Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

The iambic pentameter and the sonnet form

The basic poetic line is the iambic pentameter. This term is used to describe a ten-beat line in which the words are stressed alternately in a soft/hard, soft/hard, soft/hard, soft/hard, soft/hard pattern. Just saying the words ‘soft/hard’ in this way gives the line rhythm. This rhythm can be changed, as it might be in music, to produce a particular effect. The famous opening line of Richard III, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’, starts hard/soft, but the speech generally continues on the regular pattern with a few variants. So, for example, Shakespeare elongates line 16, ‘I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty’, where Richard interrupts the regular flow of the lines referring to his own deformity. The change in rhythm thereby mimics his physical deformity by producing a deformity in the poetic line.

In his sonnet sequence, Shakespeare adopted a highly disciplined form, each poem consisting of 14 lines with an internal arrangement of rhymes and rhythms. The sonnet came from Italy and one of its forms is known as the ‘Petrarchan’, after the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–74). This sonnet form was constructed as an octave (eight lines) and a sextet (six lines). The eight-line octave has two four-line stanzas, with a repeating rhyme structure in alternate lines. To understand this, we assign a letter to the rhyming word at the end of each line. So the Petrarchan octave rhymes abab abab. This is followed by the sextet, which has its own rhyme scheme; this may be cde cde, or cdc cdc, or cde dce. Generally, the octave presents a proposition or, sometimes, a problem that the sextet reinforces, elaborates or resolves.

Shakespeare uses an innovative alternative to this structure. In his version, the sonnet consists of three distinctive quatrains (four lines), followed by a concluding two-line couplet. For example, the lines would be rhymed as follows: first quatrain abab; second quatrain cdcd; third quatrain efef; and a concluding couplet as gg. The quatrains present the narrative or issue and the final couplet sums it up or pithily comments upon it. This form is usually known as the Shakespearean sonnet. You have already come across one used by the Chorus at the opening of Romeo and Juliet, which announces the story of the play through the use of the sonnet form. Have a look at that opening speech again and put letters to the rhyming words; you will be able to see how rhyme is used to bind words together and to suggest issues to the reader or listener. The rhythm of each line is used to direct your attention to important elements of those issues, while the sonnet form itself gives some indication that the substance of the play will be about romantic love.

Key idea

A good tip is to read passages out loud. Only then will you be able to hear the rhythms of the lines and get some idea of how Shakespeare varies his style, sometimes in keeping with different speakers and sometimes mixing verse and prose.

Shakespeare was certainly writing or had written some of his sonnets at the time he wrote many of the early plays. The disciplined structure of the Shakespearean sonnet, and possibly the knowledge of the Petrarchan sonnet, has an affinity at least with the need for the structured discipline discussed in the composition, for example, of the comedies. Whether his sonnet sequence reflects reality and parts of the poet’s own autobiography or is a fictional creation by a poet who was also a dramatist has been, and continues to be, a matter for debate (and is discussed in Chapter 26), but you might like to take note of the poet W. H. Auden’s view of the critical discussions in his introduction to the sonnets:

‘Probably, more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world. Indeed, they have become the best touchstone I know of for distinguishing the sheep from the goats, those, that is, who love poetry for its own sake and understand its nature, from those who only value poems either as historical documents or because they express feelings or beliefs of which the reader happens to approve.’

Auden, W. H. (1964: Introduction, xviii), The Sonnets. New York: The Signet Classic Shakespeare

Spotlight

Successful art is disciplined. It is not haphazard. Sometimes it may appear simple to the point where people will say, ‘Well, I could have done that.’ But of course they cannot, since beneath the apparent simplicity, or masked complexity, is the experience of trial and error and knowledge of the artistic laws that the skilled artist fashions to his or her purpose. Great artists often show the courage to push such laws to their limits or to develop new ones. Writing can be a journey that the artist has to take, and is sometimes hard and challenging as he or she strives for a finished product. Often, fictional or even real pain and anguish are detected and described by critics in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. These may relate to the passing of time, the transience of youth, or mutability and loss. That, however, is matched in some of the plays and the sonnets by a celebration of the progress of human relationships and the sustainability of the art itself.

A muse of fire

Earlier we saw how in Sonnet 55, for example, it was the poem, the art, that is seen to transcend the ravages of time: ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme’. The communicative vehicle of the plays is language. Through words, the plays can create images in our minds as well as carry the narrative forward, or build up character, or provide the communication between characters. In the Prologue to Henry V, the figure of the Chorus, the narrator, tells us that the language has to work on our ‘imaginary forces’.

