing us his byword-name and his inveterate diseases. It seems that the legacy of the foundational and glorious Trojan War, in this play at least, is no more than the perpetual plague of venery and violent destruction. Chivalry is undone; the Trojans have lost their greatest champion, and Troilus, although he’s found his cause to fight, is deeply embittered. For the moment, the knavery of the false warrior Achilles trumps all. In conclusion, while it might be thought that Shakespeare’s version of the Trojan War is the exact opposite of Homer’s account in The Iliad, that would be an exaggeration since Homer is by no means unwilling to present the occasional pettiness and contrariness of men such as Agamemnon and Achilles. The ancient author gave his listeners not so much propaganda as a complex presentation of a complex event (mythical or otherwise); Shakespeare’s account distinguishes itself in its thoroughgoing and successful attempt to weld the least attractive elements of both war and erotic experience, thereby undermining the heroic status of the great events behind the story of Troilus and Cressida. He has invented nothing entirely new, we might say, but has instead fixed his intent on spinning a counter-narrative whose threads were already embedded in his ancient original. This same motive seems to de-emphasize the more respectful Chaucerian version that Shakespeare also used as a source for his play.

Why is Troilus a “problem comedy”? Well, the grand distinction between comedy and tragedy is that while the former is about great potential and possibility confronting and overcoming (or at least settling with) various limitations owing to human nature and the social order, tragedy deals with the realm of dire consequentiality that ensues when we have exhausted or wasted all of our best options. To borrow a Churchillian line (itself borrowed to good effect by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth), the main action of a tragedy takes place within “a period of consequences,” a time when, if your mistakes outweigh your ability to make them right, you will be trapped and destroyed by the circumstances you yourself have partly or entirely created. (This is surely a Christian-era inflection of tragedy in which it’s generally acknowledged that Providence is just; Greek tragedy thrives rather on the sense that the cosmos may well not be just or even particularly comprehensible.) Troilus and Cressida trades in the disillusionment of an at least arguably idealistic young man in the face of cynicism and betrayal; the play’s action doesn’t rise to the level of high tragedy, and there is no real sense of finality at the play’s conclusion. Troilus has shifted his considerable energy into the activities of making war rather than love, but he has not regained the degree of idealism that seems to have driven him towards his short-lived match with Cressida. Plain bitterness and a desire for revenge do not constitute tragic insight; the Aristophanic scoffing of Thersites more closely captures the spirit of the play, I think, than anything connected chivalric idealism, or to the reconciliation, generosity, renewal, and transformation that prevail in Shakespeare’s lighter comedies. The term “problem play” is somewhat overused in contemporary criticism (in keeping with the propensity of criticism to choose and redefine its object to suit its own predilections and assumptions), but it seems appropriate to Troilus and Cressida, the very genre of which is by no means certain since, while the 1623 folio edition lists the play as a tragedy, other (quarto) editions call it variously a history or a comedy.

Weeks 05-06, Hamlet

2008-11-15T12:04:00.001-08:00

General Notes on Hamlet

Theology. I n Christian terms, revenge amounts to usurpation of God’s providential prerogatives. But this interpretation of revenge clashes with a more ancient that’s easily seen at work in Classical literature: in The Oresteia, for instance, Orestes would be wrong not to take vengeance on his father Agamemnon’s killer. How could Orestes not kill Clytemnestra? He and we know that such an act will bring the Furies down upon his head, but it must be done in spite of the penalty incurred. The Elizabethans love a good Senecan-style revenge tragedy, as the popularity of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy shows, but Shakespeare, who revels in the form just as much as anyone else (Titus Andronicus, anyone?) seems to face most squarely the theological dilemma it entails.

Skepticism. There is something to the idea that Hamlet is a man out of his time, someone not quite fit to be a tragic hero. That’s true even if his problem isn’t really “delay,” although he accuses himself of it. He makes his share of false assumptions and rash mistakes. I say only half in jest that the Prince’s problem may be that he has read Montaigne’s Essays and soaked in some of their epistemological skepticism. The play’s proddings towards revenge don’t seem solid to Hamlet: there is only a ghost who tells him what he wants to hear: Claudius is stealing his mother’s attention and his kingdom, so the man must be paid back.

Recognition. At what point in the play does Hamlet attain clarity about the nature of his actions? He must have come round to the idea that he needs to let things shape up as they may. But exactly how he has come that far isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps his realization is due to a number of experiences (facing the shock of Ophelia’s death, meditating on that army going to its death “even for an eggshell,” bantering with the Gravedigger and encountering Yorick’s skull as an object of meditation, escaping from the ship that was taking him to his death in England, being ransomed by pirates at sea, his conflicted feelings about Ophelia and his mother, etc.)

In The Poetics, Aristotle says that well-crafted tragedies turn upon the hero’s arriving at some fundamental insight (anagnorisis, recognition, “un-unknowing”) about the mistake he or she has made. Characterize Hamlet’s insight into his situation – what is the insight, and what has led him to it? Connect this question to the gravedigger scene.

What finally makes the play’s resolution possible – is it that Hamlet has been unable to act and something now makes him able to act? (Oedipus Rex, for example, combines recognition with “reversal” – expecting good news from a messenger, Oedipus instead learns that the guilt lies squarely on his own shoulders.)

Scene-by-Scene Notes on Hamlet.

Act 1, Scene 1.

The watchmen and Horatio offer some surmises; at line 69, Horatio suspects that the ghost’s appearance “bodes some strange eruption to our state.” They’re on watch because young Fortinbras is planning to take back the territory his father had lost to Hamlet Sr. Barnardo, too, supposes the same thing when he says, “Well may it sort that this portentous figure / Comes armed through our watch so like the King / That was and is the question of these wars” (109-11). They feel foreboding, a sickness at heart; but they have only general knowledge, and Horatio’s idea at 171 is to seek out Hamlet and have him interact with the ghost; it seems logical to him that the young Prince will be able to attain particular, intimate knowledge of the spirit’s purpose.

Act 1, Scene 2.

Hamlet’s grief seems unpolitic, self-indulgent, even prideful—at least to Claudius, who must govern. But Claudius’ rhetoric betrays a “schizoid” sense of his own conduct. He sees with “an auspicious, and a dropping eye” (11), which is of course unnatural and nearly impossible even to imagine. The new King’s grief over his brother’s death is pushed aside by his evil ambition to retain the crown he has unfairly won, and his scoffing at young Fortinbras’ supposition that Denmark is “disjoint and out of frame” (20) is ironic since, as we later find out, there’s nothing but disorder in Claudius’ realm. At this point, however, if we are a first-time audience, we don’t yet know that Claudius is a murderer, i.e. that the ghost’s story is true, so to some extent the new king is entitled to be annoyed with the excessive grief and surliness of Prince Hamlet. As Claudius points out at line 15, he has the backing of the citizenry, and Gertrude’s advice to her son is not without wisdom: “Thou know’st it is common, all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity. / … Why seems it so particular with thee?” (72-73, 75)

Soon thereafter, Hamlet speaks his first soliloquy, lamenting that “the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” (131-32), reproaching the general run of females in the person of Gertrude—”Frailty, thy name is woman!” (145)—and profoundly disparaging Claudius in comparison with Hamlet, Sr. The latter was, says the Prince, “Hyperion” to Claudius’ “satyr” (140), which makes Gertrude’s choice to remarry all the more contemptible. Hamlet’s imagination at this point, even before he hears the ghost’s damning information, seems morbid: he sees the whole world as “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed” (135-36), one inhabited entirely by “things rank and gross in nature” (136). Hamlet seems to play with the amount of time that has passed between the old king’s death and Gertrude’s marriage, and that she was apparently in genuine sorrow for her first husband only makes her subsequent conduct more unacceptable. Hamlet is already obsessed with the dark intimation that people are not what they seem: Gertrude is not the loyal wife she seemed, and Claudius is not the rightful successor the court and the people apparently believe he is. But Hamlet also knows that he must repress this obsession in public: “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (159). Privately, things are different: he already seems to suspect that “some foul play” (255) was involved in his father’s death or that “foul play” is now afoot, even though his questioning of Horatio about the ghost’s appearance indicates genuine uncertainty about its provenance and mission. The stage is set for Hamlet’s moral mission, if we call “revenge” a moral mission. Indeed, the question will trouble Hamlet as the play proceeds. But for now we hear the sententia, “[Foul] deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes” (256-57). To me, this line indicates that the “deeds” to which Hamlet refers have already been committed, in his estimation. There is an ambiguity in this last passage of Act 1, Scene 2, a bit of shuffling between matters of state (“My father’s spirit—in arms!” at 254) and essentially private thoughts about the suspicious loss of a dear father.

Act 1, Scene 3.

Laertes has evidently been taught well in the arts of windbaggery by his father Polonius since he lectures Ophelia sententiously about the dangers of giving in to the importunate suit of a lustful young man far above her station. This advice is sound enough as such things go—Hamlet is, after all, a Prince, so he is not free to love as he wishes without thought of Denmark; but as Gertrude later admits when Ophelia is dead, she had hoped the two lovers would in fact marry. But in any case, Ophelia holds her own, showing that while circumstances may constrain her, she is not lacking in understanding or the courage to speak her own mind. Polonius soon comes onto the scene and offers similar advice, accusing Ophelia of naivety about Hamlet’s intentions and showing that he reads the character of others as a function of stereotypes: Hamlet is a young, lusty bachelor, and is therefore not to be trusted, quite aside from his status as a prince.

Act 1, Scene 4.
At the beginning of Scene 4, Hamlet discusses the Court of Denmark’s fondness for alcohol, declaring that his country is “traduc’d and tax’d of other nations” (18) for this weakness. In his 1948 film adaptation of the play, Laurence Olivier chooses to quote directly from this passage and apply the words to the Prince himself, who by implication suffers from “a vicious mole of nature” (24) in that he simply cannot “make up his mind” (Olivier’s voiceover). But this is an overstatement, perhaps, since there is good reason to doubt the purposes of a ghost such as the one Hamlet sees here for the first time: “What may this mean, / That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel / Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon . . . ?” (51-53)

Act 1, Scene 5.

The Ghost then recounts in bloodcurdling detail exactly what happened to him and who is responsible for it, eliciting an excited “O my prophetic soul!” (40) from the Prince, as if he had suspected all along that Claudius had killed his father. The terms the Ghost uses to describe both Claudius and Gertrude are strongly reminiscent of the very ones Hamlet had used shortly before. I think we may be certain that the Ghost “actually exists,” but at the same time, it’s almost as if Prince Hamlet is talking to himself. He is utterly convinced at this point, begging the Ghost that he will, “Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge” (29-31).

There is a problem with the Ghost’s demand for vengeance, however: God says in Deuteronomy, “To me belongeth vengeance and recompense” (32:35). Why, then, should a soul in purgatory (a Catholic concept, by the way) be fixated on revenge? Revenge is an ancient pagan demand, and it seems petty. But Hamlet Sr. was a warrior king, so perhaps his demand that his son should punish Claudius seems reasonable in that context: the latter is a “traitor to his lord” and a dishonorable wretch who has corrupted the state. The Ghost insists that “the royal bed of Denmark ” (82) be redeemed from its current status as “A couch for luxury and damned incest” (83), but his call still seems mostly a private affair. It strains the “fatherly king” framework, and would require the son to set himself against the current order of the State, most likely at the cost of his own life. The Ghost has laid upon the Prince an extremely difficult set of demands—not only must he kill the new king without damning himself, but he must deal with Gertrude in such as way as not to damn her: “Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught” (85-86). How is the young man to do these things? He was already “tainted” in his mind before he ever saw the Ghost, we might say, and what’s more, since the Ghost deals in the ancient imperative of revenge, it makes sense to remind ourselves that even the most righteous acts of revenge in ancient literature entailed pollution that had to be atoned for afterwards. One thinks of Odysseus purifying his great hall after the slaughter of those mannerless suitors who have beset Penelope, or the dreadful punishment incurred by Clytemnestra when she killed Agamemnon, or the penalty threatened against Orestes by the Erinyes after he in turn killed Clytemnestra. In either the pagan or the Christian context, to take revenge is to pollute oneself in the doing. Had Shakespeare written a mindlessly celebratory “revenge tragedy,” we wouldn’t need to think any of these things, but there seems to be a metageneric dimension in Hamlet that positively demands such consideration.

