An Incomplete Education

by Judy Jones

  “Romances” is what scholars call the four comedies that Shakespeare wrote after his prosperous company took over the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 and began requiring texts different from those he had been supplying earlier. More wistful, more melancholy, and more atmospheric than anything that had preceded them, the Blackfriars plays were staged at night in a closed, artificially lit environment, and cost considerably more money. Their wealthier, better-educated audience expected emotional, heart-wrenching poetry, extravagant incident, extended suffering, and perilous escapes—then a happy ending.

  Close-up: The Tempest

  Scene from The Tempest, rendered by Henry Fuseli

  … These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air;

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.

  Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled.

  Be not disturbed with my infirmity.

  If you be pleased, retire into my cell

  And there repose….

  Act 4, scene 1

  The Tempest is the last play wholly written by Shakespeare. As a result, generations of readers have viewed it as the culmination of his vision, identifying Prospero, the magician and duke-in-exile, who now presides over a desert island, with the playwright, and the play itself with Shakespeare’s farewell to his art and subsequent retirement to Stratford. This may or may not have been conscious on Shakespeare’s part, but certainly The Tempest represents a heartfelt return to naïveté after the complexity and weight of the great tragedies.

  Here’s the plot: Prospero seizes an opportunity to get back at his usurping brother and restore himself as Duke of Milan. He creates a storm and shipwreck, netting not only the brother, but also a fit suitor for his daughter, Miranda; the suitor’s father, the King of Naples; the suitor’s father’s brother, likewise treacherous; and all their retainers. Conspiracies ensue, some “upstairs,” some “downstairs,” but Prospero’s magic is sufficient to vanquish all comers. Ultimately The Tempest, like all the romances, is a play of reconciliation, and Prospero turns benign and forgiving. He arranges a marriage that unites two previously hostile families—and presents a masque that elegantly celebrates that marriage. (Appropriately, the play helped to celebrate the betrothal of King James’ daughter, Elizabeth.)

  When Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, he had been reading travelers’ tales and was mindful of a recent shipwreck that had taken place off Bermuda. He must also have been thinking about the practical effects of such travelers’ activities; accordingly, The Tempest is in some respects a parable of colonialism. In the two creatures who had greeted Prospero after his own shipwreck years earlier (and who then became his servants), we have the perfect image of the good and the bad native: Ariel cooperates and serves his master by helping to oppress the rest of the population, while the bestial Caliban (a near anagram for “cannibal”) instigates the archetypal colonialist nightmare by trying to rape Miranda. All of which raises larger issues, i.e.: Is nature superior to civilization and, by extension, to art? And in which state—nature or civilization—is man nobler?

  The fact is, we are growing out of Shakespeare. Byron declined to put up with his reputation at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and now, at the beginning of the twentieth, he is nothing but a household pet. His characters still live; his word pictures of woodland and wayside still give us a Bank-holiday breath of country air; his verse still charms us; his sublimities still stir us; the commonplaces and trumperies of the wisdom which age and experience bring to all the rest of us are still expressed by him better than by anybody else; but we have nothing to hope from him, and nothing to learn from him—not even how to write plays, though he does that so much better than most modern dramatists.

  George Bernard Shaw

  The Other Romances

  Pericles—Apparently an old play partially rewritten by Shakespeare, and the first of the romances, complete with wonderful adventures in strange places, long separations, deaths not real but feared, etc., etc. Consider Marina, unpredictably saved from a murderer by pirates, sold by her rescuers to a brothel, and so resolute in her purity that she’s able to convert the brothel’s patrons. Realism it’s not, but it has a certain archaic charm.

  Cymbeline—An odd concoction, mingling Celtic Britain and ancient Rome, with a plot that is no more than a machine for producing sensations, overflowing with abductions, disguises, magic potions, and mistaken identities. The central story pits Princess Imogen, daughter of King Cymbeline of Britain, against the new queen, her stepmother, who’s determined that Imogen marry her cloddish son Cloten. Still to come: Imogen’s “seduction” by Iachimo, a kind of cut-rate Iago; her encounter with her two long-lost brothers; her mistaking Cloten’s headless body for that of her true husband, Posthumus; and the dream sequence, featuring a personal appearance by Jupiter.

  A Winter’s Tale—The fact that a character exits “pursued by a bear” is no more outrageous than King Leontes’ sudden, entirely unmotivated jealousy of his wife, Hermione, or her decision to teach him a lesson by turning into a statue for sixteen years. Then there’s the matter of Bohemia, notoriously landlocked, having been issued a seacoast. In other words, the events of the play are patently fantastical, contributing to an atmosphere that is part fairy tale and part allegory, in which we travel from court to countryside, from winter to summer, and from death to life.

