Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction

by Michael Scott

  Although Don John in his discontentment is solely looking ‘to build mischief’ (1.3.42), he is not as developed a character as Iago; but the potential for development is present. His design against Claudio and Hero also exploits accepted social practice such as the aristocratic protocol whereby Claudio asks Don Pedro to woo Hero on his behalf. In the Elizabethan court, the monarch had a significant role to play in who married whom. In the later Jacobean court, King James involved himself even in the marriage bedroom and sometimes the wedding bed. The danger of wooing by proxy is also something that Don John can exploit, so that Claudio can be made to believe that ‘the Prince woos for himself./Friendship is constant in all other things/Save in the office and affairs of love’ (2.1.153–5).

  Key idea

  Shakespeare in this play creates dramatic tension by building up the viability of realities based on perceptions that are underscored by contemporary patriarchal political structures. It is possible that someone like Don Pedro would deceive Claudio and that Claudio would have no recourse against it. The Elizabethan audience would have understood the significance of this possibly far more readily than we do.

  DECEPTION AND CRUELTY

  In contrast to the Don John narrative, Beatrice and Benedick are endowed with a competitive dislike for each other that has a history. In the play, their mutual dislike is so fierce that the audience is able to perceive that they are, deep down, in love with each other. They are attracted by their witty antagonism. Shakespeare builds this antagonism by having other characters play tricks on them in order to bring them together. The result is that the audience is presented with some hilariously comic scenes, in which protestations of love, one for the other, are falsely reported but that bring them actually into an admission of their love for each other, although initially they do not come to this realization simultaneously. This deception allows for comedy but it is balanced by a much more sinister deception in which one of the perpetrators, Hero, is herself unwittingly subjected to a cruel and potentially deadly falsehood.

  Don John instigates the perception that Hero is unfaithful and unchaste even before marriage. A visual proof is given that she has been with another man the night before her wedding with Claudio. The audience knows that it was not Hero but Margaret, with Borachio, two ‘attendants’ on those of a higher social standing who are part of a charade, the full significance of which is unknown. Moral perplexities abound in the course of exposure of this deliberate distraction. But the focus is on the ‘deceit’ itself. What is perceived to be reality is not necessarily the case in human affairs. Your senses can be tricked and manipulated into making false judgements. This makes for a good drama and, in comedy, one that can end in narrative harmony.

  Yet the conclusion is not all that there is to a play. Claudio’s public humiliation of Hero, in the church and at the altar, is violently extreme, exposing both masculine cruelty and the threat it poses to the sacrament of marriage. Take this into other, later plays such as Othello and such cruelty will lead to Desdemona’s death or, in The Winter’s Tale, it will cause the death of the child prince Mamillius, leading to penance and years of heartache before forgiveness and reconciliation. As we will see in Measure for Measure, hypocritical deception challenges the very stability of the structure of comedy. In Much Ado About Nothing, however, the deception is revealed, allowing for an alternative reading of the shocked Hero’s blushes.

  ‘KILL CLAUDIO!’

  The resolution of the problem is not forthcoming before a twist in the narrative takes place. This twist takes the emphasis away from the cruelty displayed at the altar by Claudio and Don Pedro. It also distracts the audience from that cruelty, allowing them to accept that forgiveness may be possible within the framework of the fiction. So what is it that Shakespeare introduces to allow the comedy to remain a comedy?

  With the love of Benedick and Beatrice becoming a revelation to each other, Beatrice, out of loyalty to the wronged Hero, challenges Benedick to prove his love. She demands that he should ‘Kill Claudio!’ (4.1.287). The woman here says to the man, ‘Kill your best friend for the love of me, because I am enraged at the treatment of my dearest cousin and friend. Not to do so means that you are not in love with me.’ There is no deception here. Beatrice is characterized as being in earnest, and for the moment it threatens to take the play into another realm – that of revenge.

  It is interesting to watch the 2010 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre production, widely available, because when Beatrice makes her demand, the audience laughs at Benedick’s response but then quietens as she expands upon it and Benedick finally agrees to the challenge.

  Spotlight

  The play here takes an unexpected turn; the seriousness beneath the comedy has started to dominate and as an audience we are suddenly not sure of our bearings. Is this Eve asking Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, or Lady Macbeth goading Macbeth to kill King Duncan? The request is contrary to comic expectations. With Don John’s deceit known to the audience, we are confident that it will be exposed eventually, but this scene threatens something different. Structurally, it relieves the concerns the audience might have about the injustice of Hero’s condemnation, but this still leaves unresolved the behaviour of Claudio.

  The truth of the deception rests with the linguistically eccentric ‘Watch’, Dogberry. Once Don John’s evil deed is revealed, Beatrice’s injunction for Benedick to kill his friend Claudio falls away, but Claudio must now learn ‘trust’ by accepting whoever Leonato prescribes for him to marry. The partner is, of course, Hero, who only died ‘whilst her slander lived’. The escaped Don John is recaptured, cruelties are forgotten and attention can finally be turned to uniting Beatrice and Benedick, so that all can end happily. Beatrice’s loquacity is silenced – usually in performance by a kiss from Benedick, but in the 1600 quarto by the injunction from Leonato: ‘Peace, I will stop your mouth.’ For all her female feistiness, Beatrice must agree to be the quiet wife, the silent woman of Elizabethan patriarchal fantasy.

