m
M., I. James Mabbe (1572–1642), a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, is probably the ‘I.M.’ who wrote a brief elegy for the First Folio (1623). In the poem, Shakespeare leaves the ‘world’s-stage’ for ‘the grave’s-tiring-room’, but lives on in print to renewed applause.
Park Honan
Macbeth (c. 1005–1057), King of Scotland (reigned after defeating King Duncan in battle in 1040, and was himself killed by rebels under Malcolm in 1057). See Macbeth.
Anne Button
Macbeth, Lady. See Macbeth.
Macbeth nach Shakespeare. See Macbeth.
Macbett, 1972 French play by Romanian-French author Eugène Ionesco (1909–94). Ionesco’s ironic version of Macbeth constitutes an ‘absurdist’ critique of Shakespeare’s heroic tragedy, exposing a brutal and banal cycle of ambition, conspiracy, and assassination, in which some scenes and speeches are replayed verbatim by different characters. The First Witch transforms herself into ‘Lady Duncan’, who then seduces a compliant Macbett. The triumph of Macol (Shakespeare’s Malcolm) brings only crueller tyranny.
Tom Matheson
‘Maccabeus, Judas’. See ‘Judas Maccabeus’.
McCarthy, Lillah (1875–1960), English actress, wife of Harley Granville-*Barker from 1906 to 1917 and his managerial partner. Noted for her statuesque beauty and eloquent voice, she gave enticing performances in his productions at the Savoy as Hermione and Viola (1912) and Helena (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1914).
Dennis Kennedy
McCullough, John (1832–85), Irish-born American actor in the heroic mould, whose successes included Richard III, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. When he played the latter role at Drury Lane in 1881 his performance was considered old-fashioned, but effective in a rather coarse way.
Richard Foulkes
Macduff finds the murdered Duncan (Macbeth 2.3) and begins to suspect Macbeth, whom he kills at the end of the play in revenge for the murder of his family. Shakespeare broadly follows *Holinshed’s account of Macduff, the Thane (later Earl) of Fife.
Anne Button
Macduff, Lady. She and her children are killed by Macbeth’s henchmen, Macbeth 4.2.
Anne Button
Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527), Italian political philosopher who became notorious for his ruthlessly pragmatic ideas. Machiavelli served as assistant secretary of state to the Florentine republic until the return of the Medici caused him to be exiled in 1512. Nevertheless, it was to the Medici that Machiavelli dedicated Il principe (The Prince), which he wrote in 1513 urging them to unite the country against the French invaders. As the chance of this happening became remote, Machiavelli decided not to publish this treatise or his Discorsi (Discourses) written from 1513 to 1517. It was not until after his death in 1532 that The Prince was published and the ideas within it became the focus for lengthy and heated debate across Europe. Machiavelli recognized moral exigencies and condemned rulers for excessive brutality. Nevertheless, he allowed that violent or immoral acts could be justified in the pursuit of a unified and self-sufficient state. He distinguished the successful prince from the ideal Christian ruler, implying that spiritual and ethical values had no place in the political sphere. He also emphasized the need to take risks and to accept one’s dependence upon chance. These ideas were condemned by moralists in England and France as demonic and an incitement to tyranny. In 1576 Innocent Gentillet published a denunciation of The Prince, the Contre-Machiavel, which was translated into English in 1602. But long before then, the words ‘Machiavellian’ and ‘Machiavelism’ had passed into the English language and the Machiavel had become a stock dramatic type, brought onto the stage at the beginning of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and claimed as an influence by Richard of Gloucester in Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) (3.2.193). Shakespeare may not have read The Prince but he advertised his awareness of ‘Machiavelism’ through direct reference and characterization, and through the creation of a savage political world in which a pious Christian king like Henry VI is entirely at a loss.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
machines in the Elizabethan theatre. Little was needed to adapt the mechanical winches used in the Elizabethan construction industry for *theatrical flying from the ‘heavens’ and for unassisted ascent from or descent into ‘hell’, but once settled at permanent playhouses the companies were slow to give up the minimalist habits required for touring. No play written for the Globe requires a mechanical elevator platform beneath the trapdoor set into the stage—simple steps will do for the descending actor—and not until Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1610), when Jupiter descends on an eagle, was flight called for. Philip *Henslowe was ahead of his rivals, paying for the flight machine at the Rose in 1595.
Gabriel Egan
Mack, Maynard (1909–2001), American academic, editor, and critic. His ‘The World of Hamlet’ (Yale Review, 41, 1952) discusses the imagery of the play; and King Lear in our Time (1965) considers both the play’s literary mode and several modern productions, including Peter *Brook’s versions on stage and film.
Tom Matheson
McKellen, Sir Ian (b. 1939), English actor. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he played many parts including Justice Shallow and in 1962 was Henry V in repertory at Ipswich. His star quality was established in 1969 when he played both *Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II at the Edinburgh Festival, in London, and on television, though his Hamlet in 1971 disappointed most critics. In 1972–4 he was a co-founder of a cooperative, the Actors’ Company; his parts included Edgar in King Lear and Giovanni in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. At Stratford in 1976 he played Romeo and Leontes and excelled in Trevor Nunn’s intense studio production of Macbeth, later portraying a suppressed, paranoid Iago in a similarly intimate production by Nunn of Othello. Over several years at the National Theatre he acted Coriolanus, Kent in King Lear, and a fascistic Richard III in a production set in a version of 1930s London. This latter concept he re-explored in a prize-winning film version, directed by Richard Loncraine (1996). A gay activist, McKellen has also spoken out against elitism and racialism in London theatres. In 1999 he played Prospero at the Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds. He returned to the RSC to play King Lear for Trevor *Nunn in 2007, in a production which was also filmed for television.
Ian McKellen as a chain-smoking fascist Richard III in Richard Loncraine’s film version, 1996.
Michael Jamieson
Mackenzie, Henry (1745–1831), English novelist, playwright, and editor of and major contributor to the Mirror. His observations on Hamlet in this weekly, Edinburgh-based periodical (23 Jan. 1779–27 May 1780) were praised by *Bradley for their response to Hamlet’s charm and their discernment of Shakespeare’s intentions.
Catherine Alexander
McKerrow, Ronald Brunlees (1872–1940), British bibliographical scholar. With A. W. Pollard and W. W. Greg, he transformed the understanding of *Shakespeare quartos and *folios by systematically investigating the nature and transmission of extant early printed copies, rather than relying on later derivative editions. An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927) pioneers the study of early printed books in the process of transmission from manuscript to print. Unfortunately, despite an influential Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare (1939), setting out the principle of printing Shakespeare’s works as nearly as possible in the form in which he left them, his own edition never reached publication.
Tom Matheson
Macklin, Charles (1699–1797), actor and playwright. He was born in Ireland, and his early career, possibly as a strolling player, is obscure. From 1725 he alternated minor, often comic roles in London theatres (Touchstone, Osric/Gravedigger, Sir Hugh) with periods in the provinces. In 1735 he killed a fellow actor, and his reputation for violence endured. He achieved overnight fame in 1741 playing a dignified, tragic Shylock, which contrasted with the low comic norm, in a Merchant of Venice largely reclaimed from Granville’s 1701 adaptation The *Jew of Venice. In the same season he played Malvolio. From 1742 he helped train actors, including preparing *Garrick for King Lear, and ran a school of oratory in 1753. In 1744 he hired the Haymarket and attempted to evade the Licensing Act with performances of Othello offered as the ‘free’ second half of a fee-paying concert of music. Despite a rift with Garrick he opened for him as Shylock when he took over Drury Lane in 1747 and subsequently played Iago to his Othello. In 1773 he staged a memorable Macbeth, partly in Scottish costume, and retired from the stage in 1789 when his memory failed while playing Shylock.
Catherine Alexander
McManaway, James Gilmer (1899–1980), American scholar, acting director of the *Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington (1946–8), editor of the important journal *Shakespeare Quarterly, and, with Jeanne Addison Roberts, of A Selective Bibliography of Shakespeare: Editions, Textual Studies (1975).
Tom Matheson
MacMorris, Captain. He is an Irish officer who quarrels with *Fluellen, Henry V 3.3.
Anne Button
Macpherson, Guillermo (1824–98), translator of Shakespeare into Spanish. Born in Gibraltar, he held consular posts in Cadiz, Seville, Madrid, and Barcelona. He and Jaime *Clark were the first to render Shakespeare’s blank verse systematically into Spanish verse (usually hendecasyllabic lines, as well as the rhymed lines as such). He translated 23 of Shakespeare’s plays (Dramas de Shakespeare, 1873). The 1885 reprint of his versions contained an introduction by Eduardo Benot which was remarkable for its perceptiveness.
A. Luis Pujante
Macready, William Charles (1793–1873), English actor. Born in London, he made his acclaimed debut as Romeo on 7 June 1810 under his father’s—financially challenged—management in Birmingham. During the next four years with his father’s company in the provinces the youthful Macready essayed 70 roles including Hamlet, Hotspur, Richard II, and Othello. His initial London Shakespearian performances at Covent Garden (Othello and Iago in October 1816) did not impress, but he triumphed as Richard III (25 October 1819). Already Macready was directing his attention to the restoration of Shakespeare’s original texts and to thorough rehearsals, concerns which would distinguish his own management of that theatre (1837–9) and Drury Lane (1841–3).
In the interim Macready encompassed—comedy apart—the range of the Shakespearian repertoire—Coriolanus and Cassius, Hubert, Cardinal Wolsey, Henry V, Leontes, Prospero, and Shylock—but he excelled in the major tragedies, particularly as Macbeth and King Lear. To them he brought a strong physical presence, powerful—if mannered—vocal delivery, and above all a searching intelligence which revealed character psychology. John Forster hailed his Lear as ‘the only perfect picture that we have had of Lear since the age of Betterton’. This was in his landmark revival at Covent Garden (25 January 1838) in which he restored the Fool. In Coriolanus and Henry V at that theatre and As You Like It and King John at Drury Lane, Macready implemented the principles of Shakespearian production (authentic text, well-rehearsed cast, historically accurate scenery and costumes) which were to set the standards for decades. By the time he retired in 1851 Macready could take personal credit for the greatly enhanced status of the theatre, central to which had been his achievements in Shakespeare, who had formed the core of Macready’s three American tours and the model for several new plays written for him. His diaries are a major resource.
Richard Foulkes
madrigal, secular vocal music in parts, imported to England from Italy in the late 1580s and then imitated by many composers, including *Morley and *Weelkes. The partsongs in Shakespeare’s plays are simple *catches and *three-man songs in the English tradition.
Jeremy Barlow
Maecenas, after trying to reconcile the triumvirs in Antony and Cleopatra 2.2, encourages Caesar’s attack on Antony, 4.1. He is based on C. Cilnius Maecenas (d. 8 bc), friend of Octavius Caesar, best known as the patron of *Virgil and Horace.
Anne Button
Maidenhead Inn and Woolshop are names by which parts of Shakespeare’s *Birthplace were previously known. Soon after John *Shakespeare’s death in 1601, his three-bay house in Henley Street was let to Lewis Hiccox, who converted it into an inn known as the Maidenhead (later Swan and Maidenhead). It continued in the same use until the sale of the premises in 1847, although, around 1700, it was reduced in size, to occupy the two south-easterly bays only. The Woolshop was the part of the Birthplace property which, because it was originally unheated, is thought to have been John Shakespeare’s business premises (he was a glove-maker and wool dealer). It occupied the south-east bay of the house, beyond the cross-passage.
Robert Bearman
Malcolm, Duncan’s oldest son, leads the English forces against Macbeth, Macbeth 5.6.
Anne Button
Mallarmé, Stéphane (1842–98), French poet. An unhappy English teacher but a highly praised Symbolist poet, he discussed Shakespeare in an influential article (La Revue indépendante, 1 November 1886) focusing on Mounet-Sully’s performance of Hamlet in the five-act verse drama by Dumas and Meurice, *Comédie-Française, 1886. He described the inner dilemma of the melancholy prince as a lonely shadow of himself playing a solitary tragedy, thus defining ‘Hamletism’, the late 19th-century trend, characterized by the metaphysical uneasiness of a dual personality.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
Malone, Edmond (1741–1812), Anglo-Irish scholar. Born in Dublin, graduated from Trinity College, and called to the Irish Bar in 1767, he settled permanently in London in his mid-thirties. Having inherited an ample income after his father’s death, he devoted himself to the study of English letters. His literary projects include editions of William Goldsmith (1780) and John Dryden (1800), and substantial assistance to James Boswell on his Life of Johnson. He busied himself, too, with such occasional efforts as the exposure of the two great literary *forgers of the day, Thomas Chatterton and William Henry Ireland. His main efforts, however, centred on Shakespeare, beginning with the first sustained attempt to establish the *chronology of Shakespeare’s work (1778) and culminating in two editions of Shakespeare’s The Plays and Poems, the first in ten volumes (1790) and the second, completed posthumously by James Boswell the younger, in 21 (1821).
Believing no limits should be set on Shakespeare studies until ‘every temporary allusion shall have been pointed out, and every obscurity elucidated’, he was in his own time mocked as well as admired. He is now considered among the greatest of Shakespearian scholars. He is credited for both his use of primary materials and his respect for accuracy. His exhaustive ‘investigations’ extended to old plays and tracts, records of Chancery, parish registers, wills and letters, and documents in the Exchequer and Lord Chamberlain’s Office; he was the first to use both *Henslowe’s ‘Diary’ as well as *Strachey’s 1610 account of the discovery of the Bermudas. His concern with accuracy is apparent in both his biographical and historical accounts as well as his textual efforts. In his unfinished factual Life of Shakspeare and his documentary Account of the English Stage, he strives to distinguish verifiable facts from received accounts. His textual labours are similarly driven by the desire to separate the authentic Shakespeare from the spurious. He scrutinizes Pericles and the Henry VI plays in order to single out Shakespeare’s hand, cordons off the *apocryphal works of the Third Folio from the canonical, and supplants *Benson’s hybridized 1640 Poems with the Sonnets of the 1609 quarto. The same impulse determines his selection of copy texts for the plays; hoping to bypass the mediations of intervening printers and scholars, he returns to the early *quartos and *Folio and aims at the ideal of reproducing them verbatim. In one notorious instance, his obsession with authenticity led to the whitewashing of Shakespeare’s bust in Stratford, subsequently discovered to have in its original state been painted.
However, determined to return to an unmediated Shakespeare, Malone unquestionably built on the work of the long succession of 18th-century editors which preceded him. At the same time, the basis of the modern textual apparatus is recognizable in his efforts: the establishing of authentic texts, the commitment to factual accuracy, the need for a chronology to co-ordinate his life and his works, and a historical background to differentiate Shakespeare’s times from the present. In addition to the two monumental editions which incorporated his Shakespearian projects, Malone’s legacy to Shakespeare scholarship includes the better part of his extensive library, now at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Margreta de Grazia
Malone Society, a scholarly organization, founded by R. B. *McKerrow in 1896 and named in honour of Edmond *Malone, devoted to the republication (usually in facsimile) of Elizabethan plays and dramatic documents, including many Shakespearian *quartos.
Susan Brock
Malvolio, Olivia’s steward in Twelfth Night, is disproportionately humiliated after disparaging the jester Feste (1.5) and scolding Sir Toby Belch and his companions for their noisy revelry (2.3): he finally leaves the stage with one of the most ominous exit-lines in all comedy, ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you’ (5.1.374).
Malvolio has tended to attract ‘star’ actors more than any other role in Twelfth Night, perhaps unsurprisingly given that he is of central importance to some of Shakespeare’s funniest scenes. A wide range of interpretations have included the old and cold—John Lowe (1939), Ernest Thesiger (1944), Roger Mitchell (1960), Nigel Hawthorne in Trevor *Nunn’s film version (1996)—and the young, oily, and upwardly mobile—John Abbott (1937), Laurence *Olivier (1955). Whether he deserves his punishment, and what we are to make of his intended revenge, has usually worried literary critics more than audiences.
Anne Button
Mamillius is the young son of Leontes and Hermione. His death is announced, The Winter’s Tale 3.2.142–4.
Anne Button
Manningham, John (d. 1622), diarist. A law student at the Inner Temple, Manningham jotted memoranda in a notebook later known as his Diary (1868). In his Hall in February 1602, he watched a performance of Twelfth Night, probably not its first. Then on 13 March he recorded a ribald anecdote. Richard *Burbage, who played Richard III, had a tryst with a lady whom Shakespeare got to first. Already ‘at his game’ when Burbage arrived, Shakespeare sent word that ‘William the Conqueror was before Richard III’. Embellished with new details, the anecdote was first printed in Thomas Wilkes’s A General View of the Stage (1759).
