Northrop Frye's Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance 9781442689886

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Credits
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Argument of Comedy
2. Don Quixote
3. Comic Myth in Shakespeare
4. Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy
5. Molière’s Tartuffe
6. Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tempest
7. The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene
8. Shakespeare’s Experimental Comedy
9. Toast to the Memory of Shakespeare
10. The Tragedies of Nature and Fortune
11. How True a Twain
12. Recognition in The Winter’s Tale
13. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance
14. Shakespeare and the Modern World
15. Nature and Nothing
16. Fools of Time
17. General Editor’s Introduction to Shakespeare Series
18. Shakespeare’s The Tempest
19. Il Cortegiano
20. The Myth of Deliverance
21. Something Rich and Strange: Shakespeare’s Approach to Romance
22. The Stage Is All the World
23. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare
24. Speech on Acceptance of the Governor General’s Award for Northrop Frye on Shakespeare
25. Natural and Revealed Communities
26. Foreword to Unfolded Tales
Notes
Emendations
Index

Citation preview

Collected Works of Northrop Frye VOLUME 28

Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from the Michael G. DeGroote family.

Editorial Committee General Editor Alvin A. Lee Associate Editor Jean O’Grady Editors Joseph Adamson Robert D. Denham Michael Dolzani A.C. Hamilton David Staines Advisers Robert Brandeis Paul Gooch Eva Kushner Jane Millgate Ron Schoeffel Clara Thomas Jane Widdicombe

Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance VOLUME 28

Edited by Troni Y. Grande and Garry Sherbert

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© Victoria University, University of Toronto, and Troni Y. Grande and Garry Sherbert (preface, introduction, annotation) 2010 Printed in Canada www.utppublishing.com isbn 978-1-4426-4168-6

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 Northrop Frye’s writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance / edited by Troni Y. Grande and Garry Sherbert. (The collected works of Northrop Frye ; v. 28) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4426-4168-6 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. European literature – Renaissance, 1450–1600 – History and criticism. i. Grande, Troni Yvette, 1960– ii. Sherbert, Garry Herald, 1957– iii. Title. iv. Series: Collected works of Northrop Frye ; v. 28 pr2976.f794 2010

822.3′3

c2010-904494-0

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from Victoria University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For our children Mardi Jane Grande-Sherbert and Elliot Erich Grande-Sherbert

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Contents

Preface xi Credits and Sources xvii Abbreviations xix Introduction xxiii 1 The Argument of Comedy 3 2 Don Quixote 14 3 Comic Myth in Shakespeare 20 4 Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy 33 5 Molière’s Tartuffe 42 6 Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tempest 44

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Contents 7 The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene 53 8 Shakespeare’s Experimental Comedy 72 9 Toast to the Memory of Shakespeare 81 10 The Tragedies of Nature and Fortune 83 11 How True a Twain 95 12 Recognition in The Winter’s Tale 114 13 A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance 127 Preface 128 I Mouldy Tales 129 II Making Nature Afraid 149 III The Triumph of Time 172 IV The Return from the Sea 199

14 Shakespeare and the Modern World 226 15 Nature and Nothing 236 16 Fools of Time 250 Preface and Dedication 250 I My Father as He Slept: The Tragedy of Order 251 II The Tailors of the Earth: The Tragedy of Passion 276 III Little World of Man: The Tragedy of Isolation 297

17 General Editor’s Introduction to Shakespeare Series 328

Contents

ix 18 Shakespeare’s The Tempest 333 19 Il Cortegiano 346 20 The Myth of Deliverance 361 Preface 361 I The Reversal of Action 362 II The Reversal of Energy 285 III The Reversal of Reality 403

21 Something Rich and Strange: Shakespeare’s Approach to Romance 425 22 The Stage Is All the World 440 23 Northrop Frye on Shakespeare 455 Preface 455 Introduction 456 I Romeo and Juliet 469 II A Midsummer Night’s Dream 486 III The Bolingbroke Plays (Richard II, Henry IV) 501 IV Hamlet 529 V King Lear 546 VI Antony and Cleopatra 564 VII Measure for Measure 581 VIII Shakespeare’s Romances: The Winter’s Tale 593 IX The Tempest 608

24 Speech on Acceptance of the Governor General’s Award for Northrop Frye on Shakespeare 623 25 Natural and Revealed Communities 625 26 Foreword to Unfolded Tales 642

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Contents Notes 647 Emendations 765 Index 767

Preface

This volume includes almost all of Frye’s published books, public lectures, articles, and introductions, along with one review, pertaining to Shakespeare and the Renaissance, but excluding Milton. Also included is one unpublished typescript: Frye’s speech on the acceptance of the Governor General’s Award for Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Two additional essays which deal largely with Shakespeare and the Renaissance are not included here, having been published elsewhere in the Collected Works because of their connections with Frye’s writings on critical theory: “The Structure and Spirit of Comedy” (CPCT, 162–9), and “Romance as Masque” (SeSCT, 125–51). A third, presented orally at Radcliffe College in 1950, appears with his previously unpublished papers: “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors” (LS, 144–59). Frye’s extensive writings on Milton are gathered together with his writings on Blake (postdating Fearful Symmetry) in volume 16 of the Collected Works, though our introduction does briefly address Milton’s importance as a major Renaissance figure for Frye. Since Frye first delivered so many of these items orally over the forty years of his career as a scholar and teacher, they have been arranged chronologically according to date of oral delivery, wherever known; or else according to date of first publication. Headnotes to the individual items specify the copy-text, list all known reprintings in English and French of the item, and also note the existence and location of typescripts in the Northrop Frye Fonds in the E.J. Pratt Library of Victoria University. The copy-text chosen is generally the first edition, which was often the only one carefully revised and proofread by Frye himself. In some cases he did reread essays for inclusion in his own collections, such as Fables of Identity, which then become the source of the authoritative text (as with nos. 7, 11, and 12). All substantive changes to

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the copy-text are noted in the list of editorial emendations. All authoritative versions have been collated and (although this is a reading rather than a fully critical edition) variants of particular interest are given in notes. In preparing the text, we have followed the general practice of the Collected Works in handling Frye’s own published material from a variety of sources. That is to say, since the conventions of spelling, typography, and to some extent punctuation derive from the different publishers’ house styles rather than from Frye, we have regularized them silently throughout the volume. For instance, Canadian spellings ending in -our have been substituted for American -or ones, commas have been added before the “and” in sequences of three, titles of poems have been italicized, and words used as words are placed within quotation marks (e.g., the word “argument”). Sometimes, where editors have added commas around such expressions as “of course,” these have been silently removed to conform with the more characteristic usage in the typescript. The primary Renaissance texts cited by Frye have presented special editorial problems in this volume. Before the age of copyright and professional authorship (not to mention before standardized spelling and punctuation), many Renaissance texts exist in various versions. Frye often moves freely back and forth between editions, using whichever text is most readily accessible to him at the moment of writing. In citing passages from non-Shakespearean Renaissance texts in his early works, Frye uses modern orthography and punctuation, whereas in his later works he tends to follow late-twentieth-century critical practice by citing the original text with its variable Renaissance spelling and punctuation. Our practice throughout has been to leave Frye’s quotations as he cites them, and use endnotes to reference a standard edition, along with any significant variants given in that edition. When it comes to Shakespeare, the choice of which text to cite throughout this volume has been a particularly vexing one. Not only are Shakespeare’s texts themselves unstable in many cases (of Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays published in the First Folio, eighteen were previously published in Quarto editions, with often significant variations), but Frye himself in his later works at times pauses to consider the interpretive difficulties presented by separate Quarto and Folio editions. When he does address this problem in his introductions to Shakespeare’s plays (as in nos. 17 and 23), Frye tends to bracket the difficulties for an undergraduate or general reader, and shows a preference for the Folio edition. In

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his citations of Shakespeare’s plays, however, as in his citations of other Renaissance texts, Frye moves between different editions, generally refusing to endorse a given edition as authoritative. Clues to Frye’s citations of Shakespeare may be found in the Northrop Frye Library at Victoria University, which contains several of Frye’s annotated editions of Shakespeare, both the complete works and individual plays, including those plays and collections for which Frye himself served as general editor (the Penguin Tempest; and the College Classics two-volume Shakespeare Series). Of all his annotated editions of Shakespeare, Frye drew most carefully on the extensive annotations in The London Shakespeare, edited by John Munro, which is now not widely available; and on the New Arden editions of Shakespeare’s plays (the Arden second series, published after World War II), now superseded by the Arden third series. Frye does favour the New Arden series in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, where he declares in the preface that all Shakespeare quotations come from these heavily annotated editions; but only, he adds, “wherever available.” By favouring the New Arden editions in this, his last full-length book on Shakespeare, Frye implicitly points to the importance of the broader context of textual editing and scholarship for our understanding of Shakespeare. However, the New Arden is by no means the only edition used for quotations throughout Northrop Frye on Shakespeare: the New Arden Romeo and Juliet, along with Hamlet, was evidently published too late to be available for Frye’s use in this book. Frye also at times appears to cite either from other editions or from memory, often with interesting or revealing variations and slips. Other volumes in the Collected Works have dealt with the problem of inconsistencies in Frye’s quotations of Shakespeare by silently regularizing all Shakespeare quotations according to the Riverside Shakespeare. However, we have not regularized Frye’s quotations in this volume, which is so centrally concerned with showing, as Frye says in the preface to The Myth of Deliverance, “something of what the study of Shakespeare has invariably been for [him].” To efface all the differences in Frye’s various quotations of Shakespeare would work against our understanding of the ways in which Frye has left his indelible mark on Shakespeare, and the way Shakespeare has revealingly marked Frye. We have therefore chosen as the most respectful editorial procedure to preserve in the first instance all of Frye’s citations from Shakespeare, using endnotes to indicate any substantial differences between his citations and those in the Riverside edition (and, in the case of Northrop Frye on Shakespeare,

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in the New Arden editions of the plays). For example, Frye’s modernized spelling of characters in Shakespeare’s plays (“Lavache” rather than “Lavatch”: “Anne Boleyn” rather than “Anne Bullen”) has been retained throughout the text. The exceptions are final punctuation of quotations, which in some places has been silently changed to fit a given sentence; and obvious typographical errors, which are noted in the Emendations list. We hope that gesturing towards these differences will open up new avenues of exploration both for Frye studies and for early-modern criticism. We have, however, used the Riverside Shakespeare, second edition, for all line numbers from Shakespeare’s plays throughout this volume, to facilitate cross-references between Frye’s quotations of Shakespeare in all of the Collected Works volumes. When originally published, most of the texts in this volume gave no references for Shakespeare quotations; these are now included in square brackets [ ]. In Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, the only full-length text in this volume which gave line numbers in parentheses ( ), the line numbers have been silently changed, where needed, to conform to the Riverside Shakespeare. Frye’s own occasional square brackets in the text have been changed to braces { }, to differentiate them from our editorial interpolations. Square brackets used by the editors of the Riverside and other editions have, however, been left as they are. Endnotes indicate, where relevant, a difference in line numbers or a substantive difference in wording that might indicate Frye’s apparent use of any other editions, such as the Penguin Shakespeare or The London Shakespeare. Other slips or intriguing reversals of wording in Frye’s quotations of Shakespeare are also indicated in the notes. Finally, the dates of first publication of Shakespeare’s plays have been taken from the Riverside edition, which gives more information on chronology and sources on pp. 77–87. The notes identify the source of all quotations and allusions, as far as we could track these down, and supply important contextualizing background to aid the reader. (Short identifications have been placed in square brackets in the text.) In the case of references to Frye’s major books, the original page number is followed, after a slash, with the page number in the Collected Works edition, as in [AC, 5/6]. Endnotes indicate when the books cited or used by Frye are available as his annotated copies in the Northrop Frye Library. Moreover, endnotes give crossreferences, both to items within the volume and to Frye’s other works, to show the interpenetration of his ideas and their significant develop-

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ment in different contexts. Notes provided by Frye himself are identified by [NF] following the note. Authors and titles mentioned in passing are generally not annotated, unless a note is required to clarify Frye’s points; however, dates of birth and death and date of first publication are provided in the index. The introduction is in two parts. We first survey Frye’s contributions to scholarship on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (particularly in the Canadian context, at the Stratford Festival), trace Frye’s influences to the Cambridge ritualists and other early twentieth-century scholars, and show both the continuity and the evolution of his thought throughout his writings on the Renaissance included in this volume. We then highlight Frye’s continuing significance as a literary theorist, including his affinities with contemporary critics of early-modern literature and contemporary philosophers such as Jacques Derrida. Acknowledgments A number of people have helped us in the preparation of this volume. Our greatest debt is to the Collected Works editor Alvin Lee, whose continuing faith in us, inspirational guidance, and incisive commentary motivated us to persevere; and to associate editor Jean O’Grady, whose remarkably acute eye, common sense, and saintly patience were a lifeline. We remain in awe of Jean’s talents as an editor, and are deeply grateful for her instrumental help in checking references (especially at the Northrop Frye Fonds), formatting the pieces in this volume, and preparing the index. The articles were originally expertly typed or scanned by Carrie O’Grady and Miranda Purves. We thank them and also Margaret Burgess, who copy-edited the text with her usual thoroughness and expert knowledge, and saved us from a number of errors. Among others who have answered queries and provided information are Robert D. Denham, David Hoeniger, and John Riebetanz. We benefited from the research assistance of Erin Reynolds and Stephen Tardif, at the Northrop Frye Centre; and University of Regina graduate students Kristine Douaud, André Gareau, Marcy Koethler, and Deborah Ochoa. We are most indebted to the generous and expert research assistance provided by Ellen Charendoff of the Stratford Festival Archives; Jocelyn K. Wilk of Columbia University Archives; and Barbara Brown of CBC Archives. Nor could we have completed this project without the assistance of the impressive staff of the University of Regina libraries, especially the Dr.

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John Archer Library Circulation staff and Larry McDonald at the Reference desk; and the Interlibrary Loans team, including supervisor Susan Robertson-Krezel, and Margaret Steffensen. We happily record our corresponding debt to the excellent Interlibrary Loans office at our alma mater, the University of Alberta, which sent us so many humanities and social sciences books from Rutherford Library. For financial assistance, we express our profound gratitude to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Regina, especially the generosity of Dean Thomas Chase, for enabling our trip to the Northrop Frye Fonds at Victoria University. The research and writing were greatly facilitated by Troni’s sabbatical leave in 2006–07, and by her one-course teaching release in Fall 2005, funded through the Humanities Research Institute (directed by Nicholas Ruddick). Our richly supportive academic community in the Department of English at the University of Regina eased the project along, and for their ongoing help and interest we thank all our colleagues there, especially former department head Cameron Louis and former graduate chair Jeanne Shami, Stephen Moore, Ken Probert, Lynn Wells, Peggy Wigmore, and Nicole Côté of the Department of French. We also thank the anonymous readers of the Press for their helpful comments and constructive suggestions for revision. Special thanks, as always, are due to Ruth Grande. Our Dedication records our priceless debt to our other most joyous and long-term joint project—our children—who continually beckoned us towards a higher green-world perspective.

Credits

We wish to acknowledge the following sources for permission to reprint works previously published by them. We have not been able to determine the copyright status of all the works included in this volume, and welcome notice from any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from these acknowledgments.

Canadian Broadcasting Company for “Shakespeare and the Modern World” (1964). Columbia University Press for “The Argument of Comedy,” from English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D.A. Robertson, Jr. © 1949 Columbia University Press; and for A Natural Perspective: Essays on the Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. © 1969 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Cornell University Press for “Foreword” to Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey. © 1989 Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. The Daily Princetonian for “Molière’s Tartuffe” (1954). Johns Hopkins University Press for “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 4, no. 3 (1953): 271–7. © Folger Shakespeare Library. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Credits

University of Missouri Press for “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale,” from Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama: In Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley. © 1962 the Curators of the University of Missouri. Reprinted by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Penguin Putnam for “Introduction” to The Tempest, ed. Northrop Frye. © 1959, renewed © 1987 by Northrop Frye. Used by permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Princeton University Press for “Nature and Nothing,” from Essays on Shakespeare, ed. Gerald W. Chapman. © 1965 Princeton University Press, renewed © 1993. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Quaderni d’italianistica for “Il Cortegiano” (1980). The Royal Society of Canada for “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” (1959). University of Toronto Press for Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (1967); for The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (1983); and for “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 30 (January 1961). © 1961 University of Toronto Press Inc. Reprinted by permission of University of Toronto Press Inc.

With the exception of those listed above, all works are printed by courtesy of the Estate of Northrop Frye/Victoria University, University of Toronto.

Abbreviations

AC AC2 Ayre CP CPCT

CR CW D EI EICT

ENC

FI FS

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 22. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. John Ayre. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963– 1975. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner. CW, 27. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Creation and Recreation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Collected Works of Northrop Frye The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1963. “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963. Ed. Germaine Warkentin. CW, 21. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Imre Salusinszky. CW, 17. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

xx FS2

Abbreviations

Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Ed. Nicholas Halmi, with an Introduction by Ian Singer. CW, 14. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. FT Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. GC The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. GC2 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Ed. Alvin A. Lee. CW, 19. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. INF Interviews with Northrop Frye. Ed. Jean O’Grady. CW, 24. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. LN The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 5–6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. LS Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. M&B Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Ed. Angela Esterhammer. CW, 16. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. MC The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. MM Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. NAC Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism.” Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 23. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. NB Notebook NF Northrop Frye NFC David Cayley. Northrop Frye in Conversation. Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1992. NFCL Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. NFF Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library NFHK The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 1–2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. NFL Northrop Frye’s Library (the books in Frye’s personal library that were annotated, now in the Victoria University Library) NFMC Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Gorak. CW, 11. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Abbreviations NFR

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Northrop Frye on Religion: Excluding “The Great Code” and “Words with Power.” Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. CW, 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. NP A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. NR Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 15. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. NRL Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 20. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. OE On Education. Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1988. RE The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. RT Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 13. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. RW Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935–1976. Ed. Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. s.d. stage direction SE Northrop Frye’s Student Essays, 1932–1938. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 3. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. SeS The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. SeSCT “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991. Ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. CW, 18. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. SM Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. SR A Study of English Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. StS The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. TBN The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. TCL Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature. Ed. Glen Gill. CW, 29. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. TSE T.S. Eliot: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963, 1981. WE Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Ed. Jean O’Grady and

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WP WP2

WTC

Abbreviations Goldwin French. CW, 7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

Introduction

I Although Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism secured his academic reputation as a literary theorist and critic of post-Renaissance literature, it is Northrop Frye’s work on Shakespeare and the Renaissance that did much to provide a conceptual framework for his major writings and earn him a popular following. As Alvin Lee points out, the acknowledged importance of post-Renaissance culture for Frye should not make us forget that “There is also a ‘Renaissance’ Frye, who did write extensively on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, including four books on Shakespeare, one on Milton, and numerous articles on Renaissance topics, and whose Anatomy of Criticism contains 204 references to Shakespeare.”1 Fearful Symmetry also contains more than three dozen entries each on Spenser and Shakespeare, as well as “more than twice as many references to Milton than to any other single author.”2 Indeed, Michael Dolzani has shown that Frye identifies Blake as Romantic poet, and himself as critic, with the culture of the Renaissance (NRL, xxi). Frye insists that Blake inherits his form of visionary Christianity from the tradition of Renaissance humanism.3 Frye’s writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance, then, occupy an integral place in his corpus. The pieces collected here span just over four decades, from 1948 to 1989, and in many ways represent the most accessible and successful work of Frye’s career, as well as an important testing-ground for many of his theoretical assumptions about the nature of literature and the function of criticism. From his earliest days, the Renaissance served Frye as a mine of productive scholarship, fuelling such projects as his three-volume proposal for “a comprehensive study of Renaissance Symbolism,” which he outlined

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in his 1949 application for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. The trilogy was to include an epic volume based on Spenser’s Faerie Queene and ending with Milton; a drama volume on Shakespeare’s comedy; and a prose fiction volume.4 After Frye was awarded the Guggenheim grant in 1950, he did complete some of his projected work on Spenser and Milton, and made a small start on the projected prose fiction volume. By contrast, over the course of his writing career he not only completed the projected work on Shakespeare’s comedies, but also broadened that study to consider the romances, tragedies, and sonnets. However, the heavy representation of Shakespeare in the present volume is somewhat misleading, for Frye never lost sight of either the mythological structure of symbolism common to Renaissance writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, or of the humanist educational project of prose fiction writers such as Castiglione and Sir Thomas More (not to mention Milton himself). This conceptual framework informs all of Frye’s writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance. In one respect, the decision to exclude Frye’s major writings on Milton in this volume is regrettable, since Milton is a Renaissance figure of considerable importance to Frye. Nor by any means is Milton an absent figure in Frye’s writings on the Renaissance. But, apart from the practical necessity of keeping this already lengthy volume manageable, there is good reason to yoke together Frye’s writings on Milton and Blake. As Angela Esterhammer has shown, Frye connects Milton and Blake as “the most important poet-prophets in the English tradition” and as “revolutionaries who lived in revolutionary times” (M&B, xix). On the other hand, in The Return of Eden, Frye contrasts the methods and aims of Shakespeare and Milton, as exemplars of the conservative and revolutionary poet, respectively: Shakespeare, like Spenser, is a conservative who perfects the inherited forms of poetry, while Milton, the revolutionary, develops new models out of the inherited generic tradition (M&B, 94–7). More importantly, Frye relates this revolutionary aspect of Milton and Blake to the social criticism in their poetry, a criticism that characterizes what he calls the prophetic function of their poetry.5 As a Renaissance writer, Milton functions for Frye as a kind of hinge figure negotiating between “two great mythological structures” that dominated the pre-Romantic and post-Romantic eras (M&B, 153–4): the father-god myth emphasizing rational order and nature as artefact; and the mother-goddess myth emphasizing passion or emotion, and nature as cyclical process of renewal.6 Of course, Frye makes it clear in “The Revelation to Eve” that Milton

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looks backward to the Renaissance as much as forward to the Romantics (M&B, 154), and references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest not surprisingly recur throughout this essay. As Esterhammer points out, Frye stops short of turning Milton into a full-blown Romantic poet because of the need to account for Milton’s “more traditional strain” of works like Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained; Frye focuses ultimately on “the archetypal continuities between Milton and Blake, and the resonances in their readings of the Bible” (M&B, xx–xxi). These archetypal continuities extend to Shakespeare, Spenser, and the other Renaissance writers treated by Frye in the present volume, even if Shakespeare is more a secular humanist than a visionary Christian or poet-prophet in the vein of Milton and Blake. Despite the fact that, at the time he begins writing on Shakespeare, Frye notes how “natural” it is for critics to “talk specifically about individual plays,” in his writings on Shakespeare he is determined to “bring out the archetypal centre” of the plays (NRL, 215–16). Frye’s full-length book on Milton, The Return of Eden, and his other writings on Milton show a partial fulfilment of the projected first Guggenheim volume, though, as Esterhammer acknowledges, Frye “was never the world’s foremost authority on Milton” (M&B, xviii). But Frye’s work on Milton develops the same “framework of Renaissance imagery” (M&B, 36) as does his work on Spenser and Shakespeare, which exercised considerable influence on scholars and students in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Whereas he never completed his projected Guggenheim volume on Spenser, Frye left behind extensive notes on Spenser, now available in Collected Works volumes as Notebook 7 (in NAC)—whose ideas formed the basis of Frye’s numerous remarks on Spenser in Anatomy of Criticism—and Notebook 43 (a canto-by-canto commentary on The Faerie Queene, in NRL). In Fables of Identity, Frye also published one essay on Spenser, “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene” (no. 7 in this volume). In this influential and frequently reprinted essay, Frye argues that the unity of Spenser’s epic poem can be discovered through the “axioms and assumptions which Spenser and his public shared, and which form the basis of its imaginative communication” (56). Using the Mutabilitie Cantos as a point of entry into the framework of assumptions underlying The Faerie Queene, Frye describes “four distinguishable levels of existence”: the fallen world of Mutability (“death, corruption, and dissolution”); the “world of ordinary experience” (the lower world of physical nature); the upper world or original Edenic nature, to which we may return “by the practice of virtue and through education”; and the heav-

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enly supernatural or divine world (57). Frye points out that “The conception of the four levels of existence and the symbols used to represent it come from Spenser’s cultural tradition in general and from the Bible in particular” (62).7 Even in his later works, Frye finds Spenser crucially important, as he has recourse to Spenser’s “Sabbath vision” at the end of the Mutabilitie Cantos to explain the autonomy of literature (as play) in relation to its social function. In his last published work, Frye insists that “Man’s consciousness of being in nature though not wholly of it is potentially a sabbatical vision,” necessary for the cultivation of criticism, which itself should be conceived of more broadly as “a critical attitude” of detached contemplation of what we have done, and why we have done it. This “leisurely and detached vision” raises us to the upper level of nature, and suggests a link to the eternally creating nature of God: “only a creating God would provide a Sabbath, and with it the escape for man from natural into spiritual vision” (DV, 30, 39; NFR, 190, 197). In The Critical Path, Frye specifically ties the “Sabbath vision” to literature itself, defined as “disinterested” forms of “pure creation”: “The world of imagination, from this point of view, is partly a holiday or Sabbath world where we rest from belief and commitment, the greater mystery beyond whatever can be formulated or presented for acceptance” (CP, 169; CPCT, 116). As we detail in the last section of this introduction, Frye’s view of literature as in part an imaginative recreation of nature that allows us to “rest from belief and commitment” opens up his theory of romance in new directions, suggesting his affinities with poststructuralist theorists. The prominence Spenser and The Faerie Queene enjoy in relation to Frye’s overall theoretical framework may help account for Frye’s influence among writers on romance. In The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, Frye calls romance the “structural core of all fiction” (SeS, 15; SeSCT, 14) and refers to The Faerie Queene as the “greatest romance in English literature, and one of the supreme romances of the world” (SeS, 187; SeSCT, 123). The Secular Scripture contains numerous references to Shakespeare, as Frye connects The Faerie Queene with Shakespeare’s late romances and with the structure of romance in general, with its vision of redeemed nature. Frye says in Notebook 42a, “I keep seeing Shakespeare in the back of Spenser all the time”; when he conceives of his work on “ancient British history,” Frye thinks of “the Spenser as a summarized epic explanation & the Shakespeare as a dramatic illustration of the same scheme” (NR, 16). It is significant that Frye’s early teaching, and his first graduate courses,

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were on Spenser and Milton.8 In fact, among the many writers influenced by Frye’s ideas on Renaissance romance are his former students, such as the eminent Spenserians A.C. Hamilton, James Nohrnberg, and Gordon Teskey, as well as poststructuralist theorists of early-modern romance like Patricia Parker. Nohrnberg attributes the inception of his massive schematic study The Analogy of The Faerie Queene to Frye’s influence: not only was Frye the supervisor of Nohrnberg’s dissertation, which forms the basis of his book, but Nohrnberg acknowledges as his “greatest single debt” Frye’s essay on Spenser, and also credits “the abundant references to Spenser’s genre and symbolism in the . . . Anatomy of Criticism.”9 Frye’s reputation as a theorist of romance is reflected in the fact that he was invited to write a Foreword to Unfolded Tales (no. 26 in the present volume). This collection of essays on Renaissance romance, coedited by Teskey and George M. Logan, included several prominent Spenserian critics such as former students William Blissett10 and Parker herself. A.C. Hamilton’s deep connection with Frye resonates in the Foreword to Unfolded Tales, designed as a Festschrift in honour of Hamilton.11 In the Spenser Encyclopedia, for which Hamilton served as general editor, D.M.R. Bentley identifies Frye’s unquestioned influence in the remarkable community of Canadian scholars working on Spenser.12 Along with his Foreword to Unfolded Tales, Frye wrote two other essays on Renaissance prose fiction, included here: on Castiglione’s The Courtier (no. 19), and on More’s Utopia (“Natural and Revealed Communities”: no. 25). The Faerie Queene, The Courtier, and Utopia all participate in the genre of educational treatises traditionally known as the speculum principis, or mirror for princes, which Frye renames, after Xenophon’s classical fictional biography, the cyropaedia genre (350; MM, 311). In these three essays, Frye describes the cultural movement of Renaissance humanism as a “revolution in education” (629; MM, 293). Milton’s essay Of Education sums up for Frye the social function of education in the Renaissance: Milton defines education as an attempt “to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright.”13 As a Christian humanist society, Shakespeare’s Renaissance audience believes that education and poetry can lead us out of the lower, alien level of nature, to a “second nature” where the creative efforts in all the arts join with nature to return humanity to its true home. Frye’s essays on prose fiction show him working out, late in his career, some of the projected third volume of his Guggenheim proposal, which he had said in 1949 “does not enter into my plans at present.”14 What Frye did decisively complete of his Guggenheim proposal was

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his promise to deliver a sustained study of Shakespearean comedy. In fact, as a necessary complement to his study of comedy, he also produced several analyses of Shakespearean tragedy. His highly popular and successful books on Shakespeare’s drama, each of which originated as a series of university lectures, are all included here: A Natural Perspective (1965), the Bampton Lectures at Columbia University in November, 1963 (no. 13); Fools of Time (1967), the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in March, 1966 (no. 16); The Myth of Deliverance (1983), the inaugural series of Tamblyn Lectures at the University of Western Ontario in 1981 (no. 20); and Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986), Frye’s lectures for his undergraduate Shakespeare course at the University of Toronto, taped over the course of several years and later revised by Frye for publication (no. 23). It is worth noting that, even though several of Frye’s books earned him a place as a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare ultimately won him that prestigious national recognition and monetary award late in his career,15 firmly establishing his reputation as “Canada’s most distinguished Shakespearean.”16 While his work on Shakespearean tragedy is anthologized and widely used, it is the writings on Shakespearean comedy and romance that have made the widest critical inroads. However, all of Frye’s writings on Shakespeare should be seen as part of his larger project to show that “literature is not a piled aggregate of ‘works,’ but an order of words,” though that order is not closed but open, “an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries” (AC, 17/18). When he turns his attention to Shakespearean comedy, starting with “The Argument of Comedy” in 1948, Frye confronts the need to establish criticism as a “central expanding pattern of systematic comprehension” (AC, 12/14) and hence he writes not so much on individual comedies or playwrights as on the structure of meaning underlying comedy itself. Frye’s systematic focus on the centripetal nature of criticism has led some critics to charge him with ahistoricism and universalism; nonetheless, his writings on Shakespearean comedy and romance have gained an enormous following. The second section of our introduction examines Frye’s own scholarly influences, and details some of the central aspects of his theories of Shakespearean comedy and romance. First, we outline the ways Frye has influenced Shakespeare critics and theorists of comedy, in order to highlight his historical importance and continuing relevance to the field of Shakespeare studies in the last half-century.

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As Sherman Hawkins acknowledges, “It is one of Northrop Frye’s major achievements that his investigations of comic form help to develop a poetics for comedy, and for Shakespearean comedy in particular.”17 “The Argument of Comedy” has been reprinted a dozen times; its ongoing and widespread usefulness is suggested by its latest reprinting in two twenty-first-century anthologies of narrative theory and Shakespeare criticism (see headnote to no. 1).18 Jeanne Addison Roberts sums up the value of the essay when she calls it “the single most influential work on modern American criticism of the comedies,” because Frye’s “principles were astonishingly illuminating of Shakespearean comedy.”19 For example, critics have found particularly “illuminating” Frye’s formulation of the “comic Oedipus situation.”20 But the most widely treated concept from “The Argument of Comedy” is Frye’s “green world” model, which focuses on the rhythmic movement of comedy from a “normal,” tyrannical world to a green world (a “natural” locale that effects a comic transformation), and back again. There are obvious similarities between Frye’s comedic model and the theory of “festive comedy” developed by C.L. Barber. In fact, Barber acknowledges his debt to Frye’s “brilliant, compressed summary” of the whole comic tradition in “The Argument of Comedy.”21 Barber implicitly uses the same tripartite structure as Frye in his description of comedy’s “saturnalian pattern,” a movement from everyday reality into a holiday world which releases its “festive celebrants” through a kind of “clarification,” a “heightened awareness of the relation between man and ‘nature.’”22 Wayne A. Rebhorn makes clear that “Frye and Barber are clearly the starting points for modern criticism of Shakespearean comedy and romance.”23 Despite the striking parallels that have led critics often to yoke together Barber’s and Frye’s theories of comedy, there are also important differences. Rebhorn finds that “Frye’s work on comedy has simply had a much larger impact than Barber’s,” since it is “more comprehensive” and gives the comedies “a serious, almost visionary purpose in their unveiling of new worlds.”24 In Renaissance studies, Anne Barton popularized Frye’s theories in the Riverside introductions to the comedies; Hawkins’s frequently cited article “The Two Worlds of Shakespearean Comedy” acknowledges a debt to Frye that is “very great and very obvious”;25 and Harry Berger has expanded Frye’s concept of the “green world” into a dual model of “second world” (the alternate world of escape) and “green world” (the imaginative world created by the poem’s self-conscious regard of “the second world as a fiction”).26 The green world concept, included in Shakespeare

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criticism surveys and recently even in a literary theory handbook, has been used by scholars in areas as wide-reaching as film criticism, psychology, and New Testament hermeneutics.27 Much more critical inquiry could be done, especially with the aid of the present volume, on the metamorphosis of the “green world” concept, its current uses across disciplinary fields, and its ties with Frye’s thought and writing.28 Frye’s place in Shakespearean criticism rests on his comprehensive mythological system but is not without controversy. On one level, there are clear differences of emphasis between Frye’s mythological framework and utopian vision, and twentieth-century historicist analyses, focused on the particularities of the text or performances, and on the ideological work performed by the text. In 1986, Frye deliberately flew in the face of the current trends in Shakespearean criticism by stating: “I think Shakespeare uses conceptions taken from the ideology of his time incidentally, and that we always have to look at the structure of the story he’s telling us, not at what gets said on the way. That is, as a dramatist, he reflects the priority of mythology to ideology” (584). Frye’s insistence that the myths or stories of Shakespeare somehow remain “free” from the ideological kidnapping of this or that new reading is indeed heretical in our highly politicized age, when we tend to see all stories as shot through with ideological investments. Many critics concerned more with ethical readings based on identity politics, with the aesthetic experiences of audiences witnessing embodied performances, or with the piling up of minute historical details and anecdotes often summarily dismiss the mythological focus. For example, in the wake of new historicism’s rise in early-modern studies, Jean Howard issued a warning that “reliance on certain premises of Frye and Barber can lead us to minimize some aspects of the comedies, most notably the degree of unresolved turbulence and contradiction present in those plays and present in the audience’s aesthetic experience of them.”29 Howard reminds readers, “even the festive comedies frequently function as problem-posing structures that produce aesthetic experiences marked as much by rupture and discontinuity as by the serene harmonization of contradictory elements.”30 But to claim that Frye in his Shakespearean criticism ignores “rupture and discontinuity” or imposes a Theseus-like vision of arbitrary comic law would be to misrepresent the comprehensiveness, inclusiveness, and sensitivity both of his theoretical assumptions and of his practical analyses.31 Far from imposing rigid constraints on our response to the plays, Frye insists that “there seems no way of reconciling” our response

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of participation, as comedy comes full circle towards a unified society, with our response of alienation and detachment, as we sympathize with the outcast idiotes figures (191). His eloquent evocation in A Natural Perspective of our ambivalent responses bears repeating: “Participation and detachment, sympathy and ridicule, sociability and isolation, are inseparable in the complex we call comedy, a complex that is begotten by the paradox of life itself, in which merely to exist is both to be a part of something else and yet never to be a part of it, and in which all freedom and joy are inseparably a belonging and an escape” (191). As Philip Edwards points out, “It is the strength of Frye’s arguments that he recognizes the ‘minority voice’ of the ‘alienated spectator’ to be more than a special feature of a particular kind of comedy.”32 Whatever the disagreements with Frye, or the resistance to his admittedly broad structural analyses of Shakespeare, it is clear that, in charting new territory for the criticism of the undervalued genre of comedy in the twentieth century, “Northrop Frye provided the single most important impetus.”33 Recently, William Calin has presented a strong case for Frye as “arguably the last great humanist critic and the first major theoretician”; Calin points out that Frye’s writings on Shakespeare prove that he remained “as much a practical critic as a theorist.”34 Calin argues that, in terms of Frye’s practical criticism, “His most influential book . . . is A Natural Perspective, a path-breaking study on Shakespearean comedy that has been a dominant presence in Shakespeare studies, the book to be followed or resisted.”35 As Calin shows, Frye’s work, despite the arguments of his detractors, does have a historical bent, for it does “the history proper to literature, the history of literary forms, genres, modes, myths, and archetypes.”36 In his own era, Frye not only opened up the ahistorical practices of New Criticism to a consideration of the inherited structures informing literary tradition but, as numerous commentators have pointed out, he also democratized criticism by opening it up to the reader’s responses, for “Frye proves to be a percipient innovator, pioneering in reader-response theory before it came into being.”37 Of the twenty-six pieces in this volume, only six are not on Shakespeare. The popularity of Shakespeare himself was clearly one of his chief attractions for Frye as a topic that would engage an audience of students and general readers. In Notebook 9, Frye himself even wryly confessed how well Shakespeare served him as an easy and profitable crowd-pleaser: while deliberating on a topic for the Bampton Lectures, Frye records five reasons for choosing Shakespeare. To begin with, Shakespeare would

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be convenient—“It gives me a specific topic, & my time is limited”—as well as fresh and ready at hand, unlike “Biblical typology,” “Romantic poetry,” or “general theory.” It would also further his ogdoad project, since “Shakespeare is the logical basis for [Tragicomedy], as Milton is for [Liberal].”38 Tellingly, Frye remarks, “I don’t ‘possess’ Shakespeare, but I do know him, & my papers about him have been fairly successful.” And the clincher is: “A book on Shakespeare by me, if successful, would, appearing in 1964, make news & make money. The latter is the best motivation for academic writing ever discovered, as it creates exactly the right blend of detachment & concern” (NRL, 215). Frye goes on, in the Preface to A Natural Perspective, to disclaim any commercial motivation for publishing a book on Shakespeare just after the four-hundredth anniversary of the Bard’s birth: “I did not realize, until it was too late to retreat, that the lectures would arrive on the threshold of the year 1964” (128). This disclaimer is obviously ironic, however, when set against the recognition that would have hit any twentieth-century critic working on Shakespeare—that above all Shakespeare sells. Although in A Natural Perspective Frye transfers the motivation to “make money” to Shakespeare himself (152), in fact when the Shakespeare industry hit a boom in the year of the quatercentennial Shakespeare celebrations, he got in on some of the gold. He conceived three other public talks in 1964, including no. 14, “Shakespeare and the Modern World,” a talk for CBC radio in the Shakespeare Series of the “University of the Air.” Taking his place as a Shakespearean alongside the likes of Robertson Davies, Tyrone Guthrie, G. Wilson Knight, and Eric Bentley,39 Frye was obviously reaching a wide audience and gaining a great deal of respect. In 1964 Frye gave another public lecture, “The Structure and Spirit of Comedy,” at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, as part of their Shakespeare Seminars, a talk which was subsequently published in Stratford Papers on Shakespeare.40 This was his second stint at the Shakespeare Seminars, which had been inaugurated in 1960 through the offices of the Department of Extension of McMaster University, with sponsorship by the Universities of Canada and the Stratford Festival. In its first year, the Shakespeare Seminars had featured a week-long series of performances, discussion groups, lectures, and presentations by academics and theatre professionals, delivered to a general audience of one hundred Shakespeare enthusiasts from across North America. The only “qualifications” needed to become a member of the Shakespeare Seminars were simply “an interest in Shakespeare and theatre.”41 When the one week of semi-

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nars in 1960 proved such a hit, in its second year the seminars were expanded to two sessions of one week each, and it was during this year that Frye first spoke at Stratford. In the first week of seminars in 1961, he gave the opening talk “Shakespeare’s Experimental Comedy” (no. 8), and the closing talk “The Tragedies of Nature and Fortune” (no. 10), as well as a “Toast to the Memory of Shakespeare” (no. 9) at the windup banquet; all of these talks were subsequently published in Stratford Papers on Shakespeare. In 1982 and 1985 at the Stratford Festival, Frye went on to give two more talks in the Celebrity Lectures series, “Something Rich and Strange: Shakespeare’s Approach to Romance” (no. 21), and “The Stage Is All the World” (no. 22). The publication of both these lectures as pamphlets by the Stratford Festival attests that Frye was by this time a celebrity indeed on the Canadian Shakespeare scene.42 In fact, Frye’s publicity as a Shakespeare scholar had already been evident in 1964, when he was invited, along with six other famous Shakespeare scholars, to participate in a special symposium on Shakespeare at the University of Denver: Frye’s essay “Nature and Nothing” (no. 15) was published in the proceedings, Essays on Shakespeare. Much of Frye’s wide-ranging success stems from his witty, informal, and often aphoristic style, which recommends him so well to the understanding and enjoyment of a general reader. The conversational tone of many of Frye’s lectures on Shakespeare can be explained with reference to Frye’s practice as a teacher, and to the mutual relationship he cultivated between teaching and writing. He reflected in an interview with David Cayley, “I made up my mind almost at once as a lecturer that I wouldn’t write any notes for my lecture until after I’d given it” (NFC, 142; INF, 984). To be sure, many of the Shakespeare pieces that began as public lectures were originally read not from prescripted formal papers but from notes.43 Frye also reflected on the importance of teaching as “a way of trying out ideas,” pitching his ideas to a general educated audience before writing them down. The audience is therefore of utmost importance to Frye. He boldly claims in the Polemical Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism, “What critics now have is a mystery-religion without a gospel, and they are initiates who can communicate, or quarrel, only with one another” (14/15). Frye’s drive to achieve a poetics that would be “a totally intelligible structure of knowledge” (14/16) accounts for his tendency “to address a general cultivated public rather than the primarily scholarly or academic audience” (NFC, 143; INF, 985). Stratford Festival and the universities that first heard many of his lectures on

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Shakespeare thus served Frye as an expanded classroom that allowed him to further his critical goal of developing “a coherent and systematic study, the elementary principles of which could be explained to any intelligent nineteen-year-old” (AC, 14/15). II If Shakespeare is a constant presence in Frye, from his student essays to The Great Code and Words with Power at the end of his career,44 what Frye does with Shakespeare is something much different than capitalizing on the Bardolatry that feeds the Shakespeare industry. Frye uses Shakespeare as a readily understandable cultural point of reference in order to explode prejudices and bring criticism in line with its proper function. To take one striking instance, in the Polemical Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism, Frye uses Shakespeare to stage a “head-on collision” between two different types of critics—the public critic, who seeks “to exemplify how a man of taste uses and evaluates literature, and thus show how literature is to be absorbed into society,” and the scholar, who is “engaged in a scientific procedure related to literary criticism” (AC, 8/10, 9/9).45 John Ruskin acts the scholar when, in a footnote from Munera Pulveris cited by Frye, he attempts to uncover the etymological meanings of the names Desdemona, Othello, and Ophelia. Matthew Arnold plays the role of public critic, objecting to what he calls Ruskin’s “extravagance,” his lack of “all moderation and proportion,” and his “note of provinciality.” Arnold is annoyed with Ruskin for piling up information that, Frye says, “is not the sort of material that the public critic can directly use.” As Frye makes clear, however, Ruskin “is attempting genuine criticism. He is trying to interpret Shakespeare in terms of a conceptual framework which belongs to the critic alone, and yet relates itself to the plays alone” (9/11). Whereas Ruskin is in line with “the great iconological tradition which comes down through Classical and Biblical scholarship into Dante and Spenser,” Arnold is the true “provincial,” since he “is assuming, as a universal law of nature, certain ‘plain sense’ critical axioms which were hardly heard of before Dryden’s time and which can assuredly not survive the age of Freud and Jung and Frazer and Cassirer” (10/11). Frye’s point is to stress the need for “an intermediate form of criticism, a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature” (11/13). Seeing what critics have done with Shakespeare may help us steer between the Scylla of the public critic, who, like Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and

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A.C. Bradley, builds up monuments in the “history of taste” and “follows the vacillations of fashionable prejudice” (9/10); and the Charybdis of the scholar, who “lays down his materials outside the portals of literature” in “a hope that some synthetizing critical Messiah of the future will find it useful” (10/12). In A Natural Perspective, Frye takes on precisely this role of the intermediate or “synthetizing” critic. He begins by disavowing any “contributions to Shakespearean scholarship as such” and explaining, “The present book retreats from commentary into a middle distance, considering the comedies as a single group unified by recurring images and structural devices.” The aim of the book is to make the reader forge a relation between the “experience of Shakespeare” and the “experience of other literature and drama” (129). In the second chapter of the book Frye zeroes in on the pitfalls to which criticism, especially Shakespeare criticism, can fall prey. One danger is inherent in biographical criticism, in assuming that playwrights like Shakespeare have “something to say.” Frye again distinguishes between two different types of critics, exemplified by Coleridge’s and De Quincey’s commentary on the porter’s scene in Macbeth. Coleridge dismisses the porter’s soliloquy and his few speeches in act 2, scene 3 as mainly interpolations, “written for the mob by some other hand”; apart from a couple of lines that might be Shakespeare’s spilt ink, Coleridge complains that “not one syllable has the ever-present being of Shakespeare.” De Quincey’s famous essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” on the other hand, explains the scene in terms of its function within the play, its usefulness, and one might say its primitive effect, and is far preferable to Coleridge’s dismissal, because “the conception of Shakespeare implied is the more comprehensive one” (151). “The critical principle” that the reading of Shakespeare reveals here, for Frye, “is that there is no passage in Shakespeare’s plays, certainly written by Shakespeare, which cannot be explained entirely in terms of its dramatic function and context” (150–1), no matter how much one’s own predilections or idiosyncratic associations might provoke the dislike of a specific line or passage in a given play. In claiming a disinterested autonomy for literary criticism, Frye emphasizes the limited usefulness of critics who appeal to an author’s biography and intentions, and of critics who favour a personal or ideological appropriation of literature. Of course, the history of Shakespeare criticism provides some of the most instructive examples of how an author— “the Bard”—has been made to serve the ends of the critics’ myths that

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have grown up around him. It is true, Frye points out, that “a great deal of patient scholarship” on Shakespeare now exists, which allows us to arrange the plays in a chronological order of composition and from there “write a fictional biography of Shakespeare as a kind of allegory of what that order suggests” (150). But this procedure—“attractive, because it is easy”—has now been “happily discredited” (150), presumably by W.K. Wimsatt and Munroe Beardsley, whose “intentional fallacy” Frye had defined as “the notion that the poet has a primary intention of conveying meaning to a reader, and that the first duty of a critic is to recapture that intention” (AC, 86/79).46 Critics who focus on authorial intention fail to make “the most elementary of all distinctions in literature, the distinction between fiction and fact, hypothesis and assertion, imaginative and discursive writing” (86/79), and fail to see that a poet’s intention is “centripetally directed . . . . towards putting words together, not towards aligning words with meanings.” Shakespeare again, given our intense desire to pin down the meaning of his plays, provides a cogent example: “If we had the privilege of Gulliver in Glubbdubdrib to call up the ghost of, say, Shakespeare, to ask him what he meant by such and such a passage, we could only get, with maddening iteration, the same answer: ‘I meant it to form part of the play’” (86/80). Frye recognizes that we “may be dissatisfied with the ghost of Shakespeare’s answer,” because Shakespeare appears to be such a trustworthy poet and seems to have “meant his passage to be intelligible in itself.” The nature of literature is such that multiple meanings are always possible, as “the relationship of the passage to the rest of the play creates myriads of new meanings for it”; and critical commentary, “which translates the implicit into the explicit,” changes depending upon what is “appropriate or interesting for certain readers to grasp at a certain time.” Asking what Shakespeare meant when he wrote this or that sonnet would elicit Frye’s response, “What the poet meant to say . . . is, literally, the poem itself.” Only by accepting the verbal structure created by the author, whatever the author’s intentions, and hence accepting the autonomy of language, can any reader or critic begin to explain the mystery of how “Hamlet may contain an amount of meaning which the vast and constantly growing library of criticism on the play cannot begin to exhaust” (87/80, 81). Any notion that Shakespeare has “something to say,” any bardolatrous longing after the author’s “original” meaning, however fervent, must confront the serene impartiality, the “perfect objectivity” of Shakespeare (152), who “had no opinions, no values, no philosophy, no principles of

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anything except dramatic structure” (152), and for whom the play itself is the only meaning. Frye is obviously working in the tradition of Keats, who first articulated the “negative capability” of Shakespeare,47 though Frye prefers to cite Matthew Arnold’s formulation in the sonnet “Shakespeare,” with its final couplet, “Others abide our question. Thou art free. / We ask and ask. Thou smilest, and art still.” Frye cites Arnold’s sonnet in three separate pieces (nos. 11, 13, and 14), but on the last two occasions, in A Natural Perspective and the CBC radio talk “Shakespeare and the Modern World,” Frye qualifies this “complacent grinning sphinx” (233) as an unjust depiction of Shakespeare, for “his is a detachment that is totally involved, an impartiality that brings everything equally to life” (234).48 Indeed, Shakespeare’s impartiality as a creator links him with God. Shakespeare reveals his personality “in the purely creative way that God is said to reveal his, everywhere present in all his works” (230). And we are numbered among those works, says Frye, for Shakespeare informs the very way we talk and think. It is an idea that Frye repeats in his eloquent “Toast to the Memory of Shakespeare” (no. 9), where he asks the Stratford audience to raise their glasses to Shakespeare in his three aspects: the man, the dramatic poet, and the great writer “who has played so large a part in forming our own mental processes.” To honour this great shaper of culture is a very “act of piety” (82). III Frye had earned a reputation among Shakespeare critics by mid-century, with his three earliest essays on Shakespeare, which were published between 1949 and 1953, and began as conference papers: “The Argument of Comedy” (no. 1), “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” (no. 3), and “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy” (no. 4). These essays laid the groundwork for the later books on comedy, and were all variously incorporated into the Third Essay of the Anatomy of Criticism, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths.” All three overlapping papers argue that the meaning of Shakespeare’s plays or characters cannot be understood apart from the plays’ structure, that is, their embeddedness in a conventional or archetypal pattern descended from ritual and myth. “The Argument of Comedy,” Frye’s first major paper delivered before a scholarly audience, occasioned a great deal of anxiety for him in the summer of 1948 (Ayre, 208) but, as we have seen, was ultimately one of his most successful articles.

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The title contains a witty pun on the word “argument,” which refers not just to the assertions advanced by comedy, or to a summary of its subject matter, but also to its plot (Latin argumentum), using the word as Classical Roman and Renaissance playwrights did, in its specialized rhetorical sense. Ben Jonson, for example, prefaces his plays with an “Argument” summarizing the plot, in imitation of Roman comedies like those of Plautus which begin with an acrostic argumentum.49 Frye’s first essay on comedy in fact outlines four different arguments of comedy, from the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, through the New Comedy of the Greek playwright Menander and his Roman inheritors Plautus and Terence, from there to the New Comedy conventions used in Jonson’s and Molière’s comedies of manners, and finally to Shakespeare’s greenworld transformation of comic structure. Frye’s ultimate “Argument of Comedy,” however, is the ritual pattern underlying all of the comic forms. In a move that becomes familiar in his later works on Shakespearean comedy, Frye begins by describing Greek New Comedy as “a comic Oedipus situation” or “wish-fulfilment pattern” (4). Its plot centres on a young man who desires to “possess the girl of his choice” but must first outwit the blocking characters, usually the father or senex. By another twist in the plot, “a cognitio or discovery of birth,” the young woman, who begins as an unsuitable slave or courtesan, turns out to be marriageable (4). Frye lists several different kinds of humours who act as blocking characters because they lack self-knowledge and “are slaves to a predictable self-imposed pattern of behaviour.” The final comic resolution is a release on both an individual and social level: “The normal individual is freed from the bonds of a humorous society, and a normal society is freed from the bonds imposed on it by humorous individuals” (6). These comic conventions are followed not just by Jonson and Molière but by “the English Restoration and the French rococo” (5). As he is defining the conventions, though, Frye grants that individual works of comedy exist on a continuum from the “ironic twists” of Ibsen to the “rigidly conventionalized New Comedy” of modern romantic movies. Some comedies, like Jonson’s Volpone, even “move toward tragedy” (7), particularly when they reflect the moral norms of society. This leads Frye to consider how tragedy and comedy are linked by an imaginative form of sacrificial ritual—“the ritual of the struggle, death, and rebirth of a God-Man, which is linked to the yearly triumph of spring over winter” (7)—and to articulate a central premise of his work

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on Shakespeare: “tragedy is really implicit or uncompleted comedy,” just as “comedy contains a potential tragedy within itself” (8). Just as Classical tragedy often “closes on the major chord of comedy,” Christianity recognizes that “tragedy is an episode in that larger scheme of redemption and resurrection to which Dante gave the name of commedia” (8). The resolution of New Comedy therefore turns out to be a “realistic foreshortening of a death-and-resurrection pattern,” for in its fuller mythic shape, the resolution involves not marriage but the struggle and rebirth of a divine hero. If Shakespeare, like Jonson and Restoration playwrights, can be seen to follow the New Comedy movement from blocked desire through to release and social integration, at the same time, like Aristophanes, Shakespeare reveals the older, primitive ritual pattern, for he “divined that there was a profounder pattern in the argument of comedy” than that exhibited by either Plautus or Terence.50 Indeed, Shakespeare draws on yet another comic tradition, the medieval “drama of folk ritual”—what Frye famously calls “the drama of the green world” (9)—which parallels “the ritual of death and revival” in Aristophanes. Shakespeare’s comedies as a group show “the same rhythmic movement from normal world to green world and back again,” whether the green world is described as a forest, a pastoral world, or an island, and the green-world transformation of the comic resolution suggests the ritual triumph of summer over winter. The evolution of Shakespearean comedy from Old Comedy to New Comedy to Christian commedia and finally to the primeval drama of the green world explains ultimately “why he is both the most elusive and the most substantial of poets” (13). To some extent, all of Frye’s work on comedy aims to redefine the critical project and indeed vocabulary of Shakespeare criticism by returning the theory of comedy to where Aristotle had left it. In “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” (no. 3), Frye links the word “myth” with mythos in its Aristotelian sense as narrative: indeed, “The Mythos of Spring: Comedy” is one of the four “generic plots” developed in the Third Essay of Anatomy (AC, 163–86/151–273). He distinguishes “comic myth” in Shakespeare, which emphasizes the final recognition and resolution, from Jonsonian comedy, which emphasizes the blocking characters. Shakespeare’s comic mythos appears fantastic, deriving from romance and infused with the power of “the unreal world” of wish-fulfilment, as opposed to Jonson’s realistic comedy of manners. Though Jonson’s comedy has held the stage until modern times, Shakespeare’s kind has survived only in

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opera. Frye reclaims the terms “primitive” and “popular,” by applying them to Shakespeare: his “primitive” drama, with its ritual echoes, turns out to be “far more sophisticated,” because “primeval” (164) and “profound” (144); and his “popular” brand of dramatic romance “is of a type found all over the world” (31). Shakespeare’s drama is “original” not in the Romantic sense of original genius as “the aboriginal, the atomically individual,” but in the Renaissance sense, in which “originality is a return to origins, as radicalism is a return to roots, the articulation of the archetypes of the human mind” (NRL, 137). “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” is a version of “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humours,” a paper Frye gave at Radcliffe College in 1950 (LS, 144–59). In the earlier paper, he explains the term “comedy of humours,” often applied to Jonson’s comedies, by recourse to the Tractatus Coislinianus, the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise on Greek comedy, which outlines three character types: the alazon (imposter), the eiron (self-deprecator), and the bomolochos (buffoon). “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy” advances this discussion by returning to the three character types of the Tractatus, that “dry bald little summary . . . of all the essential facts about comedy” (34). The category of alazon includes blocking characters bound by their humours: the braggart, miles gloriosus, pedant, crank, “siren,” or bluestocking. The eiron includes the tricky slave, trickster, and vice. Finally, the bomolochos category includes the fool or clown. To these three types, Frye, like Lane Cooper in An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, adds a fourth from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: the agroikos (churl or rustic, including the gull and straight man: that is, the “refuser of festivity” [40]). Now Frye has “four typical characters in comedy, arranged as two opposing pairs” (35). Frye’s illuminating delineation of these character types is one of his most well-known contributions to criticism on Shakespearean comedy, both in this essay and in “The Mythos of Spring” in the Third Essay of Anatomy, and in A Natural Perspective. Like its later incarnations, “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy” upholds the central critical principles that “characterization depends on function,” function depends on structure, and structure depends on genre (33). These first essays on Shakespearean comedy show Frye implicitly drawing the parameters of archetypal criticism, a relatively new field influenced by the work of cultural anthropology and psychology. At the same convention where he delivered “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy,” the 1954 MLA meeting in Boston, Frye also gave a short paper on “The Literary Meaning of Archetype.” This paper was later

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incorporated into the Second Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, with its definition of “archetype” as “a symbol . . . which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience” (LS, 184; cf. AC, 99/91–2). Frye distinguishes between “two kinds of archetypes: structural or narrative archetypes with a ritual content, and modal or emblematic archetypes with a dream content” (LS, 187)—in other words, archetypal criticism treats ritual as “the archetypal aspect of mythos”; and dream as “the archetypal aspect of dianoia” (AC, 107/99). Drama will lend itself to the study of narrative archetypes, whereas “naive romance” will provide the best field for a study of modal archetypes. Because of the heavy emphasis on drama, many of the pieces included in this volume focus on narrative archetypes. However, Frye’s essay “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene” (no. 7) exemplifies the modal form of archetypal criticism, for it shows how Spenser’s poem is unified by symbolism that reflects conventional symbolic frameworks: those of Biblical imagery, the Renaissance schema of four orders of existence, and the nature imagery of romance. Frye’s other piece on poetry, “How True a Twain” (no. 11), similarly focuses on the imagery in Shakespeare’s sonnets, first situating it within the poetic tradition of courtly love and then showing how Shakespeare draws on the entire range of that tradition, including three conventional orders of existence, for his depiction of love relationships. As Frye points out, the archetypal critic, who focuses on ritual and dream, can “find much of interest in the work done by contemporary anthropology in ritual, and by contemporary psychology in dreams” (AC, 108/101; cf. LS, 187–8). Frye’s treatment of archetypes in the mythos or narrative of Shakespearean drama certainly shows the influence of both fields, drawing on the insights of anthropologist Sir James G. Frazer and psychologist Carl Jung, though Frye is quick to warn against “the danger of determinism” (AC, 108/101). That is, Frazer’s and Jung’s work cannot be read as describing historical fact or essential psychological reality; both have immense value for the literary critic because they construct what Frye calls in his Guggenheim proposal a “grammar of symbolism” (NRL, 5), particularly “the work done on the ritual basis of naive drama in Frazer’s Golden Bough, and the work done on the dream basis of naive romance by Jung and the Jungians” (AC, 108/101).51 Frye’s treatment of fertility rites enacting the sacrifice and resurrection of a God-Man recalls Frazer’s work along with that of the Cambridge ritualists: Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford.52 In

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his early student essay entitled “The Fertility Cults,” Frye records a debt to Harrison and Cornford, and to the volumes of The Golden Bough entitled The Dying God (1911), and Adonis, Attis, Osiris (1906).53 The shared belief of Harrison, Murray, and Cornford in the recurring mythic phenomenon of the Year-spirit (eniautos daimon) builds on Frazer’s work on the dying and reborn “vegetation spirit.” In The Golden Bough, Frazer had identified the parallels between the practices and beliefs of modern religion and primitive ritual. He argued for the universal presence in all mythologies of the death–rebirth myth, as enacted in the seasonal cycle: the vegetation god’s movement from death to resurrection is symbolized by the movement from harvest to spring. Other relevant sources cited by Frye in “The Fertility Cults” are Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, which discusses “the archetype of the God-Man in literature”;54 and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, which treats the “Nature Cult.”55 From the ritualists, Frye borrowed and expanded two key points about the death–rebirth archetype: that it was ultimately comic, and that it was feminine or maternal.56 Frye’s assertion in “The Argument of Comedy” that tragedy is implicit or incomplete comedy becomes, in A Natural Perspective, his full-blown Odyssean view of literature (129–30), an orientation toward the dialectical upward movement of comedy. The argument has its beginnings in Frye’s student essay entitled “The Relation of Religion to the Art Forms of Music and Drama” (1936), where he presents “the Passion as the matrix of all drama: it is the world’s supreme comedy as well as its supreme tragedy” (SE, 335). In the Bibliographical Note to the essay, NF acknowledges that its “main ideas” are built on Frazer’s Golden Bough and Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, and credits Frazer for having “suggested in particular the ‘comedy’ archetype in the Passion” (SE, 343). In The Scapegoat volume of The Golden Bough, Frazer had revealed the fertility (especially saturnalian) elements in the Crucifixion of Christ.57 In “his book on libido symbols,” Jung had similarly uncovered the marriage archetype (hieros gamos) in the Passion.58 In his student essay, Frye links the “supreme sacrifice” of Christ with “the supreme drama,” in which “are woven both tragic and comic elements” (SE, 334). Shakespeare immediately comes to mind, in particular the relationship between Falstaff and Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV—“the lord of misrule and the real king who dethrones him after his brief tyranny.” Frye cites Frazer’s reading of Barabbas in the Passion as a scapegoat who “was probably released in the role of buffoon and lord of misrule for the popular carnival” (SE, 335). Thus the Passion is really a “double

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comedy”; in fact, it is “the ultimate treatment of the double comedy we noted in connection with Falstaff and Prince Henry” (SE, 335). Frye also draws on Frazer for a prime example of the death–rebirth archetype, the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. This myth will figure prominently in Frye’s readings of Shakespearean romance, especially The Winter’s Tale, where “the original nature-myth of Demeter and Proserpine is openly established,” as Frye already suggests in “The Argument of Comedy” (10). In this aetiological tale, the goddess of the harvest, Demeter, first plunges the earth into winter when Hades steals her beloved daughter Persephone; once Zeus restores spring by decreeing that Persephone return to Demeter for two-thirds of the year, the earth-goddess continues to mourn every winter when her daughter Persephone returns to the lord of the underworld. Jane Ellen Harrison sees Demeter and Persephone as two aspects of the same Earth-goddess, “two persons through one god.”59 As Frye puts it, “The fact that the dying and reviving character is usually female strengthens the feeling that there is something maternal about the green world, in which the new order of the comic resolution is nourished and brought to birth” (“Argument,” 10–11). The renewal of the green world through a feminized force of nature becomes a central idea in Frye’s later writings on romance, and is set up in his remarks on “the drama of the green world” in the Third Essay of Anatomy of Criticism: “In the rituals and myths the earth that produces the rebirth is generally a female figure, and the death and revival, or disappearance and withdrawal, of human figures in romantic comedy generally involves the heroine” (183/170). If Shakespearean comedy ends on the “tonic chord” of marriage, renewing society through the couple’s fertile union, Shakespearean romance enacts a sublime renewal of all creation, through the female resurrections of Thaisa in Pericles, Fidele in Cymbeline, and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. As he writes in the Preface to A Natural Perspective, Frye’s “main thesis [is] that the four romances are the inevitable and genuine culmination of the poet’s achievement” (128). The common structure of comedy and romance, suggested by the book’s subtitle (The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance), foregrounds the recognition scene. But in Shakespearean romance the conventional New Comedy cognitio of Shakespearean comedy gives rise to a higher recognition of the redemptive power of art. In fact, as Frye writes in “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale” (no. 12), “an emblematic recognition scene . . . is the distinguishing feature of the four late romances” (117). Frye situates the double recogni-

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tion scene of The Winter’s Tale within the “Renaissance framework” of the two levels of the order of nature (124). The play offers a Menandrine cognitio in the recognition of Perdita’s true parentage, and her subsequent marriage to Florizel. But this first recognition cannot be Shakespeare’s main focus, since it is “only reported,” whereas the second recognition scene, which “is all his own” is carefully enacted (117). In this scene, the statue of Hermione, who has long been presumed dead, is “awakened” by the faith of Leontes, and by extension of the audience. In order to emphasize the regenerative power of art as a higher order of nature, Frye evokes one of his favourite topoi, Sir Philip Sidney’s “sound humanist view” in the Apology for Poetry. Sidney argues that poets can transform the “brazen” world of nature into a “golden” world, where human beings are lifted up and “grow a second nature.” When Polixenes says, “The art itself is Nature” in The Winter’s Tale (4.4.97), he only dimly glimpses what Sidney might mean in a more profound application of the Renaissance theory of art. Polixenes refers to the art of the gardener, which can change or improve on nature, but “only through nature’s power” (120). Frye stresses that Shakespeare’s romances ultimately appeal to a higher order of nature regenerated by art—not to the lower order of physical nature in the fallen world, but to the realm of “human nature,” which is “the state that man lived in in Eden, or the golden age” (124). It is the goal of art, as of law, morality, and education, to regain this “original state” of nature as “a superior order” (124). In Shakespeare’s romances, as in Renaissance poetry generally, this “upper level of nature” is symbolized by the “starry spheres” and their music. In his treatment of the dialectical relationship between the two levels of nature, Frye aligns himself with G. Wilson Knight (whose book The Shakespearian Tempest treats the tempest and music images in the romances) and A.S.P. Woodhouse (whose article “Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene” shaped Frye’s conception of the two orders of nature).60 Like music, dance represents at play’s end “the pulsating energy of nature,” and the final recognition of the play, despite the absence of a magician, leaves us with a magical “sense of a participation in the redeeming and reviving power of a nature identified with art, grace, and love” (126). As Frye argues elsewhere, the emphasis on music, dance, and spectacle in The Winter’s Tale links it with the masque-like elements in Shakespeare’s other romances such as The Tempest.61 In his discussions of The Tempest, Frye argues that this “fourth and last of the great romances of Shakespeare’s final period” reaches “the

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very bedrock of drama itself” (52). In his early introduction to the Penguin edition of the play (no. 6), first published in 1959 and reprinted in 1970, Frye first traces the contemporary accounts of shipwreck and the dramatic traditions of masque, commedia dell’arte, and opera in the play, before focusing on how the wedding masque and the recognition scene reveal nature’s redemption from seasonal cycles and the “tempest” that is time, along with humanity’s miraculous resurrection. This revelation, facilitated by Prospero’s magic—his “so potent art” (5.1.50)—lifts the characters and the audience “not out of the world, but from an ordinary to a renewed and ennobled vision of nature” (47). Frye notes that for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, alchemy (the kind of magic evoked by Prospero at the beginning of act 5) also symbolized the kind of discipline that could redeem the lower order of nature (46). Frye’s lecture “Shakespeare’s The Tempest” (no. 18), given in Vicenza, Italy, years after he wrote his Penguin introduction, even more forcefully emphasizes the triumph of art over nature. Unlike Jonson’s realistic form of drama, Shakespeare’s comedy and romance foreground the ultimate reality of illusion, which lifts us up to a higher vision of nature. The structure of comedy plays a key role in this dialectical movement towards enlightenment: Shakespeare’s plays are about the relation of characters such as Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure to Comedy as a character in the action of the play. As he does elsewhere, Frye recalls Colin Still’s discussion of the parallels between The Tempest and ancient rites of initiation, such as the Eleusinian rites inspired by the worship of Demeter near Athens.62 However, the parallels can be explained, Frye says, not by the “inner necessity” to which Still appeals, but by “a necessity of dramatic structure” (341). What is “highly significant,” for Frye, is that “this vision of the reality of nature from which we have fallen away can be attained only through some kind of theatrical illusion” (340). Because “the power of art gives us a faith that helps us to face the past” (343), art is instrumental in effecting a conversion that is a re-creation of nature. IV It should be clear by now why, in the opening of A Natural Perspective, Frye calls himself “temperamentally an Odyssean critic” (130). Delineating two kinds of critics, Iliad and Odyssey, he aligns himself with the latter because it is comedy and romance that promise a triumph over the destructive forces of nature and time. Chapter 1 distinguishes Jon-

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son’s realistic drama from the incredible but primitive drama of Shakespeare—what Jonson called his “mouldy tales”—“with its ‘monsters’ and its desire to ‘run away from nature’” (132). As Frye argues at the end of the chapter, Jonson and Shakespeare work in two separate traditions, though there is no need to prefer one over the other. Chapter 2 presents dramatic structure, not the author, as the proper focus of criticism and of the community. Through their structure, Shakespeare’s plays make contact with the “worldwide tradition” of drama, and constitute a displacement of the ritual acts of sympathetic magic. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the myth of nature, the “mysterious personal force that commands” (172), in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances. Chapter 3 also famously outlines the dialectical movement of comedy through its three stages: the anticomic society, the confusion of identity and sexual licence, and the discovery of identity on both the social and individual level. These three stages suggest the three ritual forms preceding comedy—the periods of preparation, licence, and festivity. As we have seen, Frye stresses the audience’s ambivalent role in the dramatic enactment, as both participant and spectator. Shakespearean comedy and romance pull us to a new imaginative vision, as in Bottom’s famous speech about his dream that “has no bottom,” and this “beckoning to a new and impossible world” should provoke from us the same response as that of Antipholus in The Comedy of Errors: “I’ll entertain the offered fallacy” (199). Indeed, The Bottomless Dream and The Offered Fallacy were Frye’s preferred titles for A Natural Perspective, but Columbia University Press rejected both as “obscene” (Ayre, 302; see 129). The title Frye did settle on alludes to the final recognition scene of Twelfth Night, in which the Duke is confronted with the miraculous spectacle of the indistinguishable twins Sebastian and Viola, and exclaims, “A natural perspective, that is and is not” (129). The “perspective” or distorting glass of nature here doubles the image of one into two, and provides an apt metaphor for the mirror that drama, especially comedy, holds up to nature. As Frye puts it, “comedy does not hold a mirror up to nature, but it frequently holds a mirror up to another mirror, and brings its resolution out of a double illusion” (196). Comedy shows us nature or reality “created by human desire” (198), and urges us to accept this “offered fallacy” on faith, as a more profoundly “natural” world than the ordinary plane of existence that binds us. Hence “drama is doing, through the identity of myth and metaphor, what its ritual predecessors tried to do by the identity of sympathetic magic: unite the human and the natural worlds” (199). Frye

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links the “genuinely new vision” of nature to a state “symbolized by the innocence of childhood,” like that in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue: “The action of a Shakespearean comedy, then, is not simply cyclical but dialectical as well: the renewing power of the final action lifts us into a higher world, and separates that world from the world of the comic action itself” (209). Frye’s theory that Shakespearean comedy and romance offer a transformative fiction capable of redeeming nature must have been severely tested when, between the second and third Bampton Lectures, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As Ayre puts it, “There couldn’t have been a more brutal irony for someone lecturing in evangelical terms about comedy in an age of irony.” Though Frye did not refer to the shattering event in the remaining lectures or in the subsequent book, he registers the emotional toll in a talk a month later (Ayre, 294–5), and years later in a compelling discussion of “drama . . . as a central form of literary education” (WE, 505). Drama, says Frye, is “a training in something which the existentialists tell us is impossible: of being a spectator of one’s own life.” To explain the transformative power of drama, “that descending informing vision which is what Heidegger is pointing to when he says that man does not use language but responds to language,” Frye again appeals to two orders of reality. The first is the “social contract” under which we are born, and whose society “is only the transient appearance of society, a society in which a single psychotic with a rifle can change the presidency of the United States.” The “permanent realities of the arts and sciences which education leads us to” lie behind this lower level of society, and hence the “educational contract” has a crucial emancipatory “authority” (WE, 505–6). Frye emphasizes in A Natural Perspective that “education and the arts” are the key instruments by which Shakespeare and “all his contemporaries” strive to return to an inward state of “perpetual fertility where it was spring and autumn at once” (211). As we advance in time, Frye’s four books on Shakespeare tend to focus more and more on individual plays. Whereas A Natural Perspective blends all of Shakespeare’s comedies and romances together in one overarching pattern, The Myth of Deliverance and Northrop Frye on Shakespeare give individual plays their own chapters. Fools of Time and The Myth of Deliverance are best read as companion pieces owing to the striking symmetry of their ternary structures. As Frye declares in Fools of Time, “The easiest way to get at the structure of Elizabethan tragedy is to think of it as a reversal of the structure of comedy” (260). The “drive towards iden-

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tity” on the social, erotic, and individual level in comedy and romance is mirrored in tragedy, with the tragedy of order (Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet), tragedy of passion (Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus), and tragedy of isolation (King Lear, Othello, Timon of Athens). The first centres on the killing of the father, the second on a conflict between duty and passion, and the third on the hero’s removal from society. Frye, being a critic who has “learned his critical categories from Blake,” likens these three to “tragedies of Urizen, tragedies of Luvah, and tragedies of Tharmas” (260). In Fools of Time, Frye resolves the opposition between Iliad and Odyssey critics, for in his hands the creative effort that moves us toward self-transcendence reveals itself in tragedy, too. In his early Stratford piece “The Tragedies of Nature and Fortune” (no. 10), Frye had placed Coriolanus within the tradition of Renaissance tragedy by showing that it not only draws upon well-known collections of tragic narratives such as Lydgate’s Falls of Princes and A Mirror for Magistrates, but also uses the wheel of fortune as a central image. But Frye had pointed out that “it is possible to get a technically comic conclusion by stopping the wheel turning halfway” (84), as Shakespeare does in history plays like Henry V and Henry VIII. In Fools of Time, as in the Coriolanus essay, Frye’s statement “Tragedy is a mixture of the heroic and the ironic” (87) recalls his earlier work in the First Essay of Anatomy of Criticism (35–43/33–40), on the fictional modes of tragedy, from romance (“god-like heroism”) through to “all-too-human irony” (AC, 37/35). If the “basis of the tragic vision is being in time” (251), and tragedy forces us to confront “the reality principle,” this is “not the whole of the tragic vision” (252; cf. 130). Tragedy presents both a “sacrificial” impetus by which the finite nature of human life points beyond itself to the infinite, and “the impact of heroic energy on the human situation” (253), a vestige of the higher order of nature found in romance. Frye links these two visions, the ironic and the heroic, to the recurring symbols in Elizabethan tragedy: the order of nature, and the wheel of fortune (258). Frye describes The Myth of Deliverance as a return to his preoccupying interest in “the conception of comedy, more particularly Shakespearean comedy, and its relation to human experience” (362). Each of the three chapters focuses on one of the so-called “problem plays”—Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida—and the ways that they anticipate the later romances. If romance involves “the human concern for survival,” comedy involves “the human concern for

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deliverance.” The Christian “conversion” and Buddhist paravritti (turning about), like the Marxist term “revolution,” emphasize the religious or political necessity of achieving a reversal “of the normal current of life” (369). The “reversal upward” in comedy, or anastrophe as Frye habitually describes it (363), is the result of a providential twist or gimmick, and most often seems incredible, unlikely, or even “residually perplexing” (364). The only way to understand the comic reversal is to attend to the plays themselves, which embody “the high mysteries of comedy that Shakespeare has in his keeping,” and can teach us about freedom and deliverance (384). The problem has been that critics assumed that these plays were realistic, concerned with social issues, but Frye says they are better treated as fantastic retellings of folk tales. Frye recalls Aristotle’s discussion of reversal (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis), in chapter 11 of Poetics, to consider how these three “romantic comedies” resemble the structure of the late romances. Each play illustrates a comic reversal: the reversal of action (Measure for Measure), the reversal of energy (All’s Well That Ends Well), and the reversal of reality (Troilus and Cressida). The first two plays illustrate in typical comic fashion the “myth of deliverance, a sense of energies released by forgiveness and reconciliation, where Eros triumphs over Nomos or law, by evading what is frustrating or absurd in law and fulfilling what is essential for social survival.” Troilus and Cressida, however, is so ironic that it “does not illustrate the myth of deliverance in comedy” (403), but ends by suggesting the necessity of that myth. The play takes the fallen world as a version of reality, and Shakespeare does not reverse this disillusionment into “real illusion,” though the very attitude of disillusionment represents “the starting point of any genuine myth of deliverance” (421). The myth of deliverance lifts human beings above the fallen world to the higher order of nature made possible through “created reality” (420). As Frye argues, recalling Vico’s axiom verum factum (the true is the made), human beings “understand reality only through the medium of some fiction” (420). Shakespearean comedy and romance aim to create the illusion of a “supreme fiction superior to reality,” and hence to effect an ultimate recognition in the audience, “the incorporating of the play into our own creative lives and traditions” (424). Frye’s notion of the “created reality” of literature may be explained as one of many kinds of performative speech acts. Like a promise, or a command, literature works like a performative speech act because it not only performs the action to which it refers, but also “takes its place among the

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acts of language that transform the world, bringing into being the things that they name.”63 The mystery of comedy that Shakespeare has in his keeping lies hidden in the performativity of art, which demands the full participation, even possession, of the audience. As a performative utterance, literature, like a promise, does not describe, and therefore depend upon, a prior state of affairs that is either true or false.64 The comic performative creates the state of affairs to which it refers, delivering us from that prior state of affairs normally referred to as “reality.” Of course, Shakespeare is not confined to comedy or romance for the emancipating effect in the “created reality” of the performative. The Myth of Deliverance argues in passing that “in every play he [Shakespeare] wrote the central character is the theatre itself” (409). The theatrical experience is thus a literary conversion toward an experience of created reality. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare can be distinguished from Frye’s previous books on Shakespeare by its central emphasis on the meta-theatrical theme of plays commenting upon themselves as plays. Originally sent out for publication as a mere transcript from an audiotape of Frye’s classroom lectures on Shakespeare, the manuscript, as Ayre states, “had run into trouble,” and could only be published if “Frye reworked the fairly raw manuscript” in the summer of 1985 (388). The book had the two distinctions of being “a genuine record of Frye the classroom lecturer” and “Frye’s first genuinely ‘practical’ book” of criticism. However, Frye typically slipped in “most of his career-long themes,” and the book “also faithfully followed Frye’s irritating penchant for excluding index and notes” (389). One of those career-long themes he states in his introduction (459), but even more significantly in the chapter on Antony and Cleopatra: “I’ve often spoken of the theatre as the central character in all of Shakespeare’s plays, and this play revolves around Cleopatra because she’s the essence of theatre” (568). As Frye also makes clear in “The Stage Is All the World” (no. 22), Shakespeare reminds us more forcefully than most writers of the theatrum mundi topos, that all the world’s a stage. In modern terms, we now translate this phrase as referring to the constructed nature of our social world and, especially, our identity. Indeed, it is because he foregrounds the performative, or constructed, nature of identity that Frye predicts Antony and Cleopatra, of all Shakespeare’s plays, will prove the “most central in the twenty-first century” (565). Evidence of the belief that an individual’s “real” identity is not some “hidden inner essence” (509) but a process of performance appears

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everywhere in Frye’s corpus. A favourite way of introducing the topic for Frye is through the ambiguity of the word “hypocrite,” which turns up among other places in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare during a discussion of the tetralogy consisting of Richard II and the Henry plays. Frye tells us that the metaphor of a masked actor inherited from ancient times has given two words to the language: “One is ‘hypocrite,’ which is Greek in origin and refers to the actor looking through the mask; the other is ‘person,’ which is Latin and refers to his speaking through it” (509). The modern meaning of the word “persona” usually refers to the social aspect of the individual, but Frye avers that the term is misleading “because it implies a real somebody underneath the masks, and . . . there’s never anything under a persona except another persona” (509). Frye’s assertion that identity is “an act,” something performed, the mask or persona of an actor, does more than introduce the theatrum mundi trope, generalizing the performativity of identity to the world outside the theatre. The theatre itself provides a catalyst for changing character. Cleopatra, for instance, is a “woman whose identity is an actress’s identity,” which means that “the offstage does not exist in her life” (569). As a way of explaining her relationship with Antony, Frye says that “Her love, like everything else about her, is theatrical, and in the theatre illusion and reality are the same thing” (569). The infinite nature of heroic love that Antony and Cleopatra share becomes a tragic impossibility, and in tragedy we get forms “of heroism that are too big for the world as we know it, and so become destructive” (579). The audience, nevertheless, walks away from the tragedy not “miserable but exhilarated, not crushed but enlarged in spirit” because the lovers give us a glimpse of the mysterious otherness of passion, for “It always was, as we say, out of this world” (485). The crucial point for Frye that is too easily missed, however, revolves around the word “illusion,” which derives from the Latin word ludere, meaning “to play” (OED). It is part of our human reality to “play” with reality in order to discover better ways of adapting to it, or changing reality to make it adapt to us. The creative power is only ever present when we interrupt reality in favour of an “illusion” and create another world of possibility in this one. Frye wants us to see this creative power not just in literature, but in the sacred text too, where even the kerygmatic aspect of the Bible cannot move us without the imaginative and poetic, “the principle of the reality of what is created in the production and response to literature” (WP, 128/119). From The Critical Path to the

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later books on religion, we achieve “salvation” (CP, 53; CPCT, 35), however we conceive of it, by way of “created reality,” whether it is achieved through kerygma, “myth to live by” (WP, 117/110), or through human effort alone. All art to some extent shows us the “illusion of reality and the reality of illusion” (618), but the “supreme example of this interchange” between illusion and reality is, Frye declares in Words with Power, The Tempest (WP, 85/85). The ultimate importance of The Tempest for Frye is suggested by the fact that all four of his books on Shakespeare conclude with this play. “Most of Prospero’s ‘art’ in the play is magic,” Frye says, “but some of it is also music and drama, and this ‘art’ acts as a counterillusion, the material world of an intelligible or spiritual reality” (619). The physical, material world that we think of as “real” may last a little longer, but it too is transitory and therefore is as much an illusion in its way as the imaginary. Like the play itself, however, the illusions within the play “such as the songs of Ariel and the mirages seen by the Court Party, including the disappearing banquet, belong to Prospero’s ‘art’ and have a creative role, agents in the transformation of character” (618). Just as the characters undergo a quest, an ordeal, and a symbolic vision that prove to be a kind of “education as a result of the dramatic action,” so too does the audience (613). This literary education does not indoctrinate the audience into realizing the illusion of this or that political or religious belief, but to “believe intransitively” (WP, 131/122). The danger of a transitive belief in some particular object is that “to realize an illusion is to abolish its future and turn it into a presence” (WP, 131/121). As a witness to the power of created reality, Frye’s poetic of belief has no specific ideological goal: “Belief is rather the creative energy that turns the illusory into the real” (WP, 129/120). This creative energy derives its power from the model world that poetry offers, a potentially existent world (including the kerygmatic) that, as Frye writes, is “something to be brought into being by a certain kind of social action” (CP, 100; CPCT, 68), that is to say, creative action whereby humanity makes its own culture. Frye often uses the metaphor of possession to describe the ideal reader’s response to Shakespeare. His General Editor’s Introduction to the Shakespeare Series (no. 17) advises students to foster a kind of “reading until we pass the stage of reading and begin to enter the stage of possession, when the characters become members of our own imaginative family, and the cadences have begun to enter our own subconscious, or wherever it is that familiar phrases are stored” (322). Similarly, his

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introduction to Shakespeare’s The Tempest ends by boldly declaring it “a play not simply to be read or seen or even studied, but possessed” (52). Frye is cagey here about the relation between the “possession” and full-scale appropriation of the text, despite his assertions elsewhere that we should resist the impulse to twist the text so that it fits our own ideological mould. Frye himself, of course, does not always escape the temptation to turn Shakespeare in a direction that seems to him most apt. For example, in his discussion of the sonnets Frye neatly sidesteps any suggestion of actual homosexuality, by emphasizing that convention— and not the notoriously speculative figure “W.H.”—is the “onlie begetter” of Shakespeare’s poems. Admittedly, Frye himself has something of a blind spot on the autonomy of literary language. He insists that we must avoid confining the vast imaginative experience of literature and its conventions within a limited focus on the supposed experience of life that occasioned a given text. In his last two books on Shakespeare, however, Frye begins to grant that his possession of the plays has been driven by his own critical and philosophical concerns. He prefaces The Myth of Deliverance with the statement, “I hope the little book will suggest something of what the study of Shakespeare has invariably been for me” (361). Similarly, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare attempts to show just what the title indicates: Frye’s own take on Shakespeare, revealing how he has taken possession of the dozen or so plays in that volume. But if Frye himself is not immune to the charge of blind spots in either taste or judgment—given that “Honest critics are continually finding blind spots in their taste” (AC, 27/28)—one of his driving critical principles is that the business of criticism is to cultivate “a steady advance toward undiscriminating catholicity” (AC, 25/26). In fact, Frye’s own theories are much less set in stone than his detractors would judge them to be. As he circles around the same ideas over four decades, we can see him adapting them to the demands of the occasion, clarifying and refining them when new examples present themselves, allowing for the malleability of the conventions in the hands of specific authors or cultures. His works of practical criticism here, especially the Stratford Festival pieces, reveal just how deft he is at incorporating new plays into his discussions of dramatic structure. His overt commitment to catholicity in judgment and his moments of playful irony do succeed in keeping Frye remarkably open as a critic. In the words of Jonas Barish, “Frye’s criticism, despite its fearful symmetry, is in fact . . . uncoercive: it does not aim to legislate our responses, but to understand

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their multiplicity, discriminate them, and legitimize them.”65 Central to Frye’s writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance is his cultivation of this uncoercive openness, so characteristic of an “ethical criticism” that aims at nothing less than “the consciousness of the presence of society” (AC, 24/25). In his 1949 Diary, Frye recounts a conversation about why at that time he did not want to write a book about T.S. Eliot: “I could write only about people who were open at the top, & he was sealed off at the top” (D, 141).66 He continues, “the open top has something to do with the als ob [as if] basis of poetic truth” (D, 141). Frye is referring to Hans Vaihinger’s “as if” philosophy, which holds that human beings construct fictions and live by them as if they were fact, to create order in an irrational world. It is an argument that he memorably uses in his last work, The Double Vision, whose argument about the metaphorical basis of faith he traces to “Vaihinger’s ‘as if’: the fiction is the fact, belonging to the created world and not the there-world” (LN, 2:613).67 It is this created world, always “open at the top,” that Frye continually gestures toward, as a critic and educator, in his writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance. V Frye’s theory of literature shares with the Renaissance critic and artist a faith in the social role of all creative efforts to promote human selftranscendence. This faith in poetic power, what we might call a poetics of faith, appears in Blake’s identification of the divine and the human imagination: “God and creative man being the same thing” (MM, 286; M&B, 435); and in Vico’s axiom verum factum; as in Frye’s analyses of Shakespearean comedy and romance. The question is, why should Frye use the older Shakespearean example and its outdated Renaissance cosmology, signified by the Chain of Being, to illustrate his theory of the social function of all literature? The two levels of nature in the Renaissance are later reversed in the Romantic era where the revealed world is not found in Christian Biblical doctrine, but in a natural society held to be an ideal society buried under the actually existing one. Shakespeare’s answer to the humanist educational theory lies in art’s capacity to bring this lost ideal, or model, world into existence through the creative activity of art. For instance, in The Winter’s Tale, Frye argues, “nature is associated, not with the credible, but with the incredible,” that is, “with the impossible miracle of renewed life” (126). Frye suggests that, long before the

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Romantics, Shakespeare signals a growing sense in literary history that the more secular Western society becomes, the more literature inherits some function of the sacred Biblical text wherein literature becomes a “human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man” (EI, 44; EICT, 474). In his bold claim that literature is a “secular scripture” of man’s own creation, an analogy to the Bible or “revealed scripture” (SeS, 60, 61; SeSCT, 43), Frye once again features Shakespeare’s romance, like Spenser’s, as the “structural core of all fiction.” Romance presents us with that structural core as a narrative retelling of the Biblical story, “a parallel epic in which the themes of shipwreck, pirates, enchanted islands, magic, recognition, the loss and regaining of identity, occur constantly, as they do in the last four romances of Shakespeare” (SeS, 15; SeSCT, 14). Frye obviously chooses the oeuvre of a writer whose imaginative range is large enough to embody the four narrative schemes of tragedy, comedy, satire (or irony), and romance, narratives shaping all of literary language. Frye, however, also chooses Shakespeare as a writer who fully appreciates the fiduciary act involved in the reader’s acceptance of literary fictions and conventions, and especially in the reader’s “imaginative faith” (140) in the poet’s metaphorical structure. For Shakespeare makes the creative power of the imagination a constant theme in his plays. In both his narratives and metaphorical structures, Frye’s Shakespeare overcomes the split between the two levels of nature, which otherwise would remain entirely separate and would continue to produce a deep sense of alienation from the natural environment. As Frye states in A Natural Perspective, the plot in Shakespeare’s comedies “symbolizes a movement from one form of reality to another” (198). Comedy, like romance, gives us the world we desire, not objective reality, but the reality of what we have constructed with our creative power. Metaphor in particular achieves this identity between the subjective and the objective world, a way of thinking that does not depend upon the descriptive truth of correspondence between word and thing, but upon a more primitive and archaic kind of thinking that Frye calls “verbal magic” (161). Paradoxically, Frye advocates that it is precisely this archaic verbal magic accomplished by myth and metaphor that makes Shakespeare communicable to future generations of audiences and readers. To what extent does Frye’s own “verbal magic” make his theory of the created reality in literature communicate with future generations of his readers? The more one reads Frye, both in this volume and in other volumes of the Collected Works, the more one feels that he can still teach

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us. Because Frye, like any good teacher, is determined to “suspend the question,” it seems rather hasty to dismiss him, as Richard Halpern recently has, as a Shakespearean “modern” who represents “the impasse reached by late or academic modernism.”68 For, as Halpern himself acknowledges, Frye’s work does open itself up to new considerations, even if critics have not completely followed Frye’s lead: “The privileged position occupied by romance as a genre in Frye’s criticism is surely one of its windows on the postmodern—and yet in Shakespearean criticism, at least, this aspect of Frye’s work seems also to have come to little.”69 Furthermore, there are indications in our age that Frye’s work may yet be revitalized, as Michael Taylor provocatively concludes in his survey Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century: “it is noticeable at the end of the millennium that there are signs of a reawakening in Shakespeare criticism of a positive attitude to Shakespeare’s work as secular scripture.”70 Perhaps, as Taylor suggests, despite (or because of) “our immersion in the postmodern condition,” there may yet be among us “wonder-wounded hearers” willing to awake a new kind of faith.71 For example, H.W. Fawkner asserts, “The hypertranscendental dimensions of William Shakespeare’s work cannot be forbidden. And partly that is so because those free dimensions simply are there.”72 What remains of Frye in the twenty-first century, then, after all the theoretical, ideological, and political changes in the field of literary criticism? Is his historical fate already determined by Frank Lentricchia’s caricature that Frye stands as the Romantic idealist hypothesizing a “center of the order of words” forever opposed to the “endless labyrinth” of free association so commonly attributed to poststructuralism, especially its founding figure, Jacques Derrida?73 Such an opposition is not only reductive, but seriously misrepresents the thinking of both Frye and Derrida. What Lentricchia fails to mention is that between centre and labyrinth, or what Derrida calls the “two interpretations of interpretation,” Derrida himself does not believe “that today there is any question of choosing.”74 Despite being absolutely irreconcilable and irreducible to each other, these two interpretations of interpretation imply each other the way the centre of a circle implies the margin that marks its diameter and its limit. What has gone unnoticed is Derrida’s reference to the “common ground” of struggle between the two interpretations of interpretation where an “obscure economy” exists, an economy where the differences generate a productive exchange along with new, previously

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unthinkable, even “monstrous,” ideas—in this case, new ways of thinking about literature.75 Frye himself provides a glimpse of this “obscure economy” between the centre and the labyrinth of interpretation in literary criticism on the issue of value judgments, an issue not without its relevance to the more recent “multicultural,” and feminist, struggles over the literary canon and Shakespeare studies itself. While Frye’s position on value judgments cannot be reduced to the simple opposition between Frye and Derrida, it does not mean we should overlook the differences between the two thinkers. We should be very careful to preserve them.76 Frye, for example, is a North American literary critic struggling to break free of New Criticism’s powerful, continuing influence, whereas Derrida is a Continental philosopher who criticizes metaphysical assumptions in the tradition of critique, and strives to think outside the entire metaphysical tradition in philosophy. Frye is also a world-renowned theorist of literature, while Derrida, on the other hand, resists theory (without rejecting it entirely).77 Difficulties for oppositional thinking arise immediately, however, because, in the controversy surrounding the issue of value judgments, Frye himself (like Derrida) resists the traditional role of the critic as a judge of literary works.78 Frye, despite being repeatedly attacked for doing so, contends that a critic must suspend value judgments in the critical act.79 What has gone unnoticed in this debate is Frye’s appeal to phenomenology and the notion of epoche, the bracketing or suspension of judgment, to support his position. His use of Shakespeare illustrates the need for the suspension of judgment in order for the critic to see what a particular author or work gives creatively to the tradition, rather than have that author or work just be placed passively within the tradition. Frye’s main argument on value judgments is put forward first in the Polemical Introduction to the Anatomy of Criticism and then in his essay “On Value Judgments” collected in The Stubborn Structure (reprinted in CPCT, 258–65). Frye simply proposes that evaluation of literature ought to be suspended in favour of gaining knowledge of its conventions and genres derived from an inductive survey of literature. In the later essay on value judgments, Frye mentions in passing the philosophical movement of phenomenology, saying that “the value-sense is, as the phenomenological people say, pre-predicative” (StS, 70; CPTC, 262). But in Notebook 19 dating from the same period, Frye shows a considerable awareness of Edmund Husserl’s writing on epoche as the suspension of

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judgment and belief. Frye states that evaluative criticism must undergo a “willing suspension of belief, not disbelief . . . . I don’t, as I say, understand Husserl, but I gather his ‘reduction’ is a suspension of this kind. He compares it with the epoche of Greek skepticism, & says that fully carried out it would lead to a metamorphosis (Wandlung) of the personality” (TBN, 96–7). Husserl actually describes epoche as a “complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion.”80 Frye seems to be saying that the critic’s suspension of value judgments turns away from one’s usual beliefs and turns toward something different, something otherwise invisible, something singularly other. Frye’s position on value judgments shows him embracing the canonical tension between tradition and individual talent, the centre and labyrinth of literature, even to the point that the uniqueness of the literary work surpasses the conventional criteria of canonical literature. Critical judgments based on one’s own prejudices and assumptions must be set aside so that one is open to the particular historical and stylistic difference of the author being studied, even to the point that the critic “is not judging the great poets at all. They judge him” (StS, 69; CPCT, 261). After Frye’s brief discussion of the critical debates of value surrounding Dickens and Shakespeare, there is little doubt who the great poet is that judges us and thereby contributes to the growth of the canon. This short review of Frye’s position on value judgments and phenomenology may, in itself, serve as a call for a new assessment of Frye’s contribution to the current field of literary theory. To ignore the implications of Frye’s endorsement of Vico’s doctrine of verum factum would seriously underestimate Frye’s contributions to, and anticipations of, the new directions taken in current theoretical discussions of literature. Frye has a crucial affinity, too often ignored, with the so-called “postmodernists” like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who have an expanded sense of the autonomy of language, which includes literary language. In particular, as we have already suggested, Frye anticipates postmodern treatments of the performative in speech-act theory, but Frye’s relation to Derrida’s notion of literature as a “secret” remains an undiscovered country even more vast.81 Frye’s entire oeuvre revolves around this paradox as exemplified by Shakespeare’s work: “Literature is the embodiment of a language, not of belief or thought: it will say anything, and therefore in a sense it says nothing” (CP, 101; CPCT, 68). Literature “says nothing” because, as Sir Philip Sidney argues, the poet “nothing affirmeth,” or in more modern parlance, the poet does not make consta-

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tive utterances that are either true or false. In a sense, Frye has always been introducing us to the performative nature of literary language, that it does what it says in saying it, long before the term became intellectually fashionable. The issues surrounding performative language are especially urgent when Shakespeare enters the debate because, as Frye has argued for decades, it is reductive to read him ideologically rather than poetically, or to take him from being a “poet writing plays to an ego with something to ‘say’” (154). The paradox is that this same poet who ostensibly has nothing to say also happens to be one of the most universally successful in communicating his art to the world. Shakespeare’s trans-historical appeal was, apparently, sufficiently evident that, as his contemporary rival poet Ben Jonson famously writes, “He was not of an age but for all time” (457). Frye turns Jonson’s assertion into a question, asking why, or how, Shakespeare’s work survives the vicissitudes of historical change. He describes the question as “the greatest mystery of literature: the mystery of how someone can communicate with times and spaces and cultures so far removed from his own” (457). No critic has written more to unveil this mystery than Frye, given the recurrent theme of myth, or narrative, and metaphor, in his writings. But even after the most ideological interpretation of Shakespeare, there is an intrinsic mystery in art that “remains a mystery in itself no matter how fully known it is, and hence not a mystery separated from what is known” (AC, 88/81). No critic has done more to set authorial intentionality adrift than Frye, and no one has done more to protect it. By turning away from representational language toward the implausible literary conventions that occur “only in stories,” Shakespeare, to quote Derrida, performatively produces “a certain context,” creating an oeuvre that is more contextualizing than it is contextualized.82 But long before Derrida, Frye proposes that narrative and metaphor performatively produce a “certain context” of their own and therefore they are words, or verbal structures, that do not have their truth outside themselves as descriptive writing does. If the truth of myth and metaphor is not outside, then it must be “inside” the words themselves, hidden like a secret, and yet lying open in a book for everyone to read. Frye states that all authors are “subject to the anxieties of their times, but there is also a way of reading poetry that redeems it from these anxieties” (CP, 99; CPCT, 67). The way to redeem poetry from the anxieties of its time or from its ideological concerns is to engage, through the imagination, the created reality of the performative, or what Frye refers to as the “counter-

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historical direction [that] redeems time” (CP, 98; CPCT, 66). Frye believes that the break from present reality made possible by the created reality in every literary performative act helps account for Shakespeare’s enduring influence. Frye says that every critic dealing with Shakespeare must inevitably face the implications of the fact that “Shakespeare still holds the stage and still communicates with the present age, for reasons that would have been unintelligible to most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and quite probably to Shakespeare himself” (CP, 100; CPCT, 68). Derrida provides an opportunity to advance Frye’s argument concerning the mystery of Shakespeare and literature a bit further when he states that writers “do not always want to be understood.” Authors do not want to be understood, for if a text were transparently intelligible, “it would destroy the text, it would show that the text has no future [avenir], that it does not overflow the present, that it is consumed immediately.”83 Vico’s axiom verum factum only intensifies Frye’s resistance to the Romantic theory of genius driving modern theories of intentionality, a resistance that is never more evident than when, in The Great Code, he sides with philosophers like Martin Heidegger who says that it is “language that uses man, and not man that uses language” (GC, 22/40). The redemptive power of poetry recreates language and attaches man to words in such a way that “words become something much bigger than he is,” a redemptive power of “human self-transcendence” (CR, 70–1; NFR, 79–80). There is another consequence of the comparison between Derrida’s notion that literature’s indeterminate meaning is structured like a secret and Frye’s equally paradoxical theory of literature as a mystery no matter how well it is known. The paradoxical structure of literature as something that helps us understand reality, and yet always remains to be understood, lies at the heart of what Frye means by literature as a “secular scripture,” or in Derrida’s terms, a secular form of the sacred.84 If the sacred is an experience of hesitation or “restraint before that which should remain sacred, holy, or safe,”85 then Frye’s lifelong work of protecting the indeterminate meaning of literature from appropriation and reduction to authorial intention, or from the imposition of ideological interpretation, is a kind of reverence. Frye’s treatment of Shakespeare as an author with nothing “to say” but one who is universally communicable, represents an especially profound respect, as Derrida might put it, not for the suspension of reference so much as for the suspension of “the thesis . . . of determinate sense or real referent” in literature.86 The suspension of any determined reference in writers like Shake-

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speare for Frye means protecting interpretation from being fixed by any one kind of ideological appropriation. Like other incomparable writers of the Renaissance such as Spenser and Milton, Shakespeare brings us close to “seeing what our whole literary experience has been about, the feeling that we have moved into the still centre of the order of words” (AC, 117/109). But at the still centre, as Frye says elsewhere, Shakespeare foils every attempt to reduce his meaning to authorial intent because, like the design of a Chinese jar, literature “Moves perpetually in its stillness” (TSE, 45; TCL, 211). Even after we are told to “trust the tale and not the teller,” we still desire the author, and may “entertain the offered fallacy” of intention. Yet something more is offered, something more is promised, perhaps transcendence itself, when an author like Shakespeare, or indeed a critic like Northrop Frye, remains still and silent like a sphinx, and, with a detachment that is totally involved, lets language speak.

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Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance

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1 The Argument of Comedy 7 September 1948

From English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D.A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1949, 1965), 58–73. Originally delivered as a paper for the English Institute in early September 1948, in a session led by Philip Wheelwright in Philosophy Hall at Columbia University. The drafting of the paper was the source of some anxiety for Frye in the summer of 1948,1 since it was his “first major paper delivered to a scholarly gathering”(Ayre, 208–9). Frye went on to participate in the English Institute both as member of the supervisory committee and, in 1953, as chair.2 He incorporated this highly influential paper into the Third Essay of AC, and drew on it for his later writings on Renaissance comedy, especially A Natural Perspective, below. Reprinted in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Leonard F. Dean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 79–89; Comedy: Plays, Theory, and Criticism, ed. Marvin Felheim (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 236–41; Theories of Comedy, ed. Paul Lauter (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), 449–60; Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” ed. Leonard F. Dean and James A.S. McPeak (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1965), 93–101; Shakespeare’s Comedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. Laurence Lerner (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967), 315–25; His Infinite Variety: Major Shakespearean Criticism since Johnson, ed. Paul N. Siegel (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964), 120–9; Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. James Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 49–57; Modern Shakespearean Criticism: Essays on Style, Dramaturgy, and the Major Plays, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 165–79; Comedy: Developments in Criticism, ed. D.J. Palmer (London: Macmillan, 1984), 74–84; Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Plot, Time, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 102–9; Shakespeare: An

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Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000, ed. Russ McDonald (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 93–9. Partially reprinted in The Comedy of Errors section in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Laurie L. Harris and Mark W. Scott, vol. 1 (Detroit: Gale, 1984), 32–4; in “Henry the Fourth, Parts I and II”: Critical Essays, ed. David Bevington (New York: Garland, 1986), 181–5; and in Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. John Arthos (New York: New American; Markham, Ont.: Penguin, 1965; rpt. 1988), 162–73. The typescript is in NFF, 1993, box 4, file 3.

The Greeks produced two kinds of comedy, Old Comedy, represented by the eleven extant plays of Aristophanes, and New Comedy, of which the best-known exponent is Menander. About two dozen New Comedies survive in the work of Plautus and Terence. Old Comedy, however, was out of date before Aristophanes himself was dead;3 and today, when we speak of comedy, we normally think of something that derives from the Menandrine tradition. New Comedy unfolds from what may be described as a comic Oedipus situation. Its main theme is the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice. The opponent is usually the father (senex) and the psychological descent of the heroine from the mother is also sometimes hinted at. The father frequently wants the same girl, and is cheated out of her by the son, the mother thus becoming the son’s ally. The girl is usually a slave or courtesan, and the plot turns on a cognitio or discovery of birth which makes her marriageable. Thus it turns out that she is not under an insuperable taboo after all but is an accessible object of desire, so that the plot follows the regular wish-fulfilment pattern. Often the central Oedipus situation is thinly concealed by surrogates or doubles of the main characters, as when the heroine is discovered to be the hero’s sister, and has to be married off to his best friend. In Congreve’s Love for Love, to take a modern instance well within the Menandrine tradition, there are two Oedipus themes in counterpoint: the hero cheats his father out of the heroine, and his best friend violates the wife of an impotent old man who is the heroine’s guardian.4 Whether this analysis is sound or not, New Comedy is certainly concerned with the manoeuvring of a young man toward a young woman, and marriage is the tonic chord on which it ends. The normal comic resolution is the surrender of the senex to the hero, never the reverse. Shakespeare tried to reverse the pattern in All’s Well That

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Ends Well, where the king of France forces Bertram to marry Helena, and the critics have not yet stopped making faces over it.5 New Comedy has the blessing of Aristotle, who greatly preferred it to its predecessor,6 and it exhibits the general pattern of Aristotelian causation.7 It has a material cause in the young man’s sexual desire, and a formal cause in the social order represented by the senex, with which the hero comes to terms when he gratifies his desire. It has an efficient cause in the character who brings about the final situation. In Classical times this character is a tricky slave; Renaissance dramatists often use some adaptation of the medieval “vice”;8 modern writers generally like to pretend that nature, or at least the natural course of events, is the efficient cause. The final cause is the audience, which is expected by its applause to take part in the comic resolution. All this takes place on a single order of existence. The action of New Comedy tends to become probable rather than fantastic, and it moves toward realism and away from myth and romance. The one romantic (originally mythical) feature in it, the fact that the hero or heroine turns out to be freeborn or someone’s heir, is precisely the feature that trained New Comedy audiences tire of most quickly. The conventions of New Comedy are the conventions of Jonson and Molière, and a fortiori of the English Restoration and the French rococo. When Ibsen started giving ironic twists to the same formulas, his startled hearers took them for portents of a social revolution.9 Even the old chestnut about the heroine’s being really the hero’s sister turns up in Ghosts and Little Eyolf. The average movie of today is a rigidly conventionalized New Comedy proceeding toward an act which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is symbolized by the final embrace. In all good New Comedy there is a social as well as an individual theme which must be sought in the general atmosphere of reconciliation that makes the final marriage possible. As the hero gets closer to the heroine and opposition is overcome, all the right-thinking people come over to his side. Thus a new social unit is formed on the stage, and the moment that this social unit crystallizes is the moment of the comic resolution. In the last scene, when the dramatist usually tries to get all his characters on the stage at once, the audience witnesses the birth of a renewed sense of social integration. In comedy as in life the regular expression of this is a festival, whether a marriage, a dance, or a feast. Old Comedy has, besides a marriage, a komos, the processional dance from which comedy derives its name;10 and the masque, which is a by-form of comedy, also ends in a dance.

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This new social integration may be called, first, a kind of moral norm and, second, the pattern of a free society. We can see this more clearly if we look at the sort of characters who impede the progress of the comedy toward the hero’s victory. These are always people who are in some kind of mental bondage, who are helplessly driven by ruling passions, neurotic compulsions, social rituals, and selfishness. The miser, the hypochondriac, the hypocrite, the pedant, the snob: these are humours, people who do not fully know what they are doing, who are slaves to a predictable self-imposed pattern of behaviour. What we call the moral norm is, then, not morality but deliverance from moral bondage. Comedy is designed not to condemn evil, but to ridicule a lack of self-knowledge. It finds the virtues of Malvolio and Angelo as comic as the vices of Shylock.11 The essential comic resolution, therefore, is an individual release which is also a social reconciliation. The normal individual is freed from the bonds of a humorous society, and a normal society is freed from the bonds imposed on it by humorous individuals. The Oedipus pattern we noted in New Comedy belongs to the individual side of this, and the sense of the ridiculousness of the humour to the social side. But all real comedy is based on the principle that these two forms of release are ultimately the same: this principle may be seen at its most concentrated in The Tempest. The rule holds whether the resolution is expressed in social terms, as in The Merchant of Venice, or in individual terms, as in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. The freer the society, the greater the variety of individuals it can tolerate, and the natural tendency of comedy is to include as many as possible in its final festival. The motto of comedy is Terence’s “Nothing human is alien to me.”12 This may be one reason for the traditional comic importance of the parasite, who has no business to be at the festival but is nevertheless there. The spirit of reconciliation which pervades the comedies of Shakespeare is not to be ascribed to a personal attitude of his own, about which we know nothing whatever, but to his impersonal concentration on the laws of comic form. Hence the moral quality of the society presented is not the point of the comic resolution. In Jonson’s Volpone the final assertion of the moral norm takes the form of a social revenge on Volpone, and the play ends with a great bustle of sentences to penal servitude and the galleys. One feels perhaps that the audience’s sense of the moral norm does not need so much hard labour. In The Alchemist, when Lovewit returns to his

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house, the virtuous characters have proved so weak and the rascals so ingenious that the action dissolves in laughter. Whichever is morally the better ending, that of The Alchemist is more concentrated comedy. Volpone is starting to move toward tragedy, toward the vision of a greatness which develops hybris and catastrophe. The same principle is even clearer in Aristophanes. Aristophanes is the most personal of writers: his opinions on every subject are written all over his plays, and we have no doubt of his moral attitude. We know that he wanted peace with Sparta and that he hated Cleon, and when his comedy depicts the attaining of peace and the defeat of Cleon we know that he approved and wanted his audience to approve.13 But in Ecclesiazusae a band of women in disguise railroad a communistic scheme through the Assembly, which is a horrid parody of Plato’s Republic, and proceed to inaugurate Plato’s sexual communism with some astonishing improvements. Presumably Aristophanes did not applaud this, yet the comedy follows the same pattern and the same resolution.14 In The Birds the Peisthetairos who defies Zeus and blocks out Olympus with his Cloud-Cuckoo-Land is accorded the same triumph that is given to the Trygaeus of the Peace who flies to heaven and brings a golden age back to Athens.15 Comedy, then, may show virtue her own feature and scorn her own image—for Hamlet’s famous definition of drama [3.2.20–4] was originally a definition of comedy.16 It may emphasize the birth of an ideal society as you like it, or the tawdriness of the sham society which is the way of the world. There is an important parallel here with tragedy. Tragedy, we are told, is expected to raise but not ultimately to accept the emotions of pity and terror.17 These I take to be the sense of moral good and evil, respectively, which we attach to the tragic hero. He may be as good as Caesar, and so appeal to our pity, or as bad as Macbeth, and so appeal to terror, but the particular thing called tragedy that happens to him does not depend on his moral status. The tragic catharsis passes beyond moral judgment, and while it is quite possible to construct a moral tragedy, what tragedy gains in morality it loses in cathartic power. The same is true of the comic catharsis, which raises sympathy and ridicule on a moral basis, but passes beyond both. Many things are involved in the tragic catharsis, but one of them is a mental or imaginative form of the sacrificial ritual out of which tragedy arose. This is the ritual of the struggle, death, and rebirth of a God-Man, which is linked to the yearly triumph of spring over winter. The tragic

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hero is not really killed, and the audience no longer eats his body and drinks his blood, but the corresponding thing in art still takes place. The audience enters into communion with the body of the hero, becoming thereby a single body itself. Comedy grows out of the same ritual, for in the ritual the tragic story has a comic sequel. Divine men do not die: they die and rise again. The ritual pattern behind the catharsis of comedy is the resurrection that follows the death, the epiphany or manifestation of the risen hero. This is clear enough in Aristophanes, where the hero is treated as a risen God-Man, led in triumph with the divine honours of the Olympic victor, rejuvenated, or hailed as a new Zeus.18 In New Comedy the new human body is, as we have seen, both a hero and a social group. Aristophanes is not only closer to the ritual pattern, but contemporary with Plato; and his comedy, unlike Menander’s, is Platonic and dialectic: it seeks not the entelechy of the soul19 but the Form of the Good, and finds it in the resurrection of the soul from the world of the cave to the sunlight. The audience gains a vision of that resurrection whether the conclusion is joyful or ironic, just as in tragedy it gains a vision of a heroic death whether the hero is morally innocent or guilty. Two things follow from this: first, that tragedy is really implicit or uncompleted comedy; second, that comedy contains a potential tragedy within itself. With regard to the latter, Aristophanes is full of traces of the original death of the hero which preceded his resurrection in the ritual. Even in New Comedy the dramatist usually tries to bring his action as close to a tragic overthrow of the hero as he can get it, and reverses this movement as suddenly as possible. In Plautus the tricky slave is often forgiven or even freed after having been threatened with all the brutalities that a very brutal dramatist can think of, including crucifixion. Thus the resolution of New Comedy seems to be a realistic foreshortening of a death-and-resurrection pattern, in which the struggle and rebirth of a divine hero has shrunk into a marriage, the freeing of a slave, and the triumph of a young man over an older one. As for the conception of tragedy as implicit comedy, we may notice how often tragedy closes on the major chord of comedy: the Aeschylean trilogy, for instance, proceeds to what is really a comic resolution,20 and so do many tragedies of Euripides. From the point of view of Christianity, too, tragedy is an episode in that larger scheme of redemption and resurrection to which Dante gave the name of commedia. This conception of commedia enters drama with the miracle-play cycles, where such tragedies as the fall and the Crucifixion are episodes of a dramatic scheme

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in which the divine comedy has the last word. The sense of tragedy as a prelude to comedy is hardly separable from anything explicitly Christian. The serenity of the final double chorus in the St. Matthew Passion would hardly be attainable if composer and audience did not know that there was more to the story.21 Nor would the death of Samson lead to “calm of mind all passion spent”22 if Samson were not a prototype of the rising Christ. New Comedy is thus contained, so to speak, within the symbolic structure of Old Comedy, which in its turn is contained within the Christian conception of commedia. This sounds like a logically exhaustive classification, but we have still not caught Shakespeare in it. It is only in Jonson and the Restoration writers that English comedy can be called a form of New Comedy. The earlier tradition established by Peele and developed by Lyly, Greene, and the masque writers, which uses themes from romance and folklore and avoids the comedy of manners, is the one followed by Shakespeare. These themes are largely medieval in origin, and derive, not from the mysteries or the moralities or the interludes, but from a fourth dramatic tradition. This is the drama of folk ritual, of the St. George play and the mummers’ play, of the feast of the ass and the Boy Bishop, and of all the dramatic activity that punctuated the Christian calendar with the rituals of an immemorial paganism. We may call this the drama of the green world, and its theme is once again the triumph of life over the wasteland, the death and revival of the year impersonated by figures still human, and once divine as well. When Shakespeare began to study Plautus and Terence, his dramatic instinct, stimulated by his predecessors, divined that there was a profounder pattern in the argument of comedy than appears in either of them. At once—for the process is beginning in The Comedy of Errors— he started groping toward that profounder pattern, the ritual of death and revival that also underlies Aristophanes, of which an exact equivalent lay ready to hand in the drama of the green world. This parallelism largely accounts for the resemblances to Greek ritual which Colin Still has pointed out in The Tempest.23 The Two Gentlemen of Verona is an orthodox New Comedy except for one thing. The hero Valentine becomes captain of a band of outlaws in a forest, and all the other characters are gathered into this forest and become converted. Thus the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and re-

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turns to the normal world. The forest in this play is the embryonic form of the fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, Windsor Forest in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the pastoral world of the mythical sea-coasted Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale. In all these comedies there is the same rhythmic movement from normal world to green world and back again. Nor is this second world confined to the forest comedies. In The Merchant of Venice the two worlds are a little harder to see, yet Venice is clearly not the same world as that of Portia’s mysterious house in Belmont, where there are caskets teaching that gold and silver are corruptible goods, and from whence proceed the wonderful cosmological harmonies of the fifth act. In The Tempest the entire action takes place in the second world, and the same may be said of Twelfth Night, which, as its title implies, presents a carnival society, not so much a green world as an evergreen one. The second world is absent from the so-called problem comedies, which is one of the things that makes them problem comedies.24 The green world charges the comedies with a symbolism in which the comic resolution contains a suggestion of the old ritual pattern of the victory of summer over winter. This is explicit in Love’s Labour’s Lost. In this very masque-like play, the comic contest takes the form of the medieval debate of winter and spring. In The Merry Wives of Windsor there is an elaborate ritual of the defeat of winter, known to folklorists as “carrying out Death,”25 of which Falstaff is the victim; and Falstaff must have felt that, after being thrown into the water, dressed up as a witch and beaten out of a house with curses, and finally supplied with a beast’s head and singed with candles while he said, “Divide me like a brib’d buck, each a haunch” [5.5.24], he had done about all that could reasonably be asked of any fertility spirit. The association of this symbolism with the death and revival of human beings is more elusive, but still perceptible. The fact that the heroine often brings about the comic resolution by disguising herself as a boy is familiar enough. In the Hero of Much Ado About Nothing and the Helena of All’s Well That Ends Well, this theme of the withdrawal and return of the heroine comes as close to a death and revival as Elizabethan conventions will allow. The Thaisa of Pericles and the Fidele of Cymbeline are beginning to crack the conventions, and with the disappearance and revival of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, who actually returns once as a ghost in a dream, the original nature-myth of Demeter and Proserpine is openly established.26 The fact that the dying and reviving character is

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usually female strengthens the feeling that there is something maternal about the green world, in which the new order of the comic resolution is nourished and brought to birth. However, a similar theme which is very like the rejuvenation of the senex so frequent in Aristophanes occurs in the folklore motif of the healing of the impotent king on which All’s Well That Ends Well is based, and this theme is probably involved in the symbolism of Prospero. The conception of a second world bursts the boundaries of Menandrine comedy, yet it is clear that the world of Puck is no world of eternal forms or divine revelation. Shakespeare’s comedy is not Aristotelian and realistic like Menander’s, nor Platonic and dialectic like Aristophanes’, nor Thomist and sacramental like Dante’s, but a fourth kind. It is an Elizabethan kind, and is not confined either to Shakespeare or to the drama. Spenser’s epic is a wonderful contrapuntal intermingling of two orders of existence, one the red and white world of English history, the other the green world of the Faerie Queene. The latter is a world of crusading virtues proceeding from the Faerie Queene’s court and designed to return to that court when the destiny of the other world is fulfilled. The fact that the Faerie Queene’s knights are sent out during the twelve days of the Christmas festival suggests our next point. Shakespeare too has his green world of comedy and his red and white world of history. The story of the latter is at one point interrupted by an invasion from the comic world, when Falstaff senex et parasitus throws his gigantic shadow over Prince Henry, assuming on one occasion the role of his father [1 Henry IV, 2.4.376–434]. Clearly if the Prince is ever to conquer France he must reassert the moral norm. The moral norm is duly reasserted, but the rejection of Falstaff is not a comic resolution. In comedy the moral norm is not morality but deliverance, and we certainly do not feel delivered from Falstaff as we feel delivered from Shylock with his absurd and vicious bond. The moral norm does not carry with it the vision of a free society: Falstaff will always keep a bit of that in his tavern. Falstaff is a mock king, a lord of misrule, and his tavern is a Saturnalia. Yet we are reminded of the original meaning of the Saturnalia, as a rite intended to recall the golden age of Saturn.27 Falstaff’s world is not a golden world, but as long as we remember it we cannot forget that the world of Henry V is an iron one. We are reminded too of another traditional denizen of the green world, Robin Hood, the outlaw who manages to suggest a better kind of society than those who make him an outlaw

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can produce. The outlaws in The Two Gentlemen of Verona compare themselves, in spite of the Italian setting, to Robin Hood [4.1.36], and in As You Like It Charles the wrestler says of Duke Senior’s followers: “There they live like the old Robin Hood of England: they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world” [1.1.115–19]. In the histories, therefore, the comic Saturnalia is a temporary reversal of normal standards, comic “relief” as it is called, which subsides and allows the history to continue. In the comedies, the green world suggests an original golden age which the normal world has usurped and which makes us wonder if it is not the normal world that is the real Saturnalia. In Cymbeline the green world finally triumphs over a historical theme, the reason being perhaps that in that play the incarnation of Christ, which is contemporary with Cymbeline, takes place offstage, and accounts for the halcyon peace with which the play concludes. From then on in Shakespeare’s plays, the green world has it all its own way, and both in Cymbeline and in Henry VIII there may be suggestions that Shakespeare, like Spenser, is moving toward a synthesis of the two worlds, a wedding of Prince Arthur and the Faerie Queene. This world of fairies, dreams, disembodied souls, and pastoral lovers may not be a “real” world, but, if not, there is something equally illusory in the stumbling and blinded follies of the “normal” world, of Theseus’s Athens with its idiotic marriage law, of Duke Frederick and his melancholy tyranny, of Leontes and his mad jealousy, of the Court Party with their plots and intrigues.28 The famous speech of Prospero about the dream nature of reality [4.1.148–58] applies equally to Milan and the enchanted island. We spend our lives partly in a waking world we call normal and partly in a dream world which we create out of our own desires. Shakespeare endows both worlds with equal imaginative power, brings them opposite one another, and makes each world seem unreal when seen by the light of the other. He uses freely both the heroic triumph of New Comedy and the ritual resurrection of its predecessor, but his distinctive comic resolution is different from either: it is a detachment of the spirit born of this reciprocal reflection of two illusory realities. We need not ask whether this brings us into a higher order of existence or not, for the question of existence is not relevant to poetry. We have spoken of New Comedy as Aristotelian, Old Comedy as Platonic, and Dante’s commedia as Thomist, but it is difficult to suggest a philosophical spokesman for the form of Shakespeare’s comedy. For

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Shakespeare, the subject matter of poetry is not life, or nature, or reality, or revelation, or anything else that the philosopher builds on, but poetry itself, a verbal universe. That is one reason why he is both the most elusive and the most substantial of poets.

2 Don Quixote December 1949

From the “Turning New Leaves” section of Canadian Forum, 29 (December 1949): 209–11. Frye had a long association with Canadian Forum, the leftwing journal of opinion published out of Toronto: in 1948, he served as literary editor of the journal, and was managing editor 1948–50, during the period when this piece was published. Reprinted as “The Acceptance of Innocence” in NFCL, 159–64. The piece begins as a review of a new translation, by Samuel Putnam, of Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, 2 vols. (New York: Viking, 1949). A typescript with holograph corrections is in NFF, 1991, box 58, file 8.

A new translation of Don Quixote, the result of sixteen years of work, has now made its appearance, and it is, we are told, the first really good English rendering of the world’s greatest novel. There have been fourteen English versions altogether,1 but two made in the eighteenth century, one by Peter Motteux, a naturalized Frenchman who also completed the Urquhart Rabelais,2 and one by Charles Jarvis, a friend of Pope,3 have held the field. The former is the better known in America, and the latter in England. Mr. Putnam’s introduction is severe on Motteux, whom he accuses of having coarsened two of the subtlest characters in fiction into a couple of slapstick buffoons.4 This opinion of Motteux is endorsed by other Cervantes scholars and a number of reviewers.5 Well, the scholars must know; but for vigour and the free play of a rough but spontaneous wit, there is a lot to be said for the earlier version. Mr. Putnam has perhaps reacted too strongly against it (after all there is some buffoonery in Cervantes), and sometimes his own sentences tinkle along rather languidly, the rhythms too carefully calculated, the English idioms and colloquialisms slipping a little too glibly into their Spanish

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context. But when one has said this, one hastens to concede that, both for its text and for its admirably terse notes, this is the translation that the modern reader would want. Certainly wherever delicacy is required, Mr. Putnam is to Motteux as Pegasus to Rosinante.6 Perhaps it would be fairer to say that Motteux represents what the eighteenth century, an age of solid intellectual and social values, saw in Don Quixote. The eighteenth century could accept the folly of Quixote and the clownishness of Sancho as simply as it accepted the cowardice of Falstaff, and it saw them in the sharp light of the world of common sense that gave them both so many hard knocks. From the point of view of, say, Smollett (another translator of Quixote), hard knocks are funny when they happen to people who ask for them. In the romantic period Don Quixote is read in a romantic light, and joins Hamlet, Byron, Werther, and the noble savage in that gloomy and desperate band of idealists who maintain the purity of their egoism in the teeth of a scoffing society. Here we have passed from the squat, grinning caricatures of Hogarth’s illustrations7 to the haunting and sinister paintings of Daumier, where the knight of the sorrowful countenance looks like a pale horse riding on Death.8 “One of the saddest books in the world,” a Victorian critic asserts.9 Mr. Putnam’s translation belongs to the twentieth century, which assumes that an author becomes great by virtue of Saying Something Significant. He quotes Mr. Lionel Trilling on Cervantes’ treatment of the problem of appearance and reality,10 and puts references to the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Sartre and the symbolic logic of Bertrand Russell11 into his footnotes. These references are very unobtrusive, but they will probably set the tone for the renewed criticism which his translation will certainly inspire. Cervantes’ intention in writing Don Quixote was no doubt to ridicule the stories of chivalry, with a result summarized in the Dewey Library Catalogue as: “immense vogue of books of chivalry despite legislation till publication of Don Quixote; thereafter only one written.” But great art comes from harnessing a conscious intention to the creative powers beneath consciousness, and we do not get closer to the author’s meaning by getting closer to the book’s meaning. The greater the book, the more obvious it is that the author’s consciousness merely held the nozzle of the hose, so to speak. For instance, we can see after the event what Cervantes can hardly have seen during it, that the tale of the crackbrained knight is one of the profoundest social parables in history. The feudal chivalric aristocracy has been caught at the precise moment of

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its departure from the European stage, caught with its armour rusty, its ideals faded to dreams, its sense of reality hopelessly lost. Elsewhere, in England, for instance, a new middle class not only seized its money and power but stole its ideals as well: the story of Quixote is the story of Spain, with its great culture destroyed by poverty and bigotry, with its weak middle class and its rabble of fanatically proud pauper-nobles. “And so, Sancho my friend,” pleads Quixote, “do not be grieved at that which pleases me, nor seek to make the world over, nor to unhinge the institution of knight-errantry” [78–9]. But it is no use; the made-over world is already there. However, the book has profounder levels than that of historical parable. Cervantes may be said to have defined a principle almost as important for fiction writing as charity is for religion: the principle that if people are ridiculous they are pathetic, and if they have pathos they have dignity. The Don is ridiculous chiefly when he is successful, or thinks he is: when he has routed a flock of sheep or set free a gang of criminals. But with every beating he gets his dignity grows on us, and we realize how genuinely faithful he is to the code of chivalry. He is courteous, gentle, chaste, generous (except that he has no money), intelligent and cultured within the limits of his obsession, and, of course, courageous. Not only was the code of chivalry a real code that helped to hold a real civilization together, but these are real virtues, and would be if chivalry had never existed. It is this solid core of moral reality in the middle of Quixote’s illusion that makes him so ambiguous a figure. As with Alice’s Wonderland, where we feel that no world can be completely fantastic where such Victorian infantile primness can survive intact, we feel that the humanity of Quixote is much more solidly established than the minor scholastic quibble about whether the windmills are really windmills or not. So we understand the author’s explanation of Sancho’s fidelity very well: “Sancho Panza alone thought that all his master said was the truth, for he was well acquainted with him, having known him since birth” [97]. If we want satire on martial courage we should expect to find most of it in the army, and nobody could have written Don Quixote except an old soldier. But to satirize martial courage is not to ridicule it, but to show the contrast between the courage itself, which may be genuine and even splendid, and the reasons for its appearance—that is, the causes of war—which are usually squalid and foolish. And however silly the

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Don may look in his barber-basin helmet, the qualities that make him so haunting a figure are, in part, the qualities that make a lost cause glamorous. Yet a lost cause, even one so literally lost as Quixote’s, is pathetic as well as glamorous, and no one can miss the pathos in Quixote. Pathos arises when attention is focused on an individual excluded from a community. The child or animal whose affection is repulsed, the coloured student whose offering of intelligence is rejected by a white society, the girl whose manners are laughed at by rich people because she is poor— these are the figures we find pathetic, and with them is the mad knight whose enormous will to rescue the helpless and destroy the evil shows itself in such blundering nonsense. As humanity is always trying to find human scapegoats, it dislikes having its attention called to their human qualities, and besides, the fear of being oneself isolated is perhaps the deepest fear we have—a much deeper one than the relatively cosy and sociable bogey of hell. Whatever the reason, long-sustained pathos is intolerable, and the story of Quixote would be intolerable without the fidelity of Sancho, who enables the knight to form a society of his own. Even so it would be hard going without the good humour and charity of so many of the people they meet. There must have been times when Cervantes wished he had not made Quixote so pathetic. In the second part the Don is in charge of a Duke who has read part 1, and who is responsible for most of the adventures, going even to the point of allowing the knight and squire to live for a time in an external replica of their fantasy. He does this purely to amuse himself, but still a fundamental act of social acceptance underlies part 2. One gentleman has recognized another, however much he has turned him into a licensed jester. Don Quixote is the world’s first and perhaps still its greatest novel, yet the path it indicated was not the one that the novel followed. Imitations of this pedantic crackpot and simple companion, such as we get in Huckleberry Finn or Tristram Shandy, do not constitute a tradition. The novel is an art of character study, and character study is mainly a matter of showing how social behaviour is conditioned by hidden factors. Realistic novelists select mainly the factors of class and social status; psychological ones select those of individual experience. Very few have followed Cervantes in tackling the far deeper problem of private mythology, of how one’s behaviour is affected by a structure of ideas in which one thinks one believes. Flaubert (in Madame Bovary) was one such fol-

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lower, and Dostoevsky another; but the full exploitation of this field has yet to come. One hopes it will come soon, as the shallower fields are nearly exhausted. I have hinted that Quixote does not so much believe his fantasy as think he believes it: an occasional remark to Sancho like “upon my word, you are as mad as I am”12 gives him away. His fantasy is the facade of a still deeper destructive instinct, for at one level of his mind Don Quixote is one of the long line of madmen ending in Hitler who have tried to destroy the present under the pretext of restoring the past. It is at this level that we find the puzzle of reality and appearance. The physical world rocks and sways as Quixote explains that his valiant deeds are real, but appear ridiculous through the artfulness of enchanters. It is difficult to know where a man will stop who regards the Creator of “reality” as a magician to be outwitted. One feels at times that Quixote rather enjoys the paradoxical clash of his inner and outer worlds, and that, like so many who have committed themselves to heroism, he finds that the damage he does is something of an end in itself. But, the Don insists, he really has a positive mission: it is to restore the world to the golden age. In a passage of wonderful irony he tells Sancho that the golden age would soon return if people would speak the simple truth, stop flattering their superiors, and show things exactly as they are. The childish element in Quixote, which breaks through in fantasy, believes that the golden age is a wonderful time of make-believe, where endless dreams of conquered giants and rescued maidens keep coming true. But then he comes across a group of peasants eating acorns and goat’s cheese, who hospitably invite him to join them, and he suddenly breaks out into a long panegyric about the golden age, which, it appears, was not an age of chivalry at all but an age of complete simplicity and equality. In such a kingdom the social difference between himself and Sancho no longer exists, and he asks Sancho to sit beside him, quoting from the Bible that the humble shall be exalted [81].13 The bedrock of Quixote’s mind has been reached, and it is not romantic at all, but apocalyptic. The childishness has disappeared and the genuinely childlike has taken its place, the simple acceptance of innocence. This dream returns at the end, where Quixote and Sancho plan to retire to a quiet pastoral life, and the author intends us to feel that by dying Quixote has picked a surer means of getting there. With this in our minds, we are not at all surprised that when Sancho, who has been promised the rule of an island, actually gets one to administer, he rules

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it so efficiently and wisely that he has to be yanked out of office in a hurry before he wrecks the Spanish aristocracy. We are even less surprised to find that Quixote’s advice to him is full of sound and humane good sense. The world is still looking for that lost island, and it still asks for nothing better than to have Sancho for its ruler and Don Quixote for his honoured counsellor.

3 Comic Myth in Shakespeare 2 June 1952

From Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 46, ser. 3, sec. 2 (June 1952): 47–58. Delivered on the afternoon of Monday, 2 June 1952, in the first session of Section 2 (English Literature, Philosophy, Social Sciences, etc.) in the annual meeting of the Royal Society of Canada, into which Frye had been inducted as a member in 1951. Entitled “Symposium on Comic Myth,” the session included two other papers not published in the Proceedings and Transactions: “Comic Myth in Milton,” by Roy Daniells, Frye’s long-time friend and former graduate-student colleague; and “Comic Myth in Heine,” by Barker Fairley, Frye’s well-respected colleague at the University of Toronto.1 Incorporated into the Third Essay of AC. Reprinted in Discussions of Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedy, ed. Herbert Weil, Jr. (Boston: Heath, 1966), 132–42. Based in large part on Frye’s paper “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors,” which he presented at Radcliffe College on 30 November 1950 (see LS, 144–59), the typescript of which is in NFF, 1993, box 4, file 3.

The Elizabethan age evolved two kinds of comedy, and the names of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare may be taken to typify each kind.2 Jonson’s great comedies are comedies of manners: they are not exactly realistic plays, but they do maintain a kind of realistic illusion.3 No character or incident is introduced which permanently upsets that illusion, and unities of time and place are observed, not out of pedantry, but because they are essential to the unity of action.4 Shakespeare, on the other hand, never wrote a pure comedy of manners, and never failed to include something in his comedy which tends to dispel the realistic atmosphere. If there are no fairies or magical forests and islands, there are plot-themes derived from myth, folklore, and romance. The strong element of folklore in the

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baiting of Falstaff seems to me to rule out even The Merry Wives, which would otherwise be Shakespeare’s closest approach to the Jonsonian formula. The unities of time and place largely disappear along with the unity of probability. They are observed in The Tempest, but The Winter’s Tale, which belongs to the same late period, seems to make something of a point of defying them. Jonson, of course, had a theory of comedy that was closely related to the critical canons of his time. He was doing everything that a Renaissance critic would mean by following nature.5 In his preface to The Alchemist he congratulates himself on his superiority to certain other writers of comedy, who, unlike him, “run away from nature.”6 In his introduction to Bartholomew Fair, he is a little more explicit about who some of these other writers are: “He is loath,” says Jonson, “to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests and such like drolleries.”7 Shakespeare knew all about Jonson’s theory,8 and one wonders whether there is something deliberate in Shakespeare’s avoidance of Jonson’s formulas, almost as though he had a counter-theory of his own. At any rate, Jonson and Shakespeare have often been thought of as forming a kind of antithesis, and some of the fallacies from this oversimplified view of them are still with us. The contrast between a ponderous learned Jonson and a quick but ignorant Shakespeare is a myth based on an abortive seventeenth-century joke cycle, which comes to us through Fuller.9 There is better evidence that Jonson was a laborious writer and Shakespeare a fluent one, and it is clear that Jonson was more interested in the theory of criticism. On this basis many of us tend to think of Jonson and Shakespeare as respectively the sophisticated student of art and the inspired child of nature. True, as we have seen, Jonson was certain that he followed nature better than Shakespeare did. But since the rise of primitivism, the conception of “nature” has become less Aristotelian10 and more outdoorsy, and so Shakespeare’s comedies, which lend themselves admirably to open-air performance, seem more natural than ever. With the triumph of the novel over the drama as a form of fiction, the criticism of drama became full of assumptions derived from the novel. Hence the frequent assertion that Jonson’s characters are “flat” and Shakespeare’s “round”—especially, of course, Falstaff. This is, of course, nonsense; but neither do I agree that the difference between the two kinds of comedy is simply a difference between two kinds of artists—in other words that the difference is not a problem. The reason why I think there is a problem is that Jonson seems to have

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been so utterly right, as far as the history of the stage is concerned. All the important writers of English comedy since Jonson (except Barrie) have cultivated the comedy of manners with its realistic illusion and not Shakespeare’s romantic kind. Nearly all of them have been Irishmen, and one might expect them to have a fey and Celtic sympathy for fairyland; but from Congreve to O’Casey English comedy exhibits a remarkable dearth of leprechauns. Bernard Shaw remarked that the best way for a dramatist to get a reputation for daring originality is to stick as closely as possible to the method of Molière, whose comedy is more conventionalized even than Jonson’s.11 As for the unities of time and place, many of us are graduated from college with a vague notion that they are useless and obsolete pedantries, and that Samuel Johnson or somebody proved it.12 Nevertheless the great majority of contemporary plays probably still observe them. The tradition of Shakespearean comedy is very different. Since the closing of the theatres in 1642, it has survived chiefly in opera. As long as we have Mozart or Verdi or Sullivan to listen to, we can tolerate identical twins and lost heirs and love potions and folk tales: we can even stand a fairy queen if she is under two hundred pounds. But the main tradition of Shakespearean fantasy seems to have drifted from the stage into lyric poetry, an oddly bookish fate for the warbler of native woodnotes.13 Whitman was perhaps not wholly right when he wrote that Shakespeare’s comedies “are altogether non-acceptable to America and democracy.”14 Shaw was perhaps not wholly right when he suggested that many comedies of Shakespeare were potboilers, aptly described by such titles as As You Like It and Much Ado about Nothing, which could not hold the stage if Shakespeare were not a cultural vested interest.15 It was perhaps a wrong tendency to try to annex All’s Well and Measure for Measure to the Jonsonian tradition by calling them “problem comedies,” thus suggesting that for once in his life Shakespeare managed to produce something almost on a level with the weakest period of Ibsen. But still, when we look for the most striking parallels to Twelfth Night or The Tempest, we think, not of any dramatist, but of Figaro and The Magic Flute.16 Jonson’s comedy is one of the Renaissance developments of the Classical New Comedy that comes down from Plautus and Terence. The very slight modifications of this pattern in cinquecento Italian comedy need not be considered here. This form, though it is perhaps more of a formula, has been the ground plan of nearly all popular comedy down to our own time. Its most frequent theme is the approximation of a young

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man to a desirable young woman. The obstacles to this constitute the action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them the comic resolution. The obstacles are usually parental, and comedy often turns on a clash between a son’s and a father’s will. Thus the comic dramatist as a rule writes for the younger men in his audience, and the older members of almost any society are apt to feel that comedy has something subversive about it. This is certainly one element in the frequent social persecution of drama: in all the diatribes against the Elizabethan stage, no charge is more frequent than the corrupting of youth. Antagonism to comic drama is not peculiar to Puritans or even Christians: Terence in pagan Rome met much the same kind of social opposition that Jonson did. There is one scene in Plautus where a son and father are making love to the same courtesan, and the son asks his father pointedly if he really does love mother.17 Mr. Gilbert Norwood’s book on Plautus speaks of this scene as a kind of ecstasy of bad taste,18 but one has to see it against the background of Roman family life to understand its importance as psychological release. Even in Shakespeare there are startling outbreaks of parallel ferocity. When Mr. Alfred Harbage speaks in his As They Liked It of the normal courtesy of Shakespeare’s characters, the exceptions he finds to his rule are all concerned with the mockery of older men.19 In the movies, which provide the popular comedies of our own day, the triumph of youth is so relentless that the moviemakers are finding some difficulty in getting anyone over the age of seventeen into their audiences.20 The opponent to the hero’s wishes, when not the father, is generally someone who partakes of the father’s closer relation to established society: that is, he is a rival with less youth and more money. In Plautus and Terence he is usually either the pimp who owns the girl, or a wandering soldier with a supply of ready cash. The fury with which these characters are baited and exploded from the stage shows that they are father-surrogates, and even if they were not, they would still be usurpers, and their claims to possess the girl must be shown up as somehow fraudulent. They are, in short, impostors, and the extent to which they have real power implies a criticism of the society that allows them their power. In Plautus and Terence this criticism seldom goes further than the fact that brothels are immoral; but in some Renaissance dramatists,21 including Jonson, there is some sharp observation of the rising power of money and the sort of ruling class it is building up. The action of comedy, therefore, consists normally in a clash of wills having for its aim the control of the comic society represented in the

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cast of characters. At first the characters who are thwarting the hero’s triumph are in possession of social authority, and the audience realizes that this society is a Saturnalia or temporary inversion of the rightful society of the hero’s triumph and their desires. When the obstacles are surmounted and the blocking characters reconciled or forced to submit, a new society is born on the stage. Its appearance is usually symbolized by some kind of party: a wedding, a banquet, as in The Taming of the Shrew, or a dance. Yet this new birth is also a rebirth, the return of the old normal society that the audience is accustomed to, and which has been for a moment usurped.22 The defeated society, the group of ridiculous figures who dominate the action for the greater part of the play, are not essentially immoral, scoundrelly, or even hypocritical. They may be, but when they are the play represents a triumph of virtue over vice, and such a triumph belongs, not properly to comedy, but to melodrama, which attains its happy ending with a self-righteous moral tone that comedy avoids. In comedy the defeated characters are primarily ridiculous, and we have to inquire what, in this connection, the essence of the ridiculous is. It seems to be, from the general experience of comedy, the being confined to a certain type of behaviour, conditioned to act a single part. This brings us abreast of Jonson’s conception of character in comedy as consisting of “humours.” A humour, Jonson tells us, is a character so possessed by a certain type of behaviour that he can act in no other way. A sick man is not a humour, but a hypochondriac is, because, qua hypochondriac, he can never admit to good health, and can never do anything inconsistent with being an invalid.23 All humours are possessed by what Pope calls a “ruling passion,”24 and they are the opposite of the normal or temperate people who have their humours under control, like the hero and the audience. Jonson’s theory applies to a great variety of characters; Molière’s comedy is also a comedy of humours, but of a simpler type: he usually concentrates his actions on a single figure, a miser, a religious hypocrite, or a misanthrope, whose humour, or obsession, throws the whole society he controls into a perverted form. Jonson came nearest to this type of construction in The Silent Woman, where the whole action recedes from the humour of Morose, whose determination to eliminate noise from his life produces so uproariously garrulous25 a comic action. As we have said, humorousness, in Jonson’s sense, represents not a moral but a social failure, and it often accompanies many virtues, as it does with Malvolio. But the judgment of comedy implies the supremacy of social over moral

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standards. Thus Molière’s misanthrope is obsessed by the virtue of sincerity, only to discover (at least the audience discovers) that his friend Philinte, who is ready to lie quite cheerfully to enable other people to preserve their self-respect, is the more genuinely sincere of the two.26 The humour is uniform rather than consistent, and the appeal of humours is based on one of the essential principles of comic writing: that unincremental repetition is funny. In a tragedy everything turns on a final catastrophe, and all repetition in tragedy—Oedipus Rex is the famous example—must lead emotionally and logically to that catastrophe. Laughter, however, is partly a reflex, and, like other reflexes, can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern. In Synge’s Riders to the Sea a mother’s last son is drowned, and the result is a very beautiful and moving play. But if it had been a five-act tragedy plodding glumly through the whole seven drownings one after another, the audience would have been helpless with laughter long before the end. The same principle may be observed in comic strips and radio programs, which, as they deal with static characters and an interminable form, can do nothing but repeat. A humour is established as a miser or a glutton or a shrew, and after the point has been made every day for several months it begins to be amusing. The girth of Falstaff and the obsession of Don Quixote may be at the other end of art, but they are based on the same comic laws. Mr. E.M. Forster speaks with great disdain of Dickens’s Mrs. Micawber, who never says anything except that she will never desert her husband.27 We see here the contrast in taste between a minor comic writer too finicky for popular formulas, and a major one who exploits them ruthlessly.28 There are certain stock types of comic humours, which persist with the most amazing tenacity all through the history of the stage. The earliest extant comedy, The Acharnians of Aristophanes, presents the swaggering soldier or miles gloriosus, who is still going strong in Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Chaplin’s Great Dictator. The hero of the same early play, who constructs the whole dramatic action himself, belongs to a type made famous by Prospero, but which turned up only the other day in the psychiatrist of Eliot’s Cocktail Party. The parasite who appears in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock is another type practically unchanged in twenty-five centuries.29 As for the victorious society, the main figures are of course the technical hero and heroine, the nice young man and the nice young girl he finally gets. We find, from Plautus to the movies, that these central characters of comedy are seldom very interesting people. The young men (ad-

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ulescentes) in Plautus and Terence are all alike, and even Shakespeare’s heroes reflect a real technical difficulty, surmounted sometimes in a way that looks like a dodge. Thus the nice young men of Much Ado and All’s Well, Claudio and Bertram, are dramatically interesting only because they are not very nice young men. In The Merry Wives the technical hero, a man named Fenton, has only a bit part, and this play has picked up a hint or two from Plautus’s Casina, where the hero and heroine are not even brought on the stage at all. Ben Jonson, of course, follows the same pattern. There is a nice young man in Volpone named Bonario, but he is a nuisance, and his type is eliminated from the later great comedies, to their advantage. It is the same in Molière: everyone knows who Tartuffe and Harpagon are, but it is very hard to distinguish all the Valentins and Angéliques who wriggle out of their clutches.30 The hero’s character has the neutrality which enables him to represent a wish-fulfilment. That is, we have to believe him to be a more interesting and important person than he is represented.31 Whatever tragedy is, it has something to do with a vision of law, of what is and must be.32 It is parallel to the scientific vision, and it cannot be an accident that the two great developments of tragedy, in fifthcentury Athens and seventeenth-century Europe, coincided with the two great revolutions in science. But when in a tragedy of Euripides the gods descend into the action and set things right, something fundamentally irrational has been brought into the vision of law, something which may lead even to the happy ending of comedy, as in Alcestis. Tragic endings impress us as true, and the suspense of tragedy is simply the waiting for an inevitable moment, like a predicted eclipse. But there is no such thing as inevitable comedy. Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as desirable, and they are brought about by deliberate manipulation. The watcher of death has nothing to do but sit and watch: the watcher of birth is a member of a busy society. The comic ending is generally manipulated by a twist in the plot. In Roman comedy the heroine, who is usually a slave or courtesan, turns out to be the daughter of somebody respectable, so that the hero can marry her without loss of face. This type of ending is called a cognitio or recognition, in Greek anagnorisis, and is present whenever the final scene of a comedy turns on a lost heir found, the return of a rich forgotten relative, or a nurse with a retentive memory for birthmarks. There is a brilliant parody of a cognitio at the end of Major Barbara, where Undershaft is enabled to break the rule that he cannot appoint his son-in-law as suc-

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cessor by the fact that the son-in-law’s own father married his deceased wife’s sister in Australia, so that the son-in-law is his own first cousin as well as himself. It sounds complicated, but the plots of comedy often are complicated because there is something inherently absurd about complications. This is one reason for the convention of disguise. It should be noticed too that, as the main character interest in comedy is focused on the defeated characters, comedy regularly illustrates a victory of arbitrary plot over consistency of character. The manipulation of plot does not always involve metamorphosis of character, but there is no violation of comic decorum when it does. Irrational conversions, miraculous transformations, and providential assistance are inseparable from comedy. The conversion of Oliver in As You Like It, or of the agents of Don John in Much Ado, to say nothing of Katharina the shrew,33 strain our credulity even more than our heartstrings. Further, whatever emerges is supposed to be there for good. If the boy gets the girl, they are going to live happily ever after: if the curmudgeon becomes lovable, we are given to understand that he will not relapse. It is perhaps not surprising that Bernard Shaw, who must now be called the greatest comic dramatist of the age just before ours,34 should be interested in such subjects as creative evolution, social revolution, the advent of the Superman, and whatever metabiology is.35 Civilizations which stress the desirable rather than the real, and the religious as opposed to the scientific perspective, think of drama almost entirely in terms of comedy. In the classical drama of India the tragic ending was regarded as bad taste, much as the manipulated endings of comedy are regarded as bad taste by novelists interested in scientific realism. One reason why there is such an emphasis on conversion is that the natural tendency of comedy is to include as many characters as possible in the new society of its final scene. Comedy delivers us from humours, not from villains, and if we treat a humour too much like a villain, he becomes pathetic, and the audience’s sympathy switches over to him. Even Shylock, whose humour of carving up his debtors with a knife goes a little beyond the merely ridiculous, is pathetic, and nearly upsets the balance of tone. If his dramatic importance is ever so slightly exaggerated, as it generally is when the leading actor of the company takes the role, he does upset it, and the play becomes simply the tragedy of the Jew of Venice. The same thing is far more true of the character whose chief function has been to amuse the audience, especially the braggart. The original miles gloriosus in Plautus is a son of Jove and Venus who

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has killed an elephant with his fist and seven thousand men in one day’s fighting. In other words, he is trying to put on a good show: the exuberance of his boasting helps to put the play over. The convention says that the braggart must be exposed, ridiculed, swindled, and beaten. But why should a professional dramatist, of all people, want so to harry a character who is putting on a good show—his show at that? Comedy, unlike tragedy, seems to move logically up toward the final curtain call in which all the characters are equally applauded. The word plaudite at the end of a Roman comedy would seem out of place in a tragedy, even if the applause itself would not.36 Hence, when we find Falstaff invited to the final feast in The Merry Wives, Caliban reprieved, and Angelo and Parolles allowed to forget their disgrace, we are seeing a fundamental principle of comedy at work.37 If we look at tragedy, we can see that it has, so to speak, a positive and a negative pole. At one end is a feeling of acceptance and of the rightness of the tragedy; at the other is a feeling of the incongruity and wrongness of it. Combined, they make up the paradox of pity and terror which is tragedy. Desdemona arouses pity and Iago terror, but the central tragic figure is Othello, and our feelings about him are mixed. The negative pole of tragedy, the sense of wrongness, we call irony, and the positive pole is best described as heroism, the fact that the hero is big enough to make tragedy appropriate to him. All tragedies contain irony; unheroic or social tragedy, as we get it in Chekhov or Thomas Hardy, is primarily ironic. Irony thus contributes to tragedy the theme of the frustration of heroic action. The proportion of heroism to irony in a tragedy may obviously vary a good deal, the general rule being that sophistication increases the irony. Euripides has clearly a higher proportion of irony than Aeschylus or Sophocles, and he expresses this interest by displacing the centre of dramatic action from the tragic hero. Thus Medea is the tragedy of Jason, but the drama gains in ironic content by being focused on the figure of Medea, the escaping avenger. In Hippolytus the moral paradox in the tragic situation—the hybris of excessive virtue—achieves a similar displacement. It is clear that one step further would bring us to ironic comedy, the vision of human action as bound to a set pattern of repeating itself without getting anywhere. In other words, tragedy and comedy have, in irony, the same negative pole. In Shakespeare’s canon there is one completely ironic play, Troilus and Cressida, and taking it as our ironic norm, we can see how the tragedies recede from it on one side and the comedies on

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the other. Hamlet and Timon of Athens, especially the latter, are nearest it among the tragedies. Hamlet, like Hippolytus, has a moral paradox at its heart, being an ironic treatment of a Senecan revenge play, and in Timon the ironic feeling that the hero’s death has somehow failed to make a genuinely heroic point is very strong. Timon is oddly isolated from the final scene, dropping out of the action like Icarus in Breughel’s picture, while the community he rejected closes up over his head. The contrast with the more typical tragedies, where nobody is allowed to steal the show from the tragic hero, needs no labouring. Measure for Measure and All’s Well occupy a similar place on the ironic side of comedy: the former is a play in which all the male characters are threatened with death and yet nobody gets hurt, which makes it a tragicomedy in the Elizabethan sense. Now as tragedy recedes from irony it becomes more heroic, until we get pure hero-plays like Henry V which are no longer real tragedies. What is the corresponding positive pole of comedy? Comedy, said Renaissance critics, is imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, et imago veritatis.38 Irony in comedy is clearly speculum consuetudinis, the way of the world, così fan tutte.39 In what sense can comedy be imago veritatis as well, and what is its positive image of reality? Let us return to our point that comedy is normally an erotic intrigue blocked by some opposition and resolved by a twist in the plot known as “discovery” or recognition. There are two ways of developing this pattern: one is to throw the weight of dramatic interest on the blocking figures, and the other is to throw it on the final discovery. The former direction is that of Jonson, Molière, and their tradition; the latter is that of the romantic comedy of Shakespeare, with its folklore plots and fairy worlds, its coincidences and disguises, and its long final scenes of reconciliation, forgiveness, and wholesale marriage. As the Jonsonian tradition is ironic in its emphasis, it is obviously in Shakespeare that we should look for the imago veritatis. In Shakespeare, unlike Jonson, the comic contest is usually presented as a collision of two societies. What corresponds to Jonson’s social order of the humours is in Shakespeare a world depicted as similar to our own, but subject to an obviously absurd law, the law of killing strangers in the Comedy of Errors, of compulsory marriage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the law that confirms Shylock’s bond, or the attempts of Angelo to legislate people into righteousness. Sometimes the absurd law takes the simpler form of a tyrant like the humorous Duke Frederick or the mad Leontes. This once established, the action normally moves into a strange

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and yet oddly familiar wonderland, the wood of Puck and Oberon, the forest of Arden, Portia’s house in Belmont, the pastoral retreat of Perdita, and from there the comic resolution is brought to birth. The bondage of humorous law is defeated by another kind of community, a world sufficiently strong to enter the so-called real world and impose its form on it. Outside the theatre, this second society is the simply unreal world of the dream in which desire is irresistible. It is only in comedy like Shakespeare’s that we understand how it determines the form of our waking actions. The positive pole of comedy, then, seems to be a dream of an ideal society, not a formulated ideal, but a vision of what you will, the world as you like it. Just as comic irony is the social counterpart of tragic irony, so the “revel” of comedy is the social counterpart of heroism. The world of the absurd law is headed for tragedy, and in almost any comedy we may become aware of having been delivered from tragedy. Even in laughter itself the element of release from the horrible seems to be important. The tricky slave who carries out the comic resolution in Roman comedy is regularly threatened with the most appalling tortures if he should fail: we might refer this simply to the brutality of Roman life until we remember that boiling oil and burying alive turn up in The Mikado. The Cocktail Party and The Lady’s Not for Burning are civilized and high-spirited comedies of the contemporary theatre, but the cross appears in the background of the one and the stake in the background of the other. Shylock’s knife and Angelo’s gallows appear in Shakespeare, but as Shakespeare goes on he tends to put the tragic symbol nearer to the beginning of the comedy. The late romances are comedies that contain tragedies instead of simply avoiding them. The Tempest is a comedy of intrigue turned inside out, as it were, in which all the materials both of comedy and of tragedy are brought together and allowed to find their own levels. People go to a theatre to be delighted and instructed, in that order, but the proportion may vary in different forms. In tragedy the instruction, the sense of being awakened to reality rather than pleasantly entertained, is at its strongest. It comes as something of a shock to realize that the blinding of Gloucester in Lear is still entertainment, the more so as the pleasure we get from it obviously has nothing to do with sadism. It was the great philosophical significance of tragedy, as a means of apprehending reality, that attracted Aristotle’s attention to it, and the influence of Aristotle has been reinforced by a critical snobbery that puts tragedy, along with epic, at the top of an imaginary aristocracy of forms

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because it deals with ruling-class figures. The prestige of tragedy helped the parallel tradition of Aristotelian realism in Jonsonian comedy. In this comedy one notes a recurrent tendency to harangue and even scold audiences, warn them against relapses of taste, and insist that if dramatists must please to live, audiences have some cultural obligations too. The arrogance of Jonson and Congreve, the ridicule of bourgeois sentiment in Goldsmith and Shaw, the crusade against patriotic stereotypes in Synge and O’Casey, belong to a consistent pattern. Molière had to please his king,40 but was not temperamentally an exception. Shakespeare’s comedy, which reaches its final form in the dramatic romance, is far more primitive and popular, and is of a type found all over the world. The conventions of romantic comedy are much the same whether we find them in Cymbeline or The Winter’s Tale, in Fletcher or Lope de Vega, in the commedia dell’arte or the uninhibited plots of Italian opera, in Menander, in Kalidasa, in Chinese comedies of the Sung dynasty, in Japanese kabuki plays. If archaeologists ever discover a flourishing drama in Mayan or Minoan culture, it may not have plays like Lear or Oedipus, but it will assuredly have plays like Pericles. The contemporary commercial movie is much closer to Shakespearean romance than to the comedy of manners, and the various disrespectful Hollywood synonyms for discovery, “gimmick,” “weenie,” and the like,41 show clearly where its main interest lies. It looks as though the romance is actually the primitive and popular basis of dramatic entertainment, all other forms being specialized varieties of it. Even the operatic affinities of Shakespeare are not inconsistent with this suggestion: a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, considered as a comic structure, is more primitive and popular than a play of Shaw. “Primitive” does not here mean chronologically early: the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, for all its horseplay and personal abuse and echoes of ritual, is a far more sophisticated kind of drama than the comedy of Menander. On the other hand, “popular” does not here mean giving an audience of the lower social ranks what it wants. Romantic comedy may be courtly, as in India, or bourgeois, as today, or classless, as it comes very near to being in Shakespeare. An audience’s wants move horizontally in time: what it wants is a new variant of what pleased it before. The dramatist’s wants move vertically in depth: he wants to achieve a profounder and clearer statement of what he said before. If Shakespeare at the end of his career reached the primitive and popular bedrock of drama, he did so as a result of giving the drama what it wanted, of ex-

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pressing the laws of dramatic construction with increasing force and intensity. Jonson established, by conscious effort and will, the tradition of modern comedy; Shakespeare achieved a far deeper affinity with dramatic tradition in the manner recommended by some Chinese philosophers, by not doing anything about it.42

4 Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy 28 December 1952

From Shakespeare Quarterly, 4, no. 3 (July 1953): 271–7. Originally delivered on the afternoon of Sunday, 28 December 1952, as a paper at the Modern Language Association convention held in Boston.1 Frye records (D, 483) receiving the “very flattering” invitation from Merritt Hughes to deliver the paper in English Session One, which was chaired by Hughes and included six papers, Frye’s being the penultimate one in the session. Incorporated into the Third Essay of AC: parallel passages in AC are indicated in the endnotes. The typescript is located in NFF, 1993, box 4, file 3.

In drama, characterization depends on function: what a character is follows from what he has to do in the play. Dramatic function in its turn depends on the structure of the play: the character has certain things to do because the play has such and such a shape. Given a sufficiently powerful sense of structure, the characters will be essentially speaking dramatic functions, as they are in Jonson’s comedy of humours. The structure of the play in its turn depends on the category of the play: if it is a comedy, its structure will require a comic resolution and a prevailing comic mood.2 These sound like simple principles, but it is extraordinary how undeveloped they are in Shakespearean criticism. They have been neglected for a historical approach, which, however useful in itself, is not based squarely on the conventions of the dramatic genre. Of all forms of literary expression, the drama is the least dependent on its historical context. No doubt many in Shakespeare’s audience did addle their brains with the theory of monarchy or Reformation theology or the chain of being or the four humours when they were not being better educated

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by Shakespeare. But theatrical audiences, as such, hardly change at all from one millennium to another. In the earliest extant European comedy, The Acharnians of Aristophanes, we meet the miles gloriosus or swaggering soldier who is still going strong in Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Chaplin’s Great Dictator. We meet the comic parasite who in the Denis of O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock appears practically unchanged in twentyfive centuries.3 TV audiences are still laughing at the same kind of jokes that were declared to be worn out in the opening dialogue of The Frogs. It will therefore not do to explain, say, the rejection of Falstaff in historical terms only, and merely say that the original audience were much more aware than we of the importance of getting France conquered by a strong leader. (One may observe in passing that if any member of Shakespeare’s audience did not know that sixty years of unbroken disaster followed the career of Henry V, his ignorance was certainly no fault of Shakespeare’s.) We know very little about the contemporary reception of Shakespeare’s plays, but one of the things we do know is that Falstaff was exactly the same kind of popular favourite then that he is now, and for exactly the same reasons. It is similarly not surprising that Elizabethan audiences could still be amused by Plautus and Terence, or by adaptations of them which differ very little from their models. The central approach to Shakespeare, therefore, can only lie through a study of dramatic structure, both in the individual play and in the broader structural principles which underlie the categories of tragedy and comedy. Shakespearean comedy is a form in which the same devices are used over and over again. By not paying enough attention to structure, we deprive ourselves of the perfectly legitimate pleasure of appreciating the scholarly qualities of Shakespeare, of seeing in the repeated formulas of his comedies a kind of Art of Fugue of comedy.4 The most recent dramatic critic to be primarily interested in the structure and the categories of drama appears to be Aristotle, who did not say much about comedy. There does exist, however, a treatise called the Tractatus Coislinianus, a dry bald little summary, a page or two in length, of all the essential facts about comedy.5 Professor Lane Cooper, in his edition of it, suggests that it may summarize Aristotle’s own lost work on comedy:6 it certainly is very close to Aristotelian ideas. And what the Tractatus says about characterization in comedy is this: “There are three types of comic characters: the alazon, the eiron, and the bomolochos.”7 Alazon means impostor, boaster, or hypocrite, a man who pretends to be something more than he is. Eiron means a person who deprecates

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himself, and thereby deflates or exposes the alazon. The proper meaning of bomolochos is buffoon, a word usually restricted to farce in modern English, but which may be extended to the general sense of entertainer, the character who amuses by his mannerisms or powers of rhetoric. This list is closely related to a passage in the fourth book of the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle contrasts the bragging alazon with the self-deprecating eiron; but Aristotle also contrasts the buffoon with another character whom he calls agroikos or churlish, literally “rustic.”8 So we may expand the three types of the Tractatus into four. This rustic type may also be extended to cover the whole range of what Elizabethans called gulls and what in vaudeville used to be called the straight man, the solemn or inarticulate character who allows the humour to bounce off him, so to speak.9 The relation of Sir Toby Belch to Sir Andrew Aguecheek [in Twelfth Night] will illustrate the contrast.10 We now have four typical characters in comedy, arranged as two opposing pairs. If character depends on dramatic function, it follows that there are four typical functions in comedy, and four cardinal points of comic structure. It is clear that the buffoon and the churl or rustic polarize, however, not so much the structure of comedy, as the comic mood.11 What a clown may do in a play is variable: his essential function is to amuse, and the essential function of the rustic is to act as a foil for him. We must therefore look to the opposition of alazon and eiron to find the structural principle of comedy. Such a contest is found in all comic forms: one thinks for instance of the first book of the Republic, in which the ironic Socrates, who deprecates his own knowledge, demolishes the boastful Thrasymachus, who says more than he knows.12 One thinks too of all the hundreds of comic scenes in which some kind of boastful or self-deceived character soliloquizes complacently while another character makes sarcastic asides to the audience. We see at once that the dramatic relation of alazon and eiron is very different from the ethical one. Aristotle disapproves equally of boaster and self-deprecator: to him they are on opposite sides of the golden mean of behaviour.13 But in drama the eiron regularly speaks for or has the sympathy of the audience, and the alazon is his predestined victim. Now let us apply this idea of a contest of eiron and alazon to the formulas of Terence and Plautus, who were still structural models for the Renaissance dramatists. Their plays are usually based on an erotic intrigue between a young man and a young woman, often a slave or courtesan.

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The intrigue is opposed either by the young man’s father, or by some other kind of rival, often a wandering soldier, often a pimp. At the beginning of the comedy these opponents of the hero have control of the girl, or at least are able to thwart his desire. At the end of the play they are outwitted and the hero has his will. Such comedy turns, then, on a clash between two social groups, who are opposed even when they contain many of the same individuals. The centre of one group is the hero and heroine; the centre of the other is the father, the rival, or the persecutor of the heroine. We should expect to find our alazon types, then, in the latter group, and the eiron types in the former. The commonest type of alazon is of course the braggart or miles gloriosus, and he runs through Shakespeare from the Thurio of The Two Gentlemen of Verona to the Stephano of The Tempest. The main reason for his popularity is that he is a man of words rather than deeds, and is consequently far more useful to a dramatist than any tight-lipped hero could possibly be. Shakespeare gives a series of subtle and ingenious variations on the theme. Aguecheek, for example, has, as we have said, many of Aristotle’s agroikos characteristics. He is a miles gloriosus gone into reverse: he may be a coward, but he is a completely inarticulate one, a behaviourist’s paragon whose every remark is pure response to stimulus. Slender in The Merry Wives is a similar combination of types. Parolles [in All’s Well That Ends Well] is a half-pathetic figure, a compulsive braggart who hates his own runaway tongue, and is almost relieved to be unmasked. The kernel of truth in the Morgann conception of Falstaff14 seems to me to be that Falstaff is not an uncomplicated bragging coward, like, for instance, Jonson’s Bobadil [in Every Man in His Humour], but a versatile comic genius who adopts the miles gloriosus as one of his obvious roles. Another common type of alazon is the pedant or crank, who is also a man of words without deeds, in the sense that he is full of ideas that have no relation to reality. In Renaissance drama such a type is frequently a student of the occult sciences, like Sir Epicure Mammon or the astrologer in Congreve’s Love for Love, though the simple pedant is common enough from Cinquecento Italian comedy on. There is a whole nest of comic pedants in Love’s Labour’s Lost, including the king himself, with his academic Utopia, Holofernes, and the metaphysical poet Armado. Otherwise, Shakespeare seems not greatly interested in the type. The related type of the fop or coxcomb, who is such a staple of courtly drama, interests Shakespeare even less: the only clear example, Osric, belongs to

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a tragedy. The female alazon is rare in Elizabethan drama: Katharina the shrew is the only Shakespearean example.15 In later bourgeois comedies the miles gloriosus is often replaced by a female rival to the heroine, a “menace” or siren, as she would be called now, but this development is for the most part post-Elizabethan. So is the comedy of the bluestocking or précieuse ridicule,16 though the Beatrice of Much Ado has a link with the type in her role as a wit converted to love. Turning to the eiron characters, we find that the centre of this group are the technical hero and heroine, the pleasant young man and the pleasant girl he finally gets. We usually find too that these characters are rather dull unless they are combined with other types. The young men (adulescentes) of Plautus and Terence are all alike, as hard to tell apart in the dark as Demetrius and Lysander. The hero’s character has the neutrality that enables the whole audience to accept him without question, and hence the dramatist plays him down, makes him quiet and modest, a self-deprecating eiron. In The Merry Wives the technical hero, a man named Fenton, has only a bit part, and this play has picked up a hint or two from Plautus’s Casina, where the hero and heroine are not even brought on the stage at all.17 Far more important, from the point of view of characterization, is the type entrusted with hatching the schemes which bring about the hero’s victory. This character in Roman comedy is almost always a tricky slave (dolosus servus), and in Renaissance comedy he becomes the scheming valet who is so frequent in Continental plays, and in Spanish drama is called the gracioso. Modern audiences are most familiar with him in Figaro and in the Leporello of Don Giovanni. Shakespeare starts out full of enthusiasm for the clever servant in the Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but soon reduces him to the rank of an incidental clown, as in the Lancelot Gobbo of The Merchant of Venice. Elizabethan comedy, however, had another type of trickster, represented by the Matthew Merrygreek of Ralph Roister Doister, who is generally said to be developed from the vice or iniquity of the morality plays, a complicated question into which we cannot enter here. The vice, to give him that name, is very useful to a comic dramatist because he acts from pure love of mischief, and can set a comic action going without needing any motivation. The vice may be as lighthearted as Puck or as malignant as Don John in Much Ado, but as a rule the vice’s activity is, in spite of his name, benevolent, at least from the comic point of view. It is he who helps the play to end happily, cheats or hoodwinks the stupid old men, and puts

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the young in one another’s arms. He is in fact the spirit of comedy, and the two clearest examples of the type in Shakespeare, Puck and Ariel, are both spiritual beings.18 The role of the vice includes a great deal of disguising, and the type may usually be recognized by disguise. A typical example is the Brainworm of Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, who calls the action of the play the day of his metamorphosis [5.3.72]. Similarly Ariel has to surmount the difficult stage direction of “Enter invisible” [The Tempest, 3.2.41 s.d.]. In tragedy the vice has a counterpart in the type usually called the Machiavellian villain, who also often acts without motivation, from pure love of evil. Edmund in King Lear has the role of a tragic vice, and Edmund is contrasted with Edgar. Edgar, with his bewildering variety of disguises, his appearance to blind or mad people in different roles, and his tendency to appear on the third sound of the trumpet and to come pat like the catastrophe of the old comedy,19 seems to be an experiment in a new type, a kind of tragic “virtue,” if I may coin this word by analogy. The vice is combined with the hero whenever the latter is a cheeky, improvident young man who hatches his own schemes and cheats his rich father or uncle into giving him his patrimony along with the girl. The vice-hero is a favourite of Jonson and Middleton, but not of Shakespeare, though Petruchio [in The Taming of the Shrew] is close to the type. The vice can also, however, be combined with the heroine, who usually disguises herself as a boy to forward her schemes. For some reason this is Shakespeare’s favourite combination, in which his chief precursor appears to have been Greene.20 Another eiron type has been even less noticed. This is a character, generally an older man, who begins the action of the play by withdrawing from it, and ends the play by returning. He is often a father with the motive of seeing what his son will do. The action of Every Man in His Humour is set going in this way by Knowell Senior. The disappearance and return of Lovewit, the owner of the house which is the scene of The Alchemist, is parallel. The clearest Shakespearean example is the Duke in Measure for Measure; but Shakespeare is more addicted to the type than might appear at first glance.21 One of the tricky slaves in Plautus, in a soliloquy, boasts that he is the architectus of the comic action.22 In Shakespeare the vice is rarely the real architectus: Puck and Ariel both act under orders from an older man, if one may call Oberon a man for the moment. When the heroine takes the vice role, she is often significantly related to her father, even when the father is not in the play at all, like the father

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of Helena, who gives her his medical knowledge, or the father of Portia, who arranges the scheme of the caskets. As You Like It and The Tempest reverse the usual formula of the retreating eiron, as Duke Senior and Prospero are followed by the whole cast into their retreats. In Prospero the architectus role of this older eiron type is at its clearest. The formula is not confined to comedy: Polonius, who shows so many of the disadvantages of a literary education, attempts the role of a retreating paternal eiron three times, once too often.23 It also has a tragic counterpart in the returning ghost of the Senecan revenge plays. In other words, the major and minor themes of Hamlet are in direct counterpoint, the latter being a stock comic theme adapted to a tragedy. King Lear has a very similar structure: there too the minor or Gloucester plot is a tragic adaptation of the common Terentian theme of a stupid old father outwitted by a clever and unprincipled son. We pass now to the buffoon types, those whose function it is to increase the mood of festivity rather than to contribute to the plot. Renaissance comedy, unlike Roman comedy, has a great variety of such characters, professional fools, clowns, pages, singers, and incidental characters with established comic habits, like the malapropism of Dogberry [in Much Ado about Nothing] or the comic accents of Fluellen [in Henry V] and Dr. Caius [in The Merry Wives of Windsor]. The oldest buffoon of this incidental nature is the parasite, who may be given something to do, as Jonson gives Mosca the role of a vice in Volpone, but who, qua parasite, does nothing but entertain the audience by talking about his appetite. He derives chiefly from Greek Middle Comedy, which appears to have been very full of food, and where he was, not unnaturally, closely associated with another established buffoon type, the cook, who breaks into several plays of Plautus to bustle and order about and make long speeches about the mysteries of cooking. In the role of cook the buffoon or entertainer appears, not simply as a gratuitous addition, like the parasite, but as something more like a master of ceremonies, a centre for the comic mood. There is no cook in Shakespeare,24 though there is a superb description of one in the Comedy of Errors [3.2.95–146], but a similar role is often attached to a jovial and loquacious host, like the “mad host” of The Merry Wives or the Simon Eyre of The Shoemaker’s Holiday. In Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One the mad host type is combined with the vice. In Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch we can see the affinities of the buffoon or entertainer type both with the parasite and with the master of revels.

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Finally, there is a fourth group to which we have assigned the word agroikos, and which usually means either churlish or rustic, depending on the context. We find churls in the miserly, snobbish, or priggish characters whose role is that of the refuser of festivity, the killjoy who tries to stop the fun, or, like Malvolio, locks up the food and drink instead of dispensing it. In the sulky and self-centred Bertram of All’s Well there is a most unusual and ingenious combination of this type with the hero. More often, however, the churl belongs to the alazon group. All miserly old men in comedies are churls, and Shylock has a close affinity with this group. Shakespeare often sets up a churlish or sinister figure at the beginning of his comedy to act as a starting point for the comic action. Examples are Duke Frederick, Leontes, and Angelo.25 In The Tempest, Caliban has much the same relation to the churlish type that Ariel has to the vice or tricky slave. But often, where the mood is more lighthearted, we may translate agroikos simply by rustic, as with Shallow, Silence, and Slender.26 In a very ironic comedy a different type of character may play the role of the refuser of festivity. The more ironic the comedy, the more absurd the society, and an absurd society may be condemned by, or at least contrasted with, a character that we may call the plain dealer, an outspoken advocate of a kind of moral norm who has the sympathy of the audience. A good example is the Cléante of Molière’s Tartuffe. The plain dealer, however, goes with an implication of moral values, and Shakespeare, with his usual adroitness in keeping out of moral rat-traps, avoids the type. His closest approach to one, and it is not very close, is the Lafeu of All’s Well. In a pastoral comedy, however, the idealized virtues of rural life may be represented by a simple man who speaks for the pastoral ideal. Two social grades of this are exhibited in the Duke Senior and the Corin of As You Like It. When the tone deepens from the ironic to the bitter, the plain dealer tends to become the malcontent or railer, like Apemantus, who may be morally superior to his society, as he is to some extent in Marston’s play of that name,27 but who may also be too motivated by envy to be much more than another aspect of his society’s evil, like Thersites. Shakespeare makes no attempt to alter the traditional conception of Thersites as an envious railer. But the mood of Troilus and Cressida is so sardonic that Thersites steals every scene he is in. In his characterization, as in everything else, Shakespeare is a better dramatist than his contemporaries, but not a different kind of dramatist. In the writers of humour comedies, Jonson, Marston, Massinger,

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Middleton, Chapman, dramatic effect is normally predictable in terms of dramatic function. If a braggart is introduced, he will brag until he is unconditionally exposed. Shakespeare uses the same formulas, but in a much more subtle, complex, and unpredictable way. Lucio, in Measure for Measure, belongs to the alazon group of characters: he is not a miles gloriosus like Parolles, but like Parolles he talks too much. The Duke has the eiron role of disguising himself as a simple monk, listening unseen to the action, and then returning as an awful incarnation of omniscient judgment. The stage is set for the utter annihilation of Lucio, and in Jonson it would have been that: the scene is dramatically not unlike the trial of Volpone. But Lucio scores point after point against the Duke; he keeps getting laughs, and any character who gets laughs gets at least some of the audience’s sympathy. Horrid doubts arise in our minds: perhaps the Duke after all is only a tiresome and snoopy old bore, who has heard of himself what an eavesdropper deserves to hear. Of course morally and historically sound critics will conclude, no doubt rightly, that the scene represents an impressive triumph of Justice over Slander, and demonstrates the values of personal monarchy to an audience already convinced of them. Those who are morally spineless and historically vague, like myself, will have to take what comfort we can from the incidental victories of impudence over dignity. But I imagine that Shakespeare had a similar diversity of creatures in mind. Many in his audience doubtless held properly Jacobean views about government and prerogative, and, like some modern critics, thought that the Duke alluded to James I himself.28 Or there may have been in the audience that Henry Hawkins who asserted that Queen Elizabeth had had five children by Lord Cecil, and went on her progresses in order to be delivered of them.29 It is because he can get every ounce of dramatic effect out of his situations that Shakespeare’s characters seem so wonderfully lifelike. I am not trying to reduce them to stock types, but I am trying to suggest that the notion of an antithesis between the lifelike character and the stock type is a vulgar error. All Shakespeare’s characters owe their consistency to the appropriateness of the stock type which belongs to their dramatic function. That stock type is not the character, but it is as necessary to the character as a skeleton is to the actor who plays it.30

5 Molière’s Tartuffe 7 May 1954

From the Daily Princetonian, 7 May 1954, 2. Frye’s review of the production at the Theatre Intime is signed “Northrop Frye/Visiting Professor of English.” Frye was appointed Class of 1932 Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University in 1954. Tartuffe, which ran from 6 May to 15 May 1954, was the final play produced by the student-run Theatre Intime in the 1953–54 season. This appears to be a review of the opening night performance of the play.

A cheerful set and some pleasant seventeenth-century music make an excellent background for Molière’s Tartuffe at the Theatre Intime. Mr. Robert Hartle’s translation is in prose laced with verse, which means in practice a prose translation with a number of rhyme tags. It is a clean and speakable English, avoiding laboured colloquialism and stodginess equally well. It was Mr. Hartle’s job to translate all the original, but I think a more ruthless direction, cutting lengthy speeches and a thick underbrush of adjectives and subordinate clauses, would have brought more sparkle out of some rather gabbly moments. Otherwise, the play is very well paced. Dan Seltzer, as Tartuffe, speaks his lines with a sinister husky clarity and great deliberation of tempo. He has grasped the central fact about Tartuffe, that he is more a parasite than a hypocrite; what is important is not the lightning changes of a party line, but the steady advance of a malignant will. Tartuffe thus becomes a properly formidable creature, who bullies Orgon with a quiet authority and attacks his wife with lecherous zeal. Tom Rimer, as Orgon, has a more complex assignment: Orgon is one of Molière’s older men who have become heavy fathers because they have never really matured, and his obsession brings his childishness into

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high relief. Mr. Rimer plays him in the spirit of farce, which is probably the best solution, and brings out very well the offguard remarks (“But I want it to be true!” [2.1.451])1 that show Molière’s irony at its most incisive. Charles Schultz as Cléante, Orgon’s brother, sustains the moral norm of the play, and delivers the wordy harangues given him by Molière with great fluency. In the smaller parts, Morton Goolde and Louise Howard fill acceptably, especially the former, the roles of Orgon’s likeable if somewhat dim-witted progeny, and so does Bob Tuggle as the lover Valère. Jack Schlegel as Madame Pernelle, Orgon’s mother, and John Chandler as Loyal, give themselves acute physical handicaps, one an overhang like a sunflower and the other a facial twitch that seems to start from the ankles. The latter is entertaining enough to watch, but Mme. Pernelle has the important function of indicating the background of Orgon’s infatuation, and I think a more statuesque stupidity is better fitted for her role—the fine opening scene built around her tends to dissolve into rumble. Finally, one should pay tribute to the two female leads, Rayna Barroll as Elmire and Georgine Hall as Dorine. Dorine acts with a variety of movement that gives all her scenes a ballet-like lightness, and Elmire seduces Tartuffe with an admirable mixture of courage and embarrassment. The appearance of so distinctive and intelligent a Tartuffe on the campus should not be missed, however crowded one’s schedule.

6 Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tempest 1959

From the Penguin edition of Shakespeare’s Tempest (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959), 15–26; rev. ed. 1970. Reprinted in Shakespeare: The Complete Works [Pelican Text Revised], gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 1369–72; and in Twentieth Century Interpretations of “The Tempest,” ed. Hallett Smith (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 60–7.

In the opening scene of The Tempest there is not only a sinking ship but a dissolving society. The storm, like the storm in King Lear, does not care that it is afflicting a king, and Gonzalo’s protests about the deference due to royalty [l. 19] seem futile enough. But while everyone is unreasonable, we can distinguish Gonzalo, who is ready to meet his fate with some detachment and humour, from Antonio and Sebastian, who are merely screaming abuse at the sailors trying to save their lives [ll. 40–1, 43–5]. The boatswain, who comes so vividly to life in a few crisp lines, dominates this scene and leaves us with a strong sense of the superiority of personal character to social rank. The shipwrecked characters are then divided by Ariel into three main groups: Ferdinand; the Court Party proper; Stephano and Trinculo. Each goes through a pursuit of illusions, an ordeal, and a symbolic vision. The Court Party hunts for Ferdinand with strange shapes appearing and vanishing around them; their ordeal is a labyrinth of “forthrights and meanders” [3.3.3]1 in which they founder with exhaustion, and to them is presented the vision of the disappearing banquet, symbolic of deceitful desires. There follows confinement and a madness which brings them to conviction of sin, self-knowledge, and repentance. Like Hamlet, Prospero delays revenge and sets up a dramatic action to catch the conscience

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of a king; like Lear on a small scale, Alonso is a king who gains in dignity by suffering. The search of Stephano and Trinculo for Prospero is also misled by illusions; their ordeal is a horsepond and their symbolic vision the “trumpery” dangled in front of them [4.1.193–254]. What happens to them is external and physical rather than internal and mental: they are hunted by hounds, filled with cramps, and finally reach what might be called a conviction of inadequacy. Probably they then settle into their old roles again: if a cold-blooded sneering assassin like Antonio can be forgiven, these amusing and fundamentally likeable rascals can be too. Ferdinand, being the hero, has a better time: he is led by Ariel’s music to Miranda, undergoes the ordeal of the log-pile [3.1.1–15], where he takes over Caliban’s role as a bearer of wood, and his symbolic vision is that of the wedding masque [4.1.60–124]. The characters thus appear to be taking their appropriate places in a new kind of social order. We soon realize that the island looks different to different people—it is a pleasanter place to Gonzalo than to Antonio or Sebastian—and that each one is stimulated to exhibit his own ideal of society. At one end, Ferdinand unwillingly resigns himself to becoming King of Naples by the death of Alonso; at the other, Sebastian plots to become King of Naples by murdering Alonso. In between come Stephano, whose ambition to be king of the island is more ridiculous but somehow less despicable than Sebastian’s, and Gonzalo, who dreams of a primitive golden age of equality and leisure, not very adequate as a social theory, but simple and honest, full of good nature and good will, like Gonzalo himself. Into the midst of this society comes the islander Caliban, who is, on one level of nature, a natural man, a primitive whose name seems to echo the “cannibals” of Montaigne’s famous essay.2 He is not a cannibal, but his existence in the play forms an ironic comment on Gonzalo’s reverie [2.1.148–69], which has been taken from a passage in the same essay.3 Caliban is a human being, as Ariel is not; and whatever he does, Prospero feels responsible for him: “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine,” Prospero says [5.1.275–6]. Whether or not he is, as one hopeful critic suggested, an anticipation of Darwin’s “missing link,”4 he knows he is not like the apes “with foreheads villainous low” [4.1.249]; his sensuality is haunted by troubled dreams of beauty; he is not taken in by the “trumpery,” and we leave him with his mind on higher things. His ambitions are to kill Prospero and rape Miranda, both, considering his situation, eminently natural desires; and even these he resigns to Stephano,

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to whom he tries to be genuinely loyal. Nobody has a good word for Caliban: he is a born devil to Prospero [4.1.188], an abhorred slave to Miranda [1.2.351], and to others not obviously his superiors either in intelligence or virtue he is a puppy-headed monster [2.2.154–5], a moon-calf [2.2.106, passim], and a plain fish [5.1.266]. Yet he has his own dignity, and he is certainly no Yahoo,5 for all his ancient and fishlike smell. True, Shakespeare, like Swift, clearly does not assume that the natural man on Caliban’s level is capable also of a reasonable life. But he has taken pains to make Caliban as memorable and vivid as any character in the play. As a natural man, Caliban is mere nature, nature without nurture, as Prospero would say [4.1.188–9]: the nature that manifests itself more as an instinctive propensity to evil than as the calculated criminality of Antonio and Sebastian, which is rationally corrupted nature. But to an Elizabethan poet “nature” had an upper level, a cosmic and moral order that may be entered through education, obedience to law, and the habit of virtue.6 In this expanded sense we may say that the whole society being formed on the island under Prospero’s guidance is a natural society. Its top level is represented by Miranda, whose chastity and innocence put her, like her poetic descendant the Lady in Comus,7 in tune with the harmony of a higher nature. The discipline necessary to live in this higher nature is imposed on the other characters by Prospero’s magic. In Shakespeare’s day the occult arts, especially alchemy, whose language Prospero is using at the beginning of the fifth act [ll. 33–68], were often employed as symbols of such discipline.8 Shakespeare did not select Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals as the basis for Gonzalo’s “commonwealth” speech merely at random. Montaigne is no Rousseau: he is not talking about imaginary noble savages. He is saying that, despite their unconventional way of getting their proteins, cannibals have many virtues we have not, and if we pretend to greater virtues we ought to have at least theirs. They are not models for imitation; they are children of nature who can show us what is unnatural in our own lives. If we can understand that, we shall be wiser than the cannibals as well as wiser than our present selves. Prospero takes the society of Alonso’s ship, immerses it in magic, and then sends it back to the world, its original ranks restored, but given a new wisdom in the light of which Antonio’s previous behaviour can be seen to be “unnatural.” In the Epilogue Prospero hands over to the audience what his art has created, a vision of a society permeated by the virtues of tolerance and forgiveness, in the form of one of the most beautiful plays in the

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world. And, adds Prospero, you might start practising those virtues by applauding the play. The Tempest is not an allegory, or a religious drama: if it were, Prospero’s great “revels” speech would say, not merely that all earthly things will vanish, but that an eternal world will take their place. In a religious context, Prospero’s renunciation of magic would represent the resigning of his will to a divine will, one that can do what the boatswain says Gonzalo cannot do, command the elements to silence and work the peace of the present [1.1.21–2]. In Christianity the higher level of nature is God’s original creation, from which man broke away with Adam’s fall. It is usually symbolized by the music of the heavenly spheres, of which the one nearest us is the moon. The traditional conception of the magician was of one who could control the moon: this power is attributed to Sycorax, but it is a sinister power, and is not associated with Prospero, whose magic and music belong to the sublunary world.9 In the wedding masque of the fourth act and the recognition scene of the fifth, therefore, we find ourselves moving, not out of the world, but from an ordinary to a renewed and ennobled vision of nature. The masque shows the meeting of a fertile earth and a gracious sky introduced by the goddess of the rainbow, and leads up to a dance of nymphs representing the spring rains with reapers representing the autumnal harvest. The masque has about it the freshness of Noah’s new world, after the tempest had receded and the rainbow promised that seedtime and harvest should not cease [Genesis 8:22]. There is thus a glimpse, as Ferdinand recognizes, of an earthly paradise where, as in Milton’s Eden, there is no winter but spring and autumn “Danced hand in hand” [Paradise Lost, bk. 5, l. 395]. In the last act, as in The Winter’s Tale, there is a curious pretence that some of the characters have died and are brought back to life. The discovery of Ferdinand is greeted by Sebastian, of all people, as “a most high miracle” [5.1.177]. But the miracles are those of a natural, and therefore also a moral and intellectual, renewal of life. Some of Shakespeare’s romances feature a final revelation through a goddess or oracle, both of which Alonso expects, but in The Tempest goddess and oracle are represented by Miranda and Ariel (in his speech at the banquet [3.3.53–82]) respectively. Ariel is a spirit of nature, and Miranda is a natural spirit, in other words a human being, greeting the “brave new world” [5.1.183] in all the good faith of innocence. Hence we distort the play if we think of Prospero as supernatural, just as we do if we think of Caliban as a devil. Prospero is a tempest-raiser

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like the witches in Macbeth, though morally at the opposite pole; he is a “white” magician. Anyone with Prospero’s powers is an agent of fate, a cheating fate if evil, a benevolent fate or providence if motivated as he is. Great courage was required of all magicians, white or black, for the elemental spirits they controlled were both unwilling and malignant, and any sign of faltering meant terrible disaster. Ariel is loyal because of his debt of gratitude to Prospero, and because he is a very high-class spirit, too delicate to work for a black witch like Sycorax. But even he has a short memory, and has to be periodically reminded what his debt of gratitude is. Of the others Caliban says, probably with some truth, “they all do hate him / As rootedly as I” [3.2.94–5]. The nervous strain of dealing with such creatures shows up in Prospero’s relations with human beings too; and in his tormenting of Caliban, in his lame excuse for making Ferdinand’s wooing “uneasy” [1.2.452], in his fussing over protecting Miranda from her obviously honourable lover, there is a touch of the busybody. Still, his benevolence is genuine, and as far as the action of the play goes he seems an admirable ruler. Yet he appears to have been a remarkably incompetent Duke of Milan, and not to be promising much improvement after he returns. His talents are evidently dramatic rather than political, and he seems less of a practical magician plotting the discomfiture of his enemies than a creative artist calling spirits from their confines to enact his present fancies. It has often been thought that Prospero is a self-portrait of Shakespeare,10 and there may well be something in him of a harassed overworked actor-manager, scolding the lazy actors, praising the good ones in connoisseur’s language, thinking up jobs for the idle, constantly aware of his limited time before his show goes on, his nerves tense and alert for breakdowns while it is going on, looking forward longingly to peaceful retirement, yet in the meantime having to go out and beg the audience for applause. Prospero’s magic, in any case, is an “art” which includes, in fact largely consists of, music and drama. Dramatists from Euripides to Pirandello have been fascinated by the paradox of reality and illusion in drama: the play is an illusion like the dream, and yet a focus of reality more intense than life affords. The action of The Tempest moves from sea to land, from chaos to new creation, from reality to realization. What seems at first illusory, the magic and music, becomes real, and the Realpolitik of Antonio and Sebastian becomes illusion. In this island the quality of one’s dreaming is an index of character. When Antonio and Sebastian remain awake

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plotting murder, they show that they are the real dreamers, sunk in the hallucinations of greed. We find Stephano better company because his are the exuberant dreams of the stage boaster, as when he claims to have swum thirty-five leagues “off and on” [3.2.14–15], when we know that he has floated to shore on a wine cask [2.2.121–2]. Caliban’s life is full of nightmare interspersed by strange gleams of ecstasy. When the Court Party first came to the island “no man was his own” [5.1.213]; they had not found their “proper selves” [3.3.60]. Through the mirages of Ariel, the mops and mows of the other spirits, the vanities of Prospero’s art, and the fevers of madness, reality grows up in them from inside, in response to the fertilizing influence of illusion. Few plays are so haunted by the passing of time as The Tempest: it has derived even its name from a word (tempestas) which means time as well as tempest. Timing was important to a magician: everything depended on it when the alchemist’s project gathered to a head;11 astrologers were exact observers of time (“The very minute bids thee ope thine ear,” Prospero says to Miranda [1.2.37]), and the most famous of all stories about magicians, the story told in Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, had the warning of “time is past” for its moral.12 The same preoccupation affects the other characters too, from the sailors in the storm to Ariel watching the clock for his freedom. The tide, which also waits for no man, ebbs and flows around this Mediterranean island in defiance of geography, and its imagery enters the plotting of Antonio and Sebastian and the grief of Ferdinand. When everyone is trying to make the most of his time, it seems strange that a melancholy elegy over the dissolving of all things in time should be the emotional crux of the play. A very deliberate echo in the dialogue gives us the clue to this. Morally, The Tempest shows a range of will extending from Prospero’s self-control, which includes his control of all the other characters, to the self-abandonment of Alonso’s despair, when, crazed with guilt and grief, he resolves to drown himself “deeper than e’er plummet sounded” [3.3.101]. Intellectually, it shows a range of vision extending from the realizing of a moment in time, the zenith of Prospero’s fortune, which becomes everyone else’s zenith too, to the sense of the nothingness of all temporal things. When Prospero renounces his magic, his “book” falls into the vanishing world, “deeper than did ever plummet sound” [5.1.56]. He has done what his art can do; he has held the mirror up to nature. Alonso and the rest are promised many explanations after the play is over, but we are left only with the darkening mirror, the visions fading and leaving not a

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rack behind. Once again the Epilogue reminds us that Prospero has used up all his magic in the play, and what more he can do depends on us. It is not difficult to see, then, why so many students of Shakespeare, rightly or wrongly, have felt that The Tempest is in a peculiar sense Shakespeare’s play, and that there is something in it of Shakespeare’s farewell to his art. Two other features of it reinforce this feeling: the fact that no really convincing general source for the play has yet been discovered, and the fact that it is probably the last play wholly written by Shakespeare.13 Whether a general source turns up or not, The Tempest is still erudite and allusive enough, full of echoes of literature, from the classics to the pamphlets of Shakespeare’s own time. The scene of the play, an island somewhere between Tunis and Naples, suggests the journey of Aeneas from Carthage to Rome. Gonzalo’s identification of Tunis and Carthage [2.1.84], and the otherwise tedious business about “Widow Dido” in the second act [2.1.77–102], seem almost to be emphasizing the parallel. Like The Tempest, the Aeneid begins with a terrible storm and goes on to tell a story of wanderings in which a banquet with harpies figures prominently [bk. 3, ll. 214–66]. Near the route of Aeneas’s journey, according to Virgil, was the abode of Circe, of whom (at least in her Renaissance form) Sycorax is a close relative. Circe suggests Medea, whose speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the model for Prospero’s renunciation speech [5.1.33–57].14 Echoes from the shipwreck of St. Paul (Ariel’s phrase “not a hair perished” recalls Acts 27:34), from St. Augustine, who also had associations with Carthage, and from Apuleius, with his interest in magic and initiation, are appropriate enough in such a play.15 Most of the traditional magical names of elemental spirits were of Hebrew origin, and “Ariel,” a name occurring in the Bible (Isaiah 29:1), was among them.16 The imagery of contemporary accounts of Atlantic voyages has also left strong traces in The Tempest, and seems almost to have been its immediate inspiration. One ship of a fleet that sailed across the ocean to reinforce Raleigh’s Virginian colony in 1609 had an experience rather like that of Alonso’s ship. It was driven aground on the Bermudas by a storm and given up for lost, but the passengers managed to survive the winter there and reached Virginia the following spring. William Strachey’s account of this experience, True Reportory of the Wracke, dated July 15, 1610, was not published until after Shakespeare’s death, and as Shakespeare certainly knew it, he must have read it in manuscript.17 Strachey and a closely related pamphlet, Sylvester Jourdain’s Discovery of the Barmudas

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(1610), lie behind Caliban’s allusions to making dams for fish [2.2.180] and to water with “berries” (i.e., cedar-berries) in it [1.2.334]. Other details indicate Shakespeare’s reading in similar accounts. Setebos is mentioned as a god (“divell”) of the Patagonians in Richard Eden’s History of Travayle in the West and East Indies (1577), and the curious “bowgh, wawgh” refrain in Ariel’s first song [1.2.382, 384]18 seems to be from a contemporary account of an Indian dance.19 It is a little puzzling why New World imagery should be so prominent in The Tempest, which really has nothing to do with the New World, beyond Ariel’s reference to the “still-vex’d Bermoothes” [1.2.229] and a general, if vague, resemblance between the relation of Caliban to the other characters and that of the American Indians to the colonizers and drunken sailors who came to exterminate or enslave them. However that may be, the dates of these pamphlets help to establish the fact that The Tempest is a very late play. A performance of it is recorded for November 1, 1611, in Whitehall, and it also formed part of the celebrations connected with the wedding of King James’s daughter Elizabeth in the winter of 1612–13.20 The versification is also that of a late play, for The Tempest is written in the direct speaking style of Shakespeare’s last period, the lines full of weak endings and so welded together that every speech is a verse paragraph in itself, often very close in its rhythm to prose, especially in the speeches of Caliban. One should read the verse as an actor would read it, attending to the natural stresses, of which there are usually four to a line, rather than the metre. Some critics have felt that a few lines are “unmetrical,”21 but no line that can be easily spoken on the stage is unmetrical, and it is simple enough to find the four natural stresses in “You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort” [4.1.146] or (in octosyllabics) “Earth’s increase, foison plenty” [4.1.110]. In such writing all the regular schematic forms of verse, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and the like, fall into the background, peeping out irregularly through the texture: I will stand to, and feed, Although my last, no matter, since I feel The best is past. Brother, my lord the duke, Stand to, and do as we. [3.3.49–52]

In its genre The Tempest shows a marked affinity with dramatic forms outside the normal range of tragedy and comedy. Among these is the

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masque: besides containing an actual masque [4.1.60–138], The Tempest is like the masque in its use of elaborate stage machinery and music. The magician with his wand and mantle was a frequent figure in masques, and Caliban is like the “wild men” common in the farcical interludes known as antimasques.22 Another is the commedia dell’arte, which was well known in England. Some of the sketchy plots of this half-improvised type of play have been preserved, and they show extraordinary similarities to The Tempest, especially in the Stephano–Trinculo scenes.23 The Tempest in short is a spectacular and operatic play, and when we think of other plays like it, we are more apt to think of, say, Mozart’s Magic Flute than of ordinary stage plays. But more important than these affiliations is the position of The Tempest as the fourth and last of the great romances of Shakespeare’s final period. In these plays Shakespeare seems to have distilled the essence of all his work in tragedy, comedy, and history, and to have reached the very bedrock of drama itself, with a romantic spectacle which is at once primitive and sophisticated, childlike and profound. In these plays the central structural principles of drama emerge with great clarity, and we become aware of the affinity between the happy endings of comedy and the rituals marking the great rising rhythms of life: marriage, springtime, harvest, dawn, and rebirth. In The Tempest there is also an emphasis on moral and spiritual rebirth which suggests rituals of initiation, like baptism or the ancient mystery dramas, as well as of festivity. And just as its poetic texture ranges from the simplicity of Ariel’s incredibly beautiful songs to the haunting solemnity of Prospero’s speeches, so we may come to the play on any level, as a fairy tale with unusually lifelike characters, or as an inexhaustibly profound drama that has influenced some of the most complex poems in the language, including Milton’s Comus and Eliot’s The Waste Land. However we take it, The Tempest is a play not simply to be read or seen or even studied, but possessed.

7 The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene 29 April 1960

From FI, 69–87. First published in University of Toronto Quarterly, 30 (January 1961): 109–27. Originally delivered as a conference paper on the afternoon of 29 April 1960, during the first meeting of the Regional Renaissance Conference at the University of Western Ontario. Along with his extensive commentary in Notebook 43 (dating from September 1950), this paper is mainly what Frye completed of the projected volume on the Faerie Queene for his Guggenheim Fellowship, awarded in 1950. Reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972), 153–70; and in Edmund Spenser, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 23–40; partially reprinted in Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, ed. Hugh Maclean (New York: Norton, 1968; rpt. 1982, 1993), 582–93; and in Edmund Spenser, ed. Paul J. Alpers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 277–90. Notebook 43 (NRL, 9–92) contains Frye’s book-by-book and canto-bycanto notes on Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in Frye’s handwriting up to book 2, canto 2, at which point the commentary continues in Helen Kemp Frye’s handwriting because Frye had broken his arm in a car accident and had to dictate the remaining notes (Ayre, 226). Passages from Notebook 43 relevant to this essay are indicated in the endnotes.

The Faerie Queene, long as it is, is not nearly as long as the poem that Spenser intended to write, according to his letter to Raleigh and two of the Amoretti sonnets.1 It therefore at once raises the problem of whether the poem as it now stands is unfinished or merely uncompleted. If merely uncompleted, then it still may be a unity, like a torso in sculpture; if unfinished, then, as in Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood, certain essential clues to the total meaning are forever withheld from us.

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Many readers tend to assume that Spenser wrote the poem in the same way that they read it, starting at the beginning and keeping on until he collapsed with exhaustion. But while The Faerie Queene probably evolved in a much more complicated way than that, there is no evidence of exhaustion. In the eightieth Amoretti sonnet he sounds winded, but not bored; and of course he is not the kind of poet who depends on anything that a Romantic would call inspiration. He is a professional poet, learned in rhetoric, who approaches his sublime passages with the nonchalance of a car driver shifting into second gear. All the purple patches in Spenser—the temptations of Despair [I.ix.29–53] and Acrasia [II.xii.70–83], the praise of Elizabeth in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe [ll. 336–47], the “Bellona” passage in The Shepheardes Calender2—are deliberate rhetorical exercises. There may be passages in The Faerie Queene that we find dull, but there are very few in which Spenser’s own standards are not met. In some cantos of the fifth book, perhaps, he sounds tired and irritable, as though he were preoccupied with his anxieties instead of his subject, and in these cantos there are lapses into muddled argument, tasteless imagery, and cacophonous doggerel. But on the whole no poem in English of comparable scope is more evenly sustained. Further, Spenser is not, like Coleridge, a poet of fragments. Just as there is a touch of Pope himself in Pope’s admiration for “The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine!”3 so there is a touch of Spenser himself in Spenser’s admiration for the honey bee “Working her formall rowmes in Wexen frame.”4 He thinks inside regular frameworks—the twelve months, the nine muses, the seven deadly sins—and he goes on filling up his frame even when his scheme is mistaken from the beginning, as it certainly is in The Teares of the Muses.5 What can be said is that, as one virtue is likely to involve others, Spenser’s scheme was bound to foreshorten as he went on. In the historical allegory he still had the Armada to deal with, but in the moral allegory there is already a good deal of inorganic repetition, especially in the symbols of evil (for example, the Occasion-Ate-Sclaunder sequence and the reduplicative foul monsters). In the first book he uses up so much of the structure of Biblical typology that he could hardly have written a second book in the area of revelation; and chastity and justice, each of which is described as the supreme virtue, almost exhaust the sources of plausible compliments to Elizabeth. Spenser may well have ended his sixth book realizing that he might not write any more of it, and designed its conclusion for either possibility. He provides himself, of course, with

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opportunities for carrying on the story. Apart from Prince Arthur himself, we have a fresh set of characters; a seventh book would doubtless have got some clothes on Serena, who is left nude and shivering at the end of the eighth canto [VI.viii.50]; the poet hints that the baby rescued by Calepine may grow up to be the hero of a future legend [VI.iv.38]; he allows the Blatant Beast to escape again [VI.xii.38]. But there are many such dropped stitches in the plots of the other five books, and they do not interfere with our sense of their unity. At the same time the appearance of Spenser’s “signature” in Colin Clout and two other symbols from The Shepheardes Calender, the four Graces and the envious beast that barks at poets, make the end of the sixth book also a summing up and conclusion for the entire poem and for Spenser’s poetic career.6 There is, at least, nothing in the poem as we now have it that seems to depend for its meaning on anything unwritten. I shall assume, as a working hypothesis, that the six books we have form a unified epic structure, regardless of how much might have been added that wasn’t. There are six books, and Spenser has a curious fondness for mentioning the number six: there are six counsellors of Lucifera [I.iv.18], six couples in the masque of Cupid [III.xii.7–18], two groups of six knights fighting Britomart [III.i.20–9; IV.ix.20], six judges at Cambell’s tournament [IV.iii.4], six partisans of Marinell at Florimell’s tournament [V.iii.4], six grooms of Care [IV.v.36], and so on.7 In most of these groups there is a crucial seventh, and perhaps the Mutabilitie Cantos have that function in the total scheme of the epic. We shall probably never know on what manuscript evidence the publisher of the Folio numbered the two cantos of this poem six and seven.8 What we can see is that the Mutabilitie Cantos are certainly not a fragment: they constitute a single beautifully shaped poem that could not have had a more logical beginning, development, and end. It is entirely impossible that the last two stanzas could have been the opening stanzas of an eighth unfinished canto, as the rubric suggests. Nor is it possible that in their present form these cantos could have been the “core” of a seventh book, unless that book was inconceivably different in its structure from the existing ones. The poem brings us to the poet’s “Sabaoths sight” [VIII.ii.9] after his six great efforts of creation, and there is nothing which at any point can be properly described as “vnperfite” [title, bk. 8]. To demonstrate a unity in The Faerie Queene, we have to examine the imagery of the poem rather than its allegory. It is Spenser’s habitual technique, developing as it did out of the emblematic visions he wrote in his

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nonage,9 to start with the image, not the allegorical translation of it, and when he says, at the beginning of the final canto of book 2, Now ginnes this goodly frame of Temperaunce Fayrely to rise [II.xii.1.1–2]

one feels that the “frame” is built out of the characters and places that are clearly announced to be what they are, not out of their moral or historical shadows. Spenser prefaces the whole poem with sonnets to possible patrons, telling several of them that they are in the poem somewhere, not specifying where: the implication is that for such readers the allegory is to be read more or less ad libitum. Spenser’s own language about allegory, “darke conceit,” “clowdily enwrapped,” [Letter to Raleigh, 714, 716] emphasizes its deliberate vagueness. We know that Belphoebe refers to Elizabeth [Letter to Raleigh, 716]: therefore, when Timias speaks of “her, to whom the heuens doe serue and sew” [III.v.47.2] is there, as one edition suggests, a reference to the storm that wrecked the Armada?10 I cite this only as an example of how subjective an allegorical reading can be. Allegory is not only often uncertain, however, but in the work of one of our greatest allegorical poets it can even be addled, as it is in Mother Hubberds Tale, where the fox and the ape argue over which of them is more like a man, and hence more worthy to wear the skin of a lion [ll. 1027–63]. In such episodes as the legal decisions of Artegall [V.xii.25–7], too, we can see that Spenser, unlike Milton, is a poet of very limited conceptual powers, and is helpless without some kind of visualization to start him thinking. I am far from urging that we should “let the allegory go” in reading Spenser, but it is self-evident that the imagery is prior in importance to it. One cannot begin to discuss the allegory without using the imagery, but one could work out an exhaustive analysis of the imagery without ever mentioning the allegory. Our first step is to find a general structure of imagery in the poem as a whole, and with so public a poet as Spenser we should hardly expect to find this in Spenser’s private possession, as we might with Blake or Shelley or Keats. We should be better advised to look for it in the axioms and assumptions which Spenser and his public shared, and which form the basis of its imaginative communication.11 Perhaps the Mutabilitie Cantos, which give us so many clues to the sense of The Faerie Queene as a whole, will help us here also. The action of the Mutabilitie Cantos embraces four distinguishable lev-

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els of existence. First is that of Mutability herself, the level of death, corruption, and dissolution, which would also be, if this poem were using moral categories, the level of sin. Next comes the world of ordinary experience, the nature of the four elements, over which Mutability is also dominant. Its central symbol is the cycle, the round of days, months, and hours which Mutability brings forth as evidence of her supremacy. In the cycle there are two elements: becoming or change, which is certainly Mutability’s, and a principle of order or recurrence within which the change occurs. Hence Mutability’s evidence is not conclusive, but could just as easily be turned against her. Above our world is upper nature, the stars in their courses, a world still cyclical but immortal and unchanged in essence. This upper world is all that is now left of nature as God originally created it, the state described in the Biblical story of Eden and the Classical myth of the golden age. Its regent is Jove, armed with the power which, in a world struggling against chaos and evil, is “the right hand of Iustice truely hight” [V.iv.1.9]. But Jove, however he may bluster and threaten, has no authority over Mutability; that authority belongs to the goddess Nature, whose viceroy he is. If Mutability could be cast out of the world of ordinary experience, lower and upper nature would be reunited, man would re-enter the golden age, and the reign of “Saturnes sonne” [VII.vi.2.7] would be replaced by that of Saturn. Above Nature is the real God, to whom Mutability appeals when she brushes Jove out of her way, who is invoked in the last stanza of the poem, and who appears in the reference to the Transfiguration of Christ like a mirage behind the assembly of lower gods. Man is born into the third of these worlds, the order of physical nature which is theologically “fallen” and under the sway of Mutability. But though in this world he is not of it: he really belongs to the upper nature of which he formed part before his fall. The order of physical nature, the world of animals and plants, is morally neutral: man is confronted from his birth with a moral dialectic, and must either sink below it into sin or rise above it into his proper human home. This latter he may reach by the practice of virtue and through education, which includes law, religion, and everything the Elizabethans meant by art. The question whether this “art” included what we mean by art, poetry, painting, and music, was much debated in Spenser’s day, and explains why so much of the criticism of the period took the form of apologetic. As a poet, Spenser believed in the moral reality of poetry and in its effectiveness as an educating agent; as a Puritan, he was sensitive to the abuse and perversion of

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art which had raised the question of its moral value in the first place, and he shows his sense of the importance of the question in his description of the Bower of Bliss.12 Spenser means by “Faerie” primarily the world of realized human nature. It is an “antique” world, extending backward to Eden and the golden age, and its central figure of Prince Arthur was chosen, Spenser tells us, as “furthest from the daunger of envy, and suspition of present time” [Letter to Raleigh, 715]. It occupies the same space as the ordinary physical world, a fact which makes contemporary allusions possible, but its time sequence is different. It is not timeless: we hear of months or years passing, but time seems curiously foreshortened, as though it followed instead of establishing the rhythm of conscious life. Such foreshortening of time suggests a world of dream and wish-fulfilment, like the fairylands of Shakespeare’s comedies. But Spenser, with his uneasy political feeling that the price of authority is eternal vigilance, will hardly allow his virtuous characters even to sleep, much less dream, and the drowsy narcotic passages which have so impressed his imitators are associated with spiritual peril.13 He tells us that sleep is one of the three divisions of the lowest world, the other two being death and hell [II. vii.25]; and Prince Arthur’s long tirade against night (III.iv.55 ff.) would be out of proportion if night, like its seasonal counterpart winter, did not symbolize a lower world than Faerie. The vision of Faerie may be the author’s dream, as the pilgrimage of Christian is presented as a dream of Bunyan, but what the poet dreams of is the strenuous effort, physical, mental, and moral, of waking up to one’s true humanity. In the ordinary physical world good and evil are inextricably confused; the use and the abuse of natural energies are hard to distinguish, motives are mixed and behaviour inconsistent. The perspective of Faerie, the achieved quest of virtue, clarifies this view. What we now see is a completed moral dialectic. The mixed-up physical world separates out into a human moral world and a demonic one. In this perspective heroes and villains are purely and simply heroic and villainous; characters are either white or black, for the quest or against it; right always has superior might in the long run, for we are looking at reality from the perspective of man as he was originally made in the image of God, unconfused about the difference between heaven and hell. We can now see that physical nature is a source of energy, but that this energy can run only in either of two opposing directions: towards its own fulfilment or towards its own destruction. Nature says to Mutability, “For thy decay thou seekst by

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thy desire” [VII.vii.59.3], and contrasts her with those who, struggling out of the natural cycle, “Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate” [VII.vii.58.7]. Spenser, in Hamlet’s language, has no interest in holding the mirror up to nature unless he can thereby show virtue her own feature and scorn her own image [Hamlet, 3.2.22–3]. His evil characters are rarely converted to good, and while there is one virtuous character who comes to a bad end, Sir Terpine in book 5, this exception proves the rule, as his fate makes an allegorical point about justice. Sometimes the fiction writer clashes with the moralist in Spenser, though never for long. When Malbecco offers to take Hellenore back from the satyrs, he becomes a figure of some dignity as well as pathos; but Spenser cannot let his dramatic sympathy with Malbecco evolve. Complicated behaviour, mixed motives, or the kind of driving energy of character which makes moral considerations seem less important, as it does in all Shakespeare’s heroes, and even in Milton’s Satan—none of this could be contained in Spenser’s framework. The Faerie Queene in consequence is necessarily a romance, for romance is the genre of simplified or black and white characterization.14 The imagery of this romance is organized on two major principles. One is that of the natural cycle, the progression of days and seasons. The other is that of the moral dialectic, in which symbols of virtue are parodied by their vicious or demonic counterparts. Any symbol may be used ambivalently, and may be virtuous or demonic according to its context, an obvious example being the symbolism of gold.15 Cyclical symbols are subordinated to dialectical ones; in other words the upward turn from darkness to dawn or from winter to spring usually symbolizes the lift in perspective from physical to human nature. Ordinary experience, the morally neutral world of physical nature, never appears as such in The Faerie Queene, but its place in Spenser’s scheme is symbolized by nymphs and other elemental spirits, or by the satyrs, who may be tamed and awed by the sight of Una or more habitually stimulated by the sight of Hellenore. Satyrane, as his name indicates, is, with several puns intended, a good-natured man, and two of the chief heroes, Redcrosse and Artegall, are explicitly said to be natives of this world and not, like Guyon, natives of Faerie. What this means in practice is that their quests include a good deal of historical allegory. In the letter to Raleigh Spenser speaks of a possible twenty-four books, twelve to deal with the private virtues of Prince Arthur and the other

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twelve with the public ones manifested after he was crowned king. But this appalling spectre must have been exorcized very quickly. If we look at the six virtues he did treat, we can see that the first three, holiness, temperance, and chastity, are essentially private virtues, and that the next three, friendship, justice, and courtesy, are public ones. Further, that both sets seem to run in a sort of Hegelian progression. Of all public virtues, friendship is the most private and personal; justice the most public and impersonal; and courtesy seems to combine the two, Calidore being notable for his capacity for friendship and yet able to capture the Blatant Beast that eluded Artegall. Similarly, of all private virtues, holiness is most dependent on grace and revelation, hence the imagery of book 1 is Biblical and apocalyptic, and introduces the theological virtues. Temperance, in contrast, is a virtue shared by the enlightened heathen, a prerequisite and somewhat pedestrian virtue (Guyon loses his horse early in the book and does not get it back until book 5), hence the imagery of book 2 is Classical, with much drawn from the Odyssey and from Platonic and Aristotelian ethics. Chastity, a virtue described by Spenser as “far aboue the rest” [III.proem.1.2] seems to combine something of both. The encounter of Redcrosse and Guyon is indecisive, but Britomart, by virtue of her enchanted spear, is clearly stronger than Guyon, and hardly seems to need Redcrosse’s assistance in Castle Joyeous. We note that in Spenser, as in Milton’s Comus, the supreme private virtue appears to be chastity rather than charity. Charity, in the sense of Christian love, does not fit the scheme of The Faerie Queene: for Spenser it would primarily mean, not man’s love for God, but God’s love for man, as depicted in the Hymn of Heavenly Love. Charissa appears in book 1, but her main connections are with the kindliness that we associate with “giving to charity”; Agape appears in book 4, but is so minor and so dimwitted a character that one wonders whether Spenser knew the connotations of the word. Hence, though book 1 is the only book that deals explicitly with Christian imagery, it does not follow that holiness is the supreme virtue. Spenser is not dealing with what God gives to man, but with what man does with his gifts, and Redcrosse’s grip on holiness is humanly uncertain. In one of its aspects The Faerie Queene is an educational treatise, based, like other treatises of its time, on the two essential social facts of the Renaissance, the prince and the courtier. The most important person in Renaissance society to educate was the prince, and the next most important was the courtier, the servant of the prince. Spenser’s heroes are courtiers

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who serve the Faerie Queene and who metaphorically make up the body and mind of Prince Arthur. To demonstrate the moral reality of poetry Spenser had to assume a connection between the educational treatise and the highest forms of literature. For Spenser, as for most Elizabethan writers, the highest form of poetry would be either epic or tragedy, and the epic for him deals essentially with the actions of the heroic prince or leader. The highest form of prose, similarly, would be either a Utopian vision outlined in a Platonic dialogue or in a romance like Sidney’s Arcadia, or a description of an ideal prince’s ideal education, for which the Classical model was Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.16 Spenser’s preference of Xenophon’s form to Plato’s is explicit in the letter to Raleigh. This high view of education is inseparable from Spenser’s view of the relation between nature and art. For Spenser, as for Burke centuries later, art is man’s nature.17 Art is nature on the human plane, or what Sidney calls a second nature, a “golden” world, to use another phrase of Sidney’s, because essentially the same world as that of the golden age, and in contrast to the “brazen” world of physical nature.18 Hence art is no less natural than physical nature—the art itself is nature, as Polixenes says in The Winter’s Tale [4.4.97]—but it is the civilized nature appropriate to human life. Private and public education, then, are the central themes of The Faerie Queene. If we had to find a single word for the virtue underlying all private education, the best word would perhaps be fidelity: that unswerving loyalty to an ideal which is virtue, to a single lady which is love, and to the demands of one’s calling which is courage. Fidelity on the specifically human plane of endeavour is faith, the vision of holiness by which one lives; on the natural plane it is temperance, or the ability to live humanely in the physical world. The corresponding term for the virtue of public education is, perhaps, concord or harmony. On the physical plane concord is friendship, again the ability to achieve a human community in ordinary life; on the specifically human plane it is justice and equity, the foundation of society. In the first two books the symbolism comes to a climax in what we may call a “house of recognition,” the House of Holiness in book 1 and the House of Alma in book 2. In the third the climax is the vision of the order of nature in the Gardens of Adonis. The second part repeats the same scheme: we have houses of recognition in the Temple of Venus in book 4 and the Palace of Mercilla in book 5, and a second locus amoenus vision in the Mount Acidale canto of book 6, where the poet himself appears with the Graces. The sequence runs roughly as follows: fidelity in

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the context of human nature; fidelity in the context of physical nature; fidelity in the context of nature as a whole; concord in the context of physical nature; concord in the context of human nature; concord in the context of nature as a whole. Or, abbreviated: human fidelity, natural fidelity, nature; natural concord, human concord, art. Obviously, such a summary is unacceptable as it stands, but it may give some notion of how the books are related and of how the symbolism flows out of one book into the next one. The conception of the four levels of existence and the symbols used to represent it come from Spenser’s cultural tradition in general and from the Bible in particular. The Bible, as Spenser read it for his purposes, describes how man originally inhabited his own human world, the garden of Eden, and fell out of it into the present physical world, which fell with him. By his fall he lost the tree and water of life. Below him is hell, represented on earth by the kingdoms of bondage, Egypt, Babylon, and Rome, and symbolized by the serpent of Eden, otherwise Satan, otherwise the huge water-monster called Leviathan or the dragon by the prophets. Man is redeemed by the quest of Christ, who after overcoming the world descended to hell and in three days conquered it too. His descent is usually symbolized in art as walking into the open mouth of a dragon, and when he returns in triumph he carries a banner of a red cross on a white ground, the colours typifying his blood and flesh. At the end of time the dragon of death is finally destroyed, man is restored to Eden, and gets back the water and tree of life. In Christianity these last are symbolized by the two sacraments accepted by the Reformed Church, baptism and the Eucharist. The quest of the Redcrosse knight in book 1 follows the symbolism of the quest of Christ. He carries the same emblem of a red cross on a white ground; the monster he has to kill is “that old dragon” (quatrain to canto 11; cf. Revelation 12:9) who is identical with the Biblical Satan, Leviathan, and serpent of Eden, and the object of killing him is to restore Una’s parents, who are Adam and Eve, to their kingdom of Eden, which includes the entire world, now usurped by the dragon. The tyranny of Egypt, Babylon, and the Roman Empire continues in the tyranny of the Roman Church, and the Book of Revelation, as Spenser read it, prophesies the future ascendancy of that church and its ultimate defeat in its vision of the dragon and Great Whore, the latter identified with his Duessa. St. George fights the dragon for three days in the garden of Eden, refreshed by the water and tree of life on the first two days respectively.

