Who is Shakespeare, and why do we study him?

William Shakespeare: life and works

Who is Shakespeare, and why do we study him?
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616) - the world’s greatest English-language playwright
- he tells stories about kings, and queens and princes
- he tells stories about tricks and mistaken identities
- he gets inside our heads and hearts
- he has written some of the most beautiful lines of poetry
- Shakespeare moves us with the courage of heroes, the foolishness of clowns, the aching of lovers

William Shakespeare: life and works

- The beginnings
- Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, probably on April 23rd
- attended Stratford grammar school
- married Anne Hathaway
- William Shakespeare’s children – Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith
- Career
- an actor
- a dramatist
- Success and prosperity
- The Lord Chamberlain's Men (later changed to The King's Men)
- the Earl of Southampton - his patron and friend
- improved financial standing and building of the Globe Theatre
- Retirement and death
- William Shakespeare retired to his hometown in 1611 and died on April 23rd 1616

William Shakespeare: works

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
(Hamlet)
- Shakespeare had a wider range of reference and allusion, theme and content
- his plays were written for performance rather than publication
- his explorations encompassed the geography of the human soul
- Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays as well as the most famous sonnet collection in English
and a number of longer poems
- He was a constant experimenter with dramatic form and content
- The sources for his plays - the classical Greek and Latin writings of Plutarch and Plautus, the
Italian works of Matteo Bandello, Giraldo Cinzio and Giovanni Fiorentino
- He did not publish his plays
- Bad Quartos
- Quartos - large-sized books made of sheets of folded paper
- Heminge and Condell
- First Folio - thirty-five plays divided into 'Comedies, Histories and Tragedies‘
- The four periods

- First period (from 1590 to 1595)

- chronicle plays
- comedies
- the tragedies
- Second period (from 1596 to the turn of the century)
- Shakespeare focused on chronicle plays and comedies
- a wide range of themes
- Third period (from 1600 to 1608)
- Shakespeare wrote his great tragedies
- the comedies no longer have the bright, optimistic appeal of earlier works
- the darker elements seem to suggest that Shakespeare was experiencing
difficulties in his personal life
- Fourth period (from 1609 to 1612)
- A return to a happier state of mind
- The universal appeal of Shakespeare’s work - timeless themes, unforgettable characters and
powerful language

Shakespeare’s theatrical genius

- Plays for audiences
- an unparalleled ability to entertain all sections of his audiences - the more intellectual elements
and the less educated spectators
- Variety of themes
- the appeal of an unsophisticated life in harmony with nature
- ambition and jealousy, deception and crime
- greed, corruption and ingratitude
- love and politics
- crime, guilt and punishment
- the all-conquering power of love
- the impatience of youth
- the pains and pleasures of love
- Unforgettable characters
- Hamlet, a complex and sensitive idealist
- King Lear, a proud misguided father
- Othello, a naive victim
- Macbeth, a soldier
- Lady Macbeth, a scheming, ambitious wife
- Richard III, a liar, manipulator and murderer
- Mastery of language
- the highly poetic quality of the language
- richly dense language, with its striking imagery and musicality
- everyday sayings in the English language
All's Well That Ends Well (title of a play)
'Neither a borrower nor a lender be' (Hamlet)
- The sonnets
- Shakespeare's sonnets - 154 in all - were first published in 1609
- two groupings of the sonnets
- Sonnets 1-126 - addressed to or concern an unnamed 'fair youth‘
- Sonnets 127-154 - about a woman who is conventionally referred to as the 'dark
lady‘
- Themes
- extraordinary range of emotions explored in the sonnets
- Styles
- the range of styles is greatly varied
- complex and rich style or simple vocabulary, syntax and form.

HISTORICAL CONTEXTS FOR THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE;

SHAKESPEARE’S LITERARY AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Historical contexts for the Age of Shakespeare

- history and theatre were closely linked
- Shakespeare wrote about the cultural conditions
- ‘Religious Changes’ - consequences for economics, foreign policy, domestic and court politics,
and even marriage negotiations
- the rivalry between Catholics and Protestants
- Companies and Compacts
- the first royal licence was granted to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester in 1574
- James Burbage - an actor and entrepreneur
- The Theatre - the first playhouse
- Shakespeare - an actor and dramatist in London in 1592
- a considerable estate
- Relations with Other Nations in the British Isles
- Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone - in open rebellion against the establishment of English
government in Ireland (January 1595 )
- he united many chiefs of previously divisive ‘septs’
- Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex - Elizabeth's one-time favourite
- Misguided military tactics
- a production of Shakespeare's Richard II
- Essex was beheaded on 25 February 1601 on Tower Green
- Relations with the Continent
- a delicate balance between the Catholic powers of France and Spain
- the defeat of the Armada
- owing to disease and insufficient supplies, eleven thousand English soldiers died in France
(about eleven hundred having fallen in battle)
- Urban Growth in the Capital
- London - one of the most populous urban centres in Europe, just behind Paris and Naples
- extensive development outside the walls
- 50,000 people at the beginning of the sixteenth century and 200,000 by the end
- a need for more taverns, shops and theatres
- the bubonic plague of 1592-94 - led to the closing of the theatres and places of public gathering
Shakespeare’s Literary and Cultural Contexts
- Acting
- actors specialized in playing particular types of character
- the clown - a comical character, often with a 'country' origin
- some 'characters' have no names at all
- the acting of Shakespeare's time was not striving for 'realism' so much as 'communication',
particularly of emotions
- asides, prologues and epilogues, choruses, dumb shows, soliloquies and songs and dances
- Authorship
- as many as four or five writers working on a single play
- companies needed a lot of plays in order to offer something different
- Blackfriars Playhouse
- the Blackfriars Theatre was leased back to a boy company
- in 1608 the resident boy company was disbanded
- the Blackfriars, like all theatres, was closed at the start of the civil war in 1642
- the stage at the Blackfriars was a different shape to that at the Globe, occupying one of the short
walls of the rectangular building
- different spatial arrangements
- Blazon
- the French for 'coat of arms‘ - dwells on or lists parts of the body
- in his sonnets Shakespeare plays on the convention and uses it to attack the insincerity of writing
of love using tired conventions:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red.
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
- Censorship
- Shakespeare's plays were printed and performed under a system of censorship
- 'Master of the Revels'
- he judged all plays put on in London
- the Master was likely to object to personal satire of influential people, mockery or criticism of
friendly foreign powers
- books were licensed by the Church
- one of Shakespeare's three published volumes of poetry (Venus and Adonis) was scrutinized by
censors
- an Act to Restrain Abuses of Players was passed in 1606
 - Classical Heritage
- 'Classical' means produced by the civilizations of Greece and Rome
- the classics supplied conventions and models in a range of genres - epic, comedy, tragedy, lyric,
satire, epigram, elegy and romance
- Education
- Shakespeare receive an education at Stratford's school
- education was almost entirely based around Latin
- Shakespeare spent ten or eleven years reading and writing Latin texts of all kinds
- Latin was the main European language of scholarship and science
- disputatio in utramque partem ('arguing on both sides of the question‘)
- to write for and against a particular position, or for and against a historical personage
- the arguments of the disputation would use as building blocks literally hundreds of 'figures of
speech'
-there are many 'figures of speech‘ to be found in Shakespeare's writings
- Patronage
- a system of reciprocal obligations between parties of different economic or social status or power
- Shakespeare was enmeshed in the patronage system as poet, dramatist and actor
- as a poet, he sought the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and William
Herbert, Earl of Pembroke
- as an actor and dramatist, he was under the patronage of (at first) the Lord Chamberlain and
(later) King James himself
- the patron provided a 'passport' guaranteeing the respectability
- Romance
- the defining feature of romance as a literary genre is its unlikeliness
- a variety of unlikely happenings and situations - heavenly visions, gods descending to earth,
omnipotent magicians and a statue 'coming to life‘
- Shakespeare's romances are comedies in the sense that they end happily, but they lack comedy's
consistent lightness of tone and represent some of the negative extremes of human experience.