Park Honan
Mansfield, Richard (1854–1907), American actor-manager who was compared to Henry *Irving. His productions were lavish spectacles and his performances were forceful; his Shakespearian successes included Henry V—‘with his panache always in evidence’—Shylock, and Richard III—with ‘a hump like a camel’.
Richard Foulkes
Mantell, R(obert) B(ruce) (1854–1928), Scottish-born actor whose efforts to establish himself in the United States only succeeded when he introduced the robuster tragic and historical Shakespearian roles (Richard III, King John, Shylock, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear) into his repertoire, achieving surprising popularity with audiences more attuned to melodrama.
Richard Foulkes
Mantua, the Italian city, is the scene of parts of The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Romeo’s place of exile in Romeo and Juliet; and in The Taming of the Shrew the Pedant is told ‘’Tis death for anyone in Mantua | To come to Padua’, 4.2.82.
Anne Button
Mantuanus, Baptista Spagnolo (1448–1516), an Italian Carmelite monk, also known as Mantuan, renowned for his pastoral poetry. His Latin eclogues, translated into English in 1514 by George Turberville and published in 1567, were extremely popular in 16th-century England and formed part of many *grammar schools’ curricula. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the pedant Holofernes quotes Mantuan and invokes him by name (4.2.93–9).
Jane Kingsley-Smith
manuscript plays. Although the original manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays have not survived (with the exception of the three pages in the collaborative manuscript play Sir Thomas More), there are a dozen extant dramatic manuscripts from the period that provide information about the ways in which play scripts were prepared for the stage. Of particular interest are the layers of addition, revision, playhouse annotation, and *censorship in the playbook of Thomas *Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (1611), which was performed by the King’s Men when Shakespeare was still an active member of the company, and Philip *Massinger’s autograph copy of Believe as You List (1631), heavily annotated for use as prompt copy by the *bookkeeper for the King’s Men.
Eric Rasmussen
Marcellus is a soldier of the night watch on the battlements at *Elsinore. He sees the *ghost of Hamlet’s father, Hamlet 1.1 and 1.4.
Anne Button
marches in Shakespeare’s plays were accompanied by the *drum (muffled for dead marches), occasionally with the *fife too; a passage in 1 Henry VI 3.7.29–35 suggests that English and French marches each had a distinctive drum rhythm.
Jeremy Barlow
Marcius. For Caius Martius Coriolanus, see Coriolanus. For his son, see Martius, Young.
Mardian, Cleopatra’s eunuch, is sent by her to tell Antony that she has killed herself, 4.14 (and does so, 4.15).
Anne Button
Margaret. (1) Daughter of René Duke of Anjou, she is captured by Suffolk, 1 Henry VI 5.5, and her marriage with King Henry is arranged. In The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI), now Suffolk’s mistress, she quarrels with the Duchess of Gloucester, 1.3, and helps plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death, 3.1. She openly mourns the death of Suffolk, 4.4. In Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) she is one of those who taunt and stab York, 1.4, but by the end of the play is herself defeated and her husband and son murdered (5.5 and 5.6) by Richard of Gloucester. In Richard III she curses all the members of the House of York, especially Richard, 1.3. Shakespeare’s character has little to do with the historical figure of Margaret of Anjou (1430–82). She is his only character to appear in four plays: her most celebrated impersonator was undoubtedly Peggy *Ashcroft in the *RSC’s The Wars of the Roses, 1964. (2) Hero’s gentlewoman is mistaken for Hero by Claudio during her night-time tryst with Borachio, Much Ado About Nothing (described 3.3.138–56).
Anne Button
Margareton (Margarelon; ‘Bastard’ in *speech-prefixes). He is the illegitimate son of Priam. He challenges Thersites, Troilus and Cressida 5.8.
Anne Button
Maria. (1) A lady attending the Princess of France, she is wooed by Longueville in Love’s Labour’s Lost. (2) She is Olivia’s gentlewoman and chief architect of the plot against Malvolio (in gratitude for which Sir Toby Belch marries her).
Anne Button
Mariana. (1) Betrothed to Angelo but rejected by him, she agrees to help Isabella in Measure for Measure. (2) Widow Capilet’s friend in All’s Well That Ends Well 3.5.
Anne Button
Marín, Luis Astrana. See Astrana Marín, Luis.
Marina, daughter of Pericles and Thaisa, is carried away by pirates (Pericles 15) and sold to the proprietors of a brothel (16).
Anne Button
Mariner. He sets Antigonus and baby Perdita on the coast of Bohemia, The Winter’s Tale 3.3.
Anne Button
Markham, Gervase (?1568–1637), writer. Markham is sometimes imagined to be the *‘rival poet’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Raised in Nottinghamshire, he soldiered briefly in the Low Countries, and in 1595 addressed an elegant sonnet to the Earl of Southampton. Later he rose to a captaincy in Ireland under the Earl of *Essex.
Park Honan
Marlovian theory. The notion that some or all of Shakespeare’s plays were in fact written by Christopher *Marlowe, despite his meticulously attested death in May 1593 (mentioned when Phebe quotes from Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in As You Like It 3.5.82–3), was first developed during the heyday of the *Authorship Controversy by a San Francisco lawyer, William Gleason Zeigler, who in 1895 published a bizarre historical novel, It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries. According to Zeigler, Marlowe’s death was only faked, and he lived on in secret until 1598, producing all of Shakespeare’s best plays during these five extra years. Zeigler’s hypothesis (despite the problems involved in redating plays which allude to the Jacobean era to dates of composition between 1593 and 1598) was supported by an obscure Ohio professor, T. C. Mendenhall, who published elaborate numerical graphs of Shakespearian and Marlovian vocabulary in the Popular Science Monthly of December 1901 which made the two playwrights’ work look statistically similar, despite their obvious differences of style. The idea was further taken up in 1931 by Gilbert Slater, whose Seven Shakespeares alleges that the Shakespeare canon was really written by a committee which included Marlowe (supposed to have returned from a simulated death under Shakespeare’s name in 1594), as well as Sir Francis *Bacon, the Earls of *Derby, *Oxford, and *Rutland, Sir Walter *Ralegh, and Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.
These fantasies were understandably ignored, however, until the Marlovian theory was reinvented by a determined Broadway press agent, Calvin Hoffman. In 1955 Hoffman published The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare’, a sufficiently lurid piece of work to have attracted wide press coverage at the time. Based, it claims, on nineteen years of research (which sadly failed to produce any documentary evidence), the book outlines a scenario according to which Sir Francis Walsingham, head of Elizabeth I’s secret service, employed a team of agents to murder a nameless foreign sailor and pass the corpse off as Marlowe’s in 1593, while Marlowe fled to the Continent, avoiding the enemies who had threatened him. Marlowe then allegedly returned undercover to spend the rest of his life in hiding, writing new plays and poems for Walsingham, who, determined that these works should not languish in obscurity, passed them on to an actor called Shakespeare, insisting that he should pass them off as his own. Hoffman explains all this, in so far as he does, by alleging that Walsingham wished to protect Marlowe because he was his homosexual lover, and deduces that Marlowe must have died before 1623, when Walsingham must have covertly sponsored the publication of the First Folio, title page, testimonials, astonishingly plausible attributions to Shakespeare, and all.
Although Hoffman’s theory attracted one or two followers (including a lawyer, Sherwood E. Silliman, who dramatized the theory in The Laurel Bough, 1956, and David Rhys Williams, author of Shakespeare thy Name is Marlowe, 1966), it is now largely forgotten: picturesquely dotty as it is, it has been unable to distract very much intellectual attention from the genuinely fascinating topic of Marlowe’s actual literary influence on Shakespeare.
Michael Dobson
Marlowe, Christopher (1564–93), poet and playwright, one of the most brilliant of early modern English dramatists. The son of a shoemaker, he went to Cambridge on a scholarship, and may have been recruited there as a spy. He is thought to have worked on and off as a government spy for the rest of his life. After graduating he joined the army and went to the Netherlands, where he got involved in counterfeiting money and was sent home in disgrace. In 1589 he was imprisoned after a fight in which a man was killed. Later he joined the group of freethinkers surrounding Sir Walter *Ralegh. In 1593 he was summoned to appear before the Privy Council, accused of heresy, and released on bail while evidence was gathered against him. Some of this evidence survives in the form of the ‘Baines Note’, which vividly lists Marlowe’s ‘damnable opinions’ on religious and sexual matters. While on bail he was stabbed to death in a guesthouse in Deptford, supposedly in a quarrel over a bill, but perhaps for some other reason connected with his espionage activities (one of the men present at his death, Robert Poley, was a government agent). The few details we have of Marlowe’s life make it sound as busy and as full of intrigue as any of his plays.
His first play, Tamburlaine (published 1590), was performed in 1587, and it took the London stage by storm. Its prologue announces Marlowe’s intention to revolutionize English verse, to set it free from the ‘jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits’ and fill it instead with ‘high astounding terms’, and the play triumphantly fulfils this ambitious promise. Its flamboyant use of contemporary rhetorical techniques, its arrogant exploitation of classical myth and Asian geography, and its flagrant disregard for crude moral imperatives set radical new standards for the new generation of Elizabethan playwrights. Marlowe followed Tamburlaine with a series of equally popular and influential exercises in theatrical virtuosity: 2 Tamburlaine (1590), Doctor Faustus (printed 1604), The Jew of Malta (printed 1633), Edward II (printed 1594), and The Massacre at Paris (printed c.1594). Some of these were still being performed and imitated until well into the 17th century.
The Massacre at Paris was probably written with Thomas *Nashe, and Marlowe also collaborated with Nashe in writing the tragicomedy Dido Queen of Carthage (1594). This is closer in tone to *Ovid than to *Virgil, populated with irresponsible gods and self-centred heroes, and opening with a saucy homoerotic love scene. In this play, as in all Marlowe’s works, the classical literary tradition so revered by Elizabethan schoolmasters becomes an inexhaustible repository of scandalous erotic narratives. He drew repeatedly on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a familiar text in schools, but crossed these with Ovid’s controversial Elegies. Marlowe’s fine translations of the latter circulated in manuscript and print throughout the 1590s, and were publicly burned by order of the Church in 1599. His narrative poem Hero and Leander (written c.1592) is his most ebulliently Ovidian text. It takes place in a pagan world where the gods are always interfering with the sexual affairs of mortals, and where mortals struggle to satisfy their own desires against overwhelming odds. Its fusion of myth, eroticism, and satire was hugely influential, both before and after its publication in 1598.
Hero and Leander resembles Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, but nobody knows which came first. The doubt is symptomatic of the relationship between the two writers: this might best be described as a dialogue, in which ideas, plots, and stylistic techniques circulate from Marlowe to Shakespeare and back again up to the moment of Marlowe’s death. Marlowe’s effect on the young Shakespeare was so pervasive that some scholars have attributed parts of Shakespeare’s early plays to Marlowe (and on scholarship’s lunatic fringe, contributors to the *Authorship Controversy have attributed the late ones to him too: see Marlovian theory). The protagonist of Richard III mimics the devious political machinations of Marlowe’s villains, and Richard II looks like an admiring response to Marlowe’s Edward II. Titus Andronicus, with its plot partly based on the Metamorphoses, its shocking transformation of ancient Rome into a ‘wilderness of tigers’, and the control exerted over events by a murderous outsider, Aaron, is one of Shakespeare’s most Marlovian productions. Another is The Merchant of Venice, which like The Jew of Malta uses a Jewish protagonist to probe the moral and economic values of contemporary Christianity. But the transference of material between the playwrights was not all one way. Marlowe probably wrote Edward II in response to the popularity of Shakespeare’s three plays about Henry VI. The Machiavellian villain of Marlowe’s play, Mortimer Junior, may recall Richard III. So too may the Guise in The Massacre at Paris, who orchestrates the genocide of French Protestants for the benefit of an English Protestant audience, just as Shakespeare’s Richard implicates his Elizabethan audience in his jovial demolition of the English social hierarchy. The rivalry between these young contemporaries seems to have been richly fruitful for both.
In Shakespeare’s plays of the later 1590s, imitation of Marlowe gradually gives way to affectionate parody: the description of the sack of Troy in Dido Queen of Carthage parodically recalled by the First Player in Act 2 of Hamlet, Pistol remembering Tamburlaine in 2 Henry IV (2.4.154–8), Phoebe, quoting Hero and Leander in As You Like It (3.5.83–4). This last is Shakespeare’s only clear allusion to a contemporary poet. After about 1600 his references to Marlowe become more oblique. But one thing is certain: without Marlowe’s poems and plays the works of Shakespeare would have been very different.
Robert Maslen
Marlowe, Julia (1866–1950), American actress. Marlowe was famous for playing young heroines, such as Viola (1887, 1907), Rosalind (1889), and Imogen (1893). Her scholarly and intelligent acting bridged Romantic and realistic styles. By 1924, Marlowe had reportedly played more Shakespearian roles than any other actress, many opposite her husband E. H. Sothern.
Bradley Ryner
Marlowe Society. Founded at Cambridge University in 1907 for student productions of neglected Elizabethan drama, the Marlowe, commissioned by the British Council and directed by George *Rylands, broke new ground with its audio *recordings, released on the Argo label between 1958 and 1964, of the Complete Works, unabridged (in Dover Wilson’s *Cambridge edition). A mixture of student and professional actors perform.
Marowitz, Charles (1934–2014), American director, dramatist, and critic; founder of the innovative Open Space theatre company in London. Having worked as assistant to Peter *Brook, from 1965 on he staged a series of radical adaptations and collages of classic, canonical texts, including Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, The Shrew, Measure for Measure, and The Merchant of Venice (collected as The Marowitz Shakespeare, 1978).
Tom Matheson
Marprelate controversy. See Nashe, Thomas; religion.
marriage in Shakespeare’s world was not just a matter for the wedded couple, but was a crucial social institution that situated the married pair in a complex network of relationships to the extended family, the household, and the wider community. In post-Reformation England, there were very few institutions that sustained a life of elective celibacy, and in effect the only alternative to marriage for women was domestic service, essentially a transitional life-stage experience rather than a permanent option. Transitions between the childhood home, domestic service, and marriage shape the plots of several of Shakespeare’s early comedies (e.g. The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice). The cultural prescription and economic necessity of marriage were especially determining of women’s life chances: T.E.’s statement in The Law’s Resolutions of Women’s Rights (1632) that ‘all women are married or to be married’ is exemplified by the expectation that women must be either ‘maid, wife or widow’ that resonates in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well.
Work on marriage and the family in Shakespeare in recent decades has been informed by developments in the social history of these institutions. The immense influence of Lawrence Stone’s magisterial but not uncontroversial book The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977) has given way to more varied explorations of the status of husband and wife, and the nature and quality of the relations between them, as these matters are represented both in prescriptive writing and in Shakespeare’s plays. Such work has constituted one of the key sites in Shakespearian criticism where fundamental questions about what we might expect the relation between drama and social history to be have been posed, though no easily agreed answers have been generated. To take just one example, marriages such as that between Macbeth and his ‘dearest partner of greatness’ (1.5.10) have been adduced as evidence both for the rise of the affective companionate marriage in which both husband and wife understand themselves as embarked on a joint emotional and social enterprise, and equally as an instance of the irreconcilability of the competing demands of heterosexual marriage and the homosocial culture of aristocratic masculinity.
The relation between marriage as a social practice and the aesthetic work it accomplishes in shaping dramatic action and generic form has been much discussed in recent criticism, especially by *feminist scholars who have played a key role in reinvigorating discussions of Shakespearian marriages. Working in and against the structures of New Comedy, the teleology of marriage is what gives the romantic comedies their generic identity, though when the religious and sexual consummation of marriage is deferred beyond the ending of the play, questions can be posed about how far theatrical pleasure and social imperatives are reconcilable (Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure). In the dramas of British history which Shakespeare composed in the 1590s, the purpose of marriage is primarily dynastic, and the theatrical strategies of comedy are borrowed to underpin marriage as political resolution with the pleasures of narrative closure (Richard III, Henry V). Dramas of cuckoldry (or supposed cuckoldry) such as Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale play out an anxiety about female sexuality within marriage which in the comedies of Shakespeare’s contemporaries is linked to the question of property, but in these tragically inflected representations of aristocratic marriage takes on a more psychological cast. Throughout the canon, then, Shakespeare uses a variety of theatrical and generic strategies to explore the dramatic consequences of the often conflicted relations between love, marriage, and other social imperatives.
