History of English Literature, Volume 2: Shakespeare 9783034322294

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Volume 2

History of English Literature

Volume 2 offers a general assessment of all of Shakespeare’s works, summarizes the critical reception since its onset, traces a tentative biography of the playwright, discusses the youthful poems and the sonnets, and analyses the plays one by one. The plays are divided into the traditional thematic and chronological subsets – such as historical dramas, comedies, tragedies and romances – but they are further assessed in terms of their ‘experimental’ or ‘mature’ characteristics.

Franco Marucci

Franco Marucci is a former Professor of English at the Universities of Siena, Florence and Venice Ca’ Foscari. His publications include Il senso interrotto. Autonomia e codificazione nella poesia di Dylan Thomas (1976), The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1994), L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (2009) and Joyce (2013). His Storia della letteratura inglese in eight volumes was published by Le Lettere / Editoriale Srl, 2003–2018. As a creative writer he is the author of Pentapoli (2011), followed by Il Michelin del sacro (2012). He runs the blog , with comments and features on literature and music, and a weekly sports page.

Shakespeare

History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual context for each author.

Histor y of English Literature

‘Franco Marucci’s History of English Literature is unique in its field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.’ — J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford

Shakespeare

Franco Marucci

ISBN 978-3-0343-2229-4

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

Volume 2

History of English Literature

History of English Literature Volume 2

Shakespeare

Franco Marucci Translated from the Italian by J. Patricia Kennan, Sarah Suella Darkins and Elizabeth Harrowell

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Marucci, Franco, 1949- author. Title: Shakespeare / Franco Marucci. Other titles: Shakespeare. English Description: Oxford; New York : Peter Lang, [2018] | Series: History of English literature; volume 2 | Translation of Shakespeare, volume 1, tome 2 of Storia della letteratura inglese. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018008608 | ISBN 9783034322294 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 – Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR2894 .M346 2018 | DDC 822.3/3 – dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008608

Cover image: Edwin Henry Landseer, Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Titania and Bottom (1848). Cover design by Brian Melville. ISBN 978-3-0343-2229-4 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-223-8 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78874-224-5 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-225-2 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2018 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Franco Marucci has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

Patterned by that the poet here describes

(Titus Andronicus, IV.1.157)

Volumes of this work will be cited as follows: Volume 1 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 7 Volume 8

F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 1, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 3, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 4, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 5, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 6, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 7, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 8, Oxford 2019.

Note. For all other bibliographical references, made by author and year of publication followed by page number, see the general bibliography at the end of § 1 and the specific bibliographies for single dramas and poetical works.

Contents §§ 1–4. Introduction 

1

§ 1. Getting oriented in Shakespeare, p. 3. § 2. Shakespeare and his critics, p. 14. § 3. Organizing the dramatic canon, p. 28. § 4. Biography, p. 32.

  5–7. The Poems and the Sonnets 

39

§ 5. The narrative poems, p. 41. §§ 6–7. The sonnets (§ 6. Norm and anti-norm, p. 47. § 7. Irradiation, p. 58).

  8–16. The History Plays

69

§ 8. The history plays, p. 71. § 9. Henry VI, p. 73. § 10. King Richard III, p. 83. § 11. King Richard II, p. 92. § 12. King John, p. 99. § 13. Henry IV Part 1, p. 103. § 14. Henry IV Part 2, p. 109. § 15. Henry V, p. 117. § 16. Henry VIII, p. 126.

  17–22. The Euphuistic Comedies 

135

 § 17. The euphuistic comedies, p. 137. § 18. The Comedy of Errors, p. 137. § 19. The Taming of the Shrew, p. 143. § 20. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, p. 148. § 21. Love’s Labour’s Lost, p. 154. § 22. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, p. 159.

  23–28. The Roman Plays  § 23. The Roman plays, p. 171. § 24. Titus Andronicus, p. 172. § 25. Julius Caesar, p. 183. § 26. Troilus and Cressida, p. 192. § 27. Antony and Cleopatra, p. 201. § 28. Coriolanus, p. 210.

169

x 

§§ 29–37. The Tragedies and the Tragicomedies 

219

§ 29. The tragedies and the tragicomedies, p. 221. § 30. Romeo and Juliet, p. 225. § 31. The Merchant of Venice, p. 232. § 32. Hamlet, p. 239. § 33. Measure for Measure, p. 255. § 34. Othello, p. 267. § 35. Macbeth, p. 279. § 36. King Lear, p. 290. § 37. Timon of Athens, p. 302.

  38–43. The Romantic and Dark Comedies 

309

§ 38. The romantic and dark comedies, p. 311. § 39. Much Ado About Nothing, p. 313. § 40. As You Like It, p. 320. § 41. Twelfth Night, p. 328. § 42. The Merry Wives of Windsor, p. 335. § 43. All’s Well that Ends Well, p. 340.

  44–49. The Romances and the Apocryphal Plays 

347

§ 44. The romances and the apocryphal plays, p. 349. § 45. Pericles, p. 352. § 46. Cymbeline, p. 358. § 47. The Winter’s Tale, p. 367. § 48. The Tempest, p. 373. § 49. Apocrypha and plays in collaboration, p. 385.

Index of names 

391

Thematic index 

399

Introduction

§ 1. Getting oriented in Shakespeare It goes without saying that the primary, basic division in William Shakespeare’s works (1564–1616) is between two very distinct corpora. On one side, in possible order of writing, the canon of the sonnets, together with the smaller appendix of two poems; on the other, the plays. Each of these two canons is monumental in size. There are, in fact, over 150 sonnets, while the only other great Elizabethan to be attributed with as many writings and plays is Ben Jonson. And yet at the turn of the seventeenth century the theatres were going so strong that other playwrights could and did put their signatures to as many plays as Shakespeare (Middleton and Massinger), or they even overtook him (Thomas Heywood, Shirley and Fletcher). There was no alternative to choose, no third way to go, as the novel was very much in its infancy, though romances were high fashion. More importantly, Shakespeare had no desire or capacity to dedicate himself to writing long poems, like his contemporary Spenser, or, some decades later, Milton. It would be very mistaken, therefore, to consider Shakespeare’s poems and especially the sonnets as errors of youth. He himself described the sonnets as a monument – as the second, far more concentrated monument to his art. He boasted he possessed an art capable of immortalizing others and himself at the same time, like a Horatian monumentum aere perennius. It may have been a rhetorical convention, but Shakespeare confesses in his sonnets that becoming a playwright was a second choice, that his real vocation was that of the poet, and that the theatre contaminated and infected him like a dyer whose hands are inkstained from the job he does. So the sonnets all together form an autonomous work – a self-enclosed universe. For this reason they have been recently excluded from monographs on the whole Shakespeare and have given rise to a specific bibliography of studies which grows year on year, and is the work of ad hoc scholars. Though autonomous, the sonnet cycle is however tied by a double thread to the corpus of the plays in a system of accumulative or bilateral mutual illuminations, given an unconfutable uncertainty about which corpus precedes the other, and about whether some, or all, of the sonnets come before the plays. The normatively brief 154 sonnets can be measured up against the plays, whether 38, 39 or 40. It can be inferred, therefore, that the specific weight of a play corresponds to

4 Introduction

more or less four sonnets. It is a reasonable enough calculation, because up to now there is no known book dedicated to a single sonnet, but there are essays and studies focused on limited, circumscribed groups of them. The present specialization of Shakespeare studies confirms that a sonnet may contain the same semiotic density as a play, and is in fact a compressed play, stripped bare of all accessories. With such an untapped richness, the sonnets have challenged changing critical currents, theories on texts, fashions and tastes. Practitioners of all kinds of methods have approached them, just as they have intrigued the great poets following Shakespeare, who have often translated them. To the query about a well-educated later reader, unaware of the sonnets’ authorship, being able to recognize that the sonnets come from the same mind as the plays, the answer would be initially negative, but would gradually be transformed into assent. The poet’s voice is all one or close to being such, while the playwright’s breaks up into a poliphony of voices. The interrelation between the two corpora, as is easily verifiable, is above all lexical, and it is precisely on the recurrence of frequent and rare words both in the sonnets and plays that an experimental dating of some groups of sonnets has been based. In other words, the two reservoirs are correspondent and echo each other in a dual, overlapping, recursive process – horizontal within the poetic corpus, and vertical and transversal between poems and plays. Shakespeare the playwright – the historical playwright of England, who represents, though always via imaginary interpositions, an actual and recognizable reality – is the mirror-like, complementary face of Shakespeare the sonneteer, who embroiders a free, distorting picture of selected biographical and emotional experiences. In the sonnets there are only a few enigmatic, ambiguous, coded allusions to public history, one of which may be to the Gunpowder Plot in the parenthetic pair (124 and 125) as well as references which underscore the way royal conduct comes under criticism in the plays, because while the ‘fair youth’1 is not a political figure, he is one in the sense of not being shaken by passing things and standing firm against adulation, always for Shakespeare the force ruining courts. Another allusion is in sonnet 107, to Queen Elizabeth and a symbolic 1

This term will be adopted here throughout, though it never appears in any of the sonnets.

§ 1. Getting oriented in Shakespeare

5

‘eclipse’ that has aroused a wide range of the most varied interpretations.2 The line of a personal biography can therefore be generally traced out, but all temptations to give a slavish, close biographical reading need to be resisted, or carefully evaluated. In his sonnets, too, Shakespeare is an objectifying playwright. 2. What are then the characteristics of Shakespeare’s plays on first sight? What organization can be given to them? A first and even obvious answer could be that they can be divided up above all by: a) time; b) place; c) titles. The time is the present (at least in one case) and the past, both recent and distant. Sometimes time goes back to the classical period, the days of Greece or Rome, while in other moments it is medieval or Renaissance. Other plays may be achronic. Time is often, and especially, fantastic and imaginary, and can therefore also be in the future. And whatever the time, it is like space – mixed, defined and undefined, but always re-invented as English, French and especially Italian. In Shakespeare, in fact, there reigns a playful, bizarre synchrony of time and space, which also concerns the naming of places and characters. It seems to be a caprice, an odd decision – though often belied by subtle motivations and allusions – to call characters in the same play with classical or classical-sounding names, and at the same time create strident cacophonies and give others names from different origins and extraction. The titles of literary works, according to Gérard Genette, offer allusions and suggestions, and help the theme and the common thread of the play to emerge succinctly. Twentyone of Shakespeare’s thirty-eight plays, that is, a half plus two, have titles referring to a single protagonist, even in the form of antonomasia (The Merchant of Venice). A second typology, occurring in three plays, is that of a binary title; and two eponymous heroes are males, like the two gentlemen from Verona, or the two noble kinsmen. Other titles are verbal or transitive, indicating the final result of an action, like the taming of a shrew or love’s labour’s lost (the first with a gerund and the other with a past participle). Other titles sound like, or indeed are, proverbs, for example, All’s Well that Ends Well. Others point not to a character but 2

Lopez’s plot in 1594, the queen’s climacteric in 1596–1597, her illness in 1599 and the Count of Essex’s rebellion in 1601.

6 Introduction

to the event sparking the action, like a tempest. Or they may be thematic, like the comedy of errors, or referring to a precise, possibly hybrid genre, like a dream play (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) or a fairy play, or tale, of winter. At times, the title may refer to the moral to be drawn from the conclusion – measure for measure, much ado about nothing, as you like it. On one occasion the title points at once to the choral character of the play, indicating that there will be no dominant hero or heroine, as in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Twelfth Night stands alone as the only title based on a moment in calendar time. 3. As for genres, Shakespeare is a historical, comic, tragic and ‘romantic’ playwright (in the precise meaning of an author of romances). The hierarchy of values varies, of course, according to the dramatic aesthetics and tastes of different historical times. Not only do half of Shakespeare’s plays focus on facts and figures belonging to historical England, Rome and Greece, but various others are based on invented history. History is here, and is understood, as a synonym for a succession of documented or invented facts reaching over a long period of time. An essential branch of Shakespearean criticism is, in fact, the study of sources and how they were used. Shakespeare, whose destiny was to be ‘remade’ innumerable times, was himself a remaker. His greatness lies not in the wholesale invention of a plot or character, but in an act of refashioning. However, with him – the opposite of what normally happens – the hierarchy is inverted and the source text is either less valid or functions only as a handservant to the final result. His nature as historical playwright comes from breaking up the unity of time, followed by that of place. All Shakespeare’s plays exhibit their preference for the holes between the woof and the warp rather than the cloth itself. To use a musical analogy, they are diatonic rather than chromatic. And so it is not at all true that in Shakespeare’s case a scene drives and therefore creates another in quick succession, following an inflexible diegetic need. The true constructive internal law is just the opposite. What famously comes home to roost for the historical playwright is the treatment of movement and action in terms that are impossible for a genre which is monologic, dialogic or choral, unless there are long and laborious stage directions. Shakespeare solves the problem by treating action scenes in a Homeric way. He either resorts to brief ex post accounts,

§ 1. Getting oriented in Shakespeare

7

or chooses from the tangle of facts and the confusion one or more clashes between representative warriors, elected or pre-destined enemies or challengers in search of each other, like Hotspur and Henry in Henry IV. He never develops plots built on a brief episode, an epiphany or a lightning incident, so that within his plays space must be found sooner or later for a kind of narrated theatre. The variousness of times, places and scenes leads to a unity by means of a supra-temporal vision of history. Shakespeare makes absolute an epigraph, boutade or maxim, which he puts in the mouths of commentators within the play or the protagonists themselves: that history is in decline and times are corrupt. A pale compensation is offered by a cyclical concept of history, which puts forward a permanent redemption, one however that being intermittent and not resolutive can therefore fail. Since various characters speak in very different periods in varied periphrases of ‘these bad times’, they point to a philosophy of history. This is backed by the frequency of a metaphor registered as very high in the concordances,3 that is, ‘infection’ and its derivatives, evoking the area of illness, contagion and epidemics. It hardly seems the case to recall a very well-known generalization, that Shakespeare, like Donne, had one foot in the slowly declining medieval culture and the other in the Renaissance, unsettled by the new geographical discoveries, heliocentric theories and a pre-capitalistic economy on the advance; and that he had, so to speak, a third foot in Baroque and manneristic culture, connoted visually by the spiral, logically by discordia concors, and on a rhetorical level by antithesis, oxymoron, hyperbole and litotes – though bearing in mind the caveats historically indicated by C. S. Lewis.4 4. The emergence of the tragic in Shakespeare is rooted in the great existential contests that tragedy had sung and mourned since the times of the Greeks. An inscrutable Fate, even before human will faces its ordeals, exercises its irony in Shakespeare through its equivocations. This means 3

4

Seventy-nine recurrences in the plays. For the contextual recurrence of ‘infection’ in Sidney see Volume 1, § 48. Melchiori 1964, passim in his comment on the sonnets (see bibliography, § 6), points to the echoes of the dialogue between Cecropia and Pamela in Sidney’s New Arcadia. Volume 1, § 37.3.

8 Introduction

that language and the systems of communication are fallible and equivocal in spite of the good intentions of humans. An unfortunate and undesired mortal accident, or an unrepairable misfortune happen because of the congenital breakdowns in communication, caused perhaps by puns, identical names or ill-interpreted allusions. If the present volume had needed a subtitle to indicate its emphasis, one from the phenomenology of communication would have been most appropriate. Shakespeare’s work is both a sumptuous ‘banquet of languages’ and an illustration of how information is tampered, and of how comedy and especially tragedy are generated by equivocation. Shakespeare’s concept of man and human identity is that of a field fraught with tensions: body and spirit, senses and soul, nature and culture, nature and counter-nature, egoism and altruism, stupidity and wisdom, instinct and reason, pleasure and renunciation, modesty and ambition. Man can rise to the highest peaks of purity and immateriality, but he can also sink and be threatened with sinking into the abyss of degradation. Shakespeare shows that he takes part in the most impassioned search for ideals, but no-one can be as obscene as he can, or more precisely makes men speak obscenely as he does. Innuendos are endemic and recall the male fixation with fornication and lust. From various plays the whole cosmos appears to be permeated by uncontrollable urges, many of them revolving around the explosion of lechery. Ipso facto, the Shakespearean being regresses to an animal state – a beast, a monster. It is the demonstration of a feared, regressive rather than progressive evolutionism. The evolution of living itself is of the nature of a myth, which is found time and time again damaged, denied and destroyed. Kingdoms fall apart for natural reasons, most often because they are rotting from within, so that a new revitalizing force needs to come from outside. The monarch or prince should enforce the laws and act as their guarantor, but too often he abdicates or applies inhuman laws and just as often tyrannizes. That Shakespeare is impassible is pure fiction: he is in fact a proto-illuminist who denounces obfuscating and repressive laws, and is always on the side of civil progress and social harmony, as well as the free expression of the human faculties.* *

By now there are several thousand volume-length critical monographs available on Shakespeare’s works, and the number of essays in periodicals has to be multiplied by who knows how many times. It also needs to be said that, in answering the nature

§ 1. Getting oriented in Shakespeare

9

and aim of this volume, the following bibliography is particularly selective and will be limited to recognized landmarks only and to the most accredited studies, representative of critical tendencies that have followed one another over the last few decades; it will also include general surveys of Shakespeare’s works but exclude specialist studies for the initiated. Readers in search of a more exhaustive documentation are referred to the numerous bibliographies on Shakespearean studies (all of which are rapidly becoming obsolete, and of which the most thorough is the annual supplement of The Shakespeare Quarterly). Especially with Shakespeare, it will be possible to cite articles in journals only in a few rare cases. To facilitate access, the following material has been subdivided and ordered into sections, one of which is dedicated to Italian criticism, which excels on the international scene for its quantity and quality. Separate editions of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and criticism specifically on them and his poetic production, as well as monographs on individual plays, will be listed in their respective sections. Editions. Historical editions, all published in London unless differently specified, edited by N. Rowe (1709), A. Pope (1723–1725), L. Theobald (1733), S. Johnson (1765), E. Capell (1768), E. Malone (1790), Cambridge Shakespeare (1863–1866), Variorum (1871–1928). Modern and recent editions begin with the first Arden series (1899–1931; 2nd series 1951–1982, and 3rd series under way since 1995), and are followed, to name only the main ones, by The New Cambridge Shakespeare (ed. J. Dover Wilson and A. Quiller-Couch, Cambridge 1921–1966, since republished with a new layout and new editors); Complete Works (ed. P. Alexander, 1951), The Pelican Shakespeare (ed. A. Harbage, 1956–1967), The Riverside Shakespeare (ed. B. G. Evans, Boston, MA 1974), The Oxford Shakespeare (ed. S. Wells and G. Taylor, 1986), Complete Works (ed.  D. Bevington,  New York  2002), Complete Works: The  RSC  Shakespeare (ed.  J. Bate and R. Rasmussen, London 2007). Textual issues, sources, concordances. As I shall note below, textual issues are continually under revision. See The Oxford Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, ed. S. Wells, G. Taylor et al., Oxford 1987; D. S. Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, Cambridge 2001; A. Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, Cambridge 2003. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. G. Bullough, 8 vols, London 1957–1975; K. Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays, London 1977; Nel laboratorio di Shakespeare: Dalle fonti ai drammi, ed. A. Serpieri, 4 vols, Parma 1980; B. Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays, Oxford 2002. Concordance, ed. M. Spevak, 9 vols, Hildesheim and New York 1968–1980. Life. S. Lee, A Life of Shakespeare, new edn, rewritten and enlarged, London 1915; J. Q. Adams, A Life of William Shakespeare, London 1923; M. R. Reese, Shakespeare: His World and His Work, London 1953, 1980; A. L. Rowse, William Shakespeare: A Biography, London 1963, 1967; A. Burgess, Shakespeare, London 1970; S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, Oxford 1977, and Shakespeare’s Lives, Oxford 1991, 1993; E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’, Manchester 1985, 1988; P. Edwards, Shakespeare: A Writer’s Progress, Oxford 1986; S. Wells,

10 Introduction

Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life, London 1994; P. Honan, Shakespeare: A Life, Oxford 1998; K. Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life, London 2001, and with the title Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, London 2010; S. Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, New York 2004; P. Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography, London 2005; J. Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare, London 2008; L. Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography, Chichester 2012. Historical criticism and history of criticism. Shakespeare Criticism: A Selection, ed. D. Nichol Smith, Oxford 1916, replaced by Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. Vickers, 6 vols, London 1974, the last stopping at 1801. The Romantics were the first readers with critical depth, headed by Coleridge (whose writings are collected in Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vols, London 1930), Hazlitt (Characters of  Shakespeare’s Plays, London 1817), Lamb (Tales from Shakespeare, London 1807, in collaboration with his sister Mary, and Specimens of English Dramatic Poetry, London 1808), De Quincey (Shakespeare: A Biography, Edinburgh 1864), Swinburne (A Study of Shakespeare, London 1880) and Pater (Appreciations, London 1889), the main ones. Shakespeare Criticism 1919–1935, ed. A. Ridler, London 1936; G. Baldini, La fortuna di Shakespeare 1593–1964, 2 vols, Milano 1965; A. B. Harbage, Conceptions of  Shakespeare, Cambridge, MA 1966; A. M. Eastman, A Short History of Shakespeare Criticism, New York 1968; G. Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, London 1989, 1990; Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945–2000, ed. R. McDonald, Malden, MA and Oxford 2004. For a more detailed discussion see below, § 2. General modern criticism on the plays. E. Dowden Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, London 1875, and Shakspere, London 1877 (known by definition as the ‘Shakespeare primer’); A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, London 1904, new edn 1992; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols, Oxford 1930; G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, London 1930, 1983, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays, London 1948, 1964, and The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Including the Roman Plays, London 1965, 1968; C. F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, Cambridge 1935; J. M. Murry, Shakespeare, London 1936; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Last Plays, London 1938, Shakespeare’s History Plays, London 1944, Harmondsworth 1991, and Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, Harmondsworth 1965; E. A. Armstrong, Shakespeare’s Imagination: A Study of the Psychology of Association and Inspiration, London 1946; L. B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s ‘Histories’: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy, San Marino, CA 1947; M. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry: A Study of his Earlier Work in Relation to the Poetry of the Time, London 1951, The Rise of the Common Player: A Study of Actor and Society in Shakespeare’s England, London 1962, Shakespeare the Craftsman, London 1969, The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theatre of his Time,

§ 1. Getting oriented in Shakespeare

11

Cambridge 1979, and Shakespeare: The Poet in his World, London 1980; W. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery, London 1951, 1977 (Eng. trans., originally published in German as Shakespeares Bilder, Bonn 1936); D. Traversi, Shakespeare: The Last Phase, London 1954, Shakespeare from ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’, London 1957, and An Approach to Shakespeare, London 1968; M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, London 1957; I. Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, Princeton, NJ 1957, 1965; C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, Princeton, NJ 1959; B. Evans, Shakespeare’s Comedies, Oxford 1960; H. L. Snuggs, Shakespeare and Five Acts: Studies in a Dramatic Convention, New York, 1960; M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty: A Study of Shakespeare’s History Plays, London 1961; A. Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, London 1962; R. Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays, Cambridge, MA 1963; J. Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Polish edn Warsaw 1964, Eng. trans. London 1964, New York 1966; R. G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, New York 1965; N. Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance, New York 1965, The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies, Toronto 1983, and Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, Markham, ON 1986; T. Eagleton, Shakespeare and Society: Critical Studies in Shakespearean Drama, London 1967, and Shakespeare, Oxford 1987; A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare, San Marino, CA 1967; J. L. Styan, Shakespeare’s Stagecraft, Cambridge 1967; P. Edwards, Divine Shakespeare and the Confines of Art, London 1968; R. Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare’s History Plays, Cambridge, MA 1970; H. A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare’s Histories, Cambridge, MA 1970; R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays: From Satire to Celebration, Charlottesville, VA 1971; A New Companion to Shakespeare’s Studies, ed. K. Muir and S. Schoenbaum, Cambridge 1971; H. Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, Princeton, NJ 1972; J. Hartvig, Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision, Baton Rouge, LA 1972; D. Young, The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays, New Haven, CT and London 1972; L. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare, New York 1973; A. Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, London and New York 1974; L. Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy, Cambridge 1974; F. A. Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays, London 1975; E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare, Seven Tragedies: the Dramatist’s Manipulation of Response, Basingstoke 1976, and Myriad-minded Shakespeare, London 1988; B. Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances, Athens, GA 1976; P. Saccio, Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama, London 1977; R. Berry, The Shakespearean Metaphor: Studies in Language and Form, London 1978; R. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, Eng. trans., Baltimore, MD and London 1978 (German edn Berlin 1967); J. Wilders, The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare’s English and Roman

12 Introduction

History Plays, London 1978; J. L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad: ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’, Berkeley, CA and London 1979; B. Evan, Shakespeare’s Tragic Practice, Oxford and New York 1979; K. Muir, Shakespeare’s Tragic Sequence, Liverpool 1979; S. Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Princeton, NJ 1979; Shakespearean Comedy, ed. M. Charney, New York 1980; Les voies de la création théâtrale, by various authors, Paris 1980; R. Grudin, Comic Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1980; R. Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare, London 1980; J. Bayley, Shakespeare and Tragedy, London 1981; G. R. Hibbard, The Making of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Poetry, Toronto 1981; N. Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning, Chicago and London 1981; R. P. Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn, Berkeley, CA 1981; A. D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality, London 1983 and 2007; N. F. Blake, The Language of Shakespeare, London 1983; J. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, New York and London 1984; K. Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse: Language-games in the Comedies, Cambridge 1984, also editor of Shakespeare Today: Directions and Methods of Research, Firenze 1984; R. R. Reed, The Crime and God’s Judgement in Shakespeare, Lexington, KT 1984; W. C. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy, Princeton, NJ 1985; Alternative Shakespeares, ed. J. Drakakis, London 1985; Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield, Manchester 1985, London 1994; G. Holderness, Shakespeare’s History, Dublin 1985; K. Newman, Shakespeare’s Rhetoric of Comic Character, New York and London 1985; W. Empson, Essays on Shakespeare, Cambridge 1986; E. Faas, Shakespeare’s Poetics, Cambridge 1986; T. Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process, London 1986; D. Mehl, Shakespeare’s Tragedies: An Introduction, Cambridge 1986; R. Ornstein, Shakespeare’s Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery, Newark, DE 1986; The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Studies, ed. S. Wells, Cambridge 1986; M. Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Detroit, MI 1986; S. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge 1987, and Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge 2003; V. Thomas, The Moral Universe of Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, New York 1987; S. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles 1988, and Shakespeare’s Freedom, Chicago 2010; C. W. R. D. Moseley, Shakespeare’s History Plays: ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’: The Making of a King, London 1988; L. G. Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, New Haven, CT and London 1989; P. Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English

§ 1. Getting oriented in Shakespeare

13

Chronicles, Ithaca, NY 1990, and, with J. E. Howard, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories, New York 1997; W. B. Bache, Design and Closure in Shakespeare’s Major Plays: The Nature of Recapitulation, New York 1991; T. McAlindon, Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos, Cambridge 1991; R. S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca, Oxford 1992; N. Lukacher, Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of Conscience, Ithaca, NY and London 1994; G. Melchiori, Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos, Newark, DE 1994; Shakespeare Early Comedies: A Casebook, ed. P. Mason, London 1995; Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, ed. S. N. Garner and M. Springnether, Bloomington, IN 1996; J. Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare, London 1997; H. Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, New York 1998 and London 1999; A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. D. Kastan, Oxford 1999; Shakespeare, the Last Plays, ed. K. Ryan, London and New York 1999; L. Danson, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres, Oxford 2000; F. Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, Harmondsworth 2000; R. McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, Oxford 2001; The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. M. de Grazia and S. Wells, Cambridge 2001; A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, ed. R. Dutton and J. H. Howards, 4 vols, Oxford 2003; Shakespeare’s Comedies, ed. E. Smith, Oxford 2003, also editor of The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare, Cambridge 2007; D. Crystal, Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard, Thriplow 2008; J. Knapp, Shakespeare Only, Chicago 2010; Phenomenal Shakespeare, ed. B.  R. Smith, Chichester 2010. General modern Italian criticism on the plays. B. Croce, ‘Shakespeare’, in Ariosto, Shakespeare, Corneille, Bari 1920, 1961, 75–213; P. Bardi, Teatro shakespeariano, Bari 1927; C. Formichi, Guglielmo Shakespeare, Roma 1928; M. Apollonio, Shakespeare, Brescia 1941; P. Rebora, Shakespeare: la vita, l’opera, il messaggio, Milano 1947; V. Capocci, Genio e mestiere: Shakespeare e la commedia dell’arte, Bari 1950; M. Praz, G. Melchiori and G. Baldini, Le tragedie di Shakespeare, Torino 1957; G. Baldini, Manualetto shakespeariano, Torino 1964; F. Ferrara, Shakespeare e la commedia, Bari 1964, and Shakespeare e le voci della storia, Roma 1994; M. Praz, Caleidoscopio shakespeariano, Bari 1969; M. d’Amico, Scena e parola in Shakespeare, Torino 1974; V. Gentili, La recita della follia. Funzioni dell’insania nel teatro di Shakespeare, Torino 1978; M. Fusini, La passione dell’origine. Studi sul tragico shakespeariano e il roman­ zesco moderno, Bari 1981, and Di vita si muore. Lo spettacolo delle passioni nel teatro di Shakespeare, Milano 2010; R. Mullini, Corruttore di parole: il ‘fool’ nel teatro di Shakespeare, Bologna 1983; A. Cavallone Anzi, Varie e strane forme: Shakespeare, il masque e il gusto manieristico, Milano 1984, and Shakespeare e le arti figurative, Roma 1998; M. Marrapodi, The Great Image. Figure e immagini della regalità nel teatro di Shakespeare, Roma 1984; La grande festa del linguaggio. Shakespeare e la lingua inglese,

14 Introduction

§ 2. Shakespeare and his critics Some decades ago a precious, multi-volume collection of views and critical testimonies on Shakespeare over three centuries, was compiled,5 wisely brought to a close right in the moment (1801) when Shakespearean criticism was on the point of becoming over-crowded and unmanageable. It is a journey which begins in a pragmatic and oblique way in the mid- and late seventeenth century, with the adaptations of Shakespeare’s original plays by a multitude of hacks, though some top class playwrights also played their part. Several times great efforts have also been made to

ed. K. Elam, Bologna 1986, also editor, with A. Serpieri, of  L’eros in Shakespeare, Parma 1988; A. Serpieri, ‘Polifonia shakespeariana’, in Retorica e immaginario, Parma 1986, 109–92; R. Ciocca, Il cerchio d’oro. I re sacri nel teatro shakespeariano, Roma 1987; L. Di Michele, La scena dei potenti. Teatro, politica, spettacolo dell’età di William Shakespeare, Napoli 1988; A. Locatelli, L’eloquenza e gli incantesimi: interpretazioni shakespeariane, Milano 1988; G. Marra, Il tragico e il comico. Aspetti e saggi shakespea­ riani, Roma 1991; G. Melchiori, Shakespeare: politica e contesto economico, Roma 1992, Shakespeare. Genesi e struttura delle opere, Roma and Bari 1994, 2008, and Shakespeare all’opera. I drammi nella librettistica italiana, Roma 2006; P. Pugliatti, Shakespeare storico, Roma 1993; V. Gabrieli, La storia d’Inghilterra nel teatro di Shakespeare, Roma 1995; A. Lombardo, L’eroe tragico moderno. Faust, Amleto, Otello, Roma 1996, also editor of Shakespeare e il Novecento, Roma 2002; D. Montini, I discorsi dei re: retorica e politica in Elisabetta 1. e in Henry 5. di Shakespeare, Bari 1999; S. de Filippis, Teatro come sperimentazione. Shakespeare e la scrittura romanzesca, Roma 2003; S. Bigliazzi, Nel prisma del nulla. L’esperienza del non-essere nella drammaturgia shakespeariana, Napoli 2005; C. Mucci, I corpi di Elisabetta. Sessualità, potere e poetica della cultura al tempo di Shakespeare, Pisa 2009; Le ultime opere di Shakespeare. Da ‘Pericles’ al caso ‘Cardenio’, ed. C. Mucci, C. Magni and L. Tommaso, Napoli 2009; M. Stanco, Il caos ordinato. Tensioni etiche e giustizia poetica in Shakespeare, Roma 2009; A. Leonardi, Il cigno e la tigre: figurazioni zoomorfe in Shakespeare, Napoli 2010; S. Manferlotti, Shakespeare, Roma 2010; P. Colaiacomo, Le cuciture dell’acqua. Shakespeare alle origini del corpo moderno, Roma 2012; M. Stella, Il romanzo della regina. Scrittura della sovranità in Shakespeare, Roma 2013; B. Del Villano, Lo specchio e l’ossimoro: la messinscena dell’interiorità nel teatro di Shakespeare, Pisa 2013; G. Leone, Il palcoscenico esemplare. La questione della giustizia nelle tragedie shakespeariane, Napoli 2015. 5

Vickers 1974.

§ 2. Shakespeare and his critics

15

create a volume-length, panoramic but inevitably brief summary of Shakespeare criticism from the beginnings up to the present day.6 Which leads us to conclude that what is missing, and will forever be missing, is the comprehensive work of a second, encyclopaedic René Wellek, who with all his/her tirelessness, scrupulousness and above all reliability, will identify and discuss the critical vicissitudes and successive global visions of Shakespeare’s oeuvre over the years. The scholar we would need is someone conversant with the personalities of the main Shakespearean critics, their essays and volumes, along a route marked out by milestones, all of which is not naturally, nowadays, the exclusive fiefdom of the mother-tongue intelligentsia and of English literary studies in English. In general terms, the reception of Shakespeare in his days was immediately reflected by other theatre men who staged his works soon after his death; subsequently, in the eighteenth century, it shifted from the theatres to the historical editions of his works and to the editors’ specially written prefaces. In the nineteenth century the loci of Shakespeare’s reception became the public lectures or the essays and the passing remarks made by great poets and prose writers. Self-standing critical volumes on Shakespeare began to appear about midcentury, when Shakespeare became by far the most written-about writer of modern times, and the one on whom international academic research is the more fervent and feverish. 2. On the occasion of the 1623 publication of the First Folio, Ben Jonson wrote a verse preface which nobly recognized the greatness of his contemporary, though harbouring different and slightly malicious ideas, privately confessed to the Scotsman, Drummond of Hawthornden, who had offered him hospitality and collected his confidences. Milton too left a favourable verse testimonial in 1630. Shakespeare’s eclipse, or at least his downsizing, was due to the advance of Puritanism, the closing of the theatres, and the new French-style aesthetic that came into favour with the Restoration. From 1662 onwards Davenant, followed shortly afterwards by Dryden, showed that Shakespeare could certainly survive, but only adapted and reworked, 6

See in the highly readable Taylor 1989, 372 (the asterisked note), a list ending with Eastman 1968. Another discussion of critical tendencies, extending to the date of publication, is in R. Shaughnessy, The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare, London 2011.

16 Introduction

that is, regularized, above all refined and streamlined with the smoothing out of his presumed farrago. All this in the utter silence of the scientists, philosophers and also translators of late seventeenth-century French poetics. Dryden’s prefaces to his Shakespearean adaptations are well-balanced essays on the dramatic art, and if on one side they defend the amplitude of Shakespeare’s inspiration, on the other they fall in with an already evolutionist idea of language and literature. It follows that for Dryden Shakespeare is irremediably inelegant, rough, improper and on the whole defective. Dryden is one of the many Robert Bridges (the severe twentieth-century critic of Hopkins) who from time to time appeal to literary decorum and the aesthetics of rules. In the preface to his Antony and Cleopatra Dryden even proposed an aesthetics for drama which is the exact opposite of what is implied in Shakespeare. The hero cannot be all virtuous because it would be unjust for him to be made unhappy if he is virtuous, and neither can he be entirely vicious because then he would not be able to arouse the spectator’s compassion. Shakespeare studies, of course, the very paradoxes which belie these affirmations. Dryden repeated with objectivity his ayes and nays in the preface to the adaptation of Troilus and Cressida. Up to the end of his century adaptations indulged in deforming the originals by intervening on the psychology of the characters and introducing spatial/temporal variations. Otway collocates a Romeo and Juliet in ancient Rome and makes a total recast of the dramatis personae. The general tendency was to give a happy ending to the tragedies, as in the case of King Lear and Cordelia, the former kept alive and the second given away as bride to Edgar. Pope, the second of the major eighteenth-century editors, was also the first to separate Shakespeare’s texts from their performance, or give more weight to the value of his text for reading rather than for staging. For Dr Johnson, Shakespeare was not a poet who resorted to exceptional situations, but one who reflected pure naturalness – a ‘comic’ poet, therefore, not so good at tragic tones, and yet guilty of lapses in taste, infringements of decorum and technical and constructive slovenliness; but Johnson refrains from criticizing Shakespeare’s disrespect for the Aristotelian unities. 3. It was during the eighteenth century that the whole of Europe became gradually aware of the genius of Shakespeare; admiration, however, was inevitably held back by its Illuminist mind-cast. The metaphors used for Shakespeare were those referring to a force of nature endowed with

§ 2. Shakespeare and his critics

17

ungoverned creativity and to a gushing spring or, rather, a geyser forcing itself out of the earth (like poetic inspiration in Kubla Khan). Some have therefore thought7 that the antidote to Illuminism was the discovery of Longinus, whose treatise was translated into English in 1653. This treatise was understood by a number of minor critics, and used, as a prefiguration of Shakespeare’s mighty but confused metaphorism. In France Shakespeare awoke the interest of Voltaire, who initially esteemed him before deriding him as a ‘saltimbanque’, provoking a long and hostile answer from Giuseppe Baretti. It was the German Romantic critics – Lessing, Schlegel, Wieland, Herder – who aroused a great interest in a playwright at that point almost forgotten even by his countrymen.8 Lessing allied with Baretti in an attack against the shortcomings of  Voltaire’s dramatic art in comparison to Shakespeare’s. In his lectures on dramatic art, dating from the early nineteenth century, Schlegel floated the idea of a kaleidoscopic, organic form communicating a vibrant impression of totality to the spectator. Coleridge was guided, perhaps a little too far, by the Germans, so much so that his reputation wavers with the passing of the years, from him being declared the greatest nineteenth-century critic of Shakespeare to being amorphous, echoing others (to the point of plagiarism), even amateur and superficial. Coleridge’s Shakespeare knows well the meanders of the human psyche (as in a certain sense Coleridge himself does as a poet), and he therefore shapes a gallery of life-like characters who become perfectly organic with and in the play itself. Already at the end of the eighteenth century, Shakespeare criticism was becoming less erratic, and definitely rather crowded, and with some exceptions it will be necessary from now on to summarize the positions according to rapid formulas that have become crystallized. It was Maurice Morgann, author of a long essay (the first of such proportions), who demonstrated in 1777 that Falstaff is not a coward. Charles Lamb employed a paradoxical reasoning to argue that Shakespeare could not be staged, and that his greatness lies in the written text; performances, he 7 Taylor 1989, 89–91. 8 In Wilhelm Meister (Book IV, chapter 13) Goethe himself perceived the tragedy of Hamlet in the terms of a conflict between will and necessity, by means of the image of an oak planted in a vase: ‘Hier wird ein Eichbaum in ein köstliches Gefäß gepflanzt, das nur liebliche Blumen in seinen Schoß hätte aufnehmen sollen’.

18 Introduction

said, reduce and diminish the power of the text and distract the spectator’s attention from it. William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817) was the first Shakespearean handbook designed to diagnose, therefore also guide and reconstruct, the reader’s emotional reaction, more precisely of an ideal selection of average theatre-goers. The Romantic idolatry for the writer of the sublime plays was tinged with the suspicion that the author must have been a greater spirit than William Shakespeare was deemed to be. But the sonnets reappeared beside the plays, causing the revival of a form that had fallen into lethargy after Milton. Shakespeare’s style, Taine held, was impetuous, savage, passionate, with a Longinus-like fire of unordered, whirling images. But Shakespeare is still for Taine the painter of a gallery, and in fact Taine runs through several portraits – but not dramas in all their aspects – with an empathetic, inspired phraseology which demonstrates Shakespeare’s complete rejection of Racinian neoclassicism. 4. Edward Dowden’s 1877 primer was the first attempt in history to organize Shakespeare’s corpus of plays into four periods according to a teleological climax that starts with the impurities of the beginnings and culminates in the sublimation of the last romances. Some relate it to the climate of the mid-century’s evolutionary debate, in particular to Cuvier’s catastrophic theory of destructive phases being followed by others of recreation.9 Swinburne, having identified in Marlowe the founder of the Elizabethan theatre and Shakespeare as his first descendant, used the image of the sea with its estuaries and gulfs10 to divide the plays into three phases. Walter Pater paraphrased the somewhat faded and diaphanous atmospheres of some of the plays, though he also highlighted the taste for words in characters like Berowne, seen as a reflection of Shakespeare himself.11 But voices of dissent were also heard. At the turn of the century Saintsbury declared, though without complaint, that Shakespeare had not been a great ‘plotter’, that is, an architect of plots – Jonson’s primacy – and that his strength lay in character. Shaw, a debunker of myths, allowed and praised only the verbal music of the plays, speaking of it only in terms of musical 9 10 11

Volume 4, § 58.1. Volume 6, § 162.2. Volume 6, § 184.3.

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19

criticism. In 1906 Tolstoy took a stand and declared Shakespeare immoral, or rather, depraved, and demolished King Lear for its lack of verisimilitude. Both Shaw and Tolstoy were echoed by Robert Bridges (1907), who applied to Shakespeare the same laws of measure and decorum he had used and was to use for Hopkins. The first milestone in modern Shakespearean studies is Bradley’s 1904 volume, Shakespearean Tragedy, which establishes the principles of Shakespearean tragedy, tackles the four major tragedies and closes with more questionable chapters on Shakespeare’s ideas and tastes (he hated dogs, was not particularly religious, but was indeed politically oriented). For Bradley tragedy is regulated by a catastrophe, which involves a highly placed hero, an exceptional person therefore, without however its being caused by fate, psychological abnormalities or supernatural forces. The provocation comes from his will, aided by equivocation – the above-mentioned equivocation. Each hero is torn by an internal conflict between two opposing forces, without any traces of fatalism or heredity. Shakespeare’s plays have a tri-partite construction, with exposition, development and catastrophe, but with delays, slowing downs, counter-blows. What Bradley’s procedure does is break down the play into its constituents in order to identify the psychological drives behind the action. In doing this he is a revisionist who firmly takes a stand against the Romantic Shakespeare of Schlegel and Coleridge, whose readings and opinions rarely earn his approval. Another of his fixations is to want to clarify internal diegetic mysteries and contradictions. How long is the time in a play? How old are the characters? Why do they do something, and what is their real reason? There is hardly ever any discussion on the diegetic rhythm because Bradley’s attention is completely absorbed by psychological motivations, and when he cannot detect them he protests. But he feels the defects are compensated for by the ‘imaginative effects’. So Bradley disassembles the plays by characters rather than by action and linked diegetic units, or ambiences, or ideas, or isotopies. Extracting the characters from the dynamics of the play renders them static.12 He also investigates intentions and makes conjectures about 12

As will be shown below, the unity of measure of the character has come back into fashion, at least in Bloom 1999, which refers back to Bradley almost always with approbation.

20 Introduction

prior events. Had, for example, Macbeth and his wife already planned the murder some time before? 5. Nothing is better for starting off a discussion on the state of Shakespearean studies in the early twentieth century, than to pause over the wide-ranging essay on the poet-playwright by Benedetto Croce, dating back to 1918–1919.13 It was in no way an isolated case in Italy, though the brief evaluations by Pietro Verri, Foscolo, Manzoni and De Sanctis14 cannot be considered to form a consolidated tradition. Croce’s essay is interesting and still useful today, given that it functions as a kind of breakwater – all the more so because it gives a clear summary of the changes in cultural taste and literary sensibility from the eighteenth century up to his time of writing, with a rapid review and judgement on both historical and contemporary positions. Conceived almost a century ago by now, it is inevitably incomplete, but it is still helpful because after all almost all critical tendencies listed by Croce are still in force today. Only, I feel, three new approaches – political, gender-feminist and new historicist – have emerged from the enormous mass of studies and essays in the intervening century, and the only approach to have been definitively abandoned is Croce’s.15 A second reason for paus13

Croce 1920 (and 1961, my reference source). On Croce’s reputation in later English and American culture see A. Lombardo, ‘La letteratura inglese nella critica di Croce’, in Ritratto di Enobarbo. Saggi sulla letteratura inglese, Pisa 1971, 107–35. 14 From the colourful, pepped up overview on Shakespeare’s Italian reception in M. Praz, Storia della letteratura inglese, Firenze 1968, 192–6, we learn of the complete ignorance about Shakespeare in the country until the late eighteenth century, and that the playwright was subject to unfortunate distortions before the fundamental anti-Voltaire intervention mounted by Baretti (1778 in English and 1820 in Italian). By the nineteenth century, though, the major Italian writers did read Shakespeare, but mostly in French translations. 15 In a polemic with the German school, which had called Shakespeare a great master of ideals and morality, Croce defines him as a universal poet, objective, impersonal, impartial, even cold, who depicts life in its discordance, which he does not want to resolve and where he does not want to intervene, though recognizing the existence of an extra-, supra-human organizing principle. Like Ariosto, Shakespeare is a spectator of the contest between good and evil. But life’s contests and mysteries are not elaborated philosophically, but represented, though Shakespeare’s ‘feeling’ derives from mental presuppositions. It is, however, arbitrary to think, as Croce does, that Shakespeare

§ 2. Shakespeare and his critics

21

ing over Croce’s essay is in fact that many polemical objections started by Croce can still be shared in substance, while others are to be rejected as being dictated by prejudiced and conservative short-sightedness, answering possible prejudices in the same vein, as will be shown below. Croce begins his discussion with Voltaire, when Shakespeare was held to be a barbarian but not without talent, a judgement shared with the early Romantics and their followers, who saw in him a master of morality optimistically praising life’s sweetness and harmony. The first part of Croce’s essay makes a distinction between the practical and the poetical artist, and therefore addresses, without naming it, the biographical method.16 He regrets that so little is known about Shakespeare the man; but Shakespeare means his art, and he thus distances himself from bio-aesthetic, Romantic-type contaminations in the style of Georg Brandes and Emerson. He derides all far-fetched biographical theories, which anyway cancel one another out. He also notes the open, very open question of the attributions, and therefore touches on one of the most fashionable subjects today. That he rejects all these approaches is another matter. As is well known, Croce does not separate form from content, but sees them fused, so that he attacks anyone who presumes to separate them and analyse only the form. He also attacks anyone who

16

did not believe in eternal life, or in life as a trial and pilgrimage, and only in a life on earth, instead. Croce never introduces the distinction between Shakespeare the man and a playwright who doesn’t necessarily speak in the first person; however – we may object – his characters question one another continuously about eternal life and reward and punishment. The central sections of Croce’s essay dissect the plays by genre, with brief appreciative analyses and paraphrases which identify recurring motifs and types. Croce was one of the first to note Shakespeare’s debt to the European tradition of Arcadian, pastoral, epic and mock-heroic poetry, as well as to the early Italian improvised comedy (the ‘teatro dell’arte’), and even to the beginnings of Marinism in the two narrative poems. But he is seen by him as transcending this repertoire. As for his history plays, Croce argues that they lack an epic dimension, given that there is no teleology of history, but rather an ignoring of it, and interest centres on the phenomenology of life, what Croce terms the practical aspect of life. Something like T. S. Eliot’s ‘transfiguration’ intervenes between the domain of the practical and that of the poetic, and the biographical inspiration becomes, in this alchemy, unrecognizable. Croce accentuates the gap between the real model and artistic creation, and makes of Shakespeare a true objectivizing author who camouflages and hides himself, without transfusing himself into any character.

22 Introduction

dares section the works and analyse them under the microscope. Irritated, he asks what the use of such disquisitions is, and affirms that those who go after them are like people trying to make others realize that ‘the sun shines in the sky’. Here Croce turns down a blind alley in his mania to put a stop to the spontaneous life of criticism, and to say that everything has already been said and that we must only read and listen. His opposition to genre criticism is inexplicable. Yet by doing so he suggests the aesthetics that lies behind this attitude, that is, the dramatic genre does not exist, and the only existing thing is ‘always and uniquely “poetry”’. He classifies the approaches to Shakespeare’s works as follows: 1) The philological method. Croce opines that it is useless to try and match the chronological order, either completely conjectural or documented, with the ideal one, because one ends up loading works with values, meanings and resonances they do not possess. 2) The method he calls ‘rhetorical’, which breaks down a text into its component parts, which he classifies as a Romantic strategy – but it is far more Romantic to postulate, as Croce does, that a playwright possesses an inseparable ‘divine fantasy’ (so in the end Croce too believes in Romantic organicism). However, he admits that there are some weaker parts in Shakespeare’s plays. This method could be said to be the forerunner of formalism and structuralism. 3) Exclamative criticism, especially of the nineteenth century. 4) Imaginative or metaphorical criticism. 5) Allegorical criticism, as if each play were the translation of a historical, philosophical or moral idea. Croce fiercely attacks recent German criticism, though a similar allegorical criticism is today more alive than ever. 6) Objectivist criticism, which does not take into account the ‘informing feeling’, defined with incomparable clarity on page 199 of the essay. The characters are images and projections of the poet’s feeling, while some investigate their motivations, psychologized with abstruse imaginings and aetiologies. 7) Typological criticism: Romantic versus Classical and above all Germanic versus Latin (which Croce answers by saying that poetry’s origins are in itself alone, and not in what surrounds it, not in the race, the nation or whatever). 8) Criticism based on the fortune of the plays or the history of performances. In this case too Croce is sceptical because – as Lamb had said – plays are made for reading, and performances transforms them into something else.

§ 2. Shakespeare and his critics

23

6. In the mid- and late twentieth century the bibliography on Shakespeare developed with the speed, disorder and overlapping to be found in a culture characterized by an increasing lack of recognized guides, and where Shakespeare is no longer the private property of English academia.17 It would then be a great undertaking for anyone to attempt to monitor closely and at depth the directions, tendencies and individual positions of the last century. It is also true that some approaches passed off as revolutionary are only more refined and argued re-formulations of old or accepted viewpoints, because criticism, like fashion, is a revolving wheel. Synthetically, the approaches under way, more or less in chronological order, are as follows: a) philological, in order to obtain a canon and date the plays according to always doubtful, subjective evidence, which is internal (prosody, rhyme, etc.) or external (comparisons of parallel situations between play and play, vocabulary, etc.). Connected is b), the authorship question. In the early twentieth century some scholars tried or tried again to reduce significantly the canon of authentic Shakespeare plays, re-adopting an approach founded by J. M. Robertson and known as ‘disintegration criticism’. After lying a few years in abeyance, the Shakespeare authorship question has regained strength in a debate between ‘Stratfordians’ and ‘AntiStratfordians’. Still at such a distance these scholars are at pains to affirm that Shakespeare’s life is not documented, that no funeral odes were written on him, that he had no education, with other sceptical assertions, while the adversaries retort that testimonies do exist (William Base, Ben Jonson), and they are not equivocal.18 A book by Vickers (2002) is perhaps emblematic of a generalization that has found almost general consensus: that all Elizabethan plays, excluding Lyly’s but including Shakespeare’s, are works of collaboration. c) Studies on sources brought back to life by Shakespeare, with useful updates on allusions, identifications, occasions underlying the plays, which often describe in code contemporary facts or allegorize them. Conceptual criticism is divided into the following: d) Marxist and 17

18

New editions of the plays have been following one another without respite, competing with one another and standing out for the most varied editorial criteria, like Elizabethan or modernized spelling, the inclusion of apocryphal works, preferences for quartos rather than the Folio. S. Wells still insists on this point in TLS, 13 August 2010, 12.

24 Introduction

political;19 e) psychoanalytic, with various post-Freudian suggestions;20 f) imagery21 and archetypal-symbolic studies;22 g) feminist.23 In the late twentieth century Shakespeare came into the sights of poststructural textual

19

An example of the first German-Hungarian Marxist sociology of culture is offered by A. Hauser’s Social History of Art, 4 vols, 1st edn London 1951. In his second volume Hauser describes a playwright of monarchic leanings who defends stability, is suspicious of the masses and does not back them, though not siding with the aristocrats. Hauser divides Shakespeare’s dramatic career into periods (14ff.) according to the social class Shakespeare focuses on. His ‘crisis’ is explained by Hauser by the fact that he no longer had a public he could identify with. But he does not fail to emphasize the exceptional nature of an artistic event which involved all kinds of audiences and social classes, all of which could find therein something of interest. He would however have preferred a more naturalistic Shakespeare, less dependent on stock figures drawn from the sources. In discussing whether Shakespeare is Baroque or mannerist, Hauser finds traces of both sensibilities, more, however, of the latter (171). The canonical reference book for sociological criticism is Weimann 1967, which starts from Brecht and studies Shakespeare’s theatre as an involving and simultaneously estranging operation. The books of A. Sinfield and J. Drakakis cited in the bibliography subsequently studied Shakespeare as being instrumental to preserve and strengthen Tory consensus and hegemony. 20 After E. Jones, Hamlet and Œdipus, New York 1949, many more psychoanalysts wrote on Hamlet’s sexual complexes, offering a variety of divergent diagnoses. 21 Spurgeon 1935 provided a sensational deductive examination of the tastes, ideas and fixations of Shakespeare based on the repertoires of images. She started the statistic method. A similar kind of study was Armstrong 1946, which tabulates and interprets clusters of images, including cacophonic ones, initiating studies on semantic and tropic fields. A third landmark in this approach is Clemen 1951. K. Muir, ‘Changing Interpretations of Shakespeare’, in The Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. II, Harmondsworth 1970, 282–301, recalls (289) that a precursor, Walter Whiter, identified in 1794 the conscious and unconscious origins of Shakespeare’s images. 22 Anthropological criticism began with Barber 1959 and converges on the works of Frye cited in the bibliography. Barber finds in Shakespeare the archetypical watermark of pagan calendar holidays, after which everything returns to normal. Frye reads in Shakespeare’s comedy the lines of the Christian myth of paradise (for his reading of the sonnets see below, § 6.4). The numerous books by J. Wilson Knight, starting with the first in 1930, can be included in the area of symbolic criticism lato sensu. 23 Variegated, on the whole it notes in Shakespeare both backings and criticism of the patriarchal model.

§ 2. Shakespeare and his critics

25

studies and multiple sectorial visions of the literary text, such as those of h) Lotman’s typology of culture; i) Bakhtinism;24 j) New rhetoric; k) New Historicism. It has been argued that Shakespeare re-vivified materials from plays, narratives, chronicles, legends and histories along with actual poetic models (and Croce had suggestively given his opinion about the Italian part); and at times there emerge in the plays epistemological and epistemic codes together with previously unknown reading experiences.25 To give an example, some see Macbeth as an expression or mysterious echoing of the occultistic kenoma, that is, the great cosmological void, so it has been suggested that Shakespeare was familiar with occultism and was inspired by Giordano Bruno.26 Lastly, the term ‘presentism’ has been coined to investigate a quite common, not to say obvious, phenomenon, 24 For an application of dialogism and of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque to Shakespeare’s plays, see especially the dense and absorbing essay by Serpieri 1986 (‘Polifonia shakespeariana’), which shows the disintegration of the monolithic tableau inherited from the Middle Ages by virtue of clowns, idiots and rascals who flock through the plays. Serpieri disagrees in fact with Bakhtin for having established in his theory that dialogism belongs to the novel alone. The contrary is true, that dialogism is an even stronger feature in drama. Indeed, Serpieri finds the idea of Shakespearean dialogism appearing in Auerbach’s essay on Henry V in Mimesis. In his examination of the history plays, Serpieri shows the action, though calling them chronotopes, of Lotman’s typological clashes between a medieval ‘symbolic’ model and a ‘syntagmatic’ Renaissance one. The conceptual background of the history plays is therefore elucidated thanks to the application of categories firmly outlined by Bakhtin and Lotman. 25 In their works cited above in the general bibliography, Tillyard and Harbage, and later Nuttall, described the ideological system of the late sixteenth century in which Shakespeare must be placed. Greenblatt’s New Historicism – right from his very influential book of 1988, which received a cold welcome from most traditional critics, including the British ones – focused on canonical and especially extra-canonical and instrumental ‘discourses’ which construct amazing, though also at times forced and improbable links with Shakespeare’s plays. New Historicism could be defined as a kind of turn of the screw and re-elaboration of intertextuality, or a sophisticated form of source criticism. 26 A Blake scholar, Bloom too (Bloom 1999, 518) poses the problem of this influence, but excludes a direct knowledge, perhaps because he is a sworn enemy of New Historicism.

26 Introduction

how Shakespeare may have hidden in his works issues which have come very much out into the open today, especially colonialism and racism. Furthermore, at ten-year intervals the fruits of an eccentric form of criticism appear, systematically written against the grain and pour épater, like the works of Terry Eagleton, who moves the peripheral into the centre, and in one of his books argues paradoxically that the witches are the pivot of Macbeth, and with their radical, rebellious and also feminist convictions work at shredding society, the society portrayed in the play but also, with an easy overlapping, that of the period, and society tout court. And in 1991 the poet Ted Hughes read Shakespeare’s two narrative poems as complementary, and therefore surreptitiously Spenserian allegories of Catholicism tempting and seducing Protestantism (Venus as Virgin Mary working on a Protestant Adonis), and immediately after as the opposite, that is Puritanism destroying Catholicism, and this in a scrupulously ‘dramatic’ way, impassibly, without taking sides. 7. Among the recent books on all Shakespeare (excluding sonnets and poems), Harold Bloom’s has already been hailed as a landmark. It undoubtedly renews the critical language and the type of approach in its openly unscholarly nature, and in its absence of footnotes, bibliography or a simple names index. Were we to take this book, written by such an authoritative critic, as the indication of a tendency, we would be induced to note a growing interest in subjectivizing and clinically classifying Shakespeare the man, and therefore in spying on him while he reflects himself, always covertly, in certain of his alter egos. Bloom gradually forms hypotheses – his way of saying ‘I suspect’ is omnipresent – especially about the question of whether ‘Shakespeare identified himself with any of his characters’,27 and repeatedly confirms that two of them are his complementary incarnations – Falstaff and Hamlet. His most morbid curiosity is about Shakespeare’s sexual orientation, and he diagnoses that he was perhaps bisexual, more probably homo- than hetero-, and that the ‘dark lady’ was no pretence: Shakespeare loved the Earl of Southampton and feared being betrayed. Behind a veil the sonnets narrate a biographical event and Bloom examines both plays and sonnets in search of it. Not only,

27

Bloom 1999, 113.

§ 2. Shakespeare and his critics

27

he wants to know what his political and religious ideas were, and concludes that he was dedicated to a vision of man alone, perhaps pretending not to notice great predecessors (to name one, Dante).28 The whole enquiry comes to a close with the foreseeable result that Shakespeare ‘did not have political or even religious ideas’ and that he was all round an agnostic or tout court a nihilist. Thus Bloom and many of his coterie have become diagnosticians having under hand the symptoms, which are the textual signs. They evoke the characters as if in blood and flesh in front of them, to examine and label them according to psychological and psychoanalytical categories. There is little interest, therefore, in how the plays work and are structured, or in the great diegetic constructions and the symbolic, archetypal frameworks. It is therefore obvious that when Bloom addresses a play based on action rather than on soul-searching, and in which the meaning comes out cadenced by the symbolic stages of its diegesis (as in Pericles), he is not in his element, and is forced to do a thumbs down and speak of an ‘emptying’. Incidentally, Bloom’s book is methodologically the opposite of Melchiori’s published five years previously,29 whose approach is – surprisingly – that of formal and structuralist criticism. But when all is said and done, structuralism and semiotics have not monopolized Shakespearean criticism, or at least they have not been felt as a major influence on this side of the Channel, and they are untouched by Bloom’s polemics. His target are rather the ‘Parisian critics’, that is, the followers of Barthes and the post-Barthians, who spread the theory of the death of the author, and rejected an idea of literature as the expression of forceful characters who come almost living off the pages. Strange to say, but not too strange, Bloom is in this book almost a traditional critic who turns to Johnson and Coleridge, bows to Hazlitt, Lamb and even Bradley, contaminating them with Nietzsche, though without giving up the anxiety of influence (which brings him to find in Shakespeare, even too often, an urgency to free himself from the ghosts of Marlowe or Jonson). Less diplomatic than Melchiori, Bloom does not integrate but rejects feminism, as 28

Bloom generally repeats and reconfirms hierarchies and lists in which Shakespeare is always insuperable. But at times he admits that at least Chaucer came before Shakespeare, in the role of an almost embryonic ‘inventor of the Human’. 29 Melchiori 1994.

28 Introduction

well as, as we have seen, New Historicism. And he has his black sheep, as in his out-and-out criticism of Peter Brook’s stagings, and he looks back with nostalgia to the interpretations offered by the old school of Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. § 3. Organizing the dramatic canon All critics of Shakespeare’s plays are implicitly editors whose supplementary task is that of explaining in the first place the reasons for their ordering of the dramatic macrotext. This premise must be opened by reminding the reader that the basic information about the Elizabethan theatrical practices is summarized in Volume 1 of this work, and can be consulted there together with a survey on the acting and production system, instructions concerning scenery and staging, and the appended bibliographies. There can also be found notions on the historical, cultural and aesthetic background of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.30 A few words here, however, are necessary to re-emphasize that Shakespeare’s theatre must be placed against the background of the history of the theatre companies, and that it had its main locus of activity in two London theatres, the Globe built in 1599, destroyed by fire in 1613 and rebuilt in record time, and, at the end of Shakespeare’s career, the Blackfriars indoor theatre for a more select and refined audience.31 In the intricate context of London theatre life, Shakespeare belonged initially to the Chamberlain’s Company rivalling the Admiral’s Company, later rechristened the Queen’s Company, both intent on overcoming the competition coming from the Children’s Companies operating in other theatres. Scarcely two years after the outbreak of the plague in 1592 theatres had in fact reopened under an almost radically changed organization. Actors were recruited from the old companies and the Company of the Chamberlain’s Men was formed under the direction of the actor Richard Burbage,32 and renamed the King’s Men 30 Volume 1, §§ 34–8 and 86. 31 Not to be confused with the ‘first Blackfriars’, the venue for the Children’s Companies between 1576 and 1584. 32 In 1596 a descendant of Oldcastle, whose name had to be changed to Falstaff in the two Parts of Henry IV, became Chamberlain (§ 13.1 and § 38.2 n. 4).

§ 3. Organizing the dramatic canon

29

in 1603. Shakespeare, taken on as an actor (a role he probably covered up to the early 1600s), became a shareholder and more importantly the main playwright of the Company from the early 1590s, with an annual production of two or three plays, historical, comic or tragic according to request. Only sixteen of the plays were printed before 1623, when the First Folio33 came out, edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell, containing all plays thought to be Shakespeare’s except Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The aim was to offer a ‘critical’ edition, that is, replace what were called the ‘bad quartos’ which had been obtained from defective and corrupt texts, assembled from memory. The First Folio, which had three other editions before 1685 that also included some apocryphal plays, was the starting point for all the following ones, though constantly amended by editors right up to the present, and though, in some cases, and not without controversies, some editors have preferred some particularly ‘good quartos’, as in the case of Othello. And while Shakespeare was still alive, he was attributed with plays he had not authored but which had market-pull because he was by then well known. The printers could, in the best and luckiest cases, use a handwritten copy or a script where the actors’ names replaced those of the characters. At times these scripts were almost illegible when they reached the printers. The amazement the neophyte feels when faced by the state of neglect and precariousness of Shakespeare’s plays right from the beginning, decreases when he/she reflects on the different conventions to which play scripts were subjected in Shakespeare’s times – and perhaps even now. From then on it was a vain mirage trying to find a ‘definitive’ text of each of Shakespeare’s plays. Worst of all was the conflation strategy, with the editor making a fusion of two or more surviving versions. The texts of the plays were, in fact, the property of the companies, and were published only to stop successful plays being plagiarized by rival companies. They were equally as attractive to the stationers, who registered them in order to acquire the copyright, but they could not stop pirated editions, which were transcriptions coming from actors and hacks relying simply on 33

Publishers Blount and Jaggard, who made use of two copyists, of whom one was clever and conscientious, Ralph Crane, the other more sloppy. Two thousand copies were printed, for the price of one pound each.

30 Introduction

memory. These were, indeed, the ‘bad quartos’. It was with the Romantics, as I mentioned, that Shakespeare reached deification, but the counter-blow was not late in coming. Given the legend of him being a prosaic, practical and concrete individual, it was thought that the author of the plays had to be more ethereal and of a much more capacious mind. It was therefore conjectured that their author was really Francis Bacon or the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere, or the Earl of Derby, or Marlowe.34 This fantasy was not stunted by the fact that some of these persons had died quite some time before Shakespeare himself and the stagings and the printing of a good part of the canon. Since then a branch of Shakespeare studies has been concerned extensively with re-attributing already allocated plays, which may have been written by Shakespeare in collaboration with others, as well as the works of others where Shakespeare may have worked, and the apocrypha. The assumption is the same as the above, that the weakest pages of Shakespeare’s minor plays must have been written by mediocre collaborators. 2. The chronology of Shakespeare’s plays was for the first time carefully established by E. K. Chambers in 1930, but it is still today an open question, and the margins of error vary from five years before 1595 to five after 1605. Only for three plays are the dates of the first performance inconfutable, and probably only two were never performed during Shakespeare’s life. For this very reason in the following pages I will almost ignore the arguments concerning the dating and the attribution of plays; or I will deal with them quickly in order to answer the more pressing question of what the single plays mean and how they function dramatically in the whole gamut of their proposals, whoever wrote them and whoever collaborated in their drafting. An estimated or purely orientative date of the first performance will be given in brackets after the title, followed by that of the first known or presumed printing, recalling that in 1623 all the plays except one were included in the First Folio. It will be taken for granted that the only criterion for determining infallibly the terminus a quo of a play is the date of its being entered in the Stationers’ Register, which 34 For Marlowe, cf. Volume 1, § 95.3.

§ 3. Organizing the dramatic canon

31

declares the existence of the play, and that in almost all cases it had been performed, and that publication was booked, in order to subtract it from the free market of pirated editions. No date of composition will be given, because it is mostly unknown or may be only guessed at. What I shall be following is a division of the canon according to the combination of three variables: by genre and by theme, following in each group the chronology of the performances, but without any philological obstinacy (because the teleology of Shakespeare’s plays is not perspicuous according to any established order) and without taking a defined position over authorship. The only exception is that of the masterpieces, held together by genre – tragedy – but not by the uniformity of time or place. Heminges and Condell had organized the 1623 First Folio in comedies, histories and tragedies, the three essential partitions which figure in many other editions that followed. My order, like all others, offers some advantages as well as inevitable disadvantages. All divisions of the canon by thematic and chronological groups, like the one presented here, creates an optical illusion. While double and triple links are being forged, plays are put aside which chronologically lie in the middle or side by side, and differing in theme and genre, and the leap to the first of the next group of plays generates surprise. But all groupings are preferable to a discussion following the supposed chronological order, though undoubtedly the latter reproduces and simulates the sequence of Shakespeare’s plays in real time. It cannot be denied, either, that some plays fall into more groups and have a facultative relevance there, while for others there are no doubts at all. Other more contrived divisions are those between public and private plays, the latter destined to small, refined, elite audiences (though paradoxically these plays are more romance-like than the former). The arrangement I have followed may appear perplexing where a group includes dissimilar plays normally placed elsewhere due to their historical period, their theme, their chronology and especially their aesthetic value. But reasons will be given. Finally, in a History of English literature such as the present one, there will unfortunately be no room for a chapter on the history of performances, which is by now more than 500 years old, with plays being staged all over the globe, highlighting distinguished directors and scenographers and a brilliant tradition of not only English mothertongue actors. Even more so, some meetings at the top between Shakespeare

32 Introduction

and other foremost artists, and in particular suggestions from Shakespeare reverberating in the visual arts and opera (from Verdi to Britten) – and, by now, a whole century of film versions – constitute a fascinating field which could not be touched here. This is a subject on which research is actively under way, just like that of Shakespeare’s translations, adaptations and remakes in several languages. § 4. Biography It is well known that with Shakespeare we have no knowledge of the usual facts and information normally available in literary studies about the personality of the artist – diaries, letters, forewords and afterwords, declarations of intent and aesthetic manifestos (except in the case of Lucrece). In short, we have none of those textual ‘thresholds’ Genette speaks about. With the partial exception of the sonnets, where any autobiographical elements are to be taken with a grain of salt, we just have the plays themselves, and as drama is the most objectivizing literary genre, that deficiency enhances the objectivization. In reality, this anomaly is not so uncommon in literary figures of the late sixteenth century, especially playwrights, as been shown in Volume 1 when dealing with Marlowe, Webster, Tourneur and Greene. It is more of a constant feature, a sine qua non. It could even be said that in the case of Shakespeare this lack of information is a kind of felix culpa, because it has set off a biographical research and a strain of interpretative criticism (in all its branches), of which a good half would have been superfluous if there were available, say, just the classic collection of letters of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors. The present and widespread tendency of Shakespearean biographies, that is their cautious pruning of the fanciful and unfounded legends that have flourished around the myth of Shakespeare, paradoxically helps to keep them alive. Various biographies in the last twenty or so years therefore take away more than they add, put out rather than stoke the fire of suppositions, and allow to remain open and intact the voids that the previous biographical industry, risen almost immediately after Shakespeare’s death with Aubrey’s Brief Lives, had done its best to fill – a tradition which came to life again in the

§ 4. Biography

33

overly imaginative reconstruction of a Anthony Burgess,35 often under the attack of academic biographers. The recent tendency is rather that of biographies indifferent to the Romantic glamour of the meteoric existence of Shakespeare, cautiously plodding along in the face of the wide range of anecdotes, analysing every clue with cold scepticism, and in almost all controversial cases agnostically possibilistic. In theory the first question every biographer should start with is the possible lack of foundation of his/her task, that is, the very existence or non-existence of Shakespeare. The cruces of Shakespeare’s biography are still there, some unsolved, others stripped of any fancifulness, others cut down, where the evidence is not reliable and does not stand up to the test of common sense. 2. Shakespeare’s father, for example, was a glove-maker, not a butcher. As for Shakespeare’s birthday, however, the only certainty is that he was born on 23, 24, or 25 April, 1564. What happened was that the date was fixed as 23 April to match the day on which he certainly died at the age of fifty-two. His religion? He was certainly attracted by the outward forms of Catholicism, in a period of change-over to Protestantism, but there is of course no proof that he was born a Catholic, or became a crypto-Catholic or a convinced Protestant or an atheist. In 1568 his father became bailiff in Stratford and his moment of financial difficulty was, perhaps erroneously, thought to have been caused by his being a papist.36 It is also thought that

35

36

Burgess 1970. A genre that some time ago became very successful is that of the imaginary biographies, like Her Infinite Variety: Stories of Shakespeare and the Women He Loved, by P. T. Berkman, New York 2001. Shakespeare is here a somewhat hypocritical husband and father of a family, humanly weak, sincere and devoted, but he spends too much time alone in London, and therefore is a great womanizer (which he has also been before his marriage). He is ambitious, always gallant, has one fling after another and both courts and exploits his popularity. Berkman’s aim is to give an evocative idea of the historical context of Elizabethan times, made of sublime devotion and spasmodic religious enthusiasm, as much as lascivious passions that for evident reasons had to be hushed up. This is a pleasant, virtuosic exercise with much nodding to the plays, and provoked, it cannot but be noted, by the popularity of the cinematic fantasy Shakespeare in Love. On the possibility of John Shakespeare (and for some William too) being the secret main collaborator of the Jesuit martyrs Campion and Parsons in the distribution among the people of Catholic ‘spiritual testaments’ entrusted to them by Cardinal

34 Introduction

in Shakespeare’s plays and especially his sonnets there are signs of sorrow for having married a woman older than he was, or allusions to pre-nuptial lack of abstinence (which is echoed even in The Tempest). As is well known, Shakespeare married Ann Hathaway in all haste because she was pregnant, without respecting the traditional time lapse required by the marriage banns. The name Hamnet was however given to the male twin not because Shakespeare was already thinking about Hamlet but because that was the Christian name of the baker Sadler, a friend who witnessed his will. The following enigma, or better the void which has always been wide open to tempt ‘fillers-up’, is that of the period called the ‘lost years’, almost seven between 1585 and 1591, when Shakespeare arrived in London. This enigma is well symbolized by the extravagant legend, later conducive to the strangest romanticized reworkings, of Shakespeare poaching deer on the lands of Sir Thomas Lucy, justice of the peace. According to other not proven versions Shakespeare had been a schoolmaster or an apprentice to his father, or sooner or later he had joined a troupe of wandering players. The basic idea behind this restlessness is that his marriage soon became a straight-jacket, as is held to be shown by the fact that he had only three children and his wife did not follow him to London. He had been to Stratford Grammar School and had received basic training in the Latin classics, according to the traditional curriculum; in everything else he was self-taught.37 He may well have read The Art of English Poesy by Puttenham, committed to found the art of English poetry. His first foothold in London was a printer from Stratford, Richard Field, and in his shop Shakespeare could look at the main works in poetry and drama coming hot off the press. He tends to be seen as an ‘absolute’ playwright, who goes his own way in splendid isolation: it is a mistake. He came straight after Marlowe and elbowed his way through numerous group of hacks and right from the beginning he had to come to a compromise between his absolute aspirations and

37

Borromeo, see the detailed and somewhat sceptical discussion in TLS, 16 March 2007, 12–13. According to numerous biographers very little, so little that he is sometimes depicted (see Kott 1966, 26) as a kind of ignoramus who picked everything up, though having an immense theatrical talent.

§ 4. Biography

35

the tastes, requests and fashions of the moment. He always knowingly measured his output between comedies and tragedies, in a mixed regime. Some plays, though, came out in the wake of big hits or followed solid tendencies or were modelled on the famous actor taking part.38 Nor was the whole spectrum of Elizabethan dramatic genres saturated in the 37/38 plays he wrote, the most noticeable exclusions being the city comedy, the domestic tragedy and the comedies for the Children’s Companies. The result was a production which was anything but homogeneous and unified, at least at the beginning. The simultaneous reason for Shakespeare’s rise was a certain void in the theatre from 1592 to 1598, as well as a part of 1594, when the theatres were closed because of the raging plague. 3. Shakespeare started out in the theatre as an actor, and not as one who minded the horses for theatre patrons, which is another legend, like the one about him being a prompter’s assistant. Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit39 contains the first notice about a powerful playwright on the way up, whose star is about to eclipse the popularity of the ‘university wits’. During the forced idleness when the theatres were closed for the plague, many have suggested that Shakespeare travelled to Italy. Most probably he did not, according to scholars, because he was friendly with some of the many Italians resident in London in that period, a supposition which is more likely given that he shows little knowledge of Italian geography and has only a smattering of the language.40 And Shakespeare’s loves? He was one ahead of Burbage who went to a tryst with a female theatre-goer infatuated with the actor playing Richard III, but when Burbage knocked 38

Shakespeare had as his reference point the actor Burbage, who had to contrast with his rival, Alleyn. Certain roles follow Burbage’s ageing and his growing fat. 39 Greene’s scathing comment was corrected and softened by the playwright Henry Chettle. Greene’s reference to a ‘Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde’ is normally associated with Henry VI Part 3 in order to show that the play had already been staged and had aroused much interest; but it could also echo line 3 of Sonnet 19, ‘Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws’. Shakespeare’s aggressiveness is not in fact mentioned in other literary portraits of him, which emphasize on the contrary his ‘sweet’ character. 40 See the hypothesis of one scholar of a possible trip to Rome (but in the year 1613) under the name of Ricardus, in TLS, 20 April 2007, 23.

36 Introduction

on the door, Shakespeare answered that William the Conqueror came before Richard III. This anecdote was epoch-making, but most unlikely to be true. Another duly dispelled legend concerns an affair with the mother of William Davenant, a minor man of letters. She was the owner of a tavern on the road to Stratford, where Shakespeare stopped on his annual trip back home. From 1594 onwards the fog surrounding Shakespeare’s early life begins to clear away little by little, as the coveted documentary evidence increases. In that year he actually entered the service of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men under Henry Carey; these were to become the King’s Men after James I came to the throne. Previously Burbage, the leader of the company, had transferred the wooden theatre where he played by taking it down plank by plank, and thus was born the Globe, which performed at Bankside from 1599 to 1613, when a cannon fired for the celebrations to Henry VIII in Shakespeare’s play of the same name burnt the theatre down. It had been inaugurated by Shakespeare himself with Julius Caesar, and was the first theatre to be owned by a theatre company. Shakespeare had become a shareholder for a quota of 10 per cent of the profits. The Earl of Essex’s rebellion failed in 1601 and the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, was a fellow plotter. The play Richard II was however put on. The rebellion failed, Essex was arrested and beheaded, but the players managed to come out of it unharmed. When Shakespeare left the theatre in 1613, his place was taken by the playwright John Fletcher. Shakespeare went on with his investments and bought a house in Blackfriars; he withdrew into a private life perhaps because he had always been careful with money,41 and he disliked the idea of putting down the £50 needed to rebuild the Globe. 4. Shakespeare became a wealthy man partly because in the theatre world he was one of the few who followed Iago’s advice to ‘put money in his purse’. He had always kept hidden a second life, or the soul of a concrete man with feet well on the ground, or even of one of the bourgeois with a nose for business, who cared about appearances and had in fact obtained for his father a coat of arms. In Stratford he had become a prominent figure after buying the house known as New Place in 1597, featuring all the comforts

41 For Bloom 1999, 652, definitely a ‘usurer’.

§ 4. Biography

37

of the times and levels of luxury unthought-of. He had also taken out an insurance policy for £440, the interest on the tithes from three outlying villages, and fought to limit the enclosures, which would have damaged him financially. In 1607 the marriage of his daughter Susanna with a certain Doctor Hall was celebrated, and in 1616 that of his other daughter Judith with a wine merchant whose life was not quite unblemished. All these are certain facts, but the legend-demolishers are anything but inactive right the way through. Purely the stuff of fantasy is a meeting in the theatre between the actor Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth incognito, told by the bookseller Richard Ryan;42 just as unfounded is the tale that around the turn of the century Shakespeare frequented the most important playwrights of the time at the London Tavern known as the Siren. But it is plausible that, as the legend has it, he died as the consequence of a drinking spree. The last unanswered questions concern his three years of inactivity (how did he spend them, and why was he inactive?), and his will. Why is his wife not named in it? Or why did he only leave her the second-best bed? Was it really a sign of affection and devotion, according to Elizabethan customs,43 or rather of a low opinion?

42 With the queen dropping a glove and Shakespeare’s comment that seemed to be part of the play. 43 According to the regulations in force (but perhaps not in Warwickshire), a widow automatically inherited a third of her dead husband’s legacy. Some think that the mention of the second-best bed was a reference to the guest bed. It has been conjectured that Shakespeare wanted to exclude all his wife’s relatives from his will, as well as his son-in-law Quiney and his descendants.

The Poems and the Sonnets

§ 5. The narrative poems* Venus and Adonis and Lucrece (or, as in the running title, The Rape of Lucrece) were published in 1593 and 1594 respectively on Shakespeare’s own initiative – at least once – and both were dedicated to the right honourable Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Neither of these poems nor the sonnets were included in the First Folio of 1623 (perhaps – the latter – because the rights were not available), unlike in the collected edition of Ben Jonson which had actually been complete. Francis Meres published his criticism of the first of these two poems in Palladis Tamia, where he explicitly compared Shakespeare to Ovid, giving credence to the belief that up to and even after 1595 Shakespeare was better known as a poet than as a playwright.1 Shakespeare’s work therefore begins with an active and dialectic relationship with the sources: already in the two poems he does not invent, but recycles a mythological story and a historical episode included in poetical and historiographical writings.2 It was a deliberate and allusive choice at the same time. Venus and Adonis was dedicated to Southampton, who was in disagreement with his uncle, Elizabeth’s treasurer, regarding the woman he should marry, also due to his own homoerotic tendencies. This gender obliquity is traceable in the 200 lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the story of Venus and Adonis is encapsulated in another about an Orpheus who is himself sexually ambiguous. Lucrece, to which there is prefaced a somewhat formal, hasty and superficial avant-texte, is reminiscent of, or at least nods a wink at, the far-off Trojan roots of England, as *

The Narrative Poems, ed. M. Evans, Harmondsworth 1989; The Sonnets and Narrative Poems, ed. H. Vendler, London 1992; The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. C. Burrow, Oxford 2002; Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. K. Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen, London 2007. J. Buxton, ‘Two Dead Birds: A Note on The Phoenix and Turtle’, in English Renaissance Studies Presented to Helen Gardner, Oxford 1980, 44–55; Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. S. Orgel and S. Keilen, New York 1999; A. Mortimer, Variable Passions: A Reading of  Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’, New York 2000; J. P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Truth of Love: The Mystery of ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, Basingstoke 2012.

1 2

Venus and Adonis had been reprinted sixteen times by 1675. This of the poem is one of the historical cases that every year enriched the Mirror for Magistrates, a source for most playwrights.

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we shall see. It is derived from Ovid, but from the Fasti, and in particular from an edition that gathered together scraps of Livy, who, in the episode of the rape, pointed both to the political and the sexual consequences of the crime, and the need to control impulses in both spheres. In the two poems Shakespeare is a playwright in nuce because he makes them revolve around a hinge and a node of his theatre (one thinks of Richard III or Measure for Measure): torrid and harrowing seduction. In a chiasmus a goddess courts a shy young man whose only thought is for hunting, and she would like to tempt him into a sensual and sexual relationship. He manages to escape her and dies, mauled by a wild boar. In the second case, Tarquin lays a trap for Lucrece who, like Adonis, resists him; he rapes her and Lucrece feels so wounded in her honour that she commits suicide. 2. The conspicuous variant in Venus and Adonis, written in stanzas of four decasyllabic lines joined to two hendecasyllables with an ababcc rhyming pattern, is that it is a goddess, the goddess of love herself, begging a man for love. Adonis is the young hunter, a dreamer, chaste, immature and in love only with hunting the boar which, as Venus fears, eventually kills him with its tusks.3 Without any preamble, Shakespeare throws us in medias res, and has Venus pour out, in rapid time progressions, the passionate pleadings of a goddess soon to be enflamed, and ready for her seduction. The unfledged youth stubbornly opposes her rhetorical strategies, both of the nature of ‘ethos’ and ‘pathos’, her pampering and her sarcasm, overused in the pragmatics of masculine courtly love,4 by his restraint, his disdain and the equally pragmatic reluctance of the prudent and tempted vestal maid. And this is why he adopts typically feminine metaphors such as that of the gate, which will not open to the assailant.

3

4

Some exquisite, digressive cameos are those of Adonis’ warhorse, which leaves him to run after a lively young mare. This shared and ardent love between horses is a contrasting pendant to the stubborn denials of the hunter to the goddess. Others depict a boar transformed into a ravenous bloodthirsty beast, a poor hare chased after and laid siege to, and the early morning lark. In Venus’ rhetoric there appears the hyperbole of a wild boar that seems like a wartime killing machine, having only one dissuasive task, to distract him from the hunt and to win him for her, though the boar truly does kill the hunter.

§ 5. The narrative poems

43

Another variant is that of the domestication, verging on the estrangement, of classical myth. Adonis is a bourgeois and unapproachable young man while the goddess is a modern, but deluded woman in love, who in the end chooses to be ‘immured’ in a convent, much like the Victorian women poets who took the veil. The occasional and encomiastic nature of the poem does not conceal inquiries that boiled beneath the surface. Venus’ philosophy is the same one as will shortly affect the idealization of the fair youth, that is the neo-Platonic framework of the incarnation of beauty in Adonis, and of nature overreaching itself. For the moment Adonis has no interest in love as Eros, nor even in chaste sexual love as an instrument for procreation, and Venus is keen to reawaken him to the awareness of it. It is the same voice as that of the sonneteer inviting the fair youth to procreate and contribute to the continuation of the species. Venus puts him on guard against a Narcissist complex by warning him that beauty must be put to use and not wasted in disuse. Both beauty and natural physical gifts acquire value with usage and not by keeping them hidden. Indeed, in the very words of the Gospels (the parable of the wise virgins who consume the oil in the lanterns for the Bridegroom), chastity is unfruitful. But the crucial Shakespearean antithesis between ‘lust’ and ‘sublime love’, as described in Sonnet 129, is already second nature to Adonis. Adonis verges on sexual impotency in the presence of an erotic fury and a seductive power that would be too much for anybody. He blames Venus for such a capital antithesis (ll. 793–8): love evaporates into the sky, and its presumed, degenerate double is the ‘sweaty’ lust which usurps its name on earth. No less foreboding is Adonis’ protest against the sinful plucking of a flower that has yet to blossom. 3. Lucrece is longer, and written in seven-line stanzas with an ababbcc rhyming pattern (the same prosody as the former, but with the insertion of a fifth line before the couplet). It tells not of a mythological idyll, but of a tragic subject that could in turn make up the actual source, or the first draft in another formal medium, of a Shakespearean play.5 The subject 5

The stanza including ll. 386–92 is, however, maliciously Pope-like, with Lucrece’s pillow robbed of a kiss because protected by her hand, and the two ‘hills’ that are formed, and within which she rests, and which, ‘therefore angry’, swell up ‘to want [their] bliss’.

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matter is Rome; the rape of Lucrece is incorporated in a historical sketch and therefore narrated, reorganized and directed by a commenting voice off stage, and alternating with dialogic debate, soliloquy6 and moments of sheer suspense. But the fundamental theme taken from the annals of the past is precisely Shakespearean, that of the erotic drive preceded and also followed by meticulous and tormented inner debates. Its theme is also the subsidiary one of feminine chastity as a supreme value, untouched by temptations, and an exemplary demonstration of virtue. This psychological or agonistic drama is contained inside, and fuses with a political allegory. One area of the future playwright’s work will be in plays where a tyrant, who is also a bold and cynical seducer, seizes power and then holds it until a conspiracy of honest men remove him from the throne. Autobiography is objectified in a historical episode that was not chosen by chance, confirming that the original seed of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is morbid sexual obsession, a burning sense of shame for a betrayal or a sexual sin, profound conjugal bitterness, a wound that keeps on bleeding. The tragic events will always be, as in this case, the consequence of a cumulative effect of human weakness and vanity on the one hand, and of ‘fortune’ on the other. Collatine could have done without arousing Tarquin by praising his own wife’s beauty, loyalty and virtue so effusively, truth, or rather virtue and beauty being in her one and the same, and rivalling each other for supremacy.7 The dramatist’s temperament, shown especially in soliloquy and dialogue, is activated when he analyses the intimate rift in the dishonest person, who believes he can obtain everything when instead he ends up 6 7

The sweeping persuasive peroration addressed by Tarquin to Lucrece replicates, as I am arguing, that of Venus and Adonis, though with an inversion of roles and a far less innocent finality. The unison consequent on love – ‘Beauty, truth and rarity, / Grace in all simplicity / Here enclosed, in cinders lie’ – is the underlying theme of ‘The Phoenix and [the] Turtle’, the short allegorical poem in abba rhyming quatrains published under Shakespeare’s name in 1601 in a miscellany. The thematic link with Venus and Adonis and Lucrece is substantiated by the eulogy of chastity, absolute to the point of applauding the lack of offspring as its ultimate consecration (as in the almost oxymoronic ‘married chastity’). Believed to be a riddle, spasmodically investigated in its backstory and in its supposed references to recent history and news, this poem is usually deemed as the most obscure and mysterious of all Shakespeare’s compositions.

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45

empty-handed, or barters his honour, as he believes, for the satisfactions of lust. The torments of Tarquin the rapist are the same as those which assail Shakespeare’s assassins or hired killers before inflicting wounds. They are pessimistically overcome by simply silencing them, overwhelmed by desire, as the fruit of the weakness of their will. The author of this poem is already the masterful investigator of the aftermath of the crime: he loads Tarquin with remorse as if he were a precocious Macbeth. The climax, which is the rape, is narrated with the conventional metaphor of a military attack on a fortress, which is eventually taken by storm; the only, unmetaphorical smutty detail is that of Tarquin’s hand squeezing sleeping Lucrece’s breasts and hearing her heart beat violently. It is Lucrece, once awake and aware of the attack on her honour, who tries to repel her seducer, reminding him especially of the king’s rules of etiquette, inasmuch as the ruler’s morality is the atout of good governance and his subjects’ respect, and the higher the social rank of anyone committing a sin, the more serious are the consequences (this is not true, but was believed to be so). The ‘princely office’ is – with a clear nod to Machiavelli – the prince’s ethical code. Tarquin, the very first Shakespearean intuition of crushing licentiousness, has no excuses; but Lucrece, the extreme opposite, is subtly unseated from her role as irreproachable woman and wife. She yields too much to the idea of the ‘infection’ of the world (l. 907) and thus to the threat to human integrity and the risk to life, determined by the ‘occasion’. Unable to overcome the shame of the rape she believes that the only  way out is suicide, and the argument that honour is restored and reintegrated when the dishonoured body has been killed is specious, as is the idea that good blood can be separated in this way from infected blood. Even the narrator’s voice seems from afar to naïvely lend credibility (ll. 1742–3) to this optical effect of separation of one blood from the other. Hence in Lucrece’s reading of the events ‘no excuse can give the fault amending’.8 Shakespeare was not a Catholic, at least in this highlighting of the unforgiveable crime; and we wouldn’t even

8

Deconstructionists insist that one of the reasons why Lucrece punishes herself, committing suicide, is her collusion with the blame she believes she discovers in a remote corner of her psyche.

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consider him a Christian, although it is human that Lucrece should ask her husband to take his revenge on the criminal by killing him.9 4. Not all the compositions in The Passionate Pilgrim,10 most of which are sonnets, were written by Shakespeare. The ones that are harp on the impossibility of constancy in love, especially in the case of a voluble, capricious and flirtatious female of the type that can easily confound a callow young man. A small, and intermittent internal cycle reduces the most opulent theme of Venus and Adonis to flashes, and paraphrases it, so that we have an alternative version of it. Thus one may conclude that the affectivity of the young Shakespeare is transferred to this myth of reference. ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ was published together with the sonnets in the 1609 edition, but its authenticity, however probable, is still under discussion; it extends over 329 lines in rhyme royal and in Spenser’s archaic style. Its subject is a young woman who meets an old shepherd who asks her about her pain; in telling him about it she includes her seducer’s speech and thus fully maintains the thematic and especially formal continuity with the poems dealing with Venus and Adonis and with Tarquin and Lucrece. But it ends abruptly, without the old man intervening to support or even answer the young woman. Perhaps the poem was left unfinished by Shakespeare, so as to dedicate himself to Lucrece.11

9

10

11

The intervening time between the rape, Tarquin’s escape, and Collatine’s arrival in Collatia, is taken up by the ekphrasis of a painting of the Trojan War in Lucrece’s bedroom. The interlude is too long and scarcely justified, were it not that in this polyptych Lucrece’s gaze finally rests on the sorrowful figure of Hecuba, contemplating such a strong passion of the wife and the mother. Much like the actor in Hamlet, Lucrece gives voice to a dumb painting, identifying with it. However, Paris’ passion, or pulsion, is in its turn a foreshadowing of Tarquin’s wanton behaviour. The poem was printed in 1599 by an unscrupulous publisher who took advantage of Shakespeare’s precocious notoriety. Its third edition also contained two mythological verse epistles by Thomas Heywood, who had a heated argument with the editor, on behalf of Shakespeare too. His name was in fact omitted from the title page. A funeral elegy of almost 600 lines for a certain Will Peter, by W. S., was attributed to Shakespeare in 1989 by an American scholar, but was almost immediately reattributed by various scholars including Vickers, and the more probable authorship given to John Ford.

§ 6. The sonnets I: Norm and anti-norm

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§ 6. The sonnets* I: Norm and anti-norm Summarizing a notorious publishing event that became distinctly célèbre, 1609 is the year when Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare’s 154 *

See the editions of the Sonnets by Vendler 1992 and Burrow 2002 in the bibliography for the poems (§ 5). Some modern editions of the Sonnets alone are the following: ed. P. Rebora, Firenze 1941; ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols, Philadelphia, PA 1944 (‘New Variorum’); ed. B. Cellini (a selection), Milano 1960; ed. M. Seymour-Smith, London 1963; ed. G. Melchiori, Bari 1964, 1971; ed. A. Rossi with a supplementary Note by G. Melchiori, and translations by both, Torino 1965, 1970; ed. S. Booth, New Haven, CT and London 1977, 2000; ed. K. Muir, London 1979; ed. R. Sanesi, Milano 1983, with translations by E. Montale, R. Sanesi, G. Ungaretti; ed. J. Kerrigan (with ‘A Lover’s Complaint’), Harmondsworth 1986; ed. R. Rutelli, trans. M. A. Marelli, Milano 1986; ed. A. Serpieri, Milano 1991; ed. E. d’Errico Fossi (rhymed translations that inevitably lose the density of the English original) and with an Introduction by D. Zizzari, Milano 1993; ed. E. Chinol, Roma and Bari 1996; ed. K. Duncan-Jones, London 1997; ed. T. Pisanti, Roma 2007. Fifteen sonnets are included in M. Praz, Il libro della poesia inglese, Messina and Firenze 1951, 86–96, accompanied by an excellent linguistic and philological annotation that finds recondite echoes only within the reach of a scholar like Praz, and from sources that Shakespeare could hardly have known; this annotation, oddly enough, is not discussed by any successive Italian editor. Criticism. B. Cellini, Arte e vita nei sonetti di Shakespeare, Roma 1943; E. Hubler, The Sense of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Westport 1952; G. Wilson Knight, The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ and ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, London 1955, 1973, 2002; J. B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, London 1961; The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (essays by Hubler, Spender, Frye, Fiedler, Blackmur), London 1962; H. Landry, Interpretations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Berkeley, CA 1963, also editor of New Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, New York 1962, 1976; J. Dover Wilson, An Introduction to the Sonnets of Shakespeare, Cambridge 1963; M. Krieger, A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Modern Poetics, Princeton, NJ 1964; S. Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, New Haven, CT 1969; M. Pagnini, ‘Lettura critica (e metacritica) del sonetto 20 di Shakespeare’, in Critica della funzionalità, Torino 1970, 121–41; G. Melchiori, L’uomo e il potere, Torino 1973; R. Rutelli, Saggi sulla connotazione: tre sonetti di Shakespeare, Torino 1975, 1983; A. Serpieri, I sonetti dell’immortalità, Milano 1975, 1983 (Eng. trans. Shakespeare’s Drama in Poetry, Verona 2015); K. Muir, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, London 1979; M. Martino, Il problema del Tempo nei sonetti di Shakespeare, Roma 1985; P. Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Chicago and London 1985; J. Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets, Berkeley, CA 1986; H. Calvert, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Problems of

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sonnets, apparently for private circulation and against the author’s wishes, as well as those of his dedicatee and inspirer. Some of these were already known, and had been in circulation since 1598, having been cited in a contemporary review, the already-mentioned Palladis Tamia by Francis Meres. It was the year when Pericles was staged and London was infested by the plague, and when Shakespeare was nearing the end of his career and his playwriting output was decreasing and was now limited to his romances. But they did not in any way constitute a collection that was just finished in that year, and that had been written without a break in a single recent time span. Indeed, even though any decisive dating evidence is lacking for some, if not all, a large and unspecified number were sonnets written by Shakespeare as a young man during the decade of the flowering of the English sonnet, between 1590 and 1600 (some of them perhaps even earlier). A computation of the frequency with which key words recur – a highly fashionable methodology nowadays – has led to the unthinkable result – whether or not the order of the sonnets was actually decided by Shakespeare – that the group of the ‘dark lady’12 sonnets (127–53) can be dated to the period 1591–1595, and that the first 126 were actually written later. I will discuss the sonnets in their entirety here as a prologue to the dramas rather than an epilogue (in contrast to the prevalent method generally followed by Shakespearean scholars dealing with his complete works). This is both because they were already partly written in 1598, had been

Autobiography, Braunton 1987; H. Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets, Ithaca, NY 1987; T. Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, London 1992; P. Innes, Shakespeare and the English Renaissance Sonnet: Verse of Feigning Love, London 1997; F. Minetti, Voce lirica e sguardo teatrale nel sonetto shakespeariano, Napoli 1999; Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. J. Schiffer, New York 2000; D. Calimani, William Shakespeare. I sonetti della menzogna, Roma 2009; D. Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary, London 2010; C. Caporicci, The Dark Lady. La rivoluzione shakespeariana nei sonetti alla Dama Bruna, Perugia 2013. My own ‘I sonetti shakespeariani al microscopio dello strutturalismo’, in Nuova Corrente, 1976, 70, 155–70, discusses some Italian contributions to date. 12

The ‘dark lady’ is a conventional expression much like ‘fair youth’, never appearing as such in the text.

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circulated and were already being read, and because – should we strictly adhere to chronology – the entire collection would otherwise have to be slotted between one dramatic work and another, though it is difficult to decide exactly which ones. The dedication is the first crux. It is the most enigmatic ever affixed to a songbook, with its reference to an inspirer, dedicatee and/or internal referent designated only by the initials, as ‘Mr W. H.’. It was not inserted by Shakespeare, but rather it was an idea of Thorpe, the publisher, who, apart from anything else, prepared an edition that was philologically substandard, with numerating errors, oversights, misprints and other shoddy work. ‘Begetter’ refers equally to the inspirer and dedicatee just as much as to the procurer and supplier of the manuscript. Only in this second, weaker hypothesis could the initials W. H. be taken to designate Shakespeare’s brother in law, William Hathaway. As far as the dedicatee and recipient are concerned, there are two main historical clues: Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, who is the most likely contender; and William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, who in spite of having the right credentials had, weighing against him, the fact that several ‘lunatics’ were convinced he was the natural born son of a then-seventeen-year-old Shakespeare and of Sidney’s sister. The case for Henry Wriothesley only works if the initials of name and surname are inverted, and this might have been a crafty trick of the publisher’s so as to throw scandalized readers off the scent of a homosexual songbook.13 A certain William Hatcliffe with a degree in Law cannot boast of a single true credential. But in that case, if the Earl of Southampton is truly intended, why Mr? The appellative was intended for persons not of the aristocracy but of low extraction, such as the acting class, for example. Reviving the theory of an eighteenth-century scholar, Oscar Wilde believed he could identify the dedicatee, in ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, in a boy actor called Willie Hughes who played the female roles in Shakespeare’s plays. As far as I am concerned there are no other plausible contenders, no matter how many far-fetched theories 13

If it is not a pure poetic convention, the magnificent beauty of the fair youth is more likely attributable to William Herbert who, born in 1580, refused to marry the woman destined for him, and was possibly exhorted to do so in the first seventeen sonnets. He was the son of Mary, the sister of Sidney, who was thus his uncle.

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abound and proliferate even nowadays at regular intervals in books, essays and periodicals.14 The paradox of the sonnets will always be that of an internal addressee who will receive everlasting fame from them, but whose name is in fact – and must remain, as we shall see, owing to the same justification supporting encomiastic poetry – forever hidden. 2. The typical form of the Shakespearean sonnet, prosodically English and formed by three quatrains followed by a couplet as pioneered by Surrey, is however more often a subtle, rhetorically impervious and allusive argumentation conducted in ways that are as much purely dianoetic (vaguely syllogistic or enthymematic) as figurative, that is, in extended metaphorical spirals. However, the openings of the sonnets may offer at regular intervals simple, anecdotal, atmospheric nature pictures, or even mini-stories dashed off with efficacious sobriety, before being argumentatively developed, thus functioning as the first terms of a similitude or of a contrast. The natural resolution comes in each sonnet in the pointe of the final couplet, which must close the argumentative path in the most pregnant and epigrammatic way possible.15 There are three prosodic exceptions: Sonnet 126 which has only twelve lines, Sonnet 99 which has fifteen, and Sonnet 14

15

As an indication, Barbara Everett put forward the hypothesis (The London Review of Books, 18 December 1986, 7–10) that the dedication had been devised with ‘a perfectly definite purpose’, and argued that – almost as with ‘Easter Wings’ by Herbert – one has to look at its ‘visual form’, which is reminiscent of a classical urn. Citing studies in Renaissance epigraphy, Everett affirms that the dedication is a ‘Trinitarian metaphor’, and that Shakespeare himself is the ‘onlie. begetter’ or the Father as creator. If so, Mr W. H. is the mediator (the Son, unequivocally the brother of Shakespeare’s wife, called, as already mentioned, William Hathaway) and the person immortalized – also thanks to Thorpe, the publisher – is not the fair youth, but rather the poet. Thus Shakespeare becomes the dedicatee, ‘soothed’ by this dedication which was entirely the publisher’s idea, because the publication of the sonnets was almost pirated. Everett is going a bit far when she states, in the face of inconfutable evidence that the fair youth is male, that Shakespeare ‘dissolves genders’ and that ‘the Dark Lady and the Fair Young Man are at least and in part merely Anne […]: a woman seen in darkness and in light, masked and unmasked, always a shadowy hunter of the poet’s imagination’. Its aim is also one similar to that of the final speeches with which, at the end of many plays, political order is re-established (Booth 1969, 132), even though – as Serpieri 1973, 61, adds – it impoverishes the entropy of the three quatrains.

