Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

Angelo, despite, or because of, his angelic name, is as ignorant of his own mortal nature as his city's laws are of the propensities of human beings.

The play thus asks the question, What is natural? And how can we contend to know ourselves? A failure to understand this central question has led, in Vienna, to two different but related kinds of excess: excess of liberty and

excess of restraint. The two instincts, which are really two sides of the same coin, are exemplified by a brother and a sister, Claudio and Isabella,

In fact, as Angelo shrewdly observes, he and Isabella have a

great deal in common. They refer to themselves, and are described by others, as saints (another Shakespearean danger signal), and Angelo admits that Isabella's virtue is part of her attraction:

But as unnatural as Angelo may seem, in wishing to enforce archaic laws for their own sake, he is not more unnatural

than Isabella, who can proudly proclaim, “More than our brother is our chastity” (2.4.185).

As the Duke tests Angelo and Isabella and Lucio, and as Angelo is tested by Isabella's youth, beauty, innocence, and eloquence, so Isabella is tempted by self-love. She is at this stage as securely locked in the nunnery of her own self-regard as her brother is locked in the prison.

So Claudio shows excess of liberty, Isabella shows excess of restraint, and Angelo shows first the one and then the other. What

all of them lack, and what the play will seek to supply, is a sense of mortality, desire, and limit.

In Pompey's commonsense view sexual desire is a natural part of life, and a law that seeks to regulate or thwart it, whether the nunnery's laws or the punitive laws of Vienna, cannot be enforced. Such a law is against

nature, just as Angelo's self-repression, to “rebate and blunt his natural edge,” is against nature—”they will to't.”

In one way, then, this play suggests that human nature is why human beings need laws. The Duke's masking, and his descent—like that of the disguised Henry V—among the people, is in this

view a necessary step toward finding laws and codes that work from within and below.

Of all Shakespeare's comedies, Measure for Measure, his last comedy, is the most evidently impatient or uncomfortable with its

inherited generic form. It is a comedy that exposes the difficulties, perhaps the impossibilities, of its being a comedy—a comedy that, if it ends in marriage at all, ends only in the forced marriage of Lucio to the “punk,” or whore,

To this point we have been considering the play as one that formally explores the psychology of repression and denial (characters locked up in their separate enclosed spaces, whether prison, or nunnery, or moated grange; Angelo and Isabella as inadvertent doubles, confined by their own superhuman visions of themselves as saints),

But the play's central and most puzzling character, the Duke, traverses a space that is at once psychological and theological, and how the audience responds to him will determine

much about the tone of any production.

The Duke's predilection for testing and tempting is almost the only “explanation” we have for

some of his more humanly puzzling behavior. Why, for example, does he tell Claudio that he should be “absolute for death” when he knows he can save him? Why does he leave Angelo in charge of the state when he suspects him of weakness and inhumanity? Why, above all, does he tell Isabella that her brother is dead, when Claudio is still alive?

It is worth noting that Renaissance rulers regularly used horrific public events like executions and torture as ways of producing fear and anxiety in the populace. The beheading of noble and royal persons and the maiming and drawing and quartering of political rivals, religious dissidents, and other public figures for moral crimes and crimes against the state were a mode of social regulation.

one of the most powerful devices at the command of the ruler was the occasional and unpredictable use of clemency.

Scholars of the early modern period often warn against mistaking sixteenth-and seventeenth-century literary texts for modern ones. The term for this is “presentism,” and it is thought to be a naïve error, a kind of category mistake. Yet Shakespeare has made modernity as much as he has uncannily anticipated it,

One of the most visible onstage theatrical portrayals of the outward/inward split is the commonplace device of disguise.

Characteristically—both for Lucio and for Shakespeare—this commonplace is comically misapplied when it is cited (Shakespeare

never uses clichés straight, but always puts them in the mouth of an unlikely or ironic speaker).

The play's long last scene has offered numerous problems for readers, audience, actors, and directors. In it the Duke attempts to assert control, and though he has some successes, he also has some signal failures.

