7
‘This thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’
As the most mysterious and most traumatic of the life crises, death has traditionally been accorded society’s most extensive ritual attention, and ceremonies connected with death and dying are among the most complex and elaborate of rites of passage. Manifestly, death differs from most other such crises in that it can only be seen from one side. We are all novices to dying; except for spiritualists, or those who have medically ‘died’ and returned to life, none of us can claim to have conversed with the initiates, who by the very fact of their initiation are silent. This is perhaps one reason for the recurring interest evinced by many cultures in the phenomenon of those who claim to have come back from the dead, through intervention either medical or divine. These journeys to the ‘other side’, and the experiences and sensations encountered there, are of perpetual fascination not only to doctors of thanatology or to the popular press, but to many ordinary persons as well.1 The underworld journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas and the experiences of the soldier Er in Book X of Plato’s Republic – however complex and symbolic they are as literary events – are on one level at least classical explorations of this kind, and they speak to an enduring human curiosity.
When we bear in mind the universality of this preoccupation with death and dying, we should not be surprised to find rites of passage concerned with death among the other maturation patterns in Shakespeare’s plays. Yet once again the uniqueness of the event sets it apart. In our previous examinations of rites of passage in the plays, it became clear that Shakespeare was interested in these rites as they affected both the individual and his society before and after, as well as during, the period of transition itself. And this is just what we cannot know about dying. The playwright’s dilemma is thus closely analogous to that of every human being: how to envisage and describe experiences of which neither he nor his audience can have any real knowledge. As we shall see, Shakespeare evolved a number of dramatic strategies to cope with this problem. In doing so he was responding to the profound and pandemic need to imagine the unimaginable: to come face to face with the fact that each of us will die. But at the same time, by the very nature of the dramatic solutions he proposes, he does more. As in the sonnets, he suggests ways in which art – the act of writing and playing – can confront and transcend the limits of mortality. He explores and makes use of the common myths of return handed down in western culture: myths of ghosts and spirits, of death and rebirth. Most importantly, however, he crosses the boundary between the actor and the spectator, the Globe Theater and the great globe itself, to create for the audience in the theater a role peculiarly its own, as the repository of memory and the instrument of transmission and transcendence.
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It is a curious fact that whether in highly developed or less sophisticated societies, eastern or western, primitive or modern, the rites of separation for the dead, which we should expect to be pre-eminent among funerary rites of passage, are usually of a simple and fairly brief nature: the closing of the coffin or tomb, the disposal of implements (and sometimes persons and animals) involved in the interment, the ritual expulsion of spirits. More central, and much more extensive, are the rites of transition and incorporation.
Traditionally, transition rites include a journey by the deceased to the land of the dead, whether visualized as a Christian heaven or a country of shades. The ancient Greek rite of the ‘coin for Charon’ to pay the ferryman for passage to the underworld has its counterpart in many religions. In a literary variant of this rite, Aeneas takes the golden bough into the land of the dead, as a talisman assuring him the right to return to earth; and Hamlet might be said to make a similar use of his father’s signet ring, which protects him from the death intended for him in England and allows him to return safely to Denmark. Typically, persons who have failed to undergo other rites of passage may be doomed to a lengthy or even eternal period of wandering, rather than permitted incorporation with the dead. Catholic doctrine holds that infants who have not been baptized are destined to wander in a transitional zone or limbo, and in a number of tribal societies this is also the fate of those who have not been named, initiated or accorded funeral rites. In Shakespeare’s time unquiet spirits, those that had been murdered (like Old Hamlet) or ‘damnèd spirits … That in crossways and floods have burial’ (MND iii. ii. 382–3), were believed to be unable to rest, condemned instead to roam the nights aimlessly in search of vengeance, expiation or suitable obsequies. The Catholic concept of purgatory, an intermediary state in which the souls of those who have died in a condition of grace must expiate their sins, is another familiar type of transition rite that has its counterpart among many primitive groups.2
Rites of incorporation for the dead are often thought of as congruent with hospitality rites among the living: the new arrival is supposedly offered food or other gifts by those who have gone before him, or by the divine inhabitants of the other world.3 Such rites are by their nature taboo for the living if they wish to return to earth after their sojourn among the dead. Thus Proserpina, eating the seeds of a pomegranate, unwittingly accepted Pluto’s hospitality and was incorporated for six months a year into his kingdom. To be welcomed by St Peter at the gates of heaven, or into Abraham’s bosom, is to undergo a similar incorporation in Christian terms. (Falstaff, we may notice, is welcomed not into Abraham’s bosom but into Arthur’s – or at least so Mistress Quickly tells us. His is a specifically English heaven, tailor-made for his quintessentially English spirit.)
For the survivors a separate series of rituals is ordained. The period of mourning signals a cessation of normal activities, marked by such external signs as changes in clothing or appearance (e.g. Hamlet’s ‘inky cloak’, Pericles’ unshorn hair, or Olivia’s veil – all of which have counterparts in popular practice). The length and intensity of the mourning period usually varies with the importance of the deceased, and the death of a reigning monarch, for example, will often be observed by a public restriction on all social activities. The coronation of his successor puts an end to the period of mourning, and may be marked by public festivals, fireworks or other celebrations.
In his first soliloquy Hamlet dwells bitterly on the violation of this mourning period, interrupted by his mother’s untimely marriage. Four times in sixteen lines he specifically mentions the brief space that has intervened between the two events: ‘But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two’ (1. ii. 138); ‘and yet within a month – / Let me not think on’t; Frailty, thy name is woman – / A little month, or ere those shoes were old / With which she followed my poor father’s body’ (145–8); ‘Within a month … She married’ (153–6). The ‘maimèd rites’ (v. i. 219) that accompany the interment of Ophelia at the play’s close form a pendant to this truncated observance, as Laertes asks repeatedly, ‘What ceremony else?’ (v. i. 223, 225), and ‘Must there no more be done?’ (235). In both cases, although for different reasons, the mourners are deprived of comfort, and there is no unifying rite of incorporation.
Among such unifying rites, one of the most characteristic and universal is the shared meal, which may take place immediately after the funeral, on commemorative occasions or at the time of the lifting of mourning. Such practices as the traditional Irish wake and the custom in many faiths of bringing food to the house of mourning are contemporary versions of this rite. Once again, Hamlet records such a ceremony in broken form: ‘The funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’ of his mother and uncle (1. ii. 180–1).
The emphasis upon the survivor as one who needs to undergo rites of passage as much as do the dead is, I think, central to Shakespeare’s dramatic approach to death and dying. In fact, rites of passage concerned with death in the plays are almost always related to a change in perception of those who survive, whether the survivor be an individual, a city or a state. We do not follow Hamlet or Othello or Cordelia beyond the grave, but we are vouchsafed a glimpse of how their deaths affect others, as well as an insight into the ways ceremonies and rites of mourning may work therapeutically, to restore equilibrium to the society. As van Gennep remarks about such rites of incorporation,
their purpose is to reunite all the surviving members of the group with each other, and sometimes also with the deceased, in the same way that a chain which has been broken by the disappearance of one of its links must be rejoined.4
In the simplest terms, this is one way by which the playwright can transcend the limitations of knowledge implicit in his subject; by showing the effect of a death upon the living, he can in some measure compensate for the impossibility of showing the ‘other side’. In effect, both the onstage and the offstage audience are constituted as a society of mourners, who must be reunited with one another, and reintegrated into the world of normal activities – which for the offstage audience means the world beyond the theater. We might go so far as to imagine that in the act of walking out of the playhouse – crossing its threshold – the audience experiences the lifting of the rites of mourning. No more than for the members of a group of literal mourners, however, does this mean that they forget.
When we look more closely at several scenes from the plays, we will see that over and over again the emphasis falls upon the survivors, the mourners, the spectators. Furthermore, we will see that Shakespeare continuously creates an interplay between rites ordinarily associated with death and those we have already seen in life’s earlier stages: marriage, sexual maturity, naming, self-knowledge. And, as we have seen in our examination of other rites, the central figures responding to these events are measured by the degree to which they learn and mature through their experiences.
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There is one device used in the plays that does purport to show something of the ‘other side’, the world beyond the grave, and that is the appearance of a ghost, whether Old Hamlet, Banquo, Julius Caesar or the several victims of Richard III. True to the revenge tradition from which they derive, these spectral figures come to admonish, accuse and affright, and we may notice that in most cases those to whom they appear will shortly die. These ghosts are profoundly disturbing not only to their chosen spectators or auditors on the stage, but also to the audience in the theater. As harbingers of death, they elicit a moment of particular self-knowledge for their murderers (Macbeth, Brutus, Richard) or avengers (Hamlet, Richmond). In a more generalized sense, however, they are harbingers of death for the larger audience as well. By their very presence the audience is invited to learn what Hamlet learns: that ‘If it be now,’ tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come’ (v. ii. 222–4). Like the skull of Yorick, the Ghost is a memento mori, and the ‘readiness’ for death that Hamlet achieves in the last act remains a challenge for those who survive him.
A particularly effective version of the harbinger of death is provided by a figure who is not a ghost at all: the messenger Marcade who enters in the final scene of Love’s Labor’s Lost. Marcade’s news, that the princess’s father – the King of France – is dead, metaphorically casts a pall over the entire previous action of the play, and effects a transition between the wooing games of the previous acts and the ladies’ banishment of their suitors for a twelvemonth of mourning. Berowne, commanded by Rosaline to ‘visit the speechless sick’ and entertain them with his wit, replies in terms which indicate a lesson abruptly learned: ‘To move wild laughter in the throat of death? / It cannot be; it is impossible; / Mirth cannot move a soul in agony’ (v. ii. 853–5). Here in a comic context where ghostly figures of revenge would be incongruous, a black-garbed figure from another world again intrudes, instructs and falls silent, his message delivered. Marcade is a pivotal presence, although he is hardly developed as a character at all; he speaks only three lines, and the princess guesses his message before he can give it. But his unexpected appearance –no doubt made more startling on the stage by the contrast of his black mourning clothes with the gay raiments of the lovers and the costumes of the ‘Worthies’ – is a memento mori of the most direct kind: an intimation of mortality.
Significantly, Shakespeare very rarely depicts a funeral ceremony, or even a funerary procession, despite the opportunity for pageantry such spectacles might have afforded. The body of Henry VI is borne onstage in the opening moments of Richard III, and the ‘maimèd rites’ of the self-slain Ophelia are observed in the closing moments of Hamlet. In the midst of a storm at sea Pericles must cast the body of his queen Thaisa ‘scarcely coffined, in the ooze’ (Per. iii. i. 61), and the young boys in Cymbeline hold a touching funeral ceremony, with songs and traditional floral strewings, over the body of their beloved ‘Fidele’, who is Imogen in disguise.
These last two instances, however, have unusual sequels, for in neither case is the mourned one really dead. Both Thaisa and Imogen will awaken from their death-like sleeps, ultimately to participate in a literal reunion with their families that replaces (at the same time that it acknowledges and depends upon) the symbolic reunion of the funeral rite. Several versions of this reawakening or rebirth occur in Shakespeare’s plays, and unlike actual funeral ceremonies they offer an opportunity for both the one who has ‘died’ and the onlookers to examine the experience and its meaning in retrospect. Thus, for example, Friar Lawrence administers to Juliet a sleeping potion that he says will produce the ‘borrowed likeness of shrunk death’ (R&J iv. i. 104) for a period of forty-two hours, after which she will ‘awake as from a pleasant sleep’ (106). To an alert audience this plan will seem dangerously close to sacrilege: a resurrection designed and brought about by the agency of man. The biblical paradigm is that of Jairus’ daughter, as described in the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke:
And when Jesus came into the ruler’s house, and saw the minstrels and the people making a noise, He said unto them, Give place: for the maid is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. But when the people were put forth he went in, and took her by the hand, and the maid arose.5
(Matt. 9:23–5)
This is the part the friar has chosen for himself. We should not be surprised, therefore, when his plan miscarries. At the same time it is worth noting that Juliet has imaginatively experienced her own death in iv. iii., as she prepares to take the potion. She speculates first that the friar may ‘Subtly hath minist’red to have [her] dead’ (25) to conceal the fact that he performed the secret marriage, and then, rejecting this idea, she goes on to dwell in highly realistic terms upon the smells, sounds and bones within the tomb.
Juliet’s resolve to conquer these fears marks a turning point in her growth to personal maturity; from this point she will no leading need. Her brave toast, ‘Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, I drink to thee’ (58), is answered in the tomb itself by Romeo as he drinks the poison: ‘Here’s to my love!’ (v. iii. 119). By dying in imagination before she does so in fact, Juliet not only comes to terms with her own mortality, but in effect reverses the very conditions of life and death. She kisses Romeo’s lips, hoping to find there ‘some poison [that] yet doth hang on them / To make me die with a restorative’ (165–6). Restoration now is union with Romeo; ‘cordial and not poison’, in Romeo’s words (v. i. 85). The flawed and hubristic rebirth stage-managed by the Friar is thus superseded by a ‘restoration’ of another kind, made possible by the power of love.
Some happier restorations from apparent death, each similarly supervised by a person of spiritual authority, take place in the comedies and romances. In Measure for Measure the Duke of Vienna, disguised as a friar, undertakes to conceal and restore Claudio, who has been condemned to death for the crime of impregnating his fiancée. Like Juliet, Claudio experiences an imaginative confrontation with death, pleading with his sister Isabella to ransom him at the cost of her virginity. In fact, the process of education and self-discovery Claudio undergoes in the course of Act iii scene i is strikingly similar to that which Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has observed in her studies of terminally ill patients.6 Such patients (like Claudio) must come to terms with the unimaginable fact of their own death, and according to Kübler-Ross they pass through five stages of response: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. All patients may not complete the full progression, but this is a characteristic pattern – and it compares very closely to the conflicting emotions felt by Claudio. Advised by ‘Friar Lodo-wick’ to ‘be absolute for death’ (5) in much the same way that a patient learns the seriousness of his condition from a doctor, Claudio responds at first by hoping for a ‘pardon from Lord Angelo’ (1) – a denial of the reality of his sentence. He is imprisoned, and thus physically as well as emotionally isolated, visited only by the ‘friar’ and the Provost – again, close counterparts of the visiting teams of doctor and chaplain in Kübler-Ross’s study. From denial Claudio passes to anger at Angelo (the person who sentenced him) and then to bargaining – if not with Angelo or with God, then with Isabella: ‘Sweet sister, let me live’ (132). His ruminations on the physical deprivations of death – ‘ay, but to die, and go we know not where, / To lie in cold obstruction and to rot, / This sensible warm motion to become / A kneaded clod’ (117–20) – give voice to what is clinically known as depression: what Kübler-Ross describes as ‘taking into account impending losses’.7 ‘Tis too horrible!’ he exclaims, ‘The weariest and most loathèd worldly life / That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature is a paradise / To what we fear of death’ (127–31). At last the ‘friar’ intervenes once more, to dispel all hope: ‘Tomorrow you must die’ (168), and at this point Claudio indicates what Kübler-Ross calls acceptance: ‘Let me ask my sister pardon. I am so out of love with life that I will sue to be rid of it’ (170–1). Significantly, these are the last words we hear him speak; in a sense he does die to the world of the play, reappearing only once more, in the final scene, when the duke unmuffles him and restores him to life. And even in that scene he remains mute, more an emblem than a dramatic character, a liminal figure suspended between life and death.
There are two elements of this final scene that merit our particular attention. First we should notice that although the audience is aware of the ruse to save his life, Isabella is not. The duke has been accused of cruelty and callousness for this omission, despite his explanation that ‘I will keep her ignorant of her good, / To make her heavenly comforts of despair / When it is least expected’ (iv. iii. 110–12). But in fact Isabella is being tested as Claudio had been tested. Her self-righteous obstinacy – ‘more than our brother is our chastity’ (ii. iv. 184) – will itself undergo a transformation, as she participates in the ‘friar’s’ plot, and falsely claims that she has been violated by Angelo. Claudio’s ‘death’ becomes the instrument of Isabella’s conversion from justice to mercy, as she now pleads for Angelo’s life: ‘My brother had but justice, / In that he did the thing for which he died. / For Angelo, / His act did not o’ertake his bad intent’ (v. i. 450–3). It is at this point that Claudio is revealed.
Tellingly, it is to his sister and not to his fiancée that the Duke restores him. The rite of passage Claudio has undergone has made possible a parallel transformation for the ‘survivor’, Isabella. She, too, has passed from a kind of emotional ‘death’ to a new life, in which earthly love has its place, and the selfishness of ‘Isabel, live chaste, and brother, die’ (ii. iv. 183) is replaced by a wish for the married happiness of Mariana and Angelo despite her own (supposed) bereavement. As Claudio had observed earlier, in the characteristically riddling language which is so often associated with rebirth in Shakespeare’s plays, ‘To sue to live, I find I seek to die, / And seeking death, find life’ (iii. i. 42–3). In a metaphorical sense this is true of Isabella as well, and represents a truth she has had to learn.
The second element of particular significance in the last scene of Measure for Measure is Claudio’s appearance. ‘What muffled fellow’s that?’ asks the duke (v. i. 488), and from his question we can infer that Claudio is concealed from the audience by a blanket, shawl or scarf that hides his features. In other words, his costume closely resembles a shroud. Viewing this spectacle, an audience familiar with the more popular Bible stories might well think of the story of Lazarus, whom Christ restored to life at the behest of his sisters, Mary and Martha. When the sisters declared their faith in Him, Jesus led them to the tomb, where he called out the name of Lazarus: ‘And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go’ (John 11: 44). Not only the shrouded man and the faithful sisters, but also the motifs of loosing and binding, restraint and liberty, link this episode closely to Shakespeare’s play.
From another perspective, it is useful to recall that in initiatory rituals pertaining to puberty and sexual coming of age the novice is often covered with a blanket or rug, and that this act of covering is a symbol of death, as the later uncovering signifies rebirth. The connection between the two customs – shrouding the dead and initiating the adolescent – is a suggestive one here, since Claudio has experienced a double transition. He has ‘died’ and been reborn, but he has also ‘died’ sexually, consummating his marriage and begetting a child. By extension we might even say that some similar changes have occurred for Isabella, who in turning away from the nunnery and actively participating in the marital reconciliations of others has begun to recognize and acknowledge her own sexual nature. Whether or not we expect her to accept the duke’s proposal, the possibility of such a match is surely greater at the close of the play than it was in its opening scenes.
The two symbolic attributes that link Claudio with death – muffling and silence – are explicitly described early in the play as part of the condition of religious sisterhood. Once she has taken her vows, a nun reminds Isabella, she may only speak to men in the presence of the prioress, and even then, ‘if you speak, you must not show your face, / Or, if you show your face, you must not speak’ (i. iv. 12–13). Instead of taking the veil, however, Isabella learns a new way of speaking and a new way of revealing herself – as she explains to Mariana:
To speak so indirectly I am loath:
I would say the truth; but to accuse him so,
That is your part. Yet I am advised to do it,
He says, to veil full purpose.
(iv. vi. 1–4)
One kind of veiling replaces another, as the desire to sequester oneself away from the world is replaced by an accommodation to the needs and vicissitudes of that world. In the next scene we will hear Isabella’s public appeal to the duke, which contains what is for the audience a striking homophonie echo. ‘Speak loud,’ urges Friar Peter, and Isabella complies: ‘Justice, O royal duke!’ she calls out. ‘Vail your regard / Upon a wronged – I would fain have said, a maid’ (v. i. 20–1). Oddly, in a play so much concerned with veiling, these are the only instances of either word to occur, and they do so within thirty lines of one another. Although the two words – ‘veil’ and ‘vail’ – are not etymologically related, they play against one another in an interesting way. A veil is a covering that conceals, but the friar’s instruction, ‘to veil full purpose’, is a stratagem that is designed to reveal a hidden truth. ‘Vail’ as a verb means to lower, doff, cast down or throw down, all emblematic acts of submission, but the duke is asked to vail his regard in order to bring himself down to the level of his subjects, to condescend to them. Each kind of veiling (or vailing) thus produces an effect directly opposite to its most evident meaning, and contributes to the sense of paradox that infuses the entire last scene of the play. Moreover, to ‘vail’ one’s regard is in this context the opposite of ‘veiling’ or concealing it, making it inaccessible. The audience hears both words in one, and a further paradox is achieved.
Isabella’s petition to the duke and her complicity in the ‘friar’s’ plot demonstrate an important change in her behavior; now she is willing to temporize with the letter of the law, in order to pursue its spirit. This distinction between letter and spirit, so crucial to Angelo’s governance and indeed to all of Measure for Measure, is, interestingly enough, propounded by St Paul in a chapter of 2 Corinthians that is also much concerned with veils and veiling. Paul reminds his listeners that Moses covered his face when he brought down the tablets of the law, and alleges that the children of Israel have since been symbolically veiled, prevented from seeing the truth of Christ. Christians, he says, ‘use great plainness of speech’ (3 : 12), ‘with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord’ (18); when the heart of Israel is turned to Christ, ‘the veil shall be taken away’ (16).
The gesture of taking away the veil is repeated several times, literally as well as metaphorically, in the climactic scene of Measure for Measure. Mariana is veiled, and will not show her face ‘until my husband bid me’ (v. i. 170); Lucio challenges the disguised duke to ‘show your knave’s visage … your sheep-biting face’ (355–6) and himself pulls off the friar’s hood; Claudio is unmuffled, Angelo is exposed, and Isabella will (perhaps) not take the veil. The appearance of the muffled Claudio thus functions not only as a visual emblem of the rite of passage he has undergone, but also as an iconic representation of the transformations undergone by others. In a sense, he concretizes the more metaphorical kinds of dying and restoration with which the play has dealt. His presence is very like that of Marcade, a living memento mori who speaks (by his silence) to onstage and offstage audience alike.
As we have begun to see, shrouds, veils and masks are almost always part of the ritual of symbolic death and rebirth in Shakespeare’s plays, and this is perhaps to be expected, since the veil in many cultures is a traditional symbol of separation from one world and entrance into another. By religious law, Moslem women once they come of age must always be veiled in public, and when in public must be separated from men; much the same is true among the women of certain Orthodox Jewish groups. Not only in the Catholic Church, but also among those who practiced the ancient Greek mysteries, the ceremony of ‘taking the veil’ was part of the process of initiation. And the widow’s veil, in western culture usually a temporary sign of mourning, is in some others worn permanently after bereavement.8
The veil worn by Olivia in Twelfth Night seems to combine a number of these functions, since it is a sign at once of mourning for another and of the death-like condition of the wearer. Obsessively grieving for her dead brother (or, in Valentine’s suggestive phrase, for ‘a brother’s dead love’ – i. i. 32), Olivia paces her chamber ‘like a cloistress … veilèd’ (29) until she falls in love with Viola–Cesario and consents to unveil herself. Unveiling for her is a rite of transition marking the passage from self-love to love for another, which in this play, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, is also a passage from spiritual death to life. (In this it is akin to Isabella’s not taking the veil of the votarists of St Clare.) The metaphor Olivia chooses to describe her emergence from behind the veil is an interesting one: ‘We will draw the curtain and show you the picture’ (i.v. 231–2). Just as Elizabethan paintings were protected by curtains, so Olivia has protected herself from intercourse with the world. Her image here prefigures the more complex unveiling of the statue of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, another emergence from ‘death’ to life, from stasis to action. Equally significant, the eventual marriage between Olivia and Sebastian takes place in a ‘chantry’ located in, or near, Olivia’s garden. The outdoor setting of the wedding is in sharp contrast to the closed chamber of her earlier grief, a chamber that was in many ways the equivalent of a living tomb. Moreover, a chantry is a chapel (or part of a church) specifically endowed for the maintenance of priests to sing daily mass for the souls of the founders. The daily ritual of mourning with which the play began now sustains its final transformation, as the chantry becomes a place of beginning as well as of ending, of marriage as well as memorial.
Olivia’s veil and the muffling of Claudio have their counterparts in the mask of Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, another comedy with undertones of tragic possibility. The pattern of ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ in Much Ado is in fact quite similar to that in Measure for Measure. Hero is accused of infidelity by her fiancé, Count Claudio; she swoons and is thought dead. Friar Francis – yet another of these transforming friars – who was to perform the marriage between them, now suggests that her family and friends ‘Publish it that she is dead indeed; / Maintain a mourning ostentation … and do all rites / That appertain unto a burial’ (iv. i. 203–7). The friar’s hope is that Claudio will come to realize his mistake; if not, he intends to place Hero ‘in some reclusive and religious life’ (241) out of the sight and hearing of society. Like Friar Lawrence, then, Friar Francis threatens to ‘dispose of’ the bride ‘among a sisterhood of holy nuns’ (R&J v. iii. 156–7). His words as he leads her off are significant, and may serve as the apothegm for this entire dramatic trope: ‘Come, lady,’ he invites her, ‘die to live’ (iv. i. 252). To die to live is to die into life, to counterfeit death as a transitional rite which will lead to a new incorporation with a husband and a society – once again the opposite of the nunnery, which is ‘out of all eyes, tongues, minds’ (iv. i. 242).
Some time after Hero’s departure Claudio learns the truth – that she has been impersonated and slandered – and we might imagine that his subsequent repentance would be sufficient to restore her to him at once. Instead there is a delay analogous to that in Measure for Measure, when Isabella was not told that her brother was alive. Hero’s father Leonato tells him that he ‘cannot bid you bid my daughter live; / That were impossible’ (v. i. 278), but instructs him to do obsequies at her tomb, and offers him the hand of her ‘cousin’ – who will turn out to be Hero herself. Although the ‘cousin’ is declared to be joint heiress to Leonato’s fortune and his brother’s, Claudio apparently undertakes the marriage at least in part as a form of penance and an act of faith. We see him performing funeral rites at the monument, and hear him swear that ‘Yearly will I do this rite’ (v. iii. 23); we then hear Don Pedro, his companion in both the accusation and the act of repentance, urge him to ‘put on other weeds’ (30) – exchange his mourning clothes for a wedding suit – and proceed to Leonato’s for the ceremony. When Claudio arrives, Leonato asks if he is still determined to marry the unknown ‘cousin’, and he replies, ‘I’ll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope’ (v. iv. 38). The acceptance of a bride sight unseen reverses the dangerous and misleading demand for ocular proof (‘If I see anything tonight why I should not marry her tomorrow, in the congregation where I should wed, there will I shame her’ – iii. ii. 118–20), and Claudio, although tempted (‘Sweet, let me see your face’ – 55) adheres to his vow and takes the masked lady by the hand. The incident suggests a submerged analogy with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, another situation in which the dead bride can be retrieved from the underworld only by her husband’s faith. Orpheus in looking back lost Eurydice forever, Claudio by not looking gains back the bride he lost. When Hero unmasks herself the play’s language becomes, for a moment, translated into redemptive terms:
Hero And when I lived I was your other wife; [unmasking]
And when you lived you were my other husband.
Claudio Another Hero!
Hero Nothing certainer.
One Hero died defiled; but I do live,
And surely as I live, I am a maid.
Don Pedro The former Hero! Hero that is dead!
Leonato She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived.
Friar All this amazement can I qualify,
When, after that the holy rites are ended,
I’ll tell you largely of fair Hero’s death.
(v. iv. 60–9)
What is of special interest here is the rhetorical insistence on the actuality of Hero’s death. She is not called ‘Hero that was thought dead’, but ‘Hero that is dead’. More than a mere pretense or masquerade has taken place.
We noted earlier in this study that a pattern of death and resurrection was part of all pubertal initiation ceremonies among primitive peoples, as well as among some sects and tribes of ancient Greece, and even in the Europe of the medieval period.9 But in this case, as in the case of many similar rites in Shakespeare, the initiatory experience is indirect or transferred: a change takes place in Claudio as well as – and more centrally than – in Hero. This is part of the reason for the length of time Claudio remains unenlightened. The stages of ritual through which he passes – the mourning at Hero’s tomb, the promise to renew the rite yearly, the change of clothing, and finally the marriage – are clearly analogous to the basic pattern of separation, transition and incorporation. At the same time there remains an evident reminder of the Pauline doctrine ‘that Christ died for our sins … that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day’ (1 Cor. 15 : 3–4). Hero is no Christ, but she is an innocent victim of others’ perfidy, and her symbolic death is the instrument of Claudio’s own rebirth.
We have already seen certain instances in which Claudio clearly needs to change, to come to terms with his own sexual nature and with the nature of love. In Act ii scene i, the dance at Leonato’s house, it is Claudio who is masked, as are the other men. (In v. iv. the pattern will be reversed, and the masks will be worn by the women.) He is persuaded by Don John that Don Pedro is wooing Hero on his own account, not, as he has promised, as Claudio’s proxy. In a bitter soliloquy Claudio bids goodbye to her with a rhetorical flourish: ‘Farewell therefore Hero!’ (ii. i. 176). His eyes have deceived him; he has misinterpreted the scene. Notice that this is precisely the same mistake he will make, with more serious consequences, in the church scene, again deceived by the troublemaker Don John, again too quickly and mistakenly rejecting Hero, only to be once more reunited with her and promised her hand in marriage. Even his language is the same – ‘fare thee well, most foul, most fair, farewell’ (iv.i.102) – so that the audience is given an aural clue to the congruence between the two scenes. Hero does ‘die’ for Claudio’s errors here – indeed she does so twice. Her apparent death and resurrection provide the initiatory experience which enables him to come to know himself.
A close parallel to the Hero–Claudio situation occurs in The Winter’s Tale, where Hermione is suspected of infidelity, Leontes accuses her, and she is concealed by Paulina. In this case the ‘yearly rite’ promised by Claudio becomes a penance performed by Leontes ‘once a day’ (iii. ii. 236) for a period of sixteen years. Like Leonato, who took charge of Claudio’s marital prospects and matched him with Hero’s ‘cousin’, Pauline extracts a promise from Leontes that he will be guided by her in a future marriage choice – and then in riddling terms adds, ‘That / Shall be when your first queen’s again in breath; / Never till then’ (v. i. 82–4). After this act of faith comes another, in the chapel, and the unmasking of Hero is transmuted into the more elaborate and more richly reasonant ‘awakening’ of the supposed statue of Hermione. A curtain replaces the mask, but the language of rebirth is fully as strong. Where the two situations differ is in the degree of previous knowledge given the audience; we knew that Hero was still alive, but Paulina conceals from us, as from Leontes, the truth about Hermione. Her invitation, ‘It is required / You do awake your faith’ (v. iii. 94–5), is extended to those off the stage as well as to those upon it, and the wonder of the moment of awakening – or rebirth – is shared by every spectator.
As we have seen, this fundamental pattern of ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ can have a strong effect upon the survivors – or the audience – as well as upon those who undergo the literal experience of transition. Indeed it might well be argued that the transferred effect is far stronger – that Leontes and Claudio are more psychologically and emotionally altered by the ‘deaths’ and restorations of their ladies than are the ladies themselves. Like tragedy itself, which happens for us on the stage so that it need not have to happen to us in our lives, these apparent losses and reversals are cathartic events that transform those who observe them. This is perhaps most vividly the case when the restoration or rebirth is fleeting, as it is for Desdemona, or even wholly illusory, as with Cordelia.
Desdemona anticipates the possibility of her death in iv. iii., and requests that Emilia shroud her in her wedding sheets. The audience, which has already seen ample evidence of Othello’s obsession, receives explicit notice of his intention to kill her as v. ii. opens, and hears her plead with him in vain. We thus expect her death, and our expectations are apparently confirmed by Othello’s own words after he smothers her: ‘She’s dead’ (91), and ‘[she’s] Still as the grave’ (94). At this point he performs a gesture which is both a natural attempt at concealment and a familiar symbolic indication of death: he closes the curtains around the bed. The bed curtains are in this case a kind of veil or shroud, but they are also analogous to the curtains of a theater; the play appears to be over. Thus, when the voice of Desdemona speaks through the curtains, the audience is likely to be as startled as Othello. There is nothing supernatural about Des-demona’s ‘rebirth’, any more than in the other instances we have seen. Othello’s certainty that she is dead is yet another error of perception and judgment on his part. But the dramatic effect here is so shocking that we seem almost to be hearing a voice from another world.
J. L. Styan appropriately notes the resemblance of this scene to that of a church: ‘The taper makes of her death-bed a sacrificial altar, one upon which man’s love of life and hope of heaven are annihilated.’10 Yet there is no language of Christian mystery here. Instead of the riddling phrases of Much Ado and The Winter’s Tale we have a riddle posed in purely human terms: the riddle of a woman’s self-destructive goodness. Desdemona’s reply to the question, ‘who hath done this deed?’ – the magnificently generous ‘Nobody – I myself. Farewell’ (124) – may offer us, in its very generosity, something of tragic truth.
In terms of staging, the difference between Desdemona’s first ‘death’ and her second is the presence of Emilia. She, like the audience in the theater, hears those final poignant lines of disclaimer and forgiveness, and her anger and grief are forerunners and counterparts of our own. Emilia is a consummately ordinary woman, whose ordinariness is repeatedly contrasted with the extraordinary qualities of Desdemona. In her mediocrity, her moral frailty and her instinct for survival the audience may find a reflection of its own quotidian self. But in the almost literally disembodied voice of Desdemona we hear, as well, the language of grace and human possibility, of that which lives on after death.
With the death of Cordelia the transference of effect from victim to survivor becomes even more direct. The stage direction, ‘Enter Lear, with Cordelia in his arms’, describes a posture that has been compared to that of a Pietà. Yet Lear refuses to believe that she is dead, asking for a looking glass to mist with her breath, holding a feather before her and fancying that it stirs. His dying words repeat this wish, replacing the agonizing realism of ‘Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never’ (v. iii. 309–10) with a last burst of hope: ‘Look on her. Look, her lips, / Look there, look there’ (312–13). What does he see? In all but remotest possibility, nothing. Her revival, the rebirth that would in his phrase ‘redeem all sorrows / That ever I have felt’ (268–9) occurs only in his mind, while around him the young men, Edgar and Albany, strive to reassert the world of government, to lift the burden of mourning and begin the act of reintegration with society. It is left to Kent to point out not only Lear’s wish for death but his own; reintegration for them will happen only once they have departed ‘this tough world’ (316). ‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me, I must not say no’ (323–4).
Twice before in the play we have encountered the dramatic metaphor of resurrection, once staged by Edgar, a second time imagined by Lear. Edgar persuades the blinded Gloucester that he has fallen from an immense height, and tells him that ‘Thy life’s a miracle’ (iv. vi. 55). The ‘child-changèd’ Lear awakes from sleep and madness to find himself dressed in fresh garments, soothed with music, and welcomed by a Cordelia whom he identifies as ‘a soul in bliss’ (iv. vii.46). ‘You are a spirit, I know,’ he tells her, ‘Where did you die ?’ (49). In both scenes the fathers are ‘child-changed’, changed not only into children but by their children, and brought to a new understanding of patience, love and the radical condition of humanity. As the doctor says of Lear, ‘the great rage, / You see, is killed in him’ (78–9).
It may be useful here to recall the observations of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on the dying patient’s progression from denial and isolation to anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance of death. For Lear, although he will not acknowledge it, is a dying man. His denial, isolation and anger are all too visible in the first three acts. As Freud points out, the silence of Cordelia may be seen as a reminder of the silence of death, the thing Lear refuses to see that he has to choose – and of which his division of the kingdom is an unmistakable sign.11 Denying her, he passes through rage to bargaining, first with his elder daughters about the size of his retinue, then, turning to matters more desperate and fundamental, with the heavens and his neglected subjects: ‘O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel’ (iii. iv. 32–4). The scheme he proposes to Cordelia as they are taken prisoner is yet another version of the bargain for life: ‘Come, let’s away to prison; / We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage … and we’ll wear out, / In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones / That ebb and flow by th’ moon’ (v. iii. 8–9, 17–19). but it is with the death of Cordelia that there comes upon him the final stages of preparatory depression and ultimate acceptance. Freud’s comment on the stage direction I have already mentioned is worth citing here, because it bears directly on this subject of acceptance:
Let us now recall that most moving last scene, one of the culminating points reached in modern tragic drama: ‘Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms.’ Cordelia is death. Reverse the situation and it becomes intelligible and familiar to us – the Death-goddess bearing away the dead hero from the place of battle, like the Valkyr in German mythology. Eternal wisdom, in the garb of the primitive myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death, and make friends with the necessity of dying.12
Cordelia becomes, if not his Valkryie, then his psychopomp, his guide of souls, who leads him willingly from one world to the next. Kent’s compassionate injunction explicitly touches on this theme of acceptance: ‘Vex not his ghost: O let him pass! He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer’ (v. iii. 315–17). Edgar earlier touched upon the same theme as he led the blind Gloucester from the field of battle, and cautioned him that ‘Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all’ (v. ii. 9–11).
Cordelia’s death is unlike the previous ‘deaths’ we have considered, because her restoration is entirely illusory. She is ‘dead as earth’ (v. iii. 263); she will ‘come no more’ (309). And yet it is hardly accurate to say that Cordelia’s death is ‘real’. It is real within the confines of the play – it is real to Lear – but for the audience of Shakespeare’s plays, necessarily, there is more than one kind of ‘reality’.
In his short poem ‘On the Life of Man’, Walter Ralegh develops an elaborate conceit comparing theater and life, to conclude with a crucial distinction: ‘Only we die in earnest, that’s no jest. ‘A literal-minded observer might wish to point out the same kind of truth about Cordelia’s death that Bottom is so eager to declare about Pyramus’: ‘That Pyramus is not killed indeed’ (MND iii. i. 18). ‘The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby’ is no sooner over, and the stage littered with corpses, than Bottom and the others leap to their feet to offer the duke his choice of an epilogue or a Bergomask dance. So too with the players in Shakespeare’s company, or any company : the play over, its actors do not die in earnest, but rather return the next day to perform it again. And in this common fact of theatrical life we find the central truth about death as a rite of passage in Shakespearean drama.
We have seen the ways in which Shakespeare uses a fictive experience of ‘death’ to bring about a change in the survivors, the mourning spectators on the stage, as well as in the person who ‘dies’ and is ‘reborn’. But there are, after all, many major characters who face the final crisis and do not come back. Most obviously this is true of the protagonists of tragedy, for whom, as for Lear, the experience of the play is also the experience of learning to die. By expanding our perspective we can see that these deaths, too, bring about a change, a new access of understanding. But in the tragedies the final act of transition and incorporation is performed, not by the players, but by the audience. To solve the dilemma of finitude and mortality, the silence of the grave, Shakespeare has created for his audience a crucial role that transcends the limitations imposed by the death of the hero – as well as the limitations implicit in ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’. It is therefore to the tragedies that we should turn, to find the most inclusive of all rites of passage concerned with death and dying: the injunction to retell the tale, or to replay the play. This is the task, and the role, that the playwright assigns to the survivors: at once an act of mourning and a first step toward social reintegration.
The general pattern of this rite is set forth very clearly in a passage that is not in fact from a tragedy, but does concern itself with a potentially tragic subject: the fear of death in battle. The passage is the great ‘Saint Crispin’s Day’ speech in Henry V, in which the king attempts to rally his forces and to enable them to face the possibility of their own deaths. The scene is the English camp, and the onstage audience includes not only the nobles specifically named but also Sir Thomas Erpingham ‘with all his host’.
This day is called the Feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day, and live old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors
And say, ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words –
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester –
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd.
(IV. iii. 40–59)
This is a description of what we today call ‘oral history’, a process of education through retelling that is a familiar tradition in many cultures, but especially in those that do not employ the written word. Whether it is historical, mythic or explicitly fictive, an event is remembered and passed on from one generation to another by just such a process of transmission. But we may notice that the king fully expects the old soldier to remember his own contributions ‘with advantages’ – embellishing them in the course of the telling. If this is the case, what is the true story of what happened on Saint Crispin’s day? If the soldier adds and changes, and his son does the same, how can we remember ‘to the ending of the world’ the events and names King Harry bids us celebrate? The answer implied here, and made more explicit in the tragedies, is: by recalling and reenacting the play we have just seen. If the old soldier is a spectator–participant, so too is the audience that watches and endures. And, as we shall see, the audience in effect becomes an actor, performing the rite begun by the injunction to retell.
Just as Henry V addresses himself to his troops and spectators, so Hamlet as he lies mortally wounded addresses himself to ‘You that look pale and tremble at this chance, / That are but mutes or audience to this act’ (v. ii. 336–7). His description includes those both on the stage and off it, a community whose human bond transcends the limitations of the stage itself. They are an audience – which is to say, they hear; but they are also spectators, who see; and, as Hamlet tellingly points out, they are also ‘mutes’, who cannot – or will not – speak. At once active – in emotional response, in pity and terror, in sympathy or identification – and passive – in its entrapment in seats or boxes, and its inability to intervene – the audience occupies a dichotomous position which is both difficult to maintain, and essential to the workings of the play.
But the muteness of the spectators is a temporary rather than a permanent state. In his next words Hamlet enjoins Horatio,
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.
(V. ii. 348–51)
Horatio’s task – and by extension that of Hamlet’s other ‘audience’ – is to make history into story, fact into fable – to replay the play, and bring it back to life. Very much the same thing happens at the end of Othello, when Othello enjoins the Venetians,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well.
(V. ii. 340–43)
The play does not end with the closing of the bed curtains, but rather with Lodovico’s final words of resolve:
Myself will straight aboard, and to the state
This heavy act with heavy heart relate.
(369–70)
To ‘relate’ becomes, in fact, the crucial action afforded to the spectator of tragedy, both on and off the stage. He is invited to ‘relate’ in two senses – to retell the tale, and in retelling it to reconstitute the human bonds that have been severed, to remake a community and a society by placing the hero and his downfall in the instructive context of history, and by ‘giv[ing] sorrow words’, as Malcolm urges the grieving Macduff (Mac. iv. iii. 209), in order to come to terms with loss. Lodovico will return to Venice and ‘relate’ the story of Othello, which is to say, the events of the play itself.
As we have seen in other contexts, it is the survivors who often bear the responsibility for responding to the implications of death and dying. Thus at the close of Romeo and Juliet the Prince of Verona instructs his mourning subjects to ‘Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things’ (v. iii. 208) – to ‘relate’ to one another the play’s tragic events and their own feelings of guilt and loss. In similar terms Edgar, a survivor of the storm and a friend and kinsman of its victims, addresses the remaining English forces in King Lear:
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
(v. iii. 325–8)
Here, in accordance with the changed circumstances, explicit retelling – ‘Speak what we feel’ – entails, as well, implicit remembering and recording. ‘We that are young’ refers not only to those of Edgar’s own generation, but to those who will follow – the newly young of each succeeding generation, audiences as well as actors, who are asked to remember and to learn from the tragic past.
Moreover, even those who have caused the deaths of tragic heroes invite us, in fact command us, to remember them. Aufidius says of Coriolanus, ‘Yet he shall have a noble memory’ (v. vi. 152); Macduff says of Macbeth, ‘live to be the show and gaze o’ th’ time’ (v. viii. 24); Octavius says of Antony and Cleopatra, ‘No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous’ (v. ii. 358–9). Thus, at the close of every tragedy, our attention is drawn to the necessary act of retrospection without which the tragic experience would be incomplete.
Yet in each of these cases the relationship of onstage to offstage audience is carefully measured, to suggest not only a conjunction but also a disjunction between them. Horatio is asked ‘to tell my story’, and he complies immediately by requesting those who remain – among whom we may properly number ourselves – to see ‘that these bodies / High on a stage be placèd to the view’ (v. ii. 379–80). The stage from which they are to be regarded, of course, is simultaneously playhouse and platform. But then Horatio goes on, in effect, to summarize his story to the ‘yet unknowing world’:
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads. All this can I
Truly deliver.
(Ham. v. ii. 382–8)
He can ‘truly deliver’ so far as he comprehends what he has seen. But do we recognize The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in this catalogue of catastrophes? Horatio, who cautions against considering too curiously, is himself a curious figure for the role of amanuensis ; there are parts of Hamlet – and therefore of Hamlet – which he has never understood. Most obviously, he has not heard the soliloquies, without which the play of Hamlet as we know it is unimaginable. It is therefore to us as well as to Horatio that Hamlet – and Shakespeare – speak, in the command to ‘tell my story’. We, mutes and audience, are the only ones who ‘truly’ know it.
These final speeches of summation have sometimes been accused of a certain patness – of attempting to make all right with the world, when in fact that world has been destroyed. But this patness, when it exists, seems to me to be a part of the play’s central design, and of the design it has upon its audience. Lodo-vico is even less qualified than Horatio to ‘relate’ the tragedy of which he is a part. He does not arrive at Cyprus until the beginning of Act iv, and has therefore missed, not only Iago’s soliloquies, but the whole story of Othello’s downfall. His account, were he to give it, would begin with the striking of Desdemona, omitting the delicate psychological interplay which lies at the heart of the tragedy. Edgar, who speaks of ‘we that are young’, counts himself among them, though he has been part of the tragedy of Gloucester and Lear. But to say that we ‘shall never see so much, nor live so long’, is to overlook, for a moment, the radical role of the spectator, who has seen it all – and through whose eyes and ears the personae of King Lear continue to live long after the actors have left the stage. The Montagues and Capulets, though united by mutual tragedy, remain blindly competitive, each pledging to rear a more appropriate monument to the other’s child; the golden statues they intend to raise are mockingly lifeless counterparts of the flesh and blood children they have lost, and bear no relation to the ‘story of more woe … of Juliet and her Romeo’ (v. ii. 310–11). As for Octavius, his belated generosity is, as always, mitigated by self-interest:
No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous. High events as these
Strike those that make them; and their story is
No less in pity, than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented.
(A&C v. ii. 358–62)
The easy rhyme of ‘story’ and ‘glory’, which seems to balance two types of fame, in fact suggests a false analogy. The play is not evenly divided in its emphasis between the lovers and the aspiring emperor; its conclusion is not greeted by the audience impartially, with an auspicious and a dropping eye – our sympathies and commitment are reserved for the dead, though we may recognize the political sagacity of those who survive. Octavius, in fact, does not understand his play, and would almost surely have staged in Rome the ‘squeaking’, ‘drunken’ parody Cleopatra imagines. The limited vision of the final speaker once again emphasizes the radical disjunction between his view and that of the work of art. Only in his intuition that the play must be replayed does he anticipate the response of the offstage audience; for just as Cleopatra herself declares, i am again for Cydnus, / To meet Mark Antony’ (v. ii. 228–9), so Octavius senses in her death a paradoxical sign of continuity:
she looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.
(v. ii. 345–7)
The dramatic character of Cleopatra inhabits a self-renewing world which will outlast any single spectator, and any single performance.
In short, Horatio might conceivably write a Horatio, and Octavius an Octavius Caesar, but neither would accord completely with the plays as we have experienced them. As participants in the tragic drama they can speak only what they know; we, who know more, have, in exchange for that privilege, forfeited our right to speak. And as we have already seen, in Shakespeare’s tragedies the abdication of speech, whether by Iago, Cordelia, Coriolanus or Banquo’s ghost, is fraught with danger; the character who refuses speech is vulnerable to the accusation that he is concurrently refusing the human bond. Manifestly, for Cordelia and Coriolanus, this is not wholly the case: ‘love and be silent,’ and ‘Holds her by the hand, silent’ demarcate two of the most moving instances of human interaction in the Shakespearean canon. But as moving as they are, these moments are also tragic. Not to speak is to make oneself a victim, by dissociating oneself from the world of human communication. Iago does this explicitly at the close of Othello, but essentially he has been in this condition throughout the play, never speaking with an intent to communicate, but always to deceive. The audience, by accepting, as it must, the role of ‘mutes’, accepts as well the danger and responsibility of this failed communication – and also something more. Our hearing, our seeing – that is, our identity as audience and spectators – has been our suffering, our participating in the tragic experience. This experience has been deepened, made more private and perhaps more painful, by the very passivity forced upon us. We cannot act to affect the play’s outcome, any more than the tragic hero can act to save himself. Such is the decorum of our stage that we cannot even cry out and expect to be heard. We are thus as surely victims of the play, as the play’s protagonists are victims of its actions.
But if we are its victims, we are also its survivors, and its celebrants. Old Hamlet, having told his tale of murder, exits on a line which seems addressed to the audience as well as to his son: ‘Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me’ (1. v. 91), and the words linger in the air after their speaker has departed the stage. Hamlet, mulling them as a text, seems likewise to speak for both audiences, for all audiences, in his reply.
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.
(95–7)
The triple pun on ‘globe’ – head, world, theater – is underscored by the ambiguity of ‘seat’. ‘Sitting at a play’, the audience of tragedy is precisely what Hamlet says it is – the memory of the play’s world, the record of its action. When Aufidius promises that Coriolanus ‘shall have a noble memory’, it is only the audience which can keep his promise, and the nobility of this role is insisted upon:
Let us haste to hear it,
And call the noblest to the audience.
(Ham. v. ii. 388–9)
In the comedies, this recognition of reciprocity between the worlds on and off the stage is often accomplished through the use of an epilogue, a device which, like the soliloquy, allows for a direct confrontation between actor and audience. Thus Rosalind ‘conjures’ her hearers ‘that the play may please’, and requests them to bid her farewell with their applause.
Prospero, having drowned his book, declares himself powerless, and asks for the help of our ‘good hands’ and ‘gentle breath’ to release him and sail him back to Milan. Puck, likewise, seeks our ‘hands’, in friendship and applause. In each case the speaker of the epilogue acknowledges his own fictionality at the same time that he, like Puck, teases us with the dramatist’s favorite conundrum, that perhaps only the fictive is true.
But in the world of Shakespearean tragedy there is no such moment, suspended between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, in which the protagonist may reveal himself, and the charm dissolve apace – nor, significantly, is there an explicit clarification and release, as manifested in the welcome activity of applause. Hamlet and Lear are dead, and in a more than literal sense their fame lies in our hands – and in our gentle breath. The injunction to replay the play, ‘to tell my story’, to bear the bodies to the stage, suggests the ultimate role of the audience, no longer mute, and the ultimate reconstitution of the society disrupted by the tragic action. For each member of the tragic audience is asked to see himself as a survivor. Denied the easier mode of participation offered by comedy – a revels moment of song, dance or solicited applause which assures the communal bond – the spectator of tragedy is at once isolated and chosen, privileged and obligated by what he has seen and heard. The play itself becomes a rite of mourning, at once the ultimate and the quintessential Shakespearean rite of passage.
1 The enormous success of Life After Life, by Raymond A. Moody, Jr, M.D. (New York: Bantam Books, 1975) attests to a continuing interest in such questions. Dr Moody, a former professor of philosophy who is currently training to be a psychiatrist, takes a balanced and sensitive view of the question of the afterlife, based on interviews with some 150 persons who have reported such experiences.
2 For some specific practices of tribal groups see Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) Chapter 5; and Edward Norbeck, Religion in Primitive Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), Chapters 9 and 10.
3 Moody writes that many persons who have ‘died’ and returned to life report being welcomed by relatives or friends on the ‘other side’ (pp. 55–8); one woman described the experience as a ‘home-coming’ (p. 97).
4 Van Gennep, pp. 164–5.
5 Cf. also Mark 5 :38–42, Luke 8 :51–4.
6 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D., On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, London: Tavistock, 1969).
7 Kübler-Ross, p. 86.
8 Van Gennep, p. 168.
9 Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Death and Rebirth, Willard R. Trask (trans.) (originally published as Birth and Rebirth) (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958; rpt. Harper & Row, 1975) pp. xii ff.
10 J. L. Styan, Shakespeare’s Stagecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967; rpt. 1971), p. 33.
11 Sigmund Freud, ‘The theme of the three caskets’ (1913) in James Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, xii (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958, rpt. 1962), pp. 294–301.
12 Freud, p. 301.