Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

Spotlight

Shakespeare’s plays allow a freedom that many find difficult to accept but some, however, continue to impose strictures upon him. If they did not, how could John Drakakis, in 1985, edit a book entitled Alternative Shakespeares, a collection of radical critical essays that challenged the orthodoxy of the then current trends of Shakespearean scholarship? Yet Drakakis would be the first to note the danger of any form of literary criticism, including new historicism or cultural materialism, as being the ‘key’ to Shakespeare’s meaning. New ideas and new interpretations will continue to appear in times and ages to come. That is part of the greatness of Shakespeare.

It is said that, when some aspiring poets asked T. S. Eliot to instruct them on how to write free verse, he told them to learn first how to write a sonnet. Similarly, the contemporary artist David Hockney has complained that aspiring artists are no longer, at some art schools, being taught how to draw. As we have noted earlier, radical artists usually owe their creativity to an understanding of the established rules of their craft. Beethoven’s last symphony tantalizingly begins almost as if trying to find its way, as if the orchestra is warming up, and then builds up through the first three movements to the fourth in which, with artistic courage, the choral voice enters as a glorious instrument, taking the symphonic form to a new height. It is perhaps a metaphor for the way great artists, writers and composers constantly work from the first principles of their art, from the inheritance of others’ endeavours, through the continuing experimentation with forms and ideas to produce their work.

As we have moved from play to play, genre to genre, we have seen in Shakespeare’s works the way in which he structures his plays, how he makes them work as drama with an artistic integrity, an expression of linguistic beauty and an eye to the market. The plays needed to entertain. They needed to bring in the spectators to form the audience. We have seen how some commentators through the years have tried to appropriate Shakespeare for themselves, at one extreme deifying him, at the other denying that a man from the provinces with no aristocratic or university background could have written these texts. We have also seen how through the ages some have appropriated him for themselves and have rewritten, ‘improved’ or rejected acts, scenes, speeches and even entire plays. In this we have noted, however, that drama is a fluid art form, not entirely owned by the dramatist but in being dynamic, living in performance from age to age, agile enough to be reconstituted for new audiences and new generations.

The genre debate

Jacques Derrida was one of the writers who exerted an influence on the alternative Shakespeare movement:

‘As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, laws and interdictions are not far behind…

[quoting Gerard Genette] ‘The history of genre theory is strewn with these fascinating outlines that inform and deform reality, a reality often heterogeneous to the literary field, and that claim to discover a “natural” system wherein they construct a factitious symmetry heavily reinforced by fake windows.’

Derrida, J. (1980: 203, 207), ‘La loi du genre/The Law of Genre’, Glyph Textual Studies, vol. 7, quoted in Brown, R. D. and Johnson, D. (eds) (2000: 24), Shakespeare 1609: Cymbeline and the Sonnets. London: Macmillan

Because it does not conform to the generic rules implied by the term ‘tragedy’ which was how it was first categorized in 1623, Cymbeline has been a victim of critical uncertainty that has coloured its reception. Irrespective of theoretical warnings, some have argued that it might, therefore, be considered a ‘comedy’ but it does not abide by the rules of that genre either. The discussions will continue. Is it a pastoral? Is it a history? Is it a Roman play? Is it a tragicomedy, a term which has attracted some critical favour as evidenced, for example, by Ruth Nevo who in her analysis of the play makes a persuasive case based on structural generic understandings?

‘In Shakespearean tragic structure we regularly find protagonists in Act IV facing a great void, an annihilation of the values which have sustained them. Deprived of their objects of love or faith or hope, they experience despair, so that possible remedy, tantalisingly just within reach, is occluded from their view, or, if perceived, is snatched away by the circumstances which have swept beyond control. In his comic structures, Act IV initiates the remedial phase of the narrative, exorcising precedent errors and follies by maximizing them to the point of exhaustion. In Cymbeline, the most intricately interlocked of the tragicomedies, both vectors coexist, and are synchronized in the play’s most phantasmagoric event – the mock death of Fidele.’