One might take the Ghost’s appearance as a general protest against Denmark ’s rotten condition, but the Prince doesn’t seem certain of much yet, as we can see from his words and actions after the Ghost bids him farewell. On the one hand, we hear that Hamlet is determined to take revenge: “Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / . . . And thy commandement all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain” (98-99, 102-03). His wax-writing-tablet metaphor seems sincere, although it’s perhaps slightly comic in that Hamlet, a young man who has (accurately or otherwise) become a byword for deferral and delay, speaks of writing at the very instant when he’s most certain of his desire to act: “make a note to myself, take revenge,” so to speak. His indecisiveness or resentment at the task to which he has been called shows much more strongly, of course, in his concluding words during this scene: “The time is out of joint—O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” (188-89). That abrupt remark suggests anything but a determination to proceed “with wings as swift / As meditation” to a “sweep[ing]” revenge, the precise manner of which has been left to his own devising. One other useful thing to draw from Hamlet at this point is his remark to Horatio and the Watchmen that he may, at some points, “think meet / To put an antic disposition on” (171-72). He has already hit upon the strategy of feigning something like lunacy to accomplish his great task. It may be difficult to tell at some points just how much control Hamlet has over his speech and his actions, but here, at least, we see that he puts his wildness down to strategy.

Act 2, Scene 1.

Polonius is both an endearing character, full of well-intentioned, if comically delivered, advice to his children (and the royal couple) and a meddling intelligencer who deals with those same children in a sneaky, underhanded way. He sets spies on Laertes to find out if the young fellow is behaving, and, after having commanded Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet, he tethers her near him like a sacrificial goat to find out what’s eating him and inform Claudius and Gertrude of it. But at this point, Polonius’ assumption that the Prince’s distraction is “the very ecstasy of love” (99) seems reasonable, based upon what Ophelia has told him about Hamlet’s bizarre sighing and strange state of undress.

Act 2, Scene 2.

Everybody’s favorite nobodies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make their first appearance in the play, and Voltemand brings what seems to be good news about that troublesome issue of young Fortinbras “sharking up” an army of ruffians to take back what his father lost to the Danes—now the young blade wants only to use Denmark’s territory as a marching ground on his way to Poland, where he has other fighting to do. Polonius’ insistence that he has “found / The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy” (48-49) excites Claudius, who says, “O, speak of that, that do I long to hear” (50). Together these remarks suggest that Hamlet has been putting on a good show, taking up his “antic disposition” early in the game since “lunacy” would not be the right term with which to describe he initial surliness and melancholia in Act 1. The Prince must, we presume, act in such a manner as to draw Claudius beyond his semi-comfortable geniality towards Hamlet, and into the active agent’s circle of consequence and blood revenge. Polonius is certainly moved to act: he declares to the King and Queen, “I’ll loose my daughter to [Hamlet]. / Be you and I behind an arras then, / Mark the encounter. . .” (162-63). This determination is made stronger still when Hamlet wanders into the scene and Polonius engages him (sans Ophelia as yet) in a strange conversation that is afterwards carried on with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after Polonius exits. Not realizing the irony of his formalistic amazement at Hamlet’s “pregnant replies,” Polonius admiringly says, “Though this be madness, yet there is / method in’t” (205-06).

Hamlet kindly receives his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and he deftly, but rather gently, unmasks their dishonesty preparatory to his later, much harsher dealings with them. After the pair admit that they were indeed “sent for” (292), Hamlet suggests that the King and Queen are worried about his mopishness, nothing more, and he immediately utters one of the most famous invocations of Renaissance humanism and aliveness to the beauty of a world people were beginning to see afresh after centuries of otherworldliness (well, that’s the stereotype, anyway—the Middle Ages weren’t as drab as we like to suppose). “What a piece of work is a / man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in / form and moving, how express and admirable in / action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a / god!” (303-07) He says all this only to bring the whole “majestical roof” (301) down on our heads, reminding us that we are but the most refined dust in the cosmos, a “quintessence of dust” (308). The letdown is deepened by Rosencrantz’s dirty-minded interpretation of Hamlet’s words, and the whole thing leads directly to the announcement that a troupe of actors (“players”) is on the way to Elsinore .

Hamlet comments briefly on the state of late Elizabethan theater, saying that the mannerisms of child actors (he refers to the current craze for plays put on by children) have become an object of mockery—there’s too much affectation, too much pandering to the crowd, too much willingness to break the dramatic illusion. Denmark is disturbed as well; things aren’t what they seem, and the stage “chronicles” the age. Hamlet listens with rapt interest to the player’s interpretation of the tragic ending of the Trojan War. In The Aeneid, Book 2 (lines 675ff, Fagles translation) Achilles’ son Pyrrhus (called Neoptolemus in The Iliad and The Odyssey) has the simple task of revenging his father, and he proceeds with all swiftness to his bloody deed. (Odysseus’ brief account of the young man’s career in The Odyssey at 11.575ff has Neoptolemus behaving with great forthrightness throughout the War, too.) It is the Trojan Prince Aeneas who is filled with horror at the sight of his king Priam’s corpse because it puts him in mind of his wife Creusa and his father Anchises. Aeneas’ rage flows at once to perfidious Helen, and is only cooled by a vision of his mother Venus, who tells him to look to his family in their time of need. As for Hecuba’s grief at the murder of her husband, the player makes it seem so natural that even he gets worked up imitating it. Hamlet beholds the real article—he has a murdered father to avenge—so why doesn’t he act at once? Things are so much simpler in fiction; a noble lie or mere representation may allow us to perpetuate our highest ideals, but real life is weighed down with epistemological uncertainties, Machiavellian considerations, and “vicious mole[s] of nature” such as indecisiveness. Hamlet’s revenge imperative is hindered by Christian scruples and by doubts about the Ghost’s purpose and provenance, as his soliloquy from line 550 onwards shows: “The spirit that I have seen / May be a [dev’l], and the [dev’l] hath power / T’ assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps, / Out of my weakness and my melancholy, / . . . Abuses me to damn me” (598-603). Basing his plan on the literary gossip that “guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have by the very cunning of the scene / . . . proclaim’d their malefactions” (589-92), he invests much hope in his augmentations to The Murder of Gonzago as a means of discovering certainty in the guilty visage of one King Claudius. This plan does not give us license to despise fiction as the mere opposite of “real life”—in this instance, the public, political realm, the world of cold, hard reality and necessity, is exactly what allows Claudius to keep his murderous nature hidden from everyone but himself.

Act 3, Scene 1.

The King tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to encourage this new business of the players’ coming to Elsinore . Perhaps it will draw out the reason for Hamlet’s eccentric behavior. He and Polonius will conceal themselves to hear Hamlet talk with Ophelia. Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy, the main point of which is to state that our ignorance of what comes after death keeps us from acting on our resolutions in this life. Hamlet’s wild words to Ophelia concern mainly the impossibility of virtue maintaining itself in a corrupt world: “get thee to a nunnery” probably means just that—remove yourself from this wicked world, and seek shelter from the “arrant knaves” who go about in it. At 118, Hamlet denies that he ever established any relationship with Ophelia, that he ever made any promises. At line 129, Hamlet asks Ophelia where her father is, a line usually taken to indicate that he knows he’s being overheard. At line 142, Hamlet seems to lose his composure in a way that is not entirely “scripted,” and at 148 he utters the words that frighten Claudius: “I say we shall have no moe marriages, etc.” Claudius derives from this outburst the thought that Hamlet’s disturbed state of mind is “not like madness” (164), and so he must be watched even more closely. The Prince’s “melancholy,” says Claudius (whose guilt had already been spurred by Polonius’ unwitting words at 46-48 about “sugar[ing] o’er” the most damnable deeds with piousness), “sits on brood” (165) over something still darker, and that is what he finds most troubling about the young man’s hostility towards him.

Act 3, Scene 2.

Hamlet admonishes the players about their craft: his key bits of advice are that they “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (20) and make certain “to / hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue / her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (21-24). In part, this is a moral statement akin to what we may find in Samuel Johnson much later—actors should display virtue as it is, and force vice to confront itself head on. Hamlet means to do just that by means of his spectacle: simply showing and then speaking Claudius’ sin should make that sin’s effects register on his countenance. No embellishment is necessary for such a hideous sin as his. Hamlet’s words strike home when he tells the offended Claudius, “No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest—no offense i’ th’ world” (234-35). The King has consistently failed to take the measure of the consequences entailed by his evil conduct; his stability of mind depends on repressing consciousness of that conduct. Hamlet is cruelly merry with Ophelia in this scene—he seems to be baiting her, blaming her for the sins of his mother. The dumb show soon follows—it is an eerie scene that shows Claudius what he has done, no more, no less. But the dialogue also plays up the absolutely binding quality of the oath that Gertrude has violated, in Hamlet’s view: “Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife, / If once a widow, ever I be wife!” (222-23). That sort of language equates Gertrude with a villainess such as Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Forced to watch “himself” commit the same dark sin twice, Claudius howls out, “Give me some light. Away!” (269) With the King out of the scene, Hamlet’s anger turns first towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom he disabuses of any hope that they may “play upon” him like a musical instrument (364), and then to Gertrude, who is perhaps the main target of the whole scene, so savage is the representation of her role in the bloody affair. The Prince’s rejection of “instrumentality” is interesting in its own right—what Hamlet seems to need most of all, at this point, is to take control of events, and we will see that he must let go of this desire to control what happens around him before his revenge can be effected. But with respect to Gertrude, Hamlet’s words are even harsher than were those in The Murder of Gonzago; he says, “Now could I drink hot blood, / And do such [bitter business as the] day / Would quake to look on” (390-91). Perhaps this violent thought is directed towards Claudius only, but it’s hard to avoid supposing from what follows that it also applies to Gertrude: “Let me be cruel, not unnatural; / I will speak [daggers] to her, but use none” (395-96).

Act 3, Scene 3.

The King has decided in his anger that Hamlet must be off to England, and Rosencrantz speaks more truly than he knows when he says to Claudius, “The cess of majesty / Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw / What’s near it with it” (15-16). These two flatter the King that what he does is necessary to protect the welfare of the state and the people: “Most holy and religious fear it is / To keep those many bodies safe / That live and feed upon your Majesty” (8-10). The political realm is like an exoskeleton protecting Claudius from the ravages of introspection, and even from the guilt that comes when one knows one is putting off such inward-tending thoughts. This is the same sort of “tyrant’s plea” that accounts for the magnificent hollowness of Satan’s rhetoric in Paradise Lost. Confronting Adam and Eve in Book 4, Satan says, “. . . Melt, as I doe, yet public reason just, / Honour and Empire with revenge enlarg'd, / By conquering this new World, compels me now / To do what else though damnd I should abhorre.” At line 36 and following, Claudius tries to confront “the visage of offense” (47), but he cannot because he won’t give up the crown, the effects of his sin. It’s doubtful if we are to understand this attempt at repentance as sincere—doesn’t it seem as if Claudius isn’t so much sorry for killing the king as determined to indulge himself in remorse? Is he just “feeling sorry for himself”? Most likely, to judge from the results of his kneeling prayer: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; / Words without thoughts nev er to heaven go” (97-98). Hamlet looks almost as much the villain as the King at this point, when he reveals his earnestly un-Christian desire that Claudius’ soul at death “may be as damn’d and black / As hell, whereto it goes” (94-95). But just at this point, the King relieves Hamlet of the need to contrive such an outcome by showing that he is completely unable to repent for his mortal sin, or even to take the first necessary steps that would reclaim his chance at salvation.

Act 3, Scene 4.

After himself slaughtering the hidden Polonius, Hamlet goes so far as to accuse Gertrude of taking part in Claudius’ plot to murder Hamlet, Sr. when he blurts out, “A bloody deed! Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother” (28-29). She seems genuinely shocked at the suggestion. Hamlet has little time now for “wretched, rash, intruding fool[s]” (31) like Polonius, a man everyone else held in high regard and with whom they showed considerable patience, and he drives onward to make Gertrude confront her sinfulness as directly as he made Claudius behold his during the “Gonzago” scene. Hamlet suggests that Gertrude’s lust is not even excusable by reference to the heat of youth; at her age, he insists, “The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble, / And waits upon the judgment” (69-70). His efforts succeed without too much trouble since Gertrude cries, “Thou turn’st my [eyes into my very] soul” (89). At this point, Ernest Jones’ “Oedipal reading” of the play comes into its own, if it hadn’t already: Hamlet can scarcely stand to imagine—and yet can’t help but imagine—his mother in bed with Claudius, where they spend their time “honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty!” (93-94) The obsession is so deep that the Ghost must step in to admonish Hamlet about his “almost blunted purpose” (111) of taking revenge against Claudius.

As for Polonius, to the thought of whom Hamlet now returns, there is some remorse, but it’s quickly smoothed over with philosophizing: “For this same lord, / I do repent; but heaven hath pleas’d it so / To punish me with this, and this with me, / That I must be their scourge and minister” (172-75). Hamlet tells Gertrude not to let on that he’s not exactly insane, and he confides in her, at least to a degree, what he has in mind. Knowing he cannot trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he says nonetheless, “Let it work, / For ‘tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his own petar, an’t shall go hard / But I will delve one yard below their mines, / And blow them at the moon” (205-09). This is an odd exclamation since Hamlet knows only that he’s being “marshal[ed] to knavery” (205) of some sort; he can’t know the precise plan, but speaks with almost military precision, promising to delve “one yard below their mines” and turn their evil back upon them.

