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I have for some time been contending that a Shakespearian play is not purely and only a good story with entertainment and dramatic value linked to profound analysis of character1 and a heart-thrilling rhetoric; but that, over and above all this, it presents a close mesh of imaginative and intellectual suggestion demanding a more exact study and sensitive appreciation than it has so far received. The persons in the play are vital and human, none more so; but the interaction of those persons within the dramatic texture of the whole, and that texture itself, the action, movement and purpose of the whole artistic pattern, must at each instant be kept in mind. From such a comprehension many old difficulties are quickly resolved: what was inexplicable is found necessary; what suspected as spurious, seen as crucial. The Graveyard scene in Hamlet has been called irrelevant; and modern scholarship still repudiates the Vision in Cymbeline—regularly omitted from stage productions—and considers Henry VIII a chaotic play of doubtful authorship. There is no longer need or excuse for such confusion: for the powerfully dramatic Vision fits as perfectly into the pattern of Cymbeline as the Graveyard scene into that of Hamlet; and Henry VIII is a carefully constructed and fine play whose pattern I have elsewhere analysed.
Whereas from the old and limited understanding there was slight justification for the long and still living tradition of Shakespearian idolatry, from the new and comprehensive sight novel splendours of the intellect and themes of profundity and universal grandeur continually and pleasingly emerge. We ought not at all to be surprised at this; still less should we be offended. We are used to regarding great poetry as of universal importance, its meanings not limited to the partial and the ephemeral. Shakespeare has somehow stood alone, and for too long, as a solitary figure of irrelevant magnitude. True, we cannot interpret the whole of Shakespeare; nor of Dante; nor Byron.1 But because we can never exhaust the meanings in a great poet, that gives us no authority to neglect what meanings patently are there. Faced with a plenitude of meanings, we have asserted none: it is an easy way out. We must no longer deny to Shakespeare a quality common to great literature: the quality of universal meanings in the particular event. Shakespeare has something to say to us not only about human life, but about death; not only about England, or Venice, but about the universe. Poetry is metaphoric, its essential purpose being to blend the human and the divine. So those poets who aim primarily to speak of God, do so in terms of man; and Shakespeare, speaking with the accents and intricacies of great poetry of man, speaks accordingly of God.
The Shakespearian play shows a texture of personal thinking close-inwoven with some objective and pre-existent story. Philosophy is entwined with action and event. Shakespeare’s philosophy is infinitely variable, not static, as Dante’s: King Lear may be Senecan, but Macbeth is Christian. His philosophy may vary within one play. We cannot find by abstraction Shakespeare’s ‘own’ philosophy of life: his massed statement includes many philosophies, but is subject to none. Macbeth is a solid of which the length may be a Holinshed story but the height a Christian philosophy of grace and evil, and the breadth Shakespeare’s own emotional experience. Criticism, aware of the two-dimensional nature of the philosophic intelligence, often asserts that such imaginative solids are uninterpretable. This is nevertheless an error, since a Shakespearian play, though it may be complex, is yet far less so than life itself, which the philosophic intelligence has invariably considered a fair quarry. To apply intelligence to the whole art-form is not the same as abstracting from it those elements only that seem intelligible. There is no excuse for mental inaction. What happened was really this: criticism came to an impasse. Those elements in Shakespeare it was accustomed to analyse were, certainly, all but exhausted by analysis: as when tunnel-makers come to a nasty piece of rock. A little dynamite, however, may open out new progress. So, by attending as well to imagery and symbolism as to thought and action, to the rhythmic curves of poetry as well as to ‘character’, we touch the richer dimensional quality of the Shakespearian creation. That does not mean that we now attend only to those elements passed over before; rather that we attend afresh to the whole pattern. I have not, in my own interpretations, neglected to analyse persons or events: but I have taken them together with, and in terms of, the whole.
