Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction
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Shakespeare wrote his plays primarily for the company in which he had a business interest, and they were usually performed in one or other of the theatres in which he had a financial interest. Thus he was not only a poet and dramatist but also what we would today term a businessman.
Key idea
There appears with Shakespeare to have been no separation between the ownership of the means of production and the participation in the means of production – the plays in performance. Shakespeare was working at a time when capitalism was in its infancy and when modern industrial relations had yet to be developed. His theatre was in the business of generating income and was therefore at the centre of commercial activity, although there was a general cultural suspicion of the process of commodification that resulted from the growth of a market economy.
Shakespeare through time
Shakespeare was born in 1564, probably on 23 April, which is St George’s Day (the patron saint of England), and he died in 1616, possibly on his birthday. The actual dates of birth and death are speculative; they are mainly based on the dates of his christening (26 April 1564) and burial (25 April 1616), although the bust of him that was erected some time later in Holy Trinity Church does give 23 April as the date of his death, at the age of 53.
We might consider whether Shakespeare believed that as a dramatist he would be so highly regarded four hundred years after his death. He certainly had the desire, and he thought he would gain immortality through his non-dramatic poetry, as shown, for example, in Sonnet 60 where he writes that although ‘Time’ brings youth and beauty to an end when ‘…nothing stands but for his scythe to mow’, he yet hopes that his writing will last: ‘And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,/Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.’ But like a number of his contemporaries, with the exception of Ben Jonson, he may have regarded his plays as ephemeral and, as far as we know, he did not himself seek to have them published. He may have distinguished between his non-dramatic poetry and a play such as Love’s Labour’s Lost, which is critical of ‘fame’, although Kiernan Ryan believes that he was aware that future audiences would see his plays.
‘To grasp a Shakespearean play as fully as possible at any point in time is to recognize that its gaze is bent upon a vanishing point at which no reader or spectator can hope to arrive. Like the hat that the circus clown kicks out of reach every time he steps forward to pick it up, final comprehension of the play is perpetually postponed by each act of interpretation. Built into Shakespeare’s plays, as into his poems, is the expectation that whatever eyes are viewing them at a given moment, other “eyes not yet created” (Sonnet 81) will one day view them in another light.’
Ryan, K. (2001: 198), ‘Shakespeare and the Future’, in Cartmell, D. and Scott, M., Talking Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Palgrave
His trust in the endurance across time of poetry to praise the lover is a powerful theme exemplified also in Sonnet 55, where he exalts both the art of the poet and the lasting memory of the one to whom it is addressed.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire, shall burn
The living record of your memory:
’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity,
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
Of his 37-plus plays (as we will see in Chapter 27, scholars claim that he had a hand in more plays, usually as a collaborator, and it is now generally accepted, for example, that a 38th, The Two Noble Kinsmen, was written by him and John Fletcher), only 18 were published during his lifetime. All of these, except Pericles, were republished with the other 19 in the first collected edition of his works, prepared seven years after his death by two of his friends and fellow actors in 1623: John Heminges, referred to earlier, and Henry Condell. This collected edition, known as the First Folio, did not include Pericles, which was subsequently ascribed to him. (The Two Noble Kinsmen was published in a single edition in 1634, naming John Fletcher and William Shakespeare as the joint authors; that text was reprinted in 1679 in the Second Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies).
Single editions of the plays were known as quartos, and in Shakespeare’s case those published had usually been authorized by his company. Some ‘pirated’ editions, however, as we will see in Chapter 21, were also published without his or his company’s approval.
Spotlight
The words ‘folio’ and ‘quarto’ refer to the size of a book’s leaves. For a folio edition, the standard sheet of paper of about 340 × 430 mm (13.5 × 17 inches) was folded once, making two leaves or four pages. For the smaller quarto the standard sheet was folded twice, making four leaves or eight pages.
This dramatist, who never went to university, came from a relatively modest background; his father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and, although a prominent citizen and one-time alderman of Stratford-upon-Avon, found himself in serious financial trouble. Yet by the early nineteenth century, as we will see, his son William became almost deified in the way in which intellectuals regarded him.
Shakespeare’s reputation in schools – and beyond – is often framed by difficulty. You might yourself have made or heard such statements as ‘I was put off Shakespeare at school’, ‘Shakespeare’s not for the likes of me’, ‘I don’t understand the words’, ‘It’s boring’ or ‘I don’t know what it means’. For Shakespeare, I would imagine, these statements would be anomalous, even heartbreaking, so try not to let negative statements put you off.
For example, after working on a Shakespearean play for a short time, a student said, ‘I don’t understand this play.’ ‘What don’t you understand?’ I asked. ‘The words,’ he replied. ‘Which words?’ ‘All of them,’ he answered! Of course, he did understand most of the words but was fearful of the poetry at first. He persevered by allowing the words to flow over him and, as he became more engrossed in the story, so he started to enjoy and appreciate the play.