Kate Chedgzoy
Marshal. He officiates at Simonides’ banquet, Pericles 7.
Anne Button
Marshal, Lord. See Lord Marshal.
Marston, John (?1575–1634), English dramatist who forsook the stage in 1609 to become a priest (at Christchurch Priory in Hampshire). After graduating from Oxford in 1594 Marston joined his father’s law practice at the Middle Temple, where he began to publish satires, at first pseudonymously. His writing for the *children’s companies (beginning with Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge, 1599–1600) may have helped to inspire the discussion of satirical juvenile drama in Hamlet (2.2.337–62): in any event he became involved in the *‘War of the Theatres’ against *Jonson, though they were later reconciled. His other plays include the bitter, tragicomic The Malcontent (printed in 1604), which with its disguised Duke and atmosphere of sexual corruption shares key elements with Measure for Measure; the comedy The Dutch Courtesan (c.1604); and a comedy which takes its title from a Shakespearian subtitle, What You Will (1601–2).
Michael Dobson
Martext, Sir Oliver. He is a clergyman who is prevented by *Jaques from marrying Touchstone and Audrey in the forest, As You Like It 3.3.
Anne Button
Martius. (1) Titus Andronicus. See Quintus. (2) Caius Martius Coriolanus. See Coriolanus.
Martius, Young. He is the young son of Coriolanus. He speaks two lines, Coriolanus 5.3.128–9.
Anne Button
Marx, Karl. See Marxist criticism.
Marxist criticism. By the end of the 20th century Marxism had long ceased to be a unitary political philosophy, having developed over its 150-year history into an extraordinary array of competing theories ranging from the most vulgar or tyranny-abetting economic determinisms to some of the most sophisticated intellectual projects of the 20th century. Marxist criticism of Shakespeare has varied accordingly. All Marxist criticism is characterized by the belief that art and literature are interrelated with the societies which produce them, but further generalization is impossible. The German radical philosopher and social theorist Karl Marx (1818–83) himself was an avid admirer of Shakespeare and quoted him frequently throughout his works, often decoratively, at times more substantively, as in the discussion in his The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 of Timon’s tirade on gold in Timon of Athens (4.3.26–45), in which Marx saw expressed his own ideas on money as an alienated human power destructively ruling over humanity.
Perhaps because of these Marxian precedents, perhaps because Shakespeare was already associated with nationalist resistance against Napoleon in much of Central and Eastern Europe, Shakespeare was a major subject for both theatrical production and literary criticism in the socialist and communist movements of 19th- and 20th-century Europe—and in the last days of Soviet-imposed rule in Eastern Europe, Shakespearian productions were often vehicles of political protest and resistance. Characteristically Shakespeare was a hero for both sides in the major debate of mid-20th-century Marxist literary criticism, championed both by anti-modernist Georg Lukács for his consummate artistic representation of social ‘typicality’ and by pro-modernist Bertolt *Brecht as a predecessor of Brecht’s anti-realist epic theatre.
As Marxism metamorphosed into a variegated component of avant-garde thought in Western Europe after the Second World War and as the radicalizing 1960s spawned theoretically sophisticated literary-critical methodologies not only in Western Europe but in the UK and the USA, new Marxist-inspired work on Shakespeare began to proliferate. There were several individual attempts at explicitly Marxist interpretations of Shakespeare. The German critic Robert Weimann and the American Walter Cohen, to take outstanding examples, each developed unique Marxist contributions to Shakespeare studies. But Marxism was perhaps most influential as a component of broader developments. From the 1980s on Marxism in Shakespeare studies became a part of a larger synthesis including *feminism, postcolonial theory, *psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism more generally, variously referred to as cultural studies, *new historicism, or *cultural materialism. Even while resisting the label ‘Marxist’, both the new historicism chiefly associated with Stephen Greenblatt in the USA and the cultural materialism of Catherine Belsey, Alan Sinfield, Jonathan Dollimore, and many others in the UK incorporate Marxist themes in their emphasis on literature as a product of broad cultural and ideological processes mediating social and political power.
Ironically other elements of Marxist literary theory have provided other themes for some of the most forceful critiques of the new historicism and cultural materialism. Michael Bristol in Carnival and Theater (1985) developed the ideas on carnival of the sui generis Marxist cultural critic Mikhail Bakhtin into a provocative criticism of what he sees as an overemphasis on power in the new historicism, while Jean Howard has incorporated feminism and theories of nationalism into a developing Marxist-influenced synthesis. Graham Holderness, Terence Hawkes, Hugh Grady, and Richard Halpern (among others) have developed Marxist-influenced analyses of Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon, and Terry Eagleton showed the possibilities of combining Marxism and deconstruction in the analysis of Shakespeare.
Hugh Grady
Mary Arden’s House was the name given, until 2000, to a timber-framed farmhouse in Wilmcote, a hamlet in the parish of Aston Cantlow. It was so called on the strength of a tradition (which cannot, however, be traced back beyond the 1790s) that it was owned by Robert Arden, and may therefore have been the home of his daughter Mary until her marriage to John *Shakespeare. In 1891, when the *Shakespeare Birthplace Trust was placed on a legal footing by private Act of Parliament, it was charged with the duty of purchasing ‘as and when the opportunity shall arise…the house at Wilmcote known as the house of Mary Arden his [Shakespeare’s] mother’. This was achieved in 1930, when the property next came up for sale, and, after extensive restoration (including the removal of the early 19th-century stucco) was opened to the public. In 2000, however, the true location of the Arden homestead was identified as the neighbouring Glebe Farm, and the name Mary Arden’s House transferred to it. The former Mary Arden’s House has been re-named Palmer’s, after Adam Palmer, the owner in the 1580s.
Robert Arden, who died in 1556, was a well-to-do husbandman with eight daughters. In 1550, when he made arrangements for the future division of his estates, four were still unmarried. Mary was one of these and she was still single on Robert’s death six years later. By that time, her father had married again, taking as his second wife a widow, Agnes Hill, who had four young children of her own.
Palmer’s, with the exception of the lean-to structure at the rear, dates from the 16th century. The south face, with extensive use of decorative timber, must originally, as now, have been the ‘front’. The biggest difference between the building today and the 16th-century farmhouse is at the eastern end. This bay, with elaborate herring-bone decoration in its gable, was originally a cross wing at least two bays deep. By the 18th century, however, the bay (or bays) at the rear had been demolished, and the lean-to added. The central section of the house, a two-bay hall, was originally open to the roof. To the east was the cross wing. The bay to the west, with cross passage and kitchen, may have been built at the same time, though there is some structural evidence to suggest that it may have been added slightly later.
At the rear of the property is a complex of farm buildings, including, in one range, a dovecote, an open-fronted cowshed and small barn with cider press, together with a stable and large barn now housing a display of farming equipment. These form part of the Shakespeare Countryside Museum which is continued in another complex of farm buildings to the west. This, formerly known as Glebe Farm, has now been identified as the *Ardens’ family residence, a copyhold property, held of the lord of the manor, which Robert Arden bequeathed to his wife Agnes (Mary’s step-mother) and which was recorded as late in her tenure in a 1587 survey. The main part of the farmhouse itself, originally built with an open hall in its central bay, has been dendochronologically dated to 1514. A wing was added to the west end soon afterwards, and this was extended northwards early in the 18th century.
The Ardens’ copyhold title passed from Agnes Arden to her son-in-law, John Fullwood, and then descended in his family until 1662. It was then sold off by the lord of the manor and in 1738 later owners disposed of it to augment the living of the neighbouring parish of Billesley, hence its traditional name, Glebe Farm. A few years later, more lands and buildings were added to this glebe which recent research has further established represent the freehold premises in Wilmcote which had come to John Shakespeare on his marriage to Mary Arden. These John had then mortgaged to his brother-in-law, Edmund Lambert, whose son John kept them in his possession despite legal cases brought against him by the Shakespeares.
The buildings of Glebe Farm were bought by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1968, but it was not until 1978, on the death of the sitting tenant, that occupancy was obtained.
Palmer’s was bequeathed, in 1584, by Adam Palmer to his son Edmund, and has a well-documented history thereafter. Its mistaken attribution as the home of the Arden family can be traced back no earlier than 1794, when it featured in correspondence between Samuel *Ireland and John *Jordan. Jordan also executed the earliest known drawings of the house, though none were published during his lifetime. It was another 80 years or so before uncritical attributions of the property as Mary Arden’s House became a regular feature of tourist guides.
Robert Bearman
Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, a masque written by Francis *Beaumont (perhaps with Francis *Bacon’s assistance) to celebrate the marriage of Princess *Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine in 1613. It was performed in the banqueting hall at Whitehall along with various plays including The Tempest. One of the antimasques was borrowed by Shakespeare and Fletcher for The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
masques were quasi-dramatic entertainments performed at court which combined music and dancing and, especially in their blossoming under *James I, elaborate scenery and spectacle. Masques were often written to celebrate a particular event—a royal birthday or a marriage—and performed by a company made up of professionals and members of the court before a banquet; the culmination being a mass dance joining performers with the audience. Typically the characters of a masque would be classical deities or abstract qualities such as a Virtue and Beauty, contrasted with rustic figures, and the story would represent an archetypal conflict proceeding to resolution. Originally a carnivalesque folk celebration with the traditional themes of inversion and transgression, the courtly form became highly formalized in the Jacobean collaborations of Inigo *Jones and Ben *Jonson. As set-designer Jones emulated the elaborate perspective designs of the Italian Sebastian Serlio which were best seen from a focal point—where the monarch sat—and which used complex machinery to transform the scene as if by magic. To match Jones’s visual effects Jonson wrote poetic dialogue of the highest order.
In 1608 Jonson introduced the innovation of an ‘antimasque’ in which grotesque figures (antics) danced before the main masque, for which reason the word ‘antemasque’ is also sometimes used. Although new to the court masque, the Jonsonian contrast was really a reintroduction of the folk element of inversion. The fullest extant eyewitness account of a masque is by the Venetian chaplain Orazio Busino describing a performance of Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue in 1618, ending with an exhausting communal dance and an unseemly rush for food which sent the glassware crashing to the floor of the Banqueting House.
Gabriel Egan
Massinger, Philip (1583–1640), dramatist. Massinger was born into the gentry—a fact he never forgot—but by about 1613 he was in prison for debt and appealing to the theatre-owner Philip *Henslowe to bail him out. For the next few years he collaborated with John *Fletcher, writing for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men; twelve of these collaborations were published in the first folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays (1647). Some scholars have argued that he, rather than Fletcher, was Shakespeare’s collaborator in The Two Noble Kinsmen and All Is True. After Fletcher’s death Massinger succeeded him as the company’s principal dramatist. His highly critical portrayals of autocratic rulers in plays like The Duke of Milan (1623) and The Maid of Honour (1632), together with his bold choice of topics connected with contemporary politics in, for instance, the lost first version of Believe as You List (1631), have led to a recent resurgence of critical interest in him as a daring exploiter of the theatre’s resources for political ends. Some of his work, such as his fascinating account of conflict and conversion in the Ottoman Empire, The Renegado (1630), suggests that he was sympathetic to Catholicism. His best-known play is a funny and disturbing analysis of 17th-century class warfare, A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1633). It features the courageous, flamboyant, and utterly unscrupulous financier Sir Giles Overreach, a part played with huge success by the great actor-managers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Robert Maslen
Master Gunner of Orléans. The Master Gunner tells his son to watch for the English while he is away from his cannon, 1 Henry VI 1.6. The boy fires it himself and kills Salisbury and Gargrave.
Anne Button
Master Gunner of Orléans’s Son. See Master Gunner of Orléans.
Master of a ship. (1) He and his Mate demand 1,000 crowns ransom each for their prisoners, The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 4.1.16. (2) He tells the Boatswain to ‘Bestir’ at the beginning of The Tempest.
Anne Button
Master of the Revels. The Office of the Revels, overseen by its Master, existed to provide entertainment for the court and the official reason for the existence of Elizabethan playing companies was to meet this need; by public performance the players could maintain a state of perpetual readiness for court performance. In 1581 Edmund *Tilney (Master from 1579 to 1610) was given the patent to license all playbooks for public performance and when George *Buck succeeded to the office in 1610 he brought to it his responsibility (held since 1606) for the licensing of printed plays. Buck was succeeded by John Astley in 1622, who was himself succeeded by Henry Herbert in 1623. Herbert kept the job until the closure of 1642 and his office book is an important source of our knowledge of play licensing and *censorship in the period.
Gabriel Egan
‘master, the swabber, the bosun and I, The’, sung by Stefano in The Tempest 2.2.45. The original melody is unknown, but it very closely fits a 16th-century tune, ‘The Leather Bottel’.
Jeremy Barlow
Mate, Master’s. See Master of a ship.
material culture is a term often used to describe the study of historical objects and the way they inform our understanding of the past. Scholars approaching Shakespeare’s plays from the perspective of material culture have considered, for instance, how the study of early modern jewellery and gift-giving practices enhances our appreciation of the significance of Shylock’s turquoise ring in The Merchant of Venice, or how knowledge of spatial arrangements in early modern households can help us reconstruct the staging of domestic scenes in Othello or The Taming of the Shrew. An important part of material culture studies is often a direct encounter with the historical object itself, and an analysis of not just its appearance but also the experience of its use.
Erin Sullivan
Mathews, Charles James (1803–78), English comic actor, whose métier fell outside the Shakespeare repertoire. He was involved in several managerial enterprises with his wife Madame Vestris, including Covent Garden (1839–42), where Love’s Labour’s Lost (1839) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1840) were notable successes.
Richard Foulkes
Matthews, James Brander (1852–1929), American academic, playwright, and critic, who founded the Theatre Museum at Columbia University. His Shakespeare as a Playwright (1913) brings to bear his own practical and theoretical experience of drama.
Tom Matheson
Mayor of Coventry. He appears with Warwick, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 5.1 (mute).
Anne Button
Mayor of London. (1) He complains about the riotous behaviour of the feuding followers of Gloucester and the Bishop of Winchester, 1 Henry VI 1.3 and 3.1. (2) He is one of Richard’s supporters in Richard III. (3) He is thanked by Henry, All Is True (Henry VIII) 5.4.69–70 (mute part).
Anne Button
Mayor of St Albans. He sends for a beadle to whip Simpcox, The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 2.1.144.
Anne Button
Mayor of York. He reluctantly admits King Edward to the city of York, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI ) 4.8.
Anne Button
measure, a dance term with various meanings: it could signify, according to context, a dance, a specific choreography, a step sequence, or a unit of steps. This ambiguity, combined with the word’s more usual meaning, is exploited by Shakespeare on several occasions, e.g. in Romeo and Juliet 1.4.9–10.
Jeremy Barlow
Measure for Measure See centre section.
medicine. Renaissance medical theory was based on that of ancient Greece. The main authority was still Galen, a writer of the 2nd century ad who had been physician to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Its most important doctrine was that of the four humours. Our bodies were thought to be composed of blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile just as the world at large consisted of earth, air, fire, and water. The underlying principle was the opposition between hot and cold, wet and dry. Blood was hot and moist, yellow bile hot and dry, black bile cold and dry, phlegm cold and moist. Each predominated in turn as one went through the stages of life. Health depended on always keeping the right balance or temperature.
Distemperature was not itself a disease but a prelude to it. When Henry IV complained that ‘rank diseases grew near the heart’ of his kingdom, Warwick reassured him: ‘It is but as a body yet distempered | Which to his former strength may be restored | With good advice and little medicine’ (2 Henry IV 3.1.40–2). A similar progression is described in The Comedy of Errors 5.1.79–87: the husband of a jealous wife is said to get no recreation; this leads to ‘melancholy’ (i.e. black bile); and ‘melancholy’ brings ‘a huge infectious troop of pale distemperatures and foes to life’.
Another cause of disease was bad air due to natural conditions. Caliban’s wish ‘All the infections that the sun sucks up | From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him | By inch-meal a disease’ (The Tempest 2.2.1–3) assumes this miasma theory. But infection or contagion of the air could be caused by people too. ‘Men take diseases, one of another’, said Falstaff, and hoped that a sense of discipline could be caught in the same way (2 Henry IV 5.1.69); Olivia said one might fall in love as quickly as one might catch the *plague (Twelfth Night 1.5.285): the fear of contagion led to plague-sufferers being left alone (The Two Gentlemen of Verona 2.1.19) with an isolation order put on their houses (Romeo and Juliet 5.2.9–11).
