Brutus’s wife, Portia, similarly shows a wife’s concern about her husband’s mental and physical state:
What, is Brutus sick?
And will he steal out of his wholesome bed
To dare the vile contagion of the night?
And tempt the rheumy and unpurged air
To add unto his sickness? No, my Brutus,
You have some sick offence within your mind…
(2.1.262–7)
As a proof to her husband of her loyalty, love and strength, she has voluntarily wounded herself in the thigh (2.2.298–300), and later she dies, as Brutus reports to Cassius, by swallowing fire (4.3.154). In these plays the feminine adds a dimension of humane opposition to the political, an element of humanity to a world of masculine competitive power.
The argument between Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar (Act 4, Scene 3) is in itself, however, a tense prelude to a coming public display of masculinity – the final war that will send them both to their deaths. ‘O my dear brother,’ Cassius says to him about their argument, ‘This was an ill beginning of the night./Never come such division ’tween our souls./Let it not, Brutus’ (4.3.231–3).
The personal and the political
In Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus in making his decision to leave Antony and join Caesar discovers that Antony has sent his treasure after him and that Caesar does not look kindly on such deserters, placing them in the van of battle, ensuring they face their former comrades. But there is more to it than this. Enobarbus realizes that he has deserted his friend, which causes him greater anxiety than anything the political struggle can elicit:
I am alone the villain of the earth,
And feel I am so most
…
I fight against thee [Antony]? No, I will go seek
Some ditch wherein to die; the foul’st best fits
My latter part of life.
(4.6.31–2, 38–40)
Within all of this, although ideologies and/or pragmatism in both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra lie behind the choices being made, human behaviour is still questioned in detail within the framework of these plays.
‘In Antony and Cleopatra those with power make history yet only in accord with the contingencies of the existing historical moment – in Antony’s words: “the strong necessity of time” (1.3.43).’
Dollimore, J. (3rd edn. 2004: 207), Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Political decisions are made by Shakespeare’s Roman generals in public and it is within the same arena that their private fragilities are exposed. Coriolanus has to fight his pride first to gain the ‘voices’ of the people to become consul (Coriolanus, Act 2, Scene 3), but eventually he cannot hide his disdain. The people’s Tribune, Junius Brutus, reveals his knowledge of the man’s weakness as a sure way to bring him down:
Put him to choler straight; he hath been us’d
Ever to conquer
…
Be rein’d again to temperance; then he speaks
What’s in his heart, and that is there which looks
With us to break his neck.
(3.3.25–6, 28–30)
Spotlight
Coriolanus cannot reconcile the political with the personal. He despises the people, although he fights on their behalf against external enemies, and he cannot see why he needs their approval, ‘their voices’, to become a Consul. He cannot fully play the role of the professional political hypocrite because he is conscious of his own achievement of authority, bravery and experience. To have to stand as on a stage and gain the approval of a citizenry for whom he has absolute contempt is anathema:
Most sweet voices!
Better it is to die, better to starve,
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.
Why in this wolvish toge should I stand here,
To beg of Hob and Dick that does appear
Their needless vouches?
(2.3.111–16)
At first he does what is required of him:
For your voices I have fought,
Watch’d for your voices; for your voices, bear
Of wounds two dozen odd; battles thrice six
I have seen and heard of; for your voices have
Done many things, some less, some more: Your voices!
Indeed I would be consul.
(2.3.125–30)
Thus far he sways the populace, who remain suspicious, until Junius Brutus turns them with the revelation that his request was shot through with hypocrisy:
Did you perceive
He did solicit you in free contempt
When he did need your loves; and do you think
That his contempt shall not be bruising to you
When he hath power to crush?
(2.3.197–201)
Coriolanus is subsequently banished and turns against Rome, but towards the end of the play when he does have the power to ‘crush’, which is to lead the Volscians against the city, the feminine, in the person of his mother, dissuades him by her own appeal to him to save Rome. It is a maternal appeal but one directed to his pride. What will be his legacy if he should lay waste his own lands?
…but this is certain,
That if thou conquer Rome, the benefit
Which thou shalt thereby reap in such a name
Whose repetition will be dogg’d with curses,
Whose chronicle thus writ: ‘The man was noble,
But with his last attempt he wip’d it out,
Destroy’d his country, and his name remains
To th’insuing age abhorr’d.
(5.3.143–50)
She possesses a theatrical rhetoric which he could not master as she instructs his wife Virgilia, his son young Martius, Valeria and their attendants to ‘shame him with our knees’ (5.3.171). For him to show mercy, which he proceeds to do, will result in his own death.
