Was Shakespeare in the Victorian era?

Was Shakespeare in the Victorian era?

Shakespeare; his life and character-The chronology of plays-A survey of the plays-Estimate of Shakespeare’s genius-The Shakespeare ‘Mystery’ Shakespeare’s objectivity-His philosophy-The Elizabethan stage.

Life

Shakespeare was born on the 23rd of April 1564 at Stratford-on-Avon, a village in Warwickshire. His father was a prosperous grain dealer whose fortunes declined after sometime and Shakespeare who attended the local grammar school had to give up his studies at the age of 13 or 14 in order to help in the family business. He made a hasty marriage at eighteen, had three children-two daughters and a son. His wife, Anne Hathaway, was eight years his senior and it is probable his relations with her were not happy. There is a tradition that he was caught poaching deer and rabbits in Sir Thomas Lucy’s park at Charlecote and was beaten up. This inci-dent, it is supposed, drove him from his native village to seek his livelihood elsewhere. Be that as it may, he drifted to London in or about 1586 and remained cut off from home and family for about ten years. Little is known about his early life in London. He appears to have been attracted to the stage and is said to have begun as a holder of visitors’ horses. Later he found employment as an actor and is said to have acted the Ghost in Hamlet and Adam in As You Like It, besides acting in the plays of Ben Jonson and others.

What are the 4 periods of Shakespeare’s life?

The first notice of Shakespeare as a dramatist occurs in Greene’s pamphlet let A Groatsworth of Wit (1592). Green denounced him as “an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes factotum is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in a countrie.” The reference in Greene’s pamphlet is an adaptation of a line in Shakespeare’s Henry VI (3): ‘Oh Tiger’s heart-Wrapped in a woman’s hide’ (Act 1.4.137).

Greene’s attack was provoked by jealousy of Shakespeare’s great popularity as a refashioner of old plays. There were three plays on Henry VÍ (Parts 1, 2, 3) by other hands and these revised by Shakespeare had scored triumphant success on the stage earlier the same year (1592). Thus encouraged, Shakespeare began producing all kinds of plays then popular and soon became the most popular playwright of his day. The theatrical company to which he was attached at the time known as Earl of Leicester’s players, later became Lord Chamberlain’s, and finally after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the King’s servants. Shakespeare’s company performed at various theatres-The Theatre, The Rose, The Curtain, etc.-before acquiring the famous Globe theatre built in 1599. As Shakespeare’s prosperity grew, he became a part-owner of the Globe and Blackfriar’s theatres with which the whole of his remaining professional career was identified.

What are 5 important facts about William Shakespeare?

Shakespeare’s dramatic career covers roughly a period of twenty years from 1591 to 1611. During this period he wrote 37 plays, besides two narrative love poems and a large number of sonnets. The love poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) Shakespeare dedicated to the young and brilliant Earl of Southampton who must have rewarded him with a munificent gift. In any case he was introduced to the highest circles of the court, the nobility and scholars.

His son, Hamnet, died in August 1596 and Shakespeare was present at his burial at Stratford. From this time on he visited Stratford frequently and with his growing prosperity the financial position of his family improved. He persuaded his father to apply for a coat of arms which was granted. Thus, though not born a gentleman, he became one by inheritance. He bought in. 1597 New Place, the largest house in Stratford. He bought other real estate in Stratford and in London. About 1611 he bade farewell to the stage and retired to Stratford where he lived the quiet life of a country gentleman till he died on 23 April 1616, of a fever contract-ed, it is said, from a bout of drinking with his guests, Ben Jonson and Drayton.

There is no contemporary biography of Shakespeare and what little we know about his life is the result of patient and industrious investigation of devoted scholars during the last three and a half centuries. Despite many controversial points, Sidney Lee’s monumental Life of Shakespeare is the most authoritative source of information available to the student.

Plays

The two love poems and the sonnets of Shakespeare have been considered elsewhere in this book. Beautiful as they are, they are mere effusions of youth and if Shakespeare had written nothing more, they alone could not have been the foundation of his lasting greatness. Luckily his dramatic instinct drew him to the stage where he was to win his laurels. The drama was at the time the most popular form of entertainment and the demand for plays so great that writers for the stage were driven to touching up old plays instead of writing new ones. It was also a common practice for playwrights to collaborate in revising an old play. Shakespeare who, as we have seen, began as a reviser of old plays seems to have thus collaborated with Marlowe and Kyd in such early plays as Titus Andronicus, Henry VI and Richard III.

