Loove, Love, Nothing But Love, Sweet Love
Grace comes in odd forms in Shakespeare. When Falstaff drives Pistol out of the Boar’s Head, Doll Tearsheet and he share their moment of blind, hopeful sweetness, candid and tender. Who would have thought Shakespeare would have given such a scene to such a pair? But then who would have thought that Henry V would have fallen for Katherine, or that the overwhelming violence of Henry VI Part Two would be the site of one of Shakespeare’s great love affairs?The extravagant passion of Margaret and Suffolk is lit up by lightning flashes:
MARGARET: O could this kiss be printed in thy hand
That thou mightst think upon these by the seal
Through whom a thousand sighs are breath’d for thee…
SUFFOLK: A wilderness is populous enough
So Suffolk had thy heavenly company…
Where from thy sight I should be raging mad
And cry out for thee to close up mine eyes
To have thee with thy lips to stop my mouth.
It’s Shakespeare’s most full-blown writing in this manner so far, and the psychology is delicate as well. Accepting the inevitable, Margaret sounds a little like Juliet when Romeo is banished and she almost wants him gone so she can start her real suffering:
And as they finally fall apart, their verse divides as well:
SUFFOLK: Even as a splitted bark, so sunder we;
This way fall I to death.
MARGARET: This way for me.
The love stories in these history plays are conditioned by extreme circumstantial pressure: Shakespeare has become an expert on the unpromising soil in which the emotion can grow. But he knows the inside story as well: any relationship can be snagged not by circumstance but by the lovers’ individual DNAs. Jaques’s glib reduction in As You Like It of man’s journey through life to seven images for seven ages suits his own lachrymose nature but misrepresents Shakespeare himself, who insists that a human being’s temper and impulses are forever mixed. It’s not just a matter of the third age forever frozen in the act of choosing the perfect rhyme for his mistress’s eyebrow: in love, personality readjusts at every moment, one state of mind elides into another, and every combination can be explosive.
This is becoming interesting enough for him to take the subject to the centre of a play rather than being an incident within it. Then, the third and fourth ages seem to interplay particularly well: a whole evening can be devoted to how a lover may turn murderous. Troilus, betrayed by Cressida, no longer sighs like an amorous furnace but rages like a forest fire:
You vile abominable tents
Thus proudly pight upon our Phrygian plains,
Let Titan rise as early as he dare
I’ll through and through you…
Conversely, the most straight-arrow soldiers have amorous sinews; Coriolanus’s arch-enemy Aufidius greets him like this:
Let me twine
Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke,
And scarr’d the moon with splinters.
And of course love can make a fool of a man. The triple pillar of the Roman world Mark Antony becomes a strumpet’s fool simply because he is unable to leave Cleopatra alone, not seeing that the world he thinks well lost is what he has spent his soldier’s life battling for. Less tragically, the magnificently decrepit figure of Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost, as intent as the rest of the Court of Navarre on spiritual improvement through sexual abstinence, is tempted by the country girl Jaquenetta. He celebrates his falling-off with a battery of quixotic military images:
I do affect her very ground (which is base) where her shoe (which is baser) guided by her foot (which is basest) doth tread…Cupid’s butt-shaft is too hard for Hercules’ club… the passado he respects not, the duello he regards not; his disgrace is to be called boy, but his glory is to subdue men. Adieu, valour, rust, rapier, be still, drum, for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth.
By no accident his splendid folly lies alongside a ravishing speech delivered by his fellow votary Berowne:
A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind,
A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound
When the suspicious head of theft is stopp’d;
Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;
Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste;
For valour is not love a Hercules
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as Sphinx, as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair,
And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
The catch here is the outrageous moral equivocation: Berowne’s only aim is to find a pretext for his companions and himself to break their solemn vows of celibacy. Blood rushing to their heads, they charge off to conquer their women as if taking up Armado’s discarded weaponry:
KING: Saint Cupid, then! And soldiers, to the field!
BEROWNE: Advance your standards, and upon them, lords!
Pell-mell, down with them…
Berowne the lyrical equivocator, Armado the sentimental warrior, Troilus lethal in rejection: even in full sail Shakespeare was ever the ironist. This was a writer who so understood the unruliness of human existence that he let an anonymous lord in All’s Well That Ends Well declare that
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
Although Jaques promises both men and women as ‘mere players’, he delivers only men, all occupied in rather a limited choice of careers. He doesn’t seem interested in the women, whom elsewhere Shakespeare frequently makes more watchful, more self-aware and less benighted than the men. Berowne’s lover is Rosaline, a woman of sharp moral sense as well as wit: in the end she sends him into retreat for a year so that he can grow up by undertaking community work among the sick. Her philosophical alertness corrects the lyrical exuberance of the play, in which the men not only don’t get the girls but have their perjury punished by such penances, with only a hint of earned happiness in the future. They may not pass their tests; or perhaps the women end up more or less accepting them in the lost and intriguingly titled later play Love’s Labour’s Won.
