Shakespeare

by Paul Edmondson

  I grant I never saw a goddess go:

  My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

  And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

  As any she belied with false compare.

  (Sonnet 130, lines 11–14)

  Shakespeare’s loving, in its many forms, always has its feet on the ground, which can rejoice in love’s earthiness, its honesty and full sexual expression, as much as in its potential to transcend death.

  MAKING WAR

  England at war with itself or internationally forms some or all of the main plot for almost a third of the plays, including the three parts of Henry VI, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V, King John, King Lear, Macbeth and Cymbeline. The Roman plays Julius Caesar and Coriolanus include civil rebellion and war. Troilus and Cressida depicts the tiredness and bitterness of the Trojan War (comparable to the weariness and ongoing expense of England fighting Spain in the Netherlands during Shakespeare’s own time). Three other plays have soldiers as their leading characters: Titus Andronicus has fought ten years for Rome and lost twenty-one of his sons in battle; Othello defends the Venetian Empire against the Turkish fleet near Cyprus; Macbeth fights valiantly for Scotland against the invading Norwegians. In three other plays, war forms a prominent part of the background. Much Ado About Nothing begins with the Prince of Aragon and his comrades returning from battle only to turn into a ‘merry war’ between the flirtatiously argumentative lovers Beatrice and Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1.59); Prince Fortinbras is seeking to revenge his father and leads a successful Norwegian invasion on Denmark in Hamlet; and in All’s Well That Ends Well, Bertram escapes to the Italian wars rather than stay with his wife Helen, whom he has been forced to marry.

  Although war figures prominently in his plays, Shakespeare clearly deplores it. Any glorification of warfare is intermittent, brief and always self-questioning. While the seduction of performance can make it thrilling to see Caius Martius enter, covered in blood, during the Battle of Corioles (Coriolanus, 1.9), and while his heroism wins him the name Coriolanus, his politics become repulsive to the people of Rome. Of all the plays, Henry V is the most focused on war, its preparations, what it means to those involved and its lasting effects. The church is clearly shown to be implicated in what amounts to an illegal invasion of a foreign country. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s long speech outlining Henry V’s claim to the French throne is confusing, deliberately dull, and should raise a laugh or two when performed (Henry V, 1.33–95). With this speech, Shakespeare is satirising the entire basis of Henry V’s invasion of France, which constitutes the whole story of the play.

  In the Chorus’s opening lines to Act Two we hear the euphoria that the beginning of war often brings:

  Now all the youth of England are on fire,

  And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies;

  Now thrive the armourers, and honour’s thought

  Reigns solely in the breast of every man.

  (Henry V, 2.0.1–4)

  Yes, the play has its great stirring speeches, such as Henry V’s clarion cry –

  Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,

  Or close the wall up with our English dead.

  (Henry V, 3.1.1–2)

  – but even that thirty-four-lined speech (which ends with the King imploring his men to cry ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George’) is immediately undercut with the start of the next scene. Bardolph, Nym, Pistol and an anonymous young boy are lagging behind. The ‘breach’, or the front line, is understandably the last place they want to be. ‘Would I were in an ale-house in London’, says the Boy, ‘I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety’ (Henry V, 3.2.12–13).

  Later, on the night before the decisive Battle of Agincourt, Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the English soldier, Michael Williams, one of his most direct anti-war speeches. He, along with his comrades John Bates and Alexander Court, is talking with the king who is in disguise and moving among his troops to help boost their morale. Williams starts to imagine war’s effect on the king’s own conscience:

  But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’ – some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument?

  (4.1.133–42)

  This conversation touches the King deeply, and when his soldiers leave him he speaks two soliloquies about the burden of war on the King’s own conscience (4.1.227–81 and 286–301). In these speeches he envies his subjects’ ability to sleep after a day of honest work while he bargains and prays with the ‘God of battles’. King Henry V does indeed achieve victory the next day, despite his army being hopelessly outnumbered by the French, but Shakespeare takes pains to show that he is no war hero: Henry V orders the murder of all the French prisoners, an implicit act of brutality which contravenes the codes of combat (4.6.35–9).

