IT WOULD NOT be entirely accurate to claim that Shakespeare is a writer with whom I have a lifelong acquaintance, although perhaps my mother attended a production of Twelfth Night or Hamlet when I was in utero. And I like to think that she may have read aloud to me from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare; as a nurse during the Second World War, she survived many months of night duty by reading novels. As for my father, at trying moments he frequently quoted King Lear’s complaint: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.” My own independent relationship with Shakespeare began when I was nine, the year I started elocution lessons. These were held in the drawing room of the girls’ private school I attended at that time. I remember lying on the carpeted floor, staring up at the walls, which were paneled in yellow fabric, and practicing breathing from the diaphragm. Then I was allowed to stand up and recite Puck’s speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Through the forest have I gone,
But Athenian found I none,
On whose eyes I might approve
This flower’s force in stirring love.
Later that year I was cast as Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, in The Merchant of Venice. I gazed raptly at Lorenzo, played by another nine-year-old girl, while he declaimed:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
And how did Jessica respond to these beautiful words? I regret to report she says only, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.” No wonder I envied my suitor and learned his lines as well as my own.
From then on I studied several plays a year. I was particularly enthralled by Macbeth with its Scottish setting. We often drove past Birnam Wood on our way to visit my aunt, and I always remembered the witches’ promise to Macbeth—that he is safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill—and how cleverly the meaning of that promise is subverted, by having the soldiers carry broken-off branches as camouflage. For a few years in the 1990s the town of Birnam offered something called “The Macbeth Experience.” Sadly it closed before I had a chance to investigate.
In spite of this long acquaintance, however, I only recently began to consider what I could learn as a writer from our great forebear. The major plays, surrounded as they are by mountain ranges of criticism, seem at first glance too formidable to use as models, but when one surmounts, or in my own case largely ignores, those mountains, the texts prove to be a treasure trove of lustrous examples, useful precepts, helpful strategies, and magnificent language.
Although Shakespeare’s life remains largely mysterious, and contributes only marginally to our understanding of his work, a few key facts are germane. Popular tradition has it that he was born on St. George’s Day, April 23, 1564, and died on the same day in 1616. His mother was the daughter of a well-to-do landowner; his father a glove maker, tanner, and trader in wool. Some sources claim that his father also lent money at interest, which makes one reconsider the jibes hurled at Shylock. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-six; their first child, Susanna, was born six months later. The twins Hamnet and Judith followed in 1585. Little is known, though much is theorized, about how Shakespeare made his way from Stratford-upon-Avon to London and became first an actor, then a playwright and theater manager. In 1595 he is listed among the senior members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and in 1598 he took a share in the new Globe playhouse. Throughout all this his family seems to have remained in Stratford. Like many of his characters, Shakespeare moved back and forth between two worlds: the urban bustle of London and the rural calm of a country town. He died in Stratford at the shockingly young age of fifty-two.
Whatever else he was doing during his life, Shakespeare wrote. Thirty-six plays are, more or less, attributed to him, along with several long poems and the beloved sonnets. Of the plays perhaps half are performed and read frequently. Looking at several of those that aren’t was instructive. While there are wonderful moments, gorgeous turns of phrase, I also found him making poor use of two of his favorite devices: mistaken identity and/or disguise and the (potentially incredibly annoying) feigned death. In Cymbeline the heroine, Imogen, disguised as the page Fidele, awakes beside a headless corpse, which she mistakes for that of her husband, but which in fact belongs to the thuggish Cloten. It was reassuring to see that Shakespeare could be less than great, and that it sometimes took him several attempts to find the right form for the material. A Winter’s Tale, written the year after Cymbeline, uses feigned death and disguise to much more satisfying effect. Similarly Henry VI, written in 1590 and, for good reasons, seldom performed, helped pave the way for Henry IV. (The history plays were not written chronologically.)
Considering Shakespeare’s work as a whole also reminds us that almost all writers are drawn back, unconsciously, to their own essential, one might say primal, patterns. Young writers often feel that they can repeat themselves because no one is paying attention, but, if we want to keep going, we have to become increasingly vigilant about recognizing our core material and turning a deaf ear to those sirens that would lure us back onto the rocks of repetition.
