1See the useful survey by M. C. Bradbrook, ‘Fifty Years of the Criticism of Shakespeare’s Style: A Retrospect’, Shakespeare Survey 7 (1954) pp. 1–11, which begins: ‘There is no question relating to Shakespeare as a writer which does not involve his style. His only art was that of dramatic speech …’ Older studies of Shakespeare’s style which may still be read with profit are G. H. W. Rylands, Words and Poetry (London, 1928), R. W. David, The Janus of Poets, (Cambridge, 1935); F. W. Ness, The Use of Rhyme in Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven, 1941); there are some good comments by Harley Granville-Barker in his Prefaces on the dramatic functions of styles.
2Some acute diagnoses of the weaknesses of ‘thematic criticism’ have been made by Barbara Everett in two articles in Critical Quarterly 2 (1960) pp. 171 ff., 325 ff. See also R. M. Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton, 1963), on the Christian allegorizers, and John Holloway, The Story of the Night (London, 1961) Chapter 1.
3‘The Life of Our Design: the Function of Imagery in the Poetic Drama’, Hudson Review (1949) pp. 242–60; reprinted, and quoted from, Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. L. F. Dean (New York, Oxford Galaxy Books, 1961), p. 20.
4The following graph of the development of Shakespeare’s prose is based on those statistics of Alfred Hart derived from the Old Cambridge edition, which does not give such short prose lines as the Globe edition: see ‘The Number of Lines in Shakespeare’s Plays’, Review of English Studies 8 (1932) pp. 19–28, table on p. 21. It may not be completely accurate (some of the mislineations from prose to verse are still a matter of dispute between textual critics) but it is only intended to show the general development. (See Table I.)
5Earlier studies have been superseded by three modern ones: R. W. David, Janus of Poets pp. 80–9, which although limited in scope is intelligent and stimulating; Milton Crane, Shakespeare’s Prose (Chicago, 1951; quotations from paperback edition, 1963, including an enlarged bibliography – which however contains an inaccurate and condescending review of Miss Tschopp’s book): this is a disappointing work, surveying the whole topic in the most general and often superficial terms. His comments on the use of prose in other Elizabethan drama must be corrected by reference to Traudl Eichhorn’s article summarizing her dissertation, ‘Prosa und Vers im vorshakespeareschen Drama’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Band 84–6 (Heidelberg, 1950), pp. 140–98, but this subject is not yet adequately treated. Elisabeth Tschopp’s study, Zur Verteilung von Vers und Prosa in Shakespeares Dramen, (Bern, 1956; pp. 118; Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten, Band 41) suffers from the dryness and formality of a dissertation, but is a thorough and penetrating study which deserves to be better known. Miss Tschopp takes only ten representative plays, which she then treats in order of complexity, so denying herself the possibility of discussing any development (the plays are Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, I Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, As You Like It, A Winter’s Tale).
TABLE I PERCENTAGE DISTRIBUTION OF PROSE IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
6See R. W. David’s Lecture, ‘Shakespeare and the Players’, Proceedings of the British Academy 47 (1961) pp. 139–59.
7The extant play-manuscripts certainly distinguish the two media. W. W. Greg showed that the prompt-books’ pages were divided into four equal columns, the first containing speakers’ names: the text ‘if verse would fill approximately the two middle columns’, if prose ‘was written across all three columns’, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouse (Oxford, 1931), p. 206. Examples from Greg’s transcripts: a drunken clown scene in The Lady Mother, a form of proclamation in Sir John Barnavelt, and in Sir Thomas More a ‘split’ scene, More speaking verse, his servant Randall prose.
8I have developed this point from the observation recorded by T. Eichhorn, op. cit., p. 193, from V. F. Janssen, Die Prosa in Shakespeares Dramen (Strassburg Diss. 1897) p. 8, that ‘Lear geht auch im Wahnsinn zum Vers über, wenn das königliche oder das väter-liche Gefuehl in ihm aufflackert und sich auf einen festen Punkt konzentriert.’
9The chronology I adopt is based on E. K. Chambers and the recent survey by J. G. McManaway, ‘Recent Studies in Shakespeare’s Chronology’, Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950) pp. 23–33. I do not base any essential critical arguments on the order in which the plays were written, so perhaps I will be forgiven for occasionally changing the sequence for the sake of an illuminating juxta position.
