Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

whether it is Falstaff's translation from knight to buck and from man to “woman,” Ford's translation from jealous man to wiser husband, or Evans's, Caius's, and William Page's earnest efforts to speak and be understood.

Much Ado About Nothing

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HIS PLAY, with its gaily self-deprecating title, seems virtually to inaugurate a genre. It is the forerunner of Restoration stage comedy, of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century “comedy of

manners,” and of what has come to be called “screwball comedy,” the bantering, witty, sophisticated romantic plots that emerged in the films of the 1930s and 1940s,

Beatrice and Benedick are tense, touchy, and witty with each other, in marked contrast to the conventional romantic pair, the naïve and trusting Hero and the equally naïve Claudio,

“Peace! I will stop your mouth”—with a kiss (5.4.96).

In this case, dance offers a festive end to a play that, although formally a comedy, is full of dark moments, and often threatens to veer into tragedy.

Beatrice herself explains lightly to Don Pedro that Benedick “lent” her his heart for a while, and that she “gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one,” his having “won it of [her], with false dice” (2.1.242–244). But, tantalizingly, their shared prehistory is never explained.

in Much Ado the initial emphasis is on dissimilarity. Beatrice and Benedick are perhaps a little older, and in any case more worldly—and more wordy—than the tongue-tied Hero and Claudio.

Berowne, in Love's Labour's Lost, like Benedick, is very ready to mock the spectacle of others in love, only

to be caught, himself, composing and reading a love sonnet.

Much Ado About Nothing is indeed in many ways Shakespeare's great play about gossip. Everything is overheard, misheard, or constructed on purpose for

The pretended indifference of Beatrice and Benedick is juxtaposed to the all-too-susceptible naïveté of Claudio, who declares his inexperience and couples it

with self-doubt. Claudio in effect asks himself, Could someone like Hero love me? Isn't it more likely that she is in love with, or in bed with, someone else, someone more impressive, or higher ranking, or sexier?

In Much Ado conversion becomes one of the dominant themes of the play,

Hero will be converted into “another Hero,” Margaret converted into Hero, Benedick and Beatrice into lovers, tragedy converted into romance and comedy.

Much Ado About Nothing is a play that engages topics like male bonding and female disempowerment,

As so often in Shakespeare, the problem is not one of a wicked external diabolus ex machina but of the exploitation of existing internal weaknesses.

Don John is a catalyst, or, perhaps more symbolically, a personification of the problems that are bound to arise between two innocent, inexperienced, and silent lovers in a world that depends upon language.

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.

Men were deceivers ever. 2.3.56–57

As is not uncommon in Shakespearean plays about marriage, the interval between betrothal and wedding is regarded as a carnival or play space,

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I would live till I were married. 2.3.196–215

“A miracle!” crows Benedick. “Here's our own hands against our hearts” (5.4.91).

No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms” (5.2.30–35).

“So the life that died with shame / Lives in death with glorious fame” (5.3.3, 7–8).

This is a play that several times comes dangerously close to tragedy. Beatrice's command to her lover, “Kill Claudio,” is a turning

point in more ways than one, as actors and directors must struggle to retain the sincerity of the moment, at the same time that this earnest entreaty breaks the tone, and the frame, of all of their previous banter.

Henry V

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ACH ACT OF The Life of Henry V begins with a prologue, and each of these, as we will see, has the paradoxical effect of both bringing the audience closer to the dramatic action and marking the impossibility of conveying the “truth” of that action on the stage.

The prologue to the first act is justly famous, both for its high rhetorical style and for its evocative description of the theater-space.

The “gentles” in the audience, gentlemen and gentlewomen, are requested “[g]ently to hear” the play—that is, to make gracious allowances for its inevitable deficiencies.

But in the case of Henry V, where what is at stake is English history and English heroism, the prologues (and indeed the final and deflating Epilogue) are both more numerous and more insistent, reminding the audience at every turn that the play's illusion is illusion.

Thus these prologues, rather than increasing the realism and immediacy of the play, instead underscore the fact that it is a play.

Yet the apparent deficiency is also an advantage. Another way of understanding the claims and disclaimers of the prologues is to see that they announce the immediacy and currency of “history” for the present day— a theme that will itself be stressed by King

Henry V when he comes, on the battlefield in act 4, scene 3, to predict the future reputation of those who will have fought with him that day.

The audience is urged, by the use of its imagination, working collaboratively with the author and with the actor, to re-create

the world of Henry V and to render his time-bound victory—soon to be lost through the weakness of his son and successor, the child-king Henry VI—timeless in memory and power.

At this moment King Henry V is all king, all soldier. He has succeeded in doing what his father, Henry IV, could never do: turn civil wars, inward wars, outward toward external enemies.

In marked contrast to Richard II, whose death he mourns and repents, this King will not continue to foster

favorites who act against the public weal. Rather, he will put aside private feelings and private friendships to become a public man.

“The mercy that was quick in us but late / By your own counsel is suppressed and killed” (2.2.76–77).

language of suppression and repression will characterize both the King and the play.

Again and again in this play we will hear language and see actions that echo and correct the pattern of Richard II. Richard's inward wars become outward wars. Richard's weakness with traitors becomes a necessary and merciless execution of malefactors.

the execution of Prince Hal's old tavern companion Bardolph, who has robbed a church, is accompanied by a terse admonition: “We would have all such offenders so cut off” (3.6.98). So much for old friendships.

In fact, the whole of yet another old order is dying off in this history play: the old order, or “old disorder,” of the tavern world and the world of Misrule.

Most shocking of all, Falstaff is dead, Falstaff who throughout two entire plays steadfastly asserted his youth, and who seemed to be, in his way, an eternal energy, an eternal spirit. “The King has killed his heart” (2.1.79), says Mistress Quickly,

This extraordinary speech returns the play to many of the same themes raised at the beginning by the Prologue: memory, epitaph, and mortality.

Like another Shakespearean braggart soldier, Don Armado in Love's Labour's Lost, Pistol is given to linguistic extravagance, even at the cost of linguistic accuracy.

The common soldiers are less tolerant, and less effusive. They are frightened of dying in battle,