What’s this? What’s this? Is this her fault, or mine?
The tempter, or the tempted, who sins most, ha?
Not she; nor doth she tempt; but it is I
That, lying by the violet in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season.
(2.2.163–8)
But Isabella is also a problematic character, as I have shown elsewhere:
‘The problems surrounding Isabella occur for both director and critic with her first appearance when as a novice entering the convent she declares her wish for “a more strict restraint/Upon the sisters stood, the votarists of Saint Clare” (1.4.4–5). That Isabella is portrayed as a novice is dramatically important in that it defines the reasons for refusal to sacrifice her virginity…Thus the director and actress may legitimately ask if her desire for “a more strict restraint” is illustrative of a rather immature romantic attitude to the cloisters or of a serious meditated desire to withdraw totally from the world in order to become closer to God.’
Scott, M. (1982, 1985 p/b: 67), Renaissance Drama and a Modern Audience. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan
Isabella’s wish for a stricter regime provides an association with the severity of the Puritanism found in the character of Angelo, which is at the heart of the play’s issues. Even in Angelo’s confession (5.1.363–71), his rationalization may appear corrupt – as possessing a self-delusory satisfaction with his own guilt. Angelo’s reference to the Duke as ‘divine-like’, once his sexual hypocrisy and cruelty have been revealed, remains consistent with his character. He is saying that the Duke must be like a god in finding him, in seeing his inner being, therefore justifying his humility and his punishment. It is the construction of the hypocrisy that pervades his conduct. He has been found out by a ‘god-like’ figure and is forced to repent. He, nevertheless, continues to distance himself from the deed. Shakespeare in this play takes us into very deep territory in relation to truth, ethics and morality.
THE QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE PLAY
The kind of objections that have been raised about the play may simply confirm us in our prejudices, foreclosing the debate inherent in the drama rather than opening our minds to the ways in which the play manipulates our responses and reactions. So the questions we might ask are ones that the play is prompting us to make. Questions such as why is the Duke going to such great lengths in the first place? And what is his motive? Does he go away, as he says to the Friar, because he is unable to control the situation that he has himself created in Vienna? Does he temporarily abdicate in favour of a stricter man? If so, why doesn’t he just disappear? Does he know what kind of man Angelo is? Surely he would have known if he had knowledge of him as his deputy? Is the Duke testing Angelo? If that is so, does it make his opening explanation one of irony that is deepened by his conduct in the rest of the play? Is Isabella right or wrong in refusing to sleep with Angelo in order to save her brother? Is Mariana merely being used and, if so, why? Is she a victim of Angelo’s callousness or is she prepared to participate in a female form of rape? Does Isabella accept the Duke’s proposal of marriage at the end of the play? If she does, how can she, after all the misery he has caused her while looking on in his disguise? These kinds of questions that the play throws up may be infuriating for some, but actually they are intrinsic to our appreciation of the work.
Key idea
The questions raised by the play don’t just draw us into the play, or emanate from it: they are the play. We should be able to accept that Shakespeare may actually want us to ask these questions of his play since human conduct itself is complex, as indeed are the multiple motivations of the characters that Shakespeare portrays.
‘Measure for Measure is about the opposition between law and passion, but nothing in the play can really be understood unless the full significance of “law” is grasped. Law can be seen as an essential restraint on individual action, and thus a negative force: it is seen like this frequently in the play, both by those who dispense justice and by those who are its victims. But law has a positive aspect as well, one which makes criticism of those who break the law deeper and more subtle.’
Eagleton, T. (1970: 66), Shakespeare and Society: Critical Studies in Shakespearean Drama. London: Chatto & Windus
THE STRUCTURE OF THE PLAY
If we look at the structure of Measure for Measure, we can see that it operates to an extent according to the formulae that we have outlined earlier – problem, journey/disguise, complexity, recognition – but then leaves us not necessarily with reconciliation but with issues about ethics and authority that the play has addressed, if not resolved. As Isabella says of Angelo:
But man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d –
His glassy essence – like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep, who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
(2.2.118–24)
We have a choice. We can listen to this passage and consider it to be about the hypocrite, Angelo, which, of course it is. He is the “proud man” in question. Or we can go beyond him to include anyone’s authority in any role, be it Duke or Deputy, Friar or Bawd, Spectator or Reader, Teacher or Student. Does Isabella accept the Duke’s proposal of marriage at the end? Will he enforce such a proposal if she does not? Measure for Measure is a play with no answers but plenty of questions, and its conclusion continues to surprise and perplex, prompting audiences to ask them. That is the measure of the play.
26
Cymbeline (1609–10) and a note on the poems
Categorized as a tragedy, Cymbeline was the last of Shakespeare’s plays to be printed in the First Folio of 1623. Written in 1609–10, it does not, however, easily conform to a particular genre and is now often termed a ‘tragicomedy’. Here Shakespeare uses his dexterity to take risks with the structure that underpins many of his plays, in particular his comedies, and to startling effect. It took an artist who knew more than just the basics of his profession to be able to create a play such as this one.
