Shakespeare

by Shakespeare

  Time is a fluid and capacious medium in his plays. He shortened or lengthened it at will so that it would fit the scale of his plots. He was so enveloped in the medium of the play that he created his own time within it; there is “stage time” and “real time” which only occasionally correspond. In Julius Caesar the passage of a month, between the Night of Lupercal and the eve of the Ides of March, takes place within one impassioned night. This is not Newtonian time but medieval time, shaped by sacred meaning. In Othello and Romeo and Juliet there is the presence of what has become known as “double time,” accommodating both the swift passage of event and the slow growth of feeling; the success of the device is manifest in the fact that no audience seems to notice it.

  He was, as we have seen, generally in a hurry to complete a play. But this emphasis upon his fluency and facility must be tempered by his evident hesitations and revisions. He often seems to pause in mid-verse, as it were, pen held over paper, ready to strike out a word or improve it with a better one. There are occasions when he loses his way with a speech or passage of verse, and so returns to the beginning and tries all over again. It is a question of mustering the right impetus and fury. In his earliest plays there is at times evidence of “padding,” when he runs out of inspiration or energy; but these longueurs occur far less frequently in the plays of his maturity. More often than not he works at white heat. There are moments when he does not know whether he was writing prose or verse. In the second part of Henry IV, for example, Falstaff delivers some lines that could be printed in either mode. In Timon of Athens some of the original prose actually rhymed. His phrases are filled with the natural cadence of the English pentameter and the discrimination between poetry and prose might have seemed to him unimportant. There are occasions in which he runs verse lines together in order to save space; the lines of songs are joined together for the same reason. In the manuscript of Sir Thomas More he compresses three and half lines of verse into two lines of prose, just so that he can finish a speech at the end of the page. Again the formal difference between prose and poetry melts away in his compulsion to set it all down. It could in fact be argued that his texts were always in a fluid and incomplete state, waiting for the actors to lend them emphasis and meaning.

  There are, as a result, confusions. He sometimes muddled names, or gave characters different names in the course of the same play. Characters are also given different descriptions or professions; in Coriolanus Cominius is at one moment a consul and at the next a general. There are often loose ends, when a plot line is begun but never completed. There are inconsistencies of time and place. The space of nineteen years is suddenly contracted to fourteen years in succeeding scenes of Measure for Measure, suggesting that he did not necessarily write scenes consecutively; otherwise he would have remembered the span of time from one scene to the next. A character suddenly “forgets” information that he or she has just imparted, or asks the same question on separate occasions. In Julius Caesar Brutus receives the first news of Portia’s death having just announced the same fact to Cassius; he also gives inconsistent answers to the same question. Shakespeare was in the process of creating Brutus’s character, and may inadvertently have left both first and second thoughts upon the page. At the close of Timon of Athens Timon’s epitaph says in one line, “Seek not my name” and in the next line continues “Here lie I, Timon.” Again it is an example of Shakespeare trying out two versions, both of which somehow survived for the printer to translate into type and therefore to posterity. When in his famous soliloquy at the beginning of the third act Hamlet (1617-18) describes death as

  The vndiscouer’d country, from whose borne

  No trauiler returnes …

  he seems to have forgotten that he has already seen his father’s ghost. The speech “To be, or not to be” is probably an interpolation within the text. It may have been a speech that Shakespeare composed for an earlier version of Hamlet or for another play altogether; it may have been a speech he jotted down in a table-book for unspecified later use. It was in any case too good to abandon, and so he placed it in this version of Hamlet.