To discover more particularly what I could learn from Shakespeare, I turned to four of his best-known plays. First, a comedy: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written in the winter of 1595. Second, a history play: Henry IV, Part I, probably written in 1596–7. Third, what I would call a “tragicomedy”: The Merchant of Venice, which was performed in 1605. And lastly King Lear, which was first performed as a cheerful Christmas celebration on December 26, 1606.
To begin, let me offer a tediously brief description of each play. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often regarded as Shakespeare’s first mature play and is certainly one of his best loved and most frequently performed. Although the play owes a debt to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which, with its captivating stories of violence and transformation, was an Elizabethan best-seller, it is one of the few plays in which Shakespeare seems to have largely invented the plot, and the result is both intricate and simple. Hermia wants to marry Lysander rather than her father’s choice of Demetrius, who is the beloved of Hermia’s best friend, Helena. The four well-nigh indistinguishable lovers flee the court of Theseus to hide in a forest near Athens, where they get caught up in the feud between the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania. So too does a group of Athenian workmen who are rehearsing their own play about the star-crossed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. Magic ensues. Eventually the lovers emerge from the woods, successfully reunited.
Henry IV, Part I shows the young Prince Hal, the future Henry V, emerging from the pubs and brothels of London to become a worthy heir. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play is set between two worlds: the world of drink and disorder, where the stout, witty, pragmatic Falstaff is king, and the world of political ambition and unrest, where Henry IV, Hal’s father, is struggling to hold on to his power. The question of the play is, will the dissolute prince rise to these challenges and overcome the ambitious, accomplished, and—in the production I saw most recently—compellingly handsome Hotspur?
The Merchant of Venice, another much-beloved and much-performed play, is set in a European country that we have no reason to think either the author or his audience knew well. It involves romantic love, but in this case Shakespeare combines plots from at least two sources—the casket plot and the flesh-for-money plot—to a more solemn end. He would also surely have been aware of several recent plays with Jewish characters, including Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. The casket plot is driven by Bassanio, who, well born but poor, seeks the hand of the wealthy Portia. According to Portia’s father’s will she must marry the man who chooses the casket—gold, silver, or lead—that contains her portrait. The wrong choice means forswearing marriage. Bassanio’s friend Antonio, a wealthy merchant whose fortune is presently bound up in various ships, agrees to finance his wooing by borrowing money from Shylock; he offers his own body, a pound of flesh, if he cannot pay his debt. Bassanio’s courtship prospers, Antonio’s ships flounder, and the two plots converge in one of our earliest courtroom dramas.
King Lear, like Henry IV, Part I, is set in England against a background of political unrest. The elderly king decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters according to who claims to loves him best. When his youngest daughter, Cordelia, says she loves him according to her bond, he banishes her and sets up house with his two other daughters, Goneril and Regan. Meanwhile another father, the Duke of Gloucester, is also mistaken in his children, favoring the wicked Edmund over the good Edgar. Terrible consequences follow for both kingdom and fathers, as Goneril and Regan fight for political power and Edmund’s affections.
Each of these four plays begins with a wonderful writerly lesson: don’t waste time. Don’t bother with prologues, don’t hold back the good stuff—just plunge your readers (or viewers) into an interesting situation that must be resolved. This might seem so obvious as to be scarcely worth mentioning, but often contemporary fiction relies on some combination of voice and a secret (shadowy, barely hinted at) to hook the reader. In contrast Shakespeare’s opening scenes are full of tension, and the tension derives not just from the language but also from the overt conflict. Hermia’s father wants her to marry Demetrius and Hermia wants to marry Lysander. Henry IV is faced with rebellion, and his son is too busy partying with Falstaff to help. Bassanio, despite lack of funds and the risks of choosing the wrong casket, insists on courting Portia. Lear is determined to divide his kingdom according to his daughters’ rhetoric, and Cordelia refuses to play the game.
