by Judy Jones
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love’s delight
Outwatched with me the envious night—
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery, …
Shelley had the more interesting—and marginally longer—life. Born an aristocrat (whereas Keats’ father owned a livery stable), he came to be regarded as an atheist, a revolutionary, and an immoralist; he was, in addition, married to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of the radical social philosopher William Godwin and author of Frankenstein, with whose half-sister Byron would later have a much-remarked-on affair. Keats didn’t hang out with Shelley and Byron, was preoccupied with the financial and medical problems of his brothers, and had a traumatic relationship with a girl named Fanny Brawne. Both Keats and Shelley died miserably, Keats in Rome in 1821 from tuberculosis, Shelley off the Italian coast in 1822 when his boat was swamped in a squall. Keats was twenty-six, Shelley thirty.
Triple Play
You say the dishes are done, the kids are in bed, and the DVD player is broken? Good: This is your opportunity to take a few minutes and bone up on literary devices. And we don’t mean foreshadowing and onomatopoeia. They’re for high-school sophomores. If you want to sound like an adult, it’s wit, irony, and ambiguity you’ve got to be able to field—and every so often manifest. But what, exactly, are they? We don’t blame you for not being sure; each is booby-trapped in some way. The first has a complicated history, the second comes in too many shapes and sizes, and the third leaves you wondering whether it’s good or bad. To, er, wit: WIT
At its best, it’s—as you’ve doubtless heard—like a rapier: fast, clean, intensely civilized. And it’s immediately recognizable: Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, and Tom Stoppard are witty; Groucho Marx is funny, even trenchant, but too interested in being uncivilized to be witty; nor is David Letterman (too scattershot, too sloppy). Not that wit is necessarily grand or preening: The Simpsons provides a pretty fair version of it.
But that’s lately. In past centuries, the word was both more incendiary and more central, and how you used it revealed which side of the politico-literary fence you were on. From its original Anglo-Saxon sense of “mind, reason, intelligence,” it had come by Elizabethan times to be used of anything clever or ingenious, especially if it was also a little bizarre, paradoxical, or farfetched. The Metaphysical poetry of John Donne in which, as Dr. Johnson noted, “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” was the height of wit in this sense—which was soon being equated with the spirit of poetry itself. So far, so good.
Oscar Wilde
Enter the Augustans of the eighteenth century, who, enamored of the classical proportions and strictures of ancient Rome, had other plans for the word, insisting that, properly used, wit tended not toward bizarrerie but, rather, eloquence and precision. Alexander Pope used the word at least forty-six times in his Essay on Criticism, most memorably in the lines “True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”; John Dryden said, among other things, that wit, “like a nimble spaniel, beats o’er and ranges thro’ the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after.” Their point: that everybody should stop associating wit with the Meta-physicals (whom the Augustans loathed, and who wouldn’t be reconstructed until T S. Eliot spoke up for them a couple of centuries later) and start associating it with them.
The nineteenth century didn’t care much for the word “wit” (preferring, among others, imagination) and allowed it to languish, to the point that it was soon synonymous with mere levity; Matthew Arnold, for instance, struck Chaucer—not to mention Pope—from the list of great poets because he was “witty”: He lacked high seriousness. Now the word, like the Metaphysicals—not to mention Pope—has achieved respectability once more: It’s not that high seriousness is out (like heavy meals), just that getting it said fast, and maybe even piquantly, is, like the perfect sorbet or the perfect chèvre salad, very much in. IRONY
Socrates
Unlike wit, its meaning, or rather bundle of meanings, has held fairly steady over time: Always it’s implied that there are two sets of listeners keyed in to the same statement, story, or piece of information, and that one of them gets it—sees it for what it is, in all its poignancy or complexity or awful-ness—and the other one doesn’t. If you’re in the former set, congratulations: The ability to recognize irony, especially in writing (where there are no facial expressions or vocal inflections to help it, and you, along), has for centuries been regarded as one of the surest tests of intelligence and sophistication.
The word derives from eiron, one of the basic character types in Greek drama, the trickster who pretends he’s ignorant, thereby provoking somebody else to reveal his most ludicrous side. Not that this technique was confined to the stage: Socrates, for instance, acted the part of the eiron when he asked those apparently pointless, naïve questions of his students, only to demolish the kids in the end. Thus was born Socratic irony, where those who are in on the game smile knowingly as their master’s feigned ignorance routs dogma, superstition, and/or popular wisdom.
More common is dramatic irony, also called tragic irony, where the audience knows something—or many things—the characters on stage don’t, and consequently can read doom into all the innocent, trivial remarks they make. You know: Oedipus vows revenge on the murderer of his father, and all of us (whether because we’re already familiar with the tale, as even children were in ancient Greece, or whether because the omniscient chorus spilled the beans while Oedipus was out of earshot) gasp.
