Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction

by Michael Scott

  Barber, C. L. (1959: 124), Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

  While more recent criticism has shifted emphasis to the social and historical context of the play by pointing to the political realities it exposes, Barber’s comments still hold some force, although they need to be tempered. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the cultural materialist critic James H. Kavanagh argued from a more politically oriented position:

  ‘[The play exposes] a set of pre-conscious image-concepts in which men and women see and experience, before they think about their place within a given social formation, with its specific structure of class and gender relations.’

  Drakakis, J. (ed.) (1985: 145), Alternative Shakespeares. London and New York: Methuen

  There is no doubt that, politically, Shakespeare had to be very careful within the play; as it was probably watched by Queen Elizabeth I, he didn’t go too far in drawing contemporary parallels. The Queen herself was known as the ‘Fairy Queen’ or the ‘Virgin Queen’, so to have a Fairy Queen ‘enamoured of an ass’ – a creature renowned for its large genitalia – could have had serious consequences for the dramatist if not handled carefully within the framework of comedy. The Queen at the end of the play is assured that, as with other members of the audience, she has been witnessing the comedy, and like the audience generally she, too, has been dreaming:

  If we shadows have offended,

  Think but this, and all is mended,

  That you have but slumber’d here

  While these visions did appear.

  (5.1.417–20)

  Key idea

  The concept of the play as a dream isn’t uniquely Shakespearean. The Elizabethan dramatist John Lyly perhaps set a precedent in the Prologue to his play Sappho and Phao (1584), when he entreats the Queen to imagine herself at the conclusion to have been in ‘a deep dream’. Dream poetry is also notably plentiful in medieval English literature.

  Shakespeare asks that the play itself be regarded as a dream, in which the characters themselves enter into a dreamlike world in which they are subject to a wide range of fantasies. For example, Hermia, having fallen asleep, wakes from a nightmare:

  Help me, Lysander, help me! Do thy best

  To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast!

  Ay me, for pity! What a dream was here!

  (2.2.144–6)

  But she finds that Lysander has left her alone because he is now under the influence of the love potion and has gone in pursuit of Helena. The dream motif in the play is multilayered. Hermia has had a dream of danger and, in the story of the play, has awoken to the ‘dream’ of the forest, and yet all this occurs for the theatre audience within a performance that the dramatist is encouraging it to regard as dreamlike.

  On awakening, the lovers talk of their experiences. Demetrius says, ‘These things seem small and undistinguishable,/Like far-off mountains turned into clouds’ and Hermia remarks, ‘Methinks I see these things with parted eye,/When everything seems double’ (4.1.186–9).

  Bottom, on awaking from his ridiculous fantasy, thinks he is still rehearsing the Mechanicals’ play for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, ‘When my cue comes, call me and I will answer. My next is “Most fair Pyramus”’ (4.1.199–200). But, finding himself alone, he reflects on the events of his own dream: ‘I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was’ (203–5); he concludes that his fantasy should be made into a ballad written by Peter Quince, to be sung at the end of their performance before Theseus and Hippolyta. This is an example of metatheatre, in which the character refers self-consciously to the nature of the play, the story of which he says should be made into a ‘ballad’, into an entertainment, which, of course, is what the play actually is.

  ELIZABETH, THE ‘IMPERIAL VOT’RESS’

  In all of this, Shakespeare flatters Queen Elizabeth by simultaneously associating her with Titania and yet almost simultaneously deliberately distancing her from that association. Queen Elizabeth’s virginity was part of the myth of the authority that surrounded her person, as demonstrated in her ‘chastity’, ‘constancy’ and her ‘marriage’ to the realm. So, in Act 2, Scene 1, lines 158 and 161–4, Shakespeare has Oberon tell Puck that he once saw Cupid shooting an arrow at ‘a fair vestal, throned by the west’, that is, the English Queen, but that the ‘fiery shaft”/[was] Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon;/And the imperial vot’ress passed on,/In maiden meditation, fancy free.’

  There is a reference here also, perhaps, to Elizabeth’s visit in 1575 to the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth Castle. The visit might have suggested a possible romance between the Queen and her vassal, ending in marriage, but on this occasion it did not. The ‘imperial vot’ress’ departed ‘in maiden’ determination to remain wedded only to her realm. As we will see in discussing Richard II and Macbeth, for example, Shakespeare had to take great care not to be seen to insult his monarch Elizabeth and, later, King James. Who actually knows what happened between Leicester and his monarch in 1575?

  CRAFTSMANSHIP AND RESOLUTION

  A further element of the dramatist’s craftsmanship in the work is that, within the construction of this dream play, Shakespeare uses some sublime poetry to transport the audience into the realms of fairyland. Oberon uses the full resources of poetry to instruct Puck to administer the love potion to her eyes:

  I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

  Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

  Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

  With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.

