This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

That is to say, they are plays about late-sixteenth-century politics, rather than the politics of their own period. Play after play, by Shakespeare and by others, obsesses on moments of transfer, showing weak or embattled kings challenged by rivals, a vacant throne, civil war, the intrigue of noblemen and advisers; no history play ever depicts the long and relatively settled reign of an established monarch. While Elizabeth had made discussion of her succession a crime punishable by death, plays and other texts on historical subjects enabled the asking of otherwise censored questions about what might happen at the end of her long reign. By the mid-1590s she was into her sixties: everyone was asking, in whispers, who would rule next.

But the idea of a play being co-opted for political action – however doomed that action might be – has been extremely attractive to recent historians of early modern drama. E. M. W. Tillyard saw the histories as an essentially conservative cycle of crime, expiation, punishment and then deliverance (discussed in the chapter on Richard III). By contrast, the Essex rebellion Richard II is a radical challenge to political orthodoxy. Advocates of this transgressive reading delight that the usurping actions of Bolingbroke are dangerously endorsed by the play. But my sense of Richard II is that it allows for these ideological certainties but does not underwrite them. Readers, critics and performers have tended to find confirmation of their own politics in the play’s careful impartiality: again, we make Shakespeare mean what we want him to mean.

And the sonnet’s rhythmical structure also serves the same purpose. Those alternate end rhymes also produce inevitability in microcosm: once the pattern has been established, we are simply waiting for the completing rhyme. Each positive or relatively neutral term turns bad or is negated by its rhyming completion: dignity becomes mutiny; scene becomes unclean; foes, overthrows; life, strife; love, remove. Both the formal structure and the fatalistic language underline the proleptic or spoiler-like character of the opening Prologue. And this anticipatory quality is itself an anticipation of later elements in the play which turn on premonition or a doomed future, such as Romeo’s anxiety: ‘I fear too early, for my mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars / Shall bitterly begin’ (1.4.106–8).

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.

A second point about spoilers is more specifically generic. Can tragedy even have a spoiler? If we know the play is called ‘The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet’, are we really ever in any doubt about how things will turn out? Some evidence suggests that Renaissance tragedies were performed on a stage draped with black, which would have the same giveaway quality.

So is tragedy the genre in which the human’s capacity to affect his or her situation is most undermined? Questions of agency in tragedy are discussed in more detail in the chapter on Macbeth. Maybe the popularity of tragedy as an early modern form reflects this cultural interest. 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

There’s a moment of seeming to personify the agency of ‘Love’, but the human decision is clear: ‘both do grant the thing that both desire’. Their lustful behaviour leads to their downfall. There’s none of that fated or star-crossed language of Shakespeare, and even Brooke’s particular version of the sonnet, the kind without a rhyming final couplet, has a less inexorable sense of form than that of his imitator. So Shakespeare changes the motivation or causation for the tragedy quite distinctly. Brooke’s prefatory material is all moralistic, and in particular, anti-Catholic. His take-away message is that young people should do what their parents say, or terrible consequences will ensue, and especially they should avoid gossipy old women and dodgy friars (Brooke’s poem as a whole is a bit more sympathetic to the lovers than this framework suggests, but it starts in very didactic mode). We can see that Shakespeare – as often – jettisons this moralistic notion.

He’s naughty, yes – the dictionary definition for the nineteenth-century adjective ‘puckish’ sums it up as ‘impish, mischievous, capricious’ – but never malign. He observes the human world with dispassionate wisdom: ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ (3.2.115). Puck’s short, rhyming lines and playful physical jests place him centre stage in the imagination of a play that, since the Victorian period, has been seen as delightfully innocent and childlike. In fact, Elizabethan ideas of Puck were far from this cheery, domesticated fairy trickster. Shakespeare actually calls his character Robin Goodfellow, a name that suggested to contemporary culture a frightening hobgoblin with a potentially diabolic lineage.

Our schoolroom version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has neutered a much darker, sexier play: the ‘dream’ of the title is more Dr Freud than Dr Seuss, and the vanilla framing device of marriage creates erotic space for a much raunchier and riskier set of options, from bestiality to pederasty, from wife-swapping to sexual masochism. This really isn’t a play for children, as a school party discovered at an unexpectedly raunchy Royal Shakespeare Company performance.

