This is the fairyland. O spite of spites!
We talk with goblins, owls, and sprites;
If we obey them not, this will ensue:
They’ll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue. (2.2.190–93)
Antipholus, however, cannot refuse Adriana’s appealing invitation to have dinner (and probably sex) with her. In another aside, he declares his total commitment to the “offered fallacy”:
Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?
Sleeping or waking, mad or well-advised?
Known unto these, and to myself disguised?
I’ll say as they say, and persever so,
And in this mist at all adventures go. (2.2.213–17)
There is no stopping Antipholus now, and he earnestly seeks to enjoy his new and inexplicable situation.
Antipholus’s soliloquy at the beginning of act 4, scene 3 is entirely characteristic (but he, nevertheless, wants to escape from Ephesus as soon as possible before his good luck changes):
There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend;
And everyone doth call me by my name.
Some tender money to me, some invite me;
Some other give me thanks for kindnesses;
Some offer me commodities to buy.
Even now a tailor called me in his shop
And showed me silks that he had bought for me,
And therewithal took measure of my body.
Sure, these are but imaginary wiles,
And Lapland sorcerers inhabit here. (4.3.1–11)
Although Antipholus is convinced that these are tricks of his imagination (“imaginary wiles”), he still takes whatever is offered to him without any deeper questioning.
A Courtesan invites him to dinner, and it is evident that this is not the first dinner they have shared. Antipholus tries to exercise his righteous indignation: “Avoid, then, fiend! What tell’st thou me of supping? / Thou art, as you are all, a sorceress. / I conjure thee to leave me and be gone” (4.3.64–66). But the Courtesan is of a practical turn of mind and is not to be put off: “Give me the ring of mine you had at dinner, / Or, for my diamond, the chain you promised, / And I’ll be gone, sir, and not trouble you” (4.3.70–72). Of course, these are all happenings that pertain to Antipholus of Ephesus when his wife barred him from entering his house for dinner.
All the misunderstandings of the play are cleared up in the dénouement in act 5, scene 1. Adriana says: “I see two husbands, or mine eyes deceive me” (5.1.332). We don’t really know whether she means to express her good fortune or her bad, in the sense that two husband are double trouble. In addition to everything else, Egeon is no longer condemned to death, and he discovers that the Abbess is his long-lost wife, Emilia. Despite what we expect, neither Antipholus seems overjoyed to discover his long-lost brother, nor are the Dromio twins ecstatic either. Dromio of Ephesus says only: “Methinks you are my glass [mirror], and not my brother; / I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth” (5.1.418–19). At the end of the play, he graciously invites his brother to exit together with him: “We came into the world like brother and brother: / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another” (5.1.426–27). We are waiting for the Antipholus twins to have some courteous concluding statement, but it doesn’t occur.
Chapter 2
The Satire on Learning in
Love’s Labor’s Lost
Shakespeare seems to be enjoying himself in Love’s Labor’s Lost by making fun of rhetorical rules and principles. As Moth, Don Armado’s page, says in an aside to the clown Costard: “They have been at a great feast of languages and stol’n the scraps” (5.1.37–38). This applies to Don Armado, described in the dramatis personae as a “fantastical Spaniard” and elsewhere as simply a braggart; Holofernes, the schoolmaster, also called the Pedant; and Nathaniel the Curate. These three characters generate a good deal of amusement in the play as they struggle with the intricacies of a rhetoric founded on Latin. Parson Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the schoolmaster in The Two Noble Kinsmen both imitate Holofernes in their devotion to pedantry.
We see Holofernes and Nathaniel at their best in act 4, scene 2. They are at ease in their preoccupation with words, especially with words derived from Latin. They both speak with an emphasis on copiousness and amplification of discourse. For example, Holofernes speaks as if he were reading from a Latin dictionary. He cannot forgo any of the definitions. In his learned discourse on different types and ages of deer, Holofernes spares no detail: “The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood; ripe as the pomewater [a juicy apple], who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of coelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven; and anon falleth like a crab [crab apple] on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth” (4.2.3–7). Nathaniel, the curate, dutifully applauds his master’s skill with synonyms: “Truly, Master Holofernes, the epithets are sweetly varied, like a scholar at the least” (4.2.8–9).
Holofernes waxes passionate in his objection to Constable Dull’s contention that the animal was a pricket, or two-year-old red deer. He cannot contain his indignation at the ignorance of Dull, who is probably illiterate in any case:
Most barbarous intimation! Yet a kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way, of explication; facere [to make], as it were, replication, or rather, ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination—after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or, rather, unlettered, or, ratherest, unconfirmed fashion—to insert again my haud credo for a deer. (4.2.13–20)
Dull, in his ignorance, takes the Latin “haud credo” to refer to an old grey doe. Holofernes is hardly speaking English (or Latin either) but a mishmash of the two with endless specifications.
