Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

The structure of the plays

These three Roman plays exploit a dimension of tragedy by foregrounding a dialogue between the private and the public sphere and the effect each has on the other. To do so, Shakespeare follows his source and creates his own discipline for their structure, which often challenges expectations.

In Julius Caesar, Brutus justifies the murder of his friend Caesar to himself thus:

It must be by his death: and for my part

I know no personal cause to spurn him

But for the general. He would be crowned:

How that might change his nature, there’s the question.

It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,

And that craves wary walking.

(2.1.10–15)

In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony’s friend Enobarbus justifies his betrayal of Antony because of what he terms ‘A diminution in our captain’s brain’, which has made Antony ‘outstare the lightning’, concluding:

When valour preys on reason,

It eats the sword it fights with. I will seek

Some way to leave him.

(3.13.204–6)

In Coriolanus, the protagonist’s mother Volumnia does not desert him in the same way but, in persuading the banished warrior not to wreak his revenge on Rome by sacking the city, she condemns him to his death at the hands of the Volscian general Aufidius. At the conclusion of Volumnia’s great appeal for her son’s mercy on the city (5.3.94–124, 133–84), Coriolanus replies:

O mother, mother!

What have you done?

…

You have won a happy victory to Rome;

But for your son, believe it, O, believe it,

Most dangerously you have with him prevail’d,

If not most mortal to him.

(5.3.185–6, 189–92)

Antony and Cleopatra moves across the years and across the ancient world with astonishing rapidity because the dramatist seeks to represent a history in which the characters did move from Rome to another part of the Roman Empire, but he has to represent these movements within the timespan of a performance. Shakespeare is pragmatic. He tells a vast story within the restricted limits of a theatrical production on a particular stage. He does not focus on a single aspect but opens up the narrative to produce an episodic structure which not only allows him to violate the unities of time, place and action but also to provide an opening or debate among the play’s political adversaries. These necessarily involve plebeians and common soldiers, faced with the attitudes and decisions made by their generals. So, for example, in Act 3, Scene 7 of Antony and Cleopatra, he introduces a character that Antony respectfully terms a ‘worthy soldier’. The soldier then pleads with Antony not to fight at sea (as Cleopatra plans to do) but on land:

O noble Emperor, do not fight by sea.

Trust not to rotten planks. Do you misdoubt

This sword and these my wounds? Let th’Egyptians

And the Phoenicians go a-ducking; we

Have used to conquer standing on the earth

And fighting foot to foot.

(3.7.60–66)

Antony ignores his advice but, in creating the scene, Shakespeare introduces a number of issues: the scepticism and unhappiness of the common soldier with regard to the general that he has followed for years, and the determination of Antony not to listen to any advice but that of Cleopatra, however incorrect others deem it to be.

Similarly, in Julius Caesar the people have to make up their minds about why Caesar has been assassinated, and Coriolanus opens with the people nearing revolt because of famine and identifying Caius Martius (Coriolanus) as their chief enemy. It is no surprise, perhaps, that Bertolt Brecht, the twentieth-century advocate of Epic Theatre and political drama, was stimulated to make a translation and adaptation of Coriolanus, commenting on the plebeians in the first scene, ‘Think how reluctantly men decide to revolt! It’s an adventure for them: new paths have to be marked out and followed; moreover the rule of the rulers is always accompanied by that of their ideas’ (Willett, J. [1964: 252], Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. by John Willett. London: Eyre Methuen).

Exploring social conduct through the drama

By the time of writing Coriolanus, Shakespeare appears to have moved on from the dialogue that we saw in Henry V – written at approximately the same time as Julius Caesar – between the soldier Michael Williams and the King on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt (see Chapters 13 and 15). In this Roman play he provides a greater exploration of the significant social tensions, not just among ruling hierarchies and with soldiers but among the people themselves.

Each of these three Roman plays is termed a ‘tragedy’ but none of them lends itself to being regarded as ‘cathartic’ in quite the same way that critics have traditionally considered the four ‘great tragedies’. Some critics, of course, will argue about whether they are ‘tragedies’ or ‘histories’ and try to pigeonhole them, while others might politicize them in a different way, as does Brecht. But on our journey through these Shakespearean plays we are considering how plays open up debates, asking questions by illuminating social conduct as reflected through dramatic narrative.