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145 which is octosyllabic instead of decasyllabic. Occasional sonnets have a feminine rhyming scheme, which makes the contrast more evident with the norm of masculine rhyme. Having said that the English sonnet adopts the above-mentioned prosodic scheme, it soon had to be admitted that Shakespeare’s sonnets ultimately remain Italian in type and follow the model of Petrarch, as they are argumentatively based on an octave plus a sestet, though the latter may be divided into a quatrain and a couplet. Some rare sonnets vary the 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 scheme, and have their semantic fulcrum in the central line, so that the whole takes on the iconic form of an hourglass or a funnel; others follow a growing pattern of 12 + 2. Meres defined Shakespeare’s sonnets as ‘sugary’, but this judgement was evidently based on a not particularly convincing or representative sample. On the contrary they belong to the knotty, rugged and rough sonnet tradition that arises with Wyatt and peaks with Donne. Besides the argumentative and rhetorical schemes, and leaving aside the fact that Donne did not primarily write sonnets, the two poets share some recurrent, extended metaphors such as those regarding legal and alchemical activities, or the image of the compass (though these are tropes found in other poets and thus of stock usage as well). Shakespeare and Donne echo one another, for example, in the personification of vainglorious death, or in the image of the tomb and of the putrefied body soon to become food for worms. Shakespeare sporadically refers to Philomela, Adonis and Helen of Troy, but in his sonnets he is not, objectively, a poet indulging in mythological embroideries. Anyone studying his sonnets against the background of contemporary songbooks notices echoes, reformulations and variations, but more often discontinuities and the absence of several traditional schemes and motifs. On the lexical level a closed and impermeable idiolect is formed, made up of terms that interact reciprocally at a distance, and of nonce words. To the frictions with respect to the strict canons of contemporary sonnet writing, several internal anti-norms must be added, in sonnets that, as we will see, stand out from the continuum for evident formal reasons as well as for their content. Ever since Wyatt and Surrey, the pre-existing or contemporary model for sonnet writing meant that the poet was addressing a disdainful woman. Shakespeare breaks away from this tradition by reconnecting with that of Renaissance Platonism (which in turn harks back to the so-called, Greek eros Socraticum relaunched by the Florentine

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Neo-Platonists) and by positing masculine love as superior, qua rational, to heterosexual love. This is why a number of scholars have perceived and accentuated an affinity and a homogenous sensitivity between Shakespeare and Michelangelo as sonneteers, especially because it is highly unlikely that Shakespeare ever read Michelangelo’s poetry. The Shakespearean fair youth is the idea of universal beauty, which reincarnates in replicas in the course of time; these copies of the idea are but shadows, though they may appear as new realities to the senses. Shakespeare’s fundamental, equally Platonic dualism, is that posited by Plato between body and soul (Sonnet 146, a brief interior monologue), the soul being the centre of being, surrounded by rebel powers in a body that beautifies and adorns itself, but is subject to death – a soul that lives upon the losses of its ‘servant’, where the more the external form deteriorates, denudes and impoverishes itself, the more the interior is enriched.16 In Sonnet 59, the archetype of the fair youth can be traced back to a book 500 years old, and in it echoes the question as to whether the world is becoming better or worse. In Sonnet 67 time is not seen as being cyclical, but as subject to a gradual deterioration; and the fair youth is the reference point for beauty that does not decline: it is he who is still, and the rest rolls down its decline. Here the stress is on an obsession that takes on gigantic importance in the plays: the ‘infection’, in a precisely diagnostic sense, which is spreading throughout the world. The fair youth is then both concrete and idealized: if he is an archetype in moments of illusory trance, the poetic ‘I’ is not blind to the fact that the fair youth himself is subject – in his twofold nature as eternal and human, as demigod and as a pure and simple man – to decay. In the final analysis, the battle against time is a lost and losing contest, as even, and especially, Sonnet 126 admits. It is an illusion to think that the fair youth might remain unchanged whilst time passes. And he, as Nature’s darling, must be ceded to time by benign nature, and will grow old. However, in a group of digressive and self-standing sonnets, no longer organized as mimetic addresses to his young friend, but as ‘dramatic meditations’,17 and thus concise soliloquies, the poetic ‘I’ reaches the phase of a challenging of Platonism itself and 16 17

A sonnet frequently defined by experts as ‘vampiric’. Melchiori 1973.

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of St Paul’s binary vision, and formulates a more flexible ontological proposal – even a doubt and a theological remonstrance, as well as a passionate and back-to-front reading of the key features of religious ethics.18 3. The Platonic framework and the artistic excellence of the sonnets shroud and hide an internal history which would sound, and has sounded, like a plot which is in itself banal. A poet loves a beautiful young ephebe: after reciprocal reproaches, quarrels and separations, the poet and his young butterfly get back together. Then a dark lady who is not necessarily beautiful, but is sensual and promiscuous, steals his friend. But first the poet, who was launching himself into a career, was obstructed both in poetry and in love by an anonymous rival. The outline is almost that of a feuilleton, both grotesque and prurient, even that of porno novels of the nineteenth-century aesthetes, such as Teleny. This is precisely because it gives the impression of a diary written in verse in an ongoing regime of addresses and exhortations to an unnamed recipient, and in a great variety of tones and in a single flow, as can be ascertained from the fact that the verbs are constantly, or more frequently, in the present tense, as in a transcription without any temporal hiatuses, and with the typical jolt of the freshly shaped letter. The sonnets are in fact voluble allocutions which express without any premeditation – at least in the fiction, or more properly in the mimesis – a changing mood. Some are euphoric, triumphant, stentorian, others leaden and disconsolate; others exultant, pulsating with wellbeing, radiant; others apocalyptic, ‘terrible’ in the precise sense that the word has in Hopkins.19 The pretence of Sonnet 115 is an impulse typical of the diary: earlier the poet had written that he had touched the acme of love, without knowing that love grows constantly. So the collection, which reiterates the definition of

18

19

Similarly, as Serpieri 2015, 123–43, argues, in Sonnet 33 the first quatrain describes the sun that rises and illuminates the horizontal line of the tree tops and rivers, and represents the medieval king, and at the same time it incorporates the metaphor of the alchemist who transforms base metal into gold. But this picture is darkened, disturbed and unsettled by the overhanging clouds. An atmospheric disaster recalls a conflict of codes (medieval/Renaissance), but is then brought onto a personal plane; and harmony is unrecoverable if not by virtue of the written word. Cf. Vendler 1997, 334.

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its subject, is broken down into sequences, series and miniseries, of which the two best recognizable are a first long one with the fair youth in the centre, and a second, short one (the relationship is of five to one) which appears out of the blue, and has the dark lady in the middle. It was the fear of scandal that determined the silence shrouding Shakespeare’s sonnets. One may conjecture that the 1609 quarto was ‘suppressed’ immediately after publication, due to the indignation of the recipient,20 for whom a coded dedication and an anonymity lasting 154 sonnets was evidently not enough. A second edition, as a confirmation, came out in 1640, when Puritanism was on the increase. The publisher was John Benson, who changed the masculine pronouns to feminine, expunged some sonnets, and divided the remaining ones according to arbitrary thematic groups. Two general interpretations of the sonnets emerged in the long run, one armed against the other. Browning denounced the Romantics’ plundering of the sonnets. Significantly, he remarked in one of his poems that if, as Wordsworth believed, Shakespeare had opened his heart with them, then Shakespeare was unworthy of the universal tribute of greatness. In the ensuing 150 years the fortune of the sonnets was unprecedented. Those lamenting loss and absence were the model for Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a cycle, but not of sonnets – to avoid a dangerous comparison – but one almost identical in the number of poems, and written in memory of a deceased friend. Hopkins echoes Shakespeare’s poetry of absence in four symbolic moments or circumstances: his poetry is about a distant God, about nature as night and decay for the Friend’s abandonment; a poetry about exile from the homeland, and a poetry regarding existential desolation, with the addition of a dense, impressive range of borrowed lexical and verbal elements – an issue that, as far as I know, has never been studied.21 During the twentieth century poets in every language – Ungaretti and Montale in Italy – undertook the challenge of the translation of the sonnets. Psychobiography became an offshoot of biographical criticism, for which the sonnets are a symptom, so that, just as Shakespeare has plays centring on male friendships (between Falstaff and Hal, Valentine and 20 Serpieri 1991, 24. 21 But see below, n. 27.

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Proteus, or Hamlet and Horatio), so it is possible to delve into the morbid and ambiguous relations between the poetic voice and the fair youth, or even between inhibited men and cunning and sadistic women such as the dark lady. With this momentum, for the psychobiographers the sonnets become a shield for a self-confession, and the fair youth is the same poet or the same poetic voice, leading to an umpteenth and ingenious supposition regarding the indecipherable signature in the epigraph, which can be understood as ‘William Himself ’, the very William Shakespeare. The antibiographical and formalist reaction, or the ‘atomistic’ option – for which every sonnet is self-standing, excluding and ignoring any internal sequence – began during the early 1930s, branching out into the subsequent developments of symbolist, thematic and metaphoric, as well as philological,22 formalist and structuralist criticism. The present situation is one of consensual compromise. Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable to claim that there is, effectively, a ‘romance’ behind the sonnets, made up both of real people and of real happenings that truly occurred. The concern with ordering or re-ordering the songbook was disdainfully rejected. Nowadays we are rediscovering that the sonnets are, or hide, a ‘story’, and they can, in fact must be seen and read according to a novelistic perspective. We must give a name to the fair youth and to the dark lady, and, in the last analysis, Coleridge, who asserted their macrotextual coherence, is a wiser and more trustworthy critic than Empson; and Wilde had more critical foresight than Browning. 4. It is a fact that a literary historian cannot neglect, that writers after Shakespeare, and especially some of the major late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers – Butler, Joyce, Lawrence, or Auden – were fascinated by a human story full of gaping holes which they lamented

22 Textual criticism is by no means of little help in hermeneutic questions, and some cruces determine, according to the amendments proposed, some radical interpretive reversals: ‘books’, l. 9 of Sonnet 23 in the quarto, was amended to ‘looks’, but reappears in some editions as ‘books’ – a preferable option given the icastic continuity – that is, the poetic words that speak the depth of a Platonic and erotic passion. An example of how, in Sonnet 11, different punctuations can give rise to at least four different discursive, and thus semantic chains, is discussed by Calimani 2009, 9–10.

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and longed to fill. They did so, marvelling at the fact, as they thought, that such a vexing torment should lie behind. All of Shakespeare’s spiritual biography seemed to them to have been cleverly and tenaciously covered up, and if the dramas are the impenetrable objectification of this, then the sonnets confirm it without revealing any names and using multiple allusive veils, as in a precocious, strenuous defence of one’s own privacy. So Auden said: ‘that which is stupefying in the sonnets […] is the impression they give as being a naked autobiographical confession. […] He wrote them, I am sure, as though he were writing a diary, just for himself and without thinking of an audience […] Shakespeare will have been terrified when they were published’. Already in 1915, it was Lee,23 one of the first biographers, who insinuated that the framework of the sonnets was purely conventional, that the collection was a literary exercise and a fictitious rewriting of sources, places and commonplaces, insomuch that Shakespeare had a serene and balanced temperament; success smiled upon him and the facts described had no correspondence whatsoever with his biography. But until roughly 1950 criticism of the sonnets stagnated in a prevalently source-oriented phase, concentrating on the verification of their relations with the Sidney-Spenser and the metaphysical tradition, and of the connections with and echoes of Latin and especially Ovidian poetry. Linguistic criticism found its pioneers in the late 1930s with Robert Graves and Laura Riding, then immediately afterwards with Empson and some years later with Stephen Booth. The American, archetypical and symbolist school launched the idea, with Northrop Frye, that the fair youth should be seen as Eros plus Christ and the dark lady as Aphrodite plus the Virgin. The consensus over the aesthetic excellence of the sonnet collection was not however ecumenical, and jarring notes came from the well-known persistent contrarian, Yvor Winters, or the poet John Crowe Ransom. From 1960, the biographical approach was peremptorily disqualified as being useless and even damaging by critical structuralism inspired by Jakobson and Greimas, later amalgamated 23

For all extended biographical references in this paragraph, cf. the General Bibliography and the specific one on the sonnets.

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with Lacan’s psychoanalysis. After Levin’s incunabulum in 1962, and the equally pioneering essay by Marcello Pagnini on Sonnet 20 in 1970, Melchiori in his 1973 book very often defined it as being ‘wholly irrelevant’ to try and establish a private love story in order to explain sonnets such as 121, or 20 itself, or 129, which are instead for him ‘explorations of the dualism of human nature’. In 1975 Serpieri tried out an actantial model which may be reduced to this formula: the poetic ‘I’ wishes to eternalize his friend through his verbal art, but time opposes this, making everything transitory, so that the great contest is between Art and Time. This leads, however, to the identification of transformations and contortions in the main argumentative thread: notably the hiding, the burial and the death of the referent, inherent in the same celebrative operation, which amounts to the exact opposite of the first intention in the collection. The end result is a gigantic oxymoron or paradox: art sings and in singing it admits and verifies its inability to restore life to what is sung. A grande illusion. The signifiers, in all their range, along with certain ad hoc rhetorical figures, give their support to these dramatic reversals of perspective. However, towards the end of the first section it is made clear that some Platonic profit is garnered, and if properly speaking poetry does not ensure life to the friend, it immortalizes its author. Serpieri himself, in the recent translation of his book into English (2015), adds a final essay which is more possibilistic towards a biographical approach. Having established in 1975 that the only supporting interpretive proofs are the references to the ‘basic’ codes, that is the literary and cultural ones, and having underlined the fact that ‘specific allusions’ are ‘woven into the texture of the sonnets’ but ‘rewritten by the poet into an artificial plot’, in 2015 he slightly retracted his position and admitted an antithesis: ‘Some sonnets do not signify in isolation, but within micro-sequences whose “narrative” sounds like the account of a true story’.24

24 Serpieri 2015, 99 and 162.

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§ 7. The sonnets II: Irradiation As I mentioned, there are in the sonnets two recognizable and welldefined partitions, plus a third very small one at the end. Internally, forming a kind of padding, there are mixed series of two or three, or in rare circumstances even more sonnets, developing just as many sub-themes. But, as we shall see, the sequences that originate from them are not progressive, but if anything repetitive or concentric. It must also be recalled that nowadays the critical tendency it to move the centre of gravity from the object to the subject, assuming this collection to be one of the key documents towards the reconstruction of a series of episodes in the life of the poetic ‘I’, identifying it tout court with Shakespeare himself. But this latter will always be, as is obvious, a pretence and a fiction, or rather an imaginary creation, a literary projection and an autobiographical hypostasis. Until Sonnet 20 the prevalent and repeated axiom is one saying that it is not a sin to get married, to generate offspring and to have posterity, which thus makes us eternal. Was Shakespeare celebrating, behind this screen, a family unity that he did not possess, or that was broken (the image of Sonnet 8 is that of harmonious concord of sounds)? Did he regret having had only one male child who had died in infancy? Is it significant that the timbre of this voice is that of a mature man, of a father or a tutor who exhorts the stubborn young man who wants to postpone his wedding? But some object that the invitation to procreate is only given with the aim of eternalizing beauty, and that it isn’t even a veiled answer to the biblical injunction. The eternalizing poetry appears in Sonnet 15, but as an ersatz, and thus it is an expedient with respect to direct conception by means of sexual procreativity. The transition occurs in Sonnet 19, but without interrupting the first theme. This debut allows us to reconstruct Shakespeare’s ideological framework and, incidentally, to deny that he is a nihilist. The first twenty sonnets lean in fact towards the exact opposite of nihilism: life is transmitted and in that process everything that is beautiful in life survives, that is to say the flower of beauty in its most wonderful state, which is that of youth. Shakespeare, who regretted the fact that, his son Hamnet being dead, he could not physically live in eternity, insists on the necessity of this genetic transmission: ‘You had a father, let your son say so’. It is here that an interlude develops, which defines the relationship between subject and object as an unstable and ever more murky ménage, imbued with the pain of absence and indifference, no matter how

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illuminated in flashes by the hope of rejoining and of unity. And, changing his voice, the poetic ‘I’ humiliates itself, diminishing itself in front of the beloved, greater by convention or in reality; but even this assertion is taken back because the subject blames himself for being too indulgent; and is a confessed hypocrite in the face of crimes which should be strongly condemned. With a vein of masochism he also facilitates the betrayal of his friend. Sonnet 40 is a wholly morbid and obscure mulling over accusations and declarations of forgiveness, as well as over wrongs done to others and also personally experienced. The heart of the collection gradually stages a different and more subtle competition: the compensation of poetic verse which immortalizes is ever weaker and more damaged, both because the art of the poetic subject is imperfect, and because the young friend is, by definition, ineffable (he is a ‘limit past my praise’).25 It is he himself who nurtures his art, though he obscurely perceives the action of destructive time over human affairs (and thus time is the only winner, in spite of the contrary declarations). The poetic utterances are slightly out of phase with regard to the emotions felt in the heat of the moment, but they emanate anguish, bitterness and suspicion, and the encomiastic tone is chronically lowered as a result, and the humiliation of the subject is ironical and the opposite of what has been explicitly declared.26 The eternization is that of

25 Sonnet 82. 26 Sonnet 71 adopts a Donne-like perspective, imagining the disunion and separation after death, but with the contrast that only one of two lovers will remain with the worms. However, this is always the voice of a poet who is writing, and a sonnet that urges to forget while scripta manent, and they are scripta which immortalize a beloved, and written by someone who asks that love be forgotten! The sonnet is a fortress of irony, of false modesty and of pretended self effacement. Sonnet 124 is in turn a kind of Donne-inspired ‘definition of love’, with its framing political metaphor and the beloved depicted as a ‘child of state’, which probably alludes to a bundle of perishable things. But the second quatrain denies this, calling the friend not an accident but an Aristotelian substance, thus not assimilable with a courtier who suffers the favour or the disapproval of the court. He is then no part of the volubility of either politics or the court: ‘hugely politic’ in l. 11 means political in the utopian sense, and thus exempt from wrong behaviours.

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the poet himself by means of his verses, no matter how deaf 27 his friend may be. In the slightly wider cycle of the ‘rival poet’, or poets,28 the poetic voice harks back to the subtle irony of proclaiming verses that are well honed and perfected, to be poor and ineffectual, and he accuses the adulators for the simple fact of presuming to improve with words a model – the same fair youth – who is already perfect, making theirs a useless cosmetic operation. Once this subplot has been archived, the poetic ‘I’ proclaims, masochistic and Christ-like, his desire to take the blame for crimes he didn’t even commit, in a context of reference that is for a long time that of an abandonment or a farewell being enacted, and of the recriminations that follow as a consequence, despite their readiness to close an eye on the caprices and the lunatic moods. Sonnet 104 provides one of the few temporal references, and reveals 27 With Sonnet 27 a small sub-group of nocturnal sonnets is formed, ‘terrible’ like Hopkins’s final ones as already mentioned. Thus they can or could easily be taken as being addressed to a Deus absconditus. From a state of ecstasy the poet descends to the pain of physical distance, though comforted by the mental images; he exaggerates the unworthiness and the artistic inferiority of his poetry, which is, however, sincere, lacking in artistic merit but overflowing with love. Yet, it is perhaps precisely the opposite, and this may be a mere rhetorical figure and literary convention. Sonnets 33 and 34 dwell on the beloved’s fugitive apparition as an ephemeral glare, much like the sun obscured by clouds. The poet no longer feels downtrodden and passive, but protesting, and the young man doesn’t lift a finger to gratify his love. Hopkins will re-echo Sonnet 97 in particular – almost literally, and especially l. 3. He recodifies the remoteness from his beloved felt by the poet in the sonnets as his own agonizing remoteness from the Father. Sonnet 64 acknowledges that decadence is widespread and there is no solution, and Sonnet 65 asks the question, in more classical, less broken lines, that even Hopkins would have asked, amongst many others: that is, how to stem the threat of time the reaper. Shakespeare attempts to answer the fundamental question inherent in Hopkins’s ‘Echoes’, but he posits and resolves it in a different manner, even if he himself appeals for a ‘miracle’, meaning a metaphorical earthly miracle rather than a religious one. His reasoning follows archetypes and sequences of ideas, and transitory beauty can only be eternalized through art and the art of words, not by losing that beauty by putting it in safety – or relinquishing it in God’s hands, as Hopkins yearns in his ‘Echoes’. Sonnet 90 invokes mercy for a beaten, defeated and broken poetic ‘I’, with words that will re-echo, again precise and numerous, in Hopkins. 28 The usual suspects are Marlowe and (goodness knows why) the innocuous Chapman; a third candidate is the obscure Gervase Markham. But tot capita tot sententiae.

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that three years have passed since the first meeting, but this may be a purely conventional number. Within the second third of the collection various disapproving sonnets written to the unfaithful friend are tempered and counterbalanced when the vices are transformed into virtues by the amiability of the young man and by the euphoric sense of possession of the poetic voice, and even more by the re-emergence of the theme of immortality given by art, which opposes the transience of human affairs and the devastation of Time. Poetry is a Muse which must break the silence so as to exhibit to the centuries, and forever, the steady, unchangeable and intact icon of the beloved, though it is aware of not being up to the task as verse cannot add anything to his perfection, reiterated with new argumentations of the Platonic kind. However, just as in prayer, the act of faith renews itself every day in being repeated. In another allusive aside (Sonnets 109 and 110) the subject, after having associated with unworthy friends, and having betrayed the youth with others, realizes that he has no equal, and so returns even stronger to his one love. Up to the end of the first group (Sonnet 126), the poetic subject mimetically confesses his own unworthiness, invoking medicine from his friend and simultaneously giving him credit for the same unworthiness in a climate of perceptive alienation (the eye which no longer transmits the phenomenological to the mind, wholly absorbed in him) and of permanent denial of assertions just made (Sonnet 116, which maintains that love does not grow but is constant, and is not subject to alterations in mutable time, the opposite of the preceding sonnet).29 The discussion is concluded in Sonnet 120 with a Solomonic agreement on the faults of both one and the other.30 A lady at court; a hostess and the mother of Davenant; 29

Sonnet 118 develops a metaphor from the field of medicine: sometimes the appetite is stimulated with spicy sauces and at others we take a purge so as to preventatively avoid illness. This means that despite starving himself of him, the subject has accepted diversions and spends time with other less noble friends. Thus before contracting an illness he healed by returning to him. Sonnet 119 seems to allude to an infatuation that is almost orgiastic. 30 Melchiori 1973, 81–117, shows that the suspicions of moral cowardice attributed in Sonnet 121 to the subject by the self-righteous partly coincide with the self-accusations that the subject points at his own self, in spite of the celebrated and stentorious biblical assertion of independence and coherent pride – ‘I am that I am’: indeed the

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or a Mary Fitton according to a theory put forward by G. B. Shaw; or Sidney’s sister, or – with increasing probability,31 in my opinion – Emilia Lanier or Lanyer, a woman poet (who was one Bassano, and Italian, and thus of a darker complexion than the English, and above all from a family of musicians,32 which would be in agreement with the musical prowess mentioned in Sonnet 128, with an explicit allusion to her tempting and sexually exciting charm); or a mulatto, a half-caste, or even a black woman from the West Indies, or a brothel owner known as Lucy Negro – these are some of the possible candidates for the supposed identity of the ‘dark lady ’. But she could also be a fiction or a multi-faceted hypostasis, much like the fair youth.33 The slightly fewer than thirty sonnets concluding the collection alternate a light-hearted and gallant celebration of an unusual black beauty – another violation of the norm –34 with that of the renewed distress of a crazy and destructive love and of an uncontrollable jealousy. In vain the poet would wish to subjugate and sublimate them, in the same challenging, conflictual climate – of blandishment, dishonour, and imploration – as in the sonnets addressed to the fair youth. The very last group is formed of only two sonnets and is usually but erroneously said to be separate from the main body. The flame of inextinguishable carnal Eros reappears, though it is described with the pictorial and ekphrastic cameo of a Cupid with his lit torch vainly immersed in the waters of a river, and of the lovesick hero who goes to the healing waters but does not heal, rather nurtures his fire and makes it red hot, at his mistress’s eyes.35

sonnet says the same thing as Baudelaire’s ‘mon semblable, – mon frère’, and that the whole of humanity is accomplice and corrupt. 31 As Calimani 2009, 252, also notices. 32 Volume 1, § 36.6 n. 5. 33 Bate 1997, 56–8, unconvincingly offers the candidature of John Florio’s wife, sister of the poet Samuel Daniel, and whose Christian name is unknown. 34 Thus a Marinist and even a Crashavian poet, when grief and tearful eyes make the woman more beautiful. 35 Kerrigan 1986, 14, underlines the horizons of expectancy, in 1609, for a work containing, besides 154 traditional sonnets, these two paraphrases together with ‘A Lover’s Complaint’.

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2. In actual fact, sonnet collections put the literary historian in extreme difficulty when he or she wishes to go beyond a general and thus generic presentation and when one tries to add something more specific, even without writing an analytical book or a detailed and in-depth commentary of each sonnet (at least in cases where the textual material exceeds the few dozen pieces, as with Petrarch, but less so with Donne). Such a commentary would by necessity plagiarize the many already existing, in fact compiling a pure and hurried catalogue which is tantamount to a disservice towards the actual sonnets, and which would only highlight the tautological and redundant36 elements, without appreciating the work upon the verbal, rhetorical and argumentative signifier.37 Various books on the sonnets – if not all38 – actually end up by being annotated editions of the whole collection, or analyses of sonnets selected for content and weight and used as a starting point and possible comparison for radial cross-reference.39 The asymptotic aim of the historiographer is thus, in my opinion, that of avoiding a linear and progressive reading, though one cannot even completely allow an atomistic one to take precedence. Thus one must first acknowledge a semiosis that partly and occasionally coincides and agrees 36

37

38 39

The most tautological of all the sonnets is perhaps Sonnet 123, which may illustrate the procedure of self-paraphrasing. The first and the last line are repeated in certain cases, as in this sonnet where they say: ‘No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change’ (l. 1), which is in fact re-echoed in l. 14: ‘I will be true despite thy scythe and thee’. And yet Shakespeare’s sonnets are a text that conquers, infatuates and invites the reader to an uncontrolled empathy where it is sweet to drown, while enacting the substitution as a second voice to that of the sender of the actual textual message. In other words it seems that we have now reached a point bordering on exegetic saturation. For Taylor 1989, 365, Booth’s 1977 commentary ‘makes the sonnets more difficult to read than ever before’. ‘What remains to be said that is new?’, P. Porter asked in the TLS dated 7 March 2008, 3–5. Cf. also A. Fowler’s reservations with regard to Paterson 2010, in TLS dated 14 January 2011, 13. Like at least the penultimate in Italian so far, Calimani 2009. The books that investigate selected samples implicitly reply to the question of how many, and which ones are the exemplary sonnets of the total 154. How many of these are incomparable masterpieces? Maybe a third or a quarter of the total number, without there ever being a perfect agreement on which they are.

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with the dramaturgical one, but for the greater part diverges from it. It is not Shakespeare’s fault if the mimetic diegesis is colourless and poor. Not thought of as a story, and not ordered either during their writing or ex post, the sonnets are discontinuous, irregular and periodic utterances on static themes, and exhibit marked elaborative disproportion between verbal content and material. Shakespeare’s theatre is not actually linear, rather it is diatonic; but being true to life and naturalistic, it rests at least on the coherence of a plot. Occasionally a sonnet may sound like a short dramatic monologue that presupposes the hearer to be close at hand, or even evokes him; more importantly the sonnet condenses in its fourteen lines a web of meanings and of trails equal to the semiotic potential of the plays, which by their very nature include small sections that, without actually calling them dead, are somewhat inert and serve only as functional connections. Above, in the first subsection, I used the term ‘themes’: themes that are announced, developed, and which are closed, but themes which also return in the form of sub-themes or variations and transformations. ‘Theme’ is a technical word which crops up in literary criticism but is also and above all adopted in musical criticism.40 The first analogies that come to mind are Bach’s harpsichord suites, Scarlatti’s sonatas, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations or Chopin’s Preludes. One of the happiest titles in the bibliography on the sonnets, and which admirably hints at their organizational principle, is for this reason that of  J. B. Leishman’s Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.41 Another musical metaphor to indicate the homology with music is the modular one. The themes are repeated intact, as much in dianoetic modality as by means of figurative variations. The chain is either 40 For Coleridge, the recurrence of themes did not make it necessary to postulate or establish a new ordering, but rather they were attributable to a type of ‘fugal composition’ or to a system of emotional counterpoints and modulations, following a cumulative nature and progression. At least in this respect he was extraordinarily far-sighted. 41 All things considered, this is a disappointing, albeit extremely erudite book, whose title refers to the diachronic rather than synchronic variations within the corpus, and thus to the echoes of classical motifs (Greek and Latin), or Italian and French ones of the Renaissance (Petrarch and Ronsard). This musical label is found quite frequently in the bibliography on the sonnets, but it is not particularly elaborated.

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local or formed at a distance, and the links are verbal, lexical and conceptual within one particular sonnet, or between one sonnet and another. A lexeme may reappear after many sonnets, becoming enriched with new subtleties without losing the dialogue with what had gone on before, in a procedure that is as chromatic as it is diatonic. Epithets are moved from one referent to another and auras of resonance are formed on the key terms, giving rise to various isotopic threads (‘lines’ for example, which primarily means ‘wrinkles’ and then ‘lines of  verse’). When a lexeme is repeated even more than once in the same sonnet, this must not be deemed a stylistic violation worthy of reproach, rather cases of intensification or correction of the semantic or elusive sphere. The theme of Sonnet 14 is that of the eyes of the beloved, from which knowledge and fascination come which are superior to the knowledge derived from the stars. In the next sonnet, the stars are treated as an incidental element, even if they are always influential on the course of events in life, designated as – and this is an extremely recurrent metaphor in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy – the stage of a theatre. The same connection can be found between Sonnets 37 and 38, with the ingenious game based on the number ten, in the closing expression ‘then ten times happy me!’ (Sonnet 37), recalled in the continuation with ‘Be thou the tenth Muse’ – much like a variation that develops a sound cell, or a musical phrasing in a completely divergent manner. It seems to be equally true to say that the sonnet as a whole is a framework or even a texture of conceptual chords, of images, voices, registers, timbres, tones and pure situations.42 A musicality that exists but is appreciated to a less predictable extent when compared to the average of the other Elizabethans is that of alliteration.43 The closest analogy is that of semantic – quadriphonic, and then polyphonic – stereophony. On an epistemic level, music – as in Sonnet 8 – means the widespread Renaissance ideal that represents the unity reached through diversity and even through dissonance. It is at 42 For example looking at oneself in the mirror, or imagining what will happen when the subject dies (Sonnets 73 and 103). 43 A half-page paragraph in C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, Oxford 1965, 505–6, discusses and exemplifies that in the sonnets ‘there is a great use of alliteration both in its obvious and in its less obtrusive forms’.

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the same time both the symbol of procreativity and of the Spenserian wedding which realizes the spiritual order in the created world. This explains the alternation of the metaphorical and semantic fields – which coincide with and often overlap those of  John Donne – of testamentary legislation, of the change of the seasons, of economy, distillation and alchemy, of printing and of books, of the human body as a house and a building, of astronomy, of life as a scenic spotlight, of medicine and navigation. The poetic voice has in its turn a wide range of registers and even falsettos. In Sonnet 22 and in those immediately following, a union is celebrated; but with Sonnet 26 the rhetoric of diminutio begins. This involves the pretended and strategic presentation of the poetic ‘I’ as a poor, defenceless nobody, conversely exaggerating the extraordinary gifts of the beloved. Stentorian, bold and daring, the voice becomes (as for example in Sonnet 57) the anticipated parody of the querulous Pamela of Richardson’s novels and of those judicious Victorian heroines who depend on voluble men. But the warning voice of the exordium is not late to make itself heard, urging the handsome young man to be careful and to be wise. The tone shifts from exhortation to resentment, to challenge, to submission and to humiliation. Sonnet 94, which vibrates with the threat of cosmic infection, is thus a ‘dramatic’ sonnet, or rather that of a voice, strongly sarcastic and bitter, and therefore also similar to Hamlet’s, exemplifying its argument with images (of gardens which become dried up, and of rotting flowers)44 which reverberate in the next one. A term that is and must be often used in the comments on 44 To quote just one of many examples, the warning against the affectation of a sentiment one does not feel is criticized by the Countess of Rossillion in her address to Helena in the opening scene of All’s Well that Ends Well (I.1.47–50). In an age of polarization of criticism of the text as a discourse on political power – the 1970s – Melchiori 1973, 43–79, in his impeccable reading of four of the sonnets uses the term ‘power’ in a sense that is tout court political. For this reason the range of his references to the dramatic canon should perhaps be integrated with The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Othello, and even extended to Titus Andronicus. Anyone who makes people commit harm towards others from behind a mask of impassibility and immunity evokes Aaron, Proteus and Iago. Thus even, though not only in Sonnet 94, the power of psychological contagion is studied, as is the subtle persuading of others to harm their fellow men.

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the sonnets is that of re-traction, in its primary sense, which is not that of a denial of preceding statements but of a second, new and therefore also repetitive handling of them. Monotony is perhaps admitted as monocentrism in Sonnet 105, where the poetic ‘I’ confesses that he sings of only one thing that might be split up into three sub-themes which are beauty, kindness and constancy in the beloved. Sonnet 76 concedes that one can and should write without variety, that the style of writing can be redundant in its forms and subject matter, without breaking any continuity. The obligation is the same as that of someone who praises an old and ever new thing like the sun. Sonnet 105 speaks rather of abolition and abrogation of difference, that is of variety. And Sonnet 108 insists that every day the poet must repeat the same thing. 3. The beloved is an internal and immediate reader of the sonnets, their first, historical and ideal recipient. The poetic ‘I’ is then a writer of verses that celebrate the beloved, who will inherit them and read in them of the love that the subject has brought to him in vain and that he immortalized with his lines. It is also a distillation of his being, because the spirit will remain while the less noble and more transitory part will waste away. Read according to their communicative model, the sonnets effectively accentuate their persuasive objective. The sender and the recipient arise and stand out, distinguishable from one another in a series of messages that are pleas, apostrophes and exhortations, or even condemnations. When the latter are directed at the same subject of the enunciation the rhetoric becomes self-persuasive and communication becomes self-communication and thus confession. Certain maxims – because the procedure is also this, of enunciations of gnomic, abstract truths – are uttered in the first-person plural so as to increase the credibility and the consensus over the same truth, and in the grammatical form of imperatives or optative forms. It takes a while for the interpersonal relationship to take hold, and the first nine sonnets are pure apostrophes; but the tenth implicates the voice and the person of the subject, and the twentieth inaugurates the theme of the purity, the constancy and the loyalty of his love. This objective is pursued with an array of figures of thought in which the antithesis takes precedence (towards the middle of the fourteen lines, or sometimes later, there appears almost inevitably a significant and adversative ‘But’),

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along with hyperbole, oxymoron, paradox or even counter-sense (in saving the seed, the seed is consumed). Also used are argumentative procedures such as the insistent rhetorical interrogatives, the anaphoric formulae, the inceptions in the form of extended similes and exempla. In fact, a vein of metapoetic sonnets is embedded within the sequence, and they argue the origin of poetry itself and distinguish a healthy and balanced rhetoric from one that is false, superficial and exhibitionistic. The term ‘invention’ is used in the sonnets with full knowledge of its technical meaning, and it refers to one of the five cornerstones of rhetorical discourse established by Quintilian. The inventio is in the sonnets the fair youth, and thus on one hand poetry is an easy task because it limits itself to normatively answering the solicitations that come from him. In Sonnet 84, it is declared that every poem cannot but be tautological, as was said above, and must only copy the fullness of its subject, which is universal and the template. All the same, dialectically speaking, the poetic ‘I’ recognizes itself as being inferior to other poets endowed with greater inventio. It is however a case of false modesty, in as much as those supposed rivals embellish only the signifier and the style and do not express love. This self-criticism is surprising, until the formulation of an objection, that with their rhetoric those poets paint cheeks that have no need of cosmetics. False rhetoric – adulation, in other words – kills, and, in a certain sense, silence gives life. In the diptych of Sonnets 82 and 83, and with other reverberations in the ensuing sonnets, the same objection as Cordelia’s may be read in nuce: she remains silent but does not love any the less than they who say many words which are perhaps insincere or affected.45

45 Here references to the poets of the School of Night may be intended (see Volume 1, § 66.2 n. 1). The reticence invoked in Sonnet 102 is the same Hopkins will mention – for reasons that are partly different and partly similar – referring to his ‘unreticent youth’ (see Volume 6, § 196.2).

The History Plays

§ 8. The history plays The dilemma facing anyone attempting to undertake the formidable journey of a comprehensive study of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy with its first internal group of English history plays, is whether to treat them following the actual historical chronology to facilitate orientation, or whether to take them in the order of composition to allow each drama an atomistic reading according to a more specifically literary evolutionary line. Having decided with some hesitation to skip the English dramas of the Celtic period such as King Lear and Cymbeline, the former case would mean starting with the oldest according to historical chronology, King John, even if it is not the oldest in terms of composition. The latest chronological period of English history dramatized by Shakespeare is Henry VIII’s reign, and the subject of one of his very last written works, but the others flout or overturn historical chronology, to follow which one must retrace the compositional chronology backwards, as though Shakespeare had made himself look through some kind of reverse binoculars. I have chosen the second alternative, and my discussion will follow the verifiable and presumed compositional chronology, because the advantages resulting from a historical approach would have brought with them compositional disorientation. The problem – not in fact so unusual – was confronted and dealt with by the very first editors themselves, Heminges and Condell, who re-ordered the English historical plays in the First Folio according to chronology beginning with King John, and ending the first of their three divisions with Henry VIII. Critics and scholars have often wondered – without finding an appropriate answer – whether Shakespeare actually wanted to paint a fresco illustrating the political history of three centuries, from John down to Henry VIII. They have looked for the actual reasons why he abandoned the idea after having completed two tetralogies, of which the first is made up of the three parts of Henry VI with its natural sequel Richard III, and the second goes back to King John and moves forward as far as Richard II and Henry IV (in two parts) and to Henry V, leaving a full century empty right down to the arrival of Henry VIII. Anyone wishing to discover the seed of all this material, which dates back to the offspring of Edward III’s seven children, can find it in the second scene of Act II of Henry VI Part 2. These ten plays divide their attention between the intimate and personal plots

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of the characters and the sequence of public events. But the two opposing fronts might well be English and Scottish, loyalists and rebels, or even the two Roses; above all, right from the first Henry VI, the English and French fronts. Here is a test of the playwright’s ability in dealing with a drama that must jump not only between two plots, but between two sides engaged in active hostilities with one another. Shakespeare will henceforward be a great synthesizer of events in the five acts of his historical plots. Thanks to the close juxtaposing of the scenes, though without mentioning any dates, he creates and reiterates the illusion of a sequence without hiatuses, although there had actually been empty periods of time, and thus ellipses of even decades. He also shows a masterly knowledge of how to put out of phase, move backwards and forward in time, suppress and deliberately invent, redouble or even merge, events and characters. A cunning, brazen falsification is implemented to worsen Richard III’s bad reputation, with further wicked deeds added to those he actually perpetrated. It has been claimed and actually demonstrated that the second and third parts of Henry VI were written first: they formed a hendiadys and the first part was an introduction. But in this case I will not follow the compositional chronology to the detriment of the historical one. As far as the textual diatribe is concerned, Shakespeare wrote the majority of these English historical plays with collaborators, and he coordinated the finished product in such a way as to allow us to ascribe their authorship to him.1 But this is an observation that I will have to repeat often or take for granted from now on. 2. More than anything else, Shakespeare is the historical playwright of the Richards and the Henrys. Richard III is already at the heart of the play of Henry VI; Henry V becomes king after having made merry with Falstaff in two plays. In his turn Falstaff, with his farcical performances, unsettles the tragic continuity making the plays in which he appears at least mock-heroic. The official version of the history of the Tudors was that it revolved around an ‘original sin’ that, as such, had to be atoned for: it was the deposition of Richard II at the hands of Henry Bolingbroke, a 1

Of the second and third parts of the trilogy there are some ‘bad quartos’ preceding the First Folio; of the first part only the Folio text. The historical sources were Hall and Holinshed.

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usurpation that would be atoned for almost a century later thanks to Henry VII. Between these two poles there is only one pattern to the historical plays: the English Crown is defensive and offensive, hardly ever consecutively. It faces up to and launches into two types of action. Whether true or false, the charge of usurpation is congenital and endemic, so that the Shakespearean monarch has to face up to intrigues and conspiracies and thwart them, either with persuasion and conciliation, or with a traitorous stratagem, as in Henry IV Part 2, or with the challenge on the battlefield as in the Wars of the Roses. Offensively, the English throne lays claim to French duchies for complicated dynastic reasons, which receive rapid summaries in which Shakespeare seems to express a certain historiographic enthusiasm as an end unto itself, while wanting to inform an audience who might be ignorant of facts going back 200 years. One of these detailed summaries in blank verse occurs in the very first exchanges in Henry IV Part 1. Jan Kott spoke of a pessimistic cyclicism in Shakespeare, because at the end of every single play everything returns to how it was before, and at the beginning of the next one an analogous parable of fighting for power begins anew. His theory is that of a ‘great mechanism’ of history and of a series of steps of a ladder that the protagonists ascend and descend. Kings are cogs in this mechanism. This is highlighted by the disorienting homonymies; there is always a Richard who does away with a Henry or an Edward. But evidently a tug of war is conjured up between these fatal and deterministic notions of history and the free will of the individual. § 9. ‘Henry VI’ * The first part of the trilogy Henry VI (first acted in 1592, published in 1623) is a polyptych of English history at the beginning of the fifteenth

*

C. F. T. Brooke, The Authorship of the Second and Third Parts of ‘King Henry VI’, New Haven, CT 1912; D.  M. Ricks, Shakespeare’s Emergent Form: A Study of the Structures of the ‘Henry VI’ Plays, Logan, UT 1968; D.  R. Riggs, Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories: ‘Henry VI’ and its Literary Tradition, Cambridge 1971; D.  L. Frey, The First Tetralogy: Shakespeare’s Scrutiny of the Tudor Myth: A Dramatic Exploration of Divine Providence, The Hague 1976; R. Dombrowa, Strukturen in Shakespeares ‘King Henry the Sixth’, Amsterdam 1985;

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century. It advances like a risky, selective stereophonic production where a variety of scenes alternate whilst historical time moves inexorably forward. It begins with the funeral of the universally mourned Henry V and closes with the announcement of a marriage arranged for political gain (that of his son Henry VI). In between is the bitterly implacable, unending conflict between Church and State, or rather between Gloucester, the regent, and Winchester the bishop, later to become a cardinal. It recounts the formal founding act of the factions of the two Roses with the implicit launch of Richard III. More than anything else, in its most representative scenes and phases it illustrates the war campaign of the English against the French, including the heroism and death of Talbot, and the cunning stratagems of the Maid of Orleans. It is only in Act III that the wise, balanced Henry VI makes his appearance, still wan and a man of few words. Shakespeare brings the two battlefronts close together and has both the English and the French encampments on stage without losing credibility. In secondary scenes Falstaff 2 is made to appear a coward who runs away. The tension between one scene and another is not one of the objectives of a play that does not hide its hiatuses, any more than it hides a somewhat rambling and loosely woven pace. Two interludes concentrate on Talbot the ‘scourge of the French’, when he is invited to meet the Countess d’Auvergne, and the Earl of Suffolk’s attempted seduction of Margaret, a French nobleman’s daughter, later justified by his insistence that he wanted to propose her as a bride for Henry VI in exchange for two counties. The dominant notes are rather more those of light relief and of a mixed dramatic regime. The dramatic extension, ranging from bleak and forbidding tragedy, and humour via satire, farce, pantomime and even pure comedy, is astounding. The portrayal of heroism is sublime until it precipitates into its very opposite, fallen heroism and thus mock-heroic comedy. This is why this first part of Henry VI is vaguely similar to Troilus and Cressida, pre-empting its ‘Henry VI’: Critical Essays, ed. T. Pendleton, New York and London 2001; G.  S. Brown, Shakespeare’s History: Introduction to the Interpretation of the First Part of ‘King Henry the Sixth’ and the English Histories, Macon, GA 2012. 2

Regarding his name, see n. 36 below.

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surreptitious and yet undeniable mood of war satire.3 Shakespeare’s moving appreciation of every form of heroism, including that of his compatriots, does not hide his striking awareness of the fragile line between heroism on the one hand and human stupidity and superficiality on the other. The war may be humorous as shown in the scene where the artilleryman begs a boy to spy on the English enemy – whose movements they watch through a grating – only to shoot a sudden broadside against them, or in the nocturnal scaling of the walls of Orléans while the French arrive in their nightshirts after an evening of revelry. The ‘Temple Garden scene’ foreshadows the opening of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets when red roses and white roses blossom not from Eden, or from a hortus, but on brambles and bushes in preparation for a bloody vendetta. It is followed by the irruption of groups of followers of the two Roses in Parliament, swearing eternal enmity and rifling in their pockets for stones to throw at each other. Fine upstanding men fall apart like melting snow, and it takes just a few well-chosen words to send the Count of Burgundy back to the French fold. Unlikely acts of war, it may be argued; instead it is a plausible aboutturn of events. Shakespeare’s relativism is centred on the role of Talbot, the hero. Every so often he tends towards Quixotic behaviour, especially in the episode of the Countess referred to as ‘a peaceful comic sport’ in the Count of Burgundy’s comment. Vain and self-satisfied, Talbot cannot say no; and the Countess, temptress and enchantress, realizes to her surprise that her hero lacks the physique for his role. The ingenuous young man is almost enchained, but with a flash of rhetoric he wins through in extremis and gets free. From the beginning to the very end, Talbot is both a model and a target; a target centred by a vicious blow from the Maid who smiles upon hearing the interminable list of titles appertaining to the English warrior, given by the emissary who came to ask about him after his fall on the battlefield (in a ‘silly-pompous’ style). In the final combat Talbot fails to convince his son to flee for his own survival, and so father and son decide to face their deaths embracing each other. It is a curious

3

In the final scene, Suffolk takes on the role of Paris who moves to Thebes to capture Helen. More than anything he is a Pandarus acting to further his own ambitions.

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tit-for-tat, reminiscent of an operatic duet in their interventions expressed in rhyming couplets. But the scene is not devoid of pathos. 2. If Shakespeare studies passions, in this first part of the trilogy his theme is partisanship. It demolishes rational control to produce results that are pure primordial fanaticism. His diagnosis suggests that the cancer undermining England and even ‘destroying the kingdom’ is its divisiveness, which weakens internal power, and has repercussions on the outcome of the war against the French – still uncertain, but not due to French merit. The isolated voices of wise politicians exhort their compatriots to seek peace, well knowing that peace is an unreachable mirage, only temporary even if briefly attained. From the very outset, exemplifying the hypocritical saying de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, when Henry V (whose funeral rites are held) causes everyone to agree, arguments flare up and explode. Further on, Shakespeare gets a sadistic pleasure from introducing and then prolonging illustrative scenes full of bitter exchanges and dialogue riddled with imaginary calumnies and hyperbolic offences. In the face-to-face argument between Cardinal Winchester and Gloucester the Regent, there even seem to be signs of an ex post vision; a vision posterior, that is, to the Reformation, the prelate being a symbol of Roman corruption hated by everyone, while Gloucester’s hatred is much more credible. And the scandal consists in the enormous quantities of blood shed amongst ‘professors of one faith’. Henry is the reed – too supple and elastic – who implores his countrymen to seek a lasting peace: often the biting irony is that he expresses firmly sorrowful warnings immediately followed by a renewal of hostilities. If Henry V is a dazzling personality and a true scourge of God, his successor is that ‘effeminate king’ necessary for ecclesiastical power to impose its own hegemony. In Act V Henry resembles a Prospero immersed in his books of magic, unsuited for power and immature for marriage. This larval, diaphanous monarch lets others choose his spouse for him in the troubled, naïve scene already mentioned. The English talk in such an inflated and magniloquent way that the French suspect them of a boastful satire of the miles gloriosus; meanwhile, the French love their repartee and verbal swordplay. The Maid is first and foremost a lively farm girl full of common sense with no desire to be outwitted from the moment of her vocation, described in a prosaic, desecrating scene dissimulating genuine traces of pantomime and farce.

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The Dauphin is not a spring chicken, and after imitating the voice of the responsible king he immediately starts flirting with her in typical French fashion. She is portrayed from an anti-Catholic point of view, in sympathy with Shakespeare’s contemporaries who were by now Protestants free of superstition, and who openly doubted the Maid’s divine inspiration, believing her to be a witch (in a chiastic way, Talbot is a devil for the French, due to the terror he universally inspires). All possibilism and relativism vanishes in the final act, and a univocal version prevails: Joan is an astute shepherdess whose utterances are lies, and is endowed with truly expert cunning, rivalling Talbot. Above all, she is clearly a Faustian sorceress who evokes subterranean powers and the devils from Hell, but all in vain. She even offers them her virginity – and sells her soul – for victory. 3. The second play in the trilogy (staged in 1591, published in 1594) is a veritable tour de force given the historical period encompassed, its superabundance of characters, its many sudden, frenetic scene changes, its ramified subplots, and its variety of diegetic and linguistic registers. Without actually being binary – that is, set half in England and half in France – it manages nonetheless to give the impression of being disjointed, unbalanced and disorganized. The playwright – this once at least – proves not to have complete control of his subject matter. With so many irons in the fire and so many fires burning, the closure of so many rapid, relatively artificial incidental scenes appears summary, hurried if not perfunctory (such as the knighting of Iden, Cade’s murderer). Here more than ever, the play is structured around a series of emblematic, salient flashes illustrating a long reign and taking place within the court. But these alternate with adversative and antithetical scenes, which serve to counterbalance the narrative of those wielding power by making the audience smile and laugh, and thereby think. As far as the formal register is concerned, Shakespeare always gives his high-ranking characters contrived harangues, modelled on the rules of rhetoric and rich in long similes and mythological echoes. Such pompous, bombastic, repetitive and parliamentary-style rhetoric literally overflows in the never-ending Act III. Yet Shakespeare’s imagination is given free rein in the innumerable arguments peppered with angry invectives which contain some of his linguistically most inventive dialogues, couched in the idiomatic language of the common people in

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their own scenes. The first two acts open up to situations of calmly pacific agreement on general matters which however degenerate into bitter discord, suspicion, abuse and recrimination, showing that the divides opened in the first part of the trilogy are insurmountable. Everything happens as a result of inheritance, or rather as a consequential repercussion of wrongs received, never forgiven and never forgotten. The curtain rises on a loveinspired wedding ceremony which seems to suit everyone, but which instead reopens the wound of the loss of the dukedoms of Anjou and Maine retained by France while the king married an impoverished dignitary’s daughter without asking for a dowry. The royal court is soon shown to be a cacophony of voices and opinions; of ministers and courtiers, each one with his own personal aim contrary to the common good. Alliances are formed between one and another for intermediate and momentary strategies, and this is why they can be annulled in no time. There is a game of reciprocal elision going on where everyone is against everyone else since everyone is playing a double game, whilst believing that no one else has rumbled them. The main plot lines are the following: the elimination of honest Gloucester, slandered by the scheming Suffolk, who is himself killed by the people; the wait-and-see policy of Richard Plantagenet who, when he was sent to Ireland to quash a revolt, managed to ignite the uprising of John Cade’s artisans. Amongst the various parallel plots is the interference first of the queen, Suffolk’s lover; then that of the Duchess of Gloucester.4 The Bishop of Winchester dies of natural causes. In the finale Richard of York shows his hand and explicitly claims the crown with the support of some nobles, having defeated Henry VI in the battle of St Albans.

4

Gloucester’s wife is a miniature Lady Macbeth who encourages her husband to criminal behaviour, declaring that the throne must be theirs, even at the cost of bloodshed. But the faux-Macbeth resists her. With a further analogy, she consorts with witches and magicians in what could be a preview of the Macbeth scenes, also because it strongly recalls the accusations of witchcraft levelled against Joan of Arc in the first play. Like Macbeth, the dying Winchester has nightmares and hallucinations regarding the death of Gloucester, which he instigated.

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4. The uncontrolled anarchy that envelopes and torments Henry VI’s reign is mostly the fault of the king himself. Human beings are incurably ambitious, unrestrained, passionate troublemakers seeking to further their private aims, and this is why a heavy-handed governance that is super partes is needed to impose and maintain discipline and the existing hierarchy. Previously, it was Henry’s youth that caused the climate of unrest, but now it is attributed to his chronically feeble authority and his defection in his role as ruler. Thus he remains ever true to himself, an unheeded, scandalized, powerless witness to the bloody, atrocious misdeeds that develop and flare up. His Sermon on the Mount calling for clemency amounts to nothing. Now Henry exhibits precisely the opposite traits to those of the Machiavellian Prince; he is not a double-dealer, he is not energetic, he avoids decision-making and talks like a psalmist. He takes up the reins when it is far too late, hunting down and outlawing Suffolk, but only owing to the populace’s protests. An enemy of Machiavellianism, with him Shakespeare paradoxically has to acknowledge that some particle of it is necessary in order to govern and maintain a functioning monarchy. Indifference to the common good leads directly to the people’s oppression, and this reality emerges in exempla which form separate, evocative and allusive scenes that are intermittent and always discordant. Here Shakespeare is well ahead of his time in anticipating the twentieth-century theatre of the grotesque and, above all, of the absurd. In the third scene of Act I, an armourer enters and rejects a servant’s accusations that he had declared the Earl of York to be the legitimate heir to the throne. Following the decree of the pious monarch, the armourer and the servant fight a duel to determine who is right. Act II is interrupted during the royal falcon hunt by the news of a miracle occurred to a blind man who regained his sight. In front of this man, Henry again demonstrates his tedious pietas until another sudden outburst of pure absurdity breaks out.5 Gloucester unmasks the putative miracle, but in so doing he reveals the cause of the deception (‘we did it for pure need,’ says the wife). But in the style of Beckett, or of Yeats in his later theatre, this man, blind from birth, is also believed to have been lame after falling 5

Outline of a theory of blindness and of sight: the sighted person can distinguish colours but is not able to name them immediately after retrieving vision.

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from a plum tree he had climbed up. He is then made to stand on a stool and whipped until he is forced to run for it.6 Shakespeare is clever at fitting this digression into the bigger picture, because the miracle is not only that which happened and is then unmasked, but it is also that of a king who, in spite of having so much land and so many possessions in France in his grasp, lost them. Even the pompous Jack Cade, who holds court single-handedly with his self-satisfied ranting for more than two-thirds of Act IV, is cut down to size by his followers’ jesting. But hidden behind all this absurdity is a nation in pieces; broken, anarchic, on the brink of ruin, and without a leader. It is the monarchy itself that is at risk. Cade the braggart actually means business with his ‘reform’ programme, a reform that Shakespeare welcomed whenever possible, right up to Gonzalo’s speech in The Tempest, though always referring to it as a utopia. The episode of the artisans’ insurrection heralds that of the future Terror of the French Revolution, Cade with his summary justice and emptying of prisons being a kind of lesser Robespierre. Cade is fixated with the notion that the press and the written word are corrupting influences symbolizing the degeneration of civilization and acting as a means to manipulate the illiterate. The fact is that is it difficult to sympathize for long with this picturesque braggart, albeit likeable in his own way. Here, Shakespeare already portrays the crowd’s volubility, ready to wish long life to the king, and then ‘down with him’ in the very same breath. Cade flees,7 and as always – as in the story of the French Revolution – it is the mirage of a new expansionism that changes the orientation of the people. 5. The third part of Henry VI (staged in 1591 and published in 1595) is the most convoluted play in the trilogy because Henry loses the royal crown to Edward of York, then regains it, only then to lose it again once and for all. In the confrontation Edward gains the upper hand, but contrary to expectations only provisionally, because the future Richard III is seething behind the scenes and is now ready for anything. The dramatic speeches 6 7

Joyce will come to mind further on because Cade’s father is a builder who boasts royal descent, as well as being the abducted and unrecognized son of a nobleman. He ends up in Iden’s garden in Kent while seeking refreshment, and is killed by this mild gentleman whom Cade had formerly offended.

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are official in nature, being debates or recollections of events, episodes and outcomes of numerous battles, or soliloquies on intentions newly formed, or passionate harangues aimed at undisciplined troops. The prevalent linguistic register is martial and heroic: solemn, grandiloquent, peremptory, extravagant and spasmodic. It is, in other words, that of the Titanic code – originating with Chapman and Marlowe – of torrents of high-sounding hyperboles. The approach is binary because the stage must be imagined as being crowded with two military formations, one opposite the other. They exchange verbal fire using recriminations, insults and invective to such an extent that the verbal contention is more insistent and more protracted than the physical one, the phases of which are notoriously difficult to represent in a play if not through mime. But there is a variant. In Act II, during an abnormally long, though not particularly original soliloquy, Henry expresses his desire to relinquish the throne, and this speech might be described as his yearning for a shepherd’s carefree life. This is at last a soliloquy without the clang of warfare, Virgilian and elegiac in nature, celebrating the shepherd’s natural ease of life, free from responsibilities. The entr’acte continues with a symbolic, studied scene, almost excessively demonstrative in its chiasmus, of a son who has unknowingly killed his father, and of a father who stabbed his own son.8 Equally far removed from the continuum is the barbarous killing of Rutland, Richard of York’s tender young son who stands up to his murderer with fine rhetoric – though in vain. 6. The action opens with an unexpected attempt at reasoning, instead of using violence and giving way to impulse and atavistic vendetta. A compromise is effectively reached, and for the first time Henry exercises a political role where his anti-Machiavellian policy seems to be popular and to be crowned with a positive result. Henry has always tried and will always try to solve dynastic problems through mediation rather than bloodshed. But disastrously a good, responsible and impartial action reopens an even bloodier conflict instead of placating it. After Henry’s death, the decision to leave the crown to the York faction pleases the latter, but leaves 8

The tragic, but true incongruence of the War of the two Roses – fathers and sons who kill each other, serving in enemy factions – is still remembered at the end of Richard III by Henry Richmond.

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Henry’s son and heir to the throne, as well as the Lancastrians, extremely frustrated. Henry is subjected to a torrent of criticism for his leniency and cowardice, especially from his own side, and is naturally hounded by the queen and by his young son. And thus political expediency inexorably wins the day. Henry is excluded from political activity, confined to Scotland where he must remain on the margins of the armed or civil war that starts up again between the queen and her son on one hand, and the York coalition on the other. But a second civil or fraternal war begins within the war, among Richard of York’s four sons who start embracing ambitious dreams. Paradoxically, York the father cuts a nobler figure than his sons, who incite him to break his oath and rebel against King Henry using the same quibble often heard in Shakespeare, that an oath is only valid if made in front of a competent authority. The abruptness with which the elder Richard gives in is not implausible, and shows how quickly one falls victim to worldly temptation in these as in every Shakespearean play. And the devil puts his oar in because by now the queen is threatening an attack. But Richard of York’s rehabilitation is still not finished: he must be humiliated on a kind of Golgotha, or ‘molehill’ where his enemies – much like the Roman soldiers with Jesus – force him to dry his tears by rubbing his nose with a handkerchief wet with the blood of his freshly slaughtered son.9 In this scene, York is a grotesque stand-in for Jesus, derided at the Praetorium and on the cross, and using words that are strangely incongruous in the mouth of this bloodthirsty character who hopes for paradise for himself, and once dead will be celebrated as a flos regum, much like King Arthur. The metaphor of Henry the lamb surrounded by wolves is based on this premise.10 Faint-hearted, he is kept far from the action because his 9

10

There is here the application of the law of retaliation or of the ‘measure for measure’: Richard’s head, cut by the followers of the Red Rose, is raised on a pole, which is answered by the White Rose, by replacing it with that of General Clifford. The episode of the murder of the innocent Rutland of York in the flower of his years, and the detail of the bloody handkerchief, reverberate in the next drama, Richard III. The dominant metaphorical fields are three: in addition to the animal metaphors (lion, eagle, and chirping birds), those of the shrubs and branches and of the stormshattered boat. These images pass on to the various characters, who repeat and personalize them.

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mildness diminishes the soldiers’ ardour, and he is even forbidden to speak. During Act III he gives us a foretaste of an awkward and philosophizing Lear, albeit not furious in the wilderness, and who can only repeat that his crown, like that of Christ, is not of this world. In worldly terms Henry’s career is a resounding failure, and in fact, shortly before the decisive battle of Coventry, he nominates two regents before retiring to a life of meditation. Once victory is achieved and a treaty underway, Shakespeare’s weak man becomes a slave to lust: this is demonstrated in the second scene of Act III with the sexual blackmail of Lady Grey by the newly crowned King Edward. Richard comes on stage in the same scene, with a series of asides that tell the audience of the conspiracy he has orchestrated and is trying to launch, and above all of his strategies based on secrets and false pretences. His long speech is his own investiture. § 10. ‘King Richard III’ * King Richard III (staged in 1593, published in 1597) marks Shakespeare’s liberation – albeit still intermittent and imperfect – from the bond of history or from a binding historical storyline.11 The preceding three ‘acts’ of Henry VI still owe a great deal to the chronicle play type, and even if Shakespeare soon becomes a masterful summarizer, too many events are crammed into an extended period, without the playwright being able or even wanting to leave out secondary details and collateral characters. *

L. L. Schuecking, Über einige Nachbesserungen bei Shakespeare. ‘Titus Andronicus’, ‘Richard III’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Julius Caesar’ und ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Leipzig 1943; B. Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, New York 1958, 1964; A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns, and Other Shakespeare Lectures, London 1961, 1989, 1992 (a discussion of all the historical plays); K. Smidt, Injurious Impostors and ‘Richard III’, Oslo 1964; P. Haeffner, A Critical Commentary on Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’, London 1966; W. H. Clemen, Commentary on Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’, London 1968; D. C. Gunby, Shakespeare: ‘Richard III’, London 1980; E. Burns, William Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’, Devon 2006; C. Loder and P. Orford, Shakespeare’s ‘King Richard III’: The Perverted Machiavel, Newcastle 2007; P. Schwyzer, Shakespeare and the Remains of ‘Richard III’, Oxford 2013.

11

Its sources were Hall, Holinshed, Polydore Vergil and the Mirror for Magistrates.

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As well as condensing, he must therefore also accelerate stage rhythms as much as possible, devising coincidences and exceptional circumstances that do not ring true in real life. On top of this, history is always – short of a miracle – irreducible to any symmetry or harmonic or contrastive order, and in that trilogy Shakespeare cannot make it conform to ready-made patterns. Richard III turns this procedure upside-down and shows a mature playwright who is no longer slavishly dependent on history. In its central acts, the play loses part of its identity, but the entire first act, the end of the fourth and the entire fifth12 are masterpieces. The play manages to escape the convulsion and congestion of the three preceding works, and delves into the innermost recesses of human psychology, gradually exposing the imponderable weaknesses of the human being behind the disdain, rejection and execration of depravity, and thus the breakdown and crumbling of the will subjected to verbal seduction. Apart from Act V, Richard III is not a play about battles and heroic or cowardly actions, but a closet drama that stages, if anything, a psychological war. Looking ahead, Shakespeare launches a few creative solutions that reward him, and always will reward him, with success. Many will be the scenes from now on of a noble or royal prisoner in the Tower of London, reached by fairly cynical and brash killers who chat with their victim, almost familiarizing with him in witty, grotesque or sinister exchanges. And many other times will we watch scenes from the nursery with young children, too shrewd and amazingly wide-awake for the adults to be able to fool them. They candidly ask about things that people are trying to hide from them, having already guessed the answers.13 The circular pattern of events, cut off here from the historical continuum, is announced in Richard’s opening soliloquy, where he boasts of his victory after a war, and the relief achieved, just as Henry Richmond announces it in his final speech. In the first case Richard’s eloquence is reinforced as he

12 13

The ghost scene in Act V is, however, normally attributed to collaborators. These two scenes concern Clarence’s children with their grandmother, and Edward’s two sons, the younger physically more developed than the elder. He does not want to grow any more, and remembers his uncle Richard’s motto, that ‘Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace’.

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lets himself go in occasionally alliterative measures, as in an Old or Middle English poem.14 This introductory soliloquy is subdivided into three parts or, like a sonata, three movements. This is a false peace for Richard, who gives voice to his sense of exclusion from sexual love in the first place, to such an extent that he believes his criminal designs are justifiable. Finally, he mentally recalls and rehearses his notions of what he should do. But soon another evident internal parallel comes into play: the scene in which Richard woos Lady Anne acts as a bridge to the following one where Richards asks the queen mother for her daughter’s hand. Both scenes involve the slow but inexorable transition from one extreme to another. In the first Lady Anne is disdainful and unmoving towards Richard, but she gradually succumbs to his flattery, orchestrated with exceptionally fine verbal skills.15 Two other similar scenes echo one another: Anne’s and Margaret’s, harmonizing in tone and imagery. Act I closes with a third peroration and thus a third recurrence, namely that of Clarence towards the two killers, where the rhetorical deviousness of his peroration replicates – albeit in vain – that of the other two by Richard. The deaths that occur on stage, whether by natural or unnatural causes, are cadenced, as are the funereal laments that follow them. The murders of the king’s and of a duke’s sons in the Tower are perpetrated in exactly the same ritual manner. The second is less dramatic, and faster than the first, but by no means less efficacious and instructive. The narration of this murder, by Tyrrel the assassin, is the latest in a series of pathetic dirges on childhood innocence precociously and inhumanly destroyed. Numerous other murders are perpetrated with a cyclic rhythm, resulting in commemorations for the dead and in funerals to be organized; passionate orations abound, dripping with pathos and violent emotion, and 14

15

The visible link lies in the repetition of the verb ‘lour’d’: the clouds were first dispersed by a false appearance of peace and summer, and now come back to darken the sky, though they will be soon driven away permanently. Cf. Sonnet 33 for analogies, and § 6.2 n. 18. Unlike the first courtship, the second is done by proxy, or rather Richard courts the mother to conquer the daughter. At the end of this spasmodic address everyone, including the audience and the readers, fleetingly believe Richard’s passionate declarations. But one single line, spoken aside, confirms the bitterest disillusion for the umpteenth time, and namely that Richard is playacting yet again.

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therefore florid and ornate. In Act II King Edward delivers an oration over his dead brother, for whose shameful death he feels responsible after Richard has cunningly attributed the blame to him, and this matches Elizabeth’s lament for the death of her own husband. Even Richard, with such devious mockery that no-one perceives it, pronounces an oration over the head of the Lord Chamberlain, a beheading he himself ordered. The course of public history is only actually halted when choirs of mainly female voices take over. They are lamentations based on the Bible and consisting of magical incantations to ward off danger, psalmodies of execration rather than of praise, and rhyming anaphoric strings that reiterate the concept of the irreparable and undeserved loss of innocent relatives. Richard III is exactly antiphonal, in the double sense that the great dialectic confrontations are tit-for-tat exchanges. Act V reverts to the visibly binary pattern, and each scenic fragment set in one army finds itself mirrored in the opposing line-up, whilst the night hours pass before the impending battle. Ghosts of the dead augur victory and defeat to the contenders, Richard and Henry Richmond, with exactly the same formulae reiterated again and again. 2. Henry VI usurps his role as the nominal protagonist of his three plays, and from a distance watches a history that does not belong to him, and of which he is not the effective cause. Richard wishes to violate the same unfathomable divine teleology. It is an obvious fact, but nonetheless worth repeating, that the audience and the readers know more than the inner characters, deprived of the information given in the soliloquies and asides. However, Richard is playing a part even when alone, and he dissimulates, or rather simulates even in his own soliloquies, especially when he belittles himself and, self-communing, confesses his lack of worth, pretending to himself to be disconsolate and beaten (as in I.2.250ff.). He wins, and is convincing, precisely because, as Queen Elizabeth believes (I.3.65ff.), his external character is seen as corresponding to his inner self, and because – thanks to a theological as well as teleological irony – he is unmasked in extremis only by someone – his brother Clarence (I.4) – who is about to die and thus cannot expose him, or by the children’s intuition. The development of the play, with its chain of murderers and misdeeds, can be read as a psychic and clinical pathology report, or as the exceptional exploit of an unbeatable orator or actor. There is a conscious, elementary explanation, aetiology and even moral justification in Richard’s deformity. He does not love one single woman with authentic

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love, but courts them all should they prove useful; and women are wanton, frivolous, desiring, deceitful and malicious. Overdoing it sexually, as does his brother, leads to illness. Thus Richard redirects his own unspent energies towards his aspiration to gain power. Operatively speaking, Richard is a kind of handbook regarding oratorical strategies and behaviours needed to facilitate this ascent. His primary strategy is that of throwing others off the scent. He initially makes his brother Clarence believe that the king is subjugated by certain women as well as by the queen, just to keep him from discovering his own intrigues. There are countless episodes where he fires off a slanderous comment in an aside, only to reveal completely opposite intentions apertis verbis, or pretends to have said one thing whilst having murmured another in a softer voice. Irony is the key factor, especially because it is misunderstood: it appears in various guises, whether erotic irony (he would have killed for love of Anne!), or theological irony, consisting in assertions of humility and devoted spirituality which are purely opportunistic. The premise of an especially perverse rhetoric like his own is exhibited in his persistence carried to the point of obstinacy. His rhetoric is passionate and flamboyant because the goals he sets himself are impossible, such as courting and seducing the widow of a man he himself has killed. This is a strategy that necessitates his answering back, blow by blow, without deviating. He is foolhardy every time he runs a high risk and walks on a knife edge: in I.1 he offers his own breast to Lady Anne so that she can stab him if she rejects him, superficially acting out a scene from a melodrama or according to a courtly code of behaviour which he secretly deconstructs, or even desecrates. He abhors his own tactics as double-dealing and tries to attribute them to others and warning those who don’t recognize it (III.1). It is then automatic that his eloquence should rely on the conceptual and almost exclusively verbal, and therefore simply captious, quip. The results of the dialectic competition are systematically in his favour, although it is a hugely unfair contest – one man against all men, and women. But Richard is in no way affected by this concentric attack; on the contrary, it is he who scores points and, surrounded and harangued manages to resist, and to launch a counter-attack. Clear-headed, he gets round his opponents and wins them over to his side, realizing when circumstances require that he act by proxy, sending his mouthpieces on ahead for reconnaissance. On a behavioural level Richard knows all the means and resources that are the trade cards of duplicity. He commits nefarious crimes

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but then repents, pretending he acted on impulse or in a fit of rage. He also does the opposite, when he appears to be impulsive while in actual fact he is not. He pretends to be gullible, kowtowing to anyone better informed than himself when asking for advice, or when he seems not to know how to act. He wants to appear candidly sincere and thus outplayed, derided and fooled; he pretends to appeal to and obey the law, and to have acted in such a bloodthirsty manner only in response to an emergency situation. He acts the part of the victim whilst always declaring his innocence; he is a past master at the pretence of complaining when he declares himself to be the object of slander and injustice. His sanctimonious attitude is masterfully enacted in tandem with a faithful acolyte, who repeatedly implores Richard to accept the crown after a prolonged pretence at disdaining it and denying his ambition (‘and seem a saint, when most I play the devil’). This aside testifies to Richard’s ability to perform like an actor, missal in hand and with the aura of a mystic. Above all, to continue the theatrical metaphor, he is a director who in this seventh scene of Act III stages a farce – the farce of accepting whilst refusing, entrusting the other roles to conniving actors who must collaborate without being seen. Here Richard perfectly recites what had once been the part of Henry VI. 3. Richard’s phenomenology, which I have so far delineated, may be integrated with macrotextual and above all archetypical, theological, symbolic and allegorical perspectives. The escalation towards the bloody misdeed links Richard III and Macbeth. From now on in Shakespeare’s plays conscience becomes a recurring protagonist behind the scenes; not a single tragedy will be written where it is not either feared or brashly liquidated as though an encumbrance. But anyone indifferent to it will feel its deadly retaliation. Only Richard is exempt from the re-emergence of conscience, while the first to submit to it is the licentious and murderous Edward, who becomes unrecognizable as a character owing to his spiritual metamorphosis. Again excluding Richard, there are others who exhibit such an unexpected reversal. We have already met them in the three parts of Henry VI, where they were ruthless murderers crushed by their thirst for power. Now they are transformed and purged, wishing only for eternal life and making evangelical declarations of forgiveness and auguries for peace – once sinful, now penitent. As usual, the transformation starts as the fatal moment of death comes closer. But it is not so with Richard: in his first courtship, paradoxically he

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has to remind Anne of the laws of religion, charity and forgiveness, though he is not even a believer. Thus he is an example of a literally desperate being who feels excluded ab aeterno from any route to redemption: he is damned or predestined, and he is proud of the fact. The inexorable action of conscience emerges in Clarence’s dream before his death, a dream in which he feels incriminated by the dead victims he has killed and by his own misdeeds, and it is precisely a private and foreseen Day of Judgement, and a dream of damnation. But the killers themselves – they who were sure of the opposite – feel the scruples of conscience rising up within them – or, at the very least, ‘the dregs of conscience’. One of the two launches a denunciation against conscience which is also, and above all, a confession of its inevitability. One of the two refuses to accept payment, and repents immediately, much like the thief on the Cross. Theologically, the play revolves around the arrival of retribution, or rather a divine punishment that repairs the general disorder and disobedience, sorts out the evil people and rewards the good ones. The simplicity of this design is recognized, or more precisely intuited, by Clarence’s two young sons (II.2). It is almost as though the revenge play had been orchestrated by God himself, utilizing Richmond, who invokes God before the battle, as his extreme and supreme instrument. Conscience, or rather the divine voice, materializes in prophetic internal characters such as the old Queen Margaret, widow of Henry VI, who, undoubtedly an outsider in this play, lurks behind the scenes behaving like a sort of revenant whenever she appears on stage. The punishing God speaks through the mouths of these characters, who are not always saints and thus not even worthy of the prophetic spirit. Is the extreme flame of repentance all it takes to redeem and obtain salvation? ‘Men shall deal unadvisedly sometimes, / Which afterhours give leisure to repent’ (IV.4.292–3). However, one cannot tell if this statement is literal or bitterly metaphoric. Even Richard could benefit from it because he raves and vacillates: ‘O coward Conscience? How dost thou afflict me?’ (V.3.180); and ‘My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, / And every tongue brings in a several tale, / And every tale condemns me for a villain’ (V.3.194–6).16 But he holds fast, and as usual reaffirms that conscience is ‘but a word’. Just like Macbeth, no sooner his zenith is reached his 16

The death knells which he hears echo the epilogue of Marlowe’s Faustus.

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descent begins, and the warning symptoms are the first signs of his madness: a simple intimation for Richard, who flounders and devises other strategies, having realized that nothing is of any worth and his castle is about to collapse. His misdeed, too, ‘murders sleep’. When his rival knocks at the door, and is close to the English shore and throughout the homeland the nobles are rebelling, Richard falls into a confused state. The hail of discordant news is the theatrical representation of his plagued, horror-stricken conscience. 4. Analysing Richard’s rhetorical and performative tactics, many facets of Iago’s personality can also be recognized. Richard feels as though everyone is demonizing him, which is, in fact, what is happening. This is why he must be exorcised. But as a demon, synonymous with Satan, he can and must tempt and succeed in tempting his fellow men to sin, or dissuade them from the straight path. And when this exorcism is enacted, thus driving him away but without success, the style of writing wells up and vibrates with Miltonic sonorities avant lettre. But if Richard represents an example of the satanic, Caliban is not in fact so very different from him. Both are physically deformed and dispossessed and in search of a kingdom. A linguistic indication based on the word ‘caca’ unites them in the form of a faecal reference or allusion. For Queen Margaret, Richard is ‘cacodemon’, just as Caliban’s nickname becomes ‘Cacaliban’.17 Theologically as well as evolutionarily, Richard III squares up to the hideous prospect of a good creation that is capable of giving birth to a satanic monster.18 This is why the play is, or can be recognized to be, hiding and embedding a propitiatory rite of exorcism of far-off archetypical origin, and an allegory regarding divine providence, which struggles, and always succeeds through difficulty, in defeating the satanic forces. Richard’s monologues in the third play of the Henry VI trilogy reveal that his birth had been surrounded and announced by sinister wonders: he was born with teeth so as to bite better; he came feet first out of his mother’s womb so as to better overcome any obstacles, and so as to reach his goal – the crown –19 even faster. He possesses the inexhaustible 17 18 19

§ 48.7. In a metaphorical sense and from the preceding plays, Richard is often portrayed as the wolf that devours the sheep and the lambs: as an archetype he is above all portrayed as a barking dog, a pig in the sty, or a wild boar. His mother loathes and damns the fruit of her womb. This was taken verbatim from Thomas More’s History of Richard III.

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vitality of evil, and a wealth of malign and corrupting resources of the great historical stand-ins of Lucifer. His life history is offered as a parable, and has the resulting diegesis of magic or of a biblical paraphrase. The collective harangue in IV.4 is a kind of surreal scene in which Richard metaphorically pronounces a non serviam, and banishes the voices of his conscience which are exhorting him to stop. After this he begins his second oratorical tour de force with which he victoriously claims Elizabeth’s hand from the widowed queen her mother. Elizabeth starts to lose ground, like Eve in Genesis, when she agrees to listen to him, gets embroiled in his rhetoric and tries to keep up with him. Insuperable at arguing, confusing and entrapping, Richard is the personification of good rhetoric converted and perverted into diabolical rhetoric. Some of the characters prophesize, curse and cast spells, and their prophecies come true. And portents and dreams20 happen so as to document and support the allegory, and they are narrated and reported with wonder and warn of imminent events21 (once again confirming the analogy with Macbeth). However, the epilogue is the umpteenth surreal scene wherein the forces for good prevail, in the form of other emanations of God and of his will, as though at this stage human strength alone, whilst always assisted, is about to be defeated and divine intervention can no longer be postponed. As always in Shakespeare, jubilation at the return of order and harmony is enveloped in subterranean, dissimulated scepticism. The common people (II.3) had already realized that history is cyclical and that therefore good promises are often not kept.22 20 On the dream of Clarence, Richard’s brother, in I.4, see above, § 10.3. 21 Richard claims to be the victim of sorcery, indicating the spell cast by his sister in law Elizabeth, together with a certain, shady Madame Shore, possibly a procuress, but also a conspirator. She is mentioned five times in the play, but never actually comes on stage. 22 T. S. Eliot may have been thinking of some providential assertions which he was to reproduce verbatim in Four Quartets. ‘All shall be well’, a motto which is thought to have been echoed from Julian of Norwich (Volume 1, § 8.4), is also an aspiration for the anonymous citizens who in the third scene of Act II chant a litany that looks ahead to Eliot’s choruses in The Rock and in Murder in the Cathedral. Queen Elizabeth’s speech in IV.4.387–96 foreshadows in turn, by virtue of quite evident verbal echoes, Eliot’s motif of time future already being conditioned by time past, and of the threatening transmission of original evil, as seen in Four Quartets.

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§ 11. ‘King Richard II’* Criticism of royalty is the objective of King Richard II (staged in 1595, published in 1597), and this criticism hinges on two internal antagonists, Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV.23 The difference between them is that the latter illustrates this criticism and demonstrates it in his behaviour, while the former expresses it and becomes conscious of it in the circumstances of his deposition, when he perceives and lives out the dual nature of his role as a monarch and as a simple human being. The playwright’s judgement regarding the last twenty-five years of the fourteenth century of English history turns out to be a bitter one; the misdeeds of the past generate events which in their turn become misdeeds. Above all, the conflict between ‘love’ and the tyrannical raison d’état is lethal; neither one monarch nor the other is equal to the task, and a vast distance separates them from the utopia of the enlightened monarch Shakespeare had in mind. This is why the play also revolves around the motif of the lack of heroism, which is not, of course, bragging and thus false heroism, but rather honest and constructive dedication to the common good. Such inadequacy is also shown in the divide between the king, who is an earthly monarch, and the King, that is Jesus the Saviour of humanity. Signs and indications of a parody of the Gospel scene in the Praetorium, of the Calvary and the Passion recur and abound, together with other quotations from both the Old and the New Testament. Richard is a broken reed, but Bolingbroke carries out and thus approves of summary and illegal procedures, just as Richard *

A. R. Humphreys, Shakespeare: ‘Richard II’, London 1967, 1973; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Richard II’: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. P. M. Cubeta, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1971; Shakespeare: ‘Richard II’: A Casebook, ed. N. Brooke, Basingstoke 1973; ‘Richard II’: Critical Essays, ed. J. T. Newlin, New York and London 1984; Critical Essays on ‘Richard II’: William Shakespeare, ed. L. Cookson and B. Loughrey, London 1989; Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’, ed. K. Farrell, New York 1999; M. Clamp, Shakespeare, ‘King Richard II’, Cambridge 2004; J. Lucas, Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy: ‘Richard II’ – ‘Henry V’, London 2007; J. O’Meara, Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’, God, and Language, New York 2009.

23

Its source is Holinshed along with other six, more secondary ones, amongst which an anonymous drama, Woodstock.

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himself does at the beginning. Except that the bitterness is attenuated in extremis because Richard’s martyrdom, reminiscent of that of Christ, spurs his successor on to make a gesture of redemption and rehabilitation that augurs well. 2. As already mentioned, history is in Shakespeare a course ungoverned by God – or at least only partially governed by Him; free will is in competition with divine will and cannot be coerced by it. History is not a teleological chain, but an unreasonable one where the efforts of a few well-intentioned people are often defeated and overcome by uncontrollable passions. Honest and moralizing intentions founder and the tyrant’s enemy becomes tyrannical in turn. There is a lack of significant heroes in Richard II, apart from John of Gaunt, the only upright and coherent character. He, Richard’s uncle, bears no resemblance to his son Henry Bolingbroke, and he disappears prophesying as early as Act I. His voice is that of a providential vision that has no more hold. Animated by the prophetic spirit of the dying, he not only predicts Richard’s end but also unleashes a stream of metaphorical evocations of England, springing from uncontrollable tenderness. He truly acts in the play like the biblical prophets, echoing their cadences and repetitions, and especially cursing rampant corruption. He is the wise fence-sitter trusting in the final intervention of providence. Shakespeare’s determinism lies in the paradox that it is the author of the crimes committed who should also correct and deal out punishment, and in the fact that everyone bears the weight of a blood-smeared past history. As a result of this, the characters on stage are all shaken and devastated by their own past, unbearable and oppressive tragedies; they demand vengeance without ever receiving it, and implode on the verge of collapse. The more lucid amongst them latch onto fatalism, leaving everything up to God, but God allows, and must needs allow them to enact their own will, thus completing a vicious circle.24 Shakespeare’s philosophy of history echoes in 24 Shakespeare depicts the dilemma regarding the legitimacy of the deposition of a ruler, together with that of the investiture of a king by divine right or a social contract à la Rousseau. This is why the deposition scene was cut in performances given during the reign of Elizabeth who, with easy intuition, is said to have commented: ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’

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many of the remaining, now enfeebled nobles who lament that some past high standards no longer apply, that men and the current times are corrupt and subject to unstoppable deterioration. Monarchs and actual governors are a pale copy of their upright forefathers, after whose fall greed, corruption and a thirst for blood have all taken precedence. Halfway through the play history is a rudderless progress, adrift and left to itself, and a diabolical demiurge inflicts unending disaster. There is no responsible leader in a moment of general upheaval. The credibility of the monarchy itself is in question, with the common people in dire straits, devastated by taxes and prone to reacting with murderous fury. 3. The actual events of Richard II’s rule went back to two centuries before Shakespeare’s time. The main problem he faced was how to condense a reign of twenty years to the essentials, and how to choose the most relevant key moments and climaxes, as well as creating historical rather than legendary characters. One further intent was perhaps that of fashioning a counter-history, throwing a new light on past events and characters, taking an alternative stance to the official version, or contesting the very model of the history play. Richard’s story was still too close in time and too dependent on historical details that could not be altered, even though it was possible to reinterpret them according to partisan views; it was not a simple, vague, mythical or mythological storyline and therefore it left only narrow, limited and meagre leeway for the imagination to take flight. Only up to a certain point could Shakespeare cut and reorganize his subject matter, and it was inevitable that he should adhere to the actual sequence of events. Thus the historical play is by definition more amorphous, chaotic and linear, lacking in any organizational and constructive principle, precisely because everything is already there in the often confused, unexpected and unstructured chain of events. The trajectory of Richard II consists in the rise and fall of Richard, followed by Bolingbroke’s return from exile; from halfway through, the confrontation is between Richard and the dissidents who strongly support Bolingbroke. The latter deposes Richard, although, as already mentioned, this is anything but an action-packed drama, and Shakespeare empties it out and disintegrates it in favour of a play that is intimist and existentialist. The ‘naked king’, Richard II, is this existentialist. Dethroned, he becomes a meditative human being given to strange, spacey

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observations as well as incongruous behaviour. Act V is elegiac, with the tender and loving bride and groom who must be separated, and whisper and twitter like Romeo and Juliet. Humorous or idyllic interludes interrupt the flow of public and pseudo-heroic action right from the second scene of Act II, with Queen Isabella who makes merry with capricious tricks showing her to be closely related to the melancholy Shakespearean characters yet to appear, unaware of the origins of their melancholy. In this exquisite scene it is almost as though one were suddenly transported to the nursery of a Juliet embroidering countless variations on the theme of sweet nothings. The fourth scene in Act III is the usual Shakespearean nonce scene, out of key, something of a digression, and an unexpected cameo. The queen is inconsolable and her ladies-in-waiting don’t know how to deal with her when nothing seems to give her pleasure. It is also a scene where the voice of royalty interacts in counterpoint with the people’s voice. Here the gardeners see and describe fruit and plants with political metaphors (the rebel apricots oppressing the tree branch with their weight). But it takes no time at all for the metaphor to become literal: England is full of weeds, a garden gone to seed and waiting to be pruned.25 The play unfolds alternating tragic, pathetic, idyllic and grotesque26 scenes. 4. The false idea that Shakespeare had limited freedom regarding the possibility of adding variety to the accepted canvas of events is however disproven by the number of parallels and contrasts with respect to the reality of the events that shape the play. These are the antagonism between Richard and Bolingbroke, the Christological isotopy of the Passion and the marked 25

The queen comes out from her hiding place, damns the gardener who mentions the king’s deposition, and sets off for London. The gardener plants some rue. 26 Such a one is the third scene of Act V, heralding the twentieth-century theatre of the absurd. The Duke of York learns that his own son Aumerle is conspiring against the new king having found a note in his clothes. After a heated quarrel with his wife, who wants to cover up her son’s plot, York quickly pulls on his boots and rushes to the king to denounce Aumerle, who is already there with the king, and whose pardon he tremblingly asks. Both his mother and father hammer on the locked door. Also elegiac is the almost final scene of the footman who comes to visit Richard in prison, and entertains him by reminding him of the horse on which Bolingbroke had ridden to the coronation ceremony.

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continuity of the imagery.27 Act IV is a perfect pendant to Act I, because at first28 Richard comes on stage judging, then finds himself accused and judged by the former defendant. But, in the opening scene, Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk, who seems to disappear into thin air too soon, will later be seen to be an unknowing prefiguration of Richard himself. This beginning announces, en abyme, many chords of the play, and focuses on the rhetoric of heroism and honour, demolishing the code of chivalry and denouncing its foolishness and outmodedness. The dominant public register from then on will be the stentorian proclamation, the indignant slander, abuse and lamentation, or rather the doleful tirade or the threatening prophecy, contrasting with the impalpable, aerial Euphuism of the intimate scenes. The duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray is especially, if not only, verbal, consisting of prolonged exchanges of roundly sonorous insults in reiterative and synonymic chains. As one of the two is wrong, this is also an example of false rhetoric. Also relevant is Mowbray’s admission to having effectively plotted to kill the Duke of Gloucester, even though he repented after his last confession and communion. As already mentioned, they are both to blame, but Mowbray is perhaps for this reason the good thief who repented, while Richard is manifestly, for a fraction of a second, a Christ between two thieves. On the other hand Richard is a moderate compared to the fiery contenders who reciprocally accuse each other of misdeeds and betrayals, as he expresses the hope that they will manage to make peace without any bloodshed. And so he wisely hopes for the absurdly barbaric rules of a duel to ascertain right and wrong to be replaced with a more humane and evolved law. The truth cannot be determined by the outcome of the duel, and the long exchange of insults sounds like a satire on stubborn

27 The image of the rising sun illuminating the earth shrouded in darkness emerges three times, referring to different characters and contexts. The image of the tamed or roaring lion is also applied to the two antagonists. 28 As often happens in Shakespeare, the curtain rises to introduce a king, or someone in a governing role (like Escalus or Theseus in later plays), intent on solving a dispute between two litigants.

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heroism, which is at the same time foolish and unreasonable.29 Richard’s proposal stems from an inner philosophical and anthropological debate as to whether or not a duel is a summary and imprecise form of justice, and of the terrible consequences that accrue. But the monarch immediately reveals a lack of strength when he concludes by accepting that the duel be fought. And he does even more harm when in a coup de théâtre he stops them and condemns both contenders to exile, further exasperating the situation by showing blatant favouritism in his treatment. Mowbray has less blame, and yet gets the greater punishment (he is exiled for life), while Bolingbroke is condemned to ten years, later reduced to six. The rest of the play shows Richard’s progressive and definitive abandonment of his kingly role; he talks less and less like a monarch, and his metamorphosis is primarily linguistic. His address to England on his return from the war against the Irish rebels (III.2) sounds effeminate and mawkish, loaded as it is with stale and dated images unworthy of a monarch. He then goes on to philosophize, and especially to play with words in such a way that no one understands him, and like Hamlet he is described as a ‘frantic man’. In actual fact it is Macbeth whom Richard echoes when he realizes that life is but a performance; and he comes out with a dense monologue on vanitas, and the sad end faced by most monarchs. He demythologizes the power of the king on earth insisting that the king commands fear and respect for a short time and then disappears from the scene at the prick of a sword. This is a genuine deposition speech given by one who formerly asserted that a king’s very name was ‘worth’ thousands of soldiers, and yet now admits to being as petty-minded as the next man. Leaving his role he becomes the commentator, estranged and self-deposed, of his royalty and his legal power, especially in the long scene-stealing episode in Act IV, which is his interrogation in front of his assembly. Here, Richard is overwhelmed by a dazzling experience similar to that undergone by other blinded, impetuous and superficial Shakespearean characters that suddenly start to see everything in a new light. There is no descent of darkness, nor 29 Anticipating Othello and Roderigo’s concerns, which Iago dismisses, for Mowbray ‘the purest treasure’ is ‘spotless reputation’. The same knightly code operates here, placing honour as the highest value.

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are there devastating thunderstorms in this play, but nonetheless in Act IV Richard echoes and prefigures King Lear. The mirror scene is the ritual of the recognition of the dethroned king;30 when it is thrown to the ground the mirror is also the metaphor of the pain which has destroyed his face. 5. The religious, Edenic and Christological undertone weighs especially upon the biblical prophet, John of Gaunt, and on the prefiguration launched by Mowbray. What is known about Mowbray, exiled for life, is that he went to fight in the Crusades where he was redeemed before his death as a blameless, sinless and atoning martyr. Richard and Queen Isabel on the other hand live in their Eden of unconsciousness, far from political life and intrigue; but an Eden after the Fall, that is a garden of weeds, is England in the gardeners’ scene. Such a prospect is active in the consciousness of many of the characters in the guise of a ‘happy dream’ regarding a ‘former state’. Richard is commiserated with and sanctified as the shadow of the slandered and crucified Christ. In the magnificent, only scene of Act IV he progresses from attacking to counter-attacking and prevails over his accusers just as Christ did in the Praetorium. He reflects at a distance on his own condition as a king who still has not learnt the role, that is, how to play the part of a subject. It is Richard himself who evokes the analogy between himself and Jesus at the Last Supper, and reveals how some people near him had washed their hands of him. Like Christ he is a king as much crowned as uncrowned, and, above all, humiliated. His journey to the Tower is like a Calvary with the three Marys, when dust and insults are thrown at his mild self from the windows, which he, like Christ, does not notice. His martyrdom is embraced in the certainty that the king and the queen will receive their true crowns in heaven, and that life has been simply a chain of profane actions. Richard’s murder, at the hands of a killer, is the fruit of a tragic misunderstanding, as often occurs in Shakespeare’s works. The new king had not given express orders for him to be killed. This then allows Bolingbroke to mourn Richard’s death as well as formally, and perhaps even hypocritically, to deny any responsibility in his murder. It should be stressed that the play ends with a spiritual gesture of atonement, when the sincerely grieving king promises to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. 30

‘Is this the face which fac’d so many follies’ was perhaps echoed by Eliot in ‘Prufrock’.

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§ 12. ‘King John’ * King John (first staged in 1596,31 printed in 1623) revolves not around the king’s concession of the Magna Carta to the barons, the most memorable moment of his reign, but rather around the king’s strenuous defence of the shaky legitimacy of his throne, threatened by Arthur, the young son of his brother Geoffrey, who has the support of the King of France. King John looks for peace, and tries to mediate with the French, but is forced into battle with them once again when his nobles form an alliance with the Dauphin, and the French have landed on English shores. This Anglo-French rivalry had lasted, and would last, for centuries, and it was always a lively topic of interest for Shakespeare, who, as in other historical plays, alternates scenes on either side of the Channel. The play ends when John, who is first excommunicated by the Papal legate, makes an act of obedience; and when French are pushed back, and the English crown is safe once again, or at least it appears so. The vast number of speeches of a diplomatic or negotiating nature, organized according to the usual rhetorical schemes and embellished with conventional images and metaphors, demonstrate Shakespeare’s adherence to history. A conspicuous space is devoted to two maternal roles (Eleanor the queen mother and Constance, mother of Arthur), who hurl frenetic invectives and complaints at each other. John himself is portrayed by Shakespeare as neither wicked nor demonic, but simply cowardly and dilemma-ridden. He tries to overreach himself and then quickly has to repent when his conscience begins to make itself heard. He is denied any heroic attributes thanks to the mock-heroic nature of his death, caused by powerful stomach pains *

V. Mason Carr, The Drama as Propaganda: A Study of ‘The Troublesome Raigne of King John’, Salzburg 1977; C. Levin, Propaganda in the English Reformation: Heroic and Villainous Images of ‘King John’, New York 1988; F. A. Shirley, ‘King John’ and ‘Henry VIII’: Critical Essays, New York and London 1988, 2015; ‘King John’: New Perspectives, ed. D. T. Curren-Aquino, Newark, DE 1989; ‘King John’ dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1993; T. Merriam, Co-Authorship in ‘King John’, Tokyo 2007.

31

Possibly the remake of an earlier play, or even – as often happens with Shakespeare – the source for a later one.

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after eating food poisoned by a monk. His alter ego, proud instigator of the war against the French, is the ‘bastard’, thus called because he is Richard the Lionheart’s illegitimate son. The play’s most memorable scene presents or repeats a classic Shakespearean ploy: Hubert, the jailer and executioner, holds the young Arthur prisoner and receives orders from the king to blind him. But the prince entreats him with such fervour, and the jailer is so pliable, that the condemned prisoner is saved with a ruse and hidden by his would-be assassin, though he is eventually destined to fall from a castle, and to die in meek insensitivity. Shakespeare’s studies in sovereignty go well beyond individual circumstances and demonstrate a historical truth: anyone having the role of ruler must suffer an inevitable series of consequences, as well as paying with his or her own blood. Other reluctant and kinder monarchs would prefer to avoid the crown, and when it is theirs their rule proves inefficient. Historical times are perpetually ‘iron age’,32 and each reign imitates the other in their wretched application of the rules of warfare. 2. The first scene is tripartite, and the question that dominates almost all of Shakespeare’s historical plays is presented in its first section, namely the battle for power and supremacy with France. The French ambassador, who has come to reclaim the land held illegitimately by the king, is disdainfully dismissed. The second part of the scene deals with the dispute between the two brothers Robert and Philip Faulconbridge regarding their paternal heritage, which King John must decide. Soon, everyone present, and John in particular, realizes that between the two the bastard is the son of Richard the Lionheart. The third part of the scene contains the confessions of the two half-brothers’ mother to this paternity; the bastard, instead of reproaching her, actually thanks her. A bloody, harsh, frank and above all parallel episode develops from this, insomuch as there is then a dispute over the legitimacy of the possession of lands and noble titles which precisely mirrors John’s own case. The bastard denies his illegitimacy, and having the same father as his half-brother. He then refutes his own brother, going so far as to call him the bastard. John would be 32

This image occurs with tragic irony in scene 1 of Act IV. Hubert is in fact preparing to blind the young prince Arthur with incandescent irons.

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inclined to assign the disputed inheritance to the less legitimate brother, who renounces it with a bold gesture when offered the romantic prospect of becoming the king’s right hand man in battle.33 In this scene we have a genuine example of an authentically Renaissance-like discourse on the heredity of dominant characters, or rather a refutation of it. The bastard revels in being a bastard, and it is symptomatic of this that he is re-baptised with another name, that of an early Richard Plantagenet, confirming that it is in fact possible to defeat parental or hereditary determinism. Chance may decree that degenerate children be born from chaste marriages, and valorous individuals from adulterous unions. Such a chance will find its most blatant demonstration in King Lear’s two half-brothers. The suspicion of adultery is, in itself, obsessive in the play, and the image is passed on from one to another in various characters’ speeches. Arthur is in fact the fruit of a propitious marriage between chance and nature, but, in John’s own words, chance sold herself becoming a paramour. From this point on, the bastard’s function is primarily contrapuntal, and he acts like someone intervening to comment on the action and to scourge the cowardice of his sovereign and expose the ignoble craftiness of the contenders. He is, however, like a considerably more active Enobarbus in that he will never stop giving voice to King John’s quiescent warrior soul, representing as he does his martial alter ego. The citizens of Angers reiterate their neutrality and so the bastard incites the two kings to punish them for their indecision, and to cannonade the city.34 Once it is destroyed they can break their temporary alliance and see who is the strongest. A true deus ex machina, and diabolical prompter, the bastard is the instigator of the massacre, an agent of reciprocal destruction and an internal nihilist who

33

34

A third parallel – an impartial judge is called to decide between two contenders – emerges in the first scene of Act II, when King John and King Philip of France both address a petition to the citizens of Angers to win them over to their own side. King John in particular, in Act I a judge with the two Faulconbridges, now finds himself being judged. The Angers citizens rightly answer that they support the King of England, but that possession of the crown is not sufficient to call him such. An obvious and much noted anachronism, as the cannon would not be invented for another century.

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is so bloodthirsty that he does not mind whence the blood may flow. But the citizen representing Angers makes an even better proposal, that the two kings should be tied in an alliance formed by marrying Lewis, the French dauphin, with Blanche, the daughter of the King of Spain. Here the bastard takes the floor again with his monologue on how to act, or not act in a self-interested manner, with emphasis placed on calculated selfishness. His comments are equally derisory when both King John and the King of France are held in check by Pandulph, the Papal delegate. The applied historical perspective is post-Reformation: the political peace with France is violated to obey a Roman imposition regarding the king’s power over a bishop (of Canterbury). The bastard is immediately sent to England to get money from the abbeys. In Act V even the King of France protests against Papal interference, whose only aim is to keep the European monarchs obedient to the dictates of Rome, and both France and England promote their own decision-making autonomy. 3. Arthur is still extremely young, and he is one of those kings who have no desire to be kings, begging like Christ that that cup be taken away from him. Act IV is all his, after King John has entrusted Hubert, with the same ambiguous linguistic strategies used by Iago, with having him eliminated. When the killers come onstage, we are surprised by the young prince’s shrewdly appealing coldness. He uses the pathetic fallacy rhetoric in order to make the executioner aware of the horrendous gravity of the misdeeds he is about to commit. Act V acknowledges King John’s humanity as a being who errs, but then repents, aware as he is of the law that ‘there is no sure foundation set on blood’, and that life can never prosper from others’ deaths. All this takes place because John is immediately sucked into and then crushed by the mechanism of sovereignty, and in the following scene he belies this, condemning to death the seer who predicted he would lose the throne. Another masterful scene is a previous one in which John subtly accuses Hubert of a murder which was not in fact committed: his face and presence prompted his request. On seeing him so remorseful, Hubert reveals that Arthur is not dead, so King John has an early understanding of the inner workings of Macbeth’s psychological make-up, that is that circumstances spark and elicit the murderous instinct.

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§ 13. ‘Henry IV Part 1’ * The actual writing of Henry IV, based on Holinshed’s sparse hints, has been reconstructed as a particularly complex and laborious operation. It was a reworking of a former Shakespearean version of Henry IV, which in turn was based on an anonymous, somewhat grotesque epic drama on the reign of Henry V narrated from the point of view of various cowardly artisans recruited into the army.35 In the original version of the first of the two-part series, which was performed but never printed, Falstaff ’s name was Oldcastle, the same as that of the leader of the Lollards, who died in 1417 during Henry IV’s reign. Here, however, he was portrayed as a portly comic character. When in 1596 a descendent of Oldcastle’s was elected Lord Chamberlain, the performances of the play were halted and the character’s name was changed to Falstaff. There had in fact been a real-life knight called Fastolf 36 in Henry VI who lived thirty years after Oldcastle, but he was not a Lollard. The invention of the name Falstaff is also an onomastic pun (fall/ staff ) created by Shakespeare along the lines of his own two-part name *

The following bibliography refers to Parts 1 and 2. It begins very early with M. Morgann, Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, London 1777 (already mentioned in § 2.3). J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff, Cambridge 1943; H. Jenkins, The Structural Problem in Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’, London 1956; D. R. C. Marsh, A Critical Commentary on Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV, Part One’, London 1967; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Henry IV Part Two’, ed. D. P. Young, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; an anthology of criticism on Part 1 is in the Norton edn, ed. J. L. Sanderson, New York 1969; Shakespeare: ‘Henry IV’ Parts I and II: A Casebook, ed. G. K. Hunter, London 1970; P. Hollindale, A Critical Commentary on Shakespeare’s ‘King Henry IV’ Part 2, London 1971; C. Short, The Life and Humours of Falstaff, London 1971; D. Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff, Cambridge 1979; T. Mcalindon, Shakespeare’s Tudor History: A Study of ‘Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2’, Aldershot 2001; G. Galigani, Quel sir John Falstaff buffo e arguto, Roma 2008.

35 Namely, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which, entered in 1594, was published in 1598. 36 This is his name as it appears in the Folio in the list of characters and in III.2.104 of Henry VI Part 1. The name was silently altered to Falstaff in the majority of the later re-editions.