Rosaline’s is a short part sometimes seen as a precursor of the big female fighters who star in the classic comedies of the 1590s – Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Portia in The Merchant of Venice and especially Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew. Squaring up to the men, these women achieve, if not Rosaline’s control of her situation, at least some bargaining power. In The Merchant, set in a world hostile to human tenderness, Portia’s suitor Bassanio – a man of limited wit and ingenuity – coldbloodedly borrows money from his male admirer, Antonio, to win her by entering an absurd competition about three caskets devised by her father. Made a hostage to fortune by this alarming ceremony, Portia is eventually matched with Bassanio and makes herself indispensable by saving his Antonio’s bacon with a famous advocate’s quibble. Beyond the trickery of the bloodless pound of flesh lies a perception Bassanio and his friends would never have had. Portia has seen the flaw in the alienated Shylock, lying exactly where his strength seemed to be. Shylock has a vitality shared by no one else on the stage, but his emotional weakness is that he is prepared to murder a friend of the man who eloped with his daughter. Blinded, he blunders into Portia’s trap instead of taking the money. The interest here is in how, because of her ingenuity, love’s worm quietly turns in Bassanio’s moral darkness. Like most people in the play Portia is a thoroughgoing racist, but she is talented; in the end, observing a Christian and a Jewess beginning to make a new future together, she and Bassanio begin to feel a non-mercenary stirring for each other. But there is no doubt that it is Portia who will wear the not very attractive trousers.
Of all mad matches never was the like.
– The Taming of the Shrew
If The Merchant is racially tense, The Taming of the Shrew is sexually so – extremely. This is a play which has always changed colour in the available light. In recent times it has gained a new lease of life in the theatre from a very modern sense that the story of Petruchio and Katharina may be more than that of a male bully and a bad-tempered woman unpleasantly slugging it out for domination, with the male winning by force of muscle. The most extreme version of the new argument is that these two individualistic people, instinctively rebelling against a venal world, find a private language with which to build a mutually respectful relationship. The truth may be a little short of this, and a little less pleasing, but it’s a fruitful idea.
Like Bassanio, Petruchio looks to ‘wive it wealthily’ – in spite of the fact that his father has recently died and left him all his estate anyway. Perhaps he fancies to live off his wife and use his legacy for his own pleasure. This being a moment – The Merchant, The Two Gentlemen, Romeo – when Shakespeare thought immediately of Northern Italian towns for his settings, Petruchio arrives in Padua, on a wave of violence only a little moderated by rhyming verse. He immediately boxes his servant’s ears for a forgivable mistake; but then his future prey, Katharina, makes her debut by punching her sister Bianca, their father’s favourite. Still, the combative lovers are, in the early stages at least, hard to resist; they certainly stand in relief to the exceptionally dreary subplot of the wooing of Bianca, which involves characters as confusingly named as Gremio (Petruchio having a servant called Grumio), a host of aliases and assumed names to remember, and a notable shortage of grace, wit or affection.
Petruchio’s methods are those of a courtly lion-tamer. On his first meeting with Katharina he declares himself astonished at the popular view that she has a limp, since she seems to him as upright and slender as a hazel twig. Her famous raucous complaints are like the song of a nightingale to him, her frowns are
morning roses newly wash’d with dew.
Really, he is very polite. His warning that if she hits him he will hit her back (it’s the one thing he will never do) is considerate; and he feels it is only fair dealing to reassure her that, ‘will you, nill you’, he will marry her and bring her
from a wild Kate to a Kate
Conformable as other household Kates.
So his determination to stand for no nonsense is warmed by imperturbable praise. His inspiration is that there are two Kates, the one the world knows and the one that he senses to be in hiding; and he dares her not to be intrigued. The fact is that he knows that a self-confident, farsighted male will always win out as long as he avoids complacency or disrespect.
This single scene of supposedly formal wooing is very funny. His backhanders are matched by the ingenuity of her insults; but Shakespeare is also at pains to scatter clues to their instinctive recognition of each other – at the very least, they find a shared taste for rude jokes about tongues and tails, coxcombs and combless cocks. The giveaway is Katharina’s wordlessness when her father returns to hear the scene’s outcome: she briefly calls Petruchio
A madcap ruffian and a swearing Jack
but then relapses into silence as her father sets about the practicalities of the wedding with what she would normally see as a shopkeeper’s haste. It seems that some deeper bargain has been struck.
On the wedding day Petruchio does not so much stand Kate up as bring her down to earth. He turns up for the ceremony looking like a tramp, in
a pair of boots that have been candle-cases, one buckled, another laced; an old rusty sword ta’en out of the town armoury, with a broken hilt and chapeless, with two broken points…
He and his horse are as one: the latter is like Lee Marvin’s crapulous nag, mimicking his master in drunken decrepitude, in the movie Cat Ballou. Petruchio’s is
hipped with an old mothy saddle, and stirrups of no kindred, besides possessed with the glanders, and like to mose in the chine, troubled with the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of windgalls, sped with spavins, rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots, swayed in the back, and shoulder-shotten, near-legged before, and with a half-cheeked bit, and a head-stall of sheep’s leather…
BIONDELLO: O sir, his lackey, for all the world caparison’d like the horse…
It’s lucky that you don’t then have to see these strange ailments: no production could make them half as funny.
Taking his place at the altar rail, the dishevelled bridegroom declares, unanswerably, that:
To me she’s married, not unto my clothes.