ELIZABETHAN THEATRE;
PLAYERS, AND PLAYGOERS IN SHAKESPEARE’S TIME

- English drama flourished under Elizabeth I and James I for several reasons:
- theatre appealed to all social classes
- plays could be understood by the illiterate
- a strong theatre-going tradition
- the theatre was patronised by the Court and the aristocracy
- the language of drama was less artificial than that of poetry
- a great number of talented playwrights
- people had both the time and money to go to the theatre
- The principle of order
- the natural world which ascended from inanimate objects to animals, men, angels and eventually
God
- man was the central link in this chain
- man was at the centre of the universe
- the moon, the sun, the planets and the stars all revolved in orbit around the earth
 - Questioning the principle of order
- the development of modern experimental science
- what may occur if hierarchical order of the universe is broken
- chaos and tragedy
- the loss of order is reflected in the natural world and in the inner world of the characters
- the breaking of the laws of order may also result in comedy
- The Theatre
- the first playhouse built in London was The Theatre in 1576, followed by The Rose, The Swan
and The Globe (1599)
- only few companies owned its own playhouse – one of them was The Lord Chamberlain's Men
- The Globe and The Blackfriars
- playhouses were at first built outside the city walls
- Puritans believed that theatres fostered immorality
- the theatre was not free from censorship or regulation
- a branch of the government known as the Office of the Revels
- the Master of the Revels
- Structure of an Elizabethan theatre
- polygonal or circular three-tiered structures, open to the sun and rain
- The Globe - the open courtyard and three semi-circular galleries could hold more than 1,500 people
- the stage had two main parts:
- the outer stage - a rectangular platform where the main action of the play took place
- the inner stage - behind the outer stage
- hell - a large cellar below the floors of the outer and inner stages
- actors in ‘hell’ made dramatic appearances through trap doors onto the main outer stage
- a third space used by musicians, represent a balcony scene or stand for the walls of a city
- above the third level was a series of pulleys used to suspend fairies, angels, ghosts and
thunderbolts
- Special effects
- animal organs and blood were often used to make battle scenes more realistic
- a good example of an Elizabethan theatre was the original Globe theatre in London
- indoor theatres, such as the Blackfriars, differed slightly
- the pit was filled with chairs that faced a rectangular stage
- The Globe was only one kind of Elizabethan playhouse
- in 1608 Shakespeare’s company moved into a second theatre - the Blackfriars playhouse
- all theatres of the period had to be provided with two essential features:
- a stage - on which the actors moved and spoke
- backstage space - separated from the stage by a wall or curtain
- Players in Shakespeare’s time
- until the reopening of the theatres in 1660, women's parts were played by boys
- patriarchal morality preferred women to be chaste, silent and obedient
- boys could bring particular musical skills to the company
- perhaps because they had attended one of London's choir schools
- some boy players went on to make a living as adult performers
- the way young women disguising themselves as boys seem to 'play' with gender
- the learning of lines was a constant task
- the working day was a long one
- Shakespeare was not born into a theatrical family, as many actors were
 - Richard Burbage – Shakespeare’s friend and leading actor
- although actors had a well defined cultural position, their status was problematic in a society
- the connection to a prominent nobleman gave the actors a social position and protection
- working conditions dictated that players commit themselves one to another
- team spirit - comradeship and mutual responsibility
- epidemics enforced idleness on Shakespeare and his fellows
- the fleas and bubonic plague
- playhouses were regularly closed when the weekly number of deaths from plague rose above a
certain figure
- Playgoers in Shakespeare’s time
- the number and the kinds of playhouses changed over the course of Shakespeare’s lifetime
- the regular playgoers - those who went to see plays month after month and year after year
- foreign visitors particularly went to the playhouses since they were one of the sights of London
- between 1590 and 1600 two large playhouses seem to have served to accommodate most
playgoers
- the Rose and the Theatre - there would have been about five thousand people watching plays
- there were other playhouses – the Curtain and the Swan
- perhaps between two and three thousand people visited theatres on an average day
- many women from the middle classes and the gentry went to the theatres
- Shakespeare’s plays were performed to a socially mixed audience
- the elite expected that the players would come to them, and the impoverished had no pennies to
spare on the theatre
- audiences were excessively noisy, rowdy, or inattentive and much of the playgoers’ pleasure
was to be derived from listening
- an audience’s approval and disapproval, during the performance and after it, were certainly more
freely expressed than in a modern theatre
- the wide variety of Shakespeare’s plays reflects the tastes of the contemporary theatre
- Shakespeare’s genres and subject-matter were designed to fit in with the demands of a play-
going public.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE CRAFT OF LANGUAGE;

GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S WORKS

- Early Modern English - difficult to understand

- the use of pronouns
- words like “thou” (you), “thee” and “ye” (objective cases of you), and “thy” and “thine”
(your/yours) - appear throughout Shakespeare’s plays
- Wordplay
- puns - a word can mean more than one thing in a given context
- a way of illustrating the distance between apparent meanings and meanings lie underneath
- Shakespeare’s lines were meant to be spoken - reading them aloud or speaking them should help
with comprehension
- Shakespeare and the craft of language
- Latin was the language of scholarly and official exchange
- Shakespeare, at the grammar school, learned to read and write (and even speak) not English but
Latin
 - Latin had been regulated by a grammar, codified by dictionaries, and fixed by uniform spelling
- English was regarded as rough, rude, even barbaric
- after 1066, emerged what is now identified as Middle English
- there were no dictionaries that prescribe spelling, pronunciation, etymology, function, and
meaning
- Shakespeare was writing before English had been standardized
- 1600 - time of innovation and experimentation
- a linguistic climate favourable to Shakespeare’s genius
- four centuries separate Shakespeare’s English from our own
- Oxford English Dictionary – since 1100
- Shakespeare is credited with the invention of many words that entered English
- the size and shape of words were routinely changed
- words were available in double forms - ‘betwixt’ and ‘twixt’, ‘list’ and ‘listen’
- affixation - addition of prefixes or suffixes
- the sense of a word could be negated, intensified, or sharpened
- out - could be put before or after a verb to push its sense over the top - ‘out-tongue’ (to exceed
in eloquence)
- ‘out-Herod Herod’ (to exceed in violence or extravagance)
- un- was Shakespeare’s favourite prefix
- Lady Macbeth calls for the destruction of her womanhood, ‘unsex me here’ and berates her
husband for being ‘unmanned in folly’
- ‘great feast of languages’
- Shakespeare uses compounds freely
- wordplay – the feature of Shakespeare’s style that repeatedly came under critical fire
- the pun was singled out as a ‘fault’ or ‘vice’ of Shakespeare and his age
- Hamlet’s famous pun on sun/son
- the word son springs from sun, recalling Hamlet’s status as descendant of the recently deceased
king
- comic puns are funny because they are senseless
- puns on heir - a key word in the many Shakespeare’splays that concern patrilineal succession
- Shakespearean creativity
- during the 15th century, a huge amount of change affected English pronunciation, spelling,
grammar, and vocabulary
- an intimate relationship between Early Modern English and Shakespeare
- Early Modern English should be studied alongside and through the medium of Shakespeare
- Shakespeare’s ‘linguistic legacy’
- coining of new words (assassination and courtship) and idiomatic phrases (salad days and cold
comfort)
- most of the Shakespearean words still exist in modern English
- economy of expression - the hallmark of Shakespeare’s linguistic creativity
- Shakespeare shows us how to dare to do things with language
- unshout, unspeak, uncurse, and unsex - actions that exist only in the imagination
- we can learn how to lethargy, to dialogue, to word, and to joy
- Gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s works
- his witty and intelligent female characters
- Shakespeare responded imaginatively to sex, gender, and sexuality
 - crucial determinants of human identity and political power
- sex refers to the anatomical and biological distinctions between male and female bodies
- gender - ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’
- anatomical sex is to a large extent ‘natural’
- gender and sexuality - constructions of particular societies
- patriarchy - the power of the father over all members of his household
- women were under the rule of men
- women generally were believed to be less rational than men
- as a ‘feme covert’, she had few legal or economic rights
- in The Taming of the Shrew, Petruccio calls Katherine ‘my goods, my chattels. She is my house,
/ My household-stuff, my field, my barn, / My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything’ (3.3.101–3)
- at the end of the play Katherine instructs other women to welcome their subservience:
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe,
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience,
Too little payment for so great a debt. (5.2.150–8)