In both prevention and cure the physician’s prime concern was to control the balance of the humours. He had various means at his disposal. He could recommend a change of air or of diet, administer a concoction of herbs (perhaps made to his own special recipe and charged at a high price), purge the patient, or, in the case of fever or threatened fever, bleed him.
The justification for bloodletting before the discovery of the circulation of the blood in 1628 by William Harvey was eminently logical. Blood was thought to be the final and most purified form of our food and drink, and to be distributed through the body by the veins. It started in the liver, and had to be used up by the time it got to the furthest parts, like the water in an irrigation channel (hence the remark in Coriolanus 1.1.153 about the ‘great toe’ being ‘the worst in blood’). If there was still any blood over, there could be trouble. The excess might simply erupt in pimples, boils, and the like, but a more serious consequence, blood being hot, could be a fever. The most obvious remedy for this was to stop eating (whence our saying ‘starve a fever’) and so stop blood being produced, but the quicker way, as Biron puts it in Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.3.95–6), was to cut into a vein and let the excess blood out ‘in saucers’.
Less relevant for therapy was the function assigned to the arteries and the nerves. The arteries were thought to contain a refined form of air—‘life-breath’ or ‘vital spirit’—which was pumped through the body by the heart for the purpose of ventilation. Thus the body could be called ‘a confine of blood and breath’ (King John 4.2.247), and at a less serious level it could be argued that too much academic study, ‘universal plodding’, creates dullness because it ‘prisons up | The nimble spirits in the arteries’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.3.301–2).
The nerves were tiny tubes by which sensation passed from the body to the brain and the power of voluntary motion from the brain to the body. The medium of communication was an extremely refined form of air—‘soul-breath’ or ‘animal spirit’—created within the brain, and the brain itself was, according to some, ‘the soul’s frail dwelling-house’ (King John 5.7.3). These words were spoken as the King lay dying, and so at a solemn moment. In another play at a romantic moment Lorenzo explains to Jessica that her appreciation of music is due to her spirits (Merchant of Venice 5.1.70), and goes on to add that the same holds true for animals. Earlier in the play (3.2.63–4) and in a different, lighter, context, the song ‘Tell me where is fancy bred, | Or in the heart or in the head’ alludes to the same question, for though the brain as the seat of thought was orthodox doctrine according to Galen, it was nevertheless possible to follow Aristotle and assign this role to the heart.
Shakespeare’s wide knowledge of medical theory is not displayed pedantically for its own sake. It comes out in the natural conversation of his characters and is for the most part unobtrusive. It can also be surprisingly up to date. The idea that the spirits are the substance of the soul seems to be due to Telesius who published it (in Latin) in 1590. Telesius also, following Argenterius (1565), drew no distinction between the vital and the animal spirits—and Shakespeare, unlike most of his contemporaries, does not distinguish them either. One imagines that he must have learnt of these ideas by talking about them, and that he may therefore have numbered doctors among his friends. At any rate his eventual son-in-law John *Hall was one, and it is noteworthy that, except for Doctor Caius in Merry Wives, who is made fun of for being a Frenchman, doctors are always treated with respect. They are never, as they often have been by poets and satirists, attacked as either mercenary or murderous.
Maurice Pope
Mehl, Dieter (b. 1933), German scholar and critic. One of the most distinguished German Shakespearians of the post-war period, Mehl was president of the *Deutsche Shakespeare–Gesellschafte for almost a decade (1993–2002). His doctoral thesis examined the *dumb show in Renaissance drama, and as well as writing extensively on Shakespeare’s stagecraft, poetry, and reception he has published on *Chaucer and on D. H. Lawrence and translated Dickens.
Michael Dobson
meiosis, a figure of speech that belittles what it describes; or an understatement.
Landlord of England art thou now, not king
(Richard II 2.1.113)
Chris Baldick
Melun, Count. Mortally wounded, he warns the English lords that Louis the Dauphin will betray them, King John 5.4.
Anne Button
Melville, Herman (1819–91), American novelist. Melville himself hoped that Nathaniel Hawthorne would emulate Shakespeare’s achievement for America, but most critics feel that Melville’s own epic-tragedy Moby-Dick (1851) comes nearest to fulfilling that function, Captain Ahab evoking King Lear, and Pip the Fool (see Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 1947). Melville was always drawn to Shakespeare’s tragic vision, his power of darkness, his capacity for invoking savage nature, and several versions of Iago (Jackson in Redburn, 1849; Babo in Benito Cereno, 1855; and Claggart in Billy Budd, 1924) surface throughout his work.
Tom Matheson
memorial reconstruction. See reported text.
Menander. See Greek drama; Plautus; Terence.
Menas. He tries to persuade Pompey to kidnap Antony and Caesar at the banquet on his galley, Antony and Cleopatra 2.7.
Anne Button
Mendelssohn, Felix (1809–47), German composer. Mendelssohn’s tremendously popular, and substantial, music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61, received its first public performance in Berlin in 1843 (although the overture, Op. 21, had already been written in 1826) and was soon adopted on the British stage. The music contains the famous Wedding March.
Irena Cholij
Mendes, Sam (b. 1965), English director. Mendes began directing as a student at Cambridge, before starting his professional career at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1980s. Here he directed Simon *Russell Beale as Ariel, as Richard III (in a brilliant production at the *Other Place) and as Thersites in a notable Troilus and Cressida (with Ralph *Fiennes and Amanda Root in the title roles). Excelling in studio productions, Mendes became artistic director of the small Donmar Warehouse in London, where he directed Russell Beale as Malvolio in an award-winning Twelfth Night (2002). With the Oscar-winning success of American Beauty (1999) on his CV, Mendes then left Britain to concentrate on film-making in the United States, but he combined his commitments to live Shakespeare and to the transatlantic ‘special relationship’ when he set up the Bridge Project in 2009, a touring company composed of both British and American actors. With successive incarnations of this troupe Mendes directed The Winter’s Tale (with Russell Beale as Leontes, 2009), The Tempest and As You Like It (2010), and Richard III (with Kevin *Spacey, 2011). In 2014 he reunited with Russell Beale to direct him in the title role in King Lear at the National.
Michael Dobson
Menecrates comments on the will of the gods, Antony and Cleopatra 2.1.
Anne Button
Menelaus is the husband of Helen and brother of Agamemnon in Troilus and Cressida, based on the character of the same name who plays a more prominent part in *Homer’s Iliad.
Anne Button
Menenius Agrippa, Coriolanus’ friend, vainly attempts to dissuade him from attacking Rome, Coriolanus 5.2.
Anne Button
Menteith is a Scottish thane who first appears with the other thanes who are to join Malcolm and the English forces against Macbeth, Macbeth 5.2.
Anne Button
Mercadé brings the Princess of France the news of her father’s death, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.711–13.
Anne Button
Merchant of Venice, The See centre section.
merchants. (1) A merchant of Ephesus gives Antipholus of Syracuse helpful advice, The Comedy of Errors 1.2. (2) A second merchant is owed money by Angelo, The Comedy of Errors 4.1. (3) A merchant appears in the first scene of Timon of Athens and is cursed by Apemantus.
Anne Button
Merchant Taylors’ School, originally located in Suffolk Lane in the *City of London, was founded in 1561 by Richard *Mulcaster, under whom it became a hotbed of educational drama. Plays acted at court by Merchant Taylors’ boys include Ariodante and Genevra (1583), a possible source for Much Ado About Nothing. The school’s alumni include Edmund *Spenser.
Simon Blatherwick
Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet, accompanies Romeo to the Capulet masque, and talks among other things of ‘Queen Mab’ in one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches (1.4.55–95). He vainly attempts to summon Romeo by teasing him about Rosaline before he and Benvolio leave the masque without him (2.1). The next morning he indulges in elaborate word games with Romeo and is with him when he encounters the Nurse (2.3). In 3.1 he fights with Tybalt and is mortally wounded when Romeo tries to stop them, in revenge for which Romeo kills Tybalt.
In many ways Mercutio is a parallel figure to Romeo, the complexity, lyricism, and imagination of his language balancing Romeo’s. Actors have sometimes exchanged the two roles, as did John *Gielgud and Laurence *Olivier in 1935. When Mercutio is killed the tone of the play changes, losing some of its romantic energy as the tragedy gathers pace. In the 19th century he was seen as a ‘mercurial and spirited’ young gentleman (*Hazlitt, 1817) but more recent productions have seen a darker side to his character, as does *Zeffirelli’s film version (1968) in which John McEnery as Mercutio is intellectual, macabre, and perhaps a little mad.
Anne Button
Meres, Francis (1565–1647), critic and clergyman. Born in Lincolnshire, Meres entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he took his BA. He later claimed to be ‘Master of Arts of both Universities’. Before moving to a Rutland parish, he lived in London where in 1597 and 1598 he met literary men and prepared his uniquely informative Palladis Tamia. Wit’s Treasury. Being the Second Part of Wit’s Commonwealth, registered on 7 September 1598 and published late that year. Though full of similitudes and routine panegyrics, the book is valuable for its lack of originality and reflection of current views. Importantly, Meres refers to Shakespeare’s ‘sugared Sonnets among his private friends’; possibly these are not surviving poems, but it is clear that some Shakespeare sonnets circulated by September 1598. Even more usefully, we learn about dramas which existed by that date, although Meres’s list is not exhaustive and is meant to point up Shakespeare’s double superiority in the theatre’s two main genres. For ‘Comedy’, Meres cites The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Love’s Labour’s Won, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merchant of Venice. For ‘Tragedy’, he mentions Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet. Unless it is an alternative name for an existing comedy *Love’s Labour’s Won refers to a missing play, and Meres, evidently, was not mistaken to list that title.
Park Honan
Merke, Thomas. See Carlisle, Bishop of.
Mermaid Tavern, a tavern in Bread Street, London, in which, according to Thomas *Coryat, writing in 1615, aristocrats and intellectuals assembled on the first Friday of each month during the early years of the 17th century for convivial conversation. A verse letter of uncertain date and authorship, often ascribed to *Beaumont, addressed from the country to *Jonson, speaks nostalgically of the ‘full mermaid wine’ and the ‘things’ done and spoken thereWords that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that everyone from whom they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.
Stanley Wells
Merry Devil of Edmonton, The. A popular comedy, dated c. 1602–3, possibly written by *Dekker or *Drayton. It was attributed to Shakespeare by Humphrey *Moseley in 1653 and then included in ‘Shakespeare Volume I’ in Charles II’s library: see apocrypha.
Sonia Massai
Merry Wives of Windsor, The See centre section.
Messala brings Brutus and Cassius the news that the triumvirate have executed many senators, including Cicero, Julius Caesar 4.2, but is himself reconciled with Octavius Caesar and Antony, 5.5. He is based on M. Valerius Messalla, who fought on the republican side at Philippi but later became one of Augustus Caesar’s generals.
Anne Button
messengers. There are many unnamed messengers in Shakespeare’s plays, some of whom occasion very dramatic or significant moments (1) A messenger appears ‘with two heads and a hand’, Titus Andronicus 3.1.232, to tell Titus his voluntary mutilation has been pointless. (2) A messenger announces the approach of Don Pedro, Claudio, and Benedick, giving Beatrice the opportunity to make sarcastic remarks about Benedick, Much Ado About Nothing 1.1. (3) A messenger tells an incredulous Macbeth that Birnam wood is moving, Macbeth 5.5.
Anne Button
metaphor, the most imaginatively powerful of rhetorical figures, in which one thing, idea, or action, is referred to by the name of another, and thus some quality shared by the two terms is assumed without being specified: ‘the bubble reputation’ (As You Like It 2.7.152).
Chris Baldick
Metellus Cimber is one of the conspirators in Julius Caesar, based on L. Tillius Cimber.
Anne Button
metonymy, a figure of speech that substitutes for the thing meant some quality or property associated with it. Most commonly a quality, in the form of an adjective, stands in place of the noun: ‘a flagon of Rhenish’, i.e. of wine (Hamlet 5.1.175), ‘the quick and dead’, i.e. people (ibid. 247).
Chris Baldick
metre, the pattern of measured syllables recurring in lines of verse. In English, this refers to the expected number of stressed syllables in a line (usually four or five), and often also to the total number of syllables in the line (usually eight or ten). The predominant metre of Shakespeare’s work is iambic pentameter, i.e. normally a line of ten syllables, alternately unstressed and stressed, but with many variants. See blank verse: also alexandrine; anapaest; anaptyxis; brokenbacked line; caesura; caesura, epic; couplet; dactyl; dimeter; elision; end-stopped; enjambment; feminine endings; foot; headless line; heroic couplets; iambic; long lines; pentameter; Pyrrhic foot; short lines; spondee; squinting line; synaeresis; syncope; tetrameter; trimeter; trochee; weak ending.
Chris Baldick/George T. Wright
metrical tests. Scholars have long assumed that Shakespeare had characteristic metrical habits, which can be used to distinguish his work from that of his contemporaries, and that those habits changed over time, such that statistical analyses of metrical irregularities may be of use in determining the order in which the plays were composed. Attempts to establish the authenticity and chronology of Shakespeare’s works by means of metrical tests began in 1857 with the publication of Charles Bathurst’s Remarks on the Differences in Shakespeare’s Versification. In founding the New Shakespeare Society in 1873, F. J. *Furnivall stated that ascertaining the order of the plays by metrical tests would be one of the society’s principal objectives. A year later, F. G. Fleay tabulated the total number of lines of blank verse, rhymed verse, and prose in each play, along with short and long lines, and lines with redundant syllables. Fleay’s tables became the standard guide used by the ‘distintegrators’ to reject suspect plays and passages as non-Shakespearian. In 1930 E. K. Chambers pointed out many inaccuracies in Fleay’s tables, cited the deficiencies of verse-tests conducted by other investigators, and concluded that ‘in view of all the uncertainties attaching to the metrical tests, I do not believe that any one of them or any combination of them can be taken as authoritative in determining the succession of plays’.
In the wake of Chambers’s critique, scholars have approached metrical tests with some caution. A ‘metrical index’ developed by Karl Wentersdorf and further refined by MacD. P. Jackson and others attempts to be comprehensive in charting a multitude of changes in the features that together make up Shakespeare’s blank verse style (including *feminine endings, *alexandrines, variations in stress in iambic pentameter lines, extra mid-line syllables, extra syllables, and overflows) that may have application to questions of chronology and authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.
Eric Rasmussen
Mexico. See Latin America.
Michael is a follower of Cade, The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 4.2. His lines announcing the approach of the Staffords are given to a messenger in the Oxford edition.
Anne Button
Michael, Sir. He takes letters from the Archbishop of York, and reassures him about their military action, 1 Henry IV 4.4.
Anne Button
Middle Temple. See Inns of Court; Manningham, John; Twelfth Night.
Middleton, Thomas (1580–1627), playwright, poet, and pamphleteer. His father was a prosperous bricklayer, wealthy enough to send him to Oxford. Before 1600 he wrote poetry, including a set of satires, Micro-Cynicon (1599), and an imitation of Shakespeare, The Ghost of Lucrece (1600). By 1601 he was ‘accompanying the players’ in London. He collaborated with *Webster and others on a lost play for the Admiral’s Men in 1602, but a year later the plague closed the theatres and he started writing pamphlets, among them the flashy urban satire The Black Book (1604). Throughout his career he collaborated often, on pamphlets, on plays, and on the many pageants he devised for the City of London. His most frequent collaborator was Thomas *Dekker, but he also worked with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens (published 1623). The title pages of two more of his plays—The Puritan (1607) and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608)—claim (improbably enough) that Shakespeare wrote them, but there is a much better case for believing that Middleton revised Shakespeare’s Macbeth, since it incorporates two songs from his tragicomedy The Witch (not published until 1778). In the mid-1600s Shakespeare was the principal dramatist for the King’s Men and Middleton his anonymous assistant; but it would not be long before Middleton was presenting the company with some of its most remarkable successes.
