Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction

by Michael Scott

  ROSALINE You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day

  Visit the speechless sick and still converse

  With groaning wretches; and your task shall be

  With all fierce endeavour of your wit

  To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

  BEROWNE To move wild laughter in the throat of death?

  It cannot be, it is impossible.

  Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

  (5.2.841–8)

  But to his protests she replies (849–59) that until now his laughter has been ‘shallow’ and that, if he cannot make the sick laugh, he should ‘throw away that spirit’ as part of his ‘reformation’. In other words, he has to go through a process to make him worthy of love. In this, the play comments on the purpose of the formula that Shakespeare is developing to underpin both theme and plot within an innovative aesthetic structure. Shakespeare is signalling, thereby, the seriousness of his comedy – the movement into a world of error, confusion, even death in order to comprehend the realities of the world itself – and our experience of it.

  As critics such as Derek Traversi in An Approach to Shakespeare (1969) have noted, the sentence the women impose on the men forces them back into a severity that reminds them that vows are not to be made lightly since they are part of the bedrock of language, and hence important in holding society together. There are hints here, in this otherwise frivolous play, of the Shakespearean vision that was later to produce the great tragedy of King Lear, which some have called a grotesque comedy. In that play, Lear in old age plays games with his daughters’ affections and attempts to elicit vows from them that have disastrous consequences.

  TOPICALITY

  Love’s Labour’s Lost also contains a satire on court life, and shows a familiarity with ‘local’ characters such as Holofernes the pedantic schoolmaster and Nathaniel the curate, both of whom, with the clown Costard and a comic Spaniard, Don Adriano de Armado, present an entertainment of the Four Worthies – Hector, Pompey, Alexander and Judas Maccabeus – at the end of the play. It is a comic sketch within the play, with a Spaniard, described as the Braggart, being reduced to ridicule along with the curate and the schoolmaster. As topical entertainment, the ridiculing of pedantry and the satirizing of Spain after the defeat of the Armada are set pieces that Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience would no doubt have enjoyed.

  Spotlight

  The construction of the overall plot and themes of Love’s Labour’s Lost have serious implications that are concerned with appropriate conclusions to all things as well as the tribulations of life. The fact is that illness and death often do strike suddenly and unexpectedly. In contemporary society we try to isolate or contain this fact through material insurance and welfare systems. We know that death is unavoidable, but generally we do not see it in quite the same way that the Elizabethans did. Illness, paupers and public executions were part of the fabric of society embedded in the daily consciousness of people such as Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel and, indeed, the aristocracy and the monarchy. As much as the threat from Spain, the Elizabethans faced the continuing threat of widespread sickness, especially outbreaks of plague. They lived with poverty and disease in their streets and their homes, although Elizabeth I’s government did introduce taxes to help fund the poor.

  ‘From 1578 government orders directed that infected houses must be quarantined, and their inhabitants were supported from the poor rates and prevented from making further contacts. Plague victims died in the streets and fields, and even outside the houses of terrified countrymen who barricaded themselves in and would not give them water. Such treatment was inhumane, even though it was for the general good. The outbreak of 1625 (nine years after Shakespeare’s death) was the worst of all: more than 40,000 died in London, one in eight of the total population.’

  Briggs, J. (1997, 2nd edn: 30–31), This Stage-play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580–1625. Oxford: Oxford University Press

  ‘YOU THAT WAY, WE THIS WAY’

  Despite Elizabethan London’s familiarity with death, however, comedy is clearly a requirement. Shakespeare therefore compensates for the unsatisfactory irresolution of the lovers with a conclusion in which ‘This side is Hiems, winter; this Ver, the spring’. The songs of the two seasons are sung: the spring with the cuckoo and the winter with the owl. ‘The words of Mercury’, the messenger of the gods, we are told, ‘are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way, we this way’ (5.2.882f.).

  In the seasons there is movement between scepticism and optimism, which give way to each other. Comedy is usually associated with the spring and with ‘rebirth’, and although ‘love’s labour’ has been ‘lost’ on this occasion, there is always the promise of regeneration in the future, inscribed in that movement of the seasons. Sadly, perhaps ironically, unless it was renamed and exists as another play, Love’s Labour’s Won, recorded by Francis Meres in 1598 as a play by Shakespeare, remains ‘lost’ to us.

  The Two Gentlemen of Verona

  A serious undertone is also present in the earlier play The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

  The two gentlemen of the title are close friends Valentine and Proteus. Their names are deliberately appropriate: Valentine after St Valentine, patron saint of lovers, Proteus after the Greek god who could quickly change his shape at will, thereby associating the name with deceit. Proteus stays in Verona because of his love for Julia – the name relating to July signifying ‘passionate love’ as in, for example, Juliet – when Valentine goes off to Milan. Proteus’s father, Antonio, however, instructs his son to follow Valentine to the Duke of Milan’s court. Valentine, already there, has fallen in love with the Duke’s daughter, Silvia. The Duke wishes her to marry Thurio, whose name denotes a young shoot. So Valentine and Silvia plan to elope.