The play opens with the actor playing the Chorus calling for ‘a muse of fire’, so that this historical warrior king might appear like Mars, the god of war, on this stage, which he refers to as a ‘cockpit’. (This is because the Elizabethan theatre resembled the arenas where cockfighting took place.) He calls it a ‘wooden O’, describing the circular architecture of the theatre itself. The poetic rhetoric of the passage draws a picture in the minds of the audience as the Chorus regrets that the action on the stage simply cannot reproduce the glories of this king’s triumphs in his war against France and, in particular, his famous victory at Agincourt. By apologizing for the unworthiness of the stage to present such great deeds, the poet dramatically lifts the imagination of the audience. He is saying, in effect, listen to our words, watch the action we present and visualize the past: ‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls/Are now confined two mighty monarchies’.

Try reading this speech out loud to see how it modulates; note the break, for example, in line 8 between the word ‘employment’ and ‘But pardon…’ Then note the move to the questions: ‘Can this cockpit hold…?’ and ‘Or may we cram…?’ After these questions comes the answer, with an explanation: ‘O pardon! since…’ He then tells us what the actors are going to do for the audience, leading to the request that the audience imagines the scene of the action and is even persuaded to ‘Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them’. Within all of this the Chorus is actually creating the scene, while drawing the audience’s attention to what he is doing. As you read it aloud, imagining that there is an audience listening to you, the mastery of the speech’s structure will work for itself.

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,

Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,

Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire

Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,

The flat unraised spirits that hath dared

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object. Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt?

O pardon, since a crooked figure may

Attest in little place a million,

And let us, ciphers to this great account,

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

Whose high upreared and abutting fronts

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.

Into a thousand parts divide one man

And make imaginary puissance.

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i’th’receiving earth.

For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,

Turning th’accomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,

Admit me Chorus to this history,

Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,

Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.

(Henry V, Prologue, 1–34)

The speech sets the historical tone, just as the passage quoted in Chapter 3 from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘I know a bank a where the wild thyme blows’ (2.1.249f.), creates a painting in words of natural beauty tinged with magic. Even modern visual technology might find it difficult to present an imaginary picture of the kind that Shakespeare has Oberon deliver in that passage.

‘Like all his poetic contemporaries, Shakespeare had a profoundly figurative imagination. Composition was conceived in terms of figures of words, divided into tropes (a word shifted away from its usual context or signification) and schemes (words arranged in expressive patterns), and figures of thought (such as frankness of speech, understatement, vivid description, the structural division of argument, accumulation, refining, dwelling on the point, comparison, exemplification, simile, personification, emphasis, conciseness, ocular demonstration). Tropes and schemes were both a device to assist actors in memorizing their lines and a method of organization to make the words spoken on stage vivid and memorable for the audience.’

Bate, J. (2007: 43), Introduction, The RSC William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Basingstoke: Macmillan

Body and stage language

Shakespeare was thinking of his actors when he was writing his plays, but in actual performance oral language (speech) is not the only vehicle of communication. Even as you spoke the lines from Henry V, you probably moved, gesticulated, adding physical gestures and facial expressions to accompany the words. As well as conjuring up the imagery of the language, Shakespeare produces a script for the actors who are speaking, moving, sitting, standing and interacting with one another, with the physical elements on the stage itself, the theatre and the audience of which we are members. If you are reading the play, note which characters are on stage since some may not have many lines, or they may not speak at all, but they are all part of the play’s action.

Shakespeare realizes the force of this complex process and his art is to use it, bringing the various elements together as well as having to compensate for the fact that in his theatre there was no scenery of the kind we might expect to find in a modern theatre. There was, however, a canopy over the stage, on the underside of which was painted the signs of the zodiac (the heavens). Note, for example, in the tragedy Hamlet, how Hamlet, when talking in prose to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, describes the physical theatrical stage on which he is acting: a stage thrusting out into the auditorium as a ‘promontory’ with the painted ‘canopy’ above leading to the sky that can be seen over the open-air part of the theatre. This image of ‘the Globe’ communicates a further intensity in that it gives the dramatic character a context while at the same time providing opportunities to introduce an element of self-awareness through humorous jibes at the audience’s expense. Again, try reading this prose passage out loud. Shakespeare even tells his actor to signal to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to ‘look’ up from the ‘promontory’ that is the stage, to what is above it all:

…I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

(Hamlet, 2.2.297–305)

Shakespeare is here giving his actors stage directions, looking at, or even pointing to, the open air above the groundlings, the canopy over the stage. The audience members themselves are coughing and reeking – a congregation is breathing its ‘pestilence’ of air, which in time of plague would cause the authorities to close the theatres. The character is thereby reflecting upon himself, instructing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while at the same time jibing at the audience. How the audience would have reacted to these jibes from the stage we cannot tell, but to have the confidence to work in this way, and with what seems to have been the full cooperation of his audience, demonstrates Shakespeare’s command of his medium.