What we find with Julius Caesar and Coriolanus in particular is a merging between stage and audience, insofar as an affinity is established between the people within the audience and the plebeians being depicted. Even so, there is a different emphasis with regard to the depiction of the Roman populace between Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, where in the latter the people are treated more sympathetically.

‘Coriolanus exploits the conditions within the playhouse which produces such close contact between audience members; the play contains many scenes involving Roman citizenry, which, when we consider the atmosphere within a crowded playhouse, draws in the spectators, transforming them momentarily into the very people whom Coriolanus, reluctantly, has had to work so hard to win over. The protagonist needs the people’s voices as much as the actor playing him needs the approval of the audience. Thus it is hard to miss the irony when Coriolanus remarks that he doesn’t like to speak to the people – “It is a part/That I shall blush in acting, and might well/Be taken from the people” (2.2.144–6).’

Karim-Cooper, F. and Stern, L. (eds) (2014: 221), ‘Touch and Taste in Shakespeare’s Theatres’, in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance. London: Bloomsbury (Arden Shakespeare Library)

But this understanding comes from the fact that the plays themselves are telling a good story, which other, later, writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Günter Grass (1927–2015) readily recognized.

‘Even with popular ballads or the peepshows at fairs the simple people (who are so far from simple) love stories of the rise and fall of great men, of eternal change, of the ingenuity of the oppressed, of the potentialities of mankind. And they hunt for the truth that is “behind it all”.’

Willett, J. (ed. and trans.) (1964: 265), Brecht, B., 1957, Brecht on Theatre. London: Eyre Methuen

Merging stage and audience

Julius Caesar may have been the first play to be staged at Shakespeare’s new theatre, the Globe, in 1599. As we have seen, this theatre was constructed in ‘the stews’ of London. The play opens with the rabble, with people out on the streets. The Tribune Flavius commands them:

Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home!

Is this a holiday? What, know you not,

(Being mechanical) you ought not walk

Upon a labouring day, without the sign

Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou?

(1.1.1–5)

A new theatre, a new play, the early afternoon, and who are the audience? Shouldn’t some of them at least be at work? Shakespeare, with these opening words, draws attention to the very notion of the play as a representation, not just of the fictional history, but as entertainment itself involving the audience in a relationship with the characters on stage, the first of whom answers Flavius’ question with, ‘Why, sir, a carpenter.’ It’s not impossible that someone watching that afternoon – perhaps more than one – was a carpenter, since this, after all, was possibly the first production in the wooden theatre – the wooden O – that had been recreated from the timbers of the old playhouse in Shoreditch, ‘The Theatre’.

As with the later Coriolanus, in Julius Caesar a connection is being made from the start between the governed and those who govern, the audience and the action on stage, whether they are playing nobility or commoners. We have from this dramatic opening a communal event being enacted, suggesting a shared understanding which involves everyone in the theatre. The ‘well-heeled’ audience in the sixpenny seats might even have wondered why those standing around the stage were not at work. But that is, of course, speculation. What is of further interest is the emphasis, within the representation of the Roman context, of the interaction of the plebeian with the governing classes, and the fact that the celebration is stimulated by a series of political events.

Spotlight

Rome, the greatest empire of which Shakespeare’s time had knowledge, is used by the dramatist to develop dramatic entertainments around the lives and fates of noble men depicted as individuals, within the context of a society that was in some ways not unlike the one engaged in the dramatic experience of the performance itself.

In an ingeniously meta-dramatic moment in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare makes the defeated Queen of Egypt refer to the very action of the drama itself. She recoils from the fact that she could be ‘staged’:

…Saucy lictors

Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers

Ballad us out o’ tune. The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us and present

Our Alexandrian revels; Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth; and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’th’ posture of a whore.

(5.2.213–20)

Remember that this is the boy actor, the subject of Cleopatra’s prophecy or denial, who is speaking these lines. Antony and Cleopatra was written nine years after Julius Caesar and the meta-theatrical reference had become within that time ever more assured than at the opening of Julius Caesar. But even that play, like Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, defies categorization. Once termed a ‘tragedy’, however, debates occur as to whose tragedy it is, or who is the tragic protagonist. Is it Julius Caesar, who dies in Act 3, Scene 1 (the apex of Freytag’s pyramid) or is it Brutus, whose death comes at the conclusion of the play? We began our journey through Shakespeare’s plays by defining structures and their underpinning of the dramatic plot and action, but we’ve now arrived at a point in our discussion where we can see that Shakespeare is so much in command of his material that he can open the structure expansively without it collapsing.