  On seeing Sylvia, Proteus immediately falls in love with her and, learning of the planned elopement, betrays his friend Valentine to the Duke. Valentine is banished into the wilderness where he becomes the leader of a band of outlaws. Julia disguises herself as a boy, Sebastian, and follows Proteus to the court of Milan, where she overhears him declare his love for Silvia. Disguised as Sebastian she serves as a page to Proteus, who sends her with a message to Silvia, who continues to reject Proteus because of her fidelity to Valentine. Silvia escapes to join Valentine in the forest. The Duke and Thurio pursue them, as do Proteus and Julia. Silvia is captured by the outlaws but rescued by Proteus, who attempts to force his love on her in the form of an attempted rape. Valentine appears and Proteus’s betrayal of his friend is discovered, but Julia reveals herself in order to facilitate a reconciliation.

  This play has something of the sonnets’ story about it. Here, the madness of love is a force working within what is otherwise a rambling comedy, renowned for a comic scene (2.3) with Proteus’s servant Launce and his dog Crab. This episode is possibly based on a comic routine reworked by Shakespeare for Will Kempe.

  Key idea

  The convoluted plot has many elements found in other, later comedies – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It and Twelfth Night – but without the clear structural discipline characterized by those works.

  ‘[At the time of the formation of the Chamberlain’s Men in the early 1590s] one of Shakespeare’s first acts was to take an old play and to construct a part in it for Kemp [sic] based on Kemp’s routines or “merriments”. Kemp’s scenes…are only loosely tied to the narrative, and give him the freedom to improvise if he chooses.’

  Wiles, D. (1987: 73), Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

  Satire

  Critics have noted that the relationship between Launce and his dog Crab – whose name is associated with sexual disease – offers a parallel perspective on issues of loyalty and disloyalty that occur in the main narrative. Satirical comedy abounds, particularly in Act 3, Scene 1 through the interaction of Launce and the clown Speed, possibly played by a boy, which offers a parody of a courtly lover’
s ‘complaint’: the praise and evaluation of a courtly lover’s mistress – who in Launce’s case is a milkmaid. Among her virtues are that she can ‘milk’, brew ‘good ale’, ‘sew’, ‘wash and scour’ and ‘spin’ and among her vices are her ‘sour breath’ and that ‘she doth talk in her sleep’. You might like to compare ‘greasy Nell’ in The Comedy of Errors who has a similar comic function. It is a satire on a literary tradition as well as on the upper classes.

  BEYOND THE CONVOLUTED CONSTRUCTION

  The Two Gentlemen of Verona is written as an entertainment and, as well as the humour, contains the famous song ‘Who is Silvia? What is she/That all our swains commend her?’ (4.2.38–52). In its variety and convolutions, some might regard it as a ‘slight play’, overworked in its desire to be successful and therefore overloaded in its comic entertainment, which jars with the violence that Proteus displays.

  Nevertheless, despite all this and its strained construction, we can see at a relatively early stage in Shakespeare’s career the presence of themes such as ‘constancy’ and the ‘violent’ male temperament that will later develop, with more careful handling, in Twelfth Night and in the satirical ‘tragedy’ Troilus and Cressida, as well as in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, and, of course, throughout the sonnets.

  ‘Shakespeare seems to have set out to write a play about friendship. The essential quality of friendship, wrote Sir Thomas Elyot, is constancy…Proteus’s inconstancy, his failure in both friendship and love…could have made him the most interesting character, and perhaps the most sympathetic…if…Shakespeare’s sympathies hadn’t moved elsewhere – to Julia, Launce and Speed. These characters have a charm, a magnetic power that Proteus lacks.

  ‘…Launce takes on himself the blame for his dog’s physiological impertinence, and asks the audience “How many masters would do this for his servant?” (4.4.28–9)…Julia, a mere woman, is able to uphold the standard of constancy to which Proteus merely gives lip service.’

  French, M. (1983: 89–90), Shakespeare’s Division of Experience. London: Abacus, Sphere Books

  The idea that Shakespeare is just a ‘natural genius’ is belied by the fact that in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost he is developing his craftsmanship. Signs of this may be more clearly seen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Comedy of Errors but we can also consider his craftsmanship in the context of two further romantic comedies, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. In these later plays we see his comic formula aligning within his narrative plots, producing complex thematic issues and requiring more sophisticated interpretation. But even so, Love’s Labour’s Lost and the earlier The Two Gentlemen of Verona demonstrate his ability to create comic entertainments for a public theatre and they can therefore be evaluated as such. We should, perhaps, follow Shakespeare’s example and not become too precious about ‘rules’ but rather admire and enjoy these comedies for what they are.

  7

  Living up to its title: As You Like It (1599–1600)

  Love’s Labour’s Lost shows the development of Shakespeare’s comic structure and formula, but As You Like It exercises it in a much tighter way. This play was written at a time of some anxiety in Shakespeare’s own personal life as well as in his career, the affairs of his company and professional practice.