‘The conclusion of Coriolanus is curiously flat. Coriolanus, the only innocent among the leading characters, is savagely murdered and life goes on in its tasteless, base way…Even a villain deserves more sympathy. We know that historically the Volsces did indeed celebrate Coriolanus as a hero and honoured him after his death. Shakespeare purposely played down those facts, which might have given the play an upbeat ending and celebrated Coriolanus; he has denied the audience the feeling of satisfaction we expect at the end of tragedy. The ending of Coriolanus takes further the deflation and scepticism which Shakespeare has been practising in his tragedies.’
King, B. (1989: 93–4), Coriolanus: The Critics Debate. Basingstoke: Macmillan
Challenging the audience
What Coriolanus does show is the impossibility of the choices that the tragic protagonist is forced into making by his contradictory commitments. Shakespeare doesn’t end the play, however, with the Volscian conspirators and Aufidius, Coriolanus’ great competitor in arms, sadistically repeating the word ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!’ while they butcher him and then stand over his corpse in triumph. Rather, Shakespeare has the Lords around them cry out ‘Hold, hold, hold, hold!’ counterbalancing the repetition of the word ‘kill’. They chide Aufidius for his lack of valour, for which he first makes excuses and then, perhaps in keeping with the political hypocrisy of the play as a whole, states:
My rage is gone,
And I am struck with sorrow.
(5.6.146–7)
How the actor playing Aufidius delivers the lines is for him and his director to decide. There is even in the ending of this play a certain fluidity. Coriolanus is dead. Is what Aufidius says to be truly believed by the audience? Or is it a further testament to the hypocrisy of politics that the play has systematically exposed? Or is it merely a reflection of Aufidius’ own sense of deflation after an event that he had longed to experience? If these and other such questions are left in our minds as we leave the theatre, then the only certainty lies in the mastery of the writing that h
as left us conflicted, perhaps horrified, and still ruminating on what has been portrayed. In other words, the conclusion throws the challenge of the play’s dilemmas back to the audience – the real people, not the fictional characters of drama.
It would be a mistake, however, to think the Roman plays are without emotion. Mark Antony grieves, Coriolanus despairs and Cleopatra loves. Her great argument in Act 1, Scene 3, with Antony, who will ‘desert’ her to return to the politics of Rome, concludes with a moment of intensity. Antony begins to storm out of her presence, ‘I’ll leave you, lady’, but is halted as she calls him back with an expression of love of which the audience can be in no doubt:
Courteous lord, one word:
Sir, you and I must part, but that’s not it;
Sir, you and I have loved, but there’s not it;
That you know well. Something it is I would –
Oh, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten!
(1.3.88–93)
It is through that break at the end of line 91, ‘I would – ’ leading to the great statement of her incapacity to be anything but her love, that Shakespeare shows his artistic control of that extraordinary play. Indeed, it is with Cleopatra that the ‘poetry’ and the imagination reside in this play: Egypt is the place of sensuousness, fecund femininity and poetry, whereas Rome is the place of a rational politics that is no match for the feminine wiles of Egypt.
Key idea
In the Roman dramas the public and the private play off each other, highlighting aspects of both. In this, they can both conjure up and modulate emotion while engaging the intellect of the audience in debate.
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Critical perspectives 6: Some ‘isms’; a glossary; and selected biographies
At this point let us take a brief pause in our journey so that you can refresh yourself with some definitions of the critical movements we have been coming across in getting to know Shakespeare. This chapter also includes a glossary of technical terms used in the book. In addition, you might find it useful to have a guide that will help you find out more about Shakespeare’s life. In recent years a number of interesting biographies of the poet/dramatist have been published, based on some incisive historical research, and these are listed here.
Some definitions of ‘isms’
CATHOLICISM
Christianity provided a central authority, located in Rome under the figure of the Pope, and a unifying intellectual and spiritual influence in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. By the fourteenth century, however, the Church’s increasing worldliness and its venal abuses led to growing dissatisfaction. The Renaissance, or Early Modern period, heralded a re-examination of Christianity by humanists (such as Erasmus and More) who nevertheless rejected wholescale reform when radical clerics such as Martin Luther and his Protestant supporters sought to diverge from traditional teaching. The Roman Catholic Church, which places an emphasis on sacramental liturgy and ‘historic’ episcopal papal authority, initiated a movement (1545–63) to counter the Reformation that had been initiated by Luther in 1517. After Henry VIII’s break with Rome (1533), papal authority was briefly reinstated in England in the reign of Mary I (1553–8), but when Elizabeth I became queen a Protestant settlement was engineered and her role as head of state and supreme governor of the Church of England was affirmed.
