Shakespeare

by Shakespeare

  On occasions he read several books on the same topic, and their texts combined somewhere within him to create a new reality. There are times when he relied upon books rather than upon his own immediate experience. In his creation of the trickster in The Winter’s Tale, Autolycus, he borrowed from one of Robert Greene’s urban pamphlets, Second Cony-Catching, rather than employing his own observations of city life. He had learnt in his schooldays that one of the first characteristics of invention was imitation, and he was an imitator of genius. He possessed a most retentive memory as well, and could summon up phrases and quotations from his childhood reading; he could effortlessly revert to outworn dramatic or rhetorical styles.

  He worked on words, not necessarily on thoughts or images. Words elicited more words from him in an act of sympathetic magic. But then one word called forth another word of quite opposite intent. In the second part of Henry IV there is just such a transition (412-14):

  JUSTICE: There is not a white haire in your face, but should haue his effect of grauity.

  FALSTAFF: His effect of grauy, grauie, grauie.

  The collocation of gravity and gravy amply testifies to the mood of the play and, more importantly, the sensibility of Shakespeare. On an earlier occasion he was reading Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, in preparation for Titus Andronicus, and read the line “desyrde his presence too thentent”; the last word became transmogrified into “the Thracian Tyrant in his Tent” (138). A particular word seems to elicit from him a cluster of words, in this case alliterative; the connection is often one of sound rather than of sense. Geese are constantly associated with disease, the eagle with the weasel. There are other strange synaptic leaps. Turkeys and pistols are often associated, no doubt because of the common linkage with cock. For some reason he connects peacocks with fish and with lice in the same compound of images. On twelve occasions the word “hum” is intimately connected with death, as in Othello (2936-7):

  DESDEMONA: If you say so, I hope you will not kill me.

  OTHELLO: Hum.

  And in Cymbeline (1760-1):

  CLOTEN: Humh.

  PISANIO: He write to my Lord she’s dead.

  It is as if language was muttering to itself.

  Yet words flew so freely from him that he distrusted them; on many occasions he revealed suspicions about their duplicity and inauthenticity. There were times, even, when fluency disgusted him. The finest poetry may be feigning; the oaths pledged on stage may be hypocritical. “Alas, I tooke greate paines to studie it,” Viola says in Twelfth Night (471-3), “and ’tis Poeticall.” “It is the more like to be feigned,” Olivia replies, “I pray you keep it in.” That is perhaps why there are many plays in which Shakespeare emphasised the artificiality and unreality of his drama; his narratives were meant to be improbable, even impossible.

  It seems likely, also, that he did not know what he was writing until he had written it. He discovered his meaning only after he had conceived it in words. There is a wonderful remark of Coleridge’s in Table Talk of 7 April, 1833, that “in Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.” He explored the consequences of his words by seeing how a metaphor or an image might emerge from them and take on its own life; how one word would by assonance or alliteration suggest another; how the cadence of a sentence or a verse would curve in one direction rather than another. The most perceptive account of Shakespeare’s method occurs, perhaps surprisingly, in a late eighteenth-century treatise. In A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare, published in 1794, Walter Whiter remarks on the power of association that leads Shakespeare to link words and ideas “by a principle of union unperceived by himself, and independent of the subject to which they are applied.” He does not know what guides his hand, in other words, or what force impels him. The meaning is somehow innate within the words themselves.

  There have been many studies of his imagery, from which various conclusions have been drawn – that he was fastidious, sensitive to smells and to noise, that he engaged in outdoor sports, that he knew the natural life of the countryside very well, and so on. In the interplay of his imagery, we chance upon strange conjunctions; he associates violets with stealing, and books with love. His imagination is awash with centaurs and shipwrecks and dreams, part of the magical world that always surrounded him. But it is perhaps more appropriate to note that his images are the womb or source of further images which spring forth effortlessly. Each play has a continuous stream of images or metaphors that are intrinsic to that play. They convey a unity of feeling rather than one of meaning, rather in the way that film-music works in the cinema. There is a cohesiveness, an internal harmony, within each play; it touches even the most minor character, and places all of the protagonists together in the same circle of enchantment. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the rude mechanicals are quite unlike the fairies, but they partake of the same reality. They have been touched by the same lightning.

  Yet that lightning was for Shakespeare a source of perpetual novelty and surprise. He did not necessarily know what was within himself. His imagination quickened as it proceeded along its ordained course; a scene will suddenly appear that elicits a powerful response, or a character emerges who will proceed to steal the best lines. There is a precise moment in Henry IV when Pistol develops the characteristic of quoting or misquoting lines from old dramas. It must have delighted Shakespeare, since from that moment Pistol does nothing – or hardly anything – but that. The Wife of Bath came up and took Chaucer unawares; Sam Weller popped up from nowhere in The Pickwick Papers. It is the same process.

