Titus Andronicus (?1592-4) has only of late come into critical perspective. We may regard it a precursor of King Lear as a study of suffering age. Titus refuses imperial responsibility and hands over power to Saturninus; not unlike Lear giving over his kingship to his daughters. He is, like Lear, irascible. He is guilty of the callous sacrifice of a prisoner of war. Tamora, the conquered Gothic queen, pleads for her son’s life:
Gracious conqueror,
Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed,
A mother’s tears in passion for her son.
(I.i.104)
Titus is adamant. The comment of a Goth is: ‘Was ever Scythia half so barbarous?’ (I.i.131). After that, as though by a kind of retribution, he is impelled to kill his own son, as Lear rejects Cordelia in anger.
What follows is swift and terrible. Tamora marries the new emperor Saturninus and acts in collusion with her lover, the evil Moor, Aaron. The Goths gain influence and power. Titus soon finds himself among ‘a wilderness of tigers’ (III.i.54).1 Rome’s ingratitude to one who had so often proved her saviour in war (pages 119-20 below) is horribly evident. As troubles crowd on him, Titus gains poetic stature:
If there were reason for these miseries
Then into limits could I bend my woes.
When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’erflow?
If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,
Threatening the welkin with his big-swoln face?
And wilt thou have a reason for this coil?
I am the sea; hark, how her sighs do blow.
She is the weeping welkin, I the earth…
(III.i.219)
Somewhat laboured, but the accents of tragic poetry are there. Titus gains a strange insight through his sufferings:
Titus. What doth thou strike at, Marcus, with thy knife?
Marcus. At that that I have kill’d, my lord – a fly.
Titus. Out on thee, murderer! Thou kill’st my heart.
Mine eyes are cloy’d with view of tyranny.
A deed of death done on the innocent
Becomes not Titus’ brother: get thee gone.
I see thou art not for my company.
Marcus. Alas, my lord, I have but kill’d a fly.
Titus. But how if that fly had a father and a mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings
And buzz lamenting doings in the air.
Poor harmless fly,
That with his pretty buzzing melody
Came here to make us merry! And thou hast kill’d him.
(III.ii.52)
He has travelled far since his early ruthless actions. It is this advance on Titus’ part that saves the story from being no more than an accumulation of horrors.
I say the ‘story’, but the poetry is another matter. It swells and subsides with considerable power. Titus sometimes pretends to be mad, like Hamlet, or perhaps he is mad, like Lear, or half-mad; distraught by the calamities that have fallen on him. The rampaging villainies include the raping of his daughter Lavinia by Tamora’s two iniquitous sons, and their cutting off of her hands and tongue. Titus’ own hand is, by a trick, subsequently cut off also, and two of his other sons killed. Within this barbarous and criminal community Titus cries out not merely for revenge but for justice. He sends, or thinks that he sends, a messenger to the Underworld, but Pluto replies that, though he can help with Revenge, justice is to be found in Heaven; so Titus arranges that his friends shoot arrows with missives addressed to the various gods. This fantastically conceived extravaganza serves, in a manner characteristic of Shakespearian tragedy, to give the middle-action new life and impetus. It lifts us beyond revenge and we regard the final horrors as actions of justice. Titus is busily purposeful and his plot matures with strength and efficiency. He kills Tamora’s two sons, and serves them up to her at a banquet. He has gone from strength to strength. Though the play’s substances are horrible, the emotional and poetic correspondents are handled in masterly fashion and the artistry is on occasion superb.
We have here as deep a study of evil as could well be offered without reliance on supernatural categories. Evil is in part caused by circumstances, in part ingrained. Titus’ early actions call down his later sufferings. The Goths have reason for hating and disrupting Rome. The Moor, Aaron, our main agent of wickedness, is a solitary figure, who may be supposed to have suffered from racial antipathy. He is black. The nurse calls his son by Tamora a ‘devil’, because black (IV.ii.65). Tamora’s sons would have it killed, to preserve her honour, but he replies in accents of courage (and imagery pointing ahead to Othello; see page 32 below) that arouse our admiration:
Now by the burning tapers of the sky,
That shone so brightly when this boy was got,
He dies upon my scimitar’s sharp point
That touches this my first-born son and heir.
(IV.ii.90)
He would dare ‘great Alcides’ in this cause:
What, what, ye sanguine, shallow-hearted boys!
Ye white-lim’d walls, ye alehouse painted signs!
Coal-black is better than another hue,
In that it scorns to bear another hue.
(IV.ii.98)
His appearance and pride forecast Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, and also perhaps Othello, though his part here is that of an Iago. He is almost ludicrously proud of his wicked actions. His evil nature is so ingrained that it wins a kind of respect, as does Iago’s; and both look to death in torment with equanimity. This approach to evil has an indirect bearing on Shakespeare’s later treatment of Richard III and Macbeth.