  Shakespeare details the effects of the war on the French landscape and its people with the Duke of Burgundy’s eloquent and poetic speech, which repays close attention. Its poetry makes present the beauty of the natural world, which has now vanished as a result of the ravages of war and consequent neglect:

  And all our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,

  Defective in their natures, grow to wildness.

  (5.2.54–5)

  In his treatment of war, Shakespeare has a lot in common with Wilfred Owen, the brilliant and too-young-dead poet of the First World War. Like Owen, Shakespeare sees war’s devastation and futility. Henry V ends with a sonnet which looks forward to the bloody Wars of the Roses during the reign of the weak Henry VI, ‘whose state so many had the managing / That they lost France and made his England bleed.’ (Henry V, Epilogue, lines 11–12). It is in Henry VI Part Three that the King himself watches and overhears a son who has unknowingly killed his father and a father who has unknowingly killed his son during the civil war. King Henry VI is overtaken with grief:

  Woe above woe! Grief more than common grief!

  O that my death would stay these ruthful deeds!

  O, pity, pity, gentle heaven, pity!

  (Henry VI Part Three, 2.5.94–6)

  For Shakespeare, as for Wilfred Owen, it is the pity of war that in part provides the poetry. Both poets dare to tell the truth to cultures for which war felt essential, if never really glorious.

  MAKING HISTORY

  As well as setting out to dramatise key events during the reigns of English monarchs, Shakespeare is deeply interested in making ordinary people an extraordinary part of his history plays. The two parts of Henry IV, as much as they are about court life and the civil rebellion against Henry (who deposed the rightful king Richard II), have much to do with the garrulous, apparently irrelevant world of the Eastcheap tavern, The Boar’s Head. The pub was a place of legend, where ‘wild Prince Harry’, the Prince of Wales, enjoyed getting drunk before taking up his royal responsibilities. These two history plays are very much about the personal formation of Prince Harry into King Henry V.

  But there is a deeper, apparently non-historical interest at work. In the Henry IV plays Shakespeare brings on to stage the larger than life Sir John Falstaff. He embodies a dramatic life force of a kind that the English stage had never before seen. The key to understanding (and indeed performing) Falstaff is to recognise that he lives in an eternal present moment of pleasure. We miss the point entirely if we start to judge him morally. He lives for alcohol, comfort, other people’s attention and sex. He is ever so fat, delights in excess and exaggeration, and is himself the constant butt of Shakespeare’s incorrigible humour. Falstaff is a comic magnet, but is given moments of great pathos, too. In short, he becomes a living embodiment about why Shakespear
e is writing history: Falstaff inhabits a world of the ordinary, which he makes extraordinary. History, in the Henry IV plays, is to be found in the here and now in which we too can find something of ourselves.

  In Henry IV Part Two, the Lord Chief Justice challenges Falstaff about his ‘great infamy’, the robbery of pilgrims on Gad’s Hill, his association with Prince Harry, his age and personality. Falstaff replies that he ‘was born about three of the clock with a white head and something a round belly.’ (Henry IV Part Two, 1.2.187–89). He is self-consciously timeless, born already an old man in the middle of the after-noon. His presence always signifies escape, roguishness and the importance of sheer exuberance. Falstaff’s friends, lovers and sparring partners Mistress Quickly (whose name suggests a ‘quick-lay’) and Doll Tearsheet (whose name suggests a bed sheet torn in sexual excitement as well as one stained with tears) adore him, love him and hate him. In performance, their reactions to Falstaff being called away to likely military action (though not if he can help it) can be moving:

  DOLL TEARSHEET [weeping] I cannot speak. If my heart be not ready to burst – well, sweet Jack, have a care of thyself.

  SIR JOHN Farewell, farewell!