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(shake/spear). Falstaff enjoys a permanent place in the quartet of immortal characters in early modern literature, also comprising Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Sancho Panza and Panurge. He represents one of the numerous facets of Shakespeare’s own personality, which are both complementary and also opposite to one another, the playwright being also much like his antithesis, Hamlet. Thus he has had countless interpretations more or less faithful to the text: he has been seen as vitalistic and simultaneously nihilistic, a Socratic sage, the Eastcheap philosopher, and Christ’s twin (Auden). The psycho-biographical approach seeks to determine how much there is of Shakespeare himself in Prince Hal and in Falstaff, and to what extent this is manifested and reverberates in the relationships between father and son as well as son and father. On the other hand, Henry IV Part 1 may be seen as a railway junction, seeing that from the trilogy formally entitled after Henry IV and Henry V one might directly jump – as many scholars do – to The Merry Wives of Windsor, written a little later. 2. The two parts of Henry IV (first staged in 1597; the first part printed in 1598 and the second in 1600) form the next chronological link in the historical narrative after Richard II, Henry IV being the one who dethrones and imprisons Richard in the Tower, and later has him killed in Pomfret castle. But the English crown is by definition always under threat, and any English historical drama prior to the Tudor age must necessarily revolve around the plots and conspiracies aimed at dethroning the reigning monarch through the true or invented accusation that he or she is illegitimate. In the first of the two parts Henry faces and victoriously quells the armed rebellion of the coalition formed by Hotspur, Glendower and Worcester. Thus, half the play is fully occupied with laborious, prolix public harangues, the re-evocation and reconstruction of conflicts over legitimacy, high-flown, Titanic proclamations of mortal and undeviating ardour, negotiations, truces and all the inevitable battle scenes. From the plan of Act I, on the other hand, one clearly realizes that Shakespeare has designed the play dividing it up by means of a contrast technique (the contrast is also prosodic, between blank verse and prose). The question is whether to label Henry IV a historical rather than a mock-heroic play. Henry IV, in fact, includes some of the finest sketches in the Shakespearean (and thus Elizabethan) repertoire, all of them centred upon Falstaff, the most memorable character ever created by Shakespeare as a comic playwright. Public history forms the background

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or the foreground, depending on one’s point of view, and the two plots intermittently interchange the role of the main and the subplot, duelling for primacy. The classic royal council scene as the curtain rises, with the king and his nobles gathered together, and with Henry IV giving his speech on the state of the union and announcing both his general and his immediate intentions, changes into the antithetic farcical scene where we find Prince Henry carousing with Falstaff and planning how to rob the pilgrims in the forest. This hustle and bustle will constitute the main course of the action. Prince Henry, or Hal, has a foot in each of the two plots and thus forms their trait d’union. The settings appertaining to the court and the tavern become ever more separate until the moment when, on the battlefield at Shrewsbury, all the characters answer the call and flock together. 3. One might say that Falstaff and Hal represent the first inseparable twosome in English theatre: they compete in continual tests of wit, playing practical jokes on each other, exchanging insults in front of the audience, and indeed heaping abuse on one another without ever actually splitting up. From their creation onwards, until Beckett’s time, couples of friends and companions will illustrate the paradox whereby an insult is not employed as a weapon, but is used to verify a friendship, further cementing and reinforcing a relationship. Insults and invective keep them bound together. Falstaff is a prior allegory of evolutionism: he is a rubber wall, someone who always falls on his feet and who will always stay afloat.37 He is the very incarnation of the meaning given to the word resiliency, or adaptability. A further internal division is that between the spheres of conscience, self-consciousness and unconsciousness. The world of the court and of politics represents unconsciousness, and in this sense Hotspur is Falstaff ’s foil. Hotspur unleashes a continuous stream of bluster and bragging, whilst believing in what he says. Only hackneyed rhetoric falls from his lips, together with rehashed formulae and worn out hyperboles. He is a character who does not change and does not know how to change. Falstaff

37

This is fully apparent in the second part of the play, during Falstaff ’s monologue at the end of the second scene of Act III, when he defines himself and judge Shallow with the piscatorial metaphor of an ‘old pike’ whose best bait is a ‘young dace’, adding the comment: ‘I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him’.

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instead is self-aware, for no other reason than that he applies the maxim that life is theatre. He is a small creature out for his own gain, whose chief goal is to have a full belly and to whet his whistle, getting enough to survive whilst working as little as possible. He is an unscrupulous bon viveur, or almost. His aims in life are drinking, eating, fornicating and stealing to survive. But he is anything but inexperienced, and his sharpness, which is at odds with the poverty of his aims, shows in the wealth of his resources, which translate into actions, gestures and words. Falstaff is indeed a wall of rubber in that he is loaded with insults and yet always manages to escape unscathed, ever more active and reactive. Far from being sunk in his shiftless lifestyle, he knows that there are other ways to live, and that there are unselfish people in the world who are well-meaning and even heroic. In the second scene of Act I the disproportion between a life effectively lived and intellectual subtleness is evident from the puns, from the dialectic ability and the self-conscious exchanges of wit which may be either fresh or stale. Word games are symptomatically unknown at court, or at least much reduced, as words must be disambiguated if they are to lead unerringly to action. On the other hand, in the outer world, and in the taverns, witticism and facetious double meanings prevail. In this ambience the dialogue between Falstaff and Hal celebrates the pliability of the former, whom Hal wants to expel from his band of men and whom he offends, belittles and derides. But Falstaff subtly flatters him, alleviating the blow which, in any case, was innocuous and a pretence. Conscience means, in turn, the threat of divine punishment, and the settling of accounts is known and feared, rather than disregarded, because the punishment is only delayed. Falstaff runs a calculated risk, knowing that he and his companions risk jail and the gallows every single day. And so they all play at being scoundrels. His conscience is in a state of hibernation, but every so often a flash tells him that one day he too must redeem himself and change his way of life. Hal himself gives proof that he is conscious of the double standards – conscious that one day he will be king and that when the time comes he will be obliged to transform and regenerate himself so as to meet the challenge. The fourth scene in Act II – the tavern scene, with people being unmasked, and episodes of theatre within the theatre – is among the most famous, humorous and entertaining in Shakespeare’s entire canon. At the beginning,

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it is the usual, magical or semi-magical entertainment often enacted at the end of the play, and organized by a demiurge such as Prospero or the Duke from Measure for Measure, where the aim is solely to prolong and to put off the dropping of the final curtain. Here, this kind of scene comes much earlier on, so as to give the lie to Falstaff and force him to admit that much of what he had said was pure bluster. But it changes into an inevitable battle of wits. ‘Come, let’s hear, Jack; what trick hast thou now?’ And Falstaff saves his bacon with a supreme dialectic flick of the wrist and a verbal stratagem. He has been put to the test, but passes it with flying colours. But the final proof of his self-awareness is the father and son dialogue in the same scene. The exchange between Falstaff and Hal is a kind of farce acted out by both of them, each in his own role, which they then play at exchanging and trying out. As a father, Falstaff accuses Hal of his misdeeds, but in doing so he simultaneously transforms himself into an honest man. This distinction is clearly drawn in the third scene of Act III, when Falstaff replies to the prince’s request that he repeat his last insult: I may offend you as I treat you like a simple man, but I fear you as heir to the throne. So it is startlingly evident that Henry IV, as a play, is distinctly concerned with the exploration of the expressive and linguistic codes and with forms of communication. A Welsh lady in Glendower’s entourage cannot speak English and is forced to use sign language and gestures to communicate with her English husband. But the main discrepancy emerges between the solemn martial and diplomatic exchanges and the unbridled slanging matches of the tavern scenes. In the scene where Falstaff and Hal exchange the roles of father and son, a reflection on the codes of expression is at work, that is a parody, because the two characters freely enter and exit from one code to the other, thus estranging both. This scene also shows how Hal, who is fully aware of the expressive codes while the king knows only one, adapts to and adopts the king’s habitual and regal diction that he and his friend had ridiculed earlier on. 4. An awareness of these codes and registers is useful, even highly precious to the monarch. The historical and deontological formation – the Bildung, to use a later term – of the monarch himself is the issue that Shakespeare much cares about. Given the historical situation he thought it necessary to point out and to arrange a different training for the future king.

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In the second scene of Act III the enthroned king illustrates this concept by means of a counter-demonstration: Hal engages with his madcap alternative life, but knows he is playing and is ready to drop it at any moment. He tells both us and himself that he is simply a voluntary pawn in a controlled game which is also an alternative – and perhaps preferable – avenue of formation for a future career as king. The day will come when he will thank his former self for having orchestrated all those pranks, if for no other reason than to help him to bear the weight of the harsh and weighty duties incumbent upon his reign. It is a paradoxical apprenticeship. What the first scene of Act II clearly shows is that Hal has learned how to fit in with the tinkers and the humble folk, and to lower himself, disguised, to their level. This is an indispensable experience for a future king, and Hal expresses only satisfaction when he declares himself to be ‘of all humours that have showed themselves / Humours since the old days of goodman Adam’.38 Hal’s alternative Bildung shines forth when confronted by his father, the king, and against the background of the entire court. In the opening scenes King Henry IV seems in fact a spiritually oriented man as he plans to head a crusade. The great paradox remains, that peace on earth is expressed through war – even if against pagans – and that Christ’s message is still unheeded after 1,400 years. Nor does the king hide his satisfaction when he hears that the war against the rebels gave excellent spoils, and with that his spirituality goes up in smoke. Delirious, he blindly confesses that he would have preferred a valorous son like Hotspur rather than the degenerate and rascally Hal. His royal court is composed of greedy and ravenous nobles. In I.2 Falstaff, himself a scoundrel, is an acrobatic utopian who extols the abolition of an iniquitous law, and looks forward to the creation of a utopian world where thieves would be more honest than honest men, or to put it better, than hypocrites. The righteous world is the opposite of the existing one. It is a world where thieves are no longer hung, and thievery is a sign of equity. One even hears a forewarning of the Newgate criminal, the fair and lordly man with yellow gloves robbing from the rich to give to the poor. The damnations and the insults hurled by the carriers against price 38

Importantly, this declaration is repeated in reverse by a commentator of Hotspur’s nature: ‘you are altogether governed by humours’ (III.1.228).

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increases and the thievery, significantly placed at the beginning of the first scene of Act II, constitute small indications of internal unease. King Henry was mistaken when he supposed that acting humbly and in the shade, hiding away out of the public eye, was ever going to make him popular with his people. Hal’s repentance has a miraculous quality, and the scene in which it is revealed has its pendant in the following one where Falstaff himself is visited by the prospect of eternal damnation, and wishes to enter a church.39 When Hal puts on his regal clothing, his first action is both magnanimous and conciliatory: he frees Douglas for his outstanding bravery. Impetuous and incontrollable when he allows his hatred and disdain for the king to erupt, Hotspur is also lacking in tact, delicacy and self-control, thus showing himself to be ill prepared and deficient in the necessary qualities of a true king. § 14. ‘Henry IV Part 2’ The first question that springs to mind regarding the second part of Henry IV – one that has been repeatedly echoed and debated by critics since Johnson’s time – would seem to be rhetorical and superfluous. It is whether or not it is the sequel to Henry IV Part 1. On the one hand there is no doubt that it is, seeing that chronological time moves forward towards yet another turbulent and colourful chapter, while the core characters as well as the lesser ones stay more or less the same. On the other, this is a self-standing play dissimilar to the former in its conception, its objectives and its approach: it is more ingenious, far richer, and more sophisticated, where the first part was flowing, fast-moving and more basic. More than anything, it overshoots its measure, introducing an overwhelming array of minor themes as well as secondary and parallel events and developments which threaten to undermine its structural unity. History no doubt sounds the same alarm, and after a truce the conspiracy against Henry IV is resumed, led by Hotspur’s father; the king suffers from heart disease, 39 In his monologue there occurs the vision of the rich glutton being punished in hell. The image reverberates later at an unconscious level when (in IV.2) Falstaff in Coventry calls his madcap and disorderly soldiers ‘slaves as ragged as Lazarus’. The threatening allusion is reinforced by a reference to the parable of the prodigal son.

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of which he dies, and at the end of the play his son is crowned king. But before this epilogue is reached, the rival and competing plot emerges, based on Hal’s exploits with his supporters and merry company from the tavern, who act like rogues, hamming it up incorrigibly, especially intent on joking and playing. Falstaff risks heavily after his thievery in the forest, threatened not by his conscience but by the justice system from which he only just manages to stay free. There is talk of a new civil war, but a ruse helps to nip the idea in the bud. Thus there is always a pendulum-like alternation between events relating to the serious main plot and to a facetious storyline, where the former apparently enjoys unchanging pride of place. However, the latter gains importance through the disproportionately high number of inserted scenes which threaten to monopolize the play right down to the final act. Action related to politics and warfare is brusquely interrupted, then left on hold whilst the tavern is revisited. The reader will remember Falstaff ’s first question in Part 1, his very first words on his first appearance on stage, ‘Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?’: he remembers in other words that Falstaff does not know time because time is that sedentary, inert and recursive dimension of facetiousness and the boutade, in a constant state of self-generation. The characters in the comic storyline are called and diverted into action from this screened enclosure against their wills. If there is any continuity between the two plays, it is still that of playacting. Hal, Falstaff and company play out their roles knowingly, and no one, least of all Hal, wishes to stay in his role. He takes a step back; tired and limp, he confesses his unsuitability for any role, rejecting even the inheritance of his father’s regal attire. In his particular case his rejection of role-play, and especially of his regal investiture, is presented in the symptomatic form of disguise: as a servant, a waiter, a gambler, who thus attired has a better chance of playing a prank on Falstaff. The usual aim of these pranks is the pretence of striking off this friend of his – it is in the first place his dismissal and secondly his test. The situation is always carried to extremes, and the fun is in seeing if and how Falstaff will save his skin. The thrill of the game lies in his passing the test, relying on wit or crafty stratagems to overcome difficult, if not impossible odds. Even Mistress Quickly and Doll the prostitute join in the game: the former plays at being an honourable hostess, and the latter at being a kind of Goldoni’s ‘putta

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onorata’ [‘honourable maid’], but both are the doubles of themselves. In reality, the prologue and the epilogue create a frame for this second part of Henry IV, alienating both the reader and the audience in the process, and incorporating one mise en abyme inside another. Both prologue and epilogue warn us that a theatre within the theatre is about to begin; then inside the framework another setting is formed where the characters within play their parts in a second theatre inside the actual theatre, as happens, but more concisely, in the first part of the play. Incidentally the fact that people do not always get what they expect is alluded to and confirmed in the en abyme assertion whereby a man’s brow, which is his primary exterior communicator, is ‘like to a title-leaf ’ and ‘foretells the nature of a tragic volume’, acting as both a bookish and a theatrical metaphor in mentioning a play which is classified a tragedy from its ‘brow’, but contains other elements or will be only partially tragic.40 In itself the comic plot is gradually less and less fused with the tragic and serious one. It is indeed a pretext for the inclusion of monologues, dialogues and verbal sparring that often lead nowhere, but are simply extraneous and artificial, existing only to provoke a laugh, titillate the imagination and above all spread a sense of sexual and erotic ambiguity. From his very first appearance on stage (I.2) Falstaff is already expanding on the colour of his own urine, and then, following a chain of associative links, moves on to talk of the unfledged Hal, alluding to his lack of pubic hair. Shakespeare gives and then confirms the impression that he is aiming to produce a new Love’s Labour’s Lost (he had in fact already written it), populated with a number of bizarre and unbalanced characters who chatter incessantly and reinforce the ambiguities encapsulated in their language and in all spoken languages. Just as in his previous play, fireworks of this kind sometimes work well, and sometimes do not, sounding a forced and artificial note as the dialogue flounders in a sea of cold and stale witticisms. Act II, which is completely hinged on the attempted arrest of Falstaff after the hostess charges him with denying his alleged engagement, is extremely flat, albeit obstinately embroidered

40 The validity of the transmission of the news is confirmed to Hotspur’s father, in the first scene of Act 1, by direct eye-witnessing.

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with Quickly’s howlers, puns, and especially misunderstandings. In this scene, the friction inherent in the encounter between different linguistic registers is open and insoluble. The judge sermonizes following his own line of thought, and Falstaff twists what he says, proffering obscene puns and double entendres. At this point one could legitimately pose a second question, namely whether the comic storyline in general is less brilliant, and the historical one more alive, when compared with Henry IV Part 1. The opening scene calls Hotspur’s father into the limelight, where he declaims a series of vibrant monologues punctuated by philosophical maxims and other observations of practical and experimental psychology. But more than any other it is King Henry who emerges most forcibly from his stilted immobility and utters a number of speeches, such as the one where he contrasts his own febrile monarchical insomnia with the easy sleep of his subjects, and which make their mark and are far from perfunctory. In his death scene King Henry divests himself completely of his previous role based on anonymous routine, rising to the role of co-protagonist (which many critics deny he was in Part 1). In this tragicomic scene, or semi-tragic because it hinges on a banal misunderstanding, he has a superb exchange with his son which is at the same time yet another pantomime, thereby confirming the continuity of the main structural principle in the two Henry IV plays, that of theatre within the theatre.41 2. The various tumultuous phases of the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, partially dramatized in the first part of the diptych, are conveyed to Hotspur’s father in all their ups and downs by a series of messengers who flock to his castle giving him fragments of incomplete news. Lord Bardolph spreads the false news of Hotspur’s victory, then a second messenger proceeds to announce the complete opposite, that is, with a pun, that Hotspur is now ‘coldspur’. But from a third, white-faced messenger he infers the truth, comparing himself to Priam facing the burning of Troy. This is the first tangible occurrence of the motif of the instability in which 41 Numerous references make the theatrical metaphor central and dominant: in II.2 Hal is explicit when he suggests acting the parts of loafers and idlers, having the wise spirits making fun of them from where they watch in the sky. The prank on Falstaff is a farce planned to catch the knight red-handed with his fancy women.

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Shakespeare sums up Henry IV’s fifteen-year reign; an instability which is more obviously the reason for the puns, witticisms and word play in the comic storyline. This feature is placed in full sight in the prologue, entrusted to ‘Rumour’, who is ‘painted full of tongues’. The prologue leads the audience to consider that every communication may be, and is, above all false, unverifiable and passively swallowed by the crowd. It is the easiest thing to bamboozle people with words, and this is a proleptic warning. This is in itself is a general rule in Shakespeare’s theatrical mechanisms, as we have seen, consisting of a precocious position of gnosiological and practical relativism in virtue of which it is easier to create misunderstandings or even blatantly misinform rather than deliver truthful information. What other possible significance could the triple sequence of messengers, each giving contradictory information about the battle, possibly have if not that of illustrating the dispersion and the entropy to which the message is subject as it passes from mouth to mouth? And does Shakespeare not insinuate the hypothesis that nothing is certain and that words are ambiguous even when intended to clarify? Certainty vacillates on every side: certainty of information when there is no eye witness; military certainty, doubly so if the rebels, terrorized by the simple word ‘rebellion’, join forces with the Archbishop of York; and economic certainty, regarding whether Falstaff will ever actually be solvent for his tailor. However, Falstaff manages to confound public opinion so that he is hailed as a battle hero after Shrewsbury, enjoying the esteem of the prince’s brother. The announcement made in the prologue reverberates in persistent nebulous atmospheres, spelling out confused presages of hope and good health, especially of the likelihood that life is uncertain and the result of chance. The Archbishop of York denounces Henry, who is guilty of Richard II’s death, but he cannot silence the Shakespearean volubility of the crowd, who were formerly execrating Richard and now want him brought back to life. Other metaphors used in conjunction with uncertainty are illness, vomit and building construction.42 In Shakespeare’s mind the establishment of a nation gives rise to 42 Scene III.2, showing the recruitment, is a realistic and brutal demonstration of the common people’s lack of interest in the causes which only inflame the noble elite of the country: the people want to work, mind their own business and desert if they

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order and internal peace, which is always and exclusively dependent upon the legitimacy of the monarch and on the collaboration between temporal and spiritual power. In the second scene of Act IV, where Prince John is having a parley with the rebels, the former reminds the prelate of his function as an intermediary between God and mankind according to the medieval and Dantesque belief in ‘the two Suns’. 3. Falstaff is never going to change, he remains forever the utopian of abnormal, illegal, rakish gallantry, aware as he is of the waning of a rather peculiar code of chivalric honour. He suffers from gout but flaunts juvenile behaviour that veils his advanced years and decrepitude. The Supreme Judge is an Angel of Justice that envelops him and says ‘repent’, so Falstaff is a parodic combination of a satanic lookalike and a Faust. If in the historical setting sickness is dominant, then syphilis rules supreme in Falstaff ’s entourage. His trademark role is that of Falstaff the Lover, and Falstaff the Con Man perpetually on the hunt for pathetic, foolish and deluded victims to relieve of their wealth, such as Mistress Quickly and Justice Shallow. As a soldier Falstaff is slow and shiftless; at one point in the play he boasts of having overcome and arrested an extraordinarily impetuous knight, who in fact turns out to be an abject coward. In front of Prince John, his proverbial bragging makes him seem a miles gloriosus. The third scene of Act IV ends with a monologue that spits out all his hatred for John, whom he dislikes because he doesn’t drink, and goes on to sing the praises of sack, so good for the creative faculties of the intellect and military valour. The comic storyline is enriched in the second half of the play by the entry of Justice Shallow, a poorly defined and colourless character once acquainted with Falstaff, who remembers his existence and the fact that he lives nearby when he is sent to the battlefront. His first thought is how to fleece Justice Shallow, whom he calls ‘Master Surecard’, much like a modern day credit card. In front of the audience, this buffoon does nothing but boast of his student-day pranks and sleazy encounters, like old Capulet, the father in should be recruited. When Falstaff and Judge Shallow retire to drink and dine various conscripts try to bribe Bardolph to let them go. In fact Falstaff discharges them on Bardolph’s advice, eventually enrolling the thinnest and least suitable men, passing them off as being able and courageous from the way they hold the rifle.

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Romeo and Juliet (Shallow must be decrepit if he knew Falstaff as a young man!). The episode develops in the constant mark of the rut, on which their speeches always converge, with the well-known, inexorable adage of the passing of time and the awareness of the nearness of death. Was this further deviation into sexual teasing and erotic allusion really necessary? This question arises even more urgent with the notorious, endless ‘Boar’s-head Tavern’ scene, the fourth of Act II. Is it really the finest tavern scene ever written, as it has been deemed, or is it not in fact colourless, overworked and artificial for the most part? Indeed this scene, praised to the skies by critics and enthusiasts who extol Shakespeare’s comic and farcical excellence, deserves respect and admiration because it is the umpteenth mise en abyme and a small self-enclosed play – in three parts or sub-scenes – within the play, where chaos is unleashed only to be reduced to order with enormous craftsmanship at the end. A further similarity to Love’s Labour’s Lost lies in the parodic texture, which is by now a subject for highly refined, knowledgeable philologists researching Elizabethan drama, and is so sophisticated that most of the dialogue’s entropy is lost, or wasted, on an unaccustomed audience. When Pistol43 in particular intervenes a dense intertextual substructure emerges, far richer than that of contemporary playwrights such as Marlowe, whose fame was proverbial at the time. The scene becomes a hurly-burly and threatens to get out of hand; it finally leads to the umpteenth rascally prank, in itself theatre within the theatre as has already been mentioned, as a disguised Prince Hal overhears the insults that Falstaff heaps upon him, demanding explanations, and then exposing him. It is here that Falstaff activates one of his automatic, acrobatic selfdefence mechanisms by replying that he had only insulted Hal in front of evil-minded people, which conferred honour on his action. However, as in so many other, and often critical occasions, there is here the timely and decisive interference of the main plot in the form of Peto, who brings dramatic news of imminent civil war. Falstaff sacrifices a night of pleasure, but this is the inescapable destiny of such a valorous soldier as he claims he is, and both Doll and Mistress Quickly are sincerely pained. 43 And thus equivalent, with their artificial pirouettes, to Armado and Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

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4. Lashing out at Falstaff, whom he accuses of having offended him in front of a virtuous woman, Hal takes courage and says ‘that which his flesh rebels against’. The practical joke is interrupted by his sudden scruples of conscience, and Hal finds himself invested in his role as future monarch. Falstaff is publicly repudiated in various scenes, and he will chance his luck, but will be imprisoned in the Fleet so as to be reformed and purged of his bad habits. The diagnosis drawn in the first part of the play may be thus overturned, as perhaps Hal had been wanting from the beginning to distance himself from his disreputable friend. However, the repudiation of Falstaff – a volte-face that Romantic critics disliked – is also a supreme, masked theatrical farce in which Hal acts the part of the monarch even after having already slipped into that role. The second scene of Act II had also portrayed a tired Hal immersed in his good-for-nothing behaviour that gave the lie to his noble comportment as designated prince. There he fires off an artillery of fanciful puns to the amazement of his confident Poins. Hal is quite indifferent to the sickness of his father, the king, and would be a hypocrite if he shed tears. In the fourth scene of Act IV he is still figuratively on the road to Damascus, but has not yet reached his goal. However, a courtier realizes something we learnt from the first play and from the young prince’s self-awareness: namely that in order to repudiate a profligate, wasteful life one has to have tried out and known what it is like; only then can one reject, hate, and get rid of it. In the fifth scene of Act IV, Hal and King Henry are the only actors in the last performance of the play, the last game of theatre within the theatre. This game is more precisely that of the king who is not yet a king, looking at himself in the mirror wearing the crown, and trying the role out. For the first time Hal stops behaving in his usual scoffing, ironic and ambiguous fashion to embrace the solemn hieratic dignity of an enthroned monarch. But at the same time a tragic or misleading farce is being enacted, where misunderstandings are happily resolved rather than deteriorating into tragedy. Macbeth’s very tragedy is consumed and averted in a flash: ‘Thy wish was father […] to that thought’.44 Hal the thief and the robber might have committed his supreme

44 The king reproaches Hal before dissuading himself.

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heist, and his gesture smacks of an extreme, unthinkable, unconscious, but completely lucid coherence. Hal is the Hegelian king who makes use of antithesis in order to achieve synthesis; just as he frequented the dregs of society so as to be better acquainted with them and be able to rule the country, in the same way he tries out the feel of the crown so as to soften its mortal weight and its alienating burden: ‘to try with it, as with an enemy / That had before my face murder’d my father’ (IV.5.166–7). § 15. ‘Henry V’ * The dramatic mechanism of Henry V (a hint in the dialogue, of which more will be said below, tells us that the play had been written and staged by the autumn of 1599, and was printed a year later) is once again the combination, or to be more precise, the counterpoint, of a ‘high’ and ‘low’ plot, in the same manner as had been already inaugurated and exploited in all its variations in the two parts of Henry IV. In the more elevated storyline, Henry V is now a king unbelievably transformed and a kind of corruptio pessimi optima, insomuch as he now entirely incarnates the archetype of the enlightened and exemplary monarch after his former profligate excesses, having refused with disgust to wear the crown in the previous two plays. The illustration of this paradox is not Shakespeare’s only aim; he proposes a second objective, to illustrate the behaviour most suited to an exemplary king, almost as though he were compiling an empirical blueprint for a counter-model to Machiavelli’s Prince and this character were the living incarnation and *

W. F. P. Stockley, King Henry the Fifth’s Poet Historical: A Study of the Plays of Shakespeare, with Special Reference to ‘King Henry V’, London 1925; P. R. Cole, Some New Interpretations of the Text of Shakespeare’s ‘King Henry V’, Sydney 1939; D. Traversi, Shakespeare: from ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’, London 1958; M. A. O’Brien, A Critical Commentary on Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’, London 1967; Shakespeare: ‘Henry V’: A Casebook, ed. M. Quinn, London 1969; William Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1988; Shakespeare’s History Plays: ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’, ed. G. Holderness, London 1992; B. Batson, Shakespeare’s Second Historical Tetralogy: Some Christian Features, West Cornwall 2004; B. Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History, Cambridge 2009; J. Dillon, Shakespeare and the Staging of English History, Oxford and New York 2012.

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enactment of it: in other words, how a nation can prosper adopting governing usages and methods that are contrary to Machiavellian principles. Henry’s rhythmical and well-constructed public speeches when he formulates plans of action are as empirical as they are theoretical in their wealth of sayings and deontological definitions appropriate to a wise king. Shakespeare makes Henry say once again that a king is the mirror of the Divine King, a commandment whose validity must remain intact even when the king declares war, even an aggressive war to conquer territory, and therefore a king that allows and even commands the slaughter of innocent souls. The justification and defence of war, of offensive war, and ipso facto of violence and bloodshed:45 this is the objective of the play qua historical play. Henry V is however also a patriotic play where English valour and ardour are indirectly highlighted in comparison to the bragging of the French, who come off worse, and pay the price for undervaluing the enemy so obstinately. Henry V ends optimistically with a peace that puts an end to the hatred between the two nations, albeit this is a purely temporary peace as the Chorus reveals, and there will be an imminent violation of that alliance with France by the young Henry VI. As repeatedly mentioned, Henry V flows, ideally and chronologically, into the three parts of Henry VI, a play composed previously. The Falstaff saga survives but only indirectly, as the knight never appears in person on stage although there is talk about him and he is occasionally remembered. He passes away silently, his death being recounted by Mistress Quickly in a brief sketch which is both pathetic and grotesque. His gang is now enriched by Corporal Nym, and the ill-matched company make various apparitions during the French campaign, coming on stage to offer profuse behavioural eccentricities, effervescent, chiefly verbal skirmishes, and the ever incomplete redemption of shallow men. The second salient structural point of Henry V seems to be that Shakespeare, even while faithfully following the historical facts and intent on defining Henry V’s exceptional personality, is by now at least intermittently satisfied with having served the reader with ample dramatized excerpts of it and, taking a breather, willingly moves his

45 In III.1 Henry echoes the warmonger when he extols peace, whilst exhorting his troops to fight like tigers.

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objective towards the margins, and dwells on the picturesque, the intimate, the peripheral, the humorous, or even the ignoble aspects of war. The more elevated storyline seems now to bore him, as much as limiting and distracting him. For example, in the fourth scene of Act II he truly lets himself go in a charming ‘genre’ vignette, almost a word painting, possibly entitled ‘The English Lesson’, which, as a further variation never used before, is entirely spoken in French, while others in the play are partly in English and partly in French. In this scene Alice, the maidservant, teaches the French King’s daughter Katharine a few English words; needless to say, they are all words which, in translation, acquire humorous and often involuntarily scurrilous associations. The second scene of Act V is in turn quite rare in its postmodern flavour when King Henry passionately and unyieldingly courts that same Katharine in a mixture of English and French, producing similar exhilarating effects. Other secondary scenes also provide a wealth of gags illustrating the wonderful, never fully explored dramatic potential to be found in everyday language, with its usages, its ambiguities and its misunderstandings, mainly derived from varieties of pronunciation which involuntarily give rise to different meanings. One such interlude compares three dialects, Welsh, Scottish and Irish, through imitating the respective accents, cadences and figures of speech in a quick parodic sequence. One therefore has to reiterate that Shakespeare counters the dynamic rhythm of history, necessitating rapid-fire decisions, with scenes that are once again lethargic, static and sluggish. These interludes, however, are not particularly memorable and they are far from inevitable, apart from the cameo describing Falstaff ’s death. Pistol is always too ready to embellish his speeches with excessively bombastic parodies of Titanic drama, whilst the rest of Falstaff ’s shrinking band harbour no other thoughts than those of drinking, fornicating and getting by. 2. An exception in the canon (to such an extent that upholders of Shakespearean dramatic irony since Hazlitt’s days have been suspicious, actual textual evidence lacking), Henry is a monarch who unexpectedly sees everything clearly and distinctly, and he unwaveringly sizes up reality adapting it to the model he has in mind. The function of the secondary plot is also that of revealing a residue that refuses to coagulate and remains extraneous to the general model: that of cowardice, selfish egotism, vulgarity and human baseness. Prospero in other words does not contemplate

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Caliban; or rather he ends up by actually contemplating him. Falstaff ’s band personifies Machiavelli’s ‘effective reality’; it is its revenge. This band retards the play, pulling it away from its centre, and thus decentring it and threatening its dynamic principle – a breach that is strengthened by another internal structural challenge. In a noticeable and unique departure from his normal playwriting methods, Shakespeare destroys the illusionistic principle upon which drama has always been based by definition. He repeatedly jumps hither and thither, both in time and especially in space, unbothered by the audience’s discomfort. Here he invents a Chorus – no more a prologue or an epilogue – which carefully explains all the previous events, warns of spatial changes, and in short addresses the audience’s imagination and empathy. More precisely, the Chorus has a more specific alienating function, informing the audience of all that has happened behind the scenes. It tells them to use their imagination in order to believe in the succession of the various scenes and temporal hiatuses, and, justifying the transgressions of the Aristotelian unities, it breaks dramatic illusion and the suspension of disbelief. It points to space as a mise en abyme in that the play encloses the larger within the smaller and symbolically shrinks it. Throughout the five acts, the Chorus appeals to the sceptical audience’s eidetic capacity, which is anchored in verisimilitude. It goes to the very roots of the principle of drama and of the subsistence of dramatic fiction itself. But, regularly intervening at the beginning of each act, it also has an anti-dramatic or extra-dramatic function, insomuch as its words are also brief ‘cantos’ of a historical, descriptive and natural poem. As such they are incursions into a genre that was never before practised by Shakespeare, or has not survived – that of the descriptive poet in blank verse.46 Finally, there 46 The first chorus has a proemial function and invokes the Muse of War, dressing the protagonists of the play with mythical disguises in the midst of other personifications. The third Chorus is of eminently greater visual value in its description of a seashore and of an English fleet sailing towards France. This forms a conventional ‘genre’ picture, much like the fourth Chorus, the supreme creation of a conventional descriptive poet who always qualifies his nouns with an adjective. The prologue to Act V has a crucial alienating function in that it contains an unequivocal temporal reference that allows the dating of the play, in 1599, and at the same time dissolves any illusions: Henry’s triumph and the huge crowd that awaited him on his return

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is a definite change of pace between the first three acts, of a no-nonsense play that begins anonymously, with verbose and arid résumés of dynastic history, the nominal hero missing from the stage for a long time, and a fourth which is double the normal length. Here a battle scene has to be postponed due to infinite preparations, while dawn breaks over the two opposing armies. This is an act containing no less than eight scenes, some of which have only a marginal function and a tone that is grotesquely comic. 3. Henry’s first transformation in this play is his awareness of irrevocably belonging to time, where formerly his dimension had been timelessness, much like Falstaff: ‘now he weighs time / Even to the utmost grain’, he confides in a monologue referring to the hourglass. From being lazy, dilatory, sluggish, now he operates at an electric, even lightning speed, and he rides time.47 Neither verbally brilliant nor eloquent by nature, we see him now transformed into a consummate, committed, and magically astute rhetorician – both a rhetorician and an apologist for values which are largely ideal, much like the future fame he will earn with the honour and salvation of his soul. He is now inexplicably proficient in theology, in political theory, in psychology and in the strategies of warfare. His faith in the divine government of the world is unshakeable, as is his belief that the monarch is sent by God, and that he receives and makes use of his support. And thus Henry silently, or through eccentric comparisons, becomes one of the least-known great protagonists of human history, of English history at least. More precisely, he is a member of that elect sphere of saintly kings: a new Constantine, a Louis IX or Charlemagne, even a reincarnation of King Arthur of Geoffrey may be seen as an echo of the Earl of Essex’s victory over the Irish rebels on behalf of the ‘gracious empress’ Elizabeth. 47 Is there a hidden meaning or a deeper allusion in the tennis balls the Dauphin sends to the king as a gift? Henry answers the ambassador in kind, with other references to tennis, showing his presence of spirit, and ability to seize the moment. The scene’s humour depends on the great prankster being out-pranked; and yet, like Falstaff, his mentor, Henry knows how to turn the tables to his own advantage. The ‘balls’ gifted him by the Dauphin are later transformed into other ‘balls’, meaning the fiery, lethal and deadly eye of the basilisk (V.2.17). The Dauphin is without doubt the character most pelted by satire in the French camp, especially in scene III.7, where he expends and wastes torrents of words to sing the praises of his own horse.

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of Monmouth, Wace or Layamon.48 He is thus a universal, practical and theoretical man and monarch, precociously versed in the trivium and quadrivium (in 1413 he was only twenty-six). Such a dramatic metamorphosis can only be miraculous, and has the nature of St Francis’s stigmata imposed from above instantaneously and without warning, or a second conversion of Saul. But the diagnosis put forward by the two preceding plays must be repeated: Henry’s preparation was irregular, an acrobatic Bildung or perhaps the only truly efficacious and decisive one – like passing from the ‘wildness’ towards maturity in wisdom, following a planned pathway. Henry defends the ‘utility’ of his degenerate life to the French ambassador, and tells how he put that experience to good use. He only decides on the overseas campaign after having asked for and obtained guarantees that his claim to the French throne is legitimate. The Archbishop of Canterbury meticulously shows him proof that the presumed legitimacy of the current French sovereigns is based on a blatant violation of the very Salic law their claim depended on. Henry’s political wisdom especially shines when he remembers the dangers of a Scottish rebellion once the English troops are active on French soil. In this scene, the two prelates expound and then parry their own objections so as to reassure the king with an abundance of proof. In this phase Henry the rhetorician is mesmerized by the prelates’ crafty dialectic; they initially blackmail, then flatter him, awarding him a sum for his war expenses that had never been reckoned in that way before. But the king, sharp, cautious and far-seeing, has finally founded the political utopia of a state without divisions and where justice reigns. He therefore ignores, or pretends to ignore, that the clergy and the ecclesiastical powers, who believe in the same God that sustains him, and who administer his spiritual interests, are venal through and through, greedy, and only interested in hanging on to their possessions and wealth. Shakespeare the realist knows, and gradually insinuates, that even Henry is aware that the earthly utopia – which he believes Henry’s kingdom to be, or at least to be a close approximation to – is threatened by a series

48 The reference to Alexander the Great is implicit in I.1.46 (‘the Gordian knot’), explicit in IV.7.23ff., where the comparison is however acrobatic and substantially oppositional.

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of evils, including the presence of the scheming clergy and a hodgepodge common people who make do and get by. But Henry’s kingdom is united, and even more so than in past times. The two prelates, even if their own motivations are quite murky, sketch out the political philosophy of utopia. Shakespeare, in this defence or apology, announces the ideas expounded by Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, or by Menenius Agrippa in Coriolanus: the ideal state is harmonious, musical, rather than the dissonant coordination of separate efforts working towards the same end. Divergent capabilities are harmonized and no operation can be undertaken in sealed-off compartments. The Archbishop of Canterbury necessarily uses examples taken from the animal kingdom: not the distant eagle that clears the way for the weasel, or the cat that stays on guard for fear of the mouse will come in its absence; he would rather point to bees, which obediently supply the queen bee with pollen, thereby painting an image of the hardworking functioning state. The beehive operates as a hierarchy where different functions are allocated and everyone is integrated and perfectly in tune with their work, conscious of participating in the common good. In spite of this, justice must still be administered, given that man is both weak and a sinner, and so prisons and capital punishment must still exist even in this golden age. Shakespeare undoubtedly describes this French campaign as though it were a rare case of whole-hearted support of the entire national apparatus. 4. The band of Falstaff ’s orphans represents the reverse side of Henry’s acquired sublimity. They are resigned, downtrodden and fatalistic insomuch as they have no control over their own destinies. They are animallike for the readiness with which they engage in arguments for futile reasons, and with which their words allude to their repressed sexuality. Their proverbial Falstaffian cowardice is highlighted by the minuscule page given by Henry to Falstaff, who single-handedly gets the better of three braggarts. The Falstaffian threesome or foursome is joined by the courageous but pompous and pedantic Welsh soldier named Fluellen, by an Irish captain called Macmorris and by a Scottish Jamy. These provide predictable dialectal colour. Every time they intervene the plot is slowed down by their wordplay, thereby demonstrating that Henry V is also partly a study in communication or in the breakdowns of linguistic communication. Pistol is the hero of a more consistent subplot when Fluellen waits

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for him at the outbreak of fresh hostilities in France, and forces him to ‘eat the leek’ (the Welsh emblem). Fluellen overcomes Pistol with ease in spite of his blustering, but Pistol won’t give up, and plans to retreat to England to become a pickpocket and petty thief, telling everyone that he was wounded in battle. In one sense, Falstaff ’s lineage is guaranteed, if only because someone like Pistol confirms that it is impossible to change or correct human nature and the stain that, as Henry knows, can never be cleaned or erased. 5. Henry also possesses intact from the earlier plays the taste for putting on entertainments where he plays the parts of both actor and director. So Shakespeare patently never tires of reworking the theatre-within-thetheatre device. Immediately in the second scene of Act II, the king confidently proclaims that he has no traitors in his realm, and that the army and the common people are all on his side. He pardons a citizen who has offended him, and gives documents and mandates to the three nobles who had advised him to be more severe. The mandates are in fact accusations of high treason against them, and their former suggestions can only be used against them. Thus the king reveals extraordinary acumen, virtually forcing the three unsuspecting traitors to condemn themselves; and, as often happens in fairy stories, they are self-confessed offenders. The scene is structured so as to highlight King Henry’s cleverness, his presence of spirit and his sovereign equilibrium. But it also reveals that he possesses a well-developed sense of theatre and entertainment.49 He is in particular supreme in the ability to play down a situation when it most suits him. In the first scene of Act IV, for example, Henry dismisses all his courtiers so as to decide what to do, and this leads to the typical everyman scene where he talks at length with anonymous or common characters, such as, here, three soldiers. Conceptually it is a very important scene because Henry, who wears an officer’s cloak as a disguise, cannot be recognized, and 49 His harangue is similar to a curse from Jesus, and is based on the recognition of human fallacy and the Fall and thus the devil’s empire. He is conscious of an ‘infected’ world according to Shakespeare’s and Sidney’s recurring vision. Thus the three traitors enact a fatal repetition of Adam’s sin. Henry himself is defined by the Chorus as being an ‘offending Adam’, before his redemption.

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so is able to secretly learn how they feel. This is also yet another masquerade, where Henry is the undisputed master, creating a theatre within the theatre whose aim is to sound out the soldiers so as to better motivate them to fight in the coming battle. In fact he illustrates to them his own vision as regards the role of king, a man like any other. But as well as being a man he should also represent his role, which is not something he should always do because he might then frighten the army. In a Socratic way Henry, a master of dialectics, wrests the confession of the understandable emotions of fear, selfishness and piety from the three soldiers. But here we are dealing with upright soldiers who blindly obey the king without investigating whether his cause is justifiable. One soldier imagines for a moment, Heaven forbid!, that the king’s cause may be not justified, otherwise he would have thousands of dead and miserable people on his conscience. Then Henry broaches a legal, or rather theological question, and posits a conundrum worthy of Hamlet: can God take revenge for the bad actions previously committed by soldiers who fight in a war that is righteous, and damn them in eternity? In warfare, the king, whose cause may even be righteous, utilizes soldiers who are sinners, but does he consign them to damnation in this way if they die? The conclusion is that obedience to the king and the salvation of the soul must be kept distinct and independent. Having evoked the fear of death in the three soldiers, Henry gives them courage and obtains their unconditional support. 6. This first scene in Act IV unleashes an echo of Gethsemane. A king feels the weight of the suffering, discomfort and burdens of an entire people; single-handedly, he once again proves his elevated sense of responsibility, and takes charge of everything negative or painful inherent to warfare. As compared to the common man, what distinguishes the king is his useless pageantry. This meditating and brooding king forgets that a battle is about to be fought, and a nobleman brings him back down to earth. He calls his soldiers together, and after raising a prayer, he harangues them thoroughly. In this speech he enumerates the pious actions he performed in order to atone for his father’s terrible crimes against Richard II. And the battle is fought on the fateful anniversary of St Crispin’s Day. Once the battle is won, and no longer in disguise, he has to have a reckoning with the soldier Williams who had offended or suspected the king.

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The scene is very similar to that at the beginning where the three traitors betrayed themselves. The king craftily gives Fluellen a glove, saying that it was seized from a French nobleman. Williams, the English soldier, effectively recognizes as his own the glove Fluellen flaunts on his helmet, and Henry must intervene to prevent a fight. The scene gets out of hand when the king is forced to admit that it was he who gave the glove to Fluellen, but the English soldier, remembering the king’s earlier speech, blames the king himself, saying it was not he, the king, for he had passed himself off as any common man. The king rewards him, and this pantomime is yet another illustration of the sovereign’s prankish and joking spirit that never dies. Williams, the soldier, is a Christ-like figure at the mercy of the Pharisees’ machinations. However, the king rewards the soldier, just as Christ often praises and sends safely on their way those who prove their faith. In the second and last scene of Act V, Henry simulates, plays the ladies’ man and frivolously makes fun of everything. But Princess Katharine doesn’t fall for his ploys, unmasking his false manner of speaking when using French rather than English, which becomes the language of truth, or at least of a more probable truth. Katharine (or rather Katherina) is of course a name reminiscent of a certain Shakespearean ‘shrew’ who is tamed by the force of persuasion. This Princess Katharine is however no shrew, but simply young and naïve, and Henry gives us a fine demonstration of those verbal qualities he denies having, when he presents himself as a simple man with a direct and straightforward manner of talking. § 16. ‘Henry VIII’* In re-ordering Shakespeare’s historical plays according to the moment in history to which they refer, we must remember that Henry VIII (staged

*

C. Clark, A Study of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VIII’, London 1931, 1938, Folcroft, PA 1978; C. Leech, William Shakespeare: The Chronicles: ‘Henry VI’, ‘Henry IV’, ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, ‘Henry VIII’, London 1962; S. M. Kurland, The Drama of Politics: Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VIII’ and Jacobean England, Chicago 1984; F. A. Shirley, ‘King John’ and ‘Henry VIII’: Critical Essays, New York and London 1988; A. Wicher and J. Uchman, Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VIII’ as a Subversive Fable, Lodz 2001; T. Merriam,

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in 1613 and published in 1623) deals with events closer in time to that of writing than any of the others, with the possible exception of The Merry Wives of Windsor. There is a hiatus of seventy or eighty years. We must also remember that Henry VIII was written and performed almost fifteen years after Shakespeare’s last but one English historical play, just as it is evident that the play which, in the historical chronology, lies immediately behind it is Richard III, skipping the reign of Henry VII on which Shakespeare never wrote. This premise is necessary because Shakespeare well knew, and always repeated in his plays, that the promise with which a reign opens, lasts and closes – a promise perhaps of a golden age – is belied by later events: Richard III corrects Henry V, and Henry V is in turn contradicted by Henry VIII. We must be hopeful or at least not too disappointed; we have to believe with a sort of double-thinking that the ‘infection’ corrupting man may be cured and overcome, and that a new golden age will reappear. This golden age is always relative: after original sin the world is full of threats; evolution is reversed, Satan’s stamp is flagrant, man is fragile, uncontrolled, cowardly, hypocritical, degenerate. In spite of this cynical or sceptical view, any possible sign of improvement that appears on the horizon is welcome. At certain set moments this cyclic recourse seems to reinstate a harmonious order and a regime of justice, in this case at half-century intervals. Henry VIII is however an exception: due to the above-mentioned proximity of the writing to the dramatized facts, it may have seemed to Shakespeare that an always ephemeral golden age had indeed become in some way stabilized and made eternal: after a reign of turbulence and unrest due to the usual endemic causes, two reigns followed, that of Elizabeth I and James I, to which the author himself had been and was a living witness. These reigns had ensured the nation three quarters of a century of uninterrupted unity and increasing well-being. This is why the seal on Shakespeare’s career and the final word on the cycle of his English historical plays can only be found in this play on Henry VIII. At the very most, Shakespeare was able

The Identity of Shakespeare in ‘Henry VIII’, Tokyo 2005; Shakespeare and the Politics of Co-Authorship: ‘Henry VIII’, ed. J. Richards et al., Cambridge 2009; G. S. Brown, Shakespeare’s Prince: the Interpretation of ‘The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth’, Macon, GA 2013.

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to imagine and predict that such long-lasting calm might be disrupted just after his own death, and that the cyclical mechanism would be realized once more, although for the worse. In Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell is an incorruptible, honest secretary of the royal council, albeit a forebear of the man who was to unleash a civil war.50 Who it is that regulates this cyclical progress is not known; but in Henry VIII a providential plan is seen and there is faith in a true new beginning of the creative cycle. Human history is branded by original sin, and man and society are ‘infected’, as always in Shakespeare. More than in other cases, the devil has reappeared to tempt man on to diabolical ambition. Thus the lust for absolute power grasps and overwhelms kings, dignitaries and statesmen. There is an unbridled race to the peaks of power, thus man forgets he is transitory flesh and that what goes up must come down, another outcome of the cyclic law. In four evident cases Henry VIII traces the ascent and fall of a figure of power who was convinced he or she could not fail. On the one hand, there are rare cases – one is that of Queen Katherine – of someone reaching the highest objective of human ambition without making any intimate personal ascent, keeping faith with a correct scale of values and not being overcome by hubris. On the other hand, Shakespeare is now strangely indulgent – as he is throughout his contemporary ‘romantic’ plays – in showing the small flame of redemption, however facile and decidedly belated, which touches certain black souls, Cardinal Wolsey first of all, and souls who at the point of death repudiate all the ill they have done and are purified. The vanity of currying favour with the sovereign or thirsting for earthly honours is perceived in a flash that coincides with the current Lucifer’s plunge back to earth. It is a reiterated instant of self-awareness or reconciliation with the self. Such indulgence is perhaps due to the eagerness to pay tribute to Queen Elizabeth, the regenerator. In other words, it is possible to turn a blind eye to all human frailty if such frailty leads to the happy outcome of the appearance of two such just, upright monarchs, obviously willed by divine providence. So every cloud has a silver lining, which might be the moral of the play. Very serious harm unjustly done to innocent people 50 Before that, of course, Anne Boleyn had been sent to the block by Henry, and in 1587 Mary Stuart was assassinated at Elizabeth’s command.

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is to be condemned and should have been avoided, yet it must be condoned after the fact since it led to a greater good than the harm incurred – greater because good for the entire nation. Queen Katherine is made a saint, but she had to be repudiated so that Anne Boleyn could give birth to an Elizabeth.51 God makes use of human weaknesses and even diabolical error in order to redeem a corrupt world. In the times of Henry VIII, history has not yet settled down and reverberates with the damage, anything but rectified, from the time of the Wars of the Roses. Shakespeare had already prophetically announced in Henry V that at times good can spring from ill. 2. For this very reason the play intentionally does not depict the whole reign of Henry VIII; it chooses significant moments within the timespan from when Katherine of Aragon is repudiated and Henry is infatuated with Anne Boleyn, to the birth and baptism of Elizabeth, so more or less from 1520 to 1533. The final choral scene of the christening of the future queen is animated, vigorous, sparkling, with the people going wild for an event afoot, of which they little realize the implications. The incomparable virtues of Elizabeth are prophetically praised by Archbishop Cranmer, and the future James I is also foretold, a figure in whom Elizabeth will rise again like the phoenix. The prophecy coincides and overlaps with the reality under the eyes of Shakespeare as he was then writing. Not all five acts with all their scenes, however, were written by him, and the final product is one of the most uneven of his whole canon. It is as if, like some great Renaissance painter, the Bard had entrusted a slightly sketched outline to his apprentices. Scholars still debate about which parts were written by him and which by John Fletcher. We rather wonder that a Shakespeare out of the habit of writing English historical plays actually wrote another; but the answer to this, as I mentioned, is there to hand.52 Out of that collaboration came a hybrid anonymous, mechanical, correct draft, yet

51 52

The name recalls another Elizabeth, the daughter of James I, who married the Elector Palatine. A plausible conjecture is that he used a makeshift play on the same subject by William Rowley from 1604, hence the alternative title of All is True by which Henry VIII was also known. But this subtitle has been exploited by recent critics to underline the relativity of truth and Shakespeare’s scepticism behind appearances.

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almost without any brilliant scene or creative spark. Excessively minute is the reconstruction of prior facts that amazed his contemporaries but not us; slow and laborious its rhythm, boring its sequence of ample, wide-ranging perorations in verbose scholastic oratory making use of clichés and trite formulations. Outdoor scenes are few, since the play is all set either in the royal halls or in the corridors of power where fearful, stealthy courtiers and dignitaries hover. This is a narrow space where whispers, murmurs and gossip are overheard and where envy, flattery, lies and pretence flourish (and where one is likely to end up accused of imaginary, trumped-up crimes and sentenced after flimsy trials, if unfortunate enough to fall out of favour with the éminence grise). It is also a more spectacular, heraldic play than most, with elaborate stage directions describing solemn public ceremonies, dreams and visions, thus recalling a pantomime. It is easy to see the looming masque in fashion in James’s time. Right from the prologue, the five acts preannounce Gibbon’s theme of the rise and fall of the powerful; this is why there are recurrent farewell addresses to life on the part of the exiled, the rejected, those fallen into disgrace or condemned, moments that are slow exhalations of the spirit tearing itself apart in gentle and firm agony. Pathos never before seen in Shakespeare pervades Katherine’s farewell to the crown and Wolsey’s defenestration, their last wishes dominated – or decidedly ruined – by overly fulsome self-commiseration.53 3. Among the male characters, right from the outset the work is overshadowed by Cardinal Wolsey, King Henry’s right-hand man. Among the women the four main roles are Katherine, Anne Boleyn, Mary (who never actually appears on stage but is mentioned to establish her future role of antagonist) and Elizabeth, yet to be born. In the people’s imagination and in the enraptured descriptions by the king’s subjects, Anne Boleyn – even she is not a leading figure54 – is a copy of Katherine on whom the

53 54

The final lines of Act IV – Katherine’s farewell to life – were to be echoed word for word in Dido’s famous lament at the end of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas. Apart from the ballroom scene, Anne Boleyn entirely occupies the third scene of Act II, which highlights her insinuating wit. In this scene she pities the good, innocuous Katherine now repudiated (how sincerely we do not know), gnomically announcing that it is better to live in poverty and honesty than in pomp and pain. The

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same hyperbolic adjectives and saintly metaphors are bestowed.55 Henry VIII is the classic sovereign, strong one minute, weak another. Suborned by the cardinal, in Act I he thwarts what he believes to be a conspiracy and does away with its alleged head. Under pressure from the cardinal, he then authorizes a huge outlay for an agreement with the King of France,56 imposing a property tax of one sixth of their income on the well-to-do, as Queen Katherine points out to him with her exquisite sensitivity. These initial stages speak indirectly of an underlying discontent and prove the gap between the people and the royal court. When the queen tells him to be himself, Henry cancels the tax imposed by the cardinal, but having given in to him in the case against the Duke of Buckingham who is pronounced guilty, his good deed is rendered vain. Shakespeare makes it absolutely clear that the repudiation of Katherine is due to legal quibbling just as much as to his outburst of extra-marital sexual lust. The fourth scene in Act I (in itself anything but a masterpiece, more like the libretto for an opera of Verdi’s) is a ball organized by the cardinal where the king, at first disguised as a shepherd, pays court to Anne Boleyn. Taking a fancy to her, Henry hypocritically presents his divorce as a case of conscience, but paradoxically he is the magnanimous defender of Katherine having repudiated her, and the passionate singer of her perfect conjugal devotion. Henry restores his good name when he gets rid of Wolsey and takes up with the honest and righteous Cranmer. Acting for himself with ability and decision, the king manages to save him from the corrupt royal council which plots his elimination. Wolsey’s pride is devilish. He is one of lady-in-waiting to whom she is speaking answers as Emilia does Desdemona, that she would give up her virginity to become queen, to which Anne Boleyn perhaps deceitfully dissents. She cannot know that the cock will crow and she will be proved wrong. As if in answer, the Lord Chamberlain enters and declares her Marchioness in the king’s name, with a generous allowance. Anne Boleyn devoutly accepts, and the lady-in-waiting nearly bursts with rage and envy. 55 ‘Saint-like’, respectively II.4.135 for Katherine and IV.1.83 for Anne Boleyn. Shakespeare therefore gives – or makes his characters give – a contrary opinion to that which may be deduced from the biography and the poetry of Thomas Wyatt (Volume 1, § 42.3). 56 In I.3 two people criticize French ways by comparing them to the healthy nobility of the country gentleman.

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the most consummate of Shakespeare’s actors in the clergy, recalling in this the Bishop of Winchester, later cardinal, in Henry VI. Like him, he is full of self-pity in the guise of an innocent lamb whereas he is in fact both fox and lion. In Act II, out of mere rage for promotion denied, the cardinal is made responsible for the cavil that was to change the history of England: acting like an Iago, it is he who hints that the king’s marriage to his brother’s widow is not valid.57 His power system collapses through a mere piece of carelessness: a document ended up among many others is discovered and reveals the extent of his predatory venality in the form of bribes to gain friends and win over the Pope. According to historical truth and perhaps yet more to the irenic, elegiac tone of the play, Wolsey dies repentant; but the mild and pious Queen Katherine pitilessly fixes him in a sort of ante litteram Browning-like portrait, that of a man with unbridled worldly passions, selfish, discourteous and simoniacal. Other characters relativistically discover in him hidden gifts of generosity. It is the first or second case of the adage, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum. Invariably, in this play, death is for the dying person the moment of an epiphany and of burning self-knowledge, the knowledge of a self that is ephemeral and fleeting. 4. Confirming the general theme of the spiralling transience of things human and changes in fortune together with the cyclical trend of history, reduced en abyme, there are four cases coming shortly one after the other of arrests, incriminations, trials and sentences, but all in a climate of arbitrary haste. They are alike in their passionate but unheeded professions of innocence, and the full, even heroic, loyalty to the crown on the part of the accused. These vibrant perorations also have phrases and words in common. At the outset, two court dignitaries, with the air of chancing upon each other in the corridors of the royal palace, recall a past event, and bit by bit they get to the crux of the matter: Cardinal Wolsey is daggers drawn with 57 From Holinshed Shakespeare learnt that Wolsey did actually intercede with the Pope to impede the divorce, because Henry had fallen in love with one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting (III.2.30–6 and 85–104), daughter of a mere knight, a Lutheran moreover, so a heretic. Wolsey intended Henry to marry the sister of Frances I of France.

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one of the two dignitaries who can hardly control his rage. The proverbial coup de théâtre is that the cardinal, with a stranglehold on the king, has his rival arrested with his followers and orders them to be shut up in the Tower. In the second trial Katherine daringly accuses Cardinal Wolsey of having ‘blown’ on the ‘coal’ to incite the king; this is a partial truth since the king too has sinned on his own account in having fallen for Anne Boleyn, so for once in a while Wolsey is not wrong when he says that the divorce has been approved by the Roman consistory. The continuation of the scene in III.1, with the visit of the cardinals Campeggi and Wolsey to the repudiated queen, produces a few sparks but in the end it lasts too long and is marred by repetitions. The cardinals pronounce a few sentences in Latin, but Katherine proudly declares herself to be more English than the English, launching cutting witticisms to refute the mellifluous advice to trust in the benevolence of him who has repudiated her. The third trial is the final unmasking and disgrace of Wolsey. One thing more remains to be underlined: the bitter irony forewarning of the fact that Thomas More, another victim of Henry’s whims, is appointed Lord Chancellor, with the good wishes and favour of all concerned. Cranmer’s trial is set up for ideological reasons, in that he is accused of spreading heresies throughout the country which risk becoming fatal unless uprooted. This is the only trial in which the defendant is spared the death sentence, thanks to an exceptional intervention by Henry, who applies the impartial precepts of justice at the last minute.

The Euphuistic Comedies

§ 17. The euphuistic comedies The term ‘Euphuism’ strictly refers to two narrative works by John Lyly, and in a more general sense indicates a frequently used category and critical metaphor, often applied to all those literary manifestations featuring verbal over-abundance, a search for stylistic and formal preciosity, and an excess of somewhat cold, self-referencing conceits. Without any derogatory tone, Pater for example uses the term in this sense in a chapter of Marius the Epicurean.1 Shakespeare the Euphuist is such on the basis of either acceptation of the term, although in both cases he goes beyond it. He was almost a contemporary of Lyly’s, yet in the so-called ‘euphuistic’ comedies he adopts his style while surpassing him. This is the work of a Shakespeare who already accepts the classical tradition in no way slavishly: he varies and enlivens it. Not only does he functionalize Euphuism, making it a tool of expressive dramatic intensity, but he takes it apart or relativizes it, as in the character of Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, who refuses the rhetoric of love with words of wonderfully refined rhetoric. Shakespeare has again insistent recourse to the congenital artifice of the theatre within the theatre, an artifice which is anything but an artifice since it sets off that investigation into the function of the dramatic vehicle that was to be taken up again in his mature works. The euphuistic comedies start a tradition that will flow into the Restoration theatre and thence into periodic, and parodic, resurrections right up to the present day. Like any label, once having entered common usage, this also has become imprecise and elastic. The source of one euphuistic comedy is Plautus and two more have Italian scenarios with a few ‘romantic’ touches; the fifth of the group is one of Shakespeare’s very first nonce works, the above-mentioned Love’s Labour’s Lost. § 18. ‘The Comedy of Errors’* At the back of his mind, Samuel Beckett may have taken into account a precursory play such as The Comedy of Errors (opinions vary as to its dates 1

This premise summarizes Volume 1, § 152.1 and Volume 6, § 177.3.

*

T. W. Baldwin,  On the Compositional Genetics of ‘The Comedy of Errors’, Urbana, IL 1965; ‘The Comedy of Errors’: Critical Essays, ed. R. S. Miola, New York and London 1997.

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of staging: between 1591 and 1594, published in 1623). In its basic set-up, it may well appear as an ante litteram ‘semiotic’ play, that is, a digression on the communication theory and on the language and nomination system, both considered not as clarifying and disambiguating, but eminently equivocal. The foreshadowing of Beckett is even more blatant in the stylizing of the characters, ‘reduced’ to simple pawns in a game of combinations, and in the study of probabilities and of the series of similar combinations. The Comedy of Errors thus approaches mime and pantomime, and its diegesis is of scenes where four characters, let us say A, B, C and D, enter into action and interact through ‘throws of the dice’: a schematic, algebraic play, a board-game as are some of Beckett’s late ‘games’. But from this springs a further innovative feature, the announcement of the marionette-like, fantastic twentieth-century genre, whose main initiate is Ronald Firbank. Superficial and absurd mannequins move across the stage in delicious space-time anachronism and in more or less successful mimed and verbal pirouettes; it is above all Firbank-like, in an Ephesus in its historical antiquity, that two men from Syracuse hounded by the law should repair to a monastery where the Abbess is their unknowing mother: a playful overlapping, in other words, of the pagan world with an apparently Christian civilization of centuries later. 2. The outer framework is glaringly that of Plautus, with the twin brothers who in the end recognize each other after numerous amusing incidents;2 Shakespeare makes use of the Latin comedy’s types and stereotypes and most usual devices. The father Egeon is a model husband and parent; discouraged, somewhat passive, condemned to death by the law of Ephesus, he manneristically laments the cupio dissolvi. Antipholus of Ephesus is the man and husband who enjoys freedom and privileges precluded from his wife; her sister Luciana advises her to turn a blind eye to such things, cynically echoing St Paul’s anti-feminist recommendation that women should be subordinate to their husband and put up with their little adventures and whims, patiently keeping them happy (as the ‘tamed shrew’ was to recite not long after). Antipholus of Syracuse is the distracted 2

Shakespeare steals a march on Plautus by inventing a pair of servants who are also twins.

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tourist who wanders round the city looking for adventure and forgetting the mission for which he came to Ephesus, finding his lost brother. He is the parody of the seventeenth-century melancholic, and his humorous Sehnsucht explains his love for Luciana. Antipholus of Syracuse’s courtship of Luciana happens simply because he is not married; she believes he is and thus is scandalized, at least up to a certain point. The other Antipholus, the husband momentarily refused, has a good time with the prostitutes to spite his wife, and Angelo3 is the respectable bourgeois goldsmith who begs him to avoid making a scene in public. Luciana is also convinced that it is her brother-in-law she is rebuking, encouraging him to be unfaithful on the quiet if he really can’t help it. Imitating Plautus is ipso facto the same as parodying courtly love of a sentimental type, hence somewhat quixotic: Antipholus of Syracuse pays court to the dubious Luciana in the idioms of courtly convention, thus mocking them. The audience wants and gets its own part in the comic episodes of the servant who runs away from the greasy, plump scullery maid who makes a set at him, a scene of hilarious laughter and unstinted applause if aided by the actor and the staging. Shakespeare adds another framework of his own in the political set-up, destined to future developments (remembering that the comedy is from the early 1590s), by placing the action in an Ephesus that is an imaginary city-state with flagrant anachronisms. It is in fact a duchy with an extravagant if not capricious and therefore inhumane legislation. Duke Solinus is a political and legislative instance; like Escalus in Romeo and Juliet, even more like Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he comes on stage at the beginning and the end of the play to apply the law that decrees death to any Syracusan landed in Ephesus. Quite aware how inhumane the law is, he cannot violate it. A strange contradiction, therefore: Ephesus is a democratic state where decisions are taken by ‘solemn synods’, yet it approves and implements such a draconian law. The political chessboard of the comedy is fragmented; in the southern Mediterranean hostility and division reign 3

There are here the first two cases of homonymy within Shakespeare’s oeuvre that require the interpreter to read kinships or antitheses: Angelo in Measure for Measure is the name of the pitiless, lubricious deputy of the duke; Emilia, the good Abbess, later revealed as the mother of the twins, is Iago’s wife in Othello.

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and the economic regime is not a free but a protectionist market. In domestic transactions usury is unknown in Ephesus, though active in Venice in The Merchant of Venice, yet a creditor can claim immediate repayment of a loan and the arrest of any insolvent debtor. On the other hand, no-one in Ephesus is generous or Christianly charitable enough to pay the bail of 1,000 marks to save Egeon’s life. 3. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the future Shakespearean play to which it is most similar, The Comedy of Errors is the one which most scrupulously and rigidly observes the time and place unities: a series of misunderstandings lasting more than one afternoon would not be convincing. Equally unlikely would be the extension of the main scenic stratagem, the absence on stage of all four leading figures at the same time, or at least of two of the pairs of twins, as, say, the two masters or the two servants. When this happens and the complete quartet of masters and servants is on stage, everything is explained, the curtain comes down and the play is over. In a hypothetical remake, had Beckett undertaken it, he would have called the two Antipholuses A and C, the two Dromios B and D. Of course we could easily have doubts about the theatrical illusion and the lack of insight or intuition of the characters on stage: it never enters their heads that they are facing evident cases of homonymy and identical appearance in spite of all the misunderstandings they are going through. In addition there is their unawareness of facts and the simply unknowable: Egeon has no idea that in searching for his son he has reached the very city in which the missing son’s brother is also looking for him; the father is looking for a son, and this son is looking for his brother (on this level of farce, another omnipresent theme in Shakespeare looms, of an entirely different dramatic nature). The chain of misunderstandings and quid pro quos is activated with the help of stage movements: as in Beckett, only by coming and going and moving around the city perimeter can these misunderstandings come about. In Act III, at the home of Antipholus of Ephesus, the owner himself is turned away by the doorman, in fact Dromio of Syracuse, who has been ordered to keep the door shut whoever should come; and this Dromio can only speak but not show himself, so that the two Ephesians are forced to go away being unable to gain entrance (Antipholus the Syracusan is inside with his own Dromio and with Adriana, having decided to play the game out, whether in

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pretence or in illusion). The whole of this pantomime thus risks coming to an early close, but this is avoided by the fact that only the voices are heard, recognition being impeded in a highly unlikely manner, as I mentioned. Still on the question of likelihood, and taking into account the ‘dramatic pact’, the spectator now harbours a doubt: how is it that the variations in voice, vocabulary and pronunciation that might have hinted at the idea of different identities are not reciprocally noticed by the pairs of brothers and servants, apart from the fact that we must postulate that the same language is spoken in Syracuse and in Ephesus? Egeon, indeed, very near the end, asks Antipholus whether by any chance he recognizes his voice (V.1.301), and he expressly wonders whether a voice can change in seven years. It is justifiable that Antipholus of Ephesus does not recognize his father’s voice, since he had been lost as a baby, while his father believes he is speaking to his Syracusan son. 4. The origin of the misunderstanding and of the chain of misunderstandings is at first appearance the absence of a careful comparison of the contexts of interpersonal communication among the four members of the two pairs of twin brothers and servants. The most common mechanism is the following: A, the Syracusan master, tells B, his Syracusan servant, to do something on the basis of a contextual agreement; but A then finds himself in front of D, the Ephesian servant who knows nothing about it, and has carried out an order given him by his Ephesian master; herein lies the fuse firing semiotic chaos. This is a systematic three-part phase, and it can be played backwards, that is, a Dromio encounters his real master, then immediately afterwards he encounters the other, believing him to be the first. The agreed previous context known to both having exploded, chaos mounts with a sort of avalanche effect.4 The first warning light in the play is line 52 of scene 1, Act I: ‘As could not be distinguish’d but by names’. One might expect that the relation between res and verba would follow the norm, that two entities equal or strongly similar would be given 4

Such as the first scene in Act III, in which language and communication are interrupted and disturbed by the apparent transparency of language: ‘crow’ is both the bird and a crowbar, hence a language paradoxically more prone to misunderstanding than to reciprocal comprehension.

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different names in order to avoid insoluble confusion, thereby guaranteeing a personal and even juridical identity, particularly if we are speaking of human beings. The two Antipholuses are unfortunately known by the same name. The original error and its comedy are in this very fact, calling two very similar individuals in the same way; thus halfway through the play becomes a humorous, comic, farcical metaphysical search for or quest of identity: ‘Am I myself ?’ wonders Dromio of Syracuse. In the second scene of Act I Antipholus does not realize that the man in front of him is not his servant but the other Dromio, whence arises a first chain of misunderstandings. This exchange points to the decoding of irony and joke: it is possible to speak impolitely, impertinently, jokingly, but it is not always possible to know, as in this case, if what is heard is said in joke or is true. For a correct understanding of one or the other, a sympathy is needed which must in any case be understood and reciprocated. In other words, a silent communicative pact must be made whereby both speakers decide whether they are joking or speaking seriously; if this pact is not respected, the communication lacks a common channel and produces misunderstandings. A further supposition or deduction is that communication may break down through a sudden onslaught of madness in one of the two, or that the misunderstanding is put down to magic or the surreal. This is how Antipholus of Syracuse takes the situation; unable to decipher what has happened, he decides to flee the witchcraft of Ephesus as quickly as possible. The equivalence with A Midsummer Night’s Dream lies exactly in this: they all wonder whether they are dreaming or awake. The breaking point is somewhat delayed, indeed over-delayed. The unravelling starts when a superfluous Doctor Pinch comes onto the scene, wanting to cure a perfectly healthy Antipholus from Ephesus. Pandemonium results, since each character has a wrong idea of what is happening, and because as soon as the two from Ephesus leave the scene, the two from Syracuse enter and are taken for the escaping Ephesians. The end of Act IV sees the two from Ephesus arrested for theft, fraud and bankruptcy, and as men possessed in need of an exorcist. The two from Syracuse, off stage, are ready to set sail. As often in Shakespeare after this play, the whole of Act V savours of calculated comic suspense and prolongs the ordeal; the play appears to have no intention of channelling towards an outcome apparently within

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easy reach. As I have said, the denouement is automatic when the twins, masters and servants, all appear on the stage at once in the flesh and the homonymies are explained. Actually the errors and their comedy are likely to be repeated unless something is done to provide distinguishing signs of some sort, in order to avoid all the inconvenience caused by homonymy. § 19. ‘The Taming of the Shrew’* The Taming of the Shrew,5 though a short or semi-short play, is the only Shakespearean work to be constructed in six, not five, dramaturgic units: a substantial separate ‘prologue’ (qualified as an Induction) is in two scenes and could constitute a first act. So the story of the taming of the shrew is theatre within theatre, that is a play recited for a personage introduced in this prologue, extraneous to its content; yet it goes forward on its own without apparent connections with the frame. Every theatre within the theatre usually forms a circumscribed subsidiary episode (as in *

H. D. Sykes, The Authorship of ‘The Taming of a Shrew’, ‘The Famous Victories of Henry V’, and the Additions to Marlowe’s ‘Faustus’, Folcroft, PA 1977; G. Holderness, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Manchester 1989, 1991; J. H. Brunvand, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’: A Comparative Study of Oral and Literary Versions, New York 1990; ‘The Taming of the Shrew’: Texts and Contexts, ed. F. E. Dolan, London and Basingstoke 1996; ‘The Taming of the Shrew’: dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1997; Readings on ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, ed. L. Marvel, San Diego, CA 2000; ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, ed. M. Wynne-Davis, London 2001; ‘The Taming of the Shrew’: Critical Essays, ed. D. E. Aspinall, New York 2002; M. J. Kidnie, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Basingstoke 2006.

5

The play is not wholly attributed to Shakespeare, and its second plot (of Bianca and her suitors) is based on Ariosto’s Suppositi, either in the original or translated by George Gascoigne. The textual question is highly intricate. The text handed down is the one in the 1623 Folio, but a ‘bad’ quarto exists from 1594, and entitled to ‘a’, not ‘the’ shrew. Attributed by some to Marlowe, this text may be rightly considered an independent play, perhaps successive to a lost first version by Shakespeare himself. In this 1594 quarto the frame does not fade out and is recalled during the performance and at the end. Numerous hints of the plot of The Taming of the Shrew have been found in many sources, but it is doubtful that Shakespeare could have consulted all of them.

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Hamlet, which is here reversed in advance), since the frame threatens to rival the play which is embedded in it and it sketches its own plot, that of the drunken English tinker Christopher Sly who is brusquely driven off by the alehouse hostess and falls to the ground. A hunter trips over him, then sets up a prank: he makes the tinker believe that he is a rich man waking up at the end of a long period of amnesia to receive the gift and entertainment of the play of the taming of the shrew, after being overwhelmed by attention from false pages and servants. More than elsewhere, compositional and textual events are responsible for the fact that this frame, destined to have a certain amplitude, dwindles and fades out on the way, and lacks the expected curtain call. Shakespearean in the making, the plot orchestrated in the second story concerns the precocious feminism of women in search of husbands; they ask for self-determination but are forced to bow to the historical and ontological supremacy, used and abused, of men. For this very reason The Taming of the Shrew is also the satire of the male shrew, Petruchio, who shows off in inane, over-stated poses and is the target of disapproval. However, this second story, which becomes the main one, is less vivid and natural, and resolved in unnecessarily excessive disguises and in dialogic sketches designed to rouse laughter at the brilliance of the insults, neologisms, quotations from Italian and Spanish, and the gratuitous taste for the blunder and the listing of synonyms. The characters are a medley from Plautus’s comedy and the commedia dell’arte, with Biondello as the Harlequin servant, Gremio as a pantalone, and Grumio as the typical caricature who gets everything wrong. The result is therefore a tissue of isolated exploits, hilarious in their high-sounding, over-the-top epithets, and cleverly invented comic situations.6 In spite of all efforts, the links between the Sly frame and the play of the tamed shrew are forced and flighty. Is the play offered to Sly by the ham actors connected to the piece in a chiastic way? Is the tamed Sly the counterpart of Katherina, in other words, and is the theme that of the dethroning of marital caprice and oppression? Unquestionably male and female disguises and the pranks played on the 6

An example of a mere chain of isolated signifiers is Grumio’s list of the equine diseases afflicting Petruchio’s horse, or Biondello’s description of the groom: a discharge of words that make up an anthological cameo thanks to their sound, strangeness and improbability.

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gullible are foretold. The page in the frame, who plays the part of Sly’s wife, is a tamed shrew, addressing him mellifluously and humbly. The function of the frame is actually, if anything, a contrast, and it is a branchless trunk, pure and flavoursome English regional comedy. Sly is the plebeian with healthy, suspicious attitudes who falls for the prank while maintaining an iota of incredulity and good sense, and he remains attached to his habits and his homely pleasures. He is the common Englishman who doesn’t even bother to hide his sexual urges. The dramaturgic aesthetic underlying the performance of the play is that pleasure and identification stop time and shut out the world. And drama, any drama that entertains, cures melancholy and anxiety. It is a Shakespearean piece of self-irony that, in the one single return or resurfacing of the frame, Sly is found asleep, as if the play were boring or sleep-inducing. 2. In The Taming of the Shrew (a sub-species of the Italian Veneto plays, and the least euphuistic of our quintet) the historical picture fades into imprecision and conventionality. The inner play is set entirely in Padua, the university city and cradle of culture attracting young academics from all over the peninsula. Immediately on arrival there, these young men can go wild and become spendthrifts or heirs in search of their fortune. Some seek knowledge, others seek how to exploit their heritage. We glimpse signs of the rise of a material or materialistic, pre-capitalist culture, with match-making among the rich to consolidate and increase their income. Love is disinterested only in Lucentio, the young, inexperienced student from Pisa who speaks the ingenuous language of passion; Petruchio, on the other hand, is anything but disinterested. A calmly cynical Baptista has his daughter’s suitors recite the list of their possessions so he can give her in marriage to the richest suitor. Although lacking the usual figures of political authority, the urban space is that of the independent city-states like Ephesus and Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors.7 Shrewishness is a behavioural 7

It is no chance that the same law is in force in Padua against anyone from Mantua as that already seen in Ephesus against anyone from Syracuse. The comedy of errors comes to a head when Lucentio’s real father finds himself with a ‘Pedant’ who has been instructed to take his place, and the pedant is such a good actor that the real father is unable to convince anyone of his own identity, and risks being hauled off to prison.

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reaction studied by Shakespeare throughout the whole of his theatre, at the beginning above all. Bianca is remissive and bows in silence to her father’s imposition, while Katherina rebels. In her we see a foreshadowing of that precocious childish rebellion especially of Victorian girls – the historical phase with the highest level of psychic repression – as immortalized and exorcised in many mid-nineteenth-century novels (those featuring for example Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver), where distress caused by unbearable family or parental constraints is expressed and vented in aggressiveness, insult, caprice, self-hurt or even self-injury. Not without reason, in jest or perhaps in truth, Katherina is ‘Kate the curst’ to be exorcised. In dramatic terms, the underlying causes of Petruchio’s male shrewishness are unknown, a state necessary to enable Katherina to overcome her psychic block. The ‘cure’ depends on the pedagogical principle that it is more profitable to use gentleness than force with the obstinate and the intractable. In the first clash, the tussle is verbal rather than physical, with the winner standing firm against the other. At the end of the scene Katherina resorts to violence to see if Petruchio is, as he declares, really enough of a gentleman to bear her blows without reacting; as promised he praises her, finding her gentle and harmless. But then the presumed healer falls prey to the disease he has cured. The only really disturbing moment is in the epilogue and concerns the meaning of the therapy used by Petruchio. At the banquet in Lucentio’s house the three bridegrooms make a bet as to which of their wives is more obedient. Both Bianca and the widow whom Ortensio has married invent excuses to avoid hurrying to obey their husbands’ call. Katherina alone promptly complies, which everyone hails as a miracle. She brings the play to a close with a sermon to the other two wives, giving a list of the merits of the perfect wife: perfectly submissive, therefore giving up any womanly dignity and independence. This sermon is as full of precepts as St Paul’s epistles, echoing all future male chauvinism, and in particular Ruskin’s catechism in Sesame and Lilies.8 Is this speech

8

The correlation between divine and human love is perfect, with human love being the reflection, and the submission of the vassal to his prince, as in medieval cosmology and ontology. Here and there is a foreshadowing of Hopkins’s political theory

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or sermon hypocritical, false, disconsolately sarcastic, or is it spoken out of obedience without belief and therefore perforce (times were not ready for a feminist revolt)? To what extent does Shakespeare recognize himself in it and approve it? Or is it an ironic rebuttal from one who always supported the hierarchy, an ideologist on the side of order, harmony and a strong, firm government? 3. I will now highlight the dense web of intertextual implications hidden in this so-called minor play. In the frame the lord returning from the hunt plays a trick on Sly, a Falstaff type yet more uncouth and vulgar; like Hal, this lord invents a prank at his expense. In itself, the second play, or rather the first, by which I mean the story of the taming of the shrew and its performance, looks ahead to the actors’ performance in Hamlet. Naturally the register is here burlesque whereas in Hamlet it is tragicgrotesque. The analogy is enhanced by the fact that the lord, like Hamlet, gives exact orders that the performance is to be ‘a success’: a success as a joke here, whereas Hamlet’s aim is that the performance upset and unmask his uncle. Then these foretastes pass to another character no longer in the frame, to Petruchio himself. In Act III, he comes on stage late for his wedding ceremony, wearing a picturesque outfit classed as a madman’s, thus arousing the same amazement as the perturbed Hamlet in his drama. The bystanders’ comment on Petruchio is that there is some ‘method’ in the ‘mad’ attire. In addition, Bianca’s three suitors compete among themselves, magnifying the dowry and their own virtues like Portia’s three suitors in The Merchant of Venice. As the play develops, such presages notably increase: in the light of what happens after the marriage, it is Petruchio who becomes the real shrew, indeed he is even defined a ‘shrew’ – commentators inform us that the term may be applied to either sex. Petruchio thus having become shrewish, this term is possibly yet another new label for Hamlet, and an alternative definition. To which I add that line 195 of IV.1, ‘This is a way to kill a wife with kindness’, was later used as the title of Thomas Heywood’s best-known play. Petruchio does with Katherina exactly what Hamlet does with Polonius when he says that the moon is the sun. In Acts IV and as expounded in his Liverpool sermons (Volume 6, § 202.6) where the disobedience of the couple in Eden is the far from secret model of all political rebellions.

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V the play resembles a study or a grotesque digression on madness, since Vincentio – the real Vincentio – is in fact taken for a madman, whereby the false Vincentio appears to everyone to be the real one since there is no-one who can expose him. The insinuation is that truth is not truth in an absolute sense but is only truth as long as most people affirm and guarantee it to be true, without any possibility of it being definitively ascertained. For an instant the play finds itself in an epistemological stalemate, but it emerges from it, since this is after all a comedy, and Shakespeare desists. § 20. ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ Shakespeare had a special predilection for foursome set-ups. In his plots he often plays with a combinations of four members preferably divided into two couples. Linking up with The Comedy of Errors in type, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (probably performed by 1593, published in 1623), two couples of lovers are separated, thus setting in motion a chiasmus in the form of intersecting attractions and repulsions. These new combinations of the foursome do not come about through witchery as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but through weakness of will, actually on the part of only one member of the group. For this reason The Two Gentlemen of Verona first of all brings to life a moral fable on love and the act of falling in love. Love may well be an ephemeral flame of the senses set alight capriciously yet irresistibly through a glance: as the comedy states, ‘one nail by strength drives out another’ (II.4.189), and a passion just declared to be eternal is replaced by a successive one, and a falling in love by a falling out of love and another falling in love. But chaste, Platonic love, thus an everlasting idea and reality, triumphs over this cynical blind law.9 In this far-sighted play, Shakespeare’s harrowing worry over the nature of the sexual drive arises and looms large: but at the last minute the harmony of the person is retrieved and re-established through a sudden miracle, as if the board had been wiped clean. Beside this theme, we have the (at least transitory) idealization of a life lived in isolation far from humankind, hence the criticism of community life. Again, the identikit of a real gentleman is defined. The 9

An image and quotation recurring twice, however bitterly ironic, is that of the love of Hero and Leander.

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Two Gentlemen of Verona, therefore, is a play of crucial transition or, more precisely, germination, closing for the moment on a note of optimism and the happy ending proper to comedy. 2. If this is the case, the numerous connections and inevitable foreshadowings of successive plays should come as no surprise. I have mentioned A Midsummer Night’s Dream; but The Tempest is also distantly heralded in some of its important aspects. From Verona Valentine takes ship for Milan from where Prospero will come; he becomes an antecedent or younger brother of him. An out-and-out rascal who acts as messenger-boy, as lively as the boatswain in The Tempest, will not be allowed to die in a shipwreck. Julia’s house is a sort of unidentified Belmont in The Merchant of Venice, where, with her sharp-witted waiting-woman, she is wondering to which suitor she should give her hand, hiding her love for Proteus. The rings are pledges yet they become things of no value, and as in the Merchant they can be given away; when this happens they are proof of broken faith. In the presence of a disguised Julia, Proteus incautiously gives her a ring (believing her to be a him), the very same received from Julia as a pledge, and asks her to take it to Silvia. Silvia in turn accepts the more substantial love of the rich vain fop Thurio, and with Valentine plots an elopement without the knowledge of her father. The adventures of the foursome of lovers are interspersed with periodical entrances of two secondary roles, Speed and Launce, pages and servants of the two male leads, and they are not only superfluous doublings as regards the plot, but also delaying expedients. The audience is the target of their tirades serving as interludes.10 They are among those Shakespearean characters always asking to be paid, trying to make ends meet, somehow managing to survive, leading some sort of life. They are so English that they seem prototypes of Dickensian characters, as when Sam Weller and his father talk of their love affairs, gross, coarse and vulgar, yet real and ingenuous. Uneducated, they are neither Plautine caricatures nor Harlequins but just typically English in their wit based on phonetic ambiguity and subtle wordplay, whether sophisticated or unrefined. Launce the clown exhibits the additional curiosity of his humanized 10

Launce speaks in prose and the separation between prose and verse more or less follows the difference in origin, class and rank of the characters.

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dog, on which and with which he soliloquizes endlessly in amusingly colourful outbursts. In its first and major plot the play dissimulates a pessimistic vision of human affairs, and illustrates the law that love that can ruin even what is most authentic and solid in interpersonal relations, such as male friendships.11 There is also an underlying determinist vision of existence, so that life mislays its focal points, such as the ability to make decisions. Terms belonging to the semantic area of change and metamorphosis have a high recurrence: man spins, and in spinning his inclinations change. Even too pointedly is the name Proteus motivated with a mythological reference to the changeability and falsity of the god. The servants have more common sense and greater detachment than their masters, and can relativize the passion that blinds them. Even Lucetta, Julia’s waiting-woman, has her own little light – her name too is semantic – and while playing along she dissuades her mistress from too much enthusiasm for her budding passion. In the first moves of the chess game, Proteus loves Julia happily and determinedly, or so it appears; meanwhile Valentine seeks experience through travel and – even satirical and sarcastic like Benedick – he is contemptuous of love as madness that drives a man out of his mind. Proteus loves Julia but for the moment she hesitates and will not say yes. She dillydallies. At the start of Act II, Valentine has undergone a sea change, becoming like Proteus; instead of being immune he has fallen into the fray and is in love with Silvia, the daughter of the Duke of Milan, and she in turn loves him. But the price to be paid is to appear an inane, stultified servant repeating mechanical formulae, and an awkward suitor. Valentine sounds like a Stilnovo slave of Love and the woman is the Domina who thus, slaves, designates her servants. Proteus later arrives in Milan from Verona, accredited as a wise, mature gentleman, and is assigned to court diplomacy in that duchy. Valentine was wise and is now as mad as much as Proteus, mad and intoxicated, has now become more controlled and realistic, to the point of turning into an astute plotter. The fourth stage will produce a

11

Shakespeare revisited classical texts on male friendship until Euphues, including the precedent of a play by Anthony Munday which was in turn based on Il Fedele by the Italian Luigi Pasqualigo.

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new metamorphic remix. Valentine turns wise again and adopts that form of Shakespearean wisdom which is the refusal of a corrupt world, therefore also the nonsense of mad love. Proteus now takes on something of Iago, and becomes an informer yet does not want to appear as such. In this way he sets about stealing Silvia from Valentine and Thurio; a false perjurer, he is aware of his own villainy but he gives way to it. Meanwhile, the disguised Julia cannot resist the temptation to go to Milan to her faithful Proteus, as she believes. The villain or Machiavellian scoundrel decides that the duke’s favour and the danger to his life take priority over the obligations of friendship; so he reveals his friend’s plan to elope with Silvia. Valentine is still a prey to lethargy and fails to understand the cunning of the duke, who convinces him to reveal the imminent plan. Julia makes a move too frequently used in future plays: in the last lines she becomes the deus ex machina in disguise, here a woman dressed as a male pilgrim who instead of going into the wilderness passes from one city to another. In Act IV she loves the man who loves her not, and Proteus longs for a woman who does not care for his love. ‘’Tis a pity love should be so contrary’. 3. It is in Act IV, and from there to the end, that The Two Gentlemen of Verona increases its foresight. Two objectives are focalized, the definition of the gentleman and the corruption in community life and the political system. As in the later Bildungsroman, Valentine is the young man sent out into the world to gain experience, contrasting with the initially sedentary life of Proteus. Like Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew, or later Laertes in Hamlet, the Shakespearean gentleman from Verona goes forth into the world, attends university, joins the navy. Love in its passionate sense is almost disqualified and taken by him to be a force that prevents any commitment to the road leading to perfection. In reality the Renaissance model of the gentleman is very similar to that of the medieval knight, since his primary merit is constancy in love. Sir Eglamour is one such, and is praised for having lost yet always venerated his beloved, and he proves it by being ready to accompany Silvia through danger to Valentine. He is the opposite of Proteus the faithless, who with the perverse excuse of being Thurio’s ambassador tries to steal Silvia from him. Obviously the genuine knight never hurts a hair of the head of the lady whom he escorts. This episode of Act IV echoes with mock-heroic overtones worthy of Ariosto. The paradox

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is therefore that Shakespeare places at the head of the values of a gentleman constancy in love and noble purity of sentiment. Not a gentleman but a villain is he who makes an attempt on virginity before marriage: ‘were man / But constant, he were perfect’. Undisciplined impulse is the fault that inspires all future sins. Valentine’s speech in Act III is misogynous because he blames women for their vanity and coquetry in refusing in order to provoke, declaring them all to be ready to give in to flattery and kind words; vice versa the play attributes a triumphant victory to female rectitude in two set portraits. The first is that of ever faithful Julia who is at first hesitant, then passionate and steady in wanting to reawaken and revitalize her first and only love. The second is that of the steadfast, determined Silvia who refuses Proteus and tells him the moral of real love. The sketch of a gentleman is accompanied by that of a gentlewoman, such as Silvia, the perfect lady. The two women act together out of instantaneous, reciprocal honour and respect, coalescing against the villain Proteus. 4. The Veneto region, providing Shakespeare with three of his backdrops, is here a stylized Veneto, even less concrete and verifiable than in The Taming of the Shrew, and absorbed and made anonymous in its rigid geometry. The pendulum swings from Verona to a Milanese duchy, yet between the two imagined and shadowy towns there is a forest. Exiled from Milan, Valentine returns to Verona but falls into the hands of a band of outlaws who rob rich travellers. As often happens in Shakespeare, bandits and victims get talking and Valentine is at once elected their head. The outlaws are themselves gentlemen who have been exiled for faults similar to Valentine’s. Being a good linguist, he is accepted as their interpreter. Space is symbolic, since here more than elsewhere the topical, historical and geographical references and even place-names are either missing or intentionally generic. The two acts set in the forest are themselves exceptional foreshadowings of the Shakespearean theme of disgust for associated life and of the desire to take refuge in some inhospitable wilderness (in the text ‘shadowy desert’ and ‘flourishing peopled towns’) where, as I shall show further on, the refugee achieves a form of self-awareness and/or closes with the associated world, or more precisely recharges himself to return with other prospects, avenged and compensated. Already in this play, the symbolic geography hinges intentionally on the opposition between the duchy, that is, the court, and the

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forest, wood or wilderness; and on law against outlaw, evolved life against cave life. The second terms have a positive sign with respect to the first ones. Valentine in allying himself with the ‘outlaws’ is one of the first Shakespearean cavemen, but the outlaw is an outlaw only with respect to an iniquitous law from the clutches of which he has escaped in bitterness. He has therefore fled towards a real jurisdiction of honour, where the struggle is above all against oppression, corruption and iniquity. In the woodland ‘cave’ we therefore see a utopian form of community life that is just and equal. Valentine is the fugitive and bandit as Edgar, Lear, Gloucester, Kent, Timon, Belarius will be.12 With one of those amazing, anachronistic overlaps so common in Shakespeare, this group of honest robbers is practically modelled on Robin Hood’s band. And here all the irony of the title shines forth, since the woodland robbers define themselves ‘gentlemen’ attributing to themselves that label in its most authentic meaning, which is clearly gainsaid by the courtiers, Proteus at their head.13 The qualifications for this category seem to be a pleasing aspect and a knowledge of languages; such ‘small crimes’ as murders carried out in obedience to ‘the fury of ungovern’d youth’ can easily be passed over. The death sentence in this kind of micro-society is tolerated, so the progress of society passes through its regress, or so it appears. However, there is a principle of internal chivalry, since poor travellers and women are not attacked.14 In this play, the Duke of Milan is unusually destitute of political authority; he is only a family tyrant who takes it upon himself to choose his daughter’s husband and picks on the richest, most unlovable suitor. Being his daughter’s father and master, he has imprisoned

12 13 14

Silvia here shows, almost with a counter-demonstration, that one may be honest and upright even within an evolved, corrupt society, and she refuses Thurio as well as Proteus. And here we also have a distant anticipation of The Tempest: these unorganized Calibans ask the ‘handsome’ Valentine to become their lord and captain, in fact their king. One fascinatingly witty outcome of this theme is Launce’s monologue in the fourth scene of Act IV: in this, the clown sketches the identikit of a canine gentleman, since he has a dog who is no gentleman; still untrained, it once mortified a whole company of gentlemanly dogs by urinating incontinently under the table, and was sent out!

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Silvia in a tower. At the end, however, he exercises his authority and agrees to pardon the reformed outlaws and allows them back into the duchy, a measure that fits the play’s plan. Valentine is a miniature Prospero; behind the scenes he sees those who have harmed him near at hand and in his power. Proteus is like Antonio, his brother, for Prospero. But in neither is vengeance accomplished, and it is Valentine himself, the unblemished preux chevalier who comes out of his passivity when his beloved is about to be raped. The miraculous epilogue is even hurried, with a revival of mushy feelings that sounds false and unconvincing. All are redeemed, or to be more precise, all the really chivalrous and gentlemanly are redeemed, and all the false ones prove that they are in fact false, with countless changes of heart. § 21. ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ * Unique and unrepeated in Shakespeare’s canon is Love’s Labour’s Lost15 (staged in 1595, printed in a good quarto with Shakespeare’s name on the frontispiece in 1598), although it takes to exasperation and paroxysm an idea *

F. A. Yates, A Study of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Cambridge 1936, Norwood 1976; L. L. Schuecking, op. cit. in the bibliography for Richard III; W. C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Princeton, NJ 1976; L. A. Montrose, ‘Curious-knotted garden’: The Form, Themes and Contexts of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Salzburg 1977; ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’: Critical Essays, ed. F. H. Londré, New York and London 2001.

15

The apostrophe in Labour’s is enigmatic or ambiguous; as well as being the plural of ‘Labour’, it might mean ‘Labour is’, thus making the title ‘The labour of love is lost’. According to some, this title was taken from a little book for learning Italian, where it stated ‘sarebbe fatica sprecata parlare dell’amore’ [‘it would be labour lost to speak of love’]. Yates 1936 argued that the comedy was a coded attack on the School of Night headed by Ralegh (Volume I, § 66.2 and n. 1), and that in an extension or perhaps an anticipation of the ‘war of the theatres’, Shakespeare meant to attack that hare-brained band and in particular contemporaries such as Florio, Chapman, Nashe or Gabriel Harvey. There is also a political thread on the events of the French reign in Navarre, with Henry IV who was first a Huguenot aided by the English and then turned Catholic (Shakespeare renames him Ferdinand, but only in the list of personages). L. Innocenti’s introduction to her edn of the play (Roma 2014) throws light

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and a dramatic construction recurrent or habitual in Shakespeare’s comedies. The relations between the main plot and the subplot are altered; the scenes and incidental sketches pivoting on linguistic ambiguities, quid pro quos and blunders, gradually gain greater space and are overly protracted, so that in the end internal lack of proportion reigns on almost all fronts. The first three acts, relatively short, are followed by the second two, which are interminable precisely because of the above mentioned characteristics. And there is also a clear discrepancy between the instances of balanced, economical language that speedily leads the plot forward, and the witticisms, gags and linguistic and puzzle-like play that delay it. The theme common to both plots may be inconstancy, weakness and immaturity, which is largely human but mainly male. The four lords from Navarre are in fact unable to respect a solemn oath to dedicate themselves to a life of study without frequenting the world and women for three years. Such unrealistic ‘grammarians’ of abstinence fire up with love, but with a love this time without the furious crescendo of passion: it is the courtly, chivalrous love in its most maudlin, ritual version, properly speaking the love of love itself. The implicit criticism is however still directed at a vision of a man which banishes passion, even this bloodless passion. Breaking their oath, the four protagonists realize just how untoward and unnatural that oath was. The focal point is however elsewhere, and the real protagonist is language and dramatic language. Love’s Labour’s Lost turns on the functions of language, in one case language as a communicative system created to be misleading rather than to facilitate understanding, a case proved ad abundantiam and with secret delight; in the other case, language as an ornamental function and an end in itself. If this is so, Love’s Labour’s Lost is a metadramatic and metalinguistic entertainment, and the most sumptuous of the great ‘banquets of languages’ that Shakespeare’s plays basically always are (although the acute Moth, the page, adds that the pedants have only taken away the crumbs). Their aim is to stage verbal competitions by bringing together eccentric, often inconclusive characters, puppets without full-blooded or

on references in the title to the labours of Hercules and on the allusions implied in the names of Armado and Marcadé.

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even probable life and endowed with an extravagant way of speaking. The word splits from the matter it vehicles; the signifier thrives luxuriantly over minimal signifieds. Shakespeare pokes fun at bombast, pedantry and gratuitous wit. But he risks dying from the sword with which he lives. Yet the fascination of this work was to infect many future parodists. The Restoration theatre came immediately in its wake, with lines set out in elegant rhymes and affected, concettist persiflage: it is the founding play, the first in the category. Also, Love’s Labour’s Lost is the longest preview of the ‘fantastic’ in the sense of a motley group of brainless, confused, eccentric caricatures, sketches, larvae, ectoplasms. Here many everlasting stereotypes are launched on which western literature hinges: the miles or the knight from Ariosto or a Don Quixote in time of peace (Armado is a nomen omen) with his Sancho; the pedant with his linguistic over-refinement and preposterous ingenuousness. These silhouettes will be appropriated by Sterne, Smollett, Dickens, Meredith and Joyce. Shakespeare purposely calls them onto the stage and lets them have full rein: sooner or later the requirements of the dramatic action will assert themselves, but preceded by prologues and quarrels in which an associative demon is unchained that seems to look ahead to Finnegans Wake.16 2. The play is the umpteenth example of the foursome construction: the King of Navarre and his three lords on one side, the Princess of France with three ladies-in-waiting on the other. But the foreseeable minuet or competition of cunning and courting that may be expected is almost suffocated in its outline by the noisy entrances on stage of a ramshackle, multicoloured, varied gang of assorted characters with names that augur well: two figures of pedants with a page, an equally pedantic priest, an idiotic policeman, a country girl, a country yokel. Berowne, one of the king’s three noble friends, reads the statutory oath and warns that its terms are too severe and unachievable; he takes the oath, but he will be forced in the end to agree, in a passionate outburst, on the power of a Stilnovo type of Love, a Promethean flame bringing good to humanity, and on the enlivening 16

Joyce may have had in mind and altered the ‘sin’ that Costard commits in the play, similar to Earwicker’s Eden-type crime in the park: he seduced and made pregnant a peasant girl or a milkmaid, offending against the King of Navarre’s edict.

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action of woman and of wifely beauty, perceived through the eye of the observer and in the eyes of the woman who is observed. The success of the plot about the lords of Navarre and the Princess of France with her ladies is achieved in the fine and ironical characterization of a fabled or surreal court. The spectator and the reader are immediately aware of this kind of fantastic game. The love which the four lords dispute and philosophize about induces torpor, inertia, melancholy, inconsistency, absent-mindedness. Whoever is thus afflicted composes mawkish sonnets, sings hyperbolic serenades and conceited madrigals. This is no furious, uncontrollable, activist passion – it renders its victims powerless and lackadaisical. The four lords have brought about a culpable split between body and mind, making an impulse involving the whole human being simply cerebral. A healthy, Lawrence-type Eros is experienced only by the vulgar, yet in this imaginary dispensation the naïve love affairs of the clown Costard and the country girl Jaquenetta are forbidden and punished. The Bildung sets in at the end of the scene in which none of the four hypocritical noblemen wants to be the first to admit he is in love and therefore has broken his oath. Berowne climbs a tree from which he hears the king proclaim in verse his love for the Princess even though he drops the sonnet to the ground, ashamed of his failure. Amid the sarcastic comments of Berowne and the commiserations of the king, Longaville too reads his sonnet dedicated to Maria and set out as a metaphor of ‘rhetoric’. It is then Dumain’s turn to recite his verses for Katharine. The king emerges from his hiding place and exposes the two noblemen, but Berowne also comes down from his tree to ‘whip hypocrisy’. Then he too is unmasked and forced to confess his devoted passion for Rosaline, in lines overflowing with those same hyperbolic metaphors he has been criticizing. In a long speech Berowne argues that he and the others were perjurers when they took that oath, since they betrayed the law of youth and the great inspiration coming from the female universe.17 17

Whoever takes the trouble to search for Shakespeare’s alter egos in his plays points to Berowne as the author of the sonnets, dealing with a ‘dark lady’ who is Rosaline and brings him into line and treats him sadistically. But as in sonnets from 127 to 153, Berowne is verbally committed to proving to his companions, who are teasing him, that ‘black is fair’.

