Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

Although it is not possible to know with certainty the chronology of composition of the plays—or even, sometimes, of their performance—the sequence given here follows the order suggested by The Norton Shakespeare with the exception of a few minor changes.

For the convenience of the general reader Henry VI Part

1 is discussed before Part 2 and Part 3, even though it was written after them. The Norton editors place The Merry Wives of Windsor between Henry IV Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2, but I have elected, again for reasons of readerly conve...

Readers should bear in mind that the dating of the plays is in many cases still highly speculative and controversial, and that it is therefore difficult to draw firm conclusions about Shakespeare's development as a playwright from this, or any, order of the plays.

EVERY AGE creates its own Shakespeare.

Since the texts (today we would say “scripts”) of stage plays were not generally regarded as “literature,” many of the first published versions of the plays are of uncertain authority.

Plays were written collaboratively, under pressure of time and the stage, somewhat like film and television scripts today, and there was as yet no system of copyright. As we have said before, whoever published a work was its owner.

The great new public institution of the theater, then, the birthplace of the greatest drama in the English-speaking world, was located on the margins of the city, and on the margins of society.

been built on the bankside of the Thames in 1599. What did the Globe theater look like? It was a many-sided playhouse, built so that it seemed virtually round, and it was open to the sky. There were three levels of seating with admission, depending upon the social status of the spectator and the size of his or her purse.

In broad comparative terms, the atmosphere would have resembled a modern sporting event or rock concert more than, say, a chamber music concert or an opera. Orange-sellers offered refreshment.

In the early modern playhouse, the plays were presented in the afternoon, in natural light, and with very few props, though with lavish costumes.

What created the sense of darkness and mystery was the language, costumes, and props. Torches, candles, or other visual cues could identify the time as “night,” as could costumes (like “nightgowns”). Or, of course, the playwright could indicate the time of day, or night, through words

Women were played by boys, kings by commoners; night scenes, staged in the middle of the afternoon, were created by language. The audience was conditioned to hold two contradictory “truths” in mind at once.

Every age creates its own Shakespeare. Another way of saying this is to observe that Shakespeare serves a wide variety of cultural purposes, from political nationalism around the globe to modern-day instruction in “leadership” for business and corporate culture.

Shakespeare is in a way always two playwrights, not one: the playwright of his time, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England, and the playwright of our time, whatever time that is. The playwright of now.

In a world increasingly diverse and complex, Shakespeare is read and performed and discussed all over the globe—from France to Egypt to Romania to Japan to Israel.

Shakespeare is part of our common culture: “Shakespeare” is one of the ways we communicate with one another today on issues of cultural seriousness— political, moral, ethical, social. Shakespeare the philosopher, Shakespeare the historian, Shakespeare the therapist, Shakespeare the moralist. This is Shakespeare as cultural shorthand. It is not an exaggeration to say that in the American public sphere only the Bible has the same moral authority.

Reading aloud in this era before television was a popular household pastime,

I have quoted this exchange at some length because Austen, like Shakespeare, is often cited out of context as if her views coincided with those of one or another of her fictional characters.

since the plot of Mansfield Park turns in large part on the question of whether a theater is a morally dangerous institution that has no place in a gentleman's home, both the drama and the comic irony of this scene are enhanced by the underlying question of whether Shakespeare is more properly performed or read.

It was only with the rise of elocution and oratory as academic subjects that Shakespeare became part of the standard curriculum.

the first Shakespeare courses taught at Harvard and Yale did not appear until the 1870s. Initially used for declamation, and then for the biographical study of the author, Shakespeare's plays were not studied in American schools and colleges as literary works—that

that is, with students each reading the complete text of a play—until the late nineteenth century.

Sigmund Freud, for example, used Shakespearean characters as the models for some of his most influential cases studies and theories about human behavior. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud sees Hamlet's condition as the modern version of the Oedipus complex, making ruminative and conflicted what was transparent in the classical original.

Freud's masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams, cites examples from Hamlet, Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2, Henry VI Part 3, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and Timon of Athens. In his letters Freud compares himself to Hamlet and his beloved daughter Sophie to Lear's daughter Cordelia.

Karl Marx knew Shakespeare so well that many of his allusions are buried seamlessly within his writing.

In a set of questions posed by two of his daughters in a family parlor game, Marx identified Shakespeare, along with Aeschylus and Goethe, as one of his favorite poets.

it was not only scholars who read Shakespeare and applied what they read to their own daily life and thought. Poets and politicians knew their Shakespeare and cited him freely. Memorization, like reading aloud, was part of the culture in the United States as in England, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe.

