Words Into Action

by William Gaskill

  (from the Saturday Review, January 1897)

  Shakespeare is full of raving and swearing. All his tragic heroes overstate their case. Hamlet says he could drink hot blood—but doesn’t; Othello says he will chop Desdemona into messes, but only strangles her; Macbeth wants great Neptune’s oceans to wash the blood from his hand—and so on. They all go well over the top. Lear can’t even find the words:

  I will do such things, what they are I know not

  But they shall be the terrors of the earth.

  But all these characters have a foil, a conflicting voice which will offer common sense to put their extravagance into perspective, expressed in prose or in basic unemotional language: Iago for Othello, Lady Macbeth for Macbeth, and so on. My favourite is in Antony and Cleopatra where the lovers try to outdo each other in hyperbole. When Antony is dead, Cleopatra has a succession of exaggerated speeches in his praise. She finishes with:

  Think you there was or might be such a man

  As this I dreamt of?

  And the very minor character of Dolabella answers:

  Gentle madam, no.

  This juxtaposition between characters and between styles of writing is unique and rich. Did Shakespeare sometimes identify with his characters, was he intoxicated by his own exuberance, by his emotional, rhetorical, imaginative ability? Perhaps, but his constant ability to offset the rhetoric brings himself and the play down to earth.

  Bunyan’s phrases are wonderful and speakable, but it is impossible to imagine a whole play written at that level. It is a direct statement of strength and goodness. Bunyan was not interested in character or the nature of corruption, but only the right actions which lead to salvation. Shaw never understood the darkness in people and their potential for evil. He could not identify with them so he could not write them. He thought the Fascist dictators were joke figures and portrayed them as such in his play Geneva. He was not a poet and did not understand the nature of poetry, which is shown in his writing of the poet, Marchbanks, in Candida. The idea that the style of the writing would change with character and situation was alien to him. There is no subtext in Shaw but there’s not much passion either.

  Puritans have never liked the theatre. In 1642 the approach of the Civil War closed all the theatres and they remained firmly closed during the Protectorate and didn’t reopen until 1660. In the gap many things changed: the plays, with their new influences from Paris, the ways of presenting drama, the shape of the buildings—and the language had changed too. The Puritan Revolution banned drama but did not prevent poetry being written. Two of the greatest poets of the seventeenth century, Milton and Marvell, worked as Cromwell’s secretaries. The great river of English poetry surged on in spite of political change, absorbed it and was part of it. But it had lost the basic sensuality of Ben Jonson.

  In drama there was a more disruptive break. Shakespeare’s wonderful variety was rejected. No longer could comic elements enter the purity of classical tragedy. Comedy and tragedy became separate entities. Comedies, about contemporary life, were written in prose, and heroic tragedies, about historical or mythical characters, in verse. Comedy and tragedy, verse and prose were never again to be united. The only plays of post-Restoration drama to be revived in our own time have been comedies, from Etherege to Noël Coward. (The only Restoration tragedy occasionally revived is Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, and that only because it has two scenes of sadomasochism.) The high moral principles on which tragedy is based quickly become laughable to a succeeding age, even when they are no longer written in verse. After the Restoration, characters could no longer express powerful emotions truthfully. Plays of any quality were about people’s social behaviour and their concealment of emotion, and this lasted well into the twentieth century. Nothing in our life is noble enough for tragedy.

  16

  Action and Imagination—Macbeth

  The action of Macbeth is fast. The play is half the length of Hamlet. The scenes are short and move the action forward. And yet somehow it allows time for an imaginative life for its protagonist which gives the play its character. The language in the play is not witty and intellectually challenging like Hamlet and there is very little prose. Macbeth is a better poet than Hamlet, or rather he swims in poetry as his natural medium. He doesn’t need prose. Everything he feels he expresses. He is not struggling with his own identity but with action and its consequences. Compared with Hamlet, Macbeth is a man who does things, a great warrior who has just won the war and is admired by everybody, but we only see him after the battle, transfixed by the witches’ prophecy. When he returns to his wife it is she who drives the action while he is very passive and hesitant. After the King’s arrival at Glamis we hear Macbeth’s doubts about the murder, not so much because he feels it to be wrong but because it will produce pity in the whole world:

  Besides, this Duncan

  Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

  So clear in his great office, that his virtues

  Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against

  The deep damnation of his taking off;

  And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,

  Striding the blast, or heaven’s Cherubin, horsed

  Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

  Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

  That tears shall drown the wind.

  And we are astonished not so much by the intensity of feeling but by the extravagance of the poetic imagination. There is a wonderful picture by Blake called Pity, which attempts to render this image in visual form.