- Katherine enjoins other women to accept their ‘natural’ inferiority

- four virtues - obedience, chastity, silence, and piety
- not all women obeyed or kept silent
- ‘shrew’ links female insubordination to unruly female speech, and speech was one of women’s
most powerful weapons
- condemning women as shrews or scolds - a useful tactic for men wary of losing their authority
- chastity - the most important determinant of woman’s social status
- as Laertes warns his sister Ophelia about Hamlet’s amorous intentions:
Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmastered importunity.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep within the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire. (1.3.29–35)
- a woman’s ‘chaste treasure’ likewise is the focus of Much Ado About Nothing
- the ideology of chastity - summed up by the phrase ‘the body enclosed’ - a woman’s closed
mouth, and her enclosure within the home
- the pressure of women pushing against patriarchal strictures can be felt throughout
Shakespearian drama
- Shakespeare’s plays are more focused on the disruption of the social order than on the tranquil
reproduction of the household and the state
- a ‘world turned upside down’
- chaos - the basic element through which Shakespeare’s protagonists realize their identities
 - Shakespearian comedy is defined as a play that ends in marriage, tragedy as a play that ends in
death
- the importance of gender and sexuality is evident even in the history play
- Shakespeare tends to represent marriage as the ‘natural’
- ‘The world must be peopled’ (Much Ado 2.3.213)
- Shakespeare’s plays often present father’s power as limited
- in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet - daughters defy their fathers, upholders
of a harsh patriarchal law
- none of Shakespeare’s tragedies or histories presents a woman as primary protagonist
- but, women and ideas of femininity are crucial to the unfolding of both history and tragedy
- women are accused of being something other than what they seem
- in the comedies, the role of the male lover is frequently mocked by female characters.

SHAKESPEARE’S POETRY: SONNETS

- Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) - classically inspired narratives
- Venus and Adonis was one of Shakespeare’s most immediately popular works
- Shakespeare’s sonnets (written in the mid-1590s) use the Elizabethan form-rhyming
- the Elizabethan form-rhyming: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
- the Petrarchan form: ABBAABBA CDECDE
“Sonnet 29”
When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate,
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
- Shakespeare’s sonnets are poems of love and of time
- love outlasting time, and poetry outlasting all
- it is more realistic to see the poems not as having particular addressees but rather as examining
the masculine/feminine elements in all humanity and in all love relationships
- power - another major concern of the sonnets
- the power of the beloved to command is a microcosm of all power
- the suffering of a lover is a symbol of all suffering
- ambiguity is at the heart of Shakespeare’s sonnets – whether the ‘I’ loves or is loved by a man
or a woman
Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still; (Sonnet 144)
 - together with the constant preoccupation with time and transience, all serve to underline the lack
of certainty in the poems
- Characters in Shakespeare’s sonnets
- no “characters” are present in Shakespeare’s sonnets
- none of the figures to whom the poet refers is given a proper name
- The Dark Lady
- the woman discussed by the poet in Sonnets 127–152 is understood to have dark hair and eyes
- Shakespeare alternately describes her as ill favoured and attractive, while characterizing her as
sensual, tyrannical, and playful
- the “dark lady” sonnets - offer a parody of Petrarchan lovers through the depiction of a mistress
who has neither virtue nor beauty
- late twentieth century feminist studies was challenging the reliability of the poet’s account of his
mistress
- the poet turns from attacking or insulting her to begging for her kindness or forgiving her
transgressions
- as a satirical treatment of Petrarchan sonnet conventions the mistress herself becomes something
of a gross caricature of an “immoral” woman by design
- the “dark lady” sonnets specifically satirize the artificiality of sonnets written by Shakespeare’s
English predecessors and contemporaries
- targets of Shakespeare’s satire - the lover’s devotion, the beloved’s moral perfection, and the
ennobling power of love
- The Poet
- the narrator of the sonnets as distinguished from the man who wrote them
- the poet describes himself as older than the young man and the mistress
- he refers to himself as untruthful, raising doubts about his reliability
- the poet - enigmatic, self-deluded, inconsistent, and servile
- he seems unable to break away from relationships that he finds degrading
- what he says about the young man and the woman are not necessarily true or accurate
- inconsistencies in the poet’s characterization
- in the “dark lady” sonnets, the poet desperately tries to make sense of his life
- sonnets 127–151 depict the poet struggling with the recognition of his mistress’s unworthiness
and his inability to resist her
- The Rival Poet(s)
- sonnets 21, 78–80, and 82–86 refer to a competitor or competitors for the young man’s favour
and patronage
- the poet describes his rival(s’) verses as more ornate and artificial than his own
- he mentions only their verse, not their persons, and only in passing
- The Young Man
- the poet describes him as unusually beautiful, and at times his inner virtue seems to match his
outward nature
- the young - aloof, sensitive, vulnerable, impulsive, and inscrutable
- his essential egotism is also emphasized
- his beauty is generalized rather than particularized
- sonnets 1–17 are reflecting a period when the poet and the friend were establishing a personal
association
- the friendship in question came to some sort of an end
 - Themes in Shakespeare’s sonnets
- Love of All Kinds
- human love - a principal focus of Shakespeare’s sonnets
- spiritual and erotic, parental and filial, and love that ennobles and love that corrupts
- love is represented as an impulse
- it helps a person realize: patience, understanding, selflessness, and forgiveness
- love is also represented as friendship
- the sonnets portray the two faces of love as polarities - love is a joining of souls and an
enslavement of the body
- Infidelity
- the betrayal of love
- the poet attempts to justify and excuse his infidelity
- there is a direct symmetry between the young man’s extraordinary beauty and his inner self
- physical beauty was more often associated with moral virtue in the Elizabethan era
- the young man is destined to be unfaithful
- in Sonnets 92–96, poet’s response to betrayal is expressed in fear, irony, ambivalence, and
concern for the young man’s well-being
- Narcissism
- is an important motif related to the principal theme of love
- this motif is most evident in - “procreation sonnets,”
- the sonnets warn that self-love inevitably traps the narcissist into believing what false friends
and lovers tell him about himself
- self-love is portrayed as a destructive alliance with “devouring time”
- the poet himself is caught up in narcissism
- by loving a youth of incomparable beauty, the poet is able to recapture an idealized image of
himself
- (Writing) style in Shakespeare’s sonnets
- The Absence of a Narrative
- few traces of a traditional plot can be found in the sonnets
- the sonnets-sincere expressions of the speaker’s emotions
- a series of dramatic speeches
- the sonnets can be interpreted as a series of internal monologues
- the tensions between the poet and the young man, and between himself and his mistress, as
essentially dramatic in nature
- Multifaceted Language
- the linguistic inventiveness of the sonnets - one of their most celebrated characteristics
- the ambiguity of Shakespeare’s language - a reflection of his ambivalent attitude toward the
subjects of his poetry
- elements of his language - alliteration, assonance, syntax, neologisms, punning, and other forms
of wordplay, paradox
- the words and images in Shakespeare’s sonnets have multiple meanings and associations
- Interconnected Imagery
- the imagery of his sonnets is functional rather than merely ornamental
- imagery often serves as a unifying agent between individual sonnets
- images drawn from nature appear frequently throughout the sequence
- effectiveness of poetry as means of immortalizing beauty and defying time
 - the significance of immortalizing metaphors or conceits, particularly in Sonnet 15
- the poet accentuates the principal idea of that poem: that he is at war with time
- The Sonnets as Parody
- Shakespeare wrote his sonnets with the express intent of producing a parody
- he seems to have closely imitated certain sonnets by his contemporaries
- Sonnet VII in Thomas Watson’s Passionate Centurie of Love is identified as a candidate for the
basis of parody in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130
- there are numerous other sonnets that Shakespeare is likely to have read, and whether or not he
intentionally parodied specific verses
- Shakespeare’s lyrics are passionate, intense, and emotionally vivid
- various scholars have attempted to identify the persons who were the original models for the
persons the poet refers to and addresses.

SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS;
THE GENRES OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

- Shakespeare’s heroes are mainly historical figures, kings of England

- character and motive are more vital to his work than praise for the dynasty
- Shakespeare had an unparalleled ability to entertain all sections of his audiences
- as his career progressed his explorations encompassed the geography of the human soul
- Shakespeare’s plays
- a working life in the theatre and a constant experimenter with dramatic form and content
- the balance between the role of king and the role of man - one of Shakespeare’s main concerns
- time and again Shakespeare’s characters ask, ‘What is a man?’
- aspects of human vulnerability are exposed, examined, and exploited for their theatrical
possibilities
- all Shakespeare’s plays have come down to us in five acts
- Shakespeare both affirms and challenges accepted values
- he challenges any automatic right to power
- the necessary acceptance of human defects as part of what makes humanity valuable
- ‘darker’ or ‘problem’ plays
- the ‘problem’ areas can be seen as examinations of serious social and moral concerns
- Shakespeare’s plays do not present easy solutions
- all the ‘form and pressure’ of mankind in the modern world
- he imposed no fixed moral, no unalterable code of behaviour
- Variety of themes in Shakespeare’s plays
- Shakespeare’s themes are frequently the great abstract, universal themes, seen both on the social
level and the individual level: ambition, power, love, death, and so on
- the theatre permitted him to create characters that embody the themes directly
- Mastery of language
- Shakespeare’s characters speak modern English
- the language of Shakespeare - the first and lasting affirmation of the great changes that took
place in the sixteenth century
- the highly poetic quality of the language - a feature of all Shakespeare's plays
 - Unforgettable characters
- Shakespeare created characters who speak to the audience in language that is recognisably the
same language as they speak
- imperfectability has not only to be understood, but has also to be enjoyed in all its individual
variety
- the ‘wisdom’ of a long line of clowns and fools; comic characters with a serious purpose

When we are born, we cry that we are come

To this great stage of fools.
(King Lear)
- an unforgettable gallery of characters: Hamlet, King Lear, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet,
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Othello and Desdemona, Iago, Shylock, and many others
- the timeless universality of their preoccupations, desires, fears, and basic humanity
- The genres of Shakespeare’s plays
- ‘Comedies’, ‘Histories’, and ‘Tragedies’
- comedy and tragedy - part of traditions stretching back to classical times
- history play - had come forth much more recently
- several rudimentary oppositions between the comic and the tragic
- comedies take their plots from fiction, tragedies from history
- comedy involves men of middling estate; its perils are small-scale, its outcomes peaceful
- in tragedy - the persons and issues are exalted and they end unhappily
- comedy - beginning in turmoil but ending in harmony, celebrates life
- tragedy’s course from prosperity to calamity expresses rejection of life
- while in tragedies threats and dangers are fulfilled, in comedies they may be evaded
- Shakespeare’s comic protagonists regularly face alienation, abandonment, and death
- in tragedy - the causal chain unwinds inexorably towards destruction
- no single formula informs Shakespeare’s tragedies
- the decisive tragic act may be variously placed
- in the the tragedies of the 1590s Shakespeare’s focus shifts from heroic suffering to the clash
between personal integrity and political imperative
- the tradition of comedy was as mixed as that of tragedy but considerably richer in examples
- courtship is the staple activity in the comic drama of Shakespeare and his Elizabethan
contemporaries
- while these plays pursue love wholeheartedly, they are equally energetic in negating death
- they invoke the end of life only to avoid it, undo it, distance it, laugh it off
- only the most minor characters in them actually die
- the frequent disguisers and deceivers manipulate others through their superior knowledge
- his own tradition of women who control events in their plays
- Shakespeare’s ‘women on top’ - servants over masters and women over men
- the comic mode placing servants over masters and women over men
- the 1623 Folio lists Shakespeare’s histories between the comedies and the tragedies
- history play arose at a time when the sense of nationhood was crystallizing in England as in other
European states
- history play was tied more closely than the other two genres to what actually happened, or was
understood to have happened
- viewers liked variety in their theatrical entertainment - the mixture of kings and clowns, hornpipes
and funerals
- generic traditions in Shakespeare’s time served as guides: to playwrights in developing their
material, to audiences and readers in understanding the plays they produced
- William Shakespeare was not a political commentator
- he was a psychologically acute observer of humanity who had a unique ability to portray his
observations, explorations, and insights in dramatic form
- his history plays, his tragedies and comedies are still quoted endlessly, performed in every
language and culture in the world.

TRAGEDY: INTRODUCTION
ROMEO AND JULIET

- Tragedy: introduction
- Aristotle heads the selection of definitions of tragedy as he has been the most influential thinker
on Western tragedy who was describing the Greek tragedy of the 5th century BCE
- English medieval tragedy, differs from Elizabethan tragedy
- historically and culturally specific conditions created different possibilities for thinking and
writing
- not all tragedies end in death, though all of Shakespeare’s do
- Shakespearean tragedies do have heroes, some more heroic than others, and one or two very
hard indeed either to admire or to sympathise with
- neither Shakespearean tragedy nor earlier Elizabethan tragedy would usually emphasise the
individual to the exclusion of the state
- their closure depends on a restoration of political order following the central death or deaths of
individuals
- the focus is on two things: how the tragic hero will be remembered and how the rest will carry
on
- the tragic hero passes from a state of happiness to a state of despair because of some weakness
- tragic flaw
- he is not evil - he is a mixture of good and bad
- he is usually doomed from the beginning
- there are often premonitions of his downfall in what he says
- a series of unfortunate events lead to his downfall
- Romeo and Juliet
- William Shakespeare’s tragedy of star-crossed lovers and one of the most popular romantic
tragedies in English literature
- Shakespeare adapted his drama from a folktale
- a story about growing up, experiencing love, rebelling against authority, surrendering to the
power of fate, and facing mortality
- Romeo and Juliet is a play about life
- The significance of the chorus
- Romeo and Juliet opens with a chorus
- the chorus narrates the prologues to Acts 1 and 2
- choric forms of utterance pervade the play, often voiced by the lovers themselves
This day’s black fate on mo days doth depend:
 This but begins the woe others must end.
(3.1.121–2)

Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,

As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.
(3.5.55–6)
- the tragedy here is death itself, the cutting off of life
- one of the effects of the pervasive choric perspective is to wrap up this love story as precisely
that - a story
- the main themes in this tragedy are: love, love and death, hate, passion and fate
- Love
- in some ways, the young lovers’ emotions reflect the practice of so-called courtly love
- courtly love - a late medieval tradition that defined what love was and established a code of
behaviour for lovers
- Romeo and Juliet fall in love at first sight and their love is strengthened rather than weakened
by the challenges they must face
- they have a love that has a spiritual quality
- the couple treats love with great reverence
- they are grounded in one another, facing their fears as they try to define their love not by the
book but through their feelings
- Love and death
- the intensity of emotion combine with elements of chance to bring an expected end
- banishment is an extremity almost expected following the excess of love and anticipating the
final unboundedness of death
There is no end, no limit, measure, bound,
In that word’s death. No words can that woe sound;
(3.2.125–6)
- the lovers dies upon a kiss - an essential union between love and death
- death is offered as both avoidable (as in comedy) and unavoidable
- Hate
- Shakespeare offers no reason for the hate between the Capulets and the Montagues
- the hate is questioned when it extends to Romeo and Juliet
- because of this hate that Romeo and Juliet create such an instantaneous and pure love
- they question the hate that has been handed down to them
- Passion
- the most obvious example of passion is that of Juliet’s and Romeo’s love for one another
- in act 2, scene 4, Mercutio compares different kinds of passion
- Mercutio believes that Romeo’s passion for love has made him blind, weak, and useless
- passion is exemplified in other characters as well
- there is a quiet but dominant passion that drives the prince to find peace between the feuding
families
- Friar Laurence’s misguided passion that drives him to marry Romeo and Juliet
- Fate
- the characters are helpless to do anything other than what fate directs them to do
- fate has twisted the fairy tale that marriage might end the feud between the Capulets and
Montagues
- it is their deaths and not their love that brings the two families together
- fate has played against Friar Laurence, disallowing his letter to be delivered
- Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed lovers - their love may be strong but it is not meant to last
- Writing style in Romeo and Juliet
- Passage of Time
- Shakespeare has set up the short time frame to underscore the lovers’ hasty actions
- Shakespeare ironically contrasts the notion of time and haste with a particular character’s
dialogue
- the contradiction between the play’s hurried pace and Friar Laurence’s warning to Romeo at the
end of act 2, scene 3: “Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.”
- Construction of a Tragedy
- Romeo and Juliet is often considered an experiment in tragedy
- three main ways to interpret Shakespeare’s arrangement of events and circumstances in Romeo
and Juliet
- one method of looking at Shakespeare’s arrangement of events is to regard Romeo and Juliet as
helpless victims of fate
- a second perspective is that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of providence or divine will
- a third reading of Shakespeare’s tragic design holds that the lovers’ own reckless passion leads
to their double suicide
- Use of Puns for Comic Relief
- Shakespeare uses many puns in this play to offset some of the tension of the sword fights, the
deaths, and the anxiety
- the words that are used as puns no longer exist
- “grave man” - a serious man as well as a dead man
- Imagery through Metaphor
- using metaphors as imagery involves bringing two unlike things together and showing how they
are actually very similar: “Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs”
- this allows the audience to first see the smoke, then replace that image with a person sighing
- Shakespeare uses the metaphor not only to describe the feeling but to help the audience to share
in that feeling as well
- imagination and reality in Romeo and Juliet seem to be combined in a system of stresses and
strains.