Also striking—again, reading these openings in the context of contemporary fiction—is that they begin in the present. No casting forward to the death of the protagonist three months hence, no remembering the night the heroine came home a decade ago to find her mother burning her father’s tap shoes. Shakespeare does not use flashbacks, and his characters, with a few notable exceptions, are more likely to philosophize than to remember. The interesting and dramatic openings are happening right now and propel us into the future, not the past. Who knows what the great dramatist would have made of Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal, in which, from the opening scene, we go steadily backward in time? Or Charles Baxter’s novel First Light, which uses the same device? I am not arguing against this strategy—the arresting event followed by the leap backward, or forward, in time—only suggesting that perhaps present action is undervalued.
Another lesson to be garnered from these openings has to do with plausibility. The poet Coleridge complained that the beginning of King Lear—the king dividing his kingdom between Goneril and Regan and banishing Cordelia and his loyal servant Kent—is grossly improbable. And one might say the same of the very peculiar business arrangement between Antonio and Shylock. How many of us going to borrow money would consent to sign away a pound of flesh? And why go to a moneylender one has frequently slighted and undercut, as is the case with Antonio and Shylock?
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream we must negotiate our way past at least two unlikely events. First we have to believe that Helena, on hearing about Hermia’s proposed elopement, would, rather than rejoicing that her rival is out of the picture, betray the plan to Demetrius in the hope of winning his favor. And then there is the quarrel between Oberon and Titania, a quarrel so severe Titania tells us that the entire world is in disarray:
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The plowman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.
The fold stands empty in the drowned field.
The moon is pale with anger, and the seasons themselves have changed their wonted livery. The ostensible cause of all this is a changeling boy. Titania claims she won’t give him up because of her love for his dead mother. Oberon offers no explanation as to why he wants the boy—perhaps simply to annoy Titania? But these improbable events happen so early, are so much a given of the play, that we are not in a position to question them. And if we did, Titania’s gorgeous speech of nearly forty lines, describing not the origins but the escalating effects of the quarrel, would surely dissuade us from such unprofitable speculations. Poetry conquers all.
However implausible Shakespeare is in his opening scenes, once he has established the rules of the world he’s creating—and he almost always is creating a world markedly different from the one his audience left to enter the theater—he is usually at some pains to keep them. Though we may quibble, mildly, over the number of convenient letters, storms, and resurrections, we appreciate his ambition to keep faith with us.
And plausibility in art is not always devoutly to be wished for. Certain gestures, while not making actual sense, make poetic sense. In Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud 9 a group of famous women from several centuries sit down to dinner in a thoroughly satisfying way. In Michael Faber’s novel Under the Skin we empathize with the main character, Isserley, for many pages before realizing that she is an alien. When one stops to think about it, it is very odd that Cordelia’s devoted husband does not accompany her to England to help defeat her sisters’ armies. But we don’t stop to think, in part because the play is rushing headlong at this point, and in part because we recognize intuitively that Lear and Cordelia, who have been separated by their mutual stubbornness in act 1, must now meet alone, without encumbrances, to work out their tragic reconciliation.
Similarly, we tend not to question why Portia, with no legal experience, insists on disguising herself as a lawyer and going to argue Antonio’s case against Shylock. Poetically it makes sense that she and Shylock must confront each other and that, to save her husband’s friend, she will employ the same verbal cunning that her father used in constructing the casket test.
One of the dictums haunting the lives of fiction writers—maybe those of poets and dramatists too—is Hemingway’s remark that the writer can leave out anything so long as he or she knows what it is. This claim, in its most sweeping form, is surely indefensible. Imagine Mrs Dalloway without the party, or The Great Gatsby without the car accident that kills Tom Buchanan’s mistress. Of course this is not what Hemingway meant; he exaggerated in the interest of reminding us of the artifice of realism and the necessity of selection. One factor in Shakespeare’s enduring greatness is undoubtedly his gift for omission. While he works hard to make his plots seaworthy—here’s how Portia got to the courtroom; here’s some exposition to show how Gloucester died (offstage so as not to detract from Lear and Cordelia’s reunion)—he does omit a good deal. Typically he omits journeys, unless they make a difference. He omits first meetings and courtships. He often tells rather than shows bad behavior.