  This is confident, professional, masterly writing by Shakespeare who here is moving away from his own earlier formula of comedy and demonstrating the courage of measured experimentation in making a play work. He manipulates the audience’s reaction and emotion as its perceptions, as well as those of the characters, are challenged through the narrative process.

  The Taming of the Shrew

  In a post-feminist world, The Taming of the Shrew might be seen as a problematic play in the way that Kate, the so-called ‘shrew’, is treated by society, and by Petruchio in particular. But some feminists have seen the play as more of an exposure of a variety of issues and thereby a play of commitment, cleverly developed by Shakespeare.

  ‘The Taming of the Shrew concludes with a harmonious synthesis of unabused masculine and inlaw feminine principles, but it celebrates the outlaw aspect, defiance and rebellion.’

  French, M. (1992: 85), Shakespeare’s Division of Experience. London: Abacus

  THE SHREW AND A SHREW

  Ideas do not just come from a single mind – even Montaigne’s or Shakespeare’s – but emerge from everything that is circulating within society itself. Plays can feed off one another. It is possible that The Taming of the Shrew may have grown out of an earlier play, The Taming of a Shrew. This requires some consideration, especially as the anonymous A Shrew provides a framing device that is only partially used in Shakespeare’s play. A Shrew’s structure is dependent upon Christopher Sly’s dream that he awakes from at the end of the play and confesses that he has had ‘The bravest dream tonight, that ever thou/Hardest in all thy life…’

  Shakespeare may or may not have been involved in some way in the creation of The Taming of a Shrew. Scholars debate that at length. But the fact remains that in his The Taming of the Shrew, although the opening frame portrays Sly in a drunken stupor transformed into a ‘Lord’ and, subsequently watching a play being presented, the drama ends without Shakespeare closing the frame; Sly seems to be forgotten. Some modern directors r
esort to The Taming of a Shrew’s ending in order to round off Shakespeare’s play in production, while other directors are content with the ending of the play as it was published in the 1623 Folio, without a closing frame.

  THE INITIAL ‘PROBLEM’

  The following discussion focuses on the Shakespearean version. Underlying the play is the traditional structure of romantic comedy: a problem, a geographical relocation, a discovery, a celebration. The nature of the initial problem, however, is what may attract your interest. Bianca, ‘all white’ as her name perhaps ironically implies, in the end is the cause of her husband Lucentio losing a wager made between him and Kate’s husband Petruchio concerning which of their wives is more ‘obedient’. Petruchio’s departing comment to Lucentio rubs in the loser’s failure: ‘’Twas I won the wager, though you hit the white,/And being a winner, God give you good night!’ (5.2.187–8). The idea of this wager brings us back to the problem at the beginning of the play where we find that, until a husband can be found for Baptista Minola’s shrewish elder daughter, Katherina, known as Kate, the father will not allow his younger daughter, Bianca, who guards carefully her own shrewishness, to marry.

  To solve the problem, it appears that a larger force than Baptista – or any eligible man in Padua – has to be found: a husband who can ‘tame’ Kate. The apparently eccentric Petruchio from Verona is that force. His successful courtship of Kate, however idiosyncratic or cruel, solves the Paduan’s problem. But what is the cost? At the end of the play, Kate and Petruchio are the ones who triumph; Bianca, Baptista’s favourite, and Lucentio are the ones humiliated. Kate may have been tamed but in being so grows stronger in her marriage than the Paduans thought possible. They wager on it and lose but the question arises over the manner in which this is done. Petruchio, in his eccentricity and his studied poverty, exercises cruelty over Kate by acting as a mirror image of her own shrewishness. He does this in an attempt to force her to channel her frustrations and to accept her role in the patriarchal society against whose values she rebels. He demands that she behaves in accordance with the requirements of a reality that he creates and that he then invites her to share. She does so because it is the only way in this male-dominated society that she can survive.

  In putting it this way, I wonder if you might see within it a general ethical problem in which people, or indeed nations, deal with each other. Bringing a larger force than yourself to help solve a problem can leave you without control over the process and, indeed, the consequences of your decisions.

  Some critics, rather than considering social, even political, issues, have tended to debate whether Kate is subdued at the end of the play. Has she succumbed to Petruchio’s brainwashing or has she found a more subtle way to undermine his authority? The absence of the ending present in the anonymous play suggests that what happens is more than a wishful male fantasy: that tension between husband and wife will always be an issue, and each is charged with the task of working out the relationship to their own advantage. Shakespeare, wisely perhaps, does not come to a firm conclusion on this matter.

  MOON, OR SUN, OR WHAT YOU PLEASE

  A key scene is Act 4, Scene 5, when Petruchio decides to call the sun the moon. He is imposing an alternative name on the sun and thereby forcing upon Kate, through language, an alternative universe. Once Kate has accepted that in Petruchio’s use of language the sun can be called the moon and the moon the sun, and that if she doesn’t accede she will be penalized, then she is seen, superficially at least, to accept the alternative world that Petruchio forces upon her. This is an alternative ‘reality’ that is more extreme even than the one from which she has come. They meet someone on the road as they return to Padua, which allows the question of the perception of reality to be foregrounded. Is the person they meet a beautiful young woman or an old man? How do you differentiate between the different elements of reality, and how do you represent reality?