Spotlight
Shakespeare’s plays allow a freedom that many find difficult to accept but some, however, continue to impose strictures upon him. If they did not, how could John Drakakis, in 1985, edit a book entitled Alternative Shakespeares, a collection of radical critical essays that challenged the orthodoxy of the then current trends of Shakespearean scholarship? Yet Drakakis would be the first to note the danger of any form of literary criticism, including new historicism or cultural materialism, as being the ‘key’ to Shakespeare’s meaning. New ideas and new interpretations will continue to appear in times and ages to come. That is part of the greatness of Shakespeare.
It is said that, when some aspiring poets asked T. S. Eliot to instruct them on how to write free verse, he told them to learn first how to write a sonnet. Similarly, the contemporary artist David Hockney has complained that aspiring artists are no longer, at some art schools, being taught how to draw. As we have noted earlier, radical artists usually owe their creativity to an understanding of the established rules of their craft. Beethoven’s last symphony tantalizingly begins almost as if trying to find its way, as if the orchestra is warming up, and then builds up through the first three movements to the fourth in which, with artistic courage, the choral voice enters as a glorious instrument, taking the symphonic form to a new height. It is perhaps a metaphor for the way great artists, writers and composers constantly work from the first principles of their art, from the inheritance of others’ endeavours, through the continuing experimentation with forms and ideas to produce their work.
As we have moved from play to play, genre to genre, we have seen in Shakespeare’s works the way in which he structures his plays, how he makes them work as drama with an artistic integrity, an expression of linguistic beauty and an eye to
the market. The plays needed to entertain. They needed to bring in the spectators to form the audience. We have seen how some commentators through the years have tried to appropriate Shakespeare for themselves, at one extreme deifying him, at the other denying that a man from the provinces with no aristocratic or university background could have written these texts. We have also seen how through the ages some have appropriated him for themselves and have rewritten, ‘improved’ or rejected acts, scenes, speeches and even entire plays. In this we have noted, however, that drama is a fluid art form, not entirely owned by the dramatist but in being dynamic, living in performance from age to age, agile enough to be reconstituted for new audiences and new generations.
The genre debate
Jacques Derrida was one of the writers who exerted an influence on the alternative Shakespeare movement:
‘As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, laws and interdictions are not far behind…
[quoting Gerard Genette] ‘The history of genre theory is strewn with these fascinating outlines that inform and deform reality, a reality often heterogeneous to the literary field, and that claim to discover a “natural” system wherein they construct a factitious symmetry heavily reinforced by fake windows.’
Derrida, J. (1980: 203, 207), ‘La loi du genre/The Law of Genre’, Glyph Textual Studies, vol. 7, quoted in Brown, R. D. and Johnson, D. (eds) (2000: 24), Shakespeare 1609: Cymbeline and the Sonnets. London: Macmillan
Because it does not conform to the generic rules implied by the term ‘tragedy’ which was how it was first categorized in 1623, Cymbeline has been a victim of critical uncertainty that has coloured its reception. Irrespective of theoretical warnings, some have argued that it might, therefore, be considered a ‘comedy’ but it does not abide by the rules of that genre either. The discussions will continue. Is it a pastoral? Is it a history? Is it a Roman play? Is it a tragicomedy, a term which has attracted some critical favour as evidenced, for example, by Ruth Nevo who in her analysis of the play makes a persuasive case based on structural generic understandings?
‘In Shakespearean tragic structure we regularly find protagonists in Act IV facing a great void, an annihilation of the values which have sustained them. Deprived of their objects of love or faith or hope, they experience despair, so that possible remedy, tantalisingly just within reach, is occluded from their view, or, if perceived, is snatched away by the circumstances which have swept beyond control. In his comic structures, Act IV initiates the remedial phase of the narrative, exorcising precedent errors and follies by maximizing them to the point of exhaustion. In Cymbeline, the most intricately interlocked of the tragicomedies, both vectors coexist, and are synchronized in the play’s most phantasmagoric event – the mock death of Fidele.’
Nevo, R. (1987), ‘Shakespeare’s Other Language’, reprinted in Thorne, A. (ed.) (2003: 107–8), Shakespeare’s Romances: Contemporary Critical Essays. New Casebooks. Basingstoke: Macmillan
But to engage in the ‘genre debate’ over this play is nevertheless still a means to compartmentalize and formalize structures. The questions to be asked of this play are not necessarily about genre. Does Cymbeline work as drama to attract the audience for which it was originally intended, or audiences today? Sadly, perhaps, today the answer is no since it is not regularly performed, but nor are some of the other late plays such as Pericles, Henry VIII or The Two Noble Kinsmen – plays that were written in collaboration with other dramatists. Cymbeline, however, appears to have been solely written by Shakespeare.