10Foakes, ‘Suggestions for a new approach to Shakespeare’s imagery’, Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952) p. 91, Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959) p. 114.
11See Crane pp. 67, 70, Eichhorn p. 15 8 and passim; also William Empson on double-plots in Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 193 5) pp. 27–86. G. K. Hunter has made a valuable analysis of Lyly’s use of the sub-plot, and a very illuminating comparison of Lyly with Shakespeare: John Lyly (London, 1962) pp. 220–43, 298–349.
1I have considered the theoretical approach to the study of style more fully in the Introduction to my book, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge, 1968). I have also discussed there in more detail the Renaissance use of symmetrical syntax (Chapter 4) and imagery (Chapter 5).
2See for example Una Ellis-Fermor, The Frontiers of Drama (London, 1945) Chapter 5, and revised edition 1964 with bibliography by Harold Brooks (pp. 156–7); A. S. Downer, op. cit.; R. A. Foakes, ‘Suggestions’, op. cit.; Wolfgang Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery (London, 1951), especially pp. 3–8, 230–1; S. L. Bethell, ‘Shakespeare’s Imagery; The Diabolic Images in Othello’, Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952) especially pp. 62–5; M. Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays. The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Harvard, 1961) especially pp. 1–10; K. Muir, ‘Shakespeare’s Imagery – Then and Now’, Shakespeare Survey 18 (1965) pp. 46–57. The most valuable historical study of Renaissance imagery is still Rosemund Tuve’s Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947)
3See Shakespeare’s Way (London, 1930); K. Muir, op. cit. p. 52 pays tribute to Kolbe and conveniently summarizes some of his main findings, such as that ‘the idea of false-seeming occurs 120 times in Much Ado about Nothing, that love and folly are mentioned 140 times each in The Merchant of Venice, that the key words of Macbeth are blood, sleep, darkness, and the play deals with “one episode in the universal war between Sin and Grace” ’. This is a method which has been remorselessly wrung dry by William Empson The Structure of Complex Words, (London, 1951) and which has been recently humanized again by P. A. Jorgensen, Redeeming Shakespeare’s Words (Berkeley, Cal., 1962).
4See Bethell and Clemen, op. cit., also M. Morozov, ‘The Individualization of Shakespeare’s Characters through Imagery’, Shakespeare Survey 2 (1949) pp. 83–106.
5See Shakespeare’s Imagery And What It Tells Us (Cambridge, 1935; 1961) pp. 275–83, 284, 288, and the comments of R. A. Foakes, op. cit., p. 81. But Miss Spurgeon’s comments on image-patterns sometimes include observations which also apply to the prose of a play, as e.g. pp. 122, 153, 158, 228, 273, 276, 323.
6Apart from comments on the imagery of Iago (which well show his ‘forensic’ use of images – pp. 120–5), on the Fool in Lear (p. 143) and on the Clown in Winter’s Tale (pp. 199, 201).
7See Audrey Yoder, Animal Analogy in Shakespeare’s Character-Portrayal (New York, 1947) especially pp. 34, 40–3, 47, 51.
8See op. cit. pp. 26, 30, 33, 39, 42, 43, 52, 61, 86, 93, 96, 100, 109, 188.
9London, 1957; see also Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London, 1955); Helge Koekeritz, Shakespeare’s Pronunciation (Yale, 1953); J. Brown, ‘Eight Types of Puns’, PMLA 71 (1956) pp. 14–26.
10Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (Columbia U.P., N.Y. 1947).
11Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana, Illinois; 2v, 1944).
12See Baldwin, Vol. 1, pp. 81, 102, 125, 158, 224–5, 231–4, 249, 349, 356, 387, 427, 360, 373, 455–6. It might be noted here that the Ramist treatises are no different from the other varieties in their listing and explanation of the figures – indeed they made the process easier by their neat arrangement, and more palatable by their use of modern secular literature as a source for illustrations.
13Ibid., 1.88, 117, 227–8, 349, 359–60, 373; 2.36, 139. As late as 1665 statute 56 of Bury St Edmunds Grammar School specifies that pupils should ‘well understand their lectures and knowe what phrases are in them, what tropes and figures’, and be able to repeat them by heart. (Transcribed and communicated by Mr W. G. Ingram).