From 1604 to 1606 Middleton wrote, on his own, a series of plays for a children’s company, the Paul’s Boys. These include three scintillating city comedies: Michaelmas Term (1607), A Mad World my Masters (1608), and A Trick to Catch the Old One (1608), all modelled on the cunningly plotted comedies of Terence. Then in about 1606 he wrote his first great tragedy for the King’s Men, The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), often attributed to Cyril Tourneur. The revenger of the title first appears clutching a skull, in a pastiche of the graveyard scene from Hamlet, but he soon becomes absorbed—linguistically, morally, and through the disguises he adopts—into the degenerate world of the aristocracy on whom he has sworn vengeance. This is one of the hallmarks of Middleton’s drama: characters who strive to set themselves apart from the social classes or values they despise find themselves inextricably enmeshed in them. His best comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (printed in 1630), revolves around the interdependence between a decayed aristocracy and the emergent middle classes, to whom the aristocrats turn for the sexual and economic regeneration of their family fortunes. A similar blurring of social and moral borderlines occurs in his two great tragedies, The Changeling (printed 1653), written with William Rowley, and Women Beware Women (printed 1657). In the former, a governor’s daughter falls in love with a merchant, for whose sake she has her fiancé killed, then becomes sexually entangled with the gentleman she hired to do the killing. The play derives much of its intensity from her desperate efforts to convince herself that her values remain unchanged as she changes partners. In Women Beware Women the wife of a mercantile husband—a nobleman’s factor or business agent—grows weary of her confinement in his house and has an affair with a duke, to which her husband retaliates by having an affair with a noble widow. In all three of these last-mentioned plays, young women are the ultimate victims of what Middleton depicts as a general tendency to substitute commercial values for other methods of measuring human worth. Women are exchanged between men as expensive luxury commodities, and struggle to gain a measure of control over the various sexual transactions in which they are caught up. They invariably die in the attempt; even Moll, the heroine of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, goes through a mock death and funeral before her sufferings can achieve a comic resolution.
Middleton’s biggest contemporary success was the satirical comedy A Game at Chess (1625), an attack on *James I’s negotiations for a Spanish marriage alliance, which had the first long run in theatrical history (9 days) before being suppressed by the authorities. Otherwise he was apparently not much admired in his own lifetime. But his reputation rose to unprecedented heights in the 20th century. One reason for this is the skill with which he represents the responses of Jacobean city-dwellers—especially women—to the pressures exerted on them by their urban environment. Another is the astonishing metaphorical and thematic unity of his plays, and the ingenuity of their plotting. The new edition of his complete works by Oxford University Press should confirm his status as one of the greatest dramatists in the English language.
Robert Maslen
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A See centre section.
Milan, the main city of Lombardy, is mentioned in The Tempest (Prospero is the ‘rightful’ Duke of Milan) and is the scene of parts of The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Anne Button
Milan, Duke of. (1) Father of Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, he finally agrees to her marriage with Valentine, 5.4. (2) For Prospero, see Tempest, The. (3) The Tempest. See Antonio.
Anne Button
Milford Haven, on the coast of Pembrokeshire, was the landing place of *Richmond in August 1485 before he defeated Richard III at *Bosworth. Pisanio is instructed to kill Innogen there, Cymbeline 3.4.28.
Anne Button
Milhaud, Darius (1892–1974), French composer. In 1936–7 he composed incidental music for Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet (both performed in Paris) and for Macbeth (Old Vic theatre, London). He also wrote incidental music for a parody of Hamlet (Paris, 1939) and C.-A. Puget’s adaptation of The Winter’s Tale (Paris, 1950).
Irena Cholij
Miller, Jonathan (b. 1934), British stage and television director and cultural critic. Formerly a doctor, he remains fascinated by neurology and the workings of the mind. He entered professional theatre in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe (1961). He has an international reputation as a director, especially of opera. His Shakespearian productions always express a view of the play, whether in early work with Oxbridge amateurs (Julius Caesar set in a de Chirico forum, a Renaissance Hamlet) or his work at the National Theatre (Measure for Measure set in Freud’s Vienna, The Merchant of Venice with Laurence *Olivier as Shylock in a social setting redolent of Henry James). In 1980–1 he reinvigorated the hitherto stuffy BBC Shakespeare Television Series, producing thirteen and directing six of the plays. He twice directed The Tempest as a myth of colonialism, and he brought out the Oedipal conflicts in Hamlet by staging it alongside *Ibsen’s Ghosts and *Chekhov’s The Seagull. His adventurous seasons at the *Old Vic (which included Eric Porter in King Lear) were abruptly terminated in 1990 by the theatre’s owners.
Michael Jamieson
Millington, Thomas. See printing and publishing.
Milton, John (1608–74), political pamphleteer, Latin secretary to the Council of State under Cromwell, and the greatest poet of the 17th century. His first published work was the sonnet ‘On Shakespeare’, included without attribution among the commendatory verses in the Second *Folio (1632). It appeared definitively as Milton’s only in the 1673 Poems, where it is dated 1630. In it, the 22-year-old Milton credits Shakespeare with ‘easy numbers’ and ‘delphic lines’. A year later, in ‘L’Allegro’, the delphic element had disappeared, and Milton’s cheerful man heard ‘Sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child | Warble his native woodnotes wild’. The many echoes of Shakespeare in the Masque…at Ludlow (Comus, 1634), however, reveal a much broader appreciation of the complexity and depth of Shakespearian verse—Comus greets the Lady with the words of Ferdinand greeting Miranda, and his seductive arguments speak a language learned as much from Angelo, Othello, and Cleopatra as from Oberon. Shakespeare is implicitly invoked in the prefatory note on the verse of Paradise Lost to justify the absence of rhyme; and the earliest sketch for the epic (according to Milton’s nephew Edward Philips), Satan’s monologue at the opening of book 4, is deeply indebted to Macbeth, as is the figure of Satan generally. In Eikonoklastes (1649) Milton cites as the prototype of the hypocritical *Charles I Shakespeare’s Richard III. The tragic models recalled in the preface to Samson Agonistes are exclusively classical, but King Lear and Coriolanus resonate throughout the work. If, as Milton told *Dryden, ‘Spenser was his original’, so, even more profoundly, was Shakespeare.
Stephen Orgel
Minola, Baptista. See Baptista Minola.
miracle plays, a form of drama based on biblical texts, popular in England from the 14th century until the late 16th century when the government took active measures to prohibit it. The miracle plays derive from the introit plays of c. 950–1250, part of the liturgy of the Catholic Church, performed at the festivals of Easter and Christmas. Gradually, the plays moved outside the church, laymen joined the cast, and Latin was replaced by the vernacular. What had initially been single scenes became a series or cycle of plays under the control of local guilds rather than the Church, of which the most famous examples are the York, Towneley (Wakefield), Chester, and Coventry cycles. In the 14th century, the most popular occasion for these performances was the feast of Corpus Christi so that ‘Corpus Christi cycles’ became a generic term. References to such popular figures of miracle plays as Herod can be found in many 16th- and 17th-century plays including those of Shakespeare.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, witnesses the wreck of Alonso’s ship; listens eagerly to Prospero’s account of his life; and meets Ferdinand with whom she falls in love, The Tempest 1.2. Her match with Ferdinand is accepted by the end of the play by their reconciled fathers.
Miranda’s upbringing was sufficiently fascinating to *Dryden and *Davenant for them to create other versions of her, a sister Dorinda and a man who has never seen a woman before, Hippolito, in their 1667 *adaptation of the play The Tempest; or, The Enchanted Island. Miranda’s ignorance of social and sexual mores remained appealing to many of Shakespeare’s admirers through to the 19th century and beyond. Coleridge, for example, thought Miranda Shakespeare’s ‘favourite character’ and greatly admired ‘the exquisite feelings of a female brought up in a desert, yet with all the advantages of education, all that could be given by a wise, learned, and affectionate father’ (1811–12). However, as Stephen Orgel has argued in his Oxford edition of The Tempest (1987), precise attention to Miranda’s lines reveals a much more troubling version of her as an individual and in relation to her father than many stagings of the play have dared to suggest.
Anne Button
Mirren, Helen (b. 1945), English actress. After training with Michael Croft’s National Youth Theatre, Mirren played Cleopatra at the Old Vic in Croft’s Antony and Cleopatra (1965). Cleopatra, a role she reprised with the *Royal Shakespeare Company in Adrian *Noble’s acclaimed production (1982) and again at the *National Theatre (opposite Alan Rickman in a critically disastrous revival in 1998), is typical of the powerful, seductive characters Mirren excels at playing. In 1967, she joined the RSC, where her roles included Hero (1968), Cressida (1969), Lady Macbeth (1974), and Queen Margaret in the Henry VI plays (1977). Drawn increasingly to film and *television, she can be seen in the BBC Shakespeare series as Rosalind (1978), Titania (1981), and Imogen (1982). In 2011 she played ‘Prospera’ in Julie *Taymor’s film adaptation of The Tempest.
Bradley Ryner
Mirror for Magistrates, The, a collection of verse biographies of famous historical figures published by William Baldwin in 1559 and 1563. The first Mirror contained nineteen lives, all written from the perspective of the dead subject who lamented his downfall, usually attributing it to some crime or fault that brought retribution upon him. After Baldwin’s death, John Higgins continued the work, publishing in 1574 and 1587 The First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates, which contained new lives plundered from ancient British history. Thomas Blenerhasset’s Second Part (1578) covered the period from Caesar’s invasion of Britain to the Norman Conquest. Clearly, Baldwin had come up with a winning formula, a kind of history that emphasized the divine nature of royal authority and the nemesis incurred if this authority were violated. In his dedication to the 1559 edition, he presented the work as ‘a mirror for all men as well noble as others’ to see the ‘slippery deceits’ of Fortune and the ‘due reward for all kinds of vices’. Shakespeare’s debt to the Mirror is apparent in the plots and characters of many of his English history plays as well as in King Lear and Cymbeline. The suicide of Cordila in Higgins’s poem may have influenced the ending of King Lear. For the scene of Clarence’s murder in Richard III, Shakespeare borrowed details and a gruesome joke from Clarence’s tragedy in the Mirror.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
mislineation. Blank verse is sometimes mislined, wrongly divided, or set as prose in the early printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays. Mislineation may indicate that scribal transcripts were being used as printers’ copy, but in many instances the compositors may have departed from their copy and intentionally set verse as prose in order to conserve space and cover up errors in casting off.
Eric Rasmussen
misprints. Mistakes in the printing of Shakespeare’s early texts can be attributed to a wide variety of factors, including compositors misreading their manuscript copy (especially when setting from Shakespeare’s original *foul papers), working from a *foul case, or accidentally setting a piece of type upside down (such that ‘you’ reads ‘yon’).
Eric Rasmussen
Mnouchkine, Ariane (b. 1939), French visionary founder and director of the Théâtre du Soleil since 1964 (now based in La Cartoucherie de Vincennes, a former cartridge warehouse near Paris). Mnouchkine promotes a radical, political theatre which favours collective training, improvisation, and grand visual effects: pet projects have included plays on the French Revolution, sequences of Oriental history and classical drama, and a long-term collaboration with the feminist playwright and theorist Hélène Cixous. Mnouchkine first came to Shakespeare in the early 1960s as associate director on an English student production of Coriolanus. Her A Midsummer Night’s Dream, translated by her fellow actor Léotard, was played on a circus-ring covered with furs (1968, Cirque de Montmartre, and London), conveying a dreamlike, sensuous animality. Her widely acclaimed but controversial Shakespeare cycle (1981–4) consisted of three plays (out of the twelve originally planned) given in her own versions: Richard II (1981), Twelfth Night (1982), and 1 Henry IV (1984). These productions transposed Elizabethan codes of honour into the aesthetics of Japanese Kabuki theatre and Indian Kathakali (though their red-nosed clowns came from the *commedia dell’arte tradition). Although sometimes accused of cynically plundering other cultures for spuriously exotic effects (a criticism similarly levelled at the later work of Peter *Brook, with whom Mnouchkine is often compared), Mnouchkine’s productions have exerted a visible influence on directors of Shakespeare throughout the West. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Le Théâtre du Soleil, Mnouchkine returned to Shakespeare with Macbeth (2014) as an exploration of the irreversibility of evil.
Ariane Mnouchkine rehearsing her production of Twelfth Night, Festival d’Avignon, 1982.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
Mock-Tempest, The. See burlesques and travesties of Shakespeare’s plays; Duffett, Thomas.
Modenessi Michel, Alfredo (b. 1958), Mexican professor of English Literature and translator. He has translated and adapted over 40 plays for the theatre, mainly English, including Arden of Faversham, Marlowe’s Edward II, and 14 by Shakespeare, of which four are for Ángel-Luis *Pujante’s Spanish edition of the complete plays. He is the author of four books and a large number of papers, mainly on Shakespearian translation, Shakespeare in the theatre and the cinema, and Shakespeare’s reception in Mexico and Latin America.
Luis Pujante
modern dress, the use of contemporary costumes for classic plays. The Elizabethans had loose ideas about earlier periods and were not conscious of anachronisms, as evidenced by the Peacham drawing of Titus Andronicus (in the *Longleat manuscript) which shows Roman togas and 16th-century garb together. It was common in the 17th and 18th centuries to dress actresses in gowns with a contemporary cut, but the self-conscious use of modern clothing became possible only after the historically minded productions of the 19th century, like those of Charles *Kean, where efforts were made to set the plays in precisely rendered periods. Like the Elizabethan-dress Shakespeare of William *Poel, these productions tried to erase all evidence of the present moment. The first major use of modern dress for Shakespeare in the 20th century was in a production of Hamlet by Max *Reinhardt in Berlin in 1920. In England the movement is associated with Barry *Jackson, who began with Cymbeline at the Birmingham Rep in 1923 and caused a sensation with Hamlet in London in 1925. Directed by H. K. Ayliff, the production used short skirts and fashionable ‘bobbed’ hairdos for the women, cigarettes, cocktails, syncopated dance music, and plus fours for Hamlet. Macbeth in 1928 set the action in the First World War. It has since become common to dress the plays in modern attire, sometimes to pull the action away from any specific period, more often to indicate a direct parallel with a present circumstance. A parallel movement has preferred to set the plays in identifiable periods between Shakespeare’s and the present (Hamlet in Napoleonic dress, for example), while productions with a postmodern bias have often used eclectic or historically mixed costumes. The advantages of modern dress are many, but contemporary dress in English-speaking performances comes at the price of a conflict between the archaism of the language and the modernity of the clothes.
Dennis Kennedy
modernist criticism. Modernism was an international movement in the arts and literature characterized by radical experiments with aesthetic time and space and a revolt against 19th-century realism. With roots in 19th-century French Symbolism, modernism established itself in English-speaking cultures around 1910 and was the dominant aesthetic until the rise of postmodernism (seen by some as a continuation of modernism, however) late in the 20th century. Both international Shakespeare theatrical productions and English literary studies were markedly influenced by new modernist currents as the century developed, and in Shakespeare studies the shift from 19th-century preoccupations with character and plot to 20th-century emphases on myth, poetic images, and symbols was clearly related to the new modernist literary techniques and themes of James *Joyce, T. S. *Eliot, Virginia *Woolf, and William Faulkner. T. S. Eliot was a pivotal figure in this movement, and works of G. Wilson *Knight, the American New Critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman, the British Scrutiny critics F. R. *Leavis, L. C. *Knights, and Derek Traversi, and historicists E. M. W. *Tillyard and followers can all be characterized as instances of modernist criticism displaying the influence of modernist aesthetics.
Hugh Grady
Modern Receipt, The. John Carrington’s polite *adaptation of As You Like It, subtitled A Cure for Love and printed at its author’s expense in 1739, is heavily influenced by Charles Johnson’s *Love in a Forest (1723) but shows considerably less enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s original play. It was never intended to be performed, and probably never will be.
Michael Dobson
Modjeska, Helena (1840–1909), Polish actress who based her international career on a substantially Shakespearian repertoire (sixteen roles), initially performing in Polish or English. Perceptive and sensitive, her interpretations were overwhelmingly sympathetic, from her mercurial and intelligent Rosalind to her exonerative Lady Macbeth.
Richard Foulkes
Mohun, Michael (?1616–84), trained as a boy actor by Christopher *Beeston. He may have performed for Prince Charles (Charles II) at Antwerp. At the Restoration he worked for the King’s Company in secondary roles including Edgar, Cassius, and Iago.
Catherine Alexander
Moiseiwitsch, Tanya (1914–2003), British designer associated with the open stage movement. With Tyrone *Guthrie she designed the stage of the Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario in 1953. Her work was characterized by simple settings and costumes that accented character rather than period, often relying on portable banners and hangings to establish place and mood. For Richard III, the inaugural production in Ontario, she used large, ritualistic costumes; a modern dress All’s Well That Ends Well in the same season, however, was restrained, cool, and elegant.
Dennis Kennedy
Molyneux, Emerie (fl. c. 1590–1600), cartographer whose map of the world, the ‘Hydrographical Description’, published in 1598–9, is mentioned in Twelfth Night (3.2.74–5). Shakespeare may have come across it in his reading of *Hakluyt’s Navigations.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Monarcho (fl. c. 1570–90), a delusional Italian who entertained the Elizabethan court with his fantasies. His name became a byword for foolery or lunacy and is mentioned in Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.1.98) and All’s Well That Ends Well (1.1.106).
