WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616).

1. THE HISTORY PLAYS: History and politics

- eclipsed Kyd and Marlowe

- early tragedies and histories – relation with contemporary realities
- responds to Kyd’s revenge dramas by Titus Andronicus 1587/1594
- 3 parts of Henry VI (88-91) – “tiger-hearted” Margaret
- Richard III oncapers Marlowe’s Machiavellian villains
- 2 sequences: 1. 3parts Henry VI, Richard III; 2. Richard II, 2parts Henry IV
96/97, Henry V 99, King John 1595, Henry VIII, 16/12/13
- myths, memories of recent history – divisions, depositions, usurpations, civil
wars – aimed to bolster secure monarchic government propagated by Tudor
apologists
- Richard II – deposition scene omitted in three editions under Elisabeth
- 1601 – Earl of Essex thinks a performance of the play might arouse support
for contemporary coup – understands affairs of state
- shapes perceptions of the national past and nationhood
- 10 history plays – central to the conception of Shakespeare as the national poet
– key figure in shaping a particular national consciousness in future historical
drama – the Romantics
- England 247 times, English 143, King John 43, Henry V 49, Henry VIII 12 –
ode in Richard II by dying John of Gaunt – an ideal, separate, secure, peaceful,
kingly island – an ideal that does not exist ‘hath made a shameful conquest of
itself’ – the reality of a realm descending into unity and war
- exploits consequences of the disruption of the line from the conqueror
- power struggles and conflict of interests not only about dynastic rights or civil
peace from the legitimacy of a divinely appointed king
- the reign of Richard III – loosely ascribed to Shakespeare 1596 – not a
chivalrous king, but a pursuer the countess of Salisbury – flawed hero chasing
chimera of France (as Henry V) – civil disasters
- I/II of Henry IV – distinguished by the presentation of England prospering and
suffering beyond the king’s court – a celebration of a wider, popular England –
transformation of scapegrace king Hal into gracious King Harry – a prince who
carefully calculates (Holinshed as adolescent prelude) – prig and prodigal son
drops in to society of the ruled – with Falstaff, he learns the delight s of
responsibility, experiences elastic morality, teaches himself responsibility and
law
- Falstaff – Shakespeare’s amplest comic character; Hal as playboy prince
training for the future role as ‘the mirror of all Christian kings’; Act II 5 acting
game between father and son’
- the hierarchically ordered nation is threatened by disorder

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- civil order is related to central government – the rule by a divinely appointed
king as a source of honour and justice
- the kings and his subjects should be linked by mutual responsibilities
- kings should rule with the assent of the ruled, nobles/commoners (Henry V)
- noblemen break oaths (Richard II), peasants break feudalism in Henry VI/2
- it is rulers who fail in their moral, communal, governmental responsibilities
- good government by assiduous, virtuous prince with sanctioned claim
- the austere Roman plays – government systems alien to England – alternatives
to the rule of Christian princes: Julius Caesar 99, Coriolanus 08 – historical
alternatives reflecting on the present (corn riots) – republic riven by patrician
arrogance and plebeian self-assertion
- Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra – the tired republic commands an
empire – a lapse into imperial autocracy
- paramount examples of sober idealist dire warnings against demagoguery and
decadence – up to the 20th century

Shakespeare on the greatness of England, King Richard II. Act II, Scene 1:
This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world…
(King Richard II. Act II, Scene 1)

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 SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES

-2nd half of the 16th c. – bulk of revenge tragedies

- he is familiarised with the theme, action, stock characters but challenges
tradition
- avenger reluctant to act engrossed in inquiries/self-enquiry as to motivation,
evidence, timing, readiness – philosophy, madness
- modern representation of character development – epistemological inquiry and
relativity – private, individual representations about the world mediated for
audience soliloquies of the psychology and drama of self-consciousness
- transcendental scepticism, universal doubt
- man’s inquiry into his nature
- Erasmus Eucomium moriae – modern sceptical relativism
- folly – origin of social good/evil
- madness – irrational outbursts and an enlightened refusal of dogmatism;
complex, paradoxical meanings – Hamlet’s murdering of Polonius
- a final redeeming acceptance of the scheme of the universe
- the changes from classical and medieval drama are both epistemological and
structural
- the simplistic moral allegory is more complex in Othello’s allegiance to values
of Venetian worth (doubted, abused, wasted)
- Titus Andronicus (1592-3), Romeo and Juliet (1595-6), Julius Caesar (1599-
1600), Hamlet (1600-1), Othello (1602-3), Timon of Athens (1604-5), King
Lear (1605-6), Macbeth (1605-6), Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7), Coriolanus
(1606-8)
- the term tragedy comes from the Greek tragos (goat-skin/song) – a sense of
ritual sacrifice retrieved by Shakespeare in Caesar, Hamlet, Timon, Lear’s
crown of wild flowers
- violated innocence and deliberate sin receive the same retribution
- tragedies tell of one person – the hero; the hero functions as the embodiment
of the entire society
- Hamlet fights and eradicates evil in himself (his feigned madness); his reason
suppresses irrational impulses, laying to rest the father’s heritage of sin – the
restoration of Fortinbras’ territorial rights; Hamlet’s victory is over himself
- Hamlet is the only youth
- dispositions of character, rather than character itself
- extreme of experiencing power; native idealism; all the potentialities of nobel
youth and all the uncertainties of adolescent reaction to a great crisis
- Shakespeare concentrates attention on the hero rather than the plot – the
tragedy of an idealist in an era of transition
- Hamlet is a happy child, a lover of ideas, a thinker and idealist
- the man is typified in his father – a god-like being
- an idelist on life, capable of action

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- disillusionment as the pivotal circumstance
- stories of suffering and calamity, resulting in death - Troilus stays alive
because he ruled out of the canon, albeit tragically disillusioned with life’s
absurdity
- interest in the sufferings of conspicuous persons of high degree – quarrels of
public interest
- Romeo and Juliet is not only about love, but of social feuds threatening state
stability
- the reversal of fortune at the top of society challenges the medieval philosophy
of dignity as immortal, represented by ceremonies – Lear falls from the
perpetuity of office to the perishable-ness of the body; the action is set in the
remote past, with the re-inscription of its beliefs and discourses
- the belief that the future will be changed by the young
- true dignitas is to be found in the perennial values of loyalty, love, generosity
- the plays oppose epistemological views upheld by different locales (Egypt vs.
Rome, Venice vs. the Turkish moor, Rome vs. the barbarians) and ages
(Hamlet/Lear)
- medieval de casibus stories – tragic fall cause by the turning of the Wheel of
Fortune – external tragic sources
- in Shakespeare, the calamities are produced by the actions of the characters –
internal tragic sources; each character has a tragic flaw which triggers errors of
judgement – Aristotle’s idea of the tragic downfall brought about by a minor
fault
- the hero is not so evil as to elicit pity, nor so innocent or flawless as to create
absurdity; the hero calls the disaster; tragedy follows from men’s faults whose
source is a flaw of character – Macbeth’s ambition, Lear’s vanity and weariness
of his royal duty; Othello’s suspicion, Hamlet’s absolutization of evil,
Coriolanus’ inflexibility, Timon’s misanthropy
a) Abnormal conditions of the mind – somnambulism, hallucinations
expressive of the character; Lear’s distracted mind is an objective correlative of
social order reversed, Macbeth’s ‘dagger of the mind’
b) Supernatural interference (ghosts, apparitions, dreams, witches) –
negotiated, translated as projections of the mind
- the supernatural apparition gives shape to something already looming in the
character’s thoughts – Hamlet’s ‘prophetic soul’, Macbeth’s witches reading
into the ‘seeds of time’; they create a logical indeterminacy
- the oxymoronic, ambiguous language of the witches: ‘When the battle is lost
and won/When the hurly-burly’s done’; Fair is foul and foul is fair (Plato’s
Symposium) – the different reaction of Macbeth and Banquo to the oracles of
choice
- Anglicanism tended towards Calvinism’s emphasis on doom and providence;
counteracted by the Arminian influence of free will and choice (from Jacob
Arminius)

