‘The Elizabethan stage can be anything in this world or the next: a battlefield, the Court, the underworld. The self-enclosed, self-sufficient world of the play is a primary convention. Against that lies a set of conventions…[which]…challenge or subvert the autonomy of the play world. They include choric speeches, together with prologue and epilogue. They permit direct address to the audience by clowns (Launce with his dog) and lineal descendants of the Vice (Richard III, Iago). Sometimes the stage draws attention to itself explicitly…we have learned to be alert to “act”, “scene”, “play”, “perform”…as they occur in the text of a play. Through them we understand a fundamental premise of Elizabethan dramaturgy, that the stage is also a stage.’
Berry, R. (1985: 1–2), Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan
Forms of communication
The semiotics of the theatre is a study of the communication system of the play, the world created by dramatist and actors, including oral language. It can be self-referential, deliberately artificial or affected, but going beyond that to encompass all the elements of theatrical representation. In comedy, for example, Shakespeare is not averse to self-referential humour, laughing at his own mastery of poetic language as, for example, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 4, Scene 3, when the male lovers read their sonnets aloud, not to the women they love but directly to the audience (and to each other), to great comic effect in performance. Indeed, in this play the characters persistently fail to communicate with one another.
It is sometimes held that in a number of plays the characters that are of inferior social status speak in prose, and to an extent that is the case – as with the Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom, in his ‘audition’ for the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ play within the play, aspires to speak verse, and the result allows Shakespeare to mimic the bombastic lines of some of his contemporaries and predecessors:
The raging rocks,
And shivering shocks,
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates;
And Phibbus’ car
Shall shine from far
And make and mar
The foolish fates.
(1.2.28–35)
Humorously, Shakespeare has Bottom sum up his recitation with the words ‘This was lofty’, and the character then returns to his usual prose (1.2.36). The distinctions within language, however, vary throughout the plays. Sometimes, for example, prose is used to increase the emotional impact of what a central character is saying, as with Shylock’s affirmation of his humanity and his sense of injustice at the way, it is implied, that his nation has been persecuted by the Venetian Christians:
…he [Antonio] hath disgrac’d me, and hind’red me half a million, laugh’d at my losses, mock’d at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, – and what’s his reason? I am a Jew.
(The Merchant of Venice, 3.1.50–54)
Note the accumulation of the short, sharp clauses, rising to an emphasis on the verb ‘heated’, and then the brief pause before the question.
In As You Like It, Rosalind speaks much of her part in prose, perhaps bringing a more immediate realism to what is happening behind her contrived and controlling romantic narrative. It is such variations between poetry and prose and within poetry itself that allow modulations in tone, creating atmosphere and leaving ambiguities hanging in the air for the audience to savour in the richness of the experience, as, for example, in Viola’s concealed poetically expressed admission of her love for Orsino in Twelfth Night:
VIOLA My father had a daughter lov’d a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.
ORSINO And what’s her history?
VIOLA A blank, my lord: She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’th’ bud
Feed on her damask cheek: she pin’d in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
…
ORSINO But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
VIOLA I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers too: and yet I know not.
(2.4.108–16, 120–22)
This rich passage, brimming with images and gentle ambiguity, permits a softness of empathetic humour for the audience whose knowledge of what is going on is greater than that of either character being portrayed: the Duke doesn’t know Viola is a woman; Viola doesn’t know her brother is alive, but the audience does – and, in Shakespeare’s day, it knew moreover that all the actors were male. Viola’s melancholy tone feeds into the warm melancholy of the play’s action.
Music and song
Shakespeare sustains this mood by introducing music and song to great effect in Twelfth Night, reinforcing the play’s action and thereby inviting the audience to share the experience. For example, Feste sings of the transience of youth:
O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love’s coming.
…
What is love? ’Tis not hereafter,
Present mirth hath present laughter:
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty:
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
(2.3.39–40, 47–52)
The importance of the songs, however, has not always been perceived through the centuries.
‘Though everyone who sees the play notices how important the songs are for its atmosphere, it would have been hard to discover this before the twentieth century. In the eighteenth century neither “O Mistress Mine” nor “Come Away Death” was sung, and the Epilogue Song, as it was called, reappeared only in 1763.’
Potter, L. (1985: 36), Twelfth Night: Text and Performance. Basingstoke: Macmillan
From Shakespeare’s script, we understand that music is played in order to complement the poetry and the prose. In Much Ado About Nothing (2.3.57–9), Benedick humorously asks: ‘Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?’ but later he is forced to ridicule his own attempt at wooing through song or poetry, reflecting ‘No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms’ (5.2.39–41).
