A Pelican Book: This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

  What the plot reveals is that such liberation can only be temporary. The characters are caught up in accelerating and repeated dreamlike scenarios in which their identities blur and dissolve under pressure of events. ‘Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?’ Antipholus of Syracuse wonders as an unknown woman greets him as her husband: ‘Sleeping or waking? Mad or well advised?’ (2.2.215–16). ‘What, was I married to her in my dream?’ (2.2.185). Adriana urges her husband/brother-in-law into the house and bars the door against visitors. When her real husband arrives home, his way is stopped by the servants, because, as they tell him, he is already inside, supping with his wife. It’s an allegory of self-alienation, in which the self is dependent on being recognized, or not. It’s a funny scene, but part of its humour is compensatory for its terrors. For both Antipholuses this scene is stressful, as if both getting what you want and being prevented from getting what you want have their psychic costs. And these levels of anxiety escalate, as in this Folio stage direction from the end of Act 4: ‘exeunt omnes [all], as fast as may be, frighted’. The play, that’s to say, speeds up like Chaplin’s malfunctioning conveyor belt in Modern Times: it embodies the breathless, involuntary, panicky momentum of plot over character. Its lexicon of magic and the supernatural is striking – more mentions of witches than in Macbeth, more mentions of conjuring and magic than in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, more references to Satan than in any other Shakespeare play: these all feel like alternative non-human explanations of why things happen (see the chapter on Macbeth for more on theories of causation) or putative answers to the question of who controls the plot. Plot, not character, is destiny in The Comedy of Errors.

  The stage direction ‘as fast as may be, frighted’ is prompted by events catching up with the bewildered Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse. Running from the many residents of Ephesus who want something from them, they seek sanctuary with the abbess. Women – the slighted wife Adriana, the unnamed Courtesan who will welcome Antipholus of Ephesus when he is displaced by his unknown brother and banished from his own house, and now Emilia the abbess – are seen as crucial to male identity. Female characters in the play don’t enjoy the same self-doubt or self-questioning as the men: the female body becomes the site of male self-assertion. We don’t have to be fully paid-up Freudians to see that what happens at the end of the play is that a chaste nun-mum sorts it all out. Emilia is revealed as the ultimate guarantor of the twins’ identities, as she promises ‘full satisfaction’ (5.1.402) to the husband and sons she has not seen since the shipwreck thirty-three years previously.

  This screwball stress on plot links the play to a particular kind of comedy: farce. The Romantic poet and critic Coleridge called The Comedy of Errors a farce, defined by its ‘strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible.’ More modern iterations of farce suggest its preoccupation with doors, thresholds and access to spaces (back to Adriana’s bedchamber and the chaste enclosure of the abbey), or with its characteristic velocity: John Mortimer wrote that ‘farce is tragedy at a thousand revolutions per minute’, and The Comedy of Errors moves frenetically through some of the existential territory that the later tragedies will extend at considerable length. Interviewed by the New York Times about his own successful modern farce Noises Off (1982), Michael Frayn describes the play in terms that are entirely appropriate to Errors: ‘It’s about an anxiety everyone has, that he may make a fool of himself in public, that he may not be able to maintain his persona, that the chaotic feelings inside may burst out, that the whole structure may break down. I suspect people are seeing the kind of disaster they fear may happen to them, but one that’s safely happening to these actors. They’re discharging fear and anxiety in a way that doesn’t hurt.’

