This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

Almost all of Shakespeare’s comedies dramatize the developmental movement in which young people forgo primary attachments to their own sex in favour of exclusive romantic attachment to an opposite-sex partner. Elizabethan young men got part of their education about this rite of passage from the theatre.

Benedick’s realization of this cost is sharp but not unprecedented in the play. That romance and marriage signal an end to certain sorts of male relationship is part of the wistfulness of Much Ado. Military camaraderie outside the play is replaced within it by the ‘merry war’ (1.1.59) of words between Beatrice and Benedick, and violent plots and ambushes are recast in the play’s repeated tropes of overhearing. In ‘The Last One’ (2004), the final episode of the long-running romantic sitcom Friends, the establishment of the heterosexual couples which will bring narrative closure is simultaneously seen to cut out the same-sex friendships. Their loss is symbolized by the poignant dismantling of the table foosball which has been such a symbol of male bonding in the guys’ apartment.

Don John is believed because the world of the play makes men implicitly more likely to believe other men than they are to believe women.

Although the straightforwardness of relationships between men is irreparably damaged in the play, it could be argued that male camaraderie prevails. Much Ado is a play profoundly uneasy about female sexuality and its assumed duplicity.

Some stage productions bring him on stage in chains at this point to show that his malignancy has been curtailed and contained. But Don John merely represents a more general mistrust in the play – he is not its sole source. After all, his is a tiny part (no sniggering at the back): he has only 4 per cent of the play’s lines. He does, however, symbolize something larger than himself. And perhaps this is why he is given the identity of bastard. His own malevolent illegitimacy might be thought a kind of proof that women can – and some do – sleep with men not their husbands. Don John the bastard is himself the very certification to stabilize the play’s paranoia about women’s faithlessness. His status as a bastard thus confirms the play’s worst fears.

But however imperfect and fearful a prospect, marriage, as Benedick ruefully acknowledges, is a social inevitability: ‘The world must be peopled’ (2.3.229–30). As in a Hollywood screwball comedy such as Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday (directed by Howard Hawks in 1938 and 1940), the bantering interplay between Beatrice and Benedick functions as a kind of verbal foreplay. We feel we know they ought to get together, because their playful dialogue bespeaks deep intimacy. They just need a little help to change roles. But it is also striking how much social pressure is exerted to resolve these two confirmed singletons, these potential misfits, into a couple. Their initial refusal of convention is a challenge to everyone around them. Each says they do not want to marry, and the community swings into action to prove them wrong.

Almost everything in the play is overlooked or overheard, from the opening rumours that Claudio intends to woo Hero, to the inadvertent confession of the plot in Borachio’s loose talk which brings about the play’s resolution. Our presence as audience adds another level to the surveillance culture which governs social codes and sacrifices privacy to a potentially coercive version of ‘community’ – a kind of comic Sicilian Nineteen Eighty-Four.

So Don John is believed by the characters and by the plot because two contesting storylines run through Much Ado and give it narrative torque. One impulse reinstates male bonds and is therefore, implicitly, anti-comic; the other educates men into accepting primary allegiances with women, and thus conforms to comic necessity. Don John spins the play towards tragedy, and momentarily it obeys, bringing out a friar and a crazy plan to make a difficult marital situation better by pretending a woman is dead. That worked so well in Romeo and Juliet – a play already well known by the time of Much Ado. Like other villains, and not just in comedy, Don John represents an alternative worldview from that which comes to dominate. But as these alternative visions fight it out, we can see that Don John’s version does have some traction on the play’s psyche. The play’s men are anxious for the excuse that lets them off the obligation and commitment of marriage: Don John proffers that excuse. Ultimately he’s believed because the play’s male characters all – Benedick excepted – have a weakness for his particular misogynistic view of the world.

Shakespeare’s tragedies tend to follow certain rules. First, they’re named after their prominent hero: Macbeth, King Lear, Othello. Occasionally they have double protagonists: Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra. The shape of a tragedy is essentially biographical, ending in the death of this central character or characters.

The climax of this play is in the middle. Julius Caesar builds up to and then explores the aftermath’s shock waves of a climactic event – a political assassination. The shape of this play is unusually unteleological, that’s to say, it’s not the end it is trying to get to, but the middle.