The evil in Aaron is so extreme that it raises metaphysical questions regarding the authority of evil in the universe. The dastardly raping and mutilation of Lavinia were performed in what seems an evil part of the forest. Its horror was elaborately described (II.iii.90-108). Later Titus remembers it, while turning over the pages of Ovid’s
Titus. Lavinia, wert thou thus surpris’d, sweet girl,
Ravish’d and wrong’d, as Philomela was,
Forc’d in the ruthless, vast, and gloomy woods?
See, see!
Ay, such a place there is, where we did hunt –
O! Had we never, never hunted there –
Pattern’d by that the poet here describes,
By nature made for murders and for rapes.
Marcus. O, why should nature build so foul a den,
Unless the gods delight in tragedies?
(IV.i.51)
Is there even a questioning here regarding the cruelty of blood-sports? For the rest, nature, apart from tempests and fierce beasts, is usually idyllic in Shakespeare. Can it be that Providence and Nature are, in some moods, malignant? And that human evil has authority behind it?
I pass over King John (? 1590-6), which is not strictly a study of a tragic hero at all. It is in the main a political drama, forecasting the pattern of Cymbeline. The king ends with a happy outcome to his problems, making peace with the Church of Rome, though he himself dies from a poison, suffering rather like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. The emphasis throughout is political, or national, with the bastard Falconbridge as England’s voice.
In Richard III (about 1593) we have a wicked protagonist. His opening soliloquy gives us a psychological analysis of his motives, but during the early scenes he becomes an extravagant conception, almost a comic buffoon, like Marlowe’s Jew in The Jew of Malta. With Buckingham’s help, he attains the throne, and when he first enters as king, a new dignity is apparent. Buckingham has been his accomplice and supporter hitherto, and Richard now hints that he would like the princes in the Tower murdered. Buckingham’s response is no more than tentative and arouses Richard’s comment: ‘High reaching Buckingham grows circumspect’ (IV.ii.31). Buckingham claims the earldom promised him for his long service, but Richard is withdrawn, and meditative, with a certain foreboding. He thinks of a prophecy that Richmond should be King:
Buckingham. My lord, your promise for the earldom ‒
King Richard. Richmond. When last I was at Exeter
The Mayor in courtesy show’d me the castle,
And call’d it ‘Rougemont’: at which name I started,
Because a bard of Ireland told me once
I should not live long after I saw Richmond.
Buckingham. My lord!
King Richard. Ay, what’s o’clock?
Buckingham. I am thus bold to put your Grace in mind
Of what you promis’d me.
King Richard. Well, but what is’t o’clock?
Buckingham.Upon the stroke of ten.
King Richard. Well, let it strike.
Buckingham.Why let it strike?
King Richard. Because that, like a Jack, thou keep’st the stroke
Betwixt thy begging and my meditation.
I am not in the giving vein to-day.
Buckingham. Why, then, resolve me whether you will, or no.
King Richard. Thou troublest me: I am not in the vein.
(IV.ii.101)
Richard is our protagonist; he now enjoys the additional pomp and insignia of regality, probably wearing a great robe2 We see him in a new light, and though he is himself overpoweringly guilty, we thoroughly enjoy watching him disappoint the hopes of his companion in crime. He has become an agent of judgement. The scene acts as a pivot. Richard has now a new dignity and the play enjoys an access of power.
Before the Battle of Bosworth his accents are those of tragic dignity, and should so be spoken, with, again, foreboding:
Up with my tent. Here will I lie tonight;
But where to-morrow? Well, all’s one for that.
(V.iii.7)
I will not sup to-night.
Give me some ink and paper.
What, is my beaver easier than it was?
(V.iii.48)
These touches come disjointedly, among other thoughts. We are personally attuned to Richard’s personal burdens:
Saddle white Surrey for the field to-morrow.
Look that my staves be sound, and not too heavy.
(V.iii.64)
These impressions are summed in:
Give me a bowl of wine.
I have not that alacrity of spirit,
Nor cheer of mind, that I was wont to have.
(V.iii.72)
‘Alacrity’: a wonderful word, characteristic – I do not know why – of Richard. We no longer watch Richard objectively; we are, at such moments, within his personal experience.
After he has been visited in sleep by the ghosts of his victims, his soliloquy builds up, in the usual style of Shakespeare’s long speeches, from a beginning in ambivalence and psychological confusion, playing on the enigma of conscience, to a firm statement of self-condemnation:
King Richard (waking). Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!