In recent years it has become common to question the Duke's omniscience and power—after all, he fails to get the prisoner Barnardine to consent to die, in one of the play's most darkly comic scenes, and thus almost scuttles his own plan.

contemporary stagings of Measure for Measure often open up the ending rather than closing it down.

But the finest energies of Measure for Measure are not so much comic or historical as they are allied with tragedy and romance, with the fact of mortality and the mystery of revelation.

Othello

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ODERN SCHOLARS sometimes tend to think of race, class, and gender as distinctively contemporary modes of analysis, categories that reflect our own concerns, identities, and anxieties. But the plays of Shakespeare, produced in a period now often described as “early modern England,” are themselves strikingly “modern” in this as in other respects. To an extraordinary degree, Shakespeare's plays, from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest, exhibit and record tensions around and within these categories. And never more than in Othello.

Shakespeare's time—like ours—was one of great historical changes and social anomalies. There were black men and women living in London, some of whom owned property, paid taxes, and went to church; but the slave trade between the West Indies and Africa had already begun.

Yet notice that in fact he does nothing himself. Cassio, made drunk by Iago, causes disorder among the troops. Roderigo, goaded by Iago, rouses Brabantio and wounds Cassio. Othello, crazed and maddened by Iago, kills Desdemona. Iago has suggested all of this, but

he performs none of it. Even the handkerchief is found by Emilia, not by Iago. He is a voice in the dark, living proof that words have enormous power, even though over and over we hear characters in the play deny this.

Emilia, Iago's wife, is a realist and a literalist, like Hamlet's gravedigger, or Macbeths Porter. Like them, she sees things not for what they could be, but for what they are. Desdemona asks her, in tones of incredulity, whether she could imagine that a woman might be unfaithful to her husband, and Emilia's reply has the frank, down-to-earth tone of Pompey the bawd in Measure for Measure:

Desdemona Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world? Emilia The world's a huge thing. It is a great price for a small vice. 4.3.66–68

All's Well That Ends Well

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Classed for much of the twentieth century with the so-called problem plays or “dark comedies,” All's Well has not enjoyed, recently, the easy popularity with audiences of livelier and more romantic comedies, such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Yet it contains not one but two roles that would make an actress's career (and have). Both Helena and the Countess are brilliant, complicated, strong women who, finding themselves in impossible situations, emerge not only whole but triumphant.

Helena is at least as ingenious as Rosalind, a much more crowd-pleasing heroine. And if Bertram seems like a cad compared to the smitten Orlando, he is not more so than Much Ado About Nothings Claudio.

the repeated internal assurances that all's well that ends well condition the audience to expect a satisfactory romance resolution, and permit the playwright to describe fairy-tale events, corrupt and even detestable characters, figures (like the Widow) who seem to emerge from the quite different genre of city comedy, and frank scenarios of sexual seduction, and to keep all of these comfortably under control until the disclosures of the last scene. They lighten the “problems” of this “problem play”

Audiences and readers may again be called upon to suspend their judgment (why does Helena want to marry this lout?)

Whether or not the morphological analogy between drum and hymen (both are membranes stretched across cylindrical openings) would have been noted by an early modern audience, the symbolic role of each is fairly clear, and is emphasized by their juxtaposition in All's Well.

The two hoodwinking scenes (Bertram in the dark with a woman he thinks is Diana; Paroles “muffled”—that is, blindfolded—thinking he has been captured by the enemy) are thus set up to read or interpret each other.

As in the Spanish Tragedy, so in All's Well, a surplus of words breeds “confusion” as often as communication.

“Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live” is a bleak maxim, but one that we encounter not infrequently in Shakespeare's plays, and we must admit,

however grudgingly, that there is an admirable energy in these elemental characters, who—like their more glorious fellows—never die.

Timon of Athens

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HE LIFE OF TIMON OF ATHENS is Shakespeare's remarkable play about philanthropy and misanthropy. Among those many Shakespeare plays that have been discovered, by audiences in every generation, to be in uncanny conversation with their present-day concerns, Timon, with its luxury-loving lords living on credit, influence, loans, and gifts, is possibly the most pertinent to modern and postmodern life.