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3. Periodic verbal skirmishes take place between the components of the subplot but more often between a few of these and others from the main plot. In both cases friction is caused, the results of which are chains of quips that are not tested and parsimoniously dosed by the dramatist, but follow on with inexhaustible enjoyment and brilliant ingenuity up to, and even over, the limit of dramatic plausibility. It is sufficient to point out that the figure of the pedant has at least three hypostases: Don Armado, the decommissioned soldier and traveller, a tight-rope walker in refined, Latinate epithets and tripled if not quadrupled adjectives; Holofernes the schoolmaster; and the curate Sir Nathaniel. Such skirmishes come from well-tried misunderstandings common in everyday life and in the comic repertoire, and are easy to list. Costard for example mangles the expression ‘ad unguem’ so it becomes ‘ad dunghill’; again, since he knows no Latin, he makes ‘haud credo’ into ‘old grey doe’. In the second scene of Act I Armado and his page Moth wonder at length on the use of certain apparently ornamental, gratuitous epithets, so they study the metaphorical and figurative mechanism of dramatic style. Moth demonstrates to Armado the difference between ‘three years’ as a term and as a period that has effectively passed by. Further dialogic sketches pivot on the cavil, the confusion between abstract and concrete, the exhilarating variations in pronunciation, and on the spelling and etymology of words. After the unfortunate parade of the four lovers who present themselves to the ladies disguised as Muscovites, Act V closes with an intentionally awkward recital that is repeatedly interrupted by the most varied and impertinent examples of wordplay from the improvised actors. Berowne pronounces the closing speech and makes full disavowal of the pedantic vocabulary of love, and promises to express himself in simple, sober language for the future. Yet he is forced to undergo one further correction, since he formulates this resolution with a residue of pedantic language. His skilful, witty speech is itself an unsuccessful rhetorical exploit. It is the princess who simulates absurd sadism: the king should take himself off to a hermitage and stay there a year, since he fell in love too suddenly and his oath was broken much too soon. Berowne too will have to spend a year at the bedsides of the sick, cheering them up with his words without smiling, before he wins Rosaline.

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§ 22. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’* There are two dei ex machina in A Midsummer Night’s Dream18 (staged in 1595, printed in 1600): Theseus, the duke of Athens, and Oberon, the king of the fairies, one acting in the mythological sphere, albeit a mythology touched by anachronisms and estrangements, the other directly in the sphere of dreams and fantasy. The resulting inference is that everything happening in the wood and also beyond is dreamt – today we would say a virtual event. The conflict arising is not only between diurnal and nocturnal, between solar and lunar, but also between the light of civilization and the darkness of the primitive. However, that is not quite right, since roles and values may intertwine or intersect, and opposites may change place. In the eyes of its scholars, therefore, the comedy has seemed paradigmatic, and useful to verify one of the supporting concepts of late Renaissance Baroque in England, if not its very essence, discordia concors. From the continental Renaissance English sixteenth-century culture took the mirror-like, oppositional view of the cosmos. While in the Middles Ages and in the early Renaissance this view is expressed in the cult of harmony, of similitude and of allegory, in the Baroque the order of correspondences fractures *

F. Sidgwick, The Sources and Analogues of ‘A Midsummer-Night’s Dream’, London 1908; D. P. Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, New Haven, CT and London 1966; M. Pagnini, Shakespeare e il paradigma della specularità. Lettura di due campioni: ‘King Lear’ e ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Pisa 1976; D. C. Perkins and I. Huke, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: Literature, Revision, Notes and Examples, Walton-on-Thames 1981; Shakespeare: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: A Casebook, ed. A. Price, London 1983; R. Warren, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: Text and Performance, London 1983; ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1991; D. Diamanti, Il saggio e il folletto: aspetti della tradizione italiana in ‘A Midsummer-Night’s Dream’, Pisa 1992; ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, ed. R. Dutton, Basingstoke 1996; ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: Critical Essays, ed. D. Kehler, New York and London 1998; J. H. Blits, The Soul of Athens: Shakespeare: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Lanham, MD and Oxford 2003.

18

Unheeded, Praz, in Storia della letteratura inglese, cit., 146, considered the source or rather the dominant atmosphere to be that of Ariosto (‘an affinity of spirit […] more profound than in any other work in English literature’), in his opinion much superior to the echoes of the Faerie Queene.

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and breaks apart, with allegory giving place to metaphor and the mirror image becoming obsessive. This last image and its principle are apparent both in the impeccable geometry of composition – which connects and relates the formal levels, as here in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and in the imbrication of content and form, that is the combination of contraries. The Baroque mirror thus deforms and operates a continuous overturning of what it reflects. The spectators at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are not only Theseus and Hippolyta but also each later audience; in the wake of a topos, Shakespeare compares the theatre to the world and the theatre is the mirror of the world, and men are the substance of which dreams are made.19 2. The frame of the play is Athens, its duke and synecdoche is Theseus. Athens is the synonym of reason, enlightenment and human and civil progress. But Theseus and therefore Athens are a discordia concors since the primacy of reason is tempered by fantasy, rigour by tolerance, and order is at last re-established from a disorder which is not destruction but re-creation. The triggering public event in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the state marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, after which these two august personages disappear. Theseus has meanwhile exercised his Solomonic function as governor and judge. In the parody of a court drama, he comes on stage at the outset and at the close as guardian of order, while, within the frame, chaos breaks out but is in the end overcome. The opening is mainly of a juridical nature: looking forward to his first night of marriage with Hippolyta, Theseus is abruptly presented with a quarrel to be solved. In his role as judge, he will show himself to be tolerant and impartial, yet he has just recalled that he won Hippolyta with his sword, that is by constraining and disarming her; and Egeus immediately places before him a similar case, to which he gives an opposite verdict.20 This is an anticipation of Othello, with a father appealing to a higher judicial body, as does Brabantio who comes before the Duke of Venice to report that his daughter has been bewitched by a 19 Pagnini 1976, 116. 20 A second, close apparition: Egeus is like the Duke of Milan in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; he stops his daughter, like Hermia or Helena disputed at the time by two suitors, from loving Valentine. Similarly, Shakespeare in these first surreal plays invents inhumane laws that are denounced by the person obliged to implement them, who however applies them humanely.

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suitor’s spell when he had promised her to another man. It is at once made clear that this is a case of alleged spell, although invented and imaginary. Athenian law is similar to Venetian law, and the daughter must obey her father; in Athens as in Venice the woman is like a liquid ‘form in wax’ on which the father leaves his mark (the parallelism is underlined by the fact that neither Desdemona nor Hermia have a mother). The Roderigo of the situation is Demetrius, with the support of Egeus-Brabantio. A father claims absolute love and devotion from his daughter who wants to make her own decisions, and Athens, the cradle of culture – and expressly not Sparta – sentences to death or exile the woman who refuses to accept her father’s choices: a law that punishes a virtue, freedom of choice. A third possibility reveals the anachronisms: if Hermia resists, she must become a nun in a convent. There is no doubt that Shakespeare himself unashamedly appears from behind the scenes to deplore the inhumanity and incivility of certain legislations, in particular the tyranny of a father over his daughters, of which there are numerous cases in his theatre. Theseus applies double standards and reiterates ‘dura lex, sed lex’, claiming he is unable to change the law. In recalling the precepts of the law, he also reminds Hermia of the renunciation of sexual life imposed by life in a convent: in an understatement he confesses that ‘thrice-blessed’ is the community of Diana’s vestals, yet he regrets on her behalf the sterility to which she would be condemned, and the absence of fleshly joys (with the periphrasis ‘the rose distill’d’, the antithesis of that withering on a ‘virgin thorn’). In convincing Hermia, Theseus praises matrimonial fecundity while yet admiring the renunciation implied by virginity. Compared to the anaemic, statuary Escalus, his counterpart in Romeo and Juliet, he does have a private side. In inaugurating the sense and type of dramatic construction in this opening, an agreed, expected marriage offsets an opposed marriage, Hermia’s, whose father Egeus wishes her to marry Lysander. 3. The four stratifications and the four scenic spaces of A Midsummer Night’s Dream follow one another diatonically and by way of juxtaposition; at the heart of the play they merge and amalgamate, with the quartet of lovers, the artisans and the king and queen of the fairies all on stage together.21 Only Theseus and Hippolyta neither see nor perceive the 21

According to Pagnini 1976, 92, there is a succession or imbrication (or ‘alternative […] “montage”’ and ‘modulation’ [97]) of classic, romantic, plebeian and magic action.

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presence of Oberon and the world of the fairies, and they only venture into the edge of the wood. The move from the ‘real’ into the fantastic occurs when Theseus’s prohibition is violated, and with Hermia and Lysander’s intention to marry secretly, the same stratagem as Romeo and Juliet’s and Jessica and Lorenzo’s. The tour de force of the fantastic architect comes about in the Athenian wood, interweaving the scenarios in unity of place, where all those widely differing and apparently mutually irreconcilable personages wander piétinants sur place and in procession, illustrating the transitory, ephemeral, lunar, therefore unstable character of all things human. Hence time, midsummer, the solstice22 and the full moon – not the place – have the greatest impact on the action. The sprite Puck explains the play as the result of the magic of the spirits during the night as distinct from day, and night is the reign of error and misunderstanding which day, awaited by all, will dissipate. ‘Dream’ indicates the flagrant violation of the logic of time and space; it indicates the overlapping of the ancient history of Athens, indeed of Greek myth, on the later tale of the fairies and above all on the most everyday, prosaic reality, contemporary reality as well, of the gathering of the craftsmen. In Theseus’ words – in the first scene of Act V – imagination and reason come to blows, the former being of the lover, the madman and the poet, who sees the forms of things unknown, he alone, in the universe. Once the woodland enchantment has dissolved, Lysander will realize the hypnosis that has enthralled him, and the faint, unclear light that makes him unable to tell Theseus of the experience: ‘the fierce vexation of a dream’, a simulation of reality, an imagination, an innocent game.23 At the outset, Theseus is impatient to consummate the marriage and Hippolyta replies that four nights ‘will quickly dream away the time’. So where does the dream begin, and how long has dream prevailed over reality? Or is the whole play a dream from the first to the last word? The opening scene comes within the realms of likelihood without being a reliable historical reconstruction; re-invention and anachronism are perceived, and the 22 Actually the action of the play is imagined on Mayday, celebrating the arrival of spring. But see below, n. 31. 23 Bottom too, once free of the enchantment in the second scene of Act IV, intentionally avoids explaining the dream-like adventure he has undergone.

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audience shares the knowledge, aware that this is no exact, illusory account of historical or mythological reality. With Act II the grafting is obvious and no further doubt is possible. The artisans cannot really be Athenians. So it is from here, from the wood and in the wood that the dream starts. We may vaguely imagine, indeed for an instant actually suppose, that all the events are a dream within this semi-dream world of unlikeliness, and that the whole ‘dream’ is a deferral and distraction of Theseus’, to while away the time in tense expectation of the marriage embrace. 4. Oberon’s spite comes across as the malignant destruction of order and of the given harmony, that is of concord, and is the result of caprice. But at heart Oberon is a good sorcerer; he changes his mind and breaks the magic spell he imposed on the spur of the moment, when he realizes that the game is getting out of hand and may go badly wrong. Thus nearly everyone falls under a spell before being disenchanted, and enchantment and antidote are applied in quick succession. At stake is not the safety of individuals, so the danger is not unbridled violence, but madness and psychic imbalance, verging on twentieth-century chaos, and therefore crisis, in interpersonal linguistic communications. That spot in the wood is just a step from the abyss of entropy. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy, then the damage, the Shakespearean moral, human and pathological damage so weighty in the epilogue, is in fact limited: man remains weak and mean, even ignoble; but luckily no corpses or blood are scattered over the stage. Yet the desire to upset everything remains. This demiurgic ability attributed to Oberon in reality masks an endogenous determinism. The threat of cosmic chaos is attenuated in the form of cases of discord between lovers, unsynchronized love stories, mistakes, misunderstandings, stubborn quarrels; yet fear prevails. Seeing such fear looming, the dramatist destroys the nightmare and puts an end to the dream. Even the demiurgic gods themselves, Oberon and Titania, are in thrall to inscrutable natural forces that seek revenge if free will tends towards negative or destructive decisions. Winds have forced contagious fogs to suppurate, and the world lies in a state of ruin and waste24 owing to their discord. Shakespeare always

24 Cf. the end of this section on Titania’s speech in the first scene of Act II.

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pays attention to determinisms: Athenian laws on marriage are binding, so daughters have their hands tied; but the moon constrains and enchants, thus replacing the potential to act with the potential to be infatuated. Yet even without any spell, Demetrius, before the play’s action begins, falls in love with Helena, then out of love, and in the end back in love with her. Perhaps that is why his love for her may again fail. The enchantment of the moon and of Oberon are together the symbol of the risk in love, the symbol of human weakness, therefore, and the sweet madness of love and falling in love. Love is a fit of madness, consequently a lunar phenomenon regulated by the moon itself. It is, says Helena, not a visible but a mental fact of selfsuggestion; that is why ‘things base and vile, folding no quantity’ can be loved. 5. In the first scene of Act II, there is a second unannounced diatonic opening with further advancement into the dream and into the fourth stratification of the design. Celebrations are under way for a second king, hence the opening conflict is transposed into the impalpable, airy world of the fairies. Oberon affirms his superior masculine power as the lord and dictator over the woman, commanding and enjoining Titania to give up the Indian page to whom she has taken a liking. Oberon therefore calls the sprite Puck and plans vengeance: he instructs him to obtain the nectar of a flower once struck by Cupid’s bolt (some take this as the pansy), and to pour it into the eyes of the disobedient rebel Titania, thus making her fall in love with the first being she sees when she reawakens. In the magic kingdom, the fairy king and queen are shrewish and quarrelsome, capricious and fatuous just like humans, struggling for power and primacy. On stage they sound just like any married couple squabbling and reproaching each other for affairs and betrayals. They symbolize the dawn of the myth’s banalization and ordinariness, and of the trend towards the domestication and desacralization of a Dürrenmatt. Oberon loses head and dignity, thus becoming the engine driving the development of an unthinkable revenge play. Changing into his satanic double he will enchant Titania and Demetrius, to punish the former and because of his own frustrating impotence. As to the second order given to Puck, the text is quite clear: Oberon’s initial intention is to invert and disarrange the emotional vectors in the case of both Helena and Demetrius. She who now pursues Demetrius being in love with him, will then flee from him, while Demetrius, previously disaffected

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and contemptuous, will pursue her.25 Disorder is perceptibly on the rise, not in decline. Yet Oberon does not tell Puck to pour the nectar onto both, just onto Demetrius; distractedly he identifies the proposed victim too generally: whoever is there in the wood not dressed in Athenian garb? Puck, the amoral elf,26 will maintain that the ambiguous nature of the order accounts for his mistake,27 which was therefore really Oberon’s fault. The grand, over-extended scene of the foursome of lovers in the wood highlights the failure in interpersonal communication in spite of the best intentions, showing how any statement may be read inversely to its literal meaning, and therefore how it is natural that human beings, left to themselves, rather than finding understanding, generate chaos on their own account. It is a free-for-all in a battle of misunderstandings. The length of the episode is however in part justified to diagnose Helena’s neurosis in her continuous pursuit of Demetrius. She had initially believed that she had aroused some love for herself in Demetrius by doing him the favour of informing him that Hermia had fled into the wood with Lysander.28 Her intelligent analysis of capricious love comes up against masochism The situation distantly recalls that in Guarini’s Pastor Fido (composed between 1580 and 1583): Corisca loves Mirtillo, who does not love her since he loves Amarilli who in turn loves Silvio, who will have nothing to do with her, being only fond of hunting. Dorinda is also vainly in love. There is the same mixture of loves and hates and similar crossed polarities. See, in Guarini, III.885: ‘Amar chi m’odia e seguire chi mi fugge’ [‘Loving one who hates me and following him/her who flees me’]. 26 Puck descends from the Norwegian earth demon, Oberon from the dwarf Alberich the Nibelung, both by then absorbed from this source into British folklore, as Kott 1966, 213–36, insisted, underlining the mystification of stagings that fail to point out the sadomasochistic undertones in the love among the foursome. Frye 1986, 44, also recalls that ‘pucks’ are cited by Burton in Anatomy as elves who lead pilgrims astray. 27 Puck carries out Oberon’s command believing Lysander to be Demetrius; thus when Lysander awakes he proclaims his passionate love for an amazed Helena (who takes it as a bad joke) and execrates Hermia, who wakes from a nightmare calling Lysander who has run off after Helena. Lysander therefore explodes in fervent, passionate terms of love for Helena when the latter has only just finished lamenting and admitting her own ugliness, which makes her unappealing in everyone’s eyes. 28 It is in fact very unlikely if not incomprehensible that Lysander and Hermia should reveal to Helena that they intend to flee to the wood. 25

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when she sees Demetrius, madly in love, following her rival Hermia.29 The height of the woodland comedy of errors is reached when Helena, who was loved neither by Demetrius nor by Lysander, finds they are both now mad about her; and that Hermia has no longer either of her two suitors. Halfway through this drama, Act III scene 2, chaos is so bewildering that nobody understands what is happening and complete confusion reigns. But at the end of the act, Oberon has driven off fear and calmed the tempest. This evidently Prosperian precursor spreads mist and darkness over the starry night and breaks up the enamoured foursome who are on the verge of coming to blows and hurting each other. Puck himself is a lower-flying Ariel, more of a scoundrel and more mischievous, particularly as an agent both in dispersing and in gathering the lovers wandering through a wood turned maze, and in re-establishing the initial harmony. With the falling in love of Lysander and Hermia, the only thing lacking for utter chaos in relationships is Titania’s falling in love with Bottom.30 Confusion is about to reach its climax and, in line with an internal law found at every turn in Shakespeare, the comedy will shortly be required to move towards the restoration of order. Oberon’s spells, however, must act on other spells and reverse them. Feeling sorry for Titania’s madness – and having obtained her page – Oberon dissolves the former magic, so Titania wakes and realizes her mistake; peace having returned, the king and queen disappear as dawn arrives. Bottom too has had his ass’s head removed and his ‘sight’ restored. Some blood, in fact, has been shed: that made innocuous within the imaginary frame of an improvised performance, which is in turn the simulation of reality within an earlier simulation. 6. This second simulation refers to the performance in Theseus and Hippolyta’s honour, prepared and in the end performed in their presence Helena does not carry through the omen of the Trojan Helen, since her lack of appeal does not attract Demetrius; in a purely naturalist perspective, he leaves her alone in the wood because of her continual complaints. 30 Gossipy critics seem curiously interested in whether there has been a sexual intercourse between Bottom, with all his good principles, and the amorous Titania. Feminist critics insist on Theseus’ machismo towards Hippolyta. Kott also believes that Shakespeare drew an elliptical veil over Titania and Bottom’s nocturnal orgy ending in a plunge into pure animalistic lust. 29

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by the totally incompetent artisan company of amateur actors. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe runs as a parallel or perhaps a pessimistic echo of that of the foursome, in the form of a marriage that is frustrated, hindered, and tragically never achieved. As Browning was to do three centuries later in the monologues of the two lawyers in The Ring and the Book, Shakespeare created with this theatre within the theatre a yet more pioneering scene than the corresponding episode in Hamlet. He depicts the preparation and the rehearsal of the play as well as the staging. The first apparition of the actors (I.2) is a diatonic stage device without any buffer. The capocomico gives out the parts, Bottom flaunts howlers, gaffes and boasts like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. As well as they can, the artisans put forward an aesthetic and its relative dramatic conventions and they instinctively bring out the game of illusions that is played out on stage. Bottom, for example, thinks they should make changes to the script and add explanatory prologues to inform the audience of the pretence. Act V, in which the performance actually takes place, may appear insipid, apparently awkward and totally lifeless, as in a later work by Beaumont and in a much later one by Stoppard. The audience of a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream follows in fact the reactions of another stage audience watching a play, an audience commenting aloud on the action observed, and one which is at times alienated, and at others identifies and becomes involved. The verbal content is that of the play performed, mixed with the internal spectators’ remarks. Shakespeare gives us here a test of psychology and phenomenology of the act of listening; at the same time the spectators’ comments function as stage captions. The metatheatricality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is corroborated by the probable parody found in many speeches in rhyming couplets, especially in Act III and among the four lovers, speeches that seem like solos from a mock-heroic poem or one on courtly love, and which foreshadow passages in Byron’s Don Juan. Shortly before, Theseus has unwittingly witnessed the enchantments and disenchantments of the four lovers, seeing them lying on the ground asleep. His initial configuration is now completed with the ‘musical confusion’ of the hounds and the ‘musical […] discord’ recalled by Hippolyta, something that is in its amenity a discordia concors passing into an unexpected ‘gentle concord’. It is surprising, not to say inconsistent, to see that in his presence Lysander confirms his love for Hermia and above

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all Demetrius confirms his for Helena. It is then Theseus himself who chooses the play on Pyramus and Thisbe for their general entertainment, significantly in the form of an oxymoron, a concordia discors or discordia concors. Theseus’ reflections are an involuntary praise of the imagination, involuntary since Theseus goes into a detailed enumeration and analysis of its operations, yet claims it is incomprehensible to ‘cool reason’; his thoughts are therefore just as involuntarily an anticipation of Romantic poetics. Full of Renaissance ideas as he is depicted by Shakespeare, when he has to choose an entertainment Theseus makes a choice harmonizing with the circumstance to be celebrated. Having discarded a number of dramatic subjects as unsuitable or disharmonious, he still finds disharmony and harmony in the subject of Pyramus and Thisbe: ‘how shall we find the concord of this discord?’ Not only does he go against the stream in rejecting epic and mythology, he also rewards the work of the uncouth craftsmen, their ‘simplicity’ and love of ‘duty’. It is therefore possible that the play arose as a propitiatory rite and celebration of national harmony.31 Titania’s apocalyptic speech in Act II scene 1 is a threat, allayed by the state of things in the play, yet a distant threat that still looms. It is to be interpreted as a warning to contemporaries against the division and political and social anarchy that leads to the deterioration of creation. But with Shakespeare we are not yet in the sphere of Jessie Weston or Frazer, and the characters here are not the Fisher King or the Knight of the Holy Grail; yet the cult of the moon is in force and the moon is ‘pale in her anger’.

31

‘Midsummer night’ is 21 or 24 June, precisely at the summer solstice, the day in which festivities were held similar to the Florentine carnasciali with the same erotic licence, festivals therefore also symbolically celebrating the passage from puberty to adulthood.

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§ 23. The Roman plays In the most classic, restrictive and literal acceptation, Shakespeare’s Roman plays are three, four with Titus Andronicus; perhaps even five with Cymbeline.1 Conventionally, this is considered an elastic label, like ‘the matter of Rome’ in Middle English literature, which also conventionally includes the metrical romances on Greek history and topics. Some of them are bi- and trivalent: they may be placed in one group or in another, and may be related to one or to another play. Troilus and Cressida may seem an unwarrantable intrusion, a pawn moved onto the wrong board. It is difficult to know where to place it; even Shakespeare’s contemporaries and historical editors wavered between the ‘tragedy’ and the ‘history’ label. If I must explain why I decided to place Timon of Athens, with its Greek background, elsewhere, the reason is that the historical background is hardly worth consideration, nor is the play set within a definite period, and its characters are imaginary or romanticized, so that it appears to be a problematic, metaphysical kind of play. Those collected here will be examined, as for the English history plays, in an order which follows neither the above bi-partition nor actual chronological history, but the date – certain, presumed or likely – of composition and staging. Yet the chronology of composition this time follows historical chronology, the only flagrant exception being Titus Andronicus, which is later than all the others in its internal time but was written before them. Yet again it is evident that any study of Shakespeare’s canon according to groupings that are in line with the presence both of genre and of topic, takes on a corpus of non-consecutive plays, and that the period of composition covered may stretch to one or even two decades. Only an examination of the possible order of the real staging would reproduce the Elizabethan

1

The link between Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline is confirmed by recourse to the myth of Philomela and Tereus: cf. below, § 24, on Titus, recalling that in the room of the sleeping Imogen, Iachimo finds the book open at the page ‘where Philomel gave up’. This recurrence has induced some to believe that Shakespeare in writing Cymbeline had taken up once more, in a kind of mental and emotional continuity, his old Senecan tragedy (Baldini 1964, 530, citing G. L. Kittredge). This new version of Titus was allegedly burnt in the fire at the Globe.

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spectator’s emotion in watching the development of Shakespeare’s dramatic activity in real time, an advantage somewhat reduced by the fact that he or she could not know the direction it was to take. For this reason the Roman plays should be imagined as having been composed and staged in just under twenty years, with all the intervening stylistic repercussions in Shakespeare’s drama, and his slowly evolving maturity in thought and taste (not to mention the historical events under way in England in the period). If considered together with Julius Caesar, it is Troilus and Cressida that inaugurates an alleged, theoretical Jacobean Shakespeare, the author of plays around the turn of the century, with an overshadowed if not actually dark colouring, and tinged with a sense of bitterness and even disgust. Outside this thematic range, Shakespeare was significantly also writing Hamlet’s tragedy, at the same time or stereophonically. As well as Hamlet, anyone searching for oblique projections of Shakespeare himself would find other hypostases of his in Troilus’ and Mark Antony’s distress. Their voices echo that of the poetic ‘I’ in those sonnets by Shakespeare which were being written in the earliest years of the new century. For this reason we find in these two plays extended analogies, and simulacra appear, of the ‘dark lady’. All the Roman plays may therefore be labelled as ‘problem plays’ and dialectic or dilemmatic plays, were it not for the fact that any tragedy is dialectic and dilemmatic. On the scales for Brutus are filial devotion and the love of freedom; for Antony Eros and responsibility in marriage and above all in civil life; for Coriolanus the narcissism of hubris and dedication to the public good. § 24. ‘Titus Andronicus’* For centuries underestimated, rejected by common taste as being an orgiastic, disgusting Grandguignol and a gratuitous string of horrors, Titus *

J. M. Robertson, An Introduction to the Study of the Shakespeare Canon, proceeding on the Problem of ‘Titus Andronicus’, London 1928, and Did Shakespeare Write ‘Titus Andronicus’? A Study in Elizabethan Literature, New York 1972; T. J. B. Spencer, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays: ‘Titus Andronicus’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, ‘Coriolanus’, London 1966; J. Politi, ‘Titus Andronicus’: The Scales of Justice, Athens 1979; Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies: ‘Richard III’, ‘Titus Andronicus’

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Andronicus (staged in 1590 or perhaps a year earlier, printed in 1594)2 has been unanimously reassessed recently as an outstanding debut and a play with a wealth of stimuli and foresights, and a remarkable precursor of the experiences and dramaturgical concepts of many centuries later. It is not only, therefore, merely indebted to contemporary Senecan drama and to that of simulated madness, with Kyd and his Spanish Tragedy as its forebear; it contains the germs of literary sadism, intended as an examination of the psychic and historical roots of the compulsive sexual drive, of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty and of Edward Bond’s plays. As in Sade, Titus Andronicus focuses on violence, sexual violence especially, as a mathematical equation of oppressions and repressions, psychic, religious and to a certain extent political. As in Bond, the play investigates gratuitous physical violence as an ersatz of political and in part psychic repressions. Titus Andronicus might seem written on purpose to inspire the thought of a Foucault. Yet it also recalls the parodies of the classical world of Dürrenmatt and the recurrent twentieth-century parables on antimilitarism of John Arden. Meanwhile, to my mind another little-known play, Shadwell’s The Libertine, stands out on the historical horizon, being a remake, in a notably sadistic spirit, of the continental Don Juans, where the libertine’s followers rival and ‘Romeo and Juliet’: A Casebook, ed. N. Taylor and B. Loughrey, Basingstoke 1990; ‘Titus Andronicus’: Critical Essays, ed. P. C. Kolin, New York and London 1995; G. H. Metz, Shakespeare’s Earliest Tragedy: Studies in ‘Titus Andronicus’, Madison, WI and London 1996; P. Aebischer, Representing Personal Violence and Suffering in Shakespeare’s ‘Titus Andronicus’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Hamlet’, and ‘Othello’, Oxford 1999; M. Tempera, Feasting with Centaurs: ‘Titus Andronicus’ from Stage to Text, Bologna 1999; Titus out of Joint: Reading the Fragmented ‘Titus Andronicus’, ed. L. Stanavage and P. Hehmeyer, Newcastle 2012; M. D. Friedman and A. C. Dessen, ‘Titus Andronicus’, Manchester 2013. 2

Rewriting it in 1687 because he considered it a ‘heap of rubbish’, the dramatist Thomas Ravenscroft added that Shakespeare had only touched up a work not his own. The tragedy was taken from Shakespeare and attributed to Peele, Kyd, Greene and Marlowe by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars; now restored to Shakespeare, it is currently considered a collaboration, like all or most Shakespeare’s works. The Folio text has only one addition in respect of the first 1594 quarto, scene III.2, of which I speak below in n. 4.

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in misogyny, in the horrible chain of violence, in unbridled lust, the two brothers and sons of Tamora who rape Lavinia in Titus Andronicus.3 A further merit not to be forgotten is a form of metatheatre, in the exact sense of an internal reflection on the nature of dramatic communication, indeed on communication tout court.4 2. Titus begins as an implacable criticism of the Roman spirit. The indictments are as follows: power devouring ambition; an abstract sense of personal and family honour putting at risk even those same family ties; hypocrisy in interpersonal relations, where compliance and good will hide a savage thirst for promotion and above all vengeance; the debasing effect of lust, beast-like sexual impulse running out of control and morbidly vented. What is underway is the crisis of the subject in the throes of uncontrollable determinisms. Shakespeare is not appalled by horrifying deeds committed by their perpetrators as if under hypnosis, incapable of realizing their ethical gravity. In part, however, such execrable crimes are allowed if not required by a different religious and moral code, that of primitive or imperial Roman civilization; but in practice it sounds purely like flatus vocis. There is a quiescent conflict between the subjection to ties of blood and family, and public honour, generating imbalances and crimes that are simply criminal only to a modern mentality. In the imaginary time of the play there are no points of reference and therefore total disorientation reigns. Titus Andronicus, however, is full of mythology, and like a reflection of reminiscences of classical myth, such as the story of Tereus and Philomela in particular, and other historical or legendary episodes: Aeneas and Dido, the madness of Hecuba, Pyramus and Thisbe, the rape of Lucrece, Atreus’ banquet set before Thyestes consisting of his sons’ bodies. Such parallelisms

3 4

Not to speak of the cues from this play in the early Lawrence Durrell and in the hunting episode in the Mareotid in Justine (Volume 8, § 66.2), echoed from Act II of Titus. III.2, the killing of a fly in a plate, is a strange scene, almost a foretaste of the theatre of the absurd and among the most grotesque in the play. Titus pronounces a funeral dirge over it, then, comparing it to Tamora, he continues: ‘grief has so wrought on him, / He takes false shadows for true substances’. This opposition between shadows and substances, incidentally, is enough to confirm Shakespeare’s hand.

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are consciously evoked and tell us that history repeats itself, changing the actors but not the actions; they show Shakespeare’s incipient or ubiquitous historical pessimism. We should not be surprised by the deliberate anachronism of a very early metaphor of the furious race for power, a power that was also and above all English power, and a struggle among factions that over the last few centuries had torn apart the national establishment. The time difference and the change of scene in Titus Andronicus are unable to weaken the conceptual continuity with Shakespeare’s English history plays. Shakespeare finds or invents an ad hoc episode, as in political fantasy, to show that civilization is not necessarily progressive and may run up against moments when it stagnates or more pessimistically regresses towards barbarity. These are intervals or phases of transition that can be overcome up to a certain point, because Shakespeare’s drama as a whole confirms the recurrent nature of this relapse, which is cyclical just as is the collapse into this regress, whether of man or a whole historical phase of civilization. After which, a new start is always uncertain and laborious. In conceiving this play, Shakespeare perhaps intended to invent realistic historical characters in order to set up an exemplary case and create greater scenic and ideological estrangement. That of Titus Andronicus is an imperial Rome thrashing in the horrors and in Nietzsche’s Jenseits of ethical good and evil; but Shakespeare is not convinced – will never be convinced – that the Roman spirit is an example to be taken as a model. With Titus a longterm project begins, aiming to dismantle from its roots and foundations the myth of the Roman spirit and of Rome as the caput and leading light of the world. Hence the organization of the play on a system of ironies: just as Pius, Titus’ nickname, basically means unholy, barbarity is civilization or is to be taken relatively. In the first stages of the play the Goths are called barbarians, so the Romans are civilized; but all are barbarians, and finding anyone who is not a barbarian is the problem. That the usual speeches call on the Roman spirit, hence on non-barbarity, is heavily ironic. If Rome is degenerate, at the same time Tacitus’ mythology of the barbarians as noble, mild and civil is eroded. The Goths lack any moral code or monogamous ethic; they are ready to satisfy their lust, like supreme Machiavellian artists of hypocrisy and falsity. In this dark picture with no escape, integrity can be recovered through madness, or yet more paradoxically, through betrayal,

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violating the idola once they have been found false. General Titus is devoted to his country and his family; well on in years and awarded great public merit, saviour of his country many times over, a father morbidly fond of his children, he is subjugated, paralysed and in the end mentally clouded by this excessive love. Too late he realizes that his ethic and behavioural codes must be aberrant if they impose as necessary, dutiful and conscientiously acceptable the murder of his own son. The same awareness that the Rome he venerates is a lair of tigers, and his disillusion, do not impede, indeed they multiply, a new chain of self-destructive misdeeds. Titus carries them out by pretending to be mad, the only form of lucidity he has discovered, and the only condition to achieve summary justice. The extreme test of Roman stoic virtus is that Titus tricks his brother and his son who are willing to sacrifice their own hands to save his: he has his cut off before theirs. At this point, well on in the play, this is virtus that has become totally unproductive, stupid above all, vain and self-damaging. The accumulation of deaths for this old man, erring in all senses, in Act III above all, makes of him a King Lear in the wilderness, that archetype that was already being incubated at the very start of Shakespeare’s career.5 Titus’ son Lucius, who in turn becomes a defector like Coriolanus, sets himself at the head of an army of Goths marching against Rome. 3. The absence of the institutions is a synonym for anarchy, and the historical time imagined is a sort of Terror in the late Roman era. The administration of justice is so arbitrary and summary as to appear tribal, although within an evolved, not a primitive, environment: it would not be too much to define it sadistically fantastical. Human rights are trampled, prisoners of war are killed without a qualm since that is what is due to the fatherland. Funeral codes depend on ethical and religious codes: the ‘manes’ of the brothers who died for their country demand cruel sacrifices, and the living, unconcerned, proceed to kill as many Goths to placate their dead, give them rest and prevent bad omens. In any case, newly back from a victory Titus reiterates the primacy of military codes and patriotic and family honour above religious codes. But the situation precipitates after the 5

Similar also in the blasphemy of the cruel gods who ‘delight in tragedies’, wishing evil upon their creatures.

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inaugural scene. There is no recognized and respected judicial authority, crime spreads, and the author of the crime is neither tried nor punished. The denial of civilization lies in the fact that crime answers crime; this chain is broken, only partially, right at the end. The touchstone of the reign of terror are the gratuity of murder, the disproportion between crime and sentence (so in both cases human life is up for sale at a very low price), and the gravity and the nature of the sentence. Punishments are capital, but more often corporal, in the form of mutilation of limbs. In Act III scene 3 Titus hails Astrea, the fleeing goddess of justice; by now disillusioned, pretending madness, like Hamlet6 or Pirandello’s Henry IV, he gives his nephew arrows with which to send messages to the divinities in heaven asking that they restore justice. The reader might have expected, or hoped for, a different epilogue, maybe a more lucid and more generous form of madness. Yet Titus, at least, perishes by that same sword by which he lived: he is the self-sacrificing victim of the system whose iniquity he now fully realizes. In fact he kills his beloved daughter Lavinia, significantly replicating the gesture of Virginius with his dishonoured daughter, and he blames the sons of Tamora, who is eating the flesh of her flesh. But he is killed at the hand of the emperor himself. For a long time justice seems derided and mocked, in an irreversible crisis;7 yet a point of no return has to be reached, something must move and change by implosion. Aaron has got away with things too often, thinking up and carrying out crimes that would make even the most hardened criminals turn pale.8 But he is arrested by a Goth. The Fortinbras of the situation, who puts together the disiecta membra of a Rome by now in pieces, is Titus’ son Lucius; yet even he instinctively wants to apply summary justice and kill both Tamora and Aaron before he is stopped. 6 7 8

The connection between the two plays is traced through the recollection of Hecuba’s madness, mentioned seven times in all, counting the allusions to Priam and Troy. The only virtuous characters are Lavinia and Bassianus, perhaps only the former, counterparts of Donna Anna and Don Ottavio in a parallelism with the Don Juans. Aaron could punish the nurse by cutting out her tongue – which is ‘long’ – to stop her ‘singing’, yet he does not use this usual expedient: he makes sure by killing her. But this act horrifies Tamora’s two sons, even though they have raped Lavinia and cut off her tongue.

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4. That Titus Andronicus is the work of an ‘apprentice’ is evident from the plethoric, convulsed organization of events, however well they fit together, in the too wide cast of characters on stage and therefore, at first sight, in the complicated network of kinship. To a greater extent this is visible in the type of blank verse (the play has no prose passages), in its immaturely iambic, monotonous and over-regular rhythm, almost without foot or accent inversion, and the spare use of enjambment. Its imitative nature comes across in the use of clichéd, classical and archaic adjectives, to the point that the noun is almost always accompanied by an adjective, and in the predictability and repetitiveness of the adjective itself.9 In syntax, facile, loose parataxis reigns, with almost Augustan elegance in refined and very specific antitheses; the frequent similes are elaborate and long, not sudden and stunning, indeed at times banal or dull. In Act II, manneristic tableaux follow one upon the other, formed by internal characters and aiming to describe the idyllic, lovely silence of the hunting grounds, or in the ‘Gothic’ passage of the alcove where Tamora is found in flagrant congress with Aaron.10 The action is triggered as the result of duplicity and plotting. Titus seems ended when the curtain falls in Act I, or already slowing down, but only because it is not yet clear that Tamora is saying the contrary of what she plans and that her conciliatory words should be taken in the opposite sense. It is not the shame of being vanquished and put on show in Titus’ triumph, but the murder of her own son that sets in motion the chain of horrors. It is the fact that she is discovered with the Moor, Aaron, in the wood, and suspected of adultery, that convinces her to aid Aaron in eliminating the witness who might turn spy. Incited, her two sons first kill Bassianus, then rape Lavinia and cut her tongue out. As I mentioned, the play could close at the start had Titus only committed an act of nobility and responsibility, but – ironically – politically lethal: to some extent like King Lear, he refuses the imperial crown he is offered, an act that unleashes a 9 10

For example, every time the Goths are mentioned, the adjective ‘warlike’ is attached to them. Equally ‘Gothic’ is the ‘ruinous monastery’ where Aaron is found trying to hide his little son. Yet these depictions, linguistically clear-cut, foreseeable, even puerile in their unpretentious facility and conventionality, may be the transgression of the signifier compared to a signified that bears much more truculent, dark, blood-thirsty marks.

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power that reverberates on him like a murderous boomerang. The query arising in Act I is whether Tamora’s revenge would have been triggered had her elder son not been sacrificed. She embodies the icon of a mother wholly devoted to her sons, or rather we suspect that perhaps she is not so already in the first scene. In such circumstances two parents would fraternize, their children being dear to them both; but this passionate affection does not translate into solidarity between these parents, but in conflictual and murderous consequences. With a few wounds still open, Act I in spite of everything seems to tend towards a re-established appeasement. The Goth prisoners are in fact set free and Saturninus is appointed emperor to the full satisfaction of everyone. But then order is upset by a dramatic turn of events. One of Titus’ sons impedes his father’s intention of upholding the right of Saturninus to his daughter’s hand, and Titus kills him: the father has lost his head and taken a mad step, that is, he has killed for the sake of a dubious or secondary principle, filial respect. Suspicions regarding Tamora are confirmed by her lightning marriage with the emperor, but the escalation of vengeance comes about thanks to the entry on stage of the Moor Aaron. In him Shakespeare creates an Iago or even an Othello blended together. His background is unknown; he appears in the play as if by chance. He is Moorish, he speaks the language of the conquerors, he is totally devoid of conscience, he is a black-skinned Machiavellian. He is purely satanic, as he says whenever he has the chance and as he claims, and above all as he is systematically considered, through racial prejudice and marginalization already widespread and active at that time, according to Shakespeare. Aaron echoes and mimics Lucifer in his boundless ambition to outshine, to be first and to climb upwards, thereby ridding himself of racial inferiority. He is not Othello, but he uses bluster, hyperbole, sonorous rhetoric, overweening pride and self-satisfaction. Within the dramatic mechanism, Aaron is the schemer, yet with respect to the later play of reference, his double is not Othello the Moor but Iago the cynical white atheist who triggers the misdeed: he uses the same subtle verbal technique and rhetoric, which is convincing precisely because it is formally dissuasive (with the two brothers lusting after Lavinia), and shares the same latent, hidden misogyny. Aaron is only slightly motivated in Tamora’s plan of vengeance, and the only likely reason for his participation in it is that he is her lover; in other words, he destroys for the sake of destroying. He

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picks up any sign that might lead to disorder and chaos and enhances it until it explodes. The rape of Lavinia by Tamora’s two sons takes centre stage in Act II, and Aaron plots the capture of Titus’ two sons spreading the false suspicion that they are the killers of Bassianus. Even when they bring him his black son born of Tamora, Aaron shows all the pride and passion of Othello, together with disguised parental complacency: this is the single sign of rehabilitation in an unredeemed character, yet from his words even in this case there exudes something slightly alien. The birth of this child threatens to upset the couple’s plans, since should the baby be discovered, Tamora’s rejection by Saturninus would naturally follow. In the end, Aaron is the victim of his own boasting and of his addiction to the aside, which is not only a dramatic requirement but also the symbol of his own natural duplicity. If he had kept quiet instead of loudly dramatizing the exchange planned for his son, nobody would have noticed him. Even on the gallows Aaron does not give up, claiming an oath from Lucius that his son be saved in exchange for sensational revelations. With casuistry worthy of Browning, he objects that the oath must have value for him who takes it and for the extent of his faith in the divinity on whom it is taken, independently of whether he who demands the oath believes in the divinity or not. Once the oath has been taken, Aaron reveals with contemptuous detachment and high linguistic propriety all the misdeeds he has arranged. Previously, as if in a stereophonic procedure, Titus had become a judicial drama, since it is inferred by Titus’ son Martius that the body in the ditch was that of Bassianus, on the basis of the shining ring on his finger. Immediately afterwards, on conclusive evidence, two other sons of Titus are arrested as murderers. No trial is set up, nobody requires regularity or caution before sentence is pronounced. Yet a parallel investigation regards the perpetrator of Lavinia’s rape, since she is tongueless and handless and therefore unable to reveal the truth. Even this vile deed does not raise a cry of protest, nor do those present marvel or shudder when they hear that the freedom and pardon of the alleged murderers is to be exchanged with the chopped-off hand of one of them!11 Just as amazing

11

Although it is not said explicitly, this extortion was probably thought up by Tamora rather than Saturninus.

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is the fact that this agreement is not kept, and that the two sons will be killed in spite of it, in a totally arbitrary climate. 5. Finally, Titus offers an excellent insight into dramatic communication, consequently human communication and its semiotic nature. Needless to say, the characters speak but often contradict their words by their actions. Saturninus is at first deferent then offensive towards Titus, while as the scenes go forward cases of double-edged, false communication are highlighted: saying one thing but ironically meaning another. It is just as normal that communication makes use of common supplementary channels such as letters and messengers. Much less obvious is that this play on Titus Andronicus is the one in Shakespeare in which greater use is made of the dramatic device by which the spectator or reader’s knowledge is greater than that of the internal characters, due to the number of soliloquies and especially of asides. These are stratagems that clarify the real sense of a word or speech, and asides that at times exclude only certain characters but not others from the communication (for example in I.1.446ff.), and other times are ‘blind’, that is, addressed by the characters to themselves, hence only to the audience. But the great novelty in Titus regards the means of, and the cases and conditions necessary for, communicating, which are not only the spoken word but also a way of behaving or a physical or physiological reaction (i.e. indirect or transposed communication). This is true for characters such as Titus, men of action who also, or best, express themselves calmly or with ‘fury’ (which ‘speaks his griefs’: Titus speaks, for his sons, in tears, his ‘orators’). Tamora also makes it clear that the slaughter of Titus’ offspring will be a form of communication, because they shall know, by means of that horrendous deed, how gravely she felt the dishonour done her. In a strange sort of prophecy, in this play Shakespeare has intuited, obviously without formalizing it, the signic system of communication, and the term ‘sign’ recurs surprisingly often (sixteen times in all). In the second scene of Act II Shakespeare observes the signic system of eye movements, of silence, of melancholy, of the very hair and its mass, signs that must be read and interpreted; blushing ‘betrays’ emotion and is therefore an involuntary language (IV.2.119). Communication by means of verbal signs may overlap, or be replaced by, one based on non-verbal signs, in spite of the fact that kinesic communication is less univocal than words and is more difficult to decipher. This is explained in III.1.115–39,

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where Lavinia’s tears have at least three meanings for the bystanders and the witnesses.12 Therefore tragedy in Titus pivots semiotically on the tongue, in the term’s double meaning of the phonatory organ in the mouth and of the instrument of the word. Consequently the severing of the tongue is the tangible and symptomatic punishment equivalent to exclusion from the word and from communication. The tongue is then the usual metaphor or the catachresis of the ‘evil tongue’, the tool of gossip or the revelation of secrets. The tongue is severed in Titus Andronicus first and foremost so that the ear of others will not hear over-insistent persuasion or receive compromising revelations. The play draws our attention to the fact that communication is effected firstly and mainly through phonation, hence the spoken word; yet to achieve its aim it requires the hearing sense and it actually needs to be heard: Lavinia begs Tamora (II.2.160) to ‘open her deaf ears’, and Chiron says: ‘I’ll stop your mouth’. However, we are also invited to reflect on how communication can be effected in emergency conditions when no mouth can speak. Together with the tongue, the communication tools are the hands, writing instead of uttering words; without tongue or hands it is difficult if not impossible to communicate, that is to emit messages, although they can of course be received. It is by capitalizing on this point that Shakespeare prolongs the drama: the only resource available to a tongueless character is to pick up a blunt instrument and use it as a pen to write by cutting letters into a soft surface. On the mythological plan, the deflowering of Lavinia is a re-enactment of Tereus’ deflowering of Philomela, with the difference that Lavinia cannot embroider her dishonour. Lavinia speaks by signs, ‘martyr’d signs’, and her father creates an alphabet that interprets her meaning.13 Lavinia in effect recounts her rape by pointing to a book where the archetype of her particular case is found, the rape of Philomela; then by writing words in the sand with a stick held between her teeth. Thus the rapists are ‘decipher’d’. The reader is stimulated in this play 12 13

‘Perhaps’ Lavinia weeps for her husband’s murder, or perhaps she knows that the two nephews charged with and convicted of murder are innocent, or perhaps for the grief of their father Titus. A very telling detail is that the dumb Lavinia reads Cicero’s Orator to her nephew Lucius.

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to think that the total impediment of communication is virtually impossible: sign language has been invented for the deaf and dumb, and the Braille alphabet for the blind; but not even the synchrony of deafness, lack of voice and blindness is an absolute impediment, since the human body always possesses the faculty of indicating (with the head, the elbows, the nose, even the stubs of limbs) the letters of the alphabet, thus composing words and speech. The elimination of all indicatory tools would mean supressing the very concept and existence of the human body and its life. Aaron understands this and acts accordingly, killing the two witnesses of the birth of his and Tamora’s son. § 25. ‘Julius Caesar’* Very few times is Shakespeare as equidistant and non-committal as in Julius Caesar (staged in 1599, printed in 1623). This is primarily because Caesar is no hero, yet neither is Brutus, so there is no clear-cut, perceptible opposition among the characters according to evident historical and personal criteria. Nor is there an obvious villain. Shakespeare does launch and set in motion his usual conflict between tyranny and freedom, but he lets it die out in an insoluble impasse. At its heart – Act III – the play hinges on a few dense, memorable scenes, on masterly lengthy speeches and even single momentous lines, but at the beginning it limps and drags slowly along, as it does to an even greater extent at the end. Four protagonists are brought to the forefront, replacing each other as the play develops. Brutus *

C. Clark, A Study of Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’, London 1929; A. Bonjour, The Structure of ‘Julius Caesar’, Liverpool 1958; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Julius Caesar’, ed. L. Dean, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; ‘Julius Caesar’: A Casebook, ed. P. Ure, London 1969; T. J. Kelly, Understanding Shakespeare: ‘Julius Caesar’, London 1970; W. F. McNeir, Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’: A Tragedy without a Hero, Mainz 1971; D. C. Green, ‘Julius Caesar’ and its Source, Salzburg 1979; J. H. Blits, End of the Ancient Republic: Essays in ‘Julius Caesar’, Durham, NC 1982; ‘Julius Caesar’, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1988; ‘Julius Caesar’: dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1992; ‘Julius Caesar’: New Critical Essays, ed. H. Zander, New York and London 2005; G. Wills, Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’, New Haven, CT and London 2011; D. Lovascio, Un nome, mille volti. Giulio Cesare nel teatro inglese della prima età moderna, Roma 2015.

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overtakes Caesar halfway through Act III, and Cassius and Brutus bring the conspiracy to life; but from the halfway point on it is Mark Antony14 who gains the upper hand with his orchestration of events. Yet the distribution of the dramatic weight and relevance is even, with the single exception of Brutus who always dominates and always overshadows the action at least in spirit. The fourth and fifth acts are instead too closely faithful to Plutarch’s history,15 amounting to fifty more verbose, less inspired and mediocre pages, at the centre of which, however, stands the ‘half-sword parley’, and ending with the Battle of Philippi and the suicide of the two leaders of the conspiracy.16 Shakespeare therefore approves of Brutus yet does not condemn Caesar, who in his spontaneous and almost comic capacity of belittling and undervaluing himself, enunciates a few sensible pieces of behavioural advice and makes an effort to apply basic concepts of justice.17 In the Senate before the killing, he expresses doubts on the same regime of favouritism and flattery of which he is accused, while Brutus and Cassius themselves ask Caesar to 14

15 16

17

It cannot escape notice that two characters have names, Cassius and Portia, reappearing in other plays. The Roman Cassius has nothing to do with the one in Othello; but Brutus’ wife Portia is almost a twin of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, as is recalled in that play (I.1.165–6). Portia in turn insists on Brutus revealing to her what is planned, and immediately afterwards, in parallel, Calpurnia vainly attempts to dissuade Caesar from going to the Capitol. In this double attempted persuasion both women are similar to Lady Macbeth. As we shall see, Macbeth intertwines with Julius Caesar. There are a few erratic scenes in the play, such as that with the poet Cinna or the one with Artemidorus, ‘a Sophist of Cnidos’ who wants to hand a dissuasive letter to Caesar. Previous plays on Caesar are lost; perhaps a play by the Italian Pescetti may have been in Shakespeare’s mind. Plutarch therefore is the main source, in North’s translation published in 1579. Cassius runs himself through with the same sword he used to assassinate Caesar, throwing himself onto it with the aid of a servant, Pindarus, whose life he spared after Pindarus swore blind obedience to his will. Cassius’ suicide is due to the usual intervention of misunderstanding, since he, short-sighted, mistakenly believes that Octavian’s army has routed that of Brutus. It is a scene similar but opposite to that in which Brutus vainly asks Volumnius the same terrible favour, and it is replicated by a similar one in Antony and Cleopatra. A long simile by Caesar himself on the polar star, to illustrate his determination and constancy. The impossibility of constancy is the basic theme of Antony and Cleopatra.

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turn a blind eye and to decree, or revoke, an unjust provision, simply out of friendship or corruption. There, just before he is stabbed, Caesar on the one hand makes his only stoic and heroic speech in the whole play, and on the other proves yet more surprisingly, as we shall see, the failure of the art of verbal seduction. There, for once and only once, Brutus becomes Caesar, or at least he comes down from the superhuman level of his morality and integrity, and Caesar rises to the heights of a Brutus in his unfailing honesty. Hence Caesar’s assassination is out of tune with the behaviour and noble words of Caesar himself, either untimely or inopportune. 2. Shakespeare colours Roman history with his own English hues and transplants it. He reads Brutus’ conspiracy as being necessary and inevitable to safeguard freedom. It is always his obsession with tyranny that makes him depict human subjection to dreams of power. In Julius Caesar he traces or outlines a possible original example of the transformation of power into tyranny, the tyranny that heralded in Rome the deification and apotheosis of the ruler or emperor; and against this degeneration Cassius fights strenuously.18 The choral scenes of the crowds show the mechanism of rising, hypnotic fascination with the royal figure and the need for continual conscientious vigilance in order to visualize that behind the king is a person and that behind the cloak of royalty there shall be no impunity or immunity. The crowd in Julius Caesar is anonymous; it is the plebeians and also the very English artisans who speak with the expected English witticisms, like the cobbler who opens the scene. It is a crowd easily plagiarized and easily manipulated by words. The tribune Marullus recalls how the crowd lauded Pompey to the skies, yet now they are delirious for Caesar. The second scene of Act III is the moment in which individuals chosen among the crowd prove their unconscious, incorrigible fickleness, for they have announced a just method of judgement (that is, compare the two versions on Caesar given by Brutus and Mark Antony), yet they will be manoeuvred and duped, so that in a few instants, uncritical and unaware, they will change the verdicts they have just announced. The next scene pessimistically points out that crowds have a visceral, recurrent need to appoint and crown a sovereign; after Caesar, 18

As is well summarized by Sextus Pompeius in Antony and Cleopatra (II.6.18–19), the conspirers ‘would / Have one man but a man’.

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they want Brutus as their king. Shakespeare’s impartiality, however, rests here more than elsewhere on the cyclical concept of history, a history that leans more on the low than the high curve. Unintentionally and without actually realizing what he says, Cassius (and others as well) declares that every historical cycle rises, touches its highest point and ends, or rather degenerates. And Rome with Caesar was by then in its declining phase, inasmuch as the lasting myth of the ‘fall of the Roman Empire’ had arisen. Most characters are therefore by definition laudatores temporis acti, nostalgically recalling the greater prestige and integrity of their forebears. Brutus and Cassius realize that Caesar’s triumph is no apogee but an apocalypse. In the Roman religion, any turmoil in sky, sea or atmosphere is an omen of a political earthquake. There is an obsessive Shakespearean echo in the threat of regress in civilization towards the loomingly monstrous and the fear that history will recede to bestial levels.19 The mise en abyme of this comes from Brutus (in IV.3.216–22): a sinusoidal concept of historical becoming, according to which whoever is at the summit is already about to fall. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men’ (Matthew Arnold seems to paraphrase this line in his most famous poem), and he who exploits the rising phase of the tide finds good fortune, otherwise disaster. The Romans feel the weight of history upon them, a private and public history overflowing with examples of integrity and determination. As Shakespeare well knew as of 1594,20 Brutus is the descendant of the Brutus who drove out Tarquin when he was about to become tyrant. As for Cassius, he is a person possessed, fanatical about re-establishing the ideal of the cives romanus, especially in the sense of the lost heroic temperament. The Romans are full of their god, honour; they will do or they would like to do anything in its name; as a result, it is an empty idol. Shakespeare pre-emptively condemns the corruption of the government into tyranny; once Caesar is eliminated, however, industrious, peaceful democratic coexistence does not come about. Documented history proved that the result was almost worse than the uprooted evil: both the duumvirate and the triumvirate are found associations of quarrelsome 19

One of the conspirators, Decius, cunningly interprets Calpurnia’s dream (of the fountain of blood spouting from Caesar’s body) as an alternative Traumdeutung, as blood that revives and regenerates. 20 Having written about it in The Rape of Lucrece.

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individuals. Power in the hands of two or three is no better managed than power in the hands of a single man. 3. The play’s surprise is a type of anti-history and rests on Caesar’s depiction as a ‘chance hero’. Anyone seeking proof of the English and Elizabethan myth of the Roman spirit as sublime nobility and the strenuous cult of honour to the point of suicide, would be perplexed in trying to base the evidence on Caesar or even Brutus. In other words Caesar, a great general, could perhaps arouse expectancy of another Othello: yet he does not, first of all, speak ore rotundo, but the unassuming, realistic, laborious everyday language. Caesar the historiographer, the glory of Latin civilization, in Shakespeare’s dialogues verges on the banal truism. He is domesticated, above all in the numerous anecdotes that diminish his figure and show his medietas. He does not pompously exalt himself, rather he demeans and belittles himself. When the Ides of March arrive he is in his nightshirt quibbling with Calpurnia just like a hen-pecked Victorian husband; in private he reveals to Decius his real reason for not going to the Senate. A poor devil who trusts to soothsayers, he cannot make up his own mind; then he goes back on his decision and leaves the house, but only on remembering that he must be and act as Caesar, with no need to justify his decisions, and that he cannot tell lies. He has no superhuman aura about him: naïve, with no will of his own, subject to epilepsy known in English as the falling sickness. In the Senate, he melodramatically offers his throat to his countrymen. But in Shakespeare the king is always the Anointed of the Lord; so his actions in the play are even more parodic than in other kings. The triple offer of the king’s crown sounds like a repetition of Jesus’ temptations in the desert: but Caesar, tempted, refuses the offer more weakly each time. This is also a Pilate scene, recalling the alternative offered to the crowd of Jews, the freedom of Christ or that of Barabbas. This semi-serious allusion passes on to Brutus when at night the servant Lucius falls asleep like the apostles in Gethsemane, so that it is now Brutus who has become Christ-like. This episode is both witty and pathetic, as are others of a tender, elegiac nature when this servant is on stage, counterbalancing the dark atmosphere of the conspiracy that has now taken shape. The soothsayer Artemidorus in turn echoes those who stop Christ in the street in the Gospels begging miracles from him. On the way to the Senate Caesar unaware faces his own Calvary, and receives petitions and requests for pardons and favours. From the very outset of Act III,

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the living body of Caesar disappears while his spirit wanders freely, so that Caesar acts more incisively when dead than when alive: his ghost appears to Brutus, and in the hallucination he flourishes the swords with which Brutus and Cassius ran him through, twisting the blades in their bowels. 4. If Caesar is not Othello, Cassius foretells Iago. He advises and suborns Brutus, but in order to set up a common cause with him for an aim considered morally justifiable and politically inevitable. Cassius boasts that he is the mirror of Brutus, who however perhaps does not recognize what is confusedly happening within him, and Cassius extracts thoughts and intentions from Brutus that Brutus himself is in part unaware of. He has this maieutic function as the primary motor of the conspiracy. The analogy with Iago is strengthened since Cassius once saved Caesar from drowning in the waters of the Tiber, and must now bow in deference to the divus who accorded him no recognition or honour, therefore no satisfaction or important promotion. But Cassius is only a mediocre double of the Machiavellian, far from the stature of Brutus. He has only personal recriminations to deal with, no historical, utopian or regenerative design to realize. He compares himself to Aeneas, but unconvincingly. Caesar distrusts Cassius, and gives a portrait of this thin man that would fit Iago equally well: a practical, cynical observer with a mocking smile, a spy of the secret motives in others. Brutus on the other hand may come across as the most ethereal and disinterested hero of the whole Shakespearean gallery. He is also, with Ulysses, the most complete, mature and conscious political ideologist in any play. It is immediately clear to him that Caesar at that moment is about to cross the line that separates authoritarian government from the abuse of power, and also the line splitting remorse from that same exercise of power. He is the hesitant Shakespearean figure: he loves Caesar but he loves freedom more; he fears the coronation of Caesar as king, which actually means as tyrant. Like Macbeth he commits a regicide, or nearly, not in order to take the place of the king but only for the good of the state;21 and both are insomniac heroes. Brutus is therefore 21

The two plays have in common at least the metaphor or anecdote of the two swimmers: it is Cassius who recounts, as I have mentioned, that he and Caesar competed in a race to swim to the opposite bank of the Tiber.

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quite un-Hamletic; he does indeed hesitate, yet it takes him only one night to pass from the conception of the act to the act itself: the famous seven lines of the first scene of Act II (63–9) are an abridgement of the action in Hamlet, and Caesar is not the uncle of Brutus but his putative father. The moral and political issue now arising is this: is Brutus justified in plotting against Caesar and leading the murder? Assassination may be admitted in exceptional circumstances, it may have extenuating circumstances from the point of view of the common good in cases of imminent danger; and for the moment Caesar is not a tyrant who has suffocated freedom. Brutus’ decision rests only on long-sightedness and probability, and also on Caesar’s signs of weakness. The answer to the above question is that a similar development was to be expected, and that the honest, inflexible Brutus is plagiarized by the hurried, frenetic Cassius. And here is the first indication of a secondary motif that becomes primary, the seduction of persuasive words. Brutus is imperceptibly scaled down during the course of the play. In the first place he fails to realize that the agreement with the pragmatic, opportunist Cassius can only be temporary. Brutus has a heroic, superhuman idea of man. Anything but blood-thirsty, he wishes the death of Caesar’s spirit without the shedding of his blood. His delusion is seriously damaging especially as regards Mark Antony who, he believes, will be utterly innocuous once Caesar is dead. An abstract hero, he is confident that everyone is of his opinion and has the same ability to judge the evidence and the need: not satisfied, he challenges public opinion and is the only one who has no recourse to deception, double-dealing, stratagems, pretence. Let the senators leave the Senate, their swords dripping blood, to proclaim to the wide world Virgil’s prophecy of regeneration. An imperceptible sign of weakness or inconsistency finally surfaces in this honourable man: future history will speak of this act and will hail it; it will be symbolically repeated and even performed in the theatre, and he, Brutus, will go down in history as the Promethean benefactor who restored freedom to the world and left a laudable example. All of which is not only veiled narcissism but also an ingenuous daydream: human history, dolefully, will learn nothing from Brutus. Even in dying, Brutus repeats that he will be glorified for such noble stoicism, and that the love of truth will be his insignia. He whom I have defined the greatest political

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intellect in Shakespeare is in fact apolitical. This we see when (III.1), Mark Antony having duly softened him up, Brutus unhesitatingly agrees that Caesar’s body shall be set on show in public: an apparently conciliatory move, yet very risky, above all very humane, but not that of a politician, and even anti-political. The real politician is Cassius, who warns Brutus of the danger. The latter however responds by claiming he will take ‘political’ countermeasures to lessen the effect; but what does come into play here is his utopian dream. Undeterred, Brutus makes the mistake of supposing or rather believing that everyone thinks and acts as he does on the grounds of the uniformity – in fact inexistent – of human nature. Thus at the end of this scene it is Mark Antony who is the most astute politician, for he has defeated Cassius, his only rival, and has easily manipulated Brutus. In the second scene of Act III Brutus has to explain as clearly as possible why he killed Caesar, and he tries to do so by means of a weak thesis: ‘as he was ambitious, I slew him’. Is this belief acceptable? In strictly rhetorical terms it is not, since it challenges the credibility of the public and of the judge (which is the crowd that will have to ‘compare their reason’, i.e. of Brutus and Mark Anthony). Although politically correct, Brutus has shot himself in the foot in leaving Antony the faculty of speaking after he himself has spoken; and warnings are not enough to forestall a complete turnaround in public opinion. Brutus will die carrying out the last exemplary and symbolic gesture of liberty achieved and of a life devoted to liberty, liberty from Caesar’s tormenting spirit that haunts him. 5. Brutus is not lacking in the art of oratory, yet he never speaks in and through underlying meanings, nor does he know or contemplate the use of irony. He calls it ‘indirection’ (IV.3.75), which also means ‘allusion’, and he is proud of it. On the other hand, Mark Antony is a master of this technique. Indeed the whole play is centred on the strategies and the modalities of verbal seduction. This again is what makes it similar to Othello. Cassius makes it evident that even Brutus can be persuaded or subjugated by words and is a weathervane in his hands. Therefore Cassius is the first example of this verbal art of words and of its insinuating and conditioning effects. Having remained in the background during the initial stages, Mark Antony monopolizes in turn the whole of Act III. His harbinger is the servant who announces him to the conspirators: his message is cautious and impartial,

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made up of skilful, well-chosen antitheses, assigning the same quantity of adjectives and praise to Brutus and to Caesar, embodying prudent equidistance. Mark Antony negotiates the aftermath, interposing the neutral servant and therefore a diplomatic mission between himself and the murderers. With his first speech in this act Mark Antony enters the Senate taking a high yet calculated risk: he offers himself to the conspirators’ swords even though he has received the assurance that he will ‘depart untouch’d’. Then he launches into a challenge, hailing the dead Caesar as the summit of the world’s nobility; and he underlines it with irony, alluding to Brutus and the other assassins as the ‘master spirits of this age’. His strategy is to reveal himself as ignoble compared to Caesar, pretending not to have words, and saying that he knows he is judged by those present as a flatterer or a coward. He gets around the impatient, impulsive Cassius and wins over Brutus who cannot wait, as a reasoning spirit, to be asked to explain the paradox of Caesar’s assassination. The aim of these blandishments is achieved through the art of words, the art of masking – and indeed, for strategic reasons, of pretending to reveal – the truth, and declare defeat. This aim is the public exhibition of Caesar’s body, over which he will declaim a funeral lament. This is shown in Mark Antony’s soliloquy, in which he gives vent to the secret thoughts – true ones, thoughts of vengeance – he has not expressed. Hamlet haunts this play, and Mark Antony also becomes a Hamlet, but a Hamlet who takes revenge for his friend, passing from the conception to the act straight away, that is, without any Hamlet-like hesitations, as does Brutus. Towards the crowd, a single subject and an undifferentiated addressee, Mark Antony is in effect an Iago, stating that what he wants to show to be true is false, attenuating blame and suspicion only in order to enhance them – the arts of allusion and above all of reticence: ‘Let me not stir you up / To such a sudden flood of mutiny’ (III.2.211–12). Like Iago, Mark Antony is brilliant in declaring himself to be unskilled in the art of words! The skill of his funeral oration lies above all in denial: he says he does not want to praise Caesar, yet that is just what he does; that it was needful to kill an ambitious man, while insinuating that perhaps Caesar was not ambitious. Or rather, he does not say that Caesar was ambitious, only that Brutus, an honourable man, says he was. By so often repeating that Brutus is an honourable man, that very affirmation is eroded and overturned: Brutus

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is not an honourable man, and Caesar was not ambitious. Even the incitement to rebellion is mentioned by Mark Antony, merely as hypothesis. The imperfect syllogism is gainsaid in itself, and in the end is replaced by the rhetoric of ‘pathos’, that is the appeal to feeling and grief.22 § 26. ‘Troilus and Cressida’* Shakespeare divides Roman civilization into three or four emblematically critical junctures and as many plays, which fitted in with and related to his study of human passions and political dilemmas. Only one in his canon is on Greek history,23 Troilus and Cressida (possibly staged in 1601–1602,24 22 Subtly tantalizing is the announcement of Caesar’s will that Mark Antony at first refuses to open and read. This expectancy is prolonged, and the aim of this strategy is enhanced by the delay. Mark Anthony calls the plebeians up close to Caesar’s cloak to show each one of the rents made by the swords. Thus he lights a fuse in order to achieve a delayed, controllable explosion. In the end he realizes that the people are now on his side and that they are ready to take vengeance on the murderers. *

O. J. Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’, San Marino, CA 1938; R. K. Presson, Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ and the Legends of Troy, Madison, WI 1953; R. A. Kimbrough, Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ and its Setting, Cambridge, MA 1964; P. Ure, William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays: ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’, ‘Measure for Measure’, ‘Troilus and Cressida’, ‘Timon of Athens’, London 1970; Self and Society in Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ and ‘Measure for Measure’, ed. J. A. Jowitt and R. K. S. Taylor, Bradford 1982; B. I. Kreps, Fictions of History: The Troy Legends and Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’, Pisa 1984; B. E. Bowen, Gender in the Theater of War: Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’, New York and London 1993; W. R. Elton, Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’, and the Inns of Court Revels, Brookfield, VT 1999, Aldershot 2000.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a Greek, but largely mythological and imaginary setting, and it refers to another idea and phase of Greek history; therefore it cannot be compared with Troilus and Cressida. My placing of Timon of Athens is explained in § 23. 24 There is something of a mystery about the actual staging, and some believe that the play was never produced before the twentieth century, or that maybe the first night at the Globe was a fiasco. A further possibility is that the fifth act was altered because of over-explicit, critical and mocking references to the politics of the time, found in the risqué epilogue declaimed by Pandarus.

23

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printed in 1609). The device used is similar: that of an overview and at the same time of a ‘subjective shot’. The episode chosen is the epic-historicallegendary story most famous and proverbial in the Greek world, the Trojan War. But, as the prologue announces, Homer’s scenario is taken up in medias res, from two thirds of the progress of the long epos, and the action of the play closes before the usual end. For that very reason that was a moment of advanced stagnation in a war that had too soon become a war of positions, a remote presage of the first world war of centuries, indeed millennia later, with the weariness of the heroes and the lost confidence of the generals and strategists. At the level of historical objectivity, for the Greeks the primary aim is to crush indiscipline, particularism, emulation and above all sloth and the sexual urge; for this reason common effort pivots on the recovery of Achilles, for whose ‘cure’ the strategist Ulysses above all others gives unstinted care. As for the Trojans, who are patiently undergoing the siege, they weigh up pros and cons: on one side of the scales is the caprice of a single man, Paris, who carried off Helen, and the unspeakable distress of the community; on the other the number of the fallen as a result. The curtain suddenly comes down on the death in battle of Hector at the hands of Achilles, with no hint of the idea of the Trojan horse.25 Now this historical polyptych, already elliptical and selective, alternates with scenes dealing with a private story, by then a literary topos since the times of Boccaccio and Chaucer, who is its main source:26 that of the young yet generous and straightforward Troilus who loves Cressida. She pretends to be faithful to him and swears her eternal love; surrendered to the Greek side in exchange for another hostage, among the Greeks she falls a victim to the allurement of Diomedes, arousing the bitterness and thirst for revenge in Troilus, who has been spying on them. As frequently in Shakespeare, hierarchic relations may be overturned, and the title assigns first place to the loves of the

25 Nor is there any sign of the fire, yet Cassandra prophetically calls Paris a ‘firebrand’. 26 Along with Chaucer’s follower, Lydgate, Caxton’s Recuyell of 1475, and to a lesser extent Guido delle Colonne and Henryson. However, various theatrical works on Troilus and Cressida were popular before Shakespeare in academic circles. Chapman’s translations of Homer’s poems should also be recalled.

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two young people, pushing into the background the plot of the frame. My analysis reverses this relationship. 2. The Greek epic material is taken and used by Shakespeare through a process of desecration, domestication and anachronism. The satire of vainglorious, empty and pompous heroism might seem the objective, almost for the purpose of setting up a counter-history: the pious but also naïve Aeneas, the haughty Achilles, the wild Ajax, the sacrificial Hector, the wise Ulysses, the sage but verbose, confused and boring Nestor. A rotten, gangrenous coat enfolds the two worlds, or perhaps one and one alone.27 The horror of the Homeric wars is also played down to the point of vanishing. The focus is on the absurd game of war that has become a pastime, hence a pretence, albeit in the end returning to be a dramatically gory exercise. But Troilus and Cressida is not a grisly, horrific Senecan tragedy. No-one is a professional of war. Hector challenges every Greek who cherishes as he does blind faith in the honour of the woman who inspires him with the fuel and encouragement to win: and if he wins her honour will be the reason for his victory. In the long intervals of peace, the enemies treat each other with exquisite courtesy and plenty of compliments. A duel, albeit ‘sportful’, just begun between Hector and Ajax, is immediately declared concluded. These ceasefires are absurd for enemies as ferocious as the Greeks and the Trojans are and claim to be, as soon as they are over, and on stage they cause strong alienation. The principle on which the play is structured is in any case binary. The two stage camps, the Trojan and the Greek, are clearly identified and in conflict, but not enough to be non-communicating. The basic opposition lies in the fact that the Trojan camp embodies romanticism and idealism; the Greek camp is the opposite of romanticism lato

27

Judging by the useful test of the systems of images and of their frequency, the principal representational ranges are on the one hand those of disease and infection, and on the other those of the phases of the food cycle and of culinary art. Troilus and Cressida opens with Pandarus describing to the fiery Troilus the need for patience (regarding Cressida’s bashfulness); the comparison he uses is that of the preparation of a cake, from the grinding of the corn to when the cake is ready and sufficiently cool. Infection is the most commonly used metaphor in describing Greek inertia. A third representational category is that of animal images, but the animals considered are not beautiful and majestic but ugly, smelly, disgusting.

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sensu. Hence it is assigned not positive, but negative connotations. Troy is constructive and utopian, it believes in values; everything in the Greek camp is disvalue. This Greek pole could be described as that of negation, nihilism, brutalization, human degradation, the loss of civilizing features, regression: regression to the state of caprice, of immediate, uncontrolled impulse, of excessive vanity. In reality the play is profoundly ambiguous, since at intervals Troy becomes the Greek camp, and the Greek camp may seem Troy. The furrow that is dug is not impassable, and border crossings and symbol changes are possible. This is proved by recalling how many real border crossings come about, in the first place on the occasion of the ceasefire. Thus a momentary utopia is created, a transitory situation of Edenic calm is formed, wherein the Trojans take a step or two down from their idealisms and above all the Greeks climb a step or two up from their low daily level. And after all some Trojans are half Greek, and Ajax is a relative of Hector’s. The ambiguity, however, lies even more in the fact that it is not only the Greeks who can pretend or simulate civility and urbanity for the Trojans’ benefit, immediately thereafter returning to their own level, thus showing that it was only an episode or a form of hypocrisy; it is also the Trojans who are always able to recede to the Greek level or very near it. There are, the desperate Troilus says and hopes, apparently two Trojan Cressidas; Cressida stands in two camps and belongs to two ethical codes, Trojan honour and Greek dishonour. Calchas is the Trojan who deserts to the Greeks, Helen is a Greek woman assimilated into the Trojans. The ambiguity increases and is displayed in the Trojans’ moral pauses and weaknesses. Aeneas is distracted and lost in thought, but Hector – incorruptible in obeying the precepts of honour and patriotism, and the romantic who spares his enemies, refrains from acting cruelly against them and sends them away safe and sound after having brought them to the ground – allows himself to be infected by Achilles’ vanity. He becomes indeed almost a second Achilles when at the supreme moment of the final battle he pursues a Greek to take his shining armour and adorn himself with it. There is no need to insist on the low standing of Paris. The verdict? Romanticism unfortunately loses ground, being ingenuous and self-destructive, and Troilus and Cressida is a bitterly elegiac drama. 3. At the end of the second scene of Act I the stage stratagem used is that of presenting the Trojan heroes one by one as they return from battle.

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Pandarus enumerates and comments on them to Cressida, yet this is a pleonastic interlude, inserted really for the spectator’s benefit. The trend of the play is initially that of a carousel or a procession, with the various characters coming in turn to the footlights, nearly always their usual selves, sculpted in dialogues, behaviour, idiosyncrasies, reported speeches. The Trojan climate is idyllic, and Hector is wise in finding and following the golden right mean: honour is good, reason is better. And if detachment is lacking, the borders of right and wrong become unclear. With his speech in the second scene of Act II, Hector reveals himself as the counterpart of Ulysses: he praises control and detachment from passion and upholds the need for a binding law to regulate the government of things human. He is a defender of civil rights, and the law – which is a natural law – decrees that Helen should be returned to her legitimate husband. However, we will have to explain how he unexpectedly backtracks, and why over the offer of a ceasefire the mirage of fame has suddenly the upper hand.28 In the psychological paradigm I shall highlight, Hector is unchangeable in his devotion to honour. The Greek camp, on the other hand, vibrates with electric tension: seven years of siege are stifling, and Shakespeare recognizes that inertia generates nervousness and the insensible rancour of claustrophobia. The Greek camp is an enclosure and a tinderbox; ideal values are annihilated, men scratch about like animals searching for food, everyone has lost their heads; all is ‘trash’. The unflattering catalogue opens with Nestor himself, mouthing so many banalities and commonplaces that he now seems pathetic to the point of senility; he attacks pride above all, yet he is a narcissist continuously recalling how valiant he was as a young man. He preaches well but practises badly, and maintains his share of belated, senile slobberiness. Ajax rants like a madman with his lacerated psychology; and the preparations for the duel with Hector are splendidly caricatured by Thersites. The object of the most cutting desecration is Achilles, idle, sarcastic, abject. Yet perhaps, again ambiguously, with his mocking

28

According to C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Cambridge 1971, 159, it was a legacy from medieval times that moral judgements were first and foremost rational; anticipating future developments, Troilus positions them in the heart and in the will.

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imitations, with his mimicking of the chiefs and generals with which he and Patroclus pass the time, Achilles for Shakespeare unconsciously takes apart warlike rhetoric from a position of precocious existential apathy; he makes him in fact deconstruct an onerous role of which he wants to be rid. A first instantaneous example in which Achilles is shown to reason is found in a few lines in the third scene of Act III, when he realizes the mechanism of pride. It is a scene which is played out on the isotopy of the mirror, in that, as the maieutic and Socratic Ulysses teaches him, it is only by interacting with the community that one can measure one’s own greatness and superiority; that is, man is not a self-reflecting mirror but a mirror that reflects his image outwards, for the benefit of others. But Ulysses, with a Pindaric transition, rudely stimulates Achilles’s pride by telling him how glorious Hector will appear the next day in his challenge to Ajax, and how honour is enhanced through perseverance. This is just a momentary selfconscious flash of good sense: going against historic and legendary truth, Achilles ambushes and kills the unarmed Hector with the traitorous aid of his Myrmidons. Coming on stage well on in the play, Diomedes is a misogynist, lucidly indignant at the waste of so many human lives because of Helen. His degeneration is inexorable and immediate; on his way back to Cressida in the Greek camp he walks phallus-like on tiptoe, a sort of transposed erection, feeling relieved and jaunty. A sort of sensual uprising spreads like wildfire throughout the camp and Cressida is ritually kissed by each warrior in turn, including the venerable Nestor. For one single time, Ulysses gives way to a momentary impulse, but he immediately recollects himself and execrates and curses Cressida’s sensuality. 4. To a certain extent, and with a number of exceptions to be dealt with later, both the Greeks and the Trojans fall into a single psychic typology or phenomenology, the former more than the latter. In Shakespeare the human being is unfailingly a theatre of clashes between sensual and burning impulses and later moments of afterthought and therefore reason. This successive moment of self-awareness, however, occasionally fails to materialize. Hence the schizophrenic nature of many Greeks, who, in moments of truce, are able to set up abstract, captious disquisitions on behavioural philosophy, psychology and military strategy, then an instant later they are dallying with Cressida, ravenous for a kiss. The paradox is

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that they dissertate on that psychic and corporal harmony which they so clamorously lack. The Greeks and Trojans know everything about life and its noble nature, yet they illustrate the motto video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.29 In the Greek war council, held at the beginning, Nestor echoes Hamlet in maintaining that man shows his nobility in struggling against the slings and arrows of fortune; and Ulysses echoes him with one of the best structured and most skillful speeches of all Shakespearean theatre – that on the ‘degree’ and the need for subordination, to which I have often referred in this work – whose prop is the immanent need to control appetites by opposing them with the sense of responsibility, of the common good and of the respect for hierarchies, so that each shall do his/ her duty without unbridled emulation. Shortly afterwards in Troy, Troilus expounds his idea, that cool reason is only partially an informing criterion of life: superior to it is the sense of honour and of one’s country. Furthermore, he traces the distinction between the absolute and the relative value. Hector in turn is in favour of the medietas between the absolute value of an asset, a thing or a person, and its value for the individual who appreciates it. It is idolatry, ‘infection’ according to the generally dominant image, to adore something or someone who deserves it. Troilus responds that appetite defeats reason, which demeans and belittles appetite, and follows the theory of the ontological weakness of will. The process of ‘election’ begins from the senses, from sight and hearing. Therefore once an election is made, even if it is then regretted, one must ‘stand firm’.30 The fundamental and functional dissonance of Troilus and Cressida is therefore that it contains a number of occasional formalized speeches, real perorations – well-structured oratori-

29 Pride splits the personality in two, making the two parts clash; it is, as in Achilles, self-devouring. 30 Troilus argues unknowingly on principle, and influenced by his intimate drama of the deceived lover, when he supports the opinion that Helen should not be given back to the Greeks. This is confirmed by the epithet ‘a pearl’ (II.2.82) which he uses for Helen, a pearl that more than a thousand Greek ships have come to recover (the affective distance of Cressida was first defined with the same term in I.1.100). Shakespeare makes his Greeks and Trojans apply later theories and philosophies, such as a reference to Aristotle and to young people unfit for moral philosophy.

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cal interventions, even captious and Byzantine, in typical council scenes – alternating with naturalistic dialogues, as if picked up half-heard from life and from the street, therefore mainly in fragmentary, piecemeal prose. A few interludes repeat the cliché of the squabble and skirmish when two characters intentionally misunderstand each other, prolonging the scene with countless ambiguities. As of Act II the play is violently shaken by the abuse spewed out in strings by Thersites, a ‘verbal’ character among the best inventions in all Shakespeare’s work, veritable discharges of bile and rage with a taste for additions and preciosity in vulgarity, and purely as a pretext for ill humour. He is the nihilist who spares no-one; he is the reductionist and banalizer. The whole world turns on an argument between a cuckold and a prostitute, therefore its fulcrum is lust. With him an old obsession re-emerges once more, that of the sexual drive as the key to interpret the world. The string of bad language opening Act V calls to mind the linguistic degradation, mirroring the conceptual decline, of twentieth-century theatre. This Act V is superb and kaleidoscopic in its bursts and inconsequential flashes, ripped apart as it is by Thersites’ strident and brutal comments, and with Troilus out for vengeance, Achilles who trumpets boastfully, and Hector who seems insensible and superior to the scrum. 5. As to Troilus and Cressida, schizophrenia lies at the level of the gap between the patriot and the lover and of constancy always belied in love, therefore in human fickleness. The brave warrior Troilus denounces himself as a weakling; being debilitated and languid from passion he violates honour: these are his opening words, in which he confesses his inner battle is burning him up and making him indifferent to the real battle on the field. He disarms to arm himself, the meaning being almost the opposite. Yet love is not joy but distress and struggle, and the range of images is that of a sore, an ulceration, a gaping wound, inflicted by that same unrequited love that brings him agony with every word of praise he hears on Cressida’s beauty. Pandarus prophetically announces in a ditty that love is death; and Troilus, in a dark, apocalyptic, joyless image, desires to be ferried to Cressida as if across the Styx in Charon’s boat. He realizes that the consummation of the pleasure he expects is like dying, or at least fainting through an excess of joy. Love between the two lovers rests on the promise of constancy. And Cressida, having given her body to Troilus, proclaims

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herself constant, and even admits to having gone beyond the point where she could pretend bashfulness: her mask is down. At this point Troilus, drunk and duped, sings the utopia of the new Adam and Eve, forebears of the world recreated by honest, chaste, fresh love, constant above all. The second scene of Act IV is the moment of Donne’s unison between lovers, with Donne’s morning, ‘the good morrow’, that separates and dissolves the undivided, mystic nocturnal union.31 Cressida solemnly renews her oath and competes with her lover in the promise of remaining faithful. In reality Cressida is already an emblem of female duplicity, skillful in keeping male desire in tenterhooks, since satisfying it means submitting. She penetrates male psychology, aware that women once vanquished are no longer angels. Right from the beginning she bears the burden of a parallelism with Helen, her precursor and archetype.32 Helen betrayed Menelaus for Paris just as the inconstant Cressida will betray Troilus for Diomedes. In Act V Cressida can only criticize herself bitterly for having been led to betrayal by her eyes, that is, by her senses. 6. The context of Troilus and Cressida is the sewer, the slime, the drain into which the whole of humanity is plunged, as if into one of Dante’s infernal circles. Two or three characters, however, rise up and purify themselves, or else are immune. There is no doubt that the succumbing hero, for this reason alone the hero, is Troilus. Hector is unchanging, but his immutability is insipid, and Hector is a stiff, somewhat stupefied and colourless character; he runs off diligently to do battle every morning, heroically and fanatically ignoring the advice and prayers of his wife and sister, fearsomely war-prone. His patience, that is, his constancy, is indeed a ‘virtue fix’d’ (I.2.5). Is Ulysses the controlled, super partes voice of the author? As a brilliant politician and military strategist, Ulysses advises strong 31 32

Or else it is the paraphrase of Romeo and Juliet’s love scene, with Pandarus as Friar Laurence’s counterpart. The courtship goes forward along the lines of a fiery yet abstruse witticism. In the sketch in the second scene of Act III, Troilus is said to have but fifty-two hairs on his chin (recalling inexactly the legendary number of Priam’s offspring) and that one of them is forked, an indirect reference to Paris and, by this means, to the cuckolded Menelaus.

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discipline – constancy, once more – and respect for the upper echelons. Otherwise, chaos. This was the prescription that was to cure contemporary English anarchy for Shakespeare. In his ‘degree’ speech he adds a reinforcing moral, that of the Ptolemaic cosmos in which the sun has the medieval, Dantesque function of the sovereign who sets everything to rights. Such a system was to remain fixed and immobile, without setting off a destructive, chaotic ‘movement’. Therefore the paradigm of fixedness, immutability, consistency, works at two levels, that of the psyche and that of the state and government of the world. Ulysses’ constant, unchanging target here is Achilles’ weakness: once he has been convinced to return to battle, the Greeks will again prove victorious, whereas for the time being he infects them with his idleness and above all with his personality cult. Ulysses is the mens, the critical and self-critical conscience of the Greeks, yet in one case he too gives way: he expressly gives way to the flattery of passion and impulse against which he struggles coolly. As a disguised Puritan, therefore a weak person, he too kisses Cressida, but as mentioned above he immediately regains control and loudly repents. He cannot definitively be labelled as a character entirely approved of, for at the end he is guilty of a scarcely veiled voyeurism that proves overly and perversely damaging for Troilus. Thus his image is flawed. Ulysses, the builder, is the implacable destroyer in the second scene of Act V, when he rubs salt into the wound by making Troilus, unseen, witness the blandishments and caresses between Cressida and Diomedes, in flagrant transgression of the faith she had promised him. This scene is singularly reminiscent of Othello’s eavesdropping organized by Iago. And Ulysses acts as Iago does, since he wants to free Troilus from his torture with his own words, instead of which he pushes him into torment; and like Iago he persuades him by dissuading him. § 27. ‘Antony and Cleopatra’* Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra (staged in 1606, published in 1623) are in spirit and sense, and for a continuity between their internal * A. P. Riemer, A Reading of Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, Sydney 1968; E. A. M. Colman, The Structure of Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, Sydney 1971; B. Miyauchi, Immortal Longings: The Structure of Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’,

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time frames, two partitions of the same diptych, the second play being the sequel of the first. Without being definitely interconnected, and with an interval in composition of almost seven years (to be easily explained with theatrical conventions and constraints conditioning playwrights), they are played out on the ascent, triumph and fall of Mark Antony, now simply called Antony. They could therefore be two parts of the same chronicle play on Roman history. However, through staging circumstances that we do not know,33 they are antithetic in type: sober and concise, almost elliptical the former; sumptuous, Byzantine, fragmented, disjointed the latter. One could call it an Elizabeth colossal, not one of the longest among the plays issuing from the Bard’s pen, yet among those that seem long, over-elaborate and unstructured, and not only because they necessarily follow the historical storyline. Shakespeare attempts the greatest and riskiest challenge of his career: summarizing, pruning, snipping at fifteen of the most dense, agitated years of Roman history.34 This time period is too broad; keeping to the truth of the facts does not help in selecting events that are often negotiations and

Tokyo 1978; R. P. Tewari, A Critical Study of Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, Agra 1979; M. Steppat, The Critical Reception of Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ from 1607 to 1905, Amsterdam 1980; D. A. Male, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, Cambridge 1984; G. Sacerdoti, Nuovo cielo e nuova terra. La rivoluzione copernicana di ‘Antonio e Cleopatra’ di Shakespeare, Bologna 1990; ‘Antony and Cleopatra’: dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1990; Shakespeare: ‘Antony and Cleopatra’: A Casebook, ed. J. R. Brown, Basingstoke 1991; A. Lombardo, Il fuoco e l’aria. Quattro studi su ‘Antonio e Cleopatra’, Roma 1995; N. Fusini, Donne fatali. Ofelia, Desdemona, Cleopatra, Roma 2005; V. Maria, Marc’Antonio e la necessità del tempo, Roma 2005; S. Munson Deats, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’: New Critical Essays, New York and London 2005; J. H. Blits, New Heaven, New Earth: Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, Lanham, MD and Plymouth 2009. A now discredited theory is that the Julius Caesar of the 1623 Folio was based on a shortened script, excellently prepared, for use on stage. But the ‘psychological truth’ justifying the double announcement of Portia’s death is a highly debatable criterion. 34 Without counting Enobarbus’ récit in II.2, the famous analepsis of Antonio falling in love when he sees Cleopatra’s river procession. Amazed, those present hear that this queen could render even Caesar unwarlike; she is too sphinxlike, polyhedral, enchanting for Antony to be able to leave her; and she is immortal, eternally young – ‘age cannot wither her’ – since she is the symbol of unsatisfied voluptuousness. 33

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diplomatic transactions, or battle scenes. The title tells us that it is not a play with one, but with two protagonists, and, as we soon realize, many other semi-protagonists. Apart from the characters of the title, the other personages are sculpted through suggestive hints and flashes, never in the round. The greatest discontinuity is in Antony who, a past master in rhetoric in Julius Caesar, falls a victim to rhetoric in the second. The appeal of Cleopatra to which he falls prey in relapses is triggered when he sees her, yet even more when he hears her. Cleopatra is capable of dazzling and outmanoeuvring the love-sick Antony at any moment, and also of rekindling the flame of passion, often spent by the call of moral and patriotic duty. There is an emblematic moment (III.13) when Antony, crushed, hears her evoke hyperbolic, incredible images to confirm and reiterate the depth of her love: so that Antony, who an instant before had execrated and cursed her, not only says he is ‘satisfied’ but finds within him enough residual energy to proclaim resoundingly that he will return to fight a losing war against Augustus. He will fight in fact a war of words, untranslatable into action. In rhetorical terms, at the end of Act IV Antony does prove that he is actually a skilful orator: but he himself has become the object and recipient of his persuasion, since he needs to convince himself that he is still able to fight, still a fierce, invincible hero. He believes he will be strengthened by this bluster. He does indeed make a last, convincing appeal to his soldiers, touching and encouraging their hearts, and he goes on persuading himself with pretentious, empty words. But the lie – that Cleopatra died calling the name of Antony – comforts him and at the last minute overturns his purpose; now he wants to join her in heaven to obtain her pardon.35 2. The inclination to relapse is one of the keys, if not the key, to Antony and Cleopatra; it is a mechanism that opens and unfolds many subdivisions of the text, supporting its organization, both formal and conceptual. What can in fact be said of the structural plan of Antony and Cleopatra? It is too frayed and dismembered, and the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury critics were at least partially right when they pointed this out, 35

Shakespeare once again uses the diegetic aid of tragic misunderstanding and, as in Romeo and Juliet, has Antony kill himself to imitate what he believes is the example of Cleopatra.

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from Johnson to F. S. Boas to Bradley. Many are the fragmentary scenes, connected one to the other across sudden wide leaps, and scenes that start out in medias res forcing the reader to guess at context and topic. Antony and Cleopatra is in other words one of those Shakespearean plays that challenge inexorability and are therefore analytical and slow, hazy, unnerved and unnerving, at times piétinants sur place; plays that are inconvenient and uncomfortable for the continuous changes of the frame that weaken focalization. Set in Alexandria, Rome, Sicily and on the battlefields, it is perhaps the most wide-reaching, far-spread and flighty Shakespearean work. Act III, in a war setting, stretches across gaps of many years: from the pact between Augustus and Antony to the unavoidable rise of their enmity and to Augustus’s denouncement of Antony’s relapse. The suture between these gaps is provided by the Senecan device of the messenger. Such figures of messengers practically enter at every turn, with an almost regular rhythm, in the first place in order to keep in contact the two protagonists when they are far away; and they are tormented and often beaten or offended by the protagonists as bearers of (true) bad tidings.36 The insistence on reiterated appearances of messengers eventually produces unintentional comic as well as pathetic effects and forebodings: an anonymous soldier, unheeded, advises Antony to move the battle out to sea; and a ‘clown’ with his basket of figs containing the asps is the fatal yet unconscious instrument of Cleopatra’s suicide. Antony and Cleopatra stagnates during its central part to come alive again in the two final acts focusing on Antony’s boasting and his exalted, hyperbolic oratory. As never before in Shakespeare, the end of a hero is dragged out; and never so morbid and voluptuous is the lingering over Cleopatra’s death. My view of the play can be best approached by explaining the correlation between the intention announced and the consequent action. Perhaps only two characters do not contradict their

36

Antony and Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare’s richest plays in analepses supplied by messengers and evokers; endowed with narrative and poetic talent, they compose admirable cameos, permissible here given the distance between the poles where the action is played out, which are Rome, Egypt and the battlefields, and in the end Alexandria and the monument.

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purposes.37 Registers vary from pure political jargon to the loudly heroic proclamation, from Cleopatra’s erotic teasing with the servants to the caustic persiflage of Enobarbus. The beauty of certain imaginative glimpses, inspired and dreamy, which frame and punctuate pragmatic talk, is due to their being unplanned and abrupt flares: from the cameo of Enobarbus on Cleopatra in her barge on the river, to her memory of fishing and of the diver, to Antony’s story of the Egyptian soothsayers who measure fertility or famine from the level of the Nile. Mainly the chorus is of weary voices and unsynchronized utterances, coming from indolent, fatalistic, resigned characters. Among Antony’s followers, Enobarbus is pure cynicism: he throws an aura of insincerity on the tears Antony once shed for Caesar; mocking and irreverent, he tends to intervene in the form of riddles or recondite allusions, as do Shakespeare’s fools. This is in fact his function. In some respects he is a less rabid, less poisonous Thersites. The theme of the play is the fatally destructive disease of voluptuousness; were the passion not senile, its theme would appear similar to that of Romeo and Juliet. And here, human drama is interwoven with Roman history. The two cives who are talking as the curtain rises propose a reading of the Herculean, or Atlantic, hero,38 of the triple pillar of the world having become the ‘bellows and the fan / To cool a gipsy’s lust’; theirs is the voice of the outrage felt by the remnants of an honest Roman spirit. 3. But why then does Antony and Cleopatra seem such a disjointed, over-elaborate play? The answer is that Shakespeare does not, indeed cannot, find in history, in this case and on principle, an intelligible plan, an unvarying and recurrent pattern, not even a series of actual parallelisms: rather only incoherence, chance and irrationality. In Antony and Cleopatra he examines more profoundly the decadence of Roman masculine heroism once it has reached its apex; after Caesar Rome is only debauchery and sloth. An internal relativism requires that anyone proclaiming himself honest 37 38

The evident exceptions are first of all Octavius, and the freedman Eros, who says he will kill himself in place of Antony, and does so. Octavius accuses Antony of having metaphorically disguised himself as a woman (I.4.5), like Hercules in one of his metamorphoses. And Cleopatra calls him ‘the demi-Atlas of this earth’ (I.5.23).

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must sooner or later show some flaw; he who is without sin shall cast the first stone. The only person spared is Octavius Caesar, who is the upright Brutus of the first Roman play; and it is Octavius who is the unchanging pillar, stable and immobile, the pivot of nobility and integrity – yet even here we must entertain a shadow of doubt. In this play everything is then in a state of everlasting movement, change and alternation. Shakespeare describes a historical moment of discord, envy, enmity, or of alliances that fracture as soon as they are made. Impermanence reigns supreme primarily because, as Octavius says (I.4.40ff.), he who has no power is praised until he reaches it, and having reached it loses favour, and he who opposes this rise gains that favour for an equally short instant. The crowd wavers like a reed at high tide, and it is a reed that rots.39 Antony and Cleopatra is about ‘fortune’ in its most strictly etymological and historical sense: its theme is unexpected change, whether sudden or gradual, and the eternal metamorphosis reigning in the current of human things. This background could be called an unstoppable Heraclitean flow without a leader, therefore without teleology. All change slightly from what they were before, or even at the end with respect to the beginning or the halfway point of the play, few remaining irremovable. Antony has changed from the previous play, something no-one would have imagined. Cleopatra has no idea if she loves passionately or only out of lust for power and in order to keep herself afloat, that is, for selfishness; she frustrates Antony a little, she yearns for him a little, being at times a femme fatale, or so she is made out to be, while other times she is not and is her own opposite. Sextus Pompeius says he wishes to oppose bitter fortune without becoming its slave. Antony’s wife Octavia is the widow of Caius Marcellus. The ‘for ever’ is always pronounced and proclaimed only to be immediately denied. The objective correlative of this schizophrenia, this untrustworthiness, this impermanence of the subject, is the changing forms that the clouds paint as they appear in their airy metamorphoses, in Antony’s extemporary speech (IV.14). The intelligibility of history, for a man so blinded, is based on prolepses and omens. The soothsayer in Act I, asked to read the future by Cleopatra 39 The valorous Ventidius says that a subordinate must moderate his heroic deeds, otherwise his leader through envy causes his fall and he is out of favour.

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and her attendants, echoes the witches in Macbeth, and this seems obvious, since he unknowingly traces the final events of fifteen years later. Charmian’s line, that she loves long life better than figs, is sinister (I.2).40 Fortune is the destiny dominating and subjugating man against which Cleopatra inveighs for example in V.2: her ideal is he who dominates her in turn, so that it is suicide that affirms human independence and grants victory over Fortune. Here we can only see confirmed the philosophy of King Lear and of an absent or perverse government of human events on the part of a dynasty of ‘kings’ who are ‘wise’ only in an ironic sense. These gods are so enigmatic that at times the gifts human beings hope for are deferred or even denied, for our own good; we pray yet we are ignorant of what is our own good. These observations at the beginning of Act II merge with that on man’s relapses and his weakness: taken to the seventh heaven, the way prepared for the superhuman hero, deified or mythical, he then finds himself at the mercy of the current. Through concrete dramatic action the impermanence of history is reflected in phenomena of betrayal, change of sides, desertion, yet all followed by repentance: therefore in the motif of mutability and relapse. How often does Antony change his mind and redeem himself, and how often does he plummet back into the slavery of the senses and into weakness of will; and how many traitors repent and backtrack. Determination seems overshadowed and on the road to extinction, and conflict between opposite forces and incoherence seem to prevail.41 ‘In time we hate that which we often fear’ (I.3.12), and this sounds like the tragic adaptation of the playful informing principle of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Human life, then, cannot be configured other than as yet another series of senseless gestures, acts and events; more exactly, as a desecrating and overturned evangelical parody. Between a drink and a jest, Menas whispers to Sextus Pompeius that had he only so wished, he

40 We may of course follow the very evident track of the appearances of the serpent: the courser’s hair fallen into the water turns into a serpent; Cleopatra is affectionately called the ‘serpent of old Nile’ (a bad omen) (I.5.25). Cleopatra lays a curse on Egypt that it may become a cistern for serpents; yet Egyptian serpents are born through solar fertilization from the mud of the river. 41 Antony mourns the dead Fulvia in spite of having wished for her death.

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would now be the ‘lord of all the world’ by taking the ship to sea and cutting the throats of the triumvirs. Pompeius answers that Menas should have done it, not just speak of it, and condemns what he would have approved after the fact; but Menas the Machiavellian retorts that any chance missed is a chance lost.42 If the defeated Antony is a parody of Jesus on his way to Calvary, hence an imperfect Redeemer tragically deviated, his Judas is Enobarbus, who repents having betrayed him when the cock crows. 4. Eros knows no limit or measure, says the opening statement, and it creates and imposes its jurisdiction and separate sovereignty overshadowing everything else. Erotic relations in Shakespeare are precociously informed by and follow the Tristanian or ‘aesthetic’ code of Eros-Thanatos: sexual relations must be crowned in death to realize all their voluptuousness, always imperfect on this earth. They are thus destructive and selfdestructive, fuelled by a sudden flare and an equally sudden quenching. This sublimation is dramatically presented in the dying Antony, hurtling towards death as a bridegroom towards the bridal bed. He represents the will giving way to sensual pleasure. Othello and Macbeth, wearily on the descendant and drained, resemble him. Especially like Macbeth, Antony believes he has quietened the calls of conscience, yet they rise again. The final redemption, with self-cursing and the sarcastic reference to the ‘wise gods’, is somewhat reminiscent of King Lear. In Antony the fast advent of a heroic, delirious frenzy is amazing; it lasts for several scenes, followed by sudden disillusion and bitterness towards Cleopatra, hated and cursed. By now flagging, the hero cannot even attempt suicide – a grotesque scene. The erotic flame flares up again with separation and distance. Tense, anxious, passionate, possessive when Antony is away, Cleopatra turns sarcastic and sharp when he is close by. As false, mendacious and astute as she is heroic and noble, she plays with Antony, she teases him above all, thus she binds him closer and closer to her. Charmian touches upon a sore spot: does she really love him? Or is he not rather a tool to satisfy and foster her ego and so her selfishness? And it is now Cleopatra who surpasses her master in rhetoric: ‘I have no power upon you’ (I.3.24). Having been unfaithful 42 Those who see in Pompeius the victory of ethical reason are mistaken, therefore: his reasoning is fundamentally Machiavellian, that is, hypocritical.