The exact order in which Shakespeare’s plays were written cannot be definitely determined. Only sixteen of his thirty-seven plays were published in quarto form during his life time with or without his approval. There being no copyright law, unscrupulous publishers employed agents to scribble in short hand a popular play as it was given on the stage. and printed this ‘pirated’ or stolen edition for profit. Even so the date of publication gives no clue to the date of composition, for plays were published after they had acquired popularity and often years after they were written. Shakes-peare was singularly careless about publishing his plays and probably thought little of them as literature. It was in 1623 seven years after his death that two of his fellow-actors, Heminge and Condell, published the first collected edition of his plays now known as the First Folio “in order to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive.” It contains all the plays except Pericles which was added in a later Folio. This famous first Folio, though full of printing mistakes, is the only authoritative edition of Shakes peare’s complete plays we have.

A rough chronology of Shakespeare’s plays has been worked out from external as well as internal evidence. External evidence consists of references to the plays in diaries and memoranda of contemporaries. The most important document of this kind is Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury (1598) by Francis Meres, a Cam-bridge scholar. In this volume Meres reviews all English authors since Chaucer upto his own day, comparing each with a correspond-ing writer in Greek, Latin or Italian. He includes Shakespeare among the great in lyric poetry, tragedy and comedy. He alludes to Shakespeare thus:

As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Co nedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love’s Labour Lost, his Love’s Labour Wonne, his Midsummers Nightdream, and his Merchant of Venice; for Tragedy his Richard the II, Richard the III, Henry the IV, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.

There is no play called Love’s Labour Wonne and some ingenious critics have identified it with All’s Well that ends Well. Be that as it may, Mere’s list is conclusive evidence that these twelve plays had been produced by 1598, the date of Palladis Tamia. As pointed out by Sampson (Concise Cambridge History of English Literature) the list is selective, not exhaustive, for Mere’s method is that of balancing numbers; he balances six comedies against six tragedies.

The internal evidence of the date of composition is provided by (a) topical allusions, ie., allusions in the play to events of the day,

(b) tone, and (c) metre.

These bases, however, enable us only to classify the plays as early, middle or late. They do not fix the exact dates of composi-tion. Earlier plays or plays which belong to the experimental stage are characterised by youthful exuberance, excessive word-play and fantastic conceits. Their excessive light-heartedness marks them out as belonging to the period of Shakespeare’s ‘s immaturity. Further, the blank verse of the earlier plays tends to be end-stopped, i e. the sense ends with each line, and rhyming couplets are frequent. In later plays the blank verse is more flexible because the sense instead of ending with the line runs on to the next line so that the pause may occur anywhere in the line. In other words, end-stopped lines have been replaced by run-on lines which with their varied pauses make the blank verse responsive to every human mood or feeling. Besides, in the later plays there are progressively more and more of what are called weak or ‘feminine’ endings, i.e., additional unstres-sed syllables at the end of the line or in the middle. Moreover, rhymes become less frequent and in the latest plays almost

disappear. Dividing Shakespeare’s dramatic career into three periods, early, middle and late, the plays may be grouped as follows:

1. Early Period (1590-1596): Henry VI (3 plays), Richard III, Richard II, King John. Comedies: Love’s Labour Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Tragedies: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet.

2. Middle Period (1596-1608): Histories: Henry IV (two plays), Henry V. Comedies: The Merchant of Venice, Taming of the Shrew, Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well that ends Well, Measure for Measure. Tragedies: Julius Ceasar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens (only partly his)

3. Late Period (1608-1613): Pericles (finished by other writers) Cymbeline, Winters Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (both finished by other writers).

This classification, however rough or conjectural, helps us to understand the development of Shakespeare’s genius through stages that are natural and normal. He did not descend from the heavens fully equipped, but had to learn his trade like any other craftsman before achieving mastery in it.

Criticism

Shakespeare is so overwhelmingly great that anything like an adequate treatment of him within the limits of a single chapter is simply impossible. Nor indeed is such a treatment necessary in a book like this For one thing, the student is likely to know more about Shakespeare than about any other writer. For another, there are excellent ‘studies’ in the dramatist, highly specialised as well as general, to which he must turn sooner or later for a sound apprecía-tion of his genius. For these as well as other reasons I must be content to make a rapid survey of his plays and then to evaluate him in a few brief statements.

A Survey of the Plays

Comedies: (a) Love’s Labour Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona. (b) The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Merry Wives of Windsor. (c) Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well that ends Well, Measure for Measure.