  I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovaryisme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.

  T S. Eliot

  When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder

  That such trivial people should muse and thunder

  In such lovely language.

  D. H. Lawrence FIVE DEFINITIONS (OUT OF FIVE THOUSAND OR SO) THAT MIGHT MAKE THE GOING A LITTLE EASIER

  DIE—Can mean “to come in lovemaking: to have an orgasm.” This is what Benedick means in Much Ado About Nothing when he says, “I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes.” Heady knowledge, but use it sparingly: “Die” usually means “to die.”

  FOOL—Often a term of endearment, as it is at the end of King Lear when Lear says, “My poor fool is dead.” He means Cordelia, not the Fool, whose absence from the latter part of the play nobody ever bothers to explain.

  HORNS—The adornment and symbol of the cheated-on husband, the cuckold. Alluded to when Othello says, “I have a pain upon my forehead here.” More often, the basis of the favorite family of jokes among the Elizabethans, who seemed to think any reference to horns was in and of itself uproarious.

  HUMOUR—Mood, idiosyncrasy, temperament. Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream means the first when he says, “Yet my chief humour is for a tyrant.” (He likes to play tyrants.) Never as in our “sense of humor.” But in making “humour” such a prominent word in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare was probably giving a nod to Ben Jon-son, who in such plays as Every Man in His Humour, popularized a more formal concept of the “four humours”: When phlegm, or blood, or yellow bile, or black bile is dominant in somebody, he is rendered phlegmatic, or sanguine, or choleric, or melancholic, rather than “good-humoured,” i.e., emotionally balanced.

  QUICK—In addition to the meaning we’re most familiar with (“acting speedily”), can mean “vital, vigorous, full of energy”; “sharp, piercing”; or—here’s the important one— “living, endowed with life,” and, by extension, “pregnant.” Hence a phrase like “the quick and the dead” and a line like, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, “The poor wench is cast aw
ay; she’s quick; the child brags in her belly already.”

  THE SECOND MOST FAMOUS ENGLISH PLAYWRIGHT

  That would be George Bernard Shaw, who lived about three hundred years after Shakespeare and who beats out Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, William Congreve, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Oscar Wilde for the slot. True, he’s not really English, but Anglo-Irish. And, unlike Shakespeare, he’s not just a dramatist (or, more precisely, a dramatist with a taste for sonnet sequences). He’s an insatiable critic, a prolific letter writer, and an indefatigable social reformer. A know-it-all with a sense of humor, Shaw took it upon himself to lecture (and upbraid) his era on his era, and went on doing so from the late nineteenth century to his death in 1950.

  The plays are of varying degrees of heaviness, acerbity, and outrage, with varying ratios of polemic to farce. Even a relatively benign one like Pygmalion (the basis for My Fair Lady) manages to send up the class structure, relations between the sexes, and the idea of education. In the early Widowers’ Houses and Mrs. Warrens Profession, Shaw skewers slum landlordism and prostitution, respectively; in Major Barbara, soup-kitchen evangelism; in Heartbreak House, the human species and civilization in general. Shaw’s masterpiece (or, as his critics would have it, his attempt at a great play): Saint Joan, in which the famous martyr is revealed as a model of clear-eyed common sense.

  In all the plays, Shaw’s intention is to shake his audience’s complacency, challenge its hypocrisy, and demonstrate how anybody who isn’t part of the solution is de facto part of the problem. And neither the problem nor the solution is, in Shaw’s hands, what you may have begun by thinking it was. Thus, he writes in a preface, Mrs. Warrens Profession was written “to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female depravity or male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together.”

  Three cautions when approaching Shaw: Wit is one of his hallmarks, but it’s in the service of intellect rather than simple entertainment; don’t expect a cascade of Oscar Wilde–style epigrams and absurdities from him. Then: It’s easier to read Shaw than to see it performed; in fact, with their explicit and endless stage descriptions, his plays can verge on novels, and a lot of the arguments repay (and require) study. Finally: Remember the adjective form of Shaw’s name— “Shavian,” with a long a.

  Let’s Pause for a Moment

  and Consider Boswell’s

  Life of Johnson

  He received me very courteously; but it must be confessed that his apartment, and furniture, and morning dress, were sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled un-powdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirtneck and knees of his breeches were loose; his black worsted stockings ill drawn up; and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly particulars were forgotten the moment that he began to talk.