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Monck, Nugent (1878–1958), British director. A professional who had assisted William *Poel, he preferred working with amateurs and in 1911 founded the Norwich Players. For 40 years, first in an old inn and later at the Maddermarket theatre, which approximated to an Elizabethan playhouse, he staged some 300 plays including all of Shakespeare’s. His productions were admired for their pace and, on occasion, for their pageantry and crowd scenes. At Stratford-upon-Avon in 1946 he directed Cymbeline and in 1947 Pericles (minus its first act). Monck is a character in David Holbrook’s novel A Play of Passion (1978).
Michael Jamieson
money. The ‘universal equivalent’ of all other commodities, money in Shakespeare is important from many perspectives. These include the dramaturgical, in which money is passed from hand to hand—perhaps most typically in the form of purses, as stage properties—signifying much about the personal and social relations of the playworld in question; the moralistic, in which acquisitiveness, possessiveness, and liberality may be alternately decried or praised; the thematic, in which such topics as husbandry and usury figure importantly in works like the Sonnets and The Merchant of Venice, among many others; and the linguistic, in which, for example, puns and other wordplay are made on such irresistible denominations as the ‘crown’, ‘angel’, ‘cross’, and ‘dollar’.
Shakespeare uses a variety of monetary designations, including, where appropriate, terms for classical and foreign currency. Among the coins circulating in England mentioned by Shakespeare (real money at this time consisted wholly of coins, and not paper notes), those listed below are among the more important. They are listed in escalating order of value with the common abbreviation supplied.
The penny (1d.) was a silver coin for which the word ‘pence’ is the collective plural. The silver farthing was worth a quarter of a penny. A halfpenny was of course half a penny; a groat was worth fourpence (4d.); and a sixpence (popularly called a ‘tester’) was worth six pennies, or 6d. The shilling (s.) was a silver coin worth twelvepence (12d.). The crown was originally a gold coin worth five shillings (5s.), but later was minted in silver (as was the half-crown); it is the coin that Shakespeare most often uses to indicate large sums of money. The angel was a gold coin worth ten shillings (10s.). The ryal or rose noble was a gold coin worth fifteen shillings (15s.). A gold farthing (farthing noble) was worth a quarter of a noble. The sovereign was a gold coin valued at one pound sterling (20s. or £1). In addition to these English coins, a wide variety of foreign coins regularly circulated in England, among which were the French crown (valued around 6s.), the Dutch florin (a gold coin of two denominations, worth 2s. and 3s. 3d., respectively), the Spanish ducat (worth approximately 6s. 4d.), and the crusado (cruzado), a Portuguese coin stamped with a cross (its value is estimated variously, between 2s. and 10s.). Also notable is Shakespeare’s use of insignificant denominations like the ‘doit’ and ‘denier’ in expressions of contempt.
It should be noted that the coinage was often debased (lowered in value through the admixture of alloy) and strategically revalued. The preceding values are implied only for Shakespeare’s lifetime; even during this time, some of these coins would draw alternative evaluation, owing to the introduction of foreign money and the competition between coinage of various metals (as was the case, for instance, with the silver farthing and the copper farthing minted by Lord Harington in 1613), and even between various weights of the same metal. For this reason, coins in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are often identified with the monarch under whom they were minted.
Although Shakespeare’s characters often refer to precise sums of money, the fact that they frequently do so in numbers rounded to the hundreds, thousands, and even hundreds of thousands suggests that we are to take these sums as only general markers of value. And while it is tempting to seek the modern-day equivalence of various sums mentioned both in the plays and in documents surrounding Shakespeare’s life and career, this can be a frustrating task. One of the most difficult, and dangerous, of scholarly endeavours is the attempted conversion of currency valuations from one time to another. The problem with such an endeavour is that standards of living, desires, practices, available goods—in a word, life itself—differ so greatly from one period to another that we are left acknowledging the essentially untranslatable nature of value.
Douglas Bruster
monsters. The display of ‘monsters’ was an important element of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. In fairground sideshows, theatrical exhibitions, cabinets of curiosities, and royal entertainments, ‘monsters’ took pride of place, stimulating, in the process, an extensive literature devoted to their celebration and explication. Under the title of ‘monster’, moreover, could be brought together a gamut of non-normative types, ranging from the physically anomalous animal to the differently bodied Homo sapiens. It is through *Caliban in The Tempest that Shakespeare’s fascination with ‘monsters’ is best illustrated. The ‘savage and deformed slave’ is repeatedly represented in terms of contemporary ‘monstrous’ discourses, as the variously ethnically charged, origin-related, and theatrically oriented commentaries upon him suggest. But Shakespeare is no less drawn to the ways in which metaphorical ‘monsters’ can be put to thematic use. Thus discussion of ‘monstrous births’ in Othello illuminates the processes whereby the hero is corrupted, while the ‘monstrous’ accusations levelled at the body of Richard III highlight the twisted and dislocated condition of the English state. Isolated references throughout the rest of the Shakespearian corpus demonstrate the pervasiveness and utility of ‘monsters’ to the writer’s imaginative enterprise.
Mark Thornton Burnett
Montacute (Montague), John de See Salisbury, Earl of.
Montacute (Montague), Thomas de See Salisbury, Earl of.
Montagu, Elizabeth (1720–1800), English philanthropist, patron, and leader of the Blue-Stocking circle, she published her popular and influential Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear in 1769. Chiming with the national mood of enthusiasm for Shakespeare and animosity against the French, it offered a witty defence of Shakespeare against the criticisms of *Voltaire through an exploration of the function, effect, and rules of drama, a character study of Macbeth, and a comparison between Julius Caesar and Corneille’s Cinna.
Catherine Alexander
Montague, Romeo’s father, is the head of the house of Montague which feuds with the house of Capulet in Romeo and Juliet.
Anne Button
Montague, Lady See Montague’s Wife.
Montague, Marquis of Warwick’s brother in Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI), he affirms his loyalty to King Edward, 4.2, but is next seen as part of Henry’s court, 4.7, and is killed at Barnet on the Lancastrian side (mentioned 5.2.40).
Anne Button
Montague’s Wife appears in Romeo and Juliet 1.1 and 3.1. Her death, caused by grief at her son Romeo’s banishment, is announced at 5.3.209–10.
Anne Button
Montaigne, Michel de (1533–92), French nobleman and essayist. As a young man Montaigne practised law in Bordeaux and also resided frequently at court. In 1571, aged 38, he retired to his country estate, to the tranquillity of his extensive library, where he began his writing career. He published two volumes of Essais in 1580 before emerging from his seclusion to travel through Germany and Italy and to hold the position of mayor of Bordeaux. At the end of his second term, Montaigne returned to the Essais, publishing an expanded version of the first two volumes and a new third volume in 1588. He continued revising these works until his death.
The Essais cover a remarkable range of subjects. Montaigne juxtaposes pieces on the nature of cannibals and of smells with considerations of death, the education of children, and the power of the imagination. He argues with wit and erudition, deploying many classical texts, as well as historical and contemporary examples, to make his points. Montaigne described these pieces as Essais (Trials) and thus coined a new literary term, but he professed to have no interest in expanding literary horizons or in educating his readers. In the preface to the first volume, he described himself as the substance of his book and subsequently confessed that ‘there is no reason why you should waste your leisure on so frivolous and unrewarding a subject’. However, far from being frivolous, this quest for self-knowledge was central to Montaigne’s sceptical philosophy. He explains that men’s certainties are shaped by received wisdom which has in many cases subsequently been disproved, or by customs which are only applicable to the Western world. Montaigne’s God exists at a great distance from man and cannot be reached by human wisdom. These arguments led Montaigne to conclude that the only wisdom man could realistically strive for was knowledge of himself.
And yet, certainty on this subject also evaded the author, who found the self to be characterized by vacillation and contrariness. It continually evaded his grasp. It is this conception of identity that led to comparisons between the Montaigne of the Essais (available through John Florio’s translation published in 1603 and perhaps earlier in manuscript form) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A number of Hamlet’s reflections, that there are things outside his own philosophy, that he is both virtuous and vicious depending upon his own perspective, that his motives are unfathomable, and so on, suggest verbal and thematic parallels between Hamlet and the Essais. A similar prevailing theme of questioning and doubt in Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure has been attributed to the Essais, while King Lear may recall Montaigne’s Apology for Raimond Sebonde in its sense of man’s distance from God. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s only obvious debts to Montaigne occur in The Tempest: Gonzalo’s vision of his commonwealth (2.1.149–70) derives from the essay ‘On Cannibals’, while Prospero’s decision to be merciful (5.1.21) echoes the essay ‘On Cruelty’. The nature of Shakespeare’s relationship with Montaigne continues to be a matter of debate.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Montano, the Governor of Cyprus, is wounded by Cassio, Othello 2.3. He disarms Othello and pursues Iago, 5.2.
Anne Button
Montemayor, Jorge de (c. 1521–61), Portuguese-born poet and novelist who spent most of his life in Spain. Montemayor was renowned in Renaissance Europe for his Spanish prose romance Diana enamorada (1542), which exerted a considerable influence upon the Renaissance pastoral tradition. Its narrative of pastoral lovers pursuing one another in disguise, its use of love potions, and its breaking up of its action with songs inspired many French, Italian, and English imitations. Shakespeare may have read the Diana in Bartholomew Yonge’s English translation, not published until 1598 but apparently available in manuscript for some sixteen years before this date, or in the French translation of Nicholas Colin (1578). Echoes of the Diana have been found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, but its presence is most pronounced in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The love-triangle of Proteus, Julia, and Sylvia strongly recalls that in Montemayor’s romance where Felismena, disguised as a man, woos another woman for her lover Felix.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Montgomery, Sir John. He threatens to withdraw his support for Edward unless he claims the title of king, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 4.8.
Anne Button
Montjoy (Mountjoy) is the French herald in Henry V, who asks King Harry to consider his ransom (3.6) but ultimately begs for permission to count the French dead (4.6).
Anne Button
monuments. The erection of commemorative monuments to Shakespeare gathered pace after 1740, when William Kent produced a design for a statue of Shakespeare to be placed in Poets’ Corner, *Westminster Abbey (see Scheemakers). John Cheere later produced a bust copied from Scheemakers’s statue, which was donated (along with a full-sized copy of the statue) to Stratford town hall by David *Garrick in 1769. In 1789, Thomas Banks completed a bas-relief sculpture entitled Shakespeare Seated between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting, which was displayed on the façade of the *Shakespeare Gallery and is now in the Great Garden of *New Place. Subsequent monuments include C. C. Walker’s Monument to Shakespeare, Heminges, and Condell, in St Mary’s churchyard, Aldermanbury, London, and the *Gower memorial in Stratford: see also portraits; Janssen bust; statuary.
Catherine Tite
‘Moonshine’. See Starveling, Robin.
Moorfields, an area of moorland to the north of the Roman and medieval city wall of London, used by Londoners for gardens, pasture, quarrying, skating, the dog houses of the city’s common hunt, and other recreational activities. The earliest Elizabethan *playhouse was located close by, in Shoreditch.
Simon Blatherwick
Moors. Shakespeare’s use of the term Moor remains notoriously imprecise, despite extensive scholarship on the subject. The term is most immediately associated with Othello, ‘the Moor of Venice’, the villainous Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice. The confused etymology and use of ‘Moor’ in the 16th century suggests that Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, lacked a specific geographical or ethnographic comprehension of the term. Derived from the Greek, a Moor was understood to be an inhabitant of ancient Mauretania, which corresponded to contemporary Morocco and Algeria. However, the Greek root was also associated with ‘dark’ or ‘dim’. The Greek term became ‘Maurus’ in Latin, which throughout the Middle Ages took on the more ethnographic sense of black. The presence of Muslims believed to originate from Mauretania throughout the Iberian peninsula also led to the term being used as a synonym for Muslim. The confusion over what Shakespeare meant when he referred to Moors emerges from this tripartite conflation of the term, between inhabitants of North Africa, black, and Muslim. John Pory, in his translation of Leo Africanus’ History and Description of Africa (1600), often believed to be one of the sources for Othello, claims that Moors ‘are of two kinds, namely white or tawny Moors, and Negroes or black Moors’. Significantly, whilst both Othello and Aaron refer to their dark skin colour, the Prince of Morocco is explicitly labelled as ‘a tawny Moor’. Whenever the term is used in Shakespeare it is invariably derogatory and defined in opposition to white ethnicity and ‘civilized’ Christianity, although critical debate still rages as to whether or not this indicates that Shakespeare’s characterization of Moors influenced and prefigured subsequent racist thinking.
Jerry Brotton
moralist criticism may be defined as the attempt to find moral, social, and cultural values in Shakespeare—as his continued presence in the national curricula of many countries, often as a broader secular alternative to narrowly dogmatic religious education, confirms. John *Dryden’s and Samuel *Johnson’s complaints that Shakespeare’s works lack moral purpose represent a tendency (whose most notorious exemplar is Thomas *Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy, 1693) in Enlightenment criticism which perhaps finds a modern counterpart in the extreme reaction of the Russian novelist Tolstoy to Shakespeare (Shakespeare and the Drama, 1904) and the morally serious revaluations of F. R. *Leavis, L. C. *Knights, and the journal Scrutiny. A contrary view would be that all art is ultimately anarchic, subversive play.
Tom Matheson
morality plays, an English dramatic form, popular from the late 15th to the mid-16th century, primarily characterized by its use of allegory to convey a moral lesson. The characters were abstractions, for example, Good Counsel, Hypocrisy, False Dissimulation. Easily the most popular plot was the psychomachia, in which the characters battled for the possession of a representative man. The latter’s main enemy was a character called the Vice, an instrument of the devil, if not a devil himself, who would try to insinuate himself into the confidences of the subject, thus to corrupt him. Notable examples of the morality play include The Castle of Perseverance, Nature, and Lusty Juventus. Towards the mid-16th century, the form became increasingly secular and realistic and exerted a considerable influence over the work of dramatists such as *Kyd and *Marlowe. In particular, the memory of the Vice lingered on in Elizabethan drama. References to this character occur in Richard III, 1 Henry IV, and Twelfth Night. Critics have argued that Shakespeare’s Aaron, Richard III, Iago, and Falstaff owe a considerable debt to the exuberance and cunning of the Vice. This ancestry may also account for the difficulty of explaining the motives of Shakespeare’s villains. The Vice simply hated goodness because he was a villain.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Moratín, Leandro Fernández de (1760–1828), Spanish poet and playwright. He was the first to translate a Shakespearian play from the English (Hamlet, 1798, under the pseudonym ‘Inarco Celenio’; the previous version, by Ramón de la *Cruz, being from the French). His introduction, biography of Shakespeare, and extensive critical notes which accompany the translation are a valuable document of an 18th-century mind seemingly divided between the beauties and the imperfections of Shakespeare, but basically opposed to him because of an unswerving allegiance to the principles of Neoclassicism.
A. Luis Pujante
More, Sir Thomas (1478–1535), Lord Chancellor of England from 1529 until his disgrace in 1534 for refusing to recognize his master *Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, a refusal which would lead to his execution. As well as the celebrated Utopia (1516), he composed a History of King Richard III (written before 1513, published in 1543) which lies behind the chronicles from which Shakespeare created Richard III. He is the protagonist of the collaborative play *Sir Thomas More, to which Shakespeare contributed two scenes.
Anne Button
Morgann, Maurice (1726–1802), English politician, philosopher, and author of An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777). Convinced that other critics have misunderstood the character of Falstaff, Morgann dedicates his essay to proving that Falstaff is not a coward but rather a man of courage and honour. Morgann vindicates Falstaff by rejecting logical deduction in favour of subjective, emotional response. His impressionistic essay imagines a virtuous past and hypothetical biography (including military service) for Falstaff and uses this as the basis for his interpretation of 1 Henry IV, proving that Falstaff is indeed an honourable figure.
Jean Marsden
morisco. See morris dance.
Morley, Thomas (c. 1557–1602), composer. He studied with William *Byrd and became a proponent, publisher, and imitator of the new Italian *madrigal style (which Byrd did not care for). His treatise A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597) is an important historical source on many aspects of music-making in Shakespeare’s time.
Much speculation, based on little evidence, has taken place over the extent of Morley’s collaboration and possible friendship with Shakespeare. The two have been linked through the composer’s setting of *‘It was a lover and his lass’, and also, incorrectly, through the song *‘O mistress mine’, which Morley did not compose, but arranged instrumentally in his First Book of Consort Lessons (1599) for mixed consort (see broken music).