Nor is A Midsummer Night’s Dream a great hymn to marriage, as critics used to argue, perhaps originally performed at some aristocratic Tudor wedding. Rather, its attitude to marriage is knowingly sardonic. Rediscovering an X-rated A Midsummer Night’s Dream means engaging with its dark, adult depictions of dangerous desire.

As both prisoner and bride, Hippolyta establishes marriage as bondage (with its simultaneous associations of erotic and domestic servitude), setting the scene for Egeus, who brings for judgement by the duke the case of his disobedient daughter, Hermia. Hermia wishes to marry Lysander; Egeus favours Demetrius as her suitor. Again, marital choice is constrained, and love and imprisonment are aligned.

No wonder the wood to which the lovers escape is so associated with powerful women – from the fairy queen herself, Titania, to an apparent allusion to Queen Elizabeth as ‘a fair vestal’ (2.1.158) or ‘imperial vot’ress ... / In maiden meditation’ (2.1.163–4). But neither are women’s desires endorsed and corroborated, as they usually are in Shakespearean comedy, where women typically know what they want and how to get it (think of Rosalind, or Viola, or Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well).

To all other eyes, Demetrius and Lysander are virtually interchangeable. The stress throughout the play is not on the lovers’ ultimate distinctiveness but on their interchangeability. ‘Demetrius is a worthy gentleman’, Theseus tells Hermia, trying to persuade her of her father’s preference. ‘So is Lysander’, comes the reply (1.1.52–3). Lysander urges his own claim as equivalence rather than superiority: ‘I am, my lord, as well derived as he, / As well possessed’ (1.1.99–100).

By contrast, A Midsummer Night’s Dream gives us two lovers who are similar rather than different, with equal social and personal claims to love Hermia – and, for that matter, Helena. The plot twist, aided by Puck’s bungling application of a love potion, turns the men’s joint attention away from Hermia to Helena: again, they are in indistinguishable lockstep. Even Lysander himself can claim only to be as worthy as Demetrius. In place of romantic comedy’s usual valorization of its individual couples, A Midsummer Night’s Dream suggests that any combination is as good as any other (although it’s striking that, contrary to the playfulness with sexuality that marks Twelfth Night, written five or six years later, here it seems unthinkable to Shakespeare that Puck’s mischief might result in – horror! – same-sex desire).

So A Midsummer Night’s Dream is less a romantic comedy in which boy meets girl than a satire on romantic comedy, in which boys ricochet between girls at random, revealing the shallowness of their impulses.

Titania’s word for her desires is, of course, ‘love’: ‘how I love thee, how I dote on thee!’ (4.1.44). In the sixteenth century, as now, this word encompassed a range of emotions and behaviours, from romantic yearning to passionate sex. Once we see Titania’s bower less as a sentimental nursery illustration and more as a site of pleasurable sexual transgression, we can recognize other sexualized meanings in the play.

The fairy quarrel between Oberon and Titania over this child results in their violent estrangement. And their ‘dissension’ (2.1.116) has a catastrophic impact on the human ‘mazèd world’ (113): crop failure, extreme weather, climate change. Love here produces ‘a progeny of evils’ (115): those ‘monstrous’ births that were understood by the Elizabethans to register the sinfulness of the parents or their transgressive sexual union. Just as Victorian ideas about childlike fairies have shaped the play’s reception, so too has the often-repeated assertion that the play was written for performance at some aristocratic marriage. Since there is no evidence for this, and no specific wedding has ever been convincingly identified as the occasion for the play, the idea looks like one of those critical myths that are useful largely in telling us what we would like to believe. Making A Midsummer Night’s Dream all about marriage is an attempt to regularize its depiction of desire, and turn its energies towards a celebration of the socially conservative institution of marriage rather than the transgressive energies of sexual desire.

The play of the doomed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe that Peter Quince and his troupe of Athenian artisans have been rehearsing takes up much of the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In performance it is often extremely funny, in an over-the-top slapstick style – splicing physical comedy, an emphatically lacklustre script, Carry On innuendo and faux-poor technical execution. But in its central story, the playlet again shows us desire as destructive and violent.