Verbal irony, by contrast, is no more complicated than calling a three-hundred-pound linebacker Tiny, or saying “Brutus is an honorable man” when what you really mean is that he’s a junkyard dog. It is, though, more complicated than sarcasm, which is almost always heavy-handed and caustic (and spoken), and it can sometimes leave you wondering what, exactly, the intended meaning is. It can also be extremely moving, as when Mercutio says, of his death wound in Romeo and Juliet, “No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.”
For the graduate student: You’ll also want to take note of cosmic irony, where God mocks, thwarts, or sports with us mere-mortal types; the classic example here is the last sentence of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles: “The President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.” And of romantic irony, especially prominent—as the name suggests—in the early nineteenth century, in which the author reveals that his characters are just fictions, after all, being created and manipulated by him, as in Byron’s long satiric poem “Don Juan” (pronounced, just this once, “JOO-en”).
And everybody: Given that you’ve bothered to read (and we to write) all of the above, promise you’ll stop saying, “It’s ironic,” when all you mean, really, is that it’s a little odd. AMBIGUITY
You’re right to be suspicious of it in a contract, even in a conversation. But ambiguity—from the Latin ambi-, “both,” plus agere, “drive”—is, it turns out, not such a bad thing in literature, especially poetry, where nobody has to choose between meanings the way he might have to in a courtroom or on a street corner. Classic example: in Shakespeare, Hotspur’s drumming up antagonism to Henry IV by saying, “We must have bloody noses and crack’d crowns / And pass them current too”—where the crowns in question are first of all coins, second heads, and third what kings wear, and where a single word thus manages to hint at the action, and the most important theme, of the play.
William Empson
The final authority on ambiguity, by the way, is William Empson
, the British literary critic who wrote, in 1930, Seven Types of Ambiguity, still beloved of English professors and comp-lit grad students, where he defined “ambiguity” as “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.” The seven types, for the record, range from seemingly unconnected meanings contained in a single word, to alternative meanings that together clarify an author’s state of mind, to a statement that’s so obviously loopy that the reader has no choice but to invent his own meaning.
Empson goes on and on about all this, but all you have to worry about remembering is that, even in poetry, ambiguity can be a good thing (involving, in Empson’s words, “intricacy, delicacy, or compression of thought”) or a bad one (reflective of “weakness or thinness of thought”). That, and not using “ambiguous” when what you really mean is “ambivalent”—when you mean somebody is feeling conflicted about something, is of two minds about it: Language exhibits ambiguity; people feel ambivalence.
It’s not just that we don’t know much about Shakespeare the man; it’s not just that what he wrote presents so many obstacles (the overwhelming textual complexities, the outmoded theatrical conventions, the fact that the heroes have all been played by Richard Burton); it’s that there’s so much riding on having a meaningful relationship with him. Sorry, we can’t do much more than make the introductions; what the two of you do in the clinches is your problem.
In the meantime, whether things ultimately work out for you or not, you still ought to know what the plays are all about. Like everyone else, we’ve divided them up into four categories. Also, we’ve asked Henry Popkin, a Shakespeare-scholar neighbor of ours, for some deep background on one play from each category, plus a once-over of the rest. Still don’t know what to make of the whole business? Take a look at what some other literary titans have had to say about Shakespeare over the years.
As to who it is, precisely, that you’re spending time with here, well, that’s been the source of endless gossip. Skeptics have ascribed authorship of Shakespeare’s plays to everyone from Francis Bacon and the seventeenth Earl of Oxford to an Arab sheik named Zubair. THE HISTORIES
Shakespeare’s history plays—there are ten of them—tell the story of England from the end of the fourteenth century to the reign of Henry VIII, father of Elizabeth, the woman who gave us the adjective “Elizabethan.” (One, about Bad King John, is set roughly two centuries earlier than the rest.) It’s hard to find a contemporary analogue to what Shakespeare was doing in his histories, obsessed as they are with civil strife and rebellion, with “order and degree.” The historical novel comes to mind, of course. But in terms of the popularity these plays enjoyed, the way they came out in installments, and the extent to which they focused on certain rich, ingrown, and acrimonious families, it’s probably The Sopranos we really should be talking about.
Close-up: Henry IV, Part I
Can honour set to a leg? No: Or an arm? No: Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will [it] not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore, I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon—and so ends my catechism.