(a) All in this group are boisterous and farcical comedies, bearing the marks of Shakespeare’s ‘prentice’ work.

(b) In this group The Merchant of Venice is a rich mixture of several plots and is one of the most popular. Shakespeare’s sympa-thetic treatment of Shylock inust have made a great impression at a time when the Jews were not very popular. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare introduces us to the world of fairies with their king and queen and the roguish imp of folklore, Puck. The farce of Bottom all unconscious of his donkey’s ears, in the arms of Titania, is heightened by poetry of rare delicacy in the atter’s commands to her fairy attendants to provide comforts to her love. Bottom is one of the greatest comic creations of Shakespeares and the farcical interlude of Pyramus and Thisby presented by Bottom and his fellows at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta deservedly takes the cake in this play. It is also in this play that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Theseus his famous pronouncement on the art of poetry:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet. Are of imagination all compact.

(Bitter. V.1.)

Taming of the Shrew and Merry Wives of Windsor are middle-class comedies as distinguished from the rest of Shakespeare’s comedies which are aristocratic, dealing as they do, with the affairs of the great kings and princes. Both are farcical. Shakespeare, it is said, wrote Merry Wives at the behest of Queen Elizabeth who desired to see Falstaff in love. Fals aff is overreached by the merry wives, is humbled, and accepts defeat much to the chagrin of some critics, who cannot bear to see their idol lick the dust.

(c) Much Ado about Nothing, though a tragi-comedy, is redeem-ed by the delightful wit-combats of Benedick and Beatrice on the one hand and by the blundering constables, Dogberry and Verges, on the other. As You Like It and Twelfth Night are the funniest comedies of Shakespeare. As You Like It is a long picnic in the Forest of Arden where Rosalind and Touchstone provide rich intellectual fare. Twelfth Night is, if anything, even more hilarious.

Some hyper-sensitive critics bemoan the fate of Malvolio whose punishment they regard as too severe. They also think that in Malvolio Shakespeare was satirising Puritanism. So what? Is satire barred from Comedy? Then all great comic writers-Aristophenes, Plautus, Terence, Moliere, Ben Jonsori-were guilty. But really Malvolio is conceived in the true spirit of comedy. Sir Toby’s classic rebuke to Malvolio: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” will echo down the centuries in the hearts of all lovers of good living as a perfect silencer to kill-joy puritanism. And Sir Andrew who to use Priestley’s word, is ‘dandled’ by Shakeshpeare, is perhaps the most delightful simpleton in all literature. To top all, Feste’s song: ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ is among the most lively lyrics in the English language.

Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well and Measure for Measure, are only nominally comedies. They are mirthless and bitter. Troilus, in fact, has been classed by some as tragedy. All’s Well that ends Well is of uncertain date and is supposed to be a recast of Love’s Labour Wonne in Mere’s list. In Measure for Measure occurs the famous song: ‘Take, O take those lips away!’

Histories: Henry VI (1, 2, 3,) Richard III. King John, Richard II Henry IV (1, 2), Henry V-Henry VIII.

The three parts of Henry VI are revised versions of old plays presumably prepared in collaboration with Marlowe. Richard III is Marlowesque, and Richard II which followed soon after it also shows the influence of Marlowe’s Edward II. The patriotic note which marks all Shakespeare’s historical plays finds thunderous expression in this play in John of Gaunt’s dying speech-

This royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

(Act II. 1.)

King John ends on a similar note of high patriotism in the speech of the Bastard Falconbridge, the play’s most interesting character

This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself

(Act. V.7)

In the two parts of Henry IV Shakespeare achieves a combination of history and comedy not to be found elsewhere. In fact, history is overwhelmed by comedy which centres round Falstaff, the greatest comic character of Shakespeare. Henry which followed is a

J.B. Priestley, English Comic Characters
magnificent pageant of victories won by Shakespeare’s ideal king and has always had a special patriotic appeal for the British.

The late Henry VIII, only a fragment of which was written by Shakespeare, was completed by others.

Tragedies: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Timon of Athens, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra. Coriolanus.

Titus Andronicus, a horror play, is in the line of the Spanish Tragedy and may have been written in collaboration with others. With Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare achieved his first triumph in tragedy. As a tragedy of romantic love it has few parallels in world’s literature. Julius Caesar may be considered the prelude to Shakespeare’s great tragedies. Its style, grave and majestic, is quite in keeping with the theme of the tragedy. The tragedy is not so much the murder of Caesar, “the foremost man of all the world”, as the defeat of Brutus, “the noblest of them all”. It is the defeat of democratic idealism by dictatorship.

