The danger facing any study that traces the development of Shakespeare’s art is that in realizing to the fullest possible extent the greatness of the mature work it may neglect the early plays because they are cruder, and the late plays because they are simpler. This is in some ways inevitable as Shakespeare sets his own standards, and compared with the tragedies the late plays naturally seem less organic in construction and less powerful in effect; compared with the mature comedies the criticism of their structure also applies even though the dramatic movement here has abandoned the comedy of wit for much more profound states, and has energized the simple conventions of Romance with a new poetic delicacy. From the point of view of prose, it must be said that throughout the Last Plays the prose under-plots are disappointing in themselves, and far less meaningfully related to the main action than in the mature comedies. The detail of the prose, its resources for characterization and mood – the texture of the writing itself, is also disappointing after the creative innovations of the tragedies: Shakespeare seems content to use well-tried effects without adapting them to any radically transformed purpose. Of course to look at the Last Plays from the viewpoint of prose seems a rather topsy-turvy way of understanding them, but the continuity of approach in this study does confirm what more general criticism has found, that the world of these plays is at once more poetic, more musical, and more visual – visual in terms of dramatic meaning being conveyed through stage-movement, and especially in the Theophanies, masques and visions, with their condensation of symbolic meaning into direct representation. Shakespeare seems less interested in prose than at any time since Richard II and Romeo and Juliet, and it is in these late plays – paradoxically, rather than in the tragedies – that the study of prose gives least help to the understanding of any play as a whole. Still more to the point, Shakespeare is here creating complex effects with the simplest of ingredients, and to isolate any one of the ingredients, however desirable for the purpose of critical continuity, must leave us with only a shadow of the complete effect.
Of all the plays Pericles has the most extreme and least coherent mixture of tones, with on the one hand the stylization of form and content in the verse with its dumb-show and discovery scene, ‘The music of the spheres’, the goddess Diana, and the wonderfully rich poetry both for the discovery of Marina (III, i) and for the very moving reunions (V, i, V, iii), and on the other hand the coarse and lively prose for the brothel scenes (IV, ii, IV, v, IV, vi). The position is complicated by the play being of part authorship, with Shakespeare probably not responsible for anything in the first two Acts, but even within the later stages written by him the combination of the sublime and the lecherous,1 almost the two extremes of human experience, creates a gap which is too wide either to unite or to juxtapose with anything but the most obvious contrast. The split between the two parts is so great that it is almost as if two plays were being presented simultaneously, with Lysimachus and Marina playing parts in both. If I necessarily limit my vision to the brothel-scenes it will be to report that this half of the piece is very competently done, whatever its effect on the whole. The creatures of the brothel, the Pandar, the Bawd, and Boult are the Eastern colleagues of Pompey and Mistress Overdone, and as in that partnership the bluff humour and witty phrasing redeem the horror of the subject-matter. Just like Pompey’s boast that his trade was a ‘mystery’, there is a ruling incongruity here in the whoremongers’ pretensions to dignity, seen in answer to the lament that their whores ‘with continual action are even as good as rotten’ – ‘Therefore let’s have fresh ones, whate’er we pay for them. If there be not a conscience to be used in every trade, we shall never prosper’.
This incongruity is seen throughout the style of these scenes, particularly in the imagery, as in this ludicrous mixture of food and clothes metaphors to describe the decrepit condition of their employees: ‘The stuff we have, a strong wind will blow it to pieces, they are so pitifully sodden’. Indeed the interest of each image here is not in its ‘tenor’ but in the variety of application of these sources to the dominant ‘Vehicle’, copulation. Thus sex is referred to in one of its most common analogies, food, as with Boult’s argument that he must be allowed to enjoy the fruits of his negotiation to buy Marina: ‘If I have bargained for the joint’ – ‘Thou mayst cut a morsel off the spit’, or in referring to the hazards of the trade: ‘The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage’ – ‘Ay, she quickly pooped him, she made him roast-meat for worms’, or when about to remove Marina’s virginity: ‘Marry come up, my dish of chastity with rosemary and bays!’ More ingenious is the variety of other tenors for the same vehicle, as by a variation of the effect whereby a metaphorical phrase is placed in the context where it is literally true, here Shakespeare places a number of phrases which would be quite innocuous in their normal context but which take on a sinister tinge in this milieu – it is almost a demonstration of the creation of sexual innuendo (‘these villains will make the word as odious as the word ‘occupy’, which was an excellent word before it was ill sorted’). Thus the bawd is a ‘herb-woman, she that sets seeds and roots of your shame and iniquity’, Marina in her new occupation shall ‘taste gentlemen of all fashions; you shall fare well, you shall have the difference of all complexions’; and again, ‘you’re a young foolish sapling, and must be bowed as I would have you’; – ‘she’s not paced yet, you must take some pains to work her to your manage’, she is ground to be ploughed, a glass to be cracked. The most horrible piece of innuendo in its application of abstract business language is the bawd’s description of Marina’s refusal: ‘When she should do for her clients her fitment, and do me the kindness of our profession.…’ The Bawd is also given the other major incongruity, the use of rhetoric, reasoning with Marina first with some fluent antitheses: ‘You must seem to do that fearfully which you commit willingly, despise profit where you have most gain’, and continuing with the chain-figure gradatio:
| To weep that you live as ye do makes pity in your lovers; | ||
| seldom but that pity begets | you a good opinion, | |
| and that opinion | a mere profit. | (IV, ii) |
Suitably enough, when she is angry with Marina for her dissuading frigidity (‘fie upon her! She’s able to freeze the god Priapus’) the symmetries reappear: instead of Marina doing ‘her fitment’, ‘she has me her quirks, her reasons, her master-reasons, her prayers, her knees; that she would make a puritan of the devil, if he should cheapen a kiss of her’. One would not have expected to find rhetoric in a brothel.