Act 4, Scene 1.

The King is by now “full of discord and dismay” (45) at the turn of events; he knows Hamlet’s sword was meant for him.

Act 4, Scene 2.

Hamlet calls Rosencrantz a “sponge” (12) who “soaks up the King’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities” (15-16). As for Claudius, he is “a thing,” says Hamlet, “of nothing” (28, 30). His odd remark that “The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body” (27-28) most obviously refers to Polonius’ corpse, but I suppose it might be interpreted along the lines of the longstanding political doctrine that the king has both a civil or corporate body (imperishable) and a natural, mortal one. In this sense, perhaps Hamlet is making an oblique threat against Claudius.

Act 4, Scene 3.

Claudius realizes the desperate state in which he stands: “Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are reliev’d, / Or not at all” (9-11). Then follows Hamlet’s quizzical “fishing” conversation with the King, which culminates with the fine demonstration that “a king may go / a progress through the guts of a beggar” (30-31). The adornment and aggrandizing of this decaying body, so easily inducted into the dark processiveness of nature, is what Claudius has traded his soul for, so in this respect he truly is “a thing . . . nothing.” At line 49, Hamlet calls Claudius “dear mother,” a slip-up that seems sincere since he has had trouble keeping the two apart in his mind. Claudius is increasingly disturbed by Hamlet’s presence, and even by his very existence: requesting “The present death of Hamlet” (65), Claudius says, “Do it, England , / For like the hectic in my blood he rages, / And thou must cure me” (65-67). But what the King seeks most of all is security: “Till I know ‘tis done, / Howe’er my haps, my joys [were] ne’er [begun]” (68-69).

Act 4, Scene 4.

Young Fortinbras seeks conveyance through Denmark on his way to Poland , and the Captain Hamlet speaks to doesn’t think much of his assignment: “We go to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name” (18-19). Hamlet takes the point to heart, making yet another resolution that his mind will contain only thoughts of vengeance from now on: “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (65-66) But this one is no more permanent than the ones he made earlier in the play—this is fundamentally not Hamlet’s “nature,” if we may endow a literary character with such a thing. Part of the interest in Hamlet is, of course, that not only is the time “out of joint,” but the hero himself is “out of joint,” not immediately adapted to the dreadful role he must play. In this way, I think the romantic reading of the tragedy, in which Hamlet is too aloof and philosophical to carry out such a task as revenging a murdered father briskly, is worthy of respect.

Act 4, Scenes 5-7.

Ophelia brings dismay to the Court when she shows clear signs of madness. Perhaps her condition should not be much of a surprise since she has been used as an agent against Hamlet, dangled before him like a piece of meat. A love match has been perverted by the general condition of Denmark , as embodied in the selfish behavior of Polonius and the King. As for Ophelia’s references to flowers, well, flowers are natural beauties, things we use to express a whole range of human experience and sentiment. Ophelia’s mind is disordered, and she registers the corruption all around her, trying pathetically to beautify it with floral symbolism and songs. She has lost her father, and Gertrude will wear her “rue with a difference” (183) because she has lost her son to England . Ophelia is the blighted “flower” of the kingdom, the beauty and innocence that has been sacrificed for the sake of its ambition and lust. Her demise shows the consequences of Denmark ’s degeneracy even more clearly, perhaps, than all the play’s violence. Even Claudius seems genuinely stricken at this latest step in the march of events: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, / But in battalions” (78-79), he laments to Gertrude, and no sooner has he said it than Laertes bursts in with the common folk at his back, shouting him up for the new king. His main function is, of course, to present an obvious contrast with Hamlet—Laertes will, unlike the Prince, “sweep to his revenge” without much delay; he has no scruples about the concept. Claudius speaks with amazing irony when he promises Gertrude that Laertes will not harm him: “There’s such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would, / Acts little of his will” (124-26). Clearly, this truism afforded Hamlet, Sr. no protection from Claudius. In the sixth scene, sailors give a letter from Hamlet to Horatio, explaining how he managed to board a pirate ship that attacked the vessel bound for England . In Scene 7, the King explains to Laertes that so far, he has had to avoid confronting Hamlet because Gertrude and the people are fond of him. Hamlet’s letter to the King is ominous: “High and mighty, You shall know I am set / naked on your kingdom” (43-44). This tone is no less alarming for the promise Hamlet tenders to explain how he has returned.

The King has come to see in Laertes his earthly salvation; the young hothead promises that he would do no less to Hamlet than “cut his throat ‘i th’ church” (127), and Claudius lays out the plot he has partly contrived, only to find that Polonius is able to add a master stroke with the introduction of “an unction” (141) he bought from some itinerant medical charlatan, which he will use to envenom the tip of his rapier. As surety, Claudius will offer Hamlet a poisoned chalice during the fencing match.

The scene concludes with the news that Ophelia has drowned. Gertrude’s beautiful, ekphrastic description of Ophelia’s death from 166-83 honors her loss, but doesn’t redeem the faults that caused it. The death isn’t described as suicide, really; it seems that Ophelia simply stops resisting and is dragged down by her water-logged clothing. Another function of this episode is that it gives Hamlet space for the recognition that he must attain.

Act 5, Scene 1.

The Gravedigger scene works as comic relief, but it also gives us and Hamlet a broader perspective on events up to this point. The Gravedigger calmly goes about his business in the face of death, and even makes jests about it—jests that, as the Riverside editors inform us, refer to an actual law case, that of Hale v. Petit. (The Shakespeare Law Library’s account of that case is worth reading.) We will get no maudlin speeches or meditative musings over Yorick-skulls from him; he’s full of riddles about the sturdiness of the “houses” that gravediggers build. Hamlet appreciates by means of his experiences in this act (and in the fourth act) that the earthly prize of a kingdom, of reputation, of a patch of land, is a joke: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (213-14). If the sought-for revenge is to be accomplished, it can only happen when Hamlet’s mind isn’t tainted by pride or earthly attachment, so his meditation on Yorick the Jester’s skull from 182-95 is vital. Why, indeed, should we cling to life? the skull seems to ask the Prince, who promptly aims this intuition at womankind: “Now get you / to my lady’s [chamber], and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that” (192-94). Soon follows the funeral procession of Ophelia, the quibbling of the Churchmen over what rites to accord a possible suicide, and the preposterous one-upmanship between Laertes and Hamlet in and on Ophelia’s uncovered grave. This is obviously not the way Hamlet had meant to reveal himself to the King, but events have gotten the better of him for the moment, and he vents his grief. It almost goes without saying that the two men have ruined Ophelia’s funeral altogether. It’s just one final, if unintended, insult to this long-suffering character.

Act 5, Scene 2.

Killing Polonius got Hamlet shipped off to England to face execution, but now he recounts to Horatio how on the ship he learned an important lesson: “Rashly-- / And prais’d be rashness for it—let us know / Our indiscretion sometime serves us well / When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us / There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will . . .” (6-11). It seems that this speech refers to Hamlet’s insomnia-induced impatience to know the contents of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s letter. What exactly, he wants to know, is their “grand commission” (18)? This known, he forges a new commission purporting that his old pals R & G should be executed on the spot, once they make it to the English King’s presence. His justification of this rather harsh turnabout is simply, “[Why, man, they did make love to this employment,] / They are not near my conscience. . . . / ‘Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes / Between the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites” (57-62). Perhaps this as an injustice on Hamlet’s part, an act of disproportionate violence against men who know nothing of the evil Claudius has done, but it’s hard to feel much sympathy for them; perhaps our minds are too thoroughly poisoned by listening to Hamlet for that to be possible. They serve the interests of the King against their friend, they are “sponges” just looking for preferment, and to Hamlet they are utterly insignificant pawns in the deadly game of chess between himself and Claudius. Well, if they’ll just be patient for about four centuries, Tom Stoppard will make it up to them by writing that witty play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, so “all’s well that ends well,” right?

At line 65, Hamlet brings up a new motive (though in speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he had already hinted at it when he said, “I lack advancement”): he says that “He that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother” has also “Popp’d in between th’ election and my hopes” (64-65). In other words, Claudius’ hasty marriage with the Queen has deprived him for now of the succession. The Oedipal significance of this remark is not difficult to see. (On the theme of “inheritance,” see Anthony Burton’s “Further Aspects of Inheritance Law in Hamlet.”)

When the foppish Osric enters bearing the King and Laertes’ challenge, Hamlet calmly accepts it, overriding Laertes’ misgivings with the grand statement, “[W]e defy augury. There is special / providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be [now], / ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if / it be not now, yet it [will] come—the readiness is all” (219-22). This match is not of his making, but whatever happens, Hamlet accepts the outcome. This may be the insight or right attitude he has needed all along; he must become an instrument of God’s vengeance, which will turn the schemes of Claudius and Laertes against them. We might recall that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, although all too willing to prostitute themselves to the designs of earthly rulers, nonetheless go to their deaths as instruments of forces larger than they can imagine, so in this sense they show Hamlet the way. Well, in the end, Claudius’ plan is frustrated, and his union with Gertrude nullified without issue (i.e. children). As so often in Shakespeare, there’s a Christian lesson to be drawn: the wicked will ultimately will find a way to destroy themselves; they are remarkably consistent in the patterns of their evil. Hamlet gains no earthly reward but death. Young Fortinbras enters the kingdom almost by accident, in the wake of the old order’s self-destruction: he and other onlookers will hear from Horatio of “purposes mistook, / Fall’n on the inventors’ heads” (384-85). There’s really no question of Fortinbras’ being a better ruler than his predecessors, though Hamlet’s final thoughts commend him. He is simply an opportunist in the right time at the right place. This hardly amounts to a strong purification of the State, though it’s fair to say that that was never really the play’s emphasis anyhow.

To return to the dearly departed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, some critics see them as loose ends that Shakespeare has deliberately left hanging at the play’s conclusion—have they really deserved their harsh fate, considering that they are only minor players in a grand tragedy? Does their taking-off mean that God’s providential design is a bit “rough-hewn,” or at least that his justice is not self-evidently “just” to us? Perhaps, but in my view, this messy fact (along with Ophelia’s lamentable and unfair demise) doesn’t necessarily destroy the “providential” reading to which I have generally subscribed. At the least, Hamlet is a curious revenge play in that it ultimately denies agency to the very character who is most responsible for ensuring that the play’s villain gets what he deserves, and yet the revenge “gets itself accomplished” nonetheless, in the most hideously appropriate manner, as if Shakespeare’s God has much the same sense of “poetic justice” as Dante’s did.

Week 04, Julius Caesar

2008-11-15T12:04:00.000-08:00

Notes on Julius Caesar

Act 1, Scene 1

At the beginning of the play, Shakespeare introduces a Roman world where all people should know their place. Why is the carpenter not wearing the sign he should be wearing? The cobbler introduces another theme—the idea that something is broken and must be mended. This is a holiday time when the ordinary laws that restrain and govern people seem to have been suspended. The strongest Romans on the scene are certain that their moral pronouncements and symbolic acts will set things right again, but in this belief, we must already begin to sense, they are gravely mistaken. The common people would just as well forget the past and live entirely in the present.

Act 1, Scene 2

In this scene we get our first view of Julius Caesar himself. He seems a grand enough figure, ordering great men about in an intimate way. Still, what Julius says to Marc Antony reminds us that his wife is unable to have children. In a way that has profound political implications, Julius is alone in the middle of this admiring crowd, and he must depend upon Marc Antony. Caesar will not listen to the soothsayer. Immediately afterwards we are treated to the first conversation between Brutus and Cassius, a conversation that turns upon the issue of representation tied together with the all-important Roman preoccupation with honor. Simply put, Cassius wants Brutus to see himself through the eyes of others who expect him to save the Republic. The honest reply that Brutus gives reminds us how difficult it is for a person to be self-contained, self-defining. It is clear that Brutus has been thinking along the same lines as Cassius—he would not find it tolerable for Julius to become king. But Brutus is circumspect about speaking what he feels. Cassius obviously resents and envies Caesar, and seems to hold him in contempt. His reference to Virgil’s Aeneid puts Cassius in place of Aeneas and Julius Caesar in the place of that hero’s father, who, readers of Virgil will remember, did not make it all the way to Italy after the Trojan remnant had set sail from their burning city. Cassius does not so much seek justice as the opportunity to take power for himself. He also sees a deep disjunction between what ordinary people think Caesar is and what he actually is to those who know him best. We like to think of the Romans as thoroughly upstanding and ancient times as somehow simpler and more noble, but the fact is that Roman political culture was at least as sophisticated as ours is today: “spin” would hardly have been a foreign concept to Roman politicians. Cassius tries to stir similar resentment in the breast of Brutus, and connects him to his illustrious ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus, who helped drive out the last Tarquin King from Rome. Brutus seems naïve concerning the motives of his friend since he labels the speech something “high.” Brutus is an idealist who can’t help but transform everyone around him into something more noble and high-minded than is really the case.

