The Shakespearean plot departs from the classical plot in ways that relate to the conditions of performance, the dramatic tradition, and the author. The Greek state provided the chorus, actors, and enormous theater to stage a ceremony before the honored judges in the front row. Shakespeare’s most challenging judges were also in the front row, but they were the rowdy standees in a crowded commercial theater or, occasionally, the dangerous egos of the Renaissance court. Sophocles’s audience often saw three or four plays in a single afternoon, while Shakespeare’s audience normally saw just one. It took a professional actor like Shakespeare to elaborate out of the classical and other traditions he inherited a kind of drama that could control such an audience for hours.
Stendhal’s article on Racine and Shakespeare concentrates on only two of the classical unities: “The whole dispute between Racine and Shakespeare can be reduced to learning whether observing the two unities of place and time allow one to make plays of lively interest to nineteenth-century spectators, plays that make them weep and tremble” (Oeuvres completes, 12). Stendhal’s omission of the unity of action here may throw more light on his style of argumentation than on his theatrical beliefs. Certainly Aristotle devoted far more attention to the unity of action than to those of place or time, though Boileau-Despréaux compressed the three into a single line as if they mattered equally. Stendhal proceeds to defend Shakespeare by disputing the verisimilitude of the two unities, arguing that it is no harder to believe that ten minutes represents a year than a day, which Aristotle himself had allowed (Poetics, 49bl.W1). This psychology of verisimilitude does not apply to the unity of action; a tightly linked causal system is neither more nor less likely than a series of causally unrelated incidents, and therefore has nothing to do with the particular weakness Stendhal finds in the classical doctrine that required observation of the unities. Aristotle’s more philosophical doctrine of verisimilitude has little to do with likelihood and is related to the unity of action. For example, Aristotle praises the plot in which the statue of Mitis fell on the man who caused Mitis’s death, killing him (52a9). Such an event is far less likely than being killed by a random falling object, as Aeschylus was when a seagull tried to crack a turtle’s shell by dropping it on his bald head, which in itself is a rare enough event. The falling statue seems not to happen at random and avoids the episodic plot, where there is neither probability nor necessity that the episodes follow one another. Probability here is not a matter of statistics, but the sense of living in an orderly universe. Aristotle carries this reasoning all the way in his Poetics, preferring certain impossible incidents as more probable than certain incidents that had actually occurred but lacked this verisimilitude (60a27). Stendhal prefers to attack the pedants and ignore the important fact that, in most of his plays, Shakespeare ignores the unity of action.
The argument for a causally integrated plot is important, as suggested in the previous chapter, and even though he had “small Latin and less Greek,” Shakespeare must have known this, whether directly or indirectly. Shakespeare needed a real reason to give up a perfectly sound dramatic practice for one relatively untried by major dramatists. He sacrificed the causal tightness that had served classic drama so well in order to build thematic tightness around parallel plots. Usually the parallel plots involve different social levels—masters and servants, kings and courtiers, supernatural beings and humans—and usually the plots are not too parallel to intersect occasionally and interact causally at some level, though never enough to satisfy Aristotle’s criterion that if any incident be removed, the whole plot of the play should cease to make sense. If the Earl of Gloucester should be removed from King Lear, the plot involving the king and his daughters would hardly be affected, except for the very end, where Gloucester’s son Edmund is responsible for the deaths of the three daughters. Shakespeare sacrifices the tight integrity of the causal relationships between incidents in order to explore the parallels between two sets of incidents, provoking our awareness of the common elements. For Aristotle, a causal connection did not need to be real to bear verisimilitude; it needed to make the universe look well organized. For Shakespeare, this same effect could emerge from incidents linked not by causality or false causality that seems real, but by similarity.
Similarity and difference can be treated in many ways. They involve adjectives that can be applied to discrete things, but philosophers can dispute whether the adjectives represent qualities that actually inhere in those things or whether we project them upon those things, and indeed, whether any two things are discrete or whether we project their separate identity upon a fuzzy or a nonexistent world. I know of a child who complained about her first pair of glasses that all they did was put lines around people. Michel de Montaigne said that if all men were not different, we could not tell them apart, and if they were not all similar we could not tell them from dogs; something similar can be said about any pair of Shakespearian plots or incidents. When I walk along the street without my glasses, I cannot always recognize my friends, but as compensation, I sometimes nod politely to people I have never seen before. The ability to see similarity is very hard to tell from the inability to see difference. The person I embarrass with my greeting may genuinely resemble some friend of mine in some key features, and my myopia keeps me from noticing the remaining features. In the same way, perhaps I distinguish the friend I fail to greet from himself because of my extraordinary lack of acuity. But in comparing these people or the double plots of a Shakespeare play, the key features exist in my own mind, though constantly tested against the appearance of my friends or the dramatic text. We have already mentioned the doctrine in pattern-recognition that everything has some common features with everything else and that no two things are either identical or different in all ways.
In literature, some of these problems disappear because, as Philip Sidney said, poesy claims not to be true, and some of the similarity has only literary existence. The same patterns apply, however, in literature, and when we say, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!” or “It was not a flock of swans…. It was the ten fingers of Boyan on the strings”; the possibility of mistaking a man for a plane or a bard’s hands for gorgeous-voiced birds descending shows us how Superman flies and Boyan sings and plays, just as a simile would. Similarity in plots can be represented as the overlap between two areas, and those areas may be broken down into individual points of similarity, dissimilarity, contrast, etc. Without knowing it, a Shakespearean audience is making such analyses all the time it watches a play, and the points of overlap and contrast enter their awareness.
Similarities between characters are only a secondary subject for this book, but similarities between two roles are part of the relationship among the incidents, that is, of the plot. In Henry IV, Part 1, Shakespeare constructs a plot about three competing excellences: the wit and fellowship of Falstaff’s world in Eastcheap; the gallantry and poetry of Hotspur in London and the north and west of Britain; and the royal purposefulness of Henry IV at his court and encampment. Each of these worlds derides or decries the other two, and each has its own weaknesses: Falstaff’s criminality, drunkenness, and cowardice; Hotspur’s reckless lack of self-control; and King Henry’s edgy status as a usurper. Prince Hal confronts all three, entering into each world—wittily into that of Falstaff, gallantly into that of Hotspur, and calculatingly and perhaps a little pompously into that of the king. Near the end, he stands between the prostrate bodies of Hotspur and Falstaff and bids them both farewell. The causal connections among the three plots are tenuous, but the three role models illuminate each other, and Hal’s conspiracy to rob Falstaff the thief parodies Hotspur’s conspiracy to depose King Henry, the usurper, since each role model resists having done unto himself what he has done unto others.