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to her once, Antony may always be unfaithful. According to the rhetorical figures used by Enobarbus in II.3, she is enchanting and bewitching, an unchanging icon. Perfidious and calculating, she is at the same time candid, childish, happy-go-lucky, sounding at times like Juliet, at others like Desdemona, when for instance she is questioning the messengers while quivering and quaking at the messages they might be bringing; or else she is like any common neurotic woman. She is in herself an evident paradigm of instability, the very essence of changeability. She proves an opportunist at the height of an emergency, when she trembles before the will of Octavius the victor, voicing what is in her best interests, and the greatest of lies: that she went in fear of Antony and did not love him. And before Octavius she bows down. The Nile is a sort of natural mise en abyme; fertilizing as much as destroying, its floods bring famine while promising harvests; and its mud hides the lethal asp. A synonym is used for this asp: the ‘worm’ of the Nile, a subtle symbol and icon of the lethal phallus which, remarkably allusive, she lulls in her bosom.43 In his ignorance, the ‘rural fellow’ – Shakespeare is masterly in such scenes – distorts the simple truth: the serpent will make her ‘immortal’, and brings death and eternalization to the two lovers in their love and their love-making.44 5. Lepidus comments that there are certain congenital, hereditary weaknesses, not the outcome of will, or over which the will has no power (I.4.14– 15). Octavius is of the opposite opinion: he firmly believes that man has the power to stand upright when the stake in question requires him to do so: descending into the abyss of vice, he is irremediably branded without hope of rising again. Is Octavius the sexually repressed, ante litteram Puritan, who symptomatically criticizes whoever indulges in ‘pleasure’ and rebels against reason, a stalwart warrior against lust and unrestrained passion? Is he the misogynist, contemptuous of female weakness, a femininity he believes always ready to give in, always subject to temptation? The colourless, upright, 43 This symbolism is allusively reversed in II.5, when Cleopatra mentions a fishing episode (she enjoys fishing as a pastime), and her sadistic penetration with the hook into the fish’s mouths. 44 ‘immortal’, the blunder of the rural fellow, is taken up again a few lines later by Cleopatra expressing ‘immortal longings’.

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stiffly acid Octavius is also classical, neoclassical and therefore Augustan as much as Antony is romantic, intense, impulsive and unstable.45 The alternative to Antony is the formal, fussy, nit-picking moralist. In front of the bodies of the three women, Octavius’ last remark says it all: death was not due to poisoned figs, otherwise the bodies would be swollen. As regards my interpretation, it is exceptionally important that Octavius speaks to his men to bring this historical incident to a close, advising that ‘high order’ be restored, after a period of ungovernable chaos.46 One question, or perhaps a sceptical reserve, remains: is Octavius the real voice of the wise, balanced and reasoning monarch? There is a pinch of satire hidden deep down in the depiction and the action of this man, so inert and without vibrations, at times a maniac. As is often if not always the case with Shakespeare, the epilogue is supremely open and ambiguous: no real or credible hero comes to the fore, so the play is without a hero. Antony is only slightly redeemed by death, as if death were the proof of reconquered heroism – but we have already seen his comic, miserable failure, even in suicide. § 28. ‘Coriolanus’ * Close to Antony and Cleopatra in its date of writing but quite evidently very distant in its internal historical time (the period is far earlier, almost

45 Just as Octavia is the opposite of Cleopatra. 46 Almost a teetotaller, Octavius proves to be most self-controlled during the revelry aboard Pompeius’ ship in Act II. *

S. Rosati, Il ‘Coriolano’ di Shakespeare, Firenze 1963; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Coriolanus’: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. A. Phillips, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1970; C. C. Huffman, ‘Coriolanus’ in Context, Lewisburg, PA 1971; L. Holt, From Man to Dragon: A Study of Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus’, Salzburg 1976; Shakespeare: ‘Coriolanus’: A Casebook, ed. B. A. Brockman, London 1977; M. Quadri, ‘Coriolanus’: l’arma della parola, Pisa 1990; J. Rudanko, Pragmatic Approaches to Shakespeare: Essays on ‘Othello’, ‘Coriolanus’ and ‘Timon of Athens’, Lanham, MD and London 1993; ‘Coriolanus’: Critical Essays, ed. D. Wheeler, New York and London 1995; ‘Coriolanus’: dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 2000; J. H. Blits, Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus’, Lanham, MD and Oxford 2006; A. Pacheco, ‘Coriolanus’, William Shakespeare, Tavistock 2007.

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500 years), Coriolanus (staged in 1608, published in 1623) can however be considered the pendant to that play and a second study on a vanquished Roman hero, confirming once more the disintegration and long-standing corruption within Roman civilization, threatened ab ovo by a hotbed of infection, a pathogenic germ that was to recur, breaking out in cyclical epidemics.47 The same Roman world appears again here, eroded and devoured by primitive, senseless myths such as honour, fame, blood, rivalry, a group of values absorbed by the Volscians as well. This explains the loud-spoken, contemptuous and hyperbolic rhetoric that is dominant.48 Its basic theme, and as it were the symbol of hara-kiri, could be found in the act of betrayal and desertion. But this is not the case, since Coriolanus is most definitely not the archetype either of Mark Antony or of Enobarbus. He rather belongs to the circle, and has the stature, of Othello, Macbeth and very few other solitary, towering heroes that overshadow all other characters, having the temperament and genius of those Shakespearean figures who are active, tenacious, irreducible, strong-nerved and non-Hamletic. Even King Lear comes to mind and the punishment awaiting the overambitious, those who intend to overcome nature and are stopped and struck by nature’s boomerang. Now, if Shakespeare’s oeuvre abounds with diabolical characters committed to duplicity, yet skilful enough to seem transparent, here at last we meet a character who is not two-faced but scrupulously sincere, sturdily fighting any weakness and any compromise while seeking to maintain his hard-won coherence, and who, failing, is banned for this very virtue. Such is the prevalence in Shakespeare of hypocritical characters, that for a good deal of Coriolanus we might tend to take the 47 Human instability, chiefly the instability of glory and fame, is emphasized by Aufidius, in the same words that echo in Antony and Cleopatra: he who ascends enjoys momentary favour, descending once the highest point is reached; this is the fate awaiting Coriolanus. 48 Rome and its history were already legendary in the fifth century bc. The icons related to Coriolanus include the tiger, the viper, the dragon above all, with strangely mysterious echoes, at the end, of Beowulf: a dragon living in a fen (commentators make reference to an episode in the Faerie Queene). Coriolanus is a sort of giant often referred to as a demi-god, who with his ‘mail’d hand’ mows the other warriors, invincible as in myth, a myth also partly Anglo-Saxon.

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character not as a Shakespearean exception but as yet another of those who play-act, pretend or pose with diabolical ability.49 This is the issue at stake and the paradox of the play. Shakespeare seems to have started from the idea of a personage embodying a dilemma and so to have set out in search of such a figure in history; it was not history that gave him the idea. There is no answer, because if Shakespeare dismantles the people’s tribunes – if the Senate is powerless, if crowds are reeds blowing in the wind, anonymous, impulsive and not very shrewd – Coriolanus himself infringes Ulysses’ ‘degree’, his coherence is frustrated by self-destructive extremism, and he makes further fateful ideological and political mistakes, illustrating yet again the motto corruptio optimi pessima. Shakespeare the historiographer and political commentator leaves two roads open, that of democracy that coddles the plebeians and makes concessions, and that of autocracy and the simple raison d’état. But neither ensures order, harmony and the good working of the machine of the state. The suture between the historical background with its tensions – reviewed and evaluated by the playwright – and the personal and psychological drama it contains is very successful and very skilful. Thanks to such planning Coriolanus deserves to be counted among Shakespeare’s masterpieces (I share T. S. Eliot’s opinion in this) for the inflexible, even oppressive scenic primacy of its hero, and as one of the most intense, consequential yet hallucinatory and alienated of his works.50 It is a laboriously long play, extenuating in how it mimes

49 Distantly similar to the questioning of Jesus in the Praetorium is the third scene of Act III, when the tribunes and the plebeians cleverly provoke Coriolanus and, believing they have proof of his guilt, sentence him to exile. 50 One might even say estranged, using a much later dramatic category, though only in its theory. In other words Coriolanus is impressive in the quality, no less than the quantity, of the usual street scenes and others that flaw and destroy dramatic illusion. In the third scene of Act IV a Volscian and a Roman meet in the street and discover they have already met each other previously. This is at a time when the Volscians are about to take advantage of the unrest in Rome to go to war. The tones and topics of the conversation foreshadow those in one of Leopardi’s Operette morali. The scene of the waiters’ failure to recognize the exiled Coriolanus who, travel-weary and dirty, arrives at Anzio (IV.5) and quite by chance finds himself in front of Aufidius’ house where a banquet is being held, has a foretaste of the neo-Gothic or of a Henry James

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the sense of its action and the psychological twists of the protagonist. With Coriolanus, Shakespeare was to hand down one of the most evident, spectacular icons of the hubris pathology, together with other dramatists in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, Marlowe and Chapman in particular. This character’s phrases, sayings and words seem to issue from the mouth of Browning’s Duke of Ferrara, or to have been lent to him together with certain paranoid behaviour: ‘’twas never my desire yet to trouble the poor with begging’.51 And Menenius Agrippa says that Coriolanus ‘would not flatter Neptune for his trident’ (III.1.254: the bronze statue of a Neptune tames a ‘sea-horse’ in Browning, and the duke points it out to the envoy; the image has the same hue and insinuation of absolute power and over-weening pride). Browning’s verb ‘stoop’ appears in III.2.32, ‘stoop to the herd’. The parable of Coriolanus is defined as ‘striving’, the same stretching upwards as in Browning’s heroic protagonists. But Coriolanus may also be seen as the secret thread running through Auden’s The Ascent of F 6. ‘Ascent’ is a term attributed to Coriolanus himself (II.2.25), and in the two plays it is the mother who instigates his self-destructive heroism, and who appears at the end to interrupt or guide the ‘ascent’: Coriolanus, like Auden’s Ransom, would violate his deeply Oedipal relationship should he continue his rise, and would tread on the womb of the woman who gave him birth. 2. On the purely political and historiographical plane, Shakespeare, the supporter of harmonious cohabitation between the classes and fearful of any abuse of power and of dictatorship, investigates in Coriolanus one of the recurrent periods when the Roman political establishment and its unity are threatened by disintegrating factors. Coriolanus could fuel this turn of events and is the enemy of national unity, as Caesar was to be at least according to Brutus in Julius Caesar. However, the people lack a really well-structured political analysis, since they are quite happy with empty promises. It is enough for them that hatred be changed into love; they require compassion and not concrete measures and reforms. The crowd’s

51

scene set in Rome, just because of its evident, blatant anachronism. Coriolanus’ mother and wife embroider and chat (I.3) as if in a nineteenth-century melodrama or a Victorian novel. On Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ see Volume 4, § 115.3.

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immaturity is seen not only in its low political understanding but also in its proverbial changefulness and fragility. Shakespeare of course does not turn a deaf ear to the obvious objection: the population is such a shapeless, intellectually amorphous mass that it can get out of hand; hence the need for an iron fist (‘such as cannot rule / Not ever will be rul’d’). Coriolanus voices the need for strong powers in order to avoid chaos. The paradox is then that freedom and order are threatened by a strong arm but also by its absence. When the valorous warrior Coriolanus suddenly turns himself into an ideologue and political analyst, offering his candidacy as consul, he makes no mystery of the fact that democracy is the cause of political instability; the nation’s helm must be in the hand of a class that is not continuously subject to the approval or censure of an opposing party. But the people too are mistaken – they who live by the sword die by the same sword – since they summarily condemn Coriolanus without a regular trial, simply for a verbal fault, a sort of crime of opinion or a politically incorrect gesture. In Act III, at the trial against Coriolanus, we have just assisted at an ignoble harangue and at the attempt to make Coriolanus say things he does not feel, when a similar sleight of hand is organized by the tribunes in order to suborn the people. In effect the tribunes act as Brutus does: they call a supposition a proven fact, in this case that Coriolanus has set up a ‘tyrannical power’; they act to prevent a looming evil (and they admit it: here is peace [IV.6.34–5], whereas we would have had chaos had he been elected consul). But the outcome is the reverse side of the coin: Rome is weaker without Coriolanus, and the Volscians take advantage of the hero’s absence. So seeing the danger everybody now overturns the decision taken; this magmatic mass wants to make trouble for the tribunes so that Coriolanus will come back. Menenius Agrippa attempts to bring together the two disintegrating or conflicting positions. In Act I he is a conscientious tool of the state while subtly exploiting the technique of the stick and the carrot. In Act II he has a long part in which he is revealed as a sardonic, even absurd, tease and a somewhat disconcerting, skilful, punning pedagogue. His main task is to teach and to unmask, and he does so with imperceptible allusions: the stick works with the two foolish, idiotic tribunes he berates and leaves wordless; but he also belittles Coriolanus’ two women, his mother and his wife, with his barbed darts (which we readers understand but they do not) aimed at

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the grandiloquent, blustering folly of the wounded, bleeding Coriolanus. For this reason, in terms of the internal equivalences in the dramatic canon, Menenius is a character on a par with Enobarbus, perhaps even his double, as he is also a voice off-stage and within certain limits the voice of Shakespeare himself, always that of an outside spectator of events. This is also because Menenius is able to use subterfuge and teasing, mainly through wordplay. His well-known fable is overturned when in an extended metaphor the tribunes and the people maintain that Coriolanus is the infected limb that must be amputated, rather than treated. On the other hand, the fable itself, at least in this play, does not exactly respond to the people’s complaint nor to the fact that, as it appears, the wealthy have stored up the corn and are not suffering famine as the people themselves are. 3. Coriolanus believes and proclaims that Fate, not the patricians, has sent famine. And he adds that, in his distorted view, the plebeians deserve no provisions unless they prove their valour on the field. This political vision is ante litteram Machiavellian: the senate oversees a population that is a mass of savages who would tear each other apart if left to themselves. Therefore Coriolanus unashamedly applies apartheid to the plebeians to deny their human and civil rights.52 Plebeian subjugation will avoid the ‘ruin of the state’ that follows concessions made to the crowd. The first scene of Act III camouflages his deep-felt hatred under political ideology: it is a foundation of authoritarianism and its justification. The primary, intrinsic phenomenology of hubris is modesty, therefore also involuntary irony, and Coriolanus is a rhetorician because he always maintains that he has been over-praised and that he has in fact not done anything to deserve such acclaim. In the senate, after his first victory against the Volscians, not only does he deny any wish to hear the honours about to be attributed to him, he also materially declines them, brushing them aside – in words, in his humble attitude, showing his wounds. Thereafter he must persuade the plebeians and therefore undergo the test to be elected consul; but he ends up being a very bad rhetorician and reveals what he should have kept hidden:

52

In a really sinister line heralding Swift, he insinuates that the war will get rid of the superfluous population.

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his strategy, the fact that he is perforce acting a part. The purpose was to convince the people of something false, but he is not able to hide it and he does not wish to do so. Coriolanus is genuine in not being able to bear the false rhetoric of demagogy. When he is acting a part, he is acclaimed; when he is more sincere, acclaim declines. For a long time the common people wonder whether he is sincere or making fun of them. 4. The amazing foresight of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is in subtly having built a psychic, psychological, even psychoanalytical case on Coriolanus. Three characters are closely intertwined in this perspective: his mother Volumnia, Menenius Agrippa and the warrior chief of the Volscians, Aufidius. General Cominius says of him that he has no father; he is therefore a solipsist, a lonely being in search of a putative sustaining figure, a father substitute: Menenius affectionately calls him ‘my son Coriolanus’, and Coriolanus calls him his ‘old father’.53 But Coriolanus is spurred on above all to honour and fame by his mother, the first motor. She it is who has given him such a rigorous and inflexible code of patriotic honour (better eleven children dead than one coward) and has carved into him such a perverse educational furrow. Like Lady Macbeth she is blood-thirsty, but this blood is expressly the blood of enemies killed in battle: talis mater talis filius. So Coriolanus constantly and stubbornly pursues fame and honour; but on principle, as in all forms of hubris, every target centred is and will always be less than the highest trophy. Thus he cuts short praise not through false modesty but in all sincerity, since he is always reaching for objectives higher than fame itself. Shakespeare has also discovered and illustrated that heroic hubris may be a sexual ersatz hiding transfers of sexual desire: his wife Virgilia is a cold, colourless nun-type and Coriolanus is probably in abstinence. The Volscian Aufidius is therefore an alter ego of Coriolanus, a double, a Poe-like look-alike, a William Wilson against whose laziness Coriolanus has to struggle: it is the very principle of hubris, the overreaching of the self. The two search for each other and attract each other like magnets. Coriolanus pretends to himself to hate Aufidius, he expressly says he hates him, and Aufidius reciprocates

53

Yet another symbolic father-and-son relationship that has set off the Oedipal critics.

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yet secretly and unconsciously wishes to emulate him. Thus he always yearns for a symbolic clash at the highest level against this alter ego, that supreme, deified hero that he himself wishes to be. And that phantomlike enemy materializes in Aufidius, that shadow of himself. Coriolanus is fuelled by this contraposition or overlap: each of them projects himself into the phantom of the other, wishing to leave his own identity and move towards the other’s.54 This psychic dimension only fades and disappears when Coriolanus offers Aufidius his own services against his own country. Then another attachment takes over. Aufidius also confesses he feels more love for Coriolanus than for the bride he has just married: a slight erotic, even homoerotic, infatuation arises and takes shape, which evokes the disturbed relationship between Birkin and Gerald, and their dream duel in the cancelled episode in Lawrence’s Women in Love.55 However hubris, or the hubris of Coriolanus – Coriolanus the upright, never false with himself or with others – implies an unconscious, ultimate or original falsity: consolidated common opinion has it that Coriolanus shed his blood and performed so many heroics out of disinterested love for his country. At his disposal he has extra rhetorical weapons in his wounds and his deeds, requiring his men ‘to put [their] tongues into those wounds and speak for them’. Coriolanus has in fact been a hero exclusively for his own sake and that of his mother. This is proved by his betrayal and his desertion, belying even his sturdy patriotism. Act V sees the repentance of Coriolanus, but culpably and fatally late, which in Shakespeare always exacts agonizing retribution. An unconscious flaw in the iron heroism of his character had already surfaced in the highly enigmatic episode, left unsolved (I.9), of the old man who sheltered Coriolanus during the first war against the Volscians, for whom he had a spontaneous, humane gesture of compassion and kindness.56 But his mother is the pivot. The arrangement she had

54 As Aufidius confesses in I.10. 55 Volume 7, § 114.6. Aufidius dreamed or had nightmares in which he saw himself struggling with Coriolanus in mortal combat. 56 An episode taken word for word from Plutarch, and exploited by those holding that Coriolanus is apolitical; on being asked the name of the old man, Coriolanus cannot remember it.

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proposed to him before the sentence of exile was primarily motivated by purely Machiavellian criteria: not to desist but to pretend, to speak words without attributing any importance to them and without believing them. In this case Coriolanus resists. In Act V Volumnia is forced to realize the impossibility of hubris for the concrete purposes of human life, so she goes begging to her son and in part dissuades him from what she has taught him since childhood: she instigates him to duplicity. She succeeds above all because she makes him understand that if he is victorious on the side of the Volscians, he will be remembered as infamous, not for the fame of the valorous but for the notoriety of the cursed. As adamant and hard as steel as he had been before, Coriolanus now melts and gives way to his affections. Aufidius is therefore in a position to reproach Coriolanus for having succumbed to his mother and lost his determination; all told, he calls him a traitor, a two-faced liar. This for Coriolanus is the most tremendous dishonour, gainsaying the whole of his life’s design.

The Tragedies and the Tragicomedies

§ 29. The tragedies and the tragicomedies The section on the tragedies is necessarily the crucial and most substantial of any book on Shakespeare; so it will be in this volume, since it deals with the four works that are best known, most proverbial and most admired, the truly and quintessentially immortal creations in his canon. Here however their number will be increased to eight, since I will include four more masterpieces whose classification is a moot point; they are frequently placed elsewhere in other such books on Shakespeare since their category has always been debated. My inclusion will be in the first two cases for lack of contraindication, as they are, through their very features, self-standing and not easily or reasonably included in other homogeneous blocks – as was the case of Troilus in the previous group. These plays are Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. As regards Measure for Measure, it is the finest of those comedies that are not or have not yet reverted to being ‘light’, and indeed still ‘dark’, which belong to another group. To the nature of Timon of Athens I will return later. Should Shakespeare’s activity be easily divided into stages, here we approach and pass the 1603 watershed, with Shakespeare becoming Jacobean, no longer strictly Elizabethan. Between 1600 and 1601 there was more than a year that was mirabilis if it is true that it led to the creation and staging of four plays in a ceaseless flow of creativity. Some of these eight works were taken from Italian novellas from the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (primus inter pares Giraldi Cinthio) in French translations, together with the support, mixture and contamination of various other sources, without the final product suffering from too great a plethora of ingredients. Shakespeare consulted the histories of the historians while reworking and totally transforming the chronicle play type. Freeing history from the fixed dates of the calendar the dramatic diegesis becomes one of symbolic stations outside time or with time references that are bland and blurred. Three of the tragedies have an Italian, more exactly Veneto region, background; one is set in a Vienna that is purely by-the-way and generic; one is Danish; two Anglo-Scottish; and one has an indefinable Greek setting. Shakespeare never having written plays on biblical subjects, one of the records attributable to King Lear is that its internal time is the most remote in his drama: 2,000 years before the time of writing. The general atmosphere is rarefied, just

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slightly mimetic, but with crafty reverberations of recent, even contemporary, events in English history and in the playwright’s personal history. In King Lear, especially, Shakespeare inexorably attempts no conjuring, and up-dates and Elizabethanizes the whole scenario. Appearing to many readers as conveying on the whole a desperately nihilistic message, Macbeth was instead positively and optimistically eulogistic to those able to perceive a countermelody within the horror, devastation and pessimism regarding the overwhelming ambition of those thirsting for power.1 The fact that Hamnet was the name of Shakespeare’s son who died in childhood suggests a merging at the highest level of Danish history and autobiography. 2. The label of ‘lyrical tragedy’ has been coined for Romeo and Juliet, the tragedy of two youngsters in love; thus Antony and Cleopatra should be a ‘historico-lyrical’ tragedy in which the two lovers die embracing one another in an epilogue that is not very dissimilar. Romeo and Juliet is still an experimental, apprenticeship effort, hence here it is placed first because it is the earliest of the tragedies tout court. It is linked to Love’s Labour’s Lost in its tissue and collection of sonnets, quatrains and sestets or other rhymed lines and for the euphuistic phraseology of love poetry; addressing an educated audience rather than the common people, it is a renegotiation of the revenge play (Tybalt kills Mercutio and Romeo takes revenge), but by then divested of its horrors. The label of ‘romantic comedy’ for The Merchant of Venice is clearly misplaced: it could apply to half of it, but Shylock’s part is anything but that. It takes some features from other comedies, but it adds others given the paucity of the initial material, as is shown by the hard-to-fit episode of Launcelot Gobbo. In particular it has recourse to the doubling of the role of the despotic, morbid father with a visceral attachment to his daughter. Two matrimonial stratagems are set afloat and are successful. The thematic repertoire to which it belongs is that of the Elizabethan plays on the relations between Jews and Christians, 1

The connection is this: Banquo’s son, Fleance, fleeing from Scotland after the murder attempt made on him by Macbeth, emigrated southwards where he married the daughter of the King of Wales and begot Walter; back in Scotland, the latter became the Scottish king’s steward, and the ancestor of the dynasty that took his name, that is, Stuart, from 1603 for a century the English royal dynasty.

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Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta being the founding text. Behind Shylock’s trial was the case of Rodrigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jewish doctor executed for leading a plot against Elizabeth. The third intrusion or exception is as I said Measure for Measure, certainly a great play of Shakespeare’s maturity that remains a non-tragedy – it is in fact a comedy that could turn into a tragedy but is deviated at the last moment. This threat is triumphantly thwarted; all in all Duke Vincentio is a good wizard working only with white magic and cleverly closing his performance without bloodshed, as does Prospero. 3. Of the four great tragedies, Othello was reworked chiastically from its source: it was Iago who desired Disdemona (sic) in Giraldi Cinthio, and the murder was arranged between him and Othello,2 who revealed the suspicion rather than falling victim to Iago’s arts. In this case Shakespeare worked with greater difficulty since no English version existed, only the French one of the original. Othello is also a case in which the textual issue cannot be overlooked: a 1622 quarto was based on an autograph manuscript, and a law against blasphemy in the theatre removed all disrespectful expressions from the Folio text. The Hamlet and Macbeth texts present the opposite situation: the former was handed down in a version to be read, probably much longer than the acted script with its many cuts. The latter, on the other hand, has come down to us in a shorter text than that perhaps performed at court for the king, an unexpurgated version that has not survived. King Lear, as I mentioned, is the dismantling and remaking of a chronicle play: the tell-tale sign is in the title, where the word ‘king’ is reinstated as in the English historical plays of more than ten years before. It therefore goes back to the usual sources such as Holinshed, with the addition of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Shakespeare, though, adapted an anonymous Leir of a dozen years before. There are however hints of this plot in Sidney, Spenser and various other sources, and even a contemporary event, that of an old man against whom his married daughter brought a suit for mental incapacity, was amalgamated with the play. King Lear is unquestionably the zenith of Shakespeare’s ability to handle and unify sources without friction in a supreme personal synthesis. As to 2

Iago himself carries out Desdemona’s murder in front of the Moor, bludgeoning her to death with sacks of sand.

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Timon of Athens, Greek history remains indistinctly in the background, too fantastical and out of phase. The play is full of echoes and hints that create a certain ‘romantic’ yet particularly pungent atmosphere. From one viewpoint, it is a remake of King Lear – an addition or an appendix, as if Shakespeare had not unburdened himself completely and wished to create a further pendant to it, a hypostasis denouncing on the one hand the naïvety of excessive, unreasonable generosity, and on the other human ingratitude. About halfway through, Timon takes on a completely different direction; but at the beginning it is a sort of chiastic rediscussion of Jonson’s Volpone. Volpone demands gifts from certain gullible people who believe that by doing so they will earn themselves a large slice of the rich man’s legacy; he however tricks them and leads them on. In Shakespeare the person tricked and led on is the man of substance, not the ‘fox’ at all but the simpleton who donates gifts instead of receiving them, according to a perfect antithesis. Jonson’s Machiavellian Volpone is dethroned and Timon opens his eyes, so that in the end a certain coincidence comes about. We may wonder whether Shakespeare had intended to hide behind the veil of an episode from Greek history – still within the ambit of paganism – a rather blasphemous, extreme debate on the ethical tenets of Christianity or a certain type of Christianity: the Christian charity of giving and bestowing disinterestedly, without expectation of being paid back, is stupid and naïve. When the steward informs him that his coffers are empty, Timon is utterly taken aback; he is like a character in Pirandello who wonders why he wasn’t told before. The tropic isotopy is eloquent: from beginning to end the play refers to eating and avarice is connoted in terms of anthropophagy. Apemantus calls the beneficiaries those who eat the rich. The retaliations range from the banquet with its dishes full of hot water to eating roots in the woods. Timon’s great prayer is blasphemous because it distorts and crudely overturns the puritanical habit of saying grace before meals. Timon and Apemantus embody the asymptotic poles of one and the same human being; the latter is a double and literally an alter ego, the opposite and equal of the former. Shakespeare at times has recourse to a similar split of one character in another in whom he is reflected and completed; Coriolanus with Aufidius above all comes to mind. Lastly, Timon is a propulsive play that uses and passes on the great

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allegorical representations of the value of wealth, and the bridge thrown forward is towards Dickens. We find in Timon the seeds of the fable of Scrooge (with an inverted development: from misanthropy to generosity), or of Our Mutual Friend, with money symbolically reduced to ‘dust’. § 30. ‘Romeo and Juliet’* In Romeo and Juliet (staged in 1595, published in 1597),3 urban anarchy is placated when its voracious minotaur has claimed such a hecatomb of human bodies that the two stubborn factions of the Capulets and Montagues merge in a brotherhood. As in Hamlet and other tragedies, in the epilogue men *

R. O. Evans, The Osier Cage; Rhetorical Devices in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Lexington, KT 1966; J. R. Brown, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Style: ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘As You Like It’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Twelfth Night’, ‘Macbeth’, London 1970; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ed. D. Cole, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1970; R. Rutelli, ‘Romeo e Giulietta’: l’effabile. Analisi di una riflessione sul linguaggio, Milano 1978, new edn Napoli 1985; ‘Romeo and Juliet’: dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1986; M. C. Zaniboni, Un’antica passione: ‘Romeo e Giulietta’ dalle fonti a Shakespeare, Imola 1988; G. Holderness, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Harmondsworth 1991; ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Critical Essays, ed. J. F. Andrews, New York and London 1993; ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Nouvelles Perspectives Critiques, ed. J. M. Maguin and C. Whitworth, Montpellier 1993; A. Dickey, The Making of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, London 1994; Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Texts, Contexts, and Interpretation, ed. J. L. Halio, Newark, DE and London 1995; Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ed. J. A. Porter, New York 1997; K. L. Wright, Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in Performance: Traditions and Departures, Lewiston, NY 1997; G. Bulla, Il verso e la tragedia. Forme del linguaggio in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Roma 2004; L. Hunter and P. Lichtenfelds, Negotiating Shakespeare’s Language in ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Reading Strategies from Criticism, Editing and the Theatre, Farnham 2009; B. Sause, Love, Death, and Fortune: Central Concepts in Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Frankfurt am Main 2013; C. Belsey, ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Language and Writing, London 2014.

3

Modern editions are based however on the Q2 of 1599 integrated with the first quarto of 1595, both in some measure ‘bad’. The episode of the ‘most lamentable tragedy of Romeo and Juliet’ enjoyed wide circulation at the end of the sixteenth century and was one of those most frequently re-narrated. To summarize, this was the chain reaching Shakespeare: Masuccio-Da Porto-Bandello-Boaistuau-Painter-Brooke, the last two English, writing in prose the former, in verse the latter.

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come to their senses, but with lethal damage. Three bodies, then four, lie in the graveyard, with other deaths that occurred previously, the exorbitant price of the mad turmoil of unwisdom.4 There is only a hint of Shakespeare’s set framework here: split communities, hopes for peace so hard to achieve, the intestinal division of the cosmos en abyme; then the disorder giving way to order through its unsustainable saturation and through the irremediable block of any civil cohabitation. This is fused with the theme of the descent of humans to the underworld of beasts and instinctive incontinence. Political power is embodied in the upright, irreprehensible prince of Verona, Escalus,5 a facile Solomonic voice hopefully practising what he preaches. However, he may be accused of absenteeism since as the guardian of order he always arrives on stage a fraction of a second too late to issue his sublime principles, in premonitory yet abstract warnings, hence repeatedly unheeded. Religious authority – the divine voice interpreting and guiding events – is represented by the good-natured, intelligent Friar Laurence, as far as he goes undoubtedly wise, energetic and active, yet co-responsible for calamities due to a series of harmless distractions and to his human fears, perhaps to one alone.6 The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is caused both by human fallibility, by youthful eagerness and by the immaturity of adolescence; yet this friar is a deus ex machina who fails in his task: with his recognized authority as a ‘holy man’, like a Fra Cristoforo in Manzoni he could have revealed that Romeo and Juliet were married, so that the reasons of love might have prevailed over those of hate between the two families on the basis of fait accompli.7 Above all, in order to reunite the young couple he engineers a precarious plan far too dependent on a chain of coincidences, thus doomed to fail. The friar does not know that Romeo has received false information, telling him of Juliet’s death. This is no fault of his, rather that

4 5 6 7

We never do find out exactly why the two families hate each other so much; this lack of real causes underlines Shakespeare’s ontological pessimism regarding human nature. Clearly masking a Della Scala. Could the friar not have suggested earlier that the young couple should flee? In one of his speeches, Capulet appears to leave Juliet free to choose her husband, while obviously he would never allow her to marry a Montague.

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of Romeo’s servant, Balthasar, who, an exception to the general laziness, has been over-zealous. Had he arrived in Mantua a little later to tell Romeo of the pretended death of his bride, the tragedy would have been averted. It was however in the friar’s power to avoid at least one death, that of Juliet; but hearing the guards arrive, he abandons her just after she wakes from the catalepsy beside the body of Romeo; therefore he is an accomplice in her suicide. Is love a force that heals? A closing maxim sounds somewhat sacrilegious or heretical: God mows down his creatures through love; or he is at least severe and irremovable in punishing error. It is also true that hatred in Verona is the fruit of free will, and not even God himself can interfere with human free will. Shakespeare is always the supporter of the introduction of humane, civil and sensible laws, and of the overcoming of all barbaric traditions; yet he illustrates all the hardships on the way. 2. A tragedy mingled with comic interludes, humour, caricatures8 and romantic, fantastic and Gothic elements, on the wavelength of the later Measure for Measure: this is Romeo and Juliet. The plot is filled with reduplications that are not too noticeable and with parallelisms, as well as punctuated with echoes and elements from Shakespeare’s major canon. In many circumstances, the same mischievous, unruly young men come to the fore, transferring their sexual urge into physical violence, and escapades and masquerades, such as will appear again in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare also planned a calendar that we can check and reconstruct from a number of internal allusions, setting the story at the end of July with its warm, starry nights in a certain unspecified year; suspense is all within a very short time at the end, from a Sunday to a fatal Thursday or Friday. At the outset Romeo is in love with a Rosaline who never actually appears on stage, being only mentioned and described.9 Juliet, already a

8 9

The servant who must deliver the invitations to the Capulets’ ball cannot read and this gives rise to a predictably humorous sketch. But he is also an agent of fate, as it is by attending the party that Romeo meets with Juliet and starts the tragedy. Almost halfway through this discussion of Shakespeare’s drama we can take a first stock of recurrent names, in no way chosen due to lack of fantasy but to astute symbolic archetyping: a Paris appears in Troilus and Cressida; noticeably, there he took Helen from Menelaus while here his almost-promised bride Juliet is taken

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bride in secret, is in turn promised to a Paris who is indeed very much present on stage. An expert in medicinal herbs and cures, thus life-giving elements above all, Friar Laurence finds his worsened pendant in a hard-up, surly apothecary who supplies Romeo with the lethal poison. Romeo the melancholy, the Hamletic, is in love, languishing in unrequited passion, hence joining the repertory of Hamletic and hermetic melancholic types. His wise friends and more balanced (or rather more obtuse) supporters try to find out the ‘cause’ of his melancholy in order to heal him.10 Juliet’s nurse is in Act I the simpleton who later emerges as an astute commoner with a quick wit, cunning and experienced in the ways of life, modest and above all mischievous. She is one of the few characters who inevitably dissociates herself from the prevalent, Stilnovo, euphuistic and metaphysical register.11 Her ‘arias’ are for the most part narrative, full of popular wit, as found much later in certain dialogic ballads by Wordsworth. With this I have touched and introduced one of the two primary features of this play, which is above all a Shakespearean ‘banquet of languages’. The most typical

from him. Rosaline has a not overturned similarity with the more biting, colder and more unfriendly Rosaline, who appears among the Princess of France’s three ladiesin-waiting in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Benvolio recalls Malvolio – the opposition is selfexplanatory (with well-wishing – Benvolio – replacing ill-wishing – Malvolio). It is even possible to find a remote trace of a procedure of communicating vessels – as in Joyce’s stories and novels – between The Taming of the Shrew and this tragedy, made plausible because both are set in the Veneto region and in two cities not far apart, although in an atmosphere of controlled, refined, temporal estrangement. Some characters from one play make their entrance to the other – at the Capulets’ ball Lucentio and Petruchio are specifically named as being among the guests. 10 Romeo, madly in love, obsessed and delirious as he declares himself to be, is not out of his mind enough to stutter or make general statements when he comes on stage. He has carefully read into himself, and his is a conscious imprisonment. Like Hamlet he takes his stand against his interrogator through words. He is a punner, escaping from traps with the consummate dialectic and linguistic skill of Hamlet. The clash between Benvolio and Romeo really recalls those between Hamlet and his questioners, since both evade questions by playing on words. Weak in questions of love, they are strong in their use of words. 11 The confusion of these linguistic registers has often been judged too severely by critics, even being termed ‘a failed experiment’ (Baldini 1964, 221).

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stage device of Romeo and Juliet is exemplified in the opening scene: two of the Capulet layabouts joke for some time about nothing in particular, and the plot moves ahead not a single inch, so that total physical inactivity is offset by intense verbal activity. From then on various scenes will be initially sterile and concentric battles of Elizabethan wit, and tests to see who will have the last witty word or winning line. It is difficult to think of a curtain-raiser so full of double meanings with such ‘blunt’ arms, which may refer to the real weapon in their hands or to a phallic surrogate. That scene is perfect since cases are repeated of suspension of the stage diegesis in favour of the play on the ambiguities embedded in the language. And talking ‘about nothing’ is Romeo’s criticism of Mercutio who has launched into a fantastic digression on Queen Mab,12 apparently for no reason at all. The characters enjoy weaving tissues of inconclusive, abstract words only to find themselves abruptly brought back to real and concrete needs. The language is on the verge of coming unstuck from reality; it is hard for them to realize that its purpose is communication and not decoration. And they are surprised at having to return to the practical register after concocting and building castles of words. Among such exemplary scenes is also the fifth of Act III, in which the Capulet mother and daughter carry on a risky conversation on Romeo the murderer (literally vituperated by mother Capulet, ironically by Juliet his wife). This scene enhances the ambiguity of language and of the verbal message, showing how it is possible to allude the contrary to what is deciphered by the recipient. In the fifth scene of Act II, Juliet’s nurse exaggerates her weariness on returning from her visit to Romeo, so an impatient Juliet points out that she cannot be ‘out of breath when thou hast breath / To say to me that thou art out of breath’. The whole of this scene, highlighting the good-tempered or rather affectionately mischievous irony of the nurse, additionally exemplifies the deferral of the message and the dwelling on the code, thus enhancing the phatic function of language. In front of what he believes is Juliet’s dead body, Capulet exclaims that death ‘ties up his tongue’ and ‘will not let him speak’. The last rhetorical contradiction concerns the friar in the graveyard scene. He says that he 12

To prove what I am saying, the term ‘nothing’ was an Elizabethan euphemism for the female sexual organ.

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must be ‘brief ’ since grief has left him dumb; then he goes on to recount the facts for tens of lines. Linguistic vitality is not, cannot be, banished, nor is it possible to abolish the rhetorical figure and the flourish: even as he dies, Mercutio finds a way to be funny, as does Capulet over his daughter’s body.13 This being the case, we may think of Romeo and Juliet as a sublime opera libretto.14 The characters are depicted when possible at the instant before they act or else when they have acted violently or uncontrollably; yet before and straight after they cool the heat of the scene with speeches and statements that respect the linguistic and stylistic conventions of the recitative and of the aria.15 They appear to cool down and double up into an alter ego that watches them and comments the action from outside. As in melodrama, the demise of any plausibility is thus celebrated. In the scene in which Juliet falls in love she resists Romeo’s daring wooing with his use of images, with lips wanting to kiss, but not like the kiss of the saints, palm against palm; the kiss then exchanged is, to continue the imagery, a sin given and taken back. Juliet predicts that her marriage bed will be her tomb, and Romeo that love was born from his hatred. Here we realize the 13

Rather than more common figures, the ornate register uses circumlocution, stylization, exclamatory chains of synonyms or oxymora, and definition. It includes above all the transfer, neutralization and refinement of sexual desire. Lust is masked and watered down – made Platonic – by euphuistic and Metaphysical clichés. The young men’s dialogues overflow with well-dissimulated, masked, highly refined sexual echoes, with the rarefaction of Eros within the codes of chivalrous love. 14 In Mantua we are on the home ground of Verdi’s Rigoletto. The description of the needy apothecary’s shop is impressive; and as frequently in operas Romeo is walking along the street while describing it. Naturally Romeo and Juliet is the play by Shakespeare most often turned into melodrama, choral symphonies and ballets (Bellini, Berlioz, Gounod, Prokofiev), without counting the film transpositions and those freely based on it, such as West Side Story. 15 In the scene where the nurse keeps Juliet on tenterhooks by making her believe that Romeo is dead, the grief and desperation of the girl are not expressed realistically in broken, tortured language, agitation and aphasia, but with the warbling of a musical aria. In fact she is able to express her feelings in rhyme. The nurse, repeatedly asking for acqua vitae, in this case provides a comic counterpoint. In II.1, when she realizes she has left out some steps required by courting etiquette, Juliet says to Romeo: if you wish we can go back and go through them.

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exact and evident masking, in veils of words and concepts, of a desire that is overwhelming and hardly held back. And we might even find the origin of that much later ‘aesthetic poetry’ theorized by Morris and Pater, of the infusion of mystic, diaphanous, spiritual elements into pure fleshly desire, proverbially appertaining to the story of Heloise and Abelard. Yet the wise Juliet quickly descends into the abyss and utters the line: ‘if he be married, my grave is like to be my wedding bed’, a tragic, foreboding prolepsis. The dwelling on verbal work rather than acted action decreases, then ceases, from midway through the play: verbal messages are more orientated and adapted to intrigue, stratagems, guile, the real issues that arise. In other words, the function of language, previously poetic and ornamental, now becomes expressive and also executive: sufficient examples are in Juliet’s monologue with the phial of poison in her hand, that of the nurse over her dead body, and Romeo’s intentions before going to the apothecary in Mantua. 3. I mentioned above that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is ‘caused’. I must correct myself: the tragedy is ‘intentional’. Romeo and Juliet is a prolonged flirtation with death, a long courtship of death, an asymptotic advancement to death. It is therefore a very early Tristanian text praising death as the sublimely crowning achievement of love, and glorifying the love-death binomial it is the first, great historical ‘hymn to night’. Romeo is immediately possessed and obsessed by a similar self-destructive delirium; Juliet little by little comes to share it. At the beginning Friar Laurence reprimands Romeo who confesses he has fallen out of love with Rosaline and furiously into love with Juliet; the friar balances ‘doting’ against ‘loving’, and warns him to ‘love moderately’. When Romeo rebels at the idea of exile, preferring death, the friar defines him a ‘mad man’. The hurried marriage is also due to the fact that the two young people are burning up with their desire to consummate it sexually. Shakespeare celebrates the nobility of unshadowed love until death and sacrifice; both young lovers are fearless in their indissoluble faithfulness. Juliet becomes a clever dissembler but for reasons contrary to those of other female figures: to safeguard yet hide her faithfulness to Romeo. It is Juliet more than Romeo who tries to damp down the ungovernable eruption of passion and to rationalize it; she will be overwhelmed later, but overwhelmed she will be. Romeo instead lives in the night, denying sun and light; and Juliet is for him the semantic and

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symbolic field of snowy whiteness against the blackness of night.16 And the dark wood is his symbolic locus of eroticism. In this Tristanian Romeo, the omen of death awaiting him immediately presents itself in the form of a dream, and it is the dream and omen of the ultimate realization of the erotic unity of death desired and longed for. The Tristanian filter is the organ of sight: the eye is the origin of falling in love. Love is crowned in the embrace of the lovers in death. In his last monologue it appears finally clear that Romeo longs not so much for Juliet as for Death, the death she personifies. And this, before Novalis, is a great hymn to the night as the symbol and emblem of nothing and of death. § 31. ‘The Merchant of Venice’* The choice of the protagonist of The Merchant of Venice17 (staged in 1596, published in 1600), having once established the inadequacy of the 16

In the famous balcony scene especially.

*

A. D. Moody, ‘The Merchant of Venice’, London 1964; Shakespeare: ‘The Merchant of Venice’: A Casebook, ed. J. Wilders, London 1969; L. Danson, The Harmonies of ‘The Merchant of Venice’, New Haven, CT and London 1978; C. Dente, La recita del diritto. Saggio su ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Pisa 1986; B. Overton, ‘The Merchant of Venice’, London 1987; T. Wheeler, ‘The Merchant of Venice’ dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1994; J. O. Holmer, ‘The Merchant of Venice’: Choice, Hazard and Consequence, Basingstoke 1995; A. Oz, The Yoke of Love: Prophetic Riddles in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Newark, DE and London 1995; A. Marzola, La parola del mercante, Roma 1996; P. Dawkins, Shakespeare’s Wisdom in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Warwickshire 1998; R. Schneider, Shylock, the Roman: Unmasking Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Mill Valley, CA 1999; M. L. Kaplan, William Shakespeare, ‘Merchant of Venice’: Texts and Contexts, Boston, MA 2002; ‘The Merchant of Venice’: Critical Essays, ed. J. W. Mahon and E. MacLeod Mahon, New York and London 2002; K. Gross, Shylock is Shakespeare, Chicago and London 2006; A. Squeo, Shakespeare’s Textual Traces: Patterns of ‘Exchange’ in ‘The Merchant of Venice’: With an Anthology of Texts and Documents, Bari 2012; New Readings of ‘The Merchant of Venice’, ed. H. Sierra, Newcastle 2013.

17

With regard to the primary source, Pecorone by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, the story is almost totally changed. On the other hand, passing a test by choosing the right casket out of three possibilities is a well-known theme in folklore, one of those that might easily be included in Propp’s ‘morphology of the folktale’.

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titular hero,18 may be decided from among four, perhaps three, candidates who come on stage and replace, and take away that role from, the character one might have been induced to assign it to. The first to appear is the melancholy ‘merchant’ Antonio, but he is static, almost an accessory, and he does not fit the role. Then Shylock the Jewish money-lender bursts onto the scene. Lastly the play’s fulcrum moves to the ‘heiress’ Portia. The latter is an authentic deux ex machina, who through her stratagems and presence of mind unravels a court case that was going badly wrong. However, it is also true that Bassanio, Antonio’s best friend, is the all-important trait d’union not only between these three characters but also between the two spaces around which The Merchant revolves: one absolutely or sufficiently concrete and realistic, the ducal city of Venice towards the end of the sixteenth century, and the other a place of fantasy and utopia, Belmont. In other words, Bassanio provides the link between the realism of the Venetian streets and ghetto, and the surreal, fabled world of Gozzi’s Belmont.19 The play could have ended with Act IV, but the fifth, apparently superfluous or pleonastic,20 as are other occasional previous interludes,21 sets out a

18

At first glance the title is an insidious antonomasia; whoever attempts to decipher it retraces his steps to exclude the reference to Bassanio, let alone to Shylock the money-lender – but not a merchant – of Venice. Some critics, however, have made this mistake. 19 From seas to mountains to hills, one might say, were it not for the inner evidence that Belmont is a place on the sea, where Bassanio arrives in a boat or a ship. 20 Only ‘apparently’. The trial is a major episode in Elizabethan judicial plays (it often covers and takes over an entire monographic act, as in this case), and the most famous, and the second to come to mind, is the trial of Vittoria Corombona in Webster’s The White Devil: but in Webster it is a dramatic, devious and almost surreal trial (cf. Volume 1, § 125.3), whereas Shylock’s is grotesque, in part superbly comic and humorous, yet sardonically dramatic for Shylock. Act IV is a masterpiece in its unity of time and rapid turnarounds, and its ending (the engagement rings handed over by Bassanio and Graziano as recompense to Portia and Nerissa, dressed up as men of the law) is a triumph of wit, and continues in the equally witty skirmishes of Act V. In such features, these acts seem to look ahead to Congreve. 21 Prolonged sketches using Plautus’ model of the cunning, streetwise servant are to be found in the ramblings of Lancelot the sightless father, and Lancelot his son, Shylock’s servant about to leave his job. Not really a novelty, this intermission in itself parodies the opening of Hamlet, overturning the plan: a father looks for a son

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humorous new foundation of Venetian civilization, and promulgates a new, proto-feminist marriage ethic. Portia is therefore for me, as for the most astute commentators, its ad sensum protagonist. 2. The Merchant of Venice is a precursor since it enters and dwells within pre-Goldonian farce and the Harlequinade. Launcelot Gobbo is a sort of Harlequin, the servant of two masters; Shylock’s daughter Jessica is supposed to take part in a prank, disguised as a page; and dressed in male attire Portia and her waiting-woman Nerissa come before the court, in another masquerade. In some respects this is like a Da Ponte libretto all ready for Mozart. The focal point of the fable is in Belmont, with the reiteration of the strange ritual of the caskets that the father of the lovely Portia imposes on her suitors. But the fable turns real when Portia, who also breaks her magic staff, manages to entrap Shylock and get both her husband Bassanio and his guarantor, the merchant Antonio, acquitted. It is as if Shakespeare had fallen prey to the fascination of this make-believe in a play more polished than many others. The speeches are often long, structured and flowing, and the characters speak at greater length than is strictly necessary, with a plethora of rounded, sculptured lines that are also smoothly musical. The euphuistic register permeates the whole beginning of Act V, when the couple Jessica and Lorenzo warble on stage like Romeo and Juliet or Ferdinand and Miranda, uttering dreamy words of praise to music. All the Venetian characters save Shylock have bit by bit moved to the fabulous Belmont in this act, and we might trace in them the early forerunners of the ‘bright young things’ of Huxley and Waugh’s twentieth-century novels. In the play Bassanio and his circle lead the life of joyful and witless spendthrifts; like the characters of those novelists, they are pranksters; yet their coffers and pockets are empty, so to satisfy their pleasures they must resort to the money-lenders. Go where the money is,

without realizing he is in front of him, while for a jest this son tells him that the son is dead, and therefore he might be his ghost. But it is the father who repudiates his son who reveals his identity to him, bowing down before him. The watered-down romance of Shylock’s daughter Jessica is also dull; she runs away with the Christian Lorenzo and converts to Christianity, while remaining at bottom a Jew, with a quick spirit and appealingly ready wit.

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says Antonio to Bassanio, which means that money in Venice is hard to come by. Antonio is on the verge of ruin, Bassanio is thoughtless, Jessica in her flight takes with her Shylock’s riches thus leaving him penniless; Lorenzo is the fleeced Venetian. The historical picture is that of Venice in early decline, a topic to be taken up and perfected three centuries later by Ruskin. At his trial, Shylock denounces Venice as being racist and barbarian in its cruel treatment of slaves, kept like so many beasts. 3. In its double setting and with its assorted characters, as often happens in Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice is a tragicomic parable – in the end simply grotesque and simply humorous – on the conquest of free will: it condemns all determinisms, both those dictated by absurd human imposition and those due to psychic, metaphysical or racist constraints. Antonio and Portia are obvious pendants as we shall see, but Shylock also comes within this dialectic together with various other secondary characters. Shakespeare’s discourse on determinism forms an isotopy. Antonio is determined by his baseless melancholy; Bassanio spends money like water and is in love with Portia. In Antonio determinism takes on the aspect of a generic melancholy which, he claims, is not erotic in nature. In Portia it is initially a nausea towards love. Antonio may be seen as an existentialist who philosophizes on melancholy and apathy without knowing its cause, like Hamlet;22 as such, he is a misplaced merchant, anti-mercantile and non-compliant with the ruthless laws of that same market. So he is actually a saboteur, since he does not implement the law of profit by money-lending, rather he fights against usury in respect of evangelical disinterestedness. He is not therefore actively seeking self-affirmation but is instead a Christological double, or a spiritualist in an age of Machiavellians. Yet his determinism consists in public slander against Shylock and his race, and it shakes him like a maddening fit. The first scene of the play distinctly anticipates Hamlet since Shakespeare evokes in it a first version of that character split into two – slimy, amorphous, malleable at will, without much backbone – who is formed by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and by coincidence the names of Antonio’s two friends, Salerio and Solano, abbreviated on 22

Antonio is the origin of the Shakespearian commonplace of the world as a theatre, where every man must play a part, his own part being a sad one (I.1.77–9).

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the page into Sal. and Sol., seem two weird acronyms found in Beckett. These two counsellors utter for the most part painfully predictable aphorisms or even loads of nonsense of the Buvard and Pécuchet type (or similar to those of Polonius, who explains Hamlet’s melancholy as love melancholy), thus confessing that they are there on stage as fawning as fools. Such perorations stating that the melancholic should not be melancholy are repeated in Act I; hence we must conclude that it is nature that makes people cheerful or melancholy. But, in the realistic regime, Antonio is much too ready to lend money and credit to a Bassanio who is pursuing a whim; an honestly stoic, sceptical philosopher like him is too close to an overgrown schoolboy like Bassanio. For these reasons, critics in more recent interpretations have spoken of a secret homosexual attraction between the two characters. Should this be true, Antonio is a melancholy gay, secretly in love with Bassanio. Indeed, even too often is this indestructible, morbid love proclaimed by both with the utmost solemnity. Portia, reproving Bassanio for having given up the ring much too easily to the good-looking lawyer at the trial (this lawyer being Portia herself, disguised), might appear to have realized that Bassanio loves Antonio more than he loves her, or that Antonio loves Bassanio. The ring – matrimonial fidelity, a theme perhaps over-discussed and causing debate in Act V – is indeed the symbol of heterosexual love, it is marital sex itself, which Bassanio seems to have exchanged in favour of a secret, unconscious homosexual inclination for Antonio. The quick-witted Portia has guessed this and sets up a case on it: she now has the ring because, she pretends, it was the price for going to bed with Bassanio, and he gave it to her in the same way that a prostitute is paid. So a conclusive parallelism is that the two bridegrooms, Bassanio and Nerissa’s husband, Graziano, are tricked just as Shylock is, at least until the prank is revealed by the two women who plotted it. 4. The most plausible conjecture on the unusual name ‘Shylock’, first name or surname, is that it comes from the Bible, in the form of corruption of names of people or places found therein. He is, therefore, any Jew, depicted as typical. And yet Shylock is an atypical Jew, since he wants to get rid of that hallmark and of his own racial determinism that marginalizes him, by fighting hard for the equality of human rights for Jews in a perfectly integrated society. This is a utopia that collapses beneath the blows of the

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inextirpable racism of the Christians themselves, so that at the end of the play Shylock returns to being a really typical Jew. With respect to what I will notice on the remake of Shakespeare’s play by Arnold Wesker23 – which contains a number of good scenes rewritten and paraphrased, together with others newly invented, unrelated to Shakespeare, and weaker and more verbose – I must add that Shakespeare gives voice in The Merchant of Venice to the utopia of a Venetian Renaissance society wherein enlightened forces really did play a part and where a disinterested bond was possible – though exceptional and doomed to fail – between Judaism and Christianity for the salvation of the world. It is not strange that the tradition of peace and co-operation is symbolized in Wesker by a library, since Antonio and Shylock are depicted by him as book-lovers. Wesker indicates the abstract, blind legalism governing Venice: Shylock is willing to grant Antonio his 3,000 ducats without any formal contract, in a spirit of sincere friendship, and anyhow they unwisely stipulate a contract as a joke, unaware of playing with fire. Only in order to avoid harming his exploited, oppressed race, or creating a precedent, Wesker’s Shylock, though overcome and disappointed, has to demand compliance with the pact; but Wesker’s play ends as does Shakespeare’s, with Portia intervening with her juridical juggling. In Shakespeare, Shylock is formally integrated within Venetian society; his first speech reveals that he well knows the economic life of the city. As we learn from Wesker, who informs us that his remake is founded on in-depth historical research, the 1,400 Jews in the New Ghetto were in fact ‘needed but not wanted’. On hearing the request for a loan, Shylock suddenly livens up: only business with Christians, not friendship. As I mentioned, instead of categorically laying down the conditions for the loan, Shylock then obstinately puts forth the biblical and religious justification of usury, based on a passage in Genesis and the story of Jacob, which shows God not only admitting usury but rewarding it. That bizarre pact of the pound of flesh to be cut from Antonio’s side in case of non-repayment is stipulated as if ‘in a merry sport’: a symbolic pact, nominal and formal according to the law, but fuelling vengeance once it is discovered that Shylock has been tricked 23

Volume 8, § 126.3 and n. 7.

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and above all defrauded, and reduced to poverty by his runaway daughter. Shylock’s reasoning goes unheeded but shows the double standards in force. A Christian suffering a breach of a pact such as this would seek vengeance, and Shylock learns vengeance from these same Christians. At his trial he is forced to give up the philosophy of usury and therefore to go against his own interests: it is a ‘losing suit’, since in winning the legal case he will obtain no material advantage. Shylock believes the young doctor in law to be an exception, since his own request is pronounced to be perfectly legal, but in fact it is the ultimate trick and victimization. Entering the court as the damaged party, Shylock leaves it as the defendant, duped and condemned. The legal expert is overcome by a yet more Byzantine legalism, cunningly hairsplitting, showing that the application of the law is at times an imposture. Shylock becomes so desperate in the nefarious, fanatic search for vengeance24 that he ends up by appearing to deserve to be declared guilty of the same racism overturned: as if an anti-Semite were attacking an anti-Christian.25 5. Portia, coming on stage for the first time in Act I scene 2, is quite justified in sighing ‘if to do were as easy as to know what were good to do’, or video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. World weary and melancholy, she strangely begins by echoing Antonio’s exact words in the preceding scene. She undergoes and suffers the determinism of the dispositions of her bizarre 24 The duration of the plot is not clear from the text, nor is it clear how long passes after stipulating the pact: we may assume that Shylock claims his bond and asks for justice even before the three months are out, seeing that all Antonio’s ships are said to have been wrecked well before that moment. Yet it is difficult to explain and reconcile Salerio’s statement that Shylock would not accept the money lent even had Antonio actually had it. In response Jessica says that her father will in any case exact the pound of flesh and would not be satisfied even with twenty times the sum loaned, if given back after the deadline. 25 At the end of a detailed, careful discussion, Bloom 1999, 171–91 – indubitably an authority on the subject – reaffirms the opening thesis of his chapter, that the Merchant is ‘a profoundly anti-Semitic play’ and that it would have been much better for the Jews had Shakespeare never written it. In his opinion, Shakespeare’s major error, just this once, was to have Shylock convert to Christianity at the end of the trial. Shakespeare thus favoured the rise and the spread until our own time of a distorted view of Judaism, supported by most non-Jewish critics; those Bloom most contests and attacks are Murry, Frye, T. S. Eliot and Tillyard.

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father, wishing to contravene them, yet unable to do so.26 It is therefore clear that this is a distant, fabulous or surreal prolepsis of Prospero’s binding his daughter to a pact, and also that a very different pact will be shortly made. There will be a third, similarly binding pact, that regarding Bassanio to whom Portia has given a ring in pledge, under no circumstances to be given away on pain of severe punishment. And a fourth, which Graziano and Nerissa have made, that she will be his if Bassanio wins Portia. In the course of the play the weary, discouraged Portia is totally changed by love, becoming quite unrecognizable from what she was at first. In her filial determinism she sides with Jessica, but she is the foil of Antonio as well. Mirror-like characters at their entrance, they become exactly the opposite during the development and at their exit. Portia goes from being bitterly hypochondriac to hyperactive, forced to descend from the hyperuranian, fictional Belmont, the airy place she inhabits which is a ‘lovely mountain’ separated from everyday happenings. She plunges into the real and is herself a Prospero who dissolves enchantments. She also immediately becomes a wise wife, judicious and sensible, who takes her husband by the hand, forces him into a corner and dictates the laws of equality in marriage. § 32. ‘Hamlet’ * The greatest of Shakespeare’s plays, and probably the greatest in all ancient and modern theatre, therefore in all the languages of the civilized 26 Portia proves she is anti-Semitic in the rest of the play, but confirms the Venetian tolerance for the Moors – and the Moroccan prince is a Moor – given the affectionate words she addresses to him. This Moroccan prince is on a par with Othello, for he is not a rough country fellow: he proclaims his love in good round English, sonorous and smooth like that of the civilized Othello at the beginning of his own play, spectacular in his imagery and fantasy. The scene of the caskets is in his case skilfully split into two stages, with a Venetian scene sandwiched between the two. *

J. Dover Wilson, The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and the Problems of its Transmission, Cambridge 1934, 2009; E. E. Stoll, Hamlet the Man, London 1935; B. Coles, Shakespeare Studies: ‘Hamlet’, New York 1938; E. Jones, Hamlet and Œdipus, New York 1949, 1954; P. Alexander, Hamlet Father and Son, London 1955; H. Levin, The Question of ‘Hamlet’, London 1959; L. C. Knights, An Approach to ‘Hamlet’, London 1960; K. Muir, Shakespeare: ‘Hamlet’, London 1964; F. Marotti, Amleto

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world – this is Hamlet.27 It is thus absolutely necessary that any analytical discussion should begin not from its first word, but from the title and the dramatis personae. All Shakespeare’s plays are obviously written in English, o dell’Oxymoron, Roma 1966; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Hamlet’, ed. D. Bevington, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; M. Charney, Style in ‘Hamlet’, Princeton, NJ 1969, and Hamlet’s Fictions, New York 1988; Shakespeare: ‘Hamlet’: A Casebook, ed. J. Jump, Nashville, TN 1970; N. Alexander, Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study of ‘Hamlet’, Lincoln, NE 1971; A. J. A. Waldock, ‘Hamlet’: A Study in Critical Method, Sydney 1975; A. Gurr, ‘Hamlet’ and the Distracted Globe, Edinburgh 1978; K. Muir and S. Wells, Aspects of ‘Hamlet’, Cambridge 1978; J. L. Calderwood, To Be or Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in ‘Hamlet’, New York 1983; M. Dodsworth, ‘Hamlet’ Closely Observed, London 1985; A. Marzola, L’impossibile puritanesimo di Amleto, Ravenna 1985; ‘Hamlet’: Critical Essays, ed. J. G. Price, New York 1986; B. Everett, Young Hamlet, Oxford 1989; Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1990; ‘Hamlet’: dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1990; Ombre di un’ombra. Amleto e i suoi fantasmi, ed. L. Curti, Napoli 1994; F. Cioni, Le maschere di Amleto, Modena 1995; R. E. Wood, Some Necessary Questions of the Play: A Stage-Centered Analysis of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, Lewisburg, PA and London 1994; Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, ed. D. S. Kastan, New York and London 1995; A. Thompson and N. Taylor, ‘Hamlet’, Plymouth 1996; K. Minsaas, Woe or Wonder: The Structure of Tragic Experience in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Othello’, Oslo 1999; J. Lee, Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and the Controversies of Self, Oxford 2000; S. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, Princeton, NJ and Oxford 2001; S. Bigliazzi, Oltre il genere. ‘Amleto’ tra scena e racconto, Alessandria 2002; La traduzione di ‘Amleto’ nella cultura europea, ed. M. Del Sapio Garbero, Venezia 2002; S. Manferlotti, ‘Amleto’ in parodia, Roma 2005; S. McAvoy, William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’: A Sourcebook, London 2006; R. Camerlingo, Crimini e peccati. La confessione al tempo di Amleto, Roma 2015. 27 First staging probably in 1601. With Q1 (script discovered in 1823 by a Sir Henry Bunbury) the first 1603 quarto is intended, perhaps corresponding to a provincial performance and unauthorized publication (regarding which Shakespeare’s authentic authorship is still debated) which avoided registration in the Stationers’ Register; with Q2 the second quarto of 1605, double the size, reprinted in the identical format three times in 1611 (Q3), in another later unspecified year (Q4), and in 1637 (Q5). Q2 was used as the base, with a few cuts and additions, for the 1623 Folio, a text then receptus with integrations and amendments by later editors, except for further editions which conversely take as a base the 1605 quarto completing it with a few missing lines found in the Folio. Hamlet was the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be translated (into German, 1710). On Q1, cf. A. Serpieri’s excellent edition, Venezia 1997.

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and this play is one of the many – the principal play all things considered – which, as in certain works by our contemporary Brian Friel,28 to give just one example, must be expressly imagined as translated from another language. The Bard has deceived, and deceives, every time Hamlet is acted, by putting English speech into the mouths of Danish characters who presumably spoke Danish. Undoubtedly this is a habitual effect in Shakespeare, who however showed his awareness of the problem by devising a scene in Henry V – to cite only the most memorable one – of the king courting Princess Katharine in French. The strangeness, the inventiveness, the apparent clash is more polarized, in Hamlet, in the names of the characters. They can be divided into: Danish names, romance names and names from the classical world, themselves divided into Latin- and Greek-rooted ones. All this poses a playful improbability, in effect coming to blows with a content which is, let us once more remember, supremely uniform. Hamlet, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are credible names, either Danish or Germanic, as is Voltemand. But what can be said of the names finishing in the Latin suffix –us? They are Claudius, Cornelius, Marcellus. Laertes has a Greek root, perhaps Ophelia too. Other names, romance or romance-derived, answer to that apparently uncertain and summary knowledge of Italian, in which Shakespeare may in fact have been competent, and are a mixture of Italian and Spanish: Barnardo, Francisco, Reynaldo. But there are other names to be explained in another way, such as Horatio and not Horatius, and an Osric coming from who knows where. The height of improbability is however a Norwegian prince called Fortinbras. Outside the text, this eloquent list gives rise to moderate cacophony or at least leads us to expect cacophony: let us say to expect something ‘fantastic’, not like The Tempest but at least like The Winter’s Tale.29 The reasons for Hamlet’s primacy lie in it being a re-edition of an archetypical story: the relations between father and son, between son and mother, yet with underlying metaphysical and general meanings, evoking the atavistic story of the Father and the Son with a 28 Volume 8, § 197.1–2. 29 Showing the care taken over names and the sensitivity of his choices (recalling the fuss over the name Oldcastle in the first version of Henry IV ) in Q1 the two names had to be changed out of respect for two academic figures who might have been offended by the assonances involved, those of Polonius and Reynaldo.

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parody of the Trinity, and with the engrafting of an equally parodic series of biblical references, such as the story of Cain and Abel and a number of evangelical episodes. Among these are the resurrection of Lazarus and the death, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, with the sleepy apostles and the shadow of a resurgent Christ. From the times of Sophocles and the Greeks there had never been such a powerful play on the vendetta of a son on his faithless relatives. A supremely objective drama, Hamlet is also the most personal and autobiographical of Shakespeare’s plays, or at least we can imagine it to be so, since it is perhaps constructed according to highly camouflaged processes of transfusion – as Joyce, himself a master only slightly less phenomenal in this type of operation, was quick to realize.30 2. Compactness and fixity are brought to the highest thinkable diapason in Hamlet; another dramatic or intrinsically characteristic and tragic feature, inexorability, descends to a minimum, so that if on the one hand Hamlet is the quintessence of the dramatic, and its stage syntax is exemplary, on the other it is its subversion. With these features there are merged the density and, paradoxically, the agility of its scenes and of its dramatic development. All this is proved first of all by the fact that Hamlet is one of the few Shakespearean masterpieces with no subplot, or even a much reduced subplot or one pivoting on the fool. It arises and grows around Hamlet, although Hamlet, as we shall see, is not always on stage. This discrepancy between the action of the play and the superhuman dimensions of the protagonist is the reason for certain historical negative views on Hamlet, among them T. S. Eliot’s, which actually harked back to Goethe and to the similarity of Hamlet to an oak root in a flower vase. One might also call it the drama of two sons and two fathers, maybe even three:31 a double or even triple parallelism. Hamlet and Laertes are mirror-like, or rather homologous, and Polonius’ family may then be taken as founding the subplot which is so evidently missing. Laertes is a second Hamlet who pontificates against 30 Volume 7, § 144.6 and n. 99. 31 Like Hamlet Fortinbras has a father of the same name, whom he somehow avenges, since he recovers territory taken from his father or ceded to the Danes by treaty (I.1). Fortinbras appears very briefly twice on stage and we have no foregoing history on him. After Laertes, he is a third foil for Hamlet.

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the ruin caused by lust, yet he risks falling a victim to it, as his father fears; together with Laertes, Polonius heaps advice on Ophelia.32 And Laertes, who at the beginning has no-one for whom he needs to take revenge, also ends up by having to take revenge in order to vindicate the harm done to his sister, therefore indirectly also for his father. From the end of Act IV, Laertes and Fortinbras return to the scene after a long absence, and constitute elements threatening to upset the order of things, the inexorable nemesis looming over the horizon. It is amazing that in a sort of countermelody one character – Laertes – comes on stage proclaiming his intention to avenge his own father and is willing to do so – at once. Hamlet having for some time been a drama of non-vengeance, the revenge play moves into action thus becoming a play on revenge – Laertes’ revenge play! Diabolically astute support for Laertes comes from King Claudius for his own good reasons, which clearly include the elimination of his nephew. At this point everything is out in the open, at least to a certain extent, and King Claudius is no longer plagued by doubt, indeed he wallows in fantasies of vengeance. Inexorability fails because hesitation is intrinsic in Hamlet’s drama and if anything must be implemented and be perceived over a fairly long period of time. Unity of time as always is eroded, now for the reason we have just seen, though unity of place is kept and not broken. The storyline starts from a flashback from two months before the curtain rises, with the death of old Hamlet followed by the marriage of his brother to his queen. From the end of Act I (we are made aware of it by implications and hints in Act II), Hamlet has started to play-act and pretends to be strange, incomprehensible, bizarre, and shows his ‘transformation’ without any possible misunderstanding, with the result that his mother and his uncle are forced to take immediate action. Commentators agree that between the first and the second act there is a break of three months. The density is provided by the wealth of antefacts, suppositions and triggering causes, and by the intersecting of the said ‘subplot’ with the main plot and a further 32

Polonius is by now a recurrent type: the widower who, like Shylock, has a daughter to take care of and admonish so she will not lose her virginity but treasure it intact until she marries. Another biblical reference, to Jephthah, is used by Hamlet for Polonius.

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intersection of a third plot, that concerning the Norwegian Fortinbras. The outcome is Shakespeare’s longest play.33 It could have been made into a series of two plays or even three, in the wake of the English history plays. There are two substantial flashbacks: the assassination of good King Hamlet, as we have seen, and Hamlet’s childhood, the episode he recalls of the first arrival of the wandering players. There are however intermittent ‘out of time’ events, in themselves therefore analepses or flashbacks. Likewise, there are digressions lasting tens of lines, such as the introduction of the riding master Lamord.34 It could be said that the essential time of the action is too extended, except for the fact already mentioned that it is effectively the denial of action – the traditional dramatic motor – that is represented in Hamlet. It is also an obsessive play of machinations and counter-machinations, a kind of chess competition, which is another game without time limits and a synonym for patience and slow moves. Lastly, fixity comes from the continual swing between outdoors and indoors. The scenes of the five acts are in all twenty (thus divided amongst the single acts: 5+2+4+7+2), some of average length, others extremely brief (those in Act IV, for instance), others almost endless, like the second of Act II. These long scenes are perforce divisible and can be broken up into sub-scenes. Unity of place is enhanced in the rare case of the movements – like Hamlet’s on board a ship heading for England – not represented but referred to ex post by letter. Hamlet is off stage for seven out of twenty scenes,35 although always hovering over the play. The structural compactness is further emphasized by and in the dramatic language. It is necessary, or at least useful, to extract from the play the representational fields and the isotopies, which shows the evident predominance and ceaseless repetition of images of corruption, in both the figurative and the literal sense. The humorous, parodic, often denegating and reversed use of the classical

33

As I mentioned, this has suggested to some scholars that it was usually performed with cuts, except at Oxford and Cambridge. 34 Here the play slightly loses its bite, and this is one of the few cases where characters give way to a flow of digressions; however, they rapidly call themselves back to order. 35 These are the first and third of Act I, the first of Act II, the first, fifth, sixth and seventh of Act IV.

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comparison is masterly. The visiting players of Act IV were at one time specialists in texts taken from Homer; Gertrude is a quam mutata Niobe, Hamlet the father is Hyperion, and Claudius a satyr. Julius Caesar is that great king at whose death a cosmic cataclysm broke out, as is happening for Hamlet’s father; indeed Polonius excelled in that very role as a young man, acting a Caesar at death’s door, a gruesome premonition.36 With the grave-diggers Hamlet jokes about Alexander the Great, another who is dead and gone and turned from greatness into dust. 3. So far I have not mentioned a further quality in Hamlet: its multifacetedness. Various typologies of play are to be found within its organization, with many genres and sub-genres claiming it. Based on the opening scene, one could assign the play to the category of castle turrets, battlements and courtly indoor settings. The outdoor scenes will later come to have exceptional importance,37 although they are intermittent and the drama will be played out mainly in the airless indoor spaces of the palace. As already mentioned, Hamlet is a play of clever, ingenious, chess-like moves. The shrewdness of King Claudius is discovered by the young Hamlet through supernatural revelation. Hamlet plays a crafty game against the king to unmask him, whereas the presumptuous Polonius believes he has uncovered the cause of Hamlet’s cunning and plays a crafty game himself, with the partial complicity of his daughter. In short, it is a competition in cunning. The letter containing Hamlet’s death sentence is a further piece of artfulness warded off by another, greater act of wiliness. And a spiral of craft backfiring on its perpetrator is the finale. The first scenes themselves, with some 36 37

At the same time Polonius, who claims he is an actor in Julius Caesar, is another case (cf. § 30.2 n. 9) of a Shakespearian play gate-crashing another, a bewildering effect for the audience. Linguistic too, with curt prose lines of burning realism from many voices, guards and court functionaries, with a fore-flash of deadpan dialogue and the twentiethcentury theatre of the absurd. However, when the speech is longer than the single line, prose gives way to verse, a winged verse filled with sophisticated imagery and metaphors. In the very next scene King Claudius holds a rhetorically harmonious, elaborate discourse in the council chamber. The play therefore pivots on the juxtaposition between well-organized, honed speeches and bitty, strangely brief colloquial lines.

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others later on, foretell the future ‘Gothic’ novel with its distressfully terrifying spectres. Subdividing the characters by age and psychologies, we find ourselves in a drama of youthful aristocracy, of youngsters just out of college and inexperienced university students (like Horatio and the two ‘schoolfellows’ Guildenstern and Rosencrantz), against their elders. The three primary dramatic sub-genres are the revenge play, the historicalpolitical play and the gnosiological, existentialist, theological play. At least here in Hamlet, evidently nothing is farther from a historiographic play in the real sense of the word:38 epistemic is perhaps the right label, meaning the poetic and dramatic intuition of a cultural shift in a specific geographic area. This intuition concerns the end of the heroic age in a region of northern barbarity. The time of the play, confused and indefinable, is in any case a time in which Northern Europe was under early Danish imperialism; and Denmark, to be down-graded into a mere geographical expression in the following centuries, was the pivot of that region. Internal time must therefore be included perforce between the Danish invasion of England and the end of the political supremacy of the Danes themselves; hence before 1066. We can therefore vaguely identify this time as the end, or towards the end, of the first millennium. Through colonizations or trade treaties, Denmark held sway over England, and had subjugated Scandinavia and

38

Two main sources are blended together in Hamlet: an episode from Historiae Danicae Libri, a Latin chronicle of the eleventh century (published however in 1514) by Saxo Grammaticus (evoking a context much more barbaric and pagan than that in Hamlet), and used by Shakespeare in Belleforest’s French translation; and the play on the ‘murder of Gonzago’, the killing of the Duke of Urbino by the same means used in Shakespeare (poison dropped into his ear); this was collected from oral traditions but is foreshadowed in Castiglione’s Cortegiano. There is also almost unanimous agreement on the fact that Shakespeare adapted a lost play of the same title (therefore called Ur-Hamlet) by Thomas Kyd from 1587. Bloom 1999 (xiii, 383–431) does not agree; in the wake of the editor Peter Alexander, he is of the opinion that that lost play was by Shakespeare himself. This is maintained for the purpose of a biographical interpretation of the tragedy (more or less the same as Joyce’s) and to support the thesis that Shakespeare continued to revise Hamlet practically up to the copy used in the 1623 Folio: ‘the Ur-Hamlet never will be found, because it is embedded in the palimpsest of the final Hamlet’ (411).

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Poland. Shakespeare of course knew of an England that vacillated at that time, a land of raids and conquest by the predatory Danes. A leitmotiv, one of many in Hamlet that every now and then go underground only to reappear on the surface later, is the transformation of the Danish monarchy from a warring, predatory power into an administrative colonial power. The sovereign is no longer a warrior but – herein lies the optical illusion – a pre-Renaissance prince, therefore a Machiavellian.39 Claudius must keep and consolidate power, and his inaugural speech testifies to his wisdom; the fact that he well understands political necessity is shown in his desire to eliminate Hamlet, by now a trouble-maker, although he is aware of Hamlet’s hold on the people, hence the threat he represents for the royal power. Claudius is a Machiavellian since he puts the safety of the state before any moral qualms. This is why he is a plotter. That such a political model is in its fully developed state or even in decline is clear from many incidental hints, however slight: Denmark is threatened by disintegration, it has reached the topmost point of its trajectory and is now unhealthy, corrupt, putrescent. In this commonly accepted view, there is a historical law at work that Shakespeare seems to support: his is already – or is again in 1601 – the voice of an early cyclical philosophy or historiography, holding that a power, once its apogee has been reached, is then forced aside and dies out. Hamlet in particular is aware of this fatal decline of the establishment, even though he envelops such awareness in metaphysical and theological frames. Hence the significance of the references to the great leaders of the past. Julius Caesar is recalled a couple of times, once to say that he too is dead and a part of history, his regime over. Alexander the Great is also cited to comment that all human flesh turns to dust, and to underline that his reign too, considered eternal, proved transitory. The

39 Saxo tells a story that must have happened before 1200; and in any case the first hint of the existence of Wittenberg goes back to 1180; its university was founded in 1502. Shakespeare is even more of a subverter of historical chronology here than in the English history plays. He is also interested in a dynastic issue very much on the agenda in his day (as had happened at the death of Edward III): the question of whether the vacant throne should go to the brother or to the son of the deceased king.

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play’s historical moment is specifically that in which the fighting hero becomes the thinking hero, therefore inactive and weakened. It should be remembered that Hamlet’s father comes on stage, a ghost, armed from head to foot, and that the ideal of the fighter is cherished by the young characters. So the unthinkable transformation under way is that from pagan barbarism, overwhelmed by momentary impulses, to that of a Christianized courtier tormented by doubts, too much of a sophist and above all aware of this conflict. Shakespeare did not know the story of Beowulf, although he might have heard of it; yet on re-reading that poem we discover that a king of the Danes is terrified by a monster that appears to him as a sort of ghost; he is freed of this creature by the hero of the title. The distance is not enormous with respect to this tribal, primordial world of courts where the supernatural may become visible, and above all of a constellation of northern peoples and states whose political stability is continuously under threat, so they have to defend themselves from invasions. The real discriminator is that the Denmark of the play is Christianized. There are multiple hints that the playwright imagines it as a Catholic country – hardly surprising, as the internal time of the play must be imagined before the Reformation. The reigns beyond this world are three, including purgatory, and the fear of damnation surfaces in frequent mentions – and threats – of hell. Faint echoes are heard of actions of the conquering Danes round about, confirming their fame as a ferocious barbarian people; yet we have to imagine an era in which the barbarians had already been converted. The result is that Hamlet’s characters are anything but barbarians in their intellectual organization; on the one hand they are overtaken by passions, on the other they are able to reason along strictly logical lines. They are able to syllogize, deduce, and pass from the single specific case to the general law. 4. The revenge play is emptied or delayed because Hamlet firstly answers to, or merges with, a different type of drama, the investigation drama to ascertain the truth; having discovered the truth, it flows into an early Kierkegaardian drama – which could take place nowhere but in Denmark – on the existentialist dilemma and on the interrogation of the divine will. As I mentioned, Hamlet is all constructed on a hiatus that in classical theatre is always minimal, the hiatus between the conception of an idea and its implementation. It is fuelled by Hamlet’s hesitations, on

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which of course a whole library has been written. Hamlet’s caution is in fact, up to a certain event, purely cognitive and it regards a very early issue, that of the certainty offered by a phenomenic experience, above all when it is only reported, but also when it is directly proved, in which case the source and the very nature of the experience has to be determined. If, to indulge in an anachronistic fantasy, the philosopher presiding over the first two acts could be indicated as the epistemologist Wittgenstein,40 the philosopher of reference in the second three is Kierkegaard. There is a third, and he is the author of that book in Hamlet’s hand who, it has been suggested, is Montaigne’s, indicating his scepticism. In other words, Hamlet opens with the spellbinding advent of the supernatural or unnatural, in the form of the ghost of the deceased king: a mysterious phenomenon to be verified first by the senses in its materialization. Underlying this incipit there is already a fantastic framework of Gospel parodies. The opening scene is distantly but certainly reminiscent of that Gospel scene in which a ghost, who for some is himself a king, appears to the eleven, which makes the Danish soldiers on the ramparts the counterparts of the apostles. But the Gospel evocation is chronologically inverted, since the immediate echo is to the crucifixion, with one of the Danish soldiers offering to pierce the side of the ghost with his lance to see whether it is alive or merely a shadow. Here, however, there is also a reference to a cosmic upheaval, that preceding, not following, the death of Julius Caesar. There is a hint of the scene in the Praetorium with a fearful St Peter, masked and in denial, thanks to the crowing of the cock that makes the ghost flee. Rather than a sequence of coordinated events recalling those scenes, we therefore have a phantasmagoria violating the historical order. The atmosphere of Gethsemane, with no exact equivalents, is felt ad sensum, seeing that, this time explicitly, Marcellus the soldier alludes to a different cock-crow, which according to popular legend announced the birth and not the death of the Saviour.41 Throughout the first two acts 40 Who with reason criticized Shakespeare for being ‘not true to life’ (quoted in Bloom, 1999, 426). 41 The doubting Horatio is the St Thomas of the gospel who only trusts to his own senses, in which case he is an apostle who does not believe – but will believe – in the

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Hamlet hesitates because, although he is now certain of the phenomenon, he has to consider its nature, either angelic, therefore true, or else diabolical, therefore untrue. He addresses the ghost, inviting it to come forward and declare whether it comes from heaven or hell. Here the parody moves to the episode of Lazarus who reawoke and broke his bonds of cloth. The ghost at last reveals to Hamlet that he now lies in the flames of purgatory. Only at the end of Act III does Hamlet receive confirmation of the authenticity of the ghost: ‘I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound’. At this point the existentialist drama with its theological background comes into play. It is in fact the first time that a Shakespearean play is oriented so decisively and unequivocally and that its protagonists talk of the prospects of earthly life and of the rewards and punishments of future life. Hamlet appeals to the spectator and the reader and invites them initially to give their verdict: it is right that a murder be punished, but then, is Claudius decidedly despicable when he tries everything to make his nephew return to reason, countering the absolute with the contingent and advising a middle way? How right and sensible is it to continue grieving, blocking and paralysing one’s own life? Would it not be wiser to turn over a new leaf ? Claudius is irenic, Hamlet absolutist. As far as we can see, until almost the final act Claudius is a good king, however Machiavellian: an uncle who takes care of the queen and his nephew, an embodiment of the figure and the model of wisdom. In the Council Chamber, second scene of Act I, with consummate diplomatic rhetoric he still invokes a balance between the stranglehold of grief and the exigencies of life which must go forward again after the right period of mourning. Claudius confronts Hamlet using the rhetorical figures and the concepts of attenuation and moderation, while Hamlet is an adept at hyperbole. Affectionately Claudius asks Hamlet’s two school friends the same thing that Polonius has just asked Reynaldo about his own son: to ascertain by a stratagem the mental and psychological state of his nephew, undoubtedly shadow, or ghost, of the resurrected Messiah. Hamlet the father in turn has something of Jesus in his moral integrity and his rectitude, so Hamlet could be a parody of Peter. Horatio takes a very short time to make his solemn profession of faith. The cock is also the phallic Christ of D. H. Lawrence (Volume 7, § 122.6).

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also to prevent Hamlet from becoming a factor of unrest for the domestic safety of the state. Immediately afterwards, Shakespeare makes him almost human and forgivable when he feels like Cain. In his monologue of Act III Claudius is even repentant and desperate. He would like to pray and beg for pardon, but he is overwhelmed by the heinous nature of his crime. Like Lady Macbeth, he wishes his hand could be cleansed of the bloodstains. As a good theologian, Claudius discovers the double value of prayer, the prevention of sin and, once sin has been committed, the request for pardon. Quite lucidly, he is perfectly aware that he cannot without hypocrisy ask for pardon while not returning the crown, but he weighs worldly justice, at times ambiguously the easy way out, against the inflexible justice of Heaven. In the end, however, he is overwhelmed, the victim of divine nemesis and human weakness, for he smothers any leniency and rids himself of all scruples, first trying to get Hamlet murdered by the English, then plotting with Laertes a duel in which Hamlet is to lose his life. After a brief spell of repentance and penitence, Claudius reverts to being the real murderer of his brother by poison.42 5. As well as being a crafty, malicious equivocator, and an actor, Hamlet is therefore a detective as well. The ‘murder of Gonzago’ is in turn the precursor of the modern lie-detector, and is the stratagem by which he intends to check if the ghost really was that of his father or the devil in disguise: if his idea is confirmed by pallor, starting, revelatory nervous movements in Claudius, he will go forward and kill him. Hamlet’s first request to the travelling players, as soon as they arrive, is to perform a scene that he remembers from their previous visit to court many years before. This is well chosen and anticipatory: it is the case of the killing of a king, Priam the King of Troy, and Pyrrhus the murderer is in fact a sort of double of old Hamlet, dark and armed ‘head to foot’ – a recurrent thought. It is also a possible enactment of revenge, revenge only in words, with the sonorous language of the text and a wealth of bloody hyperbole. In fact Hamlet is immediately aware of having thought up a stratagem that will rebound onto himself, and with yet another syllogism he says: Hecuba is nothing to the player, yet he really weeps; with all 42 So Claudius did not therefore act with greater strength and determination 1) thanks to the queen’s love for Hamlet; 2) thanks to the love the people bear him.

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my excellent motives, I do nothing. Or it is an antithesis. However, he decides on an indirect, roundabout action, a performance to stage the alleged assassination carried out by Claudius, who will thus be induced to confess. Then when the king and Polonius, in Act III scene 1, hide behind the tapestry to see how Hamlet behaves when he encounters Ophelia, we see a symmetrical show to that about to be staged by the players: it should be just as revelatory to its organizers, by showing them the real cause of Hamlet’s melancholy. Having received cognitive confirmation, Hamlet has to face the theological issue. Justification is a term used in its exact technical and theological sense: having ascertained his uncle’s guilt, Hamlet torments himself by wondering whether he should get rid of someone who is already damned in the judgement of the Creator; and whether he will damn himself by killing, yet pondering whether or not he himself has any mitigating circumstances – indeed even encouragement – given that his hand would be the hand of God. Shelley’s Beatrice Cenci, in killing her father, will also feel like the hand of the Creator, who would in any case damn her parent at the end of his life, and Beatrice is sure he will indeed send him to hell. In committing suicide one ends up in hell, that same hell that the impulsive, boastful Hamlet says will gape for him, where he yearns to go if only he could meet his father. The famous soliloquy ‘To be or not to be’ certifies that the possible punishment in the other world stops the dagger from striking, and the fear of hell and damnation returns to him: Hamlet, in short, is seeking a new alibi – a religious alibi – for his inaction. 6. Once this impasse is over, he hesitates no more: he has wanted to kill Claudius ever since he mortally wounded Polonius behind the tapestry. His most ingenious murderous exploit is carried out against Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, and it is a vicarious murder.43 But he is still tormented by doubts on the justice of this reasoning. He could be called a victim of the elephantiasis of thought, aware of being so atypical. The classical comparisons he makes on numerous occasions impute his heroic inferiority to his age, but, like the repeated one about Hercules, they also express his own intrinsic inferiority. He acts out both his own cowardice and his perverse 43 Impossible not to hear an echo of Sonnet 94 on having something done by another without appearing.

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daring, and he acts it out first of all for his own benefit. He might have the courage to kill Claudius as he prays, but he wants to kill him under the same condition as that in which he killed his brother, that is weighed down by the full, damning gravity of his sin. Definite, aggravating circumstances are necessary if Hamlet is to kill.44 Of his many conflicts, the first is the Pauline clash between flesh and spirit. His fleshly or uncontrollably lustful obsession is quite evident, and emerges in every dialogue.45 Hamlet himself may have been incontinent with Ophelia; his mother is described as incontinent with his uncle; and Laertes may become incontinent in lustful Paris, as Polonius fears. In Act II there is a reference to the necessity of controlling the passions; once let loose they can lead to untoward deeds. In the third scene of Act I, Laertes indeed accuses Hamlet of possible lust, the same sin imputed by Hamlet to his own mother. Polonius too recommends caution to Ophelia, playing the hypocrite and thus the part of one who is well exercised, maybe having done them in youth, in those things that he is about to warn against or forbid. On his departure, Laertes’ warnings to Ophelia are Pauline, hence pessimistic, apocalyptic or Calvinist: he does not see the joyous, gay blossoming of the flowers in spring, but the ruin of the garden,46 that is, unbridled sex as a river overflowing its banks. Hamlet explains how a small stain may lead to the corruption of the whole being, another proof of his understanding of the Calvinist theology of corruption. Yet again he sets up another investigation on the ways of God to man: can God have conceived a humanity so fallen and faulty? And does God pardon and redeem? And can man be pardoned, and can he be saved? Hamlet renders his own case absolute and becomes a fanatic

44 The imbrication of this third scene in Act III is effective: first Claudius soliloquy, then Hamlet’s broodings, followed by Claudius’ closing couplet. 45 As far as we can see, the queen gave herself to Claudius even before the murder, thus becoming guilty of adultery. The circumstances of the murder are tinged with yet another echo of theological parody, in this case Edenic: the serpent is Satan in the ‘primary scene’, piercing the flesh with his lustful darts. This motif reverberates in turn in Sonnet 129. 46 The closing imagery of Sonnet 94.

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preacher against the moral corruption of his times.47 We see how the issue of damnation and salvation, of hell and heaven, re-emerges ex abrupto as the curtain goes up on Act V, now broached by the grave-diggers, one of Shakespeare’s most extraordinary scenic exploits in the whole of his oeuvre. It is an open air, nonce scene, outside any matrix, in which the unrelated, peripheral characters of the grave-diggers are introduced and speak. They are preparing the place in the graveyard for the burial of Ophelia, who has just been accidentally drowned (or perhaps she sought death in the water passively, gently, insensibly). One know-all wonders whether it is right to bury her as she was a suicide; the law has turned a blind eye on account of the fact that she was the daughter of a councillor, while the other makes insinuations. With Horatio, Hamlet comments on the skulls unearthed by the spades and wonders about their owners when alive. Quipper par excellence as he is, Hamlet is almost defeated by the grave-digger in the war of words and double meanings based on the term ‘lie’ and on the possessive adjective. Three years appear to have passed since Hamlet’s departure from Elsinore; talking of Hamlet himself, the grave-digger says that he was mad and was sent to England to recover his wits. This is a strangely alienating scene, since Hamlet was not as well known to the people as Claudius would have us believe, given that the grave-digger does not recognize him.48 A vaguely irreverent, Dantesque air reigns over the scene, as in a similar surreal scenario two unseen pilgrims, a Dante and a Virgil (in the person of Horatio) first chat with a grave-digger, then assist at a strange burial rite in a sort of afterlife circle of suicides. A procession arrives and they try to determine its purpose. This scene shows that it is not true that in Hamlet the institutional role of the priest, of an official figure of the clergy and of 47 Sex is dirty through his melancholy, as we see in the scene between Hamlet feigning madness and Ophelia, whom he exhorts to go into a nunnery to avoid bringing bastards into the world. The sarcasm becomes even more bitter given the slang meaning (‘brothel’) attributed to the term ‘nunnery’. 48 It has frequently been noted that, on his return from the journey to England in Act V, Hamlet seems refreshed, more mature, less bitter, leading to the idea that not three but at least ten years have passed since the previous act, and that Hamlet is now about thirty years of age. This hiatus would explain the grave-diggers’ otherwise strange failure to recognize him.

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religion, is missing, however late he appears on the scene; though it is true that such a figure never appears at court among the councillors and dignitaries. Dramatic and conceptual continuity is sensational when Laertes takes it upon himself to overturn the ban on the burial of suicides; the priest, compliant with the rules, will be among the damned and his sister among the angels. The final scene poses the question of whether it is still right to impose the biblical law of eye for eye and tooth for tooth and kill the party who intended to kill. In its political aspect, the rotten, calvinistically damned world of Denmark, including Hamlet himself, commits hara-kiri and is wholly swept away by self-destruction. After the slaughter, a hopefully radiant dawn appears: but it is an illusion, we are told in the macrotext, perhaps justified by the fact that the events in neighbouring Norway are so little known. § 33. ‘Measure for Measure’* One of the two main questions raised by Measure for Measure (staged in 1604, published in 1623) is what exactly these ‘measures’ are, in other words the guidelines and the theoretical and practical means of good government. *

M. M. Lascelles, Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’, London 1953, 1970; J. W. Bennett, ‘Measure for Measure’ as Royal Entertainment, New York 1966; D. L. Stevenson, The Achievement of Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’, Ithaca, NY 1966; W. B. Bache, ‘Measure for Measure’, as Dialectical Art, Lafayette, IN 1969; Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Measure for Measure’, ed. G. L. Geckle, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1970; Shakespeare: ‘Measure for Measure’: A Casebook, ed. C. K. Stead, London 1971; N. Alexander, Shakespeare: ‘Measure for Measure’, London 1975; W. Dodd, ‘Misura per misura’: la trasparenza della commedia, Milano 1979; R. Rutelli, Passione, manipolazione e seduzione (secondo Parret) in ‘Measure for Measure’, Bologna 1992; ‘Measure for Measure’: dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1992; L. J. Ross, On ‘Measure for Measure’: An Essay in Criticism of Shakespeare’s Drama, Newark, DE and London 1997; R. B. Bennett, Romance and Reformation: the Erasmian Spirit of Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’, Newark, DE 1999; D. Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in ‘Measure for Measure’, Basingstoke 2001; ‘Measure for Measure’: Texts and Contexts / William Shakespeare, ed. I. Kamps and K. Raber, Boston, MA 2004; J. O’Meara, On Luther, ‘Measure for Measure’, Good and Evil in Shakespeare, Comedy, and the Evolution of Consciousness, Ottawa 2009; ‘Measure for Measure’: An Authoritative Text, Sources, Criticism, Adaptations, and Responses / William Shakespeare, ed. G. Ioppolo, New York and

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But the discussion proceeds with no visible links to historical reality, therefore in the reign of fantasy and political fiction, and in the form of a moral fable. The context in which this discussion develops is that of a fictional middle-European duchy under threat of war and economic recession, whose aim is to curb and contain anarchy in order to retrieve and maintain order at home. The political system, formally monarchic, is in fact an absolutist dictatorial oligarchy exerting strong, inhumane repressive power in order to achieve that aim. The administration of justice is stridently discordant: for minor offences of little or no gravity – sounding like a foreshadowing of Swift and Samuel Butler – the sentence is prison and then on to the gallows, a barbaric legislation that the Church does not oppose in a duchy where the religion is Christian, with monks and nuns carrying on their mission within its frontiers. At the start of the play, the state is disintegrating and a strong hand is required. Duke Vincentio pretends to go away, leaving the reins in the hands of his deputy Angelo, whom he believes to be upright and politically capable. But before examining the bizarre, risky storyline that this sovereign literally sets up with his conjuror’s wand, it must be said that Shakespeare welds this investigation on politics and philosophy, and political practice, to another investigation, predominant in his theatre and never resolved and therefore always resurgent: the placing of eroticism within the human being’s ontological construction. Within the crime hierarchy of the play, sexual ‘guilt’ is punished by excessive sentences, and a repressive campaign is under way against organized prostitution and fornication, so that whoever gets a woman pregnant before marriage is beheaded and the woman is abandoned to her own devices and, as it were, deprived of civil rights.49 2. On the subject of politics, Measure for Measure deals with the following dilemma: whether law and order in the state should be based on a hard-line policy or laissez faire; and what tactics gives the best result. This play has been frequently revisited in our times by experimental directors London 2010; N. Warburton, R. Walford and M. Hunt, If Power Change Purpose: ‘Measure for Measure’, Bickley 2011. 49 In the convent and the cloister a crackdown is under way; the prioress, imposing and announcing a series of restrictive measures, is the double of Angelo in politics.

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with intentionally anachronistic stagings; its modernity, topicality and power of suggestion lie in the fact that Angelo, the duke’s deputy, implements an ante litteram reactionary or ‘Islamic’ regime with his puritanical fundamentalism. There would be good reason to submit it to the test of Foucault’s theories on sexuality and the practices of repressive power, repressive therefore of sexuality.50 In this case, in the Vienna of Measure for Measure the people at large are absent and a swarm of caricatures are only interested in fornicating and having a good time. There are no bread protests, no-one fights for freedom of opinion or pluralism. Free, promiscuous sex is an ersatz. Within this broad political metaphor Duke Vincentio’s acts are to be judged and interpreted. As the curtain rises, he might seem a curious eccentric or even a knowing Prospero holding firmly in his hands the threads of the story, or rather the performance he is maieutically organizing. If this is so, he is a mixed-up, awkward sort of Prospero, particularly at the beginning, but he is more or less rehabilitated in the epilogue. Why is it that the duke hands over his command to Angelo? He realizes from the start that he is not a good politician, indeed a failure at governing, and that he has let things get out of hand and that with his laissez faire he has thrown the duchy into chaos, including moral chaos. In other words, he abandons the ship because he is no politician and because, he says, an iron hand would be seen by his subjects as an inconsistent and unpopular measure. So he entrusts the draconian government to his deputy, Angelo, and to the ‘Nestorian’ Escalus.51 It is a deed dictated by laziness and pusillanimity that the duke finds very convenient, since he then intends to hide behind the scenes and spy on how things are going, without any responsibility, honour or trouble, leaving others to sort out the country or at least to try to do so. His reputation is not immaculate and Lucio, a secondary character and a typically fickle, changeable figure, says unflattering things about him,

50 51

Act V is a chaotic investigation on the true and the false, therefore also the pretended, seasoned with grotesque features which might have pleased Angela Carter and served as inspiration for her stories. Escalus (I will speak of his homonymy later) is an elderly councillor, as skilled in politics as the duke is an amateur almost unwilling to play his role. Friar Thomas in I.3 in fact expressly criticizes the duke for being absent, and the duke admits as much.

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unfounded gossip which is, as often happens, partly true.52 This Prospero messes up the epilogue; holding all the cards and being something of a sadist, he diabolically rehearses disastrous outcomes that very nearly happen, and only after having gratuitously frightened all those present does he finally right the situation. The duke’s impetuousness and superficiality are seen in his choice of Angelo, a reversed nomen omen, who, very like Claudius in Hamlet, is undecided and in two minds: the duke knew that years before Angelo was to have married Mariana but had receded from the marriage contract for petty economic reasons, without even trying to console her.53 Thanks to the duke’s unwise appointment and the power assigned to Angelo, Measure for Measure unfolds like a whirligig of opinions and relativistic stances on the interpretation of the law and the punishment of crime. It is also one of the most interactive of Shakespeare’s plays, involving the spectators and asking them to give their views on a variety of court cases and moral questions within the objective levels, the comic turns and the symbolic layers of the text: a text which for this reason continually refers to discourse strategies and argumenta of court rhetoric. It is indeed the work generating the greatest number of unsolved doubts perversely thrown into play, and also Shakespeare’s most non-committal of those verifying his impassable stance in asking questions on moral and juridical themes without supplying answers. Shakespeare is obsessed by the idea that lust enslaves humanity and that the government, in this case, is destined to fail because lust is ungovernable. But then a slight, ambiguous inner change in perspective dawns. If this is really true, the sin of incontinence should be barred from the statute books; if this is a sin committed by everyone, then it is natural, and God cannot punish 52 53

The duke is suspected of sexual trafficking with street women and paying them handsomely; at the same time justice is elephantine and Barnardine, a murderer, is still in prison awaiting trial nine years after his arrest! See the treatment dealt out by Angelo to the ‘fornicator’ Julietta (another homonym), made pregnant by Claudio and in labour: she is to be sent away and segregated, and shall ‘have needful, but not lavish, means’ (II.2.24). In itself the breakup of Angelo’s engagement to Mariana is ascribed to an extra touch of romance: the shipwreck of her brother’s ship in which her dowry is lost, which at the same time highlights the rather unromantic pettiness of Angelo.

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what is natural, since he himself is the origin of nature. It would mean punishing hunger or thirst or any other impellent physiological necessity. An objection, however, is at hand: clearly lust is not coercible, the problem is how to moderate it; it is natural to use it in a disciplined way, it is a sin to use it excessively.54 Yet the play is anachronistic in one sense, in that today no moralist, pedagogue or churchman would consider sexual sin damnable or punishable by death; hence it is also part of the history of customs and traditions. This anachronism is in some degree felt, so that some perorate a kind of depenalization of the sin of adultery and of any violation of chastity. In the fourth scene of Act II (II.4.109–10) there is the unthinkable, paradoxical question: is there not perhaps need for the same moderation in virtue as in vice? Is not the wholly virtuous just as much to be condemned, he, that is, who out of principle does not commit even those sins that lead to some good? And again: ‘might there not be a charity in sin / To save this brother’s life?’ (II.4.63–4). Is it thinkable to classify sins according to their equivalent in the ‘pro’ column, so that some of them are not simply condoned but even authorized? 3. The sour taste and slippery nature of Measure for Measure depend on the fact that these capital questions are discussed in the stylistic features of the farce, the grotesque fantasy and fable-like melodrama. The first part of the play is linguistically among the most technical in Shakespeare and therefore among the most difficult and contorted. The dialogues that are let loose, seeming to come from the mouths of masters of logic, are rhetorical clashes and negotiations; their aim is persuasion, attempted, achieved or avoided between the interrogator and the interrogated. The sinner Claudio has vainly tried to persuade Angelo to have the sentence commuted, and in turn persuades Lucio to go and persuade Isabella, his sister, who in turn must persuade Angelo. Previously a burgher has persuaded Angelo to keep the brothels within the city open (the purpose is mysteriously ‘for seed’) but not those on the outskirts. In Act II we see the persuasion used by the Provost on Angelo to get him to revoke the death sentence, but above all the famous scene of Isabella’s peroration to Angelo,

54 In this case too, the links with Sonnet 94 are evident.

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where Isabella uses the classical rhetorical strategies of ‘pathos’, such as the repeated plea to imagine himself in the same position, or the shocking and improper ‘metaphysical’ metaphor.55 Here Middleton alone in any way rivals Shakespeare, in two similar scenes, one of his specialties, of his two masterpieces.56 In the fourth scene of Act II this scene is repeated, in a pendant precisely reversed: the persuasion is contrary although subtle at the beginning, and Angelo – with the gradual, unaggressive rhetoric of  ‘ethos’, unlike the impassioned rhetoric of Isabella – proposes to make Isabella sin by persuading her to lose her virginity with him. But straight after, Isabella persuades her brother Claudio that his life in exchange for her virginity is an unacceptable, diabolical pact; the situation is reversed and Claudio, only apparently persuaded, tries in turn to persuade Isabella that human life is really worth more than her virginity.57 Duke Vincentio, who for some time has been wandering around the duchy incognito, persuades the honest Provost to turn a blind eye and to alter the order of the executions. Barnardine, another prisoner awaiting the death sentence, is subjected to persuasion to make him agree to die straight away, but refuses.58 In Act V the duke undergoes Isabella’s persuasion, pretending to reject it. Almost at the end there is Mariana’s peroration for the pardon of Angelo. But here the duke is by now cleverly parodying, purely for his own, somewhat masochistic enjoyment, the scene of Isabella’s peroration with Angelo. Lucio begs in extremis not to be hung or forced to marry a prostitute. The materials making up the story mainly belong to farce. A bizarre, somewhat fearful and eccentric duke leaves his reign to a deputy 55 56 57 58

Such as that of cooking seasoned food. On the distinction between the rhetoric of ‘pathos’ and of ‘ethos’ cf. the classic C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treaty on Argumentation, Eng. trans., Notre Dame, IN 1969. Cf. Volume 1 §§ 133–4. It is the servant, waiting outside the vineyard where the lovers’ encounter takes place, who is ‘persuaded’ by Isabella that she has come to Angelo at night to speak of her brother (IV.1.47). Barnardine is an indolent, sluggish, absent-minded prisoner, whose part is very small; but it is delightful, carried forward and staged in its fresh, grotesque, incongruous nature: how can a prisoner be convinced to let himself be beheaded before another, justifying his refusal by the fact that he is still drunk, therefore unprepared?