  His stage-directions are a good indication of his method. Sometimes they are misplaced. He abbreviates or omits them in a haphazard manner, as if the speed and urgency of his composition drove all before them. The fact that he did not write coherent notes or systematic directions is a sure sign that he knew he would be engaged in the rehearsals at some later time. All would then be made clear. He forgets to “exit” some characters, an omission that would of course have been picked up at just such a rehearsal. Sometimes he hopelessly confuses the speech-prefixes of minor characters, so that it becomes difficult to tell who is addressing whom. In King John the French king is sometimes known as Philip and sometimes Lewis. Shakespeare introduces characters who never speak at all; he may have intended them to play a part but in the quick working of his invention forgot about them entirely. In Much Ado About Nothing Leonato apparently has a wife called Innogen, but she never makes an appearance. The name reappears in Cymbeline. Sometimes he will add the stage-direction “with others,” and only gradually will the members of this unknown assembly reveal themselves in individual parts. Some of his plays seem too long for conventional or average performance. It has been suggested that these are reading versions of his dramas, but it is more probable that they are examples of allowing his invention to advance unimpeded. He had in any case no need to curb his flowing pen; he knew that cuts could be made in rehearsal. As an epistle at the beginning of Beaumont and Fletcher’s published works testifies in 1647, “When these comedies and tragedies were presented on the stage, the actors omitted some scenes and passages, with the authors’ consent, as occasion led them.” There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare reacted any differently.

  It is sometimes suggested that his hesitations and inconsistencies are the mark of every dramatist. But that is not necessarily the case. Moliere, for example, has practically none. They are much more the token of Shakespeare’s uniquely fluid imagination and fluency of language. He was neither a cautious nor a deliberate artist. As the Poet confesses in Timon of Athens (21-5):

  Our Poesie is as a Goume, which ouses

  From whence ’tis nourisht: the fire i’th’Flint

  Shewes not, till it be strooke: our gentle flame

  Prouokes it selfe, and like the currant flyes

  Each bound it chafes.

  Poetry creates itself in the act of being created; it needs no external stimulus but provokes itself and streams forth with its own insistent momentum. He was always, as it were, in a state of suspenseful attention, not knowing precisely where he was going. That may help to explain his more than usually erratic spellings; in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, for example, there are five different spellings of “sheriff” in five consecutive lines. The name of “More” is spelled in three different ways in the same line. It is as if he wished his meaning to be indeterminate, to be open to any and every interpretation. This was also his professional method, leaving as much as possible to the process of rehearsal and the interpretation of the player. But the effect of course is further to heighten what has been called his “invisibility” as if the words, like the oozing gum, came from some natural source.

  Yet there is an apparent paradox here. In the course of revision or rewriting, he often changes the most minute details out of some general desire to polish the verse still brighter. It may have been an instinctive, and for him a barely noticed, process; but of course there were occasions when he changed the general tenor of a scene. It has already been noticed that Shakespeare continued to revise his plays throughout his career. The new Oxford edition of his plays, for example, prints two versions of King Lear composed at different times. All the evidence suggests that some of his more accomplished dramas, such as The Taming of the Shrew and King John, are rewritten versions of his earlier originals. Othello was revised in order to augment the part of Emilia; she needed to be more sympathetic in order to avert any d
issatisfaction in the audience at her giving Iago the handkerchief. Iago must be the sole architect of evil in the play. Shakespeare presumably registered the ambivalent reaction of the first audiences to her role, and changed the text accordingly. There are interpolations in many of the plays; the diversion upon the misfortunes of the players in Hamlet is one example. In Romeo and Juliet the speech beginning “The grey eyed morne smiles on the frowning night” is transferred from Romeo to Friar Lawrence in a significant change of emphasis. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Berowne gives two different versions of the same speech, one much more lyrical than the other; one was presumably added in the margin, or on a separate piece of paper, at a later date without the printer noticing that the other had been cancelled.