Have mercy, Jesu! Soft – I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly: what! from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no, alas! I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie; I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the high’st degree;
Murder, stern murder in the dir’st degree;
All several sins, all us’d in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, ‘Guilty, guilty!’
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die, no soul will pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
Methought the souls of all that I had murder’d
Came to my tent, and every one did threat
Tomorrow’s vengeance on the head of Richard.
(V.iii.178)
A remarkable speech in its play on the antagonism, within an individual, of evil and conscience. Richard finally accepts the reality of his guilt; without repentance but also without self-pity. The speech casts light, differently, on the King in Hamlet, and Macbeth. Richard is disturbed:
King Richard.O Ratcliff, I fear, I fear –
Ratcliff. Nay, good my lord, be not afraid of shadows.
King Richard. By the apostle Paul, shadows tonight
Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers,
Armèd in proof and led by shallow Richmond.
(V.iii.215)
Despite his villainies, Richard swears regularly by St Paul (I.i.138; I. ii.36,41; I.iii.45; III.iv.75), who seems to have been an especial favourite, perhaps because of a tradition that he was, like Richard, deformed. ‘Soul’, an important word in Shakespeare, is used for Richard’s higher self and the seat of conscience. Though fear-struck by ‘shadows’, he is opposed only by a ‘shallow’ enemy. The word is significant: whatever his sins, Richard has the status of a tragic hero, studied in depth.
Countering Richard’s wickedness – or because of it? – we feel a certain sympathy, and even approval. There is no final paradox. Richard’s valuations, in descent from Aaron’s in Titus Andronicus, are consistent:
Conscience is but a word that cowards use
Devis’d at first to keep the strong in awe.
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on, join bravely, let us to’t pell-mell,
If not to Heaven, then hand in hand to Hell.
(V.iii.310)
Courage is aligned with wickedness, but it is still courage and has nobility. So has his patriotism: Richard’s address to his army is quite remarkable. Shakespeare’s worst king-villain not only conquers his fears, but becomes the voice for one of Shakespeare’s most fervent speeches of national defiance:
Let’s whip these stragglers o’er the sea again;
Lash hence these overweening rags of France,
These famish’d beggars, weary of their lives;
Who, but for dreaming on this fond exploit,
For want of means, poor rats, had hang’d themselves.
If we be conquer’d, let men conquer us,
And not these bastard Bretons; whom our fathers
Have in their own land beaten, bobb’d, and thump’d
And, on record, left them the heirs of shame.
Shall these enjoy our lands? Lie with our wives?
Ravish our daughters? Hark! I hear their drum.
Fight, gentlemen of England! Fight, bold yeomen!
Draw, archers, draw your arrows to the head!
Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood;
Amaze the welkin with your broken staves!
(V.iii.328)
All Shakespeare’s impassioned patriotism is here; and the speech is given to wicked Richard.
To the last he is brave. The ghosts may have shown him a deeper truth, but this ‘truth’ he masters, even, we may say, transcends. Like Talbot in 1 Henry VI (II.iii.50-63), he feels himself a multitudinous Titanic power:
A thousand hearts are great within my bosom.
Advance our standards! Set upon our foes!
Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George,
Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!
Upon them! Victory sits upon our helms.
(V.iii.348)
Notice how Shakespeare’s usual patriotic battle-cry is cleverly aligned with its opposite, so that Richard stands not merely for Saint George as against the Dragon, but for Saint George and the Dragon; as though he were in a state beyond good and evil. According to Nietzsche, the transcending of the good-and-evil opposition touches superhumanity.
So Richard is a super-hero:
The King enacts more wonders than a man,
Daring an opposite to every danger:
His horse is slain, and all on foot he fights,
Seeking for Richmond in the throat of death.
(V.iv.2)
He himself is, like Macbeth, finally uncertain yet unbending:
I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain to-day, instead of him. –
A horse! a horse! My kingdom for a horse!
(V.iv.9)
He meets Richmond, and is slain, but not until he has left in our minds an indelible impression of tragic heroism.
So Richard III ends well. Richard II (1595-6) is equally, or more, impressive. Richard is at the start unsure of himself, and is shown in the early scenes irresponsible and repellent. On his return from his Irish expedition he speaks finely of England’s earth and the innate power of kingship to resist insurrection. The poetry has splendour.
When the Sun is hidden crimes abound:
But when, from under this terrestrial ball
He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines
And darts his light through every guilty hole,
Then murders, treasons, and detested sins,
The cloak of night being pluck’d from off their backs,
Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves.
So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke,
Who all this while hath revell’d in the night
Whilst we were wandering with the antipodes,
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day,
But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
(III.ii.41)
For every rebel that opposes him, God sends a ‘glorious angel’ to fight on his side. Richard’s ‘character’ need not be supposed to have changed, but it is overshadowed by his royalty, whose language is poetry.
