Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

aesthetic and intellectual refinement, a fact that we should bear in mind when encountering both the comparable melancholic affectation of Orsino at the beginning of Twelfth Night and, more disconcertingly, the melancholy of Hamlet.

Jaques I thank you for your company but, good faith, I had as liefhave been myself alone. Orlando And so had I. But yet for fashion' sake I thank you too for your society.

As You Like It regularly uses the device of the pastoral debate to create unlikely twinnings of this sort. Jaques loves himself; Orlando loves “Rosalind,” whoever he thinks that personage might be. Orlando, if he were paying strict attention, might learn more than one lesson from his witty joust with the melancholy Jaques.

Many if not most of the characters in this play are overly concerned with self as they enter the Forest of Arden, and this mirroring forest and these mirroring debates give proportion and balance. Thus the forest socializes.

Of all the mirror scenes in As You Like It, the most striking is the one that brings together these two crucial figures, Jaques and Touchstone.

“Thou speak'st wiser than thou art ware of” (2.4.50). The whole of the play is constructed on paradoxes of this kind: a fool wiser than a self-styled philosopher, outlaws more gentle than the “inland bred” man; noble savages and savage nobles.

Touchstone is one of the most engaging of Shakespearean fools.

Touchstone, like Feste and Lear's Fool, is permitted to speak truth to power, and escape unscathed, despite periodic threats of discipline or punishment.

Touchstone the licensed fool is, then, in one sense another aspect of “liberty,” and of the fact that Arden leads “[t]o liberty and not to banishment.” Like all allowed fools, he is himself a mirror, reflecting and commenting on the life and times around him.

Here it is important to remind ourselves that this concept—”All the world's a stage”—was in Shakespeare's time already a cliché.

when Shakespeare put these words in the mouth of one of his most affected poseurs he was making a deliberate theatrical decision.

The choice of seven for the ages of man was a popular one in Shakespeare's time, although some experts

contended that there were three, or four, or six. But seven was the number of the planets, and the virtues and vices, and the liberal arts, and so on.

the speech will be winding to its conclusion as old Adam reenters the stage. And as he

does so, in his dignity and self-awareness he gives the lie to everything Jaques has just said about the depredations and mortifications of old age.

If it do come to pass That any man turn ass, Leaving his wealth and ease A stubborn will to please, Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame. Here shall he see Gross fools as he, An if he will come to me.

“If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions

that liked me, and breaths that I defied not” (Epilogue 14-16).

In many ways Rosalind is a Puck figure, intervening in the love matches of others, appearing in the liminal space of the epilogue to break the frame between player and character, between audience and actors.

For Rosalind and Celia—as, in a rather different kind of play, for Juliet—banishment is a necessary act of breaking away from the father.

Rosalind is able to rebel against a “bad” or repressive father at the same time that she goes forward into the Forest of Arden, where her “real,” “good,” and—importantly—absent father is already living.

“We that are true lovers run into strange capers. But as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly” (2.4.47–49).

language is the index of full humanity in Shakespeare. When characters cease

to speak, or cannot bring themselves to do so, they seal themselves off from society,

Orlando's failure of language in love, however adorably adolescent, is in part a sign that he does not yet understand what it is to be a lover.

Here the pragmatic wisdom of her decision to remain in disguise becomes evident, for Orlando is comfortable and at ease with the “boy” Ganymede, not tongue-tied as he was in the court, or pretentious as he is in his poems.

Rosalind's play will work for and upon him as do all plays-within-the-play in Shakespeare, exposing the follies and limitations of the world of the onstage spectator—as well as the correlative blind spots of the audience in the theater.

Love is a real as well as an ideal commitment. In fact, Rosalind functions throughout the play as the voice of common

sense as well as of passion. She has something of Juliet's lyricism, something of Portia's wit and worldly wisdom, and something of Teste's license to be rude. She does not hold herself aloof from love, but can be as eager a participant as she is a judicious critic.

When Orlando tells Ganymede that he would die for Rosalind, he gets an astringent reply: “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (4.1.91–92).

the love pair of Rosalind and Orlando are framed by the instructive—and amusing—examples of other lovers.

Poetry is traditionally associated with timelessness, and social life, marriage, and procreation with the world of ongoing time.

Of all Shakespeare's plays, none has more—or more beautiful—songs,

containing and defusing both emotion and potential tragedy.

And yet, as the play begins to move toward its ending, there comes a crucial moment, the moment when Orlando learns that his brother and Celia have fallen in love and will marry. Now, for the first time, he is dissatisfied with his love games.

Rosalind Why then, tomorrow I cannot serve your turn for Rosalind? Orlando I can live no longer by thinking. 5.2.43–45

That Rosalind is a magician is a point she will make, once again, in her epilogue, one of the most compelling moments of Shakespearean stage management in any of the plays.

all the boundaries that she traverses as she does so, standing on the edge of the stage, at the end of the play, poised between playing-space and pit, between actors and audience, between female and male, woman and boy.

Hamlet

ATCHING OR READINGHamlet for the first time or the twentieth, an observer cannot help being struck, I think, by how much of the play has passed into our common language. Indeed, as many commentators have observed, the experience of Hamlet is almost always that of recognition, of recalling, remembering, or identifying some already-known phrase or image. It could be said that in the context of modern culture—global culture as well as Anglophone culture—one never does encounter Hamlet “for the first time.”

Hamlet is one of the most peculiar, private, and detailed among all of Shakespeare's plays. At first glance it does not seem “universal” at all.

What is it about this odd play, derived from older sources—the twelfth-century legend of Amleth, told by the Danish author known as Saxo the Grammarian, which was later adapted into French by François de Belleforest in

1570, the primary source for the supposed ur-Hamlet, or original Hamlet, a lost play scholars speculate about—that has mined the play into our consciousness to such a degree?

The play's title, taken from the Second Quarto, The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, indicates that we are dealing with both a personal and a political or dynastic situation, with Hamlet the prince and with Hamlet the man.

Hamlet bears the same name as his father, the former King, and his play is a private chronicle, the story of a history gone awry, and wrenched into tragedy.

when the king is weak, so too is the kingdom. When there is corruption at the top, the land and its people are likewise corrupted and infected.

The world of the play is in a sense a metaphor for the consciousness of its protagonist, and its characters have relationships with Hamlet the prince that are both realistically personal and allusively psychological.

Hamlet's story has become, for every audience, its own.

Hamlet's story becomes the story of a confrontation with consciousness, and it is this story that becomes the haunting chronicle Horatio must live to retell.

In suggesting that these three worlds—the world of Hamlet's mind and imagination; the physical, political, and “historical” world of Denmark; and the world of dramatic fiction and play—are parallel to and superimposed upon one another, I am suggesting, also, that the play is about the whole question of boundaries, thresholds, and liminality or border crossing: boundary disputes between Norway and Denmark, boundaries between youth and age, boundaries between reality and imagination, between audience and actor.