HAMLET

- the story of Hamlet contains all the elements necessary for a good tragedy
- the protagonist is a young prince of Denmark who is caught between his desire for revenge and
the dictates of his conscience
- Hamlet’s dilemma constitutes the focal point of the action
- Core scene: 5.1
- long and complex scene that opens with two gravediggers digging Ophelia’s grave and
discussing about Christian burial
- scene 5.1 is a sequence of different perspectives on death prior to the final deaths of the tragedy
- an important point about social class - Ophelia would not have received Christian burial had she
not been of gentle birth
- even after death distinctions are made that rank one human being above another
 - the gravedigger sings of how death comes to all, young and old alike and carelessly throws up a
skull
- Hamlet expresses shock at such lack of feeling
- Hamlet whom we now see in the graveyard is very far from mad
- this Hamlet, joking with the gravedigger and making serious observations about life and death,
is self-evidently sane at this moment
- the play recalls an older tradition of Christian drama, combining the fear of death with the hope
of resurrection
- a skull turns out to be personally meaningful to Hamlet
- the image of Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull is one of the most famous emblematic moments in
early modern theatre
- a moment that faces in contradictory directions
- the lament for the past
‘Where be your jibes now – your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that
were wont to set the table on a roar?’ (179–81)
looks back to a classical tradition of lament, known by its Latin name as ‘ubi sunt’ (where
are . . .?)
- Themes in Hamlet
- The Active versus the Contemplative Life
- as the hero of a revenge tragedy, Hamlet ought to be a man of action, not of thought
- Shakespeare’s hero is a contemplative man
- he thinks about the actions he will take and whether taking them will be morally right
- he meditates on the difficulties and pains of being alive and the fearsomeness of death in his “To
be or not to be” soliloquy
- Hamlet ultimately proves quite active – he kills Polonius and he leaps into Ophelia’s grave and
grapples with her brother
- Revenge
- in a revenge tragedy, one act of brutality gives rise to a counteract, which gives rise to another,
until all the characters are murdered
- Hamlet is a complex example of a revenge tragedy
- Hamlet is a man with greater consciousness than the typical heroes of revenge tragedies usually
possess
- parallel revenge plots
- Hamlet has a play within a play that tests the guilt of the murderer already identified as such by
the ghost
- the deaths themselves are not framed in the ritual of a masque but arise out of a sequence of
unlucky accidents
- Spying
- nearly every character in Hamlet spies on another character
- the king orders Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet and Ophelia is used by the king
and her father as a bait for their spying
- Horatio, too, at Hamlet’s request, becomes a spy during the performance of The Mousetrap
- Doubt and resolution
- what drives Hamlet to unpack his heart is doubt
- it can be interpreted in a number of ways: as religious scepticism, as political resistance or as an
existentialist commentary on the nature of being
- the Ghost is indeed a dubious figure
- Hamlet’s doubts about whether to trust its commands cannot be dismissed as mere prevarication
- in the last act, Hamlet seems to reach a new calm based on a growing trust in providence:
‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will’;
‘There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow’
(5.2.10–11, 197–8)
- reconcilement to death is no purely prejudiced matter
- the beginning of the gradual restoration of order routinely brings the tragedies to a close
- Hamlet himself makes his final peace with the world by seeking to impose the restoration of
order through narrative closure
‘Absent thee from felicity awhile’
‘And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story’ (5.2.331–3)
- Acting and being in Hamlet
- an uncertainty as to when Hamlet is being ‘himself’ and when he is playing a part
- the position of such a character is paradoxical
- the audience has to move between awareness of the actor as character and the character as actor
- speaking in riddles, partly to the other characters, partly to the audience and partly to himself -
he does not ‘belong’ to the world of the play in the way that other characters do
- Shakespeare takes his experimentation with tragic form to new levels
- a necessary division between doing and being and a resistance to being defined by the act
- being and not being is not just a matter of being alive or ceasing to be, but of thinking or doing
- revenge is a part that Hamlet feels a duty to take on but cannot adapt to his being
- he is shamed, ironically and necessarily, by a player whose performed weeping seems to have
more force than his own inaction:
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her,
That he should weep for her?What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? (2.2.494–7)
- the play not only keeps inserting further plays into the play but also has Hamlet instruct the
players at length on how to act
- The Mousetrap – the play within the play
- Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy becomes a performance staged before an
audience inside as well as outside the play
- the women of the play are represented as men’s puppets
- Ophelia is directed and constrained by Polonius, Gertrude allows both Claudius and Polonius to
direct her
- both women are observed and despised by Hamlet
- Hamlet is disgusted by his own inability to act the appointed part of revenger
- he is even more disgusted by what he sees as a gendered willingness amongst women to betray
whatever vows of loyalty
- his mother’s brief performance of mourning, ‘Like Niobe, all tears’ (1.2.149)
- Ophelia becomes the focus of his same generalised bitterness against woman:
‘I have heard of your paintings well enough.
God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another’ (3.1.141–3)
 - Hamlet is the most isolated and singular of all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes
- a division between being and acting
- the complexity of Hamlet’s quasi-madness
- Claudius uses the image of the harlot as a metaphor for his own degradation:
The harlot’s cheek beautied with plastering art
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word; (3.1.50–2)
- the stereotype of the female chatterbox is brought in
- Ophelia’s passivity is the product of her gender (as represented in this play)
- Writing style in Hamlet - Punning
- in Hamlet, Shakespeare can be said to have given punning a rhetorical and dramatic relevance
- Revenge Tragedy
- these tragedies typically involve an initial crime that engenders waves of retribution for the crime
- these plays are often violent, brutal, and graphic
- by virtue of his intellect and philosophical disposition, Hamlet questions the conventions of his
role
- Soliloquy
- Hamlet is famous for its soliloquies, particularly the one that Hamlet relates in act 3, scene 1,
beginning “To be, or not to be”
- Shakespeare gave Hamlet several soliloquies, a feature that emphasizes the character’s inward
looking nature and the activity of his mind
- Hamlet is regarded as being among the greatest plays ever written
- the problem of what became known as Hamlet’s delay
- Hamlet is a profound study of the human condition with great dramatic excitement and
penetrating studies of human characters and relationships.