George Steiner has well remarked that Richard ‘is a royal poet defeated by a rebellion of prose’ (The Death of Tragedy, 1961, p.242). The play is dominated by the poetry of royalty.
But bad news follows. Richard becomes quickly humble, abased, in despair almost; religious thoughts come in to give what comfort they may. He thinks of death, and the murders of past kings, and the absurdity of ceremonial reverence for one who is no more than a simple man. Then, encouraged by a supporter, he becomes again confident of success. There is more bad news, and he despairs.
Before Flint Castle, he addresses Northumberland. Again he is a king, and speaks with authority; with now an added authority, partly because the speech takes in the imponderables of futurity:
We are amaz’d; and thus long have we stood
To watch the fearful bending of thy knee,
Because we thought ourself thy lawful king:
And if we be, how dare thy joints forget
To pay their awful duty to our presence?
If we be not, show us the hand of God
That hath dismiss’d us from our stewardship;
For well we know, no hand of blood and bone
Can gripe the sacred handle of our sceptre,
Unless he do profane, steal or usurp.
And though you think that all, as you have done,
Have torn their souls by turning them from us,
And we are barren and bereft of friends;
Yet know, my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot,
That lift your vassal hands against my head
And threat the glory of my precious crown.
Tell Bolingbroke – for yond methinks he is –
That every stride he makes upon my land
Is dangerous treason: he is come to open
The purple testament of bleeding war;
But ere the crown he looks for live in peace,
Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers’ sons
Shall ill become the flower of England’s face,
Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace
To scarlet indignation, and bedew
Her pastures’ grass with faithful English blood.
(III.iii.72)
This is Richard’s best speech, so far. It has a rising strength and assurance, based on royalty. I remember how Maurice Evans electrified his audience with it in his highly successful New York (though I saw it in Canada) production, in the nineteen-thirties.
He suffers a reaction:
O! that I were as great
As is my grief, or lesser than my name,
Or that I could forget what I have been,
Or not remember what I must be now.
(III.iii.136)
That is, very precisely, his problem; the discrepancy between himself as a man, and the greatness of his office. His play shows him trying to adjust himself to the greatness of his royal poetry; or failing that, he falls back on religious absolutes. If he ‘must lose the name of King’, then ‘let it go’:
I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,
My figur’d goblets for a dish of wood,
My sceptre for a palmer’s walking-staff,
My subjects for a pair of carved saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little little grave, an obscure grave;
Or I’ll be buried in the king’s highway,
Some way of common trade, where subjects’ feet
May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head;
For on my heart they tread now whilst I live.
(III.iii.147)
Like Timon, only less purposefully, he swerves from glory to its reverse, to a luxury of religious inwardness and resignation.
They go to London. In the Deposition scene Richard first compares himself to Christ, betrayed by Judas, thereby expressing a fusion of the two forces, royal and religious, that are now tugging at him; but he continues humbly enough, relinquishing his crown, and other insignia, willingly. There seems no more to do, but Northumberland advances with a paper listing Richard’s misdeeds, telling him to read it aloud, as a witness to the justice of his deposition. Whenever in Shakespeare a tragic hero appears abased or disintegrated, look for some grand reassertion. Now, at the moment of apparent degradation, Richard replies with all the suppressed power that he has been withholding. The strain has been great, and he now breaks out in flaming, scorching phrases:
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 wouldst
There shouldst 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)
He sees the surrounding company as ‘traitors’, and includes himself in that category, by reason of his renunciation, having ‘made glory base and sovereignty a slave’. His stature is greater than ever. In production, those he addresses should appear not merely embarrassed, but withered, by his cauterising rhetoric.
Naturally, this poetic force cannot be maintained. He falls back on meditative melancholy:
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 tortur’d soul.
(IV.i.293)
There is a depth in that that may be used widely in our understanding of poetry: however great, it is no more than a provisional expression of the soul-reality behind, or within.
Richard parts with his wife, who urges him to behave less humbly:
The lion dying thrusteth forth his paw
And wounds the earth, if nothing else, with rage
To be o’erpower’d.
(V.i.29)
Humility ill becomes one who is properly ‘a lion and a king of beasts’. She is partly wrong. His humility is a recognition of the inevitable, and the lion in him is not crushed.
In the dungeon of Pomfret Castle he speaks a long speech of mystical reverie, packed with interest. He becomes a kind of poet. It is emphasised that the origin of his poetry is the ‘soul,’ in the spiritual order, the earthly brain being subsidiary, though necessary:
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul;
My soul the father: and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts;
And these same thoughts people this little world
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented.