  Maybe the designation of the play as farce helps with the question of how to appreciate its priority of plot over character. But it also raises the issue about laughter’s relationship to comedy. We may feel that laughter and comedy are twins, birthed at the same moment, but that was not the case in the early modern period. The courtier poet Philip Sidney wrote to distinguish ‘delight’, the warm enjoyment of comedy which ‘hath a joy in it, either permanent or present’, from the ‘scornful tickling’ of laughter, which he identified as a vulgar response to ‘things more disproportioned to ourselves and nature’. His examples are revealing about the ways Shakespeare’s world is quite different from our own: ‘we are ravished with delight to see a fair woman, and yet are far from being moved to laughter. We laugh at deformed creatures, wherein certainly we cannot delight.’ That laughter might be a symptom of distance rather than empathy is challenging, but it’s something that The Comedy of Errors seems to interrogate. The insights of a later theorist of laughter seem helpful: the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose work Le Rire (Laughter) was first published in 1900. Bergson argues that laughter always arises from a situation in which the human body behaves like a machine or, more precisely, like an automaton. Comedy, Bergson proposes, ‘enables us to see a man as a jointed puppet’ and is derived from ‘something mechanical encrusted upon the living’. It is not human warmth that gives rise to laughter, but the encounter with something rigid and mechanical: ‘we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.’

  People are things in The Comedy of Errors, defined by exterior appearance and by the transfer of props, and as the plot accelerates they become increasingly, frenetically mechanical. And our response, according to Bergson, is decidedly unsentimental. Comedy demands separation and coldness, or, in his memorable phrase, something ‘like a momentary anaesthesia of the heart’. Not only, that’s to say, are the characters of Errors alienated from themselves and each other, but they are alienated from the audience. Privileging plot over character in this play rejects our empathic engagement and refuses, for the most part, to offer us distinct characters in recognizable situations. Rather, Errors cultivates the Bergsonian anaesthesia of the heart that is the precondition of laughter. Or, to put it another way, The Comedy of Errors is pure comedy because we do not really care about the Antipholuses or the Dromios or which is which: it is cardiac anaesthesia in five acts.

  CHAPTER 4

  Richard II

  Richard II is a play in which one king is deposed and another takes his place. What is remarkable about the depiction of this momentous transfer is that we don’t really know whether it was a good thing or not. The great unanswered question of the play is whether it was right – historically, politically, ethically, personally, dramatically – for Bolingbroke to take the throne from his cousin Richard. This question insinuates itself into the play’s imagery and choreography, and hangs over its stage history and critical reception – and the following sequence of history plays struggle with its unquiet legacy. Is Richard the rightful martyred king, or is he hopelessly, recklessly, inadequate to the task of government? Does Bolingbroke represent might, right or modernity? What might it mean for a play of the last decade of Elizabeth’s long reign to represent the overthrow of a lawful monarch in such equivocal terms, and to dare even to ask the question about which of the men occupying England’s throne might be better at the job?

  Richard II is a signal example of Shakespeare’s simultaneous interest in politics and his avoidance of the partisan. It’s this feature of his writing that has enabled the plays to be co-opted for very different ideological agendas (see the chapter on Julius Caesar for more on this). It is impossible to derive any stable sense from Richard II of Shakespeare’s own view on the conflict between Richard and Bolingbroke. On one hand, Richard is the legitimate king, but/and he is solipsistic, selfish and potentially tyrannical. On the other hand, Bolingbroke is a usurper, but/and he is pragmatic, charismatic and widely supported.

  What would contemporary audiences have thought? An official Elizabethan sermon inveighed against rebellion, arguing that Lucifer was the ‘founder of rebellion’, that earthly kings were ‘ordained of God’, and that even rebellion against a wicked r
uler was not to be sanctioned: ‘a rebel is worse than the worst prince, and rebellion worse than the worst government of the worst prince that hath hitherto been.’ This might suggest that orthodox contemporary sympathies ought to be with Richard (although it’s always worth recalling that the messages that an institution most actively promulgates are often, by definition, ones to which not all its members automatically subscribe – otherwise why the need to keep telling them?). But then, Bolingbroke is not presented negatively by the play, which ends with his having achieved the throne without any signal of divine wrath. At one level Richard II suggests that the murder of a king has no immediate consequences. And although the subsequent history plays show this isn’t true, the experience of this play shows no punishment for Bolingbroke’s actions. I don’t think Shakespeare writes his plays to convey messages – quite the opposite. In this book I try to suggest how he asks questions rather than answers them, and the reminder of the old Hollywood saying, ‘if you want to send a message, use Western Union’ is a good one for the early modern theatre. Nevertheless, you might be justified in thinking, as you left the Curtain Theatre in the late afternoon after a performance of Richard II, that you can depose and murder a rightful king and no punishment falls on your head.