That may seem pretty obvious, but it is a quite different structure from that employed by Shakespeare for similar story types in other plays. Shakespeare deals with regicide, or the assassination of a political leader, repeatedly, but two examples, one earlier and one later than Julius Caesar, will serve here. Richard II, the earlier play, ends with Richard’s own death, which, as discussed in Chapter 4, has two immediate effects on the play’s politics. First, it constructs the narrative as a tragedy, organized around the life and death of the title character. And second, it means that there are no immediate consequences of the regicide.

If Brutus is hatching the murder of Caesar at this minute, Shakespeare is hatching the play Macbeth. And like that later regicide, Brutus cannot bring himself to name the deed: ‘It must be by his death’ (2.1.10) compares directly with Macbeth’s ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’

One of the standard classroom exercises for Elizabethan schoolboys was to argue in utramque partem, or both sides of an issue (as discussed on Richard II), and it was probably a wonderful inadvertent training for playwrights. One such set topic was whether Brutus was justified in killing Caesar.

No sooner has the assassination of Caesar taken place than it is subject to narrative and interpretive retelling. The murder is immediately repackaged as a play. Those states unborn and accents yet unknown are the England and the English in which the play is being performed in 1599: present and future are ironically collapsed, as the bloodstained assassins pose like trophy hunters for the camera of history.

So, these insistent interpretative examples – what we might call the play’s hermeneutic consciousness – mean we are already primed for the play’s most famous act of reinterpretation, Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech in Act 3. Antony’s skill is to persuade the crowd away from Brutus’ explanation of the murder by introducing new information about Caesar. He tells them about Caesar’s will, which has left 75 drachmas to each Roman citizen, as well as his parks and villas by the Tiber as a recreation ground. Interestingly, we never get corroboration of this – the will that Mark Antony brandishes is a prop, rather than a proof. We cannot see for ourselves, but, as Mark Antony’s speech itself enacts, we can be persuaded that it is true. This long scene slows the play down after the violence of the murder.

Simple repetition of that phrase enacts the work of reinterpretation here, as each time the phrase is uttered it seems to mean something slightly different, until it has completed the 180-degree turn to mean its opposite: Brutus is, for Antony, very far from honourable.

After the overdetermined death of Caesar, about which characters within the play and in a much more extensive cultural discourse have talked and interpreted so much, we get a bewilderingly random death. Cinna’s death is thus part of a structural contrast. It is about action without words, or about the failure of language to effect action. Cinna’s attempts to plead for his life are shortened and abrupt – far from the measured eloquence of what we have just witnessed. But the immediate result of Antony’s clever and elevated rhetoric before the Roman citizenry is presented as the barbarity of mob violence; the plebeians who heed his reinterpretation of Caesar’s murder are the same men who attack Cinna.

The death of Cinna the poet is cued by those previous interpretative acts as symbolic – but of what? The scene misses that explanatory analysis and commentary so carefully elaborated in other scenes of the play. No one has time to interpret its significance, so the murder of Cinna is left hanging, an emblem without its motto, a parable without the gloss. It’s clear that Cinna’s death is the consequence of an unfortunate coincidence: it’s because he has the misfortune to share his name with one of the conspirators that he is killed. The plebeians are unwittingly carrying out an act of dramatic hygiene: after all, it is confusing when a play has two characters with the same name.

All these poets and poems are gently mocked: poetry is hardly a heroic pursuit. But these images of poetry must also have a self-reflexive quality, an element of the self-portrait. It’s around this period, after all, that Shakespeare’s own name begins to appear on the title pages of his printed plays: his own identity as a named author is being consolidated.

If Shakespeare’s own poetic identity is being cemented around the time of Julius Caesar, the wider social and political role of the poet is also centre stage. If the role of the poet had ever been to be an innocent bystander on the political scene, it was hard to maintain that disengaged fiction in 1599, the year of increased literary censorship known as the Bishops’ Ban.

Unusually for a Shakespeare play, we have a pretty close idea of when Julius Caesar was performed because a Swiss tourist called Thomas Platter saw it at the Globe towards the end of September 1599. (He has disappointingly little to say about it except that it was ‘pleasingly performed’ and that at the end ‘they danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, two in each group dressed in men’s and two in women’s apparel’ – it’s an interesting coda to the solemnity of the victorious Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar acknowledging Brutus as ‘the noblest Roman of them all’.)