(V.v.6)
He is like a dramatic poet, and proceeds, as I have elsewhere (The Imperial Theme, XI, ‘A note on Richard II, p.351) shown, to a series of impressions based on his own experiences and yet also touching Shakespeare’s later tragedies, and the fortunes of mankind in general. His review of the human plight is impersonal and objective, as though he were jerked into a state of being above and beyond himself, dispassionately surveying the past and concluding, like Timon:
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d
With being nothing.
(V.v.39)
In that there is a mysticism, as ambivalent as the Buddhist ‘Nirvana’, since we can take it that he is pleased with not-being; and yet who exists to be pleased? The paradox exists again, even more forcibly, in Timon of Athens (see page 138 below). Meanwhile we can say that Richard has touched a mystic truth, and so at this point he hears music. It will be allowed to play for a while, till Richard stops it: it is an all-important event in the action. Richard has been attuned to the poetic dimension, and from there has surveyed his past, while simultaneously forecasting Shakespeare-the-poet’s future; and we close in music, corresponding to the music so important in Shakespeare’s last plays. It might seem, as so much of Richard’s poetry does, ‘out of character’ with what we saw of him at first; but we are not thinking of that here, but rather of the fire of his kingly rhetoric and also the religious deepening of his meditations, whereby his comparisons of himself to Christ are not at all irelevant; and now the actual embodiment of poetry in Richard-as-poetic-dramatist culminates in the mystic intimations of music.
The rest of the soliloquy, in which Richard returns to his present situation, is less important, though necessary. Because he has not properly measured up ‘to the music of men’s lives’, he grows irritated and thinks the player faulty: ‘This music mads me’ (V.v.44,61). Yet, characteristically – characteristic I mean, of the charity we shall note in other Shakespearian heroes as they approach their end – he pronounces a ‘blessing on his heart that gives it me’ (V.v.64). In order to make clearer what Shakespeare is doing we can point to what he is not doing. He is not doing what Marlowe does. In Marlowe’s Edward II we have a not dissimilar study of a ‘weak’ King. He, too, is imprisoned in a dungeon. Here he is, in his misery:
This dungeon where they keep me is the sink
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls.
And there in mire and puddle have I stood
This ten days’ space, and lest that I should sleep
One plays continually upon a drum.
They give me bread and water being a king,
So that for want of sleep and sustenance,
My mind’s distempered, and my body’s numbed,
And whether I have limbs or no I know not.
O would my blood dropt out from every vein,
As doth this water from my tatter’d robes.
Tell Isabel the Queen I look’d not thus,
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France,
And there unhors’d the duke of Cleremont.
(2507)
The conception of tragedy here is diametrically opposed to Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare is not offering a study of degradation and failure, but one of spiritual advance with courage. Here is Edward’s death:
Edward. Something still buzzeth in mine ears,
And tells me, if I sleep I never wake.
This fear is that which makes me tremble thus,
And therefore tell me, wherefore art thou come?
Lightborne. To rid thee of thy life! Matrevis, come!
Edward. I am too weak and feeble to resist.
Assist me, sweet God, and receive my soul.
Lightborne. Run for the table.
Edward. O spare me, or despatch me in a trice.
Lightborne. So, lay the table down, and stamp on it,
But not too hard, lest that you bruise his body.
(2555)
The death of Barabbas in The Jew of Malta is even more undignified; and that of Faustus in Doctor Faustus, though it is given sublime poetry, remains what I have (in Shakespearian Production, enlarged 1964, p.33) called a ‘sublime wriggling rather than a sacrificial suffering’; and he is actually seen being taken off to Hell.
We have an interesting anomaly here. People are made to speak 'dramatic poetry for a reason: the poetry at its best is the utterance of the integral self, or the superself, or soul; and if the poetry is strong and the protagonist is weak, there is a contradiction that leaves us dissatisfied. The inmost nature of poetic drama demands the strength which Shakespeare’s tragic heroes illustrate. So now we have, in contrast to Marlowe, Richard’s death:
How now! what means death in this rude assault?
Villain, thine own hand yields thy death’s instrument.
[Kills one of his attackers. ]
Go thou and fill another room in hell.
[Killing a second. He is then struck down. ]
That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire
That staggers thus my person. Exton, thy fierce hand
Hath with the king’s blood stain’d the king’s own land.
Mount, mount my soul! thy seat is up on high,
Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die.
(V.v.105)
I do not say that Shakespeare is more ‘true to life’ than Marlowe. He may, indeed, be less true. I point simply to his tragic conception, which is concerned less with the appearances of normal life than with the soul-truth of courage, triumph, and victory-in-death. Richard III thinks he is bound for Hell; Richard II that he is going to Heaven. That does not matter: we are not thinking ethically. Both go off in style, enjoying a state of being which gives them a strange assurance, with courage in face of death. The word ‘soul’, important in Shakespeare, should be duly noted.