That desire might be the darker side of marriage is the play’s overarching thematic example of the structure of duality that shapes A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Those doubled lovers are part of a system of doubling and double-vision that extends throughout the play. For a start, A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes heavy use of rhymed couplets: more than half of its lines are rhymed, and this high proportion is amplified by companion rhetorical devices that repeat phrases and syntax to create linguistic echoes.

Most of Shakespeare’s plays have more characters than there were actors available to perform them and are therefore structured to allow efficient use of acting two parts to cover the roles (see The Comedy of Errors and Hamlet chapters for more examples of how this might have worked). But sometimes that doubling seems to have an interpretative, as well as a practical, payoff. Most notably, A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to be constructed to allow Theseus and Hippolyta, the rulers of Athens, to be doubled with Oberon and Titania, monarchs of the fairy realm. They’re already cross-connected – Oberon and Titania each accuse the other of entanglements with Theseus and Hippolyta – but they also function as their doubles.

The doubling of the rulers of the two worlds has broader implications. The fairy world comes to stand as the night-time to the court’s day, with productions often also doubling Thesesus’ master of ceremonies

Dreams, sex, death: A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy with unexpectedly adult themes.

Comedy here is a displacement of illicit, transgressive or excessive sexual desire, ultimately regulated in marriages that we suspect will be less thrilling and less dangerous than the liminal woodland dreams they repress. Perhaps that’s really a bit too much information for children.

Unusually among Shakespeare’s deeply familial comedies of fathers and daughters, cousins and siblings, this play depicts no family relationships apart from the cheerless examples of Shylock and his daughter Jessica, and his servant Gobbo and his father. In the absence of blood ties, what binds is money: relationships are financial rather than affective.

Bassanio’s marital plans for Portia combine the two worlds of Venice and Belmont. The play’s entire premise is based on his desire to appear wealthier than he really is, in order to gain more wealth, and he needs to borrow money to make this happen. Bassanio’s expensive wooing of Portia is a kind of confidence trick, funded by the credit economy of Venetian moneylending and underwritten by expectations of mercantile gain.

The language of the caskets scenes echoes with hazard, speculation and investment. Romantic relationships here are monetized along with everything else. Perhaps in this sense, Bassanio takes seriously the motto on the lead casket: ‘Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath’ (2.9.20). The noble virtues of self-sacrifice and generosity suggested here have not been particularly prominent aspects of Bassanio’s characterization. And indeed, his willingness – genuine or strategic – to commit himself to this motto takes on a different quality when we remind ourselves that he doesn’t have anything of his own to hazard.

The play continues to trade in images of gambling and risky investments, from Shylock’s Old Testament story of sheep-breeding to his daughter Jessica’s prodigal expenditure in Genoa, ‘fourscore ducats at a sitting’ (3.1.103). And although for Karl Marx Shakespeare’s most powerful economic critique was in the morose fable Timon of Athens, perhaps he should have looked instead to The Merchant of Venice. There’s very little ‘use value’ in the commodities and persons connected through financial speculation in this play.

Just as the merchant is a middleman in buying wholesale and selling retail, so too this merchant Antonio is a romantic intermediary, in the curiously triangulated relationship he has with Bassanio and Portia. Antonio’s unexplained sadness at the beginning of the play has seemed to many critics and theatre directors all too explicable: he cannot speak his love for his beloved Bassanio (see the chapter on Twelfth Night for more on male homosexuality and same-sex desire in the plays, particularly related to characters called Antonio).

In a bravura speech on ‘the quality of mercy’ (4.1.181), Portia uses her rhetoric to displace the financial self-interest of the Christian community and substitute a more rarefied glossary of abstract ethical terms. Mercy is a hyper-currency, above the earthly ledger of debit and credit, because it ‘blesseth him that gives, and him that takes’ (4.1.184) as ‘an attribute to God himself’ (192). Portia’s intervention serves to establish the Christian community on the moral high ground and to back Shylock into a corner. He obliges, helpfully (for her plan) stereotyping himself as the vengeful Jew, stropping his knife blade on the sole of his shoe. Shylock is here completely isolated on ethnic, religious and legal grounds, as if he alone in the play was interested in money, profit and speculation, and is now being punished for it.