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But Eden is not heaven: in Spenser, as in Dante, it is rather the summit of purgatory,19 which St. George goes through in the House of Holiness. It is the world of recovered human nature, as it originally was and still can be when sin is removed. St. George similarly is not Christ, but only the English people trying to be Christian, and the dragon, while he may be part of Satan, is considerably less Satanic than Archimago or Duessa, who survive the book. No monster, however loathsome, can really be evil: for evil there must be a perversion of intelligence, and Spenser drew his dragon with some appreciation of the fact mentioned in an essay of Valéry, that in poetry the most frightful creatures always have something rather childlike about them:20 So dreadfully he towards him did pas, Forelifting up aloft his speckled brest, And often bounding on the brused gras, As for great ioyance of his newcome guest. (I.xi.15.1–4)

Hence the theatre of operations in the first book is still a human world. The real heaven appears only in the vision of Jerusalem at the end of the tenth canto and in a few other traces, like the invisible husband of Charissa and the heavenly music heard in the background of the final betrothal. Eden is within the order of nature but it is a new earth turned upward, or sacramentally aligned with a new heaven. The main direction of the imagery is also upward: this upward movement is the theme of the House of Holiness, of the final quest, and of various subordinate themes like the worship of Una by the satyrs [I.vi.7–32]. We have spoken of the principle of symbolic parody, which we meet in all books of The Faerie Queene. Virtues are contrasted not only with their vicious opposites, but with vices that have similar names and appearances. Thus the golden mean of temperance is parodied by the golden means provided by Mammon; “That part of justice, which is equity” in book 5 is parodied by the anarchistic equality preached by the giant in the second canto, and so on. As the main theme of book 1 is really faith, or spiritual fidelity, the sharpest parody of this sort is between Fidelia, or true faith, and Duessa, who calls herself Fidessa. Fidelia holds a golden cup of wine and water (which in other romance patterns would be the Holy Grail, though Spenser’s one reference to the Grail shows that he has no interest in it); Duessa holds the golden cup of the Whore of Babylon. Fidelia’s cup also contains a serpent (the redeeming brazen serpent

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of Moses typifying the Crucifixion);21 Duessa sits on the dragon of the Apocalypse who is metaphorically the same beast as the serpent of Eden. Fidelia’s power to raise the dead is stressed; Duessa raises Sansjoy from the dead by the power of Aesculapius, whose emblem is the serpent. Of all such parodies in the first book the most important for the imagery of the poem as a whole is the parody of the tree and water of life in Eden. These symbols have their demonic counterparts in the paralysed trees of Fradubio and Fraelissa and in the paralysing fountain from which St. George drinks in the seventh canto. Thus the first book shows very clearly what we have called the subordinating of cyclical symbols to dialectical ones: the tree and water of life, originally symbols of the rebirth of spring, are here symbols of resurrection, or a permanent change from a life in physical nature above the animals to life in human nature under God. The main interest of the second book is also dialectical, but in the reverse direction, concerned with human life in the ordinary physical world, and with its separation from the demonic world below. The Bower of Bliss is a parody of Eden, and just as the climax of book 1 is St. George’s three-day battle with the dragon of death, so the narrative climax of book 2 is Guyon’s three-day endurance in the underworld. It is the climax at least as far as Guyon’s heroism is concerned, for it is Arthur who defeats Maleger and it is really the Palmer who catches Acrasia. We should expect to find in book 2, therefore, many demonic parodies of the symbols in book 1, especially of the tree and water of life and its symbolic relatives. At the beginning we note that Acrasia, like Duessa, has a golden cup of death, filled, like Fidelia’s, with wine and water (“Bacchus with the Nymphe” [II.i.55.6]). There follows Ruddymane, with his bloody hands that cannot be washed. Spenser speaks of Redcrosse’s hands as “baptized” after he falls back into the well of life [I.xi.36.4], and the Ruddymane incident is partly a reference to original sin, removable only by baptism or bathing in a “liuing well” [I.ii.43.4]. The demonic counterparts of both sacraments appear in the hell scene in the cave of Mammon, in connection with Pilate and Tantalus. Pilate, forever washing his hands in vain [Matthew 27:24], repeats the Ruddymane image in its demonic context, and Tantalus is the corresponding parody of the Eucharist. These figures are preceded by the description of the golden apple tree in the garden of Proserpina and the river Cocytus. Images of trees and water are considerably expanded in the description of the Bower of Bliss.

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The fact that the fountain of Diana’s nymph refuses to cleanse Ruddymane’s hands indicates the rather subordinate role of Diana in Spenser’s symbolism. It is clear, if we compare the description of Venus in book 4 [x.39–47] with the description of Nature in the Mutabilitie Cantos [VII. vii.5–13], that Venus represents the whole order of nature, in its higher human as well as its lower physical aspect. What Diana stands for is the resistance to corruption, as symbolized by unchastity, which is the beginning, and of course always an essential part, of moral realization. Hence Diana in Spenser is a little like the law in Milton, which can discover sin but not remove it. In the Mutabilitie Cantos the glimpsing of Diana’s nakedness by Faunus [VII.vi.42–6] is parallel, on a small scale, to the rebellion of the lower against the higher nature which is also represented by Mutability’s thrusting herself into heaven at the place of Cynthia, who is another form of Diana. Naturally Elizabeth’s virginity compelled Spenser to give a high place to Diana and her protégé Belphoebe, but for symbolic as well as political reasons he preferred to make the Faerie Queene a young woman proceeding toward marriage, like Britomart. Meanwhile it is the virginal Faerie Queene whose picture Guyon carries on his shield, Guyon being in his whole moral complex something of a male Diana. Temperance in Spenser is a rather negative virtue, being the resistance of consciousness to impulsive action which is necessary in order to know whether the action is going up or down in the moral dialectic. Conscious action is real action, Aristotle’s proairesis;22 impulsive action is really pseudo-action, a passion which increasingly becomes passivity. Human life in the physical world has something of the feeling of an army of occupation about it, symbolized by the beleaguered castle of Alma. The House of Alma possesses two things in particular: wealth, in Ruskin’s sense of well-being,23 and beauty, in the sense of correct proportion and ordering of parts. Its chief enemies are “Beautie, and money” [II.xi.9.9], the minions of Acrasia and Mammon, the external or instrumental possessions which the active mind uses and the passive mind thinks of as ends in themselves. Temperance is also good temperament, or the balancing of humours, and Guyon’s enemies are mainly humours in the Elizabethan sense, although the humours are usually symbolized by their corresponding elements, as the choleric Pyrochles is associated with fire and the phlegmatic Cymochles with water. The battleground between the active and the passive mind is the area of sensation, the steady rain of impressions and stimuli coming in from the outer world

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which the active mind organizes and the passive mind merely yields to. Normally the sanguine humour predominates in the active mind; the passive one becomes a victim of melancholy, with its progressive weakening of will and of the power to distinguish reality from illusion. In Spenser’s picture of the mind the fancy (Phantastes) is predisposed to melancholy and the influence of “oblique Saturne” [II.ix.52.9]; it is not the seat of the poetic imagination, as it would be in a nineteenth-century Romantic. The title of George MacDonald’s Phantastes, the author tells us, comes not from Spenser but from Phineas Fletcher, who differs from Spenser in making Phantastes the source of art.24 Maleger, the leader of the assault on Alma, is a spirit of melancholy, and is sprung from the corresponding element of earth. Having outlined the dialectical extremes of his imagery, Spenser moves on to consider the order of nature on its two main levels in the remaining books. Temperance steers a middle course between care and carelessness, jealousy and wantonness, miserliness and prodigality, Mammon’s cave and Acrasia’s bower. Acrasia is a kind of sinister Venus, and her victims, Mordant wallowing in his blood, Cymochles, Verdant, have something of a dead, wasted, or frustrated Adonis about them. Mammon is an old man with a daughter, Philotime. Much of the symbolism of the third book is based on these two archetypes. The first half leads up to the description of the Gardens of Adonis in canto 6 by at least three repetitions of the theme of Venus and Adonis. First we have the tapestry in the Castle Joyeous representing the story, with a longish description attached. Then comes the wounding of Marinell on his “pretious shore” [III.iv.17.9] by Britomart (surely the most irritable heroine known to romance), where the sacrificial imagery, the laments of the nymphs, the strewing of flowers on the bier are all conventional images of Adonis. Next is Timias, discovered by Belphoebe wounded in the thigh with a boar-spear. Both Belphoebe and Marinell’s mother Cymoent have pleasant retreats closely analogous to the Gardens of Adonis. In the second half of the book we have three examples of the old man and young woman relationship: Malbecco and Hellenore, Proteus and Florimell, Busirane and Amoret. All these are evil: there is no idealized version of this theme. The reason is that the idealized version would be the counterpart to the vision of charity in the Hymn of Heavenly Love. That is, it would be the vision of the female Sapience sitting in the bosom of the Deity that we meet at the end of the Hymn to Heavenly Beauty, and this would take us outside the scope of The Faerie Queene, or at any rate of its third book.

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The central figure in the third book and the fourth is Venus, flanked on either side by Cupid and Adonis, or what a modern poet would call Eros and Thanatos. Cupid and Venus are gods of natural love, and form, not a demonic parody, but a simple analogy of Christian love, an analogy which is the symbolic basis of the Fowre Hymnes. Cupid, like Jesus, is lord of gods and creator of the cosmos, and simultaneously an infant, Venus’s relation to him being that of an erotic Madonna, as her relation to Adonis is that of an erotic Pietà. Being androgynous, she brings forth Cupid without male assistance (see Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, 800 ff.); she loses him and goes in search of him, and he returns in triumph in the great masque at the end as lord of all creation. The Garden of Adonis, with its Genius and its temperate climate, is so carefully paralleled to the Bower of Bliss that it clearly represents the reality of which the Bower is a mirage. It presents the order of nature as a cyclical process of death and renewal, in itself morally innocent, but still within the realm of Mutability, as the presence of Time shows. Like Eden, it is a paradise: it is nature as nature would be if man could live in his proper human world, the “antique” golden age. It is a world where substance is constant but where “formes are variable and decay” [III. vi.38.6]; and hence it is closely connected with the theme of metamorphosis, which is the central symbol of divine love as the pagans conceived it. Such love naturally has its perverted form, represented by the possessive jealousy of Malbecco, Busirane, and Proteus, all of whom enact variants of the myth of Tithonus and Aurora, the aged lover and the struggling dawn. Hellenore escapes into the world of satyrs, a world too “natural” to be wholly sinful. The torturing of Amoret by Busirane, representing the anguish of jealous love, recurs in various images of bleeding, such as the “long bloody riuer” [III.xi.46.8] in the tapestry of Cupid. Painful or not, it is love that makes the world go round, that keeps the cycle of nature turning, and it is particularly the love of Marinell and Florimell, whose names suggest water and vegetation, that seems linked to the natural cycle. Florimell is imprisoned under the sea during a kind of symbolic winter in which a “snowy” [IV.ii.4.7] Florimell takes her place. Marinell is not cured of his illness until his mother turns from “watry Gods” [IV.xi.10.8] to the sun, and when he sees Florimell he revives As withered weed through cruell winters tine, That feeles the warmth of sunny beames reflection

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Book 4 is full of images of natural revival, some in very unlikely places, and it comes to a climax with the symbolism of the tree and water of life in their natural context. At the temple of Venus, we are told, “No tree, that is of count . . . But there was planted” [IV.x.22.1–5], and the next canto is a tremendous outburst of water. The wedding of the Thames and the Medway takes place in Proteus’s hall, and Proteus, in the mythological handbooks, is the spirit of metamorphosis, the liquid energy of substance driving through endless varieties of form. The impulse in sexual love is toward union in one flesh, which is part of the symbolism of Christian marriage. The original conclusion to book 3 leaves Scudamour and Amoret locked in an embrace which makes them look like a single hermaphrodite. The reason for this curious epithet becomes clear in book 4, where we learn that Venus herself is hermaphroditic, and of course all embracing lovers are epiphanies of Venus. Naturally this image lends itself to demonic parody, as in the incestuous birth of Oliphant and Argante. Britomart watches Scudamour and Amoret rather enviously, making a mental resolve to get herself into the same position as soon as she can run her Artegall to earth: for Britomart, though as chaste as Belphoebe, is not vowed to virginity. Perhaps it is her accessibility to human emotions that is symbolized by the bleeding wound she receives from an arrow in the first canto of book 3, an image repeated, with a symmetry unusual even in Spenser, in the last canto. A slight extension of the same symbol of unity through love takes us into the area of social love, or friendship, the theme of the fourth book. Friendship shows, even more clearly than sexual passion, the power of love as a creative force, separating the elements from chaos by the attraction of like to like. The human counterpart of this ordering of elements is concord or harmony, for which Spenser uses various symbols, notably the golden chain, an image introduced into book 1 and parodied by the chain of ambition in the cave of Mammon. We also have the image of two (or three) souls united in one body in the extremely tedious account of Priamond, Dyamond, and Triamond [IV.ii.41–54]. It is rather more interesting that Spenser seems to regard the poetic tradition as a community of friendship of a similar kind. In all six books of The Faerie Queene it is only in the fourth that Spenser refers explicitly to his two great models

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Chaucer and Ariosto, and his phrase about Chaucer is significant: “thine owne spirit, which doth in me surviue” [IV.ii.34.7]. When we move from friendship, an abstract pattern of human community which only noble spirits can form, to justice, in which the base and evil must also be included, we return to historical allegory. Spenser’s vision of history (III.ix) focuses on the legend of Troy: the first Troy is recalled by Hellenore and Paridell, and the second, or Rome, by Duessa, who reappears in books 4 and 5. The third is of course England itself, which will not collapse in adultery or superstition if her leading poet can prevent it. In the prophecy of this third Troy we meet an image connected with the wedding of the Thames in book 4: It {sc. London} Troynouant is hight, that with the waues Of wealthy Thamis washed is along, Vpon whose stubborne neck whereat he raues With roring rage, and sore him selfe does throng, That all men feare to tempt his billowes strong, She fastned hath her foot, which standes so hy That it a wonder of the world is song In forreine landes, and all which passen by, Beholding it from farre, doe thinke it threates the skye. (III.ix.45)

I quote this poetically licentious description of the Thames because it is so closely linked with Spenser’s conception of justice as the harnessing of physical power to conquer physical nature. In its lower aspects this power is mechanical, symbolized by the “yron man” [V.iv.44.1] Talus, who must be one of the earliest “science fiction” or technological symbols in poetry, and who kills without discrimination for the sake of discrimination, like a South African policeman. In its higher aspects where justice becomes equity, or consideration of circumstances, the central image is this one of the virgin guiding the raging monster. We meet this image very early in the adventures of Una and the lion in book 1, and the same symbolic shape reappears in the Gardens of Adonis, where Venus enjoys Adonis with the boar imprisoned in a cave underneath [III.vi.48]. Next comes the training of Artegall (who begins his career by taming animals) by Astraea, identified with the constellation Virgo. Next is the vision of Isis, where Osiris and the crocodile correspond to Adonis and the boar earlier, but are here explicitly identified. Finally we have Mercilla and the lion under her throne, where Spenser naturally refrains from

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speculating on the lion’s possible identity with a human lover. It may be the link with London on the Thames that lends such prominence in book 5 to the image of the river washing away the filth of injustice. At the same time the virgin who dominates the beast is herself the servant of an invisible male deity, hence the figure of the female rebel is important in the last two books: Radigund the Amazon in book 5, who rebels against justice, and Mirabell in book 6, who rebels against courtesy. Radigund is associated with the moon because she parodies Isis, and Isis is associated with the moon partly because Queen Elizabeth is, by virtue of Raleigh’s name for her, Cynthia.25 Just as book 3 deals with the secular and natural counterpart of love, so book 6 deals with the secular and natural counterpart of grace. The word “grace” itself in all its human manifestations is a thematic word in this book, and when the Graces themselves appear on Mount Acidale we find ourselves in a world that transcends the world of Venus: Those three to men all gifts of grace do graunt, And all, that Venus in her selfe doth vaunt, Is borrowed of them. (VI.x.15.4–6)

The Graces, we are told, were begotten by Jove when he returned from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. This wedding is referred to again in the Mutabilitie Cantos as the most festive occasion the gods had held before the lawsuit of Mutability. For it was at this wedding that Jove was originally “confirm’d in his imperiall see” [VII.vii.59.7]: the marriage to Peleus removed the threat to Jove’s power coming from the son of Thetis, a threat the secret of which only Prometheus knew, and which Prometheus was crucified on a rock for not revealing. Thus the wedding also led, though Spenser does not tell us this, to the reconciling of Jove and Prometheus, and it was Prometheus, whose name traditionally means forethought or wisdom, who, according to book 2, was the originator of Elves and Fays—that is, of man’s moral and conscious nature. There are still many demonic symbols in book 6, especially the attempt to sacrifice Serena, where the custom of eating the flesh and giving the blood to the priests has obvious overtones of parody. But the centre of symbolic gravity, so to speak, in book 6 is a pastoral Arcadian world, where we seem almost to be entering into the original home of man where, as in the child’s world of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill, it was all Adam and maiden.26 It is no longer the world of Eros; yet the sixth book is the most erotic, in

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the best sense, of all the books in the poem, full of innocent nakedness and copulation, the surprising of which is so acid a test of courtesy, and with many symbols of the state of innocence and of possible regeneration like the Salvage Man and the recognition scene in which Pastorella is reunited to her parents. Such a world is a world in which the distinction between art and nature is disappearing because nature is taking on a human form. In the Bower of Bliss the mixing of art and nature is what is stressed: on Mount Acidale the art itself is nature, to quote Polixenes again. Yet art, especially poetry, has a central place in the legend of courtesy. Grace in religion implies revelation by the Word, and human grace depends much on good human words. All through the second part of The Faerie Queene, slander is portrayed as the worst enemy of the human community: we have Ate and Sclaunder herself in book 4, Malfont with his tongue nailed to a post in Mercilla’s court, as an allegory of what ought to be done to other poets; and finally the Blatant Beast, the voice of rumour full of tongues. The dependence of courtesy on reasonable speech is emphasized at every turn, and just as the legend of justice leads us to the figure of the Queen, as set forth in Mercilla, who manifests the order of society, so the legend of courtesy leads us to the figure of the poet himself, who manifests the order of words. When Calidore commits his one discourteous act and interrupts Colin Clout, all the figures dancing to his pipe vanish. In Elizabethan English a common meaning of art was magic, and Spenser’s Colin Clout, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, has the magical power of summoning spirits to enact his present fancies, spirits who disappear if anyone speaks and breaks the spell. Nature similarly vanishes mysteriously at the end of the Mutabilitie Cantos, just as the counterpart to Prospero’s revels is his subsequent speech on the disappearance of all created things. Colin Clout, understandably annoyed at being suddenly deprived of the company of 104 naked maidens, destroys his pipe, as Prospero drowns his book. Poetry works by suggestion and indirection, and conveys meanings out of all proportion to its words; but in magic the impulse to complete a pattern is very strong. If a spirit is being conjured by the seventy-two names of God as set forth in the Schemhamphoras, it will not do if the magician can remember only seventy-one of them.27 At the end of the sixth book the magician in Spenser had completed half of his gigantic design, and was ready to start on the other half. But the poet in Spenser was satisfied: he had done his work, and his vision was complete.

8 Shakespeare’s Experimental Comedy 14 August 1961

From Stratford Papers on Shakespeare, 1961, ed. B.W. Jackson (Toronto: Gage, 1962), 2–14. Delivered on Monday, 14 August, at 2:30 P.M. in the Festival Theatre Auditorium at Stratford, Ontario, this was the opening lecture of the 1961 Shakespeare Seminar, sponsored by the Universities of Canada in cooperation with the Stratford Festival Theatre through the offices of the Department of Extension of McMaster University.

When Elizabethan drama first developed, comedy was far better supplied than tragedy was with models, precedents, and ready-made characters and themes. It had about two dozen of the adaptations from Greek New Comedy made by Plautus and Terence. Shakespeare’s early Comedy of Errors is based on Plautus’s Menaechmi, with subsidiary themes from other plays of Plautus. It also has some romance themes used later in Pericles, and a range of imagery and emotion far beyond anything that Plautus ever knew existed, but still it goes down in the handbooks as an adaptation of Plautus. The influence of the Romans was expanded and reinforced by a Renaissance Italian influence, clearly marked in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew, and which included the popular drama of the commedia dell’arte. This latter, with its stock characters and half-improvised plots, continued to fascinate Shakespeare up to The Tempest.1 The stock characters introduced into Love’s Labour’s Lost are types that run through the whole history of comedy. Five of them are summarized by Berowne as “The pedant, the braggart, the hedge-priest, the fool, and the boy” [5.2.542–3]. In the “hedge-priest” Nathaniel, who spends a scene flattering Holofernes and is finally rewarded with an invitation to dinner [4.2], we recognize a mutation of the Classical parasite. To

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these Shakespeare adds the rural constable, who, as you will be reminded by The Pirates of Penzance, has remained a comic figure ever since.2 Shakespeare’s immediate predecessors, Peele, Greene, and more especially Lyly, had already transformed a comedy of situation into a comedy of wit and dialogue. We have comedy of situation, in a fairly literal sense, in the early Gammer Gurton’s Needle, where after a great deal of running around trying to find a lost needle, a clown named Hodge sits down suddenly, jumps up with a yell, and announces that he now knows where the needle is.3 The change from this to the delicate fairytale fantasies of Peele and Lyly had taken place before Shakespeare had well started. Perhaps the attention paid to Moth, who is encouraged with a zeal worthy of a modern progressive school, reflects the popularity of the children’s companies for whom Lyly wrote.4 The admixture of masque in Love’s Labour’s Lost is another influence making for courtly refinement. There is one masque in particular that I have occasionally wondered about in connection with Love’s Labour’s Lost. It is a brilliant little sketch of Sir Philip Sidney’s, not published till 1598 but of course written much earlier, and called by Sidney’s editor The Lady of May.5 It introduces a pedantic schoolmaster who talks quite like Holofernes, including an overuse of alliteration, and another speaker who complains that the young shepherds’ mistresses have too much wit, which makes “loving labours” folly and causes the lovers to bewail their “lost labour.”6 Love’s Labour’s Lost is the only play of Shakespeare which suggests that the original audience may have been enjoying a good deal that we cannot now recapture. The sense that some of the characters are take-offs on contemporary personalities is strong, and several models have been proposed, including Florio, Gabriel Harvey, and others.7 About thirty years ago it was suggested that the play was a satire on an alleged “school of night,” involving Chapman and Raleigh, but this suggestion has not been developed very far.8 Some passages in the dialogue remain mysterious to me: when Holofernes, for instance, says, “Sir, tell me not of the father: I do fear colourable colours” [4.2.149–50],9 “colourable colours” meaning apparently “plausible excuses,” I have not the faintest notion what he means. Nor do I know what significance, if any, is to be attached to the fact that the king’s associates bear names of leaders in the French religious wars.10 Love’s Labour’s Lost has all the marks of a highly sophisticated play, and a play that must have been physically close to a sharp-witted and

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attentive audience. The conventions of disguise and concealment, in particular, are used so extravagantly that they become parodies of the conventions, which is a sure sign of sophistication. The characters make several references to being in a play, which is another. The atmosphere is rather like that of a literary coterie, with everyone lost in admiration of his own wit and that of his close friends, and decrying the wit of others with the greatest possible malice. What ordinarily happens in a comedy is that after certain complications a happy ending ensues, and the comedy ends in a festive occasion symbolizing the birth of a new society. This festive occasion is usually a marriage, sometimes in Shakespeare a triple or quadruple marriage. Or it may be a dance, as in the masque, or a song, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost, or a banquet, as in The Taming of the Shrew. The complications are usually the threats to the happiness of hero and heroine proceeding from certain blocking characters, sometimes parents, often the stock caricatures like the braggart and the pedant already mentioned. These blocking characters, because they try to frustrate the comic conclusion which the audience sees to be the desirable goal, must be presented as absurd. In Love’s Labour’s Lost the audience is deliberately cheated of the normal comic conclusion. This fact is so obvious that the chief characters comment on it, and complain that this is not at all the way a comedy should end, with every Jack getting his appropriate Jill [5.2.874–5]. The ladies promise to return a year later, but, Berowne says, “That’s too long for a play” [5.2.878]. Love’s Labour’s Lost is thus the only play of Shakespeare, outside the histories, that seems to imply a sequel, and in fact that useful man Francis Meres, who supplies a full if not exhaustive list of Shakespeare’s early plays, does mention a Love’s Labour’s Won.11 This title has been, not very convincingly, identified with one or two of the existing comedies,12 but it seems to me more likely to stand for the sequel which is at least hinted at in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Shakespeare doubtless never wrote such a sequel, but it is at least possible that it was promised or announced or assumed to be forthcoming. Meres, as his reference to the sonnets shows, knew much more about Shakespeare than merely the names of his plays.13 A dramatist may emphasize the blocking characters who thwart the happy conclusion of the play, or he may emphasize the conclusion itself, with all its reconciliations and last-minute fortunate discoveries. The former is the direction of the comedy of manners, the other of romantic comedy and of most of Shakespeare. Where the emphasis is on the

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blocking characters, the tone is satiric, and the question arises of what it is that makes a character ridiculous. Bergson, in Le Rire, suggests that an important source of laughter is the sense of mechanism: when people are bound to an invariable and predictable pattern of behaviour they seem funny.14 This conception of the ridiculous coincides with Ben Jonson’s conception of the “humour,” the miser or hypochondriac or fop who can behave in only one way.15 In a comedy of humours one frequent action is the release of a character from his humour. He undergoes some experience which proves to be therapeutic, and at the end of the play is ready to exhibit more normal behaviour. Shakespeare has such a humour comedy in The Taming of the Shrew, where the cure of Katharina’s shrewishness is triumphantly demonstrated in the final scene. There are some ambiguities: when we first see Katharina in the play she is bullying her sister Bianca, and when we take leave of her she is still bullying Bianca, but has learned how to do it with social approval on her side. Still, she is cured, as far as the dramatic action goes. Elsewhere in Shakespeare the humour theme is often sombre or even tragic, as in Leontes’ humour of jealousy. A comedy is usually so constructed that the blocking characters are in the ascendancy during the first part of the action, and are consequently in a position of social authority. It follows that if an individual humour is ridiculous, a humorous society is even more so. All Utopias, or schemes for making social action predictable, are objects of ridicule to comedy, and have been from Aristophanes to Gilbert and Sullivan. Hence when a comedy begins, as Love’s Labour’s Lost does, with solemn resolves “Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep” [1.1.48], we realize that the direction of the comic action will be toward the breaking of these resolves. They have the place of the irrational law with which Shakespeare’s comedies so often begin, like the marriage law of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the law of killing Syracusans in A Comedy of Errors. The fact that Love’s Labour’s Lost deals with a humorous group or society means that the stock caricatures, the braggart, pedant, and the rest, are not needed for the actual plot. What they form is a kind of chorus to the main action, symbolizing to some extent qualities within the King of Navarre and his courtiers. Thus when Berowne, scolding himself for falling in love, says he has been A critic, nay, a night-watch constable, A domineering pedant o’er the boy [3.1.176–7]

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he names three of the six characters as elements in his own mind. On the other side we have the theme of the “Worthies,” the men of great merit enslaved by love. This theme first appears when Armado asks his page for precedents for his love and is given Hercules and Samson [1.2.64–89]. It continues in Berowne’s mocking speech in the fourth act with its line “To see great Hercules whipping a gig” [4.3.165]. (This reference repeats the association of the infant Hercules and Moth, who is told to go whip his gig by Holofernes [5.1.66–7].) The final appearance of the stock characters as the Worthies [5.2.547–715] of course unites all of these themes. The impetus of comedy, which moves toward the breaking of a humour or prescribed pattern of mechanical action, contains within itself its own philosophy of life, so to speak, which is not a philosophy but a refusal to be controlled by theories or logical premises at all. Thus in Rabelais, who seems to have left some traces on Love’s Labour’s Lost, including perhaps the name Holofernes,16 an academy is proposed which will be the exact opposite of a monastic community. The latter is founded on vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Rabelais’s Abbey of Thélème will have all its members well to do, married, and doing as they like.17 The attitude expounded by Berowne at the beginning of the play is also that of comic pragmatism. Knowledge, Berowne implies, is not something you have but something you are; it is the art of life itself, and cannot be attained by an act of will which turns its back on life. The latter can produce only a knowledge of names, not of things. What, then, is the particular humour that the King of Navarre’s court has to be released from, corresponding to Katharina’s shrewishness or Leontes’ jealousy? The answer sounds difficult but is logical and simple: their humour is wit. An excess of wit, and their own pride in it, has incited them to their three-year conquest of knowledge, and Berowne, though he speaks against the retreat, is a prisoner of his own wit too. The grotesque penance imposed on him by Rosaline indicates that there is still something mechanical about his mockery, and that he cannot live up to his own precepts until he realizes that even joking is an act of communication rather than expression. Hence Berowne is an antithesis to the king’s dream of esoteric knowledge, but his own wit is equally opposed to the spirit of the comic society, and equally far from “common sense” in both its Shakespearean and its modern meanings.18 A religious motive might be strong enough to keep the king and his “book-mates” at their books, but religion would have to recognize the limitations of the will. There are many references in the play to the fal-

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lacy of achieving virtue through the will. “All pride is willing pride” [2.1.36], the Princess says, and she also speaks of the heresy of achieving salvation by merit as “fit for these days” [4.1.22]. Berowne, too, points to the religious dimension of his argument: For every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace. [1.1.151–2]

There are several indications that the king’s “curious knotted garden” [1.1.246] is a kind of Paradise in reverse in which, as Berowne says, what one learns is “the thing I am forbid to know” [1.1.60]. The reason for religious language in the play is simple enough. The code of love, which eventually destroys the three-year pact and replaces it with a year-long service to ladies according to the rules of that code, regularly employed the language of religion. The maze of puns on “will” and “grace” relates primarily to this language, where grace means the lady’s grace and will the lover’s experience of need for it. The setting up of the community of study is an act of rebellious will, though the god against whom it rebels is the god of love. The plan of study is envisaged by the king as a conquest, and military metaphors suitable to intellectual “Worthies” achieving merit through their deeds occur in his opening speech. The women from France, finding themselves excluded from this garden-citadel, sit down in front of it like a besieging army. The killing of the deer by the ambushed princess is the symbol of love’s victory over this benighted Eden. Holofernes, in a deliberately absurd image, compares the death of the deer to the falling of an apple from heaven to earth [4.2.3–7]. The women conquer in the name of love, and impose the final commands which override all other vows. At the same time they are caught up in the society that they conquer, and form a part of it. Under their influence the court of Navarre is transformed in the spirit of Berowne into a society of mutual mockery. This brittle and artificial society, which at such moments as the baiting of Holofernes rises into hysteria [5.2.595–631], suggests a masque like that in The Tempest summoned up by magic, which would dissolve at once if anyone were to speak and break the spell. The news of the death of the King of France acts in precisely this way. “Worthies, away! the scene begins to cloud” [5.2.721], Berowne says, and the word “cloud” again seems to anticipate the great speech of Prospero on the passing of the revels which “leave not a rack behind” [Tempest, 4.1.156]. There are,

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however, two words spoken, a word of death and a word of pregnancy. Armado, who, for a conventional braggart with a Spanish name echoing “Armada” is a curiously gentle and wistful figure, then moves to the front of the action. It is he who accepts the full three-year service, he who takes on the title of “votary” [5.2.883], and he and Jacquenetta who accomplish what there is of the normal comic resolution. It is fitting that he should be the master of ceremonies in the final moments of the play. In many of Shakespeare’s comedies the happy ending comes from what I have elsewhere called a green world, like the wood near Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the forest of Arden in As You Like It.19 This green-world structure, where the cast disappear into a forest and straighten out all their misunderstandings there, can be seen very clearly in another early comedy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Here the happy ending is most naturally associated with seasonal symbols, with the victory of spring over winter and fertility over sterility. Love’s Labour’s Lost, which cheats us of the normal comic conclusion, moves toward a separation of the seasons. The court of Navarre complain that in the delusive perpetual spring of their contemplative retreat “Berowne is like an envious sneaping frost” [1.1.100]. Berowne accepts this, and states a preference for rolling round in earth’s diurnal course. In the final scene we have the contrapuntal announcements of death and new life, already mentioned, and the two appearances of the Navarre court, first as Russians (Russia to an Elizabethan audience meant primarily cold winters) and then in their own forms. As the society breaks up and the women prepare to leave, the suspension of the normal comic close is represented by the two lovely songs of spring and winter, where winter has the last word and there is no suggestion of the triumph of one season over the other. After this the two groups separate: “you that way, we this way.”20 The texture of the play is a kind of symphony of sound and imagery. The wit should perhaps be thought of, not so much as a series of jokes punctuated by laughs at every answer, but as verbal themes broken up and analysed as a composer would do in his “development.” There is hardly an image in the play that is not repeated in a different context. Even words are thus repeated: the one exception to Berowne’s resolve to speak simply, the word “sans” [5.2.415], has already been used by Holofernes [5.1.86], so that the attentive listener’s ear has been prepared for it. Two image-themes, so to speak, are of particular importance. One is the imagery of light and darkness, another image from the cycle of

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nature reinforcing that of spring and winter. To this belong all the references to the rhetoric of the eye, to love as the sun which we do not look at but see things by, and to the “black” Rosaline—for in Shakespeare’s day “black” meant both dark and unattractive, just as “fair” still means both of their opposites. Hence Berowne’s attempt to prove black fair shows a mastery of paradox which is useful when his friends need proof that breaking their vows is really a sign of fidelity. The other thematic image is that of number, which brings out the affinity of Love’s Labour’s Lost to the masque and the dance. Moth’s little rhyme with its “envoy” (which in turn contains a polyglot pun on “oie,” goose) [3.1.86–104] sets up an echo of three and four in our ears against the groups of three and four among the lovers: “four woodcocks in a dish” [4.3.80], and the like. The nine Worthies repeat the number of the eight lovers with the somewhat ambiguous Boyet as a connecting link. The variety of verse forms in the play, quatrains, couplets, blank verse, sonnets, lyrics, and even a passage in anapests, can hardly be missed; nor can the variety of language, from the pedantries of Holofernes and Armado to the bucolic dialect of Dull and Costard. Holofernes is of particular interest to the student of language. The words “debt” and “doubt” came originally from French, and Chaucer spells them, quite correctly, “dette” and “doute.” But in Shakespeare’s day along came people like Holofernes, insisting that b’s should be inserted in them to show their Latin origin in debito and dubito, and we have been stuck with those b’s ever since. Holofernes even tries to pronounce the b’s [5.1.20–2], and others of his kind succeeded in making us say “perfect,” where Chaucer said “perfit.” Here is a change in the language which Shakespeare’s sharp ear and eye caught and recorded in its passing. The general impression that Love’s Labour’s Lost makes on us is one of tremendous buoyancy and exuberance, as one of the world’s greatest masters of words begins to feel something of the real range of his strength and skill. Questions from the Floor Question: Is there not a more explicitly religious aspect to the play than you suggest? Frye: I am speaking of its centre of gravity, so to speak. Writers of comedies in Shakespeare’s day were not supposed to discuss religion; they were supposed to provide what we call love interest. But of course such verbal constructs as the language of courtly love can provide a series of

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receding planes, and what plane you stop at may be to some extent a matter of choice. Question: Would you connect Rosaline with the dark lady of the sonnets? Frye: Some of the sonnets are very similar in tone to Love’s Labour’s Lost, but most are bitterer and more sombre. The dark lady at times is like something out of Proust, and her claim to the title of lady seems to me more precarious than Rosaline’s. Question: But there is bitterness in Berowne’s references to her willingness to “do the deed” [3.1.198], and the like. If Love’s Labour’s Lost and the dark-lady sonnets were written roughly around the same time, as seems probable, do not we ascribe too much versatility to Shakespeare’s experience in endeavouring to separate them? Frye: Berowne pretends to be bitter when he is scolding himself; when his friends speak in dispraise of Rosaline he reacts very differently. I am not happy about trying to align the sonnets with Shakespeare’s experience; they were produced, not by Shakespeare’s experience, but by his imagination. And with an imagination so powerful the merest hint of experience, even in someone else, would be enough to go on. Question: What is the point of “honorificabilitudinitatibus” [5.1.41]? Frye: It was the longest word known in Latin, and occurs elsewhere—I think in a play of Marston’s.21 Very long words, unless technical terms, can really be used only in a comic context, and a proverbially long word is always good for a laugh.

9 Toast to the Memory of Shakespeare 17 August 1961

From Stratford Papers on Shakespeare, 1961, ed. B.W. Jackson (Toronto: Gage, 1962), 195–6. Delivered on Thursday, 17 August, during the evening banquet at the Golf and Country Club in Stratford, Ontario, as part of Seminar I of the 1961 Shakespeare Seminar sponsored by the Universities of Canada in cooperation with the Stratford Festival Theatre through the offices of the Department of Extension of McMaster University.

When we speak of Shakespeare, there are at least three aspects of a personality involved. First, there is a man who lived like other men and died three and a half centuries ago. About this man we know very little, and even less that is really significant. We know that Ben Jonson loved him,1 and Ben Jonson did not love easily—he described his wife, as I remember, as “a shrew yet honest.”2 But we have no authentic likeness of Shakespeare, for I certainly do not regard the goggle-eyed mask that stares vacantly at us from the frontispiece of the Folio as an authentic likeness of any human being, much less Shakespeare. Second, there is the dramatic poet whose plays are acted in this unlikely spot, simply because it is called Stratford, and have brought thousands of people from all over the continent to flutter around his genius like moths around a light. When we look at the variety of people who come to see and hear these plays, we realize that the first remark ever made about Shakespeare’s admirers is still the best one. It is the opening sentence of the preface to the Folio: “From the most able to him that can but spell. There you are numbered.”3 But there is a third and a still greater Shakespeare. We can express ourselves only within the limits of a language that has been made ar-

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ticulate for us by our great writers. We can think only within the limits of ideas and concepts that have been worked out by our great writers. We can understand one another only within the limits of the social vision of our great writers. And there is, of course, no greater writer than Shakespeare. So, whenever we open our mouths to speak, the rhythms and cadences of Shakespeare are helping to form what we say. Whenever we think, or think we think, Shakespeare’s metaphors and images are entering into the structure of our thought. Whenever we attain any understanding or love of one another beyond the range of our immediate experience, Shakespeare’s insight into humanity is helping to make our insight possible. It is an act of sentiment, perhaps even of sentimentality, to honour the memory of a poet who has been dead for centuries. It is only ordinary courtesy to honour a poet who has entertained us as royally as Shakespeare has done this week and on so many other occasions. But to honour the poet who has played so large a part in forming our own mental processes is an act of piety. It is like pausing a moment to be grateful to the air we breathe and the water we drink. Will you rise and drink with me a toast in memory of the Shakespeare who was for an age, and in honour of the Shakespeare who is for all time.4

10 The Tragedies of Nature and Fortune 18 August 1961

From Stratford Papers on Shakespeare, 1961, ed. B.W. Jackson (Toronto: Gage, 1962), 38–55. Delivered on Friday, 18 August at 10:00 A.M., in the Festival Theatre Auditorium at Stratford, Ontario, this was the last lecture of Seminar 1 in the 1961 Shakespeare Seminar sponsored by the Universities of Canada in cooperation with the Stratford Festival Theatre through the offices of the Department of Extension of McMaster University.

In my first lecture I said that in the earlier period of Elizabethan drama comedy was better supplied than tragedy with models and precedents. Tragedy had Seneca, whose plays may not have been intended for the stage at all, and Seneca bequeathed ghosts, revenge plots, much impressive rhetoric, and mythological themes. The earlier writers of tragedy learned some of their structural principles from writing historical plays, and historical plays had inherited more directly the medieval conception of tragedy. In the Middle Ages tragedy was thought of not dramatically but as a certain kind of narrative, dealing normally with the fall of a man in high place. In The Canterbury Tales, for example, the monk is a jovial person from whom the Host clearly expects a ribald story.1 But as soon as he is asked for a tale he remembers that he is a cleric and a scholar, gives an academic definition of tragedy2 and proceeds to tell us a long series of tragic exempla, as they were called, starting from the falls of Lucifer and Adam and working his way down until the knight breaks in with an impatient protest that the company has heard enough dismal tales.3 Chaucer’s successor Lydgate, not having any knight to stop him, amassed a huge collection of such stories called The Falls of Princes, and Lydgate was followed in the sixteenth century by The Mirror for Magis-

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trates, which also grew to enormous proportions. Clearly there was a demand among middle-class readers for accounts of disaster in high places. The conception of tragedy presented by these stories was symbolized by the wheel of fortune, a symbol which goes back to Boethius in the fifth century and is illustrated everywhere in medieval poetry and painting. The history play does not need to be as tightly constructed as the tragedy or the comedy. The continuity in history itself gives the history play something of that processional and sequential structure which is the natural form of all primitive drama, from medieval Biblical plays to The Canvas Barricade.4 We can see this processional structure in many early Elizabethan plays such as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and Henry VIII, late in the Shakespeare canon as it is, preserves it more clearly than any other of Shakespeare’s histories. Here there is a series of three falls, those of Buckingham, of Wolsey, and of Catherine of Aragon,5 and these tragedies are exempla of a process which has been going on in history ever since the original fall of Satan, who set the pattern: And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, Never to hope again. [Henry VIII, 3.2.371–2]

The wheel of fortune is a tragic conception, though it is possible to get a technically comic conclusion by stopping the wheel turning halfway. This happens at least twice in Shakespeare’s histories, in Henry V and again in Henry VIII. Henry V ends with the king master of France and about to marry the French princess. Yet the ending is still tragic by implication, for Henry died almost immediately and sixty years of unbroken disaster followed for England. If anyone did not know that, after Shakespeare had written four plays to describe it, there was still the epilogue of Henry V to remind him. Henry VIII also has a technically comic conclusion: as Buckingham, Wolsey, and Catherine go down on the wheel, Anne Boleyn, Cromwell, and Cranmer come up, and the play ends with their triumph.6 But, again, everyone knows that the wheel will go on turning, that Anne Boleyn and Cromwell will go to the block in their turn and Cranmer to the stake. Thus the play is, again, tragic by implication, which is one reason why it was called by Sir Henry Wotton “All Is True,”7 and why the prologue warns us that a deeply serious play is to follow. The action of Henry VIII shows the king gradually coming into focus as the centre of the play. At the beginning he is under Wolsey’s spell, ready to believe that Buckingham is a traitor when Buckingham is clearly noth-

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ing of the kind. But he gradually gets more control and more insight into the intrigues of his court, and at the end of the play he is completely master of the dramatic situation. What we see in him at the end of the play is an incarnation of Fortune, the power that turns fortune’s wheel, raising those who are low and casting down those who are high. Being a strong king, he turns the wheel himself, and is not, like Richard II, turned by it. Opposite fortune is a hidden providence, which never appears in the superficial actions of history, and yet is there, an omnipotent and ruthless power ready to tear the whole social and religious structure of the nation to pieces in order to get Queen Elizabeth born. These two polarized forces of providence and fortune make up the action of the play: a simple, almost naive action, yet one ideally suited to a processional and pageant-like history. If we look at the spacing of histories in the Shakespearean canon we may be a little puzzled. Shakespeare starts out full of enthusiasm for the history play, and writes six of them early in his career. But after Henry V he seems to lose interest in the form, and to return to it only at the very end, and then in a play which many people have difficulty in believing is wholly his.8 Yet, if we think of what British history meant to the Elizabethan audience, his interest in history is more consistent than at first appears. British history in Shakespeare’s day did not begin with Julius Caesar and 55 b.c.;9 it began with the Trojan War, after which Aeneas founded Rome and his descendant Brutus founded a kingdom in Britain. Rome was a second Troy, and Britain, after a Welsh dynasty had risen with the Tudors, would become a third Troy, growing to greatness as Rome declined. We notice that around the turn of the century, when Shakespeare is busy with the Henry IV and V sequence, he writes a play on the Trojan war, Troilus and Cressida, which shows the pro-Trojan and anti-Greek bias that we should expect. He also begins a series of Roman plays, and another series associated with British history before the time of King John. Lear is an ancient king of Britain; Macbeth belongs to early Scotland; Hamlet is connected with the period of Danish ascendancy over England. The double series is concluded by Cymbeline, where British and Roman themes are both prominent, and the two peoples reconciled in the final scene. In the Roman plays Shakespeare was dealing with the fortunes of a cousin nation, an older civilization than his own, in many respects more like ours than like his—a fact which the present production of Coriolanus attempts to symbolize in its costuming.10 Dictatorships, annihila-

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tion wars, world-states struggling for supremacy, are familiar to us, but they must have stretched even Shakespeare’s imagination to its limits. In most of the tragedies, while Shakespeare is dramatically impartial, there is no real division of moral sympathies. It would be merely perverse to take sides with Goneril and Regan against Cordelia, or with Iago against Desdemona, and even with Macbeth and Claudius it is impossible to regard their crucial acts as anything but simply crimes. But the assassination of Caesar, the suicide of Cleopatra, the banishment of Coriolanus, are scenes in which we feel a division of moral sympathies in ourselves, and they reflect a theoretical and self-conscious approach to social issues which is more Roman and modern than it is primarily Elizabethan. True, we find this division of moral sympathies in other plays—Richard II, for instance—but it is in the three Roman plays that it seems to affect the structure of the dramatic conflict most deeply. The source of Coriolanus is of course Plutarch, and what Plutarch’s life of Coriolanus most naturally suggests is a class melodrama with Coriolanus as the villain. In Plutarch the grievances of the people are much more specific and justifiable than they are in Shakespeare. Shakespeare omits a highly significant passage in Plutarch about the rapacity of moneylenders,11 and allows his citizens little more than an aimless and sullen grousing. Again, Plutarch’s Coriolanus is more calculating: his speech to the senate strikes us as prepared and coldly malignant,12 and there is little in it to suggest Shakespeare’s Coriolanus whose “heart’s his mouth” [3.1.256], close as the substance of the two speeches may be. Shakespeare, then, as compared with Plutarch, demoralizes his citizens and makes Coriolanus more likeable. Everybody calls Coriolanus proud, but his pride is not a simple matter: much of it, including his unwillingness to boast of his achievements and his horror of exploiting those achievements for his own political ends, belong to humility rather than to pride—for of course we cannot believe that his modesty is an affectation. Again, Coriolanus cannot lie, and a man who cannot lie is irresistibly attractive, however inadequate his hold on truth. This shift of emphasis on Shakespeare’s part is clearly a fact of major importance, and we naturally wonder why it has been made. With a second-rate dramatist, or even with the best dramatists of an ideological age like our own, our first question would be, which side is he on? This is really a question about his general or habitual reactions. Does he, in general, prefer patricians or plebeians? Does he, in general, sympathize with authority or with rebellion? In my own graduate-

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student days, when fascism was still a world force, we used to talk a good deal about whether the Roman plays showed “fascist tendencies” on Shakespeare’s part or not. But of course there is no analogy between fascism and Coriolanus. A fascist leader is a demagogue, and a demagogue is precisely what Coriolanus is not. Further, fascism is a disease of modern democracy, and it is abundantly clear that the society of Coriolanus is predemocratic. It is difficult for us, living in an age when politics is so dominated by theory, even to conceive of an imagination so specific and concrete as Shakespeare’s. As far as our evidence goes, Shakespeare could hardly have cared less whether in general one should approve of the patrician or the plebeian case. His change of emphasis can have had only one purpose: to make the dramatic conflict as sharp and as evenly balanced as possible. We should remember that the very structure of his drama, with its easy mingling of noblemen and commoners, struck the patricians of his own time as somewhat subversive to begin with. You will recall Sir Henry Wotton’s letter about Henry VIII, and his complaint that it made greatness too familiar.13 The mere fact that the citizens are there in Coriolanus gives them an initial advantage, and Shakespeare’s shift of emphasis indicates his dramatic impartiality. The outcome of the conflict in Coriolanus has to seem both tragic and inevitable, and no facile or loaded way of presenting it can accomplish this. Tragedy is a mixture of the heroic and the ironic.14 The kind of romance that we have in Malory, where the hero is simply heroic, is one of its boundaries; the kind of ironic situation that we have in Death of a Salesman, where the whole point is that the central figure is not a hero, is the other. The admixture of heroism, of a quality which is more than lifesize, is what makes tragedy, in spite of its sombre and gloomy plot, so profoundly exhilarating. Further, tragedy is independent of morality in the sense that it makes no difference to the structure of tragedy whether its hero is a good man or a bad one. When Macbeth finally understands that he has been cheated of all his hopes by a series of quibbles, and that his fate, so to speak, has gone over to the enemy, he says, Yet I will try the last: before my body I throw my warlike shield. . . . [5.8.32–3]

and we realize that whatever Macbeth has done, he is still a hero, and is worth having a tragedy written about him.

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Plutarch tells us that Coriolanus’s father died in his infancy and that he was brought up solely by his mother.15 He adds that Coriolanus married at his mother’s request, and continued to live in his mother’s house after marriage.16 For anyone with Shakespeare’s insight into human nature, this was all the information he needed for his conception of Coriolanus. There are at least two characters in Shakespeare who suffer from a mother-fixation, Coriolanus and Bertram in All’s Well. But the person who tries hardest to break Bertram of his mother-fixation is his mother. The Countess of Rousillon is a shrewd and intelligent woman, and these are not adjectives that anyone would apply to the obsessed Volumnia, of whom the tribunes remark, “They say she’s mad” [4.2.9]. There is much in Coriolanus himself that has the charm, as well as the gaucherie, of a boy. The crucial scenes are almost a boy’s daydreams come true. He fights with a physical prowess so gigantic that we may wonder what the Romans needed the rest of the army for, and his return is a you’llbe-sorry triumph in which only the pleas of mother and sweetheart can fend off the annihilation of those who have wronged him. In Plutarch Coriolanus fights his way into Corioli with only a handful of followers;17 in Shakespeare he fights his way in alone [1.4.51–2]. In Plutarch he is banished from Rome with a very few followers;18 in Shakespeare he goes out alone [4.1.29]. This introversion is a part of a curious immaturity in Coriolanus. Other people are never quite real to him. We remember how he asks mercy for a Volscian prisoner who had befriended him, and then cannot remember his name [1.9.82–90]. It is an exquisite touch, not found in Plutarch, but exquisite touches in Shakespeare are not lugged in; they are there because they belong there. The repetition of the word “voices” [2.3.112, 125–30] emphasizes how ghostly society is to Coriolanus, and why the citizens hate him so. The citizens, however vacillating and misled, are not without their own dignity. “The price is, to ask it kindly” [2.3.75]— that is the voice of a human being, not of a rabble. They are used to being pushed around and told that they are not much good, and they will take a good deal from Menenius Agrippa, will allow him to tell them his preposterous fable of the belly and the members [1.1.96–160], because he at least has his eyes focused on them when he talks to them. But how do you cope with a man who treats you as though you were a dream in his mind, and an unpleasant dream at that? It is clear that the sexual energy of Coriolanus has gone into warfare, and that his real mistress is Bellona. This is also true of Tullus Aufidius.

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As this present production has tried to suggest, Coriolanus and Tullus are enemies, and therefore they are lovers. It seems a curious “therefore,” but Coriolanus in his own way does love his enemies. For enmity, though it may use the language of hatred, is not hatred, any more than love is lust. The coward is typically the man who can neither fight nor love his enemies: he may hate and despise his enemy, but his instinct, in a crisis, is to do what his enemy wants him to do. It is one of Tullus’s servants who makes the terrifying remark, which we have not found the answer to yet, that while war breeds enmity, peace breeds more hatred, because then men have less need of one another [4.5.227–32]. Coriolanus is a man who must have an enemy, and that is why he is able to turn against his own city without, so far as we can see, the slightest twinge of conscience. But the fact that enmity is more essential to him than friendship indicates once again a lack of some element of maturity. When at the end of the play Tullus calls him “boy” [5.6.100], Coriolanus breaks down completely. It is, as he says, the first time he was ever forced to scold [5.6.104–5]; it is also the first time that he boasts of his exploits [5.6.113–16]. In many respects the tragedy of Coriolanus is like the tragedy of St. Joan in Shaw, a tragedy founded on inexperience in dealing with other people and on the brutal tactlessness of youth. Coriolanus, then, is a man without a mask, or fully developed social personality. This word “personality” reminds us of the fact that the “dramatis personae” at the beginning of a play originally meant the masks used in the performance, and psychology still uses the word “persona” to mean the social aspect of character. In Coriolanus there is nothing to mediate between his thought and his expression, or between an outside stimulus and his inner response. His enemies know this, and know in advance how he will react to certain words, such as “traitor”—although, when Tullus Aufidius calls him that [5.6.84, 86], he is a traitor, or at least has put himself in a traitorous position. But the social personality is what enables us to live in a community, and it is especially the function of a leader to create a community. Society disintegrates around Coriolanus: his soldiers will follow him with great enthusiasm as long as things are going well, but at the first check they break apart or fall to looting. Contrast them with the soldiers of Mark Antony, fighting like demons and joking about their wounds, even Enobarbus, who sees through Antony like glass, committing suicide out of shame at deserting him.19 With a fully developed personality goes the power that Mark Antony has and that Coriolanus conspicuously lacks—the power of rhetoric. Coriolanus

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often speaks well and nobly, but he cannot accommodate his speech to a specific occasion or influence human actions by his speech. Even at his best he is imprisoned in his own sense of integrity. One comes away from this production with a great admiration for Mr. Scofield, not simply for the obvious reasons, but for surmounting a difficulty peculiar to this role. Mr. Scofield has to act the part of a man who cannot act a part, whose whole attitude to life is anti-dramatic. Shakespeare may well have been fascinated by Coriolanus, because he is a figure so antipathetic to Shakespeare himself—Shakespeare who, so far as we know him, is nothing but mask and the power of rhetoric, who never, so far as we know, speaks to us from his heart, and whose nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.20 Shakespeare must have been profoundly aware of the importance of rhetoric in holding a society together and of the necessity for all the devices of tact, accommodation, even hypocrisy (for “hypocrite” was also originally a metaphor of a masked actor) in saving faces and coddling egos and generally keeping the social machinery running. He was aware too of the importance of the arts in society, especially of those two arts, music and drama, which are ensemble performances for audiences, and manifest more vividly than any other arts the presence of a community. The predominance of music and drama in Elizabethan culture shows its sense of community, just as the predominance of essay and novel in Victorian culture shows its sense of individuality. Coriolanus, though a patrician, is not a conservative: the only soliloquy he makes speaks with contempt of custom and the error it accumulates. Given peacetime power, he would be less like Caesar or Antony than like that other ruthless Puritanical revolutionary, Cassius, and we remember what Caesar says of Cassius to Mark Antony: He loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony: he hears no music. [Julius Caesar, 1.2.203–4]

It seems most probable that Coriolanus preceded Timon of Athens and followed Antony and Cleopatra.21 It is usually called the last of the Roman plays, but I should prefer to call it the third of the four Plutarchan plays. Plutarch is a garrulous writer, and his life of Antony contains a digression on the misanthrope Timon. Plutarch’s lives are “parallel” lives in which a biography of a Roman follows that of a Greek whose career resembles or contrasts with his, after which a comparison between the

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two is usually made. The Greek parallel to Coriolanus is Timon’s friend, Alcibiades, a contrast in every way, a born intriguer with no principles except that of advancing his own interests, yet able to charm even those who knew that they could not trust him. Plutarch remarks that Coriolanus, for all his virtues, could not make himself loved, and that Alcibiades, for all his vices, could not make himself hated.22 In Timon of Athens, that extraordinary play (one I hope Stratford will soon perform),23 part morality and part folk tale, which forms the transition between the great tragedies and the later romances, a theme from Coriolanus reappears. Alcibiades is banished from Athens but returns with an army to compel its surrender. Here there is no tragedy, only a patching up of differences, for in this play the tragic emphasis falls on Timon, whose misanthropy makes him so isolated from the action that he tries to identify himself with everything destructive and chaotic in nature. Coriolanus is a victim of his own sincerity, not unlike Molière’s misanthropic Alceste, and it is easy to see why Shakespeare went from Coriolanus to the misanthrope Timon. In these plays, especially Coriolanus, the tragedy is confined to the human world. Plutarch is fond of omens and auguries, and in his life of Coriolanus there are several opportunities for giving a supernatural dimension to the action. But Shakespeare ignores all these: he wants no suggestion of the supernatural in this particular play. In the world which Shakespeare and his audience shared, there are several levels of nature. At the bottom is time, the enemy and devourer, time that sweeps all things away into oblivion. Above it is the turning wheel of fortune and the cycle of nature, bringing some regularity into existence but still alien and hostile to human desire. We notice in the sonnets the connection of royal figures with the cycle of nature, the sun rising to its zenith and then falling as The eyes, ’fore duteous, now converted are From his low tract, and look another way. [Sonnet 7, ll. 11–12]

The world of the wheel is the order of physical nature, a world man is in but not of, because it has in itself no moral significance. Above it is man’s proper world, the world of human nature, a world civilized by law, education, religion, and art. Yet even in this world good and evil are together, and love and loyalty cannot be wholly separated from much that is false and hypocritical. The failure to respect the conditions of a world where good and evil are inseparable can lead only to tragedy,

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even for Coriolanus whose nature is said by Menenius Agrippa to be too noble for this world [3.1.254]. In Coriolanus a great artificer in words demonstrates, however indirectly and obliquely, the vast power of ordered speech in forming the destinies of mankind, and the disaster that awaits those who, whether from impatient sincerity like Coriolanus, or from outraged idealism like Timon, cannot enter into the kind of social contract that is symbolized by the theatre and its audience. Questions from the Floor Question: What do you think of Bernard Shaw’s view that Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s greatest comedy?24 Frye: I am not familiar with the Shaw passage, but my reference to Molière’s Alceste indicates that the central situation is of a sort that might appear in a comedy, though a very sombre one. The more one disapproves politically of Coriolanus, the more purely ironic, and hence nearer to comedy, his fall will appear to be. Question: Is not the stress on Coriolanus’s homosexual relation to Tullus and his mother-fixation post-Freudian, and consequently both dated for us and anachronistic for Shakespeare? Frye: Freud said that he had discovered only what the poets had always known.25 Coriolanus’s relation to his mother is stressed in the text to a degree unusual in Shakespeare: even the crowd says that he fights to please his mother [1.1.38–9], and he is continually turning to that marmoreal and matronly stupidity with a pathetic desire for approval. He is also twice described in the text as like a “mistress” to Tullus Aufidius [4.5.117, 195]. In Shakespeare’s great plays the structure of human relations is so complex and so delicately balanced that a performance almost exaggerates an aspect of it simply by trying to bring it out. Question: Is there not good evidence of at least an aesthetic dislike of the populace on Shakespeare’s part? He often speaks of their greasy caps and their stinking breaths. Frye: This kind of reaction is appropriate for a poet who deals with sense experience more directly than with concepts. Politically, Shakespeare seems to regard the crowd as largely the creation of its leaders. Without leadership it becomes a many-headed monster, a mob, not a society. And a mob, no matter who the individuals are who compose it, is always subhuman.

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Question: Did Shakespeare use Coriolanus as a vehicle for commenting on social conditions in his time—shortages of food and the like? Frye: I think if Shakespeare had been more interested in social criticism he would have made more use of the material Plutarch could have afforded him. The passage on the moneylenders I mentioned reminds us of the crying abuse of monopolies in Shakespeare’s day. The difficulty with topical allusions is that they have to be subtle enough to get past the censor and broad enough to get across to the audience—an almost impossible requirement. Shakespeare’s topical allusions seem to be mainly about the weather—obviously he preferred to say only what he could say openly, and his instinct for keeping out of trouble was highly developed. Scholars regret this: the law courts are the best-documented part of Elizabethan life, and if Shakespeare had only got into trouble we should know much more about him than we do. Question: How does Tullus Aufidius compare with Coriolanus? Frye: He seems more accessible to jealousy and resentment, but perhaps only because he is in a position to be so. The accuracy with which he places the word “boy,” however, indicates an element of cunning in him which makes him a smaller man than Coriolanus. Question: Is Coriolanus’s decision not to attack Rome a sign of submission to his mother or a sign that he has escaped from her domination? Frye: It seems to me a gesture of submission, brought out in his despairing cry, “Oh mother, what have you done?” [5.3.182–3].26 Coriolanus is prepared for the assault on his feelings, and has made up his mind to resist it. What he doesn’t know is that Volumnia is his superior officer, that he cannot function as a soldier without her direction. Question: This production dressed the actors in Napoleonic costume. What kind of modern situation could we imagine Coriolanus in? Frye: When the Elizabethans thought of Rome they usually thought of imperial Rome: Coriolanus of course belongs to a much earlier time. Plutarch comments on the primitive barbaric nature of his age, when the words for virtue and military valour were the same. As an historical figure Coriolanus hardly belongs to an age like that of Napoleon, who according to Shaw was the man who discovered that if a cannon ball hit a man it would kill him.27 That is, he has no impersonal or logistic conception of warfare: he fights with his own hands. Similarly, no modern democracy would elect Coriolanus to be dog-catcher; but Coriolanus

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could not exist in a modern democracy. There is perhaps something of the Victorian dowager about Volumnia: one could imagine her sending Coriolanus out from Eton to govern India and assume the white man’s burden. Even so, an historical situation like that of Coriolanus would have to be an isolated or frontier situation. But of course the human situation which the historical one symbolizes is independent of historical setting. Question: Would you comment on the relation of Menenius Agrippa to Coriolanus? Frye: I suppose Menenius Agrippa is the only father Coriolanus has, and he certainly has himself a strongly paternal feeling for Coriolanus. Falstaff similarly has a paternal feeling for Prince Henry, and the dismissal of Menenius Agrippa is like a smaller version of the rejection of Falstaff, a young man casting off an older one in a way which is not simply a snub but destroys the older man’s self-respect and his whole reason for living. Question: Is Coriolanus portrayed as emotional enough to give credibility to his relation to his mother and to Tullus Aufidius? Frye: His emotions are not outgoing ones. What one admires about Mr. Scofield’s rendering of the part is its restraint, the sense of a tremendous smouldering power that never quite breaks through. If it did break through, he would no longer be Coriolanus, but someone more like Mark Antony or Othello.

11 How True a Twain 1962

From FI, 88–106. First published in The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Edward Hubler (New York: Basic Books; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 23–53. Frye’s notes for this essay can be found in Notebook 13b, NRL, 363–72.

Any critic of Shakespeare’s sonnets will, to some extent, tell the world more about his own critical limitations than about his subject; and if he starts out with very marked limitations, the clear surface of the sonnets will faithfully reflect them. Many readers tend to assume that poetry is a record of a poet’s experience. Those who tell us that Shakespeare must have been a lawyer to have known so much about law, or a nobleman in disguise to have known so much about aristocratic psychology, always start with this assumption as their major premise. The assumption is then used in value judgments. First-hand experience in life and second-hand experience derived from books are correlated with good and less good poetry respectively. Poem A is very good; therefore a genuine experience must lie behind it; Poem B is duller, so it must be a “mere literary exercise,” where the poet’s “real feelings” are not involved. Included in these assumptions, of course, is the view that convention is the opposite of originality, and the mark of inferior writers. It is particularly the lyric that suffers from such notions, as nobody can do much about the fact that every play of Shakespeare’s tells a story that he got out of a book. And while experienced critics would repudiate all this in theory, still Shakespeare was an expert in keeping his personal life out of our reach, and we find this so tantalizing that any hint of more information about that life is apt to lower the threshold of a critic’s discretion. The sonnets,

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therefore, still have power to release the frustrated Baconian who is inside so many Shakespearean scholars.1 The first point to get clear is that if we read the sonnets as transcripts of experience, we are not reading them realistically but allegorically, as a series of cryptic allusions in which a rival poet may be Chapman,2 a mortal moon Queen Elizabeth,3 and a man in hue somebody named Hughes.4 Now if we approach the sonnets in this crude allegorical way, they become “riddles” of a most peculiar kind. They begin with seventeen appeals to a beautiful youth to beget a son.5 Rationalizing readers tell us that the poet is urging the youth to marry, but only one of these sonnets—the eighth—has any serious treatment of marriage. True, the youth is urged to marry as the only legal means of producing offspring, but apparently any woman will do: it is not suggested that he should fall in love or that there is any possibility of his producing daughters or even a son who takes after his mother, which seems curious when the youth himself does. In real life, one would think, the only possible reply from the youth would be that of Christ to Satan in Paradise Regained: “Why art thou solicitous?”6 The poet then drops his appeal and falls in love with the youth himself. We next observe that although the poet promises the youth immortality, and clearly has the power to confer it, he does not lift a metrical foot to make the youth a credible or interesting person. He repeats obsessively that the youth is beautiful, and sometimes true and kind, if not overvirtuous; but in real life one would think that a poet who loved him so much would delight in telling us at least about his accomplishments, if he had any. Could he carry on a conversation, make puns, argue about religion, ride to hounds, wear his clothes with a dash, sing in a madrigal? The world’s greatest master of characterization will not give him the individualizing touch that he so seldom refuses to the humblest of his dramatic creations. Of course, if we are predetermined to see the Earl of Southampton or some other witty and cultivated person in the youth, we may ascribe qualities to him that the poet does not.7 But considering him as a real person, and reading only what is there, we are forced to conclude that Shakespeare has lavished a century of the greatest sonnets in the language on an unresponsive oaf as stupid as a doorknob and as selfish as a weasel. Shakespeare expected the Earl of Southampton to be amused by his somewhat indecorous tale of a sulky urchin who was beloved by Venus herself and would not rise to the occasion.8 But the youth of the sonnets is more like the Adonis of that poem than he is like any appreciative reader of it.

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Besides—who exactly is given immortality by the sonnets? Well, there was this Mr. W.H., except that some people think he was H.W. and that he wasn’t a Mr.9 And how do we learn about this Mr. W.H., or this notMr. H.W.? Through one floundering and illiterate sentence, to call it that by courtesy, which was not written by Shakespeare, not addressed to us, and no more likely to be an accurate statement of fact than any other commercial plug.10 We are also referred to a story told in Willobie his Avisa about a certain H.W., who, “being suddenly infected with the contagion of a fantastical fit, at the first sight of A(visa), pineth a while in secret grief, at length not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humour, bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend W.S.”11 In short, a very literary story. As an account of something happening in real life, Polonius might believe it, but hardly Rosalind. We are not told that the youth of the sonnets wanted immortality, but if he did he would have done better to marry and beget a son, as he was advised to do all along. About all that one can get out of the sonnets, considered as transcripts of experience, is the reflection that pederastic infatuations with beautiful and stupid boys are probably very bad for practising dramatists.12 This conclusion is so grotesque that one would expect any critic who reached it to retrace his steps at once. But we often find such critics merely trying to save the face of the ridiculous creature that they have themselves created. Benson, the compiler of the 1640 edition of the sonnets, simply altered pronouns,13 but this is a trifle robust for the modern conscience. Coleridge disapproved of homosexual sentiments in poetry, and sneered at Virgil as a second-rate poet all his life because Virgil wrote the Second Eclogue;14 but Coleridge had practically signed a contract to endorse everything that Shakespeare wrote, so what to do? Well: “It seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take to be a purposed blind.”15 Another critic urges that the sonnets must be regarded as Shakespeare’s earliest work, written in time for him to have got this affair out of his system, for if they are later, Shakespeare’s personality must be considered “unwholesome.”16 And what critic urges this? Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon Revisited, that genial spoofing of the eternal human tendency to turn untidy facts into symmetrical myths! The same fate seems to pursue even the details of the allegorical approach. The line in Sonnet 107, “The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur’d” [l. 5],17 sounds as though it referred to Queen Elizabeth. If so,

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it means either that she died or that she didn’t die, in which case it was presumably written either in 1603 or some time before 1603.18 Unless, that is, it is a retrospective allusion, of a kind that dilatory poets are only too apt to make, or unless it doesn’t refer to Elizabeth at all, in which case it could have been written at any time between 1603 and its publication in 1609. Once again we feel uneasily that “Shakespeare the man” is slipping out of our grasp. We should be better advised to start with the assumption that the sonnets are poetry, therefore written within a specific literary tradition and a specific literary genre, both of which were developed for specifically literary reasons. The tradition had developed in the Middle Ages, but would hardly have had so much vitality in Shakespeare’s day without a contemporary context. In the Renaissance, anyone who wanted to be a serious poet had to work at it. He was supposed to be what Gabriel Harvey called a “curious universal scholar”19 as well as a practical expert in every known rhetorical device—and Renaissance writers knew many more rhetorical devices than we do. But learning and expertise would avail him little if he didn’t, as we say, “have it.” Have what? Have a powerful and disciplined imagination, to use the modern term, which, by struggling with the most tempestuous emotions, had learned to control them like plunging horses and force them into the service of poetry. True, the greatest moments of poetic furor and raptus are involuntary, but they never descend on those who are not ready for them. Could one acquire such an imagination if one didn’t have it? No, but one could develop it if one did have it. How? Well, the strongest of human emotions, love, was also the most easily available. The experience of love thus had a peculiarly close relation to the training of the poet, a point of some importance for understanding Shakespeare’s sonnets. Love was for the Renaissance poet a kind of creative yoga, an imaginative discipline in which he watched the strongest possible feelings swirling around sexual excitement, jealousy, obsession, melancholy, as he was snubbed, inspired, teased, ennobled, forsaken, or made blissful by his mistress. The Renaissance poet was not expected to drift through life gaining “experience” and writing it up in poetry. He was expected to turn his mind into an emotional laboratory and gain his experience there under high pressure and close observation. Literature provided him with a convention, and the convention supplied the literary categories and forms into which his amorphous emotions were to be poured. Thus his imaginative development and his reading and study of literature advanced together and cross-fertilized one another.

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Of course the experience of love is a real experience. It is not assumed that the youth trying to be a poet talks himself into a certain state of mind; it is assumed that, if normal, he will feel the emotion of love at some time or other, and that, if destined to be a poet, he will not fall in love tepidly or realistically but head-over-heels. But the experience of love and the writing of love poetry do not necessarily have any direct connection. One is experience, the other craftsmanship. So if we ask, Is there a real mistress or does the poet merely make it all up? the answer is that an either/or way of putting the question is wrong. Modern criticism has developed the term “imagination” precisely to get around this unreal dilemma. Poetry is not reporting on experience, and love is not an uncultivated experience; in both poetry and love, reality is what is created, not the raw material for the creation. The typical emotions inspired in the poet by love are thus formed into the typical patterns of literary convention. When the conventions of love poetry developed, the model for most of these patterns was the spiritual discipline of Christianity. In Christianity one may, with no apparent cause, become spiritually awakened, conscious of sin and of being under the wrath of God, and bound to a life of unconditional service to God’s will. Much courtly love poetry was based on a secular and erotic analogy of Christian love. The poet falls in love at first sight, involuntarily or even with reluctance. The God of Love, angry at being neglected, has walked into his life and taken it over, and is now his “lord.” His days of liberty are over, and ahead of him is nothing but unquestioning devotion to Love’s commands. The first thing he must do is supplicate his mistress for “grace,” and a mistress who did not demand long sieges of complaint, prayers for mercy, and protests against her inflexible cruelty was a conventionally impossible female. The mock-religious language, so elaborately developed in the Middle Ages, was still going strong in Shakespeare’s day: Spenser’s twenty-second Amoretti sonnet, for instance, moves at once from the Christian Lent into the Temple of Venus, where we find “saint,” “image,” “priests,” “altar,” “sacrifice,” “goddess,” and “relics.” The secular and erotic counterpart of the Madonna and Child was Venus and Eros, or Cupid. Cupid was a little boy shooting arrows, and at the same time he was, like his Christian counterpart, the greatest of the gods and the creator of the universe, which had arisen from chaos by the “attraction” of like particles. The domain of Eros included heat, energy, desire, love, and subjective emotion; Venus had the complementary area of light, form, desirability, beauty, and objective proportion. In a sense

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all lovers are incarnations of Eros, and all loved ones incarnations of Venus. One may express this by simple metonymy: thus Ovid, in a passage in the Amores which certainly caught Shakespeare’s eye, remarks that while he prefers blondes, he can also get interested in a “Venus” with dark hair: est etiam in fusco grata colore Venus. [2.4.40]20

The possible scale of themes in courtly love poetry is as broad as love itself, and may have any kind of relationship to its Christian model, from an integral part to a contrast or even a parody. We may divide the scale into “high” and “low” phases, using these terms diagrammatically and not morally. In the “high” phases love is a spiritual education and a discipline of the soul, which leads the lover upward from the sensible to the eternal world. In Dante, the love of Beatrice, announced in the Vita nuova, is a spiritual education of this sort leading straight to its own logical fulfilment in the Christian faith. It not only survives the death of Beatrice, but in the Commedia the same love conveys the poet upward from the top of Purgatory into the divine presence itself. Dante’s love for Beatrice was the emotional focus of his life, but at no point was it a sexual love or connected with marriage. The philosophy of Plato, where one moves from the body’s attraction to the physical reflection of reality upward to the soul’s union with the form of reality, provided a convenient framework for later treatments of the “high” version of the convention. We find this Platonized form of love in Michelangelo and in the speech of Cardinal Bembo at the end of Castiglione’s Courtier. Next comes what we may call the Petrarchan norm, a conflict of human emotions in which the main theme is still unswerving devotion and supplications for grace. In Petrarch the human situation in love is far more elaborately analysed than in Dante, but as in Dante the poet’s love survives the death of Laura and does not depend on sexual experience. In Christianity love for God is obviously its own reward, because God is love. The Petrarchan poet similarly often finds that it is love itself, not the female embodiment of it, which fulfils his desire, and such a love could logically survive the death of the beloved, or be content, as Herrick says his is, with a contact of almost unbearable refinement: Only to kiss the air That lately kissed thee.21

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In Petrarch, however, there is more emphasis placed on physical frustration than on spiritual fulfilment, and the same is true of most of his followers. At this point the relation between heavenly and earthly love begins to appear as a contrast, as it often does in Petrarch himself. Thus Spenser writes his hymns to Heavenly Love (Christ) and Heavenly Beauty (the Wisdom of the Book of Proverbs) as an alleged palinode to his courtly love hymns to Eros and Venus, and Sidney indicates in his famous Leave me, O Love sonnet a “higher” perspective on the story told in Astrophel and Stella.22 In the middle of the scale comes the mistress as potential wife: this was still a rather rare form in love poetry, though of course normal for drama and romance. It is represented in English literature by Spenser’s Amoretti sequence. We then move into the “low” area of more concrete and human relations, sometimes called anti-Petrarchan, the centre of gravity of the Songs and Sonnets of Donne, who remarks: Love’s not so pure and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their Muse.23

Here the poet is less aware of the dialectic of Eros and Agape, and more aware of another kind of dialectic established in the normal opening of the convention, when the poet first falls in love. When the God of Love enters the poet’s life, the poet may regret his lost liberty of not having to serve a mistress, or he may contrast the bondage of his passion with the freedom of reason. He finds that in this context his love is inseparable from hatred—not necessarily hatred of the mistress, except in cases of jealousy, but hatred of the emotional damage done to his life by love. The God of Love in this situation is a tyrant, and the poet cannot identify the god’s will with his own desire. Such moods of despair are often attached to palinodes, or they may be understood to be necessary early stages, where the poet is still establishing his constancy. But in “lower” phases the poet may get fed up with having so much demanded of him by the code and renounce love altogether; or the mistress may be abused as a monster of frigidity who has brought about her lover’s death; or the poet may flit from one mistress to another or plunge into cynical amours with women of easy virtue—in short, parody the convention. Ovid, who as far as Shakespeare was concerned was by long odds the world’s greatest poet, had a good deal of influence on these “low” phases of courtly love, as Platonism had on the “higher” ones.

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It does not follow that the “lower” one goes, the more realistic the treatment becomes. This happens only to a very limited extent. The mistress normally remains almost equally uncharacterized at all stages: the poet is preoccupied with the emotions in himself which the mistress has caused, and with her only as source and goal of these emotions. Similarly with Shakespeare’s youth: he is not characterized, in any realistic sense, because the conventions and genres employed exclude that kind of characterization. It is interesting to contrast the sonnets from this point of view with the narrative poem A Lover’s Complaint, which, whoever wrote it,24 follows the sonnets in the 1609 Quarto, and presents three characters roughly parallel to the three major characters of the sonnets. Here what belongs to the genre is not so much characterization as description, which is given in abundance. It was assumed that the major poet would eventually move on to the major genres, epic and tragedy, and from the expression of his own emotions to the expression of heroic ones. The young professional poet learning his trade, and the amateur too high in social rank to become a professional, both tended to remain within the conventions and genres appropriate to love poetry. The appropriate genres included the love lyric and the pastoral. In the love lyric the source of love was a mistress descended from the line of Laura; in the pastoral, following the example of Virgil’s Second Eclogue, the love of two men for one another was more frequent. Here again the influence of Plato, in whose conception of love there are no mistresses, but the love of an older man for a younger one, has to be allowed for. Spenser began his career with the pastoral poetry of The Shepheardes Calender, because, according to his editor E.K., he intended to go on to epic,25 and pastoral was a normal genre in which to serve his apprenticeship. In January, the first eclogue, Spenser represents himself as the shepherd Colin Clout, in love with one Rosalind, but also dearly attached to another shepherd named Hobbinol. E.K. explains in a note that such an attachment has nothing to do with pederasty26 (just as love for a mistress has no necessary, or even frequent, connection with adulterous liaisons). Spenser devoted the third book of The Faerie Queene to chastity, which for him included both married love and courtly Frauendienst,27 and the fourth book to friendship. In the Temple of Venus, described in the tenth canto of the fourth book, pairs of male friends are given an honoured place, as friendship has a disinterested factor in it which for Spenser puts it among the “high” forms of courtly love. Examples include Hercules and Hylas, David and Jonathan, and Damon

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and Pythias. Such friends are called lovers, and it was conventional for male friends to use the language of love, just as it was conventional for a lover to shed floods of tears when disdained by his mistress. Similarly in Shakespeare the relation of poet to youth is one of love, but it is assumed (in Sonnet 20 and elsewhere) that neither the youth nor the poet has any sexual interest except in women. The “homosexual” view of the sonnets disappears at once as soon as we stop reading them as bad allegory. After all the research, the speculation, and the guesswork, our knowledge of what in the sonnets is direct biographical allegory remains precisely zero. Anything may be; nothing must be, and what has produced them is not an experience like ours, but a creative imagination very unlike ours. Our ignorance is too complete to be accidental. The establishing of a recognized convention is of enormous benefit to poets, as it enables them to split off personal sincerity from literary sincerity, and personal emotion from communicable emotion. When emotions are made communicable by being conventionalized, the characters on whom they are projected may expand into figures of universal scope and infinitely haunting variety. Thus every syllable of Campion’s wonderful song, When thou must home to shades of underground, is pure convention, and no knowledge of the women in Campion’s life could possibly have the least relevance to it.28 But it is the convention that has enabled him to realize so vividly the figure of the sinister underworld queen who has run through literature from Ishtar to the femmes fatales of our own day. Anyone who thinks he can write a better poem out of a “real experience” is welcome to try, but he cannot read Campion’s poem with any understanding unless he realizes that the convention is not working against the emotion, but has released the emotion. The same principle applies to characterization. By suppressing realistic characterization, convention develops another kind, an archetypal character who is not individualized, but becomes a focus of our whole literary experience. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, the beautiful-youth group tells a “high” story of devotion, in the course of which the poet discovers that the reality of his love is the love itself rather than anything he receives from the beloved. Here, as in Petrarch and Sidney, the love proves to be an ennobling discipline although the experience itself is full of suffering and frustration. The dark-lady group is “low” and revolves around the theme of odi et amo.29 In the beautiful-youth group Shakespeare has adopted the disturbing and strikingly original device of associating the loved one with Eros rather than Venus, a beautiful boy who, like the regular mis-

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tress, is primarily a source of love rather than a responding lover. Other familiar landmarks of the convention can be easily recognized. The poet is the slave of his beloved; he cannot sleep for thinking of him; their souls are in one another’s breasts; the poet protests his constancy and alleges that he has no theme for verse except his love; he is struck dumb with shame and bashfulness in the presence of his love; he ascribes all his virtues and talents to his love; his verse will immortalize the beloved; his love is triumphant over death (as the love of Dante and Petrarch survived the death of Beatrice and Laura, respectively); yet he continually finds love a compulsory anguish. It is a reasonable assumption that Sonnets 1 through 126 are in sequence. There is a logic and rightness in their order which is greatly superior to that of any proposed rearrangement (such as Sir Denys Bray’s “rhyme-link” scheme),30 and this order is at least as likely to be the author’s as the editor’s, for Thorpe, unlike Benson, shows no signs of officious editorial meddling. Sonnet 126, a twelve-line poem in couplets containing a masterly summary of the themes and images of the beautiful-youth group, is inescapably the “envoy” of the series—any interpretation that attempts to remove it from this position must have something wrong with it. The repetition of “render,” too,31 shows that it closely follows on the difficult but crucial Sonnet 125. If, then, Sonnets 1 through 126 are in sequence, the rationale of that sequence would be roughly as follows: We begin with a prelude which we may call “The Awakening of Narcissus,” where the poet urges the youth to beget a son in his own likeness. In Sonnet 17 this theme modulates into the theme of gaining eternal youth through the poet’s verse instead of through progeny, and this in turn modulates into the main theme of the poet’s own love for the youth. The poet then revolves around the youth in a series of three cycles, each of which apparently lasts for a year (Sonnet 104), and takes him through every aspect of his love, from the most ecstatic to the most woebegone. At the beginning of the first cycle the poet is confident of the youth’s love and feels that his genius as a poet is being released by it, and the great roar of triumph in Sonnet 19 is its high point. Gradually the poet’s reflections become more melancholy and more independent of his love. In Sonnet 30 the final couplet seems almost deliberately perfunctory, a perceptible tug pulling us back to the main theme. The poet’s age begins to haunt him in 22; a sense of the inadequacy of his poetry enters in 32, and his fortunes seem to sink as the cycle progresses, until by 37 he is not

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only old but lame, poor, and despised. Already in 33 a tone of reproach has begun, and with reproach comes, in 36, a feeling of the necessity of separation. Reproach is renewed in 40, where we learn that the youth has stolen the poet’s mistress. In 50 the poet has wandered far away from the youth, but in this and the following sonnet he is riding back to his friend on horseback. The phrase “Sweet love, renew thy force” [l. 1] in 56 indicates that we are near the beginning of a second cycle, which starts in 52. The slightly effusive praise of the youth in 17 is repeated in 53; the feeling of confidence in the poet’s verse, which we met in 19, returns in 55; and the sense of identification with the youth, glanced at in 22, returns in 62. As before, however, the poet’s meditations become increasingly melancholy, as in 65 and 66, where again the final couplets seem to jerk us back with an effort to the theme of love. By 71 the poet is preoccupied with images of old age, winter, and death. His poetry, in 76, again seems to him sterile and barren, and in 78 the theme of the rival poet begins. This theme corresponds to that of the stolen mistress in the first cycle, and the two together form an ironic counterpoint to the theme of the opening sonnets. Instead of acquiring a wife and transferring his beauty to a successor, the youth has acquired the poet’s mistress and transferred his patronage to a second poet. A bitter series of reproaches follows, with the theme of separation reappearing in 87. In 92, however, we have a hint of a different perspective on the whole subject: I see a better state to me belongs Than that, which on thy humour doth depend. [ll. 7–8]

This second cycle ends in 96, and a third cycle abruptly begins in 97, with a great rush of coming-of-spring images. Once again, in 100 with its phrase “Return, forgetful Muse” [l. 5], the poet is restored to confidence in his poetry; once again, in 106, the youth is effusively praised; once again, in 107, the poet promises the youth immortality in his verse. Again more melancholy and introspective reflections succeed, but this time the poet does not go around the cycle. He replaces reproach with self-reproach, or, more accurately, he replaces disillusionment with selfknowledge, and gradually finds the possession of what he has struggled for, not in the youth as a separate person, but in the love that unites him with the youth. In 116 the poet discovers the immortality of love; in 123 his own love achieves immortality; in 124 the phrase “my dear love”

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[l. 1] refers primarily to the poet’s love; in 125 the poet’s heart is accepted as an “oblation” [l. 10], and in 126 the youth, now only a lovely mirage, is abandoned to nature and time. Thus the problem stated in the opening sonnets, of how to perpetuate the youth’s beauty, has been solved by poetic logic. It is the poet’s love, not the youth’s marriage, which has created a new youth, and one capable of preserving his loveliness forever. This at any rate is the “argument” of these sonnets whether they are in sequence or not, and we reach the same conclusion if we disregard sequence and simply study the imagery. If Shakespeare himself had identified a specific person with the beautiful youth of the sonnets, that person would have had much the same relation to the youth that Edward King has to Lycidas.32 Milton tells us that Lycidas was written to commemorate the drowning of a “learned friend.”33 But Lycidas, as a poem, is a pastoral elegy about Lycidas, and Lycidas is a literary and mythological figure, whose relatives are the Adonis and Daphnis of Classical pastoral elegies. Similarly, the beautiful youth, though human, incarnates a divine beauty, and so is a kind of manifestation of Eros: “A god in love, to whom I am confined” [Sonnet 110, l. 12]. Just as other love poets were fond of saying that their mistress was a goddess to rival Venus or the Platonic form of beauty that had fallen by accident into the lower world, so the youth is the “rose” (in its Elizabethan sense of “primate”) or “pattern” of beauty,34 a kind of erotic Messiah to whom all past ages have been leading up (17, 53, and 106, or what we have called the “effusive” sonnets), whose death will be “Truth and Beauty’s doom and date” [Sonnet 14, l. 14].35 In short, he is a divine man urged, like other divine men, to set about transferring his divinity to a younger successor as soon as he reaches the height of his own powers. And whether the sonnets are in sequence or not, he is consistently associated with the spring and summer of the natural cycle, and winter and old age are associated with absence from him. His moral character has the same associations: it is spring or summer when he is lovable and winter when he is reproachable. The poet cannot keep the resolution announced in Sonnet 21 of detaching the youth from nature. A human being is a microcosm of nature, and the most obvious and conspicuous form of nature is the cycle. In the cycle there are two elements of poetic importance. One is the fact that winter and summer, age and youth, darkness and light, are always a contrast. The other is the continual passing of one into the other, or the cycle proper. The first element suggests an ultimate separation of

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a world of youth, light, and “eternal summer” [Sonnet 18, l. 9] from its opposite. This can never happen in experience, but it would be nice to live in the paradisal ver perpetuum that the youth’s beauty symbolizes (Sonnet 53), and poetry is based on what might be, not on what is. The second element suggests universal mutability and decay. Thus if a final separation of the two poles of the cycle is conceivable, the lower pole will be identical with the cycle as such, and the world of winter, darkness, and age will be seen as the wheel of time that carries all created things, including the blossoms of spring, away into itself. Time is the enemy of all things in the sonnets, the universal devourer that reduces everything to nonexistence. It is associated with a great variety of eating metaphors, the canker eating the rose, the festering lily, the earth devouring its brood, and the like, which imply disappearance rather than digestion. Death is only a small aspect of time’s power: what is really terrifying about time is its capacity for annihilation. Hence the financial metaphors of “lease,” “audit,” and similar bargains with time are continually associated with the more sinister images of “expense” and “waste.” The phrase “wastes of time” in Sonnet 12 [l. 10] carries the heaviest possible weight of brooding menace. Nature itself, though a force making for life as time makes for death, is capable only of “temporary” or time-bound resistance to time. Behind the daily cycle of the sun, the yearly cycle of the seasons, the generation cycle of human life, are the slower cycles of empires that build up pyramids with newer might, and the cosmological cycles glanced at in Sonnets 60 and 64, with their Ovidian echoes. But though slower, they are making for the same goal. Nature in the sonnets, as in many of the plays, is closely associated with fortune, and the cycle of nature with fortune’s wheel. Those who think of fortune as more substantial than a wheel are the “fools of time” [Sonnet 124, l. 13] who, whatever they are in Sonnet 124, include the painful warrior who is defeated and forgotten and the makers of “policy, that heretic” [l. 9]—policy, in contrast to justice or statesmanship, being the kind of expediency that merely greases the wheel of fortune. Royal figures are also, in Sonnets 7, 33, and perhaps 107, associated with the cycle of nature: they pass into “eclipse” [Sonnet 107, l. 5] like the sun and moon turning down from the height of heaven. The nadir of experience is represented by the terrible Sonnet 129, which, starting from the thematic words “expense” and “waste,” describes what a life completely bound to time is like, with the donkey’s carrot of pas-

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sion jerking us along its homeless road, causing an agonizing wrench of remorse at every instant. Directly above is “the heaven that leads men to this hell” [Sonnet 129, l. 14], and which includes in its many mansions the fool’s paradise in which the youth is living in the opening sonnets. Here we must distinguish the poet’s tone, which is tender and affectionate, from his imagery, which is disconcertingly sharp. As Sonnet 94 explains in a bitterer context, the youth causes but does not produce love: he is a self-enclosed “bud,” contracted to his own bright eyes like Narcissus. As with a child, his self-absorption is part of his charm. He does not need to seek a beauty in women which he already contains (Sonnet 20, where all the rhymes are “feminine”). He lacks nothing, so he is never in search: he merely attracts, even to the point of becoming, in Sonnet 31, a charnel-house of the poet’s dead loves. He is therefore not on the side of nature with her interest in “increase,” “store,” and renewed life, but on the side of time and its devouring “waste.” He is his own gradually fading reflection in water, not “A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass” [Sonnet 5, l. 10], or a seed which maintains an underground resistance to time. The poet’s arguments in Sonnets 1–17 are not intended to be specious, like the similar-sounding arguments of Venus to Adonis. The youth is (by implication at least) “the tomb of his self-love” [Sonnet 3, ll. 7–8], which is really a hatred turned against himself, and has no future but “folly, age, and cold decay” [Sonnet 11, l. 6]. It would take a large book to work out in detail the complications of the imagery of eyes and heart, of shadow and substance, of picture and treasure, around which the argument of the beautiful-youth sonnets revolves. We can only try to give the main point of it. Above the selfenclosed narcissistic world of the youth of the opening sonnets, there appear to be three main levels of experience. There is the world of ordinary experience, a physical world of subject and object, a world where lover and beloved are essentially separated. This is the world associated with winter and absence, with the “lower” elements of earth and water (Sonnet 44), with the poet’s age and poverty which increase the sense of separateness, with the reproach and scandal that separate them mentally and morally. This is also the world in which the poet is a busy actordramatist, with a capacity for subduing his nature to what it works in unrivalled in the history of culture, a career which leaves him not only without a private life but almost without a private personality. Then there is a world above this of lover and beloved in contact, a quasi-paradisal world associated with the presence and kindness of the

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youth, with spring and summer, with air and fire in Sonnet 45, with content, ecstasy, forgiveness, and reconciliation. It is in this world that the youth appears like a god of love, associated with the sun and its gift of life, the spirit who appears everywhere in nature (Sonnet 113), the god of the spring flowers (99), all hues in his controlling. But even in this world he is still a separate person, contemplated and adored. There is still another world above this, a world which is above time itself. This is the world in which lover and beloved are not simply in contact, but are identified. The union symbolized by the “one flesh” of Christian marriage is a sexual union: this is the kind of union expressed in the lighthearted paradoxes of The Phoenix and the Turtle, where reason is outraged by the fact that two souls are one and yet remain two.36 In the sonnets the union is a “marriage of true minds” [Sonnet 116, l. 1], but the symbolism and the paradoxes are much the same. All through the sonnets we meet metaphors of identification and exchange of souls: these are, of course, the regulation hyperboles of love poetry, and in their context (as in Sonnet 39) are often harshly contradicted by the reality of separation. But in the 116–125 group they begin to take on new significance as a genuine aspect of the experience. Sonnet 125 begins with adoring the youth’s external beauty, expressed in the metaphor of bearing the canopy, and thence moves into the youth’s heart, where an “oblation” [Sonnet 125, l. 10] and an exchange of souls takes place. The final consummation carries with it the expulsion of the “informer” [Sonnet 125, l. 13] or accuser, the spirit of the winterand-absence world of separation, with all its scandals and rumours and misunderstandings and reproaches. Thus the lower world is left behind, and the higher paradisal world still remaining is dismissed in its turn in Sonnet 126. Here the “lovely boy” [l. 1]37 is seen in the role of a mock king, invested with the regalia of time, and the poem ends in a sombre warning tone. From our point of view it is not much of a threat: he is merely told that he will grow old and eventually die, like everyone else. But the lovely boy from this perspective has nothing to him but what is temporary: what faces him is the annihilation of his essence. It is not hard to understand how the selfish youth of the winter-andabsence sonnets, whose beauty is as deceitful as “Eve’s apple” [Sonnet 93, l. 13], can also be the divine and radiant godhead of Sonnet 105, an unexampled trinity of kind, true, and fair. Love and propinquity work this miracle every day in human life, and Sonnet 114 shows it at work in the poet’s mind. But what relation does the youth have, if any, to the

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“marriage of true minds”? There is little enough in the sonnets to show that the youth had a mind, much less a true one. We can hardly answer such a question: even Christianity, with all its theological apparatus, cannot clearly express the relation of whatever it is in us that is worth redeeming to what we actually are. And Shakespeare is not turning his theme over to Christianity, as Dante does in the moment at the end of the Paradiso when Beatrice gives place to the Virgin Mary. In these sonnets the poet assumes the role of both redeemer and repentant prodigal son. His love enables him to transcend himself, but in the instant of fulfilment the object of his love vanishes, because it is no longer an object. A straight Platonic explanation would be that the lover leaves behind the beautiful object as he enters into union with the form or idea of love: this is true enough as far as it goes, but we should not infer that the poet has achieved only a subjective triumph (he is no longer a subject) or that the world he enters is devoid of a beloved personality. However that may be, one thing is made clear to us: the identity of love, immortality, and the poet’s genius or essential self. As Chaucer says: The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th’ assay so hard, so sharp the conquering, The dredful joye, alwey that slit so yerne: Al this mene I by love. [Parliament of Fowls, ll. 1–4]38

Just as Sonnet 129 is the nadir of experience as the sonnets treat it, so Sonnet 146 is its zenith. Here there is no youth, only the poet’s soul, which is told, in the exact imagery of the opening sonnets, not to devote all its attention to its “fading mansion” which only “worms” will inherit [Sonnet 146, ll. 6–7], but (in an astonishing reversal of the eating metaphors) to feed on death until death disappears. The poet’s soul in this sonnet is a nobile castello or House of Alma, to outward view a beleaguered fortress, but in itself, like the tower of love in Sonnet 124, “hugely politic” [l. 11], reaching clear of time into a paradise beyond its cycle, as the mountain of purgatory does in Dante. In this sonnet, near the end of the series, Shakespeare takes the perspective that Petrarch adopts in his first sonnet, where he looks down at the time when he was another man, when he fed his heart with error and reaped a harvest of shame. But Shakespeare is not writing a palinode: nothing in the previous sonnets is repudiated, or even regretted. Love is as strong as death: there is no wavering on that point, nor is there any tendency,

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so far as we can see, to change from Eros to a “higher” type of love in mid-climb. The second group of sonnets, 127 through 154, though a unity, can hardly be in strict sequence. Two of the finest of them, 129 and 146, have already been discussed: they indicate the total range of the theme of love as Shakespeare handles it, including this group as well as its predecessor. Some seem expendable: the silly octosyllabic jingle of 145 does not gain any significance from its context, nor do the last two, which really do come under the head of “mere literary exercise,” and for which the models have been discovered.39 Two other sonnets in this group, 138 and 144, appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, along with three poems from Love’s Labour’s Lost, two of which are also sonnets.40 Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play which cries out for—in fact practically announces—a sequel, and Meres’s reference to a Love’s Labour’s Won suggests that a sequel was mooted, if not written.41 I sometimes wonder if these sonnets were not originally thought of as potentially useful for some such play: if so, Sonnet 144 may have become the germ of the two great cycles after the play was abandoned. Perhaps the conception of an original dramatic context might be stretched to accommodate that social climber Sonnet 145. Every writer on the sonnets is entitled to one free speculation. Most of these sonnets, of course, revolve around a dark female figure, who, unlike the youth, can be treated with irony and detachment, even playfulness. The basis of the attachment here is sexual, and the slightly ribald tone of 138 and 151 is appropriate for it. This ribald tone never appears in the first group except in the close of Sonnet 20, an exception which clearly proves the rule. In the first group the youth takes over the poet’s mistress, and the poet resigns her with a pathetic wistfulness (“And yet it may be said I loved her dearly” [Sonnet 42, l. 2]) which is not heard in the second group. In the second group the poet has two loves, a fair youth and a dark lady, in which the former has the role of a “better angel” [Sonnet 144, l. 3]—hardly his role in the other group, though of course he could be called that by hyperbole. It is natural to associate the mistress of Sonnet 42 with the dark lady and the “man right fair” [l. 3] of 144 with the beautiful youth. But it is simpler, and not really in contradiction with this, to think of the two groups, not as telling the same story, but as presenting a contrast of two opposed attitudes to love, a contrast heightened by a number of deliberate resemblances—“Minding true things by what their mockeries be,” as the chorus says in Henry V [4.0.53].

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The word “fair” in modern English means both attractive and lightcomplexioned, and Shakespeare’s “black” has a similar double meaning of brunette and ill-favoured. The same pun occurs in Love’s Labour’s Lost in connection with the dark Rosaline, and in The Two Gentlemen of Verona the fickle Proteus says that his new love for Silvia makes his old mistress Julia seem like a “swarthy Ethiope” [2.6.26], though Julia herself tells us that her hair is “perfect yellow” [4.4.189]. The uniting of the two meanings suggests an involuntary attachment: involuntary means against the will, and the theme of the imprisoned will leads to more puns on the poet’s name. The centre of gravity of the dark-lady sonnets is Sonnet 130, which corresponds to Sonnet 21 in the other group, where the poet stresses the ordinary humanity of his beloved. As we saw, he could not keep this balance with the youth. The youth is either present or absent: when present he seems divine, when absent he turns almost demonic. In the dark-lady group the poet again cannot keep the human balance, and the tone of affectionate raillery in 130 (and in 128) is not heard again. In striking contrast to the earlier group, the dark lady is both present and sinister. She takes on divine attributes up to a point, but they are those of a “white goddess”42 or what Blake would call a female will.43 Like Blake’s Gwendolen or Rahab, she can be fitfully maternal (143) and more than fitfully meretricious (142), but her relation to her love is ultimately destructive. Thus these sonnets deal with what we have called the “low” dialectic of bondage and freedom in its sharpest possible form, where the lover is held by a sexual fascination to a mistress whom he does not like or respect, so that he despises himself for his own fidelity. The dark lady is an incarnation of desire rather than love; she tantalizes, turning away “To follow that which flies before her face” [Sonnet 143, l. 7], precisely because she is not loved. The youth’s infidelities hurt more than hers, but they do not exasperate: they touch nothing in the poet that wants only to possess. The assertion that her “face hath not the power to make love groan” [Sonnet 131, l. 6] indicates that she is a projection of something self-destructive in the lover, a death as strong as love, a “becoming of things ill” [Sonnet 150, l. 5] which ends, not in a romantic Liebestod, but in a gradual desiccation of the spirit. It is a very Proustian relation (though the role of the captive is reversed), and it is significant that the imagery is almost entirely sterile, with nothing of the former group’s emphasis on store, increase, and rebirth. What one misses in Shakespeare’s sonnets, perhaps, is what we find

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so abundantly in the plays that it seems to us Shakespeare’s outstanding characteristic. This is the sense of human proportion, of the concrete situation in which all passion is, however tragically, farcically, or romantically, spent. If the sonnets were new to us, we should expect Shakespeare to remain on the human middle ground of Sonnets 21 and 130: neither the quasi-religious language of 146 nor the prophetic vision of 129 seems typical of him. Here again we must think of the traditions of the genre he was using. The human middle ground is the area of Ovid, but the courtly love tradition, founded as it was on a “moralized” adaptation of Ovid, was committed to a psychological quest that sought to explore the utmost limits of consciousness and desire. It is this tradition of which Shakespeare’s sonnets are the definitive summing-up. They are a poetic realization of the whole range of love in the Western world, from the idealism of Petrarch to the ironic frustrations of Proust. If his great predecessor tells us all we need to know of the art of love, Shakespeare has told us more than we can ever fully understand of its nature. He may not have unlocked his heart in the sonnets, but the sonnets can unlock doors in our minds, and show us that poetry can be something more than a mighty maze of walks without a plan.44 From the plays alone we get an impression of an inscrutable Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold’s sphinx who poses riddles and will not answer them, who merely smiles and sits still.45 It is a call to mental adventure to find, in the sonnets, the authority of Shakespeare behind the conception of poetry as a marriage of Eros and Psyche, an identity of a genius that outlives time and a soul that feeds on death.

12 Recognition in The Winter’s Tale 1962

From FI, 107–18. First published in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama: In Honour of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 235–46. Reprinted in Shakespeare: “The Winter’s Tale”: A Casebook, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Macmillan, 1968; rpt. 1977; rpt. 1994 as Shakespeare: “The Winter’s Tale”: A Selection of Critical Essays), 184–97; Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 357–67; Shakespeare’s Later Comedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. D.J. Palmer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 332–45; and The Winter’s Tale: Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Hunt (Garland: New York, 1995), 106–18.

In structure The Winter’s Tale, like King Lear, falls into two main parts separated by a storm. The fact that they are also separated by sixteen years is less important. The first part ends with the ill-fated Antigonus caught between a bear and a raging sea [3.3.49–58],1 echoing a passage in one of Lear’s storm speeches [3.4.9–17, 28–34]. This first part is the “winter’s tale” proper, for Mamillius is just about to whisper his tale into his mother’s ear [2.1.30–2] when the real winter strikes with the entrance of Leontes and his guards. Various bits of imagery, such as Polixenes’ wish to get back to Bohemia for fear of “sneaping winds” [1.2.13] blowing at home and Hermione’s remark during her trial (reproduced from Pandosto) that the emperor of Russia was her father [3.2.119],2 are linked to a winter setting. The storm, like the storm in King Lear, is described in such a way as to suggest that a whole order of things is being dissolved in a dark chaos of destruction and devouring monsters, and the

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action of the first part ends in almost unrelieved gloom. The second part is a tragicomedy where, as in Cymbeline and Measure for Measure, there is frightening rather than actual hurting. Some of the frightening seems cruel and unnecessary, but the principle of “all’s well that ends well” holds in comedy, however great nonsense it may be in life. The two parts form a diptych of parallel and contrasting actions, one dealing with age, winter, and the jealousy of Leontes, the other with youth, summer, and the love of Florizel. The first part follows Greene’s Pandosto closely;3 for the second part no major source has been identified. A number of symmetrical details, which are commonplaces of Shakespearean design, help to build up the contrast: for instance, the action of each part begins with an attempt to delay a return. The two parts are related in two ways, by sequence and by contrast. The cycle of nature, turning through the winter and summer of the year and through the age and youth of human generations, is at the centre of the play’s imagery. The opening scene sets the tone by speaking of Mamillius and of the desire of the older people in the country to live until he comes to reign. The next scene, where the action begins, refers to Leontes’ own youth in a world of pastoral innocence and its present reflection in Mamillius. The same cycle is also symbolized, as in Pericles, by a mother–daughter relationship, and Perdita echoes Marina when she speaks of Hermione as having “ended when I but began” [5.3.45].4 In the transition to the second part the clown watches the shipwreck and the devouring of Antigonus; the shepherd exhibits the birth tokens of Perdita and remarks, “Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born” [3.3.113–14].5 Leontes, we are told, was to have returned Polixenes’ visit “this coming summer” [1.1.5], but instead of that sixteen years pass and we find ourselves in Bohemia with spring imagery bursting out of Autolycus’s first song, “When daffodils begin to peer” [4.3.1 ff.]. If Leontes is an imaginary cuckold, Autolycus, the thieving harbinger of spring, is something of an imaginative cuckoo. Thence we go on to the sheep-shearing festival, where the imagery extends from early spring to winter evergreens, a vision of nature demonstrating its creative power throughout the entire year, which is perhaps what the dance of the twelve satyrs represents [4.4.324 ff.]. The symbolic reason for the sixteen-year gap is clearly to have the cycle of the year reinforced by the slower cycle of human generations. Dramatic contrast in Shakespeare normally includes a superficial resemblance in which one element is a parody of the other. Theseus remarks in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that the lunatic, the lover, and the

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poet are of imagination all compact [5.1.7–8]. Theseus, like Yeats, is a smiling public man past his first youth,6 but not, like Yeats, a poet and a critic. What critical ability there is in that family belongs entirely to Hippolyta, whose sharp comments are a most effective contrast to Theseus’s amiable bumble. Hippolyta objects that the story of the lovers has a consistency to it that lunacy would lack [5.1.23–7], and everywhere in Shakespearean comedy the resemblance of love and lunacy is based on their opposition. Florizel’s love for Perdita, which transcends his duty to his father and his social responsibilities as a prince, is a state of mind above reason. He is advised, he says, by his “fancy” [4.4.482]: If my reason Will thereto be obedient, I have reason; If not, my senses, better pleased with madness, Do bid it welcome. [4.4.482–5]

Leontes’ jealousy is a fantasy below reason, and hence a parody of Florizel’s state. Camillo, who represents a kind of middle level in the play, is opposed to both, calling one diseased and the other desperate [1.2.384–7; 4.4.485]. Both states of mind collide with reality in the middle, and one is annihilated and the other redeemed, like the two aspects of law in Christianity. As the Gentleman says in reporting the finding of Perdita, “They looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed” [5.2.14–15]. When Leontes has returned to his proper state of mind, he echoes Florizel when he says of watching the statue, No settled senses of the world can match The pleasure of that madness. [5.3.72–3]

The play ends in a double recognition scene: the first, which is reported only through the conversation of three Gentlemen, is the recognition of Perdita’s parentage; the second is the final scene of the awakening of Hermione and the presenting of Perdita to her. The machinery of the former scene is the ordinary cognitio of New Comedy, where the heroine is proved by birth tokens to be respectable enough for the hero to marry her. In many comedies, though never in Shakespeare, such a cognitio is brought about through the ingenuity of a tricky servant.7 Autolycus has this role in The Winter’s Tale, for though “out of service” [4.3.14] he still regards Florizel as his master, and he has also the rascality and the com-

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placent soliloquies about his own cleverness that go with the role. He gains possession of the secret of Perdita’s birth, but somehow or other the denouement takes place without him, and he remains superfluous to the plot, consoling himself with the reflection that doing so good a deed would be inconsistent with the rest of his character. In The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare has combined the two traditions which descended from Menander, pastoral romance and New Comedy, and has consequently come very close to Menandrine formulas as we have them in such a play as Epitrepontes.8 But the fact that this conventional recognition scene is only reported indicates that Shakespeare is less interested in it than in the statue scene, which is all his own. In Measure for Measure and The Tempest the happy ending is brought about through the exertions of the central characters, whose successes are so remarkable that they seem to many critics to have something almost supernatural about them, as though they were the agents of a divine providence. The germ of truth in this conception is that in other comedies of the same general structure, where there is no such character, the corresponding dramatic role is filled by a supernatural being—Diana in Pericles and Jupiter in Cymbeline. The Winter’s Tale belongs to the second group, for the return of Perdita proceeds from the invisible providence of Apollo. In Pericles and Cymbeline there is, in addition to the recognition scene, a dream in which the controlling divinity appears with an announcement of what is to conclude the action.9 Such a scene forms an emblematic recognition scene, in which we are shown the power that brings about the comic resolution. In The Tempest, where the power is human, Prospero’s magic presents three emblematic visions: a wedding masque of gods to Ferdinand, a disappearing banquet to the Court Party, and “trumpery” (4.1.186) to entice Stephano and Trinculo to steal. In The Winter’s Tale Apollo does not enter the action, and the emblematic recognition scene is represented by the sheep-shearing festival. This is also on three levels. To Florizel it is a kind of betrothal masque and “a meeting of the petty gods” [4.4.4]; to the Court Party, Polixenes and Camillo, it is an illusion which they snatch away; to Autolycus it is an opportunity to sell his “trumpery” (4.4.597)10 and steal purses. An emblematic recognition scene of this kind is the distinguishing feature of the four late romances. As a convention, it develops from pastoral romance and the narrative or mythological poem. The sheep-shearing festival resembles the big bravura scenes of singing-matches and the like

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in Sidney’s Arcadia,11 and The Rape of Lucrece comes to an emblematic focus in the tapestry depicting the fall of Troy, where Lucrece identifies herself with Hecuba and Tarquin with Sinon, and determines that the second Troy will not collapse around a rape like the first one [ll. 1366–1568]. In the earlier comedies the emblematic recognition scene is usually in the form of burlesque. Thus in Love’s Labour’s Lost the pageant of Worthies elaborates on Don Armado’s appeal to the precedents of Solomon, Samson, and Hercules when he falls in love [1.2.173–7]; but his appeal has also burlesqued the main theme of the play. The allegorical garden episode in Richard II [3.4] represents a similar device, but one rather different in its relation to the total dramatic structure. In any case the controlling power in the dramatic action of The Winter’s Tale is something identified both with the will of the gods, especially Apollo, and with the power of nature. We have to keep this association of nature and pagan gods in mind when we examine the imagery in the play that reminds us of religious, even explicitly Christian, conceptions. At the beginning Leontes’ youth is referred to as a time of paradisal innocence [1.2.67–75]; by the end of the scene he has tumbled into a completely illusory knowledge of good and evil. He says: How blest am I In my just censure! in my true opinion! Alack, for lesser knowledge! How accurs’d In being so blest! (2.1.36–9)

Or, as Ford says in The Merry Wives, “God be praised for my jealousy!” [2.2.309].12 The irony of the scene in which Leontes is scolded by Paulina [2.3] turns on the fact that Leontes tries to be a source of righteous wrath when he is actually an object of it. Hermione’s trial is supposed to be an act of justice and the sword of justice is produced twice to have oaths sworn on it [2.3.168–9, 3.2.124], but Leontes is under the wrath of Apollo and divine justice is his enemy. The opposite of wrath is grace, and Hermione is associated throughout the play with the word “grace.” During the uneasy and rather cloying friendliness at the beginning of the play Hermione pronounces the word “grace” conspicuously three times [1.2.80, 99, 105], after which the harsh dissonances of Leontes’ jealousy begin. She also uses the word when she is ordered off to prison [3.2.47] and in the only speech that she makes after act 3 [5.3.122]. But such grace is not Christian or theological grace, which is superior to the order of

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nature, but a secular analogy of Christian grace which is identical with nature—the grace that Spenser celebrates in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene. In the romances, and in some of the earlier comedies, we have a sense of an irresistible power, whether of divine or human agency, making for a providential resolution. Whenever we have a strong sense of such a power, the human beings on whom it operates seem greatly diminished in size. This is a feature of the romances which often disappoints those who wish that Shakespeare had simply kept on writing tragedies. Because of the heavy emphasis on reconciliation in Cymbeline, the jealousy of Posthumus is not titanic, as the jealousy of Othello is titanic; it expresses only a childish petulance about women in general: “I’ll write against them, / Detest them, curse them” [2.5.32–3].13 Similarly Leontes (as he himself points out) falls far short of being a sombre demonic tyrant on the scale of Macbeth, and can only alternate between bluster and an uneasy sense of having done wrong: Away with that audacious lady! Antigonus, I charg’d thee that she should not come about me. I knew she would. [2.3.42–4]

This scaling down of the human perspective is in conformity with a dramatic structure that seems closely analogous to such Christian conceptions as wrath and grace. But the only one of the four romances in which I suspect any explicit—which means allegorical—references to Christianity is Cymbeline. Cymbeline was king of Britain at the birth of Christ, and in such scenes as the Jailer’s speculations about death [5.4.157 ff.] and his wistful “I would we were all of one mind, and that mind good” [5.4.203–4],14 there are hints that some far-reaching change in the human situation is taking place offstage. The play ends on the word “peace” [5.5.485] and with Cymbeline’s promise to pay tribute to Rome [5.5.460– 2], almost as though, as soon as the story ended, another one were to begin with Augustus Caesar’s decree that all the world should be taxed. No such explicit links are appropriate to The Winter’s Tale, though it is true that the story does tell of a mysterious disappearing child born in the winter who has four father-figures assigned to her: a real one, a putative one who later becomes her father-in-law, a fictional one, Smalus of Libya in Florizel’s tale [5.1.156–63], and a shepherd foster-father. This makes up a group of a shepherd and three kings, of whom one is African. The

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first part of The Winter’s Tale is, like Cymbeline, full of the imagery of superstitious sacrifice. Leontes, unable to sleep, wonders if having Hermione burnt alive would not give him rest [2.3.7–9]. Antigonus offers to spay his three daughters if Hermione is guilty, though he would prefer to castrate himself [2.1.143–50]. Mamillius, whom Leontes thinks of as a part of himself, becomes the victim necessary to save Leontes, and the exposing of Perdita is attended by a sacrificial holocaust. Not only is Antigonus devoured by a bear, but the ship and its crew were “Wrecked the same instant of their master’s death and in the view of the shepherd; so that all the instruments which aided to expose the child were even then lost when it was found” [5.2.69–72]. In contrast, the restoring of Perdita to her mother is an act of sacramental communion, but it is a secular communion, and the “instruments” aiding in it are the human arts. The main characters repair to Paulina’s house intending to “sup” there [5.2.103], and are taken into her chapel and presented with what is alleged to be a work of painting and sculpture. Hermione, like Thaisa in Pericles [3.2.90– 106], is brought to life by the playing of music [5.3.98], and references to the art of magic follow [5.3.110–11]. Art, therefore, seems part of the regenerating power of the play, and the imagination of the poet is to be allied with that of the lover as against that of the lunatic. Apart from the final scene, at least three kinds of art are mentioned in the play. First, there is the art of the gardener who, according to Polixenes’ famous speech, may help or change nature by marrying a gentler scion to the wildest stock but can do so only through nature’s power, so that “the art itself is nature” [4.4.97]. This is a sound humanist view: it is the view of Sidney, who contrasts the brazen world of nature with the golden world of art but also speaks of art as a second nature.15 Sidney’s view does not necessitate, but it is consistent with, his ridiculing of plays that show a character as an infant in one act and grown up in the next, and that mingle kings and clowns in the same scene.16 It is also the view of Ben Jonson who, recognizing a very different conception of nature in Shakespeare’s romances, remarked good-humouredly that he was “loth to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries.”17 We note that Polixenes’ speech entirely fails to convince Perdita, who merely repeats that she will have nothing to do with bastard flowers: No more than, were I painted, I would wish This youth should say ’twere well, and only therefore Desire to breed by me. . . . [4.4.101–3]

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—a remark which oddly anticipates the disappearance of the painted statue of Hermione into the real Hermione. It also, as has often been pointed out, fails to convince Polixenes himself, for a few moments later [4.4.418–41] we find him in a paroxysm of fury at the thought of his own gentle scion marrying the wild stock of a shepherd’s daughter [4.4.93]. Whatever its merits, Polixenes’ view of art hardly seems to describe the kind of art that the play itself manifests. Secondly, there is the kind of art represented by Julio Romano, said to be the painter and sculptor of Hermione’s statue, a mimetic realist who “would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape” [5.2.99– 100].18 But it turns out that in fact no statue has been made of Hermione, and the entire reference to Romano seems pointless. We do not need his kind of art when we have the real Hermione, and here again, whatever Romano’s merits, neither he nor the kind of realism he represents seems to be very central to the play itself. The literary equivalent of realism is plausibility, the supplying of adequate causation for events. There is little plausibility in The Winter’s Tale, and a great deal of what is repeatedly called “wonder” [5.2.16, 24]. Things are presented to us, not explained. The jealousy of Leontes explodes without warning: an actor may rationalize it in various ways; a careful reader of the text may suspect that the references to his youth have touched off some kind of suppressed guilt; but the essential fact is that the jealousy suddenly appears where it had not been before, like a second subject in a piece of music. “How should this grow?” Polixenes asks of Camillo [1.2.431], but Camillo evades the question. At the end of the play Hermione is first a statue, then a living woman. The explanations given do not satisfy even Leontes, much less us. He says: But how, is to be question’d; for I saw her, As I thought, dead, and have in vain said many A prayer upon her grave. [5.3.139–41]

As often in Shakespeare, further explanations are promised to the characters, but are not given to the audience: Paulina merely says, “it appears she lives” [5.3.117]. Thirdly, though one blushes to mention it, there is the crude popular art of the ballads of Autolycus, of which one describes “how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden” [4.4.262–4]. “Is it true, think you?” asks Mopsa [4.4.266], unconsciously using one of the most frequently echoed words in the play. We notice that Shake-

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speare seems to be calling our attention to the incredibility of his story and to its ridiculous and outmoded devices when he makes both Paulina and the Gentlemen who report the recognition of Perdita speak of what is happening as “like an old tale” [5.3.117]. The magic words pronounced by Paulina that draw speech from Hermione are “Our Perdita is found” [5.3.121], and Paulina has previously said that the finding of Perdita is “monstrous to our human reason” [5.1.41]. And when one of the Gentlemen says, “Such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it” [5.2.23–5], we begin to suspect that the kind of art manifested by the play itself is in some respects closer to these “trumpery” ballads than to the sophisticated idealism and realism of Polixenes and Romano. My late and much beloved colleague Professor Harold S. Wilson has called attention to the similarity between Polixenes’ speech and a passage in Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), which in discussing the relation of art and nature uses the analogy of the gardener and the example of the “gillyvor.”19 Puttenham also goes on to say that there is another context where art is “only a bare imitator of nature’s works, following and counterfeiting her actions and effects, as the Marmoset doth many countenances and gestures of man; of which sort are the arts of painting and carving.”20 We are reminded of Romano, the painter and carver who is the perfect “ape” of nature. The poet, says Puttenham, is to use all types of art in their proper place, but for his greatest moments he will work “even as nature her self working by her own peculiar virtue and proper instinct and not by example or meditation or exercise as all other artificers do.”21 We feel that Puttenham, writing before Shakespeare had got properly started and two centuries earlier than Coleridge,22 has nonetheless well characterized the peculiar quality of Shakespeare’s art. The fact that Leontes’ state of mind is a parody of the imagination of lover and poet links The Winter’s Tale with Shakespeare’s “humour” comedies, which turn on the contrast between fantasy and reality. Katharina moves from shrew to obedient wife; Falstaff from the seducer to the gull of the merry wives; the King of Navarre and his followers from contemplative pedants seeking authority from books to helpless lovers performing the tasks imposed on them by their ladies. Similarly when Florizel says that his love for Perdita cannot fail but by The violation of my faith; and then

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Let nature crush the sides o’ th’ earth together, And mar the seeds within! . . . [4.4.476–9]

—he is supplying the genuine form of what Camillo describes in parallel cosmological terms: you may as well Forbid the sea for to obey the moon, As or by oath remove or counsel shake The fabric of his folly, whose foundation Is piled upon his faith. . . . [1.2.426–30]

Puttenham begins his treatise by comparing the poet, as a creator, to God, “who without any travail to his divine imagination made all the world of nought.”23 Leontes’ jealousy is a parody of a creation out of nothing, as the insistent repetition of the word “nothing” in the first act indicates [1.2.284, 292–6], and as Leontes himself says in his mysterious mumbling half-soliloquy: Affection, thy intention stabs the centre! Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dream24—how can this be? With what’s unreal thou coactive art, And fellow’st nothing. [1.2.138–42]

A humour is restored to a normal outlook by being confronted, not directly with reality, but with a reflection of its own illusion, as Katharina is tamed by being shown the reflection of her own shrewishness in Petruchio. Similarly Leontes, in the final scene, is “mocked with art” [5.3.68], the realistic illusion of Romano’s statue which gradually reveals itself to be the real Hermione. In the artificial society of the Sicilian court there are Mamillius, the hopeful prince who dies, and the infant Perdita who vanishes. In the rural society of Bohemia there are the shepherdess Perdita who is “Flora Peering in April’s front” [4.4.2–3], and Florizel who, as his name suggests, is her masculine counterpart, and the Prince Charming who later reminds Leontes strongly of Mamillius and becomes Leontes’ promised heir. Perdita says that she would like to strew Florizel with flowers:

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The antithesis between the two worlds is marked by Polixenes, who is handed “flowers of winter” [4.4.79] and who proceeds to destroy the festival like a winter wind, repeating the senex iratus role of Leontes in the other kingdom. But though he can bully Perdita, he impresses her no more than Leontes had impressed Hermione. Perdita merely says: I was not much afeard; for once or twice I was about to speak and tell him plainly, The selfsame sun that shines upon his court Hides not his visage from our cottage but Looks on alike. [4.4.442–6]

There is a faint New Testament echo here [Matthew 5:45], but of course to Perdita the god of the sun would be Apollo, who does see to it that Polixenes is outwitted, though only by the fact that Perdita is really a princess. As always in Shakespeare, the structure of society is unchanged by the comic action. What happens in The Winter’s Tale is the opposite of the art of the gardener as Polixenes describes it. A society which is artificial in a limited sense at the beginning of the play becomes at the end still artificial, but natural as well. Nature provides the means for the regeneration of artifice. But still it is true that “The art itself is nature,” and one wonders why a speech ending with those words should be assigned to Polixenes, the opponent of the festival. The context of Polixenes’ theory is the Renaissance framework in which there are two levels of the order of nature. Art belongs to human nature, and human nature is, properly speaking, the state that man lived in in Eden, or the golden age, before his fall into a lower world of physical nature to which he is not adapted. Man attempts to regain his original state through law, virtue, education, and such rational and conscious aids as art. Here nature is a superior order. In poetry this upper level of nature, uncontaminated by the sin and death of the fall, is usually symbolized by the starry spheres, which are now all that is left of it. The starry spheres produce the music of the spheres, and the harmony of music usually represents this upper level of nature in human life. Most Shakespearean comedy is organized within this framework, and

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when it is, its imagery takes on the form outlined by G. Wilson Knight in The Shakespearian Tempest (1932).26 The tempest symbolizes the destructive elements in the order of nature, and music the permanently constructive elements in it. Music in its turn is regularly associated with the starry spheres, of which the one closest to us, the moon, is the normal focus. The control of the tempest by the harmony of the spheres appears in the image of the moon pulling the tides, an image used once or twice in The Winter’s Tale. The action of The Merchant of Venice, too, extends from the cosmological harmonies of the fifth act, where the moon sleeps with Endymion [5.1.109], to the tempest that wrecked Antonio’s ships. In Pericles, which employs this imagery of harmony and tempest most exhaustively, Pericles is said to be a master of music [2.5.30], Cerimon revives Thaisa by music, Diana announces her appearance to Pericles by music, and the final recognition scene unites the music and tempest symbols, since it takes place in the temple of Diana during the festival of Neptune. Music also accompanies the revival of Hermione in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale. All the attention is absorbed in Hermione as she begins to move while music plays; and we are reminded of Autolycus and of his role as a kind of rascally Orpheus at the sheep-shearing festival: “My clown . . . would not stir his pettitoes till he had both tune and words; which so drew the rest of the herd to me that all their other senses stuck in ears. . . . No hearing, no feeling, but my sir’s song, and admiring the nothing of it” [4.4.604–13]. Here again Autolycus seems to be used to indicate that something is being subordinated in the play, though by no means eliminated. In another solstitial play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the cosmology is of this more conventional Renaissance kind. In the middle, between the world of chaos symbolized by tempest and the world of starry spheres symbolized by music, comes the cycle of nature, the world of Eros and Adonis, Puck and Pyramus, the love-god and the dying god. To this middle world the fairies belong, for the fairies are spirits of the four natural elements, and their dissension causes disorder in nature. Above, the cold fruitless moon of Diana, whose nun Hermia would have to be [1.1.70–3], hangs over the action. While a mermaid is calming the sea by her song and attracting the stars by the power of harmony, Cupid shoots an arrow at the moon and its vestal: it falls in a parabola on a flower and turns it “purple with love’s wound” [2.1.167]. The story of Pyramus is not very coherently told in Peter Quince’s play, but in Ovid there is a curious image of the blood spurting out of Pyramus in an arc like wa-

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ter out of a burst pipe and falling on the white mulberry and turning it purple.27 Here nature as a cycle of birth and death, symbolized by the purple flower, revolves underneath nature as a settled and predictable order or harmony, as it does also in a third solstitial play, Twelfth Night, which begins with an image comparing music to a wind blowing on a bank of violets [1.1.5–7]. But in The Winter’s Tale nature is associated, not with the credible, but with the incredible: nature as an order is subordinated to the nature that yearly confronts us with the impossible miracle of renewed life. In Ben Jonson’s animadversions on Shakespeare’s unnatural romances it is particularly the functional role of the dance, the “concupiscence of jigs,” as he calls it, that he objects to.28 But it is the dance that most clearly expresses the pulsating energy of nature as it appears in The Winter’s Tale, an energy which communicates itself to the dialogue. Such words as “push” and “wild” (meaning rash) are constantly echoed; the play ends with the words “Hastily lead away,” and we are told that the repentant Leontes o’er and o’er divides him ’Twixt his unkindness and his kindness; th’ one He chides to hell and bids the other grow Faster than thought or time. [4.4.551–4]

Much is said about magic in the final scene, but there is no magician, no Prospero, only the sense of a participation in the redeeming and reviving power of a nature identified with art, grace, and love. Hence the final recognition is appropriately that of a frozen statue turning into a living presence, and the appropriate Chorus is Time, the destructive element which is also the only possible representative of the timeless.

13 A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance 19–27 November 1963

From A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965; reprinted in paperback 1965, 1995 [foreword by Stanley Cavell]). Also reprinted in paperback, New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1969. French translation Une Perspective naturelle: Sur les comédies romanesques de Shakespeare, trans. Simone Chambon and Anne Wick (Paris: Éditions Belin, 2002). Chapter 4 partially reprinted in Modern Literary Criticism, 1900–1970, ed. Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 241–4; brief excerpt from pp. 177–8 (NP, 81) reprinted in Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Much Ado about Nothing,” ed. Walter R. Davis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 109–10; selections from pp. 183–4 (NP, 91–2) reprinted as “Integrating and Isolating Tendencies in Shakespeare’s Comedies,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of “As You Like It,” ed. Jay L. Halio (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 111–12. First delivered as the Bampton Lectures,1 under the title “The Development of Shakespearean Romance,” in the Rotunda of Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, at 8:30 P.M. on 19, 20, 26, and 27 November 1963. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, 22 November, Columbia University cancelled classes and events for the weekend and for Monday, 25 November, when President Kennedy’s funeral was held; however, activities resumed on 26 November, and Frye gave his third and fourth lectures as scheduled. Frye already had a wellestablished relationship with Columbia University, having served as a visiting professor at Columbia during the summer of 1958 (Ayre, 268), and as a lecturer and member of the supervising committee of the English Institute which met each fall on the Columbia campus.2 Frye’s notes for A Natural Perspective have been published in NRL, 214–48. The typescript of A Natural Perspective with printer’s annotations is in NFF, 1988, box 22, file 4.

A Natural Perspective

128 Preface

The present book is a revision of the Bampton Lectures, delivered at Columbia University in November, 1963, under the title “The Development of Shakespearean Romance.” I am greatly indebted to Columbia University and to my hosts who acted as chairmen for the lectures, VicePresident Lawrence Chamberlain, Professor Lewis Leary, the Reverend John McGill Krumm, and Professor Lionel Trilling, for so much kindness and hospitality. The lectures have of course been altered and expanded for publication, but the contents of this book are still within the orbit of the public lecture. That is, they are not contributions to Shakespearean scholarship as such, which requires a more exhaustive knowledge of bad quartos, foul papers, and drunken compositors than I possess, but a general introduction to Shakespearean comedy. My time for preparing the lectures was limited, and Shakespearean comedy was the only topic I then had readily available. I did not realize, until it was too late to retreat, that the lectures would arrive on the threshold of the year 1964, when an enormous spate of Shakespearean criticism would be produced by our superstitious reverence for the decimal system of counting.3 Comedy is a topic on which I have written a good deal, much of it incorporated in my Anatomy of Criticism, and some repetition in this book of points made elsewhere is inevitable. Still, I hope the book will have its own place to fill. For all that has been written about it, Shakespearean comedy still seems to me widely misunderstood and underestimated, and my main thesis, that the four romances are the inevitable and genuine culmination of the poet’s achievement, is clearly less obvious to many than it is to me. The perspective taken in these lectures is also, I hope, uncommon enough to be of some value. Each play of Shakespeare is a world in itself, so complete and satisfying a world that it is easy, delightful, and profitable to get lost in it. The result is that the bulk of Shakespearean criticism consists, rightly, I think, of commentary on individual plays. The present book retreats from commentary into a middle distance, considering the comedies as a single group unified by recurring images and structural devices. From this point of view they seem more like a number of simultaneous chess games played by a master who wins them all by devices familiar to him, and gradually, with patient study, to us, but which remain mysteries of an unfathomable skill. More important, the reader is led from the characteristics of the individual play, the vividness

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of characterization, the texture of imagery, and the like, to consider what kind of a form comedy is, and what its place is in literature. It is hoped that this will help him to understand more clearly the relation of his experience of Shakespeare to his experience of other literature and drama. The title is from the Duke’s speech near the end of Twelfth Night: “A natural perspective, that is and is not” [5.1.217]. My own personal title for the book, The Bottomless Dream, perhaps expresses the main thesis more clearly.4 The book is dedicated to the Board of Regents of Victoria University by the Principal of Victoria College, in appreciation for granting him a year’s leave of absence. N.F. Victoria College in the University of Toronto July 1964

I Mouldy Tales This book is concerned with principles of criticism and with the enjoyment of Shakespeare’s comedies. The principles form a complex theory and the enjoyment a complex experience, and it will be well to begin with some large simplifying device, like that of the dichotomy. We are told, by Coleridge, that all philosophers are either Platonists or Aristotelians;5 by Gilbert, that all girls and boys are either liberals or conservatives,6 and, by popular rumour, that all human beings are either girls or boys. These statements are clearly oversimplified, and are rhetorical rather than factual: they are designed to give us some perspective on the shape of a big subject, not to tell us the truth about it. In the same way, and subject to the same reservation, I shall begin with a similar dichotomy about literary criticism. I may express it, in the manner of Coleridge, by saying that all literary critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to centre either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance. This distinction rests on a much broader one, the distinction in fact implied in the traditional view of the function of literature as twofold: to delight and to instruct. On the most naive level of literary study there is the contrast between the person who reads to improve his mind or his command of the language and the person who reads detective stories in

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bed. These may of course be tendencies within the same person, like the woman in Aldous Huxley whose efforts to read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations kept collapsing into a lurid magazine.7 More highly developed students may reflect a similar duality of purpose. Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive, or as, in Arnold’s phrase, a criticism of life.8 They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. They thus tend, whether they say so or not, to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary centre of experience. They are attracted to tragedy, to realism, or to irony, because it is in those modes that they find the clearest reflection of what Freud calls the reality principle.9 They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value “high seriousness” in theme, though modern critics would have to interpret that phrase more broadly than Arnold, to include a more functional view of irony than he had.10 I have always been temperamentally an Odyssean critic myself, attracted to comedy and romance. But I find myself, apparently, in a minority, in a somewhat furtive and anonymous group who have not much of a theory, implicit or explicit, to hold them together. It is much more difficult to say what this approach to literature does when it becomes serious: when, so to speak, it stops reading detective stories and gets out of bed. Let us look first of all at the simple example of someone reading a detective story, and see what critical principles are involved in it. Reading a detective story indicates a liking for comic and romantic forms, and for the contemplation of a fiction for its own sake. We begin by shutting out or deliberately excluding our ordinary experience, for we accept, as part of the convention of the form, things that we know are not often found in actual experience, such as an ingenious murderer and an imaginative policeman. We do not want to think about the truth or likelihood of what we are reading, as long as it does not utterly outrage us; we simply want to see what is going to happen in the story. The first critical principle we notice is that the most obviously conventionalized fictions are the easiest to read. Popular literature is stylized and artificial to a very marked degree. In the detective story, the thriller, the Western, the adventure story, the science fiction, the kind of love story that depends on the formula that one critic has called the clinch-tease,11 we know in advance the kind of story we are going to

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read, and the characteristic features of the convention, turning up at the right places, give an additional impetus to the narrative movement. We find the continuity of reading easier because of an exceptionally vigorous pacing supplied by the convention. Many such stories are accompanied by testimonials from reviewers who were unable to put them down until they had finished reading them. There is an analogy here to the kind of music often played at pop concerts, where a tonic chord is pursued for ten pages and beaten to a pulp for three pages more. If the general shape and structure of the story is prescribed in advance, then—this is our second critical principle—all the literary merits of the story, the wit in the dialogue, the liveliness of the characterization, and the like, are a technical tour de force. They illustrate the author’s rhetorical skill in working within his conventions. From the point of view of the moral critic, the author is deliberately handicapping himself by employing conventions so rigid. The more critically we read detective stories, the more we tend to take the puzzle-plot for granted and appreciate the level of writing that the author has managed to achieve in spite of his conventional apparatus. Similarly with other highly artificial types of literature. If we read a sixteenth-century lyrical poet, we do not look primarily to see what he is going to say. We know what he is going to say: he is going to complain about the cruelty of his mistress. What we look for is the amount of resonance his rhetorical skill can bring out of this compulsory subject: the resonance that distinguishes Wyatt’s They flee from me or Drayton’s Since there’s no help from mediocre poems that have precisely the same content; or that, in another craft, distinguishes a Stradivarius from other instruments of the same shape. Of course all art is conventionalized, but where the convention is most obvious and obtrusive the sense of play, of accepting the rules of a game, is at its strongest. For this reason detective stories and other forms of popular fiction are regarded as “escape” reading. The fact that they are less serious than “real” novels is connected with the fact that they are more superficially complicated, just as light verse is more superficially complicated, in its rhyme schemes and the like, than “real poetry.” The appeal that popular fiction makes is a deliberately naive appeal: it tells us little that is credible about the life we live in, and has far less of the power that tragedy and realism have of throwing lightning flashes into the murky landscape of the human situation. The critic, as distinct from the ordinary consumer, may take a negative attitude toward such fiction. He may think of reading detective stories and their congeners as a semi-

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illicit relaxation, like solitary drinking, or he may reject the convention. One normally rejects a convention by saying that the individual works which belong to it are all alike. I remember hearing myself say this, when I was a student travelling in Italy, about the pictures of someone who bored me—Sodoma or Sassoferrato or Carlo Dolci or perhaps Guido Reni. It would not have occurred to me to say that of Giotto, because I was interested in Giotto,12 though the statement itself would have had exactly the same proportions of truth and untruth. If one is interested, one accepts the convention and makes the most of the variety within it. What difference does this distinction of critics make in approaching Shakespeare? The critic interested primarily in tragedy, irony, and realism would probably, in Shakespeare’s own day, have considered Ben Jonson a more serious dramatist, at any rate in comedy. Jonson himself certainly shared this view. He described the printed collection of his dramas as his “works,” which seems normal enough to us now, but caused some amusement in his day from those who felt that what a dramatist produced were plays and not works.13 He is never tired of insisting that serious comedy observes men and manners, in contrast to Shakespearean comedy with its “monsters,” its desire to “run away from nature,” and the like.14 In The Return from Parnassus, a play which makes some comments on contemporary drama from a pro-Shakespeare and antiJonson bias, it is said of Jonson that he is “a mere empiric, one that gets what he hath by observation, and makes only nature privy to what he indites.”15 This is a very silly thing to say about Jonson, but it illustrates one important aspect of his appeal to his own time. Jonson writes comedies which, if not exactly realistic plays, still maintain a fairly consistent illusion. From the point of view of the critical theory implied by them, Shakespeare hampers himself, in his comedies and romances, by never failing to include something incredible. If there are no fairies or magical forests or identical twins, there are plot themes derived ultimately from folk tales like that of the substituted bride. There is a strong folklore element even in the baiting of Falstaff in The Merry Wives, which would otherwise be Shakespeare’s closest approach to the Jonsonian formula. In our day most critics are reconciled to the superiority of Shakespeare, but the Jonsonian point of view still survives in those critics who find the height of Shakespeare’s achievement in the great tragedies, and feel that the romances of the final period represent an exhaustion of vitality or a subsiding into more facile and commercial formulas. My own view is that the turn to romance in Shakespeare’s last phase represents a genu-

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ine culmination. I naturally do not mean that the romances are better or greater plays than the tragedies; I mean that there is a logical evolution toward romance in Shakespeare’s work, and consequently no anticlimax, whether technical or spiritual, in passing from King Lear through Pericles to The Tempest. Shakespeare will not, of course, fit any dichotomy: I am not questioning his essential seriousness, or the fact that he gives the moral critic everything that such a critic would want. But there does seem to be, in the comedies and romances, a policy of including some features of a popular, self-contained, highly stylized technique. We said that one may say of a rigorous convention that the works in it are all alike. Nobody could say this of Shakespeare’s comedies: it is all the more significant, therefore, that Shakespeare imposes some likeness on his plays by repeating his devices. The storm at sea, the identical twins, the heroine disguised as a boy, the retreat into the forest, the heroine with a mysterious father, the disappearing ruler: these themes occur so often that in some plays—Twelfth Night, for example—a whole group of such formulas is restated. When we study the four romances at the end of Shakespeare’s career, this sense of recapitulation expands to include at least some of the tragedies, as, for instance, the jealousy induced by Iago is reflected in the jealousy induced by Iachimo.16 If we accept this policy of repetition as deliberate, we are ready for another principle of “Odyssean” criticism. In comedy and in romance the story seeks its own end instead of holding the mirror up to nature. Consequently comedy and romance are so obviously conventionalized that a serious interest in them soon leads to an interest in convention itself. This shifts the centre of attention from individual works of literature to the larger groupings represented by the words “comedy” and “romance” themselves, and thus an interest in convention leads to an interest in genre. Then, one finds in any comedy or romance, because of the conventionalization, a number of motifs and devices that one finds in other similar stories, and so an interest in genre develops an interest in the technique of constructing stories. We may therefore see in the romances the end of the steady growth of Shakespeare’s technical interest in the structure of drama. The romances are to Shakespeare what The Art of Fugue and The Musical Offering are to Bach:17 not retreats into pedantry, but final articulations of craftsmanship. The key to this conception of Shakespearean romance is, apparently, the word “structure.” This word carries with it, in literary criticism, a

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good deal of verbal magic, and we need to approach it carefully. The arts of poetry and music move in time: architecture, painting, and sculpture stay where they are in space, and the word “structure” is really a metaphor from architecture. It has become applied to literary criticism partly as the result of a curious phenomenon in criticism itself. As long as we are reading a novel or listening to a play on the stage, we are following a movement in time, and our mental attitude is a participating one. It is uncritical, too, or more accurately precritical: we can make no genuine critical judgment until the work is all over. When it is all over, it assumes a quite different appearance. Now we see it as a simultaneous unity, something that has not so much a beginning and middle and end as a centre and a periphery. Criticism deals entirely with literature in this frozen or spatial way, and a distinction between criticism proper and the direct experience of literature which precedes it is fundamental to any coherent act of criticism. The point at which direct experience and criticism begin to come into alignment, in a work of fiction at least, is the point known as recognition or discovery, when some turn in the plot arrests the linear movement and enables us for the first time to see the story as a total shape, or what is usually called a theme.18 The distinction between precritical experience and the criticism which can only follow experience holds good for all works of literature. But works of literature differ in the extent to which they subordinate the critical faculty during the experience of reading or listening. This difference takes us back to our original distinction. In comedy and romance, of the popular or strongly conventionalized kind, direct experience is not only precritical but as uncritical as possible. The critic interested in tragedy or realism is closer to actual critical activity during his direct experience. In particular, a genuinely realistic play has, built into it, an allegorical relationship to what both author and critic think of as real life. In comedy and romance we surrender ourselves to the story and accept its conventions; the residual comparison of those conventions to truth or likelihood that remains in our minds is at its least active. But in realism a subcritical operation based on plausibility or likelihood starts operating very early in direct experience. Let us look at a group of plays incorporating the kind of character who enjoys manipulating others for their own good. In real life we take a dim view of such people, and so, in a realistic play like Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, we compare Gregers Werle’s activities with our habitual attitudes to such things. We feel that our sense of the relevance of literature to life

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is strengthened when we see the disaster that results from his meddling. In Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair a magistrate named Adam Overdo disguises himself in order to bring judgment to bear on what he calls the “enormities” going on at the fair [2.1.36, 39]. We are further away from realism here, and recognize the artificial convention of the impenetrable disguise, but still our habitual attitudes to life are operating, and the critical faculty to some extent with them. Eavesdropping, we know, is not really a sporting event. We are dramatically satisfied, because of the coincidence between the dramatic action and our view of ordinary life, when we see Overdo going from one bungle to another and making a failure of the great unmasking scene that he has been trying to lead up to. Now, with these plays in mind, let us approach Measure for Measure. We are told that this is a “problem” play, comparatively realistic and something of an allegory of government.19 Bernard Shaw tells us that it shows Shakespeare coming as close to the twentieth century as the seventeenth would let him.20 The inference is that we should listen to it not uncritically, but subcritically, comparing it as we go along with what we are accustomed to think of as actual human behaviour. After an act or two we decide that, with the possible exception of Lucio, every character in it is insane. At the centre of the play is an eavesdropping and manipulating character, the Duke. And what are we to make of him? He disappears in order to leave his deputy Angelo to administer a remarkably repulsive law about sexual irregularity, clearly the only law he is interested in, and which he is apparently afraid to administer himself. Then he returns disguised as a friar to reconcile Angelo’s first victim Claudio to his execution. When Angelo attempts to seduce the heroine Isabella, he proposes that she go along with the idea but substitute another girl betrothed to Angelo. A great deal is said about sin in this play, but we are solemnly informed that there is no shadow of sin on this deception— nor, evidently, on telling Isabella a brutal lie to the effect that her brother has been executed after all. Finally, the Duke returns in his own shape, and, after stretching everyone’s nerves to the utmost limits of endurance, hands out pardons all round with great complacency. We consult the critics, and find that some very influential ones regard the Duke as an incarnation of divine providence.21 Certainly he does seem to have some resemblance to the popular pious view of God, that no doubt he has had the best intentions all along, but that in the sweet by-and-by he is going to have a lot of explaining to do. I am not suggesting that this is a reasonable view of Measure for Measure: I am saying

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that if we take the phrase “problem play” in its original Ibsenish context this wild farrago is what will result.22 Measure for Measure, whatever else it is, is not an attempt at socially significant realism: it is much more disturbing fantasy than a Johann Strauss opera, but its relation to any actual Vienna is equally remote. We note in passing a fact discovered by Thomas Rymer and at intervals by other critics since: that it is easy to make a Shakespeare play look ridiculous by refusing to accept its convention.23 The more realistic the play, the nearer to actual criticism does our direct experience of the play become. In Shakespeare the critical faculty, during the direct experience of the play, is at a minimum. The assumption in Jonson, and obviously in Ibsen too, is that an audience will accept an illusion within limits. How wide those limits are may be subject to dispute, but the assumption is still there: it underlies all Jonson’s theories of following nature, of the humorous character, of observing the unities. But Shakespeare simply does not make this assumption. He does not ask his audience to accept an illusion: he asks them to listen to the story. Everything we are told in that story is of equal authority. In discussing any difficulties of plausibility in Shakespeare, we are often presented with the Elizabethan audience as a kind of censor principle. We are assured that the Elizabethan audience would think very differently about the behaviour of Isabella in Measure for Measure from anyone today who was expecting a problem play.24 But it seems clear that no audience of Shakespeare, whether Elizabethan or modern, is allowed to think at all. They have the power to like or dislike the play, but no right to raise questions, as long as the action is going on, about the plausibility of the incidents or their correspondence with their habitual view of life. The manifesto of this type of drama was laid down once and for all in Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale, when Gammer Madge begins to tell her story to the two young pages, Frolic and Fantastic: Madge: Once upon a time, there was a king, or a lord, or a duke, that had a fair daughter, the fairest that ever was, as white as snow and as red as blood; and once upon a time his daughter was stolen away; and he sent all his men to seek his daughter; and he sent so long, that he sent all his men out of his land. Frolic: Who dressed his dinner, then? Madge: Nay, either hear my tale, or kiss my tail. Fantastic: Well said! On with your tale, gammer.25

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It follows that the criticism devoted to the vividness of characterization in Shakespeare’s comedies may get out of proportion if it is not kept in its context. That context is, again, like the context of characterization in a detective story: lifelike and highly individualized characters may appear, but we should never lose sight of the incidental tour de force involved in the skill of so presenting them. Shakespeare’s technique is the opposite of, say, Chekhov’s, where the characters seem to be prior to the plot, in the sense that the action of the play is presented as the logical behaviour of the characters in it. Shakespeare tells a story that stylizes his characters and may force them to do quite unreasonable things. This is more obvious in his comedies than in his tragedies—the fact that his Moor of Venice belongs to humanity and his Jew of Venice to folklore has much to do with the fact that one is in a tragedy and the other in a comedy—but it is true in general of Shakespeare. With Every Man in His Humour Jonson began a new type of comedy, of which Ibsen and Chekhov (Ibsen at least in his middle or “problem” period) are the inheritors. The contrast between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson is hackneyed, but, like many hackneyed subjects, not exhausted. One seventeenth-century play that we know failed to please its original audience was Ben Jonson’s The New Inn: we know this because its failure was highly publicized by Jonson himself. Jonson wrote on the occasion a poem in which he scolds the public for not appreciating it and for preferring “some mouldy tale like Pericles” instead.26 A critical issue is involved here that it might be fruitful to examine. The New Inn is not firstrate Jonson, but neither is Pericles first-rate Shakespeare. Yet Pericles was not only popular in its time, but has been revived with success in ours, and I doubt that any dramatic company in its right mind would attempt to revive The New Inn, though I should hope to be wrong on this point. Jonson’s critical principle was so obviously true to him that he honestly could not understand why his audience preferred Pericles, and in trying to explain why it did we may get some insight into the rationale of Shakespeare’s technique. There is something very disarming in the way that Jonson, both here and in the entr’actes to his next play, The Magnetic Lady, attempts to instruct us in the art of liking Jonson. He would call our attention particularly to the extraordinary skill with which the play has been constructed. Is not his protasis logically and clearly laid out in the first act, his epitasis developed from it with equal clarity and logic, his fourth act a catastasis or cleverly disguised recognition scene, where the recognitions are

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false clues, and his fifth act a brilliantly resolved catastrophe, where all is made clear?27 Alas, it is not this kind of skill but rhythm and pacing that keep a play on the boards. It is rhythm and pacing that produce what in Jonson’s day was meant by wit, and only wit, in this sense, can develop parts that actors can get their teeth into. The last plays of Jonson are by no means “dotages,” as a character in Dryden’s dialogue calls them,28 but they seem almost mechanical models of plays rather than actual plays. They have every dramatic virtue except the drive and energy that keep The Alchemist in the world’s repertoire. A play may fail if its plot is too complex to be readily grasped: this seems to have happened originally even with Congreve’s Way of the World,29 and it certainly happened with The New Inn. In The New Inn Frances, Lady Frampul, comes to an inn kept by a host named Goodstock, who lives there with his one son Frank, who is tended by an old one-eyed nurse, an Irish beggarwoman. The host turns out to be Lord Frampul, father of Frances. Frank is dressed up as a girl by some women who are playing a practical joke, and makes a most convincing girl because in fact she is a girl, Lord Frampul’s second daughter Letitia. The old one-eyed nurse proves to be the real Lady Frampul, Lord Frampul’s separated wife, mother of Frances and Letitia, and as soon as her identity is established she opens her other eye. This is only the background action, the unravelling of events assumed to have taken place before the play began. The usual enormous and complicated clutter of a Jonson comedy is there in addition to it, and occupies the foreground action. Obviously the audience lost its temper at being asked to grasp all this. In any art that depends on movement, whether literary or musical, the technical skill of construction is a subordinate factor, and the real skill consists in knowing how to subordinate it. We have mentioned Bach’s Art of Fugue and Musical Offering: when we study these works, we may almost be willing to accept the principle that such technical skill is an attribute of the highest art, because we know that these works do belong on the top level of music. On the other hand, there was a composer called Raimondi who in 1852 composed three oratorios that were performed on successive nights, and then performed simultaneously, all three being in counterpoint with each other. The applause was so tremendous that Raimondi fainted, and was dead within a year, but his prodigious feat appears to have died with him.30 One thinks also of the motet in forty parts, composed, according to Edward Phillips, by John Milton’s father, and presented to a Polish prince, who rewarded

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him with what seems an appropriate enough gift in the circumstances, a gold chain.31 It is the contrast of The New Inn and Pericles, raised by Jonson himself, that concerns us at the moment, and nobody has ever objected to Pericles on the ground of overcomplexity. But I said a moment ago that the four romances represent the climax of Shakespeare’s technical interest in playwriting, and in one of them, Cymbeline, Shakespeare has failed with many critics as notably as The New Inn did with its original audience. Samuel Johnson’s contempt for the play is well known,32 and the colossal bravura stretto at the end, where as many as twenty-four different plot motifs have been counted, is said by one critic to drag wretchedly.33 But although Cymbeline has not been and is never likely to be a popular or frequently acted play, it has one advantage over The New Inn. In The New Inn the action is so manipulated that it betrays Jonson’s illusionist principles. We are supposed to take his comedies “seriously,” along with all the good fun, as a genuine reflection of nature and manners, and a play so complicated can hardly be taken seriously. Cymbeline, on the other hand, is so close to folk tale that the manipulating of the action is at least not a breach of decorum: it does not violate its own dramatic assumptions. When we see a picture that is a representation of a certain subject matter, we are expected to compare the pictorial shape with what we remember of the shape of the objects represented, and are expected also to admire the skill with which the painter has presented the illusion of those objects. Realistic pictures have an external reference to the outer world, a reference in which likeness or correspondence is one of the aims. But there are also paintings, especially in modern times, where there has been a deliberate departure from the conventions of realism, a distorting or stylizing of the subject, which indicates an interest in more purely self-contained pictorial values. Considering how familiar this is in modern painting, it is curious how little allowance is made for the same principle in literary criticism. Like every other dramatist, Shakespeare tells us a story and persuades us of its validity as a story. As with every other dramatist, the persuasion is purely rhetorical, not logical. But Shakespeare is not like every other dramatist in selecting plots that are inherently impossible to believe. In every comedy there is some explicitly antirealistic feature introduced: this feature forms a convention that we have to accept, and if the rhetoric fails to persuade us the convention is still there to fall back on. A doc-

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tor once remarked to me that he was unable to enjoy a performance of Twelfth Night because it was a biological impossibility that boy and girl twins could resemble each other so closely. Shakespeare’s answer, apparently, would be for drama what Sir Thomas Browne’s is for religion: “Methinks there be not impossibilities enough for an active faith.”34 In fact this is more or less what Paulina does say in The Winter’s Tale, when one of the most prodigiously unlikely scenes even in Shakespeare reaches its climax: “It is required you do awake your faith” [5.3.94–5]. We may compare the assumed name of Imogen, Fidele. Of course the faith spoken of is what we should call imaginative faith, but this imaginative faith is something much more positive than any mere suspension of disbelief, however willing. There is no intentional fallacy in saying that Shakespeare deliberately chose incredible comic plots, but there may be one in assigning to him some reason for doing so. We may assume, for example, that a desire to show off his brilliant technique led him to plots that were as difficult as possible to make persuasive. But then we notice that failure to persuade is sometimes an important feature of his plots. Iago’s temptation of Othello employs some of the greatest rhetoric in literature to make a convention seem real to us, yet, as everybody notices in performance, there remains something unconvincing about the temptation which is unmistakably part of its effect. The same collapse of persuasion back on an arbitrary convention often meets us in the comedies. The calumny of Hero in Much Ado is an example; and it is curious how often the cast is summoned to a meeting afterward in which, it is asserted, all difficulties in the story will be explained away, the audience itself having to leave without benefit of this. However we explain the difficulties, they seem to be there with the specific function of drawing us away from the analogy to familiar experience into a strange but consistent and self-contained dramatic world. There are other features in Shakespeare which mark a deliberate distortion of normal experience in the interest of literary stylization. A familiar example is the use of anachronism. The action of King John has proceeded for only a few lines when the king says: Be thou as lightning in the eyes of France; For ere thou canst report I will be there, The thunder of my cannon shall be heard. [1.1.24–6]

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King John, of course, had no cannon. It is habitual for us to say that the audience would never notice. Audiences in fact have a rather quick ear for such things. Or we may say that Shakespeare was in a hurry, and was unwilling to spoil his record of never blotting a line.35 The assumption that Shakespeare was a hasty and slapdash writer has often been made, by hasty and slapdash critics, but has never proved fruitful. If we say that Shakespeare had more important things on his mind, we come closer to the truth: certainly the fine image of the thunderstorm is more important than fidelity to the date of the introduction of gunpowder. But it is better to think of such anachronism positively and functionally, as helping to universalize a historical period, as presenting the typical rather than the particular event. The past is blended with the present, and event and audience are linked in the same community. Such anachronism, incidentally, is much closer to the alleged rules of Aristotle’s Poetics than impeccable documentation would be. When Caesar speaks of clocks and Ulysses quotes Aristotle,36 Shakespeare is doing properly what the relentless gimmicking of his plays in modern productions, dressing Caesar in a Fascist uniform or shooting Coriolanus with firearms, does clumsily. In Cymbeline we find that the Roman Empire is treated as being contemporary with what is clearly Renaissance Italy. The anachronism is so obvious that, little as we know of Shakespeare’s mental processes, it could conceivably have occurred to the poet himself. Surely it would be a more profitable hypothesis to see whether anachronism may not have the same kind of universalizing function in Cymbeline that it has, for example, in Auden’s For the Time Being, where Caesar is the inventor of modern medicine and credit economics.37 If we think of literature primarily in terms of printed books, the drama will seem to us at best a provisional method of conveying words from the poet to his audience. If we really want to know the play we must read it, and it is natural for the dramatist, in his turn, to feel that, if his play fails in any respect, the theatrical audience is not as high a court of appeal as the individualized audience that can read the text. This was Jonson’s view: his response to failure is that of the author in Sheridan’s Critic: “I’ll print it, every word”;38 and even for appreciative hearers his feeling is that the printed text is their reward. There they can see, especially in the annotations to the tragedies and masques, something of Jonson’s scholarship, which is as genuine a creative attribute as any great poet in English literature has ever possessed.

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Some readers are so impressed by the accuracy of print that they feel that there is not much point in going to plays once one has learned to read. Fortunately, most reasonable people understand that there is an irreplaceable value in the theatrical experience. It is a striking and perennially mysterious feature of Shakespeare, as of many of his contemporaries, that he seems to have been so absorbed in the theatrical process as to be largely indifferent to anything outside it, such as the advance in his reputation that a folio edited and proofread by him would have made. His plays bring us close to the oral tradition, with its shifting and kaleidoscopic variants, its migrating themes and motifs, its tolerance of interpolation, its detachment from the printed ideal of an established text. Sometimes we may even be in doubt whether an entire play is a garbled version of Shakespeare or the work of someone else. This fact about Shakespeare is familiar enough, though it is not always realized how closely attached it is to some of his most characteristic qualities. We seldom think of Shakespeare as a scholarly poet, because it is difficult to relate the conceptions of scholarship and oral tradition. Ever since the seventeenth century, when a contrast between a quickwitted ignorant Shakespeare and a ponderous learned Jonson formed the basis of a kind of abortive joke cycle,39 the tendency has been to feel that scholarship was something that Jonson had and that Shakespeare did not have, because Jonson issued printed texts with an abundance of footnotes. But this view is one-sided: it identifies scholarship with visual scholarship. Shakespeare, like Bach, was a scholar of the ear. He seems to have used sources in English wherever he could, not because he could not read other languages, but because he was constantly listening for phrases. His ear for a phrase was so fantastically acute that, in using The Mirror for Magistrates as a very minor source for King Lear, scholars can tell that he consulted two editions of it.40 This kind of scholarship is in its own way quite as impressive as Jonson’s, just as the kind of scholarship in Coleridge revealed by Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu41 is as impressive as the kind that Coleridge consciously displays in his prose writings. I said above that the plot complications of Cymbeline at least do not violate the assumptions of the kind of play it is, a romantic tragicomedy based on a folklore plot. Still, it does have the difficulty, easy to notice when watching one of its rare performances, of being a very serious play, and plot complications, like three-syllable rhymes, are inherently funny. They are, however, much funnier when they are incidental, as they are in the setting of a Mozart opera, where we can watch them spinning

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and gyrating along in a gabble of dry recitativo,42 as they do in Le Nozze di Figaro. Plots of operas are often more uninhibited than plots of plays, because the driving force of the opera is provided by the music. In Figaro we have a comfortable feeling that no doubt all the complications work out as they should, but in the meantime something more important, like “Voi che sapete” or “Dove sono,”43 is likely to turn up at any time and claim our main attention. Some time ago I dropped into the middle of a Chinese comedy of the Sung period, and tried, with the aid of a Chinese girl acting as interpreter, to work out what was going on.44 There were half a dozen characters on the stage, all disguised as somebody else. But then these plays, in the first place, had five or six hours in which to get their complications unravelled, and in the second place, their impact on the listener is more operatic than purely verbal. The orchestra is there, providing an emotional impetus for every detail of the action, exits, entrances, even the cadences of the speeches, and keeping the plot subordinated to its rhythm. Perhaps this reference to opera will give us a clue to our present problem. Only a minority of Jonson’s plays still hold the stage: even The Silent Woman, so much admired for so long as the perfection of dramatic construction, is very rarely performed now. Nevertheless the establishing of the tradition of modern English comedy was Jonson’s work and not Shakespeare’s. All the important writers of English comedy since Jonson have cultivated the comedy of manners with its realistic illusion and not Shakespeare’s romantic and stylized kind. Nearly all of them—Congreve, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, O’Casey—have been Irishmen, and one might expect them to have some fey and Celtic sympathy for fairyland, but apart from Yeats (who is not very close to Shakespeare either), the English, or Anglo-Irish, dramatic tradition exhibits a remarkable dearth of leprechauns. The main tradition of Shakespearean fantasy seems to have drifted from the stage into lyric poetry, an oddly bookish fate for the warbler of native wood-notes wild. In the last century, as said above, there was some attempt to annex the so-called problem comedies to more realistic assumptions about drama, but the other comedies remained recalcitrant. Shaw is forced to conclude that many of them are potboilers, aptly described by such titles as As You Like It and Much Ado about Nothing, which could not hold the stage if Shakespeare were not a cultural vested interest. The only place where the tradition of Shakespearean romantic comedy has survived with any theatrical success is, as we should expect, in opera. As long as we have Mozart or

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Verdi or Sullivan to listen to, we can tolerate identical twins and lost heirs and love potions and folk tales: we can even stand a fairy queen if she is under two hundred pounds. And when we look for the most striking modern parallels to Twelfth Night or The Tempest, we think first of all of Figaro and The Magic Flute.45 The operatic features of Shakespearean comedy are an integral part of Shakespeare’s concentration on the theatrical process. Thematic images and words echo and call and respond in a way which is a constant fascination to anyone working with the text. Such repetitions seem to have something oracular about them, as though arranging them in the right way would provide a key to some occult and profound process of thought. In performance, of course, they have the same function that similar repeated patterns have in music. As with music, it would take a superhuman concentration to notice every repetition consciously, even if we had the kind of clarity in the performance which we may take for granted in the concert hall but seldom hear in the theatre. Yet there is usually so much repetition that, again as in music, even a vague and woolgathering listener is bound to get some sense of design. In the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice, for example, we notice, first, how the sequence of events is arranged, not in the order of ordinary credibility (Portia’s not-a-scruple-more-or-less point [4.1.324–32] might well have occurred to someone much earlier), but in the order of dramatic suspense. Next, we notice the constant repetition of thematic words, “mercy,” “judgment,” “will,” “bond.” Finally, we notice at the beginning of the scene the thematic anticipation of its resolution when Bassanio says to Antonio: The Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones, and all, Ere thou shalt lose for me one drop of blood. [4.1.112–13]

Such features as the hidden irony of Antonio’s reference to Portia, “bid her be judge” [4.1.276], and the emblematic counterpoint of bringing the “balance” of justice into the action to weigh the pound of flesh [4.1.255], are also thematic devices. The opposite of repetition is the sudden starting of a new action or mood, as the jealousy of Leontes bursts on us without warning at the beginning of The Winter’s Tale, or as Isabella, who seems half asleep through the first two acts of Measure for Measure, explodes into a furious tirade against Claudio in the prison scene [3.1.135–50]. In reading

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a book we are inclined to stop and look back for the motivation, or, at least, some logical connection with what has gone before. In drama we realize that the connection is there, but it is presented musically, as a new theme or second subject which our ear accepts without explanation. The same energetic pacing of incident in Shakespearean romance makes the use of dance functional in these plays: the climax of the great emblematic scenes in the fourth acts of The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, which are closely related to each other, is marked by a dance. It is the use of dance, the “concupiscence of jigs,” as he calls it, that Jonson particularly objects to in the romances,46 but to us it merely extends the operatic affinities of the romances to the ballet. In Jonson complexity is teleological: we are presented with a deceptive appearance that is gradually turned inside out, forced by the unifying of the action to become a clearer reflection of reality. In Shakespeare complexity is contrapuntal, with several plots going on at once and preserving their individual integrity to the end, and with an intricate texture of repeating and modulating images. Before the appearance of Every Man in His Humour, a good deal of Elizabethan drama tended to favour an easygoing processional structure, with scene following scene along a central line of narrative. This processional movement is clearest in the history plays, to which Shakespeare seems to have given most of his attention at the beginning, and it is found in Marlowe as well, especially in Tamburlaine. It is a form which is very easy to follow on the stage, though more difficult to remember in detail afterward. From what we have said it is easy to understand that Shakespeare should never have lost his affection for this processional form, which is as marked in the late Henry VIII as it is in the early Henry VI series. Pericles is a most radical experiment in processional narrative: the action is deliberately linear, proceeding from place to place and from episode to episode. In the background is the Gower story, with its constant “and then” beat, a story we drop into from time to time when a part of it is dramatically manifested. The evolution of the device of the background from the prologues in Henry V is clear enough. At the same time the way in which the action of Pericles is presented makes it one of the world’s first operas. Apart altogether from the development of the masque, we sometimes forget how operatic the Elizabethan popular theatre was, with its sennets and tuckets and flourishes, its “mood music” of viols and hautboys, its interspersed songs. We are reminded of this when we study the texts of a dramatist who was inter-

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ested in the musical backgrounds of his plays and gave full directions for them. John Marston was such a dramatist: in a scene from his Sophonisba (1606), which is probably earlier than Pericles, we have “organs, viols, and voices, play for this act,” “infernal music plays softly,” “a treble viol, and a bass lute, play softly within the canopy,” and “a short song to soft music above.”47 In Pericles Gower provides a narrative continuity, like recitativo, while the main action dramatizes the central episodes. In the imagery, music is practically the hero of the play: it is to the action of Pericles what Prospero’s magic is to the action of The Tempest. And just as the structure of Pericles anticipates opera, with its narrative recitativo and its dramatized arias, so it also anticipates the kind of modern poem where, as in Eliot’s The Waste Land, the narrative connective tissue is cut out and only the essential scenes are presented. Eliot’s debt to Pericles is partly recorded in his Marina, and some of Eliot’s readers have felt that the ideal dramatic form he speaks of so often is better represented by The Waste Land, which is close to Pericles not only in its fragmentation but in its symbolism of Phoenician sailors, sterile fornication, and deliberate archaizing, than it is by his more conservative stage plays. Valéry remarks that in poetry anything that must be said is almost impossible to say well.48 This sounds like a sophisticated, even a paradoxical, remark, but it states a principle that is familiar in simple and popular poetry. In Sir Patrick Spens, for example, the shipwreck is the kind of thing that must be described; consequently the poet does not waste a syllable on it, whereas the dramatic experience which provides the emotional resonance of the shipwreck, the widows’ long agony of waiting in vain for the return of their lords, takes up two stanzas. Similar dislocations of narrative structure are an organizing feature of Pericles. Finally, we notice that the dumb show, along with such visual clichés as the procession of knights with their emblems and mottoes, occupies a prominent place in Pericles, and helps to make it a spectacular as well as an operatic play. The element of dramatic genius represented by Inigo Jones49 is clearly more adaptable to Shakespearean romance than to Jonsonian comedy: one might almost say than to Jonsonian masque. Drama, like music and fresco painting, is a public art, an ensemble performance before an audience. The late romances, Pericles in particular, are plays in which a union of the three major arts, melos, lexis, and opsis, to use the Aristotelian terms,50 give us a drama beyond drama, a kind of ultimate confrontation of a human community with an artistic realization of itself. We remain in a centre of action where, as in the commedia dell’arte,

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the spirit of which is so close to Shakespearean comedy, everything that goes on seems spontaneously improvised, precisely because its general convention is prescribed in advance. In his prologues Jonson sometimes informs his audience of what they are not going to get in his plays in the way of outlandish stage effects and characters, and in one or two of these passages he is clearly alluding to Shakespeare as a dramatist with more complaisance and less integrity. Shakespeare, by contrast, apologizes to his audience in the Prologue to Henry V for not giving them more in the way of spectacular violence. In the deliberate renouncing of spectacle there is something that, for all the reckless prodigality of incident and characterization in Jonson’s plays, points in the direction of understatement. The Chinese-puzzle intricacies of The New Inn lead us to the dramatic construct rather than the dramatic experience, and the end of this tendency is abstraction. Like Shakespeare, Jonson moves toward a final period in which a technical and scholarly interest in dramatic structure plays an important role. But the logical development for Jonson was the masque, the abstract dramatic construct which communicates not so much the experience of drama as the symbols of that experience. If we were to follow out this emphasis on dramatic abstraction to its extreme conclusion, we should eventually arrive at the kind of drama represented by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame, discussions of an action that never quite takes place. Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methusaleh is a gigantic pentalogy stretching from Adam and Eve to the furthest limits of the future, only to end by pointing to a “whirlpool of pure thought,” which would suck down all drama into itself, as the goal of the vision.51 In such a vision, experience would be contained, not expressed, or expressed at most by a single symbol. We should finally arrive at a mystical unity of consciousness in which music would be represented by what Milton calls the “perfect diapason” of a tonic chord,52 painting by Giotto’s O,53 literature by the syllable Aum. There is great richness of incident in Jonson, and yet a tendency to abstraction which ends in the renunciation of incident. Similarly, there is a great symmetry of design in Pericles and a skilful orchestration of thematic images. One aspect of Gower’s role is like that of the manager at the beginning of Sakuntala or Faust: he reminds us that this is a play, and the effect of the reminder is to shatter the framework of the play and lead us inside it. But the contrast with the prologues in Jonson’s plays strikes us at once. In Jonson the prologue, whether monologue or dialogue, is designed to awaken our critical faculties. Gower is an aged fig-

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ure recalled from the dead, like Samuel by the Witch of Endor [1 Samuel 28:3–20]; he stands for the authority of literary tradition; he is himself dependent on still older sources, and he is there to put us in as uncritical a frame of mind as possible. The play opens with Pericles attempting to win the daughter of Antiochus, who lives in incest with her father and is consequently his wife as well. It closes with Pericles reunited to his own proper wife and daughter. These two contrasting episodes frame the whole play, and most of the intervening action is contained in two other repetitions of the same theme, which also contrast with each other. In one, Pericles wins the maiden Thaisa from her father; in the other, Marina, taken from the evil parental environment of Cleon and Dionyza to the still worse one of the pander and bawd, is approached by her lover in a brothel. The setting of the play is not only dramatically but psychologically primitive. Antiochus’s daughter is surrounded with imagery of forbidden fruit, Hesperidean gardens, and serpents. Pericles’ ordeal is the ancient riddle game, which seems to combine the primitive features of the two main stories of the Oedipus legend. If Pericles fails to solve the riddle, he must die; if he succeeds in solving it, he must die. The logic is that of the Arabian Nights. But where so uncritical a participation is demanded from us, the action cannot be lifelike: it can only be archetypal. It evokes the primitive responses from us that are evoked by popular literature: it has a hero’s hairbreadth escapes, a heroine’s deliverance from death and dishonour, a miraculous curing of someone apparently dead; it appeals to the horror of incest and the tearful joy of reunions. The dramatic construct, for all its symmetry, has been reduced to great simplicity and directness in order to put the strongest possible emphasis on the immediate dramatic experience itself. The emphasis on direct experience has also reached an extreme form in our day, with the antiteleological, anticonstructional type of music and painting that finds its whole being in the immediate experience of sound or colour. Extremes meet, as Coleridge says,54 and the whirlpool of symbolic thought is not greatly different from the whirlpool of pure sensation in which a single squeak or splash of red paint may contain the kind of experience formerly associated with Mozart or Tintoretto. It is in less extreme forms that the difference emerges. We began with a distinction between the moral critic, for whom literature is essentially an allegory of experience, and the critic for whom the literary form is an end in itself. This is an aspect of a still broader distinction, which will

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concern us throughout the rest of this book, between the spectator and the participator, which is to be found within every student of literature or patron of the theatre. It is this distinction which is latent in the one we have tried to make between construct and experience, the distinction that makes The New Inn and Pericles such different conceptions of drama. The kernel of the Jonsonian tradition is something abstract and sophisticated; the kernel of the Shakespearean tradition is something childlike and concrete. There is no need to prefer one to the other, but there is some value in distinguishing them, if only to show that both are always with us, the light and the heat of one flickering but unquenched flame. II Making Nature Afraid Drama is an objective form of art, and we should expect a writer attracted to the drama to have an objective attitude to his art. This is particularly true of a dramatist who, like Shakespeare, refrains from trying to impose any sort of personal attitude on us, and shows no interest in anything except his play. In this Shakespeare is unusual even among dramatists. The fact that Ben Jonson was a dramatist did not prevent him from exhibiting a remarkable personality or from often imposing it on his audience. During a period of personal controversy known as the War of the Theatres he introduces an armed Prologue into his play The Poetaster, who says: If any muse why I salute the stage, An armed Prologue: know, ’tis a dangerous age: Wherein who writes, had need present his scenes Forty-fold proof against the conjuring means Of base detractors, and illiterate apes, That fill up rooms in fair and formal shapes. ’Gainst these, have we put on this forced defence: Whereof the allegory and hid sense Is, that a well erected confidence Can fright their pride, and laugh their folly hence.55

In other words, the armed Prologue is brought in to enable Jonson to make comments on the time and on other dramatists. In Troilus and Cressida, often thought to be connected with the War of the Theatres, an armed Prologue also appears, who calls himself:

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A Prologue arm’d, but not in confidence Of author’s pen or actor’s voice, but suited In like conditions as our argument. [Prologue, 23–5]

That is, he is armed purely for decorum: his armour is appropriate to a play about war. There is no way of knowing whether there is any reference to the War of the Theatres or not, but if there is, it can only mean that Shakespeare was keeping well out of it. Such reticence, combined with such genius, is intolerable to a certain type of stock response, which refuses to try to understand poetry apart from what it knows, or thinks it knows, about the poet. Its motto is that of the critic in Shaw’s Fanny’s First Play: tell me who wrote the play and I’ll tell you how good it is.56 Hence it cannot know how good Shakespeare’s plays are as long as it knows nothing about him except that he left his second-best bed to his wife.57 Thanks to a great deal of patient scholarship, we now have some idea of the order in which the plays were written, and it is possible to write a fictional biography of Shakespeare as a kind of allegory of what that order suggests. Thus the period of the great tragedies was also the period of what Professor Sisson calls the mythical sorrows of Shakespeare,58 with Timon of Athens representing a moment of peculiar exasperation. This procedure is attractive, because it is easy: one may demonstrate that one is a person of sensibility and insight in an area where no evidence can get in one’s way. I think of Timon of Athens particularly because it has attracted so much speculation of this kind, and because the critical procedure involved has been so well described by the poet in that play: I have, in this rough work, shap’d out a man, Whom this beneath world doth embrace and hug With amplest entertainment: my free drift Halts not particularly, but moves itself In a wide sea of wax: no levell’d malice Infects one comma in the course I hold; But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on, Leaving no tract behind. [1.1.43–50]

However, what was always a foolish procedure is now happily discredited as well. The critical principle which ought to replace it is that there is no passage in Shakespeare’s plays, certainly written by Shake-

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speare, which cannot be explained entirely in terms of its dramatic function and context. We may feel that an occasional speech or scene, such as the teaching of William in The Merry Wives [4.1], has been dragged in merely to fill up time, but there is nothing which owes its existence to Shakespeare’s desire to “say” something. I add the clause about Shakespeare’s authorship only because it is natural, when we find a passage which disappoints or exasperates us or seems inconsistent with our own view of the play, to wish that we could prove it spurious. Thus a female critic decided that the line at the end of Macbeth, “Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen” [5.9.35], was interpolated because she felt that Lady Macbeth had made her peace with God offstage.59 Everybody has his own collection of lines or passages that he would not have written if he had been Shakespeare. I myself long for evidence that the “prophecy” spoken by the Fool in King Lear [3.2.81–94] was the insertion of an actor who was not content to act the fool in only one sense. But I quite realize that this is the kind of feeling that a more flexible view of the play normally tends to dissolve. After reading Coleridge and De Quincey on the Porter in Macbeth, most people would agree that De Quincey had the broader view of Shakespeare’s artistry in this instance, and is therefore right.60 The coarseness of the brothel scenes in Pericles was strong evidence to Victorian critics that Shakespeare did not write them, and equally strong evidence to twentieth-century critics that he did.61 Here again the latter are sure to be right, as the conception of Shakespeare implied is the more comprehensive one, and the more consistent with Shakespeare’s other unquestioned work. This implies a further principle, that a critical examination of the structure of a play seldom if ever needs to take any account of speculations about authorship. This would still be true even if I felt a confidence that I assuredly do not feel in the ability of critics to disentangle Peele from Henry VI or Fletcher from Henry VIII. It is true also when there is some external evidence to be considered, as there is in the Hecate scenes in Macbeth.62 It has been proved all through the history of drama that the word “collaborator” does not have to be used in its wartime sense of traitor, and that collaboration often, in fact usually, creates a distinct and unified personality. Nobody listening to a play by Beaumont and Fletcher feels that he is being alternately addressed by two different writers. The most striking example of a stylistic break in Shakespeare is, of course, in Pericles, where after two acts of rather undistinguished bumble we suddenly hear the unmistakable roar of Shakespeare’s mighty rhetorical engines.63

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But the first two acts, however they got into that form, certainly contain the incidents and images that belong to that part of the Pericles story, and there is no break in structure corresponding to the break in style. It is consistent with Shakespeare’s perfect objectivity that he should show no signs of wanting to improve his audience’s tastes, or to address the more instructed members of it with a particular intimacy. His chief motive in writing, apparently, was to make money, which is the best motive for writing yet discovered, as it creates exactly the right blend of detachment and concern. He seems to start out with an almost empathic relation to his audience: their assumptions about patriotism and sovereignty, their clichés about Frenchmen and Jews, their notions of what constitutes a joke, seem to be acceptable to him as dramatic postulates. Setting aside the anonymous and mysterious epistle which introduces the second issue of the Troilus and Cressida Quarto,64 he seems never to have addressed his audience with any other attitude than that expressed in the last line of Twelfth Night: “We’ll strive to please you every day.” His characters may express more highbrow views, notably Hamlet, but then Hamlet, unlike his creator, is both a minor poet and a university wit. The assumptions of a dramatist or the expectations of his audience may readily be translated into opinions or propositions or statements. If we do this to Shakespeare’s assumptions, they turn into the most dismal commonplace. Hence the feeling expressed by such a variety of critics, ranging from Bernard Shaw to T.S. Eliot, that, great poet as Shakespeare was, his philosophy of life, his opinions, standards, and values were bewilderingly shallow.65 The obvious answer is, of course, that Shakespeare had no opinions, no values, no philosophy, no principles of anything except dramatic structure. Why, then, is there so determined an effort to make him an incompetent thinker as well as a great poet? The reason takes us back to the distinction between critics mentioned at the beginning of this book. Some critics think of literature as an allegory or criticism of life, hence they tend to assume that any given work of literature illustrates something that can be expressed as a truth about life as the author sees it. Hamlet, according to Laurence Olivier, is the story of a man who could not make up his mind,66 hence the action of the play is developed to illustrate the effect of indecision, including eight corpses. The other approach, associated particularly with comedy and romance, regards the story being told, the imitation of an action being presented, as a self-contained unit. The author starts with a certain kind of story: this

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develops certain kinds of characters, occupying the strategic positions of that story, and each character owes his characteristic features, the things that make him what he is, to his place and function in the story. The moralistic approach sees him as owing these characteristics rather to his place as a symbol of the truths about life that the play illustrates. This approach is the dominating one in the criticism of modern literature: critics of Faulkner or Graham Greene almost invariably account for a character in terms of what he symbolizes in the author’s habitual attitudes. Such an approach may be more appropriate to modern writers, but it can be misleading even there if it implies, as it is often apt to do, that there are no technical or structural problems whatever involved in telling a story. If one starts to tell a story about Tom Jones, one needs such a contrasting character as Blifil67 for structural reasons, not merely to symbolize the author’s disapproval of hypocrisy. In any case, many of the most cherished problems of Shakespearean criticism turn into pseudo-problems as soon as the critical perspective is reversed. An example is the question, “Is Falstaff a coward?” Falstaff appears in plays largely devoted to warfare: warfare of this kind is based on a heroic code involving physical courage and readiness to die. Falstaff seems to be fairly detached about most of this code, and, unlike his predecessor Fastolfe in Henry VI,68 is articulate enough to suggest alternative values connected with saving one’s life and retreating from trouble. The word “coward” implies a moral judgment, and whether we apply it to Falstaff or not depends on whether we accept the heroic code as a value, instead of simply as a dramatic postulate. Naturally we prefer to say that it is not we but Shakespeare who accepts or rejects the value. A tough-minded critic will insist that Shakespeare did accept it and that Falstaff is a coward; a tender-minded one will insist that he did not accept it and that he made Falstaff into an ironic hero. One approach turns Shakespeare into a stupid snob; the other turns him into a dishonest snob. When we reach a conclusion like that it is clearly time to retrace our steps. I do not think I am threshing straw here: we may have lost some of our interest in Falstaff’s cowardice, but we still talk about Shakespeare’s acceptance of legitimacy, divine right, order and degree, the chain of being, Christian eschatology, and the like, as though they were truths that he believed in and wrote his plays to illustrate, or at least did illustrate incidentally. But it seems a strange critical procedure to equate so skilful a dramatic use of a theme with a belief in it which was mere com-

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monplace in his own day and is mere superstition in ours. In Dante and Milton we recognize certain anxieties peculiar to their age, along with an imaginative vision that is independent of the age and communicates itself directly to us. Shakespeare’s plays reflect the anxieties of his time: they do not show that he shared those anxieties. He may have done so as a man—there is no evidence one way or the other—but it is pointless to make allowances for things that “date” in his plays where we do not need to make such allowances. The third scene of Troilus and Cressida presents the Greek leaders in conference, in an atmosphere as solemn, as rhetorical, and as barbaric as an Indian powwow. In the midst of this conference Ulysses delivers his speech on degree [1.3.75–137]. He wants to get the Greek leaders to try to detach Achilles from his homosexual friend Patroclus, but he has to do this with the face-saving demanded by warrior aristocracies, hence all the talk about the cosmic order. The return of the ruthless and treacherous Achilles will not restore the cosmic order, but it will help to destroy the city of Priam. The audience is not asked to reflect on the state of the universe; the audience is seeing how skilfully Ulysses, like a human Aeolus, is controlling his bag of wind. When he wants to put pressure directly on Achilles he lets go with another tremendous speech on time [3.3.145–90], to which the same principles of decorum apply. To use these speeches as a basis of Shakespeare’s belief, or of beliefs in his audience to which he was appealing, not only reduces his poetic thought to platitude but ignores the fact that he is using it as platitude. Shakespeare’s offences against propriety have often been deplored: that is no longer an issue that worries us much, partly because we have a different notion of what constitutes indecency in literature. In every poet there is a craftsman who is trying to put words together into a structure solid enough to communicate with audiences remote in time and space and cultural assumptions. There is also in every poet, as in every man, an ego that wants to harangue and buttonhole, to sound off and impress, to impose opinions and project fantasies, to make enemies squirm and friends glorious by association. The only indecency known to literature is the exhibition of the author’s naked ego, and a great deal of literary virtue consists in the covering up of personal vices. Shakespeare seems to have had less of an ego centre than any major poet of our culture, and is consequently the most decent of writers. It is an offence against his privacy much deeper than any digging up of his bones to reduce him from a poet writing plays to an ego with something to “say.”

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When a great dramatist shows a deep concern for the social issues of his time, as Chekhov and Brecht do, we do not feel that this concern springs from the ego. So far from injuring their integrity as dramatists, it is an essential part of that integrity, and if there were evidence that Shakespeare had such a concern we should doubtless feel the same way about him. The complacent grinning sphinx of Matthew Arnold’s “Others abide our question” sonnet69 could only be another kind of ego. But even concern has the technical problem of preserving the dramatic tension without collapsing into the kind of direct address to the audience that instantly destroys it. It is curious that we can think of impartiality only as detachment, of devotion to craftsmanship only as purism, an attitude which, as in Flaubert, turns all simple life into an enormously intricate still life, like the golden touch of Midas. We can hardly conceive of an imagination so concrete that for it the structure is prior to the attitude, and prescribes the attitude. Shakespeare’s impartiality is a totally involved and committed impartiality: it expresses itself in bringing everything equally to life. Let us now examine another kind of problem in Shakespeare: the one in fact that the so-called problem comedies are really about. In Terence’s play Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law), the technical hero, a young married man named Pamphilus, refuses to live with his wife because he believes that she is pregnant with a child who cannot be his. She had in fact been raped, during a religious festival, by some hooligan in disguise. It was not her fault, but nevertheless Pamphilus feels that his honour demands that he repudiate her. Eventually it turns out that the disguised and raping hooligan was Pamphilus himself. This satisfies his honour, and the play ends happily. Everybody in this play, apart from Pamphilus, is presented as a decent and generous person, even the courtesan, who is usually so rapacious in Roman comedy. The contrast with Pamphilus seems deliberate, and one can hardly see or read the play without reflecting unfavourably on its hero. A juvenile delinquent would have a more coherent code of morals than that. However, Pamphilus remains the central figure of a comedy which ends as a comedy usually does, and his rewards are out of all proportion to his merits. It is extremely unlikely that Terence had anything to “say” worth listening to, straightforward or ironic, about the society or morals of his day which he was trying to illustrate by his use of Pamphilus. All our evidence indicates that he had no interest in anything beyond trying to entertain an audience with a popular, and therefore highly convention-

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alized, dramatic structure. This is not to say that he was necessarily unaware of the ironic overtones of his play: it is to say that any reaction to the character of Pamphilus has to be based on his dramatic function in the plot. He could not possibly act otherwise, and therefore he could not possibly be a different kind of person, if this particular story is to get told. If we have a moralistic problem, then, it is not that we demand to see poetic justice done, and less happiness handed out to Pamphilus, but rather a reflection, which has moral overtones, on the structure of the play: What is the value, as entertainment, of a story like this? The disproportion between action and character is a common feature of highly conventionalized fiction. In detective stories, we may often feel that the person who got murdered deserved it, and that we have more dramatic sympathy with the murderer than with his victim. But the author must follow the convention or his reader will feel cheated. We should note carefully that he does not feel cheated when the convention overrides his sympathies. Yet sometimes, in popular literature, the demands of the plot impose behaviour on characters that seems to us to call the whole conception of the plot in question. If the hero of a thriller miraculously gets out of his scrape, that is convention: but if he had to be invincibly stupid to have got into the scrape in the first place, we may become impatient with the convention. In Shakespeare there are at least three comedies in which a male character is married, to great applause, who we have been led to think is no great catch from his betrothed’s point of view. We have Claudio in Much Ado, Bertram in All’s Well, and Angelo in Measure for Measure. Claudio is perhaps the most disturbing of the three. When Hero’s infidelity is first suggested to him, he makes no resistance to the suggestion, but merely says that of course he will break off with her if the case is proved [3.2.123–5]. He then accepts evidence that would hardly deceive a fouryear-old child, and repudiates Hero in the most public and humiliating way possible [4.1.30 ff.]. We can rationalize his behaviour in various ways, but surely Beatrice has the sympathy of most of the audience when she regards him as a worm [4.1.301–7]. Hero, apparently, dies: Claudio is unaffected emotionally by this, and ridicules Hero’s father for taking his daughter’s death seriously [5.1.52, 55–7]. Then the action moves on to a festive conclusion in which Claudio is completely accepted, and even Beatrice seems to find everything satisfactory. The real critical question involved here is: Does anything that exhibits the structure of a comedy have to be taken as a comedy, regardless of its

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content or of our attitude to that content? The answer is clearly yes. A comedy is not a play which ends happily: it is a play in which a certain structure is present and works through to its own logical end, whether we or the cast or the author feel happy about it or not. The logical end is festive, but anyone’s attitude to the festivity may be that of Orlando or of Jaques. It is unnecessary to change our attitude to Claudio, by historical or other arguments, in order to make the play a comedy for us. The didascalia on Terence’s play tell us that it was not played through on its first performance. What happened was that the audience went out during the intermission to watch a rope-dancing act in the neighbouring circus, and failed to return.70 Clearly, Terence was not writing for an audience that gave him much encouragement to analyse character very exhaustively. The Roman audience, we feel, was rather like an audience of tired husbands at a symphony: they simply had to sit there until a certain kind of action completed itself. A prologue to one of Plautus’s plays expresses this briefly but poignantly: “You’d better stretch your legs: there’s a play by Plautus coming up, and it’s a long one.”71 Even in Shakespeare we may sometimes have a feeling which, if not boredom, is at any rate completed anticipation. In A Comedy of Errors, for instance, it is clear that these twins are going to meet sooner or later, and we wait for the author to catch up with a conclusion that we have mentally reached fairly early in the play. In comedy, as in all art that moves in time, the first datum is the drive or impetus toward the working through of a certain kind of action. The poet then has the problem of pacing the play to provide a continuity of interest. The more restless his audience, the more strongly accented the pacing has to be. On the lowest level it must be as violent as possible, with constant running around and shouting, the action described by a character in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street as having “some git to it, and not all this talky-talk.”72 But even with a civilized audience vigorous pacing is easier to take in. In music this accounts for the fact that finales are almost always in high speed. The same principle in drama takes us back to our original postulates. The popular features of drama are also the highly conventionalized features, because these latter provide the continuity of expected and anticipated devices which drive the play along with a more strongly marked emphasis. Part of our feeling about the repudiation scene in Much Ado is that we are expecting a comic conclusion. The statement “all’s well that ends well” is a statement about the structure of comedy, and is not intended to apply to actual life.