Spotlight
It may be that Richard Burbage, the actor who first played Benedick, had no singing voice and was also being gently mocked by the playwright. When the clown Will Kempe left the company in 1598, Robert Armin, a singer, took over the role of clown in the company. The result was that music appears to have been written into the comedies at the same time as the humour of the ‘clown’ became more sardonic. You might like to consider whether you agree that there is a change in the role of the clown after this date, by comparing the role of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, which was played by Will Kempe, and the role of Feste in Twelfth Night, which was played by Robert Armin.
The perils of over-analysis
As we have seen, scholarship has tended over the years inadvertently to underplay the performance aspect of the plays in its attempts to evaluate their literary merits. The result has been almost to imprison Shakespeare in an elitist culture. But Shakespeare’s profession was far from elitist. He needed a popular audience in order to earn his living, the composition of which continues to be debated. (See Maguire, L. and Smith, E. [2013: 86–93].) However, there are some lines that are now very difficult for us to understand without footnotes and scholarship. The language of Love’s Labour’s Lost is particularly challenging in this respect but it can be understood if, as readers or a theatre audience, we do not get too bogged down in the minutiae of scholarship. We need to remember that the progress, the fluidity and the movement of the whole is greater than the detail of particular words, phrases or lines. We have to let the play
run in our reading of it, in order to allow it to work.
In everyday speech we allow the conversation to flow. Few of us can recount every word exactly as it was spoken once a conversation has come to an end, but we are aware of the tenor and nature of what has been said. Poetic language has a degree of intensity that raises it above ordinary everyday speech but, even so, we can begin understanding great art as we would everyday speech. Then we can recall moments of real significance that stand out through the economy, clarity and beauty of their expression.
The more you read, declaim or see Shakespeare in performance, the less inhibited you will become by the language itself.
The rise of the English language
Shakespeare lived in an age of great change. The English language more than doubled its vocabulary during his lifetime. He used many of the new words then in circulation, coining some himself and repeating neologisms coined by others. But generally there was a move from visual to oral communication, for example in the churches, as the iconography of the Catholic Church was replaced by oral and written communication (through sermons and through the growth of printing). In the Catholic Church, where the services were in Latin, frescoes and stained-glass windows told stories through pictures, but after the Reformation the walls were whitewashed over and much of the stained glass destroyed. English became the language of the Reformed Church under Henry VIII, Edward and Elizabeth. Everyone by law had to attend church on Sunday, where the sermon would be preached according to the new, often politically inspired religion.
Shakespeare’s language is not something to fear, although if you are not used to poetry it can, as we have noted, cause some initial anxiety. So find a space of your own and take some further major speeches, such as Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ (Julius Caesar, 3.2.74f.), delivered to the Plebeians after the murder of Caesar, or Isabella’s soliloquy, ‘To whom should I complain? Did I tell this’ (Measure for Measure, 2.4.170–86), following the indecent proposition made to her by Angelo, or any soliloquy from Hamlet and/or Macbeth, and try reading them out loud, finding the emphasis and the rhythm of the lines. Soon the language will flow, your fears will be dispelled and your love of Shakespeare and amazement at his achievements will begin to flourish.
Key idea
In today’s increasingly materialistic and violent world where spiritual values have been eroded, art, music, poetry, dance and drama can remind us of the qualities as well as the infirmities of the human condition. They cause us to pause, and as a consequence they matter, by affirming the positive nature of art and of being human.
6
Love’s Labour’s Lost (1595) and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1591–2)
In the early romantic comedies, including the ones previously discussed, Shakespeare appears to be developing a structure, which will come to fruition in As You Like It and Twelfth Night. He experimented further in this direction in later plays, and in the process challenged the expectations of his audiences. Here we will examine briefly two relatively early plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The limitation of this approach, however, is that the methodology can only be empirical, derived from actual readings of the plays that form the basis of our evaluations and suppositions.
Understanding the plays’ structure
Until now I have suggested that Shakespeare used a formula or underlying structure as the basis for the narratives or plots for some of his plays. That structure deviates significantly from the neoclassical rules of drama, and this allows him to tell a story, usually found in his sources, in a particular way. Whether he was consciously doing this or not it is impossible to say, since our knowledge of the structure is derived primarily from the texts we have. Just as we recognized that we confer meanings on these texts in our reading and performance of Shakespeare’s plays, so we derive an understanding of his structure empirically from the plays, assuming an authorial presence without knowing the details of how he constructed them.