Key idea
Shakespeare wrote plays not for an elite but for people from all strata of society to enjoy. His theatre, the Globe, was in an area of London where there were bear-baiting pits, brothels and taverns. The plays were written as popular entertainment and they worked as such. They brought in the crowds. They made money for him and his fellow actors in the theatre.
What I want to do in this book is to allay the fear of Shakespeare, and take you, the reader, back to how Shakespeare developed and constructed his plays for popular entertainment. I am, of course, part of the Shakespearean ‘industry’ but I want to release Shakespeare from the confines of the layers of commentary that have grown over his dramas. I want to concentrate not on what the plays mean, but how they work, and I want you to come with me on a journey through the plays, as I introduce you to their structures, their plots and language, so that you too might be entertained by them. Certainly, I will attempt to demystify the jargon and delineate the various critical schools and approaches, but we will concentrate on how the plays work and how we, four hundred years after their creation, can respond to them.
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The framing of Shakespearean comedy: The Comedy of Errors (1594)
Many writers strive for a structural formula for their work, which will ensure sustainable success. Modern crime writers, for example, may decide to start their work with a murder and then create a detective to work through various clues in order to discover the perpetrator. Alternatively, they might start by revealing the murderer to the reader or the audience and work through the book or play by showing how
he or she avoids or tries to avoid being caught. These are simple structural decisions to be made. In a complex play it is not always easy to perceive the structure underpinning the plot at first, but the writer usually needs one in order to hold the play together.
When Robert Greene, or whoever, accused Shakespeare of borrowing other people’s ideas he was, in a sense, right. Shakespeare learned from ancient and contemporary plays but framed what he learned into something new, or he discarded old formulae in order to give a freer rein to his imagination by innovating, adapting or even adopting new structures for his plays.
Some modern critics accuse Shakespeare of being too formulaic. James Shapiro, a respected, historically oriented scholar, for example, considers Twelfth Night (1601), one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated and performed comedies, to be formulaic. If this is so, it is probably because Shakespeare, in one of his earliest comedies, The Comedy of Errors, not only employed a dramatic formula derived from the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and the Latin classical dramatist Plautus (c.254–184 BCE), but began to frame a formula of his own which was to influence the later Twelfth Night. His sources for The Comedy of Errors were two plays by the Roman dramatist Plautus – The Brothers Menaechmi and Amphitryon – that he may have encountered while at school, as well as an old classical story, Apollonius of Tyre. He was probably also influenced by the Latin comedies of Terence (c.190–159 BCE), which were themselves based on plays from classical Greece.
The three Unities
Neoclassical writers and critics in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries referred to Aristotle’s work Poetics and used the work of Greek and Roman writers and dramatists as a measure for evaluating the success of a play. They judged that a play should follow Aristotle’s rules for drama, which were called the ‘three unities’ – that is, of time (a single day), place (a single location) and action (a single plot) – if it were to be judged as being of quality.
At the beginning of his career in The Comedy of Errors, and in The Tempest towards the end of his career, Shakespeare adhered to the three Unities but for the majority of his plays he ignored them. With The Comedy of Errors the discipline of keeping to Aristotle’s three Unities worked but, although he had devised the details of his plot mainly from Plautus, he nevertheless introduced further complications to it.
The plot of the play
‘The plotting of The Comedy of Errors is an intellectual feat of some magnitude, akin to the composition of a fugue. But it is also characteristic of Shakespeare to broaden the play’s emotional range by adding the wholly serious framework, derived from another classical story which he was to use again close to the end of his career in Pericles.’
Wells, S. (2002: 132), Shakespeare for All Time. London: Macmillan
In the play’s main source – Plautus’ The Brothers Menaechmi – there is only a single pair of twins but in The Comedy of Errors Shakespeare introduced a second set of twins to complicate the action, creating the potential for more identity errors and thereby more humour. Antipholus of Ephesus has a servant called Dromio. Antipholus of Syracuse, who has arrived in Ephesus searching to find his lost identical twin brother, also has a servant called Dromio. Egeon, a rich Syracusian merchant and the father of the twins Antipholus, bought the twins Dromio to act as his sons’ servants. It is a farcical situation, which is explained by Egeon in the opening scene of the play:
…she (my wife) became
A joyful mother of two goodly sons,
And, which was strange, the one so like the other,
As could not be distinguish’d but by names.
That very hour, and in the self-same inn,
A mean woman was delivered
Of such a burden male, twins both alike;
Those, for their parents were exceeding poor,
I bought, and brought up to attend my sons.
