by Judy Jones
Henry VIII—This play, Shakespeare’s last, has had its problems: Shakespeare didn’t write it alone, the portrait of the King is blurry, and the Globe Theatre burned down when wadding from onstage cannon charges ignited during its production. Still, the characters of Catherine of Aragon and Cardinal Wolsey have managed to catch the occasional fancy of actors and/or audience. THE COMEDIES
It helps to keep in mind that, during the Renaissance, a play did not have to be a barrel of laughs to be called a comedy; any drama with a happy ending and a generally optimistic point of view fulfilled the requirements. If the plot also revolved around a temporarily troubled love affair, you had romantic comedy, the genre that, from about 1595 to 1600, was Shakespeare’s forte and that hit its peak with his three so called joyous comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, all of which satisfied their audiences’ desire for escapist entertainment. After 1600, with a more somber mood reigning in England and theater audiences becoming both more sophisticated and more cynical, the tone of the plays changed; the three “problem” comedies, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, and especially Measure for Measure, hardly seem like comedies at all, except for those inevitable—and barely believable— happy endings.
Close-up: Twelfth Night
What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come and kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Act 2, scene 3
Illyria is a center of self-indulgence, a morass of misplaced love and the rejection of life—or the overeager embracing of it, sometimes by the same person. Its duke, Orsino, wastes most of his energy being lovesick over Olivia, who has spurned him. She, having renounced life to mourn her dead brother, switches over to another losing proposition, a fixation on Cesario, who is really Viola in drag. Malvolio, obsessed by self-love, is soon convinced that Olivia is as crazy about him as he is about himself.
Twelfth Night
That most of the major characters spend most of the play mooning about or making fools of themselves is not surprising, given that Twelfth Night is the closest thing Shakespeare ever wrote to a musical comedy—someone is forever breaking into a pavane or one of those apparently tuneless Elizabethan ditties (like the one above), and nearly everyone in the play seems to be taking a holiday, like they did in old Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movies. In fact, Twelfth Night was named for a holiday, the twelfth night of Christmas.
Viola, of course, is taking a holiday from her true identity by dressing up as a man. But although Malvolio and Sebastian also disguise themselves, very little of this play’s comic effect depends on mistaken identity. Instead, its humor comes from the human failings of its characters. It is the characters—even the minor ones—that really make Twelfth Night: The sensible Viola is probably Shakespeare’s most lovable heroine, and the conceited, priggish Malvolio is the character everyone remembers best, partly because narcissists were rare in Elizabethan drama and partly because the rather cruel way he’s treated by the other characters was immensely satisfying to Elizabethan audiences and wrings sympathy from modern ones.
Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarises the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned; and it may be said, that he has not only shown human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be exposed.
Samuel Johnson
The Other Comedies
The Comedy of Errors—This very early, uncharacteristically farcical comedy, drawn from two Roman plays by Plautus, gets most of its laughs from mistaken identity, with a sprinkling of marriage jokes thrown in. What’s surprising is that, as pure sitcom, it still works on the modern stage.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona—An interesting forerunner of the kind of romantic comedy that Shakespeare was to make one of his distinctive genres, exhibiting all the imaginable extremes of fidelity, gallantry, and melancholy, as if the dramatist was staking out the boundaries within which his subsequent comedies would be enacted. In Valentine and Proteus, the “two gentlemen” whose friendship turns to rivalry, and Silvia and Julia, their lady friends, he also begins to formulate his method of using contrast to establish character.
Love’s Labours Lost—Lots of learned wit, not all of it easily decipherable by contemporary audiences, in this story of a king and three courtiers who undertake a rest-and-study cure but quickly change their plans when a princess and her three ladies-in-waiting turn up. Shakespeare’s attention keeps shifting—probably a sign that the play kept being rewritten.
The Taming of the Shrew—Let’s not kid ourselves. This is a male-chauvinist play: Petruchio does eventually subjugate the self-willed Katharina. The best that can be said for her, finally, is that she learns to exchange clever remarks with him, but she must submit totally on every issue that counts. Shakespeare’s treatment of his heroine, however, merely reflects the standard Elizabethan view of a woman’s place, according to which Petruchio really does Kate a favor by forcing her to accept her proper role. By the way, in those days, shrew was pronounced “shrow,” which explains why many of the play’s rhymes seem a bit off.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Shakespeare’s first comic masterpiece is a compliment to love, but a backhanded one, given the quarrelsome marriage of Oberon and Titania, the marriage by conquest of Theseus and Hippolyta, the lampooning of tales of true love in the play within a play, and the mismatched infatuations in the forest. All of which makes it hard to tell the difference between love and lunacy. In Puck, the beneficent goblin, and Bottom, the weaver, who winds up with an ass’s head, Shakespeare created two of his most memorable minor characters.
Like a miraculous celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams.