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We all know Dryden’s poem Alexander’s Feast and the influence which is there ascribed to music. Timotheus sings “A present deity” [ll. 35–6] and Alexander “Assumes the god” [ll. 39, 44]; he sings of the fall of Darius and Alexander sheds tears [ll. 75–88]; he sings of revenge and Alexander bursts out of the hall to burn the city [ll. 131–50]. It is a fine poem, and probably a faithful reflection of the cultural tastes of world conquerors, but it is not a definitive piece of music criticism. In fact, one would say that if this is the kind of thing music does to people, music is a most pernicious influence on society, and the sooner we get rid of it the better. What Dryden’s poem leaves out, of course, is the structure of music. Structure is the area of what Eliot would call unified sensibility: it is the unity which balances a variety of moods, conflicting with and to some degree neutralizing one another.73 Any fragment of the structure may evoke, by a kind of conditioned reflex, a certain mood or association, like the “little phrase” of Vinteuil in Proust.74 But structure as a whole cannot act kinetically in this way, and it does not make for clarity to confuse the effect of a Purcell aria with the effect of a bugle call to lunch. The structure of a work of art makes it the focus of a community. It does not act on people: it pulls people into it. An audience with varied backgrounds, associations, and habitual preferences is drawn together by something that says the same thing to each of them. Mood, on the other hand, does tend to act kinetically, to suggest or act as the sign for an emotion which the hearer provides. In every wellconstructed work of art, not only are the moods, and the emotional responses they cause, varied and balanced, but often two or more moods may be evoked at the same time. Thus the death of Cleopatra has both an elegiac and an ironic aspect to it: one aspect is emphasized by Charmian and Iras, the other by the clown and in a different way by Octavius. Yet we feel that there is a kind of parliament of moods, so to speak: that the house divides, and that there is a final majority in favour of one mood and not another. Tragedy is the name of a structure: it describes one important typical action of plays. It rouses conflicting emotions, generalized by Aristotle as pity and terror, achieves the balance among those emotions that Aristotle calls catharsis [Poetics, chap. 6], and yet there is a pervading mood of a tragedy which is sombre, and which we tend to think of as typically tragic. Comedy is also the name of a structure, yet it has a predominating mood which is festive. Because we are more strongly attached to our own moods than to a poet’s structures, the names of categories of structure, such as tragedy and comedy, come to

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be used in the sense of such majority moods, so that “comic” tends to mean funny and “tragic” sad. But in literature, as elsewhere, the unified is the opposite of the uniform. If tragedy has a uniformly sombre mood, it tends to become melodramatic. By concentrating on mood it also tends to act, as far as it can, kinetically, to encourage its audience to applaud the hero and hiss the villain. The audience thereby tends to break down from community into mob. If comedy concentrates on a uniformly cheerful mood, it tends to become farcical, depending on an automatic stimulus and reflex of laughter. Structure, then, commands participation but not assent: it unites its audience as an audience, but allows for variety in response. The response to dramatic action, as to social action, ought to be a majority and not a totality. If no variety of response is permitted, as in extreme forms of melodrama and farce, something is wrong: something is inhibiting the proper function of drama. We are not surprised to find that the plays of Shakespeare that are most nearly uniform in mood, such as Titus Andronicus, are not the ones that command our deepest imaginative loyalties. We are not surprised either to find that Shakespeare often goes to the opposite extreme. We may have a comedy so sombre that the festive conclusion seems forced, almost embarrassing; or, as in Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy so full of wit and tenderness that the catastrophe carries with it a sense of outrage. Here, as in most forms of intensive irony, the audience may remain divided in its reactions. Hence both criticism and performance may spend a good deal of energy on emphasizing the importance of minority moods. The notion that there is one right response which apprehends the whole play rightly is an illusion: correct response is always stock response, and is possible only when some kind of mental or physical reflex is appealed to. There are two forms of kinetic stimulus, though they are often found together. One is the emotional response that produces gloom or cheer; the other is the more conceptualized response of sympathy or indignation. This latter expresses itself didactically, directed toward making the audience leave the theatre, still in the unnatural unity of a mob, but determined to do or at least feel something about whatever is presented as inspiring or malignant. There is nothing of this in Shakespeare, and no didactic equivalent of Titus Andronicus, which is another reason for the importance of not translating Shakespeare’s dramatic postulates into values or opinions or propositions. In certain types of drama the action could be a fable irresistibly suggesting a moral which would be its “real

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meaning,” so that the criticism of such a play could go over the head of the play itself to the conception that the author “had in mind,” the play’s idea or form. But this quasi-Platonic approach will not work with Shakespeare: his plays are existential facts, and no understanding of them can incorporate their existence. Shakespeare’s “meaning” or poetic thought can be expounded only through a structural analysis of the play which keeps the genre of the play in mind as an essential part of the critical context. I labour this point because it seems to me that there is still a good deal of confusion about Shakespeare’s relation to his audiences, whether contemporary with him or with us. Such a confusion may be clearly expressed by a confused phrase, the most common of such phrases being “giving the public what it wants.” Any dramatist who knew his audience as well as Shakespeare would know that the important difference in it is not the difference between intelligent and stupid people, but the difference between intelligent and stupid responses to the play, both of which may exist in the same mind. In all audiences there is an attitude that comes to the theatre with a mass of prejudices and clichés and stock responses, and demands that the play illustrate them, or some of them. There is nothing to be done with such an attitude except to keep it quiet, and the superficial meaning of the play is what does that: the meaning that T.S. Eliot compares to a burglar throwing a piece of meat to a watchdog, hoping that the dog will bite it and not him.75 There is also a more intelligent attitude that wants only to see a play, and does not know until the end whether or not that play is what it wants. One attitude is focused on the apparent meaning, or moral, of the play; the other is focused on its structure. One attitude is reassured by the fact that in the historical plays the English are the right side and the French the wrong side; that in the romances only a real princess marries a real prince; that clowns are ridiculous and gentlemen stately. The other attitude does not seek a hidden meaning in the play addressed only to it: it simply observes the dramatic tension. In the final scene of Measure for Measure, the Duke has the role of dispenser of justice and Lucio has his own role as a morally reprehensible scandalmonger. Yet Lucio keeps getting laughs as the Duke blusters ineffectively at him, which means that Lucio holds just enough of the sympathy of the audience to keep the scene in dramatic proportion. Our next step is to describe the typical structure of comedy, which I shall attempt to do in the next essay. Here I am concerned with distin-

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guishing the characteristics of Shakespeare’s type of romantic comedy. We have seen that the two words “popular” and “conventional” have some relevance to Shakespeare, and a close relation to one another. We have not explained, however, why certain conventions should be popular: a matter of some importance when we feel inclined to question the worth or value of a convention. For that we need a third term which complements and rounds out the meaning of the other two: the term “primitive.” By “popular” we usually mean what is temporarily fashionable, for reasons that can be derived from the social conditions of any given time. But there is a more permanent sense in which a work may be popular, not as a bestseller, but in the sense of providing a key to imaginative experience for the untrained. The popular in this sense is the continuing primitive, the creative design that makes its impact independently of special education. Burns is a popular poet, not in any technical or bestseller sense, but in the sense that he continues and provides modern examples for a primitive tradition of folk song and ballad. Longfellow is a popular poet for the same reason, popularizing primitive elements as varied as ballad and Indian legend. What is popular in one generation often becomes ridiculous in the next one, quaint in the third, and is finally regarded as primitive in the fourth. Various forms of popular Victorian art are now completing this cycle. The word “primitive,” however, suggests, not the old-fashioned, but the archaic, the region of origins and beginnings. Nobody can reconstruct the origins of literature, but students of drama have always been aware of its development from, or succession to, certain rituals concerned with promoting the food supply by verbal magic. This primitive element was clearly recognized by Aristotle in Greek, and Livy in Roman, drama, and its memory was conserved by later commentators, notably the famous and influential Donatus. Thomas Lodge, author of the main source of As You Like It, paraphrases Donatus as follows: For tragedies and comedies, Donate the grammarian saith, they were invented by learned fathers of the old time to no other purpose but to yield praise unto God for a happy harvest or plentiful year. . . . You see then that the first matter of Tragedies was to give thanks and praises to God, and a grateful prayer of the countrymen for a happy harvest, and this I hope was not discommendable. . . . But to wade further, this form of invention being found out, as the days wherein it was used did decay, and the world grew

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to more perfection, so the wit of the younger sort became more riper, for they leaving this form invented another, for, for sonnets in praise of the gods, they did set forth the sour fortune of many exiles, the miserable fall of hapless princes, the ruinous decay of many countries; yet not content with this, they presented the lives of Satyrs, so that they might wisely, under the abuse of that name, discover the follies of many their foolish fellow citizens.76

This account establishes the principle that both tragedy and the comedy of manners are relatively late, educated, and sophisticated forms of drama. Comedy is inherently more popular than tragedy, for obvious reasons, but comedy as practised by Jonson, Congreve, Goldsmith, or Shaw rests on a precarious acceptance: most of these writers, we notice, scold their audiences a good deal for preferring something more sentimental or spectacular. A tradition of arrogance toward the audience runs through such comedy from the Prologue to Every Man in His Humour to the Prologue to Caesar and Cleopatra. The popular and primitive form of drama is a romantic spectacle, full of violent action, whether melodramatic or farcical (the inclusion of these elements is a different thing from making a uniformity of mood out of them), dancing and singing, ribald dialogue, and picturesque settings. Comedy preserves this primitive form better than tragedy, and romantic comedy of Shakespeare’s type preserves it better than the comedy of manners. It is consistent with Shakespeare’s general attitude to his public that he should move toward the romantic spectacle rather than away from it, and that so many of his experiments should be concerned with reviving the obsolete. Thus, after completing the austere Coriolanus and the even more forbidding Timon of Athens, we can see him turning over the pages of what seem to us rather corny and simple-minded plays, such as The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune and the hardy perennial Mucedorus, in search of formulas for his final romances.77 Gower in Pericles is part of an interest in trecento culture that extends to Boccaccio and Chaucer, and The Winter’s Tale insists on the affinity of its story to old tales and ballads. It has been suggested that Shakespeare was responding to a new trend initiated by Beaumont and Fletcher,78 but, aside from the fact that the influence was more probably the other way round, Shakespeare’s distinctive archaizing tendencies are not to be found in Beaumont and Fletcher. The educated or humanist view of drama assumed that unity of action required unity of time, of place, of social classes (not mixing kings and

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clowns in the same play) and of illusion (keeping the action on one level of plausibility).79 Any exception, such as Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass, would be likely to take the form of parody. Shakespeare not only ignores all this but deliberately turns back to the expanded screen of the old romances. The Rare Triumphs begins, in the convention of the Prologue to Job, with the Fury Tisiphone thrusting herself into a council of gods, and this vertical extension of the action into upper and lower worlds recurs in the oracles and epiphanies at the end of Cymbeline. The Winter’s Tale seems almost written in answer to Sidney’s strictures in the Defence of Poesy about the romances of his day that show a character as an infant in one act and as grown up in the next,80 and Shakespeare takes the fullest advantage of the principle stated in the Preface to Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess (ca. 1610) that in a pastoral tragicomedy a god is “lawful.”81 All four romances provide us with infants growing into adults during the action of the play, presented or recounted. The requirement that no proper romance can take less than fifteen years for its total action is met in The Tempest by a long and rather wooden expository harangue from Prospero to Miranda at the beginning [1.2.36–186]. Shakespeare had used this device in the early Comedy of Errors: if we found it only in that play we might regard it as a shift of inexperience, but when we meet it again in The Tempest (and in Cymbeline) we suspect something more like, let us say, a sophisticated, if sympathetic, treatment of a structural cliché. The rest of The Tempest observes the unity of time so rigidly that the time seems to keep shortening as the play proceeds, this being another device, like the use of Gower in Pericles, for incorporating the audience into the action. The expansion of time to include the passing of a generation— a theme much insisted on in The Winter’s Tale—seems, paradoxically, to have something to do with the sense of timelessness in which these romances move. In Cymbeline, as already mentioned, we enter a world in which Rome and the Renaissance exist simultaneously, and the only phrase that will date such a play is “once upon a time.” It is not only in the later romances that Shakespeare shows a preference for the old-fashioned and archaic. A Comedy of Errors has more in common with a primitive folk tale like Amis and Amiloun82 than with what we should normally expect from a Renaissance adaptation of Plautus.83 Another experimental comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, with its makeshift plot, its dialogue of incessant and sometimes vicious repartee and mutual baiting, and the strong sense of personal caricature, sounds almost as though Shakespeare were trying to establish an Aristophanic

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Old Comedy on the Elizabethan stage, or had been reading Livy on the Fescennine plays of ancient Italy that preceded comedies with a regular plot (argumentum).84 A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes us back to the folklore and fairy world of Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale and Lyly’s Endimion, and the matter-of-fact bourgeois society of The Merry Wives of Windsor goes in for ducking, beating, and burning rituals of an ageless antiquity. The effect of these archaizing tendencies in Shakespeare is to establish contact with a universal and worldwide dramatic tradition. Shakespeare draws away from everything that is local or specialized in the drama of his day, and works toward uncovering a primeval dramatic structure that practically anything in the shape of a human audience can respond to. When we turn to, say, Kalidasa’s Sakuntala, in fifth-century India, we are told of a king who was betrothed to a beautiful maiden but who forgot his betrothal because of a magician’s curse: her ring of recognition, which was to awaken his memory, was lost, fell into the Ganges, was swallowed by a fish, which was caught by a fisherman, and so on. There is nothing here that reminds us of the comedy of manners, but the kinship with Pericles and Cymbeline strikes us at once. Shakespeare did not know Menander, but The Winter’s Tale is incredibly close in atmosphere to, say, Epitrepontes, which is so much nearer to myth and folk tale than the derivative Roman comedies he did know. We may say with some confidence that if archaeologists ever discover a flourishing drama in Minoan or Mayan culture, it may not have plays like King Lear or The Alchemist, but it will almost certainly have plays like Pericles. Ritual acts based on what is loosely called sympathetic magic, such as pouring water on the ground as a rain charm, resemble drama in being a sequence of significant acts, but are not otherwise dramatic. Such acts are normally accompanied by a story or myth which establishes an interrelated significance among them. Literature, in the form of drama, appears when the myth encloses and contains the ritual. This changes the agents of the ritual into the actors of the myth. The myth sets up a powerful pull away from the magic: the ritual acts are now performed for the sake of representing the myth rather than primarily for affecting the order of nature. In other words, drama is born in the renunciation of magic, and in The Tempest and elsewhere it remembers its inheritance. Magic attempts to repeat, on a human level and in a human context, the kind of power ascribed to God in Hebrew religion and elsewhere. God speaks, and the forms of creation are called into being: the magician utters spells or recites names, and the spirits of nature are compelled to

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obey. However, drama gets back the magic it renounces in another way. Once it becomes a part of literature it enters into the function of literature: This is to use words, not to operate on the nonhuman world, but to assimilate it imaginatively to the human world, which it does mainly in the two archaic forms of identity and analogy. These reappear in literary imagery as metaphor and simile. The form of metaphor is more primitive and more concentrated than the language of simile, as well as further removed from the mental categories of ordinary experience, which are closer to the distinctions of observation and reason. In its earlier stages literature is closely attached to religion, and metaphor is also at its clearest in mythology, where we have gods conceived as human in form and yet identified with various aspects of nature, sun-gods and tree-gods and the like. The imagery associated with such gods is magic in reverse, so to speak: the kind of magic that enables Milton to say that nature mourns the death of Lycidas, or Shakespeare that the anemone stole the blood of Adonis.85 When I spoke of the importance of convention in literature in general and in Shakespeare in particular, I did not examine the question of how a convention gets itself established in literature. Superficially, it is established by vogue or fashion: a young poet will naturally write in the way that people around him are writing. But if we try to look deeper we have to consider a bigger principle than anything we can derive from social history. The young poet in the sixteenth century normally began with complaints about a cruel mistress. If we ask why, we are referred to a convention that goes back through Petrarch to the origins of Courtly Love poetry in Provence. Two unanswered questions still remain: first, how did it become a convention in the first place? and second, how did it remain popular for six or seven centuries through so many social changes? The aspect of the answer that concerns us here is that conventions are descended from myths. The myth preserves the primitive identity of personal character and natural object in its purest form. At the same time the myth tells a story, and the story turns its back on the original magical function of the action. A character in a St. George play may announce that he is a Turkish knight or a doctor or the front end of a lion, like Snug the joiner, but what he will never say is, “We are representing the contest of summer and winter.” If he did, the myth would cease to be a story and go back to being straight magic. Yet the bumps and hollows of the story being told follow the contours of the myth beneath, and

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as literature develops greater variety and independence of expression, these mythical shapes become the conventions that establish the general framework of narratives. Hence the literary convention enables the poet to recapture something of the pure and primitive identity of myth. The myth of a lost paradisal garden reappears in literature as the pastoral convention, and the relation of the convention to the myth enables the pastoral poet to use a highly concentrated metaphorical imagery without any breach of decorum. To take a different example: Macbeth is not a play about the moral crime of murder; it is a play about the dramatically conventional crime of killing the lawful and anointed king. The convention gives a ritual quality to the action, and the element of reversed magic to the imagery that enables the poet to identify the actors with the powers of nature. The lawful king has his place in the “great bond” of nature [3.2.49]: he has mysterious powers of healing, and is linked to everything in nature that keeps its rightful place and order. The usurper becomes linked with all the powers of chaos and darkness: not only is his deed accompanied by prodigious portents, but he himself becomes an incarnation of tyranny, an evil spirit that Malcolm must recognize and cast out of his own soul before he can become the lawful successor. If we keep this mythical and conventional element in Duncan’s sovereignty at the centre of the play, every word of it fits together into the gigantic and terrifying tragic structure that we know so well. Take it away, and Thomas Rymer himself could hardly do justice to the chaos of what remains. The witches collapse at once into laborious grotesquerie; the passage about Edward the Confessor touching for the king’s evil [4.3.140–59] into unctuous flattery; the dialogue of Malcolm and Macduff [4.3.1–139] into a tedious and embarrassing digression. In a play so concentrated there is no possibility of half measures, no residual quality of intensity or poetry or realistic detail or whatnot that is left over for us still to enjoy if we hesitate about the convention. Accept the convention, and the play is all right; reject it, and the play is all wrong. The same principle holds for the comedies, and is even more important in the comedies. When Pepys saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream and pronounced it the most insipid and ridiculous play that ever was wrote, he was not failing in critical judgment; he was saying what any honest man would have to say about it if he were unable to accept its convention.86 The descent of convention from myth does not wholly explain why conventions are the way they are, of course, but it does illuminate one

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aspect of whatever explanation is given. I spoke of Terence’s Hecyra and of its curious plot, in which a husband is only reconciled to his wife’s having been raped when he learns that he did it himself. The question of why such a story should be told is not easy to answer, if possible, but any answer must start with the convention of the calumniated wife as a feature of storytelling in all ages and cultures. And the particular form of this story that we meet in Hecyra is clearly a shrunken and rationalized form of a story in which the original assault on the wife was made by a god, or some representative of one: the story that the same audience could see in a less displaced form in Plautus’s Amphitryon, and that was still going strong centuries later in such motifs as the jealousy of Joseph [Matthew 1:18–25]. In Much Ado we have the same theme of calumniation, but Shakespeare has put it in something much closer to a primitive context by suggesting so strongly that Hero actually dies and revives during the play: “One Hero died defiled, but I do live,” she says [5.4.63]. Shakespeare’s handling of the theme is closer to the Indian Sakuntala, already mentioned, where the heroine is carried off to heaven after being disgraced and slandered, whence the king has to go to collect her. The problems of the problem comedies have to be looked at first of all as conventional descendants of myths. The “problem” of All’s Well is not any Shavian social problem of how a woman gets her man, but the mythical problem of how Helena, like her ancestress Psyche, is going to solve her three impossible tasks: first of healing the sick king, then of presenting Bertram with a son of his own getting, and with his own ring, the talisman of recognition that, in All’s Well as in Sakuntala, awakens his mind to reality. We may still find it a problem that she should want to do all this just to get Bertram, but that is because we think of Bertram after the play as continuous with Bertram during it. We should think rather of the primitive response demanded of us, say, in Richardson’s Pamela, when Mr. B., who has been the most sinister and menacing of villains for four hundred pages, instantly turns into a dear and beloved husband on signing a marriage contract. Similarly, the problem in Measure for Measure is how Isabella’s chastity, always a magical force in romance, is going to rescue both the violated Julietta and the jilted Mariana as a result of being exposed to the solicitations of Angelo. It is a problem that brings Isabella much closer to Dylan Thomas’s long-legged bait87 than to Hedda Gabler or Ann Tanner.88 Again, Isabella is unlikely to be our favourite Shakespearean heroine, but militant chastity, which is seldom likable, is her dramatic

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role, and the condition of her quest. A more complaisant heroine could no more accomplish this quest than Pinchwife could Petruchio’s.89 In Shakespeare’s main source, Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra, Isabella’s counterpart does yield herself to save her brother and gets cheated.90 Cymbeline, a play that might have been subtitled “Much Ado about Everything,” is the apotheosis of the problem comedies: it combines the Much Ado theme of the slandered heroine, the All’s Well theme of the expulsion of the hero’s false friend, the Measure for Measure theme of the confusion and clarifying of government, and many others. There are even some curious echoes of names from Much Ado: in Cymbeline we have Sicilius Leonatus betrothed to Imogen, whose name is Innogen in Shakespeare’s sources;91 in Much Ado we have Leonato, Governor of Messina in Sicily, whose wife’s name, though she has no speaking part, is Innogen.92 The former name goes on echoing in The Winter’s Tale as Leontes, King of Sicilia. The repetition may mean very little in itself, but we notice in the romances a technique of what might be called spatial anachronism, in which Mediterranean and Atlantic settings seem to be superposed on top of each other, as Bermudan imagery is superposed on the island in The Tempest. In particular, there is a convention, referred to in the Prologue to Jonson’s Sad Shepherd93 and prominent in Comus and Lycidas, of mixing British with Sicilian and Arcadian imagery in the pastoral. The same technique of superposition is used temporally as well, binding together primitive Wales, Roman Britain, and Italian Rome. Cymbeline has at least a token connection with the history plays of some significance. History is a prominent genre in Shakespeare until Henry V, when it seems to disappear and revive only in the much suspected Henry VIII at the end of the canon. Yet the history of Britain to Shakespeare’s audience began with the Trojan War, the setting of Troilus and Cressida, and included the story of Lear as well as the story of Macbeth. Even Hamlet is dimly linked with the period of Danish ascendancy over England. Alternating with these plays of a Britain older than King John are the Roman or Plutarchan plays, dealing with what, again, to Shakespeare’s audience was the history of a cousin nation, another descendant of Troy. In Cymbeline the theme of reconciliation between the two Trojan nations is central, as though it were intended to conclude the double series started by Troilus and Cressida. The reason for the choice of the theme may be partly that Cymbeline was king of Britain at the time of Christ. The sense of a large change in

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human fortunes taking place offstage has to be read into Cymbeline, and as a rule reading things into Shakespeare in the light of some external information is a dubious practice. Still, we notice the curiously oracular gaoler, who speaks for a world that knows of no other world, and yet can say, “I would we were all of one mind, and one mind good” [5.4.203–4]. We notice, too, the word “peace” at the end of the play, and the way that the promise to pay tribute to Augustus fits into that emperor’s decree that all the world should be taxed, the decree that begins the story of the birth of Christ. But Cymbeline is not, to put it mildly, a historical play: it is pure folk tale, featuring a cruel stepmother with her loutish son, a calumniated maiden, lost princes brought up in a cave by a foster father, a ring of recognition that works in reverse, villains displaying false trophies of adultery and faithful servants displaying equally false trophies of murder, along with a great firework display of dreams, prophecies, signs, portents, and wonders. What strikes one at once about the play is the extraordinary blindness of the characters in it. Imogen begins her journey to Milford Haven by saying: I see before me, man: nor here, nor here, Nor what ensues, but have a fog in them, That I cannot look through. [3.2.78–80]

Lucius, after the battle he was so confident of winning has gone so awry, says, For friends kill friends, and the disorder’s such As war were hoodwinked [5.2.15–16]

and the gaoler tells Posthumus how little he knows of where he is going [5.4.179–81]. Posthumus replies that “none want eyes to direct them the way I am going, but such as wink and will not use them” [5.4.185–7]. Yet Posthumus himself has believed an even sillier story than Claudio does in Much Ado. The crafty Queen wastes her energies trying to teach Cloten the subtleties of courtship; Belarius tries to persuade his adopted sons to be disillusioned about a world they have never seen. The word “election,” implying free choice, is used several times, but no one’s choice seems very well considered; the word “note,” meaning distinction or prestige, also echoes, but distinctions are difficult to establish

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when “Reverence, / The angel of the world” [4.2.247–8]94 is compelled to focus on the idiot Cloten, stepson of the weak and deluded Cymbeline. In Cymbeline, as in all the romances, there is a scaling down of the human perspective. Posthumus is peevishly and querulously jealous—he is no Othello; the Queen is squalidly unscrupulous, and is no Lady Macbeth. Imogen is by long odds the most intelligent character in the play, and Imogen throughout is surrounded by a kind of atmospheric pressure of unconsciousness. The emotional climaxes of the play are the two great songs of the awakening and the laying to rest of Imogen, and in neither of them has she any notion of the context. The aubade is sung to her indifferent ear by the agency of Cloten after she has unknowingly spent a night with Iachimo [2.3.20–6]; the obsequy is sung to her unconscious body by two boys whom she does not know to be her brothers while the headless Cloten is being laid beside her in the clothes of Posthumus [4.2.258–81]. We feel in Pericles that Marina’s magical chastity will get her safely through the peril of the brothel, but at least she knows it is a peril: in other words, there is much less dramatic irony in Pericles than in Cymbeline. The ironic complications of Cymbeline are in themselves, of course, the customary conventions of pastoral romance, where the simple childlike pleasure of knowing more than the characters do is constantly appealed to by the author. But there also seems to be a strong emphasis on the misdirection of human will, which culminates in the prison scene. In this scene a number of characters appear who are new to us but are older than the action of the play. They speak in a naive doggerel verse not unlike in its dramatic effect to the verse of Gower in Pericles, and like it they are a sign that we are being confronted with something traditional and archaic. They are ghosts from the world of the dead, who have been invisible spectators of the action and now come to speak for us as spectators, impeaching the wisdom of Jupiter for allowing things to get in such a muddle. Jupiter tells them what, in fact, we have been seeing all along, that a skilful and quite benevolent design is being woven of the action despite all the efforts of human folly to destroy it [5.4.93–113]. This scene is soon followed by the great contrapuntal tour de force of the recognition scene, when the truth is torn out of a score of mysteries, disguisings, and misunderstandings; when out of all the confusion of action a very simple conclusion is reached, and one which sounds very like peace on earth, good will toward men. The difference between Cymbeline and the earlier problem comedies, then, is that the counter-problem force, so to speak, which brings a festive conclusion out of all the mistakes of the characters,

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is explicitly associated with the working of a divine providence, here called Jupiter. Jupiter is as much a projection of the author’s craftsmanship as the Duke in Measure for Measure: that is, the difference between Cymbeline and the problem comedies is not that Cymbeline is adding a religious allegory to the dramatic action. What it is adding to the dramatic action is the primitive mythical dimension which is only implicit in the problem comedies. Cymbeline is not a more religious play than Much Ado: it is a more academic play, with a greater technical interest in dramatic structure. A final few words to explain the title of this chapter and to introduce the theme of the next one. All myths have two poles, one personal, whether divine or human, and one natural: Neptune and the sea, Apollo and the sun. When the world of sea and sun is thought of as an order of nature, this polarization becomes a god or magician who controls the natural machine at one end, and the natural machine itself at the other. Tragedy, irony, and realism see the human condition from inside the machine of nature; comedy and romance tend to look for a person concealed in the mechanical chess player. When Ben Jonson speaks disapprovingly of dramatists who are afraid of nature, and run away from her,95 we find his meaning clear enough. When he says of himself that he is “loath to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries,” the reversal of the phrase is more puzzling, although the implied comparison with Shakespeare is equally evident.96 Jonson’s own pastoral romance is the very beautiful, but unluckily incomplete, Sad Shepherd. Here we have Robin Hood characters, a Puck, and a Sycorax figure, the witch Maudlin, who has the witch’s traditional tempest-raiser role, and boasts, “I’se pu’ the world of nature ’bout their ears.”97 There is a disconsolate lover who believes his mistress dead, and who asserts that her chastity, like that of the Lady in Comus, is closely associated with the higher order of nature which Maudlin cannot reach. This conception of nature as an order threatened, but not essentially disturbed, by witchcraft is in Shakespearean romance too. What Shakespeare has that Jonson neither has nor wants is the sense of nature as comprising not merely an order but a power, at once supernatural and connatural, expressed most eloquently in the dance and controlled either by benevolent human magic or by a divine will. Prospero in particular may appropriately be said to make nature afraid, as he treats nature, including the spirits of the elements, much as Petruchio treats Katha-

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rina. In the remaining two essays I shall try to examine more closely the myth of nature in Shakespeare, and the way in which the emphasis is thrown, not on the visible rational order that obeys, but on the mysterious personal force that commands. As a somewhat bewildered Theseus remarks, after the world represented by his authority has been turned upside down by the fairies in the forest: Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy. [5.1.18–20]

III The Triumph of Time I have suggested that the comedies of Shakespeare have certain qualities that I have been associating with the words “conventional,” “popular,” and “primitive,” and I shall now attempt to outline the typical structure of Shakespeare’s comedy. I have dealt with this question of comic structure elsewhere,98 and will try to avoid repeating myself beyond the irreducible minimum. At the core of most Renaissance comedy, including Shakespeare’s, is the formula transmitted by the New Comedy pattern of Plautus and Terence. The normal action is the effort of a young man to get possession of a young woman who is kept from him by various social barriers: her low birth, his minority or shortage of funds, parental opposition, the prior claims of a rival. These are eventually circumvented, and the comedy ends at a point when a new society is crystallized, usually by the marriage or betrothal of hero and heroine. The birth of the new society is symbolized by a closing festive scene featuring a wedding, a banquet, or a dance. This conclusion is normally accompanied by some change of heart on the part of those who have been obstructing the comic resolution. Tragedy ends in a “catastrophe,” and Ben Jonson uses this term for the end of a comedy also,99 but in a comedy the end might better be called an anastrophe, a turning up rather than a turning down. To get some insight into this structure, it will be useful to glance back at the ritual forms preceding drama referred to earlier, and to which drama seems to have some generic relation. In these rituals there are three elements of particular importance for the comic structure. One is the period of preparation represented by the Christian Lent and Advent and the Jewish Day of Atonement and scapegoat ritual, a sombre and

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gloomy period where there is an attempt to recognize and get rid of the principle of sterility, later identified with sin and evil. Another is the period of licence and confusion of values represented by the carnival, the Saturnalia, and the festivals of promiscuous sexual union that appear in early religions, and have left their mark on the structure of such comedies as Terence’s Hecyra, already mentioned. Third is the period of festivity itself, the revel or komos which is said to have given its name to comedy.100 These three aspects of ritual do not always appear in this order, but this order happens to be a very effective one dramatically, and it is this order that we find reproduced in the typical Shakespearean comic structure.101 This structure, then, normally begins with an anticomic society, a social organization blocking and opposed to the comic drive, which the action of the comedy evades or overcomes. It often takes the form of a harsh or irrational law, like the law of killing Syracusans in A Comedy of Errors, the law disposing of rebellious daughters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the law that confirms Shylock’s bond and justifies his actions, the law that Angelo invokes to make Vienna virtuous, and so on. Most of these irrational laws are preoccupied with trying to regulate the sexual drive, and so work counter to the wishes of the hero and the heroine, which form the main impetus of the comic action. Sometimes the irrational law takes the form of a jealous tyrant’s suspiciousness, as with the humorous Duke Frederick in As You Like It or the obsessed Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. All four of the romances introduce a hostile father or father figure who descends from the senex iratus of New Comedy.102 Cymbeline has this role in the play named after him; The Winter’s Tale exhibits both Leontes and Polixenes in the role; in The Tempest, Prospero, making a lame excuse to the audience about not wanting Ferdinand’s wooing to be too easy [1.2.451–3], takes the same part in the courtship he has arranged, and Simonides in Pericles does something similar. Closely related to the tyrant is the termagant shrew in the house of Baptista, whose father obstinately decrees that she shall be married first. The social snobbery that leads Bertram to despise Helena is both a humour and an irrational law. Or the irrational law may result from some foolish resolve, like the rash promise of folklore, as in the pseudomonastic community in Love’s Labour’s Lost, determined “not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep” [1.1.48]. The anticomic theme may be expressed by mood instead of (or along with) an element in the structure. Some of the comedies begin in a mood

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of deep melancholy. The opening stage direction of All’s Well is: “Enter Bertram, the Countess of Rousillon, Helena, and Lafeu, all in black,”103 and the opening reference is to a funeral. Twelfth Night similarly begins with Orsino sunk in love melancholy and Olivia in mourning for a dead brother. The opening line of The Merchant of Venice is Antonio’s, “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,” and the opening line spoken by the heroine, “By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world” [1.2.1–2], is in counterpoint with it, though the actual mood is of course much lighter. Cymbeline begins, “You do not meet a man but frowns,” and A Comedy of Errors begins with the speech of a man under sentence of death.104 The irrational or anticomic society may be clearly defined in its social aims, like the one in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but the new society that is formed in the last moments of the comedy never is: we merely assume that the people incorporated in this society will get along without undue sense of restriction. At the same time the irrational society represents social reality, the obstacles to our desires that we recognize in the world around us, whereas the society of the conclusion is the realizing of what we want but seldom expect to see. The drive toward a festive conclusion, then, is the creation of a new reality out of something impossible but desirable. The action of comedy is intensely Freudian in shape: the erotic pleasure principle explodes underneath the social anxieties sitting on top of it and blows them sky-high. But in comedy we see a victory of the pleasure principle that Freud warns us not to look for in ordinary life. The second period of confusion and sexual licence is a phase that we may call the phase of temporarily lost identity, like the wood of no names that Alice passed through on her journey from pawn to queen.105 The phase is usually portrayed by the stock device of impenetrable disguise, or by the activities of a character assumed to be invisible, like Puck or Ariel, the two most prominent of several “Jack-a-Lent” sources of illusion.106 In a sense, of course, all braggarts or hypocrites, such as Parolles or Angelo, are disguised until exposed. But, consistently with the main theme of comedy, the loss of identity is most frequently a loss of sexual identity. The motif of a heroine disguising herself as a boy appears in five of the comedies, there being three such disguises in The Merchant of Venice.107 Sly’s “madam wife” in The Taming of the Shrew and the brides of Slender and Caius in The Merry Wives illustrate the reverse process. Many of the moral denunciations of stage plays at that time centred on a

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verse in the Pentateuch forbidding men to put on women’s clothes and vice versa,108 but it is difficult to say whether disguising a heroine represented by a boy actor as a boy neutralized this attack or was a peculiarly subtle defiance of it. In All’s Well and Measure for Measure the motif appears in the form of the substitution of one girl for another in the dark. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream lovers are again exchanged in the dark, and a similar device makes the calumny of Hero possible in Much Ado. Other manifestations of the theme range from the identical twins of A Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night to the headless body of Cloten dressed in Posthumus’s clothes in Cymbeline. Some of these manifestations are very subtle and complicated. In The Tempest, the questions of who is the rightful Duke of Milan or King of Naples merge with a theme of uncertain identity which covers a great deal of the action of the play. The whole island seems to look different to different people, and the Court Party goes through an extended series of hallucinations. The exact shape of Caliban also seems difficult to establish. A Comedy of Errors looks at first glance as though the doubling of the identical twins was merely a way of turning an already rather rowdy Plautine comedy into pure farce. But in this play the themes from the Apollonius story, used later in Pericles,109 work in the opposite direction from farce, and so do the curiously eerie atmosphere of Adriana’s melancholy, the repeated references to jugglers and wizards, the insistence on madness, which bring the feeling of the play closer to the night world of Apuleius than to Plautus. The counterpart to Antipholus of Syracuse in Plautus goes into the courtesan’s house with a now-for-some-fun attitude;110 in Shakespeare Antipholus enters the house of his brother’s wife with almost a feeling of being initiated into a mystery: Am I in earth, in heaven or in hell? Sleeping or waking? mad or well-advis’d? Known unto these, and to myself disguis’d! I’ll say as they say, and persever so, And in this mist at all adventures go. [2.2.212–16]

Strained as it may sound, I feel that one reason for the use of the two sets of twins in this play is that identical twins are not really identical (the same person) but merely similar, and when they meet they are delivered, in comic fashion, from the fear of the loss of identity, the primitive horror of the doppelgänger which is an element in nearly all forms of insanity,

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something of which they feel as long as they are being mistaken for each other. The third and final phase is the phase of the discovery of identity. This may take many forms, but we may generalize them as social (A identified with B) and individual (A identified as himself). The identity at the end of a comedy may be social, the new group to which most of the characters are attached, or individual, the enlightenment that changes the mind or purpose of one character; or, as usually happens in Shakespeare, both. To this singular and plural identity we may add a dual form: the identity of two lovers who are finally united. When there are three or four marriages at the end of a comedy this identity obviously coincides with the social one. Singular identity occurs when an individual comes to know himself in a way that he did not before. As a rule this action follows the course outlined in Jonson’s conception of the humour. The character is tyrannized over by some trait of character that makes him repeat a certain line of conduct mechanically, as a miser is continually reaching for his gold or a hypochondriac for his medicines. Being victimized by a passion of this kind, being bound to an unchanging line of conduct, is, according to Bergson and other authorities, one of the chief sources of laughter, and Bergson’s theory is illustrated by Ben Jonson’s humour and Pope’s ruling passion.111 Such a person is under an individual form of the same kind of tyranny that appears socially with the irrational law, already mentioned. The action of a comedy often leads to a kind of self-knowledge which releases a character from the bondage of his humour. This is not necessarily an introverted knowledge, which is of little use to a comedy, but a sense of proportion and of social reality. Humour in this sense is not perhaps a major theme of Shakespeare’s comedy as it is of Jonson’s, but it is an essential minor one. It is characteristic of Shakespeare that his clearest example of a humour comedy should also be his most ambiguous one. The action of The Taming of the Shrew is directed toward breaking down Katharina’s humour of shrewishness and releasing her from it. Shakespeare did not need to live in our time to know that shrewishness could be a perverted desire for affection, and Petruchio, for all his fortune hunting and boisterous selfishness, does display some genuine affection for Katharina. His affection is carefully subordinated to his ruthlessness: if I read the action of the play correctly, he takes the precaution of not consummating his marriage until Katharina has demonstrated her new nature. But in a

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sense his ruthlessness is the guarantee of his affection. The psychology of Shakespeare’s own day would doubtless have endorsed the action of the play, which indicates that a person of Katharina’s temperament could only leap from one extreme to the other, from abnormal shrewishness to abnormal submissiveness. We also see the gentle Bianca, whom everyone loves and pities, dealing with her suitors with the greatest coolness and competence, quietly arranging for her own marriage, which has no delays or practical jokes like Katharina’s, and settling down to be undisputed mistress in her own house. It may be possible to tame a shrew: it is clearly not possible to tame the demure Bianca. Shakespeare’s play provoked rejoinders from other dramatists who reversed his action,112 but this reversal is already present in his play. Yet even the taming of a shrew is a less simple matter than, say, breaking in a colt. When we first see Katharina she is bullying Bianca, and when we take leave of her she is still bullying Bianca, but has learned how to do it with social approval on her side. Love’s Labour’s Lost is another humour comedy in which the King of Navarre and his three followers transform themselves into voluntary pedants forsaking the society of fair ladies. Fair ladies duly appear and make short work of these resolves, but the real action of the comedy is rather subtler than this. The humour that has driven the four courtiers into their retreat is, paradoxically, an excess of wit, an intellectual pride that, extending as it does to Armado and Holofernes, transforms the atmosphere of the whole play into that of a literary coterie, with everyone lost in admiration of his own wit and that of his close friends, and decrying the wit of others with the greatest possible malice. Berowne, though he speaks against the retreat, is more of a slave to the humour of irresponsible wit than anyone else. The grotesque penance enjoined on him by Rosaline indicates that there is something mechanical about his mockery, and that he cannot live up to his own precepts until he realizes that even joking is an act of communication rather than expression. But Rosaline and the other ladies are also caught by the pervading spirit, and the Pageant of Worthies [5.2.547–715], especially the incident of the baiting of Holofernes [5.2.595–631], shows it developing toward hysteria, until the news of the King of France’s death suddenly sobers the action [ll. 718–21]. Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado are similarly mechanical comic humours, prisoners of their own wit, until a benevolent practical joke enables their real feelings to break free of their verbal straitjackets. This

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benevolent practical joke is in contrast to the malevolent one that Don John plays on Claudio, which, though far more painful in its effects, operates according to the same comic laws. Claudio becomes engaged to Hero without also engaging his loyalty: he retains the desire to be rid of her if there should be any inconvenience in the arrangement, and this desire acts precisely like a humour, blinding him to the obvious facts of his situation. In his second marriage ceremony he pledges his loyalty first, before he has seen the bride, and this releases him from his humorous bondage. The theme of self-knowledge is a prominent one in All’s Well and Measure for Measure, where the attempted descents of Bertram and Angelo into vice are really mistaken forms of self-discovery. Parolles, too, is almost relieved to be unmasked, because the unmasking heals the split in his personality between his bragging outside and his cowardly inside, and he turns at once to Lafeu as a protector because Lafeu was the first to “bring him out,” to know him for what he was. In Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale the release from the humour of jealousy is a central theme, and in The Tempest the Court Party is brought by Prospero’s magic to a concentrated self-knowledge which rescues them from a state in which “no man was his own” [5.1.213]. The most common form of identity, of course, is the form achieved by marriage, in which two souls become one, and, in the piercingly accurate phrase of Hymen in As You Like It, “atone together” [5.4.110]. The paradoxes involved in two souls becoming one are the theme of The Phoenix and the Turtle.113 The discovery of sexual identity occurs when the heroine returns to her normal female garments, but sexual identity is a more deep-seated theme in comedy than it looks. The centre of the comic drive toward identity is an erotic drive, and the spirit of comedy is often represented by an Eros figure who brings about the comic conclusion but is in himself sexually self-contained, being in a sense both male and female, and needing no expression of love beyond himself. The fair youth of the sonnets is such an Eros-Narcissus figure, though of course in a very different context, and a later one, thanks to Mozart’s music the most haunting and disturbing one in all drama, is Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro. Cherubino thinks he is in love with every woman he sees, but his love is a condition, not a desire, and as his role in the play is at least half female, he is accurately described by Figaro as “Narcisetto, Adoncino d’amor.”114 In Shakespeare the characters Puck and Ariel are Eros figures of a similar kind: they are technically males, like Eros him-

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self, but from the human point of view the ordinary categories of sex hardly apply to them. In the background of Puck is the Indian boy who, like Cherubino ordered off to the wars, changes from a female to a male environment. In Twelfth Night the discovery of sexual identity is combined with the identical-twin theme: Orsino and Olivia are languishing in melancholy until out of the sea comes an ambiguous figure “that can sing both high and low” [2.3.41], who eventually becomes male to Olivia and female to Orsino, and so crystallizes the comic society. Sebastian, naturally, disclaims any such Eros role: Nor can there be that deity in my nature, Of here and every where. [5.1.227–8]

But he has not seen, as we have, how his feminine counterpart has been filling his role for him. In other comedies the heroine disguised as a boy fills the same bisexual Eros role. For it is usually the activity of the heroine, or, in some cases, her passivity, that brings about the birth of the new society and the reconciliation of the older one with it. This activity takes the form of a disappearance and return. The sexual disguise is the simplest form of this; elsewhere it takes the form of a death and revival, or comes as close to one as credibility will permit. The suggestion is very strong in Much Ado, as remarked earlier, that Hero really dies and comes back to life; as usual, the difficulties in believing this are later to be explained away to the characters, not to us. The same theme of death and revival comes into All’s Well, when Bertram is arrested on suspicion of killing Helena, who is assumed to be dead for a great part of the play. Even Katharina the shrew is newly born: “For she is changed, as she had never been,” says the delighted Baptista [5.2.115]. There is a trace of the same theme when a picture of Portia which looks miraculously like her is found in the leaden casket [Merchant, 3.2.115–26]. In the romances the theme of death and revival, associated with Thaisa, Imogen, and Hermione, is greatly elaborated, and in Pericles something of the casket symbolism of The Merchant of Venice recurs: Pericles forsakes the incestuous daughter of Antiochus, a “glorious casket stored with ill” [1.1.77], and sends the body of Thaisa into the sea in a “caulked and bitumened” coffin [3.1.71].115 The bulk of lyrical poetry in Shakespeare’s age was written in a convention in which a male lover revolved cyclically around an inscrutable female figure who was normally cruel, though her cruelty was itself

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a sexual fascination, who occasionally extended enough favour to the lover to put him into ecstasies of delight, but who could also be disdainful to the point of killing him or driving him mad. In general there was a minimum of sexual contact between lover and mistress: the lover often renounced this or celebrated a love triumphant over her (or his) death. We may call this convention, using Robert Graves’s term, the whitegoddess cycle,116 and one of its most eloquent themes is that of the mistress gloating over a collection of slain lovers, as in Campion’s When thou must home.117 But in comic drama and romance the action makes for marriage and the eventual possession of the mistress, and Shakespeare is expressing the contrast with courtly love poetry in its most concentrated form by developing an action in which a disappearing and returning heroine revolves cyclically around a male lover, and is usually the efficient cause of the conclusion. We may call this, the movement opposite to that of the white goddess, the cycle of the black bride. I take the word “black” from the Song of Songs,118 although Julia, Hero, Hermia, Rosaline, and Juliet are all associated with the word “Ethiop.” The dark lady of the sonnets, of course, is a white goddess, as she should be in that genre. The ordeal of the heroine who seeks her lover through darkness, disguise, humiliation, or even death until she finds him brings her close to the folklore figure of the loathly lady, who must remove some handicap of slander, ugliness, or captivity before her identity is recognized. In courtly love poetry friendship between men usually ranks higher than love for a mistress, being more disinterested and less of a slavery to passion or an imperious love god. This theme of the subordination of love to friendship occurs in the sonnets, where the beautiful youth takes over the poet’s mistress, and in that curious episode at the end of The Two Gentlemen of Verona in which Valentine, after rescuing Silvia from an attempted rape by Proteus, amiably makes a present of her to Proteus. We notice that Silvia, who addresses her suitors as “servants” [2.4], and who is called holy and wise as well as fair [4.2.41], has more of the courtly love mistress about her than is usual in Shakespeare. Elsewhere love normally triumphs over friendship, as Benedick reluctantly challenges Claudio to a duel at Beatrice’s command, and sometimes friendship between men is made an obstacle to the comic conclusion, the friendship of Bertram and Parolles being an example. Love conquers all, in general: it also conquers certain enemies of its own in particular. Of these, one of the most important is lust. Love is a

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specific relation between two people which individualizes them both; lust is an unspecified drive which cares nothing for its object. Bertram, in All’s Well, is certain that it would be heaven to go to bed with Diana and hell to go to bed with Helena, but in the dark his lust cannot tell the difference. In The Merry Wives Falstaff’s assault on the virtue of the two stolid matrons he picks out becomes a genuine lust as well as cony catching, and the method of expelling it, by burning him with tapers, recalls a remark quoted in Brand’s Popular Antiquities, that fires were lit at various times of the year in order “that the lustful dragons might be driven away.”119 Herne the hunter, the mythical figure with whom Falstaff identifies himself, appears to be a kind of Anglicized Orion, a lubberly hunter whose associations are with sterility and the end of the year. There is an old legend that Queen Elizabeth commissioned The Merry Wives because she wanted a play that would show Falstaff in love.120 Whether she noticed that what The Merry Wives shows is Falstaff on the prowl for money and overcome by a physiological reflex at the climax of his efforts, the legend does not say. As for the theme of social identity, the nature of the new society formed in the final moments of the play, Shakespeare seldom varies the normal comic pattern, but his approach to this pattern is more thoroughgoing. In the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence the new society is more usually a society of the young men and women, with a tricky slave as their general. The older men are defeated, sometimes reconciled, oftener fleeced or gulled if fathers, beaten as well as swindled if braggart soldiers. Shakespeare, however, very seldom emphasizes the defeat of one society by another. His main emphasis falls on reconciliation, and this in turn involves bringing the happy young couples into continuity with the society of their elders. In A Comedy of Errors, in striking contrast to the usual New Comedy structure, the central theme is the reunion, not of the twins, but of their father and mother. Here as in so many other places this early experimental comedy anticipates the techniques of the romances. The action of All’s Well never emerges from the shadow of an older generation, the Countess, the King of France, Lafeu, lamenting their losses and living with their memories, and it is the will of this older society that eventually forces Bertram to accept Helena, the conventional role of the hostile father being in this play taken by the hero himself. In Pericles the emphasis falls on the reunion of Thaisa and Pericles, and the marriage of Marina is subordinated to her return to Pericles. In Cymbeline, the lovers Posthu-

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mus and Imogen are finally united, and Cymbeline’s opposition to this collapses with the death of his queen. But equally important is the theme of the return of Cymbeline’s two lost sons to their father. In the final gesture of submission to Rome, what is eventually going to become the third Troy (the text does not mention Troy, but the pattern was familiar) puts itself into a subordinate relation to its historical parent, the second Troy. The sudden and rather gratuitous appearance of Posthumus’s father and mother in the oracle scene [5.4] reinforces the theme of continuing parental will. In The Winter’s Tale the central action is the mysterious return of Hermione to Leontes, to which again the story of the young lovers is subordinated, and of course everything is subordinated to the return of Prospero in The Tempest. In The Merry Wives the action seems more typically Plautine: we have a baffled braggart and a young man who carries off the girl from under the noses of her equally baffled parents. Yet there is another dimension even to this action. Nobody can hear the name Falstaff without thinking of the palmy days of Falstaff when he and Poins were roistering with Prince Hal. It is clear that Falstaff and his three followers, living more or less as brigands in the world of Windsor, represent a late and degenerate form of this society. Such as it is, the Falstaff society disintegrates when Falstaff is compelled to cashier his followers, and Falstaff becomes isolated from the action. At this point Fenton, who marries Anne Page by stealth, becomes the technical hero of the play. He is said to have “kept company with the wild prince and Poins” [Merry Wives, 3.2.72–3], and his ability to do what Falstaff could not do, enter the prosperous middle-class society of the Fords and Pages and share its wealth, marks a rebirth of a society older than the action of the play. The Merry Wives reminds us of the histories, and the cooperation between older and younger societies in Shakespeare, ensuring that the new society at the end shall also be continuous with the one it succeeds, reflects Shakespeare’s strong interest in historical plays. In the histories, or most of them, the comic theme, that is, the theme that makes for a reconciling or festive conclusion, is the principle of legitimacy. King John is a strong ruler until he attempts to have the rightful heir Arthur put out of the way: then he goes to pieces and Faulconbridge has to take over. Faulconbridge does not press his de facto and “natural” claim to the throne, but gives way to the right of the infant Henry III, and hence the play ends on a strong major chord, with the enemies defeated and the country united. The taint of usurpation hangs over all the Lancastrian

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plays, but the principle of legitimacy recurs in Henry VIII. For there is a “comic” power at work in this play, an invisible but omnipotent and ruthless providence who is ready to tear the whole social and religious structure of England to pieces in order to get Queen Elizabeth born. The infant Elizabeth at the end of the play is the counterpart to the device in comedy of suddenly producing the unexpected twist in the plot. In the later comedies and the romances the theme of sexual licence is often expressed by making the heroine an Andromeda figure, putting her in an exposed position where her chastity is threatened. Thus Isabella is exposed to Angelo, Marina to the brothel, Imogen, thrown from a “rock” by Posthumus, to Cloten and Iachimo, and there are suggestions of threats to Miranda coming from Caliban and later Stephano. This theme also appears earlier: Portia is exposed by the scheme of the caskets to her suitors, in such a way that she says, “I stand for sacrifice” [3.2.57], and compares herself to Hesione [3.2.54–7].121 In the Andromeda story the person who places the heroine in the exposed position is her father, and there are several fathers of heroines in Shakespeare who do not enter the play but exert a mysterious influence on the action. The King of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost, whose death postpones the normal comic resolution as the princess leaves her lover and returns to bury her father, the father of Portia who arranged the scheme of the caskets, the father of Helena who gave her his medical knowledge, the father of Isabella who is the object of what we should now call a fixation on Isabella’s part, are examples. This father–daughter relationship is greatly expanded in the romances, and will be examined in the final essay. Meanwhile, we may note that we have compared the role of the disguised heroine to that of the Eros figures Puck and Ariel, and that Puck and Ariel also act under direction from an older person. The greater the emphasis on reconciliation in comedy, the more the defeated forces of the comedy tend to become states of mind rather than individuals. Shylock is the chief exception—not wholly an exception, because what is expelled is the spirit of legalism, but an exception nonetheless, and one that nearly destroys the comic mood of the play he is in. Elsewhere the individual is released from his humour and it is the humour that is expelled. In the denouement of The Merry Wives Falstaff’s lust is expelled, but so are Ford’s jealousy and Page’s miserliness—as Falstaff says, the arrow shot at him has glanced [5.5.235]. Hence as an individual Falstaff has as much right to be at the final party as Ford and Page have. Leontes and Posthumus are treated with the greatest indul-

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gence as soon as they have overcome their fantasies; Claudio and Bertram, as explained earlier, eventually become quite satisfactory comic hero-husbands; the forgiveness of Angelo, Iachimo, the Antonio of The Tempest, the conversion of Oliver in As You Like It, all seem concerned to make the comic society at the end as inclusive as possible. The bad influence on Bertram in All’s Well is said by Lafeu, and assumed by the other officers, to be Parolles, but Parolles too is an individual with a troublesome influence to be expelled. There is, however, still a contrast between the individualizing movement of the identity of awareness and the incorporating movement of a social identity. This contrast corresponds to a split in the mind of the spectator in the audience. The comedy moves toward the crystallization of a new society; everybody, including the audience, is invited to participate in this society and in the festive mood it generates; it is usually approved by the dramatist, and the characters who obstruct it or are opposed to it are usually ridiculed. Part of us, therefore, if we like the comedy, feels involved with the new society and impelled to participate in it, but part of us will always remain a spectator, on the outside looking in. Every comic dramatist has to be aware of the ambivalence of his audience, on the alert to prevent a sudden unwanted alienation, as when the audience laughs in the wrong place, or an unwanted sympathy, as when it laughs too often in the right ones. Comedy, we have said, is a structure embodying a variety of moods, the majority of which are comic in the sense of festive or funny, but a minority of which, in any well-constructed comedy, are not. Similarly, comedy presents a group of characters, the majority of which advance toward the new society of the final scene and join it. But, again, in any well-constructed comedy there ought to be a character or two who remain isolated from the action, spectators of it, and identifiable with the spectator aspect of ourselves. Of these spectator roles two are of particular importance. One of them is the fool or clown, who, contrary to what we might expect, often preserves a curious aloofness from the comic action. The fool, when technically so, is frequently (Lavache,122 Touchstone, Feste) said to belong to the older generation, his jokes in a different idiom from what the society of the comedy wants and expects. He is often (Lavache, Costard, Gobbo, and Feste if that is the implication of Olivia’s “dishonest” [Twelfth Night, 1.5.42]) said to be lustful, more inclined to get girls into trouble than to take any responsibility for them afterward. References are made (Costard, Touchstone, Lavache) to his being whipped or imprisoned.

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The clown is significantly linked—usually by antagonism, for isolated characters do not form a society—with another role in which a character personifies a withdrawal from the comic society in a more concentrated way. There is, as usual, no word for this role, and I am somewhat perplexed what name to give it. Names which I have used elsewhere, such as pharmakos and churl,123 belong rather to the different character types that may or may not have this role. I select idiotes, more or less at random. The idiotes is usually isolated from the action by being the focus of the anticomic mood, and so may be the technical villain, like Don John, or the butt, like Malvolio and Falstaff, or simply opposed by temperament to festivity, like Jaques [in As You Like It]. Although the villainous, the ridiculous, and the misanthropic are closely associated in comedy, there is enough variety of motivation here to indicate that the idiotes is not a character type, like the clown, though typical features recur, but a structural device that may use a variety of characters. In Love’s Labour’s Lost there is a group of six humours, five of whom are summarized by Berowne as “the pedant, the braggart, the hedgepriest, the fool, and the boy” [5.2.542]. In the “hedge-priest” Nathaniel, who spends a scene flattering Holofernes and is finally rewarded with an invitation to dinner [4.2], we recognize a mutation of the Classical parasite. The sixth is Dull, the rural constable, whom Shakespeare did much to establish as a comic type. But as the main society of the King of Navarre and his courtiers is itself a humorous society, there is nothing for this group of humours to be except a chorus, commenting on and caricaturing the humours of their social superiors. This chorus role is emphasized by Berowne when, scolding himself for falling in love, he mentions three of them as elements in his own mind: A critic, nay, a night-watch constable, A domineering pedant o’er the boy. [3.1.176–7]

Of these six humours, the central fool or clown role is taken by Costard and the central idiotes role by Armado. Both of these extend, by caricature, the verbal play that is the main subject of this comedy. Costard is delighted with the display of verbal agility he hears around him, and says: O’ my troth, most sweet jests! most incony vulgar wit! When it comes so smoothly off, so obscenely, as it were, so fit. [4.1.142–3]

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But, as often happens with Shakespeare’s clowns, his own attempts to take part in the verbal repartee are not too successful. His enthusiasm is all the more generous in that he has just been sharply rebuked by the ladies for not being obscene in an upper-class way, as they are. Armado, who for a conventional braggart with a Spanish name recalling “Armada” is a curiously gentle and wistful figure, starts out as the butt of the courtiers. But his grandiloquent language proceeds from the love of his own wit, and his love of his own wit, as I have previously tried to explain, is no more ridiculous than theirs. He and Costard are, as is so often true of the clown and the idiotes, linked by antagonism: they are rivals for the same girl, and a quarrel breaks out between them. But when the action is sobered by the news of the death of the King of France, Armado moves to the centre of the stage. It is he who takes on the full three-year vow of loyalty to a cause which the four courtiers have dispensed with so easily, he who is master of ceremonies during the beautiful and muted conclusion, and he who dismisses the cast almost with a benediction: “You that way; we this way.”124 In As You Like It the clown is Touchstone and the idiotes Jaques. Jaques is a wanderer, the Italianate traveller so often ridiculed in Elizabethan literature: he is a sentimentalist and a melancholic. He is fascinated by Touchstone, feels a sense of kinship with him, and attempts to become a satirist, practising on Orlando and Rosalind with very little success. Clearly, he is a Childe Harold but no Byron. We notice too his jealousy of Touchstone and his dislike of seeing Touchstone marry Audrey and take part in the festive society. In Twelfth Night the clown is Feste and the idiotes Malvolio, and here again is the link of antagonism. Feste is ridiculed by Malvolio as a stale clown, and in revenge forces Malvolio into a clown role. When Olivia says to Malvolio, “Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee!” [5.1.369] the application of the word “fool” to Malvolio is a signal for Feste to mark the completion of the action by his reference to the whirligig of time [5.1.376]. In The Taming of the Shrew the clown is Christopher Sly, who is also the spectator of the rest of the play. In the play we know he falls asleep after a few lines, which is more consistent both with his nature and with the unity of the action.125 But in the alternative version, The Taming of a Shrew, the entire action is presented to him as a wish-fulfilment dream: he describes it as the best dream that ever he had in his life, and goes off at the end to apply its principles to Mrs. Sly.126 The audience is clearly not expected to be sanguine about his success, so that he has a kind of

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embryonic and anticipatory idiotes role as well. In The Merry Wives Falstaff has both roles, but even when united in the same person they are still at loggerheads with each other: Falstaff is continually wondering how so intelligent a person as himself can be such a dupe. In All’s Well Lavache is the clown and Parolles, like Falstaff and Malvolio, is the idiotes as butt or gull. As usual, there are sharp exchanges of antagonism between them, but there is so much of the clown in Parolles and so much of the sardonic misanthropic idiotes in the “shrewd and unhappy” Lavache [4.5.63]127 that the two roles seem at times to interchange. In Measure for Measure Lucio is another compulsive talker like Parolles, but Parolles is able to observe his own compulsions, and his exposure brings him to a terrifying flash of self-enlightenment: “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live” [4.3.333–4]. There is nothing of this capacity for self-discovery in Lucio. His refusal to bail Pompey, who has something of an abortive clown role, is in the customary pattern of antagonism: otherwise, Lucio is a clown rather than an idiotes. The Duke’s command to him to marry the whore he has made pregnant [5.1.508–12], in defiance of his own comfortable standard in such matters, again associates him with the typical lustful clown. In The Merchant of Venice the clown is Gobbo and the idiotes Shylock, who is also misanthropic and opposed to festivity on principle. The link of antagonism between the two is slight but significant: Gobbo’s desertion of Shylock for Bassanio is an anticipation of the elopement of Jessica and the transfer of social power from Shylock to the Bassanio group. The idiotes is again sinister in the misanthropic Don John of Much Ado, although Beatrice pretends that Benedick has both roles when she says of him (and to him in disguise): “He is the Prince’s jester: a very dull fool; only his gift is in devising impossible slanders” [2.1.137–8]. In this play the clown, Dogberry, is a malappropriate constable in the tradition of Dull. In the romances the fact that characters tend to assume a place in a definite moral hierarchy changes the emphasis of these two roles, in a way we shall examine later. In Caliban the idiotes is identified with the natural man, the human creature who has nature but no nurture, and who, like Swift’s Yahoo, demonstrates that human nature as such is not capable of forming a society. Caliban, however, joins, not the villains, Antonio and Sebastian, but the clowns Stephano and Trinculo, of whom Trinculo is a professional jester, and here again Caliban’s immediate and violent jealousy of Trinculo follows the usual pattern. In tragedy, of course, the hero is always something of an idiotes, iso-

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lated from the society in which he has his being. Perhaps the most concentrated study of social isolation in the tragedies is Coriolanus, where the hero is a man whose “heart’s his mouth” [3.1.256], who, like Molière’s Alceste in a comic setting,128 carries sincerity to the extreme of a social vice. In Plutarch the Greek counterpart, or rather contrast, to Coriolanus is Alcibiades,129 who also returns in revenge to the city that has exiled him, and it would be a logical development for Shakespeare to go from the isolation of Coriolanus to the isolation of Alcibiades’ friend Timon. It may seem an irresponsible paradox to speak of Timon of Athens as a comedy. Yet if we think of it simply as a tragedy, we are almost bound to see it as a failed tragedy, comparing it to its disadvantage with King Lear. But we can hardly suppose that Shakespeare was foolish enough to attempt the same kind of thing that he attempted in King Lear with so middle-class and untitanic a hero. It seems to me that this extraordinary play, half morality and half folk tale, the fourth and last of the Plutarchan plays,130 is the logical transition from Coriolanus to the romances, and that it has many features making for an idiotes comedy rather than a tragedy. If we were to see the action of Twelfth Night through the eyes of the madly used Malvolio, or the action of The Merchant of Venice through the eyes of the bankrupt and beggared Shylock, the tone would not be greatly different from that of the second half of Timon of Athens. In the first half of this play Timon is surrounded by the rare triumphs of love and fortune, for a masque of Cupid in his honour takes place at his banquet and his painter depicts him as under the favour of fortune. It gradually dawns on us that what seems to be generosity is rather, or is also, a humour of prodigality. Timon is never released from his humour, the humour merely goes into reverse, and in his exile he keeps flinging gold at his visitors from opposite motives. His story is, in the words of Launce, a parable of the prodigious son who has spent his proportion [Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.3.3–4], but he is as prodigal with curses as blessings, and his misanthropy represents as much of a social half-truth as his benevolence did before. The fact that there is no heroine in this play, nor in fact any females at all except a brace of whores attached to Alcibiades, reinforces the sense of the play as a comedy of humour with no focus for a comic development. In the festive society of Timon’s prosperous days the idiotes is Apemantus. Apemantus is something of a clown too, but the idiotes is normally higher in social rank than the clown, and Apemantus carries a fool around with him partly to make this point. Apemantus is, like Jaques

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[in As You Like It], a philosopher, of the Cynic school, though his ideal is the Stoic one of invulnerability, as his name, which means “suffering no pain,” signifies. After Timon becomes a misanthrope, he takes over the idiotes role, and Apemantus comes to visit him and point out that his motivation is suspect. From the point of view of comic structure, what he is really protesting about is being himself degraded to the rank of clown as Timon becomes the idiotes. In the quarrel that ensues between them, each is trying to assert that the other is really a fool and not a genuine misanthrope. These examples of alienated characters in Shakespearean comedy will enable us to understand some of the things that Shakespeare does with them. The most obvious, of course, is to vary the tone and express through these characters what I have called the minority moods of the play. A more important use of them is to give a new dimension to the perspective of the play. I have spoken of the member of the audience as being both participant and spectator of the action, but the same thing is a fortiori true of the author, who has both to create and to observe his creation. The clown and idiotes have a curious but consistent relationship to the making of the play as well as to the seeing of it. There is an association between being a clown and being on the stage, the clown, when fool, being professionally a dramatic figure, or motley to the view. In two plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a group of six clowns put on a play of their own, and in one, The Taming of the Shrew, the clown is an audience in himself. We notice too that the idiotes is often a rhetorician, and that he frequently delivers a set speech, like the speech on the seven ages of man in As You Like It [2.7.139–66]. Just as Duke Senior’s “sermons in stones” speech [2.1.1–17] establishes the moral reality that keeps the pastoral convention alive in literature, so this speech, by looking at human life in terms of theatrical illusion, establishes, as in a mirror, the reality of experience that theatrical illusion provides. It is thus the imaginative focus of a highly artificial comedy, where the sense of a show being put on never disappears from the action, and is not intended to do so. What fascinates us about the idiotes and clown is that they are not purely isolated individuals: we get fitful glimpses of a hidden world which they guard or symbolize. They may be able to speak for their world, like Jaques, or it may remain locked up in their minds, breaking through suddenly and involuntarily. The world we glimpse may be evil, like Don John’s cave of spleen, or ridiculous, like the world of Malvo-

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lio’s fantasies which are, in Olivia’s parody of the Song of Songs, sick of self-love [Twelfth Night, 1.5.90]. But it is never a wholly simple world, and it exerts on the main action a force which is either counterdramatic or antidramatic. Some of the most haunting speeches in Shakespeare are connected with these shifts of perspective provided by alienated characters. What often happens is that something external to us is suddenly internalized, so that we are forced to participate in what we have been conditioned to think of as removed from us and our sympathies. Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew” speech [3.1.59–73] comes to mind, with its disconcerting and unreasonable reminder that a stage-villain Jew may have learned his villainy from a Christian society. And yet the primary reason for such shifts of perspective is not to gain our sympathy for such characters. We may understand this better from the analogy of tragedy. In tragedy we recognize the importance of catharsis: pity, like terror, is raised, but it is ultimately set aside. In watching the ups and downs of York and Lancaster in the Henry VI plays we feel an automatic sympathy for the losers, qualified by all the evidence that one side is no less cruel and revengeful than the other. The losers are humanly vulnerable in a way that the winners are not. But sympathy for them, while it may be morally superior to contempt for them, would still coarsen and blunt the dramatic point. The dramatic point is tragic, and tragedy presents the event: this happens, whatever our feelings or moral reflections about it may be. If we ask why tragedy’s presentation of this event is important, the answer takes us back to the myth of tragedy. Pity and terror are moral reflections about the tragic characters, and tragedy is not dependent on moral qualities. The tragic hero, whether a good or a bad man in himself, is isolated by the tragic action from his community: his fall, while it destroys him, invisibly reintegrates him with the community of the audience. As long as he was in prosperity he was inscrutable, with his own world locked up inside him; once fallen, something of his world passes into our possession, as in the original rite his blood and body are supposed to have done. Comedy, like tragedy, has its catharsis, sympathy and ridicule being what correspond to pity and terror in tragedy. The action of The Merchant of Venice moves from justice to mercy, and mercy is not opposed to justice, but is an authority which contains or internalizes justice. The justice of Shylock’s bond is external, and the fall of Shylock is part of the process of internalizing justice: this is a point we shall return to in the final essay. To regard Shylock ultimately either with sympathy or with contempt

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is a response of mood only: either attitude would keep him externalized. Shylock is the focus of the comic catharsis of the play because both moods are relevant to him. We feel the possibility of both, but neither is the comic point of Shylock’s role. We approach nearer to this comic point when we recognize the strength of the dramatic tension between Shylock and the rest of the play. The sense of festivity, which corresponds to pity in tragedy, is always present at the end of a romantic comedy. This takes the form of a party, usually a wedding, in which we feel, to some degree, participants. We are invited to the festivity and we put the best face we can on whatever feelings we may still have about the recent behaviour of some of the characters, often including the bridegroom. In Shakespeare the new society is remarkably catholic in its tolerance; but there is always a part of us that remains a spectator, detached and observant, aware of other nuances and values. This sense of alienation, which in tragedy is terror, is almost bound to be represented by somebody or something in the play, and even if, like Shylock, he disappears in the fourth act, we never quite forget him. We seldom consciously feel identified with him, for he himself wants no such identification: we may even hate or despise him, but he is there, the eternal questioning Satan who is still not quite silenced by the vindication of Job. Part of us is at the wedding feast applauding the loud bassoon; part of us is still out in the street hypnotized by some graybeard loon and listening to a wild tale of guilt and loneliness and injustice and mysterious revenge.131 There seems no way of reconciling these two things. Participation and detachment, sympathy and ridicule, sociability and isolation, are inseparable in the complex we call comedy, a complex that is begotten by the paradox of life itself, in which merely to exist is both to be a part of something else and yet never to be a part of it, and in which all freedom and joy are inseparably a belonging and an escape. But whenever we run into an insoluble paradox in Shakespeare, there is usually one more step to take. Tragic and comic structures move horizontally across the action, and appeal to the participant in us. The overthrow of the anticomic power has about it some feeling of a Saturnalia, or reversal of the social order to something closer to the golden age. Such a reversal does not (at any rate not in Shakespeare) alter the actual hierarchy of society. Kings remain kings, and clowns clowns: only the personal relations within the society are altered. But there can be another kind of movement at right angles, so to speak, to the other, one which appeals

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to us as spectators rather than participants, and comes to us through a spectator character. This spectator response may be one of a number of moods, and so merely suggest additional emotional responses. But occasionally such a character may speak to a focused mood which gets past the conflict of sympathy and ridicule, and becomes a direct insight into the comic catharsis itself. Such responses are bound to be brief, as participating experiences, but they have a penetrating quality out of all proportion to their duration. The clown is a convenient focus for this kind of response because he is a character who devotes himself to being ridiculous, and hence very readily becomes pathetic as well, thus setting up the two Herculean pillars we have to pass through to further knowledge. In All’s Well the clown Lavache, the most mirthless even of Shakespeare’s clowns, makes a speech that seems utterly remote from the action, even as a commentary on it: I am a woodland fellow, sir, that always loved a great fire; and the master I speak of ever keeps a good fire. But sure, he is the prince of the world: let his nobility remain in’s court, I am for the house with the narrow gate, which I take to be too little for pomp to enter: some that humble themselves may, but the many will be too chill and tender, and they’ll be for the flowery way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire. [4.5.47–55]

Lavache is simply an old clown who has nothing left him but the privilege of uninhibited speech. Uninhibited speech ought to be witty, on Freudian principles, but if it fails to be that it may still be oracular, a quality close to wit, and often used by Shakespeare instead of it. As we listen to Lavache the play begins to recede until we find ourselves looking, not at a sullen Bertram being dragged kicking and screaming into a happy marriage, but at the mass of humanity moving witlessly, like lemmings, to its own annihilation. The point of the speech is structural: it sums up the blind and deluded movement that sent Bertram out to the wars, and anticipates the completion of the action by which Helena brings him home again, in opposition to everything he thinks he wants. All’s Well is unusual in that Helena is inferior in social status to Bertram (or at least that is Bertram’s view), hence there is an additional point in this sudden glimpse, very rare in Shakespeare, of the greater Saturnalia suggested in the Gospels in which the social ranks of this world are reversed in another.

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Again, here is Dromio of Ephesus in A Comedy of Errors, after he has been repeatedly beaten and called an ass: I am an ass indeed; you may prove it by my long ears. I have served him from the hour of my nativity to this instant, and have nothing at his hands for my service but blows. When I am cold, he heats me with beating; when I am warm, he cools me with beating. I am waked with it when I sleep, raised with it when I set,132 driven out of doors with it when I go from home, welcomed home with it when I return: nay, I bear it on my shoulders, as a beggar wont her brat; and, I think, when he hath lamed me, I shall beg with it from door to door. [4.4.29–39]

The word “ass,” so often used in this play, reminds us of Apuleius. “If thou art chang’d to aught, ’tis to an ass,” Luciana says to the other Dromio [2.2.199]. Here, as in Apuleius, we get a glimpse of what the human world would look like to a conscious ass: an inferno of malignant and purposeless beating. But the primary reason for this speech is not to rouse sympathy for the servant, though this is a secondary reason, and relevant to the context. The primary reason, again, is structural. The structure of A Comedy of Errors is a metamorphosis structure, a descent into illusion and an emergence into recognition. The main action takes place in a world of illusion and assumed madness; the imagery of the final recognition scene suggests a passing through death into a new world. Not only is Aegeon delivered from death at the very moment of his execution, but the Ephesus twins are imprisoned “in a dark and dankish vault” [5.1.248] by “a living dead man” with no face [5.1.242–5]. They escape by gnawing through their bonds, and the symbolism of this is at once pounced on by Dromio of Ephesus: Within this hour I was his bondman, sir, But he, I thank him, gnawed in two my cords: Now am I Dromio, and his man unbound. [5.1.289–91]

The Duke’s remark, “I think you all have drunk of Circe’s cup” [5.1.271], and his comment when the twins meet, “One of these men is Genius to the other” [5.1.333], fill out the same metamorphosis pattern. In Apuleius the descent into illusion is symbolized by the metamorphosis of Lucius into an ass, the ascent to reality by release from this shape through the power of Isis:133 we may compare the role of Diana in Pericles, which

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uses the same Ephesian setting for its conclusion. The speech of Dromio of Ephesus quoted above recalls the Apuleian theme, and so is counterpoint in contrary motion to the final deliverance. The word “ass” is often applied to the clown in Shakespeare, especially in Twelfth Night and Much Ado, but the theme of metamorphosis into an ass takes us to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom, like Sly, is raised by what seems a rather heartless practical joke from a fool’s world to a prince’s. In the cognitio the four lovers and Bottom are awakened out of a trance “more dead / Than common sleep” [4.1.81–2]. The trance causes little comment from the lovers, who have nothing to do but marry each other, and as far as the Quince company is concerned Bottom says nothing but “Not a word of me” [4.2.34]. From Heraclitus, who says that in dreams every man is his own Logos,134 to Freud, who says that every dream has a point at which it is unfathomable, a link with the unknown,135 it has been recognized that a dream is the heart of the dreamer’s private universe, and is therefore incommunicable. Yet the dreaming power is closely connected with the creative faculties, which are powers of communication. This is the paradox that Bottom struggles with: I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what a dream136 it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound137 this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched138 fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad139 of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke: peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. [4.1.204–19]

Nobody knows what the last phrase means, but the scrambled metaphors do not quite conceal the Biblical echo: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared” [1 Corinthians 2:9]. It would be wrong to sentimentalize Bottom, but equally wrong not to feel that perhaps Bottom, with what Puck calls his own fool’s eyes [4.1.84], has seen something in the heart of comedy that our wisdom does not see, just as the insane Lear sees something in the heart of tragedy that our sanity does not see. It is quite con-

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sistent with the use of incredible events and the demand for an uncritical response in Shakespearean comedy that such oracular things should be said, or hinted at, by characters even simpler than we are. There is a similar hint of folly sensing a kind of experience concealed to wisdom in Caliban’s “isle is full of noises” speech [3.2.135–43]. But the context of the romances is different, and this difference we have now to examine. The romances, in the first place, set up a hierarchy of behaviour, more clearly stratified than we find in the comedies. We can see at least five levels of it in all the romances. On the highest level is the providential deity or its human counterpart Prospero; next come the hero and heroine; next the minor characters who represent a middle level of fidelity or common sense—Helicanus, Camillo, Pisanio, Gonzalo. Below these are, first, the clownish or absurd, and below that the evil or villainous. One represents primarily human nature without nurture, in Prospero’s phrase;140 the other rationally corrupted nature, the evil that can result only from perverted intelligence. In Pericles the evil level is represented by Antiochus and his daughter who nearly kill Pericles, and by Cleon and Dionyza who nearly kill Marina. The nearest thing to a clown in Pericles is Boult, and Boult, we notice, is redeemable in part: when we leave him he is even willing to face respectable women in order to help Marina. In the more sombre Cymbeline there is no clown except Cloten, who is as evil as his stupidity will allow him to be, and though that comes far short of the cold malice of Iachimo, there is no place in the recognition scene for him. In The Winter’s Tale we have clowns and rustics who become gentlemen, and very decent ones at that; and Autolycus, for all his talk about being committed to vice, eventually settles into the role of accepted clown, like Parolles at the end of All’s Well. A lower depth of evil is reached by the jealous Leontes. In The Tempest villainy is represented by Sebastian and more particularly by Antonio; the clowns are Stephano and Trinculo, and Caliban is on their level. He is of course full of original sin, and he does not take the view of Prospero that Prospero clearly thinks ought to be taken of him, but his natural propensity to evil does not prevent him from still being likable and having his share of human dignity. Caliban, too, seems ready for some improvement at the end of the play. We can generalize these levels by saying that in all the romances there is a tendency to set an idealized or noble situation over against an evil or demonic parody of it. We have noticed this construction in Pericles with the incestuous and idealized father–daughter unions, and it appears also

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in Cymbeline, where a union of Britain and Rome is set over against a nationalistic Britain represented by Cloten and the Queen, and an Italian Rome represented by Iachimo. In all the romances except Pericles (where the episodic structure is what prevents it), the really evil characters are suddenly and most unplausibly converted at the end, if they are still alive. This is partly because they are noblemen who have gone wrong, as Gilbert would say,141 and in fact as Shakespeare says of the bandits in The Two Gentlemen of Verona [4.1.42–4; 5.4.152–7]. Thus in the romances there is no idiotes figure except insofar as the villain has that role. The function of this idiotes-villain is to injure or delay or prevent the festive conclusion, and when the recognition is reached he disappears into it, his function performed. His forgiveness, again, is primarily structural, not moral: Shakespeare’s emphasis on reconciliation is a technical emphasis rather than an oozing through of personal benevolence. Thus in the romances no one is left at the end to take the detached spectator’s role. We are left with a sense of the action going on into a world where nobody is watching. That may be one reason for the curious device of summoning the cast for explanations afterward, though it is true that this is not confined to the romances. But the romances seem to point to some postdramatic world where the questions of illusion and of a detached or alienated spectator are no longer raised. An emphasis on theatrical illusion is a mark of sophistication, and Shakespeare’s sophisticated comedies are early ones. In Love’s Labour’s Lost certain theatrical conventions, such as concealment, are used so extravagantly that they parody the conventions. The characters make several references to being in a play, which is another sign of sophistication. Such comedy does not hold a mirror up to nature, but it frequently holds a mirror up to another mirror, and brings its resolution out of a double illusion. Petruchio does not argue Katharina out of her shrewishness: he simply shows her the reflection of her shrewishness in himself. But there is still an element of deliberate illusion in the stylized, almost ballet-like action of the play, which is emphasized by being set over against the illusory world created around Sly. The much simpler scheme of an ideal world parodied by a demonic one, which we find in the romances, is a part of their primitiveness. We have noticed the archaic features in the romances. The narrator of Pericles is the antique Gower; the “peripety” of Cymbeline is a vision of ghosts chanting verse as crude as Chaucer’s rhyme of Sir Thopas;142 The Winter’s Tale keeps insisting on how like its story is to an “old tale,”

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its closest literary relatives the ballads sold by Autolycus. The crisis of this last play is the revival of Hermione, who begins to speak as soon as Paulina pronounces the magic words “Our Perdita is found” [5.3.121], and thus announces the fulfilling of Apollo’s oracle. It is impossible that Hermione can really have come to life, and we can believe other explanations if we like, though they involve equally great strains on credulity. For instance, would Leontes really have regarded Paulina with such reverence if she had been keeping the live Hermione concealed from him all this time? Ovid tells us that Pygmalion did not dare ask Venus that his statue should come alive, but only that he might have a girl “like” his statue.143 Venus, however, who, being a goddess, spoke only the language of myth, metaphor, and metamorphosis, ignored this and brought his statue to life. Shakespeare is clearly of Venus’s mind in such matters. Yet it is equally difficult to believe that the new Hermione had her origin in Giulio Romano’s chisel instead of in the old Hermione, and perhaps we had better stop trying to believe things and simply look at what is in front of us, which is a dramatic exhibition of death and revival. And it seems clear that we shall get further with that if our attitude is more like that of Bottom commenting on his dream than of Jaques commenting on the human capacity for illusion. The Winter’s Tale is a diptych, in which the first part is the “winter’s tale” proper, the story of the jealousy of Leontes, the slandering of Hermione, and the perilous exposure of Perdita. The second part, the last two acts, is the story of Florizel’s love, Perdita’s recognition, and the revival of Hermione. Shakespeare’s main source, Greene’s Pandosto, is almost entirely confined to the first part; for the rest Shakespeare appears to be on his own.144 There are parallels and contrasts in the construction: the contrast in imagery, the first part full of winter and storm and chaos and the second all spring and revival and fertility, is not easily missed. The first part begins with Archidamas speaking of how the old people in Sicilia would wish to live until the king had a son, and proceeds to the court of Sicilia, where an attempt is made to delay a return to Bohemia. Then Leontes becomes a jealous senex, after which Camillo flees to Bohemia. The second part begins with Time telling us that a generation has passed, proceeds to the court of Bohemia and an attempt to delay a return to Sicilia, and exhibits Polixenes in the role of a jealous and suspicious senex, after which Camillo flees to Sicilia. In the first part Mamillius dies and Perdita is very near death; in the second part Florizel, who reminds Leontes of Mamillius and becomes his heir, marries Perdita, after (as Bottom says

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when he has died in the role of Pyramus and sprung up again) “the wall is down that parted their fathers” [Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.351–2]. The jealous Leontes is the idiotes of the play, the focus of the anticomic mood, and the first part of the action is the anti-comedy that his jealousy constructs. We begin with references to an innocent childhood when Leontes and Polixenes were “twinned lambs” [1.2.67], and then suddenly plunge from the reminiscence of this pastoral paradise into a world of superstition and obsession. Leontes has a great fear of becoming an object of ridicule or comic butt, though, as Antigonus mutters in an aside, that is precisely what he does become. The horror of the world he creates is expressed mainly in the imagery of sacrifice: he wants to gain rest by burning Hermione alive; his courtiers offer to be or provide sacrifices in her place, and eventually the sacrificial role settles on Mamillius. The first part ends in a storm which, like the storm in Lear (which it echoes in its bear and sea), is described in such a way as to suggest an unsettling of the order of nature. We are told later that “all the instruments which aided to expose the child were even then lost when it was found” [5.2.70–2], as though a new generation had to grow up in the desert before the festival world could be reached. Some very curious echoes indicate the starting of a new action: part one ends with the clown hearing the cries of Antigonus as the bear tears out his shoulder bone; part two begins with the same clown hearing the cries of Autolycus pretending that his shoulder blade is out. The normal action of a comedy moves from irrational law to festivity, which symbolizes a movement from one form of reality to another. The world of tyranny and irrational law is a world where what is real is given us arbitrarily as a datum, something we must accept or somehow come to terms with. This is a spectator’s reality, the reality we see to be “out there.” The world of the final festival is a world where reality is what is created by human desire, as the arts are created. There is something of this in The Winter’s Tale: Leontes takes a morbid pleasure in facing what he thinks are facts, and insists on the tangible external reality of his world: “I do smell’t and feel’t,” he says [2.1.152].145 The creative arts are also deeply involved in the recognition scene: painting, sculpture, poetry, and music are all introduced or referred to, and several conceptions of art, from the idealism of Polixenes and the realism of Romano to the nonsense of Autolycus’s ballads, are mentioned. But the action of The Winter’s Tale is clearly something other than a movement from external to created reality. In the first place, the world

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of Leontes’ jealousy does not exist at all: only the consequences of believing in it exist. In the second place, the power of human desire that revives Hermione and brings the lovers together is identical, first, with the power of nature to bring new life out of death, and second, with the will of Apollo, whose oracle is being fulfilled. The action, therefore, moves from appearance to reality, from mirage to substance. Once the real world is reached, the mirage becomes nothingness. The real world, however, has none of the customary qualities of reality. It is the world symbolized by nature’s power of renewal; it is the world we want; it is the world we hope our gods would want for us if they were worth worshipping. But it is “monstrous to our human reason,” according to Paulina [5.1.41], and its truth “is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion” [5.2.28–9]. Such things happen in stories, not in life, and the world The Winter’s Tale leaves us with is neither an object of knowledge nor of belief. It would be an object of belief, of course, or symbolize one, if we could feel that The Winter’s Tale was an allegory. I have been assuming that it is not: that in Shakespeare the meaning of the play is the play, there being nothing to be abstracted from the total experience of the play. Progress in grasping the meaning is a progress, not in seeing more in the play, but in seeing more of it. Further progress takes us from the individual plays to the class of things called plays, to the “meaning” of drama as a whole. That meaning, again, is our total experience of drama. The centre of that experience is the fact that drama is doing, through the identity of myth and metaphor, what its ritual predecessors tried to do by the identity of sympathetic magic: unite the human and the natural worlds. But the world where this unity can be achieved is clearly not the world of ordinary experience, in which man is an alienated spectator. The world we are looking at in the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale is not an object of belief so much as an imaginative model of desire. The last words, “Hastily lead away,” summon us like a beckoning to a new and impossible world, and our cue is to say, like Antipholus of Syracuse when confronted by a wife he never saw before: “I’ll entertain the offered fallacy” [Comedy of Errors, 2.2.186].146 IV The Return from the Sea Comedy, like all forms of art that are presented in time, is primarily an impetus toward completing a certain kind of movement. We have been

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trying to characterize the nature of the comic drive, and have called it a drive toward identity. This is essentially a social identity, which emerges when the ascendant society of the early part of the play, with its irrational laws, lusts, and tyrannical whims, is dissolved and a new society crystallizes around the marriage of the central characters. It has also an individual form, an awakening to self-knowledge, which is typically a release from a humour or a mechanical form of repetitive behaviour. Shakespearean romantic comedy presents the full or completed form of this movement; ironic comedy presents incomplete or divergent forms of it. As a rule irony is intelligible only as a frustration of a completed movement which is presented in romance: thus we need to have the normal or romantic design at least unconsciously in our minds to understand the parodies of it that irony supplies. We may often think of the happy ending as perfunctory, and sometimes it may seem that, but even in the most sardonic comedies we should not assume that Shakespeare had a different kind of ending in mind that he could have provided for a more highbrow audience. The more highbrow audience might be more ironically minded, more bored with the conventional romantic ending, more inclined to be flattered at being asked to settle for some new variant of it. But Shakespeare, like Shylock, insists on carrying out his contract to the letter. His festive conclusions with their multiple marriages are not concessions: they are conventions built into the structure of the play from the beginning. The mythical or primitive basis of comedy is a movement toward the rebirth and renewal of the powers of nature, this aspect of literary comedy being expressed in the imagery more directly than in the structure. The mythical backbone of all literature is the cycle of nature, which rolls from birth to death and back again to rebirth. The first half of this cycle, the movement from birth to death, spring to winter, dawn to dark, is the basis of the great alliance of nature and reason, the sense of nature as a rational order in which all movement is toward the increasingly predictable. Such a conception of nature was of course deeply rooted in the Elizabethan mind: it extends even to the tendency to call anything natural that the writer is accustomed to, as when Sidney expresses horror at the custom of wearing rings in the nose instead of in “the fit and natural places of the ears.”147 In drama, tragedy, the history play (always very close to tragedy) and pure irony (e.g., Troilus and Cressida) are centred on this first half. There may be many surprises in the last act of a Shakespearean tragedy, but the pervading feeling is of something inevitable

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working itself out. The histories deal similarly with a kind of “karma” or continuous force of evil action which produces its own inevitable consequences. In the Henry VI plays the original sin of the House of Lancaster in deposing Richard and pushing Edmund Mortimer out of the way releases a flood of such “karma” which isolates and overwhelms Talbot in part 1, Duke Humphrey in part 2, and the gentle and ineffectual Henry VI himself in part 3. The organizing conception of the history play is the wheel of fortune, which, according to Chaucer’s monk, started turning with the fall of Lucifer,148 and is repeated in the fall of every great man, who discovers with Wolsey that When he falls, he falls like Lucifer, Never to hope again. [Henry VIII, 3.2.371–2]

The wheel of fortune is a tragic conception: it is never genuinely a comic one, though a history play may achieve a technically comic conclusion by stopping the wheel turning halfway. Thus Henry V ends with triumphant conquest and a royal marriage, though, as the epilogue reminds us, King Henry died almost immediately and sixty years of unbroken disaster followed. In Henry VIII there are three great falls, those of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Queen Catherine, and three corresponding rises, those of Cromwell, Cranmer, and Anne Boleyn.149 The play ends with the triumph of the last three, leaving the audience to remember that the wheel went on turning and brought them down too. Being a strong king, Henry VIII turns the wheel himself, and is not turned by it, like Richard II, but history never can end as a comedy does, except for the polite fiction, found in Cranmer’s prophecy at the end of the play, that the reigning monarch is a Messianic ruler. Comedy, however, is based on the second half of the great cycle, moving from death to rebirth, decadence to renewal, winter to spring, darkness to a new dawn. We notice that three comedies, The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, have solstitial titles: perhaps it is The Winter’s Tale that expresses the cyclical imagery of comedy most clearly. The “winter’s tale,” properly speaking, begins with Leontes’ guards coming to seize Hermione at the moment when Mamillius is about to whisper his tale into his mother’s ear, and it ends in a tremendous storm in which Antigonus perishes and the infant Perdita is exposed. Sixteen years pass, and a new dramatic action begins with a new generation, an action of irresistibly pushing life, heralded by Autolycus’s

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song of the daffodils, and growing to a climax in the great sheep-shearing festival scene, where the power of life in nature over the whole year is symbolized by a dance of twelve satyrs. The reviving force pushes on, brings Florizel and Perdita together despite the most frantic parental opposition, discloses the secret of Perdita’s birth, brings Hermione to life from a statue, and finally renews life in Leontes. The same symbolism is presented negatively in Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the audience is cheated of the comic conclusion. The courtiers present themselves to their ladies, first as Russians (Russia to an Elizabethan audience meant primarily cold winters), then as themselves. But the four Jacks panting for their Jills are disappointed; the ladies go away, and the breakup of the comic mood is symbolized by the two lovely songs of spring and winter, in which winter has the last word. Similar imagery comes occasionally into many comedies, as in this oracular speech of Helena in All’s Well: But with the word the time will bring on summer, When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns, And be as sweet as sharp. We must away; Our waggon is prepared, and time revives us. All’s well that ends well: still the fine’s the crown. [4.4.31–5]

This movement from sterility to renewed life is as natural as the tragic movement, because it happens. But though natural it is somehow irrational: the sense of the alliance of nature with reason and predictable order is no longer present. We can see that death is the inevitable result of birth, but new life is not the inevitable result of death. It is hoped for, even expected, but at its core is something unpredictable and mysterious, something that belongs to the imaginative equivalents of faith, hope, and love, not to the rational virtues. The conception of the same form of life passing through death to rebirth of course goes outside the order of nature altogether. Yet this conception is so central in Shakespearean romance, as Thaisa revives from a “block” and Hermione from a statue, that perhaps what really emerges in the recognition scenes of these romances is the primitive feeling, which is incorporated in Christianity, that it is death that is somehow unnatural, even though it always happens. We live in an ironic age, and we tend to think, in Freudian terms, of “wish-fulfilment” as confined to dreams, a helpless and shadowy counterpart of a “reality principle.”150 In watching tragedy we are impressed

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by the reality of the illusion: we feel that, for instance, the blinding of Gloucester, though not really happening, is the kind of thing that can and does happen. In watching romantic comedy we are impressed by the illusion of the reality: we feel that, for instance, the conversion of Oliver and Duke Frederick at the end of As You Like It is the kind of thing that can’t happen, yet we see it happening. In the action of a Shakespearean comedy, however, the kind of force associated with “wish-fulfilment” is not helpless or purely a matter of dreams. It is, in the first place, a power as deeply rooted in nature and reality as its opponent; in the second place, it is a power that we see, as the comedy proceeds, taking over and informing the predictable world.151 Yet there is a residually irrational element in such comedy, which expresses itself in a great variety of unlikely incidents: unexpected turns in the plot, gratuitous coincidences, unforeseen changes of heart in certain characters, arbitrary interference with the action by fairies or gods or characters who do not enter the play at all. We have already seen how Shakespeare deliberately chooses incredible plots and emphasizes the unlikelihood of his conclusions. The drive toward a comic conclusion is so powerful that it breaks all the chains of probability in the plot, of habit in the characters, even of expectation in the audience; and what emerges at the end is not a logical consequence of the preceding action, as in tragedy, but something more like a metamorphosis. I have spoken of the readiness with which dramatic assumptions can be translated into propositions or axioms of belief. Tragic assumptions usually turn out to be propositions about a metaphysical fate or about the moral fatality of characteristic acts. The sense of fatality can seldom be far away from tragedy and is usually expressed there, as it is when Romeo speaks of “inauspicious stars” [5.3.111] or Gloucester of the indifference and carelessness of the gods [King Lear, 4.1.36–7]. In the nineteenth century it was fashionable to quote such passages to show that Shakespeare was a nineteenth-century pessimist. Those who wished to save him for free will and moral responsibility, on the other hand, could point to the fact that fatality usually cooperates with character: the witches in Macbeth may be, as Holinshed says, goddesses of destiny,152 but it is clear that Macbeth has made a subconscious pact with them before the play begins. In comedy, where there is a sense of violent manipulation of plot, of characters leaping into new roles, or events driving toward a renewing transformation in the teeth of all probability, it is easy to arrive at moral axioms about a divine providence.

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Thus in Gascoigne’s Supposes, which has a plot that seems to have suggested some features of The Taming of the Shrew, one of the characters turns out to be, according to a frequent New Comedy device, the son of another character, stolen from him in infancy. This provokes the reflection from the father: “And you, Philogano, may think that God in heaven above ordained your coming hither at this present, to the end I might recover my lost son whom by no other means I could ever have found out” [5.8.9–13]. The remark inspires an equally sententious rejoinder: “Surely, sir, I think no less, for I think that not so much as a leaf falleth from the tree without the ordinance of God” [5.8.14–15].153 In Machiavelli’s Mandragola we get pious reflections of a morally different but structurally identical kind. In this play the main theme is the attempt of a young man to get into the bed of a faithful and virtuous married woman. He bamboozles her husband, talks over her mother, and bribes a venal priest, whereupon the heroine reflects that she may as well acquiesce in the goings-on and get what enjoyment from them she can, as the coincidence of having a foolish husband, an unscrupulous mother, and a scoundrelly confessor has persuaded her that the affair must be the will of God.154 Shakespeare does not use God to underwrite his comic plots in quite this way, but the conclusion is frequently ascribed to characters or powers who act as though they were agents of providence. In three of the romances a deity, Diana in Pericles, Jupiter in Cymbeline, and a hidden and offstage Apollo in The Winter’s Tale, brings about or is involved in the conclusion. Where it is accomplished by a human being, as it is in The Tempest and Measure for Measure, that character has about him something of the mysterious aura of divinity, symbolized by magic or sanctity. We are not surprised that Prospero is a magician, or to find the Duke in Measure for Measure disguised as a saintly friar, eventually marrying a girl who intended to be a nun. The themes of magic and sanctity appear vestigially in As You Like It, where a saintly hermit converts Duke Frederick and Rosalind pretends that she has a magician uncle who will provide some of the metamorphosis at the end. Portia, too, pretends to retire to a convent, and seems to have some magical or sibylline knowledge of a “letter” about Antonio’s mercantile ventures, though she is not going to tell Antonio (or us) how she came by the knowledge. In Much Ado there is a kind of parody of a modern detective story when Dogberry and his group, by their sheer consistency in blundering, help to force the story of Claudio and Hero into a comedy of renewal. As

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Borachio says: “What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light” [5.1.232–4], reminding us of the scriptural passage about God using the foolish things of the world to confound the wise [1 Corinthians 1:27]. We have noticed how frequently the comic action begins by setting up a harsh or irrational law, two typical examples being in A Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In both these instances, the law is proclaimed by a duke who announces that it is completely unbreakable and that his integrity as a ruler is bound up with enforcing it. The affinity with the common folklore theme of a king’s rash promise becoming a binding oath is strongly marked. In both instances the law disappears as soon as the action circumvents it. At the beginning of A Comedy of Errors the Duke reiterates that the law prevents him from pardoning Aegeon without a bag of gold as ransom, but when at the end he is offered the gold he merely says, “It shall not need, thy father hath his life” [5.1.391]. Theseus similarly, after telling Hermia that he administers a law “which by no means we may extenuate” [1.1.120], abandons the law in the fourth act and says to her father, “I will overbear your will” [4.1.179]. The Duke of Venice also discovers a good many extra powers of discretion as soon as the quibble about blood is pointed out to him. Thus the irrational law represents the comic equivalent of a social contract, something we must enter into if the final society is to take shape. The irrational law, also, belongs to that aspect of nature which appears, in other contexts, rational, centred in the inevitable movement from birth to death. As the end of the comic action usually reconciles and incorporates its predecessor, what corresponds to the irrational law has been internalized, transformed to an inner source of coherence. The fact that Solinus and Theseus veto the law by their own will would mean in life that we were regressing from the rule of law to a personal whim, but in the action of comedy it means precisely the opposite. The dukes of Ephesus and Venice merely ratify the fact that Aegeon and Antonio have been redeemed by a higher power than money. Athens was wrong in its method of imposing true love, but it remains true that in romance the only tolerable possibilities for a heroine are true love, chastity, and death. And even as regards the Athenian law Hermia says, with the whole wisdom of Thalia behind her: it is a customary cross, As due to love as thoughts and dreams and sighs. [1.1.153–4]

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The internalizing movement of law is clearest in Measure for Measure, where the Duke leaves Vienna to return and be invisibly present in his society. His return at the end to preside over the cognitio indicates that the movement has been completed. Dogberry and Shallow, too, however ridiculous in themselves, somehow manage to suggest a permanent social order that is less so. In a typically festive conclusion all previous conflicts are forgiven and forgotten. In ordinary life this phrase is seldom a moral reality, because it is usually a contradiction: to forgive an offence implies that the offence was real; to forget it implies that something in it was not, and forgetting is not a voluntary act as forgiveness is. To forget implies a break in the continuity of memory, a kind of amnesia in which the previous action is put out of our reach. Normally, we can forget in this way only when we wake up from a dream, when we pass from one world into another, and we often have to think of the main action of a comedy as “the mistakes of a night,”155 as taking place in a dream or nightmare world that the final scene suddenly removes us from and thereby makes illusory. The Book of Job is technically a comedy by virtue of its final chapter, which tells us that God restored to Job everything he had lost with interest, including three very beautiful daughters named Jemima, Keziah, and Keren-happuch.156 We stop and say to ourselves: Job had lost three daughters, and is it really true that a man who has lost three daughters could be completely consoled with three brand-new daughters, however beautiful or impressively named? Would he not still feel that he had suffered an irreparable loss? For the suggestion is that this renewal annihilates the sense of loss itself, which the renewals of ordinary life, such as second marriages, are not intended to do. As Pericles says to the gods: “Your present kindness / Makes my past miseries sports” [5.3.40–1]. The author of Job has solved the moral problem of his play in the usual comic fashion, by cutting its Gordian knot. But we can accept this solution only by thinking of the world of Job’s reward as a different world from the nightmare world of misery and boils and uncomprehending comforters. The sense of waking up from a dream is frequent in Shakespeare too, most explicitly, of course, in the play which is explicitly called a dream. If we are to accept the reconciliation of Claudio and Hero, of Angelo and Mariana, of Imogen and Posthumus, we have to think of them also as awakenings, where it is possible to forget as well as forgive what has happened. Yet the play would be pointless if there were not some reality in the previous tragic complications with which the final scene is still

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continuous. Renewal, the telos or final cause of comedy, is in some way both return and the opposite of return. In ordinary life we are conscious only of the discontinuity between dream and waking. In drama this is not the whole story. A tragedy employs omens and oracles and ghosts and other anticipators of the final catastrophe to emphasize the connection between the two worlds. In comedy there is a conclusion of awakening which incorporates the dream action, like Adam’s awakening to find his dream true in Paradise Lost [8.460–90], which Keats saw as a central symbol of the imagination.157 We awake in a world possessed and informed by something in the dream, or, as Hippolyta says: But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable. [5.1.23–7]

The festive ending of a comedy represents what the audience normally regards as on the whole a desirable solution to its action. This means that the action itself contains features that are undesirable: the ascendancy of a cruel tyrant or a foolish rival, the separation or estrangement of lovers, and the like. Such things are undesirable from the point of view of a standard that we have, at least potentially, in our minds before the play begins. The conclusion restores that antecedent sense of the desirable; but it does not simply reproduce it, because we do not know what it is before we start fashioning it against the action. It is the purpose of the action to define and clarify something new which is also the old reformed or metamorphosed. It is possible, of course, to bring into the theatre with us a more or less definite notion of what is desirable and demand that the action lead simply to reproducing it. This demand is the core of the conception in the arts that we call the sentimental, the movement that leads back, not to the beginning of the action of the play, but to a state of our minds before the play which remains unchanged by its action. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World caused riots on its first performance partly because its audience could not make its conclusion incorporate what they had already decided was the desirable picture of rural Irish life, an Arcadia full of toilworn Mother Machrees and twinkling-eyed Father O’Flynns.158 The sentimental is closely linked with the desire to renounce adult ex-

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perience and return to the protected and secure world of childhood. Its typically literary expression is a letter to the New York Times Book Review asking for more information about a poem beginning “Now I lay me down to sleep.” One moment in British drama that most of us would agree to be sentimental is the moment in Barrie’s Peter Pan in which a character turns to the audience and begs them to believe in fairies, or at least to say that they do, which for sentimentality is much the same thing.159 There is a famous story about the reaction of a Victorian lady to Antony and Cleopatra: “How different from the domestic relations in our own royal family!”160 The basis of this remark is the mental attitude of the audience appealed to by the sentimental domestic comedy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The sentimental is usually regarded as culturally substandard, because it denies the forward movement in art, the sense of fresh discovery in every renewal of familiar values. What it appeals to is stock response, a set of associations that one already has or at least knows about. Things that demand loyalty, such as the symbols of church and state, operate by simple continuity or repetition of the familiar: the same creed recited every Sunday, the same flag saluted in school every morning. This is why religious or patriotic art is usually sentimental in expression. Sentimentality is instinctively tearful, even at weddings, partly because it resists, as a child would do, the inexorable advance of all experience in time, which it tries to arrest by nostalgia. In trying to distinguish structure from mood, I said that while structure was the focus of a community, uniformity of mood, which demands uniformity of response, breaks down the community into a mob: the kind of audience appealed to by farce, Grand Guignol melodrama, and extreme didacticism. Sentimentality is the subjective equivalent of the mob’s stock response to mood. The sentimental is withdrawn but not detached; it is an egocentric feeling but not an individualized one; it is gregarious but not social. I have spent some time on the conception of the sentimental because a quality very like it, yet very different, is central to Shakespeare’s comedy. The sentimental is a fixation on the familiar, and so leads us back toward our subjective childhood. But there is another kind of vision in the arts, represented by Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, where the return is not to childhood but to a state of innocence symbolized by childhood, the state recalled in the stories of the garden of Eden, of the golden age, and of the myriad stories that derive from them, in the pastoral convention and elsewhere. This vision, though often presented

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as a historical event in the past and as deeply traditional, avoids the subjective pull of the sentimental, because it is a vision of something never seen or experienced, and hence, when it is presented as something we return to, it is a genuinely new vision. This is closer to the kind of vision that Shakespeare’s comedies and romances, which are never sentimental although they constantly employ what seems like the same kind of material, are based on. The action of a Shakespearean comedy, then, is not simply cyclical but dialectical as well: the renewing power of the final action lifts us into a higher world, and separates that world from the world of the comic action itself. This dialectical element in Shakespeare’s comic structure we have now to examine. The first feature of it is the parallel between the structure of a romantic comedy and the central myth of Christianity: the parallel that made Dante call his poem a commedia. The framework of the Christian myth is the comic framework of the Bible, where man loses a peaceable kingdom, staggers through the long nightmare of tyranny and injustice which is human history, and eventually regains his original vision. Within this myth is the corresponding comedy of the Christian life. We first encounter the law in its harsh tyrannical form of an external barrier to action, a series of negative commands, and we are eventually set free of this law, not by breaking it, but by internalizing it: it becomes an inner condition of behaviour, not an external antagonist as it is to the criminal. Two of Shakespeare’s comedies present the action within this familiar Christian setting. In The Merchant of Venice the supporter of the irrational law is a Jew, or at least what Shakespeare’s audience assumed to be a Jew. Shylock is frequently called a devil, because his role at the trial is the diabolical one of an accuser who demands death. When he says, “My deeds upon my head!” [4.1.206] and prefers the seed of Barabbas to Christians [4.1.296–7],161 he is echoing the Jews at the trial of Christ. The redeeming power which baffles him is the blood that he cannot have. His insistence on his bond and on justice is countered by Portia’s explicitly Christian appeal to mercy, and his claim to his bond is not denied until he has renounced mercy. In the background of the imagery are allusions to the story of the prodigal son, the parable which sums up, in epitome, the whole Christian story of the exile and return of man to his home. Measure for Measure, as its title indicates, is also based on the theme of the moral bankruptcy of law. The play turns on the hairline contrast between the situation of Claudio and of Angelo, the second not being

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revealed to us until the first has reached its climax, in Claudio’s prison cell. Claudio is betrothed and anticipates his conjugal rights; Angelo is betrothed and deserts Mariana because the financial arrangements fall through. Legally, this makes Claudio a condemned criminal and leaves Angelo a model of virtue. In the area of equity, or the personal considerations of justice, it makes the impetuous Claudio likable and the cautious Angelo a most unattractive cold fish. The knowledge of good and evil clearly does not lead to any real knowledge of either good or evil. It is explicitly said that Angelo’s right to enforce the law depends on his own immunity from temptation. In the ordinary social terms that a problem comedy might be thought to deal with, such a statement is preposterous: law, whatever may be said for or against it, certainly does not depend for its validity on the private morality of the judge who administers it. But in the terms of reference employed by Measure for Measure the statement is crucial, and quite consistent. If it were possible for one man to observe the law in a state of perfect innocence, the whole foolish experiment of leaving Angelo in charge of society would be justified, and there would be no hope that the Duke could ever return in any other shape than that of a helpless confessor of victims. The enormous disproportion between grace and merit, which has already met us several times, recurs all through Shakespearean comedy, where “grace” is a centrally important thematic word. In Love’s Labour’s Lost this theme is given us in the language of Courtly Love, which used the language of religion in its own context. Berowne protests against the academic retreat by saying: For every man with his affects is born, Not by might mastered, but by special grace. [1.1.151–2]

There are several suggestions that the King of Navarre’s “curious-knotted garden” [1.1.246] is a delusive Eden in which the real knowledge sought is “the thing I am forbid to know” [1.1.60]. The theme of salvation by one’s own merit is picked up by the Princess when she speaks of it as a “heresy” “fit for these days” [4.1.22], and when she remarks, “All pride is willing pride” [2.1.36]. Berowne finally confesses that the surrender of the courtiers to the demands of love is a falsehood that “purifies itself and turns to grace” [5.2.776], but Rosaline tells him that he must first undergo a “reformation” [5.2.869] in which he has to suppress his uncharitable spirit of mockery:

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Whose influence is begot of that loose grace Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools. [5.2.859–60]

In Shakespeare, as in all his contemporaries, the ordinary cycle of nature that rolls from spring to winter to spring again is the middle of three modes of reality. It is the ordinary physical world that, according to the theologians, man entered with his fall. Above it is the nature that God intended man to live in, the home symbolized by the Biblical garden of Eden and the Classical legend of the golden age, a world of a perpetual fertility where it was spring and autumn at once. To this world, or to the inward equivalent of it, man strives to return through the instruments of law, religion, morality, and (much more important in Shakespeare’s imagery) education and the arts. Thus it is said of Posthumus that he took so readily to his education that “in’s spring became a harvest” [Cymbeline, 1.1.46]. All the arts are employed as regenerative symbols in the romances, but the most important one by far is the traditional one, music. Music is traditional because all that is now left of this upper world of nature is the ordered revolution of the starry spheres, with their inaudible music that symbolizes the harmony of the soul. This harmony of the soul, in its turn, is symbolized by female chastity, which in all pastoral romance down to Milton’s Comus is an attribute of the higher order of nature, and a containing of spiritual energy. The central symbol of this upper world is the moon, the boundary between the two orders of nature and the habitation of Cynthia or Diana, the goddess of chastity.162 Below the cycle of nature, or the ordinary physical world, is the abyss of disorder which Shakespeare often summons up by the word “nothing,” and symbolizes, most frequently, by the tempest. It is also the world of the devouring time which sweeps everything into annihilation. The subjective equivalents for storm and tempest are madness, illusion, or death itself. As the comic action proceeds, the middle world of ordinary experience disappears into the world above it, and separates itself from the world below it. A Gentleman in The Winter’s Tale, reporting the recognition scene of the finding of Perdita, says that the King and Camillo “looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed” [5.2.14–15], and it is the separation between redemption and destruction which constitutes the dialectic of romantic comedy. The images of chaos, tempest, illusion, madness, darkness, death, belong to the middle action of the comedy, in the phase of confused identity. It is at this point, the low point of the hero’s or heroine’s fortunes,

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as a rule, that the comic dialectic is formed. All the tempest comedies, A Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Tempest itself, prominently display the imagery of madness: almost everybody in Twelfth Night is said at some time or other to be mad, and this theme comes to its climax in the practical joke played on Malvolio, where Malvolio’s noble thoughts of the soul are a pretext for keeping him shut up. A similar theme appears in the equally unpleasant scene in The Taming of the Shrew where Petruchio compels Katharina to deny the evidence of her senses. Olivia says of Malvolio, “Why, this is very midsummer madness” [3.4.56], and perhaps this very common phrase accounts for the title of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the action of which appears to take place nearer the first of May. A similar repetition of the theme of madness looms conspicuously in A Comedy of Errors, which introduces a rudimentary psychiatrist to exorcise it. In A Comedy of Errors and The Merchant of Venice the action passes through a threat of death to the central character. In Measure for Measure the confrontation with death is symmetrical and thoroughgoing, with the disguised Duke in a curiously macabre psychopomp role. Every major male character in the play is threatened with death, though no one actually gets hurt much, except that a character who does not enter the play at all, the pirate Ragozine, expires of natural causes [4.3.69–71]. In other plays, as previously remarked, it is the heroine who is threatened with death or who actually dies, as far as the imagery of the play is concerned. The convention of striking or wounding the heroine, much favoured by Beaumont and Fletcher, appears in Cymbeline when Posthumus strikes the disguised Imogen, in Pericles when Marina is pushed back, or whatever the right stage direction is, and vestigially in The Winter’s Tale, when Polixenes threatens to mutilate the beauty of Perdita. In the romances the confrontation with death is central to the action: the focus of it in Pericles is the attempt to murder Marina and in Cymbeline it is the prison in which Posthumus awaits death while experiencing the vision of his ultimate deliverance. Both here and in The Winter’s Tale there seems, as in Measure for Measure, to be a deliberate effort to threaten as many and actually harm as few characters as possible, and in The Tempest, besides the plots to murder Alonso and Prospero, the Court Party is led into ordeals of madness and illusion which bring them to the verge of suicide. We may note the similarity to the convention of the detective story, where suspicion of a capital crime passes over all the main characters before it settles on one. It looks as though the “all’s well that ends well”

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formula is deeply involved with a structure in which redemption from death, or even revival from death, is a central element. As comedy normally works toward a reversal of its original postulates, the comic action is most simply described as a turning around. Hence Feste’s reference to the whirligig of time in Twelfth Night; hence the byplay about the proverb “He that is giddy thinks the world turns round” at the end of The Taming of the Shrew [5.2.20]; hence Benedick’s final remark in Much Ado: “man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion” [5.4.108–9]. But Benedick’s word “giddy” echoes an earlier passage in the play, a vapouring speech of the drunken Borachio which appears to have no meaning and no relevance to anything, and which therefore ought to be looked at sharply: Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is? how giddily a turns about all the hot bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty? sometime fashioning them like Pharaoh’s soldiers in the reechy painting; sometime like god Bel’s priests in the old church-window; sometime like the shaven Hercules in the smirched wormeaten tapestry, where his cod-piece seems as massy as his club? [3.3.130–8]

Leaving aside the reference to primitive art, we notice that the word “fashion” is used in two senses. One sense is fashion as constant change, the principle of giddiness in life which enables people to take up and discard their moods, their attitudes, their prejudices, and their affections, and which diffuses through life that continuous amnesia of which comedy makes so distinctive a use. This fashion has a demonic side, which is why it is described as a deformed thief (the word “deformed” being called to our attention as a multiple pun). The other meaning is fashion in the sense of shaping or creating. What it shapes, in this speech of Borachio, is what we should now call personae, the dramatic attitudes people assume in society, which makes life theatrical even as it makes the theatre lifelike. But the conception of fashion as a shaping power has further overtones. The real turning around, in the comic action, is the reversal of the poet’s presentation into the spectator’s perception, and this reversal is completed when the comic action defines the world of its conclusion, and separates itself from the world of confusion and chaos below it. There is a group of comedies, including The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the action moves from a world of parental tyranny and irrational law into a forest.

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There the comic resolution is attained, and the cast returns with it into their former world. The forest world presents a society in contrast to the one outside it, as the court of Duke Senior is in contrast to the court of Duke Frederick. The forest society is more flexible and tolerant than its counterpart: the brigands in The Two Gentlemen are noblemen who have been banished for murders and “such like petty crimes” [4.1.50] (their own phrase: we occasionally wonder whether, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the audience was not expected to take some of this play as deliberate hokum). It is associated with the “golden world” in As You Like It and with Robin Hood in both As You Like It and The Two Gentlemen. It is explicitly a dream world in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and at least a magical one in As You Like It, as its effect on Oliver and Duke Frederick indicates. This forest world I have elsewhere called the green world (from Keats’s Endymion, 1.16),163 and it represents a structural principle found in various forms in all the comedies. It is the place where the upper or purely human world toward which the comic action moves begins to take shape, and around which that world crystallizes. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the forest is inhabited by fairies. These fairies are spirits of the elements, and as such they are part of the cyclical processes of nature: when Oberon and Titania quarrel their dissensions are reflected in bad weather. In this play they appear to be autonomous, but it is clear that they are essentially related to human life, and this relation turns out to be one of service, ranging from the blessing of the house at the end to Peaseblossom’s scratching Bottom’s head. Properly employed, they are spirits of energy, who pinch the lazy maids, and of chastity, which, in Shakespearean romance as in Comus, is an attribute of the higher human world that separates itself from nonbeing. (In Milton the forest is sinister, but the reversal of the image does not alter the fact that the theme is also Shakespeare’s theme.) Fairies reappear in The Merry Wives, which is linked to the forest comedies by virtue of the final scene, and here again they are agents of chastity. It is interesting that as such they are enemies of Falstaff’s lustful desires, and yet Falstaff’s realization that his tormentors are not fairies rings with an authentic disappointment: And these are not fairies? I was three or four times in the thought they were not fairies; and yet the guiltiness of my mind, the sudden surprise of my powers, drove the grossness of the foppery into a received belief, in despite of the teeth of all rhyme and reason, that they were fairies. See now how wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent, when ’tis upon ill employment! [5.5.121–8]

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The forest or green world, then, is a symbol of natural society, the word “natural” here referring to the original human society which is the proper home of man, not the physical world he now lives in but the “golden world” he is trying to regain. This natural society is associated with things which in the context of the ordinary world seem unnatural, but which are in fact attributes of nature as a miraculous and irresistible reviving power. These associations include dream, magic, and chastity or spiritual energy as well as fertility and renewed natural energies. Magic in Shakespeare’s day was an “art,” and we have seen that the arts, especially music, are also attributes of a world which, being natural for man, is a world in which art and nature are at one.164 The Merchant of Venice has no forest, forests being difficult to accommodate to a Venetian setting, but Portia’s house in Belmont is a place of magic, chastity, and mysterious music. In this play the dialectic of the two societies is worked out in an extremely elaborate imagery of worth and value. At one pole is the gold and wealth of Shylock, acquired by usury, including a ring worth a wilderness of monkeys [3.1.122–3], and in which his daughter ranks as one more possession. The other pole is represented by the father of Portia, who associates his daughter with three caskets of which the leaden one is the only one of value. Bassanio’s ordeal is compared to the Argonautic voyage for the Golden Fleece [1.1.169–72; 3.2.241], and in the background is an intricate verbal texture woven of the relation between reality and appearance and the relation between gain and hazard. A good deal of byplay about the value of rings comes into the final act, and the mercantile ventures of Antonio move from disaster to profit as soon as the comic action is completed. In the romances there is a conflict between a society which is artificial in the modern sense, a courtly aristocracy full of all-too-human pride, passion, and selfishness, and another society which we may call a “natural society,” in the paradoxical sense just established. This natural society develops from the green world of the forest comedies, and is associated with a figure who is either a healer or in some other way a preserver of life. In Pericles it is represented by Cerimon, a folklore doctor whose magical and musical skill not only revives Thaisa but has brought a whole society to life. As an admirer says: hundreds call themselves Your creatures, who by you have been restored. [3.2.44–5]

In Cymbeline the focus of the natural society is Belarius, the foster father

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who brings up Cymbeline’s sons in simple and primitive surroundings. In the plays used as sources by Shakespeare the character corresponding to Belarius is a magician, and in Cymbeline mysterious music proceeds from Belarius’s cave. The preserver of Imogen’s life is Pisanio, who brings her to Belarius’s world and thus completes the movement of the flight of Cymbeline’s children from calumny. Pisanio also has an association by proxy with the medical profession in the drug he gives to Imogen. In The Winter’s Tale the natural society is the rural society of Bohemia, at the centre of which is the shepherd who is Perdita’s foster father, and who preserved her at birth. No mysterious music is heard in this world except the ballads of Autolycus, though Autolycus complacently notes the Orpheus-like influence of his songs, “which so drew the rest of the herd to me that all their other senses stuck in ears” [4.4.608–9]. But it is music that awakens Hermione in another area of the natural society, the chapel of Paulina, where Hermione has apparently been preserved for years while dead to the court. We notice that the natural society is particularly the world in which the heroine—Thaisa, Fidele, Hermione—dies and comes back to life. In the same play, when the clown and shepherd protest to Autolycus that they are plain fellows and Autolycus replies, “A lie; you are rough and hairy” [4.4.722], there is a curious association in the background between the natural society of the play and the Biblical Esau, sent to wander in the desert although the rightful heir. A similar Esau–Jacob echo comes into the interview between Lancelot Gobbo and his blind father when Gobbo is about to forsake a descendant of Jacob [Merchant of Venice, 2.2.73–113]. In The Tempest the whole action takes place in the natural society of the island, under the magic and music of Prospero. The connecting link with the Court Party is Gonzalo, who had the role of preserver of the infant Miranda’s life before the action of the play begins, and whose response to the island is a reverie of a simple golden age of primitive equality and leisure. In the earlier All’s Well the natural society is contained in Helena’s magical power of healing the diseased king, but the speech of Lavache the clown, quoted in the previous essay, declaring his preference for “the house with the narrow gate,” indicates that he too belongs to it. Measure for Measure seems to have no area of natural society beyond the moated grange in which the forsaken Mariana sits all day and sings of “lights that do mislead the morn” [4.1.4]. The natural society is often simple and primitive, and so socially inferior to the court. The situation of All’s Well turns on the social inferior-

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ity of Helena to Bertram, and the relation of Imogen to Posthumus is similar, or felt to be so by Cymbeline. Social promotion is rare, and we notice a curious snobbery in the romances that sometimes seems almost perverse. In The Tempest the cold-blooded Antonio is treated with considerably more respect than the amusing rascals Stephano and Trinculo; Perdita, obviously the person who ought to marry Florizel, can outwit Polixenes only by the fact that she is a real princess; Guiderius in Cymbeline, despite his great services to his country, must die for killing Cloten, and is only saved by the fact that he is a real prince. “The comedies of Shakespeare,” wrote Walt Whitman, “are altogether unacceptable to America and democracy.”165 It seems to me, on the other hand, that a democracy is in an even better position than Shakespeare’s society to understand that princes and princesses may be wish-fulfilment dreams as well as social facts. It would hardly be possible to depict the absorbing and informing of a courtly society by what we have called a natural society without making the social symbols of the latter identical with those of the former. I have spoken of the way in which drama begins with the renunciation of magic, when ritual acts designed to operate on the order of nature are enclosed by a myth. I said that when drama renounces magic in this way it gets it back again through the nature of poetic imagery itself, which assimilates the natural to the human order by analogy and identity, simile and metaphor. The traditional symbol of this lost and regained magic in human art is Orpheus. Orpheus is often mentioned by name in crucial passages where he obviously belongs, as in Lorenzo’s speech on harmony in The Merchant of Venice [5.1.54–65], but in a wider and more general sense Orpheus is the hero of all four romances, the musical, magical, and pastoral power that awakens Thaisa and Hermione, that draws Ferdinand toward Miranda, that signalizes the ritual death of Imogen, and that gives strange dreams to Caliban. We have seen that the wheel of nature in Shakespearean comedy is far bigger in its scope than the wheel of fortune that organizes the histories. The high point of the wheel of fortune is symbolized by the weeded garden in Richard II, the work of art that requires constant judgment and vigilance. This figure reappears in Prospero’s monologue to Miranda about his general incompetence in finding the right people to “trash for over-topping” [1.2.81]. Its low point is represented by usurpation, tyranny, war, the execution of the innocent, and the like. But the wheel of fortune turns all at once: there is no dialectic in the historical plays, no glimpse of a redeemed or

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recreated world. We notice that coronation scenes in the histories are frequently accompanied by the disgrace or repudiation of a scapegoat figure: we have Fastolfe at the coronation of Henry VI and Falstaff at that of his predecessor. Similarly the coronation of Anne Boleyn is accompanied by the disgrace of Queen Catherine, and we are not surprised to find that it is a song about Orpheus that is sung to her in the hour of her humiliation, a reminder of the greater cycle that she enters into in the vision at her death. The author of the epistle to the reader in the Troilus and Cressida Quarto remarks that the comedies of Shakespeare are sprung from the sea of Venus. So they are, but the foamborn Aphrodite who presides over the end of comedy belongs in the shallower shores of a much deeper ocean. This is the sea of chaos itself, the abyss of nothingness symbolized in the Bible by the monster Leviathan, the dragon of the deep that only God, in God’s own time, can hook and bring to land. In his speech before the walls of Harfleur, Henry V threatens to let loose the chaos of a looting and raping soldiery on the town, and says: We may as bootless spend our vain command Upon th’ enraged soldiers in their spoil As send precepts to the leviathan To come ashore. [3.3.24–7]

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Proteus says: For Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews, Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones, Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands. [3.2.77–80]

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is Shakespeare’s most perfunctory comedy, and the speaker, Proteus, is a rather poor creature. But even so the contrast between the scope of history and the scope of comedy is very clear. In the Bible the Leviathan is not simply a whale or sea monster: it is both the power of tyranny, identified with Nebuchadnezzar and the Pharaoh of Egypt, and the abyss of lost identity.166 For by the principles of metaphor a sea monster can be the sea, and the sea can be the flood of annihilation that drowned the world in the time of Noah, the monster that swallowed Jonah, the Mediterranean tempest that shipwrecked St.

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Paul, and the dragon of the apocalypse. In the commedia of the Bible, then, it is the anticomic monstrous power that controls most of the world until the Last Judgment, or whatever corresponds in the Bible to the comic recognition scene. In the tempest comedies of Shakespeare there are recalls of most of these Biblical associations. St. Paul’s journeys are echoed in A Comedy of Errors, even in The Tempest. In Pericles the sailors’ superstition that the ship will be wrecked if Thaisa’s body is not thrown overboard suggests one of the adventures of Jonah, and the “caulked and bitumened” coffin that brings her safely to land suggests an ark. Antiochus, too, as the story of his death indicates, seems to be connected with the Antiochus of Syria who is one of the Antichrist figures of the Bible.167 In A Comedy of Errors the fear of the loss of identity, already referred to, is expressed in two or three images of sinking in water: I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop Who, falling there to find his fellow forth Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself. [1.2.35–8]

The feeling that in one dimension of the imagery we never quite get out of the sea recurs in The Tempest. In The Merry Wives Mrs. Ford remarks, in exasperation, of Falstaff, “What tempest, I trow, threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor?” [2.1.64–5]. We are reminded of the wife of Dromio of Ephesus, who takes Dromio of Syracuse to be her husband. Her horrified brother-in-law describes her as a monster whose body covers all Europe, and who is also full of oil: “If she lives till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world” [Comedy of Errors, 3.2.99–100]. In The Tempest, Prospero’s magic is said to affect only the world of the four elements, his servants, including Ariel, being elemental spirits like the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This white magic is contrasted with the black magic of Sycorax, who has the traditional power of witchcraft over the moon,168 and, like Spenser’s Mutability, threatens the whole cosmic order. Prospero can raise a tempest, like the witches in Macbeth, but his motives being good, his magic is in tune with the higher order of nature, and his last magical effort, just before he renounces his powers, is to “require” some heavenly music. But although Prospero is benevolent and human, confining his work

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to the cycle of nature, the half of the cycle that he works in, the progress from death to renewed life, is an aspect of nature that still seems to us miraculous. The word “strange” is constantly echoed through the play, and Alonso opposes “strange” to natural, to be told by Prospero that what he thinks strange actually is natural. We notice that Prospero, in his renunciation speech, explicitly claims to have raised the dead, and the pretence that some of the characters have actually died and come back to life is as strong as it is in The Winter’s Tale. Prospero pretends that he has lost Miranda “in this last tempest” [5.1.153], and the mariners seem to be spending the action of the play in a world of hellish music with strange and several noises Of roaring, shrieking, howling, jingling chains, And moe diversity of sounds, all horrible. [5.1.232–4]

The island, then, is a place of confused identity in which a world of nothingness, symbolized by the tempest and the sea, separates from a world of regained identity in which Ferdinand receives a “second life” from Prospero, and the Court Party, as Gonzalo says, find their true selves again. Stephano and Trinculo fall into a “filthy-mantled pool” [4.1.182] and Caliban is persistently associated with fish: they hardly emerge from a submarine world. The Court Party wander through a “maze” of hallucinations, and for them the conceptions of reality and illusion are reversed. In the cognitio Antonio and Sebastian understand that their realistic efforts to gain power by assassination are what is unnatural, and so unreal, and that the marvels and wonders of the magical island are a part of a purgatorial cleansing of both their reason and their senses: And as the morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness, so their rising senses Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle Their clearer reason. [5.1.65–8]

The higher or human nature which is revealed to them by Prospero’s art, an art including magic, music, and drama, is, as Polixenes says in The Winter’s Tale, an art which itself is nature [cf. 4.4.97]. Polixenes, however, is thinking of this higher nature in the terms of a Renaissance highbrow: for him it is a conservative order, and belief in it is quite consistent with

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his going into a fury at the thought of his own stock being improved by the graft of a shepherd maiden. Perdita’s repudiation of “bastard” flowers is not a hereditary nervousness about bastards: her chastity, as always in Shakespeare, is contained energy, and stands not for the purity of nature but for nature as a pulsating power, expressing itself in the miraculous springtime renewal which takes place without the aid of art. The sense of the energy of nature is in The Tempest too: here again, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairies are instruments of energy and chastity, “pinching” the lazy and the dissolute. Prospero’s magic is an identification with nature as a power rather than as an order or harmony, and is expressed in images of time rather than space, music rather than architecture. Like all magicians, he observes time closely (“The very minute bids thee ope thine ear,” he says to Miranda [1.2.37]), and his charms are effective only if he follows the rhythm of time. The subtitle of Greene’s Pandosto, the source of the first part of The Winter’s Tale, is “The Triumph of Time,” and it is often suggested in the comedies that a power of bringing about the comic conclusion is inherent in time itself. From Twelfth Night, where Viola says, “O Time, thou must untangle this, not I!” [2.2.40] to The Winter’s Tale, where Time is personified as the Chorus and speaks of his comic power To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour To plant and o’erwhelm custom [4.1.8–9]

we are aware of how deeply the spirit of magic and ritual, the sense of the significant act at the right time, has been inherited by comic and romantic drama. This feeling for the right time ramifies into all the imagery of The Tempest. The moon and the tides, several times mentioned in The Winter’s Tale as well, in spite of the Mediterranean setting of both plays, are a part of its rhythm, and so is the moral virtue of patience, or waiting for the time to accomplish one’s desires. Patience is one of the two virtues personified in the dialogue; the other is the “delicate wench” Temperance [Tempest, 2.1.44], the central virtue of all comedies, the etymology of which connects it, like the word “tempest” itself, with time (tempestas) and the distribution of time. The chastity of Miranda is a controlled energy that must develop from virginity to marriage by observing the proper rhythms of time and of ritual, otherwise the whole order of nature will go out of alignment. Prospero’s concern on this point is a

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magical rather than a moral anxiety: the opposite pole is the incestuous daughter of Antiochus in Pericles, born at a most favourable time when “the senate-house of planets all did sit” [1.1.10] and consequently very beautiful, but as Pericles says: being played upon before your time Hell only danceth at so harsh a chime. [1.1.84–5]

The reference to music, an art dependent on time and rhythm, shows how essentially music and dance are involved in such imagery. We notice, too, how carefully the stage directions space out the movements in the masques and dumb shows. Below this upper world of magic and music, which is also the world of genuine or restored nature, is the middle world of ordinary nature. This world is a cyclical movement between the poles of life and death, poles represented by the comic Eros and the tragic Thanatos or Adonis, Puck and Pyramus. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Cupid shoots an arrow at a “fair vestal” whose chastity makes her, like Miranda, part of the higher world of the moon and the music of the spheres [2.1.158–64]. The arrow describes a parabola, which outlines, so to speak, the shape of the world it is in; it falls on a white flower and dyes it purple. The flower is called “love-in-idleness,” and is used to inspire love, but purple is the colour of the dying god, and the parabola movement was probably derived by Shakespeare from a curious image in Ovid’s account of Pyramus.169 Another image of this cyclical world where life pursues death is the hunt, Diana the huntress being the earthly form of the moon goddess. The extraordinary loveliness of the lines given to Theseus and Hippolyta about the music of hunting suggests the harmony of a world below the heavenly sphere, theologically “fallen,” but with its own kind of beauty and energy. Twelfth Night also begins with images of music, violets, and hunting inspired by love. In Love’s Labour’s Lost the killing of the deer by the princess is compared by Holofernes to an apple falling from heaven to earth [4.2.3–7]: the image is deliberately absurd, and therefore contains something not wholly absurd. In The Tempest another fall under a tree, Stephano and Trinculo seizing the “glistering apparel” on the “line” [4.1.193] (assuming that “line” here means linden tree)170 is immediately followed by their being hunted by spirits in the shapes of hounds. The Twelfth Night passage refers to the Actaeon myth, which naturally is central to this white-goddess cycle of love pursuing death,

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and the theme of wearing the horns of the deer in As You Like It and elsewhere may have more to do with this myth than with stale jokes about cuckolds. The identity of Eros and Adonis recurs in The Winter’s Tale, where Perdita would like to strew Florizel with flowers, not “like a corse,” but “like a bank for love to lie and play on” [4.4.129–31]. Shakespeare frequently indicates the two poles of the natural cycle, in its various contexts, by a pair of songs. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, as mentioned earlier, we have the two songs of spring and winter, the order of which indicates the postponing of the comic conclusion. In Cymbeline, as also mentioned, there are the aubade and dirge of Imogen. In The Winter’s Tale there might have been a winter song in the first part to contrast with Autolycus’s song of the daffodils which begins the second, but a song would have been inappropriate in that part of the play. Its place is taken by the ghost story of the old man who dwelt by the churchyard, which Mamillius begins to tell. In The Tempest Ariel’s first two songs of escape from and submergence in water, one a song of cocks and watchdogs and the other of funeral bells, have a similar contrast. The spirits addressed in the first song are those with “printless foot” [5.1.34], referred to by Prospero, who keep on the shore just out of reach of the sea. Prospero has been the expelled idiotes of a dramatic action that was completed fifteen years before the play begins. His position is not unlike Timon’s to start with, but he has “books” and the kind of power symbolized by magic, which expresses itself very largely in music and drama. Timon, though he lives in a cave, is not a magician: he finds his gold by accident, and no suggestion of the supernatural is allowed to enter this particular play. The result is that, after trying to identify himself with the tempest world, with everything chaotic and destructive in nature, he finally dies “upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood” [5.1.216]. Prospero, in contrast, uses his magic to create what we have called a natural society out of the other characters. Because this natural society represents a higher order of nature than the one they know, what they get from him is a kind of initiation, like that of Aeneas in Virgil, whose journey the Court Party is repeating, as the dialogue about “widow Dido” and the identifying of Tunis with Carthage indicates. The opening tempest and the harpy banquet are other Virgilian echoes, rare as it is to find Shakespeare taking his eye off Ovid even for a few scenes. Gonzalo has some confused notion that a spiritual pilgrimage of some sort is going on: he sees the island as an earthly paradise and speaks of their fresh and new-dyed garments. But Antonio and Sebastian take longer to reach this point of view.

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Prospero, with Ariel’s help, divides the cast into three groups, corresponding roughly to the moral levels referred to earlier. First are the hero and heroine, Ferdinand and Miranda; next is the Court Party, including both the virtuous Gonzalo and the “three men of sin”; and last are the group Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. Each of these goes through a typical ordeal. Ferdinand succeeds Caliban as a piler of logs; the Court Party wanders through “forthrights and meanders”; the clowns are submerged in a horsepond. Each, also, reaches an emblematic vision. Ferdinand and Miranda watch the masque of goddesses; the Court Party is introduced to the disappearing banquet. They have been brought up to think that reality is whatever their greed can clutch, and the disappearing banquet stands for the deceitful and illusory status of this kind of reality. Stephano and Trinculo are enticed to steal the glistering apparel dangled in front of them. These three visions are closely related to the three levels of the sheep-shearing festival in The Winter’s Tale. The masque of goddesses corresponds to Florizel’s phrase “a meeting of the petty gods,” with Perdita as Flora. Polixenes and Camillo, the spirits of the winter, came from the court to turn the festival into an illusion that they snatch away. Autolycus makes it an opportunity to steal purses and sell his bits of glistering apparel. He calls his stock “trumpery,” the same word that Prospero uses to describe what he tempts Stephano and Trinculo with. It is the wedding masque in which the dialectic of Shakespearean romance is most fully and completely stated. What the wedding masque presents is the meeting of earth and heaven under the rainbow, the symbol of Noah’s new-washed world, after the tempest and flood had receded, and when it was promised that springtime and harvest would not cease.171 There is in fact a definite recall of the Biblical scene: Spring come to you at the farthest In the very end of the harvest. [4.1.114–15]172

But these lines say more: they say that out of the cycle of time in ordinary nature we have reached a paradise (Ferdinand’s word [4.1.124]), where there is a ver perpetuum, where spring and autumn exist together. It is not a timeless world, but it is a world in which time has a quite different relation to experience from ordinary time. Milton says of his Eden that there “spring and autumn / Danced hand in hand,”173 and he may have been thinking of Shakespeare’s masque, which ends in a dance of

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spring nymphs and autumn reapers. And because a new heaven and a new earth is a world of chastity and a recovery of innocence, Venus is expressly excluded from the masque. For Venus belongs to the cycle of life and death below this world, and wherever she is, “dusky Dis” [4.1.89] is also. With the vision of this world, the world of ordinary experience disappears, for the separation has finally been made between reality and illusion, the created and the objective. The world of what Pericles calls “a tempest, / A birth, and death” [5.3.33–4], being finally expelled, becomes the world of nonbeing: we have only, in the words of The Winter’s Tale, a world ransomed and a world destroyed. In the world of the masque time has become the rhythm of existence, the recovery by man of the energy of nature. In the nonexistent world below, time is the universal devourer that has finally nothing to swallow but itself. Prospero’s great speech at the end of the masque tells us that everything we perceive disappears in this time. That is, the world of the spectator is ultimately abolished. What is presented to us must be possessed by us, as Prospero tells us in the Epilogue. We are told that the characters, as usual, will adjourn to hear more about themselves, but we need not follow them, for it is our own identity that we are interested in now. If anything is to make sense of this play, no less than of Peter Quince’s play, it must be, as Hippolyta says, our imagination and not theirs. When Prospero’s work is done, and there is nothing left to see, the vision of the brave new world becomes the world itself, and the dance of vanishing spirits a revel that has no end.

14 Shakespeare and the Modern World 13 May 1964

From our transcription of the audiotape in the CBC Radio Archives, Toronto (CBC reference no. 841023-9 [12]). Fifth and final program in the Shakespeare Series in the series “University of the Air.”1 Frye’s talk was introduced as follows: “Tonight ‘University of the Air’ presents ‘Shakespeare and the Modern World’ by Northrop Frye, the last in a series of five lectures to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. Professor Frye is the principal of Victoria University in Toronto and is known internationally for his books of criticism, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake and Anatomy of Criticism. Tonight Professor Frye speaks about Shakespeare’s continuing influence on the English literary tradition and his relation to the literature of our own time. Northrop Frye—” The talk has been reprinted in RW, 167–77. The typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 1, file V; and 1991, box 37, file 6 (two copies with clippings).

Let us suppose that hundreds of years from now, an archaeologist from the People’s Republic of Central Africa starts digging out the H-bomb rubble that covers our civilization and gets down to the year 1964. He can decipher very little of the language, but he finds two types of pictures recurring. One is of four young men with shocks of untidy hair;2 the other is a vacant mask-like face, floating on top of a collar and doublet, representing a poet born in 1564.3 Our African would perhaps come to the conclusion that religion in 1964 was of an orgiastic and frenzied kind which, for some reason, included a superstitious reverence for the decimal system of counting, a feature which enabled it to preserve some memory of an older pantheon of gods. Well, this is 1964, and we can perhaps see more point in having an-

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niversaries for poets. The main point is that we can remind ourselves of what we really owe to poets. The more seriously we try to think and express ourselves, the more clearly we realize that we can think and talk only within the limits of the language we know. By language I don’t mean simply English, but the body of ideas and images in words that we’ve inherited. Nobody is an original thinker or writer in the sense of starting from outside the structure of what has already been thought and said. The first fact about Shakespeare’s relation to us, then, is the fact that we can’t open our mouths, to any serious purpose, without his images and phrases forming part of what we are saying. I don’t mean by this merely that we are constantly quoting Shakespeare, or constantly using phrases like “foregone conclusion,” which he invented.4 Certainly we are—you remember the man who didn’t like Hamlet because it was so full of quotations5—but I mean something more far-reaching than that. Great writers are the obvious models of style for their successors, and some are better models than others. When Shakespeare was six years old, a book appeared called The Scholemaster on how to teach Latin to children.6 The teacher translates a passage from Cicero into English; the child puts it back into Latin, and then compares what he does with Cicero. This means that Cicero has to be regarded as a perfect model of style: this is the “classical” view of literature, where the greatest writers are the best models. Whether Cicero was or not, there are certainly English writers who are, and they set the standards for a good common style. Ben Jonson was a writer of this kind, and when Jonson talks about style, the sense of craftsmanship in a great tradition is in everything he says: he speaks, for example, of “the well-joining and cementing of words; when as it is smooth, gentle, and sweet, like a table upon which you may run your finger without rubs, and your nail cannot find a joint.”7 Classical writing of this kind is part of a conservative culture, something deliberately and consciously imposed. The fact that the greatest poet in English is Shakespeare has given English a very different slant. Many critics, including Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot, have told us that Shakespeare is a dangerous influence in a literary tradition because he is so clever and resourceful, and so impossible to imitate without disaster.8 We get the feeling that in his language almost anything goes: his language is a verbal fairyland, with something new and astonishing around every corner. The original audience, as the great waves of sound poured over them, must often have felt like a modern reader confronted with Finnegans Wake:

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Shakespeare is not a good model of style, but he is something much bigger than a model: he is an emancipating force. English is peculiarly a language of free speech, with its vast mongrelized vocabulary and its easy flexible syntax, and Shakespeare set the seal of a great poet’s approval on those features of it. Writers in every generation have rediscovered the uniquely generous and democratic quality of English, its ability to express every aspect of what one wants to say, without freezing into convention or prefabricated shapes. This quality in English is the quality that is now making it a world language, and it is a quality that has everything to do with Shakespeare’s central place in its tradition. Some people associate freedom with a lack of discipline, especially the freedom of genius. Those who would like to be great poets but don’t want to work at it tend to think of Shakespeare as a “child of nature,”11 who simply turned on a tap when he wanted to write. Didn’t the editors of the Folio suggest that he never blotted the line,12 and Jonson remark on his small Latin and less Greek?13 Well, it is true that Shakespeare was not a visual scholar, like Jonson, whose plays bristle with footnotes and references. But Shakespeare, like Bach, was a scholar of the ear. He seems to have used sources in English whenever he could, not because he could not read other languages, but because he was constantly listening for phrases. For instance, he used a rather stodgy collection of poems, The Mirror for Magistrates, as a very minor source for King Lear, and his ear for a phrase was so fantastically acute that scholars can tell that he consulted two editions of it.14 He was, of course, a close observer of life, but all his plays come out of books, and the simple-minded notion that knowledge of books is only second-hand knowledge of life is not one that he could ever have held. It’s quite an experience to compare one of his plays with its sources, and see his swift selective mind operating with such an infallible sense of what is essential and what should be cut out. There is nothing here that gives any aid and comfort to the lazy or the anti-intellectual. Literature must have existed for thousands of years in an oral state, before anything was written down. In oral literature there were minstrels or reciters who made their living by telling stories, and under these conditions, although every storyteller has his own stock, there is no private property or law of copyright, and all authorship is anonymous. When

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writing, and especially printing, developed, authorship became more identified, and now, when everything is printed, we hardly think of literature apart from authors. A play of Bernard Shaw introduces a group of dramatic critics, and one of them says he can say nothing about any play until he knows who wrote it.15 This is a very common attitude to literature now, when we want to know what kind of man produced what we are reading, and what in it refers to his own love affairs, religious or political views, or daily experience. Shakespeare, and most of the dramatists around him, were much closer to the oral tradition. They were absorbed in the theatrical process, and left the publication of their plays to chance or to unauthorized pirates. Not all of them: Ben Jonson took great pains to edit and publish his plays.16 Why did Shakespeare publish nothing except his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece? Surely he must have had some idea of how good he was, and known that these two poems were not his greatest work. Why did he allow so many quartos to appear without, apparently, ever glancing at a proof sheet? How did such a play as A Yorkshire Tragedy, which everybody knows he didn’t write, appear in his lifetime with his name on the title page?17 Why is it that we sometimes can’t be sure whether an entire play is by someone else or a garbled version of his? Why was he so indifferent to the advance in his reputation that a Folio revised and edited by himself would have made? Some of these questions have straightforward answers, and to many people, including myself, they are not the most serious questions to ask. But to others they are quite a barrier to the understanding of Shakespeare. For Shakespeare was not merely indifferent to fame: he seems to have almost wiped out his personality. All the pictures of him that make him look like a poet are fakes; most, if not all, the anecdotes about him are later fabrications. He kept clear of all quarrels, rivalries, gossip, and intrigue. There is no personal statement anywhere in his writings; the only likely exception (there generally is an exception to every statement about Shakespeare) is a famous passage in the sonnets that warns us not to look for personal statements: Thence comes it that my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. [Sonnet 111, ll. 5–7]18

Human nature being what it is, a great deal of writing on Shakespeare has consisted of efforts to peek around the personal barrier. I am not

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speaking of the cranks who have tried to prove that he was somebody else, although the number and vociferousness of them show how irritated people get when they can’t attach a body of poetry to a personal body. I am speaking of serious people who have ransacked the plays for clues to Shakespeare’s moods when he wrote them, and then tried to string the moods together into a biography. In the sonnets, Wordsworth said in a moment of misguided enthusiasm, Shakespeare unlocked his heart:19 so hundreds of people have read the sonnets for no other purpose than to try to find out who W.H. and the youth and the dark lady and the rival poet were.20 One scholar, Caroline Spurgeon, studied the imagery of the plays in search of unconsciously dropped clues to the writer’s personality.21 What emerged was a dismally amiable mediocrity whose favourite game was probably bowls. It is a pitiful haul that scholars have salvaged from their research: a will, a few addresses, a baptismal certificate, and some financial transactions that suggest only a commonplace middle-class snob. I am not saying that it does not matter what kind of man Shakespeare was: to me it matters profoundly that he was a poet who chose not to reveal his personality—except, of course, in the purely creative way that God is said to reveal his, everywhere present in all his works. It is a pity that so much wasted effort, so much phoney biography, so many misled and misleading attempts to reconstruct the man behind the plays, chokes up the Shakespeare sections of our library stacks. But it is worth it to have so gigantic an exception to the cult of personality in literature. The renouncing of personality is part of what makes Shakespeare an emancipating poetic force. Most great poets have had commanding personalities, and their successors have had to come to terms with them. Goethe, for instance, had a personality of this kind, and when we study his influence on later German writers, such as Thomas Mann, it is clear that his influence has been a bit like the one Jacob got when he wrestled with the angel, a blessing obtained at the price of being to some extent crippled. This might have been true of English if our greatest poet had been Milton. Keats, for example, was deeply influenced by both Milton and Shakespeare, and he felt that Milton, simply by being a great man as well as a great poet, was a hampering influence, forcing him to write imitation Milton.22 Shakespeare had no personality to impose, and so he helped Keats to write not imitation Shakespeare, but authentic Keats. This may be oversimplified, though it is surely significant that Keats felt this way, and of course poets can waste their talents trying to imitate

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Shakespeare, especially if they belong to that large and obsessed group who want to revive poetic drama. But as long as Shakespeare is a central part of our cultural heritage, our attention is being directed away from a man towards the work itself. We can hardly exaggerate the importance for our culture of the fact that our greatest poet was a man of whom we know nothing significant except that he stuck to his business as a poet. The great personalities among the poets often have a kind of driving will to power in them that forces a whole civilization to accept the authority that they impose. This is particularly true when they are epic poets—Virgil, Dante, Milton—moving towards a single colossal masterpiece. It is part of the liberalizing quality of English literature that its greatest poet is a dramatist, and a secular dramatist who can’t invoke the authority of religion, as Calderon did in Spain. For the dramatist must be immediately judged by his audience, or, as Samuel Johnson said, The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give, And they that live to please must please to live.23

This fact has not prevented many dramatists from scolding their audiences and trying to improve their taste. But Shakespeare seems never to have approached his audience with any other attitude than the one implied in the last line of Twelfth Night: “We’ll strive to please you every day.” He seems to stand on the exact level of his audience: their political prejudices, their clichés about Frenchmen or Jews, their notions of what constitutes a joke, are good enough for him. In the history plays, the English and the French are quite clearly the good and the bad guys. He may modify this in many ways, but not to the point of upsetting his audience. He was evidently willing enough to write an unpopular play if that was what took shape in his mind: Troilus and Cressida was such a play, and it is hard to think of Timon of Athens as a smash hit. But directly after writing Timon we can see him turning over the pages of what seem to us very corny and simple-minded plays, thirty years and more old, in search of the fairy-tale formulas about magicians in caves and long-lost children restored to their parents that we find in the last romances, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.24 His identity with his audience was so complete that he never allowed any part of that audience to take him over. He belonged essentially to the popular theatre, and he did all the things that many highbrows of his time disapproved of, such as mixing kings and clowns, serious and

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comic scenes, in the same play.25 The highbrows thought this was bad taste because it was socially subversive. As a satirist of Shakespeare’s day says: A goodly hotch-potch! when vile russetings Are matched with monarchs, and with mighty kings.26

A similar line of reasoning led the French drama to eliminate such social mixtures. French drama thus has the “classical” sense of a culture imposed by authority. Shakespeare’s much freer social perspective, where the ruling class stays on top but where Falstaff or Autolycus or Thersites can always steal some of the show, reflects the English genius for allowing subversive elements to enter the social order without destroying its structure. As the court of James and Charles became more interested in drama, many writers took advantage of that interest to write courtly plays. That got them out of the rain, and it gave them quieter and more sophisticated audiences. But in doing this they got caught in the narrowing spiral of ruling-class idealism. Twenty-five years after Shakespeare’s death Parliament closed the theatres, and the act coincided with an inner collapse of vitality: the playwrights working for Charles and Henrietta Maria had got to be a rather insipid lot. Shakespeare’s relation to the popular theatre is a part of his much broader social attitude. It is not easy to explain in a few words what the attitude was. Certainly the silly phrase “giving the public what it wants” doesn’t cover it. Anybody who knew his audience as well as Shakespeare would know that the important difference in it is not the difference between intelligent and stupid people, but the difference between intelligent and stupid responses to the play, both of which may exist in the same mind. In all audiences there is a stupid attitude that comes into the theatre with a mass of prejudices and clichés and stock responses, and demands that the play illustrate them, or some of them. There is nothing to be done with such an attitude except to keep it quiet, and the superficial meaning of the play is what does that. T.S. Eliot compares this to a burglar throwing a piece of meat to a watchdog, hoping that the dog will bite it and not him.27 The intelligent attitude wants only to see a play, and doesn’t know until the end whether or not that play is what it wants. One attitude is focused on the apparent meaning, or moral, of the play; the other is focused on its structure. I have been speaking of the difference to our civilization that Shake-

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speare’s place in it has made, and I have said that he consistently acts as an emancipating and liberalizing force. Nowhere is this more true than in his complete detachment from all opinions and points of view and arguments and ideologies. No one can discover from the plays what his religious or political views were; he had no philosophy of life and he has no “message for our time.” Like his absence of personality, this fact about him has infuriated many people who have been clawing and scratching the plays for a long time to find a system of ideas underneath them. Some try to identify Shakespeare’s views with those of certain characters whom they like or happen to agree with. They say that he must have been a bleak agnostic pessimist because the blinded Gloucester talks that way; or he must have been a reflective and melancholy idealist because Hamlet is; or he must have had a conservative belief in order and degree because Ulysses makes an eloquent speech on that subject when he is trying to talk the Greek leaders into bringing Achilles back [Troilus and Cressida, 75–137]. None of these approaches will work, because the whole procedure involved is wrong. The plays are structures that contain infinite meanings. They can be read and acted and interpreted forever, but no reading or interpretation is ever definitive; at no point can we say that this and this only is what Shakespeare really means. There is no “real meaning” in Shakespeare because there is nothing to be abstracted or pulled out from the total experience of the play. It seems to me wrong, then, to think of Shakespeare as not simply writing plays, but as trying to “say” something by means of the plays. Whatever he could “say” would be dated by now, and we’d have to discard it anyway. The other extreme is to think of him as a dispassionate recorder of life, as what Stendhal said a novelist should be, a mirror dawdling down a lane, filling his stage with a great vitality and variety of character, but as mindless and unconcerned in the process as Mother Nature herself.28 This is the view of him expressed by Matthew Arnold when he said: Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still.29

But I don’t like this Shakespeare, either. I don’t think that this complacent grinning sphinx could have written plays that after four hundred years we feel are about us, too. Shakespeare is detached from his society but not removed from it; he deals with all of it at once, not with a part

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against another part. That society was a class structure in his day and it appears as such on his stage, but his own point of view, and the one he hands on to us, is classless. There are social and moral differences between Prospero and Caliban, Henry V and Falstaff, Ulysses and Thersites, but each articulates something essential to the situation he is in: we must have both sides of the difference. His is a detachment that is totally involved, an impartiality that brings everything equally to life. When Matthew Arnold called culture, which of course includes Shakespeare, a force that seeks to do away with classes, as something making for human equality as well as human freedom, he was making a much more profound comment on Shakespeare’s attitude and influence.30 Our first impression of Shakespeare is one of infinite variety: thirtyseven plays in every conceivable kind of theme and mood and structure. He seems to have picked up his subjects at random, writing one play after another with few, if any, links between them that we can trace. But once we get all his plays together in a book, we begin to get a sense of the unity of the vast human testament he has left to us. The human imagination lives in a bigger world than human experience does, a world that extends from the marvels of Oberon’s magic to the obscene mysteries of Macbeth’s witches. Shakespeare, as we should expect, is aware of all dimensions of this world at once. His comedies end in scenes of great festivity, with three or four marriages going on and everybody forgiving everybody else; yet there is always someone, Shylock or Malvolio or Parolles, who doesn’t fit, who suggests quite different emotions, or someone like Jaques in As You Like It, who reminds us that there is joy in escape as well as in belonging. Macbeth hurls himself on Macduff in utter horror and despair, yet in doing so he shows that whatever he has done he is still a hero, and is worth having a tragedy written about him. Lear dies in the pure illusion that Cordelia is alive, but perhaps his madness knows something that our sanity does not know. Henry V conquers France and marries its princess in triumph, yet he dies almost at once and sixty years of unbroken disaster to England follow. There is always something that keeps the perspective open. If I had to make a statement about the literature of our own time, I should say that it was mainly a literature of closed perspectives, an ironic literature, concentrating upon the cruelty or absurdity or obscenity of life, strongly moralizing in tone. The limitations of its view are clear enough: its virtues are in the honesty and fearlessness with which it is ready to face the repulsive or the degrading or the devious. I imagine that writers

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of our time, as in every other time, derive much of their courage from the security of their cultural tradition. And in the centre of that tradition is the Shakespeare who saw what they see in the context of a wider vision, who helps them to write honestly about racial segregation because he saw Othello as a human being who happened to be black, who helps them to understand the unconscious because he saw Hamlet failing to deal with the man who killed his father and married his mother. Other ages will owe him different debts, but such a creator can never stop creating. That is what all these anniversary rituals are trying to say.

15 Nature and Nothing April 1964

From Essays on Shakespeare, ed. Gerald W. Chapman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 35–58. Originally given as a lecture at the University of Denver in a series honouring the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. In spring 1964, as Chapman recounts in the book’s preface, “The departments of English and Theatre invited six scholar-critics, of singular distinction and plural approach, to say about Shakespeare whatever they might care to say on the occasion of his four-hundredth anniversary. . . . they now find themselves juxtaposed in one book unaware of what each has said” (v).1 Chapman also points out, “The essays are printed here substantially as given; they thus retain the flavour of the spoken word” (vi). Notebook 9 records Frye’s conception of this paper: see NRL, 218,2 and 248, with the significant heading “Denver.”3 Since Frye was drafting NP and FT (nos. 13 and 16) around the same time, this paper echoes those books, which contain fuller discussions at several points.

Criticism exists because literature is endlessly fascinating, and one of the things that is fascinating about literature is the sense of the oracular that we get from it.4 The fascination that the fool or the madman had for primitive societies was based on the feeling that when the ordinary consciousness was disordered or put out of action, something mysterious, awful, perhaps divine, could speak in its place. A prophet’s “Thus saith the Lord” is much more convincing if he can say little that makes much sense in his own person. Nowadays we have a similar veneration for “creative” minds, the word “creative” being a fossilized religious metaphor, and have developed psychological theories about the creative nature of the subconscious or unconscious parts of the mind. These parts

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are usually thought of as the lower depths of the mind, corresponding to the oracular caverns of Greek religion. We expect poets to be frequently, if not foolish, at any rate a trifle simple-minded in their ordinary social attitudes, and in their professional function to speak with an involuntary wisdom. It would be simpler to try to distinguish poetic from discursive thought in a way which does not require the metaphorical intangibles of psychology. The poet’s relation to the thinker is similar to his relation to the historian as explained by Aristotle: he establishes the typical or universal constructs of thought, and never, qua poet, makes a definite predication.5 That is, the poet does not define or establish a new and consistent denotation for his words, but deals with the traditional and habitual connotations of words. All directed thinking, when verbal in expression, comes out of a verbal structure already in existence. This structure is not simply a dictionary list of the words we use: it is a network of associative assumptions. Directed thought proceeds by aligning a verbal structure with the events or phenomena that it attempts to describe. Such writing is intentional: it means what it says, because the verbal structure is paralleled with something else. It is the poet’s task to articulate the associative structure with which all thinking begins, to use words in their original “ambiguous” sense and not in a particularly defined sense. Poetic thinking is thus not intentional but constructive; it contains meaning, but that meaning is in what the words say as a construct. In Shakespeare certain words, such as “nature” or “fortune,” are repeated with such emphasis that we realize that the meaning of the word is part of the meaning of the play in which it is emphasized. We have also the stock device of a speech turning on the multiple meanings of a word, like Faulconbridge on “commodity”6 or Ulysses on “degree” and “time.”7 If we did not know English, we should have to look such words up in a dictionary. Since we do know English, we look them up in a kind of imaginary historical dictionary, to see what they would have meant to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. This gives us a meaning which in itself is only commonplace, just as the meaning of such a phrase as “Shut up your doors” [King Lear, 2.4.304, 308] or “He has no children” [Macbeth, 4.3.216] is commonplace when removed from its context. If we try to understand, say, “Shakespeare’s conception of nature” as a set of conventional assumptions shared by all his contemporaries, we shall discover, as others have discovered, that Shakespeare was a shallow and obvious philosopher.8 If we pay more attention to the difference between poetic

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and other kinds of thought, and deal with such a word only in its specific dramatic contexts, our other and better feeling that Shakespeare’s plays take us into the very centre of human wisdom will be justified. Here we shall attempt a procedure halfway between the general history of the idea and specific commentary. Nature, as we ordinarily use the term, means the order of physical existence which forms our environment, the objective or external aspect of our own lives, the world of animals and plants and minerals, surrounded with the sea and the sky. Nature means this in Shakespeare too, of course, but always with its imaginative and poetic overtones. The most important imaginative impact that physical nature has on us is a sense of alienation. There is nothing in it that seems intelligent, moral, or specifically responsive to human needs. Man imposes his own way of life on nature, and transforms it into something with a human shape. There are in consequence two levels of nature: an upper level of human nature and a lower level of physical nature. We are born into the latter world, but do not really belong to it. It is natural to man to be moral, civilized, and socially disciplined; it is unnatural to him to live like the animals. Man’s present relation to nature can hardly be expressed except by paradox. Certain human qualities, such as the chastity of Miranda or Marina, are natural, on the human level of nature; the innocence with which animals copulate is natural to them but impossible for human beings. This takes us into the explanation of the two levels of nature given by Christianity, which formed part of a conventional framework of imagery familiar to Shakespeare and to his audience. The nature God had originally planned for man was that of the golden age or the garden of Eden: this was lost at the fall, but in some measure is recreated by the disciplines of civilization, morality, religion, and the arts. Man is subject to death, and on the physical level of nature there can be no more natural event than death. Yet death was not a part of the order originally planned for man, and in that context death is unnatural, sin even more so. The circling of the immortal heavenly bodies in the sky is the most eloquent symbol of the order and harmony of the nature that was originally intended for man. The traditional music of the spheres symbolized a harmony that is recreated by human music. Music in Shakespeare has its traditional Platonic meaning of the musical arts, which include poetry (as distinct from the technical arts of painting and architecture), and it also has regularly attached to it the pun on the word “harmony” which makes it a symbol of the original order of nature established for man be-

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fore the fall. Shakespeare consistently uses music to represent the order and balance that ought to exist in both individual and social forms of human life. Music is indispensable in restoring sanity to the insane, health to the sick, even life itself to those who, like Thaisa, have temporarily lost it [Pericles, 3.2.88–106]. We recall the famous passage in the fifth act of The Merchant of Venice [5.1.54–88] where music is associated with the harmony of the disciplined soul; and the figure of Orpheus, symbolizing the hidden sympathy between man and nature evoked by music and poetry, haunts this and many similar passages in Shakespeare.9 As, in Burke’s phrase, art is man’s nature,10 the worlds of art and nature are identical on the human level, a fact which helps to account for the vitality of the pastoral convention, the pretence that the simple natural life of the shepherd goes hand in hand with proficiency in music and poetry. The setting of the pastoral is usually designed to suggest the garden of Eden or the golden age. In ordinary life the fact that man essentially belongs to a world with a human shape is symbolized by the garden, the cultivated form of nature. When cultivated, the garden belongs to the human level of nature; when left uncultivated, it relapses to the ordinary physical level. The garden is used as an image of human society with particular emphasis in Richard II. The Queen addresses the gardener as “old Adam’s likeness” [3.4.73], and talks of Eve and the serpent, but this garden is not Eden: it is the ground that Adam had to till after the fall, and the Queen’s attempt to curse it is useless because what is called in King Lear the general curse of nature [4.6.206] is already there. Hamlet speaks of his time as an unweeded garden possessed by “things rank and gross in nature” [1.2.135–6], but this is the nature of the physical world. When Burgundy in Henry V says that the vineyards of France “Defective in their natures, grow to wildness” [5.2.55], he is referring to the upper or human level of nature. The natural state of man, then, is a civilized and ordered state, and the king in particular is the symbol of this order. The better a king he is, the less he is a symbol and the more he is an incarnation of it. “Nature’s above art in that respect,” says Lear [4.6.86], meaning apparently that kings, like poets, are born and not made. Macbeth’s murder of Duncan is a breach in the order of nature, which lets in a destructive force, represented by the tempest-raising witches, and by the prodigies and portents of the murder itself, with which Macbeth allies himself, to his own inevitable destruction. But no king can actually restore mankind to the golden age; all around human society is still the lower or physical order

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of nature. This order moves in circles, imitating the stars in their courses, but its cyclical movement is an amoral force, and it operates by necessity rather than by intelligence and freedom. It produces not only the cycles of seasons and of days, but also, in human life, the cycle of prosperity and decline that is called the wheel of fortune. In Shakespeare’s plays, the histories move almost entirely within the lower cycle or wheel of fortune. The highest point of history is represented by the weeded garden in Richard II and by the conquest of “the world’s best garden” in Henry V [Epilogue, l. 7]. Its lowest point is usually marked by an executed traitor or by a disgraced scapegoat figure like Fastolfe, Falstaff, Pistol, or Exton.11 Tragedy differs from history in suggesting, more clearly than the histories usually do, some original breaking away from a higher level of nature. In Antony and Cleopatra, for example, there is no question of legitimacy or of a sacred anointed king to keep us reminded of the higher kind of order, and the ultimate triumph of Octavius is built into the wheel of fortune, which in a pagan setting is also a wheel of fate. But even there the music of Hercules accompanies the passing of Antony’s power, just as the music of Orpheus accompanies the downfall of Queen Catherine in Henry VIII [3.1.1–14]. Tragedy also moves down with the descending part of the lower natural cycle, into the darkness of Macbeth or the chaos of the storm in King Lear. Comedy moves upward with the ascending cycle, but suggests, in a way that history cannot do, a reintegration with the higher level of nature. In the histories we notice the working of a principle that we might call Proust’s law. The only paradises are the paradises we have lost, and every period of history seems to create a pastoral myth out of something in a previous age. The Henry VI plays naturally keep looking back to the days of Agincourt; but in the reigns of Henry IV and V too there are plots against the king that look back to the days of Richard as a kind of original social contract, all disasters being blamed on Bolingbroke’s violation of this contract. We look back to the days of Richard, and find John of Gaunt taking the same view of the age of Edward III. In Richard II itself our sympathies are very evenly divided, because of the conception of nature involved. Richard, as king de jure, is the natural head of the state; because he does not do what is required of him in that state, society’s natural need for order throws up another natural force in the form of Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke is neither a wicked usurper like Macbeth nor a righteous avenger like Hamlet, but, like Oliver Cromwell in Marvell’s poem,12 a natural force that under certain conditions inevitably makes its

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appearance. His de facto authority, because of society’s need of order, becomes de jure as well, a fact borne witness to by York’s dramatic transfer of loyalties to him. Still, the transfer of power from Richard to Bolingbroke does illustrate a breaking of the connection between human society and the cosmic order, and consequently the deposing of Richard creates a pastoral myth. As soon as Richard becomes impotent, all the magic of music and poetry becomes attached to him, aided by the fact that Richard is a poet himself. Once Henry IV is firmly established as king, he begins to bear the obloquy of responsibility, but neither his effort to dissociate himself from Richard’s murder nor his dream of going on a crusade can give his crown the glamour that, in history, only a lost cause can have. Hotspur, with his tremendous energy and egoism, is very well adjusted to nature as an amoral force, the aspect of nature that has been intensified by Henry’s accession. His contempt for poetry and music, however, indicates that his instincts are for rebellion and anarchy rather than for order. His much less likeable conqueror, Prince Henry, succeeds his father legitimately, and so behaves like a de jure monarch, even to the extent of describing the plot of Scroop and Grey against him as “Another fall of man,” echoing a phrase used by Queen Isabel in the garden scene in Richard II.13 Despite the deep egoism that this phrase suggests, Henry understands the conditions of royalty very well. When his father dies and he is faced with two opposed symbolic father-figures, the Chief Justice and Falstaff, he chooses the right one and rejects the wrong one. His meditations about his father and Richard just before Agincourt betray some uncertainty about his claim to the English throne (to say nothing of the French one, though France hardly counts in the argument), and perhaps some in the audience might have remembered the poignant scene of the death of Mortimer in 1 Henry VI. Still, it is unnecessary for Henry V to placate his God by building any more chantries for Richard, because he is ascending the wheel of fortune, which does not start turning downward until after his death. Only one phrase, in his speech before Harfleur, “Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage” [3.1.8], shows any awareness on Henry’s part that the level of nature he represents is not the highest possible to man. This glimpse of a better aspect of nature recurs in Burgundy’s great speech on the desolation of France already referred to, again in a context which indicates its remoteness. In the world of present action, as Shakespeare presents it in the histories, there is a mixture of two things that are separable when we think of them

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as past. One is the vision of nature in its original human sense, the cosmic order forfeited by the fall, an event recalled by every act of treachery or usurpation committed since. The other is nothingness, the abyss of annihilation and nonbeing into which everything, so far as we can see, disappears. Thus the revolving wheel of nature and fortune which is the organizing principle of the histories contains a latent dialectic expressed by the words “nature,” in its upper-level sense, and “nothing.” These two words are so prominent in King Lear that we may turn to that play to see how tragedy, when emancipated from a historical context and moving in the more autonomous world of myth and folk tale, deals with this dialectic. The abdication scene establishes for us a descent into the lower order of physical nature, a descent symbolized by the act of dividing the kingdom, which in itself would have led to tragedy even if Cordelia had played the role expected of her. Immediately after the abdication we hear Edmund swearing fealty to nature [1.2.1–2], and we realize that this means nature as an amoral force, the nature symbolized by Edmund’s position as Gloucester’s “natural” son. Edmund’s contempt for astrology is an essential part of his conception of nature as earthbound and as having no attachment to any cosmic order. Edmund, however, has no principle of order within himself, and hence the force he incarnates is, like Macbeth’s, purely destructive and self-destructive. The world he helps to bring into being is a world headed towards “nothing.” Lear, like Richard, soon discovers that, as man is essentially social, any man’s social context is essential to him; hence a king depriving himself of his kingship has given “all,” and is left with “nothing.”14 It is impossible for a king to represent only the ideal of kingship, to live with “The name and all th’ addition to a king,” as Lear proposes to do [1.1.136]. Similarly Richard, faced with the logic of Bolingbroke’s revolution, which also began by proposing to leave him with the royal title, says, Make me, that nothing have, with nothing grieved, And thou with all pleased, that hast all achieved! [4.1.216–17]

But in the lower order of nature there are some remnants of the original order. These are chiefly the society-forming instincts, the emotions of love and loyalty. The traditional symbol of a vestigial state of innocence in ordinary life is the child, for whom love and loyalty are essentials. The representative of this simple and instinctive side of nature in King Lear is another “natural,” the Fool. The Fool, like the child, has a certain

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licence to see and comment on the simple truth of the situation in front of him, just as Cordelia, Lear’s one real child, had done earlier, without the licence. The characters in King Lear line up on one side or the other of these opposed conceptions of the “natural.” The Fool does all he can do, and that is a good deal, to keep Lear anchored on his side, and aware of his community with the “poor naked wretches” [3.4.28] who are also abused when order turns to tyranny. Edgar, of course, is to Edmund what the Fool and Cordelia are to Goneril and Regan. His function in regard to his father is expressed in the phrase “Ripeness is all” [5.2.11]: he preserves Gloucester through a purgatorial period of attempted suicide until he reaches what is, considering his circumstances, a “natural” death in a state of serenity, even of joy. On the occasions when he speaks in his own person, Edgar assumes a sententious “chorus-character” style not unlike that of a more fully conscious and intelligent Fool. One line in particular, from his last speech (if it is his; the Quartos give it to Albany),15 indicates the parallel: “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” [5.3.325]. Edgar’s relation to Lear is more complex, but extremely important for understanding the conception of nature in the play. Tom o’ Bedlam, who eats live frogs and drinks of the frog pond, is in the context of tragedy what Caliban is in comedy and Swift’s Yahoo in satire: the naked kernel of the natural man, man shut out from society and therefore from the distinctively human side of his nature.16 “Thou art the thing itself,” says Lear [3.4.106], contemplating this disconcerting response to his prayer to the poor naked wretches. On the other side of poor Tom are the abysses of nothingness haunted by the foul fiends who possess Tom as they possess Caliban. The vision of Tom o’ Bedlam thus represents the bottom of Lear’s descent into nature, a perilous path to walk on as he enters the valley of the shadow. In comedy there is a tension between the natural and the social: in a comedy of manners, where there is a strong element of satire, society is presented as unnatural, as grotesque or ridiculous or hypocritical. The audience itself is assumed to be a natural society, possessed of an integrity and common sense that most of the characters in the play lack. A purely ironic comedy, like most of Chekhov’s, preserves this tension of audience and theatrical society to the end. Shakespeare never attempted this kind of comedy (Troilus and Cressida does something quite different), which with its pervading sense of society as a spectacle, held up to be gazed at, seems to belong more naturally to the proscenium theatre.

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Shakespeare remains faithful to the normal conclusion of comedy, where the characters who most closely represent the audience’s attitude, usually the hero and the heroine, triumph over the unnatural society of the play, and bring as much as possible of that society into reconciliation with them. In The Taming of the Shrew Katharina’s obedience is more natural than her shrewishness, not because of any moral difference between them, but because, as obedient wife, she is less obviously easy to regard as ridiculous, and is less of an obstacle to the festive conclusion. What then becomes of her shrewishness? Theoretically at least, it has disappeared: she is changed, her father says, as she had never been [5.2.115]. Thus the action of comedy begins in a world of illusion and moves toward a separation of the natural, or at least the more natural, from the nonexistent. The more romantic the comedy, the more closely the natural society reached at the end approximates the upper level of nature. This last point indicates a complicating factor in comedy. The lower order of nature, the physical world we live in and the human society adapted to it, is simply there, the reality principle.17 But no matter how fully we may realize our own human natures by social discipline, there will always be a still higher order of nature which is not there, but which is desirable. As comedy normally moves toward the desirable, its action includes a good deal of what is not merely unlikely but, in terms of the nature we live in, unnatural. In the daylight world of the histories, Owen Glendower’s interest in magic looks merely like a neurotic obsession [1 Henry IV, 3.1.13–61]. But comedy, which deals with what we want, has much to do with the world of dreams and hopes and wishes, and hence in the comedies magic may have a functional role, as have fairies, identical twins, substituted brides, and lost-and-found princesses. In real life it is seldom that things turn out “right,” yet our use of the word “right” indicates that the unlikely, when desirable, has its nature too. Comedy, then, usually begins with a social situation which, however “really there” it may be, is presented as undesirable, absurd, or ridiculous, and hence as having something in it which is unnatural. A harsh father forbids his daughter to marry the obviously right man, or someone with authority plunges himself into some obsession, like Leontes, with potentially disastrous results. The action moves toward a “happy ending” or festive conclusion which is more desirable and more in accordance with what the audience sees to be common sense. There is an interchange of reality and illusion: what is presented as real at the outset disappears; what was at the beginning only a hope or wish realizes itself.

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The conception of nature that we have dealt with thus far helps us to see this action as a movement from a lower to a higher level of nature, or from an artificial society (in the modern sense of artificial) to a natural society. This natural society, of course, is far removed from the eighteenthcentury conceptions of that phrase that we may be more familiar with. And perhaps we can revise a sentence two paragraphs back to read: the more romantic the comedy, the more closely the natural society reached at the end approximates the regained golden age or lost paradise of man. We saw from the example of the Fool in King Lear that there is a kind of “natural” behaviour which is somewhat like the kind idealized in the eighteenth century: primitive, simple, unspoiled, and instinctively loyal and affectionate. The Fool suggests two other character types, the child and the professional clown. Children are not much featured in Shakespeare, except as amateur clowns like Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Robin in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The child is associated with innocence, and innocence in an adult world would be a form of “natural” behaviour which is instinctively obedient to the higher nature of man, however much at odds with the lower nature around it. A very clear example is the chastity of Marina in the brothels of Mytilene.18 Female chastity is in fact Shakespeare’s usual image of innocence, just as the traditional child’s innocence has much to do with sexual inexperience. The affinity between chastity and the harmony of unfallen nature, so much dwelt on in Milton’s Comus,19 is already present in the Shakespeare romances. Most of the lesser fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream have a childlike quality about them, as do, more obviously, the disguised fairies in The Merry Wives. The Robin of this play, just referred to, is called “Jacka-Lent”20 and has the same name as the boy-fairy Puck. Fairies are also devoted to chastity, as Falstaff discovers to his cost. Fairies are elemental spirits, and elemental spirits are in the physical world what children, regarded as symbols of innocence, are in the ordinary human world: remnants of an original “true consent,” as Milton calls it,21 with the cosmic order. The control of elemental spirits, or magic, is thus an essential part of the music and poetry that are attributes of the higher nature of man. In most of Shakespeare’s comedies the action is presented as a collision of two societies. One is an obstructive or anticomic society, often equipped with some kind of harsh law that threatens the happiness or even the life of the main characters. Shylock, Duke Frederick, Theseus,

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Solinus, Angelo, all invoke or administer the laws of such societies.22 Sometimes it is represented simply by an unsympathetic father or by some quirk of perverseness or melancholy in one of the central characters (Proteus, Bertram, Ferdinand of Navarre, and, of course, Katharina).23 As the action of comedy moves toward the fulfilment of love, this anticomic society is nearly always concerned to roughen the course of true love. The other society, which brings about the festive conclusion, is a natural society in the paradoxical sense that we have been studying. That is, it is associated with music, magic, chastity, fairies, dreams, and improbable but fortunate events. In some of the comedies this natural society is located in a forest or similar pastoral setting: the three forest comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, show the shape of the action very clearly. We begin with a society based on some kind of obstacle to the happiness of the young lovers, and thence move into a forest where the comic resolution is achieved. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in As You Like It to a lesser extent, the forest is a world of magic, and in The Two Gentlemen of Verona it is a world of Robin Hood– like adventurers who give more the impression of being released from social inhibitions than of being actual criminals. We notice that in all three plays the society of the forest world is at least equal in rank to that of the anticomic one. The robbers in The Two Gentlemen are all exiled noblemen; at the centre of the forest of Arden is the senior Duke; the fairies have their own king and queen. The effect of this equality is to carry through the comic resolution without disturbing the social ranks of the original anticomic society. In Love’s Labour’s Lost the roles of the two societies are reversed: the pastoral retreat of the four nobles is the anticomic society. This is connected with the fact that this play does not reach the normal comic resolution. In the three forest comedies the forest society begins in a state of antagonism to the anticomic one, being outlawed, exiled, or beyond the reach of the “sharp Athenian law” [A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.162]. At the end of the play it has taken over its rival and informed it with its own comic spirit, just as outlawed impulses in the mind do in a wishfulfilment dream. In other plays it is simply the union of two separated and equal societies, one of them exiled or outcast at the beginning, that brings about the comic ending. Ephesus in A Comedy of Errors has passed a law killing all Syracusans, but of course it is the arrival of the complementary Syracusan twins that saves Aegeon and winds up the play. In

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Twelfth Night the two separated societies are those of Orsino and Olivia, united by the twins from the sea, where the Comedy of Errors theme of perilous landing reappears briefly in the story of Antonio. In other comedies the procomic or natural society is associated with some kind of curative or healing power which is applied to the anticomic one. Petruchio, whose rough magic charms Katharina into adjusting to marriage, has something of a “doctor” role—not the dottore of the commedia dell’arte but the doctor of those plays of Molière in which the right man is the only cure needed for an allegedly sick heroine.24 The fairy forest appears briefly in the conclusion of The Merry Wives in a curative role, expelling the lust of Falstaff and the avarice of Page. In a much more serious comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena’s power of curing the King of France makes her the focus of the natural society. Since Helena is inferior in social rank to Bertram, this play seems an exception to the rule that the two societies are always equal in rank, but the exception is only in Bertram’s mind, as the King of France makes clear. In The Merchant of Venice the natural society of Portia’s house in Belmont faces the Venice of Shylock with its very different conception of the value of gold. In this house, as in the forest of Oberon, magic, music, and the harmony of the spheres form part of the triumph of love and friendship. In Measure for Measure the anticomic society is centred on Angelo, and the disguised Duke is the complementary focus. Around him gather the victims of Angelo’s anticomic legalism, and with these victims the Duke returns at the end in the regular reversal of fortune. In this play, as in All’s Well, the two societies are in the same place, not in two different ones, so that the contrast between them is expressed by the spirit and attitude of what is said rather than by the conventional imagery of magic or forest or fairy. All through the comedies we can see the spirit of the natural or procomic society catching, like fire in kindling, on certain spots. One of these spots is the clown or fool, whose licensed speech is essential to the spirit of comedy. Another is the song, often associated with the clown, which with its music helps to focus and intensify the comic mood. In Shakespearean comedy, where the unmusical is so closely associated with the villainous or the absurd, it is hardly possible to imagine what an anticomic song would be like: in any case there are none. The great aubade in Cymbeline is sung to Imogen at the behest of Cloten after she has unconsciously spent a night with Iachimo, but Cloten’s indifference to its beauty and the fact that it is doing his suit no good are both obvious. A

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song may be sung in an ironic or melancholy context, like the spring and winter songs at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, with its postponed happy ending, or “Who is Sylvia?” sung by the fickle Proteus to the wrong girl while the right one is listening,25 but the emotional effect of the song is always to throw us forward to the comic conclusion. The progress of the comic action is not a simple one, but follows the dialectical pattern already mentioned. As the action moves from a lower to a higher level of the natural, the latter pulls away from a world which, left to itself, becomes amorphous. We may call this, the world of “nothing” left behind, a sense of lost identity. As the comic resolution is taking shape, we pass through a phase marked by impenetrable disguises, confusions, misunderstandings, and menaces. There is a pervading theme, even in quite lighthearted comedies, of madness or death, or both. The theme of death hangs over not only the sombre Measure for Measure, but The Merchant of Venice and A Comedy of Errors as well, and the accusation of madness is prominently featured in Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.26 In the four romances with which Shakespeare’s work concludes, the separation of higher nature from nothing is at its clearest. In Pericles the two worlds, as noted by Wilson Knight, are symbolized by music and tempest.27 A world presided over by the providence of Diana, and associated with music, the chastity of Marina, and the magical healing powers of Cerimon, separates from the unreality of shipwreck and incest and treachery and venereal disease. In Cymbeline the growing point of the natural society is the cave of Belarius, again associated with magic, music, and the preservative potion given Imogen by Pisanio, in place of the death demanded by both the Queen and Posthumus. When the society of this cave emerges, the opposed society dominated by the Queen and Cloten dissolves. In The Winter’s Tale the focus of the natural society is the pastoral world of Bohemia, with another focus in Paulina’s house, where Hermione’s life has been preserved. The union of Perdita and Hermione, like the union of Marina and Thaisa in Pericles, separates the comic society from the mirage of Leontes’ jealousy. Leontes, Camillo says prophetically, o’er and o’er divides him ’Twixt his unkindness and his kindness; th’ one He chides to hell and bids the other grow Faster than thought or time. [4.4.551–4]

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The last phrase indicates that the world of higher nature which romance approaches is also a world not of time but of the fulfilment of time, the kind of fulfilment traditionally symbolized by the perpetual spring of paradise. In The Tempest the world of shipwreck and treachery has largely spent its force before the action of the play begins, Prospero and Miranda having been preserved in being by Gonzalo many years before. The entire action thus takes place within the natural society, which is controlled by Prospero’s magic, and has the usual associations of music and chastity. Here Caliban represents what Tom o’ Bedlam represented in tragedy, the fiend-haunted natural man whom Prospero is trying to raise to a better level of nature. The dialectical action comes to its climax in the masque of elemental spirits presented to Ferdinand and Miranda. The theme of the masque is the marriage of the lovers, and the imagery is that of a paradisal perpetual spring.28 No other scene in Shakespeare displays such a concentration of images of a “golden world,” to use a phrase from As You Like It [1.1.118–19]. But then Prospero speaks, the spell is broken, and the scene vanishes. There follows Prospero’s great speech over the vanishing of everything in time [Tempest, 4.1.148–58], which seems both a curious anticlimax to the wedding masque and somewhat overresonant as a sequel to its delicate fantasy. In the context of our present argument we can see it as the point in Shakespearean comedy where the separation of nature and nothing is at its clearest. But there is another aspect to the scene which brings the speech following the masque into focus. The masque is a work of music and drama, summoned up by Prospero to enact his present fancies. The speech, like the very different time-speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, presents us with the total annihilation of everything in time which is the first fact of ordinary life. Thus the dialectic of nature and nothing in Shakespeare turns out to be also the dialectic of art and life, art being identical with nature on its higher level, and guaranteeing, more clearly than any myth of a lost paradise, a reality in our lives that is clear of the dissolving chaos of experience. In this scene the interchange of reality and illusion has completed itself. We go out of the theatre into “real life” again, which we know now to be also an illusion because of a reality that we have glimpsed for an instant in the illusion of the play.

16 Fools of Time 15–17 March 1966

Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967); paperback reprint 1973, for which Frye found no errors needing correction (letter in NFF, 1988, box 62, file 4). Originally delivered as the Alexander Lectures, University of Toronto, 15–17 March 1966, to an audience so large that it had to be relocated from Hart House, as scheduled, to Convocation Hall, which it filled to two-thirds capacity.1 Chapter 1 partially reprinted as “A Tragedy of Order” in Yulius Kaissar, Theatre Program of the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv, 1977; chapter 2 partially reprinted in TwentiethCentury Interpretations of “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 114–25; chapter 3 partially reprinted as “King Lear: The Tragedy of Isolation,” in Shakespeare: “King Lear”: A Casebook, ed. Frank Kermode (Nashville, Tenn.: Aurora, 1970), 265–9. Translated into French as Les Fous des temps: Sur les tragédies de Shakespeare, trans. Jean Mouchard (Paris: Éditions Belin, 2001). The notes Frye made for the Alexander Lectures have been published in NRL, 248–85, 288–96. The typescript of the book is in NFF, 1988, box 22, file 2.

Preface and Dedication What follows is the original written version of the Alexander Lectures, delivered at Convocation Hall, University of Toronto, on March 15, 16, and 17, 1966. The oral version, considerably shorter and more concise, had its advantages, but for publication I felt that the longer form, with its greater number of examples and expanding passages, was preferable. This is the fifth series of lectures I have published, and two more series are in course of publication.2 But for all the experience I have had with it,

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I still find the public lecture a fantastically difficult genre, and nowhere more so than in a field so thoroughly worked over as Shakespearean tragedy. I can only hope that the constant effort to make the familiar statement into a fresh insight has here and there been successful. I am greatly indebted to the Canada Council for a Fellowship that helped me to work on this and other projects. The following preface was read at the beginning of the first lecture: The invitation to deliver the Alexander Lectures came to me in England,3 when I had already contracted for two other series.4 Yet I accepted very promptly, and for two reasons. In the first place, I was deeply touched by the great and most unusual honour of being asked to contribute to this famous series on my own campus. In the second place, the invitation came at almost the same moment as the news of the death of Professor A.S.P. Woodhouse.5 If it is not too pretentious to do so, I should like to dedicate these lectures to Professor Woodhouse’s memory. Although I met him once or twice, I never really knew Professor Alexander,6 who retired from teaching in the year that I entered high school, but I did know of Professor Woodhouse’s admiration for him, and it is mainly through Professor Woodhouse that I can attach myself personally to the teacher commemorated in this series.

I have only to add that the occasion of giving the lectures at the invitation of University College was made both pleasant and memorable by the kindness and hospitality of Professor Clifford Leech and Principal Douglas LePan of that College, and President Claude Bissell. The fact that all three are old friends did not diminish the sense of gracious welcome.

I My Father as He Slept: The Tragedy of Order The basis of the tragic vision is being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation. In the tragic vision death is, not an incident in life, not even the inevitable end of life, but the essential event that gives shape and form to life. Death is what defines the individual, and marks him off from the continuity of life that flows indefinitely between the past and the

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future. It gives to the individual life a parabola shape, rising from birth to maturity and sinking again, and this parabola movement of rise and fall is also the typical shape of tragedy. The mood of tragedy preserves our ambiguous and paradoxical feeling about death; it is inevitable and always happens, and yet, when it does happen, it carries with it some sense of the unnatural and premature. The naiveté of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, astonished by the fact that he should die when he has been wading through other men’s blood for years, is an example, and even Shakespeare’s Caesar, so thoroughly disciplined in his views of death in general, still finds his actual death a surprise.7 Being in time is not the whole of the tragic vision: it is, in itself, the ironic vision. Because it is the basis of the tragic vision, the ironic and the tragic are often confused or identified. The nineteenth-century pessimism which produced the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the novels of Thomas Hardy seems to me ironic rather than tragic. So does the philosophy and literature of existentialism, which I think of, for reasons that may become clearer later on, as post-tragic. But tragedy, no less than irony, is existential: the conceptions that existential thinkers have tried to struggle with, care, dread, nausea, absurdity, authenticity, and the like, are all relevant to the theory of tragedy.8 Tragedy is also existential in a broader, and perhaps contradictory, sense, in that the experience of the tragic cannot be moralized or contained within any conceptual world view.9 A tragic hero is a tragic hero whether he is a good or a bad man; a tragic action is a tragic action whether it seems to us admirable or villainous, inevitable or arbitrary. And while a religious or philosophical system that answers all questions and solves all problems may find a place for tragedy, and so make it a part of a larger and less tragic whole, it can never absorb the kind of experience that tragedy represents. That remains outside of all approaches to being through thought rather than existence. The remark of the dying Hotspur, “Thought’s the slave of life,”10 comes out of the heart of the tragic vision. Tragedy revolves around the primary contract of man and nature, the contract fulfilled by man’s death, death being, as we say, the debt he owes to nature. What makes tragedy tragic, and not simply ironic, is the presence in it of a counter-movement of being that we call the heroic, a capacity for action or passion, for doing or suffering, which is above ordinary human experience. This heroic energy, glorified by itself as something invincible which bursts the boundaries of normal experience, is the basis of romance. In tragedy the heroic is within the human context,

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and so is still limited and finite, formed and shaped by death. In Greek tragedy especially, we can see how death is both the punishment of the aggressor and the reward of his victim. This makes tragic sense, if not moral sense. But because the heroic is above the normal limits of experience, it also suggests something infinite imprisoned in the finite. This something infinite may be morally either good or bad, for the worst of men may still be a hero if he is big enough to anger or frighten the gods. Man may be infinite if he is infinite only in his evil desires. The hero is an individual, but being so great an individual he seems constantly on the point of being swept into titanic forces he cannot control. The fact that an infinite energy is driving towards death in tragedy means that the impetus of tragedy is sacrificial. Sacrifice expresses the principle that in human life the infinite takes the same direction as the finite. Tragedy, then, shows us the impact of heroic energy on the human situation. The heroic is normally destroyed in the conflict, and the human situation goes on surviving. “A living dog is better than a dead lion,” says the Preacher [Ecclesiastes 9:4]: whether better or not, the dialectic of tragedy works through to a situation in which the heroic is normally dead and the less heroic is all that can remain alive. Octavius and Aufidius may be shrewder and more prudent men than Mark Antony or Coriolanus, but they are smaller men. Tragedy often ends with the survivors forming, or about to form, a secondary or social contract, a relation among more ordinary men which will achieve enough working justice or equity to minimize further tragedy. In the worlds of Fortinbras and Malcolm fewer ghosts will walk; after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet there will be less lethal feuding in Verona. Sometimes the social contract that forms at the end of a tragedy is of great depth and significance, as it is in the Oresteia; sometimes, in Greek tragedy, it exists only in the final comments of the chorus; sometimes, as often in Shakespeare, it is merely an exhausted and demoralized huddle. Whatever it is, it usually expresses some limiting or falling away of perspective after the great heroic voices have been silenced. This comes out clearly in the last two lines of King Lear: The oldest hath borne most: we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. [5.3.326–7]

The basis of irony is the independence of the way things are from the way we want them to be; in tragedy a heroic effort against this indepen-

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dence is made and fails; we then come to terms with irony by reducing our wants. In tragedy the ironic vision survives the heroic one, but the heroic vision is the one we remember, and the tragedy is for its sake. The more ironic the tragedy, the fewer the central characters who die. In Troilus and Cressida, though the setting is a battlefield where men die like flies every day, none of the central characters dies except the greatest of all, Hector; in Timon of Athens nobody dies except the only noble character, Timon. Our first tentative conclusion about the feelings roused in us by the tragic experience, therefore, is something like this: the heroic and the infinite have been; the human and finite are. In Greek tragedy, the gods have the function of enforcing what we have called the primary contract of man and nature. The gods are to human society what the warrior aristocracy is to the workers within human society itself. Like aristocrats, they act toward their inferiors with a kind of rough justice, but they are by no means infallible, and we often glimpse their underlying panic about the danger that men will become too powerful. Man has certain duties toward the gods, and he expects, without having the right to claim, certain benefits in return. But as long as the gods are there, man is limited in his scope, ambitions, and powers. Men in Greek tragedy are brotoi, “dying ones,” a word with a concrete force in it that our word “mortals” hardly conveys. Such a view is by no means original with the Greeks: much earlier, for example, the Gilgamesh epic in Mesopotamia had portrayed the gods in a similar aristocratic role. There, the gods found that they could not continue to live without having to work: this being beneath their dignity, they created men to do the work for them. The epic then goes on to describe how man attempts and fails to achieve immortality. It is a very ironic story, but if we compare it with the Iliad we feel that the heroic, or distinctively tragic, component is missing. The intense interest that the gods in the Iliad take in the conflict going on below them is their response to the infinite quality in human heroism. They watch it, not with a detached ironic amusement, but with a tragic sense of engagement. For one thing, some of the heroes are their own progeny. The only moral check on their desire to seduce human women is the slave-owner’s check, the fact that all children born of such a union will be lost in the lower society. We are occasionally reminded in the Iliad that the Olympian gods, no less than the Christian God, are losing their own sons in the human struggle, and, unlike the Christian God, they are compelled to leave their sons’ souls in Hades.

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As for the heroes themselves, their life sustains a continuous illusion. Nothing that is done in a heroic conflict has anything except death for its form, and the klea andron that Homer celebrates [Iliad, bk. 9, l. 189], the brave deeds of men,11 consist only in spilling and destroying life. In Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus in the Iliad [bk. 12, ll. 310–28] there is one terrible instant of awareness in which Sarpedon says that if he could think of himself as ageless and immortal, like the gods, he would walk out of the battle at once.12 But, being a man, his life is death, and there is nowhere in life that is not a battlefield. Unlike his counterpart Arjuna in the Bhagavadgita, he can hope for no further illumination on that battlefield.13 The Greek heroes belong to a leisure class remote from our ordinary preoccupations; this gives them more time, not for enjoying life, but for doing what the unheroic cannot do: looking steadily and constantly into the abyss of death and nothingness. The Greek gods respect this, just as the Christian God respects the corresponding contemplative attitude, the contemptus mundi, on the part of the saint. There are two kinds of death in Greek tragedy: ordinary death, which happens to everybody, and heroic death, which may be directly caused by the gods out of fear or anger, or, if not, has at any rate some peculiar significance, a marking out of a victim. Death may thus be seen as caused by the impersonal force of fate or by the will of the gods. Sometimes, as in the fall of Oedipus, an oracle or prophecy is being fulfilled, and this combines the two themes of divine will and natural event. Gods and fate both represent an order or balance in the scheme of things, the way things are. If this order is disturbed by human pride, boastfulness, or insatiable ambition, a personal divine force reacts to it, after which the pattern of ordinary fate reappears in human life. This reappearance is called nemesis. Death in itself is a natural event; a death brought about by the gods forcibly assimilates human life to nature. Thus the gods, however harsh in their wrath or jealousy, manifest by their actions a social and moral force in human life itself, the principle of stability, or living in the face of death, which in the soul is called temperance (sophrosyne) and in society justice. The individual gods, like individual men, may be partial and passionate: Greek poets and philosophers, like their successors, could never quite solve the problem of how a being can be an individual and yet not ultimately finite. But even in Homer we can see how conflicts among the gods are contained within a single divine order, the will of Zeus. This single divine order corresponds to the order of temperance or stability

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among the conflicting impulses of the human mind. The Hippolytus of Euripides is a chaste and virtuous youth: in other words he is a worshipper of Artemis. He is eventually justified by his faith in Artemis, but he is so aggressively chaste and virtuous that he provokes the anger of Aphrodite and comes to grief. In relation to the whole group of Olympian gods, his chastity is excessive and unbalanced. But temperance and stability do not provide a static order; they are an ordering of powers and forces. Pentheus in The Bacchae tries to keep a tight grip on himself when confronted with Dionysus, and is swept out of the way like a leaf in a hurricane.14 In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche describes the Greek sense of the limited and finite as the “Apollonian” side of Greek culture.15 This is the sense that comes out particularly in the exquisite Greek feeling for plastic form,16 and which, in the verbal arts, ranges from the profoundest conceptions in Greek thought, Plato’s idea and Aristotle’s telos, to cautionary proverbs of the “nothing too much” type. The sense of infinite heroic energy Nietzsche identifies with the “Dionysian,” where the individual is not defined and assigned a place in the scheme of things, but released by being dissolved into the drunken and frenzied group of worshippers.17 Nietzsche’s Apollonian–Dionysian distinction is one of those central insights into critical theory that critics must sooner or later come to terms with, though coming to terms with it means, first of all, deciding whether the particular historical projection given to the insight is the best one. I use it because I find it illuminating for Shakespeare: I am quite prepared to believe that it may be less so for the Greeks, where Nietzsche’s argument seems greatly weakened by what appears to me a preposterous view of Euripides. Nietzsche is on much sounder ground in saying that the spirit of tragedy was destroyed by a spirit he identifies with Socrates and associates with comedy and irony.18 Tragedy is existential: Socrates, with his conception of militant knowledge, begins an essentialist tradition in human thought. His disciple Plato is the greatest of all the essentialist philosophers, of those who have approached reality through thought rather than experience, and Plato’s literary affinities are clearly with the comic poets, not the tragic ones. We next meet tragedy in Seneca, whose tragedies are Greek subjects recollected in tranquillity. Or relative tranquillity: there are melodramatic qualities in Elizabethan drama that are popularly thought of as Senecan—ghosts screaming for revenge, an action full of horrors and with lots and lots of blood—but these are mainly generalizations from

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one Senecan play, Thyestes. In this play Atreus revenges himself on his brother by inviting him to dinner and serving him his children in a pie [act 5]—an incident which reappears in Titus Andronicus [5.3]—but even this is an authentic Greek theme. Seneca is, again, an essentialist philosopher, a Stoic, and for him the two contracts we have mentioned, the primary contract with gods and nature which is natural law, and the secondary social contract which is moral law, are identical. He tends to think of his characters as heroic in proportion to the extent to which they identify themselves with this law. They are heroic in endurance rather than in action, in their capacity to surmount suffering rather than in the power of their wills. Hence rhetoric, the ability to express an articulate awareness of what is happening, has a function in Seneca that is quite different from its function in the three great Greeks. In the Greek plays the action is presented by the characters and represented by the chorus: the chorus has a role of response to the action that, like the music in an opera, puts the audience’s emotion into focus. Seneca retains the chorus, but he has much less need for it: the rhetorical speeches take over most of the chorus’s real dramatic functions. Even action, in Seneca, is constantly dominated by consciousness. To know is a higher destiny than to experience, and by virtue of his consciousness man may rank himself with the gods, in fact may even outgrow them. In Euripides’ Heracles the hero’s feat of entering hell and carrying off Cerberus is a physical feat so astounding that the goddess Hera promptly sends madness upon him. Otherwise, man will become too big for his breeches. The important thing is not whether Heracles’ madness is internal or external in origin: the important thing is that his madness is the kind of thing that inevitably happens when the power of the gods is threatened. Seneca’s Juno is equally anxious to set limits to human power, but the madness is, to a much greater extent, a weakness in Hercules himself which she exploits. Seneca thinks of Hercules’ feat as a harrowing of hell, an allegory of the kind of power in man that may eventually deliver him from the power of the gods, unless, as Juno says, the gods can succeed in setting man to war with himself.19 The source of the conflict, to use Greek terms, is praxis in Euripides, a conflict in the dramatic action; it is theoria in Seneca, a conflict of mental attitudes. The early Elizabethan tragic dramatists, like Seneca, developed a highly rhetorical texture, and had even less need of a chorus. Again, gods are essential to the Greek conception of tragedy, but they are not really essential to Senecan tragedy. A later play in the Senecan tradi-

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tion, Octavia, which introduces the Emperor Nero and Seneca himself as characters, has a ghost, but no gods, and indicates that if Roman tragedy had survived it would have gone in the direction of historical rather than mythical themes, the direction from which the Elizabethans started. The Elizabethans had little place for the gods either, which they regarded as personifications of natural forces. This means that social and political situations have a much more important place in Elizabethan than in Greek tragedy. In Greek tragedy catastrophe is referred primarily to the gods: crimes are offences against them, which is why purely ritual themes, such as leaving a body unburied, are so prominent. Royal figures are certainly important, but their subordination to the gods is always emphasized. Elizabethan tragedy not only had no gods, but was also a secular form avoiding the explicit use of Christian conceptions of deity. In contrast to the miracle plays, it used relatively few subjects from the Bible; in contrast to the morality plays, especially Everyman, it gave the teachings of the church a minor role. The figure of the proud cardinal, whose crimson robes make him a natural dramatic focus, is a popular symbol of the subordination of church to state. For the Elizabethans, the royal figure or human ruler tended to become the mythical centre of the action, and the relations of the ruler and his people take the place of the relations of gods and men. The organizing conceptions of Elizabethan tragedy are the order of nature and the wheel of fortune. Nature as an order, though an order permeated with sin and death as a result of the fall of man, is the conception in Elizabethan drama corresponding to what we have called the ironic vision or being in time—Nietzsche’s “Apollonian” vision. Fortune as a wheel rotated by the energy and ambition of man, which, however gigantic, can never get above a certain point, and consequently has to sink again, is the “Dionysian” or heroic vision which complements it.20 The order of nature provides the data of the human situation, the conditions man accepts by getting born. The wheel of fortune supplies the facta, what he contributes by his own energy and will. But nature and fortune are not an antithesis: they interpenetrate in a very complex way. In the first place, there are two levels of nature. Man lives in a lower nature, the physical world or world of the four elements which moves in cycles. This is particularly the Dionysian world of energy, and it is, for practical purposes, identical with the wheel of fortune. A state of aggressiveness, or what we now call the law of the jungle, is “natural” to man, but natural only on this lower level of nature. Above

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this world is a world of specifically human nature, the world represented by the Christian paradise and the Classical golden age, and symbolized by the starry spheres with their heavenly music. Man lost this world with the fall of Adam, but everything that is good for man, law, virtue, education, religion, helps to raise him toward it again. It is therefore also natural to man, on the higher level of nature, to be civilized and in a state of social discipline. The king or ruler symbolizes the invisible ideals of social discipline, and the respect paid to him derives from those ideals. But while he symbolizes them he does not incarnate them. No earthly king is clear of the wheel of fortune, or independent of the aggressive energy of the lower nature. He must know how to wage war, how to punish, how to outmanoeuvre the over-ambitious. In Richard II the kingdom is symbolized by a garden, and the garden, which is a state of art and a state of nature at the same time, represents the upper human level of nature. The gardener is addressed as “old Adam’s likeness” [3.4.73]. But the garden is not the garden of Eden; it is the garden that “old” Adam was forced to cultivate after his fall, a garden requiring constant effort and vigilance. In contrast to most of his contemporaries (Chapman is the chief exception), Shakespeare’s sense of tragedy is deeply rooted in history. Richard II and Richard III are nearly identical with tragedy in form, and even when a history play ends on a strong major chord it is never a comedy. The difference is chiefly that tragedy rounds off its action and history suggests a continuous story. We may compare the Greek dramatic tragedies with the Iliad, which, though complete in itself, is part of an epic cycle that keeps on going. As complete in itself, it is a tragedy, the tragedy of Hector; as part of the epic cycle, its central figure is Achilles, who does not die in the Iliad, but leaves us with a powerful intimation of mortality. Sometimes the continuity of history gives a cadence to a history play that tragedy cannot achieve. Henry V ends with the conquest of France, just before Henry died and all his achievements began to vanish; Henry VIII ends with the triumph of Cranmer, Cromwell, and Anne Boleyn, along with the audience’s knowledge of what soon happened to them. In other words, the history play is more explicitly attached to the rotation of the wheel of fortune than the tragedy. But the difference is only one of degree: Fortinbras, Malcolm, perhaps Edgar, all provide some sense of “historical” continuity for their tragedies; we know what happens to Troy after the conclusion of Troilus and Cressida; Athens comes to terms with Alcibiades after the death of Timon, and the Roman plays are episodes of the continuing story of Rome.

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The easiest way to get at the structure of Elizabethan tragedy is to think of it as a reversal of the structure of comedy. Comedy exhibits a type of action that I have elsewhere called a drive towards identity.21 This identity is of three kinds. There is plural or social identity, when a new social group crystallizes around the marriage of the hero and heroine in the final moments of the comedy. There is dual or erotic identity, when the hero and heroine get married. And there is individual identity, when a character comes to know himself in a way that he did not before, like Parolles, Angelo, or Katherina the shrew. Translating this division into tragic terms, there are three main kinds of tragic structure in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. There is, first, a social tragedy, with its roots in history, concerned with the fall of princes. There is, second, a tragedy that deals with the separation of lovers, the conflict of duty and passion, or the conflict of social and personal (sexual or family) interests. And there is, third, a tragedy in which the hero is removed from his social context, and is compelled to search for a purely individual identity. In Greek drama, these tragic structures might be called the Agamemnon type, the Antigone type, and the Oedipus type. In terms closer to Christianity, they might be called the tragedy of the killing of the father, the tragedy of the sacrifice of the son, and the tragedy of the isolation of the spirit. A critic who had learned his critical categories from Blake, like the present writer, would most naturally think of them as, respectively, tragedies of Urizen, tragedies of Luvah, and tragedies of Tharmas.22 In Shakespeare, we have a group of tragedies of order, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet; a group of tragedies of passion, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus; and a group of tragedies of isolation, King Lear, Othello, and Timon of Athens. These are not pigeonholes, only different areas of emphasis; most of the plays have aspects that link them to all three groups. What seems a rather odd placing of Othello and Coriolanus should become clearer as we go on; Titus Andronicus belongs mainly to the first group. As passion or strong interest always conflicts either with another passion or with some externalized force, the passion-tragedy could also be called the dilemma-tragedy, as the example of Antigone indicates. In each of Shakespeare’s three social tragedies, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet, we have a tragic action based on three main charactergroups. First is the order-figure: Julius Caesar in that play; Duncan in Macbeth; Hamlet’s father. He is killed by a rebel-figure or usurper: Brutus and the other conspirators; Macbeth; Claudius. Third comes a nemesis-

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figure or nemesis-group: Antony and Octavius; Malcolm and Macduff; Hamlet. It is sometimes assumed that the hero, the character with the title role, is always at the centre of the play, and that all plays are to be related in the same way to the hero; but each of the heroes of these three tragedies belongs to a different aspect of the total action. The nemesisfigure is partly a revenger and partly an avenger. He is primarily obsessed with killing the rebel-figure, but he has a secondary function of restoring something of the previous order. The Elizabethan social or historical tragedy shows, much more clearly than the other two kinds, the impact of heroic energy on the human condition, the wheel of fortune creaking against the greater wheel of nature. Central to the form is an Elizabethan assumption about society, which is simple but takes some historical imagination to grasp. Society to the Elizabethans was a structure of personal authority, with the ruler at its head, and a personal chain of authority extending from the ruler down. Everybody had a superior, and this fact, negatively, emphasized the limited and finite nature of the human situation. Positively, the fact that the ruler was an individual with a personality was what enabled his subjects to be individuals and to have personalities too. The man who possesses the secret and invisible virtues of human nature is the man with the quiet mind, so celebrated in Elizabethan lyric poetry. But such a man is dependent on the ceaseless vigilance of the ruler for his peace. This view of social order, with its stress on the limited, the finite, and the individual, corresponds, as indicated above, to Nietzsche’s Apollonian vision in Greek culture. That makes it hard for us to understand it. We ourselves live in a Dionysian society, with mass movements sweeping across it, leaders rising and falling, and constantly taking the risk of being dissolved into a featureless tyranny where all sense of the individual disappears. We even live on a Dionysian earth, staggering drunkenly around the sun. The treatment of the citizens in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus puzzles us: we are apt to feel that Shakespeare’s attitude is antidemocratic, instead of recognizing that the situation itself is predemocratic. In my own graduate-student days during the 1930s, there appeared an Orson Welles adaptation of Julius Caesar which required the hero to wear a fascist uniform and pop his eyes like Mussolini,23 and among students there was a good deal of discussion about whether Shakespeare’s portrayal of, say, Coriolanus showed “fascist tendencies” or not. But fascism is a disease of democracy: the fascist leader is a demagogue, and a demagogue is precisely what Coriolanus is not. The demagogues in that play

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are the tribunes whom the people have chosen as their own managers. The people in Shakespeare constitute a “Dionysian” energy in society: that is, they represent nothing but a potentiality of response to leadership. We are apt to assume, like Brutus, that leadership and freedom threaten one another, but, for us as for Shakespeare, there is no freedom without the sense of the individual, and in the tragic vision, at least, the leader or hero is the primary and original individual. The good leader individualizes his followers; the tyrant or bad leader intensifies mass energy into a mob. Shakespeare has grasped the ambiguous nature of Dionysus in a way that Nietzsche (like D.H. Lawrence later) misses.24 In no period of history does Dionysus have anything to do with freedom; his function is to release us from the burden of freedom. The last thing the mob says in both Julius Caesar and Coriolanus is pure Dionysus: “Tear him to pieces.”25 Two contemporary plays, much simpler in their construction than any of Shakespeare’s, illustrate the impact of the facta of fortune on the data of nature. At one extreme we have Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, who is the Dionysian energy of fortune incarnate. Tamburlaine is a “scourge of God” [5.3.248], conquering one demoralized society after another with nothing in the order of nature to stop him: nothing, that is, except death itself. He is a portent of the kind of limitless ferocity that would get loose if the alliance of social and natural order represented by the strong ruler were to break down. At the opposite extreme (perhaps designed to be that) we have Chapman’s double play on the conspiracy and tragedy of Byron.26 Here the central figure is an idealized Henry IV of France, a firm, wise, patient ruler who has to deal with the excessive ambition and egotism of one of his subjects. He gives Byron every chance to fit into the social order, and only when forbearance becomes obviously impossible does he reluctantly consent to Byron’s execution. One scene consists of a reported speech by Elizabeth I, and Essex is mentioned more than once in the dialogue,27 so it is clear that Henry IV is not the only ideal monarch in Europe. Henry and Elizabeth are what we have called order-figures, rulers whose personalities give form and shape to their kingdoms. Byron, along with Tamburlaine, is a rebel-figure: whatever his moral status he is a genuine hero, and everything about him suggests the unbounded and infinite, just as everything about the order-figure suggests law, finiteness, and the principle of individuality. In Shakespeare’s day there had been no permanently successful example of popular sovereignty. Machiavelli had drawn the conclusion

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that there were two forms of government: popular governments, which were unstable, and principalities, or what we should call dictatorships, the stability of which depended on the force and cunning of the prince. This analysis, of course, horrified the idealists of the sixteenth century who were trying to rationalize the government of the prince with arguments about the “general good,” and so Machiavelli became, by way of the attacks on him, a conventional bogey of Elizabethan drama. From the point of view of tragic structure, what Machiavelli was doing was destroying the integrity of tragedy by obliterating the difference between the order-figure and the rebel-figure. Machiavelli comes into Marlowe’s Jew of Malta to speak the prologue, and there he asks: “What right had Caesar to the empire?” [l. 19]28—in itself surely a fair enough question, and one which expresses the central issue in the tragedy of order. The order-figure, in Shakespeare, holds his position through a subtle combination of de jure and de facto authority. In the history plays, legitimacy is a factor of great importance: a magical aura surrounds the rightful heir, and the favour of God, or at least the cooperation of nature, seems bound up with preserving the line of succession. It is clear that hereditary succession is regarded as essential to a fully developed social order. Richard II was an impossible king, but Bolingbroke’s seizure of the crown was an awful and portentous event, throwing a shadow over the whole Lancastrian line. It does not affect Henry V, apparently, because he succeeded his father in good faith, but it brings disaster as soon as he dies. In the first part of Henry VI we are told something which is played down in the later histories: that Bolingbroke not only took the crown from the Lord’s anointed, but pushed the person next in line, the Earl of Mortimer, out of the way. In trying to determine the moral boundary between the ruthlessness of Henry V or Henry VIII and the rascality of John or Richard III, the attempts of the latter two to get rid of the heir apparent are clearly decisive. Bolingbroke, though he wanted Richard II murdered, has to dissociate himself from the actual deed by making a scapegoat out of Exton [5.6.39–40]: in King John it is insisted that Hubert is “damned” if he really killed Arthur [4.3.116–19]. Still, John, like Richard III and Macbeth, was simply accepting the logic of the de jure argument, which implies that anyone who has any claim to the throne at all can acquire the de jure aura by murdering everybody who has a better claim. To some extent this is true—that is, it is to some extent accepted by Shakespeare as a dramatic postulate. Once Arthur is dead, the legitimate heir becomes John’s son, the young Henry III, and the fortune of Eng-

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land is bound up with recognizing him as such. In plays where leadership does not depend wholly on hereditary succession, as in the Roman plays and Hamlet, the choice of a predecessor, including Caesar’s preference for Antony and Hamlet’s for Fortinbras, has a good deal of moral significance. Enough is said, however, about the merits and services of Coriolanus, Othello, Caesar, Titus, and others to make it obvious that in some social contexts de jure authority can be earned as well as inherited. Richard II was a lawful king, but a medieval king was perennially short of money, and if he were extravagant or a poor manager he had to live practically like a brigand in the middle of his own society. In this situation the question of what kind of law the lawful king represents becomes very ambiguous. The success of Bolingbroke’s rebellion depends partly on its justice: he makes common cause with those plundered by Richard’s favourites. The justice he appeals to is the right of inheriting private property: a dramatist who could write a whole play about King John without mentioning Magna Carta could hardly have cared less about the freedom that broadens through precedents. But Bolingbroke’s real success lies in, so to speak, the nature of nature. Richard is the natural head of the state, but has not done a ruler’s work, and society’s need for a centre of order throws up a natural force in the form of Bolingbroke. One does not feel either that Bolingbroke is a pawn of circumstances or that he is consumed by personal ambition: one feels that he is part of a process too much in accord with nature to be described even by such a mysterious term as fate. Shakespeare presents him rather as Marvell was later to present Oliver Cromwell: Nature that hateth emptiness Allows of penetration less, And therefore must make room Where greater spirits come.29

Richard is king de jure; Bolingbroke is the power de facto, but at a certain point the de facto power acquires the de jure attribute as well: this point is represented by York’s dramatic transfer of loyalties. We are not dealing in this play with a simple moral issue: Bolingbroke is neither a wicked usurper like Macbeth nor a righteous avenger like Richmond. Both his supporter Northumberland and his opponent Carlisle are right in their attitudes. Julius Caesar has no de jure monarch to displace, but he comes to power in the same way, through society’s need for a personal leader.

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The ruler, we said, represents, though he does not embody, the upper order of nature, the world man was originally intended to live in. The conventional physical symbol of this order is that of the starry spheres with their unheard music. The music is that of the Apollonian world, for Apollo was the god of music, at least of the music that suggests “harmony,” order, and stability. Nietzsche’s Dionysian conception of music belongs to the age of Wagner.30 Metaphors of harmony are seldom far away from any discussion of social order, and the passing of such an order is regularly symbolized by music. This is true even of the fall of Catherine of Aragon in Henry VIII. The deposed Richard II is poet, actor, and musician, and when he hears music and remarks, How sour sweet music is When time is broke and no proportion kept! [5.5.42–3]

he goes on to make it clear that the words “time” and “proportion” link music and social order together. Closely allied to this use of music is the suggestion of the supernatural. Ghosts, omens, portents, oracles, magic, witchcraft do not enter tragedy primarily as marvels: they are not there to be exhilarating, in the way that they are in romance. As things experienced, they threaten our sense of reality with madness: as things conceived, they show up the limited and finite nature of the human perspective, especially in thought. Thus they emphasize the existential irony in tragedy by showing that there are always more things to be experienced in heaven and earth than philosophy can digest.31 The authority of the order-figure is attached to a mysterious and invisible nature of which we know little except that it has authority, and, in Shakespearean tragedy, it is usually only the ruler’s ghost that walks. Except for the episode of Hercules leaving Antony, where mysterious music is again heard,32 there is nothing really supernatural in Shakespeare’s tragedies that is not connected with the murder of the order-figures. In Macbeth we have Banquo’s ghost instead of Duncan’s, partly because of the emphasis on the repose that Duncan has gained by getting murdered, and partly because the line of the reigning monarch descends from Banquo. The scene in which Duncan makes Malcolm Prince of Cumberland in front of Macbeth [1.4] is oddly anticipatory of the scene in Paradise Lost in which God the Father arouses the jealousy of Satan by displaying his Son,33 and it is interesting that Milton considered writing a Macbeth which would include the ghost of

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Duncan.34 The special case of the ghosts in Richard III will meet us later. The physical symbol of order is that of the stars in their courses: rebellion is symbolized by comets, thunder and lightning, “exhalations,” and similar aspects of meteorology unusual enough to be called unnatural, because they interrupt the sense of nature as predictable. Elizabethan tragedy, while it may in some respects be Senecan, is certainly not Stoic. The Stoic’s primary loyalty is a loyalty of conviction to the universal law of nature and to humanity as a whole. In Shakespeare and his contemporaries what commands loyalty is a specific social order embodied in a specific person. In the histories there is no conception of any loyalty broader than England, and even when Shakespeare’s subject is the Roman Empire in which Stoicism grew up, loyalties are still concrete and personal. It is a comitatus group that gathers around both Caesar and Antony. In the tragedies, as in the comedies, Shakespeare’s settings are deliberately archaic. The form of society in them is closer to that of the Iliad, or of Beowulf, than it is to ours—or to his own. The social unit involved may be a great kingdom—England or France or the Roman Empire—but its head and eyes, to use images very frequently employed, are the ruler and his small select band of personal followers. Warfare, again, continually breaks down into the warfare of the Iliad: physical prowess by individual heroes fighting in pairs. Coriolanus has no sense whatever of what Ulysses calls “the still and mental parts” of battle:35 he simply dashes in and fights with his own hands. The histories ignore the more realistic side of medieval warfare, the side that was essentially a ransom racket. The collapse of this sense of personal heroism, as in Achilles’ murder of Hector or Octavius’s contemptuous refusal of Antony’s challenge, indicates the subsiding of the tragic into the ironic vision. The role of religion also is Homeric. Prayer in Homer consists mainly of reminding the gods pointedly that they have been well fed by a hero’s sacrifices, and that victory in battle is the obvious way of making sure that the supply does not fail. Similarly, the God of Shakespeare’s histories ignores the pleas of the afflicted, but appears to respond eagerly to Henry’s suggestion that he will do “more” than the two chantries he has already built for King Richard’s soul if he wins Agincourt [Henry V, 4.1.289–302]. Brutus in Julius Caesar is something of a Stoic, even though it is Cassius who calls himself one,36 and Brutus is one of the few characters in Shakespeare capable of an impersonal loyalty. But Brutus is utterly lost in the Elizabethan Rome that Shakespeare depicts. He assumes that the

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process of leadership looks after itself, and that his only task is to remove the danger of tyranny. Consequently he is helpless in the face of Antony, who understands the principle of personal leadership. Cassius, in contrast, is motivated in his hatred of Caesar by personal feelings; because they are personal they are concrete, and because they are concrete he can see clearly what has to be done to consolidate power. But he is emotionally dependent on Brutus: that is, his loyalties, like his resentments, are personal, and Brutus is the one man for whom personal loyalties are inappropriate. Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra shows the existential nature of tragedy even more clearly. He attempts a kind of intellectual detachment that would rationalize his leaving a losing cause and joining one that seems more in accord with the laws of nature and the general good of humanity. After all, nobody can think of Mark Antony as the Lord’s anointed. But Enobarbus’s own nature and humanity are bound up with his personal loyalty to Antony and to Cleopatra—for it is only when Cleopatra seems about to betray Antony that he gives in to his impulse to desert. Once he has exchanged a loyalty of experience for a loyalty of rational conviction, however, and compares his detachment with Antony’s generosity, he is too numbed even to feel like a traitor. He feels simply that he is no longer alive, and he does not have to kill himself: he merely lies down and dies. An equally instructive figure outside Shakespeare is Clermont, the hero of Chapman’s second Bussy play.37 Clermont believes himself to be a Stoic hero, invulnerable to the blows of fate, his soul in accord with the laws of nature, an indestructible centre for his own universe. He holds forth on these subjects at considerable length to anyone who will listen, and as a good many people are compelled to listen, the play develops into quite a Stoical harangue. Clermont, however, is a protégé of the Duke of Guise, hence his loyalties, and therefore his real existence, are bound up with that Duke, whom he supports to the point of defending the St. Bartholomew Day massacre in front of an Elizabethan audience that was at least half Protestant. When the Duke is assassinated, Clermont commits suicide, describing himself as the Duke’s “creature” after having all but convinced us that he is a creature of universal law [5.4.193]. True, an exalted notion of friendship is a central aspect of that law, but what the action really shows us is a philosophy blown to pieces by the existential facts of murder, irrational loyalty, and revenge. A loyalty like this brings us very close to the spirit of the real Machiavelli, who found the source of social stability in a ruling personality

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and who recognized that the qualities of leadership were not moral. In Shakespeare there are, in practice, certain moral limits to leadership: an undying loyalty to Macbeth or Richard III would be quixotic. But theoretically there are no limits. Bosola in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi reminds us of this when he remarks that it is no harm to die in so good a quarrel,38 after he has wiped out practically the whole cast as a result of being the loyal “creature” of two desperately wicked men. The strength of personal loyalty accounts not only for so many suicides in Elizabethan tragedy, or attempted suicides like Horatio’s, but also for the irresistible power of the motivation for revenge. Brutus predicts that as Antony is Julius Caesar’s creature, he cannot survive Caesar’s death as an effective force [2.1.181–3]. This is typical of the way that Brutus misinterprets political facts: Antony’s single-minded desire to revenge Caesar makes him immensely stronger than Brutus. One of the most familiar facts of Elizabethan tragedy is that revenge is so often presented as a duty, a moral imperative, the very call of conscience itself, and may still be so even if the avenger is a ferocious sadist who thoroughly enjoys what he is doing. The sanctions of religion often endorse the revenge, and the audience is usually assumed to be sympathetic to it. If Desdemona had been sleeping with Cassio, we (that is, most people in most audiences including Shakespeare’s) might still think that Othello’s murder of her was wrong, but certainly Othello would not have thought so, and the other characters would have taken, not our view, but the view of the tragic convention. Hamlet believes that “heaven was ordinant”39 in seeing to it that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were killed without “shriving-time allowed” [5.2.47]. They were merely serving the king whom they had every reason to believe was the rightful king, but this time the convention is pulling in the opposite direction. Hamlet, again, is less remorseful about killing Polonius than annoyed with Polonius for not being Claudius, and seems genuinely bewildered that Laertes should be hostile to him. He can only realize, by an effort of which he is rather proud, that Laertes too might want to avenge a father’s murder: For, by the image of my cause, I see The portraiture of his. [5.2.77–8]

We should say that Hamlet at this point was completely paranoid, and in fact Hamlet also blames his madness when apologizing to Laertes for

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having exterminated his family. But the sanctity of the greater revenge atones for everything: Laertes dies full of remorse for his own treachery and flights of angels sing Hamlet to his rest. In Shakespearean tragedy, man is not really man until he has entered what is called a social contract, when he ceases to be a “subject” in the philosophical sense and becomes a subject in the political one, essentially related to his society. The ordered society in Shakespeare is, to use Heidegger’s term, ecstatic: its members are outside themselves, at work in the world, and their being is their function.40 As we saw, the vital thread of Enobarbus’s life was the tie that bound him to Antony, not anything inside himself. What Falstaff sardonically notes of the relation of Shallow to his servants could in other contexts be quite seriously true: “Their spirits are so married in conjunction with the participation of society that they flock together in consent, like so many wild-geese” [2 Henry IV, 5.1.68–71]. In the first part of Henry VI, Talbot, the hero of the play, is kidnapped by a French Countess, who says to him: Long time thy shadow hath been thrall to me, For in my gallery thy picture hangs: But now the substance shall endure the like, And I will chain these legs and arms of thine. [2.3.36–9]

Talbot tells her that in seizing him she still has only the shadow, for “his substance, sinews, arms, and strength” [2.3.63] consist of the soldiers who follow him. It follows that, for the leader, there is no difference between reality and appearance, between what he is and what he seems to be. His reality is his appearance, and what he does is what he is. Machiavelli remarks that it is not important that a prince should be virtuous, only that he should seem so. Until we stop to think about it, it is difficult to realize how far this principle goes in Shakespeare. Edward IV was the first to stab Prince Edward on the field of Tewkesbury, and he condemned his brother Clarence to death out of a superstitious fear of his name, influenced by his mistress. Yet, had it not been for the villainy of Gloucester, Edward would have got away with what is practically a saint’s death, mourned by his faithful queen. The piety of Henry VI, on the other hand, was genuine, and therefore contemptible, because it prevented him from being a sufficiently ruthless ruler. The prince is a dramatic figure: like the actor, he is required not so

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much to be as to appear, to put on a show. The conception of reputation in Shakespeare is bound up with the emphasis on appearance. It seems selfish for Hamlet to prevent Horatio’s suicide, not because he cares about Horatio’s life, but because he wants somebody to survive to tell his story properly. It seems weak in Othello, as Eliot says, to beg that a story of his killing an anti-Venetian Turk should be told about him.41 It seems cowardly for Cleopatra to be motivated to suicide, and Macbeth to his final hopeless fight with Macduff, out of a fear of being publicly ridiculed. But for successful rulers, how they appear in society is their real existence, and it is natural that a sense of an original function should appear like a mirage to these tragic figures in the last moments of their isolation and failure. At the end of Hamlet we get a strong feeling that the play we are watching is, in a sense, Horatio’s story, and this feeling links together the two conceptions of reputation as the real personality and of the actor as the real man. The good ruler is not, clearly, the ruler who performs good acts, but the ruler who does what has to be done at the time. The word “time” is very important here, and we shall return to it. Ruling involves a good deal of killing and executing, assaulting other countries when they are in a weak spot, committing minor injustices for the sake of greater ends. De jure authority is of little importance without de facto power, and the basis of de facto power is the ordeal by battle, the symbol of which appears at the beginning of Richard II in connection with Bolingbroke. The good ruler, in short, is the ruler who wins his battles. Henry V is a very complex play, but all its complexities do not eliminate from it the simple-minded glorification of the victory of Agincourt, and the conquest of France. It is in the exhilaration of this victory that England, in all its history, comes nearest to feeling its social identity. The feeling seems to depend on two elements to be found only on a battlefield: the presence of death and the inspiring power of enmity. In contrast to hatred, which is divisive, enmity is a socially unifying force. Two servants in Coriolanus agree that while war creates enmity, it is peace that breeds hatred, because then “men have less need of one another”;42 and one thinks of Falstaff’s chilling phrase about the men he recruits: “the cankers of a calm world and a long peace” [1 Henry IV, 4.2.29–30]. The leader who has the authority to expose his followers to death is the leader who commands loyalty. Timon tries to build up a peaceful society on a basis of equality, generosity, and mutual friendship, and sees it instantly disintegrate in front of him.

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In the Folio text of Julius Caesar, Caesar makes a vague boast that he “doth not wrong” [3.1.47]: what he originally said, according to Ben Jonson, was: “Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause.”43 Jonson thought this ridiculous, but the fact that one may do wrong with just cause is central to the whole paradox of ruling, and it is highly characteristic of Shakespeare’s Caesar that he had the insight to see this. For Shakespeare’s Caesar was in a position to answer Machiavelli’s question in Marlowe about his right to the empire. The answer is not the simple one that might is right, but still less is it the idealistic one that might imitates right. The ruler is not, like the judge, a mere incarnation of law: he is a personality, and in tragedy the personality takes precedence over whatever is conceptual or moral. If we start with the view that the head of the state should be an instrument of law or a philosopher-king, we shall end with disillusioned reflections about the little wisdom with which the world is governed. In Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies the world is not governed by wisdom at all, but by personal will. For Shakespeare’s order-figures it would be more accurate to say that right imitates might. The process of holding power, however ruthless, is primary; whatever order and justice and stability there may be follow after that. It is easy to infer from all this that Shakespeare was a great “believer” in personal rule, and wanted his audience to believe in it too: that he idealized strong rulers and minimized their faults, glorified the successful military leader and admired ruthlessness and hardness. The Roman leaders are much more attractive in him than they are in Plutarch. One could quote a good deal in support of this thesis and still misinterpret the poet. The poet presents a vision of society: the critic, in trying to interpret the vision, is almost compelled to translate it into a conception or theory of society. As a theory of society, what we have been expounding sounds rather childish, especially to people who, like ourselves, live in a post-tragic age. For us, to put a personal loyalty above a loyalty of principle, as the Nazis did, is culturally regressive: it begins in hysteria and ends in psychosis. But Shakespeare has no theory of society: what he has is a vision of society, and that vision is so powerfully convincing that we accept it without question. We often think of Shakespeare’s tragedies as reflecting the social facts of his own age, but, as already indicated, they do this only to a very limited extent. The settings of King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Coriolanus are primitive by Elizabethan standards too, and because they are primitive they are archetypal, reflecting the immutable facts of passion and power and loyalty and absurdity that

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are always present in human life. The vision in Shakespeare’s tragedies is, quite simply, a tragic vision, a vision in which death is the end of all action, and in which the actions that lead most directly to death are the strongest ones. The wise man, says Socrates the philosopher, will live by the laws of the just state whatever state he is living in.44 Every man, says the tragic dramatist, lives, or would like to live, by the self-destroying passions that are most clearly revealed in the archaic settings of Shakespeare’s tragedies. In the three plays that are typically tragedies of order, the order-figure is murdered fairly soon. Hamlet’s father is killed before the play begins; Duncan just as he is about to enjoy some of the fruits of victory; Caesar just before he accepts the kingship and enters into his de jure heritage. No actual ruler is outside the operation of the wheel of fortune, and no triumph therefore can be without its reminders of death. The Ides of March come for Caesar; Duncan is saved from the treachery of the Thane of Cawdor by the Thane’s more treacherous successor; and on the great day of the senior Hamlet’s life, when he won his duel with the King of Norway and Prince Hamlet was born, the first gravedigger entered into his occupation. But the simple irony of fortune’s turning wheel is not the real dramatic point of these assassinations. Critics who have noted that Aristotle’s word hamartia is also the ordinary New Testament word for sin have often assumed that a tragic victim must have a “flaw” or a “proud mind” that will make his death morally intelligible.45 But the flaw of the murdered ruler is simply to be there, and his proud mind is merely to be what he is. Unlike Edward IV, who imprisoned his brother because his name began with G, Caesar dismisses the warning soothsayer as a “dreamer” [1.2.24]. Caesar’s “flaw,” then, is only that he fails to be a superstitious tyrant. As for pride of mind, even Caesar hardly has that in an excessive degree, much less the “meek” Duncan.46 The fall of the prince may have a moral cause, but the cause is not primary: what is primary is the event. Or rather, not only the event, but the event along with its consequences. The important thing about the order-figure, in short, is not that he gets murdered, but that he has been murdered. The essential tragic action starts just after his death. This is also true of the action of King Lear, where the order-figure, by abdicating as king, has destroyed his own social context, and has therefore essentially murdered himself. The pushing back of the murder of the ruler into something pretragic is closely connected with a prominent feature in the histories: the ten-

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dency to idealize an earlier age. The story of the War of the Roses in Henry VI looks back longingly to the great days of Agincourt and laments the premature death of Henry V. But there were conspiracies against Henry V, as well as against his father, which looked back to the deposition of Richard II as the beginning of all social evils. We go back to Richard’s time, and find John of Gaunt idealizing an age which ended with Edward III. There is a trace of the same feeling at the opening of Julius Caesar, with the tribune’s despairing cry: “Knew ye not Pompey?” [1.1.37].47 We are back to the point at which we began. The heroic has been; only the human is. It is the same feeling that gives the lost cause its glamour: the feeling that paints Oliver Cromwell with the wart on his nose and gives Charles I all the Van Dykes.48 As we continue to study the romantic appeal of the lost cause, it begins to attach itself to the dream of a lost paradise or golden age. For, as Proust tells us, all paradises are paradises that we have lost; all social ideals are ideals that no longer exist; justice itself, considered as an ideal, vanished long ago with Astraea. Poetry must have an image; drama must have a character, and the feeling of lost social identity is what is expressed in the story of the fallen prince. The fallen prince is the “primal father” of a rather desperate myth of Freud’s,49 which seems to assume a crude notion of a “collective unconscious” that literary criticism, fortunately, does not need. In criticism, the murdered prince, from Agamemnon onwards, stands for the sense of falling away from social unity which is constantly present in every generation. The tragic vision begins with being in time, and time is always time after. It is always later than a time when we had a greater allowance of life and could attach more significance in that life to parental figures. Or, reversing the image, we now watch a heroic action with what is described by Lewis of France in King John as: those baby eyes That never saw the giant world enraged. [5.2.56–7]

We have frequently mentioned Richard II, and we notice that Richard uses several phrases linking his deposition to the trial of Christ. The primary reason for this is that Richard has one of the essential characteristics of royalty, being a born actor, and Bolingbroke can steal his crown but not his show. He adopts these parallels, not because he is a Christlike character, but because he fancies himself in that role. And yet his

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dramatic instinct is sound. As king, Richard has “lost the hearts” of both nobles and commons,50 and so for all practical purposes has abdicated his birthright. As a man, he attracts the same mixture of sympathy and condemnation as any other man who has muffed a very important job. But purely as lost cause, as a symbol of man’s rejection of the Lord’s anointed, he is entitled to his echoes. Behind the echoes of the rejected Christ are the echoes of the lost paradise itself, for, as the Queen says in the garden scene, Richard’s fall is “a second fall of cursed man” [3.4.76]. Every fall of every ruler is that. There are, then, two symbolic aspects of the ruler, or what we have been calling the order-figure, in Shakespeare’s tragedies. There is the deposed or murdered ruler, Caesar, Duncan, Hamlet’s father, Richard II, the abdicating Lear, who, as that, represents a lost social identity: we shall not look upon his like again, or the like of what he stood for. His archetype is neither Apollo nor Dionysus, but Keats’s hero Hyperion, the father of the sun-god, to whom Hamlet’s father is twice compared.51 The other is the ruler conceived as actual ruler, the successful strong man, Octavius, Henry V, Henry VIII, and Julius Caesar for the first two acts of his play. Such a figure is both Apollo and Dionysus, lord of both the order of nature and the heroic energy of fortune. The leader controls a world where reality is also appearance, and therefore illusion, as well as reality. Nietzsche points out how the defining of individuality, which is the key to Apollonian order, is only made possible by continuous illusion.52 The social order the leader represents grows by conquest and successful battles; sanity depends on hysteria; law and stability depend on punishment. His palace is founded on a prison, as Henry V unconsciously indicates: We are no tyrant, but a Christian king; Unto whose grace our passion is as subject As is our wretches fettered in our prisons. [1.2.241–3]

The strong ruler is in the position that Camus in our day has identified with Sisyphus, forever condemned to roll the stone of time.53 A ruler who has been killed at the height of his powers, or is thought of as living a long time ago, like the Edward the Confessor of Macbeth who could heal the sick [4.3.141–59], may become a legend of mystery and magic, a dream of glory that is hardly a memory and has ceased to be a hope. His legend becomes, like the ghost of the murdered Caesar to Brutus at

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Philippi, the symbol of our own evil genius, of our inability to reach our own ideals. Polite fictions about the present, such as the implicit reference to James I in the Macbeth passage,54 or Cranmer’s prophecy at the end of Henry VIII, turn the tragic vision into something else. The tragic present is always in the intervening rebel state. And so every actual strong ruler, as that, is something of an avenger or nemesis, someone who re-establishes and renews a legendary glory in a spirit of wrath. The more successful he is, the more his order appears to be an emergency order, proved in war, which is, as Henry V says, the vengeance of God [4.1.166–9]. Then the strong ruler in his turn passes into legend and his achievements into nothing. In the total action of Hamlet there are three concentric tragic spheres, each with a murdered father and a nemesis. At the centre is Polonius, murdered by accident and avenged by his son. Around this comes the main action of the play, where Hamlet’s father is murdered and avenged by his son. Around this again comes the story of the old and the young Fortinbras of Norway, the father slain by Hamlet’s father, the son achieving by accident what a successful revenge would have achieved, the throne of Denmark. Of Fortinbras we know little except that he will fight for anything; so whatever the future of Denmark may be, it is unlikely to be a peaceful future. The story of Polonius, Laertes, and the mad Ophelia is an ironic tragedy of blood, some features of which we shall look at next. The story of the old and the young Fortinbras gives to the whole action the dimension of being in time, the turning of the wheel of history. In between comes the story of Hamlet, Hamlet whose mind is a complete universe in itself, ranging from hints of a divinity that shapes our ends to a melancholy sense of the unbearable loathsomeness of physical life, and whose actions range from delicate courtesy to shocking brutality. All this magnificent vision of heroic energy is poured out as a sacrifice to a dead father, to a ghost who returns screaming for blood from what is supposed to be a place of purification. Hamlet is forced to strike everything out of his “tables” that represents thought and feeling and observation and awareness [1.5.98–101],55 and concentrate solely on hatred and revenge, a violent alteration of his natural mental habits that makes his assuming of madness only partly voluntary. It is the paradox of tragedy that he shows us infinitely more than hatred and revenge, that he could never have shown it without the impulse to revenge, and that nothing is left of it except silence for him and the telling of his story for us.

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In the tragedy of order a strong and capable ruler is murdered, this act and the revenge for it occupying the major part of the tragic action. In such a tragedy the ruler himself has to be a mature man in middle life, and the rebel-figure who strikes him down has to be of comparable weight. Brutus, Macbeth, and Claudius are all well past their youth and solidly married, and are in an almost fraternal relation to their victims, especially Claudius, whose crime, as he recognizes, belongs to the archetype of Cain. The tragedy of order is thus one form of a struggle-ofbrothers theme which is frequent in the histories as well. Richard III and John are brothers of the monarchs they succeed by usurpation; Prince Henry and Hotspur have the same name and are the same age, twins struggling in the womb of time, like Esau and Jacob. In the tragedy of order the ruler’s authority is a “good” thing only in the sense that society is not demonstrably any better off without it. Brutus’s crucial error, we said, lay in his assumption that the problem of authority takes care of itself: that if we remove the threat of Caesar we need not worry too much about the succession to Caesar. This error is symbolized by his dissuading the conspirators from taking an oath. The oath would have consolidated a revolutionary group, which could then have acted with the same ruthless efficiency as the second triumvirate (or two-thirds of it) does later. But it is obviously possible to construct a tragedy in which the order itself is evil, and in which the rebellion against it appeals to the sympathy of the audience. This is the rule in the type of tragedy usually described as the tragedy of blood, though I should prefer to call it the tragedy of the sick society. In, for instance, The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The White Devil, or Women Beware Women, we are introduced to a society, usually a court, so hopelessly rotten and corrupt that we can expect from it nothing but a long series of treacherous murders. There is no order-figure: the head of the state is as bad as everyone else, and the only action we feel much in sympathy with is that of revenge—revenge on him, usually. In a society that is evil, cruel, sick, or repressive, the hero is likely to be crushed simply because he is a hero. In the tragedies of order the action focuses on a rebel whose fortune is too big for nature. In tragedies of a sick society the central figure is often a victim, and the victim’s nature is too big for his fortune. What is squeezed out of the tragic action is not excessive ambition but excessive vitality, though it is only because of the perverted social context that it is excessive.

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Chapman’s Byron plays, we said, are examples of a tragedy of order in which the order-figure is idealized, and the authority he represents is consequently idealized too. In Bussy d’Ambois the situation is very different: here the setting is the weak and divided court of Henry III of France. Bussy is a force of nature, recalling, as an admirer says, the golden age,57 imported into this court, where his energy and outspokenness, together with his duelling prowess, proceed to tear it to pieces until he is done to death. A weak society has little to do with either the order of nature or the wheel of fortune, as it is neither natural nor fortunate, and a hero in such a setting has about him the energy of an unspoiled nature, which in that context is destructive. Such a play is an order-tragedy in reverse, as it were, in which the rebel-figure has our sympathy. The Duchess of Malfi is even more clearly a tragedy of unspoiled vitality crushed by an evil society. The excuse for murdering the Duchess is that she has polluted the aristocracy by marrying someone of healthier blood, but the real reason is that she is young, attractive, and warm-hearted, all qualities that infuriate her psychotic brothers. The killing of the order-figure relates itself to the theme of the primal father. Therefore the tragedy of the destruction of vitality in a sick society may easily become the tragedy of youth, where the order-figure is an evil father-figure and the victim is typically a son or daughter in revolt against him. The clearest example of such a tragedy in English literature is Shelley’s Cenci. Here the essential theme is the struggle of youth and age, with the sadistic and incestuous Cenci representing both fatherhood and evil. Two spheres of repressive authority enfold him: one is that of the Church, represented by the Pope, who takes his side primarily because he stands for the tyranny of fatherhood; the other is that of history and tradition, the temporal chain of repression that only revolution can break, a revolution of which Beatrice is a portent. For Shelley, tyranny and repression are essentially a part of the data of existence, the state of things associated with Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound. There is no tragedy of this type in Shakespeare. Apart from the resistance of Cordelia in the opening scene of King Lear, the nearest approach to it is Romeo and Juliet, where our sympathies are so solidly with the young lovers. Yet nobody would say that the Prince or the parental figures in that play were evil or sinister: the most sinister character is Tybalt, and he has more in common with the “angry boys” of Elizabethan London.58 But the feud of course is evil, and the lovers are sacrificial victims of it: they are described by Capulet as “Poor sacrifices of our enmity” [5.3.304], and the prologue speaks of

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The feeling of the sinister and repressive is really transferred in this play from the parental figures to the order of nature which, as we saw, is closely connected with the order of society. The sense of a fateful order symbolized by the “inauspicious stars” [5.3.111] dominates Romeo and Juliet, though it is rare in Shakespeare as a whole. Tragedies based on the rebellion of youth against age are not frequent in the drama of Shakespeare’s time: even the Duchess of Malfi is killed by brothers. The central action of The Spanish Tragedy is the treacherous murder of young Horatio, whose dialogue with Bel-imperia has a gentle elegiac melancholy about it in contrast to the pervading air of bloody bustle in the rest of the play. Horatio is a martyred son, a kind of Absalom-figure, described by his father as “a youth run through and through with villains’ swords, hanging upon this tree.”59 But the father is the avenger of the murder, not the cause of it. In Shakespeare there are no Absalom-figures, but we notice that under a tyrant’s rule, when social order does become corrupt, dramatic interest often focuses sharply, if briefly, on a youthful victim: the princes in the Tower, Arthur in King John, Macduff’s little boy in Macbeth. Such figures are most conspicuous in the earliest plays. In the Greeks and in Seneca much attention is paid to youthful sacrificial victims: those who, like Iphigeneia, Polyxena, or Astyanax, are murdered to appease a wrathful deity or the ghosts of the dead. Titus Andronicus, though without any historical roots, is an intensely academic play, full of explicit literary allusions, some of which, such as Lavinia’s reading of the story of Philomela in Ovid [4.1.42–58], form part of the action, and the play glances at many of the stock Classical themes, like that of the unburied body. We notice that the first action of the play is the sacrifice of a boy, Alarbus [1.1.96–145], and from this action all the horrors of the play take their origin. Alarbus is avenged by his mother Tamora, and her revenge is associated in the dialogue with that of Hecuba [1.1.136–41]. Again, in the first part of Henry VI, the hero Talbot sees his young son killed before his face, and compares him to the youthful victim-figure Icarus, and himself to Daedalus, escaping by their death from a world that Suffolk later describes as a “labyrinth” where “Minotaurs and ugly treasons lurk” [5.3.188–9]. The gloomy action goes on until it winds up at the end of part 3 with the murder, first of the

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young Prince Edward, then of his father Henry VI, who again compares himself to Daedalus and his son to Icarus [5.6.21–5]. We have emphasized the way in which most of Shakespeare’s tragic characters are in an “ecstatic” relation to their societies: their life is in their social relationships, and their loyalties are personal. In some of the tragedies, notably Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra, the social order is split, and there is no symbol or centre of social unity. Verona is torn apart in the Montague–Capulet feud, and although there is an order-figure in the Prince, he dominates the action only fitfully. Troilus is caught in the war between Greeks and Trojans, and Antony between the Roman and Egyptian worlds. In such a situation, personal loyalty is likely to be deflected from society and to concentrate on sexual love or family loyalties. These three plays, in particular, are tragedies of love or passion, and they are Shakespeare’s version of the tragedy of the son, the crushing out of vitality in a world where two social powers grind on each other. This vitality is Dionysian, the energy of physical nature, but because it is crushed, the hero resembles Dionysus rather in his role as a dying or suffering god. Romeo’s story follows the general outline of the various dying-god stories available to Shakespeare, in Ovid and elsewhere, the closest analogue being that of Pyramus. Troilus does not die in his play, but his role is similar dramatically. Antony is not young, but his tremendous physical vitality makes him the most Dionysian of the three—in fact Plutarch calls him the new Bacchus. Sacrificial imagery may occur anywhere in a Shakespearean tragedy, but when the context is the tragedy of order it is usually more closely related to the analogy between the individual and the social body. An example is Marcus’s speech in Titus Andronicus: O let me teach you how to knit again This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf, These broken limbs again into one body. [5.3.70–2]

Dionysus and the other gods of the cycle of life and death in nature are, in the earlier forms of the myth, closely associated with a female figure who represents the basis of that cycle, or Mother Earth. The god becomes the lover of the goddess, is cast off or sacrificed, and dies; the goddess does not die. The god is subordinated to her, and in her relation to him she is sinister or treacherous as well as loving. This relationship

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survives in the courtly love poetry of Elizabethan lyrics, where the mistress is coy, cruel, or in extreme cases brings about her lover’s death or madness and gloats over her achievement. The women loved in the passion-tragedies have all the “white goddess” characteristics of someone whom it is death to love.60 Cleopatra is the tantalizing mistress; Cressida the treacherous siren, whose infidelity repeats and reverses the original action of Helen, thereby making the latter a part of the turning wheel of history; and Juliet is the bride in the midst of enemies. All of these, like the Duchess of Malfi, assume the ancient female prerogative of choosing their own lover, and are abused or despised in consequence by the male-dominated societies they belong to. Cressida is the archetype of falsehood; Cleopatra, to the Romans, is whore and gipsy; Juliet’s father puts on quite a senex iratus show without even knowing the real facts of her situation. Something of the elusiveness of these figures comes into the raising of them to the upper stage— Juliet on the balcony, Cleopatra on the monument, Cressida on the walls of Troy—which is a recurrent feature of this group of plays. The tragedy of love is the tragedy of Eros, a name which turns up in a significant context in Antony and Cleopatra, and Eros is also subordinated to his mother Venus. The maternal phase of the white-goddess cycle is represented by the ferocious mother of Coriolanus, Volumnia, whose supreme happiness as a mother consists not so much in giving her son life as in exposing him to death. Here again the social order is split into something very like a civil war of patricians and plebeians, and the crisis of the action of Coriolanus is, as in the other passion-tragedies, a collision of personal and social loyalties. Again, we have suggested a parallel between the victim of the passion-tragedy and the rebel of the ordertragedy, and the wives of the rebel-figures sometimes show a similar parallel with the passion-heroines. Gertrude is less aware of what she is doing than Cressida, but her dramatic function is like Cressida’s in slipping so promptly from Hamlet’s father to his enemy. Lady Macbeth is a less morally acceptable encouragement to her husband than Volumnia to her son, but the dramatic roles are analogous. A tragic hero may be an older man or a younger man, a paternal or a filial figure: the tragedy of order is the typical Shakespearean form of the fall of the older man, and the tragedy of passion the typical Shakespearean form of the fall of the younger one. Both types of tragic hero may appear in the same play, in Hamlet, for example, where two fathers are killed and two sons also killed in efforts to avenge them. Ophelia’s

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songs, which surely have as much to do with Hamlet’s dead love as with “conceit upon her father” [4.5.45], are concerned mainly with a Dionysus or Adonis figure (“you call him a-down-a,” she says [4.5.171–2]), a Prince Charming or bonny sweet Robin who comes to a maid on St. Valentine’s day, who is borne on a bier and buried in a shroud white as “mountain snow” [4.5.36], and whose death is full of the imagery of flowers and water, like the death of Ophelia herself. But in the final song [4.5.187–99] the memory of Polonius is more obviously present: here the figure has a white beard as well as a flaxen poll, and the cycle is completed with the figure of the murdered father—the wheel becomes it, as she says [4.5.172]. Ophelia is drowned, or drowns herself, while gathering flowers which are clearly phallic symbols, recalling a passage in Plutarch about the search of Isis for the body of Osiris. Henry V is not a person that one would at first associate with the tragedy of passion, as he has probably less passion than any other major character in Shakespeare. But he is Shakespeare’s most complete example of the cyclical movement of the youthful tragic hero, and so establishes the context for the group of passion-tragedies. Of the great conquerors of history, the most famous are Caesar and Alexander. Caesar had consolidated his power and was of mature years at the time of his death, hence his role in tragedy is that of an order-figure who has developed from the favourite of fortune into becoming part of the order of nature, and whose achievement becomes an even greater memory. Alexander died in youth, and his triumphs, dramatically speaking, instantly disappeared: he is the supreme example of the young hero raised by the wheel of fortune to its height and then thrown off. Henry is England’s Alexander, the parallel being called to our attention by Fluellen. He starts in a Dionysian role of a wild madcap prince, with Falstaff his Silenus tutor, and the imagery associated with him is that of a midsummer night’s dream. Falstaff speaks of their group as “Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon” [1.2.25–6], and Ely later remarks: And so the Prince obscured his contemplation Under the veil of wildness, which, no doubt, Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night. [Henry V, 1.1.63–5]

And Falstaff’s last words are “I shall be sent for soon at night” [2 Henry IV, 5.5.89–90]. But although Falstaff’s company “go by the moon and the seven stars, and not by Phoebus,”61 the prince informs us that he is going

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to turn his back on this Dionysian role, “imitate the sun,”62 and become something more like an incarnation of Apollo. If we think of Henry simply as a hero of action, that is, if we take the point of view of the chorus, we shall see him as a prince of the most radiant and triumphant glory. Alexander was much preoccupied with his resemblance to divinity: Henry is not, but several touches in the imagery make him a preternatural figure, a Messiah treading the winepress. In Falstaff’s company Henry takes on fallen human nature: as he says, in the regular imagery of night, “I am now of all humours that have showed themselves humours since the old days of goodman Adam to the pupil age of this present twelve o’clock at midnight” [1 Henry IV, 2.4.92–5]. But when he becomes king, according to Canterbury, he becomes an unfallen Adam: Consideration like an angel came And whipped th’ offending Adam out of him, Leaving his body as a paradise T’ envelop and contain celestial spirits. [Henry V, 1.1.28–31]

He describes a conspiracy against him, which we shall glance at again, in the familiar phrase “a second fall of man,”63 and his conquest of France has apocalyptic overtones. France is twice called the “world’s best garden,” and its cities turn into a “maid,” like the New Jerusalem.64 But of course other things are going on too. There is a markedly disapproving emphasis on what amounts to the killing of Falstaff. Fluellen, not a person temperamentally much in sympathy with Falstaff, compares his death to Alexander’s murder of Clitus, which, being done in hot blood, under great provocation, and bitterly repented afterward, brings out the coldness of Henry all the more clearly.65 There is the gradual disappearance of our other old friends, as Bardolph and Nym are hanged and the disgraced and beaten Pistol, his wife dead, goes back to a life of begging and stealing. In a tyranny, we said, there is often a sharp focus on a youthful victim: here, where the sense of tyranny is carefully muted and left only to implication, the Boy, whose shrewd comments make him a kind of infant Falstaff, simply vanishes, doubtless murdered by the enemy. The world’s best garden, as Burgundy’s speech shows, is a ruin, and Henry is appealed to do something about it as soon as it is, as he says, “all mine” [5.2.174–5]. But, as we know, he dies at once; the war goes on and on, and the only result of his marriage to Katharine is

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Henry VI, the most pitiful creature in all Shakespeare. At the beginning of Henry VI La Pucelle says: With Henry’s death the English circle ends: Dispersed are the glories it included. [1 Henry VI, 1.2.136–7]

And, however many fiends La Pucelle may keep company with, she is dead right. What we see in the play from this point of view is an illustration of the remark in the Epilogue: “Fortune made his sword” [Henry V, Epilogue, l. 6]. And Fortune, according to the useful Fluellen, is “painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls” [3.6.32–6]. Even at the beginning of the play we notice some oddly elegiac cadences. The sentimental Canterbury urges Henry to revive the glory of Edward III’s time, when the chronicle of England was as full of praise As is the ooze and bottom of the sea With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries. [1.2.164–5]

The play does not build up to an attitude that we are expected to take, to a view that coincides with whatever Shakespeare “had in mind.” Shakespeare is neither the mouthpiece of a jingoistic audience nor an oversubtle ironist. We are quite free to admire Henry or to regard him as detestable. There is plenty of textual evidence for both views, but neither view of him will alter the structure of the history play he is in. And what the structure of a history play says to us is: “This is the essential poetic significance of something that really happened.” From the point of view of France, Henry is a rebel-figure, a Tamburlaine or scourge of God who explodes within a weak and demoralized social order and destroys it in a tragedy of blood. In France, Henry is an angel of death, which is what Coriolanus is also described as being to the enemies of Rome, in one of those many passages where the echoes and overtones of a statement sound very different from the context of the statement itself: He was a thing of blood, whose every motion Was timed with dying cries. [Coriolanus, 2.2.109–10]

There is no incongruity, even from the French point of view, in Henry’s

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making such a to-do over the legitimacy of his claim to the French throne when his claim to his own was so doubtful. Henry is repeating the legend of his patron St. George, coming over the sea and acquiring the country de facto by conquest, and de jure by marrying the king’s daughter. From the point of view of England, Henry’s story is not a tragedy, because it ends in triumph and marriage. But it is one episode of what is, in its totality, a tragic vision, the cycle of nature and of fortune, of which the victims of the passion-tragedies represent other episodes. In the tragedies of order, it is the function of the nemesis-figure to re-establish a disrupted continuity. The continuity is personal as well as social: Hamlet and Malcolm are the sons of the kings they avenge, and Octavius is a Caesar. In the tragedies of passion there is a conflict between personal and social loyalties. Henry V has no nemesis problem, but when his father dies, he makes the crucial social transition from prince to king, using “prince” here in the sense of heir apparent, someone who is still technically a private citizen, and who can therefore be presented dramatically in a “madcap” role without stirring up the anxieties of censorship. As king, he is confronted with two surviving fatherfigures. One, the Chief Justice, is the symbol of Henry’s new social duties in his Apollo role of sun-king; the other, Falstaff, is the symbol of his old nighttime companionship of tavern and highroad. Henry wipes Falstaff out of his life, hence, as it is somewhat disconcerting to observe, the role of the martyred father in Henry V is taken by Falstaff, not an order-figure but a disorder-figure, a lord of misrule. In destroying Falstaff, Henry also destroys, along with his sense of humour, an inner tension within society itself, the resistance to what Falstaff calls “old father antic the law” [1 Henry IV, 1.2.61]. This inner tension explodes in a far more sinister form as soon as Henry dies, and becomes, so to speak, a nemesis of misrule. Falstaff’s whole being is in his relation to Prince Henry—“Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing,” he says [1.2.92–3]—and, as long as the Prince is a madcap, Falstaff is a parasite, a corrupt recruiting sergeant, and something of a brigand. As an attendant on a victorious king, he might well have settled into the role of professional jester, so important as a safety valve in court life. He is given to drinking and wenching, but so are the jesters of the comedies. As it is, he has the role of rejected commentator on the action of Henry V, his place being taken by a properly disciplined chorus. For it is the function of the chorus in Henry V, as of Gower and Time in the romances, to put us into as uncritical a frame of mind as possible.

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Henry’s one passion is for conquest, and the conquest, as the cities are turned into a maid, takes the form of the play’s heroine, the Princess Katharine. Setting the play in its historical context, the Princess, representing France as the object of fatal love, modulates into the sinister Queen Margaret of the earlier Henry VI plays, the source of so much disaster immediately after Henry’s death. The theme of the fateful bride is thus present by implication in Henry V also. Coriolanus is also related to the passion-tragedies, as already suggested.66 The three women of this play, Volumnia, Virgilia, Valeria, with their echoing names, seem at first to be merely the hazy “womenfolk” of a man’s world. But very soon we are aware that Coriolanus is motherdominated: even the crowd knows this, and remarks that he fights to please his mother [1.1.37–9]. His sexual energy has gone into warfare, and his real mistress is Bellona, but though he is a leader in battle, there is a withdrawn and remote quality in him that has something adolescent about it. Other people are not quite real to him: he forgets the name of the Volscian who befriended him [1.9.82–90], and stands for consulship in a world of “voices” [2.3.112, 125–30]. He fights so prodigiously that he is an army in himself, and when wronged he returns in irresistible strength, only the pleas of his mother and sweetheart being able to deflect his vengeance. His story, in short, is a boy’s dream come true, and the complete solitude both of his assault on Corioli and of his exile (in Plutarch he has a band of followers on both occasions)67 emphasizes the dreamlike quality. Everybody calls Coriolanus proud, but that is not his trouble: his unwillingness to boast of his exploits and his horror of using them for political ends have much more to do with humility, in the most genuine sense. He has the charm, as well as the gaucherie, of a youth, the attractiveness of a man who cannot lie. But he has no power of holding a social order together: wherever he is, society seems to disintegrate. Even as an army leader, his soldiers follow him with enthusiasm only as long as things are going well: at the first check they break apart or fall to looting. The contrast with the soldiers of Antony, joking about their wounds even in the face of the most obvious disaster, is an instructive one. Although a patrician, Coriolanus is not a conservative, in the good sense: one of his rare soliloquies speaks with contempt of tradition and custom. In standing for consul he is required to be, in our terms, an order-figure, but he cannot be anything more than a rebel-figure, a partisan of his own side. Shakespeare presents the social conflict in Rome through patrician eyes: the concrete details of the plebeians’ grievances given by

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Plutarch are suppressed. Yet in being so favourable to the patricians, Shakespeare manages to bring out all the more clearly their alienation from the rest of Rome: they are so obviously an army of occupation that we feel little surprise at Coriolanus’s going over to the Volscians without a twinge of conscience. Volumnia has conditioned Coriolanus to feel that he must have an enemy: he loves his enemies in his own way, and if he loves anyone it is his enemy Tullus Aufidius. By making a friend of Tullus he becomes a predestined victim, and, during their quarrel, Tullus, with the cunning of a smaller man, calls him “boy” [5.6.100]. Coriolanus breaks down completely: it is, he says, the first time he is compelled to scold [5.6.104–5]. It is also the first time he boasts, and he thereby exposes himself to being called a braggart [5.6.113–19]. His collapse is the inevitable outcome of the scene in which his family, led by his mother, come to plead with him. Coriolanus in this scene is prepared for the assault on his feelings: what he does not know is that Volumnia is his superior officer, for it is only in his attitude to her that he recognizes authority. His cry of despair, “Oh, mother, what have you done?” [5.3.182–3]68 accepts the fact that she is in effect condemning him to death, and links his story to the other tragedies of passion in which a woman’s love is fatal. The nearest thing to a father that Coriolanus has is Menenius Agrippa, who is a “humorous patrician” [2.1.47], a strong partisan but a highly articulate one, and very useful to his own side because the citizens, even the tribunes, listen to him with a good deal of tolerance. He has a curious role, half counsellor and half jester, which reminds us in a very different way of Falstaff. The episode in which Menenius, confident of Coriolanus’s love and full of paternal affection for him, comes to his tent and is brusquely dismissed is in some ways very like a minuscule version of the rejection of Falstaff, an annihilating snub which destroys his self-respect and even his reason for going on living. In Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra, which are much more obviously tragedies of passion and fatal love, this counsellor-jester figure recurs, in Mercutio, in Pandarus, in Enobarbus. We notice that a set speech, usually calling attention to some central symbol of the play, is associated with the type. Menenius tells the fable of the belly and the members; Mercutio makes the Queen Mab speech; Enobarbus describes Cleopatra on her barge.69 Pandarus, being little more than an old fool, is hardly capable of a great speech of this kind, but the Falstaffian paternal, or avuncular, relation to the hero recurs in him, and

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his repudiation forms the bitter conclusion of a very bitter play. Mercutio and Enobarbus are not directly repudiated, but they are both destroyed by the colliding social forces of the plays they are in. The Queen Mab speech becomes much more functional to Romeo and Juliet if we see the play in its context of passion-tragedies. The merest glance at the text will show how important the imagery of day and night, of light and darkness, is in it, and the play seems to be closely related, in its use of this imagery, to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is probably near it in date.70 In the comedy there are two worlds: a day-world of Athens presided over by Theseus, full of bustle and hunting, and with laws to keep refractory lovers in order, and a night-world of a wood near Athens presided over by the fairies. This latter is a world of dreams and of sexual love, and its symbols are those of the cycle of nature, traditionally personified by the gods of love and of death, Eros and Adonis. Puck is an Eros figure squeezing the juice of a purple flower on sleeping lovers, and elsewhere in the wood Peter Quince’s company is rehearsing a farcical version of the story of Pyramus, one of the many stories in which also, in the original Ovidian version, a purple or red flower springs from the dying hero’s blood.71 In the tragedy there is the day-world of Verona, when the Capulets are abroad and feuding is likely to break out, and the night-world of the Capulet party, the balcony scene, and the graveyard, where the sexual passion is fatal and ends in a much more serious version of the Pyramus story. The love itself is described as a day within a night, and, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the night-world is a Dionysian world: And fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels. [Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.3–4]72

And just as in the comedy the drive toward the fulfilment of love is carried through by the fairies and the tragic side of the story is reduced to parody, so in the tragedy the drive toward the fatal conclusion is in the foreground and the unseen impulses that prompt the lovers to fall in love so suddenly and so completely are suggested only by way of parody, in Mercutio’s account of a fairy “hag” who evokes dreams of love from lovers [1.4.70–1; 92–4]. The sense of fatality and of a sinister sexual incubus (or succuba) is part of the character of Cressida and of Cleopatra: it is not part of the character of Juliet, and a special device is needed to suggest

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it. This is in spite of the fact that she rapidly bursts out of her role as a demure and bashful maiden at the Capulet party to become the Queen of the Night who calls to the horses of Phoebus to put an end to the day. Some curious phrases in the dialogue, such as “pink for flower” [2.4.58], appear as jokes, going by too fast for us to see much significance in them. The heroic society, most fully presented in the tragedy of order, is a society of action, and its two deadly rivals are feeling and thought. People who think too much, like Cassius, are dangerous to it: the isolating quality of thought and consciousness will be our next subject. But a continuous suspension of feeling is as necessary to the heroic life as a suspension of thought. A tragic action is fully tragic only to its spectators: heroes do not suffer except when they become objective to themselves. One great value of tragedy as a form of art is that it corrupts and weakens our heroism, refining our sensibilities by sapping our courage. It makes a fuss about murder and brutality, instead of accepting them as necessary pleasures of life. The tragedy of passion is in a peculiar sense the audience’s tragedy: it is less spectacular than the tragedy of order, and is more intimate in its use of rhetoric. In the tragedy of order the rhetoric of the controlling figures is of two kinds: the ruler’s rhetoric and the counsellor’s rhetoric. The counsellor’s rhetoric consists mainly in building up a huge picture of society in which reality and appearance are presented as the same thing. Examples are Ulysses’ speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida, designed to restore Achilles to his position of supremacy in the Greek camp, and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech to Henry V comparing the state to a beehive, characterized by obedience, industry, consent, and an occasional massacre of drones.73 The ruler’s rhetoric is at its clearest in the address to the army, as we have it in Henry V’s exhortations before Harfleur and Agincourt74 and in the two harangues with which the action of Richard III goes into its last phase.75 Such rhetoric is hypnotic in its effect: there is usually a large element of lying in it, but it turns the wheel of the illusion of history, and the mob will not listen to anyone who, like Brutus or Coriolanus, disdains to use it. Brutus, like many liberals, is antirhetorical, and Coriolanus’s “heart’s his mouth” [3.1.256]: both are in consequence historical failures. It is essential to the purpose of such rhetoric that it should pretend not to be rhetoric: as with the counsellor’s set speech, it presents its illusion as obvious reality. Thus Antony asserts that he is a plain blunt man, not an orator like Brutus, and Polonius, another counselling rhetorician, swears he uses no art at all.76

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The Dionysian heroes of the passion tragedies express themselves in a very different rhetoric from that of the king or counsellor, and, as elsewhere, there are instructive parallels in the histories. Hotspur is a vigorous and likeable figure, full of the natural vitality that in a disordered period is likely to become actively rebellious. The order-figure, we saw, is associated with music and with magic. Hotspur has a good deal of contempt for both music and poetry, the implication being that his destiny is not for kingship. He is also contemptuous of the occult: he lives in a bright daylight world a long way below the moon, and in that world Glendower’s talk of magic and portents seems only neurotic obsession [1 Henry IV, 3.1.13–68]. Julius Caesar, however, was also a person of great common sense, but magic and portents surrounded him nonetheless. Thus Hotspur is a typical Dionysian figure of energy and fortune rather than of order and nature, a Phaethon, not the Phoebus that his rival Prince Henry is anxious to imitate. His rhetoric matches this impression: a remark made about it indicates that he might have been a greater man if he had been a duller one: He apprehends a world of figures here, But not the form of what he should intend. [1 Henry IV, 1.3.209–10]77

Hotspur is at the opposite extreme from Richard II, whose rhetoric mirrors his fortunes: that is, it falls away from the situations he is in instead of battering against them. It is beautiful but self-indulgent, luxuriating in monologue but never consolidating a group. The quality of music and poetry in Richard’s speech, the concentration on the pathos of his fall, and the touch of youthful narcissism about him, bring him much closer than any other of Shakespeare’s kings to the victim-figures of the tragedies of passion. We notice that Richard seems deliberately to seek the kind of situation that calls for elegiac lament, and is recalled unwillingly from “that sweet way I was in to despair” [3.2.205]. It is right that he should be gazing at his reflection in a mirror during the most public of his scenes, just as it is right for Henry V to describe himself as a person “that never looks in his glass for love of anything he sees there” [5.2.147–8]. In the rhetoric of a breaking social order we hear fragments of the kind of oracular truth that according to Nietzsche is thrown up by the Dionysian elegiac lament in Greek tragedy.78 We hear them in Lear’s maddened reflections on justice, in Timon’s misanthropy, in the cynicism of

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Enobarbus, in such comments as Williams’s “there are few die well that die in a battle,”79 just before the great gamble of Agincourt is risked and the horror of possible death is upon him. Such utterances are like sharp dissonances in classical music: however logical and right in their place, they are out of key with the whole design and have to be elaborately resolved within that design. Lear and Timon can be explained away as mad; Enobarbus is ultimately a creature of Antony; Williams is talked down by King Henry’s sonorous monologue. And yet in these dissonances we hear what is described at the end of King Lear as one of the results of undergoing a tragic experience, when we are able to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” [5.3.325]. We have already noticed, particularly in the histories, how, although the order-figure has, de jure, the right to command, he seems to be able to escape final moral responsibility for the consequences of his commands. Henry IV condemns Exton as the murderer of Richard II even though he admits that Exton was carrying out his own wishes;80 Jack Cade is killed and sent to hell by Iden with great enthusiasm, though he is explicitly said to be a mere tool of the Duke of York.81 It is clear that the Eichmann plea, that we must do what we are ordered to do, belongs only to the purely ironic vision: it is not an integral part of the tragic vision, where there must be some power of self-determination for the least heroic character. Similarly, Henry V responds to Williams by a long prose speech explaining that although a king may command his soldiers to risk their lives, even to the point at which their death is practically certain, kings “purpose not their death when they purpose their services” [4.1.157–8] and hence are absolved of responsibility for their deaths. One may understand the argument that a commander does not murder the soldiers killed under him, even if the commander is a king who has started the war essentially for kicks. But such a speech, delivered at such a place and time, and in disguise at that, has a quibbling and weaseling sound to it, and we may wonder what it is doing there. It seems to me that it is serving a purpose in Shakespeare’s histories rather similar, though a contrast, to the speech of God in book 3 [ll. 80–134] of Paradise Lost. In Milton, God absolves himself of direct responsibility for Adam’s fall, and, however unconvincing he may sound, Milton is trying through this speech to make God’s will to redeem man seem more credible. In Shakespeare, Henry, by absolving himself of direct responsibility for the deaths of his soldiers, makes his proclamation ascribing the victory of Agincourt to God alone less hypocritical.

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What he is really saying is that he is not himself divine, for only a divine leader could assume the scapegoat role of responsibility. It was this aspect of the speech that commended it to Samuel Johnson,82 who always approved of speeches emphasizing human limitations. Brutus may be morally more attractive to us when he accepts responsibility for killing Caesar, but by doing so he limits his possible social function to that of a rebel-figure. The powers that be are ordained of God: the powers that be being what they are, this means that God ordains tragedy in human life, through the present constitution of nature. The Trojan War, the theme of Troilus and Cressida, is, conventionally, the beginning of secular history, the convention being the assumption that the Trojans were the ancestors of the Romans and the Britons. The sense that the archetypes of history are being formed by the actions of the play is pervasive, and occasionally expressed: Pandarus says, for example, “let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end after my name; call them all Pandars; let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids” [Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.200–3]. And because the side that attracts our sympathies is the losing side, the archetypes are those of the tragic vision. The Trojans are fighting to retain possession of Helen, to whom they have no moral right: this fact puts the Greeks into the nemesis-role that is usually victorious in tragedy. Yet we prefer Hector and Troilus: as in other tragedies of passion, it is the greater and more heroic vitality that is destroyed, something colder and meaner that succeeds with the Greek victory. The two great tragic conceptions of being and time pervade the play: each is the subject of an eloquent speech by Ulysses. These two conceptions as presented are, respectively, the worlds of Tantalus and of Sisyphus. There is only a world of continuing process: nothing exists in the perfect tense, and nothing is ever really or permanently done. The greatest deeds of heroes must be continually repeated if the heroes are to be recognized. It is characteristic of this tragedy of passion that the orderfigures, Priam and Agamemnon, should be in the background, subordinated both to the champions and to the counsellors. Achilles does come back, though only through the pure accident of the death of Patroclus, and he does vanquish Hector, though only by the kind of treacherous murder that anyone else could have encompassed equally well. So the wheel of fortune gets off to a good start. Things work out more or less as Ulysses had planned them, but not because he planned them: he is an instrument of fortune, but for all his wiliness he is Fortune’s rejected

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counsellor, able to see her general design but not really able to direct it. His relation to Achilles is parodied by Thersites’ relation to Ajax, the latter all beef and no brains, the former too impotent to express his mental ability except in soliloquy or in the character of a “privileged man” or fool [2.3.57–65]. On the Trojan side, the Tantalus and Sisyphus themes are associated with the heroines, Helen and Cressida. The close linking of the heroic and the erotic is appropriate for a tragedy of this category, where heroism is seen as a deviation from love. Hector can see the absurdity of fighting for Helen, yet he allows himself to be overruled by Troilus’s acceptance of the absurdity. Hector and Troilus agree to continue pushing the stone of “fame” and “glory” up the hill, though Hector at least clearly recognizes that it is a form of idolatry, a service of something that is not there. Troilus urges this course because of his love for Cressida, and Cressida wants an indefinitely prolonged Tantalus situation. She feels that she can only be adequately loved as long as she makes her lover “tarry” [4.2.15–16], in the role of a perpetually elusive Courtly Love goddess. Once possessed by Troilus, an act she bitterly resents because it breaks her will to “hold off” [1.2.286], she enters the world of Sisyphus, ready to be possessed again by whoever is present, like the host in Ulysses’ time speech. She does not remain faithful to her original lover, but neither did Helen, who is Troilus’s heroic inspiration. Both Troilus and Cressida comment on the supremacy of the unconditioned will, and on the impossibility of keeping the will commanded by the reason, in love as in war. In the cosmos evoked by Ulysses’ “degree” speech the reason does command the will, being its superior, but this order is not the order of history, in which the irrational plays so important a role. In a world where action and passion are the same thing, there can be no union of the reason and the will on equal terms. As actor, man is an impotent spectator; as spectator, an impotent actor. The latter role is represented in the kind of voyeurism which is senile in Pandarus and sardonic in Thersites; the former is in Ajax’s lack of self-knowledge and Achilles’ remark on his inability to see to the bottom of his own mind [3.3.308–9], as well as, on the Trojan side, in the failure of Hector and Troilus to understand the squalid malignancy of the way that things really happen. The divided world of the passion-tragedies usually shows some correlation with another division between day and night, Apollo and Dionysus, common sense and romance, reality and desire, in which the

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Dionysian world is defeated. We saw something of this in the Henry IV plays and their alternation of dramatic interest between the historical theme, with Prince Henry as the emerging sun-king, and the night imagery attached to the Falstaff group. The same symbolic pattern is in Romeo and Juliet, with its subordinated “midsummer night’s dream” theme, and even in Coriolanus there is a touch of a similar contrast between the plebeian daylight world of complaint and envy and the dreamlike world of the hero’s exploits. The exploits make possible the kind of patrician life which produces Menenius, who describes himself as “one that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning” [2.1.51–3]. Troilus and Cressida has no very prominent day and night pattern in its imagery, but it does contrast the Trojans, who are playing a romantic game, with the Greeks, who are simply out to destroy a city. One word frequently associated with Hector is “live”: he dislikes killing people unless they are enemies of a type that fall within his strictly designed heroic code, and the contrast with Achilles, examining Hector and gloating with such pleasure over the idea of killing in itself, is a sharper form of the contrast between romantic and realistic worlds. Both worlds are aspects of human nature, and both show human beings bound to acting out prescribed roles, rituals that they have created themselves. In the more romantic and idealistic world, the one that is destroyed by the tragedy, there is usually a greater sense of gaya scienza, a life with moments of passionate and profound joy.83 Defeated or not, we are never in any doubt about the reality of Romeo’s love or Coriolanus’s heroism. But in Troilus and Cressida there is a strong feeling of the quixotic and unreal quality of Trojan courtliness. The world that wins out in the comedies not only loses here, but has its values and standards called into question, an aspect of the play summed up in the repudiation of Pandarus, already mentioned. Hence Troilus and Cressida is not merely, so far as Hector is the hero, a tragedy; it is also, so far as Troilus is the hero, an anti-comedy. It therefore impresses us, in the age of the antihero, as a peculiarly modern play. But it will probably always seem a modern play, at least as long as the present age of irony lasts. The Trojans are not innocent in any intelligible sense of the word, but in Troilus’s trust in Cressida and in Hector’s chivalry there is a quality of innocence. The play dramatizes, not the loss of innocence, but the sense of the infinite vulnerability of innocence, however little of it there is and wherever it is, and the inevitability of the defeat of such innocence by experience. The two components of the tragic vision, the ironic sense of being in time

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and the heroic effort that struggles against it, are both very clearly presented, but the ironic vision, elaborated by Ulysses’ two great speeches, is more dominant than in any other tragedy. Antony and Cleopatra is the definitive tragedy of passion, and in it the ironic and heroic themes, the day-world of history and the night-world of passion, expand into natural forces of cosmological proportions. The Western and Roman world is pervaded by order, rule, and measure: when Antony tries to live by its standards he says: I have not kept my square; but that to come Shall all be done by th’ rule. [2.3.6–7]

Its commander is Octavius Caesar, the very incarnation of history and the world’s greatest order-figure, a leader who is ruthless yet not really treacherous given the conditions of a ruler’s task, who is always provided with all the justifications he needs for destroying Antony. Here, turning the wheel of history appears in its most persuasive form as conquering the world, and conquering the world, being thought of as ultimately the most real activity, is presented as a duty. It has many moral imperatives on its side, but we can hardly say that it is a pattern of virtue, at least so far as it affects Antony. As a Roman soldier, Antony reminds us more of the Antony in Julius Caesar, an altogether smaller character. His lieutenant Ventidius, in a highly significant speech, alludes to the danger of a subordinate’s doing so well as to affect his superior’s “image,” as we would say now. Antony is much more calculating, when doing his conquering duty, than he is when he rewards the deserting Enobarbus, or when he turns the conference on Pompey’s ship into an epiphany of Dionysus. The Eastern and Egyptian world is presided over by Cleopatra, queen of the ancient and timeless land which renews its fertility by the overflowing of the Nile each year. The play opens with the remark that Antony’s dotage “O’erflows the measure” [1.1.2], which is a Roman view, and Cleopatra’s world is a Dionysian world of gigantic feasting and drunkenness and love-making. Both worlds are equally hard on the taxpayer, to use a standard that Plutarch at least is aware of even if Shakespeare ignores it. Each world is a self-evident reality to itself and an illusion to its rival. To the Romans, Antony is “not Antony” in Egypt [1.1.57]: to Cleopatra, if he stays there, he “will be himself” [1.1.43]. Antony himself, of course, tends to find his identity in his immediate context, and to wa-

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ver disastrously between the two. But just as Octavius is the incarnation of history, so Cleopatra, like Falstaff, is a counterhistorical figure. Most of what she substitutes for heroic action is idleness and distraction, and there is plenty of textual justification for making her a straight temptress like the other Renaissance sirens who entice the hero from his quest with some Bower of Bliss or lotus land. The Egypt of the play includes the Biblical Egypt, the land of bondage, and the Egypt of legend in which serpents and crocodiles are spawned from the mud of the Nile. Cleopatra, the serpent of the Nile, is a Venus rising from it in Enobarbus’s speech; she wears the regalia of Isis; she is a stella maris,84 a goddess of the moon and the sea. She has affinities with the kind of goddess figure that both Hebraic and Classical religions kept trying to subdue by abuse: she is a whore and her children are all bastards; she is a snare to men and destroys their masculinity, making them degenerate slaves like Circe; she is an Omphale dressing her Hercules in women’s clothes; she has many characteristics of her sister whore of Babylon. This last gives a curiously apocalyptic tone to the play: just as Troilus and Cressida is something of a secular fall, so Antony and Cleopatra, with its references to “Herod of Jewry,”85 seems a kind of summing up of the old dispensation. The final cadences of the play seem to unite the two Biblical demonic themes, Egypt and the serpent, in a way that makes Cleopatra a central symbol of everything sinister in human history: This is an aspic’s trail: and these fig-leaves Have slime upon them, such as the aspic leaves Upon the caves of Nile. [5.2.351–3]

But Antony and Cleopatra is not a morality play, and Egypt is not hell: it is rather the night side of nature, passionate, cruel, superstitious, barbaric, dissolute, what you will, but not to be identified with its vices, any more than Rome can be identified with its virtues. Prince Henry finds himself in the same Dionysian night world when he is a youth, and still has the choice of going up the wheel of fortune and history or of plunging downward into a world which becomes with increasing clarity a world of thieves and whores. But Henry, like Odin in the Eddas, learns a good deal from his descent and escapes from it at the sacrifice of some of his humanity. Antony is on the other side of the wheel: he can only fall out of history and action into the antihistorical and mythical world of passion opposite it, where the dominating figure is female and the hero

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is her subordinate. The slighter and younger Octavius goes up the wheel and takes command of history: Antony goes on to a hero’s destruction, yet even in his death he is upstaged by Cleopatra, who monopolizes the attention of the audience to the end, looking in her death ready to “catch another Antony” [5.2.347] and start all over. She is worth the attention, because she is all we can see of a world as big as the Roman world, and not only all we can see of it but that world in herself, a microcosm of passion “whom everything becomes” [1.1.49].86 Her Egypt is able to bring a superhuman vitality out of Antony that Rome cannot equal, not in spite of the fact that it destroys him, but because it destroys him. At the close of the play the two ends of the wheel confront each other: the Cleopatra who has pursued conclusions infinite Of easy ways to die [5.2.355–6]

and the Caesar who has been equally busy in pursuing difficult ways to live. Rome with its measure and order has won out over the overflowing Nile: the last line of the play urges us, in Caesar’s voice, to see “High order in this great solemnity.” But we can see something else besides high order: we can see that there is a part of nature that can never be ordered, a colossal exuberance of powers, the tailors of the earth as Enobarbus calls them [1.2.162–5], that weave and unweave the forms of life. Antony has caught a glimpse of these powers at the price of disappearing like a cloud when “the rack dislimns” [4.14.10], for it is only a selfdestroying will that can bring one close to them. In fact Antony may say, with Slender in The Merry Wives, “I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely” [1.1.251–2]. Hercules has deserted him, but we remember how Hercules got rid of the burden of the world by tricking Atlas into reassuming it: perhaps there is something gullible about Caesar, as Cleopatra suggests when she says she hears Antony mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse their after wrath. [5.2.285–7]

However, Caesar is now the master of his world, the secular counterpart to Christ, the offstage presence in Cymbeline who is able to exact tribute from the end of the world in Britain even when defeated there. We say,

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in Roman terms, that Antony has lost “the world” for love. But his disappearance from that world is also, in a final twist of the tragic paradox, the appearance of another world that endures no master. III Little World of Man:87 The Tragedy of Isolation In Shakespeare’s tragedies certain moral issues are involved, and often, particularly in the histories and the Roman plays, our moral sympathies are divided. But in many of the greatest tragedies there is no division of moral sympathies at all. Whatever sympathy we may have for Iago, Edmund, Macbeth, or Claudius is dramatic, not moral. And yet the feeling of Shakespearean tragedy is authentic, in contrast to the less authentic version of tragedy that we call melodrama, where we feel impelled to applaud the hero and hiss the villain. Titus Andronicus seems to us less authentically tragic than Hamlet: the plot of Hamlet is slightly less violent, but not so much so as to make that the crucial difference. In authentic tragedy we participate in the action: we condemn Iago and Macbeth because they are what they are and yet have succeeded in making themselves extensions, for a moment, of ourselves. Melodrama leans to the moral and conceptual, and tries to identify us with a heroism we admire and separate us from a villainy we detest. Melodrama thus tends to find its emotional tragic focus in the punishment of the villain, and our reaction to that is primarily: “Oh, the difference from me!” Thus melodrama appeals to emotions akin to those aroused in watching a public execution. The action of The Spanish Tragedy is watched by a personified Revenge and the ghost of Don Andrea, a former lover of the heroine, Bel-imperia. Bel-imperia is in love with someone else when the play begins, and one wonders if the reason for Don Andrea’s pleasure in the action is resentment that everybody has so completely forgotten about him. But no: the reason is that he just likes to see bloody things happening: Horatio murdered in his father’s bower; Vile Serberine by Pedringano slain; False Pedringano hanged by quaint device; Fair Isabella by herself misdone; Prince Balthazar by Bel-imperia stabbed; The Duke of Castile and his wicked son Both done to death by old Hieronimo;

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298 My Bel-imperia fallen as Dido fell, And good Hieronimo slain by himself: Aye, these were spectacles to please my soul! [4.5.1–12]

Occasionally we feel that a tragedy has manipulated its action in the direction of horror, just as a comedy may manipulate its action in the direction of a happy ending. The Cardinal, in Shirley’s play of that name, is an unattractive but well-realized character for four acts, but when he goes on into attempted rape and poisoning we feel that the integrity of his character has been sacrificed to a blood-and-thunder conclusion. Such manipulation is melodramatic rather than tragic. Again, at the end of Titus Andronicus Aaron’s fate is carefully spelled out for us: he is to be buried up to his waist in earth until he starves to death. His response to this is most satisfactory: a regret that he had not done ten thousand more evil deeds [5.3.187–8]. The conclusion is tragically less authentic than the threat to torture Iago to death at the end of Othello, because, coming where it does in that play, it is the utter futility of revenge on Iago that most impresses us. Terrible things happen in Shakespeare’s mature tragedies, but they do not happen with the particular kind of sadistic brutality that goes with appealing to high moral principles in the audience. In Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore the theme is brother–sister incest, and the sister’s nurse, a harmless and amiable old woman who has connived at the incest, first has her eyes put out and then, as an act of justice applauded by the whole cast, is sentenced to be burned alive. This is the kind of audience response condemned by Blake when he remarks how, at a tragic scene, “The soul drinks murder and revenge and applauds its own holiness.”88 The Christian religion appears explicitly in Elizabethan tragedy mainly in connection with its doctrine of hell, and so usually has the same brutalizing and debasing effect as the morality which it reinforces. Hamlet’s speech on Claudius’s prayer belongs to the very common tragic convention of making sure that the villain dies at the time most inconvenient for his entry into the next world. The convention illustrates the difficulty that tragedy, which deals with the inescapable human situation, has with a God for whom all things ought to be possible. We saw that the Greek gods enforce the mortality of man: similarly the Christian God, in a Christian tragedy, is normally a deus in machina, stuck in a legal and sacramental machine, automatically sending Claudius to hell if he dies drunk, and to purgatory if he dies praying. In other words, God in trag-

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edy is seen through a haze of human passion, and is created in the image of that passion. We have glanced already at the fact that God’s main interest, in Elizabethan tragedy, is in promoting the revenge, and in making it as bloody as possible. The source of Middleton’s The Changeling is a book called The Triumphs of God’s Revenge Against Murder,89 though Middleton is more restrained than Ford and Tourneur, who are particularly fond of putting up signs reading “Danger—God at work” in the course of the action. In the Ford play just referred to, one character comments: I need not now—my heart persuades me so— To further his confusion; there is One Above begins to work: for, as I hear, Debates already ’twixt his wife and him Thicken and run to head.90

In both of Tourneur’s plays91 there is a muttering roll of thunder when the villainy has really gone too far. The religious dimension, in both Ford and Tourneur, goes with a moral interest that leads them to call their characters by allegorical names, like the Lussurioso and Ambitioso of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Christianity is—or was—a moral and conceptual system including a theme of salvation which is comic in shape, and a theme of damnation which is subtragic. Its climax, in which life is separated into a heaven and a hell where infinite torments are exacted for finite offences, is an apotheosis of melodrama. The existential form of tragedy has to wriggle out, as best it can, from underneath a religious doctrine where “grace and vengeance strangely join,” as Isaac Watts puts it.92 There is a Biblical injunction, “Vengeance is mine,”93 but the vengeance of God being apparently of the same kind as the vengeance of cruel and malicious human beings, it is not difficult for any revenger to think of himself as the appointed instrument of divine wrath. The Hieronimo of The Spanish Tragedy, who quotes the passage,94 is one of many examples. When one reads Dante’s Inferno one may reflect what an immense debt humanity owes to the people of Dante’s day who placidly went on sinning, and thereby reached in experience some sense of the unreality of the conceptual nightmare. Among other things, they have forced us to read the poem less melodramatically, which in this case means less literally. Faustus is the great religious tragedy of false wisdom,95 as Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan play96 is the great religious tragedy of false love. Both plays

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take their heroes to hell; both were in consequence very popular, and it is significant that both eventually became something of a circus. That is, the religious theme strongly suggested to their audiences unauthentic ways of responding to them. There is, however, another conception of hell which is more genuinely tragic. Tragedy is concentrated on death as the essential event of life, and as far as the tragic action is concerned it is also the end of life. One muchabused female in Euripides remarks how horrifying it would be if death were not the end of life.97 We notice the extraordinary power, in Greek tragedy, of the desire to have one’s body buried, planted in a definite spot and marked. The unburied body, “a prey to dogs and birds,” in the Homeric phrase,98 is left to dissolve in the flux of time; burial is, at least symbolically, real death, or deliverance from time. This dimension of the theme comes unobtrusively but palpably into Antigone. But of course there was still a shade that survived in the world below, and this shade still felt all the tragic emotions of enmity and revenge. The ghost of Achilles demanded sacrifices; the ghost of Darius returned with sombre warnings for his successor. In the convention of the returning ghost, tragedy expresses something that does not in itself depend on any belief in survival after death. No event in time ever completes itself; no act of aggression fails to provoke revenge; no act of revenge fails to provoke another act of revenge. We have noticed how closely Shakespearean tragedy is linked to history, and history to the sense of the same kind of event going on without cessation. Hell, seen from this point of view, is an allegory of the unending torment of the human condition. As Thomas Dekker says, “There is a Hell named in our Creed, and a Heaven, and the Hell comes before; if we look not into the first, we shall never live in the last.”99 A sour remark of one of Timon’s servants indicates even more clearly that the real hell is the one we ourselves create: “The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic: he crossed himself by ’t; and I cannot think but in the end the villainies of man will set him clear” [3.3.28–30]. At the bottom of Dante’s hell we find a three-headed Satan meditatively chewing Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius, one in each mouth.100 Judas we can understand, and we know something of Dante’s secular anxieties from the De Monarchia. But Caesar is nobody in particular in the Commedia, merely a name in the upper regions of hell. Why should Brutus and Cassius be assigned the ultimate indignity of becoming twothirds of the devil’s bubble-gum? There are degrees of villainy in the Inferno, and apparently the traitor is to be considered the most detestable

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of all villains, whatever the motives for his treachery. There are implications here for the theory of tragedy that are of central importance. We said that it is natural to man to be in a state of social discipline, hence the figure we called the order-figure, Caesar or Duncan or Agamemnon, represents the reality of human life, of being in time. And yet the more closely we examined this reality, the more it began to look like illusion as well. The order-figure, we saw, is an actor, wholly absorbed in appearance, and the wheel of history he turns is based on a constant round of battles. Battles are very serious matters to ordinary people, the nonheroic who are not allowed to wear heavy armour. One thinks of Falstaff’s remark: “There’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive; and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life” [1 Henry IV, 5.3.36–8]. But to heroes battles are a game. It is not that they are never hurt or killed, but that battles for them are primarily a risking of or gambling with life, a game played with death as the stakes. Man is homo ludens, a player of games,101 and he is never more deeply engaged in play than when he is trying to kill someone at the risk of being killed himself. The coward is despised because he refuses to play the game, and so reminds us that it is a game, and that we have a choice of not playing it. In the “ecstatic” heroic society one’s life is in one’s loyalties: to die bravely in battle is still, in a very real sense, to preserve one’s essential life. The coward feels that the centre of life is not in his leader or society but in himself. He is feared as well as despised, because unless his behaviour is shouted down with contempt and ridicule there will be a slight suggestion about it of sanity in the midst of hysteria. This suggestion is tolerable only when released as humour, as it is in Falstaff’s speeches on honour and counterfeits.102 Falstaff in these speeches is not so much a clown as the spokesman of the ironic vision that outlives the tragic one. The hypocrite is another character type who is isolated from the tragic society. There is an etymological connection between the hypocrite and the masked actor. In a sense we are all hypocrites because we all wear social masks or personae, as Timon says to the painter, referring to the fall of man: The painting is almost the natural man; For since dishonour traffics with man’s nature, He is but outside. [1.1.157–9]

The strong man or successful ruler is the man who is no longer aware of

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a disparity between reality and appearance, and is able to live in a continuous state of self-hypnosis. There is something to be said for genuine hypocrisy, if the phrase is not an oxymoron: to be constantly aware of an incongruity between what one says and what one is takes a degree of skill, self-discipline, even honesty, of a type that one would hardly expect from a mere vice. After three plays in which a long procession of characters move in and out like figures in a waving tapestry, Richard III hits us with the impact of complete humanity, assuming that great wickedness is a necessary part of that completeness. This is because he is a hypocrite, an actor who knows he is putting on a show, and he establishes a dramatic bond with us in spite of ourselves, as though he were giving us a confidential wink. Richard is naturally less likeable than Falstaff, but he has something of Falstaff’s capacity to attach himself to the audience even as he loses contact with his own society. The ghosts who appear to him at Bosworth suggest to us that in proportion as one conceals oneself from the tragic society one makes oneself visible to the unseen world of the dead, from which revenge so frequently comes. Richard divides the sympathies of the audience in the same way that he divides his own mind. Our attention is turned toward the play, where Richard is a lively, even an exhilarating, source of dramatic action, but we have deep moral reservations about what he is doing that identify with the ghosts of death and revenge. The traitor is much more disturbing than the coward or hypocrite. It is the first postulate of the heroic society that no traitor can be honourably motivated: no enemy’s cause is just, because justice cannot exist apart from loyalty to one’s own leader. The coward goes on living in his society, however shamed and disgraced; the traitor suggests the nothingness, the sense of annihilation, inherent in the dissolving of the social group. This nothingness or not-being is an abyss far deeper than death, for death in itself affects only the individual, and the individual is not, in this conception, the ultimate form of human life. Hence though the coward and hypocrite may speak directly to us, with the oracular ring of unacceptable truth in what they say, the traitor remains more inscrutable. His motto is Iago’s “Demand me nothing: what you know, you know” [Othello, 5.2.303]. We recognize this inscrutability even in Iago’s soliloquies: when he says, For that I do suspect the lusty Moor Hath leaped into my seat: the thought whereof

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Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards, [2.1.295–7]

he is not really trying to rationalize his own villainy, and so taking us into his confidence: he is merely trying to poison our minds against Othello. There are two levels of treason: the lower one is betrayal of one’s society to an enemy society; above it comes conspiracy, or a purely internal rebellion against the ruler. This latter, besides being the central theme of the order-tragedies, is deeply ambiguous. Brutus and Cassius in Shakespeare are certainly not the simple traitors that they are in Dante. From his own point of view, Brutus is not a rebel but, as Beddoes calls him, the saint of avengers,103 and Caesar to him represents not an object of loyalty but a menace to loyalty. We remember the couplet: Treason never doth prosper. What’s the reason? Why, if it doth prosper, none dare call it treason.104

There is a sense, and a not particularly cynical sense, in which this is true. If Brutus had been more like Antony, more ruthless, self-centred, and realistic, his relation to Caesar would have been much more like Caesar’s relation to Pompey. Bolingbroke, again, was not a traitor, because he won, but if Richard II had been a stronger ruler he would certainly have died a traitor’s death. Bolingbroke’s son Henry V is a strong ruler, and when the CambridgeScroop-Grey conspiracy against him fails the horrified king remarks, I will weep for thee; For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like Another fall of man. [2.2.140–2]

The phrase is echoed from the garden scene in Richard II [3.4.76], and indicates that Henry V has, for the moment, put an end to the cycle of disorder that began with the deposition of Richard, and has finally crushed the cause of the Earl of Mortimer, who de jure had a better claim to the throne than he had, as we are reminded in Henry VI. These conspirators are traitors in the lower sense of being willing to betray their country to France, and Henry at the time is deeply sunk in what we have called the self-hypnosis of a successful ruler about to start a major war. His father, just before his death, had pointed out to him that the most effective way of dealing with rebellious temperaments was to keep them busy with

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“foreign quarrels” [2 Henry IV, 4.5.214]. But even so the remark gives us an important clue to the meaning of treason in Shakespeare. The traitor reminds us of what the doctrine of original sin reminds us, that human life is an ironic condition, and that the greatest efforts of loyalty and heroism can raise it only from the ironic into the tragic. And if the human condition can be seen as unendingly ironic or tragic, it is being seen as life in hell, with the traitor closest to the source of personal evil. In melodrama the effort is to separate the audience from the villain: melodrama speaks comfortable words, like “hanging is too good for him.” It seeks to persuade the audience that they are a part of a social order more reassuring than the ironic or the tragic. We notice that the three conspirators against Henry V all make speeches in turn explaining how glad they are to be caught and punished. It is clear that the phenomenon now known as brainwashing is not the invention of this politically very unoriginal age. There is some suggestion of being relieved from a kind of demonic possession, of a type that seems to run through history with its own version of de jure succession. We find this again in the death of the Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, where there is also a suggestion that the demonic possession passes from the old Thane of Cawdor into the new one: Malcolm, in his turn, seems aware of the danger of inheriting it from Macbeth. More important is the fact that such repentant traitors are seeking the consolations of melodrama for themselves. They are referred to, in Sonnet 124, as “fools of time” Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime. [ll. 13–14]

The word “fool” in Shakespeare, when used in direct connection with time, nature, or fortune (as in Romeo’s phrase “fortune’s fool” [3.1.136] and Lear’s “the natural fool of fortune” [4.6.191]), means essentially the person to whom things happen, the one who cannot control events. The successful ruler is a combination of nature and fortune, de jure and de facto power. He steers his course by the tiller of an immediate past and by the stars of an immediate future. He is resolute and decisive, and yet his actions in a way rest on a continuous suspension of decision, for he acts as an agent or instrument for the decisions of nature. Antony finds that Octavius has better luck at games than he has: the significance of this is not simply that Octavius’s fortune is in the ascendant, but that his fortune is better synchronized with the natural course of events. It is this synchronizing of nature and fortune that soothsayers study, and

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that the witches in Macbeth know something about. We call it fate, which oversimplifies it. The soothsayer in Antony and Cleopatra calls it, more accurately, “nature’s infinite book of secrecy” [1.2.10]. One feature of this “fate” is the sense of continuity in time, the preserving of which is what makes legitimacy so important a principle of government. The order-figure experiences time as the rhythm of his actions. He does things when it is time to do them, and the sense of responding to the moment gives a continuous dramatic exhilaration to his life. Julius Caesar is almost devoid of anything that we should call anxiety: death “will come when it will come” [2.2.37], and he can hardly understand any other attitude. In the pretragic first act of Othello, Othello tells Desdemona that she will have to fit into his busy schedules as best she can, because “we must obey the time” [1.3.300]. Prince Henry uses the New Testament phrase “Redeeming time” about his proposed emergence from the world of Falstaff into the world of action,105 and later, Exeter, explaining to the King of France that Henry V is no longer a dissolute prince but an irresistible conqueror, says, Now he weighs time Even to the utmost grain. [Henry V, 2.4.137–8]

The tragic rebel has committed himself primarily to fortune, and in fortune what happens depends on resolution, decision, and will, instead of on a natural course of events to be followed. Hence, as soon as the rebel-figure plans his rebellion, he has a sense of having broken through the continuity of time. He no longer has any sense of the present moment: he is conscious only of the “gap of time” that Leontes falls into when he becomes jealous [The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.154]. We recall the famous speech of Brutus: Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream. The Genius and the Mortal instruments Are then in council, and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection. [Julius Caesar, 2.1.63–9]106

The last word draws attention to the identity of Brutus’s inner mental

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state and his political situation. He is now in a state of “dread”: everything is thrown forward to a future moment, and that moment, when reached, will become an irrevocable past. The future moment is the moment of guilt, and it imposes on one, until it is reached, the intolerable strain of remaining innocent. As Atreus says in Seneca, once he has determined on cooking his brother’s children for his brother’s dinner: “Why do I remain innocent so long?”107 We notice that anyone who is forced to brood on the past and expect the future lives in a world where that which is not present is present, in other words in a world of hallucination. Macbeth’s capacity for seeing things that may or may not be there is almost limitless, and the appearance of the mousetrap play to Claudius, though more easily explained, has the same dramatic point as the appearance of Banquo’s ghost. Brutus speaks of a “hideous dream” with the Genius in council; the assassination summons up an evil genius in the form of Caesar’s ghost. The fact that murder is a uniquely uncanny crime has a good deal to do with the sense of breaking the temporal continuity of existence. Of course the moment of guilt is also the moment of opportunity, the catching of the tide in the affairs of men. But the rebel, as a rule, is not the instrument of nature, whose rhythms, if often destructive and terrible, are always leisurely. He himself is the source of decision, and so the sooner he acts on his decision the better. Satan remarks to Christ in Paradise Regained, Each act is rightliest done Not when it must, but when it may be best, [bk. 4, ll. 475–6]

and Christ himself said to his betrayer, “What thou dost, do quickly.”108 The resolute or autonomous decision, then, is always hurried: it violates time, just as the violent death is untimely (or, in Elizabethan language, “timeless”). Brutus, as soon as he has got his army into a strong position, cannot endure the strain of waiting, and makes a resolute decision to take it out to Philippi, where it is cut to pieces. When Claudius marries Gertrude, Hamlet is more outraged by the “wicked speed” of the event than by the “incestuous” aspect of it [1.2.156–7],109 and Claudius’s later hurry in getting Polonius buried “in hugger-mugger” [4.5.84] indicates his demoralization. That Macbeth is being hurried into a premature act by his wife is a point unlikely to escape the most listless member of the audience, but Macbeth comes to regret the instant of fatal delay in murdering Macduff, and draws the moral that

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The flighty purpose never is o’ertook Unless the deed go with it. From this moment The very firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand. [4.1.145–8]

That is, in future he will try to attain the successful ruler’s spontaneous rhythm of action. Even in the more domestic and mercantile setting of the fall of Timon, we can still hear the theme of the breaking of time in the steward’s speech: ’Tis all engaged, some forfeited and gone, And what remains will hardly stop the mouth Of present dues. The future comes apace. What shall defend the interim? [2.2.146–9]

The same feeling of broken rhythm comes into the passion-tragedies too, especially Romeo and Juliet. The sense of a love that is “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden” [2.2.118], of something that explodes and hurls its victims to destruction (the image of gunpowder is frequently used), hangs over the whole play, and is expressed not only by such agents of professional caution as Friar Laurence, but by the lovers themselves. The ideal source of the rhythm of time which the successful ruler accommodates to human action is indicated in Henry VI’s pathetic speech expressing his own longing to retreat from the world of rule and rebellion to a pastoral world where time is experienced as a pure becoming, where such a phrase as “ripeness is all” has its real meaning and is not merely a command to live out the whole of a miserable life: To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, Thereby to see the minutes how they run, How many makes the hour full complete; How many hours brings about the day; How many days will finish up the year; How many years a mortal man may live. When this is known, then to divide the times. [3 Henry VI, 2.5.24–30]

The link is obvious and significant with the colloquy between Touchstone and Jaques in As You Like It [2.7.12–34], and indicates how the pastoral and the recovery of time are both symbols of a higher level of nature than history as such can reach, even though the social discipline

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of war brings us closer to it than the lack of discipline which is what is so often meant by peace. At the opposite extreme is Macbeth’s “tomorrow” speech [5.5.19–28], where the experience of time is the demonic parody of Henry’s. Of the three great rebel-figures, Claudius, morally, is halfway between the “noblest Roman” Brutus and the “butcher” Macbeth.110 He has committed a detestable crime, but still he is a born ruler, prompt in danger, affable and gracious in peace, and an affectionate husband. For the early part of the play, at least, he seems genuinely attached to Hamlet. Hamlet’s view of him is a natural one for Hamlet to take, but is not always consistent with the impression Claudius himself gives. Claudius also delays in striking down Hamlet, and also gives unconvincing excuses for his delay. The main structure of the play is the one we have mentioned, with Claudius the usurper and Hamlet the avenger; but on this is superimposed a secondary pattern. Claudius is a real king, with some divinity hedging him; Hamlet is not sure that the ghost is authentic, and then he himself, through his blunder in killing Polonius, stirs up his own nemesis in Laertes. Hence Hamlet has some of the rebel-figure’s characteristics, especially the feeling that the time is out of joint and the necessity of forcing himself into resolute decisions. Hamlet, however, is primarily a nemesis-figure, an avenger who is in the position of trying to achieve some identity, both individual and social, by a destructive act. And just as the act of seizing power is subject to hurry, so the act of vengeance is subject to delay. If the vengeance is just, it represents a reintegrating of nature and fortune, and so has to wait for the natural course of events. As Hieronimo says in The Spanish Tragedy, Wise men will take their opportunity, Closely and safely fitting things to time. But in extremes advantage hath no time; And therefore all times fit not for revenge. [3.13.25–8]

If God is on the side of the vengeance, the avenger must wait for God’s time, which is usually very slow for human impatience. Thus Charlemont, the pious hero of The Atheist’s Tragedy, is led to the very brink of death before events work out in his favour. The avenger reintegrates time by starting a new cycle, whatever the moral status of his revenge. Even the abortive attempt at revenge on Claudius by Laertes is hailed by the crowd “as the world were now but

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to begin” [Hamlet, 4.5.104]. Like the rebel-figure, the nemesis-figure may be of any moral status. Antony in Julius Caesar, with his unscrupulous rhetorical tricks, his cynical use of Caesar’s will, and his determination to treat Lepidus as a “property” [4.1.40], is not a very attractive figure, but the irresistible power of a new cycle of time is on his side. Cassius almost kills himself in obedience to this principle of a renewed cycle: the battle of Philippi is fought on his birthday and so “time is come round” [5.3.23]. Edmund’s “wheel is come full circle” [King Lear, 5.3.175] is another reluctant tribute of rebellion to its returning adversary. This theme is at its clearest where we are most in sympathy with the nemesis. Thus at the end of Macbeth, after the proclamation “the time is free” [5.9.21], and of promises to make reparations of Macbeth’s tyranny “Which would be planted newly with the time” [5.9.31], there will be a renewal not only of time but of the whole rhythm of nature symbolized by the word “measure” [5.9.39], which includes both the music of the spheres and the dispensing of human justice, the opposite of Richard II’s anarchy where “time is broke and no proportion kept.” We notice how frequently the avenger has to be completely isolated from the action, generally by exile, before the nemesis can take place. Bolingbroke and Richmond come from overseas; Malcolm and Macduff from England; Hamlet, like so many heroes of folk tales, lands “naked” on Danish shores [4.7.44]; Edgar emerges from his Poor Tom role and Cordelia, in an effort at nemesis that fails, invades England from France; Coriolanus, Lucius, and Alcibiades in Timon come back in vengeance to their native cities. Avengers are to be distinguished from traitors, and obviously they are never cowards; but they are usually isolated from a tragic society in a similar way: they have to face the action, so to speak, before being reintegrated with it. We may now apply our principles of isolation to the threefold structure of the tragedy of order. We have the parody of the order-figure in the tyrant, who, like Richard III or Macbeth, is the leader of his society but is not attached to it. What the tyrant does he does primarily for selfinterest, and hence he tends as he goes on to become more and more incapable of anything except murder. The traitor, like Iago or Edmund, is a parody of the rebel-figure, whose actions dissolve and disintegrate his society: naturally he is identical with certain types of rebel-figure, such as Macbeth. Third, we have certain characters isolated by the action of the play, like Lear or Timon, who become parodies of a nemesis-figure, making futile threats of revenge. Othello, with his talk of “the cause”

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and of “sacrifice” [5.2.1, 65], is also a nemesis parody. The tyrant and traitor increase the evil of the world they are in, but they desert the order of nature for the wheel of fortune. Hence, while their regimes are worse than those of their predecessors, they are also less inevitable, as they give the wheel of fortune a harder push that will eventually bring them down and their nemesis up. This process gives us a normal and morally intelligible tragic action ending in the post-tragic contract already discussed. These three types tend to be attracted to two opposite poles. At one pole is the character who is involved wholly in, and seems to enjoy, the tragic action he brings about, whether he is a tyrant like Richard III or a traitor like Iago and Edmund. He could also be a nemesis-figure, though there is no example in Shakespeare, except for a few moods of Hamlet: a more typical example is Tourneur’s Vendice,111 who surrenders himself to justice as soon as he has established the justice. Such a character is for a time a demonic parody of the successful ruler: Iago, in particular, seems to create the tragedy of Othello with a successful ruler’s sense of timing. This type also has about him some feeling of a master of ceremonies or lord of misrule, a perverted artist in crime, a sinister Prospero evoking his own drama, even a kind of macabre clown. The connection of this last with Richard III is clear enough, and still clearer in Marlowe’s Barabas. These “Machiavellian” characters are projections of the author’s will to direct the action to a tragic end: they fascinate us and inspire a reluctant admiration, but they are always set over against us. At the other pole is the character whose isolation from the action has intensified his consciousness. He has withdrawn from the social group and is now seeing it as objective, as facing him with indifference or hostility. But he is seeing it, so to speak, from our own side of the stage, and his thoughts are for the moment ours. Most of the really titanic figures of Shakespearean tragedy are in this position for most of the play, Lear, Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth included, and it is the presence of this perspective that makes the tragedy authentic. These two poles of dramatic interest are not the moral poles, the simple difference between the right side and the wrong side. The dramatic and the moral placing of characters syncopate against each other, creating a complex pattern of sympathies without confusing us about our ultimate reactions. “I am myself alone,” says Richard III:112 he is not at all a coward and the term “traitor” is too simple for him, but his relation to his society eventually becomes unreal. To understand this fully we have to see him in his context, as the end of a long process of social disintegration which

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has gone on all through the vast tetralogy that ends with his death. We mentioned Talbot, the hero of the first part of Henry VI, and his remark to the French countess who tries to take him prisoner that he is his own shadow, his substance being in his followers [2.3.45–66]. Talbot’s chief opponent is La Pucelle, better known as Joan of Arc. La Pucelle in Henry VI is so complex a character that some critics ascribe her to two authors, the one they approve of being Shakespeare.113 She speaks eloquently of her mission and of France’s case (her rhetoric is supposed to hypnotize Burgundy at once); she seems genuinely possessed by a belief in her own purity and nobility of descent, and may have turned to her “fiends” in an act of genuine patriotism [5.3.2–23]. She has a brusque realism and, though terrified of death for herself, she has an accurate sense of the rise and fall of fortune in history. No actress could bring unity out of the role, because the interconnecting lines have not been written, and if they had been they would have shattered the framework of the play. What Shakespeare is interested in is not La Pucelle’s character, much less her cause, but the symbolism of two kinds of society. On the one side is the heroic, “ecstatic” society of Talbot, desperate and beleaguered; on the other is its opposite, a society created out of the ambition of one person. Help comes too late to save Talbot, but La Pucelle’s victories are won with great speed, her promises, as King Charles says, bearing fruit instantly, like Adonis’s gardens. The “fiends” appearing to her symbolize her type of society, and the contrast is essentially the same as that between the heroic but hard-pressed Duncan and the world of tyranny, treachery, witchcraft, illusion, and looking into the seeds of time set up by Macbeth. There is a suggestion that the instant La Pucelle is executed something of her spirit passes into Margaret, and thereby becomes imported into England. The first part concludes with an ironical comparison of the taking of Margaret to England with the carrying of Helen off to Troy by Paris. As with the Thane of Cawdor, it appears that evil also has its legitimacy and its de jure succession. The account of the War of the Roses is full of the kind of imagery that Shakespeare uses for the disintegration of social order. The destructive energy of storm and tempest is prominent, and so are the meteors, comets, and “exhalations”114 that represent social disorder. We also have the prophecies, oracles, soothsayings, and rumours that accompany the violation of time, when the sense of the present is dislocated into a “hideous dream” of the future, “When avoided grace makes destiny.”115 The uncanny “clock” passages in Richard III have the same sense of the “un-

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timely.”116 From the second part of Henry VI on, the action is polarized around a good and a bad Gloucester, like much of the action of King Lear, and with Richard III the cycles of fortune and history stop turning for an instant and show us an apocalyptic separation of order and chaos, the human and the demonic. Richard III, in becoming himself alone, also becomes the circumference of a shadow-world of murdered ghosts who return on All Souls’ Day to carry him off. When he says, By the apostle Paul, shadows to-night Have struck117 more terror to the soul of Richard Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers Armed in proof, and led by shallow Richmond, [5.3.216–19]

he completes the theme of shadow and substance that began with Talbot, Talbot being the murdered “primal father” of this group of plays. The isolated characters at the other pole are isolated through consciousness. They become aware of what is happening, and speak for us because in that moment of awareness they join the audience, and see the action around them as a spectacle. For a philosopher, isolation is the first act of consciousness. I am myself alone, he says, and the rest of the world then becomes objective to him. But for the hero of a tragic action, isolating one’s mind in this way is deeply terrifying. In the tragic society one’s life is in one’s function or relation to others, and when the group preserves one’s real life, isolation becomes a confronting of nothingness. Cowards and traitors are isolated: the consciousness, once withdrawn from its social context, discovers that doubts are traitors and that conscience makes cowards. With Timon, it “Walks, like contempt, alone” [4.2.15]. An example of the paradoxical isolating of consciousness in a tragic action is this speech of Henry IV: O God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times Make mountains level, and the continent, Weary of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea! And, other times, to see The beachy girdle of the ocean Too wide for Neptune’s hips; how chance’s mocks And changes fill the cup of alteration

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With divers liquors: O, if this were seen, The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, What perils past, what crosses to ensue, Would shut the book, and sit him down and die. [2 Henry IV, 3.1.45–56]

Henry IV is one of Shakespeare’s successful heroes, turning the wheel of history one stage at a time, his perspective a short-range practical one, his attention clearly focused on what he is doing. It is significant that for such a man a moment of enlarged consciousness should also be a moment of depression. Suddenly he sees, in the framework of this gloomy Ovidian cosmology, a vision of the wheel of history turning forever, and himself in the Sisyphus role that we have spoken of in connection with the ruler. As soon as his mind gets sufficiently detached from his situation to get a properly philosophical view of it, the first question that occurs to him is simply, why go on with it? We should think of Sisyphus as a happy man, according to Camus.118 Henry is not a happy man: he is a bothered man, with insomnia and a nagging conscience; but if he were a philosopher-king he would give up entirely. The limiting of his consciousness to his specifically royal function is all that keeps him going. When one’s real life is in one’s loyalties and actions, all that the isolated mind can attain is an awareness of absurdity. Life is an idiot’s tale, signifying nothing; the question is whether to be or not to be; the gods kill us for their sport.119 These famous utterances are not merely expressions of despair; they are the only kind of philosophical reflection that we are likely to get from a tragedy, unless it is a philosophical tragedy in the tradition of Seneca, like Fulke Greville’s Mustapha, and not many such tragedies belong in the public theatre. Life is real and life is earnest only as long as we do not try to disentangle reality from illusion, earnestness from play. Once withdrawn from the course of action that holds us within our society, chaos is come again. Some of the rebel-figures have a certain temperamental affinity for isolation. Brutus, and, in a different way, Cassius, have something of a philosophical temperament, which means that they are likely to be overthrown in the world of action and yet achieve a different kind of triumph through the fortitude of consciousness. Brutus says, “I shall have glory by this losing day” [5.5.36], and with him a victory of the mind is neither cheap nor entirely hollow. Macbeth, somewhat unexpectedly, also turns out to be his own best commentator, in contrast to his wife’s more common procedure of thrusting the sense of guilt into the unconscious.

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If Othello, as Eliot says, is cheering himself up in his final speech,120 Macbeth is certainly cheering himself down in his soliloquies, painting a picture of soul-sickness with the greatest accuracy of detail. Hamlet’s contemplative temperament, keeping him to a “discourse of reason” [1.2.150] which interferes with his spontaneity of action, makes him one of a group of melancholy characters involuntarily hooked in to a tragic action for which they have little liking or affinity. Bosola, Bussy, and Vendice are other examples. Hamlet, in particular, sees things, not objectively, but as the objectified counterpart of a withdrawn and melancholy disposition, in short a nauseated vision. But often a character is isolated from the action without any mental resources for isolation. Coriolanus, for example, is a most unreflective hero: we noticed how as soon as he is exiled from Rome he joins the Volscians without any apparent twinge of conscience. The simplest and starkest account of the isolating of an unreflective temperament, however, is Othello. Othello is attached to the society of the Venetian Senate as a capable and trusted public servant, but at the centre of the Senate sits the spiteful old pantaloon121 Brabantio, with the voice of the accuser, pointing to the one thing that isolates Othello, his black body, and insisting on the “unnatural” quality of Desdemona’s love for him. This is the foundation on which Iago builds, Iago having only to make Othello’s mind black too. He is helped in doing this, partly by the fact that jealousy in itself tends to create an enclosed prison-world, and partly by a curious quality in Othello’s imagination that can only be called cosmological. Othello woos Desdemona by creating for her amusement an entire world of marvels and adventures: it may have been all true, but it is clear that its effect on Desdemona did not depend on its truth. Within this world of romance, love gives form and embodiment to a social function. Under Iago’s influence Othello takes the initiative in creating a hell of “goats and monkeys,”122 where the voice in his ear is a demonic parody of a creative word. In one of those apparently pointless remarks by which Shakespeare indicates the shape and direction of his imagery, Emilia alludes to this creation of a private universe. Desdemona says she would not be unfaithful “for the whole world” [4.3.79], and Emilia says that in that case “having the world for your labour, ’tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it right” [4.3.81–2]. When Othello has put out the last light in his black world, he sees, over against it, “another world” [5.2.144], a perfect chrysolite or rejected pearl in which Desdemona’s love and chastity insensibly modulate into the memory of his

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services to the state, just as his first awakening of jealousy brought with it a sense that “Othello’s occupation’s gone” [3.3.357]. At the beginning of King Lear, we see the hero preparing to take the fatal step of depriving himself of his own social context. He will exchange the reality for the “name” of king [1.1.136], and instead of being loved by his subjects for his qualities, he will be loved by his daughters for himself alone. All seems to go well until, with Cordelia’s “nothing” [1.1.87–9], he finds himself staring into the blankness of an empty world. Those who love Lear love him according to their bond, the tie of loyalty which is their own real life. Who is Lear to be loved apart from that? That is, what is the identity of a king who is no longer a king? Lear starts asking questions about his own identity very early, and he gets a variety of answers. “My lady’s father,” says Oswald [1.4.79]; “Lear’s shadow,” says the Fool [1.4.231], a much shrewder person than Oswald. The word “shadow” recalls Richard II, seeking his identity in a looking-glass [4.1.265–98]. The substance of Lear and of Richard is royalty and loyalty: their shadows, or spectres as Blake would call them,123 are the subjective Lear and Richard confronting an objective world which is unreal because they are. They are in the position of the Biblical Preacher who was once king in Jerusalem, and who now knows only that all is “vanity,” that is, vapour, mist, shadow [Ecclesiastes 1:2]. Or, to put the essential paradox more clearly, all things are full of emptiness. At the beginning of King Lear we are introduced to Edmund, making polite murmurs about his duty and services, and immediately after the abdication scene Edmund appears again, saying, Thou, Nature, art my goddess: to thy law My services are bound. [1.2.1–2]

One of the first points made about Edmund is his contempt for astrology. This contempt has nothing to do with anybody’s belief in astrology, but is purely a matter of consistent imagery. The royalty of Lear held his society bound to that greater nature which is symbolized by the stars in their courses, the world of order and reason that is specifically the world of human nature. With the abdication we are now wholly confined to the lower physical nature of the elements, an amoral world where the strong prey on the weak. It is this lower nature, the Dionysian wheel of physical energy and fortune, to which Edmund attaches himself. He is Gloucester’s “natural” son, and on that level of nature he will act naturally.

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In this situation Lear is joined by the Fool and Kent, Kent being also a fool, as the Fool himself informs him, for we are now in a world where it is folly to be genuinely loyal. The Fool is a “natural” in the sense of representing something still unspoiled and innocent in the middle of a fallen nature. The usual symbol of this natural innocence is the child, the two being associated in the proverb “children and fools tell the truth.” Nothing shows the royal nature of Lear more clearly than his tenderness for his “boy”; this tenderness becomes increasingly parental, and the great cry at the end, “And my poor fool is hanged!” [5.3.306], represents a blending together in his mind of the two people he loves as a father. Goneril habitually refers to her husband as a fool because he is a “moral fool,” full of childish scruples he ought to outgrow. Goneril, of course, does not distinguish the childish from the childlike, and so does not believe that the Fool really is a fool, as she cannot understand innocence. The jokes of the Fool, like those of the clowns in Hamlet, consist largely of puns, conundrums, and parodies of syllogisms, and so establish a comic counterpart to the tragic action in which absurdity is made convincing. The philosopher first isolates himself and then stabilizes himself: he remains a sane, conscious, normal intelligence, and nature therefore appears to him as an order, though a relatively static order or chain of being, not the controlled force that it is to the successful ruler. In the tragic vision whatever isolates the hero pushes him much further than this, into the nausea of Hamlet or the hell-worlds of Othello and Macbeth. Lear is pushed directly toward the hysterica passio he so dreads [2.4.57],124 and nature therefore appears to him in the objective form of madness, which is storm and tempest. On the heath, a mad shadow confronts a mad shadow-world, for the storm is described in a way that makes it not simply a storm but chaos come again, the cracking of nature’s moulds. The turning point of the scene is Lear’s prayer, a prayer which addresses no deity, but the dispossessed of the earth. In this prayer Lear finds his human identity again, though in a very different context from kingship, and immediately after it Poor Tom appears. No one can study King Lear without wondering why Edgar puts on this Poor Tom act for Lear’s benefit. He has to go into disguise, of course, but none of Cornwall’s spies are likely to be listening, and elsewhere on the heath open conspiracy is discussed under the storm’s cover. Just as, in a comic context, Petruchio shows Katherina the reflection of her own shrewishness in himself, so Poor Tom is the providence or guardian spirit that shows Lear the end of his journey to find his own nature.

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What is the nature of man? There are many answers, but Lear is now in an order of nature so disordered that Edmund is called a “loyal and natural boy” [2.1.84]. The Fool, who really is a loyal and natural boy, is all that is left of the “desperate train” which Regan pretends to be afraid of [2.4.305–7]. The question then takes the form: what is left of a man when we eliminate his social and civilized context and think of him purely as an object in physical nature? The answer given by satire is the Yahoo, the natural man with his natural vices, of which Gulliver’s greater cleanliness and intelligence are merely sophistications. The softer and gentler answer given by comedy is Caliban, nature without nurture, the deformed slave who is loyal to the wrong master and resentful of the right one. The answer given by tragedy is Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole,125 the wallnewt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets; swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipped from tithing to tithing, and stock-punished,126 and imprisoned. [3.4.129–135]

The imagery is deliberately nauseating, and we notice again that nausea is deeply involved in man’s contemplation of himself in a physical context. “Is man no more than this?” asks Lear wonderingly [3.4.102–3], but he has had his answer. “Thou art the thing itself,” he says [3.4.106], and starts tearing at his clothes to remove what is left of his relation to human society. Poor Tom, a better mirror of identity than Richard had, is trying to stand between Lear in front of him and the abyss of nonbeing inhabited by the foul fiends behind him, and provide, so to speak, a solid bottom for Lear’s fall into nature. If Lear had been granted the few moments of rest he so needed, Edgar’s efforts might have preserved his sanity. Besides the intricate series of puns on “natural” in King Lear, there is also an emphatic repetition of the words “all” and “nothing.” In giving away his crown, Lear gave “all” to his daughters, and, as the Fool keeps insisting, he is now “nothing.” Richard II uses the same words: Make me, that nothing have, with nothing grieved, And thou with all pleased, that hast all achieved! [4.1.216–17]

The word “nothing” has two meanings: it is a grammatical negative meaning “not anything,” and it is a positive noun meaning “something

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called nothing.” Poetry has been exploiting the puns involved in this double meaning ever since Polyphemus in the Odyssey [bk. 9, l. 408] screamed that “nobody” was blinding him. In Shakespeare the word “nothing,” when it means something called nothing, usually refers to the loss of essence, not to the end of existence. “Edgar I nothing am,” says Edgar [2.3.21], meaning that he ceases to be Edgar though he goes on living; “the king is a thing of nothing,” says Hamlet [4.2.28–30],127 meaning that Claudius is not really the king although he is on the throne; Timon says his friends “are to me nothing” [3.6.83], meaning that friends have vanished from his life although life goes on for both. Timon says later, “nothing brings me all things” [5.1.188], referring to his approaching death, but there he is emphasizing a nihilism in it which is symbolized by his suicide. Goneril and Regan, however brusque and insensitive, show a certain hard common sense in their attitude to Lear, and are not revealed as evil until they separate him from what is left of his society. The outcry made about their cruelty in cutting off his “train” seems excessive at first, but is deeply rooted in the convention of the play. That act shows that they do not merely “seek his death” [3.4.163]; they seek rather his annihilation. To murder Lear, and thereby get the noisy old nuisance out of the way, would show less real malice than wiping out the society he commands and letting him go on living. The latter obliterates the idea or real form of Lear, so to speak: it strikes at a deeper life than his physical one. We have spoken of the type of rhetoric in Shakespeare which, as in Ulysses’ speech on degree, Canterbury’s beehive figure, or Menenius’s fable of the belly and members, sets out a conservative view of society and sees it as a structure of natural order. To see it in this way, the appearance or facade of society must be regarded as also the reality of society. This is life seen from the point of view of action, where reality and appearance are the same thing. The rhetoric of isolation, as we find it particularly in the fourth acts of King Lear and Timon of Athens, is mainly a bitter denunciation of human hypocrisy, the contrast of reality and appearance. Lear and Timon are in a position to see this hypocrisy because, like the hypocrite, they have separated their real selves from their social relationships. The denunciation has the oracular ring of truth, but of a truth that we cannot do anything about. It is the voice, not of pure detachment, but of a detached consciousness. The feelings are still engaged: Timon is still an outraged idealist and Lear a helpless king. We feel that both Timon and Lear are “unreasonable,” that the workings of the sexual

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instinct in a “simpering dame”128 hardly call for so much horror, that ingratitude could be shrugged off as well as screamed at. Eliot takes a similar view of the excessive disgust in Hamlet’s view of his mother’s remarriage.129 But in the tragic vision, where one starts with a social order in which reality is appearance, the discovery of sin and hypocrisy and corruption cannot be made by the reason, but only by saeva indignatio.130 Lear has turned his world inside out by his abdication: the order of nature becomes first the disorder of the heath, for an impotent king creates a wasteland, and then the perverted order of the Cornwall society, descending through chaos to hell. The first shade encountered in Dante’s hell is a Pope who did not want to be a Pope: “Che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto.”131 The “gran rifiuto,” the voluntary surrender of one’s appointed function, is a frequent source of tragedy in Shakespeare, though it is never made from “viltà” [cowardice], but for heroic reasons. It is clear that Titus Andronicus could have been emperor of Rome if he had wanted to be: by withdrawing in favour of the weak and vicious Saturninus he allows a perverted social order to be set up, in which he is reduced to the impotence of shooting protests attached to arrows into the emperor’s garden. The withdrawal creates two concentric spheres of tragic action, so to speak, which might be described as the Goths within and the Goths without. The central action is the mutual revenge of Tamora and Titus, grotesque and horrible to the verge of absurdity— or perhaps not merely to the verge, as it seems to me that absurdity is one of the central dramatic points of the play. This action is contained by a peripheral one in which Titus’s son Lucius, like Coriolanus (to whom he is compared in the dialogue), though more successfully, returns with an alien army and destroys the malefactors. This action is the morally intelligible action of the tragedy of order, ending in a post-tragic contract which restores the pretragic one. In King Lear and Timon of Athens there are also two concentric spheres of action, but their relation is reversed: here the morally intelligible action is inside and the absurd one contains it. The society that Timon attempts to create by his prodigal generosity is the typically Athenian society of the symposium, the festivity of wine and reason which is in Plato the embodiment of the idea of society. The word “embodiment” is not strictly Platonic; it suggests rather incarnation, and incarnation suggests the symposium of Christ in which two things are important: the betrayal of Christ and the communion with him. The fact that Timon’s guests are devouring his substance, in other words eating him, and re-

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peated phrases about “tasting” his bounty,132 apply communion imagery to him by way of parody. The Biblical echoes of the fact that his guests are traitors come in to some phrases of Apemantus: “It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man’s blood—the fellow that sits next him, now parts bread with him, pledges the breath of him in a divided draught, is the readiest man to kill him” [1.2.40–9].133 The same senators (probably) who cut so poor a figure in relation to Timon are also those who uphold the law against Alcibiades’ plea for pardoning a hot-blooded homicide. Their argument is the same as that of the Prince of Verona: “Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill,”134 but the context is different. Alcibiades is pure hero, a soldier whose life is dedicated to the risk of death, and, with his unfailing courtesy to Timon, he stands out as a character who, if not attractive, is at any rate not contemptible. In Plutarch’s scheme of “parallel lives” Alcibiades is the Greek counterpart of Coriolanus, and Plutarch remarks, in comparing the two, that Coriolanus with all his virtues could not make himself loved, and Alcibiades with all his vices could not make himself hated.135 Shakespeare could not have read Plutarch’s account and missed the point that Alcibiades was a scoundrel, but he has other dramatic uses for him. Alcibiades, with his drum and his two whores, is the kind of rebelfigure who always gets control of a society if there is no order-figure. He will, as he says, Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each Prescribe to other, as each other’s leech. [5.4.83–4]

That is, he will pull Athens back on the wheel of fortune where the main energies of life are expressed in war rather than peace. Timon had a different conception of society, and, wrong-headed as his attempts to achieve it may have been, one feels that he is rightly called “noble” [5.4.80]. In his exile he has acquired something of the more realistic view of human nature that the order-figure has, a view which has a lower opinion of generosity and a higher one of death. He is asked to take command of Athens against Alcibiades, and at this point he makes his “gran rifiuto.” Like Lear, he is not easily convinced of the moral indifference of nature: nature sustains him with roots and water, but he hopes, and half expects, that it will destroy everybody else. But Athens refuses to be destroyed: it makes a deal with Alcibiades and the wheel of history goes on turning.

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Thus the inner action of the play is a very ironic tragedy of order, in which a peaceful but inglorious society expels a military leader, only to have him return and compel it to revert to the ordinary cycle of life. The containing action—I call it that because, although the play concludes with Alcibiades beating his drum, Timon is the hero, and his is the action we remember afterwards—is the total isolation of Timon from his society. This action is like a parody of, for instance, Aristophanes’ Acharnians, where the good citizen (Dicaeopolis) withdraws from the war of Athens and Sparta and celebrates his own feast of Dionysus at home, driving away all the parasites and politicians who come to interfere with him. In Timon of Athens the peaceful festival and the beating off of interference belong to totally opposed conditions. The symposium is a social ideal of which human nature, in the tragic vision, is not capable; Timon’s life in exile is a fierce and lonely pastoral, and the pastoral, whether attempted by a society of shepherds or by a solitary noble savage, is also not a possible way of life in a tragic context. We have suggestions of this in Shakespeare as early as the pastoral speech of Henry VI, already referred to. Like Lear on the heath, Timon cannot remain in the philosopher’s position: that can only be done by someone in the midst of society, like Apemantus. Apemantus is a cynic (hence the repetition of “dog” in connection with him), with Stoic ideals of invulnerability, and as such he is not “opposite to humanity,” as one of Timon’s guests complacently says [1.1.273], but he is constantly aware of what humanity is. Timon in exile, trying to be opposite to humanity, tries also to ally himself with everything destructive in nature. His sense of outrage and his isolation prevent him both from exploiting human nature like Alcibiades and from a consistent vision of absurdity, such as Apemantus has. The only end for him is suicide, and he dies “Upon the beached verge of the salt flood” [5.1.216], the sea representing chaos as the storm does in King Lear. The story of Timon, as a tragedy, is absurd, in the existential and not the moral sense, and so the vision of absurdity contains and enfolds the vision of the turning wheel of fortune. In King Lear there is also an inner and an outer action. The inner action is a straight tragedy of order, with Gloucester the martyred father, Edmund the rebel-figure, and Edgar the nemesis. Its general context is that of the original sin in which the killing of the father becomes a central symbol of guilt, as Gloucester says in an ironic anticipation of his own betrayal:

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322 Our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vile,136 That it doth hate what gets it. [3.4.145–6]

Gloucester’s is a morally intelligible tragedy, passing, like the story of Oedipus, through a terrifying blinding and ending, again like Oedipus, in comparative serenity. Gloucester is physically isolated from the action, and, unlike Lear, he tries to make an end of himself physically, by suicide. Edgar appears to him in various disguises, as he does to Lear, and with the same object of guiding him past the abyss of nonbeing. Everything can be explained in Gloucester’s tragedy: he had a moral flaw that made him gullible, and he had a proud mind, shown in his boast about the sexual exploit that produced Edmund. At the moment when Edgar’s nemesis is completed, Edgar says, The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us; The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes. [5.3.171–4]

For all his courage and devotion Edgar never seems to be able to resist remarks like this, and even as a comment on Gloucester it seems a trifle facile. It is always possible to say that if the hero had acted otherwise (in most cases, more virtuously) the tragedy would not have occurred. The point of saying it about Gloucester is apparently to emphasize the sense of his tragedy as fitting into a moral order. But the fact that Gloucester’s tragedy is morally explicable goes along with the fact that Gloucester is not the main character of the play. If we apply such formulas to Lear they give us very little comfort. What does the good sport at Edmund’s making prove when we have Goneril and Regan “got ’tween lawful sheets?” [4.6.116].137 At the blinding of Gloucester, Cornwall is fatally wounded by a servant. This is again part of the moral sense that Gloucester’s tragedy makes, Edgar’s axiom “Ripeness is all” [5.2.11] being closely related to the view of Job’s comforters that a full and completed life is the natural result of virtue. Gloucester appeals for help on this basis, “He that will think to live till he be old” [3.7.69] being an ironic anticipation of his later desire to cut his own life short. Another servant remarks of Regan: If she live long And in the end meet the old course of death,

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Women will all turn monsters. [3.7.100–2]

Well, it is true that Regan is poisoned, but Cordelia is hanged. Regan’s death proves nothing, except perhaps the reality of nothingness. King Lear has been called a purgatorial tragedy,138 and if that means a structure even remotely like Dante’s Purgatorio, we should expect to see, as we see in Dante, existence being taken over and shaped by a moral force. Our understanding of the tragedy, then, would have that qualified response in it that is inseparable from a moral or conceptual outlook. It is true that Lear has suffered terribly, but he has thereby gained, etc. Suffering is inevitable in the nature of things, yet, etc. But, of course, Lear is not saying anything like this at the end of the play: what he is saying is that Cordelia is gone, and will never, never come back to him. Perhaps he thinks that she is coming back to life again, and dies of an unbearable joy. But we do not see this: all we see is an old man dying of an unbearable pain. The hideous wrench of agony which the death of Cordelia gives to the play is too much a part of the play even to be explained as inexplicable. And whatever else may be true, the vision of absurd anguish in which the play ends certainly is true. We began this discussion by establishing a distinction between authentic tragedy and melodrama. By melodrama I mean a dramatic vision that confirms the audience’s stock moral responses: that achieves comedy primarily by applauding the hero and tragedy primarily by punishing the villain. Such a dramatic vision is aesthetic in the perverted Kierkegaardian sense of externalizing man’s ethical freedom.139 In a sense it is antitragic, providing as it does a justification for a tragic action that comes from something outside tragedy, and so, really, explaining tragedy away. In authentic tragedy what we see as external to us is, first of all, the order of nature, with its servomechanism the wheel of fortune. Nature and fortune, when seen from the point of view of the human situation, constitute a vision of absurdity and anguish, what design is in them being unintelligible to human imagination, human emotions, and ultimately to human moral instincts. Introducing thunder as the voice of disapproving divinity in Tourneur140 is melodramatic, in the sense that it presents God as confirming the moral prejudices that the audience already has. The thunder in King Lear is the tragically authentic voice of nature crumbling into chaos, though Lear himself half hopes that it is making a comment on his situation. The gods in Greek tragedy are not melodramatic, because they are, as Elizabethan critics saw, assimilable with nature; they emphasize the morally unintelligible aspect of human

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anguish instead of neutralizing it. Seneca is not as melodramatic as his influence would suggest, but his deep Stoic belief in a morally intelligible natural order gives his tragedies a potentially melodramatic quality which accounts for a good deal of that influence. It is perhaps on this basis that we can come to terms with the venerable puzzle: is tragedy compatible with a Christian view of life? Christianity as an institutional religion, giving a mysterious sanction to society’s moral anxieties, is inconsistent with tragedy because it is simply incapable of the tragic vision. But the reality, that is, the myth, of Christianity is very different: it tells us that all we can see, out there, of the activity of God in human life comes to a focus in the absurd and anguished figure of the crucified Christ. The heroic effort which Christ made against the irony of universal death was, Christianity tells us, successful. But the earthly end of his career, so far as we can see it, was exactly the same as the end of a failure, and of all Christian doctrines, the doctrine that Christ died is the most difficult to disbelieve. The moral or melodramatic attitude can do nothing with this crucifixion vision except reverse it, seeing it as followed by a second moral judgment in which Christ is the judge and those who condemn him are his writhing victims. In this double gyre of sadomasochism there is no place for the heroic struggle against irony which is, so to speak, the tragic enzyme. A genuinely tragic Christian attitude would see suffering as a participation in the passion of a hero who was both divine and human, and so would establish a place within Christianity for the tragic hero. I use the religious example only as an analogy to the tragic structure in Shakespeare. If there is anything more than absurdity and anguish in the death of Lear or Othello, it comes, not from anything additional that we can see in or know about the situation, but from what we have participated in with them up to that moment. When Macbeth sees life as a meaningless idiot’s tale, we can see that such a vision of absurdity is right for Macbeth at that point, and is therefore true for him. But it is not the whole truth, even for him, because he is capable of articulating it, nor for us, because we have shared with him, however reluctantly, an experience too broad and varied to be identified with its inevitable end, however desired an end. Tragedy finds its ultimate meaning neither in heroic death nor in ironic survival, nor in any doctrine deducible from either, but in its own re-enactment as experience. It was his perception of this element in tragedy that led Nietzsche to his conception of assenting to a recurrent experience as the mark of the hero,141 but that takes us up

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a blind alley. The hero of a tragedy ultimately includes the audience who form the substance of the hero, like Talbot’s soldiers, who participate in a ritual act of suffering in which the suffering is not real but the awareness of it is. The awareness survives the play and gives it a death-and-resurrection pattern which is expressed by Keats in his sonnet on reading King Lear: Let me not wander in a barren dream, But when I am consumed in the fire, Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.142

In the tragedy of isolation the hero becomes a scapegoat, a person excluded from his society and thereby left to face the full weight of absurdity and anguish that isolated man feels in nature. He is thus dramatically in the position of the villain of melodrama, but the feeling of moral separation of the bad character from the good (or at any rate not so bad) audience is not there. Or if it is there, it does not have the same relevance. The dreadful pact consummated by Iago with the words “I am your own for ever” [3.3.480] has bound us too, and we feel no deliverance from Iago’s prospective death, because he is one of the dark powers who have also humiliated us. In a tragic story there are plausible reasons why a character gets into a scapegoat position, but they are never so plausible as to make the response “of course I should never have done that” relevant. Whatever the tragic hero has done, we are never so wise or virtuous that we cannot participate in the consequences of his fall with him. At the end of a comedy a new society is created or restored and the characters go off to a new life out of our reach. Even those who exclude themselves from this society, like Jaques in As You Like It or Marchbanks in Candida, have secrets in their hearts we can only guess at. At the end of a tragedy, where most of the main characters are usually dead in any case, there is a far greater sense of mystery, because (paradoxically) it is not what the characters have learned from their tragic experience, but what we have learned from participating in it, that directly confronts us. We read in Frazer of an ancient ritual (how much it was ever practised could hardly matter less) in which a divine king is killed at the height of his powers and ritually eaten.143 His body and blood pass into the bodies and blood of his eaters, and thereby create a single divine body out of them. Elizabethan tragedy was more primitive than Greek tragedy in bringing down the hero on the stage, in sight and almost within touch of

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most of the audience. But, whatever may be true of melodrama, tragedy does not unify the audience in a mystical communion of this kind: so far as the theatre can do this, it does it in comedy, where a new social order is created and the audience applauds to show its agreement that this is what it wants. Tragedy individualizes the audience, nowhere more intensely than in the tragedy of isolation. Man is a creator as an individual; as a member of a society or species, he is a creature. The end of a comedy leaves him creaturely, invited to join a party to celebrate the creation of a new society, from the further fortunes of which he is of course excluded by the ending of the play. The end of a tragedy leaves him alone in a waste and void chaos of experience with a world to remake out of it. It is partly because of this insistent challenge to the spectator’s recreative powers that the great tragedies are so endlessly fascinating to critics: merely to experience them seems to demand commentary as part of one’s response. To go further with this point would take us into a fourth area of tragedy, which in Shakespeare would be the romances, including Henry VIII, seen as tragedies, and as the fulfilment of his tragic vision. I have already written a book on the romances as the fulfilment of Shakespearean comedy,144 and do not wish to cover the same ground again, even from a different point of view. But it is obviously possible to see The Tempest as a tragedy of order in which the dethroned prince acts as his own nemesis in another world, building up in that world a natural society, though according to a conception of nature that rises clear of history and the wheel of fortune. We can see Cymbeline as a tragedy of passion in which the division of loyalties between Rome and Britain, along with the separation of Posthumus and Imogen, are overcome as soon as the fatal female influence of the Queen disappears. We can see The Winter’s Tale as a tragedy of the isolation of consciousness caused by Leontes’ jealousy which, like Lear’s abdication, creates a wasteland that extends from Sicilia into Bohemia and dissolves in a chaos of storm and death and devouring monsters. Here the memory of Hermione is cherished so intensely that it becomes a new existence. These plays are no longer tragic in any sense in which we have been using that term in these lectures. Yet they represent another possible dimension of tragedy, of which the Greek archetype is Alcestis, or perhaps even the satyr play, in which death is contained by the action and the emphasis is thrown on participation in a continuing movement, the pensive pulsation of Blake’s Urthona. The audience does not directly par-

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ticipate, but it catches the rhythm of participation in the dance and song and in the innumerable links of reconciliation and renewed partnership in which these plays end. As I have tried to show elsewhere,145 they seem to point toward a world where the antithesis of spectator and spectacle, the subject confronting the object, no longer exists. Here the antithesis of tragedy and comedy is also overcome, and with it the antithesis of creator and creature. The paradox of tragedy, the vision of what is at once natural and absurd, is united to the paradox of comedy, a vision of what is equally natural and absurd in a different context. Here there is neither a chaos to recreate nor a new community floating away into the land of dreams, but, like the island of The Tempest which is Mediterranean and yet so curiously American as well, an old world that is a brave new world, an inheritance of which we are at last the rightful possessors.

17 General Editor’s Introduction to Shakespeare Series 1968

“General Editor’s Introduction,” which appeared, signed “Northrop Frye,” on pp. vii–xii of both volumes 1 and 2 of Shakespeare Series (Toronto: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968–69). Each volume presented newly edited versions of three Shakespeare plays. Volume 1 included King Lear, edited by F. David Hoeniger; Twelfth Night, edited by J.A. Lavin; and Antony and Cleopatra, edited by Berners W. Jackson. Volume 2 included Hamlet, edited by M.B. Smith; The Tempest, edited by David Galloway; and Henry IV, Part 1, edited by J.F. Sullivan. The volumes were part of the College Classics in English Series, for which Frye was the general editor.1 The typescript is in NFF, 1988, box 1, file y.

We do not know much about Shakespeare, and a good deal of what we talk about in connection with him is fiction. The fictions begin with his birthdate, which is generally assumed to be April 23, 1564, because he probably died on that day fifty-two years later, because we have a record of his baptism on the 26th, and because April 23 is the day of St. George, the patron saint of England.2 We know nothing at all about him as a writer until he appears as an established dramatist in London: the gap used to be filled in by a story about his being arrested for poaching, evidently based on an interpretation of the opening scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is now realized to be entirely wrong.3 His sonnets were published in 1609, probably without his consent. Most of them are concerned with a beautiful youth and some others with a female brunette. There is no real evidence that either of these figures had any existence outside the sonnets, but there is enough fiction about them to fill a library in itself. Even evidence can be misleading. There is evidence, for

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example, that Shakespeare wrote a play called A Yorkshire Tragedy. The evidence consists of an edition of the play published in Shakespeare’s lifetime with his name on the title page.4 This is real evidence as far as it goes, but it is not good enough, and no scholar believes that Shakespeare did write this play. We have no notion what Shakespeare’s religious or political views were, what he did, if anything, besides work for the stage, or whether he ever travelled abroad. The two contemporary representations of him, the frontispiece in the Folio and the bust on the Stratford monument, do not make him look at all like a proper poet: the noble brow and serene expression of the later faked portraits are much more to our taste. One would think that so great a poet must at least have realized how good he was, but though Shakespeare took some pains with his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, he left his plays to be gathered up by two loyal friends and published seven years after his death.5 Nor is there any sign of his having taken any interest in the publication of the Quartos that appeared in his lifetime. All this seems very mysterious, even sinister, to those who, like many nineteenth-century critics of Shakespeare, have been brought up to believe that writing is a form of self-expression or distilled personal experience. The simple fact that Shakespeare wrote plays throws a different light on our knowledge, or lack of knowledge, about his personality. In drama, success depends on the cooperation of a group rather than on the personality of a writer, who is sometimes, especially in spectacular or expensive productions, not very important at all. Henry VIII, for example, though it contains some fine scenes, is rather low-keyed in style, because this play featured an unusual amount of pageantry and costuming. It was not the custom either for dramatists in his day to publish their own works; the first to do so was Ben Jonson, in 1616.6 Again, drama is an objective form where the author does not speak in his own person, but has to make everything he says appropriate to the character saying it. We may like to feel that Shakespeare is lecturing us on the drama in Hamlet’s speech to the players [3.2.1–45], or announcing his retirement from the stage in Prospero’s “revels” speech [The Tempest, 4.1.148–58], but when we assume this we are really assuming that, just this once, Shakespeare is indulging us and interrupting his play in order to say something to us. There are certainly many dramatists with strong personalities and definite critical views, including Ben Jonson in Shakespeare’s own day. But drama is even more congenial to temperaments who prefer to disappear behind their work, including the majority of Shakespeare’s contempo-

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raries, about whom we know even less than we do about him. The lack of information about Shakespeare’s early years is not surprising either, for drama, unlike lyric poetry, music, or mathematics, is not a genre for infant prodigies. There is no clear evidence of his having written anything before his middle twenties or after his late forties, so we should be careful about ascribing qualities in early and late plays to the eager hopefulness of youth or the mellowed wisdom of old age. We may as well make a virtue of necessity, and realize the immense advantage we have in dealing with a poet who is important to us only for his poetry. We need not bother with “Shakespeare the man” apart from the page or two of authentic but hardly breathtaking facts that can be found in any good handbook.7 We certainly need not investigate the attempts to show that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by somebody else, as these speculations are merely documents in the psychology of obsession. The main scholarly, as distinct from critical, issues in the study of Shakespeare are: the order and dating of the plays;8 the sources used; the staging of the plays in Shakespeare’s theatres; and the editorial and bibliographical problems connected with trying to establish the text. The editors of the plays in this volume have tried to introduce you to these issues so far as they affect the plays they are editing, and to distinguish what is definitely known about these matters from what is still controversial and unsettled. All these questions are exceedingly difficult on advanced levels, but in the elementary stages they are quite comprehensible. The research into the dating of the plays, as established by entries in the Stationers’ Register, contemporary references, and the like, confirms in general the impression of the difference between early and late plays which anyone can feel for himself with a little practice. In the early plays the rhythm is closely bound to the pentameter line, and there is a good deal of rhyming; in the late ones there are many lines with weak endings, so that the rhythm is pushed on into the next line, often with a longer pause in the middle of a line than at the end. The effect of such run-on lines is to build up larger rhythmical units. The following is typically the rhythm of an early play (Love’s Labour’s Lost): You may not come, fair princess, in my gates;9 But here without you shall be so received As you shall deem yourself lodged in my heart Though so denied fair harbour in my house.

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Your own good thoughts excuse me, and farewell: To-morrow shall we visit you again (2.1.171–6);

and this is typically the rhythm of a late one (The Winter’s Tale): I had thought, sir, to have held my peace until You had drawn oaths from him not to stay. You, sir, Charge him too coldly. Tell him, you are sure All in Bohemia’s well; this satisfaction The by-gone day proclaim’d: say this to him, He’s beat from his best ward. (1.2.28–33)

Again, the main sources of the plays are frequently obvious: North’s Plutarch for the Roman plays; Holinshed for the histories; earlier plays, some lost and some still extant, for some of the tragedies. Shakespeare knew French, Latin, and perhaps Italian, but preferred to use sources in English: being a poet, he was constantly on the alert for phrases he could pick up or modify. It is a fascinating experience to compare a play with its main source, where known, and see the dramatist’s swift selective eye passing over this, seizing on that, suppressing irrelevant details and inventing relevant ones, throwing in characters not found, or barely named, in the sources (Enobarbus, Mercutio, Gloucester) to add whole dimensions of imaginative power.10 We should remember that however many natural touches and glimpses of real life there may be in the plays to delight us, everything connected with the structure and shape of the play has been got out of a book, or earlier play. We know that this is true of nearly all the plays, and those for which no likely general source has yet been found (Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Tempest) look equally literary. The general shape of what most people think of as the typical Elizabethan theatre with its projecting outer or “apron” stage, along with its upper areas, the distribution of the audience into pit and galleries, the emphasis on costume rather than scenery, the use of boy actors and singers, and even more controversial questions like the existence of an inner stage or an Elizabethan “theatre in the round,” are by now fairly familiar. Two things above all should be kept in mind. In the first place, although Shakespeare’s theatres were probably among the best in Europe, they were still very small and intimate structures. The physical closeness of the play to its audience, and the intensity with which that audience was able to concentrate on the language and action, are difficult to re-

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produce in even the most historically accurate reconstruction. Second, the energy and excitement generated by a performance, including the surge and thunder of the verse and the frequent (in some plays almost constant) accompaniment of music, bring it closer in emotional effect to opera than to most modern proscenium plays. There is no primary text except the Folio for a good many of the plays, and where this is true, the modern editor sticks closely to it: conjectural emendations are not now much favoured. The existence of a good Quarto complicates the editing very considerably (except when the Folio reprints the Quarto text, as sometimes happens), and an immense amount of hard work has gone into establishing what the modern reader reads and the modern actor speaks. No manuscripts of Shakespeare survive, unless some handwriting experts are right who have thought that one of several hands in a manuscript of a play on Sir Thomas More is Shakespeare’s.11 One is best advised not to use any critic, not even the very careful and unobtrusive editors of this volume, as a guide to the understanding of the play. The best approach to Shakespeare is still the one suggested by the editors of the Folio: “Read him, therefore; and again and again: And if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.”12 This means reading until we pass the stage of reading and begin to enter the stage of possession, when the characters become members of our own imaginative family, and the cadences have begun to enter our own subconscious, or wherever it is that familiar phrases are stored. One of the elements in Shakespeare’s own genius was his power of possessing everything he read, though he does not appear to have been an unusually erudite or scholarly reader. People rarely read with this kind of intensity, largely because of a panicky feeling that there is so much reading to “cover” or “get through.” But one first-rate work of literature possessed is worth far more to one’s literary education than any amount of casual familiarity with any number of books. After we have gained some possession of the play, we can turn to the critics, and discover that they have had similar experiences to ours, and are offering to share those experiences with us. But the critic, as distinct from the teacher, is most useful when what he writes comes to us as conversation about a play we know, rather than as an introduction to a play we do not know.

18 Shakespeare’s The Tempest 18 May 1979

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 47, file 1 (which also contains an earlier typescript with holograph corrections). Frye’s lecture was originally presented to a high-school audience at the Olympic Academy in Vicenza, Italy, on 18 May 1979, as part of his lecture tour of Italy (Ayre, 368–72).1 First published in Northrop Frye Newsletter, 2, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 19–27; reprinted in Shenandoah 42 (Winter 1992): 36–50, and EAC, 81–93.

In Shakespeare’s day, if a cultivated person had been asked what a comedy was, he would probably have said that it was a play which depicted people in the middle and lower ranks of society, observed their foibles and follies, and was careful not to diverge too far from what would be recognized as credible, if not necessarily plausible, action. This was Ben Jonson’s conception of comedy, supported by many prefaces and manifestos, and is illustrated by the general practice of English comic writers down to our own day.2 But the earlier Elizabethan dramatists—Peele, Greene, Lyly—wrote in a very different idiom of comedy, one which introduced themes of romance and fantasy, as well as characters from higher social ranks.3 The first fact about Shakespeare, considered as a writer of comedy, is that he followed the older practice and ignored the Jonsonian type of comedy, even in plays which are later than Jonson’s early ones. One reason for this is not hard to see. Observing men and manners on a certain level of credibility demands a degree of sophistication, whereas the fairy-tale plots of Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale and Lyly’s Endymion appeal to a more childlike desire to see a show and be told a story, without having to think about whether the story is “true to life” or not. The child

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wants primarily to know what comes next; he may not care so much about the logic of its relation to what it follows. If the adult completely loses this childlike response, he loses something very central to the dramatic experience, and Shakespeare was careful never to lose it as a playwright. Jonson tends to scold his audiences for not being mature enough to appreciate him: Shakespeare says (in the epilogue to Twelfth Night): “We’ll strive to please you every day,” and never fails to include some feature or incident that is incredible, that belongs to magic, fairyland, folk tale, or farce rather than to the observation of men and manners. In Jonsonian comedy the play is intended to be a transparent medium for such observation: we learn about life through the comedy. In Shakespearean comedy the play is opaque: it surrounds us and wraps us up, with nothing to do but to see and hear what is passing. This does not mean that an unusual or unfamiliar type of story is wanted: again, the simple and childlike response is to the familiar and conventional, new variants of well-loved stories that have been told many times before. Shakespeare’s comedies are all very different from one another, but he understands this response well enough to keep repeating his comic devices. Further, not only does Shakespeare adhere to the pre-Jonsonian type of comedy, but he moves closer to it as he goes on. The plays are classified by the First Folio as comedies, histories, and tragedies, but criticism has isolated a fourth genre, that of romance, to which Shakespeare devoted his main attention in his last years. We have also come to realize that the romances are not a relaxation or letdown after the strenuous efforts of King Lear or Macbeth, as often used to be said, but are the genuine culmination of Shakespeare’s dramatic achievement.4 These are the plays in which Shakespeare reaches the bedrock of drama, the musical, poetic, and spectacular panorama of magic and fantasy in which there is no longer tragedy or comedy, but an action passing through tragic and comic moods to a conclusion of serenity and peace. We notice that the plays that seem most to have influenced Shakespeare in writing the romances were much cruder than those of Peele or Lyly. One of them was Mucedorus, a play of the 1590s revived around 1609, which clearly held the affections of the reading public as well as playgoers, as it went through seventeen editions in about eighty years. It is a very simple-minded play about a prince who goes in disguise to another country to woo a princess, and who gains her after baffling a cowardly villain and rescuing her and himself from a wild man in a forest. There is a prologue in which two figures named “Comedy” and “Envy”

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engage in a sharp dispute about the shape of the forthcoming action, the former promising a happy ending and the latter many pitfalls along the way.5 In another early play, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, which features a magician and his daughter, like The Tempest, we begin with an assembly of gods and a debate between Fortuna and Venus, again over the character of the story that is to follow.6 From such unlikely (as it seems to us) sources, Shakespeare drew hints for an expanding stage action that can include not only all social levels from royalty to clowns, but gods and magicians with superhuman powers as well. The romances end happily, or at any rate quietly, but they do not avoid the tragic: The Winter’s Tale in particular passes through and contains a complete tragic action on its way to a more festive conclusion, and Cymbeline, which has at least a token historical theme (Cymbeline was a real king of Britain, and his coins are in the British Museum), is actually classed as a tragedy in the Folio. Such plays are “tragicomedies,” a genre that not only Shakespeare but Beaumont and Fletcher were popularizing from about 1607 onward. In the preface to Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess (ca. 1609), it is said that in a tragicomedy a god is “lawful,” i.e., superhuman agents can be introduced with decorum.7 But to expand into a divine world means reducing the scale of the human one. The jealousy of Leontes and Posthumus is quite as unreasonable as that of Othello, but it is not on the gigantic human scale of Othello’s: we see it from a perspective in which it seems petty and ridiculous as well. The form of the romance thus moves closer to the puppet show, which again, as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister reminds us, is a form of popular drama with a strong appeal to children, precisely because they can see that the action is being manipulated.8 The debates of Comedy and Envy in Mucedorus, and of Venus and Fortuna in The Rare Triumphs, introduce us to another approach to the manipulating of action. Here we are told that the play to follow is connected with certain genres, and that characters who personify these genres are taking a hand in the action. The notion of Comedy as a character in the action of a comedy may seem strange at first, but is deeply involved in the structure of Shakespearean comedy. Let us look at a comedy of Shakespeare that many people have found very puzzling, Measure for Measure, from this point of view.9 In Measure for Measure, Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna (which Shakespeare seems to have thought of as an Italian town) announces his departure, leaving his deputy Angelo in charge to tighten up laws against sexual irregularity. Everything goes wrong, and Angelo, who sincerely

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wants to be an honest and conscientious official, is not only impossibly rigorous, condemning to death young Claudio for a very trifling breach of the law, but is thrown headlong by his first temptation, which is to seduce Claudio’s sister Isabella when she comes to plead for his life. The action leads up to the dialogue of the condemned Claudio and his sister in prison. Claudio’s nerve breaks down under the horror of approaching death, and he urges Isabella to yield to Angelo. Isabella, totally demoralized by her first glimpse of human evil, and, perhaps, by finding herself more attracted to Angelo and his proposal than she would ever have thought possible, explodes in a termagant fury. She says, “I’ll pray a thousand prayers for thy death” [3.1.145]—hardly a possible procedure for any Christian, though Isabella wants to be a cloistered nun. Everything is drifting towards a miserable and total impasse, when the disguised Duke steps forward. The rhythm abruptly changes from blank verse to prose, and the Duke proceeds to outline a complicated and very unplausible comic plot, complete with the naive device known as the “bed trick,” substituting one woman for another in the dark. It is clear that this point is the “peripety” or reversal of the action,10 and that the play falls into the form of a diptych, the first half tragic in direction and the second half comic. Vincentio has the longest speaking part of any character in Shakespearean comedy: a sure sign that he has the role of a subdramatist, a deputy producer of the stage action. Measure for Measure, then, is not a play about the philosophy of government or sexual morality or the folly of trying to legislate people into virtue. It is a play about the relation of the structure of comedy to these things. The Duke’s actions make no kind of realistic sense, but they make structural dramatic sense, and only the structure of comedy, intervening in human life, can bring genuine repentance out of Angelo and genuine forgiveness out of Isabella. In The Winter’s Tale the action also forms a diptych, and again we have first a tragic movement proceeding toward chaos and general muddle. This action comprises Leontes’ jealousy, the disappearance of his wife Hermione, the death of his son Mamillius, the exposing of the infant Perdita, and the devouring of Antigonus, who exposes her, by a bear. Then a shepherd and his son enter the action: as in Measure for Measure, the rhythm immediately changes from blank verse to prose. The shepherd finds the infant and the son sees the death of Antigonus, and the shepherd’s remark, “Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new born” [3.3.113–14],11 emphasizes the separating into two parts of the total ac-

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tion. This separating of the action is referred to later on in a recognition scene, not presented but reported in the conversation of some gentlemen: “all the instruments that aided to expose the child were even then lost when it was found” [5.2.70–2].12 Such phrases indicate that the real dividing point in the action is the finding of Perdita at the end of the third act, not the sixteen years that are said to elapse before the fourth act begins. In the final scene of the play Paulina, the widow of Antigonus, says to Hermione, who is pretending to be a statue: “our Perdita is found” [5.3.121]. This is the formula that first draws speech from Hermione. Paulina, though an agent of the comic structure of the second half of the play, is not its generator: that appears to be some power connected with the Delphic oracle, which had previously announced that Leontes would live without an heir “if that which is lost be not found” [3.2.135–6]. In The Tempest there is no clearly marked peripety or reversal of action. The reason is that the entire play is a reversal of an action which has taken place before the play begins. This concentration on the second half of a total dramatic action accounts for many features of The Tempest. It is quite a short play, which is why Prospero’s role has fewer lines than Vincentio’s, though he dominates the action even more completely. Again, we are constantly aware of the passing of a brief interval of time, an interval of a few hours, very close to the period of time we spend in watching the play. The dramatic action is generated by Prospero and carried out by Ariel, whose role is parallel to that of Paulina in The Winter’s Tale. But because only the second or rearranging half of the action is presented, the characters have no chance to mess up their lives in the way that Angelo and Leontes do. The theme of frustrated aggressive action recurs several times: when Ferdinand tries to draw his sword on Prospero, when Antonio and Sebastian attempt to murder Alonso and Gonzalo, and later to attack Ariel, and when Stephano’s conspiracy is baffled. Prospero’s magic controls everything, and the effect is of an audience being taken inside a play, so that they not only watch the play but, so to speak, see it being put on. Ordinarily, in our dramatic experience, this sense of a play being created before our eyes is one that we can only get when we are watching an action that seems to be partly improvised on the spot, where we know the general outline of the story but not its particulars. Various devices such as Brecht’s “alienating” techniques13 and the Stanislavsky method of acting14 attempt to create such a feeling in modern audiences. In Shakespeare’s day this type of improvising action appeared in the

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commedia dell’arte, which was well known in England, and influenced Shakespeare in all periods of his production.15 Some of the sketchy plotoutlines (scenari) of this type of play have been preserved, and we note that they feature magicians, enchanted islands, reunions of families, clown scenes (lazzi), and the like. Such scenari are probably as close as we shall ever get to finding a general source for The Tempest. Not only does Prospero arrange the action, but we are seldom allowed to forget that it is specifically a dramatic action that is going on. Prospero orders Ariel to disguise himself as a nymph of the sea, while remaining invisible to everyone but himself [1.2.301–3]. In reading the play, we might wonder what point there is in dressing up so elaborately if he is to remain invisible, but in the theatre we realize at once that he will not be invisible to us. Again, an illusory banquet is presented to and snatched away from the Court Party, and Ariel, as a harpy, makes a sombre speech condemning the “three men of sin” [3.3.53–82]. It is an impressive and oracular speech, but we hardly notice this because Prospero immediately undercuts it, coming forward to commend Ariel on doing a good actor’s job. The opposite emphasis comes in the epilogue, when Prospero says, As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free. [ll. 19–20]

The epilogue represents only the convention of asking the audience to applaud the play, so we hardly notice how grave the tone is. Yet it is clear that the restructuring of the lives of the characters in the play is being said to be a deeply serious operation, with an application in it for ourselves. We have not merely been watching a fairy tale, we feel, but participating in some kind of mystery. What kind of mystery? The Tempest is almost a comic parody of a revenge tragedy, in which there is repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation instead of revenge. The characters are divided into three groups and each is put through ordeals, illusions, and a final awakening to some kind of self-knowledge. There is hardly a character in the play who is not believed by other characters to be dead, and in the final recognition scene there is something very like a sense that everyone is being raised from the dead, as there is with Hermione in the last scene of The Winter’s Tale. Prospero actually claims the power of raising the dead in his renunciation speech, and he also pretends that Miranda was drowned in the storm he raised.

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The Court Party goes through a labyrinth of “forthrights and meanders” [3.3.3] with strange shapes appearing and disappearing around them, but nevertheless they finally arrive at a state of self-recognition where Gonzalo is able to say that each has found himself “when [formerly] no man was his own” [5.1.213].16 Gonzalo himself is on the highest moral level of the Court Party: in contrast to Antonio and Sebastian, he finds the island a pleasant place and his garments fresh, and he is excluded from Ariel’s condemnation of the “three men of sin.” Alonso comes next: his repentance and his gaining of self-awareness seem equally genuine, and he is clearly the focus of Prospero’s regenerative efforts. Next is Sebastian, a weak and ineffectual person who does what the stronger characters around him suggest that he do. In the final scene he seems quite cheerful, and we feel that, while nothing very profound has happened to him, he will be as easily persuaded to virtue as to vice. Antonio, who speaks only once in the last scene [5.1.265–6], in reply to a direct question, is a more doubtful quantity. Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban go through a kind of parody of the Court Party ordeals and illusions, yet they too reach some level of self-awareness. Stephano is reconciled to losing his imaginary kingdom, and Caliban, who has emerged as much the most intelligent of the three, is apparently ready to be weaned from idolatry, and so to take the first step in self-knowledge himself. To the extent that people are acquiring self-knowledge, then, they seem to be taking their places in a moral hierarchy. Yet as we look further into it, it seems to be less a moral hierarchy than an imaginative one. They move from illusion to reality as the play presents these categories. What is illusion? Primarily, it is what such people as Antonio consider reality. As soon as Alonso falls asleep, Antonio starts a plot to murder him: this is Realpolitik, the way things are done in the real world. Similarly, he takes a very “realistic” view of the island, in contrast to Gonzalo’s. But the play itself moves towards a reversal of this view of reality. Antonio’s one remark in the last scene, already alluded to, is that Caliban is a “plain fish”—one of several indications that living on his level is symbolically living under water. The illusions in the mazy wanderings of the Court Party are more real than Antonio’s life without conscience. What then is reality, as the play presents it? That is more difficult, and Prospero seems to agree with T.S. Eliot that whatever reality is, humankind cannot bear very much of it.17 But just as “reality” for Antonio turns out to be illusion, so perhaps what is illusion on the much higher level of Ferdinand and Miranda might turn out to be closer to reality.

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The masque put on for their benefit by Prospero is a vision of the highest form of “reality” in our cultural tradition: the vision of what in Christianity is called “unfallen” nature, the original world before the fall, the model divine creation that God observed and saw to be good. The dance of nymphs and August reapers seems to suggest the “perpetual spring” which is a traditional attribute of paradise, and the three goddesses of earth, sky, and rainbow suggest the newly washed world after Noah’s flood, when the curse was lifted from the ground and a regularity of seasons was promised. The vision, however, is one of a renewed power and energy of nature rather than simply a return to a lost paradise: a sense of a “brave new world” [5.1.183] appropriate as a wedding offering to a young and attractive couple. And it seems highly significant that this vision of the reality of nature from which we have fallen away can be attained only through some kind of theatrical illusion. The action of the play, then, moves from illusion to reality in a paradoxical way. What we think of as reality is illusion: not all of us are realistic in the criminal way that Antonio is, but, as Prospero’s great speech at the end of the masque says, in our world everything that we call real is merely an illusion that lasts a little longer than some other illusions. At the other end, what we think of as real can come to us only as a temporary illusion, specifically a dramatic illusion. This is what the wedding masque symbolizes in the play: the masque is presented to Ferdinand and Miranda, but the whole play is being presented to us, and we must be sure that we omit no aspect of it. The play keeps entirely within the order of nature: there are no gods or oracles, though Alonso expects them, and Prospero’s magic operates entirely within the four elements below the moon. Sycorax, like other witches, could draw down the moon, i.e., bring “lunatic” influences to bear on human life,18 but this is not Prospero’s interest, though it may be within his power. In the action that took place before the play began, when Prospero was Duke of Milan, his brother Antonio had become the persona or dramatic mask of the absent-minded Prospero, and gradually expanded until he became “absolute Milan” [1.2.109], the entire Duke, until Prospero and the infant Miranda vanished into another world in an open boat (for Milan, like Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale, appears to have a seacoast). On the enchanted island this dramatic action goes into reverse, Prospero expanding into the real Duke of Milan and Antonio shrinking to a kind of discarded shell. Prospero’s life in Milan is what passes for real life in our ordinary experience: the action of The Tempest

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presents us with the aspect of nature which is real but, like the dark side of the moon, constantly hidden from us. We note in passing the folk-tale theme of the struggle of brothers, the rightful heir exiled only to return later in triumph. The feeling that the play is some kind of mystery or initiation, then, is a quite normal and central response to it. The connection between drama and rites of initiation probably goes back to the Old Stone Age. In Classical times there were several mystery religions with dramatic forms of initiation, the most celebrated being those of Eleusis, near Athens, which were held in honour of the earth-goddess Demeter, the Roman Ceres who is the central figure in Prospero’s masque. In the eighteenth century Bishop Warburton suggested that the sixth book of the Aeneid, depicting Aeneas’s journey to the lower world, was a disguised form of Eleusinian initiation,19 and in 1921 Colin Still, in Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, applied a similar theory to The Tempest.20 He noted that the route of the Court Party, from Tunis in Africa to the coast of Italy, paralleled the route of Aeneas from Carthage, and the otherwise pointless identification of Tunis with Carthage made by Gonzalo in act 2, along with the equally pointless amusement of Antonio and Sebastian, seems to be emphasizing the parallel.21 I suspect that Colin Still’s book was an influence on T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, published the next year, though Eliot does not mention Still before his preface to Wilson Knight’s Wheel of Fire in 1930.22 Colin Still, recognizing that Shakespeare could have had no direct knowledge of Classical mystery rites, ascribed the symbolic coincidences he found with The Tempest to an inner “necessity,” to the fact that the imagination must always talk in some such terms when it gets to a sufficient pitch of intensity.23 I should add only that the “necessity” is specifically a necessity of dramatic structure. We can see this more clearly if we turn to a dramatic form which not only did not influence Shakespeare but was nowhere in his cultural tradition, the Noh play of Japan.24 In a Noh play what usually happens is that two travellers encounter a ghost who was a famous hero in his former life, and who recreates the story of his exploits in this ghostly world, which is also presented as a world of reconciliation and mutual understanding. This type of drama is linked to Buddhist beliefs in a world intervening between death and rebirth,25 but we do not need such beliefs to make imaginative sense of Noh plays. We do recognize in them, however, a very powerful and integral dramatic structure. When we enter the world of The Tempest, with its curious feeling of being a world withdrawn from both death and birth, we recognize

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again that that world is being specifically identified with the world of the drama. As often in Shakespeare, the characters in The Tempest are invited to a meeting to be held after the play in which the puzzling features of their experiences will be explained to them. This seems a curious and unnecessary convention, but it is true to the situation of drama, where the audience always knows more about what is going on than the characters do, besides being in a greater state of freedom, because they are able to walk out of the theatre. Each character in The Tempest, at the beginning of the play, is lost in a private drama of his own. This is true even of Prospero, in the long dialogues he holds with Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban in act 1, mainly for the benefit of the audience. Through the action of the play, a communal dramatic sense gradually consolidates, in which all the characters identify themselves within the same drama, a drama which the audience is finally invited to enter. The Tempest, like its predecessor The Winter’s Tale, is both comedy and romance. In the tradition of comedy that Shakespeare inherited from Plautus and Terence, what typically happens is that a young man and a young woman wish to get married, that there is parental opposition, and that this opposition is eventually evaded and the marriage takes place. Comedy thus moves towards the triumph of youth over age, and toward the vision of the renewal and rebirth of nature which such a triumph symbolizes, however little of nature there may be in a Roman comedy. In The Tempest, the conventionally comic aspect of the play is represented by the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. Prospero puts up a token opposition to this marriage, apparently because it is customary for fathers to do so, and he forces Ferdinand into the role of servant, as part of the token tests and ordeals which traditionally make the suitor worthy of his mistress. The corresponding comic element in The Winter’s Tale is centred on the successful marriage of Florizel and Perdita in the teeth of strenuous parental opposition. Florizel temporarily renounces his princely heritage and exchanges garments with the thief Autolycus, just as Ferdinand takes over Caliban’s role as a bearer of logs. Here again the renewal of nature is a part of the theme, more explicitly because of the romance element in the play. The great sheep-shearing festival in the fourth act of The Winter’s Tale is a vision of the power of nature extending through four seasons, that being probably what the dance of the twelve satyrs symbolizes [4.4.324 ff.]. Nature has it all her own way throughout this

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scene, and Perdita, the child of nature, announces that she will have nothing to do with “bastard” flowers adulterated by art [4.4.79–85]. Nor will she listen to Polixenes’ sophisticated idealism about art as being really nature’s way of improving nature. The traditional symbol of the domination of art over nature, Orpheus, whose music could command animals and plants, appears only in parody, in connection with the ballads of Autolycus.26 But this triumph of nature and its powers of renewal and rebirth, with its centre of gravity in the future, is only the lesser recognition in the play. The main emphasis comes not on the successful wooing of the younger pair, but, as usually in Shakespearean romance, on the reintegrating of the world of their elders. The greater recognition scene takes place in a world of art, Paulina’s chapel where we are told that we are being presented with a work of sculpture and painting, where music is heard, where references to the art of magic are made. In the vision of the triumph of art, the emphasis is not on renewal and rebirth but on resurrection, the transformation from death to life. And just as the vision of nature’s renewal and rebirth relates primarily to the future, so the triumph of art and resurrection relates primarily to the past, where the words of the oracle, spoken sixteen years earlier, are brought to life in the present, and where old sins and blunders are healed up. In his essay “The Decay of Lying” Oscar Wilde says of music that it “creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.”27 Perhaps it is the function of all art to “create a past” in this sense of revealing to us the range of experience that our timid senses and reasonings largely screen out. The power of nature gives us a hope that helps us to face the future: the power of art gives us a faith that helps us to face the past. The Tempest is concerned even more than The Winter’s Tale with the triumph of art, and much less with the triumph of nature. This is mainly because Prospero is a magus figure: in Elizabethan English “art” meant mostly magic, as it does here. Prospero renounces his magic at the end of the play: this was conventional, for while magic was a great attraction as dramatic entertainment, it was a highly suspicious operation in real life, hence all dramatic magicians were well advised to renounce their powers when the play drew to a close. But there is more to Prospero’s renunciation of magic than this. We recall the deep melancholy of his “our revels now are ended” speech at the end of the masque [4.1.147–58], and his sombre comment on Miranda’s enthusiasm for her brave new world:

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“’tis new to thee” [5.1.184]. In the world of reality that we can reach only through dramatic illusion, the past is the source of faith and the future the source of hope. In the world of illusion that we take for reality, the past is only the no longer and the future only the not yet: one vanishes into nothingness and the other, after proving itself to be much the same, vanishes after it. As a magus, Prospero is fulfilling the past, reliving and restructuring his former life as Duke of Milan. To do so, he must take an obsessive interest in time: “the very minute bids thee ope thine ear,” he says to Miranda [1.2.37], referring to astrology,28 and he later tells her that the fortunes of all the rest of his life depend on his seizing the present moment [1.2.180–4]. Antonio’s urging the same plea on Sebastian later [2.1.207 ff.] is a direct parody of this. Prospero’s anxiety about time interpenetrates very curiously with his anxieties as a theatrical producer, making sure that Ariel comes in on cue and that his audience is properly attentive and impressed. Such strain and such anxiety cannot go on for long, and all through the play Prospero, no less than Ariel, is longing for the end of it. Prospero’s magic summons up the romantic enthusiasm for magic with which the sixteenth century had begun, in Agrippa and Paracelsus and Pico della Mirandola and the legendary Faust. It continued for most of the next century, and among contemporary scholars Frances Yates in particular has speculated about its curious relation to Shakespeare’s romances.29 But this vision of a power and wisdom beyond human scope seems to be passing away when Ariel is released and melts into the thin air from whence he came. Whether magic was a reality or a dream, in either case it could only end as dreams do. In Shakespeare’s day magic and science were very imperfectly separated, and today, in a postscientific age when they seem to be coming together again, the magus figure has revived in contemporary fiction, with much the same dreams attached to it. Such a return may make The Tempest more “relevant” to us today, but if so, the weariness and disillusionment of Prospero are equally “relevant.” Just as the mere past, the vanishing age, seems to be summed up in the figure of Ariel, so the mere future, the yet-to-vanish new age, seems to be summed up in the figure of Caliban. Caliban’s name seems to echo the “cannibals” of Montaigne’s famous essay, a passage from which forms the basis for Gonzalo’s reverie about an ideal commonwealth in act 2.30 Around the figure of Caliban, again, there are many phrases indicating Shakespeare’s reading in contemporary pamphlets dealing with the first English efforts to settle on the American coast.31 Every editor of The Tempest has to record this fact, while pointing out that Prospero’s island is in

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the Mediterranean, not the Atlantic, and has nothing to do with the New World. Still, the historical situation of The Tempest, coming at the end of an age of speculative magic and at the beginning of an age of colonization in the New World, seems to give Caliban a peculiar and poignant resonance. Caliban is the shape of things to come in the future “real” world, not a brave new world of hope, but, for the most part, a mean and cruel world, full of slavery and greed, of which many Calibans will be the victims. Of course we had rather have the past of faith and the future of hope than the past of dream and the future of nightmare, but what choice have we? This is perhaps another way of asking what The Tempest, as a dramatic illusion, has to give us in the way of reality. When Shakespeare touches on such subjects he is apt to bury what he says in unlikely places, passages of dialogue that the eye and ear could easily pass over as mere “filler.” We find such a passage in the inane babble of Antonio and Sebastian at the beginning of the second act. Sebastian’s response to a narrow escape from drowning is a kind of giggling hysteria, and Antonio falls in with this mood and encourages it, because he knows what he wants to do with Sebastian later on. In the course of the dialogue Gonzalo, who is speaking with a wisdom and insight not his own, assures the others that “Tunis was Carthage” [2.1.84]. We pick up the implication that The Tempest, as explained, is repeating the experience of Aeneas voyaging from Carthage to Italy to build a new Troy, and presenting an imaginative moment, at once retrospective and prospective, in the history of the third Troy, as England was conventionally supposed to be. The dialogue goes on: Antonio: What impossible matter will he make easy next? Sebastian: I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and give it to his son32 for an apple. Antonio: And, sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands. [2.1.89–94]

Gonzalo never claims to make impossible matters easy, but Prospero can do so, and by implication Shakespeare himself can. And it is Shakespeare who gives us, as members of his audience, his island, as one would give a child an apple, but with the further hope that we will not stop with eating the apple, but will use its seeds to create for ourselves new seas and even more enchanted islands.

19 Il Cortegiano May 1961

From Quaderni d’italianistica, 1, no. 1 (1980): 1–14; reprinted as “Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano” in MM, 307–21. Frye gave this talk at Aula Atti Accademici, Venice (23 May 1979), and at the University of Urbino, Urbino (29 May 1979); it was translated into Italian by Francesca Valente and Alfredo Rizzardi and published as a booklet with the title Il “Cortegiano” in una società senza cortigiani (Urbino: Università degli studi di Urbino, 1979). In the following text we have used the English translations of quotations from The Courtier as they appear in Frye’s typescript (in NFF: 1988, box 47, file 1; copy in 1991, box 39, file 1), which was evidently his script for the oral delivery. For publication in Quaderni d’italianistica, the official journal of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies, he replaced these with Castiglione’s original Italian; these Italian quotations are now supplied in the notes, preceded by Q for Quaderni.

I Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano purports to describe a conversation among a number of people gathered at the court of the duke and duchess of Urbino in the spring of 1507.1 They had proposed, as one of their aftersupper “games,” the ideal courtier as a theme for a discussion extending over four nights. Some kind of actual discussion seems to have been the basis for the book, and Castiglione himself was no doubt present at it, though he follows the modest precedent of Plato in the Phaedo and represents himself as absent in England.2 He was not able to get down to completing the book, however, until some years later, and a good deal happened in that time. The duke of Urbino, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, was a childless invalid who had adopted his young nephew Francesco

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della Rovere as his heir. Francesco, who makes an attractive appearance at the end of book 1 as a boy of seventeen [secs. 54–5], succeeded his uncle, and retained Castiglione in his service. He also committed two murders, and was expelled from Urbino by Pope Leo X, who replaced him with his own nephew.3 Castiglione was forced into temporary retirement by this, and thereby gained the leisure to finish his book.4 Several of those who figure in the dialogue were at that time refugees from other courts and cities—Giuliano de’ Medici from Florence, the Fregoso brothers from Genoa,5 Castiglione himself from Mantua—but many of them were senior statesmen by the time the book was finished. Giuliano de’ Medici, though he died in 1516, lived long enough to see his family restored to power in Florence and his brother elected to the Papacy.6 It was part of Castiglione’s code that gentlemen who wrote should be in no hurry to entrust what they wrote to the printing press. The press was useful for scholarly editions of the classics, and, in the more revolutionary England, for religious and political polemic, but poets, even prose writers, who belonged to the gentry tended to keep their work in manuscript and pass it around to friends. The final release to the printer was often accompanied by protests about the forcing of the author’s hand by importunate readers of the manuscript. In Castiglione’s case the importunate reader was the famous Vittoria della Colonna, and Castiglione’s disclaimer seems to have been genuine enough.7 II Cortegiano was not in fact published until 1528, fourteen years after completion,8 and Castiglione died in the next year. Although Castiglione of course wrote other things, II Cortegiano was not so much a book by him as his book, his legacy to posterity, and the longer he postponed its publication, the more it receded into a distant past, as an increasing number of those featured in it died. The retrospective feeling about the book, the sense of its celebration of an ideal already left behind by history, was as obvious to Castiglione himself as it is to us, and forms part of the book’s intention. Many of those who belonged to Castiglione’s original group are still well known, partly because they had the sense to get their portraits painted by Raphael or Titian. Castiglione alludes to himself also as a kind of verbal painter, and speaks in his preface of the skill of “Making, by perspective art, that which is not seem to be” (Letter of Dedication, sec. 1).9 The remark suggests an interesting link between portrait painting and the ideology of an ascendant class. In English history, for example, we derive much of our sense of Henry VIII’s character from Holbein’s

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portrait of him standing stockily with his feet wide apart, his cruel little eyes glittering out of his terrifying face.10 And most of our feeling for the glamour and romance of the cause of the seventeenth-century Cavaliers comes from Van Dyck’s portraits of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, and from the haunting melancholy and charm with which he invested those two rather commonplace people.11 Similarly, it is Raphael who preserves for us the sly wit of Bibbiena, the imperturbable calm of Emilia Pia, and the melancholy sensitivity of Castiglione himself.12 However, other aspects of culture were developing besides painting which were much less tender to the sensibilities of a declining ruling class. Two Genoese whose names are familiar to us if not to Castiglione, Christopher Columbus and John Cabot, had begun the exploration of America that eventually shifted power from the Mediterranean citystates to the Atlantic nations, England, France, Spain, Portugal. In many respects Il Cortegiano was the testament of a disappearing culture to the emergent seaboard countries. It was Francis I of France who urged Castiglione to complete his book for the sake of posterity,13 Charles V who described its author as one of the finest gentlemen in the world,14 and Elizabethan England which responded eagerly to the book (in the translation of Sir Thomas Hoby published in 1561), and found in Sir Philip Sidney the embodiment of Castiglione’s ideal.15 The two essential facts of Renaissance society were the prince and the courtier, and it is not surprising that two of the most influential Renaissance books should be Machiavelli’s Il Principe and Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, which were written at much the same time.16 But the city-states of Italy, with their intense local loyalties and lack of national feeling, could not provide a broad enough economic base to compete with the courts of France and England, where the destruction of the feudal system had replaced the rebellious barons of the Middle Ages with the servants of a highly centralized monarchy. In England, the rise of a wealthy middle class limited the power of the prince—Henry VIII was the only king of England to have the kind of absolute power that was common on the Continent for many centuries later—and the courtier ideal did not last long after the death of Elizabeth I. But it was a very intense ideal while it lasted, and its incorporation into Elizabethan literature, including some of Shakespeare’s plays, has helped to preserve it for the English-speaking world. We have noted something wistful and nostalgic in Castiglione’s tribute to what was even then a vanishing ideal, even though he deprecates

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such an attitude in his introduction to the second book. At the time of the discussion the glory of Urbino itself was in decline: its greatness had been due to Guidobaldo’s illustrious father Federico, but Guidobaldo was prevented by ill health from achieving much in either war or peace, and the court was held together by the duchess. The importance of this fact for Castiglione’s argument will meet us later. In the next decade it became increasingly obvious that the real powers in Italy were France, Spain, and the Empire (at that time linked to Spain), and that what they did would determine Italian history, regardless of how many princes and courtiers modelled themselves on Italian handbooks. Castiglione died two years after the sack of Rome: in that brutal context, an idealized courtier looks rather woebegone, and Castiglione himself a quixotic figure, without the schizophrenic mental armour that kept the original Quixote serenely believing in his fantastic code. But the great beauty and power of the book clearly derive from something other than the historical context, and we must try to see what this is. Castiglione defines both his genre and his literary tradition when he says in his introduction: “I am content to have erred with Plato, Xenophon, and Marcus Tullius; and just as, according to these authors, there is the Idea of the perfect Republic, the perfect King, and the perfect Orator, so likewise there is that of the perfect Courtier” (Letter of Dedication, sec. 3).17 Central to Italian humanism was the admiration of Plato not merely as a philosopher but as a literary artist. A century earlier the humanist Bruni (Leonardo Aretino) had spoken of the urbanity of the Platonic dialogue, of how well people kept their temper in the discussions, of the pleasantness and fluency of the style, and of the pervasiveness of the quality called in Greek charis, of which Castiglione’s “grace” is a fair translation.18 Castiglione’s genre is essentially that of the Platonic symposium (along with its Latin developments in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and the like), in which a discussion is maintained on a topic which has a Platonic form or idea behind all its manifestations, with the hope that eventually something of that form or idea could be glimpsed by those taking part. Thus something of the Platonic form of love, also one of Castiglione’s main themes, is glimpsed at the end of the dialogue which is explicitly called the Symposium. Plato’s dialogues are often concerned with issues in education, but do not envisage a curriculum or organized program for education much beyond conversations with Socrates. The question of what an educated man ought to know and what his social responsibilities are arises later,

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and focuses, with Cicero and later Quintilian, on the figure of the orator. In Cicero’s De Oratore, one of the books most influential for Renaissance culture, the orator becomes the type of the educated man (doctus vir), with a scope and range of extraordinary versatility, making up in brilliance what it might lack in depth. For Quintilian at least the orator’s training was moral as well as intellectual. The oratorical ideal retained a good deal of prestige through the Middle Ages, when most educated people were trained either for the church or the law, and in either case would need to know how to speak. Hence a central place was given to rhetoric, and as rhetoric is a study of the figuration of language as well as of verbal persuasion, it was an excellent training for poets as well. With the Renaissance the prince emerged as both the head and the centre of his society, and with him came the revival of the form we may call the cyropaedia, the treatise on the education of an ideal prince, whose training would be an educational model because he would be the most important person in his society to educate. The original Cyropaedia of Xenophon, to which Castiglione refers,19 dealt with the training of Cyrus, one of the authentically great men of the ancient world, and a legendary figure in both Classical and Biblical literature. Erasmus’s Institute of a Christian Prince,20 published in 1516 when Castiglione was working on II Cortegiano, established the cyropaedia as a central Renaissance genre. In England, the great epic of Elizabethan literature, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, is in one of its aspects a cyropaedia, an educational treatise on the qualities of the ideal prince, identified with the romantic hero Prince Arthur. The sixteenth century was one of the world’s greatest ages in educational theory, and in choosing the courtier for his theme, Castiglione must have felt that he had a more up-to-date model than the orator and a more practicable one than the prince. Much of the medieval oratorical ideal remained in the Renaissance, because nonmilitary professional careers were still mainly concerned with the church and the law. The immense prestige of the church as an employing institution is visible all through Castiglione’s book, despite his efforts to keep everything explicitly religious out of the discussion, and to construct an essentially secular ideal of education. We may note that three of those who take part in his symposium were later made cardinals.21 But shifting the model from orator to courtier gave it a more concrete social reference. As for the cyropaedia form, it would have been difficult to discuss the perfect prince in such a genre without sinking into flattery of the prince nearest at hand, and as this was the invalid duke of Urbino, who retired to bed

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after supper and took no part in the conversations, such flattery would have been largely wasted in any case.22 As for Plato’s Republic, we can hardly ascribe much direct influence from it, or from Plato generally, on Castiglione, although he had a profoundly Platonic cast of mind, and Platonic idealism appealed to him deeply. “There is a perfection for everything, even though it be hidden” (1.13), he says.23 But he is clearly anxious to avoid the Utopian theme itself, which would mean bypassing the education of the individual in favour of a theoretical regulating of society. Two major English writers, Spenser and Milton, expressed a preference for Xenophon’s Cyropaedia over Plato’s Republic as the more practical and concrete of the two books,24 and Castiglione also concerns himself only with what from his point of view were more or less practical possibilities. Still, when we come to the fourth book, where the courtier’s social function as an adviser to the prince is discussed, it seems clear that the courtier must have some vision of the form of society too, if he is to perform his duties intelligently. The subject of a cyropaedia may be the ideal prince, but the author of a cyropaedia could only be an ideal courtier, as Castiglione describes him, and his theory of education would have to derive itself from a social vision. It is, I think, the latent Utopian tone of Castiglione’s dialogue, its implicit reference to a hidden perfection in society itself, that makes it still relevant to us. Among the great educational books of that very fertile period, we have to place Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) in the first rank.25 In More’s book there is a collision of views between Hythloday, the traveller who has been to Utopia and has returned a convinced Communist, and More himself, who listens to his narration. Hythloday is now a revolutionary who feels that nothing can be done for Europe until private property is abolished and the various principalities replaced with something more like the Utopian republic.26 More represents himself, in contrast, as feeling rather that Hythloday should use his knowledge of Utopia to act as a counsellor to European princes, trying to inform their policies with something of the Utopian spirit.27 Castiglione’s courtier has no Utopia to go to, but he has a similar informing vision to communicate. II The first book of Il Cortegiano opens the discussion, sets out the kind of person the courtier is to be, outlines the general range of what he should

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know, and sketches in the cultural context of his society. The main line of discussion is sustained first by Ludovico da Canossa, a reasonable and open-minded speaker, who expresses the general consensus (with some disagreement) that the courtier should be of noble birth, though as a matter of convenience more than as a feeling of propriety.28 It is not that one kind of man is inherently better than another, but that one of the most essential qualities of the courtier, as we shall see more fully in a moment, is spontaneity, doing things with the effortless ease of one accustomed to doing them from birth, which is simpler if in fact he has been accustomed to them from birth. If he is not nobly born, in other words, all his courtly qualities will be acquired, and the strain of acquiring them is likely to show through at some point. The primary profession of the courtier is said to be military, but everything he does in war as well as peace is done as an amateur, leaving strategy to the professionals.29 One would expect him to know enough to be a commissioned officer: this is no doubt assumed, but all the emphasis is on his bearing and deportment, on manifesting his courage to the right people, on his ability to ride well (Castiglione had a special interest in horsemanship),30 and the like. Castiglione is not temperamentally much of a warrior, however, and he takes more pleasure in describing the courtier at peace and at play. Here again, one would expect that one reason for his being an amateur would be administrative: that is, he need not be a great painter himself, but he should know who the best painters are, know why they are the best, and see to it that they are fully employed.31 One gets the impression, though, that Castiglione’s prince does not delegate much authority to his courtiers, no doubt mainly because of the limited area of the Italian city-states. The English treatises in the same general genre, from Elyot’s Governour (1531) to Milton in the next century, lay more stress on the educated man’s responsibilities as a magistrate or deputy officer. Castiglione’s courtier, in contrast, seems to be almost entirely a court functionary. The scope of the courtier’s peacetime activities covers mainly sports and the fine arts, including literature. The courtier should be an amateur poet, writing gracefully and wittily within a convention;32 he should understand something of music, painting, and sculpture. Many fine and eloquent things are said of these arts, especially music, where the musical amateur’s preference for the single melodic line with an instrumental accompaniment—normally the lute—over elaborate contrapuntal structures like the madrigal is made clear.33 Some of the issues discussed

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seem rather barren in themselves: for instance, is sculpture superior to painting because it has one more dimension, or inferior because of its more restricted subject matter? The issue is raised apparently only to make it clear that both arts belong in a civilized environment.34 In the verbal arts, scholarly erudition is not stressed to the degree that it is in the orator’s training: what the courtier knows is far less important than how he displays his knowledge, as in the apt placing of quotations. The strong humanist prejudice against using words not generally employed in conversation is felt throughout: in the third book, discussions of Aristotelian philosophy are sharply broken off by the two chief women, the duchess and Emilia Pia, who tell the speakers that they must speak so as to be understood.35 We are obviously in an age when the technical language of scholastic philosophy is giving way to the more colloquial idiom used by most of the major philosophers between Bacon and Leibnitz, who tended to be socially amateurs rather than school philosophers. We notice too that while Tuscan has, among Italian dialects, the immense prestige conferred by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, no centre dominates the whole country in the way that London dominated England and Paris France, making its own dialect the standard form of the language and reducing all others to rustic or clowns’ speech.36 But whatever the courtier does, he must do it with “grace”: everything leads up to that as the final manifestation of courtliness. Grace is almost impossible to define: it eludes verbal formulation, because “He who has grace finds grace” (1.24), and those who do not have it are unlikely to know what it is.37 Grace is manifested however in two ways. One is by sprezzatura, another untranslatable word conveying the sense of masterly ease, spontaneity, the tossed-off quality that shows nothing of the long practice that has led up to it.38 The other is by disinvoltura,39 the grace of bodily movements, the repose of the trained athlete. The courtier must demonstrate these qualities in athletics, in riding (in almost all European languages the words for members of the aristocracy are derived from horse-riding), and whenever he attempts poetry or music. “We may call that art true art which does not seem to be art; nor must one be more careful of anything than of concealing it” (1.26).40 This is of course a very ancient principle, and is also reinforced by the tradition of the orator, who tries to conceal the fact that he is persuading. Even so one wonders why there is so heavy an emphasis on these qualities. I think there are two answers, one relatively superficial, the other more profound.

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The superficial answer is that the courtier is a member of the aristocracy, and it is the social function of the aristocracy to put on a show. To use a criterion that Castiglione does not, the aristocracy illustrates for the rest of the community the level of civilized, leisurely, privileged living that their taxes are supporting. The association of aristocracy with showmanship runs through all human history: the Americans, with no hereditary aristocracy, have, with a fine sense of fitness, made one out of their entertainers. Castiglione thinks of the courtiers as primarily under the eyes of other courtiers: “Gentlemen are seen in public spectacles before the people and before ladies and great lords” (1.21), he says.41 But especially in the second book, the sense of the courtier as under the eyes of the rest of the community is also present. In any case, what Thorstein Veblen calls “conspicuous consumption” is essential not only to the morale of the gentry themselves but to that of the rest of society,42 which sees in its aristocracy the visible models and embodiments of the flower and fruit of civilization. We have derived two words from the metaphor of the masked actor: “hypocrite” and “person.” The former contains a moral value judgment, the latter does not. If we compare Castiglione on the courtier with Machiavelli on the prince, we see a remarkable parallel: both are constantly on view: what they are seen to do is, socially speaking, what they are; their reputations are the most important part of their identity, and their functional reality is their appearance.43 The difference is that Machiavelli’s prince, being the man who must make the decisions, must accept the large element of hypocrisy involved; must understand how and why the reputation for virtue is more important for him than the hidden reality of virtue. It is essential for the prince to be reputed liberal, Machiavelli says, though he is probably better off if in reality he saves his money.44 For the courtier, whose social function is ornamental rather than operative, the goal is an appearance which has entirely absorbed the reality, a persona or mask which is never removed even when asleep. In regard to women, we are told that men “are ever fearful of being deceived by art” (1.40),45 that is, of being manipulated. For the prince manipulation is essential; for the courtier it is not. This really means that, considered as an educational ideal, the courtier’s training goes in the direction, not of concealing a reality under a bravura performance, as the actor conceals his private identity on the stage, but of total candour and openness. To do things with “grace” is possible only if they are done with the practised skill that has descended

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from the consciousness to what we should now call the unconscious mind, and this in turn means that “grace” marks the total absorption of the courtier’s education into the courtier’s personality. The second book, much the longest of the four, carries on from the first, and the main speaker, Federico Fregoso, adds little to what Ludovico had already said, except that Ludovico is a liberal-minded person and Fregoso is a stilted, not to say stupid, snob. Here the sense of being constantly under social inspection extends to a feeling of stage fright. The courtier should avoid such sports as wrestling (recommended in the first book), not merely because the straining and heaving involved makes sprezzatura impossible, but because the courtier might be defeated by someone of inferior rank, which would be unseemly: “because it is too unseemly and too ugly a thing, and quite without dignity, to see a gentleman defeated by a peasant, and especially at wrestling” (2.10).46 We catch a glimpse of the extent to which in practice an aristocracy is really a kind of army of occupation. We also notice an increasing influence as we go on of Aristotle’s ideal of the “magnanimous man,”47 and of the principle that “the safest thing is to govern ourselves always according to a certain decorous mean” (2.41).48 Aristotle, of course, had no notion of making his “middle way” into a cult of mediocrity, but Fregoso, with his emphasis on such matters as dressing in dark clothes and making a good impression even without speech, seems to be subsiding into the view that being inconspicuous is an essential part of grace. Finally Bibbiena takes over, and, from an obviously immense repertoire, gives a large number of examples of the kind of jokes, smart repartee, and stinging epigrams (arguzie) that the courtier may use. Jokes are very hard to translate, because of their reliance on accidents of language; more important, anecdotes quickly lose the flavour of the specific occasion of which they form part. Some of the stories turn on exaggeration, of the type known as “tall stories” in American folklore, and among them are some hardy perennials. The story of the people whose speech froze to ice on a cold day and could be heard only when it thawed out again is still going strong in a Victorian farce called Handy Andy (1845).49 But although the anecdotes themselves often lack freshness, the principles behind them are of great educational importance. First, the emphasis put on them indicates the humanist principle of making conversation and ordinary speech the basis of all verbal communication. Second, the element of satire is heavily involved: the courtier is apparently intended to score off other people a good part of the time, and satire implies a

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moral principle. If a pompous and overdignified person slips on a banana peeling, we find it funny: if a blind man does so we do not. What is involved, then, is the educational principle of making something that is naturally aggressive into something that is socially acceptable, or rather functional. Education is largely a matter of channelling energies, and energy without education tends to be anarchic, even brutal—modern taste does not find Bibbiena’s examples invariably urbane, especially the practical jokes and hoaxes at the end. Then again, the success of a joke or epigram depends entirely on time and place, and the practice of such things imbues the courtier with that sense of distributing the rhythm of life which is the inner secret of grace. The third book purports to describe a “Court Lady” as the complement of the male courtier. The main speaker is Giuliano de’ Medici, again a sensible and good-humoured person, and a young man named Gasparo Pallavicino, with the omniscience of twenty-one, casts himself in the role of an extremely tedious misogynist. In this attempt to provide a mate for “a Courtier that never existed and perhaps never can exist” (2.100),50 there is a good deal of delicate humour. There is irony in the fact that although this group is said to have a heavy predominance of males, nevertheless it is held together by two women, and hence the crucial importance of women in the courtier’s life is being demonstrated all through the disagreements in the discussion. An extraordinary amount of sexual hostility is expressed in this book, and again the reason is the same: sexuality is normally aggressive and domineering, and education is largely a matter of channelling its energy into something more in keeping with civilized life. There is also a delicate humour in the way that Castiglione represents his courtiers as plunging away from the main theme into other areas, such as the distinctions of Aristotelian philosophy. In fact the main subject is so frequently torpedoed that it is hardly defined at all with any clarity. As Pallavicino says: “to wish to give her knowledge of everything in the world, and allow her those virtues that have so rarely been seen in men during the past centuries, is something one cannot endure or listen to at all” (3.11).51 Anything rather than face the fact that courtiership means nothing whatever without women, and that the courtier has no real social function at all unless his society admits women on the same level. Giuliano de’ Medici does his best: he points out to Pallavicino, with great courtesy, that “mankind” means men and women,52 not males, and

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that Pallavicino’s attempt to align men and women respectively with Aristotle’s form and matter is illiterate nonsense. He says that if women often desire to be men, it is not because men are better “but in order to gain freedom and to escape that rule over them which man has arrogated to himself by his own authority” (3.16).53 And yet even he can hardly discuss the subject without giving a long series of stories, mainly from Plutarch’s essay on the virtues of women,54 about all the admirable females who commit suicide after rape—in other words, conform to male codes. The discussion also revolves around what is in the context a quite genuine problem: society and the church insist that monogamous marriage is the only possible love-relation between a man and a woman, yet a far more promiscuous kind of love-making is obviously built in to the courtier’s code. It is one of many issues which are too complex to be resolved in the argument. III In the fourth book the argument draws toward its climax, and focuses on the courtier’s social function as the adviser of the prince. Some feel that he is to be not an adviser but a teacher, and this raises a problem. If he knows enough to teach the prince, he is presumably a person of considerable age and experience; if he is to be that, what becomes of all his graceful accomplishments in riding, playing tennis, singing to a lute, and the rest, which are normally best performed by a young man? The group, and perhaps Castiglione as well, never quite come to terms with the fact that they are really talking about two different ideals here, one courtly and the other humanistic, one active and the other contemplative. Trying to combine the two merely brings us up against the old paradox: “si la jeunesse savait, si la vieillesse pouvait.”55 There is a prevailing sentiment in this fourth book that the courtier is there to know and see the truth, and tell the truth to the prince; that he is to instil the principles of virtue, little by little, into the prince’s mind; that he is to promote justice and vergogna wherever he can.56 Vergogna combines the ideas of a sense of honour, of reverence for the fitness of things, and of guilt if honour is betrayed: it is an almost perfect translation of the Homeric term aidos,57 and like it expresses something very central in the heroic code. Half a century after his death, Castiglione’s book was banned by the Inquisition and placed on the Index: this of course was silly, and reflects a time when the Catholic Church was frightened by

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everything. But it is true that the heroic code underlying the ideal of the courtier is committed to the world and the world’s educational values. Castiglione’s code has much in common, not only with the Classical heroic code, but with similar codes across the world, like the samurai code in Japan. Every aristocracy contains within it a tendency to make an autonomous religion out of its social status. A strong attraction in W.B. Yeats toward this element in Japanese culture is combined with an equally strong admiration for Castiglione.58 There are objections by some in the group to this new program for the courtier: is he to become simply a schoolmaster, and even if he were to succeed in his aim of educating the prince, would he not make him a mere justice of the peace rather than a great monarch? Ottaviano Fregoso stresses the extroverted and historical side of a ruler’s greatness, his glory and wealth and splendid buildings, as against the philosophical and contemplative. But there is also a feeling that the pattern of what is being talked about derives from Aristotle’s relation to Alexander and Plato’s to Dionysius, and whatever has Aristotle and Plato for its exemplars can hardly be an ignoble ideal.59 But the tone of melancholy that recurs throughout the book is very marked here. It is generally agreed that monarchy is the best form of government because it is the most “natural,” and because God is thought of as a sovereign monarch, and it is also urged that some promising young men, Francis I in France, Henry VIII in England, will make very good princes.60 But we get glimpses of futility, of a sense that the courtier is to make these great cultural efforts merely to help a prince who probably won’t listen—and, according to Machiavelli, shouldn’t listen, except for reasons of publicity. In the third book we ran into an impasse: the courtier should be a lover, but religion and society will only tolerate marriage. In the fourth book we find a contrasting impasse: the courtier is to inform the prince’s mind with justice and virtue, and yet, as Machiavelli demonstrates, ethical scruples merely hamper and inhibit a prince. His subjects are half men and half vicious animals, and the prince must not forget the animal qualities, the lion’s courage and the fox’s cunning, if he is to remain a prince.61 Castiglione does not admit this kind of argument, but he has lived through the same age as Machiavelli and has seen much the same kind of history. The hopelessness of the prospect of the prince’s will and the courtier’s wisdom forming a unity remains in the background, however justified the efforts towards such a union may be. The book concludes with Bembo’s panegyric on love, which has the

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function of suggesting that the courtier’s training does have a goal which is of value in itself, and leads far beyond his duty as the prince’s adviser. Bembo climbs the Neoplatonic ladder of love, postulating three levels in man, with an impelling power attached to each.62 These are sense and appetite; reason and choice; intellect and will.63 By will is meant the emancipated and purified will that, in a more religious context, Virgil leaves Dante with near the end of the Purgatorio. It is a power, Bembo says, of conversing with angels.64 Each level is a form of what Plato calls Eros, and in the course of climbing the ladder Eros discovers his identity with beauty [Symposium, 210a–212a]. Beauty is of divine origin, and has goodness for its centre, which means that we have first of all to pass through the tiresome argument that all beautiful people are good, except those who regrettably are not.65 The lover begins in the physical world of sense, admiring beautiful bodies; the soul in him then awakens and sees the form of beauty within bodies; and finally, as reason gives way to intellect or universal reason, beautiful forms become the universal form of beauty and love passes from the contemplation of it to union with it.66 Pallavicino puts up his customary protest against including women in so high an ideal, but is silenced for the moment with a reference to the role of Diotima in Plato’s Symposium.67 A far more effective and beautiful answer is the final vision of the dawn breaking outside the windows as the courtiers have talked through the night, with all the stars scattered except for Venus, the focus of all beauty, who guards the confines of night and day. Bembo’s vision reflects the Platonism of Ficino, but is not confined to its age: the Eros ladder has been climbed many times since, its last major appearance in our culture being, perhaps, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Similarly, Machiavelli’s conception of the prince belongs to a tradition of absolutizing the will that reaches its culmination in Nietzsche. But the real “relevance” of such books to our own time rests on a different basis. In the course of time, prince and courtier become metaphors for elements that are in all of us. Each of us, that is, has a prince and a courtier within himself, a principle of will and a principle of “grace” which in the last analysis turns out to be love. (The love, we said, is that of Eros, not the Christian agape, but agape by definition is a “grace” that does not come from man, and there are no rules for educating it.) The will is developed by our vision of society and of our place in that society; grace and love come from our vision of culture. The life of will is the life of work; the life of grace and love is the life of leisure, of play, of the

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“games” of which Castiglione’s dialogue is one. In Castiglione’s day the courtier was the servant of the prince; in our day the life of leisure is subordinate to the life of work. But we are slowly coming around to think that perhaps the life of leisure is the real life, and that play is that for the sake of which work is done. Similarly, no one in Castiglione’s book questions the social superiority of the prince, yet in Bembo’s vision we are carried up to a world which has left all princes behind, and far below. Such a conception of leisure cannot, of course, remain associated with an elite and privileged minority, but has to spread through the whole of society. In the French Revolution the revolutionary ideals of modern man were defined as liberty, equality, and fraternity. The first two have been vigorously pursued in different parts of the world: they are both impersonal, and depend on mass movements. The third, fraternity, has been practically ignored as an ideal: it is the ideal of personal respect, and is infinitely more difficult to maintain and promote than the others. But it must become increasingly the chief preoccupation of our time, and as it does so, the kind of educational ideal associated with it will come more clearly into focus. Castiglione is one of the very few educators who have grasped the importance of this ideal, and that is why his book is not only a beautiful handbook of grace but a profound vision of human destiny.

20 The Myth of Deliverance 25–27 March 1981

The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983); British edition (Brighton, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1983). Reprinted with introduction by A.C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). Originally given as the Tamblyn Lectures at the University of Western Ontario, 25–27 March 1981.1 Frye’s notes which he used to write the Tamblyn Lectures have been published in NRL, 297–320; the typescript for the original speech which formed the basis of chapter 1 is also in NFF, 1988, box 47, file 4. The typescript for the book is in NFF, 1988, box 21, file 4; copy in NFF, 1991, box 28, file 1.

Preface This book is based on the Tamblyn lectures, given at the University of Western Ontario on 25, 26, and 27 March 1981, as the inaugural series. I am grateful to many at that university for the honour of inviting me to give the lectures and for their hospitality during my visit. I think particularly of Dean John Rowe, Professor James Reaney, and Professor John Graham, along with so many of my friends and former students who made the occasion festive. I have written about these plays of Shakespeare before, and consequently some repetition of earlier work is inevitable; but the main course of the argument is different, and I hope the little book will suggest something of what the study of Shakespeare has invariably been for me. One begins by reading or seeing a play like other plays, subject to the conditions and limitations of its own age and to our corresponding limitations in receiving it. One ends with the sense of an exploding force in the mind

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that keeps destroying all the barriers of cultural prejudice that limit the response to it. In other words, we begin with a notion of what the play might reasonably be assumed to mean, and end with realizing that what the play actually does mean is so far beyond this as to be in a different world of understanding altogether.

I The Reversal of Action In this book I return to an interest that has preoccupied me over the years; the conception of comedy, more particularly Shakespearean comedy, and its relation to human experience. I should like to base the main argument on the three plays of Shakespeare that are sometimes called “problem plays,” Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida.2 Many of the critics who first called them problem plays imposed what I consider a pseudo-problem on them which is here being ignored. The term originally suggested that these plays were more “realistic” and more concerned with “serious” social issues than, say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Merry Wives of Windsor.3 But while Troilus and Cressida is admittedly an experimental play in a special category, the other two are simply romantic comedies where the chief magical device used is the bed trick instead of enchanted forests or identical twins. Even if I cannot claim to have established the point by first-hand research, the bed trick seems to me quite as improbable as anything that goes on in the wood of Oberon and Titania—where, in fact, one of the things that does go on is the confusion of lovers’ identities in the dark. There are said to be one or two actual bed tricks in history, but one suspects that drunkenness played the decisive role in them rather than darkness. In any case the bed tricks are by no means the only fantastic or incredible elements in the two plots, which, like most of Shakespeare’s comedies, are essentially retellings of folk tales. The best way to introduce my subject will be to explain, first, my chapter headings, and then my title. In a famous chapter of the Poetics (11), Aristotle speaks of reversal and recognition (peripeteia and anagnorisis) as characteristic of what he calls complex plots. His distinction between simple and complex plots, and his obvious preference for the latter,4 seem to me connected with another distinction I have made elsewhere in discussing the structure of romance.5 Some romances are simply “and then” stories, in which B follows A, and in which the reader follows both

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to see what happens next. But there are also “hence” stories, in which B is presented as a credible effect of A, so that the story incorporates some sense of logic, which in a work of literature always means a special form of rhetoric.6 Sometimes the effect seems to reverse the direction of the action up to that point, and when it does we are normally very close to the end. Hence a reversal in the action often forms a part of an anagnorisis, a word that can be translated either “discovery” or “recognition,” depending on how much of a surprise it is. Thus in a detective story the identifying of the murderer is a “discovery” in the sense that we realize that he is a murderer for the first time: it is a “recognition” in the sense that, if the normal conventions of the detective story are being preserved, he is already a well-known and established character. In a tragedy, an action that seems to be proceeding in a straight line may be, through a reversal in the action, suddenly perceived as a parabola, an action turning downward, the metaphor preserved in the word “catastrophe.” In a comedy there is normally a reversal upward, a change from bad fortune to good, or what we might call an anastrophe. As a rule, the downward turn in tragedy appears to us as something inevitable, brought about by the will of the gods, the hero’s excessive pride, or other causal agent. In comedy the upward turn of the hero’s fortunes is often some kind of “gimmick” or concealed device.7 Thus if a young man wants a young woman slave and can’t get her, “it turns out that” she was kidnapped by pirates in infancy and is someone respectable enough to marry. This surprising or unexpected quality in a comic structure is often so perfunctory or arbitrary that the plot seems to us simple rather than complex: first the hero is frustrated, “and then” he’s satisfied. Aristotle gives this kind of reversal a separate name (metabasis)8 and regards it as structurally inferior to peripeteia. The Poetics is primarily concerned with tragedy, and in tragedy reversal seems deeply built into the human situation. A tragic outcome usually reverses what the hero wants, and much of the art of tragedy consists in showing that such a reversal has its own rationale. In Greek tragedy the general rule is that a hero’s hybris or aggressive act throws out the whole machinery of law and order (dike), the contract of law and justice that gods, men, and nature all endorse. The conception of nemesis is primarily the sense of this cosmic order righting itself after it has been put out of balance by hybris. The Presocratic philosopher Anaximander even suggests that birth itself is a disturbance of nature, an aggressive act

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of which the nemesis is death.9 In any case nemesis, though its agent may be a bloodthirsty avenger or an offended god, is not merely a morally intelligible force but almost a physically intelligible one. If the hero were to get away with his aggression, the world would have to be, so to speak, recreated in the image of that aggression. When a reversal takes place in comedy, it appeals to something in the audience that wants a happy ending for deserving characters. The audience would like to believe too that such an ending is also natural, if not inevitable. But it is very seldom that a genuinely comic resolution to a play seems the “logical” outcome of the action. There is nearly always something residually perplexing or incredible about it. As late as The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare is still insisting on the unlikeliness of the story he nevertheless insists on telling: “the verity of it is in strong suspicion” [5.2.28–9]; “it would be hooted at like an old tale” [5.3.116–17].10 I am speaking primarily of the New Comedy form that dominated literature from later Classical times to, in England, the Victorian age. During most of that time a reader’s halting perception of the naturalness of the conclusion could be assisted by assertions about the workings of divine providence in human life, providence being assumed to favour happy endings. If the belief in such a providence is not familiar enough to the audience to be incorporated into literary convention, such manufactured happy endings are often regarded as imaginatively dishonest, and a more ironic and ambiguous form of comedy takes their place. Aristotle’s terms are so suggestive that they keep spilling over all our experience of drama, including many dramatic forms and genres that Aristotle himself was not concerned with. By “recognition” Aristotle seems to have meant primarily the recognition of some characters by other characters in the final scene. This could also be a recognition of a previously unrecognized quality in a character, of the kind we have just noted in detective stories, where we discover that one character has committed a murder. As we watch the conclusion of a play, however, we find this recognition extending from other characters to ourselves in the audience. In fact, except when the recognition is a pure surprise, the audience’s recognition normally comes first. Othello’s recognition of the innocence of Desdemona and the malice of Iago comes at the very end of the play, but we have recognized these things all along, and have been waiting with an almost intolerable suspense for Othello at last to see what we see. Similarly with such comic devices as twins or concealed parentage, where the audience usually knows the essential data already.

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In short, reversal is primarily something the dramatist does to his plot; recognition is the response to it on the part of other characters and of the audience. In the very concentrated Greek dramatic forms, reversal and recognition normally occur in the same place, as two aspects of the same thing, which is why Aristotle discusses them together. In the more spread-out Shakespearean tragedies there may be other reversals much earlier. In Hamlet, in the scene where Hamlet refrains from killing Claudius at his prayers [3.3], however we explain the scene or account for Hamlet’s motivation, we realize, not simply that we are watching a tragic action— that was fairly obvious from the beginning—but that Hamlet himself is now irretrievably a doomed tragic hero. Similarly in Antony and Cleopatra, when Mark Antony marries Octavia. As the soothsayer has told him [2.3.18–31], Antony’s evil genius is not necessarily Cleopatra, whatever the Romans may say, but Caesar; and by contracting an alliance with Caesar in this marriage he has brought the opposition of fate down on himself. When he runs after Cleopatra’s galley in the battle of Actium, Antony makes a fool of himself in the ordinary colloquial sense in which we still use the word; by marrying Octavia he makes a fool of himself in a special sense largely confined to Shakespearean tragedy. That is, he becomes a victim of fate, the kind of person to whom things happen: “fortune’s fool” like Romeo [3.1.136], or “the natural fool of fortune” like Lear [4.6.191], someone no longer in full command of his own destiny. Here the peripety comes in the middle, bending the story line downward. But it is also possible to achieve a reversal of action at the very beginning. Thus King Lear begins with the reversal of Lear’s attempt to put on a big show of love and loyalty focused on himself, with Cordelia in the lead role. The “problem” comedies anticipate the romances of Shakespeare’s final period in many ways: one is the very long and elaborate recognition scene, usually taking up the whole of the fifth act, in which a great number of mysteries of identity are cleared up. This elaborate recognition scene develops out of the less complex forms of it in A Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, where the main problem is to get the twins unscrambled. Such recognition scenes are a feature of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy that a modern audience needs some historical imagination to take in— to say nothing of some critics, who often simply throw up their hands when confronted by them. For one thing, as we saw, the mysteries are usually mysteries only to the characters on the stage: the audience has al-

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ready been alerted to them, and simply watches the pattern completing itself. For another, the action is as highly stylized as a puppet play, which in some respects it resembles. Then again, the action is a disconcerting mixture of the inevitable and the incredible. The conversions, reconcilings, reunions, even resurrections, are not reflections of experience: such things happen only in plays. But they happen in these plays because they are the kind of thing that must happen if the play is to carry out its own postulates, and are inevitable structurally. Plays like this have to end like this, whatever the outrage to reality. We have next to ask why, but the answer will take us into a rather long detour. Every society lives inside a transparent envelope known as culture or civilization, out of which the specific arts and sciences, including literature, develop.11 In a primitive society, whatever we may mean by primitive, it is hardly possible to separate the literary from other verbal elements of culture, but as a society grows more complex, a central, sacrosanct verbal culture emerges and takes on a systematic form that tends to dominate that society as a structure of verbal authority. I call this verbal culture that grows up in and tries to control and unify a society, so far as words can do so, a myth of concern.12 I call it a myth, or more accurately a mythology, because it is usually contained in some kind of narrative (mythos) or story framework. It is often called an ideology, but I find that term rather restricting, though I may use it occasionally. And I speak of concern rather than belief, because a general public assent to certain formulas is more important to a society than actual belief in them. Belief may be in theory the essential thing, but private beliefs elude social vigilance, as the public expression of them does not. Such myths of concern may be centred either in the religious or in the political area, but they always contain an element of both. Myths we call religious, like those of Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, must operate within some political context; political myths, democratic, Marxist, or fascist, must have a religious dimension as well. In some societies there is one dominating myth of concern, where everyone must express agreement with its main principles, or at least refrain from open disagreement. In others, including our own, there may be subordinate myths of concern, Christian or Marxist or whatnot, operating as pressure groups. As a society grows, its central concerns, which are largely undifferentiated at first, begin to develop into the more varied and specific forms of culture and civilization. Literature, music, science, religion become distinguishable and self-contained areas, even though there may be no

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sharp boundary lines. In proportion as they develop, the inner laws of their own structures become more clearly visible, and the extent to which they are permitted to follow their own line of development determines the level of civilization in society. The arts and sciences thus have two poles, a social pole of origin in the human sense of concern, where the artist or scientist does something primarily because his society thinks it important for him to do it, and an opposite pole in the structure of the art or science itself, where he follows the inner laws of that structure and finds himself making technical discoveries within it. One pole is that of accountability to society, the other of fidelity to the laws of a discipline of growing autonomy and coherence. The two poles do not, in theory, have to be inconsistent with each other, but in practice there is likely to be a good deal of tension between them. Science will give us clearer examples than the arts. The science of astronomy, in the time of Galileo, had to break free of the mythological concern for believing in a geocentric universe, and biology and geology, in the time of Darwin, had to break free of the concern for belief in a divine creation taking place six thousand years previously. Apart altogether from the persecution of social dissidents, similar oppositions have arisen between Soviet science and doctrines inferred from the nineteenth-century myth of Marxism. In these examples it is the myth of concern that seems clearly wrong or obsolete, but in such issues as the atom bomb, atmospheric pollution, and energy crisis, social concern clearly has its own case. But because the material benefits of allowing the sciences to develop their own structures are so obvious, there is usually a working agreement in most countries that the sciences ought to keep some autonomy as disciplines as well as remaining accountable to society, and that the scientist may preserve a loyalty to his science as well as to his country. The arts are not so fortunate, and literature is the least fortunate of all. Extreme proponents of a dominant concern are very unwilling to admit that literature has any authority or even structural basis of its own worth bothering about, and maintain that all literature should say what the dominant myth wants it to say, or at least determine itself by the dialectics of that myth. About two generations ago, there was a sentimental enthusiasm for the Middle Ages as a time when all aspects of culture were united under the banner of a single myth of concern, and Marxism, at least until recently, used a similar sales pitch. Even among

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broader-minded readers and students of literature we often find a concern that literature should not get too literary, or criticism too free from the clichés of social anxiety. It seems obvious that literature should have some accountability to society, just as science does, otherwise it would have no identifiable social function at all. But the expression of social concern, whatever species of concern may dominate a given society, has too often been hysterical and superstitious, too obviously an issue of maintaining authority without criticism, to be fully trusted. Shakespeare himself had a vigilant and by no means stupid censorship to contend with, and avoided it so expertly that he turned a negative achievement into a positive asset. Literature develops out of human concern, admittedly, and it is not only legitimate but inevitable that criticism should study works of literature as a reflection or mirror of the social and historical concerns from which they arose. But as soon as we have several works of literature we become aware of the different ways in which they reflect one another, and this becomes intensified when we have many works in a single convention or genre. It is from the study of the conventions and genres that are grouped around such words as “comedy” that we begin to get a glimpse into the authority of literature, an authority which derives from its integrity as a structure rather than from its fidelity as a mirror of its time. Literature, like science, requires loyalty and commitment from serious writers, even when that loyalty conflicts with social demands. The traditional way of defending myths of concern consists largely of denouncing all the others, and it is still perhaps broadly true that most myths of concern ultimately want to destroy all other such myths. But when competing myths of concern can bring about such appalling disaster if the social power they represent is stupid or bigoted, it is clearly time to look for common underlying factors as a basis of possible coexistence. The immediate question that this situation leads to seems to be, Are there common themes that underlie all possible myths of concern? For an answer to this we have first to look at society in the limit-situation of crisis. It is when a society is at war, or, far more clearly, when it is faced by a natural crisis like a plague, a famine, a flood, or an earthquake, that it becomes obvious that real human concerns are much fewer and simpler than the complications of religious and political mythologies may suggest. In any case, in such a situation two essential human concerns invariably loom up in the foreground: survival and deliverance.13

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By deliverance, as something distinct from survival itself, I mean the expansion of consciousness or energy that we often expect or experience or hope for when we pass through a crisis of survival. Those of us who remember living through the Second World War will remember also how often we were told that we had to win the peace as well as the war. The assumption was that a new and greatly expanded life would await us as soon as the war was over. This was an illusion of considerable importance in sustaining democratic morale, and when the war ended it disappeared, having performed its function. But the myth of deliverance is not always a deliberately summoned-up mirage of this kind. On the contrary, it seems to be at the core of every major myth of concern. In Christianity deliverance appears in the conception of salvation; in Buddhism it is the goal of enlightenment; in Judaism it is the restoration of Israel; in Marxism it is equality in a classless society; in democracy it is the attaining of personal and social liberty. In ordinary human history, however, myths of concern are preoccupied with the survival of the institutions in which they are embodied. In order to safeguard these institutions, the actual goal of deliverance becomes something to be indefinitely postponed, associated either with a future from which only posterity will benefit, or with life after death in a “next” world. But in a developed and pluralistic culture, we said, literature achieves an authority of its own along with a relatively autonomous structure. What does literature, by itself, have to say about survival and deliverance? The question becomes especially significant when the institutions embodying concern lose their perspective on such things. We notice that some words in religion, such as “conversion” in Christianity or paravritti (turning around) in Buddhism, or “revolution” in political ideology, emphasize the fact that one thing necessary is a reversing of the normal current of life. Other words, such as “enlightenment” or “salvation,” emphasize rather the sense of recognition that accompanies this process. Reversal and recognition, then, seem to be structural principles outside literature, which suggests that a study of them inside literature may provide at least some interesting analogies to social concern from literature, and analogies that have become, as it were, distinct species and not merely derived varieties. It seems to me that the conventions and genres grouped around the term “romance” have much to do with the human concern for survival, and that the conventions and genres grouped around the term “comedy” have much to do with the human concern for deliverance. Romance

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is a narrative form throwing its main emphasis on linear movement. Its primary appeal is to keep one listening or turning the pages or coming back for a further instalment, as in the old cliffhanger movie serials, or in Scheherezade’s strategy to stop her story at a point where her repulsive husband’s curiosity to find out what happened next will be stronger than his sadism. In the vast eighteenth-century Chinese romance formerly called in English The Dream of the Red Chamber, and now known as The Story of the Stone, each chapter ends with the formula, “if you want to know how this turned out, read the next chapter.”14 The formula is essentially the same in, say, Ariosto, at the other end of the world’s culture. The kernel of romance is a series of adventures, in other words romance is a discontinuous form of narrative in which a hero or heroine or both survive a number of crises. If they survive them in unexpected ways, so much the better for the reader’s interest. The most primitive type of romance is an endless form, like contemporary comic strips, and while literal endlessness is not possible for frail human mortality, romances are often extended to enormous length if the sequential formula seems to be working satisfactorily. In most forms of comedy, on the other hand, at least the New Comedy with which Shakespeare was mainly concerned, the emphasis is on a teleological plot, usually one with a mystery in it which is disclosed in or near a final recognition scene. The emphasis is not on sequence, but on moving toward a climax in which the end incorporates the beginning. The climax is a vision of deliverance or expanded energy and freedom. This may be expressed socially, individually, or in other ways, but however it is expressed, we normally have a vision of a group of people going off the stage or page to begin a new kind of life. As the audience is excluded from this new life, its quality is left undefined: we are, as a rule, simply told that they are going to be happy. I have explained this more fully elsewhere, and repeat it here only to clarify what follows.15 The essential drive in comedy is toward liberation, whether of the central character, a pair of lovers, or its whole society, and so comedy has the same narrative shape as many of the programs in religion that lead toward goals of salvation or enlightenment or beatitude. In Aristotle, where reversal is treated mainly as a structural principle of tragedy, something in an action exceeding the bounds of what is given to the human situation (hyper moron, beyond fate, is Homer’s phrase for this)16 is reversed by the returning power of nature or divine will or opposed human force. Such a reversal operates within the general frame-

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work of law. But the parallels suggested between comedy and myths of deliverance make us wonder whether the typical comic reversal may not transcend the framework of law altogether, as the work of a redeeming or rescuing force opposed to the normal movement of circumstances. Some works of literature we instinctively call comedies: with others we may ask, Is this play really a comedy? or some similar question. Such questions have meaning and are worth discussing in some connections, but we should be aware that comedy is a context word and not an essence word. If a play in a theatre is subtitled “a comedy,” information is being conveyed to a potential audience about what kind of thing to expect, and this type of information has been intelligible since before the days of Aristophanes. But to answer the question of whether it really “is” a comedy or not would involve us in a limiting definition of the essence of comedy, as a something not found in other things, whereas comedy is a term indicating a certain grouping of literary phenomena which may be found to a greater or lesser extent anywhere in literature. There has never been such a “thing” as comedy, though most people are familiar with the range and ambience of what the word indicates. In Greek drama the form used by Aristophanes is so different from the form used by Aeschylus that we almost have the illusion of there being such a thing as comedy. Hence Samuel Johnson’s remark about Shakespeare’s plays, that they are strictly neither tragedies nor comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind.17 Still, I think everyone experiences tragedy in King Lear for all its grotesque comedy, and comedy in Measure for Measure for all its painful scenes. Socrates’ remark at the end of the Symposium, that the same man might be capable of both tragedy and comedy,18 seems to imply that tragedy and comedy were not, for Plato, forms or ideas, but aspects of them. A critic accustomed to thinking in Platonic terms would perhaps draw the inference that survival and deliverance and other such myths of concern were the real forms, and religious or literary formulations of them only imitations. I should prefer to try to do without the “real forms,” and leave such words as “tragedy” and “comedy” plastic enough to account for their varieties, without getting trapped into thinking in terms of essences or realities in a higher world which poetry reflects. A myth of deliverance, in any case, can be found in either tragedy or comedy, but the shapes given to the expressions of the myth will differ accordingly. Let us look at the Odyssey for an illustration of some of the structural prin-

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ciples of romance and comedy. The Odyssey is divided into twenty-four books: whoever made this division or whenever it was made, it is a very accurate analysis of the actual proportions of the poem. The twenty-four books break into two parts of twelve books each. In the first twelve books we have all the characteristics of romance, a sequence of exciting adventures that the hero manages to squirm out of each time. These twelve books are, so to speak, a circumference looking for a centre.19 Odysseus wants to get home, but, like a baseball player, he has to go around in a circle to get there. At first base there is Calypso, the goddess who wants him to be her husband, and promises him immortality if he will stay with her [bk. 5, ll. 135–6]. At second base there is Circe, who is willing to accept him as a lover in default of being able to turn him into a pig [bk. 10, ll. 325–35]. At third base there is Nausicaa, whom it is proposed he should marry, settling down with her in Phaeacia [bk. 6].20 The return of Odysseus is a contrast with three other returns, those of Ajax, Agamemnon, and Menelaus. The return of Ajax is a tragedy caused by the hero’s own hybris; that of Agamemnon is a tragedy too, but a tragedy of a different type. In Aeschylus it is primarily a revenge tragedy because Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon when he gets home has, for at least its professed motive, his earlier sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia, and this outrage in the past is reinforced by one in the present, the bringing back of Cassandra as a slave-mistress. Menelaus is, Homer says [bk. 4, ll. 561–9], by virtue of having married and regained a daughter of Zeus, to be carried off to Elysium or the Happy Islands at his death. What shape the return of Odysseus is to be is left in doubt until it is clear that his desire to return home to Penelope and Ithaca is a steadfast one. This suggests that the return of Odysseus seems to be at least partly dependent on his own courage and persistence, even though it could not have been accomplished without the help of Athene. Obvious as this sounds, it is a point that has to be established at the beginning. The Odyssey opens with a speech of Zeus explaining that gods are not to be blamed for human woes because human beings bring their woes on themselves [bk. 1, ll. 32–43]. His example is Aesgisthus, the lover of Clytemnestra, who has been killed by Orestes. Like other theologians, Zeus chooses his examples rather selectively: Aesgisthus is a clear instance of villainy meeting its just deserts, but the more ambiguous and perplexing cases of Agamemnon and Orestes themselves are passed over. Still, the implication that human beings play some role in determining the outcome of

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their own fortunes enables Athene to make out a case for the safe return of Odysseus. The second half of the poem, the last twelve books, is in one of the typical shapes of comedy rather than of romance. The setting is Odysseus’s house in Ithaca, and throughout these last twelve books Odysseus has the comic role of the hero who starts as the character least likely to succeed. He begins as a despised, unrecognized, and anonymous beggar whose tales about himself to Eumaeus and others almost raise questions about his actual identity. Gradually he becomes a stronger and stronger force, is reunited with his son Telemachus, and then with his wife, and finally overthrows the perverted social order represented by the suitors and emerges as master of his house.21 Various themes from the first or romance half of the poem seem to be repeated in different contexts: there are repetitions of the themes of descent to the lower world, of disguised identity, of marriage, of ordeals that only the hero can pass, and the treacherous companions who steal the oxen of the sun [bk. 12, ll. 340–422] seem a kind of parallel to the suitors. If the romance half of the Odyssey is a circumference looking for a centre, the second or comic half is a centre gradually expanding into a circumference.22 The Odyssey, in its comic half, presents a very different plot, at least superficially, from the typical New Comedy plot of several centuries later. In that plot, a festive society, generally featuring the sexual union of young people, is born out of a perverted or absurd social order, represented mainly by their parents, which is in charge of things at the beginning of the play. Yet the Odyssey preserves the essentials of the same kind of thing: the heroine Penelope is delivered from what in other stories would have been a band of robbers or pirates; the perverted order represented by the suitors is destroyed and the proper order restored; there is no antagonism between father and son, but it is the union of the two that makes the dénouement possible. Some features of the second half of the Odyssey remind us of similar features in Shakespeare.23 The main emphasis, as in The Winter’s Tale, falls on the reconciliation and reunion of an older couple—Homer shows no interest in providing a bride for Telemachus. Then again, Athene’s activity on behalf of Odysseus sometimes expands into a kind of stagemanager role, disguising Odysseus in the forms most advantageous for him at the moment, and reminding us of the stage management of, say, Prospero in The Tempest. And while the entire Odyssey is dominated by the theme of nostos or return, the second half, which never leaves Ithaca,

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is concentrated on a growing self-actualizing of the hero, like the growth of Prince Hal from prodigal to hero in Henry IV. Both halves of the Odyssey are “literary,” in the sense that the kind of thing that happens is the kind of thing that happens only in stories. But the second half seems to have a closer analogy to the moral and religious standards connected with the heroic ethos of Homer, of a kind that makes it authoritative for its culture as well as simply entertaining. Thus the descent of the suitors to Hades in book 24 has an ethical dimension lacking in the more primitive account of the gathering of the souls of the dead in book 11. In any case it is clear that the climax of the poem, Odysseus’s reconquest of his son, wife, and household, is a gigantic reversal of the situation we encounter in the opening book, with the suitors wasting his substance, Telemachus and Penelope impotent to resist them, and the hero himself far away, perhaps dead. Further, the reversal of the situation is not simply that, but a growth in the identity of Odysseus himself, as son, wife, and household become his “property,” in the Aristotelian sense of what is proper to him and a part of his real self.24 The general shape of the Odyssey plot, where the hero is banished or exiled, returns in disguise, and finally claims his own, may be found in any number of folk tales and literary works. It seems so central to imaginative experience that it would be even surprising if it did not turn up somewhere in Shakespeare. In fact it occurs several times in different forms, but the one most useful for our purposes is the story in Measure for Measure, to which we must now turn. There seems no way out of summarizing the story for expository purposes, however well known it may be. Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna (which Shakespeare seems to have thought of as an Italian town), leaves his deputy Angelo as regent to administer a remarkably unenlightened law providing the death penalty for adultery, but returns disguised as a friar to see what will happen. The young man Claudio, betrothed and legally married to Julietta25 except for a public announcement of the betrothal, has intercourse with her and is condemned to death. Claudio’s sister Isabella, the heroine, is physically and intellectually mature, and not only mature but unusually attractive and intelligent. Her emotional development, however, has lagged behind, and her intense desire to become a nun seems to be prompted more by an adolescent girl’s fear of the world than by a genuine vocation. We suspect this at her first appearance where, though not yet even a novice, she tells a senior nun with great confidence that she would prefer “a more strict

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restraint” in the convent [1.4.4]. There is also a strong father-fixation that comes out in a later speech. Poets are often supposed not to have known about such things before Freud “discovered” them, but Shakespeare, inspecting the sexual mores of Vienna centuries earlier, obviously saw much the same phenomena. When Lucio, a young man about town, comes to tell Isabella that her brother has been condemned to death, she is still lost in her dream of a recluse life, and reacts as though she were half asleep. Under Lucio’s prodding she finally goes to plead with Angelo for her brother’s life, and under further prodding begins really to enter the role. Very soon she finds that she can save Claudio at the price of being seduced by Angelo. She visits Claudio in the prison and tells him this, and Claudio, with the horror of an imminent death fresh on him, urges her to save him by yielding to Angelo [3.1.132–5]. Isabella explodes in a furious tirade [3.1.135–50], and the action appears to end in a deadlock. The “legal” situation involved is one that can be explained from a study of the social and historical background of Shakespeare’s day. Most modern audiences would probably find the law the disguised Duke is so anxious to have enforced a sick and silly law, but Shakespeare, with his infallible instinct for keeping out of trouble, never says so, or in fact says anything at all that could possibly be construed as an attack on the anxieties of his contemporaries. The play is speaking to us with the independent authority of drama itself, and to understand it we must ignore the gabble of rationalizations that many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries would automatically have started going in their minds, and listen to what the play is telling us by its action. The framework of Isabella’s speech is, of course, nominally Christian. Its giveaway is in the line “I’ll pray a thousand prayers for thy death” [3.1.145]. Nobody in the remotest shape of a Christian could start offering prayers for a brother’s death: a recluse nun who did that would have mistaken her calling. A real saint, whatever her course of action, would have shown some sympathy with and compassion for Claudio’s plight—in short, if we were to take such a line seriously we should have to regard Isabella as a somewhat sinister character. But, of course, we cannot take it seriously. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Isabella, as the disguised Duke well realizes, but she is totally demoralized. She has had her first direct glimpse of the evil in human nature that she has previously only read or heard about in books and sermons. Perhaps we are also intended to suspect that something

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in her has been more attracted both by Angelo and by his proposition than she would ever have dreamed possible, and that a suppressed recognition of this is at the heart of her misery. It is even possible that the gradual warming of her interest in pleading for Claudio’s life had more to do with Angelo than with Claudio. In any case the action of the play, which has been uniformly sombre and menacing up to this point, appears to be heading for unrelieved tragedy. Claudio is about to die for an act that most of the characters who comment on it clearly regard as trifling; Angelo has been revealed to the audience as the most contemptible kind of hypocrite, the kind who tries to make himself feel better by despising himself. Isabella might, in theory, return to the convent, but her dream of a sheltered life devoted to prayer and contemplation has been shattered for ever. The Duke himself seems to be merely dodging his responsibilities: his apparent confidence that his precious law will work if it is only enforced is ironically illustrated by the fact that it gets a firm grip on Claudio, who is a decent person, but fumbles badly with the actual pimps. He makes an eloquent speech attempting to reconcile Claudio to his fate, but, apart from the fact that the speech is not a Christian speech but a purely Stoic one, it completely fails of its ostensible purpose. In that context he has no more power of redemption than anyone else. The only person in the first half of the play who seems to do anything sensible is Lucio, but Lucio has no real generosity: he will try to help Claudio because he regards Claudio as a gentleman, but refuses to bail the pimp Pompey because he is not [3.2.64–77]. As in most tragic actions, the characters in it have no knowledge of themselves. Angelo, for example, in attempting, or rather pretending, to struggle with his temptation, says of the devil: O cunning enemy, that to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook! [2.2.179–80]

He calls Isabella a saint, which is intelligible in this context, but he also calls himself a saint, which indicates that he still has a lot to learn about himself, and through himself about human nature. At a very clearly marked point in the prison scene, act 3, scene 1, line 150, the disguised Duke steps forward to speak to Isabella, and the rhythm switches abruptly from blank verse to prose. This is the first sign that we are in an entirely new ball game: the play breaks in two as sharply as a diptych. From here on we are engaged in a comic action, an

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extremely complicated intrigue involving a bed trick, endless disguisings, and many lies. The action is stage-managed by the disguised Duke, who takes on a role that is frequent and very important in Shakespeare, of a kind of deputy dramatist, arranging a dramatic action within the larger design. The clearest example of such a deputy dramatist role in Shakespeare is that of Prospero in The Tempest, who sets up the whole action of the play, so to speak, within the play. Hamlet, too, is responsible not only for an actual play within the play, but creates a great variety of subdramatic roles, lunatic, lover, poet, intriguer, avenger, soliloquizer, and others, enacted by himself. Such deputy dramatist figures in Shakespeare usually have very long and elaborate speaking parts. In Othello, for instance, Iago’s speaking role is longer than Othello’s own, because Iago is the demonic producer of the terrible foreground action. Similarly, Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure has the longest speaking role of any character in Shakespeare’s comedies, and he shows a producer’s concern for timing, the extending of suspense to the limit, the positioning of the characters in the right lighting, and so on. We get some curious modifications of this role in Shakespeare. King Lear, we said, begins with Lear’s ambitious but inept design of staging a big dramatic scene of love and loyalty around himself. In the deposition scene in Richard II, Richard is losing his crown to Bolingbroke while stage-managing a dramatic performance in which Bolingbroke has a secondary part. The stage-managing of her own death scene by Cleopatra needs no elaboration. A similar though minor form of the device is, I think, involved in the use of Lucio in Measure for Measure itself. In each of the three problem comedies there is a character, Lucio, Parolles, Thersites, who is a compulsive talker, unable to stop even when he is clearly getting into trouble, and much given to slander. We shall try to account for the significance of such a character, who represents the irresponsible use of words, later on. But in Measure for Measure Lucio is also a kind of counter-producer, with his own show to put on. He has no end in view beyond wanting to keep the brothels open, and is not a serious competitor of the Duke, but he acts as a kind of lightning-rod in the play: that is, he prevents us from taking the Duke completely at his own valuation. For the most part we are asked to accept folk-tale conventions in the plot, where a ruler, like Haroun al Raschid, moves disguised through his people,26 and in which a pious friar talks a pious young woman into a very dubious scheme designed to immobilize her

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seducer. Our realistic responses are in abeyance, but they are still operating: we do not wholly lose sight of the fact that in real life the Duke would be an intolerable snoop. Lucio’s reckless slanders to the disguised Duke about himself remind us that in real life listeners seldom hear much good of themselves, and even more seldom deserve to. Similarly, in the final scene Lucio keeps getting laughs as the Duke blusters at him, keeping the scene in just enough balance to prevent it from dissolving into melodrama. Measure for Measure, then, is a dramatic diptych of which the first part is a tragic and ironic action apparently heading for unmitigated disaster, and the second part an elaborate comic intrigue which ends by avoiding all the disasters. The next question clearly is, What is the significance of such a construction, and what light does the structure throw on the play’s meaning? All the answers to this have to begin with the fact that Measure for Measure is not a play about the philosophy of government, the responsibilities of rulers, the social problem of prostitution, or any of the things that so many commentators insist that it is. It is a play about the relation of all such things to the structure of comedy. And because comedy is a context word and not an essence word, the phrase “structure of comedy” means among other things the reflection of other comedies in Measure for Measure. Measure for Measure, then, is a comedy about comedy, as Hamlet is a tragedy about tragedy, and as the history plays are plays about history (more particularly history as seen through the actions of royalty) considered as a theatrical performance. We notice that many plays of the time begin with prologues indicating the role that theatrical convention is about to play in what follows. Mucedorus, for instance, begins with a dialogue between “Envy” and “Comedy” in which Envy prophesies many threatening complications in the action, but Comedy assures the audience that everything will ultimately turn out well.27 An old play called The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune begins with a similar debate between Fortuna and Venus.28 I mention these two examples of a very common convention (we could go as far afield as the opening of Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppaea)29 for two reasons. First, they are both plays that Shakespeare seems to have been reading or rereading about the time he was writing his final romances (or seeing: Mucedorus was having a revival).30 Second, they are both rather simple-minded plays of the public theatre, and remind us that what may seem at first sight a sophisticated convention, of introducing personifications of the actual structure of the

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play itself, is in fact a feature of popular drama, to which Shakespeare’s loyalties were very deep. We began by saying that a work of literature has two poles, its origin in the conditions of its time and its place in the structure of literature itself. As a reflection of its own time, a play may reflect many things, including the general framework of assumptions and values and moral standards that Shakespeare’s audience could be assumed to have brought into the theatre with them. This framework at the time would have had a general Christian shape, and it has often been noticed that Measure for Measure (though the phrase itself is used by Shakespeare in other contexts) takes its title from the New Testament,31 and seems to be concerned with some version of the Christian contrast between law and grace, in which the former is found to be insufficient without the latter. If we attend only to the contemporary reference of the play, we may feel that it looks like a Christian allegory, with political overtones. But, first, our experience of the play tells us that it is not an allegory, and, second, no contemporary of Shakespeare who wanted to see a Christian allegory on the stage would be very well satisfied with Measure for Measure. The Merchant of Venice also deals with the superseding of the law by grace, of justice by mercy, of trusting to a bond by forgiveness. It is hardly a Christian allegory either, but it is a step closer to being one, because its central blocking character is explicitly identified as a Jew, who is contrasted with a spirit referred to as “Christian,” and alleged to be full of charity and good will. Because of these identifications, it is also a step closer to melodrama, as melodrama is more of a direct reflection of the audience’s pre-established moral values. We may feel that the Shylock-Jew identification, in particular, blurs the immediacy of the play for us and makes it more of a historical document, though of course this does not affect the skill of the dramaturgy. From our present point of view, Measure for Measure, which deals with legalism and forgiveness simply as aspects of human life, expresses the authority of comedy much more unequivocally than The Merchant of Venice, being less dependent on references to what is established outside comedy. According to ancient critics working on an Aristotelian basis, the action of comedy is assisted by the machinery of certain devices, classified as oaths, compacts, laws, witnesses, and ordeals.32 All five of these are heavily featured in the action of Measure for Measure, but the one that concerns us at the moment is the ordeal. Three major male characters, Claudio, Angelo, and Lucio, are all brought face to face with death: the

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Duke himself, in disguise, is threatened with the rack, and the Provost with disgrace and dismissal. The Greek word for ordeal (basanos) also means touchstone, and facing death is an ordeal designed in part to reveal one’s genuine character.33 Claudio is under sentence of death during nearly all the play: this belongs to a common structural principle of comedy, which is part of its function in presenting a theatrical form of deliverance. It is found in the otherwise very lighthearted Comedy of Errors. Claudio is capable of courage and resignation, but he is no masochist, and is young enough, and feels innocent enough, to want desperately to live. Angelo has been conditioned to feel that death is the lawful penalty for certain acts, and in a state of despair he is ready to welcome the application of that principle to himself. Lucio ignores the threats of whipping and hanging, and protests only against the violation of his comfortable double standard of sexuality, in being forced to marry the woman who has borne him a child. Yet nobody comes out of the play much damaged: Shakespeare seems to go out of his way to emphasize this point. An imprisoned pirate expires of natural causes, but even the condemned murderer Barnardine, who has previously refused to be beheaded on the ground that it will not cure his headache, gets away with his refusal and is finally allowed to go free. Instead of all these deaths, three suspended marriages are completed, and a fourth between the Duke and Isabella seems indicated at the end. We begin to wonder if the bed trick, the device which both condemns Angelo and saves his life, and is the central image of the play, does not represent a rite of passage from death to new life. We notice that a beautiful image of Claudio, uttered during the prison scene, is among other things a grotesque anticipation of the bed trick image: If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms! [3.1.82–4]

In any case the title of the play seems to imply some analogy between the action of the comedy and the struggle of legalism and forgiveness in Christianity, though, as we said, not the kind of dependent analogy that would make the play allegorical. In the first half of the play, Claudio is betrothed to Julietta and anticipates his marital rights before making a public announcement. Angelo is engaged to Mariana and breaks off the engagement because the financial arrangements fall through. Legally,

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this makes Claudio a condemned criminal and Angelo a model of virtue; but there can hardly be an audience in the world that could not see what nonsense this legal valuation is. As we saw earlier, in glancing at the farcical scene with Pompey and Elbow [3.2], the law as such is often incompetent even to identify the right people as lawbreakers, much less improve the quality of life. In short, the situation in the first half of the play is founded on what Christianity calls the knowledge of good and evil, the perspective of trial and judgment, with accusers and defenders, that runs all through its central mythology. The knowledge of good and evil was forbidden to Adam and Eve, and from this play we can, within the context of comedy, see why: it is not a genuine knowledge of anything, including good and evil. Of the three threatened characters, Angelo cannot escape from the legalistic perspective by himself, but is pulled out of it by the fact that he is genuinely loved by Mariana. His relation to her is a miniature version of Bertram’s relation to Helena in All’s Well, of which more later. Lucio alone remains untouched by the action, as he has nothing of the power of self-analysis that his opposite number in All’s Well, Parolles, does have. Lucio is completely a product of a society dominated by the knowledge of good and evil, which, we said, is not a real knowledge even of that. When he calls Isabella “a thing enskyed and sainted” [1.4.34], this is clearly a tribute to her, but it is also an expression of his own immaturity about women, which finds nuns and whores easier to understand than the vast majority of women who are neither, because nuns and whores can be clearly labelled “good” and “bad.” But adopting such labels does not go with knowledge, only with reflecting conventions. Lucio has no awareness whatever of being good or bad, merely of doing or not doing what is accepted in his circle. He utters slanders because he speaks according to “the trick,” the fashion, and fornicates because that is done too. However, all these disclosures of character are subordinate to the speech Isabella gives in response to Mariana’s appeal, urging the forgiveness of Angelo [5.1.443–54]. At the time of making the speech, she knows that Angelo has tried to make her the instrument of a peculiarly loathsome hypocrisy, and she also thinks he has double-crossed her and sentenced Claudio to be executed after all. Nevertheless, the woman who earlier had stated her intention of praying for Claudio’s death pleads for Angelo’s life on the ground that he is less villainous than self-deluded. As soon as she makes this speech we understand that this is really what the whole second half of the play has been about. The primary end

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and aim of everything the Duke is doing is to get that speech out of her, and the state of morality in Vienna could not matter less. Far less of a rhetorical set speech than Portia’s speech on mercy, it expresses the genuine kind of love, the charity which is the supreme virtue, that Isabella had dimly in mind when she first wanted to be a nun. Isabella herself, perhaps, could not always live on the level of nobility that that speech represents, but there has been a moment in which her essential self spoke; and such moments may become foci around which all the rest of one’s life may revolve. Passion and accusation (parodied in the fornication and slander of Lucio) are reversed into the fusion of love and wisdom that makes humanity redeemable. We noticed that in the structure of tragedy there is a reversing movement known as nemesis, the dialectic counter-movement to the aggressiveness of the hero. If Measure for Measure possessed a character on a genuinely heroic scale, this nemesis-reversal would be the kind we should expect from the action of the first half of the play. The phrasing in the New Testament passage which the title of the play echoes, “and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again,” points to this kind of tragic reversal. But the reversal in Measure for Measure, carried out by the Duke but dependent also on the genuine sanctity of Isabella, is full of improbability and absurdity, yet nonetheless it triumphs over the armoured tanks of self-righteousness so completely that we are no longer in this measuring world when the play ends. The law has been, not annulled or contradicted, but transcended; not broken but fulfilled by being internalized. One feature of the play that seems puzzling at first is the emphatic assertion that the effectiveness of law depends on the personal integrity of the lawgiver. This is not true of ordinary experience: all Shakespeare’s historical plays, for example, make the point that the effectiveness of the ruler depends on his will, not on his morality. The point Measure for Measure makes is rather different. Society depends on law, but law at its best can only define the law-breaker: from the point of view of the law, an honest man is one who has never been convicted of stealing. But society could hardly hold together with a standard as low as that: morality must rise at least to morale before it can function at all. What holds society together are the honest men, the individuals who impose a much more rigorous standard of honesty on themselves. But to try to embody individual discipline in social legislation would result in the most frightful tyranny: society as such must be left more

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flexible. If Angelo were the model of disciplined rectitude that he is assumed to be at first, his enforcing of the law would be theoretically justifiable, but such enforcing is really a projection of his own self-conflicts, and sooner or later he, or anyone else in his position, will collapse under the strain. That is why the Duke himself cannot stay and administer his own law: if he did it would break him and there would be no redeeming force left in the action. So while the law is transcended by the Duke’s general forgiveness, it is fulfilled at the same time: what he does is to break down the antithesis between individual and social reformation. It works with everyone except Lucio, and Lucio’s anonymous wife may yet do something even for him. We may note at this point that the same diptych construction, the same halfway break, occurs later in The Winter’s Tale, in the transition between winter in Sicilia and spring in Bohemia. An action proceeding towards unrelieved gloom and disaster ends with Antigonus leaving the infant Perdita in Bohemia and being pursued by a bear. Again, in a precisely marked spot, act 3, scene 3, line 58, the rhythm switches suddenly from blank verse to prose with the entry of the two Bohemian shepherds, and a different action begins. (The break does not occur quite where we should expect it, at the beginning of act 4 with Time introduced as a chorus to tell us that sixteen years have gone by.) Shakespeare practically abandons Greene’s Pandosto, the story he has been retelling up to that point, and a highly complicated comic structure with two recognition scenes in it follows. The difference from Measure for Measure is that there seems to be no deputy dramatic figure for the second action, unless Apollo, working through Paulina and an offstage oracle, has theatrical ambitions, as Jupiter appears to have in Cymbeline and Diana in Pericles. In The Tempest the deputy dramatist figure reappears in Prospero, but this play, which is an unusually short one, is concerned only with the second half of the diptych action. The first part has taken place before the play begins, and its last episode, the wrecking of Alonso’s ship, is the first scene of the play we have. These parallels with two of the romances merely establish that the reversal of action in Measure for Measure is not an accident or a stunt, but something deeply involved with Shakespeare’s romantic conception of comedy. The “problem” comedies anticipate the romances more clearly than Shakespeare’s other earlier comedies, and Measure for Measure, in particular, anticipates them in the way that it contains, instead of simply avoiding, a tragic action. What we are seeing is a myth of deliverance,

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with some resemblances to the myths of deliverance we already know, more particularly the Christian ones familiar to Shakespeare’s audience, although The Winter’s Tale has a strong admixture of Classical myth as well, such as the Demeter–Proserpine story. But resemblances are structural analogies only, not keys to interpretation. I cannot imagine Shakespeare speaking of the theatre, as Bernard Shaw does, as “that older and greater church to which I belong”34—that kind of self-consciousness does not seem to be in his makeup. But nonetheless he writes as though he knew that the theatre was a great and catholic institution with its own traditions, its own conventions, and its own authority. We normally identify verbal authority with the language of doctrines and concepts and ideas. This would be the authority for the “problem” plays too if they really were problem plays in the sense of being media for issues or observations outside the conventions of comedy. The purpose of the reversal of action we have dealt with in Measure for Measure is to prevent it from becoming a problem play in the ordinary sense. The reversal forces it solidly and securely into the mould of comic convention. Nothing extradramatic to which the play points is outside it; whatever is not in the play, or is there in addition to the play, is in front of it, in the shared experience of the audience. In other societies, or in this one, man may learn about freedom and deliverance also from his religion, from his political ideology, from various wise men or gurus, even from exploring his own consciousness. One’s view of such things will be incomplete until we have paid some attention also to the high mysteries of comedy that Shakespeare has in his keeping, and reveals to those who are willing to follow three simple rules: listen to the story; look at the action; and don’t think, at least until you know what you’re thinking about. What a man essentially is (and a woman: the usual difficulty with pronouns) is revealed in two ways: by the record of what he has done, and by what he is trying to make of himself, at any given moment. The former is the case of the accuser and relates to the past: it shapes the general form of the tragedy, as we see so powerfully in the conclusion of Oedipus Rex. The latter relates to the future, is based on forgiveness and release, and shapes the general form of comedy. The “problem comedies” give a good deal of attention to both, and so do the romances. All four romances feature a gap of sixteen years or so (before the play begins in Cymbeline and The Tempest), establishing a pattern of an older and a younger generation, the younger one concerned primarily with its own future, the older one with healing various traumas in its past. A study

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of the comedy which is in many respects complementary to Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, should help to bring this situation into clearer focus. II The Reversal of Energy In the previous chapter we discussed Aristotle’s conception of reversal as a structural principle of drama. Aristotle was mainly concerned with tragedy, and reversal is the structural feature resulting from the fact that the outcome of tragedy is usually the opposite of what the tragic hero hoped for or aimed at. The basis of tragic reversal in Greek drama is normally a process in which a contract of order and balance, supported by gods, human society, and nature itself, recovers its balance after an aggressive act. The recovering of balance is the basis of what is generally called nemesis;35 but the agent of nemesis, whether an angry god or a human avenger, is merely the antithesis of the aggressive action. Only if the reversal is accompanied by some form of recognition is there a sense of an action being fulfilled and completed instead of merely neutralized. Such recognition, whatever form it takes, has something in it of an increase of awareness, a move from ignorance to knowledge. Even the most appalling forms of such knowledge, such as Oedipus’s knowledge of his relations with his parents or Macbeth’s realization that the prophecies given him were only bad jokes, are still knowledge. This sense of a movement toward knowledge, however, may enlighten the audience as well as the dramatic characters. In Greek tragedy, if the play seems to end with some kind of simplistic pessimism or sense of external fatality, we often find that it is the first play of a trilogy, or otherwise separated from its real context. As the Oresteia of Aeschylus proceeds from the murder of Agamemnon to the revenge of Orestes, a chain reaction of neutralized or avenged aggression is set up, which continues a movement started in the house of Argos long before the trilogy of Aeschylus begins. In the last play of the trilogy, The Eumenides, this almost mechanical neutralizing force is represented by the Furies, the spirits of vengeance. The Furies, however, have to take a subordinate place in a structure of law which is set up by Athene on the Areopagus. They are thereby transformed into the genuine Eumenides or “kindly ones,” in a social order of a higher kind, though no less just. The serene conclusion of The Eumenides does not turn the tragic action comic: it completes and fulfils the tragic vision by keeping it within the

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framework of law. The Oresteia trilogy is a tragedy pursued to its final cadence. Terrible things have happened, but we finally get a glimpse of something that makes such things at least assume a shape. This does not mean that we have to accept some moralizing formula of the “All is best, though we oft doubt”36 type, but that there is a kind of uncompromising sense in the balancing of hybris and nemesis, aggression and retribution. If there were no such sense the action could hardly be presented within a dramatic structure at all. The three plays were originally followed by a satyr play, but the satyr play seems, using metaphors again, to be related to the previous action spatially rather than consecutively, a contrast of mood rather than a continuing modulation of the action. A parallel example would be the kyogen farce that follows the Noh play in Japanese drama,37 to which it is still thematically related. Such scenes in Shakespeare as the gravediggers in Hamlet [5.1], the porter in Macbeth [2.3], the Tom o’ Bedlam scene in Lear [3.4], are also not “comic relief” but spatial expansions of the tragic world, where something grotesque and macabre suddenly thrusts itself up into the rhetoric of heroism. The Areopagus decision in The Eumenides, in which Orestes is acquitted, internalizes the form of law and justice, of which the Furies embody the externalized form. This process of internalizing is an ambiguity involved in most of the Greek words translated roughly as “fate” (heimarmene and others), which may refer either to an arbitrary progression of external events we cannot control, or to a vision of immutable order which is the expanded understanding of the same thing, and which is an expression of a sense of freedom within law rather than of bondage under it. Similarly, justice is the external antagonist of the criminal, but the inner condition of the just man. A parallel expansion and internalizing of such “fate” encounters us in Oedipus at Colonus, where we see, not a comic action, but an enlarged and more comprehensive vision of the Oedipus tragedy. In comedy, on the other hand, there appear to be two levels of the action: the comic conclusion frequently evades or overrides a law which is often presented as absurd or irrational. A simple example is the humour comedy, of the kind we have in Jonson and Molière, where a central character imposes a foolish law or whim on himself, hypochondria, miserliness, or whatnot, tries to impose the consequences of this state of mind on others, generally his children, and finds the action of the comedy finally baffling him. In Measure for Measure, the law that condemns Claudio can hardly be called whimsical or arbitrary, nor is anything said

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directly against it: we merely see that the action of the comedy annihilates its social effects. A second look at the play suggests that it is the spirit of legalism itself that is being transcended, rather than any particular law. So while the law is being internalized also in Measure for Measure, the leap from crime to forgiveness, from condemnation to redemption, suggests the two levels of action, the movement outside the framework of law altogether, that is typical of comedy, however serious a comedy it may be. Measure for Measure is among other things a subtle and searching comedy of humours in which Angelo and Isabella are released from the humours of different kinds of legalism, or what Blake would call moral virtue.38 At this point the metaphor of “structure” is beginning to fail us. The metaphor is drawn from architecture, and suggests something more static than poetry is. In a critical response to any work of literature, we first follow the narrative, in reading or in the theatre, and afterwards we react to it as a totality, with all its parts existing simultaneously. The sense of “structure,” therefore, originates in the audience after the play ends. But while watching such a play as Measure for Measure, what we are aware of at the time is a powerful force encountering still more powerful counter-forces: it is the swirling and contending energies within the play that hold our attention while it is going on. These energies come from the creative energy of the poet, as transmitted to us through the acting of the play. To take our next step we must turn our attention from structure to movement, which involves among other things invoking Plato rather than Aristotle. Aristotle is interested in poetry; Plato in the poet. Plato’s views on the relation of structure to representation are crude compared to Aristotle’s; Aristotle’s view of the poet as a kind of imitative supermonkey is crude compared to Plato’s. Each, when standing on his own ground, sees further and more clearly than any critic has seen since. It is from Aristotle that we get the explanation of the great audience reactions, catharsis and the like, that give literature its permanent social function. It is from Plato that we get the conception of Eros, the heightened energy, with its roots in love, that marks the creative genius. The dialogue of the Phaedrus begins with Socrates commenting on a speech by the rhetorician Lysias which appears to recommend emotional control and more disinterested attitudes in love. Socrates realizes that Eros is an energy so powerful that there can be no question of simply controlling it: it must be turned in a certain direction. Normally, the en-

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ergy of Eros travels in the direction of Thanatos or death, and the greater the erotic energy, the sooner it gets there. But if the force of love is reversed and sublimated, it becomes a creative force. This reversal is symbolized among other things by the “palinode” that the poet Stesichorus wrote on the divine beauty of Helen after the gods had struck him blind for writing about her sexual passion.39 This leads to the conception of the human psyche as a chariot with two horses, one the noble horse of spiritual love and the other the bucking and plunging horse of passion [Phaedrus, 246]. If we follow the upward course of sublimated love, it leads us to union with love’s objective counterpart, beauty. The vision of love and beauty, in its turn, restores to us the memory of our original state which birth in this world has so largely obliterated. This regained totality of vision is so different from ordinary experience as to seem to the latter a form of madness. And as the conception of love in Socrates is always close to education, the Phaedrus is also concerned with the relation between love and genuine eloquence, the right ordering of words. An analogy is involved between the contrast of genuine and wasteful love, and the contrast of genuine creative skill with words and the meretricious skill that produces rhetoric with its appeal to the passions, and sophistry with its appeal to prejudice. This meretricious skill includes the whole approach to poetry that Plato condemns as imitative, using poetry as a self-contained craft rather than as a direct expression of spiritual vision. It is suggested toward the end that even the invention of writing may have a tendency to encourage the self-contained approach [274b ff.]. The previous essay should have made it clear that the present book has no interest in following Plato into his rejection of the authority of art. Some of these conceptions reappear in a very different context in Christianity, where God’s love for man (agape or caritas) is inseparable from the wisdom or Word of God, and is the source of the kind of love that man is intended to develop in response, first back toward God, and secondly toward his neighbour. The New Testament does not use the word eros, and classifies the kind of love that is rooted in the sexual instinct as philia, which makes it really a form of gregariousness.40 Hence the reversal and sublimation of love is central in Christianity too, and is connected with its strong emphasis on chastity and celibacy. In the Middle Ages, however, a cult of Eros again developed, owing less to Plato than to Virgil and Ovid. Its focus was heterosexual rather than homosexual, and was based on a close imitation of Christian conceptions, with eros

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replacing agape. The underlying assumption of the cult was apparently that the Christian teachings had left something out that was central to human experience and essential to it, especially in poetry. There is no need to rehearse the familiar story of the growth of the convention of Courtly Love in southern France and its subsequent spread over Europe.41 We need only remember that love, in the form of unshakeable devotion to a mistress, releases a creative power which inspires the hero to great deeds and the poet to great words. This is still the assumed convention in most of Shakespeare. In the sonnets we see the reflection of the view that love is, so to speak, the petrol that runs the poet’s engine: a poet who attempts to write without the stimulus of love is assumed conventionally to be a rather poor creature. Devotion to a mistress is still the conventional motivation of the hero in Troilus and Cressida, where Hector issues a challenge to the Greek warriors on the basis of the superiority of his lady-love to theirs [1.3.260–83], though nobody in either the Greek or the Trojan army imagines that Hector’s wife Andromache or any other female has anything to do with the challenge. There are various levels of this Eros cult. In its stricter forms, it was, as in Plato, a sublimated reversal of the normal current of love, a vita nuova or different dimension of experience altogether. Dante’s love for Beatrice started at the age of nine and was not diminished by Beatrice’s death, but it was not a sexual love and did not affect his marriage, any more than Socrates’ homosexual interests affected his marriage to Xanthippe. The theme of reversal in this context appears at the very beginning of the Inferno, where Dante encounters three beasts he cannot overcome, but must turn in the opposite direction and be propelled through hell, purgatory, and heaven by the power of love.42 Dante’s love for Beatrice is technically an Eros love, Eros being the god who appears in the Vita nuova; but Beatrice’s love for Dante, which makes her an agent of revelation guiding the poet through the heavens of the Paradiso, is pure caritas. But while some forms of Courtly Love were highly sublimated, others were not, as we can see if we turn from Dante or Petrarch to The Romaunt of the Rose or the story of Tristan and Iseult. By Shakespeare’s day love is normally, in comedy, a heterosexual attachment leading to marriage. The tragic form of such love is the Liebestod, as we have it in Romeo and Juliet, where the heightened energy of love, which transforms Juliet into the most articulate thirteen-year-old in history, meets with an equally heightened catastrophe. We can see in this play how the medieval Courtly Love conventions are still operating as a parallel to Chris-

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tian doctrines. Strictly speaking, from a Christian point of view, Romeo’s suicide might involve him in damnation, but not many in the audience would want to speak as strictly as that. The audience would recognize that Romeo has his own religion: it does not conflict with Christianity or prevent him from going to Friar Laurence for confession, but when he says, “My bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne” [5.1.3], he is speaking of the god to whom he really is committed and who really does run his life, who is Eros.43 Romeo and Juliet die as saints and martyrs in this god’s calendar, just as the “good women” of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women include Dido and Cleopatra, who were also erotic saints and martyrs.44 We may add for completeness that Eros is the heightened form of the energy of life itself, which, in a person not capable of love or passion or heroism, is only a mechanical energy that keeps on going until it is exhausted. In some very ironic plays, such as The Cherry Orchard, we are shown this life-energy as a repeating habit that, like a wound clock, ticks away until it stops. The central characters in Chekhov’s play are presented with various crises and challenges, but they never rise to them, and so their survival is a mere waiting for enough frustration to pile up to end the process. Similarly in many plays of Beckett, where such survival may be symbolized by mutilation, imprisonment, or the paralysis of will. This mere survival, whatever else it may be, is clearly not heroic. In heroic codes survival is a very tepid virtue unless it is continually risked, unless mortal combat or perilous adventure are deliberately sought out. Survival is honourable only when it emerges out of a chance of losing it. When Shakespeare’s Cressida deserts Troilus for a Greek lover, she is being very sensible in a way: the fate of captive women in a conquered city will not be hers. But few audiences would find her slithery survival tactics as appealing as the desperate fidelity of Juliet. We said that it was largely from Virgil and Ovid that medieval and Renaissance poets derived their sense of love as either a destructive passion leading to death or a power that, when reversed or sublimated, may become a transcending of ordinary experience. If we compare Virgil’s Aeneid with the Odyssey, we notice that the Aeneid, like its predecessor to which it owes so much, is divided exactly in two, the first six books being a contrast to the next six. The first six, like the first twelve of the Odyssey, recount a series of adventures in which a group of refugee Trojans try to reach “home,” home being in this case not the old Troy but the new one in Italy, though the Homeric theme of nostos or return is included in the entire historical cycle of which the poem forms part, because the Dar-

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danians, as the Trojans are also called, came from Italy in the first place. Like Odysseus, Aeneas is decoyed by at least two false homes, Crete and Carthage, before he finally reaches the right one. In the second half of the poem the counterpart to Odysseus’s growing mastery of his own house is Aeneas’s struggle to establish a bridgehead in Latium, make a dynastic marriage, and undertake various wars and alliances that point in the direction of the founding of Rome. One hardly expects a strong sexual theme in the story of so “pius” a hero,45 but after all his mother is Venus, who collaborates with Aeneas’s enemy Juno to cause Dido of Carthage to fall in love with him. The result is, as far as Dido is concerned, a Liebestod, one of the world’s great love tragedies. Aeneas deserts her, but he also has to descend to the world of the dead, and when he meets Dido there in book 6 he gets a very humiliating snub. The snub, however, is part of a crucial theme of reversal that begins at that point. Aeneas is told, in a passage which is not only the most frequently quoted passage in the poem but one of the most familiar in all literature, that to descend to the world of the dead is easy enough: it is reversing the movement and going back up again that is difficult: facilis descensus Averno; noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est. [bk. 6, ll. 126–9]46

At the end of book 6, not only does Aeneas himself get back, but we have before that a vision of a number of souls who are to emerge from the shades in the future, as in the Christian myth of the harrowing of hell, as a new dispensation begins for mankind. The second half of the Aeneid contains many of the conventional features associated with comedy, such as love leading to a stable marriage, and the compacts, witnesses, ordeals, and the baffling of the blocking characters that we so often find in comic actions. Juno’s opposition continues, but she changes the direction of her strategy, announcing, in a line in book 7 that caught the eye of Freud (who uses it as the motto of his Traumdeutung),47 that if she cannot prevail on the heavens she will stir things up from below: flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. [Aeneid, bk. 7, l. 312]48

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One of her most effective allies is Fama or rumour, who, along with slander, has been all through literature an example of the irresponsible and socially disintegrating use of words, the exact opposite of the union of love and true eloquence that is the ideal of the Phaedrus. Aeneas struggles through all his obstacles, but the conclusion of the Aeneid is not comic, in the way that the second half of the Odyssey is comic, because the real hero of the epic is not Aeneas but Rome, and because everything is pointing forward to the establishing of law, order, the Pax Romana,49 and the rule of Caesar many centuries later. The Aeneid has rather the feeling of the Oresteia about it, of tragic struggle forming a final contract to which the divine, human, and natural orders are all parties. The foreground action, ending as it does with the killing of Turnus by Aeneas, suggests that the last part, the part corresponding to The Eumenides, dealing with the setting up of law and its social powers, is not being written but is left as a prophecy for Roman readers to supply for themselves. The essential point for us here is that Aeneas is beginning something new in the historical process by turning back the Eros–Thanatos current of passion, adventure, and violent death represented by Dido, making his way up again from the world of the dead that awaits all action as such, and laying the foundation for the great city that rules the world by law. In the sunlight of the Roman imperium the gods fade away into ghosts. Juno’s opposition seems increasingly to be merely childish, and even Venus is at best only decorative. The kind of love that triumphs in Measure for Measure is again sexual love leading to marriage, and apparently this is to be the direction of Isabella’s life as well. The play seems to be a kind of analogue to the Christian principle that charity is the fulfilling of the law, and Isabella’s great speech of forgiveness reaches the level of caritas without necessarily breaking away from eros. The atmosphere of All’s Well That Ends Well is quite different. This story comes ultimately (i.e., by way of an Elizabethan translation in Painter’s Palace of Pleasure) from Boccaccio’s Decameron (3.9).50 Boccaccio wrote some magnificent Courtly Love poems that filtered through to Shakespeare by way of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, which are based on them, but the decorum of the Decameron demands a different approach. There Boccaccio shows little interest in the ennobling and creative aspects of love, but he is never tired of insisting that the attitude of the church and established society to the sexual needs of young people is dismally unrealistic and uncomprehending. Boccaccio’s story in its turn is related to well-known folk-tale

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themes, such as the healing of the impotent king and the clever heroine who, like Psyche in Apuleius,51 somehow manages to accomplish impossible tasks. To sketch in the setting of the play: a great doctor has died before the play begins, leaving his daughter Helena, the heroine of the play, an orphan, and leaving behind him also a number of recipes for curing diseases that apparently have practically supernatural powers. Helena is adopted into the household of the Countess of Rousillon, where she falls in love with the Countess’s son Bertram. The news spreads that the king of France is ill of a disease that has baffled his doctors, so that he has given up hope of a cure. Helena feels that if she can get to him she can cure him, and will ask Bertram as a husband for her reward. Bertram has, by his own father’s death, become a ward of the king’s, hence the marriage, in such circumstances, would normally be easy enough to arrange, whatever her difference in rank from Bertram. As in the romances especially, Shakespeare seems to emphasize, even to go out of his way to emphasize, the most primitive and archaic folktale aspects of his story. He includes from his source the bargain by which Helena offers to suffer death by torture if she fails [2.1.173–4],52 though accepting such a proposal, as the king appears to do by implication, seems rather out of key with his character. Shakespeare adds to his source a strong emphasis on the fact that the king is not merely healed but rejuvenated, including apparently the restoring of his sexual activity.53 It seems clear that Helena’s healing powers, in which she has such complete confidence, are really a form of magic, whatever she may have found in her father’s recipe books. If so, perhaps the rather puzzling dialogue at the beginning between Helena and Parolles about the former’s virginity [1.1.110–86], often attributed to a corrupt text,54 may be emphasizing the traditional folk-tale association of magic with virgins. So if Helena succeeds in her design of marrying Bertram she will also be, like most magicians in plays, renouncing her magic at the end. In any case she claims her reward, of marriage to Bertram, who will have nothing to do with her, and although he does go through a wedding ceremony under compulsion, he leaves immediately and tells her she can expect nothing from him as a husband. He puts this in the riddling form so common in folk tales: she will have to bear a son by a husband who refuses to sleep with her and wear an ancestral ring of his that never comes off his hand [3.2.57–60]. The device employed here is worth an extra comment. In a story by Edgar Allan Poe, Three Sundays in

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a Week, the narrator is told by a crusty uncle that he cannot marry the girl of his choice until three Sundays come together in a week.55 The solution is along the lines of Jules Verne’s Round the World in Eighty Days, which was doubtless derived from it.56 In the course of the story the narrator remarks that his uncle had no qualms about breaking the spirit of one of his vows, but the letter was inviolate. This is exactly the principle that impossible-task folk tales operate on, because these riddling conditions can always be broken in the letter. So as soon as we hear Bertram’s refusal couched in these terms, we know that he has no chance of getting away with his refusal. Bertram’s hostile reaction, like Isabella’s to Claudio’s pleading, does not make him a very attractive figure to the audience, but, like Isabella again, his attitude is comprehensible enough in itself. Admittedly he is, like Isabella, emotionally immature, though far less intelligent than she, and everything in his male ego is disgusted by the situation. Women are not to choose but to be chosen; Bertram does not want to marry and “settle down,” but to become a soldier and have dashing affairs, and even if he did marry he wouldn’t want someone he had previously thought of as something between a kid sister and a family retainer.57 He resents (though in his society he would have had to suppress this anyway) the fact that both his mother and the king think that marriage would be good for him. More important than any of this, the king is fulfilling a promise made to Helena about which he was never consulted, and is making his life and interests only the means of doing so. However benevolent everyone’s intentions may be, Bertram sees the whole pattern of his life snatched away from him just at the moment that he is about to enter on it. To put the matter within the central metaphor of our present concerns, he is not ready to see the current of his life suddenly reversed. Helena is not so easily balked. She is no goddess for all her magic, but a warm-hearted and impulsive young woman whose affection for Bertram has outrun her discretion. Hence while Bernard Shaw may regard her as a proto-Ibsenite,58 Boccaccio, and Painter more explicitly, merely think of her prototype as a bit pushy. Shakespeare himself puts her through the concealments and disguises that his heroines so often resort to. He does not dress her up as a boy this time, only as a pilgrim, but he also uses, as he does with so many heroines, the pretence that she is dead. The heroine in Shakespearean comedy often brings about the comic resolution by her own efforts, but she never has quite the role of a deputy dramatist. The conventions of the time demand that she keep the

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lowest possible profile, of which the bed trick and the rumoured death are about as explicit symbols as one could get. Bertram wishes to seduce a virtuous young woman named Diana, and Helena persuades Diana to seem to agree but allow Helena to replace her in the actual assignation. Meanwhile, Bertram greatly admires a miles gloriosus figure named Parolles, and the parallel between Bertram and Parolles is central to the structure of the play. We saw previously that each of the problem plays has a compulsive talker who specializes in slander, the socially disintegrating use of words, the opposite pole of the union of love and eloquence that we met in the Phaedrus. Bertram, besides not being in love, is about as inarticulate as any major character in Shakespeare, but Parolles, as his name suggests, is at no loss for words in any situation, except for the one moment when he believes his captors to be Russians and says, “And I must lose my life for want of language” [4.1.70].59 This scene, in which he is blindfolded and then exposed as a coward by the other officers, runs parallel to Bertram’s assignation, for Bertram, if not actually blindfolded, is as much hoodwinked in the dark by the bed trick as though he were. The exuberant flow of the slanders of the terrified Parolles [4.3.241 ff.] arouses some amused admiration even among the officers against whom they are directed, and however self-defeating his performance, it has more brio than Bertram’s shufflings and evasions with the king in the recognition scene that corresponds to it. Some characters in the play, notably Lafeu,60 express the view that Parolles is really Bertram’s evil genius [2.5.42–8], but, as Lafeu himself soon comes to recognize [5.3.254], Parolles will not sustain such a role: he may be a fool but he is not really malignant. Even his rhyming letter to Diana [4.3.223–30], which is intercepted by the officers, warning her against Bertram, may be more well-intended than treacherous, however inept. His importance in the play is of a different kind. In most of Shakespeare’s comedies the social ranks and relationships are unchanged by the action of the play: All’s Well is almost the only play in which there is an explicit social promotion in the foreground of the action—and I say “almost” only because of the “preposterous estate” of the shepherds at the end of The Winter’s Tale [5.2.148]. It is emphasized that Helena is below Bertram in social status, and that it takes direct intervention of the king to make her marriage possible. Such a theme introduces the conception of one’s “natural place” in society, the position for which one is fitted by one’s talents and social function.

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Parolles pretends to be a captain, and greatly resents being called Bertram’s follower or servant. But he discovers, like others of his type, that his will to survive is stronger than his commitment to heroism. The heightening of experience through love, creativity, or heroism is not for him: he has to fall back on eros at its minimum level, the level where it is only the mechanical impulse to keep life going. “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live” [4.3.333–4]. In his society that means that he has to accept a social demotion and look around for a master. Apart from Bertram, everybody has talked to him, even Helena, as though he were a fool or clown, and it is apparently in that role that he is accepted into Lafeu’s train at the end. His soliloquy, from which the above quotation is taken, ends with a burst of self-confidence: the contrast between that and his later appearance before Lafeu suggests that he had a much rougher time in between than the action of the play itself indicates. That gives to his superficially farcical role a dimension of self-discovery that makes it considerably more serious. In any case, Parolles adopts the normal direction of life, but at least he knows that he is doing it. An officer eavesdropping on him, when he is cursing himself for talking too much, says, “Is it possible he should know what he is, and be what he is?” [4.1.44–5].61 One would think that this was eminently possible for everybody: self-knowledge does not necessarily lead to improved action, though it does for him once he is out of his false role. Bertram, with his effort to prove his virility by trying to seduce Diana, is in the opposite situation of self-will without self-knowledge. A comment on Bertram by another officer makes this clear: “he that in this action contrives against his own nobility, in his proper stream o’erflows himself” [4.3.23–5]. The overflowing “proper stream” is a modulation of the central theme of the play. Bertram’s current of life and energy is flowing the wrong way, which is also, like the descent to hell in the Aeneid, the easy way. All’s Well does not have the explicit link with the Bible that Measure for Measure indicates in its title, but the Biblical connection is there, and it comes out in an apocalyptic speech by the clown Lavache, perhaps the most extraordinary speech by a clown in the whole of Shakespeare: “I am for the house with the narrow gate . . . but the many will be . . . for the flow’ry way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire” [4.5.50–5]. He also says that those that “humble themselves” may go in the opposite direction,62 and a humbling process is in store for Bertram as well as Parolles, along with a reversal of his energy.

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In the recognition scene Bertram, after being caught out in all his lies, finally disgorges one couplet indicating that he has accepted the situation, is willing to take on Helena as his wife, and in general do as he has been told. The couplet says: If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly. [5.3.315–16]

The speech does not pierce us with its passion, and, with its “if,” would not win any prizes for gallantry either. But consider Bertram’s situation. He has been wrung dry by being processed through a Shakespearean recognition scene, and an instant earlier has been under arrest on suspicion of having murdered his wife. More important for our present point of view, he is, in every conceivable sense of the word, all turned around. He has strained every muscle, so to speak, to travel east, and finds that he has been going west the whole time. The woman he thought he was running away from he turns out to have slept with, and she has the ring he knew he gave to someone else. He can get his bearings only by accepting the direction in which he is actually facing, which he naturally does, like Parolles, with reluctance and bewilderment. If his surrender lacks enthusiasm, it is still enough to justify the title of the play, which Helena has already repeated twice [4.4.35; 5.1.25], and the king a third time in the epilogue [l. 2].63 For “All’s Well That Ends Well,” the only title in Shakespeare with a predicate, is a statement only about the structure of comedy, and is mere nonsense as a statement about human life. The reason why it is true of comedy is that when a comedy “ends well,” the ending is traditionally the beginning of the real lives of the more sympathetic characters. Bertram has not shown much capacity to love, but according to comic convention he will later. So, again, the reversal of Bertram’s libido from war and lechery to genuine life illustrates a myth of deliverance, in the form of redemption, and, once more, illustrates it within the context of comedy. In the hands of a second-rate dramatist it would be only a mirror of the audience’s ready-made conceptions of such things: it would be, that is, a sentimental melodrama in which a young man going to the dogs is redeemed by the self-sacrificing love of a noble young woman. In Shakespeare’s hands it has all possible comic dimensions, including the ironic dimension which has made so many critics of the play feel uncomfortable, much as Lafeu is made uncomfortable by Lavache’s gloomy prophecy.

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In All’s Well, then, there is the current of self-wasting energy that I have called the Eros–Thanatos current, symbolized by Bertram’s self-will, Parolles’ lack of heroism, and Lavache’s vision of the great mass of people drifting to the “broad gate and the great fire.” There is also the reversal of this current of energy backward into a renewed and creative life. The play opens with older characters “all in black,” talking mainly about the dead;64 it proceeds through the healing of an impotent king to a recognition scene which is largely an inquest on the alleged death of Helena. Helena rejuvenates the family, the king, and may even rejuvenate Bertram’s fixated notions of family honour and tradition. As in Measure for Measure, many of the central characters are brought very close to an actual confrontation with death. Helena explicitly risks her life on the success of her healing of the king, spreads a rumour that she has actually died, and thereby forces Bertram to face the possibility of a death sentence. Parolles is told when blindfolded that he is going to be hanged after all [4.3.303–8],65 a farcical suggestion to us but hardly to him. Yet, again as in Measure for Measure, nobody gets permanently hurt in the long run, and, in a world where the principle of “all’s well that ends well” is true, that is what matters. The central bed-trick device seems to be, once again, an image of passage through death to new life, a passion-motivated descent into an illusion that reverses itself and turns to reality and renewed energy. Angelo and Bertram are quite sure that they want specific women, Isabella and Diana, and not others, Mariana and Helena, but their lust in the dark takes no account of what they think they want. We notice that the reversal of Bertram’s (and Angelo’s) current of libido is not a sublimation in any Platonic or Freudian sense. It is what might be called the fundamental sublimation, the movement from what is traditionally called lust to what is traditionally called true love, initiated by the woman but to be later completed by the man. In lust we have an instinctive and generalized desire of a man for a woman (or vice versa), which cannot rise above the genital union to include personality, friendship, or tenderness. The wars Bertram is engaged in are obviously not very bloody, but accessible if not necessarily willing women are supposed to be a perquisite of the soldier’s death-dealing trade. Bertram does not want to kill Diana, but he does want to turn her into a sexual object he will not even have to like or respect, much less love, and that would destroy her integrity as a woman quite as effectively. There is such a thing as a fate worse than death: this dimension of the action is very lightly touched in the play, but, as with Parolles,

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there are suggestions of something more serious in the background of the action. The dawn of the conventional true love, and the uniting of such love through all obstacles, was the central theme of most comedy for two thousand years, and in fact still is, though the myriads of examples of it that continue to appear (even in a society where so large a proportion of marriages either end in divorce or endure in misery) are for the most part ignored in university classrooms. The vision of a newborn society centred on love, which is whisked away from us by the end of the play, remains in our minds as the core of the desperate hope that the natural cycle will one day turn from winter to summer, from darkness to dawn, from aged impotence to youthful energy, from the heroism of murder to the heroism of social life, and then stop. As Helena says, But with the word the time will bring on summer, When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns And be as sweet as sharp. We must away; Our wagon is prepared, and time revives us. All’s well that ends well: still the fine’s the crown. [4.4.31–5]

If Helena’s “word” is specifically the word “yet,” which she has just used twice [4.4.27, 30], she is speaking of the comic resolution at the end, which the audience carries away with them as a vision projected on the future, which has nevertheless been “presented” as the one vision that humanity wants to become present. In some respects All’s Well is not typical of Shakespeare’s usual practice in constructing comedies. The typical New Comedy plot that we have so often referred to, which came to Renaissance Europe mainly from Plautus and Terence, features the victory of the young over the old, with two young people getting married in spite of the opposition of their parents. It often featured too, within limits, the triumph of a tricky slave who takes the side of the young hero and outwits the senex figure. Often the slave is freed or the heroine is proved to be of noble birth. The imagery is mainly social, and while such a form can hardly be called revolutionary, within an authoritarian society it affords a good deal of psychological release. Shakespeare adopts many New Comedy features, but his main focus is less on social than on natural and sexual images of renewed fertility. The social ranks established at the beginning of the play are normally unchanged at the end, and he seems to dislike the

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tricky slave role. Puck and Ariel are elemental spirits acting under orders, and his clever servants remain only that. But All’s Well has a much more restless feeling of social change about it, with Bertram being pulled out of the clichés of family pride in the direction of Helena’s still mysterious capacities, Helena herself advancing from the background of the Rousillon household to a primary place in it, the clown Lavache turning philosophical, and the captain Parolles becoming a licensed fool in Lafeu’s train. It does not, we said, suggest as many analogies to Christian conceptions as Measure for Measure does, but, especially in Lavache’s oracular speech, there is a faint whisper of the vision of social reversal that finds expression in the Magnificat: “he has put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.”66 The king remains the king, of course, but when the actor playing him goes out to ask for the audience’s applause, his opening line is “The king’s a beggar, now the play is done.” Measure for Measure, where the main emphasis is on the return and restoration of the original Duke’s authority, is more typical of Shakespeare’s comic structures. But when we take the two problem comedies together, we get a greatly expanded vision of comic themes and possibilities. In Measure for Measure the two halves of the action illustrate a dialectic between life and art, in which the elaborate dramaturgy of the disguised Duke reverses and redeems the direction of life for all the characters. The implication is that art redeems the past by separating what is creative in it from the general death-wish frenzy of ordinary history. Every work of art was produced in history, and was therefore contemporary with the usual amount of human folly, injustice, destructiveness, and cruelty; but the work of art itself seems to retain an odd quality of innocence. This quality of innocence is, or is closely connected with, its power to communicate with future generations. The unquenchable human hope for more peace and justice in the future, which the triumph of youth in a typical New Comedy action symbolizes, complements this feeling. Thus if a creative artist (we may think for example of William Morris in the nineteenth century) becomes deeply committed to social movements intended to bring about a better society in the future, he is not being inconsistent if he is also committed, quite as strongly, to preserving and continuing the creativity of a distant past. These comments may seem to be taking us a long way from the problem comedies, but they are not so far from the great romances that follow them in Shakespeare’s canon. We noted that the diptych construction

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of Measure for Measure reappears in The Winter’s Tale, where in a clearly marked place a switch from blank verse to prose heralds the beginning of a new action. But the new life and deliverance to which the action of The Winter’s Tale leads seems to go in two quite different, if complementary, directions. One direction is the marriage of Florizel and Perdita, which evades parental opposition in typical New Comedy fashion, by demonstrating that Perdita is a real princess. The imagery of this resolution is connected with the renewal of nature. Its focus is in the great sheep-shearing festival of the fourth act, where there are flowers for every season of the year, including winter-flowers for the disguised Polixenes and Camillo, who act as spirits of frost and snow, trying to destroy the festivity, in which they have little permanent success, however great the temporary confusion they cause. The triumph of youth over age is attached to such images as covering Florizel “like a corse” with flowers [4.4.131], and with Perdita’s total rejection of any floral product of nature in which art has had a share. Florizel’s former tricky servant, Autolycus, has a most important role in this scene, but it is not the typical New Comedy plot-role of helping to bring about the festive ending for the young people. He would rather like such a role, but, consistently with Shakespeare’s usual attitude to such figures, the recognition takes place without him. The recognition scene itself is reported only, in the conversation of some gentlemen, and in rather stilted language at that. It is clearly being subordinated to another recognition scene which occupies the conclusion of the play. This is the meeting of Leontes with Hermione, the imagery of which is a contrast in every way to its counterpart. Its theme is not a new marriage of young people with happiness predicated for the future, but the healing of a breach in the past and the reconciling of a middle-aged couple. The imagery is not of the coming of spring and the renewing force of nature without reference to art; the meeting takes place in a building (Paulina’s chapel), where all the arts are referred to. Leontes is presented with what is alleged to be a work of painting and sculpture, and the name of an actual and well-known artist (Julio Romano) is attached to it, which seems curious, as, on the main narrative line presented to us, there is no statue at all. (There are, of course, other narrative lines, in which Hermione is rising from the dead or emerging from the statue like Galatea). Music and poetry are employed in the final awakening of Hermione, and there are references to magic, which was a common meaning of the word “art” at the time.

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In The Tempest there is a similar double resolution. Ferdinand and Miranda are to be married and enter their brave new world, and parental opposition is minimized: that of Alonso is passed over and that of Prospero only simulated. Prospero makes quite a fuss over preserving Miranda’s virginity until the marriage rites have been completed, but that is again less a matter of morality than of magic. As in all magic, timing is of the essence of the operation, and without proper timing the marriage will not have the fertility promised in the masque. Meanwhile Prospero himself has settled accounts with the enemies in his past: that is, reconciliation and forgiveness have closed up what Leontes, at the end of The Winter’s Tale, calls “this great gap of time” [5.3.154].67 So once more there is a healing of the past through art (here represented by Prospero’s magic, which however includes the dramatic and musical art of the masque), and a projection of future happiness for the young lovers through the natural energies personified in the masque as Juno, the sky, Ceres, the earth, and Iris, the rainbow. The implication seems to be that the central resolution of the comedy is something in a present where past and future are gathered, in Eliot’s phrase,68 which combines these two tonalities in an overall harmony. It has been suggested that the action of The Tempest, in moving from North Africa through an enchanted island to Italy, is designed to recall the journey of Aeneas from Carthage through the Sibyl’s cave to Latium,69 and the suggestion seems to me obviously right. What Aeneas sees in the lower world is a vision of a historical future. The historical future in The Tempest is not obvious; but every editor of the play is compelled to deal in his introduction with the pamphlets and other documents that Shakespeare used about voyages across the Atlantic to the New World, in spite of the fact that the play itself never goes outside the Mediterranean Sea. Perhaps in the background we can see a vast historical cycle turning from the Renaissance Magus with his elemental spirits to a future of colonizing and exploring in a new world that will generate new ideas about the natural man and natural societies, along the lines begun by Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals, another source for The Tempest.70 This is not a comic perspective, of course, nor does it suggest any myth of deliverance, but is simply the wheel of history continuing to revolve. Still, it raises larger questions about art and nature and the relation of both to reality and illusion. To this final aspect of reversal and recognition we must now turn.

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III The Reversal of Reality Two of Shakespeare’s problem plays, then, are fairly typical comedies in which redemptive forces are set to work that bring about the characteristic festive conclusion, the birth of a new society, that gives to the audience the feeling that “everything’s going to be all right after all.” Such plays illustrate what we have been calling the myth of deliverance, a sense of energies released by forgiveness and reconciliation, where Eros triumphs over Nomos or law, by evading what is frustrating or absurd in law and fulfilling what is essential for social survival. But comedy is a mixture of the festive and the ironic, of a drive toward a renewed society along with a strong emphasis on the arbitrary whims and absurdities that block its emergence. There is a much larger infusion of irony in Measure for Measure and All’s Well than in, say, As You Like It or Twelfth Night, and of course there are many comedies, especially in modern times, where the ironic emphasis is too strong for the drive toward deliverance, and where the play ends in frustration and blocked movement. In Shakespeare’s canon the play that comes nearest to this is Troilus and Cressida, a play that, whatever else it may do, does not illustrate the myth of deliverance in comedy. It seems to be designed rather to show us human beings getting into the kind of mess that requires deliverance, a secular counterpart of what Christianity calls the fall of man. Shakespeare’s plays are classified by the Folio as comedies, tragedies, and histories, to which modern critics generally add romance as a fourth genre. Troilus and Cressida is hard to “fit into” these categories (I use quotation marks because “fitting” is not the point of generic criticism) because it has so many elements of all four. It is a kind of history play, for the Trojan War was the normal beginning of secular history in Shakespeare’s day, and the characters in it sometimes seem to realize that they are establishing the patterns and types of the future. The most obvious example is the scene (3.2) in which Troilus, Cressida, and Pandarus successively speak as it were to the future, a posterity who will take Troilus to be the pattern of truth and fidelity, Cressida the pattern of falseness, if she proves false, Pandarus to be the patron saint of all panders. Again, the Troilus story was not part of the Homer–Virgil account: it was the medieval romance precipitate, so to speak, of the Trojan War, and came to Shakespeare from medieval sources, notably Chaucer.71 Shakespeare’s warriors, especially the Trojans, are almost completely

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medievalized, and fight according to the romantic medieval codes of chivalry and Courtly Love. The strongly anti-Greek tone of the play is also derived from the fact that medieval Europe was sympathetic to the Trojans because of Virgil’s story that the Trojans had founded Rome. This story was adapted to Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose legendary history, with its suggestion that Britain was to be a third great Trojan kingdom succeeding Rome, was widely accepted in Shakespeare’s day, appearing in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and elsewhere.72 The play also seems to be a tragedy, what with the death of Hector, the destruction of Troilus’s trust by Cressida, and the bitter final scene, with Troy approaching its final catastrophe. Yet the author of the curious epistle to the reader which prefaces the reprinted Quarto regards it as a comedy, though he realizes that it is a very black comedy, and unlikely to find a warm response in the public theatre.73 He suggests that it was not acted in Shakespeare’s lifetime: there is other evidence that it was, but it could hardly have been a popular play then.74 It is generally recognized, however, that it is a uniquely “modern” play, with its ambiguous irony, its learned language, and the prominence it gives to the antiheroic. For the same reason the twentieth century has less difficulty in placing it within the comic context. The play seems to revolve around the relation of reality and illusion. In the conference of Trojan leaders (2.2) the association of fame and glory and the like with the rape of Helen, and the attempt to make that rape seem more glamorous by persisting in fighting for it, is recognized by Hector to be pure illusion, and even Troilus, though he asks, “What’s aught but as ’tis valued?” [2.2.52], understands this too. The Trojans, then, choose the illusion of fame and glory, knowing it to be an illusion, and knowing that Helen herself is not the real motive for fighting. In Euripides’ play on Helen a version of the legend is adopted in which the Helen who was in Troy during the war was a wraith or illusion, the real Helen being in Egypt the whole time.75 The very commonplace and minor Helen of Shakespeare’s play is not a ghost, but the fact that she is as little worth all that bloodshed as though she were seems to be patent to everyone. Later, when Troilus is forced to watch as Cressida takes up with the Greek Diomed [5.2.5–112], a similar problem arises in his mind. Which is the real Cressida, the one deserting to the Greeks or the faithful one who was an essential part of his own identity? The Greeks, though caught up in the same fantasy, are, by comparison, realists. Ulysses makes an impressive speech [1.3.83–137] on the

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chain of being and the fact that society depends on hierarchical order in order to suggest that Achilles, who is a “better” warrior than anyone present, should be brought back into the conflict. The appeal to the chain of being undercuts the personal application, but there is also some expert needling of Agamemnon and Nestor in Ulysses’ description of the way in which Achilles ridicules them to Patroclus [1.3.142–84]. The proposal modulates into a scheme of replacing Achilles with Ajax as the number one Greek hero, which should provoke Achilles to re-enter the combat. This scheme is a kind of controlled experiment within a tragic framework: if we disturb the hierarchy of nature by placing Ajax above Achilles, the disturbance is bound to right itself by the return of Achilles. The scheme is clever, and up to a point it works, but the real outcome of the play has very little to do with Ulysses’ plans, and nothing at all to do with the chain of being. It seems to be assumed in the play that Hector is, in fair fight, invincible, and that neither Ajax nor Achilles would be a match for him. It also seems to be assumed that the murder of Hector, not any hanky-panky with a wooden horse, is what really brings about the fall of Troy. Hector, the knight sans peur et sans reproche,76 who fights without hatred or envy, and is incapable of treachery or malice, is the one moral reality in the play, and he is in the centre of illusion. He agrees to go on fighting, because, as with Othello, it is his occupation or identity; but he fights in a world where sooner or later hatred, malice, and treachery will take over, and wolves will pull down the stag. If Ulysses believed his own speech about hierarchy and degree, then, he would advise the Greek army to go away and leave Troy in peace. Without degree, he says, everything meets in “mere oppugnancy” [1.3.111], but what else is the Trojan war? In a state of war, authority must come to terms with the fact that the great majority of fighters are motivated by hatred, and that hatred sooner or later makes use of weapons that, in Thersites’ phrase, “proclaim barbarism” [5.4.16] and bring about the chaos that Ulysses pretends to dread. Thersites, though he has not heard the speech, knows that Ulysses’ counsel accomplishes very little as such: “now is the cur Ajax prouder than the cur Achilles, and will not arm today” [5.4.14–15]. It is particularly in the relations of Ajax and Achilles that we see how heroism is, in Heidegger’s term, “ecstatic,” outside itself, thrown into situations in which the personality recreates itself to meet each one differently.77 We first see Ajax as a sullen brute whom the Greek leaders manipulate with contemptuous ease, in contrast to Achilles, who is far more intelligent,

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and, for all his self-indulgence, not ill-natured. But the manipulation does change the personality, and by act 4, scene 5, the scene of Hector’s visit to the Greek tents, it is Achilles who has become the brute and Ajax who is speaking with moderation and point. The manipulation is too efficient, in other words, to accomplish its own real aim. We remarked that each of the problem plays has a character who is a focus for slander and railing, the socially irresponsible use of words. This character type is represented in Troilus and Cressida by Thersites, but, while the slanders of Lucio and Parolles are the wildest fantasy, the railing of Thersites is close to the facts. The Greek leaders, or some of them, are as stupid as he says they are: the war really is being fought for a whore and a cuckold. Thersites is frustrated by the fact that words do nothing to alter a situation: in fact they cannot even express it. To call Menelaus an ass [5.1.58–60] does not begin to express the stupidity of Menelaus, or the damage such stupidity does in the world. He talks of studying magic in order to give some effectiveness to his curses, but in the meantime all his vituperation cannot evoke the irony that the Prologue achieves with the baldest of factual statements: The ravished Helen, Menelaus’ queen, With wanton Paris sleeps; and that’s the quarrel. [ll. 9–10]

Still, Thersites’ function is significant: the slanders of Lucio and Parolles illustrate how the irresponsible use of words tends to disintegrate society, but the railing of Thersites brings out the element of self-delusion in the rhetoric of the warriors. Every history play of Shakespeare makes it clear that, in the art of ruling, Plato’s philosopher-king would be an impossible schizophrenic. If a king ever stopped to philosophize, he would lose the rhythm of action on which his effectiveness as a ruler depends. Similarly, in this play it is the primacy of the will which is constantly stressed: the will is there to act, and knowledge and reason have very little function beyond a purely tactical one. Continuity of action is therefore not necessarily consistency of action: one responds to the situation that is there, however different it may be from the previous one. There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of Cressida’s affection for Troilus as long as Troilus is present; but when Diomed is present she rationalizes her desertion of Troilus by speaking of the way in which sense perception of the immediate takes control over the shadows of memory [5.2.107–12].

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The great Hindu scripture, the Bhagavadgita, is an episode from a heroic epic, the Mahabharata, in which two bands of warrior nobles face one another in battle, and a warrior on one side, Arjuna, wonders why he should be fighting an army which contains so many of his own relatives.78 Similarly, the Greeks and Trojans are more closely related than one might at first expect: the Helen known throughout history as Helen of Troy is the wife of a Greek warrior; her abduction is said to be retaliation for the previous abduction of the Trojan Hesione, who was given to a Greek; Cressida follows her deserting father into the Greek camp; Hector will not risk killing Ajax because Ajax is half Trojan; Achilles’ professed reason for abandoning the battle is that he is secretly in love with a daughter of Priam. Arjuna is told by his charioteer, the god Krishna in disguise, to stay and fight because he is a warrior and should fight, and Hector, we saw, agrees in the Trojan council to go on fighting although he knows there is no real reason for doing so. Arjuna is finally rewarded by a vision of the universe within the body of the god Krishna,79 but in Troilus and Cressida we get no such vision, only Ulysses’ speeches about the necessity of degree and the oblivion connected with time. These speeches are partly sepia clouds concealing much more practical aims, but they have a dramatic function far beyond that. They are, in fact, speeches about the two bases of what we think of as reality: about our perception of time and space, space being presented as the hierarchical structure familiar to Shakespeare’s audience and time as the devouring monster equally familiar from the sonnets and elsewhere. Ulysses’ function in the play is not that of a warrior but of a counsellor, and his speeches represent the detachment of intelligence from the rest of consciousness (rather like Falstaff’s speech on honour, in a less farcical context),80 leaving the warriors to fight with a ferocity untroubled by the calls of the intellect. When we look at these speeches in the context of the play, the presiding geniuses of space and time appear to be Tantalus and Sisyphus. The imagery of the opening lines of the play speaks of “tarrying,” waiting endlessly for something not yet to be grasped, and before long Cressida is telling us that this is in fact part of her own strategy to “hold off” [1.2.286]. Men, she says, concentrate on women only as long as they are out of reach: once the women are possessed, the men revert to their former interests. As she says bitterly after her first night with Troilus: You men will never tarry.

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408 O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off, And then you would have tarried. [4.2.16–18]

However, she is soon moved to a Greek context, where what is appropriate is not to hold off but to hold on. The theme of tantalizing also appears in the emphasis on voyeurism of various kinds, in Pandarus’s leering stage-management of the union of the lovers, in Thersites’ sardonic comments while watching the seduction of Cressida and Troilus’s duel with Diomed, and, on a much more pathetic level, Troilus’s involuntary spying on Cressida’s unfaithfulness. The theme of spying appears again in the fact that Troilus’s love affair with Cressida, and Achilles’ with a daughter of Priam, are Courtly Love amours where, conventionally, the first requisite is secrecy, yet both affairs are, it seems, well known to the leaders in the two camps. Achilles expresses surprise that his amour is known, and Ulysses, as usual, refers him to the cosmos, with an eloquent speech about the omniscience of “the providence that’s in a watchful state” [3.3.196]. He passes over the fact that what watchful providence really knows is that Achilles’ alleged love for a daughter of Priam is a cover-up for his homosexual infatuation with Patroclus. Similarly, the speech on time which Ulysses has just delivered to Achilles is a kind of eulogy of Sisyphus, an insistence, not merely that men have short memories, but that envy and self-interest shorten them still further, to the point at which incessant repetitive activity is necessary to sustain one’s reputation. It is hardly possible, in such a context, that Sisyphus could be, in Camus’s phrase, a happy man:81 as one’s reputation grows, and as continuous effort is needed to sustain it, one finds the stone getting heavier each time it is rolled up the hill. The speeches of Ulysses define the nature of what Christianity calls a fallen world. We guide ourselves in that world by our perception of time and space, which we perceive in such a way as to make them sources of external authority as well. The cosmos is a world of “degree”; time is an inexorable wheel of fortune. They are what we have of reality, and produce in us a sense of ineluctable fatality. But no sooner have they done this than they begin to suggest a sense of unreality as well. We noted earlier that Hector and Troilus deliberately choose the illusions of fame and love and glory, knowing them to be illusions. This is of course particularly true of Hector, who talks less about the chain of degree than Ulysses but clearly knows at least as much about it. Yet their decision

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arouses a response in us that is not only sympathy but a faint perception of a reality that all our metaphysical chains of bondage cannot quite hold in. The inference is that no serious view of life can get established until we have recognized a quality of illusion in what we think of as objective reality, and a quality of reality in what we think of as subjective illusion. In ordinary experience, what we call real tends to be associated with the objective, with what other people see more or less as we see. What we call illusion is correspondingly associated with the subjective, the world of dream and of the emotions, ranging from love to hatred, that distort our “real” perspective. It is here, perhaps, that a man of the theatre might have something to say. For Shakespeare was a man of the theatre who concentrated intensely on the theatrical experience: we may even say that in every play he wrote the central character is the theatre itself. When we are in a theatre, the play we see and hear on the stage is, we say, an illusion. But we could search the wings and dressing-rooms forever without finding any reality “behind” it: it seems clear that in a theatre the illusion is the reality. Furthermore, it is as objective a datum as anything else that we see and hear. Whatever is not the play in the theatre is the shared experience of the audience watching it, an experience that will differ with each member of the audience, and yet represents a consensus as well. In a theatre, then, the illusion is objective and the reality subjective. That does not, by itself, completely reverse the nature of reality and illusion, but it suggests that there are other aspects of both to which the drama is relevant. We notice that something like a reality–illusion distinction is often incorporated into the action of the plays themselves. In the great sequence of historical plays from Richard II to Henry V, we begin with Richard II, a king so unrealistic in his extravagance and irresponsibility that society’s need for real leadership throws up Bolingbroke to fill the vacuum that society as well as nature abhors. Bolingbroke is neither a ruthless usurper nor a puppet pushed forward by others: he is simply the kind of figure who must appear in so troubled a time. He is therefore a practical man taking short views, and that is what enables him to hold power. Everything he does is thrown outwards into the immediate situation, while Richard becomes increasingly narcissistic. The great fortress of extroverted and spontaneous action is our everyday existence in time and space, which we never see objectively without the aid of clocks and mirrors. The growing prominence of these images in Richard’s deposition [Richard II, 4.1] indicates, it seems, his growing assimilation to a subjec-

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tive and withdrawn world. Similarly, Ulysses’ invocation of the chain of being as a gigantic mirror which ought to reflect the Greek army’s true shape, and of time as a striking clock which ticks away Achilles’ former achievements into oblivion, illustrates the world of divided consciousness that the Trojan War symbolizes.82 Bolingbroke’s coming to the throne, however inevitable, was still a usurpation, and it left a dark land full of the meteors and comets of rebellion. In the midst of this dark world is the Eastcheap tavern with Falstaff and Prince Henry. Almost at once Falstaff speaks of going by the “moon and the seven stars” [1 Henry IV, 1.2.14], and later calls himself and his companions “Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon” [1.2.25–6]—language with a grotesque recall of the fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Prince Henry, however, is biding his time: he will eventually “imitate the sun” [1 Henry IV, 1.2.197], and when he is a king a new day will dawn. The day dawns at the end of 2 Henry IV, when the prince is crowned as Henry V, and, as his first act, destroys the identity of Falstaff, who for a moment clings to the hope that he will “be sent for at night” [5.5.89–90].83 But there is no night in the blazing noon of Henry’s conquest of France, except, of course, for France itself. Henry progresses from victory to marriage, after which the wheel of fortune turns once more and England is plunged into another night. The issue involved in the rejection of Falstaff is not a moral one, but the end of a dramatic conflict between Henry’s day-world of warfare and Falstaff’s night-world of thieves and whores. Falstaff’s world is a world of illusory values, but it is also, dramatically, as intensely real as anything we have in literature. Henry’s world is real too, but by no means the real world: it is a carefully selected slice of reality, shot through with the illusions inspired by fortune and victory. Shakespeare’s profoundest treatment of the paradox of reality and illusion in history is perhaps Antony and Cleopatra. It is easy to approach this play, conventionally, with the assumption that the Roman world represents reality and the Egyptian world illusion, and that Antony loses his grip on reality as a potential world-ruler in exchange for the illusions of Cleopatra’s magic. But Cleopatra has not uttered six lines before we realize that any such conception of her is all wrong. She is no Circe-like enchantress and has no illusions at her command. Antony and other Romans may sometimes call her or think of her as a witch, but it is the luminous daylight reality of the woman “whom everything becomes” [1.1.49]84 that fascinates Antony and upstages everyone else

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within reach. Caesar wins the world, but Antony remains a bigger man than Caesar because he is destroyed by a bigger world than Caesar ever knew, and perhaps one more real than any world that can be ruled. We are beginning to suspect that such collisions of forces in Shakespeare are not collisions of reality and illusion, but collisions of different worlds, each of which has its own form of reality and of illusion. In Troilus and Cressida we get a vision of the world that a pro-Trojan reader might well make out of the Iliad, a world where all purpose seems perverted and all ideals merely enchantments. Virgil, we saw, reversed the Homeric story into a story of a new Troy that in the course of centuries came to rule over Greece as well. This reversal of heroic action, we also noted, involved a rigid separation between the social concern of warfare and the individual concern of love, and the supremacy of the former over the latter. It has much the same framework as Ulysses’ vision of restored degree, with an invincible Achilles detached from the arms of Patroclus, but it has a more positive and permanent, in short a more genuinely historical, aim. A century before Shakespeare another epic portrayal of the conflict of love and war was given in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. In Ariosto’s romance there is assumed to be a deeply serious state of warfare at the centre of the Christian world. Paris is under siege by a Saracen or Moslem army, a situation which is a kind of crusade in reverse. Both Christian and Saracen forces are led by individual heroes who keep wandering off on their own mainly erotic affairs and meeting one challenge after another, of a kind to which their chivalric code must give top priority. Ariosto makes it fairly clear that if the Christian heroes would unite they could easily drive off the Saracen army, and that if the Saracen heroes would unite they could easily take Paris. Orlando, the figure corresponding to Achilles in the Iliad, is the greatest of the Christian champions, but he has gone mad in pursuit of a Saracen (or at any rate pagan) heroine named Angelica, and has retired from the conflict. It is a well-known fact that whatever is lost on earth is collected in the moon, that being what the moon is for. If Orlando is mad, he must have lost his wits, and if he has lost his wits they must be somewhere in the moon. So an English knight named Astolfo rides on a “hippogriff” or flying horse to the top of a high mountain, whence he changes planes to Elijah’s chariot of fire to go on to the moon. He is taken on a tour there by St. John, and, sure enough, he sees a large bottle labelled “Orlando’s wits” [canto 34, stanza 83]. He takes possession of this, returns to the

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earth, and pours the contents into Orlando’s nose [canto 39, stanza 57]. Orlando immediately recovers his sanity, finds that he no longer cares anything about Angelica, and settles down to help destroy the Saracen army [canto 39, stanza 61]. If one were to suspect a certain lightheartedness in Ariosto’s treatment one would be right, but there is a serious theme behind it all the same. This is brought out in the many references to the distant future of the story which is Ariosto’s present, and in which Italy is becoming increasingly the battlefield of stronger invading forces from France and the Empire. So the account of Astolfo’s journey to the moon seems to expand into a vision of the moon as a “lunatic” counterpart of the real world, a world which, except that it exists, is both the source and the repository of all illusion. The vast poem therefore turns on a reversal of the action, from madness to sanity, from the moon to the earth, from ultimately frivolous to ultimately serious concerns, that reminds us in some respects of the crucial return from the lower world in the Aeneid. We note that the closing line in Ariosto is modelled on the closing line of the Aeneid.85 But the reversal in the Aeneid assumes that Aeneas has to abandon not only Dido but, so to speak, the whole Dido way of life, and cling to his historical destiny as founder of the Roman Empire. In Ariosto there is rather the feeling that somehow the sane and the lunatic ways of life have to be brought together and put in some kind of alignment before the story is complete. We are not surprised to find that in Shakespeare’s lighter comedies it frequently happens that a world presented dramatically as a “real” world, full of courts and order and justice and other conventional attributes of reality, is opposed to a fairy-tale world of magic and enchantment, out of which the comic resolution comes. It is, I think, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that we can see this “green world” type of structure in Shakespearean comedy most fully and suggestively.86 The action of this play is constructed around three main groupings of its characters. The first group is at the Athenian court, with Theseus and Hippolyta at the centre, and four lovers before them. As so often in comedy, an absurd or unreasonable law is being appealed to, in this case by Hermia’s father Egeus. The law of Athens says that a young woman must marry the man her father chooses or face the alternatives of death or perpetual imprisonment in a convent. Egeus is far gone in senility, and shows no distress at the possibility of his daughter’s being executed if she does not marry the man he chooses as a surrogate for himself. It

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is natural to want to rationalize this scene by saying that Theseus probably has a better private strategy in mind, and will talk Egeus around to it offstage. But all we actually hear Theseus say echoes Angelo’s “no remedy”:87 he must and will enforce the law as it stands. We may also perhaps infer from his parenthetical “What cheer, my love?” [1.1.122] that Hippolyta, who is presented throughout as a person of great common sense, is disappointed, if not disgusted, with the situation. Once again, an unreasonable law, whatever we think of it, is not openly denounced but merely evaporates from the action. It is there to present a state of contrast to the direction in which the comic action moves. In the world where there could be such a law, reason and order are assumed to be in complete control of emotion and impulse, and the most natural symbol of this is absolute parental authority, especially in sexual matters, with any deviation from it leading to death or sterility. Perhaps, if we carried out this conception of reason and order to its logical conclusion, the reality it invokes would turn out to be simply whatever is dead, with illusion the flickering flame of life within it. In the second grouping we are in the wood of Oberon and Titania, with the Quince company in one corner of it and the four lovers in another. This is a world of magic and metamorphosis and confused identity, and has strong affinities with the world of dream, as the play’s title indicates. In this wood there are farcical versions being enacted of two of the world’s greatest tragic stories: that of Pyramus and Thisbe by the Quince company, and that of the Knight’s Tale by the lovers, with two male rivals in pursuit, first of Hermia, and then of Helena. As dawn breaks, Theseus and Hippolyta enter the wood hunting, meet the lovers there, and Theseus quite suddenly reverses his former decision, telling Egeus that he will overbear his will [4.1.79] . The conscious or daylight reason for his change of attitude is the switching of Demetrius’s affections to Helena. But that was the work of Oberon, whose influence is not, Oberon says, confined only to the hours of darkness [3.3.389–93]. Oberon seems to be something of a deputy dramatist too. In any case everyone comes together in the third and final arrangement, in a series of concentric circles. Quince’s group is in a most unlikely place, at the centre and the focus of attention, the lovers, including Theseus and Hippolyta, being grouped around them. At the end of the scene the human characters retire from the stage, and the fairies come in for the blessing of the house, indicating that the concluding action, though in Theseus’s court, is as much under their inspection as the action

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of the previous night in the wood. If so, there is a very central irony in the fact that the final act begins with Theseus’s speech on art dismissing all claims to reality on the part of such spiritual beings as those who have just reversed his authority. Theseus’s famous speech, among its many remarkable features, uses the words “apprehend” and “comprehend” twice, in order to make an analogy between ordinary life and art. In ordinary life sense experience apprehends and reason comprehends. Here reason is or should be in charge, and rules out or modifies sense data when they are distorted by excessive emotion. In the dark, sense alone may not be able to distinguish a bush from a bear, but the more frightened one is, the stronger the impulse to think it a bear. The poet’s business, however, is to “apprehend” emotion itself, rather than sense data, and he instantly tries to “comprehend” it with what a later critic would call an objective correlative88 to put around it: a symbol, a story framework, character, or whatever: Such tricks hath strong imagination That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy. [5.1.18–20]

The emotion of joy is what is “apprehended”; and then a goddess of Mirth or a lucky accident or a discovered treasure is brought in to “comprehend” it. In all this Theseus uses the word “imagination” in its customary Renaissance sense as the tendency to create things that are not there out of the things that are there, illusion out of reality. Such a theory, consistently with Theseus’s social attitude, to law and everything else, makes poetry a form of illusion which must be kept strictly subordinate to reality. When the Quince play is brought to him, Theseus sees what for him is the reality in it, the fact that, whatever its merits, it is a sincere effort to do him honour. As with a modern social critic, the play is primarily for him a reflection of the class structure of his own society. The sensitivity and courtesy with which he responds to the play are genuine enough, and the actors are left with the impression that they have done an excellent job of entertaining the court, as indeed they have. But we may notice that the Quince play is, as Theseus himself says, a “palpable-gross play” [5.1.367] which is almost a parody of Theseus’s conception of the imagination. The actors are sure that the ladies at least in their audience will not be able to distinguish fiction from fact, and so accompany their lion with

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reassurances that he is not a real lion, along with a talking wall and an ambulatory moonlight. Brecht with all his “alienating” devices89 could hardly do better: illusion is entirely subject to the reality of the world the audience normally lives in. The main reason why Quince’s players adopt these procedures is that the court is their fairyland. They hardly think of their audiences (or, again, the ladies in it) as real people at all. If Snug the joiner dresses up as a lion, he would be unlikely to be much worried about the reactions of Mrs. Snug the joiner, but court ladies are unimaginably delicate and fragile. Theories of reality, it seems, whether they originate in the mind of Theseus or of Peter Quince, do not appear to lead to an overwhelming sense of reality. When Hippolyta says, voicing the thought that is in everyone’s mind, that the play is the silliest stuff she has ever heard [5.1.210], Theseus says: The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them. [5.1.211–12]

The remark is not very adequate as dramatic criticism, as it puts William Shakespeare and Peter Quince on much the same level, but when anything is repeated in Shakespeare (as with the words “apprehend” and “comprehend” in Theseus’s speech) it is likely to be something to look at rather sharply, and Puck’s epilogue repeats two of the key words used here: If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumbered here. [ll. 423–5]

And when we add the comments of Hippolyta, who has so much more incisive and concrete a mind than Theseus, we get something more interesting. Hippolyta disagrees with Theseus about the reality of the lovers’ experience, but she does not adopt his categories and say that she is inclined to believe it because of its internal consistency. She says rather, . . . all their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. [5.1.24–7]

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Every drama of Shakespeare contains a great variety of subdramas, and the subdrama of the four lovers in the enchanted wood, however fanciful in detail, is a whole experience which is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. The word “transfigur’d” indicates that the experience is neither real nor illusory, but has got clear of that commonplace antithesis. The dramatist is not interested in the credible, but in the strange and admirable, the illusion more real than reality, the reality that incorporates all the dreams of illusion. Hippolyta’s other comment is in response to Theseus’s remark, quoted above, that all dramas are unreal, and bad plays can be good plays if imagination amend them. She says, “it must be your imagination then, and not theirs” [5.1.213–14]. Here “imagination” is approaching its more modern meaning of creative power, and Hippolyta is ascribing the essential imagination in this creative sense to the audience and not to the dramatist. What is said in this play expresses the general formula for the later romances as well. In The Tempest, for example, certain illusions, such as Ariel’s songs and the wedding masque, turn out to be the essential realities of the dramatic action; the Realpolitik of Antonio, his proposal to murder Alonso before he and Sebastian have any idea how they are to get off the island, is the kind of illusory pseudo-action that is symbolized by Ariel’s harpy banquet, the meal spread out and snatched away. We are back to the Tantalus imagery of Troilus and Cressida, where the realities within the illusions are never quite grasped. But in The Tempest the audience is presented with an action in which reality is grasped through illusion. The climax of the illusion, the masque, is interrupted by Prospero with his great speech telling us that reality itself is simply an illusion that lasts a little longer. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream one very important character is the moon: the moon is referred to incessantly by all the characters, and lunar imagery comes in even where there is no direct reference to the moon, as in Theseus’s “the lunatic, the lover and the poet” [5.1.7], or Lysander’s allusion to Demetrius as “this spotted and inconstant man” [1.1.110]. As an image of something she cannot possibly believe, Hermia speaks of the moon breaking through to the antipodes and joining the sun there [3.2.52–5], somewhat in the spirit of Lewis Carroll’s walrus and carpenter poem.90 And yet in this play the daylight and the moonlight world do have some kind of equal and simultaneous validity: the dream world enters into and informs waking experience, though, as Bottom discovers, it is very difficult to reverse the process and reconstruct the dream. And

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so, as Puck says in the Epilogue, those in the audience who don’t like the play can pretend that they have dreamed it. For those who are unable to pretend this, and know that they have seen it, there is a final act of reversal and recognition in the drama: the act in which the play passes from the stage into the minds of the audience. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” says Puck [3.2.115], as though he had nothing to do with making them behave foolishly. Actually, nobody in the play impresses us as a fool except Egeus, the invoker of law, and certainly Bottom, the only mortal who actually sees any of the fairies, is no fool, whatever Puck may say. The wood is unmistakably a wood of Eros: Cupid’s darts and magic potions are all about us, and people behave very strangely under erotic influence. As Plato had said so many centuries previously, Eros can never be clearly separated from madness, and madness, though a different thing from folly, often appears as folly in the waking world. Hermia coaxes Lysander to sleep a little further from her [2.2.43–4]: this is no doubt a very proper way for a young lady to behave who is spending a night in the woods with her lover, but her doing this is the cause of Puck’s mistake. The prototype of Bottom, Lucius in Apuleius, is also transformed into an ass, and his life in that form is mostly one of misery; yet it is during his metamorphosis that Lucius hears the wonderful story of the separating and reunion of Love and the Soul, of Cupid and Psyche.91 Bottom himself, back in human shape, has lost his Titania, and will never see her again, but something has happened to him in the meantime infinitely far above his normal experience as Bottom the weaver. In Classical mythology, to which A Midsummer Night’s Dream owes a great deal, the moon is female, and is a part of what Robert Graves calls the Triple Will,92 being also the virgin huntress Diana (one of whose names in Ovid is Titania)93 on earth and Hecate or Persephone in the lower world: Puck speaks of “triple Hecate’s team” [5.1.384]. It might be possible, then, to think that the fairy world represents a female principle in the play which is eventually subordinated to a male ascendancy associated with daylight. In the background is the unseen little boy who moves from female to male company as Oberon simultaneously asserts his authority over Titania; in the foreground is Theseus’s marriage to a conquered Amazon. But this seems wrong, and out of key with the general tonality of the play. Theseus’s marriage will at least end his unsavoury reputation as a treacherous lover, glanced at by Oberon, and the most explicit symbol of male domination, Egeus’s claim to dispose

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of Hermia as he wishes [1.1.41–2], is precisely what is being eliminated by the total action. The fairy wood is a wood of Eros as well as of Venus and Diana, and both sexes are equally active principles in both worlds. The relation of the two worlds is turned inside out in Romeo and Juliet, which is probably near to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in date. In this play the character that makes the most impressively described entrances is the sun, which ushers in days when the blood as well as the temperature is hot and quarrelling families are abroad. Here the stories of Pyramus and Thisbe and the Knight’s Tale are acted out in grisly earnest (the Knight’s Tale theme is embryonic only, but the ghost of it appears in the rivalry of Paris for Juliet). Romeo and Juliet is uniquely a tragedy without villains, for even Tybalt is a man of honour according to his own lights, and is probably no more belligerent than Mercutio in any case. The other characters seem to be rather decent and well-meaning people: how do we get six deaths out of their interactions? For a common-sense, daylight explanation we need only the family feud, but Romeo (and the Prologue) ascribes the tragedy to malignant stars as well. In the dialogue, the fairy world of night, erotic feelings, and wish-fulfilment dreams has shrunk to Mercutio’s account of Queen Mab. Yet the dreams Queen Mab inspires condition one’s action when awake as well, and in the setting of Romeo and Juliet her influence is baleful, reminding us of what the lives of the four lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream would have been if their fates had been left entirely to Puck. So Romeo is perhaps not wholly wrong in ascribing some of the disaster at least to a dark and mysterious world that seems pure illusion and yet somehow transforms what we call reality. The traditional Christian explanation of reality and illusion is that God created a real and perfect world, and that man fell out of it into his present world, which is subject to the illusions generated by sin and death. The only progress toward reality that man is capable of is the progress from this world up toward the original world that was intended to be his home. This is a purgatorial ascent, the means being obedience to law, virtue, morality, and the sacraments of religion. Yet the goal of the journey, which is man’s regaining of his own moral reality, appears as an illusion at first, because its original context of paradise or the garden of Eden has disappeared. Spenser thus calls his world of moral realization “Faerie.” Obviously the direction of man’s regeneration has close similarities with the reversal of Aeneas’s journey in the lower world and that fact, along with the Fourth Eclogue, does much to account for Virgil’s later reputation as practically an honorary Christian.94

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Hence the structure of Christian doctrine in Shakespeare’s day envisaged a conception of “nature” on two levels. On the lower level was the “fallen” world we are born in, to which animals and plants seem reasonably well adjusted, but from which man is or ought to be alienated. Man is to turn away from this level of nature and seek in his institutions a kind of discipline that will help to raise him to a higher and specifically human level of nature. It is “natural” for man, though not for an animal, to wear clothes, to live under social discipline, to feel moral obligations, to accept the necessity of law. Even chastity and celibacy in sex can be “natural” to man on this level of nature. Nature on this higher human level is much the same thing as art, the state of art being also the state of human nature. Such a nature is primarily what is called natura naturata, nature as a structure or system, and is founded on the horror of idolatry which inspired so much of early Christianity and of Judaism before it. Idolatry means an absorption into a “fallen” nature and an adoration of whatever is numinous in that nature. Christian teaching says that while fallen nature reflects much of the glory and wisdom of the original creation, it is not numinous: all the gods discovered in it are devils. The greatest of all these potential idols, strictly speaking, is the Eros that is founded in our own sexual impulses, and is consequently our central link with fallen nature. Thus in Paradise Lost Adam and Eve are placed in the original providential form of the world. After the serpent has persuaded Eve to transgress the commandment about eating the forbidden fruit, Eve comes to Adam as a spirit of fallen nature, now a very dangerous idol. Adam yields to her urging to eat of the same fruit, because he would rather die with Eve than live without her. We are expected to sympathize with Adam, because Adam’s fall is also ours, and in his situation we should have done the same thing. But still he falls from a world of reality which God had provided for him to a world of illusion, and his sexual relations with Eve sink from love to lust. Under God’s guidance, however, Adam finds that there is a solid bottom of reality to this illusory world, and he reaches it when he and Eve join hands as they walk out of their garden into a lower world. The joining of hands is the beginning of a human community that struggles all through history to regain its lost heritage; and the love in it is inspired by compassion and not by passion. This construct of two levels of nature endured long past Shakespeare’s day into the eighteenth century, when it began to fall to pieces. It lasted so long because it was part of an ideological structure of authority. The

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first stirrings of political, and, later, economic and technological revolution weakened it, and the Romantic movement brought in a new ideology assuming that man was first of all a product of nature, whether fallen or not, a natura naturans from which he derived all his powers, including his intelligence. Romanticism was part of the general modern tendency to try to get past thinking in terms of a simple opposition of reality and illusion. In the previous century Vico, though without much influence in his time, had laid down the principle of verum factum, that man understands only what he has made.95 Or, perhaps more accurately, man understands reality only through the medium of some fiction that he has created, whether a verbal or a mathematical fiction. Any sort of reality that lies beyond or outside such human fictions is pure alienation, and inaccessible to us. Hence literature also exerts its authority, and communicates what truths it possesses, only through what Wallace Stevens calls a supreme fiction, a structure that has been made in the full knowledge that it is a fiction.96 The Romantic construct gave a central importance to Eros, as the source not merely of love but of creative power as well. This aspect of Romanticism is directly descended from the stress that poets, and only poets, placed on Eros from medieval times through all the intervening centuries. The Romantics restated what had always been a central vision of poetry, and we can find in Shakespeare, especially in the more romantic comedies, the same conception of an illusion that turns into created reality through the influence of love. What the waking world calls folly or madness may be dramatically superior to what it calls reality, as with Florizel’s determination to remain faithful to Perdita: If my reason Will thereto be obedient, I have reason; If not, my senses, better pleased with madness, Do bid it welcome. [4.4.482–5]

In observed reality we try to separate what is illusory in our perception, as we try to separate our sense that the earth is flat and fixed from what other observations tell us. In created reality there can be no exclusion of the illusory, which is the kernel of the supreme fiction superior to reality. We have wandered from the play with which we began this discussion, the third “problem comedy” of Troilus and Cressida, but we suggested the reason for doing so at the beginning. Troilus and Cressida, the earli-

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est in its chronological setting of any Shakespeare play, is a play about the beginning of history, and shows us how man acquires the sense of illusory reality that the playwright tries to reverse into real illusion. It represents one extreme of Shakespeare’s dramatic spectrum, as the more romantic comedies, including the four romances, represent the other. The Trojan war has set up its version of reality, which is a machinery of causation, a pseudo-fatality in which the Trojans must go on fighting to keep Helen. Troilus must therefore agree to Cressida’s going to her father in the Greek camp (we note in passing the reversal of the normal comic movement of the heroine from father to lover) in order to maintain the fiction about Helen that he had defended himself. Cressida may be “faithless,” but fidelity would be impossibly quixotic in the world she is in, a world where heroism degenerates into brutality and love itself is reduced to another kind of mechanical stimulus, as Thersites points out with so much relish. When at the end of the play Pandarus shrivels into a contemporary London pimp, professionally concerned with the spreading of syphilis, there is very little sense of shock or incongruity: we have already realized that this play is about us, if not about the aspect of us that we want to put on exhibition. It is by a final irony of language that we call the portrayal of such a world “disillusioned,” and associate the term pejoratively with a weary pessimism. Being disillusioned with a world like that is the starting point of any genuine myth of deliverance. We take our first step towards such disillusionment when we realize that the basis of consciousness in such a world is the perception of time and space as Ulysses expounds them. Thinking in terms of time and space, however, though familiar to us, is post-Newtonian rather than Shakespearean: in Shakespeare’s day what we call space was usually expressed as place, or space-there. The world of degree, where everything has its natural place, or what Chaucer calls its “kindly stead,”97 is a discontinuous conception of space: only wisdom and prudence seek for the natural place and try to stay in it; the arrogance and pride of the vast majority try to get above it and end by falling below it. Time for Ulysses is also discontinuous: it is time-then, a series of moments very loosely connected by memory or sustained attention, its main linking force being the automatic one of repetition. At the other extreme in Shakespeare time and place have a creative instead of a destructive role. We have mentioned the curious double recognition in the romances, where older people heal breaches in their pasts by the power of love in a context of art, and younger people go out into a

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new life by the power of love in a context of nature. The main emphasis is on the former. In Pericles the marriage of Marina and Lysimachus is subordinated to the reunion of Pericles with his wife and daughter. In Cymbeline there is the same past–future double recognition, as Cymbeline’s lost sons are restored to him and provide an heir for the future, while Posthumus’s lost parents reappear in a dream. But again the emphasis falls on the healing up of the past, and there is no new marriage at the end at all. In The Winter’s Tale Time is not only the chorus of the play but seems in some mysterious way to be an arranger of the action, or what we have called a deputy dramatist: the subtitle of Greene’s Pandosto is “The Triumph of Time.” In The Tempest, even the title (tempestas, meaning time as well as tempest) suggests the near-obsession with time that seems to affect everyone in the play, the centre of it being Prospero’s vast magical experiment, which, like all works performed by magic, depends on timing of the most precise kind. Of all the arts linked with creative time, music has a special place as pre-eminently the art of time, an association that runs all through Shakespeare, a familiar example being Richard II’s prison speech. But because of its associations with the harmony of the spheres and cosmic order, music has no less intimate a link with conceptions of degree and natural place. Unnatural acts, such as rebellion, are linked with discord, as Pericles remarks of the incestuous daughter of Antiochus: But being played upon before your time, Hell only danceth at so harsh a chime. [1.1.84–5]

There is a curious and sometimes rather off-putting snobbery in the romances: Perdita can remain with Florizel only because she is a real princess; Guiderius, who kills the oaf Cloten in Cymbeline, is released from a death sentence only because he is “better than the man he slew” [5.5.302], i.e., superior in social rank; Antonio and Sebastian retain their social superiority to Stephano and Trinculo at the end of The Tempest in spite of their melancholy moral performance. Such themes seem to be structurally connected with the emphasis on the restoration of the rightful past. In The Tempest particularly we see how the illusions of Ariel gradually transform the kind of life represented by the shoddy realism of Antonio into a superior kind of reality. Antonio’s Realpolitik echoes Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, who satisfies one of Ulysses’ concerns for degree and

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place by returning to the Greek army, but then pulls down Hector, who is far above him in any conception of “degree” that would make sense at all, by a combination of treachery and ferocity. The supreme fiction of The Tempest is the wedding masque, an illusion within an illusion, where the goddesses of heaven, earth, and the rainbow provide a vision of paradise that prompts Ferdinand to say, echoing Peter in the Transfiguration, “Let me live here ever” [4.1.122]. But Prospero speaks and interrupts the masque, and there follows a speech where we are back in the world of a time that devours and annihilates everything, even the great globe itself. Nevertheless, Ferdinand and Miranda have been given the masque as a wedding present, to be the emblem of their whole lives. Prospero’s epilogue suggests that the entire play is something similar for its audience: As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. [ll. 19–20]

The basis of the epilogue is the conventional appeal for applause: Prospero has done his work, renounced his magic, and exhausted his powers: it is now for the audience to respond. But Prospero’s language is more serious than that: it makes practically a religious issue, echoing the Lord’s Prayer, out of the reception of the play.98 Prospero himself, following Ariel, merely wants release and freedom; we are to go home and take with us only what he has given us. But even granting that the audience’s recognition of the play is the final recognition, and the reversal of its direction into their minds the final reversal, still play and audience are two things, and the recognition still does not have the final quality of entering into and becoming one with the thing recognized. After we have applauded and set Prospero free, what do we do with ourselves? I have said that when Shakespeare repeats something in a play it should be closely examined; but what should be examined even more closely are the totally pointless passages of filler which Shakespeare has stuck in merely to keep the characters talking. There are no such passages, but there are some that look like that. In the first scene of act 2 of The Tempest we are introduced to the Court Party, where Sebastian, an obvious weakling, has reacted to shipwreck by a state of giggling hysteria. Antonio falls in with his mood and encourages it, because he knows what he wants to do with Sebastian later. Gonzalo has asserted with great confidence that Tunis was the ancient Carthage [2.1.84]; it was

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not, but the point of saying so is to indicate that The Tempest is partly modelled on the underworld descent of Aeneas in book 6 of the Aeneid. Antonio and Sebastian make fun of his solecism, and Antonio says, Antonio: What impossible matter will he make easy next? Sebastian: I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and give it his son for an apple. Antonio: And, sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands. [2.1.89–94]

We hardly expect Antonio, of all people, to be the one to tell us what we should be doing with the experience of seeing The Tempest. And yet Shakespeare, who has a knack of making impossible matters easy, seems to be suggesting, however indirectly, that this is also what we can do: take the island home with us as we would an apple, and make it for us and for our children a source of further islands in the sea. The last reversal of the action into our minds brings about the last recognition, the incorporating of the play into our own creative lives and traditions. In ordinary experience action, energy, and reality are the phenomena of a life proceeding towards death. The portrayal of the reversal of these things in dramatic and other literature will not make us immortal, but it will give our imaginations a depth and a perspective that can take in other possibilities, chiefly the possibility of a more intense mode of living. Prospero the magician claims to have raised the dead; Prospero the dramatist practises a more credible and more useful art, the art of waking up what is dead or sleeping within us, like Hermione stirring within Julio Romano’s statue and responding to Paulina’s challenge of “be stone no more.”99

21 Something Rich and Strange:1 Shakespeare’s Approach to Romance 11 July 1982

Lecture delivered at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, Stratford, Ontario, on Sunday, 11 July 1982, from 10:30 A.M. to noon, in the Festival Theatre, to an audience of about five hundred people. This was the inaugural lecture in the Celebrity Lecture Series, initially designed to celebrate Stratford’s thirtieth anniversary season, and advertised by Artistic Director John Hirsch as “A series of lectures by leading scholars, playwrights, artistic directors and other prominent theatrical figures.”2 Published in the Celebrity Lecture Series of the Stratford Festival under the general editorship of Michal Schonberg (Stratford: Stratford Festival, 1982), from which the text below is taken. The typescript is in NFF, 1988, box 47, file 5.

The First Folio of 1623 describes Shakespeare’s plays on the title page as comedies, histories, and tragedies. Since then, students of Shakespeare have increasingly come to think of four plays written near the end of Shakespeare’s career, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, as forming a special group called “romances.” These romances are obviously close to comedy, even though Cymbeline is grouped with the tragedies in the Folio. They represent a type of romantic drama that was becoming fashionable at the time (probably Shakespeare was mainly responsible for the fashion), and is also found in Shakespeare’s younger contemporaries Beaumont and Fletcher. In one play by the latter the word “tragicomedy” is employed in the preface, indicating that the authors were aware of romance as a distinctive genre.3 The romances seem to be characterized by a return to a kind of primitivism, a revival of types of drama that were popular in the 1580s and 1590s.4 It is interesting to see Shakespeare turning over the pages of

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plays that one would think would be old hat by then, and taking themes and phrases from them. What I think Shakespeare is doing is something rather broader than that. I think that at the end of his writing career he evolved naturally into a genre that presents to its audience the bare bones of a dramatic spectacle, the kind of thing that all over the world, in every culture and period, has proved to be the basis of dramatic entertainment. It is not surprising, then, to find these romances using not only the devices of the rather primitive plays of a generation earlier, but those of other popular forms of drama as well: the commedia dell’arte, the puppet show, and the pantomime among others. In every play that Shakespeare wrote, the central character is always the theatre itself. Shakespeare is inexhaustibly curious about the ways in which people spend every moment of their waking lives, especially when they are with other people, throwing themselves into the dramatic roles that seem to be suggested by the group they are in. In Hamlet we see in the soliloquies how even in solitude we keep dramatizing ourselves to ourselves, and there are many dream scenes, in the romances and elsewhere, showing how the dramatic impulse persists in sleep. There are two words which we have derived from the Classical practice of putting masks on actors, the words “hypocrite” and “person.” One is a moral term with a somewhat restricted meaning, the other is not. In Iago we have a character who is specifically a hypocrite, wearing a mask of a bluff honest soldier that conceals his real identity. Elsewhere, one’s acting roles are what give us a “personality,” which reveals our identity instead of concealing it. In the area of the “person” (from Latin personare, to sound through) we are all actors, and, as Jaques says in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage” [2.7.139], which perhaps alludes to a very similar sentiment inscribed on the Globe Theatre itself.5 It is particularly in the history plays, I think, that we can see how it is the quality of one’s acting that makes one a hero. Theatrical heroism, of course, is heroism of a special kind: apart from fighting the odd duel, the theatre cannot present the hero as doing things, but for the most part as talking about them. It is the mastery of rhetorical language that makes a figure in a play heroic. In Richard II the king of that name, because he is a king, is committed to a certain kind of theatrical role. As events move on, he decides to play a different role, that of the tragic loser. In the clash between him and Bolingbroke near the end of the play, Bolingbroke seems to be winning everything, the crown, the title, the mastery of the kingdom, and yet Richard continues to put on his own show, and

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that is the one thing that Bolingbroke cannot steal. After we leave the theatre, it is Richard II, with his gazing into a mirror [4.1.276–88] and his wonderful speech in prison [5.5.1–66], that we remember: he is still the hero of the play. In Julius Caesar we see the distinction between the liberal Brutus, who, like so many liberals, distrusts rhetoric (except for his own particular kind), and Mark Antony, who is not afraid to exploit all the rhetorical resources he has in order to sway the mob. Antony goes on into another play, but there he is up against the greatest show stealer of all time, Cleopatra, with the fattest female role in the history of drama. That is why (Julius Caesar being a special case) Antony is the only tragic hero of Shakespeare who dies in the fourth act. He has to be cleared out of the way so that Cleopatra can have the entire fifth act to put on her show. In this play Shakespeare seems to have reached some kind of limit in his study of the dramatic role of leadership, and his next play (probably) was Coriolanus, the tragedy of a public figure who refuses to be an actor. Because of this he cannot create a community around him, either for war or for peace. He can fight with great ferocity in battle, but cannot persuade his soldiers to keep together if things are not going well. The lives of Coriolanus and of Mark Antony, as told in Plutarch, brought Shakespeare to the story of Timon of Athens. Timon of Athens, I think, is the beginning of the romances, a transition to them from the Roman and other historical plays. Here we have a play split into two parts. In the first half, Timon is sitting in the middle of Athenian society, collecting parasites because of his prodigal generosity. Then he runs out of money, his so-called friends instantly desert him, and the second half of the play presents him as a misanthrope and a hermit. He discovers gold in the cave where he is, and he keeps throwing gold at the people who visit him, a kind of parody of his earlier behaviour. This play is a curiously abstract pattern of drama, one that would normally read as a tragedy, but could also be taken to be an extremely sombre and sardonic comedy. It is probable that the next play was Pericles, and Pericles, with its frequent “dumb shows” and its constant change of scene from one city to another, Mytilene, Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, seems to be an experimental play in what is felt to be a new genre. We notice how in all the romances the characters are scaled down in size: they seem to be viewed from a greater distance, as it were. Leontes in The Winter’s Tale and Posthumus in Cymbeline are jealous, but their jealousy is not on anything like the

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level of Othello’s: the level of Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor is closer to it. It is perhaps worth noticing that at roughly this time, on the other side of the world, the puppet play was reaching its highest development in Japan with Chikamatsu6 and others, and the scaling down of Shakespeare’s chief characters has some affinity with the puppet play. In Henry VIII, which seems to be later than The Tempest, we have a history play which is simplified abstract history, much as Timon of Athens is simplified abstract tragedy. In this play the central conception of the wheel of fortune dominates the entire action, and because Henry VIII is a strong king he turns the wheel himself. The turns of the wheel bring down first Buckingham and then Queen Katherine, then Wolsey, and at the end of the play we are shown the triumph of Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cranmer, and Thomas Cromwell. There was not a person in Shakespeare’s audience who did not know that these three characters all met with terrible ends very soon afterwards. Hence a lurking irony, implying that the wheel of fortune is still turning, hangs over the prophecy of a glorious future spoken by Cranmer [5.4.14–62]. This feeling of the scaling down of characters nearly to puppet size conveys with it the sense that somebody else is pulling the strings. In Pericles the goddess Diana is pulling the strings, and gathers all the characters together to meet for a final recognition scene in Ephesus. In Cymbeline there is a curious scene in which the god Jupiter appears, partly in answer to complaints that he is not doing anything: he says he is really working very hard, for a god, and that sooner or later he is going to bring all the action into a play with a shape [5.4.93–113]. In The Winter’s Tale there does not seem to be this kind of figure, though the oracle of Apollo reverses the direction of the action in the middle of the play, but there is a figure called Time, who appears at the beginning of the fourth act to tell us that sixteen years have gone by. The story that Shakespeare is retelling in the first half of this play is Greene’s Pandosto, which is subtitled “The Triumph of Time.” In this kind of controlled dramatic structure, there is very little difference between the staging of the play and the action of the play. In The Tempest the difference has practically disappeared. One type of character that Shakespeare, not surprisingly, is fond of is the figure of the deputy dramatist, the character who puts on a show within the play we are seeing. Hamlet is a very obvious example: besides putting on the mousetrap play, he also enacts a great variety of dramatic roles. In Othello we notice that Iago’s speaking part is much longer than Othello’s own because Iago is a kind of demonic producer

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of the dramatic action. In Measure for Measure the first half of the play has to do with an action which is heading for unrelieved tragedy. Angelo has turned out to be an odious hypocrite; Claudio is going to have his head cut off for a legal quibble; and his sister Isabella is so wrapped up in her contemplation of her own virtue that she cannot spare any sympathy for her brother’s plight. The Duke, who is responsible for all these goings-on, seems to have run away, although he has returned disguised as a friar. At a very clearly marked point in Measure for Measure, in the prison scene of the third act, the action of the play up to that point reaches a deadlock, and the disguised Duke comes forward. The rhythm switches abruptly from blank verse to prose, and from then on we are wrapped up in an elaborate comic action worked out by the disguised Duke. He talks Isabella into a bed-trick arrangement with Angelo, a somewhat dubious proposition, one would think, for a pious friar to urge on a pious nun, and he shows a producer’s concern for timing and for the positioning of characters and for subordinating roles in the right way, which carries us through the recognition scene to the end of the play. In The Winter’s Tale, similarly, the action of the first part of the play is sombre and tragic, what with Leontes’ jealousy, which kills his son and apparently his wife, with the infant Perdita carried to the shores of Bohemia and left to die there, and with the person who takes her there being eaten by a bear in a howling storm. After the stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” [3.3.58 s.d.], the rhythm again abruptly shifts from blank verse to prose as the two shepherds come in. Winter in Sicilia then changes to spring in Bohemia. The second half of the play is again an elaborate comic action with two recognition scenes in it. Here there seems to be no deputy dramatist figure, although Paulina in the last scene has something of the role, but, as I suggested, perhaps a personified Time is representing that role here. In The Tempest we do not find this kind of break in the action. The reason is that The Tempest, which is a fairly short play, presents much the same structure that we have in Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale, but presents only the second half of it. The first half, the tragic half, which ends with Prospero and his infant daughter put out into a leaky boat and seemingly headed for a watery death, has taken place twelve years before the play begins, so that the entire play is a comic action with Prospero as the deputy dramatist. Prospero is the clearest example of such a figure in Shakespeare.

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There have been rather sentimental critics, mainly in the nineteenth century, who have suggested that Prospero was a self-portrait of Shakespeare, because they think of Prospero as a serene and benevolent person, like some people’s view of God, and that Shakespeare could not resist the impulse to depict himself in such a role in what seems to be one of his last plays.7 Actually, we find that Prospero is a fussbudget, continually running around doing things and planning more things, scolding certain people to keep them in hand, praising other people, and generally behaving like a harried, overworked theatrical producer. In that sense he may very well be a self-portrait of Shakespeare. In the scene where the court party has a banquet spread in front of them, the banquet is snatched away and Ariel comes forward in the form of a harpy and makes a speech, beginning “You are three men of sin” [3.3.53–82]. It is an extremely impressive speech, with powerful undertones and undercurrents; but as soon as it ends Prospero begins to praise it purely as an actor’s performance, using theatrical jargon and distracting us, if not the court party, from the impact of the speech itself. This undercutting is part of the fact that Prospero is a magician, though magic is only a small part of his stage-managing activities. More accurately, a good deal of his magic takes the form of music and drama. As a Duke of Milan, he seems to have been a remarkably incompetent Duke, by his own statement [1.2.109–11], and he says that when he goes back, every third thought will be his grave [5.1.312]. No doubt the Milanese will be grateful for two-thirds of his thought, but it is clear that Prospero is not a person of action. He is essentially an artist (magic was a common meaning of the word “art” in Shakespeare’s day), and much of his magical art is expended on presenting a masque as a kind of wedding present for Ferdinand and Miranda. The romances are closely related to the comedies, but Shakespeare’s comic structures differ from the usual kind that we find in Ben Jonson in his own day and in Molière later. These latter derive from the Latin comedy of Plautus and Terence, and what happens is usually that a young couple want to get married and are blocked, usually by parental opposition, but finally succeed and baffle the older people, usually with the aid of a special character type known in Classical drama as the tricky slave.8 We do find this formula occasionally in Shakespeare (for instance as a subplot of The Merry Wives of Windsor), but on the whole Shakespeare does not care for it. He doesn’t like tricky slaves—he has Puck and Ariel but they act under orders and are not human beings anyway—and, in

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the romances particularly, he subordinates the happy marriage of the young people to the restoration of the older generation. In Pericles the marriage of young Marina to Lysimachus is rather perfunctory: it has to be there because the play is too close to comedy not to have it, but the main emphasis is certainly on Pericles’ reunion with his lost wife. In The Winter’s Tale the marriage of Florizel and Perdita, made possible only by the fact that Perdita is a real princess after all, is worked out in a recognition scene which is simply reported in the conversation of two gentlemen. The second recognition scene, where the older generation, Leontes and Hermione, are reunited, is clearly the more important. Similarly, the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda, while it has more importance in The Tempest, is still subordinated to the restoration of Prospero to his dukedom. In Cymbeline there is no new marriage at all. The romances are, however, still more remarkable in the way that they build up to two kinds of resolution in the action. One is the conventional comic resolution where two young people make a happy marriage: there everything is thrown forward to the future, their real lives being assumed to begin after the play ends. The other resolution, where the older generation are reconciled and make up for past faults, obviously relates to the past. This curious balancing of a double resolution, one of youth awakening to the future, the other of older people sealing up their past, is very prominent in both The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. In The Winter’s Tale the union of Florizel and Perdita is associated with the triumph of nature which renews its life in the springtime. Perdita, in the great sheep-shearing festival scene, hands flowers around to everyone, giving the old men the flowers of winter, and a question is raised about grafted plants. Perdita calls them bastards and says she will have nothing to do with any such mingling of art and nature [4.4.79–85]. Nature, renewing its own life in the spring without any aid from art, has it all its own way here. But the reconciliation of Leontes and Hermione takes place in a chapel: references are made to works of painting and sculpture; all the resources of poetry and music are called on, and magic is also referred to, so that this scene is as dominated by art as the other is by nature. Even in Cymbeline we have a parallel double recognition scene. Most of what happens at the end relates to the future, but the hero Posthumus has already had his parents revealed to him in a dream, so his past is more or less put straight too, even though the audience doesn’t particularly care about his past and doesn’t know who his parents were.

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The association of the triumph of youth and the future with nature, and of the restoration of older people’s relationships with art and the past, reappears in The Tempest, though in a very complex and ambiguous way. Time, we said, is a chorus character in The Winter’s Tale and the triumph of time is clearly one of the play’s main themes. But there is no play in the Shakespeare canon, perhaps not in the history of drama, so obsessed by the passing of time as The Tempest. In fact I suspect the word “tempest” itself is not simply the English word for a storm but the Latin word tempestas which means time as well as tempest. Everybody is watching the clock. Prospero is a magician, and magicians were exact observers of time. He says to Miranda, “The very minute bids thee ope thine ear” [1.2.37]. He has got this knowledge from his study of astrology, and he tells her later that within the next few hours he must do something crucial or else his fortunes will never brighten again. Ariel is watching the clock for his freedom during the entire play, and Antonio and Sebastian, plotting the murder of Alonso, also use the imagery of tides to persuade themselves that they too are seizing the right moment. We get the feeling that time is gradually foreshortening as we watch the play, and that the time spent in the play’s action is very close to the amount of time that we spend in the theatre watching it. The Tempest is a play which observes to an almost fanatical degree the old rules about the unity of time and place and action. I think that what is happening is that the whole action in the play is moving towards a moment that brings us to the boundary of life in time as we know it and of another world that is above time. This goes back to the fact that in Shakespeare’s day there were assumed to be two levels of nature. There was a model or perfect world which God first created, ending with the creation of Adam and Eve and the planting of a garden for them to live in. Man fell out of this world into an order of nature which is alien to him, but his home is still the garden of Eden, the place where he was originally intended to live. The essential human odyssey, then, is to move from the nature around us to the proper human sphere, though now this proper sphere has to be a state of mind rather than an environment, the garden of Eden having disappeared. Around us is the “fallen” order of physical nature; the original model world is within us, invisible, and in part an illusion. At least an illusion from the point of view of people who live entirely in the lower world of nature. Man can raise himself from physical nature to his proper level of human nature by the sacraments of religion, by observing the law, by morality and virtue, by

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the right kind of education. For a few of the elite, magic was also a way of raising the human consciousness from the apparent outer reality of this world to an inner world of power and of wisdom.9 Such were some of the assumptions that most of Shakespeare’s original audience would have taken into the theatre with them. But the assumptions raise questions about reality and illusion that would be of considerable interest to a dramatist. When we go into a theatre, we say that the show in front of us is an illusion. But it is an illusion without any reality behind it: we can search the wings and dressing rooms forever without finding any hidden reality. The Tempest is not simply a play but, in a sense, a play about playing, or at least a play about the kind of thing drama does. It gives us an action that involves the reversing of the usual conceptions of reality and illusion. Antonio and Sebastian and Gonzalo and Alonso form a group at the beginning of act 2, and the first thing that occurs to Antonio is to murder two of the other people. This is Realpolitik, being realistic about a social situation. Antonio and Sebastian haven’t the slightest notion of how they are to get off the island after they have murdered the other two, but that doesn’t matter: their instinct is simply to go through the rituals of what is considered reality on their terms. It is the kind of reality summed up in Prospero’s great speech at the end of the masque, where he says that “we are such stuff that dreams are made on” [4.1.156–7],10 where everything that Antonio and Sebastian call real is simply an illusion that lasts a little longer. The characters in The Tempest are divided into groups, and the groups are presented with various ordeals and symbolic visions.11 Ferdinand’s ordeal is the piling of logs and his symbolic vision is the wedding masque. The court party has the ordeal of searching for Ferdinand through a labyrinth or a maze of “forthrights and meanders,” as is said [3.3.3], and their symbolic vision is the banquet which is snatched away from them to emphasize the illusory nature of the kind of thing they have been clutching and grabbing for all their lives. The ordeal of Stephano and Trinculo and Caliban is falling into a horse pond, and their symbolic vision is of what Prospero rather mysteriously calls trumpery [4.1.186], by which he apparently means fine clothes which he hangs in front of them. Stephano and Trinculo immediately seize them, though Caliban will have nothing to do with them. That points to a significance in Caliban we shall come to in a moment. Within the court party we find a certain stratifying of moral characters. There is, first of all, Gonzalo, and Gonzalo represents the fact that

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this world that is alienated from us is still the material out of which we make human reality. Gonzalo is, in many senses, a good-natured man, and the island seems to be a pleasanter place for him than it is for Sebastian and Antonio. His clothes are dry: theirs appear to be still wet, a fact linked to a symbolism of garments that runs all through the play. When, a moment later, Antonio is reminded by Sebastian that he usurped the dukedom from Prospero, he says, “Look how my garments sit upon me, much feater than before” [2.1.272–3],12 unconscious of the irony. Gonzalo’s reaction to the stimulus of the island is very different: his Utopian reverie means among other things that there is an inherent good in nature, because even the “fallen” level of nature is still a divine creation, and is still there to be used and employed by man. It was not until the eighteenth century that people began to suspect that this hierarchy of two levels of nature was up for revision. Traditionally, on the higher level of specifically human nature, art and nature are much the same thing, because it is “natural” for man to be in a state of cultivation, to be civilized, to wear clothes, to practice virtues and make moral decisions, and what goes on in the animal world does not apply to him. In the eighteenth century, Rousseau began to suggest that perhaps man was the child of nature—physical nature—as well as the child of authority and providence, and that there might be something in physical nature with which human destiny is deeply linked.13 Shakespeare did not know Rousseau, who was two centuries later, but what he did know was Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals.14 This essay opened up a whole new dimension of thought by suggesting not merely that cannibals were children of nature, but that there was a lot to be said for what Prospero calls nature without nurture [4.1.188–9]. Cannibals may eat each other, but they don’t burn each other alive for trifling differences in religious dogma; they get a lot of fresh air and exercise; they have some ideas of justice and fair play. If we pretend to greater virtues than they have, we ought at least to have theirs as well. It is particularly Montaigne’s reflections about the rudimentary forms of justice to be found in these so-called savage societies that seems to have struck Shakespeare, who certainly read this essay before writing The Tempest. Gonzalo paraphrases some of it when he is impelled by the island around him to say what he would do if he were colonizing it.15 He would make it a kind of golden age of freedom and equality and of justice [2.1.144–65], a projection of his own gentle and honest nature. He is a redeemable character, and below him comes Alonzo, who, though his

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record is worse, is also capable of remorse and repentance. Below him is Sebastian, a weakling whose instinct it is to do what the stronger people around him suggest that he do. He makes several interested remarks during the recognition scene, in contrast to Antonio who says almost nothing at all: in other words Sebastian can be as easily persuaded to virtue as to vice, depending on who gets to him first. It is obvious that the conception of the two levels of nature I referred to has a good deal to do with the character of Caliban, whose name almost seems to echo “cannibal,” though he is conditioned to a different diet. Everybody abuses Caliban, even Prospero and Miranda: he is a stinking fish, a monster, a mooncalf, a hag-born whelp, and so on indefinitely,16 and yet he has his own dignity in spite of all this. Among the general assumptions about nature that Shakespeare probably shared with his audience, one was that nature is dangerous for us, not in itself, but because of our own tendency to find divine beings or numinous presences in it. The Christian teaching is that there are no gods in nature, and from that point of view what is holding Caliban’s development up is mainly what is called idolatry, which leads him first to worship his mother’s god Setebos and then to transfer his loyalties to Stephano, who with his wine bottle becomes for Caliban a divine king, a Dionysus figure dropped out of the moon, according to his own statement [2.2.137–41]. But Caliban outgrows this feeling too, and in his final words we see that there is something redeemable about him too. At that point Prospero says of him, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” [5.1.275–6]. We don’t quite know what he means by this, nor whether Caliban is actually to be taken off the island when Prospero leaves it or not. But what we do realize is that some process of education, of being initiated into a higher form of existence, is going on for everybody in the play. Gonzalo, naturally, is the member of the court party who most vividly realizes that it is going on for them: he says that when they came to the island “no man was his own,” and that now they have found themselves [5.1.212–13]. When Prospero abuses Caliban, Miranda chimes in with a speech beginning “Abhorred slave” [1.2.351]. Some nineteenthcentury editors, feeling that this was not a proper speech for a young lady, transferred it to Prospero: this was wrong, because the Folio text is a very good one, and should not be altered for irrelevant reasons. But it is true that Miranda is simply echoing her father at this point. Enter Ferdinand. Prospero decides to give him a rough time, so that he will not undervalue what he is getting in Miranda, and Miranda immediately be-

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comes aware of a division of loyalties in her mind. She begins to wonder if her omniscient father could conceivably be wrong about something, and by the end of the scene she is apologizing to Ferdinand for her father’s bad behaviour. All of which indicates that Miranda is becoming a more developed and independent person. As for Prospero himself, the nervous strain of dealing with elemental creatures who will tear him to pieces if he forgets a single syllable of any of his charms is obviously what is making him so edgy during most of the play. And yet, although he has been brooding over his wrongs for a dozen years, as soon as his enemies are in his power he has the wisdom to see that revenge on them is not the point at all. His attitude to Caliban, as we have just seen, also softens a good deal, so it appears that Prospero is also getting educated, and his renunciation of magic at the end is in part evidence of that fact. I said that the drama presented to us is an illusion which has no reality behind it. Its reality is within it. Our ordinary notions of reality and illusion are reversed in the play: what Antonio and Sebastian think of as reality turns out to be illusion, and what seems illusion, such as the songs of an invisible Ariel, turn out to be messages of reality. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that the highest moment of the play is the play within it, the wedding masque which Prospero has his spirits put on for Ferdinand and Miranda. The masque symbolizes their own happy married life in the future, and it presents the union of a fertility-giving heaven with a fertilizing earth, the rainbow, the symbol of promise in the Bible, being the intermediary between them. That is, the wedding masque presents a vision of the world as it originally was. There are echoes of the world after Noah’s flood, when, at least symbolically, it was not the sticky mess it would have been in reality, but a fresh, clean, new-washed world. Ferdinand recognizes the paradisal nature of such a world when he says, “Let me live here ever” [4.1.122]. But of course we can’t do that in this world, and the masque is interrupted by Prospero himself. The masque symbolizes the element of fertility ritual which is latent in all marriages. Prospero seems unreasonably fussy about preserving Miranda’s virginity until the actual marriage has taken place, and it is clear that Ferdinand is an honourable man and will do what he is supposed to do. Prospero’s motives, I think, are less moral than magical. As a magician he understands the importance of time, and that extends to having every step of the rite come in its proper order. Unless the right

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order is preserved, the marriage will not be auspicious and fertile. At the beginning of Pericles, the hero condemns the daughter of King Antiochus for “being played upon before your time” [1.1.84]. He means that she is living in incest with her father; but this way of putting it indicates how important the timing of events is to right living. I said that the illusion of the theatrical performance has no reality behind it. What reality there is, apart from the reality of the illusion itself, is in front of it, in the experience the audience shares as it sees the play and walks out of the theatre. It is customary to end plays with epilogues, and the epilogue to The Tempest, spoken by Prospero, begins in the conventional manner of such things: we have tried to please you and put on a good play, so now give us some applause and show some appreciation. But what he is very soon saying is something wholly different from the conventional epilogue of the kind that we have in All’s Well or As You Like It. He says, And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free. [ll. 15–20]

The sudden deepening of tone—he is echoing the Lord’s Prayer17—and our sudden realization that Prospero longs for release as intensely as Ariel ever did, make it clear that there is something going on more than simply an epilogue. He has used up all his magic in the play, and what more he can do depends on us. So the question arises, What do we do with the play? If we find in Shakespeare a passage of dialogue which seems pure blither, stuck in to fill up some spare time, we should congratulate ourselves, because that is likely to be where some of the deepest and most central themes of the play are to be found.18 We find such dialogue at the beginning of act 2, when Antonio and Sebastian are making fun of Gonzalo with many pointless and feeble jokes. Sebastian has reacted to the shipwreck by a kind of giggling hysteria, and Antonio falls in with this mood and encourages it, because he knows what he wants to do with Sebastian later. Gonzalo, doing the best he can to be cheerful and say that after all things could be worse, remarks that their garments seem

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to be as fresh as when they were at Tunis at the marriage of Alonso’s daughter. From this we learn that the court party is going from North Africa to Italy, and on the way has met with Prospero’s island. There is a curious dialogue about the “widow Dido” [2.1.77–102], and we find it hard to understand how she got into the conversation, despite the silly context. But we may remember that the Aeneid of Virgil also describes Aeneas going from the shores of North Africa from Carthage to Italy to found Rome, and on the way passing through the cave of the Sibyl, where he goes into the lower world and sees a prophecy of the future greatness of Rome. There are an unusually large number of echoes from Virgil in The Tempest, and it seems clear that Shakespeare is emphasizing the parallel between his story and the sixth book of the Aeneid, and that his play too is in part a story of initiation, of passing through one kind of life into another.19 The descent in The Tempest is submarine rather than subterranean, but it is nevertheless a passage into an extraordinary world, where everyone is convinced that everyone else they can’t see is dead. Prospero even pretends that Miranda has died in the middle of the tempest he raised. It seems that the literary context of The Tempest is being suggested by the reference to Dido and by Gonzalo’s assertion that Tunis, where they have just been, is the same city as Carthage, the city Aeneas left, leaving Dido to burn herself up on a funeral pyre. Tunis and Carthage were close to each other, but not the same city: Gonzalo, positive as he sounds, is wrong.20 Antonio and Sebastian go on making fun of his solecism with more of what seems the dreariest nonsense. Antonio says, “His word is more than the miraculous harp” [2.1.87]. Sebastian: He hath raised the wall and houses too. Antonio: What impossible matter will he make easy next? Sebastian: I think he will carry this island home in his pocket and give it his son for an apple. Antonio: And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands. [2.1.88–94]

The date of The Tempest, which is approximately 1611, is a very crucial date in the history of mankind. It is the time when the sixteenth-century Renaissance Magus, with his ability to unite magic and science, was passing out of the picture, and magic was beginning to lose its hold on the imaginations of the learned.21 But the British Empire was just begin-

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ning: the East India company had been founded, and the first attempts had been made to settle in America. There seems to be an enormous wheel of history turning in the background from the past into the future, looking forward to the later debates about man as the child of nature that we have already glanced at, and that were begun by the discovery of the New World. It has always been mysterious to critics why Shakespeare seems to have used several pamphlets dealing with voyages to Bermuda and Virginia as sources for The Tempest.22 Every editor of the play is compelled to mention these sources in his introduction, which means that many students who never read anything except the introduction get the impression that Prospero’s island is in the middle of the Atlantic. It isn’t; we never leave the Mediterranean. And yet there is still this aimless identifying of Tunis with Carthage? Well, he’ll take the island home and give it to his son for an apple; his son will then sow the seeds in the sea and bring forth more islands. And perhaps that is in the long run what we are supposed to do with the play. The magical island sinks back into the sea as we leave the theatre, but we have still with us the kernels of an imagination that in our own way, whether we are dramatists or not, may sow themselves and bring forth more magical islands of our own.

22 The Stage Is All the World 28 July 1985

From the pamphlet with the same title published in the Celebrity Lecture Series of the Stratford Festival under the general editorship of Michal Schonberg (Stratford: Stratford Festival, 1985). Reprinted in MM, 196–211. This was a lecture delivered at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, Stratford, Ontario, 28 July 1985, to an audience of seven hundred people in the Festival Theatre, as one of the Festival’s weekly celebrity lecture series. Two typescripts exist in NFF, box 1988, box 49, files 1 and 2.

The proverb “all the world’s a stage” was a commonplace in Shakespeare’s day, partly because it had come down from Classical times and could be quoted in Latin: totus mundus exerceat histrionem.1 The Globe theatre, the one popularly associated with Shakespeare’s plays, bore on it the motto Quod fere totus mundus exerceat histrionem: “nearly all the world’s a stage.”2 Apparently the Globe architects made the curious blunder of getting an academic, or conceivably a lawyer, to write out the phrase for them, which he was unable to do without a qualification. The aphorism is used a good many times in various contexts by Shakespeare and other dramatists.3 What I should like to do here is to look at some of the uses of the phrase, mainly in Shakespeare, to see what is implied about the conception of personality in them, and, more broadly, how a dramatist looks at personality. Also to see whether the statement is reversible, as the nineteenth-century New England writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed when he said: The world’s a stage, as Shakespeare said one day: The stage a world, was what he meant to say.4

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The reason why it is possible to say that all the world’s a stage is simple enough. All our social and personal relations are dramatic ones, even theatrical ones. If a friend comes into the room where we are, we instantly throw ourselves into the dramatic role that our knowledge of him and his orbit of interests suggests. True, the dialogue is improvised rather than memorized, as it is in the form of drama known as the commedia dell’arte, which I shall come back to in a moment. That means that we are continually thrown back on our own repertoire of ideas and suitable responses. There are two influences making for the conventionalizing of what is said, and the pressure of these influences is strong enough to make most dialogue of this sort fairly predictable. Occasionally we recognize that what someone says is identical with a standard dramatic convention, and we say that he is putting on an act. If the dialogue is being carried on in a police state and the room is bugged, the last difference between conversation and theatrical performance disappears. In ancient times actors usually wore masks, and we have derived two words from the metaphor of the masked actor: “hypocrite” and “person.” “Hypocrite” is from Greek, and refers to an actor looking through a mask; “person” is from Latin, and refers to his speaking through one. So everything connected with “personality” has ultimately to do with a mask of some kind. We often use the word “persona” nowadays to mean the social side of the psyche, its aspect in relation to other people. The poet Yeats even extended the metaphor to writing, saying that the writing personality was a mask for the ordinary one.5 However, such metaphors often have misleading associations, and the metaphor of a mask is misleading when it suggests that one can remove the mask and disclose the real person underneath. Hamlet, for example, is a character who quickly wearies of social relationships, and likes to get by himself and soliloquize. But in a soliloquy one simply dramatizes oneself to oneself, one invisible mask conversing with another. Contemporary pop psychologists would perhaps say that Hamlet’s soliloquies were topdog monologues, addressed to a cowardly underdog who doesn’t want to get on with skewering Claudius.6 But the topdog is equally unwilling to do the same thing, and in fact keeps talking in order to keep on avoiding it, and Hamlet soon realizes this aspect of his topdog self too, and then goes on talking about that, and so on until in due course Shakespeare’s longest play emerges. In short, the mask metaphor fails us if it assumes that there is a real me underneath the mask I put on. There is no core to that onion: there

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is never anything underneath a persona except another persona. When we are alone, we have not walked away from a theatrical situation; we have walked into another one of a different kind. Each man carries inside him an entire Ottawa of politicians jockeying for power, civil servants struggling with routine, mass demonstrators organizing temper tantrums, secretaries trying to transcribe the inner turmoil into some kind of self-justifying narrative. In the physical world scientists postulated, very early on, the existence of an “atom,” that is, an indivisible unit of matter. We still keep the word, but we have split what we now call an atom, so that the reason for continuing to use a word that means the unsplittable turns out to be a fallacy. Similarly, we use the term “individual,” the undivided and undividable unit, for the hundred billion cells and bacteria that add up to John or Joan Smith. Never was there a sillier word. Let us say that we have just made a decisive action, of the kind that reassures us about how well integrated we are. But the decision may have emerged from a group of momentarily concurring moods, or a single mood taking a chance and seizing its opportunity, or a compulsion left over from the age of two. Still, the fact that we have adopted the word “individual,” and other words like it, shows how strongly we want to believe in some kind of hidden inner essence that remains stable and consistent, even though we may run through a dozen personal masks in an hour or so. If we do, though, the result may become confusing even to us. Most of us simplify our lives by developing routines and habits, in conversations as in other things, to help us recognize ourselves as ourselves when we talk. Let us take the simplest of Shakespeare’s uses of the phrase we’re discussing. At the beginning of The Merchant of Venice the hero Antonio tells us that he feels sad, without knowing why. He goes on: I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one. [1.1.77–9]

Shakespeare’s audience would have no trouble with that remark. The part you play in the drama of life is conditioned by your temperament, and temperament, at that time, meant the proportioning of four liquids or humours in the body. Antonio has, at the moment at any rate, a large proportion of one of these liquids, known as black bile or melancholy, in him: that makes him inclined to be observant and withdrawn from strenuous action. It’s a mood only, as Antonio is basically a healthy man.

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In more extreme cases a character may be totally bound by the domination of one humour, and able to react only through it. This is the principle underlying Ben Jonson’s invention of the “comedy of humours.” Jonson starts with the medical conception, as it was then, of temperaments dominated by one humour, and becoming melancholy or sanguine, phlegmatic or choleric, as a result.7 But he extends this in the direction of what we’d now call a conditioned reflex. A Jonsonian humour is a character who has a uniform response to every situation. A miser in a Jonson play can do and say nothing that isn’t miserly or in some way connected with saving money. In his comedy Every Man out of His Humour a miser named Sordido tries to hang himself because there’s been a good harvest and he won’t be able to foreclose many mortgages.8 There’s a reference to something similar in the Porter’s speech in Macbeth [2.3.4–5]. His servants get to him in time and cut him down, and the first thing he says on coming to is to ask them why they had to cut an expensive rope instead of just untying it.9 In The Silent Woman the whole action turns on the fact that a central character, named Morose, hates noise of all kinds, and is delighted at the prospect of getting a dumb wife, who, of course, explodes into a deafening clatter of talk the instant she’s married. If you find the suspense unbearable, I can tell you that the situation is resolved by the fact that she’s a boy in disguise. The comedy of humours, whether called that or not, is an extremely durable type of comedy. Molière used similar formulas in an even simpler way than Jonson: in all his famous comedies the action revolves around a character with one of the standard comic humours: a miser in L’Avare, a hypochondriac in Le Malade imaginaire, an ambitious snob in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. In the eighteenth century, when Pope called Jonson’s humour “the ruling passion,”10 the same recipes were used for satire, and in the early twentieth century the philosopher Bergson wrote a book called Le Rire, in which he postulated the observing of someone bound to a mechanical routine of behaviour as one of the main sources of the laughable.11 Assuming, that is, that the mechanical routine is voluntary and self-imposed. This type of humour is funny because we recognize in it, say, ninety-seven per cent of what we all do, and because of our feeling that we have another three per cent or so of free and unpredictable response. This feeling may be an illusion: if it is ever proved conclusively to be one, nearly all comedy as we know it will disappear from human life, as the reactions of Archie Bunker,12 for example, would then be no more funny than the gestures of a spastic or paraplegic.

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The mechanical nature of such behaviour enables a type of drama to evolve which can depend on improvised dialogue. The types in Jonson’s and Molière’s comedies had descended directly from the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, and another line of descent, perhaps going even further back to the popular farces playing in Italy before Plautus, produced the Italian commedia dell’arte, well known in England in Shakespeare’s time, and a major influence on Shakespeare, Molière, and Goldoni. There would be a company comprising the standard characters; a brief scenario, listing the props and outlining the main routines, would be posted up, and the action would go on from there. Similar devices are used in night clubs today, though more commonly in dialogue form. The standard characters of the commedia dell’arte included Pantalone, a middle-aged wealthy Venetian who regularly took a dim view of his daughter’s boyfriends, a Dottore, a professional man, often a Bolognese lawyer, pompous and pedantic, and Arlecchino or Harlequin, a clown who often pretended, like Hamlet, to split in two and hold dialogues with himself. As the form evolved and spread to other countries, we get the French clown Pierrot, the grotesque Pulchinello, who became the English Punch, the heroine Columbine, and the zanni or subordinate clowns who have given us the word “zany.” In the Gardiner ceramic museum in Toronto, there’s a complete set of these characters in eighteenth-century porcelain.13 Also, when Brian Macdonald produced the Gilbert and Sullivan Gondoliers here at Stratford,14 he realized that Gilbert had written a purely commedia dell’arte story, with a Pantalone in the Duke of PlazaToro, a Dottore in the Inquisitor, and an Arlecchino in the twin heroes. You will remember a dance with puppets in that production, and the puppet play, where the mechanical nature of the behaviour is so obvious, represents the basic theme of which humour comedies are variations. I’ve spoken of our strong desire to believe in a stable and consistent entity underneath the variety of dramatic masks we assume. In the humour comedy this consistent entity appears in the form of parody: the humour is consistent only because he’s conditioned himself to make the same kind of response every time. In some writers who have handled such characters with great skill—I’m thinking particularly of Dickens—we sometimes get the impression that the humour has conditioned himself to a minor obsession to avoid being taken over by a major one, just as one may develop a phobia about cats in order to conceal a hatred for one’s parents. In Shakespeare, where the great characters are so much more

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complex than they are in Jonson, the sense of consistency comes from the limitations of their repertoire. That is, Falstaff, for example, has a great variety of dramatic functions—stage coward, braggart, jester, parasite, butt, vice—but through all this variety he always sounds like Falstaff. We know that there are limits beyond which he can’t go, as when he says, for instance, that he’ll “purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do” [1 Henry IV, 5.4.164–5]. To a professional dramatist, the axiom that the world’s a stage suggests the way he works. I said that there is no solid essence or identity behind the various dramatic roles we assume in life. If there were, the dramatist’s creations would be what Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream [5.1.211], thinks they are: shadows, purely subjective entities dreamed up out of nothing. But in practice the dramatist finds a fully inhabited world of impulses, moods, even things like personalities, inside his mind, and sees an objective social world outside him with counterparts of these things. Whenever we start to create, the creation hooks on to something objective and autonomous, something with a life and character of its own, so that we never know when we are creating something and when we have invoked or summoned something that is starting to recreate us. The drama is the most obvious form of the objectivity of creation in words, because there the fictional figures are taking the form of actual people on a stage. The easiest way for a dramatist to proceed is to recognize the largely mechanical element in social behaviour that he also finds in himself because he has to respond to it, and this creation of the mechanical is the primary form of drama that I’ve been dealing with, the humour comedy, the situation comedy, the improvised dialogue, and other developments of puppet theatre. But unless we are practising dramatists, we begin to feel that “all the world’s a stage” is not a particularly cheerful remark. Antonio says it, we saw, because he is feeling melancholy, and the much more famous use of it at the beginning of the set speech on the seven ages of man in As You Like It comes from Jaques [2.7.139–66], who is practically a professional melancholic. Let us glance at the content of this speech first. Man goes through a series of stages from infancy to old age, and each stage is an actor’s role. Some of these roles, the lover, the soldier, the justice, are more or less voluntarily assumed: the man could have been other things. But even in these some involuntary factor seems to be at work. Astrologers have noted the affinity of Jaques’ stages with the sequence of planets— the lover and Venus, the soldier and Mars, the justice and Jupiter—and

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also the omission of the sun, the sign of a coordinating consciousness and will. One man in his time plays many parts, says Jaques. If we ask, Which of these phases comes nearest to being the real man? it becomes clear that there isn’t any real man, or if there is—and this is probably the answer that Jaques himself would give—we are closest to the real human essence in the mewling and puking infant at one end and the “mere oblivion” [2.7.165] of total senility at the other. But we are asking the question wrongly. The identity of the real man, so far as there is one, is to be found, we said, in the limited number of roles that one can play. The context of the speech is interesting. We are in the forest of Arden, a pastoral retreat of a quietness and simplicity like that of the golden age, except that it gets cold in winter. Two standard features of such pastoral retreats in literature are, first, remoteness from the injustices and absurdities of urban or courtly existence, and, second, deliverance from the tyranny of time. Jaques is introduced after being talked about as a character, and he sets out at some length a theory of the function of satire on urban or courtly life, along with some moralizings on the theme of time that he has picked up from Touchstone. Orlando comes in demanding food, is welcomed, goes out to fetch his servant Adam, and Duke Senior gives Jaques a cue: Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy: This wide and universal theatre Presents more woeful pageants than the scene Wherein we play in. [2.7.136–9]

Jaques then weaves together the themes of satire and the passing of time into the seven ages speech. The speech is totally ignored by the others: Orlando reappears with Adam and the company breaks into the wonderful Blow, blow, thou winter wind song [2.7.174–90]. It seems merely a filler speech, designed to patch over a gap in the action, but one is usually mistaken in assuming that Shakespeare does things for second-rate reasons. The speech is rather what we, in this age of Brecht, might call an alienation speech.15 It reminds us that we are watching a play, or rather a play within the drama of the world, and a remarkably artificial and withdrawn dramatic scene at that. We become aware too that what seems the weak spot in Jaques’ identifying of life with a series of actor’s roles is what is really alienating in it. An actor has a life apart from his acting: Jaques’

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man going through his seven stages has no other life, but is simply an acting mechanism, a mechanism that soon wears out. After setting up this scarecrow, this vision of man as a dramatic puppet, in the magic forest of Arden, Jaques’ function in the play is more or less complete: he says nothing of much interest after that until the closing lines, when he walks out of the artificial happy ending, looking for another kind of reality. If we turn to a far more impressive melancholic than Jaques, namely Hamlet, we see how the axiom of the world as a stage can take on a tragic form. Hamlet exhibits an astonishing variety of moods, qualities, abilities, and sensitivities; but at the same time he is always Hamlet, and his identity as Hamlet depends, once again, on the limitations of his roleplaying powers. Most of us come to terms with the fact that our identity, while not simply negative, is at least finite: because we are A we can’t do what B and C do. The more active the intelligence, the more frequent the sense of frustration: if Shakespeare himself could speak of desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope [Sonnet 29, l. 7], what price the rest of us? With Hamlet the frustration becomes claustrophobic: the world’s a prison to him, and his dreams will not be bounded in a nutshell. The reason is that in contrast to Claudius, who is blocked by a crime in his past, Hamlet is blocked by his future, because the act of vengeance, if he accomplished it, would not fulfil but impoverish his life. So in Hamlet we have perhaps the most impressive example in literature of a titanic spirit thrashing around in the prison of what he is, longing for death but suspecting that suicide will not release him any more than murder did his father. The duty of revenge makes it impossible for his inner and outer lives, however rich and eventful they are in themselves, to mesh gears. There is a good deal about plays and acting in Hamlet, partly because drama becomes for him a contrasting symbol of the integrating of the two worlds into a coherent unity of action. But Hamlet is not a dramatist: he merely wants to use a drama for a nondramatic purpose, something Shakespeare himself never did so far as we know; and Hamlet’s observations on actors and what constitutes a good production have “amateur” stamped all over them. In the nineteenth century Hamlet seemed the central and essential play of Shakespeare, because it dramatized all the central Romantic and nineteenth-century problems: the conception of consciousness as the assassin of action, the sense of the disharmony of inner and outer worlds, the role of the creative imagination in overcoming the disharmony, and the obstacles and

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failures the creative impulse meets with. After about the Second World War in our century, the focus of what was felt to be Shakespeare’s central play began to shift from Hamlet to King Lear.16 With King Lear we move over to the other side of our axiom: the stage as a world. The theatre as a metaphor for the universe was extremely common in Shakespeare’s day, and one reason was that the universe was assumed to have been intelligently designed by its Creator, and intelligent meant having some relation to human life. In Romeo and Juliet we meet Friar Laurence discoursing on herbs [2.3.1–30], the Friar being the kind of man who would know about herbs. Some herbs, he knows, are poisonous, but the assumption of his study is that God would never have made a plant that did not have some human function, if only a negative one. Similarly, the stars are not just up there: they have been put there to influence the character of living things. Even later than Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne could not understand why in the new continent of America there were poisonous snakes and the like, but not “that necessary creature, a horse.”17 In so designed a cosmos all facts and all ideas are linked together, potentially in the human mind, actually in God’s. The image of a totally participating theatre begins to take shape. All facts and principles have their assigned and ticketed places, and step forward on the stage when needed. Courses in the training of memory were taught in which you constructed a theatre-shaped encyclopedia in your mind, and remembered something by pulling it out of its numbered place in the auditorium. The scholar who did most work on these memory theatres, the late Dame Frances Yates, was convinced that the design of the Globe theatre was influenced by them.18 I have always been interested in the cultural frameworks of human societies, and I call such a framework a mythology. People have often asked me, not always politely, why I don’t say ideology, like everyone else. The reason is that ideology to me suggests ideas, and a myth to me means a mythos, the Greek word for story or narrative. I know that we often assume that human beings build up structures of ideas, fitting them together logically if we believe in the ideology, pseudologically if we don’t. But this is mostly illusion: what man does is what he has done from the dawn of consciousness: make up stories. All ideologies are derived from stories or story patterns. The Christian-centred ideology of Shakespeare’s day that I’ve just spoken of came from Christian mythology, a story that was a comedy in its shape. The story of the salvation and redemption of mankind is a comedy because it comes out right and

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ends happily for all those whose opinion on the matter counts. Secular ideologies, whether progressive or revolutionary, are mostly comic plots imposed on history. Occasionally a dramatist will remind us how we can get fooled by putting all our beliefs and values into a single story form. In Ibsen’s Ghosts there’s a dialogue between Parson Manders and Mrs. Alving, in which the parson informs Mrs. Alving how she should have gone about ordering her life.19 It’s apparent at once that he knows nothing about the facts of her life, but he goes on talking anyway because he’s commenting on the kind of drama he’s assigned to God. God operates what he would call a Providence, which makes God a composer of sentimental domestic comedies. The fact that Mrs. Alving’s life has been full of tragic irony doesn’t get through to him: Providence would never go in for that kind of story. It’s clear that Ibsen himself has no use for his parson, and the reason why he dislikes him so much is not just that he’s smug and ignorant, but that he believes in a God who’s a third-rate dramatist: not a patch on Ibsen himself. In a more recent play, Amadeus, the composer Salieri pleads with God to give him the reward of genius in return for a devout life.20 God ignores this plea and bestows all the genius on a grubby creep named Mozart. At the bottom of Salieri’s mind was a notion that God would have bourgeois literary tastes, that the central bourgeois fable of the industrious and idle apprentice would be a favourite with him, and that he could always be counted on to enter into a dramatic situation that illustrated it. A glance at the Book of Job might have shown him that the divine mind was not confined in its choice of plots to the formulas of Horatio Alger,21 but such assumptions die hard, especially when they are not realized to be assumptions. Returning to Shakespeare’s theatre, it is clear that there are difficulties in putting across a tragedy to an audience whose assumptions about life are unconsciously based on a mythology in the shape of a comedy. One ready-made way of meeting this difficulty is to give the tragedy a preChristian setting. Lear is a legendary king of Britain who was supposed to have lived around the seventh or eighth century B.C., and, although Shakespeare is as freewheeling as ever in his allusions, introducing Saxon names like Edmund and Edgar and speaking of godsons and holy water, still there does seem to be a fairly consistent presentation of a society without Christian assumptions. The result is that the characters all make their own guesses about the shape and nature of things, or show

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by their behaviour what they accept about it. The world-stage metaphor appears in Lear’s When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools. [4.6.182–3]

The word “fool” is applied to practically every decent character in the play. The characters who are not fools are Goneril, Regan, and Edmund particularly: for them the world is “nature,” and nature is a jungle in which the predators are the privileged class. But Albany is called a “moral fool” by Goneril [4.2.58] because he is unwilling to accept such a world; Kent is a quixotic fool because of his loyalty to an outcast king; the Fool himself is a “natural” who illustrates the proverb “children and fools tell the truth.” There is also a sense of the word that seems to be peculiar to Shakespeare: the fool as victim, as the kind of person to whom things happen. In this sense Lear calls himself “the natural fool of fortune” [4.6.191], and it is in this sense, or a closely related one, that he speaks of the world as a stage of fools. Various characters make comments on the meaning of the events that occur to them: they are foolish comments in the sense of being the cries of victims who can’t see their tormentors. Gloucester, at one point, speaks of the gods killing men for their sport [4.1.36–7]; Albany, a well-meaning if rather weak man, keeps noting signs of a providence that will work out an approximate justice in things; Edgar searches for moral explanations of tragic events that make some sense when applied to Gloucester but none when applied to Lear. In spite of all this, the action of the play seems to be heading for some kind of serenity and at least the peace of exhaustion, until there comes the final agonizing wrench of the hanging of Cordelia and the death of Lear. No one in the history of drama had ever taken such a chance before, and even Shakespeare barely got away with it. As is well known, the Restoration stage ignored it and cobbled up another version in which Cordelia marries Edgar, and this version held the stage till the nineteenth century.22 Even then, criticism, down to about the beginning of the Second World War, kept talking placidly about the purgatorial shape of the tragedy, the amount of moral sense it made, and what the good characters had learned from their suffering, how Lear really dies of joy when he undoes his button, or Cordelia’s button, and thinks she’s coming to life again, and so on and so on.

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I said a moment ago that the nineteenth century put Hamlet at the centre of Shakespeare because it dramatized the preoccupations of the Romantics: in fact if there had been no Hamlet there might not have been a Romantic movement. In the twentieth century King Lear came into the foreground with the existentialist movement that grew so rapidly after the French Resistance, when it was fashionable to speak of existence as absurd. Absurd meant among other things that the providential God who kept gimmicking his way through human history to some kind of future happy ending was as dead as anything that had never been alive can be. It also expressed what Browning summed up a century earlier in the phrase “there may be heaven; there must be hell.”23 Justice and freedom may exist somewhere or somehow; Hitler and Stalin are right there. The world-stage of fools in King Lear, then, is the theatre of the Absurd, where no hidden benevolent design becomes manifest, where rebellion, obedience, courage, loyalty, acceptance or rejection of religious belief, all seem to be without direction in a world set up largely to benefit the Gonerils and the Cornwalls. I don’t know what the central Shakespeare play will be in the twentyfirst century, assuming we reach it, but I’d place a small bet on Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays on historical subjects, but it’s obvious from the start that he has no interest in anything that we call history. His play on King John never mentions Magna Carta; his play on Richard II never mentions the Peasants’ Revolt. What he is interested in is chronicle, the actions and interactions of the people at the top of the social ladder. Along with this goes a close study of the kind of dramatic performance required of a leader, especially a king. We get an interesting sidelight on this from Henry IV, when he is scolding Prince Hal for wasting his time carousing in the Eastcheap tavern. He tells the prince that he is simply repeating the follies of Richard II, who lost his crown because he was seen too often and not with the right people: The skipping king, he ambled up and down . . . Mingled his royalty with cap’ring fools. [1 Henry IV, 3.2.60–3]

He says that while he was scrambling his way up to seize the crown from Richard, he put on a far better show. Its main principle was to appear in public very seldom, and, when appearing, always to make the maximum effect:

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Well, this is his play, and perhaps it’s unfair to look back to its predecessor, Richard II, where the report from Richard’s headquarters about Bolingbroke’s behaviour is very different from what Bolingbroke himself later remembers of it: Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench, A brace of draymen bade24 God speed him well, And had the tribute of his supple knee. [1.4.31–3]

If both Bolingbroke and Richard are right, we have the principle that the progress from hail-fellow democrat before election to austere dictator after it has been normal for many centuries. Let’s go back to what I said earlier about the two words derived from the masked actor, “hypocrite” and “person.” “Hypocrite,” of course, is a moral term, and “person” is not: it’s accepted that we all need personalities, but we’re not supposed to be hypocrites. At the same time, the ability to be constantly aware that one is saying one thing and thinking another requires as much self-discipline as a major virtue, and the man who can honestly say at his death that he has been a consistent hypocrite all his life has achieved an impressive ethical triumph. Unfortunately, what he is almost certain to have done instead is to start believing his own hypocrisies. But nobody, as Shakespeare presents history, can be a genuinely successful leader without the hypocrisy that goes at the very least with short views and inconsistent actions. Thus in Richard II Bolingbroke’s first act of authority as the new king is his execution of Richard’s favourites, Bushy and Green [3.1.29–30]. One of his main charges against them is that they have separated the king from the queen, destroying their life together [3.1.11–15]. An act or so later he is ordering a far more drastic separation of the king and queen himself, and their devotion to one another, despite Bushy and Green, is quite obvious. For leadership, especially if one is stealing a kingdom, moral principles can be dangerous hang-ups. New situations arise, and one does what fits the new situation, not what is consistent with what one did before. Shakespeare, in short, would have agreed with Machiavelli, whom he had not read, that the appearance of virtue in a prince is infinitely

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more important than the reality.25 The dramatic show, the PR job, as we should call it now, must go over according to its own rules: what happens behind the scenes follows a quite different rhythm. Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, who at times puts on a show of the greatest generosity, sends his general Ventidius out to defeat the Parthians, which Ventidius does. But when a subordinate suggests that Ventidius could win a far bigger victory if he really cleaned the Parthians up while they were demoralized and routed, he responds that if he did that Antony would soon see him as blocking his own “image,” and get rid of him by some means or other. If we ask what the motive is that keeps the leader resorting to such tricks, we can only answer in a dramatic metaphor: the desire to remain at the centre of the stage. It may not even be as definite as a desire: it may be only a habit or instinct. Bolingbroke, whom Shakespeare studies carefully through three plays, owes his strength as a leader to his constant vigilance and his genius for short views. In the second part of Henry IV we see him tired, bothered, unable to sleep, and weary of watching the titled thugs around him with the suspicion that he’d be a fool to abandon. He breaks out once in a startling, eloquent, bitter, almost terrifying speech [3.1.45–56], in which he says that if a young man, for instance, were granted a long-term vision of his own life, seeing its progress to the end, he would simply lie down and die rather than try to live through it. His friend Warwick observes that there is a longer-range perspective to be seen within history, by which the stream of treacheries and intrigues and vicissitudes may at least look a bit more intelligible, and may even be up to a point predictable. Henry answers, Are these things then necessities? Then let us meet them like necessities, [2 Henry IV, 3.1.92–3]

and goes back to his immediate problems. Bolingbroke makes a fairly impressive figure in history because he deliberately remains ignorant of history. He confines himself to the dramatic situation, and does not concern himself even with the underlying design of the play he is in. Once he took his eye off the processional aspect of the social drama, its narrative movement and changes of personnel, he would be swept off the stage. When York watches the crowd rejecting Richard II and hailing Bolingbroke as the new king, his mind goes straight to the inevitable image:

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Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance As in a theatre the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next, Thinking his prattle to be tedious . . . [Richard II, 5.2.23–6]

In Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare is confronted with a world totally unfamiliar to him, except for what his sources could tell him, but a mind like his doesn’t miss much even when so handicapped. The cycles of time have brought us around to the Roman phase of history again, and so Antony and Cleopatra sets out a world that in most respects is much more like our world than like Shakespeare’s. Here there is nothing of the Tudor mystique about hereditary succession and the lawful supremacy of the Lord’s anointed: power is simply up for grabs. We are not in a closely knit kingdom any more: there is only one world, though it has two aspects. One aspect is represented by Rome, with its order, measure, law, discipline, and uniformity of action. The other aspect is centred in Egypt, the land of the overflowing Nile, with its extravagance, barbaric splendour, and debauchery. Caesar is wholly in one world, Cleopatra wholly in the other, and Antony vacillates between them. Hundreds of messengers rush around this world bearing news, but nothing is really communicated. History of a sort is being made, and Caesar even says, when his victory has become a certainty: “the time of universal peace is near” [Antony and Cleopatra, 4.6.4]. But nobody is attending to the history: the attention is focused on the separations and reunions of a pair of horny lovers. The sexual relation, traditionally a private, even a secret relation, has become the spotlit centre from which everything else radiates. The real end of the action of the play is to take place after it concludes, with Caesar’s final triumph in Rome when he returns. Caesar had naturally wanted Cleopatra to be the centre of that triumph, but Cleopatra, who has spent five acts upstaging everyone in sight, is not going to be part of someone else’s scene. She gets rid of Antony by act 4 and arranges the fifth act around her suicide, so that all Caesar can say, in the last lines of the play, is that his army will attend Cleopatra’s funeral “in solemn show” [5.2.364] before proceeding to Rome. The lives and fortunes of millions depend, quite literally, on the kind of motivation that inspires two or three people. The motivation turns out to be, first and last, a dramatic one: the motivation to put on a show. The stage is all the world, and human life has become what the stage is: a place where illusion is reality, with a procession of actors waiting to be applauded, not for what they have been or done, but for what they have remembered in time to say.

23 Northrop Frye on Shakespeare 1986

Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler (Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry & Whiteside; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), hardcover; paperback editions of both also issued in 1986. Reprints of both editions issued in 1988. Translated into French as Shakespeare et son théâtre, trans. Charlotte Melançon (Paris: Boréal-Express, 1988; paperback). Winner of Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction in 1986.1 Frye’s notes for the book, contained in Notebook 29 (located in NFF, 1991, box 25) and in Notes 58-5 (located in NFF, 1991, box 36, file 6), have been published in NRL, 342–5 and 321–45. The typescripts for Frye’s lectures on Shakespeare are located in NFF, 1988, box 54, files 1–7. File 5 contains a series of lectures ordered from one through eleven (with the fifth lecture missing), and dated as follows: First lecture: Introduction, 11 September 1979; Second and third lectures: Romeo and Juliet, 19 and 26 September 1979; Fourth lecture: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3 October 1979; Sixth and seventh lectures: Richard II, 17 and 24 October 1979; Eighth and ninth lectures: 1 Henry IV, 31 October and 7 November 1979; Tenth and eleventh lectures: Hamlet, 12 and 21 November 1979. File 6 includes lectures with two additional dates: Introduction, 10 September 1980; Twelfth Night, 5 January 1981. See also NFF, 1988, boxes 52–3, for drafts of each book chapter, and typescripts of Shakespeare lectures.

Preface I have been teaching an undergraduate course in Shakespeare for some time2 and it would never have occurred to me to make a book out of my lecture notes. But Robert Sandler taped the lectures over a period of years and got a publisher interested, and my secretary, Mrs. Jane Widdi-

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combe, supplied me with the transcripts. The material in the book comes mainly from them, but in altering the format from oral lectures to a book I have had to make certain changes. One change is the altering of the format from two or three lectures on each play to a continuous discussion. What is comfortable for students attending fifty-minute lectures once a week can be most uncomfortable for someone reading a book. Other changes arise from the fact that I have written about many of these plays elsewhere, and, though I felt it was ethical enough to use my writings in my lectures, the situation is different with another publication. I have tried to avoid running too closely parallel with my other writings, but cannot claim that I have always succeeded. Topical allusions, parentheses, answers to questions, and other things that may enliven a lecture but distract a reader, have naturally also gone. I should explain that these lectures represent one-third of a course in Shakespeare taught at Victoria College (and by others in the other arts colleges of the University of Toronto) for some years.3 Another third consisted of a colleague’s lectures: we attended one another’s lectures and made cross-references that had, once again, to come out of this version. The colleagues have been, over the years, Professors Cyrus Hamlin, Julian Patrick, Alexander Leggatt, and John Reibetanz. I have not consciously used material taken from them, but I may well have done so, where there was so much said that was far too good to forget. The remaining third was a tutorial that supplied reading lists and prescribed essay topics and allowed for freer discussion. No prerequisite courses were called for, but we assumed that students would come to university with some elementary knowledge of Shakespeare’s life, age, language, canon, and theatre. The text used was the New Arden edition, wherever available. In addition to those already named, I am deeply grateful to Helen Heller and Sandra Rabinovitch for the extraordinary pains they have taken with the manuscript. Their care and vigilance will do a great deal for my readers. N.F. Introduction When the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays was published in 1623, it included some prefatory material, including a poem by Ben Jonson. In that

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poem there’s the well-known line: “He was not of an age but for all time.”4 This was a very generous and accurate remark, but it was too bad that Jonson couldn’t fit “not only of an age,” which was what he meant, into the metre. Shakespeare has two sides to him: one is the historical side, where he’s one of a group of dramatists working in Elizabethan London and writing plays for an audience living in that London at that time; the other is the poet who speaks to us today with so powerfully contemporary a voice. If we study only the historical, or 1564–1616, Shakespeare, we take away all his relevance to our own time and shirk trying to look into the greatest mystery of literature, the mystery of how someone can communicate with times and spaces and cultures so far removed from his own. But if we think only of Shakespeare as our contemporary, we lose one of the greatest rewards of a liberal education, which is studying the assumptions and values of societies quite different from ours, and seeing what they did with them. We have to keep the historical Shakespeare always present in our minds, to prevent us from trying to kidnap him into our own cultural orbit, which is different from but quite as narrow as that of Shakespeare’s first audiences. For instance, we get obsessed by the notion of using words to manipulate people and events, of the importance of saying things. If we were Shakespeare, we may feel, we wouldn’t write an antiSemitic play like The Merchant of Venice, or a sexist play like The Taming of the Shrew, or a knockabout farce like The Merry Wives of Windsor, or a brutal melodrama like Titus Andronicus. That is, we’d have used the drama for higher and nobler purposes. One of the first points to get clear about Shakespeare is that he didn’t use the drama for anything: he entered into its conditions as they were then, and accepted them totally. That fact has everything to do with his rank as a poet now. Some time ago, when I was lecturing on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I got the question: “What was Shakespeare trying to make fun of in the Peter Quince play?” Apart from the grammar—Shakespeare doesn’t try to do things, he does them—it was a sensible enough question. But notice the assumption: if he were making fun of something, that something would be outside the play, along with a point or thesis or attitude about it that he was “trying to” use the play to put across. And one thing seems clear in Shakespeare: there is never anything outside his plays that he wants to “say” or talk about in the plays.5 In this case he wasn’t making fun of anyone or anything: certainly not of working-class people struggling with playwriting. The fact that Theseus calls for the play and

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doesn’t humiliate the actors establishes that.6 And making fun of incompetent and doggerel poets is pretty small game for Shakespeare. No, he wasn’t making fun at all: he was simply allowing his audience to have fun. If Shakespeare were alive now, no doubt he’d be interviewed every week and his opinions canvassed on every subject from national foreign policy to the social effects of punk rock. But in his day nobody cared what Shakespeare’s views were about anything, and he wouldn’t have been allowed to discuss public affairs publicly. He wasn’t, therefore, under a constant pressure to become opinionated. We have no notion what his religious or political views were, if any: his plays merely present aspects of social life that would have been intelligible to his audience and would have spoken to the assumptions they brought into the theatre with them. Even then he would deal only with those aspects that fitted the play he was writing. The fact that the plays are mostly in verse means, among other things, that there are two levels of meaning: a presented or surface meaning, and an underlying meaning given us by the metaphors and images used, or by certain subordinated or played-down events or speeches. They’ve been called the “overthought” and “underthought.”7 Sometimes the two levels give us different versions of what’s happening. Henry V as presented to its audience is a fairly simple-minded patriotic play, but when you listen to the resonances of what’s said you can hear that some pretty horrible things are being done to France, even to England. I’ve spoken of anti-Semitic and sexist themes in Shakespeare: many people who want to assimilate the great man to our own ideology would resist such suggestions, and of course they can always find things in the underthought to justify them. But we shouldn’t let a play as presented disappear from view: if we do, even the aspects of Shakespeare that seem most relevant to us get badly out of proportion. We know more about Shakespeare than we do about most of his contemporaries in the theatre, who, except for Ben Jonson and one or two others, lived and worked without impressing their personalities on their own time. Even so, what we know doesn’t look very impressive to people who think that a very great poet really ought to have been an obviously great man, living constantly in the public eye, like Goethe or Victor Hugo. That’s a superstition: a poet doesn’t have to be a particular kind of person, and poets who are also strong personalities are mostly products of different cultural conditions. Drama is particularly

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an anonymous medium, where collaboration and compromises with actors, directors, theatre managers, and censors complicate the picture. A very spectacular play, again, needs a low-key text: Henry VIII, which is a kind of costume piece, is a Shakespearean example. I’m not going into the so-called controversies about whether the plays were written by someone else or not—they’re not serious issues. But if you hear it said that Shakespeare didn’t have the education or the experience to write such plays, there are two points involved of some critical importance. As to the education: what Shakespeare might have learned at the Stratford school has been pretty thoroughly gone into, but the real point is that he had the best education anyone in his job could possibly have, acquired at the best possible place, namely the theatre. The “experience” argument is based on the amateur’s notion that you don’t write but only write “up” something you’ve already been exposed to. If that were true, Shakespeare certainly would have a pretty exciting biography. It isn’t, so he hasn’t. In every play Shakespeare wrote, the hero or central character is the theatre itself.8 His characters are so vivid that we often think of them as detachable from the play, like real people. So such questions as “Is Falstaff really a coward?” have been discussed since the eighteenth century.9 But if we ask what Falstaff is, the answer is that he isn’t: he’s a character in a play, has no existence outside that play, and what is real about him is his function in the play. He has a variety of such functions— vice, braggart, parasite, jester—and one of the things he has to do is certainly to behave at times like a stage coward. But Falstaff, like the actor who plays him, is only what he appears to be; and what he really is, even if it could exist, wouldn’t concern us. I stress this because for the last century or so serious literature has been largely character-centred. A book called Shakespearean Tragedy, by A.C. Bradley, appeared near the beginning of this century, with a thesis that Shakespeare’s tragedies, in contrast to the Greek ones, were tragedies of character.10 The tragedy comes about because a particular character is in the one situation he can’t handle. If Hamlet had been in Othello’s situation, there’d have been no tragedy, because Hamlet would have seen through Iago at a glance; if Othello had been in Hamlet’s situation, there’d have been no tragedy, because Othello would have skewered Claudius before we were out of act 1. True, certainly; but it seems clear that Shakespeare didn’t start with a character and put him into a situation: if he’d worked that way his great characters would have been far

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less complex than they are. Obviously he starts with the total situation and lets the characters unfold from it, like leaves on a branch, part of the branch but responsive to every tremor of wind that blows over them. Bradley’s is still a great book, whatever one may say of it, but it’s conditioned by the assumptions of its age, as we are by ours. One of the greatest benefits of studying Shakespeare is that he makes us more aware of our assumptions and so less confined by them. A much more subtle and deeply rooted assumption is that Shakespeare was a great poet who wrote plays. Well, he was, but if he’d worked all his life in a nondramatic medium he’d be, as we can see from his nondramatic works, a very remarkable poet, but not one to dominate the imagination of the world. Among his first plays are a series of three on the period of the reign of Henry VI, the period of the War of the Roses. We may find these plays rather dull reading, because we don’t have the Elizabethan fascination with the period, the sort of fascination an American audience watching a film of Gone with the Wind would feel for their Civil War. But shortened and skilfully edited, as they were recently, we can see that they were originally what they still can be: marvellously effective drama. Then there’s Titus Andronicus, probably Shakespeare’s first tragedy, but too late to be written off as a youthful indiscretion.11 In that play Titus’s two sons are kidnapped by the Emperor of Rome, who tells him that he’ll kill them unless Titus chops his hand off and sends it to him [3.1.150–6]. So Titus chops off his hand12—on the stage, of course—and sends it. The Emperor double-crosses him and kills the boys, sending their heads to him, but Titus gets his deposit back: the hand comes along too. Then comes the problem of getting all this meat off the stage. Titus can take the two heads in one hand,13 but he hasn’t any other hand with which to carry his other hand, if you follow me, so he turns to the heroine Lavinia. But she’s had both hands cut off and her tongue cut out in a previous caper, so there’s still a problem. However, she has a mouth, so she takes the hand in it, and carries it off the stage like a retriever [3.1.282]. Reading the text alone, you may think that Titus Andronicus is a godawful play. But if you see it on the stage, you’ll realize that it’s superb theatre, however horrifying. The moral of all this is that with Shakespeare the actable and theatrical are always what come first. The poetry, however unforgettable, is functional to the play: it doesn’t get away on its own. Some plays find a place for quite long speeches, like Hamlet, but they advance the action

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on some level: they’re not like arias in an opera. Shakespeare was a poet who wrote plays, all right; but it’s more accurate and less misleading to say that he was a dramatist who used mainly verse. Most of the people who complain about Shakespeare’s taste and the like have got this point the wrong way round. A great poet, they feel, shouldn’t condescend to melodrama or bawdy jokes. Behind this is an obscure feeling that drama is an impure medium for a poet anyway. Perhaps it is. But Shakespeare was a poet because he was a dramatist, so the principle doesn’t apply to him. And his instinct for what fits the dramatic situation is little short of infallible. I spoke of the prefatory material in the First Folio: there’s also an introduction by the two editors, who remark that whatever we don’t like in him we probably don’t fully understand.14 I’ve found this to be quite simply true in my own experience of Shakespeare, so that’s what I’m passing on. In Shakespeare’s society, the first question you would ask yourself about anyone would be: is he or she a social superior, inferior, or equal? Every aspect of your behaviour toward him or her would depend on your answer to that. There are all kinds of nuances in the plays, turning on social distinctions, that we may have to make a special effort to recapture. It’s very important in Romeo and Juliet that Romeo, no matter how distraught he may be, is invariably courteous to inferiors, and when he calls one of them “good fellow” [1.2.56; 5.3.42] he’s not condescending or patronizing. On the other hand, Tybalt’s opening line is, “What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?” [1.1.66]. Six puns in ten syllables (“drawn,” “heart” {hart}, and “hind” all have two meanings), in which he’s managed to say that the fighting servants (“hinds”) are cowardly (“heartless”). They’re busy proving that while they may be mischievous they’re not cowardly: Tybalt just assumes they are because they’re inferior in rank to him. So we feel that while Tybalt is no doubt a cultivated, even brilliant man, we’re not sure that we’re going to like him much. Reacting to such a concentration of puns takes fairly sharp ears and agile minds for any audience. I once read a book on the language of children which remarked that children seem endlessly fascinated by the fact that a word can have more than one meaning.15 The authors should have added that they ought to keep this fascination all their lives: if they lose it when they grow up they’re not maturing, just degenerating. Of course, the better-educated people in Shakespeare’s audience had been specially trained to be sensitive to words. They studied grammar, logic, and rhetoric at school, and rhetoric included all the figures of speech and

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verbal arrangements like antithesis. We find a great deal of this formalized rhetoric in the earlier plays: in the later ones the language changes to a more colloquial texture. The chop-logic of the clowns, drawing absurd conclusions from equally absurd premises, would have seemed funnier to people for whom it was a kind of parody of their own schooling. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when the character in Quince’s play called Wall makes his speech explaining that he is a wall, Theseus says, “Would you desire lime and hair to speak better?” [5.1.165] and Demetrius answers, “It is the wittiest partition that I ever heard discourse, my lord” [5.1.166].16 The point is that “partition” also meant a division of a “discourse,” or written composition to be orally recited. I’m assuming that the plays were written for a reasonably well-educated audience. Some of the “groundlings,” the people who paid a penny to stand in front of the stage, would no doubt be illiterate, but they weren’t the people whose attendance financed the theatre, and so far as we know they didn’t resent the fact that a lot of the language went over their heads. Many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed in front of the most discerning audiences that could be found in London: some at court functions for courtly audiences, including royalty; some at the Inns of Court (lawyers’ colleges), and many at theatres, notably Blackfriars, much smaller and more intimate than the Globe, the theatre we most tend to associate with Shakespeare. Even so, the theatrical conditions would be very different from anything we’re used to. A good deal of the lighting, especially in enclosed theatres, came from candles or torches, and as most of the theatres were wooden, they’d give a modern fire inspector ulcers: in fact the Globe was burned to the ground during a performance of what is probably Shakespeare’s last play, Henry VIII.17 The thrust stage brought the action of the play physically close to the audience: if you’ve seen Shakespeare in both thrust-stage and proscenium theatres, you’ll realize what a difference that makes. There would not be many women in the theatre, unless the audience was very private and upper-class,18 and a good many of the jokes, such as Cleopatra’s “O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!” [1.5.21] would probably get a louder laugh then than they would now, when we take expressions of sexual feelings more for granted. The female parts, as you know, were taken by boys, so when we learn that Miranda is fifteen, Perdita sixteen, and Juliet under fourteen, there’s less incongruity when the actor is a boy no older than that himself. Other heroines whose age is not given we may often take to be older, because

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they’re so articulate. In a modern performance of Measure for Measure, for instance, no actress well enough known to be given such a part as Isabella would be likely to be under twenty-five. I imagine that Shakespeare thought of her as about seventeen. Of course the early maturing of both men and women then was a matter of social conditioning, not of genetics, and it makes an interesting contrast with our deliberate delaying of maturity and our pointless limbos of “adolescence.” There’s a close association with music all the way through Shakespeare: there are the incidental songs and a good many stage directions, such as “tucket {trumpet flourish} within,”19 that show how operatic the effect of the play was, and still is in a good production. Spectacle, of course, depended largely on the words. Now we have film to provide spectacle without shifting scenery, and it’s not surprising that many of the most memorable Shakespeare productions of this century have been film productions. We shouldn’t overlook, though, the extent to which Shakespeare turned limitations into positive qualities. For instance, when Romeo hears the news of Juliet’s “death,” his memory calls up the shop of an apothecary who will sell him poison, and he describes this shop at considerable length [5.1.37–52]. A film, in a single shot, could give you everything Romeo mentions and a good deal more. But then you wouldn’t have the psychological insight that shows you how the desperate Romeo, resolved on death, suddenly concentrates his mind with the fiercest intensity on a single scene: he’s practically hallucinating the shop. Shakespeare’s audience lived in what was in many respects a more intellectually tidied-up world than ours. Practically nobody believed, or had even heard of the notion, that the earth was a planet revolving around the sun:20 the earth was the centre of the whole cosmos, and nature was intimately related to man. Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet has a profound knowledge of herbs [2.3.1–30], he being the kind of man who would have such a knowledge. The assumption is that every plant growing out of the ground must have some connection with the human condition, good or bad. Similarly with the stars: they’re not there just to look decorative, but to “influence” (this word was originally a technical term in astrology)21 the human make-up. Comets and similar phenomena are signs of human social and political turmoil: “Disasters in the sun,” as Horatio says in Hamlet [1.1.118], reminding us that “disaster” is another word we get from astrology.22 Human health depended on “temperament” or “complexion,” the proportions in the body of the four humours: blood, phlegm, bile, and

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black bile.23 Shakespeare’s audience, first seeing Hamlet in his black clothes at a court reception, would know that he suffered from an excess of melancholy or black bile, and would expect a soliloquy expressing a hatred of life and a nauseated vision of it. Melancholy was a physical disease as well as an emotional and mental one, and they would also realize that when Hamlet assumes madness when already melancholy he’s going to find it hard to know every time where the boundary is. The four humours were the product in the organic world of the four possible combinations of four “principles”: hot, cold, moist, dry. In the inorganic world these four combinations produced the four elements, so it’s easy to understand why quarrels among the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream should produce bad weather, fairies being spirits of the elements. We’ll come to other examples of this as we go on. The general moral outlook of the audience would be Christian in origin, though the differences in doctrine between Catholics and Protestants, Episcopalians and Puritans, don’t get into the plays. Some plays with Continental settings present an obviously Roman Catholic life, but the Protestant part of Shakespeare’s audience could take that in their stride, just as they could the pre-Christian settings of King Lear or Julius Caesar. Shakespeare seems to have been popular and well liked both as a person and as a dramatist. He never engaged in personal feuds, as many of his contemporaries did, and his instinct for keeping out of trouble was very agile. He had to contend with a vigilant and by no means stupid censorship, and references to contemporary politics, or anything that looked like such references, would probably be pounced on before the play reached the stage. We have some of a censor’s comments on what seems to us an utterly harmless play, Sir Thomas More, which exists in a manuscript of several different hands, one of which is said by handwriting experts to be Shakespeare’s.24 The censor regards it almost as a revolutionary manifesto, and insists on drastic and extensive changes “and not otherwise at your peril.”25 The nearest Shakespeare came to getting into trouble was with a revival of Richard II, which we’ll come to later.26 But that episode shows how sensitive the authorities were. However, Shakespeare seems to have had the instincts of a born courtier: Macbeth, for example, would have been just right for James I, who had come to London from Scotland a few years earlier. Then there were the parsons, who often fulminated against the wickedness of stage plays from their pulpits, and pamphleteers who took the same view. There is a certain type of bourgeois mentality, usually one

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dominated by the work ethic, which regards playgoing as a sinful waste of time, and there was a lot of that around in Shakespeare’s London. It’s usually associated with the Puritans, but that’s vague: there were plenty of both cultivated Puritans and non-Puritan prudes. However, the City of London was largely in the hands of people not enthusiastic about plays. No theatres could be established in the City of London (the first one was opened in the 1950s), except in private areas outside their jurisdiction, like Blackfriars. Again, an outbreak of plague was regularly followed by the closing of theatres, and once, in 1593–94, the closing lasted so long that Shakespeare was forced to earn money in some other way. That was when he wrote his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and dedicated them to the Earl of Southampton as a possible patron.27 The middle-class influence in Parliament got a law passed early in the seventeenth century restraining the bad language used in plays. The results of such anxieties are always pernicious for students of literature, whatever one’s moral views. We notice that Quartos appearing before the law was passed are sometimes better swearing texts than later Quartos or the Folio: more important, they certainly come closer to what Shakespeare wrote. In the Quarto of Henry IV, Part II, the Prince says, “Before God, I am exceeding weary” [2.2.1]; in the Folio the speech begins, “Trust me.” Trust me; Shakespeare wouldn’t have written that, except under duress. Finally, there were the highbrow critics, who were mainly humanists, students of the Classics who thought that the models for practically everything, including drama, were to be found in Greek or Latin literature. The “rules” derived from Classical drama prescribed a unity of action which included a unity of setting (not switching from, say, Rome to Alexandria and back again, as in Antony and Cleopatra); a unity of time, not exceeding twenty-four hours (not a chorus character coming in in the fourth act to tell you that sixteen years have gone by, as in The Winter’s Tale [4.1.5–6]); and, above all, a unity of social class. Kings and other upper-class people belonged in tragedies, and it was a violation of decorum to introduce clowns and fools and the like into tragedy. A contemporary satirist says: A goodly hotch-potch! when vile russetings Are match’d with monarchs, and with mighty kings.28

That gives you the clue to the anxiety: there was felt to be some social

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subversiveness in mixing classes in the same play. The late play of Henry VIII is a very spectacular play, with long parades of nobles in full dress, and a contemporary lord complained that such a play made greatness too familiar.29 Fortunately, the two reigning sovereigns, Elizabeth and James, seem to have been fairly liberal-minded in such matters, and English drama was never straitjacketed in the way that French drama was in Louis XIV’s time. Our knowledge of how other contemporaries reacted to the plays is spotty. We know that Falstaff was a smash hit and that the early comedies were popular, but reactions to the great tragedies are surprisingly uninformative. We know nothing of what audiences made of King Lear. The great tragic roles were mostly taken by the actor Richard Burbage, and when he died a contemporary wrote a eulogy of him that mentioned some of the roles he had acted, including “the grieved Moor” (Othello) and “kind Lear.”30 When a book appeared recently that misquoted this passage as “king Lear,” a reviewer remarked that the change in the one letter, a “g” for a “d,” had wiped out the whole of the contemporary criticism of the play.31 Shakespeare produced an average of two plays a year, a feat which would have left him very little time to astonish the world in any other way. There is no clinching proof of his having written anything before his late twenties or after his mid-forties, so resist the temptation to talk in your essays about the eager hopefulness of youth in The Comedy of Errors or the mellowed wisdom of old age in The Tempest. Drama is not a genre for infant prodigies: I can’t think of a dramatist who made a major reputation as early as, say, Keats or Rimbaud in lyric poetry. One would think that at least he must have known how good he was. Ben Jonson certainly knew how good he was, and he carefully edited and published The Works of Ben Jonson in 1616. He got some ribbing from contemporaries who told him that what a dramatist produced were plays and not works.32 But Shakespeare left it to two friends in his company, Heming and Condell, to gather up his collected plays and publish them in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after his death. Any scholarly study of this operation will tell you what a long, complicated, and frustrating job it was, and that it was a near miracle that the editors finally succeeded in collecting every play now believed to be Shakespeare’s except Pericles, which may be his only in part.33 The Folio was an outstanding piece of bookmaking for its time, ranking with its finest contemporaries, the 1611 Bible and some scholarly editions of the Classics. Our debt to Heming and Condell34 is beyond all words to express.

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Some plays were published during Shakespeare’s lifetime as Quartos (sheets folded in four instead of in two like a folio), which usually sold for sixpence. Quartos, like human beings, are divided into two groups, good and bad; and, as with human beings, the division is sometimes oversimplified. Bad Quartos were usually pirated from an actor’s copy or from the memory of someone associated with the play; good ones were occasionally authorized by the company as a response to a wide demand, when there was no longer much danger of the play’s being swiped by another company. Plays then had fairly short runs and were seldom revived. The first Quarto of Romeo and Juliet is technically a bad Quarto, but it’s a good bad Quarto; the second Quarto is technically a good Quarto, but (I expect you to be following this with bated breath) it’s a bad good Quarto, and the editing process is accordingly complicated. The important point is that Shakespeare himself didn’t publish these Quartos, good or bad, and there’s no evidence that he ever glanced at a proof sheet of any of them. Again, any modern writer would raise all the hell he could if rubbishy plays appeared during his lifetime with his name, or even initials, on the title page, but this did happen to Shakespeare, and we have no record of any response. There’s a very interesting collection of plays once attributed to Shakespeare called The Shakespeare Apocrypha: take a look at some of them, especially one called A Yorkshire Tragedy.35 When the great Civil War broke out between Parliament and Charles I, one of the first things Parliament did (they controlled London) was to close the theatres in 1642, and they were not reopened until after the Restoration in 1660. They weren’t the same theatres: the Restoration theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, were new, and no Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre survived into that period. The practical result was that stage traditions were broken at a most crucial time, and when “Shakespeare” was performed on the Restoration stage, it was often a hatchet job: King Lear with a happy ending where Edgar marries Cordelia,36 The Tempest as a musical comedy with two Ferdinands and two Mirandas,37 and so on. You can see a Molière play performed in Paris today very nearly as it was in his day, because the theatrical traditions in France were not broken, but Shakespeare had to be reconstructed, and that process barely began before about a century ago. Even as late as the 1890s Bernard Shaw was speaking of Sir Henry Irving’s “Shakespeare impostures.”38 In England, during performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it used to be traditional for a sight gag to be used in Peter Quince’s play. Thisbe comes in, finds Pyramus dead with his sword sticking in him, tugs at the sword, can’t budge it, and finally stabs herself with the scab-

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bard. There’s an early seventeenth-century play in which a character says, “he’s stabbed himself with the scabbard, like Thisbe in the play,”39 so this may be a stage tradition that by accident survived from Shakespeare’s day. But there aren’t many such survivals. In Shakespeare’s day you could be reasonably sure of seeing a performance that either was under Shakespeare’s own direction or close to his intentions, and you wouldn’t be afflicted with anything much worse than some silly adlibbing from clowns. But now you’re largely at the mercy of the director. If he’s a serious and responsible person you’re all right; if he’s some idiot who wants to twist The Merchant of Venice into an anti-Nazi melodrama or set The Tempest on the planet Mars, you’re not all right, and neither is the play. The gimmicking of Shakespeare, mixing up the costumes and the like, is by no means always bad. To give two random examples: I’ve seen a Love’s Labour’s Lost in an Edwardian setting, with bicycles and tennis flannels, that was charming, and a modern-dress Troilus and Cressida (Thersites in a gas mask) that was as impressive as any performance of the play I’ve seen.40 Such productions, in fact, are one way of showing how universal Shakespeare’s appeal is. Others I wouldn’t voluntarily recall: they just haunt my dreams. In any case there are a good many performances of Shakespeare now, and there’s no reason for reducing him to a text stuck in a book. In listening to a play on a stage or on film, you have to listen as carefully as you do to music, because, like music, certain themes are brought in, often very casually, to be developed later. Near the beginning of King Lear, Edmund tells us confidentially that he’s going to act a part with a “sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam” [1.2.135–6]. You don’t, in theory, know that Tom o’ Bedlam is going to be very important in the play, but the name registers on your ear. In Romeo and Juliet, we hear Friar Laurence discoursing about herbs, some of which are poisonous [2.3.1–26]. Later, after Tybalt’s death and Romeo’s banishment, Lady Capulet tells Juliet not to worry: she knows someone in Mantua who will see to it that Romeo is poisoned. Finally the poison theme moves into the foreground, fortissimo. Or certain words, like “sleep” and “blood” in Macbeth and “gold” in Timon of Athens, keep resounding in your ear until what they’re pointing to comes into focus. Finally, in reading the play try to reconstruct the performance in your mind: assume you’re directing the play and have to think of what kind of people you would choose to act what parts, and where you would place them on the stage and get them on and off. It’s difficult, certainly, and

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you’ll do some stumbling at first, but eventually the play will take off on its own, and you’ll feel that you’ve released something in your mind that’s alive, but something too that you can always call home. I Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare, we remember, got started as a dramatist by writing a series of plays, four in all, about the period 1422–85, from the death of Henry V to the accession of Henry VII. During this period England gradually lost all the land it had conquered in France (except Calais, which it lost a century later), then suffered a disastrous civil war between Lancastrians and Yorkists, and finally acquired the Tudors after leaving the last Yorkist king Richard III dead on a battlefield. The political moral of all those plays seemed clear: once feuding nobles get out of hand, there’s nothing but misery and chaos until a ruler appears who will do what the Tudors did—centralize authority, turning the nobles into courtiers dependent on the sovereign. Romeo and Juliet is a miniature version of what happens when feuding nobles get out of hand. The opening stage direction tells us that servants are on the street armed with swords and bucklers (small shields). Even if you came in late and missed the prologue, you’d know from seeing those servants that all was not well in Verona. Because that means there’s going to be a fight: if you let servants swank around like that, fully armed, they’re bound to get into fights. So in view of Tudor policy and Queen Elizabeth’s personal dislike of duels and brawling, this play would have no trouble with the censor, because it shows the tragic results of the kind of thing that the authorities thoroughly disapproved of anyway. The first scene shows Shakespeare in his usual easy command of the situation, starting off with a gabble of dialogue that doesn’t contribute much to the plot, but gets over the latecomer problem and quiets the audience very quickly because the jokes are bawdy jokes, the kind the audience most wants to hear. The servants have broadswords: they don’t have rapiers and they can’t fence; such things are for the gentry. They go in for what used to be called haymakers:41 “remember thy swashing blow,” as one of them says [1.1.62–3].42 The macho jokes, “draw thy tool” [1.1.31] and the like, are the right way to introduce the theme that dominates this play: the theme of love bound up with, and part of, violent death. Weapons and fighting suggest sex as well as death, and are still doing so later in the play, when the imagery shifts to gunpowder.

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Then various characters enter, not at haphazard but in an order that dramatizes the social set-up of the play. The servants are on stage first, then Benvolio and Tybalt, then old Montague and old Capulet, and finally the Prince, who comes in to form the keystone of the arch. This sequence points to a symmetrical arrangement of characters corresponding to the two feuding houses. Later on we meet Mercutio, who “consorts,” as Tybalt says, with the Montagues,43 and Paris, who wants to become a Capulet by marrying Juliet. Both are relatives of the Prince. Then come the two leads, first Romeo and then Juliet, and then the two go-betweens, the Nurse and Friar Laurence. The scene turns farcical when old Montague and old Capulet dash for their swords and rush out into the street to prove to themselves that they’re just as good men as they ever were, while their wives, who know better, keep pulling at them and trying to keep them out of trouble. But something much more serious is also happening. By entering the brawl, they’ve sanctioned it, because they’re the heads of the two houses, and so they’re directly responsible for everything that follows. The younger people seem to care very little about the feud: the only one keen on it is Tybalt, and Tybalt, we may notice, is not a Capulet by blood at all; he’s expressly said to be a cousin of Lady Capulet [3.1.146]. In the next scene, even old Capulet seems quite relieved to be bound over to keep the peace. But once the alarm is given and the reflexes respond, the brawl is on and the tragedy set in motion. After that, even Capulet’s very sensible behaviour in restraining Tybalt from attacking Romeo in his own house comes too late. Of course we are never told what the original feud was about. The Prince begins: Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, Profaners of this neighbor-stained steel— Will they not hear? (1.1.81–3)

The timing is accurate to the last syllable: two and a half lines before they’ll stop whacking each other and listen. If it took more, the Prince would seem impotent, stuck with a situation that’s beyond his power to control; if it took less, we wouldn’t have the feeling of what it would be like to live in a town where that sort of thing could happen at any time. We notice that the crowd is saying what Mercutio is to say so tragically later on: “A plague a both your houses!” [3.1.99–100, 106]. They’ve had

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it with feuds, and are on the Prince’s side, even though they can express their loyalty only by increasing the brawling. After the Prince leaves, the Montagues pick up the pieces, and the conversation seems to get a bit aimless. But we can’t skip anything in Shakespeare. Lady Montague says: Oh, where is Romeo? Saw you him today? Right glad I am he was not at this fray. (1.1.116–17)

It would overload the play to build up the Montagues as much as the Capulets are built up, and these are almost the only lines she gets to speak— certainly the only ones with any punch. But slight as they are they tell us that the sun rises and sets on her Romeo, and so when at the end of the play we’re told that she died, offstage, at the news of Romeo’s exile, that detail seems less arbitrary and dragged-in than it would otherwise. The next episode is Paris’s suit to the Capulets for Juliet’s hand. In the third scene Lady Capulet proposes a family conference to discuss the prospective marriage, and dismisses the Nurse [1.3.7–8]. But, being a conscientious as well as a slightly prissy young woman, she remembers that noble families don’t do that to old and trusted servants—or perhaps she realizes that the Nurse is closer to Juliet than she is—so she calls her back again [1.3.8–9]. She soon regrets her concession, because the Nurse goes into action at once with a long reminiscing speech. This is the kind of speech that looks at first sight like a digression, introduced for comic relief and to give us an insight into the Nurse’s character and idiom. But Shakespeare doesn’t do things for second-rate reasons: he almost never drags in a scene, and I say “almost” because I can think of only one clear example, the scene about the teaching of Latin to the boy William in his one potboiler, The Merry Wives of Windsor [4.1]. Again, he’s not like Dickens or anyone else for whom characterization might be an end in itself. His conventions are different: the action of the play is what is always primary with him, and anything that seems to be a detour in the action is probably advancing that action on another level. Of course the speech does give us an insight into the Nurse’s character, as well as into that of a man who has died years before the play begins, the Nurse’s husband. We know him only from this: “Yea,” quoth he, “dost thou fall upon thy face? Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit; Wilt thou not, Jule?” (1.3.41–3)

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and that is all we ever want to know about him. As usual with raconteurs of the Nurse’s type, we get the punch line four times. The real reason for the speech, I think, is to sketch in a background for Juliet, whom we see but have barely heard speak yet. We suddenly get a vision of what Juliet’s childhood must have been like, wandering around a big house where her father is “Sir” and her mother is “Madam,” where to leave she must get special permission, not ordinarily granted except for visits to a priest for confession, and where she is waiting for the day when Capulet will say to his wife, in effect: “I’m sure we’ve got a daughter around this place somewhere: isn’t it time we got rid of her?” Then she would marry and settle into the same mould as her mother, who was married at the same age, about fourteen. Meanwhile, there is hardly anybody for the child to talk to except the Nurse and the Nurse’s husband with his inexhaustible joke. Of course there would be a great deal more to be said about her childhood. But there was also, one gathers, a good many deaths (“The earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she,” Capulet says to Paris [1.2.14],44 and the Nurse has lost a daughter as well as a husband), and there would be enough loneliness to throw Juliet on her own resources and develop a good deal of self-reliance. So when, at her crisis in the play, she turns from a frightened child into a woman with more genuine courage and resolution than Lady Macbeth ever had, the change seems less prodigious if we were listening closely to all the overtones in the Nurse’s harangue. After the Nurse finally stops, there’s a speech from Lady Capulet, which settles into couplets—occasionally a sign in Shakespeare that something is a bit out of key. To the Nurse, marriage means precisely one thing, and she is never tired of telling us what it is. Lady Capulet would like to be a real mother, and say things more appropriate to a well-born girl awaiting courtship and marriage. But she really has nothing to say, communicates nothing except that she approves of the match, and finally breaks down into, “Speak briefly, can you like of Paris’s love?” [1.3.96]. Juliet can only mumble something to the general effect that “It must be all right if you say so: you’re looking after these things.” If she hadn’t seen Romeo, Juliet would probably have been talking in the same way to her daughter fifteen years or so later. So Capulet gets a chance to throw a party, which he loves doing, and does his best to keep things properly stirred up: Welcome, gentlemen! Ladies that have their toes

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Unplagued with corns will walk a bout with you. Ah ha, my mistresses! which of you all Will now deny to dance? She that makes dainty, She I’ll swear hath corns. Am I come near ye now?45 (1.5.16–20)

Well, that gives us the quality of Capulet’s humour: it’s corny. Meanwhile, a group of Montagues have crashed the party, disguising themselves in masks, as was customary: Romeo sees Juliet, makes his way to her after narrowly escaping death from Tybalt, and the two of them enter into a dialogue that’s an exquisitely turned extended (eighteen-line) sonnet [1.5.93–110]. That’s not “realistic,” of course: in whatever real life may be, lovers don’t start cooing in sonnet form. What has happened belongs to reality, not to realism; or rather, the God of Love, as I’ll explain in a moment, has swooped down on two perhaps rather commonplace adolescents and blasted them into another dimension of reality altogether. So Capulet’s speech and the Romeo–Juliet sonnet, two verbal experiences as different as though they were on different planets, are actually going on in the same room and being acted on the same stage. This is the kind of thing we can get only from Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet is a love story, but in Shakespeare’s day love included many complex rituals. Early in the Middle Ages a cult had developed called Courtly Love, which focused on a curious etiquette that became a kind of parody of Christian experience.46 Someone might be going about his business, congratulating himself on not being caught in the trap of a love affair, when suddenly the God of Love, Eros or Cupid, angry at being left out of things, forces him to fall in love with a woman. The falling in love is involuntary and instantaneous, no more “romantic,” in the usual sense, than getting shot with a bullet. It’s never gradual: “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” says Marlowe, in a line that Shakespeare quotes in As You Like It.47 From that time on, the lover is a slave of the God of Love, whose will is embodied in his mistress, and he is bound to do whatever she wants. This cult of love was not originally linked to marriage. Marriage was a relationship in which the man had all the effective authority, even if his wife was (as she usually was) his social equal. The conventional role of the Courtly Love mistress was to be proud, disdainful, and “cruel,” repelling all advances from her lover. The frustration this caused drove the lover into poetry, and the theme of the poetry was the cruelty of the mistress and the despair and supplications of the lover. It’s good

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psychology that a creative impulse to write poetry can arise from sexual frustration, and Elizabethan poets almost invariably were or pretended to be submerged in unhappy love, and writing for that reason. Back in the thirteenth century, we have Dante, whose life was totally changed by seeing Beatrice at her father’s home when he was nine years old. He devoted the rest of his life to her, even though he survived her by many years. But he had no further relations with her, certainly no sexual relations, and his devotion to her had nothing to do with his marrying someone else and fathering four children. His successor in poetry was Petrarch, whose mistress, also out of reach, was Laura, and it was Petrarch who popularized the convention in sixteenth-century England. In the 1590s, when the vogue was at its height, enormous piles of sonnets more or less imitating Petrarch were being written. By Shakespeare’s time the convention had become more middle-class, was much more frequently linked to eventual marriage, and the more overtly sexual aspects of such relationships were more fully explored. So “love” in Romeo and Juliet covers three different forms of a convention. First, the orthodox Petrarchan convention in Romeo’s professed love for Rosaline at the beginning of the play. Second, the less sublimated love for which the only honourable resolution was marriage, represented by the main theme of the play. Third, the more cynical and ribald perspective that we get in Mercutio’s comments, and perhaps those of the Nurse as well. On the principle that life imitates art, Romeo has thrown himself, before the play begins, into a love affair with someone called Rosaline, whom we never see (except that she was at Capulet’s party, where she must have wondered painfully what had happened to Romeo), and who tried to live up to the proud and disdainful role that the convention required. So Romeo made the conventional responses: he went around with his clothes untidy, hardly heard what was said to him, wrote poetry, talked endlessly about the cruelty of his mistress, wept, and kept “adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs” [1.1.133]. In short, he was afflicted with love melancholy, and we remember that melancholy in Shakespeare’s time was a physical as well as an emotional disturbance. More simply, he was something of a mooning bore, his love affair a kind of pedantry, like Tybalt’s fighting by the book of arithmetic [3.1.101–2]. Juliet, to her disgust, is compelled to adopt some of the same coy and aloof attitude in her edgy dialogue with Paris in Friar Laurence’s cell [4.1.18–43]. It’s obvious that there was no sexual relationship between Romeo

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and Rosaline, a fact that would have disappointed Mercutio, who takes it for granted that Romeo has spent the night of what we now call the “balcony scene” [2.2] in Rosaline’s arms. Romeo enters the play practically unconscious that he has walked in on the aftermath of a dangerous brawl, and then starts explaining to Benvolio how firm and unyielding his attachment to Rosaline is, even though Rosaline, playing along as best she could, has told him that she has sworn to “live chaste” [1.1.217]. The dialogue between Romeo and Benvolio seems to us a curiously long one, for the amount said in it, but it’s essential to round out the situation Romeo has put himself in. I said that the Courtly Love convention used an elaborate and detailed parody, or counterpart, of the language of religion. The mistress was a “saint”; the “god” supplicated with so many prayers and tears was Eros or Cupid, the God of Love; “atheists” were people who didn’t believe in the convention; and “heretics” were those who didn’t keep to the rules. Benvolio suggests that Romeo might get Rosaline into better perspective if he’d compare her with a few other young women, and Romeo answers: When the devout religion of mine eye Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires;48 And these, who, often drowned, could never die, Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars! (1.2.88–91)

This is close to another requirement of the convention, that the lover had to compare his mistress to the greatest heroines of history and literature (heroines from the point of view of love, that is), always to their disadvantage. These included Helen of Troy, Dido in the Aeneid, Cleopatra, heroines of Classical stories like Hero and Thisbe, and, of course, Laura. Mercutio, who knows all about the convention even though he assumes that Romeo has taken a different approach to it, says: Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura, to his lady, was a kitchen wench . . . Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a grey eye or so, but not to the purpose. (2.4.38– 43)

However, Romeo takes Benvolio’s advice, goes to the Capulet party, sees Juliet, and the “real thing” hits him. Of course, the “real thing” is

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as much a convention, at least within the framework of the play, as its predecessor, but its effects on both Romeo and Juliet are very different. Before we examine those effects, though, we have to notice another aspect of the convention that’s woven into the play. In the love literature of the time there were very passionate and mutually consuming friendships between men: they also were usually sublimated, and distinguished from “homosexual” attachments in the narrow sense. In fact, the convention often tended to put male friendship even higher than love between men and women, simply because of this disinterested or nonsexual quality in it. Shakespeare himself, in his sonnets, represents himself as loving a beautiful young man even to the point of allowing the latter to steal his mistress, which in this context indicates that neither man has a sexual interest except in women. In this age we’d think of “sexual” much more broadly, but the elementary distinctions are the ones that apply here. The predominance of male friendship over love gets a bit grotesque at the end of a very early comedy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a puzzling enough play if we try to take it seriously. In this play the “two gentlemen” are named Valentine and Proteus, which means that one is a true lover and the other a fickle one. Valentine loves Silvia, but is blocked by the usual parental opposition; Proteus loves Julia, but discards her as soon as he sees Silvia. He then deliberately betrays Valentine in order to knock him out as a rival for Silvia; Julia disguises herself as a male page and sets out in pursuit of Proteus. At the end of the play Proteus finds Silvia alone in a wood, tries to rape her, and is baffled when Valentine bursts out of the bushes and says, “Ruffian, let go that rude uncivil touch . . . !” [5.4.60]. All very correct melodrama, and we wait for Proteus to get the proper reward of his treachery to Valentine. What happens next is so incredible that I can only resort to paraphrase. Proteus says in effect: “I know it was a dirty trick to try to rape your mistress; it just seemed too good a chance to miss.” And Valentine responds, in effect: “Oh, that’s all right, old man, and of course if you really want Silvia so much she’s yours.” Fortunately, the disguised Julia, who’s been following closely behind, puts an end to this nonsense by fainting. They pick her up and see who she is; Proteus now finds her more attractive than he did before, and everything ends happily. So far as all this has a point, the point seems to be that love for women is to be subordinated in a crisis to male friendship. Getting back to our present Verona gentlemen, Tybalt tries to force Romeo into a duel, which Romeo tries to avoid because he’s now more

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of a Capulet than Tybalt is. Mercutio is disgusted with Romeo’s submissiveness and takes Tybalt on for himself. In the duel Romeo makes a bungling effort at interference, and Mercutio gets a fatal wound. When he is dying, he asks Romeo why he interfered, and Romeo can give only the miserably helpless answer, “I thought all for the best” [3.1.104]. Mercutio says only: Help me into some house, Benvolio, Or I shall faint. (3.1.105–6)

The name “Benvolio,” at the climax of this terrible scene, means that he has turned his back contemptuously on Romeo. At that point Juliet drops out of Romeo’s mind, for the first time since he saw her, and all he can think of now is vengeance on Tybalt for his friend’s death. Once again, male friendship overrides love of women, but this is tragedy: by killing Tybalt and avenging Mercutio, Romeo becomes irrevocably a tragic figure. Someone once raised the question of whether Shakespeare’s audience would have assumed that Romeo was damned for committing suicide, suicide being regarded by the church as one of the most heinous of sins.49 The simplest answer is that the question is tedious, and Shakespeare avoids tedium. But it could be said also that the audience would understand that Romeo, as a lover-hero, really belongs to another religion, the religion of love, which doesn’t collide with Christianity or prevent him from confessing to Friar Laurence, but nonetheless has different standards of what’s good and bad. It also has its own saints and martyrs, those who lived and died for love, and Romeo and Juliet certainly belong in that calendar. Chaucer, two hundred years earlier, had written The Legend of Good Women, in which the women chosen, including Helen and Cleopatra and Dido (also Thisbe, whom Mercutio mentions and whom we’ll meet again), are “good women” from Eros’s point of view: the great erotic saints.50 When Romeo suddenly feels uneasy just before going into the Capulet party, he says: But he that hath the steerage of my course Direct my sail! (1.4.112–13)51

We are not sure whether he is referring to the God of Love or the Christian God here, and neither, perhaps, is he. But later in the play, when he

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gets the false feeling of euphoria that so often precedes a tragic catastrophe, and says, “My bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne,” he clearly means Eros [5.1.3]. Coming back to the effects of love on the two main characters, the most dramatic change is in their command of language. Before she sees Romeo we hear Juliet making proper-young-lady noises like, “It is an honour that I dream not of” [1.3.66] (“it” being her marriage to Paris). After she sees Romeo, she’s talking like this: Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, Towards Phoebus’ lodging! Such a wagoner As Phaëton would whip you to the west And bring in cloudy night immediately. (3.2.1–4)

It appears that Juliet, for all her tender years and sheltered life, has had a considerably better education than simply a technical training to be a wife and mother. The point is that it would never have occurred to her to make use of her education in her speech in the way she does here without the stimulus of her love. As for Romeo, when we first meet him he’s at the stage where he hardly knows what he’s saying until he hears himself saying it. We don’t hear any of the poetry he wrote about Rosaline (unless the “religion of mine eye” lyric I quoted from a moment ago belongs to it), and something tells us that we could do without most of it. But after he meets Juliet he turns out, to Mercutio’s astonishment and delight, to be full of wit and repartee. “Now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature,” Mercutio says [2.4.90–1], and even Mercutio knows nothing of the miraculous duets with Juliet in the great “balcony scene” and its successor. When he visits Friar Laurence, the Friar sees him approaching and feels rather apprehensive, thinking, “Oh no, not Rosaline again,” and is considerably startled to hear Romeo saying, in effect, “Who’s Rosaline?” More important, especially after Juliet also visits him, he realizes that two young people he has previously thought of as rather nice children have suddenly turned into adults, and are speaking with adult authority. He is bound to respect this, and besides, he sees an excellent chance of ending the feud by marrying them and presenting their furious parents with a fait accompli. After disaster strikes with the death of Tybalt and the Prince’s edict of banishment, we get very long speeches from both the lovers and from

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Friar Laurence. The rationale of the Friar’s speech is simple enough: Romeo thinks of suicide, and the Friar immediately delivers an involved summary of his situation, trying to show that he could be a lot worse off. The speech is organized on lines of formal rhetoric, and is built up in a series of triads. The point of the length of the speech is its irony: the Friar is steadily adding to Romeo’s despair while he is giving reasons why he should cool it. With Romeo and Juliet, the reason for the loosening of rhetorical control is subtler. Take Juliet: Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but “I,” And that bare vowel “I” shall poison more Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice. I am not I, if there be such an “I” Or those eyes’ shot that makes the answer “I.” (3.2.45–9)52

It all turns on puns, of course, on “I,” “Ay” (meaning yes, and often spelled “I” at the time), and “eye.” But she’s not “playing” with words: she’s shredding them to bits in an agony of frustration and despair. The powerful explosion of words has nowhere to go, and simply disintegrates. Some critics will tell you that this is Shakespeare being immature and uncertain of his verbal powers, because, after looking up the probable dates, they find it’s an “early play.” Don’t believe them. It is true that the earlier plays depend on formal rhetorical figures much more than the later ones: it doesn’t follow that the use of such figures is immature. There are other examples of “playing on words” that indicate terrible distress of mind: John of Gaunt’s death speeches in Richard II, for example.53 It is through the language, and the imagery the language uses, that we understand how the Liebestod of Romeo and Juliet, their great love and their tragic death, are bound up together as two aspects of the same thing. I spoke of the servants’ jokes in the opening scene associating sexuality with weapons, love, and death in the context of parody. Soon after Romeo comes in, we hear him talking like this: Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love. Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O anything, of nothing first create!54 (1.1.175–7)

The figure he is using is the oxymoron or paradoxical union of opposites:

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obviously the right kind of figure for this play, though Romeo is still in his Rosaline trance and is not being very cogent. From there we go on to Friar Laurence’s wonderfully concentrated image of fire and powder Which, as they kiss, consume, (2.6.10–11)

with its half-concealed pun on “consummation,” and to Juliet’s Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say it lightens, ( 2.2.119–20)

suggesting that their first glimpse of one another determined their deaths as well as their love. The love–death identity of contrasts expands into the imagery of day and night. The great love scenes begin with Juliet hanging upon the cheek of night and end with the macabre horrors of the Capulet tomb, where we reluctantly can’t believe Romeo when he says: For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes This vault a feasting presence full of light. (5.3.85–6)

The character who makes the most impressive entrances in the play is a character we never see, the sun. The sun is greeted by Friar Laurence as the sober light that does away with the drunken darkness, but the Friar is speaking out of his own temperament, and there are many other aspects of the light and dark contrast. In the dialogue of Romeo and Juliet, the bird of darkness, the nightingale, symbolizes the desire of the lovers to remain with each other, and the bird of dawn, the lark, the need to preserve their safety. When the sun rises, “The day is hot, the Capulets abroad” [3.1.2],55 and the energy of youth and love wears itself out in scrambling over the blockades of reality. The light and dark imagery comes into powerful focus with Mercutio’s speech on Queen Mab. Queen Mab, Mercutio tells us, is the instigator of dreams, and Mercutio takes what we would call a very Freudian approach to dreams: they are primarily wish-fulfilment fantasies.56 And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love. (1.4.70–1)

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But such dreams are an inseparable mixture of illusion and a reality profounder than the ordinary realities of the day. When we wake we carry into the daylight world, without realizing it, the feelings engendered by the dream, the irrational and absurd conviction that the world as we want it to be has its own reality, and perhaps is what could be there instead. Both the lovers carry on an inner debate in which one voice tells them that they are embarking on a dangerous illusion, and another says that they must embark on it anyway whatever the dangers, because by doing so they are martyrs, or witnesses, to an order of things that matters more than the sunlit reality. Romeo says: O blessèd, blessèd night! I am afeard, Being in night, all this is but a dream, Too flattering-sweet to be substantial. (2.2.139–41)

Perhaps so, but so much the worse for the substantial, as far as Romeo’s actions are concerned. Who or what is responsible for a tragedy that kills half a dozen people, at least four of them young and very attractive people? The feud, of course, but in this play there doesn’t seem to be the clearly marked villain that we find in so many tragedies. We can point to Iago in Othello and say that if it hadn’t been for that awful man there’d have been no tragedy at all. But the harried and conscientious Prince, the kindly and pious Friar Laurence, the quite likeable old buffer Capulet: these are a long way from being villainous. Tybalt comes closest, but Tybalt is a villain only by virtue of his position in the plot. According to his own code—admittedly a code open to criticism—he is a man of honour, and there is no reason to suppose him capable of the kind of malice or treachery that we find in Iago or in Edmund in King Lear. He may not even be inherently more quarrelsome or spoiling for a fight than Mercutio. Juliet seems to like him, if not as devoted to his memory as her parents think. Setting Tybalt aside, there is still some mystery about the fact that so bloody a mess comes out of the actions of what seem to be, taken one by one, a fairly decent lot of human beings. The Nurse, it is true, is called a “most wicked fiend” by Juliet [3.5.235], because she proposes that Juliet conceal her marriage to Romeo and live in bigamy with Paris. But Juliet is overwrought. The Nurse is not a wicked fiend, and wants to be genuinely helpful. But she has a very limited imagination, and she doesn’t belong to a social class that can af-

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ford to live by codes of honour. The upper class made their names for the lower classes—villain, knave, varlet, boor—into terms of contempt because the people they described had to wriggle through life as best they could: their first and almost their only rule was survival. The deadliest insult one gentleman could give another then was to call him a liar, not because the one being insulted had a passion for truth, but because it was being suggested that he couldn’t afford to tell the truth. Besides, Shakespeare has been unobtrusively building up the Nurse’s attitude. On her first embassy to Romeo [2.4] she is quite roughly teased by Mercutio, and while she is a figure of fun and the audience goes along with the fun, still she is genuinely offended. She is not a bawd or a whore, and she doesn’t see why she should be called one. Romeo, courteous as ever, tries to explain that Mercutio is a compulsive talker, and that what he says is not to be taken seriously; but it was said to her, seriously or not, and when she returns to Juliet and takes so long to come to the point in delivering her message, the delay has something in it of teasing Juliet to get even. Not very logical, but who said the Nurse was logical? Similarly when she laments the death of Tybalt and Juliet assumes that she’s talking about Romeo [3.2.37–60], where the teasing seems more malicious and less unconscious. The Nurse has discovered in her go-between role that she really doesn’t much like these Montague boys or their friends: as long as things are going well she’ll support Romeo, but in a crisis she’ll remember she’s a Capulet and fight on that side. The question of the source of the tragic action is bound up with another question: why is the story of the tragic love and death of Romeo and Juliet one of the world’s best-loved stories? Mainly, we think, because of Shakespeare’s word magic. But, while it was always a popular play, what the stage presented as Romeo and Juliet, down to about 1850, was mostly a series of travesties of what Shakespeare wrote. There’s something about the story itself that can take any amount of mistreatment from stupid producing and bad casting. I’ve seen a performance with a middle-aged and corseted Juliet who could have thrown Romeo over her shoulder and walked to Mantua with him, and yet the audience was in tears at the end.57 The original writer is not the writer who thinks up a new story—there aren’t any new stories, really—but the writer who tells one of the world’s great stories in a new way. To understand why Romeo and Juliet is one of those stories we have to distinguish the specific story of the feuding Montague–Capulet families from an archetypal story of youth, love, and death that is probably older than written literature itself.

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The specific story of the Verona feud has been traced back to a misunderstood allusion in Dante’s Purgatorio, and it went through a series of retellings until we come to Shakespeare’s main source, a narrative poem, Romeus and Juliet, by one Arthur Brooke, which supplied him not only with the main theme, but with a Mercutio, a counterpart of Friar Laurence, and a garrulous nurse of Juliet.58 Brooke begins with a preface in which he tells us that his story has two morals: first, not to get married without parental consent, and second, not to be Catholic and confess to priests.59 That takes care of the sort of reader who reads only to see his own prejudices confirmed on a printed page. Then he settles down to tell his story, in which he shows a good deal of sympathy for both the Friar and the lovers. He is very far from being a major poet, but he had enough respect for his story to attract and hold the attention of Shakespeare, who seems, so far as we can tell, to have used almost no other source. Brooke also says he saw a play on the same subject, but no trace of such a play remains, unless those scholars in the guesswork squad are right who see signs of an earlier play being revised in the first Quarto.60 But the great story of the destruction of two young lovers by a combination of fate and family hostility is older and wider than that. In Shakespeare’s time, Chikamatsu, the Japanese writer of Bunraku (puppet plays), was telling similar stories on the other side of the world,61 and thousands of years earlier the same story was echoing and reechoing through ancient myths. Elizabethan poets used, as a kind of literary Bible, Ovid’s long (fifteen books) poem called Metamorphoses, which told dozens of the most famous stories of Classical myth and legend: the stories of Philomela turned into a nightingale, of Narcissus, of Philemon and Baucis turned into trees, of Daphne and Syrinx. Ovid lived around the time of Christ, but of course the stories he tells are far older. He has many stories of tragic death, but none was more loved or more frequently retold in Shakespeare’s day than the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the two lovers separated by the walls of hostile families, meeting in a wood, and dying by accident and suicide. In this play we often hear about a kind of fatality at work in the action, usually linked with the stars. As early as the Prologue we hear about “star-crossed lovers” [l. 6], and Romeo speaks, not of the feud, but of “some consequence still hanging in the stars” when he feels a portent of disaster [1.4.107].62 Astrology, as I’ve said, was taken quite seriously then, but here it seems only part of a network of unlucky timing that’s working against the lovers. Romeo gets to see Juliet because of the sheer

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chance that the Capulet servant sent out to deliver the invitations to the party can’t read, and comes to him for help. There’s the letter from Friar Laurence in Verona to Friar John in Mantua, which by accident doesn’t get to him, and another hitch in timing destroys Friar Laurence’s elaborate plan that starts with Juliet’s sleeping potion. If we feel that Friar Laurence is being meddlesome in interfering in the action as he does, that’s partly because he’s in a tragedy and his schemes are bound to fail. In Much Ado about Nothing there’s also a friar with a very similar scheme for the heroine of that play, but his scheme is successful because the play he’s in is a comedy. But when we have a quite reasonable explanation for the tragedy, the feud between the families, why do we need to bring in the stars and such? The Prologue, even before the play starts, suggests that the feud demands lives to feed on, and sooner or later will get them: And the continuance of their parents’ rage, Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove. [Prologue, 10–11]

The answer, or part of the answer, begins with the fact that we shouldn’t assume that tragedy is something needing an explanation. Tragedy represents something bigger in the total scheme of things than all possible explanations combined. All we can say—and it’s a good deal—is that there’d have been no tragedy without the feud. This, I think, is the clue to one of those puzzling episodes in Shakespeare that we may not understand at first hearing or reading. At the very end of the play, Montague proposes to erect a gold statue of Juliet at his own expense, and Capulet promises to do the same for Romeo [5.3.298–304]. Big deal: nothing like a couple of gold statues to bring two dead lovers back to life. But by that time Montague and Capulet are two miserable, defeated old men who have lost everything that meant anything in their lives, and they simply cannot look their own responsibility for what they have done straight in the face. There’s a parallel with Othello’s last speech, which ends with his suicide, when he recalls occasions in the past when he has served the Venetian state well [5.2.338–56]. T.S. Eliot says that Othello in this speech is “cheering himself up,” turning a moral issue into an aesthetic one.63 I’d put it differently: I’d say it was a reflex of blinking and turning away from the intolerably blazing light of judgment. And so with Montague and Capulet, when they propose to set up these statues as a way of persuading themselves that

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they’re still alive, and still capable of taking some kind of positive action. The gesture is futile and pitiful, but very, very human. So far as there’s any cheering up in the picture, it affects the audience rather than the characters. Tragedy always has an ironic side, and that means that the audience usually knows more about what’s happening or going to happen than the characters do. But tragedy also has a heroic side, and again the audience usually sees that more clearly than the characters. Juliet’s parents don’t really know who Juliet is: we’re the ones who have a rather better idea. Notice Capulet’s phrase, “Poor sacrifices of our enmity!” [5.3.304]. Romeo and Juliet are sacrificial victims, and the ancient rule about sacrifice was that the victim had to be perfect and without blemish. The core of reality in this was the sense that nothing perfect without blemish can stay that way in this world, and should be offered up to another world before it deteriorates. That principle belongs to a still larger one: nothing that breaks through the barriers of ordinary experience can remain in the world of ordinary experience. One of the first things Romeo says of Juliet is, “Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!” [1.5.47]. But more than beauty is involved: their kind of passion would soon burn up the world of heavy fathers and snarling Tybalts and gabby Nurses if it stayed there. Our perception of this helps us to accept the play as a whole, instead of feeling only that a great love went wrong. It didn’t go wrong: it went only where it could, out. It always was, as we say, out of this world. That’s why the tragedy is not exhausted by pointing to its obvious cause in the feud. We need suggestions of greater mysteries in things: we need the yoke of inauspicious stars and the vision of Queen Mab and her midget team riding across the earth like the apocalyptic horsemen. These things don’t explain anything, but they help to light up the heroic vision in tragedy, which we see so briefly before it goes. It takes the greatest rhetoric of the greatest poets to bring us a vision of the tragic heroic, and such rhetoric doesn’t make us miserable but exhilarated, not crushed but enlarged in spirit. Romeo and Juliet has more wit and sparkle than any other tragedy I know: so much that we may instinctively think of it as a kind of perverted comedy. But, of course, tragedy is not perverse: it has its own rightness. It might be described, though, as a kind of comedy turned inside out. A typical comic theme goes like this: boy meets girl; boy’s father doesn’t think the girl good enough; girl’s father prefers someone with more money; various complications ensue; eventually boy gets girl.

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There’s a good deal in the Romeo and Juliet story to remind us of such comedy themes. Look at the way the Chorus begins act 2: Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie And young affection gapes to be his heir. [Prologue, 1–2]

If we tried to turn the play we have inside out, back into comedy, what would it be like? We’d have a world dominated by dream fairies, including a queen, and by the moon instead of the sun; a world where the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe has turned into farce; a world where feuding and brawling noblemen run around in the dark, unable to see each other. In short, we’d have a play very like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the one we’re going to discuss next. II A Midsummer Night’s Dream Elizabethan literature began as a provincial development of a Continentcentred literature, and it’s full of imitations and translations from French, Italian, and Latin. But the dramatists practically had to rediscover drama, as soon as, early in Elizabeth’s reign, theatres with regular performances of plays on a thrust stage began to evolve out of temporary constructions in dining halls and courtyards. There was some influence from Italian theatre, and some of the devices in Twelfth Night reminded one spectator, who kept a diary, of Italian sources.64 There was also the influence of the half-improvised commedia dell’arte, which I’ll speak of later. Behind these Italian influences were the Classical plays from which the Italian ones partly derived. For tragedy there were not many precedents, apart from the Latin plays of Seneca, whose tragedies may not have been actually intended for the stage. Seneca is a powerful influence behind Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and there are many traces of him elsewhere. In comedy, though, there were about two dozen Latin plays available, six by Terence, the rest by Plautus. These had been adapted from the Greek writers of what we call New Comedy, to distinguish it from the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, which was full of personal attacks and allusions to actual people and events. The best known of these Greek New Comedy writers was Menander, whose work, except for one complete play recently discovered, has come down to us only in fragments. Menander was a sententious, aphoristic writer, and one of his aphorisms

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(“evil communications corrupt good manners”) was quoted by Paul in the New Testament.65 Terence carried on this sententious style, and we find some famous proverbs in him, such as “I am a man, and nothing human is alien to me.”66 When we hear a line like “The course of true love never did run smooth” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream [1.1.134], familiar to many people who don’t know the play, we can see that the same tradition is still going strong. And later on, when we hear Bottom mangling references to Paul’s epistles [4.1.211–14],67 we may feel that we’re going around in a circle. New Comedy, in Plautus and Terence, usually sets up a situation that’s the opposite of the one that the audience would recognize as the “right” one. Let’s say a young man loves a young woman, and vice versa, but their love is blocked by parents who want suitors or brides with more money. That’s the first part. The second part consists of the complications that follow, and in a third and last part the opening situation is turned inside out, usually through some gimmick in the plot, such as the discovery that the heroine was kidnapped in infancy by pirates, or that she was exposed on a hillside and rescued by a shepherd, but that her social origin is quite respectable enough for her to marry the hero. The typical characters in such a story are the young man (adulescens), a heavy father (sometimes called senex iratus, because he often goes into terrible rages when he’s thwarted), and a “tricky slave” (dolosus servus), who helps out the young man with some clever scheme. If you look at the plays of Molière, you’ll see these characters over and over again, and the tricky servant is still there in the Figaro operas of Rossini and Mozart68—and in Wodehouse’s Jeeves.69 Often the roles of young man and young woman are doubled: in a play of Plautus, adapted by Shakespeare in The Comedy of Errors, the young men are twin brothers, and Shakespeare adds a pair of twin servants. In Shakespeare’s comedies we often get two heroines as well: we have Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, Hero and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Olivia and Viola in Twelfth Night, Julia and Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Helena and Hermia in this play. It’s a natural inference that there were two boys in Shakespeare’s company who were particularly good at female roles. If so, one seems to have been noticeably taller than the other. In As You Like It we’re not sure which was the taller one—the indications are contradictory—but here they’re an almost comic-strip contrast, Helena being long and drizzly and Hermia short and spitty.

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Shakespeare’s comedies are far more complex than the Roman ones, but the standard New Comedy structure usually forms part of their actions. To use Puck’s line, the Jacks generally get their Jills in the end (or the Jills get their Jacks, which in fact happens more often). But he makes certain modifications in the standard plot, and makes them fairly consistently. He doesn’t seem to like plots that turn on tricky-servant schemes. He does have smart or cheeky servants often enough, like Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, and they make the complacent soliloquies that are common in the role, but they seldom affect the action. Puck and Ariel come nearest, and we notice that neither is a human being and neither acts on his own. Then again, Shakespeare generally plays down the outwitting and baffling of age by youth: the kind of action suggested by the title of a play of Middleton’s, A Trick to Catch the Old One, is rare in Shakespeare. The most prominent example is the ganging up on Shylock in The Merchant of Venice that lets his daughter Jessica marry Lorenzo. Even that leaves a rather sour taste in our mouths, and the sour taste is part of the play, not just part of our different feelings about stage Jews. In the late romances, especially Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, the main comic resolution concerns older people, who are united or reconciled after a long separation. Even in this play, while we start out with a standard New Comedy situation in which lovers are forbidden to marry but succeed in doing so all the same, it’s the older people, Theseus and Hippolyta, who are at the centre of the action, and we could add to this the reconciling of Oberon and Titania. In the Roman plays there’s a general uniformity of social rank: the characters are usually ordinary middle-class people with their servants. The settings are also uniform and consistent: they’re not “realistic,” but the action is normally urban, taking place on the street in front of the houses of the main characters, and there certainly isn’t much of mystery, romance, fairies, magic, or mythology (except for farcical treatments of it like Plautus’s Amphitryon). I’ve spoken earlier of the highbrows in Shakespeare’s time who thought that Classical precedents were models to be imitated, and that you weren’t writing according to the proper rules if you introduced kings or princes or dukes into comedies, as Shakespeare is constantly doing, or if you introduced the incredible or mysterious, such as fairies or magic. Some of Shakespeare’s younger contemporaries, notably Ben Jonson, keep more closely to Classical precedent, and Jonson tells us that he regularly follows nature, and that some other people like Shakespeare don’t.70 Shakespeare never fails to introduce something

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mysterious or hard to believe into his comedies, and in doing so he’s following the precedents set, not by the Classical writers, but by his immediate predecessors. These predecessors included in particular three writers of comedy, Peele, Greene, and Lyly. Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale is full of themes from folk tales; in Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay the central character is a magician, and in his James IV, while there’s not much about the Scottish king of that name, there’s a chorus character called Oberon, the king of the fairies; in Lyly’s Endimion the main story retells the Classical myth of Endymion, the youth beloved by the goddess of the moon. These are examples of the type of romance-comedy that Shakespeare followed. Shakespeare keeps the three-part structure of the Roman plays, but immensely expands the second part, and makes it a prolonged episode of confused identity. Sometimes the heroine disguises herself as a boy; sometimes the action moves into a charmed area, often a magic wood like the one in this play, where the ordinary laws of nature don’t quite apply. If we ask why this type of early Elizabethan comedy should have been the type Shakespeare used, there are many answers, but one relates to the audience. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has the general appearance of a play designed for a special festive occasion, when the Queen herself might well be present. In such a play one would expect an occasional flattering allusion to her, and it looks as though we have one when Oberon refers to an “imperial votaress” in a speech to Puck [2.1.163]. The Queen was also normally very tolerant about the often bungling attempts to entertain her when she made her progressions through the country, and so the emphasis placed on Theseus’s courtesy to the Quince company may also refer to her, even if he is male. But if there were an allusion to her, it would have to be nothing more than that. Even today novelists have to put statements into their books that no real people are being alluded to, and in Shakespeare’s day anything that even looked like such an allusion, beyond the conventional compliments, could be dangerous. Three of Shakespeare’s contemporaries did time in jail for putting into a play a couple of sentences that sounded like satire on the Scotsmen coming to England in the train of James I, and worse things, like cutting off ears and noses, could be threatened.71 I make this point because every so often some director or critic gets the notion that this play is really all about Queen Elizabeth, or that certain characters, such as Titania, refer to her. The consequences to Shakespeare’s dramatic career if the Queen had believed that she was being publicly represented

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as having a love affair with a jackass are something we fortunately don’t have to think about. An upper-class audience is inclined to favour romance and fantasy in its entertainment, because the idealizing element in such romance confirms its own image of itself. And whatever an upper-class audience likes is probably going to be what a middle-class audience will like too. If this play was adapted to, or commissioned for, a special court performance, it would be the kind of thing Theseus is looking for at the very beginning of the play, when he tells his master of revels, Philostrate, to draw up a list of possible entertainments [1.1.11–15]. One gets an impression of sparseness about what Philostrate has collected, even if Theseus doesn’t read the whole list; but however that may be, the Peter Quince play has something of the relation to the nuptials of Theseus that Shakespeare’s play would have had to whatever occasion it was used for. We notice that the reason for some of the absurdities in the Quince play comes from the actors’ belief that court ladies are unimaginably fragile and delicate: they will swoon at the sight of Snug the joiner as a lion unless it is carefully explained that he isn’t really a lion. The court ladies belong to the Quince players’ fairyland: Shakespeare knew far more about court ladies than they did, but he also realized that court ladies and gentlemen had some affinity, as an audience, with fairyland. This play retains the three parts of a normal comedy that I mentioned earlier: a first part in which an absurd, unpleasant, or irrational situation is set up; a second part of confused identity and personal complications; a third part in which the plot gives a shake and twist and everything comes right in the end. In the opening of this play we meet an irrational law, of a type we often do meet at the beginning of a Shakespeare comedy: the law of Athens that decrees death or perpetual imprisonment in a convent for any young woman who marries without her father’s consent. Here the young woman is Hermia, who loves Lysander, and the law is invoked by her father, Egeus, who prefers Demetrius. Egeus is a senile old fool who clearly doesn’t love his daughter, and is quite reconciled to seeing her executed or imprisoned. What he loves is his own possession of his daughter, which carries the right to bestow her on a man of his choice as a proxy for himself. He makes his priorities clear in a speech later in the play: They would have stol’n away, they would, Demetrius, Thereby to have defeated you and me:

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You of your wife, and me of my consent, Of my consent that she should be your wife. (4.1.156–9)

Nevertheless Theseus admits that the law is what Egeus says it is, and also emphatically says that the law must be enforced, and that he himself has no power to abrogate it [1.1.119–21]. We meet this situation elsewhere in Shakespeare: at the beginning of The Comedy of Errors, with its law that in Ephesus all visitors from Syracuse are to be beheaded [1.1.3–25], and in The Merchant of Venice, with the law that upholds Shylock’s bond [4.1.214–300]. In all three cases the person in authority declares that he has no power to alter the law, and in all three cases he eventually does. As it turns out that Theseus is a fairly decent sort, we may like to rationalize this scene by assuming that he is probably going to talk privately with Egeus and Demetrius (as in fact he says he is [1.1.114–16]) and work out a more humane solution. But he gives Hermia no loophole: he merely repeats the threats to her life and freedom. Then he adjourns the session: Come, my Hippolyta—what cheer, my love? (1.1.122)

which seems a clear indication that Hippolyta, portrayed throughout the play as a person of great common sense, doesn’t like the set-up at all. We realize that sooner or later Lysander and Hermia will get out from under this law and be united in spite of Egeus. Demetrius and Helena, who are the doubling figures, are in an unresolved situation: Helena loves Demetrius, but Demetrius has only, in the Victorian phrase, trifled with her affections. In the second part we’re in the fairy wood at night, where identities become, as we think, hopelessly confused. At dawn Theseus and Hippolyta, accompanied by Egeus, enter the wood to hunt. By that time the Demetrius–Helena situation has cleared up, and because of that Theseus feels able to overrule Egeus and allow the two marriages to go ahead. At the beginning Lysander remarks to Hermia that the authority of Athenian law doesn’t extend as far as the wood, but apparently it does; Theseus is there, in full charge, and it is in the wood that he makes the decision that heads the play toward its happy ending. At the same time the solidifying of the Demetrius–Helena relationship was the work of Oberon. We can hardly avoid the feeling not only that Theseus is overruling Egeus’s will [4.1.179], but that his own will has been overruled too, by fairies of whom he knows nothing and in whose existence he doesn’t believe.

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If we look at the grouping of characters in each of the three parts, this feeling becomes still stronger. In the opening scene we have Theseus, Egeus, and an unwilling Hippolyta in the centre, symbolizing parental authority and the inflexibility of law, with three of the four young people standing before them. Before long we meet the fourth, Helena. In the second part the characters are grouped in different places within the wood, for the most part separated from one another. In one part of the wood are the lovers; in another are the processions of the quarrelling king and queen of the fairies; in still another Peter Quince and his company are rehearsing their play. Finally the remaining group, Theseus, Hippolyta, and Egeus, appear with the sunrise. In the first part no one doubts that Theseus is the supreme ruler over the court of Athens; in the second part no one doubts that Oberon is king of the fairies and directs what goes on in the magic wood. In the third and final part the characters, no longer separated from one another, are very symmetrically arranged. Peter Quince and his company are in the most unlikely spot, in the middle, and the centre of attention; around them sit Theseus and Hippolyta and the four now reconciled lovers. The play ends; Theseus calls for a retreat to bed [5.1.36–70], and then the fairies come in for the final blessing of the house, forming a circumference around all the others. They are there for the sake of Theseus and Hippolyta, but their presence suggests that Theseus is not as supremely the ruler of his own world as he seemed to be at first. A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to be one of the relatively few plays that Shakespeare made up himself, without much help from sources. Two sources he did use were tragic stories that are turned into farce here. One was the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid, which the Quince company is attempting to tell, and which is used for more than just the Quince play.72 The other was Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, from which Shakespeare evidently took the names of Theseus, Hippolyta, and Philostrate, and which is a gorgeous but very sombre story of the fatal rivalry of two men over a woman.73 So far as this theme appears in the play, it is in the floundering of Lysander and Demetrius after first Hermia and then Helena, bemused with darkness and Puck’s love drugs. I spoke of the relation of the original Pyramus and Thisbe story to Romeo and Juliet, and the theme of the Knight’s Tale appears vestigially in that play too, in the fatal duel of Romeo and Paris. I spoke also of the role of the oxymoron as a figure of speech in Romeo and Juliet, the self-contradictory figure that’s appropriate to a tragedy of love and

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death. That too appears as farce in this play, when Theseus reads the announcement of the Quince play: Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief? That is hot ice, and wondrous strange snow! How shall we find the concord of this discord? (5.1.58–60)

Why is this play called A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Apparently the main action in the fairy wood takes place on the eve of May Day; at any rate, when Theseus and Hippolyta enter with the rising sun, they discover the four lovers, and Theseus says: No doubt they rose up early to observe The rite of May. (4.1.132–3)

We call the time of the summer solstice, in the third week of June, “midsummer,” although in our calendars it’s the beginning of summer. That’s because originally there were only three seasons, summer, autumn, and winter: summer then included spring and began in March. A thirteenthcentury song begins “sumer is i-cumen in,” generally modernized, to keep the metre, as “summer is a-coming in,” but it doesn’t mean that: it means “spring is here.”74 The Christian calendar finally established the celebration of the birth of Christ at the winter solstice, and made a summer solstice date (June 24) the feast day of John the Baptist. This arrangement, according to the Fathers, symbolized John’s remark in the Gospels on beholding Christ: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”75 Christmas Eve was a beneficent time, when evil spirits had no power; St. John’s Eve was perhaps more ambiguous,76 and there was a common phrase, “midsummer madness,” used by Olivia in Twelfth Night [3.4.56], a play named after the opposite end of the year. Still, it was a time when spirits of nature, whether benevolent or malignant, might be supposed to be abroad. There were also two other haunted “eves,” of the first of November and of the first of May. These take us back to a still earlier time, when animals were brought in from the pasture at the beginning of winter, with a slaughter of those that couldn’t be kept to feed, and when they were let out again at the beginning of spring. The first of these survives in our Hallowe’en, but May Day eve is no longer thought of much as a spooky time, although in Germany, where it was called “Walpurgis Night,” the

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tradition that witches held an assembly on a mountain at that time lasted much longer, and comes into Goethe’s Faust. In Faust the scene with the witches is followed by something called “The Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania,” which has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s play, but perhaps indicates a connection in Goethe’s mind between it and the first of May.77 In Shakespeare’s time, as Theseus’s remark indicates, the main emphasis on the first of May fell on a sunrise service greeting the day with songs. All the emphasis was on hope and cheerfulness. Shakespeare evidently doesn’t want to force a specific date on us: it may be May Day eve, but all we can be sure of is that it’s later than St. Valentine’s Day in midFebruary, the day when traditionally the birds start copulating, and we could have guessed that anyway. The general idea is that we have gone through the kind of night when spirits are powerful but not necessarily malevolent. Evil spirits, as we learn from the opening scene of Hamlet, are forced to disappear at dawn, and the fact that this is also true of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father sows a terrible doubt in Hamlet’s mind. Here we have Puck, or more accurately Robin Goodfellow the puck. Pucks were a category of spirits who were often sinister, and the Puck of this play is clearly mischievous. But we are expressly told by Oberon that the fairies of whom he’s the king are “spirits of another sort” [3.2.388], not evil and not restricted to darkness. So the title of the play simply emphasizes the difference between the two worlds of the action, the waking world of Theseus’s court and the fairy world of Oberon. Let’s go back to the three parts of the comic action: the opening situation hostile to true love, the middle part of dissolving identities, and the final resolution. The first part contains a threat of possible death to Hermia. Similar threats are found in other Shakespeare comedies: in The Comedy of Errors a death sentence hangs over a central character until nearly the end of the play. This comic structure fits inside a pattern of death, disappearance, and return that’s far wider in scope than theatrical comedy. We find it even in the central story of Christianity, with its Friday of death, Saturday of disappearance, and Sunday of return. Scholars who have studied this pattern in religion, mythology, and legend think it derives from observing the moon waning, then disappearing, then reappearing as a new moon.78 At the opening Theseus and Hippolyta have agreed to hold their wedding at the next new moon, now four days off. They speak of four days, although the rhetorical structure runs in threes: Hippolyta is wooed,

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won, and wed “With pomp, with triumph and with revelling” [1.1.19]. (This reading depends also on a reasonable, if not certain, emendation: “new” for “now” in the tenth line.)79 Theseus compares his impatience to the comedy situation of a young man waiting for someone older to die and leave him money. The Quince company discover from an almanac that there will be moonshine on the night that they will be performing, but apparently there is not enough, and so they introduce a character called Moonshine. His appearance touches off a very curious reprise of the opening dialogue. Hippolyta says, “I am aweary of this moon: would he would change!” [5.1.251], and Theseus answers that he seems to be on the wane, “but yet, in courtesy . . . we must stay the time” [5.1.254–5]. It’s as though this ghastly play contains in miniature, and caricature, the themes of separation, postponement, and confusions of reality and fantasy that have organized the play surrounding it. According to the indications in the text, the night in the wood should be a moonless night, but in fact there are so many references to the moon that it seems to be still there, even though obscured by clouds. It seems that this wood is a fairyland with its own laws of time and space, a world where Oberon has just blown in from India and where Puck can put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. So it’s not hard to accept such a world as an antipodal one, like the world of dreams itself, which, although we make it fit into our waking-time schedules, still keeps to its own quite different rhythms. A curious image of Hermia’s involving the moon has echoes of this; she’s protesting that she will never believe Lysander unfaithful: I’ll believe as soon This whole earth may be bored, and that the moon May through the centre creep, and so displease Her brother’s noontide with th’Antipodes. (3.2.52–5)

A modern reader might think of the opening of The Walrus and the Carpenter.80 The moon, in any case, seems to have a good deal to do with both worlds. In the opening scene Lysander speaks of Demetrius as “this spotted and inconstant man” [1.1.110], using two common epithets for the moon, and in the last act Theseus speaks of “the lunatic, the lover and the poet” [5.1.7], where “lunatic” has its full Elizabethan force of “moonstruck.” The inhabitants of the wood-world are the creatures of legend and folk

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tale and mythology and abandoned belief. Theseus regards them as projections of the human imagination, and as having a purely subjective existence. The trouble is that we don’t know the extent of our own minds, or what’s in that mental world that we half create and half perceive, in Wordsworth’s phrase.81 The tiny fairies that wait on Bottom—Mustardseed and Peaseblossom and the rest—come from Celtic fairy lore, as does the Queen Mab of Mercutio’s speech, who also had tiny fairies in her train. Robin Goodfellow is more Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic. His propitiatory name, “Goodfellow,” indicates that he could be dangerous, and his fairy friend says that one of his amusements is to “Mislead nightwanderers, laughing at their harm” [2.1.39]. A famous book a little later than Shakespeare, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, mentions fire spirits who mislead travellers with illusions, and says, “We commonly call them pucks.”82 The fairy world clearly would not do as a democracy: there has to be a king in charge like Oberon, who will see that Puck’s rather primitive sense of humour doesn’t get too far out of line. The gods and other beings of Classical mythology belong in the same half-subjective, half-autonomous world. I’ve spoken of the popularity of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for poets: this, in Ovid’s opening words, is a collection of stories of “bodies changed to new forms.”83 Another famous Classical metamorphosis is the story of Apuleius about a man turned into an ass by enchantment, and of course this theme enters the present play when Bottom is, as Quince says, “translated” [3.1.118–19].84 In Classical mythology one central figure was the goddess that Robert Graves, whose book I’ll mention later, calls the “white goddess” or the “triple will.” This goddess had three forms: one in heaven, where she was the goddess of the moon and was called Phoebe or Cynthia or Luna; one on earth, where she was Diana, the virgin huntress of the forest, called Titania once in Ovid; and one below the earth, where she was the witchgoddess Hecate. Puck speaks of “Hecate’s triple team” at the end of the play [5.1.384].85 References to Diana and Cynthia by the poets of the time usually involved some allusion to the virgin queen Elizabeth (they always ignored Hecate in such contexts). As I said, the Queen seems to be alluded to here, but in a way that kicks her upstairs, so to speak: she’s on a level far above all the “lunatic” goings-on below. Titania in this play is not Diana: Diana and her moon are in Theseus’s world, and stand for the sterility that awaits Hermia if she disobeys her father, when she will have to become Diana’s nun, “Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon” [1.1.73]. The wood of this play

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is erotic, not virginal: Puck is contemptuous of Lysander’s lying so far away from Hermia, not realizing that this was just Hermia being maidenly. According to Oberon, Cupid was an inhabitant of this wood, and had shot his erotic arrow at the “imperial votaress,” but it glanced off her and fell on a white flower, turning it red. The parabola taken by this arrow outlines the play’s world, so to speak: the action takes place under this red and white arch. One common type of Classical myth deals with a “dying god,” as he’s called now, a male figure who is killed when still a youth, and whose blood stains a white flower and turns it red or purple.86 Shakespeare had written the story of one of these gods in his narrative poem Venus and Adonis, where he makes a good deal of the stained flower: No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf, or weed, But stole his blood and seem’d with him to bleed. [ll. 1055–6]

The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is another such story: Pyramus’s blood stains the mulberry and turns it red. In Ovid’s account, when Pyramus stabs himself the blood spurts out in an arc on the flower. This may be where Shakespeare got the image that he puts to such very different use. Early in the play we come upon Oberon and Titania quarrelling over the custody of a human boy, and we are told that because of their quarrel the weather has been unusually foul [2.1.60–145]. The implication is that fairies are spirits of the elements, and that nature and human life are related in many ways that are hidden from ordinary consciousness. But it seems clear that Titania does not have the authority that she thinks she has: Oberon puts her under the spell of having to fall in love with his ass’s head, and rescues the boy for his own male entourage. There are other signs that Titania is a possessive and entangling spirit—she says to Bottom: Out of this wood do not desire to go; Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no. (3.1.152–3)

The relationship of Oberon and Titania forms a counterpoint with that of Theseus and Hippolyta in the other world. It appears that Titania has been a kind of guardian spirit to Hippolyta and Oberon to Theseus. Theseus gives every sign of settling down into a solidly married man, now that he has subdued the most formidable woman in the world, the

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Queen of the Amazons. But his record before that was a very bad one, with rapes and desertions in it: even as late as T.S. Eliot we read about his “perjured sails.”87 Oberon blames his waywardness on Titania’s influence, and Titania’s denial does not sound very convincing. Oberon’s ascendancy over Titania, and Theseus’s over Hippolyta, seem to symbolize some aspect of the emerging comic resolution. Each world has a kind of music, or perhaps rather “harmony,” that is characteristic of it. That of the fairy wood is represented by the song of the mermaid described by Oberon to Puck. This is a music that commands the elements of the “sublunary” world below the moon: it quiets the sea, but there is a hint of a lurking danger in it, a siren’s magic call that draws some of the stars out of their proper spheres in heaven, as witches according to tradition can call down the moon. There is danger everywhere in that world for mortals who stay there too long and listen to too much of its music. When the sun rises and Theseus and Hippolyta enter the wood, they talk about the noise of hounds in this and other huntings. Hippolyta says: never did I hear Such gallant chiding; for, besides the groves, The Skies, the fountains, every region near Seem’d88 all one mutual cry; I never heard So musical a discord, such sweet thunder. (4.1.114–18)

It would not occur to us to describe a cry of hounds as a kind of symphony orchestra, but then we do not have the mystique of a Renaissance prince about hunting. Both forms of music fall far short of the supreme harmony of the spheres described in the fifth act of The Merchant of Venice: Oberon might know something about that, but not Puck, who can’t see the “imperial votaress.” Neither, probably, could Theseus. So the wood-world has affinities with what we call the unconscious or subconscious part of the mind: a part below the reason’s encounter with objective reality, and yet connected with the hidden creative powers of the mind. Left to Puck or even Titania, it’s a world of illusion, random desires, and shifting identities. With Oberon in charge, it becomes the world in which those profound choices are made that decide the course of life, and also (we pick this up later) the world from which inspiration comes to the poet. The lovers wake up still dazed with metamorphosis; as Demetrius says:

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These things seem small and undistinguishable, Like far-off mountains turnèd into clouds. (4.1.186–7)

But the comic crystallization has taken place, and for the fifth act we go back to Theseus’s court to sort out the various things that have come out of the wood. Theseus takes a very rational and common-sense view of the lovers’ story, but he makes it clear that the world of the wood is the world of the poet as well as the lover and the lunatic. His very remarkable speech uses the words “apprehend” and “comprehend” each twice. In the ordinary world we apprehend with our senses and comprehend with our reason; what the poet apprehends are moods or emotions, like joy, and what he uses for comprehension is some story or character to account for the emotion: Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy. (5.1.18–20)

Theseus is here using the word “imagination” in its common Elizabethan meaning, which we express by the word “imaginary,” something alleged to be that isn’t. In spite of himself, though, the word is taking on the more positive sense of our “imaginative,” the sense of the creative power developed centuries later by Blake and Coleridge.89 So far as I can make out from the OED, this more positive sense of the word in English practically begins here.90 Hippolyta is shrewder and less defensive than Theseus, and what she says takes us a great deal further: But all the story of the night, told over, And all their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. (5.1.23–7) Theseus doesn’t believe their story, but Hippolyta sees that something has happened to them, whatever their story. The word “transfigured” means that there can be metamorphosis upward as well as downward, a creative transforming into a higher consciousness as well as the reduction from the conscious to the unconscious that we read about in

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Ovid. Besides, the story has a consistency to it that doesn’t sound like the disjointed snatches of incoherent minds. If you want disjointing and incoherence, just listen to the play that’s coming up. And yet the Quince play is a triumph of sanity in its way: it tells you that the roaring lion is only Snug the joiner, for example. It’s practically a parody of Theseus’s view of reality, with its “imagination” that takes a bush for a bear in the dark. There’s a later exchange when Hippolyta complains that the play is silly, and Theseus says: The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them. (5.1.211–12)

Hippolyta retorts: “It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs” [5.1.213–14]. Here “imagination” has definitely swung over to meaning something positive and creative. What Hippolyta says implies that the audience has a creative role in every play; that’s one reason why Puck, coming out for the Epilogue when the audience is supposed to applaud, repeats two of Theseus’s words: If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended. (5.1.423–4)

Theseus’s imagination has “amended” the Quince play by accepting it, listening to it, and not making fun of the actors to their faces. Its merit as a play consists in dramatizing his own social position and improving what we’d now call his “image” as a gracious prince. In itself the play has no merit, except in being unintentionally funny. And if it has no merit, it has no authority. A play that did have authority, and depended on a poet’s imagination as well, would raise the question that Theseus’s remark seems to deny: the question of the difference between plays by Peter Quince and plays by William Shakespeare. Theseus would recognize the difference, of course, but in its social context, as an offering for his attention and applause, a Shakespeare play would be in the same position as the Quince play. That indicates how limited Theseus’s world is, in the long run, a fact symbolized by his not knowing how much of his behaviour is guided by Oberon. Which brings me to Bottom, the only mortal in the play who actually sees any of the fairies. One of the last things Bottom says in the play is rather puzzling: “the wall is down that parted their fathers” [5.1.351–2].

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Apparently he means the wall separating the hostile families of Pyramus and Thisbe. This wall seems to have attracted attention: after Snout the tinker, taking the part of Wall, leaves the stage, Theseus says, according to the Folio, “Now is the morall downe between the two neighbours.”91 The New Arden editor reads “mural down,”92 and other editors simply change to “wall down.” The Quarto, just to be helpful, reads “moon used.” Wall and Moonshine between them certainly confuse an already confused play. One wonders if the wall between the two worlds of Theseus and Oberon, the wall that Theseus is so sure is firmly in place, doesn’t throw a shadow on these remarks. Anyway, Bottom wakes up along with the lovers and makes one of the most extraordinary speeches in Shakespeare, which includes a very scrambled but still recognizable echo from the New Testament, and finally says he will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of his dream, and “it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom” [4.1.215– 16].93 Like most of what Bottom says, this is absurd; like many absurdities in Shakespeare, it makes a lot of sense. Bottom does not know that he is anticipating by three centuries a remark of Freud: “every dream has a point at which it is unfathomable; a link, as it were, with the unknown.”94 When we come to King Lear, we shall suspect that it takes a madman to see into the heart of tragedy, and perhaps it takes a fool or clown, who habitually breathes the atmosphere of absurdity and paradox, to see into the heart of comedy. “Man,” says Bottom, “is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream” [4.1.206–7].95 But it was Bottom the ass who had the dream, not Bottom the weaver, who is already forgetting it. He will never see his Titania again, nor even remember that she had once loved him, or doted on him, to use Friar Laurence’s distinction.96 But he has been closer to the centre of this wonderful and mysterious play than any other of its characters, and it no longer matters that Puck thinks him a fool or that Titania loathes his asinine face. III The Bolingbroke Plays (Richard II, Henry IV) I’ve mentioned the sequence of plays, four in all, that Shakespeare produced early in his career, on the period of the War of the Roses between Lancaster and York (so called because the emblem of Lancaster was a red rose and that of York a white one). With Richard II we begin another sequence of four plays, continuing through the two parts of Henry IV and ending with Henry V. The two central characters of the whole se-

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quence are Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, who appears in the first three, and his son, later Henry V, who appears in the second, third, and fourth. Although there are ominous forebodings of later events in Richard II, the audience would pick up the allusions, and we don’t need to assume that Shakespeare began Richard II with the ambition of producing another “tetralogy” or group of four plays. The second part of Henry IV looks as though it were written mainly to meet a demand for more Falstaff. Still, each play does look back to its predecessors, so there is a unity to the sequence, whether planned in advance or not. And, as the Epilogue to Henry V tells us, the story ends at the point where the earlier sequence began. I’ve provided a table of the intermarriages of English royalty between the reigns of Edward III and Henry VII, the period that covers the eight history plays. If you add Henry VIII, Henry VII’s son, all the histories are covered that Shakespeare wrote except King John. In order to show the important marriages, I haven’t always listed sons and daughters in order of age, from the left. We can see that there were not many Romeo and Juliet situations: in the aristocracy at that time you simply married the man or woman who would do most for the fortunes of your family. Edward III (1327–77) Edward (Black Prince)

Lionel (Clarence)

Richard II (1377–99)

Philippa m. Edmund Mortimer (March)

John of Gaunt (Lancaster) Henry IV (Bolingbroke) (1399–1413) Henry V (1413–22)

Elizabeth m. Edmund (Hotspur)

John

Edmund (York)

Thomas of Woodstock (Glaucester)

John Beaufort (Somerset) John (Somerset) Humphrey (Gloucester)

Roger Mortimer

Margaret m. Edmund Tudor

Henry VI (1422–61) Edmund Mortimer (March)

m.

Anne Mortimer

Richard (Cambridge)

Edward (Aumerle)

Richard (York) Edward IV George (1461–83) (Clarence) Edward V (1483)

Richard

Richard III (1483–85) Elizabeth

m.

Henry VII (Richmond) (1485–1509)

We start with Edward III’s five sons. Shakespeare speaks of seven sons: the other two, both called William, died early on. Edward’s eldest

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son and heir, Edward the “Black Prince,” who would normally have succeeded his father, died the year before his father did, and the rules of succession brought his son, Richard, to the throne when he was still a boy. As some of his contemporaries remarked, “Woe to the land that’s governed by a child!”97 and yet Richard lasted for twenty-two years, as long as Henry IV and Henry V together, Shakespeare’s play covering only the last year or so of his reign. The daughter of the second son, Lionel, married into the family of Mortimers; her daughter in turn married Hotspur of the Percy family. When Richard II’s life ended in 1399, his heir, by the rules of succession, should have been the third Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, who was also nominated, according to the conspirators in Henry IV, by Richard II as his successor. That was the issue that the revolt against Henry IV, which involved Hotspur so deeply, depended on. Bolingbroke was the son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, and so not the next in line to the crown. However, he succeeded in establishing the Lancastrian house as the royal family, and was followed by his son and grandson. Apart from what the conspirators say, the fact that Bolingbroke seized the crown from Edmund as well as Richard is played down in this sequence, but there is a grimly eloquent speech from this Edmund, dying in prison, in 1 Henry VI (although Shakespeare, if he wrote the scene, has confused him with someone else).98 The Yorkist line came from the fourth son, Edmund, Duke of York, whose dramatic switch of loyalties from Richard to Bolingbroke, and the resulting conflict with his son Edward, called Aumerle, is the real narrative turning point of Richard II. The Yorkist line was not consolidated until the marriage of Aumerle’s brother, Richard, to a descendant of Lionel produced Richard, Duke of York, who began the War of the Roses. The Yorkists got the upper hand in the war, and the Yorkist heir succeeded as Edward IV. Edward’s two young sons, Edward (called Edward V because he had a theoretical reign of two months, although never crowned) and Richard, were supposed to have been murdered in the Tower by their wicked uncle, who became Richard III. Whether Richard III did this, or whether the story came from the Tudor propaganda machine, is still disputed: in any case Shakespeare bought it. Richard III, after a reign of about two years, was defeated and killed in battle by the Duke of Richmond, a descendant of John of Gaunt through a later wife. (She was not his wife when their son was born, and the line had to be legitimized by a special act of Richard II.) The Duke of Richmond then

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ascended the throne as Henry VII and founded what is called the House of Tudor, from the name of his father. Because of his descent from John of Gaunt, his victory technically restored the House of Lancaster, but one of the first things he did was to marry the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth, and the marriage put a symbolic end to the war by uniting the red and white roses. References to this could easily be turned into a compliment to Queen Elizabeth’s complexion: a sonnet by the poet Fulke Greville begins: Upon a throne I saw a virgin sit, The red and white rose quartered in her face. 99

The fifth son, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, had been murdered just before the action of Richard II begins, and the duel that Bolingbroke and Mowbray are about to fight in the opening scene of the play results from Mowbray’s being implicated in the murder. There was another well-known contemporary play on this subject, Thomas of Woodstock (anonymous). This play is probably a source for Shakespeare, as it seems to be earlier, although it loads the case against Richard more heavily than Shakespeare does. According to this play Woodstock lost his life because he was too persistent in giving Richard II advice, and Richard was as much involved with his death as Mowbray.100 Shakespeare’s play seems to have made a deep impression on his public, and there were six Quartos of it, five of them within his lifetime. The first three omitted the deposing scene at the end of act 4; the fourth, the first one that had it, appeared five years after Queen Elizabeth’s death.101 The cutting out of the deposing scene could have happened anyway, because of the official nervousness about showing or printing such things, but there is evidence that the play was revived during the conspiracy of Essex against Elizabeth, perhaps for the very purpose the censors worried about, that of accustoming the public to the thought of deposing a monarch. The queen herself made the connection, and is reported to have said, “I am Richard II, know ye not that? [. . .] This tragedy was played forty times in open streets and houses.”102 We may perhaps take “forty” to be (literally) Elizabethan rhetoric for “at least once,” but even the commission of inquiry must have realized that there was no relation between the reckless and extravagant Richard and the cautious and stingy Elizabeth. It is perhaps a measure of her sense of insecurity, even at this period of her reign, that she thought there was.

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As for Shakespeare’s own dramatic vision, we have that curious garden scene (3.4), for which scholars have never located a source,103 and which is two things that Shakespeare’s writing practically never is, allegorical and sentimental. Considering the early date of the play (mid-1590s, probably), it is most unlikely that there was any contemporary allusion, but if the Essex group did revive the play for propaganda, this scene would have backfired on them, as it says that a capable ruler ought to cut ambitious nobles down to size before they get dangerous. In Richard II Shakespeare had to make a marriage of convenience between the facts of medieval society, so far as they filtered down to him from his sources, and the Tudor mystique of royalty. That mystique regarded government by a central sovereign to be the form of government most in accord with both human nature and the will of God. It is true that no English sovereign except Henry VIII ever had the unlimited power that was very common on the Continent then and for many centuries thereafter. But still the reigning king or queen was the “Lord’s anointed,” his or her person was sacred, and rebellion against the sovereign was blasphemy and sacrilege as well as treason. The phrase “Lord’s anointed” comes ultimately from the Bible. The Hebrew word “Messiah,” meaning “the anointed one,” is applied in the Old Testament to a lawfully consecrated king, including even the rejected King Saul.104 The Greek equivalent of Messiah is Christ,105 and Jesus Christ was regarded as the king of the spiritual world, lawful kings in the physical world being his regents. If a lawful king happened to be a vicious tyrant, that was ultimately the fault of his subjects rather than of him, and they were being punished through him for their sins. So when Richard II, during the abdication scene particularly [4.1], draws so many parallels between his trial and the trial of Christ, he is not comparing himself directly to Christ, but saying that the same situation, of the world rejecting the Lord’s anointed, is being enacted once again. Of these echoes from the Passion in the Gospels, perhaps the most striking is that of Pilate’s washing of his hands in a futile effort to make himself innocent of the death of Christ. Bolingbroke uses this image when he is making his first act as the next king, in ordering the execution of Bushy and Green [3.1.5–6]; it is repeated in a contrasting context by Richard: Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king (3.2.54–5)

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and explicitly linked with Pilate by Richard in the abdication scene [4.1.239–42]. The closing lines of the play are spoken by Bolingbroke, and express his purpose of going on a crusade “To wash this blood off from my guilty hand” [5.6.50]. One awkward question might be raised in connection with this doctrine of the sacredness of the royal person. Suppose you’re second in line from the throne, and murder the one who’s first in line, do you thereby acquire all the sanctity of the next Lord’s anointed? Well, in some circumstances you do.106 Shakespeare’s King John becomes king when his nephew, Prince Arthur, is really in line for the succession, and although the prince technically commits suicide by jumping out of a window, John is certainly not innocent of his murder. John thereby becomes by default the lawful king, and when he dies his son Prince Henry becomes his legitimate heir. The strongest man in the country at the time is Falconbridge, bastard son of Richard I, who would have been king if he were legitimate, and could probably seize power quite easily in any case. But he holds back in favour of Prince Henry, and the play comes to a resounding patriotic conclusion to the effect that nothing can happen “If England to itself do rest but true,”107 which in the context means partly keeping the line of succession intact. You may not find this particular issue personally very involving, but the general principle is that all ideologies sooner or later get to be circumvented by cynicism and defended by hysteria, and that principle will meet you everywhere you turn in a world driven crazy by ideologies, like ours. A lawful king, as Shakespeare presents the situation, can be ruthless and unscrupulous and still remain a king, but if he’s weak or incompetent he creates a power vacuum in society, because the order of nature and the will of God both demand a strong central ruler. So a terrible dilemma arises between a weak king de jure and a de facto power that’s certain to grow up somewhere else. This is the central theme of Richard II. Richard was known to his contemporaries as “Richard the Redeless,”108 i.e., a king who wouldn’t take good advice, and Shakespeare shows him ignoring the advice of John of Gaunt and York.109 His twentyyear reign had a large backlog of mistakes and oppressions that Shakespeare doesn’t need to exhibit in detail. In the scene where his uncle John of Gaunt is dying, John concentrates mainly on the worst of Richard’s administrative sins: he has sold, for ready cash, the right of collecting taxes to individuals who are not restrained in their rapacity by the central authority [2.1.57–60]. This forms part of what begins as a superbly

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patriotic speech: Shakespeare’s reason for making the old ruffian John of Gaunt a wise and saintly prophet was doubtless that he was the ancestor of the House of Tudor. We also learn that Richard had a very undesirable lot of court favourites, spent far too much money on his own pleasures [2.1.19–26], and at the time of the play was involved in a war in Ireland that had brought his finances into a crisis [1.4.38–52]. As we’ll see later, getting into a foreign war is normally by far the best way of distracting a disaffected people, but Ireland roused no one’s enthusiasm. In the Middle Ages the effective power was held by the great baronial houses, which drew their income from their own land and tenants, many of them serfs; they could raise private armies, and in a crisis could barricade themselves into some very strong castles. In such a situation a medieval king had a theoretical supremacy, but not always an actual one, and, as his power base was often narrower than that of a landed noble, he was perpetually hard up for money. So if he were stuck with a sudden crisis, as Richard II is with the Irish war, he would often have to behave like a brigand in his own country and find pretexts for seizing and confiscating estates. What kind of law does a lawful king represent who resorts to illegal means of getting money? Or, who resorts to means that are technically legal, but violate a moral right? Depends on what the moral right is. If it’s abstract justice, protection of the poor, the representation of taxpayers in government, the right of the individual to a fair trial or the like, forget it. Shakespeare’s King John never mentions Magna Carta, and Richard II never mentions the most important event of the reign, the Peasants’ Revolt (twenty years earlier, but the social issues were still there). But if you take private property away from a noble house that’s powerful enough to fight back, you’re in deep trouble. The Duke of York tries to explain to Richard that his own position as king depends on hereditary succession, and that the same principle applies to a nobleman’s right to inherit the property of his father [2.1.189–208]. When Richard seizes John of Gaunt’s property [2.1.160–2], he’s doing something that will make every noble family in England say “Who next?” So John’s son Henry Bolingbroke gets a good deal of support when he defies Richard’s edict of banishment and returns to claim his own. We don’t know much about what is going on in Bolingbroke’s mind at any one time, and that’s largely because he doesn’t let himself become aware of the full implications of what he’s doing. When he says at first that he merely wants his rights [2.3.118–36], it’s possible that he means that. But this is the point at which Richard’s spectacular incom-

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petence as an administrator begins to operate. In the demoralized state of the nation a de facto power begins to gather around Bolingbroke, and he simply follows where it leads, neither a puppet of circumstances nor a deliberately unscrupulous usurper. The rest of the play is the working out of this de jure and de facto dilemma. Some, like the Duke of York, come over to Henry’s side and transfer the loyalty owed the Lord’s anointed to him. So, when York’s son Aumerle conspires in favour of Richard, York accuses his son of the same treason and sacrilege he’d previously accused Bolingbroke of before he changed sides. In the scene where York insists on the king’s prosecuting his son for treason and his duchess pleads for pardon [5.3], Bolingbroke is at his best, because he realizes the significance of what’s happening. He’s made the transition from being the de facto king to being the de jure king as well, and after that all he needs to do is get rid of Richard. There are others, like the Bishop of Carlisle, who take the orthodox Tudor line, and denounce Bolingbroke for what he is doing to the Lord’s anointed [4.1.114–38]. As Shakespeare presents the issue, both sides are right. Henry becomes king, and makes a better king, as such things go, than Richard. When his nobles start quarrelling among themselves in a scene that reads almost like a reprise of his own challenge to Mowbray, he puts all the challenges “under gage” [4.1.86], postpones all action, and squashes instantly what could become a dangerous brawl. But the way he came to the throne leaves a curse over the House of Lancaster that starts working out after Henry V’s death twenty years or so later [4.1.136–49]. Perhaps the only thing that would really resolve the situation is for Henry IV to go on the crusade he keeps talking about, because killing Moslems is so meritorious an act that it wipes out all previous sins, however grievous. John of Gaunt introduces the theme of crusade [2.1.53–6], as one of the things England was devoted to in its prime: he was doubtless thinking of the contrast between Richard and his namesake, Richard I, who spent so much of his ten-year reign fighting in the Third Crusade. But Henry’s plans to go on a crusade are interrupted by revolts against him [1 Henry IV, 1.1.18–30], and that again is inevitable: one revolt begets another. He carries on as best he can, and the comforting prophecy that he will die in Jerusalem turns out to apply to the name of a room in the palace of Westminster [2 Henry IV, 4.5.232–40]. It is a particularly savage irony, from Bolingbroke’s point of view, that his enemy Mowbray, who, unlike him, was banished for life, should have died fighting in a crusade [Richard II, 4.1.92–100].

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It should be clear by now that Shakespeare is not interested in what we would normally think of as history. What is really happening in history is extremely difficult to dramatize. Shakespeare is interested in chronicle, the personal actions and interactions of the people at the top of the social order. And the centre of his interest is in the kind of dramatic performance involved in being a leader in society, more particularly a king. All social relationships are in a sense theatrical ones: as soon as someone we know appears, we throw ourselves into the dramatic situation that our knowledge of him makes appropriate, and act it out accordingly. If we’re alone, like Hamlet or like Richard in prison, we soliloquize; that is, we dramatize ourselves to ourselves. And what we all do, the prince makes history, or chronicle, by doing. In his vision of leadership, Shakespeare often comes curiously close to Machiavelli’s The Prince. Curiously, because it is practically impossible that Shakespeare could have known Machiavelli’s writings, and because Shakespeare’s social vision is a deeply conservative one, whereas Machiavelli’s was realistic enough to make the horrified idealists of his time give him a reputation in England and elsewhere as the voice of the devil himself.110 He comes in, for example, to emit cynical sentiments as the prologue speaker of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.111 But the theorist and the dramatist converge on two points: the dramatic nature of leadership and the fact that the qualities of the born leader are not moral qualities. In ancient times stage actors usually wore masks, and the metaphor of the masked actor has given two words to the language. One is “hypocrite,” which is Greek in origin and refers to the actor looking through the mask; the other is “person,” which is Latin and refers to his speaking through it. Today we also use the word “persona” to mean the social aspect of an individual, the way he encounters other people. To some extent it’s a misleading term, because it implies a real somebody underneath the masks, and, as the soliloquy reminds us, there’s never anything under a persona except another persona. What there is is a consistency that limits the variety of social relations to a certain repertoire: that is, Hamlet always sounds like Hamlet, and Falstaff like Falstaff, whatever their roles at the moment. But for Shakespeare, as we’ll see further later on, the question of identity is connected with social function and behaviour; in other words with the dramatic self, not with some hidden inner essence. Well, “hypocrite” is a moral term and “person” is not: we accept that everyone has a personality, but it’s supposed to be wrong for people to

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be hypocrites. Hypocrisy has been called the tribute that vice pays to virtue,112 but to know that you’re saying one thing and thinking another requires a self-discipline that’s practically a virtue in itself. Certainly it’s often an essential virtue for a public figure. Situations change, and the good leader does what the new situation calls for, not what is consistent with what he did before. When Bolingbroke orders the execution of the king’s favourites, one of his gravest charges against them is the way that they have separated the king from the queen [3.1.11–15], but an act or so later he himself is ordering a much more drastic separation of them. A successful leader doesn’t get hung up on moral principles: the place for moral principles is in what we’d call now the PR job. The reputation of being virtuous or liberal or gracious is more important for the prince than the reality of these things, or rather, as in staging a play, the illusion is the reality. Bolingbroke begins and ends the play, and the beginning and ending are in a most symmetrical relationship. At the beginning there is to be a public duel, or trial by battle, between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, over the murder of Thomas of Woodstock. Although Mowbray belongs to the house of Norfolk, not York, here is in embryo the theme of the eight historical plays: two noblemen quarrelling among themselves, with the king driven to stratagems to maintain his ascendancy. Perhaps a shrewder monarch would have left them to fight it out, on the ground that a duel to the death would get rid of at least one dangerous nobleman, but Richard stops the duel and banishes both, Mowbray for life, Bolingbroke for ten years, later reduced to six. The duellists talk so much that we suspect they’re both lying, but it’s Bolingbroke who drops the key image of civil war, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel: That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death . . . Which blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth. (1.1.100–5)

At the end of the play, Bolingbroke, now Henry IV, hints that the death of the imprisoned Richard would be most convenient to him, and his follower Exton carries out the murder, and returns expecting a reward for faithful service. He forgot that leaders have to dissociate themselves immediately from such acts, whether they ordered them or not, and the play closes with Exton banished and Henry saying, “With Cain go wan-

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der thorough shades of night” [5.6.43], echoing Mowbray’s line about his banishment: “To dwell in solemn shades of endless night” [1.3.177]. The play is thus enclosed by the image of the first human crime, Cain’s murder of his brother, the archetype of all civil wars that follow. In the middle comes the scene of the queen and the gardener. The gardener is addressed as “old Adam’s likeness” [3.4.73], which means that this is not a garden like Eden, where nothing was “unruly” [3.4.30] and there were no weeds, but a garden made from the soil that Adam was forced to cultivate after his fall. Another phrase of the queen’s, “To make a second fall of cursèd man” [3.4.76], is repeated in a very curious context in Henry V [2.2.142]. Every fall of every consecrated ruler repeats the original fall of man. Since then, history has proceeded in a series of cycles: Shakespeare’s audience was thoroughly familiar with the image he uses constantly in his plays, the wheel of fortune,113 and would see the entire action of this play, from the murder of Woodstock to the murder of Richard, as a single turn of that wheel. Richard’s image for this is that of two buckets, one going up and the other down, “The emptier ever dancing in the air” [4.1.186], a most sardonic comment on the sort of person who succeeds in the way that Bolingbroke has succeeded. One corollary of this conception of a wheel of fortune is that in history it is only the past that can be idealized or thought of as heroic or peaceful. The Henry VI plays look back to the great and victorious Henry V; the play of Henry V looks back to the time of Richard as a time when there was no curse of usurpation on the royal house; and in this play we have John of Gaunt idealizing an earlier time, apparently the reign of Edward III, the reign that saw the Black Death and the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War with France. What keeps the wheel turning is the fact that people are conditioned to a certain reflex about it: whenever there’s a change in personnel in the state, the assumption is normally that somehow or other an old age is going to be renewed. As the Duchess of York says to Aumerle after the king has pardoned him, “Come, my old son: I pray God make thee new” [5.3.146]. The joyful expectation on the part of the people that a new king will give a new life to the nation is put by York into its proper context: As in a theatre the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next. (5.2.23–5)

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The illusion of movement in history corresponds to the processional aspect of a drama, the series of events that holds the interest. We have to listen on a deeper level, picking up such things as the Cain imagery, to realize that the beginning and the end are much the same point. We feel this circularity of movement from the very beginning, the ordeal by battle that opens the play. Such ordeals, in medieval times, were surrounded by the most detailed ritual and punctilio. The combatants appeared before the king and formally stated their cases; the king would try to reconcile them; he would fail; he would then allow a trial by battle at a time and place duly stated. As the play goes on, the duel modulates to one between Bolingbroke and King Richard, but the same ritual formality continues, except that there is no longer any question of a fair fight. That is one reason why Richard II is written, contrary to Shakespeare’s usual practice, entirely in verse: no contrasting force from outside the duelling ritual breaks in to interrupt the action. Bolingbroke realizes that one of the qualities of the leader is inscrutability, giving the impression that there are great reserves of power of decision not being expressed. Of course many people look inscrutable who are merely stupid: Bolingbroke is not stupid, but he understands that the leaders who attract the greatest loyalty and confidence are those who can suggest in their manner that they have no need of it. Later, in 1 Henry IV, Bolingbroke is telling his son Prince Hal that, in the dramatic show a leader puts on, the one essential is aloofness. He says that he appeared publicly very seldom, and always with calculation: By being seldom seen, I could not stir But like a comet I was wond’red at (1 Henry IV, 3.2.46–7)

and contrasts his own skilful performance with Prince Hal’s wasting time with low company in Eastcheap, which he says is repeating the mistake of “the skipping king” Richard [3.2.60], who lost his crown mainly because he was seen too often and not with the right people. What Henry says may be true as a general political principle, though whether it was true of his own behaviour at the time or not is another question: certainly the communiqué from Richard’s headquarters about Bolingbroke is very different from what Bolingbroke remembers of it: Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench; A brace of draymen bid God speed him well

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And had the tribute of his supple knee. (Richard II, 1.4.31–3)

One aspect of this question of leadership has been studied in a fine piece of scholarship, a book called The King’s Two Bodies, by E.H. Kantorowicz. Oversimplifying a bit, the king’s two bodies, as distinguished in medieval and Renaissance theory, are his individual body as a man and his symbolic aspect as the body of his nation in an individual form.114 To extend this in the direction of Richard II, if the individual man is A, and the symbol of the nation as a single body is B, then the real king is B, the consecrated and sacrosanct figure, the king de jure. But the stronger the king is as an individual, and the more de facto ability he has, the more nearly A will equal B, and the better off both the king and his society will be. In any case, whether A equals B or not, it is clear that A minus B equals nothing, and that equation is echoed in the words “all” and “nothing” that run through the abdication scene [4.1.200–22], and in fact are continuing as late as King Lear.115 Richard has been brought up to believe in the sanctity of his office, and unfortunately that has not made him more responsible but less so. Hence he turns to magic and fantasy as soon as he is even momentarily frustrated. When he goes to see the dying John of Gaunt, thinking of how soon he can get his money, he soliloquizes: Now put it, God, into116 the physician’s mind To help him to his grave immediately! (1.4.59–60)

This is not the voice of a strong-willed and powerful king, but of a spoiled child, and those who talk in such accents can never get away with what they do for long. John of Gaunt tells him his flatterers have got inside his individual castle, and have cut him off from that identification with his society that every genuine king must have. Nobody could express the doctrine of the two bodies more clearly than John of Gaunt does: A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown, Whose compass is no bigger than thy head; And yet, incagèd117 in so small a verge, The waste is no whit lesser than thy land. (2.1.100–3)

After his return from Ireland, Richard refuses for a time to believe that anything can affect an anointed king adversely. But after the roll call of

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disasters has been recited to him he suddenly reverses his perspective, fascinated by the paradox that an individual, as vulnerable and subject to accident as anyone else, could also be the body of his whole kingdom. In short, he turns introvert, and that is a dangerous thing for a ruler to be who expects to go on being a ruler. It is obvious, long before his final murder, that Richard is no coward, but his growing introversion gives him some of the weaknesses that make other men cowards. One of them is an overreacting imagination that sketches the whole course of a future development before anyone else has had time to figure out the present one. Sometimes these flashes of the future are unconscious: at the beginning he tells Mowbray that he is not favouring Bolingbroke and would not “Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom’s heir” [1.1.116]. That could pass as the straight thematic anticipation that we’ve met before in Shakespeare. So, more doubtfully, could his complaint about John of Gaunt’s “frozen admonition”: chasing the royal blood With fury from his native residence. (2.1.118–19)

But when disaster becomes objective he instantly begins to see himself as the central figure of a secular Passion. When Northumberland reports Bolingbroke’s wish for Richard to come down and parley with him in the “base court” (the basse cour or lower courtyard of Flint Castle), the symbolism of the whole operation flashes at once through his mind: Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaeton . . . In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base . . . In the base court? Come down? Down, court! Down, king! (3.3.178–82)

So active an imagination makes Richard a remarkable poet, but cripples him as a practical man, because his mental schedule is so different from those of people who advance one step at a time, like Bolingbroke. We are reminded here, as so often in Shakespeare, that successful action and successful timing are much the same thing. His being a day late in returning from Ireland has resulted in twelve thousand Welshmen, on a rumour that he was dead, deserting to Bolingbroke [3.2.67–74]. Very little is said about fortune or fate or the stars here, because Richard has made so many mistakes in timing that something like this was bound to hit him sooner or later.

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Eventually Richard comes to understand, if not consciously at first, that he is programming himself as a loser, and has thrown himself into the elegiac role of one who has lost his throne before he has actually lost it. This in its turn is a kind of self-indulgent retreat from the confronting situation: “that sweet way I was in to despair” [3.2.205], as he calls it. In the abdication scene he makes what could look like a last throw of the dice: And if my word be sterling yet in England, Let it command a mirror hither straight. (4.1.264–5)

It is Bolingbroke who gives the order to bring a looking glass: there is nothing sterling about Richard’s word anymore. As far as history is concerned, Richard has had it: nothing remains but to find some device for murdering him. But as far as drama is concerned, Richard is and remains the unforgettable central figure, and Bolingbroke is a supporting actor. How does this come about? How does Richard manage to steal the show from Bolingbroke at the very moment when Bolingbroke is stealing his crown? The reason goes back to the distinction we made earlier between the two forms of mask: the hypocrite and the person. We all have to be persons, and that involves our being hypocrites at times too: there’s no way out of that. But Richard is surrounded with nobles solidly encased in hypocrisy of various kinds: many of them, as we’ll discover more fully in the next play, are just gangsters glorified by titles and blank verse, and all of them, including Bolingbroke, are engaged in pretending that a bad king is being deposed for a good one. Some truth in it, of course; there’s always a lot of truth in hypocrisy. When Richard says he sees traitors before him, that is only what a loser would be expected to say. But when he goes on, Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself, I find myself a traitor with the rest, (4.1.247–8)

he may sound as though he were saying what Northumberland is trying to bully him into saying, or signing: that he is justly deposed as a criminal. But in fact something else is happening: in that solid mass of rebels ritually carrying out a power takeover, Richard is emerging as a starknaked personality, and the others can do nothing but stare at it.

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There follows the inspired mirror scene, in which he dramatizes his phrase “turn mine eyes upon myself.” He’s still putting on an act, certainly; but it’s a totally different act from what he was expected to put on. In one of his two aspects, the king is a human being: by forcing everyone to concentrate on him as a human being, while he stares in the mirror, a kind of royalty becomes visible from that humanity that Bolingbroke will never in this world find the secret of. We see a principle that we see later on in King Lear: that in some circumstances the real royalty is in the individual person, not in the symbolic one. Bolingbroke lives in a world of substance and shadow: power is substantial to him, and Richard with his mirror has retreated to a world of shadows. But a nagging doubt remains, of a kind related to the close of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: which has the more effective power, the Duke of Athens or the king of shadows in the wood? In the context of a history the issue is clearer cut than in a fantastic comedy, of course, except for the audience’s response. The audience takes Richard out of the theatre, and groups everyone else around him. The contrast between what Bolingbroke has become and what Richard has been all along comes out in the two final episodes of the play. The first episode is the one we’ve glanced at already: Bolingbroke’s pardoning of Aumerle, who conspired against him, in response to the impassioned pleas of the Duchess of York [5.3]. In this episode there are two themes or verbal phrases to be noticed: the theme of the beggar and the king, and the theme of setting the word against the word. Bolingbroke is now king, and everyone else becomes in a sense a beggar: if a subject does anything that puts his life in danger, he must sue to the king for his life as a beggar would do. The “word” being discussed is the word of royal command, specifically the word “pardon.” The Duke of York, as hot for prosecuting his son as ever, urges Bolingbroke to say pardon in French [5.3.119], where pardonnez-moi would have the general sense of “sorry, nothing doing.” But Bolingbroke knows that he is now in a position where he is the source of the word of command, and must make all such words as unambiguous as possible, even when he does what he is soon to do to Exton. This scene is immediately followed by Richard’s great prison speech, which in many respects sums up the play, and repeats these two themes of the beggar and the king and of setting the word against the word. The prison is the final actualizing of the individual world dramatized by the mirror earlier, and Richard is fascinated by the number of personae

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he can invoke. His soul and brain become an Adam and an Eve, and they germinate between them a whole new world of thoughts [5.5.6–11]. Some of the thoughts are ambitious, wanting only to get out; some are resigned (perhaps Boethius, writing The Consolation of Philosophy while awaiting execution in prison, is in the background here), but all of them are discontented. Not because of the prison: they’d be discontented anywhere. Here, setting “the word against the word” [5.5.13–14]118 refers to the words of Scripture, the commands that come from the spiritual world and so often seem ambiguous; and the king and beggar are the same identity, different only in mask and context. He concludes: Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased till be he eased With being nothing. (5.5.39–41)119

Ever since the beginning of language, probably, “nothing” has meant two things: “not anything” and “something called nothing.” Richard is saying here (not very grammatically) that every human being, including himself, is discontented, not pleased with anything, until he becomes that something we call nothing, i.e., in this context, dead. This double meaning becomes very central in King Lear later. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the two worlds of the play, Theseus’s court and Oberon’s wood, represent two aspects of the mind, the conscious, rational, daylight aspect and the dreaming and fantasizing aspect. One dwells in a world of things and the other in a world of shadows; the shadow mind may live partly in the imaginary, in what is simply not there, but it may live partly also in the genuinely creative, bringing into existence a “transfigured” entity, to use Hippolyta’s word [5.1.24],120 which is neither substantial nor shadowy, neither illusory nor real, but both at once. In Romeo and Juliet we got one tantalizing glimpse of this world in Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, but what we see of it mostly is the world created out of the love of the two young people, a world inevitably destroyed as the daylight world rolls over it, but possessing a reality that its destruction does not disprove. Richard II is in a more complex social position, and has been caught in the paradox of the king, who, we remember, possesses both an individual and a sacramental body. The latter includes all the subjects in his kingdom; the former, only himself. In the prison, however, an entire world leaps into life within his own mind: the other world he was look-

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ing for in the mirror. He has as many thoughts as he has subjects, and, like his subjects, his thoughts are discontented, rebellious, and conflicting. But the king’s two bodies are also God’s two realities, linked by the anointing of the king.121 The imagery changes as music sounds in the background: Richard comments on the need for keeping time in music, and applies the word to his own life: “I wasted time, and time doth now waste me” [5.5.49].122 From there two conceptions of time unfold: time as rhythm and proportion, the inner grace of life itself that we hear in music, and time as the mechanical progress of the clock, the time that Bolingbroke has kept so accurately until the clock brought him to power. Near the beginning of the play, John of Gaunt refuses to take active vengeance for Woodstock’s death on the Lord’s anointed. He leaves vengeance to heaven, which will release its vengeance “when they see the hours ripe on earth” [1.2.7]. The word “they” has no antecedent: John must mean something like “the gods,” but the image of ripening, and of acting when the time is “ripe,” brings in a third dimension of time, one that we don’t see in this play, or perhaps fully anywhere else, although there are unconscious commitments to it like Edgar’s “ripeness is all” [King Lear, 5.2.11]. There is a power in time, with its own rhythm and form: if we can’t see it in action, perhaps it sees us, and touches the most sensitive people, such as Hamlet, with the feeling that it shapes our ends [Hamlet, 5.2.10]. If we did see it, perhaps the world of history would burst like an eggshell and a new kind of life would come forth. Richard II was, we said, written entirely in verse, the reason being that the action is centred on what is practically a ritual, or inverted ritual: the deposing of a lawful king and the crowning of the successor who has forced him out. At the beginning of Henry IV, the hangover has set in. Bolingbroke, realizing that there is nothing worse for a country than a civil war, has determined at the outset to get started on a crusade [1.1.18– 27]. The idea, we said, was partly that God would forgive anyone anything, even deposing an anointed king, if he went on a crusade. But even more, an external enemy unites a country instead of dividing it. Shortly before his death, Henry IV tells Prince Henry that when he becomes king he should make every effort to get a foreign war started, so that the nobles will be interested in killing foreigners instead of intriguing against each other and the king [2 Henry IV, 4.5.212–15]—advice Prince Henry is not slow to act on. But at this point the new king’s authority is not well enough established for a foreign war, much less a crusade. Henry finds

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that there are revolts against him in Scotland and Wales, and that many of the lords who backed him against Richard II are conspiring against him now. So Henry IV contains a great deal of prose, because this play is taking a much broader survey of English society, and showing the general slump in morale of a country whose chain of command has so many weak links. Falstaff speaks very early of “old father antic the law” [1 Henry IV, 1.2.61],123 and both the Eastcheap group and the carriers and ostlers in the curious scene at the beginning of the second act illustrate that conspiracy, at all levels, is now in fashion. In the opening scenes two issues make their way into the foreground. One is the fact that medieval warfare was in large part a ransom racket: you took noblemen prisoner in battle, and then their tenants had to put up enough money to buy them back. That’s why there’s so much said about the denying of prisoners: they were a perquisite of the king’s. The other is the fact that Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, has in some respects a better claim to the throne than Henry IV has, and though he is at first theoretically on Henry’s side, he marries the daughter of the Welsh rebel Owen Glendower, and forms a rallying point of sorts for a plot against the House of Lancaster. The conspirators are not an attractive lot: Northumberland, for example, the father of Hotspur, was a bully in Richard II and is a coward in this play: he was a traitor to Richard, then a traitor to Bolingbroke, and ends by betraying his own son [2 Henry IV, 2.3.9–16]. Worcester is sulky and insolent: Henry is compelled to assert his royal authority and send him offstage [1 Henry IV, 1.3.15–20], and Worcester realizes that once he is distrusted by the king there is no turning back [1 Henry IV, 5.2.4–25]. The only attractive figure is Hotspur, who’s already a legendary fighter and a logical leader of the conspirators—if only they can get him to shut up. But they don’t trust him either, because Hotspur, however foolish in many respects, is at least ready to fight in good faith: he doesn’t have a conspiratorial mind, and doesn’t really understand what his colleagues are after, which is their own interests. Before long they have produced what for a Tudor audience would be one of the most terrifying of symbols, later to appear at the beginning of King Lear: a map, with proposals to divide the country into parts [1 Henry IV, 3.1.69–70]. Prince Henry is mentioned in contrast to Hotspur in the first scene, and is said to be the same age as Hotspur, though historically Hotspur was twenty years older [1.1.86–9].124 In the second scene the Prince appears, with Falstaff. The Prince is the central figure of this and the next

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two plays, and it’s a very careful planning that shows him from the beginning flanked with these two characters. Hotspur is a kind of parody brother and Falstaff a parody father: later in the play Falstaff actually puts on a dramatic subscene in which he plays the role of Prince Henry’s father [2.4.376–432], and this scene displaces one that the Prince had already proposed, in which he would take the part of Hotspur and Falstaff that of Hotspur’s wife. In this scene, too, the Prince represents Hotspur as answering, when his wife asks him how many he has killed today, “some fourteen” [2.4.107], and before long we have Falstaff’s story about his fighting with two men in buckram who expand eventually into fourteen. The comic symmetry has a serious side to it. The central and essential virtue for a king who’s eventually going to win the battle of Agincourt is courage. According to an ethical system that goes back ultimately to Aristotle, a virtue is a mean between extremes, and the virtue of courage is a mean between cowardice at one extreme and rashness or foolhardiness at the other. Falstaff represents one extreme and Hotspur the other, little as that statement does justice to the complexity of either. Shakespeare’s treatment of Hotspur’s rhetoric is, even for him, an extraordinary technical tour de force. To paraphrase a remark of Worcester’s, Hotspur says everything except the point of what he wants to say [1.3.209–10]. “I profess not talking” [5.2.91], he says calmly later in the play, but he is certainly an enthusiastic enough amateur. But he can’t seem to give form or direction to what he says, and as you listen to him— and of course you have to listen to someone who hardly ever stops—a conviction begins to settle in your mind: whatever his courage or other good qualities, this man will never be a king. No one else in Shakespeare, not even the much later Coriolanus, who resembles him in some respects, shows such energy in breaking away from people. In the opening scene he gives us his brilliant portrait of the dandy who professes to regret the invention of gunpowder [1.3.29–69]: no great point in it, except that it shows us how Hotspur divides people into the men who fight and the anthropoids who don’t. Later he comes on the stage reading aloud from a letter [2.3.1–14]—we never learn who wrote it. We learn only that the letter urges caution, and Hotspur gets claustrophobia when anyone urges caution. Then there is the hilarious scene in which Hotspur ridicules Owen Glendower and his fantasies about the omens surrounding his birth [3.1.11–34]. The failure of Glendower to come to his aid at the battle of Shrewsbury clearly has some connection with this [4.1.131–2]. Again,

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Hotspur has no taste for music or poetry—always a bad sign in Shakespeare—because he can’t sit still long enough to listen to them [3.1.125– 33, 226–62]. We couldn’t imagine him carousing in Eastcheap with Falstaff and Poins: he’d be bored out of his mind in five minutes. His obviously adoring wife addresses an eloquent and pathetic speech to him about his neglect of her, but he’s engaged in men’s work and won’t listen [2.3.37–64]. In the last act, brushing aside some letters for him, he complains: the time of life is short! To spend that shortness basely were too long. (5.2.81–2)

Fighting is the one thing that does not bore him, and nothing that does not lead to fighting is worth bothering with. His wife’s name, incidentally, is Kate: the historical Lady Percy was named Elizabeth, and Shakespeare’s main source calls her Eleanor.125 I don’t for a moment think there’s any particular significance in Kate, but it would be highly characteristic of Hotspur if in fact he were not quite sure what his wife’s name was. In contrast to Falstaff, who is all realism, Hotspur is a quixotic figure, as much in love with honour as Falstaff is detached from it. With many of his supporters abandoning him, and thinking that his glory will be all the greater with the odds against him, he goes into battle and is struck down by Prince Henry. His dying speech is the reverse of all the rest of his rhetoric, and says exactly and very economically what he means: O Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth! . . . But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool; And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop. (5.4.77–83)126

Most editors now follow the First Quarto for the second line, which gives a simpler reading: “But thoughts, the slaves of life, and life, time’s fool.” I don’t question their editorial judgment, but if I were directing the play I’d insist on the Folio reading above. Going back to the ethic of the golden mean, of virtue as a middle way between extremes, we notice that the extremes have a good deal in common, and are less opposed than they look. Rashness or foolhardiness can be a form of cowardice, as any psychologist will tell you. And however absurd it sounds to associate Hotspur with cowardice, this speech indicates that all his life he has

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been running away from something, something that has a great deal to do with time and the way that time ticks away the moments of his youth, that all too brief interval when he can be still a first-class fighting man. We notice also the word “fool,” apparently meaning victim, in the sense in which Romeo calls himself fortune’s fool; a sense that will become very important in King Lear. The theme of time we must leave and pick up later. Falstaff is so complex a character that it’s hardly possible to make an unqualified statement about him, even that his name is Falstaff. His name was originally Oldcastle: when this gave offence, Shakespeare reverted to a very minor character introduced into what may well have been his first play, Henry VI.127 There a Sir John Falstaff comes running across the stage away from a battle; when asked with contempt if he will desert his great commander Talbot, he says, “All the Talbots in the world, to save my life” [1 Henry VI, 3.2.108]. We note that this Falstaff is in a panic, something the Falstaff we know never is, apart from some very unreliable reports about him. The “cowardice” of Falstaff comes from a cool and reasonable approach to a situation full of hypocritical idealism: as is said of him by another character, he will fight no longer than he sees reason [1 Henry IV, 1.2.185]. As a result his cowardice is full of humour— something a mere panicky deserter never could have—and also very disturbing, because it calls into question a lot of clichés about honour and glory. His soliloquy on honour on the field of Shrewsbury [5.1.127–41] must have seemed to many in the original audience about as funny a speech as had ever been spoken on a stage, because they accepted more of the idealism about honour, and for them the speech would probably have had far greater psychological release than for us. In one of the plays in Shaw’s Back to Methusaleh, set in the future, a monument has been erected to Falstaff. It is explained that after a few experiences of warfare (even though this is early twentieth century, and before the atom bomb), it had been realized that cowardice was a major social virtue, and so a monument had been set up to the sage who discovered the fact.128 We’re closer to that state of mind today than we are to the Elizabethan attitude, to say nothing of the medieval one. To the kernel of the stage coward have been added a large number of other stage types. Falstaff is also a miles gloriosus or bragging soldier, who claims to have killed Hotspur [1 Henry IV, 5.4.124–53];129 he is a parasite, a type deriving from Classical comedy, with the bottomless capacity for drink appropriate to a parasite (the point is made very early

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that his bills are paid by Prince Henry); he is a comic butt, someone to be played tricks on in order to see how he can wriggle out of them; he is a vice, a central figure of the old morality plays who acted as a tempter and stirred up complications, later someone with the role of starting a comic action going. Above all, he is a jester, whose outrageous boasts are his way of keeping the party lively: his two men in buckram grow into an astonishing number, but he is not a schizophrenic, as he would have to be to expect to be believed. In part 2, after he meets Shallow, he soliloquizes: “I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing out of six fashions” [5.1.78–80]. Characters in comedy normally do not have enough scope to become counterparts of the great tragic heroes: Falstaff is the only comic character in Shakespeare who does, because his setting is a history play. The Falstaff of the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor is a much smaller figure. But the Falstaff of the histories ranks with Don Quixote as an inexhaustible comic study, though for opposite reasons. Don Quixote clings to his idealistic and romantic hallucinations about the age of chivalry in a society which ignores them; Falstaff clings to a self-serving rationality and a prose rhythm, while all the noblemen bumbling in blank verse are, if equally self-serving, better at disguising the fact. As long as Prince Henry’s interest in him holds out, he seems invulnerable, but there are two weak spots in his armour. In the first place, he is Sir John Falstaff, knight, well enough known to have a rebel officer surrender to him because of his name alone. Consequently he is involved in the war game whether he wants to be or not, and is empowered to recruit soldiers for the war against the conspirators. Being a vice, he takes bribes to let the good recruits off and conscript only worthless ones: our sympathy for him goes down a good deal when he tells us complacently what he’s done, but again his realism gives us a side to such warfare that the blank-verse history makers give little hint of. He speaks of the men he’s collected as “the cankers of a calm world and a long peace” [1 Henry IV, 4.2.29–30], and defends their lean and beggarly appearance with the phrase “food for powder” [4.2.65–6]. What difference does it make whether a soldier has been a good or a bad soldier if he’s dead? At the battle of Shrewsbury he tells us that of his hundred and fifty men about three are left alive, “and they are for the town’s end, to beg through130 life” [5.3.37–8]. And while his exploits on the field of Shrewsbury are absurd enough, we may also remember that he is far too old to be on a battlefield at all, and is not, to put it mildly, in top physical

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condition. He’s isolated also in a different and subtle way. I’ve spoken of elements in the action of a Shakespeare play that we don’t see but know are there, like the sun in Romeo and Juliet and the moon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the histories we don’t, except in film productions, see any horses, though we realize that horses are constantly carrying all the important people over the country and into battle. But we can’t imagine Falstaff on top of a horse. His other weakness is his very real fondness for Prince Hal, who is, as he tells us early on, merely using Falstaff and the others as stooges for putting on an act of his own. In his opening scene he says to the Prince, “Thou hast the most unsavoury similes, and art indeed the most comparative, rascalliest, sweet young prince” [1 Henry IV, 1.2.79–81].131 There is no mistaking the genuineness of the affection in that tone: even the frigid Prince feels it occasionally, though never deeply. Falstaff is aware that his hold on Prince Henry is by no means secure, and this awareness increases as the two plays go on, driving him in the second part to make the very foolish move of writing the Prince a letter warning him against Poins [2 Henry IV, 2.2.119–30], who, as the best of the Eastcheap lot, is the normal object of his jealousy. But even so we are told quite explicitly in Henry V that his public rejection by Henry has destroyed his will to live [2.1.88]. One of the sources for Henry IV and Henry V is an older play called The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, a messy dog’s breakfast of a play that still helped to give Shakespeare a central idea for his own plays: that the popular appeal of a great king who conquered France would be immensely enhanced if he were presented first as a “madcap” Prince [1 Henry IV, 1.2.142–3], associating with ordinary or low social types, getting into trouble with the law, and displaying the kind of undirected energy for which his later career provided an outlet.132 In this play Prince Hal tells us at the start that he is putting on a show very carefully designed for maximum effect, in which a reputation for being idle or even profligate will be suddenly reversed when he enters on his responsibilities. Throughout the play he seems utterly confident of his eventual success and his ability to take care of Hotspur as well: we may wonder what his confidence is based on, as whatever else he may be doing in Eastcheap, he is not getting much practice in fencing. Perhaps he already feels what comes out clearly in the imagery of Henry V: that he is on the rising side of the wheel of fortune, and so nothing can stop him. In this soliloquy, at the end of the second scene, two images are used that are

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important. One is the sun, which Henry will imitate when he rises from prince to king after having been sunk in the darker elements of his kingdom. Falstaff speaks of his group as “Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon” [1.2.25–6], which sounds like a parody of Oberon’s wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he urges the Prince, with unconscious irony, to make a place for the activities of the night when he becomes king. The other image is that of time, which emerges in the last line of the soliloquy: “Redeeming time when men least think I will” [1.2.217].133 As we’ll be seeing at intervals all through, the role of time is always centrally important in Shakespeare. The tragic action normally cuts into time, and anyone who, like Hamlet, feels that there is no right time for him, and that the whole time of his activity is out of joint,134 can meet nothing but disaster. Macbeth often reproaches himself for acting a second too late, allowing someone crucial to escape his massacres by not seizing the exact moment. In comedy, time is usually a little more leisurely, sometimes taking a generation or so to work out its designs, as in The Winter’s Tale. Prospero in The Tempest, in contrast, has studied astrology and knows when the right moment comes for him. For a king to be successful, a sense of timing is perhaps the most important ability he can have: in Henry V it is said of the new king, when he is about to invade France: Now he weighs time Even to the utmost grain. [2.4.137–8]

The first remark Falstaff makes in this play is to ask Prince Hal what time it is, and he is told that such people as Falstaff, who sleep all day and drink all night, don’t need to know the time [1 Henry IV, 1.2.1–12]. Falstaff is a time-blocking figure, someone who gets in the way of the movement of history. Hotspur’s hair-trigger reactions also indicate that he has no sense of time, though for opposite reasons: he tends to jump his fences before they are there, and only in the enlightenment of his dying speech does he realize that life is time’s fool, the plaything and often the victim of time [5.4.81]. Prince Henry himself is rather helpless when his father upbraids him for the manner of his life and tells him that he is simply being Richard II all over again [3.2.93–5]. His plan of action is based on the crucial difference between the reputation of a prince, who is still technically a

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private citizen, and a king, a difference Richard did not take account of. Henry IV tells his son that when he was making his way to the throne he appeared very seldom in public and always with the maximum effect [3.2.39–59] (this, we noted, is the opposite of what Richard II said about him, but something no doubt has to be allowed for selective memory). And clearly the Prince can’t say, “Yes, but I’m going to be in a much stronger position than you—thanks I admit largely to you—and I’m putting on a far better act than you ever thought of.” When this scene is parodied in the Eastcheap tavern, with Falstaff taking the role of the Prince’s father and ending, naturally, with a plug for himself as the Prince’s companion (“Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world”), the Prince answers, “I do; I will” [2.4.479–81] and we realize that he means precisely what he says. Prince Henry fits the general pattern of the play in that he is looking out primarily for his own interests: his companions are people to use and manipulate, and, as his father has already discovered, a king cannot afford real friends. The long scene in the Eastcheap tavern, act 2, scene 4, begins with an episode I still find puzzling, but I think it has something to do with the same principle. The Prince enters laughing and perhaps drunk, telling Poins that he has become very popular with the drawers and servants of the tavern, who regard him as a good fellow and not proud like Falstaff, and one of them, named Francis, has offered him a gift of a pennyworth of sugar. There follows an elaborate practical joke on Francis, solely with the object of making him look a fool. After this has gone on for quite a while, Poins says: “What cunning match have you made with this jest of the drawer: come, what’s the issue?” [2.4.90–1]. In other words: “What’s so funny?” Francis has done nothing but try to express some affection for the Prince: his gift is not worth much, but it’s the first rule of chivalry never to devalue a gift from a social inferior for that reason. The Prince does not answer Poins’s question at all; he says: I am now of all humours that have showed themselves humours since the old days of goodman Adam to the pupil age of this present twelve o’clock at midnight. (2.4.92–5)

The surface meaning of this is that he feels like indulging any fancy that has ever entered the mind of the human race. I think there may be something more being said: something to the effect that Prince Henry is very close to completing his “madcap prince” act, and that what he has got

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from putting it on is a sense of having soaked himself in every social aspect of the kingdom he is going to rule. He is becoming his entire nation in an individual form, which is symbolically what a king is. It is interesting though that this statement, a very important one if I’ve got it anywhere near right, comes in a scene that shows him pulling away from someone who is trying to appreciate him as a person. It is true that the battle of Shrewsbury shows him in a much more sympathetic role: he gives what he thinks is the dead Falstaff an obituary speech that one might make about a dog that has been run over, but still there are traces of affection in it, and when Falstaff revives, with his preposterous claim of having killed Hotspur himself, he allows him to get away with it. Considering what Hotspur’s opinion of Falstaff would have been, Henry’s generosity comes close to a desecrating of Hotspur’s body. The First Part of Henry IV is, in one of its aspects, the tragedy of Hotspur, and it ends with the triumphant survival of Falstaff. It is possible that Shakespeare had planned the rejection of Falstaff in a second play by this time. The historical material in the second part is thin enough to make it likely that a demand for more Falstaff was the main reason for the second part’s existence, and Shakespeare must have known that his audience would find the scene of his public rejection a bit hard to take. Nonetheless, as the first part includes the tragedy of Hotspur, so the second part includes the tragedy of Falstaff, so far as Falstaff is capable of a tragic role. 2 Henry IV follows the same general outline as the first part; but it soon becomes clear that the Eastcheap group is heading for rapid disintegration. The first scene with Falstaff begins with Falstaff asking his page for the doctor’s report on his urine [1.2.1–2]; the third includes Falstaff’s order “Empty the jordan” [2.4.34]. We feel that we are being physically pushed closer to Falstaff than we really want to get. Mistress Quickly is not so amiably chuckle-headed as before: Falstaff is still sponging off her, as he was in the first part, but her reluctance to pawn her plate to fill his clamorous belly [2.1.154] has a genuine pathos and the abortive lawsuit she brings has a kind of desperation [2.1.1–131]. One gets the impression that Falstaff’s supplies from the Prince are being cut down, and that it is much harder for him to support all his vices in the style to which they are accustomed. Other characters indicate that the setting is not all good fun, clean or dirty. We meet Pistol, who is a familiar type of braggart soldier, but he is neither witty, nor, in Falstaff’s phrase, a cause of wit in other men [2

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Henry IV, 1.2.10]. Doll Tearsheet is fairly typical of the stage whores of the drama of the time, very tough-talking and belligerent and generally drunk. Even she is somewhat taken aback by Falstaff’s lifestyle. When at the end of the play she is arrested and the beadle remarks, “there hath been a man or two lately killed about her” [5.4.6],135 we get a glimpse of underworld activities that no prince, however much of a “madcap” act he puts on, can afford to get mixed up with. Similarly with others Falstaff meets. He is accustomed to feel that it doesn’t matter what he does if his evasions afterward are sufficiently amusing, but such techniques do not work with the Chief Justice, nor with Prince Henry’s younger brother John, who has about as much humour as the horse he rides on. Falstaff, in short, is beginning to feel the strain of a professional jester whose jokes no longer go over, apart from the fact that he does not stop with jokes. He spends time with Justice Shallow, the one fully realized character peculiar to this play, and the time extends, because each of them thinks he has something to gain from the other. But nostalgic reminiscences reminding him how old he is and how long it was since he was young are hardly what Falstaff wants to hear at this point. In this play Henry IV is near his death: he is perpetually exhausted and he can’t sleep. His great strength has always been in his ability to take short views, to do what has to be done at the time and not worry about the remoter perspectives. But in this play a long and desolate speech breaks out of him about how any youth, if he could see the entire pattern of time stretching out ahead of him, would simply lie down and die and refuse to go through with it [2 Henry IV, 3.1.53–6]. The nemesis of usurpation is working itself out: a good deal of the discussion between the king’s party and the rebels consists of rehashing feuds and grudges that go back to the beginning of Richard II, or even earlier. The implication is partly that rebellion is, among other things, caused by a sterile brooding on history with the object, not of building up a future, but of reshaping the past. Meanwhile Prince Henry is very near the point at which he is to take over as king, and the wish for his father to die and change the scene is very close to his consciousness, as a conversation with Poins shows. In the meantime he is in a state of doldrums, anxious to break away from his madcap act, but still having to wait for his cue. His guideline is still “in everything the purpose must weigh with the folly” [2.2.175–6], but the folly and the idleness are beginning to chafe. Eventually there comes the scene in which he is caught trying on his sick father’s crown:

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one of the traditional episodes of the madcap prince saga that had to be included [4.5.41–88]. His excuses when discovered sound lame [4.5.138– 76]—he has learned something from Falstaff but not enough—but then King Henry is dying and starved for affection, and he accepts the excuses with a certain wry amusement, mingled with hope. Falstaff, though he has had many warnings that he will not be in as much favour with the new king as he thinks, pushes all the slights he has had out of his mind, and just as the impetuous Hotspur realizes at the moment of death that he has been running away from something, so the leisurely and heavily moving Falstaff plunges into a frenetic energy to get to the coronation of the new king and become the second-greatest man in the kingdom. Well, we know what happened to that dream. At the end of part 1, on the battlefield of Shrewsbury, there is the greatest possible contrast between all the ferocious fighting and the absurd antics of Falstaff with his bottle of sack. But in the second part there seems a closer connection between the rejection of Falstaff and the main historical action of the play, in which Prince John gets the rebel army to disarm by a rather shabby and obvious trick. The Archbishop of York, on the rebel side, remarks: we are all diseased, And with our surfeiting and wanton hours Have brought ourselves into a burning fever, And we must bleed for it. (4.1.54–7)136

Bloodletting was so standard a medical practice at the time that the analogy carries on into the social body. But there is a crucial distinction, which the Archbishop misses, between the bloodletting of civil war and of foreign war, and this tough, gritty, cynical play ends with the expectation of very soon invading France. IV Hamlet Hamlet seems to be the first play of Shakespeare in which he is deliberately competing with a well-known earlier play on the same subject. We don’t have the earlier play, but allusions to it tell us that it had a ghost crying, “Hamlet, revenge!”137 One of the most popular tragedies of the time was The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, and some resemblances between it and Hamlet suggest that the earlier Hamlet was also Kyd’s.138

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The Shakespeare play has a First Quarto, a bad pirated one, which garbles the text and makes a frightful mess of such things as the “To be or not to be” speech,139 but still has many points of interest. In it, Polonius is called Corambis,140 the Queen explicitly says that she knew nothing of Hamlet senior’s murder,141 a stage direction tells us that Hamlet leaps into Ophelia’s grave to struggle with Laertes,142 and Hamlet’s speech to the players refers to the ad-libbing of clowns.143 In short, it undoubtedly has some authority: how much is another question. It has been staged in its own right,144 and while I have not seen a performance, it’s clear that it’s a lively and actable play, and may well have come closer than the texts you’re reading to the Hamlet the Elizabethan audience actually got. I don’t see how an uncut Hamlet could ever have been performed under Elizabethan conditions. There’s a seventeenth-century Hamlet play in German, called Der bestrafte Brudermord (Brother-Murder Punished), probably derived from a version brought to Germany by English companies on tour there, and it’s closer to Q1 than to the texts we know.145 Shakespeare’s company seems to have been annoyed by Q1, and they took the unusual step of issuing an authorized Quarto, which, they said on the title page, was twice as long as Q1, and printed “according to the true and perfect copy.”146 This Q2 is the basis of most modern editions of the play. Then there’s the Folio Hamlet, shorter than Q2 but still containing many passages not in it.147 Editors assume that every line likely to have been written by Shakespeare must be preserved, and that their job is to reconstruct a monolithic Hamlet, containing everything in both Q2 and F that’s missing from the other. No doubt they’re right as editors, though whether Shakespeare really wrote such a definitive Hamlet is by no means certain. Anyway, when we take Q2 as a basis and add to it all the F lines not in it, the result is Shakespeare’s longest play. It’s long partly because everyone, with the exception of the two women, talks too much. (That’s just the dramatic effect, of course: words are not really being wasted.) “Brief let me be,” says the Ghost [1.5.59], and goes on for another fifty lines. “I will be brief,” says Polonius [2.2.92], after the Queen pulls him up and tells him to get on with it, but he isn’t. Even the Player Queen, Gertrude says, protests too much [3.2.230]. Hamlet, of course, talks incessantly: he wonders why he “must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words” [2.2.585], and goes on talking about that. He talks so much that he begins to sound like a guide or commentator on the play, and one of the standard ways of misreading Hamlet is to accept Hamlet’s views as Shakespeare’s. But Hamlet’s views of Polonius,

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of his mother’s sin in marrying Claudius, of the treachery of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, while they may often be reasonably close to what we’re likely to accept, are surcharged with Hamlet’s melancholy—that is, they’re sick. He sees what’s there, but there’s an emotional excess in his perception that’s reflected back to him. His self-reproaches are sick too, but it’s not so hard to see that. We must never forget that while he’s alienated from the other characters (except Horatio), he’s still involved in the action, and not where we are in the audience. For example: his address to the players is often read as encapsulating Shakespeare’s own view of how his plays should be acted. But Hamlet’s views of classical restraint in acting, his preference for plays that are caviar to the general [2.2.437],148 and the like, are views which are primarily appropriate to a university-trained highbrow. It’s obvious as he goes on that Hamlet could never conceive of the possibility of such a play as King Lear. He’s not much of a poet, he tells Ophelia, but when he’s instructing the actors how to speak “my lines,” we hear the voice of the amateur, concerned primarily with making sure that nobody misses a syllable of his precious speech. We can’t check up on his abilities here, because we never get the speech, at least to recognize it: presumably it came after the play broke up. In short, Hamlet is one more character in Shakespeare, who contains him as he contains Peter Quince. When I was an undergraduate, my Shakespeare teacher149 assigned an essay topic, “Minor Problems in Hamlet,” by which he meant all the “problems” except two: how mad was Hamlet, and why did he delay? This was years before a very influential essay had appeared by L.C. Knights called “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” an attack on pseudo-problems raised by Shakespearean critics that are not relevant to the kind of thing Shakespeare was doing.150 It didn’t take me long, even without the benefit of that essay, to find that most of the minor problems were pseudo-problems. But I discovered two things that were useful. First, there’s no boundary in the play between the actual and the pseudoproblems; second, there’s no other play in Shakespeare, which probably means no other play in the world, that raises so many questions of the “problem” type. It’s quite clear that problems, genuine or phony, are part of the texture of the play, and central to its meaning. I’m not saying that we get to the “real meaning” of the play by figuring out answers to its problems: I’m saying rather the opposite. Insoluble problems and unanswerable questions meet us everywhere we turn, and make Hamlet the most stifling and claustrophobic of plays. Not for us, because we’re

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outside it, but for the characters caught up in its action. It used to be said that one reason for all the complexity is the older Hamlet play, which saddled Shakespeare with an “intractable” plot and situation much cruder than he wanted to use. There can hardly be much in that: the earlier Hamlet looks so mysterious because we don’t have it, but we do have an earlier version of King Lear (spelled Leir),151 and it’s clear from that that Shakespeare never allowed any source to become “intractable” and get in the way of his play. Example of “problem”: why does Hamlet fly into such a rage when he hears Laertes expressing a very natural and poignant grief for his dead sister, even if it includes some equally natural cursing of Hamlet? No direct answer, probably, but we can understand something of his feeling. Apart from Hamlet’s sudden discovery that Ophelia is dead, as he assumes by suicide, a shock great enough to demoralize him in itself, he’s seeing the reflection in Laertes of his own dilemma of words taking the place of action. “Show me what thou’lt do!” he screams at Laertes [5.1.274], although there is nothing appropriate for Laertes to do at this point except kill Hamlet. Then Hamlet says: What is the reason that you use me thus? I loved you ever. (5.1.289–90)

This has a ring of sincerity, but if Hamlet is only assuming madness, as we have been led to think, has he really forgotten that he’s wiped out Laertes’ family? Perhaps not, at least if when he says to Horatio, For, by the image of my cause, I see The portraiture of his, (5.2.77–8)

he is thinking of Laertes as someone else with a murdered father. In apologizing to Laertes, however, he pleads diminished responsibility, and says that his madness and not Hamlet himself was to blame [5.2.230–9]. But the worst thing Hamlet has done to Laertes is to murder Polonius, and he does that in a scene where he is swearing to his mother with the greatest vehemence that he is not mad [3.4.141–6]. And if Hamlet can make madness a not-guilty plea for murder, why can’t Ophelia be exonerated from suicide for the same reason? Yet the gravediggers agree that she was a voluntary suicide [5.1.9–13]; the priest grumbles that her death was “doubtful” [5.1.227], and has certainly no intention of giving

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her the benefit of any doubt; and Hamlet himself tells us that the funeral rites are those of a suicide [5.1.219–21]. And so it goes: every part of the play is like this. Take the use of the supernatural. The opening scene gets the point established that the Ghost is objective and not just a hallucination of Hamlet’s. For a speculative temperament like Hamlet’s there might be a certain exhilaration in the revealing of another world, in seeing for oneself that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in Horatio’s cautious and sceptical philosophy [1.5.166–7]. But everything that seems to expand the horizon in the play actually limits it still further. The fact that the Ghost has to leave by dawn suggests that he could be an evil spirit, and there’s enough sense of evil to make the group who first see him huddle together and try to warm themselves up, so to speak, by thinking of the “so hallowed and so gracious” time of Christmas Eve [1.1.164], when there are no evil spirits. In the next scene Hamlet, in his black clothes, standing apart from the brilliant court scene, is urged by his mother not to seek his father in the dust [1.2.70–1], and by his new stepfather to throw his “unprevailing woe” [1.2.107] to earth. Melancholy, the cold and dry humour, is being associated with earth, the cold and dry element. With Hamlet’s first soliloquy a vision begins to form of a corrupt Danish court resting on a seething and heaving quicksand. This vision is embodied for us on the stage at the end of the first act, when the Ghost disappears below it and follows Hamlet and his friends hic et ubique, as Hamlet says [1.5.156], saying “swear” at intervals [1.5.149–81], the perfect image for an unresting spirit whose unresolved murder is threatening the whole Danish world with destruction from below. Quite a contrast with the language of the opening scene, which begins (practically) with the words “Long live the king!” [1.1.3], meaning Claudius, and where the first line addressed to the Ghost by Horatio contains the word “usurp.”152 Usurpation, kingship, and the source of evil are reversing their locations. Hamlet’s real difficulty with the Ghost is: if purgatory is a place of purification, why does a ghost come from it shrieking for vengeance? And why does purgatory, as the Ghost describes it [1.5.10–20], sound so much as though it were hell? The Ghost’s credentials are very doubtful, by all Elizabethan tests for such things, and although Hamlet is in a state close to hysteria when he calls the Ghost “old mole” [1.5.162], “this fellow in the cellarage” [1.5.151], and the like, it is still unlikely that he would use such phrases if he had firmly identified the Ghost with his father at

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that point. On the other hand, he has always despised and distrusted Claudius, and is inclined to think the story authentic whether the teller of it is or not. There are two elements, in any case, in the message the Ghost brings him that increase to an unbearable pitch what I’ve called the sense of claustrophobia. The first element is the role of religion in the play. The Ghost suffers so much in purgatory because he was killed before he had time to be confessed and shriven [1.5.74–9]. So Hamlet decides that he won’t kill Claudius while he’s at prayer because he wants him to go to hell and not to purgatory [3.3.73–96]. Never mind how genuine this feeling is just now: the implication is that when we enter the next world we run on a mindless railway switch that will automatically send Claudius to hell if he dies drunk, and to purgatory if he dies praying. We could write this off as an excuse, of course, if it stood alone; but the notion is deeply rooted in Hamlet’s mind, whether implanted by the Ghost or already there. He makes a point of the fact that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were to be killed with “not shriving-time allowed” [5.2.47], and when he discovers that the man behind the arras is Polonius and not Claudius he says, “take thy fortune” [3.4.32]. Apparently everything depends on whether the priest gets there in time or not. So it’s not very reassuring to find that the only accredited priest in the play is that horrible creature who presides over Ophelia’s funeral, and who gets a concentration of malice and spite into an eight-line speech that would do credit to the Devil himself, who doubtless inspired it [5.1.226–34]. The supernatural dimension of the play, then, doesn’t expand our vision: on the contrary, it seals it in by surrounding us with an “afterlife” that has no infinite presence in it, only the clicking and whirring of a sacramental machine. Hamlet’s weariness with his life and his longing for death, if necessary by suicide, are expressed many times in the play. Suicide is an obvious way out for someone who feels that the world is a prison, even if “a goodly one” [2.2.245]. But the machine cuts that escape off too: if you kill yourself you won’t get the release of death; you’ll simply lose what chance there is of ever being released. The second element in the Ghost’s message that squeezes Hamlet’s life into narrowing limits is the interruption of the habits, such as they are, of Hamlet’s life. At first, though he has no use for Claudius, he has no great hatred for him either, and the real cause of his melancholy is not the loss of his father but the remarriage of his mother. The Ghost tells him that he must focus on Claudius and stop brooding about Ger-

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trude. “Taint not thy mind,” he says [1.5.85], apparently not realizing how much it’s tainted already, and “leave her to heaven” [1.5.86], again not a reassuring recommendation coming from him. But Hamlet’s feelings are still fixated on his mother, and he has to keep working up his hatred of Claudius. It is a little unusual for someone who has an appointment to see his mother to stop on the way and remind himself in a soliloquy that he must be careful not to murder her [3.2.388–99], especially when he’s about to pass up a chance to kill Claudius and get rid of his ghostly incubus. One reason why it’s Gertrude rather than Claudius who drives Hamlet up the wall is her total unconsciousness of having done anything wrong. She is a soft, easygoing, sentimental woman who “would hang on” her late husband [1.2.143] and be treated with the greatest solicitude in response, and Hamlet does not see that the instinct to hang on his father was the same one that prompted her to attach herself after his death to the nearest strong-looking man who presented himself. Because of her compliant nature, Hamlet finds her delightfully easy to bully, and she keeps crumpling under his ranting until the exasperated Ghost comes in to derail him again. We notice that the Ghost is still solicitous about her, in spite of his purgatorial preoccupations [3.4.112–15]. Hamlet keeps calling the marriage incestuous, as technically perhaps it was: marriage with deceased husband’s brother was the other half of the great Victorian anxiety symbol of marriage with deceased wife’s sister. The Hamlet situation was the one that brought the Reformation to England, when Henry VIII asked the Pope to dissolve his marriage to Catherine of Aragon on the ground that she had been previously married to his deceased older brother. But no one else, even the Ghost, seems much concerned about that side of it, although the Ghost does call Claudius an incestuous and adulterate beast [1.5.42], along with many other epithets that he had after all some provocation for using. But the incest theme is really another stick to beat Claudius with: the real centre of Hamlet’s distress is the “wicked speed” [1.2.156] of the marriage; it seems almost to suggest some prearrangement. Freudian critics have been quick to notice that Hamlet is in the classic Oedipus situation in regard to his parents, and have suggested that Hamlet is paralysed in trying to move against Claudius because Claudius has fulfilled Hamlet’s own Oedipal desires by killing his father and marrying his mother.153 It would not be reasonable to ignore the Oedipal element in the set-up, but, as always in Shakespeare, there are

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many other factors involved. Hamlet is a student whose few pleasures have to do with the life of the mind. It is pathetic, almost humorous, that after he hears the Ghost his conditioned impulse is to reach for what we would call his notebook and make a memorandum about the hypocrisy of villains [1.5.92–112]. I am not saying that Hamlet has a studious temperament averse to action, though he does have the student’s disease of melancholy, which means that his actions are apt to be out of synchronization, being either delayed, like his revenge on Claudius, or hasty and rash, like his killing of Polonius. This fact has a good deal to do, naturally, with his horror at seeing his amiable mother moving so much faster to remarry than one would expect. What I am saying is that the cold, bleak, primitive call to revenge does not give Hamlet’s life a positive purpose: it merely impoverishes still further what life he has. Among the conflict of emotions in his mind when he watches Claudius praying and wonders if he should kill him now, one is undoubtedly a strong distaste for a treacherous and rather cowardly act, which is what sticking a rapier into a man’s turned back really amounts to, whatever the urgency of the revenge ethic. It is, as he says, “hire and salary, not revenge” [3.3.79].154 O.K., Claudius started it, but if you adopt the methods of your enemies you become like your enemies, and Hamlet has no wish to become like Claudius at his worst. Revenge, said Francis Bacon in his essay on the subject, is a kind of wild justice,155 and something in Hamlet is too civilized for stealthy murder, though he clearly would stand up to any kind of open conflict. In all revenge tragedies we need three characters (sometimes doubled or in groups): a character to be killed, a character to kill him, and an avenger to kill the killer. The revenge is usually regarded by an audience as a positive act of retribution that brings the moral norms of society into balance again, and it usually sympathizes with the avenger accordingly. Because in the Bible God is represented as saying “Vengeance is mine,”156 the avenger is often regarded, in the tragedies of the period, as an agent of divine vengeance, whatever his own moral status. It is in tragedy particularly that we see how persistently man creates his gods in his own image, and finds nothing incongruous when a ferocious and panic-stricken human revenge is called the carrying out of God’s own will. Shakespeare has two revenge tragedies apart from Hamlet: Julius Caesar and Macbeth. Julius Caesar and Duncan are murdered; Brutus (with others) and Macbeth are the murderers; the avengers are Mark Antony, with Octavius Caesar, and Malcolm and Macduff.

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In Hamlet, however, there are three concentric rings of revenge tragedies. In the centre is Polonius murdered by Hamlet and avenged by Laertes. Around it is the main action of the play, Hamlet senior murdered by Claudius and avenged by Hamlet junior. Around that again is the background story of Fortinbras senior, killed by Hamlet senior in a duel on the day that Hamlet junior was born and the first gravedigger entered into his occupation [5.1.143–8]. Fortinbras junior, at the beginning of the play, is planning a revenge on Denmark [1.1.95–107]: Claudius manages to avoid this threat, but Fortinbras comes in at the end of the play, achieving precisely what a successful revenge would have achieved, the crown of Denmark. The final result of all the to-do the Ghost of Hamlet senior starts is that the successor of Claudius on the throne of Denmark is the son of the man he had killed long before the play began. Naturally, the simultaneous existence of these three revenge themes produces a fantastically complex play, especially when Hamlet has both the murderer’s role in the Polonius tragedy and the avenger role in the main story. Their total effect is to neutralize the sense of the restoring of moral balance that a revenge is supposed to give us as a rule. Revenge does not complete anything, it merely counters something, and a second vengeance pattern will grow up in opposition to it. Of Fortinbras, on whom the hopes and expectations of the few survivors of the play are fixed, we know nothing except that he will fight for anything. In tragedy the typical effect on the audience is traditionally assumed to be a catharsis, a word that has something to do with purification, whatever else it means. Hamlet seems to me a tragedy without a catharsis,157 a tragedy in which everything noble and heroic is smothered under ferocious revenge codes, treachery, spying, and the consequences of weak actions by broken wills. Let us look first at the inner circle of Polonius, Laertes, and Ophelia. At the beginning we have a contrast between Hamlet, forbidden to leave Denmark and become a student again at Wittenberg, and Laertes, who has finally persuaded his father to let him go to France. So we have a scene of leave-taking, with Polonius sounding off with a number of maxims (we get an impression that Laertes has heard them all before, and perhaps not very long before), and ending with the noble and resonant “This above all” [1.3.78], etc. After which he gets a servant to follow Laertes to Paris to snoop and spy and encourage talebearing from his friends [2.1.1–71]. That’s one of the first examples of how any opening in the thick fog surrounding the court of Denmark gets sealed up again.

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In the same scene Polonius tells Ophelia not to encourage Hamlet’s advances, because he’s too high in rank to want to marry her. Ophelia says that Hamlet’s wooing has been “honourable” [1.3.111], and we gather later on that Claudius and Gertrude would have approved of the match and that Gertrude at least expected it. Polonius may be simply an obstinate ass, but it’s more likely that he’s rationalizing something, and that we have to add him to the Shakespearean fathers with grown-up daughters who won’t let go, except on their own terms. Laertes weighs in with a remarkably priggish speech about maidenly virtue, and Ophelia tells him, very politely and demurely, that he just might try to mind his own business and look after his own morals. “Oh, fear me not,” snaps Laertes [1.3.51]: sisters are not supposed to answer back. The point of this is, apparently, to establish Laertes as already suspicious of Hamlet. After Hamlet learns the truth about how Claudius became king, he conceals his feelings under the disguise of madness, and Claudius feels that there is something dangerous there to be investigated [3.1.188], something more than just the shock of his father’s death and mother’s remarriage. Polonius is all ready with a theory. In speaking of the love conventions that come into Romeo and Juliet, I said that those who died for love were saints and martyrs in the God of Love’s calendar.158 It was also in the convention that great lovers frequently went mad when frustrated in love: one of the best-known poems of the age was Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, about the great knight Roland, or Orlando, of Charlemagne’s court, driven mad by the infidelity of his mistress, Angelica. Polonius, a wide if not always critical reader, has decided that the frustration of Hamlet’s courtship of Ophelia, the result of his own piercing insight into the situation, has driven Hamlet mad [2.1.107–16]. Must be true: he read about it in a book somewhere. He has one piece of evidence: Hamlet, Ophelia reports, had burst into her room, stared hard at her face, and then left [2.1.74–97]. We can see that he was wondering if he could possibly make Ophelia a friend and confidante in his situation, as Horatio is, and saw nothing but immaturity and weakness in her face. However, Polonius proposes setting a booby trap for Hamlet, using Ophelia as a decoy, and Ophelia has no power to resist this scheme. So there’s a conversation between Hamlet and Ophelia, with Claudius and Polonius eavesdropping, as Hamlet realizes near the end of the interview (at least, that’s how the scene is usually played, and it seems to fit everything). That’s the end of any luck Ophelia might have in future. “Am I not right, old Jephthah?” Hamlet says to Polonius [2.2.410].159

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“If you call me Jephthah, my lord,” says Polonius, “I have a daughter whom I love passing well” [2.2.411–12]160 (congratulating himself on his astuteness in picking up another reference to his daughter). Sure, but what Jephthah did to his daughter was sacrifice her. The women in this play are heroines in a tragedy, but not tragic heroines, like Juliet or Cleopatra: they’re pathetic rather, crushed under the wheels of all the male egos. To look briefly now at the struggle with Claudius: if we could manage to forget what Claudius did to become king, we could see what everybody except Hamlet and Horatio sees, a strong and attractive monarch. He shows the greatest coolness and shrewdness in dealing with the Fortinbras threat, preparing to meet it if it comes, but deflecting it nonetheless. Apparently there’s no question of any de jure line of succession in so turbulent a time, and the new king is elected by the nobles. Hamlet says late in the play that Claudius “Popped in between the election and my hopes” [5.2.65], but there might have been a quite sensible decision that Hamlet was too young and untried: in any case, Claudius not only treats him like a son [1.2.64], but publicly supports him as his own successor [1.2.109]. And while in such a time Claudius may have strengthened his position by marrying Gertrude, there seems no reason to doubt the sincerity of his affection for her. In fact, once the play starts, he does no harm to anyone except Hamlet, and even against him he proceeds very unwillingly. The delay in Hamlet meets a corresponding delay, with equally unconvincing excuses, in Claudius. An uncomplicated villain, like Richard III, would have wiped Hamlet out of his life at the first hint of danger, and slept all the better for it. Claudius seems a sensuous, even coarse, physical type, with an abounding vitality that makes for a lot of noisy partying. When Hamlet is freezing on the ramparts of Elsinore he hears such a party going on, and makes a disapproving speech about how a heavily drinking king is bad for Denmark’s reputation [1.4.8–22]. Two points to note here: first, Hamlet doesn’t yet know why Claudius has to drink so much; second, the party, judging from what Claudius has said, is at least partly in honour of Hamlet and the fact that he’s staying in Denmark. Even the final scene, in which Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes all die, is essentially a party in honour of Hamlet. We’re told (by Claudius) that Hamlet is a great favourite with the “general gender” [4.7.18] offstage, who evidently don’t trust Claudius completely—at any rate, Laertes is hailed as a possible new king on his return from France. But Shakespeare’s portrayal

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of crowds is not very flattering in any of the plays in which crowds are featured. So Claudius keeps his distance from Hamlet, not wanting to harm him as yet, only watching. And as he does so the “mousetrap” play [3.2.237] suddenly closes on him. There are dozens of confrontations with pictures and mirrors and images in this play, but of course the central one is the mirror that, in the dumb show, holds up to Claudius the image of his crime. It takes all the nerve of a very strong man not to break right there: when he speaks (and it’s a long time before he speaks), he says: “Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in it?” [3.2.232–3]. It’s the question of a suspicious tyrant, not of the affable and gracious king that Claudius still is to everyone except Hamlet and Horatio. When the image is repeated, that does it. But it isn’t every murdering villain who would take to prayer in such circumstances. The prayer wouldn’t be very effective unless he did what he still could to undo his crime, such as surrendering the crown. But the cold little voice in possession of Claudius says very clearly, “Don’t be silly,” and there’s nothing to do but get up and start planning the death of Hamlet. After all, the mousetrap play depicts a nephew killing his uncle, not a usurper killing his brother. I think it was the critic Wilson Knight, at one time a colleague of mine here in Toronto, who first pointed out how healthy a man Claudius was, except for his crime, and how sick a man Hamlet was, even with his cause.161 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for example, are old friends whom Hamlet is at first delighted to see: he soon realizes that they have been “sent for,” which they immediately admit, and the discovery doesn’t bother him too much [2.2.274–95]. They are serving the king, whom they assume is the rightful king—Hamlet hasn’t taken them into his confidence to that extent—and it never occurs to them that they are not acting in Hamlet’s own best interests. “My lord, you once did love me,” Guildenstern says with simple dignity [3.2.335]. For Hamlet to describe them so contemptuously to Horatio as the shabbiest kind of spies, whose death is simply a good riddance, is one of those bewildering shifts of perspective that make what broadcasters call “easy listening” impossible. I’ve spoken of the number of mirrors and confronting images that we meet everywhere in the play. Hamlet, for example, finds himself watching the recruits of Fortinbras, who, deflected from Denmark, are going off to attack Poland, free at least to get out of Denmark and engage in some positive action. Then we hear that the territory to be fought over

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is hardly big enough to hold the contending armies [4.4.18–22]. One doesn’t escape claustrophobia even by avoiding Denmark. Hamlet eventually leaves Denmark and is sent to England, but in his journey there he is “benetted round with villainies” [5.2.29],162 and is as unable to sleep as fettered mutineers. Polonius spies on him; Claudius spies on him; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spy on him, and he has the additional difficulty of pretending to be mad when with them and sane when with Horatio. He tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he has of late “foregone all my exercises” [2.2.296–7],163 but tells Horatio that since Laertes went into France he has been in continual fencing practice [5.2.210–11]. Gertrude is forced by Hamlet to “look upon this picture, and on this” [3.4.53],164 to compare Hamlet senior with Claudius, in the process of having also to contemplate the very unflattering portrait of herself that Hamlet is drawing. Claudius says of the mad Ophelia that without our reason we are mere “pictures,” or else beasts [4.5.86], and as Ophelia isn’t a beast she must be a picture, a terrible but quite recognizable picture of what she could have been. The function of a play, says Hamlet, is to hold the mirror up to nature [3.2.22].165 He should know; he asks a player for a speech about Pyrrhus, the ferocious Greek warrior about to kill Priam, and hears how: As a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood, And like a neutral to his will and matter, Did nothing. (2.2.480–2)166

I said that in the first act we get a vision of the court of Denmark as rocking and heaving on the quicksand of the murder of Hamlet’s father, and that this vision is to some degree physically presented to us when the Ghost disappears below the stage and speaks from there. At the beginning of the fifth act the lower world suddenly yawns open on the stage, as the gravediggers are preparing a grave for Ophelia. This episode is particularly one that the more conservative humanist critics I spoke of earlier regarded as barbaric. It is a type of grotesque scene that Shakespeare occasionally throws into a tragedy: the porter answering the knocking at the gate in Macbeth [2.3] and the clown coming in with the basket of figs and the serpent in Antony and Cleopatra are other examples. The word “grotesque” is connected with the word “grotto,” a cave or opening in the ground, and it usually has some connection with the ironic aspect of death, death as the decaying of the body

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into other elements. These grotesque death scenes became particularly popular in the Middle Ages, when a form appeared in literature known as the danse macabre, the figure of Death coming to take away a great variety of social types from king to beggar.167 The popularity of the danse macabre was based on the fact that in a hopelessly unjust society death is the only impartial figure, and the only genuine democrat: in fact, all we can see of the God who is supposed to be no respecter of persons. The reasons why such scenes as this were disapproved of by highbrows are all connected with the incessant self-idealizing of ascendant classes, whether aristocratic or bourgeois. We feel sympathy with Laertes when he speaks of Ophelia’s “fair and unpolluted flesh” [5.1.239], and when we hear the gravedigger telling us that “your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body” [5.1.171–2], we dislike the implication that Ophelia’s fair and unpolluted flesh wouldn’t stay that way very long. In this scene we’re at the opposite end from the mood of sinister chill in which the play opened. In that opening scene we heard Horatio explain how: A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless168 and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. (1.1.114–16)

Here the atmosphere is not simply ghostly, but heroic as well: the great Caesar cannot just die; prodigies occur when he does. In the present scene we get a very different tone: Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. (5.1.213–14)

And there are no ghosts in this scene: characters are either alive, like Hamlet and Horatio and the gravediggers, or dead, like Yorick and Ophelia. The terrible ambiguity of life in death, which the Ghost has brought into the action, and which has transformed the action of the play into this nightmarish sealed labyrinth, is resolving into its primary elements. Then we come to the funeral of Ophelia, which Hamlet recognizes to be the funeral of a suicide as soon as he sees it. There follows the struggle between Hamlet and Laertes I spoke of, where probably both men are in Ophelia’s still open grave [5.1.251–65]. Both profess a deep love for her: Laertes clearly means what he says, and Hamlet, though ranting,

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probably does too. All this affection comes a little late in the day for poor Ophelia, who has hardly had a decent word thrown at her since the beginning of the play. She is bullied by her father, and humiliated by being made a decoy for Hamlet [3.1]; she has been treated, during the play scene, to a conversation with Hamlet that would have been more appropriate in a whorehouse [3.2.110–35]; and even Gertrude, who seems genuinely attached to her, panics when she comes in for the mad scene, and refuses to speak with her [4.5.1]. But something connected with her death brings about a sudden sobering of the action, especially in Hamlet, who all through the gravedigger scene has been in a mood in which his melancholy is never quite under control, and his far-ranging associations “consider too curiously,” as Horatio observes [5.1.205]. It is as though Ophelia’s suicide, to the extent that Hamlet assumes her death to be that, has broken the longing for death in Hamlet’s mind that has been burdening it from the beginning. As the play slowly makes its transition to the final duelling scene, Hamlet modulates to a mood of complete acceptance and resignation. He realizes he has not long to live, but commends himself to providence— the first indication we have had that such a thing is in his world—and says simply, “the readiness is all” [5.2.222]. Horatio tries to tell him that he is still a free agent, and could decline the contest with Laertes if he liked, but Hamlet has already asked Osric, “How if I answer no?” and Osric has said, “I mean, my lord, the opposition of your person in trial” [5.2.170–2]. Sometimes a no-answer is more informative than any pretence of an answer: Hamlet’s enemies will not wait very long now. The sudden quieting of mood affects Laertes as well as Hamlet. Just as Hamlet, in spite of the powerful push to revenge given by the Ghost, could not bring himself to assassinate Claudius without warning, so Laertes, with both father and sister to avenge, feels ashamed of his poisoning scheme. Laertes and Hamlet die mutually forgiven, and with “heaven” absolving them of mortal sins. This does not mean that the machine-god of the earlier action has suddenly turned sentimental, in spite of Horatio’s speech about flights of angels [5.2.359–60]—angels who can hardly have read the first four acts. It means rather that the two elements of tragedy, the heroic and the ironic,169 have reached their final stage. On the heroic side, the last scene reminds us what a tremendous power of mental vitality is now flowing into its delta. Against the sheer fact of Hamlet’s personality, all the reminiscences of his indecision and brutality and arrogance seem merely carping: the death of so great a man

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is still portentous, even if he doesn’t have Julius Caesar’s comets.170 On the ironic side, the immense futility of the whole action takes such possession of us that we feel, not that the action has been ridiculous, but that we can look at it impartially because it has no justifications of its own. Horatio, obeying Hamlet’s charge to tell the story again—a charge far more weighty than any ghostly command to revenge—promises: So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced171 cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads. (5.2.380–5)

This is a summary of what I called earlier a tragedy without a catharsis. The ironic side of the play relates to what has been done, which is precisely nothing, unless we call violent death something. The heroic side of it relates to what has been manifested. Hamlet has manifested such a torrent of abilities and qualities that Fortinbras assumes that he would have been a great king and warrior too [5.2.395–400]: two roles in which we’ve never seen him. Hamlet’s earnest injunction to Horatio to tell his story [5.2.346–9] expresses something that we frequently meet in the resolution of tragedies. Othello’s last speech contains a similar injunction [5.2.340–56]. The effect of this imaginary retelling is in part to present what the tragic hero has done in relation to what he has been: it asks for a totally conscious judgment, not just a subtracting of bad deeds from good ones. The contrast between judging from actions and judging from character comes into the central struggle between Hamlet and Claudius. A man’s quality may be inferred from the record of what he has done, or it may be inferred from what he is trying to make of himself at any given moment. The former is, so to speak, the case for the prosecution: you’ve done such and such, so that’s forever what you are. Most of us are aware that our potential of interests and abilities steadily narrows as we get older, and that what we can still do becomes increasingly predictable. But we tend to resign ourselves to that, unless, like Claudius, we’re blocked by some major crime and we have enough intelligence and sensitivity to know that it is a major crime. Claudius is someone of great potential fatally blocked by something he has done and can never undo.

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Hamlet has an even greater potential, and has not blocked himself in the same way. He is aware of the infinite possibilities inherent, at least in theory, in being human and conscious, but, of course, knows also that even someone as versatile as he still has only a limited repertoire. It takes a very unusual mind to feel that simply to be a finite human being is to be in some sense a prisoner. We all build secondary prisons out of our actions; but these are projections of the deeper prison of what we are, the limits of our powers imposed at and by birth. Hamlet, so far as it’s a study of its chief character, is perhaps the most impressive example in literature of a titanic spirit thrashing around in the prison of what it is. A naive consciousness would say that, although bounded in a nutshell, it was also king of infinite space [2.2.254–5], but Hamlet’s consciousness is not naive, and it dreams. The stock remedy for the claustrophobia of consciousness is action, even though human action is so often destructive or murderous. But consciousness is also a kind of death principle, a withdrawing from action that kills action itself, before action can get around to killing something else. Hamlet himself often comments on his own inaction in these terms, often with a kind of half-realized sense that the Ghost cannot stimulate any form of vitality, however destructive, in the living world, but can only draw everything it touches down with itself into the shades below. The “to be or not to be” soliloquy [3.1.55–87], hackneyed as it is, is still the kernel of the play. It’s organized largely on a stream of infinitives, that mysterious part of speech that’s neither a verb nor a noun, neither action nor thing, and it’s a vision that sees consciousness as a kind of vacuum, a nothingness, at the centre of being. Sooner or later we have to commit ourselves to nothingness, and why should so much merit be attached to dying involuntarily? The Ghost insists that Hamlet mustn’t die before he’s killed Claudius, and the one thing that prevents Hamlet from voluntary death is the fear that he might become just another such ghost. Until the death of Ophelia releases him, he sees no form of detachment that would achieve the kind of death he wants: freedom from the world. During the nineteenth century, and through much of the early twentieth, Hamlet was regarded as Shakespeare’s central and most significant play, because it dramatized a central preoccupation of the age of Romanticism: the conflict of consciousness and action, the sense of consciousness as a withdrawal from action which could make for futility, and yet was all that could prevent action from becoming totally mindless.172 No other play has explored the paradoxes of action and thinking about ac-

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tion so deeply, but because it did explore them, literature ever since has been immeasurably deepened and made bolder. Perhaps, if we had not had Hamlet, we might not have had the Romantic movement at all, or the works of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard that follow it, and recast the Hamlet situation in ways that come progressively nearer to us. Nearer to us in cultural conditions, that is, not in imaginative impact: there, Shakespeare will always be first. V King Lear The story of Lear is one of a series of legends about the ancient history of Britain, legends that in Shakespeare’s day were thought to be genuine history. How they got to be that makes a curious story, but we just have time for its main point. A Welsh priest living in the twelfth century, called Geoffrey of Monmouth, concocted a fictional history of early Britain modelled on Virgil, and according to this Britain was settled by Trojan refugees led by one Brutus, after whom Britain was named.173 There follows a long chronicle of kings and their adventures, mostly, so far as we can see, gathered out of Welsh legend and historical reminiscence. This is where the story of Lear and his three daughters came from: Lear was supposed to have lived somewhere around the seventh or eighth century before Christ.174 So, except for Troilus and Cressida, which is a very medievalized version of the Trojan War, King Lear is the earliest in historical setting of all Shakespeare’s plays. It’s true that we notice a tendency to mix up various historical periods increasing as Shakespeare goes on. In Hamlet, for instance, we seem to be most of the time in Denmark of the Dark Ages, but Hamlet is a student at Wittenberg, a university founded around 1500, and Laertes appears to be going off to a kind of Renaissance Paris. In King Lear we find Anglo-Saxon names (Edmund, Edgar, Kent) and Roman ones (Gloucester), and we also have contemporary allusions, including religious ones, of a type that the audience was accustomed to. But still there does seem to be a roughly consistent effort to keep the setting pre-Christian. There are a lot of advantages here for what is perhaps Shakespeare’s biggest dramatic design. First, with a setting so far back in time, the sense of the historical blurs into the sense of the mythical and legendary. The main characters expand into a gigantic, even titanic, dimension that simply wouldn’t be possible in a historical context like that of Henry IV. Then again, there are certain tensions between a tragic structure and

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a framework of assumptions derived from Christianity. Christianity is based on a myth (story) which is comic in shape, its theme being the salvation and redemption of man. You can see what I mean by comic: when Dante wrote his poem about hell, purgatory, and paradise he called it a commedia because it followed the central Christian story, which ends happily for all the people who matter. Tragedy needs a hero of outsize dimensions: you can get this easily in Greek tragedy, where some men can really be descended from gods, and where there’s very little distinction between history and legend anyway, but in Christianity there’s no hero except Christ who has a divine dimension of any kind. Also, tragedy raises some disturbing questions about what kind of power is in charge of the universe. Christianity has prompt and confident answers, but the more emotionally convincing the tragedy, the more we may feel that the answers sometimes are a bit too pat. We can see this feeling reflected in what people say who are assumed to be living before the coming of Christ. The very little evidence we have seems to indicate that Shakespeare took more time over King Lear than over most of his plays, and the freedom with which he handled a story familiar to his audience is extraordinary. No previous account of Lear suggests that he went mad, or that Cordelia was hanged by her enemies; and the incorporating of the Gloucester–Edgar subplot, as a counterpoint to the main, Lear–Cordelia one, is entirely Shakespeare’s. The material seems to have come from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia,175 but the source doesn’t seem significant. Neither do the books he consulted for the names of the devils inhabiting Poor Tom and the like.176 There’s a Quarto text as well as a Folio one, but the relations between them that an editor has to deal with are just too complex to go into.177 When you start to read or listen to King Lear, try to pretend that you’ve never heard the story before, and forget that you know how bad Goneril and Regan and Edmund are going to be. That way, you’ll see more clearly how Shakespeare is building up our sympathies in the opposite direction. The opening scene presents first Gloucester and then Lear as a couple of incredibly foolish and gullible dodderers (Gloucester’s gullibility comes out in a slightly later scene). Gloucester boasts about how he begot Edmund in a way that embarrasses us as well as Kent [1.1.9–25], and we feel that Edmund’s treachery, whatever we think of it, is at any rate credibly motivated. Even at the end of the play, his simple phrase “Yet Edmund was beloved” [5.3.240], meaning that Goneril and Regan

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loved him at least, reminds us how intensely we can feel dramatic sympathy where we don’t necessarily feel moral sympathy. As for Lear and his dreary love test, it’s true that Goneril and Regan are being hypocrites when they patter glibly through the declarations of love they are required to make, but we shouldn’t forget that it’s a genuine humiliation, even for them, to have to make such speeches. At no time in the play does Lear ever express any real affection or tenderness for Goneril or Regan. Of course loving Goneril and Regan would be uphill work, but Lear never really thinks in terms of love: he talks about his kindness and generosity and how much he’s given them and how grateful they ought to feel. He does say (publicly) that Cordelia was always his favourite [1.1.123], and that certainly registers with the other two, as their dialogue afterward shows [1.1.290]. But they don’t feel grateful, and nobody with Shakespeare’s knowledge of human nature would expect them to. Then again, while they’re not surprised that Lear acts like an old fool, even they are startled by how big a fool he is, and they realize that they have to be on their guard to stop him from ever having the power to do to them what he’s just done to Cordelia. The hundred knights Lear insists on could easily start a palace revolution in such a society, so the hundred knights will have to go. In the first two acts, all Lear’s collisions with his daughters steadily diminish his dignity and leave them with the dramatic honours. They never lose their cool: they are certainly harsh and unattractive women, but they have a kind of brusque common sense that bears him down every time. A hundred knights would make quite a hole in any housekeeper’s budget, and we have only Lear’s word for it that they’re invariably well behaved. If we look at the matter impartially, we may find ourselves asking, with the daughters, what all the fuss is about, and why Lear must have all these knights. When Regan says, This house is little: the old man and ’s people Cannot be well bestow’d, (2.4.288–9)

what she says could have a ring of truth in it, if we forget for the moment that she’s talking about Gloucester’s house, which she and Cornwall have commandeered. Every move that Lear makes is dramatically a flop, as when he kneels to Regan, intending irony, and she says, “these are unsightly tricks” [2.4.157], which they assuredly are. The same thing is true of some of Lear’s allies, like Kent and his quarrel with Oswald

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that lands him in the stocks [2.2.150]. It is not hard to understand Kent’s feelings about Oswald, or his exasperation with the fact that Goneril’s messenger is treated with more consideration than the king’s, but still he does seem to be asking for something, almost as though he were a kind of agent provocateur, adopting the strategy of Goneril’s “I’d have it come to question” [1.3.13]. It is not until the scene at the end of the second act, with its repeated “shut up your doors” [2.4.304, 308], that our sympathies definitely shift over to Lear. Regan says, “He is attended with a desperate train” [2.4.305], meaning his fifty (or whatever their present number) knights, but they seem to have sloped off pretty promptly as soon as they realized that they were unlikely to get their next meal there, and Lear’s “desperate train” actually consists only of the Fool. When we catch her out in a lie of that size we begin to see what has not emerged before, and has perhaps not yet occurred to them: that “his daughters seek his death” [3.4.163], as Gloucester says. It is during and after the storm that the characters of the play begin to show their real nature, and from then on we have something unique in Shakespeare: a dramatic world in which the characters are, like chess pieces, definitely black or white: black with Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall; white with Lear, Cordelia, Edgar, Gloucester, Kent, and eventually Albany. Perhaps the best way of finding our bearings in this mammoth structure is to look for clues in the words that are so constantly repeated that it seems clear they’re being deliberately impressed on us. I’d like to look at three of these words in particular: the words “nature,” “nothing,” and “fool.” To understand the word “nature,” we have to look at the kind of world view that’s being assumed, first by Shakespeare’s audience, then by the characters in the play. The opening words of Edmund’s first soliloquy are “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” [1.2.1], and later in the first act Lear, beginning his curse on Goneril, says: “Hear, Nature, hear; dear goddess, hear” [1.4.275]. It seems clear that Edmund and Lear don’t mean quite the same thing by the goddess Nature, but I think Shakespeare’s audience would find this less confusing than we do. At that time most people assumed that the universe was a hierarchy in which the good was “up” and the bad “down.” These ups and downs might be simply metaphors, but that didn’t affect their force or usefulness. At the top of the cosmos was the God of Christianity, whose abode is in heaven; that is, the place where his presence is. The lower heaven or

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sky is not this heaven, but it’s the clearest visible symbol of it. The stars, made, as was then believed, out of a purer substance than this world, keep reminding us in their circling of the planning and intelligence that went into the Creator’s original construction. God made a home for man in the garden of Eden, which, like the stars, was a pure world without any death or corruption in it. But Adam and Eve fell out of this garden into a lower or “fallen” world, a third level into which man now is born but feels alienated from. Below this, a fourth level, is the demonic world. The heaven of God is above nature; the demonic world of the devils is below it; but the important thing to keep in mind is that the two middle levels both form part of the order of nature, and that consequently “nature” has two levels and two standards. The upper level, the world symbolized by the stars and by the story of the garden of Eden, was man’s original home, the place God intended him to live in. The lower level, the one we’re born into now, is a world to which animals and plants seem to be fairly well adjusted: man is not adjusted to it. He must either sink below it into sin, a level the animals can’t reach, or try to raise himself as near as he can to the second level he really belongs to. I say “try to raise himself,” but he can’t really do that: the initiative must come from above or from social institutions. Certain things—morality, virtue, education, social discipline, religious sacraments—all help him to raise his status. He won’t get back to the garden of Eden: that’s disappeared as a place, but it can be recovered in part as an inner state of mind. The whole picture looks like this to the audience: 1. Heaven (the place of the presence of God), symbolized by the sun and moon, which are all that’s left of the original creation. 2. Higher or human order of nature, originally the “unfallen” world or garden of Eden, now the level of nature on which man is intended to live as continuously as possible with the aid of religion, morality, and the civilized arts. 3. Lower or “fallen” order of physical nature, our present environment, a world seemingly indifferent to man and his concerns, though the wise can see many traces of its original splendour. 4. The demonic world, whatever or wherever it is, often associated with the destructive aspects of nature, such as the storm on the heath. When we speak of “nature” it makes a crucial difference whether we mean the upper, human level of nature or the environment around us that we actually do live in. Many things are “natural” to man that are

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not natural to anything else on this lower level, such as living under authority and obedience, wearing clothes, using reason, and the like. Such things show that the proper “natural” environment for man is something different from that of animals. But when Edmund commits himself to his goddess Nature, he means only the lower, physical level of nature, where human life, like animal life, is a jungle in which the predators are the aristocracy. When Lear appeals to the goddess Nature to curse Goneril, he means a nature that includes what is peculiarly natural to man, an order of existence in which love, obedience, authority, loyalty are natural because they are genuinely human; an order in which “art,” in all its Elizabethan senses, is practically indistinguishable from nature. Goneril is being cursed because her treatment of her father is “unnatural” in this context. But we shouldn’t assume that Edmund knows clearly that he is talking about a lower aspect of Nature, or that Lear knows clearly that he is talking about a higher one. Such categories aren’t clear yet in a pre-Christian world. In the Lear world there is no actual God, because there is only the Christian God, and he has not revealed himself yet. Very early, when Kent stands out against Lear’s foolish decision, Lear says, “Now, by Apollo—” and Kent answers: Now, by Apollo, King Thou swear’st thy Gods in vain. (1.1.160–1)

Lear retorts by calling him “miscreant,” unbeliever. A parody of this discussion occurs later, when Kent is in the stocks [2.4.21–2]. And just as the divine world is hazy and mysterious, so is the demonic world. King Lear is in many respects the spookiest of all the great tragedies, and yet nothing explicitly supernatural or superhuman occurs in it: there is nothing to correspond to the Ghost in Hamlet or the witches in Macbeth. Five fiends inhabit Poor Tom [4.1.58–63], but we don’t believe in his devils, and wouldn’t even if we didn’t know that Poor Tom is really Edgar. To Shakespeare’s audience, the Lear world would look something like this: 1. World of impotent or nonexistent gods, which tend to collapse into deified personifications of Nature or Fortune. 2. Social or human world with the elements the more enlightened can see to be essential to a human world, such as love, loyalty, and authority. In particular, the world represented by Cordelia’s and Edgar’s love, Kent’s loyalty, Albany’s conscience, etc.

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3. World of physical nature in which man is born an animal and has to follow the animal pattern of existence, i.e., join the lions and eat well, or the sheep and get eaten. 4. A hell-world glimpsed in moments of madness or horror.178 As an example of what I’m talking about, notice that one of the first points established about Edmund is his contempt for astrology. If we ignore the question of “belief” in astrology, for ourselves or for Shakespeare or his audience, and think of it simply as a dramatic image revealing character, we can see that of course Edmund would dismiss astrology [1.2.118–33]: it has no place in his conception of nature. Astrology was taken seriously in Shakespeare’s day because of the assumption that God had made the world primarily for the benefit of man, and although the original creation is in ruins, we can still see many evidences of design in it with a human reference. The stars in the sky are not just there: they’ve been put there for a purpose, and that’s why the configurations of stars can spell out the destinies of men and women. Similarly, there are links, however mysterious and fitful, between natural and human events, at least on the top social level. Comets, earthquakes, and other natural disturbances don’t just happen: they happen at crucial times in human life, such as the death of a ruler. Not necessarily a Christian ruler: there were, as we saw, such portents at the time of the murder of Julius Caesar. So Lear has some ground for expecting that the order of nature around him might take some notice of his plight and of his daughters’ ingratitude, considering that he’s a king. But one thing the storm symbolizes is that he’s moving into an order of nature that’s indifferent to human affairs. His madness brings him the insight: “They told me I was everything: ’tis a lie; I am not ague-proof” [4.6.104–5]. With his abdication, whatever links there may be between the civilized human world and the one above it have been severed. It should be clear from all this that the question “What is a natural man?” has two answers. On his own proper human level it is natural to man to be clothed, sociable, and reasonable. When Goneril and Regan keep asking Lear why he needs all those knights, the first part of his answer, in the speech beginning “Oh, reason not the need” [2.4.264], is a quite coherent statement of the fact that civilized life is not based simply on needs. But in this storm world that Lear is descending into, what is natural man like? Lear has hardly begun to formulate the question when Poor Tom appears as the answer to it. “Didst thou give all to thy two daughters?” [3.4.49].179 Lear asks, still preoccupied with his own

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concerns. But we’re getting down now to the underside of the GonerilRegan world: Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool . . . (3.4.129–34)

The imagery creates a world more nauseating than Hamlet ever dreamed of. “Is man no more than this?” Lear asks [ 3.4.102–3]. In a way Poor Tom is a kind of ghastly parody of a free man, because he owes nothing to the amenities of civilization. Lear is reminded that he still has at least clothes, and starts tearing them off to be level with Poor Tom, but he is distracted from this. He says in a miracle of condensed verbal power: “Thou art the thing itself” [3.4.106]. He has started at one end of nature and ended at the other, and now his downward journey has reached a terminus. Perhaps one of Edgar’s motives in assuming his Poor Tom disguise was to provide a solid bottom for Lear’s descent. Below or behind him is the chaos-world portended by the storm: the world of the furies and fiends that Edgar is keeping Lear protected from, just as he protects Gloucester later from the self-destructive “fiend” [4.6.72] that wants to hurl him over a cliff. The word “nothing” we remember from Richard II, where it was connected with the conception of the king’s two bodies.180 In both plays “nothing” seems to have the meaning of being deprived of one’s social function, and so of one’s identity. A king who dies is still a something, namely a dead king; a king deprived of his kingship is “nothing,” even if, or especially if, he still goes on living. That is one thing that the issue of the train of knights is about. They represent, for Lear, his continuing identity as king, even though he has abdicated his powers and responsibilities: he wants both to have and not have his royalty. His daughters do not, at least not at first, want to kill him: they want him to go on living without power, once he has renounced it. Regan says, and may well mean it at this point: For his particular, I’ll receive him gladly, But not one follower. (2.4.292–3)

Such treatment of him is, at least symbolically (and symbolism is immensely important here), what Lear says in another connection is “worse

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than murder” [2.4.23].181 To kill him would be murder; to let him survive without his identity is a kind of annihilation. Similarly Edgar says, when assuming his Poor Tom disguise, “Edgar I nothing am” [2.3.21]. He’s still alive, but his identity as Edgar is gone, or at least in abeyance. There is another context, easier to understand, in which the conception of nothing is of great significance. What is the cause of love, friendship, good faith, loyalty, or any of the essential human virtues? Nothing. There’s no “why” about them: they just are. In putting on his love-test act, Lear is obsessed by the formula of something for something. I’ll love you if you love me, and if you love me you’ll get a great big slice of England. When Cordelia says that she loves him according to her “bond” [1.1.93], she of course doesn’t mean anything like Shylock’s bond: the word for her has more the modern sense of “bonding.” Love and loyalty don’t have motives or expectations or causes, nor can they be quantified, as in Lear’s “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” [1.1.51]. Much later in the play, when Cordelia awakens Lear and he finally realizes he is still in the same world, he says, I know you do not love me; for your sisters Have, as I do remember, done me wrong: You have some cause, they have not. (4.7.72–4)

Cordelia’s answer, “No cause, no cause,” is one of the supreme moments of all drama. And yet when Cordelia says that, she is saying precisely what she said at the beginning of the play: she will have nothing to do with these silly conditional games. It is characteristic of such relationships that sooner or later they come to focus on some anxiety symbol, which for Lear is the issue of the hundred knights. Pursuing this anxiety drives Lear toward the madness he so much fears, and forces him into those dreadful bargaining scenes that we can hardly bear to reread: Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty, And thou art twice her love. (2.4.259–60)

As for “fool,” we have first of all Lear’s version of the common phrase, used several times by Shakespeare, “all the world’s a stage”:182 When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools. [4.6.182–3]

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The word “fool” is in course of time applied to practically every decent character in the play. Those who are not fools are people like Goneril and Regan and Edmund, who live according to the conditions of the lower or savage nature they do so well in. But Albany is called a “moral fool” by Goneril [4.2.58] because he is unwilling to accept such a world; Kent is called a fool for taking the part of an outcast king. As for the Fool himself, he is a “natural,” a word that again evokes the sense of two levels of nature. As a “natural” in this world, he is deficient enough, mentally, to be put in a licensed position to say what he likes. In his kind of “natural” quality there is a reminiscence of a still coherent and divinely designed order of nature, a world in which no one can help telling the truth. In our world, there is the proverb “children and fools tell the truth,” and the Fool’s privilege makes him a wit because in our world nothing is funnier than a sudden outspoken declaration of the truth. There is another sense of the word “fool” that seems to be peculiar to Shakespeare, and that is the “fool” as victim, the kind of person to whom disasters happen. Everyone on the wrong side of the wheel of fortune is a fool in this sense, and it is in this sense that Lear speaks of himself as “the natural fool of fortune” [4.6.191], just as Romeo earlier had called himself “fortune’s fool” [3.1.136]. Speaking of Romeo, we raised the question of why he talks so much about the stars as causal elements in his tragedy when we have a simple and human cause ready to hand, namely the feud. And when in King Lear Gloucester says, As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, They kill us for their sport, (4.1.36–7)

he certainly hasn’t forgotten that his own plight is the quite understandable result of his own folly, Edmund’s treachery, and Cornwall’s brutality; it doesn’t need any gods to explain it. Some nineteenth-century commentators felt that this remark displayed an atheistic pessimism which Shakespeare himself believed in (because they did) and was keeping up his sleeve. I don’t know what Shakespeare believed, but he knew what his audience would buy, and he knew they wouldn’t buy that. Gloucester is no atheist: he postulates gods, divine personalities, and if he replaced them with a mechanism of fate or destiny he couldn’t ascribe malice to it. What he feels is that there is some mystery in the horror of what’s happened to him that goes beyond the tangible human causes.

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Edgar and Albany, on the other hand, are moralists: they look for human causes and assume that there are powers above who are reacting to events as they should. Albany is a decent man, and Goneril a vicious woman, and yet in Goneril’s world Albany looks weak and ineffectual. He produces his great melodramatic coup, the letter proving Goneril’s intrigue with Edmund, which should overwhelm her with shame and confusion. But Goneril isn’t listening: in her world, of course anyone of her social rank who despised her husband would take a lover. It’s true that she kills herself when Edmund is fatally wounded, but that too is part of the Goneril ethic. Albany’s demonstrations of the workings of providence also get undercut pretty badly. When he hears of the death of Cornwall he says it shows that “justicers” are above [4.2.78–9], passing over the fate of Gloucester himself and of Cornwall’s servant. He sees a “judgment of the heavens” [5.3.232] in the deaths of Goneril and Regan: at once Kent enters, inquires for the king, and Albany says, “Great thing of us forgot!” [5.3.237]. It looks almost as though the memory of the “heavens” had slipped up along with Albany’s. Finally, he tries to set up a scene of poetic justice in which: All friends shall taste The wages of their virtue, and all foes The cup of their deservings. (5.3.303–5)

What follows this is Lear’s terrible lament over the dead body of Cordelia, and in the nuclear-bomb desolation of that speech, words like “wages” and “deserving” fade into nothingness. It may be, as some say, that Lear thinks Cordelia is alive again at the end of the speech, but we know that if so he is being mocked with another illusion. Edgar too, for all his prodigies of valour and fidelity, gets some curiously limp things to say. At the end of the heath scene he makes a chorus comment (which is not in the Folio): When we our betters see bearing our woes, We scarcely think our miseries our foes, (3.6.102–3)

and so on for another dozen sickening lines. After he strikes down Edmund in the final duel, he remarks that the gods are just, and that Gloucester’s blindness was the inevitable result of going into a whorehouse to beget Edmund [5.3.171–4]. (I feel very sorry for Edmund’s

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mother, who seems to me to get a quite undeservedly bad press.) Even though Edmund agrees with the statement, it doesn’t make much of a point, as we’re explicitly told that Goneril and Regan were “got ’tween lawful sheets” [4.6.116].183 In fact, the whole relation between Gloucester and the Lear tragedies seems to have something of a contrast between an explicable and an inexplicable disaster. The Gloucester tragedy perhaps can—just—be explained in moral terms; the Lear tragedy cannot. There is a lot more to be said about both Albany and Edgar, and I shall be saying some of it myself in a moment. They are not in the least ridiculous characters, but, like all the virtuous people, they are fools in the sense that a fool is a victim: they utter the cries of bewildered men who can’t see what’s tormenting them, and their explanations, even if they are reassuring for the moment, are random guesses. In this dark, meaningless, horrible world, everyone is as spiritually blind as Gloucester is physically: you might be interested in looking at the number of references to blindness in the play apart from those connected with Gloucester. The moral for us, as students of the play, is clear enough: we have to take a much broader view of the action than either a fatalistic or a moral one, and try, not to “explain” it, but to see something of its dimensions and its scope. Many critics of Shakespeare have noticed that there often seem to be two time clocks in the action of his plays, the events in the foreground summarizing slower and bigger events in the background that by themselves would take longer to work out. It’s a little like looking at the scenery from the window of a car or train, with the weeds at the side of the road rushing by and the horizon turning slowly. In the foreground action the scene on the heath seems to take place in the same night that begins with Regan and Cornwall shutting Lear out. In the background we pick up hints that Albany and Cornwall are at loggerheads, but are forced to compose their differences and unite against a threatened invasion from France, partly encouraged by Cordelia, although in the foreground action nothing has yet happened to Lear that would justify such an invasion. At the end of act 2 we still don’t feel that Gloucester’s statement “his daughters seek his death” is quite true yet, though they certainly don’t care if he does die. But within an hour or two Gloucester’s concern for Lear becomes strictly forbidden, and his action in helping the king to get to Dover is, from Cornwall’s point of view, the basest treachery. It’s not difficult to get all this from the indications we’re given. I think there’s also a third rhythm of time, if it really is time, in a still larger background.

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We remember the phrase that Shakespeare uses twice in the history plays, in the garden scene of Richard II and early in Henry V: “a second fall of cursèd man.”184 Before the play begins, we are in roughly the upper world of human nature; not a paradisal state, of course, but a world where there is authority, social discipline, orders of distinction, and loyalty: the conditions regarded as the central ones in the Tudor world. Then the dreaded image of the map appears, with a proposal to carve up the country: the same image we met at the beginning of Henry IV. By the end of the scene we have the feeling of sliding into a different world, and when Edmund steps forth with his “Thou, Nature, art my goddess,” we feel that he’s the first person to have recognized this new world for what it is. He’s Gloucester’s “natural” son, and on this level of nature he’s the kind of person who will take command. When the storm begins in act 3 it’s described in a way that makes it clear that it’s more than just a storm. It’s an image of nature dissolving into its primordial elements, losing its distinctions of hierarchies in chaos, a kind of crossing of the Red Sea in reverse. One of the central images of this descent is that of the antagonism of a younger and older generation. “The younger rises when the old doth fall,” says Edmund [3.3.25], and Goneril, speaking of Lear, issues a blanket denunciation of old people generally: “The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash” [1.1.295–6]. On the other side, Lear appeals to the gods, “If you do love old men” [2.4.190], and Gloucester, with a still more futile irony, appeals for help, during the blinding scene, to any “who will think to live till he be old” [3.7.69].185 The principle that made hereditary succession so important in the history plays seems to be extended here, in a world where the honouring of one’s parents is the most emphasized of all virtues. Albany regards Goneril’s treatment of her father as the key to everything else she does that’s wrong: She that herself will sliver and disbranch From her material sap, perforce must wither And come to deadly use. (4.2.34–6)

The connection between honouring one’s parents and long life is, of course, already present in the fifth commandment [Exodus 20:12], though the characters in King Lear are not supposed to know that. In any case the principle doesn’t work in the post-storm world: Cornwall’s servant feels that so wicked a woman as Regan can’t possibly live out

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her full life [3.7.100–2], and Regan does get poisoned, but then Cordelia is hanged, so that again doesn’t prove or explain anything. Wherever we turn, we’re up against the ambiguity in all tragedy: that death is both the punishment of the evil and the reward of the virtuous, besides being the same end for everybody. Our moralists, Edgar and Albany, the survivors of the play, actually speak as though the length of human life had been shortened as a result of the play’s action. The last four lines, spoken by Edgar in the Folio and by Albany in the Quarto, are: The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say: The oldest hath borne most: we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (5.3.324–7)

The second line, incidentally, seems very curious. If it’s a vindication of the conduct of Cordelia and Kent in the opening scene, it’s a bit late in the day; and as a general principle it covers too much ground. When Edmund says, “Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land” [1.2.16], he is saying what he feels, and certainly not what he ought to say. Nonetheless, I think it’s a very central comment: it points to the fact that language is just about the only thing that fights for genuine humanity in this blinded world. Let’s go back to the conception of the king’s two bodies. Lear gives up his second body when he surrenders himself to the power of Goneril and Regan, and consequently, as we said, he no longer has any identity as a king. His loss of identity troubles him, and he says to Oswald: “Who am I?” [1.4.78]. The question is rhetorical, but Oswald’s answer, “My lady’s father” [1.4.79], has the unusual quality of being both the exact truth and a calculated insult. The next time he asks the question it is the Fool who answers: “Lear’s shadow” [1.4.231]. There follows the expulsion and the storm on the heath, and before long things begin to change in Lear. We notice the point at which he is suddenly conscious of the misery of the Fool, and an even more significant moment when he says: “I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep” [3.4.27]. The prayer is a strange prayer, not addressed to any deity, but to the “poor naked wretches” of his own kingdom [3.4.28]. What is happening is that he has lost his identity as a king in the body peculiar to a king, but is beginning to recover his royal nature in his other body, his individual and physical one; not just the body that is cold and wet, but the mind that realizes how many others are cold and wet,

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starting with the Fool and Poor Tom. To use religious terms, his relation to his kingdom was transcendent at the beginning of the play; now it is immanent. Whatever his actual size, Lear is a giant figure, but his gigantic dimensions are now not those of a king or hero; they are those of a human being who suffers but understands his affinity with others who suffer. In the mad scenes (which would have to be very carefully staged in Shakespeare’s day because there was a tendency to think mad people funny), we get a negative aspect of Lear’s new sense of identity with his subjects. He speaks of the endless hypocrisies in the administering of justice, of the sexual pleasure with which beadles lash whores, of the prurience lurking under the prude, of the shame of living in a society where “a dog’s obeyed in office” [4.6.158–9]. These things are not exactly news to us, but they are new sensations to him. All Poor Tom’s fiends of lust and theft and lying sweep through him, but they are not in possession of him: he is, like Prince Hal, though in an infinitely subtler way, absorbing the good and bad of the human nature in his kingdom. He is at the opposite pole from the deposed king who had half expected the storm to take his part: Tremble, thou wretch, That hast within thee undivulged crimes, Unwhipp’d of Justice; hide thee, thou bloody hand . . . . (3.2.51–3)

We can summarize all this by saying that Lear has entered a world in which the most genuine language is prophetic language: that is, language inspired by a vision of life springing from the higher level of nature. Albany’s providence and Edgar’s divine justice make sense as a part of such a vision, though as prophecy in the sense of predicting what is going to happen it may fail. Kent, again, is often prophetic; his fury against Oswald is really a prophetic vision of the kind of thing that such people as Oswald do in the world: Such smiling rogues as these, Like rats, oft bite the holy cords a-twain . . . (2.2.73–4)

The “holy cords” may be parental or matrimonial: in either case he’s dead right about Oswald, as the rest of the play shows. Again, he is someone possessed by a need to have a “master” who represents genu-

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ine “authority,” as he says to Lear [1.4.23–30]. At the end of the play, when he comes in to “bid my king and master aye goodnight” [5.3.236], he of course means Lear; when he repeats this a few lines later, a second or two after Lear’s death, he may have some intuition about a bigger master who nonetheless includes Lear: I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; My master calls me, I must not say no. (5.3.322–3)

I don’t mean that he is moving toward a specific religious belief, Christian or other; I mean only that his vision of the source of authority and mastery is expanding from its exclusive focus on King Lear. The audience is apparently expected to recognize a number of Biblical allusions that the characters who make them do not know to be Biblical. Cordelia speaks of going about her father’s business [4.4.23–4], echoing a phrase of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke [2:49]: had she known of the resemblance she would hardly have made the remark in quite those words. A gentleman says of Lear: Thou hast one186 daughter, Who redeems nature from the general curse Which twain have brought her to. (4.6.205–7)

He could, theoretically, mean Goneril and Regan, or he could mean Adam and Eve. I’d say that he means Goneril and Regan and has probably never heard of Adam and Eve. At the same time it would be true to say that Adam and Eve brought a general curse on nature, and a bit overblown to say it of Goneril and Regan, except insofar as they are participating in a “second fall of cursèd man.” The statement is unconsciously prophetic, and the audience picks up more than the speaker is aware of. Lear on the heath, again, is attended by two bedraggled prophets, the Fool and Poor Tom. The Fool is introduced in the somewhat ambiguous role of keeping Lear amused by repeating incessantly, “You are nothing, nothing, nothing.” However unhelpful, it is prophetic enough: it tells Lear the outcome of his journey to Regan and what the next stage of his life will be. Goneril, no devotee of either humour or truth, believes that he is “more knave than fool” [1.4.313], because the Fool is a “natural” allied to a level of nature that she does not know exists. On the heath the Fool’s role is largely taken over by Poor Tom, although the idiot dog-

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gerel that he recites (in the Folio text only) at the end of act 3, scene 2 is still called a “prophecy” [l. 95]. As for Poor Tom, a ballad on “Tom o’ Bedlam” was collected in the eighteenth century, and may well go back to something very similar extant in Shakespeare’s time. The last stanza of the ballad goes: With an host of furious fancies Whereof I am commander, With a burning spear, and a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander. By a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to tourney Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end, Methinks it is no journey.187

This kind of imagery reminds us of certain primitive poets and magicians, like the “shamans” of central Asia, who go through long initiations that involve journeys to upper and lower worlds. We are now in a world where all knowledge of anything “spiritual” or otherworldly has been degraded to Poor Tom’s fiends, his nightmare with her ninefold [3.4.121], his dark tower of Childe Roland [3.4.182], and other phantasms linked to the night and the storm. Edgar says explicitly that he is trying to “cure” Gloucester’s despair [4.6.33–4], and to lead him to feel that “ripeness is all” [5.2.11], that man does not own his life, and must wait until it concludes of itself. Lear has told Gloucester the same thing earlier, and the fact that the mad Lear is in a position to do so says a good deal about the essential sanity of Lear’s madness. What Edgar expects to do for Lear by producing his Tom o’ Bedlam act is more difficult to say. He seems to be acting as a kind of lightning rod, focusing and objectifying the chaos that is in both Lear’s mind and in nature. He’s holding a mirror up to Lear’s growing madness, somewhat as, to refer to a very different play, Petruchio tries to cure Katharina’s shrewishness by showing her in his own behaviour what it looks like.188 The action of the play seems to be proceeding to a conclusion that, however sombre and exhausting, nonetheless has some serenity in it. But just as we seem about to reach this conclusion, there comes the agonizing wrench of the hanging of Cordelia and the death speeches of Lear [5.3.253–312]. Naturally the stage refused to act this down to the

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nineteenth century: producers settled for another version that married Cordelia off to Edgar.189 We act the play now as Shakespeare wrote it, but it’s still pretty tough even for this grisly century. I said that in the course of the play the characters settled into a clear division of good and bad people, like the white and black pieces of a chess game. The last of the black pieces, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund, have been removed from the board, and then comes the death of Cordelia. Part of this is just the principle that the evil men do lives after them, Edmund’s repentance being too late to rescind his own order. But there seems to be a black king still on the board, and one wonders if there is any clue to who or what or where he is. I said that Hamlet was the central Shakespeare play for the nineteenth century; in the twentieth century feelings of alienation and absurdity have arisen that tend to shift the focus to King Lear. All virtuous or evil actions, all acceptances or rejections of religious or political ideology, seem equally absurd in a world that is set up mainly for the benefit of the Gonerils and the Cornwalls. A generation ago this statement would have stimulated arguments about ways and means of changing such a world, but such arguments are not only irrelevant to Shakespeare’s play, but avoid one of its central issues. I suggested in speaking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Bottom got closer than any other character to the central experience of the play, even if he didn’t altogether know it. The implication is that it takes a fool or clown to see into the heart of comedy. Perhaps it takes a madman to see into the heart of tragedy, the dark tower of Lear’s fury and tenderness, rage and sympathy, scorn and courtesy, and finally his broken heart. I’ve often come back to the titanic size of Lear, which is not a size of body or ultimately even of social rank, but of language. This seems to put him at an immense distance from us, except that he is also utterly human and recognizable. Perhaps Lear’s madness is what our sanity would be if it weren’t under such heavy sedation all the time, if our senses or nerves or whatever didn’t keep filtering out experiences or emotions that would threaten our stability. It’s a dangerous business to enter the world of titans and heroes and gods, but safer if we have as a guide a poet who speaks their language. To speak of a black king, however metaphorically, is to make an assumption, and to ask what or who it is makes secondary assumptions. Another step takes us into the blind-men-and-elephant routine, where we “identify” the source of tragedy as the consequence of human acts

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or divine malice or fatality or cosmic absurdity. I also spoke of three important words in the play, “nature,” “fool,” and “nothing”: perhaps I could have mentioned a fourth, “fortune.” Fortune in Shakespeare’s day, we saw, was symbolized by a wheel, and there are several powerful images of wheels in this play. In some rural areas at certain times of the year a wheel was made of straw, rolled to the top of a hill, then set on fire and let roll down: the Fool seems to be using this image about Lear’s fall from one level of nature to another [2.4.71–4]. Lear himself, waking out of sleep and seeing Cordelia, speaks of himself as bound on a wheel of fire [4.7.45–7], a spirit tormented in hell, though he soon discovers he isn’t. Edmund accepts Edgar’s view of him as the nemesis of Gloucester’s folly in the phrase “The wheel has come full circle” [5.3.175],190 after which he suddenly changes character. The image is inexact in one essential respect: wheels turn, but they remain wheels. Whatever is turning in King Lear also keeps turning into other things. The language of definition is helpless to deal with this: the language of prophecy can come closer, because it’s more nearly related to the language of madness. At the beginning of the play Lear is technically sane, but everything he says and does is absurd. In his mad scenes his associations are often hard to follow, but his general meaning is blindly clear. The language is a counterabsurdity: that is what the play leaves for us, a sense of what we could release if we could speak what we feel. I keep using the word “prophetic” because it seems to me the least misleading metaphor for the primary power of vision in human consciousness, before it gets congealed into religious or political beliefs or institutions. In the final scenes particularly, we see both what’s in front of us, where “all’s cheerless, dark and deadly” [5.3.291], and the power of language that will not stop expanding, even when it starts to press into the mystery that’s blocked off from us by death. We don’t know the answers; we don’t know that there are no answers. Tragedy forces on us a response of acceptance: we have to say, “Yes, this kind of thing is human life too.” But by making that response we’ve accepted something much deeper: that what is defined or made finite by words becomes infinite through the power of words. VI Antony and Cleopatra I’ve talked about Hamlet as the central Shakespeare play for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when so many cultural factors re-

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volved around the difficulties of uniting action and the consciousness of action. In the existentialist period of this century this theme was still in the foreground, but, with a growing sense of the absurdity of trying to rationalize a world set up for the benefit of predatory rulers, King Lear began to move into the centre in its place. I don’t know what play will look most central in the twenty-first century, assuming we get there, but Antony and Cleopatra is, I think, the play that looks most like the kind of world we seem to be moving into now. History goes in cycles to a large extent, and in our day we’re back to the Roman phase of the cycle again. It’s amazing how vividly Shakespeare has imagined a world so much more like ours than like his. There’s no Tudor anxiety about who the Lord’s anointed is or who his successor should be. We can see what the power relations are like in the conference on Pompey’s galley. The Roman Empire has reached the stage of the second “triumvirate,” or control by three leaders, Antony, Caesar, and Lepidus. Lepidus, who holds a third of the world but not his liquor, is only a cipher, and as soon as the time is right he is swept into prison on a trumped-up charge by Caesar [3.5.7–12]. Caesar and Antony are making an alliance, to be cemented by Antony’s marriage to Caesar’s sister Octavia, but we realize that they are only postponing a showdown. Enobarbus says so, speaking on Antony’s side; Antony tells him to be quiet, but Caesar expresses his agreement, and remarks again after Antony’s death that two such leaders “could not stall together” in the same world [5.1.39]. After the conference ends, the triumvirate goes off the ship, because Pompey lacks the nerve to murder the lot of them and become master of the world himself [2.7.66–80]. Having missed his chance, the officer who suggested it to him deserts him in disgust. The defeat of Antony by Caesar does not centralize authority in the way that, for example, the defeat of Richard III centralizes authority in the House of Tudor. We’re not in a closely knit kingdom anymore: there’s only one world, so there’s no patriotism, only more or less loyalty to the competing leaders. Late in the play the demoralized Antony challenges Caesar to a duel [3.13.25–8], and we see how clearly the creator of Tybalt understands that in this world personal duelling is an impossibly corny notion.191 There are any number of messengers in the play, and the air is thick with information and news, but nothing much seems to be getting communicated, although when something does happen it affects the whole world at once. But while there is one world, there are two aspects of it: the aspect of “law and order” represented by Rome, and the

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aspect of sensual extravagance and licence represented by Egypt. The lives and fortunes of millions depend, quite simply, on the whims and motivations of three people. The fact that two of them are lovers means that what is normally a private matter, the sexual relation, becomes an illuminated focus of contemporary history. The historical Cleopatra was a highly cultivated woman who spoke seven languages and had had the best education her time afforded. It’s true that she used her sex as a political weapon, but Queen Elizabeth used her virginity as a political weapon. All the efforts of Roman propaganda failed to disguise the fact that she was the one person the Romans were really afraid of. When the news of her death reached Rome, even the normally stodgy Horace was prompted into something like enthusiasm: Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus . . .192

Now’s the time to drink and dance, because Cleopatra’s dead and everything’s going to be wonderful. Virgil was more restrained, but even he puts the word nefas, “shameful,” into his allusion to her in the Aeneid.193 The spectre of an enemy equipped, not merely with an open female sexuality, which was frightening enough, but with terrible secret weapons like intelligence and imagination, was gone forever. (I’m not idealizing her—she was a tough and dirty fighter—but her qualities had survival value in her world.) Shakespeare’s treatment of her is not historical: for one thing, the historical Cleopatra was Greek, not Egyptian, and we have to forget that in this play, where she’s the very essence of Egypt. But we can see from the play why she still haunts history as well as literature. Of the two aspects of the Roman-Egyptian world, Caesar belongs consistently to the Roman side, Cleopatra consistently to the Egyptian one, and Antony vacillates between the two. Near the beginning of the play, with Antony in Egypt, Cleopatra remarks sardonically: “A Roman thought hath struck him” [1.2.82–3].194 But Antony, at least then, knows what a Roman thought is, and Cleopatra, quite genuinely, does not. The Roman way of life makes no sense of any kind to her, despite her previous experience of it, when she was attached to Julius Caesar. The most elementary way of misreading this play is to turn it into either a moral or a romantic melodrama, against or for Cleopatra. The moral view identifies Rome with the virtues of Rome, and Egypt with the vices of Egypt,

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and says what a pity it was that so great a man, instead of living up to his historical destiny, allowed himself to be debased by a sexy woman. The romantic view is expressed in the title of the second most famous play on the subject in English literature: John Dryden’s All for Love, or The World Well Lost. (The play itself is better balanced.) Both views are copouts: what we have to make sense of is a tragedy, not a morality play or a sentimental love story. We’ve seen Shakespeare working, in Hamlet and King Lear, on wellknown stories that had been treated in earlier plays. In Antony and Cleopatra he was dealing with one of the best-known stories in the world, one that everybody had heard of and that was endlessly alluded to in every kind of literary genre. There was an earlier play (one of many) on this subject too: Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra (1594), which deals with events occurring after the death of Antony. According to Ben Jonson, “Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no children; but no poet.”195 You may gather from this, correctly, that Jonson’s judgments were not always notable for fairness. Shakespeare found a good deal of poetry in Daniel’s play,196 and probably found in him too the emphasis on the horror of being part of Caesar’s triumph in Rome as the main motive for Cleopatra’s suicide. For the rest, Shakespeare’s main source was Plutarch’s Lives, which was available to him, in those easygoing days, in an English translation made from a French translation of the Greek.197 The incidents of the play almost all come straight from Plutarch, except that the impression of Antony we get from Plutarch is one of a rather brutal gangster: I hope the reasons why Shakespeare gives so different an impression of him will become clearer as we go on. For this, and for all the rest of the plays in this course, we have the Folio text only. Modern printed texts, where you get involved with act 4, scene 15,198 may give the impression of a cumbersome play, but any good production will show that the speed and economy of Shakespeare’s storytelling are still at top level. Caesar and Antony also appear in Shakespeare’s earlier play Julius Caesar, but I think it’s a mistake to read our present play as a sequel, though we could look at a few details here that refer back to the earlier time. Julius Caesar had set up the triumvirate pattern earlier in his career, when he got control of the western part of the Roman world, leaving Pompey in control of the east. Crassus, a slum-landlord profiteer, supplied the money and was the third member. Looking for a more heroic role, he led an expedition against the Parthians, on the eastern frontier of the empire: the Parthians captured and murdered him, and poured

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molten gold down his throat—the only evidence we have of what the Parthian sense of humour was like.199 I mention it only because Cleopatra uses the image as one of the things she would like to do to the messenger who brings the news of Antony’s marriage [2.5.34–5]. Pompey was murdered in Egypt, but his son, who had become a pirate, is still an influential figure in the world of Antony and Cleopatra. The rebels against Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, were defeated and killed at the battle of Philippi by an army led by Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar, as he was then called. In this play Antony has a good deal to say about how much the Philippi victory depended on him and how little on his colleague, but in Julius Caesar he and Octavius both seem rather meanminded and cynical, co-opting Lepidus but determined to treat him as a “property” [4.1.40], always ready (especially Antony) to manipulate a crowd with tear-jerking speeches, but using the impetus of revenge for Julius Caesar’s death to get power for themselves. Both of them are relatives of Julius Caesar: Octavius was born his nephew, but was adopted as his son. The fact that Cleopatra had been Julius Caesar’s mistress, and had borne him a son, Caesarion, makes an additional complication to the later play. Caesar tells his lieutenants how Cleopatra and Antony were publicly enthroned in Alexandria, along with “Caesarion, whom they call my father’s son” [3.6.6]. We notice how often tragedy includes as a central theme a rupture within a family, as in Hamlet and King Lear, and in this play Caesar, and Antony by virtue of his marriage to Octavia, are both involved in inter-family feuds. There is, of course, a considerable difference between Roman and Egyptian views on what constitutes a permanent sexual relationship. In Rome there is no obstacle to Antony’s marriage to Octavia because Cleopatra has no legal status as a wife; but in the closing moments of the play, when Cleopatra plans her entrance into the next world, it never occurs to her that anybody in that world would be stupid enough to regard Antony as still married to Octavia. Her only problem, as she sees it, is to get into the next world before her attendant Charmian, so that she won’t have to get Antony pried loose from somebody else [5.2.300–3]. The point here is not how primitive her views of the next world are, but the fact that she can’t conceive of any world at all where she wouldn’t continue to be Cleopatra. I’ve often spoken of the theatre as the central character in all of Shakespeare’s plays,200 and this play revolves around Cleopatra because she’s the essence of theatre. Besides having the fattest female role in the entire

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range of drama, she’s a woman whose identity is an actress’s identity. One wonders how the lad who first attempted the part got along, and how much he liked expressing Cleopatra’s contempt of having “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness” [5.2.220]—a line that in any case took the most colossal nerve on Shakespeare’s part to write, even if the context is logical enough. One occasionally hears some such question about the play as, “Did Cleopatra really love Antony or was she just play-acting?” The word “really” shows how wrong the assumption underlying the question is. Cleopatra is not an actress who can be Vivien Leigh or Elizabeth Taylor offstage: the offstage does not exist in her life. Her love, like everything else about her, is theatrical, and in the theatre illusion and reality are the same thing. Incidentally, she never soliloquizes; she talks to herself occasionally, but someone else is always listening and she always knows it. The most famous description of her is in the speech of Enobarbus describing her appearance in the royal barge on the Cydnus [2.2.190–205]. Enobarbus is a character who in this age of Brecht might be called an alienation character:201 it’s part of his function in the play to comment on how the principals are doing as theatrical figures. He has several other aspects, one of them being a plain blunt Roman soldier, and one wonders if a plain blunt soldier would really talk about Cleopatra in the terms he does if he were not half in love with her himself. At the same time, he calls her Antony’s “Egyptian dish” [2.6.126], and has earlier commented to Antony himself about her carefully manufactured tantrums. He comes close to the centre of his own feelings, however, when he says that “vilest202 things / Become themselves in her” [2.2.237–8], echoing Antony’s earlier remark that she is someone “whom everything becomes” [1.1.49].203 To translate this simply as “she can get away with anything” would be inadequate: it means far more than that. Pascal remarked in one of his aphorisms that if Cleopatra’s nose had been an inch shorter the history of the world would have been different.204 But Shakespeare’s Cleopatra could have coped very easily with a snub nose (actually the historical Cleopatra may have had one, as some of her coins suggest). She doesn’t depend on any conventional attributes of beauty. The whole of Cleopatra is in everything she expresses, whether splendid, silly, mean, grandiloquent, malicious, or naive, and so her essential fascination comes through in every mood. She has the female equivalent of the kind of magnetism that makes Antony a born leader, whose soldiers will follow him in the face of obvious disaster.

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Of course there is a price to be paid for being in contact with such a creature, the price of being upstaged by someone who is always centre stage. At the beginning of the play we have this little whispered exchange among her attendants: Hush! here comes Antony. Not he: the queen. (1.2.79)

The words could not be more commonplace, yet they tell us very clearly who is number one in that court. Her suicide is motivated by her total refusal to be a part of someone else’s scene, and she needs the whole fifth act to herself for her suicide show. Apart from Julius Caesar, who is a special case, Mark Antony is the only major hero of Shakespeare who dies in the fourth act. An obsolete proverb says that behind every great man there is a devoted woman, but Cleopatra is not a devoted woman and she’s not standing behind anybody. Octavia, now, is the kind of woman who does exactly what she should do in a man’s world, and she bores the hell out of Antony. There is no character in Shakespeare whom Cleopatra resembles less than Falstaff, and yet there is an odd link between them in dramatic function. Both are counterhistorical characters: they put on their own show oblivious to the history that volleys and thunders around them. But the history of Falstaff’s time would have been the same without him, and Cleopatra, though very conscious of her “greatness” in her own orbit, hardly seems to realize that she is a key figure in Roman history as well. Her great betrayal of Antony comes in the middle of the battle of Actium, when she simply pulls her part of the fleet out of the battle. What is going on in her mind is probably something like, “What silly games these men do play: nobody’s paying any attention to me at all.” She may not even be aware that her action would lose Antony the battle, or that it would make any difference if it did. She says to Enobarbus, “Is Antony or we in fault for this?” [3.13.2], and it seems clear that it is a real question for her, even though she’s obviously dissatisfied with Enobarbus’s patriarchal Roman answer that the fault was entirely Antony’s for paying attention to a woman in a battle. We may still wonder why she insisted on entering the battle in the first place: the reason seems to be that Caesar was shrewd enough to declare the war personally on her, putting her in the spotlight of attention. So, although Antony could have won handily on land, she insists on a sea fight, because there would be nowhere to see her in a land operation.

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Let’s look at Antony’s death scene, in which, after a bungled attempt at suicide and mortally wounded, he makes his way to Cleopatra’s monument and asks her to come down and give him her last kiss. But Cleopatra has already started on her private war to outwit Caesar’s plan to make her part of his triumph in Rome. It sounds like a restricted operation, but it’s as important to Cleopatra as the mastery of the world is to Caesar. So she apologizes to Antony, but she’s afraid she can’t come down “Lest I be taken” [4.15.23]. She must stay in the protection of a monument that would hold up a cohort of Roman legionaries for about a minute and a half. There’s no help for it: “we must draw thee up” [4.15.30]. What follows is a difficult scene to stage, but nobody can miss the humiliation for Antony of this grotesque manoeuvre, to say nothing of the physical agony of the ordeal for a dying man. “Here’s sport indeed! How heavy weighs my lord!” [4.15.32], says Cleopatra. Our minds go back to an earlier scene, when, with Antony absent and Cleopatra stupefied with boredom, she proposes to go fishing, as she used to do with Antony: my bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up, I’ll think them every one an Antony, And say “Ah ha! y’are caught.” (2.5.12–15)

To Antony’s exhausted murmur, “Give me some wine, and let me speak a little,” her answer is, “No, let me speak, and let me rail” [4.15.42–3]. When Antony is finally going, she says first, “Hast thou no care of me?” [4.15.60], and then breaks into the tremendous rhetoric of her lament for her dead lover. I’m taking phrases out of their contexts a bit, and of course Shakespeare’s really intense scenes are so delicately balanced that emphasizing and overemphasizing any single aspect are almost the same thing. The reason why Antony is in this situation, and mortally wounded, is that when his fleet surrendered to Caesar he assumed that Cleopatra had betrayed him, and Cleopatra had to counter this threat with the most dramatic action possible: of sending to Antony, by her eunuch Mardian, a report of her death, which Mardian was urged to “word piteously” [4.13.9].205 All of which still does not show that Cleopatra is a monster of selfishness. Selfishness is a product of calculation, and Cleopatra, at least at the moment of Antony’s death, is not calculating. Her reactions are too instinctive to be called selfish: she’s just being Cleopatra. And she’s still

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being Cleopatra when, a few scenes later, she thinks of the humiliation of being in Caesar’s triumph, and says with the utmost horror (echoing a phrase Antony had used earlier), “Shall they hoist me up . . . ?” [5.2.55] (emphasis mine, but doubtless hers as well). From now on, her whole strategy is directed to baffling Caesar’s intention to include her in his triumph in Rome. She first has to make sure that this is his intention. The dying Antony has said to her, “None about Caesar trust but Proculeius” [4.15.48]. It would not occur to Cleopatra to trust anybody: what she does with all the people she meets is to ascertain, within a few seconds, whether she can get what she wants from them or not. Proculeius, precisely because he is trustworthy, walks into her monument and takes her prisoner; then Dolabella comes in. It is to him that she utters a prodigiously exaggerated eulogy of Antony: he doesn’t fall for that, of course, being a Roman, but he’s dazzled by her all the same, and in no time she’s extracted the information she wants. Caesar certainly does want Cleopatra to be part of his victory procession in Rome: her presence there “would be eternal in our triumph” [5.1.66], he says. He has her under close guard, and keeps two of her children as hostages, dropping a veiled threat about their fate if she should fool him. That falls flat: Cleopatra is one of the least motherly heroines in literature, and hardly even knows that she has children. There is a scene (which I’m reading the way it usually is read and produced) in which, with Caesar present, she pretends to be outraged with her treasurer, Seleucus, for exposing some minor cheating of hers, reserving for herself some “trifles” that were part of the Roman loot [5.2.159–74]. Caesar is amused by this, but assumes that if Cleopatra still wants such things she can hardly be meditating suicide, which is precisely what she hoped he would think. Then she arranges for a clown to bring a basket of figs to her past the Roman guard, poisonous serpents being under the figs. This clown, brief as his scene is, is extraordinarily haunting: as with the more elaborate gravediggers’ scene in Hamlet, he represents almost our only contact with the population of survivors on whose backs all these masters of the world are sitting. As a clown, he mixes up his words, as clowns conventionally do, but the way he mixes them makes him an eerie and ghoulish messenger from another world, and not at all the kind of world Cleopatra thinks of herself as entering. He hands on a recommendation to Cleopatra from a woman who has sought the same remedy for life: “how she died of the biting of it, what pain she felt; truly, she

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makes a very good report o’ the worm” [5.2.253–5]. At the same time he strains Cleopatra’s nerves nearly to the breaking point: he’s garrulous; he doesn’t want to shuffle off the stage; he knows very well what he’s carrying and what it’s for, and at any moment he could wreck her whole scheme. However, the stage is finally clear: her scheme has succeeded; the “worm” is ready to do its job. She wishes that the serpent, like its ancestor in Eden, could speak, and call “great Cæsar ass” [5.2.307]. It’s hardly necessary to add that she’s greatly underrating Caesar: there isn’t a syllable of disappointment or baffled rage from him when he discovers he’s been circumvented. That’s how things go sometimes, is his only reaction. Let’s give them both a big funeral and attend it “in solemn show” [5.2.364]. They’ve earned that, at least. All of which seems merely to be accumulating evidence that Cleopatra was Antony’s evil genius. It’s true that she herself doesn’t seem to be really evil, in the way that Goneril and Regan are evil. No doubt she’d be capable of it, in some contexts. But what we see is a woman possessed by vanity, and vanity, whatever the moralists say, is a rather disarming vice, in a way almost innocent, exposing the spoiled child under the most infuriating behaviour of the adult. And sometimes we even wonder if she’s such a simple thing as an evil genius at all. In the second scene of the play a “soothsayer” is introduced, making a not very glamorous living telling the fortunes of a group of giggly attendants on Cleopatra. We know that Shakespeare would never introduce such a character unless he were going to use him later, and later he duly appears, to tell Antony that his real evil genius is Caesar [2.3.18–31]. (He’s Egyptian, of course, but that seems to have nothing to do with it.) The mysterious quality called “luck,” so important and so frequently mentioned in tales of legendary heroes, only works for Antony, the soothsayer says, when he’s out of Caesar’s range. Within Caesar’s orbit, Caesar will have all the luck. So the really fatal misstep that Antony makes is not returning to Cleopatra but marrying Octavia. In his last days there’s a temporary rally in his favour, and Cleopatra says to him: O infinite virtue, com’st thou smiling from The world’s great snare uncaught? (4.8.17–18).

The world’s great snare is war generally, and war with Caesar in particular. The point is that most moralists would say that the world’s great snare for Antony was Cleopatra herself, and Cleopatra’s use of such a

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phrase means that she has a different point of view on the subject, perhaps one to be respected. There’s also a curious scene at the beginning of the third act, when one of Antony’s generals, named Ventidius, has done what Antony should have been doing all along: fought with and defeated the Parthian army. One of his subordinates suggests that he follow up the victory in a way that will knock the Parthians out for much longer, but Ventidius says he’s done enough. If he makes a more impressive victory than he has made, he’ll be threatening Antony’s “image,” as we call it now, and Antony will find some way of getting rid of him [3.1.12–27]. We’re back to the smaller, calculating Antony of Julius Caesar, and the episode seems to be telling us that if Antony really did his Roman duty we’d find him a rather commonplace character, not the unforgettable tragic hero of this play. There are different levels on which characters can be presented to us in literature. In pure myths characters may be gods or divine beings, though since Classical times this has been rather uncommon. Or they may be heroes of romance like the knights of Arthur’s court, or like what Don Quixote dreamed of being, capable of incredible feats of strength, endurance, and love. Or they may be leaders like Othello or King Lear or Bolingbroke, with nothing strictly supernatural about them, but with authority and a power of speech denied to ordinary mortals. Or they may be people roughly on our own level, or they may be unfortunate or foolish or obsessed people whom we feel to be less free than ourselves, and whom we look down on (I mean in perspective, not morally). At the beginning of the play Caesar and Antony are on the third level, social and military leaders. Caesar’s greatest strength is his limitation to that role: he is single-mindedly devoted to leadership, and lets nothing else get in his way. He has gods, of course, but he seems to be indifferent to them, and one would never guess from this play that he himself was deified after his death. Thus: 1. Divine being, hero descended from gods, hero who is a protégé of the gods, etc. 2. Romantic hero and lover, human but not subject to ordinary human limitations. 3. Kings and other commanding figures in social or military authority. 4. Ordinary people. 5. Foolish, obsessed, unfortunate people; people assumed to be in a state of less freedom than we are.206

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Antony is a leader, we said, but he has a heroic dimension that makes him a romantic legend, on the second rather than the third level, even in Caesar’s eye, as when Caesar recalls his tremendous powers of endurance in his earlier campaigns, drinking “the stale of horses” [1.4.62] and the like. A bystander remarks that his soldiership is “twice the other twain” [2.1.35], meaning Caesar and Lepidus, whatever Lepidus may count for. His immense physical vitality (Plutarch calls him the “new Bacchus” or Dionysus)207 and his great personal magnetism mean that any army following him feels drawn together into a fighting community. In front of the most certain defeat, his men, or some of them, are still fighting with high morale and joking about their wounds. In his last wretched days, when he is only, as his soldiers call him, the ruin of Cleopatra’s magic [3.10.18], he still seems like a kind of force of nature. Even his blunders are colossal, and, as Enobarbus says, there is a glamour in being part of so majestic a lost cause [4.6.30–9]. The story of Enobarbus is the clearest illustration of Antony’s power as a leader. Enobarbus, we said, is a commentator on the action; his detachment makes him use rational categories, and causes him to be especially sensitive to the decline of rationality in Antony. He contrasts the courage of Caesar, guided by a cool head, with the courage of Antony, which is increasingly guided by panic, “frighted out of fear,” as he says [3.13.195], so that in a sense Antony’s reason has been taken prisoner by Caesar. He then draws the inference that the rational thing for him to do would be to desert to Caesar. But his reason has betrayed him. He finds himself at once in the deep cold hell of the deserter, no longer trusted by those he has left, never to be trusted by those he is trying to join. Then comes the news that Antony, aware of his desertion, has sent on all his possessions and his “treasure” [4.6.20]. What he discovers in that moment is that his identity consisted of being a part of Antony’s cause, and that he is now nothing, just as a hand severed from the body is no longer a hand. It’s significant, I think, that he does not commit suicide: he simply lies down in a ditch and stays there, because he’s already dead. The great romantic heroes are normally great lovers too, and Antony’s love for Cleopatra gives him again a dimension that puts him beyond the usual human categories. We may look at the extraordinarily concise opening scene. Two fairly anonymous Romans speak of Antony’s “dotage” and his spending his energies in cooling a “gipsy’s lust” [1.1.1–10] (the Gypsies were believed at that time to have come from Egypt, and the term is Roman racism). Then they eavesdrop on the first encounter

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we have between Antony and Cleopatra. The important part of it for us is Cleopatra’s “I’ll set a bourne how far to be beloved,” and Antony’s response, “Then thou must208 needs find out new heaven, new earth” [1.1. 16–17]. However the scene is staged, it’s framed by the two visiting Romans, so that it’s in a deliberately confined area, yet out of this confined area comes the declaration of a love that bursts the boundaries of human experience altogether. The two Romans, like most tourists, have seen and heard what they expect to see and hear, and have no notion of what they really have seen and heard, which is a statement of what another very great love poet, John Donne, calls Lovers’ Infiniteness.209 As for Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt was a goddess, an incarnation of Isis, the goddess of the sea, in whose “habiliments” [3.6.17],210 according to Caesar, she publicly appeared. She is also described by Enobarbus as enthroned on her “barge” [2.2.191] on the water, as though she were a kind of Venus surrounded by love spirits. The effect she produces is so close to being that of an incarnate love goddess that Enobarbus speaks of how even the holy priests “Bless her when she is riggish {sexually excited}” [2.2.239].211 It is after Antony dies that in her laments for him she speaks of him as a divinity whose legs bestrid the ocean and whose eyes were the sun and moon [5.2.79–82]. We may, with Dolabella, consider this just the rhetorical grief of a very rhetorical person, but then there is that curious episode of soldiers hearing a mysterious music which means that Hercules, Antony’s patron, has deserted him [4.3.12–17]. This scene, act 4, scene 3, is the only moment in the play that looks in the least supernatural, and we may think it at first a bit out of key: something that Shakespeare found in Plutarch and thought maybe he ought to include, but that doesn’t really belong.212 I don’t think that critical judgment will quite do. If one is explicitly writing romance or myth, characters can go into extrahuman categories without trouble, according to the conventions of what’s being written; but Antony and Cleopatra is on the historical level of credibility. On that level, anything above the human may be suggested, but it must almost always be associated with failure. The desertion of Antony by Hercules means that Antony has failed to become a pagan incarnation, a Hercules or Dionysus walking the earth. Such heroic incarnations always fail: that’s one of the things Greek tragedy is about. Agrippa, on Caesar’s side, remarks that the gods always give great spirits flaws to keep them on the human level [5.1.32– 3]. There’s a truth in this I want to come back to, but not all tragedy is about heroes who had flaws preventing them from living up to their her-

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oism. Some tragedies are about heroes whose “flaws” were their virtues, whose heroism was simply too destructive a force to the world around them to survive in it. Antony was perhaps not one of those, but he comes so near to being one that what emerges from the deepest centre of this immensely profound play is Cleopatra’s bitter complaint: It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods, To tell them that this world did equal theirs, Till they had stolen our jewel. (4.15.75–8)

What is true of heroism is true of love as well. There are no superhuman lovers, and all attempts at such love have been tragic. Antony’s page, who kills himself to avoid having to kill Antony, is named Eros, and it seems clear that Shakespeare uses the name for the sake of its resonances, and for the aspect of the play in which it is a tragedy of Eros: Unarm, Eros, the long day’s task is done, And we must sleep. (4.14.35–6)

In one of his more manic phases in the same scene, Antony speaks of himself and Cleopatra as becoming the model for lovers in the next world, gazed at by all as the two who, so to speak, made it: Dido, and Aeneas,213 shall want troops, And all the haunt be ours. (4.14.53–4)

The reference to Dido and Aeneas is deeply ironic, as it’s both right and wrong. Aeneas rejected Dido’s love; she burned herself on a funeral pyre; Aeneas went on to Italy but had first to visit the lower world to gain a prophecy of the future greatness of Rome; he met Dido in the lower world; she cut him dead and went off to find her first husband. Nevertheless, Dido is one of the most famous lovers in literature, and Aeneas is famous by virtue of his association with her. The Aeneas who went on to Italy and made a dynastic marriage with someone called Lavinia is, despite Virgil’s best efforts, almost an antihero. Antony’s tragedy is in many respects like the tragedy of Adam as seen later by Milton. Adam falls out of Eden because he would rather die with Eve than live without her [Paradise Lost, 9.908–9]: theologically he may have been wrong, but

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dramatically everyone applauds his decision.214 Success in heroic love being impossible, better to fail heroically than to succeed in mediocrity. Here we have to return to Agrippa’s observation. There is a character in one of Blake’s Prophecies who says, at the end of a long poem, “Attempting to become more than man we become less.”215 It is because Antony is so much bigger a man than Caesar that he is also, at other times, so much smaller. Along with Cleopatra, he is often not simply ordinary but silly and childish. Caesar never descends to that level, because he never rises above his own: he has no dreams of divinity, and so no awakenings into the “all too human,” as Nietzsche calls it.216 Cleopatra is often spoken of as though she had charms or love potions or magic spells or other apparatus of a witch. She hasn’t any of these things: what gives the illusion of them is the intensity of her humanity, and the same thing is true of Antony. But intense humanity is a two-way street. One yardstick to contrast Rome and Egypt, and which this time does illustrate the superiority of Rome, is the treatment of messengers. Caesar is invariably courteous to his messengers, and so is Antony at the beginning of the play, when the messenger who brings the bad news from the eastern front is even encouraged to include a comment on Antony’s lackadaisical response. But Cleopatra’s treatment of the messenger of the marriage to Octavia shows her at her impossible worst, and Antony soon shows that he has caught the infection, when he orders Caesar’s messenger Thidias to be flogged [3.13.95–103]. There is, it is true, another element here: it almost looks as though Cleopatra, feeling that Antony’s number is up, would be ready to do a deal with Caesar, and of course her repertoire of deals is very limited. Enobarbus, one feels, also suspects that Cleopatra is ready to come to some kind of terms with Caesar, and this is the moment when he decides to leave Antony. The childish petulance in Antony’s action comes, first, from the fact that it’s obviously Cleopatra that he wants to take the whip to, and, second, that he’s reacting in a small-minded way to disaster, by retreating from the present into fantasy and reminiscence of the past. Antony never recovers his original control, and later tells the eunuch Mardian how close he has come to death for bringing the (false) news of Cleopatra’s death [4.14.36– 7]. But still his lowest moment in the play is the pitiful complaint in his speech to Thidias: He {Caesar} makes me angry with him. For he seems Proud and disdainful, harping on what I am Not what he knew I was. (3.13.141–3)

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One pattern of imagery that runs all through the play is the contrast of land and sea, of a solid and a liquid world, an imagery that reinforces the contrast between Rome and Egypt. I spoke of the first scene, where a Roman begins the play with: Nay, but this dotage of our general’s O’erflows the measure . . . (1.1.1–2)

This is a Roman view of someone taken over by Egypt, the land that owes its fertility, in fact its very existence, to the annual overflowing of the Nile. The metaphors associated with Rome are often geometrical, as in Antony’s apology to Octavia, “I have not kept my square” [2.3.6], implying something solid. On Pompey’s galley there is a discussion between Enobarbus and Pompey’s lieutenant, Menas, in which the words “land” and “sea” echo like a cuckoo clock [2.6.82–94]; and Cleopatra, the “serpent of old Nile” [1.5.25], as Antony calls her, is constantly associated with seas and with two rivers, the Nile and the Cydnus. It is she, as is said earlier, who insists that the battle of Actium should be a sea fight, and it is the fleet that finally betrays Antony. I said a moment ago that in tragedy we sometimes get forms of heroism that are too big for the world as we know it, and so become destructive. If the wills of Antony and Cleopatra had been equal to the passions they express in their language, there wouldn’t have been much left of the cosmos. “Let Rome in Tiber melt” [1.1.33], says Antony at the beginning of the play; “Melt Egypt into Nile” [2.5.78], says Cleopatra later. From the scene of Antony’s attempted suicide on, the play is full of images of the world dissolving into chaos, of the sun burning its sphere, of cloud shapes becoming as indistinct “As water is in water” [4.14.11]. The chaos is social as well as cosmic, because with the loss of such a leader the hierarchy on which all existence depends collapses, as Lear’s world after his abdication collapses into the world symbolized by the storm. Cleopatra says of Antony: The soldier’s pole is fall’n: young boys and girls Are level now with men. (4.15.65–6)

The entire history of the word “standard,” which is not even used, lies behind these images. The images of dissolution point to the fact that Caesar becomes master of the world because he knows the substance, location, and limits of the world that can be mastered: for a short time, one

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may master anything that will stay in place. Antony has fallen into the world of process and metamorphosis, a far bigger world than Caesar’s, but a world that no one can control unless he can also control death itself. Cleopatra comes to feel that to choose death with Antony is a greater destiny than Caesar, who is “but Fortune’s knave” [5.2.3], can ever reach; and she speaks of transcending the world of the moon and of the corruptible elements below it: I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life, (5.2.289–90)

difficult as it is to envisage a discarnate Cleopatra. One cannot read or listen far into this play without being reminded that the action is taking place about thirty years before what Shakespeare’s audience would have considered the turning point of history, the birth of Christ. There are references to Herod of Jewry,217 which are in Plutarch but have overtones for the audience that they would not have for Plutarch;218 and Caesar, with his victory practically in sight, remarks, “The time of universal peace is near” [4.6.4], where again the audience knows more of his meaning than he does. It would have been strange if Christ had been born into a world whose temporal master was a protégé of Hercules, ruling the world probably from Egypt. It is partly in this context that the upper limits of Antony and Cleopatra become so significant: of Antony as a failed pagan or heroic incarnation, of Cleopatra as a goddess of love, of the sea, and of the overflowing Nile. The Egypt of this play is partly the Biblical Egypt, whose Pharaoh was called in the Bible “the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers” [Ezekiel 29:3],219 and whose ruler here is the serpent of old Nile whom we last see nursing a baby serpent at her breast. There are some books on mythology that tell you things about the actual grammar of mythology that you won’t find in more conventional handbooks. I referred earlier to Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, a book that appeared about forty years ago, which tells us of a goddess personifying the fertility of the earth, who takes a lover early in the year, then turns him into a sacrificial victim, then erases the memory of him and starts the next year with a new lover.220 We remember that Cleopatra hates to be reminded that she once was the mistress of Julius Caesar, and she apparently does not react to the name Herod, though she had been involved with him too. And when she is finally dead—at least so far

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as our knowledge of such things goes—Caesar looks down on her and comments that: she looks like sleep, As she would catch another Antony In her strong toil of grace. (5.2.346–8) The old dispensation, as the theologians call it, has rolled by, carrying its symbols of the skin-shedding serpent, the sea, the dying and renewing life of the earth. And, whatever happens to human fortunes in the next thirty years, it is still there, ready to roll again. VII Measure for Measure Most critics link the title of this play with a verse from the Sermon on the Mount: “Judge not, that ye be not judged: for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”221 The phrase is a common one, and was used by Shakespeare in an earlier play,222 but the link with this quoted passage seems to be clearly there, and suggests that this play is concerned, like much of The Merchant of Venice, with the contrast between justice and mercy. Only it doesn’t talk about Christians and Jews; it talks about the contrast between large-minded and small-minded authority, between a justice that includes equity and a justice that’s a narrow legalism. The title also suggests the figure of the scales or balance that’s the traditional emblem of justice. The play seems to me very closely related to the late romances, and that’s why I’m dealing with it here, although it’s earlier than King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. The story used in the play has many variants, but the kernel of it is a situation where a woman comes to a judge to plead for the life of a man close to her, husband or brother, who’s been condemned to death. The judge tells her that he’ll spare the man’s life at the price of her sexual surrender to him. In some versions she agrees and the judge doublecrosses her, having the man executed anyway. She then appeals to a higher judge, king, or emperor, who (in stories where it’s a husband she’d pleaded for) orders the judge to marry her and then has him executed. All these elements of the story are in Shakespeare’s play, but he’s redistributed them with his usual infallible instinct for what fits where.

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The versions closest to his play are a long (two-part), crowded, rather cumbersome play called Promos and Cassandra, by George Whetstone, which goes back to 1578,223 and a story in a collection by an Italian writer who used the name Cinthio, a collection that also seems to have provided, whether in the original or in a French translation, the source of Othello.224 Shakespeare used such collections of stories a good deal: one reason, and we’ll see in a moment why it is a reason, is that a lot of the stories are very close to being folk tales; in fact a lot of them are folk tales that the author has picked up somewhere and written out. This play, as most critics recognize, has three well-known folk-tale themes in it: the disguised ruler, the corrupt judge, and the bed trick. If we look at the first of these themes, the disguised ruler, we run into a difficulty that’s central to this play. The Duke of Vienna, Vincentio, feels that his town is getting morally out of hand, especially in its sexual permissiveness, so he disappears, leaving a subordinate named Angelo to administer a law very strictly providing the death penalty for adultery. Our reactions to this may be very unfavourable to the Duke. Surely he’s being a coward when he runs away from his responsibilities, leaving someone else to administer an unpopular and perhaps sick law because he’s afraid of spoiling his nice-guy image (at least, that’s more or less the explanation he gives); he’s being incompetent in putting Angelo in charge instead of his more conscientious and humane colleague Escalus; and he’s a sneak to come back disguised as a friar to eavesdrop on the consequences of what he’s done. But whether our reactions are right or wrong, they clearly seem to be irrelevant to the play. Why are they irrelevant? We can see that Lear is being foolish when he abdicates, and our knowledge of that fact is highly relevant: what’s different here? I haven’t any answer to this right now, except to say that this is a different kind of play: I have first to explain what I think is going on. We saw in King Lear that when the king abdicates, his kingdom is plunged into a lower level of nature, and when Lear has reached the bottom of that, on the heath with the Fool and Poor Tom, he starts to acquire a new kind of relation to his kingdom, where he feels his affinity with the “poor naked wretches” he prays to. Because King Lear is a tragedy, this doesn’t get far before Lear is involved with other things, like madness and capture. In Measure for Measure what happens as a result of the Duke’s leaving the scene is not that we descend to a lower order of nature, but that we’re plunged into a lower level of law and social organization. The Elizabethans, like us, attached great importance to the principle in law called

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equity, the principle that takes account of certain human factors. Angelo is out simply to administer the law, or rather a law against fornication, according to legalistic rules. Authority is essential to society, but what we called in King Lear “transcendental” authority, with an executive ruler on top, depends on the ruler’s understanding of equity. If he hasn’t enough of such understanding, authority becomes a repressive legalism. Legalism of this sort really descends from what is called in the Bible the knowledge of good and evil. This was forbidden knowledge, because, as we’ll see, it’s not a genuine knowledge at all: it can’t even tell us anything about good and evil. This kind of knowledge came into the world along with the discovery of selfconscious sex, when Adam and Eve knew that they were naked, and the thing that repressive legalism ever since has been most anxious to repress is the sexual impulse. That’s why a law making fornication a capital offence is the only law the abdicating Duke seems to be interested in.225 In the framework of assumptions of Shakespeare’s day, one was the doctrine in the New Testament that the law, as given in the Old Testament, was primarily a symbol of the spiritual life. The law in itself can’t make people virtuous or even better: it can only define the lawbreaker. You’re free of what Paul calls the bondage of the law226 when you absorb the law internally, as part of your nature rather than as a set of objective rules to be obeyed. Under the “law” man is already a criminal, condemned by his disobedience to God, so if God weren’t inclined to mercy, charity, and equity as well as justice, nobody would get to heaven. This is what Portia tells Shylock in The Merchant of Venice [4.1.193–202], where Shylock symbolizes the clinging to the “bond” of the literal law that was the generally accepted view of Judaism in England at the time. It’s a very skewed notion of Judaism, naturally, but there were no Jews legally in England then, and so no one to speak for another point of view.227 Measure for Measure, I suggested, deals with the same target of narrowminded legalism, but without the very dubious attachments to assumed Christian and Jewish attitudes. What Jesus attacked in the Pharisees is as common in Christianity as it is anywhere else, and Angelo’s breakdown illustrates the fact that no one can observe the law perfectly. Portia’s point is repeated by Isabella when she says to Angelo, “Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once” (2.2.73). I’ve often referred to the ideology of Shakespeare’s day, the set of assumptions his audience brought into the theatre with them. Every society has an ideology, and its literature reflects the fact. But I don’t think

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any culture is really founded on an ideology: I think people first of all make up stories, and then extract ideas and assumptions from them. The Christian ideology of Shakespeare’s day, as of ours, was a derivation from Christian mythology; that is, the story that Christianity is based on. Our word “myth” comes from the Greek mythos, meaning plot, story, narrative.228 The Christian myth, the complex of stories it tells, is, we said, structurally closest to comedy. Critics a hundred years ago said that Measure for Measure was a play in which Shakespeare was trying to discuss serious issues like prostitution and the theory of government, but couldn’t get far because of censorship and other obstacles. Of course he couldn’t have got far with such themes: the assumption is that he wanted to discuss them, and that’s an assumption I very much distrust. Other critics think the play is a kind of dramatic exposition of Christian doctrines and principles.229 I distrust the assumption in that even more. I think Shakespeare uses conceptions taken from the ideology of his time incidentally, and that we always have to look at the structure of the story he’s telling us, not at what gets said on the way. That is, as a dramatist, he reflects the priority of mythology to ideology that I’ve just spoken of. Further, he reflects it increasingly as he goes on. Because of this, his later plays are more primitive than the earlier ones, not, as we might expect, less so. They get closer all the time to folk tales and myths, because those are primitive stories: they don’t depend on logic, they don’t explain things and don’t give you room to react: you have to listen or read through to the end. That’s what brings Measure for Measure so close to the romances at the end of Shakespeare’s productive period, both in its action and in its mood. Well, it’s time we got to the second theme, the crooked judge.230 We saw from A Midsummer Night’s Dream how often a comedy begins with some kind of irrational law—irrational in the sense that it blocks up the main thrust of the comic story, which somehow manages to evade or ignore it. Usually such a law is set up to block the sexual desires of the hero and heroine, and sometimes it isn’t really a law, but simply the will of a crotchety parent who lays down his law. Sometimes, instead of the law, we start with a mood of deep gloom or melancholy, and that’s the main obstacle the comic action has to scramble over. Twelfth Night, for example, begins with Duke Orsino overcome with love melancholy—at least he thinks he is—and Olivia in deep mourning for a dead brother. These elements in comedy are those connected with the corrupt judge theme in Measure for Measure. The ugly law is scowling at us from the

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beginning, and Angelo’s temperament, in both his incorruptible and his later phases, ensures that there will be enough gloom. Angelo, to do him justice (we can’t seem to get away from that word), expresses strong doubts about his fitness for the post. Nonetheless he’s put in charge of Vienna, ready to strike wherever sex rears its ugly head. He has a test case immediately: Claudio is betrothed to Julietta (I call her that for clarity),231 and betrothal in Shakespeare’s time could sometimes be a fully marital relation, complete with sexual intercourse. Claudio and Julietta have got together on this basis, but have failed to comply with all the provisions of the law about publicizing the marriage. So he’s guilty of adultery, and has to have his head cut off. Lucio, a man about town, is horrified by this, not because he’s a person of any depth of human feeling, but because he sees how enforcing such a law would interfere with his own sex life, which is spent in brothels. So he goes (at Claudio’s urging, it is true) to Claudio’s sister, Isabella, who is almost on the point of becoming a novice in an order of nuns, to get her to plead with Angelo for her brother’s life. Isabella is not very willing, but Lucio finally persuades her to visit Angelo, and accompanies her there. Before this happens, though, there’s a broadly farcical scene in which a dimwitted constable named Elbow comes into the magistrate’s court presided over by Angelo and Escalus, with a charge against Pompey, who is a pimp and therefore one of the people the newly enforced law is aimed at. The scene seems to be pure comic relief, but it establishes three important points. First, Angelo walks out on the proceedings before long and leaves Escalus to it: his speech on doing so ends with the line “Hoping you’ll have good cause to whip them all” (2.1.137).232 Angelo despises the people before him so much that he can’t bother to listen to their meanderings. The phrase from the Sermon on the Mount, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” comes to mind. What it surely means, among other things, is: If you despise other people for their moral inferiority to yourself, your own superiority won’t last long; in fact, it’s effectively disappeared already. Second, even Escalus can hardly figure out who did what to whom, so we wonder about the ability of law ever to get hold of the right people, or understand what is really going on about anything. Third, while Claudio, who is a decent man, is going to be beheaded, Pompey, who at least is an avowed pimp (and incidentally quite proud of it), is let off with a warning. We may notice another feature of the scenes with the bawds: very little is said about the relatively new and then terrifying disease of syphilis;

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it’s clearly in the background, but it stays in the background. “Thou art always figuring diseases in me,” says a fellow patron to Lucio, “but . . . I am sound” (1.2.53–4). That isn’t because Shakespeare felt reticent about the subject: if you think he did, take a look at the brothel scenes in Pericles.233 But to pull down houses of prostitution because of the danger of syphilis would give the law in this play a more rational motive than Shakespeare wants to assign to it. He’s no more out to justify the law than to attack it: he merely presents the kind of hold that such law has on society, in all its fumbling uncertainty and lack of direction. We’re ready now for the big scene with Angelo and Isabella [2.4]. I’ve suggested to you that when you’re reading Shakespeare you might think of yourself as directing a performance, which includes choosing the kind of actors and actresses that seem right for their assigned parts. If I were casting Angelo, I’d look for an actor who could give the impression, not merely of someone morally very uptight, but possessing the kind of powerful sexual appeal that many uptight people have, as though they were leading a tiger on a leash. If I were casting Isabella, I’d want an actress who could suggest an attractive, intelligent, strongly opinionated girl of about seventeen or eighteen, who is practically drunk on the notion of becoming a nun, but who’s really possessed by adolescent introversion rather than spiritual vocation. That’s why she seems nearly asleep in the first half of the play. If the setting of the interview weren’t so sombre, with a man’s life depending on the outcome, the dialogue would be as riotously funny as the strange case of Elbow’s wife. Let’s resort to paraphrase. Isabella: “I understand you’re going to cut my brother’s head off.” Angelo: “Yes, that is the idea.” Isabella: “Well, I just thought I’d ask. I have to go now; I have a date with a prayer.” Lucio: “Hey, you can’t do that! Make a production of it; weep, scream, fall on your knees, make as big a fuss as you can!” So Angelo and Isabella start manoeuvring around each other like a couple of knights who are in such heavy plate armour that they can’t bend a joint. The effect is that of a sombre Jonsonian comedy of humours. The humours in this case are two forms of predictable virtue, in people paralysed by moral rigidity. We’ve already heard Isabella telling a senior nun that she would like her convent to be as strict and rigid as possible [1.4.3–5]; we’ve heard Angelo saying out of his shell of righteousness: ’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, Another thing to fall. (2.1.17–18)

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Isabella goes into general maxims about the beauty of combining strength with gentleness, and Angelo, genuinely bewildered, says, “Why do you put these sayings on me?”(2.2.133).234 But something keeps them going; Isabella gets increasingly interested in her role, another meeting without Lucio is arranged, and eventually the serpent of Eden thrusts itself up between justice in his black robes and Purity in her white robes, and tells them both that they’re naked.235 At least, I’m pretty sure that the serpent speaks to them both, although of course it doesn’t get through to Isabella’s consciousness. Her overt reaction, when she finally understands what Angelo is proposing, is simply horror and outrage. But I wonder if she isn’t suppressing the awareness that she’s much more attracted to Angelo than she would consciously think possible, and that in her gradual warming-up process Angelo has done more warming than Claudio. However that may be, she goes off to visit Claudio in the prison and tells him that he will now have to die, not to fulfil the demands of the law, but to save his sister’s honour, which naturally he will do with the greatest willingness. She’s utterly demoralized to discover that Claudio is very unwilling to die, and quite willing to have her go along with Angelo to preserve his life. To paraphrase once again: “But it’s my chastity,” screams Isabella. “Yes, but it’s my head,” says Claudio. Isabella then explodes in a furious tirade (in which, incidentally, a Freudian listener would hear a strong fatherfixation, even though the father does not exist in the play). She pours all the contempt on Claudio that her very considerable articulateness can formulate, tells him that the sooner he dies the better, and even that “I’ll pray a thousand prayers for thy death” (3.1.145). She’s awakened out of all her dreams, and the world around her that her awakened eyes see is a prison. A real prison, not the dream prison she’d like her convent to be. So far the action has been fairly unrelieved tragedy for the major characters. The Duke has disappeared. The Friar, not generally known to be the Duke, is a prison chaplain, or seems to be functioning as one. His opening gambit as Friar doesn’t seem to have much promise: it’s a speech addressed to Claudio, telling him to “be absolute for death” [3.1.5], that he should welcome death because if he lives he may get a lot of uncomfortable diseases. It is doubtful that any young man was ever reconciled to immediate death by such arguments: certainly Claudio isn’t. The terror of death he expresses to Isabella, in the wonderful speech beginning “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where” [3.1.117], shows that the Friar’s consolations have left him untouched. Angelo has betrayed his

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trust; Claudio is about to die; Isabella’s dreams of a contemplative spiritual life, free of the corruptions of the world, are shattered forever. We notice that as we go on we feel less and less like condemning people, because of the steady increase of a sense of irony. We can’t condemn Claudio for his fear of what he feels to be, despite Isabella and the Friar, a totally undeserved death; we can’t condemn Isabella for turning shrewish when she feels betrayed by both Angelo and Claudio. As for Angelo, he now knows what it’s like to fall as well as to be tempted. As almost an incarnation of the knowledge of good and evil, he’s in a state of schizophrenic war with himself, the newly born impulse to evil determined on its satisfaction, the repudiated impulse to good despising, hating, and being miserably humiliated by its rival. This sense of a dramatic irony replacing an impulse to make moral judgments again points to the limitations of law, or at least of this kind of law. It was generally accepted in Shakespeare’s day that the writing of a play was a moral act, and that the cause of morality was best served by making virtue attractive and vice ugly. Whetstone’s play, mentioned earlier, says this in its preface,236 and Hamlet endorses the same view [3.2.19–28]. No doubt Measure for Measure accomplishes this feat too in the long run, but in the meantime we wonder about the dramatic pictures of virtue and vice that we’ve had. Angelo is certainly not more likeable as a hypocritical fraud than he was in his days of incorruptibility, but he seems somehow more accessible, even more understandable. Perhaps we can see, if we like, that what finally broke him down was not Isabella’s beauty, and not even his own powerfully repressed sexuality, but the combining of the two in a sadistic position of authority over a supplicating girl. But Isabella, in her invulnerable virtue, would not be anyone’s favourite heroine, and, at the other extreme, there’s Lucio, who retains something about him that’s obstinately likeable, though he’s clearly a basket case morally, and Barnardine, whose vitality makes it pleasant that he gets away with his refusal to be beheaded. In any case, the action in the prison scene reaches a complete deadlock, with Claudio still begging Isabella to do something to help him, and Isabella telling him in effect, in every possible sense, to go to hell. Then the disguised Duke steps forward to speak to Isabella, and the rhythm abruptly switches from blank verse to prose (3.1.151). This is the most clearly marked indication of structure, I think, that we’ve yet reached in any of the plays we’ve talked about. The play breaks in two here: the first half is the dismal ironic tragedy we’ve been

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summarizing, but from now on we’re in a different kind of play. One of the differences is that the Duke in disguise is producing and directing it, working out the plot, casting the characters, and arranging even such details as positioning and lighting. So it’s really a play within a play, except for its immense size, a half play that eventually swallows and digests the other half. Within the Duke’s own conventions, he’s playing with real-life people, like those nobles who used to play chess games using their own servants for pieces. In anything like a real-life situation, such a procedure would almost certainly meet with disaster very quickly, like Lear staging his love test. But in Measure for Measure, where we’re in the atmosphere of folk tale, our only reaction is to see what comes next. It’ll all work out just fine, so don’t you worry. The first element in this new play that the Duke produces is the story of Mariana, who provides a close parallel and contrast to the Claudio situation, and one which involves Angelo. Angelo had previously been engaged to a lady named Mariana, who still loves him, but the engagement fell through because the financial arrangements weren’t satisfactory. According to the way the law works things out, Angelo’s uncompleted engagement leaves him a person of the highest social eminence, whereas Claudio’s uncompleted betrothal leaves him a condemned criminal. So much for the kind of vision the knowledge of good and evil gives us: even if Angelo had remained as pure as the driven snow, the contrast in their fates would still be monstrous. The way the Duke proposes to resolve this situation is the device of the bed trick, where Isabella pretends to go along with Angelo’s proposal and assign a meeting, but substitutes Mariana in her place. It sounds like a very dubious scheme for a pious friar to talk a pious novice into, but something in Isabella seems to have accepted the fact that she’s in a new ball game, and that the convent has vanished from her horizon. I’ve talked about the affinity of this play with folk tales, and we can’t go far in the study of folk tale without coming across the figure of the trickster. The trickster may be simply mischievous or malicious, and may be associated with certain tricky animals, like the fox or the coyote. But in some religions the trickster figure is sublimated into a hidden force for good whose workings are mysterious but eventually reveal a deep benevolence.237 There are traces of this conception in Christianity, where a “providence” is spoken of that brings events about in unlikely and unexpected ways. I don’t want to labour the religious analogies, because they’re structural analogies only: if we try to make them more

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than that, they get very misleading. I think the Duke in this play is a trickster figure who is trying to turn a tragic situation into a comic one, and that this operation involves the regenerating of his society: that is, of course, the dramatic society, the cast of characters. A trickster, because, while tragedy normally rolls ahead to an inevitable crash, comedy usually keeps something hidden that’s produced when it’s time to reverse the movement. Let’s go back to King Lear and his abdication. I said that when he’s reached the bottom of his journey through nature, he discovers a new awareness of the “poor naked wretches” of his kingdom. He abdicates as “transcendental” ruler and takes on another identity in an “immanent” relation to his people, especially the suffering and exploited part of his people. As I said, this theme can’t be completed in a tragedy, but a comedy like Measure for Measure can take it a bit further. Duke Vincentio opens up, by leaving his place in society, a train of events headed for the bleakest and blackest tragedy. By his actions in disguise, he brings the main characters together in a new kind of social order, based on trust instead of threats. I’m not talking about the moral of the play, but about the action of the play, where something tragic gradually turns inside out into something comic. The trickster element in him comes out in the fact that his schemes involve a quite bewildering amount of lying, although he assures Isabella that there’s no real deception in what he does. He starts by telling Claudio privately, in the prison, that Angelo is only making trial of Isabella’s virtue. He gets Isabella to agree to the bed trick scheme, which necessitates lying on her part; Isabella is told the brutal lie that Claudio has been executed after all; he gives such strange and contradictory orders to Angelo and Escalus about his return that they wonder if he’s gone off his head; his treatment of that very decent official, the provost of the prison, would have a modern civil servant heading for the next town to find a less erratic boss. Whenever he remembers to talk like a friar, he sounds sanctimonious rather than saintly. We have only to put him beside Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet to see the difference between a merely professional piety and the real thing. There are two or three references in the play to frightening images that turn out to be harmless: an indulgent father’s whip, a row of extracted teeth in a barber shop, and, on the other side, Angelo’s “We must not make a scarecrow of the law” (2.1.1). In this play most of the major male characters are threatened with death in some form; the two women are

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threatened with the deaths of others. Yet in the long run nobody really gets hurt: even the condemned criminal Barnardine is set free, except that he has another friar attached to him. A pirate in the prison who died of natural causes has his head employed for some of the deceptions, that’s all [4.3.69–76]. It’s an ancient doctrine in comic theory that one of the standard features of comedy is what’s called in Greek the basanos, which means both ordeal and touchstone: the unpleasant experience that’s a test of character.238 This seems to be why the Duke starts off with his “Be absolute for death” speech to Claudio in the prison. He doesn’t seriously expect Claudio to be reconciled to death by hearing it, but it leaves him with a vision of seriousness and responsibility for the whole of his life that will make him a proper husband for Julietta and ensure that he doesn’t drift off into being another Lucio. Sounds far-fetched, but you won’t think that an objection by now. Angelo, of course, gets the bed-trick deal, which is a popular device in literature. Shakespeare used it again in a comedy that’s usually thought of as a companion piece to this one, All’s Well That Ends Well. Even the Bible has such a story, when Jacob, who wanted and expected Rachel, woke up to find Leah in his bed instead [Genesis 29:16–25]. Jacob’s society being polygamous, he got them both in the long run, but in Shakespeare’s bed-trick plays the device is used to hook a man to a woman he ought to be married to anyway. It’s one of the devices for the middle part of a comedy, the period of confused identity in which characters run around in the dark, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or the heroine puts on a boy’s clothes.239 One thing it represents in the two comedies where it occurs is the illusory nature of lust, in contrast to genuine love. Angelo’s lust tells him that he wants Isabella and doesn’t want Mariana, but in the dark any partner of female construction will do, and on that basis his wakened consciousness can distinguish between what he wants and what he thinks he wants. For Angelo the bed trick is the agent both of his condemnation and of his redemption. When his deceptions are uncovered in the final scene, he welcomes the death sentence as the only thing appropriate for him: he’s still a man of the law, even if his conception of law has matured. Mariana is the spark plug of the second half of the play: without her steady love for Angelo, no redeeming force could have got started. It nearly always happens in Shakespearean comedy that one of the female characters is responsible for the final resolution. Her importance, I think, is marked by the fact that when we meet her we hear a song, no less, and a very lovely song, in this grim clanking play [4.1.1–6].

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But of course Isabella is the Duke’s staged masterpiece. After being instructed how to act, she brings her accusation against Angelo [5.1.20–103], and there follows a great to-do about not believing her and a stretching of tension to the limit. Eventually Angelo is publicly humiliated, ordered to marry Mariana, and condemned to death immediately afterward. Mariana’s pleas for his life are rejected, so she turns to Isabella. Isabella’s speech [5.1.443–54] corresponds dramatically to Portia’s speech on mercy in The Merchant of Venice, but the latter is a rhetorical set speech: Portia after all is a lawyer, or pretending to be one. Isabella’s speech is short, thoughtful, painfully improvised, as the rhythm shows, and full of obvious fallacies as a legal argument. She is also making it at a time when she believes that Angelo has swindled her and had her brother executed after all. The essential thing is that the woman who earlier had told her brother that she would pray a thousand prayers for his death is now pleading for the life of the man who, as she thinks, murdered him, besides attempting the most shameful treatment of herself. People can’t live continuously on that sort of level, but if one’s essential humanity can be made to speak, even once in one’s life, one has a centre to revolve around ever after. The Duke is so pleased that he announces that he is going to marry her, though later he speaks of proposing to her in a private conference. The final confrontation is with Lucio, and that one is perhaps the strangest of all. Lucio was the spark plug of the first half, as Mariana is of the second: without his efforts on Isabella, all the Duke’s schemes would, so far as we can see, have ended in nothing but a dead Claudio. Yet he is the only one of the Duke’s characters (apart from Barnardine, whose inner attitude is unknown to us) on whom the Duke’s benevolent trickery makes no impression whatever. The Duke transfers to him the penalty he assigned to Angelo: Lucio is to marry the whore he has made pregnant, then executed. The threats of whipping and hanging are ignored by Lucio, and he doesn’t seem to notice that they are remitted, but he protests strongly against the violation of his comfortable double standard. He seems to be possessed by a peculiarly shabby version of the knowledge of good and evil. What is “good,” or at any rate all right, is what other fashionable young men do. Slandering a prince is all right because it’s only the “trick,” the fashion; visiting whorehouses likewise. But of course the whores are “bad” women. And yet the final scene would be much poorer without him: he gets all the laughs, and the Duke’s rebukes of him are simply ineffective bluster.

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He represents in part the sense of vestigial realism that we still have, the part of ourselves that recognizes how unspeakably horrible such snooping and disguised Dukes would be in anything resembling actual life. His slanders are forgiven, perhaps because he was describing the kind of person he would admire more than he does the actual Duke. And while the bulk of what he says is nonsense, one phrase, “the old fantastical Duke of dark corners” (4.3.156–7) is the most accurate description of him that the play affords. The title of the play is quoted by the Duke when he speaks of the retribution in the law: “An Angelo for a Claudio, life for life” (5.1.409).240 This is the axiom of tragedy, especially revenge tragedy, with its assumption that two corpses are better than one. From there, the action proceeds upward from this “measure for measure” situation to the final scene with which Shakespearean comedy usually ends: the vision of a renewed and regenerated society, with forgiveness, reconciliation, and the pursuit of happiness all over the place. Forgiveness and reconciliation come at the end of a comedy because they belong at the end of a comedy, not because Shakespeare “believed” in them. And so the play ends: it doesn’t discuss any issues, solve any problems, expound any theories, or illustrate any doctrines. What it does is show us why comedies exist and why Shakespeare wrote so many of them. And writing comedies may be more valuable to us than all the other activities together, as we may come to realize after the hindsight of three or four hundred years. VIII Shakespeare’s Romances: The Winter’s Tale The First Folio says it contains Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies, and that suggests a division of the main genres of Shakespeare’s plays that has pretty well held the field ever since. The main change has been that we now tend to think of four very late plays, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, as “romances,” to distinguish them from the earlier comedies. These plays reflect a new vogue in playwriting, which Shakespeare probably established, and in which he was followed by younger writers, notably Fletcher and his collaborator Beaumont. One of these plays, Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, has a preface that speaks of its being in a new form described as a “tragicomedy.”241 These four romances have not always been favourites: only The Tempest has steadily held the stage, though it’s often done so in some

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very curious distortions,242 and Pericles and Cymbeline, though superbly actable, are not very often performed even now. Nevertheless, the romances are popular plays, not popular in the sense of giving the public what it wants, which is a pretty silly phrase anyway, but popular in the sense of coming down to the audience response at its most fundamental level. We noticed a primitive quality in Measure for Measure linking it with folk tales, and there’s a close affinity between the romances and the most primitive (and therefore most enduring) forms of drama, like the puppet show.243 To mention some of their characteristics: first, there’s a noticeable scaling down of characters; that is, the titanic figures like Hamlet, Cleopatra, Falstaff, and Lear have gone. Leontes and Posthumus are jealous, and very articulate about it, but their jealousy doesn’t have the size that Othello’s jealousy has: we’re looking at people more on our level, saying and feeling the things we can imagine ourselves saying and feeling. Second, the stories are incredible: we’re moving in worlds of magic and fairy tale, where anything can happen. Emotionally, they’re as powerfully convincing as ever, but the convincing quality doesn’t extend to the incidents. Third, there’s a strong tendency to go back to some of the conventions of earlier plays, the kind that were produced in the 1580s: we noticed that Measure for Measure used one of these early plays as a source. Fourth, the scaling down of characters brings these plays closer to the puppet shows I just mentioned. If you watch a good puppet show for very long you almost get to feeling that the puppets are convinced that they’re producing all the sounds and movements themselves, even though you can see that they’re not. In the romances, where the incidents aren’t very believable anyway, the sense of puppet behaviour extends so widely that it seems natural to include a god or goddess as the string puller. Diana has something of this role in Pericles, and Jupiter has it in Cymbeline: The Tempest has a human puppeteer in Prospero. In The Winter’s Tale the question “Who’s pulling the strings?” is more difficult to answer, but it still seems to be relevant. The preface to that Fletcher play I mentioned says that in a “tragicomedy” introducing a god is “lawful,” i.e., it’s according to the “rules.”244 It may seem strange to think of Shakespeare rereading, as he clearly was, old plays that had gone out of fashion and been superseded by the highly sophisticated productions that came along in the early 1600s. But if we think of him as trying to recapture the primitive and popular basis of drama, it makes more sense. Mucedorus (anon.), for example, was a

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play written in the 1590s and revived (something rather unusual for that period) around 1610 or so, about the time of Shakespeare’s romances.245 It tells the story of how a young prince fell in love with a picture of the heroine, a princess in a faraway country, and journeyed in disguise to her land to court her. It’s advertised on its title page as “very delectable and full of mirth,”246 as it has a clown who mixes his words. The hero finds himself in the woods while the heroine and her suitor, a cowardly villain, are taking a walk. A bear appears; the heroine says whatever heroines say when they’re confronted with bears; the cowardly villain mutters something like “Well, nice knowing you,” and slopes off; there’s a scuffle in the bushes and the hero appears carrying the bear’s head. He says to the heroine, in effect, “Sorry this beast has been annoying you, but he won’t be a problem now; by the way, here’s his head, would you like it?” As far as we can make out from the dialogue and stage directions, the heroine says, “Thanks very much,” and goes offstage lugging what one might think would be a somewhat messy object. As you see, it’s all very delectable and full of mirth: it’s a good-natured, harmless, simple-minded story, and the audience of Shakespeare’s time ate it up. (So did readers: it went through seventeen Quartos.)247 But when we look at The Winter’s Tale and see a stage direction like “Exit, pursued by a bear” [3.3.58 s.d.], we wonder if we’re really in so very different a world, for all the contrast in complexity. Shakespeare himself didn’t seem to think so: in the winding up of the two main stories in the play, he has a gentleman say of one, “This news which is called true is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion” (5.2.27–9), and Paulina remarks of the other: That she is living, Were it but told you, should be hooted at Like an old tale. (5.3.115–17)

I think the “romance” period of Shakespeare’s production covers seven plays altogether. We know the approximate dates of Shakespeare’s plays, but we can’t pinpoint them all exactly in relation to the others: in any case a dramatist of his ability could have worked on more than one play at a time. The rest of this paragraph is guesswork, but not unreasonable guesswork. I think that after finishing Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare turned over the pages of Plutarch’s Lives until his eye fell on the life of Coriolanus. Coriolanus makes a perfect contrast to

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Antony, because his tragedy is the tragedy of a genuine hero who rejects the theatrical, the continuous acting role that made Antony so magnetic a figure. Coriolanus performs amazing feats of valour, but he has to do everything himself: he can’t hold an army together. There’s an immature and mother-dominated streak in him that won’t let him develop beyond the stage of a boy showing off. Plutarch’s scheme, you remember, was to write “parallel” lives, taking two at a time, one Greek and the other Roman, who suggested resemblances or contrasts with each other, and then comparing them.248 The Greek counterpart of Coriolanus was Alcibiades, who was prominent in the Athens–Sparta war, and in the life of Alcibiades there’s a digression telling the story of Timon the misanthrope or man-hater. Timon of Athens seems to me to be really Shakespeare’s first romance: it differs completely from the great tragedies both in its choice of hero and, more important, in its structure. It breaks in two, like a diptych: we’ve seen that structure already in Measure for Measure. Timon is at the centre of his society, a wealthy man giving parties and being a patron of the arts, for the first half of the play; then he loses his money and his so-called friends drop quickly out of sight, and he’s a hermit getting as far as he can from the human race for the second half. Of course we soon realize that he was completely isolated in his sociable phase, just as he’s pestered with a great variety of visitors, cursing every one of them, in his hermit stage. The stylizing of the action is typical of the romances, and Timon himself, who dies offstage with a couple of lines of epitaph, is a scaled-down tragic hero. Pericles is a curiously experimental play that recalls the early plays I mentioned, including an early play of Shakespeare’s, The Comedy of Errors. Pericles is based, as the conclusion of the earlier comedy is, on the traditional story of Apollonius of Tyre.249 The poets who had retold this story included Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, and Gower is brought on the stage to help tell the story of Pericles. This seems to be partly to suggest the authority of the story being told: you may not believe anything that happens in the story, but if someone gets up out of his grave after two hundred years to tell it to you, you don’t start saying “yes, but.” Pericles also tells its story partly by means of “dumb shows,” like the one in the Hamlet mousetrap play. In The Comedy of Errors there’s a priestess of Diana’s temple in Ephesus, but no Diana: in Pericles Diana appears to the hero in a dream to tell him where to go next. I have no idea why the name Apollonius got changed to Pericles, except that Shake-

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speare probably made the change himself. The first two acts of Pericles don’t sound at all like Shakespeare, but no collaborator has been suggested who wasn’t considerably younger,250 and I’d expect the senior collaborator to be in charge of the general design of the play. Cymbeline, like Pericles, is a “tragicomedy” (in fact it’s included with the tragedies in the Folio). Cymbeline was king of Britain at the time of the birth of Christ, and, unlike Lear, is a fully historical character: his coins are in the British Museum. Nonetheless the main story told in the play is practically the story of Snow White. No dwarfs, but a very similar story, along with a jealousy story in which the villain, Iachimo, is, as perhaps his name suggests, a small-scale Iago. The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest we’ll be dealing with next. Henry VIII, which seems to be later than The Tempest, is a history play assimilated to romance by concentrating on the central theme of the wheel of fortune, which keeps turning all through the play, and coming to an ironic conclusion with Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell, and Cranmer (two later beheaded and one burned alive) at the top of the wheel. There follows a very strange play called The Two Noble Kinsmen, a bitter, sardonic retelling of the story of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. We remember that the names Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream were apparently taken from this tale, but nothing of its sombreness got into the earlier play. The Two Noble Kinsmen appeared, long after Shakespeare’s death, in a Quarto saying it was the joint work of Shakespeare and Fletcher.251 Most scholars think that the play is mainly Fletcher’s (it was included in the Beaumont and Fletcher Second Folio), but that the Quarto is right in assigning part of it to Shakespeare. After that the trail fades out, although there is a rumour of another collaboration with Fletcher which is lost.252 Many critics also think that Henry VIII is partly or largely Fletcher’s,253 but I’ve never found this convincing, and I suspect that the motivation for believing it is partly that The Tempest seems a logical climax for the Shakespeare canon, and Henry VIII doesn’t. I spoke earlier of Greek New Comedy, which provided the original plots for Plautus and Terence. A spinoff from New Comedy was prose romance, which featured such themes as having someone of noble birth abandoned on a hillside as an infant, rescued and brought up as a shepherd, and eventually restored to his or her birthright, the essential documentary data having been thoughtfully placed beside the infant, and brought out when it’s time for the story to end. Infants did get exposed on hillsides in ancient Greece, though it may not have happened as often,

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or with such hospitable shepherds, in life as it does in literature. One of these late Greek romances, by a writer named Heliodorus, was available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries in English, and is alluded to in Twelfth Night.254 The imitating of such romance formulas became fashionable in Elizabeth’s time, and one such story was written by Robert Greene, Shakespeare’s older contemporary, and called Pandosto. This story is the main source of The Winter’s Tale, and its subtitle, The Triumph of Time, should also be kept in mind. The first thing to notice about the play is that, like Measure for Measure, it breaks in the middle: there are two parts to the play, the first part all gloom and tragedy, the second part all romantic comedy. But in Measure for Measure there’s no break in time: the action runs continuously through the same scene in the prison, where the deadlock between Claudio and Isabella is ended by the Duke’s taking over the action. In The Winter’s Tale Time himself is brought on the stage, at the beginning of the fourth act, to tell you that sixteen years have gone by, and that the infant you just saw exposed on the coast of Bohemia in a howling storm has grown up into a lovely young woman. It was still a general critical view that such breaks in the action of a play were absurd, and Shakespeare seems to be not just ignoring such views but deliberately flouting them.255 The next thing to notice is that there are two breaks in the middle, and they don’t quite coincide. (In speaking of breaks, of course, I don’t mean that the play falls in two or lacks unity). We do have the sixteenyear break at the end of the third act, but just before that there’s another break, of a type much more like the one in Measure for Measure. We see Antigonus caught in a terrific storm and pursued by a bear: the linking of a bear with a tempest is an image in a speech of Lear’s, and the storm here has something of the Lear storm about it, not just a storm but a world dissolving into chaos. After Antigonus’s speech, the rhythm suddenly shifts from blank verse to prose, just as it does in Measure for Measure, and two shepherds come on the scene. So while we have the two parts of the time break, winter in Sicilia and spring in Bohemia sixteen years later, we also have another break suggesting that something is going on that’s even bigger than that. We don’t have a deputy dramatist like the Duke constructing the action of the second part. But we notice that Shakespeare follows his source in Pandosto quite closely up to the point corresponding to the two breaks, and after that he gets much more detached from it. Greene’s Pandosto, the character corresponding to Leontes, never regenerates: toward the end he’s attempting

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things like incest with his daughter, and his death is clearly a big relief all round.256 Near the end of this play we have two scenes of the type critics call “recognition scenes,” where some mystery at the beginning of the play is cleared up. One of these is the recognition of Perdita as a princess and daughter of Leontes. This recognition scene takes place offstage: it’s not seen by us, but simply described in rather wooden prose by some “gentlemen,” so however important to the plot it’s clearly less important than the bigger recognition scene at the end, with Hermione and Leontes. Some of the things the gentlemen say, though, seem to be pointing to the real significance of the double break we’ve been talking about. One of them describes the emotional effect on all concerned of the discovery of the identity of Perdita, and says, “they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or of one destroyed” (5.2.14–15).257 Another, in recounting the death of Antigonus, says that the whole ship’s crew was drowned: “so that all the instruments which aided to expose the child were even then lost when it was found” {i.e., by the shepherds} (5.2.70– 2). Tough on them, considering that they were only carrying out a king’s orders, but, as we remember from the last speech of Richard II, kings have a lot of ways of keeping their hands clean. We notice that back in the scene where the shepherds find the baby, the shepherd who does find it says to the one who saw the bear eating Antigonus, “thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn” (3.3.113–14).258 The New Arden editor says that this is just a simple statement of fact, whatever a “fact” may be in a play like this.259 The two halves of the play seem to be not just Sicilian winter and Bohemian spring, but a death-world and a life-world. Ben Jonson remarked to his friend Drummond, as an example of Shakespeare’s carelessness in detail, that in this play he’d given a seacoast to Bohemia, which was a landlocked country.260 It’s just possible that Shakespeare knew this too: in The Tempest he also gives a seacoast to the inland Duchy of Milan. The Winter’s Tale was one of many plays performed in connection with the festivities attending the marriage of King James’s daughter, Elizabeth, to a prince who came from that part of the world.261 In a few years the Thirty Years’ War broke out and he lost his kingdom, and was known thereafter as “the winter king of Bohemia.” (However, that story has a long-term happy ending: it was through this marriage that the House of Hanover came to the British throne a century later.) The names Sicilia and Bohemia came from Pandosto, but Shake-

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speare reverses their relation to the characters. I doubt that the name Bohemia means much of anything, and the setting of the play doesn’t stay there: it changes back to Sicilia for the end of the play, so that we begin with Sicilia dying and end with Sicilia newborn. And I think the name Sicilia may mean something. It was in Sicily that the literary pastoral— and this play is full of pastoral imagery—originated, and it was in Sicily that the beautiful maiden Proserpine was kidnapped and carried off to the lower world by Pluto, forcing her mother, Ceres, to search all over the upper world for her. In this play Hermione doesn’t search, but she doesn’t come to life either (or whatever she does) until Perdita, whose name means the lost maiden, is said to be found. We start off, both in the prose introductory scene and the dialogue of the main scene that follows it, with a heavy, cloying, suet-pudding atmosphere that feels like a humid day before a thunderstorm. Leontes, king of Sicilia, is entertaining Polixenes, king of Bohemia, as a guest, and they’re crawling over each other with demonstrations of affection. Leontes’ queen, Hermione, is just about to give birth, and Polixenes has been visiting for nine months, so it’s technically possible for Leontes to do some perverted mental arithmetic. Before long, with no warning, the storm strikes, and Leontes, who’s been playing the gracious host role up to now, suddenly turns insanely jealous, setting in motion an extremely grim train of events. In a romance, we just accept Leontes’ jealousy as we would a second subject in a piece of music: it’s there, and that’s all there is to it, except to keep on listening. There are references to a period of innocence in the childhood of the two kings, then some teasing about the role of their two wives in losing their innocence, and finally Hermione says to Polixenes: Th’ offences we have made you do, we’ll answer, If you first sinn’d with us, and that with us You did continue fault, and that you slipp’d not With any but with us. (1.2.83–6)

In its context, all this is harmless badinage, but to a poisoned mind every syllable suggests a horrible leering innuendo, as well as an in-joke that Leontes is excluded from. Leontes is caught in the strong tricks of imagination that Theseus spoke of in A Midsummer Night’s Dream [5.1.18], where nothing, under the pressure of what Leontes calls “affection” or emotional stress, con-

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solidates into something, and creates an irrational fantasy. The wife of Greene’s Pandosto does at least hang around her guest’s bedchamber, but Leontes has nothing in the way of “evidence” of that kind, and even the most perverse director couldn’t give us a justified Leontes trapped by designing women. We notice how this creation of something out of nothing is associated with the contact senses: he says he smells and feels and tastes his situation, but seeing and hearing, the primary senses of the objective, he takes less account of [2.1.151–4].262 Here again we start rolling down a steep slide, as in King Lear, except that in King Lear the degenerating is in the king’s outer circumstances, whereas here it’s in his character. Before long Leontes is trying to get his courtier Camillo to murder Polixenes; foiled by Camillo’s flight, he turns coward and (as he says explicitly [2.3.4–7]) is resolved to take it out on Hermione. He hits perhaps his lowest point when he complains that he can’t sleep, and wonders if having Hermione burnt alive would give him rest [2.3.7–9]. Later he speaks of burning the infant Perdita [2.3.93–6], who’s just been born in the middle of this hullabaloo, and when Hermione’s friend Paulina speaks her mind, he threatens to burn her too [2.3.114]. Other images of useless sacrifice run all through this part of the play. Leontes is also obsessed by the notion that people are laughing at him behind his back (which of course they are, though not for the reason he thinks). He can say, however, “How blest am I” [2.1.36] in acquiring his totally illusory knowledge of good and evil. And yet every so often the fog clears a bit, and we realize that the Paulina–Leontes relation is really that of a nanny and a child in a screaming tantrum. Leontes says to Paulina’s husband, Antigonus: I charg’d thee that she should not come about me. I knew she would. (2.3.43–4)

There is a quite funny scene where Paulina sweeps in, Leontes orders her out, a swarm of male courtiers make futile efforts at pushing her, and Paulina brushes them off like insects while Leontes blusters. We realize that as soon as he gets rid of his obsession he’ll be quite a decent person again, though one doesn’t go through such things unmarked. At least he has had the sense to consult the oracle of Apollo, which tells him the exact truth about his situation. But Leontes has fallen into what he calls, in the last lines of the play, a “gap in time” [5.3.154],263 and so the timing goes all wrong.

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First comes the news of Mamillius’s death from shame at the accusation of his mother [3.2.144–5]. He seems a trifle young for such a reaction, but this is romance. It’s this news that shatters Leontes’ ugly world: nothing has lessened his affection for this boy, and he has never seriously questioned his legitimacy. Now he’s in a very bad situation for a king, without an heir to succeed him. For very soon afterward comes the news of Hermione’s death, brought by Paulina. “She’s dead, I’ll swear’t,” says Paulina [3.2.203]—a remark we might put away for future reference. Then again, the machinery has already been set in motion to make Antigonus go to Bohemia to leave the infant Perdita on Polixenes’ territorial doorstep. We notice that Hermione returns to visit Antigonus as a ghost in a dream [3.3.16–39]—by Jacobean dramatic conventions a pretty reliable sign that she’s really dead. As Antigonus has not heard the oracle’s report, he disappears into a bear, thinking that Polixenes after all must be the infant’s father. The Winter’s Tale is set in a pagan and Classical world, where Apollo’s oracle is infallibly inspired, and where the man who survived the flood is referred to by his Ovidian name of Deucalion [4.4.431] and not his Biblical name of Noah.264 As always, Shakespeare is not rigorously consistent: there are Biblical allusions, such as Perdita’s to the Gospel passage about the sun shining on all alike,265 which may be considered unconscious, but Polixenes’ reference to Judas Iscariot [1.2.417–19] hardly could be. We also seem to be back to “anointed kings,” and the awfulness of injuring them: doubtless the more Shakespeare’s reputation grew, the more carefully he had to look out for long ears in the audience. But no one can miss the pervading imagery or the number of links with Ovid’s Metamorphoses: in this play we’re not only in the atmosphere of folk tale, as we were in Measure for Measure, but in that of Classical mythology as well. At the centre of the play there’s the common folk-tale theme of the calumniated mother. This is a cut-down version of a myth in which a hero or heroine has a divine father and a human mother, so that the man who would normally expect to be the father becomes jealous and wants to kill at least the child, if not the mother too. So the calumniated-mother theme is usually connected with a threatened-birth theme, which is also in the play. We’re reminded of two famous Ovidian myths in particular. One is the myth of Ceres and Proserpine, already mentioned, and referred to by Perdita in speaking of her spring flowers [4.4.116–18]. (I give the Ovidian Latin names: the Greek ones, Demeter and Persephone or Kore, may be more familiar now.)266 The other is the story of Pygmalion and

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the statue Venus brings to life for him.267 There is another faint mythical theme in the resemblance between Florizel and Mamillius, a resemblance commented on by Leontes. After Leontes has lost his own son and heir, Florizel becomes his heir in the old-fashioned mythical way, by coming from afar, marrying the king’s daughter, and succeeding by what is called mother right. There are two main stories in the play, contrapuntally linked as usual. One is a straight New Comedy story of Perdita and her lover, Florizel; of how their marriage is blocked by parental opposition, and released by the discovery that Perdita is really a princess after all. The other is the story of the separation and reunion of Leontes and Hermione, which, again as usual in Shakespeare, seems to be the more important story of the two. The cultural environment is more extra-Christian than preChristian as in King Lear. A tragedy reveals the impotence of the Classical gods; a comedy can give us something of the sunnier side of paganism. The opening dialogue refers to the boyhood of Leontes and Polixenes as a state of innocence that was clear even of original sin. In King Lear we met two levels of nature: an upper level of human nature, which includes many things that in Shakespeare’s day would also be called “art,” but which are natural to man, and a lower level associated with predatory animals and what we call the law of the jungle.268 In The Winter’s Tale there are also two aspects of nature, but they’re in more of a parallel than a hierarchical relation. Philosophers have always distinguished two categories of nature. One is nature as a structure or system, the physical aspect of it; the other is the biological aspect, nature as the total power of growth, death, and renewed life. They’re sometimes called natura naturata and natura naturans. In King Lear, again, the upper, human level is associated with nature as an order; the lower level is associated mainly with ferocity, Tennyson’s nature “red in tooth and claw.”269 But in The Winter’s Tale we have the story of Florizel and Perdita associated with a genial nature of renewing power, the other aspect being more emphasized in the Leontes–Hermione one. There are still different levels, but these exist in both the forms of nature emphasized in the two stories. There seem to be three main levels in all. In the Leontes–Hermione world, there is a low or demonic level in the chaos released by Leontes’ jealousy, a world full of treachery and murder, pointless sacrifice, sterility, and utterly needless pain. This is a world of fantasy below reason, the imagination working in its diseased or “imaginary” aspect. Above

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this is a middle world of rationality, where the court is functioning normally. This middle world is represented particularly by two characters, Camillo and Paulina, who, like Kent in King Lear, combine outspoken honest criticism with a fierce loyalty. Above that again is the world we enter in the final scene, a world of imagination in its genuine creative sense, as far above reason as jealousy is below it. In the Florizel–Perdita world, which is set mainly in Bohemia, there are also three main levels of the action. At the bottom is Autolycus the thief, by no means as sinister a figure as the jealous Leontes, but still something of a nuisance. He would like to be the standard New Comedy tricky servant, but, as I remarked earlier, Shakespeare doesn’t care much for this character type, and manoeuvres the main action around him. He lives in a somewhat mindless present: for the life to come, he says, he sleeps out the thought of it [4.3.30]. Above him comes the normally functioning level of this world, which is represented primarily by the sheep-shearing festival (4.4). The imagery of this scene is that of the continuous fertilizing power of nature, with Perdita distributing flowers appropriate to all ages, and with a dance of twelve “satyrs” at the end [4.4.342 s.d.], who perhaps celebrate the entire twelve-month year. Perdita seems, her lover tells her, like the goddess Flora presiding over “a meeting of the petty gods” [4.4.4]. In her turn Perdita speaks with the most charming frankness of wanting to strew her lover with flowers, not “like a corse,” but as “a bank for love to lie and play on.” [4.4.130–1]. She has Autolycus warned not to use any “scurrilous words” in his tunes [4.4.213–14], and while of course the primary meaning is that she is a fastidious girl who dislikes obscenity, her motives are magical as well as moral: a festive occasion should not be spoiled by words of ill omen. The top level of this world, the recognition and marriage, we do not see, but merely hear it reported, as mentioned earlier. In the Florizel–Perdita world the relation of art to nature has a different aspect at each of these levels. When Autolycus first enters (4.3) he is singing the superb “When daffodils begin to peer” song, one of the finest of all spring songs, and we welcome this harbinger of spring as we do the cuckoo, who is also a thief. Later he comes in with a peddler’s pack of rubbish, which he calls “trumpery” [4.4.597].270 We should note this word, because it’s used again in a similar context by Prospero in The Tempest [4.1.186]: it’s connected with tromper, deceive, and, at the risk of sounding moralizing, we can say that his ribbons and such are “artificial” in the modern derogatory sense of an art that is mainly a corruption

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of nature. He also produces a number of broadside ballads, which were quite a feature of Elizabethan life: they were the tabloid newspapers of the time, and some of the alleged news they carried was so extravagant that Shakespeare’s examples are hardly caricatures. It is on the next level that Polixenes offers his Renaissance idealistic view of the relation of art to nature: in grafting, we use art in implanting a bud on a stock, but the power of nature is what makes it grow. The emphasis on the power of nature is appropriate, even though Perdita will have nothing to do with any interference from art on “great creating nature” [4.4.88]. And in the reported recognition, the gentlemen tell us that such wonderful things have happened “that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it” [5.2.24–5]. So it seems that Autolycus and his preposterous ballads have something to do with the function of art in this world after all. In the Leontes–Hermione story we have at the bottom the parody art of Leontes’ jealousy making something out of nothing, a demonic reversal of the divine creation. On the middle level we have, in the conversation of the gentlemen, a very curious reference to a painted statue of Hermione made by Julio Romano. Romano was an actual painter, widely touted as the successor of Raphael,271 but the reason for mentioning his name here eludes us: perhaps there was some topical reason we don’t know about. He is said to be a fanatically realistic worker in the technique we’d now call trompe l’oeil: there’s the word tromper again. If what we’re told is what we’re to believe, there’s no statue at all, so there was no point in mentioning him, although the conception of art as an illusion of nature perhaps fits this level and aspect of the story. The final scene involves all the arts, in the most striking contrast to the Perdita–Florizel recognition: the action takes place in Paulina’s chapel; we are presented with what we’re told is painting and sculpture; music and oracular language are used at appropriate moments; and another contemporary meaning of the word “art,” magic, so important in The Tempest, is also referred to [5.3.110]. If we look at the words that get repeated, it seems as though the word “wonder” has a special connection with the Florizel–Perdita story, and the word “grace” with the Leontes–Hermione one. “Grace” has a bewildering variety of meanings in Shakespearean English, many of them obsolete. In the opening dialogue Hermione uses it so frequently and pointedly that we don’t just hear it: it seems to stand out from its context. When she becomes the victim of Leontes’ fantasy, she says that what’s happening to her is for her “better grace” [2.1.122], and when she finally

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speaks at the end of the play, what she says is a prayer for the graces of the gods to descend [5.3.121–3]. We may, perhaps, isolate from all the possible meanings two major ones: first, the power of God (the Classical gods in this play) that makes the redemption of humanity possible, and, second, the quality that distinguishes civilized life, of the kind “natural” to man, from the untutored or boorish. Let’s see what we have now: A. The Leontes–Hermione story of the order of nature; winter tale of “grace.”

B. The Florizel–Perdita story of the power and fertility of nature; spring tale of “wonder.”

A. Transformation of Hermione from illusion to reality; union of all the arts.

Upper Level B. Recognition of Perdita as princess by birth (i.e., nature); ballads of wonder.

A. Court world of Camillo and Paulina; art as Romano’s illusion of nature.

Middle Level B. World of festival; image of art as grafting or attachment to power of nature.

A. Illusory world of Leontes’ jealousy: parody of imaginative creation. Mamillius’s aborted “winter’s tale.”

Lower Level B. Autolycus: pure present; songs of spring; also “trumpery” or arts corrupting nature.

In the final scene, what we are apparently being told is that Paulina has kept Hermione hidden for sixteen years, Hermione consenting to this because the oracle seemed to hint that Perdita would survive. There was never any statue. But other things seem to be going on that don’t quite fit that story. In the first place, Paulina’s role, partly actor-manager and partly priestess, seems grotesquely ritualistic and full of pretentious rhetoric on that assumption; some of the things she says are really incantations:

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Music, awake her; strike! ’Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach . . . (5.3.98–9)

Later she remarks that Hermione is not yet speaking, and then pronounces the words “Our Perdita is found” [5.3.121], as though they were the charm that enabled her to speak. In several comedies of Shakespeare, including this one and The Tempest, the action gets so hard to believe that a central character summons the rest of the cast into—I suppose— the green room afterward, where, it is promised, all the difficulties will be cleared away. The audience can just go home scratching their heads. Here it looks as though the green-room session will be quite prolonged; Leontes says: But how, is to be question’d; for I saw her, As I thought, dead; and have in vain said many A prayer upon her grave. (5.3.139–41)

One might perhaps visualize Leontes saying, “Do you mean to tell me,” etc., then erupting into fury at the thought of all those wasted prayers and starting the whole action over again. We notice the importance of the word “faith” in this play: it’s applied by Camillo to Leontes’ fantasy, which is below reason, and by Florizel to his fidelity to Perdita despite parental opposition, which, he says explicitly, is a “fancy” above reason. And in this final scene Paulina tells her group that they must awaken their faith [5.3.95], which would hardly make sense unless Hermione were actually coming to life. Such things don’t happen in real life, but they happen in myths, and The Winter’s Tale is a mythical play. We seem to be getting two versions of the scene at once: which is real and which is the illusion? On the stage there’s no difference: the illusion and the reality are the same thing. But if even Leontes can say, “how, is to be questioned,” what price us as we leave the theatre? I’ve spoken of the popularity of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a kind of poet’s bible, and in no play of Shakespeare, except perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is its influence more obvious and insistent than it is here. This is partly because poetic language, a language of myth and metaphor, is the language best adapted to a world of process and change, where everything keeps turning into something else. Even in King Lear we saw that a new kind of language was getting born out of all that suf-

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fering and horror. Here something equally mysterious is going on, but in the context of comedy. To use Theseus’s words “apprehend” and “comprehend”:272 in this final scene we “apprehend” that we’re looking at a real Hermione, and “comprehend” that she’s been hidden by Paulina for sixteen years and there’s no statue. That’s the “credible” version: we call it credible because there’s nothing to believe. Or, perhaps, we “apprehend” that first there was Hermione, then there was a statue of her after she died, and now there’s Hermione again. How do we “comprehend” that? Obviously not by trying to “believe” it. In Ovid most of the “metamorphoses” are changes downward, from some kind of personal or human being into a natural object, a tree, a bird, or a star. But there can also be metamorphosis upward. This happens every year when winter turns into spring and new forms of life appear: this kind of metamorphosis we’ve been associating with the story of Perdita. The story of Hermione seems to imply something more: new possibilities of expanded vision that such people as Shakespeare have come into the world to suggest to us. As so often in Shakespeare, expanded vision seems to have a good deal to do with time and the ways we experience it. We noted that The Triumph of Time was the subtitle of Greene’s Pandosto, and the early part of the play stresses such words as “push” and “wild” (meaning rash), which suggest a continuous violation of the normal rhythms of time. Then Time appears as chorus: perhaps it is he, not Apollo, who controls the action. We might even give the two parts of the play the Proustian subtitles of Time Lost and Time Regained. The concluding speech, by Leontes, speaks of the “gap of time” he fell into with his jealousy, and ends “Hastily lead away.” There is no time to be lost, once one has found it again. IX The Tempest There’s a book on The Tempest called Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, by Colin Still (1921).273 A mystery play is normally a medieval play on a Biblical subject produced by one of the crafts in a medieval town. “Mystery” here, however spelled, is an obsolete word meaning trade or craft. But this critic meant that The Tempest was a play dramatizing a mystery in the sense of a religious rite; also that it was a mysterious play. There are several things about it that make it look, if not mysterious, at least unusual: it’s the first play in the Folio, though a late play; it’s in an un-

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usually good text; no general source for the story has been found that looks at all satisfactory; if the critics are right who think Henry VIII is partly Fletcher, it may be the last play wholly written by Shakespeare;274 and the central figure, Prospero, has characteristics that seem to suggest some self-identification with Shakespeare.275 So it could be Shakespeare’s play in a special sense, his farewell to his art, if we like, especially in the speech of Prospero on drowning his “book.” Whatever else it is, The Tempest is certainly one of the late romances: it’s also an unusually short play, one of the shortest in the canon. I mentioned how Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale break in the middle, with a shift from blank verse to prose, from tragedy to comedy, and that in The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare is following a source in some detail for the first half, but seems to be largely on his own in the second half. In The Tempest I don’t think you’ll find any such break: the reason is, it seems to me, that this play presents only the second half of the full story. The first half is the story recounted by Prospero to Miranda in the second scene: a sombre tale of treachery in which he, as Duke of Milan, was deposed and exiled with her. If this is right, it’s not surprising that there seems to be no really convincing general source. We’ve also met, several times in Shakespeare, the play within the play. Sometimes this is a separable piece inserted into the main narrative, like the Peter Quince play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the mousetrap play in Hamlet, or it could be a dramatic action set up by one of the characters, like Duke Vincentio’s show in Measure for Measure. In The Tempest the play and the play within the play have become the same thing: we’re looking simultaneously at two plays, Shakespeare’s and the dramatic structure being worked out by Prospero. In a set-up like that, what critics call the “unities” of time and place have to be very strictly observed: The Tempest is the opposite of The Winter’s Tale in this respect. You can’t go on producing a play for fifteen years or so, but in this play Miranda’s all grown up and we’re ready to start. You get the feeling that the time covered by the action of the play coincides very closely with the time we spend watching it: in fact, the time even seems to shorten as we go on. The principle I’ve mentioned so often, that the theatre itself is the central character in Shakespeare,276 is at its most concentrated here: the subject of this play is the producing of a play, which, like the second half of Measure for Measure, is put on by the chief character with what within his convention are real people. We remember that when we look into what Duke Vincentio is really doing, we may not like it or him very much, and in this

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play too our feelings about Prospero may vary: sometimes we may think of him as a human providence or guardian angel, sometimes as a snoopy and overbearing bully. As before, Shakespeare doesn’t ask you to fall in love with his play director, only to keep your eye on what he’s doing. Take, for example, the episode in which the Court Party, faint with exhaustion and hunger, finally see a banquet spread out before them. They immediately start to move in on it; Ariel appears in the form of a harpy and it’s snatched away from them, and then Ariel delivers a long speech, beginning “You are three men of sin” [3.3.53–82]. This is a beautifully constructed, very impressive, oracular speech; but as soon as it ends, it’s instantly undercut by Prospero, who congratulates Ariel on how well he’s given the speech. Our attention is switched from what Ariel is saying to the mechanics of saying it, as though we were not at a performance but at a rehearsal with Prospero directing. Again, there actually is an inset play within the play, namely the masque that Prospero puts on for the benefit of Ferdinand and Miranda. And here too our attention is directed away from what the masque says to the way that Prospero is putting it on: yes, these are spirits, he says in answer to Ferdinand, that I get to “enact my present fancies” [4.1.121–2]. Then he suddenly remembers the conspiracy of Caliban and his friends, and says what, if he were living in this century, would be “Cut!” Those who think that Prospero is a self-portrait of Shakespeare are right about one thing at least: Prospero is an actor-manager. Prospero says to Ariel: Go make thyself like a nymph o’ th’ sea: Be subject to no sight but (thine and) mine, invisible To every eyeball else. (1.2.301–3)277

Why such an elaborate get-up if nobody’s to see him except Prospero? We’re forgetting ourselves in the audience, watching both Shakespeare’s play and Prospero working out the action of the play. It’s not uncommon for a play to depict one play in rehearsal and then have another story move across it, as in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.278 Devices of the same general type were used in Shakespeare’s day too: take a look at Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle sometime. But for one play to be consistently both process and product is surely very unusual. What would have given Shakespeare the idea for such a play?

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I’ve mentioned the close affinity of the romances with more primitive and popular types of drama. I certainly don’t mean anything derogatory by either “primitive” or “popular”: I mean drama that rests on what I called earlier the bedrock or fundamental audience response, the basic drive that sends people into a theatre. The words “primitive” and “popular” are closely connected: the primitive is often what was popular long ago, and the popular often begins to look primitive after a lapse of time. Among the primitive and popular forms of drama at the time was the Italian commedia dell’arte, which had been known in England. This was a dramatic formula drawn from the stock characters of New Comedy, or perhaps from farces even earlier than that. Here the actors worked from a brief scenario posted up and listing the general story line, the props, and the main types of sight gag. They looked at this before they went onstage, but there were no scripts, and most of the dialogue was improvised. A good many of the scenari of these plays have survived: the plots often centre on a magician living in a cave or on a magic island, and the props include logs of wood, robes for the magician, and the like. The stock characters included Pantalone, sometimes called Prospero,279 usually a well-to-do middle-aged Venetian, whose dramatic functions often included keeping his daughters away from suitors. The suitor of Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew speaks of an older rival suitor as “the old pantaloon” [3.1.36–7], perhaps wanting to say it about her father. The Dottore, often a Bolognese lawyer, fat, pompous, and pedantic, was another, and then there was the endlessly versatile and resourceful Arlecchino or Harlequin, who sometimes was or pretended to be twin brothers, but sometimes was a mute (Harpo Marx is a twentieth-century Harlequin). The clowns (zanni, from whom we get our word “zany”)280 went through a series of comic routines, technically called lazzi. The commedia dell’arte was an influence on Shakespeare—the horseplay episodes in The Merry Wives of Windsor are typical lazzi—as it was on Molière later and the eighteenth-century Italian dramatists Gozzi and Goldoni. A grotesque figure associated with Naples, Pulcinello (there are various spellings) became the English Punch, the central figure of all Punch and Judy shows. If we want a “source” for Shakespeare’s Tempest, these scenari are probably as good places to look as any.281 Prospero has both Pantalone and Dottore elements; Caliban, Pulcinello ones; and Stephano the butler and Trinculo the jester (dressed in a harlequin costume) are typical zanni. The

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earlier plays of the 1580s I mentioned before also often featured fairy stories with hermit-magicians—one that seems particularly close to Shakespearean romance is called The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune. As we go further afield, we find a large number of fairy-tale and magic-romance themes that show family resemblances, sometimes tantalizing ones, to The Tempest. Prospero was Duke of Milan, and appears to have been more or less useless at that job because he spent all his time reading books; nevertheless his people dearly loved him. We’re well outside the realistic area already. His brother Antonio, at first through necessity, then through ambition, took over as regent, and finally, after making a deal with Alonso, King of Naples, an enemy of Prospero, felt strong enough to assume the title of Duke of Milan, sending Prospero and his three-yearold daughter, Miranda, in a leaky boat out to sea. This last act certainly went beyond what was needed for keeping order in Milan: otherwise, what Antonio did was the same kind of filling of a power vacuum that we met in Richard II. Like Goneril and Regan in King Lear, he moved from a partly defensible moral position into outright evil. Gonzalo, a Milanese courtier charged with outfitting the boat, supplied Prospero and Miranda with food, water, clothes, and, above all, some books. As he can hardly have provided the books merely to give Prospero something to read while he drowns, he seems to have acted on an intuition that the boat might not sink after all. Although he was working for Antonio, he gets a great deal of credit for his charitable actions in the play, and if he did have such an intuition, he was right: the boat drifted to the shore of an island somewhere in the Mediterranean between Naples and Tunis. Some of the books were evidently books of magic, grimoires and the like, and textbooks on astrology and alchemy. A ship bearing Antonio and his confederate Alonso, along with Alonso’s brother Sebastian and son Ferdinand, with Gonzalo and some other courtiers (an unnamed son of Antonio is also referred to, perhaps by a slip), is returning from Tunis from the wedding of Alonso’s daughter Claribel. The first scene, in prose, describes the wrecking of the ship (more accurately the denuding it of passengers) by Prospero’s magic. It’s a brilliant scene of sailors cursing the passengers for getting in their way, Antonio and Sebastian cursing the sailors for trying to save their lives, and Gonzalo clinging to a hope that the Boatswain will be hanged and therefore not everybody will be drowned. It’s interesting that Sebastian calls the Boatswain, who is a most vital and likeable person, not at all a

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type to get hanged, “blasphemous” [1.1.40–1], and Gonzalo repeats the charge at the end of the play, saying he’s one “who swear’st grace overboard” [5.1.219].282 Yet the Boatswain, for all his great provocation, says nothing blasphemous: perhaps the Folio text left out the bad words in deference to the law of some years back I mentioned earlier, and the words were ad-libbed. If used, they would doubtless have been thought of, by the frightened passengers, as words of ill omen. Everyone is superstitious when frightened. But, up to a point, Gonzalo’s intuition is right again. Next comes a long, technically rather clumsy scene in which Prospero fills in Miranda about the story I just summarized, then calls in Ariel and Caliban and uses them to outline the earlier history of the island. We are told that when Prospero first came to the island it had been controlled by an evil witch named Sycorax, who had been banished there from Algiers because she was pregnant with what proved to be Caliban, and the pregnancy commuted her death sentence. The magic changes from black to white with Prospero. When we first read through the play, our attention is caught by a lovely speech by Caliban, not a person we’d associate with beautiful speeches as a rule, beginning “Be not afear’d; the isle is full of noises” (3.2.135 ff.). What this speech appears to be telling us is that not all the magic on the island is directly controlled by Prospero, whose own magic seems to be used only to torment Caliban, so far as it’s applied to him. The island, evidently, is a place of magic, harnessed or directed by Sycorax to bad ends and by Prospero to good ones. The wrecked passengers are separated, mainly by Ariel’s activity, into four main groups. Each, with one exception, goes through a quest, an ordeal, and a symbolic vision. Ferdinand, the hero, goes in quest of his father, even though he’s been told, through one of Ariel’s songs, that his father is drowned. On the way he meets Miranda: Prospero oversees them, and pretends to be hostile to Ferdinand. The excuse he gives in an aside for this seems a very thin one, but in romances fathers of heroines regularly do go through phases of hostility to prospective sons-in-law, like Polixenes at the sheep-shearing festival, and also, in romances the hero should do something to prove himself to be worthy of his great prize. So Ferdinand is given Caliban’s job of carrying logs of wood. Apart from showing the necessity of including all the normal conventions of romance, this scene has another function. Everyone in the play is getting some sort of education as a result of the dramatic action, and the sight of Ferdinand, the third man in her experience, is important

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for Miranda’s. When she and Prospero first visit Caliban, she makes a speech, beginning “Abhorrèd slave,” in which she is simply parroting her father. (If your edition of The Tempest gives this speech to Prospero, throw it away.)283 But as soon as Ferdinand comes in sight, she takes his side against her father, and by the end of the scene she’s apologizing to Ferdinand for her father’s behaviour. A small step, but a giant one for her with her experience. Ferdinand’s symbolic vision, the masque composed by Prospero that he sees in the company of Miranda, we shall have to leave for later. The Court Party searches for Ferdinand, as Ferdinand does for them, convinced that he’s drowned. This conviction, that everyone they don’t see is dead, affects all the wrecked passengers in some way, and gives an eerie afterworld quality to the island. I’ve spoken of the island as having a magical quality of its own, apart from Prospero, and two elements of this magic are noticeable. It seems rather elastic spatially—the Court Party wanders interminably “through forthrights and meanders,” as Gonzalo says [3.3.3]—and it seems to be much farther from any mainland than any such island could well be. Apart from Antonio’s “ten leagues beyond man’s life” [2.1.247], which is rhetoric, there is a recurrent surprise that inhabitants of such an island should be able to speak Italian. In any case the ordeal of the Court Party is their exhausting wandering and the confinement that follows it, and their symbolic vision the banquet spread before them, which Ariel, descending in the form of a harpy, snatches away from them, the vision being symbolic of deceitful desire. This vision, however, does not seem to be shared by Gonzalo, who apparently does not hear Ariel’s speech: his vision is rather his private reverie in which he sees the island in the form of an ideal commonwealth, much to the amusement of Antonio and Sebastian. Stephano and Trinculo fall in with Caliban and go on a quest to find Prospero, with the object of murdering him. Their ordeal is to fall into a horsepond and then to be hunted by spirit dogs; their symbolic vision is the “trumpery,” evidently some fine-looking clothes, that Prospero hangs out for them to steal [4.1.193–254]. We remember the word from The Winter’s Tale. Caliban is not taken in by the “trumpery”: perhaps his symbolic vision is the dream of music I mentioned earlier. Then there’s the Boatswain and his crew, who don’t get a chance to go on a quest of any kind, but are confined in what sounds like a noisy pit of hell, and then released to see their ship once more as good as new. Thus:

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Character

Quest

Ordeal

Vision

Ferdinand

search for father

log bearing

masque

(a) Gonzalo

(a and b) search for Alonso’s son

(a and b) “forthrights and meanders”

(a) commonwealth (b) harpy banquet

(a and b) search for Prospero

(a and b) horsepond

(a) dream of music (b) “trumpery”

imprisonment and noise

renewed ship

(b) “three men of sin” (a) Caliban (b) Stephano Trinculo Boatswain and crew

The Tempest is more haunted by the passing of time than any other play I know: I suspect that even its name is the Latin tempestas, meaning time as well as tempest, like its French descendant temps, which means both time and weather. This is partly because Prospero, as a magician, has to be a close watcher of time: his knowledge of the stars tells him when it’s time to tell Miranda about her past (“The very minute bids thee ope thine ear” [1.2.37]), and he also says to Miranda that his lucky star is in the ascendant, and unless he acts now he’s lost his chance forever [1.2.180–4]. All through the play he keeps reminding Ariel of the time, and Ariel himself, of course, is longing for his freedom, even “before the time be out” [1.2.246]. The right moment can also be associated with tragic or evil actions: we remember Pompey in Antony and Cleopatra, missing his chance for the murders that would have made him master of the world. The evil right moment for Antonio and Sebastian comes when Alonso and Gonzalo drop off to sleep, and Antonio’s speeches urging Sebastian to murder them are full of the imagery of time. The proverb that time and tide wait for no man is constantly in the background: even though this is a Mediterranean island, there is much talk about tides and their movements. Tragic or evil time presents a moment for, so to speak, cutting into the flow of time. Antonio and Sebastian have no idea how they are to get off the island after they’ve murdered Alonso, but that doesn’t matter: they must seize the moment. Comic time is more leisurely, because it’s adapted to nature’s own rhythms, but in a comedy everything mysterious comes to light in time. One of Paulina’s oracular commands to Hermione

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in the statue scene of The Winter’s Tale is “’tis time; be stone no more.”284 Comic time can be leisurely, but it can also be very concentrated: Ferdinand and Miranda are united for life even though, as Alonso says, they can’t have known each other more than three hours. Prospero does a good deal of fussing about keeping Miranda’s virginity intact until after the ceremony: again the reason is more magical than moral. Unless things are done in the proper time and rhythm, everything will go wrong. The play is full of stopped action, like the charming of Ferdinand’s and Antonio’s swords; and the Court Party, Ariel says to Prospero, “cannot budge till your release” [5.1.11]. The theme of release spreads over all the characters in the final recognition scene, including the release of Ariel into the elements, and carries on into Prospero’s Epilogue, when he asks the audience to release him by applause. To release is to set free, but what does freedom mean in this context? We have to go back to Shakespeare’s world to give an intelligible answer. In that world everything has its natural place—“kindly stead,” as it’s called in Chaucer285—and within the individual mind the natural order is a hierarchy with reason on top and emotional impulses under it. Camillo says of Leontes in his jealous phase that he’s “in rebellion with himself” [1.2.355], and being a king he’s starting an anarchic revolution from the top down. Similarly the Court Party, or at any rate the “three men of sin,” are in a state of self-rebellion, with reason and impulse out of their natural place. Prospero uses the related image of fog giving place to clear air: And as the morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness, so their rising senses Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle Their clearer reason. (5.1.65–8)

When the psychic factors are all in their right place, man knows himself, and Gonzalo speaks of the whole Court Party as having found themselves “When no man was his own” [5.1.213]. The total effort of Prospero’s magic, then, is to transform the Court Party from the lower to the higher aspect of nature, reversing the tragic movement that we found in King Lear. But magic in its turn is a binding of nature, and the speech in which Prospero renounces his magic represents the release of nature as well. Sycorax was an evil magician, and the traditional attribute of the witch, since Virgil at least, was the drawing down of the moon,286 which I sup-

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pose means the attracting of “lunatic” influences to the earth. Similarly, Antonio and Sebastian are said by Gonzalo to be people who would like to lift the moon out of its sphere. Prospero’s work is entirely “sublunar”: he works within our world and is human himself. In the final scene Alonso speaks of needing a goddess and an oracle to explain what’s happening [5.1.187–8, 244–5], and goddesses and oracles have turned up in the other three major romances. But The Tempest, except for Ariel, does not move out of the normal natural order: even Caliban, though the son of a witch, is human. The action of the play is a transformation within nature. There are times when we wonder, as we wonder at the end of The Winter’s Tale, whether that is really all that is going on. One of the most beautiful songs in the world tells us quite clearly that Alonso is drowned [1.2.397–405], and Prospero’s renunciation speech mentions raising the dead to life as one of his powers. He also speaks of Miranda to Alonso in a way that gives Alonso the impression that she is dead. We can say here, as in The Winter’s Tale, that people die and come to life again, but only metaphorically. Fine, but in a poetic drama there is no meaning except metaphorical meaning. At the bottom of the ladder of nature, as far as this play is concerned, is Caliban. No character in Shakespeare retains more dignity under so constant a stream of abuse. Nobody seems even to know what shape he is: he is constantly called a fish, but that seems a judgment by nose rather than eyesight. I was once asked by a former student, now a teacher, how I would costume Caliban, and was startled to realize that I hadn’t a clue. Most of the productions I’ve seen make him look like a very imperfectly trained seal. He is clearly deformed, whether a “monster” or not, and he is clearly a savage. The worst handicap for a savage, Shakespeare’s contemporaries would feel, is idolatry. Caliban has been supplied with a god named Setebos by his mother, and when Stephano appears with his wine bottle he makes a god out of him, a sort of Dionysus dropped from the moon [2.2.137–41]. But he outgrows that too, and his last speech in the play indicates a genuinely human ambition to “seek for grace” [5.1.296]. Prospero treats him in a way calculated to instil as much hatred for him in Caliban as possible: the excuse for doing so is that Prospero was originally kind to Caliban, until he tried to rape Miranda. There seem to be things about nature that even Prospero doesn’t know. What Prospero means, other than the fact that Caliban belongs on the island, when he says, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” [5.1.275– 6], we’re not sure, nor do we know if Prospero is likely to take Caliban

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along when he leaves the island. You may think this quite a long way out in left field, but I sometimes wonder whether the ability to see humanity in Caliban isn’t something of a test of character in the observer. Of all the Court Party, the one whose redemption we’re least sure about is Antonio. Alonso’s repentance is clearly genuine, and Sebastian is a weakling who will do what the stronger-willed people around him suggest that he do. But Antonio keeps very close to himself during the last scene, except when he is asked a direct question, and his answer to that calls Caliban a “plain fish, and no doubt marketable” [5.1.266]. At the top of what we see of nature is the wedding masque, a lovely celebration of the fertility of nature and its relation to marriage presented by three goddesses of the earth, the sky, and the rainbow. Venus, who is most active on a lower level of nature, is excluded from the action. The presence of the rainbow and the emphasis on the continued regularity of the seasons suggest a new world washed clean by the flood (a highly symbolic flood, naturally), and the references to a perpetual spring and autumn give us the attributes of an earthly paradise—in fact “paradise” is the word Ferdinand uses [4.1.124]. The dance at the end is between nymphs of the brooks, who seem to represent spring, and harvesters of the autumn: this dance seems to have impressed itself on Milton, who in his description of Eden speaks of spring and autumn dancing hand in hand.287 I’ve said that in a stage play reality and illusion are the same thing, and the action of The Tempest seems to show us both an illusion of reality and the reality of illusion. At the bottom level is the Realpolitik of Antonio and Sebastian and their plot to murder Alonso, a plot parodied by Stephano’s plot to murder Prospero. This is the way you’re supposed to act in the “real world” to get along, but on this island such reality seems to be merely an illusion of greed. The quality of dreaming on the island also seems to be an index of character: we have Gonzalo’s reverie on his ideal commonwealth and the dream in the speech of Caliban I mentioned. Everything that we think of as “real,” everything physical, tangible, and substantial around us, is, Prospero tells us in his great “Our revels now are ended” speech [4.1.148–58], an illusion that lasts a little longer than some other illusions. On the other hand, illusions, such as the songs of Ariel and the mirages seen by the Court Party, including the disappearing banquet, belong to Prospero’s “art” and have a creative role, agents in the transformation of character. Most of Prospero’s “art” in the play is magic, but some of it is also music and drama, and this “art” acts as a

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counter-illusion, the material world of an intelligible or spiritual reality. We don’t know how far Prospero intended actual revenge on his enemies at the beginning of the play: the care he took not to harm anyone suggests that he didn’t. Still, it sounds a little as though Prospero were getting educated too, and specifically on the point that revenge is illusory counter-action, just as “the rarer action” which renounces revenge [5.1.27] is the genuinely creative counter-illusion. The books Gonzalo put into Prospero’s boat are part of a collection that Prospero prizes above his dukedom, and perhaps the reason why Caliban’s conspiracy infuriates him instead of amusing him is Caliban’s hatred of his books, as the only sources of power he has. Even if The Tempest has no general source, it is a very bookish play, and shows particular obligations to three of the world’s greatest writers: Ovid, Virgil, and Montaigne. Ovid is used mainly in the speech of Prospero renouncing his magic, where the original Ovidian magician is Medea, a person morally rather closer to Sycorax than to Prospero.288 Like the changeling boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who moves from Titania’s control to Oberon’s, and Caliban in this play, who has first a Sycorax and then a Prospero dominating his life, the change from female to male domination seems to be a part of temporal progress, whether an improvement or not. The use of Virgil, or at any rate of the first six books of the Aeneid, is more striking and significant. The story in the Aeneid of Phineus, unable to eat because of the Harpies befouling his food,289 seems to be glanced at in the scene where the banquet is snatched from the Court Party by Ariel in the form of a harpy. The sixth book of the Aeneid tells us that Aeneas, after Dido’s suicide, set out on the final lap of his journey, from Carthage to the west coast of Italy. On the way he came to the passage to the lower world guarded by the Cumaean Sibyl, descended to that world, and there eventually met the ghost of his father, who prophesied to him the future greatness of Rome and its worldwide empire. Gonzalo’s “here’s a maze trod indeed” [3.3.2] and Ferdinand’s search for his father seem like Virgilian echoes. We notice that the Court Party is following a rather similar route, from Tunis in North Africa, near Carthage, to Naples, near which the cave of the Sibyl traditionally was to be found. Also that in an apparently rather aimless conversation among Gonzalo, Antonio, and Sebastian, Gonzalo insists on identifying Tunis with Carthage, and the other two keep repeating the names Dido and Aeneas [2.1.84; 77–82]. Of course Antonio and Sebastian are only baiting Gonzalo, whom they regard as a fool, but

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Gonzalo is not a fool, and aimless conversations in Shakespeare usually have a point of some kind. Rome, according to Virgil, was the second Troy, and the founding of Rome was also the rebuilding of Troy. We remember Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version of British history, according to which Britain was also settled by Trojan refugees, so that Britain was a third Troy. This symbolic history does not figure in Shakespeare, but it comes into some contemporary poems—Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for example.290 The time of The Tempest, roughly 1611, was a time when Britain, having lost its last toehold on the Continent fifty years back, was beginning, with the founding of the East India Company and the first tentative settlements in America, to think in terms of an overseas empire. It would be strange if Shakespeare were untouched by the kind of speculation we find in Samuel Daniel’s poem Musophilus (1599), where the poet speaks of the extending of English into unknown parts of the world: Or who can tell for what great work in hand The greatness of our style is now ordain’d? What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command, What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrain’d . . . 291

Note that Daniel is talking about language, not military conquest: the power of art, not arms. In writing this play, Shakespeare read some pamphlets about voyages to Bermuda, and some other works on the New World.292 We know that he read them, because of specific phrases incorporated into the play. Because they are definite source material, every editor of the play has to include them in his introduction, where they seem to do little but confuse the reader. Why would Shakespeare be using such material (some of it still unpublished, and read in manuscript) for a play that never moves out of the Mediterranean? The only clue is that practically all the material used has to do with Caliban. It seems clear that these accounts of the New World are to be connected with Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals, which is the source of Gonzalo’s reverie about his ideal commonwealth and probably of the character Caliban as well. Caliban, though not technically a “cannibal,” and if not quite “the thing itself” like Poor Tom,293 deprived of all the amenities of specifically human life, is still a kind of “natural man”: an example, as Prospero says, of nature without nurture [4.1.188–9], the much neater phrase that Shakespeare’s time used for heredity and environment.

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Montaigne’s essay touches on the question so intensely discussed a century later, of whether a “natural society” was possible; that is, a society that lived in harmony with nature, as social animals do up to a point, and had much less, if any, need of the cultural envelope of religion, law, morality, and education. We notice that there is a very clear moral classification in the society of The Tempest, but that there is no alteration of any social ranks at the end of the play. Antonio and Sebastian can still regard themselves as gentlemen compared to Stephano and Trinculo, and Sebastian can still twit them with stealing Prospero’s clothes, forgetting that a few hours back he was plotting with Antonio to steal his own brother’s life and crown. Prospero is never under any doubt that he is king of his island, or that Stephano’s plot against him is a rebellion, or that Caliban is a slave. Caliban is to comedy what Swift’s Yahoos are to satire: evidence that the animal aspect of man, when isolated by itself, is both repulsive and incompetent. And yet the paradox in Montaigne’s essay remains unanswered. We have no doubts about the superiority of our way of life to that of the “cannibals.” But in what does the superiority consist? In torturing other people to death for trifling deviations in religious belief? The “cannibals” don’t do that, nor is there anything unnatural in being healthy and physically vigorous, or even in getting along without most of our class distinctions. They don’t have a lot of our worst vices: perhaps we could do with some of their virtues. Let’s look at the whole context of Gonzalo’s speech. Much of the dialogue in this scene sounds pretty silly, because Antonio and Sebastian seem to have a fit of hysterical giggles. The island is clearly a pleasanter place to Gonzalo than to Antonio and Sebastian. His clothes are dry; theirs are wet: he sees lush and green fertility around him; they see barrenness. As we said, he identifies Tunis and Carthage; we have suggested a reason for his doing that, but he is technically wrong, so Antonio and Sebastian keep making fun of him: Antonio: What impossible matter will he make easy next? Sebastian: I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and give it his son for an apple. Antonio: And, sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands. (2.1.89–94)

To this Gonzalo simply answers, “Ay.” Then he goes on to dream of his ideal commonwealth [2.1.148–69]: we have suspected already that the

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quality of dreaming on this island is an index of character. Antonio and Sebastian don’t fall asleep when the others do, but remain awake plotting murder. Gonzalo’s commonwealth is rather loosely constructed, and they make the most of that: he will be king, but there will be no sovereignty, so “the latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning” [2.1.158–9]. Prospero tells us that when he returns to Milan as Duke, “Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.312). Doesn’t sound like much of a prospect for Milan. W.H. Auden, in a dramatic poem based on The Tempest called The Sea and the Mirror, has Prospero remark to Ariel that he is particularly glad to have got back his dukedom at a time when he no longer wanted it.294 In the Epilogue Prospero tells us that he has used up all his magic, and the rest is up to us. We then hear him pleading for release, in a tone echoing the Lord’s Prayer295 and going far beyond any conventional appeal for applause. How are we to release him? In many tales of the Tempest type, the island sinks back into the sea when the magician leaves. But we, going out of the theatre, perhaps have it in our pockets like an apple: perhaps our children can sow the seeds in the sea and bring forth again the island that the world has been searching for since the dawn of history, the island that is both nature and human society restored to their original form, where there is no sovereignty and yet where all of us are kings.

24 Speech on Acceptance of the Governor General’s Award for Northrop Frye on Shakespeare December 1987

From the typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 7. This was Frye’s fourth nomination for a Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction (see Introduction, n. 15). The other finalists in the category of Nonfiction in 1986 were Claude Bissell (for The Imperial Canadian), Phyllis Grosskurth (for Melanie Klein), and Witold Rybczynski (for Home). The jury members were Kenneth McNaught (chair), Christina McCall, and Richard Harrison. The prize included $5,000 cash, a specially bound edition of the book, and promotional funds for the publisher.

It may seem strange, even ironic, that the first of my twenty-six books to receive this award1 should be a book written practically by accident, which I did not start out with the intention of writing, and could hardly believe I had written. It was not pondered for years, like other books of mine, but appeared suddenly on my desk in the form of typed transcripts of lecture notes.2 Still, it is pleasant that it is one of my teaching books. It will not tell a Shakespearean scholar anything he does not know, but it may suggest to a student, or member of the theatre-going public, that even so formidable a name as William Shakespeare need cause no panic, and in fact would not be so great a name if it did not represent something accessible to everyone. I have been on the Governor General’s awards committee myself,3 and I still remember the remark of a committee member, that if the decision was easy it said little for Canadian culture, and if it were difficult somebody would be done an injustice. I imagine that there have been few easy decisions. But the real importance of the awards, and the justification for associating them with so distinguished an office, is not that they pick the “best” books, but that they indicate a specific interest on the part of the nation in the production of good ones.

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It remains only to present my regrets at my unavoidable absence from this event, to express my appreciation to the Committee for the award, and to publicize my gratitude to those who have done as much as I have myself to make the book successful. Notable among the latter is Ms. Helen Heller, whom I am embarrassing by forcing her to read this.

25 Natural and Revealed Communities 22 April 1987

From the typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 3. First published in MM, 289– 306. Originally given as the Thomas More Lecture in the Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, on 22 April 1987. A revised version was presented as the inaugural Newman lecture at McGill University, on 17 October 1989: Frye’s holograph notes used for adapting the Thomas More Lecture into the Newman lecture are in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 6. His notes on More have been published in NRL, 380–8.

I am using the connection of this lectureship with Thomas More to reconsider his Utopia, a work I shall always associate with butterflies in the stomach. In my first year as a junior instructor fifty years ago,1 I was arbitrarily assigned a course in sixteenth-century literature, and Utopia, in the Elizabethan Robinson translation, was practically the first text I taught to undergraduates.2 Despite this, the lectures went very well: that is to say, they disappeared. I asked the two stock questions about the book and got the two stock answers. How many would rather live in Utopia than in Henry VIII’s England? Every one. How many would rather live in Utopia than in twentieth-century Canada? Not one. That established the essential points about the book, first, that Utopias present a more coherent form of social life than history does, and second, that no normal human being wants to live in anyone else’s Utopia. Then I sat back and let the students argue about the book according to their own socialist, liberal, or laissez-faire biases. Utopia was a most contemporary text for the 1930s. There had been a great awakening of interest in Communism during the Depression, and some Communist critics, notably Karl Kautsky, had

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called attention to the proto-Marxist features of Utopia’s abolition of private property, of exploited labour, and of a leisure class.3 Most striking of all, from this point of view, was the climax of the narration of Hythloday, the character who has been to Utopia and whose account of it constitutes the second book. He sums up his experience by contrasting the Utopian commonwealth with the “conspiracy of rich men” (conspiratio divitum)4 in Europe promoting their own interests and pretending that that conspiracy was the commonwealth. More conservative critics were horrified by the placing of More among the prophets of Stalin in a kind of Communist Old Testament, and most of them insisted that Utopia was a jeu d’esprit, an in-joke for a small elite of humanists, on no account to be taken seriously as a social blueprint of any kind. There is, it is true, a fair amount of in-joke apparatus about Utopia, such as the elaborate pretence that a real voyage has been made to a real place, a pretence neutralized by the meanings of the Greek words suggested in the proper names. Utopia itself means “nowhere”; its chief river, the Anydrus, is a river “without water”; its capital Amaurote suggests “cloud-town,” and so on. But humanists on the level of More and Erasmus did not think of themselves as a private elite: they were deeply committed and public-spirited men, and there is no real question that Utopia, in its intention as well as its reputation, was a very serious book. At the same time we do have the paradox of an idealized state whose religion is not only non-Christian, but seems to be, for most modern readers, so much more humane than anything produced under a Christian label in sixteenth-century Europe. This does constitute a genuine critical problem, even if we leave out the contrast with More’s personal attitude and the things he says in his other writings. The transition from medieval to modern England, from the medieval Warwick to the modern Wolsey, from Malory to More, had come with a rush in a generation or two, after being delayed so long by the War of the Roses. The feudal economy of medieval England lay dead with Richard III on Bosworth field, and England soon fell into something like the Italian city-state pattern, on a far larger scale, where the main secular figures were the prince, who now held supreme power instead of being the nominee of a baronial house, and the courtier, the servant and adviser of the prince. The main advance on the cultural front was of course the movement we call humanism. Medieval culture had been a Latin and vernacular culture: humanism promised an immense expansion of knowledge and wisdom when the Greek antecedents of this culture be-

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gan to come into view. In the Middle Ages the greater number of highly educated people were clerics of one sort or another: the humanists, while deeply interested in Biblical and patristic scholarship, brought in also a conception of secular education that could be fitted to the new facts of society. For that society, the most important person to be educated was the prince, so a program for educating the prince or magistrate could serve as a model for education generally. Hence such works as Erasmus’s Institute of a Christian Prince,5 which had many epigones, including Elyot’s The Governour in England.6 The great Classical precedent for this educational model was Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (The Education of Cyrus), a fictional biography of the great Persian conqueror that places him within the context of a Persian society based on certain moral principles, including the supremacy of law. As one man, even a prince, cannot do everything, Castiglione provided, in his very influential Courtier, a similar model for the courtier, who was to place his accomplishments at the service of the prince. Had not Plato said [Republic, 473b] that society was best off when philosophers were kings or kings took up philosophy? True, if the Seventh Epistle is anything to go by, Plato had pretty well given up on the princes of his time.7 But the goal of providing the prince, or those directly responsible to the prince, with an all-round education covering every aspect of the social life he was to give leadership to, would, if attained, practically make the scholar the architect of his society. In every age intellectuals are attracted to the idea of putting their expertise to a political use, and one well-known book of this century, Julien Benda’s Trahison des clercs (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals), reminds us that this impulse is normally a mistaken one.8 Thus Castiglione starts out full of enthusiasm for an education that trains the courtier for both peace and war, though as an amateur in both. He should know enough about literature and the pictorial arts to know how to patronize their practitioners, but should not engage too deeply in them himself. The implication, that the amateur, at least when he is a possible patron, is superior in social rank and status to the professional, remained a stereotype for centuries in England, where Castiglione, in the Elizabethan period, had a good deal of prestige.9 As late as Henry James’s Tragic Muse the hero, torn between politics and painting as a career, remarks that the social establishment in England approves of the artist only if he is a gentlemanly bungler: if he takes his art seriously he becomes declassed.10 But as Castiglione goes on to consider the courtier’s actual

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social function, he runs into a paradox that makes the end of his book rather sad and quixotic. The courtier should be young to acquire all his graceful skills, but if he is to advise the prince he needs to be considerably older.11 And why should any prince listen to his advice? Princes are out for fame and glory, not for the virtues of a local justice of the peace. Further, if we look back at Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, we wonder if this really is a book on education at all. Cyrus has high intelligence, and the sort of charm and magnetism that marks the born leader. But Cyrus is the first, and the only one available to Xenophon, of the series of world conquerors that later included Alexander and Caesar. The book is concerned almost entirely with his military enterprises. Machiavelli, who wrote a very different kind of treatise on the prince, praises the Cyropaedia, but the context in which he does so is significant: it is in the fourteenth chapter, which begins with the statement: “A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline.”12 The ideal prince is not the ruler who has had a model education, but the ruler who is always fighting or thinking about fighting. Castiglione’s courtier becomes increasingly individualized and isolated as the book goes on, and the climax of his education is love, the ideal of Plato’s Symposium rather than Plato’s Republic. Xenophon’s Cyrus is taught to love and be just to his own countrymen, but when he comes of age his father explains that he will now be concerned mainly with enemies, and for them he needs a morality the exact reverse of everything he has so far been taught.13 When we turn from the humanist movement and its educational ideals to More’s book, we note that there are no courtiers in Utopia, because there is no prince. It is true that More’s Elizabethan translator rendered More’s word princeps, which in its Utopian context means something like mayor, as “prince,” and thereby caused a good deal of misunderstanding. But the model of Utopia is republican, and is closer to the monastic orders, with their combination of authority and election, although the monastic structure is of course secularized, with the nuclear family as its unit. The Utopians detest war, and attach no glory to conquerors, but when they do go to war it is total and all-out war: no deals are made with the other side to keep it going for their mutual profit. Hence More avoids the paradoxes inherent in the “arts of peace and war” construct. But while he avoids them he is certainly well aware of them. Hythloday points out at considerable length that it is no use for him to try to put what he has learned about social organization from

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his sojourn in Utopia at the service of a European prince. He would be promptly and constantly ignored, while the prince and his real counsellors went on with the planning of further wars. More represents himself in the book as urging that Hythloday should still continue to try to advise in spite of all rebuffs and setbacks. The fact that More himself is supposed to be urging this points, very obviously, to the tragic irony of More’s own life, spent in the service of a prince who betrayed him and finally ordered him to the scaffold. But it also points to the fact that Utopia, even though it means “nowhere,” is being accepted as some kind of social reality. We have next to ask, What kind? As a revolution in education, humanism polarized the two elements in educational theory that educators are still wrangling about: the elements of content and of lifestyle. In the Middle Ages the student was thought of as being confronted by an objective body of knowledge: hence the popularity, in that period, of the encyclopedic treatise, covering the whole spectrum of medieval knowledge from God downward. For the humanists education was thought of as an individual acquirement, enabling one to become a personal force in society. This is the reality behind the cult of the amateur, already mentioned. No knowledge should get out of proportion to its social function: the pedant, however great his learning, has missed the central point of his education. Good style, specifically in the writing of Latin, thus becomes primary on the basis of the principle later formulated as “le style, c’est l’homme même” (the style is the man himself). Philosophy, for example, becomes an aspect of social cultivation, as it is in the dialogues of Socrates with the young gentlemen of Athens. It is no longer to be a specialized profession with its own technical jargon, as in the realist and nominalist schools of scholastic philosophy. Glancing back again to my first days of teaching: Thomist realism was then dominant in Catholic universities, and the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies had been set up by Gilson and Maritain on my own campus. It was thus puzzling to many of my students of that period that More should present his Utopians as not merely indifferent to abstract and generalized concepts (“second intentions”), but as quite unable to take in the notion of a real universal, even the universal “Man.”14 The Utopians live in a very concrete world: they are keenly interested in, for example, astronomy, but they are post-nominalist humanists, like More himself. They understand the limitations of words, and they never fall into the trap of regarding an argument as an end in itself.

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It is obvious that More was influenced by Plato’s Republic, not so much in detail as in the general idea of constructing a social model. Plato, it appears, presents his Republic (which incidentally is not a republic, though Utopia is) primarily to answer the question, What is justice? We have justice, Plato thinks, when everyone works at what he is best fitted to work at [433a]. In designing the form or idea of a just society, Plato looks at the actual society of his own day to see if he can find an intelligible structure in it. The French philologist Georges Dumézil says that the Indo-European peoples of the ancient world show in their mythologies a conception of human society as divided among three major classes: the red men or warriors, the white men or priests, the blue men or artisans.15 In India this conception was actually embodied in the three castes of Indian society, and it seems to be also the intelligible principle that Plato discovers in his. Plato’s state has a philosopher-king and his counsellors, a warrior caste not involved in marriage or family life, and a caste of producers. At the end of book 9, it is agreed that such a state could probably not exist, but that the wise man should live according to its principles whatever his actual society is like.16 It looks as though the real point of Plato’s Republic [592] was to construct an allegory of the wise man’s mind, the philosopher-king, warriors, and artisans symbolizing respectively his reason, his will, and his desires and appetites. Similarly Utopia is in part an allegory of a humanist’s education, an education that acquires the shape, when completed, of a model vision of society that constantly informs him and gives direction to his social life. Everyone who has a responsible social function at all works with some such model, however unconscious, in his mind: a world of greater health for the physician, greater equity for the social worker, and the like. That is why, when Hythloday comes back from Utopia a convinced Communist revolutionary, whose only remedy for Europe is to scrap the whole set-up and start over on a Utopian basis, More himself urges a more practical and gradualist attitude, using the Utopian vision as a basis for ad hoc reforms [35]. According to Erasmus, Utopia is much closer to England than the fiction in the book about a voyage to a new world would suggest.17 In one of its aspects, Utopia is an educational treatise setting England beside an imaginary yet real form of England, an England making the kind of moral sense that an educated humanist tries to make of whatever society he lives in. It has much in common with another educational treatise written later in the century, Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Here the whole apparatus of chivalric romance is consolidated into a world called “Faerie,”

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which is a moral model of England itself, and is therefore, as Spenser indicates in his introduction to the second book, “nowhere,” that is, not in space. Both More’s Utopia and Spenser’s Faerie have affinities with Dante’s Purgatorio, another construct that brings out the moral implications of life on Dante’s side of the world. If we ask what corresponds in More’s vision to the three classes of Plato, the answer is not far to seek. Utopian society is not Christian, and Utopians do not have the full or revealed forms of the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. But no human society, Christian or not, can function without at least a modicum of the four natural virtues: fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice. Utopia is a society in which these virtues are set free to function properly on a basis of nature and reason. In theory, all societies are equipped with stage one, the natural virtues, and Christian societies with stage two, the revealed virtues. If Utopia can get so far with stage one only, why cannot Europe get infinitely further with both stages? The answer, of course, is that Europe has practically nothing of stage one. Thus, unlike Plato, More’s book contains a strong element of satire: this comes out most explicitly in the first book, which although written later certainly belongs to the total vision. We may think, vaguely and with much hindsight, of the age of More’s Utopia as one of great exhilaration. A new Atlantis had sprung out of the west: Athens and Jerusalem were now only Turkish towns; the centre of power was moving from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic seaboard countries: new worlds, new wealth, new learning, were there for the taking. More, being a practical man, took shorter views. He saw the terrible human dislocations in great social changes: he saw the misery brought about by the enclosure movement, the futility of the hideous penal laws, and the prospect of more and more wars.18 As he looked more deeply, he saw the roots of these evils in social inequality with its inevitable consequence, the over-production of the superfluous and the under-production of the necessary. At this point we may realize that the satirist Lucian, four of whose dialogues were translated by More into Latin, was perhaps a more specific influence on More than Plato was. In Lucian’s dialogue Zeus tragoedus a conference of gods is called, who are to come represented by their statues. Zeus tells Hermes, who is arranging the conference, to put the gold statues in the front row, silver ones next, and so on. Hermes objects that some attention should be paid to quality of workmanship, because only barbarians can afford gold statues, and all the Greek gods will be out in the bleachers. Zeus agrees that

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quality of workmanship should come first (Lucian himself began as a sculptor’s apprentice), but still preference must be given to gold, or the whole human economy that keeps the gods going will fall to pieces.19 It is not a very long step from here to the Utopian use of gold for chamber pots and children’s toys [61]. Although, of course, More is also building on the insight, very rare for his time, that gold is only the symbol of wealth, not its reality. When we look at the literary genres belonging to or closely related to Utopia, we notice a form that recurs frequently: the form of the mirrorsatire, the depiction of a society that is essentially just like ours, but looks silly because we are seeing it objectively.20 A century later than More Joseph Hall, an Anglican bishop who collided with Milton, wrote such a satire, Mundus alter et idem (Another World, Yet the Same World). The form is still going strong in the Victorian Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. In More’s own day this kind of satire is represented by Erasmus’s Encomium moriae (Praise of Folly), where the narrator reminds us of the professional fools that were a feature of Renaissance courts, and in fact of More’s own household. As a literary archetype—King Lear is the obvious example— the Fool, with a capital F, is by no means a fool in himself, but sees folly all around him, and cannot help saying so. As a result his social situation would be intolerable if he were not in a position where no one takes him seriously. “I would fain learn to lie,” the Fool says to King Lear [1.4.180], and may well mean it. Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead portray scenes of the newly dead gathered on the shore of the Styx, to be ferried across by Charon into the land of shades. This is a Classical form of what was still popular in More’s day as the danse macabre, the vision of death as striking down people in every walk of life, the only visible form of social equality. The irony in Lucian is naturally based on the formula “you can’t take it with you.” The more one has, the more one has to leave behind, and the more noise one is apt to make about leaving it, especially if it has been stolen in acts of tyranny. The Fool figure here is Menippus the Cynic, Lucian’s hero, who has possessed nothing during his life, and has therefore been greatly despised. But, by having nothing, he is infinitely better adjusted to whatever awaits him after death. I suspect that the name Hythloday, which seems to suggest something like “babbler” or “speaker of trifles,” is connected with the character type who is considered a fool but is not one, and whose vision or picture (imago) of Utopian life enables him to see the folly around him in Europe.21 Like Menippus, the Utopians live

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with a simplicity and economy that their neighbours consider perverse or stupid, but makes them look proportionately more sensible from an outside perspective. We shall come back to this “outside perspective” later. Utopia is a society based on nature and reason, though both of these terms need qualifying. The ready acceptance of discipline by the Utopians, the deliberate emphasis on the monotony and uniformity of their clothes, houses, and cities, implies that they think of nature as primarily a system or order, the aspect of nature sometimes called natura naturata. This order of nature transcends reason but not itself. The Utopians are reasonable, but they are not rationalists: reason is for them a servant for man to use, not a mental tyranny that uses him. They even have saints who devote themselves to the most unpleasant and irksome work: their motivation is not rational, but is still natural within this conception of nature. The secular monastic features of Utopia remind us a little of Rabelais, who knew Utopia and admired it. Rabelais gives us a secular sendup of monastic communities in the Abbey of Thélème, whose members reverse the traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience by being all well-off, married, and doing as they like.22 This also is a “natural” society, but the immense emphasis on eating and drinking and excreting and copulating in Rabelais provides at least as much evidence as we need that Rabelais’s “nature” is natura naturans, the nature of biology rather than physics or mathematics. Thus Utopia introduces to modern literature the problem of the “natural society,” and begins the arguments about whether such a thing is possible or not. The element in More’s satire that contrasts a sensible non-Christian Utopia with a silly and vicious Europe that is technically Christian reappears in Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals. In many respects, says Montaigne, moral as well as physical, the cannibals live more sensibly than we do. A simple outdoor life keeps them healthy; they have a government of sorts, but not one that systematically robs and starves the helpless; they may eat their enemies, but do not burn them alive or torture them to death over doctrinal trivia. What really can be said against them as compared with us? Well, of course, Montaigne says in his last sentence, “ils ne portent point de hault de chausses”: they don’t wear breeches.23 Montaigne’s tone is light but his point is serious. Twenty years ago, in attending the Montreal Expo, I dropped in to the Canadian Indian exhibit, where the walls were covered with printed statements expressing the exhibitors’ opinion of their white visitors. I

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remember nothing of the actual wording, but what was said in effect was: You conquered us, not fairly in battle but by infecting us with your foul diseases; you stole our land and shut us up into open-air cages; you trapped the animals and burnt the forests we depended on for food and shelter; worst of all, you robbed us of our Great Spirit and put your own horrible scarecrow in its place. The question of a natural society is clearly not dead. In the eighteenth century the natural society debate came into the foreground with the political revolutions that brought in the second phase of the modern world. The conservatives, Swift at the beginning of that century and Burke at the end of it, clung to the traditional view. Man lives in a different order of nature from the nature of animals and plants. Many things are natural to man that are not natural to anything else living in his environment. It is natural to man to wear clothes, to be under social discipline, to be aware of moral obligations: man’s nature, as Burke explicitly says, is a nature which is also art.24 The last book of Gulliver’s Travels provides some fine print for this thesis: a natural society might be achieved by exceptionally gifted animals like the Houyhnhmns, but man is not really an animal, and Swift creates the Yahoo to remind us of what man would be like if he were one. He would not, for example, be an attractive animal: he would be more like rats and weasels than like baby pandas or koala bears.25 On the other side we have Rousseau, who suggests that the traditions of human civilization are based on what ought to be a society of nature and reason, but have lost touch with it. Civilization produces a grotesque inequality in society, symbolized, as in More, by an immense over-production of superfluous things. The real human community of nature and reason lies groaning underneath this. Rousseau, like Rabelais and Montaigne, is thinking primarily of nature in the context of natura naturans. What is new and different is the revolutionary shape of his construct. The natural society for him is an immense fettered energy that would transform the world if it were liberated.26 The debate is still with us, and so far as our present tentative solutions go, each side has scored a point. On the conservative side, it is generally agreed that there are not and cannot be any noble savages; no human society can be fully natural in the sense of doing away with an envelope of culture and custom that insulates them from the physical world. On the other, the traditional belief that human nature should dominate over physical nature has been expressed in a relentless exploitation of natural

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resources, and this exploitation is now running into diminishing returns. Hence the importance of ecological movements insisting that humanity is as wrong in enslaving and exploiting nature as it is in enslaving and exploiting other men, and that no improvement in human conditions of any importance is possible unless this is taken into account. I am at present, however, concerned with the aspect of the question that comes into literature. We notice first that the conception of a human society which is natural in the sense of being primarily related to physical nature is a constant theme in literature, and is much older than More. It produced the pastoral, a convention that has run through literature from Greek times to the present; it produced the bucolic poetry of Virgil and Horace; it produced even the shepherd symbolism of the Bible, though otherwise it is outside the mainstream of the Christian tradition, Christianity being a big-city religion with a strongly urban basis in its organization and symbolism. This by-form of Utopian fiction we may call the Arcadia. More’s Utopia is not an Arcadia, even though there is a constant interchange between country and city life, the absence of which in the nineteenth century is emphasized in the Communist Manifesto.27 One romance not often mentioned in discussions of Utopias is Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, which gives us an idealized picture of the half-pastoral religion of the late pagan world, stressing its quiet serenity and slightly over-ripe beauty, and then brings it into collision with the new force of Christianity. The Arcadian or pastoral tradition has produced much that is very lovely, in painting and music as well as literature, but in literature it seldom gets very far away from what is called escape reading. The reason is that the pastoral assumes a stabilized human population. When the evolutionary theories of Darwin appeared in the nineteenth century, they inherited a theory of unstable population from Malthus and gave it a good deal of prominence. Huxley’s essay on Evolution and Ethics starts with the Darwinian conception of evolution as a cut-throat competition for the means of subsistence, in which the mutations that promote survival are conserved, and those that do not are wiped out. Then a human society is established, say on an island, and sets up a counter-evolutionary or ethical movement. It educates children, takes care of the weak and helpless, aids the handicapped, and tries to rehabilitate misfits. The result is that the population increases until there is hardly room to breathe, and the old ruthless evolutionary pattern with its ferocious struggle to survive gradually returns.28 Again we notice how many things in his

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brief sketch More does not overlook. The population of Utopia steadily increases, and from time to time the Utopians buy land that their neighbours regard as useless and proceed to make its desert blossom like the rose. If the neighbours prove unreasonable in giving up such territory, the Utopians will take it by force—a growing point of a very different social development that More does not pursue [54]. Ever since Utopia was published, there has been in literature a steady production of imaginary communities. In the nineteenth century, largely as a reaction to the excesses of laissez-faire, there was a large number of romances describing eutopias, “good places,” seriously intended social models. We have seen how simplistic it would be to classify More’s book with these even though that does not detract from More’s essential seriousness. Along with the eutopia goes the vision of what has been called the dystopia, the society that has allowed itself to follow certain tendencies until it freezes into a claustrophobic nightmare, as in Orwell’s 1984. One reason for this development is that one man’s eutopia is likely to be another man’s dystopia. Thus Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s description of the Boston of the twenty-first century, published in 1889, impressed many people in its day as a great manifesto of human emancipation, but it horrified William Morris, who wrote News from Nowhere to set up a contrasting picture of the good life.29 Even in More there are strict limitations on freedom of movement from one city to another, even sharper limitations on freedom of speech and on public assemblies, and a relentless all-pervasive discipline in family life as well as in the public at large. There is also the omnipresent appearance of bondmen to remind the virtuous of the consequences of straying too far out of line. Although I imagine many of More’s contemporaries would be impressed with the humanity of Utopian discipline (one does not at any rate see gibbets with twenty men hanging from them), still many of us would see in the features just mentioned cracks in the facade indicating a latent hysteria under all the parade of order. The imaginary society is a central theme in our century of what is so inaccurately called science fiction. There are two main forms of science fiction: a software philosophical fantasy descending from More’s Utopia, and a hardware technological one of which the ancestor is Bacon’s New Atlantis. The New Atlantis has no time for such subtleties as a nonChristian ideal state: Bacon simply sends a Bible floating on the sea to the shores of Atlantis before the story begins, so that they have already been converted to Christianity.30 Bacon is concerned almost entirely to

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describe the project he tried to interest King James in, an institute of scientific research and technological innovation.31 We notice that Bacon’s slight and amusing sketch, like practically all the hardware romance that has descended from it, is future-oriented. As long as technology is continuously being improved, society is in a constant state of revolutionary ferment. But there is always the possibility that those obsessed with power will see in a certain phase of technology a chance for seizing and holding power, arresting further developments and establishing a permanent tyranny. This is what happened with the invention of the “telescreen” in 1984.32 More important, a eutopia, or social model presented as a straightforward ideal, attempts to present a human life without self-conflict. But in our ordinary experience life without self-conflict is possible only for machinery or for social insects like ants and bees. In insect states the individual hardly exists except as a social functionary. In Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, the inhabitants, long before the narrator arrives, have abolished machinery in obedience to the arguments of a scripture called “The Book of the Machines,” which tells them that human beings have already been reduced to “affectionate machine-tickling aphids,”33 and that after machines have finally learned to reproduce themselves they will take over human society. Butler himself regards this fear as ludicrous: in fact, the pseudo-argument is part of his attack on Darwinism as a view of life that confuses the organic with the mechanical. But it is not wholly ludicrous: we may think (to use an example I have often given) of the way in which the primary technological invention, the wheel, immediately became a symbol of fate and fortune, of what dominates and tyrannizes over human life instead of serving it as a machine should do. In any case, the great majority of social constructs in science fiction today are dystopias. I may single out one for an obvious reason: R.M. Lafferty’s Past Master, published in 1968. In this story we have a Utopian society in the future which seems to be equipped with everything it needs, including robots acting as thought police to hunt down everyone who objects to what is going on. The result is that the inhabitants of this society are dying like flies or committing suicide out of sheer boredom. The rulers, who have acquired the power to travel in time, reach back into the past and lift Thomas More out of the sixteenth century to serve as a rallying point for this moribund Utopia of the future. More at first is exhilarated to see a working model of the society he dreamed of, but before long it is obvious that he is regarded as only a stooge by his em-

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ployers, who are determined to maintain him in that position. By the end of the story he has been sentenced to be beheaded.34 The use of More in this story reminds us that More’s Utopia, unlike its hardware counterparts, is not future-oriented. Utopian technology is of the simplest kind, and they want no progress except a progress in expanding from where they are into a fuller life. In speaking of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead earlier, I said that his hero, Menippus the Cynic, who has possessed nothing during his life, is for that very reason far better adjusted to whatever awaits him on the other shore of the Styx. Lucian offers no suggestions about what that “whatever” might be, and it is extremely unlikely that he had any ideas on the subject. More had, and the fact opens up a new dimension in his argument. I suppose that a Marxist reading Utopia would feel that once alienation and exploitation were abolished, the projecting of a hope for immortality, for a next life compensating those who have been cheated out of this one, would disappear also. For More, on the contrary, the Utopian way of life greatly intensifies the desire for immortality. Belief in the immortality of the soul is a doctrine that Utopians are as fanatical about as Utopians can get: anyone who denies the doctrine instantly becomes isolated from Utopian society and is degraded to a second-class citizenship [95–6]. Here again we may glance at some of his precedents. Plato’s Republic ends with a vision of reincarnation, immortality, and the universe turning on the spindle of necessity. Cicero imitated Plato in his De Re Publica,35 fragments of which were discovered only in the nineteenth century: his sixth book, however, had been preserved by a later writer, Macrobius, who wrote a commentary on it. That book, the famous Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio), a favourite book of Chaucer, gives us a vision of later history in the context of a description of the structure of the universe.36 It looks as though there is some impetus in the Utopia form that naturally carries it through to a perspective beyond that of social life in this world. Such a perspective is hinted at in the final pages of More’s Utopia, when Hythloday and his companions bring Christianity, in a humanistic setting, to the commonwealth. The choices the Utopians make among the humanist texts are interesting enough in themselves, but cannot detain us here [75–6]. They welcome Christianity, partly because of the communistic elements in the life of the early post-pentacostal church.37 One convert, however, who shows too much zeal in propounding his faith and denouncing all others, is quietly restrained, though on secular

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and not religious grounds [94]. The tactics necessary to keep Christianity going in the late Roman Empire are not necessary in Utopia, where there is no divine Caesar and no state worship. We are left with a Utopia which will accept Christianity, but without persecuting non-Christians or compelling them to profess belief in Christian doctrines. It is left to the inner strength of Christianity to make itself the keystone of the Utopian arch, fulfilling the natural and reasonable elements in that society and providing a clear vision of the belief in immortality that the Utopians already hold. The year after Utopia was published, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door at Wittenburg, and the humanist liberal found himself again confronted with a revolutionary situation, not the imaginary revolution of Hythloday, but an actual one coming from, as far as one can see, a quite unexpected quarter. More instantly took the anti-Lutheran point of view: he never seems to have considered the merits of the Reformers’ case, as Erasmus did. I am concerned here only with some discrepancies in the relation of Utopia to More’s life. It should be remembered that my own commitment is to the other side, but I am not suggesting that there was anything in More’s own life that he could or should have done differently. When a liberal is caught in a revolutionary situation, the revolutionary can always say to him: your liberal dreams of improvements within the existing order are just that: dreams. It is the revolutionary who reshapes history, and if you want to get anywhere in history you must join us. We can see from Utopia that this argument would have little force with More. Once their eponymous ancestor Utopus has transformed them from barbarians to a civilized people, the Utopians have no further interest in history, in fact do not believe in a history that is going anywhere, and do not share the modern conviction that the static is inherently bad. For them, the static is the stable, so why change it? And yet, for example, among the Utopian priests there are some women [99]. True, they are elderly, widowed, and few in numbers, and one wonders how, in so rigidly patriarchal a society as Utopia (one of its least attractive features) women could develop enough self-confidence to be anything at all. Still, they are there, and within a year or two More was ridiculing Luther and Tyndale for advocating the ordaining of women in the Reformed church.38 More important, the Utopian toleration for the different sects who all believe in a single God certainly does not enter into More’s actual policy. The usual answer to such difficulties

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is that revelation, which for More would come through the church, often contradicts nature and reason by being stricter and less flexible. This pattern was established in Old Testament times, when detailed and precise dietary laws were imposed on Israel but not on other nations. A total outsider without any Christian commitments might say, however: if the intolerance of revelation comes from a wiser source than the tolerance of reason, why does it seem to be so much more stupid? Is it really revelation, or just one more example of the human resistance to revelation? To revert for the last time to my teaching Utopia in the 1930s: it was widely believed then that capitalism, with or without a revolution, would evolve into socialism, socialism being assumed to be not only more efficient but morally superior. That did not happen: the two economies simply froze into an adversary situation, with democracies resisting reforms that sounded like Communism, the Communist countries resisting reforms that sounded like bourgeois revisionism. This deadlock repeated the religious polarizing of the sixteenth century. An adversary situation, it seems clear, impoverishes both sides. A revolution, once it reaches the point of establishing contact with what has preceded it, has no resources for anything but repression; those outside the revolution are similarly forced into a reactionary repression. The liberal may get clobbered from both ends, but an impartial view would say that he is the one who has been right all along. I think of Utopia as belonging to the first great wave of humanism, a reforming movement that envisaged a far profounder reform of the church than either Reformation or Counter-Reformation achieved. This is more obvious in Erasmus than in More, but a good deal of the same reforming vision is in Utopia. All human communities, real or imaginary, are aggregates. We use the word “body” in two senses: it means the physical structure of the individual, and it means, metaphorically, the unity of a community, the body politic. The revealed community, as we get it in the apocalyptic parts of the New Testament, is a spiritual existence in which the metaphor has become a reality, and where, in Christian terms, there is only the body of Christ, which is both individual and social. But in our present mode of existence social bodies will always be aggregates, and tolerance and flexibility are the best conditions for them. Even the individual body is a community of billions of cells and bacteria, with specialized functions and yet, presumably, with no “knowledge,” whatever knowledge may be in such a context, that they are forming a larger body. But they too can make mistakes about their relation to

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that body, as we see in the intolerant anarchist revolution we call cancer. I myself have allergic ailments that, I am told, are caused by a panicstricken xenophobia among the blood cells, their inability to distinguish a harmless from a dangerous intruder. Good health, in both bodies, depends on a sense of unity that also rejects a hysterical insistence on uniformity. Plato remarked that the most frightful tyrannies were very like his ideal pattern entrusted to the wrong people [Republic, 564–9]. In a world where all people without exception are more or less the wrong people, Utopia can exist only where More put it, in the “nowhereness” of the consciousness within the individual mind. There it can do much to inform and reform the society around it, as long as we neither abandon its vision nor try to shape a society according to it.

26 Foreword to Unfolded Tales 1989

Foreword to Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), ix–xii, from which the text below is taken. The dedication to the book reads: “The contributors present this volume to A.C. Hamilton, Cappon Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada, in recognition of his contribution to English Renaissance studies.”1

This varied and fascinating collection of essays deals with aspects of one of the strangest success stories in English literature, the domination of the Elizabethan-Jacobean period by romance. This era had a strong sense of hierarchy in literary genres as elsewhere, and romance had, in theory, an inferior status.2 Romance stirred up sexual anxieties (see the quotation from Ascham in Carol Kaske’s paper);3 it was constantly ridiculed for its extravagance, its neglect of the unities, the incredibility of its characters and their actions, its lack of attention to everything that critics of that time meant by “nature.”4 Yet it is romance that takes over The Faerie Queene, the last period of Shakespeare, and the biggest work of Sidney. In Gordon Teskey’s lively analogy, it is like the parasite of the medusa jellyfish that devours its host from the inside.5 Our own age is equally hierarchical, with certain “serious” genres studied in universities and others, mostly types of formulaic romance, consigned to the outer darkness of bedrooms, bus stations, and other places where fiction is actually read with some intensity. We may perhaps wonder if some of these subliterary conventions may not come in a distant future to show surprising powers of survival. One thinks of the remark of the garrulous drunk who tells the story of Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller: “Architas made a

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woodden Doue to flie; by which proportion I see no reason that the veryest blocke in the worlde shoulde dispayre of any thing.”6 The Elizabethan period and ours are not the only ones in which Hobgoblin has often snatched the garland from Apollo:7 in the “Romantic” period itself, and even more in the “pre-Romantic” age preceding it, romance formulas have outmanoeuvred more highbrow preferences for what is called the “Classical,” the supposed opposite of romance in most ages. But in the period covered by this book there was an ambiguity in the conception of the “Classical” itself. One of the most obvious and remarkable features of the period was its aspect as a “Renaissance,” or recreation of Classicism, which gave it among other things an educational vision of great clarity and power, the vision for which the canon of Classical writings provided the central content. By an educational vision I do not mean the forcible inserting of Latin paradigms into small boys, though there was a good deal of interest in that too: I mean the encyclopedic program of accomplishments set out in Castiglione’s Courtier, in Elyot’s Governour, and in courtesy books and miscellanies intended for the upper classes, such as Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman. The major Classical models for this educational genre were the reconstituted society of Plato’s Republic, the description of the magnanimous man (or however one translates it) in the Nicomachean Ethics,8 and the Cyropaedia, Xenophon’s account of the life and education of Cyrus. These models reached sixteenth-century England in varied and often devious ways, but they are an informing presence in The Faerie Queene and, according to Fulke Greville,9 in Sidney’s Arcadia. The fact that The Faerie Queene is among other things an educational treatise is emphasized in the Letter to Raleigh.10 Even Shakespeare’s most uninhibitedly romantic play Cymbeline, so prominently featured in this book,11 begins by praising Posthumus’s achievements in the liberal arts [1.1.40–54], and can hardly find anything worse to say of the degenerate Cloten than that he cannot subtract two from twenty and get eighteen [2.1.54–6]. Education and romance seem very far apart in our minds today, because we think of education in a context of ideas, information, and the devoted efforts of a bureaucracy to prevent young people from getting it. The contemporaries of Spenser thought of it in a context of love, a word that had far less of the sentimental and rather embarrassing connotations that it has to us. The association of love and the arts had been inherited from the Middle Ages—one thinks of the famous opening stanza of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls12—and embellished with themes derived

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from the Italian Platonists. The Faerie Queene is really all about love, and three of its books, those devoted to Chastity, Friendship, and Courtesy, deal explicitly with recognized aspects of love. Britomart’s chastity, in the completed poem, would have become the “married chastity” celebrated in Shakespeare’s Phoenix and the Turtle [l. 61], as would also that of the invisible Faerie Queene herself. Love is also the climax of the courtier’s education in Castiglione,13 and the interpenetration of love and learning in the literature of the time, from Euphues to Love’s Labour’s Lost, needs no further comment here. Even the so-called “classics” were read in a very romantic way: Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, became essentially the love story of Dido. Before I read Patricia Parker’s essay I had assumed that Shakespeare had no interest in the last six books of the Aeneid.14 It takes a good deal of historical imagination to enter into this unity of learning and love: we tend to think of sexual and social relations, even relations within the individual psyche itself, as primarily adversarial, an antagonism that education normally intensifies instead of reconciling. Certainly Renaissance education was within a context of class and patriarchy, and knowing one’s place in society was at the centre of all other knowledge. But romance tries to give that knowledge a chivalric idealism that minimizes the arrogance that goes with class and sex distinctions. In a mistress’s lament for her maid in Deloney’s Thomas of Reading there is an exquisite blend of genuine personal feeling with class-inspired reflections about how hard it is to get good servants these days: “Farewell my sweet Meg, the best seruant that euer came in any mans house, many may I haue of thy name, but neuer any of thy nature, thy diligence is much, in thy hands I laid the whole gouernment of my house, and thereby eased my selfe of that care, which now will cumber me.”15 The concentrated training in words given by the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic meant that Elizabethan education was verbal to a very intense degree. Perhaps the plethora of schools of critical theory today, most of which are at least referred to in the essays following, may be necessary to do justice to the intensity of the feeling for verbal texture in works of this period. Several aspects of it are featured here: multiple meanings of words (Judith Anderson), names (Alastair Fowler), recurring imagery (William Blissett), and complex patterns of verbal design like those of euphuism (the two essays on Greene).16 Spenser in particular was acknowledged to be a supreme master of rhetoric in his own day, but even what seem to be more casual writers demand very close attention to their texture, nor is all of it confined to English. To quote The

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Unfortunate Traveller again: “There was a Lord in the campe . . . sold syder and cheese by pint and by pound to all that came, (at the verie name of sider I can but sigh, there is so much of it in renish wine now a daies.) Well, Tendit ad sydera virtus, thers great vertue belongs (I can tel you) to a cup of sider.”17 Whatever the social or cultural conditions, friendship and courtesy will always be the essential social virtues in every age that they are in Spenser, and it is friendship and courtesy that have brought these essays together in honour of A.C. Hamilton. Whether explicitly referred to or not, his presence is everywhere throughout the book, which continually reflects the influence of his work on Sidney, on Shakespeare, on euphuism, and above all on Spenser, especially his monumental edition of The Faerie Queene.18 There could be no more impressive tribute to the fact that a first-rate scholar, simply by being what he is and by what he does, creates and fosters a community around him, a community not of discipleship but of a high morale sustained by the awareness that he is there.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Alvin A. Lee, “Introduction,” The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), xvi. 2 Ronald Bates, Northrop Frye (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971), 49. 3 See FS, 150/154. Dolzani has convincingly made this point (NRL, xxi). 4 NF’s notes on prose fiction can be read in NRL, pt. 1. For the full text of the narrative portion of NF’s Guggenheim application, see NRL, 3–5. 5 See NF’s sustained argument, begun in FS (159–60/163), made explicitly in RE (95; M&B, 98), and repeated in WP (115/109; cf. 53/60), regarding a passage from Milton’s Areopagitica on the “liberty of prophesying” which extends the prophetic from sacred to secular contexts. See also NF’s early essay “The Writer as Prophet: Milton, Blake, Swift, Shaw” for another example of NF’s commonplace contrast between the conservative poet (Shakespeare) and the revolutionary poet (Milton) (LS, 160). 6 Whereas Angela Esterhammer emphasizes NF’s view of Milton as a “precursor of Romanticism” (M&B, xxvi), Dolzani argues for NF’s “double vision, having historical affinities to the Renaissance and Reformation on the one hand and the Romantic revolution on the other, with Blake as a hinge between them” (NRL, xxiv). 7 In GC, in fact, NF expands the structure of Biblical imagery to include seven categories (166–7/186–7), though he makes clear that they fit into a broader framework of “two levels of nature” (139/159), a lower and an upper level. 8 See, e.g., Denham’s chart of NF’s teaching from 1949–50 (D, xxvii), and NF’s comments in his 1942 Diary on how his “graduate Spenser course is waving gently in the breeze” (D, 49). 9 James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), xiv. 10 NF served as supervisor for Blissett’s dissertation, “The Historical Imagination in the English Renaissance: Studies in Spenser and Milton” (see, e.g.,

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D, 285). Blissett in turn supervised the dissertation of Gordon Teskey, who also studied with NF. For NF’s connection with Hamilton, see no. 26, nn. 1 and 18. See the Spenser Encyclopedia entry entitled “Canada, influence and reputation in.” Milton’s Prose, ed. Malcolm W. Wallace (London: Oxford University Press, 1925 ), 146. Annotated copies in NFL. For NF’s slightly different citation of the same passage from “Of Education,” see CP, 31; CPCT, 20. Guggenheim Application, NRL, 4; see also Dolzani, NRL, xxiii. The Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction for Northrop Frye on Shakespeare in 1986 consisted of a cash prize of $5,000 to the author, as well as a specially bound edition of the book (preserved in the NFL). The other books for which NF placed as finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction were MC (in 1967), GC (in 1982), and WP (in 1991). Ric Knowles, Shakespeare and Canada: Essays on Production, Translation, and Adaptation (Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2004), 12. Sherman Hawkins, “The Two Worlds of Shakespearean Comedy,” Shakespeare Studies, 3 (1967): 63. NF’s “The Argument of Comedy” lends itself to being anthologized because it is complete, self-contained, and relatively brief. Russ McDonald points out that “Frye’s immensely impressive system is seen to best advantage in Anatomy of Criticism,” but “Frye’s tome does not lend itself to brief excerpts,” whereas “The Argument of Comedy” “offers an earnest of Frye’s pedagogic gifts in a manageable unit” (Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000 [Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004], 90). Jeanne Addison Roberts, “American Criticism of Shakespeare’s Comedies,” Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976): 3. Roberts adds, “I am sorely tempted to expand my definition of American to include Canadian” (3). Not only did NF’s attention to the “function of comedy” and its “principles” “inspire application and amplification”; “The great flowering of American interest in the pastoral and perhaps our emphasis on sex and love in our criticism may be traced in part to Frye” (3). See, e.g., Erich Segal’s comparative study of comedy’s evolution from the Greeks through to Samuel Beckett: The Death of Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 98. C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), 11n. Barber, 4–8. Rebhorn, “After Frye: A Review-Article on the Interpretation of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 11 (Winter 1979): 554.

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24 Rebhorn, 557. Rebhorn also distinguishes between NF and Barber by saying, “Where Frye comes at comedy through structure, Barber gives prominence to tone and mood, the festive release he finds at its center” (556). 25 Maintaining the importance of the “two strongly contrasted locales, representing two different orders of reality,” Hawkins moves beyond NF’s “green world” model, which Hawkins thinks fits only four of the comedies, and two late romances; hence he develops another complementary, “closed world” pattern in which “the characters stay put,” while intruders enter the community and facilitate the removal of the obstacles to love, which come from the lovers rather than from external forces (Hawkins, “The Two Worlds of Shakespearean Comedy,” 65–7). 26 Harry Berger, Jr., “The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World,” in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 13–14. 27 See, e.g., the entries on “the green world” in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Michelle Lee, vol. 103 (Detroit: Gale, 2007); and David Mikics, A New Handbook of Literary Terms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). For the use of the concept in film criticism, see Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 49: “The genre of remarriage is an inheritor of the preoccupations and discoveries of Shakespearean romantic comedy, especially as that work has been studied by, first among others, Northrop Frye” (49). Cavell traces the plot of romance in Hollywood films, showing that the “place Frye calls ‘the green world,’ a place in which perspective and renewal are achieved” is, in several of the films, Connecticut! In the field of New Testament studies, Brenda Deen Schildgen’s study of ritual time in the Gospel of Mark follows NF (even more closely than she acknowledges) in her argument that “the ritual initiated at the first food multiplication is a Markan version of the ‘green world,’ where the world of history, politics, social, gender and ethnic hierarchies and taboos temporarily ceases and a new utopian end of the violence of human history takes its place” (144). Schildgen adds, “This retreat to the ‘green world’ is not an imaginary mirror of the ordinary time world but a visionary projection of the utopian experience made possible when humans retreat from the rules, structures and power conspiracies of the world of contemporary history and politics” (144). Schildgen follows Berger in showing how these two worlds “are not opposites but fictional mirrors of each other” (146); but her use of the green world model resonates at many points with NF’s writings on comic structure. See Brenda Deen Schildgen, Crisis and Continuity: Time in the Gospel of Mark (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998). 28 For an intriguing start, see G.K. Hunter, “Northrop Frye’s ‘Green World’: Escapism and Transcendence,” who examines not just the cultural connota-

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tions of the term “green world” but its presentation in NF: in Shakespeare: Le Monde vert (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995), 39–47. Jean E. Howard, “The Difficulties of Closure: An Approach to the Problematic in Shakespearean Comedy,” in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan, ed. A.R. Braunmuller and J.C. Bulman (London: Associated University Presses, 1986), 113. Howard, 114. See, e.g., Christy Desmet’s judgment that NF does not valorize Hippolyta’s famous speech about “something of great constancy” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.23–7) because he privileges Theseus’s viewpoint: “Hippolyta’s standard for persuasion is far different from the teleological, Oedipal plot that Northrop Frye identifies as the grand pattern for Shakespearean comedy.” But a quick perusal of NF’s analyses of Hippolyta’s speech in this volume (e.g., 207, 415, 499) shows how this kind of oppositional reading can lead a critic not only to misrepresent NF but actually to re-inscribe the very prejudice one is at pains to expose. In fact, Desmet’s commentary on Hippolyta’s speech sounds remarkably consonant with NF: “Truth works not by strict categories but by a loose, baggy accumulation of stories. . . . From the perspective of her generous aesthetic, the transfiguration of the lovers’ minds is an unnamed ‘something’ that holds together with a consistency that cannot be quantified or even named.” See “Disfiguring Women with Masculine Tropes: A Rhetorical Reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler (New York: Routledge, 1998), 321. Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2005; orig. pub. 1968), 51. On NF’s important discussion of “minority moods” in Shakespeare’s plays, see 189. Lawrence Danson, “Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism: The Comedies,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 231. William Calin, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: From Spitzer to Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 118. Calin, 127. Calin, 136. Calin, 122. M.M. Mahood also singles out NF’s importance in the shift to the reader’s or audience’s response: the third chapter of NF’s A Natural Perspective is the “most interesting” of the three books published in 1965 that marked “an increasing concern with comedy as a communal experience.” See “Shakespeare’s Middle Comedies: A Generation of Criticism,” Shakespeare Survey 32, ed. Kenneth Muir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 3–4. The “ogdoad” is the name NF gives to his projected eight-volume magnum

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40 41

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opus. Dolzani explains, “Whatever their ostensible subject, almost all of Frye’s notebooks and notes over forty-five years attempt to relate themselves at some point to the ogdoad project” (NRL, xxiii). According to NF’s code in his notes, a single-word title and a symbol designate each volume in his projected double tetralogy of books. For example, the first four volumes, three of which figure in his three-volume Guggenheim proposal, are Liberal ( ), Tragicomedy ( ), Anticlimax (^), and Rencontre (ï). Dolzani has shown that, while NF alternately conceives of the Spenser study as Liberal or Anticlimax, the study of Shakespearean drama is “more consistently” designated as Tragicomedy (xxiii). For the April/May 1964 program of the Shakespeare Series in CBC’s “University of the Air,” see the headnote to “Shakespeare and the Modern World” (no. 14). For “The Structure and Spirit of Comedy,” see CPCT, 162–9. Press release titled “Second Year of Shakespeare Seminars at Stratford,” and dated 24 March 1961, courtesy of the Stratford Festival Archives. In 1964, which produced nos. 14 and 15, the number of participants swelled to an alltime high of 157. Stratford Papers on Shakespeare stopped production after publishing five annual volumes every year from 1960 through 1964, and two cumulative issues in 1965/67 and 1968/69, after which noteworthy Celebrity Lectures were published separately as pamphlets. For example, NF had finished only two of the Bampton lectures before he arrived in New York to give them; the other two were in rough form, and were never fully completed because of NF’s shock over Kennedy’s assassination (Ayre, 294–5). NRL contains all of NF’s notes for the lectures that grew into his four books on Shakespeare: for the Bampton lectures that became NP, see pp. 214–48; for the Alexander lectures that became FT, see pp. 248–85; for the Tamblyn lectures that became MD, see pp. 297–320; and for the undergraduate lectures on Shakespeare, and the later drafts of the essaylectures that became NFS, see pp. 321–45. As NF explained to David Cayley, these notebooks were for him a crucial composition tool, and explain the often aphoristic quality of his writing: “I keep notebooks in which I write very short paragraphs, and everything I write is the insertion of continuity into those aphorisms” (NFC, 146; INF, 987). See Robert D. Denham, “Northrop Frye’s Shakespearean Criticism,” in The Importance of Northrop Frye, ed. S. Krishnamoorthy Aithal (Kanpur, India: Humanities Research Centre, 1993), 2. Denham cites NF’s “earliest reference” to Shakespeare “in an essay on music he wrote when he was twenty-two,” which was subsequently published in 1938. As Denham’s indispensable 1997 edition of the Student Essays has further shown, Shakespeare is a steady presence in NF’s unpublished student writing from 1932

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onward. For example, in the first essay “The Basis of Primitivism,” written in 1932 when he was twenty, NF is already using “Shakespeare in his plot derivativeness” to exemplify his idea that the “great poets refused to be bound by conventions, but in being original they were quite conscious of origins” (SE, 5). The Polemical Introduction draws on an essay contemporaneous with NF’s early Shakespeare articles: “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 19 (October 1949): 1–16. See William K. Wimsatt and Munroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review, 54 (1946): 468–88; revised and republished in Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 3–18. Keats defines “Negative Capability” with reference to Shakespeare, as the capability “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”: see his “Letter to George and Thomas Keats (21 December 1817), in Letters of John Keats, 3rd ed., ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 72. For NF’s citation of the concept, see WE, 77; RT, 61. See also pp. 113 and 155. NF uses the word argumentum in this specialized sense in NP (164), where he speaks of comedy’s ritual origins from loose satiric verse to a structured plot. In NRL, NF aligns Shakespeare with both New Comedy and Old Comedy, first writing that Shakespeare favours the Old Comedy of Aristophanes (102), but then warning, “I shall have to be careful with my Old Comedy thesis: Old Comedy goes with the opposite of Shakespeare, really: personal attack & opinionated writing” (157). See also “The Literary Meaning of Archetype,” LS, 187–8, where NF cites as especially illuminating Jung’s “book on libido symbols,” that is, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 408. NF would have known this original authorized translation, first published in 1916, before Jung revised the book and a new translation was issued (annotated copy in NFL: New York: Moffat, Yard, 1963). See LS, 382n. 11. See Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (London: Merlin Press, 1963; orig. pub. 1911), 332–4; Gilbert Murray, “Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy,” published in Harrison, Themis, 341–63; and Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955; orig. pub. 1925), v–ix, 147–58; Francis MacDonald Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1961), 66–7, 181. Cornford’s book is available in NFL.

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53 Sir James Frazer, Golden Bough (henceforth GB) (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 1955; orig. pub. 1906–11): see NF’s Bibliography in SE, 137–8. 54 Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1948; orig. pub. 1934), 261, 271–4. Though he cites her on occasion throughout his writing, in “The Social Context of Literary Criticism” NF distances himself from Bodkin’s Jungian criticism and her use of the term “archetype”: “because I found the term ‘archetype’ a useful one, I am still often called a Jungian critic, and classified with Miss Maud Bodkin, whose book I have read with interest, but whom, on the evidence of that book, I resemble about as closely as I resemble the late Sarah Bernhardt” (LS, 348). NF is here distancing himself from Jung, too, for whom archetypes actually exist in the personal and collective unconscious. 55 Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), 35. Annotated copy in NFL. For his student essay, NF no doubt used the first edition of Weston’s book, published in 1920. 56 Later in his career, in WP, NF goes on to develop another key point about the centrality of the “dying god” myth: its rootedness in the four “primary concerns” essential to human well-being. NF links the recurrence of myth to the human anxiety about satisfying the primary concerns (food and drink; sex; property; liberty of movement), and hence he grounds myth in embodied existence. NF insists that the “axioms of primary concern” apply to “all people without significant exception” (WP, 42/51–2). Glen Robert Gill has argued that because of this focus on the materiality of mythical discourse, NF’s later work “opens into and is fully contemporary with the work of several influential postmodern thinkers” (such as Lacan, Cixous, Kristeva, Lakoff): see Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 186. 57 GB, vol. 9, The Scapegoat, 412–23. 58 Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, 408. 59 Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 272. 60 See no. 6, n. 6; and no. 7, n. 11, in this volume. 61 See, e.g., “Romance as Masque,” SM, 148–78/SeSCT, 125–51; and AC, 287– 93/269–74, where NF calls The Tempest “a comedy so profound that it seems to draw the whole masque into itself” (290/271). 62 Still argues that The Tempest belongs to the same kind of religious drama as medieval mystery, miracle, and morality plays, whose main features resemble those of ancient initiation rituals. See Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of “The Tempest” (London: Cecil Palmer, 1921); and its successor, The Timeless Theme: A Critical Theory Formulated and Applied (London: I. Nicholson & Wat-

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son, 1936). Annotated copies in NFL. For NF’s citation of Still, see SE, 337 and 517–18n. 39; and TBN, 296–7. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95, 98. Culler, Literary Theory, 97. Jonas Barish, “Recent Studies” [Review of NP], Studies in English Literature, 6 (Spring 1966): 364. The conversation was with David Hoeniger, who NF says “asked me if T.S. Eliot were one of the books I wanted to write” (D, 141). See Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As If”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical, and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924). Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 115. Halpern, 115. Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 224. Taylor, 223–4. H.W. Fawkner, Shakespeare’s Miracle Plays: Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), 11. Fawkner radically extends NF’s readings of the late romances by asking “whether Shakespeare in the last plays actually bothers to take us to that artistic transcendentality (ground us there), or whether he in fact only uses such a transcendental artistic ground as a starter and first condition” (18–19). Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 14. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), 293. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” in Writing and Difference, 293, 283. Patricia Parker’s distinction between the teleological nature of Renaissance dilation and Derridean différance may prove helpful here: “the distance between a dilation and delay which is finally caught within the horizon of a telos or ending, however tentatively or self-consciously construed, and the kind of unlimited ‘différance’ envisaged by Derrida.” See “Deferral, Dilation, Différance: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jonson,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 204. Parker herself has sensitively cited and extended NF’s work on romance in a poststructuralist direction: see especially Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). For an incisive discussion of Derrida’s resistance to both theory and critique

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(including criticism as an act of judgment), see Rodolphe Gasché’s introduction to The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 11–18. Despite the repeated claims that Derrida and NF are utterly opposed to each other, there have been no sustained comparisons of NF and Derrida on their views of literature, or on the subject of Shakespeare. Derrida, for example, has written more about literature than any philosopher and he has even referred to NF. Readers interested in Derrida’s many writings on literature, for which we can only supply a short list, can begin with the following: Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 256–318; Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992); Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Joseph G. Kronick, Derrida and the Future of Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999; Asja Szafraneic, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Timothy Clark, The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, and the Later Gadamer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). For Derrida’s essay on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, see “Aphorism Countertime,” Acts of Literature, 414–33; and on The Merchant of Venice, see “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical Inquiry, 27 (2001): 174–200. A.C. Hamilton, Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 21–5. On NF and value judgments, see also Jean O’Grady, “Re-Valuing Value,” in Northrop Frye: New Directions from Old, ed. David Rampton (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009), 225–45. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press), 137. See Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” trans. David Wood, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 29. Derrida, and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Donis and David Webb (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 14–15. Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, 30. Derrida, The Gift of Death [Second Edition] and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 156. See also Derrida, “Passions,” 24–5. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 31. Derrida, The Gift of Death [Second Edition] and Literature in Secret, 157.

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Notes to pages 3–5 1. The Argument of Comedy

1 See Jan Gorak, “From Escape to Irony: Frye’s ‘The Argument of Comedy,’” in Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives, ed. Jean O’Grady and Wang Ning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 76. 2 The English Institute, sponsored by six universities (Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Rochester, Claremont Graduate School, and Rutgers), was formed in 1939, and, except for a three-year break during World War II, met annually for a week of sessions at Columbia University in the fall. Columbia University also published an annual volume of the best papers read at each session. In 1957, NF described the English Institute as an exemplary annual scholarly gathering: “a group of about 150 scholars, most of them primarily concerned with English, who meet to discuss, not research in progress, but techniques of criticism as applied to research. Nobody gets or gives a job as a result of going to the institute: its members meet for the sole purpose of acquainting themselves with what is going on in such fields as editing, linguistics, the history of ideas, analytical bibliography, explication de texte, the study of myths and archetypes, and so on. My own experience of the institute, the amount I have learned from it and the friends I have made at it, convince me of the value of a parallel organization in Canada” (WE, 59). The English Institute went on in 1965 to organize a famous session on NF himself, which he did not attend in order to allow uninhibited discussion and whose proceedings were published as Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). 3 See Gilbert Murray, Aristophanes: A Study (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964; orig. pub. 1933), 210. 4 In William Congreve’s Love for Love (1695), the hero Valentine cheats his father Sir Sampson Legend out of the heroine Angelica, while Valentine’s friend Scandal violates Mrs. Foresight, the wife of Angelica’s uncle, old Foresight. Congreve acknowledges his debt to Menander and Terence in the Dedication to The Way of the World (1700). 5 See, e.g., Joseph C. Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of “All’s Well That Ends Well” and Its Critics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968). 6 See Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 4, chap. 8 (1128a), where Aristotle compares “the old and the new comedies; to the authors of the former indecency of language was amusing, to those of the latter innuendo is more so; and these differ in no small degree in respect of propriety” (trans. W.D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York: Random House, 1941]. Rpt. of the Oxford University Press translation of Works of Aristotle, ed. W.D. Ross [Oxford: 1908]). Cf. Murray, Aristophanes, 212–13.

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NF would have known the counter-argument that Aristotle favoured Aristophanes’ comedy over Menander’s: see, e.g., Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy with an Adaptation of the Poetics and a Translation of the “Tractatus Coislinianus” (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922; Kraus Reprint, 1969), 18–41. In Aristotle’s formulation of the four causes, the “material cause” is that out of which the thing is made; the “formal cause” is the form, “archetype,” or “essence” of the thing; the “efficient cause” is the agent or means by which the thing is made; and the “final cause” is the purpose or end of the thing, “‘that for the sake of which’ a thing is done” (see Physics, bk. 2, chap. 3 [194b]; cf. bk. 2, chap. 7 [198a]; and De Generatione animalium, bk. 1, chap. 1 [715a], in Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. McKeon). The stock character of the “vice” (often Vice) in the medieval morality play is a comic and sinister tempter who moves the plot forward by trying to effect the downfall of the everyman figure. See, e.g., Robin Young, “Ibsen and Comedy”; and Simon Williams, “Ibsen and the Theatre, 1877–1900,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, ed. James McFarlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 58–67; 165–82. The word “comedy” can be traced back to the Greek komoidia, meaning “song [oide] of the komos.” The komoi were ritual processions in which drunken revellers sang and danced around the image of a large phallus. Beginning with Aristotle, commentators have linked the origin of comedy with these “phallic songs” (Poetics, 4; cf. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 101–14). In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and The Merchant of Venice, respectively. Terence, The Self-Tormentor (Heauton timorumenos), l. 77: “homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.” For Aristophanes’ attacks on Cleon, see chap. 2 of Murray’s Aristophanes, pp. 39–68. On the connection between the Ecclesiazusae and Plato’s Republic, see Murray, Aristophanes, 186–9. This paragraph was incorporated into AC, 177/164–5. Hamlet’s statement that the “end” of acting is “to hold . . . the mirror up to nature” echoes the well-known treatise on comedy by the fourth-century Latin grammarian Aelius Donatus, whom NF describes as a “famous and influential” commentator on the origins of drama (161). Donatus attributes both to Cicero the statement that “comedy is an imitation of life, a mirror of custom, an image of truth”; and to Livius Andronicus the similar statement that “comedy is a mirror of daily life” (Donatus, “A Fragment on Comedy and Tragedy,” trans. George Miltz, in Theories of Comedy, ed. Paul Lauter

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[Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964], 27). Cornford also presents Hamlet’s definition of drama as a definition of comedy: see The Origin of Attic Comedy, 178. See Aristotle, Poetics, chap. 6. See Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 56, 66–77. “Entelechy” is an Aristotelian term that refers to a completed state of actuality, the condition of a thing whose essence is fully realized; in De anima, Aristotle famously defines the soul as the entelechy (the “actuality”) of the body (bk. 2, chap. 1; 412a20). Aeschylus’s trilogy the Oresteia comprises his last three plays Agamemnon, the Choëphoroe (Libation Bearers), and the Eumenides, which ends with a processional and restorative songs of blessing, once Orestes has been acquitted of the sin of matricide and the Furies have been appeased. NF praises the St. Matthew Passion as “the artistic presentation of the supreme sacrifice,” in his essay “The Concept of Sacrifice,” written while he was a student in Emmanuel College. He describes Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion as “the greatest works of art the human race has ever seen or is ever likely to see” (SE, 124). The reference is to the last line of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, in which the Chorus points to the Aristotelian catharsis presumably effected by Samson’s tragedy. In his student essay “The Fertility Cults,” NF calls Samson “an important but frequently overlooked example of a sacrificial victim” (SE, 136). Colin Still, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play. Robert D. Denham notes that NF apparently first encountered Still’s book through T.S. Eliot’s preface to Wilson Knight’s Wheel of Fire: see SE, 517n. 39. Cf. William Witherle Lawrence’s book Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (New York: Macmillan, 1931), which takes as its point of departure F.S. Boas’s standard designation of All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida as “problem plays” (Shakspere and His Predecessors [New York: Haskell House, 1896; 1905]). Among the folklorists who refer to the episode of “carrying out Death” in the fertility rites are Frazer, GB, vol. 4, The Dying God, 233–40; and vol. 9, The Scapegoat, 227–8; Harrison, Themis, 416; Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 9–11. See the Homeric Hymns 2, for the nature-myth of Demeter and Persephone (in Latin, Ceres and Proserpine). On the Saturnalia as a festival that “was popularly supposed to commemorate the merry reign of Saturn, the god of sowing and of husbandry,” see Frazer, GB, vol. 9, The Scapegoat, 306. The references are to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, The Win-

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ter’s Tale, and The Tempest, respectively. In the last play, the Court Party includes Alonso, King of Naples; his brother, Sebastian; and Prospero’s brother, Antonio. 2. Don Quixote 1 For a summary of the “curious history of the English versions of Don Quixote,” see Putnam’s introduction, xi–xv; and his bibliography, 1037–9. 2 Motteux completed Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais, as Putnam notes (466n. 20). 3 Charles Jervas (more commonly Jarvis) was a portrait painter who instructed Alexander Pope in the art of painting, and to whom Pope wrote his unpublished Epistle to Jervas extolling the sister arts of painting and poetry. 4 Putnam charges Motteux with having turned “those two superb creations, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, into a pair of English clowns” (xii); and he condemns the “prevailing slapstick quality of the work, especially where Sancho is involved” (xiii), along with “other grave faults” that support Motteux’s condemnation by the critics. 5 Among those Cervantes scholars who have censured Motteux, Putnam names Bertram D. Wolfe, John Ormsby, and Richard Ford (Putnam, x–xiii). 6 Pegasus is Zeus’s foremost winged horse, swift as the wind; Rosinante (“Rocinante” in Putnam’s edition) is of course Don Quixote’s bony old nag, “the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world” (Putnam’s translation, 29). 7 William Hogarth submitted six designs for the 1738 Lord Carteret edition of Don Quixote, though they were rejected in favour of John Vanderbank’s paintings, and only published posthumously. Hogarth’s other extant illustration of Don Quixote, “Sancho’s Feast,” is of unknown date. See Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 45–56; and Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd. ed. (London: Print Room, 1989; orig. pub. 1965), nos. 94–99, 100. 8 Honoré Daumier produced 29 paintings and 41 drawings of Don Quixote, according to a recent exhibition catalogue: see Daumier, 1808–1879 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1999), 516–41. NF here alludes to Don Quixote’s adoption of Sancho’s new title “the Knight of the Mournful Countenance” (143), which leads the knight to have “a sad-looking face” painted on his shield. 9 The Victorian critic may be J.H. Shorthouse: “Cervantes’ masterpiece, which, at its first appearance, was received with shrieks of laughter, will come in the end to be recognized as one of the saddest books ever written” (“The Humorous in Literature,” Macmillan’s Magazine, March 1883; see Literary Remains of J.H. Shorthouse, ed. Sarah Shorthouse [London: Macmillan,

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1905], 273). But the comment is not uncommon in the nineteenth century: in his novel Westward Ho! the Victorian clergyman and writer Charles Kingsley refers, on moral grounds, to Don Quixote as “One of the saddest books . . . which man can read” ([London: Macmillan, 1902], 57); and Fyodor Dostoevsky says of Don Quixote, “Man will not forget to take this saddest of all books with him to God’s last judgment”: see A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 2:1129. For Putnam’s quotation of Lionel Trilling, see xxix, and 469n. 10. On Kierkegaard and Sartre, see Putnam, 470n. 13; on Bertrand Russell, see 1019–20n. 2. NF appears to be paraphrasing several similar passages in the text here, as, for example, “‘And faith, Sancho,’ said Don Quixote, ‘you appear to me to be no sounder in mind than I am’” (209). See Matthew 23:12: “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted” (cf. Luke 14:11, 18:14). 3. Comic Myth in Shakespeare

1 As a newly elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, NF in fact appears to have been responsible for organizing this session. He certainly secured the participation of Fairley, whose talents as a lecturer NF deeply admired (D, 508, 521, 502–3), and no doubt also that of his friend Daniells. The “Programme of Papers” records that Fairley and Daniells did give their papers alongside NF, though his was the only one published in the Proceedings and Transactions (see App. C, p. 113; D, 752n. 111). 2 NF contrasts Shakespeare and Jonson as writers of Old and New Comedy, respectively, in his NB 8: “Shakespeare as a writer of comedy is the only major example of ‘Old’ Aristophanic comedy vis-à-vis Jonson or Molière Terentian comedy” (NRL, 140). However, he qualifies, “I shall have to be careful with my Old Comedy thesis: Old Comedy goes with the opposite of Shakespeare, really; personal attack & opinionated writing” (157). NF begins his essay “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors” by arguing that, though “The phrase ‘comedy of humors’ belongs to Ben Jonson,” Jonson in fact wrote “comedies of manners,” in contrast to Shakespeare (LS, 144). 3 The “comedy of manners” is defined as “a play deriving its comedy from the social habits (manners and mores) of a given society, usually the dominant one at the time the play is written” in The Harper Handbook to Literature, ed. NF, Sheridan Baker, and George Perkins (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 112. 4 NF discusses “the Renaissance developments of the unity of time and place out of Aristotle’s unity of action” in NRL, 114; he cites Shaw’s observation

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that “comedy at a certain pitch of concentration tends to acquire them,” and notes that The Tempest “has acquired them . . . for the same reason.” See, for example, Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry: “There is no Arte deliuered to mankinde that hath not the workes of Nature for his principall obiect” (Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. [London: Oxford University Press, 1904; rpt. 1937], 1:155). In the First Essay of AC, NF takes Sidney as representative of the Renaissance humanists, who “tended to think of themselves as secular oracles of the order of nature” (62–3/59). Jonson addresses his preface to The Alchemist to his reader: “thou wert never more fair in the way to be cozened than (in this Age) in Poetry, especially in Plays; wherein now the concupiscence of dances and antics so reigneth, as to run away from Nature and be afraid of her, is the only point of art that tickles the spectators” (The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, ed. G.A. Wilkes, 4 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1981–2], 3:228, ll. 3–7). “He” refers to “the author,” here Jonson himself: see the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, ll. 113–14, in Complete Plays, 4:10 (which prints “loth” rather than “loath”; and “Nature” rather than “nature”). NF echoes Jonson’s phrase “making nature afraid” in NRL, 146 (NB 8.134); and uses it as the title of chap. 2 of NP. Shakespeare’s name is recorded in the 1616 First Folio of Ben Jonson’s Workes as one of the “principall Comœdians” to have acted in Every Man in His Humour (1598), and one of the “principall Tragœdians” to have acted in Sejanus (1603): E.K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988; orig. pub. 1930), 2:71–2 (hereafter referred to as William Shakespeare). See also Russ McDonald, Shakespeare & Jonson / Jonson & Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 4–5. “Many were the wit-combates betwixt him [Shakespeare] and Ben Johnson, which two I behold like a Spanish great Gallion and an English man of War; Master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning; Solid, but Slow in his performances. Shake-spear, with the English-man of War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention.” Thomas Fuller, Worthies of England (1662), in Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:245. For the short-lived “seventeenth-century joke cycle” pitting Shakespeare against Jonson, see Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:246–53. On Aristotle’s conception of nature, see Metaphysics, bk. 5, chap. 4: “it is plain that nature in the primary and strict sense is the essence of things which have in themselves, as such, a source of movement.” Aristotle uses the word “nature” to designate the function and end of a literary kind in Poetics, 49a15: “tragedy came to a halt, since it had attained its own nature” (Aristotle, “Poetics” I, with “The Tractatus Coislinianus,” A Hypothetical Recon-

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struction of “Poetics” II, The Fragments of the “On Poets,” trans. with notes by Richard Janko [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987], 6; cf. 214–15). George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch): A Play Cycle in Five Parts, in Complete Plays with Prefaces (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963), 2:x: “I was finding that the surest way to produce an effect of daring innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.” See Samuel Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare” (1765): “the unities of time and place are not essential to a just drama, that though they may sometimes conduce to pleasure, they are always to be sacrificed to the nobler beauties of variety and instruction.” Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, 2 vols., vols. 7 and 8 of the Yale edition of Johnson’s works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 1:80. NF echoes Milton’s famous contrast, in L’Allegro, between Jonson and Shakespeare: “Then to the well-trod stage anon, / If Jonsons learned Sock be on, / Or sweetest Shakespear fancies childe, / Warble his native Wood-notes wilde. . . .” (ll. 131–4). Milton’s implication that Shakespeare wrote more by nature than by art becomes part of a long tradition, supported notably by Voltaire and Samuel Johnson. “The comedies (exquisite as they certainly are) bringing in admirably portray’d common characters, have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made for the divertisement only of the élite of the castle, and from its point of view. The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy.” Walt Whitman, “A Thought on Shakespeare,” in Prose Works, 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 2:558. For the reference to Shakespeare’s comedies as potboilers, see Shaw, Back to Methusaleh (“Postscript After Twentyfive Years”), in Complete Plays with Prefaces, 2:xcii: “If he [Shakespeare] could be consulted as to the inclusion of one of his plays in the present series he would probably choose his Hamlet because in writing it he definitely threw over his breadwinning trade of producing potboilers which he frankly called As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and What You Will.” Shaw’s attacks on Shakespeare’s popularity are scattered throughout his work, notably in “Better than Shakespear?” in his Preface to Three Plays for Puritans (in Complete Plays with Prefaces, 3:lii– lxii), and in “Bernard Shaw Abashed,” The Daily News (London), 17 April 1905. Shaw’s twelve-point summary of criticisms is reprinted in Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (London: Cassell, 1961), 1–3. See also Archibald Henderson, “Blaming the Bard,” George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956; orig. pub. 1932), 689–702.

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16 At this point in “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors” (LS, 147), NF inserts a transitional paragraph, to introduce his focus on “the structure of comedy in general”: “I feel that it is a waste of time to discuss Shakespeare’s characterization without relating characters to their dramatic functions, which in turn cannot be done without some knowledge of the genres of drama, and of the structures peculiar to those genres.” NF then cites both Aristotle, as “the most recent critic to be primarily interested in structure and genre,” and the “Greek treatise on comedy called the Tractatus Coislinianus, which may go back to Aristotle’s teachings.” 17 Plautus, The Comedy of Asses (the Asinaria), act 5, sc. 2, in the Loeb Plautus, vol. 1, trans. Paul Nixon (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 217–21, esp. 221. NF refers to this same scene from Plautus in AC, 164/152–3. 18 Gilbert Norwood, Plautus and Terence (New York: Cooper Square, 1963), 66: Norwood writes that the concluding scene of The Comedy of Asses exemplifies the way “Plautus carries bad taste to the pitch of infamy.” 19 Alfred Harbage, As They Liked It: An Essay on Shakespeare and Morality (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 179. NF echoes this point, and comments at length on Harbage’s book, in NB 8.173: “He anticipates many of my best ideas (about Shakespeare himself, that is) and adumbrates others” (NRL, 163). 20 This paragraph and the one that follows were incorporated into AC, 164– 5/152–3. 21 The latter half of this sentence, which appeared in “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors” (LS, 148), was incorporated into AC, 165/153, where “some Renaissance dramatists” becomes “Renaissance dramatists.” 22 This paragraph, with the exception of the final sentence, does not appear in “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors” (LS, 148–9). Instead, NF inserts a paragraph outlining the “three essential types of comic character” in the Tractatus Coislinianus: “the alazon or imposter,” “the eiron or self-deprecator,” and “the bomolochos, or buffoon.” In the next paragraph, before treating Jonson’s theory of humours, NF discusses the alazon as a hypocrite “who has conditioned himself to act a single part, and so falls into the bondage of his own law.” See also AC, 172/160, where NF adds “a fourth character type” of comedy, the agroikos, or churl, mentioned in Aristotle’s Ethics (Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 4, chap. 8, 1128a–b, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. McKeon, 1001; this passage is reprinted in one of NF’s major sources, Cooper’s An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, 120). 23 As NF points out in “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors” (LS, 149), Jonson expounds his theory of humours through his “presenter” Asper, in the Induction to Every Man out of His Humour, ll. 88–109 (Complete Plays, 1:288). In NRL, 174, NF explains “the essential point about the humor: he’s bound to a certain ritual code which is his ruling passion. Such rituals or ruling pas-

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sions are fixations resulting from imperfect development. They are generally acquisitive fixations.” The “ruling passion,” according to Pope, is the predominant principle of character that directs “Man” to different purposes, whether to vice or virtue, as Pope explains at length in An Essay on Man, 2.123–44; see also Epistle I: To Richard Lord Viscount Cobham, ll. 174 ff.; and Epistle III: To Allen Lord Bathurst, ll. 155–6. By his use of the term “garrulous,” NF may be echoing the Tractatus Coislinianus: “Garrulity” is one of the designated means by which comedy provokes laughter through diction (Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, 225). As Cooper explains in his amplification of the Tractatus, garrulity “embraces verbosity of every sort—bombast, triviality, learned nonsense” (231). This sentence was incorporated into AC, 167/155. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 104. This paragraph, originally in “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors” (LS, 149–50), was incorporated into AC, 168–9/156–7. This paragraph was incorporated into AC, 163/151. The titular character in Molière’s Tartuffe is a pious hypocrite; Harpagon is the miser in Molière’s play L’Avare (The Miser). Valentin is not a character as such in any of Molière’s plays; NF may be thinking of Valère, the young male hero who, like Angélique, appears in several of Molière’s plays, even acting as Angélique’s lover in La Jalousie du Barbouillé (A Jealous Husband). Or NF may be conflating Molière’s Valère with Shakespeare’s Valentine, from Two Gentlemen of Verona. This paragraph is largely taken from “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humours” (LS, 150–1); a few sentences from it are incorporated into AC, 167/155. See Cornford’s discussion of the “sense of internal structural necessity” in tragedy, “the feeling that such things must be” (Origin of Attic Comedy, 171). “Katherina” in the Riverside edition of The Taming of the Shrew. NF’s spelling “Katharina” is used in the London Shakespeare. In “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors,” NF called Shaw “the greatest comic dramatist of our age, so lately and so incredibly dead” (LS, 153); Shaw had died four weeks earlier, on 2 November 1950. See Shaw’s Preface to Back to Methuselah: “as the conception of Creative Evolution developed I saw that we were at last within reach of a faith which complied with the first condition of all the religions that have ever taken hold of humanity: namely, that it must be, first and fundamentally, a science of metabiology” (Complete Plays with Prefaces, 2:lxxxvii–lxxxviii). See AC, 164/152. This paragraph was incorporated into AC, 164–6/152–4. Comedy is “an imitation of life, a mirror of custom, and an image of truth.”

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Modern scholars generally ascribe the quotation to Aelius Donatus, the well-known Roman grammarian whose essay On Comedy (De Comedia) was widely reprinted in Renaissance editions of Terence. Renaissance writers often echo Donatus and follow his attribution of the quotation to Cicero. See, for example, Thomas Lodge’s Defence of Poetry (1579) (Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, 1:81); and Ben Jonson’s Every Man out of His Humour, 3.6.176–9 (Complete Plays, 1:350). For Shakespeare’s use of Donatus in Hamlet, see no. 1, n. 16. See AC, 178/165. Così fan tutte, the title of Mozart’s famous opera, is generally translated “Thus do all [women].” Molière’s king was Louis XIV. In cinematic language, a “gimmick” is a trick or device; a “weenie” is some small object that provides characters with motivation and moves the plot forward (for example, a stolen jewel). See AC, 170/158. NF alludes to the Chinese concept of wu wei (literally, “nondoing”), as taught in Taoism and Zen Buddhism. See RT, 61: “We must not do things, but let them happen. This is the Chinese wu wei, Keats’ negative capability, which imitates Milton’s God in withdrawing from the causation sequence and simply watching with prescience.” 4. Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy

1 See PMLA, 68, no. 2 (April 1953): 36, which published the following abstract of NF’s paper: “It is now generally accepted that the characters of Shakespeare’s plays, especially the comedies, ought to be examined in terms of dramatic conventions and not in terms of naïve realism. It follows, or should follow, that it is a waste of time to discuss Shakespeare’s characterization without relating his characters first of all to their dramatic functions. This cannot be done without further study of the structure of comedy. On the basis of an analysis of the central structure of New Comedy in Plautus and Terence, with a few hints from Aristotle and the Tractatus Coislinianus, an attempt is made to indicate the dramatic functions of a few typical characters of Shakespearean comedy, some of them already familiar (the vice, the miles gloriosus), some of them not yet isolated and defined as types.” At the same MLA convention, in the first session on the morning of Saturday, 27 December, NF delivered a fifteen-minute paper entitled “The Literary Meaning of Archetype” (LS, 182–9), with abstract as follows: “An attempt to define the word ‘archetype’ in such a way as to make it a useful conception for the literary critic without committing him to any philosophical or psychological positions.” 2 This paragraph was incorporated into AC, 171–2/159.

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3 This sentence, along with the preceding and the following sentence, was incorporated into AC, 163/151, where the name of the comic parasite in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock was corrected from “Denis” to “Joxer Daly.” 4 See the opening of the Third Essay in AC, where NF draws an analogy between the structural principles of music and of literature, concluding that, “as literature is an art of words, it should be at least as easy to find words to describe them as to find such words as ‘sonata’ or ‘fugue’ in music” (AC, 134/123–4). 5 This sentence was incorporated into AC, 166/154. 6 See Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, 3: “When all possible objections have been urged against the fragment, there remain certain elements in it that, we may contend, preserve, if not an original Aristotelian, at all events an early Peripatetic, tradition.” 7 Cooper’s list actually reads: “the characters [ethe] of comedy are (1) the buffoonish, (2) the ironical, and (3) those of the impostors” (226). 8 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 4, chap. 8 (1128a–b), also cited in Cooper, 120. 9 This sentence was incorporated into AC, 175–6/163. 10 Portions of this paragraph were incorporated into AC, 172/160. 11 This sentence was incorporated into AC, 172/160. 12 Thrasymachus contends that “‘Just’ or ‘right’ means nothing but what is to the interest of the stronger party,” only to have Socrates shift the terms of the argument so that “stronger” means superior not in force, but rather in the knowledge and ability to rule well. Thrasymachus’s subsequent objection that “injustice pays better than justice” is similarly “demolished” by Socrates. See The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford (London: Oxford University Press, 1972; orig. pub. 1941), 336b–354c. Cooper calls Socrates “the ‘ironical man’ of all time,” and points out that “he is obviously related to one of the types of character proper to comedy, a fact that seems to be recognized by Aristotle” (102; cf. Nicomachean Ethics, 1127a [bk. 4, chap. 7], qtd. in Cooper, 119). In AC, NF uses the contest between the alazon Thrasymachus and the eiron Socrates as an example of fourth-phase comedy in which “we begin to move out of the world of experience into the ideal world of innocence and romance” (AC, 181–2/169). Rather than stopping with “a negative victory over a humour and the kind of society he suggests,” the dialogue ends when “the rest of the company, including Thrasymachus, follow Socrates inside Socrates’ head, so to speak, and contemplate there the pattern of the just state” (AC, 182/169). 13 See Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 4, chap. 7 (1127a). In Cooper’s citation of this passage, Aristotle points out that “Ironical people, . . . in depreciating them-

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selves, show a more refined character” than boasters, though the eiron can be contemptible because “Sometimes irony itself appears to be boastfulness” (Cooper, 118–19; and Cooper’s citation of Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.E.C. Welldon [London: Macmillan, 1892], 129, which gives the reference to Aristotle as bk. 4, chaps. 13–14). Morgann calls Falstaff “the most perfect comic character that perhaps ever was exhibited”: “All his boasting speeches are humour, mere humour, and carefully spoken to persons who cannot misapprehend them.” Far from being a “constitutional coward,” Falstaff exhibits “that Courage which is founded in nature and constitution”; his reputation as a “vain glorious Coward” proceeds from his “modesty” and “whimsical ridicule of himself.” See Maurice Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777; London: Henry Frowde, 1912), 20, 22, 78–80. This sentence, and the two that follow, were incorporated into AC, 172– 3/160. The term, referring to a woman who ridiculously affects a refined delicacy of language and taste, dates from Molière’s very successful play Les Précieuses ridicules (“The Affected Ladies”), first performed in 1659. Portions of this paragraph were incorporated into AC, 167/155. This paragraph and the eight that follow were incorporated into AC, 173– 6/160–4. See Edmund’s aside when Edgar enters act 1, sc. 2 of King Lear: “Pat! he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy” (1.2.134). See Robert Greene’s The Scottish History of James the Fourth (1598), in which Queen Dorothea dresses as a squire in act 4, sc. 4, in order to escape from (and later redeem) her adulterous husband, who plans to murder her. See NRL, 159, where NF calls Shakespeare himself “always the retreating eiron.” The tricky slave in Plautus often claims responsibility for the machinations of the plot (as does Chrysalus in Bacchides [The Two Bacchises], ll. 232, 350), though NF is probably referring to Miles gloriosus (The Braggart Warrior), in which the tricky slave Palaestrio boasts, “What a mix-up I’m making! What machines I’m setting in motion!” (l. 813). Palaestrio is referred to as “masterbuilder” or architectus throughout the play (ll. 901–2, 915, 1139). Cf. NRL, 177, 179, 180. In Hamlet, Polonius acts as a spying father first in act 2, sc. 1, when he asks Reynaldo to spy on Laertes; then in act 3, sc. 1, when he hides behind an arras with King Claudius to eavesdrop on a conversation between Hamlet and Ophelia; and finally in act 3, sc. 4, when he is fatally stabbed by Hamlet, behind the arras where he has hidden himself to hear Hamlet’s conversation with Gertrude.

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24 Unless we consider Titus, who says, “I’ll play the cook” (Titus Andronicus, 5.2.204) and enters the banquet scene (5.3) “like a cook, placing the dishes,” in order to serve Tamora’s sons up to her in a pie. In fact, NF’s description of the cook as a buffoon who appears “like a master of ceremonies, a centre for the comic mood” admirably explains the grotesque effect of Titus’s donning of this role in the final scene of the play. Ann Christensen examines Titus’s role as a cook, along with the roles of Shakespeare’s other male characters who prepare food (Timon, Prospero, Petruchio), although Christensen’s focus on the “nurturing problematic” neglects the generic influence of the cook as stock character in Roman comedy: see “‘Playing the Cook’: Nurturing Men in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Yearbook, 6 (1996): 327–64. 25 In As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, and Measure for Measure, respectively. 26 In 2 Henry IV Shallow and Silence are country justices; in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shallow is a country justice, and Slender is his nephew. 27 NF refers here to Marston’s The Malcontent (not to Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer). 28 See Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies, 83–4, 107–8. Lawrence cites the extended discussion of parallels between Duke Vincentio and James I in Louis Albrecht, Neue Untersuchungen zu Shakespeares Mass für Mass (Berlin, 1914), 129–216, esp. 131, 168. 29 Actually, Henry Hawkins reportedly alleged that Elizabeth had children not by Lord Cecil but by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester: “my Lord Robert hath had fyve children by the Queene, and she never goethe in progress but to be delivered.” See the testimony of Thomas Scot to the earl of Leicester in March 1581, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth and James I, 1547–1625, ed. Robert Lemon and Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1856–72), vol. 148, item 34. Louis Adrian Montrose cites this record as a reference to Lord Robert Dudley, in “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 311. NF probably saw the citation in E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923; rev. ed. 1951), 1:107, where it appears alongside a reference to “Robert Cecil” (107n. 1). 30 Portions of this paragraph were incorporated into AC, 172/159–60. 5. Molière’s Tartuffe 1 See Tartuffe and Other Plays by Molière, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: New American Library, 1967). “It” refers to Mariane’s acquiescence to marry Tartuffe, as her father Orgon demands.

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6. Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tempest 1 NF glosses “forthrights” as “straight paths”: see the Penguin ed. note at 3.3.3. 2 Michel de Montaigne, “Des Cannibales” (ca. 1579–80), first translated into English by John Florio (1603) as “Of the Caniballes.” See The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (New York: Modern Library, 1933), 160–71. Annotated copy in NFL. 3 “It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kinred, but common, no apparell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousnes, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them” (“Of the Caniballes,” 164). 4 See Daniel Wilson, Caliban: The Missing Link (London: Macmillan, 1873). 5 The Yahoos are an imaginary race of brutish men subject to the Houyhnhnms in bk. 4 of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: they represent Swift’s vision of the filth, savagery, and depravity of natural man. 6 See Sidney’s remark that the poet “dooth growe in effect a second nature” (Apology for Poetry, in Smith, 1:156). NF owes a debt to the influential work of A.S.P. Woodhouse on the two orders of nature and grace in Comus and The Faerie Queene: see “The Argument of Milton’s Comus,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 11, no. 1 (1941–42): 46–71; and “Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene,” ELH, 16, no. 3 (September 1949): 194–228; NF cites the latter essay in no. 7. In “Rencontre,” LS, 112, NF describes the “two levels of nature” in the “discarded model” of the universe used by English poets up until the close of the seventeenth century: “a lower level of physical nature and a higher level appropriate to human nature. This higher level was the one originally designed for man by God, the level represented by the earthly paradise or garden of Eden. Man has lost it, but the disciplines of religion, law and morality are there to help him regain it.” On the Romantic modification of the pre-Romantic schema of the “two levels of nature,” see also “A Study of English Romanticism,” ENC, 104 ff. 7 In “Rencontre,” NF cites the Lady’s defence of chastity in Milton’s Comus as an instance of a Renaissance appeal to a higher level of human nature (LS, 112; cf. 102). 8 Among Renaissance writers espousing the view that alchemy could redeem nature, NF cites Agrippa, Paracelsus, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola as being “the most conspicuous names” associated with a “visionary Christianity” that anticipates Blake (FS, 150/154). On the influence of philosophical

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occultism and alchemy in Shakespeare’s day, see Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), annotated copy in NFL and cited in LN, 1:52; and John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Mebane cites Marsilio Ficino’s statement that “humankind imitates all the works of divine nature, and the works of lower nature we perfect, reform, and amend” (Ficino, Theologica Platonica, 2:223; trans. Mebane, 24); and Pico’s statement that at the creation God told Adam, “you may sculpt yourself into whatever shape you prefer. You can degenerate into the lower natures, which are brutes. You can be regenerated, in accordance with your soul’s determination, into the higher natures, which are divine” (Pico, Oratio [De Hominis dignitate], 114–16; trans. Mebane, 40). Similarly, as Mebane explains, “Paracelsus continually reminds us that alchemy is essentially redemptive. . . . Alchemy is an art which God granted to humanity so that we may ameliorate our fallen condition” (92). In his 1954 review of Jung’s book Psychology and Alchemy, NF discusses the blend of alchemical and Christian tradition in “the notion of a redeeming principle of nature as an aspect of Christ” (NFCL, 128; EICT, 212). NF gives Virgil and Theocritus as sources for the idea, in SM, 134 (CPCT, 379): “The power of drawing down the moon is a conventional attribute of magicians and witches, and has been constantly alluded to since Virgil’s Eighth Eclogue, which is partly an adaptation of Theocritus’s charm poem, popularized it (‘carmina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam’).” See also Frank Kermode’s introduction to the Arden ed. of The Tempest, 6th ed. (2nd ser.; London: Methuen, 1958), xl–xli. For an early and influential analysis of Shakespeare as Prospero, see, e.g., Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (3rd ed., New York: Harper, 1881; orig. pub. 1872), 371–2, 380. NF, like Shakespeare, may have been aware that the term “tempest” in fact carries an alchemical meaning, as Mebane has shown: “it is a boiling process which removes impurities from base metal and facilitates its transmutation into gold” (Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, 181). In Robert Greene’s comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), the Franciscan Friars Roger Bacon and Thomas Bungay manufacture a Brazen Head, upon which the Devil confers the power of speech, but they do not show due patience or diligence in waiting to hear it speak. When the Head finally speaks the words “Time is” (x.53), “Time was” (x.65), and “Time is past” (x.75) to the inept assistant Miles, a supernatural hand breaks the Head with a hammer.

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13 NF appears to support the most commonly held chronology of Shakespeare’s plays as discussed in E.K. Chambers’s chap. 8, “The Problem of Chronology,” in William Shakespeare, 1:243–74 (see especially the tables at 1:246 and 1:271). After a review of the textual scholarship, Chambers assigns a date of 1611–12 to The Tempest, and 1612–13 to Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and supports the view that Shakespeare collaborated on the last two plays, probably with John Fletcher (see 1:496; 1:531). 14 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, bk. 7, ll. 197–206. Shakespeare may have used Arthur Golding’s translation of this passage (London, 1567), sig. M3v: for a careful assessment, see T.W. Baldwin’s William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 443–52. 15 St. Augustine studied at Carthage, as he famously recounts in the opening line of bk. 3 in his Confessions: “Veni Karthaginem” (“To Carthage I came”). Apuleius, who is cited on several occasions by Augustine, flourished in Carthage. Apuleius’s interest in magic is evident throughout his corpus: see, for example, Socrates’ description of the witch Meroe’s powers in bk. 1 (sec. 8) of The Golden Asse (or The Metamorphoses). This prose romance with its focus on the young hero Lucius’s initiation was well known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, in the 1566 translation of William Adlington: see especially bk. 11 for the extended account of Lucius’s initiation into various mysteries. 16 See, e.g., Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J.F. (London: Chthonios, 1986), bk. 2, chap. 7 (on Ariel as elemental spirit); bk. 3, chaps. 10–12 (on the divine Hebrew names). See also E.M. Butler, Ritual Magic, 78 (annotated copy in NFL); and Kermode’s Appendix B in the 1958 Arden ed. (p. 142). 17 See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:492. 18 NF cites the refrain from the First Folio; the Riverside ed. changes “bowgh, waugh” to “Bow-wow.” 19 See James Rosier, A true relation of the most prosperous voyage made this present yeere 1605, by Captaine George Waymouth, in the discouery of the land of Virginia (London, 1605), STC 21322, sig. C3v-r. In the 1954 Arden ed. (xxxiii), Kermode quotes Samuel Purchas’s reference to Rosier’s account, in the popular Renaissance travelogue Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613), 637. 20 Princess Elizabeth married Frederick, the Elector Palatine, on 14 February 1613; The Tempest was one of many plays performed at court during the winter season of 1612–13, as part of the magnificent celebrations preceding the wedding. See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:342–3. 21 See J. Dover Wilson’s ed. of The Tempest, where he outlines the many “signs” of the play’s supposed “abridgment” from an earlier version by Shakespeare: broken lines, incorrect verse-lining, mingling of verse and prose, and vari-

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ous “cuts” to the original text. For example, Wilson calls Prospero’s “No” (at 5.1.129) “extra-metrical” and deduces that there must be “a ‘cut’ in the text which deprived us of the rest of the retort” ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921; rpt. 1969], 79–85). NF may be echoing E.K. Chambers’s famous response, in “The Integrity of The Tempest,” that Prospero’s line “is not, however, unmetrical” (Review of English Studies, 1, no. 2 [1925]: 145). 22 See Allardyce Nicoll, Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage (London: G. Harrap, 1938; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1963), 199–207. 23 See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:493–4; and Kermode’s summary of the borrowings from the commedia dell’arte tradition (Introduction to 1958 Arden ed., lxvi–lxix). 7. The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene 1 See Letter to Raleigh, 715, in Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton, text edited by Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (London: Pearson, 2001). All citations of The Faerie Queene and its accompanying materials, including the Letter to Raleigh, refer to this edition, with parenthetical references giving book, canto, stanza, and where relevant line numbers. The two Amoretti sonnets in which Spenser mentions not having finished The Faerie Queene are nos. 3 and 80. All references to Spenser’s shorter works refer to The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). 2 The Shepheardes Calender, October, l. 114; see also E.K.’s gloss on the Bellona passage (183). 3 Essay on Man, Epistle 1, sec. 1, l. 217. 4 Shepheardes Calender, December, l. 68. 5 For a possible explanation of what NF means by Spenser’s mistaken scheme, see William Oram’s discussion of the “imperfect” or “broken” pattern of the poem’s numerological scheme: “Introduction” to The Teares of the Muses, Yale ed., 267. 6 Colin Clout is Spenser’s authorial persona in The Shepheardes Calender: see E.K.’s gloss on September, l. 176: “by Colin is ever meante the Authour selfe” (163). The four Graces in The Shepheardes Calender appear in April, l. 109; the beast that barks at poets appears in September, ll. 180–192. 7 For further examples and comments by NF on the significance of the number six in The Faerie Queene, see NRL, 39, 40, 42, 50, and 87–8. 8 On the numbering of the Mutabilitie Cantos in the 1609 folio edition, see A.C. Hamilton, “General Introduction” to The Faerie Queene, 16–17. 9 Spenser’s earliest published verse appeared anonymously in 1569 in the English translation of Jan van der Noot’s A Theatre for Worldlings, as “Epi-

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grams” (translations of Petrarch’s Rime 323) and “Sonets” (translations of Joachim Du Bellay’s Songe, and four sonnets paraphrasing Revelation). Spenser later revised Du Bellay’s and Petrarch’s sonnets as The Visions of Bellay and The Visions of Petrarch, and published them, together with Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, at the end of Complaints, 1591. E. De Selincourt assigns “the emblematic art of the early Visions” to Spenser’s undergraduate days: see Introduction to The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J.S. Smith and E. De Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), xxxi–xxxiii. Annotated copy in NFL. NF is most likely referring to John Upton’s note to l. 2 of III.v.47: see Upton’s 1758 ed. of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, cited in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1958; orig. pub. 1934), 3:247. What follows draws a good deal on the parallel argument of A.S.P. Woodhouse, “Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene,” ELH (September 1949). [NF] In his original University of Toronto Quarterly publication of the present essay, NF added to this note, “but there are some differences of emphasis owing to the fact that I am looking for a structure of images rather than of concepts.” See also no. 6, n. 6. For the moral reality of poetry and its educative power, see Letter to Raleigh, 714–16. Spenser’s Puritanism is well represented in the entry on “Puritanism” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A.C. Hamilton, Donald Cheney, W.F. Blissett, David A. Richardson, and William W. Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 573–4. A good discussion of Spenser’s imitators can be found in The Spenser Encyclopedia entries “Imitations and Adaptations: Renaissance (1579–1660),” “Imitations and Adaptations, 1660–1800,” and “John Keats.” See AC, 195/181–2. For NF’s discussion of gold symbolism in The Faerie Queene, see NRL, esp. 39 and n. 167, 74–5, and 91. See no. 25, where NF renames the genre of treatises on the education of an ideal prince, traditionally known as the speculum principis, the “cyropaedia.” See also NF’s discussion of Baldasar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier at pp. 350–1. For Spenser’s view on nature and art, see The Faerie Queene, II.v.29 and IV.x.21. See also the entry “Nature and Art” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 504. Edmund Burke’s assertion that “Art is man’s nature” is found in An Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old Whigs, ed. John M. Robson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 105. See NF’s similar comment in NRL, 90. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:156–7:

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Notes to pages 63–73

Nature’s “world is brasen, the Poets only deliuer a golden”; “Neyther let it be deemed too sawcie a comparison to ballance the highest poynt of mans wit with the efficacie of Nature: but rather giue right honor to the heauenly Maker of that maker, who, hauing made man to his owne likenes, set him beyond and ouer all the workes of that second nature, which in nothing hee sheweth so much as in Poetrie.” Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, vol. 2: Purgatory, canto 32, trans. Dorothy Sayers (Markham, Ont.: Penguin, 1955; rpt. 1977). See also AC, 204/190. Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (New York: Random House, 1961), 28. Annotated copy in NFL. The Biblical passage on the brazen serpent is Numbers 21:9. See also GC, 172/193. For Aristotle’s discussion of proairesis, see, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 3, especially 1112a (chap. 3); and 1139a (bk. 6, chap. 2). See also AC, 210/196, where NF defines proairesis as “free choice of an end”; and ENC, 273, where NF mentions proairesis in the context of Milton’s conjunction between reason and choosing. See John Ruskin, “Unto This Last”: Munera Pulveris: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 43. Annotated copy in NFL. See George MacDonald’s epigraph to Phantastes (1858): “Phantastes from ‘their fount’ all shapes deriving, / In new habiliments can quickly dight,” taken from Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island, or the Isle of Man (1633), canto 6, st. 48, ll. 1–2 (rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: De Capo Press, 1971). The entry “Cynthia” in The Spenser Encyclopedia identifies Sir Walter Raleigh’s fragmentary poem The Ocean to Cynthia (1592?) as Spenser’s source. See Dylan Thomas’s evocation of Eden in the “green and carefree” days of Fern Hill: “it was all / Shining, it was Adam and maiden, / The sky gathered again / And the sun grew round that very day. / So it must have been after the birth of the simple light / In the first, spinning place” (ll. 29–34). For a good description of the Schemhamphoras or Shemoth meforashim, the seventy-two names of God, and their function within the context of the Jewish mystical text, see Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, trans. Allan Arkush (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 99–102. 8. Shakespeare’s Experimental Comedy

1 See p. 52. 2 A topical reference: The Pirates of Penzance was performed at the Avon Theatre in the Stratford Festival from 7 July through 19 August 1961, with Howell Glynne playing the “rural constable” role as Sergeant of Police. The

Notes to pages 73–4

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closing night of the play was the final evening of Seminar 1, that portion of the Shakespeare Seminar in which NF delivered this essay, as well as the subsequent “Toast to Shakespeare” and the essay on “Tragedies of Nature and Fortune” (nos. 9 and 10). The 1961 Stratford Seminar took place over two weeks in summer 1961, 14–19 and 21–26 August. Perhaps NF is recalling a particular production he witnessed of Gammer Gurton’s Needle; in the only extant text of this play, written by “Mr. S. Mr [Master] of Art” (1575), Hodge finds the needle not after he sits down but after Diccon gives him “a good blow on the buttock”: see 5.2.290 s.d., in Gammer Gurton’s Needle, ed. Charles Whitworth (London: A. & C. Black, 1997; orig. pub. New York: Norton, 1984). John Lyly wrote eight plays that were performed before Queen Elizabeth by the Children of St. Paul’s and by the Children of the Chapel Royal: see Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 3:411–17. By “Sidney’s editor,” NF probably means Albert Feuillerat, who reprints “The Lady of May” in his ed. of The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 2:329–38. Annotated copy in NFL. “The Lady of May” was untitled when first published as an appendage to the 1598 ed. of Sidney’s Arcadia; it was performed in 1578 or 1579, probably before Queen Elizabeth. The title was added in the 1725 ed. of Sidney’s Works. Sidney’s pedantic schoolmaster is “Maister Rombus.” Dorcas, an old shepherd, is the speaker who complains: see Feuillerat, The Complete Works, 2:336. See the discussion of “individual identifications,” including John Florio, Gabriel Harvey, and Thomas Nashe, in the Arden 5th ed. of Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Richard David (London: Methuen, 1956; rpt. 1960), xxxviii–l. See Frances A. Yates, A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936); and M.C. Bradbrook, The School of Night: A Study in the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Ralegh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), especially chap. 7 (153–78). NF reverses the word order here: the Riverside ed. (following both the Quarto and Folio) has “tell not me” rather than “tell me not.” The names Berowne and Longaville allude to the Duc of Biron and the Duc de Longueville, supporters of the real King of Navarre (Henri, not Ferdinand), in his wars of 1589–93 for the crown of France. The name Dumaine may recall that of the Duc de Mayenne, historically an opponent of the King of Navarre, whom Shakespeare may have confused with another supporter, Maréchal D’Aumont: see Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:338. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (1598); for the list of plays, including the reference to Loue labours wonne, see the excerpt in Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:194. Of the seven plays that have been variously identified as Love Labours Won, Chambers lends credence briefly to Much Ado about Nothing but finally

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settles on The Taming of the Shrew as the most likely candidate, given the chronology of Shakespeare’s works (William Shakespeare, 1:272–3). See Meres, Palladis Tamia: “so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, &c.” (in Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:194). The comic is “Something mechanical encrusted on the living”; “the comic character always errs . . . through automatism. At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which compels its victims to keep strictly to one path.” See Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1935), 37 (chap. 1, sec. 5) and 184–5 (chap. 3, sec. 4). See pp. 24–5. In Rabelais’s Gargantua (1535), chap. 14, the hero is taught Latin by a “doctor sophist” named Thubal Holoferne. See Gargantua, chap. 57. See, e.g., Berowne’s reference to “Things hid and barr’d . . . from common sense” (1.1.57–8), cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as an instance of the now obsolete meaning of “common sense” as “ordinary or untutored perception.” See p. 9; and AC, 182–4/169–71. This final line of the play appears in square brackets in the Riverside ed., because it was added in the First Folio ed. of the play (1623), where it is assigned to Brag. (Braggart, i.e., Armado). It is not in the 1598 Quarto ed. of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which the Riverside editors argue “must be the basis of any modern edition” (p. 246). John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan (1605): “His discourse is like the long word Honorificabilitudinitatibus: a great deal of sound and no sense” (5.2.22–4). Samuel Johnson first noted, in his analysis of Love’s Labour’s Lost, “This word, whencesoever it comes, is often mentioned as the longest word known.” See Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Sherbo, 1:280. 9. Toast to the Memory of Shakespeare

1 See Jonson’s poem “To the memory of my beloued, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left vs,” prefixed to the First Folio ed. of Shakespeare’s plays (1623). The poem is reprinted in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, facsimile ed. by Helge Kökeritz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), A3. 2 Conversations with Drummond, in Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954; orig. pub. 1925), 1:139 (l. 254). Annotated copy in NFL.

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3 “To the great Variety of Readers,” by Iohn Heminge and Henrie Condell, in Kökeritz’s facsimile ed., A3. 4 NF alludes to Ben Jonson’s famous remark in “To the memory of my beloued” (see n. 1, above) that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time!” 10. Tragedies of Nature and Fortune 1 “The Prologue of the Monk’s Tale,” fragment 7, ll. 1924–64, in F.N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 188–9. 2 “The Prologue of the Monk’s Tale,” fragment 7, ll. 1973–7 (Robinson, 189). 3 Chaucer’s Knight does indeed interrupt the Monk with the plea, “good sire, namoore of this!” The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, fragment 7, l. 2767 (Robinson, 198). But it is the Host who further complains, “Youre tale anoyeth al this compaignye.” The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, fragment 7, l. 2789 (Robinson, 199). 4 Donald Lamont Jack’s The Canvas Barricade, which had won first prize in a Globe and Mail playwriting competition, was directed by George McCowan and ran at the Stratford Festival 7–26 August 1961. “This comedy, with extensive music and dance, was the first original Canadian play produced in the Festival Theatre”: see John Pettigrew and Jamie Portman, Stratford: The First Thirty Years (Toronto: Macmillan, 1985), 1:156. 5 The First Folio spelling, adopted by the Riverside ed. of Henry VIII, is “Katherine.” Given its use as a historical pointer, we have retained NF’s preference for the standard spelling of the historical personage, Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII. 6 The First Folio spelling, adopted by the Riverside ed., is “Bullen”; but we have retained NF’s preference for “Boleyn,” since it serves as a historical pointer. 7 “The King’s players had a new play, called All is true, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order with their Georges and garters, the Guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous”: see Letter of Sir Henry Wotton to Sir Edmund Bacon, 2 July 1613, in Logan Pearsall Smith, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907; rpt. 1966), 2:32–3. This letter is cited by Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:343–4, as the most detailed contemporary account of Henry VIII. 8 See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:496–8. The other hand that many scholars have seen in Henry VIII is that of John Fletcher. 9 The first Roman invasion of Britain, led by Julius Caesar, occurred in 55 B.C. 10 “Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s designs for Coriolanus were of the Napoleonic pe-

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riod, and Langham’s choice of this time setting caused much controversy” (Pettigrew and Portman, Stratford: The First Thirty Years, 1:153). “Life of Caius Marcius Coriolanus,” in Plutarch’s Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1916; rpt. 1959), 4:127 (sec. 5, pars. 1–4). All references are taken from this edition. Plutarch’s Lives, 4:155–6 (sec. 16, pars. 2–4). See n. 7, above. On the five tragic modes from “godlike heroism” through “all-too-human irony,” with high mimetic tragedy as the central balancing position between them, see AC, 35–43/33–40. Plutarch’s Lives, 4:119 (sec. 1, par. 2). Plutarch’s Lives, 4:127 (sec. 4, par. 4). Plutarch’s Lives, 4:133 (sec. 8, par. 3). Plutarch’s Lives, 4:171 (sec. 21, par. 3). See Antony and Cleopatra, 4.7.4–10 and 4.9.15–22. See Sonnet 111, ll. 6–7. See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:271. “Comparison of Alcibiades and Coriolanus,” Plutarch’s Lives, 4:227 (sec. 3, par. 3). The Stratford Festival in fact went on to perform Timon of Athens in 1963, and took the play on tour in 1964. Shaw, “Epistle Dedicatory,” Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, in The Complete Plays with Prefaces, 3:509. On his seventieth birthday (in 1926), Freud is reported to have said, “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. . . . What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.” See Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1951; orig. pub. Macmillan, 1940), 34. In the Riverside, “O mother, mother! / What have you done?” Shaw, The Man of Destiny, in The Complete Plays with Prefaces, 1:697. 11. How True a Twain

1 The Baconian theory claims that Sir Francis Bacon (an aristocratic, university-educated lawyer) wrote the plays of Shakespeare. From its beginnings in the writings of Delia Bacon (1856) and Dr. William Henry Smith (1857), Baconianism had its heyday in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. 2 For the theory that George Chapman is the rival poet alluded to in Sonnets 78–86 (particularly 80 and 86), see Arthur Acheson, Shakespeare and the Rival Poet (London: Bodley Head, 1903), 149, who cites William Minto’s Character-

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istics of English Poets from Chaucer to Shirley (1885) as the source for this identification. See also Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:568. Line 5 in Sonnet 107, “The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,” has been read as an allusion to Queen Elizabeth’s failing health or death, since Elizabeth, though “mortal,” was often compared to Diana, the chaste “moon” goddess. Depending on how one dates the writing of the sonnets, Elizabeth had “endured” either her Grand Climacteric (her risky sixty-third year, in 1595–96); or a serious illness (rumoured in 1599–1600); or the final “eclipse” of her death, in 1603. See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:563–4. See Sonnet 20, l. 7: “A man in hue, all hues in his controlling.” Thomas Tyrwhitt first proposed that the pun in the original 1609 ed.—“A man in hew all Hews in his controlling”—referred to William Hughes, the mysterious “W.H.” to whom the printer dedicated the Sonnets (see n. 10, below). Edmond Malone popularized Tyrwhitt’s theory in The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare ([London, 1790] New York: AMS Press, 1968), 10:191. NF may also be referring to Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr W.H., ed. Vyvyan Holland (London: Methuen, 1921; rpt. 1958). In this enlarged version of the 1889 story, Wilde’s protagonist falls under the spell of the theory that the sonnets address a boy actor named Willie Hughes. Wilde’s story is included along with NF’s essay in The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. See also LS, 244. Sonnets 1–17 are generally known as the procreation sonnets: see Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Arden ed. of Shakespeare’s Sonnets ([England:] Thomas Nelson, 1997), 99. John Milton, Paradise Regain’d, bk. 3, ll. 198–200: “But what concerns it thee when I begin / My everlasting Kingdom, why art thou / Sollicitous, what moves thy inquisition?” Nathan Drake is the first to have argued that Shakespeare addressed the sonnets to Henry Wriotheseley, third Earl of Southampton: see Shakespeare and His Times (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1817), 2:62–79. Chambers discusses the problems with identifying the “boy-friend” in the sonnets as Southampton, and examines the merits of the other common identifications: Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; and (more plausibly) William Lord Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (William Shakespeare, 1:565–8). Shakespeare had dedicated Venus and Adonis (1593), as well as The Rape of Lucrece (1594), to Southampton. See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:61–2. As noted by Chambers, if W.H. is William Lord Herbert, the title “Sir” has been suppressed; if W.H. refers to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, not only has the title been suppressed but the initials have been reversed. In both cases, the dedicatee would not be “a Mr.” (William Shakespeare, 1:565– 8). See the printer’s dedication to the 1609 Quarto edition of the Sonnets:

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Notes to page 97

“TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF. / THESE.INSVING.SONNETS. / MR.W.H.ALL.HAPPINESSE. / AND.THAT.ETERNITIE. / PROMISED. / BY. / OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET. / WISHETH. / THE.WELL-WISHING. / ADVENTVRER.IN. / SETTING. / FORTH. / T.T.” T.T. is the well-known printer Thomas Thorpe, who entered Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Stationers’ Register on 20 May 1609. Canto 44, Willoby his Avisa ([1638; orig. pub. 1594] New York: Burt Franklin, 1967), 91–2; authorship attributed to Henry Willobie. NF has modernized the spelling. B.N. De Luna points out that the commendatory verses prefixed to the poem are the “earliest known allusion, by name, to Shakespeare as a poet”; see The Queen Declined: An Interpretation of Willobie His Avisa, With the Text of the Original Edition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 1. See also Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:568–74. George Steevens appears to be the first to have explicitly written about the issue of homosexuality in Shakespeare’s sonnets (cited in Malone’s The Poems and Plays of William Shakespeare, 10:207). See also Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 30, who discusses Steevens’s and Malone’s glosses on Sonnet 20, l. 2. Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent., ed. John Benson (London: Tho. Cotes, 1640). As Chambers points out (William Shakespeare, 1:559), Benson omitted eight sonnets, regrouped the rest in a new order, added titles, and altered pronouns “so as to suggest that those really written to a man were written to a woman.” On the critical debate surrounding Benson’s editorial changes, see James Schiffer, “Reading New Life into Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Survey of Criticism,” Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York: Garland, 2000), 3–71. Coleridge suggests that Corydon’s homosexual love for Alexis in Virgil’s Second Eclogue is a “perversion of the proper ultimate end” of poetry, and should provoke “disgust and aversion.” See Biographia Literaria (London: Dent; New York: A.P. Dutton, 1906), 164 (chap. 14). Annotated copy in NFL. In the margin beside this passage, NF has written “eek!” The one “purposed blind” mentioned by Coleridge is no doubt Sonnet 20. See entry of 14 May 1833, in Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H.N. Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1836), 231. Samuel Butler, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, vol. 14 of The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew (London: Jonathan Cape; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1925), 100. In order to retain his practice of modernizing the spelling and punctuation, all of NF’s citations of the sonnets refer to the Arden edition, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Any significant variations from this text in NF’s citations are indicated in the notes.

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18 See n. 3, above. 19 “It is not sufficient for poets, to be superficial humanists: but they must be exquisite artists, & curious vniuersal schollers.” Gabriel Harvey, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G.C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), 161. 20 Showerman translates the line “and even a love of dusky hue will please” (393), though NF, who capitalizes “Venus,” might prefer a more literal translation, such as “Venus is still pleasing when darkly coloured.” See Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1958), 392. On the familiarity of Renaissance poets with Ovid’s Amores, 2.4, see Frederick H. Candelaria, “Ovid and the Indifferent Lovers,” Renaissance News, 13, no. 4 (Winter 1960): 294–7. 21 Robert Herrick, To Electra (“I dare not ask a kisse”), ll. 7–8, The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. F.W. Moorman (London: Oxford University Press, 1915), 231. Annotated copy in NFL. The lines actually read, “Onely to kisse that Aire, / That lately kissed thee.” 22 Sir Philip Sidney, Leave me ô Love, in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, 2:322. 23 John Donne, Loves Growth, ll. 11–12, in John Donne: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (London: Nonesuch, 1932; orig. pub. 1929), 24. Annotated copy in NFL. Hayward’s ed. prints “Mistresse” rather than “mistress.” 24 Chambers speaks for many early twentieth-century scholars when he argues, “The Shakespearean authorship of A Lover’s Complaint is open to much doubt” (William Shakespeare, 1:550). In fact, Chambers endorses Robertson’s ascription of the poem to George Chapman: see J. M. Robertson, Shakespeare and Chapman (London: T.F. Unwin, 1917). But since the studies of MacDonald P. Jackson (1965) and Kenneth Muir (1973), editors have commonly appended A Lover’s Complaint to the Sonnets as part of Shakespeare’s original design. See John Kerrigan’s discussion in his ed. of The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1986), 66, 389–90. 25 See Edmund Spenser, E.K.’s dedicatory Epistle to Gabriel Harvey, ll. 146–67, The Shepheardes Calender, Yale ed., 18–19. 26 For E.K’s note on pederasty, see Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, Yale ed., 33–4. 27 Named after Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s medieval poetry collection (1255), Frauendienst refers to the courtly lover’s exaggerated service of his lady. 28 Thomas Campion, When thou must home to shades of under ground, in The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Walter R. Davis (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 46. 29 Literally, “I love and hate,” a topos of love poetry initiated by Catullus’s

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famous Carmen 85, which begins “Odi et amo.” See The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, trans. F.W. Cornish, in Catullus, Tibullus, and Pervigilium Veneris, trans. F.W. Cornish, J.P. Postgate, J.W. Mackail (London: William Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1912), 162–3. Sir Denys Bray, Introduction to The Original Order of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Methuen, 1925), 1–44. Compare Sonnet 125, l. 12; and Sonnet 126, l. 12. Edward King (1612–37) was Milton’s fellow-student at Cambridge, who drowned when the ship in which he was sailing struck a rock off the coast of Wales in the Irish Sea. King’s death occasioned Milton’s elegy Lycidas, first published in the 1638 volume of poetry that fellows of Christ’s College put together to commemorate King’s death. See Milton’s opening remark to the 1645 printing of Lycidas, in Poems of Mr. John Milton: “In this Monody the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunatly drown’d in his Passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637.” “Rose” in Elizabethan parlance meant “a peerless or matchless person; a paragon” (OED 5). For Shakespeare’s repeated use of the word in this sense, see Sonnet 1, l. 2; Sonnet 67, l. 8; and Sonnet 109, l. 14. The line reads: “Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date”; NF has capitalized “Truth” and “Beauty’s.” Cf. the 1609 Quarto: “Thy end is Truthes and Beauties doome and date.” See ll. 41–8 of The Phoenix and Turtle, the passage from which NF takes his title: Reason cried, “How true a twain / Seemeth this concordant one!” (ll. 45–6). The Poems, ed. F.T. Prince (London: Methuen; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 182. NF prefers the variant title The Phoenix and the Turtle, as used by G. Wilson Knight in The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare’s Sonnets and The Phoenix and the Turtle (London: Methuen, 1955). Here NF does not retain the Quarto’s original capitalization, as in DuncanJones’s Arden ed.: “O thou my lovely Boy.” F.N. Robinson’s ed. of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (see no. 10, n. 1) prints “that alwey slit” rather than “alwey that slit”; and “Love” rather than “love.” See Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 113 and n. 2; and James Hutton, “Analogues of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 153–54: Contributions to the History of a Theme,” Modern Philology, 38, no. 4 (May 1941): 385–403. Duncan-Jones follows Hutton in singling out Marianus Scholasticus, the sixth-century Byzantine poet, as Shakespeare’s source for Sonnets 153–4; and in suggesting that Shakespeare may have known Scholasticus’s six-line epigram through a lost translation by Ben Jonson (DuncanJones, 422). On the printing of Shakespeare’s sonnets in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), see Hallett Smith’s introduction in the Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., 1881–2. As Smith points out, Sonnets 138 and 144, “in rather inferior texts” (1881), are

Notes to pages 111–15

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the first two of the twenty sonnets in The Passionate Pilgrim. The third and fifth sonnets of the collection are taken from Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.3.58–71, and 4.2.105–18, while the sixteenth sonnet of the collection comes from the poetic missive in Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.3.99–118. See also Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:547–8. See p. 74. For the ancient earth-goddess as an ambivalent figure of poetic inspiration as well as her association with death, see Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber & Faber, 1948). Annotated copy in NFL. NF discusses William Blake’s theme of female will in FS, especially 74– 6/80–2. Gwendolen and Rahab, cited in NF’s next sentence, are examples of female will, or the natural desire of the fallen senses for material embodiment. See Blake, Jerusalem, chap. 2, pl. 30 [34], l. 31, in Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. David J. Erdman, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 176 (hereafter cited as “Erdman”); and NF’s analysis in FS, chap. 11, especially 379–80/368–9, 402/390. See Epistle 1, l. 6 of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man: “A mighty maze! but not without a plan.” NF is echoing Pope’s earlier version of the line, as described by Samuel Johnson in The Life of Pope: “A mighty maze of walks without a plan.” See Maynard Mack’s note to the line in vol. 3 of the Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, general ed. John Butt (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958; orig. pub. 1950), 12. NF discusses the line’s two versions in SeSCT, 25 (SeS, 30–1); see also 490n. 32. “We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still.” Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare (1849), l. 2. NF cites the opening lines of this poem on p. 233. 12. Recognition in The Winter’s Tale

1 All line references to The Winter’s Tale refer to the Riverside ed., though NF did own and annotate two other individual editions of the play, both of which are now in NFL: J.H.P. Pafford’s Arden ed. (London: Methuen, 1963), hereafter cited as Pafford; and Baldwin Maxwell’s Penguin ed. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1956), hereafter cited as Maxwell. Given that the present essay was written prior to 1963, it appears that NF used the Penguin ed. of the play for most of his citations. Significant variations that appear in the Riverside ed. are given in the notes. 2 See Robert Greene, Pandosto or the Triumph of Time (1588), appended to Pafford, 181–225. As Pafford notes, “In Pandosto (191), the Emperor of Russia is not the father of Bellaria ( = Hermione) but of the wife of Egistus ( = Polixenes)” (60). 3 See Pafford, xxvii–xxxiii.

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4 See Pericles, 5.1.211–12: “Thaisa was my mother, who did end / The minute I began.” 5 The Riverside ed. has “met’st” rather than “mettest.” 6 See W.B. Yeats, Among School Children, l. 8. 7 On the tricky servant (dolosus servus), see p. 37. 8 Menander’s play involves the dishonouring of an innocent wife’s reputation, the exposure and adoption of her baby in a pastoral setting, the separation of wife and husband, the husband’s subsequent repentance, and the discovery of the foundling and birth tokens in the course of two recognition scenes. See Menander, The Arbitrants (Epitrepontes, or “Those Who Submit Their Case to Arbitration”), in The Principal Fragments, trans. Francis G. Allinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1964), and Allison’s plot summary on pp. 3–8. NF may have known the play in Gilbert Murray’s translation and “completion” of it: see The Arbitration (London: Allen & Unwin, 1945). 9 See Pericles, 5.1.240–9; Cymbeline, 5.4.93–113. 10 The Riverside ed. has “trompery” rather than “trumpery.” In earlier printings of this essay, the reference was given as 4.4.608, perhaps an error for 4.4.680, as in the New Variorum Edition of The Winter’s Tale, ed. Horace Howard Furness (New York: Dover, 1964; orig. pub. 1898). 11 In Sidney’s Arcadia (1590), the shepherds’ singing-matches form the basis of the Eclogues that follow most of the books and interrupt the romance narrative. 12 The Riverside uses square brackets for “[God],” as in Quartos 1 and 2 of the play; the Folio ed. of the play prints “Heauen” rather than “God.” 13 In Hosley’s collection of essays (see Headnote), this citation originally read “I’ll write against them, Despise them, curse them” (239). 14 “I would we were all of one mind, and one mind good”; NF has changed “one mind” in the second phrase to “that mind.” 15 See no. 7, n. 18. 16 Sidney, Apology for Poetry, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:197–9. 17 Jonson, Induction to Bartholomew Fair, ll. 113–15 (in Complete Plays, 4:10), where “tales, tempests” appears as “Tales, Tempests.” NF also cites the passage on p. 21. 18 NF transposes two words in the quotation: “so perfectly he is her ape.” 19 “Nature and Art in Winter’s Tale, IV, iv, 86 ff.,” SAB [Shakespeare Association Bulletin], 18 (1943): 114–20. [NF] In the Diaries, NF mentions several meetings between 1949 and 1955 with Harold Sowerby Wilson, his colleague at University of Toronto (see especially D, 210). For the passage in Puttenham, see Wilson’s article, 118; and The Arte of English Poesie, bk. 3, chap. 25, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:188. 20 Arte of English Poesie, bk. 3, chap. 25, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:188. NF has modernized Puttenham’s spelling.

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21 Arte of English Poesie, bk. 3, chap. 25, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:191–2. 22 NF may be thinking in particular of Coleridge’s famous passage in Biographia Literaria, chap. 15: “Shakspeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class” (172). 23 Arte of English Poesie, bk. 1, chap. 1; in Smith, 2:3. 24 The Riverside ed., following the authoritative Folio, has “dreams” rather than “dream.” 25 NF’s citation appears to come from Maxwell’s Penguin ed., which agrees with the Riverside. Compare Pafford, which prints “corpse” rather than “corse.” 26 G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearian Tempest (London: Oxford, 1932), chap. 3, “The Romantic Comedies”; and chap. 5, “The Final Plays.” See also Knight’s The Crown of Life (London: Methuen, 1948), 14–22, for an influential discussion of music in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. 27 Metamorphoses, bk. 4, ll. 121–7. 28 Induction to Bartholomew Fair, ll. 115–16, in Complete Plays, 4:10. 13. A Natural Perspective 1 The Bampton Lectures, first given at Columbia in 1948, were established by Ada Byron Bampton Tremaine, in imitation of the theologically oriented Bampton Lectures at Oxford University, begun in 1780. Tremaine stipulated that the lectures be concerned with theology (at least once every four years), science, art, or hygiene, and she provided for the publication and distribution of at least one hundred copies of each lecture series to the public libraries of New York City. As the topic of his Bampton Lectures, NF first contemplated the theological one of Biblical typology and “the role which the symbolism of the Bible has played in literature” (Ayre, 284); but he switched to Shakespeare in mid-June 1963 (Ayre, 292), initially outlining four talks that would each focus on a single play (Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Timon of Athens, and The Comedy of Errors) moving from tragedy and irony to comic transformation (Ayre, 292). 2 See no. 1, n. 2. 3 1964 marked the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. 4 See Bottom’s description of his fantastic experience in love, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.204–19, cited on p. 194. 5 See Coleridge, Letter to James Gooden, 14 January 1814 [1820], in Selected Letters, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 205. Kathleen

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Coburn points to the first instance of Coleridge’s Platonic-Aristotelian division as his comments on Tennemann (1817–18): see her ed. of The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Pilot Press, 1949), 54. “I often think it’s comical (fal, lal, la!) / How Nature always does contrive (fal, lal, la!) / That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative.” See Willis’s opening song in act 2 of W.S. Gilbert’s Iolanthe or, The Peer and the Peri, ed. William-Alan Landes (Studio City, Calif.: Players Press, 1997), 30. The woman is Miss Fulkes; the “lurid magazine” is The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds. See Huxley’s Point Counter Point (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955; orig. pub. 1928), 192–3. Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” and “Wordsworth,” in Essays in Criticism, 2nd ser. (London: Macmillan, 1929), 5, 41 ff., 143. The reality principle is “the principle that the actual conditions of living modify the pleasure-seeking activity of the libido” (OED). Freud first used the term in “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911): see Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 12:219. On “high seriousness,” see Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” 21–2, 41, 49. The phrase occurs, for instance, in Elizabeth Burton’s The Pageant of Stuart England (New York: Scribner’s, 1962), where she refers to Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie as “a splendid example of the labyrinthian clinch-tease school of writing” (309). While a student at Oxford University, NF encountered the paintings of Giotto di Bondone on a month’s tour of Italy during March and April of 1937. He mentions Giotto several times when recounting his impressions of Italy in his letters to Helen Kemp: he admires Giotto’s Madonna in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (NFHK, 2:727), and the “magnificent” Giotto chapel (the Scrovegni Chapel) in Padua, though he does register some ambivalence: “I find Giotto, and still more Fra Angelico, don’t quite connect as far as my personal likes and dislikes are concerned” (NFHK, 2:737; see also 2:743). Herford and Simpson summarize the contemporary reaction to Jonson’s original title “Works” for his collected edition: see Ben Jonson, 9:13. See also James A. Riddell, “Ben Jonson’s Folio of 1616,” The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 152–3. See the Prologue to Every Man in His Humour (Complete Plays, 1:183–4), where Jonson derides Shakespeare’s licence with the dramatic unity of time, and promotes instead his own representation of “deeds, and language, such as men do use” (l. 21), along with his own “image of the times” (1. 23). The Prologue concludes by addressing the audience: “there’s hope left, then, / You, that have so graced monsters, may like men” (ll. 29–30). For Jonson’s disapproval of plays that “run away from nature,” see no. 3, n. 6.

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15 The Return from Parnassus; or, The Scourge of Simony, is the final and most well-known play in the Parnassus trilogy, consisting of The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, and The Second Part of the Return to Parnassus, a series which was performed at St. John’s College, Cambridge, between 1597 and 1603. The quoted passage is from act 1, sc. 2, ll. 183–5. See the Temple Dramatist ed. (London: Dent, 1905), 15, where the word “indites” is given as “endites.” 16 In Othello and Cymbeline, respectively. 17 On NF’s analogy between the formulas of comedy and Bach’s Art of Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge), see p. 34. 18 See NF’s similar distinction in NFMC, 138, between the “two mental operations” involved in responding to all media: the “precritical” (or “linear”) response, and the “simultaneous” response. See also CP, 28 (CPCT, 17), where, using Schiller’s terms naïve and sentimental to distinguish these two experiences of reading, NF refers to “the ‘recognition’ which, in a work of fiction particularly, brings the end into line with the beginning and pulls the straight line of response around into a parabola.” 19 The first critic to designate Measure for Measure a “problem play” was Frederick S. Boas, Shakspere and His Predecessors, 344–5. Lawrence defined the genre as one in which “a perplexing and distressing complication in human life is presented in a spirit of high seriousness. . . . the theme is handled so as to arouse not merely interest or excitement, or pity or amusement, but to probe the complicated interrelations of character and action, in a situation admitting of different ethical interpretations” (Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies, 4). Measure for Measure has been read as an allegory aimed at the Christian governor (e.g., Elizabeth Marie Pope, “The Renaissance Background of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 2 [1949]: 66–82), as well as at James I (e.g., David L. Stevenson, “The Role of James I in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure,” ELH, 26, no. 2 [June 1959]: 188–208). 20 “In such unpopular plays as All’s Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida, we find him [Shakespeare] ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him.” G.B. Shaw, Preface to Plays Unpleasant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946; orig. pub. 1898), 22. Annotated copy in NFL. 21 See, e.g., E.K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1925), 215; G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Somber Tragedies (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 81, 87; R.W. Chambers, The Jacobean Shakespeare and Measure for Measure, Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, 1937 (London: British Academy, 1938), 48–50; F.R. Leavis, “The Greatness of ‘Measure for Measure,’” Scrutiny, 10, no. 3 (January 1942): 244. 22 The term “problem play” gained currency after it was formulated by Georg Brandes, in Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York: Mac-

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millan, 1906), vol. 1, and then applied to the plays of Brandes’ contemporary Henrik Ibsen. See Bjørn Hemmer, “Ibsen and the Realistic Problem Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, 70–1. For an influential critic who treats Shakespeare’s problem plays in relation to Ibsen’s problem drama, see Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, 4–5, in particular his argument that “The controlling spirit in a problem play must obviously be realism” (7). See especially A Short View of Tragedy (1692), chap. 7, for Rymer’s many criticisms of Othello, notably that it breaks the unities of time (153–4) and place (142), and shows “nothing of Nature” (155), forcing the audience to “deny their senses” (151). See R.W. Chambers, Jacobean Shakespeare, 34–44. George Peele, The Old Wives’ Tale (1595), ll. 106–14, in Minor Elizabethan Drama (London: Dent, 1958), 2:131–60. NF’s citation matches the passage in this ed., apart from a few minor stylistic differences, and the phrase “seek out his daughter” (rather than “seek his daughter”). See Jonson’s Ode to Himselfe (ll. 21–2), printed at the end of the 1631 Quarto of The New Inne (in Complete Plays, 4:471). NF’s heading “Mouldy Tales” also echoes Jonson’s Volpone: “I cannot endure to see the rabble of these ground ciarlitani, that spread their cloaks on the pavement, as if they meant to do feats of activity, and then come in, lamely, with their mouldy tales out of Boccacio. . . .” (Volpone, 2.2.47–50, in Complete Plays, 3:31). See the commentary on the main play by the Boy, Probee, and Damplay, in the choruses following the first four acts of The Magnetic Lady (1632). As Peter Happé explains in his Revels ed. of the play, the protasis is “the setting forth of the situation,” the epitasis the complication, the catastasis the “surprise development after a false resolution,” and the catastrophe the resolution of the plot (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 13–14. The character is Neander, in John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), 1:81. For some displeased contemporary reactions to the first performance of The Way of the World (1700), see Kathleen M. Lynch’s introduction to the Regents ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), ix. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians relates that Pietro Raimondi (1786–1853) composed his triple oratorio, Putifar-Giuseppe-Giacobbe in 1847– 48; it was first performed in Rome in 1852, in a concert lasting six hours, and requiring 430 performers. According to the contemporary account, Raimondi was so overcome with the colossal sound of the three oratorios together, a sensation he had desired for so long, that at the end of the concert he fainted. Edward Phillips, The Life of Mr. John Milton (1694), rpt. in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 19.

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32 See Johnson’s concluding remarks on Cymbeline: “To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecillity, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.” Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Sherbo, 2:908. 33 The musical term bravura refers to a passage or piece of music requiring a brilliant display of the performer’s skill; stretto is a musical direction to perform more quickly, making the final measures short and concise. On the twenty-four plot motifs, see Barrett Wendell, William Shakspere: A Study in Elizabethan Literature (New York: Scribner’s, 1894), 358–61; and the first note to 5.5 of Cymbeline in J.M. Nosworthy’s Arden ed. Lytton Strachey, Books and Characters, French and English (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922), 59, is the critic who complained, “Could anything drag more wretchedly than the dénouement of Cymbeline?” 34 Religio Medici and Other Writings (London: Dent, 1906), 10. Annotated copy in NFL. 35 NF echoes the passage from Ben Jonson’s Timber: or, Discoveries (1641): “I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand.” See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:210. 36 Caesar asks, “What is’t a’ clock?” (Julius Caesar, 2.2.114); and Ulysses, in describing Troilus as a “liberal man” (Troilus and Cressida, 4.5.100–3), echoes Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 1120a (bk. 4, sec. 1). See Kenneth Palmer’s App. 3 in the Arden ed. of Troilus and Cressida (313–14) for Ulysses’ citation of Aristotle, which Palmer argues is part of Shakespeare’s larger concern in the play with the first five books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. 37 The Fugal-Chorus praises Caesar in seven stanzas for having conquered “Seven Kingdoms,” including “the Kingdom of Credit Exchange” or credit economics (st. 4) and “the Kingdom of Organic Dwarfs” or modern medicine (st. 6). W.H. Auden, For the Time Being (1944; London: Faber, 1945), 88–9. A 1955 ed. is annotated no. 75 in NFL. 38 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic (1781), 2.2.527, in Plays, ed. Cecil Price (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 541–2. 39 See no. 3, n. 9. 40 Shakespeare borrowed from John Higgins’s account of Cordila in the 1574 ed. of The Mirror for Magistrates, but also borrowed a passage from the 1587 ed. of the Mirror: see Wilfrid Perrett, The Story of King Lear from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare (1904; rpt. New York: Johnson, 1970), 189, 214–15, 274. See also Kenneth Muir’s introduction to the Arden ed. of King Lear (London: Methuen, 1953; rpt. 1959), xxiv–xxxvii, especially n. 2 on p. xxxv.

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41 John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927; rev. 1930). 42 Recitativo refers to a type of vocal writing intended to mimic dramatic speech in song. 43 “Voi che sapete [che cosa é amor]” (“You who know [what love is]”) is an aria from act 2 of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro; 1786), libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte; “Dove sono [i bei momenti]” (“Where are they [the beautiful moments]”) is an aria from act 3. 44 In his 1938 review “Music and the Savage Breast,” NF refers to “the Chinese drama of the Sung dynasty, which is still acted in Toronto” (NFMC, 90). On the drama of the Sung dynasty, see NFMC, 349n. 5. 45 The preceding paragraph, including the references to Milton and Shaw, largely repeats material from p. 22. 46 See p. 126. 47 See act 4, sc. 1 of Sophonisba: the stage directions before the opening line, and before lines 102, 202, and 212, respectively. 48 Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry, 23. 49 Inigo Jones (1573–1652), the father of English architecture, is also famous for his extensive work on stage design and costuming, especially for Ben Jonson’s masques; Jones introduced both movable scenery and the proscenium arch to English theatre. 50 Together with mythos, ethos, and dianoia, melos (melody), lexis (diction), and opsis (spectacle) are the six elements of poetry that Aristotle discusses in Poetics, 1450a (chap. 6). See the Fourth Essay of AC for NF’s fuller treatment of these terms, especially his analysis of lexis as both “diction” (“a narrative sequence of sounds caught by the ear”) and “imagery” (a “simultaneous pattern of meaning apprehended in an act of ‘mental vision’”) (243–4/225–6). 51 See Lilith’s final speech: “the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force.” Shaw, Back to Methusaleh, in Complete Plays with Prefaces, 2:261. 52 John Milton, At a Solemn Musick, l. 23. 53 Giotto reportedly drew a perfect circle in a single stroke, freehand, for an emissary of Pope Benedict XI, who then called him to work in Rome. See TBN, 81. 54 “Extremes meet,” one of Coleridge’s favourite proverbs, is included in Aphorism 1 in his Aids to Reflection, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1848), 1:1. 55 NF cites the prologue of The Poetaster: or, His Arraignment from The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson (London: Dent, 1910), 1:235 (no line numbers). Annotated copy in NFL. (See Prologue, 5–14, in Complete Plays, 2:127.)

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56 “You dont expect me to know what to say about a play when I dont know who the author is, do you?” The speaker is Flawner Bannal, the youngest of the four critics judging the inset play in the Epilogue to Fanny’s First Play, in Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with Prefaces, 6:165. 57 See “Shakespeare’s Will,” in Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:173. 58 Charles Jasper Sisson, The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare (London: H. Milford, 1934). 59 “Could he complete his wonderful picture of Rembrandtesque power and pathos, of the Lady-Queen suffering remorse by adding such words . . . ? I, for one, cannot conceive the master writing these words, and feel sure they must have been some interpolation, by one who could not understand his ways.” See Mrs. C[harlotte] C[armichael] Stopes, “Is Lady Macbeth Really a ‘Fiend-Like Queen’?” originally published in Ladies’ Edinburgh Magazine (1877); rpt. in Shakespeare’s Industry (London: G. Bell, 1916), 110–25; see 125. John Munro cites “Mrs. Stopes” in his London Shakespeare ed. of Macbeth (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958), 6:1201. Annotated copy in NFL. 60 Compare Coleridge’s “This low porter soliloquy I believe written for the mob by some other hand, perhaps with Shakespeare’s consent,” with Thomas De Quincey: “when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard, and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.” See Coleridge’s Notes on Macbeth, in Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), 1:67, and De Quincey’s “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823), in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (London: A. & C. Black, 1897), 10:393. 61 Frederick S. Boas exemplifies the Victorian critics disgusted with the “highly unpleasant scenes 3, 5, and 6 of Act iv, which there is a natural repugnance to ascribe to Shakspere” (Shakspere and His Predecessors, 544). For further discussion of the brothel scenes in Pericles, including Sir Walter Raleigh’s defence of them in the twentieth century, see F.D. Hoeniger’s introduction to the Arden ed., lxx–lxxi. 62 Two songs from Middleton’s The Witch (ca. 1620–27) were interpolated in 3.5 and 4.1.39–43, 125–32 of Macbeth: see Kenneth Muir’s Arden introduction, xxxiii–xxxvi. 63 As Hoeniger points out, most modern scholars “believe that Shakespeare had little or nothing to do with Acts I and II, but that he wrote either completely or in large part Acts III–V” (Arden introduction to Pericles, liii). 64 The epistle is reprinted in Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:216–17.

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65 See T.S. Eliot’s famous complaint about Hamlet: “We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him.” “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920; London: Methuen, 1934), 102. Annotated copy in NFL. On Shaw’s criticisms of Shakespeare, see no. 3, n. 15. 66 The famous last line of the narrator’s interpolated opening voice-over in Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film Hamlet, which Olivier both starred in and directed. 67 In Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749), the innocent Tom, a foundling adopted by Squire Allworthy, is contrasted with Mr. Blifil, Allworthy’s nephew who though outwardly pious undermines Tom at every opportunity. 68 See 1 Henry VI. The Riverside ed. uses the spelling “Falstaff” rather than “Fastolfe.” 69 “Others abide our question” is the opening sentence of Arnold’s sonnet Shakespeare. See p. 113. 70 See the Didascalia (Production Notice), 145, and the Prologues to the first and second performances of The Mother-in-Law, 150–1, in Terence II, ed. and trans. John Barsby (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 71 These two lines constitute the entire prologue of Plautus’s Pseudolus. NF paraphrases slightly the translation by E.F. Watling in his NFL ed., The Pot of Gold and Other Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 217. 72 The character is an audience member, banker B.J. Gougerling, who is watching the main character Carol Kennicott’s production of The Girl from Kankakee, in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), 228 (chap. 18, sec. 6). 73 T.S. Eliot discusses the “unified sensibility” exemplified by Donne and contemporary Renaissance poets such as Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert, and Marvell, in “The Metaphysical Poets”: see Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1951; orig. pub. 1932), 281–91. Annotated copy in NFL. 74 In Swann’s Way, the first part of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (À la Recherche du temps perdu) (1913–27), the Vinteuil Sonata, through a “little phrase” in one of its movements, becomes the “national anthem” of Swann’s obsession with Odette, and later provides a means of taking both Swann and the narrator Marcel beyond their disappointments in love toward a realization of the meaning and value of art: “In that way Vinteuil’s phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, had espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough” (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff [New York: Holt, 1924], 1:287–301; 2:184). 75 “The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog” (T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and

Notes to pages 162–4

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78 79 80

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the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England [London: Faber, 1933], 151; annotated copy in NFL). See LN, 1:91, 2:602; TBN, 140; WP, 59/64–5; and MM, 21/SeSCT, 293. Thomas Lodge, Defence of Poetry (1579), in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:80. NF has modernized the spelling. The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1589) includes the name Fidelia, echoed in the Fidele of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline; and Hermione, echoed in The Winter’s Tale. See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:487; and Nosworthy’s Arden introduction to Cymbeline, xxiv–xxviii. Chambers notes that the bear in The Winter’s Tale “perhaps came originally from Mucedorus” (1:489). On Shakespeare’s possible borrowing from Mucedorus in The Tempest, see Kermode’s introduction to the Arden ed., lix. See A.H. Thorndike, Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakspere (New York: AMS Press, 1966; orig. pub. 1901). See, e.g., Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:197–9. “Now, of time they are much more liberall, for ordinary it is that two young Princes fall in loue. After many trauerces, she is got with childe, deliuered of a faire boy; he is lost, growth a man, falls in loue, and is ready to get another child; and all this in two hours space: which how absurd it is in sence euen sence may imagine.” Sidney, Apology, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:197. “A tragie-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie: which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kinde of trouble as no life be questiond, so that a God is as lawfull in this as in a tragedie and meane people as in a comedie.” John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess: A Critical Edition, ed. Florence Ada Kirk (New York: Garland, 1980), 15–16. The folk tale of Amis and Amiloun was popular in many versions throughout Europe, including the well-known Middle English version. Like the twin brothers in The Comedy of Errors, Amis and Amiloun were born on the same day and look so alike that only their clothing can distinguish them. They pledge brotherly loyalty to each other, are put into the service of the same duke at age twelve, and continually withstand the temptation to break their pledge of loyalty. See the Middle-English version of the tale in Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace, ed. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1997), 10–88. The Comedy of Errors adapts Plautus’s Menaechmi, the story of identical twins separated in their youth, and borrows from Plautus’s Amphitruo for 3.1. Here and elsewhere in the present volume, NF uses the title A Comedy of Errors (not a recognized variant). Fescennine verse, a precursor of Roman comedy, was satirical, bawdy, and

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improvisational, and was used mainly at festivals and weddings: see George E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 7–8. Livy characterizes the Fescennine verses as “rude lines hastily improvised,” in contrast to what came later: the looser, more lyrical verses arranged for the flute, and subsequently the plays “with a plot” (argumentum). See History of Rome, 7.2.2–13, in Livy, trans. B.O. Foster (London: Heinemann, 1960; orig. pub. 1924), 3:361–3. Lycidas, ll. 39–49; Venus and Adonis, ll. 1055–6, 1167–70. Entry on 29 September 1662: “I sent for some dinner, . . . and then to the King’s Theatre, where we saw ‘Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,’ which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life” (Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Richard Braybrooke [London: Dent, 1906], 1:290). NF has enclosed this passage in square brackets in his copy in NFL. See Thomas’s poem The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait. Ann Tanner is the future married name of Ann Whitefield, the aggressive female protagonist in Shaw’s Man and Superman, who spends the entire play trying to get Jack Tanner to marry her, and finally wrenches his consent from him at the end of the play. Pinchwife is the foolish and impotent old husband in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, who cannot prevent his lively young wife from giving him cuckhold’s horns behind his back; Petruchio fares much better in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew in taming the sharp-tongued but ultimately more controllable Katherina. Isabella’s counterpart is Cassandra: see 3.4 and 4.4 in the extract from George Whetstone’s The Historie of Promos and Cassandra (1578), reprinted in the Arden Measure for Measure, 177–8, 180–1. In the Second Parte of the Historie, 184–93, Promos’s cheating of Cassandra is reversed when her brother Andrugio tricks Promos, and an incredible happy ending results. On the chronicles as the source for the name of Shakespeare’s Imogen, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 8:10–11. The original stage directions to 1.1 and 2.1 of Much Ado about Nothing add “Innogen his wife” and “his wife” to the list of characters appearing onstage with Leonato (see Textual Notes in the Riverside ed., p. 397). “And though he now present you with such wool / As from mere English flocks his muse can pull, / He hopes when it is made up into cloth, / Not the most curious head here will be loth / To wear a hood of it, it being a fleece, / To match, or those of Sicily, or Greece” (Prologue, 9–14). Jonson, The Sad Shepherd; or, A Tale of Robin Hood, a Fragment (1783), in The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson (Dent, 1910), 2:637.

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94 In the Riverside: “yet reverence / (That angel of the world) doth make distinction / Of place ’tween high and low” (4.2.247–9). 95 See p.132. 96 See pp. 21 and 120. 97 In NF’s Everyman ed., 2.1 (p. 652). Alternatively, Herford and Simpson render the line “I’is pu’ the world, or Nature, ’bout their eares” (2.3.35, Ben Jonson, 7:30). 98 Notably, in nos. 1 and 3; in “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors,” LS, 144– 59; and in the Third Essay of AC, 163–71/151–9. 99 See Jonson, The Magnetic Lady, 4.Chor.23 (Complete Plays, 4:556). See also pp. 137–8. 100 See no. 1, n. 10. 101 NF’s “three aspects of ritual” recall Cornford’s three ritual phases of Aristophanic comedy: the Ag n (a deadly struggle between adversaries); the Sacrifice and Feast; and the final Marriage or K mos (The Origin of Attic Comedy, 26–77). See also NF’s annotated copy of Theodore Herzl Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961); and NRL, 231, where NF struggles to bring together Gaster’s phases (which NF understands as “fasting, purgation & festival”) with the agon-pathos-anagnorisis phases of comedy emphasized by Cornford. As Dolzani points out in n. 71, NF has adapted Gaster’s four-phase pattern of Near East ritual (mortification, purgation, invigoration, and jubilation) into a three-day pattern like that in Christianity’s Easter ritual. 102 Compare AC, 172/160: “Central to the alazon group is the senex iratus or heavy father, who with his rages and threats, his obsessions and his gullibility, seems closely related to some of the demonic characters of romance, such as Polyphemus.” 103 The Riverside ed. prints the stage direction from the authoritative First Folio, with different wording than NF, but the same sense: “Enter young Bertram, Count of Rossillion, his mother [the Countess of Rossillion], and Helena, Lord Lafew, all in black.” 104 The man is Aegeon, sentenced to death for having broken the law that bars Syracusians from entering Ephesus. The Riverside ed. uses the spelling “Egeon.” 105 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, chap. 3, in The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: New American Library, 1960), 225–7. 106 “Jack-a-Lent” refers literally to “the figure of a man, set up to be pelted: an ancient form of the sport of ‘Aunt Sally,’ practiced during Lent”; or figuratively to “a butt for every one to throw at” (OED). See, e.g., Falstaff’s reference to “Jack-a-Lent” in Merry Wives, quoted on p. 214. 107 The disguised heroines in The Merchant of Venice are Jessica, who escapes

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Notes to pages 175–81 her father’s house dressed as a boy (2.6); and Portia and Nerissa, who dress as a judge and his clerk in the trial scene (4.1). “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God” (Deuteronomy 22:5). The Apollonius of Tyre story, particularly as told in the eighth chapter of John Gower’s Confessio amantis, is the source for the main plot in Shakespeare’s Pericles and for the Aegeon–Emilia plot in The Comedy of Errors. In the tale, after revealing the incestuous relationship between the king and his daughter, Apollonius is persecuted and undergoes many adventures and trials, including the loss of his own wife and daughter, before being finally reunited with his family. The themes of the story are the punishment of inappropriate lust and the reward of love and faithfulness. See NRL, 219. Menaechmi, or The Two Menaechmuses, ll. 416–41, in The Pot of Gold and Other Plays, 109–10. On Bergson’s theory of laughter, see p. 75. On Jonson’s humour and Pope’s ruling passion, see p. 24. See, e.g., Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed (ca. 1611), as well as the several other plays discussed in Morris’s Arden introduction to The Taming of the Shrew, 88–104. See p. 109. “A little Narcissus, a little Adonis of love”: see Figaro’s aria Non più andrai (“You won’t go anymore”), in act 1 of Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). In the Riverside: “bitum’d” rather than “bitumened.” Graves outlines three phases in the cycle of the white goddess, in the mythology of his Classical sources: “the New Moon is the white goddess of birth and growth; the Full Moon, the red goddess of love and battle; the Old Moon, the black goddess of death and divination.” Graves calls her “the White Goddess because white is her principal colour, the colour of the first member of her moon-trinity” (The White Goddess, 70). See also LN, 1:79, 393; WP, 219–20/191–2. See WP, 219/191. “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem” (Song of Songs 1:5). On the black but comely bride, see also GC, 154–5/175. See NRL, 231, where NF gives the source for this quotation as Gaster [Thespis, 36]. Gaster’s note attributes the quotation to the antiquary Bourne, mentioned in John Brand, Popular Antiquities, 304, and cites references in Frazer’s Golden Bough. The legend was begun by John Dennis: “This Comedy was written at her [Queen Elizabeth’s] Command, and by her direction, and she was so eager to see it Acted, that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days; and

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was afterwards, as Tradition tells us, very well pleas’d at the Representation.” See the Epistle Dedicatory prefacing his adaptation The Comical Gallant: or The Amours of Sir John Falstaffe (London: Cornmarket Press, 1969; orig. pub. 1702). Subsequently, Nicholas Rowe added to the legend by claiming that Queen Elizabeth “was so well pleas’d with that admirable Character of Falstaff, in the two Parts of Henry the Foruth, that she commanded him to continue it for one Play more, and to shew him in Love. This is said to be the Occasion of his Writing The Merry Wives of Windsor.” See his “Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear” (London: J. Tonson, 1714; orig. pub. 1709), preface, ix. NF is implying that Hesione is an Andromeda figure, for just as Andromeda’s father exposed her to a sea-monster sent by Poseidon, and fastened her to a rock, Hesione’s father agreed to have Hesione bound to the rocks and exposed to be devoured by a sea-monster sent by Poseidon to attack Troy. In Portia’s complex comparison, Bassanio shows more love than “young Alcides” (Hercules) did in rescuing Hesione, the “virgin tribute,” intended as payment by Troy to appease Poseidon’s wrath. NF’s name for the clown in All’s Well That Ends Well, “Lavache,” apparently comes from the London Shakespeare ed., and, like “Lafeu,” has been retained for its symbolic significance (la vache in French means “the cow,” with several slang connotations; the meaning of le feu or “the fire” also extends to many figurative meanings). The name in most other standard editions, including the Riverside, appears as “Lavatch,” or simply “Clown,” as in the First Folio. On the pharmakos or scapegoat, the “typical or random victim” that is “neither innocent nor guilty,” but “in the situation of Job,” see AC, 41–2/39. On the churl, see no. 3, n. 22; LS, 148–9; and AC, 172/160, 175–6/163–4. See no. 8, n. 20. See NRL, 245. The Taming of a Shrew (1594) is an anonymous play that shares the main plot, many scenes and characters, as well as some dialogue with Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1623); scholars are divided over whether A Shrew is the source of, or a derivation from, Shakespeare’s play; or indeed whether both plays derive from a common (Ur-Shrew) source. NF refers to Slie’s words to the Tapster in the Epilogue to The Taming of a Shrew, excerpted in App. 3 of the Arden Taming of the Shrew, 305: “thou hast wakt me out of the best dreame / That ever I had in my life, but Ile to my / Wife presently and tame her too.” In the Riverside ed., “A shrewd knave and an unhappy.” Alceste is the protagonist and title character of Molière’s The Misanthrope (1666). See no. 10, n. 22.

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Notes to pages 188–98

130 See NRL, 219. On Timon of Athens as the last of the Plutarchan plays, see p. 90. 131 NF’s contrast between the “graybeard loon” and “the loud bassoon” alludes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (ll. 11, 32). 132 In the Riverside ed., “sit.” 133 In Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Lucius transforms into an ass in bk. 3, and transforms back again into human form in bk. 11: see the Loeb ed., trans. W. Adlington (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 135–7; 561. See NRL, 246, for NF’s note on the “Apuleius world of CE [The Comedy of Errors]: even the ass transformation is there; primitive fear of the doppelganger & theme of self-knowledge.” 134 Fragment 95: “Heracleitus says that there is one world in common for those who are awake, but that when men are asleep each turns away into a world of his own” (Heracleitus, On the Universe, vol. 4 of Hippocrates [London: William Heinemann, 1943]), 501. 135 “Every dream has at least one point at which it is unfathomable; a central point, as it were, connecting it with the unknown.” Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. A.A. Brill (1913; New York: Carlton House, 1931), 22n. 10 (chap. 2). 136 The Riverside ed., following both the Quarto and Folio eds. of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, prints “what dream” rather than “what a dream.” 137 The Riverside ed. has “[t’] expound”; Quarto 1 of the play prints “expound,” whereas Quarto 2 and the First Folio print “to expound.” 138 The Riverside ed. encloses “a patch’d” in square brackets, as another textual variant: the First Folio of the play prints “a patch’d”; but Quartos 1 and 2 both print “patcht a.” 139 The Riverside ed. has “ballet” rather than “ballad.” 140 See The Tempest, 4.1.188–9. 141 “They are all noblemen, who have gone wrong”: the words of Ruth and the Chorus of Girls, in the finale song of act 2, Sighing softly to the river. See W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance: or The Slave of Duty, ed. Bryceson Treharne (New York: G. Schirmer, 2002), 203–4. 142 As NF memorably recounts (LS, 34), in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the Host interrupts the irritating ballad stanzas of Tale of Thopas to complain, “Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!” (fragment 7, l. 930). 143 Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 10, ll. 274–6. 144 See p. 115. 145 In the Riverside ed., following the primary authoritative text (First Folio): “I do see ’t, and feel ’t.” NF’s conflation of the senses is perhaps understandable given the context of Leontes’ speech to Antigonus: “You smell this business with a sense as cold / As is a dead man’s nose; but I do see’t,

Notes to pages 199–208

146 147

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and feel’t, / As you feel doing thus [grasps his arm]—and see withal / The instruments that feel” (2.1.151–4). The Riverside ed. prints “the [offer’d] fallacy.” The primary authoritative text, the First Folio, has “free’d” rather than “offer’d.” “For nowe they cast Sugar and Spice vpon euery dish that is serued to the table; like those Indians, not content to weare eare-rings at the fit and naturall place of the eares, but they will thrust Iewels through their nose and lippes, because they will be sure to be fine” (Sidney, Apology for Poetry, in Smith, 1:202; NF changes “place” to “places”). Sidney is complaining about the widespread use among English writers of too many flowery, affected, or “farre fette words.” See p. 83. See p. 84. See chap. 3 of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, “The Dream as a Wish-Fulfilment.” Compare AC, 186/173, where NF describes romance as “nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream.” “But afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, because euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken.” Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577), vol. 5, Scotland, excerpted in App. A of Muir’s Arden ed., 178. See George Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), in Early Plays from the Italian, ed. R. Warwick Bond (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1911). NF has modernized the spelling and punctuation. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Mandragola (ca. 1518), in The Literary Works of Machiavelli, ed. J.R. Hale (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 1–61. The wife Lucrezia and the priest Fra Timoteo refer to God’s will on p. 60. NF alludes to the subtitle of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer: or, The Mistakes of a Night, as in The Miscellaneous Works (London: Macmillan, 1904). Annotated copy in NFL. See Job 42:14–15; the King James version has “Kezia,” as does NF in his citation of the passage in RT, 566. On Job as a comedy, see RT, 566–8. “The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.” John Keats, Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, in The Letters of John Keats, 68. See Malcolm Kelsall’s description of the riots, in his ed. of John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (London: A. & C. Black, 1994), xiii. See Peter Pan’s lines at the end of act 4: “Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!” J.M. Barrie, Peter

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Notes to pages 208–26 Pan, Or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, in The Plays of J.M. Barrie (New York: Scribner’s, 1930), 74. “How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!” Michael Neill quotes the reported reaction of the unnamed Victorian female spectator, in his Oxford ed. of The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 40. “Barrabas” in the Riverside; NF’s preferred “Barabbas,” retained here, agrees with the spelling in the King James version of the Bible (see, e.g., Matthew 27:16–26). The preceding paragraph echoes p. 46. “in spite of all, / Some shape of beauty moves away the pall / From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon / Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon / For simple sheep; and such are daffodils / With the green world they live in.” John Keats, Endymion, bk. 1, ll. 11–16. For NF’s famous initial formulation of the “green world,” see p. 9. See pp. 124–5; on Sidney’s golden world, see no. 7, n. 18. See no. 3, n. 14. On the Leviathan symbolism in the Bible, see GC, 188–91/209–13. On Antiochus, see GC, 93–4/113. See p. 47. See no. 12, n. 27. “Line” is a variant of “lime” or “linden.” Editors have also taken the word “line” to mean “clothes-line,” in the context of this passage. See p. 47. In the Riverside, and the authoritative First Folio: “end of harvest” (not “end of the harvest”). See p. 47. 14. Shakespeare and the Modern World

1 As the CBC announcer recounted in signing off after NF’s talk, “The other lectures in the series have been ‘Who Was William Shakespeare?’ by Robertson Davies [15 April]; ‘Shakespeare in the Theatre,’ by Sir Tyrone Guthrie [22 April]; ‘Shakespeare and the English Language,’ by G. Wilson Knight [29 April]; and ‘On Interpreting Shakespeare,’ by Eric Bentley [6 May].” 2 NF’s reference to the Beatles is timely and appropriate for a 1964 radio broadcast: Beatlemania had hit North America in February once the band made its first trip to the United States and appeared, among other places, on The Ed Sullivan Show. 3 A reference to the Folio frontispiece portrait of Shakespeare, which NF elsewhere calls a “goggle-eyed mask”: see p. 81.

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4 See Othello’s line to Iago, “But this denoted a foregone conclusion” (3.3.428), cited by the OED as the first appearance (in 1604) of the phrase. 5 The saying is proverbial, though the actress Fanny Kemble, while discussing a performance of Hamlet, recounts a corresponding incident about the naive reaction of a guardsman who went to see a Shakespeare play for the first time: “After sitting dutifully through some scenes in silence, he turned to a fellow-guardsman, who was painfully looking and listening by his side, with the grave remark, ‘I say, George, dooced odd play this; it’s all full of quotations.’ The young military gentleman had occasionally, it seems, heard Shakespeare quoted, and remembered it.” See Frances Ann Kemble, Records of a Girlhood (New York: Henry Holt, 1879), 26. 6 See Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1st ed., 1570; collated with 2nd ed., 1572), ed. Edward Arber (London: Constable, 1932). Annotated copy in NFL. See also WE, 148. 7 Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries (1641), in Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 8:626. NF’s citation modernizes the spelling. 8 Matthew Arnold: “what distinguishes the artist from the mere amateur, says Goethe, is Architectonicè in the highest sense; that power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes: not the profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of imagery, not the abundance of illustration. But these attractive accessories of a poetical work being more easily seized than the spirit of the whole, and these accessories being possessed by Shakespeare in an unequalled degree, a young writer having recourse to Shakespeare as his model runs great risk of being vanquished and absorbed by them, and, in consequence, of reproducing, according to the measure of his power, these, and these alone.” From the Preface to Poems (1853), in The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. C.B. Tinker and H.F. Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), xxv. NF’s reference to T.S. Eliot’s recognition of Shakespeare as “a dangerous influence” may refer to the passage in “Hamlet and His Problems”: “Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge . . . .” (in The Sacred Wood, 95). 9 In the Riverside ed., “Yet” rather than “While.” 10 On the audiotape, NF clearly says “moldy-mettled,” though this is not a recognized textual variant in Hamlet. 11 See p. 21. 12 See no. 13, n. 35. 13 See Jonson’s poem “To the memory of my beloued, The Author Mr. Wil-

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Notes to pages 228–32

liam Shakespeare: And what he hath left vs”: “And though thou hadst small Latine, and less Greeke, / From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke / For names; but call forth thund’ring Æschilus, Euripides, and Sophocles to vs . . . ” (Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 8:391; rpt. in Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:208). On King Lear and The Mirror for Magistrates, see no. 13, n. 40. See p. 150. See p. 132. See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:535–7. NF has conflated the fifth and sixth lines of the sonnet; compare the passage in Duncan-Jones’s Arden edition: “Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, / And almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.” William Wordsworth, Scorn not the Sonnet, ll. 1–3: “Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, / Mindless of its just honours; with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart . . . .” See pp. 96–8. Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935). See also LN, 401. Milton exerts a pervasive influence on Keats’s writing, notably on the two versions of Hyperion, as Keats describes in his letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 21 September 1819: “I have given up Hyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—Miltonic verse can not be written but in an artful or rather artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations” (Letters, ed. Forman, 384). See also Keats’s letter of the same day, to George and Georgiana Keats, where he writes of his preference for Chatterton’s rather than Milton’s language: “The Paradise lost though so fine in itself is a curruption of our Language—it should be kept as it is unique—a curiosity—a beautiful and grand Curiosity . . . . I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written but it [in] the vein of art . . . .” (425). See also SR, 154–5; ENC, 197–8. Samuel Johnson, Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick, at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane 1747, ll. 53–4. The lines are given as “The Drama’s Laws the Drama’s Patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live,” in Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New York: Rinehart, 1958; rpt. 1960). Annotated copy in NFL. NF discusses two of these “corny” plays on pp. 378–9. See p. 120. Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum: Six Books, bk. 1, satire 3, ll. 39–40, in The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall, ed. Philip Wynter (New York: AMS Press, 1969; orig. pub. Oxford, 1863), 9:586. See no. 13, n. 75.

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28 See Stendhal, The Red and the Black [Le Rouge et le noir (1831)], trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Modern Library, 1926). Annotated copy in NFL. NF appears to have taken the metaphor of the path from the epigraph to chap. 13 (p. 100), which Stendhal fictitiously ascribes to “Saint-Réal”: “Un roman: c’est un miroir qu’on promène le long d’un chemin” (trans. Catherine Slater [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], p. 80, as “A novel is a mirror you turn this way and that as you go down a path”). Compare the passage in chap. 49, trans. Moncrieff, pp. 166–7: “Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.” See also LN, 263 and n. 47. 29 See no. 11, n. 45. 30 “Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or party. Our religious and political organisations give an example of this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way; but culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men all live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely, —nourished and not bound by them.” Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935; rpt. 1971), 70 (chap. 1). Annotated copy in NFL. See also WE, 501. 15. Nature and Nothing 1 The other scholars, in the order printed in the book, were Robert B. Heilman (“The Role We Give Shakespeare”); Harry Levin (“Shakespeare’s Nomenclature”); J.V. Cunningham (“‘With That Facility’: False Starts and Revisions in Love’s Labour’s Lost”); Gunnar Boklund (“Judgment in Hamlet”); and Maynard Mack (“‘We Came Crying Hither’: An Essay on Some Characteristics of King Lear”). In the book, NF’s essay comes after Heilman’s and before Cunningham’s, forming part of what Chapman in the preface designates as the first group: “The first three essays, boldly allusive and thematic, sweep through the whole canon of plays (and much of Shakespearean criticism) in pursuit of principle” (vi).

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Notes to pages 236–47

2 In NRL, NF initially sketches the idea for this paper: “I’ve thought for a long time of doing a paper on Lear: it isn’t a new notion. I can fan out from there into the conceptions of nature & nothingness, the storm as a reduction of creation to chaos, & so on” (218). 3 “Denver: a rewrite of the present IV, a second twist” (NRL, 248), where “the present IV” apparently refers to the group of Shakespeare’s plays that NF was planning to include in the fourth chapter of NP (see NRL, 218–19); “a second twist,” as Dolzani explains, is the “phrase used by NF in the notebooks to denote recreation on a higher level of understanding” (NRL, 447n. 125). 4 See NFMC, 37. 5 “The distinction between historian and poet is . . . that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. . . . Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.” Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b, chap. 9, in Works, trans. McKeon, 1463–4. See also M&B, 339; and AC, 82–3/76. 6 See King John, 2.1.573–98. 7 See p. 154. 8 See p. 152. 9 On Orpheus as “the hero of all four romances,” see pp. 217–18. 10 See no. 7, n. 17. 11 For Fastolfe (the Henry VI plays) and Falstaff (the Henry IV plays), see p. 218. Pistol, who appears in 2 Henry IV, becomes the surviving outsider in Henry V: see p. 282. On the scapegoating of Exton at the end of Richard II, see p. 263. 12 NF cites the poem on p. 264. 13 See Henry V, 2.2.142; and Richard II, 3.4.76. 14 See King Lear, 2.4.249; 1.4.192–4. See also pp. 317–18. 15 See Kenneth Muir’s note in the Arden ed., p. 206. 16 See pp. 187 and 317. 17 See p. 202 and no. 13, n. 9. 18 In Pericles, 4.2.92 ff. 19 See p. 46. 20 See p. 174 and n. 106. 21 Milton, Il Penseroso, l. 95. See M&B, 144, for NF’s citation and discussion of the way Milton’s phrase functions as “the musical metaphor.” 22 In The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Comedy of Errors, and Measure for Measure, respectively. 23 In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, All’s Well That Ends Well, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew, respectively. 24 NF lists the dottore as one of the chief characters of the commedia dell’arte, on

Notes to pages 248–51

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p. 444. See the definition in The Harper Handbook to Literature: “Il Dottore was Pantalone’s friendly physician, the archetype of all the greedy and ignorant doctors of Molière and Fielding” (113). See The Two Gentlemen of Verona (4.2.39–53), where the “right” girl, Julia, who is disguised in boy’s clothes, overhears the song that Proteus sings to “Silvia” (the spelling in the Riverside ed., following the authoritative Folio). For more detailed references to madness in these plays, see p. 212. See p. 125. For the reference in The Tempest to the ver perpetuum, see p. 224. 16. Fools of Time

1 Peter Buitenhuis said of NF’s Alexander Lectures, “It was the first time that the series, one of the most distinguished in English studies in North America, had been given by a member of the University of Toronto”: “Northrop Frye’s Iliad: The Alexander Lectures, 1965–66,” Varsity Graduate [University of Toronto], 12 (June 1966): 2. Buitenhuis’s story is accompanied by a congratulatory announcement, on the facing page, of NF’s appointment as the University of Toronto’s first University Professor, effective 1 January 1967. 2 The five previously published books based on lecture series are AC (which he prefaces by saying, “This book contains the substance of the four public lectures delivered in Princeton in March 1954” [vii]); EI (originally given as six radio talks in the CBC Massey Lectures series in November and December 1962); WTC (originally given as the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia in March 1961); RE (chaps. 1–4 originally given as the Centennial Lectures at Huron College in March 1963); and NP (originally given as the Bampton Lectures at Columbia University in November 1963; included as no. 13 in this volume). At the time of publication of FT, in the preparation stages for publication were SR (originally given as lectures that NF called “the Clevelands,” for the Graduate School at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in May 1966) and MC (originally given as the Whidden Lectures at McMaster University in January 1967). See TBN, 3, 51. 3 See Ayre, 302. 4 The lecture series that became SR and MC: see n. 1, above. 5 A.S.P. (Arthur) Woodhouse died on 31 October 1964. On NF’s relationship with Woodhouse, see Ayre, 185, 201. 6 W.J. (William James) Alexander taught at University College in Toronto from 1889 to 1926. He was such a popular and respected lecturer at the University that in 1928, after his retirement, colleagues and former students (among them A.S.P. Woodhouse and Pelham Edgar) formed the Alexander Lecture series, to be delivered annually by a distinguished scholar on literary studies. In the Royal Society of Canada’s memorial notice on

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Notes to page 252

Woodhouse, F.E.L. Priestley wrote that Woodhouse “often asserted that he [Alexander] was the finest expositor of English literature that he had ever heard” (Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 4th ser., 3 [June 1965]: 183). See Tamburlaine’s repeated question before he dies in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part 2: “And shall I die, and this unconquered?” (5.3.150, 158). In Julius Caesar, after asking his betrayers, “wilt thou lift up Olympus?” Caesar famously pronounces the shocked words: “Et tu, Brute?—Then fall Caesar!” (3.1.74, 77). Heidegger develops the concepts of care and authenticity in “Care as the Being of Dasein”: care is the primordial state of being as Dasein (“being-there,” or human being) strives towards authenticity (division 1, chap. 6 of Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson [San Francisco: Harper, 1962]). On Heidegger’s concept of authenticity, see also Being and Time, 312–48 (div. 2, chap. 2). On dread (angst/anxiety), see Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread (1844), trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944; rpt. 1957). Annotated copy in NFL. For Kierkegaard, dread is the feeling of vertiginous excitement, but also the undefinable fear of freedom; dread “is different from fear and similar concepts which refer to something definite, whereas dread is freedom’s reality as possibility for possibility” (38). On nausea, see Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel La Nausée [Nausea] (1938). Sartre defines nausea as a state of being whereby we feel alienated by the very existence of objects and things, and our existence is absurd because it goes beyond understanding and the power of language to describe or classify (127). Besides Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, Albert Camus famously treats the absurdity of human existence: see The Myth of Sisyphus, 119–23 (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien [New York: Vintage, 1955; rpt. 1991]; annotated copy in NFL). NF refers to this text on pp. 274, 313. For Camus, the absurd is born on the occasion when we cannot reconcile “these two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle” (51). On the existentialists, see also NF’s statement in NRL, 262: “The existential philosophers, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, build up structures containing moods or emotional reactions like absurdity, anxiety, nausea, & the like. But that’s because they choose these moods. What they’ve really chosen, as the key to reality, is the tragic structure.” See AC, 211/197: “Tragedy . . . seems to elude the antithesis of moral responsibility and arbitrary fate, just as it eludes the antithesis of good and evil.” See 1 Henry IV, 5.4.81. NF cites the line as in the First Folio, and in the Second and later Quarto eds. The Riverside ed. uses the line from the First Quarto, “Thoughts, the slaves of life.” As the Arden editor A.R. Humphreys

Notes to pages 255–8

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notes, this phrase produces a series of “successive subjects all governing ‘must have a stop,’” by contrast with the Folio line, which “produces a series of ‘moralizing clauses.’” In A.T. Murray’s translation: “the glorious deeds of warriors.” See the Loeb ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954; orig. pub. 1924), 1:397. Annotated copy in NFL. See NRL, 261: “Sarpedon’s speech in Homer is, almost literally, a bromide.” For the speech in English translation, see NRL, 449n. 165; and Loeb ed., 1:567. Arjuna gains illumination on the battlefield in Bhagavadgita, chap. 11 (“the Eleventh Lesson, intituled ‘The Sight of the Universal Form’” [266]), in Hindu Scriptures, ed. Nicol Macnicol (London: Dent, 1938; rpt. 1963), 262–6. See LN, 556, where NF considers Euripides’ Pentheus as an example of what happens when we prematurely try to reach the higher level of nature, that “pre-fall vision of freedom and consciousness that transcends law” and “is accompanied by the regeneration of nature”: “we get caught up in the swirl of natura naturans and are destroyed like Pentheus in the Bacchae.” Pentheus, master of Thebes, after being driven mad by Dionysus and witnessing the Bacchic rites of the Maenads, is torn apart by his mother Agave, who thinks he is a lion. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 46 (sec. 4). Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 33–8 (sec. 1). Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 36–7 (sec. 1). See The Birth of Tragedy, secs. 11–12, where Nietzsche attributes to Euripides a crucial role in creating the myth of “Greek cheerfulness,” or the optimism that knowledge would “heal the eternal wound of existence” (109) and overcome the suffering of the individual. Nietzsche calls Euripides “the poet of aesthetic Socratism” (86) who “wrecked tragedy” (80) because, like Socrates, Euripides believed that “To be beautiful everything must be intelligible” (83–4). According to Nietzsche, Euripides moved away from the terrors and mysteries of Dionysian tragedy and made New Comedy possible by creating a more conscious art, for he “brought the spectator onto stage” (77) through the chorus and represented the reality of ordinary life and language on stage. See Juno’s opening speech in Seneca’s Hercules furens: “behold, he has broken down the doors of infernal Jove, and brings back to the upper world the spoils of a conquered king. I myself saw, yes, saw him, the shadows of nether night dispersed and Dis overthrown.” Juno declares, “now with himself let him war,” there being no earthly force stronger than Hercules (Loeb ed. of Seneca’s tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961], 1:7–9, 11). Here and in the paragraph that follows NF implicitly draws an analogy be-

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Notes to pages 260–2

tween the two orders of nature in Renaissance writing and Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian (spelled “Apollinian” in Kaufmann’s translation). See The Birth of Tragedy, first three paragraphs of sec. 21, where Nietzsche says that it is “Apollo who forms states” (124) and then asks why the Greeks during their great period of political triumph did not “exhaust themselves either in ecstatic brooding or in a consuming chase after worldly power and worldly honor” (125). The answer is that tragedy mediates between these two dangers of the political instincts through Dionysian music, which offers an experience of the primal will of nature. The inevitable pain and pleasure produced by the creative and the destructive aspects of Dionysian music are in turn mediated by the tragic hero, whose suffering the audience witnesses. Tragedy “brings music,” a universal language that carries us beyond our individuality, and then “places the tragic myth and the tragic hero next to it, and he, like a powerful Titan, takes the whole Dionysian world upon his back and thus relieves us of this burden” (125). This “joyful” return of the tragic hero to the Dionysian primal will of nature affirms life despite individual suffering, and represents Nietzsche’s version of what NF calls the “heroic vision” in tragedy. See pp. 178 and 200. See NRL, 248, par. 178 ff., where NF uses the abbreviations “Ur.” or “U.” (Urizen), “L.” (Luvah), and “Th.” (Tharmas) to organize his notes for FT. In pars. 265 and 267 (pp. 269–70), and in the chart on p. 278, NF outlines the categories of Urizen, Orc, and Tharmas tragedy. Luvah is “the eternal name of Orc”: see NF’s discussion of Luvah/Orc as Eros, in FS, 234–5/234. To these Blakean categories, NF adds a fourth: “The Urthona group are the romances” (NRL, 270). Orson Welles’s influential production of Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theatre in 1937 featured modern dress (uniforms from Fascist Italy) and a central analogy between Mussolini and Caesar, played by Joseph Holland (Welles himself played Brutus). “The Dionysiac exhilaration at annihilating the individual skirts the fringes of the death-wish of the mob. Nietzsche becomes (involuntarily) a prophet of Nazism; D.H. Lawrence writes The Plumed Serpent”; “there’s a dialectic in the Dionysiac, . . . the loss of individuality can be totally destructive & evil as well as emancipating” (NRL, 265, 266). D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926) was reputed to be a proto-fascist novel, and NF describes it as propounding “schoolboyish Naziism” (SE, 429) and as being “ideologically wrong” (LN, 468); see also NF’s discussion of the novel in his letter to Helen Kemp (NFHK, 2:589). In TBN, 300, NF describes Lawrence as representative of the “Eros quadrant,” “perhaps best described as a ‘Dionysus’ quadrant” that favours “the theme of finding identity in individual isolation.” See Julius Caesar, 3.3.28, 35; and Coriolanus, 5.6.120.

Notes to pages 262–6

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26 See George Chapman’s two-part play The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608), ed. John Margeson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 27 The Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron: for Byron’s account of Queen Elizabeth’s speech about the Earl of Essex, see 5.3.139–42; and for references to Essex, see 5.3.140 and 4.1.133–8. See also the discussion in App. 3, “Byron and the Essex Conspiracy,” in Margeson’s ed. 28 The line in NRL, 259, reads: “What right had Caesar to the empery?”; above the last word, NF has written “empire” (NRL, 449n. 158). As H.S. Bennett notes, most editors emend the only extant text of The Jew of Malta, the 1633 Quarto, from “empire to empery to complete the scansion of the line.” See The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris (New York: Gordian, 1966), 32. 29 Andrew Marvell, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland, ll. 41–4, in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), 1:88. Annotated copy in NFL. NF has adjusted the punctuation and changed “Spirits” to “spirits.” 30 See The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 24, where Nietzsche equates the paradoxical mixture of pleasure and pain in the experience of tragedy with the Dionysian characteristic of “musical dissonance,” asking, “How can the ugly and the disharmonic, the content of the tragic myth, stimulate aesthetic pleasure?” (141). NF alludes to the tendency of Romantic composers to experiment with dissonance, exemplified by Richard Wagner’s experimentation with what is now called the “Tristan chord.” On the historical significance of Wagner’s innovative use of dissonance in the chord, see Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 208–10. 31 See Hamlet, 1.5.166–7: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 32 Antony and Cleopatra, 4.3.13–17. 33 Paradise Lost, bk. 5, ll. 603–15; for Satan’s subsequent jealousy, see ll. 659–71. 34 In Milton’s outline of tragedies from “Scotch Stories Or Rather Brittish of the North Parts,” the last item is Macbeth: “beginning at the arrivall of Malcolm at Mackduffe. the matter of Duncan may be express’t by the appearing of his Ghost.” Milton’s list of possible tragedies for his great poem is preserved, apparently in his own handwriting, in pp. 35–41 of the Cambridge manuscript in Trinity College Library. See The Uncollected Writings of John Milton, vol. 18 of The Works of John Milton, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott and J. Milton French (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 245. 35 Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.200. 36 Cassius apparently converts from Epicureanism to Stoicism in act 5, sc. 1 of Julius Caesar, for he begins to believe in omens—“now I change my mind, / And partly credit things that do presage” (77–8)—and declares, “I am fresh of spirit, and resolv’d / To meet all perils very constantly” (90–1).