Julius Caesar speaks to Marc Antony again, and makes it clear that he does not trust Cassius, finding in him an anxiety-provoking degree of pride. It is also manifest that Caesar surrounds himself with people willing to tell him what he wants to hear. He is always on stage, a quality that Casca’s comments reinforce.

Casca is scornful of Caesar’s “act” in the presence of the common people who would make him king. The “tag-rag” crowd seems like an ordinary Elizabethan rabble. They follow their own appetites and are greedy for emotional spectacle, which is exactly what they get when Caesar swoons in an epileptic fit.

At the end of the second scene, Cassius clarifies his scheme after Brutus makes his exit—the plan is to manipulate Brutus by taking advantage of his noble honesty. In this play, there are characters who stick to their ideals (or who idealize others), and there are cynical realists like Cassius.

Act 1, Scene 3

Cicero proves unwilling when he speaks to Casca to buy into all the high talk about prodigies and omens. Cicero believes what’s happening is all a matter of interpretation. Casca fears the omens, but Cassius is contemptuous, comparing Julius Caesar to such thunder and lightning. The man is fearful, and a Roman must confront his fears if he would be free. As far as Cassius is concerned, Caesar’s greatness is a mark of the people’s degeneracy. Of course, this comment shows the weakness in the entire conspiratorial plan: if Romans are in fact sheep, how are they supposed to maintain the virtuous Republic of old, even if an assassination restores that form of government? If they are fit only to be led, why then, someone must lead them. So the argument is really over who will dominate the populace. As Thomas Carlyle will later write, “In the long run, every government is the exact symbol of its people.” Democracies and republics die when the citizenry are no longer worthy of such noble experiments or capable of sustaining them. This is not to say that Shakespeare or his audience were sympathetic to republican arguments—monarchy was generally considered the best form of government in Shakespeare’s time. Both Casca and Cassius want to borrow Brutus’s connection to heroic Roman history, thinking to render their own bloody deeds noble and acceptable by reference to violent acts that helped found the Republic.

Act 2, Scene 1

Brutus says that he acts for the general good, not because he has anything in particular against Caesar, who has always been a friend to him and a man of reason. (As the introduction points out, Shakespeare brackets out the way Julius Caesar attained the level of power he held at the time of his murder. However, his bringing destruction to northern Europe’s tribes and crossing the Rubicon aside, it remains true that Caesar was a man of considerable merit—he was a cultivated man, not a brute.) The main argument Brutus makes is the abstract one that power would surely corrupt his friend, so it is necessary to extrapolate what that friend might do if given absolute power. A man who would be king is a serpent, and must be dealt with as such. Brutus himself is very much taken with the heroic past connected to his family name, and like many good Romans he is firmly wedded to the past.

At line 63, it becomes apparent how much of a toll taking part in a conspiracy has begun to exact upon Brutus: “Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.” When he is introduced to the conspirators, he finds it necessary to explain just how un-Roman it is to require an oath in such matters as they are about to undertake, and he makes haste to check the bloodiness of their intent. Protecting Marc Antony turns out to be a mistake, of course, but it shows Brutus’s nobility of mind all the same. It’s possible to attribute to Brutus some degree of less than high-minded strategizing when he says that Antony “can do no more than Caesar’s arm / When Caesar’s head is off” (182-83), but perhaps that would be ungenerous. Brutus seems quite naïve throughout this scene, nowhere more so than when he says of Caesar, “Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds” (173-74). As always, Brutus is most comfortable with theories and abstractions, and with ritual and ceremony rather than practical action: the conspirators are first and foremost “butchers,” whatever their intentions towards the state. Brutus recognizes that Caesar’s blood must be spilled, but it’s hard to see how his words connote recognition of the full horror in such a deed.

At line 233 and following, Portia shows herself to be perhaps the only character who understands Brutus, with the possible exception of Octavius, who treats him as a worthy opponent. She requests in strong terms that Brutus let her in on what is troubling him, and he promises to do so, although he is subsequently interrupted by Caius Ligarius. But he must tell her subsequently since later on she seems aware of what is afoot. In speaking to Caius Ligarius, Brutus again employs the metaphor of sickness and health—it seems he sees himself as a physician or a surgeon as well as a priest with respect to the body politic.

Act 2, Scene 2

When talking to his wife, Caesar seems genuinely magnificent in his disregard for death, but he also seems rather pompous in declaring himself more dangerous than danger itself. On the whole, he is a politician who has come to believe his own PR—always a dangerous thing to do because it unfits a person to exercise power in real-life, real-time situations. Because Decius Brutus understands this weakness in Caesar, he is able to use it to bring the man out to the Capitol, where he will meet his fate. I think Shakespeare follows the general line that the time had already come for Rome to turn imperial, but the fat and fond Julius Caesar he portrays is not the right man to wield such enormous power. None of this is to say that Caesar is to be portrayed as an old fool or a clown; rather, it seems likely that Shakespeare’s representation of this “great man” pays tribute to the difficulty of settling on any one image of such a colossal, polarizing figure as Julius Caesar. On display are certain physical and character weaknesses and a tendency towards exaggeration, but counter-balancing these traits, in almost any worthwhile production, will be the impressive pageantry, the sheer spectacle, surrounding Caesar’s every move.

Act 3, Scene 1

In the famous assassination scene, the conspirators crowd around Caesar, with the ostensible purpose of getting him to revoke his banishment of one Publius Cimber, brother of the conspirator Metellus Cimber. Caesar’s words make him seem grandiose and ungenerous, and he is instantly cut down. As in some ancient accounts, Caesar is most surprised to find Brutus amongst those who have betrayed him. (See http://www.livius.org/caa-can/caesar/caesar_t09.html for Suetonius’ highly regarded narrative of the murder, which has Caesar maintaining dignified silence.)

Both Cassius and Brutus make bold to consider the historic nature of what they have just done, treating it as if it were a piece of stagecraft for the ages. Brutus is particularly concerned to strike the right ceremonial note, telling his fellow conspirators to bathe their hands in the blood of the slain ruler and make their way to the marketplace, where they will proclaim “Peace, freedom, and liberty” (110) for all. But subsequent audiences, of course, know perfectly well how the whole affair turned out—the death of Julius Caesar brought not the restoration of republican ways, but rather the supremely competent imperial rule of Augustus after a period of civil strife. So when we see the conspirators on stage smearing themselves with the blood of the man they have just killed, we are likely to concentrate more on the viciousness of their deed than on the high-minded ideals that set Brutus, at least, in motion.

Act 3, Scene 2

Immediately after the assassination, Brutus makes the fatal mistake of trusting Marc Antony. Antony appears diabolically skillful throughout this scene, beginning with his earnest-seeming demand to know why Caesar deserved to die and his eerie willingness to shake hands with the blood-spattered killers before him, then proceeding to his obviously genuine and yet carefully stage-managed outbursts of feeling for the murdered Caesar and his request to pay his respects at the man’s funeral. Cassius suspects the worst, but Brutus will have none of it, and he brushes aside Cassius’s objections with the ridiculous stipulation that he himself will speak first and thereby provide sufficient explanation for what has been done. He has just agreed to serve as the warm-up act for a master rhetorician who does not mean him well, and we shall see what Antony makes of the demand that he not blame the “honorable” conspirators. Operating by the ancient code of revenge, Antony plans to “let slip the dogs of war” (273) after his stirring words have driven the conspirators out of Rome. The deed that these deluded men believed would bring order and liberty, Antony correctly understands as the harbinger of violence and chaos. For the moment, these are his elements, and with them he will set to work forging a new order with Octavius.

The speech that Brutus makes to the Roman mob, while noble, is also absurd because it issues a call to Romanness to people thoroughly incapable of any such thing. Brutus insists that he has placed love of country above love for his old friend Caesar, and he may indeed have done so. But the rogues and peasants to whom he speaks have no understanding of such idealism. They value persons over principles, favors over sacrifice. They are moved by Brutus’s words, but their instinct is to offer him the crown they had meant to offer Caesar.

Marc Antony’s speech is a masterpiece, full of power and deception, strong feeling and a call to personal loyalty. Casting himself as Caesar’s friend, Antony highlights the qualities of Julius in this capacity: friendship, or amicitia, was amongst the highest Roman virtues, and Brutus has betrayed a man who loved and honored him. (In The Divine Comedy, Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest section of the inferno for that reason: they are traitors to their lord.) If a man betrays his friend, you cannot believe anything he says or trust him in any action. ( Cicero wrote a fine treatise called De Amicitia, or “On Friendship,” and Seneca’s Letters deal with the concept insightfully.) He attacks the notion that Caesar was ambitious or selfish, and employs a species of repetition to savage effect respecting the word “honorable,” which comes to signify the opposite quality after its first few uses. In the end, Antony does what he promised Brutus not to do: he calls the conspirators traitors. He convinces his audience that they have lost a generous, unique benefactor at the hands of men who do not even understand that all-important Roman concept, “honor.” Honor consists in standing by your friends, which is exactly what Marc Antony tells the irrational, inflamed crowd to do now. Fortune favors those willing to ride the waves of passion that arise from great and terrible events, not those who, like Brutus, believe troubled human affairs can be set to rights by the dispassionate operations of reason. The latter assumption hardly seems a good bet in the third scene, when the rabble decide that it isn’t even worth distinguishing Cinna the poet from Cinna the assassin.

Act 4, Scene 1

Antony the man of feeling now shows another side of himself—the side that allows him to “lay honors” on his fellow Triumvir Lepidus and yet call the man an ass when he’s out of earshot. This brazen contempt for “a tried and valiant soldier” (28) surprises the youthful Octavius, but Antony won’t change a word of his dismissive pronouncement against Lepidus. It’s time to head for the wars Brutus and Cassius are stirring up.

Act 4, Scenes 2-3

Back at the camp, Brutus and Cassius become embroiled in a bitter argument about funding for their armies—Cassius’s corrupt favoritism has made him deny Brutus necessary pay for his men. Although the fight sounds like schoolboy squabbling, it has a serious side: Cassius’ offense is a dangerous one for the cause since a mutinous army is no help, and his charge of untenderness on the part of Brutus seems genuine, so it reinforces the play’s interest in the importance of Roman honor and friendship. “A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities” (86), pleads Cassius, and in the end he brings Brutus around. Shakespeare was capable of shredding cherished notions of classical chivalry, as he does in his later play Troilus and Cressida (1601-02), but here in Julius Caesar no such thoroughgoing cynicism seems to be afoot. When Cassius’s Thersites-like “cynic” struts onstage to offer his saucy rhymes, Brutus makes Cassius dismiss the fellow as untimely and impertinent.

Brutus and Cassius disagree more civilly about military strategy around line 200. Brutus comes down in favor of marching out to meet the enemy rather than waiting: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries” (218-21). This is one of the most famous pronouncements in the play, but the “tide” metaphor is also revealing—although Brutus counsels heroic action, he still sees this action as a reaction, as a principled response to what the rhythm of life brings. Contrast this attitude with Marc Antony and Octavius. Antony in particular, at least in this play if not in Antony and Cleopatra, is closer to the view of Edmund in King Lear: “all’s meet with me that I can fashion fit.” We might argue that Brutus, for all his unrealistic idealism, is at crucial points more grounded in reality as something given that must be acknowledged than his adversaries are. Antony is a supreme opportunist, but his manner of handling the opportunity that comes to him as a gift from Brutus is masterful, active, and creative: a fine word-chef, he whips up a generous Julius bound to please the common people. By the end of Act 4, Brutus is afflicted with a second vision of Caesar as his “evil spirit” (281). Even the supernatural is arrayed against him; history is not on his side in the struggle between republican principles and monarchical rule.

Act 5, Scenes 1-3

Brutus and Cassius exchange angry words with Octavius and Marc Antony, and a bit later Brutus says to Cassius that he abhors the prospect of suicide—evidently, he assumes he will either be victorious or be killed in battle. But when the battle goes against his side, he must confront the suicide of his own friend Cassius, who requires his Parthian servant to stab him with the very sword he had used during the assassination of Caesar. Brutus sees this act as the work of Julius Caesar’s vengeful spirit.