Nevo, R. (1987), ‘Shakespeare’s Other Language’, reprinted in Thorne, A. (ed.) (2003: 107–8), Shakespeare’s Romances: Contemporary Critical Essays. New Casebooks. Basingstoke: Macmillan

But to engage in the ‘genre debate’ over this play is nevertheless still a means to compartmentalize and formalize structures. The questions to be asked of this play are not necessarily about genre. Does Cymbeline work as drama to attract the audience for which it was originally intended, or audiences today? Sadly, perhaps, today the answer is no since it is not regularly performed, but nor are some of the other late plays such as Pericles, Henry VIII or The Two Noble Kinsmen – plays that were written in collaboration with other dramatists. Cymbeline, however, appears to have been solely written by Shakespeare.

Provenance

The play, apparently, was enjoyed by both James I and Charles I, which may give us a clue about its provenance. It was possibly written with an eye to King James, who was attempting to revise recent history by asserting a new relationship with Spain, even though the Catholics had tried to assassinate him through the Gunpowder Plot. He wished to be regarded as a new Caesar Augustus and maybe he would have fancied himself as the masque-like Jupiter of Act 5, descending to take control of the ‘petty spirits of region low’, and so to calm their conscience in a promise to ‘uplift’ the tribulations of Posthumus:

His comforts thrive, his trials well are spent:

Our Jovial star reign’d at his birth, and in

Our temple was he married. Rise, and fade.

He shall be lord of lady Imogen,

And happier much by his affliction made.

(5.4.104–8)

Similarly, the King may well have associated himself with Cymbeline who supports the mercy shown by Posthumus to Iachimo, and that would allow him, the King, similarly to show mercy and forgiveness in his kingdom:

Nobly-doom’d!

We’ll learn our freeness of a son-in-law:

Pardon’s the word to all.

(5.5.421–3)

Whether of course this was the kind of bountiful mercy King James showed in reality is a different matter altogether. What is interesting is that it seems to echo the perception that the King had of himself.

Some, of course, might criticize Shakespeare for appearing to write with such flattering intent. We have seen earlier how he was able to take associations between the contents in the plays and royal approval/disapproval to the very limit but, without the King, Shakespeare would have had no profession. A little sycophancy was no bad investment given the commercial nature of the theatre. When Marston, Jonson and Chapman openly satirized the King in their collaborative Eastward Ho! (1605), Jonson and Chapman were arrested and threatened with having their noses sliced and ears cut, while Marston, who some believe had fled to Norwich, decided on his return, having been involved in frank ‘Palace’ discussions, to terminate his career as a dramatist, marry the daughter of the King’s chaplain and take Holy Orders himself! Playwriting could be a precarious profession and, having been patronized by James, the King’s Men would have taken this protective association seriously.

Shakespeare in the age of King James

King James was building a new Britain. He had joined the crowns of England and Scotland the year before this play, in which Wales also has a prominent function in the action, was first staged. There is a political dimension culminating in a need for peace, a rejection and indeed condemnation by Cymbeline of ‘our wicked queen,/Whom heavens in justice both on her, and hers,/Have laid most heavy hand’ (5.5.464–6). The collocation ‘wicked Queen’ has often been acknowledged as a ‘fairy story’ circulated in an oral tradition. The phrase, however, might, in this case, interest us in a different way. It must be doubtful that Shakespeare would have concluded any play during the reign of Elizabeth I with such a phrase, however much related to fairy stories. Was it possible that his flattering of the King who was making his peace with Elizabeth’s most ardent enemy, Spain, allowed him a freedom of expression not available to him under the previous monarch?

The failure to pay tribute to Rome in the play was the Queen’s, and so the reconciliation with Augustus’ Rome takes place allowing for ‘A Roman, and a British ensign wave’ since ‘Never was a war did cease/(Ere bloody hands were wash’d) with such a peace’ (5.5.481, 485–6).

Structural convention and innovation

All of this comes at the end of a long final act in which recognitions and expressions of forgiveness come quickly one after the other, in an almost bewildering and yet well-controlled manner. With the earlier comedies, as we have seen, characters escape from, or resolve, the problems posed at the start, through geographic relocation or physical disguise or both. Although discomforts, sadness, melancholy and difficulties are present in the relocations, dramatic characters are nevertheless able to reassess themselves and confirm their identities. But in this possibly more challenging play, Shakespeare innovates upon that structure, almost, but not quite, dismantling it.

Innogen (wrongly first printed in 1623 as Imogen but still spelled thus in the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works) is already married to Posthumus; he is banished by the King at the start, and has relocated to Rome where he has undertaken an improper wager with Iachimo concerning the fidelity of his wife. Iachimo hides in a trunk to gain access to her bedroom – you may recall that in The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff is forced to hide in a ‘buck basket’ to escape from his attempted adulterous escapades – and fails in his seduction but nevertheless slanders her to Posthumus.

‘Iachimo’s entry into Imogen’s [sic] bedroom from the trunk is an event of fairy-tale surrealism superimposed upon a scene of the most exact realism. The dramatist names the time…the length of Imogen’s bedtime reading…and the time of her morning call…As she sleeps, the trunk lid opens and Iachimo steps into the silence of her room…Some readers believe that Iachimo kisses Imogen…“That I might touch!/But kiss, one kiss!/Rubies unparagon’d,/How dearly they do’t” (2.2, 16–18). Surely the point is that he does not touch, no matter how close he comes, that even his expression of a wish to do so is a figurative comment upon Imogen’s beauty, not upon his desire for it.’

Brownlow, F. W. (1977: 139), Two Shakespearean Sequences. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan

The slanders can be achieved because he is able to give not only a description of her bedroom but produce the bracelet he has removed from her arm. It was a gift from her husband – you may remember a similar vaginal symbol of Portia’s ring in The Merchant of Venice. Further, as she lay sleeping while Iachimo was in the room, he observed:

On her left breast

A mole cinque-spotted: like the crimson drops

I’th’ bottom of a cowslip.

(2.2.37–9)

Shakespeare’s mastery here lies in his drawing on and adapting the various dramatic conventions, especially recognition, which have helped him develop the structure of many of his plays. The use of the ‘mole’ as a proof of Imogen’s infidelity draws, for example, on the convention of anagnorisis, or recognition, which usually resolves the complexities of the plot. Here, though, it will produce an incorrect recognition by Posthumus of Imogen’s behaviour. A physical proof of one’s identity, such as a mole, may normally be required for identity in a recognition scene to be assured, as it is in Twelfth Night when Viola and her brother Sebastian are reunited:

VIOLA	My father had a mole upon his brow.
SEBASTIAN	And so had mine.
	(5.1.238–9)

More particularly in Cymbeline, it is a ‘mole’ that provides identity when the King probes for proof that Belarius’ revelation of his lost sons are truly who they are:

CYMBELINE	Guiderius had
	Upon his neck a mole, a sanguine star;
	It is a mark of wonder.
BELARIUS	This is he,
	Who hath upon him still that natural stamp:
	It was wise Nature’s end, in the donation
	To be his evidence now.
	(5.5.364–9)

Of course, it was not ‘Nature’s end’ of proof but the dramatist’s to provide a satisfactory resolution. But in this drama Shakespeare uses the mole as recognition in two ways:

• to exacerbate and to verify Iachimo’s evil story, diverting the plot into a further problematic course

• at the end, to prove the identity of the long-lost sons in order to help resolve the complex narrative.

Further, when Imogen, disguised as the boy Fidele, awakes to find her/himself lying next to the headless body of Cloten, there is no physical proof, such as a mole, to denote the victim’s identity, only Posthumus’ clothes that Cloten had borrowed. Imogen, however, in her anguish searches for physical proof and ironically believes she finds it:

A headless man? The garments of Posthumus?

I know the shape of’s leg: this is his hand:

His foot Mercurial: his Martial thigh:

The brawns [muscles] of Hercules: but his Jovial face –

Murder in heaven! How – ? ’Tis gone.

(4.2.308–12)

Shakespeare here again distorts an important element of his comic formula to provide tragic effect in a horrific moment that is clearly not comic. It is neither tragic nor comic, nor is it tragicomic. It is simply the way the drama’s narrative works, playing off different dramatic conventions. It is possible – and is certainly believed to be so by Terry Hands – that the same actor in Shakespeare’s company played both Posthumus and Cloten. This would have added a further dimension to the action, leaving the audience unsure of the relationship between the two characters. Is one the distorted image of the other?

The dirge for Fidele

Earlier, Fidele – the disguised and now drugged Imogen who is assumed to be dead – is laid to rest by Guiderius and Arviragus, while a dirge is sung which has become one of the most famous of Shakespeare’s lyrics. In the context of the movement of the play, however, this song serves the purpose of gradually varying the dramatic tone as the complicated plot moves towards the horror of what is to come: Imogen’s mistaking of the dead Cloten for Posthumus. The dirge begins:

Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages,

Thou thy worldly task has done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

(4.2.258f.)

Key idea

Perhaps we should note, with Juliet Dusinbere (1975: 182), that Othello is not far away in composition or theme: ‘Posthumus’s decision to write against women in revenge for Imogen’s faithlessness (2.4.183) becomes, in a more passionate man [Othello], the strangling of a wife.’ Posthumus, of course, also instructs Philario to murder her. Further, the bedroom scene, with Iachimo’s desire ‘to kiss’ Imogen, may remind us of Othello’s ‘Once more, and that’s the last’ (Othello, 5.2.19). There are interesting dramaturgical comparisons to be made between these two plays.

It is no wonder that scholars and critical observers become perplexed at this play’s genre but it is a pity if such uncertainty on their part is one of the reasons why the work is not performed or indeed read as widely as some of the other great plays. Perhaps, as Ruth Nevo asserts, tragicomedy is a useful term for it in that its proliferation of motifs draws the audience into its narrative, after what is a difficult opening in which so much information has to be given. Once, however, into its stride, the play twists and turns, demonstrating Shakespeare’s wealth of dramatic experience, drawing on other plays and culminating in the complicated, though well-executed, series of final recognitions in the last act.

Shakespeare’s poems

Cymbeline was probably being written in 1609, the same year in which Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint were published. The Sonnets show the strict discipline of a poetic form and suggest a narrative sequence that had been developed over a number of years from the 1590s onwards. A Lover’s Complaint, whose authorship textual critics now question, is a young woman’s story of her seduction told to a stranger. It was probably written by John Davies of Hereford (c.1565–1618) in imitation of Shakespeare’s style.

There are 154 poems in the sonnet sequence, the first 126 addressed to a young man of high social status; the next ones, from 127 to 152, are addressed to a dark lady, an unfaithful mistress of the narrator, and involve a rival lover. The final two poems concern Cupid and Diana. Some regard the Sonnets as autobiographical, but there is no firm evidence to suggest that they are. Shakespeare created characters and narrators in his plays, so why not in his poems? In form, they differ from the Italianate Petrarchan sonnet in that the 14 lines are divided not as eight and six but as four quatrains and a concluding couplet. This form, as we saw in Chapter 5, has come to be known as the Shakespearean sonnet.

In the Sonnets and in the narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare demonstrates his dexterity as a poet. Venus and Adonis (1593) was written while the theatres were closed because of plague. It became a very popular work, making his name prior to the fame to come with the plays. It is a dramatic poem in which Venus detains Adonis from the hunt, proposing that they should make love:

‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemm’d thee here

Within the circuit of this ivory pale,

I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:

Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.’

(lines 229–34)

With such ‘steamy’ lines of sexual innuendo the poem probably secured its success. The animal and landscape imagery predominates, as bantering between the two characters takes place. Adonis repels love:

‘I know not love,’ quoth he, ‘nor will not know it,

Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it…’

(lines 409–10)

The poem presages many elements of the later plays, from Much Ado About Nothing to Antony and Cleopatra and All’s Well That Ends Well and also the Sonnets as, for example, in Venus’s reference of mortality being defeated by posterity:

What is thy body but a swallowing grave,

Seeming to bury that posterity,

Which by the rights of time thou needs must have,

If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity?

If so, the world will hold thee in disdain,

Sith in thy pride so fair a hope is slain.

(lines 757–62)

But Adonis leaves her for the hunt and is killed by a boar.

The Rape of Lucrece (1594) has a dark theme as the title implies, in Tarquin’s assault on Lucrece, for which, as The Argument preceding the poem records, ‘with one consent and a general acclamation the Tarquins were all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls’. As with Venus and Adonis, we find presaged within it much to be found in later dramas. Read the following lines, for example, and think about issues we’ve discussed during our journey through the plays:

Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud,

Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows’ nests?