  Exit [with Bardolph, Peto, and the Page]

  MISTRESS QUICKLY Well, fare thee well. I have known thee these twenty-nine years come peascod-time, but an honester and truer-hearted man – well, fare thee well.

  (Henry IV Part Two, 2.4.382–8)

  There is ample scope for laughter in that exchange, too, especially if Falstaff exits with self-conscious heroism and if, by the end of her speech, Mistress Quickly realises perhaps that the man she loves has not really been all that honest and not very true-hearted.

  When Shakespeare is making history he is in part evoking the story of people passed over in the writing of the history books. Falstaff, his companions and counterparts (Bardolph, Nym, Peto, Poins, Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, and the aged Justices of the Peace Robert Shallow and his Cousin Silence) collectively take up much of the stage time in the two parts of Henry IV. Their dialogue is written entirely in prose, which allows them to occupy a dramatic texture of warm sentiment and humour as well as one of relaxed and unbuttoned reflectiveness. They are totally irrelevant to the story of King Henry IV, but they are everything when it comes to Shakespeare’s helping us to experience history. It is as if he is dramatising the feeling of remembering where we were when significant historical events took place. The poet T. S. Eliot describes history as ‘a pattern / Of timeless moments’ and goes on to say that ‘History is now and England’ (‘Little Gidding’ in The Four Quartets). Shakespeare is dramatising that same kind of poetic reality.

  MAKING MORTALITY

  There are many times when Shakespeare invites us to share a defiant life force in the face of hopeless odds. Claudio, condemned to death for getting Juliet pregnant outside wedlock in Measure for Measure, articulates a fear of death and the unknown:

  Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

  To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

  This sensible warm motion to become

  A kneaded clod, and the dilated spirit

  To bathe in fiery floods…

  (Measure for Measure, 3.1.118–22)

  His language is powerful because of the use of monosyllables in that first line, a favourite device of Shakespeare to catch our attention and refresh our listening. He combines, too, a Latinate vocabulary – ‘obstruction’, ‘sensible’, ‘motion’, ‘dilated’ – with a simpler, Anglo-Saxon one: ‘cold’, ‘rot’, ‘clod’, ‘floods’, ‘bathe’ and ‘fiery’. The language yokes together the four elements of earth (‘clod’), air (‘spirit’), water (‘bathe’) and fire (‘fiery’). That Claudio imagines bathing in ‘floods’ of fire combines two of these opposing elements to convey his inner sense of fear. Later in the play, the condemned Barnardine is awoken elsewhere in the prison and told that the day of his execution has finally come. He is drunk, hung-over and defiantly refuses to die:

  BARNARDINE I swear I will not die today, for any man’s persuasion.

  DUKE But hear you—

  BARNARDINE Not a word. If you have anything to say to me, come to my ward, for thence will not I today.

  (Measure for Measure, 4.3.56–60)

  Although Barnardine’s sentence of death has not been lifted, his protest, as far as we know, works, and his life, albeit on death row, continues. His obstinacy makes him no less than a life force, and one that resonates significantly in a story which dramatises the effects of denying life, exuberance and sexuality.

  There are moments, too, when characters let go of an old way of life and step bravely into a new one. In All’s Well That Ends Well, the cowardly Captain Paroles, who has been tricked by his friends and fellow soldiers into betraying them under the pain of torture and death, is left ashamed, friendless and broken. But he manages still to find hope in life:

  Captain I’ll be no more, But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft As captain shall. Simply the thing I am Shall make me live […]

  There’s place and means for every man alive.

  (All’s Well That Ends Well, 4.3.332–5, 340)

  A similar example, but one tragically focused on death, comes with Hamlet’s readiness to die as he approaches the fateful duel with Laertes:

  Not a whit. We defy augury. There’s special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

  (Hamlet, 5.2.165–70)

  Hamlet’s invocation of the gospel about a God who holds in love even the humble sparrow (Matthew 10:29) leads him to accept his own destiny. The prose is all-encompassing, carefully shaped and is followed (in the second quarto version only) by the simple, understated ‘Let be’. This acceptance of life and death is perhaps Shakespeare’s finest articulation of what it means to be a tragic hero, a human being caught up in the inevitability of a tragedy.