Elizabethan contemporary issues

Although eighteenth-century critics complained about the lack of structural decorum, Julius Caesar, like Henry V, involves itself in contemporary issues such as the reign of the ageing Queen, the famines that afflicted the rural communities of early Jacobean England, and the continued outbreaks of plague in London. The nature and make-up of the original audience in the new London theatre had knowledge of contemporary events of the day, and they were mirrored in the stories of the past that Shakespeare exploited.

Even in our contemporary theatre, the great orations to the people by Brutus and Antony following Caesar’s assassination are sometimes made directly to the audience. But to the Elizabethans watching the spectacle, the bloody nature of Caesar’s body which Antony displays, the tears in Caesar’s robes, the wounds still oozing blood, all emphasized by Antony’s rhetoric and also, to an extent, indicative in ‘theatrical terms’ of the actual executions that they could watch across London at Tyburn, were immediate experiences for which there were plenty of extra-theatrical analogues. There is in Shakespeare’s theatre a realization of the theatrical potential of earlier morality plays. In the old medieval The Play of the Sacrament, the defiled consecrated host of the Catholic Mass bleeds in the hands of those desecrating it, just as Caesar bleeds again on stage or the traitors bleed at their execution. Within that context, the plays refer not only to the larger context of Elizabethan/Jacobean society itself but also to the public discourses that sustain them.

‘In particular, this première Globe play reflects candidly on the process whereby hegemony is obtained through the control of discourse, a process in which the inauguration of the playhouse was itself a major intervention. Victory in Julius Caesar goes to those who administer and distribute the access to discourse, and the conspirators lose possession of the initiative in the action from the instant they concede Antony permission to “speak in the order of [the] funeral” (3.1.230–50). Inserting his demagogy into Brutus’s idealistic scenario, Antony disrupts the “true rites and lawful ceremonies” of the republic to expedite a counter-coup (3.1.241).’

Wilson, R. (ed.) (2002: 72), ‘Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival’, in Julius Caesar: Contemporary Critical Essays. Basingstoke: Palgrave, New Casebooks

Manipulation of perception

It is the language, the manipulation of perception, the stage management of the oratory, which works within the play, and as in a play, it sways an audience this way and that.

Spotlight

Antony and Cleopatra opens with a statement that the great general has been compromised, with his own soldiers complaining:

Nay, but this dotage of our general’s

O’erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes,

That o’er the files and musters of the war

Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn

The office and devotion of their view

Upon a tawny front.

(1.1.1–6)

He has been entrapped, as far as his soldiers are concerned, by the ‘tawny front’ that is Cleopatra. The image of Mars, the god of war, is introduced, which is to be counterbalanced in the play by that of Venus, the goddess of love. The images do not make characters into gods but put them in the service of various adversarial gods. In a telling scene before battle, soldiers hear music in the air and discuss what it should mean. One of them hopes that it might be a good omen but the other corrects him, saying, ‘’Tis the god Hercules whom Antony loved/Now leaves him’ (4.3.21).

The line functions not just as part of the story but also as a reflection on the audience’s wonder of stage representation. What is that strange music that the soldiers hear but also that the audience hears? It is a question not just for the fictional characters but also for the spectators, and one that is answered by the stage character who draws the audience into the action.

On the other hand, in Julius Caesar the audience does not witness the offer of the crown three times to Caesar – although some film directors cannot resist the temptation to visualize it. Shakespeare knew his business of writing in a disciplined way, omitting distractions, but also, as in the later Othello, forcing the audience to make up its mind from conflicting narratives. The audience hears the off-stage noise but the conspirators use the noise to persuade Brutus to join them. This is part of the continuing unfolding drama of the play, one episode leading to the next and that to the following, rendering the narrative complex and ambiguous until it is drawn to a conclusion. Indeed, although Caesar dies in Act 3 of the play, his presence prevails until the end when Brutus ‘runs on his sword’.

The domestic and the public

You will recall that, except for the prostitutes, there are no female roles in Timon of Athens, which allows for the restrictive dominance of the masculine world of Athens. In the earlier Julius Caesar, however, aspects of the play work by the exposure of the feminine attempt to ward off the determination of the masculine. Calphurnia, Caesar’s wife, begs him not to go to the Capitol because of the dream she has had. She attempts to impose domestic discipline upon him:

What mean you, Caesar? Think you walk forth?

You shall not stir out of your house today.

(2.2.8–9)

Caesar is momentarily shown to be vulnerable and is tempted by her:

Mark Antony shall say I am not well,

And for thy humour I will stay at home.

(2.2.55–6).

The domestic, however, gives way to the public through Decius’ explanation of the dream as a means to exalt Caesar with the promise that ‘the Senate have concluded/To give this day a crown to mighty Caesar’ (2.2.93–4). Caesar’s domestic subservience is shown to give way to politics and pride and male hubris overcomes Calphurnia’s female intuition.

Brutus’s wife, Portia, similarly shows a wife’s concern about her husband’s mental and physical state:

What, is Brutus sick?

And will he steal out of his wholesome bed

To dare the vile contagion of the night?

And tempt the rheumy and unpurged air

To add unto his sickness? No, my Brutus,

You have some sick offence within your mind…

(2.1.262–7)

As a proof to her husband of her loyalty, love and strength, she has voluntarily wounded herself in the thigh (2.2.298–300), and later she dies, as Brutus reports to Cassius, by swallowing fire (4.3.154). In these plays the feminine adds a dimension of humane opposition to the political, an element of humanity to a world of masculine competitive power.

The argument between Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar (Act 4, Scene 3) is in itself, however, a tense prelude to a coming public display of masculinity – the final war that will send them both to their deaths. ‘O my dear brother,’ Cassius says to him about their argument, ‘This was an ill beginning of the night./Never come such division ’tween our souls./Let it not, Brutus’ (4.3.231–3).

The personal and the political

In Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus in making his decision to leave Antony and join Caesar discovers that Antony has sent his treasure after him and that Caesar does not look kindly on such deserters, placing them in the van of battle, ensuring they face their former comrades. But there is more to it than this. Enobarbus realizes that he has deserted his friend, which causes him greater anxiety than anything the political struggle can elicit:

I am alone the villain of the earth,

And feel I am so most

…

I fight against thee [Antony]? No, I will go seek

Some ditch wherein to die; the foul’st best fits

My latter part of life.

(4.6.31–2, 38–40)

Within all of this, although ideologies and/or pragmatism in both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra lie behind the choices being made, human behaviour is still questioned in detail within the framework of these plays.

‘In Antony and Cleopatra those with power make history yet only in accord with the contingencies of the existing historical moment – in Antony’s words: “the strong necessity of time” (1.3.43).’

Dollimore, J. (3rd edn. 2004: 207), Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Political decisions are made by Shakespeare’s Roman generals in public and it is within the same arena that their private fragilities are exposed. Coriolanus has to fight his pride first to gain the ‘voices’ of the people to become consul (Coriolanus, Act 2, Scene 3), but eventually he cannot hide his disdain. The people’s Tribune, Junius Brutus, reveals his knowledge of the man’s weakness as a sure way to bring him down:

Put him to choler straight; he hath been us’d

Ever to conquer

…

Be rein’d again to temperance; then he speaks

What’s in his heart, and that is there which looks

With us to break his neck.

(3.3.25–6, 28–30)

Spotlight

Coriolanus cannot reconcile the political with the personal. He despises the people, although he fights on their behalf against external enemies, and he cannot see why he needs their approval, ‘their voices’, to become a Consul. He cannot fully play the role of the professional political hypocrite because he is conscious of his own achievement of authority, bravery and experience. To have to stand as on a stage and gain the approval of a citizenry for whom he has absolute contempt is anathema:

Most sweet voices!

Better it is to die, better to starve,

Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.

Why in this wolvish toge should I stand here,

To beg of Hob and Dick that does appear

Their needless vouches?

(2.3.111–16)

At first he does what is required of him:

For your voices I have fought,

Watch’d for your voices; for your voices, bear

Of wounds two dozen odd; battles thrice six

I have seen and heard of; for your voices have

Done many things, some less, some more: Your voices!

Indeed I would be consul.

(2.3.125–30)

Thus far he sways the populace, who remain suspicious, until Junius Brutus turns them with the revelation that his request was shot through with hypocrisy:

Did you perceive

He did solicit you in free contempt

When he did need your loves; and do you think

That his contempt shall not be bruising to you

When he hath power to crush?