  (2.1.249–52)

  It is as if the language within the dream of the play actually takes the audience to the place where:

  …sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

  Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;

  (2.1.253–4)

  Oberon, the King of the Fairies, has the power within the play to correct Puck’s errors and his own vindictiveness towards Titania, but he can also ensure that the love potion is correctly administered to the two pairs of earthly lovers. In the end, he releases Titania from the spell, lifts the ass’s head from Bottom’s shoulders and allows the lovers to find the correct partner, which leads to the marriages they wish for and to the assent of the reluctant Egeus. Through correspondence – Oberon with the Duke Theseus and Titania with Hippolyta – Shakespeare implies moreover that the resolution in the fairy kingdom guarantees the resolution in the earthly one.

  In modern performances the same actor occasionally plays Theseus and Oberon and the same female actor – in the Elizabethan theatre a boy actor – Hippolyta and Titania. The plot, developing from the foundations of the structure, allows for reconciliation and a ‘happy ending’. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the disasters are averted first of all by the corrective authorized by Oberon and secondly by the way in which the potentially tragic performance of Pyramus and Thisbe by the Mechanicals is subjected to a hilariously comic treatment, the result of their own thespian incompetence. With Romeo and Juliet we find some of the same ingredients but they are treated very differently.

  Romeo and Juliet

  In Romeo and Juliet we see that the reverse occurs in the end, since the attempts by a controlling agent to bring about reconciliation go wrong in the story. Juliet drinks the sleeping potion, which makes it look as if she is dead, but she will awake once she is within the family’s burial chamber. Word will be sent to her banished lover Romeo who, like a Prince in a fairy story, will be with her when she wakes. They will embrace and escape all their difficulties. But Friar Laurence, though a member of the Church, is human and the reality of the situation proves very different from that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  It is almost as if Shakespeare is using his structure to answer the question ‘But what if?’ applying it to different scenarios. In this case, what if the fairy tale does not run its true course because circumstances beyond the control of the characters do not al
low it to do so? What happens if the fairy-tale prince is ignorant of the friar’s plan and thinks that his princess is really dead? Here, Shakespeare is engaged in deconstructing a familiar fairy-tale motif, and refusing to allow the artifice of a dream to provide for reconciliation. As Hamlet is later to note, death and sleep, although at first they may resemble each other, are not the same. In Romeo and Juliet we have Shakespeare experimenting with formal alternatives to allow for the creation of tragedy.

  Spotlight

  In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when the antidote is administerd and the victims awake, they do so, as we have seen, with ‘parted eye,/When everything seems double’ (4.1.188–9). In Romeo and Juliet, when the ‘meddling friar’s’ potion wears off, Juliet finds that Romeo has already killed himself. Ironically, his dying words are, ‘Thus with a kiss I die.’ She awakes and, having kissed Romeo to share his poison, stabs herself with his dagger. Interpret the structure one way and we have a comedy, of the kind when Bottom, as Pyramus, comes back to life after he has stabbed himself; take it the other way and we have, within the mimetic framework of the play, a tragedy. But the structure itself holds both possibilities together, allowing us to conclude that tragedy is the obverse of comedy.

  NO FAIRY-TALE SOLUTIONS

  Romeo and Juliet concerns itself more explicitly with social political issues; the feud between the Montagues and Capulets sets the scene that leads to the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt. The search and the expression of the self through love is what takes Romeo, a Montague, into the very home of Juliet, a Capulet, and leads, after the death of Tybalt, to him becoming ‘geographically’ distanced from Verona. There he hears the news of Juliet’s death but not of the plan to unite the lovers because Friar Laurence’s messenger is detained in a place where the plague is rife. Romeo’s cousin Mercutio’s dying curse anticipates this complication: ‘A plague o’ both your houses’ (3.1.107). Earlier in the play, Mercutio has ranted against Queen Mab, ‘the fairies’ midwife’, who ‘gallops night by night/Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love’ (1.4.54, 70–71). But as the action develops, the dream turns into a nightmare.

  Spotlight

  To find its full force and the way Mercutio’s famous Queen Mab speech works, you might like to try to declaim it out loud. You will find that it gathers pace to a point almost of incoherence, of getting out of control – forcing Romeo to stop him: ‘Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace./Thou talk’st of nothing’ (95–6). To this, Mercutio responds:

  True, I talk of dreams,

  Which are the children of an idle brain,

  Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,

  Which is as thin of substance as the air

  And more inconstant than the wind, who woos

  Even now the frozen bosom of the north

  And, being anger’d, puffs away from thence

  Turning his side to the dew-dropping south.

  (1.4.96–103)

  These dreams of love and the ‘madness’ that they induce in the lovers are, within the context of the real environment, too innocent, born of fantasy. They are in a sense wish fulfilments that emerge from a Neoplatonic concern with the intangibly spiritual predilections of the lovers, who in the reverie are elevated beyond the physical world. In Romeo and Juliet the difficulties of the physical world interfere with the dream, to produce devastating tragic consequences.

