So o’er this sleeping soul doth Tarquin stay,
His rage of lust by gazing qualified,
Slaked not suppressed for standing by her side.
His eye which late this mutiny restrains
Unto a greater uproar tempts his veins,
And they like straggling slaves for pillage fighting,
Obdurate vassals fell exploits effecting,
In bloody death and ravishment delighting,
Nor children’s tears nor mothers’ groans respecting,
Swell in their pride, the onset still expecting.
Anon his beating heart, alarum striking,
Gives the hot charge, and bids them do their liking.
His drumming heart cheers up his burning eye,
His eye commands the leading to his hand.
His hand, as proud of such a dignity,
Smoking with pride marched on to make his stand,
On her bare breast, the heart of all her land,
Whose ranks of blue veins as his hand did scale
Left their round turrets destitute and pale.
(The Rape of Lucrece, lines 423–41)
‘Proud’ often referred to male sexual arousal, as did ‘stand’, so ‘standing by her side’, ‘proud of such a dignity’, ‘pride marched on to make his stand’ are all part of this vivid description of one of the most infamously aggressive erections anywhere in literature. ‘Proud of this pride’ and ‘to stand in thy affairs’ are the terms used to describe the poet’s own erection in Sonnet 151. But in Lucrece the sexuality is presented through the terrible parallel violence of pillaging and the suffering of innocent mothers and children. Shakespeare at once draws the reader in with a complicit eroticism and supplies the opportunity for the reader to feel self-disgust.
‘SUGARED SONNETS’
Shakespeare’s Sonnets continue to inspire complicated reactions as well. It has too often been assumed that those published in 1609 represent a coherent sequence that tells the story of Shakespeare’s life. Many readers find it impossible to disassociate the first person of the Sonnets, the ‘I’, from Shakespeare himself. The matter is complex. The ‘I’ both is and is not Shakespeare some or all of the time; art both is and is not autobiographical.
A dominant and still popular reading strategy (since the late eighteenth century) has been to try to identify real-life protagonists in the Sonnets – ‘the young man’, ‘the dark lady’ and ‘the rival poet’ – and then to find people in Shakespeare’s life who might take those roles. But this is a limited, simplistic and short-sighted way of approaching some of the greatest, most varied and nuanced poems in the English language. In fact only twenty of them are unambiguously addressed to a male subject (real or imagined) and only seven of them definitely concern a female subject, but even these poems need not be addressed to the same male and female subjects. The remaining one hundred and twenty-seven Sonnets might be addressed to either a male or a female – that is, they have a universal application – or they are abstract and addressed to no one (for example Sonnets 94, 116 and 146). Even though Sonnet 144 mentions two loves, one of ‘comfort’ (‘a man right fair’), and one of ‘despair’ (‘a woman coloured ill’), that does not mean that only those two lovers (real or imagined) should be applied biographically to all one hundred and fifty-four poems, but this is what most critics have done for around two hundred and fifty years. Instead, we ought to be able to imagine as many different addressees as there are sonnets for them, since the terms of address within them vary.
Close analyses of their language and style suggest that the Sonnets were not written in the order in which they are printed which contradicts any notion that they represent an intended sequence. Rather, they are an anthology. In 1598, the clergyman and scholar, Francis Meres, referred to Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’ in his book Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury. Either Meres himself was one of Shakespeare’s ‘private friends’, or he had caught sight or heard of some sonnets by Shakespeare being passed around literary London. The Sonnets were not published until a decade later and may or may not include the poems to which Meres refers. In any case, Shakespeare could have been revising his poems at any point up until their appearance in 1609.
Far more life-giving than any biographical reading is to accept Shakespeare’s Sonnets as poems written on diverse occasions, some to or for real people (like Sonnet 128 perhaps), others as poetical essays (such as Sonnet 116). Some of them might well include personal confessions (perhaps Sonnet 36); others might be sketches for speeches that Shakespeare never augmented or set into a fully dramatic context.
It is worth bearing in mind, too, that there are other sonnets embedded within the plays throughout the whole of Shakespeare’s career. Romeo and Juliet is structured around the sonnet form. It begins with a sonnet, a sonnet introduces act two, the lovers speak a shared sonnet when they first meet (1.5.92–105), and the tragedy ends with a truncated sonnet. Helen writes a letter to the Countess in the form of a sonnet (All’s Well That Ends Well, 3.4.4–17); Jupiter speaks an extended sonnet to Posthumus (Cymbeline, 5.5.187–207) and the Epilogue to All is True (Henry VIII) is a sonnet in rhyming couplets. That the sonnet form was a vehicle through which Shakespeare cast imaginary thought and feeling again raises questions over the prevalent biographical approaches to these remarkable poems.