14Edited by P. L. Carver, Early English Text Society O.S. no. 202 (London, 1937).
15Baldwin, 1.88, 212, 250–3, 446.
16Quoted by W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York, 1956) p. 259.
17Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie ed. G. D. Willock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936) p. 202. I have collected much of the classical and Renaissance evidence on thishead in my own Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (Macmillan, London, 1969). See also Tuve, op. cit. especially Chapter VIII, ‘The Criterion of Rhetorical Efficacy’.
18On this and many other relevant points concerning the early comedies see G. K. Hunter, op. cit. (here especially pp. 314–16).
19The most detailed study of the structure of classical prose remains that by Eduard Norden, Die Antike Kunstprosa (2 vols. 1898; 5th edition, Stuttgart, 1958). A brief but illuminating treatment in English is given by L. P. Wilkinson, Golden Latin Artistry (Cambridge, 1963) which also includes a good bibliography, while Eric Laughton makes some useful points on Ciceronian symmetries in ‘Cicero and the Greek Orators’, American Journal of Philology, 82 (1961) pp. 27–49. The subject of symmetry in English Renaissance prose has not yet been properly studied, though G. K. Hunter in his book on Lyly does a good analysis of Euphuism and refers to all the extant criticism of Lyly of any value; the ‘anti-Ciceronian’ theories of M. W. Croll, as I have argued in my book on Bacon, are to be treated with care.
20For further evidence of the identification between prose and verse see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953) Chapters 8, 4; John Rainolds, Oratio in Laudem Artis Poeticae ed. W. Ringler and W. Allen (Princeton, 1940) pp. 20–1, 49, 66, 74; K. G. Hamilton, The Two Harmonies: Poetry and Prose in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1963) pp. 78, 10–11, 14.
21K. Pollheim, Die Lateinische Reimprosa (Berlin, 1925); M. W. Croll, Introduction to Euphues ed. H. Clemon (New York, 1916); J. P. Schneider, The prose-style of Richard Rolle of Hampole with special reference to its Euphuistic tendencies (Baltimore, 1906); W. Ringler, ‘The Immediate Source of Euphuism’, PMLA 53 (1938) pp. 678–86.
22Quoted from G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. 3 (London, 1960), p. 16.
23English Works, ed. A. Wright (Cambridge, 1904) p. 200.
24Euphues, ed. E. Arber (London, 1919) p. 36.
25Works ed. A. Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1963) Vol. 1, p. 15.
26Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Harvard U.P., 1960).
27Cf. Kenneth Muir’s point that ‘Shakespeare was in no danger of becoming too colloquial in his dialogue. Even his apparently colloquial prose is a good deal further from actual Elizabethan speech than the dialogue of Middleton or Jonson.…’ ‘Shakespeare and Rhetoric’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 90(1954) p. 60; quoted Barish, op. cit., p. 306.
1Op. cit., p. 6. Although he is right in saying that (e.g.) the prose of Love’s Labour’s Lost is more sophisticated than that of Titus Andronicus, I hope to show that he is mistaken in urging that ‘The application of a rigidly chronological method would portray a wholly incredible and misleading development’.
2‘The so-called “devices”, really no more devices than sentence is a device, express more special forms of meaning, not so common to thinking that they cannot be avoided, like the sentence, but common enough to reappear frequently in certain types of thinking and hence to characterize the thinking, or the style.’ Quoted J. A. Barish, op. cit., p. 25, from The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1941) p. 12.
3Quoted G. K. Hunter, op. cit., p. 347, from ‘Shakespeare and Lyly’, Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961) p. 24.
4Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, p. 88.
5Op. cit., pp. 316–18, 330–42.
6The multiple effect of this technique of separate presentation without comment has been acutely described by M. C. Bradbrook in connection with the rustics’ show in Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Their mimic play apes the flight from Athens, though of course the parallel is not visible either to them or to their highly condescending auditory: it is part of the “mirror” technique of the play-within-the-play …’ Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London, 1951; Peregrine ed., 1964, p. 142). See also Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London, 1962) on how Bottom and his fellow-actors consistently demolish any dramatic illusion (pp. 107–9), and earlier for a sensitive analysis of Julia’s disguising in Two Gentlemen (pp. 102–3).