Act 5, Scenes 4-5

In the end, Brutus decides to run upon his own sword rather than face capture. He leaves it to the people of the future and to history to judge his actions, expressing confidence in the outcome: “I shall have glory by this losing day / More than Octavius and Marc Antony” (36-37). Octavius and Antony are impressed with the end Brutus makes, and Antony declares him “the noblest Roman of them all” (5.5.68) He acted for the general good rather than for his own personal interest. On the whole, I think we find in Julius Caesar not so much a wholesale or cynical rejection of the principles enunciated by the noble Brutus as a complex, at times ambivalent exploration of those principles. Ideals seldom, if ever, match events on the ground: participation in almost any kind of politics compels even the best people to abandon or at least compromise their noblest aspirations and their customary civility. This is not to abandon politics since that really isn’t possible; it is to see things as they are without flinching or dissembling.

Week 03, Romeo and Juliet

2008-11-15T12:02:00.000-08:00

Notes on Romeo and Juliet

Prologue and Act 1, Scene 1

It has sometimes been said that Romeo and Juliet is not much of a tragedy because unfortunate accidents seem to be responsible for most of the bad things that happen. There is no prideful Oedipus the King in this play who brings about his own downfall, but I don’t believe Shakespeare follows any unitary model of tragedy—he constitutes his tragic intensities and ideals circumstantially, from one set of materials to the next. A notion of tragedy as broad as “a fall from good fortune to bad” probably serves him as a point of departure. What, then, is the stuff of tragedy in this play? We are dealing with a primal tragedy of youthful expectations and middle-aged fears, of existential rawness and fear of irretrievable loss. Sigmund Freud wrote that “it is monstrous to see one’s children die.” That is what happens to both houses. As for Romeo and Juliet, they are open to the intensities and extremes of passion that come with first love. Romeo in particular idealizes love and fidelity to an extent that cannot help but be perilous. He hasn’t had the experience to do otherwise. There is a medieval quality to this play so full of turnabouts and sudden emotional passages from mirth to despair.

The Prologue announces that this will be a tragedy not only of two lovers but also of two extended families, the Montagues and the Capulets. Antipathy has become habitual with them, and they have therefore embroiled the entire city of Verona in civil strife. The quibbling servants of the first scene show how trivial the feud has become, and Sampson’s obscene innuendos about Montague maidens suggests that the family feud is easily made to serve selfish purposes, base appetites. There is no nobility in such factional strife. Tybalt and Benvolio are as absurd in prosecuting the quarrel as the low-born servants. The Prince breaks up the current fighting, but it is clear from what he says that he has dealt leniently with such disorders in the past. As in Measure for Measure, the ruler has allowed his subjects’s petty desires to wreak havoc in his realm.

We first hear of Romeo when Lady Montague asks Benvolio where the young man has been hiding himself. He shuns company, and Benvolio soon learns from him that love is the cause. Romeo speaks with considerable wit, but his words are also full of Petrarchan extremes: “O heavy lightness, serious vanity,” and so forth. Benvolio, a somewhat less inexperienced young man, advises Romeo to look around him and compare as many beautiful women as possible with the one who seems to be giving him the trouble.

Act 1, Scene 2

Capulet is very pleased with the prospect of the Prince’s kinsman Paris marrying his daughter Juliet, and he invites the young man to a public feast that also presents Romeo with the opportunity Benvolio is pushing on him. Romeo is dubious, and maintains his distant Rosaline’s matchless quality.

Act 1, Scene 3

The Nurse apparently has been with Juliet from infancy onwards, and she sees the girl’s life as a whole. The bawdy joke made by her husband years ago, here repeated, implies that the Nurse has been preparing Juliet for this time from her childhood. Her words are poignant in that they remind us just how short is the time between carefree childhood and the consequential time of adulthood. Juliet is intrigued about Paris, but no more than that since he is no more than a name to her.

Act 1, Scene 4

Mercutio recounts the legend of Queen Mab to Romeo and others present. The substance of his speech is that this Queen inspires all sorts to follow their own particular desires—by implication, we don’t have a great deal of control when it comes to our emotions and desires. All of this is meant to deflate Romeo’s dream, but the deeper significance of Mercutio’s speech is to put everyone in the same condition as Romeo—a follower of idle dreams. Romeo is not in so light a mood after all—he says, “my mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night’s revels” (106-09).

Act 1, Scene 5

Benvolio’s plan doesn’t go quite as he had intended since Romeo, upon seeing Juliet, becomes just as smitten with her as he was with his former love. Old Montague and Capulet are willing enough to keep the peace, but the younger generation is always spoiling for trouble. Romeo’s forebodings are fulfilled when Tybalt conceives a hatred for him at the very moment when he falls in love with Juliet. The first meeting between Romeo and Juliet is one of the finest scenes Shakespeare ever wrote. Together they speak a sonnet; Romeo takes the lead while Juliet is both passionate and poised. Both are soon dispossessed of any notion that there is a clear path forwards for them.

Act 2, Scene 1

Ever the realist, Mercutio jokes with Benvolio about the supposed otherworldliness of Romeo’s new affection. Mercutio stands for the view that any “idealizing of eroticism” is downright silly and perhaps disingenuous, since raw sexuality is always at the bottom of any romantic pose a lover may strike up: of Juliet he can only say, “O that she were / An open[-arse], thou a pop’rin pear! / Romeo, good night, I’ll to my truckle-bed, / This field-bed is too cold for me to sleep” (37-40). He says this to Benvolio, however, and not to Romeo. Mercutio is frenetic and open-hearted in his way, but he’s not inclined to lie around in a chilly “field-bed” to keep watch over the passions of Romeo.

Act 2, Scene 2

Romeo’s romantic idealism is absolute up to this point, as is easy to see by remarks such as, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” (1-2). Juliet’s idealism, though strong, shows more regard for the narrow dynastic concerns that hem in the two lovers. Her famous lines, “That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet” (43-44) capture the dilemma of lovers right up to Shakespeare’s time: love is a universal passion and as such it ought to generate community, but this same passion is hindered by a host of social demands and expectations that are anything but charitable, so that it often creates rifts between individuals and the larger group, which we call “society.”

Juliet reveals her passion fully since at first she doesn’t know Romeo is listening, which spares both of them the awkward task of dissembling their love. Juliet’s language is tinged with realistic (if unfounded) concerns—in particular, she fears that Romeo’s propensity to swear by the moon may indicate rashness rather than constancy. But she is steadfast in her eagerness to marry him, whatever the obstacles. The language of falconry marks Juliet’s desire for Romeo: “O, for a falc’ner’s voice,” she says, “To lure this tassel-gentle back again!” (158-59). There is recognition in such language that desire is essentially a wild thing, not something safe and tame. We can find the same insight, though in a darker vein, in the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt and other Tudor poets preceding Shakespeare.

Act 2, Scene 3

Friar Lawrence’s pronouncement near the beginning of this scene is instructive: “Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, / And vice sometime by action dignified” (21-22). The Friar is collecting a basket with “baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers” (6) that will turn out to be useful—and harmful—in a way he doesn’t yet imagine. Shocked by Romeo’s sudden transference of his attentions from Rosaline to Juliet, he nonetheless agrees to perform the secret marriage rite Romeo wants, in hopes of ending Verona’s unrest. The Friar seems to think that the Montagues and Capulets will be charitable and reasonable once they realize two of their own have chosen to marry.

Act 2, Scene 4

Mercutio shows his awareness of how silly the feuding amongst the two houses (especially amongst the younger generation) is: he takes on the persona of a grandsire to denounce “fashion-mongers” like Tybalt (33). Mercutio is in on the hostilities, of course, but he isn’t entirely circumscribed or defined by them. Given the opportunity, he engages with Romeo in a battle of wits, and then takes bawdy aim at Juliet’s Nurse, who has come as the girl’s emissary. Nurse Angelica is not amused. Romeo promises he will arrive in good time to spend the night with Juliet after they are married.

Act 2, Scene 5

In his lectures on Shakespeare, Coleridge implies that while the Nurse is eccentric, she is at the same time a universal type of the caring, elderly nurse.* It’s easy to see that quality in her here—beset by the impatient Juliet, the Nurse holds her ground for a while, but finally gives the girl the information she wants. Angelica’s circumstances and pace are not the same as Juliet’s: “I am the drudge, and toil in your delight; / But you shall bear the burthen soon at night” (75-76). She is fond of Juliet almost to a fault, but always aware that the young girl is surrounded by a potentially hostile world of causes and effects, of limitations and consequences. Pleasure and idealism are not free.

*The quotation: The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakspeare to a direct borrowing from mere observation; and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class,—just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them,—so it is nearly as much so in old age. The generalization is done to the poet’s hand. Here you have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a long-trusted servant, whose sympathy with the mother’s affections gives her privileges and rank in the household; and observe the mode of connection by accidents of time and place, and the childlike fondness of repetition in a second childhood, and also that happy, humble, ducking under, yet constant resurgence against, the check of her superiors!

(http://absoluteshakespeare.com/guides/essays/romeo_and_juliet_essay.htm )

Act 2, Scene 6

Friar Lawrence leads Romeo and Juliet off to perform the marriage ceremony; his advice to Romeo, “Therefore love moderately” (14) is strangely ineffectual, given the Friar’s willingness to facilitate such a hasty, secret wedding.

Act 3, Scene 1

Romeo’s attempt to get between Tybalt and Mercutio results in the latter’s death, and then Romeo is honor-bound to avenge his kinsman. Having slain Tybalt, he laments that he is now “fortune’s fool” (136). The Prince steps in and dispenses his characteristically tempered style of justice, banishing Romeo on pain of death. This decree is mild since, after all, Paris is the Prince’s own kinsman.

Act 3, Scene 2

Juliet is indulging herself in a little romantic idealism around the time of the deadly quarrel: Give me my Romeo, and, when I shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night” (21-24). But the Nurse soon brings her the bad news about Tybalt’s death (over which Juliet is genuinely aggrieved since he was her kinsman) and Romeo’s guilty flight. The Nurse also provides hope, for she knows Romeo is hiding with Friar Lawrence.

Act 3, Scene 3

Banished Romeo is unable to imagine a “world without Verona walls” (17), and when the Friar tries to show him the sunny side of the whole affair, Romeo says with some justice, “Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel” (64). Romeo’s willingness to kill himself if it will assuage Juliet’s grief over Tybalt shows the depth of this affection that the Friar, as a holy man, supposedly lacks. Friar Lawrence’s advice is that Romeo should make his way to Mantua.

Act 3, Scenes 4-5

Romeo and Juliet spend their first night together in the Capulet stronghold, and engage in a traditional “argument with the dawn” of Troubadour lineage. Juliet is filled with dread, and tells Romeo, “Methinks I see thee now, thou art so low, / As one dead in the bottom of a tomb” (55-56). When Lady Capulet professes her desire to poison Romeo in Mantua, Juliet pretends to share the same wish, but she can’t bring herself to pretend any joy in the prospect of marrying Count Paris, to whom her father has decided she should be wed “early next Thursday” (112). Old Capulet’s rebuke of Juliet is immediate and harsh—either she will marry Paris or he will disown her. Juliet is the Capulets’ only child, and in her stubbornness the father of the household sees his hopes of dynastic immortality frustrated. The Nurse angers Juliet by professing that it would be best to give in to her father’s wishes and marry Paris.

Act 4, Scene 1

Friar Lawrence sees that Juliet’s situation is desperate, and offers an equally desperate remedy—she will take a drug that induces death-like symptoms for forty-two hours, and then Romeo will come to the tomb of the Capulets and take her away with him to Mantua. This is a common motif in literature: cheating the Grim Reaper, or at least attempting to negotiate a better deal with him. Film students may recall Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in which a medieval man plays a game of chess with Death in hopes of gaining more earthly time. The Friar, for a holy man, has a flair for quick-thinking deception, and is able to put his earlier sententia about virtue and vice to good use.

Act 4, Scenes 2-4

Juliet shows remarkable courage and does not shrink from swallowing her potion, even when she conjures the ghost of Tybalt.

Act 4, Scene 5

This is one of the scenes that leaps from joy to despair in a heartbeat. The Capulet parents suffer (or rather think they suffer) an irretrievable loss of the sort all parents fear. As I mentioned at the beginning of this commentary, Freud’s remark that “it is monstrous to see one’s children die” is appropriate here. And there’s a strong medieval quality to the grotesque imagery here and elsewhere in the play: old Capulet says to Paris, “O son, the night before thy wedding-day / Hath Death lain with thy wife” (35-36). The scene ends with a comic exchange between some musicians who had been summoned earlier by the Capulets and the servant Peter. Together, they introduce a devil-may-care, self-interested attitude into the midst of unspeakable woe. These musicians have little to do with the goings-on of great houses—they are just “working-class stiffs,” as we would say, and they seek their own security and comfort, when the latter is to be had. The scene doesn’t reach the synthesized profundity and silliness of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, but it’s effective all the same.