And frequently he omits the psychological explanations so beloved of contemporary writers. Ford Madox Ford urged novelists to first interest their readers, then explain. While Shakespeare does an admirable job of following the first half of this advice, he often, flagrantly, neglects the second. Production after production of The Merchant of Venice struggles to make sense of Antonio’s melancholy and of his huge, and not sufficiently requited, affection for Bassanio. A current popular solution is to make Antonio gay, but for most of the play’s history, audiences were happy to believe in profound asexual male friendship of a kind they recognized from the Greeks and from various Elizabethan romances. In King Lear we are given no insight into why Cordelia is so closemouthed.
Of course Shakespeare was writing for performance, and anyone who has had the good fortune to see several different productions of the same play knows the profound difference that actors, directors, and designers can make. What he so felicitously leaves out, they fill in, assisted by his readers and viewers. In Aspects of the Novel E. M. Forster famously claims that if you write “the king dies and then the queen dies” you don’t have plot, but if you write “the queen dies because of grief,” you do. I would argue that readers nowadays tend to be very good at supplying the “because.” When two events are juxtaposed we almost invariably tend to link them. A writer may try to thwart that instinct—insisting that the heroine’s dream about a black dog has no significance—but readers will invent meaning and motivation.
In the case of Shakespeare, even when he does explain, he often undercuts or complicates the explanation. In King Lear, Edmund argues that his bad behavior is due to his illegitimacy, but Lear’s legitimate daughters behave equally badly. Shakespeare is determined not to allow us to choose either nature or nurture as the key to character. “In sooth,” says Antonio at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice, “I know not why I am so sad.”
Other explanations are frankly unconvincing from the start. When Prince Hal explains that he is carousing with Falstaff so that, as a prodigal son, he will shine more brightly when he returns to the fold, we are, I think, rightly skeptical. (Although several members of the current British Royal Family seem to have taken this speech to heart.)
I am not, for a moment, arguing against explanation. How much less moving, for example, Tim O’Brien’s story “The Things They Carried” would be if we didn’t discover that Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s fatal inattention is the result of his hopeless, romantic daydreams. But I think there is a useful reminder in Shakespeare about the limits of explanation. His characters are almost always—Aristotle would be pleased—in action, and those actions speak as loudly as explanations. Flannery O’Connor’s story “Good Country People” ends with a Bible salesman stealing a young woman’s wooden leg, an event O’Connor claimed she had no idea was going to happen until fifteen or twenty lines earlier. Her readers at once recognize the inexplicable rightness of this theft.
Perhaps omitting explanations came more naturally to Shakespeare because he already knew the plots of many of his plays. He had read them in the work of other playwrights or in such histories as Holinshed’s Chronicles. Given his many skillful appropriations, it seems particularly fitting that his own work has been so widely borrowed. The novelist Iris Murdoch famously claimed to have taken all her plots from Shakespeare. And many other writers have reimagined, or extended, his work. (I discuss such borrowing more fully in “Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be.”) For now let me mention three essential aspects of his modus operandi:
1. He didn’t conceal his borrowing. A play called King Leir was published in 1605, and much of the material for his King Lear came from Holinshed.
2. He often combined material from several sources, as in King Lear and The Merchant of Venice.
3. He was not afraid to make changes in the borrowed material: in the most likely source for the casket plot, the woman is a widow.
Using a plot familiar from either history or another work changes the nature of suspense. Most of Shakespeare’s audience would surely have known that Prince Hal was going to come to his senses and lead England to victory; like us, we may surmise, they felt fairly confident that Antonio would not die under Shylock’s knife. We often say we’re in suspense when we don’t know the outcome of events and are longing to find out. But another species of suspense, equally nail-biting, is generated when we know, more or less, what is going to happen and are longing to prevent it. After many readings of King Lear, I still keep hoping for Regan and Goneril to be shocked out of their terrible behavior.
Sometimes the outcome of events is signaled as much by form as by content. Even though A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens with Hermia’s father threatening to kill her if she doesn’t marry Demetrius, we know we are watching a comedy, a world where bad behavior will be less than fatal and love will triumph. When I wrote Criminals, my novel about a banker who finds a baby at a bus station, I knew from the beginning that I wanted the climax to be a reenactment of the judgment of Solomon, with two mothers struggling over the baby. In the first draft of the novel the baby fell to the floor and died. Several readers pointed out that I had not sufficiently foreshadowed such a terrible event. In revision, I revived the baby; she now suffers only a broken wrist.
