Shakespeare's Style Page 2
Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV is a creative and imaginative speaker and an excellent actor. He is particularly skilled in hyperbole, or what we would ordinarily call exaggeration, or just plain lying. His speeches are self-conscious thrustings beyond the ordinary and commonplace. The fact that he is a fat man gives a literal meaning to his hyperbole. He is a gormandizer with an unquenchable appetite for food and drink.
Falstaff’s banishment at the end of 2 Henry IV is a significant event. Prince Hal, now King Henry V, does what he has always hinted he would do, and the rejection of his boon companion of the tavern in Eastcheap is predictable. Yet it comes with a harsh cruelty: “I know thee not old man” (5.5.47). Falstaff has always insisted on his everlasting youth. He dies shortly thereafter in Henry V.
The chapter on Shakespeare’s illiterates is somewhat speculative, but Dame Quickly (in the Henry IV plays and in The Merry Wives of Windsor) and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet speak as if they know the language only phonetically. Their many malapropisms and spoonerisms come naturally to characters who don’t know how to read or write. Princess Katherine in Henry V is clearly not illiterate, but her English lesson is also entirely phonetic, and she discovers that common English words sound like dirty words when pronounced in the French fashion.
The wit combat of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing is a merry war between two potential lovers, but it is also full of invective and slander. They go to great lengths to defend their unmarried state. The question that arises is whether the plotting to make them fall in love with each other and get married is really necessary. I think the play is set up in such a way that there is no possibility that the two will marry without some help from their friends.
The Roman style of Julius Caesar seems to be a deliberate attempt on Shakespeare’s part to create a style suitable to his Roman subject matter. The play has one of the smallest vocabularies of any of his works, and it makes almost no use of figurative language. It has a great many monosyllabic (or near-monosyllabic) lines, and it also uses some old-fashioned rhetorical devices like apostrophe. Remember that the play is usually dated between Henry V and Hamlet.
Jaques in As You Like It functions as a satiric observer. Like Touchstone, the Clown, Jaques satirizes pastoral conventions and romantic assertions. He is definitely a malcontent, and proud of his melancholy humor, although it sometimes takes a sentimental turn. His seven ages of man speech is sour and cynical, but Duke Senior and his exiled court are entertained by Jaques’s wit. The name, pronounced “Jakes,” makes a continuing pun because it is also an Elizabethan word for a toilet.
Feste, the Clown, is Olivia’s corrupter of words in Twelfth Night. His verbal dexterity is remarkable, ranging from puns and wordplay to double-talk and learned nonsense to outright parody. His histrionic skill in the role of Sir Topas, the Curate, who ministers to the “mad” Malvolio, is notable. He is full of mock quotations and satire on learning.
Hamlet as actor is only one of the ways of talking about his style. It is surprising how strong a connection there is between Hamlet and the contemporary theater. His advice to the players offers an intelligent commentary on Shakespeare’s own theater. Hamlet seems self-conscious of his own ranting style, like a bad actor, and he can suddenly change to a more purposive discourse. After he has met with the ghost of his father, he is capable of putting on “an antic disposition” and playing mad as a form of self-protection.
There is a great deal of sex nausea in Troilus and Cressida. The Trojan War is represented as anti-heroic and anti-romantic. The play seems like a tragedy, but it has so much satirical invective in it that it is often called a comical satire. Pandarus, who is Cressida’s uncle and go-between, speaks with sexual innuendo, and Cressida herself is a supremely ambivalent character. Ulysses calls her, unflatteringly, one of these “daughters of the game.” The scurrilous Thersites does a good deal to promote a cynical view of both the war and the possibilities of love.
Like Falstaff in the Henry IV plays, Parolles, the man of words in All’s Well That Ends Well, is a “miles gloriosus,” a braggart but an errant coward. Everyone in the play recognizes him as a liar and a rogue, except for Bertram, who flees from his marriage to Helena. Parolles’s language is extravagant (as is his dress too), and he misuses a number of italianate words that have nothing to do with the context. After his unmasking, he manages to survive by recognizing his own histrionic role and vowing that in the future he will be “Simply the thing I am.”