From such interpretations we become aware of the dominating Shakespearian themes; of love and hate, warriorship, kingship; ideas of state-order, conflicts of life-forces and death-forces; patterns of romance-fulfilment and the tragic sacrifice, and difficult visions that go farther yet. My two most important results I take to be: (i) the discovery of tempests and music as dominant contrasted symbolic impressions throughout the whole, or nearly the whole, of Shakespeare; and (ii) my reading of the Final Plays as visions of immortality crowning Shakespeare’s work and to be given as serious attention in their peculiar quality as Macbeth and King Lear in theirs. Though general acceptance of my contentions is not as yet apparent, it will come; if not soon, then late. Critics are sometimes, quite naturally, alienated by novelty and tend to read into vividness of statement a rigidity and schematism which are not necessarily implicit. To safeguard my essay from misunderstanding I next shortly outline what I take to be the nature of a Shakespearian play, using a succession of simple headings: What it is; What it does; and How it does it. These are chosen to prepare the way directly for my ideas on production. The formulation of scientific stage principles follows logically from any understanding of Shakespeare’s positive and challenging significance.
2. WHAT IT IS
A Shakespeare play is primarily an aural time-sequence, like music: a sequence of impressions, thoughts and images, carried across mainly by audible words allotted to various fictional persons. To these we must add sound-effects such as alarums, trumpets, thunder and music. Visual details concerning the action are not emphasized, as a rule, by stage-direction, except in the latest group of plays; and then only with moderation. It is true that the text is often itself richly descriptive; but these are pictures within the spoken word. That which builds the essential Macbeth, which persists common to various readings and stage-performances, is outwardly at least aural, not visual; though the aural can be received by the ear of imagination in silent reading.
But through this medium a varied content is delivered. There are conceptual thoughts, ideas. There are also mind-pictures. Shakespeare is crammed with visual impressions, a chain of them, blending one into another. We do not visualize them at all clearly at a first performance or a first reading, but they are there nevertheless at the back of the words, semi-consciously received. From this flux of ideas and images emerge greater units: the developing persons of the drama, the action and general movement, the marshalling of forces of one sort or another. The play is expressly dynamic, not static. This is true of all Shakespeare’s plays, but of his tragedies especially. Compared with a drama of more classical tradition the Shakespearian tragedy is simply crammed with action. You get from it a sense of intense life in conflict, development, and movement. Whatever Shakespeare is doing, one thing is clear: he does it largely through the medium of action. If we grant that Shakespeare expresses profundities, then we must be prepared to see those profundities expressed in terms of intense dramatic activity. Each play is an onslaught on the mind. And action implies conflict. We watch fierce contestants, men or principles. The ‘principles’ of the middle scenes usually become opposing armies towards the end; the inner psychological disturbance tends to objectify itself as the play unfurls into open military opposition. Observe how often armies are brought on the stage, sometimes actually fighting; and how individual combats may be crucial to the plot, as in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. These are surface symptoms of what is always embedded deep in Shakespeare: the play’s significant action.
The Shakespearian movement, whether of a whole play, or a scene, or a speech, undulates: it shows a rhythmic rise and fall. There are vast waves of action, and, within each, subtler minute crests and cusps, a ceaseless rippling variation.
We may have a sense of speed-waves. The middle action of Hamlet starts with a long scene of ordinary conversation. The player’s speech whips up the action for a while; then it falls back, but not right back, towards the poignant intensity of Hamlet’s meeting with Ophelia. Then we have Hamlet’s address to the players, working up shortly to the play-scene. From now on the speed increases rapidly. The King flies, Hamlet’s answers snap back at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; the King’s agonized prayer swiftly follows, and Hamlet’s entry; and Hamlet’s interview with his mother. This interview starts with a rapid dialogue leading to Polonius’ death. There is a pause, Hamlet settles down to his purpose, the movement is deliberate, but quickly gains speed as Hamlet loses control; he grows more wild and volleys abuse, the action gathers, rises to a climax; and the Ghost enters. The Ghost’s appearance checks the whole movement that started with the Play scene. Hamlet is now limp, his bolt shot, the Queen too: the whole action is limp. The scene drags on like a wounded snake, with repetitions: an intentional anti-climax. Shakespeare’s art functions in terms of rising action followed by a fall. He never fears an anti-climax. It is all done with curves, like a line of undulating hills. After a fall there is continuation: he never cuts off his action at a precipice.