Marina preserves her chastity against all comers, and in addition to her other resources she is given repartee to defend herself, at first ineffectively against the Bawd (IV, ii) but with more spirit against Boult, as he introduces her ‘honourable’ client, Lysimachus ‘the governor of this country, and a man whom I am bound to’, and she replies: ‘If he govern the country you are bound to him indeed, but how honourable he is in that, I know not’. As ever Shakespeare makes one character comment on the wit of the victor at repartee, and here in terms perfectly adapted to the context: ‘Pray you, without any more virginal fencing, will you use him kindly?’ Although Marina spoke verse in her encounter with the bawd, here she is brought down to prose and continues in that medium in the dialogue with Lysimachus. He begins by asking, ‘Now pretty one, how long have you been at this trade?’: she tries the ploy of not understanding: ‘What trade sir?’ and he is ashamed to name what he is about: ‘Why, I cannot name’t but I shall offend’. His gentility is the weakness which she exploits, for if he were to say ‘prostitute’ she could say ‘maid’, and she answers his revised and slightly more dignified question: ‘How long have you been of this profession?’ (he has perhaps observed that the brothel world is touchy about its vocation), by silently substituting ‘maid’: ‘E’er since I can remember’, and the split meaning develops with an irony for the audience to enjoy: ‘Did you go to’t so young? Were you a gamester at five, or at seven?’ – ‘Earlier too sir, if now I be one’. As he comes nearer to the point she reminds him of his supposed honour, and when he finally urges a ‘private place’ she produces her secret weapon by ascending to verse:
If you were born to honour, show it now.
Lysimachus, surprised at this revelation, reverts to his nobility and verse and is suddenly converted to her part, leaving in repentance. Another striking demonstration of the relative powers of the media follows, as the people of the brothel now return to try stronger remedies; Marina continues in her real medium while their prose seems to set them further below her: finally she triumphs, verse being as superior as ever, and the lecherous gives way to the sublime.
Prose is used with more variety in Cymbeline, but although the organization of the many parts within this complex whole is remarkably assured, the prose scenes have little importance in relation to the complete design. There are three separate applications of prose, for the wager between Iachimo and Posthumus (I, iv), for the courtly boor Cloten (I, ii, II, i, II, iii, III, v, IV, i) and for Posthumus and his gaoler (V, iv). The wager-scene is conducted in Shakespeare’s best aristocratic vein, with the open-ended courtly images: ‘I could then have looked on him without the help of admiration, though the catalogue of his endowments had been tabled by his side, and I to peruse him by items’. – ‘Since when I have been debtor to you for courtesies, which I will be ever to pay, and yet pay still’. But as Iachimo needles Posthumus into swearing the truth of his love, the tone of the prose, which had been that of relaxed and amicable conversation, rises to a more taut level and the images go with it, especially for Iachimo’s cynicism: ‘You may wear her in title yours; but you know strange fowl light upon neighbouring ponds’, and more biting still: ‘If you buy ladies’ flesh at a million a dram, you cannot preserve it from tainting’.
At the opposite extreme of civilization is the boor Cloten, whose inferiority to the rest of the court is shown in one of the council scenes, where amongst the general verse he speaks a bluff, aggressive prose (III, i) – he is as crude as Lucio but not so witty, and resembles Ajax as a comic butt. However he is too courtly and too hot-tempered a figure to be insulted to his face, and so Shakespeare revives a device which he had used for Jack Cade, that of having a superior deflated by his own supporters in comic asides to us. This is an amusing effect, particularly when his own imagery is ludicrous, as he here laments the absence of sporting companions good enough to be a match for him:
CLOTEN. Every Jack-slave hath his bellyful of fighting, and I must go up and down like a cock that nobody can match.
SECOND LORD (aside). You are cock and capon too; and you crow, cock, with your comb on.
Sharper still is this bit of wordplay, especially after we have seen his companions urging him to change his shirt (‘the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice’): Cloten: ‘Would he had been one of my rank’. Aside: ‘To have smelt like a fool’. The device is made more credible as far as Cloten’s limited observation is concerned, and more amusing for us, by having one lord flatter his hurt pride and the other debunk it.
Left alone Cloten is just as objectionable, and his obscene images take the same form as those in Pericles, either through food: ‘When my lust has dined’ (III, v), or with innuendo as in his disgusting application of ‘penetrate’ (II, iii – all the more horrible as it surrounds ‘Hark, hark the lark’), and his non-bawdy images are just as crude: She said upon a time – the bitterness of it I now belch from my heart’. Shakespeare has arranged with equal aptness that the phrase of Imogen’s which most injures him should be one from a source that in his case, as we have seen from his followers’ references to his stink, is bound to be foul – ‘His meanest garment’, and his indignant repetition of the phrase recalls Dogberry on ‘ass’. The images deflate Cloten directly, out of his own mouth, and as he travels alone after Imogen he is made to look more ridiculous by his slow-witted habit of digression, in which he is not much above the bumbling type clown. He is given two soliloquies en route planning revenge, and in both of them the second part of the speech is a gleeful and gruesome listing of the particular revenges that he will take, while in the first his stupidity is shown by the way in which he wanders from the point: ‘Meet thee at Milford Haven. I forgot to ask him one thing, I’ll remember’t anon. Even there, thou villain Posthumus, will I kill thee. I would these garments were come. She said upon a time.…’ and so on – he is given a self-recapitulation, like Pompey – ‘which as I say …’ (III, v). In the second speech in addition to the meandering his vanity comes out too, in his self-conscious bawdy punning and in his praise of himself:
I am near to th’place where they would meet, if Pisanio have mapped it truly. How fit his garments serve me. Why should his mistress, who was made by him that made the tailor, not be fit too? The rather – saving reverence of the word – for ’tis said a woman’s fitness comes by fits. Therein I must play the workman. I dare speak it to myself, for it is not vain glory for a man and his glass to confer in his own chamber; I mean, the lines of my body are as well drawn as his; no less young, more strong.…
By such means all sympathy is withdrawn from Cloten, and like Parolles or Oswald, he deserves what he gets.