(2.3.197–201)

Coriolanus is subsequently banished and turns against Rome, but towards the end of the play when he does have the power to ‘crush’, which is to lead the Volscians against the city, the feminine, in the person of his mother, dissuades him by her own appeal to him to save Rome. It is a maternal appeal but one directed to his pride. What will be his legacy if he should lay waste his own lands?

…but this is certain,

That if thou conquer Rome, the benefit

Which thou shalt thereby reap in such a name

Whose repetition will be dogg’d with curses,

Whose chronicle thus writ: ‘The man was noble,

But with his last attempt he wip’d it out,

Destroy’d his country, and his name remains

To th’insuing age abhorr’d.

(5.3.143–50)

She possesses a theatrical rhetoric which he could not master as she instructs his wife Virgilia, his son young Martius, Valeria and their attendants to ‘shame him with our knees’ (5.3.171). For him to show mercy, which he proceeds to do, will result in his own death.

‘The conclusion of Coriolanus is curiously flat. Coriolanus, the only innocent among the leading characters, is savagely murdered and life goes on in its tasteless, base way…Even a villain deserves more sympathy. We know that historically the Volsces did indeed celebrate Coriolanus as a hero and honoured him after his death. Shakespeare purposely played down those facts, which might have given the play an upbeat ending and celebrated Coriolanus; he has denied the audience the feeling of satisfaction we expect at the end of tragedy. The ending of Coriolanus takes further the deflation and scepticism which Shakespeare has been practising in his tragedies.’

King, B. (1989: 93–4), Coriolanus: The Critics Debate. Basingstoke: Macmillan

Challenging the audience

What Coriolanus does show is the impossibility of the choices that the tragic protagonist is forced into making by his contradictory commitments. Shakespeare doesn’t end the play, however, with the Volscian conspirators and Aufidius, Coriolanus’ great competitor in arms, sadistically repeating the word ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!’ while they butcher him and then stand over his corpse in triumph. Rather, Shakespeare has the Lords around them cry out ‘Hold, hold, hold, hold!’ counterbalancing the repetition of the word ‘kill’. They chide Aufidius for his lack of valour, for which he first makes excuses and then, perhaps in keeping with the political hypocrisy of the play as a whole, states:

My rage is gone,

And I am struck with sorrow.

(5.6.146–7)

How the actor playing Aufidius delivers the lines is for him and his director to decide. There is even in the ending of this play a certain fluidity. Coriolanus is dead. Is what Aufidius says to be truly believed by the audience? Or is it a further testament to the hypocrisy of politics that the play has systematically exposed? Or is it merely a reflection of Aufidius’ own sense of deflation after an event that he had longed to experience? If these and other such questions are left in our minds as we leave the theatre, then the only certainty lies in the mastery of the writing that has left us conflicted, perhaps horrified, and still ruminating on what has been portrayed. In other words, the conclusion throws the challenge of the play’s dilemmas back to the audience – the real people, not the fictional characters of drama.

It would be a mistake, however, to think the Roman plays are without emotion. Mark Antony grieves, Coriolanus despairs and Cleopatra loves. Her great argument in Act 1, Scene 3, with Antony, who will ‘desert’ her to return to the politics of Rome, concludes with a moment of intensity. Antony begins to storm out of her presence, ‘I’ll leave you, lady’, but is halted as she calls him back with an expression of love of which the audience can be in no doubt:

Courteous lord, one word:

Sir, you and I must part, but that’s not it;

Sir, you and I have loved, but there’s not it;

That you know well. Something it is I would –

Oh, my oblivion is a very Antony,

And I am all forgotten!

(1.3.88–93)

It is through that break at the end of line 91, ‘I would – ’ leading to the great statement of her incapacity to be anything but her love, that Shakespeare shows his artistic control of that extraordinary play. Indeed, it is with Cleopatra that the ‘poetry’ and the imagination reside in this play: Egypt is the place of sensuousness, fecund femininity and poetry, whereas Rome is the place of a rational politics that is no match for the feminine wiles of Egypt.

Key idea

In the Roman dramas the public and the private play off each other, highlighting aspects of both. In this, they can both conjure up and modulate emotion while engaging the intellect of the audience in debate.