MACBETH

- at about 2100 lines, Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy and among the briefest of his
plays
- many believe that it was composed for a performance before King James I, who had a deep
interest in witchcraft
- intriguing portrayal of madness, ambition, and the supernatural
- it also encourages discussion about gender roles, human motivation, and what makes a good
king
- Shakespeare displays a sensitive understanding of the human condition by dramatizing the
devastating effect evil has on those who yield to temptation and sin
- ultimately, time and order are restored through the actions of the defenders of goodness
- Ghosts and witches
- the opening scene of Macbeth is unlike realistic openings with its thunder and lightning and its
three witches speaking in riddling rhyme
- ‘witches’ - ‘the Weird Sisters’
- Banquo’s puzzlement on first seeing them
- Macbeth is first presented to us through the witches’ speech
- Macbeth’s occupation of two worlds simultaneously
- the word ‘rapt’, meaning ‘transported’ or ‘enchanted’ is used to reiterate the way the witches
transport him almost literally into another world:
BANQUO
My noble partner
You greet with present grace, and great prediction
Of noble having, and of royal hope,
That he seems rapt withal. (1.3.54–7)

BANQUO
Look, how our partner’s rapt.
(1.3.143)
LADY MACBETH
[reading from Macbeth’s letter to her]
‘When I burn’d in desire to question them further, they made themselves
air, into which they vanish’d. Whiles I stood rapt in the wonder of it, came
missives from the King, who all-hail’d me, ‘Thane of Cawdor’; by which
title, before, these Weird Sisters saluted me.’ (1.5.3–9)
- his struggle to maintain an existence across two worlds is made worse by the need for conscious
craft and deceit
- he must ‘look like th’innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t’ (1.5.64–5); ‘False face must
hide what the false heart doth know’ (1.7.83)
- the first utterance is Lady Macbeth’s command; the second, which is also the closing line of a
scene, is Macbeth’s statement of resolve
- he finds it impossible to maintain a separation between the worlds he occupies
- the first sign - the appearance of the dagger
- a second sign - his inability to say ‘Amen’ in response to hearing Duncan’s son cry out ‘God
bless us!’ (2.2.26–32)
- a third sign - the voice that cries out to him in his imagination that he himself will sleep no more
(2.2.34–42)
- a fourth - the inability to wash off the blood
- the climax of these invasions of the other world is the appearance of Banquo’s ghost
- it has a substantial reality beyond Macbeth’s imagination, since no-one but Macbeth sees it
- towards all of these invasions of another world, Lady Macbeth is brisk and dismissive, urging
Macbeth not ‘to think / So brainsickly of things’ (2.2.44–5)
- convinced that ‘A little water clears us of this deed’ (2.2.65–6)
- given Macbeth’s description of his own anxiety as his ‘fit’, Lady Macbeth calls upon the same
word to explain Macbeth’s extraordinary behaviour:

Sit, worthy friends. My Lord is often thus,

And hath been from his youth: pray you, keep seat;
The fit is momentary; upon a thought
He will again be well. (3.4.52–5)
- the word ‘fit’ positions Macbeth’s behaviour as a sickness, an aberration
- even Lady Macbeth is to find herself susceptible to such uncontrollable manifestations of anxiety
- the scene of her sleepwalking - one of the best-known set-pieces of Shakespearean tragic
performance
 - her strong agency and will are lost to the other world that takes her over
- Deeds of violence in Macbeth
- the violent and bloody images - the horses that eat each other, the mother plucking her child
from the nipple to dash out its brains, the bloody child, the ‘blood-bolter’d Banquo’ (4.1.123)
- they conjure up a world where this kind of interaction seems the norm:
MACBETH
It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood:
(3.4.121)
- the edge of humanity
- the two central protagonists are capable of inhuman cruelty
- these two oppose one another’s views of manhood
- it is the female partner who verges on inhumanity by insisting that she would have plucked her
nipple from the infant smiling in her face and dashed its brains out (1.7.47–59)
- Core scene: 4.2
- several important perspectives:
- a brief view of the ordinary life that goes on outside the violent and hallucinatory world
of Macbeth and his wife
- the representation of a very different woman and a very different set of family
relationships
- the intimate exploration of real fear
- this scene shows Macbeth’s reign of terror that brings not only death but also loss of faith
- one of the saddest moments of the scene is when Macduff’s son asks his mother ‘Was my father
a traitor, mother?’ and she answers: ‘Ay, that he was’ (4.2.44–5)
- womanhood is explored through the contrast between Lady Macduff’s care for her children and
Lady Macbeth’s willingness to dash her child’s brains out
- an image of deep family love inaccessible to either Macbeth or his wife
- Signifying nothing
- Macbeth does behave monstrously
- can a monster be a tragic hero?
- what Shakespeare does is to draw the audience into Macbeth’s inner world so closely that they
cannot help but feel what it is like to be him
- Macbeth finds himself so empty - even the death of the one person to whom he has seemed close
cannot touch him:
She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.
(5.5.17–18)
- the character is given lines that reduce him to a mere caricature of the actor who plays him:
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (5.5.24–8)
- a climax of desperation
- it is the capacity for despair that keeps him human and allows the play to achieve the status of
tragedy
- Themes in Macbeth – Ambition
- ambition unchecked by morality
- Lady Macbeth is the character who personifies this theme
- Macbeth’s ambition is within him from the beginning
- without the encouragement of the witches and Lady Macbeth, it might have been restrained
- Shakespeare demonstrates that ambition does not reside only alongside evil
- unlike Macbeth Banquo’s ambition is perfectly content in the future of his family
- he has no aspirations of his own to overthrow Macbeth
- Macbeth, however, sees Banquo as a threat that must be eliminated
- Kingship
- the theme of kingship - good and bad, legitimate and illegitimate
- what happens to a country when it falls under the reign of a self-centred, immoral, and evil king
- he uses monarchical means to carry out personal revenge
- Macbeth represents a monarchy of bad kingship and an ultimately illegitimate claim to authority
- in contrast to Macbeth are the characters Duncan, Malcolm, and King Edward
- Duncan appears to have been a noble, kind, and just king
- Malcolm is the rightful heir to the throne and is perceptive, bold, moral, shrewd, militarily gifted,
and deeply loyal to Scotland
- Evil
- Macbeth is a complex study of evil and its corrupting influence on individuals
- larger view of evil’s operation in the world
- the tragedy is resolved through the forces of good that ultimately correct all the evil Macbeth
has unleashed
- the witches represent a supernatural power that introduces evil into Macbeth
- their power lies in tempting humans like Macbeth to sin
- the evil that initially manifests itself in Duncan’s murder expands until it corrupts all levels of
creation, contaminating the family, the state, and the physical universe
- Gender Roles
- Shakespeare’s ambiguous treatment of gender and sex roles
- he makes the witches less human by taking away their femininity
- Lady Macbeth prepares to “unsex” herself, to suppress any supposed weakness associated with
her feminine nature
- Macbeth’s feelings of doubt and insecurity which his wife attributes to “effeminate” weakness
- the more Macbeth follows his ideal understanding of manliness, the less humane he becomes
- this perverted version of manhood ultimately separates him from the rest of humankind
- Writing style in Macbeth – Symbolism
- the weather in the play symbolizes Macbeth’s condition
- there are thunderstorms, symbolizing the violence and chaos being stirred up in Scotland
- blood symbolizes two elements: the ascension to the throne, and also the guilt from which the
Macbeths can never escape
- Duncan’s blood on Macbeth and Macbeth’s blood on Macduff represent changes in the
monarchy
- the blood Macbeth must clean from his hands, and that which Lady Macbeth seems never able
to clean from hers, symbolizes the guilt of their heinous acts
- blood - a stain on their conscience that cannot be removed
- Depiction of Time
 - Macbeth dislocates the passage of time
- Macbeth’s evil actions interrupt the normal flow of time
- chronological time establishes the sense of physical passage in the play
- providential time overarches the action of the entire play
- Imagery
- infants symbolize pity throughout the play, and breast-milk represents humanity, tenderness,
sympathy, and natural human feelings
- another set of images focuses on sickness and medicine
- other major image patterns include sleep and sleeplessness, order versus disorder, and the
contrast between light and darkness.

FARCE: THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR

- the theatrical term ‘farce’ - ‘French farce’

- plays set in bedrooms or drawing-rooms with lots of doors and hiding spaces
- this type of drama works via a frenetic pace and split-second comic timing
- ‘a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude
characterisation and ludicrously improbable situations’
- words are often less important than actions
- the church-going members of the medieval community had to laugh
- there was no way out of this stark medieval model: heaven or hell
- Shakespeare’s intellectual environment - a possibility of ‘heaven on earth’
- the Shakespearean farce indicates an aesthetic connection - a link to the world of romance
- the comedies of the Roman playwright Plautus - the formal basis of farce-plots - featuring lovers
who can’t be united because of parental opposition, servants both quick witted and dull who assist
their cause, financial crises and scams, disguise and mistaken identities, and a last-minute
resolution
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- a local ‘real world’ setting - in the royal town of Windsor
- Queen Elizabeth I had enjoyed the character Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV and wanted to see a
play about Falstaff in love
- The Merry Wives of Windsor is not really about Falstaff in love but rather about Falstaff in
trouble
- he is full of himself and fails miserably to seduce two married women
- for Shakespeare’s audiences the plot and characters would have made this a familiar play
- the play is unusual in reference to the other plays of Shakespeare
- the language is written mostly in prose rather than in a combination of blank verse and sonnet
- the only comedy that is completely set in the England of Shakespeare’s time and depicts the
family lifestyle of ordinary citizens
- a citizen comedy
- although there is a threat of betrayal—that is, if Falstaff gets his wish—Shakespeare turns the
theme on its head
- that is how he created much of the humour of this play
- the local knight does not get his way; and the husbands (and wives) prevail
- Themes in The Merry Wives of Windsor – Jealousy
- the character Ford - an extremely suspicious man
 - Ford is rude with his wife, accusing her at every turn, of betraying him
- she hatches a plan not only to humiliate Falstaff but also to teach her husband a lesson
- jealousy - green-eyed monster - can debilitate a person’s rational mind and drive that person
crazy
- Ford has the potential to be such a man
- Ford’s jealousy, has reached such a high pitch that it has completely consumed his life
- through Ford, Shakespeare demonstrates how blind jealousy can make a person
- had Ford’s wife been less in love with her husband, the jealousy might have ruined them both
- Love and Marriage
- the love of Mistress Page and her husband
- a very healthy type of love and marriage
- his wife’s love for him is secure
- Page also demonstrates a more general love - a love of mankind
- standing opposite this pair, is the marriage of Ford and Mistress Ford
- Ford is extremely jealous and insecure both in himself and in his wife
- Mistress Ford patiently waits for her husband to rid himself of his negative emotions
- a foil for both of these married couples is Sir John Falstaff
- he is the worst example of a husband that is involved in this play who shows no emotions for
anyone, except for himself
- Falstaff seems incapable of any feeling
- Money
- the issue of a lack of money, represented by Falstaff and his crew of men
- money, in this play, does not determine class
- Falstaff - the major representative of the impoverished nobility
- Revenge
- the wives seek their revenge on Falstaff for his having been so arrogant
- they heap more punishment upon him because they find him such an easy target
- Falstaff just happens to be the character through which Mistress Ford can teach her husband a
lesson
- Falstaff is beaten, to the enjoyment of the wives
- Shakespeare encourages revenge, it appears, or at least that was the convention of comedy in his
time
- with revenge comes laughter and enjoyment
- the play does soften the edges a little at the end
- Writing style in The Merry Wives of Windsor
- Shakespearean Citizen Comedy
- the basic elements of this play: the jealous husbands, the merry wives, the practical jokes, and
the leering knights
- most of the humour is based on the differences in the various classes
- the merry wives - more faithful to their vows of marriage and more clever in their duping of the
knight
- instead of the husband becoming the fool, the knight was made into one
- Shakespeare’s Blank Verse
- Shakespeare typically writes his plays in blank verse
- Shakespeare used blank verse to set off the language of members of the upper classes from that
of the common citizens
- the majority of the lines in this play are written in prose
- Puns
- it is created when one word that sounds just like or similar to another word is used to either make
another person laugh or to confuse that person
- a language must have homonyms, or words that sound the same but are spelled differently
- English has a lot of these words
- one example of a homonym – a set of words see and sea
- in act 4 Shakespeare has fun playing with words
- this is another way that he can make his audience laugh
- the comedy enacts the humiliation of the fat knight
- Merry Wives – female ‘politicians’ – who control the plot of the comedy
- comedy celebrates the community’s ability to resolve its problems without the violence of
revolution
- Falstaff is teased and pinched out of his lecherous folly by a band of children
- the women and children of the community working together to drive out the disruptive and
anarchic force of unbridled lust and greed
- children are a sign of the community’s vitality
- irresponsible lechery such as Falstaff ’s is destructive of the larger picture
- the play demonstrates that the married women have a more realistic grasp of what is actually
going on in their small world
- their acts of ‘revenge’ are all based on their traditional feminine roles, their areas of domestic
expertise
- the anarchy of farce is comfortably brought into domestic harmony, under the control of the
‘merry wives’.

COURTLY LOVERS AND THE REAL WORLD

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

- courtly love - amour courtois

- its principal characteristics are: the courtly lover idealizes his beloved; she, his sovereign lady,
occupies an exalted position above him
- an emphasis on the physical beauties of the distant beloved
- the physical sufferings of the frustrated lover - sighing, burning, lack of appetite, sleeplessness,
etc.
- the 14th century Italian poet Petrarch wrote a collection of poems (Canzoniere or Rime) about
his love for a lady called Laura
- they were translated, adapted and imitated by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey
- most of the writers were male
- a silent and distant object, with no inner life of her own - she would never speak or come down
from her pedestal
- her voice is rarely or never heard in these poems
- his myth of her - the way he wants her to be seen
- the conventional image of the courtly lover by the late 16th century in England was material for
satire, particularly on the stage
 - an example from Shakespearean play - Hamlet is pretending to be mad, for his own very good
reasons
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- one of Shakespeare’s most successful and best-loved works throughout the centuries
- some of his most memorable and imitated characters
- Puck - the fairy sprite with a fondness for mischief
- Bottom, a weaver - a magical spell is cast to give him the head of a donkey
- the play was written in approximately 1595
- two sets of lovers - two royal couples, tradesmen (or ‘‘Mechanicals’’) who are actors and fairies
who cannot be seen by any humans but one
- two men are put under magic spells to love the same woman
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains a thought-provoking meditation on love and perception
- Shakespeare makes a joke of the young men of this play, Demetrius and Lysander - of their
emotional immaturity
- the absurd scenes, 2.2 and 3.2, in which, first, Lysander (the former lover of Hermia) awakens
to make passionate declarations of love to Helena:
LYSANDER: Transparent Helena, nature shows art
That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart.
. . . Reason becomes the marshal to my will[,]
And leads me to your eyes, where I o’erlook
Love’s stories written in love’s richest book.
(2.2.110–11, 126–8)
- a few minutes later, Demetrius (supposedly also in love with Hermia) wakes to see Helena as his
ideal beloved:
DEMETRIUS: O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!
To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?
Crystal is muddy! O, how ripe in show
Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!
(3.2.137–40)
- but Helena has had enough of this deceiving rhetoric of courtly love:
O spite! O Hell! I see you all are bent
To set against me for your merriment.
If you were civil and knew courtesy,
You would not do me thus much injury.
Can you not hate me, as I know you do,
But you must join in souls to mock me too?
If you were men, as men you are in show,
You would not use a gentle lady so,
To vow, and swear, and superpraise my parts,
When I am sure you hate me with your hearts.
(3.2.145–54)
- the next thing the audience witnesses is a girl-fight – an extended episode of physical comedy
- the comic potential of casting a tall girl and a short girl in the parts of Helena and Hermia:
HELENA: Fine, i’faith!
Have you no modesty, no maiden shame,
No touch of bashfulness? What, will you tear
 Impatient answers from my gentle tongue?
Fie, fie, you counterfeit, you puppet, you!
HERMIA: ‘Puppet’? Why so – Ay, that way goes the game.
Now I perceive that she hath made compare
Between our statures; she hath urged her height,
And with her personage, her tall personage,
Her height, forsooth, she hath prevailed with him.
And are you grown so high in his esteem
Because I am so dwarfish and so low?
How low am I, thou painted maypole? Speak!
How low am I? I am not yet so low
But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes.
(3.2.284–98)
- neither of the girls has been anointed with the magic flower
- their emotional lives are always more real
- when all four lovers awaken at the end of the midsummer’s night (4.1), Demetrius remains in his
enchanted state - he continues to see Helena as his true love
- Lysander has had a second application of the love-juice, to return him to devotion to Hermia
- the last words of the two girls occur in this scene - a recognition that love is never easy
HERMIA: Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
When everything seems double.
HELENA: So methinks;
And I have found Demetrius, like a jewel,
Mine own, and not mine own. (4.1.186–9)
-Themes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream - True Love
- when love can be considered to be true?
- the most stable relationship in the play is between Theseus and Hippolyta
- at the end they are married and happy with each other
- another royal couple, Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies
- Shakespeare uses the two young couples to show love as a much more volatile thing
- strangest result of the flower’s magic is that Demetrius and Helena stay together after the spell
is removed from Demetrius
- the triple wedding at the end of the play
- the play makes a statement about the capricious nature of true love
- couples that have nothing to do with each other can find themselves brought together by love
(like Bottom and Titania)
- Chance
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream relies on a clever, credible interplay between the intentions of the
characters and blind chance
- the chance occurrences that complicate the plot lead to better results than anyone could have
arranged
- the chance events serve to make their victims more appreciative of ordinary, stable reality
- Authority
- the play is centred around authority figures and their struggles to impose their authority on those
under them in the social order
- the first instance of undermined authority occurs in the first scene
 - Theseus - the highest authority figure in the mortal world in this play
- in the end, the disputes between those in authority and those they should control are settled with
good humour
- Writing style in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Wedding Play
- a play for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta
- this sort of short play - an ‘‘interlude’’ - was traditionally performed between the acts of a longer
play
- sometimes was performed, along with other forms of entertainment, at a royal wedding, as in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream
- maybe Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream for private performance at the wedding
of some noble
- the play shows its bridegroom, Theseus, as a wise and beloved ruler
- the placement of characters from antiquity, Theseus and Hippolyta, as the play’s centre
- the way that it invokes the world of fairies, which were associated with weddings by the
Elizabethans
- the bridal characters—Hippolyta, Hermia, and Helena—are not the sorts of flattering portraits
- the play was commissioned for some royal occasion
- Shakespeare’s particular blend of romance, magic, and farce
- Levels of Reality
- deft way of mixing together different levels of reality
- the real world combined with the supernatural
- the pending wedding ceremony - the opportunity to mix different social strata together in a way
that would never occur in real life
- the fairies in this play live in the real world but are invisible to the eyes of mortals (with the
exception of Nick Bottom)
- the real, social world of Athens is divided into three levels: the court, the nobles, and the
tradesmen
- each level can be considered a different form of reality because the characters who inhabit it
view the world in different ways
- Mixed Audience
- audiences of Shakespeare’s time were socially mixed
- padded seats - where well-heeled patrons could relax comfortably during the performance
- a standing-room crowd referred to as the “groundlings”
- there were other areas, galleries that were less crowded
- the play’s varied tones range from the rough joke of having a queen fall for a man with an
donkey’s head
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about love but the concept of true and lasting love is just an
illusion
- Shakespeare parodies love’s inconsistencies with the plot device of the love-in-idleness flower,
which is supposed to make those under its spell fall in love immediately and indiscriminately upon
waking up.
 ROMANTIC COMEDY: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