A more engaging prose-character is the gaoler, who extols the advantages of dying in some wittily gruesome images, rather as if the ‘Be absolute for death’ speech were delivered by the Porter in Macbeth. Indeed the scene resembles the two tragic clown scenes in its length, in its style (with a mixture of equivocation and antithesis), and in its placing, for Posthumus is at this point under sentence of death. However, the scene has been preceded by the masque-like confrontation of the ghosts by Jupiter, with his reassuring forecast of Posthumus’ ultimate union with Imogen, and with Posthumus finding the riddling prophecy. So the atmosphere is by no means tragic – it is not as if this were the Gaoler to Lear and Cordelia – and the scene is therefore curiously redundant as far as any tragic intensification is concerned, although it does remind us that the legal sentence is still to be carried out, so making Posthumus’ release a more real triumph. Because of our knowledge of the impending solution Posthumus can be shown as a witty and spirited opponent, and indeed the scene may be meant as a transition from dark to light, the point at which the hyphen in ‘tragi-comedy’ is placed: hence the words of Jupiter in the masque beforehand, which could be applied to Shakespeare constructing a serious situation in all his comedy:
Whom best I love, I cross; to make my gift,
The more delayed, delighted.
Wit is the dominant note as the prisoner quibbles with his gaoler:
GAOLER. Come sir, are you ready for death?
POSTHUMUS. Over-roasted rather; ready long ago.
GAOLER. Hanging [-meat] is the word sir; if you be ready for that, you are well cooked.
POSTHUMUS. So if I prove a good repast to the spectators, the dish pays the shot.
This is a rare piece of gallows wit, and the incongruity of it is heightened by them both being such willing contenders.
The gaoler now moves on from the food-images to take up his prisoner’s last jest about payment – ‘A heavy reckoning for you, sir’, and from this point he can develop a series of witty paradoxes on the theme ‘That Death is an advantage’:
But the comfort is
you shall be called to no more payments,
fear no more tavern bills,
which are often the sadness of parting,
as the procuring of mirth.
You come in faint for want of meat,
depart reeling with too much drink;
sorry that you have paid too much
and sorry that you are paid too much;
purse and brain both empty;
the brain the heavier for being too light,
the purse too light, being drawn of heaviness.
O, of this contradiction you shall now be quit.
O the charity of a penny cord,
it sums up thousands in a trice;
you have no true debitor and creditor but it;
of what’s past, is, and to come, the discharge.
Your neck sir, is pen, book, and counters;
so the acquittance follows.
The structure of this speech is extremely assured, employing all the standard symmetrical devices, developing the paradox with several ingenious variations, and with a witty piece of wordplay on ‘It sums up thousands’. The gaoler is given further clever paradoxes on Death and on Sight, and an amusing jest; that the man about to die does not know which way he will go (up or down), and will find it impossible to discover:
You must either be directed by some
that take upon them to know,
or to take upon yourself that which I am sure
you do not know;
or jump the after-enquiry on your own peril. –
The jests are growing more bitter when the news arrives that Posthumus is to be freed, and the Gaoler’s exclamation shows again Shakespeare’s technique of putting a metaphorical phrase into the context where it is literally true – ‘I’ll be hanged then’; when left alone he comments with a gruesome image perfectly adapted to context: ‘Unless a man would marry the gallows, and beget young gibbets, I never saw one so prone’. Finally he relapses into confusion and naive moralizing, and is thus restored to his own character.
In addition to the reader’s normal delight in coming upon The Winter’s Tale, the student of Shakespeare’s prose is pleased to discover more energy and invention in the lower medium here than in any of the late comedies. Inevitably it remains inferior, far removed from the peaks of poetry in the play – Leontes’ extraordinarily powerful jealousy, the apotheosis of English pastoral in the sheep-shearing scene, and the great consummation of the final reunion. But if denied these heights, prose is twice given extremely important functions in the major emotional movement of the play, and it also reflects the basic social structure – courtier, clown, rogue. The opening conversation between Camillo and Archidamus is in fluent court prose, with its direct onward movement and expanded images which are somehow quite appropriate to describe the friendship between Polixenes and Leontes: ‘They were trained together in their childhoods; and there rooted betwixt them such an affection, which cannot choose but branch now’; despite being separated they have so frequently exchanged letters and embassies ‘that they have seemed to be together, though absent; shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced as it were from the ends of opposed winds’. It is noteworthy that when Camillo next speaks prose, with Polixenes in Bohemia (IV, ii – a prose interlude, as it were, between Time’s choric speech and Autolycus’ song) there are none of these courtly images, and the mood is more tense as the King tries to persuade him to stay, being given rhetorical symmetry to argue for their interdependence:
The need I have of thee,
thine own goodness hath made;
better not to have have had thee
than thus to want thee.
Thou, having made me businesses which
none without thee can sufficiently manage
must either stay to execute them thyself,
or take away with thee the very services thou hast done;
which if I have not enough considered –
as too much I cannot –
to be more thankful to thee shall be my study;
and my profit therein, the heaping friendships.
The absence at this more serious point of polite imagery is another sign of its slightness, and a sharp contrast to it is the metaphor in which Polixenes, worried about Florizel, sees Perdita as a trap: she is ‘the angle that plucks our son thither’.
That pretender to a courtier’s role, Autolycus, is given an energy of syntax and imagery appropriate to his profession as cony-catcher, and as he works on the unsuspecting rustics the imagery of traps is used for the last time, in his direct address to us (Shakespeare always makes us aware of the ‘hunt’ situation): ‘A prize, a prize!’ – ‘If the springe hold, the cock’s mine’ – ‘If I make not this cheat bring out another, and the shearers prove sheep, let me be unrolled, and my name put in the book of virtue’ (IV, iii), and as the trap closes: ‘Very wisely, puppies!’ and with his prey in it: Fortune ‘drops booties in my mouth.… I will bring these two moles, these blind ones, aboard’ (IV, iv). We see Autolycus’ dissembling directly here, and perhaps in a Jonsonian way we admire the resourceful guller and scorn the simple gulls, but his attitude and especially his images reveal a boasting superiority which is less attractive: ‘For the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it’, a brutality seen most clearly in the long soliloquy after he has fleeced the country folk and their festival (IV, iv): ‘Ha, ha, what a fool Honesty is! And Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman! I have sold all my trumpery; not a counterfeit stone …’ left, for the rustics thronged ‘who should buy first, as if my trinkets had been hallowed, and brought a benediction to the buyer’. He is a cross between Chaucer’s Pardoner and Falstaff: ‘You might have pinched a placket, it was senseless; ’twas nothing to geld a codpiece of a purse.… So that in this time of lethargy, I picked and cut most of their festival purses’. The rustics are a ‘herd’, and if a disturbance had not ‘scared my choughs from the chaff, I had not left a purse alive in the whole army’. These hard, contemptuous images remind us of the cynic braggarts – Parolles or Lucio – and just as they were unmasked and Lucio realized his possible fate: ‘This may prove worse than hanging’, now as Florizel and Camillo come forward Autolycus thinks that the game is up – ‘If they have overheard me now – why, hanging’, and he grovels in the usual way of an exposed petty crook: ‘I am a poor fellow, sir’. But the bubble is not pricked, for Shakespeare seems concerned throughout the play to mute any potentially serious effect (for example, the uncomfortable plight of the fleeced rustics is not shown us, and thus not felt), and Autolycus can resume his perch: ‘Sure, the gods do this year connive at us, and we may do anything extempore’.
Having received this dispensation Autolycus goes on with his work, and in addition to the Elizabethans’ perennial interest in seeing the tricks of the cony-catcher revealed, there is comedy of all sorts in his practices. The first trick, feigning injury and then picking the Clown’s purse (who shows, ironically, much more charity here than he did either to the shipwreck or to Antigonus) is excellent visual comedy with an added irony in Autolycus’ self-description, and it certainly impressed one spectator with the tricks of the trade: the astrologer Simon Forman noted in his diary to ‘remember also the Rog that cam in all tottered like coll pixci and how he feyned him sicke.… Beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellouss’ (Quoted, New Cambridge edition, p. viii). Once dressed in Florizel’s clothes, and having removed his false beard (‘my pedlar’s excrement’) Autolycus dons the courtier’s grand manner, and as well as our amusement at Autolycus’ dissembling there is more mockery of a familiar butt, the courtiers’ ‘gait’, ‘odour’, and contemptuous attitude to his inferiors. But Autolycus over-reaches himself in his new style, falling into a malapropism when he asks about their business with the King: ‘What advocate hast thou to him?’ and the error is stressed by the Clown misinterpreting it further – ‘Advocate’s the court-word for a pheasant’. Autolycus now puts on the style still more by ascending to verse for a majestic three lines to excuse their rustic mistake, which is of course at the same level as his own:
How blest are we, that are not simple men.
Yet nature might have made me as these are,
Therefore I will not disdain.
The rustics add a further layer of satire in their asides on the clumsy way he wears the clothes and on his use of a toothpick, but Autolycus produces the most convincing disguise yet in his terrifying account of the punishment to be inflicted on the shepherd, starting from this pungent double-balance:
the curses he shall have, the tortures he shall feel, will break the back of man, the heart of monster.
There is a wonderful piece of invention: ‘those that are germane to him, though removed fifty times, shall all come under the hangman’, and a quite sinister sequence of participles for the tortures to be inflicted (he has obviously read either The Unfortunate Traveller or Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) with a gloating anaphora on ‘then’:
He has a son, who shall be flayed alive, then, ‘nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasps’ nest, then stand till he be three quarters and a dram dead; then recovered again with aquavitae, or some other hot infusion; then, raw as he is, and in the hottest day prognostication proclaims, shall he be set against a brick wall, the sun looking with a southward eye upon him, where he is to behold him with flies blown to death.
In that superlative torture-scene Shakespeare out-Herods Nashe, but although Autolycus has the dissembler’s power to adopt styles and is therefore potentially evil, he remains within a comic frame: it is all rather like a pantomime, for we are sure that no harm will come to anyone.
The last social level to be characterized by its prose style is that of the clown, but at his first appearance Shakespeare uses the normal disabilities in speech and thought to create an important dramatic effect. The storm rages, Antigonus has put down the baby Perdita and been chased off by the bear, and the old shepherd discovers the child, his wheezy syntax showing his age: ‘Mercy on’s, a barne? A very pretty barne. A boy, or a child I wonder? A pretty one, a very pretty one; sure some scape’. He is given a rather sly formal image to draw the usual conclusion: ‘Though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape’, (ironically, of course, that is the kind of conclusion that Leontes has drawn, and both are wrong), and as his son appears he greets him with a ludicrous contradiction in tense: ‘If thou’lt see a thing to talk on, when thou art dead and rotten, come hither’ (like ‘she makes a very good report o’th’worm’). But his son, the clown, has still bigger news, and at this turning point in the tragi-comedy Shakespeare makes the transition from serious to comic as gentle as possible by giving the clown the task of reporting the double disaster – the sinking of the ship and the death of Antigonus – in such a way that all the sting will be removed from them.
This muting of potential seriousness is done partly through the imagery, which is not merely ‘homely’ but innocuous, as in the account of the sea roaring up into the sky: ‘betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin’s point’, which suggests nothing more dangerous than thrusting a needle between the threads in a piece of cloth, for the sea is thereby rendered quite static, fixed in position. For the vessel’s last perilous minutes: ‘Now the ship boring the moon with her mainmast, and anon swallowed with yeast and froth, as you’d thrust a cork into a hogshead’ – again we have the static, toy-like vision of the ship bobbing up and down, with the sea reduced to beer, either being brewed or poured out, and the ship’s violent tossing reduced to the action of pushing a cork down into a barrel (either to seal the barrel, which is of course a positive action with little danger attached to it, or else to have the cork pop up again – neither idea conveys the seriousness of the ship’s plight). Finally the ship is disposed of with an image taken from a popular Elizabethan tavern-game, ‘flap-dragon’ (a ‘play in which they catch raisins out of burning brandy and, extinguishing them by closing the mouth, eat them’, as Johnson explained it): ‘But to make an end of the ship, to see how the sea flap-dragoned it.…’ So the loss of the ship and its company is reduced to the moment of closing your mouth to eat the raisins, and the whole disaster is presented in the rather comforting images of cakes and ale – images which, like the childish attitude, are also eminently characteristic of the Shakespearian fool.
The muting effect achieved by the innocuous imagery is completed by the clown’s narrative technique, for like earlier clowns – Launce, Gobbo (or the love-puzzled states of a more intelligent person, Berowne or Touchstone), he is made to construct a confused dialogue as he attempts to report both disasters simultaneously, gets his left hand completely mixed up with his right, and reduces the tragic loss to a comic turn. He begins by announcing his double theme: ‘I have seen two such sights, by sea and by land’, but at once digresses with a pointless self-correction in the interests of complete exactitude (like Pompey, the more ludicrous in the context of confusion) – ‘but I am not to say it is a sea, for it is now the sky; betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin’s point’. When asked, ‘Why boy, how is it?’ he goes on with the sea: ‘I would you did but see how it chafes, how it rages, how it takes up the shore’: here the parallelism conveys the clown’s simple-mindedness, as if he is incapable of joining the different phenomena together, and cannot get beyond the wondering ‘how’. Now he remembers what he is meant to be describing, corrects himself again – ‘but that’s not to the point’, and takes up the left hand, say: ‘O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls’. This is the first potentially pathetic observation, and corresponds to the normal emotions of pity at tempest and shipwreck in the other Romances (Pericles, The Tempest). To recall those other responses is to see how far we now move from pathos, as the clown’s simple vision only records the experience of seeing, and the up-and-down movement is made innocuous by the antitheses:
Sometimes to see ’em,
and not to see ’em.
Now the ship boring the moon with her mainmast,
and anon swallowed with yeast and froth.…
This is now a painted ship upon a painted ocean.
Having recorded thus much of the one side he takes up the other, with an unconscious pun, for as Dover Wilson glosses it, ‘land service’ means both military (as opposed to naval) service and a dish at table, the second sense continuing the food-and-drink imagery: ‘And then for the land service, to see how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone, how he cried to me for help, and said his name was Antigonus, a nobleman’. Again the naïve wonder-struck sense of the marvellous – ‘to see’, ‘how … how’ – the recording instrument remembers even the man’s name and social status (we now know for sure that Antigonus is dead), and by its accuracy for detail – ‘tore out his shoulder-bone’ (a piece of realism that would be ghastly in any other context) reduces the moment of death to an anatomical detail, as when carving a chicken should one begin with the leg or the wing – it is as if Antigonus is the carcass of some bird on the dinner table. But of course the still more grotesque point is that our observer has been so caught between the two spectacles that he did not stir, and in vain did the man cry for help as the clown had not connected the spectacle with himself – like Pyrrhus in the Player’s speech, he stood
And like a neutral to his will and matter,
Did nothing.
(Later his father makes just this point: ‘Would I had been by, to have helped the old man’, and the clown rejects it scornfully by reference to the other, impossible task: ‘I would you had been by the ship-side, to have helped her; there your charity would have lacked footing’.) Now he suddenly remembers his left hand again with another unconscious pun: ‘But to make an end of the ship’ – making himself at the same time both the narrator completing a section of his tale and the destroyer of the ship – ‘to see how the sea flap-dragoned it’. But no, that was not quite accurate, he had not recorded everything, and stops himself to add another point to the left hand – but then he sees the balance with the right hand and pairs the two in grotesque symmetry:
but first, how th’poor souls roared,
and the sea mocked them;
and how the poor gentleman roared,
and the bear mocked him.
adding with a final macabre love of accuracy a consideration of which was making the most noise, and actually awarding it to the man and the bear, as if they were engaged in some co-operative exercise – ‘both roaring louder than the sea, or weather’. – They must have been making an awful lot of noise.
The two sides are really disposed of now, in both senses of the word, but he has not yet finished diminishing them, and when asked when this happened replies, ‘Now, now, I have not winked since I saw these sights’, which may well be literally true, after the wide-eyed view we have been given, but it is at least an unobjectionable point. However, he goes on to add corroborative detail for each side with a peculiarly incongruous effect:
The men are not yet cold under water,
nor the bear half dined on the gentleman – he’s at it now.
The ‘not yet cold’ being offered as a sign of veracity is another dehumanizing detail (‘he’s only just gone out – his coffee is still warm’), human life being reduced to a mere question of temperature, and to describe the bear as ‘dining’ on the gentleman (instead of vice-versa) is such a genteel word, so very civilized that it suggests that the bear is not mauling him or tearing off chunks of flesh but is sitting down to it and eating in a well-mannered way. Indeed the clown now goes in as a servant might, to see if the diners have finished: ‘I’ll go see if the bear be gone from the gentleman’, or rather as a naturalist might: ‘and how much he hath eaten. They are never curst, but when they are hungry’, and Antigonus finally becomes left-overs: ‘if there be any of him left, I’ll bury it’. Thus Antigonus is reduced to a pronoun, and neuter at that. It was necessary to get rid of all the parties involved in Perdita’s exposure – as one of the courtiers says at the end, ‘so that all the instruments which aided to expose the child were even then lost when it was found’, but the disposal has been done humanely. For by showing us the disasters through the eyes of a clown, and by the clever manipulation of the sequence of his speech and his use of imagery and rhetorical structure, Shakespeare has succeeded in completely dehumanizing the sailors and Antigonus (no deaths move us less), turning the potentially tragic into the comic by the flick of a wrist. This is surely the most creative adaptation of prose in all the last plays.
At their other appearances the clowns are given the more conventional features of Shakespeare’s linguistic comedy, although not without humour. The young one’s soliloquy on the ingredients to be bought for the sheep-shearing (IV, iii) has the familiar eddying digression and repetition of a whole line of clowns, man and boy, before him. Elsewhere his style ranges from the ludicrous oxymora of a Bottom: ‘I love a ballad but even too well, if it be doleful matter merrily set down; or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably’, to the serious and therefore more ridiculous romantic jargon of a Launce: ‘If I were not in love with Mopsa, thou shouldst take no money of me, but being enthralled as I am, it will also be the bondage of certain ribbons and gloves’. He is the centre of the only piece of repartee in the play, the ‘tittle-tattle’ between his rival loves Mopsa and Dorcas, and he is given the only piece of comic logic, a syllogism to persuade his father to tell the truth about Perdita: ‘She being none of your flesh and blood, your flesh and blood has not offended the King; and so your flesh and blood is not to be punished by him’. In their last appearance the two confront Autolycus (V, ii) and can crow over him because where he formerly slighted them, now (as can be seen from their clothes after their rewards from the King) they are both a ‘gentleman born’: the rogue admits that they are indeed, and the Clown shows the ludicrousness of the title in his answers:
AUTOLYCUS. I know you are now, sir, a gentleman born.
CLOWN. Ay, and have been so any time these four hours.
SHEPHERD. And so have I boy.
CLOWN. So you have. But I was a gentleman born before my father;
and so the rhetorical figure amphibology is newly twisted to comedy (Joseph, p. 193). Then the clown coins another mala-propism, ‘preposterous’ for ‘prosperous’, but by so doing accidentally describes their ‘turned upside down’ condition exactly, ‘being in so preposterous estate as we are’. Lastly he promises to help Autolycus by exercising his new gentleman’s right to swear: ‘I’ll swear to the Prince, thou art a tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt not be drunk’, although his naïve wish for veracity makes him at once admit the untruth, and in the same form: ‘but I know thou art no tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt be drunk. But I’ll swear it’ – and as he hopes for amendment the phrase takes on by repetition still less meaning; ‘and I would thou wouldst be a tall fellow of thy hands’. As Autolycus promises to be so he urges the point again in a briefer form, and remembering the other half of the injunction gets his left hand muddled up with his right again as he seems to think that the two states are interdependent: ‘Ay, by any means prove a tall fellow. If I do not wonder how thou venturest to be drunk, not being a tall fellow, trust me not’. To Shakespeare’s simpler clowns words are not allies.
To his courtiers, though, words are always a vehicle for conveying information politely, and in the penultimate scene of the play the stock situation of a courtiers’ conversation reporting an outside event is applied with new artistry (V, ii). Shakespeare makes three court gentlemen explain about the reunions between Leontes, Polixenes, Perdita, Florizel, Paulina, Camillo, and the shepherds, partly because this is a difficult scene to stage but more important because he wishes to preserve our emotions intact for the most important meeting, Leontes’ rediscovery of Hermione. But in addition to this need, by presenting an event through a third party (as he had done with the Clown and the shipwreck) Shakespeare can change the emotional effect of it and our attitude to what follows. Two stylistic devices are used throughout, rhetorical structure and imagery, and by separating them we may see more clearly the function of each. The first is used to balance the oppositions and confrontations within the scene, as in the double paradoxes for the meeting of Leontes and Camillo:
There was speech in their dumbness,
language in their very gesture;
they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed,
or one destroyed.
These antitheses become resolved into the basic opposition which runs through the whole scene, that between the extreme emotional reactions, joy and woe: ‘the wisest beholder … could not say if the importance were joy, or sorrow; but in the extremity of the one, it must needs be’. The paradox is sustained for the reactions of Leontes:
Our King, being ready to leap out of himself,
for joy of his found daughter,
as if that joy were now become a loss,
cries, O, thy mother, thy mother.
and the extremest opposition between the two terms is used for the account of
the noble combat, that ’twixt joy
and sorrow was fought in Paulina.
She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband,
another elevated that the oracle was fulfilled.
Here the ultimate stage of antithesis is a guarantee of the intensity reached by the emotions: we recall Blake’s paradox: ‘Excess of sorrow laughs, Excess of joy weeps’, or better still Cordelia’s reactions:
patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears
Were like a better way.
We are convinced that some rare human experience has taken place.
The affected vocabulary of the courtiers, and the structure of the language with its careful antithesis between Joy and Sorrow, both set up a slightly unreal ‘distancing’ atmosphere, but the effect of this is paradoxically not to withdraw us from the action but to make us positively wish to join it. We are made very much aware of the medium through which we are seeing the action, and whereas the result of the clown’s narrative was to concentrate our attention on him and reduce the twin disasters to the tiny, confused images reflected by his intellect, here the effect produced is, I suggest, one of frustration: we want to get beyond this refracting glass and see for ourselves. It is most of all through their imagery that we are reminded that the courtiers are not objective recording agents, because of the artificiality of the structure and content of their images for each of the meetings: on Leontes and Camillo: ‘They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes’; on Leontes and Polixenes: ‘There might you have beheld one joy crown another, so and in such manner, that it seemed sorrow wept to take leave of them; for their joy waded in tears’; Leontes ‘thanks the old shepherd, which stands by like a weather-bitten conduit of many kings’ reigns’ (with a pun on ‘rains’); on Paulina and Perdita: ‘She lifted the Princess from the earth, and so locks her in embracing, as if she would pin her to her heart, that she might no more be in danger of losing’. The prime example of self-conscious imagery is this from the Third Gentleman, who is the main and most ornate narrator:
One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes – caught the water, though not the fish – was when …
– there the speaker nudges you politely so that you should not miss the metaphor – no, applaud it – as again in this mannered preparation for Perdita’s reaction to the news of Hermione’s death: ‘She did, with an alas, I would fain say, bleed tears; for I am sure, my heart wept blood’.
The cleverness of these images draws attention to themselves, makes the reader or spectator think about the metaphor or the speaker, and so exerts pressure on us to take our mental eye off the scene being described – but we do not want to forget it, and in our frustration we fight against this distraction and try to see the truth through these enchanting glasses. But if we only catch a glimpse of the situation we are constantly reminded that something of great importance is happening, and Shakespeare stresses that we are only seeing a reflection of it: ‘That which you hear, you’ll swear you see, there is such unity in the proofs’ – ‘Then you have lost a sight, which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of’, it is ‘like an old tale’ (three times repeated, to disarm that objection) – ‘The dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and princes, for by such was it acted’ ‘if all the world could have seen’t, the woe had been universal’. As the narration is thus prolonged, our certainty that this is a notable event increases our impatience with these mirrors – we want to see too, and this is the very wish that Shakespeare puts last:
Every wink of an eye, some new grace will be born.
Our absence makes us unthrifty to our knowledge.
Let’s along.
In this way the imagery of court, which has so far been the sign of good breeding conveying information, or at its most unfavourable a sign of insincerity or dissimulation, is suddenly put to its most daring use yet, and by this innovation our emotions are considerably heightened – and after the departure of the three gentlemen frustrated for another fifty lines by the confusion of the clown – until they are released even more strongly in the formalized and intensely moving poetry of the statue scene. Again prose has been the discord prefiguring a deeper harmony.
In The Tempest both discords and harmony are largely given to the verse scenes, and prose is the medium for much inferior functions, repartee in the upper plot and a cruder verbal humour in the lower world. In the main plot prose is actually the first medium we meet, in the disorder of the storm and shipwreck, with the boatswain’s bluff images: ‘Blow till thou burst thy wind, if room enough’ – ‘Hence, what cares these roarers for the name of king?’ The courtiers are also reduced to prose, but Shakespeare goes further than this and immediately begins to characterize them through their language: Sebastian and Antonio on first impression are as unpleasant as later, in their outrageous abuse of the boatswain: ‘A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog!’ – ‘Hang, cur, hang, you whoreson, insolent noise-maker’. By immediate contrast the good counsellor Gonzalo is shown as a dry wit through his imagery, finding comfort in the boatswain’s face:
Methinks he hath no drowning-mark upon him, his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging, make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage.… I’ll warrant him for drowning; though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell, and as leaky as an unstanched wench.
The courtiers now ascend to verse in their alarm, but at the end of this brief and compact scene Gonzalo is left alone in the cooler medium of prose, making a quizzical relaxed jest: ‘Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea, for an acre of barren ground. Long heath, brown furze, any thing. The wills above be done, but I would fain die a dry death’. Thus in a dozen or so lines Shakespeare has created Gonzalo as a sympathetic wit, and the calm of his final piece of prose continues in the peace and purity of the verse between Prospero and Miranda in the following scene.
The next time that we see the courtiers they again use prose, and our first impressions of the violent cynics and the grave statesman are confirmed. Gonzalo is set apart with Adrian, talking seriously and perhaps rather predictably, while Sebastian and Antonio break witty comments on them. Although the two villains are unsympathetic even here, we have to concede the wit: ‘He receives comfort like cold porridge’, ‘Look, he’s winding up the watch of his wit. By and by it will strike’. They catch Gonzalo in repartee, with Sebastian being given a new ingenuity in that he anticipates a word, lands his blow before it appears, and then caps it with another twist:
GONZALO. When every grief is entertained that’s offered, Comes to the entertainer
SEBASTIAN. A dollar.