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– ‘a mad, fantastical trick’, as in a comedy by Plautus –59 but he returns disguised as a friar, preaching against the world and eavesdropping on what his subjects are doing. The string of disguises and stratagems starts with that of the duke as Friar Lodowick, and continues with that of Mariana, betrothed to Angelo, as Isabella; a third disguise, more or less, is that of the head of a pirate looking like Claudio, who happens to have died, and is taken to Angelo as proof of the beheading of Claudio himself. The development is fast, at times even elliptical and pruned of all repetitions;60 indeed the lack of facts, or the intention to avoid digressing too far from the storyline, requires a subplot, that of the servants of the bawd Mistress Overdone, or that of Lucio, otherwise called a ‘fantastic’, a sort of fool without any specific context, a hotbed of words in full flow, quips, blunders, and insults, mixed with occasional truths. These characters bring alive periodic, protracted interludes, not always very novel, which fill out a play that would otherwise be very slight, thus making it at times verbose and needlessly lengthened, in the final act in particular. Confirmation of this marked compactness comes from the unity of time and place, strict as perhaps nowhere else in Shakespeare.61 Between the first scene of Act I and the rest of the play an unspecified period of time elapses, but the four final acts take place over one, two or three days62 and, very unusually in Shakespeare, without interruption. In its geography – the type is mixed, rich in blatant unlikelihoods practically put on show, since as usual Shakespeare does not recreate from life but only reimagines – Measure for Measure is Mitteleuropean, taking place in Austria in an imaginary 59

Shakespeare’s source is a novella by Giraldi Cinthio on which G. Whetstone wrote a play and its prose version about twenty years before. However, the so-called ‘bed-trick’ – that is, the substitution of a person in the bed of a husband or a wife – was the usual ingredient of jokes in oral form that was to be used dozens of times in the theatre even by non-English writers (and by Shakespeare in All’s Well that Ends Well). 60 The understanding between Isabella and Mariana, who will have to lie with Angelo instead of Isabella, is given in a fade-out, the result being communicated by the facts. 61 As to place, the only violation of its unity is the scene at the ‘moated grange’, whose charmed atmosphere was to be recreated in the nineteenth century by Tennyson. 62 Measure for Measure is the most confused and contradictory of Shakespeare’s plays as regards the calculation of internal time.

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period of wars, disorder and famine in its own area. All this makes the legitimate duke’s absence all the more inexplicable. Thralldom to Hungary is greatly feared, the empire ‘of Russia’63 is not far away, and there are rumours that the duke might be away on a mission in Poland. In the nomenclature Shakespeare again uses the cheerful, Harlequinade variety of other fantastic plays. Escalus is a nomen omen since he is the well-balanced prince in Romeo and Juliet, the latter, Juliet or Julietta, the same name as the woman seduced and made pregnant by Claudio, a perfectly Italian name in Vienna, like Angelo, Isabella, Mariana and Lucio.64 Other names have Latin endings or are anglicized. Lodowick is the only name that is vaguely Viennese. Some scenes are in the street, but there is no sign of any sense or connotation of any specific Austrian or Germanic place; Vienna is indeed masqueraded as a Mediterranean or vaguely Italian locality, as in many later twentieth-century novels by Ronald Firbank. 4. In Shakespeare, therefore in this play too, the governor is the mirrorlike image of God according to Elizabethan cosmology. Duke Vincentio, another omen, is a lord who is also a Lord, therefore he is a Christ who ‘winningly’ and hopefully intends to prove to himself that mortal man is not of little faith, and who only wants to play at doubting that he is of little faith. In the evocative opening we can also see man abandoned to his destiny by God, a man who by his own means only must orientate himself simply with his faculty of wisdom mitigated by compassion, and must act without prompts: the condition of post-lapsarian man. In reality, later the duke does convince himself that humanity is more corrupt than he had thought, and is forced to have recourse to at least some of the severity that he had never 63 The long, wordy story in episodes by the citizens regarding the wife of the constable Elbow who, pregnant, sought the services of the bawd Overdone, is heard by Escalus, who adds that the story would be suitable for one of those long white nights in Russia. 64 In fact Shakespeare appears to have exhausted or diminished his naming fantasy, or rather to be working by propagation and archetypal reiteration and, with a form of controlled automatism, to assign names to characters that are omina through the effect of previous attributions: as here in the case of Claudio, who in his sexual incontinence cites – though transforming him – Claudius of Hamlet, a tragedy separated from this one in the writing by only two other plays.

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put into practice. In such a theological scheme of things the two governors embody the two-fronted God, the Old Testament God and the New Testament God, the vindictive God and the benevolent God. The epilogue seems a farce of the Last Judgement presided over by a capricious God who distributes rewards and punishments without criteria. In fact the religious theme hangs on a possible revision of the moral code. As mentioned above, Measure for Measure pivots on containing libido and on determining where and how that is possible, on the extent of guilt and therefore the extent of just punishment or just pardon. One query resounding in the subplot of the pimps and the plebs is in the following form, perhaps a little too banal: is it right to ban brothels? Should the local youth perhaps be castrated? All told, there is something wrong somewhere if nature, which cannot be contravened, authorizes the turning of a spontaneous blind eye to a sin if that sin leads to a greater good. The criminal law is in conflict with the natural decree, and Shakespeare is always in favour of natural moral law. Codified religion is therefore called into question in that its non-naturalness forces the human being, even when originally righteous, to an ordeal from which he only just emerges victorious, or else defeated and overwhelmed by contradictions. God himself ends up in the dock and man is declared innocent and absolved thanks to extenuating circumstances. Isabella (in III.1) maintains that it is monstrous to give back and preserve the life of someone at the cost of the shame of someone else. Sexual intercourse has happened between Claudio and Juliet, after stipulating ‘a regular contract’ of marriage, that is a classic, binding engagement; therefore she is stained with a guilt that is the same as that pardoned and indeed authorized by the duke and recommended to Mariana. Angelo in turn bears a name that promises well and which he belies, being more of a tempting Satan; he is that Angel, that Lucifer, and his sexual lust is an ersatz for the thirst for power, for the desire for primacy and for the ambition to overcome Vincentio.65 Were the above not true, Angelo’s ongoing, tireless defence by the duke in the final act, and all his leniency, would make no sense. 65 Claudio’s diagnosis: Angelo is like a rider who lets his horse feel the spur as soon as he mounts, to give him the idea of his power. To make a name for himself he has resuscitated laws never before applied, and an edict long disused.

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The duke anticipates and indeed pushes even higher the casuistry implicit in Manzoni’s Fra Cristoforo. The stratagem he uses is formally risky and in contrast with official religious morality; and it is incomprehensible how Isabella, a future nun, does not realize this: how, that is, it can be morally justified that a betrothed girl should go to bed with the fiancé who has refused her, and how premarital sex can be approved. 5. From the midway point of the play on, the duke is a deus ex machina who exploits small, cunning lies and stratagems, unscrupulous enough to clash with current morality, and unravelling a situation that threatens to explode. Angelo throws a spanner in the works by lying with Mariana whom he believes to be Isabella, yet perfidiously not granting the mandate to release Claudio from prison, and ‘puts him to the test’. The Provost, though upright, assents to save Claudio, and the farce of Barnardine who does not want to die induces him to play the trick of sending Angelo the decapitated head of a pirate, passing it off as that of Claudio. Meanwhile the duke reveals the truth bit by bit, telling it to some and hiding it from others, including Isabella, thus intentionally creating suspense in order – to express it in terms of Baroque aesthetic – to highlight even more triumphantly how good wins in the end. He even tells Isabella that the head really is that of Claudio! In all four of the final acts the duke appears, disappears, reappears like a sort of Elizabethan Godot. And when he is absent he sends contradictory, unreal missives. He works behind the scenes as the opponent of Angelo whom he has appointed and must defend on principle, and above all through ontological conviction. The first result is that Claudio, unmasked, becomes resigned and ‘settled’ through his acts, and is awaiting death, whereas without letting him know the duke is actually working to save him. In fact the duke metamorphoses, from a lethargic, lazy misanthrope he was at the beginning, into the capable, active, acrobatic creator of a plan for general salvation. He himself, however, must carry out and have others carry out moral acrobatics, as I mentioned: he must act with duplicity and pretend, with Angelo first of all. Or at least he must have recourse to legal chicanery. On stage, from here on a gigantic prank is enacted, an independent treat that he concedes himself. Now he has become more of an artist than a statesman: good at disguising himself, doing and undoing at his will, a risky game on the verge of seeing all

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his plans fail. He demonstrates that good, in a compromised situation, needs lies and duplicity; but also that it is a pleasure to lie, and to take risks.66 6. The question we should ask – though this undoubtedly happens frequently in Shakespeare – is why the duke voluntarily has recourse to a kind of slow torture, exasperatingly delaying his own agnition; and why he does not leave off his disguise – re-establishing justice or a different justice, and unmasking Angelo – much sooner than he actually does. And why he risks compromising the end he has in mind, saving first of all a human life unjustly condemned to death. Especially since the order for the execution has been confirmed, in spite of the fact that Angelo’s blackmail has apparently been accepted and he has lain with the woman he believes to be Isabella. The duke sarcastically meditates on how quickly a crime committed by authority can become law; for which reason he could and should promptly cast off his disguise. Now the duke reveals to the honest Provost the dishonesty of Angelo and the innocence of Claudio, and pleads with him to transgress orders for the sake of good. But the Provost is a model of trustworthiness, as the duke had imagined; therefore he gives him trouble, so much so that the duke is forced in the end to show him his seal as a guarantee and a pledge of his imminent return (although, importantly, without revealing to him that he is actually the duke). The duke does nothing, or almost nothing, contrary to justice, but the justice he applies is very summary: Barnardine, the confessed criminal, will be executed before Claudio, and his head, sent to Angelo, will be passed off as that of Claudio; yet the duke confirms Barnardine’s death sentence, and this injustice or cruelty is not removed, rather it is exploited. All in all, many vicissitudes would have been avoided had the duke remained in his own place! But the duke is indeed an engineer of the imagination who enjoys resolving superfluous difficulties brought about by himself; or he is a prankster, a dangerous joker playing tricks that are in bad taste and decidedly excessive, such as saying to Isabella that her brother has been beheaded. The show, the pyrotechnical Baroque pageant pivoted on trompe 66 According to himself, he is a wandering monk on a mission for the Pope!

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l’œil must for this very reason be enjoyed and savoured in all its excess. The duke even pretends not to believe in what he himself is trying to bring to the surface, above all through his innate sense of theatrical fiction. To the end he defends the person he wants to unmask, and labels ‘mad’ the woman he intends to defend and see triumphant. Still disguised as a friar, he fuels the jokes of the opportunist Lucio, who always talks behind the backs of the absent, unaware that one absentee is in fact present in disguise. The show is also a bitterly grotesque farce since truth is triggered by a heap of lies: and even Isabella has to say that she has been raped by Angelo in order to have him punished for the execution of her brother as she believes, brought about by the lie told her by the duke. The show then has a second and a third internal act, since the duke plays an astute double game: first disguised as a friar, he then appears on stage dressed as a duke, then again as a friar and again as a duke, disguises which allow him to be received as an authority and immediately afterwards disapproved as a liar. The recognition is complete only when the emergency has reached its height and the situation is about to get out of control, with the duke himself, dressed as a friar, about to be thrown into prison. The comic counterpoint is provided by the continual interference of Lucio, taunted by the duke, whip in hand, who is then in turn taunted when Lucio believes him to be the friar. A few instants before the curtain comes down, something happens that not everyone knows: Claudio is indeed alive; and therefore the required law of an eye for an eye that the duke wishes to impose, is no longer necessary and has been averted. When Claudio takes off his hood, removing it from the head that everyone believed had been chopped off, the director stages the last and most incredible of his theatrical exploits. The happy ending is exceptional for Shakespeare, even though this is something of a dark comedy, since its aim is not to provide an account of the physical and moral damages required by the re-establishment of order. Mariana adds that at times the villain is redeemed; and Angelo has been honest, at least until the moment when he was tempted. In practice, from the theological viewpoint, Shakespeare corrects the Gospel parable of the vineyard: payment is granted not only to the labourer who arrives late, but also to the labourer who has only just begun to work with a will.

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§ 34. ‘Othello’* Staged in 1604, published in 1622 with a number of discrepancies compared to the 1623 Folio, Othello confirms once and for all an idea that has been taking shape since the empirical reading one after the other of the great Shakespearean plays. It is a clearly evident fact that they have a decided tendency to start off from within a court or the seat of political power: this court is real, half-real, surreal or purely fantastical and improbable, all together. More precisely, it is presented as a powder-keg in a highly precarious state of calm, therefore on the verge of blowing up with a bang. On principle, in the Shakespearean court and at the moment the play opens, a

*

E. E. Stoll, ‘Othello’: An Historical and Comparative Study, Minneapolis, MN 1915; R. Flatter, The Moor of Venice, London 1950; H. Gardner, The Noble Moor, London 1956; R. B. Heilman, Magic in the Web: Action and Language in ‘Othello’, Lexington, KT 1956; M. Rosenberg, The Masks of ‘Othello’, Berkeley, CA 1961; E. D. Jones, Othello’s Countrymen, Oxford 1965; M. B. Smith, Casque to Cushion: A Study of ‘Othello’ and ‘Coriolanus’, Ottawa 1970; R. M. Colombo, Le utopie e la storia: saggio sull’‘Othello’ di Shakespeare, Bari 1975; ‘Othello’: A Casebook, ed. J. Wain, London 1971; A. Serpieri, ‘Otello’, l’Eros negato: psicoanalisi di una proiezione distruttiva, Milano 1978, Napoli 2003; Aspects of ‘Othello’, ed. K. Muir and P. Edwards, Cambridge 1977; J. Adamson, ‘Othello’ as Tragedy: Some Problems of Judgment and Feeling, Cambridge 1980; C. Bene, Otello, o la deficienza della donna, Milano 1981; ‘Othello’ dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1983; William Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1986; P. H. Davison, ‘Othello’, Basingstoke 1988; M. Elliott, Shakespeare’s Invention of ‘Othello’: A Study of Early Modern English, London 1988; ‘Othello’: Critical Essays, ed. S. Snyder, New York 1988; Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’, ed. A. G. Barthelemy, Boston, MA and London 1994; V. M. Vaughan, ‘Othello’: A Contextual History, Cambridge 1994; Aspetti di ‘Othello’, ed. L. Di Michele, Napoli 1996; E. Pechter, ‘Othello’ and Interpretive Traditions, Iowa City 1999; Tre secoli di ‘Otello’, ed. E. Sala Di Felice and L. Sanna, Roma 1999; S. Bassi, Le metamorfosi di Otello. Storia di un’etnicità immaginaria, Bari 2000; M. Ingenito, Figlio di un dio minore: Otello, il moro di Venezia, Napoli 2000; ‘Othello’: New Critical Essays, ed. P. C. Kolin, New York and London 2002; A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’, ed. A. Hadfield, London 2003; N. Potter, ‘Othello’: Character Studies, London and New York 2008; J. B. Altman, The Improbability of ‘Othello’: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood, Chicago 2010; S. Benson, Shakespeare, ‘Othello’ and Domestic Tragedy, New York and London 2012.

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power libido explodes: a character, whether a subordinate, an underling or in some other way someone set apart, decides to push himself forward, and committing variously heinous crimes, to climb the career ladder of honours and positions of command. This uncontainable, jostling libido may mask sexual libido, since these two come together and join forces, expressly evil forces. Hence the similarity in kind – a common dramaturgical alpha – of at least four plays which however each reach a different omega. Claudius in Hamlet wants to become king, having set his sights on his sister-in-law and perhaps even having committed adultery with her. Macbeth longs for the sceptre of the King of Scotland. Edmund yearns to enjoy the benefits of his brother the legitimate son; on his way he grabs the title of Earl of Gloucester to become the right hand man of Lear’s two daughters, for a while being the bone of contention between them as husband or lover. In Othello, while Iago may seem an Edmund to the power of two in wickedness and ingenious plotting, he is in fact a relative, or maybe a huge, exception, since there is evidently a major disproportion between the small promotion he desires and the means he uses with all their destructive potential. He is not fighting to obtain the throne of the king or of the doge of Venice, he does battle only to become Othello’s lieutenant. His libido is satisfied and fulfilled in the destruction of the Moor’s happiness, with no power or intention to achieve any further target: a libido, therefore, that can never be calmed and satisfied by an object of erotic desire. With respect to other Shakespearean villains, Iago shows no open desire to possess any woman throughout the play.67 His libido takes fire through perhaps unfounded, perhaps feigned fears he himself only partly understands regarding a possible adultery of his own wife Emilia with Othello; and through an emotional and sexual marital breakdown. It is certain that he is a sexually frustrated misogynist, to which might be added that he is also impotent, inhibited, frigid, or

67 In his absorbing psychoanalytical reading, Serpieri 2003 interprets the play, behind the screen of its Venetian setting, as the staging of a ‘puritanical-bourgeois civilization [English, of course] that removes and expels the “monsters” of its own imagination through projection’ (5); Iago is expressly the ‘Puritan protestant’ (73) who makes his reasons for hatred ‘slip’ one over the other and his love too, a love for Desdemona which is confessed (II.1.286ff.) and then repressed, or more precisely ‘slipped’.

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homosexual. Iago therefore is a bi-polar character: he is credible in the everyday drama of Elizabethan and Jacobean times, but archetypal in the symbolic plot, in which he embodies a satanic principle aiming at damaging, polluting, and destroying without receiving anything in exchange, that is for purely sadistic or diabolical pleasure in doing so. If this is true, Othello may be a remote, repeatable irony in actu of Satan’s rebellion in Genesis, and Iago the systematic spoiler of the Creator’s plan for redemption. The interpreter’s task is to uncover how Iago’s plot, together with this symbolic watermark, works together with that of Othello. And here things become more mysterious and complex. Seen from Othello’s viewpoint the play is another parable on human vulnerability, on fallen nature, on the driving out of Eden of the original couple; yet Othello is not really an Everyman but an alien and a misfit. The racism of which he is explicitly a victim weighs heavily on him in the first Venetian act with its evident overtones, however compensated by the value and daring that the fading, declining marine republic is no longer able to express within itself. So Othello is even, in Freudian terms, a model of control of anal and erotic impulse. He is able to appear as the champion of victorious rationality over an instinct that he has tamed; or the touchstone of the balanced, harmonious Renaissance man, his own master, and at the same time the ‘Ruskinian’ chastiser of Venice. At a later stage, however, Shakespeare seems to play cleverly with his dramatic impassibility and his ability to hide behind it. Othello falls under Iago’s blows and concentric assault, and Shakespeare retraces his steps, enhancing his pessimism on human nature’s ability to rise and erase the stain of original sin. Inexorably, there resurfaces in Othello, the black Othello, the Shakespearean mark of the beast.68 A further incongruence or conceptual aporia, or even dramatic paradox, is that Iago in his tendency to attribute everything to impulse, to the economic or material drive,69 stoutly denying anything spiritual, gives proof of an intellect almost superhuman 68 I use this term in the sense of Kipling’s tale of the same title, on which see Volume 6, § 266.5. 69 Right from the play’s first scene, where Roderigo and Iago are talking, the internal primacy of the economic metaphor is evident (‘Put money in thy purse’), a sign of absence of spirituality and a hint of a conflict between interest and

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in building his plan, albeit the intellect is not exactly the spirit. It is also that he should be able, indeed forced, to prove the ontological bestiality and monstrosity of man, triggering Othello’s jealousy, not exactly a bestial passion, probably uniquely human. As in all Shakespeare’s tragedies, the plot must bring the apparent success of the villain’s plan to the highest point in order to make the villain’s unmasking and punishment take over. Once the bloody tragedy is achieved, order is restored, yet the remedy is always less than the evil, which has taken its full course. Even in Othello, there is someone who has not taken action, or has not taken action at the right time, or else comes on stage one fatal instant too late, as Emilia does when Othello has just smothered Desdemona. The epilogue, in this case too, is much too easy. The real course of the facts is reconstructed in a flash and the denouement is immediate. And perhaps – though not here – the villain professes repentance and makes some honourable gesture as he dies. But many of those harmed are dead, stabbed, suicides or through natural causes. It is almost derisory that an outsider reaps the benefits which should have gone to someone else, as does Cassio in becoming the governor of Cyprus. 2. Othello is perhaps Shakespeare’s work with the greatest tension and cohesion. The unity of place is lacking, but only between the first and the other acts, set in the island of Cyprus, as steps in a feverish, claustrophobic Kammerspiel, without plot twists, time lapses and the changing of scenes which are habitual to Shakespeare. Internal evidence tells us that it lasts a long time, but the reader perceives an almost synchronic twenty-four-hour action from Act II onwards.70 The cast is small, with only six main characters; drastic, not to say tyrannical, is the pruning of any secondary plot and any diegetic extension.71 The internal director of this plot from its first step

disinterestedness. Iago is a denier, a ‘critic’, or nothing else: his task is to deny, to be on the side of nothing, a real nihilist. 70 For this reason it is likely that the marriage was never sexually consummated through lack of time, and that Desdemona dies a virgin. 71 Only towards the end does Iago have to face and resolve a few unforeseen events: Roderigo has lost patience because he has now understood that he will never lie with Desdemona despite Iago’s confirmed, repeated promises; and we learn that Iago has

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is Iago. The play is his own construction, and its stages and his aims are explained or revealed by him in short soliloquies cadencing it. Othello marks the evident prevalence of the aside and of the performative and informative soliloquy. Soliloquies are informative above all of the plot – this time in its transposed sense, that is the plot set up by the character who always seems, and is called, ‘honest’ in public. He speaks and acts consequentially, while in those soliloquies he unveils the real essence and purpose of his ‘dishonest’ hidden plans, creating friction between the audience within and that outside the drama. Iago is thus similar yet different from Edmund in King Lear. In this regard, it should be noted that Iago speaks clearly of his motive – and he speaks truly, or almost truly – only to Roderigo, as well as to himself, hence to the theatre audience. Yet he has not revealed to Roderigo the depth of the evil roots of his hatred for Othello, masking them. In the first half of the play Othello gives orders to his ensign who pretends to second him, and the ensign becomes his supporter and counsellor while subjugating him and keeping him on the leash from the moment he has aroused his jealousy. Iago pursues two plans that are instrumental in achieving his vengeance: he must make Roderigo believe that he will soon enjoy Desdemona sexually, and he must stop him from giving up; secondly, he makes Cassio believe that it will be easy to retrieve the post of lieutenant by convincing Desdemona to speak to Othello in his favour. This will bring about the opposite effect since Othello, brainwashed by Iago, will believe that such pressing requests hide an adulterous affair, and will therefore become mortally and destructively jealous. Iago’s direction is successfully pivoted on the attempt to allow no potentially useful human pawn to escape his plan through impatience or desperation, and to recruit other possible pawns, such as his own wife Emilia or the flirt Bianca. At times he can afford the luxury of allowing himself to become the devil’s advocate and being (not just seeming) honest, then giving up that particularly

had jewels delivered to Desdemona on behalf of Roderigo himself. Iago calms him down by involving him in a wicked collateral plan: inventing that Othello is to be sent to Mauritania and persuading Roderigo to eliminate Cassio so Othello and Desdemona will have to stay in Cyprus.

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hazardous game the moment it threatens to put his plan at risk.72 Iago’s brainwashing of Othello exploits the art of words. Modern as never before, almost prefiguring twentieth-century epistemology,73 Shakespeare explores both the innate ambiguities and the deliberately distorting resources of language. In Othello, communication is systematically interrupted, disturbed or falsified; more exactly, it is altered, indeed overturned as regards the explicit meaning of the message. With Iago, rhetoric becomes mere artifice in order to change reality into appearance and even falsity. Rhetoric with its figures is used by Iago to persuade or set in motion dis-persuasion, that is to remove a consolidated conviction. He employs this method to overcome and undermine Othello’s belief in the honesty of Cassio and of his own wife, who thereby become suspected of going to bed together before and during her marriage with Othello. It is easy to see how Iago acts both through his words and his silence, both through his superfluity and through his paucity of words, and through the essential weapon of reticence – with allusions, dubitative formulae, feigned chance observations.74 He is especially gifted in sarcasm, contradiction, oxymoron. But his most efficient rhetorical technique is that already mentioned, the ability to fuel a passion while trying to extinguish it, or taking purely neutral facts or even contrary proofs as criteria supporting a phenomenon. It is no chance, but metadramatically and philosophically necessary, that a string of whistleblowing comes about and that such information is not clearly, or not at all, defined, therefore is simply rumour, however necessary to the storyline. 72 Halfway through Act IV Othello is about to backtrack, recalling the purity and the charm of Desdemona whom he says he must kill. It is then that Iago, instead of denying in order to confirm, directly confirms, saying that if Othello has no reason to kill her, no-one else has. Hearing these words, Othello plunges back into despair, so that without raising his suspicion Iago is able to suggest strangling her. In the previous temptation scene, the playwright imbricates his stage directions, by making Othello notice Iago’s wily grimaces. 73 In I.1.157 Shakespeare glimpses the break in the semiotic link between res and verba, and a case of the sign of a referent being no longer the sign of that referent, only appearing to be so. 74 The trigger of procured jealousy is given in a line of Iago’s, ‘I like not that’, addressed to Cassio, which Iago at first refuses to explain to Othello, thus fuelling his curiosity.

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At the outset, Iago denigrates Roderigo to Othello, so his vengeance is built on the opposition between the two ex-rivals.75 Soon afterwards, Roderigo and Iago inform Brabantio of a rumour that his daughter has run away and that the Moor is having sex with Desdemona, a rumour partly true and verified, yet also false since Desdemona is no victim of any magic and loves the Moor spontaneously. Rumour in its truly etymological sense is at the origin of the dramatic action, since Desdemona has fallen in love with Othello, as she says, hearing him speak. Thirsting for romance, she has fallen in love with and married romance; she could well have fallen in love with a man who had simply narrated Othello’s adventures. In the ‘trial’ in Act I at the duke’s council, Othello is believed, but he also calls Desdemona to testify. The next piece of information in the chain76 is proposed but not sent to its recipient: that of Cassio being drunk while on watch, something of which Montano immediately offers to inform Othello before being dissuaded by Iago. However, this warped rumour of the scuffle condemns Cassio and leads to his destitution. A second summary trial is held at the end of this episode, in which Othello is a paradoxical judge who can only pass the wrong sentence since the evidence has been tampered with and the witnesses are false. Roderigo had been encouraged to rebel by Iago who tells him that Cassio is madly in love with Desdemona. In the key scene of Othello’s temptation at the hands of Iago, the communicative model works as follows: Othello believes the ‘message’, being sure the source is truthful whereas it is not; so he receives and believes a false content. He requires certain proof, but this proof is anything but certain, being false and warped by his own tendency to deform. In fact Iago answers that certain proof of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness cannot be had, although a series of circumstances having a substantial degree of truth leads almost to certainty, or near certainty. Shakespeare seems here to anticipate one of the proofs Newman was to posit in his ‘grammar of assent’! Iago lists certain so-called proofs that jointly provide certainty or what Othello believes 75

First instance of metaphorical continuity: the strings of Iago’s purse of secrets refer to the famous ‘put money in thy purse’ at the end of Act I. 76 In between comes the arrival in Venice of messengers reporting that various Turkish galleons are sailing towards Rhodes: discordant pieces of news are to be reconciled.

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to be certainty: the first piece of evidence is decidedly false, Cassio’s dream in which he murmurs his love for Desdemona; the second is the handkerchief that Desdemona is thought to have given Cassio; the third, the eavesdropping on what Iago and Cassio say to each other, which Othello believes to refer to sleeping with his wife, with the missing pieces of the conversation being filled in by Othello according to his own feared version of the facts.77 A similar bias is confirmed at the last moment in a piece of contrary evidence that comes to light by chance, on the faithfulness and chastity of Desdemona, and this is Emilia’s account; but Othello is by now blinded by jealousy and wants Desdemona to confess her guilt. Finally on this point, for future generations and the twentieth century in particular, Shakespeare here inaugurates the theme of the danger and ontological curse of words. Instead of communicating the truth, words may more often be easily used to communicate an untruth, as also happens in King Lear. It is equally true that the tragedy comes from an incomplete communication (if only Emilia had heard Iago’s suspicion of Desdemona’s honesty …). The corruptibility of words is alluded to in Gratiano’s line: ‘All that’s spoke is marr’d’. 3. The mark of the beast, as I mentioned, is that branded into man, according to Shakespeare, after the original sin and the banishment from Eden, and this reading is supported by a number of allusions of a theological and biblical nature. Cassio’s ‘election’ is one such in Iago’s interpretation, as if divine grace had been randomly assigned to another and not to him. Iago therefore is the disturbing element, like Satan, the serpent in Eden: all before was quiet, with him and by his means the tempest breaks out.78 And Satan, previously Lucifer, conceives endless hatred against Othello with Titanic, Miltonic and biblical echoes: ‘I am not what I am’. As it 77 Iago also tells Othello that it is impossible to catch the two alleged lovers in bed, but he describes this negated circumstance with such details of savage lust that Othello is distraught. It is also true that in the eavesdropping scene, malicious fate takes a hand: the handkerchief dropped unwittingly by Desdemona is given back to Cassio by Bianca, coming onto the scene while Othello is spying. 78 The tempest at the opening of Act II is symbolic in two senses: it is that about to explode in Othello’s soul, and it is the real storm, the atmospheric sign preluding great tragic events, whether imagined or real, connected or disconnected as they may be.

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develops, the play appears more and more to evoke a metaphor of Eden, the earthly paradise, the radiant perfection of the ‘chrysolite’, a replica that Othello stubbornly intends to install in the island of Cyprus. As Othello says, once jealousy is flourishing, ‘chaos’ replaces order. In Act III Iago’s bowing and kneeling before Othello triggers echoes and gleams of Jesus’ temptation in the desert, with Othello accepting a false and foresworn offer of faithfulness. But it is Iago, not Othello, to say he is all his henceforth. All these are gestures and acts of an agent provocateur. First he demolishes Cassio, then he comforts and raises him. In doing so he has to disclaim all his rigour, saying that pardon may be had, difficulties can be set aside, never despair. Iago knows – like Satan, deep in his heart, and as he says in a soliloquy – that the world is good, disinterestedness and love do abound, as if he were trying to disclaim his guilt. He is then a paradoxically diabolical agent, apart from his own sinful personal advantage, of a correct, selfless action that is even beneficial: ‘Divinity in hell!’79 On a theological plane, evil comes from doing too much good. Othello specifically describes the emergence of the animalistic in the human in the form of giving way to passion that erupts beyond the control of reason: or rather, giving way to one passion, jealousy. It is implicit that jealousy is not to be taken here as ascertaining adultery through verification, but as the suspicion that the spouse may commit or may have committed adultery; so jealousy is clinically changed into hallucination, fixation, paranoia and madness.80 This is the picture of the drama as seen in Othello. Monstrosity, also at the centre of King Lear, is in Othello synonymous with jealousy itself, a monster selfgenerated without reason. Shakespeare represents again a phenomenon arrived at through a different aetiology. Yet it is still shown how, acting on weak, fragile human nature, it is possible to force a person step by step down into the abyss of madness. Iago is the assistant and instrument of a ‘monstrous birth’; he gives birth to the monster and admits as much with 79 As to this point, Shakespeare’s favourite image recurs of dropping poison into the ear as the symbol of brain-washing, used in Hamlet and Macbeth. 80 He becomes a suspicious Macbeth who has also said farewell to sleep, a similarity supported and enhanced by the fact that Othello longs for ‘vengeance’, and to obtain it he orders that Cassio be eliminated.

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pride and satisfaction. The mark of the beast permeates the play throughout and Cassio sees the brawl under this mark. It is also a mark assigned explicitly to Othello and to many others by Iago, who amputates the sublime and spiritual from human life and reduces everything drastically to libido, bestial lust and material interests. Beyond this allegorical and theological theme, Iago’s good side is his Renaissance and Machiavellian, hence secular voluntarism, as when he comforts the desperate Roderigo with the metaphor of life as a garden,81 adding that homo faber suae fortunae. Here Iago expounds in prose a dynamic, satanic optimism of evil, and the necessity to promote oneself and get on in life. He therefore exalts human free will, but a free will unfortunately directed towards evil. He is the champion of ruthless human interventionism; the other categories to which he does not belong are those of the meek donkeys or of the ‘honest knaves’. Yet it is a vitality that hides the rot. The character’s obsession is sex. The rumour he spreads from the beginning is that Othello and Desdemona think of nothing but having sex, to which they are deterministically forced, being always avid. His rudimentary emotional and sexual psychology is that the woman is desirous and dissatisfied and needs continual excitation and new masculine attractions, and that Desdemona is secretly a nymphomaniac. The sickness and infection he wishes to convey to Othello are already his own, and they are revealed during the terrible storm in Act II when he abruptly hurls insulting, offensive terms against his own wife Emilia. On this is based the interpretation of Iago as the ‘victim of erotic denial’, a Puritan eroticism which sees the demonic in women and fears it. Iago is in fact no less jealous than Othello, and succumbs even more than the Moor to that sickness (‘it is a monster, begot upon itself, born on itself ’, says his wife Emilia) with which he wants to infect Othello. The Iago-Emilia couple is not well assorted, since they are almost always quarrelling when they are on stage. Iago is a tyrant who maltreats his wife and holds her in contempt, and Emilia describes marriage as the tomb of love.

81

Hamlet too pronounces a monologue on a withered garden as life appears to him, but he is a paralysed pessimist vastly different from Iago, whose garden withers or flowers according only to ‘our wills’.

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4. The ducal council held in Act I in Venice does not itself originate a discourse on the state of La Serenissima, nor does it launch a framework of substantial political plot; yet it is not simply a digressive, instrumental episode. The whole of Act I, leading up to other hints to be found further on, serves to show the decadence of Venetian civilization, which, according to an early historical topos, at the end of the Renaissance was already losing energy and declining, and was brought back to life with young blood and alien lymph, so desperately sought after. This civilization comes to an agreement with the alien who brings that precious blood, while not ceasing to demonize him, as he is the victim of a residual ancestral myth and of inveterate racial prejudice. Herein is the insoluble ambiguity of Othello’s inner view. Othello is perhaps the first and most important appearance in literature of the archetype of the black man; at the same time, he must be coupled with the main actor of another Venetian play, Shylock, under the common denominator of racial intolerance. And Cassio is a Florentine as Othello is Moorish – two nationalities, or origins, that are unwelcome to the racist Iago.82 The Venetian space-time of Othello is a mafia-type Venice where promotion is obtained by influence; the loss of the sacred is shown by Iago, who calls upon the deity in some kind of way, through interjections, oaths and sayings, yet in order to proclaim anti-Christian feelings such as vengeance. Iago and Roderigo frighten the old Brabantio with the prospect that Desdemona may be made pregnant by a ‘black ram’; a double disaster, that the girl may lose her virginity, and that she will do so with a black, something even worse and more scandalous. In the next scene of the ducal council, Othello feigns certainty and haughtiness since the Venetians have no other commander for the Cyprus war as courageous as he is. Brabantio in turn voices the most sinister and instinctive racial prejudice, with severe comments on the alien race, so that Othello seems more controlled, objective and in command than his elderly father-in-law. He informs the Senate, belying himself, that he does not possess the art of words, yet he does indeed. 82

The Turks are another target of Venetian xenophobia, equally alien as Jews and blacks. The blacks can criticize the Turks, telling them, as Othello does in II.3.161, that they are incontinent and cannot restrain themselves. They are, therefore, and stand for, the incapacity for self-control.

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He also wields the weapon of irony and is an expert rhetorician. His speech never has inflections or signs of diversity; it is consistent with that of the other characters. For the senators’ benefit, Othello reconstructs the story of his life, while making them aware of his distance from the uncivilized savage type, and he demonstrates his awareness of the boundaries between civil life and barbarity. The fact that it is he himself who orders his subordinates to regain their self-control during the brawl in Cyprus both confirms and denies his marginalization. Until he falls a prey to jealousy, he is really the paradoxical custodian of political order on the island, given the lack of discipline of his employer, Othello being a mercenary. During and after the brawl, the fact that Othello confesses that his blood is about to boil serves to testify in reality that he is able to control himself, and straightaway he cools down. And it is he who is horrified in front of something monstrous, that is the transgression and degradation of human nature. From halfway through Act III, the civilized and therefore reasonable native changes into that unmasked wild beast he was. It is symptomatic that the noble Venetian who arrives in Cyprus bearing a letter with the order that Othello is to return to Venice, notes the enormous change from the exemplarily controlled, calm and civilized Othello before departure, to the beast he now sees before him. This Lodovico speaks clearly: everyone thought well of Othello, the noble Othello, and now his nobility has been shaken by nature, as has his virtue, which one thought nothing could tarnish. 5. The three characters out of the six protagonists who act outside pre-set schemes and determinisms are Desdemona, Cassio and, though incompletely, Emilia. Desdemona is anything but meek, if it is true that she disobeys her father and courageously, rebelliously, marries Othello. She also embodies the absence of rhetoric, the absence of diplomacy, and the absence of premeditation; such absences reach fearful climaxes of candour and naïveté. It does not seem possible to reverse Cassio’s courtly love for her into an occult or repressed fleshly love. Cassio might be called a Euphuist, since from the beginning he overflows with old-fashioned poetic conceits and uses hyperboles and mythological language to venerate Desdemona as a courtly Madonna, perhaps a real Madonna with the addition of sacred symbolisms. Cassio, in other words, addresses Desdemona as an Eve before the Fall. His religious faith is simple and traditional, and he believes he will

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be saved – therefore fears he will not be saved; after drinking too much, therefore sinning, he immediately repents. He ponders and comments, but only lightly, on that Shakespearean chasm, the chasm of the beast into which man plunges on losing his reason and self-control. In his affair with Bianca, Cassio is the pale, weak homme sensuel moyen who hurries to lie with her, chastity in pieces. Emilia is a redeemed Magdalen. Before this redemption at the end, she is a worthy companion to her husband Iago, uttering monologues of yet greater daring and more lethal cynicism. She scandalizes Desdemona in one such speech, admitting without embarrassment that she, Emilia, would be unfaithful to her husband if the price were right, even though the person to be blamed when wives betray their husbands is the husband in question.83 In the bridal chamber, when Desdemona’s murder has just happened, and before being run through by Iago the uxoricide, Emilia is the most distraught, having just announced that she may leave Iago and divorce him. § 35. ‘Macbeth’ * With respect, say, to Hamlet – a drama with a wide mesh with which it has many points of contact, together with contrasting elements, and which 83

Cf. § 16.3 n. 54 for a similar discussion in the conversation between Anne Boleyn and her waiting-woman in Henry VIII.

*

W. Miller, Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ and the Ruin of Souls, Madras 1901; B. Coles, Shakespeare Studies: ‘Macbeth’, New York 1938; H. M. Paul, The Royal Play of ‘Macbeth’, London 1950; G. R. Elliott, Dramatic Providence in ‘Macbeth’, Princeton, NJ 1958; W. H. Toppen, Conscience in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, Groningen 1962; A. Lombardo, Lettura del ‘Macbeth’, Vicenza 1969, Milano 2010; M. Cappuzzo, Da Duncan a Malcolm. La tragedia di Macbeth, Messina 1972; A. Dillon-Malone, Criticism of ‘Macbeth’: With Scene by Scene Analysis, Character Studies, Essays on Themes, Questions, Tallaght 1977; Aspects of ‘Macbeth’, ed. K. Muir and P. E. Edwards, Cambridge 1977; K. C. Mathur, Witches’ Caldron: A Study of Motive in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, Lucknow 1977; A. Rose, William Shakespeare, ‘Macbeth’, London 1978; ‘Macbeth’: dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1982; S. Booth, ‘King Lear’, ‘Macbeth’, Indefinition and Tragedy, New Haven, CT and London 1983; C. Corti, ‘Macbeth’. La parola e l’immagine, Pisa 1983; Shakespeare: ‘Macbeth’: A Casebook, ed. J. Wain, London 1994; G. Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, Oxford

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could be its model – Macbeth (staged in 1606, published in 1623)84 has a convulsive development and presents a strong concatenation. This is the outcome of a determinism that could be taken for fatality, yet unfolds as the result of Shakespearean human vulnerability and a naïve daydream of omnipotence. This is a parable placed within a historical play, that is historically documented albeit re-created, concerning Scotland at the beginning of the second millennium, and objectivized as a ‘sonata of ghosts’ and of an avant lettre expressionistic theatre of conscience. Yet it is also a play with a ‘whodunnit’ feel, where light is gradually and chorally shed on bloody misdeeds, eventually achieving identification of the guilty. Readers who tend to protest against any allegorical reading, as well as those who remain obstinately faithful to a merely objectivizing Shakespeare – an impassive scene-setter, a moral relativist who never takes sides – may have second thoughts. Shakespeare is always a legitimist who stages usurpations, often achieved after much bloodshed, later set right and avenged by means of the re-establishment of the status quo. He is the guardian and strenuous guarantor of law and order. Hence this play can be turned upside down, its

1996; M. Cavecchi, Shakespeare mostro contemporaneo: ‘Macbeth’ nelle riscritture di Marowitz, Stoppard e Brenton, Milano 1998; L. H. Craig, Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ and ‘King Lear’, Toronto 2001; A. F. Kinney, Lies like Truth: Shakespeare, ‘Macbeth’, and the Cultural Moment, Detroit, MI 2001; J. Wilkinson, The Cripples at the Gate. Orson Welles’s ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth, Roma 2004; William Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’: A Sourcebook, ed. A. Leggatt, London 2006; Wayward ‘Macbeth’: Intersections of Race and Performance, ed. S. L. Newstok and A. Thompson, Basingstoke 2010; ‘Macbeth’: The State of Play, ed. A. Thompson, London 2014. 84 A longer version may have been presented at court, so the Folio text may be an abbreviated version from a performance script, with alterations, interpolations and pruning. The debate still continues on the number and identification of spurious passages. These may be the speech of the bleeding soldier, the interlude with the porter and Hecate’s song, which ended up in a play by Middleton, into whose canon Macbeth has recently been incorporated by the editors of the work of this playwright (see Volume 1, § 130.1). The source is Holinshed but with an amazing number of prompts from other documents of the time, mixed and whirled together as if in a blender.

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complementary point of view being that of Malcolm and Macduff. It is hardly surprising that the term ‘tyrant’ is applied by the legitimists to Macbeth. The epicentre is further north in a Scotland shaken by internal rebellion instigated by the Norwegians, whose threat resounds in Hamlet as well. Thus in the political plot Macbeth is a usurping Claudius, again a relative of the legitimate king; and the avengers are Duncan’s sons, the protagonists of an underlying revenge play.85 Here Shakespeare decided to externalize the human urge to overstep destiny, and to bend it ambiguously or through a fatal misunderstanding to one’s own plans, by rhythmically bringing on stage the three witches, thus objectivizing a tendency to evil that he sees as always congenital and ineluctable.86 Always loyal to his theological frame of mind, he does however add that sooner or later punishment comes about. Punishment is this time situated outside a precise historical faith and found within a set of rules, thus codified: it is therefore, first of all, a purely moral law. Macbeth mentions very little, and much less than Hamlet, the commandments and precepts of the Christian religion and the name of God, and the spectre of eternal damnation. Yet the play still confirms Shakespeare’s religious framework: whoever is wicked is damned, and in the end it is not possible – after Luciferian, Faustian, pre-Nietzschean professions – to escape the final day of reckoning and its grip. Official figures and roles of the faith are lacking in Macbeth: no friars, monks, priests, or wise teachers, save one. But in Shakespeare’s universe there is always the awareness or the threat of the life beyond that may dispense reward or damnation. Here the only figure of a counsellor is in fact a physician who is unable to cure the The erotic obsession, the curse of the flesh, is less evident in this play, and is not the motor fuelling the plans of any character. However, in the second scene of Act IV, set in England at the court of the deeply pious, and therefore chaste Edward the Confessor, a worried Malcolm accuses himself of numerous vices that he is unable to uproot, lust amongst them. Shakespeare does not sound out his historical pessimism as well, although he insinuates it in the weakness of this future Scottish monarch. 86 Recalling Hamlet’s, there is an explicit admission of a natural predestination or inclination towards evil; if left inert, nature produces and generates ‘cursed thoughts’. 85

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sickness of the two sovereigns, who both need a soul-healer, that is a confessor. A range of similarities thus links Macbeth and Hamlet, as I mentioned: as the curtain goes up on both plays, a supernatural phenomenon is immediately followed by the crudest instance of naturality. The witches triplicate Hamlet’s ghost, having the same function of foretelling, or inducing or stimulating: the ghost of Hamlet’s father claims vengeance from his son just as the witches in fact fatally determine the destiny of the general. In both cases the outcome is a crime. As in the case of the soldiers on the ramparts in Hamlet, in Macbeth there is uncertainty as to whether the witches are good and true or whether they are sent by the devil. But Macbeth is first of all a courageous warrior and a man of action, quite the opposite of Hamlet. This allegorical liturgy is enacted in a play where two primary colours merge one with the other, black and red. Statistically, night, evening or dusk scenes prevail; the sun is clouded or darkened; wickedness materializes in the dead of night without stars or moon; remorse strikes in the dark or before dawn. Nature has its part and echoes the ill deed with signs of commotion, turbulence, omens. Sleep is impossible, waking is forced, an awakening tormented and always distressing. The play is invaded by blood, the blood that flows from the bodies slaughtered by the two murderers. Fantasies, hallucinations and delirium are all dyed red. At the level of symbols and of colours, the blood is also that still staining the hands of the assassins – blood that is visible to the authors of the crimes as clotted, therefore blackened, bloodied hands. Thus the dominant hue is red-black. Macbeth is throughout a spiral of cruelty and horror, of bodies and murders and oozing blood. For this very reason it is an eminently dynamic play, dominated by fatal inexorability and blind human determinism masquerading as fatal determinism. Hamlet is unable to kill, Macbeth kills too much, and too many.87 The construction is in stations or stages that rise from the conception to the action and to the consequences of the action; the historical period of 87 A further analogy is that Macbeth, after the discovery of Duncan’s murder, utters words, whether recited or actually believed, that hint at the degeneration and ruin of the world, and echoing Hamlet’s disgust (‘Had I but died …’).

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several years is selected in emblematic events which are summarized in the form of récits. For this reason Macbeth is a play without a subplot, with no comic interludes or humour, with the only exceptions of the appearances, sinister and grotesquely humorous, of the witches and of the ‘porter’ in Act II, and of that in Act IV, where the last two scenes are more dilatory and, for Shakespeare, excessively prolix or conventionally pathetic. They form one of the rare pauses that vary and break up an obsessive scenario, with which Shakespeare fills out a slim, concise plot, instead of having to deal with too much material. It is an allegorical, highly shaped, structured and emblematic story – this much is revealed by ritual symmetries: three witches, two generals who are friends, two sons of the king, two hired assassins. And, in addition to the ever-present colour theme, there is compactness in the representational register, with recurrent images of poisonous insects, snakes, scorpions, bats at dusk. 2. In the second scene of Act I the captain’s report on the outcome of the battle between the Scots, loyal to the king, and the rebels aided by the Norwegians, is one of the many examples in Shakespeare of narrative theatre: it is a concise and effective reconstruction of actions without dialogue. This is in practice a wisely economical measure that reduces a stage action, a battle in all its phases, which would have been difficult to devise in that it is above all visual. This report contains its stage direction, as the captain is bleeding and very weak, and has to make a great effort to recount a heroic event in his feeble voice. It also opens the case study on fate and the competition with fate: Macbeth, in that narrative, rises up against the ‘rebel’s whore’, the brazen-faced blindfolded goddess Fortune, in the name of a good, legitimate cause, as far as is within man’s understanding. He does not court fate, he spurns it. The ending reminds the spectator, though not Macbeth who has not heard,88 of the witches’ opening prophecy, since the battle is ‘lost’ and ‘won’, according to the sides at war and their alliances. These preliminaries are a mise en abyme or

88

This strengthens the idea that Macbeth and his tragedy depend on what the witches murmur amongst themselves, not on what they say to him.

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even a prolepsis of the whole play: it is right to fight against fate for just objectives, and Macbeth challenges fate twice and wins. From here on, the high tension of the play is evident simply as a thriller. The sudden plan of Lady Macbeth is to kill Duncan during the night and lay the blame on the drunken guards; but it is a gross implausibility, just as is Macbeth’s belief in the truth of the witches’ prophecy. A similar murder by the guards is hardly credible (what is the point? just out of drunkenness?), nor is it possible that devastating grief can absolve the hosts. Duncan’s murder is conceived, planned and carried out in the first part of Act II, with no Hamletic hesitations thanks to Lady Macbeth’s sarcastic spurring of her husband.89 Immediately after the regicide, the ‘porter’s’ scene, as I mentioned, relieves the tension with its rough chat and unbridled flow of words, with no lack of unfailingly playful hints and irreverent allusions, tragically unaware of the recent misdeed.90 At first Macbeth throws investigations off the scent with his solemn expressions of horror at what he has discovered and his own personal grief. It is the thane Lennox who supports the version prepared by Macbeth and his wife. However, in concocting his alibi, Macbeth has made a first false step which in practice gives rise to suspicion: he has also killed the two guards. Another thane, Macduff, notices this and reproves him. Macbeth justifies himself by saying he had been overwhelmed by the gravity of the event. Lady Macbeth pretends to faint. Without it being openly expressed, most people realize that there is no good reason, indeed no reason at all, why two simple servants should have slaughtered the good king. With the maturity and good sense of experienced adults, Duncan’s two sons understand their danger. They 89 This scene may have its ironic or grotesque pendant in the second scene of Act IV in which Lady Macduff, warned by a messenger, does not have time to escape and is caught by Macbeth’s killers who murder her and her small son. This is because, in his wife’s words, Macduff is Macbeth’s double in his alleged cowardice, and it is his wife who is brave. 90 The subtle link depends on the effect of the wine, which triggers the will to act but eliminates the ability to act; and this is obviously a sinister, involuntary comment on Macbeth’s problems.

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realize they are stumbling blocks on Macbeth’s path to the throne, to be eliminated at the very next opportunity; so they flee. Their flight gives Macbeth an unexpected helping hand for a short while, lending credence to his version that they were behind the murder. The chain of crimes has only just begun, and Macbeth proceeds to eliminate Banquo as a result of reasoning by consequence: it is useless to kill Duncan thus favouring Banquo, who according to the witches’ prophecy is to be himself the father of kings. Macbeth hints at an alleged enmity on Banquo’s part towards the two killers to whom he entrusts the murder. Now it is the coward Macbeth, as his wife defines him, who will have to make an energetic appeal to the two assassins to do their duty as men of honour, and they accept the double task of getting rid of father and son. Macbeth has not understood, indeed could not understand, that the witches’ prophecy was not synchronic but diachronic, and like Chinese boxes: Macbeth’s ascent to the throne would entail a mathematically necessary consequence, a compulsory clause, the attempted elimination of Banquo’s descendants. Damnation might follow, but at least there would be good reason for it. This is the openly Mephistophelian implication: Macbeth has given himself up to man’s eternal enemy. If this play is a thriller, then Macbeth actually weighs within himself a second excessively weak project, so weak that the criminal plan fails halfway through thanks to a perceived lack of motivation for the killing of Banquo and his son by the assassins: would they be willing to kill simply because Banquo had no particular liking for them and favoured others over them? Saying ‘we are men’ they also admit that they have enough good sense left to think otherwise. All told, Macbeth has not thought up a motive that gains and ensures the absolute conviction and determination of the two murderers. Satisfied, fulfilled and hopeful, he exclaims at the end of the scene that with this murder the cycle ‘is concluded’, meaning he will run no more danger; and instead it is by all means re-opened. Lennox has also realized what has happened, and he speaks to a nobleman on the subject. Everything is reconstructed as it actually happened, starting from the death of Duncan. Informed that Macduff has left for England, Macbeth swears to let no time go by between the impulse to act and action itself, pronouncing the line ‘Time, thou anticipat’st

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my dread exploits’. Here is a perfect indication of the reversal between this play and Hamlet, and the paradox of a prompt, unhesitant action which however will always prove fatally slow. 3. The first appearance of the witches, the ‘weird sisters’, may raise the suspicion that they have been sent to meet a certain person, Macbeth, and that they have arrived there to spy out the land. The occasion for the encounter will be when the battle ‘is lost and won’, and they go off stage singing that ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’. This apparently innocuous refrain is highly proleptic since it indicates the overturning and exchange of accepted ethical values: if it is true that what is honest is soiled, this means that man is no longer expected to respect age-old codes and can be tempted to violate them. It seems he is even counselled by some ancestor of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to move beyond foul and fair. Macbeth hears the echo of the superman doctrine. For this reason the three witches are Mephistophelian hypostases tempting him towards a satanic challenge. In their second appearance, one witch tells the other two of her vindictive harming of a sailor whose wife refused to give her chestnuts to munch. In their nonsense verses is hidden and yet proclaimed the diabolically gratuitous principle of wickedness against the innocent and the harmless, and a gleeful looking on at the ongoing ruin of the world. They have their own preordained plan; their aim is to make Macbeth, an Everyman, fall into their trap. In the mists that clear away the day is ‘foul and fair’, says Macbeth echoing their words. Sleepless, Banquo and Macbeth above all verify a further prophecy from the witches, although they did not hear it: that of the mariner whose sleep is gone through their persecution. And we start to understand that there is also something true in what they say. The expressionist forewarning, the nature of the play as mental theatre and agon, is even more evident in Act IV, in whose tightly constructed first scene we might recognize, given Macbeth’s tendency to hallucinate (except that Banquo too saw the witches), simply a visualization and oneiric materialization of his worries and urges. Macbeth too investigates, wanting to know who ‘instigated’ the witches. Witches and instigators are subtle fortune-tellers, a sort of future Eliotian Sosostris uttering sibylline phrases that cannot come true unless in a purely fantastic, metaphorical sense. Throughout the play

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Macbeth lacks the necessary wit to understand how in this fantastic sense it is possible that a wood can move and that a man can be ‘not of woman born’. This is why the scene adapts a classical topos and also a Dantesque episode, the descent of the living into the underworld to learn its secrets. Unsettled, Macbeth loses patience and threatens a curse upon the witches should they not complete their prophecy. In Act IV, containing accessorial and dilatory parts, there is time to tell the miracles of King Edward the Confessor who heals and prophesies, and is the authentically divine voice since he works white magic in direct opposition to the witches’ black magic. 4. There are two equal and contrary counterparts from whom Macbeth could learn and by whom he could be forewarned, therefore also be saved. At the outset, fourth scene of Act I, we hear how the Thane of Cawdor, a rebel, died repentant. But it is Banquo, cautious and waiting on events, the primary alternative to Macbeth. He does not anticipate destiny by letting himself be blinded by the prophecy, rather he continues to investigate it, though he does nothing to collaborate in making it happen or happen sooner. He is a passive recipient of the prophecy. The witches told the truth, in part and only as a consequence of a falsity, or they have simply known the degeneration inherent in free will. They are malignantly capricious rather than out-and-out liars. Lady Macbeth scolds her fearful husband before the king’s murder, willing to overreach and humiliate him with her alacrity, timeliness and daring, yet she cannot be as mannish as she wishes.91 In fact the couple show singular synchrony and perfect agreement in their outbreak of ambition. In dealing with the witches’ oracular announcements, two of which immediately come true, Macbeth has

91

‘That I may pour my spirits in thine ear’: as I mentioned, a further allusion to Hamlet and to the poison poured into Hamlet senior’s ear by Claudius. This is a relevant analogy since in both cases there is usurpation through a murder, only thought about and imagined now. The range of allusions is enlarged a few lines after, when Lady Macbeth spurs on her husband to be like a flower on the surface and like the ‘serpent’ below, another allusion recalling the rumour that Hamlet the father had been killed by a snakebite. In Act III Banquo is the serpent that is not yet dead, or else the smouldering doubt.

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correctly tested the proof of what he has seen and its effect on his senses, and the truth of the voice he has heard. A process of deduction commences. When he receives the tidings that he has been appointed Thane of Cawdor, a fatal rhythm sets in, overpowering and automatic, with uncertain expectancy followed by triumphant confirmation. Banquo speaks of a ‘demon’ capable of telling the truth; Macbeth no longer doubts: ‘The greatest is behind’. Banquo in turn already foresees future developments: ‘that, trusted home, / Might yet enkindle you unto the crown’. It is a logical error that two prophecies proving to be right imply that the third is also true. Macbeth concludes that the prophecy is neither good nor bad, for if it is bad it has nevertheless foretold his promotion, and if it is good it leads to the impulse to kill. But for the moment he says he will not collaborate with ‘fortune’, leaving fortune to take her own way. In fact the unconfessed dilemma is: whether to let fate take its course or to assist it in order to accelerate its action, or whether to take over from fate itself. At the castle where the king is staying, Macbeth, alone, gets to the nub of the problem: the consequences of the act and the inescapable backlash of remorse. The bloodthirsty plan is an invention that turns on its inventor; it is a ‘poisoned chalice’ which, like that of Christ in Gethsemane, Macbeth wishes could be removed from his lips. His resistance is overcome by his wife. Also in the murder of Banquo, Macbeth commits a deed without perceiving its unbearable consequences; remorse strikes him in the form of hallucination. The toast he drinks to Banquo is sincere: he wants to cover up the murder but also to set the clock back; then once more he is overcome. He thinks of returning to the witches: no longer do the witches seek him out, it is he who seeks them out. In Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene Shakespeare manages a dramatically effective ellipsis. Not only is this scene set in medias res, it also indirectly informs the spectator of what has happened through the witnesses’ story; the prose gives it an extraordinarily modern feel. The doctor’s questions are interrupted by the appearance of Lady Macbeth herself, candle in hand: it is a habitual action with her in such moments to rub her hands. Shakespeare has her recollect in a glimpse the misdeeds performed. She said that a little water would wash away all the blood, and it is a Dantesque retaliation, a scene of pathological, clinical truth, invaded by hallucination with the hue of

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blood, one that Dickens alone in future would successfully imitate. As usual the Shakespearean character – Macbeth at his last stand – renders absolute his own condition and realizes the advent of nothingness and the inexorable path down to destruction, the void and the abyss. The final lines are a grotesquely ironic Passion and Death, unholy Stations of the Cross, following closely in the wake of other Gospel allusions throughout the play. The witches’ apparitions had formed a dazed, deformed parody of the Three Wise Men come to invest and recognize a king, that king that Herod wants to be rid of, greeting Macbeth as ‘King hereafter’. But Macbeth himself is a Herod who will undertake a slaughter of the innocent. The picturesque, legendary, fabulous implication of the witch rests on the fact that the Epiphany Witch is a good witch, and that the Epiphany is the celebration of Christ’s manifestation. In the night of the king’s murder, at the first light of dawn, like an allusive omen the cock crows, the symbol also of Peter’s betrayal in denying his loyalty to a king, although he does not materially kill him. The murder is a cataclysm which the onlookers themselves see in terms of a foul sacrilege: the veil of the Temple of the Lord is rent. Lennox recalls a Shakespearean commonplace, the weather perturbation that accompanies all bloody actions.92 Before the final duel, Macduff advises Macbeth to surrender, so that his body might be hung on a pole with an inscription below, not ‘Here lies Christ king of the Jews’, but ‘Here may you see the tyrant’. At this moment Macbeth is shaken by an imperceptible twinge of redemption, for he attempts to overturn destiny or what he has now unmasked as the false, equivocal voices and heralds of destiny, the witches: if they have tricked him, it is therefore legitimate to challenge destiny and the vagaries of destiny, a destiny newly established and rediscovered in its etymology and its work, therefore unfathomable.

92 Cited also, in Hamlet, by those who, like the soldiers, speak of the fatal apparitions of the ghost.

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§ 36. ‘King Lear’* The outer framework of King Lear (staged in 1606, published in 1608)93 is that of a court drama and of an attempted, temporary usurpation and of belated reintegration of legality, although vicarious and after terrible loss of human life. The picture within is that of a distressing moral fable

*

R. B. Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in ‘King Lear’, Washington 1948; S. Rosati, Il Giro della ruota. Saggio sul ‘King Lear’ di Shakespeare, Firenze 1958; J. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of ‘King Lear’, London 1959; R. A. Fraser, Shakespeare’s Poetics: in Relation to ‘King Lear’, London 1962, 2005; M. Mack, ‘King Lear’ in Our Time, London 1965; Shakespeare: ‘King Lear’: A Casebook, ed. F. Kermode, London 1969, 1992; T. J. Kelly, Understanding Shakespeare: ‘King Lear’, London 1970; P. Gullì Pugliatti, I segni latenti: scrittura come virtualità scenica in ‘King Lear’, Messina 1976; U. Khanna, William Shakespeare: ‘King Lear’: A Critical Introduction, Delhi 1978; The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of ‘King Lear’, ed. G. Taylor and M. Warren, Oxford 1983; ‘King Lear’, dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1986; William Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, ed. H. Bloom, New York 1987; Critical Essays on ‘King Lear’, William Shakespeare, ed. L. Cookson and B. Loughrey, Harlow 1988; Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, ed. J. L. Halio, New York and London 1996; L. H. Craig, Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ and ‘King Lear’, Toronto 2001; F. Gozzi, Il gioco del teatro in ‘King Lear’, Roma 2002; A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, ed. G. Ioppolo, London and New York 2003; M. Del Sapio Garbero, Il bene ritrovato. Le figlie di Shakespeare dal ‘King Lear’ ai ‘Romances’, Roma 2005; ‘King Lear’: New Critical Essays, ed. J. Kahan, New York 2008; G. Story Brown, Shakespeare’s Philosopher King: Reading The Tragedy of King Lear, Macon, GA 2010. See also M. Pagnini’s 1976 book quoted in the bibliography for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, above all for the discussion of the links between King Lear and the contemporary episteme and the idea that in the play equivalences both of an iterative and contrary nature are at work; see also Booth’s 1983 book quoted in the bibliography for Macbeth.

93

Its textual history in partly similar to that of Hamlet. It is impossible here to discuss the conjectures put forward concerning the fact that the 1608 Q1 (the remake of an anonymous Leir of 1605 already staged from 1594) was printed in copies that differed amongst themselves, and the origin of the text – significantly different – followed in the 1623 Folio. Each successive editor has proposed various combinations among quarto and Folio; today the autonomy and aesthetic independence of the two versions is acknowledged.

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and of a metaphor that for most of the play is transfigured into an arcane, dreamlike ordeal. It shows fallen nature and nature in decline, in the senses and in the polyvalence of the terms, as we shall see, and a violent, compassionless destruction of the least and last residue of humaneness. It is not therefore unusual, indeed it is by now typical, that a Shakespearean play is launched with a customary scene that might be defined as the speech of the sovereign on the state of the kingdom: a scene that verifies powers as well as one giving information on the horizons that are opening up and on his immediate operative intentions. Here in King Lear two crucial variants come however into play: the king does not consolidate his power, he leaves it and abdicates; and the scene is preceded by a short prelude staging the Earl of Gloucester, a court noble, and his two sons. This scene deceives and misleads us since we witness an exchange of cynical, even salacious sexual lines between the earl and another nobleman, giving the false impression that the play is to be based on the court’s meanness, low intrigue and washing of dirty linen.94 Another assumption could be that Shakespeare here launches a warning for the reader: that the Gloucester plot is at least on a standing with the main one, if not actually challenging it in importance. As if in a symphony, these two elements or thematic cells – Lear’s descent and Gloucester’s descent – intersect and struggle for primacy; and if this is a symphony, or an attempt at harmony, the first theme, supposedly the minor one, enters on stage first. But the title could, perhaps should, be reversed. The trigger of the play is found immediately afterwards in the notorious, madly authoritarian gesture of an elderly deluded king applying mistaken criteria to break up the reign of which he wants to be free; in this he is imitated almost at the same time by Gloucester who also makes a bad mistake regarding his own sons, distributing or assigning them, not a reign, but an inheritance. Lear cannot conceive that words may convey lies, for he is an old, wooden gentleman. He cannot accept falsity or hypocrisy and wants to hear the hyperboles ringing out, for he loves the signifier of 94 The connection between the earl’s facetiousness on his bastard son Edmund, conceived outside marriage through the sin of lust, is found in the blind Gloucester’s later statement, almost at the end, in Act IV, when he will bitterly confess that blindness is the gods’ punishment for this sin.

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words. Unlike her two sisters Goneril and Regan, Cordelia makes a balanced profession of her sincere daughterly affection for him which rebounds to her disadvantage.95 Another court dignitary loyal to the king, Kent, echoes Cordelia, frankly inviting Lear to revoke the edict in which he disinherits that daughter; in vain, however, and he is exiled as a result. But the mistakes of the puppet king are not yet over; now he addresses offensive words to his ‘degenerate’ daughter, downgrading her to a mere exchange merchandise for her suitors. For the purpose of the political plot, Lear’s ill-advised act of abdication merges with the ambitions of the criminal social climber Edmund, bastard son of Gloucester; the latter, however, considers him to be upright and more honest than his legitimate son Edgar, for whom he has no esteem. Lear’s abdication is outside usual ritual and rare in the history of royalty; in his case this is not a tragedy of the thirst for power but a thirst for no power, since the kingdom is not conquered amidst bloodshed but fragmented by will of the sovereign himself. Until Act II, a reading of events might lead us to think of Lear as a weak, changeful and moody monarch, hence an anti-Machiavellian incompetent rightly dethroned, and his two daughters possessed of healthy though cynical and practical political know-how. Goneril reduces by two, then by four the 100 knights assigned to her father; her bitter reproaches serve finally to clear Lear’s beclouded mind, and he discovers he has become a shadow of himself. Actually he enhances and aggravates his self-deception because he deludes himself that he will receive greater benevolence and respect in the household of his other daughter. Goneril for the moment is a wise, impartial governor who places internal political order above any personal objective, even when her own father is in question; Lear is the romantic reveller who rebels against the laws of self-control. Edmund, bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, meanwhile has first successfully plotted to rid himself of his half-brother convincing him to go into hiding, then he has formed the idea of joining 95

Words and actions of Lear’s three daughters seem to echo the gospel parable of the two sons, one of whom said yes and took no action, the other said no and acted: see I.1.235–6, ‘leaves the history unspoke / That it intends to do’, the King of France’s comment within a speech on gospel paradoxes, which also recalls the theme of Christ coming to build on stone rejected by the builders.

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forces with Lear’s two daughters.96 The two sisters are both by now trying to overcome a belated inner resistance, and the forces, equally belatedly arriving from France, headed by Cordelia and her husband.97 Thus from Act III the restitution of legitimate royal power and the resolution of the conflict among the pretenders both get under way. In the end the compensation obtained is incomplete; both degenerate sisters commit suicide, neither Lear nor Cordelia regains possession of the kingdom; there being no direct heir, it passes into the hands of Edgar and Kent. 2. Coming now to the further layers of the play, it is first necessary to describe the forms of its architecture and structural organization, since there is perhaps no other play where Shakespeare faced such an ambitious challenge in the coordination and interpenetration of elements so disparate. In purely evaluative terms, the opening scene of King Lear is incomparable, then from the end of Act I and throughout Act II it drags through too many negotiations, apart from the scene of the lively exchange of insults between Kent – Lear’s henchman – and Regan’s steward, Oswald, albeit in itself superfluous or too prolonged. Act III is the most powerful and tremendous Shakespeare ever wrote: the Calvary of the two blinded fathers on the storm-battered wilderness, and the similar although totally feigned madness of a son equally delirious, Edgar. These scenes of storm and madness have no equal in the whole of Elizabethan theatre, nor

96 Edmund is recognizably of the lineage of the Iagos and Iachimos and other supreme Shakespearean plotters and social climbers. His greed, material and political, makes use of female fragility; for his own aims he makes Regan and Goneril fall for him, and they fight over him illustrating the destructive action of desire. Edmund is like Hamlet for Regan, or rather like a King Claudius with the concubine Goneril. He makes it a question of honour in this business – lethal sarcasm – to back up his claims. 97 This ‘resistance’ appears in a later story, crowds being absent in this play, and is told by the servants of Goneril’s court: one of them rebels against the Duke of Cornwall and confronts him in a duel, wounding him in the name of justice and under the shadow of scandal. At the head of the liberating army landing at Dover, Cordelia is the heroine, although she succumbs. From a practical and human viewpoint, however, the tragedy and slaughter are in part also due to her passivity and her late action.

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perhaps in modern theatre,98 for power, truth, intensity and even clinical reliability. At the end, Edgar comes to the forefront, with his ranting ‘with method’, studied and tactical, on a par with that of Hamlet. Gloucester’s honest, misunderstood son Edgar becomes himself the internal director of the play and also the imaginative scene-setter of a wonderful stratagem. And again, the scene with Gloucester who intends to throw himself off the Dover cliffs onto the rocks towers as one of the most memorable stage moments in all of Shakespeare: it is a scene of inner and outer illusionism that with its unique evocative power indelibly grips the spectator. The evident awkwardness of the denouement is however due to the caution and the guarantees that are necessary in a world so fallen and compromised in order for the truth – that Edmund is a plotter – to be accepted and believed. King Lear convinces us – should there be any need – that in Shakespeare’s masterpieces the action’s spring is above all the level of credibility of words, hence the reliability and the equivocal, deformable nature of communication.99 King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello are all triggered by the degree of credence lent to rumour or gossip. Hamlet believes those who say the ghost is his father; Macbeth believes what the witches say; Othello places his trust in Iago; and Lear in the high-flown expressions of gratitude of his two daughters instead of in the sensible, sincere words of the third. And Gloucester believes the words of his bastard son. It is a series of natural, semi- and supernatural pronouncements.100 The question about

98 Beside himself, Lear imagining his daughters’ trial foreshadows the twentieth-century expressionist and absurd theatre. The lines of the dialogue are all independent and detached one from the others: each character speaks for himself, following the thread of his own thoughts and obsessions. 99 For this reason the double characters have recourse to the soliloquy to unveil their secret plans, rather than expressing them openly. Soliloquies are therefore placed in the mouths of the two brothers Edmund and Edgar, and serve a double purpose also in informing the spectator on the development of the story. Edmund is with good reason the most phatic of the characters, acting and interacting within the play with the diabolical or Machiavellian smile of someone who is saying: everything’s going fine, I’m winning. 100 The motor of the plot is therefore disguise. Lear must be really decrepit and indeed almost blind if he does not realize he is in the company of the faithful Kent for

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who is the real protagonist of the play leads us to a further point regarding its construction principle. There are four candidates, Lear himself, the Earl of Gloucester, and his two sons Edmund and Edgar. All take turns at the footlights, where they stay before drawing back to make room for others while awaiting re-entry. If this is true, King Lear is an eminently parallelistic play, with parallelisms not only hidden or slightly hinted at, but also blindingly conspicuous, of overpowering inner evidence. Two plots run ahead parallel and end up by overlapping each other; within them, characters, elements and cells of the plot double and redouble, at times correlating and corresponding one with another. Each character, in other words, has an inner double, linked both horizontally and vertically. Lear and Gloucester, the victims of selfishness, impulse, short-sightedness, or of perversely diabolical trickery, reward offspring who are either degenerate or criminal; and they wander, driven out or in voluntary exile – one metaphorically, the other really blind –101 until they are regenerated and made wise, that is, regaining their vision, therefore capable of recognizing the error made towards their own children.102 Goneril has her double in Regan, but their respective husbands, one the copy of the other, turn from being doubles to being contraries. Unrecognized companion of the king in his wandering, and his devoted subject, Kent is at times on a par with the fool, at least when he makes use of the same linguistic ingenuity to unmask the king’s folly or to cover traitors and informers with insults. As to the vertical links, the two wicked sisters merge together in Edmund, Gloucester’s degenerate son, while Cordelia relates to Edgar. Regan and almost the whole of the play. Under the name of ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’ Edgar too has made himself as wild and hairy as a caveman, and goes quite unrecognized until his denouement. Gloucester, blind, does not recognize him even by his voice, although he is called ‘father’ a number of times. Edgar becomes a mimic when he interferes in a peasant’s voice – yet another disguise, no longer grotesque but purely comic – with his father’s arrest. The spectator may consider the delay excessive before he reveals his identity to his father, as if he were enjoying the postponement of the epilogue. 101 Gloucester is half-blind: he has suffered Edmund’s deceit without realizing it; but he has discovered and denounced that of the two sisters, supporting resistance and suffering the reprisal. 102 ‘He childed as I fathered’, comments Edgar watching Lear depart.

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Goneril think up almost the same deception against Cordelia as Edmund towards Edgar: the only variant is the degree of awareness and clear determination. The former use a false rhetoric to discredit Cordelia indirectly, with the result that she is exiled, the same punishment meted out to Edgar thanks to equally verbal tools such as rumour, murmuring, informing or a false letter; then directly and deliberately on the part of Edmund.103 All told, Shakespeare cannot be happy with just one father, he has to stage two, and not a single pair of daughters but a total of five between sons and daughters. There is yet another question to be asked, one historically perplexing even the great Tolstoy: is this an evident case of redundancy? And if it is, why? The answer is that Shakespeare indulges in it to emphasize and reiterate a demonstration.104 The meaning of King Lear is human fragility and fallibility; it is the crisis of legibility and intelligibility of the cosmos and the human soul; it is also the Calvinist inclination to evil and the demonic greed that overwhelms, leaving few exceptions unscathed. Cordelia and Edgar, one and the same character split into two, are counterdemonstrations of such a pessimistic view by simply being in the minority. All the others are vanquished. Thus the idea prevails of an apocalyptic upset and disorientation. The very tools of knowledge – of the phenomenon and of the human soul – fail dismally: above all the wisdom of old age is no longer any guarantee. Fallibility is blamed on the old, but the young profiteers are the two women more than the others. And Regan and Goneril are closely akin to Lady Macbeth. The parallelism results in a frame of antitheses, paradoxes, conceptual reversals, oxymora. The old are not wise but naïve, as capricious and as instinctive as children, and the young outclass them in maturity – as does Cordelia, a sensible elderly girl. The natural offspring – only apparently – are dishonest and plot more than do the illegitimate. The hypocrite gains the material advantage while the sincere person is harmed and excluded. The fool, irreplaceable in the 103 The fact that Lear compliments Regan on her alleged benevolence at the end of Act II, saying that otherwise he would have considered her a bastard, places Regan and Edmund within the same symbolic area. 104 As noticed by Pagnini 1976, 40–1 and n. 1, Schlegel had already given his opinion that the union of two examples had a cosmic, universalizing value.

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marvellous Act III, then inexplicably set aside,105 speaks to Lear in riddles and rhymed songs and is whipped for telling the truth: inner interpreter and commentator, bitterly laughing, he lists the titles Lear has lost, save that of ‘fool’ with which he was born.106 The primary opposition and the cardinal isotopy regard sight and blindness. Gloucester, blinded, and only because he is blinded, suddenly ‘sees’; and in the final summing up on who comes to his senses – on who sees again having been blind before – the first is the Duke of Albany. Salvation comes however from awareness that, according to the Gospel, one must be like doves and like serpents. Care must be taken that the Gospel love of truth is not counterproductive; care must be taken, it seems, even in turning the other cheek. 3. The fabulous, paradigmatic, almost didactic drama of King Lear concerns human blindness streaked with pride and belatedly repentant, and filial ingratitude. But it also celebrates boundless love and devotion, in Cordelia, in Kent,107 partly in Gloucester, in Edgar. Another supposition therefore arises and is confirmed, that Shakespeare’s group of masterpieces forms a tissue of strong links of reciprocal dialogic references. King Lear is like Hamlet in its supporting symbolism, apart from the mishaps; Hamlet in turn is like Macbeth, while Macbeth is not like King Lear.108 The sense of this framework of separate yet involved, overlapping acts under construction, is the reflection on the condition of being fathers and being children. The ontological questions are: what a father can and must expect from his child; what it means for a child being a child and how to respond to claims of filial love. What is analysed is the mystery of being a father and 105 Perhaps one of the few structural faults in the play. But the fool might finish up murdered for his mockeries against the new rulers, which might be conveyed in Lear’s allusion ‘and my poor fool is hang’d’ (a line discussed for its ambiguities in Pagnini 1976, 60–1 and n. 32). 106 Cf. Pagnini’s insightful analysis (1976, 67ff.). 107 Kent illustrates and proves human ingratitude by means of a counter-demonstration, returning to the place whence he was banned, but prudently disguised in order to do good, in virtue of the love that Lear does not deserve. 108 However Edmund, like Macbeth, obtains promotion to the title of Earl of Gloucester after his father’s dismissal, a promotion gained through his deceptions. Like Hamlet, Edmund is a student and has been away from home for nine years.

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of being a child. But this condition is explored in an echo of the mystery of the Trinity; in Shakespeare this is not the mystery of the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, since the Holy Ghost is often replaced by the mother, and the mother is not always present. This is an outline that does not hold in Macbeth but is central in Hamlet and King Lear. In these two plays a father donates to his children, albeit laying down conditions; and the child has various responses at his disposal. Hamlet109 is wholly pivoted on this dialectic. Shakespeare once again deals with, and above all revises, his everlasting debate on human nature. A single characteristic line attributed to a secondary character (‘a gentleman’, IV.6.203–4) serves as an example, alluding to the unavoidable proneness of man to dishonest and vicious impulses, and the threat therein: Cordelia ‘redeems nature from the general curse’.110 ‘Nature’ is the word statistically most frequent in the play with all its derivations111 excluding the declinations and conjugations of the auxiliary verbs. This is so because its object is the opposition between nature and non-nature. So ‘nature’ attracts within its sphere another term, ‘monster’, which follows in frequency but is equal to the former in conceptual density. In other words, by reasoning and discoursing on nature and human nature and its deviations, the spectre of the monstrous is encountered, that is, the abyss of animal abjection. King Lear is a phantasmagoric, terrifying spectralization of man turned monster and the vision of this Frankenstein’s hypostasis. In the play it is stated that at times man really seems ‘a worm’, not just in a physical sense. In the language of truth which madness can use, Lear too recognizes humanity in the figure of the centaur: his daughters are centaurs from the waist down, although women above. Nature can only be benign in origin, and a natural primeval order in things is admitted; but nature is also human nature, freedom of choice,

109 In Act II scene 4, Lear mentions the subject of bastardy: if you do not listen to me, he tells Regan, I will be inclined to say that your mother was an adulterer and that you are not my natural daughter. Gloucester’s point is thereby echoed or hypothesized. And it is significant that for a second time, after Hamlet, a son (Edgar in this case) has to pretend to his father, though he has a purpose. 110 ‘General’ could be amplified as ‘ontological’. 111 Among which ‘unnatural’ and ‘disnature’.

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and freedom of choice may go against nature.112 Another related investigation is how far nature can be forced, violated, corrupted, overturned, and silenced. For this very reason a natural father may have natural daughters who are and show themselves to be bastards; and a ‘natural’ son may have a bastard father. The two old fathers consider what their honest sons do to be unnatural – terminological equivalences serve at every turn –113 whereas Edmund can easily call upon nature in support of his plans. Lear believes Cordelia has descended by natural degrees until she touches the monstrous, the bottom step of the ladder. But he avoids discussing the agent of such depravation. A monstrum, that is a miracle, is necessary if reason is to admit and contemplate such depravation. When human monstrosity materializes in Shakespeare, certain omens are usually seen both in the upheaval of surrounding nature and in atmospheric turbulence. In the play there are allusions to signs in the sky such as eclipses, unusual phenomena and other occurrences never before seen. In a soliloquy, Edmund derides this aetiology: they are only reactions to luck mislaid. In reality, he expresses himself in favour of human free will: fate has nothing to do with it, every person may seek good or evil. And yet Gloucester voices a seriously calamitous worry; hallucinating, he prophesies an imminent cataclysm, a world in ruins. Edmund answers him that man is a ‘whoremaster man’. 4. The tissue of recurring argumentations on nature and disnature is dense and unceasing, demonstrating that this is the main framework of conceptual reference in King Lear. In refusing and cursing Cordelia, Lear firstly calls upon nature to implement unnatural metamorphoses: that the reproductive cycle should cease, that Cordelia herself should become a monster, a young woman with the features of old age. Straight away, Edmund’s rhetoric and his very action appear to make nature similar to disnature and vice versa, or rather to make them seem so, for the spectator knows him to be unnatural and Edgar to be a follower of nature. In 112 In some cases therefore nature is the equivalent of free will, an inalienable, inviolable inclination which, mysteriously, may be directed either towards good or towards evil. 113 Both Lear and Gloucester at least use the argument that Cordelia and Edgar have descended to the level of the ‘monster’. With a synecdoche, Goneril is also a ‘seamonster’ (I.4.259) when she drives out her father.

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the second scene of Act II Kent hurls at the steward Oswald a string of colourful insults thus bringing the dialectic of the monstrous back into the limelight. Oswald is accused of being a monster, but it is in fact Kent who is accused of flaunting linguistic eccentricity: to be affected, hence unnatural. For his part, Edgar decides to live as a semi-beast, by begging like a moron, thus effectively descending the ladder of human nature, but in order to disguise himself. For Goneril, defending her sister, her father is an old idiot on the borders of nature, disnature or non-nature. When asked why he needs a retinue at all, Lear sings praises to a small superfluity even in poverty, calling therefore upon nature but again in the context of the natural and the monstrous: if one cannot enjoy something superfluous one plunges down into bestiality, and man becomes no better than a beast. Bare-headed Lear’s curses in the storm would unchain the elements’ commotion with their fury that deforms, overturns and rents nature apart; he breaks out into philosophizing on the ‘thing itself ’, mere man in his essential being, represented by Edgar (that is, yet again, by the monstrous, the man descended to the beast on the inversely evolutionary ladder),114 in turn a ‘philosopher’ with whom he wishes to stay. Regarding Edmund, the Duke of Cornwall has heard of his so-called conflict between nature (filial nature) and duty, when he receives news from Edmund himself of his father’s delation. 5. In the storm115 Lear regains his lost wisdom; two stories converge, of fathers unjustly banished who come together in a common cause. At the end of the play a principle of justice is found in extremis, although those who have suffered will not benefit since they are maimed and crazy, succumbing under the burden of the ordeals they have undergone. In the final evaluation, the evil is greater than the remedy. Step by step we move towards a slow epiphany that sets right the overturned yet still relative natural order

114 But, as we know, Edgar is feigning madness as Hamlet does; his is a miraculous, sudden metamorphosis from the colourless, submissive character appearing at the start of the play. 115 ‘tempest in my mind’ is the objective correlative set by Lear himself and the reason why he describes Edgar, ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’, as having lost his mind and therefore being very similar to himself.

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of things. Gloucester too is the second or third to repent miraculously in front of  Tom o’Bedlam’s hut with the night reigning outside.116 ‘Ripeness is all’, and men must confront the blows of destiny, yet this destiny is bizarre, capricious, inscrutable. Furthermore, it is true on the one hand that the just man comes onto the scene too late for the emergency, as does Cordelia, and on the other the forces of good are disconnected, isolated, overcome. All told, the context of King Lear does not appear, indeed it certainly is not, particularly Christian; it is in fact pagan. Lear calls upon the mythological divinities or at least upon the ‘gods’, gods altogether Lucretian; Gloucester famously deplores their sadistic or absent government in Act IV. It is however a moral dispensation. The characters in the tragedy are not all perverse and evil, and the good and honest come to the fore and some amongst them are saved, given the implicit threat of a spread of monstrosity. The Duke of Albany’s conversion is a whit too sudden and unjustified, but it is the good nature that asserts itself while the inexorable nemesis goes forward; and a messenger announces the death of Cornwall, wounded by a servant. The two characters condense and symbolize the penitent thief in a possible allusion to the Crucifixion. Shakespeare is not blind to divine justice, but whoever administers such justice is too inclined to let things take their course. Edgar’s theological conclusion and deduction is deeply worrying: the gods, not the one God, are just – truth and justice triumph – yet with what severity and sadism. They acknowledge free will in man, but if man in turn is vicious they torment and persecute him. In Edgar’s view, man tends to extra-marital and pre-marital lust, and whoever does not control the erotic instinct commits a sin: conception outside marriage, concludes Edgar, cost Gloucester his sight. Within the play, up to now Edgar has been the hypostasis of a god tormenting humanity, cheating perhaps for a good cause; like an illusionist this god has tricked his father after the ‘fall’ from the cliff. Such a concept of a divinity that allows or even instigates in man any foul deed is usual in Shakespeare; he must be an exterminating god imposing biblical holocausts. In the final slaughter some guilty people die but so do some of the just, above all the just who have been unjustly 116 The miraculously healed Gloucester recalls Amfortas in Parsifal, whose music would be an excellent accompaniment.

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stricken. The three competing suitors die at the same time, as Edmund observes, while he would like to bid farewell to life in carrying out at least one good deed. He has sent a killer to murder the king and his daughter, but now he wants to revoke the order. But it is too late, and Lear comes on stage bearing in his arms the hanged body of Cordelia. The tragedy closes on Lear mourning over Cordelia’s body, and with his death. § 37. ‘Timon of Athens’ * The two final acts of Timon of Athens117 (probably written about 1607, published in 1623) make it a play worthy of inclusion among Shakespeare’s masterpieces; and the fact that in all probability half of it was written by Middleton, the second or third greatest Elizabethan playwright after Shakespeare, is in its favour and not the contrary. Echoing and rampaging through it are the longest invectives and the most implacable accusations against the degeneration of the human race, and the bitterest denouncements of hypocrisy, opportunism and selfishness that may be uncovered behind the most basic values of civil and community life when under pressure. Timon is therefore akin to King Lear: he is no king, only a rich Athenian aristocrat, probably a bachelor; he has no family, no sons or daughters; mad yet truthful, like Lear he hurls curses and probes the monstrosity of man in that same wilderness that in Shakespeare is always the symbolic place *

D. Diamond, ‘Timon of Athens’: A Symphonic Portrait after Shakespeare, New York 1950; M. C. Bradbrook, The Tragic Pageant of ‘Timon of Athens’: An Inaugural Lecture, London 1966; S. C. Chakraborty, Shakespeare: A Reading of ‘Timon of Athens’, Calcutta 1970; P. Ure, William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays: ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’, ‘Measure for Measure’, ‘Troilus and Cressida’, ‘Timon of Athens’, London 1970; R. Soellner, ‘Timon of Athens’: Shakespeare’s Pessimistic Tragedy, with a Stage History by G. J. Williams, Columbus, OH 1979; J. Rudanko, op. cit. in the bibliography for Coriolanus.

117 Timon of Athens is today almost unanimously held to be a collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton, without discounting parts added by players popular at the beginning of the century (which stylistic critics are still trying to distribute and assign). It is also considered to be an unrevised text and is included in the category of the unfinished works.

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of an inverted conversion. There man’s divine claims are unmasked with the sudden recognition that the signs of historical evolution and of history itself have capsized, and that the world pivots on hatred, ingratitude and avarice. King Lear is the more tumultuous and humanly tragic play, but Timon in its finale reaches a greater fixity and attains the insistent repetitiveness of the biblical jeremiad. It is more discursive and thought out, and hallucinatory nihilism touches by now frightening heights. Conversely, the three initial acts bring alive a story and a fable, and pour cause Timon is one of the most symmetrical plays, and one of the most highly stylized in Shakespeare, as is proved by the reduction of many of the dramatis personae to anonymous roles and simple functions, and the skeletal, demonstrative and didactic organization of the fable. There is no reason for extending the timespan, since the fable is beyond time; the whole story takes place in a sequence of frames which are inexorable in their progression, thus justifying the intervening hiatuses. So the space too is imaginary, an Athens where Roman names mix with those of senators of the polis. A further anomaly is the drastic reduction of female characters to two, the two whores of the fourth act, of which more later. 2. With Hamlet, therefore, Timon is perhaps Shakespeare’s most philosophical and ideological play. Its mirror-like organization is placed at the service of an ontological proposal among the most pessimistic Shakespeare ever undertook. Mirroring means relativity, and implies that at a certain moment the axis of the true and the just shall collapse, deny and discard itself, and a system of values shall overturn into its own opposite. The alpha and omega are philanthropy and misogyny, friendship and hatred, illusion and disillusion. The caesura at the end of Act III cuts and separates two parts or demonstrative actions that may be retitled as blessing and cursing. Timon embodies the extremism, first of good then of evil, and the inner key emerges in IV.3.301–2: ‘The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends. When thou wast in thy gilt, and thy perfume, they mock’d thee for too much curiosity; in thy rags thou know’st none, but art despis’d for the contrary’. In the light of what happens, Timon can only admit that man has returned to being a beast; that fortune is a blindfolded goddess, that the human being looks only to his own profit, and that above all the gods always play with their creatures: that creation is the supreme

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trick of the creator, not his masterpiece. So Shakespeare the destroyer, the iconoclast? In reality Timon closes with conciliation: the misanthrope Apemantus proves to Timon that he has been as extreme in prodigality as he is cynical in dismissing the whole of humanity, and he recommends the panacea of the happy medium. Yet it is impossible to survive and carry on in this sublunary world without using compromise; puritanically and calvinistically, nature is always fallen and is always ready to fall again, and hypocrisy and insincerity, or at least a certain dose of each, are essential to community life. A good, trustworthy person who is unselfish is left in the world at the end – the steward – but Timon can only let himself die and compose his own epitaph. 3. The play’s ideological issue is yet again played out in the fields of ontology, economics, politics and art. ‘How goes the world?’, ‘how go things?’ are naturally idiomatic expressions, but the play immediately pushes this investigation to the fore, only apparently casually, as questions to be taken literally.118 Timon precisely studies how and where the world is going: and the world, comes the answer, ‘wears […] as it grows’, with the idea of a creation going adrift, towards ruin, in reverse, not towards any progressive improvement. The term ‘hereditary’ pops up and sounds like a prediction or an omen of the future debates on evolution. At the beginning Timon appears as one who, alone, tries to implement and make credible the inverse of a cosmos dominated by avarice. He has in fact founded, or refounded, in his own small sphere, a hortus conclusus, an Edenic and therefore utopian form of economic organization, equating services rendered to the recompense awarded, without distinction of degree and rank. He has set up this reign, literally of gold, but only in one of the two senses in the play’s acceptation of the term, that is not in the infection of avarice but in that of happiness on this earth and the Gospel announcement on the use of wealth. On the one hand Shakespeare does not say how Timon acquired the fortune that he is now so anxious to distribute; on the other, he makes it quite clear that if usury is ruinous, that is lending money at interest and repaying a higher sum, there is also a form of generosity that is just as negative. Such is Timon’s

118 Opening lines of Act I scene 1.

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generosity, giving without receiving anything or even asking for anything in return – or even, having received, reciprocating with more than the value of what is received. In purely economic terms, Timon can only ruin himself with a similar policy that rests on passive interest. This system might even function had it no perverse repercussions: in fact Timon gets into debt and sets in motion both his own ruin and usury itself, the opposite of the principles he originally applied. In Act III those whom he benefited practise a different economy, an economy sic et simpliciter: business is business, money is not lent out of friendship, and loan respects certain guarantees and is regulated on the basis of an interest rate. In two cases and exempla, Timon is unaware of facing the greed or personal profit of the beneficiary. Repayment of a debt is claimed, hereby pitilessly ruining another person; an old man does not want to give his daughter in marriage to an indigent servant. It is Timon’s task not only to solve both disputes according to evangelic charity, but also, according to the Gospel, to refuse the double of the number of talents lent to a certain Ventidius he has saved, giving the servant enough to equal the dowry of the rich Athenian’s daughter. In a regime organized along such lines, nobody makes any profit. Timon is a Christological foreshadowing in giving freely and asking for nothing in return, and he has created a sort of league of twelve apostles in whom he blindly trusts.119 Or he is an Arthur with his Round Table, and he trusts his friends, the faithful, his champions, not to abandon him, being bound to him by a code of honour.120 Chiefly, in Timon Shakespeare seems more than ever aware of the historical turning point of a capitalistic economy based on added value, Marxist style. Timon is ruined through his own prodigality, and the contradiction is that thereafter his beneficiaries ask him to pay the debts that he has contracted with them, even though they themselves had often received gifts from him. However, in Timon the political effects are not well amalgamated with the private drama. The fifth scene of Act III and all those concerning Alcibiades are grafted onto 119 In his blasphemous prayer at the end of the spectral banquet in Act III, Timon expressly mentions the twelve guests at his table, all now transformed into ‘villains’. 120 Lucius (III.2.16ff.) recalls Peter who promises never to deny Christ, then denies him. The banquet scene, which could be with friends and disciples one and all turned Judas, also recalls that of the merchants driven from the temple by a furious Jesus.

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the trunk artificially and even implausibly. Alcibiades confronts the senate with a petition that a blind eye be turned to the crime of a friend, who in defending his own reputation carried out a murder. Through his insistence in petitioning for his friend’s acquittal or a reduction of the sentence, he is banned and, like Coriolanus, will fight against his own country, though eventually giving up. Who is in the wrong? And above all: which of the two contenders does Shakespeare support? The senate is the inflexible guardian of law and order against any attempt at disorder, always a strong point in Shakespeare; yet it is said to have prospered out of usury. Timon’s home is frequented by flatterers, art itself is not the search for truth but blandishment. Timon is also a metaliterary play in that, apart from the protagonist who is their patron, a poet and a painter debate the motives and objectives of their art. If art is imitation then it must imitate nature, that is, homo homini lupus; if it softens and idealizes him, it is adulation. And in effect the painter’s picture is a ‘pretty mocking’, a pleasing falsification, since that true thing it imitates is in fact the contrary of what is true and the painting does not catch man’s inner nature: it is superficial art, simply skin-deep mimicry. If the painter paints, and the poet sings, the generosity of Timon, both of them paint and sing falsely since that is Timon’s delusion. Art ‘almost’ depicts natural man, ‘almost’ because nature is now degenerate and man is nothing but appearance.121 4. Timon’s sudden disillusion has its deus ex machina in Apemantus, his alter ego or critical conscience, unheeded right to the end. Between the two there is a slow exchange of roles causing a perfect chiasmus. In the first few scenes the peevish misanthrope Apemantus talks in front of the deaf Timon in the language that Timon will use in the final scenes of Act V. When the curtain falls, Apemantus has in part become Timon, the Timon of the first scenes, and Timon has become Apemantus. A similar prolepsis is found in Apemantus’ refusal to dine at Timon’s house, and in 121 This is a remote foreshadowing of the notion, later so dear to the Decadents and the postmodern, of art as fiction or falsity. The debate comes up again in Act V, when the painter and the poet present themselves to Timon in the woods to obtain gold; and where with a riddle Timon sends them off in search of a scoundrel who tricks them, who is in fact their own identity unknown to themselves through their fallacious, lying, flattering art.

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his decision to feed on water and roots, Timon’s future food in the woods. Apemantus will have to confront Timon with the reality of human nature, always capable of noble actions as much as of rolling in the mud, of being free and escaping even from the devil’s chains, as well as of masking the impulses of baboon and monkey. These are sermons that the reader later recalls as preparation for the delirium of the protagonist at the end. Timon’s guests, adds Apemantus, feed on Timon who does not realize or does not care that he is being devoured. And this greed is the warning symptom and symbol of their sub-humanity. Timon himself in the first scenes appears less noble and unselfish when Apemantus points out the secret foundation of his generosity: he delights in being flattered and in a delirium of all-powerfulness and apparent domination. From the halfway point of the play, having feigned unawareness of being in debt, Timon becomes fully conscious of the fact but deludes himself that his ‘friends’ will at once prove and show themselves as such, and will unhesitatingly help him. As I mentioned, the bitterly disappointed Timon isolates himself from human companionship and hurls a curse that is fully operational: he hopes for a literal revolution of the existing cosmos and announces a new ontogeny, having become suddenly aware of the real tendency of the world and the reasons behind human behaviour. The first desirable revolution is political in type: that slaves and madmen shall take the helm of government from the senators. A second type is genetic: that mothers shall become sterile. A third type is evolutionary: that development shall be inverted and humans go back to being the beasts from which they descended, outwardly as well. But this is a stage – the mark of the beast – they have not yet utterly erased from themselves: and ‘yet confusion live!’ Timon sees himself in the symbolic figure of a plague spreader delighted at the prospect of infecting the world and the universe, of making it contagious and destined to dissolution. Here Carlyle may be evoked and his moment – now however not in any way dialectic – of the ‘everlasting no’. Timon in fact removes all his clothes, a sartor for the moment simply naked, not yet resartus, and thus he remains until the end.122 Little by little it is the sexual curse that

122 But unintentionally Timon also foreshadows Baudelaire’s ‘mon semblable, – mon frère’, saying he hates his ‘semblable’ (IV.3.22), that is his similar, so himself as well.

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becomes functional to his lucidly visionary plan: let the prostitutes infect the world by satisfying the lust of the male and by spreading syphilis and a ‘planetary plague’.123 The prevailing semantic area is that of infection, as shown in the number of times the term is used: everything healthy is corrupt and festering; anything still healthy will fatally be infected. Timon often ends his speeches with an ‘amen’, to indicate that his are blasphemous psalms with inverted meanings, lauding the ruin of the world and inciting human beings to destruction and self-destruction.124 In the last few lines Apemantus finds himself obliged to condone at least a small amount of hypocrisy, flattery in other words, in order for the world to continue; and he advises Timon to undertake a second metamorphosis, from benevolent and malevolent to hypocrite, and to ‘turn rascal’. Hearing this voice, or the still small inner voice, reproaching him and telling him that whoever utters such curses wishes not to live but to die, he begins to conceive the idea that, in his state, the most coherent decision he can make is to take his own life.125

123 The two prostitutes Phrynia and Timandra, on stage with Alcibiades, are the only two females present in the play (if we exclude the Amazons in a masque performed during Timon’s banquet), and it is to them that this lethal recommendation is addressed. 124 The irony is that the ‘banditti’ coming to steal Timon’s gold, on being so ferociously incited to commit thefts and acts of destruction, are on the verge of being converted and redeemed, and feel they are being encouraged to turn honest! 125 Timon, digging in the woods, has found not only nutritious roots but also a small treasure in gold, so he partly repents and partly contradicts himself, donating it to the poor and to the few who have remained faithful to him.

The Romantic and Dark Comedies

§ 38. The romantic and dark comedies It is worth repeating that Shakespeare’s mature art is that of combination and therefore of variation. After a certain date, the playwright no longer launches abstract controversies, nor does he explore unknown dramatic procedures; he consolidates those already proven, so that kinship and sutures between one play and another emerge and stand out ever more distinctly. As at the beginning, but more incisively, variation means above all an inclination towards tragicomedy, romance or simply comedy. After the first few experimental and euphuistic plays, the middle and final comedies form a group partly running parallel to some tragedies like a second rail track. The earliest is from 1598 and may precede Henry V and Julius Caesar; the last is on a level with Troilus and Cressida. If this is true, this group of comedies constitutes Shakespeare’s other side and we discover his Olympian ability to pass from mood to mood. 2. Much Ado About Nothing draws its material from the well-tried sources always confidently used by Shakespeare: Ariosto, Spenser, Bandello through Belleforest, perhaps even Castiglione. Yet the idea of Claudio and Hero, though with other names, was already used by other dramatists, and Shakespeare as usual was not the first to take possession of it. In As You Like It, one of the appetizing elements for future criticism is the somewhat lesbian affection, as it has appeared, of Rosalind for Celia and even for the peasant Phebe. The lack of appeal of the title has also been rightly noticed, a title singled out by some as an example of the paradoxical lack of imagination in certain others (the subtitle of Twelfth Night – Or, What you Will –1 seems to show a certain degree of impatience, irritation or hurry). Much more effective was the mixage of sources in this play, a further proof of Shakespeare as a master arranger, seeing that we are speaking of a chain whose first link had been forged seventy years earlier in Siena with the collective production of a play entitled Gl’ingannati and performed in a night of the ‘beffana’.2 This play had had successive translations and adaptations in various

1 2

And almost identical to the title of the preceding As You Like It. The title seems to indicate a play suited to the Epiphany feast.