Act 5, Scene 1

Romeo hears from Balthasar that Juliet’s body lies in the tomb of the Capulets, and, to borrow a phrase from Hamlet, he determines “with wings / As swift as meditation or the thoughts of love” to purchase a dram of deadly stuff from a poor apothecary (druggist), and die next to Juliet. The apothecary becomes a base-born “victim” of this noble tragedy, protesting, “My poverty, but not my will, consents” (75).

Act 5, Scene 2

Friar Lawrence learns to his discomfiture that Friar John was detained by townsmen concerned about the plague, so he wasn’t able to deliver his friend’s letter to Romeo.

Act 5, Scene 3

Romeo boldly confronts death and all its accoutrements: “Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, / Gorg’d with the dearest morsel of the earth, / Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open, / And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food” (45-48). The death-imagery in this play is quite ugly, and throughout it has underlain the graceful words and actions of the young hero and heroine like the grotesque underside of a fair medieval decorative panel or casket. Romeo also confronts the hapless Paris, and kills him, only to die after one last look at Juliet’s body. The “ensign” of Juliet’s beauty is still visible, but the already aggrieved Romeo isn’t able to process this fact in anything but an ultra-romantic way, so surrounded is she by the architecture and trappings of death.

When Juliet awakens, her only comfort is Friar Lawrence, and Romeo’s words in 3.3 about the Friar’s inability to enter into the deep passions of the two lovers ring true: at the critical moment, Lawrence is frightened away from the scene when he hears the watch coming, and leaves Juliet alone. The entirely conventional fate he had imagined for her—delivery to “a sisterhood of holy nuns” (157) is not for Juliet, who embraces Romeo’s dagger and dies, falling directly on his body.

Friar Lawrence (along with Balthasar) is called to give an account of what has happened, and is forgiven his less than wise or heroic interventions. As the Prologue promised, the “strife” of the Montagues and Capulets is “buried” by the death of their beloved son and daughter. This family that has dealt in hatred, says the Prince, is justly punished: “heaven finds means to kill your joys with love” (293), but neither does he exempt himself from blame since he has been guilty of “winking” (294) at the chaos the two families have long visited upon Verona. Love has indeed brought the warring houses together, but the price is the death of what they hold most dear.

Week 02, Titus Andronicus

2008-11-15T12:01:00.000-08:00

Notes on William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Act 1, Scene 1

The play seems to be set in the fourth century CE, and it depicts a Roman world turned upside down—one in which a Goth leader only recently brought to Rome in chains is elevated to nearly supreme power, and a valiant Roman is crushed by his rigid belief in an ancient code of honor that virtually no-one around him takes seriously. In the eventful first scene, Titus Andronicus, a soldier of forty years’ standing, returns to Rome with his trophy Goths Tamora and her sons, only to be confronted with the bickering of Saturninus and Bassianus over the imperial succession. While Saturninus proclaims his right as the first-born son of the late emperor, Bassianus advances his cause in the name of virtue: “suffer not dishonor to approach / The imperial seat” (13-14), he pleads to the Tribunes, Senators, and his own followers. Titus has just returned from ten years of fighting in Rome’s cause, and all ears await his sentence as to who should take the throne. The general’s speech to the assembled Romans is magnificent in its honest reckoning of the losses he has willingly borne for his country, and moving in its attention to the children he has lost: “Titus, unkind and careless of thine own, / Why suffer’st thou thy sons, unburied yet, / To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?” (86-88) He is a Roman of the old school and a believer in strict pietas to family and state.

At his remaining sons’ request, therefore, he will sacrifice conquered Tamora’s eldest son. Titus’ sons explain clearly why they want to commit this act. They say to their father, “Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths, / That we may hew his limbs and on a pile / Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh . . . / That so the shadows be not unappeas’d, / Nor we disturb’d with prodigies on earth” (96-101). Titus agrees to this demand without hesitation, but Tamora is quick to see the affair as hypocrisy: “must my sons be slaughtered in the streets / For valiant doings in their country’s cause?” (112-13) Her sons have only done what Titus’ would do in defense of their homeland. Tamora’s plea, “Thrice-noble Titus, spare my first-born son!” (119) is revealing in that its numerical quality suggests a world in which everything can be quantified or accounted for: surely, this strange honor code in which Titus believes is expansive enough to allow for generosity towards the eldest son of a valiant, defeated queen! Titus isn’t simply noble; he is thrice noble, and ought to be magnanimous in victory. But Titus disagrees: the honor code is strict, and a demand by blood for blood cannot be refused without shame. It would, in fact, constitute an outrage against the memory of Titus’ dead sons. So Tamora’s individual heartache, her natural appeal as a mother, must be subordinated to the Roman ritual in such cases: piety must be upheld, and the general tells her to “patient” herself while this act of Roman religiosity is accomplished. Tamora’s denunciation seems appropriate: “O cruel, irreligious piety!” (130) The aftermath of the deed is announced with the words, “Alarbus’ limbs are lopp’d, / And entrails fee the sacrificing fire, / Whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky” (143-45). The alliteration of the first line is deliciously absurd, and lets us in on the comic undertone of this otherwise tragic play: Titus Andronicus has an over-the-top quality, a tendency to revel in its scenes of violence and criminality, that mark it as a fine example of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. “Shakespeare was young when he wrote Titus,” as an old professor of mine used to suggest as a way of accounting for the play’s exuberance and outright silliness (there are approximately 217 references to body parts in Titus Andronicus—surely no accident on Shakespeare’s part), but we might as well admit that it’s a masterpiece of its kind. The Elizabethans loved this kind of limb-hacking, blood-spattered spectacle, as the popularity of other plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy attests.

Well, with Alarbus’ limbs duly lopp’d, Titus must return to the public responsibility that awaits him. Offered the throne in his own right, he magnanimously turns it down with the utterance, “Give me a staff of honor for mine age, / But not a scepter to control the world” (198-99). As kingmaker he chooses the eldest son of the departed Caesar as the new emperor, and Saturninus promises to wed Lavinia out of gratitude for this service (240). But Bassianus, with the aid of Titus’ sons, escapes with his beloved Lavinia. Titus kills his son Mutius when the latter bars his way in pursuit of the absconders (291), but Saturninus flies into a rage all the same, and chooses Tamora to be his empress in place of Lavinia. The perverse nature of this choice is implied in Tamora’s promise to the young man: “If Saturnine advance the Queen of Goths, / She will a handmaid be to his desires, / A loving nurse, a mother to his youth” (330-32). Titus has given control of great Rome to a man who seeks a mother in the “barbarian” woman who wants nothing more than to destroy it as a means of revenging her losses in battle and the slaughter of her child. As empress, Tamora (at 428 and following) deviously smoothes things over for Titus, who has been left to lament the betrayal by his sons of the reputation he held dear. As she explains to the inexperienced young emperor, she does this the better to crush Titus and his entire line when Saturninus is secure on the throne: “let me alone, / I’ll find a day to massacre them all, / And rase their faction and their family, / The cruel father and his traitorous sons” (449-52). And so the act ends with Saturninus’ offer of a double wedding, and Titus’ promise of fine hunting.

Act 2, Scenes 1-2

Aaron is exultant at Tamora’s advancement because it means great rewards for him, not only in terms of wealth but also personal pride: he will “be bright, and shine in pearl and gold” (19), but more than that, he will “wanton with this queen” who promises to be the ruin of the hated Romans and their emperor. Chiron and Demetrius scheme with Aaron’s aid to ravish Lavinia: says Aaron the strategist, “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull” (128), and therefore they can absorb in silence the savage crime these young men desire to commit against Lavinia. They will all conspire with Tamora to refine the plot. Scene 2 tells us of the hunting scene’s beginning.

Act 2, Scene 3

Tamora and Aaron converse in the woods, and then Bassianus and Lavinia discover Tamora and insult her. Aaron brings back Chiron and Demetrius, who kill Bassianus and rape and mutilate Lavinia, with Tamora’s explicit and sadistic approval; she mocks Lavinia’s appeals to feminine compassion, reminding all present of Titus’ utter lack of compassion for her own heartrending pleas in support of her son. She goes off to enjoy herself with Aaron while the deed is done. Saturnine is easily duped by Aaron’s forged letter and planted bag of gold into thinking that Titus’ sons Martius and Quintus are Bassianus’ murderers. They are dragged from the pit into which they have fallen and brought to prison. Tamora pretends to Titus that she will yet again assist him.

Act 2, Scene 4

Titus’ brother Marcus finds Lavinia and wonders what has happened. Waxing poetical, he likens the scene to the story of Tereus and Philomel: “But sure some Tereus hath deflow’red thee, / And lest thou shouldst detect [him], cut thy tongue” (26-27). Worse yet, he says, the ravishers have improved upon the dastardly practice of the original: “A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met, / And he hath cut those pretty fingers off / That could have better sew’d than Philomel” (41-43). Off they’ll go to afflict poor Titus with the sight of his ruined daughter, as if he hadn’t suffered enough already: as usual, the reference to suffering is harshly physical: “Come let us go, and make thy father blind, / For such a sight will blind a father’s eye” (52-53).

Act 3, Scene 1

Everyone ignores Titus’ self-sacrifice of four decades, and the tribunes he implores are nowhere to be found, so he tells his sorrow to the stones instead. His entire world view has crashed, and Rome seems “a wilderness of tigers” (54) intent on devouring only Titus and his kin. Lucius has been banished for trying to assist his brothers. At this point, we pity Titus already, but now he is shown Lavinia to top off his grief. Of course, pity has its limits when a man insists on serving up puns such as, “Speak, Lavinia, what accursed hand / Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight?” (66-67) Titus’s sacrifice of Tamora’s sons in the name of piety now appears worthless since piety is dead in Rome. To be “wonder’d at in time to come” (135) now seems appropriate to Titus, and his thoughts turn to what they can do to bring this about.

Aaron enters at line 150 and offers to lend the Andronici a hand—or rather take one, and Titus (who had already thought it appropriate to “chop off” the hands that had vainly defended Rome) falls for the ruse: in spite of all that’s happened, he still thinks that when a man has given his word, honor will bind him to it. Aaron’s pitch is, “if thou love thy sons, / Let Marcus, Lucius, or thyself, old Titus, / Or any one of you, chop off your hand / And send it to the King” (151-54). As for Aaron, he is as always the ultimate stage villain: “Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace, / Aaron will have his soul black like his face” (204-05). Aaron’s cynical, selfish perspective is that codes exist only to get others to do what you want them to do. But the Moor also pledges allegiance to pure wickedness, and as we can see from his exultant comments when he is in great danger later on, he is almost religious in his devotion to evil. Titus’ rigidity in adhering to old Roman honor and morality has opened a window for Aaron’s excesses, and the man indulges his sadistic brand of individualism when Roman morality breaks down.

A messenger soon undeceives Titus, and the absurd spectacle of “thy two sons’ heads, / Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here” (254-56), brings no more tears from the old man but instead determination to plan the destruction of Tamora and the Emperor. Lucius will go to the Goths to raise an army. Titus, Marcus and Lavinia continue the grotesque “body parts” motif by carting their dismembered kinsmen’s particulars off the stage: “Come, brother, take a head, / And in this hand the other I will bear; / And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employ’d; / Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth” (279-82).

Act 3, Scene 2

Just when we thought the hand theme couldn’t be more over-the-top, along comes the second scene, with Titus and family seated at a banquet. When Marcus clumsily blurts out, “Fie, brother, fie, teach her not thus to lay / Such violent hands upon her tender life” (21-22), Titus responds with the immortal lines, “O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none” (29-30). Titus continues to think on revenge, connecting even Marcus’ killing of a fly to this imperative: “I think we are not brought so low, / But that between us we can kill a fly / That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor” (76-79). Marcus thinks Titus is out of his mind, but that doesn’t seem to be the case; I suppose it’s just that by now his overflowing grief has transformed itself into a macabre sense of humor. Titus and Lavinia soon go off to read “Sad stories chanced in the times of old” (83). He doesn’t know yet just how informative those stories will turn out to be, but it’s easy for us to guess that Ovid is about to provide some enlightenment about Lavinia’s predicament.