HUMANISM
This is the general term for the renewed interest in classical ideas and literature that developed in Italian city-states during the fourteenth century, and particularly after the fall of Constantinople in 1492, spread throughout Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, helped by the invention of the printing press (c.1450). Inspired by a desire to access knowledge of the ancient world, it emphasized the use of primary sources, encouraging intellectual curiosity and self-improvement. Renaissance humanists believed that ‘the new learning’ created good Christians, good citizens and a deep appreciation of humankind and the created world. It transformed European thought, leading to an expansion in the curriculae of schools and universities. Italian writers like Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), the poet Petrarch (1304–74) and others were influential in emphasizing the centrality of man in the universe. These beliefs have been subsequently modified in modern times by other linked ideologies such as Christian humanism and liberal humanism.
PROTESTANTISM
Protestantism originated in the protest by a German theologian from Wittenberg, Martin Luther (1483–1546), who in 1517 attacked church practices he felt needed to be reformed and who (it is generally believed) nailed his 95 theses to the church door in that town. Luther’s protest was inspired by the ideals of humanism. Protestantism based its authority not on tradition or on the primacy of papal interpretation of the Scriptures but on the Bible as the only source of truth, and placed much greater emphasis on the individual conscience. Protestantism soon divided into a number of denominations that championed differing theological emphases. In England, Henry VIII did not embrace Protestantism but seceded from papal authority to create an anglicized Catholic Church of which he was the supreme head. A more Protestant theology was introduced under Edward VI, who produced the influential Book of Common Prayer, and was consolidated by Elizabeth I, but elements of Catholic theology remained enshrined in Church of England doctrine, causing conflict with some forms of extreme Protestantism, particularly Puritanism, in the reigns of Elizabeth I and the early Stuart monarchs.
NEOCLASSICISM
This movement emanated mainly from the 1660s and became prominent throughout the eighteenth century. It promoted the concepts of order and decorum necessary within a work of art, deriving its inspiration from the classical age for definition and interpretation. There was an understanding that literature concerned itself with form, with ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’ (Alexander Pope (1688–1744): An Essay on Criticism [1711]). The neoclassical rules for that expression worked with established generic principles rather than allowing the writer the freedom of the imagination or the individualism fostered in Renaissance humanism, although Elizabethan writers such as Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) were drawn towards such formal rules.
ROMANTICISM
Romanticism developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It regarded art and literature in the context of its ‘organic nature’, developing from laws within itself. It looked towards the ideal, found in myths and also in the innocence of ordinary people expressed in simplicity of language. It thereby rejected the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century. It also privileged a free autonomous individualism. For the Romantics, Shakespeare’s art came from his ‘natural genius’, a view advocated particularly by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).
REALISM
Realism was a reaction against the Romantic notion of the ideal, and was evident in the realist novelists of the nineteenth century, for example Charles Dickens (1812–70) and George Eliot (1819–80), who depicted as clearly as possible what they considered to be the realities and experiences of life in all strata of society. It is a mimetic form that could easily be transferred to the stage, with the plays of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) in particular. Realism influenced dramatic criticism in its concentration on characters that behave as they would do in real life.
ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM
This movement grew out of Jungian psychology in the early twentieth century, taking realistic and psychological aspects of Shakespearean criticism into a new dimension. Primordial myths and patterns within the collective unconsciousness could be detected in, and aroused by, a variety of different texts: for example, Hamlet displays a similar pattern of myths that can be found in the plays of Aeschylus (525–456 BCE) or Sophocles (496–406 BCE), and the play could reveal similar archetypal modes of behaviour, as represented in figures such as Orestes and Oedipus in mother–son relationships or in the concentration on the taboo of incest, and on the subsequent retribution of the gods.
; MODERNISM
Modernism rejected the nineteenth-century concept of the ‘organic nature’ of art, and in the early twentieth century also rejected realism. Modernist writers such as James Joyce (1882–1941) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) made the reader aware that they were ‘reading’ something that had been ‘written’, thereby forcing the reader into a self-conscious acknowledgement of the role that language played in the shaping of literary response. In the theatre, modernist-influenced movements such as constructivism arose around the same time as communism and the Russian Revolution. In Germany they were followed by the politically oriented theatre of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), although modernism was not politically partisan since it also had exponents on the right such as Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).
POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism arose out of modernism and the experience of a war-torn Europe, which led to the rejection of authority by some. Like modernism, this movement rejected the linearity of an artistic product and worked through presenting patterns of experience that did not have to express a ‘sense of meaning’. It conveyed a vacuity of existence and an absence of purpose, exemplified in drama such as Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1906–89).
NEW HISTORICISM
This approach questions contemporary interpretations that look for the ‘relevance’ of drama, insisting that Shakespeare can be understood only by being located within the period of the plays’ inception and composition. It draws on historical evidence from outside the text, including sources not necessarily connected with the text, such as medical cases, historical tracts, tax records and gravestones, and aims to locate common structural patterns in all forms of narrative. It sought to combine elements of materialism with the poststructuralist writings of Michel Foucault (1926–84), and emphasized the various ways in which power operated to contain resistance.
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