The great tragedies-Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra-are psychological tragedies or tragedies of character. Shakespeare follows the ancient aristocratic tradition in tragedy in that his heroes are all great men. Chaucer’s monk before beginning his tale defines tragedy-

Tragedie is to seyn a certain storie Of him that stood in great prosperitee, And is fallen out of heigh degree Into miserie, and endeth Wrechedly.

The hero’s downfall is brought about by a fatal weakness in his own character. In Hamlet it is excessive refinement of sensibility, in Othello it is excessive simpleness of mind. in Lear it is excessive egoism and ungovernable temper, in Macbeth it is inordinate ambition, in Antony it is unbridled passion of love.

Timon of Athens, which is only partly Shakespeare’s, is, a tragedy of misanthropy. Coriolanus, though inferior to the great tragedies, is true to type and depicts the tragedy of excessive pride.

Last plays: Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Tempest. All these plays of Shakespeare’s last period though containing a lot of tragic matter have happy endings. They are neither true tragedies nor true comedies. For want of a better name they are called Romances. Their tone is calm and tranquil in marked contrast with the furious violence of the great tragedies that preceded them. Their theme is forgiveness and reconciliation.

Pericles is not entirely Shakespeare’s and was added to his plays in a later Folio. Cymbeline is notable for the character of Imogen, one of Shakespeare’s greatest heroines. The play contains the beauti-ful funeral song: ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’. Winter’s Tale, based on Greene’s romance Pandosto, is unforgettable for the character of that charming rogue Autolycus, that ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, and for the famous song: Shakespeare created a whole world and peopled it with figures that walk out of his pages to live in our imagination for ever ination books have been written on Falstaff and Hamlet as though they were historical characters. In Verona the guides show you Juliet’s tomb, as also Juliet’s house with the very balcony from where she talked to Romeo!

The partisans of Romeo are now planning to put up his statue in the heart of the city. What greater tribute could be paid to Shakespeare, the master illusionist of drama?

So far we have considered Shakespeare as a dramatist. But there is more to Shakespeare than the dramatist. His plays are not only great drama, they are also great literature. Shakespeare was the greatest poet not only of his age but of all time. No other dramatist has been also as great a poet. That is why Shakespeare’s plays are read as literature in millions of homes all over the world.

As a poet, Shakespeare was the lord of language. Together with his dramatic penetration, he possessed an unrivalled power of expression. Literature is memorable speech and no other writer has given us so many memorable speeches as Shakespeare. That is why Shakespeare is, outside the Bible, the most often quoted of

all writers.

Defects

To accept Shakespeare’s greatness is not to be blind to his defects. He would not be human if he were absolutely free from faults. Shakespeare was not a very careful writer. He wrote with great speed and often in a hurry. We have it on the authority of Heminge and Condell as well as that of Ben Jonson that he never blotted a line. He was writing for a stage that was hungry for plays, and Shakespeare met the demand as best he could. There are obvious marks of hurried writing in many of his plays. The conclusion of As You Like It is a glaring example. The resolution of the plot is effected by deus ex machina (god from the machine). A messenger arrives in the Forest of Arden and informs the exiled Duke that the usurper has become a hermit leaving the ducal throne to be reoccupied by its rightful occupant Equally, if not more, unconvincing is Celia’s marriage to Oliver. This is felt to be a big fly in the ointment. In Lodge’s Rosalind Oliver saves Celia from bandits and this is good enough reason for their marriage. But Shakespeare in his hurry could not assimilate harmoniously the elements of the plot he had borrowed from Lodge. The same want of care is responsible for many anachro-nisms in his plays. That his geography was poor is shown by his giving a seacoast to Bohemia (Winter’s Tale).

Shakespeare seems to have been lordly indifferent to these petty matters, which in any case would not be observed in the swift action on the stage. For it must never be forgotten that he was writing his plays to be acted, not read. It is only in reading that we become aware of his little inconsistencies.

A more serious defect is his excessive word-play and forced wit which hardly raises a smile now. Maybe tastes have changed and Shakespeare was writing for an age less sophisticated than ours. And in any case Shakespeare had to keep the groundlings in mind, and perhaps they laughed at his inanities. It is certainly they that account for his occasional coarseness. We have all heard the chorus of joyous screaming and whistling from the low-priced stall in a cinema hall when a particularly ‘Juicy’ scene is flashed on the screen.