Mark Twain wrote that when he was a pilot-apprentice on the Mississippi his pilot-master would recite Shakespeare to him by the hour. “He did not use the book, and did not need to; he knew his Shakespeare as well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication table.”

Abraham Lincoln often quoted Shakespeare at length and by heart during the period of the Civil War. Lincoln's favorite Shakespeare play was Macbeth, which he found all too apposite as a story of tyranny and murder.

John F. Kennedy, like Lincoln, loved Shakespeare and quoted him often in his speeches.

President Lyndon Johnson did not quote Shakespeare so much as he was parodied through him, in Barbara Garson's satirical send-up Macbird (1966), a broad-brush political allegory that identified Johnson/Macbeth/Macbird as the culprit in the murder of Kennedy/Duncan/Ken O'Dunc. It will not be especially useful to chronicle the disappearance of confident and knowledgeable

Shakespeare quotation in public life, except to say that parodies like Macbird— and less tendentious Shakespeare “adaptations” like West Side Story—began gradually to take over the public space that previously had been occupied by a more direct engagement with Shakespeare's language and the characters and plots of his plays.

Whether it is “all the world's a stage” or “one touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” Shakespearean taglines and Shakespearean “philosophy” or wisdom, dislocated from their dramatic context, often assume a certain weightiness (indeed, a rhetorical ponderousness) that is belied by looking at the dramatic situation. This habit of disembodied quotation tends to make Shakespeare into an all-purpose sage, a single author representing the totality of the world's wisdom. The World Wide Web has made this practice even more common

Polonius's advice to his son Laertes in Hamlet, a collection of weary maxims that the early modern period would have recognized as empty commonplaces, is often cited out of context as Shakespeare on thrift (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”), Shakespeare on decorum (“the apparel often proclaims the man”), and so on.

When members of the U.S. Congress quote Shakespeare they are invoking his cultural authority, not necessarily his plays. A short list of Shakespearean references in the Congressional Record will make this perfectly clear. It is not only that twenty-first-century politicians and lawmakers may not always know their Shakespeare

as well as did their predecessors, but also that they do not expect the general public to recognize the context of the references. Citing Shakespeare gives weight and heft to a political statement.

a more charitable view would be that the power of Shakespeare's evocative language “transcends” the immediate context of the plays.

That these plays can sustain so many powerful and persuasive interpretations is in fact as close as I can come to explaining the elusive nature of their greatness. To spend a few hours with them is pure pleasure. To spend a lifetime with them is a remarkable privilege.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

One

make The Two Gentlemen of Verona a harbinger of much that is most pleasurable and intricate in later Shakespearean comedies, tragedies, and romances.

we might regard Two Gentlemen as an anthology of bits and pieces waiting to be crafted into more compelling drama.

The play is a kind of love cartoon,

“I knew him as myself,” explains Valentine, “for from our infancy / We have conversed, and spent our hours together” (2.4.56–57).

I rather would entreat thy company To see the wonders of the world abroad Than, living dully sluggardized at home, Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness. But since thou lov'st, love still, and thrive therein— Even as I would, when I to love begin. Two Gentlemen 1.1.5–10

Proteus Inconstancy falls off ere it begins. What is in Silvia's face but I may spy More fresh in Julia's, with a constant eye? Valentine Come, come, a hand from either. Let me be blessed to make this happy close. 'Twere pity two such friends should be long foes. [JULIA and PROTEUS join hands] Proteus Bear witness, heaven, I have my wish for ever. Julia And I mine. 5.4.111–118

It is the lesser blot, modesty finds, Women to change their shapes than men their minds. 5.4.106–107

Proteus Than men their minds! 'Tis true. O heaven, were man But constant, he were perfect…. 5.4.108–109

“To love fair Silvia, shall I be forsworn; / To wrong my friend I shall be much forsworn…. Love bade me swear, and Love bids me forswear” (2.6.1–3, 6).

I cannot leave to love, and yet I do. But there I leave to love where I should love. Julia I lose, and Valentine I lose. If I keep them I needs must lose myself. If I lose them, thus find I by their loss For Valentine, myself, for Julia, Silvia. I to myself am dearer than a friend, For love is still most precious in itself, And Silvia—witness heaven that made her fair— Shows Julia but a swarthy Ethiope. I will forget that Julia is alive, Rememb'ring that my love to her is dead, And Valentine I'll hold an enemy Aiming at Silvia as a sweeter friend. I cannot now prove constant to myself Without some treachery used to Valentine. 2.6.17–32