Thomas Carlyle
The Merchant of Venice—In this double plot, the courtship of Portia pits the true values of Belmont, her home, against the false values of Venice, which thinks life is all about gold, silver, and justice (as opposed to mercy). Although the play is classed as a romantic comedy, the emphasis is more on friendship than on love, and the question of anti-Semitism inherent in Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock always gets more attention than either.
Much Ado About Nothing—The witty exchanges of the unwilling lovers Benedict and Beatrice make for much of this comedy’s charm. On the other hand, Claudio’s bitter denunciations of Hero, the woman he so recently adored, tend to distress modern audiences with their cruelty. As the title suggests, confusions and misunderstandings abound, compounded by the two monumentally incompetent constables, Dogberry and Verges.
As You Like It—We’re in the idyllic Forest of Arden, to which all the good characters have fled from the corrupt court. Our backpackers include: the young nobleman Orlando, who falls in love with Rosalind, daughter of the banished duke (and the first of Shakespeare’s self-reliant, no-nonsense heroines), Rosalind’s cousin Celia, Jaques (always referred to as “the melancholy Jaques”), and the fool Touchstone. The exiles praise the free life of the forest, but, except for Jaques, they all jump at the chance of going back to civilization.
The Merry Wives of Windsor—Said to have been written in response to Queen Elizabeth’s request to see Falstaff in love. If so, the monarch got short weight. This is Falstaff bereft of his wit, and he’s not in love, or even in lust, just prodded by vanity and greed. Amiable enough on the whole, however, and the only play in which Shakespeare presents (and defends) the life of his own middle class.
Troilus and Cressida—A romance with an unfaithful woman (Cressida) conducted in the middle of a war (Trojan) over another unfaithful woman (Helen).
War and love are shown to be equally vicious and destructive. Or, as Thersites says, “Lechery, lechery; still wars and lechery; nothing els
e holds fashion.” This play squeaks through as comedy on a technicality: The two principals are still alive at the end.
All’s Well That Ends Well—Classed, along with T & C and Measure, as one of the “dark” or “problem” comedies, said to mirror the increasingly pessimistic side of Shakespeare and/or Elizabethan England. This one is the lightest of the three and Helena one of the most endearing of Shakespeare’s heroines. Having cured her king of an ailment that baffled the court physicians, she sets out resolutely to track down (and bag) her man, a self-centered nullity under the influence of his friend, the boastful and opportunistic Parolles. That she wants him at all is problematic, but then, Shakespeare never said love had to be reasonable.
Measure for Measure—Scholars like to roll out religious allegory to explain this play, but even with the special pleading it can seem bitter and cynical. The Duke appoints his deputy, Angelo, to clean up the mess he has made in Vienna. Why can’t he do it himself? Doesn’t he see through Angelo’s hypocrisy? If so, he is at fault for putting Vienna at the deputy’s mercy. If not, he is incompetent. Isabella’s refusal to lay down her virginity to save her brother is understandable, but must she then tell him about it? Isn’t the Duke’s revenge for Lucio’s verbal insults a bit excessive? And what real satisfaction can anybody take in a finale in which sordidness is converted to happiness by fiat? Are you starting to see the problem? Do you care?
I keep saying Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
Matthew Arnold
What is he? You might almost answer, He is the earth … the globe … existence. … In Shakespeare the birds sing, the rushes are clothed with green, hearts love, souls suffer, the cloud wanders, it is hot, it is cold, night falls, time passes, forests and multitudes speak, the vast eternal dream hovers over all. Sap and blood, all forms of the multiple reality, actions and ideas, man and humanity, the living and the life, solitudes, cities, religions, diamonds and pearls, dunghills and charnel houses, the ebb and flow of beings, the steps of comers and goers, all, all are on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare; and, this genius being the earth, the dead emerge from it.
Victor Hugo
Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales. That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny: but this was all. Suppose anyone to have had the dramatic handling for the first time of such ready-made stories as Lear, Macbeth, &c. and he would be a sad fellow indeed, if he did not make something very grand of them.
George Gordon, Lord Byron THE TRAGEDIES
Amazingly, nineteenth-century audiences preferred the comedies; it’s only since the twentieth century that they have been impressed by Shakespeare’s tragedies— at least, with those four tragedies generally acknowledged as his greatest: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. All of these were written between 1601 and 1606, after Shakespeare began leaning toward heavily symbolic, multilayered plots that clearly juxtaposed good and evil. Combine these elements with the kind of psychological complexity that only a terribly unhappy character can put across, and you can see why the tragedies jibe so nicely with the modern sensibility.