  MAKING TRANSGRESSION

  Shakespeare is fascinated by the criminal mind as well as by the effects of criminal action on the perpetrator. Richard III murders his way to the crown and is haunted in his dreams by the eleven ghosts of his victims on the night before his own death at the Battle of Bosworth. Although he then has a twenty-nine-line, justly famous soliloquy, shot through with self-questioning, it is his understated confession to Sir Richard Ratcliffe a moment later that conveys volumes about the King’s emotional state: ‘Ratcliffe, I fear, I fear’ (5.5.168).

  Macbeth also murders his way to the crown and Shakespeare achieves powerful effects through the language that portrays his inner feelings. Actors are often perceived as failing in the role of Macbeth. One reason is that the power of the poetry is so intense that an audience needs longer to digest it than is possible during a live performance. Impressive imagery flashes before us. When, towards the end of Act One, Macbeth almost convinces himself that he should not murder King Duncan he imagines the effect of the crime like this:

  His virtues

  Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against

  The deep damnation of his taking off,

  And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

  Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed

  Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

  Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye

  That tears shall drown the wind.

  (Macbeth, 1.7.18–25)

  King Duncan’s many good qualities will blow like angels on heavenly trumpets in protest. Pity itself will be born anew and the angels themselves will ride on the currents of the air like horses, showing the murder to the whole world and prompting sufficient tears to overwhelm the entire element of air. This is Shakespeare at his most vividly surreal and visually extravagant. So impressed was William Blake (1757–1827) with Shakespeare’s imagery at this moment that he painted it as ‘Pity’ (c.1795).
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  A similarly bizarre image occurs a few moments later in the following scene. Macbeth is on his way to kill King Duncan and pauses to see the famous imaginary, air-born dagger (‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ 2.1.33), and to notice the personification of Murder leading the way to the scene of the crime, like the rapist Tarquin in Lucrece (Macbeth, 2.1.52–6). As soon as he has murdered King Duncan, Macbeth’s transgression turns into tormenting guilt. He begins to feel that he has murdered sleep as well. He will never rest properly again and his wife, too, will be haunted with sleepwalking nightmares because of her part in the murder (Macbeth, 5.1.). So terrible is the King’s blood on Macbeth’s hands that he imagines being able to turn the whole of the world’s ocean into blood:

  Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

  Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

  The multitudinous seas incarnadine

  Making the green one red.

  (Macbeth 2.2.57–61)

  To convey the horror of Macbeth’s realisation, Shakespeare invents a new verb, ‘to incarnadine’, that is to turn into the colour of raw flesh. In a King Midas-like way, Macbeth now imagines that if he were to touch the ocean it would turn every sea in the world into the colour of blood. That is how guilty he feels (and there is also a submerged allusion to the first plague of Egypt, when the God of Israel, through Moses, turned the River Nile into blood, Exodus 7:20).

  Macbeth’s transgression evokes the infamous King Tarquin, who raped Lucrece. Giacomo in Cymbeline thinks about Tarquin, too (2.2.12–14). He has tricked Princess Innogen into looking after his travelling trunk in her bed-chamber. When she falls asleep, the lid opens, and sometimes in performance Giacomo clutches the side of it, vampire-like, before he sits up. The scene can definitely be nightmarish and generate nervous laughter: there really is somebody lurking in that Ottoman trunk at the end of your bed. He speaks forty lines during which he commits to memory an inventory of her bedroom in order to prove he has been there and to win a wager he has made with her husband that he can violate Innogen’s chastity. We are asked to imagine a silence so profound that we can hear the singing of crickets. There is an atmosphere of claustrophobia during which Giacomo makes extraordinarily detailed observations of Innogen’s naked body and slips her bracelet from her arm. His act of transgression is made electrifying because Innogen might awake at any moment. The whole episode is dark and brooding and amounts to a visual rape: