[20 November 1946]
We shall not spend very much time on Taming of the Shrew. It is the only play of Shakespeare’s that is a complete failure, though Titus Andronicus may be another. The plot of Taming of the Shrew belongs to farce, and Shakespeare is not a writer of farce. Ben Jonson might have made the play a success, but it is not up Shakespeare’s alley.
What is the nature of farce? The characters represented must be universal—the clown, the shrew, etc.—and the actors must be individual geniuses. Farce is impromptu in nature. You cannot have a great writer of farce without the cooperation of the people who perform in it. In tragedy and comedy there is a conflict between freedom and necessity. In comedy the conflict is resolved and freedom wins. Farce is pure caprice and there is no necessity whatever. Think of Groucho, Chaplin, Grock. The characters in a farce do what an ordinary man does alone in a bathroom or dreams of doing. They do openly and sanely what only a madman would do in public.
In a world of real individuals, such behavior would inevitably cause great suffering, and it is therefore important in farce to exclude the slightest hint of individuality in the characters. The actor represents not a human being but a god who does not suffer, so thoroughly humble or so proud that loss of dignity means nothing to him. Custard pies thrown in his face or not being loved are equally matters of indifference to him. The farce character has no memory and no foreboding. He exists entirely in the moment. He is all body, but his body is heavy or light not in its own right but as an expression of his spirit, as if an angel should become incarnate. If he falls down or loses his hat, he only pretends to mind. He does not really care, because he wills what happens. It is fatal if a real individual is introduced.
It is also fatal if the plot is connected with a serious issue. Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator fails for this reason. When you see Chaplin with a balloon, in a barbershop with Mussolini, you are prompted to think Mussolini is quite nice and could not cause suffering in any way. But it won’t work. Mussolini also makes us think of Hitler, and the suffering that both caused is too near to us.
In our time the war of the sexes has become much too serious an issue to be treated in a farcical manner. This has been true in England ever since the passage of the Married Woman’s Property Act in 1882. Up to that point there was no question, basically, that man was boss. I cannot tell you what a shock it was to come to this country. In England things are run for the benefit of men, and it is too bad if you are a girl. In America things are run for the benefit of women, and the men have an unfortunate time. I dropped into a bar after I had been here for a week and wondered about the unaccompanied women I saw. I still wonder. In England women are colorless. In America they are more interesting than the men. They are better educated, confident, and amusing to talk to. Perhaps, however, they suffer more in this country than they are willing to admit by holding such a dominating position, and one that is increasing. In fifty years most American men will be honorably employed as gigolos.
In the war of the sexes, a woman today should represent a masculine protest. Katherina should be physically and mentally grotesque. Petruchio should be uniquely timid and appear to be the least likely person to tame her. Shakespeare treats the problem of the war of the sexes in some depth in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing, plays in which he is interested in the conflicts of the egos of men and women and in struggles between love and hate. Petruchio uses only physical means in his attempt to tame Katherina, and he remains throughout a cad. We do not see why she should grow to like or love him. She suffers as a character from her failure to protest successfully. Her final speech of submission to Petruchio (V.ii.136–79) is either unconvincing or pathetic.
There is too much writing in Taming of the Shrew for the limits of farce, and Shakespeare is not unaware of this. He intended the Induction to comment on and expand the play by suggesting that the action is a daydream of Christopher Sly. But the play’s a bore. Either Petruchio should have been timid and then got drunk and tamed Katherina as she wished, or, after her beautiful speech, she should have picked up a stool and hit him over the head.
King John and Richard II form a transition from the Henry VI plays and Richard III to the great Henry IV plays, and to Henry V, where Shakespeare is getting bored. Set battle pieces remain in King John, as in the scenes at Angiers, but they are absent in Richard II. In Henry V, battle scenes subside into the Chorus. They are felt to be unrealistic. In King John and Richard II Shakespeare also drops the subplot, like Cade’s rebellion in Henry VI, in favor of the depiction of a few characters. There is a consequent loss of the sense of the whole of society that we find in the earlier histories. Shakespeare brings the subplot back in Henry IV.
The interest in King John and Richard II centers on character and problems of language. Those mastered, Shakespeare goes on to the great studies of action of his middle period. The plays of the final period focus on feeling. There is less interest in history in King John. An earlier play, The Troublesome Reign of King John, explains historical motivation better—the falling off of the nobles, for example. Shakespeare may have written The Troublesome Reign, or he may just have used it. In Shakespeare, King John is not an altogether great Protestant king, as he is in The Troublesome Reign, nor is he altogether bad, as he shows in his repentance over Arthur. In Richard II there is no suspense: Richard goes downhill, Bolingbroke uphill. Bolinbroke is passive, accepts circumstances, relies on others, and has kinghood thrust upon him. York is a puzzling character: at first reluctantly disloyal to Richard, he is later anxious to execute his son for treason against Bolingbroke.