- Romance carries with it a suggestion of the mysterious actions of fate, as well as adventures in
the world of the emotions
- Shakespearean romantic comedy
- witty language - a way of dealing with both the attraction and the fear of falling in love
- the moments of extraordinary eloquence for the female characters
- the three romantic comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night,
provide three of the greatest roles for women
- Beatrice, Rosalind, and Viola talk, in their very different styles
- the genre of romantic comedy operates with some assumptions which Shakespeare put into
question (for example, heterosexuality)
- Shakespeare chooses to make the woman’s experience the emotional focus of the play
- this specifically differentiates Shakespearean romantic comedy from earlier popular ‘romances’
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Shakespeare’s play that has been described as a comedy which is also serious and even profound
in its implications
- it has also been considered an enjoyable but problematic play
- a play that gently pokes fun at the manners and conventions of an aristocratic, highly
sophisticated society
- Much Ado About Nothing is set in a ‘real’ geographic location - Messina in Sicily
- here are the local rich family and their servants, the townsfolk, and visiting soldiers
- everyone knows everyone else’s business, and if they don’t, they make it up
- the behaviour of the gentlefolk is ruled by strict conventions, especially regarding gender, but
also regarding social hierarchy
- there are two princes among the visitors, Don Pedro and his bastard brother, who are
automatically deferred to by everyone
- the more conventional inhabitants of the play’s society must engage in deception and gossip
- the play also shows the danger of such behaviours in a community
- the villain’s destructive intentions are most powerful against the conventional couple, Claudio
and Hero
- The ‘merry war’ of Beatrice and Benedick
- Beatrice and Benedick - the couple who talk, and bicker, endlessly displaying for each other
their intellects, their energy, and their compatibility
- we see their linguistic vitality, which is particularly shown up by contrast with the ‘ordinary’
folk amongst whom they live
- Benedick is given plenty of opportunities for clowning
- he begins by chatting to the audience in a long stand-up routine, and ends by fantasising about
his own ideal woman:
Rich she shall be, that’s certain: wise, or I’ll none: virtuous, or I’ll never cheapen her: fair,
or I’ll never look on her: mild, or come not near me: noble, or not I for an angel: of good
discourse, an excellent musician – and her hair shall be of what colour it please God.
(2.3.23–7)

- Themes in Much Ado About Nothing

- War of the Sexes
 - much of the conflict between the sexes concerns Beatrice and Benedick
- each tries to outdo and ‘outduel’ the other in crafting the cleverest and most deflating remarks
- in one of the most-often quoted sections of the play Beatrice declares:
“O that I were a man for his sake! Or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake!
But manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue,
and trim ones, too. He is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be
a man with wishing: therefore I will die a woman with grieving.” (4.1.311-318)
- this sentiment is one with the words of Balthasar’s song, from act 2, scene 3:
“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, / Men were deceivers ever / One foot in sea, and one
on shore, / To one thing constant never.”
- this song describes the war between the sexes, set to poetic phrases
- Love and Marriage
- although Beatrice and Benedick make their gestures against love and marriage, Shakespeare’s
play does not turn in that direction
- Shakespeare does, however, create the opposite type of couple
- Claudio and Hero are infatuated and that is enough to lead them to the altar
- Shakespeare is a master of representing opposites
- Don John - the other side of the love and marriage issue
- he attacks the prince and tries to destroy the love Claudio has for Hero
- however, Shakespeare does not allow his play to turn on Don John’s misery
- love and marriage are what hold this play together
- Loss of Honour
- a woman’s loss of honour has significant consequences in this play
- the loss of virginity appears to be a worse crime than murder
- the standard of chastity seems to apply only to women of the upper classes
- the double standard for men and women still remains
- Villainy
- Don John is villainous but the audience knows very little about him
- what drives him, where his anger is coming from, and what pleasure he derives from his
misdeeds are all missing from this play
- Don John represents villainy but only through two meagre tricks, which are quickly uncovered
and cause no long-lasting harm
- Writing style in Much Ado about Nothing
- Witty Linguistic Competition
- Beatrice and Benedick are champions of witty conversations
- the wittiness of their dialogue does two things, besides showing off their intelligence:
- it helps them to keep their true feelings hidden
- acts almost like a competition between them as if one of them can win it and then walk
away from the other, claiming victory
- they constantly try to outsmart each other
- Tragicomedy
- obstacles are presented as the young lovers attempt to reach the day of their wedding
- another tragic element - Beatrice’s request that Benedick prove his love to her by killing Claudio
- Animal Imagery
- Shakespeare uses a lot of animal imagery in this play
- in the opening lines of the play, the messenger describes Claudio as “doing in the figure of a
lamb the feats of a lion”
 - the messenger describes Claudio’s character, his psychology, and his actions
- by using the lamb and the lion to describe Claudio, Shakespeare has told a significant background
story about Claudio in just a few words
- Italy as Setting
- there is no real significance to having this play set in Italy
- one reason might be to give the audience a distance from their English reality
- it is so much easier to laugh at people of another culture
- these are someone else’s problems, someone else’s foibles
- the language of Much Ado about Nothing is accessible even for modern audiences, except for
that of Dogberry, the comical Constable
- Dogberry probably was hard to understand even in his times
- Shakespeare’s genius is the understanding of human psychology which making Much Ado about
Nothing as relevant today as it will be tomorrow.