He flourishes his superior learning over Dull, as the butt of these latinate, insider jokes. Both Holofernes and Nathaniel lord it over the poor Dull, who probably doesn’t understand a word of what they are saying. Holofernes exclaims scornfully: “Twice sod [soaked] simplicity, bis coctus [twice cooked]! / O thou monster Ignorance, how deformed dost thou look!” (4.2.23–24). Nathaniel goes into more detail, partly in hexameters, in his disdain for Dull: “Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book. He hath not eat paper, as it were, he hath not drunk ink. His intellect is not replenished. He is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts” (4.2.25–28). The two “book-men” (4.1.35)—Dull’s word—are excessively proud of themselves and thankful, “Which we of taste and feeling are, for those parts that do fructify in us more than he” (4.1.29–30).
There is no room for modesty in these two pedants. As Don Armada calls Holofernes, “Arts-man, preambulate [walk forth]. We will be singled from the barbarous” (5.1.78–79). Holofernes speaks of his rhetorical endowments with a singular innocence, as if he is just reporting the facts to the unlettered world:
This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it. (4.2.66–73)
Holofernes is rather artless in his boasting. He is so immersed in the world of latinate rhetoric that he has no self-consciousness at all about his relation to the rest of the nonpedantic world.
Don Armada is not a pedant, but he nevertheless pairs well with Holofernes and Nathaniel in his ornate, euphuistic style (influenced by John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, 1579). He is not so specifically latinate as the schoolmaster and the curate, but he follows the demands of rhetoric with overbearing fullness. For example, in his letter to the king about Jaquenetta and Costard, he answers his own questions, as orators were taught to do in their orations:
The time When? About the sixth hour; when beasts most graze, birds best peck, and men sit down to that nourishment which is called supper. So much for the time When
. Now for the ground Which? Which, I mean, I walked upon. It is ycleped [named] thy park. Then for the place Where? Where, I mean, I did encounter that obscene and most preposterous event, that draweth from my snow-white pen the ebon-colored ink, which here thou viewest, beholdest, surveyest, or see’st. But to the place Where? It standeth north-north-east and by east from the west corner of thy curious-knotted garden. (1.1.234–45)
There is an amusing copiousness and amplification in this letter. Don Armada doesn’t hesitate to specify exactly (and more than exactly) what he wishes to say. Why do we need to know the precise place where he encounters the event he is writing about: “north-north-east and by east from the west corner of thy curious-knotted garden?” Don Armado is drunk with words, and he uses the same sort of synonymy as Holofernes does when he says “viewest, beholdest, surveyest, or see’st.” Why not just “see’st?” He also refreshes the obsolete medieval word “ycleped” for “called.” This is tedious but entertaining in its extravagance.
In the next scene (1.2), Don Armado meets his verbal match in his page, Moth. There is an elaborate play on words that has only an expressive meaning. Armado begins by asking his page:
Armado. How canst thou part sadness and melancholy, my tender
juvenal?
Moth. By a familiar demonstration of the working, my tough signor.
Armado. Why tough signor? Why tough signor?
Moth. Why tender juvenal? Why tender juvenal?
Armado. I spoke it, tender juvenal, as a congruent epitheton appertaining to thy young days, which we may nominate tender.
Moth. And I, tough signor, as an appertinent title to your old time, which we may name tough. (1.2.7–17)
Moth suddenly blossoms as a skillful rhetorician, imitating—and parodying—his master. This passage bears no relation to the action of the play, but is there purely for our entertainment. This is what Don Armado calls later the “Sweet smoke of rhetoric” (3.1.63).
To return to act 1, scene 2, Don Armado’s long soliloquy on love at the end of the scene obviously prepares us for what the king, Longaville, Dumaine, and especially Berowne will say later in the play (3.1 and, most elaborately, in 4.3). Don Armado seeks clarity of vision in his overspecifications about the workings of love:
I do affect the very ground which is base, where her shoe (which is baser) guided by her foot (which is basest) doth tread. I shall be forsworn (which is a great argument of falsehood) if I love. And how can that be true love which is falsely attempted? Love is a familiar; Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love. Yet was Samson so tempted, and he had an excellent strength; yet was Solomon so seduced, and he had a very good wit. Cupid’s butt-shaft is too hard for Hercules’ club, and therefore too much odds for a Spaniard’s rapier. (1.2.163–73)
We need to take seriously Don Armado’s overly full speculations about the nature of love and his comparison of himself with famous lovers, since that is what Love’s Labor’s Lost is all about. He has an ardor that some of the more upper class lovers lack: “Adieu, valor; rust, rapier; be still, drum; for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth. Assist me some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio” (1.2.177–81).