The plays are vehicles for two kinds of stars: the man of action and the lyric character. In King John the star is not the king, although King John has two interesting moments. The first of these moments is his suggestion to Hubert that Arthur would be better out of the way, in a speech in which the fine weather is counterpointed by his thoughts. “Give me thy hand,” he says to Hubert,
I had a thing to say,
But I will fit it with some better time.
By heaven, Hubert, I am almost asham’d
To say what good respect I have of thee.
Hub. I am much bounden to your Majesty.
K. John. Good friend, thou hast no cause to say so yet,
But thou shalt have; and creep time ne’er so slow,
Yet it shall come for me to do thee good.
I had a thing to say; but let it go.
The sun is in the heaven, and the proud day,
Attended with the pleasures of the world,
Is all too wanton and too full of gauds
To give me audience. If the midnight bell
Did with his iron tongue and brazen mouth
Sound on into the drowsy ear of night;
If this same were a churchyard where we stand,
And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs;
Or if that surly spirit, melancholy,
Had bak’d thy blood and made it heavy, thick,
Which else runs tickling up and down the veins,
Making that idiot, laughter, keep men’s eyes
And strain their cheeks to idle merriment,
A passion hateful to my purposes;
Or if that thou couldst see me without eyes,
Hear me without thine ears, and make reply
Without a tongue, using conceit alone,
Without eyes, ears, and harmful sound of words:
Then, in despite of brooded watchful day,
I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts.
But, ah, I will not! Yet I love thee well,
And, by my troth, I think thou lov’st me well.
“So well that what you bid me undertake,” Hubert answers,
Though that my death were adjunct to my act,
By heaven, I would do it!
K. John. Do not I know thou would’st?
Good Hubert, Hubert, Hubert, throw thine eye
On yon young boy. I’ll tell thee what, my friend,
He is a very serpent in my way;
And wheresoe’er this foot of mine doth tread,
He lies before me. Dost thou understand me?
Thou art his keeper.
Hub. And I’ll keep him so
That he shall not offend your Majesty.
K. John. Death.
Hub. My lord?
K. John. A grave.
Hub. He shall not live.
K. John. He shall not live.
K. John. Enough.
I could be merry now.
(III.iii.25–67)
This speech shows an enormous advance in Shakespeare’s technical skill. He gets away from conventional rhetoric, and the single word speeches—“death,” “a grave,” “enough”—are very skillful.
King John’s other interesting moment occurs when he is dying and is semidelirious. The speech he makes has been criticized by some for the elaboration of its rhetoric, but I think the fantasticalness of the rhetoric is dramatically appropriate:
Ay, marry, now my soul hath elbow room.
It would not out at windows nor at doors.
There is so hot a summer in my bosom
That all my bowels crumble up to dust.
I am a scribbled form drawn with a pen
Upon a parchment, and against this fire
Do I shrink up.
Hen. How fares your Majesty?
K. John. Poison’d, ill fare! dead, forsook, cast off!
And none of you will bid the winter come
To thrust his icy fingers in my maw,
Nor let my kingdom’s rivers take their course
Through my burn’d bosom, nor entreat the North
To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips
And comfort me with cold.
(V.vii.28–41)
I don’t care for the Hubert-Arthur scene (IV.i). Little kids on stage are impossible. They should be drowned. The ultimate origin of this scene is the episode of Abraham and Isaac in miracle plays—Isaac was the Shirley Temple of the day. The Chester play of “The Sacrifice of Isaac” has better rhetoric for this kind of pathos, and is tempered by the formal quality of its stanzas and its focus upon the moment of sacrifice.
The real interest in King John and Richard II lies in Shakespeare’s development as a writer. Language is a means of making human feeling, and patterns of human feeling, conscious. Language and people develop side by side and, to a degree, independently. A poet is first and foremost in love with language. The love of language is either itself a poetic gift or a symptom of it. In a young writer, technical skill outruns mastery of feeling. This is the opposite of the average unliterary man or woman who grows up to develop feelings that are more mature than his or her capacity for expression. Language, like any other creature, wants to be autonomous, to go its own way. Left to itself, it wants beautiful sounds and intricate rhetorical patterns. It is also conservative. It does not want to change a pattern that works well, and it is threatened by emotions and ideas that are too strong, too disorderly, or too new for tidy expression. Language is the enemy of action. If language had its way, action would stop, and man would exist in a lyrical trance, as in the poems of Mallarmé, and in such a lyric as Peele’s,
Hot sunne, coole fire, temperd with sweet aire,
Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white haire,
Shine sun, burne fire, breath aire, and ease mee,
Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me,
Shadow (my sweet nurse) keep me from burning,
Make not my glad cause, cause of mourning.