The two elements in Richard’s story, his intermittent royal assurance and his growth through depth of suffering, are both present at his death, with its religious conclusion. Perhaps what we should most emphasise is his long struggle to adjust himself to the poetry of kingship, and his final dedication, in death, to himself as king, which is one with the assurance of his soul’s ascent.
In Richard II the hero’s variations are largely a matter of poetry, which comes in long speeches, almost ‘arias’. In Romeo and Juliet (1595-6) the hero’s progress is a progress in the poetry he speaks; there is a steady advance. On his first entrance he speaks euphuistic verses of little appeal:
Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing! of nothing first create.
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
Dost thou not laugh?
(I.i.181)
True, the artificiality is intended, and the paradoxes are well considered:
Love is a smoke rais’d with the fume of sighs;
Being purg’d, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vex’d, a sea nourish’d with lovers’ tears.
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.
(Li. 196)
Romeo at this stage has no true object for his love; it is all bottled up inside him, and he therefore speaks the better as a voice of love’s essence and wholeness, seing its paradoxes. These speeches are not all trivial; they are a kind of prologue to the action. They remain studied, without fervour. His lines on Rosaline do not ring true. She is merely a make-shift, on which to rhapsodise. When he meets Juliet, he speaks with true fervency:
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.
(I.v.49)
The sonnet he shares with her in his first approach has charm. In the Balcony scene he unloads passages of imagistic speech that, without being weak, remain somewhat ‘operatic’. The language is cut off from the colloquial, it has no accents of normal talk:
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return…
(II.ii.15)
Again, watching Juliet as she speaks to herself:
She speaks:
O! speak again, bright angel; for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o’er my head,
As is a wingèd messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned wondering eyes
Of mortals, that fall back to gaze on him,
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds,
And sails upon the bosom of the air.
(II.ii.25)
Later we have:
I am no pilot; yet wert thou as far
As that vast shore wash’d with the furthest sea,
I would adventure for such merchandise.
(II.ii.82)
While Romeo speaks like this, Juliet’s words are far more convincing. She has a sense of the real situation:
Well, do not swear. Although I joy in thee,
I have no joy of this contract to-night:
It is too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden…
(II.ii.116)
The actor of Romeo feels almost an unfair discrepancy between Juliet’s varied utterance, intermixing true love with doubts, poetry with colloquial speech, and his own one-way lines of rhapsodic adoration. While the fictional Romeo rhapsodises, the actor is miserable. It is made more difficult by his having, as a rule, to speak up-stage. The contrast is, however, only an extreme example of Shakespeare’s usual treatment of love, in which the woman comes off better than the man. She is real in love; he is a poetic aspirant: we find it again with Orsino and Viola, with Othello and Desdemona. It is almost as though the man loves less a person than love itself. Romeo can even comment on the situation not as a man in love but as one speaking about a man in love. Hearing Juliet call his name, he says:
It is my soul that calls upon my name.
How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night,
Like softest music to attending ears!
(II.ii.164)
The loved one is as the lover’s soul, his higher self. The succeeding lines are less interesting. It is as though Romeo loves the situation as much as the girl. The hero’s task, as we found with Richard II and royalty, is to adjust himself to his own poetry; to make the poetry real. In the Balcony scene it is not quite real, while Juliet’s is.
Romeo’s secret marriage follows, and then the duelling. Here, for the first time, Romeo has strength. He starts by refusing to meet Tybalt’s insulting challenge, for the good reason that Tybalt is now a kinsman, but after Mercutio’s death he becomes an avenging fury. He has been too ‘effeminate’ (III.i.120). Now:
Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire-ey’d fury be my conduct now!
(III.i.129)
He rejects ‘heaven’, and plunges into action. It is a mistake to give him a prolonged fight, or many stabs. In production, Tybalt should stand amazed, without defence. Romeo vanquishes Tybalt more by the radiations of his fury than by skill, charging and stabbing in one wild rush, as may be deduced from his words: ‘This shall determine that’ (III.i.137). On the first night of my Toronto 1932 production. I found that I could not draw my rapier, and had no time to grip my dagger – or perhaps I had lost it – so I just pushed at Tybalt, who fell: and the audience, who could not see clearly what was happening, assumed that he was killed. I did it that way in subsequent performances; it was true enough to the essence of the attack. This is a grand moment for the actor: now at last he has something to grip. Directly after, the spasm over, he knows he is ‘fortune’s fool’ (III.i.142).