GONZALO. Dolour comes to him indeed, you have spoken truer than you purposed.
SEBASTIAN. You have taken it wiselier than I meant you should.
Adrian now takes up the lead but they mock him with the same means, until Gonzalo joins him in discussing the King’s daughter Claribel and agrees that Tunis has not had such a ‘paragon’ as Queen ‘since widow Dido’s time’; the two cynics seize on it: ‘Widow Dido!’ – ‘What if he had said widower Aeneas too?’ – and with a fine comic effect Adrian seems also to object to the description: ‘Widow Dido said you? You make me study of that’ – but only to correct the place: ‘She was of Carthage, not of Tunis’. The wit-play continues until the King interrupts it, and it is significant that all the characters now move up from prose to verse to speak to him (social decorum controlling the medium, as it had done for Lucio and Iago). As Gonzalo goes on to explain his scheme for an ideal commonwealth, they make further facile witticisms at his expense until he finally addresses them directly and is rightly given some successful blows, ending in the dismissal to their plea: ‘Nay good my lord, be not angry’ – ‘No I warrant you, I will not adventure my discretion so weakly.’ The balance of wit and sympathy has gradually shifted, and their alienation from us is completed when they move up to verse, a sinister change of medium for this ‘Open-eyed conspiracy’ to lay its Machiavellian plot – but as in all Romances potential damage and suffering are averted.
The other function of prose here is for the jester Trinculo, the butler Stephano, and occasionally Caliban. This grotesque trio act out a kind of running antimasque to the play, appearing in each Act as another extreme counterpoint (II, ii, III, ii, IV, ii, V, i), and their abuse of human potentiality apes the plots of their equally unprincipled social betters, but at a much more incompetent level.2 Their human degradation is shown stylistically by comparison with the savage Caliban, for whereas he often speaks verse they never do; again he seems to be seduced to prose by their presence, although he is sometimes given verse with them to emphasize his superiority, as two of the links in the Great Chain of Being thus overlap. But although this prose trio has a valid function in relation to the whole play, the general point about complex structures being built from simple ingredients which applies to all the Romances is particularly true here, for although there are intermittently comic effects in their scenes it has to be admitted that the detail of the writing is often thin and overextended. At his first appearance Trinculo comes on in prose after Caliban’s verse soliloquy (II, ii), and in his parallel soliloquy the jester is given some ludicrous images well attuned to his interests:3 ‘Yond same black cloud, yond huge one, looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor’, and also a good joke against the English (always a successful trick to an English audience, as in Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Othello, and farther afield in Mozart’s The Seraglio) and their appetite for monsters, given more point by parallel structure:
There would this monster make a man.
Any strange beast there makes a man.
When they will not give out a doit to relieve a
lame beggar,
they will lay out ten to see a
dead Indian.
When Stephano enters there is a witty use of the device of placing a metaphorical phrase in a context where it is literally true (here also involving the adaptation of the proverb from ‘two legs’ to ‘four legs’) as he sees the gaberdine and the legs protruding: ‘Have we devils here? … I have not ‘scaped drowning, to be afeard now of your four legs. For it hath been said, as proper a man as ever went on four legs cannot make him give ground. And it shall be said so again, while Stephano breathes at nostrils’.
Thereafter the comedy is largely visual and of structural significance. Their next scene moves from the farce of their drunkenness to the farce of Ariel invisibly provoking them to blows, but as Caliban (now in the more intense and persuasive medium, verse) provokes them to a plot against Prospero our comic sympathies dwindle rapidly, as they had done towards Antonio and Sebastian, and we are again reassured by Prospero’s magic. In their re-appearance all wet after Ariel has led them into ‘the filthy mantled pool’ there is a small piece of humour in Trinculo’s complaint that ‘I do smell all horse-piss at which my nose is in great indignation’, as if his nose had a separate existence. This trio of miniature Machiavels, over-reached and undermined, are fast becoming comic butts on whom the corrective forces in the play can release their and our indignation, and as in the serious comedies the butts are almost receiving the punishments due by right to their superiors. But for their masters the punishments would be too humiliating and would thus create larger antipathies and sympathies which might unbalance the dominant interest in Prospero. Certainly they receive much more severe correction than do Antonio or Sebastian, for at this moment outside Prosperou’s cell (and watched invisibly by Prospero and Ariel) they are forestalled in their murder plot first by the line of royal clothes (their adoption of which is as ironically and ineffectually symbolic of a deeper purpose as is Falstaff’s assumption of the crown during the play-scene), and then by the delights of word-play (on ‘jerkin’ and ‘line’). Finally the metaphor of the hunt which has threatened so many comic gulls is here given tangible form as the Folio Stage-direction shows: ‘A noyse of Hunters heard. Enter diuers Spirits in shape of Dogs and Hounds, hunting them about: Prospero and Ariel setting them on’. At the final confrontation of wicked servants and wicked masters the significances are neatly drawn, and Trin-culo is let off with a passable joke: ‘I have been in such a pickle since I saw you last, that I fear me will never out of my bones. I shall not fear fly-blowing’. The magic of the play lies with Prospero, in poetry as in art, and although the prose of The Tempest undoubtedly contributes to the whole, it is relegated more and more to its inferior position as the poetry rises above it. It is a quiet but at least an innocuous ending.