He causes the officiating priest to drop the Bible by uttering a great enthusiastic oath to confirm that he will have Kate; then he kisses her with ‘such a clamorous smack’ that the church echoes with it. He punches the priest and calls for wine, all of which he drinks except for what he throws into the sexton’s face: this is all somehow done for love. He makes off with his bride, leaving the wedding guests to have the reception without them. To her relief perhaps: he is removing them both from a world which they resent, a fakery in which fathers love their daughters imperfectly and well-wishers think only of money.
So far, so good; but things take a darker tilt once the pair are free of their past. Till now Shakespeare has used the convenience of slapstick to justify the play’s violence, usually accompanying it with rhyme. With marriage the gloves come off. Petruchio lets his wife lie in the mud when her horse collapses exhausted under her. At his country house he bullies his servants mercilessly; he throws the dinner around and will neither feed nor sleep with his new bride; and not a rhyme in sight. If it is one thing for a man to flatter his wife with a great kiss at the altar, it’s quite another to behave like a pig in front of the servants, who are lax only because he’s made no particular demands on them before. For their part, they have, naturally enough, taken on his values, and they hit each other a good deal; one of them, Grumio, is a mini-Petruchio, taunting and tormenting the new mistress in her hunger. It feels like the Addams Family mansion.
Eventually Petruchio feeds Kate, perhaps on the principle of softening up the animal for the kill; but he denies her every new piece of clothing that she wants, dangling it before her and snatching it away to keep her in a permanent posture of begging. Then, chillingly, he turns to us to report on his ‘reign’; significantly he does this from on high, the Elizabethan stage’s commanding upper level. We must understand that the whole affair has been a matter of breaking in a horse or a dog; this being a soliloquy, he means what he says, and he dares us to reply:
But he is safe by now because he knows we’ve enjoyed ourselves, however grudgingly: this is much like Richard III’s audience ending up on his side without meaning to.
At length Kate and Petruchio return from their honeymoon, the devil continuing to get the sweetest tunes:
PETRUCHIO: Well, come, my Kate; we will unto your father’s
Even in these honest mean habiliments:
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor,
For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich:
And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,
So honour peereth in the meanest habit.
What, is the jay more precious than the lark
Because his feathers are more beautiful?
Being by Shakespeare, this attractive speech is followed by its opposite; a dismal piece of bullying as Petruchio insists that it is seven o’clock rather than two:
Look, what I speak, or do, or think to do,
You are still crossing it…
It shall be what o’clock I say it is.
What is the writer up to, bringing things to such a dark point – and letting a little poetry in at the same time? Why, nothing, he would shrug: he is an entertainer, using what comes to hand. But as in The Comedy of Errors, his piercing insights into men and women are jostling with his instincts for knockabout. Confoundingly, under Petruchio’s totalitarianism Kate begins to sound like an adult, matching her husband’s cadences:
Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak,
And speak I will; I am no child, no babe;
Your betters have endur’d me say my mind,
And if you cannot, best you stop your ears.
My tongue will tell the anger of my heart
Or else my heart concealing it will break…
They start off back to Padua, their ghastly holiday over. Petruchio insists that the moon is the sun and vice versa and that the old man approaching them on the road is a beautiful girl whom Kate should embrace in greeting; then he changes his mind and makes him an old man again. Kate, who a few moments ago was developing the limpid integrity of a Hermione or her namesake in Henry VIII, also shifts tone: as if she’d suddenly got the point of the unsavoury game, she obliges him with wit and panache, rather as Polonius indulges Hamlet by pretending a cloud looks like a weasel and a whale:
Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes
That have been so bedazzled with the sun
That everything I look on seemeth green;
Now I perceive thou art a reverend father;
Pardon I pray thee for my mad mistaking.
Her acquiescence is not so much a surrender as an intelligent means of taking control, and the sudden compliance takes the wind out of Petruchio’s sails. What is he to do with such obliging behaviour?
Back in Padua they encounter the subplot, and we see why Shakespeare has left it so stupid. Its slapstick, involving a mirthless disguise to raise money for Bianca’s marriage, stands in steep contrast to Petruchio’s modulation as he turns gently to Kate:
Prithee Kate, let’s stand aside, and see the end of this controversy.
They watch what they have saved each other from. Petruchio might take Kate’s arm as carefully as in the Elizabethan ceremony of hand-fasting, when the lovers answer each other’s prayer for mutual good treatment. It is a most surprising exchange, and Kate says almost exactly the same thing as Petruchio just has:
Husband, let’s follow, to see the end of this ado.
Put the lines side by side and you see what Shakespeare has done – the key, the rhythm, the inflection and phrasing are the same. Perhaps too the word ‘husband’ – affectionate, prosaic and normal – is what he has been waiting for:
PETRUCHIO: First kiss me, Kate, and we will.
KATE: What, in the midst of the street?
PETRUCHIO: What, art thou ashamed of me?
KATE: No sir, God forbid, but ashamed to kiss.
PETRUCHIO: Why then, let’s home again. Come sirrah, let’s away.
KATE: Nay I will give thee a kiss; now pray thee, love, stay.
PETRUCHIO: Is not this well? Come, my sweet Kate,
Better once than never, for never too late.