Even though the Cinna scene is so short, then, it seems burdened with trying to say something about the role of the poet in contemporary political life. Even the poet as bystander is brought, resistantly, into politics. And in case we miss it, the play has another go at the same suggestion. It has a second poet, too – a figure called in modern editions with wonderful superfluity,

For there were always two Hamlets in Hamlet. Not quite the cloven prince literalized by the Meyer brothers, but Shakespeare’s play significantly duplicates his Hamlets by giving the dead king and his troubled son the same name.

To call Hamlet a nostalgic play or a play preoccupied by the past may seem perverse, given the many, many ways it has seemed to capture Shakespeare at his most modern. For Sigmund Freud and for Karl Marx, Shakespeare was the textual exemplar for their theories of psychological and economic modernity.

Hamlet’s soliloquies have come to represent the ultimate articulation of a fraught, reflective consciousness: modern man captured in the process of emotional and intellectual formation. We are so used to seeing a Hamlet that anticipates modernity, a play that is more popular and more appreciated four centuries after its composition than it ever was at the time, that it is hard for us to register the ways it is deeply retrospective in tone.

In sharing a name, father and son cannot be entirely distinguished: young Hamlet cannot form an autonomous identity for himself. This psychological overlap has sometimes been literalized in stage productions: one review of Richard Eyre’s 1980 production at the Royal Court in London described how ‘Jonathan Pryce, in what is effectively his first soliloquy, plays both sides of the conversation between Hamlet and his dead father, adopting for the latter a deep voice wrenched from his stomach’; Laurence Olivier also voiced the ghost’s lines in his 1948 film. Such doublings suggest the strong psychic overlap between dead father and troubled son. The repeated names link Hamlet more closely than we often allow to the concerns with political and psychological succession that characterize Shakespeare’s history plays of the 1590s. In many ways Hamlet’s closest canonical neighbour is not the later tragedies of Othello and Macbeth but the earlier 1 Henry IV, another story of a prince trying to escape the burden of a father with whom he shares the same name (and we can see that that play goes to considerable onomastic lengths to hide the fact that the prince – variously dubbed Hal or Harry – is, like his father, ‘Henry’, a name he can only really inherit, like the crown itself, on the death of his father).

Part of the charge of this play written around 1600 must have been the issue of succession. Elizabeth I was approaching seventy, and childless. Most people in England could not remember another monarch, but the question of who would succeed her preoccupied late Elizabethan society and theatre, as discussed in the chapter on Richard II. It is particularly explored on stage in history plays, and Hamlet has some particular affinities with this genre. Shakespeare’s history plays interweave patrilineal and fraternal rivalries within the family and state, marginalizing women and rehearsing versions of regime change. Seen in this context, Hamlet exists as a belated history play, and a rather apocalyptic one. Mysteriously, Hamlet himself, despite being evidently old enough, does not inherit the throne on his father’s death. The play itself does not adequately explain why he is supplanted by his uncle, but in a cultural atmosphere in which succession was such a hot topic, it’s hard to imagine that this puzzling element would have gone unnoticed. What unfolds is the self-destruction of a royal dynasty, leaving the kingdom to fall into foreign hands: one nightmare scenario for England at the end of Elizabeth’s long reign. Fortinbras marches on Denmark and is able, suavely, and without shedding a single drop of his own soldiers’ blood, to enter the throne room and take over.

The future is hardly presented in Hamlet as something to look forward to. As an image of late Elizabethan political anxieties, it’s a bleak ending. Like Elizabethan culture more widely, the play prefers to look backwards rather than forwards: to dare to think forwards, to a time post-Elizabeth, was a crime.

Connected to this backward-looking is the issue of religion. One big question about Hamlet focuses on what a Catholic ghost talking about a Catholic purgatory is doing in an apparently Protestant play.

The murder of old Hamlet isn’t a religious allegory for doctrinal upheaval. That’s not really how Shakespeare’s imagination works, unlike, say, his contemporary Edmund Spenser, whose epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590) begins with the knight Redcrosse encountering the beautiful pure Una, or the true Church, menaced by the monstrous Error, or ignorance or misinformation, and fiendishly impersonated by the scarlet woman Duessa, signifying Catholicism. These ciphers for big ideas are a long way from Shakespearean forms of characterization and circumstantial detail. Nevertheless, something of Hamlet’s nostalgia might be attributed to this specific kind of religious retrospection at the end of the sixteenth century.