William Shakespeare

B

Shakespeare’s Attitudes

Shakespeare’s philosophy of life can only be deduced from the ideas and attitudes that appear frequently in his writings, and he remained always a dramatist, not a writer of philosophical or ethical tracts. Nonetheless, the tolerance of human weakness evident in the plays tends to indicate that Shakespeare was a broad-minded person with generous and balanced views. Although he never lectured his audience, sound morality is implicit in his themes and in the way he handled his material. He attached less importance to noble birth than to an individual’s noble relations with other people. Despite the bawdiness of Shakespeare’s language, which is characteristic of his period, he did not condone sexual license. He accepted people as they are, without condemning them, but he did not allow wickedness to triumph. The comments of Shakespeare’s contemporaries suggest that he himself possessed both integrity and gentle manners.

It should be remembered that even though Shakespeare was a poet “for all time,” as his friend Ben Jonson said, he nevertheless was necessarily a product of his own era and shared many beliefs of the time. These beliefs are different from our own, and some of them may now seem strange and even unenlightened. Although Shakespeare anticipated many modern ideas and values, in other ways he does not rise above the ideas and values of his own time. As the history plays indicate, he accepted the idea of monarchy and had little interest in, or even concept of, participatory democracy. Although many of his women characters are assertive and independent, the plays still have them subordinate their energy to the logic of the male-dominated household. It is also likely that Shakespeare believed in ghosts and witches, as did many people of his time, including King James I.

C

Shakespeare’s Stagecraft

Shakespeare brilliantly exploited the resources of the theaters he worked in. The Globe Theatre held an audience of 2,000 to 3,000 people. Like other outdoor theaters, it had a covered, raised stage thrusting out into the audience. The audience stood around the three sides of the stage in an unroofed area called the pit. Covered galleries, where people paid more money to sit, rose beyond the pit. Performances took place only during daylight hours, and there was little use of lighting. Few props were used, and little scenery. Costumes, however, were elaborate. Language created the scene, as in this passage from The Merchant of Venice:

Act V, scene 1 

D

Shakespeare’s Language

In Shakespeare’s time English was a more flexible language than it is today. Grammar and spelling were not yet completely formalized, although scholars were beginning to urge rules to regulate them. English had begun to emerge as a significant literary language, having recently replaced Latin as the language of serious intellectual and artistic activity in England. Freed of many of the conventions and rules of modern English, Shakespeare could shape vocabulary and syntax to the demands of style. For example, he could interchange the various parts of speech, using nouns as adjectives or verbs, adjectives as adverbs, and pronouns as nouns. Such freedom gave his language an extraordinary plasticity, which enabled him to create the large number of unique and memorable characters he has left us. Shakespeare made each character singular by a distinctive and characteristic set of speech habits.

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Just as important to Shakespeare’s success as the suppleness of the English language was the rapid expansion of the language. New words were being coined and borrowed at an unprecedented rate in Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare himself had an unusually large vocabulary: about 23,000 different words appear in his plays and poetry, many of these words first appearing in print through his usage. During the Renaissance many new words enriched the English language, borrowed from Latin and from other European languages, and Shakespeare made full use of the new resources available to English. He also took advantage of the possibilities of his native tongue, especially the crispness and energy of the sounds of English that derives in large measure from the language’s rich store of monosyllabic (one-syllable) words.

The main influences on Shakespeare’s style were the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the homilies (sermons) that were prescribed for reading in church, the rhetorical treatises that were studied in grammar school, and the proverbial lore of common speech. The result was that Shakespeare could draw on a stock of images and ideas that were familiar to most members of his audience. His knowledge of figures of speech and other devices enabled him to phrase his original thoughts concisely and forcefully. Clarity of expression and the use of ordinary diction partly account for the fact that many of Shakespeare’s phrases have become proverbial in everyday speech, even among people who have never read the plays. It is also significant that the passages most often quoted are usually from plays written around 1600 and after, when his language became more subtle and complex. The phrases “my mind’s eye,” “the primrose path,” and “sweets to the sweet” derive from Hamlet. Macbeth is the source of “the milk of human kindness” and “at one fell swoop.” From Julius Caesar come the expressions “it was Greek to me,” “ambition should be made of sterner stuff,” and “the most unkindest cut of all.”

