Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction

by Michael Scott

  Key terms

  The Renaissance is a term describing what is now often called the Early Modern period of Western history. It refers to a ‘rebirth’ of interest in classical writers, myths and ideas, in a period stretching from the late thirteenth century in Italy to the mid-seventeenth century elsewhere in Europe.

  The Reformation was a movement of ‘reform’ in the Church, leading to a break from Rome’s control over Church doctrine. It was a rebellion against the excesses of the Catholic Church and a challenge to the authority of the Pope. The protestors were led at first by the German monk Martin Luther, who in 1517 attacked Church practices that he felt needed to be reformed. Those who followed his ‘protests’ became known as Protestants (see Chapter 24). They believed that Church doctrine should be founded on biblical texts as the only source of truth. The Reformation in England took place during the reign of Henry VIII, with the dissolution of the monasteries and the secession of England from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

  Mana and logos are terms used by the poet and critic William Empson in his explanation of correspondence. During the 1930s the word mana became one of intellectual interest, particularly for cultural anthropologists. It is a word found in Polynesia and other South Seas communities, the meaning of which varies slightly. It refers to the power and prestige that in Polynesian culture were attributed to a supernatural force. Mana is found within a person. It does not necessarily come just from birth. It can develop within a leader but is not acquired. Empson also uses the term logos in his chapter on the double plot in Some Versions of Pastoral (2005). The Greek word logos, ‘word’, is from Western culture and particularly the Bible. The opening of St John’s Gospel states, ‘In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Logos, the Word, is the origin of all things. By bringing two heterogeneous terms from different cultures together within his critical perception, Empson points out the incongruous correspondence between the two different words, which each help to explore the other, just as in plays there is a correspondence between various characters in a main plot with characters in a subplot, which helps the audience to explore and elucidate the play as a whole.

  Could this have been done if Shakespeare had maintained just a single action as required by the three Unities? Aspects of The Comedy of Errors show that correspondence of characters is possible within a play broadly following the Unities. It is more clearly manifested, however, with double-plot structures and their narratives. Empson, in proposing the idea in the 1930s, was decades ahead of his time. I will be talking about correspondence at various times on our journey, with Hamlet or with Troilus and Cressida, for example, which is a play that Empson discusses as an example of how correspondence works.

  For further definitions, see Chapter 24.

  5

  Shakespeare’s poetic and theatrical language

  Shakespeare’s plays are written predominantly but not exclusively in verse. He is a poet and, in the twenty-first century, an age relatively unaccustomed to verse speaking or reading poetry, it is his verse that can frighten people. Even without feeling exactly fearful, many people have reservations about the fact that Shakespeare uses verse, but this can be overcome through familiarity with the texts. Once you become more familiar with the language, you will find that the verse form has a simple malleable structure, which allows Shakespeare to paint pictures in words and to inspire imaginations.

  At the end of the twentieth century, before the revolution in social networking using modern communication technologies, it could have been argued that the contemporary age was predominantly a visual rather than a verbal one. But new technologies have, to an extent, restored the force and the variety of the written word as well as the need to be concise, as in, for example, the word limitation imposed by Twitter. Ironically, Shakespeare’s verse form stems from a similar need for discipline. He uses rhythms of language that imitate speech but in a disciplined way, while still taking advantage of the range of possible forms within that discipline.

  The iambic pentameter and the sonnet form

  The basic poetic line is the iambic pentameter. This term is used to describe a ten-beat line in which the words are stressed alternately in a soft/hard, soft/hard, soft/hard, soft/hard, soft/hard pattern. Just saying the words ‘soft/hard’ in this way gives the line rhythm. This rhythm can be changed, as it might be in music, to produce a particular effect. The famous opening line of Richard III, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’, starts hard/soft, but the speech generally continues on the regular pattern with a few variants. So, for example, Shakespeare elongates line 16, ‘I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty’, where Richard interrupts the regular flow of the lines referring to his own deformity. The change in rhythm thereby mimics his physical deformity by producing a deformity in the poetic line.

  In his sonnet sequence, Shakespeare adopted a highly disciplined form, each poem consisting of 14 lines with an internal arrangement of rhymes and rhythms. The sonnet came from Italy and one of its forms is known as the ‘Petrarchan’, after the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–74). This sonnet form was constructed as an octave (eight lines) and a sextet (six lines). The eight-line octave has two four-line stanzas, with a repeating rhyme structure in alternate lines. To understand this, we assign a letter to the rhyming word at the end of each line. So the Petrarchan octave rhymes abab abab. This is followed by the sextet, which has its own rhyme scheme; this may be cde cde, or cdc cdc, or cde dce. Generally, the octave presents a proposition or, sometimes, a problem that the sextet reinforces, elaborates or resolves.

