This study is organized on roughly chronological lines (rejecting Crane’s theory that the prose should be studied under the separate genres1) because I want to try to follow Shakespeare’s development-although it should perhaps be said at once that there is not in the prose any analogous process to the gradual flexibility of the blank-verse line, for nearly all the devices I have distinguished continue in their essential form. But if we examine the prose of the plays chronologically we can chart a definite development in the dramatic application of these devices, that is to their function in revealing character, dramatic mood, and overall meaning. This gradual progress is not that of a person going up a flight of stairs, say, or climbing a ladder, leaving each stage behind him as he goes: rather it is like the manipulation of a series of optical lenses, which as their operator slowly learns, will under different arrangements reveal ever deeper perspectives. That is to say that Shakespeare does not abandon these prose devices as he develops (and I had better say here, with W. K. Wimsatt,2 that by using the word ‘device’ I do not imply any divorce between form and content – the devices recur because they are meaningful forms) but instead of shedding them he puts them into new relationships with the increasing power and range of his drama. Shakespeare was an economical dramatist, who preferred to creatively redesign extant moulds rather than build them anew, and as Marco Mincoff has succinctly put it, ‘even a genius will not break down the wall to enter a room, when there is an already open door waiting for him’.3 Indeed one of the insights which this study affords is how Shakespeare constantly adapted old ideas to new purposes, most remarkably in the prose of the tragedies.
In the group of plays to be considered in more detail now there is to be seen a gradual extension of the formal conventions of prose, a movement by which the various prose devices – malapropism and clumsy speech, abusive imagery, rhetorical structure – become less the province of type-characters such as the clown or of set-scenes, but are slowly integrated to more realistic personalities and to the dramatic texture. I repeat ‘slowly’ because the movement is not a sudden one, and as far as Love’s Labour’s Lost is concerned, from this point of view I cannot agree with C. L. Barber that ‘The play is a strikingly fresh start, a more complete break with what he had been doing earlier than I can think of anywhere else in his career, unless it be where he starts to write the late romances.’4 In terms of structure, as G. K. Hunter has shown,5 the play is almost a reversal, being modelled much more closely on Lyly than the preceding comedies were. The distinction, as Mr Hunter formulates it, is that whereas Lyly constructs his plots in parallel layers which do not come into contact with each other (thus the witty page-scenes, although they reflect ironically the behaviour of the upper plot, do not mingle with the plot and could be separated from it without damaging its structure), Shakespeare in the earlier and later comedies also uses parallel layers but crosses them, confronts the various levels, so that for example servants mock their masters and their pretensions to Love and Honour directly. I find this a very perceptive analysis, and would only add that Shakespeare sometimes, in addition to directly confronting the two layers so that we cannot miss the ironic parallel between them, uses (especially in the middle comedies both gay and serious) the more subtle technique of presenting an ironic juxtaposition and allowing us, if we perceive it, to draw a more fluid and therefore possibly more extensive conclusion, humorous as well as meaningful.6 Certainly Mr Hunter is correct in the conclusions he draws from his analysis: the parallel presentation of learning and love in the upper and lower worlds of this play has often been noticed, but he goes further, to show that Shakespeare ‘makes it more clear than elsewhere in his drama that he is basing his play on a debate, and is sacrificing plot movement to the static representation of opposed attitudes’ (p. 330); a confrontation so formal that it lacks the ‘developing tension’ found in a Lyly plot, for ‘in Love’s Labour’s Lost the episodes of opposition tend not to act out the debate theme of learning against love, but are most often static bouts of wit’ whose general effect is that of ‘self-sufficient verbal brilliance’ (p. 331).7
But if Shakespeare was not applying the prose-scenes of the play with any subtlety to its thematic movement, the scenes themselves contain an interesting mixture of old and new. In the first appearance of people from the lowest world (I, i, 80 ff.) we meet the familiar ‘instant character’ device of malapropism, as Dull the constable explains his relationship to the Duke by service: ‘I myself reprehend his own person, for I am his Grace’s farborough,’ and Costard says of the letter that ‘the contempts thereof are as touching me’ (rightly so!). But a development on malapropism shown here and perfected later is that by which a word is taken not just in the wrong sense but in one actually opposite to that meant (and Shakespeare places both the normal word and its discordant partner close together so that we see the error at once). Thus Costard, about to be led off to prison, becomes more amusing and more pathetic in his plight: ‘Well, if ever I do see the merry days of desolation that I have seen, some shall see.…’ ‘It is not for prisoners to be too silent in their words, and therefore I will say nothing. I have as little patience as another man, and therefore I can be quiet’ (I, ii, 160 ff.). The relationship of Moth to Armado clearly repeats that of Speed to Valentine, with the same use of repartee to display the page’s wit and the master’s follies, and with a duplicate highly structured set-speech to mock the Romance Lover’s symptoms. So Moth urges Armado to ‘win your love with a French brawl’ (= bransle, a dance) that is,
to jig off a tune at the tongue’s end,
canary to it with your feet,
humour it with turning up your eyelids,
sigh a note and
sing a note,
sometimes through the throat,
as if you swallowed love with singing love,
sometimes through the nose,
as if you snuff’d up love by smelling love;
with your hat penthouse-like o’er the shop of your eyes,
with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet,
like a rabbit on a spit.
or your hands in your pocket,
like a man after the old painting;
and keep not too long in one tune, but a snip and away.
These are complements,
these are humours,
these betray nice wenches that would be betrayed
without these,
and make them men of note –
do you note? –
men that most are affected to these.
(III, i, 10–26)
This solo exceeds the earlier mocking speech by the complexity of its rhetoric, but it follows it in the mixture of stock-symptom and ludicrous behaviour, being still at the stage of the earlier grotesque lists. Not that it isn’t an effective and amusing use of parallel structure to heap up absurdities and so multiply the ridicule, but it is just as much a set performance as the earlier examples.
The repartee-scenes (I, ii; III, i) are, however, better integrated for Armado is seen (like a schoolmaster) examining and approving his page’s wit and so can legitimately be the ‘feed’; thus the ‘explicit comment’ can also be germane to the situation: ‘Thou art quick in answer’, ‘A most acute juvenal’. So Shakespeare preserves the device but relates it more to the action, as he does further by making Armado melancholy in love and using Moth to cheer him up: this is a use for prose-repartee that will reappear (Nerissa to Portia, Celia to Rosalind), and as in later examples it is not without a deflating intent, as in the prose asides which Moth is given:
ARMADO. I love not to be crossed.
MOTH [Aside]. He speaks the mere contrary, crosses love not him …
ARMADO. A most fine figure.
MOTH [Aside]. To prove you a cipher.
(I, ii, 34–59)
The use of logic in a comic way is also seen at this level, as in Costard’s use of ‘In manner and form’ (I, i, 204) or in Armado’s reasoning by exempla of other great men in love (I, ii, 160–70), or better still in Moth’s ‘proof’. Moth urges Armado to learn his love ‘by heart’, ‘and in heart’, ‘and out of heart’, and the whole sequence must be quoted to show how Shakespeare deftly uses other prose devices (equivocation, the aside, rhetorical structure) to illuminate Moth’s pseudo-logical wit. The page proffers the handle:
MOTH. All those three will I prove.
ARMADO. What wilt thou prove?
MOTH. A man, if I live; and this by, in, and without, upon the instant.
By heart you love her,
because your heart cannot come by her;
in heart you love her,
because your heart is in love with her;
and out of heart you love her,
being out of heart that you cannot
enjoy her.
ARMADO. I am all these three.
MOTH. And three times as much more –
[Aside] and yet nothing at all. (III, i, 35 ff.)
This is perhaps an aspect of Elizabethan humour which the modern reader finds hard to enjoy, but if we try to see the basic incongruity of a page or a clown being au fait with the subtleties of logical proof, then we may share the resulting surprise when it is used cleverly. And we must surely admire Shakespeare’s skill in fitting various devices together to present so wittily this scene of the clever page trying to stimulate his love-heavy master and at the same time deflating him.
In the upper plot, the play shows its immaturity in that as in the earlier plays verse is used rather clumsily for repartee, (II, i, IV, i) and the presence of other elements later to be placed in prose, such as the deflating aside and witty bawdy, makes the effect doubly incongruous (cf. Two Gentlemen, I, ii and II, i; Shrew, II, i). More appropriately, we find again the convention of prose being used when the noblemen come to deal with clowns (I, i), and the first use of prose to comment on a play performed in verse (V, ii). But Shakespeare also uses prose for a noble character detached from lower class influences in Berowne’s soliloquy (IV, iii, 1 ff.), and having followed the normal pattern of prose devices we can gauge the innovation here. Berowne is shown to be overcome by love and to have rhymed (being shortly followed by the three other noblemen, all with sonnets); Shakespeare presents his confusion by first lowering him to prose, and then using against him devices which have so far been specifically associated with clowns: rhetorical structure in a set-speech, imagery which deflates love, and the sort of self-dialogue which revealed Launce’s confused state:
The King he is hunting the deer;
I am coursing my self.
They have pitched a toil;
I am toiling in a pitch,
pitch that defiles.
Defile, a foul word.
In addition to the normal devices of parallelism and antithesis Shakespeare also uses there more artificial and elaborate rhetorical figures, such as antimetabole, the mirror-image (‘pitched a toil; … toiling in a pitch’), and anadiplosis, whereby the last word of a clause or sentence becomes the first word of the one following (‘pitch, pitch that defiles. Defile …’) All figures are defined by their context, of course, and I would suggest that here the obvious patterns of the rhetoric both reinforce the idea and the image that Berowne is trapped, and suggest a degree of nervous tension which is heightened by the brief, jerky rhythms.
To this complex of effects Shakespeare now adds the clown’s syllogism, the clear-cut logical device that will remorselessly expose any confusion:
Well, set thee down, sorrow,
for so they say the fool said,
and so say I,
and I the fool. – Well proved, wit.
As Sister Joseph has pointed out (p. 191) this is a formal fallacy, for it fails to use the middle term of the syllogism in its full extension in at least one of the premises. We may have been ignorant of the technical details, but we can’t fail to have observed the comic effect; but in case we have, Shakespeare repeats it:
By the Lord, this love is as mad as Ajax.
it kills sheep;
it kills me,
I a sheep. – Well proved again o’ my side.
With this patent misuse of logic Shakespeare suggests concisely the sort of confusion that Berowne suffers – ‘here’s our own hands against our hearts’. As he goes on he falls into other clown habits, such as equivocation on ‘lie’ (the Shakespearian clown’s eternal standby), and into that popular equivocation of the ‘What’s better than one beer?’ – ‘Two beers’ variety:
O, but her eye, by this light, but for her eye, I would
not love her; – yes, for her two eyes.
Concluding this cross-talk act with himself Berowne relapses into the languid symmetries of the lover:
Well, she hath one o’ my sonnets already.
The clown bore it, the fool sent it, and the lady hath it.
Sweet clown, sweeter fool, sweetest lady.
So, by simply taking the prose devices hitherto associated with clowns Shakespeare has created a complex emotional state with precision and wit. Further the imagery deflating love is not that of the normal all-purpose mockery but is related to the situation, for if Berowne is ‘toiling in a pitch’ the King now enters groaning with love, and Shakespeare develops the trap image aptly: ‘Shot, by heaven. Proceed, sweet Cupid. Thou hast thumped him with thy bird-bolt under the left pap,’ and as the two remaining lords appear in similar plight the situational image becomes one of stage grouping too, as the four lords o’erpeering each other are like the trapped birds when brought to table: ‘four woodcocks in a dish’.
If the soliloquy of Berowne is an innovation and a minor triumph in this play, the major discovery in prose is Armado. Shakespeare invents a complete and individual style for him, from vocabulary to imagery to syntax, and is so sure that the results are successful that for the first time the ‘explicit comment’ on somebody’s wit is made before they appear. Armado is prepared for, stylistically, in a long speech by the King (I, i, 160–75) describing him as a ‘refined traveller of Spain’,
A man in all the world’s new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;
One whom the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony.
We are to expect a conceited misuser of language and we are not disappointed, for Shakespeare never delays after such introductions, and at once a letter from Armado arrives to be followed in the next scene by the man himself (it is rather fascinating to watch him in person for the first time to see if he really is as portentous as his letter seems). The ‘high-born words’ are soon brought out, with such affected constructions as ‘soul’s earth’s God and body’s fostering patron’, ‘ycleped’, ‘curious-knotted’, ‘a congruent epitheton appertaining to thy young days’, ‘condign’, ‘rational hind’, and so on. The nature of this inflation is well shown dramatically, as in his letter Armado’s indignation with Costard is so great that he can hardly bring himself to say that he has caught him with a woman, and his thrashing-about, ‘with – with – o with – but with this I passion to say wherewith –’, is rudely interrupted by Costard: ‘With a wench’, an excellently, crude anticipation by which we can gauge the circuity of Armado’s periphrasis: ‘with a child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or for thy more sweet understanding, a woman’ – and he finally gets there. We want to applaud Shakespeare’s invention here, but it works even better for Armado’s imagery, which is characterized by the most ambitious metaphors, from his first appearance in the letter addressing the King as ‘the welkin’s viceregent’ (I, i, 214) to his exit as the humiliated Hector – ‘I have seen the day of wrong through the little hole of discretion’ (V, ii, 711–12). As in that last example Shakespeare often makes his images look ludicrous by their stilted conjunction of abstract and concrete (the ‘little hole’ of ‘discretion’); at other times a simple word will be wrested to an unnatural application: ‘So it is, besieged with sable-coloured melancholy, I did commend the black-oppressing humour to the most wholesome physic of thy health-giving air’ (I, i, 225–7). Together with these two characteristics goes a constant weakness for the fully-formed personification of abstract ideas, which at times becomes dramatized in those long-drawn-out images which always look so artificial in prose:
If drawing my sword against the humour of affection would deliver me from the reprobate thought of it, I would take Desire prisoner, and ransom him to any French courtier for a new-devised curtsy.
(I, ii, 62 ff.)
It is a trick which he shares with an earlier braggart, Cade.
These two traits might be enough to characterize and to ridicule Armado, but Shakespeare has a possibly more effective method too. So far in his use of rhetorical structure in set-speeches the symmetries of syntax have been used to point fun at the person or events being described in the speech – the grotesque beating of Dromio, Petruchio’s horse and his journey on it, Launce and his dog, the Romantic hero travestied. But for the first time Shakespeare makes the symmetries mock the user of them (an effect thought by Mr Barish to be more typical of Ben Jonson). Armado’s natural tendency is towards portentous periphrasis, and the structures of rhetoric are ideal to show him duplicating meaning until the form is sufficiently orotund for him. So in his first solo, the letter, although it is mainly devoted to establishing his other characteristics, we find such preposterous repetitions as this introducing the event
that draweth from my snow-white pen
the ebon-coloured ink,
which here thou viewest, beholdest, surveyest, or seest.
We find more repetitions in the soliloquy where he admits his love for Jaquenetta, as when the normal romance phrase ‘I worship the ground on which she treads’ is fed into the dissecting apparatus of his brain and comes out so:
I do affect the very ground – which is base –
where her shoe – which is baser –
guided by her foot – which is basest –
doth tread.
I confess that I find this still very amusing today (it is also the figure auxesis, Joseph, p. 149). The trick of splitting everything up into tiny repetitious parts (it is a small-scale partition or perhaps the figure eutrepismus) is seen to still better effect at the end of this speech, where he feels a dreadful premonition coming over him that he must rhyme (rather like some animal going off to be ill):
Adieu valour, rust rapier, be still drum,
for your manager is in love;
yea, he loveth.
Assist me some extemporal god of rhyme,
for I am sure I shall turn sonnet.
Devise wit, write pen,
for I am for whole volumes in folio.
That is surely the wittiest version of the common-place Elizabethan triumph of Venus over Mars, and there, too, is Shakespeare’s gift of phrasing which defies analysis – ‘I shall turn sonnet’ – ‘I am for whole volumes in folio.’
The characterization of Armado through his military symmetries (for they are as tidy as ranks of soldiers) is surely deliberate, and is worked up to a third solo which fulfils all our expectations from his style. In the second of his letters to be read aloud by a third party (which is somehow funnier than if he were to read it himself, perhaps because we can laugh happily, free of his presence) Armado declares his love to Jacquenetta. This is perhaps the most important letter that he will ever write, and his style rises mightily to the occasion. The preliminaries show his beloved division, which here repeats the same point three times, and is then put into still finer shape by the answering recapitulation which heaps tautology on tautology:
By heaven, that thou art fair, is most infallible;
true, that thou art beauteous;
truth itself, that thou art lovely.
More fairer than fair,
beautiful than beauteous,
truer than truth itself,
have commiseration on thy heroical vassal.
Having come thus far he now introduces an exemplum to parallel his situation toward her, that of King Cophetua and the beggar ‘Zenelephon’ (even Armado is not above error), and it was a happy stroke of wit that made Shakespeare remember the most sharply divided of all Latin tags, on which Armado is now made to build up a fantastic structure of repetition, embroidered with more elaborate rhetorical figures (gradatio or the climbing figure in the middle, antimetabole at the end – it would be tedious to enumerate them all), and enlivened by another self-dialogue:
| he it was that might rightly say, veni, vidi, vici; | |
| which to annothanize in the vulgar – | |
| o base and obscure vulgar – | |
| He came, / saw, | / and overcame. |
| He came, one; / saw, two; / overcame, three. | |
| Who came? – the king. | |
| Why did he come? | – to see. |
| Why did he see? | – to overcome. |
| To whom came he? | – to the beggar. |
| What saw he? | – the beggar. |
| Who overcame he? | – the beggar. |
| The conclusion is victory. On whose side? – the king’s. | |
| The captive is enriched. On whose side? – the beggar’s. | |
| The catastrophe is a nuptial. One whose side? – the king’s, | |
| no, on both in one, or one in both. | |
Again it was remarkably inventive of Shakespeare to build a scene within a scene here, for although this is a letter which is being read aloud, within it Armado is made to mistake himself, to get his left hand mixed up with his right, as spontaneously as Launce had done in direct presentation. The remainder of the letter is just as structured, just as repetitious, and just as hilarious. Shakespeare’s explicit comment on this abnormal style is now wittily related to the characters, for when the Princess asks, ‘What plume of feathers is he that indited this letter?’ we have this sardonic exchange:
BOYET. I am much deceived but I remember the style.
PRINCESS. Else your memory is bad, going o’er it erewhile.
That proves, I think, that Shakespeare was working consciously.
So much invention in prose would be enough for any play, but Shakespeare’s exuberant creativeness is not satisfied with having constructed Armado as a grotesque parallel to the interest in love and learning of the upper plot: he goes on to invent some still more grotesque beings to parallel Armado, and what Armado lovingly describes as ‘Sweet smoke of rhetoric’ soon covers the whole stage. Nor is he content simply to create separate entities, however funny, but always confronts them: so just as in the Two Gentlemen he had brought his two clowns Launce and Speed face to face, now he first of all introduces Costard into Armado’s world (III, i), and then crosses the conflicting styles brilliantly. Having established Armado and Moth trading ‘riddles’ (epithets applied to topics as ingeniously and obliquely as possible) he brings Costard on, who not being in on the joke and being stupid anyhow, creates such total confusion that Armado has to stop the fun8 and recapitulate: ‘Come hither, come hither. How did this argument begin?’ This un-Lyly-like mixing of the two lower planes is very funny (I find myself laughing as I write this), and Shakespeare goes one better by now playing off Costard’s noted propensity for malapropism against the affected language of both Armado and Berowne. Armado gives Costard a letter to take to Jaquenetta, and gives him some money, saying, ‘There is remuneration.’ Left alone, Costard unsticks his palm to see how rich he is:
Now will I look to his remuneration. Remuneration. O that’s the Latin word for three farthings.
That is a splendid enough joke, but Shakespeare now makes him go on to do a little dialogue with himself, as anyone might hearing a foreign word for the first time:
Three farthings, remuneration. ‘What’s the price of this inkle?’ – ‘One penny.’ – ‘No, I’ll give you a remuneration.’ Why, it carries it. Remuneration.
Now Berowne enters with his letter for Rosaline and gives it to Costard with some rather affected Romance language:
And to her white hand see thou do commend
This sealed-up counsel. There’s thy guerdon. Go.
This time Costard, who takes the epithet for the thing itself, has a new scale of values, for he holds a shilling:
Gardon, o sweet gardon. Better than remuneration, a ‘levenpence farthing better. Most sweet gardon, I will do it, sir, in print. Gardon, remuneration. (Exit.)
The joke is lost on Berowne, but with this carefully worked and neatly timed juxtaposition Shakespeare has deflated the pretensions both of Armado and Berowne, and once again correctively confronted naturalness and pose. But he has also deflated, though with sympathy, Costard, blissfully oblivious to words’ meanings. Shakespeare’s sense of humour is not only endlessly enlivening but also humane, for few wits are left for long in the superior position.
This small confrontation is but a prelude to the full-scale bout between Armado and his equally grotesque peers, Sir Nathaniel the curate and Holofernes the schoolmaster. These eccentrics are introduced separately first, in a scene which is a parody of pedantry worthy of other masters of this genre (Rabelais or Sterne, say, Peacock or Nabokov). Holofernes is the more strongly characterized, and here the stylistic tic is well related to character, for the Elizabethan schoolmaster frequently taught their pupils ‘copie’ and variety by giving many duplicate meanings – thus ‘foaming out synonyms’, as John Hoskins tartly described it.9 Holofernes’ first demonstration of the habit is quite moderate compared to extant Elizabethan examples:
The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood; ripe as a pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven, and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth.
(IV, ii, 2–7)
But when Dull oafishly takes the phrase ‘haud credo’, to mean that the deer was a ‘doe’, and then says it was a pricket, Holofernes becomes indignant and the synonyms come pouring out:
Most barbarous intimation. Yet a kind of insinuation, as it were in via, in way, of explication; facere, as it were, replication, rather, ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination, after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or ratherest unconfirmed fashion, to insert again my haud credo for a deer.
He is like a Roget’s Thesaurus gone mad, and he continues so. The final confrontation (V, i) between this party, with their grammar-school jargon, and Armado with his ambitious ignorance and vain rhetoric rivalling them in display, and with the two commentators standing by, Moth the sharp answerer who shows up everyone’s foolishness, and Costard who only reveals his own (he is still fascinated with ‘remuneration’) – this is a masterpiece of linguistic characterization and comic situation. But it would take a disproportionate amount of time to analyse it, and a good deal of the humour might escape in the process (this is the occupational hazard for those trying to comment on Shakespeare’s wit). The six characters remain individually distinguished by their style throughout, and though the result is polyphonic it is not harmonious. The scene is followed by another long set-piece, the masking, which in turn is followed by the pageant of the Nine Worthies, where the nobility’s comments in prose show the destructive potential of prose-imagery. It may seem ungrateful to criticize this play, for it is Shakespeare’s first virtuoso piece in prose, but I don’t think I am alone in finding it too long, and although the individual effects are brilliant they are often repetitive. There are just too many riches here. Appropriately, perhaps, Armado is given the last, symmetrical balance: ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way; we this way.’
If Love’s Labour’s Lost ultimately disappoints, despite the great expansion of the possibilities for characterization within prose, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at once impresses by its consistency and economy. Again the separate and parallel structure resembles Lyly, as G. K. Hunter has shown (pp. 318–30), but now with a dramatic movement running through the plot at the three levels of lovers, clowns and fairies, that expectation of the wedding ceremony which will be the climax of the action and which the rustics’ performance is to grace. This triple structure is reproduced stylistically by the differences between the verse of the nobles and that of the fairies, and by the use of prose for the rustics. Further, the separateness of these worlds is stressed by the fact that when the enchanted Titania declares her love to Bottom in his ass’s head, she speaks in verse, he in prose (III, i, 132–206), for although he like Christopher Sly has been deceived into temporary membership of a higher social realm, she is a fairy and he remains himself.10 Characters from the upper human world are once brought down to prose, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost, to comment satirically on the play-within-the play (as Miss Tschopp notes, p. 26–7; it might also be said that the impulse to put on the play, and the discussion of roles and scenes, always take place in prose). But whereas the images in the previous mocking are sharp and destructive, as in the various metaphors for Holofernes’ face – ‘A cittern-head’ – ‘The head of a bodkin’ – ‘A death’s face in a ring’, and so on (V, ii, 611–24) the spectators’ comments are now wittier and less violent, though the images still deflate: ‘He hath rid his prologue like a rough colt; he knows not the stop’ – ‘His speech was like a tangled chain; nothing impaired, but all disordered’ (V, i, 118 ff.) – there is more charity in the wit of this play. A significant change of medium occurs in both plays when the actors are ‘put out’, for they step down into their normal prose, a quite consistent use of the convention. But it is nevertheless remarkable how Shakespeare preserves the individual voice, keeps it going as it were under the cruder verse of the play. So when Costard has finished being Pompey the Big he speaks that famous epitaph on Sir Nathaniel’s failure as Alisander in his own inimitable way:
There, an’t shall please you; a foolish mild man; an honest man, look you, and soon dashed. He is a marvellous good neighbour, faith, and a very good bowler: but for Alisander, alas, you see how ’tis, a little o’erparted.
(V, ii, 584–90)11
And when Bottom is reproved by Theseus for cursing the wall, for ‘The wall methinks, being sensible, should curse again’, Bottom puts aside the tortured rhetoric of his Pyramus and answers with his own quite personal blend of simplicity and unshakeable confidence:
No in truth sir, he should not. Deceiving me is Thisby’s cue; she is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall. You shall see, it will fall pat as I told you.
(V, i, 185–9)
The secrets of Shakespeare’s individualization of characters through their speech deserve more detailed study than I can give them here, though already we can feel the growing consistency of tone. Perhaps the most valuable experience for Shakespeare so far has been the creation of the eccentrics of Love’s Labour’s Lost and their confrontation in that brilliant battle of language: it may have ruined the balance of the play, but it was a great formative event.
In this play exuberance is disciplined, and though he could easily have done more, Shakespeare is content to characterize only one of his rustics, Bottom. The others have that fluent simple folk speech, their only deviations being at moments of excitement, as in the obsessive repetitions of Flute’s requiem for Bottom’s ‘sixpence a day’ (IV, ii, 18–22), or for the echt-Shakespearian popular speech-fault, malapropism: Quince wants to have someone ‘to disfigure or to present the person of Moonshine’ (III, i, 5 3), and though he manages to correct Bottom’s ‘flowers of odious savours sweet’ (73), he is himself corrected (and thus Shakespeare draws attention to the humour) for saying ‘he is a very paramour for a sweet voice’ (IV, ii, 11). Bottom also malaprops, and famously: ‘There we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously’ (I, ii, 95); ‘there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion living’ (III, i, 29); ‘I have an exposition of sleep come upon me’ (IV, i, 35). But he is also distinguished even here, as Sister Joseph first pointed out (p. 55) by his weakness for perverting the application of words, divorcing the appropriate partners. This is the figure hypallage, which Tristram Shandy’s father used to express his contempt for the inevitable union of opposites in Love:
‘You can scarce’, said he, ‘combine two ideas together upon it, brother Toby, without an hypallage.’ – What’s that? cried my uncle Toby. The cart before the horse, replied my father.
(Book 8, ch. 13)
Bottom’s version of it is to get the senses of the body mixed up, as in his fuddled recollection of the dream: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ (IV, i, 224 ff.). Having invented this glorious confusion, Shakespeare does not forget it, but brings it back into Bottom as Pyramus awaiting his love:
I see a voice; now will I to the chink,
To spy an I can hear my Thisby’s face.
Bottom is semper eadem, to his very last words:
Will it please you to see the epilogue, or to hear a Bergomask dance, between two of our company?
There is something more significant about Bottom’s use of hypallage, for here a rhetorical figure becomes a part of personality – as we see again in his incongruous images: ‘I will aggravate my voice so, that I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove; I’ll speak in a monstrous little voice.’ (55)
These contradictions seem inherent in the ‘very tragical mirth’ of this ‘tedious brief scene’, and the union of contraries (the figure synoeciosis, similar to oxymoron) might sum up, though not in any portentous way, the general effect of the rustics’ performance. But more particularly, I think the figure well describes Bottom’s personality, for although in his verse his ‘chief humour is for a tyrant: I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split’, in prose he is without exception as gentle as the sucking dove, and this gentleness is partly conveyed, though it is also a question of attitude, in his prose. He is the first to feel that ‘to bring in, God shield us, a lion among ladies, is a most dreadful thing’, and he proposes that they write yet another direct address to the audience to reassure us (in case we might for the moment be deceived) that this is not a real lion. Shakespeare makes him invent a little prologue, and conveys Bottom’s gentleness through his repetitions:
‘ladies’, or ‘fair ladies, I would wish you’, or ‘I would request you’, or ‘I would entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble; my life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing, I am a man as other men are’: and there indeed let him name his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner,
(III, i, 30 ff.)
As he finishes his inset speech and reverts to his normal language we see again retrospectively how the kindly repetitions and the simplest possible syntax convey his gentle efforts to be reassuring. Similar simplicity and artless repetition show his kindness towards the fairies, and the way he takes them on immediate trust, with his pleading ‘Good Master X’ or ‘Good Monsieur Y’, and his playful witticisms with their names:
Good Master Mustardseed, I know your patience well. That same cowardly, giant-like ox-beef hath devoured many a gentleman of your house. I promise you, your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now. I desire you more acquaintance, good Master Mustardseed.
(III, i, 180–201; also IV, i, 1–50)
Bottom’s speech and behaviour throughout his transformation to an ass is a small masterpiece of decorum for Shakespeare, using the word in its Elizabethan sense of fitting style to character. We see it best by juxtaposition as when the song he sings to show that he is not afraid awakes Titania, and the fairy-queen instantly declares her love: Bottom’s answer to her intense verse is as matter-of-fact as could be:
TITANIA. And thy fair virtue’s force perforce doth move me,
On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.
BOTTOM. Methinks mistress, you should have little reason for that. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days. The more the pity, that some honest neighbours will not make them friends.
And as if surprised at his skill at equivocation and moralizing he adds: ‘Nay, I can gleek upon occasion.’ Thus Shakespeare mocks Titania by the double contrast between verse and prose and between romantic love and citizen morality, and then gives Bottom the explicit comment on his wit to make the device look natural.
In the gradual movement from clown to character Bottom is, as E. K. Chambers said, ‘with the possible exception of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the first of Shakespeare’s supreme comic creations, greater than the Costard of Love’s Labour’s Lost or the Launce of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, as the masterpiece is greater than the imperfect sketch’ (loc. cit.). A more valuable comparison might be with Armado, the prose character who has been given the most complex and consistent stylistic characterization so far. But Armado is a fantastic creation, a grotesque vademecum of the possibilities of linguistic affectation in the early 1590’s: he is extremely detailed, but stiff, like a suit of armour. You never feel that Armado has a personality, or that he could do anything of his own accord; you do not find him thinking. I realize that this is an extremely vague attempt to chart the moment when Shakespeare moves from external to internal characterization, but I cannot find any better words to express the difference between Armado and Bottom. Certainly Bottom has a personality and a very humane one, but the difference is not simply that between affected, rhetorical language and simpler rustic speech. In fact, at the key-moment of Bottom’s transformation, when he awakes and finds himself alone and (as we see) no longer an ass, Shakespeare uses a complex syntactical structure which an external rhetorical analysis would describe as containing all the figures which were used to mock Armado’s artificiality – anaphora, isocolon, parison. But there is an enormous difference in application. Shakespeare had earlier, as ever, exploited the dramatic situation he had created by making Bottom refer to his new condition, metaphorically – ‘What do you see? You see an ass-head of your own, do you? … I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me’ (III, i, 120 ff.) – and literally, if unwittingly: ‘I must to the barber’s, monsieur, for methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face. And I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch’ (IV, i, 25) – and (the most brilliant invention of all) by developing an ass’s appetite: ‘I could munch your good dry oats. Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay.’ Now as the enchantment passes, and he awakes with his last human actions marvellously intact – ‘When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer’ – his brain moves slowly, gradually coming to grips with his late experience. He has a vague memory of what has happened, struggles to recapture it, and unwittingly stumbles on it yet again with the word ‘ass’: the symmetries catch exactly the movement of his brain towards the recognition and away from it, and finally – as if he had in fact divined the truth but decided that it was safe to withhold it – the structured syntax shows up his growing confidence as he takes refuge in a comprehensively confused hypallage:
Snout the tinker! Starveling! God’s my life.
Stolen hence, and left me asleep.
I have had a most rare vision.
I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.
That is Bottom’s great moment, and a daring piece of theatre as we teeter on the brink of his discovery. But the symmetries do not mock him – they anatomize the process of his thought, and reinforce our impression of his artless, harmless simplicity. Shakespeare follows up this dramatic effect with complete consistency as Bottom rushes back to tell his fellow-actors ‘wonders’, ‘promising, ‘I will tell you everything, right as it fell out’ – ‘Let us hear, sweet Bottom’ – ‘Not a word of me.’ We are left wondering whether this sudden reversal is another sign of his earlier marriage of contraries, or whether he is again trying to suppress what he doesn’t dare admit to himself. Either way, the prose of Bottom is all of a piece.
If the artistic problem for Shakespeare creating Bottom was to show the brain moving slowly, along innocuous and charmingly predictable lines, the ingredients needed for Mercutio were exactly opposite. And as we consider the extent to which Mercutio’s prose bulks in Romeo and Juliet we see another contrast with the Dream, taking us back to Love’s Labour’s Lost (which, chronologically, Romeo probably succeeds). For the exuberance which pushed out a great energetic variety of prose in that comedy is still at work in the tragedy, creating in both plays an imbalance which is essentially one of tone rather than of any approved proportion of prose to verse. Indeed the play opens like a comedy, with the bawdy puns on ‘stand’, ‘fish’ and ‘flesh’ that we have met from the servants in earlier comedies (Two Gentlemen’, II, v; Shrew, Ind. ii), although the sudden shift of the metaphor from a sexual to a military purpose as Sampson and Gregory prepare to fight the Montague’s servants (‘Draw thy tool’, ‘My naked weapon is out’) may freeze our laughter. The comic scene between the clown and the musicians (IV, v) is justifiably not serious (like the mocktragic verse scene which has preceded it) for Juliet is not in fact dead, but the effect is not yet geared to the tragic action, being simply imported from the comedies. Similarly, Mercutio’s role as the mocker of Romance recalls the function of the pages of the comedies, as he attacks the usual symptoms of love (II, i) and more originally, the lover’s challenge to the great exemplars:
Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in; Laura to his lady was a kitchen-wench, marry she had a better love to be-rhyme her; Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gipsy, Helen and Hero, hildings and harlots; Thisbe a gray eye or so, but not to the purpose (II, iv, 40 ff.).
But though he fits into a pattern which recurs when ever Shakespeare dramatizes love, Mercutio is more than a type, and his mockery is the consistent expression from first to last of a scoffing personality. Further, he is the first character in prose who is not inferior, intellectually or socially, the first to have any range of wit and intelligence in prose. The fact that he is given the delicately imaginative verse of the Queen Mab speech is, as Miss Bradbrook has suggested (op. cit., p. 238) not psychologically improbable, and could indeed be explained by the convention which Shakespeare elsewhere uses whereby the move of a prose character up to verse is an index of the great intensity or worth of the person or experience being described in that verse. But elsewhere, however, his oscillations from verse to prose, and his use in verse of attitudes (such as mockery and bawdy) which Shakespeare later relegated to prose, seem evidence of a fundamental artistic uncertainty about the scope of the respective media. The same conclusion applies more strongly to the meanderings of the Nurse from verse to prose and back – there is little sense here of the decorum shown in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The presence of Mercutio and the Nurse in the play, and particularly their bawdy, can be explained in view of Shakespeare’s recurrent desire to separate the purely physical appetite from his nobler lovers and locate it somewhere else in the play, be it in wordplay or in particular characters who will act as lightning-conductors. So these two represent deliberately basic versions of the male and female experience of sex. Mercutio with his ‘poperin pear’ and ‘occupy’, the Nurse with her ‘fall backwards’ and ‘bear the burden’: by their presence Romeo and Juliet are the purer. But nevertheless their humour bulks too large in the play, and there are times in their scenes when we feel, as we never do in the mature work, that we have lost track of where the play is going. Also this deflating humour, like that of Love’s Labour’s Lost, is often too violent. Granted that Mercutio is the ‘allowed man’ who will remind us of the hidden basis of love, and granted that some of Shakespeare’s most brilliantly creative use of bawdy is seen in this play we may still feel that the wit has gone too far in ‘exposures’ such as this: ‘for this drivelling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole’, a scabrous idea more fully developed in the ensuing puns. An Elizabethan may have felt that the wit redeemed the salaciousness, but to the modern critic – and even one who, having read Eric Partridge’s Shakespeare’s Bawdy is not likely to be shocked – it seems a superfluity which can only damage the tone of the play. In actual practice it is probably so excessive that it just disappears into the ground, and is for most people simply connected with Mercutio, but if so then we have a failure to relate the bawdy structurally such as Shakespeare seldom repeated (cf. the more controlled jesting at the end of the next play, The Merchant of Venice, or the little jokes in the later comedies which remind us of one aspect of the situation whenever a heroine puts on male costume). For the development of Shakespeare’s prose both here and in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Blake’s anarchic proverb applies: ‘You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.’
Yet if his exuberance damages the balance of the whole Shakespeare does show economy and wit in the creation of prose-styles to fit character and situation. When Romeo comes down to prose to jest with Mercutio his style is plain but flexible, and he is made to demonstrate his intellectual superiority in a great bout of punning (both wits also use the figures antimetabole and polyptoton) as to Mercutio’s use of ‘pink’ meaning ‘flower’ Romeo replies:
ROMEO. Why then is my pump well flowered.
MERCUTIO. Sure wit. Follow me this jest now, till thou hast worn out thy pump, that when the single sole of it is worn, the jest may remain after the wearing solely singular.
ROMEO. O single-soled jest, solely singular for the singleness.
MERCUTIO. Come between us, good Benvolio; my wits faints.
ROMEO. Switch and spurs, switch and spurs; or I’ll cry a match.
(II, iv, 60 ff.)
This is as dazzling a piece of wit as any yet, and much better integrated, being no simple ‘Wit vs. Stooge’ encounter: here the issue is in doubt, and the repartee is made to seem the real expression of personalities. Thus the ‘explicit comment’ of Mercutio on Romeo’s wit (which is repeated more admiringly later – ‘O here’s a wit of cheveril, that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad’, etc.) no longer seems a dramatic convention but a quite human reaction. Mercutio’s punning is a part of his character (indeed, as Miss Mahood has shown, the wordplay is quite crucial to the whole drama), and it leads directly to his death, for it is the edge which finally provokes Tybalt: ‘What wouldst thou have with me?’ – ‘Good King of Cats, nothing but one of your nine lives, that I mean to make bold withal, and as you shall use me hereafter dry-beat the rest of the eight’ (III, i, 80). Shakespeare, as consistent as ever, gives Mercutio his most serious pun at the very end: ‘Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.’
The same energy in Mercutio’s character that goes into punning is seen in complementary stylistic effects, such as his syntax with its quick impatient brevity and the mocking repetitions with which he satirizes Tybalt: ‘He fights as you sing prick-song, / keeps time, / distance, / and proportion; / he rests his minim rests, / one, / two, / and the third in your bosom; / the very butcher of a silk button, / a duellist, / a duellist; / a gentleman of the very first house, / of the first and second cause’ (II, iv, 19–26). And for his dying words the characteristic short repetitions come out again: ‘Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic!’ (III, i, 100 ff.). In his imagery particularly we find the mocker at his most vigorous, for all his images deflate others. In being directed at targets they might be classified as ‘objective’, but I think that in practice they should be called ‘subjective’ as their real function seems to be to demonstrate his irrepressible sarcasm: thus what he says about Romeo – ‘he is already dead, stabbed with a white wench’s black eye, run through the ear with a love-song, the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft’ (II, iv, 13–16) does not really affect its target. This suggestion as to where Shakespeare has placed the emphasis in the movement of Mercutio’s images could be tested further in his other mockeries, whether of the Nurse (II, iv, 97–129), about Tybalt (II, iv) or to his face (III, i) or to Benvolio, in that last full-scale demonstration of his wit and his love of quarrelling (III, i, 5–32). The air of witty display which characterizes Mercutio’s images also comes out for his death (in Shakespeare’s style all lines move towards one point, all the details complement each other) as he describes his wound:
No ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve … I am peppered, I warrant, for this world.
And though for his last speech he is given the customary dignity of verse, the deflating image comes home:
They have made worms’ meat of me.
The Nurse, by contrast, is given ‘subjective’ images but they are designed to make her look ridiculous, partly by the way she introduces incongruous colloquialisms into them:
O there is a nobleman in town, one Paris, that would fain lay knife aboard; but she good soul has as lief see a toad, a very toad, as see him.
(II, iv, 194–6)
The images jar too because they are so crude, so unsuited to the characters to whom they refer: ‘I anger her sometimes, and tell her that Paris is the properer man; but I’ll warrant you, when I say so she looks as pale as any clout in the versal world’ (197–200). And to Juliet she says of Romeo, ‘He is not the flower of courtesy, but I’ll warrant him as gentle as a lamb’ (II, v, 42). Whatever sense can be extracted from her confusion, it seems to mock her. This confusion is wonderfully demonstrated in her longer speeches, where repetition and digression muddy the whole stream of thought:
Pray you sir a word: and as I told you, my young lady bid me enquire you out; what she bid me say, I will keep to myself; but first let me tell ye, if we should lead her in a fool’s paradise, as they say, it were a very gross kind of behaviour, as they say. (II, iv, 171–81)
Like Bottom she malaprops (‘she hath the prettiest sententious of it’) and like him too she confuses attributes, but on a larger scale, as in this curiously indiscriminate mixture of praise and dispraise:
Well, you have made a simple choice, you know not how to choose a man. Romeo? No, not he, though his face be better than any man’s, yet his leg excels all men’s; and for a hand and a foot, and a body, though they be not to be talked on, yet they are past compare.
(All Shakespeare’s clowns suffer a fatal disconnection somewhere between brain and tongue.) Sometimes her garrulousness is a mere working-out of her style, but in this scene the obstreperousness and delay always associated with the clown does produce a dramatic effect, in the growth of Juliet’s tension until Romeo’s message is finally delivered – later Shakespeare will fit this reaction more organically to the play.
Whereas the oscillations between verse and prose in Romeo and Juliet are too haphazard, in The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare achieves not only consistency in the observation of this convention, but also breaks it only for specific dramatic effect. The use of prose in this play is the most complex so far, for the prose-speakers include Portia and Nerissa, Shylock, Bassanio, Antonio, Launcelot Gobbo and his father, and various smaller characters, while this lower medium is also used for atmospheric contrast and to develop important thematic aspects. The part closest to the tradition is that of the clown, for at his first appearance Gobbo is given a set-piece reminiscent of Launce with Crab. Gobbo’s dilemma is whether to desert Shylock or not (in addition to the comedy this speech conveys some distrust of the Jew as a hard master) and like Launce he tries to make the situation clearer by dramatizing it, acting out a sort of psychomachia between his conscience urging him to stay and the devil at his elbow urging him to go. But Shakespeare only gives his clowns solo speeches if he wants to show their confusion, and the form it takes here is the splendid invention by which Gobbo is unable to decide on which form of his name the Good and Evil Angels are to use: the devil seems more winning, ‘saying to me, “Gobbo”, “Lancelot Gobbo”, “good Lancelot”, or “good Gobbo”, or “good Lancelot Gobbo, use your legs, take the start, run away”‘. On the other side the conscience is less vociferous (naturally) but we see the clown’s confusion as it becomes too much for him to go on listing all possible permutations of his name and he relapses into ‘aforesaid’:
My conscience says ‘no; take heed honest Lancelot’, ‘take heed honest Gobbo’, or as aforesaid, ‘honest Lancelot Gobbo, do not run, scorn running with thy heels’.
As Gobbo continues to alternate the two sides (standing still the while) both he and they are made to look more ridiculous (with one incongruous image: ‘my conscience, hanging about the neck of my heart’), and still no solution seems in sight. Rhetorical symmetry is now used to make the dialogue sharper still:
| my conscience | says Lancelot, budge not.’ |
| ‘Budge’ | says the fiend |
| ‘Budge’ not | says my conscience. |
| ‘Conscience,’ | say I, ‘you counsel well.’ |
| ‘Fiend,’ | say I, ‘you counsel well.’ |
| To be ruled by my conscience, I should stay with the | |
| Jew my master, who | |
| – God bless the mark – is a kind of devil: | |
| And to run away from the Jew, I should be ruled | |
| by the fiend, who | |
| – saving your reverence – is the devil himself. | |
| (II, ii, 1 ff.) | |
The impasse seems complete, but there is always an escape route for the Shakespearian clown through his repertory of tricks, such as malapropism: ‘Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation,’ or by putting a metaphorical phrase into the context where it is literally applicable: ‘and in my conscience, my conscience is but a kind of hard conscience, to offer to counsel me to stay with the Jew’. The devil has won.
This is a moderately amusing scenario for stage-business, but Shakespeare complicates the situation and increases the verbal humour by introducing Gobbo’s old father, who is given a doddering repetitive style. Lancelot points him out to us with the clown’s perversion of language – ‘O heavens, this is my true-begotten father … I will try confusions with him,’ and that malapropism describes exactly what follows, a curiously grotesque piece of humour as Gobbo confuses his father by giving him false directions to find Gobbo fils, and then tells him that his son is dead. Shakespeare works up the humour here by giving Gobbo many of the clown’s devices, such as taking an image a stage further, into the ridiculous: ‘who being more than sand-blind, high gravel-blind, knows me not’; or taking an image literally, as his father laments the son’s death: ‘Marry, God forbid! The boy was the very staff of my age, my very prop’ – ‘Do I look like a cudgel or a hovel-post, a staff, or a prop?’; or more amusing, applying comic logic: ‘But I pray you, ergo old man, ergo I beseech you, talk you of young Master Lancelot?’; or heaping up like Sancho Panza a random list of proverbs: ‘It is a wise father that knows his own child.… Give me your blessing, truth will come to light, murder cannot be hid long; a man’s son may, but in the end truth will out.’ All the ingredients are there, then (and later he is given more malapropism, confusion and specious logic – III, v, 1–38) but somehow the scene does not please, perhaps because the old father is too sympathetic to us to be a butt. However, Shakespeare now exploits the situation by staging a confrontation between the two clowns before Bassanio, as both interrupt each other in trying to explain to him what they want, the result being an antiphonal piece of confusion as Gobbo tries to nudge his father into explaining, and the old man digresses:
LANCELOT. Indeed the short and the long is, I serve the Jew, and have a desire – as my father shall specify –
GOBBO. His master and he, saving your worship’s reverence, are scarce cater-cousins –
LANCELOT. To be brief, the very truth is, that the Jew having done me wrong, doth cause me – as my father being I hope an old man shall frutify unto you –
GOBBO. I have here a dish of doves that I would bestow upon your worship, and my suit is –
It hardly seems possible that they will ever explain, and the situation is made more amusing in that the audience has seen them together and observed their chronic confusion, and then sees some new (and more intelligent) person trying to cope with their chaos: so we see the whole thing again through his eyes, and Shakespeare makes them still more characteristic and ridiculous this time. The fresh point of view records the confusion more intensely, and this perspective will be often repeated (as for Mistress Quickly, Pompey, and other clowns). Gobbo’s concluding words to Bassanio reassert one habit of his style and also devalue Shylock: ‘The old proverb is very well parted between my master Shylock and you sir; you have the grace of God, sir, and he hath enough.’ Gobbo may be still more of a clown than a personality, such as Bottom was, but there is compensation elsewhere in the prose.
In the upper level of the play we find a similar division of prose between pure wit and relevance to the plot, with perhaps more of the second quantity. In the prose-scene between Portia and Nerissa (I, ii), which is the main exposition of the terms of her father’s will and how she must choose her husband, logic and rhetoric help to clarify the issue, for as elsewhere the disjunctive formulae of the one and the symmetrical syntax of the other combine to present the argument in a form which, as Mr Barish suggested (p. 40) accounts for the eternal clarity of Shakespeare’s prose in the theatre. So Nerissa’s sound counsel of moderation is developed by these means:
they are as sick that surfeit with too much,
as they that starve with nothing.
It is no mean happiness therefore to be seated in the mean;
superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but
competency lives longer.
But Portia’s answering rebellious images are also sharpened in this antithetical way:
The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps
o’er a cold decree; such a hare is madness the youth,
to skip o’er the meshes of good counsel the cripple.
That balance shows the tension in the situation and also gives us a hint of the adventurousness of Portia’s character. Her dilemma is now set out with inescapable clarity by these symmetries, which are even given a rhyme at the end:
I may neither choose who I would
nor refuse who I dislike;
so is the will of a living daughter
curbed by the will of a dead father.
Is it not hard Nerissa, that I cannot choose one,
nor refuse none?
The interest now switches to the present suitors, and Shakespeare revives a device which he had used briefly in The Two Gentlemen (I, ii) whereby the maid reads over the list of suitors for the mistress to ‘describe them, and according to my description level at my affection’. The following commentary also resembles an earlier form, that of one-sided repartee as Nerissa (like Antipholus, Valentine, or Armado) merely provides the ‘feed’ lines, and Portia produces the wit (though now the superior person, socially and intellectually, is talking not listening – perhaps this is a transitional moment in Shakespeare’s gradual transfer of wit to the prose of the ‘upper’ people). So she reviews each of the nationalities satirically, with imagery giving the main edge: as of the Englishman who lacks the tongues, ‘who can converse with a dumb-show?’, and most biting of the drunkard German: ‘I will do anything, Nerissa, ere I will be married to a sponge.’ But rhetorical structure is used again, deflating the German by playing on our expectation that an antithesis will oppose a positive and a negative, and then producing two negatives: she likes him
Very vilely in the morning when he is sober, and
most vilely in the afternoon when he is drunk.
When he is best, he is a little worse than a man, and
when he is worst, he is little better than a beast.
And at the end of the scene the fifth suitor is dismissed with another antithetical balance, and we now know precisely what her choices are.
Portia’s images mock their targets and draw little attention to her, but in another scene where ‘noble’ characters speak prose the imagery is used to mock them and to set up an atmospheric contrast. The two Venetians Solanio and Salerio are introduced discussing the news on the Rialto (III, i), and Salerio reports that rumour has it that a ship of Antonio’s has been wrecked on the Goodwins,
a very dangerous flat, and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried, as they say, if my gossip Report be an honest woman of her word.
The first image is slightly affected (‘carcasses … buried’) but the rest of the sentence seems much more ludicrous, partly because of the personification of ‘Report’, (which abstraction is then joined to a much lower concrete term – it is the trick that mocked Armado) and partly because of the incongruity of this nobleman pretending to have a ‘gossip’. The second affectation is the aspect that Solanio seizes on for an equally incongruous realistic continuation of the image, and a sarcastic comment which itself becomes an affected image:
I would she were as lying a gossip in that as ever knapped ginger, or made her neighbours believe she wept for the death of a third husband. But it is true, without any slips of prolixity, or crossing the good highway of talk, that the good Antonio,
– and now follows a self-conscious interruption:
the honest Antonio – o that I had a title good enough to keep his name company
a gesture which Salerio cattily punctures – ‘Come, the full stop’, so bringing Solanio out of his part – ‘Ha! What sayest thou? Why, the end is, he hath lost a ship.’ So finally we have the simple idea which a balloon of affectation has been hiding, and we feel like applying to them the deflatory prose image (and to keep decorum Shakespeare brings Bassanio down from verse to five lines of prose to deliver it – a sensitive transition) that Bassanio used for Gratiano after an equally affected piece of verse: ‘His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff. You shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them they are not worth the search’ (I, i, 114–18). Shylock now enters, and Salerio and Solanio divert their malice towards him, with some extremely nasty images at his expense, and goaded, he finally answers with the great speech ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’. C. L. Barber has noted that we never meet Shylock alone: ‘he regularly comes on to join a group whose talk has established an outside point of view towards him’ (p. 181). But in this case that perspective is flawed, for the purpose of the ludicrous images given to the Venetian noblemen at the start of the scene seems to be to show them as mannered, arrogant and puerile (which they are not elsewhere), so that our sympathies are all with Shylock. This is a deliberate use of one of the resources of prose for an important contrast in mood and sympathy.
Shylock’s prose is indeed the great innovation in this play. He is of course given much verse, and that seems to be the medium for those of his dealings, in public or with his family, where emotions are most involved. The distinction is not entirely clear, but he seems to be given prose when he is on business, and it is a prose almost without images – they are reserved for the intensity of verse. At this first appearance the use of the figure epistrophe shows him codifying each stage of the agreement, with an ominous echo:
Three thousand ducats – well.
For three months – well.
Antonio shall become bound – well.(I, iii)
The presence of repetition and parallelism is the dominant feature of Shylock’s prose, but Shakespeare puts it to a variety of uses, such as for his even-handed but rather sinister suggestion as to the possible sorts of destruction waiting for Antonio:
But ships are but boards,
sailors but men;
there be land-rats and water-rats,
land-thieves and water-thieves, I mean pirates.
It is typical of his ruthless relegation of prose to the harsh world of business that having once used an image he should explain it (‘I mean pirates’). In both these sequences we see another characteristic of Shylock’s prose, the extreme brevity of each member, a sort of Tacitean or Senecan brevity, but here suggesting a miserliness with words, a sharp, cutting language of statement which resents spending any more than it needs. We see it again later where he refuses to dine with Bassanio and so ‘smell pork’:
I will buy with you,
sell with you,
talk with you,
walk with you, and so following;
but I will not eat with you,
drink with you,
nor pray with you.
There the brevity of the symmetry (which uses the traditional figures isocolon, parison, epistrophe) is applied like a knife edge to convey the absolute separation between Jew and Gentile: the line is drawn with indisputable straightness. As Antonio appears Shylock stands aside and speaks to us, and as he does so he moves up to verse, and that quality so notably absent in his prose – emotion – appears:
How like a fawning publican he looks.
I hate him for he is a Christian.…
And for the remainder of this scene he stays in verse as Shakespeare develops the emotions of hate and resentment still further (‘Fair Sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last’). Our reaction at this point is a mingled one of distrust and sympathy, but we certainly see something of his case.