Act 4, Scene 1

An excited Lavinia explains via Ovid’s tale about Procne, Philomel, and the wicked Thracian King Tereus, and she writes Stuprum (as in the Latin phrase for rape, per vim stuprum, “violation by main force”) – Chiron – Demetrius. Titus says he will be another Lucius Junius Brutus, this time expelling not Tarquins but Goths, and he writes a note to be carried along with presents by the boy Lucius to Tamora’s sons at the palace. Shakespeare has cleverly combined Ovid’s story from The Metamorphoses with the violent foundational myth of the Roman Republic: the rape and suicide of Lucretia. Below is the momentous tale from Titus Livius’ The History of Rome, in which Lucretia, to ensure that “no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example,” lets death attest to her adherence to the female married chastity necessary to preserve dynastic Roman bloodlines. The matron’s death allows her determined husband Collatinus, Lucius Junius Brutus, and others to use her outraged corpse as a prop for the expulsion of the Tarquin (Etruscan) King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, father of Lucretia’s rapist, Sextus Tarquinius. Lucretia, then, more insightful about the severe implications of the rigid Roman honor code than her own husband and his male compatriots, provides the blood that spurs Roman valor into throwing off 244 years of Tarquin rule.

From Livy’s History of Rome, Book 1: The Earliest Legends

1.57: [ ....] The royal princes sometimes spent their leisure hours in feasting and entertainments, and at a wine party given by Sextus Tarquinius at which Collatinus, the son of Egerius, was present, the conversation happened to turn upon their wives, and each began to speak of his own in terms of extraordinarily high praise. As the dispute became warm, Collatinus said that there was no need of words, it could in a few hours be ascertained how far his Lucretia was superior to all the rest. “Why do we not,” he exclaimed, “if we have any youthful vigour about us, mount our horses and pay our wives a visit and find out their characters on the spot? What we see of the behaviour of each on the unexpected arrival of her husband, let that be the surest test.” They were heated with wine, and all shouted: “Good! Come on!” Setting spur to their horses they galloped off to Rome, where they arrived as darkness was beginning to close in. Thence they proceeded to Collatia, where they found Lucretia very differently employed from the king’s daughters-in-law, whom they had seen passing their time in feasting and luxury with their acquaintances. She was sitting at her wool work in the hall, late at night, with her maids busy round her. The palm in this competition of wifely virtue was awarded to Lucretia. She welcomed the arrival of her husband and the Tarquins, whilst her victorious spouse courteously invited the royal princes to remain as his guests. Sextus Tarquin, inflamed by the beauty and exemplary purity of Lucretia, formed the vile project of effecting her dishonour. After their youthful frolic they returned for the time to camp.

1.58: A few days afterwards Sextus Tarquin went, unknown to Collatinus, with one companion to Collatia. He was hospitably received by the household, who suspected nothing, and after supper was conducted to the bedroom set apart for guests. When all around seemed safe and everybody fast asleep, he went in the frenzy of his passion with a naked sword to the sleeping Lucretia, and placing his left hand on her breast, said, “Silence, Lucretia! I am Sextus Tarquin, and I have a sword in my hand; if you utter a word, you shall die.” When the woman, terrified out of her sleep, saw that no help was near, and instant death threatening her, Tarquin began to confess his passion, pleaded, used threats as well as entreaties, and employed every argument likely to influence a female heart. When he saw that she was inflexible and not moved even by the fear of death, he threatened to disgrace her, declaring that he would lay the naked corpse of the slave by her dead body, so that it might be said that she had been slain in foul adultery. By this awful threat, his lust triumphed over her inflexible chastity, and Tarquin went off exulting in having successfully attacked her honour. Lucretia, overwhelmed with grief at such a frightful outrage, sent a messenger to her father at Rome and to her husband at Ardea, asking them to come to her, each accompanied by one faithful friend; it was necessary to act, and to act promptly; a horrible thing had happened. Spurius Lucretius came with Publius Valerius, the son of Volesus; Collatinus with Lucius Junius Brutus, with whom he happened to be returning to Rome when he was met by his wife’s messenger. They found Lucretia sitting in her room prostrate with grief. As they entered, she burst into tears, and to her husband’s inquiry whether all was well, replied, “No! what can be well with a woman when her honour is lost? The marks of a stranger, Collatinus, are in your bed. But it is only the body that has been violated, the soul is pure; death shall bear witness to that. But pledge me your solemn word that the adulterer shall not go unpunished. It is Sextus Tarquin, who, coming as an enemy instead of a guest, forced from me last night by brutal violence a pleasure fatal to me, and, if you are men, fatal to him.” They all successively pledged their word, and tried to console the distracted woman by turning the guilt from the victim of the outrage to the perpetrator, and urging that it is the mind that sins, not the body, and where there has been no consent there is no guilt. “It is for you,” she said, “to see that he gets his deserts; although I acquit myself of the sin, I do not free myself from the penalty; no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example.” She had a knife concealed in her dress which she plunged into her heart, and fell dying on the floor. Her father and husband raised the death-cry.

1.59: Whilst they were absorbed in grief, Brutus drew the knife from Lucretia’s wound, and holding it, dripping with blood, in front of him, said, “By this blood-most pure before the outrage wrought by the king’s son-I swear, and you, O gods, I call to witness that I will drive hence Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, together with his cursed wife and his whole brood, with fire and sword and every means in my power, and I will not suffer them or any one else to reign in Rome.” Then he handed the knife to Collatinus and then to Lucretius and Valerius, who were all astounded at the marvel of the thing, wondering whence Brutus had acquired this new character. They swore as they were directed; all their grief changed to wrath, and they followed the lead of Brutus, who summoned them to abolish the monarchy forthwith. They carried the body of Lucretia from her home down to the Forum, where, owing to the unheard-of atrocity of the crime, they at once collected a crowd. Each had his own complaint to make of the wickedness and violence of the royal house. Whilst all were moved by the father’s deep distress, Brutus bade them stop their tears and idle laments, and urged them to act as men and Romans and take up arms against their insolent foes....

1.60: When the news of these proceedings reached the camp, the king, alarmed at the turn affairs were taking, hurried to Rome to quell the outbreak. Brutus, who was on the same road, had become aware of his approach, and to avoid meeting him took another route, so that he reached Ardea and Tarquin Rome almost at the same time, though by different ways. Tarquin found the gates shut, and a decree of banishment passed against him; the Liberator of the City received a joyous welcome in the camp, and the king’s sons were expelled from it. Two of them followed their father into exile amongst the Etruscans in Caere. Sextus Tarquin proceeded to Gabii, which he looked upon as his kingdom, but was killed in revenge for the old feuds he had kindled by his rapine and murders. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus reigned twenty-five years. The whole duration of the regal government from the foundation of the City to its liberation was two hundred and forty-four years. Two consuls were then elected in the assembly of centuries by the prefect of the City, in accordance with the regulations of Servius Tullius. They were Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. (End of Book 1)

From The History of Rome, Vol. I, Titus Livius. Editor Ernest Rhys. Translator Rev. Canon Roberts. Everyman’s Library. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1912.

Act 4, Scene 2

Titus’ note to Chiron and Demetrius reads “Integer vitae, scelerisque purus, / Non eget Mauri jaculis, nec arcu” (20-21). But the boys aren’t good enough readers of Horace’s Odes to realize that Titus knows they conspired with the Moor. Aaron is clearly out for himself—he doesn’t even tell Tamora about this new information. The Empress delivers a child by Aaron, who protects his newborn son fiercely when Chiron and Demetrius think to kill the infant, bearing him away to the Goths with the intention of raising the child as a warrior. Aaron kills the Nurse, horrifying even the wicked sons of Tamora. A countryman’s fair-skinned baby will be substituted and presented as Saturninus’ legitimate heir. What is the child to Aaron? He makes the point succinctly: “My mistress is my mistress, this myself, / The vigor and the picture of my youth: / This before all the world do I prefer” (107-09). Rome and its politics can go hang; Aaron’s main concern is to take the portion of immortality that a child of one’s own promises.

Act 4, Scene 3

Titus’ arrows bear messages soliciting the gods for justice nowhere to be found on earth. The whole scene seems to show him both unhinged and yet canny: he tells Publius and Sempronius, “’Tis you must dig with mattock and with spade, / And pierce the inmost centre of the earth; / Then when you come to Pluto’s region, / I pray you deliver him this petition” (11-14). His stratagem, though, is to shoot arrows towards Saturninus’ palace, and thereby to unsettle the young Emperor. Titus also pays a rustic or “clown” to present Saturninus with a short speech and some pigeons. But then, perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss the notion that there’s something insane about Titus’ behavior all through the play: if insanity is “doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results,” Titus is at times close to a madman: he keeps supposing that if somebody makes a promise, it must be kept; and if somebody is legally entitled to an office, he’ll do his duty rather than taking advantage of the situation. Such persistence in doing the honorable thing would make sense in a normal setting, but in decadent Rome it can only destroy him.

Act 4, Scene 4

Saturninus is enraged before the Senate over Titus’ “blazoning our unjustice every where” (18) and then has the clown hanged after reading the letter Titus wrote. Tamora thinks she has at last driven Titus off the deep end, and the Emperor is frightened upon hearing that Lucius is headed for Rome with an army of Goths, but he misunderstands Titus’ motive, which is revenge of a sort not reducible to politics. Titus doesn’t want to rule Rome—what good would that do his battered spirit and maimed body now? Tamora promises to sooth Titus’ anger, and thereby get him to separate Lucius from his invading force.

Act 5, Scene 1

The Goths swear loyalty to Lucius. Aaron, captured with his child, is brought in—he did not know about this new development. Lucius threatens the child, so Aaron promises to tattle everything about his plots with Tamora and her sons—but Lucius must swear by the Roman gods first. All this plotting is news to Lucius because he left to raise an army of Goths before Lavinia revealed exactly what had happened to her and who did it. When asked if he’s sorry, Aaron outdoes himself with a flourish of supervillain rhetoric from 124-44. It would be hard to top the following claim for sheer malice: “Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves, / And set them upright at their dear friends’ door, / Even when their sorrows always was forgot, / And on their skins, as on the bark of trees, / Have with my knife carved in Roman letters, / ‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead’” (135-40). He seems dedicated not so much to the kind of violence that furthers his self-interest or ambition but rather to a code of “evil for evil’s sake,” perhaps in part out of hatred for the Romans he so evidently despises: friendship is the target of Aaron’s alleged stratagem here, and readers of classical history and culture will know that loyalty in the cause of amicitia was among the primary Roman virtues. More than that, Aaron asserts a fierce liberty in the face of Roman culture, which seems to depend so much on “the ties that bind” people: ties of memory, friendship, and honor.

Act 5, Scene 2

Tamora and sons show up at Titus’ place dressed as Revenge, Murder, and Rapine. He doesn’t believe them, but they consider him mad in spite of the clues he lets slip. “Revenge” wants Titus to send for Lucius, and promises that when they are all at a banquet at Titus’ home, she will bring Tamora, Chiron, Demetrius, the Emperor and any other foes so that he may take revenge upon them. Titus insists that Rapine and Murder stay with him, and promptly kills them, fully informing them that they are literally on the banquet menu. Like the Thracian King Tereus in the legend, Tamora will “swallow her own increase” (192).

Act 5, Scene 3

Dinner is set and served. Titus asks if Virginius (a decemvir from 451-449 BCE) was right to kill his daughter for chastity’s sake. (Appius had used legal trickery in an attempt to force himself on her, claiming that she was actually his slave; Virginius, disguised as a slave, killed her just after Appius’ co-conspirator Marcus Claudius judged in favor of Appius.) He then kills Lavinia, explaining to all present that Chiron and Demetrius had ravished her. Asked where they are, he informs Tamora and Saturninus with an unforgettably gleeful rhyme: “Why, there they are, both baked in this pie; / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred” (60-62). Titus immediately stabs Tamora, and Saturninus kills him, whereupon Saturninus is killed by Lucius. Aemilius asks for a full account of all the misdeeds, and receives it from Lucius, who is chosen emperor. Aaron’s child is carried in. Aaron, who has also just been brought in, is sentenced to starve, but he maintains his standing as the play’s most remorseless evildoer: “If one good deed in all my life I did, / I do repent it from my very soul” (189-90). The savage irony of this punishment is that, as mentioned earlier, Aaron had set himself up as a free spirit, unbound and untouched by Roman customs or values. The Emperor will be properly buried, but Tamora will become food for the birds.