  Shakespeare uses an innovative alternative to this structure. In his version, the sonnet consists of three distinctive quatrains (four lines), followed by a concluding two-line couplet. For example, the lines would be rhymed as follows: first quatrain abab; second quatrain cdcd; third quatrain efef; and a concluding couplet as gg. The quatrains present the narrative or issue and the final couplet sums it up or pithily comments upon it. This form is usually known as the Shakespearean sonnet. You have already come across one used by the Chorus at the opening of Romeo and Juliet, which announces the story of the play through the use of the sonnet form. Have a look at that opening speech again and put letters to the rhyming words; you will be able to see how rhyme is used to bind words together and to suggest issues to the reader or listener. The rhythm of each line is used to direct your attention to important elements of those issues, while the sonnet form itself gives some indication that the substance of the play will be about romantic love.

  Key idea

  A good tip is to read passages out loud. Only then will you be able to hear the rhythms of the lines and get some idea of how Shakespeare varies his style, sometimes in keeping with different speakers and sometimes mixing verse and prose.

  Shakespeare was certainly writing or had written some of his sonnets at the time he wrote many of the early plays. The disciplined structure of the Shakespearean sonnet, and possibly the knowledge of the Petrarchan sonnet, has an affinity at least with the need for the structured discipline discussed in the composition, for example, of the comedies. Whether his sonnet sequence reflects reality and parts of the poet’s own autobiography or is a fictional creation by a poet who was also a dramatist has been, and continues to be, a matter for debate (and is discussed in Chapter 26), but you might like to take note of the poet W. H. Auden’s view of the critical discussions in his introduction to the sonnets:

  ‘Probably, more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world. Indeed, they have become the best touchstone I know of for distinguishing the sheep from the goats, those, that is, who love poetry for its own sake and understand its nature, from those who only value poems either as historical documents or because they express feelings or beliefs of which the reader happens to approve.’

  Auden, W. H. (1964
: Introduction, xviii), The Sonnets. New York: The Signet Classic Shakespeare

  Spotlight

  Successful art is disciplined. It is not haphazard. Sometimes it may appear simple to the point where people will say, ‘Well, I could have done that.’ But of course they cannot, since beneath the apparent simplicity, or masked complexity, is the experience of trial and error and knowledge of the artistic laws that the skilled artist fashions to his or her purpose. Great artists often show the courage to push such laws to their limits or to develop new ones. Writing can be a journey that the artist has to take, and is sometimes hard and challenging as he or she strives for a finished product. Often, fictional or even real pain and anguish are detected and described by critics in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. These may relate to the passing of time, the transience of youth, or mutability and loss. That, however, is matched in some of the plays and the sonnets by a celebration of the progress of human relationships and the sustainability of the art itself.

  A muse of fire

  Earlier we saw how in Sonnet 55, for example, it was the poem, the art, that is seen to transcend the ravages of time: ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme’. The communicative vehicle of the plays is language. Through words, the plays can create images in our minds as well as carry the narrative forward, or build up character, or provide the communication between characters. In the Prologue to Henry V, the figure of the Chorus, the narrator, tells us that the language has to work on our ‘imaginary forces’.

  The play opens with the actor playing the Chorus calling for ‘a muse of fire’, so that this historical warrior king might appear like Mars, the god of war, on this stage, which he refers to as a ‘cockpit’. (This is because the Elizabethan theatre resembled the arenas where cockfighting took place.) He calls it a ‘wooden O’, describing the circular architecture of the theatre itself. The poetic rhetoric of the passage draws a picture in the minds of the audience as the Chorus regrets that the action on the stage simply cannot reproduce the glories of this king’s triumphs in his war against France and, in particular, his famous victory at Agincourt. By apologizing for the unworthiness of the stage to present such great deeds, the poet dramatically lifts the imagination of the audience. He is saying, in effect, listen to our words, watch the action we present and visualize the past: ‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls/Are now confined two mighty monarchies’.

  Try reading this speech out loud to see how it modulates; note the break, for example, in line 8 between the word ‘employment’ and ‘But pardon…’ Then note the move to the questions: ‘Can this cockpit hold…?’ and ‘Or may we cram…?’ After these questions comes the answer, with an explanation: ‘O pardon! since…’ He then tells us what the actors are going to do for the audience, leading to the request that the audience imagines the scene of the action and is even persuaded to ‘Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them’. Within all of this the Chorus is actually creating the scene, while drawing the audience’s attention to what he is doing. As you read it aloud, imagining that there is an audience listening to you, the mastery of the speech’s structure will work for itself.