(1.1.49–57)
Key idea
Try to watch as well as read The Comedy of Errors, which is a very funny play about the confusions that arise from mistaken identities. Highly entertaining, it is also a ‘foundation play’, which can help you to understand how many of Shakespeare’s later plays work. Widely available, Trevor Nunn’s 1978 RSC musical production with Judi Dench and Michael Williams stands the test of time, but there are plenty of other recordings of this play on DVD and the Internet.
The play opens with Egeon being arrested and sentenced to death by the Duke of Ephesus. Ephesus and Syracuse are at war and unwittingly Egeon has landed in the Ephesian port, looking for one of his lost twin sons. Now a captive, he narrates the story of his life to the Duke in order to explain why he has arrived at Syracuse: ‘A heavier task could not have been impos’d,/Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable’ (1.1.31–2). In the process he tells the incredible story of the birth of his twin sons and the twin servants years ago in ‘the self-same inn’. He continues by describing how, on their sea voyage home, a storm blew up and the sailors abandoned the ship they were on, leaving them alone. In order to save themselves, Egeon and his wife fastened one of their baby twins and his servant to one end of a ‘small spare mast’ (1.1.79) and the other twin and his servant twin to the other end. The wife and Egeon then fastened themselves to either end of the mast.
So they floated, carried by the ‘stream’ or current (1.1.86) until the storm subsided and the waters calmed, allowing them to see two ships coming towards them, one ‘of Corinth’, the other ‘of Epidaurus’. A further mishap then occurred as they hit a rock that split ‘our helpful ship’ down the middle, separating them from each other. The wife, with the one twin and the one servant twin, were lighter than the husband and his ‘burden’ and were rescued by the ship from Corinth, while the other ship rescued Egeon and the other twin son and his servant twin. That ship travelled more slowly than the Corinthian ship and so the family was separated.
He explains that, at the age of 18, his twin son, together with his servant, both of whom had retained the names of their lost brothers, ventured abroad in search of them. He now having lost all his family followed in a search to find the twins whom he had brought up. After five years of searching, he had landed in the hostile town of Ephesus (now in present-day Turkey) where he says he will be content to die and end his misery.
It is a story of a man apparently beset by tragedy but his predicament is so ridiculous as to make it farcical. This is, as the title of the play has announced, a comedy. The Duke’s reaction to the tale is to take pity and give Egeon a single day to find the money to pay a ransom for his life. Of course, the money and its passage through the play will be an important stage prop along with others in the development of the comedy.
Key idea
The Unities define the play’s structure: a single day, a single place and a single action, the search to find the means of reprieve, which will actually be accomplished through Egeon’s discovery of all the twins and his long-lost wife.
The Duke says:
…I’ll limit thee this day
To seek thy health by beneficial help;
Try all the friends thou hast in Ephesus,
Beg thou, or borrow, to make up the sum,
And live; if no, then thou art doom’d to die.
(1.1.150–54)
In Trevor Nunn’s 1976–8 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) musical production of the play, these lines are turned into a song-and-dance routine, thereby contributing to the comical nature of what might otherwise become an outwardly sombre, potentially tragic denouement.
Spotlight
Throughout the farcical story, but one that retains a degree of credibility, the audience is given signals that Egeon’s escape from death will be as a result of acquiring the sum needed for his release, and that he will recover his lost sons. In the process, and with the arrival – unknown to him – of Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse in Ephesus on a similar quest, a series of mistaken identities ensues as the two sets of twins get thoroughly confused with one another. As an audience, we sit
back to enjoy the comic ‘errors’ that begin in the next scene when Antipholus of Syracuse, with his Dromio, arrives in Ephesus but is warned that a Syracusian merchant has been sentenced to death, and therefore not to divulge his Syracusian identity.
Dromio of Syracuse is sent off to the Inn with Antipholus’ money and the farce ensues as Dromio of Ephesus arrives on the scene and is mistaken for Dromio of Syracuse. The play moves along as a comic romp of mistaken identities, involving sexual innuendo, a frustrated marriage, a courtesan, a merchant, an officer of the law, a fake exorcist magician and, finally, the Duke himself. The situation becomes so chaotic that no one, not even the Duke, can sort out what is happening. But at this point the dramatist engineers a discovery. It is prompted by the local Abbess, into whose ‘house’ Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse escape to seek sanctuary. She turns out to be the long-lost wife of Egeon, and her recognition of her husband is the first step towards a resolution of all the errors that have arisen.
Spotlight
In its denouement the play is following a classical discipline that allows resolution through what Aristotle termed anagnorisis, or discovery, although he uses this term primarily in relation to tragedy. Anagnorisis is when the characters on stage recognize the errors of the action of the play and so bring it to a conclusion through a discovery. Anagnorisis often involves a process of ‘self-discovery’ and comes usually towards the end of the play, although we will see that later, in King Lear, Shakespeare will frustrate its placement to great, if controversial, effect.