  After Macbeth has agreed to commit the murder he waits for the bell which is his wife’s signal. He sees the dagger in the air drawing him to the murder. We don’t see it but we see him see it, our imagination is now part of his. We don’t know whether it attracts or repels him. Is it real or not? He tries to touch it without success. He dismisses it from his mind, which immediately moves on to other images:

  Now o’er the one half-world

  Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

  The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates

  Pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered Murder…

  and we are off on a journey with him, moving through the night, like Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas, looking at other wrongdoers, at the personified Murder, moving like the rapist Tarquin, like a ghost. The actor is there, on the stage, but his words have released us to an imaginary world. We are brought back to the physical here and now, and Macbeth has become the figure of the Murder he is about to commit. He talks to the ground he is about to walk on. He is still. The bell rings.

  I go and it is done. The bell invites me.

  His imagination has created the dagger to move him to the murder, and his own poetry has turned him into the murderer.

  The stage is empty for a moment; then his wife comes on. Her speech covers the tension we feel; is the deed being done… or not? We hear Macbeth shout offstage. What has happened? I know of nothing more exciting and simply theatrical than this and the scene that follows. Macbeth reappears and is greeted with ‘My husband?’—a question that implies, ‘Are you the man I married, are you worthy to share my bed?’

  MACBETH. I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?

  LADY MACBETH. I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.

  Did not you speak?

  MACBETH. When?

  LADY MACBETH. Now.

  MACBETH. As I descended?

  LADY MACBETH. Ay.

  MACBETH. Hark! Who lies in the second chamber?

  LADY MACBETH. Donalbain.

  MACBETH. This is a sorry sight.

  LADY MACBETH. A foolish thought to say a sorry sight.

  The short lines express the shared tension of the couple. Macbeth tells of the two men and his inability to say ‘Amen’ and then begins his elaborate invocation of sleep:

  Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,

  The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,


  Balm of hurt minds, great Nature’s second course,

  Chief nourisher in life’s feast…

  His wife interrupts him—‘What do you mean?’—but she can’t stop the outpouring. They both speak in verse but everything, she says is prosaic and practical.

  There are two lodged together… Who was it that thus cried?… Give me the daggers… I hear a knocking at the south entry… A little water clears us of this deed… Get on your nightgown…

  She uses hardly any imagery. The gap between her language and his is huge, but it is still two people talking. Their words take us in and out of their minds, setting up ideas whose importance they are unaware of. Three of the main themes of the play—the blood as the symbol of guilt; the inability of the guilty to sleep; and the consequences of action—are all introduced naturally, dramatically and with the utmost economy, without in any way impeding the flow of the action. Lady Macbeth rejects the emotion and the poetry, but the images stay with her. She has to behave like a sensible teacher or a doctor, but everything her husband says sinks into her mind and stays in her unconscious till it reappears in the sleepwalking scene. Then she needs the doctor.

  The invocation of sleep is hysterical and overwrought. Frank Kermode called it fustian, and so it may be, but it is splendid fustian. It is as if the murder had opened Macbeth’s poetic bowels. At the end of the scene he is an apparent wreck incapable of action. But he has become the deed’s creature and we never see him as craven again. Later he goes with the other lords to see Duncan’s body, in spite of having said he was too scared, and kills the two grooms, justifying it in this speech:

  Here lay Duncan,

  His silver skin laced with his golden blood,

  And his gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature

  For ruin’s wasteful entrance.

  Which is run-of-the-mill conventional poetry. It lacks conviction but it has a certain facile deviousness. His wife, being no literary critic, mistakes it for the beginning of a hysterical breakdown and faints. From this point on he is in charge and no longer needs her. He has become desensitised. He is still a poet, but the kind of poetry changes, and he proceeds to increasingly violent and reckless action. He reacts to Banquo’s ghost with another flood of rhetoric but it has a demented courage; at the end of the scene he even manages some humour:

  The time has been

  That when the brains were out the man would die,

  And there an end; but now they rise again

  With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,

  And push us from our stools.

  And the diction has altered:

  It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood.

  Stones have been known to move and trees to speak…

  By the end of the play he has supped full with horrors. He is not less poetic but the form, the vocabulary is different. The language of ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ is spare, the imagery simple and compressed and the rhetorical development economical. Macbeth’s journey through the play is between his actions in the real world and his imagination. Mark Antony’s rhetoric in the Forum created the actions that followed it. Macbeth’s poetry is a response to his own actions. He is an evil monster but we cannot avoid being part of—or at least fascinated witnesses of—this journey.