  Spotlight

  In this scene Shakespeare is asking about the relationship between words and actuality. Are words the instruments of will, and is dominant will determined in the end by those with most power, by a tyrannical individual, or more subtly? And is that power something that can be imposed upon one human being by another, violently, or does power work through persuasion and agreement between members of a society? In a complex social organization, how can an individual survive or even overcome the obstacles placed in their way? If the play asks such questions, we may have to look beyond the plot of the play itself to what it signifies, almost in the manner of a humanist parable.

  In her own interest and for her own preservation, Kate is forced to acquiesce, accepting the new reality of Petruchio’s alternative world. She has, in other words, been ‘tamed’, or at least gives him the impression that she has:

  Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,

  And be it moon, or sun, or what you please.

  And if you please to call it a rush-candle,

  Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.

  (4.5.12–15)

  Her answer can be read ambivalently: call it what you want, even a ‘rush-candle’ if you like: whatever, it doesn’t matter what I say as long as I get what I want. This is one possible interpretation. The question remains about the extent to which she has acquiesced in the process and found a way to neutralize the force of Petruchio’s power.

  Key idea

  At the opening of the story, Petruchio and Kate had both been portrayed as rebels in their different attitudes to the prevailing social order, Kate behaving in an uncooperative manner (‘shrewishly’) and Petruchio willing to violate social decorum. But by the end they appear to be in harmony with each other, to such an extent that they triumph, exposing the hollowness of their fellow characters’ relationships. In fact, at the end of the play, it is Bianca and the newly married Widow who display, from within the institution of marriage, the characteristics of shrewishness about which, at the beginning, the dominant order had disapproved.

  UNCERTAINTY IN THE DETERMINING OF SOCIAL VALUES

  In this early play, Shakespeare is posing, through its structure and narrative, questions concerning the constructions of reality that depend on who gains power. As we will see, this is to become a significant area of exploration in Shakespeare’s early history plays, which he was writing possibly at around the same time. The question here isn’t so much ‘What if?’ as ‘How does?’ in the sense of how does power operate, construct, develop or destroy particular conceptions of reality.

  In this play Shakespeare explores the question by deploying a ‘Punch and Judy’ type of humour, and some productions (for example Jonathan Miller’s for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987) have set it as a commedia dell’arte entertainment – commedia dell’arte being an Italian Renaissance form of stereotypical comic drama from which the Punch and Judy routine developed.

  In the history plays, as we will see, Shakespeare later uses the comic character Falstaff, and his tavern companions, to expose the issue of the uncertainty in the determination of social values. The action of those plays similarly displays the uncertainty of moral values, which are challenged and/or constructed both by those in power or those seeking power.

  ‘The Taming of the Shrew cannot in the twenty-first century be looked on as a domestic, marital comedy, with an erring wife rightly and meekly subjecting herself to the will of her husband, wrapped up in comedy and fun as in the Burton and Taylor film. It has to be viewed as the ruthless subduing of a woman by a man in a violent excess of male savagery, couched in the form of a class wish-fulfilment dream of revenge.’

  Bogdanov, M. (2013: 173), Shakespeare: The Director’s Cut. Edinburgh: Capercaillie Books

  You may, of course, agree with Michael Bogdanov, who directed The Taming of the Shrew for the RSC in 1978, and decide that The Taming of the Shrew asks the ‘How does?’ question in a way that is socially unacceptable today, but there may be a danger that in doing so the critical focus is narrowed. But is that a good or a bad thi
ng? Shakespeare doesn’t answer the questions he raises in Much Ado About Nothing or in The Taming of the Shrew. Both these plays are sufficiently open-ended to suggest that his conclusions are provisional and leave answers for us to consider and debate.

  11

  The Merchant of Venice (1596–8)

  Since the Jewish Holocaust of the Second World War, The Merchant of Venice has provoked much debate about how it can be read or performed without causing unease. This is because it contains what some regard as overt anti-Semitism. The question many critics ask is whether in this play Shakespeare is confronting or pandering to the anti-Semitic prejudices of his audience or readers, both historical and contemporary.

  While this complex play is often considered controversial because of its treatment of the Jew, Christians do not entirely escape without blame. The play has three interwoven themes, each of which depends on the structure for comedy that Shakespeare had developed.

  Confronting or pandering to anti-Semitic prejudices?

  Much has been written on the historical existence of Jews in Elizabethan London and reference is frequently made to the execution in 1594 of Dr Roderigo Lopez, Elizabeth I’s Portuguese physician, who was thought to have been a Jew, and who was accused of trying to murder her. Lopez’s trial and execution stoked a degree of anti-Semitism. Julia Briggs points to the fact that Jews in London, like Roman Catholics, could not profess their faith openly and notes that many of them were European ‘converts’, or converses, who had come from Spain.