The play now jerks forward, there is a new life to it. Half-way through, the drama, in Shakespeare’s usual manner, ignites. In Romeo’s scene with the Friar, where he hears of his banishment, his abandonment in grief, though somewhat boyish in its petulance, is yet given impressive sequences:
There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence banishèd is banish’d from the world,
And world’s exile is death; then ‘banishèd’
Is death mis-term’d. Calling death ‘banishèd’,
Thou cutt’st my head off with a golden axe,
And smil’st upon the stroke that murders me.
(III.iii.17)
The play of words, or thoughts, is still perhaps a trifle artificial, but it is carried by the prevailing passion. About this there is no doubt:
Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel:
Wert thou as young as I, Juliet thy love,
An hour but married, Tybalt murderèd,
Doting like me, and like me banishèd,
Then mightst thou speak, then mightst thou tear thy hair,
And fall upon the ground, as I do now,
Taking the measure of an unmade grave.
(III.iii.63)
This is a good example of what may be called ‘poetic acting’, in which the whole physique is in attunement with the words. At ‘fall upon the ground’, the actor simultaneously falls, and is lying for the last line, whose accent follows the thought, drawn out as the body lies full-length, and with a deeper note.
Romeo’s poetry is from now on more assured, as though it was necessary for misfortune to unleash it. He parts with Juliet at dawn:
It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops:
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
(III.v.6)
The apprehension is exquisitely expressed in the imagery; the real dawn is present, poetically delivered. At ‘jocund day’ Romeo’s eye, for an instant, lights up: though as a man he is sad, the poetry is bright. In Shakespeare ‘characterisation’ is an element in his art, but does not dominate.
When we next meet Romeo he is in Mantua. He has had a dream that blends tragedy with joy:
If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand:
My bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne;
And all this day an unaccustomed spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead –
Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think –
And breath’d such life with kisses in my lips,
That I reviv’d, and was an emperor.
Ah me! how sweet is love itself possess’d,
When but love’s shadows are so rich in joy!
(V.i.l)
He is half in a spirit-existence: ‘spirit’ lifts him ‘above the ground’. The dream is one of death and revival through love, and he becomes an ‘emperor’, the word denoting a new life of immeasurable richness. We think of ‘an emperor Antony’ in Cleopatra’s dream (Antony and Cleopatra, V.ii.76), and of the last plays. We have a glimpse of a truth beyond tragedy.
The hope of joyful news may be thought ironic, in view of what follows; but it is only superficially so, because the news is, in a way, good. I mean this. Romeo hears from his servant Balthasar of Juliet’s supposed death. He greets the news not with misery or anguish, but with defiance. The news jerks him many stages up his ladder of poetic advance:
Is it even so? Then I defy you, stars!
(V.i.24)
He follows on with words of sudden purpose and efficiency:
Thou know’st my lodging: get me ink and paper,
And hire post-horses; I will hence to-night.
(V.i.25)
His servant fears his wild looks: but there is an over-riding calmness and determination. Here Romeo, as Granville-Barker says, ‘comes to his full height’ (Preface to Romeo and Juliet, ‘Characters’).
This is the first time Romeo has spoken of practical details: we are within a new poetic realism. Also he is manly; on the stage he should be wearing riding boots, and a long cloak. He has a new dignity, and his voice should reflect it. For the actor, it is all most enjoyable; the part really never catches fire till the news of Juliet’s death. As tragedy thickens round the protagonist, the actor’s enjoyment increases, and this pleasure in the acting reflects a meaning. We may say that the actor enjoys the poetic dimension of what is being performed; or, to preserve the fiction’s realism, that he enacts the over-soul of the protagonist, which remains unruffled, ‘tempest-tost’ as in Macbeth (I.iii.24-5), but not ‘lost’. Romeo may be unhappy, but his over-soul, which is the poetry, enjoys itself mightily.
He next describes the Apothecary:
…meagre were his looks,
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones…
(V.i.40)
He describes the shop with its jumble of goods; and the Apothecary’s ‘penury’. Romeo has hitherto thought only of himself. But he has grown up – ‘shot up’ would be more true – since the news of Juliet’s death, and he now speaks, like Richard II in his meditative soliloquy, as one objectively aware of general human suffering, unrelated to himself. The Apothecary – a wonderful part on the stage – is suffering personified, and acts here as the implement of tragedy. Romeo asks for poison:
Apothecary. Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua’s law
Is death to any he that utters them.
Romeo. Art thou so bare, and full of wretchedness,
And fear’st to die? Famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes,
Contempt and beggary hang upon thy back;
The world is not thy friend, nor the world’s law:
The world affords no law to make thee rich;
Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.
Apothecary. My poverty, but not my will, consents.
Romeo. I pay thy poverty, and not thy will.