All in all, the play is a delightfully outrageous, bloody instance of Elizabethan revenge tragedy in the tradition of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, in which the protagonist Hieronymo seeks violent justice for the vengeful murder of his son. Melodramatic as it may seem, Kyd’s early revenge tragedy is serious and philosophical. It considers life’s great questions, above all what constitutes justice in a wicked world, and is perhaps worthy of comparison with similar efforts by Aeschylus or Sophocles. Shakespeare’s play is sometimes dismissed as frivolous, but it has a serious dimension that repays study. Titus is no mere villain, and neither is Tamora. Only Aaron seems to be an outright dastard, with Tamora’s foolish sons coming in a distant second—they lack the cunning and brains Aaron exhibits. Shakespeare’s genius leads him to employ the Romans versus Goths theme in a manner that confounds any simple opposition between Roman and Goth. Titus turns out to be more of a Goth than we might have thought: excessive, bloody, and barbarous in his revenge. Tamora is more than a cardboard or stage barbarian, and shows herself a skilled manipulator of Roman politics. Aaron’s race adds yet another perspective on the Goth/Roman opposition: it’s true that the “villain plot” he drives sets itself up against the twin revenge plots of Titus and Tamora and in part displays the man’s dedication to wickedness, but Aaron shows considerable loyalty to his child as the image of himself, and exults in his blackness. Moreover, while Shakespeare may not be subjecting the revenge code to the kind of scrutiny it receives in Hamlet (where it’s understood that revenge is against God’s law), he seems quite interested in the complexities of Roman honor, and the allusions he makes to the Lucretia story from Livy’s History of Rome and the Philomela tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses allow him to explore the significance of those key Roman myths. What is the play suggesting about moral codes? Perhaps that people must live by them and within them, but also that they must not be imprisoned by them altogether. Rigidity, failure to reflect on one’s values, allows cynicism and outrage to flourish: extremes beget counter-extremes. “Titus is an honorable man,” to be sure, but the play as a whole keeps iterating that claim until it generates a Mark Antony effect: by the fourth and fifth acts, what’s needed isn’t more old-fashioned honor but a good plan for revenge against the barbarous Goths and Moors who have taken advantage of Titus’ stiff morality.

Finally, Julie Taymor’s 2000 production Titus sets the play in a strangely neo-fascist Italy, with its futuristic architecture and art. Taymor’s choice makes sense because the 1920’s-40’s dictator and Hitler ally Benito Mussolini appropriated the ancient Roman symbols of power and tried to turn Italy into an empire. (For one thing, he invaded Ethiopia.) And even in ancient times, the image of Rome in its imperial phase was due at least partly to the well-oiled propaganda machine of Augustus Caesar and the wisest of those who followed him as rulers. Augustus promoted the idea that Rome’s anachronistic republican values were still operative, even though by his day, such values were probably more of a fashion statement than anything else. By Titus’ era, his Rome no longer exists, in spite of his stubborn (if stylized) adherence to it. Titus’ stylization, its earnestness aside, is itself decadent and not much more than an anachronistic fashion. Of course, fashion statements can have political implications and reflect political facts on the ground, whether sincere or not. Shakespeare would probably praise Taymor’s concentration on the role of fabrication and stylistic borrowing and recycling in politics and history, with the definition of “reality” as consisting significantly (though not necessarily entirely) in people’s perceptions of themselves rather than being reducible to some external standard.

Week 01, Introduction

2008-11-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

Introduction to E432 Shakespeare

1. Slow down; a good plan might be to read one act per day over the course of the work week. You really can’t read Shakespeare fast “for information”; his plays may be action-oriented, but he’s too fond of his linguistic medium to permit us to read him like a newspaper article: too many styles, too much metaphor, too much rhetoric to allow that kind of instrumental reading. That statement is true of poetry in general, of course—poetry foregrounds language as a worthy object of reflection and aesthetic delight—but the archaicism factor in Shakespeare makes it “still more truer.” You say it’s 8:00 a.m.? Well, Shakespeare and his theater-goers liked to say “‘tis scarce two hours since the worship’d sun peered forth the golden window of the east.” They didn’t always put it that way, of course—but they liked how it sounded. Bardweb’s Grammar Introduction offers a fine summary of the complexities of Shakespeare’s language. But hey, we moderns aren’t so dumb and insensitive after all—Martin Heidegger, a man of the twentieth century, knew enough to say that “language is the dwelling-house of Being.”

2. Watch a film version if your time permits—most filmed productions are reasonably good, and some are awesome. Netflix, Amazon.com, Blockbuster.com, or Internet Movie Database can be used as a search engine to give you a sense of what’s available, and you can always google some obvious keyphrase like “Shakespeare on film” to find lists. Film interpretations vary widely since the text is, after all, only a prompt for performance. The actors and director may see possibilities in the language that translate into action amongst the actors, or lead to a certain thematic emphasis. Atmospherics will differ—I recently saw Derek Jarman’s Gothic take on The Tempest. It took some getting used to since one doesn’t generally think of that play as being so gloomily set, but it was excellent in its way. And what about that remarkable Richard III starring Ian McKellen and set in the 1930’s-40’s fascist era, or The Merchant of Venice starring the likes of Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, and Lynn Collins? If you want conventional but very good performances, try the BBC Shakespeare productions done in the late 1970’s, which most school libraries have. The production values for the BBC films aren’t on a par with Hollywood-style movies, but the actors are professional Shakespearians like Helen Mirren, Patrick Stewart, Sir John Gielgud, and many others.

3. Grammar and Rhetoric Issues (borrowed and slightly adapted from Bardweb’s Grammar Introduction.)

A) Inverted syntax (word order): “John caught the ball” may be “John the ball caught.”

B) Rhetorical devices abounding:

alliteration: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought....” {Sonnet XXX})

metaphor: “Now is the winter of our discontent.” “My love is a red rose” (Burns).

metonymy: “all hands on deck.” “Lend me your ears,” etc.

Elliptical expressions: “And he to England shall [go] along with you.” Hamlet, III, iii} and a host of other devices.

C) Grammar Irregularities:

Anthimeria . One part of speech is often substituted for another; this happens especially with nouns and verbs: Prospero says to Miranda in The Tempest: “What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” The word “backward” is an adverb, but it is used as a noun here, producing a verse that is both beautiful and strangely apt, considering that Prospero is asking his daughter Miranda to recall her remote childhood—something hazy and mysterious, yet intimate.

Pronoun irregularity: “Yes, you may have seen Cassio and she together.” Othello 4.2.3.

Omission of relative pronoun: “I have a brother [who, omitted] is condemn’d to die. Measure for Measure 2.2.34.

Verb #: “Three parts of him / Is ours already.” Julius Caesar 1.3.154-55.

3. Shakespeare the Man, 1564-1616:

In politics he seems to have been royalist enough (the relevant sovereigns are of course the Tudor Elizabeth I (1553-1603) and the Scottish Stuart James I (1603-25), and for the most part conservative in the sense that he sides with the nobility over the rabble every time. This outlook stems from his bourgeois roots and lifestyle—Shakespeare grew up in the Warwickshire countryside; his father had some local influence and wealth when William was young, but he seems to have fallen on hard times later on. Shakespeare did pretty well for himself as a businessman, what with his excellent and crowd-pleasing playwright skills (he was also an actor), wise decisions about theater matters at the Globe and later at the more intimate Blackfriars, and apparently in local side ventures like money-lending. People who have property and wealth tend to support stability in the social and political realms, and Shakespeare was no different from most people in that regard.

In religion Shakespeare may, as some biographers suggest, have had Catholic leanings even though he conformed to the Anglican Church that took its inception from Henry VIII’s inability to get the Pope to grant him a divorce. So England joined the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther had begun in October 1517. But it’s expecting a lot to suppose everybody in the “reformed” countries would automatically go along with the program. Many English people tried to keep up the old faith, though they had to keep a lid on their activities since Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth in particular didn’t want their subjects reverting to Catholic forms and allegiances. Shakespeare seems to have had a few closet “Papists” in his family, and he also seems to have had connections with powerful Catholics beyond his family.

Shakespeare was probably more or less a traditionalist, affable (if brilliant) Englishman, not some atheist radical like Christopher Marlowe or an irascible ruffian like Ben Jonson, even if he knew and liked such men. What does this biography mean for his poetics? Hard to say, really. John Keats wrote admiringly in his letters of the “chameleon poet” endowed with “negative capability” or the ability to explore a personality or a situation without need for immediate certainty in the moral or factual sense. I suppose he must have been thinking of Shakespeare when he wrote that. What besides negative capability and chameleonic tendencies would allow an artist so completely to get slip inside a charming but thoroughly wicked character such as Richard III or Iago; or a flawed but noble one like the Roman general Coriolanus; or an all-purpose rogue like Jack Falstaff; or an intelligent, sensitive character like Macbeth whose ambition traps him in a downward spiral of preventive-strike murder and psychological “hardness,” to borrow a term from today’s hip-hop culture? You couldn’t generate so many wonderful characters if you were intent on propagating some stolid moral drawn from your politics or religion. Shakespeare disappears with remarkable efficacy into his multifarious characters, so that he really is what Samuel Johnson and others have called him: “a poet of nature” (human nature, animal nature, everything).

The plays fall loosely into four categories: comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. Shakespeare was clearly aware of basic theories about what a comedy or tragedy (the most “established” dramatic types) ought to be like, but he doesn’t seem to have spent much time worrying about whether he was conforming to such theories. As Coleridge says in a lecture on Shakespeare, “no work of genius dare want its appropriate form.” That’s downright romantic organicism, but when it comes to Shakespeare, I’ll pledge allegiance to it: I’ve long thought that Shakespeare, in spite of the occasional loosely constructed plot or reference to non-existent Bohemian seacoasts, anachronistic Roman chimney-tops, or silly devices like the criminal-minded letter Edmund the Bastard ascribes to his brother Edgar to fool their father Gloucester (why would you communicate by letter with someone you’re presently living with?), composed as something like a romantic poet. Although he rather unromantically started out by borrowing from some source or other—no one cared about absolute originality in his day—he saw all sorts of possibilities in that source material, and his plays took shape in accordance with the necessities of their own characters, events, and structure. You respond to a work of art as you create it, so that in a sense it creates itself processively. Form and meaning aren’t simply imposed upon one’s material in cookie-cutter fashion; they develop dynamically in accordance with the “inner laws” of the work itself. The romantic theorists and poets understood the creative process well, I think—imagine a sculptor facing his or her medium of blank stone: the first creative act is performed; the sculptor stands back and beholds the results in altered stone, which prompts another act, and on it goes in a ceaseless dialectic between mind and medium, until the demand for a “product” halts the process. Or consider Beethoven—yes, good old Ludwig Van—starting with those famous four initial notes of the Fifth Symphony. Well, he followed those notes where they just had to go—and where they had to go wasn’t always where you or I might have thought. Beethoven consistently surprises us in this way, and so does Shakespeare. None of this is to say that Shakespeare didn’t care what his audiences wanted—of course he did; he wasn’t a nightingale singing alone in the woods like Shelley’s wan “unacknowledged legislator,” and he doesn’t seem to have assumed a deep chasm between art and the rest of life the way some of the romantic poets would later do. But what I’m talking about is an inner core” of compositional or creative process, and I think any great artist is something of a romantic in this regard. Diderot gives us a saucier, less dreamy way of describing literary creation: “my thoughts are my whores; they run, and I follow after.”

In practical terms for us as readers, this need not mean that we seek absolute coherency in the material; rather, it means we should be looking to tease out potential of whatever sort we find in one textual location and connect it to other locations in the same or other plays. Shakespeare is capable of logical precision, but that’s schoolboy stuff: what really drives his plays is the sympathetic, imaginative connections he makes between character and character, event and event, predicament and predicament. Above all, his brand of realism is psychological, not the realism of historical happening (though you can learn a lot about English history from his history plays).

Above all, it seems best not to superimpose some scheme or pattern on any Shakespeare play prematurely—the plays make sense, but the sense they make isn’t and shouldn’t always be immediately reducible to neat formulae or critical principles. Be especially mindful of this advice if you consult online materials like Sparknotes, etc. Some of this stuff is actually pretty good nowadays—it isn’t always churned out by illiterate fools for lame students the way it used to be. All the same, it comes at you saying “hey you, here are three key themes you can use to write a sensible paper on The Merchant of Venice.” The themes identified may be worthwhile, but the more you allow yourself to be bound by them, the less room will there be for your own perhaps eccentric and more interesting take on the play. Maybe you will notice something in Act 2, Scene 4 that relates to other things that happen in the play but aren’t really dealt with by the geniuses of Spark Notes. And maybe that “something” is the thing you should be writing about. Good critics are basically good storytellers—they tell interesting, compelling (and yes, informative where applicable) stories about other people’s stories. So if you use net-notes, use them to open up possibilities, not to reduce complex works of art to utter comprehensibility.

The Sonnets: Here are a few thoughts about the sonnet form. The rhyme pattern for an English sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. Three quatrains (four-line units) and a concluding couplet that comments in some manner on the subject of the quatrains. “Sonnet 130” illustrates the possibilities of this structure well: the three quatrains make fun of Petrarchan over-praising, and the final couplet overturns the mocking tone by genuinely praising the love object. “Sonnet 73” with its succession of metaphors and neat summation-couplet, exemplifies the “sugared style” of many of the poems (i.e. the piling up and development of a series of metaphors, often one per quatrain) of sonnetry. The 154 sonnets are divided broadly between 1-126, which are supposedly addressed to “a fair young man” and 127-54, which are addressed to “a dark (-haired) lady.”