Iago’s “Ha! I like not that” (3.3.35) when he sees Cassio leaving Desdemona marks an important moment in the play. “Ha” in itself is a meaningless interjection, but the speaker can make it an emotionally loaded exclamation expressing surprise or wonder. Iago is an excellent actor, and he plays on Othello’s credulousness, so that he soon picks up what is essentially Iago’s word. Iago understands wonderfully well Othello’s tragic vulnerability, and “Ha” marks his seduction by Iago.
Lucio functions as a calumniator in Measure for Measure, but he may also be an unpleasant truth-speaker. He is described in the cast of characters as a “fantastic,” which means literally a creature of fantasy, but it also identifies him as extravagant, capricious, and bizarre. He slanders the absent Duke for no apparent reason, but he may also be providing us with special insights into the Duke’s failings. He encourages Isabella to plead with Angelo to spare her brother, but he also refuses bail for Pompey when he is taken to prison.
Madness in King Lear is useful, stylistically, for broadening and deepening his role and providing him with a much wider range of emotions. The king comes to understand things that he took no notice of before, like the plight of “Poor naked wretches” (3.4.28). The Fool is Lear’s closest companion in his madness, offering him a way to understand what has gone wrong with his previous perception of reality. At the very end of the play, Lear recovers from his madness, but he dies soon afterward. Interestingly, only act 4, scene 6 shows the king completely mad.
Insomnia troubles both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In their extreme guilt over the murder of King Duncan, they cannot sleep. More murders follow, but the Macbeths are never at peace with themselves. Lady Macbeth raises important questions about her husband’s manliness, but the issue is never resolved in the play. At the end, Lady Macbeth goes mad and is troubled by images of blood, while her husband falls into a deep despair, regarding life as “a tale / Told by an idiot” (5.5.26–27).
In the symbolic contrast between the values of Egypt and Rome in Antony and Cleopatra, we need to remember that Antony is also a great Roman general as well as a lover. The Roman Antony is conceived in terms of Stoic values: strong self-control, a powerful sense of duty, and a seriousness of purpose. Antony is also manly. He struggles, unsuccessfully, against his dotage in Egypt, and he is well aware of his impending tragedy. His marriage to Octavia, Caesar’s sister, is well-intentioned, but he is inexorably drawn to Cleopatra in Egypt.
Timon of Athens is perhaps not a fully finished play. It cultivates excess both in Timon’s prosperity in the first part and his adversity in the second. This is a bitterly satirical play, full of invective about money and the exercise of political power. Many false suitors, like the Poet, the Painter, and the Jeweler, apply to Timon for money and gifts, and when he discovers an unlimited supply of gold in his exile, he is still extravagant in his bounty. Apemantus, the cynical truth-speaker, tries, unsuccessfully, to curb Timon’s excesses.
Coriolanus is represented as a manly Roman warrior who despises the cowardly plebeians. When he returns from his bloody battle with the Volscians, he cannot compromise his own integrity to play a humble role so that he may be chosen consul. Volumnia, his dominating mother, pleads with him to be politic, but her son can only follow his own patrician values (that he has, of course, learned from his mother). There is a turn in the action when Coriolanus, at his mother’s entreaty, agrees to spare Rome, but he knows it will be fatal to him.
Marina, Pericles’s daughter in Pericles, is a
super-romantic heroine, who, in her absolute innocence, plays a saintly role. In the overtly sexual brothel scenes in Mytilene, Marina not only preserves her virginity; she also converts all her clients, including Lysimachus, the Governor of Mytilene. At the end of the play, she manages, movingly, to revive her grieving father.