The lengthy declamations that are so frequent in Shakespeare’s plays and sometimes so undramatic are also explained by the taste of the time. The audience wanted poetical declamations and Shakespeare’s lyrical genius supplied them. Further, Shakespeare’s stage had no painted scenery and declamations made up for this deficiency in spectacle.

In short, Shakespeare was writing for a particular stage and a particular audience. His main aim was to make money and his chief concern, therefore, was to please his audience. This audience was a mixed company representing all strata of society. Shakespeare had to appeal to all tastes. He gave poetry and pathos, subtle wit and humour, thought and reflection, for the refined; blood-and-thunder sensationalism for the unrefined; music and dance, love and romance for all. The trivial inconsistencies and petty crudities which arm-chair critics have picked out from his plays sink into insignificance before the astonishing variety of his excellences. The final impression after reading Shakespeare’s plays is this one of unparalleled variety. Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra may be aptly applied to his plays: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety.

The Shakespeare ‘mystery’: The puzzle that one man and that too a mere actor with. no more than a perfunctory grammar school education should have produced within the space of twenty years about twice as many plays has led to crankish theories assigning the authorship of the plays to Bacon, Marlowe, or this or that peer of the realm. The theories are too crazy to be taken seriously and it is sufficient to say that all documentary evidence (such as title page and contemporary references) assigns the plays to William Shakespeare. There is really no mystery if we remember the fact that Shakespeare simply borrowed his plots and thus saved himself the bother of inventing them. There are only four plays which he wrote independently, for they cannot be traced to any originals. These are: Love’s Labour Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest. His originality consisted not in inventing plots but in in turning the base metal of his borrowings into gold, in building ships out of matchsticks.

As regards his lack of university education, it proved an advan-tage rather than a disadvantage. Being a graduate of the streets, he was thrown upon his own resources without being biased by bookish knowledge. His training as an actor enabled him to know and meet the needs of the stage He had thus the two basic quali-fications of a dramatist: direct knowledge of human nature and practical knowledge of the stage. Given the necessary genius, there is really no ‘mystery’ of Shakespeare. The mystery is in the genius and genius cannot be explained.

Of the many Shakespearean theories, one that needs considera-tion even in this book is the theory of his objectivity. A widely held view of Shakespeare is that he was the most impersonal of artists and we can know nothing about his own view of life and art from his plays. When we say Shakespeare says this or that, we commit the fallacy of quotations. It is argued that the quotation represents the view of the particular character and not that of Shakespeare. Mathew Arnold’s sonnet on Shakespeare: “Others abide our question Thou art free” has reinforced this view, which has gained wide currency among general readers. But this is push-ing the theory of Shakespeare’s objectivity too far. According to this view Shakespeare was a god who held absolutely aloof from his characters. Such detachment or indifference on the part of a writer is simply impossible. Even a pamphlet bears the mark of its writer. It is inconceivable that a man should write thirty-seven plays without leaving the impress of his own personality upon them.

In strict theory a dramatist can never say anything in his own person. But in practice the dramatist can and does now and then make a character his mouthpiece. And this is what Shakespeare does in many of his plays. This is specially true of such plays as Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The The Tempest. Who has not felt that it is not Hamlet but Shakespeare who is lecturing the actors on the art of acting? Who can doubt that it is not Theseus but Shakespeare who is defining poetry in the A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Who does not feel that Prospero’s farewell to his magic is Shakespeare’s own farewell to the stage?

Among other reasons for the great popularity of Hamlet is the feeling that here, if anywhere, Shakespeare has unburdened his soul. There are so many utterances in this play that are stamped as Shakespeare’s. For example: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends/Rough-hew them, how we will.” “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”

The clowns of Shakespeare acquire special significance in this respect. They are not mere conventional appendages to the plays. They perform the function of a chorus, and in their foolish or fantas-tic utterances may be found some of the profoundest opinions of the poet. Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night and Stephano the drunken butler in The Tempest-all reflect Shakespeare’s own criticism of life. Being an artist he does not preach directly, but gives his vision of life an artistic expression through characters from whom we least expect it. The fool in Lear, one of the most pathetic characters in all Shakespeare, is class by himseıf. His babblings are a running and hard-hitting commentary on Lear’s folly and no doubt reflect Shakespeare’s own feelings as they do ours.