Act 5, scene 1
A Scene from Henry IV, Part I
A play that got away from its author. While surely intended to focus on Hal, the future Henry V, as the embodiment of the perfect prince, a model of courage, common sense, and fidelity to his father, King Henry IV, it winds up lingering most fondly over— and etching most sharply—the volatile young rebel Hotspur and the Rabelaisian old reprobate Falstaff Granted, the former, full of foolhardiness and childish resentments, and the latter, with his steadfast refusal to take anything to heart beyond simple self-preservation, could not have governed England (at least not an England we could bear living in), but we’d rather share a pot of ale (or a container of yogurt) with either than with Shakespeare’s coldblooded paragon.
The first half of the play enforces the contrasts by cutting back and forth between the conspiracy that Hotspur, his father, and his uncle—the redoubtable Percy family, who had helped Henry IV depose Richard II and now think themselves unfairly ignored—lead against the King, and the highway robbery being planned by Falstaff Hal eventually scotches both schemes, thwarting Falstaff’s plan to rob the King’s treasury at Gadshill and Hotspur’s plan to rob him of his realm at Shrewsbury. The dual successes may make a man of Hal, but they don’t make him any more endearing.
The genius of the play lies in its integration of something like realistic comedy into a chronicle-play format and in its depiction of Falstaff—equal parts wit and fool, philosopher and con man, hypocrite and debunker. In fact, Falstaff was such a favorite of Elizabethan audiences that he was brought back in both Henry IV, Part II and The Merry Wives of Windsor (and his death reported at the beginning of Henry V). Critics disagree on whether Falstaff is a coward or not, and on whether he really expects his lies to be believed, but the majority of them maintain not only that he is the most superbly rendered comic figure in all of Shakespeare, but that, in six centuries of English literature, only Chaucer’s Wife of Bath gets off anywhere near the same number of good lines.
The Other Histories
Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III—Early Shakespeare, set against a background of England’s sixty-three-year Wars of the Roses, between the House of Lancaster and that of York, and guaranteed to induce such objections on the part of the uninitiated as: What’s the plot? Who’s the hero? Isn’t there too much going on? And how can you do that to Joan of Arc? The three-part sequence examines the problems created by a king who is weak and who has only a dubious title to his throne. Shakespeare would deal more neatly with the same issues a few years later, with Richard II, his study in weak character, and Henry IV, his study in dubious title.
Richard III—You may want to think of it as Henry VI, Part IV No shades of gray here: Richard is totally evil. He’s also totally entertaining, and ascends to the throne by slaughtering a clutch of its legitimate heirs. Eventually he’s over-thrown—by a prince not in the least evil and much less entertaining, but whose dynastic claims are impeccable, whose marriage ends the Wars of the Roses, and whose granddaughter will turn out to be Elizabeth I. The best scenes: Richard’s wooing of the Lady Anne and the downfall of the Duke of Buckingham, his early supporter. The most famous lines: “A horse! a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” and “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by the sun of York.”
I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.
Ben Jonson
King John—He of the Magna Carta, which means another history with, instead of a royal hero, a royal villain. But not without a hero altogether: That’s the Bastard Faulconbridge, son of Richard the Lion-Hearted. More rhetoric here than poetry, it’s often said, specifically much noodling about such contemporary political issues as the rights and duties of kings, the wisdom of inheritance by primogeniture, and the relation of secular rulers to spiritual ones.
Richard II—Richard loves to play at being king and gets off some rather good poetry on the subject, but he is the victim of indecision, effeminacy, and bad advisors, and he is eventually overthrown by the hard, efficient Bolingbroke, who’ll take the throne as Henry IV. The first really developed “tragedy of character” in the English drama—and the first of the four parts of Shakespeare’s second, or mature, history cycle, to be followed by the two halves of Henry IV and Henry V. Most famous speech, hands down: “This happy breed of men, this little world, / This precious stone set in the silver sea.” Runnerup: “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground, / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”
Henry IV
, Part II—In which Prince Hal is required to reject the irrepressible Falstaff for the sake of higher duty: “Reply not to me with a fool-born jest: / Presume not that I am the thing I was.” Comedy looms larger here than history, though, and Falstaff (especially with Hotspur gone) larger than any other three characters put together. Perhaps to make Hal look better, the play also gives us a really shameless opportunist in the person of his brother John.
Henry V—Prince Hal, now a hero-king, conquers France. His old drinking buddies get the worst of it again, being unfavorably contrasted with a cross-section of doughty British soldiers (reminiscent of the bomber-crew movies of World War II, with Wales and Scotland corresponding roughly to Brooklyn and Chicago). The two most famous lines: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” and “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”
Shakespeare, (whom you and ev’ry Play-house bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, wing’d his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despight.
Alexander Pope