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 c) Chance and accidents – Desdemona’s handkerchief, the near misses of
Romeo and Juliet – fortuitous occurrences which simply speed the action’s
course towards catastrophe (due to fatal errors)
- the conflict is twofold: opposing parties, inner conflicting passions,
tendencies, ideas, Hamlet’s split personality; the Christian internalisation of
Fate – the hereditary sin
- Shakespeare’s original conflict – shifting epistemological perspectives, the
coexistence of intersecting, conflicting discourses
- ambiguous intertextuality: Plato, Montaigne, Erasmus
- the hero’s hubris as an infringement upon universal order
- individualism is reprobated; Shakespeare does not extol the Renaissance titan;
Socrates’ lesson in the last tragedy; individual worth is secondary to the
community values shared by civilised human communities – Coriolanus is twice
mistaken in leaving Rome and abandoning the citizens’ interests (Agrippa); his
support to the Volsci hurts his family and his human identity
- each individual is constituted by the anonymous order of society
- not merely crime and punishment cases – the heroes fail because of an excess
or insufficiency in relation to universal order
- the universal scope of the moral scheme
- Macbeth’s usurpation marks a shattering of the being
- old Hamlet’s murder disjoints the axis mundi
- old Hamlet, not Claudius is the correspondent of Cain; ‘smote the pole-axe in
the ice’, a world ‘disjoint and out of frame’, ‘distracted globe...out of joint’
- the breaking of bonds parent/child (Lear), king/subjects (Caesar) – prophesied
by signs of cosmic disorder (late eclipses of the sun); Hubris (overflows the
measure) – genre identity awareness (the Aristotelian motivation of the hero’s
fall)
- Antony’s forsaking of Rome (civilisation, moral order, military virtue, power)
- change in vision (eyes); Antony bears the consequences of hereditary faults
and his own choices – dolphin, trinity (one of the 3 pillars of the world);
universal order pictured as a crown (chain/dance)
- suicide as world’s harmony – the high Roman fashion – the mending of the
crown
- destiny translates as changes in the world’s geometry
- love first appears as absolute, only to end in ambiguity and illusion
- the Elizabethan period – sharp transition from the ideals of chivalry (honour,
valour, loyalty, courtesy, munificence)to practical efficiency, expediency,
opportunism, diplomatic manoeuvre
- feudal aristocracy gives way to the bourgeoisie; from Christian chivalry to
pagan Renaissance

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 THE COMEDIES

- Cordelia’s voice ‘ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in women’ vs.
the strident vocal company of Regan and Goneril
- strident versus soft, unfeminine aggression (Queen Margaret, Lady Macbeth
vs. passive female victims)
- women as defined, circumscribed in patriarchal society by certain roles
- capable of exploring gender opposition and blurring
- no types or stereotypes
- innovative romantic comedies (Rosalind, Beatrice, Viola), where women have
crucial initiatives in a male-dominated world, who confuse distinctions of
male/female traits
- Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies explore power struggles between men
(excepting Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra
- happy denouments, romantic and domestic alliances; negotiations on equal
footing
- women’s integrity and intelligence shine and triumph
- the early comedies – structural awkwardness and loose ends
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1587)) and The Taming of the Shrew (1588)
evince the beginner’s uncertainty – a woman who dangerously resolves to prove
her faith to an undeserving lover; a woman brutally schooled into wifely duty;
Julia’s disguise as a man to follow Proteus to Milan
- the device of cross-dressing (boy-boy-woman) – the romantic ploy related to
the European carnival of transvestitism
- The Taming of the Shrew – rombustiously carnivalesque, unromantic – rough
games, staged tantrums, physical trials
- Katherine’s direct challenges to her assumed identity, coping with the a man’s
antics of assumed volatility; they eventually drop their false identities in mutual
respect; the final test showing a feudal submission to her husband’s will is a
cynical response to a hardened cynic: ‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy
keeper/Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee’
- Shakespeare further amplified, varied, reversed the ambiguous gestures of the
early comedies
- The Comedy of Errors (1589-94) – slick Roman symmetry; reflections on
familial and amatory relationships that slip into tenderness
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-6) - matrimonial and familial sulkiness is
reflected in the acrimonious and threatening disputes between Oberon and
Titania; crossed purposes; tidiness ironically enforced by the interference of
Puck, the embodiment of malign disordering; the multiple marriages are
accompanied by a tragic entertainment and a blessing of the fairies
- the lovers wake from their dreams magically placed beside an unexpected but
proper partner