Two other poems are worthy of special mention. The book called Shakespeare’s Sonnets ‘never before imprinted’ also contains a 329-line poem, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’. ‘Complaints’, or laments, were popular in the late sixteenth century and were sometimes printed at the end of sonnet sequences. ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ is a deliberately enigmatic poem which never makes clear who the ‘Lover’ of the title is: the young maid, the young man, or perhaps the lonely, first-person narrator (who might be male or female), lying down on a hillside and hearing this ‘plaintful story from a sist’ring vale.’ (line 2). The poem echoes the themes, moods and ideas that run through the preceding sonnets and can be read as Shakespeare’s own creative reflection on his collection.20
And no reading of Shakespeare as a poet is complete without trying to engage with his most mysterious and unusual work of all, a 67-line poem which has come to be known as ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ (the ‘Turtle’ is a turtle-dove). This was Shakespeare’s response to a commission, along with other leading poets, from Sir John Salusbury upon his knighthood. It was published in Love’s Martyr: or Rosalind’s Complaint by Robert Chester (1601) and printed, like the narrative poems, by Richard Field of Stratford-upon-Avon. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ is at once hauntingly medieval and challengingly metaphysical. Ostensibly about two birds, mourned by a whole company of birds, the poem gradually unfolds a description of love both real and lost:
So between them love did shine
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the Phoenix’ sight.
Either was the other’s mine.
(‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, lines 33–6)
The poem is a tragedy in miniature and ends with a short funeral rite. The Phoenix and the Turtle, enigmatically ‘enclosed in cinders’, demand as much pity as do Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra: ‘for these dead birds sigh a prayer’ (line 67). Shakespeare’s (unusually female) Phoenix does not rise from the ash at the end, except in the mind of the reader who knows that that is what phoenixes do. Perhaps this is Shakespeare’s own subtle way of igniting something of his own muse of fire within us, one deeply significant example of how he continues to empower us throughout the whole body of this work.
4
THE POWER OF SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare’s language inspires actors to portray a heightened reality, which in turn invites the audience to accompany them on a powerful emotional journey. We know whenever we arrive at a theatre to watch a Shakespeare play that, for the better part of three hours, something significant is about to unfold; so much so that it is often said that Shakespeare shows us w
hat it is to be human. This chapter sets out to illustrate the power of his making as a dramatic poet – his depiction of thought and emotion – by considering six topics: love; war; history; mortality; transgression; and forgiveness.
MAKING LOVE
Romeo and Juliet speaks to anyone who has dared to love across a divide. The play’s romance is set against the violence on Verona’s streets between two feuding families, the Capulets and the Montagues. Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague have fallen in love at first sight at the Capulets’ masked ball (which Romeo and his friends have gatecrashed in disguise). Their famous ‘balcony scene’ takes place on a knife’s edge: ‘If they do see thee, they will murder thee’, says Juliet (2.1.112). Their eloquence when speaking together for around 150 lines is wrapped up in the romance of daring and escape, ‘I have night’s cloak to hide me from their eyes’, says Romeo (2.1.117). We listen as they find a way of speaking that we have not heard in the play until this point. Although their dialogue resonates with references to Elizabethan culture and mentions falconry, schoolboys and their books, and merchandise from the new world, a sense of timelessness is achieved because the lovers see themselves in the context of eternity. Juliet says:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep. The more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.
(2.1.175–7)
The scene is made powerful by its impassioned lyricism. When Romeo hears Juliet repeating his name and then calling back at him we hear:
It is my soul that calls upon my name.
How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night,
Like softest music to attending ears.
(2.1.209–11)
The language, rich with sibilant sounds, is close to music. In performance, Shakespeare’s dramatic truthfulness is often best served through honouring the musicality to be found in his language. The best Shakespearian actors do not shy away from near-aria moments such as these, while at the same time making them sound sincere. These three lines illustrate how Shakespeare often universalises personal emotion. Romeo’s ‘soul’ (Juliet) calls out his ‘name’ and leads him into a meditation of two lines about the musicality of all ‘lovers’ tongues’ (voices) being like music in the night.
Romeo and Juliet depicts a tough-edged sexuality. Shakespeare changes Juliet’s age from the source story, making her only thirteen (the same age as his own daughter, Susanna, at the time he wrote the play). While she is waiting for Romeo on their wedding night, Juliet speaks an excited soliloquy. She longs for the coming of ‘gentle’, ‘loving, black-browed night’ so that she and her new husband, Romeo, can consummate their secret marriage and enjoy sex:
Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars.
(Romeo and Juliet, 3.2.21–2)
‘Die’ was slang for the experience of orgasm, and perhaps Shakespeare’s imagery here is his way of describing what orgasm feels like: it is to be cut up into ‘little stars’ and to experience a moment of infinity.
Queen Cleopatra of Egypt wants to die because her lover Antony has killed himself out of love for her, as well as shame of himself. As she prepares for her suicide she recalls their lovemaking:
His delights
Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above
The element they lived in.
(Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.87–9)
One interpretation of her abiding memories is that she is recalling the movement of his back and buttocks, moving and leaping like a dolphin as he thrusts into her. A few moments later, just before she allows the poisonous asp to bite her, she says ‘Husband, I come’ (5.2.282). As Juliet called for the coming on of night, so Cleopatra calls for the coming of her husband, the darkness of death, and sex, all at the same time; then, as now, ‘come’ meant to experience orgasm. Cleopatra well understands that
The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
Which hurts and is desired.