The play communicates its concerns by having the actors move around the physical environment of the stage, addressing each other and sometimes involving the audience directly. Such interactions between the actor and audience may have had a dramatic effect very different from the romantic, empathetic or more sentimental appeal of a passage such as this from Hamlet, as interpreted in some conventional literary critical readings. The fact is that we cannot be certain, although we sometimes see in plays by Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists the use of banter with the audience as an integral element in the drama. In the famous opening of Richard III, as with the later speeches in that play, and as with Iago in Othello, for example, we find that Shakespeare allows characters to confide in his spectators by addressing them directly, drawing them into the action and engaging them with the story. The Chorus in both Romeo and Juliet and Henry V, and as we will see with Gower in Pericles, directly addresses the audience in the telling of the story.

‘The Elizabethan stage can be anything in this world or the next: a battlefield, the Court, the underworld. The self-enclosed, self-sufficient world of the play is a primary convention. Against that lies a set of conventions…[which]…challenge or subvert the autonomy of the play world. They include choric speeches, together with prologue and epilogue. They permit direct address to the audience by clowns (Launce with his dog) and lineal descendants of the Vice (Richard III, Iago). Sometimes the stage draws attention to itself explicitly…we have learned to be alert to “act”, “scene”, “play”, “perform”…as they occur in the text of a play. Through them we understand a fundamental premise of Elizabethan dramaturgy, that the stage is also a stage.’

Berry, R. (1985: 1–2), Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan

Forms of communication

The semiotics of the theatre is a study of the communication system of the play, the world created by dramatist and actors, including oral language. It can be self-referential, deliberately artificial or affected, but going beyond that to encompass all the elements of theatrical representation. In comedy, for example, Shakespeare is not averse to self-referential humour, laughing at his own mastery of poetic language as, for example, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 4, Scene 3, when the male lovers read their sonnets aloud, not to the women they love but directly to the audience (and to each other), to great comic effect in performance. Indeed, in this play the characters persistently fail to communicate with one another.

It is sometimes held that in a number of plays the characters that are of inferior social status speak in prose, and to an extent that is the case – as with the Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom, in his ‘audition’ for the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ play within the play, aspires to speak verse, and the result allows Shakespeare to mimic the bombastic lines of some of his contemporaries and predecessors:

The raging rocks,

And shivering shocks,

Shall break the locks

Of prison gates;

And Phibbus’ car

Shall shine from far

And make and mar

The foolish fates.

(1.2.28–35)

Humorously, Shakespeare has Bottom sum up his recitation with the words ‘This was lofty’, and the character then returns to his usual prose (1.2.36). The distinctions within language, however, vary throughout the plays. Sometimes, for example, prose is used to increase the emotional impact of what a central character is saying, as with Shylock’s affirmation of his humanity and his sense of injustice at the way, it is implied, that his nation has been persecuted by the Venetian Christians:

…he [Antonio] hath disgrac’d me, and hind’red me half a million, laugh’d at my losses, mock’d at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, – and what’s his reason? I am a Jew.

(The Merchant of Venice, 3.1.50–54)

Note the accumulation of the short, sharp clauses, rising to an emphasis on the verb ‘heated’, and then the brief pause before the question.

In As You Like It, Rosalind speaks much of her part in prose, perhaps bringing a more immediate realism to what is happening behind her contrived and controlling romantic narrative. It is such variations between poetry and prose and within poetry itself that allow modulations in tone, creating atmosphere and leaving ambiguities hanging in the air for the audience to savour in the richness of the experience, as, for example, in Viola’s concealed poetically expressed admission of her love for Orsino in Twelfth Night:

VIOLA	My father had a daughter lov’d a man,
	As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
	I should your lordship.
ORSINO	And what’s her history?
VIOLA	A blank, my lord: She never told her love,
	But let concealment, like a worm i’th’ bud
	Feed on her damask cheek: she pin’d in thought,
	And with a green and yellow melancholy
	She sat like Patience on a monument,
	Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
	…
ORSINO	But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
VIOLA	I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
	And all the brothers too: and yet I know not.
	(2.4.108–16, 120–22)

This rich passage, brimming with images and gentle ambiguity, permits a softness of empathetic humour for the audience whose knowledge of what is going on is greater than that of either character being portrayed: the Duke doesn’t know Viola is a woman; Viola doesn’t know her brother is alive, but the audience does – and, in Shakespeare’s day, it knew moreover that all the actors were male. Viola’s melancholy tone feeds into the warm melancholy of the play’s action.