Close-up: King Lear
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
Act 3, scene 2
“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.” Though this line comes from Julius Caesar, it applies best to King Lear, which, increasingly, scholars and critics have come to regard as the most bitter, bleak, and pessimistic—as well as the greatest—of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
King Lear, Act I, Scene 1, painted by Edwin Austin Abbey
The play’s opening events hardly prepare us for the bombshells that follow. Retiring from power and dividing his kingdom, Lear relies, outrageously, on a single test—his daughters’ public declarations of love. Offended by this silliness, Cordelia, his favorite and the only one of his three daughters who is genuinely devoted to him, brusquely rejects his demand. That’s all it takes to propel Lear— and us—inexorably through five acts of unspeakable anguish, culminating in the deaths of both Lear and Cordelia. And why? Not just because Lear has a dumb view of human relations. The fact is that this is a terrible world, filled with evil and unimaginable cruelty. What comfort there is doesn’t derive from anything as trivial (and as unattainable) as a happy ending, but from the warmth and joy Lear and Cordelia feel when they are temporarily reunited. Lear has learned a lot, but the tuition was a killer.
There is nothing halfhearted about the play’s tragic effects; no one gets hurt just a little. Lear, having abdicated, doesn’t shuffle off to a tower room to do jigsaw puzzles; he is driven out, crazed, to seek shelter on the heath in a raging storm. Cordelia is hanged in prison. Gloucester’s punishment for being misled about his legitimate son, Edgar, and for being faithful to his king is to be blinded—on stage.
King Lear is full of the kind of significant parallels Shakespeare liked to use to reinforce his effects. Gloucester is a second tragic father, also brought to grief for failing to distinguish between his good and bad children. Lear, judging his daughters’ devotion to him by the number of knights they will allow him, is repeating his original mistake of trying to measure love. Meanwhile, a virtual symphony of madness is being played out in the delirium of Lear, the feigned lunacy of Edgar, and the addled wisdom of the Fool, who pretty much sums up the moral of the play when he tells Lear, “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”
The Other Tragedies
Titus Andronicus—Lots of blood and gore, with about as much substance as a Charles Bronson movie and a similar cumulative effect—that is, if you can imagine Bronson as a victorious Roman general who sets out to avenge the rape and mutilation of his daughter, Lavinia. Not a play to win raves from the critics, who like to think of it either as the work of a young Shakespeare out to have a hit at any cost, or as not the work of Shakespeare at all.
Romeo and Juliet—The world’s most famous star-crossed lovers play out the world’s worst run of luck. Although it contains some beautiful poetry and a couple of brilliantly developed minor characters (Mercutio and the Nurse), and despite the moralizing of twentieth-century remakes like West Side Story, this one is really just what it appears to be—a classic tearjerker.
Julius Caesar—Ruined for most of us by being taught in high school, when we were too young to care about anyone as noble and good as Brutus, whose tragedy this really is. (We were just confused and irritated when the title character got killed off in the middle of the action.) True, the plot is more straightforward than most of Shakespeare’s, but the play’s austerity isn’t for sixteen-year-olds.
Hamlet—The Master’s shot at one of the big box-office genres of his day—the revenge tragedy, in which, nine times out of ten, a treacherous murder is avenged by a tireless pursuer, with plenty of carnage along the way. Shakespeare’s addition of a psychological and philosophical dimension, and his creation of a hero who thinks so much that he can’t get the job done, have, however, sufficed to discourage Jean-Claude Van Damme (though not, it’s true, Mel Gibson) from attempting a movie version.
Othello—All about the deceptiveness of appearances. Othello’s black exterior is no guide to his noble character. “Honest Iago” is untrustworthy. Desdemona, who is innocence itself, gets smeared. And Cassio, who has been
fooling around with a courtesan, is really a fine fellow after all.
Macbeth—Don’t fall for the victim-of-circumstances line. Not only does Macbeth murder his king and slaughter a whole family of innocents, but the business about his wrestling with his conscience has been greatly exaggerated. He worries only about the practical consequences, not the ethical implications, of his evil deeds. When his wife judges him to be “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness,” she doesn’t mean what we mean by “kindness,” and besides, she’s hardly an authority on the subject.
Antony and Cleopatra—Overly complex, perhaps, but then Shakespeare had a lot to deal with here: the decline and fall of Antony, who, although he’s the victim of his own unbridled passion, can’t be made to seem a total fool; the development of Cleopatra from a selfish little twit into someone whose death by asp moves us; and the depiction of Rome and Egypt as two different and opposing worlds, without the benefit of split-screen technology.
Timon of Athens—A kind of morality play about worldly vanity. Timon, a nobleman, goes broke entertaining his friends, who then refuse to have anything to do with him. He becomes a hermit and a cynic, whom, for all practical purposes, we can forget about. An acknowledged mess, Timon was probably tinkered with beyond recognition.
Coriolanus—At last, a tragedy in which both sides repel us—the aristocratic Coriolanus with his noblesse oblige and his contempt for the masses, and the scheming tribunes who play on those masses’ foolishness, fickleness, and gullibility. Because of its ambiguity, the play has been easy to use propagandistically; it was staged as a pro-Fascist parable in France between the wars, and later rewritten from a Marxist perspective by Bertolt Brecht. THE ROMANCES