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languages and had proved therefore a great favourite.3 The Merry Wives of Windsor in turn offers yet another genetic case history. John Dennis claimed that it had been commissioned by the queen in person, as she wished to see Falstaff brought back to life and in love. At the same time it draws on a ‘comedy of jealousy’ of 1593 and on the piquant Italian repertory, with a part specifically written for the comic actor Richard Tarlton. According to one scholar (writing in 1932) the hurried composition – proverbially fourteen days in 1597 – was due to the fact that it was to celebrate the new members of the Order of the Garter, the Lord Chamberlain among them. According to others Shakespeare perhaps exploited parts of this masque in a later edition of the play. Falstaff met the need, the historical personage he represented having been expelled from the Order for unworthiness.4 All’s Well that Ends Well also has the air of a remake and of a piece of collective team work in which Shakespeare was perhaps the director and coordinator. Once more Shakespeare trusts to the synergy of Boccaccio translated by Painter. Various hypotheses continue to be formed on the date, not of writing which is of only relative interest, but of the first performance of this play, which would help to determine whether it was earlier or later than Measure for Measure. To judge from the story, from analogies in the plot and from the argumentative plan, here we are, significantly, on the level of that ‘dark’ comedy and of Troilus and Cressida, but with some new flavours and without the static nature or the oscillations between two places as found in the latter. All’s Well that Ends Well is a more exotic play with greater movement, with two entirely Florentine acts, set therefore where Shakespeare had never been, that is in a city touched in their drama only by Chapman, Marston, Massinger and above all Middleton. As to the text of 3 4

But Shakespeare mixes overlapping sources, and the nucleus of the story had been written in prose by Bandello and translated by Belleforest, then into English in a short novel by Barnaby Rich. This 1599 or 1600 version of the Merry Wives contains a series of allusions: it is no chance that Shakespeare takes revenge on that Lord Cobham (Henry Brooke), erstwhile Chamberlain, who had forced him to change the name of his ancestor Oldcastle in the Henry IV series. Shakespeare had in fact given Ford the name Brook, but the new allusion was perceived in the Folio, where Brook becomes Broome. The theory cannot hold that the Merry Wives was written between the two Henry IV plays.

§ 39. ‘Much Ado About Nothing’

313

All’s Well, that of the Folio is a clear case of a text founded on the so-called notes or foul papers that were provisional and hurriedly thrown together. § 39. ‘Much Ado About Nothing’* There is nothing absolutely new in Much Ado About Nothing (staged in 1598, printed in 1600) with respect to the previous euphuistic comedies and tragicomedies, and one would never end noticing and pointing out reverberations from them, such as the tamed shrew, the sworn bachelor, or the melancholic. But these elements are exploited towards a happy end with masterly lightness and miraculous rarefaction. It is a cleverly crafted play, devised along successive encapsulations and in a kind of Chinese box mechanism, with chromatic passages from one diegetic path to another with no sense of constraint or heaviness. Secondly, it is the English classic of love skirmishes and mischievousness, wit, word games, and humorous, positively comic quarrels firmly settled in the educated playgoer’s memory, making up a proverbial repertory. The authors of this wit are two Shakespearean characters who have both reached the status of antonomasia, Benedick and Beatrice. Their wit is a ceaseless flow that hardly ever tires; indeed, it is enjoyable and immediately understood by the listener and therefore ipso facto by the reader. To flavour the whole there are the stage, verbal and pantomime numbers of the Messina watch and its varied, appealing caricatures. They are among the most successful and inebriating reappearances of the band of respectable simpletons who attempt refined speech and use long words, thus raising roars of laughter over their unintended blunders, which convey the desired meaning while triggering other involuntary, unfailingly exhilarating ones. Within this stage counterpoint *

J. R. Mulryne, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, London 1965; Shakespeare: ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and ‘As You Like It’: A Casebook, ed. J. R. Brown, London 1979; J. Drakakis, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’: Notes, London 1980; N. Greiner, Studien zu ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, Frankfurt am Main 1983; Critical Essays on ‘Much Ado About Nothing’: William Shakespeare, ed. L. Cookson and B. Loughrey, Harlow 1989; Shakespeare, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (Actes de Colloque, Université Stendhal, Grenoble, November 1991), ed. J. Perrin, Grenoble 1992; M. Simpson, The Windy Side of Care: A Reading of Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, Greenwich 2007; A. Findlay, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, Basingstoke 2011.

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Shakespeare creates Dogberry, the most sparkling of a recurrent type, the city guard or policeman. 2. Reviewing the plays Shakespeare here recalls, cites and reprises means compiling and discussing at least briefly a substantial list. For its theme, man’s resistance overcome by the power of love, and to a greater extent for its ‘banquet of languages’, Much Ado About Nothing is akin to Love’s Labour’s Lost. It is a less refined, above all less artificial play, more realistic and plausible, although in its own way fantastical as well. All in all, Much Ado surpasses Love’s Labour’s Lost in its fresher, more natural development, so that the epic battles of wit do not weigh it down too much, and over-insistence on abstruse and contorted word games is rarer, easily absorbed and immediately left behind. Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play for the erudite, and therefore, as I observed, unique of its kind; Much Ado is for a universal audience. In an approximately decreasing order, at first glance the greatest analogy is between this play and The Tempest. A Spanish prince, though not shipwrecked, visits a Mediterranean island, neither magic nor enchanted, and one shown on maritime charts. We find a Prospero in the figure of a friar, a bizarre deus ex machina, and the Antonio of the play is a bastard brother of the Spanish prince. A relation between two pure young souls is hindered by this prince, in whom we can find a pre-incarnate Caliban of a more noble type, allied to two half pints, Borachio and Conrade, counterparts of Trinculo and Stephano. A second storyline brings us to The Winter’s Tale. Two elderly fathers called respectively Leontes and Leonato, with nothing leonine about either of them, exhibit a morbid emotional relationship with their two only daughters, although Leontes is married and Leonato is a widower. A similar melodramatic, suffocating affection of an elderly father for a young daughter also recalls The Merchant of Venice and King Lear. By now we know that this is one of the archetypal situations on which Shakespeare worked most intensely. Previous slander on the immorality and the loss of virginity of the bride before marriage is another recurrent internal topos, and Friar Francis, the priest who aids the happy ending and ensures the recompense for all those harmed, is a reprise from Romeo and Juliet, and a second figure, if not positive at least not negative, of a churchman. The cliché of the bastard son or brother reminds us of Edmund in King

§ 39. ‘Much Ado About Nothing’

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Lear, but as Much Ado is a comedy he is a bastard experiencing an inner drama and trauma which are only vaguely hinted at. Claudio is of course not a casually chosen name, indeed it is full of Shakespearean echoes: he is Isabella’s brother in Measure for Measure, and is Latinized as Claudius in Hamlet. All in all, here he reverses the previous bearers of his name, because his naïvety causes him twice to blunder.5 As in numerous other plays, Shakespeare has a soft spot for an ending in the form of a Baroque pageant and trompe l’œil. Claudio believes his Hero to be dead, and spontaneously offers to redress his unjust calumny; he is led to believe that he is to be given a bride who is the exact living copy of his dead beloved, and like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale he wonders in amazement if the Hermione he has in front of him is a marble statue or his own partner still alive and mummified. Borachio’s confession makes Hero’s feigned death almost useless – it is indeed a purely sensational device, literally a coup de théâtre. 3. To illustrate in detail what I have said, we can start by noting that the first encapsulation in the play comes with the arrival in Messina (early on) and the departure (towards the end) of the Aragonese prince Don Pedro, back from an unspecified war in the area. Leonato, governor of Messina, is no flatterer but a generous, liberal man; his invitation to Don Pedro and his followers is not politically necessary but is given in a spirit of frank friendship. Sicily in the seventeenth century was under Spanish rule, which makes the arrival of an Aragonese prince a natural likelihood; he is a regular visitor in Messina and is treated with evident respect. Shakespeare’s Messina is a small Eden, and pour cause there is a satanic saboteur working behind the wings: Don John, who has just made peace with his brother Don Pedro. On hearing the name of Don John the reader has a flash of recognition: here perhaps is an idea borrowed by Shakespeare from the Don Giovanni myth, absent from his works. This particular Don Giovanni is simply Spanish, that is he is not a Don Giovanni with all or some of his charisma. Under this name Don John is found in the seventeenth-century

5

He misunderstands the fact that Don Pedro himself is courting Hero, and he immediately believes that Hero has an understanding with Borachio.

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dramatist Thomas Shadwell; he is in any case here a fanciful, mysterious, awkward plotter, and a plotter because he is a bastard. He appears outlined as an emblematic, archetypical desdichado. However, an acrobatic analogy with the great figure of the western myth, Don Giovanni Tenorio, might perhaps come from the fact that, as we shall see, the Don John in this play is another Spanish burlador, even though his game is to discredit a sort of sublimely pure Donna Anna to a Don Ottavio figure. The young Florentine Claudio is in turn a novice who has usurped the position and rank of Don John, a kind of double of Iago in Othello. Benedick is from Padua, which is slightly reminiscent of The Taming of the Shrew: albeit Sicilian, Beatrice is the shrew and Benedick is a Petruchio, both from Padua (as I mentioned above, he too is a type of shrew).6 The two actions alternating on stage, as if duelling in their story within the outer frame, are the love at first sight between Claudio and Hero and the route, more of attraction than of collision, between Benedick and Beatrice. In order to make his declaration to Hero and ask for her hand, Claudio turns to Don Pedro; but Don John maligns Hero by making it appear that, although superficially saint-like, she shamelessly receives men at night. While the engagement between Claudio and Hero moves towards its climax, the skirmish between Benedick and Beatrice advances step by step, in the form of a war for positions. The sparks exchanged from their first entrance hide an attraction masked by excessive enmity and gratuitous insult. It is a perfect exercise in irony: they speak of the underground force of erotic attraction while denying being affected and claiming that they are unassailable by love. Benedick’s fear is, and will be, that all women are faithless, and whoever marries sooner or later becomes a cuckold and can be betrayed. A somewhat ante litteram feminist, Beatrice, like Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, begs Hero to take her own decision with regard to her father’s wishes in choosing her husband; indeed, with an elaborate comparison she reminds her that at the end of any marriage lies regret at having married. The comedy is proverbial for this independent

6

§ 19.3.

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space given over to malicious cut-and-thrust quibbling, in which the spirit of wit has its heyday, where each exhilarating line, refined, eccentric and hopefully decisive, has to make way for the next in order to leave the other party wordless. Halfway through the play, Benedick and Beatrice have been convinced to deny their scepticism and so confess they love each other; but their boundless, agonizing pride forbids each to take the first step, thus requiring the assistance of intermediaries. Right to the end the two will admit their ‘defeat’ in words that say and gainsay through acrobatic circumlocution. When they are forced to announce their agreement to the marriage, they manage a final quarrel in which they almost take back what they have just promised. They marry but – so they say – only through mutual compassion. The play closes with a burst of quips and jokes. 4. A sport, an amusement, an entertainment, also described as a ‘scene’, having the aim of making Benedick and Beatrice, separately, believe that one is madly in love with the other although this is not quite true; or else a ‘dumbshow’, a pantomime: this is the plan Don Pedro, Leonato and the other characters around them have devised as a game. As to its likelihood, they can devote themselves to this pastime or joke since the courtship of Hero by Claudio7 appears to have come to a rapid, successful conclusion, and the time before their wedding can be pleasantly spent in attempting to achieve a Herculean labour, that of making Benedick and Beatrice fall in love. A chain of mises en scène, in line with a device we have so often found in Shakespeare, is in fact the generating principle or motor of the play. Actions of this type follow one upon the other repeatedly, they criss-cross and slit one into another. They are even at times superfluous decorations complicating the development, attempts to procure enhanced pleasure in trying to untangle them. We realize that there is hardly any diegetic need 7

In fact this action itself was about to go badly wrong and trigger a tragicomedy of misunderstandings: Don Pedro, asked by Claudio to sound out Hero in his favour, is a cheeky young man, and for an instant Claudio believes that instead of winning her to his side he has actually stolen her away from him. Benedick, also misunderstanding, arrives to announce happily that ‘the prince hath got your Hero’.

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for Don Pedro to disguise himself and pay court to Hero on behalf of Claudio; the latter is indeed an odd soldier if courage fails him to declare himself. The theatre within the theatre begins with the first bouts of the mortal duel of inventions between Benedick and Beatrice; their volleys of quarrelling are not based on events, being a series of asides. Don Pedro is the director of a first show, followed by others, due to various devisers. The first staging is how to bring together Beatrice and Benedick and get them engaged, since they tease each other openly and cannot bear the sight one of the other, though we gather this is only an attitude and a pose, and that their evident, ongoing dislike masks a hidden attraction. Everyone is invited to collaborate in this little spectacle. Benedick soliloquizes in the garden, and the eavesdroppers are eavesdropped or so they pretend to be in order to lay siege to him, making him believe that they do not know they have been overheard (II.3). In III.1, an exactly symmetrical scene, Beatrice is made to hide in the arbour in order to overhear similar praises from a madly enamoured Benedick. Benedick will be left to languish, unable to make his declaration and to uproot his passion. Within this is another scene, that of the unfaithfulness of Hero, contrived by Borachio and Don John with the unwitting collaboration of Margaret the waitingwoman. Such a criss-crossing is not unheard of in Shakespeare, above all because the jokers are in turn victims of a joke, indeed mixed with what could turn out to be a seed bed of tragedy. Don John has nothing against Hero, he only wants to ruin Claudio who has taken his place in Don Pedro’s favour. This promising prank or show, which might have ended in a Don Giovanni balcony scene, is only recounted ex post for the sake of economy. The alleged discovery of Hero’s infidelity is hidden from her, so the theatre within the theatre has and profits from the classic effect, the surprise turnabout: during the marriage ceremony Claudio unexpectedly will publicly put to shame the bride he believes unfaithful. There is a return to the fantastic with a supremely extreme device: the friar suggests pretending that Hero is really dead, in order to change slander into remorse; thus death will be the proof of Hero’s innocence and Claudio too will repent. As in Romeo and Juliet, therefore, the friar is one of the dei ex machina who devise a basically unnecessary or exaggerated stratagem

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simply for the enjoyment of the show and the effect produced, although they must or desire to do it out of a vaguely resigned distrust of the effective course of human justice and of the victory of truth. In other words, Don John’s mise en scène is not openly exposed by Leonato and Hero, it is thwarted and revealed by a counter-mise en scène, the feigned death of Hero. All the ‘conspirators’ involved in the enamouring of Benedick and Beatrice, including the couple themselves, take part against the trio who have accused the girl of dishonour. The comedy, qua comedy, playfully and wittily sides with the possibility of light being cast on events and that the guilty and the wicked face judgement: a counter-demonstration, so to speak, since the happy ending of this thread of the story is due to the local watch under Dogberry, who, zealous and active,8 capture the two amateur rogues Borachio and Conrade. The two prisoners indirectly praise the perspicacity of the guards and confess what the prince’s wisdom has not uncovered. Borachio defends himself in a stentorian, solemn language that parodies that of the great misunderstood figures in history; he stoically accepts the punishment given. In this last scene but one, we see that Leonato and his people are still acting out grief for something that never happened, that is, Hero’s death. They show sincere sorrow for her ruined reputation. The last masquerade is still to come, since Claudio will marry a self-proclaimed cousin of Hero’s, as like her as two peas in a pod. The false niece arrives veiled, since the joke must be revealed only at the very last minute. When Hero unveils, a clever play on words explains the business to Claudio: Hero was dead, but only for the duration of the slander.

8

In one of his most famous speeches, Dogberry instructs his men to avoid any type of trouble and to run away at the first sign of danger. Sophisticated, heady comedy is in the detail of a ‘deformed’ type that the watchmen, mistakingly, believe they have finally laid their hands on. Naturally, this disorderly gang vaguely recalls the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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§ 40. ‘As You Like It’* One of the similarities between As You Like It9 (staged in 1598, printed in 1623) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the fact that some young characters are in love without being beloved, and that while not loving they love in turn others by whom they are not beloved. All this happens, though, without any enchantments being at work, only cunning and pranks. Shakespeare chooses an internal, feminine deus ex machina who not only has a thousand resources up her sleeve, but can devise, anticipate and guarantee the ending – the weddings of four couples of lovers – in terms that appear impossible just through her temporary disguise as a man. A second macrotextual reference concerns the hatred between two brothers, the opposition between the court and the forest and the regime of corruption besetting human history. Metaphysical and metahistorical reflection never stops and never relaxes in Shakespeare. However, here he surrounds the mortal enmity between the two brothers with the aura of a happily ending fable, and therefore of a history that is neither true nor likely; in this climate he solves and averts the usurpation of one by the other.10 In contrast with the

*

C. Clark, A Study of ‘As You Like It’, London 1931; ‘As You Like It’: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. L. Halio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968; J. R. Brown, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Style: ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘As You Like It’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Twelfth Night’, ‘Macbeth’, London 1970, and his book quoted in the bibliography for Much Ado About Nothing; P. Reynolds, William Shakespeare, ‘As You Like It’: A Dramatic Commentary, London 1988; ‘As You Like It’ from 1600 to the Present: Critical Essays, ed. E. Tomarken, New York and London 1997; P. Dawkins, Shakespeare’s Wisdom in ‘As You Like It’, Warwickshire 1998; ‘As You Like It’: essais critiques, ed. J.-P. Débax and Y. Peyré, Toulouse 1998; M. A. Hunt, Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’: Late Elizabethan Culture and Literary Representation, Basingstoke 2008; ‘As You Like It’: Authoritative Text, Sources and Contexts, Criticism / William Shakespeare, ed. L. S. Marcus, New York and London 2012.

9

The play was modelled, with the usual variables, on a fairly popular novel by Lodge (Rosalynde, written to pass the time during a voyage to the Canary Islands), and on Chaucer’s apocryphal ‘Tale of Gamelyn’, with grafts from day-by-day observation in Touchstone and Jaques. The two pairs of brothers are paralleled by the couple of the two cousins, two kinswomen (and this is proleptic). Rosalind is, like Hamlet, dear to the people, hence

10

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insufferable court atmosphere is the forest,11 where human relationships are dictated by disinterested love. The utopia of a society, harmonious in being authentically genuine, is closer to hand within its magic circle. No other play presents such an admirably evocative idea; as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest is a closed circuit, a shadowy or nocturnal world where love affairs are made and unmade, and the characters of the play wander about having strange encounters and avoiding others; a world with wonders as well, mirages and omens, although only apparent and above all only innocuous. The usurping Duke Frederick is yet another demonstration of the blind thirst for power; had this been – or had it developed into – a tragedy, its theme would have been another overpowering passion, envy. The conversions of the two villains are expected, and they come about at the end: the wicked duke becomes a monk, and the bad brother among Sir Rowland’s three sons, Oliver, makes peace with the other two. Justice is re-established, and the duchy, as in The Tempest, returns to its legitimate owner. The aim of reforming the court is therefore achieved, although by passing from the regime of reality to that of the dream, the fable, the imagination. It is one way to temper and vaporize the urgency – and above all to mask and postpone the effective insolubility – of the theme.12 The atmosphere of the forest is that of a Virgilian eclogue transposed

11 12

feared by the usurping duke her uncle. During the comedy we have two feigned marriages that are pure tricks (Touchstone to Audrey, and Rosalind and Orlando who play at marrying, since Orlando believes that Rosalind is a man). In Act IV the sequence of repentances and recognitions prevents the comedy from sliding towards tragedy. In the play the Ardennes Forest is referred to as the Forest of Arden, making it more recognizable to an English audience. Perhaps as never before, in As You Like It Shakespeare breaks the barrier of dramatic objectivity by camouflaging his voice into that of the melancholic Jaques, above all in his plan (II.7) to ‘cleanse the foul body of the infected world’. His next monologue on life as a theatre and on the seven ages of man is an essay in cynical and deterministic philosophy that anticipates Pirandello, his ‘rules of the game’ and the notion of ‘one, no one and one hundred thousand’, of man the puppet and marionette manoeuvred by a capricious, random hand. Orlando too is a pessimist who unsheathes his sword as soon as he is in the forest, sure that ‘all things had been savage’ and is then surprised to find only ‘gentleness’.

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to modern times, one of kind shepherds, maybe lovably simpletons whose hindered, pathetic love affairs achieve simple and blissful success. The forest, however, may inevitably have its own disorder, albeit more easily overcome. This is so easy that one may indulge in the pleasure of making the task more difficult than it is and than it may be: the pleasure of creating obstacles and playing at chaos, at least for a moment. Rosalind, the deus ex machina, is such a juggler. Shakespeare, on the other hand, can never resist the temptation of making the play flow towards the theatre within the theatre, choosing that character, Rosalind, as the puppeteer who manoeuvres her puppet-actors as she likes, amusing herself in pushing them towards a dead end. The more impediments she can think up, the more she enjoys herself, with trip-wires and delays on the way to a denouement that is never at risk. She can let the imagination run wild since like a magician – exactly like a Prospero – she can at any moment dissolve the game she has arranged. 2. What is so amazing in As You Like It is its finish and its pleasing naturalness, its memorability, the unparalleled verve of so many of its scenes, above all since they are achieved at the cost of the utmost risk. After the first dynamic and propulsive act at the court, for the other four acts in the forest the play becomes static and piétinant sur place. Together with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is the most unsubstantial, impalpable, at times the most surreal, certainly the most lacking in action of the whole of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. It is so because the subplots, overlapping and alternating, are slowed down in their snail-like progress by extemporary intervention, dilatory and digressive but not specious or exhibitionist, except in the jester Touchstone; and also because the play is suspended in an infinitely protracted stage game on several levels and fronts. Jaques theorizes that man is the actor in a show in which he cannot say who the spectator or the manoeuvrer is, therefore a metaphysical show. Shows follow one after the other, self-enclosed, natural or provoked, with the characters who in turn withdraw behind the wings, having heard or directly seen that a show is starting, and wanting to enjoy it. This spectator can therefore with reason turn into the actor, as Rosalind says when she sees a shepherd and shepherdess arriving, bickering about their love: ‘I’ll prove a busy actor in their play’. In the forest Zerlinas let themselves be caught by caricature Don Juans, and a shepherdess who puts on airs refuses a sweetheart having fallen

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for a girl disguised as a boy – these are some of the pantomimes. Rosalind and Orlando’s love affair is played out on estrangement, with Rosalind involved in a pathetic, plaintive love story only to take immediate control of it in a precarious equilibrium. So the wonder of the play is its standing on the borders between reality and pretence. This is a parodic or metatheatrical layer, pivoting on the register and prosodic variety. Touchstone the jester, Jaques the melancholic, Orlando and Rosalind themselves parody the linguistic codes which would fit the actions that are carried forward. Several times the jester mocks the weaponry of rhetoric, oratory, dialectics, legal diatribe and heraldic etiquette. Jaques scatters his monologues and stories with witty, disconsolate sayings. Rosalind, together with Beatrice in Much Ado, takes the prize for the most mischievous of Shakespearean heroines; therefore she is in the limelight from beginning to end with her inexhaustible wit that targets the very essence of falling in love. Orlando, like Ariosto’s paladino, carves weighty, conventional rhymes onto tree trunks, verses then commented upon dispassionately and humorously by Rosalind without hurting his feelings. Each time the shepherds come on stage the parody of ancient and modern pastorals resounds, from Virgil to Guarini. There are long prose passages of mellow, fluid speeches as never before in Shakespeare, one could even say closed pieces, so many that Hamlet or at most one or two other major plays have more, or more famous, as Jaques’s magnificent cameo on the wounded stag, or the one on the world as a theatre. But exquisite ditties are sung on the way to relieve melancholy and accompany the bitter sweet pains of love, and the curtain closes with a masque which has nothing supernatural about it except the appearance of a personified Hymen. This is the play that has to the greatest extent intrigued recent feminism, which has valorized the androgynous ambiguities of gender and the taste for male-female transvestism. Rosalind plays at being a man and enters into a male role she maintains at length, with hundreds of exhilarating effects pulled out of her hat in dealing with the male and female sweethearts (Orlando and Phebe), who are unaware (or perhaps having an inkling) that beneath the disguise there is a woman. This hermaphroditism, glimpsed in As You Like It, was the same stimulating the women writers of the last and the present centuries. It is a deliberate piece of mischief that Virginia Woolf entitled her novel about a young Elizabethan,

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first man then woman, Orlando. Orlando does not change clothes in this play, but his beloved, Rosalind, plays at dressing in male attire; and Orlando is semi-conscious, conscious yet also unconscious, that he is courting a woman dressed as a man, or perhaps really a man with feminine features. It is evident that the ‘impossibilities’ of marrying a person of one’s own sex, here in Shakespeare conclusive and cogent, would be debated and reversed in future civilizations, no longer being accepted as taboos or metaphysical and ontological hindrances. 3. The real novelty within Shakespeare’s canon is that As You Like It comes decidedly within the blueprints of a play of symmetries, balancing, parallelisms and number modules. The first contraposition is that between two brothers, the dukes, the younger one governing but a usurper, his older but unnamed brother exiled in the forest. A clear-cut boundary of civilizations is traced between an illegal, tyrannical state and a free zone allowed to those banned, where the law of love is in force. A third is added to these two poles, that of the three sons of a deceased knight, Rowland de Boys. The number system is completed with a couple of cousins, one Rosalind, the daughter of the exiled duke, and the other the daughter of the duke in power (Celia, but the friendship and harmony between these two contrast with the hatred of their fathers);13 and with two shepherds and two shepherdesses. Only one is the court jester. The plot moves on at first in a succession of stage events similar in meaning, one strengthening the others, thereby amplifying the basic motifs. In narrating his father’s bias in allowing his brothers Oliver and Jaques, but not him, to study, Orlando de Boys announces that within his family nucleus the same injustice is in force that we will find in the state organization.14 His opening soliloquy

13 14

Such close love between daughters of fathers who hate one another is a structural fault, but may also be a weakness in the usurping duke, and a distant foresight of his rehabilitation. Orlando’s identification with the gospel’s prodigal son serves as a threat: should he be denied an education once more he will ask his father for his inheritance and set off in search of fortune. We can also sense a witty allusion to the biblical episodes of Cain and Abel and Jacob and Esau: the two brothers Orlando and Oliver have a fight, in the presence of a servant whose name, unsurprisingly, is Adam.

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of complaint and rancour is a distant foreshadowing of those of Caliban, thereby being doubly proleptic. The diagnosis of the duke’s hatred for his brother is the same as Oliver’s for his brother: the pathology and aetiology of the inferiority complex. The play opens with two situations to be settled and two orders to be re-established, both referred to pairs of brothers.15 The events of the forest are yet another version of the utopia of a state of nature within reach or hoped for, and also of a regression – as I have frequently mentioned – to cave life. The banned community around the exiled duke is that which in Shakespeare either awaits reintegration or has bid a final farewell in order to found a new golden age or something similar, far from so-called civilization, thus moving in reverse through the stages of the evolution of the species. With half-hidden nostalgia, however: the exiled duke’s opening speech announces that everything is all right, thus implicitly denying his statement and confessing to feeling the distance from the court. Survival requirements therefore imply finding some degree of compromise, so man is really not in his element under any jurisdiction. In philosophizing and moralizing on the stag killed by the hunters, Jaques automatically attacks man who in turn usurps nature having been the victim of usurpation by other men. Even a community respecting the natural duties of harmony and brotherhood has to face needs which will split it: in order to survive, it is necessary to eat, and the forest hunters are aware of the same dilemma shown in Cymbeline by Belarius before he leaves to find food with his (presumed) sons, as we shall see. Usurpation, a word explicitly used by Jaques, is apparently connatural with life. A small instance of hypocrisy in the forest inhabitants is to denounce one usurpation in order to perpetrate another. Jaques deconstructs exile: man has usurped the forest, the habitat assigned to animals; yet in the animal reign as well – the well-fed herd deigns not

15

The discord can be extended to all three de Boys brothers: Jaques is the mildest and most distracted, yet in one scene he and Orlando chat wittily on their reciprocal incompatibility. In another, somewhat obscure and perhaps textually corrupt scene, Jaques is accused of having a past which will not bear inspection.

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a glance to the dying stag – the law of the strongest prevails, and that of usurpation as a consequence.16 4. At the end of Act I a kind of migration and collective biblical exodus takes place from the court to the forest, seen as a kind of promised land. A labyrinthine or circular road play starts, of chance encounters on the way, mostly encapsulated within the wanderings, on the one hand, of Rosalind and Celia, and on the other of Orlando, with the counterpoint of the latest repressive measures decreed by the duke in his court and the pastimes of the exile’s followers. In Act I Rosalind has fallen in love with Orlando at first sight, and for her he has overcome an unbeatable wrestler in the tournament. She has become a Miranda (‘O excellent young man!’), and Orlando immediately falls in love with her, without Rosalind as yet being, or knowing she is, or wishing to be, a Prospero. Orlando too is immediately banned for having offended the duke, and the main action becomes the Ariosto-type search for him on the part of Rosalind, and of Rosalind herself, she too a victim of the same purge, on the part of Orlando in the forest: a search which could have been quickly and happily ended if Rosalind herself had not wished to delay it by disguising herself, hereby hiding her real identity for four long acts. The very first re-integration is that promised to Rosalind by her cousin Celia, who intends to give back the inheritance usurped by her own father from Rosalind’s. In this way the sins of the fathers are settled by the children and Celia pays back Rosalind, or promises to do so. The jester Touchstone, accompanying the two cousins in the forest, holds forth on the relations between Fortune and Nature. Basically, the play is already finished as regards one of its parts, since it is just a question of waiting. The direction of movement is in fact not straight forward but backwards in the long accounts of what has gone before, or in the periodical weave of witticisms, an end in themselves, on the part of one or other of the characters stepping into the limelight. The waiting is filled with an unprecedented series of games, masquerades and jokes and capricious match-making. The jester Touchstone bewilders a shepherdess with his ready wit and pretends to marry her, out of pure enjoyment; and 16

The sense of this reflection is reiterated in a later récit, concerning Oliver’s rescue by Orlando while sleeping under an oak: a snake was about to bite him but fled when it saw Orlando approaching; but a hungry lion was watching him, ready to attack.

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Rosalind directs and unhurriedly manoeuvres the conflictual, stormy loves of the two shepherds as well as managing her own. The word ‘sport’, so often found in the later Shakespeare, is batted to and fro between Rosalind and Celia. The simulation going forward is considerable: Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, allows herself to be courted by Orlando in order to subject him to what she terms a dis-enamouring therapy, but in fact to keep him close to her. Meanwhile she is present at the episodes of the vain courting between the shepherds, Phebe and Silvius, melodramatic scenes that create the illusion of unreality or destroy that of reality. In one of these Rosalind cannot help coming out of her hiding-place to curb the pride of the shepherdess, with the result that, in man’s disguise, she triggers the shepherdess’s love for herself. The great duet or duel between Rosalind and Orlando in the first scene of Act IV is formally recited in order to cure Orlando’s passion; the latter has agreed to pretend, that is, has accepted to take Ganymede for Rosalind, without knowing that Ganymede is Rosalind in disguise. This pantomimic rehearsal of the theatre of the absurd serves to accentuate, not relieve, the loves of both. The prolonged skirmish ends when Celia pretends to marry them. Even after the mock marriage Rosalind asks Orlando how faithful he will be to her, warning him that she will be a shrew. The pact is also that stipulated with the disbelief of the spectator and the internal characters. Orlando is too immature, naïve and disorientated to be likely to provoke the passion of the experienced Rosalind; and nobody realizes her disguise until Rosalind herself reveals it of her own free will. The change of sides is usual in Shakespeare through the intervention of a pretended deus ex machina, just when all appears to be lost. Rosalind mitigates Orlando’s sadness by promising that he will magically find Rosalind herself in flesh and blood once more, and that he will marry her. Like the Sibyl, she also makes prophecies that seem contradictory or preposterous, could one know that what she says is made possible by her feminine gender. The concluding masque is too sudden even for Shakespearean standards. Celia and Rosalind come on stage led by Hymen without their disguises, and Jaques de Boys, fourth of the brothers,17 arrives to say that the usurping duke, full of warring intentions, has repented and is restoring the duchy to 17

This character, homonym of Jaques the melancholic, does not appear in the list of dramatis personae.

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his exiled brother. The other Jaques announces his intention of withdrawing to the monastery where the previously wicked duke had sought refuge; yet Jaques remains the melancholic to the end, and does not take part in the general celebration. § 41. ‘Twelfth Night’* The second scene of Act I, and the first of Act II, of Twelfth Night18 (staged in 1600, printed in 1623) are analogous, one the repetition of the other. A pair of twins, brother and sister, having just survived a shipwreck off the coast of Illyria, say farewell to two captains by whom they have been saved, and separately set out inland. After three months it is in the one-scene Act V that we see them together, much to the wonder of the other characters and even more to their own surprise, given that each believed the other to be dead, and because they seem two identical copies of the same sex. This misunderstanding is possible because Viola, the twin sister, has disguised herself for these three months, taking on the male name of Cesario and dressing in imitation of her brother Sebastian, whom she obviously resembles completely. It is Sebastian who conjectures that ‘this may be some error’ (IV.3.10). A shipwreck, the dispersal of identical twins, the vicissitudes they encounter, the final recognition, the resolution

*

Shakespeare: ‘Twelfth Night’: A Casebook, ed. D. J. Palmer, London 1972; L. Potter, ‘Twelfth Night’: Text and Performance, Basingstoke 1985; ‘Twelfth Night’: Critical Essays, ed. S. Wells, New York and London 1986; Critical Essays on ‘Twelfth Night’, William Shakespeare, ed. L. Cookson and B. Loughrey, Harlow 1990; ‘Twelfth Night’: A Guide, ed. A. McCallum, Lewes 1995; L. E. Osborne, The Trick of Singularity: ‘Twelfth Night’ and the Performance Editions, Iowa City 1996; P. Dawkins, Shakespeare’s Wisdom in ‘Twelfth Night or What You Will’, Warwickshire 2002; M. Simpson, So Full of Shapes: A Reading of Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’, London 2006; William Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’: A Sourcebook, ed. S. Massai, London 2007; G. Atkin, ‘Twelfth Night’: Character Studies, London and New York 2008; ‘Twelfth Night’: New Critical Essays, ed. J. Schiffer, London 2011; ‘Twelfth Night’: A Critical Reader, ed. A. Findlay and L. Oakley-Brown, London 2013; F. E. Dolan, ‘Twelfth Night’: Language and Writing, London 2014.

18

On the subtitle of this play, cf. § 38.2.

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of misunderstandings and the re-ordering of attachments and love stories that perforce appeared unsynchronized and hopeless – this is the same framework as in Plautus and in The Comedy of Errors. However, this frame brings alive an internal picture that is less mechanical and more composite, where certain targets, both contingent and absolute, are hit, and highly modern ideological and epistemological issues are faced. Twelfth Night is first and foremost the mature, reiterated result of Shakespearean illusionism of time and place. Italian-sounding names act in a Slav and Balkan theatre of pure fantasy; but this front-line plot is attached to, confused with and crosses over another, a subplot with full-blooded caricatures that are recognisably or probably English, at least in the number of hidden and explicit references to contemporary times. The scenes of Twelfth Night are therefore of two types: they repeatedly register the vain strategies devised by Duke Orsino to win Olivia’s love; they follow the imperceptible awakening of Olivia’s passion for Viola whom she believes to be a man,19 since he introduces himself as Cesario, Orsino’s messenger; and of Viola herself for Orsino. Their shrouded, dissimulated courtships are broken up by the exuberant, noisy gags from the trio of Olivia’s guests, the often drunken, maladjusted but occasionally lucid pranksters, the knights Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, together with the jester.20 The most daring illusion is the fact that at Olivia’s court and in a duchy of Illyria there is a steward Malvolio, the victim of the most ferocious joke ever organized in a Shakespearean play. Italian by name but not by nature, Malvolio is the English Puritan revealed in his oily, hypocritical self-complacency and in his outbursts of sensuality and amorous vanity which he superficially denies.21 He is thus a masterly satirical portrait of false compunction, a genre of which the 19

To avoid confusion, in this section it must be remembered that Viola appears to everyone disguised as Cesario until her denouement in Act V; she is therefore taken to be a man, everyone considering her to be of the male sex. 20 The trio becomes a quartet with Maria, Olivia’s small but lively waiting-woman. 21 Shakespeare is a consummate self-parodist who appears to be citing the episode of the fateful letter in Macbeth when Malvolio reads the counterfeit letter the knights have left on the road for him to find, which Malvolio believes a madly enamoured Olivia has written to him. This letter is full of arcane allusions and injunctions from destiny, as he interprets it.

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English are so proud.22 The counterpart of Malvolio and of the aberration he represents are the numerous marriages in a play so abounding in matchmaking. Shakespeare is the usual intermediary who leaves no character unmarried when love and sexual desire have been aroused. Belying Puritan continence, Twelfth Night finishes in a nuptial song and a hymn to procreativity, and in the disavowal of sexual restraint. It is therefore an intimately anti-Puritan play that, for lack of any other option, turns a blind eye on the knights’ outrageous behaviour when repression of pleasure is its only alternative. However, in both the main and the subplot, the Twelfth Night typical scene is always two-sided, since the play is again regulated not on the principle of propulsion but of dilation, and the early and even central lines of dialogue of a scene are sayings, jokes, puns and other word games, belatedly interrupted by the communication of intentions regarding some real action. The joke devised against Malvolio is invariably only a single yet flamboyant occurrence of the constructive paradigm of the theatre within the theatre. The ‘error’ of the previous youthful comedy is here the misunderstanding, but utilized in a large number of meanings and applications. 2. Therefore, inheriting and updating the set-up of The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night is yet another of the parallel, highly balanced comedies, binary comedies in fact, of the late Shakespeare. Illyria is an imaginary, by then inexistent geographic area on the Adriatic or Dalmatian coast; its regime is that of a duchy, although the political background, unlike As You Like It, is left vague. The main plot is almost immediately blocked and stalled since Olivia wants nothing to do with Orsino, who does not give up and keeps sending Cesario to spy out the land. Cesario is in fact Viola in disguise and she is secretly in love with Orsino himself; dressed as a man, she makes Olivia fall in love with her. The two theatres of action are the duke’s palace and Olivia’s house. Olivia herself has lost a brother,

22

A further, probable reference to contemporary events is one to the casuistry of the Jesuits persecuted in early Elizabethan times, when the Order authorized the distinction between the word given and the mental word dictated by conscience, also called mental reservation, hence falsity.

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not a twin, thus bringing the couples of siblings to two. Act I pivots on the repeated theme of reproach, accusation and defence. Maria reproaches the jester who defends himself; then it is the jester who reproaches Olivia for being silly; Olivia defends herself and in turn reprimands the jester; then it is Malvolio who launches an invective against the class of jesters, with Olivia who defends them. Cesario acts as Orsino’s intermediary four times, with Orsino himself appearing only three times (nearly the whole play takes place at Olivia’s house) in the classic guise of the solitary melancholic and distracted outsider. Olivia, who has sworn eternal mourning for the death of her brother, soon breaks her oath as she falls in love with Viola-Cesario as soon as she sees her. Distinguishing the plot from the subplot means separating the melancholy, wistful or melodramatic characters from the Bohemian jokers and pleasure-seekers. The merging of the two plots becomes evident when Viola is challenged to a duel by Sir Andrew, a fake duel in which neither of the two really wants to fight as they are both scared; therefore the duel is called off. Shakespeare is interested in bringing to a happy conclusion the courtships of his three protagonists, Orsino, Viola and Olivia – but only up to a certain point. A complementary if not prevalent interest is in the games and jokes of the theatre within the theatre. Compared to his other plays around that period, Shakespeare appears to enter into the comedy he is writing, anxious to enjoy the games and jokes vicariously – a concept of the theatre similar to Goethe’s Raritätenkasten, almost a challenge to the laws of likelihood, quite unashamed in himself revealing that what we are looking at is all pretence. The joke on Malvolio recalls in its effects those on Falstaff exposed and unmasked in his plays, though the real Falstaff was perhaps a Catholic; but Malvolio’s is yet richer and more flavoursome. Before finding the letter Malvolio is already reciting his dream of triumph, imagining himself as the ‘count’ married to Olivia, amid the scarcely repressed witticisms of the four pranksters watching him. His monologue is like a comic or grotesque and parodic version of the soliloquy. The second stage in the joke is that of a smirking Malvolio who in his yellow stockings and cross-garters presents himself to Olivia; the third, the imprisonment in the large dark room where surreally he undergoes the rebukes of the ventriloquist jester who imitates the voice of a priest. Yet not only the jester, but all the characters sooner or later recite

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a part. Orsino plays the melancholic while Olivia is falsely in mourning and unable to pose: veiled, she then removes her veil in front of Viola, she says and gainsays, she pretends self-control while being impulsive. In the first encounter between Viola and Olivia, one impersonates the mistress and the other has learnt the part of a script, and feigns a different sex to that she is apparently impersonating. Shakespeare is making the audience his accomplices when he has a character say: ‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’. This is a definition suitable to the whole play and its effects. The duel between Sir Andrew and Viola requires a staging within the staging, since Sir Andrew, acting, will have to provoke Viola intentionally. But Sir Toby, without anybody noticing, will try to create such reciprocal fear in the two disputants as to foil the duel and make it fictional, so that the two challengers agree to fight simply for the sake of the challenge. In the scene of Malvolio’s joke, the jester too dresses up in beard and priest’s cassock, thus disguising himself and changing his voice to trick Malvolio all the better. 3. The misunderstanding in Twelfth Night is a) diegetic, linked to the effects and consequences of the disguises, mainly that of Viola as Cesario; b) connected to the appearance-reality conflict, therefore a perceptive, logical and cognitive misunderstanding; c) genderic; d) purely linguistic. In the first two cases the key figure is the jester, who overturns the relations between ‘folly’ and ‘wisdom’, in order to submit this opposition to the play of appearances. As often in Shakespeare, the jester is anything but a jester, explicitly denying that role and claiming to be a wise man. The mouthpiece of a number of uncomfortable truths, he always speaks the truth thanks to the immunity extended to a jester. He is the only really free character. He always attacks and unveils a person’s moral compromises, small follies, foolishness, contradictions and weaknesses. That Countess Olivia is a simpleton is in part proved at a later stage: she appears irremovable yet she removes her veil; she pets Viola thus exposing her own vanity; she has just said she wants nothing to do with the duke, then tells Viola to come again and gives her a ring, letting her family circle believe that the ring had been left behind by Viola herself.23 In the jester’s opinion, the conflict between 23

In itself, this gift of a ring is vaguely reminiscent of the same gift or pledge Portia gives Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice.

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appearance and reality is utterly aggravating and insoluble: ‘nothing that is so, is so’. Had he the last word, human events would be governed by caprice, unintelligible and unalterable by and with reason, with an upside-down world to be righted only by a magic wand. We realize that the gift or the custody of his purse from Antonio to Sebastian was planned and looked ahead to future developments. Yet it is paradoxical that in Shakespeare, where disguises make people unrecognizable for so long, Antonio the captain is immediately recognized and arrested years later. At the end of Act III the outcome of Viola’s mission is the opposite of that hoped for, since instead of making Olivia fall in love with Orsino, she makes Olivia in love with herself. For the second time, more insidiously, Shakespeare pivots the play on the male attire of a woman, with all the malicious implications that would come about in the future, as I mentioned. There is no real or likely need for Viola’s decision to dress as a man, a eunuch indeed, to approach Orsino: it is only a caprice, a game, a transgender fantasy.24 Orsino gives a symptomatic physical description of Viola: a youth with feminine features, with a fresh rosy complexion, and a piercing voice; he plants allusive clues of his love right from the start of the play. The androgynous, sexually undefined nature of Viola – neither boy nor adult – is evident to Malvolio as well. Viola determinedly objects to Olivia: I am mine – like the feminists – and I will remain single and nobody will have my heart. At the end of the play the proof that Viola, androgynous or of the male sex, is Viola, Sebastian’s sister, is found only in the woman’s attire left with the captain: even this is perhaps not self-evident. The duke understands, and tells Olivia that she is married ‘to a maid and a man’ at the same time. However, the intensity of Antonio’s disinterested devotion to Sebastian is out of proportion and hence suspect, as is his voluntary sacrifice. Sebastian is undoubtedly male and heterosexual, trying to rid himself of Captain Antonio and his unmistakable advances, although later we discover that the captain is known as a warlike, bloody and tenacious warrior. 4. The linguistic ambiguity crops up in the first words: ‘hart’, homophone of ‘heart’, an ambiguity that Orsino makes his own. The atmospheric condition is called an ‘element’, and it is precisely this word that the jester will not 24 A weak motivation is that eunuchs or castrati were sought after as singers in courts; Viola intends to make music for Orsino.

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use further on, pronouncing it to be worn out. ‘Element’ is found five times throughout the play. Consciousness and care for language is polarized in Twelfth Night by the characters, and it is an unwritten pact that each conversation opens with an apparently idle verbal skirmish to decide whose wit is the quickest and most brilliant, and above all the most elliptically acute. The inevitable question therefore is ‘what’s that to th’ purpose?’ (I.3.21). Wit is a semantic short cut, so the slow-witted do not catch the associations and require an explanation of what seems non-pertinent. The bickering has to be disambiguated by those speaking one and the same language, suddenly found to be of difficult comprehension. ‘What’s your metaphor?’ (I.3.70) is another question implying the consciousness of the questioner, the consciousness of using figurative language and the imagery of the language, not the use of catachresis. Both the jester and the pair of knights are clever linguists and avant lettre language philosophers. The impertinent digressions with which the third scene of Act II opens constitute perceptive though fleeting hints of the univocality and bi-univocality of language and its meaning and associations. In the first scene of Act III Viola and the jester deliberately play at misunderstanding each other, with the latter realizing the ambiguity and polyvalence of language and words, and the essence of language, as reversible as a goatskin glove. The jester observes that with words one may not only evoke obscene meanings, but even say something false that seems true. If words are full of falsity one can no longer use them to make true statements. He then realizes and exemplifies the nominalism of language and the fracture between the word as sound, as signifier, and the word as reference: you can play with someone’s sister as a word and as a person. Practically every scene points out certain abnormal or unforeseen functions of language, of that language that nominally communicates, but equivocates, misunderstands, and causes misunderstandings in everyday use. In the same way, should one sing ‘Peace, you rogue, no more o’ that’, some may feel insulted by a command apparently addressed to them. But crisis in linguistic communication goes hand in hand with that precarious cosmos that the jester, an institutional protester, implies or explains. But have words suffered from over-use, and do they still? Yes, at least when they are used too frequently, and become hackneyed and no longer mean anything very exact.

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§ 42. ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’* A facile hypothesis concerning the resurrection of Falstaff (already commemorated in his last moments in Henry V) and that of some of his followers in The Merry Wives of Windsor (staged in 1600, printed in 1602), as well as the one already mentioned in the introduction to this group of plays, is that the playwright was rather short of ideas, so he ably exploited the mythical status of his protagonist. A mythical character, due to his very nature, never dies; and if he does, he may rise again for never-ending adventures within the realms of saga. The Merry Wives of Windsor, therefore, is a play scattered with concise but comically hilarious, self-pitying or trustful soliloquies by Falstaff. Time has not passed, and timeless Falstaff is still ‘out at heels’, a stubborn old satyr who offers himself up for sacrifice the three ritual times, rubbery enough always to land on his feet and imperturbable even after the most ruinous of tumbles. In peacetime, he is no longer the bragging warrior, only a senile ladies’ man, if possible a chaser of wealthy ladies whose husbands can be done out of their money. But by now he has become confused, weary, awkward, without resources, and he ends up by sending two wealthy bourgeois wives in Windsor two duplicates, that is two identical letters in which he declares himself (having become aware of the ‘absurd’ plan of Ford’s, one of the husbands, the prospect of money to be made is enough for him). In fact Falstaff becomes the pivot of an exemplary punitive action against uncontrolled lust and against similarly unbridled jealousy: sometimes a misogynist, here Shakespeare is declaredly misanthropic or on the side of the female gender. Falstaff is, in a way, a recurrent invalid and needs continual doses of medicine, administered by women and wives who do not fall. Creativity is an exquisite female gift in this play, even in the excessively breezy, cynical forms of *

J. M. Robertson, The Problem of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, London 1918; J. E. V. Crofts, Shakespeare and the Post Horses: A New Study of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, Bristol 1937; J. Addison Roberts, Shakespeare’s English Comedy: ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in Context, Lincoln, NE and London 1979; G. Melchiori, Shakespeare’s Garter Plays: ‘Edward III’ to ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’, Newark, DE and London 1994; ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’: New Critical Essays, ed. E. Gajowski and P. Rackin, London and New York 2015.

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a Mrs Quickly, while most of the males appear as fools. The goal of harmony among the human components and the balance between body and spirit can be achieved, albeit in the awareness that mankind is under the historical jurisdiction of the Fall, therefore fragile and fallacious. Such a perspective is offered in at least three visible cases: the foolish duel between Parson Evans and Dr Caius is wisely circumvented;25 the illness of the jealous Brook, aka Ford, is cured, and the young Fenton and Anne Page get married in line with the law, yet once more, of Renaissance ‘proportion’, that is, the balance between the intention of the parents and the free decision of the couple, and against the convention of the ‘forced marriage’. The Merry Wives of Windsor, therefore, is ultimately tinged with the surreal, dimmed light of the later Shakespearean romances. The sounds of war do not reach that outlying spot, and a healthy bourgeois class tends to its otia with Shakespeare humorously celebrating its integration. Traditional, historical hostility is laid aside and a French immigrant doctor can aspire to the hand of the young daughter of middle-class English people with her mother’s blessing. Even regional irredentism is allayed since the Windsor parson is a Welshman whose linguistic idiosyncrasies are the target of benevolent mockery. With this figure, Evans the parson, the amusing word play is extended on pronunciation, local inflexions, idioms and above proverbs of one part of the population (Wales, the mountain land of pastures, cheese and wool). The final re-composition does not exclude Falstaff who, unmasked, is not expelled by the community but takes part in the festive occasion, easily reintegrated into that society that has tricked him thrice. The early seventeenth-century British societal model enjoyed apparent harmony, at least temporarily, and Shakespeare – here at least – takes this into account, perhaps allowing himself to be carried away more than necessary by a daydream. The seeds of tragedy are therefore subdued and transcoded into the register of farce. The two merry wives take vengeance on Falstaff, and it is a vendetta with a happy ending of the category, and of their gender, against the men, with the aim of defending the honour 25

Shades of Ariosto: the two contenders in the duel are cleverly sent off in two different directions, scared one of the other by the resounding rhetoric of the organizer of the joke, hence the first prank.

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of women, archetypal temptresses by (wrong) definition.26 Falstaff ’s servants are also vindictive, as they inform the two wives’ husbands of their master’s temptations. Ford’s neurosis and paranoia are almost tragicomic and therefore grotesque. Ford is obviously an Othello without a Iago, not needing such a figure because he already harbours one within him; but jealousy, as such, fires up without reason. He is a masochist who wants to catch his wife in flagrant adultery, yet he also wishes to push her towards unfaithfulness, hence he wishes his own cuckolding. As Shakespeare reiterates and proves, the jealous person is always affected by a real pathology or psychopathology. Ford gets over it, he seems even to smile at his own folly; but he may relapse, so he is playing with fire, as his friend Page perhaps has realized, being a balanced husband himself: ‘Be not extreme in submission / As in offence’.27 The concatenation of the play is little less than granitic in spite of being interspersed with curtailed scenes and disconnected lines – editors are still debating them – which denote a previous drafting. If all the later and last works of Shakespeare pivot on hoaxes and on their staging, Merry Wives is a superior orchestration of the model, with intersections perfectly devised among the many parallel actions. It is the play par excellence of ongoing jokes laid out in a triple climax, with the two merry wives of Windsor, Ford and Page, deserving the epithet of sui generis jokers. But it also one of the most parodic and therefore richest in quotations and references, veiled, hidden and vague or sometimes explicit, to literary and theatrical works well known to contemporary audiences, from Marlowe to Sidney to Spenser. The epilogue is a vague and free reworking in the style of the Faerie Queene. Falstaff ’s counterparts are those paragons from mythology (Actaeon, Empedocles, Jupiter as a bull) and from the Bible

26 For this very reason Merry Wives may sound like a farcical or grotesque parody of the revenge play: Mrs Ford’s lines in II.1.63–6, extrapolated, sound Hamletic chords (‘How shall I be revenged on him? I think the best way were to entertain him with hope, till the wicked fire of lust have melted him [Falstaff ] in his own grease)’. Ford’s language at the prospect of being betrayed is equally apocalyptic throughout the play. 27 It is however strange that Page is short-sighted and senseless enough to favour the foolish Slender and choose him to be his daughter’s husband.

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(David and Goliath) to whom he continually refers, unaware – or halfaware – that they will be gainsaid. 2. Of Love’s Labour’s Lost there is but one; here the opening fireworks come across as slightly damp and prove a rather pathetic failure. The mispronunciation of English by the Welsh parson and the French doctor generates weary if not stale double meanings, at times sexual, and equally predictable or over-abstruse, far-fetched misunderstandings. They would have been better appreciated in smaller doses. However, there are those who use the language intelligently, while others, such as Nym, use it stupidly and obtusely, endlessly repeating some senseless expression. So The Merry Wives does not enthral until Act III and until the dropping of the animated bickering of the two strangers for the hand of the lovely Anne Page.28 The concatenations of the plot are the courting of the latter by three suitors, the foolish Slender (supported by both the girl’s mother and the factotum Mrs Quickly; the latter can wind anyone round her little finger, double- and triple-crossing the three hopefuls, and keeping them on tenterhooks), Dr Caius and the young popinjay Fenton, lacking any supporter but Anne herself. Fenton and Anne are only apparently the naïve and freshly ingenuous characters typical of comedy and melodrama. The main overlap is that between the prank that the Ford and Page ladies devise and the show set up by Ford, who wants to catch his wife in flagrant adultery. In both cases the device, yet again, is that of theatre within the theatre, and the term used is in fact ‘sport’. The direction of the two-party show falls to the wives. They must first expose the lustful old satyr, but in order to get two birds with one stone they must at the same time arouse the jealousy of their husbands, always ready to see things in the very worst light, thus effecting a second therapeutic move. The final moral will be that every astute deviser of a joke must look over his or her shoulder, since in joking one may well end up as the object of another joke. In thinking up the prank and talking to Mrs Page, Mrs Ford expressly and consciously uses theatrical terms such as prompts, catcalls, the performance itself, as if in 28 The legal action started against Falstaff by the country justice, Shallow, also comes to nothing. Shallow is another character retrieved from the previous Henry IV plays, with identical marks of the elderly lover recalling his youthful infatuations.

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a set script. The first joke, when on Ford’s appearance Falstaff is hurriedly stuffed into the basket of dirty linen to be taken to the river for laundering, fits into the second, which is a performance or trick rather than a joke, since Ford wants to catch Falstaff in the act. In practice Falstaff is the tool of the two pranks, with the two Fords, husband and wife, engaged in a trial of strength. The already-mentioned prompt is that Mrs Page pretends to be scandalized at the adultery taking place between Mrs Ford and Falstaff. On the other hand, neither knows that Ford has devised an opposing scheme to unmask – not Falstaff but his own adulterer wife by disguising himself as Brook29 (forewarned by Nym and Pistol, who have been sacked by Falstaff for insubordination). The scene is a superlative pantomime crowned by the entrance of Ford, in turn disappointed because he does not uncover the guilty party, so the two women win hands down. Later, in narrating the outcome of the scene to Brook, Falstaff, not knowing that he is Ford, also uses theatrical terms (Brook ‘spoke the prologue of our comedy’). In the second joke Mrs Ford’s expedient is ingenious in having the laundry basket carried out once more without Falstaff inside, to trick her husband, who has the basket emptied but doesn’t find the guilty party. Falstaff brazenly escapes the house disguised as the maid’s aunt, with Ford beating the daylights out of her. The third joke verges on a pageant which might be magic were not everyone aware of the fabulous nature of the story of Herne, the hunter with the horns. The planned denouement is to dovetail with the happy ending of Anne Page’s courtship, and each of the supporters of the three suitors believes the night is propitious for his/her candidate. The end of the joke can be nothing but an accelerated pantomime, with two of the tricked suitors, Slender and Caius, carrying off the woman each believes is his bride. Once Falstaff has been dealt with, each boasts of having married Anne to the candidate he or she supported, but the trickster is tricked in a further game. Falstaff admits to having been tricked, but what remains of his vanity is destroyed by the two wives, who repeat that, even had they wanted to sin, never would they have given 29 A surname rightly translated in Verdi’s libretto for Falstaff as ‘caro signor Fontana’. In fact, in an atmosphere leaning towards farce, Falstaff should act as Viola-Cesario for Orsino in Twelfth Night.

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themselves to such as Falstaff. The supreme play on hoaxes, The Merry Wives also shows a remarkable gusto for disguises, from Falstaff ’s to the horrendous ‘fat woman of Brainford’ to the female attire used by the two lads, accomplices in the joke near Herne’s oak. § 43. ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ The first lines of All’s Well that Ends Well (staged in 1602 or 1603, published in 1623) seem to promise a romantic comedy, or rather a fantastic romance, since it is a celebration of a heroine’s devotion to her thwarted love and her stubborn battle against the conventions of rank, a battle happily won and crowned through clear-headedness, wit and initiative. This is therefore a play full of movement, rather than static and concentric. The characters on stage are few, but space is expanded, and those characters move and zigzag through various geographic points of the Continent, Rossillion, Paris, Florence and Marseilles. Such turnarounds are too numerous and too unexpected; but if this play is not one of the greatest, it is because it contains elements that are on the whole mechanical and specious, mainly taken from the repertory of the marvellous, the adventurous and the allegorical. Apparently Shakespeare fails, indeed he draws a blank, on his own ground or at least on the ground where he often gets things so very right, that is the scene inserted to slow down the pace, and purely consisting of a verbal duel and a contest in witticisms. There are a number of such scenes, here dull and feeble, that make us neither laugh nor smile nor understand why they were put in in the first place, since they are so colourless and pieces of pedantic virtuosity. It is unusual, or less usual, for Shakespeare to investigate the relationship between a mother and a son, and the vicarious paternity exercised by a benign king, paternal indeed but ill, albeit very wise. The Countess of Rossillion has just been widowed and her son Bertram orphaned. This results on his side in intolerance, underlying insecurity, diffidence and a psychic block.30 The King of France might in turn remind one of 30 At the start of the play Bertram is still an adolescent, apparently suffering from an Oedipus complex, seeing that his mother is so morbidly attached to him. The countess’s advice to Bertram recalls that of Claudius to Hamlet: to put behind him the grief for his father’s death. As is hinted towards the end of the play, Bertram’s later

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Amfortas of the Nibelung myth: he has a wound that will not heal, therefore suffers from an incurable ailment, but is cured; and he is no resigned fatalist. However, gradually a different and bitterer overtone is infused into the romance. It no longer seems pure comedy, but one of Shakespeare’s dark and gloomy works, since it dwells luridly on the ineluctable dominance of lust and on the multiple and reiterated acts of ignobility to which its victim must give way – a victim that is male for the most part, but indirectly and secretly female as well. Helena is modelled on Isabella in Measure for Measure without being either a nun or a novice. She is honest but in order to confront the fickleness and erotic frailty of the male she is willing to put into practice the principle of omnia munda mundis (a motto which could be the title for the play itself ); or at least to skate on very thin ice. It is a fact that many of the dialogues, at times hardly needful for the basic theme, flutter around erotic impulse, right from the verbal conflict between Helena and Parolles in Act I. Here Helena dares to ask him how women can defend their virginity; perhaps a very early forerunner of a Wilde character, Parolles wittily advises the girl to lose her virginity. But behind the current of Parolles’ speech is Helena’s worry that Bertram may lose his own virginity at court.31 The allegory underlying the play is more Wagnerian than Wildean, though, since it is the degeneration of human nature due to the dominance of the flesh, something of which the King of France above all is woefully aware. His long speech (I.2) on moral rectitude, the integrity of the previous age, and the inconstancy and frivolity of the young, deplores the degeneracy of the times and its mores. Even his farewell to the warriors on their departure for Florence exudes the same sense of the decline and collapse of a civilization based on values. The king criticizes Bertram for being a slave to appearances: virtue is of the virtuous, no matter of what social class; the times advised and imposed rigid distinctions of rank. Bertram’s arrogance in marrying Helena, but reserving

31

sexual disorders are due to a refusal on the part of a girl his own age, daughter of a high court dignitary. In I.3 the countess is dealing with the clown who wants to marry the scullery maid Isbel. The underlying theme is overpowering lust, marked by the devil’s imprint. Here the clown is covertly contesting the Puritan idea of sex.

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the right not to consummate the marriage, is for the king the outcome of changing times. If not exactly an Amfortas, the King of France is then a sort of King Arthur, the weak, prostrate Arthur of later romantic mythologies. The most recurrent metaphor, or the prevailing metaphorical field, is that of incurable disease, starting from the king’s (a mysterious ‘fistula’) and extending to sexual disease. ‘Art can never ransom nature / From her inaidable estate’. The king is in fact morbidly worried by sexual danger, and warns the soldiers on their departure for Florence against Italian women, who will actually show themselves to be more upright and stronger than the prurient French soldiers.32 2. The King of France’s ailment launches two interconnected actions. Only the magic prescription of a dead doctor can heal him and does so, and the medicine is administered by Helena herself, the doctor’s daughter, vainly in love with Prince Bertram who scorns and repulses her. The reward given her by the king for her miraculous cure is to choose the husband she prefers, and she chooses Bertram. Obedient to the king, Bertram marries her while swearing never to have sexual relations with her as long as he lives. As a result, he immediately sends his bride back to his mother in Rossillion,33 enrols as a French soldier and, in company with the feather-headed Parolles, takes to the field in defence of the Duke of Florence against the forces of Siena. Meanwhile the traditional roles of courtship have been reversed: it is the woman not the man who chooses, and it is the man not the woman who claims self-determination. The play is spurred on by Helena’s stratagems to seduce her legitimate spouse, to make him consummate the marriage and to win him over as her husband, thus framing romantic love within the bourgeois pattern. But this action is delayed by some incidental happenings. In an idle, roundabout way a clown babbles on and on with the countess of Rossillion, and Bertram leaves in the company of the wordmonger Parolles, who vaunts courage and daring in war without having an iota of 32 33

On leaving, Bertram receives double catechizing, from the king and from his mother, with advice and counsel very similar to that given to Laertes by Polonius in Hamlet. There is a dark, morbid turn to the maternal affection of the countess for Helena, arousing the suspicion that she is in fact her natural mother and that she may want to favour an incestuous relationship with her own son.

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either, thus drawing attention to himself. He slowly becomes an exact alter ego of Falstaff, and if this is true, Bertram is yet more reckless and weaker than the young Henry V, being confused, hesitant and immature. This is a genuine analogy, and one which, as we shall see, becomes unmistakable at the end of the comedy. The Florentine plot, from Act III, declines into unlikelihood and is and sounds like a free but failed prompt from Boccaccio. Appointed the leader of the Florentine cavalry, Bertram returns from battle while a widow and her daughter Diana, courted by Bertram, wait to greet him at the city gate, right at the moment when Helena arrives dressed as a pilgrim and travelling towards the shrine of St James of Compostela – though somewhat out of her way.34 This coincidence is just too perfect and gratuitous, and results in a detour, however unconvincing, towards sensationalism. Acts III and IV alternate along two parallel developments. Bertram’s attempted seduction of Diana gets under way but closes after the joke of the drum, of which more later. It is in III.6 that similarities with the scenes of Falstaff ’s exposure in his three plays become more evident. This is why the artifice of the theatre within the theatre is re-used, in a scene at last sparkling and witty, where fine rhetorical strategies are used to stimulate Parolles to boasting, thereby rendering his downfall more appealing. Bertram resembles Henry V, as I mentioned, because it is here that he begins to distance himself from Parolles and become self-aware. Convinced by his comrades in arms to retrieve the lost drum from the enemy camp, Parolles shows himself as the lover of words that he denies being but that his name reveals. The ambush is devised and then carried out by means of ‘parolles’, that is invented words without meaning – yet very evocative in themselves – to simulate the idea that it is an ambush by enemy mercenaries. Asked to recount the undertaking, Parolles gives false and negative opinions without suspecting, blindfolded as he is, in whose presence he finds himself; and he even announces he is willing to betray Bertram. In the end his blindfold is removed and he is mocked; but, like Falstaff, he takes it more or less in good part.

34 Cf. what Praz 1969, 83, has to say in this regard, reviewing a 1962 book by the critic G. Lambin.

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3. Diana’s temptation in turn gives rise to a second mise en scène. Helena informs the Florentine widow of her identity and proposes to lie with Bertram, who will believe her to be Diana (the much-used, often mentioned ‘bed trick’); as a reward she gives her a substantial dowry. The ingenious solution, devised by Shakespeare the perhaps Catholic casuist, is a winwin situation: such an encounter would not in fact violate any religious commandment, for Helena will lie with Bertram, even though Bertram unquestionably commits a mortal sin not in fact but in intention – a sin in thought, recalling the Creed. Bertram will lie with his wife, believing her to be a mistress; the mistress will be believed a slut without being one, and Helena will have legitimately lain with her husband misleading him, while enjoying a right sanctioned by the sacrament of marriage. The preliminaries to the encounter allow full range to Bertram’s increasingly fiery desire and he loses his head, while Diana is anything but ingenuous and yielding, at first resisting him. Obviously prevented from representing sexual intercourse in act, Shakespeare has the encounter retold by two secondary characters. These two also say that Helena is presumed dead, indeed she has certainly died, and that, the Florentine war being at an end, the French company has returned home. Performance within performance is the epilogue. At Rossillion, the countess learns of Helena’s presumed death and assigns Bertram, who agrees, a new bride, the daughter of a dignitary. The king, on his own part, must make the best of a bad job. It is at this point that Shakespeare sets up one of those excessively protracted, almost dramatically sadistic, or masochistic, denouements aimed on the one hand to show how difficult and risky it is to discover the truth however obvious it may be, and how appearance may win the day; and on the other, to keep suspense alive and kicking, perhaps overdoing it. Strange but true, Bertram either does not realize that the ring given back to him by Diana (i.e. by Helena) was not his, or else he wants to pretend it is his, thus inventing that it was thrown to him from a window in Florence.35 Coming on stage, Diana claims she has been seduced by the count, and 35

This is the final appearance of this diegetic, fabulous and anthropological element: one of the two clauses in the marriage contract is that Bertram will consummate the marriage when the family heirloom ring is taken from him by Helena.

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shows another ring, a family heirloom, worn by Bertram on his finger. An apparently insoluble enigma is how Diana, who really does recite her role perfectly, can be chaste yet sinning, having lain with Bertram as she claims, and how Bertram can have Helena’s ring, the latter – we are told – never having been in Florence. Bertram in theory could have promised to marry Diana, Helena being believed dead, but Parolles claims it is pure and simple adultery. When the situation has left everybody totally bewildered, Helena reappears and all ends well.36

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With a sort of ‘Hermione effect’ from The Winter’s Tale.

The Romances and the Apocryphal Plays

§ 44. The romances and the apocryphal plays It is hardly credible that around 1608 Shakespeare might appear to be in decline, given that just a few years, if not a few months, previously he had reached the climax of his dramaturgy in various plays. On the contrary, he reveals in the new genre of romances an even greater constructive skill, even an ability never before displayed in planning and harmonizing the various synchronic and stereophonic plots and subplots, and in preparing, as usual abruptly and diatonically, further developments. It has been repeatedly noted that these romances are eminently narrative and no longer static, since they drew on Alexandrian sources filled with adventurous, sensational, exciting events, and on a kind of revival of Sidney. Such an atmosphere lasted well after 1608, when a plague epidemic briefly closed all theatres. When they re-opened, Shakespeare’s company probably expressly asked him to respond to certain successes of other playwrights in this reborn adventurous genre. The anonymous Mucedorus was on everyone’s lips; without having anything to do with Sidney, the title evoked Sidney’s second hero, Musidorus; thus it was a fine piece of wit on Shakespeare’s part to reply in Pericles with a hint of Pyrocles, Sidney’s other hero in his romance. In this sense, the most daring initiative of compressing a long plot in a drama is The Winter’s Tale, so much so that it was believed to be a play in two parts – something found in Marston and Dekker, as well as in the chronicle plays – later reduced to one single part. Those who assume Shakespeare’s decline argue that he was by then feeling his age, and following the vague and the vogue of the fantastic he showed that he no longer wished to break new ground, thus ceasing to be a landmark for imitators. Proof of this, they maintain, is that he was by then a camouflaged Shakespeare, difficult to spot and distinguish with any certainty with respect to collaborators, and that he might indeed have inspired his contemporaries, yet he might also have been inspired by them. In reality, Shakespeare was not yet fifty and had never been stronger. 2. The last four romances are crucial for anyone seeking to illuminate the author behind and within the work. Shakespeare returns to the father-son/daughter relationship, to human ingratitude and above all to the representation of psychic feebleness and instability. He builds an almost systematic phenomenology or psychosis of adultery. Should we lend credence

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to the idea that these plays were personal exorcisms, the result would be an alarming picture of wretchedness and perversions, including incest. In Greene’s Pandosto, the source for The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare found a protagonist who kills himself worn out by the horror of an incestuous passion, a tragic end he eschewed in his version. All in all we might suspect him of having harboured and damped down throughout his life that conjugal episode debated at length by Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses, the adultery of his wife with a brother. Only a person having undergone such affliction and such atrociously acute suffering, it has been said, would return so obsessively to it in the attempt to objectivize it. Suspicion on Leontes’ possible impotence evaporates with the fact that he generated Mamillius and, recently, Perdita; yet he must still feel unable to satisfy his wife sexually. It is therefore a mistake to diagnose Leontes as a latent homosexual on the basis of his recollection of a blissful Eden-like childhood passed with Polixenes. Human communities, oppressed by suspicions and manias, are taken to the very verge of the abyss in this last phase, yet in all four cases Shakespeare magically, perhaps provisionally, sets everything right. 3. Of course it must be taken into account that Shakespeare was also writing Henry VIII and concluding his career with this objectivizing historical play, and that he had collaborated on other works which, as we shall see, lie beyond yet at the same time within this mediated, potentially autobiographical framework. Pericles was taken from Gower, who had narrated not of a Pericles but of an Apollonius of Tyre in Confessio Amantis; this source, not unusually, was contaminated with other elements taken from obscure, little-known works such as that of a certain George Wilkins. Pericles is one of those cases in which the source may become and appear the resulting, rather than the inspiring, work. Recent and less recent editors have in fact had recourse to the expedient of mixing Wilkins with Shakespeare, borrowing passages from the former’s novel and fitting them into places where the diction of the Shakespearean play seems awkward or rough. Textually Pericles is a famous anomaly: absent from the 1623 Folio, it has come down to us in two 1609 bad quartos and other faulty folios, raising not unfounded suspicions that at least the first two acts were written by others, with Shakespeare taking over only from the third. It was in fact excluded from the canon until the 1778 Malone edition. There has even

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been the hypothesis, as for Hamlet, of an Ur-Pericles which Shakespeare adapted. Cymbeline too, mixing Holinshed, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Boccaccio (a novella about a Bernabò da Genova, perhaps derived from a ‘Frederyke of Jennen’ in High German, translated into English in 1518), might have inspired, or may have imitated, a play by Fletcher, Philaster. ‘Imogen’ is a printing or transcription mistake for the ‘Innogen’ of many chronicles in Middle English, the name of the wife of Brutus, the Trojan founder of the new Troy, not the daughter of Cymbeline. It is therefore true that Posthumus is Ascanius, son of Aeneas, according to English historiography; but there is a prevailing general opinion that Imogen is too sublime a bride for such an anonymous, shallow, untrustworthy husband. Historical evaluations of it are controversial, and Cymbeline was consigned under dustcovers and even rewritten by Shaw, but considered de chevet and a gem by other critics, including the present author. In The Winter’s Tale some situations and dramatic events are taken from other plays and camouflaged, and it seems that by now Shakespeare is an iridescent or crazy kaleidoscope where everything is confounded with everything else. Of all the inversions, transformations and alterations with respect to Greene’s Pandosto – several of them technically and dramaturgically functional – two respond to a criterion of likelihood that we might call anthropological: Leontes reforms and repents, and it is to be noticed – Italians are likely to feel all the cultural associations – that the ideal region of overwhelming, blinding and impassioned jealousy is Sicily and not Bohemia. The Tempest was also a work shortened from a longer one, as shown by three foregoing events summarized in as many récits. Its sources were surprisingly oral and also the Italian commedia dell’arte, merged with details of the shipwreck of the seafarer Somers in Bermuda in 1609, found in a 1610 news report Shakespeare saw in manuscript.1 It was written in Stratford and Shakespeare was not in charge of the staging. This is the Shakespearean work that after Hamlet has inspired the greatest number of adaptors, musicians and filmmakers, as well as theatre directors. It never fails to stimulate extremist critical interpretations, such as that which sees in Caliban Prospero’s id, 1

Volume 1, § 161.2 n. 3. On the whereabouts of Prospero’s island cf. § 48.6 and n. 34.

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and with whom Prospero feels kinship, shadowing forth that underground autobiographical motif – incest – that comes and goes on the surface. § 45. ‘Pericles’* Staged in 1608,2 printed the next year, Pericles is in the whole Shakespearean canon the romance most replete with pure and simple sensationalism, the one most overflowing with fantastic, amazing vicissitudes and dizzyingly sudden changes of scene. The playwright seems to have thrown himself headlong and unrestrainedly into this game for the mere pleasure of playing. It also seems the most elementary fable, the most educational script with the most facile moral and the limpest pathos possible, with the most predictable happy ending and the most conventional of messages conceivable. It would therefore seem ipso facto the most superficial and mechanical play ever produced by Shakespeare, hindered from further expanding and delving into both plot and character by the same hectic diegetic rhythm he has imposed upon himself. So it seems, and so it is, although in part it is not so. It is true that the play is a real scenic tour de force. It in fact alternates on, and rebounds among, such cardinal points, all within a fantastic, pre-Christian Asia Minor, as Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, Pentapolis, Mytilene. Pericles is therefore also the most exotic of Shakespeare’s exotic plays, albeit its exoticism is entirely

*

F. Kermode, William Shakespeare: The Final Plays: ‘Pericles’, ‘Cymbeline’, ‘The Winter’s Tale’, ‘The Tempest’, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’, London 1963, later incorporated into Renaissance Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, London 1971, 219–59; J. Beneke, Metaphorik im Drama: dargestellt an Shakespeares ‘Pericles’ und ‘Cymbeline’, Bonn 1975; I. Dutz, Shakespeares ‘Pericles’ und ‘Cymbeline’ in der Bildkunst, Bern 1976; H. W. Fawkner, Shakespeare’s Miracle Plays: ‘Pericles’, ‘Cymbeline’, and ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Rutherford, NJ 1992; D. Skeele, Thwarting the Wayward Seas: A Critical and Theatrical History of Shakespeare’s ‘Pericles’ in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Newark, DE and London 1998; ‘Pericles’: Critical Essays, ed. D. Skeele, New York and London 2000; M. P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: ‘Pericles’ as Test Case, Oxford 2003.

2

Unquestionably: it was seen in London by the Venetian ambassador before 23 November 1608.

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domesticated; and it is also the play that most brazenly violates the time unity, spreading the internal events across a period of at least twenty years. In this case Shakespeare not only has no scruples in imitating one of his predecessors – the poet John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer’s; he also borrows and implements the aesthetic commandment Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius. In and with this play, as if spiritually copying them, we revert to those ‘metrical romances’ in Middle English, famous or rather infamous for their excess of pure romantic adventures, their stylistic and prosodic carelessness and their thematic anonymity. That motto means that the older the material, the better; in other words it means that the content of the play is known and its merit does not lie in its novelty. Reduced to its basic moral, we have in Pericles a noble, upright prince in search of a lost wife; unjustly punished by fate, he miraculously retrieves wife and daughter. His constancy, innocence and chastity are rewarded in two of the most triumphant and extended denouements in Shakespeare’s drama: a moral which for this reason hails even purely natural justice in human things and, in the Manichaean conflict, the final victory of good. 2. Through John Gower, who speaks the prologues to the five acts,3 the dramaturgic aesthetic announced is the clearest, the barest and the most primordial: to entertain and above all, as in Baroque aesthetics, to surprise, marvel, and amaze not only with language addressing the ears, but by awakening the sense of sight. The spectator is literally catapulted into scenarios distant from his own, carried there on the wings of the prologues. The distancing effect is controlled and therefore partial, since the prologue makes us aware that the succeeding scenarios are credible only through such flights of the imagination. In the prologue to Act IV Gower specifies that all the characters, through dramatic licence, speak one language, and that language is English. The horrors too – and the horrors here could well rival those in Titus Andronicus – are mock atrocities, innocuous because wrapped in a sort of filter; and they are mostly horrors due to crimes believed to have happened, but which fortunately did not happen. The first contradiction comes from a dramaturgical technique that is not

3

There was a previous recourse to this device in Henry V (§ 15.2).

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revolutionary but accentuates tried and tested solutions. There are many prologues in Shakespeare, but here they are placed in the mouth of one back from the dead, the ghost of Gower. Through a pleasing parody of his own Confessio Amantis he rises from the tomb and speaks in decasyllables and couplets or other prosodies, not only to prepare the audience and reveal certain aesthetic key points, but also to direct the show with his wand. There are two hypostases of Prospero, and the first is Gower himself since he adjusts, administers and distributes the scenes, brings on the characters in turn and alternates the theatres of action; more importantly he trims the plot, lengthens, tunes and co-ordinates it, as arranger and director.4 Decidedly novel and unprecedented is however the expedient of the interludes in the form of pantomime, almost solely actions, fast and stylized, therefore described in a stage direction, and which – the old poser of the theatre – could not be expressed in dialogues, but only narrated and described. Furthermore, Pericles is the most filmic of Shakespeare’s plays, for its script is already a screenplay, with the voice off commenting on the scenes and nonchalantly summarizing, selecting, up-dating.5 The pace of the play is mixed, some scenes slowing down (like the final denouement), others accelerating. But the speed suddenly increases when Pericles unexpectedly hears music, falls asleep and has a vision, then immediately after decides to sail for Pentapolis. Previously, two thirds of the way through the development, a somewhat long-winded episode had been set in motion, the red-light episode of the failed transformation of the purely chaste Marina into a prostitute in Mytilene. In Pericles the number of summary, elliptical and unfocused scenes increases through the dramatic need for economy. 3. That the simple chain of events is followed in all its unpredictability is the second mistaken impression. Rather, reality is shaped in a woof

4

5

The second Prospero is Cerimon, ‘a lord of Ephesus’, the usual voice of Renaissance philosophy. He no longer finds the greatest success in the life of the aristocracy socalled, but in the effective aristocracy, that is, in the virtue and intelligence that works for good. He is a good-natured alchemist, not a necromancer; the ‘resurrection’ of Thaisa, Pericles wife, comes about thanks to him. A ‘special effect’ is the lightning that strikes the wicked tyrant Antiochus and his daughter at the height of their earthly fortune.

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of symmetries, since it is only through these that the underlying meaning emerges.6 Antiochus and his daughter, nature turned bad, have their counterparts in a still healthy nature, in Pericles and Marina. Antiochus’ failed attempt to have Pericles killed by a murderer is repeated in Dionyza, who pays Leonine to kill Marina, in this case too unsuccessfully. Thaliard repeats the same probabilistic reasoning as Leonine: Pericles has sailed away, and has probably died in that traditionally treacherous natural element, water; thus he can tell Antiochus that his mission is achieved and escape death. Leonine in turn tells Cleon that Marina is dead, although she has in fact only been kidnapped, alive, by pirates. The pairs of fathers and daughters swell to three with Simonides and Thaisa. There are six knights challenging one another in a tournament for the hand of Thaisa. And there are two storms: the first causes Pericles’ ship to be wrecked at Tarsus; the second is not disastrous but miraculous, as during it Marina is born, and Thaisa dies, but only apparently. In replicating the scene of the murder, attempted but thwarted (IV.1), Shakespeare returns to what is for him a classic situation, the pangs of conscience of the murderer which however are not enough to make him stay his hand. Leonine does not kill, except in intention, because the pirates take action before he can do so. Determined in temperament in his own words but hesitant when it comes to the crunch, Leonine is also a believer who, paradoxically, in carrying out his sinful, traitorous action pleads with his intended victim to pray. These temporary qualms paradoxically throw him into a thorny dilemma and recoil against him while helping to save an innocent life: in order to survive he will have to take a false oath, to the effect that he has really killed the young Marina who, he imagines, will have been slaughtered and thrown to the bottom of the sea. A telling contrast is the scene immediately following, opening in a brothel with the pimps who complain of the need of ‘a conscience to be used in every trade’, which is their work of recruiting fresh, not worn-out, prostitutes. At the end we discover that there have been two deaths and two rebirths or resurrections, therefore two miracles, one apparent and one real: Pericles magically finds the daughter he believed dead, having 6

Macrotextual symmetries as well: Helicanus, for instance, reverses Angelo in Measure for Measure.

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seen her tomb and read the epitaph; and he also finds that his wife, she too believed dead, is alive. 4. Under the modesty of its hypothesis, Pericles touches on issues inherent in the evolution of human institutions and the alternating of political, religious and moral jurisdictions. Confident, utopian, teleological, Shakespeare concludes that the battle to overcome disorder is victorious – on all fronts, in spite of temporary setbacks and much suffering. Pericles is an Everyman who, unaware, tries with all his strength to implement a moral law before the Revelation. At first he is an indomitable Calaf who challenges danger: the heads of the pretenders for Antiochus’ daughter are cut off not by an algid Turandot but by her father himself, to become allusive, dissuasive trophies. At the same time Pericles is an Adam, not just encouraged but dissuaded by a satanic double from picking the forbidden fruit, or the apple of the Hesperides. At the court of Simonides he is however no longer full of initiative but sluggish and paralysed. At Tarsus he is like a Ulysses at sea after so much wandering, while here he is a fearful Aeneas, resigned, bowed down and subjected to divine will or fate. Indeed he becomes discouraged, overcome, catatonic, an unshaven hermit with long, unkempt hair, wearing sackcloth, and wandering in search of death and inanition. In this far-off, fabled primordial era of civilization, Shakespeare tracks down the conflict between man and his beast-like impulses. Under analysis here is a stain never before seen and for the first time encountered in Shakespeare,7 incest. Incest is yet another, or the last variant of the beast’s impulse and of human lust (there is no incest in animals). This perversion is achieved with the consent of both those involved (Antiochus and his daughter); but it is the king who tempts his daughter and causes her to sin. Incest is therefore execrated as an act against nature, on a par with cannibalism in I.1, and he who commits it is a poisonous serpent. Mytilene is placed en abyme in a brothel where long, squalid negotiations are carried out. Everything is fetid and corrupt, with even the city governor a sly customer who demands healthy virgins who will not transmit the syphilis virus. This city, however, is a brothel out of an eastern fairy-tale, where the customers all of a sudden 7

Unless allusively and hypothetically, as I argue in § 43.2 n. 33, in All’s Well that Ends Well.

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become pious. Even the governor Lysimachus reforms and marries the young Marina who, like a future martyr, resists all attempts to make her a prostitute and converts those around her. Lysimachus develops into one of the dei ex machina, an anti litteram St Augustine; although his past does not bear scrutiny, Shakespeare happily turns a blind eye on it. 5. Mytilene is redeemed, Tyre and Ephesus have always been model principalities, and the three city-states are an example to a socio-political theatre dominated by bad government. In the opening scene Pericles denounces a certain oriental or indeed generalized corruption: it is difficult to fight against perverse, wicked practices since the damage would be greater than the remedy. Antiochus’ regime is despotic, tyrannical, above all idolatrous. In the Asiatic area it is a strong reign in spite of, or because of, being tyrannical and therefore intrinsically fragile, but its days are counted. Tyre is a weak vassal state because it is democratic and virtuous. Pericles of Tyre takes care of his subjects and protects them, and his regime flourishes and resists because it abstains from the bane of politics, adulation. Unusually, during his absence an upright deputy governs, the figure of the frank Helicanus. Pericles is therefore an anti-Machiavellian sovereign who serves the community and makes the prince a servant, without hiding his faults or making them appear virtues. Antiochus looms as the embodiment of tyranny, with mellifluous yet blood-thirsty methods, while Pericles is caring and uncorrupted. His exile is not due to a caprice, lack of preparation or indifference; it is a political measure required by necessity. In Tarsus the idea is clear of an instable, restless area where one despotic power threatens nearby states, and might invade and overrun them, exterminating them overnight through mere expansionist greed.8 The first scene of Act II is the proverbial scene in Shakespeare, that of the anonymous walk-ons. A number of resigned but clear-headed fishermen wonderfully describe the similarity between the natural reign and that of humans, and pessimistically acknowledge the presence of a whale that always eats the smaller fish. These fishermen are, deep down, revolutionaries who can forgive no feature of a system where the aggressive, the dishonest and the 8

Pericles the ambassador of civilization donates corn to the city of Tarsus, where a famine forces the inhabitants to become cannibals.

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cunning always win. However, having just repelled the shipwrecked Pericles with suspicion and diffidence, they end up comforting and aiding him. The episode of Simonides’ tourney celebrates the survival, or rather the foresight, of an exquisite courtly code, of noble, modest contestants who do not seek the limelight and are entirely fair. Nor does Helicanus seize his chance of taking power during the absence of Pericles, even when the subjects and the nobles encourage him to do so. As always, in Shakespeare civil society coalesces solely through unity of intent. § 46. ‘Cymbeline’* If the raison d’être of Shakespeare’s theatre is close though never parasitic dependence on the sources, Shakespeare makes his own previous plays the very source of Cymbeline (staged in 1609, printed in 1623), while relying as always for ideas and storyline on a definite external rather than internal source. The Shakespearean connoisseur will therefore distinctly perceive surfacing within his memory figures, roles, archetypes and stage scripts that he finds of course varied and transformed. Cymbeline is thus an admirable, paradigmatic example of a remake within the Shakespearean canon itself. It is the twin or cousin of many previous works, and the combination serves once more to touch and focus on long-time nerve centres of Shakespearean inspiration, such as the parent-child relationship, the conflict between chaos and order and between civilization and barbarism, the allegory of politics and community life, the mystery of the divine government of the world and therefore the meaning of history, and the nature of sexuality. The crucial variant is the happy ending. A threatening hint of tragedy, in Cymbeline, turns magically into an elegiac, romantic and transfigured *

N. T. Carrington, Shakespeare: ‘Cymbeline’, London 1954; G. Almansi, Il ciclo della scommessa: dal ‘Decameron’ al ‘Cymbeline’ di Shakespeare, Roma 1976; C. Abartis, The Tragicomic Construction of ‘Cymbeline’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Salzburg 1977; D. R. C. Marsh, The Recurring Miracle: A Study of ‘Cymbeline’ and the Last Plays, Sydney 1980; H. R. Danson Brown and D. Johnson, Shakespeare 1609: ‘Cymbeline’ and the Sonnets, Basingstoke 2000; R. King, ‘Cymbeline’: Constructions of Britain, Aldershot 2005. See also Kermode 1963, Beneke 1975, Dutz 1976 and Fawkner 1992, cited in the bibliography for Pericles.

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atmosphere, ending in a festive, sumptuous pageant with surreal effects, illusions and enchantments; and tragedy tones down into play. All in all, Cymbeline is an anthological and recapitulatory work. Nothing apparently is new, everything has a precedent or a parallel, and many are the links with this play or that, and above all with this tragedy or that; but the outcome is that Shakespeare has become more indulgent and objective, and almost composes a palinode. With respect to the tragedies, he has foregone that high price in the form of physical and moral damage and death demanded as holocaust and for punishment by the re-establishment of order and justice. Vicious nature or the viciousness of nature, or simply the diabolical or the fatal, are set in motion, but the epidemic is less severe, the slaughter is contained, the bacillus is less lethal. Shakespeare uses the same ingredients to make a much sweeter dough, where previously he prepared bitter-sweet or unpalatable dishes. Justice and not iniquity is sought, and at the end it is issued and ordered by the unfathomable divine government of the world and by that same ‘air’, avenger for what has happened (V.2.4). All the characters on stage, dressed in new attire, compete with each other in doing favours and in well-wishing, and the villain Iachimo is forced to repent, which he does with such supererogatory impetus that it seems miraculous. And Shakespeare basks in this climate of recovered and rediscovered human nobility. 2. Cymbeline comes from the reservoir of the ‘metrical romances’ on material from Celtic Britain which fill the thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury canon in Middle English. By its very nature, such material is at the crossroads of the historical and the legendary. Based on this one could stretch it and make Cymbeline a fourth or fifth Roman play set in Britain. The anachronisms found in that textuality abound and are reflected here without changes. The historical time is that of Emperor Augustus, the first ten years of the Christian era. At stake is the tribute of the Britons who try to resist and indeed momentarily repulse the Romans’ punitive raid; but the climate is that of reciprocal respect, with a Roman domination that is enlightened and ‘courtly’. In such a political framework, the dignified, proud independence of Shakespeare’s ancestors against the colonizers and invaders is recalled, as well as the ancient meekness of Celtic Britain. Posthumus is a disguised Troilus or even a Hector from Troilus and Cressida,

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and in fact he challenges a Roman, convinced that his woman is the most virtuous according to the code of chivalry; hence through her virtue alone he will be victorious in the challenge. Dominators and subjects, like the Trojans and the Greeks, are today friends, tomorrow bitter enemies in the application of that self-same code. Troilus and Cressida appears indeed to be fresh in the playwright’s memory not only for certain literal references (as in IV.2.251–2), but also in the repetition of the exchange of gifts and pledges of eternal fidelity between Imogen and Posthumus and thus for the reappearance of the theme of constancy in love. Constancy, this time, is endangered only through chance, through the fury of the diabolical and even the improvident naïvety of the young couple. Posthumus is the first to play with fire. From Rome, Iachimo brings to Cymbeline’s court a letter from Posthumus to Imogen, a letter in which nothing is revealed to her of the wager (that she will, or will not, fall to the seduction of an insistent suitor). In this way Posthumus is part-creator of the plan leading to his own downfall; an honest, decent young husband, he is also naïve. The main instigator of the deception is just this rash man, and this deception consists in disinformation, which in Shakespeare is often lethal, but this time perfectly and consciously devised. Imogen and Posthumus have the same exuberant, thoughtless hurry as Juliet and Romeo, and the same brashness, without expressing it with the euphuistic complacency of their play. Romeo and Juliet’s epilogue is just about to be recalled and re-enacted in Imogen’s reawakening in Act IV after she has taken a drug she believed to be poison, and finding beside her a sort of Romeo in the shape of the effectively dead Cloten, a suitor she has pitilessly refused, dressed however in the same clothes as her beloved. At the beginning the two lovebirds, just married, coo happily together embodying that rara avis, the sparklingly happy newlyweds, one of the Shakespearean options of human love. They represent fidelity against any fall to temptation, promiscuity and sexual debasement; they symbolize purity and chastity up to heroic sublimation. For this very reason, there is really little authentically sexual in Cymbeline. The two protagonists are romantic lovers, Iachimo is an impotent voyeur, Cloten a braggart who wants to ‘penetrate’ Imogen by deputy and trusts to the seductive power of music. Cymbeline’s queen is in turn a minor, clumsy Lady Macbeth who exclusively targets power and the succession to the

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throne of her own son by her first marriage, the same Cloten. She has a heart of stone and does nothing but plot and plan; news of her death, as in Macbeth, is communicated to the king by a doctor. But she cannot be compared to that grandiose character for she is only her innocuous parody. With King Lear and Othello the derivation is most evident and unmistakable. With respect to Lear, Cymbeline has not negotiated his daughter’s marriage with two suitors, but he has exiled her husband on discovering her disobedience. Like Lear, Cymbeline is afflicted by lack of judgement and falls prey to attacks of uncontrollable rage which cloud his mind; he may get better, if this is the diagnosis. His first foray into madness was twenty years before when he adopted the orphan Posthumus9 as his son; now he drives him out when he becomes his son-in-law. He himself, in fact, has three children from his first wife, two sons and a daughter, and Cordelia and Imogen are one and the same person and undergo the same fate. The king’s two sons were exiled at a tender age and raised in the wood by the banished lord Belarius; instinctively good-natured (and that only because they have been kept away from the court), the two brothers reverse their counterparts in King Lear, Goneril and Regan. It is also equally clear that Cloten and his two half-brothers are a variation on the Edmund-Edgar pair in the same tragedy. But the wicked brother, Cloten, is a good deal less astute than Edmund, being a fool and a vainglorious muddler. Nearly all the second half of the play is set in the wilderness, where the wicked are punished and the just, in disguise, wander about paying for their mistakes, vainly searching for one another. This is a déjà vu episode of woods, virgin forest, false hermits and cavemen who are actually court officials and aristocrats incognito. Having discovered the foundations of existence and the ultimate vanity of the world, they are still awaiting the revenge of and a reward from history with the patience of Penelope. Phantasmagorias happen, fascinating Shakespeare with their stage potential and their 9

Thus named because born posthumously, with Leonatus as his second name, that is, ‘born of a lion’, and in fact an indomitable, brave warrior. That names are omina is confirmed by the etymologist-soothsayer at the end, who explains that mulier comes from mollis aer, the air enveloping Posthumus, that is his bride Imogen, a name which – as I mentioned above – is a printing error for Innogen, a name echoing ‘innocent’.

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fabulous resources, as in King Lear. But reminiscences from other plays also surface. Iachimo is evidently Iago’s paronomasia; were that not enough, he gives Posthumus the idea that Imogen is unfaithful, thus injecting him with the disease of jealousy. As Iachimo boasts of having lain with Imogen, Posthumus believes her unfaithfulness to be proven. Unlike Iago, however, Iachimo has no real, deep-seated emotional motivation. He is no long-time acquaintance of Posthumus’, nor does he desire Imogen: he solely acts because he is envious of Posthumus’ renown as an honest man and a perfect knight, and wants to topple him out of mere devilry. He is a diabolical double as is Iago, diabolical because, with an evident anachronism, and acting on prejudice, he is an ‘Italian’, to be precise ‘Siena’s brother’ (when there were as yet no Italians, only Romans!). As an Italian, Iachimo is a cheap Machiavellian philosopher; the idea of woman’s unshakable constancy has never even crossed his mind, sic et simpliciter, beyond any national specifications (‘any lady in the world’).10 In the allegorical frame, the upright, moral Briton resists against the already corrupt imperial Roman. Imogen’s bracelet is the counterpart to Desdemona’s handkerchief, and Posthumus behaves like Othello, were it not that Cymbeline is a tragicomedy, the two spouses are far from each other, and Pisanio, Posthumus’ servant, ensures a happy ending, even though he has to lie to Posthumus saying that he really did kill Imogen. Or we might say that that bracelet is like Portia’s ring given to Bassanio, then handed on by Bassanio to the fake lawyer in The Merchant of Venice. In the scene of the attempted seduction of Imogen by Iachimo, the latter uses the rhetorical weapons of omission, allusion and aposiopesis, which Imogen decodes even though her self-esteem is cleverly put to the test by the rumour that while she is constant, her husband is having a great time keeping company with prostitutes. In fact the seduction is chiastic compared to the one in Othello: Iachimo injects Imogen, not Posthumus, with jealousy, or perhaps both of them. Iago does not tell Desdemona that Othello is unfaithful to her, at least not explicitly. In the chess game between the two characters, Imogen does not give way nor does she believe, therefore Iachimo changes tactics and sings the praises 10

That is: any lady would fall, if tempted (I.5.109–10).

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of her chastity and of Posthumus’ conviction of her faithfulness, and has recourse to guile and trickery finding his way to seduction barred: that is, he will hide in the trunk. Accordingly, the second scene in Act II is a nontragic repetition of the scene of Desdemona’s murder – only in fact in the intense, prescient preparation of the girl for a night of sleep – without the murder. At the same time, Iachimo rapes the woman not physically but only verbally, with an ecstatic description that echoes that of Cleopatra by Enobarbus. Back in Rome, Posthumus, hearing that Iachimo has lain with Imogen, resists the overpowering evidence better and longer than Othello; but the intimate, malicious detail of the mole below her breast is the last straw. Iachimo has won the battle and can now rub salt into the wound. Posthumus’ exclamations on bastardy invading and possessing the world, and his outburst of misogyny, echo those of Othello. If Iachimo repeats Iago, Pisanio is the faithful, indomitable servant, quite different from Emilia. 3. The internal time of Cymbeline is continuous and contiguous, while space is binary or ternary: Britain and Rome alternate until halfway through the play. Fragmenting the unity of place, at that point a long interlude takes place in woodland near the Welsh coast. The initial rhythm of the play is rapid and sketchy, the pace is quick, enthralling, irregular and without frills, aided by a pleasing concreteness in the monologues and dialogues, some of which anticipate a sort of dramatic stream of consciousness, pivoting on the brevity and suspension of the sentences. But the play gradually worsens. Magical coincidences supervene within other coincidences from Act IV onward, and improbabilities follow improbabilities. One of these is that the cave of Belarius and his presumed children becomes the crossroads where everything happens for a good deal of the second half. Another is that Iachimo, without warning, suddenly turns into a leader who lands in Britain, once more for the single, somewhat implausible reason that he must be present at his reckoning and at his own downfall. A prey to remorse, certain of having caused the death of the innocent Imogen, Posthumus, although he has been the hero of the Britons’ victory, awaits death in prison as a deserter by his own admission, and falls asleep. Here Shakespeare indulges in a debatable supernatural intermezzo making Posthumus have a vision in which the ghosts of his father, mother and siblings appear, all

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asking for compassion for his sufferings as an unhappy orphan. Jove in person descends from on high to show an annoyed epicurean disinterest, indeed a certain degree of sadism, in denying or postponing any reward, yet promising a happy end. This is a plethoric mythological masque, indeed a masque within a masque. Act V is something of a mess, dwelling excessively on the minor roles such as that of the philosophizing jailer; and the scene of the denouement and general pardon is prolonged by an interminable reminiscence – on the part of Iachimo – of his much-claimed yet failed seduction of Imogen, and by Posthumus’ perorations. Too many unsolved issues have to be set right; hence this epilogue is at times vibrant, more often lifeless. 4. As in many of Shakespeare’s later plays, Cymbeline opens within a stylized, fantastic, though more historical court, closely observed and presented simply as an institution and as yet another touchstone. The Shakespearean court par excellence, quite apart from time and place, is the symbolic seat of all that is anti-human. In this court of Cymbeline’s there is no reward for value and honesty. Whoever is virtuous and upright is banned, and the two most virtuous characters, or simply and exceptionally virtuous, get short shrift. The hypocrites, like the queen and Cloten,11 come out on top. Blind class prejudice is the rule. Shakespeare’s voice recommends an ideal interclass, democratic political state in which Posthumus is no longer marginalized and banned as socially ‘low’. A similar allegory hinges on a third character, Belarius, banned twenty years earlier without having committed any crime, simply a victim of slander and envy. The two antithetic spheres and jurisdictions are thus the court as anti-nature, and the woodland, the forest, the heath, the uninhabited world, the mountain and the cave, as genuine nature. The usual connotations are inverted. So-called civilized life is uncivilized and primitive incivility is the only and true civilized life. Actually Shakespeare attenuates on the way his discredit of the court by placing a buffer between the good and the wicked, in the form of redeemable and (in the end) redeemed characters, and even of 11

In the fifth scene of Act III there is another parody of Christ’s temptation by Satan in the desert. Cloten continuously asks the honest servant Pisanio: ‘wilt thou serve me?’ Cloten however remains a pathetic boaster and braggart.

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certain dei ex machina. Pisanio, Posthumus’ servant, is the main one; the good doctor, rightfully suspicious, who places not poison but cordial in the box, is another. Like the servant who in King Lear kills the Duke of Cornwall, this doctor thwarts the queen and her homicidal machinations. Shakespeare thus makes us believe in, and himself looks forward to, the existence of an ancient seed of good, that of the Britons who resisted the Romans, even though they were ultimately very similar themselves to the latter, but certainly more honest than the men of imperial Rome on the downward slope of corruption and loss of values. This Roman spirit was, as in Iachimo, self-satisfied with ruin itself, or too resigned in believing it. That British gene was perhaps weak and naïve, as are Imogen and Posthumus. Shakespeare also aims to idealize exile from civilization in presumed autarchic barbarism. On close inspection the exiled man in the woodland oasis is only a temporary outcast from civilization; he remains a misanthrope only until the moment of reintegration arrives. He execrates the ‘civilization’ of the court, but expects to join it again as soon as it is miraculously reformed, although he is patient, not to say inactive, in bringing it about. But this wait, and this life depending on sustenance given by food found in nature, generate uniquely fascinating intermezzi in Cymbeline. We feel that Shakespeare believed in this utopia, in this need for regeneration, as if he had experienced it himself. Belarius’ wilderness is, as it seems, the place where values must become their own opposites and get straight again; in other words, it represents the reign of Shakespearean mirror-like reflection. One line defines it well: ‘our courtiers say all’s savage but at court’, while the wilderness proves that all is evolved but at court (IV.2.33). That wilderness and court, and court and wilderness, are reversible fields of values is reiterated and proclaimed at the end by Belarius himself: ‘Beaten for loyalty / Excited me to treason’ (V.5.345–6). The whole episode of the three cavemen implies that history’s progress is its regress, economic regress above all, since money has become useless and the regime of the wilderness is purely based on sharing. The two cavemen Guiderius and Arviragus12 are Parsifalian ‘pure fools’. In an admirable dialogic scene one 12

These are Cymbeline’s two sons incognito. Belarius, who seems a wise man if not a Franciscan lay saint, and possesses the real key to life and dispenses it in intelligent

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of them kills Cloten with bold unconcern, cutting off his head without any qualms of conscience, since his legal codes and natural ethics are different. Through some atavistic moral sense,13 he instinctively feels that the wicked and the dangerous should be eliminated. The atonement for this immoral, presumably barbarous act, comes with the exquisite, delicate funeral service held for two bodies, one really dead and the other, in catalepsy, only apparently so. Yet an insoluble dilemma encroaches upon this celebration of life in the wild in a state of incorrupt nature: the two young people are impatient to see that world that might corrupt them, Blake’s world of experience opposed to that of innocence, a world of which they cannot remain ignorant if they are to criticize it; and which they cannot wait to experience. Shakespearean man is, therefore, always an alien held in a vice; when out of the world he yearns to be back, and his longing leads him to approach it and join it, only to discover corruption and be stained by it. The historical allegory of Cymbeline is that of disorder giving place to order, of war leading to peace, the pax romana re-established at the end of a time of collective madness and a plunge into the terrifying reign of chaos – for what such peace is worth, and as long as it may last. Peace cyclically returned after war, although disorder always raised its head; in peace achieved, the virtues of friendship are symbolized, those of quiet, courtesy, indulgence, therefore an ephemeral optimism that is credible. On a smaller scale, Cymbeline patriotically celebrates the daring and the ancient courage of the Britons under the Romans, while at the same time dissimulating a lesson for the present and dissuasion for the future. King Cymbeline’s unnamed queen launches a bloody type of intrigue to be repeated an infinite number of times throughout English history, serving as admonishment and warning.