Imogen, the romance heroine of Cymbeline, resembles Marina in her innocence and purity. She maintains her love and devotion to her exiled husband, Posthumus Leonatus, in spite of a great many difficulties and improbabilities. She resists the powerful suit of the italianate villain, Iachimo. The labyrinthine plotting of the play, including a theophany of the God Jupiter and the ghosts of Leonatus’s parents, is all resolved in the happy ending that fulfills the oracle.
In the chapter on The Winter’s Tale, I consider the elaborate speech rhythms of the play that depart from the iambic pentameter pattern. The blank verse of this late play is very different from that of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies. The dramatic speech rhythms override what we have come to expect from Shakespeare’s blank verse. For example, there are many unexpected caesuras, or pauses, in the five-beat line, and there is liberal use of enjambment, or the continuation of the line beyond the five-beat ending. There is also abundant use of spondaic feet, with two accented syllables (rather than the iambic unaccented and accented foot) to imitate passionate speech.
Prospero’s magical art in The Tempest is meant to be taken seriously as a way of understanding the play. Virtually everything happens by way of magic, including the shipwreck and the bringing together of Ferdinand and Miranda. Prospero does not use black magic, like Doctor Faustus in Marlowe’s play. His knowledge comes from the intense study of books rather than from a compact with the devil. But any kind of magic is dangerous, and, at the end of the play, Prospero abandons his books and magical accoutrements in order to regain his essential humanity.
Cardinal Wolsey seems like a tragic character in Shakespeare’s history play Henry VIII. He is a faithful servant of the king and does his bidding, including the divorce from his loving wife Katherine. Wolsey, the son of a butcher, is surrounded by his aristocratic enemies at court, whom he manages to outwit. Through a series of mistakes, however, Wolsey incurs the displeasure of the king and his fall is imminent. We sympathize with him in his adversity, as we also do with King Richard II.
The Jailer’s Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen goes mad for her love of Palamon, and her mad style very much follows that of Ophelia in Hamlet. She is pretty and lyrical in her devotion to her lover, and she sings many songs. The Doctor, who comes to counsel her father, manages to cure her of her madness by the practical expedient of the nameless Wooer, who pretends to be Palamon, but has vigorous sexual intercourse with his paramour.
In the conclusion, I draw some general observations about Shakespeare’s style. The main point is that Shakespeare is so varied in his plays that one cannot make easy generalizations. He doesn’t repeat his successes; for example, he never writes another farce based on Plautus after the success of The Comedy of Errors, or another comedy strongly indebted to John Lyly after Love’s Labor’s Lost. Shakespeare draws on a wide variety of sources to construct his plays, especially Holinshed’s Chronicles for the English history plays and Plutarch’s Lives for the Roman plays, but one can pursue this matter further in the eight volumes of Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957–1975). Shakespeare is especially skillful in creating convincing villains and satirical observers, a topic that I have developed in Shakespeare’s Villains (2012). In his frequent soliloquies and asides, he explores the self-consciousness of his characters, a broad topic that is excellently discussed in A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), which deals with the four major tragedies. A more modern discussion, strongly oriented to the theater, is in Harley Granville-Barker’s various Prefaces to Shakespeare in six volumes (1927–1948).
Shakespeare’s plays are often deliberately ambiguous in order to take advantage of unresolved dramatic conflict. For example, in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s sympathies are divided between his compassion for the conspirators, especially Brutus, and his feeling that the party of Caesar must inevitably triumph. We have the impression in many plays that Shakespeare wants to have it both ways and avoid definitive judgments about his characters. In Macbeth, for example, the murderous protagonist begins the play with a moral sensitivity with which we cannot fail to be sympathetic. And what about Shylock in The Merchant of Venice? He is intent on a murderous revenge, but we also hear a lot about his cruel treatment by Antonio, the Christian, to whom Shylock is asked to lend money. As Shylock exclaims with so much ironic bitterness:
“Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last,
You spurned me such a day, another time
You called me dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys?” (1.3.123–26)
In any close reading of Shakespeare’s plays, we should be particularly attentive to the complexity of his writing. And we should not despair at not being able to “pin down” Shakespeare’s style. For, like Cleopatra, its hallmark is “infinite variety” (2.2.238).