  This is a very common phenomenon in the plays of Shakespeare. There are single lines that contain intact Shakespeare’s first and second thoughts. In the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet, for example, there exists the strange and unmetrical line “Rauenous douefeatherd rauen, woluishrauening lamb”; here the process of his thought from ravenous through dove to raven is made clear; if the editor removes the first “Rauenous,” a certain sense emerges. The ending of Troilus and Cressida has been heavily restructured, and it can in fact fairly be claimed that there are few plays in which there is no evidence of rewriting or structural revision. He often cut lines at a later date. In the two sequences of history plays, concerning Henry VI and Henry IV respectively, there is some evidence that he added speeches which would knit the plays together and thus provide a more unified structure of action. He added material for plays to be performed at court, and was sometimes obliged to rewrite existing material. Thus Oldcastle became, in a later version, Falstaff. He also changed material to accommodate the changing cast of players. This need not necessarily negate the impression given by his contemporaries that he wrote speedily and easily; it implies only his plays were always in a provisional or fluid shape. It is clear enough that at some point he generally went back over what he had written. It may have been at the moment of making a fair copy for his earliest manuscript pages; it may have been at the time he revised a play for a new season of performances.

  One example may stand for many. In Hamlet his first version of the Player Queen’s speech runs:

  For women feare too much, euen as they loue,

  And womens feare and loue hold quantitie,

  Eyther none, in neither ought, or in extremitie.

  But this was too prolix and confusing, so he tightened up the verses in a succeeding version (1888-9):

  For womens feare and loue, holds quantitie,

  In neither ought, or in extremity.

  He would have had to ensure that these changes met with the approval of the actors, who of course would have had to learn the new lines; he must also have made certain that the revisions were not so drastic that the play had to be resubmitted to the Master of Revels for approval. Within these constraints, therefore, his plays were never fixed or finished; he was continually remaking them and, to the horror of editors who would prefer a definitive text, we may fairly assume that each play was slightly different at every performance.

  There were ideas and projects that he abandoned as unpromising or unworkable. And of course he changed his mind about plot and characterisation as he went along. He had already read around the subject, perhaps over a period of weeks or even months, and the principal lines of action were clear to him. It is not necessary to suppose that he kept elaborate synopses or schemes before he began composition, and it is in fact more likely that he retained the entire play in his capacious memory. The play hovered in the air, as it were, in inchoate shape. That is why he could change direction as he wrote; he could alter motive and character, create fresh scenes and provoke new debates. In his speech-prefixes stock names slowly give way to personal names as Shakespeare deepens and extends their characterisation; in All’s Well That Ends Well, for example, “Clown” becomes “Lavatch” and “Steward” becomes “Rynaldo.” They are coming to life in front of him.

  He lost interest in certain plot lines after he had introduced them. Nothing, for example, is made of the Princess’s early demands for the territory of Aquitaine in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The business between Lorenzo and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice is left unresolved. In that play, too, it is clear that Shakespeare gained interest in Shylock while at the same time noticeably losing enthusiasm for Antonio. Antonio opens the play in an intriguingly melancholy style, but thereafter is never properly developed. The public context of Coriolanus is rapidly succeeded by private communings; the character of Hamlet is transformed in the last two acts of the play. Of course it could be argued that these were long-considered decisions on Shakespeare’s part, but they bear all the hallmarks of improvisation and spontaneous invention.

  CHAPTER 48

  So shaken as We Are,

  So Wan with Care

  In the summer of 1595 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men went on tour. In June they were at Ipswich and at Cambridge, in each place receiving the not inconsiderable sum of 40 shillings. There had been a time when a university town such as Cambridge had shunned the presence of common players, but their status and prestige had risen. William Shakespeare already had, as we have seen, an eager audience among the educated young; it is not too much to suggest that he might have been a “draw” for the members of the various colleges.

  They had left London for the very good reason that the theatres had once again been closed. There had been a number of food riots, over the soaring costs of fish and butter, in the late spring and early summer; there were twelve affrays in June alone. The apprentices had taken over the market in Southwark, and then subsequently the market at Billingsgate, to sell the staples of food at what they considered to be an appropriate rate. Then, on 29 June, a thousand London apprentices marched on Tower Hill to pillage the shops of the gun-makers there, clearly with nefarious intent. The pillories in Cheapside had been torn down, and a makeshift gallows was erected outside the house of the Lord Mayor. There were pamphlets circulated on the “rebellious tumults” and in subsequent legal proceedings the apprentices were charged with attempting to “take the sword of auchtoryte”1 from the mayor and aldermen of the city. Five of their leaders were hanged, drawn and quartered, thus incurring an unusually severe punishment. So London was placed under the Elizabethan version of martial law, and of course the theatres were out of action.