Apothecary. Put this in any liquid thing you will,
And drink it off; and if you had the strength
Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight.
Romeo. There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls,
Doing more murders in this loathsome world,
Than these poor compounds that thou may’st not sell:
I sell thee poison, thou has sold me none.
(V.i.66)
He is however genuinely pained by the Apothecary’s destitution, and his words are warm with sympathy. A gesture, such as the laying of his hand on his shoulder, is indicated:
Farewell; buy food, and get thyself in flesh.
Come, cordial and not poison, go with me
To Juliet’s grave, for there must I use thee.
(V.i.83)
Romeo is in a new consciousness. He is aware of suffering humanity, and even sees the world as ‘loathsome’. Law-breaking is not merely allowed; it is right. He is socially nihilistic, but out of that nihilism flowers a superb truth, or half-truth: ‘I sell thee poison, thou hast sold me none.’ He is in the world of Timon of Athens. All this may be ‘out of character’. That Romeo should suddenly attain such tragic dignity may seem illogical; but it is what the poetry says. What we have been watching is a drama of poetic development with a basis in ‘ordinary’ life but not controlled by it.3
He enters the tomb. He dismisses his servant, Balthasar, giving the man a letter for his father. Though set on a terrible purpose, he is utterly responsible, and not mad, though a burning ferocity is in him, if need be:
…therefore hence, be gone:
But, if thou, jealous, dost return to pry
In what I further shall intend to do,
By heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint,
And strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs.
(V.iii.32)
Assured that Balthasar will not remain, he speaks kindly, and gives him money, like Timon with Flavius:
So shalt thou show me friendship. Take thou that:
Live and be prosperous; and farewell, good fellow.
(V. iii.41)
He next meets the hostile Paris, but is unwilling to hurt him: ‘Good gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man’ (V.iii.59). ‘Youth’: Romeo speaks as one of an older generation. He advises Paris to fly from a ‘madman’ (V.iii.67); but, his words being ineffectual, they fight, and Paris is slain. He takes his hand in death, and, with no thought of rivalry, will ‘bury’ him near Juliet.
The end is approached calmly, with thoughts of happiness before death, at first doubted, but then half-ratified by sight of Juliet, who seems so unnaturally bright in death’s despite:
How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death: O! how may I
Call this a lightning? O my love! my wife!
Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquer’d; beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advancèd there.
(V.iii.88)
What has happened? He is amazed and in momentary joy at Juliet’s seeming life. The beauty of the poetry reflects a truth, for Romeo, as in his recent dream, is being again attuned to an intuition beyond death: that is why the lines ring in us with so great an appeal. At this last moment, Romeo is exactly measured to his own poetry; the adjustment is perfected. He has climbed his hill.
He sees Tybalt’s body, and asks forgiveness – ‘Forgive me, cousin’ – for having ‘cut thy youth in twain’ (V.iii.99); again an emphasis, as Granville-Barker notes, on the other’s ‘youth’. He is in a state of supreme understanding above mortal conflicts. He embraces and kisses Juliet as a wedding-in-death, and takes the poison:
Come, bitter conduct, come unsavoury guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!
Here’s to my love! O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
(V.iii.116)
The ‘pilot’ may be compared with his former reference, seeing himself as venturing across seas for love’s ‘merchandise’ (page 38). His quest is now different; or perhaps the same.
Juliet’s death is given only a few lines and is done perfunctorily. Women in Shakespeare, supreme in love, are not accorded tragic dignity. Juliet’s fine potion speech (IV.iii. 14-59), with its terror, would not be allowed for a man.
Once again, all this is enjoyable for the actor. From the news of Juliet’s death on, Romeo is a tragic protagonist of power, and in the process much of obvious splendour attends. He is aware of suffering, and is kindly to the Apothecary and Balthasar; and is in a state transcending former enmities, forgiving, and all but loving, Paris and Tybalt; but he is also wild with a controlled and purposeful passion. He has grown up many years; indeed, being death shadowed, an eternity. He speaks supreme poetry at sight of Juliet in her strange life. Such is Romeo’s triumph: we have nothing to regret, and much to acclaim.
1The quotation gives the title to a remarkable essay on Titus Andronicus by Alan Sommers: ‘Wilderness of Tigers’, Essays in Criticism, July 1960, X.3.
2I am thinking of Sir Donald Wolfit in this scene, where he made the crimson robe flash out with extraordinary effect at the climax, as a tongue of fire. Wolfit was an adept in making robes speak.
3One might compare Aristotle’s statement in the Poetics that in tragedy action takes precedence over character. For the subtleties involved in Aristotle’s contention, see B.R. Rees, ‘Plot, Character and Thought’, Le Monde Grec, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1975.