This singular reconciliation makes the play’s famous final moments, when Kate stands before two pairs of newly-weds to expound the duties of a wife, especially ambiguous. Here the production finally shows its colours without necessarily sounding the depths of Shakespeare’s mystery. When Kate declares
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper
is her tongue in her cheek, or is this what she has painfully decided? Is her public deference a coded message to her husband, reminding him of a bargain he had best not fail in?
Has she changed Petruchio? Perhaps, by making him see her for what at heart she really is. On the other hand, for all the roughness of their courtship, it is possible that these two understood each other from the first moment – she seeing exactly what he was up to, he allowing her anger to exhaust itself on him. And whatever the reality of their marriage is to be, it can hardly be as ominous as that of Bianca’s with Lucentio. Bianca has seemed independent-minded in its palatable, father-pleasing version, well this side of her sister’s truculence. But now as a wife and far from tamed, she begins to display some of Kate’s unruliness in her resentment of the men. The point is obvious – difficult in a small way, she will end up unhappier than her genuinely conflicted sister. As for Kate, whether her speech bodes ‘peace… and love and quiet life’ or only the continuation of Petruchio’s ‘awful rule’, it will certainly be true to itself.
Rocking on an awkward hinge, The Taming of the Shrew mixes cruelty with farce, sometimes leaving out the farce. For all its outlandish rituals, it expresses Shakespeare’s intense curiosity about men and women, as if he were wondering out loud how to disarm their mutual defensiveness. Nerve and imperturbability may help a man get over his fear of a woman; humour may ease a woman’s anger. It’s a modern commonplace that as soon as you ask whether men should be cavemen, or if women are happier leading or being led, or how much of either, you offend someone: Shakespeare gleefully confounds our narrow programming. But we can surely agree that a good partnership defines its own terms. Some characters in the play are scandalised by Kate’s and Petruchio’s union; but the mad-brained rudesby and his shrewish wife are not to be judged by expert outsiders, and finally Petruchio speaks for them both:
If she and I be pleas’d, what’s that to you?
BENEDICK: I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is not that strange?
BEATRICE: As strange as the thing I know not…
– Much Ado About Nothing
There is an odd convergence between The Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing. Petruchio and Benedick have no relatives in their plays, while Katharina is a neglected sister and Beatrice the niece of a man who is fonder (and less frightened) of his daughter. There is something of the fully grown orphan in all four of them – all redeemed by their mother wit, and all a liability to their friends, who want them to see that two joined solitudes can be better than one. The difference is that Benedick and Beatrice, for all their vitality, lack the relative self-knowledge of Petruchio and Kate: Much Ado, though more popular, is a less searching play, not so provocative, more reassuring.
I confess that if there is a Shakespeare that I like less than I feel I ought to, this is it. Aside from the more arcane academic interpretations – that no-thing is a euphemism for vagina, or that the play is about not(h)ing things down – the title is apt enough: Much Ado can be a little disappointing. It is full of characters done slightly better elsewhere – Leonato aspires to Capulet in Romeo and Juliet but lacks his devouring energy; Claudio could be an early study for Troilus were it not for his extreme unimpressiveness on every front. The play’s broad comic relief, Dogberry, is a one-joke character along the lines of Sheridan’s Mrs Malaprop, though, like a stammerer suddenly made fluent by a crisis, he touchingly regains his grip on the English language when he realises that real villainy is at hand and reports it to Leonato. The comic mechanism depends on our accepting a degree of obtuseness in the otherwise gifted Benedick and Beatrice in never acknowledging that their mutual aggression is defensive: obviously the reason they could ‘talk themselves mad’ is that they are very much bothered by each other. There is even a complicating factor – an ambiguous passage which suggests that Benedick once won Beatrice’s heart ‘with false dice’: the poignancy makes them rather sillier for not, it seems, understanding their own behaviour now.
But if plot were everything Hamlet wouldn’t be famous, and if we all understood ourselves better we wouldn’t need the theatre at all. Much Ado has always held the stage, largely because of the two scenes in which Benedick and Beatrice separately overhear their friends discussing how much loved each is by the other (the first, with Benedick, is much better rendered than the second – even Shakespeare had difficulty making the same joke twice). And there is good judgment in it – in a romantic comedy the audience likes to be ahead of the characters, urging them to see what is as plain as the nose on their faces.
Shakespeare’s ironic view is that the difficult love of the two touchy wits is likelier to last than the conventional romance of Claudio and Hero. The latter is conducted on the classic lines of Romeo and Juliet, though Claudio is not as manly as Romeo and Hero less imaginative than Juliet: they go through all the standard crises of malicious intervention, but unlike that of Romeo and Juliet, the instinctive trust between them is very inadequate. The mind of the deeply unheroic Claudio is full of far more disloyal thoughts than those of which he accuses Hero; the reconciliation feels rigged up; and, as if unimpressed by the writing, Claudio is signally ungrateful for his undeserved good luck in getting his fiancée back from the grave – all he has to say, ambiguously, is ‘another Hero!’