Let not my beauties fire,
Enflame my unstaied desire,
Nor pierce any bright eye,
That wandreth lightly.
The writer who surrenders to language—including even W. B. Yeats—is a minor poet. The relation between poet and medium is like The Taming of Shrew, where the writer is the husband and language the wife. In the period of courtship, the writer should fetch and carry and stand waiting in the rain. Once accepted, however, he must be the boss. If a writer doesn’t love language, he isn’t even a minor poet. In a young poet, look for artifice and technical skill. Everyone must begin as a minor poet. Beginning poets confine themselves to poetical feelings, either those of others or those that are their own particular discoveries. Housman is an instance of the latter. A major poet is always willing to risk failure, to look for a new rhetoric. Shakespeare, in 1595, might have startled us very much, because in 1595 he was not interested in plays, but in poems and sonnets. Highbrows then would have been much more interested in his advances in lyric poetry. It is great luck that Shakespeare had no money and was forced into drama. From observation and experience, one can say that circumstances in the theater create artistic problems that a dramatist must learn to meet. Shakespeare had to study action, which was a bore. So he had to find the rhetoric to make action interesting to him, and he thereby developed a rhetoric that enabled men of action such as Faulconbridge to transcend action and become interesting. Or, taking a particular lyric rhetoric as a given, he had to find a character to suit it, as he did with Richard II.
The really interesting character in King John is Faulconbridge, who dominates the play out of proportion to his historical importance. A bastard can be represented in two ways. First, as an example of nature versus society, an honest and graceful child as opposed to the hypocritical and weak offspring of a loveless marriage. The other way is to represent him as a criminal outlaw, as opposed to a legitimate child—Edmund versus Edgar in King Lear, for example. Faulconbridge is dubious about all human nature—including his own—but he remains loyal.
Shakespeare’s real interest is in the bastard’s diction. Consider his long speech on “commodity”:
that same purpose-changer, that sly devil,
That broker that still breaks the pate of faith,
That daily break-vow, he that wins of all,
Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men, maids,
Who, having no external thing to lose
But the word “maid,” cheats the poor maid of that—
That smooth-fac’d gentleman, tickling Commodity,
Commodity, the bias of the world—
The world, who of itself is peised well,
Made to run even upon even ground
Till this advantage, this vile drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this Commodity,
Makes it take head from all indifferency,
From all direction, purpose, course, intent—
And this same bias, this Commodity,
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word,
Clapp’d on the outward eye of fickle France,
Hath drawn him from his own determin’d aid,
From a resolv’d and honourable war,
To a most base and vile-concluded peace.
And why rail I on this Commodity?
But for because he hath not woo’d me yet:
Not that I have the power to clutch my hand
When his fair angels would salute my palm,
But for my hand, as unattempted yet,
Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich.
Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
(II.i.567–96)
For a moment this looks like a traditional villain’s speech, but Faulcon-bridge in fact acts as a loyal man. This type of speech is serviceable for a cynic turning villain, like Iago, for example, or for an honest man in despair, like Timon. It looks back also to Berowne’s speech on marriage in Love’s Labour’s Lost:
What, I? I love? I sue? I seek a wife?
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch,
But being watch’d that it may still go right.
(III.i.191–95)
And it looks forward to Hotspur’s speech on Glendower in Henry IV:
O, he is as tedious
As a tired horse, a railing wife;
Worse than a smoky house. I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill far
Than feed on cates and have him talk to me
In any summer house in Christendom.
(1 Henry IV, III.i.159–64)
All these speeches use unliterary language as an offset to the conventional language affected by most men of action. Faulconbridge uses such language in his fleering of Lewis when Lewis invades—“a beardless boy, / A cock’red silken wanton” (V.i.69–70). And he expresses himself with the same kind of diction when he accuses Hubert of killing Arthur:
If thou didst but consent
To this most cruel act, do but despair;
And if thou want’st a cord, the smallest thread
That ever spider twisted from her womb
Will serve to strangle thee; a rush will be a beam
To hang thee on. Or wouldst thou drown thyself,
Put but a little water in a spoon,
And it shall be as all the ocean,
Enough to stifle such a villain up.
(IV.iii.125–33)
Faulconbridge is apparently unconscious of literary style, but he actually displays an enormous literary gift. Shakespeare is interested in how men of action should talk, not in conventional braggadocio. Out of this interest was to come the great development of his verse in the future.