  In one of Shakespeare’s final plays, The Tempest (1611), Prospero brings an end to a masque that he has presented to his daughter Miranda and her intended husband, Ferdinand, by admitting that:

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air;

  (4.1.148–50)

  The revels, the plays, the fairies and the dreams are all metaphors of the way in which art represents the twists and turns of life, leaving in the end nothing behind. They are ‘such stuff/As dreams are made on’, exposing along the way the conduct, conversations, accidents and ideologies in ‘our little life’ that underpin the social environment in which we exist, but where we find that it ‘is rounded with a sleep’ (The Tempest, 4.1.156–8).

  INNOCENCE AND NAIVETY

  In Romeo and Juliet there is innocence in the immediacy of the protagonists’ love for each other – but also naivety. The lovers wish to transcend the limits of the social world and the responsibilities they have towards their respective families. Romeo tries to prevent the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt, but the former is stabbed under Romeo’s arm and killed. The Duke in the play is the embodiment of the law but he cannot control the violence that the historical feud has produced. The lovers try to escape from the feud but they cannot. Even at the end of the play, in their sorrow, Montague and Capulet can only resort to their inanimate wealth to compensate for their grief. Montague promises to erect a statue ‘in pure gold’ (5.3.299), and Capulet reciprocates in a similar vein.

  The friar’s meddling is like Puck’s; it goes wrong but cannot be corrected because there is no Oberon to rectify the errors of the friar’s attempts to effect a solution since the political problem itself is too great, even for the ‘innocent’ lovers to overcome. This is their naivety, a naivety in a belief that dreams of happiness and reconciliation can overcome and transform reality.

  Romeo and Juliet are victims of a social breakdown rather than a social order. In youth and innocence, they believe they can rise above the identities inscribed in their names and the language that determines their being. Juliet asks, ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet’ (2.2.43–4). But Tybalt, cousin of Juliet Capulet, kills the Prince’s cousin Mercutio, friend of Romeo Montague. Romeo avenges his friend’s death, only in turn to be banished by the Prince who has lost his kinsman. The two lovers lack understanding of the full implications of the social determination of identity itself, of peace and concord. Shakespeare, as we will see later, also explores this theme in another, possibly earlier, comedy, The Taming of the Shrew.

  The social context

  The social situation reflected in the quarrel between the Montagues and Capulets and in the protagonists’ intense love turns out to be as inanimate as the golden statues to be erected in their memory, as cold and unproductive as death itself. Romeo and Juliet are not characters of high rank of the sort that we find in the later tragedies; they are young and in their youth they refuse to conform; but they also represent the future of society. Juliet refuses to marry Paris in defiance of her father, just as Hermia refuses to marry Demetrius in defiance of Egeus, but here the tragedy is framed within the social context of hatred and ecclesiastical meddling in earthly issues, and by the general political inability to create a sustainable peace in a society that is out of control.

  Romeo and Juliet is not an ‘innocent’ play or a play about ‘innocence’, as some may be tempted to surmise. It is a play that structurally moves from an early comic narrative to a tragic one, but with a particular care for the details of dramatic form by an exponent of consummate dramatic craftsmanship.

  ‘Romeo and Juliet …is architectonic in layout and design, its action punctuated by the three appearances of the Prince, always as an authority figure…The play’s characters are carefully conceived to complement and contrast with one another, the preparations for the Capulets’ ball at which Romeo first sees Juliet are ironically echoed by those for her marriage to Paris, and each of the play’s three love duets – one in the evening…the second at night…and the third at dawn…is interrupted by calls from the Nurse. Before Shakespeare started to write…he must have worked out a ground plan as thoroughly as if he had been designing an intricate building.’

  Wells, S. (2002: 141), Shakespeare for All Time. Basingstoke and Oxford: Pan Macmillan

  From dream to nightmare

  Let us sum up these two plays by returning to the questions at the beginning of the discussion. What kind of dream is it that Shakespeare creates in A Midsummer Night
’s Dream? It is a metaphorical dream charting one of a number of directions that drama can take, leading in this case to comedy. By contrast, in Romeo and Juliet, what appears at first sight as a dream that Mercutio claims is a ‘vain fantasy’ degenerates into a nightmare of unresolved social tensions and issues that lead to tragedy. As for whose dream it is, we have to say that, although the characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are all part of the dream within the play, and although we who are watching the play are invited, like Queen Elizabeth, to think of it as no more than a dream, the play written by the playwright and acted out by the performers may itself be the dream. It may be a fantasy reflection of the variety of experience found in life itself, along with a series of imaginary resolutions to the problems it raises.

  How does Shakespeare achieve all this? The answer is through a tightly controlled plot held together by an underlying structure and communicated by language and the action. But, once performed, the dream ends; it is gone until, of course, it is time to perform it again, when the environment within which we exist may have changed, imposing different readings and interpretations on the play and creating radically different performances. Shakespeare retains a solid but nonetheless flexible structure beneath his plays, together with tightly constructed narrative lines, and through this combination the dramas are able to withstand and indeed prompt changing interpretations. With this in mind, let us move on to consider one of his principal building materials, language.