Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

The two men, Antonio and Shylock, are

analogous in a number of other ways, too. They are of the same generation, both are lonely, both are excluded at the close.

Modern productions have increasingly experimented with doubling these parts, so that an actor will play, in different productions or different performances, the role of Antonio and also the role of Shylock.

The ambivalence that an audience feels about this play is something built into the play and emerging from it.

if we feel this ambivalence—it is not because the play fails but because it succeeds.

The Merchant of Venice is a deeply disturbing play, whose interpreters over time have sought to purge it of its most dangerous and disturbing energies.

Comedy or tragedy? The history of the play's interpretations encompasses all of these alternatives, and more.

Henry IV Part 1

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history plays, as we have seen, the “history” being staged tends to conflate a number of time periods: the time in which the play is set, the time in which it is written, and the

time(s) in which it is performed.

At once the story of the making of a king and the making of a man, the play juxtaposes Hal to a number of other claimants for historical and dramatic attention: his father, Henry IV; his adoptive father figure, Sir John Falstaff; and his rival, Hotspur (Henry, or Harry, Percy).

Some readers and scholars of the group of plays often called the “second tetralogy,” Richard II, Henry IV Part I and Part 2, and Henry V, have regarded them as a kind of English national epic, even dubbing them the “Henriad,” on the model of the Iliad.

Henry IV Part I is readily understood as a play about the contention between vice and virtue for the soul of a prince—between the dissoluteness of Falstaff, “that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity” (2.5.413), and the militant idealism of Hotspur, “the theme of honour's tongue” (1.1.80).

after the fall of Richard will come the redemption of Prince Hal, “[r]edeeming time,” as he says, “when men think least I will” (1.2.195).

The play's design is one that emphasizes correspondences between its various worlds.

Henry IV Part 1 works to a certain extent by this mode of comparison and contrast. The play is full of complex correspondences between its characters, as well

as telling juxtapositions between its several dramatic worlds. Thus, for example, the King and Falstaff are similar—both are subversives, rebels, pretenders—and both are elderly examples for Prince Hal. But they are also opposite:

Falstaff, like Juliet's Nurse, cannot change his nature to adjust to new circumstances, while Hal is manifestly in the process of getting an education.

There are at least four dramatic worlds in 1 Henry IV,

the court world ruled by King Henry; the tavern world presided over by Falstaff; the world of the rebels, which is also the world of the countryside and of the feudal lords, dominated by Hotspur;

the world of Wales, a world of magic and music, represented by Owen Glendower. Broadly speaking, these various “worlds” correspond to several of the genres of Shake...

The most arresting aspect of Henry's persona as the audience encounters him in 1 Henry IV'is that the buoyant, optimistic, and ambitious Bolingbroke of Richard II is now suddenly old.

is a man weighed down by a double sin, the usurpation of Richard's throne and the subsequent murder of Richard.

The England of Henry IV is a fallen world, a world, we might say, made up too much of politics and plotting, and not enough of fellowship and love.

It is, therefore, the dramatic worlds that remain in Henry IV Part 1, Hotspur's and Falstaff's, that will present for Prince Hal the real dichotomy and choice.

in the central design of this play it is to Hotspur and to Falstaff that we should look in order to understand the making of the...

Hotspur's grandiose “if we live, we live to tread on kings” (5.2.85) might well remind a Shakespearean audience that Tamburlaine had literally used a conquered Eastern king as his footstool

Hotspur is easy to parody, because he, too, is a figure of excess.

The Hotspurs of this world, like the Tybalts, cannot survive, although a world deprived of their spirit and their quixotic idealism is a world less valuable to live in.

So Hotspur rejects time in favor of honor. On the other end of the scale of heroism

and idealism, Falstaff rejects time as well, the first time we see him:

In Falstaff we encounter the early modern equivalent of one of the most popular morality play characters, the Vice—the personified figure of depravity or corruption.

Falstaff s huge fat body is a visual metaphor similar to that of Nell, the kitchen wench in The Comedy of Errors: he is out of all compass, the grotesque physical opposite of the enclosed and classical body of a Hotspur or a Hal.

the play takes an evenhanded view of Falstaff s qualities. While he is not the sublime antihero sometimes claimed by his uncritical admirers and adherents

(“They hate us youth”), he is an excellent antidote to unrealistic idealism, as well as (in this play, at least) a diverting and amusing stage presence.

he speaks, upon occasion, a crucial and even a painful truth, as when, for example, he acknowledges th...

King Henry IV, who was the thief and usurper of the kingdom, is himself on the brink of being robbed of his crown

That Falstaff does not fear Hal, when he becomes King, as he feared his father, will ultimately be Falstaff's undoing.

The morality play struggle between vice and virtue can also be understood both in terms that resemble the classical psychomachia, or conflict of the soul, and in terms of modern psychology and psychoanalysis. That is to say, the struggle is situated inside Hal as well as

outside him. Hal has elements of Falstaff in his nature and character, and elements of Hotspur, and in a sense the whole play is the working out of this inner conflict,

the story of his miraculous reformation preceded him,

Redeeming time when men think least I will. 1.2.173–195

“So when this loose behavior I throw off / And pay the debt I never promisèd”:

Hal becomes one of the people, as Christ descended to Earth, to learn about them,

to instruct them, and to redeem them. Where Bolingbroke, Hal's father, wooed the common people as a calculated act (“Off goes his bonnet to an oysterwench”),

Hal's wooing, though in a sense no less calculated, is much closer to an act of love. Like all the most successful monarchs—including Queen E...

These are key words, cold words: “I do; I will.” The language of the marriage ceremony here seems deliberately and ironically to signify an impending divorce. The play-within-the-play predicts the future, as would be clear to anyone in the audience who knew either the historical facts or Shakespeare's unerring way with prophecy.

War is the pivot or threshold here, comparable, for example, to the death of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, which signaled the play's transition from comedy to tragedy—or

When comedy turns into history in this play, timelessness turns into time,

The feudal world of Richard IIis now only a distant memory.