(5.2.291–2)
The tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet is what Richard Wagner called the Liebestod, the love-death narrative. The lovers have no choice but to take their love-making and their sexual experience to their graves, even though we know they would give everything for just one more night together.
Shakespeare delights in comic lovemaking, too. One of the most abiding of all stage-pictures is surely Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, making love to the simple, homely Nick Bottom who has had a spell cast on him to give him a donkey’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare combines sentiment, humour and lyricism with sex:
Come, wait upon him, lead him to my bower.
The moon, methinks, looks with a wat’ry eye,
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforcèd chastity.
Tie up my love’s tongue; bring him silently.
(3.1.189–93)
These lines end the scene and in some productions lead to a great procession as the attendant fairies lead Bottom off the stage to the place of sex. When we next see this unlikely couple, performance often presents Bottom as exhausted with lovemaking while Titania is ready for more, Shakespeare’s own stage version of Botticelli’s great painting Venus and Mars: ‘O how I love thee, how I dote on thee!’ says the Queen of the Fairies as her donkey-man falls asleep in her arms (4.1.44).
As You Like It is the play that contains the most marriages at the end: Touchstone and Audrey, Silvius and Phoebe, Celia and Oliver, and Rosalind and Orlando. The god of marriage himself, Hymen, appears on stage finally to bring about these pairings. But it is the journey towards these marriages rather than the marriages themselves that the audience is asked to enjoy. The main focus of our attention is watching the hero, Orlando, fall in love with another young man Ganymede (his beloved Rosalind in disguise). In the presence of Rosalind’s cousin Celia, they even enact a betrothal rite known as hand-fasting (4.2.107–37). The moment is the closest Shakespeare comes to portraying what we now call a gay marriage. When Rosalind finally becomes Orlando’s wife he, she and we all know that he is so deeply in love with her person that it matters not a jot whether she is male or female. While disguised, she has been able to see his undefended heart open to the possibility of a homosexual love. She has seen him fall for another man, who happens to be herself.
Same-sex love ripples through the canon: Antonio for Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, Antonio for Sebastian and Duke Orsino for his pageboy (Viola in disguise) in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, and Achilles for Patroclus, who enjoy sex in their tent while the Trojan war rages around them, in Troilus and Cressida. The two noble kinsmen, Palamon and Arcite, see themselves as:
one another’s wife, ever begetting
New births of love; we are father, friends, acquaintance;
We are in one another families.
(The Two Noble Kinsmen, 2.2.80–83)
Palamon asks: ‘Is there record of any two that loved / Better than we do, Arcite?’ (2.2.112–13). A few seconds later, their masculine love will turn to rivalry for Queen Hippolyta’s sister, Emilia, whom they see from their prison window. One interpretation might see her entrance as ruining everything. A couple of scenes earlier we have heard Emilia herself describe her own female-female love for Flavina (who has died). She recalls the plucking of twin flowers and the placing of them between Flavina’s breasts. Emilia concludes:
That the true love ’tween maid and maid may be
More than sex dividual [than between the separate sexes].
(The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1.3.81–2)
She goes on to say that she will never love a man (1.3.86). Her feelings and perspective change when the noble kinsmen Palamon and Arcite start to war for her affections.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets have come to represent love in its rich variety, too. Within them we find some of the finest and most memorable articulations of love’s many moodedness in the English language. Amo
ng the Sonnets we find an intensity of romance and commitment: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ (Sonnet 18); there is mourning for lost love: ‘weep afresh love’s long-since-cancelled woe’ (Sonnet 30); there is a longing for love: ‘All days are nights to see till I see thee’ (Sonnet 43); there is cynicism about love: ‘So true a fool is love’ (Sonnet 57); there is love-sickness: ‘my love was my decay’ (Sonnet 80); love brings youthfulness: ‘love is a babe’ (Sonnet 115); and there is a philosophical sense of absolutism in love: ‘Love’s not time’s fool’ (Sonnet 116).
Sonnet 130 is worthy of particular notice since in it Shakespeare playfully subverts and parodies the Petrarchan convention of love, which had been (and still was) dominant in love poetry across Europe for the better part of three centuries. In Petrarchan love, the woman was always the unattainable ideal for whom the man pined, like Romeo’s for Rosaline before he meets Juliet (1.2.199–235). Not so for Shakespeare in Sonnet 130 in which the physical reality of the mistress contradicts a series of romantic clichés. It opens with the declaration that ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’ and goes on to tell us that coral is redder than her lips, her breasts are a dull brown colour rather than snow-white, there are no roses in her cheeks, no perfume in her breath, no musical tone in her voice. No goddess she. The simple rhythm, the metrical feet of Shakespeare’s own verse, is good enough for someone who defies all false comparison. There is a sudden change of tone in the couplet as the poet sets his mistress apart from all convention and celebrates her beauty, which is beyond all comparison:
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