Jeremy Barlow
Morocco. Within the *Arab world, Morocco has staged several noteworthy Shakespearian productions. Abdelkrim Berrchid wrote an original adaptation of Othello, Otayl wal-khayl wal-ba’ru’d (Oteyl, Horses and Gunpowder), which was presented in Casablanca in 1975–6 by Ibrahim Ouarda. The play is a subtle deconstruction of Othello and other mythical Arab figures including Shahrayar and Harun Er-Rachid and critiques state violence. First written in French in 1968, Nabil Lahlou’s Ophelia is not Dead was performed throughout Morocco up to 1998. Like his compatriot Berrchid, Lahlou used Shakespeare to underline the postcolonial problems and identity issues facing his country. In 2003, during the Arab Theatre Spring Festival held in Rabat, an adaptation of King Lear by the Egyptian Ahmed Abdelhalim was presented at the National Theatre Mohammed V. Zankat Shakespeare (Shakespeare Street) is a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, featuring characters named ‘Lbarani’ (Romeo) and ‘Mershana’ (Juliet). It was performed in 2007 at the Meknes National Theatre Festival and again in *Tunisia at the Carthage Theatre Festival. Created by Bab Bhar Cinémasrah Company, which is based in Tangiers, it was written by Zoubeir Ben Bouchta and produced by Jilali Ferhati. In Casablanca during the 2009 Bedawa Théâtre Festival, the Moroccan group ‘A Liwae’ performed Julius Caesar at the Touriya Sekatt Theatre. Directed by Boussarhane Zitouni, the production was a much applauded, faithful rendering of the Shakespearian play, and featured Kamal Kadimi as Brutus, Jawad Alami as Cassius, and Habib Al Azehar Bilghiti as Julius Caesar.
Rafik Darragi
Morocco, Prince of. He is one of Portia’s unsuccessful suitors in The Merchant of Venice.
Anne Button
Morozov, Mikhail (1897–1952), influential *Russian academic, translator, and critic. His important works include Shakespeare on the Soviet Stage (1947).
Tom Matheson
morris dance. Referred to in All’s Well That Ends Well 2.223 and Henry V 2.4.35 (where the dance is associated with May Day and Whitsun respectively), and performed on May morning in The Two Noble Kinsmen 3.5. The ‘wild Morisco’ in The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 3.1.365, despite the bells on the legs and similarity of the name, appears to be a different kind of dance: a solo display, similar in character to the morisques described by Arbeau (1589), and more closely linked to the early Renaissance moresca.
Jeremy Barlow
Mortimer, Lady. She is Mortimer’s inconveniently monoglot wife and Glyndŵr’s daughter, 1 Henry IV; she appears in 3.1, where she speaks and sings in Welsh.
Anne Button
Mortimer, Edmund. (1) In 1 Henry VI 2.5 he is brought in a chair, decrepit with age, to advise Richard Plantagenet (later the Duke of York), whom he names his heir, before his death. The 5th Earl of March (1391–1424) was on good terms with Henry V (contrary to what the scene suggests) and died aged 33 of the plague. (2) Sir Edmund Mortimer (1376–1409) forms an alliance with *Glyndŵr (marrying his daughter) and *Hotspur (who is married to his sister) against King Henry in 1 Henry IV. He is confused by Shakespeare and *Holinshed with the preceding Edmund Mortimer (his nephew).
Anne Button
Mortimer, Sir John (1923–2009), English playwright, novelist, and barrister. His 1977 fictional ‘entertainment’ Will Shakespeare was based upon and a prelude to six television plays, shown on ATV in 1978, directed by Peter Wood, with Tim Curry as Shakespeare. Mortimer, ‘not with the assurance of history, but with the liberty of fiction’, attempts to explore ‘why such an apparently calm course [as Shakespeare’s] was forever inwardly troubled with storms of bitterness, self-hatred, and rejection of the world’.
Tom Matheson
Mortimer, Sir John, and Sir Hugh. They are uncles of York who fail to save him from defeat at the battle of Wakefield, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) (see 1.2.62–75 and 1.4.2).
Anne Button
Morton describes the battle of *Shrewsbury to Northumberland, 2 Henry IV 1.1.
Anne Button
Morton, John. See Ely, Bishop of.
Moseley (Mosely), Humphrey (d. 1661), prestigious Royalist bookseller, publisher, and freeman of the *Stationers’ Company. On 9 September 1653 he entered *The Merry Devil of Edmonton as by Shakespeare, and the lost Henry the First and Henry the Second as by Shakespeare and Davenport; on 29 June 1660 he similarly entered three lost plays, *Duke Humphrey, The History of King Stephen, and Iphis and Iantha, as Shakespeare’s. These attributions have always been treated with scepticism.
Sonia Massai
Mote, originally ‘Moth’, pronounced ‘mote’ (meaning speck), of which ‘moth’ was a variant spelling. (1) Armado’s page in Love’s Labour’s Lost, he is given the part of the infant Hercules in the performance of ‘The Nine Worthies’. Legend has it that Hercules strangled two snakes as a baby in his cradle. (2) He is one of Titania’s fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Anne Button
‘Motley’, collective pseudonym—from Jaques’s line in As You Like It, ‘Motley’s the only wear’ (2.7.34)—for costume- and set-designers Sophie Harris (1900–66), her sister Margaret Harris (1904–2000), and Elizabeth Montgomery (1902–93). The three attended Queen Anne Art School and afterwards made money by selling sketches of actors at the *Old Vic theatre. There they met Sir John *Gielgud, who asked them to design costumes for Romeo and Juliet (1932). Their economical yet functional designs, revolutionary for their suggestive, representational nature, became a widely accepted alternative to historically accurate designs. Around 280 productions from 1927 to 1978 boasted ‘design by Motley’.
Bradley Ryner
Mouffet, Thomas (d. 1604), physician, entomologist, and poet. Mouffet’s poem ‘Of the Silkworms, and their Flies’ (published in 1599) includes a retelling of the Pyramus and Thisbe legend which was thought to have influenced A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This view has been strongly challenged, not least on the grounds that the poem was probably written after Shakespeare’s play.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Mouldy, Ralph. He is recruited to fight by Falstaff, 2 Henry IV 3.2, but buys himself out.
Anne Button
Moulton, Richard Green (1849–1924), English academic, based in Chicago. His Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A Popular Illustration of Scientific Criticism (1885) moves away from the dominant biographical interpretation offered by the likes of *Dowden, towards a more text-based approach.
Tom Matheson
Mountjoy. See Montjoy; Belott–Mountjoy suit.
‘Mousetrap, The’, Hamlet’s name (3.2.226, perhaps a flippant coinage?) for the tragedy performed by the *players, otherwise called ‘the murder of Gonzago’ (Hamlet 2.2.539).
Anne Button
Mowbray, Lord Thomas. He is one of the rebels treacherously caught and executed by Prince John, 2 Henry IV 4.1, and the eldest son of the Thomas Mowbray of Richard II.
Anne Button
Mowbray, Thomas. He is accused by Bolingbroke of embezzlement and of murdering the Duke of Gloucester (Thomas of Woodstock, youngest son of Edward III), Richard II 1.1. He is based on the 1st Duke of Norfolk (1366–99) in whose custody Gloucester died, though, according to *Holinshed, Mowbray had incurred Richard’s displeasure for having tried to save him, contrary to his orders.
Anne Button
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–91), Austrian composer. Mozart did not set any Shakespeare himself. However, the music from his opera Così fan tutte was reworked by Delibes and Prosper Pascal into a version of Love’s Labour’s Lost entitled Peines d’amour perdues!, which was first performed in Paris in 1863. He was contemplating an opera based on The Tempest at the end of his life.
Irena Cholij
Mr W.H., the mysterious dedicatee of the first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The identity of ‘Mr W.H’. has been endlessly discussed, and so has his function. The initials at the end of the dedication are those of the publisher Thomas Thorpe, not of Shakespeare; and ‘begetter’ might have a range of meanings, including ‘inspirer’, ‘originator’, and ‘procurer’ (i.e. of the manuscript for the printer). A prime candidate as inspirer has been Henry Wriothesley, Earl of *Southampton, dedicatee of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and often regarded as the *‘Fair Youth’ of the Sonnets. This, however, requires the assumption that the initials are deliberately reversed, presumably so that the dedicatee’s identity would be apparent only to those in the know, and that ‘Mr’ (for Master) is also part of the disguise. Some scholars favour William Herbert, Earl of *Pembroke, one of the dedicatees in 1623 (seven years after Shakespeare died) of the *First Folio. A case has been made for Sir William *Harvey, Southampton’s stepfather, on the grounds that he could have got hold of the manuscript and passed it on to Thorpe. Receding from plausibility, it has been proposed that the initials mean ‘William Himself’, or are a misprint for ‘W.S.’, and that Thorpe is dedicating the volume to its author. Oscar *Wilde, elaborating on a remark made by Thomas *Tyrwhitt to *Malone, and building on supposed puns in Sonnet 20 on the word ‘hue’, posited an otherwise unknown but beautiful boy actor called William Hughes, making this fancy the basis of his entertaining story ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ Various historical bearers of the name—none of them actors—have been discovered, including a sea-cook mentioned by Samuel Butler in his edition of the Sonnets (1899). Leslie Hotson, in Mr W.H. (1964), set forth the claims of a William Hatcliffe. If Thorpe’s use of initials was intended to conceal the truth from all but a select band of readers in his own time, he must be considered wholly successful.
Stanley Wells
Mucedorus, a popular romantic comedy set in Spain, published in 1598 and revised in 1610. Attempts to identify Shakespeare as the reviser have failed, although the play was catalogued as Shakespeare’s (see apocrypha) in the late 17th century.
Sonia Massai
Much Ado About Nothing See centre section.
Muir, Kenneth (1907–96), English academic, distinguished for more than 60 years across the spectrum of Shakespeare studies in research, scholarship, and criticism. His Arden editions of Macbeth (1951) and King Lear (1952) remain standard; his Shakespeare’s Sources (1957, rev. 1977) revealed the breadth of Shakespeare’s literary antecedents; and Shakespeare as Collaborator (1960) reclaimed several plays once regarded as *apocryphal. He edited *Shakespeare Survey (1965–80), and was a pillar of the International Shakespeare Conference and the *International Shakespeare Association. A lifelong commitment to Labour politics and a cosmopolitan cultural perspective informed but never distorted his habitual scholarly accuracy, lucidity, and economy.
Tom Matheson
mulberry tree. A year before he demolished Shakespeare’s former Stratford home *New Place in 1759, the Revd Francis Gastrell cut down a mulberry tree which had grown in its garden. One of his reasons for so doing was that he was tired of being asked for cuttings from it by early *bardolatrous pilgrims convinced that it had been planted by Shakespeare himself, and he was able to sell the tree for a considerable sum to one Moody, a Birmingham-based manufacturer of, among other things, souvenir tobacco-stoppers. Although Shakespeare’s patron *James I had encouraged the planting of mulberry trees in the Midlands during 1609 in a short-lived bid to foster a native silk industry, there is no evidence to confirm that the tree had indeed been planted by Shakespeare: the earliest written reference to it dates only from the 1740s. However, the tree’s posthumous fame was firmly established at Garrick’s *Jubilee in 1769 (where it was made the subject of one of the song lyrics Garrick composed for the occasion), and it has been calculated that by the end of the 18th century enough relics purporting to be made of the wood of the true mulberry had been sold to have consumed a whole copse of mulberry trees. The most famous of these was a chair designed for Garrick by William *Hogarth.
Michael Dobson
Mulcaster, Richard (c. 1530–1611), educational theorist and headmaster of the *Merchant Taylors’ School, where he taught Edmund *Spenser and perhaps Thomas *Jenkins, Shakespeare’s schoolmaster at Stratford. His Elementary (1582) argues that many boys would benefit from being taught in English as well as in Latin, and defends English as a medium for serious writing.
Robert Maslen
Müller, Heiner (1929–96), German dramatist. In the tradition of *Brecht, he propagated communist ideals, but became increasingly critical of actual conditions in (former) East Germany. He translated and co-translated several Shakespeare plays; more independent adaptations are his gruesome Macbeth (1971), his intertextual Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome (1984), and his subversive text Hamletmachine (1977).
Werner Habicht
multiple setting. To present a story taking place in multiple locations the actors usually cleared the stage between scenes to signify the shift to a new place, but an occasionally employed alternative was ‘multiple setting’ or ‘simultaneous staging’ in which widely separated locations were presented onstage together. In Shakespeare’s Richard III 5.3 the camps of Richard and Richmond are represented by two tents onstage—which conveniently allows ghosts to address both combatants—and in Jonson, Chapman, and Marston’s Eastward Ho 4.1 Slitgut remains up a pole to view rescues, depicted on the stage below him, which occur across several miles of the Thames. In An Apology for Poetry Philip *Sidney mocked the over-use of this technique in plays which ‘have Asia on the one side, and Africa on the other’.
Gabriel Egan
Munday, Anthony (1560–1633), playwright, poet, and writer of many varieties of prose. After a spell as a bookseller’s apprentice, he enrolled at the English College at Rome in 1579, probably as a government spy. He published a journalistic account of these experiences, The English Roman Life, in 1582. During the 1580s he wrote anti-Catholic propaganda and informed against Catholics as well as writing and translating prose romances. Between 1594 and 1602 he produced plays for the Admiral’s Men, after which he concentrated on writing *pageants for the city of London and on revising the Survey of London by John Stow. In the early 1590s he wrote, perhaps with Henry Chettle, the first version of the history play *Sir Thomas More, which fell foul of the censors and was rewritten by other playwrights, including Shakespeare. It was never acted. His play based on the Robin Hood legends, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (pub. 1601), seems to have been popular—he followed it with two sequels—and may have influenced As You Like It. Finally, Sir John Oldcastle (1599) was co-written by Munday, Michael Drayton, and others to capitalize on the success of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, and the scandal they had provoked by characterizing the Protestant martyr Oldcastle as a felonious glutton.
Robert Maslen
‘Murder’ is impersonated by Demetrius in Titus Andronicus 5.2.
Anne Button
murderers. Unnamed assassins in Shakespeare’s plays include the following: (1) The stage direction at the beginning of The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 3.2 requires ‘two men’ to lie on the Duke of Gloucester’s ‘breast, smothering him in his bed’. The Second Murderer has regrets. (2) In Richard III assassins are hired by Richard to kill Clarence, 1.3. The First Murderer kills him, 1.4, the Second has misgivings and says he will refuse the fee, 271–3. (3) Two assassins are hired by Macbeth, Macbeth 3.1, to kill Banquo and his son (though Fleance escapes, 3.3). In 4.2 murderers kill *Macduff’s son and chase his wife (Ross reports that ‘Wife, children, servants, all | That could be found’ were slaughtered, 4.3.212).
Anne Button
‘Murder of Gonzago, The’. See ‘Mousetrap, The’.
Murdoch, Dame Iris (1919–99), Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher. Bradley Pearson, the hero of The Black Prince (1973), conquers his impotence only when, after a series of discussions about Hamlet, his young mistress Julian Belling comes to him disguised as the ‘Black Prince’. In The Sea, the Sea (1978), a 60-year-old Shakespearian theatre director faces, Prospero-like, his ‘wifeless, childless, brotherless, sisterless’ existence.
Tom Matheson
Murphy, Arthur (1727–1805), English playwright. In youth Murphy wrote vigorously in defence of Shakespeare against *Voltaire in the Gray’s Inn Journal (‘with us islanders Shakespeare is a kind of national religion in poetry’), and he later wrote a splendid attack on *Garrick’s rewritten version of Hamlet (1776, published in Jesse Foot’s biography of Murphy, 1811). His biography of Garrick (1801) remains an important source for the study of 18th-century Shakespeare.
Michael Dobson
Murry, John Middleton (1889–1957), English writer and critic, husband and promoter of Katherine Mansfield. Author of Keats and Shakespeare (1925); Shakespeare (1936), which places King Lear behind Coriolanus in achievement; and Countries of the Mind (2 vols., 1922, 1931), which includes a notable essay on ‘A Forgotten Heroine of Shakespeare’.