Two-thirds of the play is in prose, while Claudio and Hero carry the burden of its verse, which is not particularly distinguished. However, the dialogue of Benedick and Beatrice shimmers with wit and vision. For most of the action they use each other as target practice, but are then obliged to work side by side to avenge Hero when Claudio rejects her in church on their wedding day. Collaborating on this project takes their minds off themselves for once, and they find they are more deeply engaged than they thought. As at an equivalent point in The Shrew, their language becomes terser and more direct, its metaphorical flair replaced by limpid prose or measured verse. It is as if love, to present itself fully, needs a painful project to work on, preferably on someone else’s behalf. At the end they find they are inseparable – like Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls, Beatrice even develops a love-struck cold – and feebly attempt to disguise their vulnerability with jokes about cuckoldry and with the affectionate dis-missiveness that might well prove a good basis for a marriage and in any case fools nobody.
If Shakespeare often saw love as a practical truce that keeps the world turning, he also knew that it could transform its surroundings and cause the young to teach their elders. The tragedy of the world’s most famous love story, written somewhere between The Shrew and Much Ado, lies in the destruction of what was already perfect. There is no question but that Romeo and Juliet are ready for and meant for each other. When they meet, by chance at a party, they immediately construct a perfect sonnet together, beginning ‘If I profane with my unworthiest hand’ – right there, off the cuff, amidst the noise of the dancing. This has often been pointed to as a Shake-spearian pleasantry: in fact it is a masterstroke. For these lovers fit together as ideally as perfect lines of verse: in a sense they are the verse, emotional content wedded to formal perfection. Outlandish as the idea may sound, the fact that in 1845 Charlotte Cushman played Romeo with her sister Susan as Juliet is not so bizarre: they are like two halves of an egg.
Their difficulties all lie beyond themselves and not at all within their characters. So their story is impressively simple, perhaps uniquely so in Shakespeare – its irony lies not in itself but in its consequences. United at last, they lie in bed after their only night together as long as they dare, their ears sharp for Juliet’s mother approaching the door. That’s the excitement of being young and forbidden: it happens in parents’ houses all the time. But they are in special danger: Romeo of the Montagues has been banished for the murder of Juliet’s Capulet cousin Tybalt. The degree of anxiety that Romeo should now be gone quickly shifts to and fro between them. First Juliet declares they still have plenty of time together; when he agrees and recklessly decides to stay, she urges him to go, for that really was the morning lark they both heard and no nightingale. This inconsistency is not a conceit: it is, in the brief time available, proof of what they could have become if life had given them the chance. It is a baffling thing that apparently well-adapted lovers can nevertheless drain each other’s strength and individuality; but Romeo and Juliet have the gift of becoming strong or weak as the other is weak or strong, each in turn shouldering the necessary weight. Their combined strength remains constant: they would have made good parents.
Less than ten years later, Shakespeare will write a very similar morning scene for Troilus and Cressida after they’ve spent their one night together: but their tenderness is compromised by his complacency and her uncertainty about how best to talk to him now they are intimate. They are interrupted not by a parent but by a hefty piece of political strategy (the exchange of Cressida for a Greek prisoner of war) to which they are unequal – partly because of their inexperience but more because of the vicious reality of warfare, with which their integrity will not be able to compete. That grim insight lies ahead; for the present Shakespeare’s interest is in a couple who, despite impossible circumstances, have everything going for them. Given that the source story Shakespeare used, Arthur Brooke’s Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, is highly critical of the lovers for ‘thralling themselves to unhonest desire’ (and disrespecting their parents), it is specially interesting that nothing makes you question the integrity of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Instead he pitches their idealism into pervasive violence – in some sense to be refined by it. Capulet’s cruelty to his daughter is physically explicit and her mother’s acquiescence in it equally destructive; Tybalt’s blood is on Romeo’s hands, though that at least was in defence of his best friend Mercutio, a somehow manly fault in a culture which daily causes fights to break out over nothing at all. These miseries distil and perfect Romeo’s and Juliet’s feeling for each other.
Since they have no internal faultline, the lovers have eventually to be defeated by a Shakespearian accident – a messenger unable to deliver a letter because of a suspected epidemic. And their rapture has always to compete with a mocking world, its cadences lapping against the ugly outcrops of Capulet and Tybalt, Mercutio’s obsessive debunking of romance and the petit guignol Apothecary, ‘in tattered weeds, with overwhelming brows’, who sells Romeo his poison. The figure of the Nurse grounds much of the action in a day-to-day bustle of rope ladders and bad news, not to mention the need to rest her back before delivering her urgent messages. These are the cross-rhythms against which love has to hold its tempo. No sooner has Juliet swallowed her sleeping draught and been extravagantly mourned by her family than a group of musicians turn up to play at her wedding. Finding there is no job for them to do and therefore no cash, they have an argument with a household servant before sensing that there might still be some advantage in a wedding that’s turned into a funeral:
SECOND MUSICIAN: Hang him Jack; come, we’ll in here: tarry for the mourners and stay dinner.
As for the lovers themselves, their eroticism is sustained by constant improvisation, and by youth’s peculiar talent for visualising its dilemmas: adolescents can be obsessed with death even if they are not threatened by it as these two are. The tendency of Romeo and Juliet to see visions is anticipated from the start by the apparently cynical Mercutio, who, to instil in Romeo enough bravado to gatecrash the Capulets’ party, evokes the world of dreams with his extempore account of Queen Mab, midwife to the fairies. Romeo, infected, immediately responds by sensing that
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night’s revels, and expire the term
Of a despised life closed in my breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.