Or toads infect fair founts with venom mud,

Or tyrant folly lurk in gentle breasts?

Or kings be breakers of their own behests?

But no perfection is so absolute

That some impurity doth not pollute.

(lines 848–54)

The Rape of Lucrece is written in what is known as rhyme royale, with a seven-line stanza ababbcc in contrast to the six–line stanza ababcc of Venus and Adonis.

These are both dramatic poems written by a young enthusiastic poet, displaying a tight control of his medium. The sonnet sequence, not published until 1609 but composed over time while he was writing many of his plays, is similarly disciplined. It may be tempting to consider these poems as ones that Shakespeare had been writing on and off and forming into a sequence for his own intellectual amusement and enjoyment, away from the pressure of getting his plays on to the stage. Such a view, however, maybe regarded as reductive, in a similar way that some of the biographical identification theories can be regarded as distracting. Jonathan Bate has his own speculations over the identities of the various characters possibly related to the lovers’ ‘tryst’, but referencing the final couplet of Sonnet 152 he is prompted to ask, ‘Does love come from the “I” or the “eye”, is it a “truth” or is it a “lie”?’ (Bate, J. [1998: 53]).

‘We will never know whether…the sonnets are knowing imaginings of possible intrigue…their reticence on this matter is essential to their purpose: we must be denied knowledge of the original bed deeds, because the sonnets are interested not so much in who lies with whom as in the paradoxes of eyeing and lying.’

Bate, J. (1998: 58), The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Picador

Although scholarship now generally considers the publication of the Sonnets to have been authorized, the poet W. H. Auden wrote in the 1960s, ‘Of one thing I am certain: Shakespeare must have been horrified when they were published’ (Auden, W. H. [1964: xxxvi]). It is an interesting quote, whatever the circumstances of their publication. That first publication did not attract at the time the same level of success that was seen with the earlier publications of the narrative poems.

There is a lovely little poem ‘To the Queen’ which was found only at the end of the last century and is not included in the Arden edition but is readily available in other editions. Written as an epilogue to a Court performance in 1599, it plays on the ‘dial of time’, a familiar theme that we have encountered. The Passionate Pilgrim is an unauthorized anthology of 19 poems published by William Jaggard in 1599. It claims to be ‘By W. Shakespeare’ and thereby was trading on his name and success presumably to make the publisher some money. It opens with two of Shakespeare’s sonnets, 138 and 144, which must have been in private circulation at the time, and contains two further sonnets and a poem from Love’s Labour’s Lost. These last three had been published in quarto in 1598: Poem 5, Sir Nathaniel’s ‘If love make me foresworn, how shall I swear to love?’ (4.2.106–20), and Poem 3, Longaville’s ‘Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye’ (4.3.59–72), together with Poem 16, which in the comedy is Dumaine’s ‘ode that I have writ’, ‘On a day – alack the day! –’ (4.3.98f.). Although they were attributed to Shakespeare when first published (1598/9), his involvement with any of the other poems is uncertain. What is known is that Shakespeare was unhappy about their publication.

Shakespeare’s poem The Phoenix and Turtle (1601) has perplexed critics because of its obscurity. Some see it in relation to a poem by Robert Chester, Love’s Martyr, pertaining to Elizabeth I and the death of a courtier, although relatively recent scholarship has suggested that it concerns a real-life event referring to the execution of a Catholic widow, Anne Line, who had received a Catholic priest into her home. The historian Michael Wood believes it to be a poem that ‘may take us nearer to Shakespeare’s feelings about a real event of his time than anything else he wrote’ (Wood, M. [2003, 2005 p/b: 259]).

Key idea

The Sonnets were published in 1609, the same year that Cymbeline was first performed. If some people categorize this as an inferior play, they are, I believe, misguided. Shakespeare knew how to write a sonnet. He knew how freely to experiment with his dramatic structure. He knew his business. He knew how to write a play. Cymbeline may be something of an enigma because it resists clear definition. That resistance is possibly its strength.