13

little sermons, is in fact guilty of a fairly serious crime, having kidnapped them from the king as babies: but he did so only to take vengeance for a wrong undergone, for he brings them up with the love of a real father. Imogen’s two unaware brothers have gently ambiguous feelings towards Fidele, the disguised Imogen, who is their guest in the woods: they give her fraternal love, believing her a man, but a love masquerading as that languid, sensual affection for a young girl who appears angelic.

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§ 47. ‘The Winter’s Tale’* The Winter’s Tale14 (staged in 1610 or 1611, printed in 1623) opens announcing a tragedy along the lines of Othello; but the less impulsive, more controlled Leontes has others perpetrate it. The courtier Camillo is in fact ordered to poison Polixenes, believed guilty, and not Hermione, his wife and the alleged sinner, whom he sentences to life imprisonment. Bloodthirsty and crazy, he gives orders for his unborn daughter to be sent the stake as he considers her the fruit of adultery; like Othello, he ends up falling into legal barbarism. This announced tragedy, however, like a nightmare or a bad dream, does not come about and is averted; and the play becomes one of reform, expiation and a happy ending. This is because Leontes has no allies to push him over the edge into the abyss of insanity; he is mysteriously surrounded only by good – perhaps simply cowardly – people, a real though somewhat faint chorus of dissuaders; or else real crusaders, vibrant and sacrificial for the triumph of truth and good. Thus he is pulled back from the verge of that abyss. This time – in Shakespeare it hardly ever happens – Chance is benign; kind human nature assists it. Paulina is the first of two dei ex machina, looking after the disgraced Hermione, visiting her in prison and safeguarding her honour, and preparing the happy yet unexpected end. Structurally, in fact, never was there a more divided and deviated play. Halfway between the first and the third part, both set in Sicily, the scene changes to Bohemia with a leap of sixteen years15 and *

S. L. Bethell, ‘The Winter’s Tale’: A Study, London 1947; A. D. Nuttall, William Shakespeare: ‘The Winter’s Tale’, London 1966, 1970; S. Iwasaki, Nature Triumphant: Approach to ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Tokyo 1984. See also Kermode 1963, Beneke 1975, Dutz 1976, Abartis 1977 and Fawkner 1992 cited in the bibliographies for Pericles and Cymbeline.

14

The title comes from a tale that Mamillius starts to tell his mother Hermione at the beginning of Act II, or from that of the various courtiers who reconstruct the epilogue in the last scene – a long tale, full of detail and a wealth of wonders, like the stories told on a winter’s evening. According to likelihood criteria, it is strange that the repented Leontes does not visit Bohemia for sixteen years, at least to remedy the damage done, or even to clear up the painful misunderstanding with Polixenes, and to call Camillo back from exile.

15

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an especially conspicuous change of pace: from realism to fantasy, from empathy to alienation, from likelihood to miracle-working, and above all from tyrannically imperious suspense to diegetic slowing and dawdling. The exact point and moment when Shakespeare destroys the empathic illusion – already put under strain by the timeless or decidedly anachronistic features of that reign of Sicily, let alone a Bohemia on the sea – is to be placed when Leontes, the supreme thinking being, the realist and in nuce phenomenologist, relies on the responses of an oracle of ‘Delphos’ (i.e. of Delos). He has just sentenced his wife to prison when the news of the death of his small son makes him change his mind; hence his expiation, which will take sixteen long years to be completed. But in the meantime his son and wife are dead (or so he is led to believe) and his daughter is lost. This is the price to be paid for the physical and moral hurt consequent upon the weakness of human nature – hurt to others as well as to itself, in a sort of self-harming. We will also eventually realize that Leontes, at the end of the sixteen years, has become the victim of the possessive, domineering Paulina, and a kind of human relict, a larva with no will of his own, and therefore the political ghost of a king. 2. The chain of magic is set in motion by Antigonus’ dream, in which Hermione orders him to take her own new-born daughter to Bohemia and leave her there. This dream is devised as a second oracle, since Antigonus learns that he will not see his wife Paulina again, his death foretold.16 At the end of Act III other prodigies take place on stage, grotesquely underplayed and alienated in the frank, rough and enjoyably comic account of the shepherds who witness them, such as that of the bear that tears Antigonus apart, of his ship engulfed by the tempestuous sea, and of the little girl found and saved. The whole of Act IV pivots on the verbal brilliance of Autolycus, the Bohemian Jack-of-all-trades, a thief of linen who holds the stage, but no longer with the novelty and freshness of other times and other plays by Shakespeare, in tricking a naïve group who are staging a

16

In this dream Hermione’s child is also rechristened Perdita, meaning ‘she who was lost’; the name is usually pronounced with the accent on the ‘i’ probably because it recalls the Italian ‘perduta’ (‘lost’).

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parody of sentimental pastorals.17 Act V pivots and closes on the famous illusion of the living and speaking statue of Hermione; its unveiling is the sensationalistic, spectacularly effective high point of the play. However, the fragility of good, mild human nature always lies in ambush, ready to relapse again, and this second half of the play includes an action somewhat similar to one of the first: Polixenes – the wise, calm, reasonable Polixenes – is himself taken by a fit when, in disguise, he discovers that his son and heir to the throne is about to marry a shepherd girl; he drives him away, disinherits him and threatens him with death. Like Cymbeline, he suffers from the deadly sin of anger; infuriated, he suddenly sets up a regime of summary, pitiless justice. The possibility that Polixenes, by means of Camillo, should come to his senses, forgive his son and allow him to marry as he wishes, is defined a ‘miracle’. It is in fact thanks to a miraculous sixth sense that Camillo sends the newly married couple to Sicily.18 The epilogue is schematic, something rare in Shakespeare. It is made up of events not acted out but narrated and reported in order to make the most of the climax itself. In some respects it shows a triumphant confirmation of the correct use of a good deal of evidence, that which ascertains the identity of Perdita, who has no direct first-hand witnesses to prove who she is. The director of the illusionism of the living and talking statue of Hermione – of a show of jealousy first punished and then sincerely repentant, rewarded by the return of the treasure believed lost –19 is Paulina, organizer for that very reason of an allegorical action.

17 18

19

Scene four in Act IV, a rustic Bohemian festival for the sheep-shearing, is almost 900 lines long, a huge scene, the second longest in Shakespeare after the second of the final act in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The second scene in Act IV duplicates the opening of the play, as Camillo begs the King of Bohemia to allow him to leave for Sicily where he wishes to die. Camillo, the second deus ex machina, is not therefore unbiased, also because at the last minute he will marry the widow Paulina. A second parallelism is that between the driving out of Perdita and that of Florizel. In other words Polixenes, in disowning his son, acts very much as Leontes does. The whole play on seeming, appearing and being, is reflected in The Winter’s Tale in the recourse, yet again, to the theatrical metaphor.

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3. More precisely, the difference between The Winter’s Tale and Othello is that the chaste wife, not of a Moor but of a Sicilian king, is too ready to convince Polixenes to stay on as a guest, thus arousing her husband’s jealousy, since he is unable to see her innocent intention. There are two variants: there is no instigator such as Iago, nor any other behind-the-scenes manoeuvrer of Leontes’ jealousy. And Hermione does not wish her king and husband to pardon any fault or offence of Polixenes. Instantly falling a prey to rage, Leontes decrees summary measures out of all proportion and totally undeserved, causing harm, greater or lesser or in some cases irremediable, to himself and his family. As sudden and uncontrollable is the fit of jealous madness that takes sometimes unfounded suspicion for certainty, so equally rapidly does the king repent and devote himself to expiation. It may seem implausible that Leontes first insistently begs Hermione to intervene with Polixenes and to persuade him, and that then all of a sudden decides that his wife is being too forward; but jealousy is a fit. Unlike what occurs in Othello, Leontes tries to reason and the infectious process is slower; he tells himself he is betrayed, meanwhile actually analysing how the mechanism of jealousy is set in motion by its victim. He shows the maximum selfawareness. And jealousy is credulity, maybe based on nothing, maybe on something. The Eden-like situation precipitates into its opposite, and the whole of humanity is for Leontes half women who betray their husbands, and the other half therefore cuckolds. No cure or remedy exists. Leontes, as I mentioned, has no Iago beside him, indeed all his diplomats are in fact anti-Iagos. He is therefore Othello and Iago all in one, and he creates his own instigations as well as dissuasion from jealousy,20 and with the same rhetorical weapons (such as denegation: am I so stupid as to set in motion this murder plan without full proof ?). Leontes himself creates suspicion regarding what Hermione is up to, a suspicion certainly not confirmed by court circles. In the second scene of Act I Camillo functions as a soundingboard for Leontes; he is his own theatre of conscience. It is extraordinary how his insinuations are paraphrased from Iago’s hints in Othello. The first half of the play therefore studies the inexorability with which jealousy gains 20 Antigonus, however, suspects (II.1.142) that there is an Iago, a ‘villain’, at the king’s side.

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ground, in an atypical protagonist who deludes himself that the aggregation of proofs he believes he has found and tracked down adds up to certainty, and to show in his own person the very paradigm of the inductive, inferential process in the post-lapsarian human condition, when there are no longer absolute certainties and truth is only a sum of clues. So Leontes is someone who resists, rather than giving way to jealousy, at least hesitating before he gives way, thinking over both proof and counterproof. The whole play is a fabric of cases of authentication of what is true on the basis of evidence, which at times is sufficient, other times it is not, at times being taken for proof proven when it is not proven, and proof that is both natural and supernatural, magic and fabulous. The recurrent, paradigmatic verb in The Winter’s Tale is ‘seem’, given that what seems is just as likely to be true as false. For instance, it is possible that Perdita be born of Hermione and Hermione be suspected of adultery, since nine months have indeed passed since Polixenes was in Sicily (but in that case Polixenes must have acted immediately at first sight!). Polixenes in turn believes Camillo, and has himself seen proved what he fears in the altered expression of Leontes, therefore he escapes. The hasty flight of Polixenes and Camillo is taken by Leontes as overwhelming proof of guilt. Leontes makes life difficult for himself when he theorizes how one behaves according to subjective appearances and not according to proven evidence (II.1.36ff.). The pivot of the first scene in Act II is that Leontes gives, or believes he can give, logical and inductive motives to this irrational process typical of a fit: it is therefore incoherent for him to appeal to the ahistorical, anachronistic response of an oracle. 4. Yet the first of Leontes’ mistakes rebounds into a second, as a similar attack on psycho-physical balance is his self-inflicted punishment, lasting much longer than necessary. Shakespeare’s god or gods are less godlike if they impose a more painful expiation on the individual than the hurt inflicted by him or her on his/her neighbour. Paulina would speak for the most absurd, inhumane form of renunciation if it were not known later that hers is a tactical move. She has in fact a providential, almost divine plan up her sleeve. The order at the outset is Edenic, nothing needs changing. Long-term friends experience a time of perfect brotherly peace, the offspring of the two kings are born and set out towards a radiant future. This is a cyclical reincarnation of the possibility, at least, of the real Eden

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of our first ancestors on this earth: and it is as if original sin had never been committed (I.2.74–5). In such a surreal space the world might have been like the garden in Act IV, with a Botticellian Flora distributing to all every kind of flower according to the season. Yet behind or in front looms the Fall, so man stumbles at the end of this Edenic state. The disturbing element is therefore the feminine, as always Eros unleashed: both Leontes and Polixenes recall the wonderful time when neither had yet met a woman. In the play this memory – that Adam fell through a woman – is verified by the fact that the means through which Polixenes is convinced to remain is a woman. The queen and Polixenes draw apart into the ‘garden’ to conclude their discourse. The percentage of the wicked in this play is miraculously low: Leontes is a madman who reforms, repents and atones; Autolycus is a rogue, yet to a certain extent innocuous and even beneficial, and a good and friendly chap. All the rest of the characters are sensible, reasonable human beings.21 Paulina is the hypostasis of the Old Testament God, since once such a fault as Leontes’ has been committed, in her eyes the person responsible is practically unforgivable. Sadistically, she takes care that Hermione is considered dead so that Leontes shall suffer for as long as possible and will expiate through grief and pain similar to that inflicted. Only his court dignitaries softly advise him to desist since he has suffered and expiated more than his due. The allegorical message is that the gods are unfathomable (the oracle symbolizes this) and distribute evil which is in fact good; they set in motion a plan of salvation that only rarely becomes clearly intelligible. Paulina is a hypostasis of this – she is named after St Paul after all – for she takes away the good from Leontes in order to allow repentance to take root in him. The Edenic utopia is corroborated by the fact that a monarch (Polixenes) is free to absent himself from his kingdom yet all goes well there. However, safety and well-being are apparent – man is always in the realm and under the sign of ‘seeming’. Eventually a throne cannot remain with no heirs without damaging domestic stability; in spite of the grief for human loss, political needs prevail and Leontes must 21

Camillo is blackmailed with promises of huge rewards for killing Polixenes; but, rara avis, he applies contrary evidence: no-one has ever made a fortune by betrayal, hence he does not betray.

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remarry, but he is lucky enough to be able to do so with the wife believed dead. The remote political lesson for current times is that corrupt nature needs equally natural yet healthy grafts in order to regenerate. Flora-Perdita recites a list of bastard flowers, but Polixenes approves of the alleged bastardy of nature when a noble plant is united with a less noble one, in order to obtain a better product. § 48. ‘The Tempest’ * In The Tempest (staged in 1611, and printed in 1623 with the addition of a masque to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth with the Elector Palatine), for the third, fourth and umpteenth time Shakespeare chooses a protagonist who is deposed and exiled, by himself or by others, and, from the whole range of potential alternatives, the caveman. Prospero is of the same family as King Lear, Edgar, Belarius, Camillo and above all Timon of Athens.22 The exile theme is ambivalent, as is by now quite clear. Exile *

C. Still, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of ‘The Tempest’, London 1921; E. B. Wagner, Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’: An Allegorical Interpretation, Yellow Springs, OH 1933; M. Srigley, Images of Regeneration: A Study of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ and its Cultural Background, Uppsala 1985; ‘The Tempest’: dal testo alla scena, ed. M. Tempera, Bologna 1989; V. Mason Vaughan and A. T. Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History, Cambridge 1991, also editors of Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, New York 1998, repr. as ‘The Tempest’: A Critical Reader, London 2014; Shakespeare: ‘The Tempest’: A Casebook, ed. D. J. Palmer, Basingstoke 1991; C. Mucci, Tempeste, Pescara 1998; J. Wilkinson, Remembering ‘The Tempest’, Roma 1999; A. Lombardo, La grande conchiglia. Due studi su ‘La Tempesta’, Roma 2002; W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, ed. A. Kirsch, Princeton, NJ 2003; B. J. Sokol, A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ and Early Modern Epistemology, Madison, WI and London 2003; M. Simpson, Wise Hereafter: Observations on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, London 2004; Shakespeare. Una ‘Tempesta’ dopo l’altra, ed. L. Di Michele, Napoli 2006; G. Bradshaw and K. Sanderson, The Connell Guide to Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, Lacock 2012; Revisiting ‘The Tempest’: The Capacity to Signify, ed. S. Bigliazzi and L. Calvi, Basingstoke 2014. See also Kermode 1963 and Fawkner 1992 cited in the bibliography for Pericles.

22 The magical preparation of the banquet and its disappearance in Act III echo what happens in Timon of Athens, where the protagonist parallels Prospero in his

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may be simulated, dissimulated or unconscious. Shakespeare’s exile may be entered into voluntarily due to disgust for the world so far inhabited; or else in order to escape from some mortal danger and thus survive; or it may be imposed by some power, therefore simply undergone. The exiled person may have decided he wants nothing more to do with the world; he may be resigned to the fact that never more will he return there; but he may also hide from himself the hope, or vague intention, that his day of triumph will arrive with a glorious re-entry into that world, once he has carried out his own type of (most often) bloodless vendetta, having achieved the victory of human justice, the punishment of the wicked, and full repayment for the wrong endured. These are therefore stereophonic and parallel scenarios. Shakespeare is always ready to evoke by magic nonexistent duchies, principalities, republics and realms, imaginary and ahead of his time such as those ruled by the Duke of Vienna, the Prince of Verona or the King of Sicily. Here in The Tempest we have the duchy of Milan23 and the kingdom of Naples. In his own way the Duke of Vienna in Measure for Measure is therefore a caveman. Like him, Prospero is a ruler in spite of himself, withdrawn and detached, and an expert in magic, who is however deposed, not self-deposed; he does not disappear of his own free will but is usurped and banned. The possible fault of such Shakespearean plays on the deposed or the exiled, and the victims of obvious injustice, is that the exile is passive and inert, and does not react nor tries to re-establish justice at the head of a coalition of just men. Having in turn deposed Sycorax and administered the island for twelve years, Prospero has shown himself a politician and a governor. Is this island a hortus conclusus and an allegory of good government? In reality Prospero reveals himself as one of those exiles who pretend to be resigned and to having given up the hope of justice, to have yielded to the deviation of the cosmos towards evil and moral,

23

thoughtless generosity, which is in itself a form of negligence, and for a belated vendetta that is the reintegration they deserve – although Timon is a tragedy and ends tragically. The Duke of Milan is the title of a later play (1621 and 1623) by Philip Massinger (Volume 1, § 143.1), which has however very few points of contact with this of Shakespeare.

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social, political and eschatological chaos. At the end of those fateful twelve years he in fact seizes his chance and devises his come-back; after having thoroughly scared those who once wronged him, he does them a mischief that hides a general good. He makes his daughter fall in love with the heir to the throne of Naples; he becomes convinced of the extreme, determined wickedness of his brother (and here we recall Hamlet) but averts it, just as he blocks the presumptuous attempt of the trio, Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban, to depose him for the second time. He finally pardons his former enemies and returns as duke to Milan, like Duke Vincentio of Measure for Measure to Vienna. 2. The semantics of the names of characters, in the first place, lays down an obvious allegorical track. Prospero augurs well, Miranda is a miracle and a marvel (and the semantic distance between her and Claribel is not so very great),24 Trinculo lets the imagination run wild, Caliban perhaps hides an underlying atavist root, as I shall argue.25 Whereas Shakespeare usually concentrates and insists in other dramas on tragic facility, here he puts on stage tragic incapacity or wishful thinking. In almost all his tragedies his main character at first weakly resists the impulse towards criminality and then inexorably slithers in that direction, at times capitulating even too readily. Here each criminal plan fails triumphantly. Many of the characters are diabolical doubles halted in the act of killing or trying to kill; or they are beings of imperfect will, thus subject to a last-minute redemptive impulse; or they are aided by the mysterious intervention of providence. The devil’s squibs are damp and fail him in his attempt to instigate a potential murderer who ultimately backs away. Hamlet and Macbeth are indeed recalled 24 Tunis is a new Carthage, symbol of the inauguration of a new cycle after ruin, and Claribel, the daughter of the King of Naples and sister of Ferdinand, married to the Tunisian king, is a Dido reborn, not a widow. With her marriage, considered ill luck, the play opens, and it closes with other celebrations. 25 Not totally implausible is the mixture of Spanish-sounding and Italian names. We must remember that the duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were at the end of the sixteenth century under the corrupt, tyrannical dominion of Spain. Administration of law was arbitrary, exorbitant taxes and duties were imposed, and the life of the people was wretchedly hard, relieved in Milan by Archbishop Carlo Borromeo.

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here and are reworked in order to bring about a happy end. Antonio, like Claudius, has usurped but without murder, moved to compassion by the little Miranda. He now considers killing Alonso in a plot with Sebastian, but is stopped in extremis.26 As to the second trio of plotters, they are ridiculous and easily unarmed. The world can be redeemed, it can start all over again, it will be marvellous. Motivated, or justified, or suggested by a promising contemporary event – a royal marriage that is to end the feuds and conspiracies for power and the succession – the basic theme, therefore, appears to be a new start of a cycle of regeneration of the world, expressly of a ‘brave new world’ according to Miranda’s words. For this reason, if this re-start is cyclical, the new cycle brings with it the ineradicable demonic mark of the old one, and the world will age, as is said in Timon: it will fatally move towards new corruption. Thus, with a touch of melancholy, nothing in creation can basically renew itself utterly, as Prospero responds to Miranda’s amazement: ‘’Tis new to thee’, as if to say, that is what you think because you know it so little or not at all. Miranda may marvel each time at a beautiful new world, as her own world seems to her, since she does not know the world she supposes to be civilized. In turn Gonzalo’s famous speech in the second scene of Act II, the utopian yearning for an age of gold and a state of nature, confirms by a counter-demonstration that life in the natural state is impossible, a utopia indeed, nothing but a wonderful but unattainable dream. 3. The opening moment coincides in The Tempest, as I mentioned, with a break in a continuity that has lasted for twelve years, and with Prospero’s denouement to Miranda, a revelation that the laws of good play-writing usually require to be placed at the end, but is here found well in advance. Prospero’s récit is similar to that of a soul in purgatory addressing Dante in one canto of his poem; more precisely, it seems as if to issue from the mouth 26

In the first scene of Act II King Alonso and the other shipwrecked travellers, exhausted, fall asleep, and Sebastian and Antonio irresistibly wonder whether it would be possible to make them sleep not for a while but for eternity: killing them off might be a good idea. The same temptation is debated on a grander scale by Macbeth and his wife, as Coleridge noted. This is the crucial point where The Tempest threatens to become an authentic tragedy, before turning back into a comedy an instant later.

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of a Virgil (Prospero) who explains to a Dante figure an event previously unknown, with phatic marks and the maieutics of the master fuelled by the urgent questions of the ingenuous pilgrim. Having patiently waited, Prospero now sees the unhoped-for possibility of vengeance and compensation. He could have acted earlier, but he wants to make the most of them, to stage an allegory, a pageant, a Baroque morality play – he wants to enhance vengeance and compensation as if on stage, as various Shakespearean characters do, although they are defeated and appear to be losers. The second part of the second scene of Act I comically unveils the increasingly weak, less attractive side of a pedantic Prospero, who gets Ariel to repeat to him something he already knows, that the tempest has been magically caused and what effects it has had. This effect is doubled when, as a clumsy tip for the spectator, he gets Ariel to recount how years before he was freed from his slavery to Sycorax. Prospero, the distracted, inept duke of long ago, is now a clever planner, at least of the show of his own reintegration. Not only that, he imagines and will succeed in arranging a partly Machiavellian alliance between Milan and Naples in the form of a marriage between Miranda and Ferdinand. Prospero’s power is mainly the organizational power of Shakespeare himself in this play: he is the internal director or his assistant director. His power is the dramaturgical power of ‘divide and rule’. He achieves his plan, so long awaited, after having devised it in every detail, and to his own great satisfaction he himself comments and explains the stages of the progress step by step. This director’s skill consists in dividing up the shipwrecked travellers into three or four separate contingents across what is only a small island, with no communication between the groups being possible. The fleet has sailed once more for Naples after the sinking of the royal ship; Alonso and his followers wander all over the labyrinth of the island seeking Ferdinand; the latter has been momentarily imprisoned as a test by Prospero; and the third contingent is formed by the trio TrinculoStephano-Caliban. This division serves as pure pleasure in prolonging the vendetta and the final recognition, and the members of each of the three groups know nothing of the others, believing themselves to be the only survivors. Right up to the end, furthermore, Prospero keeps Alonso in the dark – in order to achieve the richest and most spectacular coup de théâtre – regarding the fact that Ferdinand is alive, and Miranda as well. The most

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respectful of the classical unities of all Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest plays out in almost ‘real time’, three hours, and takes place all within one place. 4. The theological and eschatological counterpoint of The Tempest arises and is woven from the rising of the curtain as in Hopkins’s ‘Deutschland’, with a wealth and profusion of parodic, even humorous tones which in no way weaken its credibility, and without a thread of coherent, connected mirrorings being established, rather a series of spontaneous flashes. The dissonance of voices makes the ship into a fragmented microcosm of elements in which each thinks exclusively of and for himself. The boatswain, atheist and blasphemous, says the tempest is ungovernable, and he mocks the hierarchies and authorities both earthly and divine; he speaks his mind and thinks only about saving his own skin. The king on the ship is the King of Naples, with the capital letter as if he were the King, that is, Christ. Antonio, Prospero’s brother, is not a king but a duke; he has broken the medieval and Renaissance symbolic code of royalty, and through ‘telling tales’ he has falsified his memory so much as to change lies into truth, exercising ‘the outward face of royalty’ (I.2.104–5).27 Among the passengers, a double of Christ is Gonzalo, to whom the boatswain, echoing the centurion at the foot of the Cross, says: if you can command these elements, calm the tempest. Ambiguously and unconsciously, from the point of view of those in danger, the boatswain cooperates with divine providence in calming the storm, and this unconscious providential cooperation is sensed by Gonzalo: in wishing him death on the gallows he indirectly labels him as the good thief. A further Gospel analogy, and an evocation of Hopkins, is the desperate situation that forces the voyagers to prayer. Gonzalo is thus the first empirical theologian, more precisely a theologian of redemption through expiation and a believer in the divine promise of apocalyptic renewal. In fact the creator of the tempest and the divine double is Prospero; the tempest is therefore

27

Antonio is the most conventional of Machiavellian princes, slaves of political rationale. His court in Milan works on the system of patronage and Antonio is an activist who has set up a protective network of satellites and followers, transferring into political power an evident libido in the image of the ivy that covers the trunk and sucks the vigour, a vaguely sexual image which associatively alludes to the faded sexuality of Prospero.

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feigned or strategic and at any moment can be stopped without material damage and without human lives being set at peril: ‘not a hair perished’ is a resounding, overpowering echo of Jesus’ prediction in Luke 21:18. For his part, Prospero presents himself immediately afterwards as a sort of Creator who has reinstated an Eden in the island, since on the one hand he limits and controls the demonic in Caliban and on the other he impedes an Adam (Ferdinand) from lusting for an Eve (Miranda). Miranda, as I mentioned, can repeatedly glorify the goodness, nobility and beauty of creation since she has never known the preceding or alternative world, which is the reversal in actu of those elements into their contrary. When Miranda is unequivocally faced with the verifiable appearance of evil, she expresses amazement and delusion, but she never fears that the battle may be lost.28 Prospero therefore reveals himself as experience, Miranda as ignorance, that is, innocence, terms to be interpreted as in Blake’s future dichotomy. According to theology and medieval and Renaissance cosmology, the microcosm is modelled on the macrocosm, and Prospero is therefore the hypostasis of God the creator, and Miranda understands the historical dichotomy of a god ‘of power’ and a God of ‘compassion’ and ‘love’. Prospero in the past underwent a sort of biblical fall that was not for him banishment from but towards an Eden. The exiled couple was that formed by a father and a daughter, not – prudently! – of a man and wife. Prospero appears thus as really a new Adam, and adapting Genesis he himself is the inhabitant of an Eden lacking any female temptress. 5. The ‘omniscience’ or ‘prescience’ of Prospero is however limited. The first warning comes in his allusive sense of humour when he tells Miranda that he is her father and that her mother was a virtuous woman who always affirmed that she was his daughter (as if he were not quite willing to vouchsafe for the fact). But he believes in ‘divine providence’ and knows that it is thanks to that that he and his daughter landed on the island: and there was a good Samaritan, Gonzalo, who filled the ship with provisions and books of magic as well. If he is a magician, Prospero could decree at any moment the 28

Miranda’s unsubstantial yet vigilant kindness materializes in the imperceptible reference to the Platonic and, later, Wordsworthian theory of experience as remembrance, remembrance of her childhood in Milan before exile.

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settling of accounts, but he simply took the propitious chance offered, since there is a Fortune in creation that is obscurely at the service of providence and against which not even Prospero has any power. Prospero’s cognitive status wavers and therefore the past escapes him while even the future is in question, although he knows the immediate future, as he shows when the ship of his usurping brother is passing close by, and also when he predicts the imminent arrival on the scene of the trio of grotesque conspirators. An underlying criticism or limit against him is that he is atrophic, all mind, without body and without impulses. The background story of Sycorax and Caliban is a confirmation, since the case is mirror-like and chiastic. Sycorax was also driven out of Algiers with her son, according to Prospero’s story,29 but she was a diabolical sorceress while Prospero is an angelic wizard, for he has freed Ariel – that good, delicate spirit, instinctively unable to work the evil spells of the sorceress – from the pine trunk. Sycorax, pregnant evidently by Satan, gives birth to the devilish subhuman satyr Caliban. Sycorax might have been the Eve of the new Adam, Prospero the widower. There are grounds for the accusation that Prospero, deposed, becomes a deposer against Sycorax and Caliban – that he is a tyrant of unpredictably capricious powers, with his ups and his downs, quite capable of going from harshness and arbitrariness to acts of sublime indulgence. Shakespeare also makes of Prospero a Puritan in pectore. The first scene of Act IV recalls and parodies Genesis with a command and a condition very similar to the prohibition regarding the Tree of Knowledge: Miranda and Ferdinand shall have no sexual relationships before marriage, an obscure allusion to that sexual sin that is believed in popular mythology to be the secret guilt of the couple in Eden. On a purely theological level Caliban, in being a demonic incarnation, can never save himself in Prospero’s view, and is predestined to damnation.30 This is confirmed in IV.1.188ff.: Caliban is a born devil on whom the efforts of the redeemer are ‘all lost, quite lost’. When the curtain falls,

29 30

‘For one thing she did’ her life was saved: presumably a good action and confirming the redeemability of the satanic in this play. As Browning would later elaborate imaginatively in ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, Caliban has a vague idea of the alternative theology of the peoples of Patagonia, and his god is Setebos: this, however, is a purely incidental element in Shakespeare, found in travel stories of the time.

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Caliban goes off in search of ‘grace’, which he is highly unlikely to find. The infected world is therefore to be disinfected – and ‘infect’, as in Timon, is a term highly recurrent and of great conceptual importance in this play, like ‘monster’ and its derivatives in King Lear.31 Caliban excepted, the demonic is defeated, thus every cloud has a silver lining, for evil has been reabsorbed in the providential plan of salvation in spite of some hurt, and one creature having been excluded from it.32 The very last Gospel parody is that of a Prospero stripped of his magician’s robes and attired as a prince; like Christ risen again, he appears before the doubters, the disloyal apostles and therefore men of little faith. 6. The Tempest therefore takes Shakespeare’s equidistance and dramatic neutrality to the limit. Subtly disassociating itself from Prospero’s ontology, or at least not totally identifying with it, this biunivocal play hints realistically at different or even radically alternative prospects. The island of The Tempest is both a never-never land and a reflection of the islands and lands effectively colonized by the English, or new, unknown lands where Englishmen landed as travellers or exiles with the mirage of building for themselves a new life.33 In another light it is the island of Britain itself, lightly disguised and camouflaged. At a realistic level, and from the point of view of verisimilitude, the island can only be situated between Tunis and Sicily, or in the lower or central Tyrrhenian Sea (as specified in I.2.234).34 In 31

32

33 34

Has the tempest, asks Prospero, ‘infected’ anyone’s reason (I.2.208)? Miranda is infected, but with the infection of love (III.1.31). The reference in V.1.131 is explicit: Antonio is infected and infects with his stubborn wickedness. ‘Infect’ varies to ‘infest’ in V.1.246, and infested is the mind of Alonso should he continue to wonder how all those miraculous events could have happened on the island. The new cycle of a golden age is celebrated and symbolized as a dance, which T. S. Eliot will remember and use as an image of Renaissance harmony in his Four Quartets, intimately based on the exit from a negative cycle (and negative for the same reasons as in Shakespeare, the supremacy of lust over agape) and the reconnection of history to its redemption (Volume 7, § 101). So The Tempest is central to him, though the line I.2.394 appears verbatim in the third section of The Waste Land. Where there were savage, rebellious natives of monstrous aspect. Montaigne’s essay on cannibals contributed to the invention of the name Caliban. ‘Cauliban’ was the word for ‘black’ in the Romany language. According to Lawrence Durrell, Shakespeare was thinking of Corfu; the local name Corcyra is an anagram of Sycorax (Praz 1969, 81).

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Shakespeare’s fantastic geography things are a little different: I.2.229 alludes to the ‘Bermudas’, bringing to mind a Caribbean scenario and those islands of Marvell’s to which the Puritans emigrated – and Prospero, as I mentioned, is also a Puritan sui generis – to build a ‘brave new world’ (and the ‘new world’ has always traditionally been a periphrasis for America, where a ‘new’ England and a ‘new’ York were founded). At the beginning of Act II, the green island with a temperate climate, musical and welcoming as Gonzalo imagines – perhaps paraphrasing Bede – might be England approaching its metamorphosis thanks to an event as happy as it is miraculous with regard to prospects and expectations. That this is the case is borne out in II.2.28ff., which mocks the English tendency to be enthralled by painted fish and to dive into taverns where everyone is monstrous and Caliban would appear an average human being. We have to thank Trinculo for his bitter thought that ‘if th’other two [Prospero and Miranda] be brained like us, the state totters’. The unknown island is a conveniently naïve screen to launch attacks on the stupidity of Shakespeare’s countrymen. In this view, Prospero is the cultivated, refined Renaissance prince, enlightened, fond of the liberal arts, just as much as he is the colonizing oppressor. He has taken the island from Sycorax and Caliban, he exercises tyrannical power over Ariel, puts off restoring him his freedom, and has exported and imposed upon his daughter the English educational system. Of course he has taught the semi-beast Caliban the language of the colonizer, English. In this imaginary situation of isolation from the inhabited world, Shakespeare underlines the ease with which systems, prejudices and cultural warping can be passed off for truth. Prospero’s trompe l’œil is exemplified in the well-timed evocation to Miranda of a totally false relativism: that Ferdinand is like Caliban for the rest of the inhabited world, whereas the contrary is true, since there are so many Calibans and only one Ferdinand. The castaways in turn discover on the island a gentle, well-formed monstrosity, quite unbelievable when and if it is narrated to the Neapolitans. The Tempest has therefore been taken for one of the first metaphors of colonialism, and undoubtedly Shakespeare here launches an investigation into the raison d’être for colonialism itself: whether it is allowable to suffocate cultural independence and also the native ‘civilization’ in the name of an equivocal civilization according to developed western canons – something which would later turn out to be a euphemistic cover-up of exploitation.

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7. Caliban is matter with little spirit as Prospero is spirit without matter. Shakespeare sides initially with Prospero only to backtrack, on the way becoming – Bakhtin-like – more possibilistic. Caliban was quite willing to learn, he was helpful to his new master, until he made an attempt on Miranda’s virginity. The revolting part of Caliban is his symbolic and semantic connection with dung within a fairly clear excremental isotopy, which has not, however, enjoyed much credit among critics. Normally Trinculo is semantically explained by stressing the first syllable, that is implying the primacy of the seme of drinking (Italian ‘trincare’); personally I would tend to move the stress to the penultimate syllable of his name.35 The connecting thread between Trinculo and Caliban is to be found in the mark of the savage or subhuman or semi-bestial, having among its associations faeces incontinence. This isotopy arises from ‘sty’, the place where Caliban says he is kept by Prospero (I.2.344). In the second scene of Act II we see the surreal extraction of Trinculo from a composite, four-footed monster with two faces and two voices, in the form of a grotesquely filthy birth from the anal orifice, confirming the name. Trinculo forced himself inside Caliban and comes out again, and Caliban, in Stephano’s words, has ‘given birth’ to him emitting a fart. And Stephano’s ‘stomach’ is ‘not constant’. At the end of the act Caliban’s vulgar little song may be due to drunkenness, but ‘Ca-caliban’ is an explicit indication. The successive link is the arrival of Ariel in the form of a harpy at the banquet Prospero prepares for the castaways. Here Shakespeare might have taken inspiration from the Aeneid, where the foul birds dirty the food of the Strophades (Book III, 209–62) with their excrements. In IV.1.199 there is a line in which Trinculo says he smells horse-piss on himself. Yet originally Caliban had his own sort of culture, his own religious mythology centred on an alternative god, and presumably his own language, which could and should have been allowed to survive out of respect for his entelechy. Prospero tried to civilize him, but after the attempted rape of Miranda he was abandoned to himself and made a slave living in terror of corporal punishment. Life in the wild acquires some kind of dignity when compared with civilized life, and the natural

35

This stress shift, giving Trincùlo, evokes both the Italian ‘culo’ [‘arse’], and ‘inculare’ [‘bugger’].

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state exalted by Gonzalo foretells the investiture of the ‘good savage’. The primitive Caliban shows himself to be as gently imaginative and dreamy as the civilized Stephano and Trinculo are abject and vulgar. The fellowship that forms among the three is the practical demonstration that for a good master Caliban really would be a good savage and render valid service; and also of the fact that Caliban is aware of the harm he has received from Prospero and can react against his own usurpation. He offers himself to the two drunkards as boot-licker simply because he has understood that it is better to be their servant than Prospero’s slave; and thanks to Stephano and Trinculo’s stupidity he will paradoxically be one too many for them. This grotesque, higher moral stance of Caliban emerges when Stephano and Trinculo are dazzled by the glistening apparel hung on the washing line36 by Prospero, and Caliban is unable to get them away. 8. The divine hypostasis represented by Prospero is confirmed once more at the end, when he sounds like a benevolent or forgiving God, who only distributes rewards and indulgence, turning a blind eye to guilt. In the light of the facts, the fruits and benefits of a second felix culpa are obtained. Prospero, who lost the Milan duchy, is now doubly rewarded, since his daughter will become Queen of Naples. This is observed and remarked upon by that sort of evangelist, Gonzalo. In spite of this, the play finishes abruptly truncated, in part even enigmatically, unlike other plays that seem never to finish: it leaves the spectator to imagine what will happen later and how Prospero will behave and what his mental outlook will be. Shakespeare does not close the ongoing debate and dispute he has started, and this epilogue is hurried and incomplete, as Auden implicitly noticed in his remake The Sea and the Mirror.37 Antonio and Sebastian are substantially left out of the plan of redemption, and Prospero above all is thoughtful and saddened, anything but electrified at the prospect of once more taking up the reins of the Milan duchy. The terms in which he expresses himself – that he will ‘retire’ to his Milan, where ‘every third thought shall be his grave’ – even threaten a possible repetition of the 36 Or on the ‘lime’ (‘on this line/lime’ [IV.1.193]), about which there is a textual controversy. 37 See, on this, Volume 8, § 8.4.

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plot that twelve years before led to his exile. ‘This thing of darkness / [I] acknowledge mine’ is a sibylline declaration, actually incidental, which has led critics to the idea of a final deconstruction of the theological and ontological plan of Prospero and of the play itself, and made them doubt – again a puritanical doubt – about the possibility that the demonic can ever be expelled from man. § 49. Apocrypha and plays in collaboration* The Shakespeare apocrypha closest to the margins of the canon, asking for and occasionally obtaining inclusion, are two, Edward III and Sir Thomas More; a third, Cardenio, was handed down as Shakespearean but is lost. Both Edward III and Sir Thomas More were excluded from the 1623 Folio, and the former was published without its author’s name in 1596. A number of its scenes are considered authentically by Shakespeare. The second had its performance banned by the Master of the Revels and was only printed in 1844. It was a work by five or even six people, one of whom, in the manuscript housed in the British Museum, was identified as Shakespeare in three single pages for a total of 150 lines (an invaluable discovery, since for the rest only six signatures on legal documents are authentically his). Edward III describes and dramatizes the maturation of the great sovereign who like Henry V succeeded in curbing his passions (erotic passion included, such as that for the Countess of Salisbury) in the interest and for the benefit of his subjects. The scenes attributed to Shakespeare have slowly grown in number in the opinion of scholars, increasing the total part thought attributable to Shakespeare. After 1596 the play was not republished until 1908, and the reason for its lack of success could be the same – anti-Scot witticisms – that had the co-authors of

*

H. D. Sykes, Sidelights on Shakespeare: Being Studies of ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’, ‘Henry VIII’, ‘Arden of Feversham’, ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’, ‘The Troublesome Reign of King John’, ‘King Lear’, ‘Pericles Prince of Tyre’, Stratford-upon-Avon 1919; Shakespeare, Fletcher and ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’, ed. C. H. Frey, Columbia, MO and London 1989; R. A. Underwood, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ and its Beginnings, Salzburg 1993. See also Kermode 1963, cited in the bibliography of Pericles.

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Eastward Ho, Marston, Chapman and Jonson,38 sentenced to prison for a short time. But that play was later, and for Edward III one would have to imagine a veto by the future James I seven years before he succeeded to the throne of England. An unheeded supporter of the inclusion of this play within the Shakespearean canon has been Giorgio Melchiori.39 Sir Thomas More was the combined work of five playwrights under the supervision of Anthony Munday, who cannot be suspected of Catholic leanings (the opposite, if anything).40 On the basis of the two contemporary biographies on More that were banned but circulated in manuscript, Munday did not of course portray him as a Catholic martyr but as a wise, intelligent champion of freedom of conscience, with the special merit of having placated a xenophobic uprising and the start of a popular revolt in 1517. For which reason, this play complies with that prudent tendency to silences, reticence, ellipses or understatements that mysteriously appear in historical Elizabethan theatre. Here too More signs an explosive document, Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, without that fact being actually mentioned. Further plays written by others were ascribed to Shakespeare during his life due to his renown. In 1663 seven were added to the third Folio; C. F. Tucker Brooke in 1908 edited fourteen in his critical edition, among which the most famous and aesthetically valuable is Arden of Feversham.41 In 1954 five new plays were attributed to Shakespeare, all later removed except the two mentioned above. 2. The Two Noble Kinsmen (staged in 1613, excluded from the Folio, published in 1634) disappoints or embarrasses those who have constructed theories and teleologies based on the upwards spiral of scandalous topics such as incest and jealousy. It is however of interest for a return of certain main cores of Shakespeare’s youthful plays, such as the friendship of the two

38 39

Volume 1, § 107.1. Above all through the echoes between certain monologues and Sonnet 94, thoroughly examined in Melchiori 1973, 43–79. 40 See the detailed information provided in Melchiori 1994, 113–28. Melchiori, a great supporter of the dramatic excellence of Sir Thomas More, also edited the play with V. Gabrieli (Manchester 1990). 41 Volume 1, § 92.

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gentlemen of Verona, or the atmosphere of the sonnets. It is also intriguing for a nihilistic vein that might explain why Shakespeare abandoned the stage and why he kept silent during the last three years of his life. Superficially it looks back to A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the reappearance of Theseus, the just, Solomonic law-giver of Athens and the enlightened governor both in the public sphere, where he is the upright custodian of law, and in the private sphere, as a monarch capable of deferring impulses according to their correct hierarchic priority. Act III takes place entirely in the wood, where aristocrats and country folk come and go without any magic spells. Hamlet may come to mind, but only for the reappearance of the disappointed, unloved virgin with her pitiful, pathetic raving. However, the play to which The Two Noble Kinsmen comes closest and is most connected is Pericles. Shakespeare wrote a remake of Chaucer just as in Pericles he wrote a remake of Gower. The prologue, while announcing that the model is unachievable, pays homage to it and emulates it. As anyone who pronounces a captatio does, Shakespeare claims the independence of his greatness as much as the awareness of his immortality, while remarking his indebtedness. The transposition in dramatic form of Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ on the tragic history of Palamon and Arcite was certainly carried out by Shakespeare in collaboration with John Fletcher, although the text reaching us does not specify the distribution of the parts.42 Dealing with this and other Shakespearean products whether dubious, apocryphal, or written in collaboration, the critic is like a water diviner with his dowsing rod, who perceives, or believes he perceives, underground vibrations of one collaborator or another; or else a medium. If Act I is Shakespeare’s, it is a Shakespeare become inconceivably and strangely academic, wordy, clumsy, wallowing in useless circumlocutions and captious periphrases, instead of the lithe, fluent or contorted yet powerful playwright we know. The jailer’s plot can be considered the secondary one, less dignified and heroic and completely human, while the other is a story of semi-divine or fabulous heroes. The two plots meet and merge, one overlapping the other, with a notable dissonance of register. Gradually the nameless jailer’s daughter

42 40 per cent of the play is Shakespeare’s, according to text alchemists.

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accumulates dull, long-winded speeches that seem to herald the Romantic theatre or Wordsworth’s dramatic monologues. Of humour there is little, and even the jailer has none although his role would seem propitious. The intermezzo of the peasants in the wood, under the direction of the longwinded schoolmaster, is forgettable and never really takes off. It is a poor copy of that of the artisans in Midsummer or of the precociously manneristic evolutions of the secondary characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost. After an overly rigid, stylized first act, the second is however more appealing and direct, and the third gains greatly in fluency. The fourth and fifth alternate between the clinical farce (the jailer’s mad daughter) and the solemn, ritual requirements of the aristocrats’ duel. 3. The legendary Greek world is as harmonious and supple as the Renaissance architecture that was intended to imitate its essential sublimation and immateriality. If experiential life is chaotic, random and unstructured, myth is mathematical law and pure symmetry. In The Two Noble Kinsmen the sense of place and time is entrusted to a prelude in the form of a wedding procession celebrating the mythological marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. The arrival of three widows in their weeds to claim the bodies of their husbands fallen in the war against Thebes, represents the pressing needs of public governance and induces the bridal couple to postpone the consummation of their wedding to satisfy the passionate prayers of the three widows. The latter lead to the next step in the story, inducing Theseus to return to Thebes to capture the two protagonists, the two brave Theban warriors Palamon and Arcite. After Act I the widows disappear from the scene. Always fiery and mordant in Shakespeare, flesh here seems to be kept in check, distanced and put on hold. Diana is the ideal goddess ex machina in a sacrificial rite of renounced sexuality. The dilemma facing the august couple in Act I is in fact how, and how soon, to attend to impelling conjugal intimacy, and how long to put it off for the public good as an act of succour for the laying to rest of the unburied warriors: ‘being sensually subdued, / We lose our human title’. In the evolution of human civilization in the heroic age, Theseus has made it possible to reach a higher level of humanity. But the dilemma is subsumed by a second between Athens and Thebes: the latter city is wild and outlawed, and the two pure but naïve heroes escape from it to avoid being tainted.

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Behind the flight of Palamon and Arcite from the court of Thebes lie all the numerous escapes of Shakespeare’s ‘cavemen’ in the previous plays. It is therefore a topos. The two Thebans resolve their dilemma by fighting for love of their country, for Thebes and not for the wicked king Creon. Ritually, three pairs of the same sex appear in the play: Pirithous and Theseus, Palamon and Arcite, Emilia and Flavina. One of the speeches (I.3) explains the Greek concept of friendship, stating with more explicit expressions and undertones that ‘the true love ’tween maid and maid [but this can be true for the male sex as well] may be / More than in sex dividual’. Palamon and Arcite are reawakened from a vaguely sublime, dreamy and ingenuous homosexuality to heterosexual love when they see Emilia from the window. Emilia, Hippolyta’s sister, is wrenched from Diana and ceded to Venus, although at the end of the same scene she has sworn never to love a man. 4. Even the cavemen of Shakespeare’s other plays are guilty of a false conscience and wish to hide from themselves their desire to return one day to the inhabited world. Their renouncement, therefore, claimed to be eternal, is only temporary. The implicit renunciation of heterosexual love by Palamon and Arcite collapses like a castle of cards. One of the few humorous moments in the play is Palamon’s being struck all of a heap in ecstasy having seen Emilia, when an instant before he has been announcing the absolutely indissoluble nature of his friendship for Arcite. Casuistically, the two young men indicate Emilia as the goddess to be adored and the woman to be sexually enjoyed. In their immaturity not only do they now quarrel as violently and as excessively as they previously proclaimed their indivisibility, but it never even enters their heads to wonder whether Emilia will appreciate their offers. Divided, one let out of prison and the other incarcerated (but soon also to be freed by the jailer’s daughter, who is madly in love with him), each of the two, without knowing the circumstances, holds the other to be fortunate. Arcite refuses to be banned and stays through his love for Emilia; disguised as a poor man, he wins the May celebrations and is assigned to her as her page. The play becomes a severe, albeit apparently benevolent satire on ancient chivalry and the stupidity of the chivalrous ideal. In Act III the two former friends agree that they must fight a duel to dispute their beloved, but the paradox is that Palamon, a fugitive, needs

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food and is practically fully trained by Arcite to guarantee the perfect parity of the duel. The two knights seem to double themselves, and with one part of himself each observes two other knights preparing this single combat. They are also two contenders who set up yet another Shakespearean performance, albeit unconsciously or semi-consciously, as if in an agreed game or a pretence – the staging of the formalism of chivalry. They hate each other and prepare to kill one another according to the etiquette of chivalry, as if it were a rite, a celebration or a joust. Lovingly each aids the other in donning his armour. Maturity is Theseus prerogative; his duty is to apply the law condemning the two transgressors to death. But he gives in to the persuasion of his wife and sister-in-law; by making an exception, he shows the needful flexibility of that very law. The denouement concerns, above all, the folly of the two knights, which has made tragedy of their love and of the outcome of the duel: ‘That we should things desire, which do cost us / The loss of our desire! That nought could buy / Dear love, but loss of dear love!’

Index of names

(In this and in the Thematic Index, references, including those to names and topics appearing in footnotes, will be to section and sub-section numbers) Abel  32.1; 40.3 Achilles  26.1; 26.2; 26.3; 26.4; 26.5 Actaeon 42.1 Adam  13.4; 15.5; 26.5; 34.1; 45.4; 48.4; 48.5 Adonis  2.6; 5.1; 5.2; 5.4 Aeneas  24.2; 25.4; 26.2; 44.3; 45.4 Ajax  26.2; 26.3 Alcibiades  37.3; 37.4 Alexander the Great  15.3; 32.2; 32.3 Alexander, Peter  32.3 Alighieri, Dante  2.7; 32.6; 48.3 Alleyn, Edward  4.2 Aphrodite see Venus Arden, John  24.1 Ariosto, Ludovico  2.5; 19.1; 21.1; 38.2; 40.2; 40.4; 42.1 Aristotle  2.2; 15.2; 26.4 Armstrong, Edward A. 2.6 Arnold, Matthew  25.2 Artaud, Antonin  24.1 Arthur, Duke of Brittany  12.1–3 Arthur, King  9.6; 15.3; 43.1 Aubrey, John  4.1 Auden, Wystan Hugh  6.4; 13.1; 28.1 Auerbach, Erich  2.6 Augustus (Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus) 27.2; 27.3; 27.4; 27.5; 46.2 Bach, Johann Sebastian  7.2 Bacon, Francis  3.1

Bakhtin, Michail  2.6 Baldini, Gabriele  23; 30.2 Bandello, Matteo  30.1; 38.2 Barber, C. L., 2.6 Baretti, Giuseppe Marc’Antonio  2.3; 2.5 Barthes, Roland  2.7 Basse, William  2.6 Bate, Jonathan  7.1 Baudelaire, Charles  37.4 Beaumont, Francis  22.6 Beckett, Samuel  9.4; 13.3; 18.1; 18.3; 31.3; 33.5 Beethoven, Ludwig van  7.2 Belleforest, François de  32.3; 38.2 Bellini, Vincenzo  30.2 Benson, John  6.3 Berkman, P. R. 4.1 Berlioz, Hector  30.2 Blake, William  2.6; 48.4 Bloom, Harold  2.4; 2.6; 2.7; 4.3; 31.4; 32.3; 32.4 Blount, Edward  3.1 Boaistuau, Pierre  30.1 Boas, F. S. 27.2 Boccaccio, Giovanni  26.1; 38.2; 44.3; 45.1 Boleyn, Anne  16.1; 16.2; 16.3; 16.4; 34.5 Bolingbroke, Henry see Henry IV Bond, Edward  24.1 Booth, Stephen  6.2; 6.4; 7.2 Borromeo, Federico, Cardinal  4.2; 48.2 Botticelli, Sandro  47.4

392 Bradley, Andrew Cecil  2.4; 2.7; 27.2 Brandes, Georg  2.5 Brecht, Bertolt  2.6 Bridges, Robert  2.2; 2.4 Britten, Benjamin  3.2 Brontë, Charlotte 19.2 Brook, Peter  2.7 Brooke, Arthur  30.1 Browning, Robert  6.3; 16.3; 22.6; 24.4; 28.1; 48.5 Bruno, Giordano  2.6 Brutus, Marcus Junius  25.1; 25.2; 25.3; 25.4; 25.5; 27.3; 28.2 Buckingham, Duke of (Edward Stafford) 16.3 Bunbury, Sir Henry  31.5 Burbage, Richard  3.1; 4.2; 4.3 Burgess, Anthony  4.1 Burton, Robert  22.5 Butler, Samuel  6.4; 33.1 Byron, Lord George Gordon  22.6 Cade, John  9.3; 9.4 Caesar, Gaius Julius  25; 27.1; 27.2; 28.2; 32.3; 32.4 Cain  32.1; 40.3 Calimani, Dario  6.3; 7.1; 7.2 Calpurnia  25.2; 25.3 Calvin, John  36.2; 37.2 Campeggi, Lorenzo, Cardinal  16.4 Campion, Edmund  4.2 Carey, Henry, Lord Chamberlain  4.3 Carlyle, Thomas  37.4 Carter, Angela  33.2 Cassandra 26.1 Castiglione, Baldassarre  32.3; 38.2 Catherine of Aragon  16.1; 16.2; 16.3; 16.4 Caxton, William  26.1 Cervantes, Miguel de  13.1 Chambers, E. K. 3.2

Index of names Chapman, George  7.1; 9.5; 21.1; 26.1; 28.1; 38.2; 49.1 Charles the Great  15.3 Charon 26.5 Chaucer, Geoffrey  2.7; 13.1; 26.1; 40.1; 49.2 Chettle, Henry  4.3 Chopin, Frédéric  7.2 Cicero, Marcus Tullius  24.5 Clarence, George, Duke of  10.1; 10.2; 10.3 Clemen, Wolfgang  2.6 Cleopatra  27 Clifford, Lord John  9.6 Cobham, Lord (Henry Brooke) 38.2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  2.3; 2.4; 2.7; 6.3; 7.2; 48.2 Condell, Henry  3.1; 3.2; 8.1 Coriolanus, Gnaeus Marcius  24.2; 28; 37.3 Costantine 15.3 Crane, Ralph  3.1 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury  16.2; 16.3; 16.4 Crashaw, Richard  7.1 Cressida  26 Croce, Benedetto  2.5 Cromwell, Thomas  16.1 Cupid  6.4; 7.1; 22.5 Cuvier, Georges  2.4 Da Porto, Luigi  30.1 Daniel, Samuel  7.1 Davenant, William  2.2; 4.3; 7.1 David 42.1 De Sanctis, Francesco  2.5 De Vere, Lord Edward  3.1 Dekker, Thomas  44.1 Della Scala, Cangrande I  30.1 Delle Colonne, Guido  26.1 Dennis, John  38.2

Index of names Derby, Earl of (William Stanley) 3.1 Diana  22.2; 49.3 Dickens, Charles  20.2; 21.1; 29.3; 35.4 Dido  16.2; 24.2; 48.2 Diomedes  26.1; 26.5 Dollimore, Jonathan 2.6 Don Giovanni Tenorio  24.1; 24.3 Donne, John  1.3; 6.2; 7.1; 7.2; 26.5 Dowden, Edward  2.4 Drakakis, John  2.6 Drummond of Hawthornden  2.2 Dryden, John  2.2 Durrell, Lawrence  24.1; 48.6 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich  22.5; 24.1 Eagleton, Terry  2.6 Eastman, Arthur M., 2.1 Edward the Confessor  35.1; 35.3 Edward III, King of England  8.1; 10.1; 10.3; 32.3; 49.1 Edward IV York, King of England  9.5 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 19.2 Eliot, Thomas Stearns  2.5; 10.4; 11.4; 28.1; 31.4; 32.2; 48.5 Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia  16.1; 48.1 Elizabeth I Tudor, Queen of England  1.1; 4.4; 5.1; 10.1; 10.2; 10.4; 11.2; 15.2; 16.1; 16.2; 16.3; 29.2 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  2.5 Empedocles 42.1 Empson, William  6.3; 6.4 Enobarbus  12.2; 27.1; 27.2; 27.3; 27.4; 28.1; 28.2 Eros see Cupid Esau 40.3 Essex, Earl of (Robert Devereux) 1.1; 4.3; 15.2 Eve  10.4; 26.5; 34.1; 34.5; 48.4; 48.5 Everett, Barbara  6.1

393 Faulconbridge, Philip, the Bastard  12.2 Faulconbridge, Robert  12.2 Field, Richard  4.2 Fiorentino, Ser Giovanni  31.1 Firbank, Ronald  18.1; 33.3 Fitton, Mary  7.1 Flaubert, Gustave  31.3 Fletcher, John  1.1; 4.3; 16.2; 44.3; 49.2 Florio, John  7.1; 21.1 Ford, John  5.4 Foscolo, Ugo  2.5 Foucault, Michel  24.1; 33.2 Fowler, Alastair  7.2 Francis I, King of France  16.3 Frazer, James  22.6 Freud, Sigmund  2.6 Friel, Brian  32.1 Frye, Northrop  2.6; 6.4; 22.5; 31.4 Gabrieli, Vittorio  49.2 Ganymede 40.4 Gascoigne, George  19.1 Gaunt, John of  11.2; 11.5 Genette, Gérard  1.2; 4.1 Geoffrey of Monmouth  15.3; 29.3; 44.3 Gibbon, Edward  16.2 Gielgud, Sir Arthur John  2.7 Giraldi, Giambattista (Cinthio) 29.1; 29.3; 33.3 Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke  9.1; 9.2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  2.3; 32.2; 41.2; 41.2 Goldoni, Carlo  31.2 Goliath 42.1 Gounod, Charles  30.2 Gower, John  44.3; 45.1; 45.2; 49.2 Gozzi, Carlo  31.1 Grammaticus, Saxo  32.3 Graves, Robert  6.4 Greenblatt, Stephen  2.6 Greene, Robert  4.1; 4.3; 24.1; 44.2; 44.3

394 Greimas, Algirdas Julien  6.4 Grey, Lady Jane  9.6 Guarini, Giovan Battista  22.5; 40.2 Hall, Edward  8.1; 10.1 Hall, John  4.4 Harbage, Alfred  2.6 Harvey, Gabriel  21.1 Hatcliffe, William  6.1 Hathaway, Anne  4.2; 6.1 Hathaway, William  6.1 Hauser, Arnold  2.6 Hazlitt, William  2.3; 2.7; 15.2 Hector  26.2; 26.3; 26.4; 26.5 Hecuba  5.3; 19.3; 24.2; 24.3; 32.5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  14.4 Helen of Troy  6.2; 9.1; 26.1; 26.2; 26.3; 26.4; 26.5; 30.2 Heminges, John  3.1; 3.2; 8.1 Henry IV, King of England  8.1; 8.2; 11.1; 11.2; 11.3; 11.4; 11.5; 13–14; 21.1; 42.2 Henry V, King of England  8.1; 8.2; 9.1; 9.2; 13.1; 15; 49.1 Henry VI, King of England  8.2; 9; 10.2; 10.3; 10.4; 15.1 Henry VII (Henry Richmond), King of England  8.2; 9.5; 10.1; 10.3; 16.1 Henry VIII Tudor, King of England  4.3; 8.1; 16; 49.1 Henryson, Robert  26.1 Heraclitus 27.3 Herbert, William, Earl of Pembroke  6.1 Hercules  27.2; 32.6 Herder, Johann Gottfried von  2.3 Heywood, Thomas  1.1; 5.4; 19.3 Holinshed, Raphael  8.1; 11.1; 13.1; 16.3; 29.3; 35.1; 44.3 Homer  1.3; 26.2 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  2.2; 2.4; 6.3; 7.1; 7.3; 19.2; 48.4

Index of names Horace 1.1 Hughes, Ted  2.6 Hughes, Willie  6.1 Huxley, Aldous  31.2 Innocenti, Loretta  21.1 Isabella of Valois, Queen Consort of England  11.3; 11.5 Jacob  31.4; 40.3 Jaggard, Isaac  3.1 Jakobson, Roman  6.4 James I Stuart, King of England  4.3; 16.1; 16.2; 49.1 Jesus Christ  6.4; 9.6; 11.1; 11.4; 11.5; 12.3; 13.1; 13.4; 15.5; 25.3; 27.3; 28.1; 32.1; 32.4; 33.4; 35.4; 36.1; 37.3; 46.2; 46.4; 48.4; 48.5 Joan of Arc  9.1; 9.2; 9.3 John Lackland  8.1; 12 John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford  14.2; 14.3 Johnson, Samuel  2.2; 2.7; 14.1; 27.2 Jones, Ernest  2.6 Jonson, Ben  1.1; 2.2; 2.4; 2.6; 2.7; 5.1; 29.3; 49.1 Jove  42.1; 46.3 Joyce, James  6.4; 9.4; 21.1; 32.1; 32.3; 44.2 Judas  27.3; 37.3 Kerrigan, John  7.1 Kierkegaard, Søren  32.4 Kipling, Rudyard  34.1 Kittredge, George Lyman  23 Kott, Jan  4.2; 22.5; 22.6 Kyd, Thomas  24.1; 32.3 Lacan, Jacques  6.4 Lamb, Charles  2.3; 2.5; 2.7

395

Index of names Lambin, Georges  43.2 Lancaster, House of  9.6 Lanier (or Lanyer), Emilia  7.1 Lawrence, D. H. 6.4; 22.2; 28.4; 32.4 Layamon 15.3 Lee, Sidney  6.4 Leishman, James B., 7.2 Leopardi, Giacomo  28.1 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  2.3 Levin, Samuel  6.4 Lewis, Clive Staples  1.3; 7.2; 26.3 Livy (Titus Livius) 5.1 Lodge, Thomas  40.1 Lombardo, Agostino  2.5 Longinus, Cassius  2.3; 25.1; 25.2; 25.3; 25.4 Lopez, Rodrigo  1.1; 29.2 Lotman, Yuri  2.6 Louis IX, King of France  15.3 Lucifer see Satan Lucrece  5.1; 5.3; 24.2 Lucretius 36.2 Lucy, Sir Thomas  4.2 Lydgate, John  26.1 Lyly, John  2.6; 17 Machiavelli, Niccolò  5.3; 15.1; 15.2 Malone, Edmond  44.3 Manzoni, Alessandro  2.5; 30.1; 33.4 Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) 25.1; 25.2; 25.4; 25.5; 27; 28.1 Margaret of Anjou, Queen Consort of England  10.1; 10.3; 10.4 Marino, Giambattista  7.1 Markham, Gervase  7.1 Marlowe, Christopher  2.4; 2.7; 3.1; 4.1; 4.2; 7.1; 9.5; 10.3; 14.3; 19.1; 24.1; 28.1; 29.2; 42.1 Marston, John  38.2; 44.1; 49.1 Marullus, Roman tribune  25.2 Marvell, Andrew  48.6

Marx, Karl  2.6; 37.3 Mary Magdalen  34.5 Mary Stuart  16.1 Mary I Tudor, Queen of England  16.3 Massinger, Philip  1.1; 38.2; 48.1 Melchiori, Giorgio  1.3; 2.7; 6.4; 7.1; 7.2; 49.1; 49.2 Menelaus  26.5; 30.2 Menenius Agrippa  15.3; 28.1; 28.2; 28.4 Meredith, George  21.1 Meres, Francis  5.1; 6.1; 6.2 Middleton, Thomas  1.1; 33.3; 35.1; 37.1 Milton, John  1.1; 2.2; 2.3; 34.3 Montaigne, Michel de  32.4; 48.6 Montale, Eugenio  6.3 More, Thomas  10.4; 16.4; 49.1 Morgann, Maurice  2.3 Mowbray, Thomas de, Duke of Norfolk  11.4; 11.5 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  31.2 Muir, Kenneth  2.6 Munday, Anthony  20.2; 49.1 Murry, John Middleton  31.4 Nashe, Thomas  21.1 Neptune 28.1 Nestor  26.2; 26.3; 26.4 Neville, Lady Anne  10.1; 10.2 Newman, John Henry  34.2 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm  2.7; 24.2; 35.1; 35.3 Niobe 32.2 North, Sir Thomas  25.1 Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp Freiherr von Hardenberg) 30.3 Nuttall, Anthony David  2.6 Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie  33.3 Olivier, Lawrence  2.7 Orpheus 5.1

396 Otway, Thomas  2.2 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 5.1; 6.4 Pagnini, Marcello  6.4; 22.1; 22.3; 36.2 Painter, William  30.1; 38.2 Pandarus  9.1; 26.3; 26.5 Paris, son of Priam  5.4; 9.1; 26.1; 26.5 Parsons, Robert  4.2 Pasqualigo, Luigi  20.2 Pater, Walter  2.4; 17 Paterson, Don  7.2 Patroclus 26.3 Peele, George  24.1 Perelman, Chaïm  33.3 Pericles 44.3; 45 Pescetti, Orlando  25.1 Peter, Will  5.4 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 6.2; 7.2 Philip II, King of France  12.2 Philomela 6.2 Pirandello, Luigi  24.3; 29.3 Plautus, Titus Maccius  18.2; 19.1; 20.2; 33.3; 41.1 Plutarch 25.1 Polydore Vergil  10.1 Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) 25.2, 27.3 Pope, Alexander  2.2; 5.3 Porter, Peter  7.2 Praz, Mario  2.5; 22.1; 43.2; 48.6 Priam, King of Troy  14.2; 24.3; 26.5; 32.5 Prokofiev, Sergei  30.2 Purcell, Henry  16.2 Puttenham, George  4.2 Quiney, Thomas  4.4 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) 7.3 Rabelais, François  13.1 Racine, Jean  2.3

Index of names Ralegh (or Raleigh), Sir Walter  21.1 Ransom, John Crowe  6.4 Ravenscroft, Thomas  24.1 Richard I, King of England  12.1; 12.2 Richard II, King of England  8.1; 8.2; 11; 13.2; 15.6 Richard III, King of England  4.3; 8.2; 9.5; 10 Richard Plantagenet  3rd Duke of York  9.3; 9.6 Richardson, Ralph  2.7; 7.2 Rich, Barnaby  38.2 Richmond, Henry see Henry VII Riding, Laura  6.4 Robertson, John Mackinnon  2.6 Robespierre, Maximilien  9.4 Robin Hood  20.4 Ronsard, Pierre de  7.2 Rousseau, Jean Jacques  11.2 Rowley, William  16.2 Ruskin, John  19.2; 31.2; 34.1 Ryan, Richard  4.4 Sade, Marquis de  24.1 Sadler, Hamnet  4.2 St Augustine of Hippo  45.4 St Crispin  15.6 St Francis of Assisi  15.3 St James the Great (of Compostela) 43.1 St Julian of Norwich  10.4 St Luke  48.4 St Paul  15.3; 18.2; 47.4 St Peter  32.4; 35.4; 37.3 St Thomas the Apostle  32.4 Saintsbury, George  2.4 Salernitano, Masuccio  30.1 Salisbury, Countess of (Catherine Montacute) 49.1 Satan  10.4; 16.1; 24.4; 33.4; 34.1; 34.3; 35.3; 46.4; 48.5

397

Index of names Scarlatti, Domenico  7.2 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von  2.3; 2.4; 2.5; 36.2 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus  24.1; 26.2 Serpieri, Alessandro  2.6; 6.2; 6.3; 6.4; 31.5; 34.1 Shadwell, Thomas  24.1; 39.3 Shakespeare, Hamnet  4.2; 7.1; 29.1 Shakespeare, John  4.2 Shakespeare, Judith  4.4 Shakespeare, Susanna  4.4 Shaughnessy, Robert  2.1 Shaw, George Bernard  2.4; 7.1; 44.3 Shelley, Mary  36.3 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  32.5 Shirley, James  1.1 Sidney, Mary Herbert (Countess of Pembroke) 6.1; 7.1 Sidney, Sir Philip  1.3; 6.1; 6.4; 15.5; 29.3; 42.1; 44.1 Sinfield, Alan  2.6 Smollett, Tobias  21.1 Socrates 13.1 Somers, Sir George  44.3 Sophocles 32.1 Southampton, Earl of (Henry Wriothesley) 2.7; 5.1; 6.1 Spenser, Edmund  1.1; 2.6; 5.4; 6.4; 7.2; 22.1; 28.1; 29.3; 38.2; 42.1 Spurgeon, Caroline Francis Eleanor  2.6 Sterne, Lawrence  21.1 Stoppard, Tom  22.6 Stuart, Royal House  29.1 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of  6.2 Swift, Jonathan  28.3; 33.1 Swinburne, Algernon Charles  2.4 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius  24.2 Taine, Hippolyte  2.3 Talbot, John  9.1; 9.2 Tarlton, Richard  38.2

Tarquin the Proud  25.2 Tarquinius, Sextus  5.1; 5.3; 5.4; 24.2 Taylor, G., 2.1; 2.3; 7.2 Tennyson, Lord Alfred  6.3; 33.3 Theseus  11.4; 49.2; 49.3; 49.4 Thorpe, Thomas  6.1 Tillyard, E. M. W. 2.6; 31.4 Tolstoy, Leo  2.4; 36.2 Tourneur, Cyril  4.1 Tristan 30.3 Troilus  26; 46.2 Tucker Brooke, Charles Frederick  49.1 Tudor, Royal House  8.2 Ulysses  15.3; 26.1; 26.2; 26.3; 26.4; 26.5; 45.4 Ungaretti, Giuseppe  6.3 Vendler, Helen  6.3 Venus  2.6; 5.1; 5.2; 5.4; 6.4; 49.3 Verdi, Giuseppe  3.2 Verri, Pietro  2.5 Vickers, Brian  1.4; 2.6; 5.4 Virgil (Publius Virgilius Maro) 32.6; 40.1; 40.2; 48.3; 48.7 Virgin Mary  2.6; 6.4; 34.5 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 2.3; 2.5 Wace, Robert  15.3 Wagner, Richard  43.1 Waugh, Evelyn  31.2 Webster, John  4.1; 31.1 Weimann, Robert  2.6 Wellek, René  2.1 Wells, Stanley  2.6 Wesker, Arnold  31.4 Weston, Jessie  22.6 Whetstone, George  33.3 Whiter, Walter  2.6 Wieland, Christoph Martin  2.3 Wilde, Oscar  6.1; 6.3; 43.1

398 Wilkins, George  44.3 William the Conqueror  4.3 Wilson Knight J. 2.6 Winchester, Henry Beaufort, Bishop and Cardinal  9.1; 9.2; 9.3; 16.3 Winters, Yvor  6.4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  32.4

Index of names Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal  16.1; 16.2; 16.3; 16.4 Woolf, Virginia  40.2 Wordsworth, William  6.3; 30.2; 49.2 Wyatt, Thomas  6.2; 16.3 Yeats, W. B. 9.4; 21.1 York, House of  9.6

Thematic index

Aeneid (Virgil)  48.7 aestheticism 6.3 agnosticism  2.7; 4.1 Alexandrian sources  44.1 America 48.6 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton)  2.5 anthropology  11.4; 43.3; 44.3 apartheid 28.3 apocalypse apocalyptic discourse 22.6; 32.6; 42.1 apocalyptic imagery  26.5; 36.2; 48.4 apocrypha  2.6; 40.1 apologies of authoritarianism  28.3 of war  15.1 apostles  25.3; 32.1; 32.4; 37.3; 48.5 appeasement 24.4 archetype  2.6; 2.7; 6.2; 6.4; 7.1; 10.3; 10.4; 24.2; 26.5; 28.1; 30.2; 32.1; 33.2; 34.1; 34.4; 39.2; 39.3; 42.1; 46.1 Ascent of  F6, The (Auden)  28.1 Athens  22.1; 22.2; 22.3; 22.5; 37.1; 49.2; 49.3 attributions  3.1; 3.2; 5.4; 10.1; 19.1; 24.1; 49.1 authorship question  2.6; 3.2 autobiography  1.1; 4.1; 5.3; 6.4; 7.1; 29.1; 32.1; 44.3 Bakhtinism  2.6; 48.7 ‘banquets of languages’  21.1 Baroque  1.3; 2.6; 22.1; 33.6; 39.2 late Renaissance  22.1 Beowulf  28.1; 32.3

Bermudas  44.3; 48.6 Bildung  13.4; 15.3; 21.2 Bildungsroman 20.3 blank verse  8.2; 13.2; 15.2; 24.4 Bohemia  44.3; 47.1; 47.2 bourgeoisie 34.1 Brief Lives (Aubrey) 4.1 ‘bright young things’  31.2 Britannia 46.2 Britons  46.2; 46.3; 46.4 Calvary  11.1; 11.5; 27.3 Calvinism  32.6; 36.2; 37.2 cannibalism  45.4; 48.6 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 13.1; 49.2 Carthage 48.2 Catholicism  2.6; 4.2; 5.3; 21.1; 32.3; 41.2; 43.3; 49.1 anti- 9.2 Celts  8.1; 46.2 chivalric code  11.4; 14.3; 21.1; 26.2; 46.2; 49.4 Christianity  2.6; 18.1; 29.1; 29.3; 31.1; 31.4; 32.3; 33.1; 35.1; 36.4 criticism of  34.4 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens)  29.3 chronicle play  10.1; 27.1; 29.1; 29.3; 44.1 cinema 4.1 colonialism  2.6; 32.3; 46.2; 48.6; 49.6 comedy  2.6; 18.1; 18.2; 18.4; 19.1; 19.3; 20.1; 21.1; 22.1; 22.4; 22.5; 29.2; 30.2; 31.2; 33.6; 38.1; 39.2; 39.3; 39.4; 40.1; 41.2; 42.2; 43.1; 43.2; 46.1; 46.2; 48.2

400 city 4.2 commedia dell’arte  2.5; 19.1; 44.3 English regional  19.1 of errors  1.2; 18.4; 19.2; 22.5; 41.1 Jonsonian 29.3 Latin and Plautine  9.2; 17; 18.2; 19.1; 33.3 romantic  29.2; 43.1 tragicomedy  38.1; 39.4 concettism  10.2; 21.1; 26.5 Confessio Amantis (Gower)  44.3; 45.2 conspiracies Essex’s rebellion  1.1; 4.3; 15.2 Gunpowder Plot  1.1 Lopez Plot  1.1 Cornwall  36.1; 46.4 criticism  2.1; 2.2; 2.4; 2.5; 2.6; 2.7; 6.3; 7.2; 16.2; 17; 48.7 allegorical, metaphorical, symbolic  2.5; 2.6; 6.3 anthropological 2.6 Croce 2.5 feminist 2.6 formalist  2.5; 6.3 gossipy 22.5 hermeneutic 4.1 linguistic 6.4 Marxist 2.6 philological  2.5; 2.6; 6.3 psychoanalytical 2.6 on the reception of drama  2.5 Romantic  2.3; 2.5; 14.4 sociological 2.6 source  1.3; 2.6 structuralist  2.5; 6.3; 6.4 symbolist 6.3 textual 6.3 Crusades  11.5; 47.1 ‘dark lady’  2.7; 6.1; 6.3; 7.1; 21.2; 23 deadpan 32.3

Thematic index deconstruction 5.3 degeneration  9.4; 11.2; 25.2; 26.3; 35.1; 37.1 Denmark  29.1; 32.1; 32.2; 32.3; 32.4; 32.6 determinism  8.2; 11.2; 12.2; 20.2; 22.4; 31.3; 31.4; 31.5; 34.3; 35.1; 35.2; 40.1 dialogism 2.6 diaries  4.1; 6.3; 6.4 Dido and Aeneas (Purcell) 16.2 divertissement 21.1 Don Juan (Byron)  22.6 Donjuanism  39.3; 39.4; 40.2 doublethinking 16.1 drama closet 10.1 court 36.1 existentialist 32.3 exotic 45.1 fairy-tale  1.2; 33.3; 36.3 grotesque or absurd  9.4 historical  11.3; 13.2; 15.1; 16.1; 27.3; 32.3; 35.1; 44.3 judicial 24.4 Kierkegaardian 32.4 murder  35.1; 35.2 oneiric 1.2 political 32.3 psychological or agonic  5.3 Roman  27.3; 46.2 self-enclosed 14.3 semiotic 18.1 Senecan 24.1 theological 32.3 dramatic canon  7.2 dramaturgy  1.1; 1.3; 2.1; 2.3; 2.4; 2.5; 2.6; 3.1; 3.2; 4.1; 4.2; 4.3; 4.4; 5.1; 6.1; 6.2; 7.2; 8.1; 8.2; 10.1; 11.1; 12.1; 13.1; 14.3; 16.2; 22.4; 24.1; 24.4; 29.1; 34.1; 34.2; 35.1; 37.1; 38.1; 39.3; 42.1; 44.1; 45.1; 45.2; 46.1; 49.1 Duke of Milan (Massinger)  48.1

Thematic index ‘Echoes’ (Hopkins) 7.1 Eden  9.1; 11.5; 26.2; 34.1; 34.3; 39.3; 47.4; 48.4 Egypt  27.2; 27.3 Alexandria 27.2 ekphrasis  5.3; 7.1 enclosure  4.4 England  1.1; 2.6; 5.1; 9.1; 9.2; 9.3; 11.2; 11.3; 11.4; 11.5; 12.2; 15.4; 16.3; 29.3; 32.2; 32.3; 32.6; 35.1; 35.2; 46.3; 48.6 English cities  12.1; 12.2; 15.3; 19.2 English dynasties Lancaster 9.6 York 9.6 English language Middle English  10.1; 23; 44.1; 45.1; 46.2 Old English  10.1 English Royal families Plantagenet  9.3; 12.2 Stuart 29.1 Tudor  8.2; 13.2 epic  15.2; 22.6 Greek 26.2 epiphany  1.3; 16.3; 35.4; 36.5; 38.2 epistemology  2.6; 19.3; 34.2; 41.1 Eros  5.2; 6.2; 6.4; 7.1; 21.2; 22.2; 23; 27.4; 30.2; 30.3; 33.1; 36.5; 47.4 Euphues (Lyly)  20.2 Euphuism  11.4; 17; 19.2; 29.2; 30.2; 31.2; 34.5; 38.1; 39.1; 46.2 Europe  2.3; 32.3 evolutionism  1.4; 13.3; 16.1; 37.3 existentialism  11.3; 26.3; 31.3; 32.3; 32.4 Exodus, biblical book  40.3 exoticism  38.2; 45.1 Faerie Queene (Spenser)  22.1; 28.1; 41.2 fair youth  1.1; 5.2; 6.1; 6.2; 6.3; 6.4; 7.1; 7.3 fairy-tale   1.2; 29.3; 31.1; 31.5; 33.3; 35.4; 40.1; 42.2; 45.1.

401 Fall  15.5; 16.1; 32.6; 34.5; 37.2; 42.1; 47.4 Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth 13.1 fantastic, genre  1.2; 18.1; 21.1; 21.2; 22.3; 30.2; 32.1; 33.3; 35.3; 39.2; 39.4; 43.1 Fasti (Ovid)  5.1 Faustianism  9.2; 35.1. feminism  2.5; 2.6; 2.7; 19.1; 19.2; 21.5; 31.1; 39.3; 40.2; 41.3 anti- 18.2 Finnegans Wake ( Joyce)  21.1 flamboyant  10.2 flashback  32.2 fool  27.2; 31.3; 32.2; 33.3; 36.2 formalism  2.5; 49.4 Four Quartets (T. S. Eliot)  9.1; 10.4; 48.5 France  2.3; 9.3; 9.4; 12.1; 12.2; 15.1; 15.2; 15.3; 15.4; 16.3; 21.2; 30.2; 36.1; 43.1; 43.2. French cities  12.2 French Revolution  9.4 Freudianism 34.1 post- 2.6 gender and gender studies  2.5; 5.1; 40.2; 40.4; 41.3; 42.1 Genesis, biblical book  10.4; 31.4; 34.1; 48.4; 48.5. genius loci  43.2 Germanic peoples Danes  32.1; 32.2; 32.3; 32.4 Goths  24.2; 24.3; 24.4 Gethsemane  15.6; 25.3; 32.4; 35.4 Gl’ingannati  38.2 ‘Good Morrow’ (Donne)  26.5 Gospels 25.3 Gothic and neo-Gothic  24.4; 28.1; 30.2; 32.3 Grandguignol 24.1 Groatsworth of Wit (Greene)  4.3 grotesque, genre  9.4; 15.2; 19.3; 31.1; 33.3; 35.1; 35.2; 36.2

402 hara-kiri  28.1; 32.6 Hebraism 31.4 anti-Semitism  31.4; 31.5 Historiae Danicae Libri  32.3 Holinshed’s Chronicles  8.1; 10.1; 11.1; 13.1; 16.3; 29.3; 35.1; 44.3 Holy Grail  22.6 homosexuality  2.7; 6.1; 31.3; 34.1; 44.2; 49.3 hortus conclusus  9.1; 37.3; 48.1 hubris  16.1; 23; 28.1; 28.3 Huguenots 21.1 humanism 36.1 iconoclasm 37.2 idealism 26.2 idiomatic language  9.3 Il Cortegiano (Castiglione)  32.3 Il Fedele (Pasqualigo) 20.2 Illyria  41.1; 41.2 imagery  2.6 imperialism 32.3 In Memoriam (Tennyson)  6.3 incunabula 6.4. interlude  7.1; 11.3; 20.2; 26.3; 31.1; 33.3; 45.2; 46.3 Ireland 9.3 Islam 33.2 isotopy  2.4; 7.2; 11.4; 14.3; 26.3; 29.3; 31.3; 36.3; 48.7 Italy 4.3 Italian cities  1.2; 18.2; 19.2; 20.2; 20.4; 22.2; 31.1; 31.2; 34.4; 48.1; 48.2; 48.3; 48.4; 48.8 Jesuitism  4.2; 41.1 Justine (Durrell)  24.1 kenoma  2.6 Kent  9.4; 36.3 Kubla Khan (Coleridge)  2.3 Libertine, The (Shadwell)  24.1 Lollards and Lollardism  13.1

Thematic index London  3.1; 4.1; 4.2; 4.3; 6.1; 10.1; 11.3; 45.2 London theatres Blackfriars  3.1; 4.3 Globe  3.1; 4.3; 23; 26.1 ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (T. S. Eliot) 11.4 Magna Carta  12.1 male chauvinism  19.2 Manichaeism 45.1 Mannerism  1.3; 2.6; 18.2; 49.2 Marius the Epicurean (Pater)  17. Marxism  2.6; 37.3 masochism  7.1; 22.5; 42.1; 43.3 masque(rade)  16.2; 37.4; 38.2; 40.2; 40.4; 46.3; 48.1 match-making 40.4 Mediterranean 18.2 memento mori 13.4 Mephistopheles  35.2; 35.3 Metamorphoses (Ovid)  5.1 Middle Ages  2.6; 6.2; 19.2; 22.1; 26.3; 26.5; 48.4 Mirror for Magistrates  5.1; 10.1 mise en abyme  11.4; 14.1; 14.3; 15.2; 16.4; 25.2; 27.4; 30.1; 35.2; 45.4 mock-heroic, tradition  2.5; 8.2; 9.1; 12.1; 13.2; 20.3; 22.6 monologue  9.5; 11.4; 12.2; 13.3; 13.4; 14.3; 20.4; 30.2; 30.3; 32.5; 34.3; 40.1; 40.3; 41.3 dramatic 7.2 interior 6.2 Wordsworthian  49.2 Mucedorus 44.1 Murder in the Cathedral (T. S. Eliot)  10.4 music  2.4; 3.2; 7.2; 15.3; 22.6; 30.2; 36.5; 41.3; 46.2 librettos  3.2; 16.3; 30.2; 31.2; 42.2 songs 35.1 ‘My Last Duchess’ (Browning)  28.1 mythology  1.4; 4.1; 5.1; 5.3; 5.4; 6.2; 9.3; 11.3; 15.2; 20.2; 22.1; 22.3; 22.4; 22.6;

Thematic index 24.2; 25.1; 25.3; 26.1; 34.4; 34.5; 36.5; 39.3; 42.1; 46.3; 49.3 classical  5.2; 22.3; 23 Germanic  22.5; 28.1; 43.1 late Romantic  43.1 religious  2.6; 48.7 Tacitus’ 24.2 naturalism  2.6; 22.5 neoclassicism 2.3 New Ghetto in Venice  31.4 New Historicism  2.5; 2.6; 2.7. Newgate novel  13.4 nonsense 35.3 Norfolk 11.4 Norway 32.6 novel  1.1; 2.6; 6.3; 32.2; 38.2; 40.1; 40.2; 44.3 novel, genres and forms erotic 6.3 Joyce’s  28.1; 30.2 metrical  23; 45.1; 46.2 neo-Gothic 28.1 twentieth-century  31.2; 33.3 Victorian 28.1 nunnery 32.5 objective correlative  27.3; 36.5 occultism 2.6 onomastics  1.2; 13.1; 30.2; 32.1; 33.3 toponymy 20.4 Order of the Garter  38.2 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens)  29.3 paganism  2.6; 13.4; 18.1; 29.3; 32.3; 36.4; 36.5; 48.1 pageant  33.6; 39.2; 42.2; 46.1; 48.3 Palladis Tamia (Meres)  5.1; 6.1 Pandosto (Greene)  44.2; 44.3 pantomime  9.3; 14.1; 15.6; 18.1; 18.3; 39.4; 40.4; 42.2; 45.2 papacy  12.1; 12.2; 16.3; 33.5 Paris  2.7; 32.6; 43.1

403 Parsifal (Wagner)  36.5; 46.4 Passion  11.1; 11.4; 11.5; 35.4 Pastor Fido (Guarini)  22.5 Patagonia 48.5 pathetic, genre  10.1; 11.4; 15.1; 25.3; 26.3; 27.2; 35.1; 40.1; 40.2; 42.2; 46.4; 49.2 pathetic fallacy  12.3 Pecorone (Ser Giovanni Fiorentino)  31.1 Pelican Guide 2.6 persiflage  21.1; 27.2 Philaster (Fletcher)  44.3 philology  2.5; 2.6; 3.2; 6.1; 6.3; 14.3; 24.1; 49.1 plague  3.1; 4.2; 4.3; 6.1; 38.4; 44.1. Platonism and Neoplatonism  5.2; 6.2; 6.3; 6.4; 7.1; 20.1; 30.2 poetry  1.1; 2.5; 4.2; 6.3; 7.1; 7.3; 16.3; 32.3 aesthetic 30.2 Anglo-Saxon or Middle English  10.1 Ariosto 20.3 celebrative 6.1 court 22.6 Dantean 48.3 erotic 30.2 of exile  6.3 historical 15.2 Latin 6.4 mock-heroic 22.6 Morris’s 30.2 mystical 30.2 Pater’s  30.2 Poland  32.3; 33.4 ‘Portrait of Mr W. H.’ (Wilde)  6.1 presentism 2.6 Principe (Machiavelli) 15.1 ‘problem plays’  23 prose  13.2; 20.2; 24.4; 26.4; 30.1; 32.3; 33.2; 34.3; 35.4; 38.2; 40.2; 49.2 prostitution  14.1; 18.2; 26.4; 31.3; 33.1; 33.3; 37.4; 45.2; 45.3; 45.4 Protestantism  2.6; 4.2; 9.2; 34.1

404 psychoanalysis  2.6; 2.7; 28.4; 34.1 Lacanian  6.3; 6.4 puns  1.4; 13.3; 14.4 Puritanism  2.2; 2.6; 26.5; 27.5; 29.3; 33.2; 34.1; 34.3; 37.2; 41.1; 43.1; 48.4; 48.5; 48.6; 48.8 Quixotism  9.1; 18.2; 21.1 racism  2.6; 24.4; 31.2; 31.4; 34.1; 34.4 Raritätenkasten 41.2 realism  31.1; 32.3; 47.1 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (Caxton) 26.1 Reformation  9.2; 32.3 relativism  9.1; 9.2; 14.2; 27.3; 35.1; 48.6 reliability 36.2 remakes  46.1; 49.2 Renaissance  1.2; 1.3; 2.6; 3.1; 6.1; 6.2; 7.2; 12.2; 16.2; 20.3; 22.1; 22.6; 32.3; 34.1; 34.3; 34.4; 42.1; 45.2; 48.4; 48.5; 48.6; 49.3 Restoration  2.2; 17; 21.1 revenge play  12.3; 22.5; 29.2; 32.2; 32.3; 32.4; 35.1; 42.1 rhetoric  1.1; 1.3; 2.5; 5.2; 6.2; 6.4; 7.1; 7.2; 7.3; 9.1; 9.5; 10.1; 10.2; 10.4; 12.1; 12.3; 21.3; 25.4; 27.1; 27.4; 30.2; 32.5; 33.3; 34.1; 36.2; 40.2; 42.1; 43.2; 46.2; 47.3 Rigoletto (Verdi)  30.2 Ring and the Book, The (Browning)  22.6 rite  10.1; 11.4; 21.1; 26.3; 31.2; 35.1; 36.1; 42.1; 49.2; 49.3; 49.4 funereal  32.6; 46.4 propitiatory 22.6 sacrificial 49.3 rivers Nile  27.2; 27.3; 27.4 Tiber 25.4

Thematic index road play  40.4 Rock, The (T. S. Eliot)  10.4 romance  1.1; 1.3; 1.4; 6.1; 29.3; 31.1; 34.2; 38.1; 42.1; 43.1; 44.1; 44.2; 45.1; 46.2 fantastic 43.1 Sidney’s 44.1 Romanticism  2.3; 2.4; 2.5; 3.1; 6.3; 14.4; 22.6; 26.2; 43.1; 49.2 Rome  2.2; 4.3; 5.3; 24.2; 24.3; 25.2; 27.2; 27.3; 28.1; 28.2; 46.2; 46.3 Russia 33.3 sadism  21.2; 21.3; 22.5; 24.1; 24.3; 27.4; 33.2; 34.1; 36.5; 43.3; 46.3; 47.4 saga  15.1; 42.1 satire  9.1; 9.2; 11.4; 15.3; 19.1; 20.2; 26.2; 27.5; 32.2; 41.1; 42.2; 49.4 Scandinavia 32.3 Scotland  9.6; 29.1; 34.1; 35.1 Sea and the Mirror, The (Auden)  48.8 Sehnsucht 18.2 semiotics  1.1; 2.7; 7.2; 18.1; 18.4; 24.5; 34.2 Sesame and Lilies (Ruskin)  19.2 Shakespeare, works of apocrypha and collaborations Arden of Feversham  40.1; 49.1 Cardenio 49.1 Edward III 49.1 Sir Thomas More 49.1 Two Noble Kinsmen, The 49.2 euphuistic comedies Comedy of Errors, The  18.1; 19.2; 20.1; 41.1; 41.2 Love’s Labour’s Lost  14.1; 14.3; 17; 21.1; 29.2; 30.2; 39.2; 42.2; 47.2; 49.2 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 18.2; 18.3; 18.4; 20.1; 20.2; 22.1; 22.3; 22.4; 22.6; 26.1; 27.3; 39.4; 40.1; 40.2; 49.2

Thematic index Taming of the Shrew, The  19.1; 19.2; 20.3; 20.4; 30.2; 39.3 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 7.2; 20.1; 20.3; 22.2 history plays Henry IV Part  1 1.1; 3.1; 13.1; 13.2; 13.3; 38.2 Henry IV Part  2 1.1; 3.1; 14.1; 38.2. Henry V  15.1; 16.1; 45.2 Henry VI  4.3; 8.1; 9.1; 9.5; 13.1; 16.3 Henry VIII  8.1; 16.1; 34.5 King John  8.1; 12.1 King Richard II 11.1 King Richard III 10.1 Ur-Henry IV  13.1; 32.1 poems ‘Lover’s Complaint, A’  5.4; 7.1 Passionate Pilgrim, The 5.4 ‘Phoenix and [the] Turtle, The’ 5.3 Rape of Lucrece, The  5.1; 25.2 Venus and Adonis  5.1; 5.2; 5.3; 5.4 Roman plays Antony and Cleopatra  2.2; 25.1; 25.2; 27.1; 27.2; 27.3; 28.1; 29.2 Coriolanus  15.3; 28.1; 28.4 Julius Caesar  4.3; 23; 25.1; 25.2; 27.1; 27.3; 28.2; 32.2; 38.1 Titus Andronicus  7.2; 23; 24.1; 24.2; 24.4; 24.5; 45.2 Troilus and Cressida  2.2; 9.1; 15.3; 23; 26.1; 26.2; 26.4; 26.5; 29.1; 30.2; 38.1; 38.2; 46.2 romances Cymbeline  8.1; 23; 40.3; 44.3; 46.1; 46.2; 46.3; 46.4 Pericles  2.7; 3.1; 6.1; 44.1; 44.3; 45.1; 45.2; 45.4 Tempest, The  4.2; 9.4; 20.2; 20.4; 32.1; 39.2; 40.1; 44.3; 48.1; 48.2; 48.3; 48.4; 48.6

405 Winter’s Tale, The  32.1; 39.2; 43.3; 44.1; 44.2; 44.3; 47.1; 47.3 Ur-Pericles 44.3 romantic and ‘dark’ comedies All’s Well that Ends Well  1.2; 7.2; 33.3; 38.2; 43.1; 45.4 As You Like It  38.2; 40.1; 40.2; 40.3; 41.2 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 13.1; 16.1; 38.2; 42.1; 42.2 Much Ado About Nothing 22.6; 38.2; 39.1; 39.2 Twelfth Night  1.2; 38.2; 41.1; 41.2; 41.3; 41.4; 42.2 sonnets sonnet  13 7.1 sonnet  14 7.2 sonnet  15 7.1 sonnet  19 4.3 sonnet  20 6.4; 7.1 sonnet  22 7.2 sonnet  26 7.2 sonnet  27 7.1 sonnet  33 7.1 sonnet  34 7.1 sonnet  37 7.2 sonnet  38 7.2 sonnet  40 7.1 sonnet  57 7.2 sonnet  64 7.1 sonnet  65 7.1 sonnet  71 7.1 sonnet  73 7.2 sonnet  76 7.2 sonnet  90 7.1 sonnet  94 7.2; 49.1 sonnet  97 7.1 sonnet  102 7.3 sonnet  103 7.2

406 sonnet  104 7.1 sonnet  105 7.2 sonnet  107 1.1 sonnet  109 7.1 sonnet  110 7.1 sonnet  116 7.1 sonnet  118 7.1 sonnet  119 7.1 sonnet  120 7.1 sonnet  121 7.1 sonnet  123 1.1; 7.2 sonnet  124 1.1; 7.1 sonnet  125 1.1 sonnet  126 7.1 sonnet  128 7.1 sonnet  129 5.2 tragedies and tragicomedies Hamlet  4.2; 5.3; 19.1; 19.3; 20.3; 22.6; 25.4; 29.3; 30.1; 31.1; 31.3; 32.1; 32.2; 32.3; 32.4; 32.6; 33.3; 34.1; 34.3; 35.1; 35.2; 35.4; 36.1; 36.2; 36.3; 37.2; 39.2; 40.2; 43.1; 44.3; 48.1; 48.2; 49.2 King Lear  2.4; 8.1; 12.2; 27.3; 28.1; 29.1; 29.3; 34.2; 36.1; 36.2; 36.3; 36.4; 36.5; 37.1; 39.2; 46.2; 46.4; 48.5 Macbeth  2.4; 2.6; 5.3; 9.3; 10.3; 10.4; 11.4; 12.3; 14.4; 25.4; 27.3; 27.4; 28.1; 29.1; 29.3; 34.3; 35.1; 35.2; 35.3; 35.4; 36.2; 36.3; 41.1; 46.2; 48.2 Measure for Measure  5.1; 13.3; 18.2; 29.1; 29.2; 30.2; 33.1; 33.2; 33.3; 38.2; 39.2; 43.1; 45.3; 48.1 Merchant of Venice, The  18.2; 19.3; 20.2; 25.1; 29.1; 29.2; 30.2; 31.1; 31.2; 31.3; 39.2; 41.3; 46.2 Othello  3.1; 7.2; 11.4; 18.2; 22.2; 25.1; 25.5; 29.3; 34.1; 34.2; 34.3; 34.4; 36.2; 46.2; 47.1; 47.3

Thematic index Romeo and Juliet  2.2; 14.3; 18.2; 22.2; 27.1; 27.2; 29.1; 29.2; 30.1; 30.2; 30.3; 33.3; 39.2; 39.4 Timon of Athens  23; 26.1; 29.3; 37.1 Ur-Hamlet 32.3 Sicily  27.2; 39.3; 44.3; 47.1; 47.2; 47.3; 48.1; 48.6 soliloquy  5.3; 9.5; 10.1; 25.5; 32.6; 34.2; 34.3; 36.2; 36.3; 41.2 Spanish Tragedy (Kyd)  24.1 Stationers’ Register  3.2; 32.1 stoicism  24.2; 25.1; 25.4; 31.3; 39.4 stream of consciousness  46.3 structuralism  2.5; 2.7; 6.3; 6.4 poststructuralism 2.6 surrealism 31.1 suspension of disbelief  15.2 symbolism  6.4; 36.3 ‘Tale of Gamelyn’  40.1 tautology  7.2; 7.3 Teleny 6.3 Thanatos 27.4 theatre  1.2; 1.3; 2.1; 2.2; 2.6; 4.3; 4.4; 5.1; 6.4; 7.2; 7.4; 10.3; 13.3; 14.1; 15.1; 19.2; 22.1; 22.2; 25.4; 26.4; 28.1; 29.3; 30.2; 31.3; 32.1; 33.1; 33.3; 35.3; 39.2; 40.1; 40.2; 44.3; 45.1; 45.2; 46.1 absurd  24.1; 32.3; 36.2; 40.4 Beckett’s 9.4 classical 32.4 of cruelty  24.1 Elizabethan  2.4; 3.1; 36.2. expressionist  35.1; 36.2 Goethe’s 41.2 historical 14.3 Italian 2.5 marionette  21.1 metatheatre  14.1; 14.3; 14.4; 15.5; 17; 19.1; 22.6; 24.1; 34.2; 37.3; 39.4; 40.1; 41.1; 41.2; 42.2; 43.2.

Thematic index narrative 35.2 Restoration  17; 21.1 Romantic 49.2 Yeats’s 9.4 theatrical companies Children’s Companies  3.1; 4.2 Lord Admiral’s Men  3.1 Lord Chamberlain’s Men  3.1 King’s Men  3.1; 4.3 Queen’s Men  3.1 Thebes  9.1; 49.3 Traumdeutung (Freud)  25.2 Tree of Knowledge  48.5 trompe l’œil  33.6; 39.2; 48.6 Troy  5.1; 5.3; 6.2; 14.2; 22.5; 24.3; 26.1; 26.2; 26.3; 26.4; 32.5; 44.3; 46.2 Tunis  48.2; 48.6 typology of culture (Lotman)  2.6 Ulysses ( Joyce)  49.2 understatement  22.2; 49.1 universities Padua 19.2 Verona 20.3 Wittenberg 32.3 ‘university wits’ 4.3 utopianism  7.1; 11.1; 13.4; 14.3; 15.3; 20.4; 25.4; 26.2; 26.5; 31.1; 31.4; 37.3; 40.1; 40.3; 45.4; 46.4; 47.4; 48.2

407 Victorianism  5.2; 7.2; 19.2. villain  20.2; 20.3; 25.1; 34.1; 37.3; 40.1; 46.2; 47.3 Wales  13.3; 15.1; 15.4; 29.1; 42.1; 42.2; 46.3 ‘war of the theatres’  21.1 wars and battles Anglo-Irish war  11.4 of Coventry  9.6 of Cyprus  34.4 of St Albans  9.3 of Shrewsbury  13.2; 14.2 Theban War  49.3 Trojan War  5.3; 26.1 Volscian wars  28.1; 28.4 Wars of the Roses  8.2; 9.5; 16.2 Warwickshire 4.4 Waste Land, The (T. S. Eliot)  48.5 West Indies  7.1 West Side Story  30.2 White Devil, The (Webster)  31.1 Wilhelm Meister (Goethe)  2.3 Winchester  9.1; 9.2; 9.3; 16.2 witchcraft  9.3; 35.2 Women in Love (Lawrence)  28.4 Woodstock  11.1 ‘Wreck of the Deutschland’ (Hopkins)  48.4

Volume 2

History of English Literature

Volume 2 offers a general assessment of all of Shakespeare’s works, summarizes the critical reception since its onset, traces a tentative biography of the playwright, discusses the youthful poems and the sonnets, and analyses the plays one by one. The plays are divided into the traditional thematic and chronological subsets – such as historical dramas, comedies, tragedies and romances – but they are further assessed in terms of their ‘experimental’ or ‘mature’ characteristics.

www.peterlang.com

Franco Marucci

Franco Marucci is a former Professor of English at the Universities of Siena, Florence and Venice Ca’ Foscari. His publications include Il senso interrotto. Autonomia e codificazione nella poesia di Dylan Thomas (1976), The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1994), L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (2009) and Joyce (2013). His Storia della letteratura inglese in eight volumes was published by Le Lettere / Editoriale Srl, 2003–2018. As a creative writer he is the author of Pentapoli (2011), followed by Il Michelin del sacro (2012). He runs the blog , with comments and features on literature and music, and a weekly sports page.

Shakespeare

History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual context for each author.

Histor y of English Literature

‘Franco Marucci’s History of English Literature is unique in its field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.’ — J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford

Shakespeare

Franco Marucci

Peter Lang

Volume 2