  The play neither hides nor maximizes Richard’s faults, and its apparent impartiality means that neither candidate is idealized. Richard has his favourites, those ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’ (2.3.165), but Bushy, Bagot and Green are less effective and less venal than in other narratives of the story. The chronicler Raphael Holinshed, one of Shakespeare’s sources, summarizes Richard’s downfall as the result of his shortcomings as a ruler: ‘by reason he was so given to follow evil counsel, and used such inconvenient ways and means, through insolent misgovernance and youthful outrage’. These sound very dramatic and stage-worthy behaviours, but Shakespeare ignores the cue. The only example of these failings we see is Richard’s sequestration of John of Gaunt’s assets. And while this act is distinctly, even deliciously, callous – ‘Pray God we may make haste’, says Richard, hearing of Gaunt’s sickness, ‘and come too late!’ (1.4.63) – it is explicitly undertaken not to bankroll some luxurious monarchical frou-frou, but to fund ‘our Irish wars’ (1.4.61). Elizabethan Londoners would have recognized both the expense and necessity of such a campaign, for war was still being waged in Ireland in the 1590s when the play was performed. Shakespeare gives Richard a soliloquy in prison in the play’s final act that creates sympathy for him; he develops an extended role for Richard’s wife, Queen Isabella, who is virtually invisible in the sources, solely for the purpose of humanizing the king; he silences any protest from the common people and their complaints against the social elite in a play so resolutely highbrow that even the gardener speaks blank verse and sophisticated political theory.

  In making Richard a weak king Shakespeare is obviously influenced by Edward II, a history play by his brilliant contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. Yet where Marlowe depicts a sexual relationship between Edward and Gaveston, homoeroticism in Richard’s court is largely underplayed and does not seem to be a factor in the king’s apparent inadequacies (although modern performances, such as the 2012 BBC Hollow Crown television version with Ben Whishaw as Richard, sometimes emphasize it). Gaunt’s own rhetorical resistance to Richard’s rule is impressive: his famous patriotic lament for ‘this sceptred isle’ was an immediate hit, included in popular books of quotations from 1600 onwards. Gaunt’s charge that Richard is ‘Landlord’ (2.1.113) of England, not king, is never countered, and his nephew’s high-handed behaviour immediately confirms rather than contradicts the allegation. But later in the play, when the Bishop of Carlisle defends the king’s divine right, there is again no argument, simply the cleric’s imprisonment in the Tower of London. Gaunt’s and Carlisle’s perorations, one against and one for Richard, are both literally unanswerable: the play shows us different viewpoints without ever adjudicating them. Perhaps this is the residue of humanist education techniques likely to have been part of Shakespeare’s experience at school: the skill of arguing in utramque partem (Latin, meaning literally ‘on both sides’). Schoolboys learned the importance of using rhetoric to construct persuasive and plausible characterizations of opposing arguments. In its depiction of Aumerle, at first fiercely loyal to Richard but ultimately won over to Bolingbroke’s support, the play dramatizes its own process of persuasion. Everyone – even including Richard’s horse Roan Barbary – comes to see Bolingbroke’s unstoppable claim.