Tom Matheson
Muscovy. In Love’s Labour’s Lost the King of Navarre and his lords disguise themselves as Muscovites (Russians). See Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Anne Button
music has a vital, and integral, role in Shakespeare’s work, whether in explicit cues for music (present in all the plays except The Comedy of Errors), the wealth of musical imagery (employed in the poems, such as Sonnet 8 or The Rape of Lucrece 1121–41, as well as in the drama), or the sheer musical resonance of Shakespeare’s writing. The extent and function of music in the plays varies considerably, depending on the nature of the work. Almost all the tragedies and all the history plays require ‘signal’ music—alarums, *sennets, marches, and other military *flourishes, interrupting and charging the atmosphere as they signal the entrance (or exit) of important figures or the start of important events. Particular instruments could suggest a location or occasion, evoke an atmosphere, and even indicate the status of the characters on stage. Some of the associations remain obvious today: *drums accompanying marching, *horns for the hunt, *trumpets heralding royalty. Other timbres no longer carry their original significance: *cornets for dignitaries not high enough in rank to merit trumpets, *hautboys for banquets, consorts of *flutes or *recorders for rituals of death and transfiguration. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the conventions of signal music are used to comic effect: as we reach daylight and the resolution of the action, horns, appropriately, are employed to announce the arrival of the hunting Duke, whereas the opening of the mechanicals’ play a little later is marked by the inappropriately self-important and over-ceremonious use of trumpets.
Instrumental music is important for creating or enhancing the atmosphere where words are silent, or as a backcloth for speech that is often melancholy and reflective. There are numerous cues for ‘soft music’, one of the most poignant being in King Lear (Scene 21), where music’s curative powers help temporarily to restore Lear’s sanity. In the fourth act of All Is True (Henry VIII) Katherine goes to sleep to ‘sad and solemn music’ that continues as she dreams. The peaceful music (and vision), painfully at odds with her waking condition, intensifies the audience’s pity for her. In a different way, soft music is particularly effective as an accompaniment to Richard II’s soliloquy in Pomfret Castle (5.5.41–63) and, more positively, the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo at Belmont in The Merchant of Venice (5.1.69–88). These speeches are especially notable for their rich musical imagery.
Instrumental music is employed in other functional ways. It is used for magical, or apparently magical, events, such as the coming to life of Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale and the apparitions of the banquet in The Tempest. It is used ceremonially, to accompany the coronation procession in All Is True, the laying of the coffins in Titus Andronicus, and the bearing away of the hero’s body at the end of Coriolanus. And it is used joyfully, especially to accompany dances. While some of these, such as that which closes Much Ado About Nothing, are mostly there for pure entertainment, others serve a more dramatic purpose. The dances in Romeo and Juliet and All Is True are the critical occasions when the two main characters in each play first meet, while the dance of shepherds and shepherdesses in The Winter’s Tale allows the disguised Polixenes to question the old shepherd about his son while the son is present but otherwise occupied. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the dance of fairies at the very end of the play is particularly important for affirming the sense of resolution and harmony that has finally been reached in the play. Sometimes, however, music is used to emphasize the distance in understanding between characters. One very dramatic instance of this occurs in the fourth act of Romeo and Juliet. The (presumably) jolly and brash music which is required to accompany the happy Paris as he approaches the Capulet house to marry Juliet is in stark contrast to the state of shock that is about to grip the household as they discover Juliet’s apparently dead body. The sudden triviality and inappropriateness of the music heightens the pathos of the scene, and serves as a symbol of the obliviousness of the elders of both houses to the needs and turmoil of their children. The dialogue which ensues between the suddenly redundant musicians, who resolve to stay and cadge a free meal despite the family’s bereavement (4.4.170–1), gives a wonderful glimpse of the stoical opportunism of the profession.
The addition of words and the use of the human voice allow for even more diverse functions of music in the plays. The healing and soothing power of music is evoked in several instances when songs are called for but no lyrics provided, such as Marina’s song in Pericles, the Welsh song in 1 Henry IV, and Lucius’ song for Brutus in Julius Caesar. In contrast, broken snatches of songs are used to portray the disturbed state of many characters. Comic instances of this include: the nervous Parson Hugh Evans, in The Merry Wives, mixing up the words of a psalm with a secular love song; Mistress Quickly feigning innocent normality when suddenly disturbed by her master Caius, also in The Merry Wives of Windsor; and the singing of various drunken characters in Twelfth Night and The Tempest. A poignant, more extended example is Desdemona’s fragmented singing of the Willow song in Othello. Snatches of song are also used to depict madness, whether the very painful broken mind of Ophelia in Hamlet, or the assumed madness of Petruccio in The Taming of the Shrew, and are a normal mode of communication for clowns and fools.
The remaining songs cover a wide variety of moods and functions. There are celebratory songs, such as in the wedding masques in As You Like It and The Tempest, and there are the more solemn dirges and laments of Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing. Love’s Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night both end, a little surprisingly, with reflective songs, a sad tinge belying the apparently happy resolution of the plays. The association of love with music is made explicit in the opening words of Twelfth Night: ‘If music be the food of love, play on’; yet there are few actual love songs. Indeed, music’s power seems to fail in the serenades *‘Who is Silvia?’ (Two Gentlemen of Verona 4.2.38–52) and ‘Hark, hark, the lark’ (Cymbeline 2.3.19–25). However, in both cases it is the serenader who, not being the right lover (and therefore in some way ‘false’), is unable to harness that power. The only ‘true’ serenade is Benedick’s attempt in Much Ado About Nothing (5.2.24–8), but this is given comic treatment, its awkward poetry reflecting Benedick’s awkwardness at being a conventional lover. Earlier in the play there is an interesting use of song as Balthasar sings *‘Sigh no more, ladies’. Led to expect a sentimental love song celebrating Claudio and Hero’s engagement, it is puzzling to hear lines like ‘Men were deceivers ever’ and ‘To one thing constant never’. However, the intention is to help set up the appropriate mood for introducing a discussion of Beatrice (from whom such sentiments might well be heard), knowing that Benedick is hidden nearby.
Music is heavily associated with magic, hence its importance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest and the use of a song as the ‘fairies’, as Falstaff believes them to be, taunt him in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Songs are also used to emphasize the ‘other-worldness’ of the banished Duke’s court in the Forest of Arden in As You Like It. There are songs commenting on corrupt courts (in Troilus and Cressida and As You Like It) and songs that mark the passing of time as other activities are occurring, such as *‘Tell me, where is Fancy bred?’ in The Merchant of Venice (3.2.63–72) and *‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ in As You Like It (3.1.175–94). And there are songs, such as those by the Gravedigger in Hamlet and Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, whose prime purpose is to provide relief from the tragedy of the plays. Indeed, the relentless tragedy of the opening three acts of The Winter’s Tale is made all the more stark by the total absence of music, contrasted with almost an excess of singing and dancing in the fourth act.
No instrumental music survives that can be associated for certain with a production during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and musical information from the stage directions and play texts in the quartos and First Folio is often unclear or vague, with inconsistent use of musical terms: printed editions were intended for the reader rather than the performer. If one examines musical directions in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries too, as Manifold (The Music in English Drama, 1956) has done in some detail, then it becomes possible to reach firm conclusions about the meaning of some expressions, but not others. Of the various types of ceremonial trumpet signal, for example, sennet and *tucket emerge with precise meanings, but flourish seems at times a more generalized term.
Musicians at the Globe and in other theatres did not form an integrated ensemble, but consisted of separate groups from different backgrounds: the actors themselves, who were expected to be musically versatile; the trumpeters, probably with military training; and the players of hautboys or shawms, who may have been drawn from the local waits, and, if so, could doubtless play a variety of instruments. Actors when singing might accompany themselves on the *lute, as indicated for Ophelia with her song fragments in Hamlet 4.5; clowns and others too played *tabor and *pipe, for example Ariel, in The Tempest 3.2, when correcting the tune sung by Stefano and Trinculo.
The placing of musicians in the playhouse is not always clear from surviving descriptions. In private theatres the musicians’ performing area was called the *‘music room’, suggesting a standardized location, and various references to music ‘above’ imply this was in the gallery over the stage. There was a tradition that musicians should be heard from behind a curtain, and not be seen unless involved in the action; two out of three illustrations of indoor theatre stages (all from after Shakespeare’s death) show the centre of the gallery appropriately curtained. Yet in the remaining picture the audience occupies the centre space, and in the only representation of an open or public theatre stage, a problematic copy of de Witt’s sketch of the *Swan (c.1596), the entire gallery is occupied by what appears to be audience. Positioning evidently varied on occasions to produce a particular effect; in Antony and Cleopatra for example, the sound of hautboys playing under the stage is regarded as a puzzling omen by a group of soldiers before battle (4.3).
Shakespeare’s use of music reflects changes in compositional style and performance practice which took place throughout Europe during his career, summarized in musical history as the transition between the Renaissance and baroque eras. A major development was the burgeoning of secular music, both vocal and instrumental, including at court level the emergence of opera in Italy and increasingly elaborate *masques under *James I in England. Many of the later plays incorporate some kind of staged entertainment or masque, with only three of the eleven plays from Timon of Athens onwards lacking such a scene. Settings of songs from the last plays sometimes display the dramatic and declamatory characteristics of early opera (e.g. *‘Get you hence’ and *‘Hark, hark, the lark’) and during this final period traditional *ballads are quoted less frequently.
Taste in instrumental timbre was changing too; Renaissance instruments such as the *bagpipes, *rebec, and *regal descended the social scale as their raucous sound went out of fashion. This move towards tonal refinement coincided with the need for gentler sounds in private theatres such as the Blackfriars, not only to please the audience, but also to avoid annoying the neighbours. Cornets replaced trumpets, and soft instruments, including the *organ, were played in the intervals. Music came to take on a more extensive role in the theatrical event as a whole, with performances before the play too. But the popular custom in the public theatres of ending a play with a sung and danced afterpiece or *jig was not approved of in private theatre productions.
It has been argued that the standard six-piece English mixed or ‘broken’ consort of the period (see broken music) formed an ensemble in some Shakespeare plays; it was certainly a line-up used for professional entertainment in other contexts. Circumstantial evidence includes that of a German visitor to the Blackfriars theatre in 1602 who was delighted with the playing of a mixed consort for an hour before the play (unnamed) began. It may be that the combination was associated more with the private theatre; productions at the reconstructed Globe theatre in London have demonstrated the need for loud instruments to make an impact in the outdoor acoustic, over a sometimes noisy audience. With so many gaps in our knowledge of music on the Shakespearian stage, theories of common practice must be treated with caution.
Music has remained intertwined with Shakespeare down the centuries since his own time. Some of the most important *adaptations of the Restoration were musical: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, for example, were both turned into semi-operas. A Midsummer Night’s Dream became The *Fairy Queen, with splendid music by Henry Purcell, while *Dryden and *Davenant’s rewritten The Tempest was given music by a group of composers including Matthew *Locke and Pelham Humfrey. (A subsequent score was misattributed to Purcell for many years). Both these plays continued to attract much musical attention during the 18th century, including being set as all-sung operas by J. C. Smith in 1755 and 1756. Music went with magic, tragic as well as comic: hence William Davenant’s alteration of Macbeth into a semi-opera, with singing and dancing witches. The music for this was originally composed by Matthew Locke. It was reset by John Eccles around 1695, but it was Richard *Leveridge’s setting of 1702 that took the theatres by storm, accompanying all major London productions of Macbeth until well into the 19th century, long after Shakespeare’s ‘original’ play had been restored.
Other important musical practices in the Restoration included the use of specially composed act music—instrumental music to be played between the acts of a play—and the addition of masques to several works. Of particular note is the insertion of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, divided into four entertainments, into Charles *Gildon’s adaptation of Measure for Measure (1700), which then served as the vehicle for the first public performance of Purcell’s opera.
During the 18th century the interpolation of additional songs was often dictated by the presence of good singers, and their relative acting abilities. Another important factor governing the introduction of music was the desire to emulate on stage major events in real life. Hence the coronation scene in All Is True (Henry VIII) became an impressive spectacle, with music, around the time of the coronations of George II in 1727 and George III in 1761. Music seems to have become even more important in Shakespeare performances in the 19th century. The comedies were often crammed full of songs, notably in the productions mounted by Frederick *Reynolds and Henry *Bishop, with lyrics normally taken from several Shakespeare plays and from other poets, and the music adapted and arranged from various composers. When *Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed in London in 1844 so popular did it prove that it became almost obligatory in productions of the play for almost a century (and, indeed, was used in a Guildford theatre as late as 1965).
Productions of Shakespeare’s plays since the 1900s have, on the whole, tended to follow one of three trends when choosing music. The first is the historical approach, trying to use ‘authentic’ music and instruments (along with costumes and so on) from Elizabethan times, pioneered by *Poel and now associated with the *Globe reconstruction on Bankside. The second is the use of serious contemporary music, which has sometimes been very experimental: Roberto Gerhard’s music for King Lear (1955), for example, was one of the earliest works in this country to use musique concrète. The third is the adoption of music of a more popular style, especially for productions set in a particular decade, such as the 1920s, or set in present times.
Starting with the semi-operas of the Restoration there have been several hundred reworkings of Shakespeare’s plays into *operas, operettas, and *musicals. From the 20th century there have also been a number of important film scores, notably those by William *Walton for Laurence *Olivier’s films. Shakespeare’s plays, too, have inspired a large number of orchestral works, such as *Tchaikovsky’s fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet, and smaller instrumental pieces. Even as early as the 17th century lyrics from the plays started to be set as art songs independent of the stage, and there have been many musical settings of passages from the plays not originally intended to be sung, a striking example being Ralph Vaughan *Williams’s Serenade to Music (1938), which is based on Lorenzo and Jessica’s dialogue in The Merchant of Venice (5.1.54–110). A Shakespeare Music Catalogue (1991) lists over 20,000 arrangements and settings written for stage productions or otherwise inspired by Shakespeare’s works; there seem to be no signs of this industry abating.
Jeremy Barlow/Irena Cholij
musicals. Among the earlier Shakespearian successes on the modern light musical stage were the Rodgers and Hart musical The Boys from Syracuse (1938) (based on The Comedy of Errors), Cole Porter’s Kiss me Kate (1948) (derived from The Taming of the Shrew), and The Belle of Mayfair (1906) and the Sondheim/Bernstein West Side Story (1957) (both versions of Romeo and Juliet). In America in the 1960s and 1970s there was a spate of ‘mod-musicalized’ Shakespeare plays, which included: Galt MacDermott, John Guare, and Mal Shapiro’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971); a Canadian Rockabye Hamlet (1974); Pop (1974), based on King Lear; and an Othello derivative in the ‘blaxploitation’ mode entitled Catch my Soul (1968). More recent musicals have included the ‘western’ musical The Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas (1988) and Return to the Forbidden Planet (1989), a work based on The Tempest (via the film *Forbidden Planet) using rock and roll numbers from the 1950s and 1960s. Gaston Serpette’s operetta Shakespeare! (1899) is about an English dog, and not the dramatist.
Irena Cholij
music of the spheres, a Renaissance concept derived from Pythagoras, in which the proportional movement of the planets was linked to musical *proportion. There are several allusions in Shakespeare (e.g. Twelfth Night 3.1.109).
Jeremy Barlow
music room. Musicians in the Elizabethan theatre were located behind the scenic wall, either hidden within the tiring house or else in a balcony overlooking the stage. Prior to 1609 music used in plays at the Globe comes from ‘within’, suggesting somewhere out of sight inside the tiring house, but thereafter the music tends to come from ‘above’, indicating that the stage balcony was used. At the Blackfriars the stage balcony was always occupied by the musicians, whose lengthy pre-performance recitals were famously excellent and who, unlike the musicians in open-air theatres, which used continuous performance until 1609, also played between the acts. It seems likely that when the King’s Men took over the Blackfriars in 1608–9 they regularized the musical arrangements by adopting Blackfriars practice (visible musicians in the balcony playing music between the acts) at both playhouses, much as they adopted the Blackfriars observance of intervals and use of a flight machine.
Gabriel Egan
Mustardseed is one of Titania’s fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Anne Button
mutes. These are characters who are referred to in Shakespeare’s plays but do not appear (such as the ‘brave son’ of the Duke of Milan, The Tempest 1.2.440–1) or those mentioned in stage directions who do not speak and are not referred to by others (such as ‘Innogen’, wife of Leonato in the first stage direction of Much Ado About Nothing, edited out in modern editions).
Anne Button
Mutius is one of Titus’ sons, killed by him, Titus Andronicus 1.1.287, as he attempts to stop Titus from pursuing Lavinia.
Anne Button
‘My heart is full of woe’, a popular song mentioned by Peter in Romeo and Juliet 4.4.131.
Jeremy Barlow
Myrmidons, Achilles’ personal guard, are instructed to kill Hector in Troilus and Cressida (5.7) and carry out their instructions, 5.9.
Anne Button
mystery plays. See miracle plays.