Don Armado is more believable in his passion than Berowne and his fellow lords, whose love affair is put off for a year and day. The ladies are not convinced of their sincerity.
Chapter 3
Richard’s Physical Deformities in
3 Henry VI and Richard III
Richard of Gloucester’s physical deformities are very much a part of his own thinking; he is acutely conscious of being foul and unappealing. If he is incapable of being a lover, he will make up for it by being powerful. There is a curious connection between his deformity and his unquenchable thirst for the crown, as if he were another Marlovian Tamburlaine. To be king by whatever means it takes is a superior goal to being merely sexually attractive.
Richard’s long soliloquies in act 3, scene 2 and act 5, scene 6 of 3 Henry VI are matched by his powerful opening soliloquy in Richard III. As one of Shakespeare’s earliest villains (perhaps Aaron in Titus Andronicus is earlier), Richard is frankly aware of his own physical shortcomings. In describing himself, he even uses the word “chaos,” the word for an amorphous, shapeless mass:
Why, love forswore me in my mother’s womb:
And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,
To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub;
To make an envious mountain on my back,
Where sits deformity to mock my body;
To shape my legs of an unequal size;
To disproportion me in every part,
Like to a chaos, or an unlicked bearwhelp
That carries no impression like the dam. (3.2.153–62)
It is notable that Richard is so acutely aware of his own deformities, which he makes no effort to mitigate. These deformaties are mentioned by many other characters in this play and in Richard III.
Richard is emphatic in his certainty that love has “forsworn,” or abandoned and renounced, him, already before he was born. Even if he cannot attain the crown, he is sardonic about “What other pleasure can the world afford” (3.2.147):
I’ll make my heaven in a lady’s lap,
And deck my body in gay ornaments
And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks.
O miserable thought! and more unlikely
Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns! (3.2.148–52)
He repeats with no uncertain emphasis the impossibility of his being a lover:
And am I then a man to be beloved?
O monstrous fault, to harbor such a thought!
Then, since this earth affords no joy to me,
But to command, to check, to o’erbear such
As are of better person than myself,
I’ll make my heaven to dream upon the crown,
And, whiles I live, t’ account this world but hell,
Until my misshaped trunk that bears this head
Be round impalèd with a glorious crown. (3.2.163–71)
He separates himself from the world that is of better appearance (“person”) than himself.
Richard uses his monstrous physical deformities to justify his duplicitous villainy:
Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry, “Content” to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions. (3.2.182–85)
Like most villains in Shakespeare, he is painfully truthful with himself, and he lays out for us, with unabashed frankness, his course of conduct in both 3 Henry VI and Richard III. He is proud of the fact that he “can add colors to the chameleon, / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, / And set the murderous Machiavel to school” (3.2.191–93). In other words, he boasts that he can out-machiavel the notorious Machiavelli, the source of evil in the Renaissance. So now that we know Richard’s motivation, we will not be surprised or shocked by anything he does.
In another long soliloquy in act 5, scene 6, Richard reiterates his rejection of love. He sees it clearly as a natural consequence of his physical deformity:
Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,
Let hell make crook’d my mind to answer it.
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word “love,” which graybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone. (5.6.78–83)
He speaks like Iago in Othello. He is an atheist, freed from the prohibitions that restrict other men. His brother Clarence is doomed, but so are all the others who stand between him and the crown: “Clarence, thy turn is next, and then the rest, / Counting myself but bad till I be best” (5.6.90–91). Richard seems certain of obtaining the crown by killing all that
stands in his way. As he says in an aside after kissing his brother King Edward: “To say the truth, so Judas kissed his master, / And cried ‘All hail!’ whenas he meant all harm” (5.7.33–34). Richard, the atheist, gleefully adopts the role of Judas, whom he sees as a diabolical prototype.
Richard’s soliloquies and asides in 3 Henry VI lead directly into his soliloquy at the beginning of Richard III, which continues the earlier play as if the two plays were designed to follow each other. “Grim-visaged war” might caper “nimbly in a lady’s chamber / To the lascivious pleasing of a lute” (1.1.9, 12–13), but not Richard, who was meant for other actions:
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks
Nor made to court an amorous looking glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on my own deformity. (1.1.14–27)
Richard seems to delight in his own deformity, something that sets him apart—and renders him superior—to other men. By his frankness, Richard endears himself to the audience. There is not the slightest attempt at concealment. The conclusion is obvious:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
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