This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

That gappy quality is so crucial to my approach that I want to outline it here. Shakespeare’s plays are incomplete, woven of what’s said and what’s unsaid, with holes in between.

Shakespeare’s construction of his plays tends to imply rather than state; he often shows, rather than tells; most characters and encounters are susceptible to multiple interpretations.

Gappiness is Shakespeare’s dominant and defining characteristic. And ambiguity is the oxygen of these works, making them alive in unpredictable and changing ways.

His works hold our attention because they are fundamentally incomplete and unstable: they need us, in all our idiosyncratic diversity and with the perspective of our post-Shakespearean world, to make sense. ‘Shakespeare’ is here less an inert noun than an active verb: ‘to Shakespeare’ might be defined as the activity of posing questions, unsettling certainties, challenging orthodoxies, opening out endings.

I want to explore the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are spacious texts to think with – about agency, celebrity, economics, friendship, sex, politics, privacy, laughter, suffering, about a tonne of topics, including art itself.

Shakespeare takes shape through our interpretations. It’s here, in our engagement with the works, that they take flight. This – reading, thinking, questioning, interpreting, animating – this really is Shakespeare.

Everything, from the name of its heroine to its ideology of gender relations, is contested,

So, at the end of the play, Katherine is, depending on how you look at it, broken-spirited, parroting patriarchal ideology and utterly submissive, offering to put her hand under her husband’s foot, or ironically and unabashedly vocal, preaching the interdependence of husband and wife to earn herself half of a fat wager placed by her husband.

The Taming of the Shrew prompts questions rather than answers them. The question of how to interpret the play is hard-wired into its very structure and amplified in its ongoing reception.

We make his work mean what we want it to mean.

In around 1610, almost two decades after The Taming of the Shrew, John Fletcher wrote a sequel called The Tamer Tamed.

Parleying with her husband from her ‘barricaded’ bedroom, Maria reminds him of his patriarchal reputation: ‘You have been famous for a woman tamer, / And bear the feared name of a brave wife-breaker: / A woman now shall take those honours off, / And tame you.’

Fletcher’s interpretation of the gender politics of Shakespeare’s conclusion seems equivocal, and this contemporary response suggests that the questions the play has prompted for later audiences were always present.

from the start it prompts and participates in arguments about gender relations, rather than adjudicating or settling them. As we’ll see repeatedly in this book, Shakespeare’s plays are questions rather than answers.

Katherine’s speech draws on this understanding of marital reciprocity,

So, A Shrew closes with Sly suggesting the play he has seen is a handbook to wife-taming that he will implement in his own household.

The standard critic on this is E. M. W. Tillyard, who argued that Shakespeare’s history plays were broadly propagandistic, a means of consolidating Elizabeth’s power by providing a genealogical and historical sanction for Tudor rule.

Many more recent critics, trying to assess how Shakespeare’s history plays might intervene in contemporary political debates, have suggested that their role is rather to rehearse repressed anxieties about the Elizabethan succession. This argument goes that history plays try out different versions of monarchies in decline, different versions of power changing hands, so they are documents of political uncertainty rather than of historical triumph.

In part the struggle between Richard and the chorus of bereaved women in the play is a struggle over the historical past and who has the right to tell it.

The question of whether Richard does determine his own fate or has it determined for him echoes through the play.

Only in Romeo and Juliet does the Prologue summarize the entire play, deaths and all.

Two households, both alike in dignity In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife. The fearful passage of their death-marked love And the continuance of their parents’ rage – Which but their children’s end, naught could remove – Is now the two-hours’ traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. (Prologue 1–14)

What, then, is the purpose and effect of so completely pre-empting the play’s outcome in its opening lines? First, it’s worth recalling that early modern audiences and readers were less interested in shock endings or surprise fictions than we are – or think we are. Ideas of originality have a high status in twenty-first-century ideas of art, but that’s not the case for the sixteenth century. A humanist education system suspicious of novelty, sometimes judging invention or fiction as morally compromised because untrue, taught generations of playwrights and poets that translating, reworking and rewriting existing texts was the sign of the artist. For readers and audiences, this intellectual method known as imitatio also offered the particular in-crowd pleasure of spotting those sources and appreciating the craft and invention worked on them.

the pleasure of reading was not in the surprise and fulfilment of seeing how things turned out in an uncertain plot, but rather in enjoying the variations on an established theme.

At the time of Shakespeare’s writing, philosophies of causation were on the move. They began to shift away from the providential, theocentric views of medieval Christianity – broadly, things happen because God says so – via Machiavelli’s unsentimental stress on human ingenuity and significance in The Prince (circulated widely in the second half of the sixteenth century), and emerged somewhere about the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (printed in 1651), where things happen because humans, individually and collectively, behave in particular self-interested ways.

The Prince’s announcement at the end of the play that ‘Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd’ (5.3.307), suggests a judgement that can target responsible human agents. To put it another way, the play moves away from those mysteriously fatal loins and misadventured piteous overthrows to a more explicitly temporal and judicial explanatory framework.

No one reading Romeo and Juliet could really generate from it the moral that children should obey their parents, since those parents have forfeited moral authority because of their unexplained and therefore unjustified family feud, and so are not presented as sources of moral authority.

As Friar Lawrence says, sagely: ‘Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast’ (2.2.94).