Another lesson to be learned from Shakespeare is how necessary and pleasurable a subplot can be; to tell one story we often need another. Lear would be a shadow of its present self if the actions of the king and his daughters were not mirrored in those of Gloucester and his sons. In the case of The Merchant of Venice the two plots—Shylock’s hatred of Antonio and Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia—exist in almost equal relation to each other, one advancing the other until they converge. A third plot, the elopement of Shylock’s only daughter, plays a part in both. Over and over, Shakespeare demonstrates that a successful subplot is one that is interesting and compelling in its own right, resonates with the main plot appropriately, and intersects with it at just the right moments.
A good subplot also has the virtue of passing time in a way that permits major changes, both internal and external, to occur in the main plot. The scene between Lorenzo and Jessica (which I so enjoyed playing at the age of nine) allows Portia and her maid, Nerissa, to return from the courtroom to Belmont.
This gift for plotting goes hand in hand with another of Shakespeare’s great strengths: his talent for what I might call “social characterization.” Such were the economics of theater in his day that limiting his cast was not a consideration. Not for him the two hander, or even the four hander. Most of his plays have casts of over twenty, and many of them have at least eight substantial roles. This is a large number of characters to bring to life; in performance, designers and actors play a key role in helping to distinguish them: Lorenzo is the one in a blue tunic, Regan has spiky hair. But Shakespeare also helps us by showing each in his or her social niche; even his outsiders—Shylock, Edmund—are defined in relation to society. Too often fiction writers inadvertently make their characters quite unrealistically friendless and isolated. But as Portia says, “Nothing is good, I see, without respect.” Characters come to life in relation to, and in contrast with, each other.
This social characterization also enables Shakespeare to let us know almost immediately whether a character is a major or minor figure. When in the second scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we meet the six rude mechanicals—Peter Quince, Nick Bottom, Francis Flute, Tom Snout, Snug, and Robin Starveling—we immediately understand from the way they’re introduced that Bottom is the one we should pay attention to; he exuberantly offers to perform every part in the workmen’s play. At the same time the comic tone makes clear that he is a minor character. Meanwhile Quince, Snout, Flute, Snug, and Starveling are introduced as a group. We are invited to appreciate the music of their names and their idiosyncrasies without worrying about their psyches.
In King Lear Edmund is unmistakably introduced as a major character. In act 1, scene 2, he has the stage to himself and harangues us in a twenty-two-line soliloquy that begins:
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
The speech culminates in his ringing declaration: “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” We are never in doubt that Edmund is going to play a major part in both the plot and the theme of the play, and we also know at once his position in society. His character is further deepened by his relationships on the one hand with the vicious sisters, Goneril and Regan, in contrast to whom he seems almost kindly, and on the other with his brother, the virtuous Edgar. Edmund and Edgar act as foils: the character of each throws that of the other into relief.
I fear I can no longer avoid talking about the most obvious and the most impossible lesson we can learn from Shakespeare: namely what can be accomplished by the magnificent, melodious, rigorous, energetic, boisterous, vivid, inventive use of language. Over and over at crucial moments, and also just in passing, the words fly off the page. Titania’s forty-line speech, which I quoted from earlier, could be summarized in a single sentence—the natural world is thrown into disarray by her and Oberon’s quarrel—but who would wish it a line shorter when the imagery is so playful and so deeply pleasurable?
In Henry IV, Part I Hotspur and his allies, the rebels, are poised to fight the king, but there is still time to turn back. Sir Richard Vernon arrives with the news that one of the king’s allies, the Earl of Westmoreland, is approaching with seven thousand men. “No harm,” says Hotspur. And the king, Vernon adds, is coming in person. “He shall be welcome too,” says Hotspur. Then Hotspur asks for news of the nimble-footed, madcap Prince of Wales, and Vernon, who has previously shown not the least impulse toward poetry, answers:
All furnish’d, all in arms;
All plumed like estridges that with the wind
Bated like eagles having lately bathed;
Glittering in golden coats, like images;
As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer;
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.