Music and song

Shakespeare sustains this mood by introducing music and song to great effect in Twelfth Night, reinforcing the play’s action and thereby inviting the audience to share the experience. For example, Feste sings of the transience of youth:

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O stay and hear, your true love’s coming.

…

What is love? ’Tis not hereafter,

Present mirth hath present laughter:

What’s to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty,

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty:

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

(2.3.39–40, 47–52)

The importance of the songs, however, has not always been perceived through the centuries.

‘Though everyone who sees the play notices how important the songs are for its atmosphere, it would have been hard to discover this before the twentieth century. In the eighteenth century neither “O Mistress Mine” nor “Come Away Death” was sung, and the Epilogue Song, as it was called, reappeared only in 1763.’

Potter, L. (1985: 36), Twelfth Night: Text and Performance. Basingstoke: Macmillan

From Shakespeare’s script, we understand that music is played in order to complement the poetry and the prose. In Much Ado About Nothing (2.3.57–9), Benedick humorously asks: ‘Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?’ but later he is forced to ridicule his own attempt at wooing through song or poetry, reflecting ‘No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms’ (5.2.39–41).

Spotlight

It may be that Richard Burbage, the actor who first played Benedick, had no singing voice and was also being gently mocked by the playwright. When the clown Will Kempe left the company in 1598, Robert Armin, a singer, took over the role of clown in the company. The result was that music appears to have been written into the comedies at the same time as the humour of the ‘clown’ became more sardonic. You might like to consider whether you agree that there is a change in the role of the clown after this date, by comparing the role of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, which was played by Will Kempe, and the role of Feste in Twelfth Night, which was played by Robert Armin.

The perils of over-analysis

As we have seen, scholarship has tended over the years inadvertently to underplay the performance aspect of the plays in its attempts to evaluate their literary merits. The result has been almost to imprison Shakespeare in an elitist culture. But Shakespeare’s profession was far from elitist. He needed a popular audience in order to earn his living, the composition of which continues to be debated. (See Maguire, L. and Smith, E. [2013: 86–93].) However, there are some lines that are now very difficult for us to understand without footnotes and scholarship. The language of Love’s Labour’s Lost is particularly challenging in this respect but it can be understood if, as readers or a theatre audience, we do not get too bogged down in the minutiae of scholarship. We need to remember that the progress, the fluidity and the movement of the whole is greater than the detail of particular words, phrases or lines. We have to let the play run in our reading of it, in order to allow it to work.

In everyday speech we allow the conversation to flow. Few of us can recount every word exactly as it was spoken once a conversation has come to an end, but we are aware of the tenor and nature of what has been said. Poetic language has a degree of intensity that raises it above ordinary everyday speech but, even so, we can begin understanding great art as we would everyday speech. Then we can recall moments of real significance that stand out through the economy, clarity and beauty of their expression.

The more you read, declaim or see Shakespeare in performance, the less inhibited you will become by the language itself.

The rise of the English language

Shakespeare lived in an age of great change. The English language more than doubled its vocabulary during his lifetime. He used many of the new words then in circulation, coining some himself and repeating neologisms coined by others. But generally there was a move from visual to oral communication, for example in the churches, as the iconography of the Catholic Church was replaced by oral and written communication (through sermons and through the growth of printing). In the Catholic Church, where the services were in Latin, frescoes and stained-glass windows told stories through pictures, but after the Reformation the walls were whitewashed over and much of the stained glass destroyed. English became the language of the Reformed Church under Henry VIII, Edward and Elizabeth. Everyone by law had to attend church on Sunday, where the sermon would be preached according to the new, often politically inspired religion.

Shakespeare’s language is not something to fear, although if you are not used to poetry it can, as we have noted, cause some initial anxiety. So find a space of your own and take some further major speeches, such as Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ (Julius Caesar, 3.2.74f.), delivered to the Plebeians after the murder of Caesar, or Isabella’s soliloquy, ‘To whom should I complain? Did I tell this’ (Measure for Measure, 2.4.170–86), following the indecent proposition made to her by Angelo, or any soliloquy from Hamlet and/or Macbeth, and try reading them out loud, finding the emphasis and the rhythm of the lines. Soon the language will flow, your fears will be dispelled and your love of Shakespeare and amazement at his achievements will begin to flourish.

Key idea

In today’s increasingly materialistic and violent world where spiritual values have been eroded, art, music, poetry, dance and drama can remind us of the qualities as well as the infirmities of the human condition. They cause us to pause, and as a consequence they matter, by affirming the positive nature of art and of being human.