  O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

  The brightest heaven of invention,

  A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,

  And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

  Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,

  Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,

  Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire

  Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,

  The flat unraised spirits that hath dared

  On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

  So great an object. Can this cockpit hold

  The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

  Within this wooden O the very casques

  That did affright the air at Agincourt?

  O pardon, since a crooked figure may

  Attest in little place a million,

  And let us, ciphers to this great account,

  On your imaginary forces work.

  Suppose within the girdle of these walls

  Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

  Whose high upreared and abutting fronts

  The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.

  Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.

  Into a thousand parts divide one man

  And make imaginary puissance.

  Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them

  Printing their proud hoofs i’th’receiving earth.

  For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

  Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,

  Turning th’accomplishment of many years

  Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,

  Admit me Chorus to this history,

  Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,

  Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.

  (Henry V, Prologue, 1–34)

  The speech sets the historical tone, just as the passage quoted in Chapter 3 from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘I know a bank a where the wild thyme blows’ (2.1.249f.), creates a painting in words of natural beauty tinged with magic. Even modern visual technology might find it difficult to present an imaginary picture of the kind that Shakespeare has Oberon deliver in that passage.

  ‘Like all his poetic contemporaries, Shakespeare had a profoundly figurative imagination. Composition was conceived in terms of figures of words, divided into tropes (a word shifted away from its usual context or signification) and schemes (words arranged in expressive patterns), and figures of thought (such as frankness of speech, understatement, vivid description, the structural division of argument, accumulation, refining, dwelling on the point, comparison, exemplification, simile, personification, emphasis, conciseness, ocular demonstration). Tropes and schemes were both a device to assist actors in memorizing their lines and a method of organization to make the words spoken on stage vivid and memorable for the audience.’

  Bate, J. (2007: 43), Introduction, The RSC William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Basingstoke: Macmillan

  Body and stage language

  Shakespeare was thinking of his actors when he was writing his plays, but in actual performance oral language (speech) is not the only vehicle of communication. Even as you spoke the lines from Henry V, you probably moved, gesticulated, adding physical gestures and facial expressions to accompany the words. As well as conjuring up the imagery of the language, Shakespeare produces a script for the actors who are speaking, moving, sitting, standing and interacting with one another, with the physical elements on the stage itself, the theatre and the audience of which we are members. If you are reading the play, note which characters are on stage since some may not have many lines, or they may not speak at all, but they are all part of the play’s action.

  Shakespeare realizes the force of this complex process and his art is to use it, bringing the various elements together as well as having to compensate for the fact that in his theatre there was no scenery of the kind we might expect to find in a modern theatre. There was, however, a canopy over the stage, on the underside of which was painted the signs of the zodiac (the heavens). Note, for example, in the tragedy Hamlet, how Hamlet, when talking in prose to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, describes the physical theatrical stage on which he is acting: a stage thrusting out into the auditorium as a ‘promontory’ with the painted ‘canopy’ above leading to the sky that can be seen over the open-air part of the theatre. This image of ‘the Globe’ communicates a further intensity in that it gives the dramatic character a context while at the same time providing opportunities to introduce an element of self-awareness through humorous jibes at the audience’s expense. Again, try reading this prose passage out loud. Shakespeare even tells his actor to signal to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to ‘look’ up from the ‘promontory’ that is the stage, to
what is above it all:

  …I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

  (Hamlet, 2.2.297–305)

  Shakespeare is here giving his actors stage directions, looking at, or even pointing to, the open air above the groundlings, the canopy over the stage. The audience members themselves are coughing and reeking – a congregation is breathing its ‘pestilence’ of air, which in time of plague would cause the authorities to close the theatres. The character is thereby reflecting upon himself, instructing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while at the same time jibing at the audience. How the audience would have reacted to these jibes from the stage we cannot tell, but to have the confidence to work in this way, and with what seems to have been the full cooperation of his audience, demonstrates Shakespeare’s command of his medium.

  The play communicates its concerns by having the actors move around the physical environment of the stage, addressing each other and sometimes involving the audience directly. Such interactions between the actor and audience may have had a dramatic effect very different from the romantic, empathetic or more sentimental appeal of a passage such as this from Hamlet, as interpreted in some conventional literary critical readings. The fact is that we cannot be certain, although we sometimes see in plays by Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists the use of banter with the audience as an integral element in the drama. In the famous opening of Richard III, as with the later speeches in that play, and as with Iago in Othello, for example, we find that Shakespeare allows characters to confide in his spectators by addressing them directly, drawing them into the action and engaging them with the story. The Chorus in both Romeo and Juliet and Henry V, and as we will see with Gower in Pericles, directly addresses the audience in the telling of the story.