  When it was first published, the play was titled ‘The Tragedy of King Richard the Second’ – and a number of early quarto editions which attest to its contemporary popularity carry that title. How might reading it as a tragedy affect the question of how we read Bolingbroke’s actions and their dramatic weight? Richard himself lays claim to occupy the central dramatic role, if not the moral pole position, conventionally offered to the titular character in tragedy. As with King Lear, or Coriolanus, or Macbeth, or Romeo and Juliet, it is Richard’s death that brings the play to a close. Shakespeare has cut his historical material into this particular shape: obviously, there’s lots more of the story still to come, since, unlike tragedy, history does not come to an end. As we saw when thinking about Richmond in Richard III, in the final scene of a tragedy there tends to be little investment in what is coming next. When Fortinbras enters at the end of Hamlet, or when Edgar (or perhaps it is Albany) tries to say something sententious at the end of King Lear, we know that they are just temporizing: the light has gone out from the tragic world and we are not interested in, or convinced that there is, any future beyond the end of the play. But there is another aspect to Richard II, which is its engagement with the ongoing processes of history. History continues. The death of one king inevitably means the coronation of another: the king is dead, long live the king. As Richard’s reign ends, we hear about Bolingbroke’s ‘unthrifty son’ (5.3.1) for the first time – the figure who will eclipse his father in the Henry IV and Henry V plays: here, the mention works to announce that his dynasty has a future. Part of the myth of monarchical sanctity – what the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz memorably dubbed ‘the king’s two bodies’: one physical and subject to mortality like any other person, the other sacred and continuous – is that the death of a king is not the end. The death of the great man, like Richard, is not actually tragic in this schema – it is the necessary and inevitable renewal of the role. Hereditary monarchy, like history itself, is actually opposed to tragedy because it cannot invest in the significance of the individual over the role. When the play was reprinted amid the other plays of the historical sequence in the collected Folio text of 1623, its title was modified to ‘The life and death of Richard II’. Historical sequence cannot have room for individual tragedy.

  But try telling that to Richard, who certainly believes he’s in a tragedy. Sometimes favourably characterized by critics as a ‘poet king’, he deploys a range of emotive and figurative language to describe the events of the play from his own perspective. In particular he likens himself to Christ, and his rival to Judas, and his courtiers to those who stood by at this betrayal:

  Did they not sometime cry ‘All hail!’ to me?

  So Judas did to Christ. But He in twelve

  Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand, none.

  (4.1.160–62)

  In such moments the figurative language makes it quite clear that Richard himself believes Bolingbroke’s actions to be a sinful betrayal against divine order, but, as Mandy Rice-Davies famously said (in a slightly different context), ‘he would, wouldn’t he?’ Richard utters stereotypical laments, preferring to talk than fight. As his enemies advance in the middle of the play, he responds with an ecstasy of self-pity to news of the capture of his allies, then invites his followers to ‘sit upon the ground, / And tell sad stories of the death of kings’ (3.2.151–2). Richard’s commitment to the genre of tragedy makes him passive, whereas Bolingbroke, firmly engaged in the work of history,
is active. If Richard tries to write himself into a tragedy through this topos of martyrdom, Shakespeare partly cooperates, giving him a tragic hero soliloquy in which he reveals his own mental anguish: ‘Thus play I in one person many people, / And none contented’ (5.5.31–2). Bolingbroke, by contrast, has no soliloquy, no intimation of privacy or interiority. His motives are opaque: we never know, for instance, when he decides that his rightful quest to regain his own inheritance shifts into a challenge for the crown itself. His role on stage is a masterclass in what is unspoken. He delivers short, pragmatic speeches in response to Richard’s long self-justifications. The scene in which Richard reluctantly hands over the symbols of office is indicative: nine poetic lines to Richard, followed by Bolingbroke’s ‘I thought you had been willing to resign’ (4.1.180); three lines for Richard and then again ‘Are you contented to resign the crown?’ (190); then speeches by Richard of twenty-two, fifteen, nine and fourteen lines, with hardly a word in edgeways for anyone else. Richard may be losing control of his kingdom in this scene, but he never loses control of the stage. Even once the scene-stealing Richard is imprisoned offstage, Bolingbroke’s character remains obscured. Different performances can make his final lines of regret for Richard’s death in which he vows a pilgrimage ‘to the Holy Land / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand’ (5.6.49–50) sound variously stricken, horrified, regretful, contented or coldly pragmatic.