In his next prose scene Shakespeare plays upon our sympathies still further, for in contrast to the affectation and malice of the Venetians Shylock’s statement of the common humanity of Jew and Gentile comes over with great dignity. For this central speech Shakespeare recalls Shylock’s brief symmetries, as after one of his infrequent and therefore more frightening images (he will take Antonio’s flesh ‘To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge’), the Jew begins to itemize Antonio’s insults:
| He hath disgraced me and | ||
| hindered me half a million, | ||
| laughed | at my losses, | |
| mocked | at my gains, | |
| scorned | my nation, | |
| thwarted | my bargains, | |
| cooled | my friend, | |
| heated | mine enemies, | |
(That last antithesis recalls the beaten Dromio, but at how great a distance.) The speed of the return of these precise patterns is the structural basis which gives this list its angry force. Shylock moves into attack now by stating Antonio’s reason in the baldest, feeblest terms, where it does look ridiculous:
And what’s his reason? I am a Jew.
Here too we see the effect which can be produced by setting a plain unpatterned piece of prose against the surrounding symmetries so that it stands out with greater force (and if the writer is wise he will make this contrast turn on some important development in the sense, as here). Without a pause Shylock moves on to the next stage of the argument, listing the human senses that Jews, like Christians, have and his mounting anger is shown stylistically by a pattern being set up and then broken in the second sentence as he thrusts in all these human attributes together:
| Hath not a Jew | eyes? |
| Hath not a Jew | hands, |
| organs, | |
| dimensions, | |
| senses, | |
| affections, | |
| passions? |
The structure here entirely determines (or reflects) the increased intensity of the emotions. By sharp contrast Shylock pitches the next section at a more deliberate, sarcastic note, working through the reactions between the individual body and the external world, and the force of his anger makes him leave out the expected question at the beginning of the sentence: Is not a Jew
Fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases,
warmed
and cooled by the same winter
and summer as a Christian is?
Having established the correspondence with such indisputable precision Shylock now begins to reason from this basis. He first takes up the passive-suffering role of the Jew implied in that last sentence (‘hurt … weapons … disease’) and expounds it to show his race, in addition to its normal human reactions, being at the mercy of its enemies as if tied to the stake (as in Kafka there seems no possibility of fighting back):
If you prick us do we not bleed?
If you tickle us do we not laugh?
If you poison us do we not die?
But Shylock is not a lone individual at the mercy of some enigmatic persecuting bureaucracy, and within the same syntactic mould his argument now takes its crucial turn towards positive action:
And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?
The passive role is forgotten, and now Shylock makes the bridge between the first part of his argument and the second, from correspondence in nature to that in deed, in appropriately equal antitheses with the logical fulcrum ‘If here, then there’ tying the two parts still more closely together:
| If we are like | you in the rest, |
| we will resemble | you in that. |
| If a Jew wrong a Christian, | what is his humility? Revenge. |
| If a Christian wrong a Jew, | what should his sufferance |
| be by Christian example? Why revenge. | |
The equality having been established (and the structure has placed ‘humility’ with particular ironic force) Shylock can develop the ‘eye for an eye’ concept to the overplus suitable both to a moneylender and to the vicious emulation inherent in the whole concept of revenge:
The villainy you teach me I will execute,
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
So throughout this crucial speech the Gorgian or Ciceronian symmetries of syntax have been dramatically adapted to the turns and twists of Shylock’s argument, giving to each its maximum force. The significance of this moment in Shakespeare’s development is that whereas previously such rhetorical solos have been the province of clowns, now for the first time a serious character has been given a long highly structured speech, and one which is completely organic to the themes and action of the play. Furthermore, whereas such speeches have formerly been mere static lists of ridiculous attributes (Berowne’s soliloquy being an exception in social scale but not in content) or full-scale demonstrations of clownish confusion (with an innovation in that we see Bottom thinking – or we think we do), here Shakespeare has used a long articulated speech to develop an argument. This is an important step in the application of rhetoric to drama.
But the symmetries are tools which can be adapted to any purpose, and they are now applied to a diametrically opposed end. In that great speech Shylock’s catalogue of Jewish oppression and Jewish right has won our sympathy for his race (we may have become distrustful of him when he threatens revenge), but Shakespeare is dealing with a dramatic character, and part of his intention towards Shylock is to make him look ridiculous. In the continuation of this scene with Tubal Shylock becomes enraged by his daughter’s flight with the jewels, and his repetition of ‘two thousand ducats’ reminds us of the report of Solanio in a previous scene that Shylock is running up and down crying ‘O my ducats! O my daughter!’ (II, viii, 12–24 – it is remarkable how Shakespeare writes this verse-speech for Solanio so that it catches exactly Shylock’s tight repetitions–’My ducats, and my daughter! A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats, Of double ducats’, and so on). Thus when we now see him behaving in the same way he looks even more ludicrous, according to the general law that when people fall into behaviour which has already been predicted for them, they seem doubly funny. The sympathy which we have given Shylock as the representative of a persecuted race is now gradually forfeited, first of all by his grotesquely self-centred version of Jewish oppression (the selfishness heightened by epistrophe):
The curse never fell upon our nation till now,
I never felt it till now –
and secondly as it gradually becomes evident that he is more worried about his money than about his daughter, for he abdicates from all human feeling in his wish for revenge:
| I would my daughter were dead at my foot, | |
| and the jewels in her ear. | |
| would she were hearsed at my foot, | |
| and the ducats in her coffin. | |
Once more the rhetorical structure exposes the emotion more clearly, and it is used again with the figure antimetabole (exact inversion) to show his growing anger at the expense of the search:
The thief gone with so much,
and so much to find the thief.
There the figure is the unique way of showing the miser’s dilemma and as his self-pity mounts the rhetoric provides a more insistent channel for it:
| and no satisfaction, | ||
| no revenge, | ||
| nor no ill luck stirring but what lights on my shoulders, | ||
| no sighs | but | of my breathing, |
| no tears | but | of my shedding. |
Throughout, the brief symmetries consistently characterise Shylock.
At this point Tubal reminds him that ‘other men have ill luck too’, such as Antonio—and Shylock interrupts with greedy repetitions: ‘What, what, what, ill luck, ill luck?’ This second emotion of joy is as strong as his earlier sorrow, and Shakespeare effectively shows the split reaction in his mind by juxtaposing the two feelings with the same characteristic stylistic patterns, short clauses often repeated, as he tries to come to grips with the situations. In this dialogue Tubal is rather like the ‘feed’ in cruder repartee, for his alternation of subjects seems designed to show Shylock’s twin emotions:
This alternation of extreme joy and sorrow is a sort of comic schizophrenia, and has the effect of increasingly alienating Shylock from us (I am not sure that far from taking the lines sentimentally, as many critics do, we shouldn’t be glad that he’s lost his turquoise). For the growing pain suggests that the anger at Jessica is going to be converted into increased anger with Antonio, who will then be the focus for a double revenge. Shylock is thus both a figure of fun and a figure of fear, and in his last words in the scene his constant brief repetition stresses both his race and his revenge: ‘Go, Tubal, fee me an officer … Go, Tubal, and meet me at our synagogue. Go good Tubal; at our synagogue Tubal’.
So Shakespeare has used the same basic syntactical methods to produce sympathy for Shylock’s nation, assent to his argument, laughter for his personal greed, hatred at his inhumanity, and fear of his revenge. All these reactions are essential to our experience of the play as a whole, of course, but I would like to end this discussion here by stressing the remarkable flexibility of the tools of Shakespeare’s prose. With the same rhetorical structures he has constructed a whole gamut of emotions for Shylock, Nerissa’s consolatory sententiae, Portia’s oppressive situation and her rebellious wit, and not least the thoroughgoing confusion of Gobbo. Prose reaches maturity with The Merchant of Venice, and of all his varied tools Shakespeare seems to make the most original application of the symmetries of syntax—and it is a resource whose possibilities he has only begun to explore.