Some critics have read the courtroom scene as a kind of allegory of the defeat of Old Testament vengeance through Christ-like self-sacrifice. But for modern audiences, this court represents something simpler and more sickeningly familiar: a system of justice rigged on racial grounds, revealing the true limits of Venetian tolerance for religious difference.

A Jew who sheds ‘one drop of Christian blood’ (4.1.307) must have his lands and goods confiscated, according to the laws of the state, and if there is a suggestion he plots to kill a Venetian citizen, his life can be ended on the Duke of Venice’s command. Portia’s disquisition on mercy starts to look a bit hollow. Shylock’s life is saved, but barely: his money is confiscated, partly to fund his renegade daughter and her husband, and he is forced to convert to Christianity.

Like the moneylender, the merchant struggles to find a place in the play’s whitewashed romantic world of Act 5: as so often, these adversaries are more similar than they initially appear. There is no place for Antonio at the end of the play, no marriage partner to bookend his opening declarations of sadness with contentment. One reason that there is no resolution of the play’s central triangle may indeed be unrequited homosexuality in the character of Antonio – and perhaps of Bassanio too. Another might be the structure of mercantilism itself. Throughout the play its titular merchant adds middleman value to Bassanio, sold at a profit to the wealthy heiress Portia, just as Bassanio’s credit-fuelled courtship of Portia lays out 3,000 ducats to win a fortune many times that sum. At the end of the play, Portia has the upper hand. Bassanio has learned, and earned, his lesson: his first allegiance must henceforth be to his wife, not his friend.

1 Henry IV is a history play that would prefer not to be. It has scant patience with heroics, fighting and politics, and little investment in its eponymous central character, the king. It is cavalier with historical facts and chronicles. It would rather be joking in the tavern than politicking in the court.

These opportunistic sequels tell us something about the way the early modern theatre industry was developing responsive, and recognizable, marketing techniques to cash in on successful productions. But they also tell us something more particular about the star quality of 1 Henry IV. The sequels share only one element. Not the king, not even the prince; not the battles or rebellions or disquisitions on the nature of government. Their common denominator is Falstaff. Fat, dodgy, cash-strapped, self-interested Falstaff. In inventing this anti-hero, Shakespeare had launched a cultural phenomenon that he milked in two further plays: the success of 1 Henry IV was the success of Falstaff.

It’s worth stepping back a moment to see how unusual this level of physical description is in Shakespeare’s writing. Very few characters in Shakespeare are given specific physical characteristics. We hear that Cassius in Julius Caesar has a ‘lean and hungry look’ (1.2.195), just as the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet has been worn to the bones by misery; we know that Juliet is just shy of fourteen years old; we know that one of Helena and Hermia is fair and the other dark and one is tall and the other short (but as with everything in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who can possibly remember which is which?). Beyond this handful of immediate examples, most of which have thematic rather than specifically personal resonances, there isn’t much more.

In part, then, Falstaff’s fatness laughs in the face of Oldcastle’s piety, presenting a figure who is self-indulgent rather than ascetic, carnal rather than spiritual. He is a figure of feasting rather than fasting.

Claiming that Shakespeare invents what it is to be human, Bloom develops two characters as extended examples. Hamlet is a predictable enough choice, but the other is Falstaff. In an interview about his work, Bloom describes Falstaff as ‘the most intelligent person in all of literature’, but he also suggests something less personal and more general: ‘Falstaff is life! Falstaff is the blessing.’

Falstaff’s fatness is less an individualizing characteristic of his personality and more metaphorical, as if his bulk makes him exceed the individually human and take on a kind of symbolic function. That expansive meaning is something Falstaff himself aspires to.

The suggestion that Falstaff represents a physical, self-centred enjoyment of existence identifies him with popular archetypes such as the Lord of Misrule or the embodiment of carnival. These operate within structures of inversion or excess that challenge normal hierarchies and protocols of self-discipline.

Their rhetoric is to set up a statement that seems to demand a pious answer. We have all heard – perhaps even heard ourselves delivering – the standard line: it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. Homer’s rhetoric is funny because it is anti-climactic. He sets up a cliché morality, but completes it with his own realist, bathetic conclusion. That makes him attractive, precisely because he is not up to the ideals with which our culture bombards us, and because he therefore allows us, too, the leeway to fail.