7Mr Hunter also comments on the separate existence of the plot-elements presented in the exposition: ‘The nobles debate their vow to prefer learning to experience; then the debate is transferred to the level of ordinary life, in the case of Costard v. Dull,’ and finally ‘we move with the prisoner into the custody of Armado, in whom we discover another of the treasons that the “necessity” of the oath has given rise to: Armado himself is in love and is preparing to use his wit in the service not of honour but of love. Act I thus sets the scene for the defeat of learning by experience. But the human actions and impulses it initiates do not develop regularly throughout the play. The imprisonment of Costard has no real effect, and Armado’s love does not modify anything till we come to the end of the play, and then the loose thread is picked up’ (p. 332).
8C. L. Barber has perceptively noted this recurrent feature: ‘The other way to make masquerades dramatic is to have the fiction of the game break down, which is the way things consistently go in Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (op. cit., p. 94).
9Directions for Speech and Style (1599) ed. H. Hudson (Princeton, 1935) p. 24. Further invaluable glosses on the mockery of rhetoric, logic, and grammar-school practices generally can be obtained from the books of Sister Joseph and T. W. Baldwin. As they are essential to the appreciation of the comedy, perhaps future issues of the New Arden and New Cambridge editions of the play could include annotation derived from these sources (indeed both series of editions heavily neglect appropriate reference to logic and rhetoric in the plays).
10As C. L. Barber has well written: ‘Metamorphosis cannot faze him for long. His imperviousness, indeed, is what is most delightful about him with Titania: he remains so completely himself, even in her arms, and despite the outward change of his head and ears; his confident, self-satisfied tone’ (though that is not the right description of it) ‘is a triumph of consistency, persistence, existence’ (p. 157). Cf. also E. K. Chambers: ‘From beginning to end of the play his absolute self-possession never for a moment fails him. He lords it over his fellow-actors, as though he, and not Quince, were poet and stage-manager in one; he accepts the amorous attentions of a queen with calm serenity as no more than might naturally have been expected; nor does he ever, either before or after his transformation, betray the slightest suspicion of the fact that he is after all only an ass’ (Shakespeare: A Survey (1925) pp. 86–7). On the last point I argue that Bottom does suspect something. Miss Tschopp has also noted that here ‘we see a representative of the prose-world being put into the world of the supernatural’, with a consequent separation of media. Op. cit., p. 27.
11One detects here, too, that authentic note of the speech of the speech of the common people which Shakespeare elsewhere catches, though not all critically. It is a naturalness, sometimes clumsy, sometimes carrying a contradiction. One recognizes it, but finds it hard to analyse: as, earlier, Biondello’s ‘I knew a wench married in an afternoon as she went to the garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit’ (Shrew, IV, iv, 100); or the Nurse’s ‘Go thy ways, wench, serve God’ (II, v. 45).
1Johnson on Shakespeare ed. Walter Raleigh (London, 1908) p. 125. The three most distinguished modern accounts would seem to be J. D. Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge, 1943), C. L. Barber, op. cit., Chapter 8, and Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly (London, 1964).
2. J. A. Barish has analysed this speech very sensitively in his book on Ben Jonson (op. cit., pp. 46–8). For instance he notes in Hal’s first sentence ‘the fact that the three phrases are arranged in climactic order: each succeeding one represents a more advanced stage in Falstaff’s surrender to sloth, and each is longer than its predecessor; with “sleeping vpon Benches in the afternoone” we reach the fullest phrase and Falstaff’s final collapse into indolence’ (p. 46). Mr Barish also observes the part played by symmetrical syntax in giving Hal’s speech ‘the impression of spontaneity’: ‘Improvization needs ground rules, and Hal’s construction of a certain syntactic frame gives him freedom: he does not have to worry about what to do with his clauses, or where to put them. Having erected a rapid scaffolding that presupposes some degree of balance and likeness, he can proceed to forget it and concentrate on the details; he can extemporize, as he does, with lordly abandon. The suspended sentence, for him, is no stranglehold, but a series of strong struts. Shakespeare may be planning his effects with the utmost care, but Hal, at least, seems to be talking with perfect naturalness’ (p. 49). This is admirably put, and only neglects the speech’s dramatic context.
3The First Part of King Henry IV ed. A. R. Humphreys (London, 1961). Amongst other valuable features of this edition the elucidation of the quibbles is especially helpful.
4In Euphues the simile of the camomile does not occur in any of the speeches, but in a section of direct address, where the author mocks those who superficially attack education and learning. It is given as one example of their specious reasoning among a dozen such facile oppositions, which Lyly dismisses sharply: ‘For neither is there anything but that has his contraries. Such is the Nature of these novices, that thinke to have learning without labour.’ Euphues ed. E. Arber (London, 1919) pp. 46–7. Thus as its original application was as an example of speciousness, then Falstaff is doubly damned – but here I may be reading too closely in context.
5The Arden editor notes that there is an additional pun on ‘major/Mayor’ (and so on ‘sheriff’) pronounced and often spelt alike, and quotes Hardin Craig’s reconstruction of the supposed syllogism: ‘Major premiss: Natural cowards are cowards without instinct, Minor premiss: Falstaff is a natural coward, Conclusion: Falstaff is a coward without instinct.’ But ‘what Falstaff in fact denies is the minor premiss, though, eager for his pun, he confuses the two’. See Craig, ‘Shakespeare and Formal Logic’, Studies in English Philology (the Klaeber Festschrift: Minneapolis, 1929), pp. 380–96 and Sister Joseph p. 176 (who simply uses it to show Shakespeare’s knowledge of the syllogism).
6Sister Joseph preceded me in pointing out these logical devices used by Falstaff, but she has not seen the significance of those given to him in the later stages of the play, which bloom out of this soil.
7I prefer the punctuation of Qq 1 and 3 here to that of Q 2 and F, which put the question mark after honour, thus making Falstaff ask two consecutive questions and getting only one answer. This seems to me to disturb the structure of the speech with its blow-by-blow progress.
8Prose Works, ed. H. Davis, Vol. I (Oxford, 1939), pp. 96–7. Similarly, in Arden of Feversham, (c. 1591 – thus the sophism may have been familiar) Alice refuses to be bound by an oath:
Tush, Mosbie; oaths are words, and words is wind,
And wind is mutable: then, I conclude,
’Tis childishness to stand upon an oath.
I, i, 437–9; Shakespeare Apocrypha ed. T. Brooke (Oxford, 1908).
9Walter Kaiser has done a subtle analysis of these mirror-effects, op. cit., pp. 254–7. He also comments on the ‘doubleness’ of Falstaff, in relation to the expression ‘a double man’, and traces it to an adage by Erasmus which begins: ‘Those men who are untrustworthy and insincere, now commonly called “two-tongued”, used to be called, with a proverbial witticism, “double men”,’ ibid., pp. 221–2. It is significant that Shakespeare gives the expression to Falstaff himself, denying that he is a ‘double man’ (1 HIV, V, iv, 141).
10Shakespeare’s Comedies (London, 1960). Some critics find Mr Evans’ persistence in tracing these patterns of ‘discrepant awareness’ and the enthusiasm with which he announces his findings, wearying, but although he possibly overworks his method there can be no doubt that this is a major contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare’s dramatic art.
11Such as the conclusive couplet ending Hamlet’s last ominous speech at Ophelia’s grave:
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew and dog will have his day.
(V, i, 285)
12I adopt the reading proposed by J. W. Lever in an article which much illuminates this scene: ‘Shakespeare’s French Fruits’, Shakespeare Survey 6 (1953) pp. 79–90.
1Dr Harold Brooks has pointed out to me a relevant detail concerning Beatrice’s evasions in the context of Elizabethan society: ‘Beatrice does not show weakness by the illogic here. She must ride off into the fantastic, if she is to escape what in the world of Elizabethan reason and morals is inescapable, her duty to accept marriage, and to accept (perhaps with a veto on any man she can’t abide) a husband from her kin. Her wit-of-escape here has some resemblance to Falstaff’s (or Foote’s as Johnson describes it), and is proper to her feminine resource in the given situation.’
2Thus Miss Spurgeon’s description of the dominant images as being those from English country life ignores the relation between imagery and character. But she does see the significance of the ‘battle of wits’ imagery, and gives a full account of it (p. 273).
3The germ of Dogberry’s attitude is perhaps the reaction of Sir Hugh Evans to Shallow’s remedy for Falstaff’s abuse: ‘The Council shall hear it; it is a riot.’ – ‘It is not meet the Council hear a riot; there is no fear of Got in a riot; the Council, look you, shall desire to hear the fear of Got, and not to hear a riot; take your vizaments in that’ (Merry Wives, I, i, 31–5).
4I have given some examples of this convention being used seriously in Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose, Chapter 2.
5See especially op. cit., pp. 142, 186, 195, 197, 201.
6For this speech I prefer the punctuation of Peter Alexander, which seems to me to bring out what is intended (but for one lapse after ‘euen so’) in the Folio text. As with Launce and Gobbo, the clown’s dialogue may have been accompanied by some stage ‘business’.
7Miss Tschopp has made some sensitive comments on the alternation between prose and verse in Twelfth Night: in III, iv. Olivia reveals herself to Maria concerning Cesario in verse, but as soon as Malvolio appears she remembers her supposed condition, and goes back to prose (op. cit., p. 31); Malvolio has played his narcissistic self-important role in prose up to the time of his exposure, even in soliloquy, but when he appears before Olivia in V, i to complain about the disgrace he goes over to verse, and in so doing ‘he expresses himself in a foreign way: with the familiar way of life he also loses the form of expression familiar to him’ (p. 33); and when Aguecheek accuses Viola of having broken his head (V, i, 190–3) she distances herself from him in verse (p. 31).
1See Narrative and Dramatic Sources ed. G. Bullough, Vol. 5 (London, 1964) pp. 45, 91, 7.
2Institutes of Oratory IX, 2, 102; translated by H. E. Butler, Loeb Library (London, 1921).
3Shakespeare’s Professional Skills (Cambridge, 1964) p. 62.
4Miss Tschopp comes to a similar conclusion about the use of prose for the playful side of Hamlet’s personality, his ‘witty, often cruel games’, and that this aspect appears when he is not really involved with his duty of revenge: ‘Always, when Hamlet concentrates on his task, verse appears. The more or less playful giving in to the moment signifies a diversion from this task’ (op. cit., pp. 61–2).
5Here again I part company with Sisson’s punctuation, which is based on that of the Good Quarto, and prefer Peter Alexander’s version of the Folio.
6See the classic analysis by Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet (New York, 1959) pp. 139–64.
7Similarly tension is increased in other plays when a character is made to sense a plot: Lady Capulet does so, although falsely (a Very just’ reaction, as Johnson described it): ‘He is a kinsman to the Montague; Affection makes him false, he speaks not true’; Coriolanus does so, rightly, saying to the Tribunes: ‘Have you not set them on?… It is a purposed thing, and grows by plot’; Emilia also, more aptly still.
8I cannot claim to have searched all Hamlet criticism, but this point, to judge from the recent discussions that I have read, does not seem to be in general circulation. Dover Wilson’s book What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge, 1935) pays little attention to the clowns, and although Granville-Barker notices the major effect of the delay on Hamlet himself he does not connect the function of the clowns’ equivocation with it, nor discusses the nature of Hamlet’s reaction as a result of the later discovery of the truth. See his Prefaces to Shakespeare (London, 1958: two volume edition) Vol. I, pp. 135–7. Perhaps I should mention here that Miss Mahood also argues that Hamlet’s wordplay is a release of his feelings against Claudius (op. cit., pp. 118–21).
1Angel with Horns pp. 82–170, on all three plays, and especially pp. 108–28 on the group as a whole.
2‘ “Greeks” and “Merrygreeks”: A Background to Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida’, Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama, ed. R. Hosley (London, 1963) pp. 223–33.
3John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, p. 15.
4See M. C. Bradbrook’s excellent study: ‘What Shakespeare did to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1958).
5See J. E. Hankins, Shakespeare’s Derived Imagery (U. Kansas Press, Lawrence, 1953) p. 249.
6G. K. Hunter notes in his New Arden edition: ‘To “flesh a hound with the spoil” was to give it some of the flesh of the hunted animal to eat, to stimulate its hunting instincts. So, Bertram’s will (lust) is to be fleshed (rewarded and stimulated) with the honour of the girl it has hunted down.’ The trap image occurs occasionally in the upper action as a metaphor for the way men deceive women: Mariana laments that despite the terrible example of the ‘wreck of maidenhood’ it ‘cannot for all that dissuade succession, but that they are limed with twigs that threaten them’ (III, v, 27) and Diana says to Bertram on behalf of woman
I see that men may rope’s in such a snare,
That we’ll forsake ourselves
(IV, ii, 38–9).
7The atmospheric contrast between prose and verse is used again later in the play, but in the opposite direction, when Angelo is given prose for virtually the only time (apart from a few lines in the hearing of Elbow’s dispute) as a neutral medium for his discussion with Escalus of the Duke’s impending return, against which his anguished verse soliloquy can stand out with more intensity:
This deed unshapes me quite, makes me impregnant
And dull to all proceedings.
(IV, iv)
8A. P. Rossiter comments on the change of tone, but does not relate it to the dramatic situation: ‘It is to me quite evident that the texture of the writing – the tenseness of image and evocative quality – undergoes an abrupt change when the Duke begins talking prose in III, i; and that this change applies more or less to all the serious matter thereafter’ (op. cit., p. 164).
9We must resist the temptation to see the Duke as an image of Providence, a view which is based, as A. P. Rossiter wittily says, ‘on this syllogism: God moves in a mysterious way: Duke Vincentio moves in a mysterious way: therefore the Duke is God. There is a piece missing in the syllogism; something missing in the play corresponds to it’ (op. cit., p. 168).
1Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, translated L. D. Schmitz (London, 1877) Vol 2, p. 91, Letter of May 5, 1798. Quoted by Eichhorn, op. cit., p. 145, who, however, applies it to Elizabethan drama to argue that in using prose the dramatists wished to represent on the stage the ‘fresh intensity and naturalness of Renaissance life’ (p. 146). Whether or not this applies to the use of prose in medieval drama or in other Elizabethan plays, it certainly does not apply to Shakespeare.
2In neither play, so far as I know, has the full force of this image been grasped. In his Magic in the Web (Lexington, 1956) R. B. Heilman notes the significance of some but not all of these images; Spurgeon’s list for Hamlet is not complete, and the Machiavellian nature of the process is lost by her grouping them under ‘sports and Games’; M. Morozov, op. cit., pp. 101–5 notes some of these in Hamlet but does not see their dramatic function. A more general consideration of the image is provided by T. R. Henn, The Harvest of Tragedy (London, 1956) Chapter 4: ‘The Nature of the Net’.
3The word ‘trash’ here refers to the long strap which was attached to the collar of a hound as a handicap to prevent it from following too fast. See D. H. Madden, The Diary of Master William Silence (second edition; London, 1907) pp. 37–8, a book which gives valuable elucidation of all these hunting usages.
4Cf. Maria on Malvolio at a similar stage in a plot: ‘Nay, pursue him now, lest the device take air and taint’ (Twelfth Night, III, iv).
5Nevill Coghill has pointed out the significance of Lear’s ‘When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man’s life’ being spoken to the kneeling Gloucester (op. cit., pp. 24–6).
6Coleridge’s Shakespeare Criticism ed. T. M. Raysor (London, 1961; Everyman edition), Vol. 2 p. 216.
7This reading is strengthened by Buckingham’s boast that Richard ‘is not lolling on a lewd day-bed’ (Richard III, III, vii, 72), where, as Eric Partridge notes ‘day-bed (either a bed used in the day-time, when a man should be manfully busy, or a couch) increases the notion of lasciviousness’. Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London, 1956) s.v. ‘lewd’. In the additional notes to his New Arden edition of the play Kenneth Muir records a reference supplied by Hilda M. Hulme from John Hey-wood, concerning ‘a wife’s complaint of her young husband’s infidelity: “It semeth ye wolde make me go to bed at noone”’ (p. 258).
8In her inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge in February, 1966, and published by the Cambridge University Press: The Tragic Pageant of ‘Timon of Athens’ (pp. 38).