Later that night, irredeemably in love in Juliet’s garden, he looks upwards and for the first time notices a detail:
Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear
That tips with silver all those fruit-tree tops…
He is like his author: he has seen reality anew and repainted it. Juliet, more than a match for him, applies her intellect – can he really be invoking something that changes its shape every night?
O swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable…
The play’s casualties are not just the lives of its heroes but their talents.
Later, as he finally climbs out of her bedroom window, Juliet is shocked by what she sees:
O God, I have an ill-divining soul;
Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb…
The hallucination revisits her the night before her enforced wedding to Paris. She is to take a potion which will make her mimic death until Romeo comes to her family tomb to save her – an idea almost as foreign to her as it is to us. Shakespeare takes time to touch in the fact that Juliet, although a married woman, is still a child facing the dark: an impulse to call her mother and Nurse back again pushes her over the end of one line into the next, which is then syncopated, its natural rhythm abandoned:
I’ll call them back again to comfort me:
Nurse! What should she do here?
The thrill of it awakens a luxuriant second sight. She feels the temperature in her bedroom changing: the air thickens, the phial of narcotic clutched in her hand swells and heats up like a forbidden thing. Her body has anticipated its exact effect:
I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins
That almost freezes up the heat of life.
As she looks at the modest liquid, her verse is completely silenced; the rest of the line is blank, four bars tacet:
My dismal scene I needs must act alone.
Come, vial.
She marvels that it will go straight to her brain before she knows it, her breath dying on her lips. How can this be? The idea of such a drug is familiar to us: we wonder in the same way about anaesthesia, how it won’t allow us to count as far as ten, how we might be the unlucky one in several thousand who is immobilised but still sensitive to pain:
What if this mixture do not work at all?
Ever practical, Juliet lays a dagger beside her on the bed. Then another fantasy tempts her:
What if it be a poison, which the Friar
Subtly hath minister’d to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour’d
Because he married me before to Romeo?
Well, yes, human beings being what they are. What, after all, does she know of these men? Her husband is a murderer, her father threatens to beat her up for having her own opinions, so what price a herbalist Friar? But then again:
How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
I wake before the time that Romeo
Come to redeem me? There’s a fearful point!
It’s as if she were casting about for the most powerful means to stimulate her imagination. Once in the tomb, she will suffocate on the smell of death, she will surely run mad. It takes some seventeen lines to complete the fearsome litany; she hears unearthly shrieks while she, like a lost soul in Goya’s Madhouse, plays games with the dead bodies:
And in this rage with some great kinsman’s bone
As with a club dash out my desperate brains…
And all the time there will be Tybalt’s festering corpse, lying over there in his bloody sheet. The fantastic idea of him rising up to stalk Romeo like the walking dead catapults her into action. She must hurry to save her husband:
Stay, Tybalt, stay!
Romeo, I come, this do I drink to thee.
Brought to this point by her own imagining, she throws back the poison without another thought.
Romeo learns the news of Juliet’s narcolepsy while standing in the street in Mantua, where he is feeling the fragile cheerfulness of the traveller:
If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand.
Compared to her ghoulish fantasies, his of her are sweetly conventional: Juliet has visited him in his dream and laid such kisses on his lips
That I reviv’d and was an emperor.
This is not quite of her order of imagination, but then, freed by banishment, he has been under less pressure recently. When ‘reality’ arrives in the form of Balthasar’s news, his heroic terseness stands in contrast to his wife’s unrestrained fancies:
Is’t even so? Then I defy you, stars.
Thou know’st my lodging; get me ink and paper,
And hire post-horses; I will hence tonight.
A few stage minutes later he steps into Juliet’s tomb, armed with a real poison, and stands over her body, astonished that in death she can look so lovely, and so exactly as she was before:
here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light…
O my love, my wife!
Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquer’d; beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there…
In Shakespeare beauty of speech often arises from a mistake: this is like Constance’s lament for a son we know is still alive. Romeo’s language continues to sing: he is mistaken but deeply and beautifully in tune:
Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe
That insubstantial death is amorous
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
For fear of that I still will stay with thee,
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again; here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chambermaids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last,
Arms take your last embrace, and lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death.
Come bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide,
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark.
Here’s to my love. O true apothecary,
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
Widely separated in the play, this speech of Romeo’s and that of Juliet before she drinks the poison enact their relationship more deeply than a further love scene could have done. As they balanced each other’s intimate weaknesses, they have deferred to each other’s strengths in their separation. Her power of imagining has been greater than his, but he has made up for it with a special potency in grief; her delicacy was the counterweight to his command of their last moments. He dies with a long protective hymn on his lips; she hurriedly and without beauty, on the point of a knife. Their misfortunes, like Benedick’s and Beatrice’s project, created a call and response between female sensibility and male protectiveness, male recklessness and female care. They were completely equipped for it; death’s interception was banal.