Falstaff’s popularity, then, is in part related to the fact that he is unapologetic and unrepentant. He embodies the larger anti-moralistic energy of theatrical production in this period that so annoyed preachers fulminating against theatres as ‘Satan’s synagogue’. But Falstaff also features as one aspect of a structuring principle of repentance, apology and recidivism in the play.

comes. Like the sun – a traditional symbol of monarchy – he allows clouds to obscure his majesty so that he shines more brightly when people are eager to see him. Like precious metal set off against a dull background or foil to make it look more desirable, his ‘reformation’ will be all the more attractive. Like a holiday, or other rare occurrence, new Hal will be the more desirable because unusual. The language is part religious: ‘reformation’, ‘redeeming’, ‘fault’, offence’ – Hal is thinking about the prodigal son narrative. It is also part mercantile: ‘debt’, ‘promised’, ‘foil’, ‘attract’; Hal thinks of himself as a commodity needing its value inflating. It’s a masterclass in manipulation. He is stage-managing his reformation for maximum effect, a self-conscious prodigal who knows that the worse his behaviour is now, the greater the sense of welcome when he turns over that new leaf.

In moral and structural terms the play probably needs to end with Hal’s repentance and reconciliation with his father. And to some extent it does. Hal assumes the proper role of the Prince of Wales in the climactic battle at Shrewsbury against the rebel forces. He fights alongside his father and, in a Shakespearean invention not found in the historical sources, protects him against attack by Douglas.

Henry IV is deeply concerned with real and imagined relationships between fathers and sons. There’s Northumberland and his son Hotspur as well as King Henry and his son Hal. But when King Henry wishes, at the outset of the play, that the brave Hotspur were really his son, and ‘that it could be proved / That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged / In cradle clothes our children where they lay’ (1.1.85–7), his wish for an alternative son legitimates Hal’s own wish for an alternative father.

The end of 1 Henry IV is no ending at all. Hal and his father have been reconciled, and, at least for now, Hal has behaved in a princely manner. He has dispatched his rival, the rebel Hotspur. One Henry down, one to go. But just as this battle is not the whole war, and just as the last lines of the play see the king reorganizing his forces to continue the fight against the rebels, so too Falstaff is an unresolved and perhaps unresolvable figure. To adapt a phrase from a different context, perhaps he is simply too big to fail.

Shakespeare writes some fabulous villains. Richard III, Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear are all energetically amoral figures whose iniquity is elevated into a compelling personal credo. They are alluring and terrifying in equal measure, drawing other characters into their nihilistic world, demonstrating the awful entranced complicity of villain and victim.

As we’ve seen before, the boy-meets-girl structure of romantic comedy doesn’t quite capture Shakespeare’s approach. Often it’s girl-meets-boy for starters, but then there are the boy-meets-girl-and-this-really-messes-up-his-boy-pals or even boy-meets-girl-who-will-have-to-do-since-the-boy-he-really-wants-is-off-limits versions. That’s to say that romantic comedies, produced by Renaissance dramatists including Shakespeare for a largely male audience, major on male-male relationships.

Given that Don John scarcely troubles to hide his malevolence, that he bears the useful shorthand ‘bastard’ like an accusing finger as part of his name throughout the play and that his first attempt to screw Claudio over at the ball fails, then why do Claudio and Don Pedro believe him so implicitly? One possible answer is generic rather than psychological. The classical New Comedy, associated with Plautus and Terence, on which Shakespeare often bases his own dramas, delivers a stock cast of lovers, wily servants and boastful soldiers.

(We might observe in passing that Much Ado is probably the first Shakespearean comedy in which the crucial blocking element to romance is actually psychological rather than circumstantial: the obstacle that needs to be overcome to bring the couple together is, here, significantly an internal, not an external, one. That’s what makes this part of the play seem so modern – it doesn’t rely on elaborate plot, but on recognizable relationship congestion caused by emotional scarring, fear of commitment and so on.)

If the blocking figure is a conventional element of Shakespearean comic structure, Don John is given a slightly different role from that found by Shakespeare in his sources. While the tale of the slandered-but-virtuous woman is a popular trope in early modern literature (and one to which Shakespeare is repeatedly drawn in plays from The Merry Wives of Windsor to The Winter’s Tale), the plot from Shakespeare’s source, the Italian poet Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, took male jealousy as its motivation.