9Sister Joseph gives a useful explanation of this syllogism:
‘Apemantus states a disjunction:
Traffic confound thee, if the gods will not.
The merchant denies it by affirming that the alternatives are identical:
If traffic do it, the gods do it.
Apemantus catches up the identification, betters it and hurls it back:
Traffic’s thy god, and thy god confound thee.
making his last statement stronger than his first by virtue of the cue which his opponent has unintentionally given him’ (p. 212).
10As Celia to Rosalind (As You Like It, III, ii, 213), Hero to Claudio Much Ado, IV, i, 77), Desdemona’s clown (Othello, III, iv, 14), and the Bastard Faulconbridge on foppish travellers (King John, I, i, 192).
11See Kenneth Muir’s introduction to his New Arden edition, p. xxvii.
12See II, ii, 5–8; III, ii, 15–21; 51–8; III, v, 13–15; III, vii, 7–10; III, x, 35–7; III, xiii, 3–12, 29–37, 41–6, 62–5, 94–5, 195–201. Many of these are expressed in deflating asides or soliloquies, as Enobarbus increasingly takes on the role of a rather sardonic commentator on the action.
13Dr Harold Brooks, in commenting on an earlier version of this passage, put this point rather well: ‘Shakespeare must show that he has, with all his cynic qualities, an imagination that can be aroused; or how, later, should he ‘think and die?’ He backed himself to be more of a cynical realist than he is, and Antony’s magnanimity finds him out.’
14See M. N. Proser, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearian Tragedies (Princeton U.P., 1965) pp. 225–9, and Michael Lloyd, ‘Cleopatra as Isis’, Shakespeare Survey 12 (1959).
15See M. Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays (Harvard U.P., 1961); W. Rosen, Shakespeare and the Craft of Tragedy (Harvard, 1960). The best study of Coriolanus in my opinion is that by Una Ellis-Fermor in Shakespeare the Dramatist (London, 1961) pp. 60–77. Richard David has well observed how the prose in the play is distributed according to the structure, being found in the first two and last two Acts: ‘the third, containing the central conflict of the play, is more intense, and prose therefore drops out altogether’ (op. cit., p. 89).
16See A. C. Schlesinger, Boundaries of Dionysus (Harvard U.P., 1963) p. 36: ‘… we are not required to approve of a character’s actions in order to feel sympathy; the requirement is that appreciable values be present in the character.’ This whole section can be usefully related to Shakespeare’s tragedies.
17An intelligent observation on the uniqueness of this scene between Volumnia and Virgilia has recently been made by Glynne Wickham (‘Coriolanus; Shakespeare’s Tragedy in Rehearsal and Performance’, in Later Shakespeare, eds B. Harris and J. R. Brown (London, 1966, pp. 167–81): ‘this scene is monopolized by women just as the former scenes are populated exclusively by men. This contrast is so extreme and so unusual in Shakespeare’s plays – it is the only scene for women which is neither introduced nor interrupted by a man – as to suggest design rather than accident’. (p. 172.)
1Muriel Bradbrook has commented on the antithetical structure of the play: ‘In Gower the story is told to illustrate the difference between lawful and unlawful love; and this theme remains in the play. The contrast between the daughter of Antiochus, who opens the play, and the daughter of Pericles, who concludes it, the one guilty of incest, and dramatically consumed by fire from heaven, the other preserving her chastity in a brothel, is a contrast of the old-fashioned moral sort’ The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (London, 1955) Penguin Books Peregrine edition (London, 1963) p. 208. On the authorship of Pericles see the valuable study by Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare as Collaborator (London, 1960).
2Dr Brooks suggests to me that Stephano can be seen as ‘Prospero’s antitype (they are compared as King and would-be usurper of the island); and Trinculo as in some respects Ariel’s: the draggled court-fool against one who is, among other things, Prospero’s jester (as Puck is Oberon’s). In recollecting their conspiracy, Prospero accepts the Prince’s responsibility to be aware of and to foil incontinence and folly.’
3The brief prose scene in Henry VIII (V, iv) between the Porter and his Man controlling the crowd at Queen Elizabeth’s christening does not seem worth considering separately, although it also contains some suitably crude comic imagery, and could just be Shakespearian.