Spotlight
This appears to be the formula for the plays we call the romantic comedies:
1 An opening statement of a dilemma or an impossible resolution, often but not always associated with the threat of death
2 A search deriving from the opening statement relating, firstly, to an individual or a number of individuals attempting to find identity or self-knowledge, and secondly to one or more couples seeking to surmount obstacles in their attempts to find some form of relationship
3 The requirement of certain characters, usually lovers, to remove themselves from the society that is responsible for setting up the obstacle to fulfilment, that removal often being signified by geographical relocation or physical disguise, or both
4 Through the adventures under disguise or in the area of relocation, a movement is made towards the resolution of the difficulties, which is usually effected through a contrived recognition scene – Aristotelian anagnorisis – in which misunderstandings of identity are rectified, multiple marriages result and a new revitalized society emerges that looks towards a future in which generations are now reconciled with each other.
In Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we can see the elements of the formula taking shape – the initial problem, the journey and the disguise, the revelation and the reconciliation. However, in both plays the dramatist is already playing with the expectations of his audience, and in such a way that the structure being developed is already under some stress. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare includes topical warm satire within a structure that has a stark conclusion. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, he uses song and an old comic routine as part of the entertainment within a narrative plot that is over-elaborate and which, with an attempted rape, threatens to undermine its comic genre. And yet at the same time this technique points towards complexities that will become more marked in later plays.
We have also already seen how Shakespeare experimented – in 1595 – with both the comic and the tragic genre, moving the fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream into the poetic extravagance of Mercutio’s ‘Queen Mab’ speech in Romeo and Juliet, which presages the movement from comedy to tragedy that follows Mercutio’s ‘accidental’ death.
Key idea
Relatively early in his career as a writer, Shakespeare is not afraid to experiment, pushing the boundaries, as if asking himself, and the narratives with which he is dealing, the question ‘What if?’ So ‘what if’ there is no magic potion to put right the mistakes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? ‘What if’ Romeo arrives at the tomb without knowing that Juliet is not dead but only asleep? In The Two Gentlemen or Love’s Labour’s Lost, these experiments are pushed even further to suggest a questioning of elements of the very structure that we can detect in his other early comedies. The sudden reformation of the aptly named Proteus in the former is unsettling, while the failure in the formal ending of Love’s Labour’s Lost challenges the convention of a return to an ordered society.
We have also seen that during the 1590s Shakespeare is involved in writing a number of sonnets, at first to a young man and subsequently to a ‘dark lady’ with whom he (or his fictional persona as the poet) is involved in an affair, only to discover that she is also sexually involved with a young rival. There is also within the sonnets a sense of time passing, of the need to seize the day, a concept known as carpe diem. It is dangerous to read autobiography into fictional work but no writer can absolutely escape from him- or herself. The act of writing necessitates, in one form or another, the exposure of the self, although Shakespeare’s own ‘self’ is elusive.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
In this early comic play, Ferdinand, the King of Navarre, believes he can divorce himself and three of his courtiers from the world and create ‘a little academe,/Still and contemplative in living art’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1.1.13–14). His plan is to vow to abjure the society of women for three years while he and his companions study together. This turns out to be impossible, since no
sooner is the oath made than an emissary from the King of France, his daughter the Princess, accompanied by three ladies, arrives to negotiate with King Ferdinand. Thus the obstacle to resolution is constructed and the resulting comedy arises from the four men humorously trying to find ways, including going in disguise, of breaking their oath in order to woo the ladies, who are forced to remain outside the palace ‘gates’.
The breaking of an oath is a serious business in Shakespearean drama, but in this case the attempts to do so drive the King and his companions into the comic world of deception, self-deception and ‘merriment’, until a messenger, Monsieur Marcade, arrives from France to announce to the Princess the death of ‘The King, your father –’ (5.2.716). This change of mood, coupled with the failure of the men to reconcile themselves to the women, prepares the audience for an inversion of the customary comic ending.
THE THEME: A PROCESS TO BE TAKEN
Protestations by the men that ‘Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief;’ (5.2.749) are rejected by the Princess and her women. Death has produced a different perspective on the humour of the men’s perjury, and no commitment to marriage can take place until each has served a term in which they will be forced to understand the realities of the world. So one of them, the iconoclastic Berowne, known for his disarming comic wit, is told by his new love, Rosaline, to spend a year with the sick, helping them to laugh before she can consider him:
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 7