  The ‘seasonal’ patterning of life and death is never far away in As You Like It (1599–1600) and Twelfth Night (1601), the plays to be considered in this and the next chapter. These plays achieve an almost aesthetic perfection without the need for neoclassical rules. In both, Shakespeare’s own formula achieves a maturity that subsequently he will deliberately frustrate or even deconstruct in plays such as Cymbeline (1609–10) – which is termed a ‘tragedy’ in the First Folio – in order to produce differing effects.

  In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Princess of France is prevented from entering Navarre’s Court because of his vow. The vow places Navarre in a dilemma, as the Princess points out:

  ’Tis deadly sin to keep that oath, my lord,

  And sin to break it.

  (2.1.105–6)

  The end of that play and the romantic comedies that were to follow can be regarded, particularly by festive and archetypal forms of criticism, as embodying the seasonal energies of spring combating the ‘death’ of winter. It is the energy of life, which is to lead ultimately to the festivity of a midsummer night, for example. These critics hold that a seasonal rhythm underpins the way in which civilization and art order their affairs. The King of Navarre and his courtiers are acting unnaturally in taking their vows of celibacy for three years. Sexuality and procreation are fundamental to new life and life itself follows a seasonal pattern.

  Pleading for her brother Claudio’s life in Measure for Measure (1604), Isabella reminds Angelo that even the killing of animals for food is determined by the requirements of the various seasons:

  …Even for our kitchens

  We kill the fowl of season: shall we serve heaven

  With less respect than we do minister

  To our gross selves?

  (2.2.85–8)

  And as we will see in As You Like It, Jaques observes a seasonal pattern of life going through seven ages, the last being ‘mere oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’ (2.7.165–6).

  Troubled times

  Recent criticism has been alert to the fact that at the time he was writing As You Like It and Twelfth Night – along with the tragedy Hamlet (1601) – Shakespeare was himself facing deaths in his family. His young son, Hamnet, twin brother of Judith, had died in August 1596. James Burbage, the father of the company and the man who had helped frame his career, had died in 1598 and Shakespeare’s own father died in 1601 (and was buried in Stratford on 8 September). It was thus a period of loss. We, of course, have to be wary of reading autobiographical detail into fictional works, and death, as noted earlier, was a more common everyday event in Elizabethan society than in our contemporary, sanitized existence. But, whatever the age, there are few deeper sorrows than the death of a child, a parent, a close friend and/or mentor, and it appears that Shakespeare experienced the loss of all three in a short space of time.

  Further, although Shakespeare appears to have been personally financially secure, his company had also been experiencing difficulties. The lease on their playhouse in the north of the city, The Theatre, expired in 1598, and a quarrel broke out between the company and the owner of the lease of the land on which it had been built. The company dismantled the timbers of The Theatre in late December 1598, as their lease allowed, and having acquired land near the sewers on the South Bank of the Thames, had transported the wood and fabric to build a new theatre, the Globe, which opened in 1599.

  Almost simultaneously with the opening came adverse publicity. This was in the form of an argument with one of their star actors, the clown Will Kempe, who acrimoniously left the company and made his departure known by dancing a jig from London to Norwich. Further, a young poet, John Marston, who had had his profane and satiric verses publicly burned in 1599, following Bishops Whitgift and Bancroft’s ban on the writing of satiric poems and epigrams, had turned to writing plays. He and some other satiric playwrights wrote for the more expensive, small private theatres at St Paul’s and Blackfriars. They satirized one another and those writing in the public theatres and also the ‘feathered’ gentry who would pay for the sixpenny seats to watch, and be seen at, the plays performed in the Globe theatre. Such gallants would be better off, possibly, paying their sixpence to go to the private theatres – although that didn’t mean they would not be satirized there – thus reducing the revenues of the Globe. But perhaps the biggest commercial threat of all was the plague. This regularly closed the theatres, leaving theatre companies without a steady income for long periods.

  Key idea

  Although Shakespeare was personally reasonably wealthy by the time he wrote As You Like It, the period between 1599 and 1604 was a critical one for the company, wh
ich faced many commercial challenges including the frequent closing of the theatres because of the plague. His plays therefore had to be as audiences ‘liked’ them. Shakespeare duly produced a series of highly successful plays including Henry V (1599), Julius Caesar (1599) (two plays that may have been the ones with which the new theatre opened), As You Like It (1599–1600), Twelfth Night (1601) and Hamlet (1600–1601).

  Sex and sexual titillation

  There is something pertinent about the title of a play such as As You Like It, but the same could be said of the subtitle of Twelfth Night, which was or, What You Will, or even the title Much Ado About Nothing; they all have a certain bawdy edge to them. What You Will has the pun on ‘will’, or ‘penis’, but Twelfth Night itself was also regarded as ‘the feast of fools’. Much Ado About Nothing has a pun on ‘no thing’ or ‘vagina’, while at the same time advertising that the play concerns itself with trivia. As You Like It, of course, refers to what audiences like, and at the end of the play Rosalind in the epilogue makes that very point:

  I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women – as I perceive by your simpering none of you hates them – that between you and the women the play may please.

  (Epilogue, 207–12)