Provenance
The play, apparently, was enjoyed by both James I and Charles I, which may give us a clue about its provenance. It was possibly written with an eye to King James, who was attempting to revise recent history by asserting a new relationship with Spain, even though the Catholics had tried to assassinate him through the Gunpowder Plot. He wished to be regarded as a new Caesar Augustus and maybe he would have fancied himself as the masque-like Jupiter of Act 5, descending to take control of the ‘petty spirits of region low’, and so to calm their conscience in a promise to ‘uplift’ the tribulations of Posthumus:
His comforts thrive, his trials well are spent:
Our Jovial star reign’d at his birth, and in
Our temple was he married. Rise, and fade.
He shall be lord of lady Imogen,
And happier much by his affliction made.
(5.4.104–8)
Similarly, the King may well have associated himself with Cymbeline who supports the mercy shown by Posthumus to Iachimo, and that would allow him, the King, similarly to show mercy and forgiveness in his kingdom:
Nobly-doom’d!
We’ll learn our freeness of a son-in-law:
Pardon’s the word to all.
(5.5.421–3)
Whether of course this was the kind of bountiful mercy King James showed in reality is a different matter altogether. What is interesting is that it seems to echo the perception that the King had of himself.
Some, of course, might criticize Shakespeare for appearing to write with such flattering intent. We have seen earlier how he was able to take associations between the contents in the plays and royal approval/disapproval to the very limit but, without the King, Shakespeare would have had no profession. A little sycophancy was no bad investment given the commercial nature of the theatre. When Marston, Jonson and Chapman openly satirized the King in their collaborative Eastward Ho! (1605), Jonson and Chapman were arrested and threatened with having their noses sliced and ears cut, while Marston, who some believe had fled to Norwich, decided on his return, having been involved in frank ‘Palace’ discussions, to terminate his career as a dramatist, marry the daughter of the King’s chaplain and take Holy Orders himself! Playwriting could be a precarious profession and, having been patronized by James, the King’s Men would have taken this protective association seriously.
Shakespeare in the age of King James
King James was building a new Britain. He had joined the crowns of England and Scotland the year before this play, in which Wales also has a prominent function in the action, was first staged. There is a political dimension culminating in a need for peace, a rejection and indeed condemnation by Cymbeline of ‘our wicked queen,/Whom heavens in justice both on her, and hers,/Have laid most heavy hand’ (5.5.464–6). The collocation ‘wicked Queen’ has often been acknowledged as a ‘fairy story’ circulated in an oral tradition. The phrase, however, might, in this case, interest us in a different way. It must be doubtful that Shakespeare would have concluded any play during the reign of Elizabeth I with such a phrase, however much related to fairy stories. Was it possible that his flattering of the King who was making his peace with Elizabeth’s most ardent enemy, Spain, allowed him a freedom of expression not available to him under the previous monarch?
The failure to pay tribute to Rome in the play was the Queen’s, and so the reconciliation with Augustus’ Rome takes place allowing for ‘A Roman, and a British ensign wave’ since ‘Never was a war did cease/(Ere bloody hands were wash’d) with such a peace’ (5.5.481, 485–6).
Structural convention and innovation
All of this comes at the end of a long final act in which recognitions and expressions of forgiveness come quickly one after the other, in an almost bewildering and yet well-controlled manner. With the earlier comedies, as we have seen, characters escape from, or resolve, the problems posed at the start, through geographic relocation or physical disguise or both. Although discomforts, sadness, melancholy and difficulties are present in the relocations, dramatic characters are nevertheless able to reassess themselves and confirm their identities. But in this possibly more challenging play, Shakespeare innovates upon that structure, almost, but not quite, dismantling it.
Innogen (wrongly first printed in 1623 as Imogen but still spelled thus in the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works) is already married to Post
humus; he is banished by the King at the start, and has relocated to Rome where he has undertaken an improper wager with Iachimo concerning the fidelity of his wife. Iachimo hides in a trunk to gain access to her bedroom – you may recall that in The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff is forced to hide in a ‘buck basket’ to escape from his attempted adulterous escapades – and fails in his seduction but nevertheless slanders her to Posthumus.
‘Iachimo’s entry into Imogen’s [sic] bedroom from the trunk is an event of fairy-tale surrealism superimposed upon a scene of the most exact realism. The dramatist names the time…the length of Imogen’s bedtime reading…and the time of her morning call…As she sleeps, the trunk lid opens and Iachimo steps into the silence of her room…Some readers believe that Iachimo kisses Imogen…“That I might touch!/But kiss, one kiss!/Rubies unparagon’d,/How dearly they do’t” (2.2, 16–18). Surely the point is that he does not touch, no matter how close he comes, that even his expression of a wish to do so is a figurative comment upon Imogen’s beauty, not upon his desire for it.’
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 33