The tragedies often rise to a crest of action about Act III, then, with variations, descend. Or so it seems to us today, but the military conflicts that the modern producer and audience find it so hard to take seriously were probably far more important to a contemporary, and as nerve-racking as the sound effects in Sherriff’s Journey’s End to us. Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and Timon of Athens show this central crest. Othello, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra rise to a later climax but do not close till the action is completed and rounded off. We might contrast Marlowe’s technique in Doctor Faustus where, except for the very short epilogue, the play is cut off abruptly at a violent climax: Marlowe is mainly interested in his heroes as individuals, Shakespeare in the hero’s relation to life in general. We have a pattern of the turning wheel of events, the rhythm and leverage of life swinging over. We find it in individual speeches at a high moment; the words gather power, rise, maintain their height, then, wavering, sough. back, as in the King’s sleep-speech in 2 Henry IV (III. i. 18–25), where the surges pile up steadily to the word ‘clouds’, and then fall back for the line following. This is a typical unit. So is Macbeth’s ‘If it were done …’ soliloquy (I. vii. I) which rises to a climax and sinks for the last four lines. We may remember that grand moment in Richard II when lyrical Richard, brought before Bolingbroke, starts humbly, then grows swiftly in spiritual stature, takes on the tragic purple of dethroned kingship, and sears his enemies with white-hot speech.
The play’s whole development repays attention. Richard is first weak, spoilt, careless and cruel, like Marlowe’s Edward II. But this, almost the whole of Marlowe’s protagonist, is the merest beginning of Shakespeare’s. Returning from Ireland he addresses the earth of England in words that recapture some of our sympathy and, above all, create in us a new sense of Richard’s sacred office. His confidence in that blackens Bolingbroke with a single phrase. When disaster closes on him his tragic despair is so developed that he becomes before our eyes unearthly, prince of a new world, a saint in sorrow. And still he is England’s king; never more so. His words to Northumberland pile phrase on damning phrase that leave his enemies spiritually crushed before they start to win. Then again he reverts to saintly meditation. They go to London. But watch what is happening: he is not falling, but rising. Step by step he climbs his miniature Calvary. At last he is to resign his crown. He does so, humbly. Northumberland would next have him read a record of his misdeeds. Now watch how the words gather strength:
K. RICHARD: Must I do so? and must I ravel out
My weav’d-up follies? Gentle Northumberland,
If thy offences were upon record
Would it not shame thee in so fair a troop
To read a lecture of them? If thou would’st,
There should’st thou find one heinous article
Containing the deposing of a king
And cracking the strong warrant of an oath,
Mark’d with a blot, damn’d in the book of Heaven!
Nay, all of you that stand and look upon me,
Whilst that my wretchedness doth bait myself,
Though some of you with Pilate wash your hands
Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates
Have here deliver’d me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin.
(IV. i. 228)
Observe the references to Christ. Richard towers over them all in spiritual stature, king yet, the elected of God. The scene rises to a climax at ‘Containing the deposing …’ down to ‘damned in the book of Heaven’; and then drops, but with a returning and only slightly lesser crest, soon after. It is all done by varied modulation, waves, curves. And after this scene we have Richard’s parting with his wife, deep in the luxuriating sunset of sorrow; his meditative listening to music in prison; his death. The climax comes well before the end and the movement curves over.
This spiritual rise under tragic stress we find often: as in Romeo, Hamlet, Lear, and Cleopatra. Shakespeare continually surprises: not by remarkable events alone, but by revealing a continual and growing power in his persons. Each is conceived according to the principle of growth; each tragedy is a rise. Marlowe’s Edward satisfies your expectation; Shakespeare’s Richard shatters it, revealing strength where we expected weakness. Marlowe’s tragedy gives us a study of a failure; Shakespeare’s a revelation of grandeur. Even the conclusion to Faustus presents rather a sublime wriggling than a sacrificial suffering. Marlowe’s tragic heroes are all ambitious materialists, and when they crash they end. Shakespeare’s are purgatorial pilgrims. Shakespeare is fundamentally Christian, Marlowe pagan. So a Shakespearian tragedy has always direction and a positive thrust. In developing his persons, in constructing a play, in writing a speech, Shakespeare is master of the seventh wave; crash follows crash, and when we expect exhaustion, and fear, after so much expense of power, a comparatively limp conclusion, the seventh wave towers up, something we had never guessed yet recognize as inevitable, and not till then the return, the vast retraction, and silence.
That Shakespeare’s two dominant symbols are aural effects is not therefore strange. As I have shown in The Shakespearian Tempest, the Shakespearian universe turns about the axis of tempests and music. True, many of the tempests are given visual though verbal description; but many, too, are presented in stage-directions of thunder. A Shakespearian tragedy is ‘full of sound and fury’: the action demands flourishes, trumpets, drums, alarums, cannon, sounds which bridge the two opposites of music and thunder. In terms of music and tempest we can discover a certain recurrent pattern in tragedy: some sort of music near the beginning, suggesting peace; followed by the thunder of disrupting action and conflict about Act III; a falling back to a dark serenity and melodious pathos, with often more music, usually in some way a broken music, in Act IV or thereabouts; and then the final tragic impact, usually after an armed conflict, perhaps with stately martial sounds, as in Hamlet, Timon of Athens and Coriolanus, blending the powers of music and tempest-thunder.1
All these are merest samples. There is much more that might be said. To different minds different rhythmic variations will be apparent. I have left unnoticed the romantic comedies, where the persons are on the whole more static and a musical and harmonious resolution is played out with some sort of tempest and division in the background; and also the Final Plays, which start with tragedy and end with a reversal towards union and peace. Plays may often be considered as three—or four—vast waves of action, with intervals between. The usual act and scene divisions are of little use; we must discover rhythms independently. It is a good plan to think of the play as a cinematograph sequence: short scenes are not technically weak in Shakespeare. We may get a flashed view of one army, then of the other, then again the first, giving a sense of speed and action. But the order may be most important: fine effects are gained by juxtaposition, as when Buckingham’s execution follows Wolsey’s feast and the King’s merry-making. There are a myriad subtleties in all this. There is no looseness in the interlinked sequence: and each link in the chain is the more massive for each and all that precede it. The play gathers power as it moves. It is more than an addition. It increases like compound interest. Tragedy becomes a massive and ever-swelling river thundering into a serene and peaceful sea. Shakespeare, remember, does not fear an anti-climax. And the temporal sequences in Shakespeare build a reality beyond the temporal; their crashing and mighty rhythms raise an architecture surpassing speech; for, though the play be ‘full of sound and fury’, it is very far from ‘signifying nothing’.
So it will not follow that we are excused from exact analysis of imagery, symbol, and thought. Though a speech be a sound-sequence, it will not sound well unless the speaker has some degree of understanding. Similarly a whole play will not move well unless the producer realizes more than the general rhythmic succession of big sounds. We have stressed the importance of varied movement and rhythmic undulations; but this very variety and rhythm depend ultimately on meaning of various kinds, and the meanings, once you start on them, are most subtle and comprehensive.
The plays were meant to be acted, and even an ideal spectator can at any one performance receive only a general sense of story and grand action. Yet that general sense may be taken to include an awareness of every word that has been spoken during the performance in its interrelation with everything else. That is why one experience of a great work is not enough; we must grow to know it. Shakespeare, like the Greek dramatists, preferred plots not entirely new to his audience, for the early scenes should gain power from some knowledge of what is to come. Ideally the whole play should be semi-consciously in the mind at every moment. The final result will be a massed area of the mind rather spatial than temporal with a spatiality which includes the power and rhythms of a sequence. It is therefore both spatial and temporal.
As our knowledge of a Shakespearian play increases we become more and more intensely aware of a certain quality peculiar to it. This can be held in the mind after the events which help to build it are forgotten; indeed, the ability to leave such an impression is the distinguishing mark of high imaginative literature. This quality, though mental, is to the inward eye partly at least visual, spatial, an expanse. The action of Macbeth leaves us with a sense of certain imaginative areas. We see darkness and colour. There is gold of kingship, crowns of sovereignty, ingots of world-power: the poetry emphasizes them, the events build them. Red blood streams, sticks on the hand. Nature’s innocence is in the martlet’s nest, the tree borne by the crowned child, Birnam wood. Images of divine grace flash out. Night-birds wing the air. Thunder crashes and lightning’s scimitars gash the darkness. Feasting, first to honour Duncan and later when interrupted by Banquo’s Ghost, or as suggested negatively in the horror of the Weird Sisters’ cauldron-stew of filth, is powerful. Varied impressions may be allowed to group themselves into a new kind of dramatis personae of symbolic suggestion. Those we have noticed tend to divide into two camps of life-forces and death-forces. This is how we may approach the more universal meanings of a Shakespearian play in terms of certain sense-suggestions thrown up and built in the mind by the story, its persons, and their words.
I have been criticized for selecting cross-sections of imaginative correspondence such as the kingship, crown and sceptre references in Macbeth without close reference at every instant to their peculiar contexts and order of sequence in the play. But we are analysing the final effect of the whole play in an ideal recipient’s mind, or that which may be attained by anyone after continual study. In this whole result every part is co-existent; though built of a sequence it is a sequence whose nature and end is to accumulate itself swiftly into that whole. Every effect has a simultaneous reference to its own context and to the whole. To attempt to work along the time-surface of particular context with each minute correspondence, showing how this in its context throws back to that and forward to something else in theirs, and to continue doing this, may involve subtleties and intricacies of doubtful value; and even of doubtful honesty, since we should never be able to start doing this on any wide scale without an already formed knowledge of the massed existence of such references without implications of sequence.
We can thus start to know the whole play, action and atmosphere, time-sequence and symbols, as a single almost visual quality built equally of action and sense-suggestions. The main action is often crystallized into some symbolic solidity, such as the three Apparitions in Macbeth, the handkerchief in Othello, the caskets in The Merchant of Venice. It is as though the aim and purpose of the play’s movement were to solidify itself. The whole result is weighty, held in the mind as, to use a phrase from Measure for Measure (III. ii. 298), ‘ponderous and substantial’; it is still, though made of action; solid, though built of flux; or, to use Shakespeare’s favourite symbols, it is music created of thunderous and tempestuous conflict. Passive, it radiates power; and, existing subject to neither time nor space, it seems composed of both.
A major poet’s resolution of conflicts makes an objective art-form of quiescent yet potent quality. Whatever personal distresses and contemporary conflicts he bodies forth, the resulting stillness makes a significant wedge into life exposing light for other generations with other conflicts; though in Shakespeare the conflicts are generally universal enough, having direct significances for the modern world.
Many of our difficulties—the matter of significant relations independent of order, the mystery of a seeming stillness made of movement, the paradox of a passive activity—are illuminated by our recognizing that the germ of composition is an intuitive perception of a certain stillness, an idea or quality. Such an intuition will condition creation. It will not necessarily come before the work is started, but we must suppose there to be always a moment of conception during the early stages of composition when the essential nature of the work to be is first properly apparent. This becomes the nucleus, preliminary drafts or ideas are re-coloured to tone with it, action and imagery clothe it, grow from it, cluster round it. Or perhaps it is better to say that all actions, events and images that clash with the central intuition are rejected: it comes to the same thing. No doubt such a process may be repeated more than once, as the work grows under writing and revision, under a developing conception. But we need not here multiply our troubles; artistic creation, like any other type of creation, is a mystery. So we shall assume a single central though dynamic stillness at the back of the process, a hub of the turning wheel. From this central principle we can begin to understand the work in its wholeness. That is why, in interpreting a play’s intellectual meaning, you cannot or must not work from the surface. However careful and subtle your elucidation of details and correspondences along the surface, you cannot give a dynamic interpretation without some sense of a whole; either the whole play, or the whole of one aspect. To do this we must intuitively recognize a central principle of some kind and call on quotations only as evidence. For example, I feel a mass of references to crowns, sceptres, and regal pomp in Macbeth: and in evidence I write down quotations irrespective of their order, since each relates primarily not to others but to a certain centrality that gives them all meaning: here a certain sense-perception of the glories of kingship. At the centre of creation and understanding alike there remains a stillness, the hub of the wheel.
The completed result shares this quality of stillness, as the rim of a whirling wheel is still, or appears so. From the action and movement is thrown up a spiritual edifice, a solid of the mind, a cinematograph roll: every unrolling of it in performance or reading rolls it into a new solid in the recipient’s imagination. A performance is therefore not simply a sequence but architectonic, and makes a mind-building. In Abt Vogler Robert Browning imagines an organist making of great music a mystic building and in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan the paradisal dome could be ‘built in air’ by ‘symphony and song’. In describing fine architecture we might say that it seems to be creating itself instant by instant, for such is its expressly dynamic, rhythmic and vital quality; and we may give a corresponding emphasis to the more solid attributes of great poetry.1 All great art forces the mind to understand the paradox of a pulsing solidity, blending spatial and temporal conceptions. It introduces us directly to that which is built of both and beyond both; space-time or eternity. This is how Dante’s great poem, explicitly projecting events in their eternal quality, has an exact, implicit, analogy throughout Shakespeare.
4. HOW IT DOES IT
This peculiar fluid-solid nature of the literary art-form is created by its limiting itself at some point. The end stops the narrative accumulation, and that stoppage turns the river into a reservoir. We must on no account allow a leakage. In terms of an art-form we can get a certain revelation, but only if we respect its limits.
The conventions of poetic drama forbid our complaining at the technical compression by which the loving Othello’s mistrust is raised within a half-hour’s scene, or our wondering how a man of Iago’s peculiar tendencies has lived in freedom until the play’s opening. We must confine our attention within certain limits; we must receive the whole play, neither more nor less. Consider the two main types of play: romance and tragedy. These express two primary rhythms, the love-quest and the death-quest; and the relief they instil is a relaxing of tensions, that of unsatisfied love and that of unsatisfied life. But we must not ask too far. We must not inquire as to what sort of a husband Bassanio will make. The sublimity of King Lear depends on our not trying to work out immortality doctrines from it: the tragic sacrifice is performed, and, even though King Lear itself makes us believe in some kind of immortality, while watching King Lear we must feel death to be in some sense the conclusion, or we miss the very impact on which our belief depends. In the Final Plays, where I argue that the quality of immortality is expanded in significant designs of resurrection and reunion, we must again not question beyond the framework. The play’s design is our only whole. That design depends on its limits, and only by respecting those limits can we focus its quality. To argue that Leontes and Hermione must anyhow die after the action is irrelevant: they do not exist after the action. We have witnessed a supposed death and reunion whose patterned rhythm can awake knowledge of a difficult truth, like a parable of Jesus. We cannot appreciate a picture’s design if we expand the view on our own beyond the frame. We must not say: ‘That’s all very pretty, but I happen to know that piece of country and there’s an ugly factory a little farther on, that ruins the conception.’ This may be true, but it is irrelevant, at all events until we have got the utmost which we are capable of receiving from the art-form itself. So the interior action of a Shakespearian play draws significance from the play’s conventional limits: and this thought helps us again to see how the whole is at once dynamic and static. There is an interplay of solidity and movement. Later we shall find an important analogy on the plane of stage-representation.
Not only do conventions bar our consciousness from certain dangerous directions; they ask us to give positive assent to strange occurrences. We have to accept people who speak poetry, but our reward is a richer understanding than normal language can induce. Consider Cleopatra’s speech in Antony and Cleopatra:
My desolation does begin to make
A better life. ’Tis paltry to be Caesar;
Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave,
A minister of her will: and it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds;
Which shackles accidents and bolts up change;
Which sleeps and never palates more the dung—
The beggar’s nurse and Caesar’s.
(V. ii. I)
An intuitive perception of a difficult thought, that of death’s positive and victorious significance, is expanded; the one white beam split into spectroscopic tints, and displayed for analysis and inspection; so building into us a full understanding of a difficult intuition. This is one instance of what is always happening in Shakespeare. Compare Richard III’s soliloquy after the ghosts disappear. Richard analyses at length the workings of his own conscience by which he paradoxically is forced to condemn himself. This baffling intuition of a divided mind conscious of its own division is cleverly presented. Richard questions his own identity. The King’s fine prayer in Hamlet is analogous. Poetic drama, if we accept its conventions, becomes more substantial than our normal life-view.
Similarly, the play’s wider action may present most unusual incidents. Shakespeare relates his hero to society in general and state-order; moreover, he sees that society as part of nature widening out to the whole universe. Logically, therefore, Macbeth’s crime eclipses the sun. In order to see any act in its wholeness we must not limit our context at any point. Great literature is at work to interweave temporal and transient subtleties with eternal verities: the swing of the seasons, storm-wrack, sun, stars, comets; and with universal principles, of life, death, resurrection. That is why a Shakespearian play or the New Testament, or any great work of literature, superficially falsifying life’s appearances, is to a final judgement the only realism. What we usually call fact is a miserable abstraction, torn from its context, uprooted and dead. Poetic art gives us not the factual, which is dead, but the actual, which lives. It aims to reintegrate our abstractions into their only proper context in the whole of life. The cramming of unlimited significances into one self-limited work necessarily forces statements and symbols at first sight hard to accept. The play’s limits force the creation of miraculous events which in turn are to be understood in terms of those limits. The problem of the New Testament is closely related.1 Such strange events, we had better say, are true in their context and as part of the whole: certainly, they are always most important for our understanding. If we refuse them what Coleridge called our ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ we mutilate that whole and its meaning; but if we focus the whole pattern, no less and no more, infinite vistas are opened. This is particularly to be remembered in reading the Final Plays. In Pericles we must give the same kind of assent to the miraculous resurrection of Thaisa as we should to the raising of Lazarus in the New Testament.
Poetic drama is both more difficult and more important than the realistic plays of today, but it can address the mind only through conventions. The conclusion to Measure for Measure can be understood only from a formal acceptance of the peculiar quality of the whole. Finally, every play demands a different kind of acceptance: so that the peculiar convention of a work of art is that work of art itself. Hence the importance of pure acceptance as the condition of understanding, as when you the more easily do a complicated calculation in mathematics by agreeing that a letter shall stand for a number, and by so doing work out an answer true for all values of your letter: that is, an answer of universal quality.
To sum up: The Shakespearian play is a creation of intellectual and imagistic complexity demanding and exhausting all our powers of analysis. It is primarily an aural time-sequence with rhythmic modulations, but nevertheless creates in the mind a result that may be imaged as spatial, solid, and rich in sense-suggestion. Since this spatial result is wound into the mind along a time-sequence we must call it a ‘space-time’ creation, tuning our minds to awareness of the space-time dimension. This, its particularly universal and eternal quality, is closely related to the proper use of conventions.
From these considerations I shall now construct some general principles of stage production. I shall concentrate mainly on the Tragedies, which raise most clearly the crucial problems. However, what I have to say applies with equal force to all except the more farcical elements in the Comedies.
1 My previous animadversions as to ‘character’ come under two distinct headings: (i) a refusal to analyse any person in the drama in isolation from the whole play and its various actions and effects; (ii) an antipathy to the term ‘character’ in the sense of ‘fictional person’ because of certain dangerous ethical associations. It is not always understood that neither of these objections precludes intense concern with the subtle psychology and richly human action of which the plays are made.
1 Here Shelley in the first edition was replaced by Byron in my 1949 text.
1 This pattern characterizes Shakespeare’s work as a whole, from the early romances, through tragedy and the mysticism of the Final Plays, to Henry VIII; Shakespeare’s last play corresponding to the ritualistic conclusions of Hamlet and Timon of Athens. [1949]
1 For an extended discussion of such ‘musical buildings’ see my Laureate of Peace, III.
1 The more miraculous events in the New Testament are discussed in The Christian Renaissance (enlarged, 1962).