  Published in 1791, James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. is still the greatest biography in the English language and a gold mine of conspicuous erudition. In fact, in the days, not so very long ago, when people aspired to intellectual superiority the way they currently yearn for vast real estate holdings, the ability to quote Boswell quoting Johnson constituted the basic literacy test in some (admittedly preposterous) social circles.

  Don’t look for a story line; just think of the book as a talk show with a particularly entertaining guest and an interviewer who knows enough to shut up and listen. And don’t let the scholarly reputation scare you off; Johnson the eighteenth-century savant seemed awesome even to his contemporaries, but making him accessible was Boswell’s mission in life.

  Essentially a quick succession of close-ups of Johnson holding forth, the biography is three-dimensional and so fast-paced that you may feel like you’re being whisked from one dinner party to another without ever having time for a cigar. Before the evening’s over, however, Johnson will have come alive, and, although none of his aphorisms will help you get rid of cellulite or make a killing in corn futures, you’ll probably find both his unshakable moral certitude and his way with words fortifying.

  Keep in mind that Johnson was not only a great conversationalist but the author of the Dictionary of the English Language—which he wrote, by himself, over the course of eight years, after reading every notable piece of English literature from Shakespeare’s time to his own day and jotting down all the words he thought needed explaining—and a famous “Preface to Shakespeare,” among a great many other works. Also that Boswell was no ordinary biographer but a man obsessed with his subject, a writer whose prodigious memory, application, and style revolutionized the genre.

  Finally, you might want to memorize a few bits of Johnsonese yourself, just in case intellectual snobbism comes into vogue again during your lifetime. Here are some good ones to toss off in the drawing room, bearing in mind, of course that your timing, as well as your delivery, must be impeccable:

  If he does really think that there is no distinction between vice and virtue, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

  Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

  A man of genius has seldom been ruined but by himself.

  That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

  No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

  A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.

  Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

  Were it not for imagination, sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as a duchess.

  Worth seeing? Yes, but not worth going to see.

  He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others.

  I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

  It is better to live rich, than to die rich.

  A Bedside Companion to the Nineteenth-Century English Novel

  In general, English novels of the nineteenth century are a lot easier to read than, say, Faulkner; they don’t ask much more of you than sheer stick-to-itiveness. But there is the problem of understanding what all those characters are traipsing across, riding in, and being offered a glass of. Not to mention the varieties of clergy and degrees of aristocracy they always seem to be bumping into. And then there’s the money. Herewith, a partial exegesis of seven difficult areas in Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, Trollope, Hardy, and yes, the Brontës. THE TOPOGRAPHY: PICKING YOUR WAY

  THROUGH THE COUNTRYSIDE

  In general, it’s gentle. And it’s Anglo-Saxon: No buttes, mesas, or steppes need apply.

  The Cornfield by John Constable

  At the Seashore

  STRAND—Land bordering a river, lake, or sea; a beach. But especially the area between tidemarks (which means the body of water is more often than not the ocean). In London, the street called the Strand occupies the former shore of the Thames.

  SHINGLE—A stretch of beach covered with loose, smooth pebbles and little or no sand. Also, the pebbles themselves.

  BIGHT—A bend or indentation in a shoreline (sometimes used of a bend in a river, as well). Therefore, a wide bay formed by such a bend. From an Old English word that meant “bend” or “angle,” including those of the body, like the inside of the elbow and the armpit.

  In the Woods

  GLADE—A clearing in a forest where the sunlight shines down between tall trees. Has a strong positive charge: A glade is a pleasant place to be. (“Glade” is related to “glad,” and originally meant “bright.”)

  COPSE—A thicket of small trees or shrubs. It derives from the French couper, “to cut.” Emotionally neutral: One might use it as a trysting-place or as a source of kindling wood. Also called “coppice.”

  GROVE—This one’s second natur
e, but don’t lose sight of its salient feature: no undergrowth.

  On the Moor

  MOOR—A broad tract of open land, usually high but poorly drained, with patches of heath (see below). An expansive, potentially threatening place: Lots happens, emotions run high, limits are hard to set, and Heathcliff goes at it with Cathy.

  HEATH—In common parlance, synonymous with “moor,” but refers more specifically to that part of a moor that is not quite so soggy and, not totally surprisingly, covered with heather.

  FEN—Flat, swampy land; a bog. But especially the kind of swampy land where peat forms, hence a frequent component of moors. The Fens are certain low-lying districts in central England, not far from Cambridge.

  In the Meadow

  SWARD—Basically, any land covered with grassy turf, whether man-made (a lawn) or natural (a meadow); a wide expanse of green. Usually in heavily forested, densely populated, or somewhat arid areas, swards stand out by contrast. Also spelled “swarth.”