Shakespeare wrote many of his plays in blank verse—unrhymed poetry in iambic pentameter, a verse form in which unaccented and accented syllables alternate in lines of ten syllables. In Shakespeare’s hand the verse form never becomes mechanical but is always subject to shifts of emphasis to clarify the meaning of a line and avoid the monotony of unbroken metrical regularity. Yet the five-beat pentameter line provides the norm against which the modifications are heard. Shakespeare sometimes used rhymed verse, particularly in his early plays. Rhymed couplets occur frequently at the end of a scene, punctuating the dramatic rhythm and perhaps serving as a cue to the offstage actors to enter for the next scene.

As Shakespeare’s dramatic skill developed, he began to make greater use of prose, which became as subtle a medium in his hands as verse. Although prose lacks the regular rhythms of verse, it is not without its own rhythmical aspect, and Shakespeare came to use the possibilities of prose to achieve effects of characterization as subtle as those he accomplished in verse. In the early plays, prose is almost always reserved for characters from the lower classes. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, the weaver Bottom speaks in prose to the fairy queen Titania, but she always responds in the verse appropriate to her position. Shakespeare, however, soon abandoned this rigid assignment of prose or verse on the basis of social rank. Although The Merry Wives of Windsor is the only play written almost entirely in prose, many plays use prose for important effects. Examples include Ophelia’s mad scenes in Hamlet, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in Macbeth, and Falstaff’s wonderful comedy in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.

X

The Sonnets

Although Shakespeare is today best known for his plays, his sonnets still rank among the world’s best-loved poems. Shakespeare’s sonnets were published for the first time as a collection in 1609, although two (numbers 138 and 144) had previously been printed in a volume of Elizabethan verse called The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). The 1609 collection of sonnets was dedicated to “Mr. W.H.,” the “only begetter of these . . . sonnets.” The dedication was signed by “T.T.,” (Thomas Thorpe, the publisher). Thorpe may have secured a copy of the poems that had been circulating among Shakespeare’s friends, or he may somehow have obtained Shakespeare’s own manuscripts. In addition to 154 sonnets, the volume contained “A Lover’s Complaint.” In this poem, too-little read today, a woman tells a herdsman the story of her seduction and later abandonment by her lover. The presence of a “Complaint” in a book of sonnets was a well-recognized practice, and Shakespeare’s sonnets and “The Lover’s Complaint” were undoubtedly intended to be read together.

The first 126 sonnets are apparently addressed to a handsome young nobleman, presumably the author’s patron. The poems express the writer’s selfless but not entirely uncritical devotion to the young man. The next 28 sonnets are written to a “dark lady,” whom the poet seemingly cannot resist. Another figure in the sequence is the “rival poet.” Scholars have spent much time trying to identify the specific figures the sonnets address, but it is unlikely that the sonnets are so personal. More likely, the sonnet offered Shakespeare a structure for experiments in lyric verse that enabled him to play with familiar conventions of feeling and poetry. Although no systematic narrative develops in the sonnets, there is a thematic link between the “young man” group and the “dark lady” group. The youth and the mistress betray the poet, and at one point the author berates the young man for stealing the dark lady from him. Miscellaneous sonnets treat various other themes, most notably the rending effects of time and the eternalizing possibilities of art.

The form of the poems is an English variation of the traditional fourteen-line sonnet. The lines, which each have ten syllables, are arranged into three quatrains, or groups of four lines, and a final couplet (two successive lines that rhyme). The rhyme scheme of the sonnets is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. A theme is developed and elaborated in the quatrains, and a concluding thought is presented in the couplet. Sonnet 116 is typical of the form and excellence of the poems.

The poet himself prophesied in Sonnet 55: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rime.” The appreciation of the sonnets’ power and beauty by successive generations confirms this prophecy. Shakespeare’s sonnets continue to be read and enjoyed, and they remain among the greatest poetic achievements in the English language.

XI

Shakespeare Texts and Scholarship

So far as is known, Shakespeare had no hand in the publication of any of his plays. In any event, he did not own his plays once he had supplied the scripts to the theatrical company. Except when the plague closed the London theaters, acting companies normally did not consider it in their own interest to allow their popular plays to be printed. However, in whatever manner they reached their publishers, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays were printed during his lifetime in pamphlets (known as quartos, from the format in which they were printed), which sold for sixpence. Publishers secured these plays in various ways, some perhaps from the acting company, and some from lines taken down in shorthand during performances or reconstructed from memory by actors. The plays that reached print, therefore, had various degrees of reliability, but what is of interest is that Shakespeare seemed not to care one way or the other.

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