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- love emerges as a matter of uncertain discovery; it both claims possession and
is obliged to recognise distinctions, differences, individualities – Helena ‘found
Demetrius like a jewel/Mine own, and not my own’
- Love’s Labour’s Lost (1593-4) – discountenancing of the rash and possessive
presumptions of male lovers at the end; role playing, word games, rhetorical
devices; verbal posturing countered by ‘honest plain words’; the sentimental
male pretensions of love are ‘bombast and as lining to the time’ (‘A time,
methinks, too short to make a world-without end bargain in’) – a refined,
serious put-down requiring separations
- The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) – overshadowed by the popularity of the
romantic comedies, but central to a representation of Tudor England
- image of a prosperous English town on the fringes of the royal castle and park
– mercantile, colloquial, not noble or lyrical but down-to-earth prosiness; the
triumph of romantic love over the well-intentioned schemes of parents or ill-
advised would-be adulterer
- Falstaff appears as a self-deceived, preposterous wooer of a married woman –
crucial instance to the sexual politics in the play; he is removed in a dirty linen
basket, compromised in woman’s clothing (as a ‘fat woman of Brainford’),
adorned with the horns of cuckoldry; ruse piles upon ruse, exposures abound;
Slender and Cains go to assignations in Windsor Forest but are fobbed off with
boys
- disguise and cross-dressing, self-exploding schemes, contrived encounters are
prominent in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare’s middle career – festive
fooling demoted to subplots
- the central concerns are the pains, strains, pleasures of young love
- the successive resolutions depend on the resourcefulness of the woman
protagonist
- Shakespeare dramatises the ambiguities of his age concerning the freedom to
act and think independently in courtship and in marriage
- The Merchant of Venice (1596-7) – Portia represents ‘the will of a living
daughter curbed by the will of a dead father; she dons the robes of a male
advocate and uses her ingenious intellect to rescue Antonio from the dire
conditions of Shylock’s bond
- As You Like It (1599-1600) – Rosalind, banished from her uncle’s court,
retires to Arden Forest as Ganymede; she tries to cure Orlando of his love for
herself – suggestion of the volatility of gender; Rosalind-Ganymede assumes
control of Orlando’s emotional development, and the destinies of the sojourners
in Arden
- she emerges triumphantly as the mistress of herself – controlled, sensible, self-
analytical, not cold or phlegmatic
- she unsentimentally anatomises human affection to lovesick Orlando: ‘Men
are April when they woo, December when they wed/Maids are May when they

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are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives’; she earns a benign
authority in exile
- Twelfth Night (1601) – shipwrecked Viola steers a middle way between
contradictions, oppositions, displays of melancholy, spleen, choler in the
disconcerting world of Illyria
- role of eunuch (Cesario); Orsino flirts, while Viola makes sexual advances;
her resourceful intelligence preserves her from the affectations of blinkered
lovers, from the folly, hypocrisy and cruelty of Illyrian households
- Much Ado About Nothing (1598-9) – the more violent dislocations of Messina
(tendency painfully accentuated in the ‘problem comedies’: All’s Well That
Ends Well (1603), Measure for Measure (1604)
- Much Ado About Nothing – references to martial conflict, refines and limits
the conflict to the battle of wits between Beatrice and Benedick – fragmented by
slander, acrimony, dishonour, then re-scrambled for an insecure reconciliation
- a play about mutuality, not serenity; bitter-sweet tones of Balthazar’s song
(‘Sigh no more, ladies’); men are deceivers, but relations require an agreement
between equal partners
- All’s Well That Ends Well – sick king, unattractive hero handled by the long-
suffering but determined Helena
- Measure for Measure – a problematic Duke, hypocritical Angelo vs. prickly
Isabella
- both plays rely on bed tricks so that spurned mistresses may claim their lovers;
both force couples into relationships rather than allow them to be forged by
mutual consent
- juxtaposes rather than coalesces characters; Isabella’s passionate and articulate
defence of mercy is a probing statement about the difficulties and consequences
of judgement – untried ideals, instinctive or acquired wisdom; her idealism
suggests naivety about herself and the others’ shortcomings; a paly of dark
corners and hazy margins