Constance in King John and Richard II in Richard II represent a combination of dramatic and lyrical writing. Shakespeare was learning to find a character suitable to a lyric style. Mark Van Doren notes that Constance is the last of Shakespeare’s wailing women. She is not used as chorus, but is presented instead as a grieving individual who plays incessantly on words and has a good deal of acting in her nature. She derisively mocks Elinor by playing fleeringly on the word, “grandam”:
Eli. Come to thy grandam, child.
Const. Do, child! go to it grandam, child!
Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig.
There’s a good grandam!
(II.i.159–63)
And she plays on the word “day,” when France declares that people shall never see the day of the marriage of Lewis and Blanch but as “a holiday”: “A wicked day, and not a holy day!” (III.i.83). The style of Constance’s speeches is like that of Sonnet 135—“Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will”—which was written at about the same time. When Cardinal Pandulf tells Constance, “you utter madness and not sorrow,” she goes off into a dialectic of grief to prove that she cannot be mad:
Thou art not holy to belie me so.
I am not mad. This hair I tear is mine;
My name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost.
I am not mad. I would to heaven I were!
For then ’tis like I should forget myself.
O, if I could, what grief should I forget!
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canoniz’d, Cardinal;
For, being not mad, but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be deliver’d of these woes
And teaches me to kill or hang myself.
If I were mad, I should forget my son,
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he.
I am not mad. Too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity.
(III.iv.43–60)
Constance is a minor character. In Richard II the lyric type of character takes center stage, and Richard’s language overflows onto other characters as well. When Bushy asks the Queen to lay aside her heaviness and “entertain a cheerful disposition,” she answers:
To please the King, I did; to please myself,
I cannot do it. …
I cannot but be sad—so heavy sad
As, though in thinking on no thought I think,
Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink.
Bushy. ’Tis nothing but conceit, my gracious lady.
Queen. ’Tis nothing less. Conceit is still deriv’d
From some forefather grief. Mine is not so,
For nothing hath begot my something grief,
Or something hath the nothing that I grieve.
’Tis in reversion that I do possess;
But what it is that is not yet known what,
I cannot name. ’Tis nameless woe, I wot.
(II.ii.4–6, 30–40)
Even John of Gaunt can go in for this kind of speech, as when he says goodbye to his exiled son, Bolingbroke, and recommends that he adopt the behavior of Richard, that of an actor (I.iii. 279–93).
Richard is an early version of Hamlet. He can also be compared to other unsuitable kings, to Henry VI, a pious man who would be a monk and is forced to be king in time of stress, and to Richard III, a man of action who insists upon becoming king and, in spite of justice, plans ahead to get rid of people who stand in his way—which is what Bolingbroke does not do. Richard II is interested in the idea of kingship rather than in ruling. Like a writer of minor poetry—he is good at that—he is interested more in the idea than in the act. He is good at presiding over a tournament, not at taking an action that means something, and his passion for ritual even embraces self-humiliation. He says, for example, when he looks in the looking glass in the scene in which he gives up the crown,
O flattering glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That like the sun did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that fac’d so many follies
And was at last outfac’d by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face.
As brittle as the glory is the face,
[Dashes the glass to the floor]
For there it is, crack’d in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport—
How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face.
(IV.i. 279–91)
Richard has few feelings, but he enjoys those situations that should produce feelings. When Bolingbroke says, after Richard has broken the mirror, “The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy’d / The shadow of your face,” Richard seizes upon the remark in order to elaborate upon it as a literary conceit:
Say that again.
The shadow of my sorrow? Ha! let’s see!
’Tis very true: my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul.
(IV.i.293–98)
In his farewell to the Queen, Richard doesn’t think of his wife or even of himself, but of how his story will sound in literature:
Think I am dead, and that even here thou takest,
As from my deathbed, thy last living leave.
In winter’s tedious nights sit by the fire
With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales
Of woful ages long ago betid;
And ere thou bid good-night, to quite their griefs
Tell thou the lamentable tale of me,
And send the hearers weeping to their beds.
For why, the senseless brands will sympathize
The heavy accent of thy moving tongue
And in compassion weep the fire out;
And some will mourn in ashes, some coal-black,
For the deposing of a rightful king.
(V.i.38–50)
In his last soliloquy, Richard is really happy. He compares the prison he is in to the world and finds the comparison interesting:
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;
And, for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.
(V.v.1–5)
Richard has only literary gifts, and he is stupid. Hamlet has intellectual ones, and can see that what happens to him is universal. Richard sees only himself. Both characters are egotistic, though Hamlet does more harm. Behind both is the real grief of the reflective melancholic person over the problem of whether to be or not to be. For Hamlet, it is an open possibility to choose one or the other. The only escape for Richard is into language. Shakespeare is able to work the lyrical style out of his system through the depiction of Richard II and proceed to the men of action in the plays of his middle period. In his last period he develops lyrical plays that avoid men of action.