  A complementary path can also be traced in the shape of his career. He began as an ambitious and prolific dramatist, ready to take on any subject and any form. He excelled in melodrama as well as history, in farce as well as lyrical pathos. He could do everything. He seemed to have a natural genius for comedy, in which he could improvise effortlessly, but he learned very quickly how to employ other materials. It was only in the course of writing his plays, however, that he managed to discover his vision. It had been waiting for him all along, but he did not properly find it until the middle stage of his life. It was only then that he became truly “Shakespearian.” It may even be that, in the later years, he astounded and terrified himself with these great acts of creation.

  CHAPTER 45

  Thus Leaning on Mine Elbow

  I Begin

  John Keats wrote that the poetical character “is not itself – it has no I self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.” And thus “a Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in [forming] and filling some other Body.”

  All of Shakespeare’s characters have an exultant and self-sufficient energy that lifts them above the realm of nature. That is why the greatest tragic characters are also close to comedy. Their expansiveness and self-assertion provoke delight. It is also why Shakespeare betrays no real interest in motive. His characters are fully alive as soon as they come upon the stage, and no excuse for their conduct is ever necessary. He will even excise their motives, outlined in his sources, simply to augment their inward or obsessive energy. They become mysterious and more challenging, provoking the audience to wonder or alarm. There are other occasions when motive has to be inferred from conduct; the characters have acquired a reality so strong that you must try to see around them.

  Their speech and action are all of a piece, and their utterances are so knit together that they manifest a complete and coherent spirit or soul. The very cadence of the voices creates a unique and identifiable personality. In the second scene of the play, on the occasion of his first appearance upon the stage, the rhythms of Othello are deeply embedded in the structure of the verse with a series of half-lines-“’Tis better as it is … Let him do his spite … Not I, I must be f
ound … What is the news? … What’s the matter, think you?” It is the rhythm of Othello’s being.

  As far as the great tragic heroes are concerned, there is a corresponding belief in the ruling power of the self. Their destiny does not lie in the stars, in some abstract notion of Fate or, least of all, in some scheme of divine providence. Their movement is so irresistible, their inner life so powerful, that they gather momentum as the drama proceeds. Even in their fall they are wonderful.

  Genius must find its time, too, and can quicken only in the general atmosphere of its period. It has been claimed, for example, that the sixteenth century was the age of the adventurer and of the striving individual. We see him first, on the English stage, in Faustus and in Tamburlaine. In that interim between the imperatives of a sixteenth-century religious culture and the claims of “society” in the seventeenth century, the individual being emerged as the object of speculation and enquiry in Montaigne’s work no less than in Marlowe’s. This was also the Shakespearian moment.

  Shakespeare’s major protagonists have all the strength and vitality of their creator. Their capacity for life is astonishing. They have a mental, as well as a physical, energy. Even Macbeth retains a mysterious optimism. They are at one with the forces of the universe. Shakespeare’s true villains are pessimists, denying human energy and the capacity for human greatness. They are self-absorbed and melancholy, the enemies of movement and vitality. And here, if anywhere, the true sympathies of Shakespeare’s own nature can be found. Studies of his imagery have also shown that he was in love with movement in all of its forms, as if only in that quick sway and acceleration could he catch the vital life of things.

  There was, naturally and inevitably, a particle of himself in all of his characters; that is what brings them alive. He is the source of their being. He adverts to that fact in the plays themselves. Richard III declares that “a thousand harts are great within my bosome,” and in Richard II Aumerle cries out: “I have a thousand spirits in one breast”; in the same play the king himself reveals that “play I in one person many people.” It is an odd but insistent emphasis. As Hazlitt said of Shakespeare, “He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it.”1 He had a preternaturally sensitive imagination, which could clothe itself in the being of another. This gift or capacity expresses itself in terms of another insistent Shakespearian theme. I am not what I am. Who is it that can tell me who I am?

  Since there is an element of Shakespeare in all the myriad heroes and heroines of his plays, they must also remain fundamentally mysterious. They are not governed by rational choices; their logic is always the logic of intuition and of dream. Their dilemma often concerns the role that they must play, and the part they must assume in the world. It is the secret of his heroines. His characters are witty, and cryptic, and whimsical. They are sometimes inscrutable, and more than a little fantastical. As Ophelia remarks to her father of Hamlet’s behaviour, “I doe not knowe, my Lord, what I should thinke”(517). They partake of their maker. That is also why Shakespeare’s characters still seem “modern,” since they are based upon diversity and indeterminacy. It is sometimes said that he invented individual consciousness on the stage but it would be more true to say that, taking his cue from Montaigne, he conveyed the idea of consciousness as unfixed and unstable. This was almost certainly not a deliberate ploy on his part but, rather, the natural expression of his own genius.

  It also reflects an actor’s consciousness. As the hero of Sartre’s novel Les Maim Sales reveals, “You think I am in despair. Not at all. I am acting the comedy of despair.” It has been remarked that in Shakespeare’s plays the language of self-knowledge is the language of acting; by impersonating others he became more himself. Or, to put it another way, Shakespeare understood himself by becoming someone other. He often resorts to metaphors of the stage, and one of his favourite phrases is “to play the part.” His lovers learn to perform and improvise before one another. His most interesting characters are actors at heart. No other dramatist of his age maintains such an emphasis. He did not owe this interest to the fact that he was a player; rather, he became an actor because he already possessed that interest. His plays, with the possible exception of those of Moliere, are the most entirely suited to the theatre in the history of world drama.