Chapter 1
Antipholus of Syracuse as Comic
Hero in The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare’s only thorough imitation of Plautus, the prolific Roman comedy writer of the third and second centuries BCE. Shakespeare goes Plautus one better by doubling the twin masters and the twin servants, thus more than doubling the fun of mistaken identity. We must assume a kind of comic impenetrability in the play so that Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant, Dromio, can never ascertain, although there are clues in abundance, that they have found their lost brothers. I would like to speak about Antipholus of Syracuse as the ideal comic protagonist, because his great good fortune comes not from any intrinsic merit in himself but purely by chance and a willingness to accept, without too much questioning, all the good things that come his way. This lighthearted conception of your own identity is clearly comic, whereas in tragedies, such as Sophocles’s Oedipus, identity is a serious and profound matter.
Antipholus of Syracuse, accompanied by his servant, Dromio, has been on a long search for his missing twin brother (and his mother too). In Ephesus in act I, scene 2, his quest seems hopeless:
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy [unlucky], lose myself. (1.2.35–40)
Antipholus seems melancholy and not very hopeful of succeeding in his search.
He meets the wrong Dromio (Dromio of Ephesus), who knows nothing of the money Antipholus has entrusted him with. He beats him, which is the usual way that difficult situations in farce are resolved. Antipholus fears that the town of Ephesus is a malign place and that he should leave as soon as possible:
They say this town is full of cozenage:
As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguisèd cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many suchlike liberties of sin.
If it prove so, I will be gone the sooner. (1.2.97–103)
So the play does not begin comically. There are occurrences that Antipholus cannot explain and the town itself seems threatening.
But by act 2, scene 2, everything is about to change. However, Antipholus needs to beat the other Dromio, who knows nothing about what his master has said to Dromio of Ephesus. Antipholus assumes that his own servant is playing a practical joke on him. But the elaborate jesting on hair comes to a sudden end when Adriana, the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, and her sister, Luciana, enter. Adriana has a long, humble speech declaring that her husband must be spending time with his girlfriend. Antipholu
s is genuinely puzzled by what is going on:
Plead you to me, fair dame? I know you not.
In Ephesus I am but two hours old,
As strange unto your town as to your talk;
Who, every word by all my wit being scanned,
Wants wit in all one word to understand. (2.2.148–52)
So all the actors in the play are thoroughly bemused and think that everyone must be involved in a huge, practical joke. The questions everyone asks each other all have puzzling, mistaken answers.
Antipholus is sure that something strange is going on: “How can she thus then call us by our names, / Unless it be by inspiration?” (2.2.167–68), but he still attributes it to the witchcraft for which Ephesus is famous. Adriana is in no doubt that Antipholus is her husband, and her genuine affection gives him pause. He says aside:
To me she speaks, she moves me for her theme;
What, was I married to her in my dream?
Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this?
What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?
Until I know this sure uncertainty,
I’ll entertain the offered fallacy. (2.2.182–87)
This speech is at the heart of the comic assumptions of the play. Dreaming is added to witchcraft as an explanation of the mystery, and “error,” in its Latin sense of a wandering of the mind, is now introduced as a way to solve the paradox, as expressed in the oxymoron “sure uncertainty.”
Now the comedy takes an optimistic turn for Antipholus as he commits himself to accept the present reality, although he is sure that it is all a delusion (“the offered fallacy”). Antipholus makes what is essentially a comic choice: to play along with the delusion so long as it bestows rich benefits on him. A tragic protagonist would not let the question of his real identity slip by without making a heroic effort of finding out who he really is. His servant Dromio is not convinced: