Mad About Shakespeare

5. The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet

A rite of passage for any lover of Shakespeare is the first pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon. I had just left school, but I cadged a place on a minibus filled with thirteen boys, driven erratically from Sevenoaks to Oxford by Bob Taylor, and then more smoothly into Warwickshire by one of the English masters, Hugh Pullan. Once in Stratford, we checked into the youth hostel and walked into town, where at a grim little café I ate a ‘Choppy Grill’ followed by a ‘Peach Delight’, each mouthful the embodiment of the full awfulness of 1970s English food. Then we wandered down to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre by the Avon and sat high in the gallery, looking down on Trevor Nunn’s production of The Comedy of Errors.

Since this is Shakespeare’s shortest play, it is often padded out with extra stage business. Never, the critics agreed, had it been so well stuffed as here. Farcical pressing of door buzzers, a chase timed in synchrony with an old Western movie projected on a screen, an assortment of dances and acrobatic acts, a rousing musical finale. The stage set was a café in a square, with brightly coloured laundry suspended from washing lines across the street. Roger Rees, as Antipholus of Syracuse, wore a white suit and a very 1970s red and white checked shirt with an enormous collar. A camera was strapped around his neck to indicate that he was a tourist in a strange town.

The Comedy of Errors is an early play, Shakespeare’s first comedy of mistaken identity. Twins, both called Antipholus, have been separated since infancy. They each have a servant called Dromio. The two Dromios are also twins. The reason for the doubling of names is that, after the shipwreck in which the two pairs were separated and the father assumes that his wife and one child plus servant have been drowned, the surviving child and servant are given the names of their lost siblings. This detail is explained in a long and clunky expository speech early in the play, but we aren’t supposed to trouble ourselves with its implausibility, since realism is not the mode of farce.

The best scene in the production – which must have been filmed for television, because you can find it on YouTube – has Judi Dench striding on in the role of Adriana, wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, and accusing him of having an affair. It is one of the most powerful and poignant speeches to come from the mouth of a Shakespearean wife. Especially when delivered with the force and nuance of Judi Dench in her prime. She is actually addressing Antipholus of Syracuse, who has just arrived in town and has no idea who she is, let alone what she is talking about. Plead you to me, fair dame? he replies at the end of her tirade, getting as big a laugh as any Shakespearean line ever gets.

I didn’t notice the twist in Antipholus’ next words – I know you not – even though we had been told in school that in Elizabethan usage ‘know’ could mean ‘have sex with’, which added irony to his innocence, since Adriana’s accusation is precisely that her husband is ‘knowing’ a mistress instead of her. Nor did I think about her pain – or the double standard to which she unerringly points. The language of her speech was too closely packed for my ear to follow:

How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,

That thou art then estrangèd from thyself?

Thy self I call it, being strange to me,

That, undividable, incorporate,

Am better than thy dear self’s better part.

Ah, do not tear away thyself from me!

For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall

A drop of water in the breaking gulf,

And take unmingled thence that drop again

Without addition or diminishing,

As take from me thyself, and not me too.

I only saw below the surface of the marital spat when I was back at home, reading the play in the double-columned Oxford Edition that my parents, who never fought, had given me. Adriana seemed to be suggesting that a partner in love is a second self. We spend our lives in search of our lost other half. If we are lucky enough to find them, the two halves will be joined and we will be whole, undividable, incorporate. Two selves become one body in sexual and emotional union. Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh, as St Matthew’s Gospel has it in the verse immediately before the words we hear in the liturgy of the wedding service: What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. The division carved by adultery is accordingly, for Adriana, a taking of her own self from herself. The irony that shadows her anguish is the fact that the Antipholus to whom she is speaking is not her ‘other half’ in the sense of her sexual partner, but her other half’s biological other half, the twin from whom he has been separated.

No playgoer can instantly take in all these layers of thought. Shakespeare’s friends the actors must have known this. When they collected his plays after his death and published them in the great book that we call the First Folio, they wrote in their Preface: Read him, therefore, and again, and again, and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him. The demand sounds a bit coercive, but it chimed with what I was learning from my stellar group of English teachers: persevere with Shakespeare, read him repeatedly and closely, and you will be rewarded. To get an education out of him you need a little education into him. You have to put in some work, by way of a close reading of his words – a line-by-line thoughtfulness of the kind you don’t have time for in the transience of the theatrical moment.

Some special arrangement must have been made. After The Comedy of Errors, we were allowed to go backstage. The house manager showed us the prop store, rehearsal space and dressing rooms. We caught a glimpse of Judi Dench deep in conversation with Trevor Nunn. And then we walked on to the stage, looked out into the darkened auditorium and I fantasized about becoming an actor or maybe a director myself.

The next morning I became a tourist, but Anne Hathaway’s cottage seemed only quaint, not relevant to what I wanted from Shakespeare. In the afternoon, we sat through a marathon (nearly four-hour) matinee of King Lear. This was a full works production, with Donald Sinden in Donald Wolfit mode. It left me cold. I barely remember a single detail, apart from the well-staged rain. Was there a risk of overexposure? Was I going cold on Shakespeare?

The school party headed home and I stayed on alone for the evening show: The Winter’s Tale. My faith was reawakened. This was a play that took you through a dark tunnel into the light beyond. The language of the opening scenes was crabby and harsh, though rendered with great lucidity by Ian McKellen as Leontes under the direction of John Barton. This Leontes was a ramrod-backed soldier, ruling Sicilia as a one-party state – McKellen anticipating the buttoned-up Iago he created a decade later and the Richard III as anglicized Hitler that he brought to both stage and screen in the 1990s. After the interval, the play was transformed into a joyful country romp, with young love, a lost one found, and finally a magical return to life. For the Bohemian shepherding scenes, Barton handed over the direction to Trevor Nunn and Barry Kyle. McKellen did not like the disjunction. ‘Three directors are two too many,’ he remarked wryly when asked to look back on the production many years later. But at the time, I loved the contrast: the tragic first half and comic second made The Winter’s Tale feel like a two-for-the-price-of-one special offer.

Returning home on the train the next morning, I reflected on the astonishing variety of the three plays I had seen. By good fortune, the sequence had followed their order of composition. The Comedy of Errors was early Shakespeare, finding his way, experimenting and having fun. King Lear was middle Shakespeare, written in the full maturity of his tragic voice. The Winter’s Tale was late Shakespeare, moving into a vein that critics call ‘romance’. So what was the unifying thread? Most obviously, family.

In The Comedy of Errors, husband, wife and twin children all lose and find each other. In King Lear, bad children turn against their parents, leading intemperate fathers to exile their good children, actions for which they pay a terrible price (Gloucester blinded, Lear driven mad) and then, piling on the tragedy, they pay a second time when, after the briefest of reunions, they are separated again through death. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes pays an equally great price for his false accusation that the child in his wife Hermione’s womb is not his own, but that of his best friend Polixenes: his only boy Mamillius is struck dead and for sixteen years he has to live with the belief that he has also caused the deaths of his wife and baby daughter. The early play ends in comic reunion, the middle one in tragic desolation, the late one in the ‘romance’ twist of a seemingly magical return from death. The progression mirrors that of many lives: you lark around when young, encounter adversity in middle age and, if you allow yourself to awake your faith, as Paulina puts it in The Winter’s Tale, you may achieve a certain serenity and hope in old age, a recognition that things have a way of falling into a pattern.

I had packed a slim volume of poetry to read on the train, the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot. My eyes fell on a passage towards the end of ‘Little Gidding’:

See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.

But all wasn’t well at home. The problem in my family was not infidelity of the kind imagined by Leontes or ingratitude as embodied by Goneril and Regan. I thought about the character of Hermione: what must it have been like for her to be kept locked up by Paulina in a secluded house for sixteen years? The image of a woman who had once been so loving, so active, so charming, as a wife, a hostess, a mother, now just sitting there all day, alone with her thoughts of her lost children, never venturing out. The circumstances were very different, but I was led to think of my own mother, who, almost as soon as my brother left home, had retreated into the house. And could not make herself get up from her chair.

Then I realized that the three plays had something else in common, and I remembered again the words of the Doctor in Macbeth about ministering to a mind diseased. Mental illness. Lady Macbeth had gone mad. A running gag in The Comedy of Errors is the way that the mistakes of identity caused by the presence of two sets of twins lead people again and again to accuse each other of being mad. When the Duke comes on in the final scene, to try and sort everything out, he encapsulates the play in a single line:

I think you are all mated or stark mad.

In Shakespeare’s time – as in the Bible – madness was often thought of as a symptom of being possessed by devils. Adriana, believing that her husband is so afflicted, calls on a mad doctor named Pinch to conjure the devils out of him. His spell does not work, so he resorts to an equally age-old practice:

Mistress, both man and master is possessed,

I know it by their pale and deadly looks.

They must be bound and laid in some dark room.

The same remedy is tried for Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s other twin play: when the authorities are conned into thinking that he is mad, he is locked up in a dark room. In Shakespeare’s London, people branded with madness might be incarcerated in Bethlem Hospital, known as Bedlam. Edgar in King Lear, disguising himself as a Bedlam escapee, pretends to be possessed by devils:

My face I’ll grime with filth,

Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots,

And with presented nakedness outface

The winds and persecutions of the sky.

The country gives me proof and precedent

Of Bedlam beggars, who with roaring voices

Strike in their numbed and mortifièd arms

Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary,

And with this horrible object, from low farms,

Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills,

Sometimes with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,

Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod, poor Tom!

That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am.

Bedlam was located in the parish of Bishopsgate, where Shakespeare lodged for much of his career. The ‘hospital’ was very close to the Shoreditch theatres for which he wrote in the years before his company built the Globe on the south bank of the Thames. The father of Ned Alleyn, the man who dominated the London stage in the years when Shakespeare was beginning his career as an actor and playwright, had actually been keeper of Bedlam. He retained the keeper’s house even after leaving the post, and Alleyn seems to have been brought up there. If Shakespeare’s best friend, Richard Burbage, lead actor in his company, was in any way like a modern method actor, he could easily have prepared to play his madmen’s parts by going along to Bedlam, which was – shamefully, we now say – a place of public spectacle.

Shakespeare did not, however, exploit the twenty or so inmates confined at Bedlam in the way that some of his fellow-dramatists did. Edgar merely plays the role of Poor Tom, whereas in The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, an entire strand of the plot is set in a lunatic asylum based on Bedlam, with much slapstick comedy at the expense of the mentally ill. For Shakespeare, in the plays I saw on that first trip to Stratford, mental disturbance was a wide spectrum, a phenomenon to which any one of us could be subject. Dr Pinch in The Comedy of Errors was a joke: he gets his diagnosis wrong. Antipholus is not really mad. When Donald Sinden quietened down in the closing scenes of Lear we witnessed a man coming out of madness, recovering self-knowledge. And McKellen’s Leontes was infected with a different kind of madness, the paranoia that comes from sexual jealousy, his mind racing to false conclusions, the intensity of his love for Hermione creating suspicion and then seeming certainty on the basis of pure delusion. Madly, he believes his own dream of cuckoldry:

Affection? – thy intention stabs the centre.

Thou dost make possible things not so held,

Communicat’st with dreams – how can this be? –

With what’s unreal thou coactive art,

And fellow’st nothing. Then ’tis very credent

Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost,

And that beyond commission, and I find it,

And that to the infection of my brains

And hard’ning of my brows.

‘Affection’ could mean ‘delusion’ as well as ‘passion’: a single word holds the brainworm of Hermione making love to Polixenes together with the madness of Leontes’ belief that his fears must be true merely because he has dreamed them.

The intriguing thing about The Winter’s Tale was its turn from the infection of Leontes’ brain in the first half to the joyful affection of the young lovers, Florizel and Perdita, in the second. After Time bid us imagine the passing of sixteen years, and the action moved from the chilly Sicilian court to the country warmth of Bohemia, the poetry began to tiptoe with grace and ease. Watching the play from the gods in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, I imagined myself in Florizel’s shoes. I wanted to be infatuated with a girl again, to hold her in a slow dance at the end of a disco, and to say,

when you do dance, I wish you

A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do

Nothing but that. Move still, still so,

And own no other function.

I think I loved the play because it was reversing my own story: the previous year, I had been Florizel, in love for the first time. But now I was Leontes, convinced that she had left me for someone else. The Winter’s Tale meant so much to me because it offered the hope that you could lose someone, but then get her back.

Shakespeare thought that being in love is another kind of madness:

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:

That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Did this mean that the gift of poetry was compensation for the frantic heartache of love? Now that seemed to me an interesting idea.

Among our set texts for A-Level English Literature was the Penguin selection of The Metaphysical Poets. I still have the copy – an orange paperback with a leaf design – that I somehow forgot to return to the English department’s book cupboard when I left school. The poems were printed in their original spelling, which made them seem more challenging than Shakespeare, whose olde wordes had been smoothed out by his editors. Our teacher warned us that we would be in for some mental gymnastics. ‘John Donne makes Tom Stoppard seem like tennis for rabbits,’ he pronounced.

Cunningly, he got us started with a local reference. The key technique, he explained, was a kind of metaphor known as a conceit (‘Yes, it was a way of showing off’), in which, as Dr Johnson put it when coining the term ‘metaphysical poets’, the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together. One of Johnson’s examples was the poet Abraham Cowley, a disciple of Donne, comparing a lover’s heart to a hand grenade. A modern poem was handed around the class in order to illustrate the idea of a conceit. ‘In 1617, Donne preached a sermon in St Nick’s just across the road,’ we were told. This inspired the poem, ‘A Letter to John Donne’ by C. H. Sisson:

I understand you well enough, John Donne

First, that you were a man of ability

Eaten by lust and by the love of God

Then, that you crossed the Sevenoaks High Street

As Rector of St Nicholas:

I am of that parish.

To be a man of ability is not much

You may see them on the Sevenoaks platform any day

Eager men with dispatch cases …

Bring out your genitals and your theology.

What makes you familiar is this dual obsession.

It was easy to see that a double conceit was at work here: John Donne giving a sermon and stockbrokers commuting from Sevenoaks was one pair of heterogeneous ideas yoked together, genitals and theology another.

Naturally, the genitals pricked our interest more than the theology. When we turned to Donne himself, although we wondered what the hell was meant by such lines as The general balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk in the eerily titled ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day’, the rewards were ample: poem after poem was about sex. In one, he was undressing his girlfriend to a state of full nakedness; in another, he was telling the busy old sun not to rise so that he could have another shag before going to work. There was a poem for every stage of a relationship, from fancying –

Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee,

Before I knew thy face or name

to seducing –

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,

And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest

to the transition from talking about it to doing it –

For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love

to parting with the assurance that you will be back –

Sweetest love, I do not goe,

For weariness of thee

to getting angry after being dumped –

When by the scorne, O murdresse, I am dead.

Our anthology of the Metaphysical Poets also included Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’:

Had we but World enough, and Time,

This coyness Lady were no crime …

But at my back I alwaies hear

Times winged Charriot hurrying near:

And yonder all before us lye

Desarts of vast Eternity.

Thy Beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound

My ecchoing Song: then Worms shall try

That long preserv’d Virginity:

And your quaint Honour turn to dust;

And into ashes all my Lust.

The Grave’s a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace.

Now let us sport us while we may … Great sport in the classroom, too, as we found double entendres in such images as private place and the echo of a forbidden word in quaint. Chaucer’s ribald Miller’s Tale was another of our set texts, so we were familiar with an attention-grabbing line that centuries later would be unknowingly paraphrased by Donald J. Trump: And prively he caught hir by the queynte.

For the romantic in me, best of all was John Donne’s ‘The Extasie’, which turned on the same idea as that of Adriana in The Comedy of Errors:

Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe againe,

And makes both one, each this and that.

Like so many of Donne’s poems, it is a seduction workout, the argument being that if love makes two souls into one, then the two bodies must be joined forthwith in sexual intercourse. The poet and his lover are in the outdoors, on a grassy bank purpled with spring flowers, their hands interlocked, their mutual gaze magnetic, their souls reaching towards union,

And whil’st our soules negotiate there,

Wee like sepulchrall statues lay;

All day, the same our postures were,

And wee said nothing, all the day.

Imagine that, I thought: to lie under the sun with your lover, all the day, souls and bodies united and with no need for words. Shakespeare and Donne: they were writing four hundred years ago and yet they understood my desires, my dreams.

I wondered whether Shakespeare invented the idea of the teenager in love. He wasn’t the first to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet, but he was the first to make Juliet so young (not quite fourteen) and to get inside her head, to find words for that dizzy yearning of first love:

Come night, come Romeo, come thou day in night,

For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night

Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-browed night,

Give me my Romeo, and, when I shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

In a culture where young women were thought of as passive objects, to be handed from father to husband, Shakespeare makes Juliet into a hot-blooded subject. Where her father wants to sell her as a wife, she speaks here of buying the mansion of love and she can’t wait to possess it. To enjoy sex. We had learned that a central conceit in Donne was the double entendre whereby an orgasm was perceived as a little death. Here, Juliet is suggesting that when she comes (‘dies’), she literally sees stars. In a poetic tradition where the beautiful attributes of the female body were customarily surveyed and enumerated by the rapacious male eye, here the imaginative gaze falls on the lovely white body of the boy. In Donne, it was always the man’s voice, hungry for the woman’s body. In Shakespeare, even though the lines were written to be spoken by a boy actor, the girl has a voice. She shares both the love and the lust.

The summer school for Greek children was my first experience of teaching. To finance Interrail excursions into the Italian Renaissance, I worked there each July during my university years. There was chatter at the time about whether teenagers are put off Shakespeare by having to study him from the age of fourteen. I thought that it was a question of how you introduce him. Choose the right play – Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and begin with a performance, then set the class to work on a few key passages, not worrying about the meaning of every word. I tested my approach. VHS cassettes had just become available, so I was able to show the Franco Zeffirelli film of Romeo and Juliet (now I’d begin with Baz Luhrmann). Then we spent an hour discussing Juliet’s speech and Romeo’s response to the light at her window. ‘What do you think is conveyed by the line, It is the east, and Juliet is the sun?’

‘Juliet is bright as the sun, an angel.’

‘The directing light of Romeo’s life.’

‘The life-giving force of Romeo.’

This was a class of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, English their second language. One of them even cried out ‘ἴαμβος’: she had recognized the iambic pentameter.

It was typically bold of our teachers to choose the story of the middle-aged Antony and Cleopatra as opposed to the teenage Juliet and her Romeo for our A-Level tragedy of love. It is a much longer, more demanding and ultimately more grown-up play. But they were an inspiring team and they brought it alive for us.

Classes alternated between Alan Hurd, a Cambridge man who had become a county cricketer, and John Adams, who could have been an Oxford don but was committed to schoolteaching. Hurdy and JA, we called them. Hurdy coached the cricket team, which included two future England players; he took special delight in hearing a master from Tonbridge complaining on the boundary that it was ‘A fine state of affairs when we can’t beat the grammar school down the road’. Hurdy was a great admirer of E. M. Forster, who had been miserable as a pupil at Tonbridge. His own tone of teaching was Forsterian, probing but never coercive. ‘School,’ says the headmaster in The Longest Journey, a novel based on Forster’s experience at Tonbridge and then Cambridge, ‘School is the world in miniature.’ Then he paused, as a man well may who has made such a remark. Hurdy loved the quiet subversion of the public-school ethos in that.

JA, meanwhile, was master of the bon mot, as in the one about John Donne making Tom Stoppard seem like tennis for rabbits. And such pronouncements as ‘To say that Fielding’s character of Tom Jones is an insufficiently deep psychological entity is like saying that Mozart makes inadequate use of the electric guitar.’ He had the whole of Western culture at his fingertips. He launched us into the first ten lines of Antony and Cleopatra, spoken by a Roman soldier who doesn’t contribute anything else to the play:

Nay, but this dotage of our general’s

O’erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,

That o’er the files and musters of the war

Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,

The office and devotion of their view

Upon a tawny front. His captain’s heart,

Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst

The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper

And is become the bellows and the fan

To cool a gipsy’s lust.

Nay, but: see how Shakespeare pulls you into the moment by beginning the play in the middle of a conversation. Dotage: what does that mean? Yes, old age. They’re worried that Antony is over the hill, past his prime. But what else does it mean? Doting, yes, falling in love. Unwisely. Excessively. Overflowingly. And see how the line itself overflows the measure of the iambic pentameter, runs on into the next line. Enjambment, a good word to use in the exam, but use it purposefully, showing its dramatic effect, don’t just tick it off to show the examiner you know the technical terms. Plated Mars: Mars, the god of war, but there’s a story in Ovid – Shakespeare’s favourite poet – about Mars being snared in a net as he makes love to Venus, the goddess of love. We’ll see Cleopatra as Venus when we come to Enobarbus’ great speech about Antony’s first sight of her on the barge at Cydnus. This is a play about big hearts and broken hearts. And about excess. Reneges all temper: this is what Empson would call a seventh-type ambiguity, in which two opposite things are said at once. Antony and Cleopatra are both wildly hot-tempered – each has a scene where they berate a messenger – but temper here also means temperance, moderation, restraint. The oxymoronic pattern continues in the bellows and the fan: bellows are used to heat a fire – the fire of lust, as it were – whereas fans are for cooling yourself in the Egyptian heat – gypsies were thought to come from Egypt, where the people were dark-skinned, hence tawny front. Though as a matter of historical fact, Cleopatra was an Alexandrian Greek, not a native Egyptian.

One part of my brain was befuddled by the time he got to seventh-type ambiguity, but the exposition of Shakespeare’s way of opening up the whole world of a play within its very first speech was mesmerizing. It made me want to become a teacher if I failed in my theatrical ambitions.

As the exam season approached, we reached the final act. The Clown has brought Cleopatra the asp, wishing her joy o’ th’ worm. She dresses herself for death:

Give me my robe, put on my crown: I have

Immortal longings in me. Now no more

The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip.

Yare, yare, good Iras! Quick! Methinks I hear

Antony call: I see him rouse himself

To praise my noble act. I hear him mock

The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men

To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come!

Now to that name my courage prove my title!

I am fire and air: my other elements

I give to baser life. So, have you done?

Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.

Farewell, kind Charmian. Iras, long farewell.

Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall?

If thou and nature can so gently part,

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,

Which hurts and is desired.

We spent an entire class taking these lines to pieces and putting them together again. The patterns of repetition and variation. Those run-on lines. The internal rhymes (grape/lip, mock/luck). The double meanings (the stroke of death suggesting the blow of a sword as well as the caress of a lover). The interplay between the abstraction of Immortal longings and the sensuous immediacy of the almost entirely monosyllabic line The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip. The shifts between Cleopatra talking to herself, talking to her handmaids Charmian and Iras, talking to the dead Antony as she imagines him becoming the husband in death that he could not be in life. Our discussion veered from the Renaissance theory that everything is made from a mix of the four elements of fire and air (the light ones, reaching towards the heavens) and earth and water (the baser, heavier ones) to ribald questioning as to whether there was a double meaning in Husband, I come. ‘The only comparable moment in Western culture that comes immediately to mind,’ said JA, ‘is Isolde’s Liebestod at the end of Tristan, so I suspect that we may answer in the affirmative.’

For a long time, I thought that Antony and Cleopatra was one of the few plays with respect to which I agreed with Charles Lamb: Shakespeare was just too big for the stage. How could any production sweep across the entire Mediterranean world as the play does, how stage the adamantine pillars of Rome and the eunuch’s playground of Egypt with equal conviction? How could any actor do justice to the transcendent language of Cleopatra’s closing arias?

I have been confounded twice. First in 1987. Critics were sceptical when Peter Hall, who had by then moved from the Royal Shakespeare Company to the National Theatre, cast Judi Dench as Cleopatra, alongside Anthony Hopkins, who shared a toughness as well as a name with Antony. Would she really have it in her to melt his military demeanour? Dench had doubts herself: ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ she allegedly said to Hall, ‘you are setting out to direct Cleopatra with a menopausal dwarf.’ He knew exactly what he was doing. Cleopatra’s allure comes not from her looks but from her mercurial behaviour, her playfulness and above all her language. Peter Hall knew that no actor could command the twists and turns of the Shakespearean pentameter better than Judi Dench. He could trust Shakespeare and trust her to make it work, and it did. Every line came freshly minted from her tongue as she ran the gamut from flirtation to joking to fury to the fire and air of those final speeches. As I looked around the sweeping amphitheatre of the Olivier auditorium, I saw that every male face was enchanted by her every move and word. Here was a Shakespearean education for us men: the lasting beauty is that which comes from within. The lover with whom you will stay in love is not the one with the pretty face, but the one who makes you laugh and makes you cry and is always one step ahead of you and never ceases to surprise.

Further education came two decades later. The Manchester Royal Exchange cast Josette Bushell-Mingo as Cleopatra. She had been the director of the highly physical chamber version of King Lear in Liverpool that I numbered among the most memorable productions of that play. The Manchester auditorium was in-the-round, the action played on a stone floor that mixed Roman numerals and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Stunted pillars for the Romans were played off against a stagey platform for Cleopatra, adorned with scarabs. There was no doubt who held the power here. The magnetic Bushell-Mingo dominated every scene in which she appeared, camp and playful one moment, threatening the next. As one reviewer wrote, she was truly a drama queen.

The production was praised for casting a Black actor, but for Bushell-Mingo that was not the point. ‘Cleopatra’s colour is completely irrelevant,’ she said in an interview. The key to her view of the character was not race, but command: ‘Cleopatra was the first woman in history to be completely in control of her own image – she’s like Madonna, no – Ginger Rogers, in that New Yorker cartoon where Fred Astaire dies and goes to heaven and she says, “What kept you?”

‘The most helpful thing I read about Antony and Cleopatra was Harley Granville Barker’s Preface,’ she added, ‘which was all about the importance of pace. Tempo. Thinking ahead of the line.’ Yes, Shakespeare on the stage needs pace above all else.

Virginia Woolf once wrote that The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her. Reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, another of our set texts, I found a darker variation on this idea:

O know, sweet love, I always write of you,

And you and love are still my argument:

So all my best is dressing old words new,

Spending again what is already spent.

For as the sun is daily new and old,

So is my love still telling what is told.

Dressing old words new: were the words ‘I love you’ and ‘you are so beautiful’ no more than an echo of what had been spoken by millions of people before? Spending again what is already spent: the verb ‘spend’, we learned in class, could refer not only to financial transactions but also to the expending of a person’s life-force in orgasm – that little death again. Did this mean that the act of love, as well as the words, was at best an age-old routine, at worst a quasi-commercial transaction, never a manifestation of unique passion? If this sense of verbal inadequacy and sexual cynicism was felt even by the genius who created a simile such as new snow on a raven’s back and the injunction to take a lover and cut him out in little stars, what hope would there be for a word-poor teenager such as me, as opposed to a creature of his imagination such as Juliet?

Allowing Shakespeare (and the Metaphysical Poets) to speak my mind for me, as Woolf suggested, seemed like the best solution. As with Donne, it took a while to work my brain around the knotty language of the sonnets. Some of them could be grasped immediately: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely. That could be quoted at the right moment. Others, though, were baffling: They that have power to hurt, and will do none … They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces. What was going on there? Was he praising his gilded but adamantine beloved or condemning him? It didn’t help when Hurdy sent me off to read an essay by William Empson – he of the seven types of ambiguity – which began with the claim that this particular sonnet, number 94, was open to 4,096 different interpretations. Too clever by half.

Slowly, by reading a few sonnets aloud each night before bed, I began to grasp that it didn’t matter who the Dark Lady was or whether Will Shakespeare the man really was in love with a Lovely Boy. What we were witnessing was this capacious imagination at play, spinning every conceivable variation on the theme of love. Spiritual and physical, gay and straight, finding yourself and losing yourself, the joy of presence and the ache of absence, the paranoia and the jealousy, the ecstasy and the agony. And the stupidity of it. Our classroom favourite was the parody of conventional love poetry: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun … If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun. Though, as always with Shakespeare, there was a twist in the tail: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.

Another of the Dark Lady sonnets caught an element that was familiar to me, but that laddish Jack Donne didn’t seem to worry about. The sexual liberation of the 1960s hadn’t fully reached middle-class, churchgoing Sevenoaks, so in homes such as mine teenage fumbling was always accompanied by secrecy and shame. Shakespeare proved himself as good at expressing the shame as he was at voicing Juliet’s sexual liberation:

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action, and till action, lust

Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted and, no sooner had,

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad,

Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme,

A bliss in proof and proved a very woe,

Before, a joy proposed – behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Extreme. Bliss, then woe. Joy in anticipation, vanishing afterwards into a dream. Despised as soon as enjoyed: before, during and after, the business of desire could drive you mad. Mad in pursuit and in possession so.

Equally unsettling was the discovery that in Elizabethan usage hell was a euphemism for the vagina. Was Shakespeare projecting his own dark feelings about lust in action on to his mistress, implicitly blaming her for his self-disgust? When this question came up, Hurdy responded by talking about a writer he especially admired, Ezra Pound. ‘He was a fascist and an anti-Semite, but that didn’t make him a lesser poet. As Auden said of Yeats, time will pardon him for writing well.’ (A prediction belied, at least for now, by the ‘cancel culture’ of the 2020s.) ‘Our business as critics,’ he continued, ‘is not to make moral judgements about the author, but to pay close attention to the quality of the writing. Pound’s prerequisite for a good poem was To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.’

To test the proposition, Hurdy showed us the text of sonnet 129 in its original printed form. The accumulation of epithets in a single sentence; the breathless pace of it, imitating the mad pursuit of which it spoke; the wordplay (waste suggesting ‘waist’, below which the action takes place); the repetition and variation (Past reason hunted … Past reason hated … well knowes … knowes well); the possibilities opened up by the absence of conjunctions (was it blouddy and full of blame or blouddy full of it?) and indeed by the habits of the printing-house – v was printed as u, so the word printed as ‘proved’ in our modern edition originally looked like ‘proud’, which, we were delighted to learn, was a term used for an erect penis, which was pretty much the situation at this moment in the pursuit.

All this, Hurdy suggested, answered to Pound’s demand for every word to do its work. Then he added: ‘Pound also said that literature is news that STAYS news. And that’s what makes Shakespeare so extraordinary: he has stayed news for four hundred years.’

Sonnet 129 in its original spelling

Public domain image from the author’s collection

Josette Bushell-Mingo as Cleopatra and Tom Mannion as the dying Antony