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Notes to pages 267–72

37 George Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613), ed. Robert J. Lordi (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977). 38 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown (Revels ed.; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986; orig. pub. Methuen, 1964), 5.5.99–100. 39 In the Riverside ed., “Why, even in that was heaven ordinant” (Hamlet, 5.2.48). 40 On Heidegger’s treatment of Dasein’s ecstatic involvement in the world, see “Dasein’s Being as care,” Being and Time, div. 1, pt. 6, sec. 41. NF uses the term “ecstatic” in Heidegger’s sense of “care,” the relation that Dasein, or human being, has with itself. Dasein “is always ahead of itself in its being,” and it is “ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-in-a-world” (Being and Time, 236). See also WP: “The type of identification we have been calling existential metaphor may also be called, following Heidegger, ‘ecstatic.’ The word ecstatic means, approximately, standing outside oneself: a state in which the real self, whatever reality is and whatever the self is in this context, enters a different order of things from that of the now dispossessed ego” (82/83). 41 “I have always felt that I have never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness—of universal human weakness—than the last great speech of Othello. . . . What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself.” T.S. Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” in Selected Essays, 130. 42 In the Riverside ed., “because they then less need one another” (Coriolanus, 4.5.231–2). See also p. 89. 43 “Many times hee fell into those things, could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him; Caesar, thou dost me wrong. Hee replyed: Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause: and such like; which were ridiculous.” Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter, Herford and Simpson, 8:584. See also T.S. Dorsch’s Arden introduction to Julius Caesar, ix. 44 See Plato’s Republic, 592b—one of NF’s favourite topoi: see, e.g., M&B, 369, where NF says of Socrates: “His superb and brilliant performance is, in the broadest sense, a comedy: this is the comic vision of human life, where we are led up to, and by implication inspired by, a glimpse of a community in which everyone lives happily ever after, even if we do not leave the theatre in exactly the same condition.” See also NFR, 294, where NF aligns Socrates’ view of the wise man with the Sermon on the Mount and with Camus’s view of Sisyphus as a happy man. 45 See AC, 38/36, 210/196. On the treatment of hamartia as sin or moral flaw, see William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 39–45; and Gerald F. Else, Aristotle’s

Notes to pages 272–6

46 47 48

49

50

51 52

53 54

55 56

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Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 378–85. See Macbeth, 1.7.16–17: “this Duncan / Hath borne his faculties so meek.” In the Riverside ed., “you” rather than “ye.” According to the OED, a Van Dyke (more commonly “Vandyke”) could refer to a Cavalier fancy-dress costume, a broad collar with a deeply cut edge, or a short pointed beard—all features made famous by the seventeenthcentury court painter Anthony Van Dyck, who painted Charles I. Freud claimed that both totemism and taboo originate in Darwin’s “primal horde,” in which the primal father dominated the females and kept them for himself, warding off all his male offspring when they came to maturity. The male rivals ultimately united, killed and ate the father, then possessed the females for themselves, but subsequently suffered guilt and remorse, and renounced both their own murder of the father and their incestuous desire for the females. See Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), chap. 4, sec. 5, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 13:141–6. See also RT, 371–2. “The commons hath he pill’d with grievous taxes, / And quite lost their hearts; the nobles hath he fin’d / For ancient quarrels, and quite lost their hearts” (Richard II, 2.1.246–8). Hamlet, 1.2.139–40 and 3.4.56. See The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 21, on the “glorious Apollinian illusion” that “tears us out of the Dionysian universality and lets us find delight in individuals; it attaches our pity to them, and by means of them it satisfies our sense of beauty which longs for great and sublime forms” (128). The sense of beauty gained in the “Apollinian illusion” leads Nietzsche to make his famous assertion that “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified ” (sec. 5, p. 52; sec. 24, p. 141). See The Myth of Sisyphus, cited in n. 8. In the famous passage from Macbeth, the Doctor implicitly pays tribute to James I, through a reference to Edward the Confessor’s royal touch, which could heal “a crew of wretched souls” suffering from scrofula, or the King’s Evil (4.3.141–59). James I resembled his ancestor Edward in having adopted the custom of laying-on of hands. See NRL, 284. Enobarbus describes the gods as “the tailors of the earth,” as he comforts Antony on Fulvia’s death: “When it pleaseth their deities to take the wife of a man from him, it shows to man the tailors of the earth; comforting therein, that when old robes are worn out, there are members to make new” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.2.162–5). In NRL, NF writes, “Enobarbus’ phrase . . . would make a good Orc chapter title, or even a book title” (271).

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Notes to pages 277–88

57 The admirer is Henry III himself: “No envy, no disjunction, had dissolv’d / Or pluck’d out one stick of the golden faggot / In which the world of Saturn was compris’d, / Had all been held together with the nerves, / The genius and th’ingenuous soul of D’Ambois” (Bussy D’Ambois, 3.2.103–7). 58 NF probably alludes to Kastril’s speech, in Jonson’s The Alchemist, about the “angry boys” who “take tobacco” (3.4.21–5; Complete Plays, 3:295). 59 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy [or Hieronimo is Mad Again] (1592), in The First Part of Hieronimo and The Spanish Tragedy, Regents ed., ed. Andrew S. Cairncross (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 139. The lines appear at 3.12A.124–6, with the spelling “thorough and thorough.” Scene 12A in the Regents ed. designates what is known as the “Fourth Addition” from the Quarto of 1602, and merges this addition with the original authoritative text of 1592. Most other modern editions of the play place the 1602 additions in an Appendix. 60 See p. 112. 61 1 Henry IV, 1.2.14–15. 62 1 Henry IV, 1.2.197. 63 Richard II, 3.4.76: “a second fall of cursed man.” Henry echoes the phrase when he publicly denounces the betrayal of Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey as “Another fall of man” (Henry V, 2.2.142). 64 For references to France as the world’s “best garden,” see Henry V, Epilogue, l. 7; and 5.2.36. See 5.2.321–3, for the French King’s lines about “the cities turn’d into a maid; for they are all girdled with maiden walls that war hath [never] ent’red.” 65 For Fluellen’s comparison of “Harry Monmouth” to Alexander the Great, and of Falstaff to Alexander’s “best friend, Clytus,” see Henry V, 4.7.31– 53. 66 For an earlier version of NF’s analysis of Coriolanus in the next four paragraphs, see pp. 88–92. 67 See no. 10, nn. 17–18. 68 See no. 10, n. 26. 69 In Coriolanus, 1.1.96–160; Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.53–103; and Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.191–239, respectively. 70 On NF’s probable view of the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays, see no. 6, n. 13. 71 See pp. 125–6 and 222. 72 In the Riverside ed., “Titan’s [fiery] wheels.” The Second (and only “good”) Quarto of Romeo and Juliet (1599) gives a version of these lines twice, once at the end of 2.2, and again at the beginning of 2.3, where the lines appear as NF cites them, with one exception: the word “fiery” appears only in Quarto 1; Quartos 2–4 and the Folio print “burning” rather than “fiery.” 73 Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.83–124; and Henry V, 1.2.183–213.

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74 Henry V, 3.3.1–43; 4.3.18–67. 75 See act 5, scene 3 in Richard III: no doubt the two generals’ orations to their troops—Richmond’s (ll. 237–70), and Richard’s (ll. 314–41)—would seem like “harangues” to a pacifist like NF. 76 Julius Caesar, 3.2.217–18; Hamlet, 2.2.96. 77 In the Riverside ed., “what he should attend” (rather than “intend”). 78 Nietzsche observes that the vision of the dying god Dionysus, beheld by his servants the satyrs, is later transferred to the function of the chorus: “But while its attitude toward the god is wholly one of service, it is nevertheless the highest, namely the Dionysian, expression of nature and therefore pronounces in its rapture, as nature does, oracles and wise sayings: sharing his suffering it also shares something of his wisdom and proclaims the truth from the heart of the world” (Birth of Tragedy, 65 [sec. 8]). 79 Henry V, 4.1.141–2. 80 See Richard II, 5.6.38–44. 81 For Jack Cade’s rebellion and punishment, see 2 Henry VI. 82 Samuel Johnson comments on Henry’s declaration “Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own”: “This is a very just distinction, and the whole argument is well followed, and properly concluded.” Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Sherbo, 2:552. 83 The phrase “gaya scienza” is famously used in the title of Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenshaft (la gaya scienza): see especially bk. 4, sec. 327. Translated by Kaufmann as The Gay Science in the now standard English edition of Nietzsche’s book, the term derives from “gai saber, a Provençal name for the art of poetry” (OED). NF uses the common translation of gaya scienza as “joyful knowledge” in NFR, 361; and as “joyful wisdom” in LN, 234, where gaya scienza describes NF’s own “approach to faith.” 84 As the OED records, the term “stella maris” (literally, star of the sea) is “A title given to the Virgin Mary . . . , used allusively of a protectress or guiding spirit.” 85 For the “Herod of Jewry” references in Antony and Cleopatra, see, e.g., 1.2.28– 9; 3.3.3; 3.6.73. 86 In the Riverside ed., “Whom every thing becomes.” 87 NF takes the first phrase in the title from King Lear, where the Gentleman describes how Lear on the heath “Strives in his little world of man to outscorn / The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain” (3.1.10–11). 88 William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–20?), pl. 37, l. 30 (Erdman, 183). Almost two decades earlier, in FS, NF had cited this line and the one before it from Jerusalem to make the point that “Blake’s complete vision is a divine comedy” (FS, 304/300). The most profound kind of tragedy, NF writes, “leads to a resurrection of the imagination in the spectators, or, as in Aristotle, a purging of the spirit. Without the feeling of an

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90 91

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93 94 95 96

97 98 99

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Notes to pages 299–301 implicit commedia or triumph of life out of death, tragedy is a mere adoration of fate, a death-worship of the sort Blake attacks in Jerusalem.” John Reynolds, The Triumphs of Gods Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Wilfull and Premeditated Murther (1621), described in the Revels ed. of The Changeling as “a collection of thirty ‘Tragicall Histories’ divided into six books” (ed. N.W. Bawcutt [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958]), xxxi. The fourth story in bk. 1 provided the principal source for The Changeling (1653). Though NF attributes this play to Thomas Middleton alone, it is generally regarded to have been written in collaboration between Middleton and William Rowley, as specified on the title page of the 1653 quarto. The character is Richardetto, a “supposed physician,” in John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 4.2.7–11. Cyril Tourneur wrote The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611); and has generally been attributed as the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607 [variant date 1608]), although that play was printed anonymously, and has also been attributed (with less evidence) to Thomas Middleton. “Here I behold his inmost Heart / Where Grace and Vengeance strangely joyn / Piercing his Son with sharpest smart / To make the purchas’d Pleasures mine.” Stanza 4 of Isaac Watts, Christ Crucify’d; The Wisdom and Power of God, in Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707–1748): A Study in Early Eighteenth-Century Language Changes, ed. Selma L. Bishop (London: Faith Press, 1962), 357. “It is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19–21); Paul refers to Deuteronomy 32:35. Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, 3.13.1: “Vindicta mihi!” NF presumably means Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1604–16). Tirso de Molina (Fray Gabriel Téllez), El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedras [The Trickster of Seville and His Guest of Stone] (1630), trans. Roy Campbell, in The Classic Theatre, vol. 3: Six Spanish Plays, ed. Eric Bentley (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 233–314. NF may be thinking of Andromache’s speech on the desirability of death, in Euripides’ Troiades (The Trojan Women), ll. 634–83. See, e.g., Homer, Iliad, bk. 1, ll. 4–5 (Loeb ed., 1:3). Dekker his Dreame (1620), in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 8. NF’s citation modernizes the spelling. Dante, Inferno, canto 34, ll. 28–69. See Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955; orig. pub. 1950). See also NRL, 256, where NF adds, “all the forms of society are rules of games. . . . There is the ritual game of data, of social & religious conventional action & belief that we have

Notes to pages 301–11

102 103

104

105

106 107

108

109 110 111

112 113

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to pretend to accept at least, & there is the game of facta, of what one can choose & do for oneself. In tragedy data & facta usually collide.” For Falstaff’s speeches on honour and counterfeits, respectively, see, e.g., 1 Henry IV, 5.1.129–41 and 5.4.113–29. “Brutus, thou saint of the avenger’s order; / Refresh me with thy spirit, or pour in / Thy whole great ghost.” Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death’s JestBook: The 1829 Text, ed. Michael Bradshaw (New York: Routledge, 2003). 1.1.186–8. In SR, 51–85 (ENC, 125–50), NF devotes a chapter (“Yorick: The Romantic Macabre”) to Beddoes, and calls the five-act play Death’s Jest-Book “this gorgeous plum-pudding of a poem, filled to bursting with heady lines and breathtaking images” (52; ENC, 126). NF may be citing the couplet as proverbial. It originated in John Harington, Epigrams, 1618, bk. 4, no. 5: “Of Treason”: “Treason doth neuer prosper, what’s the reason? / For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.” See 1 Henry IV, 1.2.217. Prince Hal echoes Ephesians 5:15–16: “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” In the Riverside ed., “mortal” rather than “Mortal” (l. 66); and “the state of a man” rather than “the state of man” (l. 67). Seneca, Thyestes, ll. 280–1: “tam diu cur innocens versatur Atreus?” Translated as “Why does Atreus so long live harmless?” by Frank Justus Miller in the Loeb ed., 2:114–15. In the King James Version, the verse reads: “That thou doest, do quickly” (John 13:27). NF’s citation matches Young’s Literal Translation of the Bible (1898); the American Standard ed. of the Bible has “doest” rather than “dost.” Perhaps NF is recalling the line from Sir Walter Scott, who cites it in several novels, including The Talisman, chap. 25; Kenilworth, chap. 37. See also TBN, 47. In the Riverside, “incestious” rather than “incestuous.” See Julius Caesar, 5.5.68; and Macbeth, 5.9.35. NF’s spelling “Vendice” is a less common variant not used in most modern editions of The Revenger’s Tragedy. The Revels ed. adopts the Quarto spelling “Vindice.” Richard speaks these words not as Richard III but as Duke of Gloucester in 3 Henry VI, 5.6.83. See, e.g., Alfred W. Pollard, who sees George Peele’s hand in the “Joan of Arc libels” in 1 Henry VI (Introduction to Henry VI and Richard III, by Peter Alexander [New York: Octagon, 1973; orig. pub. 1929], 24). See, e.g., Julius Caesar, 2.1.44: “exhalations” are meteors. As T.S. Dorsch notes in the Arden ed., it was believed that meteors were produced when the sun drew up the vapours (exhalations) of the earth. Richard III, 4.4.219.

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Notes to pages 312–19

116 Richard asks, “What is’t a’ clock?” (5.3.47); Richmond echoes the question (5.3.234); and Richard contends with the uncanny striking of the clock as he arms for battle (5.3.276). 117 In the Riverside ed.: “strook.” 118 “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, trans. O’Brien, 123). 119 The references are to Macbeth, 5.5.26–7; Hamlet, 3.1.55; and King Lear, 4.1.36–7, respectively. 120 See n. 41, above. 121 In the commedia dell’arte, Pantalone, or Pantaloon, a traditional character named after a Venetian saint, was “a rich retired Venetian merchant with baggy pants, a pointed beard, and a young wife or bumptious daughter” (Harper Handbook to Literature, 113). 122 See Iago’s words to Othello in 3.3.403; and Othello’s echo in 4.1.263. 123 NF may have neglected to capitalize the first letter of “spectres.” See FS: “Abstract ideas are called spectres by Blake, and Spectre with a capital letter is the Selfhood. The corresponding term is ‘Emanation,’ which means the total form of all the things a man loves and creates. In the fallen states the Emanation is conceived as outside, and hence it becomes the source of a continuously tantalizing and elusive torment. In imaginative states it is united with and emanates from the man, hence its name” (73/78). 124 In the Riverside ed., “[Hysterica] passio.” “Hysterica” is a later editorial emendation printed in Folio 4 (1685); the First Folio, as well as Quartos 1 and 2, print “Historica.” 125 In the Riverside ed., “todpole.” 126 In the Riverside ed., “[stock-]punish’d.” The Quartos print “stockpunish’d,” the First Folio “stockt, punish’d.” 127 In the Riverside ed., NF’s single line is split in three: Hamlet says, “The King is a thing—”; Guildenstern asks, “A thing, my lord?” to which Hamlet replies, “Of nothing. . . .” 128 King Lear, 4.6.118. 129 “Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. . . . the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions.” T.S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood, 101–2. 130 That is, savage indignation, especially at human folly—a phrase memorably used (as the OED records) by Jonathan Swift in his epitaph: “Hic depositum est corpus Jonathan Swift. . . . Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” (famously translated by Yeats, in Swift’s Epitaph: “Swift

Notes to pages 319–24

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132 133

134 135 136 137 138 139

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has sailed into his rest; / Savage indignation there / Cannot lacerate his breast”). [The shadow of] “him who from cowardice made the great refusal.” Dante, Inferno, canto 3, l. 60, in The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, ed. H. Oelsner, trans. John Carlyle Aitken (London: Dent, 1962; orig. pub. 1900), 31. This ed. in NFL. See, e.g., Timon of Athens, 1.1.274–5; 1.2.122–3; 5.1.58. After “in one man’s blood,” NF has omitted the following lines: “and all the madness is, he cheers them up too. / I wonder men dare trust themselves with men. / Methinks they should invite them without knives: / Good for their meat, and safer for their lives. / There’s much example for’t.” Romeo and Juliet, 3.1.197. See no. 10, n. 22. In the Riverside ed.: “vild.” The Riverside ed. adds “the” before “lawful sheets,” as in both Quarto 1 and the First Folio ed. of the play. See, e.g., G. Wilson Knight’s chapter “The Lear Universe,” in The Wheel of Fire, 194–226. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard contrasts the aesthetic and the ethical: aesthetic experience seeks subjective pleasure in order to avoid boredom, but this individual inwardness struggles in a dialectical way with the commitments and ethical obligations of external existence. Ethical freedom, for Kierkegaard, does not mean merely doing one’s duty by following the universal of moral law, for the “single individual is higher than the universal” (Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric, trans. Walter Lowrie [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1945; orig. pub. 1941], 55; annotated copy in NFL). NF invokes Kierkegaard to suggest that melodrama not only externalizes our moral choices by putting them on stage, but also gives us pleasure by giving us what we desire morally. Kierkegaard claims that when we obtain aesthetic pleasure we may avoid participating in a moral dilemma. Truth is subjective, for Kierkegaard, and hence requires us to make our own singular moral decision rather than simply following external realities such as the universal moral law. What NF regards as “perverted” is Kierkegaard’s separation of the aesthetic and the ethical: “I think Kierkegaard understood the conception of imaginative literalism very well, but his ‘either-or’ dialectic contrasts the aesthetic and the ethical. Well, in many contexts they are a contrast. But he never got through to the final insight: the ethical is the aesthetic transformed. Ethical is kerygmatic in my context” (LN, 251). See Tourneur, Atheist’s Tragedy, 2.4.139 s.d. and following. See Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), pt. 3, sec. 13, entitled “The Convalescent,” where

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Notes to pages 325–30 Zarathustra becomes heroic when he passes through a phase of nausea, produced by an awareness of the endless recurrence of nature, and finally assents to his role as “the teacher of the eternal recurrence” (220), becoming “pregnant with lightning bolts that say Yes and laugh Yes” (228). See also The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 24, where Nietzsche states: “That striving for the infinite, the wing-beat of longing that accompanies the highest delight in clearly perceived reality, reminds us that in both states we must recognize a Dionysian phenomenon: again and again it reveals to us the playful construction and destruction of the individual world as the overflow of a primordial delight. Thus the dark Heraclitus compares the world-building force to a playing child that places stones here and there and builds sand hills only to overthrow them again” (141–2). NF calls Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” “not just a hideous but really obsessive idea,” in NR, 298, 299; and says it “is the same thing as the Christian orthodox doctrine of hell” (LN, 361, 363; see also 388). John Keats, On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again, ll. 12–14. See Frazer, GB, especially vol. 4, The Dying God. The book is NP, no. 13 in this volume. See pp. 196 and 225. 17. General Editor’s Introduction to Shakespeare Series

1 Robert D. Denham points out that NF, though serving as general editor for a dozen additional titles in the College Classics series, provides a General Editor’s Introduction only for the Shakespeare volumes; see Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), entry B13. 2 On the conjectural birthdate of Shakespeare, including the evidence that he died in his fifty-third year, see Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:1–2. 3 On the story of Shakespeare’s stealing of deer from Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, see Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:18–21, and 2:257. See also Stephen Greenblatt’s helpful reassessment in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), 149–56. 4 See no. 14, n. 17. 5 See p. 466. 6 See p. 132. 7 Several handbooks on Shakespeare’s biography, along with Chambers’s William Shakespeare, are listed in the General Bibliography at the end of the Shakespeare Series volumes. 8 A chronology of the plays, giving their “most likely” dates, is included in the Historical and Biographical Data following NF’s introduction to the Shakespeare Series volumes, xiii–xviii. This chronology basically matches

Notes to pages 330–34

9 10 11

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that of Chambers (William Shakespeare, 1:270–1), with three exceptions: Titus Andronicus (which Chambers places after, not before, Richard III); The Merry Wives of Windsor (which Chambers places two or three years later, in 1600–1); and Two Noble Kinsmen, not recognized in the chronology of NF’s Shakespeare Series volume, but placed by Chambers at the end of the list, in 1612–13. In this speech of King Ferdinand of Navarre to the Princess of France, the Riverside ed. has “within my gates” rather than “in my gates.” See p. 228. See Munro’s introduction to Sir Thomas More in the London Shakespeare, 4:1255–60. Sir W.W. Greg, The Book of Sir Thomas More (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), identified seven different hands in the play: the principal author or scribe responsible for the original fair copy; five writers responsible for additions to the play; and the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, whom NF refers to as the “censor” recommending omissions of the play’s supposedly volatile political material. Munro concludes that Shakespeare’s hand is most probably Hand D (which supplied Addition II, a new version of scene 6). Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:499–515, argues that Addition III by Hand C belongs to Shakespeare as well. See also p. 464. “To the Great Variety of Readers,” by Iohn Heminge and Henrie Condell, from the First Folio (1623); rpt. with modernized spelling in the London Shakespeare, 1:lxxxix. 18. Shakespeare’s The Tempest

1 NF “was asked by a flamboyant Vicenza native, Francesca Valente, a cotranslator of the Italian Fearful Symmetry, who was then based at the nearby Italian Cultural Institute, to come to Italy to lecture in the major universities” (Ayre, 368). As part of this Italian lecture series, NF also gave his talk “Il Cortegiano,” later translated and published by Valente and Alfredo Rizzardi: see no. 19. According to William French, NF’s visit was sponsored by the Canadian Embassy in Rome, and “Frye was impressed that the Canadian ambassador in Rome, D’Iberville Fortier . . . came to his lecture on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” French also reported, “Frye gave lectures in English—‘I spoke very slowly’—but the audience was supplied with a translation. However, he sensed that few of his listeners consulted the translations as most were able to follow him. In Vicenza he spoke on The Tempest to a group of high-school students and was impressed not only with their knowledge of English but of Shakespeare” (Globe and Mail, 14 June 1979, 15). 2 See pp. 20–2. 3 See p. 73. 4 On Shakespeare’s romances as a “letdown,” see, e.g., Dowden’s Shakspere:

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11 12 13 14

Notes to pages 335–7

A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, 3rd ed., 337–8, 358 ff.; and Lytton Strachey’s assessment in Books and Characters, 48–64. NF’s view of the romances as the “culmination of Shakespeare’s dramatic achievement” is the central thesis of NP: see pp. 128 and 132–3. On Mucedorus and the two figures of Comedy and Envy, see p. 378. The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1589), ll. 97–198: see John Isaac Owen, ed. (New York: Garland, 1979), 217–23. The play has been assigned to Thomas Kyd but is of uncertain authorship: see Owen, 40–80; Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:28. See also p. 378. See no. 13, n. 81. See Wilhelm’s joyful discovery of the “mighty secrets” of the puppet theatre, and the amusement of the other children who are watching him, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, trans. Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman & Hall, 1874), 1:13–14 (bk. 1, chap. 6). The discussion of Measure for Measure that follows anticipates NF’s discussion in no. 20, pp. 374–8. Aristotle defines “peripety” (peripeteia) in Poetics, 1452a (chap. 11, ll. 22–4): “A Peripety is the change of the kind described from one state of things within the play to its opposite, and that too in the way we are saying, in the probable or necessary sequence of events. . . .” (Basic Works, trans. McKeon, 1465). See also pp. 362–4. See p. 115: the Riverside ed. has “met’st” rather than “mettest.” In the Riverside ed., “which aided” rather than “that aided”; NF cites the line as in the Riverside ed. on p. 120. See no. 22, n. 15. Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev (Stanislavski) (1863–1938) developed what he called the “system,” which is not however synonymous with the school of Method acting, as adapted by the New York Actor’s Studio led by Lee Strasberg: see David Magarshack, Stanislavsky on the Art of the Stage (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), Preface, 1–7. Stanislavsky’s “system” aims “to apply certain natural laws of acting for the purpose of bringing the actor’s subconscious powers of expression into play”; the core of the “system” consists of ten elements: “‘if,’ given circumstances, imagination, attention, relaxation of muscles, pieces and problems, truth and belief, emotional memory, communication and extraneous aids” (Magarshack, Introduction, 32). The Stanislavsky “system” does indeed aim to affect the audience with the organic process of the actor’s profound, embodied emotion rather than thrilling them with the actor’s mere technique, and Stanislavsky himself remarks that the best kind of actor seeks the “joy of finding one more organic quality so that it should pass, like a spear, through his own heart, and also pierce the hearts of those for whom his creative work is meant” (“The System and Methods of Creative Art,” chap. 27, trans. Magarshack, 237).

Notes to pages 338–44

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15 On the commedia dell’arte, see p. 444. 16 The analysis of The Tempest in this and the following two paragraphs echoes pp. 44–7 and 224–5. 17 T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, pt. 1, ll. 42–3: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” 18 See p. 47. 19 “We hope then to make it very evident, that the Master-piece of the Æneis, the famous sixth Book, is nothing else but a Description, and so designed by the Author, of his Hero’s Initiation into the Mysteries; and of one Part of the spectacles of the eleusinian. . . .” (Bishop William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated [1738], 2nd ed. [New York: Garland, 1978], 1:184 ff. [bk. 2, sec. 4]). Colin Still, in Shakespeare’s Mystery Play (see NF’s following sentence), cites Warburton: see pt. 1, chap. 1, p. 10; and pt. 1, chap. 2, “The Play and the Pagan Rites,” 15 ff. 20 See our Introduction, n. 62. 21 See p. 50. 22 Eliot remarks, “I do not think that Mr. Wilson Knight himself, or Mr. Colin Still in his interesting book on The Tempest called Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, has fallen into the error of presenting the work of Shakespeare as a series of mystical treatises in cryptogram, to be filed away once the cipher is read; poetry is poetry, and the surface is as marvellous as the core.” See his Introduction to G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire, xix. 23 “A very remarkable similarity does undoubtedly exist between the Play and the pagan rites . . . . mainly (though perhaps not wholly) due to some factor of inherent necessity” (Still, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, 83). 24 See no. 20, n. 37. 25 On the bardo, the state in between death and rebirth, see, e.g., NRL: “The Tibetan conception of Bardo, an archetypal dream achieved by the soul (or whatever it is) between death & rebirth,” is linked with The Tempest “because the island is an obvious Bardo, complete with demons of wrath, for the Court Party” (NRL, 115–16). 26 On the connection between Orpheus and Autolycus, see also p. 216. 27 Not from Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying,” but from “The Critic as Artist,” as NF acknowledges in NFR, 41 (CR, 11). See The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: W.H. Allen, 1970), 343 (pt. 1). 28 See p. 49. 29 See Dame Frances A. Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), chap. 4. See also The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, especially chap. 15, “Prospero: The Shakespearean Magus.” 30 See no. 6, n. 2.

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Notes to pages 344–7

31 See pp. 50–1. 32 The phrase “give it to his son” appears as “give it his son” in the Riverside ed., as cited with NF’s commentary on p. 424. 19. Il Cortegiano 1 The Everyman ed. notes that the first of the dialogues is set on the evening of 7 March 1507: see Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London: Dent, 1928), introduction by W.H.D. Rouse and critical notes by Drayton Henderson, 16n. 1. Annotated copy in NFL; hereafter cited as Everyman ed. 2 Castiglione had gone on a diplomatic mission to England, where he received for his lord, Duke Guidobaldo, the order of the Garter from Henry VII, but had returned to Urbino on 5 March (Everyman ed., 16n. 1). Unusual among Plato’s works, Phaedo consists not of actual dialogue “carried on in the presence of the reader,” but reported dialogue from Phaedo, which took place in prison before Socrates drank the fatal poison (Introduction to Phaedo, in Plato with an English Translation, Loeb ed., vol. 1, trans. Harold North Fowler [London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966], 195). 3 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. with an introduction by George Bull (Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1967; rev. 1976), 28–9. Annotated copy in NFL; hereafter cited as Bull. 4 Bull, 11. 5 For character sketches of Federico and Ottaviano Fregoso, see Bull, 25–6. 6 Bull, 27. 7 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton, illustrative material edited by Edgar de N. Mayhew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 1–2. Annotated copy in NFL. Hereafter cited as Singleton. All NF’s English quotations from Castiglione’s text are from this edition; the notes give the page number in Singleton, while NF’s parenthetical references in the text indicate the book and section number. 8 Though he might be said to have completed a draft of his Cortegiano by 1514, at that time Castiglione began a series of redactions of the text, completing the first redaction with a dedication to Francis I, king of France, in 1515; a “definitive” version of the second redaction in 1520–21; and a third redaction in 1524. See Guido La Rocca’s chronology, as adapted in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, ed. Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), xxi–xxiii; and Cecil H. Clough, “Francis I and the Courtiers of Castiglione’s Courtier,” European Studies Review, 8, no.1 (1978): 24. 9 Singleton, 3. Q: “far parer per arte di prospettiva quello che non è.” NF’s

Notes to page 348

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11

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13

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quotations appear to have been taken from Il Cortegiano, ed. Vittorio Cian, 2nd ed. (Florence: Sansoni, 1916), which differs in minor details from most modern eds. See the frontispiece in Roy Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967). As Strong records, Hans Holbein the Younger’s original masterpiece of Henry VIII had hung in the Privy Chamber of Whitehall, but much of it was destroyed by the fire that swept through the palace on 4 January 1698. What we know of the portrait survives only in Holbein’s original drawing, the Chatsworth Cartoon for the Privy Chamber wall painting, which is in the National Portrait Gallery; and in imitations of Holbein’s original painting, including two copies by Remigius van Leemput. For Anthony Van Dyck’s portraits of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, see Roy Strong, Van Dyck: Charles I on Horseback (New York: Viking, 1972), especially no. 5 (Charles I on Horseback, ca. 1635), no. 7 (Charles, Henrietta, and their two children), no. 11 (Triple Portrait of Charles I, 1636), and no. 32 (Queen Henrietta Maria, ca. 1632). Raphael’s portraits of Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena (ca. 1515) and Emilia Pia are reproduced in Singleton as figs. 12 and 8, respectively. For The Portrait of Baldessare Castiglione attributed to Raphael (ca. 1515–16), and now in the Louvre, see pl. 138, in Adolf Paul Oppé, Raphael (London: Methuen, 1909). Monseigneur d’Angoulême, who in 1515 became Francis I of France, is celebrated as a glorious patron of letters in the Courtier (Singleton, 67–8; 322). Castiglione had dedicated the first redaction of his book to Francis I (see n. 8, above; and Clough, “Francis I,” 25–6). When he heard of Castiglione’s death, the Emperor Charles V remarked, “‘Yo vos digo que es muerto uno de los mejores caballeros del mundo’—‘I tell you, one of the finest gentlemen in the world is dead’” (Bull, 9). See Sir Walter Raleigh’s introduction to Hoby’s translation of The Book of the Courtier (London: David Nutt, 1900), lxxviii–lxxxv. Gabriel Harvey extravagantly praised Sir Philip Sidney as the living representative of the perfect courtier as depicted by Castiglione: see bk. 4 of Harvey’s Gratulationum Valdensium Libri quatuour (1578), in The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: AMS, 1966), 1:xxxvii–xxxviii; xli–xlii. See also Bull, 13. The Prince was written in 1513, though not published until 1532. Before the death of Machiavelli in 1527, the work was known as On Principalities. See NF’s lecture at Columbia University, “Criticism in Education,” for an echo of this sentence, as NF reflects on having given this talk some months earlier, “in something of a dream state, in Urbino, the home town of Castiglione” (WE, 528).

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Notes to pages 349–51

17 Singleton, 7. Q: “mi contenterò aver errato con Platone, Senofonte e Marco Tullio, lassando il disputare del mondo intelligibile e delle Idee; tra le quali, sí come (secondo quella opinione) è la Idea della perfetta Repubblica, e del perfetto Re, e del perfetto Oratore, cosí è ancora quella del perfetto Cortegiano.” 18 See Bruni’s letter of 1403 to Niccolò Niccoli, in Leonardi Bruni Arretini Epistolarum libri VIII, ed. Lorenzo Mehus (Florence, 1741), 1:8, quoted in “The New Philosophy,” ed. and trans. James Hankins, in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 1987), 260. 19 For references to Cyropaedia, see the quotation for which the original Italian is given in n. 17, above; and 1.43.68–9: “Scipio Africanus, it is said, always kept in his hand the works of Xenophon, wherein, under the name of Cyrus, a perfect king is imagined.” 20 In translation Erasmus’s Institutio principis christiani is more well known as Education of a Christian Prince: see Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. A.H.T. Levi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 203–88. NF similarly uses the word “institute” to mean “education” in WE, 266: “the ideal of education is the institute of a Christian prince.” The date of Erasmus’s treatise (1516) is erroneously given as 1615 in MM. 21 The three characters in the Courtier who later received the red hat (the cardinal’s biretta) are Pietro Bembo, Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, and Federico Fregoso: see Bull, 24–5. 22 For the duke’s retiring to bed after supper, see Courtier, 1.4 (Singleton, 15). 23 Singleton, 27. Q: “Pur io estimo, in ogni cosa esser la sua perfezione, avvenga che nascosta.” 24 For Spenser’s preference for Xenophon, see Letter to Raleigh: “For this cause is Xenophon preferred before Plato, for that the one in the exquisite depth of his iudgement, formed a Commune welth such as it should be, but the other in the person of Cyrus and the Persians fashioned a gouernement such as might best be: So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule” (The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, 2001, 716). On Milton’s preference for Plato over Xenophon, see M&B, 42, where NF says that “we should expect him [Milton] to be of Spenser’s mind in this matter” because of Milton’s “impatience with Plato and with what he calls Plato’s ‘ayrie Burgomasters’” in Aeropagitica. Milton shows no preference, however, in his prefatory remarks in An Apology for Smectymnuus, but rather speaks of “the divine volumes of Plato, and his equal Xenophon.” 25 An earlier version of the following three sentences on More’s Utopia appears in “The Instruments of Mental Production” (the first essay of StS), in WE, 266. 26 For Hythloday’s call for the abolition of private property and his recom-

Notes to pages 351–4

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42

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mendation of Utopia, see Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams, ed. George M. Logan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 38–9. For More’s appeal to Hythloday to become a courtier who counsels the king, see Utopia, 13. Castiglione’s Courtier, 1.14; Singleton, 28. Castiglione first identifies the courtier’s “principal profession of chivalry” (1.12; Singleton, 25), and later says, “the principal and true profession of the Courtier must be that of arms” (1.17; Singleton, 32). See, e.g., Courtier, 1.21 and 1.27; Singleton, 38 and 45. See Courtier, 1.49–52 (Singleton, 77–82). Courtier, 1.44 (Singleton, 70). The lute, used to accompany singing, is called the “viola” in the Singleton translation, 2.13 (104–5). Courtier, 1.50–2 (Singleton, 78–82). Courtier, 3.4 (Singleton, 205); and 3.17 (Singleton, 218). On the relationship of the Tuscan dialect to what Castiglione calls “current usage,” see Courtier, Letter of Dedication, sec. 2 (Singleton, 3–6); and 1.29 (Singleton, 48–9). Singleton, 41. Q: “chi ha grazia, quello è grato.” The word “sprezzatura,” translated as “nonchalance,” appears in Italian in Singleton’s text (1.26.43). In AC, NF writes, “The ecstasy of creation and its response produce, on one level of creative effort, the hen’s cackle; on another, the quality that the Italian critics called sprezzatura and that Hoby’s translation of Castiglione calls ‘recklessness,’ the sense of buoyancy or release that accompanies perfect discipline, when we can no longer know the dancer from the dance” (93–4/86). The original Italian word “disinvoltura,” or “ease,” appears in Singleton’s translation (44). Singleton, 43. Q: “Però si po dir quella esser vera arte, che non appare esser arte; né piú in altro si ha da poner studio, che nel nasconderla .” Singleton, 38. Q: “e veggonsi i gentilomini nei spettaculi publici alla presenzia de’ popoli, di donne e di gran signori.” The phrase “conspicuous consumption” is the title of chap. 4 of Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Modern Library, 1934), 75. Annotated copy in NFL. See also WE, 82–3, 529. The elevation of appearance over reality is clearest in The Prince, chap. 18, when Machiavelli emphasizes the importance of keeping good faith by seeming to be “compassionate, faithful, humane, honest, religious”: “Thus it is not necessary for a prince actually to have all the above written qualities, but it is very necessary to seem to have them” (trans. William J. Connell [Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005], 95).

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Notes to pages 354–9

44 Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Connell, 88–9. 45 Singleton, 66. Q: “sempre temono essere dall’arte ingannati.” 46 Singleton, 101. Q: “perché sta troppo male e troppo è brutta cosa e for della dignità vedere un gentilomo vinto da un villano, e massimamente alla lotta.” 47 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1123b (bk. 4, sec. 3). 48 Singleton, 139. Q: “È adunque securissima cosa . . . governarsi sempre con una certa onesta mediocrità.” 49 Courtier, 2.55 (Singleton, 154–5). See also Samuel Lover, Handy Andy: A Tale of Irish Life (Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1923), 452. Handy Andy was first published in 1842, though NF gives a date of 1845. 50 Singleton, 196. Q: “un Cortegiano che mai non fu né forse po essere.” 51 Singleton, 213. Q: “ma il volerle dar cognizion di tutte le cose del mondo, ed attribuirle quelle virtú che cosí rare volte si son vedute negli omini, ancora nei seculi passati, è una cosa che né sopportare né appena ascoltar si po.” 52 Courtier, 3.14 (Singleton, 216). 53 Singleton, 217. Q: “Le meschine non desiderano l’esser omo per farsi piú perfette, ma per aver libertà, e fuggir quel dominio che gli omini si hanno vendicato sopra esse per sua propria autorità.” 54 Plutarch, “Bravery of Women” (Mulierum virtutes), as translated by Frank Cole Babbitt in the Loeb ed. of Plutarch’s Moralia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 3:471–81. 55 This proverbial phrase may be translated into English as “If youth only knew, if age only could.” 56 NF may be thinking of the following passage in bk. 4, sec.11, which gives the primary meaning of “vergogna” as “shame”: “Jove . . . sent Mercury to earth to bring them justice and shame” (Singleton, 295–6). 57 NF may have in mind Gilbert Murray’s discussion of “aidos” as “shame” and “sense of honour” in The Rise of the Greek Epic (New York: Galaxy, 1960), 83–90. 58 In the writing of his plays, particularly At the Hawk’s Well (1917) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939), Yeats borrowed structural elements from Japanese Noh drama. On Yeats’s use of the Courtier, see Corinna Salvadori, Yeats and Castiglione: Poet and Courtier (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1965). 59 Courtier, 4.47–8 (Singleton, 332–3). 60 For the endorsement of monarchy, along with the praise of Francis I of France, and Henry VIII of England, see Castiglione’s Courtier, 4.38 (Singleton, 322). 61 The well-known comparison of the prince to a lion and a fox appears in chap. 18 of Machiavelli’s The Prince (trans. Connell, 94). 62 On the Neoplatonic ladder of love, see Courtier, 4.54, 69 (Singleton, 339–40; 354–7).

Notes to pages 359–63

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Courtier, 4.51, 53 (Singleton, 336; 338–9). Courtier, 4.51 (Singleton, 336). Courtier, 4.53 (Singleton, 339). For the movement from contemplation to union, see 4.67–8 (Singleton, 352– 4). 67 Courtier, 4.72 (Singleton, 358). 63 64 65 66

20. The Myth of Deliverance 1 As noted in both the 1983 and 1993 eds. of MD, “The Tamblyn Lectures, devoted to the cultivation of the humane arts and sciences, were established by John and Helen Tamblyn in memory of their parents, Dr. and Mrs. W.F. Tamblyn and Dr. and Mrs. F.K. Hughes.” This lecture series at the University of Western Ontario is now defunct. 2 See no. 1, n. 24. 3 NF had addressed the problem play as “realistic” in NP: see pp. 135–6. 4 The action is “simple, when the change in the hero’s fortunes takes place without Peripety or Discovery; and complex, when it involves one or the other, or both.” “We assume that, for the finest form of Tragedy, the Plot must be not simple but complex.” Aristotle, Poetics, 1452a (chap. 10, ll. 15– 17), and 1453a (chap. 13, ll. 30–1), in Basic Works, trans. McKeon, 1465, 1466. 5 In the second Charles Eliot Norton Lecture given at Harvard University in 1975, NF had outlined the distinction between “the ‘hence’ narrative and the ‘and then’ narrative”: see SeS, 47–52 (SeSCT, 34–7). 6 NF clarifies the distinction in NR: “My and-then and hence narratives won’t quite do. And-then narrative is the under side of romance, romance as a sequence of sensational events, adventures, love affairs, quests. The top side is the design that pulls toward a successful conclusion, or, much more rarely, an unsuccessful one. ‘Hence’ narrative is characteristic of realistic fiction. In romance the plot must manipulate the characters; in realistic fiction the characters tend to become central, and the story examines what would happen given those characters, instead of just telling a story and getting the characters to fit into that” (207). 7 On the “gimmick,” see p. 31. 8 Aristotle uses the word metabasis, meaning “change of fortune,” to describe tragedy in general, whether the plot is simple or complex: see Poetics, 1452a (chap. 10, l. 16). NF may have in mind Aristotle’s discussion of a different kind of change or reversal: “A Discovery is, as the very word implies, a change from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either love or hate, in the personages marked for good or evil fortune. The finest form of Discovery is one attended by Peripeties” (1452a, ll. 30–2; trans. McKeon, 1465). Indeed, NF registers some uncertainty over the meaning of metabasis in his

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Notes to pages 364–70

discussion of the discontinuous form of romance: “It is this discontinuous sequence that is turned into a teleological plot of comedy by reversal (metabasis rather than peripeteia, I think, but must check)”: see NRL, 300. See the fragment of Anaximander reprinted in The Presocratics, ed. Philip Wheelwright (New York: Odyssey, 1966), 54, and Wheelwright’s discussion, 53–4. NF cites this fragment on several occasions, notably in DV (NFR, 202) and RT, 291, 534. In the first of the RT passages, NF notes “Heidegger’s interest in Anaximander [in The Anaximander Fragment] and his efforts to get behind the Socratic tradition to ‘think being’ again”; but NF resists Heidegger’s emphasis on the “‘forgetting of Being’ in the Platonic tradition.” NF writes, “Anaximander gives the formula of tragedy: to be born is hybris, to die is nemesis. Contemplating nothing in anguish is exactly what King Lear does, and Heidegger is wonderful for illuminating Lear”; however, at the same time NF registers his distance from “Those glumpy damn Germans, Heidegger and Nietzsche” (RT, 292). The quotation in the Riverside ed. reads: “That she is living, / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale.” See the first Larkin-Stuart lecture, delivered on 30 January 1980, reprinted as the first chapter of CR: “The main thesis of this essay is that man does not live directly and nakedly in nature like the animals, but within an envelope that he has constructed out of nature, the envelope usually called culture or civilization” (NFR, 37). NF goes on to use the metaphor in a 1985 essay: “Man cannot live directly in nature; without this envelope he is more vulnerable than a snail without its shell” (NFR, 352). NF calls the envelope “semitransparent” in “The Bridge of Language,” the keynote lecture he gave at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on 3 January 1981, NFMC, 315–29. This essay echoes the first chapter of MD at several points, indicated below. On the “myth of concern,” see CP, 36 ff. (CPCT, 23 ff.; and RT, 121–2, 125). In “The Bridge of Language,” NF traces this idea to Camus: “Camus’s novel The Plague (La Peste) is a brilliantly concentrated study of the way in which, in the face of a raging epidemic, all human concerns vanish into the two basic ones: survival and deliverance” (325). This is no doubt the sentence NF refers to in NRL, 297, when he notes that MD “develops from a sentence in my paper for the AAAS conference” (see n. 11, above). See also NRL, 308: “Myths of concern reduce to survival and emancipation, Martha and Mary [Luke 10:38–42]. How these are expressed in romance and comedy respectively. Sequential shape of romance; teleological shape of comedy, especially New Comedy.” Scholars now generally agree that Cao Xueqin, or Tsao Hseuh-chin (ca. 1717–63), wrote the eighty-chapter Story of the Stone (ca. 1760). The novel, also known by various titles including The Dream of the Red Chamber, was

Notes to pages 370–7

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18

19 20

21

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not published during Xueqin’s lifetime; Gao E subsequently edited it, added another forty chapters, and published it in 1791. NF’s Library contains annotated copies of the first three volumes (the original eighty chapters, each ending with the formula described by NF): see The Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five Volumes, trans. David Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973–80). The Penguin ed. describes the text both as “a sort of Chinese Remembrance of Things Past” (1:22) and as “the great novel of manners in Chinese literature” (back cover). See, e.g., the third and fourth chapters of NP (no. 13, pp. 172–225). Homer, Odyssey, bk 1, l. 35; Murray’s Loeb ed. translates hyper moron as “beyond that which is ordained” (1:5). “Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind.” Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare, in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Sherbo, 1:66. “Socrates was forcing them [Agathon and Aristophanes] to admit that the same man might be capable of writing both comedy and tragedy—that the tragic poet might be a comedian as well.” Plato, Symposium, 223d, trans. Jowett. See NRL, 308. The order of Calypso and Circe should perhaps be reversed here: Circe would be “first base,” since Odysseus meets and leaves her before washing up alone on the island of Calypso (who would then be “second base”); he remains with Calypso for seven years before moving on to meet Nausicaa. See NRL, 309, where NF says of Ulysses: “he’s the New Comedy eiron who turns out to be It, and the suitors show their true alazon colors.” Throughout his writings NF uses the Latin name Ulysses and the Greek name Odysseus interchangeably to refer to the hero of the Odyssey. See NRL, 308. See NP, 1–2 (pp. 129–30), which begins by framing the study of Shakespearean comedy and romance through an implicit comparison to the Odyssey: NF describes himself as an “Odyssean critic . . . attracted to comedy and romance.” See Aristotle, Politics, 1263a37–1263b (bk. 2, chap. 5) (Basic Works, trans. McKeon, 1151). In the Riverside: “Juliet.” In the Arabian Nights, Caliph Haroun al-Raschid often represents the motif of the disguised ruler, who dresses like a merchant and goes to town to spy on his subjects without fear of being recognized: see Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–58), 4:431 (item no. K1812.17): “King in disguise to spy out his kingdom.” For a Haroun tale,

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30

31

32

33 34 35 36 37

38

39

Notes to pages 378–88

see, e.g., “The Caliph’s Night Adventure,” in Tales from the Arabian Nights, trans. Richard F. Burton, ed. David Shumaker (New York: Gramercy Books, 1977), 692–4. Mucedorus, Induction.1–79, in Three Elizabethan Plays, ed. James Winny (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), 106–8. See p. 335. Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea) (1642) is an opera seria in three acts, from an Italian libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello that follows historical incidents in the life of Nero as described in the Annals of Tacitus. In the Prologue, Virtù and Fortuna debate which one of them is the more important goddess. Mucedorus (1598) was a very popular play, judging from its frequent reprinting during the early 1600s, and its revival in an expanded version in 1610– 11. Its authorship is uncertain: the late seventeenth-century ascription of the play to Shakespeare has generally been dropped, in favour of ascription to Greene, Peele, or Lodge. See Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:35–6. See, e.g., Matthew 7:1–2: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” NF is referring to the section on dianoia (in particular, the five different kinds of proofs or persuasions) in the pseudo-Aristotelian Tractatus Coislinianus, trans. in Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, 226, and treated in detail by Cooper, 269–81. See also AC, 166/154. This sentence echoes AC, 166/154–5. See George Bernard Shaw, Dramatic Opinions and Essays, with an Apology (London: Constable, 1907), 1:xxiii. Shaw has “Church” rather than “church.” “Righteous indignation” or “retribution” in ancient Greek. NF cites the first line of the Chorus’s closing sonnet in Samson Agonistes (l. 1745). Noh and kyogen are the traditional Japanese forms of drama, originating in the Muromachi period (1333–1573). Kyogen (meaning “mad words” or “wild speech”) is a comic form of unmasked drama designed to make the audience laugh: it developed alongside the formal, symbolic, and serious masked Noh drama, serving as comic interludes between Noh acts. See Arthur Waley, The N  Plays of Japan (Rutland, Vt.: C.E. Tuttle, 1976; rpt. of 1st ed. [London: Unwin, 1921]). Annotated copy in NFL. “You cannot have Liberty in this World without Moral Virtue, & you cannot have Moral Virtue without the Slavery of that half of the Human Race who hate Moral Virtue.” William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment, p. 92, in Erdman, 564. Stesichorus’s palinode on Helen does not survive, except in fragments cited in Plato’s Phaedrus, 243a–b. After writing a slanderous ode on Helen, for

Notes to pages 388–92

40 41 42 43 44 45

46

47

48 49

50

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which the gods punished him, Stesichorus then composed his famous palinode on Helen, as Socrates tells Phaedrus: “And I bethink me of an ancient purgation of mythological error which was devised, not by Homer, for he never had the wit to discover why he was blind, but by Stesichorus, who was a philosopher and knew the reason why; and therefore, when he lost his eyes, for that was the penalty which was inflicted upon him for reviling the lovely Helen, he at once purged himself. And the purgation was a recantation, which began thus,—‘False is that word of mine—the truth is that thou didst not embark in well-benched ships, nor ever go to the citadel of Troy;’ and when he had completed his poem, which is called ‘the recantation,’ immediately his sight returned to him” (trans. Jowett, 149). On Stesichorus’s palinode, see Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 90–117. See NF’s essay “Vision and Cosmos,” SeSCT, 226 and 309–10, for echoes of this sentence and the paragraphs that follow on courtly love. On the sublimation of Eros, see NF’s 1953 essay “The Survival of Eros in Poetry,” SeSCT, 255 ff. The three beasts are a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf: see Dante, Inferno, canto 1, ll. 31–129. See SeSCT, 226, 256. NF also includes Helen of Troy as one of Chaucer’s good women, “meaning women good by Eros’s standards” (SeSCT, 256). Throughout the Aeneid, Virgil refers to his hero with the epithet “Pius Aeneas.” The adjective “pius” epitomizes the Roman values of devotion to the gods, a sense of duty and social responsibility, honour, and patriotism. “Easy is the descent to Avernus: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recall thy steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this the toil!” Loeb ed., trans. Rushton Fairclough, 1:515. Freud, title page to The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965). Freud again cites Virgil’s line at the end of the book, rendered in the Strachey translation as: “If I cannot bend the High Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions” (647n. 1). On the significance of Virgil’s line for Freud, see Jean Starobinski, “Acheronta Movebo,” trans. Françoise Meltzer, Critical Inquiry, 13 (Winter 1987): 394–407. “If Heaven I can not bend, then Hell I will arouse!” in the Loeb ed. The Pax Romana (“Roman peace”) is a term used in Ancient History to describe “a state of relative peace maintained throughout large parts of the Roman Empire” from the beginning of Augustus’s reign in 27 B.C. to the death of Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 180; “During this period, individual provinces were allowed a degree of autonomy in making and administering laws, etc., while remaining under the overall control of Rome” (OED). Boccaccio’s Decameron, the ninth novel of the third day. As G.K. Hunter

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53

54 55 56

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points out in his Arden ed. (xxv), Shakespeare could have known the story through a number of intermediary sources, including the 1566, 1569, or 1575 ed. of William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, which bases its thirty-eighth novel on Boccaccio’s story. Painter’s version, “Giletta of Narbona,” is reprinted in the Appendix to the Arden ed. In Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Venus out of intense jealousy imposes three impossible tasks on Psyche, whom her son Cupid loves. Psyche must separate an enormous pile of seeds according to their individual varieties; obtain the golden fleece from vicious sheep; and collect in a bottle the water from Styx and Cocytus that flows from a cleft in the mountain and is guarded by impassable dragons. When Psyche accomplishes each task with the aid of kindly nature and supernatural forces, Venus commands her to bring back from Hades a bit of Persephone’s beauty in a box. Psyche does so, but succumbs to temptation when she opens the box to steal a bit of Persephone’s beauty. Though she is overcome by a deadly sleep, Cupid saves her and marries her, securing Jupiter’s blessing. Psyche is granted immortality and gives birth to Pleasure (Voluptas) (4.28–6.24). See p. 167, where NF says that All’s Well involves “the mythical problem of how Helena, like her ancestress Psyche, is going to solve her three impossible tasks.” In Painter’s story, burning is the specific torture that the heroine offers to endure: Giletta says to the king, “if I do not heale you within these eight dayes, let me be burnt” (Arden ed., Appendix, 147). In discussing the miracle of the king’s healing with Parolles, Lafew says, “your dolphin is not lustier” (2.3.26). When the king enters, dancing with Helena, Lafew similarly calls him “Lustick, as the Dutchman says” (l. 41). For representative critics, see Hunter’s note in the Arden introduction, xli; and John Munro’s note in the London Shakespeare, 2:878. See Poe, “Three Sundays in a Week,” in Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Modern, 1938), 730–5. Annotated copy in NFL. NF gives the early alternative title in translation for Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873): see, e.g., Round the World in Eighty Days, trans. Henry Frith, Every Boy’s Library ed. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1879). Jules Verne himself acknowledged that Around the World in Eighty Days was indebted to Poe’s “Three Sundays in a Week” for the idea of gaining a day: see Henri Potez, “Edgar Poe et Jules Verne,” La Revue, 15 mai 1909 (10), 22e ann., 80:194–5; and Célestin Pierre Cambiaire, The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France (New York: G.E. Stechert, 1927), 252. See NRL, 301. “In Shakespear’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. . . . No doubt Nature, with very young creatures, may save the woman the trouble of scheming: Prospero knows

Notes to pages 395–405

59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72

73

74 75

76

77

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that he has only to throw Ferdinand and Miranda together and they will mate like a pair of doves; and there is no need for Perdita to capture Florizel as the lady doctor in All’s Well That Ends Well (an early Ibsenite heroine) captures Bertram. But the mature cases all illustrate the Shakespearian law.” Shaw, Epistle Dedicatory to Arthur Bingham Walkley, in Man and Superman (Complete Plays with Prefaces, 3:496). In the Riverside ed., as in the Folio (the sole authoritative text): “I shall” rather than “I must.” “Lafew,” in the Riverside ed. As with “Lavache,” we have retained NF’s spelling, from the London Shakespeare, for its symbolic significance. In the Riverside ed., the line ends, “and be that [not what] he is?” By the “opposite direction” NF means heaven: “I am for the house with the narrow gate, which I take to be too little for pomp to enter. Some that humble themselves may” (4.5.50–2). See Matthew 7:13–14. See also the king’s words at 5.3.333. See p. 174. The First Soldier as Interpreter specifies death by beheading (not hanging). See Luke 1:52; NF has modernized “hath,” but otherwise the verse matches that in the King James version. See also RT, 509–10. In the Riverside ed.: “this wide gap of time.” T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, l. 67. See NFR, 50. See, e.g., Kermode’s Arden ed. of The Tempest, xxxiv n. 2. See also SE, 181 and 496n. 27, where NF cites Still, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, as he does on p. 341 in the present volume. See no. 6, n. 2. See Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde; relevant excerpts are reprinted in Appendix V of the Arden ed. of Troilus and Cressida. See Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1139), which the Spenser Encyclopedia calls “the first coherent account of what has traditionally been called the Matter of Britain” (329). The Epistle, from the second issue of the Quarto of 1609, is reprinted in the Appendix to Troilus and Cressida in the London Shakespeare, 5:718, and in the Textual Notes to the play in the Riverside ed. See the Introduction to Troilus and Cressida in the London Shakespeare, 5:574. Euripides’ Helena [Helen] performed in 412 B.C., takes as its starting point Stesichorus’s story of Helen: see n. 39, above. At the beginning of the play, Helen relates that Hera gave Paris a phantom as a substitute for the real Helen, who has lived in Egypt waiting for her husband Menelaus. “Le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche,” or “the knight without fear or reproach,” is originally the motto of the exemplary war hero Lord Bayard (1476–1524), France’s most famous knight. See p. 269. On Heidegger’s “thrownness,” see NFR, 38.

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86 87 88

89 90

91

92

93

Notes to pages 407–17

Bhagavadgita, chap. 1, vv. 28–46, in Hindu Scriptures, ed. Macnicol, 227–8. See no. 16, n. 13. See 1 Henry IV, 5.1.127–41. See no. 16, n. 118. On Ulysses’ two speeches, see also p. 154. Falstaff’s line, which NF cites on p. 281, in the Riverside ed. includes the word “soon”: “I shall be sent for soon at night.” See this quotation in the context of NF’s expanded discussion of Antony and Cleopatra as a “tragedy of passion,” pp. 294–6. “Released from its body, now ice-cold, the angry spirit which, among the living, had been so proud and insolent, fled cursing down to the dismal shores of Acheron.” Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, canto 46, stanza 140, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 573. Compare Virgil’s “But the other’s limbs grew slack and chill, and with a moan life passed indignant to the Shades below.” Aeneid, bk. 12, ll. 951–2, trans. Fairclough, 365. On NF’s concept of the “green world,” see pp. 9 ff., and 214–15. See Measure for Measure, 2.2.48. “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” T.S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood, 100. For Eliot, the problem with Hamlet is that Shakespeare did not provide an “objective correlative” for the excessive emotion: see NF’s comment on p. 319. See no. 22, n. 15. The Walrus and the Carpenter appears in Lewis Carroll, Through the LookingGlass, chap. 4; see The Annotated Alice, ed. Gardner, 233–6. In the first two stanzas of the poem, the sun shone mightily even though “it was / The middle of the night”; and the moon sulked “Because she thought the sun / Had got no business to be there / After the day was done.” For NF’s quotation of Hermia’s speech, see p. 495. See n. 51, above. See also NFR, 42: “in Apuleius’ story of The Golden Ass, the lovely fairy tale of Cupid and Psyche floats up like a soap bubble out of the sickening brutality of its context.” The phrase “Triple will” comes not from The White Goddess (see LN, 882n. 11), but from Graves’s poem To Juan at the Winter Solstice (l. 9), as NF notes in NFR, 59. Graves does use a similar phrase, “Triple Goddess,” in The White Goddess, 70 and passim. On the three phases of the white-goddess cycle, see no. 13, n. 116. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 3, l. 173.

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94 On the Edenic vision of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, see pp. 208–9. NF cites a relevant passage from the Fourth Eclogue in NFR, 315. 95 In CR, NF cites the phrase from The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Bergin and Fische (1968), sec. 331 (pp. 96–7): see NFR, 37. 96 See “The Realistic Oriole: A Study of Wallace Stevens,” in FI, 239 (TCL, 130). For Stevens’s concept of the “supreme fiction,” NF cites “the title of his longest poem”—Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1947; in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens [New York: Knopf, 1954], 380–408)—as well as a passage from The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination [New York: Knopf, 1951], 31. Annotated copies of both books are in NFL. 97 Chaucer, House of Fame, l. 732: see RT, 404 and 680n. 12. 98 See Matthew 6:12, Luke 11:4. 99 The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.99. 21. Something Rich and Strange 1 See Ariel’s song in The Tempest: “Full fadom five thy father lies, / Of his bones are coral made: / Those are pearls that were his eyes: / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange” (1.2.397–402). 2 Quoted in Press Release no. 21, dated 21 June 1982, Stratford Festival Canada (courtesy of Stratford Festival Archives). The 1982 series included six other talks open to the public (with general admission $5.00 each), and given on consecutive Sunday mornings, as follows: on 18 July, Hugh MacLennan; on 1 August, Samuel Schoenbaum; on 8 August, Arthur Miller; on 15 August, Sam Cohn; on 22 August, a panel consisting of Jean Gascon, Edward Gilbert, John Hirsch, and John Wood, and moderated by Don Harron; and on 29 August, Robertson Davies. 3 Cited in no. 13, n. 81. The play is The Faithful Shepherdess, which most scholars—like NF himself on p. 163—attribute to Fletcher alone: see Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 3:216–17, 221–2. See also p. 335. 4 See, e.g., Mucedorus and The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, which NF treats on pp. 162, 334–5, and 378. No. 20 in this volume (MD) echoes the current essay at numerous points. 5 See p. 440. 6 Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) wrote dramas for the classic Bunraku puppet theatre of Osaka, in which life-sized puppets are manipulated by three handlers while the narration and dialogue are spoken by a narrator to music. In 1981, NF had seen an adaptation (The Lover’s Exile) by Canadian filmmaker Marty Gross of one of Chikamatsu’s best-known works, The Courier to Hell; see the interview in INF, 536–45. 7 On Prospero as Shakespeare, see no. 6, n. 10.

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Notes to pages 430–40

See p. 37. NF expands on the two levels of nature in the Renaissance on pp. 419–20. In the Riverside ed., “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.” For echoes of this paragraph, see pp. 44–5 and 224. In the Riverside ed., “look how well my garments sit upon me, / Much feater than before.” Cf. SE, 33–4. See pp. 45–6. See no. 6, n. 3. See p. 46. See pp. 423 and 622. This paragraph echoes pp. 345 and 423–4. On the Virgilian echoes in The Tempest and the play as a form of Eleusinian initiation, see p. 341. See pp. 423–4. See p. 344, where NF cites the work of Frances Yates on the sixteenth-century “enthusiasm for magic.” On the contemporary pamphlets, see pp. 50–1. 22. The Stage Is All the World

1 A paraphrase or rough translation; a literal translation is “the whole world moves the actor.” However, NF’s translation as “all the world’s a stage” is common, being adopted, for example, by Agnes Latham in the Arden ed. of As You Like It (London: Methuen, 1975). Latham notes, “Curtius derives it [the motto] from John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, 1159, where it appears as quod fere totus mundus iuxta Petronium exerceat histrionem” (2.7.139n). See Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 139–41. Annotated copy in NFL. 2 The motto of the original Globe Theatre (built in 1599) was popularly taken to be Totus mundus agit histrionem (see previous note), following Edmond Malone’s suggestion in the Third Variorum Shakespeare (Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare [London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1821], 3:67). See Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2:434. Curtius traces the Globe motto to the Policraticus (in particular to the new edition of 1595), arguing that “the ‘exerceat’ of the latter is changed to ‘agit.’” Scholars now dispute whether the motto ever existed on the original Globe: see Gabriel Egan’s entry on the Globe Theatre in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Michael Dobson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3 See Curtius, 140–4. As Latham notes in the Arden As You Like It, T.W. Baldwin also gives some good examples in Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 1:652 ff.

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4 See Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858; London: Collins, n.d.), 51 (chap. 2). Annotated copy in NFL. The cited couplet forms part of the Prologue that the narrator says he wrote for a romantic comedy; the next couplet is also very much in NF’s spirit: “The outside world’s a blunder, that is clear; / The real world that Nature meant is here.” 5 On Yeats’s theory of the writer’s mask, see, for instance, A Vision, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1937), 73 ff.; and “The Death of Synge,” Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), 503–4. 6 Frederick S. Perls first used the terms “topdog” and “underdog” to help patients work through the unconscious manipulative strategies that lead to neuroses. See Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, ed. John O. Stevens (Moab, Utah: Real People Press, 1969): the topdog, corresponding to Freud’s superego, “usually is righteous and authoritarian; he knows best. . . . The topdog is a bully, and works with ‘You should’ and ‘You should not,’” whereas “The underdog manipulates with being defensive, apologetic, wheedling, playing the cry-baby, and such” (18). Perls’s Gestalt therapy prods patients to “bring about a reconciliation of these two fighting clowns” (19). 7 NF gives an expanded treatment of the four humours, deriving from the four “principles” and elements, in “Rencontre: The General Editor’s Introduction,” LS, 104–5. 8 Jonson, Every Man out of His Humour, 3.7.1–10, in Complete Plays, ed. Wilkes, 1:350–1. 9 By “his servants,” NF means Sordido’s (not Macbeth’s). See Every Man out of His Humour, 3.8.16–21, in Complete Plays, 1:353. 10 See no. 3, n. 24. 11 On Bergson’s Le Rire (Laughter), see no. 8, n. 14. 12 Archie Bunker, played by Carroll O’Connor, was the loud and bigoted protagonist of the popular television sitcom All in the Family (premiering in 1971) and its spin-off Archie Bunker’s Place (1979–83). 13 The Gardiner Museum, opened in 1984 by financier George R. Gardiner and his wife Helen as an exclusive showplace for ceramic art, is located at 111 Queen’s Park, next door to Victoria College’s Annesley Hall. 14 In the previous year, 1984, The Gondoliers was directed by Brian Macdonald, with music direction by Berthold Carrière, as part of the series of Gilbert and Sullivan operas that was begun at the Stratford Festival in 1981. In 1985, The Pirates of Penzance was the last in this series. The productions were filmed by camera director and producer Norman Campbell, shown on CBC television, and released on video by Home Vision (The Gondoliers in 1986). 15 In his plays, Bertolt Brecht developed what he called the alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt), a device whereby he provoked the spectator’s critical judgment by making strange the familiar world and continually reminding the audience that what they are watching is not reality. See Brecht’s defini-

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Notes to pages 448–55

tion of the Alienation Effect (V-Effekt) as “a technique of creating detachment,” in “A Short Organum for the Theatre 1948” [orig. pub. as “Kleines Organon für das Theater”], trans. John Willett, in Playwrights on Playwriting: The Meaning and Making of Modern Drama from Ibsen to Ionesco, ed. Toby Cole (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1960), 88. King Lear was being performed at the Stratford Festival as NF delivered this speech: the play ran from 20 May to 13 October 1985. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 26–7 (sec. 22). Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 342–67. Annotated copy in NFL. See Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts and Other Plays, trans. Peter Watts (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967), 45–52 (second half of act 1). “The night before I left Legnago forever, I went to see Him, and made a bargain with Him myself! I was a sober sixteen, filled with a desperate sense of right. I knelt before the God of Bargains, and I prayed through the mouldering plaster with all my soul. [He kneels.] ‘Signore, let me be a composer! Grant me sufficient fame to enjoy it. In return, I will live with virtue. I will strive to better the lot of my fellows. And I will honour You with much music all the days of my life!’” Paul Shaffer, Amadeus (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 8 (act 1, sc. 2). The popular nineteenth-century American writer Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832– 99) wrote over a hundred dime novels that used the formula of rags to riches (epitomized by the motto “Strive and Succeed”), showing how poor boys could achieve the American dream with hard work and determination. NF comments on his reading of Alger “at an early age” in WE, 154. As Kenneth Muir points out, after the Restoration Thomas Betterton’s performance in King Lear “used the text more or less as Shakespeare wrote it.” Once Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear appeared in 1681, this notorious adaptation did indeed hold the stage until the nineteenth century. See Muir’s introduction to the Arden ed. (London: Methuen, 1959), xliv. Robert Browning, Time’s Revenges, l. 65. See SE, 93. The Riverside ed. reads “bid.” See p. 354. 23. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare

1 See Introduction, n. 15. See also NF’s acceptance speech for the Governor General’s Award, no. 24 in this volume. 2 Some of NF’s lecture notes on Shakespeare in the NFF date back to 1979 (see headnote). NF did, however, teach Shakespeare in other courses before this date: see NFHK, 368n. 5, where Denham notes that NF’s 1934–35 teaching while a reader at Victoria College included Romeo and Juliet, 1 Henry IV,

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8 9 10

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Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra. See also the sporadic references in D: e.g., on 11 January 1949 (D, 75), NF comments on having “unloaded” his “English Institute paper” (“The Argument of Comedy,” no. 1 in this volume) to his students in the Religious Knowledge course; on 9 February 1949 (D, 120), he recounts his lecture on Titus Andronicus, in connection with Nashe; on 24 and 26 April 1952 (D, 582, 585), he complains about gaffes in first-year papers on Hamlet; and on 22 February 1955 (D, 609), he mentions the discussion on The Winter’s Tale in “the graduate group.” Denham helpfully outlines NF’s teaching schedule from 1939–40 (D, xxvii), including a considerable amount of teaching on Renaissance literature that would have afforded ample opportunity for incorporating Shakespeare into the discussion: besides helping to teach the year-long drama course led by Ned Pratt, NF taught undergraduate courses in Spenser and Milton, and a graduate course in Spenser. As well, prior to his teaching of a Shakespeare course in the late 1970s, NF had extensively lectured on Shakespeare in his Stratford talks (see Introduction, xxvi–xxvii, xxxii–xxxiii); his early academic papers; and the university lecture series that became NP and FT (nos. 13 and 16 in this volume). The course—English 212Y, “Shakespeare”—was described in the University of Toronto Calendar of 1980 as “Special study of not more than twelve plays by Shakespeare, including at least eight of the following: Romeo and Juliet; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Richard II; Henry IV, Parts I and II; Henry V; Twelfth Night; Measure for Measure; Hamlet; King Lear; Antony and Cleopatra; The Tempest.” Though the lecture for Twelfth Night survives in the NFF, separate chapters on this play and on Henry V are not included in NFS. To the plays listed in the course description, NF adds The Winter’s Tale. See no. 9, n. 4. See p. 151; and AC, 87/80. See A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.32 ff. See Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letter to Alexander Baillie, 14 January 1883, in A Hopkins Reader, ed. John Pick (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 177–8. Annotated copy in NFL. NF connects Hopkins’s “‘overthought,’ or explicit meaning, and his ‘underthought,’ or texture of images and metaphors,” to Sidney and Shakespeare in LS, 353–4. See also LN, 91, where NF links Hopkins’s overthought and underthought to “what Derrida’s deconstruction really is: the removal of the ideological surface from the palimpsest to get down to the mythological vision. Eliot’s burglar’s dog-meat image means the ideology often deceives the careless reader or listener, who doesn’t bother looking for the myth.” See pp. 409, 426, 609. See NF’s citation of Maurice Morgann’s influential eighteenth-century discussion of Falstaff, on p. 36; see also p. 153. Bradley argues that, for Shakespeare, “The centre of the tragedy . . . may be

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11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18

19 20

Notes to pages 460–3

said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing in action. . . . What we do feel strongly, as a tragedy advances to its close, is that the calamities and catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main source of these deeds is character” (Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth [London: Macmillan, 1904], 7–8). For Bradley’s contrasting of Shakespearean and Greek tragedy, with the latter’s emphasis on “justice and retribution,” see, e.g., Shakespearean Tragedy, 25n. 13. This paragraph echoes D, 120–1. It is actually Aaron who chops off Titus’s hand on stage (3.1.186–7, 191 s.d.). The text indicates (3.1.279–80) that Titus takes one head rather than two; his brother Marcus takes the other one. See p. 332. Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 78. NF cites the authors’ remark that children are fascinated by the multiple meanings of words in his 1963 speech “Elementary Education and Elemental Scholarship,” published in PMLA: see WE, 198. In the Riverside ed., “that ever I heard” (rather than “that I ever heard”). The burning of the Globe Theatre on 29 June 1613 is recorded most famously in Sir Henry Wotton’s letter to Sir Edmund Bacon, dated 2 July 1613; cited in no. 10, n. 7. This point is now generally contested by theatre historians, who have shown that women of all social classes attended both the public and private playhouses in Shakespeare’s day. See, e.g., Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; orig. pub. 1987), 58. NF is not alone in underestimating the presence of women, as Alfred Harbage discusses: “It is surprising, in view of the evidence to the contrary, how many authoritative works convey the impression that few women went to the Elizabethan public theatres” (Shakespeare’s Audience [New York: Columbia University Press, 1941; rpt. 1958], 74.) See, e.g., King Lear, 2.1.78 s.d.; 2.4.182 s.d. As David Bevington points out in his General Introduction to The Complete Works of Shakespeare (5th ed. [New York: Pearson Longman, 2004], xxv), Nicolas Copernicus’s heliocentric model was published abroad in De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). It was not until 1610 that Shakespeare’s contemporary Galileo Galilei confirmed Copernicus’s hypothesis by publishing telescopic examinations of the moon. However, the new Copernican theory had spread to England before this date, notably in Thomas Digges’s A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes according to the most aunciente doctrine of the Pythagoreans, latelye revived by Copernicus and by Geometricall Demonstrations approved (1576). Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Thomas Nashe, for example, in 1595 refers to Copernicus as the author “who held that the

Notes to pages 463–7

21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34

35

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Sun remains immoueable in the center of the World, and that the earth is moved about the Sun” (Nashe, Works, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 1904–1910; rpt. and ed. F.P. Wilson [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958], 3:94). See OED: “influence” in its astrological sense means “The supposed flowing or streaming from the stars or heavens of an etherial fluid acting upon the character and destiny of men, and affecting sublunary things generally.” The obsolete astrological meaning of “disaster” is, literally, “an obnoxious planet”: see OED, which cites Horatio’s same line from Hamlet. See no. 22, n. 7. See p. 332 and n. 11. Tilney’s remark appears in the margin of folio 3a: “Leaue out ye insurrection wholy & ye Cause ther off & begin wt Sr Tho: Moore att ye mayors sessions wt a reportt afterwardes off his good service don beinge Shriue off London vppon a mutiny Agaynst ye Lumbardes only by A shortt reportt & nott otherwise att your own perrilles E. Tyllney” (cited in Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:503; and London Shakespeare, 4:1256). See p. 504. See no. 11, n. 8. See no. 14, n. 26. The lord is Sir Henry Wotton: for his remark, see no. 10, n. 7. The poem entitled A Funerall Elegye on the Death of the famous Actor Richard Burbedg who dyed on Saturday in Lent the 13 of March 1618 exists in several versions, but the lines cited by NF are generally agreed upon: “No more young Hamlet, old Hieronymo / Kind Lear, the grieved Moore, and more beside, / That lived in him, have now for ever died” (ll. 3–5). See, e.g., Ivor Brown, Shakespeare and the Actors (London: Bodley Head, 1970), 77. The book with the misprint may be Robert Speaight’s Shakespeare on the Stage: An Illustrated History of Shakespearean Performance (London: Collins, 1973), 19. The reviewer has not been located. See no. 13, n. 13. See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:518–28; and the introduction to Pericles in the London Shakespeare, 2:1070–4. Two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors who apparently took on the task, after his death, of collecting his works for publication in the First Folio (1623). Their names are variously spelled, in the historical documents and among scholars: variants include “Heminge and Condell” and “Heminges and Condell.” The Shakespeare Apocrypha: Being a Collection of Fourteen Plays Which Have Been Ascribed to Shakespeare, ed. C.F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908; rpt. 1967). Annotated copy in NFL. For A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), see pp. 249–61. See also p. 229.

742

Notes to pages 467–72

36 See no. 22, n. 22. 37 NF appears to be speaking figuratively of the doubling of lovers’ roles in Davenant and Dryden’s adaptation The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island: A Comedy (1670; facsimile ed. London: Cornmarket, 1969), set to music as an opera by Henry Purcell (ca. 1695). To Shakespeare’s Ferdinand the text adds Hippolito, “one that never saw Woman,” and to Miranda it adds her sister Dorinda, who, like Miranda in Shakespeare’s play, “never saw man.” 38 Shaw writes of Irving’s performances in the 1890s, “Even in his Shakespearean impostures (for such they were) there were unforgettable moments”: see Preface to Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1931), xxii. 39 Edward Sharpham, The Fleire (1607), cited in the Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700, ed. John Munro (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 1:174: “Faith like Thisbe in the play, a has almost kild himselfe with the scabberd.” 40 The references are somewhat uncertain. Among its several performances of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Stratford Festival mounted a 1979 production drawing an analogy with the Bloomsbury circle in the early twentieth century; but since no bicycles are mentioned in reviews or the props list of this production, NF may be referring to a different performance (perhaps outdoor). As for Troilus and Cressida, the modern-dress production may be that of Michael Macowan in 1938 for the London Mask Company at London’s Westminster Theatre: see Troilus and Cressida, ed. Anthony B. Dawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47–8. It is likely that NF saw this performance, since he was in London at this time and, as he wrote to Helen Kemp in 1938, had heard that it “was a perfectly swell modern version of Troilus and Cressida” (NFHK, 2:789). 41 “Haymaker” is slang or colloquial for “A swinging blow” (OED). 42 NF does not follow the Riverside or the New Arden eds. here, which print the line as in Quartos 2–3 and the First Folio: “remember thy washing blow.” NF’s use of “swashing” comes from Quarto 4 and is adopted by several eds., such as the London Shakespeare (5:127); the Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. J.A. Bryant, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1964); and The Pelican Shakespeare, ed. John E. Hankins (New York: Penguin Books, rev. ed. 1970). NF appears to have used one of the last two eds. for the citations from Romeo and Juliet in this chapter, presumably because he was lecturing in 1979, a year before the New Arden ed. of Romeo and Juliet came out. 43 See Tybalt’s line at 3.1.45: “Mercutio, thou consortest with Romeo,” which Mercutio interrupts by mocking and repeating Tybalt’s word “consort.” Tybalt uses the word again just before he is slain by Romeo (3.1.130). 44 NF’s citation matches the London Shakespeare, 5:135. In the Riverside ed., “Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she.”

Notes to pages 473–83

743

45 The Riverside ed. prints “[a bout]” (as in Pope’s editorial emendation); and “Ah” rather than Quarto 1’s “Ah ha.” 46 On the courtly love tradition, see pp. 99 ff., 388–90. 47 Marlowe, Hero and Leander, First Sestiad, l. 176. For Shakespeare’s citation, see As You Like It, 3.5.82. 48 The Riverside ed. encloses “fire” in square brackets, as an editorial emendation: the Quarto and First Folio eds. of the play have “fier.” 49 See W.H. Auden, “Commentary on the Poetry and Tragedy of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” in the Laurel Shakespeare ed. of Romeo and Juliet, ed. Charles Jasper Sisson (New York: Dell, 1958), 21–39. See also Auden’s expanded discussion in his reconstructed lecture on Romeo and Juliet [6 November 1946], in Lectures on Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 44–52. Auden goes further than raising the question of Romeo’s damnation; he decisively declares that Shakespeare’s audience would have regarded Romeo as damned for having killed himself. See also NRL, 339. 50 The Legend of Cleopatra and The Legend of Thisbe are the first two stories in Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women. See also p. 390. 51 The word “sail” here follows Quarto 1, also adopted by the Riverside ed. (which places the word in square brackets). The Arden ed., by contrast, follows the Folio and Quartos 2–4 by printing “suit” rather than “sail.” 52 This passage appears in different versions in the Quarto and Folio eds. of the play. NF’s citation follows the Pelican ed. The Riverside and Arden eds. replace “I” with “ay” at the end of lines 45 and 49, and the Riverside ed. replaces “I” with “ay” again at the end of line 48. The last line in the Riverside ed. reads, “Or those eyes [shut], that makes thee answer ay.” The Riverside also uses square brackets with “death[-darting],” to indicate the textual variant (“death arting”) in Quarto 2. 53 See, e.g., Richard II, 2.1.73–83. 54 In the Riverside ed.: “O any thing, of nothing first [create]!” The square brackets indicate the variation between “create” in Quarto 1, and “created” in Quartos 1–4 and the First Folio. 55 The Riverside ed. follows Quarto 1: “the Capels [are] abroad” (“are” is a textual variant that does not appear in Quartos 2–3). NF’s citation, by contrast, follows the First Folio and Quarto 4. 56 See no. 13, n. 150. 57 A reference to Irving Thalberg’s 1936 MGM film production of Romeo and Juliet, which starred the middle-aged actors Leslie Howard, born in 1893, as Romeo; and Norma Shearer, born in 1902, as Juliet. In his letter postmarked 28 April 1937, NF describes this film production, which he saw in Brussels: “The female end sagged a bit—the Nurse wasn’t too good and Norma Shearer was a pretty elephantine Juliet. . . .” (NFHK, 2:742). 58 For the sources of Romeo and Juliet—including the reference in Dante’s

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59

60 61 62 63 64

65

66 67 68

69

70 71

Notes to pages 483–9

Purgatorio, 6.105—see the Arden ed., 32–7. Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562) is reprinted in Appendix II of the Arden ed. See Arden, 239–40: “And to this ende (good Reader) is this tragicall matter written, to describe unto thee a coople of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and advise of parents and frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instruments of unchastitie) attemptyng all adventures of peryll, for thattaynyng of their wished lust, usying auriculer confession (the kay of whoredome, and treason) for furtheraunce of theyr purpose, abusyng the honorable name of lawefull mariage, the cloke the shame of stolne contractes, finallye, by all meanes of unhonest lyfe, hastyng to most unhappye deathe.” See Brian Gibbons’s Arden introduction, 4–13. See no. 21, n. 6. NF appears to have substituted “still” (not a variant in any edition) for “yet.” See also RT, 575. See no. 16, n. 41. See also NRL, 338. The spectator was John Manningham, a student of law in the Middle Temple, who kept a book of memoranda known as Manningham’s Diary. See his entry on the Twelfth Night performance, dated February 1601, in The Diary of John Manningham, ed. Robert Parker Sorlien (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1976), 48: “At our feast wee had a play called ‘Twelve night, or what you will’; much like the commedy of errors, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni.” See also Lothian and Craik’s Arden ed., xxvi–xxvii. See 1 Corinthians 15:33. The line from Menander’s Thais is translated in the Loeb ed. as “Communion with the bad corrupts good character”: see Menander, The Principal Fragments, trans. Francis G. Allinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 357. See no. 1, n. 12. See p. 194. See Gioacchino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (Il Barbiere di Siviglia [1816]; libretto by Cesare Sterbini); and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro [1786]; libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte). These operas are based on the first and second play, respectively, in the Figaro trilogy by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais: Le Barbier de Séville (1773), Le Mariage de Figaro (1778), and La Mère coupable (1792). Reginald Jeeves is the ingenious valet (“the gentleman’s personal gentleman”) of Bertie Wooster in many of P.G. Wodehouse’s short stories, such as the collection entitled The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), and novels, beginning with the first full-length Jeeves novel Thank You, Jeeves (1934). See, e.g., pp. 21 and 132. The play in question is Eastward Ho (1605), written by George Chapman,

Notes to pages 492–4

72

73 74

75

76

77

745

Ben Jonson, and John Marston. The anti-Scottish sentences that landed the authors in jail, and were cancelled in the Quarto ed., appear in act 3, sc. 3, ll. 44–52: see the Revels ed. of the play, ed. R.W. Van Fossen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 139. For a list of the play’s other uncensored satirical passages directed against the Scots, see E.K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 3:255. In Conversations with Drummond, William Drummond of Hawthornden records that Jonson said of the incident, “the report was that they should then [have] had their ears cutt & noses” (Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 1:140). The Pyramus and Thisbe story in Quince’s play (5.1.127–347) derives from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, bk. 4, ll. 67–201. For the excerpt from Golding’s 1567 translation, see the Arden ed., 149–53. See also the Arden ed. (137–9) for additional excerpts from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which echo speeches in the play, notably Titania’s in act 2, sc. 1. See the excerpts reprinted in the Arden ed., 129–34, taken from William Thynne’s 1561 ed. of The Woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer. The first line of the anonymous musical round, preserved in Harleian Manuscript 978 (ca. 1260), and sometimes anthologized as the “Cuckoo Song”; see, e.g., The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, ed. Celia and Kenneth Sisam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 15–16, 571. The variant spellings of the word “i-cumen” include “y-cumen” (in Sisams’ ed.) and “icumen.” John 3:30. For a Church Father’s commentary, see, e.g., Saint Augustin [sic], On the Gospel of St. John, Tractate 14, par. 5: “Again, Christ was born when the days were just beginning to lengthen; John was born when they began to shorten. Thus their very creation and deaths testify to the words of John, when he says, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’” (trans. John Gibb and James Innes, in Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986; orig. pub. 1888], 7:95). St. John’s Eve is celebrated on June 23, the evening before the Feast Day of John the Baptist, and therefore coincides with the pagan summer solstice festival of Midsummer’s Eve. See “Walpurgis Night’s Dream or the Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania,” pt. 1, ll. 4223–4398 of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy: Backgrounds and Sources, The Author on the Drama, Contemporary Reactions, Modern Criticism, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: Norton, 1976), 104–9. Annotated copy in NFL. On the connection between Goethe’s Walpurgis Night and Shakespeare’s May Day rites in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Hamlin’s notes, affirming that Goethe “must have had in mind that the May Day rite from Shakespeare, where all strife between Oberon and Titania is resolved, is essentially the same seasonal festival as the Walpurgis Night itself (the night of April 30 to May 1), and

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78

79

80 81

82

83 84 85

86 87

88 89 90

Notes to pages 494–9

that the essential meaning of this festival is regeneration, renewal of life and spirit, indeed salvation. . . .” (p. 322). See, e.g., chap. 8, “Osiris and the Moon,” in Frazer’s Adonis, Attis, Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion, 2:129–39 (vols. 5–6 of The Golden Bough, 3rd ed.). Annotated copy in NFL. See also Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis (2nd ed. [London: Merlin Press, 1963]), 192. Annotated copy in NFL. See Hippolyta’s speech in ll. 7–11, particularly her reference to “the moon, like to a silver bow / [New] bent in heaven.” NF refers to the fact that Brooks in the Arden ed. (like the Riverside ed.) has adopted “New bent,” as first emended by Rowe; in contrast, the Quarto and Folio eds. print “Now bent.” See Brooks’s note in the Arden ed., p. 6. See no. 20, n. 90. See William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, ll. 102–7: “Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear, — both what they half create, / And what perceive.” Burton’s comment appears in his discussion not of “Fiery spirits or devils” who lead people astray by false fire, but rather of “Terrestrial devils”: “And so likewise those which Mizaldus calls ambulones, that walk about midnight on great heaths and desert places, which (saith Lavater) “draw men out of the way, and lead them all night a by-way, or quite bar them of their way”; these have several names in several places; we commonly call them Pucks.” See Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (3rd ed. 1628 [London: Dent, 1932]), 1:195. Annotated copy in NFL. In the Loeb ed., the opening line of Ovid’s Metamorphoses reads: “My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.” Annotated copy in NFL. For this sentence and the next two, including the references to Apuleius, Graves, and Ovid, see p. 417. NF appears to have transposed the words “triple” and “Hecate’s” (“Hecate’s triple team” is not a known textual variant). See p. 417, where NF cites the phrase as in the Arden ed., “triple Hecate’s team”; cf. the Riverside ed., “triple Hecat’s team.” See no. 12, n. 27. See Sweeney Erect, l. 8, where Eliot alludes to the story of Theseus’s desertion of Ariadne, her subsequent suicide, and the suicide of Theseus’s father, who feared the worst when Theseus returned to Athens having forgotten to change his black sails. In the Riverside ed., “Seem” rather than the usual emendation “Seem’d.” See WE, 564. The OED dates the first use of the word “imaginative,” in the sense of “Characterized by, or resulting from, the productive imagination; bearing evidence of high poetic or creative fancy,” in 1829, though it also cites Coleridge’s use of the word in a similar sense, in 1817.

Notes to pages 501–4

747

91 See the list of textual variants for act 5, sc. 1, l. 204, in the Arden ed., 115. 92 NF appears to be referring to an editor other than the “New Arden editor” he indicates here, for it is the Penguin editor, Madeleine Doran, who “reads ‘mural down’” (5.1.204): see A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Baltimore: Penguin, 1959). Annotated copy in NFL. In the second series of the Arden Shakespeare (the New Arden), Brooks’s ed. of the play (1979) adopts the line “Now is the mure rased between the two neighbours,” and in fact argues strongly against “mural down” in Appendix II: see the lengthy discussion of the textual crux, 159–62. 93 For echoes of this sentence and the next four, see p. 194. 94 See no. 13, n. 135. 95 On the textual variants with the words “to expound,” see no. 13, n. 137. 96 See Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.82. 97 The Third Citizen’s cry in Richard III (2.3.11). On the proverbial nature of the phrase, its Biblical origin, and a contemporary reference, see Antony Hammond’s note in the Arden ed., 204. 98 See 1 Henry VI, 2.5.61–92. On Shakespeare’s dubious authorship of the play, see Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:290–3. On the confusion of Edmund Mortimer with his uncle Edmund Mortimer and other relatives, see the note in Cairncross’s Arden ed., 53. See also Humphreys’ note in the Arden 1 Henry IV, 28. 99 See Sonnet 82 of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke’s Caelica, in The Works in Verse and Prose Complete, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: AMS Press, 1966; orig. pub. 1870), 3:103. The first word of the sonnet is “Under” (not “Upon”). In LS, 85, NF cites the whole sonnet with the correct opening word. Owing to the existence of a variant manuscript of Caelica (the Warwick MS), Greville’s sonnet appears as Sonnet 81 in some editions (such as Geoffrey Bullough’s Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville). 100 See Thomas of Woodstock, ed. George Parfitt and Simon Shepherd (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1977): Richard rejects plain-speaking Woodstock in 2.2.939: “Give up your council staff; we’ll hear no more”; and Richard’s involvement in Woodstock’s death becomes clear in 5.1.2397, when the murderer Lapoole says, “The king commands his uncle here must die.” On the play’s connection with Richard II, see Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:352. 101 See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:348–55. 102 See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:326–7 (rpt. in the Arden ed., lix). This is the record of a conversation between Queen Elizabeth and William Lambarde. Our inserted ellipsis indicates a comment made by Lambarde, intervening between the queen’s sentences; and a second sentence by Queen Elizabeth starting with the warning, “He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors” (followed by “This tragedy” and the rest of the sentence cited by NF).

748

Notes to pages 505–18

103 See the Arden introduction to Richard II, li–lvii. 104 Saul is anointed in 1 Samuel 10:1, but the phrase “the Lord’s anointed” does not appear in relation to Saul until 1 Samuel 26:9 ff. 105 See John 1:41. See also GC, 89/108. 106 See p. 263. 107 King John, 5.7.118. 108 With regard to “Richard the Redeless,” NF focuses later in this paragraph on historical details in Richard II that find striking parallels in the anonymous medieval poem by that title. See Richard the Redeless and Mum the Sothsegger, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), especially notes to the “Passus Quartus,” ll. 4, 17–19 (pp. 71, 72). 109 See York’s words to Gaunt regarding Richard II: “all in vain comes counsel to his ear” (2.1.4). 110 See pp. 262–3. 111 See p. 263. 112 François La Rochefoucauld, Lord Brooke, The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, trans. Louis Kronenberger (New York: Random House, 1959), 73 (no. 218): “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice offers to virtue.” The original French reads, “L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu.” 113 On the wheel of fortune, see p. 84. 114 See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957; rpt. 1981). Richard II is the subject of Kantorowicz’s second chapter, where he claims that Shakespeare “eternalized that metaphor” (26) of the king’s two bodies, a fiction constructed by medieval political theology whereby the monarch possesses both a natural body and a (mystical) political body. 115 For an analysis of Richard II and the disintegration of kingship into nothing, or a mere name, see Kantorowicz, 29. On Richard’s links with Lear, see p. 317. For NF’s preliminary sketch of this paragraph, see NRL, 343. 116 NF has substituted “into” for “in” (the latter appears in the Riverside ed., Quartos 1–5, and the First Folio). 117 The Riverside ed. has “[incaged]” in square brackets, since the word appears in the First Folio only, whereas Quartos 1–5 print “inraged.” 118 In the Riverside ed.: “the word itself / Against the word.” 119 The second line in the Riverside (and Arden) ed. reads, “he be [not ‘be he’] eas’d.” 120 See p. 499. 121 On the issue of how the king “becomes a twin personality through his anointment and consecration” (49), see Kantorowicz, 45–9. 122 In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “now doth time” (rather than “time doth now”).

Notes to pages 519–29

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123 See p. 284. 124 On the ages of Hal and Hotspur, see the note on ll. 86–7 in the Arden ed., 8. NF compares Hal and Hotspur to Esau and Jacob, on p. 276. 125 On Lady Percy’s historical identity as Elizabeth, see the Arden ed., 25n. 79; and 51n. 36. Shakespeare’s “main source” is Holinshed’s The Chronicle of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (2nd ed., 1587), which gives Henry Percy’s wife’s name as “Elianor” (see the excerpt reprinted in the Arden ed., Appendix III, 170). 126 The ellipsis indicates three missing lines. The Riverside (and Arden) ed. alters the second line of the quotation in keeping with Quartos 2–6 and the First Folio, as indicated by NF’s next sentence. NF also cites the Folio version of line 81, on p. 252. The Arden editor, Humphreys, gives a helpful gloss on the difference in the line’s meaning in the Folio and Quarto versions: see no. 16, n. 10. 127 For the offence against the family of Oldcastle and the change of name from “Oldcastle” to “Falstaffe,” see the Arden introduction to I Henry IV, xv–xviii. 128 Shaw, act 2 of Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman in Back to Methuselah (Complete Plays with Prefaces, 2:184). 129 On the miles gloriosus, see p. 36. 130 In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “during” rather than “through.” 131 The Riverside ed. prints “[similes]” since the word appears only in Quarto 5; Quartos 1–4, 6, and the First Folio all print “smiles.” 132 See, e.g., the episode in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (1598) in which the Prince is arrested and sent to prison for robbery, forcing his father, the King, to ask the Mayor of London to release him (sc. 3, ll. 7–10). The full play is reprinted in The Case for Shakespeare’s Authorship of “The Famous Victories,” ed. Seymour M. Pitcher (London: Alvin Redman, 1962), 9–79. 133 In the Riverside ed., “think least” rather than “least think.” NF notes the New Testament echo in Hal’s line, on p. 305. 134 See Hamlet, 1.5.188: “The time is out of joint.” 135 The Riverside ed. does not have the word “lately”; NF’s citation follows the First Folio. 136 In the Riverside ed., the last three lines (and the larger passage from ll. 55 to 79) are enclosed in square brackets, to indicate that they appear only in the First Folio. 137 On the earlier play, called by scholars the Ur-Hamlet, see Harold Jenkins’s Arden introduction to Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1982), 82–5. Thomas Lodge in Wit’s Misery (1596) first alluded to the performance of the UrHamlet in his account of the “ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge,” a phrase echoed by other writers in the period: see the Arden ed., 83 and n. 1.

750

Notes to pages 529–32

138 See the Arden ed., 97–101. 139 See The First Quarto of Hamlet, ed. Kathleen O. Irace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 140 See the Arden introduction, 34–5. 141 As Jenkins points out, Quarto 1 is ambiguous about the question of the queen’s guilt: “whereas Shakespeare makes it apparent that the Queen knows nothing of the murder, the reporter makes her swear, ‘I never knew of this most horrid murder,’ thereby betraying that she does know now though Hamlet has given her no account of it” (Arden introduction, 34). 142 See the Arden introduction, 36. 143 See the Longer Notes to act 3, sc. 2, ll. 44–5 in the Arden ed., which reprints in modernized form the passage from Quarto 1. 144 See Irace, The First Quarto of Hamlet, 20–7, for Quarto 1’s production history, including (during NF’s time) performances in London and the United States in the 1920s, at Oxford (1948), in London (1978), and in Nottingham (1983). 145 See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:422–3. 146 See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:408, which reprints the title page of the second quarto (Q2; 1604), including the description “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie” (NF has modernized the spelling). See also Jenkins’s discussion of Quarto 2 in his Arden introduction, 14 ff. 147 See the Arden introduction, 44–5. 148 In the Riverside ed.: “caviary,” not “caviar.” 149 The undergraduate teacher was Pelham Edgar, whose Shakespeare class NF took in his second year (1930–31), while in the honour course at Victoria College (Ayre, 63). See also Joseph Adamson, Northrop Frye: A Visionary Life (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993), 22; and SE, xxi. NF dedicated FS to Edgar in 1947, and edited Edgar’s posthumous memoirs Across My Path (Toronto: Ryerson, 1952), which includes NF’s recollections of Edgar as a teacher (ix) and Edgar’s recollections of NF as a student (84). 150 L.C. Knights’s essay was first printed, with the frontispiece comment “based on a paper read to the Shakespeare Association,” as “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?: An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism” (Cambridge: G. Fraser, Minority Press, 1933); rpt. in Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), 1–39. See also NFHK, 2:601, where HK recalls that Knights “came down one night I remember, with an article he’d written on pedantic Shakespearian criticism” (letter to NF dated 14 October 1936, at Toronto). 151 The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1605). See the Arden introduction to King Lear, xxiv–xxxiii.

Notes to pages 533–44

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152 “What art thou that usurp’st this time of night . . . ?” (1.1.46). 153 The most well-known Freudian critic to compare Hamlet and Oedipus is Ernest Jones, who uses the conflict between Hamlet’s sexual desire for his mother and repression of it to account for his hesitation in killing Claudius. See Hamlet and Oedipus (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 91– 103. See also NRL, 324. 154 In the Riverside ed.: “[hire and salary],” as in the First Folio only. 155 See the opening sentence of the fourth chapter, entitled “Of Revenge” (1625), in Francis Bacon’s Essays, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: Dent, 1932), 13. Annotated copy in NFL. 156 See no. 16, n. 93. 157 See AC, 67/63; and NRL, 192, 325. 158 See p. 477. 159 In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “i’ th’ right” rather than “right.” 160 In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “that” rather than “whom.” 161 See G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire, 19–50: the second chapter, “Hamlet’s Melancholia,” argues that “Hamlet’s soul is sick to death” (21); while the third chapter, “The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet,” develops Hamlet’s contrast with Claudius, who “is in a state of healthy and robust spiritual life” (45). See also NRL, 253. NF emphasizes the importance of Knight’s influence on him in SM, 12–13 (SESCT, 318–19); cf. NRL, xxxii– xxxiii. 162 In the Riverside ed.: “[villainies].” The square brackets indicate that this is Capell’s editorial emendation; Quartos 2–4 and the First Folio print “villaines.” 163 The Riverside (and Arden) ed. reads “forgone all custom of exercises.” 164 In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “Look here upon” rather than “Look upon.” 165 NF points out that Hamlet’s definition of drama echoes the Classical definition of comedy: see p. 7; cf. no. 3, n. 38. 166 In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., the quotation begins, “So as” rather than “As.” The Riverside ed. also encloses in square brackets the word “And” at the beginning of the second line (since it is present only in the First Folio). 167 See SE, 181. On the late-medieval danse macabre, see, e.g., James M. Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Glasgow: Jackson, Son, & Co., 1950). 168 The Riverside ed. prints “[tenantless],” as in Quartos 3–4. 169 On tragedy’s mixture of the heroic and the ironic, see also p. 87. 170 See the reference to Julius Caesar’s “comets” in the play of that name (2.2.30), and in Hamlet (“stars with trains of fire” [1.1.117]). 171 In the Riverside ed.: “[forc’d],” as in the First Folio; Quartos 2–4 print “for no.”

752

Notes to pages 545–62

172 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s criticism typifies the nineteenth-century reading that Shakespeare’s Hamlet suffers a mental disorder characteristic of the nineteenth century, an excess of self-consciousness—in Coleridge’s words, “great, enormous, intellectual activity, and a consequent proportionate aversion to real action.” See Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Raysor, 1:34. 173 NF recounts Geoffrey of Monmouth’s narrative, Historia regum Britanniae, up to the naming of Britain in chap. 16 of bk. 1, where “Brute calleth the island Britain, and his companions Britons” (History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Sebastian Evans [London: Dent, 1963], 26). 174 NF is summarizing the events of chaps. 1–15 in The History of the Kings of Britain, where Geoffrey of Monmouth dates the events of Lear’s reign, including Cordelia’s, as concurrent with the time when “Isaiah and Hosea prophesied” (trans. Evans, 43) and when Romulus and Remus founded the city of Rome. 175 The source for the Edmund–Gloucester subplot in King Lear is narrative material from bk. 2, chap. 10, of Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (New Arcadia) (1590), which should be distinguished from the Old Arcadia. See Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, 1:206–14. The relevant excerpt is reprinted in Bullough, 7:402–14; and excerpted in the Arden King Lear, 243–9. See also the Arden ed., xxxvii–xlii, for links between King Lear and the Arcadia (the New Arcadia, though not designated as such by the Arden editor). 176 Tom’s names for devils, “Flibbertigibbet,” “Smulkin,” “Modo,” and “Mahu” (King Lear, 3.4.115, 140, 142–3), derive from Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures (1603): see the excerpts in the Arden ed., 253–6. 177 Summarized in the Arden ed., xv–xx. 178 For more on the imagery and structure of the apocalyptic and demonic worlds (of desire and repugnance) and the analogies at the realistic and ironic levels of representation, see AC, 141–58/130–46. See also GC, chap. 6. 179 The Riverside and Arden eds. print “daughters” (the Folio reading) rather than “two daughters” (the Quarto, adopted here by NF). 180 See p. 517–18. 181 In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “murther” rather than “murder.” 182 For NF’s fuller treatment of this metaphor, see no. 22. 183 See no. 16, n. 137. 184 See p. 511. 185 NF has substituted “who” for “that.” 186 The Riverside uses square brackets for “one”: Quartos 1–2 have “one”; but the Folio has “a.” 187 The ballad known as “Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song” has been reprinted in vari-

Notes to pages 562–9

188 189 190 191 192

193

194 195 196 197

198 199

200 201 202 203

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ous forms: see, e.g., Dame Edith Sitwell’s Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), 1:90; and Loving Mad Tom: Bedlamite Verses of the XVI and XVII Centuries, ed. Jack Lindsay (Welwyn Garden City: Seven Dials Press, 1969; orig. pub. 1927). On the dating of the ballad and its relation to Shakespeare’s play, see Stanley Wells, “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song and King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 12 (1961): 311–15. See, e.g., 4.1.85–6 of The Taming of the Shrew, where Petruchio’s behaviour towards Katherina is said to make him appear “more shrew than she.” See no. 22, n. 22. In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “is come” rather than “has come.” See Tybalt’s deadly personal duel with Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, 3.1.60– 135. “Now is the time to drain the flowing bowl, now with unfettered foot to beat the ground with dancing”: the opening lines of Horace’s Ode 37, from bk. 1 of the Odes (in Horace, The Odes and Epodes, trans. C.E. Bennett, Loeb ed., 98–9). See Virgil’s Aeneid, bk. 8, l. 688: “sequiturque (nefas) Aegyptia coniunx.” In the Loeb ed., H. Rushton Fairclough translates the phrase “and there follows him (O shame!) his Egyptian wife” (2:106–7). The Riverside ed. has “strook,” as in the authoritative First Folio; the Arden ed. prints “struck.” Jonson, Conversations with Drummond, in Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 1:132. Annotated copy in NFL. NF has modernized the spelling. See M.R. Ridley’s Arden introduction to Antony and Cleopatra, xxiv–xxvii, for a comparison of Shakespeare’s play with Daniel’s Cleopatra. See Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecian and Romans (1579), excerpted in the Arden appendix of Antony and Cleopatra, 241–78. As opposed to the Folio ed. of the play, which does not give act and scene divisions. See Antony and Cleopatra, 3.1.2, for a reference to Crassus’s death, with a note on Orode’s pouring of “melted gold into the dead man’s mouth” (Arden ed., 94). See also Dio Cassius’s account in Roman History, bk. 40.27, trans. Earnest Cary and Herbert Baldwin Foster (Loeb ed.), 3:447: “And the Parthians, as some say, poured molten gold into his mouth in mockery; for though a man of vast wealth, he had set so great store by money as to pity those who could not support an enrolled legion from their own means, regarding them as poor men.” See, e.g., pp. 409 and 426. On Brecht’s concept of the alienation effect, see no. 22, n. 15. In the Riverside ed., “vildest.” See no. 16, n. 86.

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Notes to pages 569–78

204 Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, sec. 2, no. 162 (trans. W.F. Trotter, in Pascal’s Thoughts and Minor Works [New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910], 62–3): “He who will know fully the vanity of man has only to consider the causes and effects of love. . . . Cleopatra’s nose: had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered.” 205 NF’s citation is slightly elliptical; Cleopatra actually says, “Say that the last I spoke was ‘Antony,’ / And word it, prithee, piteously.” 206 For NF’s fuller development of his five fictional modes, see AC, 33–5/31–3. 207 NF cites North’s translation of Plutarch’s report that Antony was called the “new Bacchus,” a passage that the Arden leaves out of the Appendix, but cites on p. 150, n. 15. For the full passage in context see the following ed. of Thomas North’s translation: Shakespeare’s Plutarch, ed. C.F. Tucker Brooke (New York: Haskell House, 1966), 2:96. For the modern translation as “New Dionysus,” see Plutarch’s Lives, ed. Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb ed.), 9:275. 208 NF has transposed the words here: the Riverside ed., and the authoritative First Folio, print “must thou.” 209 The modernized title of one of John Donne’s Songs and Sonets (1633): see Lovers infinitenesse, in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (London: Nonesuch, 1962), 11. 210 In the Riverside ed.: “abiliments.” 211 The Riverside and Arden eds. gloss “riggish” as “wanton” (that is, lascivious). 212 For the mysterious music and its supernatural explanation, see the note to 4.3.15 in the Arden ed. (150), which directs the reader to Shakespeare’s source in Plutarch as given in the Appendix, 271. 213 The Riverside (like the Arden) ed. reads, “Dido and her Aeneas.” 214 See M&B, 88; and RE, 79. 215 “Attempting to be more than Man We become less said Luvah.” William Blake, The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth, p. 135, l. 21, in Erdman, 403. 216 Nietzsche uses the phrase in the title of Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits [Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister], to signify the merely human, enfettered by conventional morality and social conformity, in contrast to the free spirit, charged by Dionysian energy, who has gone beyond good and evil. In M&B, 424, NF contrasts Nietzsche’s and Blake’s notions of the “all too human”: “although Zarathustra tells us that man is something to be surpassed, he has to settle for conceptions of renewal and rebirth and cyclical return. Renewal and rebirth, for Blake, are only parodies of resurrection.” By surrendering to “a life-affirming Antichrist figure whom he identifies with Dionysus,” Nietzsche may have “gone over to what Blake would have considered the real Antichrist, namely Caesar or the authority of the ‘all too human’ world.” See also no. 10, n. 14, for NF’s use of the phrase in AC, 37/35.

Notes to pages 580–9 217 218 219 220 221 222

223

224

225 226 227

228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236

237

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See, e.g., 1.2.28–9; 3.3.3; 3.6.73. For Plutarch’s references to Herod, see the Arden Appendix, 262, 267. See FS, 302/298; and GC, 189/210. See p. 496. See no. 20, n. 31. NF’s following discussion of Measure for Measure echoes his discussion of the play at several points in MD: see pp. 374 ff. See the Duke’s words to Shylock in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice: “How shalt thou hope for mercy, rend’ring none?” (4.1.88). For NF’s designation of this as “an earlier play,” see, e.g., Chambers, William Shakespeare (1:270–1), who dates it in 1596–97, and Measure for Measure in 1604–5. On NF’s dating of the plays, see no. 17, n. 8. George Whetstone, The Right Excellent and Famous Historye of Promos and Cassandra (1587), rpt. in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 2:442–513; and abridged in J.W. Lever’s Arden ed. of Measure for Measure, 166–93. See Giraldi Cinthio, Hecatommithi (1565): Measure for Measure draws on Decade 8, Novella 5, “Epitia.” Lever translates the relevant excerpt in the Arden ed., 155–65. See also Bullough, 2:430–42. Othello draws on the 1566 ed. of Hecatommithi, Decade 3, Novella 7: see Appendix I of M.R. Ridley’s Arden ed. (237–46); Ridley discusses the French translation of Cinthio on pp. xv, 238. See also Bullough, 7:239–52. On the connection between Measure for Measure and the Biblical account of the knowledge of good and evil, see NFR, 156–7; cf. 163. See, e.g., Galatians 4. See John Russell Brown’s Arden introduction, xxxvii: “Officially Jews had been expelled from England since the reign of Edward I, but if they conformed outwardly to Christianity, they could live peaceably in London and maintain some features of their ancient life and religion.” See p. 366. See no. 13, n. 21, for critics adopting a Christian reading of the play. See the Arden introduction, xxxvi–xliv. See no. 20, n. 25. In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “find” rather than “have.” See Pericles, act 4, scenes 3, 5, and 6. On the controversial nature of these scenes, see no. 13, n. 61. In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “upon” rather than “on.” See Genesis 3:7. See Bullough, 2:443: “For by the rewarde of the good, the good are encowraged in wel doinge: and with the scowrge of the lewde, the lewde are feared from evill attempts: mainetayning this my oppinion with Platoes auctority.” See LN, 1:72–3; NR, 183, 279.

756

Notes to pages 591–9

238 On basanos, see p. 380. 239 On comedy’s second phase of confused identity, see pp. 174–6. 240 The line is markedly different in the Riverside (and Arden) ed., based on the sole authoritative text of the First Folio: “An Angelo for Claudio; death for death!” (not “a Claudio”; and not “life for life”). The source of NF’s citation is uncertain, though his line does curiously echo that in Charles Gildon’s 1700 adaptation Measure for Measure, Or Beauty the Best Advocate: see The Plays of Charles Gildon, ed. Paula Backscheider (New York: Garland, 1979), 42: “An Angelo for Claudio, life for life.” NF may also be conflating Biblical passages such as Exodus 21:23: “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life.” 241 See no. 13, n. 81. 242 Such as in Davenant and Dryden’s adaptation The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island: A Comedy, alluded to on p. 467. 243 NF makes the same point about the affinities between the romances and the puppet show, on pp. 335 and 427–8. 244 Cited in no. 13, n. 81. 245 Though a 1609 Quarto of Mucedorus was once said to exist, this theory is now deemed suspect: see Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:34–5. See also p. 334, where NF gives 1609 as the approximate date of the play’s revival. 246 The title page of the 1598 ed., as cited in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:34. 247 See Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:34. NF also mentions the “seventeen editions” on p. 334. 248 See pp. 90–1. 249 See no. 13, n. 109. 250 See F.D. Hoeniger’s introduction to the Arden ed. of Pericles, lvi–lxiii. 251 On The Two Noble Kinsmen, see Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:528–32. 252 The lost play is Cardenio: see Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:539–41. 253 See the Arden ed. of King Henry VIII, ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1957), xvii–xxvi. See also Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1:496–7. 254 Duke Orsino exclaims in Twelfth Night, “Why should I not (had I the heart to do it), / Like to th’ Egyptian thief at point of death, / Kill what I love?” (5.1.117–19). As Lothian and Craik note in the Arden ed. of Twelfth Night (137), the “Egyptian thief” refers to “Thyamis, an Egyptian robber-chief in Heliodorus’ Ethiopica,” which was translated into English by Thomas Underdowne in 1569, and reprinted in 1587. 255 See, e.g., Sidney’s views in the Defence of Poetry, exemplifying the “humanist view of drama” NF refers to on pp. 162–3. 256 See Greene’s Pandosto, rpt. in the Arden ed. of The Winter’s Tale, Appendix IV, 220–5. 257 In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “of” is deleted—“or one destroyed.” Cf. p. 116. 258 See no. 12, n. 5.

Notes to pages 599–609

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259 See J.H.P. Pafford’s note on ll. 112–13 in the Arden ed. of The Winter’s Tale (72): “Bethell and others attach great importance to this statement. . . . Whatever importance is attached to the remark it must be agreed that it is a simple statement of fact in language completely fitting to the occasion and to the speaker.” 260 Jonson, Conversations with Drummond (Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 1:138; annotated copy in NFL); qtd. in Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:207: “Sheakspear in a play brought in a number of men saying they had suffered Shipwrack in Bohemia, wher ther is no Sea neer by some 100 Miles.” 261 The royal husband of Princess Elizabeth was Friedrich V, Elector Palatine. See Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:343. See also the Arden introduction to Winter’s Tale, xxiv. 262 Leontes actually does mention seeing along with feeling, and he refers to the ability to “see withal / The instruments that feel.” As for the sense of smell, Leontes says that Antigonus, rather than he, “smell[s] this business.” In NP, NF cites this passage in a way that differs from the First Folio: see p. 198. 263 In the Riverside ed., based on the authoritative First Folio, “this wide gap of [not in] time,” correctly cited by NF on p. 305. Cf. NF’s reference to “this great gap of time” on p. 402. 264 The story of Deucalion is told by Ovid in Metamorphoses, bk. 1, ll. 318–415. See also NFR, 222; and GC, 36/53–4. 265 See p. 124. 266 Compare NF’s reference to “Demeter and Proserpine,” on p. 10. See Ovid’s Metamorphoses, bk. 5, ll. 391–571, for the story of Proserpine’s rape by “Dys” or Pluto, and of her mother Ceres’ ultimate liberation of her daughter for half the months of the year. See also our Introduction, xliii. 267 See Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 10, ll. 243–97; and Pafford’s introduction to the Arden ed., xxxiv. See also LN, 2:507, 683; and NR, 235, where NF writes: “what Pygmalion symbolizes is not the conventional metamorphosis of nature into art but the still higher metamorphosis of art into nature.” 268 This paragraph draws on material discussed more fully on pp. 419–20. 269 See Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), stanza 56, ll. 13–16, where “Nature” opposes “Man,” “Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law— / Though Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—.” 270 In the Riverside ed., “trompery.” 271 See, e.g., the section on “Giulio as Raphael’s Heir,” in Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 1:37–8. 272 See Theseus’s speech at 5.1.18–20, which NF has discussed at length in the previous chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on p. 499. 273 See our Introduction, n. 62. 274 See p. 597.

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Notes to pages 609–22

275 On Shakespeare as Prospero, see p. 48. 276 See pp. 409, 426, and 459. 277 NF’s citation follows the lineation in the Folio, the only authoritative text for the play. In the Riverside ed., the first line ends “sea; be subject”; the second line begins “To no sight . . . .” 278 The title of the play in English translation; it was originally written in Italian by Luigi Pirandello as Sei personnagi in cerca d’autore (1921). 279 See K.M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell’arte, 1560–1620, with Special Reference to the English Stage (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962; orig. pub. 1934), 1:18n. 3, 22. 280 OED cites Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2.463) as the first recorded use of the word “zany,” in 1588. 281 Here NF may draw on Lea’s influential study of the relation between the commedia dell’arte and The Tempest: see Italian Popular Comedy, 2:443–53. See also the Arden introduction to The Tempest, lxvi–lxix. 282 In the Riverside (and Arden) ed., “That swear’st grace o’erboard.” 283 See p. 435. 284 NF’s citation leaves out the word “descend”: “’Tis time; descend; be stone no more.” 285 See no. 20, n. 97. 286 See no. 6, n. 9. 287 See p. 47. 288 See p. 50. 289 Virgil only briefly alludes to the story of Phineus’s punishment by the Harpies: see Aeneid, bk. 3, ll. 211–13. For a fuller account, see, e.g., Apollodorus, The Library, bk. 1, sec. 9, par. 21, trans. Sir James George Frazer (Loeb ed.), 1:103–7. Annotated copy in NFL. 290 See p. 69. 291 Samuel Daniel, Musophilus: Containing, A generall Defence of all Learning (1602–3), ll. 963–6, in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 1:255. Except for the words “ordain’d” and “restrain’d,” NF has modernized the spelling. In Grosart’s ed., the verse is arranged in six-line stanzas. Cf. NF’s citation in LS, 5. 292 See pp. 50–1. 293 See King Lear, 3.4.106. 294 W.H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, pt. 1 (“Prospero to Ariel”): “I am glad that I did not recover my dukedom till / I do not want it. . . .” See The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), 352. Annotated copy in NFL. 295 See no. 20, n. 98. NF quotes a longer version of the passage containing Prospero’s echo of the Lord’s Prayer on p. 423.

Notes to pages 623–7

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24. Speech on Acceptance of the Governor General’s Award for Northrop Frye on Shakespeare 1 NF had been nominated three other times as a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in Nonfiction. Because he served on the adjudication committee for the awards (see n. 3, below), he had to declare three of his own books ineligible in 1963 (Ayre, 275). 2 See the opening paragraph of the Preface to no. 23, pp. 455–6. 3 While NF was a jury member for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, he served as “head of the English section from 1958 to 1960 and overall chairman from 1961 to 1963” (Ayre, 275). 25. Natural and Revealed Communities 1 “In the fall of 1935 I confronted my first undergraduate class, armed with the text of More’s Utopia, in the Elizabethan translation. To say that I had butterflies in my stomach would be poetic licence: what was inside me felt more like a horde of brooding vultures” (WE, 612). 2 Ralph Robinson’s 1551 English translation of More’s Utopia was the basis of many modern editions, including the Everyman ed. now in NFL: Utopia with the “Dialogue of Comfort” (London: Dent, 1931). This was no doubt NF’s teaching text in 1935; it was reprinted in the accessible Everyman ed. in 1951 and 1957, with modernized spelling. 3 Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia, trans. H.J. Stenning (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959): see esp. pt. 3, chaps. 1–2. 4 Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Logan, trans. Adams (see no. 19, n. 26), 105. Subsequent references to this edition are inserted in square brackets in the text. 5 See no. 19, n. 20. 6 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named The Governor, ed. S.E. Lehmberg (Dent: London, 1962). 7 In the Seventh Letter, Plato does not pursue the efforts he began in the Republic to educate the corrupt tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, and make him a philosopher-king. See Plato’s Epistles, trans. Glenn R. Morrow (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). 8 Julien Benda, The Great Betrayal, trans. Richard Aldington (London: George Routledge, 1928), 21, 31–59. 9 On the issue of aristocratic “amateurism,” see Castiglione, Courtier, 2.12 (Singleton, 104). 10 Nicholas Dormer comments to his sister that their mother, Lady Agnes, does not like art to be taken seriously as a profession: “Mother wouldn’t like it. She has inherited the fine old superstition that art’s pardonable only so long as it’s bad—so long as it’s done at odd hours, for a little distraction,

760

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20

21

22

23 24 25

26

Notes to pages 628–34

like a game of tennis or of whist.” Henry James, The Tragic Muse, ed. Philip Horne (Toronto: Penguin, 1995), 25. For the unresolved problem of the courtier’s appropriate age, see Castiglione, Courtier, bk. 2, secs. 13–17; Singleton, 107–9. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Connell (see no. 19, n. 43), 84. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 1:115. On “second intentions,” see Logan and Adams, ed., More’s Utopia, 64n. 57. Georges Dumézil’s foundational work of comparative mythology proposes that Indo-European societies are organized by a tripartite social hierarchy of priests, warriors, and artisans (including farmers). This hierarchy is outlined (with the corresponding colour code NF mentions) in L’Idéologie tripartie des Indo-Européens (Bruxelles: Revue d’Études latines, 1958). Like NF, Dumézil compares the Indo-European tripartite ideology with Plato’s Republic: see Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus: Essai sur la conception indo-européenne de la société et sur les origines de Rome (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 257–61. See also TBN, 7. Versions of this sentence and the one that follows appear in “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” CPCT, 199. Desiderius Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 993 to 1121, 1519 to 1520, vol. 7, trans. R.A.B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 23–4. For the debates on the enclosure movement, penal laws, and warmongering, see More, Utopia, 18–19, 15, and 29–30, respectively. Lucian, Zeus tragoedus, in The Works of Lucian of Samosata, vol. 3, trans. H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), 83–5. See, e.g., Lucian’s twenty-second “Dialogue of the Dead,” where Menippus is unconcerned about his inability to pay Charon for crossing the river Styx: The Works of Lucian, 1:143. Logan and Adams, in their edition of More’s Utopia, 5n. 9, similarly give the etymology of Raphael Hythloday’s surname as “nonsense peddler” or “expert in nonsense.” The Abbey of Thélème appears in bk. 1, chaps. 52–8, of François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, in The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 116–30. See no. 6, n. 2. See p. 61 and n. 17. For a similar paragraph on Gulliver’s Travels, see “Varieties of Literary Utopias”: “The Yahoo is the natural man, man as he would be if he were purely an animal, filthy, treacherous, and disgusting. . . . The Houyhnhnms can live in a genuinely pastoral world; human beings have to put up with the curse of civilization” (CPCT, 208–9). Jean-Jacques Rousseau is perhaps best known for the opening phrase of

Notes to pages 635–7

27

28

29

30

31

32

761

his book, The Social Contract: “Man was/is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One who believes himself the master of others is nonetheless a greater slave than they.” See LN, 309. In The Social Contract and other writings such as The Discourse on Social Inequality, Rousseau examines the inequalities that exist in the state of nature, which are exacerbated by further inequality brought on by the formation of society in the “social contract.” See Rousseau, The Social Contract (London: Dent, 1913), 46. Annotated copy in NFL. Marx observes that with the rise of capitalism, in the commercial stage, there is a division of labour and the market that undermines the self-sufficiency of rural economies. He states, “The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns,” and the advent of Communism will bring about “the abolition of the distinction between town and country.” Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 477, 498. Rather than an island, Huxley uses the example of a colony to illustrate the paradoxical return of the “struggle for existence” problem brought about by the artificial, social intervention of ethical treatment toward the weak and the infirm. See Thomas Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, ed. James Paradis and George C. Williams (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 92. After reading Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Morris declared in a letter to his friend Andreas Scheu: “I must surely write something as a counterblast to this” (Andreas Scheu to Alfred Russel Wallace, 3 February 1909, British Museum Add. MSS 46440; cited in Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet’s Influence, ed. Sylvia E. Bowman, 90, 454n. 18). J.W. Mackail’s standard biography made it common knowledge that Bellamy’s utopia served as the “immediate occasion” for the writing of News from Nowhere: see The Life of William Morris (London: Longmans, Green, 1899; rpt. 1968), 2:256–7. Morris had published a scathing review of Looking Backward in Commonweal, the Socialist League journal founded and edited by Morris, in which his News from Nowhere was first published in serial form (Commonweal, 5 [22 June 1889]:194–5). On Morris’s News from Nowhere and its relation to Bellamy’s Looking Backward, see “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” CPCT, 210–11. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in Essays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis, and Other Pieces, ed. Richard Foster Jones (New York: Odyssey Press, 1937), 460. For “Salomons’ House, or the College of the Six Days’ Works,” see the prefatory remark “To the Reader” (449) by William Rawley, in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. In the narrative, the college, an institute of scientific research and technological innovation, is devoted to knowledge, or discerning between “divine miracles” and “works of nature” (459). 1984 opens with the now-famous line “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING

762

33 34

35 36

37 38

Notes to pages 637–42

YOU,” and introduces the “telescreen” as the means by which Big Brother surveils (and transmits messages to) the population. See George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 3. Annotated copy in NFL. See also LS, 140–3. Samuel Butler, Erewhon; Erewhon Revisited (London: Dent, 1932), 146. Annotated copy in NFL. Thomas More is executed again for his religious beliefs, but this time he is forced to renounce, ironically, the “Dream of Engineered Humanity” (134) reflected in his book Utopia. For the scene of his (second) execution, see the last chapter, “Apocephalon,” in R.A. Lafferty, Past Master (New York: Garland, 1975). See RT, 108: “the Somnium Scipionus takes the place, for Christian Europe, of the vision of Er.” Bk. 10 of Plato’s Republic ends with the vision of Er. See Cicero, Scipio’s Dream, in The Republic, bk. 6, secs. 9–24, in De Re Publica, De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Loeb ed.). Annotated copy in NFL. In the headnote to bk. 6, Keyes points out, “The Vatican manuscript has preserved no part of this book. But in addition to the scattered fragments printed below, the famous Dream of Scipio has been handed down to us by Macrobius, in connection with his commentary upon it” (257). For the text of Scipio’s Dream as handed down by Macrobius, see Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). In a dream, Cicero meets Scipio Africanus the Younger, who in turn reports a dream-vision in which his grandfather, the Elder Africanus, foresees the Younger’s future (in Stahl’s ed., chap. 2; Loeb, bk. 6, secs. 11–12). Then the Elder guides the Younger through the structure of the universe (in Stahl’s ed., chaps. 4–5; Loeb, bk. 6, secs. 17–18). Stahl, 52–5, also includes a brief discussion of Macrobius’s influence on Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetic works, such as The Parliament of Fowls, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (on dreams in general). More, Utopia, 93–4. Logan and Adams also note the Communist practices of Christians in Acts 2:44 and 4:32. Aside from using Scripture to attack Tyndale’s advocacy of ordaining women as priests, More ridicules the presumption: e.g., “But as he wolde haue euery woman to take her selfe for a preest / so wolde he that euery man shulde wene hym selfe a kynge” (595). See Thomas More, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, in The Complete Works of Thomas More, ed. Louis A. Schuster et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), vol. 8, pt. 1. 26. Foreword to Unfolded Tales

1 NF’s association with A.C. (Bert) Hamilton dates back to NF’s early days as a Victoria College professor, when Hamilton (only nine years younger

Notes to pages 642–3

2 3

4 5 6

7

8 9

10 11

12

763

than NF) was a Ph.D. student: see D, passim, especially NF’s comments on Hamilton’s thesis (551). At the time of publication of Unfolded Tales, Hamilton’s comprehensive overview of NF’s work, Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism (1990), was listed as forthcoming in Hamilton’s biographical blurb (315). The prestigious James Cappon Chair of English Language and Literature is one of two regular named chairs in the Department of English at Queen’s University and was established in 1959 in honour of the first founding member of the Department. See the discussion of the Renaissance genre hierarchy in Gordon Teskey’s Introduction to Unfolded Tales, 2–3. Teskey in turn cites SeS, 23. The quotation from Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570) appears in Carol V. Kaske, “How Spenser Really Used Stephen Hawes in the Legend of Holiness,” Unfolded Tales, 119–36. Ascham castigates in particular the Morte D’Arthur, “the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry,” though he laments that “ten Morte Arthurs [sic] do not the tenth part so much harm as one of these books made in Italy and translated in England” (qtd. in Kaske, 119–20). See p. 21. Introduction to Unfolded Tales, 9–10. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jacke Wilton (1594), ll. 26–9, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, rev. F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 2:220. See also LN, 525, where NF cites this passage from memory and calls it the “best motto of the book” he is working on. NF echoes Gabriel Harvey’s words “Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo.” See “Three Proper, and wittie, familiar Letters,” in Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Smith and Selincourt, 628. See also LS, 21 and n. 10. See no. 19, n. 47. Spenser’s word for “magnanimity” is “magnificence” (see Letter to Raleigh, in The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, 716). Sir Fulke Greville calls Sidney’s Arcadia a social model, the “extraordinary frame of his own Common-wealth,” in Life of Sir Philip Sidney (1652 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907]), 14. Annotated copy in NFL. Rpt. Folcroft Library Editions, 1971. See also LS, 68, for NF’s citation of this passage in his discussion of Renaissance prose forms envisioning a model society. Edmund Spenser, Letter to Raleigh, 714–16, in The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton. On The Faerie Queene as an educational treatise, see also pp. 60–1. Two essays in Unfolded Tales focus on Cymbeline: Patricia Parker’s “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline” (189–207); and A. Kent Hieatt’s “Cymbeline and the Intrusion of Lyric into Romance Narrative: Sonnets, ‘A Lover’s Complaint,’ Spenser’s Ruins of Rome” (98–118). See SE, 445.

764

Notes to pages 644–5

13 The debate concerning love concludes with Cardinal Bembo’s vision of love in bk. 4, secs. 51–71, in Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Singleton, 336–57. See also pp. 358–60. 14 See Parker’s “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline,” cited in n. 11, above. 15 Thomas Deloney, Thomas of Reading, or the sixe worthie Yeomen of the West (1623), chap. 13, in The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. Francis Oscar Mann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), 264. See also LS, 58. 16 NF refers to the following essays, respectively, in Unfolded Tales: Judith H. Anderson, “‘Myn auctour’: Spenser’s Enabling Fiction and Eumnestes’ ‘immortall scrine’” (16–31); Alastair Fowler, “Spenser’s Names” (32–48); William Blissett, “Caves, Labyrinths, and The Faerie Queene” (281–311); Robert B. Heilman, “Greene’s Euphuism and Some Congeneric Styles” (49–73); and W.W. Barker, “Rhetorical Romance: The ‘Frivolous Toyes’ of Robert Greene” (74–97). 17 Nashe, Unfortunate Traveller, in Works, ed. McKerrow, 2:210. See also LS, 58. 18 A.C. Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene (London and New York: Longman, 1977). NF refers to Hamilton’s other works: Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967); Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser (Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring, 1972); and his revised and expanded thesis, The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961). NF may also be referring to the forthcoming Spenser Enyclopedia (1990), for which Hamilton served as general editor.

Emendations

page/line 17/30 58/38 78/11 118/22 125/39 156/23 171/2 172/2 213/31 222/27–8 230/20 245/25 337/23 343/17 348/1 359/27–8 396/30 396/36 397/6 414/6 439/12–13 445/38

this pedantic crackpot for his pedantic crackpot towards its own for toward its own cast disappear for cast disappears In my just censure! for In my censure! [as in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama, and Riverside ed.] image of the blood for image about the blood who . . . is for whom . . . is as much a projection for as much as projection and the way in which for and of the way in which which makes for and which makes loveliness . . . suggests for loveliness . . . suggests everywhere present in all for everywhere in all A Midsummer Night’s Dream for The Midsummer Night’s Dream parallel to that of Paulina for parallel to that of Pauline death to life for death of life wide apart for wide part Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit for Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit in the Aeneid for in Aeneid and the great fire for and great fire [as in source, and citation at p. 398] make me know for make to know [as in source] words “apprehend” and “comprehend” for word “apprehend” and “comprehend” aimless identifying of Tunis with Carthage for aimless identifying Tunis with Carthage Jaques’ stages for Jaque’s stage [as in TS]

766 447/8 447/23 450/38 453/11 490/15 511/19 627/2 628/10 638/3 638/25 639/26

Emendations than Jaques for that Jaques [as in TS, MM] So in Hamlet for So in Hamlet (the play) [adjustment from oral to printed version] and so on and so on for and so on [as in TS and MM] what the motive is for what is the motive [as in MM] reason . . . play comes for reason . . . play come corollary of for corollary from or another for of another Caesar. The book for Caesar, and the book [as in TS] reminds us that for reminds us, first, that sixth book for lost sixth book [as in MM] has transformed for had transformed

Index

note: Dates, including those for the plays of Shakespeare, are those of first publication in the language of the title, unless otherwise noted. Works are listed under their author, if known. References to literary characters are considered to be references to the works themselves. Given the enormous number of Shakespearean references, however, brief allusions to a character or even a play may not be listed separately but rather subsumed under a more general heading such as “Shakespeare: comedies of: character types in,” or “Shakespeare: romances of.” Absalom figure, 278 Absurd, theatre of the, 451 Adonis, 222, 223 Advent, 172 Aeschylus (ca. 525–ca. 456 b.c.e.), 28, 371; Oresteia, 8, 253, 372, 385–6, 392 Agrippa, Cornelius (1486–1535), 344 Agroikos. See Churl Alazon, 34–7 Alchemy, 46, 49 Alexander the Great (356–323 b.c.e.), 281, 282, 358, 628 Alexander, William John (1874–1944), 251 Alger, Horatio (1832–99), 449 Alienation effect, 337, 415, 446, 569 Allegory, in Spenser, 56 All in the Family, 443 & n. 12 Amis and Amiloun, 163

Anagnorisis. See Recognition Analogy, 165, 217 Anaximander (ca. 611–546 b.c.e.), 363–4 Anderson, Judith, 644 Antimasque, 52 Antiochus IV of Syria, called Epiphanes (d. 163 b.c.e.), 219 Apocalypse, 219 Apollonius, Prince of Tyre, 596 Apuleius, Lucius (ca. c.e. 125–ca. 180), 50, 175, 393; The Golden Ass, 193, 417, 496 Arabian Nights, The, 148, 370, 377 & n. 26 Arcadia, and Utopia, 635 Archetypal criticism, in NF’s Shakespeare criticism, xl–xliii Architecture, 134 Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533), 370;

768 and Spenser, 69; Orlando Furioso, 411–12, 538 Aristocracy, 353–4, 358 Aristophanes (ca. 448–ca. 388 b.c.e.), 4, 11, 31, 75, 371, 486; death and revival in, 8, 9; personal opinions in, 7; Acharnians, 25, 34, 321; The Birds, 7; Ecclesiazusae, 7; The Frogs, 34; The Peace, 7 Aristotelianism, 129 Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), 60, 65, 161, 256, 358; on catharsis, 158; on cause, 5; on comedy, 5, 34–5 (see also Tractatus Coislinianus); on elements of poetry, 146; on hamartia, 272; on mean, 355, 520; on nature, 21; on poetry, 237, 387; on reversal and recognition, xlix, 362–5, 370, 385; on tragedy, 30; Ethics, 35, 36, 643; Poetics, 141, 363 Arnold, Matthew (1822–88): on culture, 234; on poetry, 130; on Shakespeare, 227; Shakespeare (1849), xxxvii, 113, 155, 233–4 Art: as magic in Elizabethan times, 71, 120, 215, 343, 401, 430, 605; and morality, 57–8; and nature, xliv, 61, 120–2, 124, 215, 239, 249, 434, 604–5; transcends social conditions of its creation, 400 Arts and sciences, and concern, 367 Ascham, Roger (1515–68), 642; The Scholemaster (1570), 227 Astrology, 49, 463, 552 Astronomy, 367 Atom, 442 Atonement, day of, 172–3 Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907–73): For the Time Being (1944), 141; The Sea and the Mirror (1944), 622 Augustine, St. (c.e. 354–430), 50

Index Augustus, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (63–14 b.c.e.), 119, 169 Babylon, as symbol, 62 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685–1750), 142, 228; Art of Fugue (1750), 34, 133, 138; The Musical Offering (1747), 133, 138; St. Matthew Passion (1729), 9 Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans and Baron Verulam (1561–1626), 353; on revenge, 536; and Shakespeare, 96; The New Atlantis (1627), 636 Baptism, 62 Barber, C(esar) L(ombardi) (1913–80), xxix Barrie, Sir J(ames) M(atthew) (1860– 1937), 22; Peter Pan (1904), 208 Barroll, Rayna, 43 Beatles, 226 & n. 2 Beaumont, Francis (1584–1616), and John Fletcher (1579–1625), 151, 162, 212, 335, 425, 593, 597; The Knight of the Burning Pestle (perf. ca. 1607, pub. 1613) (now attrib. to Beaumont alone), 610 Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–89), 390; Endgame (1957), 147; Waiting for Godot (1954), 147 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803–49), 303 Bellamy, Edward (1850–98): Looking Backward (1888), 636 Benda, Julien (1867–1956): Le Trahison des clercs (1927), 627 Benson, John (d. 1667), 97, 104 Beowulf, 266 Berger, Harry, Jr., xxix Bergson, Henri (1859–1941): Le Rire (1900), 75, 176, 443 Bestrafte Brudermord, 530 Bhagavadgita, 255, 407

Index Bibbiena, Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da (1470–1520), 348 Bible, 299, 536, 583, 635; Authorized Version, 466; as comedy, 209; on kingship, 505; narrative shape of, 62 Biology, 367 Birth, and death, 202 Bissell, Claude T. (1916–2000), 251 Blackfriars Theatre, 462 Blake, William (1757–1827), 56, 260, 298, 315, 326; on female will, 112; on imagination, 499; on moral virtue, 387; NF on, xxiii, xxiv–xxv; The Four Zoas, 578 & n. 215; Songs of Innocence (1789), 208 Blissett, William (b. 1921), xxvii, 644 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–75), 162, 353; Decameron, 392, 394 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus (ca. c.e. 480–524), 84; Consolation of Philosophy, 517 Bradley, A(ndrew) C(ecil) (1851– 1935): Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), 459–60 Brand, John (1744–1806): Popular Antiquities (1777), 181 Bray, Sir Dennis, 104 Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956), 155; alienation technique of, 337, 415, 446, 569 British Empire, 438 Brooke, Arthur (d. 1563): The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), 483 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605–82): on belief, 140; on horses, 448 Browning, Robert (1812–89), 451 Brueghel (or Breughel), Pieter (ca. 1525–69), 29 Bruni, Leonardo (“Aretino”) (1369– 1444), 349

769 Buddhism, 341, 369; as myth of concern, 366 Buffoon, 35, 39 Bunraku, 483 Bunyan, John (1628–88), 58 Burbage, Richard (ca. 1567–1619), 466 Burke, Edmund (1729–97), on art as man’s nature, 61, 239, 634 Burns, Robert (1759–96), 161 Burton, Robert (1577–1640): Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 496 Butler, Samuel (1835–1902): on Shakespeare, 97; Erewhon (1872), 632, 637; Erewhon Revisited (1901), 97 Byron, George Gordon, Baron (1788– 1824), 15, 186 Cabot, John (1425–ca. 1500), 348 Caesar, Gaius Julius (ca. 100–44 b.c.e.), 85, 281, 289, 552, 628 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro (1600–81), 231 Calin, William (b. 1936), xxxi Cambridge ritualists, xv, xli–xlii Campion, Thomas (1567–1620): When thou must home (1601), 103, 180 Camus, Albert (1913–60): The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), 274, 313, 408 Canada Council, 251 Cao Xueqin (ca. 1715–63): The Story of the Stone (The Dream of the Red Chamber) (ca. 1760), 370 Capitalism, and socialism, 640 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832–98): Alice books, 16; Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), 174, 416 & n. 103, 495 & n. 80 Castiglione, Baldassarre, Conte di Novilava (1478–1529): life and character of, 347–8; The Courtier (1528), 100, 346–60, 627–8, 643, 644

770 Catastrophe, 25, 172, 363, 478 Catharsis, 7–8 Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536), 535 Cause, Aristotle on, 5 Cecil, William, 1st Baron Burghley (1520–98), 41 Ceres, 402. See also Demeter Cervantes, Miguel de (1547–1616): Don Quixote (1605–15), 25, 349, 523, 574; theme of, 15–19; translations and interpretations of, 14–15 Chain of being, liv, 33, 153, 316, 405, 410. See also Cosmos, four-level Chamberlain, Lawrence Henry (1906– 89), 128 Chandler, John, 43 Chaplin, Sir Charles (Charlie) Spencer (1889–1977): The Great Dictator (1940), 25, 34 Chapman, George (ca. 1559–1634), 41, 73, 96, 259; Byron plays (1608), 277; The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608), 262; The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613), 267, 277 Charles I (1600–49), 232, 273, 348, 467 Charles V (1500–58), 348 Characters (literary), levels of, 574 Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345–1400), 162, 403, 596, 638; on “kindly stead,” 421, 616; on love, 110; spelling in, 79; and Spenser, 69; The Knight’s Tale, 392, 413, 418, 492, 597; The Legend of Good Women, 390, 477; The Monk’s Tale, 83, 201; The Parliament of Fowles, 643; The Tale of Sir Thopas, 196; Troilus and Criseyde, 392 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860– 1904), 28, 137, 155, 243; The Cherry Orchard (1904), 390 Chikamatsu, Monzaemon (1673– 1724), 428, 483

Index Child (dramatic character), 245 Children, language of, 461 China, 32; comedy in, 31; drama in, 143 Christ: body of, 640; communion with, 319; as king, 505 Christianity, 23, 110, 202, 369, 589; calendar of, 493; as city religion, 635; and courtly love, 99–101, 388–9, 473, 477; on the fall, 418; law in, 116, 209, 379, 392, 583; as myth of concern, 366; mythology of, 448–9, 494, 584; and nature, 47, 238, 435; sacraments in, 62; and tragedy, 8–9, 298–9, 324, 547 Churl (character), 35, 36, 40, 185 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 b.c.e.): as model, 227; De Oratore, 349, 350; Somnium Scipionis, 638; Tusculan Disputations, 349 Cinthio (Giovanni Battista Giraldi) (1504–73), 582 Classical age: educational ideals of, 643; influence of literature of, 465, 488; mythology of, 417, 496–7; religion in, 341 Cleon (d. 422 b.c.e.), in Aristophanes, 7 Cleopatra, 390, 475, 477, 566. See also Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra Clown (character), 184–95, 245, 247, 501 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834), 54, 129, 148; on imagination, 499; scholarship of, 142; on Shakespeare, 97, 122, 151 Colonna, Vittoria (ca. 1492–1547), 347 Columbia University, 128 Columbia University Press, xlvi Columbus, Christopher (1451–1506), 348 Comedy, 171, 368, 379, 386, 397; audi-

Index ence in, 184; catharsis in, 190–2; characters of, 24–6, 33–41, 184–5 (see also Humour characters); and history, 240; and Homer’s Odyssey, 373–4; of humours, see Humour characters; identity in, 199–200, 260; ironic, 200, 243, 403; Jonsonian vs. Shakespearean, 20–2, 143, 333–4; as loose category, 371; of manners, 20, 22, 31, 74, 143, 162, 164, 243; mood in, 158–9; and myth of deliverance, 369–71; NF’s theories of, xxviii– xxxi; “Odyssey” critics favour, 129, 130, 133, 134, 152; romantic, 74, 244, 245; structure of, 3–13, 22–4, 26–32, 74–6, 198, 244–5, 342; time in, 525, 615; and tragedy, 7–9, 162, 200–4 passim, 206–7, 325–6, 363–4, 384–7, 485–6. See also New Comedy; Shakespeare, subhead comedy of Comic strips, 370 Commedia dell’arte, 441; characters of, 247, 444, 611; Shakespeare and, 31, 52, 72, 146–7, 338, 426, 486 Communism, 640; and More’s Utopia, 625–6 Concern, myth of, 371; and arts and sciences, 366–9 Condell, Henry (d. 1627), 332 & n. 12, 461, 466 Congreve, William (1670–1729), 22, 31, 143, 162; Love for Love (1695), 4, 36; The Way of the World (1700), 138 Contemporary literature, 344 Convention, literary, 130–2, 133, 156, 368; as liberating, 103; and myth, 165–6, 166–7; in poetry, 95, 98–9 Cook (character), 39 Cooper, Lane (1875–1959): An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (1922), 34 Corinthians, Epistle to the, 194, 205

771 Cornford, F(rancis) M(acdonald) (1874–1943), xli–xlii Cosmos, four-level or traditional, 56–7, 62, 124, 125, 549–50; reversal of, 419–20 Counter-reformation, 640 Courtier. See Castiglione Courtly love: and Romeo and Juliet, 473–6, 477, 478; Shakespeare and, 113, 389–90, 404. See also Love poetry Creation, human, modern theory of, 236–7 Criticism, 273; and concern, 368; vs. experience of lit, 134; generic, 403; and literature, 236; NF’s as Odyssean, 130; NF’s relevant to twenty-first century, liv–lxi; and poetry, 271 – schools and types of, 644; Freudian, 535; “Iliad” vs. “Odyssey,” 129–32, 133, 148–9, 152–3 Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658), 240, 273 Crucifixion, the, 8 Culture, 366 Cycle, of nature, 106–7, 200 Cyropaedia, xxvii, 350, 351. See also Xenophon Cyrus the Great (of Persia) (d. 529 b.c.e.), 350 Daniel, Samuel (1563–1619): Cleopatra (1594), 567; Musophilus (1599), 620 Danse macabre, 542, 632 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), 63, 110, 154, 231, 353, 474; love in, 389; De Monarchia, 300; Divine Comedy, 8, 11, 12, 100, 104, 209, 547; Inferno, 299, 300, 303, 319, 389; Paradiso, 110, 389; Purgatorio, 323, 359, 483, 631; Vita nuova, 100, 389

772 Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–82), 45, 635; and new idea of time, 367 Daumier, Honoré (1808–78), 15 Death, 238, 251–2; and birth, 202; and tragedy, 300 Dekker, Thomas (ca. 1570–1632), 300; The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600), 39 Deliverance, myth of, 368–71, 384, 403 Deloney, Thomas (ca. 1550–1600): Thomas of Reading (ca. 1600), 644 Demeter (Ceres), xlv, 341; and Persephone, xliii, 10, 384, 600, 602 Democracy, 217, 369, 640; as myth of concern, 366 Depression, the, 625 De Quincey, Thomas (1785–1859), on Shakespeare, 151 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), and NF, lvi–lx passim Detective stories, 129, 137, 156, 212, 363, 364; convention in, 130–2 passim Dewey Decimal System, 15 Diana, 417 Dickens, Charles (1812–70), 471; Forster on, 25; humour characters in, 444; Edwin Drood (1870), 53 Didacticism, 208 Dido, 390, 475, 477 Dionysius the Younger (4th c. b.c.e.), 358 Dionysus, 279; Dionysian vs. Apollonian, 256, 258, 261, 262, 265, 274, 289 Dolci, Carlo (1616–86), 132 Donatus, Aelius (4th c. c.e.), 161 Donne, John (1572–1631), 576; Songs and Sonnets (1633), 101 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821–81), 18, 546 Dottore (character), 247, 444, 611 Drama, 231, 384; characterization in,

Index 33–4; criticism of, 21; and dream, 206–7; as group art, 90, 146; historical, 83, 84; illusion and reality in, 48, 409, 433, 436, 437, 569; life and, 213, 440–1, 445, 448; linear vs. simultaneous response in, 387; meaning in, 159–60, 199, 232; as objective or mature form, 329–30, 458–9, 466; plot in, 157; popular, see Popular literature; reading of, 141–2; and ritual, 7–8, 52, 161–2, 164–5, 172–3, 217; social persecution of, 23; specific forms of, 200–1; unity in, 162–3. See also specific types of drama Drayton, Michael (1563–1631), 131 Dream, 194; and drama, 206–7 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden (1585–1649), 599 Dryden, John (1631–1700): Alexander’s Feast (1697), 158; All for Love (1678), 567; An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), 138 Dumézil, Georges (1898–1986), 630 East India Company, 439, 620 Ecclesiastes, 253, 315 Ecological movement, 635 Eddas, 295 Eden, 211; in Spenser and Dante, 63 Eden, Richard (ca. 1521–76): History of Travayle in the West and East Indies (1577), 51, 344 & n. 31, 439 & n. 22, 620 Edgar, Pelham (1871–1948), 531 & n. 149 Education, 356; liberal, 457; in Renaissance, 61, 643–4 Edward III (1312–77), 502, 511 Edward IV (1442–83), 503 Egypt, as symbol, 62 Eichmann, Karl Adolf (1906–62), 290 Eighteenth century: common sense

Index in, 15; cosmology of, 434; drama in, 208; natural society in, 245; nature in, 634 Eiron, 34–9 passim Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888–1965), 498; on explicit vs. real meaning, 160, 232; on Hamlet, 319; on Othello, 270, 314, 484; on reality, 339, 402; on sensibility, 158; on Shakespeare, 152, 227; The Cocktail Party (1950), 25, 30; Marina (1930), 146; preface to The Wheel of Fire (1930), 341; The Waste Land (1922), 52, 146, 341 Elizabeth I (1533–1603), 41, 85, 183, 262, 348, 466, 504, 566; and Shakespeare, 96, 97–8, 181, 469, 489–90, 496, 504; and Spenser, 54, 56, 65, 70 Elizabeth (daughter of James I). See Stuart, Elizabeth Elizabethan age, 93; British history in, 85; character of, 631; group arts important in, 90; kingship in, 259, 261, 265; nature in, 46, 200, 211; rhetoric in, 461–2; theatre as metaphor in, 448; theatres in, 149–50, 232, 331–2, 462, 464–5, 467, 486 – literature of: critics of, 323; drama, 23, 72, 83, 145–6, 263, 465–6, 486; foreign influences on, 486; love poetry, 280, 474; and Ovid, 483; romance, 642–4; theory of genres, 61; tragedy, 256–61, 266, 268, 298–9, 325. See also Renaissance Elyot, Sir Thomas (ca. 1490–1546): The Governour (1531), 352, 627, 643 England, 16 English (language), quality of, 228 English Institute, 3 hdnt. English literature, and Shakespeare, 231

773 Epic, 30; Renaissance theory of, 61 Equality, and liberty and fraternity, 360 Erasmus, Desiderius (ca. 1466–1536), 626, 630, 639, 640; Encomium moriae (In Praise of Folly) (1509), 632; Institute [or Education] of a Christian Prince (1516), 350, 627 Eros, 419; and Adonis, 222, 223; in comedy, 403, 417; and creativity, 387–90, 420; cult of, 388–90; Erosfigure, 178–9, 183, 287; in The Faerie Queene, 67, 70; in love poetry, 99– 100, 101, 103; Plato on, 359, 387–8, 417; in Shakespeare’s sonnets, 106, 111, 113; in tragedy, 280, 577. See also Courtly love; Love Essay, as individual form, 90 Essex, Earl of (Robert Devereux) (1566–1601), 504, 505 Eucharist, 62 Euphuism, 644, 645 Euripides (ca. 480–406 b.c.e.), 8, 26, 28, 48, 256, 300; Alcestis, 26, 326; Bacchae, 256; Helena, 404; Heracles, 257; Hippolytus, 28, 29, 256; Medea, 28 Everyman, 258 Existentialism, 252, 451 Experience, role of personal in production of art, 95, 99, 103 Expo ’67, 633–4 Fall, the, 8 Falstaff, 21, 39, 466, 570; character sketch of, 522–4; cowardice of, 15, 153; on honour, 407; and ironic vision, 301, 302; as miles gloriosus, 36; rejection of, 11, 34, 94, 284, 286, 410; roles of, 445, 459 Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The (1598), 524

774 Farce, 159, 208 Fascism, 261; as myth of concern, 366; Shakespeare and, 87 Faulkner, William (1897–1962), 153 Faust, 344 Fawkner, Harald William (b. 1946), lvi Ficino, Marsilio (1433–99), 359 Fielding, Henry (1707–54): The History of Tom Jones (1749), 153 Flaubert, Gustave (1821–80), 155; Madame Bovary (1857), 17 Fletcher, John (1579–1625), 31; and Shakespeare, 151, 597; The Faithful Shepherdess (ca. 1610), 163, 335, 593, 594. See also Beaumont Fletcher, Phineas (1582–1660), 66 Florio, John (ca. 1553–1625), 73 Fool (character), 184, 247, 501, 632; meaning of in Shakespeare, 304, 365, 450, 555. See also Clown Ford, John (1586–after 1639): ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633), 298, 299 Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (1879– 1970), on Dickens, 25 Fortune, wheel of, 511, 555, 564; in Shakespeare’s histories, 84, 201, 217–18, 240–2; and tragedy, xlviii, 84, 201, 258–9, 272, 310, 321, 323. See also Shakespeare, Henry VIII Foucault, Michel (1926–84), lviii Fowler, Alastair, 644 France: drama in, 5, 232, 466; existentialism in, 451; influence of literature of on English literature, 486 Francis I of France (1494–1547), 348, 358 Fraternity, and liberty and equality, 360 Frazer, Sir James George (1854–1941): dying king ritual in, 325; influence of on NF, xli–xliii

Index Fregoso, Federico (ca. 1480–1541), and Ottaviano (1470–1524), 347 French Revolution, ideals of, 360 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), 273, 375; on dreams, 194, 501; on pleasure principle, 174; and the poets, 92; on reality principle, 130, 202; Traumdeutung (1900), 391 Friedrich V, Elector Palatine (1596– 1632), 599 & n. 261 Fry, Christopher Harris (1907–2005): The Lady’s Not for Burning (1949), 30 Frye, (Herman) Northrop: influence of, xxvii, xxviii–xxxi; as teacher, xxxiii – works: Alexander lectures (1966), 250–1; “The Argument of Comedy” (1949), xxviii–xxix, xxxvii–xxxix, xlii, xliii; Bampton Lectures (1963), xxxi–xxxii, xlvii, 128; “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy” (1953), xxxvii, xl; “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” (1952), xxxvii, xxxix–xl; The Critical Path (1971), xxvi; The Double Vision (1991), xxvi; “The Fertility Cults” (written 1935), xlii; Fearful Symmetry (1947), xxiii; Fools of Time (1967), xlvii–xlviii; Foreword to Untold Tales (1989), xxvii; General Editor’s Introduction to Shakespeare Series, lii; “How True a Twain” (1962), xli, liii; “Il Cortegiano” (1980), xxvii; Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tempest, xlv, liii; “The Literary Meaning of ‘Archetype’” (written 1952), xl–xli; The Myth of Deliverance (1963), xlvii, xlviii–l, liii; “Natural and Revealed Communities” (1990), xxvii; “Nature and Nothing” (1965), xxxiii; Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986), xxviii, xlvii, l–li, liii, 455–6,

Index 623; “On Value Judgments” (1968), lvii; The Return of Eden (1964), xxiv, xxv; “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale” (1962), xliii–xliv; “The Relation of Religion to the Art Forms of Music and Drama” (written 1936), xlii; “The Revelation to Eve,” xxiv–xxv; The Secular Scripture (1976), xxvi; “Shakespeare and the Modern World” (1964), xxxii, xxxvii; “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors” (written 1950), xl; “Shakespeare’s Experimental Comedy” (1962), xxxiii; “Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” xlv; “Something Rich and Strange” (1989), xxxiii; “The Stage Is All the World” (1985), xxxiii, l; “The Structure and Spirit of Comedy” (1965), xxxii; “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene” (1961), xxv–xxvi, xli; Tamblyn Lectures (1981), 361; “Toast to the Memory of Shakespeare” (1962), xxxiii, xxxvii; “The Tragedies of Nature and Fortune” (1962), xxxiii, xlviii – Anatomy of Criticism (1957), xliii, xlviii; essays incorporated into, xxxvii, xxxix, xl, xli, 128; Shakespeare in, xxiii, xxxiv–xxxv; value judgments in, lvii – A Natural Perspective (1965), xxxi, xxxii, xl, xlii, xliii, 326; argument of, xlv–xlvii, 128–9; outline of, xxxv– xxxvi; Shakespeare in, xxxvii (see also Bampton Lectures) Fuller, Thomas (1608–61), 21 Galileo (Galileo Galilei) (1564–1642), 367 Gammer Gurton’s Needle, 73

775 Garden symbol, 239 Gardiner Ceramic Museum, 444 Gascoigne, George (ca. 1534–77): Supposes (perf. 1566), 204 Genre, 133, 368; Renaissance theory of, 61, 642–3 Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1100–54), 404, 546, 620 Geology, 367 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck (1836– 1911), 129, 196; and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842–1900), 31, 75; The Gondoliers (1889), 444; The Mikado (1885), 30; The Pirates of Penzance (1880), 73 Gilgamesh, 254 Gilson, Étienne (1884–1978), 629 Giotto (di Bondone) (ca. 1266–1337), 132; his O, 147 Giulio Romano (Giulio Pippi de’Giannuzzi) (ca. 1492–1546), 121, 122, 123, 197, 605 Globe Theatre, 426, 440, 448, 462 God, 71, 230, 254, 255; as creator, 164, 418, 552 (see also Cosmos, fourlevel); death of, 451; and love, 100, 388; and mercy, 583; popular view of, 135, 430; as providence in drama, 204–5, 449; and royalty, 358, 505, 506, 518; in Shakespeare’s histories, 263, 266, 275, 283, 290–1; in tragedy, 298–9, 308, 323, 324, 536. See also Gods/Goddesses Gods/Goddesses, 295, 496; in drama, 163, 167, 203, 335, 594; dying, xxxviii–xxxix, xli–xliii, 7–8, 125, 222, 279, 497; as metaphors, 165, 171; in Shakespeare’s romances, 47, 118, 335, 428, 594, 617; in tragedy, 26, 253, 254–6, 257–8, 323–4, 363–4, 385, 603. See also White goddess Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–

776 1832), 458; influence of, 230; Faust (1808–32), 147, 494; The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), 15; Wilhelm Meister (1796–1829), 335 Golden age, 211, 259 Goldoni, Carlo (1707–93), 444, 611 Goldsmith, Oliver (ca. 1730–74), 31, 143, 162 Gone with the Wind (1939 film), 460 Goolde, Morton, 43 Gospels, 192, 505 Governor General’s Award, NF receives, xxviii, 623–4 Gower, John (ca. 1325–1408): Apollonius of Tyre, 596 Gozzi, Count Carlo (1720–1806), 611 Grace, 210–11, 259, 299, 379, 605–6; in the courtier, 353–9 passim; in courtly love, 99, 100; and nature, xliv, 70, 71, 118–19 Graham, John Finlayson (b. 1924), 361 Graves, Robert von Ranke (1895– 1985), on white goddess or triple will, 180, 417, 496, 580 Great Britain: history of, in Shakespeare’s history plays, 501–4; prehistory of, 85, 168, 291, 404, 546, 620 Greece: Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in, 256, 261; comedy in, 39, 72, 591; drama in, 161, 365, 371; romance in, 597–8; tragedy in, 26, 253–60 passim, 278, 289, 298, 300, 323, 325, 363–4, 385–6, 547, 576 Greene, Graham (1904–91), 153 Greene, Robert (1558–92), 644; and Shakespeare, 9, 38, 73, 333, 489; Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay (1594), 49, 489; James the Fourth (1598), 489; Pandosto (1588) (source for The Winter’s Tale), 114, 115, 197, 221, 383, 422, 428, 598, 599, 601, 608

Index Green world, xxix–xxx, xxxix, xliii, 9–13, 78, 214–15 Greville, Sir Fulke, 1st Baron Brooke (1554–1628), 643; Mustapha (1609), 313 Guggenheim Fellowship, prospectus for, xxiv, xxv, xxvii Hall, Georgine, 43 Hall, Joseph, Bishop (1574–1656), 232 & n. 26, 465 & n. 28; Mundus alter et idem (ca. 1605), 632 Halpern, Richard L. (b. 1954), lvi Hamartia, 272 Hamilton, A(lbert) C. (b. 1921), xxvii; tribute to, 645 Hamlin, Cyrus, 456 Harbage, Alfred Bennett (1901–76): As They Liked It (1947), 23 Hardy, Thomas (1840–1928), 28, 252 Harlequin (character), 444, 611 Harrison, Jane Ellen (1850–1928), xli–xlii Hartle, Robert, 42 Harvey, Gabriel (ca. 1550–1630), 73, 643 & n. 7; on scholars, 98 Hawkins, Henry (1571–1646), 41 Hawkins, Sherman, xxix Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831): Phenomenology of Spirit [or Mind] (German, 1807), 359 Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), 269, 405 Helen of Troy, 475, 477 Heliodorus (3rd c. c.e.): Aethiopica, 598 & n. 254 Hell, 298; harrowing of, 62; as human life, 300, 304 Heller, Helen, 456, 624 Heming, John (1556–1630), 332 & n. 12, 461, 466

Index Henri IV, King of France (1553–1610), 262 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England (1609–69), 232, 348 Henry IV (1367–1413), 502, 503 Henry V (1387–1422), 469, 502, 503 Henry VI (1421–71), 460 Henry VII (1457–1509), 469, 502, 503–4 Henry VIII (1491–1547), 347–8, 358, 502, 505, 535, 625 Heraclitus (ca. 540–ca. 480 b.c.e.), on dreams, 194 Herod (the Great) (74–4 b.c.e.), 295, 580 Herrick, Robert (1591–1674), 100 History play. See Drama, “historical” Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945), 18, 451 Hoby, Sir Thomas (1530–66), 348 Hogarth, William (1697–1764), 15 Holbein, Hans, Jr. (1497–1543), 347–8 Holinshed, Raphael (d. ca. 1580), and Shakespeare, 203, 331 Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809–94), 440 Homer (8th c. b.c.e.), 300, 357, 370, 403; Iliad, 129, 254–5, 259, 266, 411; Odyssey, 60, 129, 318, 371–4, 390–2. See also Criticism, schools and types of Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–89), on overthought and underthought, 458 & n. 7 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 b.c.e.), 566, 635 Howard, Jean Elizabeth (b. 1948), xxx Howard, Louise, 43 Hugo, Victor Marie (1802–85), 458 Huizinga, Johan (1872–1945): Homo Ludens (1938), 301 & n. 101 Humanism (Renaissance), educational theory of, xxvii, 626–7, 629

777 Humour characters, 6, 24–5, 27–8, 40–1, 75, 176, 386, 443–5 Humours, four, 463–4 Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938), lvii– lviii Huxley, Aldous Leonard (1894–1963): Point Counter Point (1928), 130 & n. 7 Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825–95): Evolution and Ethics (1893), 635 Hypocrite (character), 90, 301–2, 354, 426, 441, 452, 509–10, 515 Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906), 22, 136, 137; An Enemy of the People (1882), 6; Ghosts (1881), 5, 449; Hedda Gabler (1890), 167; Little Eyolf (1894), 5; The Wild Duck (1884), 134–5 Identity, 165, 217; loss and recovery of, 174–6, 200; personal, l–li Ideology, 366, 506; and mythology, xxx, 448–9, 583–4 Idiotes (character), 185–96 Illusion and reality, li–lii, 418; in drama, 48, 409, 433, 436, 437 Imagery, poetic, 217 Imagination, 99; changing meaning of, 499 India: castes in, 630; drama in, 27, 31 Indians, North American, resentments of, 633–4 Individual, as problematic word, 442 Innocence, 208–9 Ireland, and English literature, 22, 143 Irony, 171; in comedy, 28–9; “Iliad” critics favour, 129, 130; as modern, 202–3, 234, 293; in tragedy, 28; vision of, 252, 253–4, 258, 290 Irving, Sir Henry (1838–1905), 467 Isaiah, Book of, 50 Islam, as myth of concern, 366

778 Italy, literature of influences English, 36, 72, 486, 644 Jack, Donald Lamont (1924–2003): The Canvas Barricade (perf. 1961), 84 Jacob, 591; and Esau, 216 James I (1566–1625), 41, 51, 232, 275, 464, 466, 489, 599, 637 James, Henry (1843–1916): The Tragic Muse (1890), 627 Japan, 358; drama in, 31 Jervas (or Jarvis), Charles (ca. 1675– 1739), 14 Jesus, 493; birth of, 580; death of, 324; harrowing of hell, 62; teaching of, 583 Job, 191; Book of, 206, 449 Johnson, Samuel (1709–84): on drama 231; on Shakespeare, 22, 139, 291, 371 John the Baptist, 493 Jonah, 218, 219 Jones, Inigo (1573–1652), 146 Jonson, Ben (1572–1637), xxxviii, 23, 38, 136, 162, 172, 567; masques of, 147; personality of, 329; publishes plays as “Works,” 132, 141, 229, 329, 466; quality of his plays, 138; and Shakespeare, 81, 126, 142, 228, 271, 456–7, 458, 488, 599; on style, 227 – comedies of: bland heroes in, 26; humour characters in, 24, 33, 40–1, 75, 176, 386, 443, 444, 445; and New Comedy, 5, 9, 22; scolding of audience in, 31; vs. Shakespeare’s, 20–2, 29, 32, 120, 132, 137, 139, 143–9 passim, 171, 333–4, 430 – works: The Alchemist (1610), 6–7, 21, 36, 38, 138, 164; Bartholomew Fair (1614), 21, 135; The Devil Is an Ass (1631), 163; Epicene, or The Silent

Index Woman (1616), 24, 143, 443; Every Man in His Humour (1598), 36, 38, 137, 145, 162, 443; The Magnetic Lady (1631), 137–8; The New Inn (1629), 137–9 passim, 147, 149; Poetaster (1602), 149; The Sad Shepherd (1641), 168, 171; To the memory of my beloved (1616), 81 & n. 1, 82 & n. 4, 228 & n. 13; Volpone (1605), 6–7, 26, 39, 41 Joseph (Old Testament), 167 Jourdain, Sylvester (d. 1650): Discovery of the Barmudas (1610), 50–1, 344 & n. 31, 439 & n. 22, 620 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius (1882–1941): Finnegans Wake (1939), 227 Judaism, 369 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961), influence of on NF, xli, xlii Kalidasa (fl. 5th c.), 31; Sakuntala, 147, 164, 167 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. (1895–1963): The King’s Two Bodies (1957), 513 Kaske, Carol V. (b. 1933), 642 Kautsky, Karl (1854–1938), 625–6 Keats, John (1795–1821), xxxvii, 56, 466; on Adam’s dream, 207; on Lear, 325; and Milton, 230; Endymion (1818), 214; Hyperion (1820), 274 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (1917–63), xlvii Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55), 15, 323, 546 King, Edward (1612–37), 106 King: Elizabethan idea of, 259, 261, 265; in Shakespeare, 271, 506, 513, 553. See also Prince; Ruler Knight, G(eorge) Wilson (1897–1985), xliv, 540; The Shakespearian Tempest

Index (1932), 125, 248; The Wheel of Fire (1930), 341 Knights, L(ionel) C(harles) (1906–97), 531 Krumm, John McGill (1913–95), 128 Kyd, Thomas (1558–94): The Spanish Tragedy (1592), 276, 278, 297–8, 299, 308, 529 Kyogen play, 386 Lafferty, R(aphael) A(loysius) (1914– 2002): Past Master (1968), 637 Language, literary vs. other uses of, lviii–lx Latin (language and literature), 227; and English, 486 Law: Christianity and, 116, 209, 379, 392, 583; irrational, in comedy, xlix, 29–30, 75, 173, 176, 198, 205–6, 209–10, 213, 245–6, 375, 386–7, 403, 412–13, 490–1, 584; Old Testament, 640; rulers and, 264, 271, 274, 382–3, 507, 582–3; Shakespeare and, 95; in tragedy, 26, 363, 370–1, 385–6 Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885– 1930), 262 Leary, Lewis Gaston (1906–90), 128 Leech, Clifford (d. 1977), 251 Leggatt, Alexander (b. 1940), 456 Leibni(t)z, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646– 1716), 353 Leigh, Vivien (1913–67), 569 Leisure, 359–60 Lent, 172 Lentricchia, Frank (b. 1940), lvi Leo X, Pope (Giovanni de’ Medici) (1475–1521), 347 LePan, Douglas Valentine (1914–98), 251 Leviathan, 62, 218–19 Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair (1885–1951): Main Street (1920), 157

779 Liberty, and equality and fraternity, 360 Linear vs. simultaneous apprehension, in drama, 387; in reading, 134, 387 Literature: authority of, 420; and concern, 366–9; and criticism, 236; delight and instruction in, 129–30; experience of, as precritical, 134; function of, 165; impersonality in, 154–5; as performative, xlix–l, lix. See also Modern literature; Oral literature; Poetry; Popular literature Livy (Titus Livius) (59 b.c.e.–17 c.e.), 161, 164 Lodge, Thomas (1558–1625): Defence of Poetry (1579/1580), 161–2 Logan, George M., xxvii, 642 London: as cultural centre, 353; theatres in, 465 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807– 82), 161 Lope de Vega. See Vega Carpio, Lope de Louis XIV (1638–1715), 466 Love: and education, 643–4; ladder of, 359; sublimation of, 388. See also Courtly love; Eros Love poetry, 165, 280; convention in, 98–102, 179–80 Lover, Samuel: Handy Andy (1842), 355 Lover’s Complaint, A (1609), 102 Love’s Labour’s Won, 74, 111 Lowes, John Livingston (1867–1945): The Road to Xanadu (1927), 142 Lucian (ca. c.e. 117–180): Dialogues of the Dead, 632, 638; Zeus tragoedus, 631–2 Luke, Gospel of, 561 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), 639 Luvah, in NF’s theory of drama, 260

780 Lydgate, John (ca. 1370–ca. 1451): The Fall of Princes, 83 Lyly, John (ca. 1554–1606): and Shakespeare, 9, 73, 333, 334, 489; Endymion (1591), 164, 333, 489; Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), 644 Lyric, 95, 330; convention in, 131; and fantasy, 22, 143 MacDonald, Brian (b. 1928), 444 MacDonald, George (1824–1905): Phantastes (1858), 66 Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527), 262–3, 267–8, 269, 271; Mandragola (perf. 1519), 204; The Prince (1532), 348, 354, 358, 359, 452–3, 509, 628 Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius (5th c. c.e.), 638 Magic, 50, 393, 433, 438; as art in Elizabethan times, 71, 120, 215, 343, 401, 430, 605; drama and, 164–5, 217; Shakespeare and, 204, 244, 263, 287, 334, 344, 388–9. See also Green world; Ritual; Shakespeare, The Tempest Magician, 47, 48, 49, 52, 171, 562, 611–12 Magnificat, 400 Malory, Sir Thomas (d. 1471), 87, 626 Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766–1834), 635 Mann, Thomas (1875–1955), 230 Manningham, John (d. 1622), 486 & n. 64 Maritain, Jacques (1882–1973), 629 Marlowe, Christopher (1564–93), 310, 473; Doctor Faustus (1604), 299–300; The Jew of Malta (1633), 263, 271, 509; Tamburlaine (1587), 84, 145, 252, 262 Marston, John (1576–1634), 40, 80; The

Index Malcontent (1604), 40; Sophonisba (1606), 146 Marvell, Andrew (1621–78): An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland (1681), 240, 264 Marx, Adolph (“Harpo”) (1893–1961), 611 Marx, Karl (1818–83): Communist Manifesto (1848), 635 Marxism, 369; as myth of concern, 366, 367 Mary, Virgin, 99 Mask, 441–2, 509 Masque, 5; in Love’s Labour’s Lost, 73; Shakespeare and, 9; and The Tempest, 52 Massinger, Philip (1583–1640), 40 Mathematics, 330 Matthew, Gospel of, 124 Medici, Guiliano de’ (1479–1516), 347 Melancholy, 464, 474 Melodrama, 159, 208; and tragedy, 297–8, 299, 304, 323–4, 325, 326 Menander (ca. 343–291 b.c.e.), 4, 8, 11, 31, 486–7; Epitrepontes, 117, 164 Meres, Francis (1565–1674), 74, 111 Metaphor, 165, 217 Michelangelo (Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti) (1475–1564), 100 Middle Ages: Biblical plays in, 84; cult of Eros in, 388–9; death in, 542; education in, 626–7, 629; idealization of, 367; kingship in, 507; love in, 643; love poetry in, 98, 99; tragedy in, 83–4; Trojan War in, 403–4 Middleton, Thomas (ca. 1570–1627), 38, 41; The Changeling (1653), 299; A Trick to Catch the Old One (1608), 39, 488; Women Beware Women (1657), 276 Miles gloriosus, 25, 27–8, 34, 36, 37

Index Miller, Arthur (1915–2005): Death of a Salesman (1949), 87 Milton, John (1608–74), 147, 154, 245, 351, 352; influence of, 230, 231; NF on, xxiii, xxiv–xxv, xxvii; and Spenser, 56, 65; Comus (prod. 1634, pub. 1637), 46, 52, 60, 168, 171, 211, 214, 245; Lycidas (1638), 106, 165, 168; Paradise Lost (1667), 47, 59, 207, 224, 265, 290, 419, 577, 618; Paradise Regained (1671), 96, 306; Samson Agonistes (1671), 9 Milton, John, Sr. (ca. 1563–1647), 138–9 Miracle plays, 8 Mirror for Magistrates (1559), 83–4, 142, 228 Modern age: as Dionysian, 261; as ironic, 202–3, 293; and King Lear, 448, 451, 563, 565 Modern literature: criticism of, 153; as ironic, 234 Modes, fictional, 574 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622–73), 29, 31, 247, 430, 487, 611; bland heroes in, 26; humour characters in, 24–5, 386, 443, 444; and New Comedy, 5; performance of, 467; Shaw on, 22; L’Avare (1669), 443; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (perf. 1670), 443; Le Malade imaginaire (1673), 443; Le Misanthrope (1666), 25, 91, 92, 188; Tartuffe (1664), 40, 42–3 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533– 92), 634; on cannibals, 45, 46, 344, 402, 434, 619, 620–1, 633 Montefeltro, Federico de (1422–82), 349 Montefeltro, Guidobaldo de (1472– 1508), 346–7, 349, 350–1 Monteverdi, Claudio (1567–1643): The Coronation of Poppaea (1642), 378

781 Mood, in drama, 158–9, 173–4 Moon, 219, 417; power over, 47, 340, 616–17; as symbol, 125, 211 More, Sir Thomas, St. (1478–1535): Utopia (1516), 351, 625–41 Morgann, Maurice (1726–1802), on Falstaff, 36 Morris, William (1834–96), 400; News from Nowhere (1891), 636 Motteux, Peter Anthony (1660–1718), 14–15 Movies, 5, 25, 31; youth in, 23 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756– 91), 22, 142, 143, 148; Don Giovanni (1787), 37; The Magic Flute (1791), 22, 52, 144; The Marriage of Figaro (1786), 22, 37, 143, 144, 178–9, 487 Mucedorus, 162, 334–5, 378; plot summary of, 594–5 Mummers, 9 Murray, (George) Gilbert Aimé (1866– 1957), xli–xlii Music, 134, 157, 215, 265, 330, 366–7; as art of time, 422; as group art, 90, 146; influence of, 158; modern, 148; “pop,” 131; repetition in, 144; in Shakespeare, 125; of the spheres, 238; Wilde on, 343 Mystery plays, 608 Myth, 171; and ideology, xxx, 448–9, 583–4; and literary convention, 165–6, 166–7; and ritual, 164, 217 Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) (1769–1821), 93 Nashe, Thomas (1567–1601): The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jacke Wilton (1594), 642–3, 645 Nature: Aristotle on, 21; and art, xliv, 61, 120–2, 124, 215, 239, 249, 434, 604–5; cycles in, 106–7, 200; and grace, xliv, 70, 71, 118–19; levels of,

782 xliv, 46, 47, 91, 124, 211, 238, 258–9, 419–20, 432–3, 434, 550–1, 555, 603– 4 (see also Cosmos, four-level); pollution and exploitation of, 634–5; in Shakespeare, 171–2, 237–49 passim; and society, 634–5 Nazis, 271 Nebuchadnezzar (d. 562 b.c.e.), 218 Nemesis, 363–4, 382, 385, 386 New Arden Shakespeare, xiii–xiv, 456 New Comedy, 9, 12, 72, 116, 117, 172, 173, 181, 204, 364, 597, 611; as genre, 4–6, 8, 22–3, 373; popular formulas of, 400, 401; Shakespeare and, 370, 399, 486–8, 489, 603, 604 New Testament, 272, 379; on law, 583; on love, 388 Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727), and new ideas of space, 421 New York Times, 208 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844– 1900), 359, 546, 578; on Apollonian vs. Dionysian, 256, 258, 261, 262, 265, 274, 289; and tragedy, 324; The Birth of Tragedy (1872), 256 Nineteenth century: drama in, 208; and Hamlet, 447, 451, 545, 563, 564; pessimism in, 252; Shakespeare in, 329 Noah, 47, 218, 224 Noh play, 341, 386 Nohrnberg, James Carson (b. 1941), xxvii North, Sir Thomas (ca. 1535–1601), trans. Plutarch, 331 North America, discovery and settlement of, 344, 348, 439, 620 Norwood, Gilbert (1880–1954): Plautus and Terence (1963), 23 Nothing, meanings of, 317–18, 517 Novel, 21; development of, 17–18; as individual form, 90

Index O’Casey, Sean (John Casey) (1884– 1964), 22, 31, 143; Juno and the Paycock (1924), 25, 34 Octavia [formerly attrib. to Seneca], 258 Oedipus, 322; complex, in comedy, 4, 6 Old Comedy, 4, 5, 9, 12, 31, 164, 486 Old Testament, 640; law in, 583 Olivier, Laurence Kerr, Baron (1907– 89), 152 Opera, 257; and comedy, 22, 31, 143–4, 145 Oracular utterance, 236 Oral literature, 228 Oratory, 350 Orpheus, 217, 239, 343 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903–50): 1984 (1949), 636, 637 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 b.c.e.–c.e. 17), 197, 417, 492, 500; in Middle Ages, 388, 390; and Shakespeare, 101, 107, 113, 222, 223, 278, 279, 287, 497, 602–3, 619; Amores, 100; Metamorphoses, 50, 125–6, 483, 496, 602, 607, 608 Painter, William (ca. 1425–95): Palace of Pleasure (1566), 392, 394 Painting, 134; fresco, 146; modern, 148; portrait, 347–8; realism and abstraction in, 139 Pantalone (character), 444, 611 Pantomime, 426 Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) (1493–1541), 344 Paradise, 259 Parasite (character), 34, 39, 72 Paris, as cultural centre, 353 Parker, Patricia (b. 1946), xxvii, 644 Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), on Cleopatra, 569 Passionate Pilgrim, The (1599), 111

Index Pastoral, 321, 600; convention, 102–3, 239, 635; imagery, 166 Pater, Walter Horatio (1839–94): Marius the Epicurean (1885), 635 Pathos, 16; as isolation, 17 Patrick, Julian William Orde (b. 1941), 456 Paul, St., 50, 218–19, 487; on law, 583 Peacham, Henry (1546–1643): The Compleat Gentleman (1622), 643 Peele, George (ca. 1556–96): and Shakespeare, 9, 73, 151, 333, 334, 489; The Old Wives’ Tale (1595), 136, 164, 333, 489 Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703), 166 Peripeteia, 336 & n. 10, 362, 363 Persephone (Proserpine), 417. See also Demeter Person or persona, 89, 354, 426, 441, 452, 509, 515 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) (1304– 74), 353, 389; love in, 100–1, 103, 104, 110, 113 Petrarchan convention, 100–1, 165, 474, 475 Pharaoh, 218 Pharmakos. See Scapegoat Phenomenology, lvii–lviii Phillips, Edward (ca. 1630–96), 138 Philosophy: and isolation, 312, 316; in Renaissance, 629 Pia, Emilia (d. 1528), 348 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, Comte (1463–94), 344 Pilate, Pontius (d. ca. c.e. 36), 505 Pirandello, Luigi (1867–1936), 48; Six Characters in Search of an Author (Italian, 1921), 610 Plain dealer (character), 40 Plato (ca. 428–ca. 348 b.c.e.), 8, 60, 61, 256, 358; and comedy, 256; and Eros, 359, 387–8, 389, 417; love in,

783 102, 359; on the poet, 387; symposium form in, 319, 349; Phaedo, 346; Phaedrus, 387–8, 392, 395; Symposium, 349, 359, 371, 628 – Republic, 7, 349, 351, 628, 641, 643; on philosopher-king, 406, 627; as Socrates’ model for wise man’s mind, 272 & n. 44, 630, 631; structure of, 35; vision of, 638 Platonism, 129; Platonic love, 100, 101, 110 Plautus, Titus Maccius (ca. 250–184 b.c.e.), 4, 9, 22, 34, 72, 157, 163, 172, 175, 181, 342, 399, 430, 444, 486–7, 597; brutality in, 8; characters in, 23, 25–6, 35–9 passim; Amphitryon, 167, 488; Casina, 26, 37; Menaechmi, 72, 487; Miles gloriosus, 27–8 Plot, simple and complex, 362–3 Plutarch (ca. 46–120 c.e.): on Coriolanus, 86, 88, 90–1, 93, 188, 285, 286, 320; Shakespeare and, 271, 279, 281, 294, 331, 427, 567, 575, 576, 580, 595–6; “Bravery of Women,” 357; Lives, 567, 595 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49): Three Sundays in a Week (1841), 393–4 Poet: Aristotle vs. Plato on, 387; social attitude of, 237; training of in Renaissance, 98–9 Poetry, 134; and criticism, 271; and experience, 95, 99, 103; and magic, 71; thought in, 237; and verse, 131 Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 629 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), 14, 24, 54, 176, 443 Popular literature, 25, 134, 146, 148, 611; conventions in, 130–2, 156; drama, 22–3, 31, 157, 335, 378–9, 444, 611; nature of, 161–2; Shakespeare and, see under Shakespeare

784 Primitive, the: as archaic, 161–2; equivalent to popular, 31, 161–2, 611 Prince, in Renaissance, 60–1, 350. See also Machiavelli, The Prince Printing: effects of, 229; Renaissance coyness re, 347 Prodigal son, 209 Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), 80, 112, 113, 608; on lost paradises, 240, 273; À la Recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), 158 Puppet play, 335, 366, 426, 428, 444, 594 Purcell, Henry (1659–95), 158 Puritans, 23, 57–8, 465 Putnam, Samuel Whitehall (1892– 1950), 14–15 Puttenham, George (ca. 1529–91): The Arte of English Poesie (1589), 122, 123 Pygmalion, 197 Pyramus, 125–6, 222, 279, 287; and Thisbe, 483, 492, 497 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) (ca. c.e. 35–ca. 100), 350 Rabelais, François (ca. 1494–1553), 14, 634; Abbey of Thélème in, 76, 633 Rabinovitch, Sandra, 456 Raimondi, Pietro (1786–1853), 138 Raleigh, Sir Walter (ca. 1554–1618), 50, 73; and Queen Elizabeth I, 70; Spenser’s letter to, 53, 59, 61 Ralph Roister Doister, 37 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) (1483– 1520), 347, 348, 605 Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, The, 162, 163, 335, 378, 612 Reading: linear followed by simultaneous apprehension in, 134, 387; personal appropriation in, 332

Index Realism, 27, 171; “Iliad” critics favour, 129, 130, 131, 134 Reality. See Illusion and reality Reaney, James Crerar (1926–2008), 361 Recognition, xlix, 362–5, 385, 402; in comedy, 26, 29; double, xliii–xliv, 116, 343, 383, 401, 421–2, 431, 599; outside literature, 369; in reading, 134; scene, 116–18, 126, 202, 365, 370 Reformation, the, 640 Reibetanz, John (b. 1944), 456 Religion, 366–7, 370 Renaissance: cosmology in, see Cosmos, four-level; education in, 643–4; NF and, xxiii–xxvii, liv; prince and courtier in, 60–1, 348; prince and orator in, 350; problem of texts from, xii–xiii; theory of kingship in, 513 – literature of: comedy, 5, 23, 29, 36, 37, 39, 172; critics of, 21, 29; love poetry, 98, 390. See also Elizabethan age Reni, Guido (1575–1642), 132 Repetition, as comic, 25 Restoration: comedy in, 5, 9; Shakespeare in, 450, 467 Return from Parnassus, The, 132 Revelation, Book of, 62 Revenge tragedy, 258–9, 268–9, 299, 308–9, 536, 593 Reversal, 362–5, 370, 385; outside literature, 369 Revolution, 640 Reynolds, John (fl. 1620–50): The Triumphs of Gods Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Wilfull and Premeditated Murther (1621), 299 Rhetoric: in Elizabethan age, 461–2; importance of, 90. See also Oratory Richard I, Coeur de Lion (1157–99), 508

Index Richard II (1367–1400), 503, 504 Richard III (1452–85), 469, 503, 565, 626 Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761): Pamela (1740–41), 167 Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur (1854–91), 466 Rimer, Thomas, 42–3 Ritual, and drama, xlvi, 7–8, 52, 161–2, 164, 172–3, 199, 217, 221 Riverside Shakespeare, xiii–xiv, xxix Robin Hood, 11–12 Robinson, Ralph (1520–77), 625, 628 Roman Catholic Church, 62; in Renaissance, 350, 357 Romance, 59, 171, 252; NF on, xxvi– xxvii, lv; “Odyssey” critics favour, 129, 130, 133, 134, 152, 372; plot of, 362–3; primitive nature of, 31; prose, 597–8; in Renaissance, 642–4; and survival, 369–70 Romano, Giulio. See Giulio Romano Romantic movement, 66; and Hamlet, 447, 451, 545–6; heroes in, 15; reversal of cosmology in, 420; romance in, 643 Romaunt of the Rose, The, 389 Rome, ancient: comedy in, 23, 26, 30, 37, 39; drama in, 161; and Great Britain, 93; as second Troy, 85, 404, 620; as symbol, 62; tragedy in, 258 Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio (1792– 1868): The Barber of Seville (perf. 1816), 487 Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712–78), 46; on natural society, 634; on nature, 434 Rovere, Francesco Maria della (1490– 1538), 346–7 Rowe, John Gordon (b. 1925), 361 Ruler, 301–2; de jure and de facto, 270, 304; in Shakespeare’s histories, 382;

785 in Shakespeare’s tragedies, 274–5, 276. See also King Ruskin, John (1819–1900), 65 Russell, Bertrand, Earl (1872–1970), 15 Russia, 78, 202 Rymer, Thomas (1641–1713), 136, 166 St. George play, 9, 165 Sakuntala. See Kalidasa Samuel, and the Witch of Endor, 148 Sandler, Robert (b. 1944), 455 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80), 15 Sassoferrato, Giovanni Battista Salvi da (1609–85), 132 Satan, 62 Satire, 355–6, 632 Saturnalia, 11–12, 24, 173, 192 Satyr play, 326 Saul, 505 Scapegoat, 172–3, 185 Schlegel, John, 43 School of night, 73 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), 252 Schultz, Charles, 43 Science, and concern, 366–7 Science fiction, 130; hardware and software in, 636 Scofield, (David) Paul (1922–2008), 90, 94 Sculpture, 134 Seltzer, Daniel (1933–89), 42 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Younger (ca. 4 b.c.e.–c.e. 65), 83, 278, 313; influence of, 324, 486; nature of his tragedies, 256–7; Hercules furens, 257; Thyestes, 257, 306 Senex iratus, 173 Sentimentalism, in art, 207–9 Shaffer, Peter (b. 1926): Amadeus (1979), 449 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616),

786 348, 645; anachronism in, 140–1, 266; audience of, 136, 152, 160, 231– 2, 379, 433, 449, 458, 461–4, 489–90, 583; authorship question, 151–2; biography of, see “as dramatist above all”; “life of”; and the censorship, 93, 368, 464; children in, 245; chronology of his works, 150, 330; classification of his works, 334, 335, 403, 425, 593; criticism on, 229–30, 233, 329, 332; as dramatist above all, xxxvi–xxxvii, lix, lx, 6, 87, 90, 142, 149–55, 229, 233, 330, 457–61 passim, 584 (see also “meaning in”; “theatre in”); editions of, xiii–xiv, xxix, 330, 332, 456, 530; First Folio of, 332, 334, 335, 403, 425, 435, 456, 461, 465, 466, 593, 608; heroes of, 59; influence of, 81–2, 226–35; Johnson on, 371; life of, 95–6, 150, 230, 328–9, 459; and A Lover’s Complaint, 102; and Love’s Labour’s Won, 74, 111; meaning in, 159–60, 199, 233–4, 237–8, 458; music in, 238–9, 463; nature in, 171–2, 237–49 passim; NF studies, 361–2, 531; NF teaches, 455–6; NF’s writings on, xii–xiv, xxiii–lxi; pastness and presence of, 457; performance of, 141, 463, 467–8, 562–3; personality of, 81, 229–31, 329–30, 464; and the populace, 92; and popular drama, 31, 133, 231–2, 378–9, 423–4, 594–5, 611; as Prospero, 48, 50, 430, 609, 610; quartos of, 332, 465, 467; rhyme and rhythm in, 330–1; Roman plays of, 85–6, 87, 90, 168, 188, 259, 264, 266, 271, 297; as scholarly, 142, 228; sources of, 331; theatre in, l–li, 144, 384, 409, 426, 440–54 passim, 459, 568, 609; time in, 557; topical allusions in, 93

Index – comedies of, 58, 74, 124–5, 266, 466; character types in, 33–41, 184–98, 245, 444–5; convention in, 139–40; development of, 132–3; green world in, 9–13, 78, 214, 412; heroines of, 38–9, 174–5, 179, 180, 183, 212, 487, 591; vs. Jonsonian, 137–49 passim, 333–4, 430; and New Comedy, 370, 399, 486–8, 489; as primitive, 161–72 passim; renewal in, 593; romantic, 200; songs in, 247–8; structure of, xlix, 20–32, 128–9, 172–84, 203–18 passim, 244–6, 248, 584; time in, 221 – history plays of, 74, 160, 201, 231, 297, 469; heroism and rhetoric in, 426–7; historical background of, 501–4, 509; about history, 378; idealization of past in, 240, 272–3; and larger British history, 85, 168; personal loyalties in, 266, 271; processional form in, 145; responsibility in, 290–1; on the ruler, 382, 406; Saturnalia in, 11–12; succession in, 182–3, 263–4; theme of, 510; and tragedy, 259, 276; wheel of fortune in, 84, 201, 217–18, 240–2 – problem plays of, 10, 22, 143, 155, 167, 377; and realism, 136; and the romances, 365, 383, 384; unsuitable name, 362, 384 – romances of, 30, 47, 117, 188, 209, 231, 642; character in, 119; as culmination, 31–2, 52, 128, 132–3, 334; dance in, 145; death and revival in, 179, 202; explanations in, 196; hostile fathers in, 173; levels in, 195–6; music in, 211, 217; natural society in, 215; primitivism in, 162–3, 196, 425–6, 593–5; and the problem comedies, 365, 383, 384; snobbery in, 160, 217, 422; sources of, 334–5; spatial and temporal anachronism in,

Index

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168; and tragedy, 326–7; youth and age in, 181–2, 384, 421–2, 431, 488 tragedies of, 137, 200–1, 251; archaism in, 266; and history, 259, 300; of isolation, 260, 309–26; moral sympathies in, 86, 297–8; of order, 260–76, 279, 280, 284, 288, 301; of passion, 260, 279–97; and the romances, 132–3, 326–7; “tragic period” question, 150 All’s Well That Ends Well (1623), 4–5, 10, 11, 22, 26, 29, 40, 156, 168, 174, 175, 179, 180–1, 202, 381, 403, 437, 591; analysis of, 392–400; clown and idiotes in, 187, 192, 195; motherfixation in, 88; natural society in, 216–17, 247; Parolles, 36, 178, 184; as problem play, 167, 362, 385; youth and age in, 181 Antony and Cleopatra (1623), 90, 208, 265, 288, 465, 581, 595; analysis of, 564–81; Antony, 89, 365, 453; Cleopatra, 377; clown in, 541; death of Cleopatra, 158; Enobarbus, 267, 269, 290; illusion and reality in, 410–11; Octavius, 304–5; as play for twenty-first century, 451, 565; reputation in, 270; role-playing in, 427; theatre in, 454; time in, 615; as tragedy of passion, 260, 279–80, 285, 286–7, 294–7; wheel of fortune in, 240 As You Like It (1623), 22, 27, 39, 40, 143, 161, 173, 178, 184, 203, 204, 223, 249, 307, 325, 403, 426, 437, 473; clown and idiotes in, 186, 189, 197; as forest comedy, 246; green world in, 10, 12, 78, 213–14; Jaques, 234; seven ages speech, 445–7 The Comedy of Errors (1623), 37, 39, 157, 174, 212, 219, 248, 365, 380, 466, 494, 596; clown in, 193–4; identity

787 theme in, 175–6; irrational law in, 29, 75, 173, 205, 491; natural society in, 246–7; and Plautus, 9, 72, 163, 175, 487; and the romances, 181 – Coriolanus (1623), 162, 266, 270, 271, 283, 288, 520; analysis of, 85–94; isolation in, 188, 314; leadership in, 261–2, 427; and Plutarch, 595–6; production of, 85, 89, 90, 94; as tragedy of passion, 260, 280, 285–6, 293 – Cymbeline (1623), 10, 31, 115, 120, 174, 175, 178, 183–4, 211, 212, 296; anachronism in, 141; as apotheosis of problem comedies, 168–71; Christianity in, 119; clown in, 195; and education, 643; ending of, 85, 181–2, 196, 223, 431; folk tale in, 139, 142; green world in, 12; natural society in, 215–16, 217, 248; as romance, 119, 163, 164, 427; songs in, 247; supernatural power in, 117, 204, 383, 428, 594; as tragedy of passion, 326; as tragicomedy, 335, 425, 597 – Hamlet (1603), 15, 44, 85, 168, 227, 233, 235, 239, 297, 310, 316, 318, 460, 463, 494, 551, 567, 568, 596, 609; on acting, 7, 59, 329, 588; analysis of, 529–45; Claudius at prayer, 298, 365; Eliot on, 319; gravediggers scene, 386, 572; Hamlet, 152, 314; The Mousetrap, 306, 540; Ophelia’s songs, 280–1; Osric, 36; as play for nineteenth century, 447, 451, 545, 563, 564; Polonius, 39, 288; reputation in, 270; revenge in, 29, 268–9; role-playing in, 377, 426, 428, 441, 447–8, 509; setting of, 546; time in, 306, 518, 525; as tragedy of order, 260–1, 264, 271, 272, 274, 275, 280, 284, 308–9; as tragedy about tragedy, 378

788 – Henry IV plays (1598, 1600), xlii– xliii, 85, 244, 269, 270, 301, 374, 465, 546, 558, 560; analysis of, 518–29; crusades in, 508; Henry’s isolation, 312–13; Hotspur, 241, 276, 289; idealization of past in, 240, 273; leadership in, 451–2, 453, 512–13; time in, 305; and tragedy, 295; two worlds in, 11, 293, 410 – Henry V (1600), 11, 29, 85, 111, 168, 218, 263, 289, 410, 511, 558; battle of Agincourt and rulership in, 270; ending of, 34, 84, 201, 234, 259; idealization of past in, 240, 273, 511; nature in, 239, 240, 241; overthought and underthought in, 458; prologue to, 145, 147; responsibility in, 290–1; rhetoric in, 288; sources of, 524; time in, 305, 525; and tragedy, 274, 275, 281–5; treason in, 303–4 – Henry VI plays (1623, 1594, 1595), 145, 151, 153, 190, 241, 263, 269, 283, 285, 303, 321, 460, 522; child sacrifice in, 278–9; idealization of past in, 240, 273, 511; Joan of Arc, 310–11; karma in, 201; time in, 307 – Henry VIII (1623), 87, 145, 151, 168, 240, 263, 265, 329, 459, 462, 466; authorship of, 597, 609; green world in, 12; and Queen Elizabeth, 183; and tragedy, 274, 275, 326; wheel of fortune in, 84–5, 201, 259, 428, 597 – Julius Caesar (1623), 90, 252, 294, 464; and Antony and Cleopatra, 567, 568, 570, 574; Brutus, 303, 305–6, 313; morality in, 7; performance of, 261; responsibility in, 291; as revenge tragedy, 536; rhetoric in, 427; time in, 305, 309; as tragedy of order, 260–76 passim, 284, 288

Index – King John (1623), 182, 237, 263, 264, 273, 278, 451, 507; anachronism in, 140–1; succession in, 506 – King Lear (1608), 31, 44, 45, 85, 164, 168, 188, 194, 233, 234, 253, 277, 334, 371, 377, 464, 466, 468, 481, 501, 516, 531, 567, 568, 581, 601, 607, 612; analysis of, 546–64; blinding of Gloucester in, 30, 203; Edgar, 38, 386; Fool (character), 151, 632; “fool” (word) in, 304, 365, 522; Gloucester plot, 39; gods in, 203; Lear’s abdication, 519, 582–3, 590; nature in, 239, 242–3, 245, 603–4, 616; “nothing” in, 513, 517; performance of, 467; as play for twentieth century, 448, 451, 563, 565; social order in, 271, 272, 274, 289–90; sources of, 142, 228, 532; stage metaphor in, 449–51; storm in, 114, 198, 240, 598; time in, 309, 518; as tragedy of isolation, 260, 309, 310, 315–24 passim – Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), 36, 111, 112, 183, 214, 222, 245, 331, 644; analysis of, 72–80; clown and idiotes in, 185–6, 189; ending of, 202, 223, 246, 248; grace in, 210–11; green world in, 10; as humour comedy, 122, 177; irrational law in, 173, 174; and Old Comedy, 163–4; pageant of worthies in, 118; performance of, 468; rhythm in, 330–1; as sophisticated, 196 – Macbeth (1623), 48, 85, 151, 168, 203, 219, 234, 278, 304, 305, 306, 309, 310, 313–14, 334, 385, 443, 464, 468, 551; morality in, 7, 87, 166; nature in, 239, 240; porter in, 151, 386, 541; reputation in, 270; as revenge tragedy, 536; time in, 306–7, 308, 309, 311, 324, 525; as tragedy of order,

Index

–

–

–

–

260–1, 263, 265, 271, 272, 274–5, 280, 284 Measure for Measure (1623), 22, 115, 144, 156, 168, 174, 175, 178, 184, 248, 371, 403, 594, 602; vs. All’s Well, 396, 398, 400; analysis of, 374–85, 392, 581–93; clown and idiotes in, 187; as comedy about comedy, 335–6; as comedy of humours, 386–7; death in, 29, 212; as diptych, 400–1, 429, 596, 598, 609; the Duke, 38, 117, 171, 204, 206, 609; good and evil in, 209–10; irrational law in, 29, 30, 173; Lucio vs. the Duke, 41, 160; natural society in, 216, 247; performance of, 463; as problem play, 135–6, 167–8, 362 The Merchant of Venice (1600), 6, 37, 125, 174, 179, 212, 217, 239, 248, 457, 488, 498; and anti-Semitism question, 379, 581, 583; Christianity in, 209; clown and idiotes in, 187, 188, 190; irrational law in, 29–30, 173, 491; performance of, 468; Portia, 204, 592; repetition in, 144; Shylock, 27, 40, 183, 190–1; theatre metaphor in, 442; two worlds in, 10, 215, 247 The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), 21, 26, 28, 36, 37, 39, 118, 132, 151, 164, 174, 245, 296, 328, 362, 428, 430, 457, 471, 523, 611; clown and idiotes in, 187; ending of, 182; fairies in, 245; green world in, 10, 214; as humour comedy, 122, 183; Leviathan symbolism in, 219; love and lust in, 181; natural society in, 247 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), 164, 174, 175, 207, 225, 248, 362, 410, 486, 524, 525, 591, 597, 607, 609, 619; analysis of, 486–501; Bottom, 563; clown in, 189, 194–5, 197–8; cosmology of, 125–6, 222; as forest

789

–

–

–

– – –

comedy, 246; green world in, 10, 78, 213–14, 287, 516, 517; illusion and reality in, 412–18; irrational law in, 29–30, 75, 173, 205, 584; Pepys on, 166; performance of, 467–8; Puck, 37, 38, 178–9, 183; Puck and elemental spirits, 219, 221, 245, 464; Quince’s play, 457–8, 462, 467–8; Theseus on imagination, 115–16, 172, 445, 600; title of, 201, 212 Much Ado about Nothing (1600), 10, 22, 26, 27, 37, 140, 143, 169, 171, 175, 180, 484; clown and idiotes in, 187, 194, 204–5; and Cymbeline, 168; Hero’s revival in, 167, 179; as humour comedy, 177–8; as problem play, 156–7; reversal in, 213 Othello (1622), 28, 235, 335, 466, 481, 544, 582; Eliot on, 314, 484; Iago, 140, 298, 302–3, 325, 377, 426, 428; recognition in, 364; reputation in, 270; revenge in, 268; time in, 305; as tragedy of isolation, 260, 309–10, 314–15, 324 Pericles (1609), 10, 72, 115, 120, 175, 179, 193–4, 206, 212, 219, 222, 225, 422, 437; as bedrock of drama, 164; brothel scene, 151, 170, 245, 586; clown in, 195; Jonson on, 137, 139; music in, 125; narrative structure of, 145–9, 195–6; natural society in, 215, 248; as romance, 31, 162, 163, 427, 596–7; as Shakespearean, 151–2, 466; supernatural power in, 117, 204, 383, 428, 594 The Phoenix and Turtle (1601), 109, 178, 644 The Rape of Lucrece (1594), 118, 229, 329, 465 Richard II (1597), 85, 86, 118, 201, 217, 263, 303, 315, 422, 451, 464, 479, 519, 528, 558, 599, 612; analysis of,

790

–

–

–

–

–

504–18; idealization of past in, 273; illusion in, 409; leadership in, 452, 453–4; nature in, 239, 240–1, 242, 259; “nothing” in, 317, 553; roleplaying in, 273–4, 377, 426–7; social order in, 264, 265, 270, 274; time in, 309; and tragedy, 259, 289 Richard III (1597), 263, 266, 288; roleplaying in, 302; as tetralogy with Henry VI plays, 310–12; and tragedy, 259, 309, 310 Romeo and Juliet (1597), 159, 467, 492, 524; analysis of, 469–86; class distinctions in, 461; courtly love in, 389–90, 538; fate in, 203, 277–8; “fool” in, 304, 365, 522, 555; Friar Laurence, 448, 463, 590; performance of, 463, 482; poison theme in, 468; Queen Mab, 496; as tragedy of passion, 260, 279–80, 286–8, 293, 307; two worlds in, 418, 517 Sonnets (1609), 74, 91, 304, 389, 407, 447; analysis of, 98–113; and Love’s Labour’s Lost, 80; male friendship in, 178, 180, 476; and Shakespeare’s biography, liii, 80, 95–8, 103, 229– 30, 328 The Taming of the Shrew (1623), 24, 27, 37, 38, 72, 74, 174, 179, 212, 213, 457, 562, 611; clown and idiotes in, 186–7, 189; as humour comedy, 75, 76, 122, 123, 176–7; illusion in, 196; irrational law in, 173; natural society in, 244, 247 The Tempest (1623), 6, 9, 10, 21, 22, 36, 144, 145, 146, 164, 168, 171, 174, 178, 184, 212, 217, 219, 331, 428, 466, 597, 599, 604, 605, 607; analysis of, 44–52, 337–45, 608–22; Ariel, 38, 178–9, 183; audience’s possession of, 52, 345, 424, 439, 622; Caliban, 40, 243, 317; clown and idiotes in,

Index

–

–

–

–

187, 195; and commedia dell’arte, 72; identity theme in, 175; illusion and reality in, lii, 12, 416, 422–4, 433–9; natural society in, 216, 217, 249; NF on, xliv–xlv; performance of, 467–8; Prospero, 25, 39, 71, 77, 117, 204, 329, 373, 377, 383, 429–30, 594; renewal in, 402; time in, 163, 221–2, 422, 432, 525; and tragedy, 30, 326, 327; transfiguration in, 219–25 passim Timon of Athens (1623), 90, 150, 162, 231, 254, 259, 270, 289–90, 300, 301, 312, 468; clown and idiotes in, 188–9; ending of, 223; time in, 307; as tragedy of isolation, 29, 260, 309, 318–21 passim; as transition play, 91, 92, 188, 427, 428, 596 Titus Andronicus (1594), 159, 257, 457, 486; child sacrifice in, 278; tongue and hand scenes in, 460; as tragedy, 297, 298; as tragedy of order, 260, 279, 319 Troilus and Cressida (1609), 85, 149–50, 152, 168, 204, 218, 231, 233, 237, 243, 259, 295, 316, 390, 546; Achilles, 422–3; analysis of, 403–9, 420–1; courtly love in, 389; illusion and reality in, 411, 416; as ironic, 28, 200, 254; performance of, 468; as problem play, 362; Thersites, 40; as tragedy of passion, 260, 279–80, 286–7, 291–4; Ulysses on degree and time, 154, 249, 288, 410 Twelfth Night (1623), 22, 126, 133, 140, 144, 152, 174, 175, 213, 221, 222, 231, 248, 334, 365, 403, 486, 493, 584, 598; Sir Andrew Aguecheek, 35, 36; clown and idiotes in, 186, 188, 189–90, 194; green world in, 10; identity in, 179; Malvolio, 212; natu-

Index ral perspective in, xlvi, 129; natural society in, 247; title of, 201; Sir Toby Belch, 39 – The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1623), 36, 37, 72, 112, 188, 196, 218; and courtly love, 180, 476; as forest comedy, 246; green world in, 9–10, 12, 78, 213–14 – The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), as partly Shakespearean, 597 – Venus and Adonis (1593), 96 & n. 8, 108, 165, 229, 329, 465, 497 – The Winter’s Tale (1623), 21, 31, 47, 75, 76, 140, 144, 145, 168, 178, 183–4, 211, 212, 220, 223, 225, 337, 338, 340, 342, 364, 384, 395, 420, 465, 614; analysis of, 114–26, 593–608; art and nature in, 61, 220–1, 342–3, 431; clown in, 195; as diptych, 336–7, 383, 401, 402, 429, 609; green world in, 10; illusion and reality in, 196–9; natural society in, 216, 217, 248; recognition in, 431; renewal in, 201–2, 424, 617; rhythm in, 331; as romance, 162, 163, 164, 427; sheepshearing festival, 224; source of, see Greene, Pandosto; supernatural power in, 204; time in, 221, 422, 428, 432, 525, 616; as tragedy of isolation, 326; as tragicomedy, 335; youth and age in, 373 Shakespeare Apocrypha, The, 467 Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), 31, 143, 162, 229; on comedy, 22; and evolution, 27; on Napoleon, 93; on Shakespeare, 22, 92, 135, 143, 152, 394, 467; on theatre, 384; Arms and the Man (1898), 25, 34; Back to Methuselah (1921), 147, 522; Caesar and Cleopatra (1906), 162; Candida (1898), 325; Fanny’s First Play (1911), 150; Major Barbara (1907), 26–7; Man

791 and Superman (1901–3), 167 & n. 88; Saint Joan (1924), 89 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), 56; Cenci (1819), 277; Prometheus Unbound (1820), 277 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751– 1816), 143; The Critic (1779), 141 Shirley, James (1596–1666): The Cardinal (1641), 298 Sicily, 600 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–86), 103, 200, 348, 645; on poetry’s golden world, xliv, 61, 120; Apology for Poetry (A Defence of Poetry) (1595), 163; Arcadia (1590), 61, 118, 547, 642, 643; Astrophel and Stella (1591), 101; The Lady of May (1598), 73 Simile, 165, 217 Sir Patrick Spens, 146 Sir Thomas More, 464 Sisson, Charles Jasper (1885–1966): The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare (1934), 150 Smith, Adam (1723–90): The Wealth of Nations (1776), 130 Smollett, Tobias George (1721–71), 15 Socrates, 629; and comedy, 256; on wise man, 272; and Xanthippe, 389. See also Plato Sodoma, Il (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi) (1477–1549), 132 Song of Songs, 180 Sophocles (ca. 496–405 b.c.e.), 28; Antigone, 260, 300; Oedipus at Colonus, 386; Oedipus Rex, 25, 31, 255, 384, 385 South Africa, 69 Southampton, 3rd Earl of (Henry Wriothesley) (1573–1624), 96, 465 Soviet Union, science in, 367 Spain, 16; drama in, 37 Spenser, Edmund (ca. 1552–99), 351,

792 644; Hamilton on, 645; NF on, xxiii, xxiv, xxv–xxvii; Amoretti (1595), 53, 54, 99, 101; Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), 54, 67; Four Hymns (1596), 60, 66, 67, 101; Mother Hubberds Tale (1591), 56; Mutabilitie Cantos (1599), 55, 56–7, 65, 70, 71, 219; The Shepheardes Calender (1579), 54, 55, 102; The Teares of the Muses (1591), 54 – The Faerie Queene (1590–96), 350, 404, 418, 620, 630–1, 642, 643, 645; love in, 644; male friendship in, 102–3; sixth book of, 119; structure of imagery in, 53–71; two worlds in, 11, 12 Spirits, elemental, 245 Spurgeon, Caroline Frances Eleanor (1869–1942): Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935), 230 Stage. See Drama; Elizabethan age Stalin, Joseph (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) (1879–1953), 451, 626 Stanislavsky (Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev) (1865–1938), 337 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783– 1842), on novelist as mirror, 233 Sterne, Laurence (1713–68): Tristram Shandy (1759–65), 17 Stesichorus (640–555 b.c.e.), 388 Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), on supreme fiction, 420 Still, Colin (b. 1888): Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of “The Tempest” (1921), 9, 341, 608 Strachey, Lytton (1880–1932), 139 & n. 33 Strachey, William (1572–1621): True Reportory of the Wracke (1625), 50–1, 344 & n. 31, 439 & n. 22, 620 Stratford Shakespearean Festival, 81; NF at, xxxii–xxxiii, liii

Index Strauss, Johann, Jr. (1825–99), 136 Structure: in criticism, 133–4; in literature, 387; and mood, 158–9 Stuart, Elizabeth (1596–1662), 51, 599 Sullivan, Sir Arthur (1842–1900), 22, 144. See also Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck Survival, 368–71 passim Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745): yahoos in, 46, 187, 243, 317, 621; Gulliver’s Travels (1726), 634 Symbol, meaning of may vary, 59 Symposium, 319, 321, 349 Synge, John Millington (1871–1909), 31, 143; The Playboy of the Western World (1907), 207; Riders to the Sea (1904), 25 Taming of a Shrew, The (1594), 186 Taylor, Elizabeth (b. 1932), 569 Taylor, Michael, lvi Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809–92), on nature, 603 Terence, Publius Terentius Afer (ca. 190–159 b.c.e.), 4, 6, 9, 22, 23, 34, 39, 72, 172, 181, 342, 399, 430, 444, 486– 7, 597; characters in, 23, 26, 35–6, 37; Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law), 155–6, 157, 167, 173 Teskey, Gordon (b. 1953), xxvii, 642 Tharmas, in NF’s theory of drama, 260 Theatre: of the Absurd, 451; as character, see Shakespeare, “theatre in”; Elizabethan, see under Elizabethan age; as metaphor for life, see Drama, “life and.” See also Drama Thinking, 227; poetic, 237 Thisbe, 475, 477. See also Pyramus Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914–53): Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait (1941), 167; Fern Hill (1945), 70 Thomas of Woodstock, 504

Index Thomism, 629 Thorpe, Thomas (ca. 1569–ca. 1635), 104 Time and space, new ideas of, 421 Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) (1518–94), 148 Tirso de Molina (Fray Gabriel Téllez) (ca. 1571–1648): The Trickster of Seville and His Guest of Stone (1630), 299–300 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) (1488–1576), 347 Tom o’ Bedlam, 562 Tourneur, Cyril (ca. 1575–1626): The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611), 299, 308, 323 & n. 140; The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), 276, 299, 310 Tractatus Coislinianus, 34–5 Tragedy, 25, 171, 370, 484, 485, 564; Aristotle on, 385; catharsis in, 190, 191, 537; Christianity and, 298–9, 324, 547; vs. comedy, 7–9, 26–31 passim, 162, 172, 200–4 passim, 206–7, 325–6, 363–4, 384–7, 485–6; and death, 300; decorum in, 465; and heroism, 288; and history, 240; “Iliad” critics favour, 129, 130, 131, 134; irony in, 28, 87, 543; isolation in, 187–8; as loose category, 371; and melodrama, 323–4; in Middle Ages, 83–4; mood in, 158–9; and morality, 87; nemesis in, 382; and recreation, 324–7; Renaissance theory of, 61; of sick society, 276–7; time in, 525; types of, 260; vision of, 251– 4, 262, 272, 273, 290, 291, 385–6. See also Revenge tragedy; Shakespeare, tragedies of Tragicomedy, 163, 335, 425, 593, 594 Treason, 300–1, 302–4 Trickster, 589

793 Tricky slave, 5, 8, 30, 37, 38, 40, 181, 399, 400, 430–1, 487 Trilling, Lionel (1905–75), 15, 128 Tristan and Iseult, 389 Troy, and Great Britain, 85, 168, 291, 403–4, 546, 620 Tuggle, Robert (b. 1932), 43 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835–1910): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 17 Tyndale, William (ca. 1495–1536), 639 Unfolded Tales, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (1989), xxvii, 642–5 United States, aristocracy in, 354 University of Western Ontario, 361 Urizen, in NF’s theory of drama, 260 Urquhart, Sir Thomas, of Cromarty (1611–60), 14 Utopia, 61, 75 Vaihinger, Hans (1852–1933), liv Valéry, Paul (1871–1945), 63, 146 Value judgments, lvii–lviii, 95 Van Dyke, Anton (Sir Anthony) (1599–1641), 273 & n. 48, 348 Veblen, Thorstein (1857–1929), 354 Vega Carpio, Félix Lope de (1562– 1635), 31 Venus, 225; in love poetry, 99–100 Verdi, Giuseppi (1813–1901), 22, 144 Verum factum. See Vico Verne, Jules (1828–1905): Around the World in Eighty Days (French, 1873), 394 Verse, and poetry, 131 Vice (character), 37–8 Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744), on verum factum, xlix, lv, lviii, lx, 420

794 Victoria College, NF as principal of, 129 Victorian age, 94; art in, 161; group arts less important in, 90. See also Nineteenth century Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70–19 b.c.e.), 231, 546, 616, 635; Christianity and, 418; in Middle Ages, 388, 390, 403, 404; Fourth Eclogue, 208, 418; Second Eclogue, 97, 102 – Aeneid, 341, 396, 475, 477, 566, 577; Elizabethan attitude to, 644; reversal in, 390–2, 411, 412, 418; and The Tempest, 50, 223, 402, 424, 438, 619–20 Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard (1813–83), 265 Walpurgis night, 493–4 Warburton, William (1698–1779), 341 Warwick, Richard Neville, Earl of (1428–71), 626 Watts, Isaac (1674–1748), 299 Webster, John (ca. 1580–ca. 1626): The Duchess of Malfi (1623), 268, 277, 278, 280; The White Devil (1612), 276 Welles, (George) Orson (1915–85), 261 Western story, 130 Wheel symbol, 564, 637 Whetstone, George (ca. 1544–87): Promos and Cassandra (1578), 168, 582, 588 White goddess, 112, 180, 222, 279–80, 417, 496, 580 Whitman, Walt (1819–92), on Shakespeare, 22, 217 Widdicombe, Jane (b. 1943), 455–6

Index Wilde, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills (1854–1900), 143; on music, 343 Will, vs. grace, 359 Willoby, Henry (ca. 1574–ca. 1596): Willobie His Avisa (1594), 97 Wilson, Harold Sowerby (1904–59), 122 Wimsatt, William K. (1907–75), and Monroe C. Beardsley (1915–84), on intentional fallacy, xxxvi Witch of Endor, 148 Wodehouse, P.G. (Sir Pelham Grenville) (1881–1975), 487 Wolsey, Thomas (ca. 1475–1530), 626 Woodhouse, A(rthur) S(utherland) P(igott) (1895–1964), xliv, 251 Word of God, 388 Wordsworth, William (1770–1850), 496; on Shakespeare, 230 Work, and play, 360 World War II, 369 Wotton, Sir Henry (1568–1639), on Henry VIII, 84, 87 Writing, effects of, 229 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503–42), 131 Xenophon (ca. 435–354 b.c.e.): Cyropaedia, 61, 349, 350, 351, 627, 628, 643 Yates, Dame Frances (1899–1981): The Art of Memory (1966), 448; Shakespeare’s Last Plays (1975), 344 Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), 116, 143, 358; on mask, 441 Yorkshire Tragedy, A (1608), 229, 329, 467