  17

  Stress, Metre and Pitch

  English is an accented language. Changing the accent in a word can change its meaning—entrance/entrance, convict/convict, refuse/refuse and so on. It must be hell for foreigners. Speaking any text, verse or prose, you accent the word that you think makes the line clear, or rather you make a line clear and find you have stressed one word more than another. Many actors underline in their scripts the word they mean to stress. A straight, flat little line under the word is like a metal weight pulling the word down, or a foot pushing it into the ground. If you suggest to actors that the stress they have chosen may be misguided, they squash down another word, instead of rethinking the whole sentence. Whenever I read a piece of prose in which the writer has italicised particular words—Lewis Carroll is an example—I cannot speak the line in my head. My voice moves along the line and is suddenly brought up short by this block rearing up in front of me. It’s like Ayers Rock in the middle of the desert. I can’t get over it and I can’t go round it. When I stress the word so that it isolates itself from the rest of the sentence it sounds wrong. I am sure that is not how Carroll heard it in his head. The rise and fall around the stressed word often subtly affects the meaning, just as one hill is only slightly higher than another in a range. Discussions of the important word in a sentence in isolation are unproductive, unless the shape of the whole sentence is tested with it. It is more important to think of a line as a unit in which the outcome of the whole suggests the stress. (This might be one good reason for actioning a line.)

  Stresses in classical languages are short or long, but in English they are usually light or strong, whether in verse or prose. I prefer ‘light’ to ‘weak’, and ‘strong’ to ‘heavy’. ‘Weak’ and ‘heavy’ are negative words. Nowadays much speech does indeed consist of heavy stress, which drags the line down. ‘Light’ and ‘strong’ suggests a springiness in which even the less important words have life. In ‘the cat sat on the mat’, ‘sat’ and ‘mat’ are likely to take a stronger stress than ‘the’ and ‘on’, whatever the intention behind the line. The line is a statement of fact: the cat was sitting on the mat. (It could also mean, with the ambiguity of the English language, that the cat sat down on the mat.) The line is without a speaker and without a context. Like a messenger’s speech in Greek tragedy it is impersonal.

  As a general rule the following take lighter stresses:

  • Articles

  • Prepositions

  • Most pronouns

  • Conjunctions

  The following take stronger stresses:

  • Verbs—except auxiliary verbs

  • Nouns

  Adjectives and adverbs are variable.

  Light stresses must never be thrown away. The patterns made between light and strong form the basis of speech. If the patterns become regular, the speech becomes verse. The word order in English, with the articles—‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’—before the noun, makes a natural pattern of light before strong, which in verse is called an iamb. (Aristotle thought that the iambic form was the most like real speech.) Two light stresses before a strong—anapest—is also common. ‘The cat’ is iambic, ‘on the mat’ is anapestic. But it is iambic which is the basis of most English verse and in the form of five iambics together (pentameter), usually unrhymed, it is the basis of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The strong stress is the basis of the divisions of the line into feet but it is the relation of light to strong which makes the rhythm.

  ‘To be or not to be; that is the question’ is an iambic line but it’s not entirely regular. (For one thing it has an extra syllable, but I don’t want to go into that at the moment.) Regular stress would demand that ‘is’ should be strong and that doesn’t sound right. It would seem more natural to take the stronger stress on ‘that’ which makes a dum-da rather than a da-dum (this is called a trochee). The reversing of the stress in the middle of the line highlights the word ‘that’. This does not mean that it has to be spoken with any extra emphasis; the metrical break has already given it emphasis. A trochee is particularly effective at the beginning of a line that is otherwise iambic. The Chorus begins Henry V with ‘O, for a muse of fire that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention’. You have to start with a strong stress on ‘O’ and one on ‘muse’. This ‘strong-light-light-strong’ on the first four syllables gives a forward thrust to the speech—and the whole play.

  As a general rule always stress a line first for sense, and only in extreme cases go against sense to satisfy the demands of the metre (unlike singing where you go for metre first). Sometimes you have to use unusual stresses because a word was pronounced differently in the period in which
it was written. In the following example, Cleopatra is saying what she would endure rather than be led in triumph through the streets of Rome:

  rather make

  My country’s high Pyramides my gibbet

  And hang me up in chains.

  (Antony and Cleopatra 5.2)

  If you say ‘Pyramides’ with three syllables, stressed on the first as we would today, you get an irregular line with three light stresses together. You also have to pause between ‘high’ and ‘Pyramides’ to keep it in some sort of rhythm. I’m not sure that it is not preferable to the four-syllable ‘py-ram-i-dees’ with a strong stress on the second syllable, which correct metre demands. The latter sticks in the throat and most of the audience wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. You could justify it by saying it is a piece of typical overstatement by Cleopatra and will pass unnoticed in the flow of passion.

  In his first meeting with the Ghost, Hamlet says:

  Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell

  Why thy canonised bones, hearsèd in death,

  Have burst their cerements, why the sepulchre

  Wherein we saw thee quietly inurned

  Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws

  To cast thee up again.

  (Hamlet 1.5)

  You have to stress ‘canonised’ on the second syllable and possibly in ‘sepulchre’ too; ‘hearsèd’ must have two syllables. The effect is of a baroque tomb, as elaborate as the one the Ghost has broken out of, conveying a bizarre splendour which justifies the strangeness of the speaking.