Shakespeare was willing to sacrifice the unity of action to achieve the richness of implication that resides in the presence of more than one plot, but Stendhal was certainly wrong on the first pages of his Racine and Shakespeare to reduce the conflict between Shakespearian and classical tragedy to the abandonment of the unities. In this chapter, I would like to concentrate on a little-discussed peculiarity of Shakespearean plotting, the use of lies. We have discussed recognition scenes as key moments in the production of terror, pity, or laughter and have said that the stage is set for such scenes by errors or lies. In the surviving classical dramas, these two ways of complicating the plot are about equally prevalent. In Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies, except in a single play, which is carefully labeled, virtually every recognition scene is generated primarily out of a lie, not an error.
Shakespeare may have had several reasons for preferring lies to errors as an instrument for complicating his plots: most simply, lying is a wonderful activity. It excels factuality because it is unrestricted by the limits of possibility, and excels fiction as well because it claims to be true; it is as creative as sex and is as human as you are, but endlessly richer. Plausible lying demands skill, ingenuity, psychological insight, and a capacity for consistency and coherence worthy of an epic or dramatic poet, but the rewards for really splendid lies are greater, for both the liar and the person lied to. In chapter 9 of his Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift called this “the sublime and refined point of felicity…, the possession of being well deceived” (84), and Nietzsche’s Will to Power links it with both art and love: “When a man loves, he is a good liar about himself, and to himself; he seems to himself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect; he is more perfect…. Art here acts as an organic function; we find it present in the most angelic instinct, ‘love’; we find it as the greatest stimulus of life—thus art is sublimely utilitarian even in the fact that it lies” (426–27 [4.4.808]). And Benjamin N. Cardozo is really talking about lies, not fictions, when he says, “Law has built up many of its doctrines by a make-believe that things are other than they are,…a class of fictions…which is a working tool of thought, but which at times hides itself from view till reflection and analysis have brought it to the light” (The Paradoxes of Legal Science, 34). If art and love and law all rest on lies, we have begun dealing with one of humanity’s most beneficial and unappreciated activities. In fact, we might take very seriously the remark of Razumikhin, the Dostoevsky character most like Dostoevsky: “I am human because I lie” (Crime and Punishment, pt. 3, chap. 1). The argument can be made that a human being can make only one statement that is undeniable and unquestionable. No one can say “I am,” or “I am not,” or “I know,” or “I know not,” or “I cogitate,” or “Atoms fall in space,” or “God is omnipotent,” or “God is good,” or “God is dead,” or “Good and evil strive,” or “I have will,” or any other thing without arousing doubts in one quarter or another. But one rock we can stand upon beyond all questioning: “I am a liar.”
This valorization of lying applies to a rather simple kind of lie, a statement the liar knows to be untrue. This definition excludes self-deception, which is another topic, and ignores the question of whether the liar is correct about untruth. Deluded characters may state something true and still be liars if they believe it to be untrue. This definition also tends to ignore what Harry Frankfurt’s book defines as bullshit, the blithe unconcern about whether one’s statement is true or not. Most lies involve three people: the liar, the person lied to, and the person (or, occasionally, the thing) lied about. These roles may merge, as when Falstaff lies about how he himself behaved in a battle or a robbery, or when Sir Toby persuades Malvolio that he is most attractive in cross garters. In Shakespeare, lies may be self-serving or they may be altruistic, designed to help the person lied to or the one lied about, or someone else. They may be vicious, designed to harm others or even oneself, as when Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona denies her feelings, tears up a love letter, and says to herself, “O hateful hands, to tear such loving words” (1.2.105). These lies often miscarry in their intent, as Friar Laurence’s lie about Juliet’s death does in its design to help Romeo and Juliet, but the lie about Hero’s death arranged by Friar Francis in Much Ado about Nothing works beautifully. Surprisingly often, the lie is revelatory, expressing facts about the liar, the person lied to, or the person lied about.
But this varied array of uses for lies should not obscure a more professional reason for Shakespeare to introduce so many of them into his plays. In a way, each lie is a little drama, with at least the rudiments of a plot, and many of Shakespeare’s plays center on big lies where one person or a group of conspirators entrain others into a play within a play. In Hamlet and the introduction to The Taming of the Shrew, the lord arranges for a group of professional actors to perform a play to manipulate one person in the audience. In Love’s Labor’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest, local groups stage elaborate outdoor performances, one to tease and torture Falstaff and the other three for the delectation of the stage audience. But in all six of these plays, there is a second play within the play: the leader also orders, manipulates, or persuades others to carry out an elaborate plot to bring his will to bear on one character (or in The Tempest, two). Shakespeare uses many other such puppet-masters or theatrical directors who do not call the performances they arrange dramas and who use the characters around them, sometimes with the connivance of others, sometimes by lying to everybody. Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona may be the kindest of these liars when he confesses to befouling the floor in order to avert a beating of his dog, who had done so. At the other end of the spectrum, Iago is the most evil of the puppet-masters, making Cassio his unwitting accomplice and Amelia his half-understanding helper, and Desdemona and Othello themselves not only victims but participants in the drama he concocts. Iago’s drama has only Othello’s destruction as its goal, no personal gain. In Measure for Measure an equally elaborate set of lies by the Duke is benevolent. He uses his absence, his disguise, and Isabel and Mariana’s identities in the hope of reforming Vienna and, later, of thwarting Angelo’s own elaborated lies. When disguises transform women into men, who are often seeking a rapprochement with the men they love, as Julia does in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth Night, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, or Imogen in Cymbeline, these britches parts are all revelatory. Since on the Shakespearean stage all these women’s parts were played by boys, the disguises restored the actors to their own gender.
Many of the lies in Shakespeare are intended to be revealed in a recognition scene, like that where Hal reveals that he and Poins have robbed Falstaff or where Prospero reunites the lost in The Tempest. Sometimes they are designed never to be believed in the first place, as on the sunny day when Petruchio says, “I say it is the moon that shines so bright,” simply to assert his will (The Taming of the Shrew, 4.5.4). If such lies are taken seriously, like the flattery of the toadies in Timon of Athens, the liars are nonplussed. More often, the liar intends the lie to go undiscovered, but in Shakespeare, it never does, although unrevealed lies can be very serviceable dramatically, as in Ferenc Molnár’s The Play’s the Thing.
Shakespeare’s minor characters lie handsomely and with enough variety to constitute an encyclopedia of the resources of lying, but in this chapter, the larger lies that lead to the main recognition scenes are of more interest. These lies can expand the classical dramatic form that the Elizabethans inherited, but the Greeks already used extensive additional plots embedded within the main plot by the liar, using containment to relate it back to the main plot. Sophocles embedded a second plot in the Philoctetes with Odysseus’s lies, and Euripides as well in Iphigenia at Aulis with Agamemnon’s lying, so the Elizabethans had this tradition to build on. In Shakespeare, these elaborated lies take on lives of their own and introduce alternative plots into the dramas, expanding them much as Homeric similes expand into vignettes of life or nature far from the action of the epic.
Of the dozen recognition scenes we discussed in Cymbeline, only one grew out of an error: Imogen mistook the dastard Cloten’s headless body for her husband’s. Cloten had worn Posthumus’s clothes not to deceive but to spite Imogen, so she makes an error untouched by lies. This pure error is a rarity in Shakespeare. In Twelfth Night and the carefully labeled Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare has a pair of siblings each believe the other has been drowned in a shipwreck, and recycles a variant of the conceit in Pericles, but the rest of his dozens of recognitions all correct lies.