I saw young Harry, with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm’d,
Rise from the ground like feather’d Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat,
As if an angel dropp’d down from the clouds
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus
And witch the world with noble horsemanship.
“No more, no more,” cries Hotspur.
At that moment everyone in the theater, in the audience, and on the stage, knows that Hotspur’s enterprise is doomed. He and Harry are counterparts; they cannot both exist. They must meet, and one of them must die. And it is the music of the language, the gorgeous hyperbole, the cadences that signal this just as much as the content. Knowing the outcome only deepens the dread and anticipation with which I watch Hal and Hotspur make their way through the battle until, at last, they confront each other, sword in hand.
Many young writers are drawn to what is unkindly called “purple prose,” and most find themselves pilloried for their efforts. This kind of lavish, ambitious writing is easy to fail at and easy to make fun of. Almost all my own early work was met with rejections, dozens and dozens of them, that began with the chilling phrase “The writing is beautiful, but . . .” The typical response to this barrage of criticism seems, sadly, not to continue reaching for more richly specific language, deeper metaphors, but to retreat into a flatter, less adorned style. For fiction writers there is no way round having to write some fairly serviceable sentences—“Nina had spent the night in the living-room,” in Alice Munro, or “On the bus to Dublin they did not say much,” in William Trevor—but that is no reason to give up on the excitement and the possibilities of language. The notion of a painter who doesn’t care about paint is baffling, but many writers (I exclude the poets) aren’t that interested in words. They are convinced that the value of their work lies in characterization, plot, and theme. But these four plays, and many others in Shakespeare’s canon, have survived, in large measure, because of the language he gave his characters.
He sets a daunting standard, and perhaps I’ve made it even more daunting by quoting only verse; for those of us who don’t naturally write in iambic pentameter, this gives him an unfair advantage. So let me add that he also uses prose to admirable, and sometimes surprisingly modern, effect. Here is Sir John Falstaff musing on the field of battle:
Well, tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air—a trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis sensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism.
Was Beckett thinking of these dark repetitions and mortal puns, I wonder, when he wrote Waiting for Godot? I do not mean to suggest we should all be aspiring to write Shakespearian prose. Shakespeare himself, if he were writing now, would surely continue to reinvent the possibilities of language (I imagine him listening appreciatively to all kinds of voices: rappers, politicians, comedians, gravediggers, dental hygienists, Tony Kushner’s lush lyricism, Elena Ferrante’s intimate frankness). But I do mean to suggest that whatever your voice as a writer, you should be paying more attention to it—amplifying and enriching the language, bringing new words and new metaphors into your vocabulary and into those of your characters.
So harken ye all, do not let the Bard’s mastery daunt you. His plays are a treasury that we can visit over and over, ransack and purloin as often as we need, and yet the gold remains piled high, waiting for us to return. Here are sixteen golden sovereigns I’ve carried away from studying these four great plays:
1. Begin dramatically.
2. Don’t keep back the good stuff.
3. Consider beginning in the present.
4. Negotiate your own standards of plausibility.
5. Once you’ve invented your rules, keep them.
6. Don’t be dismayed or surprised if some pieces of work turn out to be rehearsals. It sometimes takes several attempts to find the right form for the material.
7. Be careful how you repeat yourself, and why.
8. Remember the power of appropriate omission. We don’t need to take every journey with the characters, make every cup of coffee.
9. Don’t overexplain.
10. Be sure that borrowing a plot, character, or situation doesn’t seem like theft.
11. Know which kind of suspense your narrative depends on, and foreshadow accordingly.
12. Be aware that form and tone govern content.
13. Does your plot need a subplot, or two?
14. Develop your characters individually, and in society. Let the reader know who are the major characters and who are the minor.
15. Be ambitious with your language. Write better sentences.
16. Whatever you do, keep making rhymes, puns, clauses, phrases, metaphors, sentences, paragraphs, sonnets, scenes, stories, plays, poems, novels . . .
Shakespeare may not believe in explanations but he is good at apologies. Here is one of his most famous, which I also learned when I was nine, lying on the floor of that yellow-paneled drawing room:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here,
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck,
Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long—
Else the Puck a liar call.
So good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.