Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

The plebeians are a swayable chorus, a malleable, responsive audience to be played

upon by the cleverer actor—and Brutus has too many scruples, too many principles, to think of trying to be clever. With characteristic blindness he brushes aside Cas-sius's all-too-perceptive fears of Antony's skill as an orator.

Mark Antony is in fact the spirit of misrule in this play, the spirit of chaos and anarchy.

Antony's assumption of command immediately following Caesar's death, is yet another sign of what is bitterly wrong with the whole notion of the conspiracy. Instead of reason, chaos now runs the state.

Antony is a master orator, a skillful manipulator of crowds, and his delight in disorder keeps him from feeling bound, like Brutus, by scruple. His behavior in the oration scene is in striking contrast to that of Brutus. Brutus speaks in prose, he appeals to reason, to the wisdom of the

people, and he speaks, sometimes, in riddling syllogisms:

The rhythmic and repetitious nature of this speech explains in part why Antony's funeral oration is the piece of Shakespeare's poetry many schoolchildren are asked to memorize.

is designed to show Antony's facility in demagoguery It is easy to memorize, easy to hear and follow, the perfect kind of language to reach and move the shallow masses.

In this new situation Antony is suddenly at something of a disadvantage. His predilection for chaos makes him more suited to misrule than to rule. The time has come for the cold precision of Octavius Caesar, who is this play's version of the new political man.

Brutus was human, and according to some he was the best of humanity and he is dead. And Caesar is dead, with all his strengths and all his flaws. Octavius is not dead, but in

a sense he is also not alive. He is the sober, calculating, self-controlled new man, the politician, who replaces the ancient mythic hero, replacing Julius Caesar and even Antony, rulers with excesses and blind spots, but also with human energies and human passions.

Hal of 2 Henry IV, deliberately cold, conscious o...

The play is at considerable pains, from the first, to demonstrate the resemblance between Brutus and Caesar.

Caesar does not yield to his wife, while Brutus does yield to his. But the stage picture draws a clear analogy between the two.

In this very well-structured

play each act seems to focus on one character: act 1 centers on Cassius, act 2 on Brutus, act 3 on Caesar, act 4 on Antony, and act 5 on Octavius.

This scene is a vivid emblem of the confusion that has fallen upon Rome. When times are bad for anyone, the poet suggests, they are especially bad for poets. In Shakespeare's own time the censorship of poets, playwrights, and other writers was a fact of life, and imprisonment or corporal punishment was often the fate of offenders.

The material nature of stage plays in Shakespeare's time, and the formal contradiction they present, is that they are written in order to be spoken and performed.

This now-proverbial protestation of failed understanding—”it was Greek to me”—is another in the play's catalogue of oblique, deceptive, co-opted, or untranslatable utterances and messages.

For both living and dead, Caesar is the only character in the play who speaks the language of performance and command—until the rise in the final act of another Caesar, the new man, Octavius.

Caesar is as likely to be taught and read today in classes on political theory, business, and “leadership” as in the context of Shakespeare and his literary contemporaries. It both models a version of politics (“Friends, Romans, countrymen”) and undermines its own models.

This is, after all, a play rewritten by Brecht and appropriated by Marx. But its lessons are elusive, and its images refract upon the viewer.

As You Like It

21

HAKESPEARE IS A master at bringing literary conventions to life on the stage, thereby both illustrating them and exposing their pretensions and shortcomings.

In As You Like It Shakespeare turns his attention to the pastoral, a literary mode that enjoyed a tremendous vogue in Elizabethan England. Pastoral plays, poems, elegies, and romances, borrowed in part from Italian and also from ancient Greek and Latin models, were a favorite with audiences and readers, high and low on the social scale.

it is a way of offering a criticism of contemporary social, political, and

religious practice in a “safe” context of coded fiction.

From its earliest appearance pastoral had been used as a mode of social critique: under the guise of merely talking about

shepherds, poets could write critical and satirical accounts of government, politics, and religion (a priest was a “pastor;” his congregation was a “flock”).

A poet was, conventionally, a shepherd, and the tradition of the pastoral elegy extended from ancient Greece through Spenser and Milton to Shelley in the Romantic period, and beyond.

A good modern analogue to the pastoral convention might be the mythology of the American West and the “Western” in fiction and film.

The word “cowboy,” like the word “shepherd,” is readily understood as a metaphor, and it need not have any direct connection with livestock in order to carry familiar connotations of recklessness, wildness, or individuality.

conventions of the genre, and others, too, were so well known to Shakespeare's audience (as the conventions of the Western are to modern audiences) that the playwright could use, mock, and tease them with the confident expectation that his point would quickly be understood.

As You Like It is not only a pastoral play but also a play about the nature of pastoral, and it begins with one of the most convenient devices of the pastoral tradition, the journey or sojourn.

There was a Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's county of Warwickshire, northwest of the Avon River. “Arden,” as it happens, was also Shakespeare's mother's maiden name.

it is arguable that some nostalgia for childhood would double the geographical place with a psychological, or at least a remembered, place of ideal past-ness and fantasy.

By playing with these spellings, Shakespeare combines all the connotations of the real places with an unlocatability that belongs only to fantasy.

The part of old Adam is one of the roles alleged to have been played by William Shakespeare, who is also said to have played the Ghost

in Hamlet, and other older men and father figures from King Henry IV to Menenius.

The most common of all activities of pastoral shepherds in English Renaissance literature was the writing of poetry. “Shepherd” virtually meant “poet” when it appeared in a literary context,

Shakespeare presents us with a shepherdess in a remote and timeless forest who has read and memorized verses from the poetry

of his great contemporary and rival, Christopher Marlowe. This minor but amusing circumstance is indicative of the way the play will flaunt, and flout, its pastoral conventions, taking them as a known quantity that can be tweaked at will.

The result is both the reinstatement of those conventions, and the pleasures they provide, and also a comical c...

Furthermore, although so many people write poetry in the Forest of Arden, much of the poetry they write is disquietingly bad.

The Forest of Arden, then, is a golden world, an Eden, an Arcady, and in some sense a tongue-in-cheek parody of all of these.

In a play in which all names have significance, Rosalind has taken the name of Ganymede, the cupbearer of the gods, a lovely Trojan youth who was carried off by Zeus because of his beauty—a beauty that made him sought after by women as well as by men.

Arden is a projection of one's own beliefs, dreams, or fears—a psychological mirror of the self.

Into the midst of this idyll comes Orlando, flourishing his weapon and declaring, “I almost die for food; and let me have it” (2.7.103). The Duke's response is mild: “Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table” (104). “Speak you so gently?” says Orlando, abashed. “Pardon me, I pray you. / I thought that all things had been savage here” (105–106).

Orlando, who is in his own phrase “inland bred,” or civilized, finds that the wilderness is more civilized than he is. He is the savage here.

His melancholy is itself a pleasant affectation, rather than an emotional affliction. Melancholy was a fashionable Elizabethan complaint, a mark of