  The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had in any case begun their career in London during a generally troubled period. One alderman complained to the Privy Council in 1596 of the “great dearth of victual which hath been continued now these three years, besides three years’ plague before.”2 Weavers’ apprentices were part of the summer riots of 1595, and a silk weaver was incarcerated in Bedlam for accusing the mayor of insanity. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom, the leader of the artisans, is himself a weaver. It has been suggested that Shakespeare was transforming violence into farce and comedy. Certainly this would resemble his practice on other occasions. There are, of course, many other contemporary allusions in his plays that are now irrecoverable. He may also have taken advantage of the interval of closure to travel back to Stratford: there is a local record of “Mr. Shaxpere” purchasing “one book” from “Jone Perat”3 at the end of August. Aubrey reports on unknown authority that he “was wont to goe to his native Country once a yeare.”4

  When the company resumed acting in London at the end of August the Lord Mayor demanded that their resident theatres, the Curtain and the Theatre, should be pulled down in order to avoid the threatening presence of crowds and disorder in that neighbourhood. The virtues of the players, however, were more widely appreciated by the gentry than the City fathers. At the beginning of December Sir Edward Hoby wrote to his first cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, member of the Privy Council, asking “your grace to visit Canon Row; where as late as it shall please you a gate for your supper shall be open, and King Richard present himself to your view.”5 This may allude to a late-n
ight performance of The Tragedy of King Richard III but it has generally been interpreted as referring to The Tragedy of King Richard II that had just lately been written. It is in certain respects a contentious play, concerned as it is with the forced abdication and murder of a legitimate sovereign, and Cecil may have been invited to check its suitability for the court. The scenes directly concerned with those events may have been acted within the lifetime of Elizabeth I, but they were never printed in the period. That would have incurred too great a risk.

  The censored play was a popular success, however, with three quarto editions printed in the space of two years; the last two of them included the name of William Shakespeare as author. Its popularity may in fact have helped to promote the life of Richard II in the public imagination. There is a letter from Raleigh to Robert Cecil written in the summer of 1597, shortly before the publication of the play in quarto form, in which he states that “I acquainted my L: generall [the Earl of Essex] with your letter to mee amp; your kynd acceptance of your enterteynemente, hee was also wonderfull merry at ye consait of Richard the 2.”6 Here the name of the dead king is a joking pseudonym for the living queen.

  Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of King Richard II in verse, and it has all the splendour of his lyric impulse. That is why it is associated with A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as Romeo and Juliet. The verse shimmers and soars as the history of England is mingled with enchantment – not the enchantment of legend or of faery, but of a theatrical and lyrical sovereign who laments the end of his reign in soliloquies of dust and desolation. He is the monarch of metaphor and simile. His is in every sense a wonderful performance. Shakespeare has followed the symbolic logic of his dramaturgy by combining king and actor in one role, with all the spectacle and vainglory the combination implies. That is why it is also a play of ritual and rhetoric, with elaborate effects of staging as well as language. Richard finds his deepest being while musing upon his role or part within the world. He is depicted here as a highly self-conscious and dramatic monarch; he is the only person in the play to be granted soliloquies while his enemy and supplanter, Henry Bolingbroke, remains resolutely unyielding and external. The declining king seems to grow in interest as he approaches his defeat and death – or, rather, Shakespeare becomes more interested in his temperament and situation. At the beginning of the play he is depicted as somewhat callous and avaricious but, as he figuratively and literally bends lower to the earth, he inspires some of Shakespeare’s greatest verse. The dramatist is always engaged by failure, especially failure on such a cosmic scale. It summons up all the grace and sympathy of his nature, which may in part be connected with some tenderness towards his father, and in this play he proves himself beyond doubt to be the master of pathos.