  In the speech by Theseus on the nature of imagination, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is an apparently fluent and straightforward passage (1715-1717):

  … the Poets penne

  Turnes them to shapes, and giues to ayery nothing,

  A locall habitation, and a name.

  But in the vocabulary of the Elizabethan drama “shape” was the name for the actor’s costume, “habitation” for his place upon the stage, and “name” for the scroll on the actor’s chest revealing his identity.

  When in his speech Hamlet adverts to “this goodly frame the Earth,” to this “sterill Promontory” and “this Maiesticall Roofe, fretted with golden fire” his audience would know that he was referring in turn to the walls of the theatre, to the bare stage, and to the roof of the pent-house above his head spangled with stars. The theatre was the occasion for the speech. Shakespeare is saturated with the language of the stage. Who would dream, in all his talk of “shaddowes,” that “shadow” was a technical term for the actor? Thus at the close of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Robin Goodfellow declares that “If we shadowes haue offended” he is speaking for the cast. When the actor playing Buckingham in All Is True declares that “I am the shadow of poore Buckingham”(258) he is making an overtly theatrical reference. The connection also lends resonance to Macbeth’s remark that “Life’s but a walking Shadow, a poore Player” (2004). In one of Shakespeare’s most theatrical plays, Richard II, there is a constant interplay between shadow as reflection of what is real and shadow as insubstantiality or unreality itself. There are shadows everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays. There is also a curious fact about shadows that he understood very well: however insubstantial they may be, they lend depth and delight to any view.

  Shakespeare sees his characters as an actor would, not as a poet. It is noticeable, for example, how many of his characters blush. That is for the stage. Dickens said that he had only to imagine a character, and that character would appear before him. Shakespeare had the same power in excelsis. And the central point is that Shakespeare sees before him not just the character but the actor playing the character. That is why he, of all contemporary playwrights, had the surest command of stagecraft. It was an instinct. He saw gestures; he saw groups of actors moving across the stage. There are some scenes that are dominated by one gesture or by a series of parallel gestures, such as kneeling or sitting on the ground as a token of abasement. Characteristically, a scene with many characters will be preceded by a scene with few characters, both as a principle of contrast and as a means of giving time for the larger cast to be assembled. He also gave 95 per cent of the lines to the fourteen principal actors in the company; this was partly a matter of seniority, but it was also the carefully planned economy of a practical manager. It permitted rehearsals to go ahead without the presence of the hired men.

  One stage direction in Timon of Athens has all the marks of Shakespeare’s imaginative vision: “Then comes dropping after all Apemantus discontentedly like himselfe.” In Antony and Cleopatra there is the direction: “Enter the Guard rustling in.” He hears, as well as sees, the players. In such business, as he himself wrote, action is eloquence. He must have visualised the costumes also since, in Elizabethan drama, clothes made the man (or woman). There are scenes in which he ordains the use of masks, or of clothing all in black. The visual imagery of the play was of the utmost importance. That is why he was aware of the passage of time and of daylight across the open stage, so that he wrote shadowy scenes for the hour when the shadows begin to deepen across London itself. In the last act of Romeo and Juliet Romeo and his servant enter “with a Torch”; in the last act of Othello, the Moor
enters “with a light.” So each scene or episode has its own form and tempo, with the overriding emphasis being given to the continuity and the coherence of the action. That is why in the Folio he is described as “the Famous Scenicke Poet,” and why Tolstoy believed that Shakespeare’s principal gift lay in his “masterly development of the scenes.”2

  It has become clear that he saw certain performers, Kempe or Burbage, Cowley or Sincler, in the roles he had assigned to them in his imagination. Most of the actors had their own particular speciality, at which he aimed his art. He heard their voices; he knew in advance their individual presence upon the stage. Why does Gertrude say that Hamlet is “fat and scant of breath” (3508) when fighting Laertes, if Burbage himself were not inclined to perspire during the duelling scene? There is no other indication of Hamlet’s weight. The development of Burbage as an actor had a direct influence upon the growing depth and complexity of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. They also gradually age with Burbage. Shakespeare wrote progressively more challenging parts for Kempe, too, leading him up to the supreme achievement of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where his genius for clowning is touched by lyricism and by mystery.

  It is possible that a character would somehow acquire added qualities by virtue of being performed by one particular actor. It was reported by Charles Gildon in 1694, for example, that “I am assur’d from very good hands, that the person that acted Iago was in much esteem for a comedian, which made Shakespeare put several words and expressions into his part (perhaps not agreeable to his character).”3 Inadvertently, perhaps, Othello has therefore been sometimes considered as a form of commedia dell’arte.