The whole play has posed a series of questions. What if the poison didn’t work, asked Juliet; what if the Friar was deceiving her; what if she woke up too soon? In the end Shakespeare makes the whole play a query: what if the course of history could be changed through love alone? Romeo and Juliet, on either side of an impossible divide, cause their two families, at each other’s throats for as long as anyone can recall (we can read that as two halves of the world), to sit down and begin to talk peace at last. I have seen the play done as a folie à deux, in which the director assured us such love couldn’t have lasted. I’ve heard it said that Capulet’s and Montague’s plan to build statues to their dead young heroes is no more than a public relations exercise, a competition in insincere grief. I call that an imaginative failure, fear of an outlandishly optimistic idea. It is, certainly, frantically difficult to find young actors with the emotional generosity and grace for these parts: but really, Romeo and Juliet are undebunkable. Both of them are improved by love, made wittier, wiser, more able to apprehend life – not least because Shakespeare allows them a small handful of inglorious moments: Romeo’s earlier extravagance in grief, the touch of punctiliousness in Juliet that makes her ask at what time the next day she should send her Nurse to confirm the wedding schedule he has in mind. Once they are dead it may seem a dramaturgical mistake to have Friar Laurence take the time to tell the Prince the whole detailed story we’ve been watching all evening, but you can see what Shakespeare was up to: he needed to cool matters down and ask his bigger question about the parents’ responsibility and whether the wider world is in safe hands after all.
HERMIA: Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
When everything seems double.
HELENA: So methinks;
And I have found Demetrius, like a jewel,
Mine own and not mine own.
– A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The following year (probably) Shakespeare sets love’s compass further askew for an audience that may well have remembered Romeo and Juliet. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a story of love in a deeper sense than is understood by its rather erratic quartet of lovers – just as Twelfth Night is about a deeper form of harmony than who marries whom in the end. In the Dream love is close to madness; the play’s intoxication is both chemical and romantic, and in the end more comprehensive than either. Surviving its hallucinations is an optimism that goes way beyond the idea that love is blind or that men are asses.
Early on in the play Lysander observes, unexceptionably, that the course of true love never did run smooth. He might have said that its terms are often more unpromising even than they were in Romeo, when love sprang up from enmity, or in The Comedy of Errors, where the clock ticked on towards a death sentence and a family reassembled itself just in time. In the Dream Egeus, the father of Hermia, who wants to marry against his wishes, is less impressive than Capulet but still more violent, so that Hermia is confronted with an extremity no other disobedient child in a Shakespeare comedy faces – state execution. Her true love for Lysander is also under siege from the unruly desire of her best friend Helena for him. Meanwhile Duke Theseus, the heroic aggressor and rapist of myth, is trying – more comically than most productions allow – to recommend himself to the terse Hippolyta, a disgusted Amazonian prisoner of war he has decided to marry and who he somehow thinks might come to admire him in time. In fairyland, King Oberon’s love for Queen Titania is being poisoned by an emotion well down on the human scale – his male vengefulness in a child custody dispute between them, which he will take so far as to make her humiliate herself by falling in love with a donkey.
So the relationships between men and women in both worlds are all over the place: in this play the love is not at all where you think it will be. Shakespeare introduces early on the carpenter Peter Quince and the weaver Nick Bottom, who have real passion in them – not for any individual but for the theatre. They are amateur actors, and on the whole theirs is a generous enthusiasm: as Stanislavsky would have said, more to do with what they can offer to the theatre than what the theatre can do for them. Falling foul in mid-rehearsal of Oberon’s vengeful designs on Titania, Bottom is famously translated into an ass, but then blessed with everything that a fairy queen can give – junior fairies to sing and dance for him, bees’ thighs lit by glow-worms to see him to bed and butterfly wings to waken him – all in a language so erotic that, as always in Shakespeare, it improves on any physical representation.
The paradox is that this absurd and nightmarish situation works on Bottom as true love would do: his imagination is as released as Romeo’s was in the orchard as he instructs the fairy Cobweb to steal a honey-bag from ‘a red-hipped humble-bee on top of a thistle’. His sense of wonder survives waking from his dream of Titania:
Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was – and methought I had – but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had.
Quickened sensibility leaks into his restored life, and may well, among other things, make him into what he would most want to be – a better actor.
The mysterious power of this affection between a fairy queen and a man with the head of an ass is so convincing that even Oberon is overcome by whatever passes in the fairy kingdom for remorse – or perhaps by envy for the unlikely liberation he sees. He is reconciled with Titania, and together they fly through the night to bless the house of three pairs of aristocratic newly-weds. Two of these couples have emerged from a night of utter confusion in the woods in which they’ve been rendered laughably (and in the women’s case most painfully) out of control of their loyalties by fairy magic; they articulate a hesitant return to life of such surpassing beauty that among other things it conjured some of his loveliest music from Benjamin Britten. Married at the same time as Theseus and Hippolyta, they attend a wedding-night entertainment devised for them all by Quince’s Dramatic Society of tinkers, tailors and joiners. The show is the old love story of Pyramus and Thisbe – Shakespeare’s final joke, since some of his audience would have remembered it being used more stirringly in Romeo and Juliet the previous year. Their various reactions to the performance crystallise their relationships: Theseus begins to see Hippolyta as an equal, and the young women, in their silent reproach of their husbands’ facetiousness, start to exert proper control over their immature, barracking partners.
Nevertheless the working-class actors rapidly learn that an aristocratic crowd can be the unkindest of all. Although he comes out on their side in the end, to some extent the treatment of these ‘Mechanicals’ may have been Shakespeare’s genial revenge on all amateurs: professionals still dread the opinionated member of the local Dramatic Society anxious to buttonhole them in the bar and say, in the tones of Bottom the Weaver, that their Hamlet was better than the one they’ve just seen you in.