I have dwelt at some length on this point not to deny Shakes-peare’s objectivity but only to show its limitations. Shakespeare is the most impersonal of dramatists, but he does now and then drop the mask to reveal himself. To apply the theory strictly would be unjust to Shakespeare as well as to his readers. Unjust to Shakes-peare who was very human, unjust to his readers who would like to cherish the recorded thoughts and beliefs of the greatest of poets.

Shakespeare’s Philosophy

To accept the autobiographical element here and there in Shakes-peare’s plays does not, however, justify our identifying him with a body of doctrines called his philosophy of life. Shakespeare left no such system. What passes as Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom or philosophy is a collection of opinions and and reflections reflect appropriate to the characters who spoke them. They do not make any coherent or consistent system. On the other hand, they are contradictory and inconsistent. In Lear, for example, Kent says:

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our condition.

This is contradicted in Julius Caesar where Cassius says:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves that we are underlings.

The gems of wit and wisdom scattered in the plays are ad hoc judgements which are as various and conflicting as humanity itself. Shakespeare’s wide-ranging sympathy encloses the whole of huma-nity. He is the least didactic of writers. He doesn’t preach, he does’t judge. He is content to hold the mirror up to nature. He understood human nature. And to understand is to forgive. He had universal charity. He recognised that

There is a soul of goodness in things evil, Could men observingly distil it out.

(Henry V)

Elizabethan Stage

As Shakespeare’s plays were written to be acted and acted on a particular stage, we should always have a mental picture of that stage (in many respects so unlike our own) while reading any of his plays.

The Elizabethan theatre was a round or octagonal building enclosing a courtyard which was open to the sky. The stage was a rectangular platform projecting from one side into the courtyard. On the bare floor in front and on either side of this platfrom stood the common people or ‘groundlings’ who paid a penny or so for admission. The better class who paid more sat on seats in tiers of galleries running all round, one above the other, as in a modern circus, the uppermost being covered with a thatched roof slanting inward. The nobles and fashionable gallants sat on the stage itself and amused themselves by throwing orange peel and nutshells among the groundlings who surrounded them on three sides. The platform had a curtain across the middle, separating the front or outer stage from the back or inner stage. The latter could be exposed to view by simply drawing the curtain aside. The inner stage was used for scenes which took place in any interior, such as Desdemona’s room, Lear’s hovel or Prospero’s cell. Above this was the actor’s dressing room or ‘tiring house’ with windows opening on to a balcony for scenes which took place at an elevated spot, such as an upper room, the walls of a castle, etc. It was from this balcony that Juliet talked with Romeo.

The Elizabethar stage was a primitive affair as compared with our own. It had no front or ‘drop’ curtain, no painted scenery and only the most primitive of stage properties. Change of scene was announced by a written sign. These peculiarities of the Elizabethan stage had important bearings on Shakespeare’s technique. The absence of painted scenery thus accounts for the large number of scenes in his plays. The staging of such a play for example as Antony and Cleopatra in its entirety on the modern stage would ruin the producer. That is why modern stage managers cut out many scenes and combine others to suit their limited resources in painted scenery.

The absence of the ‘drop’ curtain explains why so many Shakespearean scenes have tame endings or endings in the nature of an anti-climax. For example, to clear the stage the dead Polonius has to be dragged off by Hamlet in full view of the audience (The stage direction is Hamlet tugging in Polonius). On the modern stage the curtain would come down do at the right moment and Polonius would walk off unseen by the audience.

As regards the stage properties there was little beyond a few articles of furniture. Make-shift devices were resorted to for the sake of realism. A tree, for example, would do duty for a forest. Ben Jon-son in his prologue to Every Man in his Humour ridicules the crude realism of the “three rusty swords” which represented “York and Lancaster’s long jars” in Shakespeare’s historical plays. These limitations of scenery and properties explain the long descriptive passages that occur frequently in Shakespeare’s plays. In Henry V Shakespeare openly appeals for the imaginative cooperation of the audience “to eke out our imperfections with your thoughts”.

These and many other features of Shakespeare’s plays become clear if we keep in mind the stage setting of his day. Take solilo-quies, for example. It is absurd that anyone should go on talking to himself for ten or fifteen minutes. But there is no absurdity if we remember that no distance separated the actor from his audience which surrounded him on three sides and some of whom sat on the stage itself. The soliloguy was, therefore, a means by which the character shared his thoughts with the audience. Another notable feature of the Elizabethan stage was that female parts were taken by boys. The age was not yet ripe for women to appear on the stage. Actresses came on the stage only after the Restoration.