Thoroughly heckled, the performance goes unluckily. It reaches a nadir when the figure of Moonshine appears, played by the tailor Robin Starveling. The only pleasure for him in this alarming task is that he has escaped his original casting as Thisbe’s mother, but the new role is onerously prop-bound – as well as remembering his lines, he has to carry an emblematic thorn bush and lantern with him to explain his part. On the big night he has added to this problem by bringing his dog along, perhaps as a sort of security blanket. This nameless mutt doesn’t get as much exposure as Crab in The Two Gentlemen – Starveling is laughed off the stage within moments – but he does give his master, shouted down by the courtly hooligans, the chance of a little grace under pressure:
All that I have to say is to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon, I the man i’ the moon, this thorn-bush my thorn-bush, and this dog my dog.
Although there’s no particular evidence for it, the theatre tradition is that the props go missing and the under-rehearsed actors lose their lines and then their collective nerve – until near the end, something changes. The tenderness that Shakespeare has felt towards their efforts becomes a discreet hymn to the imaginative power of theatre in those who don’t quite recognise their own abilities. Thisbe, played by a young bellows-mender called Flute, comes upon the dead body of Thisbe’s lover Pyramus:
Asleep, my love?
What, dead, my dove?
O, Pyramus, arise.
Speak, speak; quite dumb?
Dead, dead? A tomb
Must cover those sweet eyes.
These lily lips,
This cherry nose,
These yellow cowslip cheeks,
Are gone, are gone;
Lovers make moan,
His eyes were green as leeks…
Tongue, not a word,
Come, trusty sword,
Come, blade, my breast imbrue!
And farewell, friends,
Thus Thisbe ends,
Adieu, adieu, adieu.
The play would originally have been performed on the three-sided stage of the Curtain or The Theatre; on this platform between heaven and hell stands Flute, a young man who’s perhaps never appeared in a play before. The audience knows he is embarrassed at the idea of playing a woman and perhaps thought him silly for that, since all the women’s parts in Elizabethan theatre were played by male actors – but he is an amateur, so how would he know that. When he was cast he protested that the part was impossible for him as he had a ‘beard coming’; a hoary old stage tradition obliges him to pause after declaring that he has this beard before qualifying it with ‘…coming’ because of his colleagues’ amazed look at his hairless chin. The stage business is so theatrically hallowed that it is quite a relief once in a while to see the line played through simply. Better still, just before the performance, Flute chides Quince for saying Bottom is a ‘paramour’ instead of a ‘paragon’ – a mistake natural enough because of the unfamiliarity of the words, but Flute’s scandalised reaction –
A paramour is – God bless us! – a thing of nought
– testifies both to the state of his nerves and the idea’s proximity to the awful gender-bending he is about to undertake.
Now he has watched his colleague Starveling being cruelly mocked, and to his utter misery finds himself standing as the bereaved Thisbe, wearing what once seemed to him an acceptable wig, before an audience thirsty for blood. He has nowhere to go except the text and his own heart. At the moment of speaking his banal lines he is, I should say, taken by Thisbe’s heartbreak and at that moment becomes an actor, in other words someone who puts themselves into someone else’s shoes. The onstage spectators no longer interrupt, and Shakespeare’s actual audience, then and now, quietens down as well. Flute’s unexpected sincerity is dissolving all the boundaries among them – between foreigners and clerks, lords and carpenters, apprentices, illiterates and poets; they’re all held for a moment on the same intake of breath. His language is simple, naive, almost comic – and best of all, it’s a countryman’s language, the author’s natural accent.
Shakespeare is closing this beautiful play – as gorgeous but in some ways as impenetrable as a perfect diamond – with two things he by now does especially well: the soliloquy and the unlikely nature of love. But he has added a very large third: the theatre platform as an instrument of change in its audience. He did this once before. In Love’s Labour’s Lost the same sort of arrogant young males heckle an honourable performance of The Nine Worthies by the villagers, and are eventually silenced by the actor of Hector, Don Armado, answering back:
The sweet war-man is dead and rotten; sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried; when he breathed, he was a man. But I will forward with my device…
In the Mechanicals’ Pyramus and Thisbe, the actors likewise find pride in their work, the onstage audience learns some respect for honest endeavour (not the same as talent but perhaps more moving), and, I should say, in the dance that follows, take hands with the working men to celebrate their evening together. The fairies, watching from their hidden corners, see that this group finally has enough love in it to be worthy of blessing, and they move through the house promising the couples faithfulness and unblemished issue.
Shakespeare is halfway through his career: Hamlet lies ahead, together with darker forms of comedy, and love will be still less straightforward. The century will soon turn over: but at this tipping point, and long before he has thought of the phrase himself, he’s found a touch of nature to make the whole world kin, and the perfect platform to do it from. We have laboured to recreate the physical experience through four centuries of theatre architecture, forests of audience surveys and expectations of acting that find reconciling the epic and the detailed hard in a way Shakespeare would never have understood. At its best all this is not just a laborious search for historical accuracy, but rather the hope of capturing something still more tantalising, Shakespeare’s particular mystery: his way of making us all one with his music both high and low, his range, immediacy and metaphysical delicacy.