Shakespeare

Shakespeare uses all the tricks of Elizabethan stagecraft, including simultaneous staging, in order to show that the dramatic world is mixed and uncertain. Entire plays seem to be made up of parallels and contrasts and echoes. All of his characters have mixed natures. Despite the apparently orchestrated harmony of his endings, there are in fact very few genuine resolutions of the action. The closing scenes are deliberately rendered ambiguous, with one character generally excluded from the happy picture of reconciliation. That is why some critics have agreed with Tolstoy that Shakespeare really had “nothing to say.” He simply showed action and rhetoric upon the stage for the purposes of spectacle and entertainment. Yet generations of readers have also been affected by his apparent profundity. There has never been a great English dramatist whose art has remained fundamentally so mysterious. That is why he retains all of his power.

The stuff of Shakespeare is endlessly variable, but the connections or associations become darker. The comic servants of the first dramas become Iago or Malvolio; the clown of the early comedies becomes the Fool of King Lear or the gravedigger of Hamlet; the sexual jealousies within The Merry Wives of Windsor turn murderous in Othello; the joyous misrule of Falstaff becomes rancid and acrimonious in Thersites or in Timon. His imagination was drawn to the same patterns again and again. The same rushing power, the same imaginative furia , is evident in all of them. You can often tell, in little asides or allusions, that Shakespeare is thinking of the next play even as he is completing the one to hand. In Macbeth , for example, there is a clear signal of Antony and Cleopatra . The language of Henry V anticipates that of Julius Caesar . The plays are all of a piece and are best seen in relation to each other.

The majority of the plays open in medias res , as if a conversation had already been taking place which the audience has just joined. It is part of Shakespeare’s fluency that he creates a world already in process. The art of Elizabethan stagecraft is the art of the entrance, since there are no formal divisions into acts, and in Shakespeare the players enter from an ongoing world which is fully alive in some enchanted space elsewhere. The action is conceived as a sequence of intense episodes; but his pacing, his sense of variety and change, are so fluent that this action proceeds without impediment or hesitation. It is a continuous stream, mimicking the process and activity of life itself.

It has become apparent that Shakespeare was a master dramatist who was also a consummately practical man of the theatre – or, rather, he was a master dramatist because he was a practical man of the theatre. He was actor, playwright, sharer in the proceeds and, eventually, part-owner of the theatre itself. He seems to have ensured that all of the cast were used in his plays, and it is possible that he kept extra costs to a minimum. Hence the conspicuous absence of expensive “special effects” in his drama. Such effects do in any case distract the audience from a plot based upon human conflict. The great advantage of his position, however, lies in the fact that he was able to write very much as he wished; he was not a hired writer obliged to accede to the pressures and fashions of the moment. Once his popularity and success had been assured in his early days with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, he was able to strike out in whatever direction he wished. This in part explains the boldness and variety of his drama. If he wished to write a play with a Moor as the tragic hero, or a play with an enchanted island for its setting, the rest of the company were prepared to trust his judgement. As long as he provided two or three plays each year, his “fellows” were satisfied.

His whole social, financial and imaginative life was therefore implicated in the stage. There was no one in his period with the same range of connections; he was uniquely theatrical. There were other playwrights, for example, who were not concerned to have their work performed. George Chapman grandly declared: that “I see not mine own plays.” 1But Shakespeare was present at every part of the life of his plays, from the first words written down in a fury to the last words refined at rehearsal. When they were acted he knew every sigh or shout they elicited from the audience.

There were other tasks to perform. It was he who perused plays submitted for approval by other writers, and it was no doubt his task to revise and generally to prepare manuscripts for performance. He was asked to rewrite difficult passages or introduce a speech at an opportune moment. He provided prologues or epilogues for the revival of old plays, and rewrote contentious passages to avoid the censorship of the Master of the Revels. He was a swift worker. It should always be remembered that the great majority of the plays written in this period have wholly disappeared. Within the hundreds that have been lost, there will have been many touches of genuine Shakespeare.

His role as a company man may help to explain why he was not perhaps concerned with the publication of his plays in his own lifetime. The fellowship of the players was so intense that the plays themselves may have been considered to be in a sense common property, a communal effort that should remain within the community. It would have been considered inappropriate, and against the spirit of their fellowship, for him to cause to be published these works under his own name. One contract survives for another dramatist in which it is stipulated that the author “should not suffer any play made or to be made or composed by him” to be printed “without the license from the said company or the major part of them.” 2Shakespeare’s agreement is unlikely to have taken the form of a contract, but he felt a deep obligation to give them his work. The great virtue of this informal understanding was that the company preserved his plays; the work of no other playwright, with the possible exception of Jonson, was kept intact in this manner.

The difference between Shakespeare and Jonson is in any case instructive. Jonson was willing to introduce himself as an author, as an individual outside the bounds of any company or fellowship; Shakespeare, of an older generation, was much more at ease in the collaborative and guild-like venture of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men where the individual was subsumed within the group. His status was much closer to that of a craftsman than an “artist” in any modern sense. It was only after his death that his fellow professionals, in an act of group piety, formally published his plays.

From the evidence of the manuscript of Sir Thomas More Shakespeare wrote at extreme speed and intensity; he seems to have been able to summon up the energy and the inspiration at will, with the words and cadences emerging from some deep well of his being. He left some lines unfinished in the rapidity and restlessness of creation. In Timon of Athens the protagonist is described as begging “so many” talents; Shakespeare clearly meant to add an exact figure at a later stage. But he simply had to get on. He hardly ever punctuated, preferring to rely instead upon the roll and rush of creation. In some instances he seems to have left spaces between his words, where punctuation marks could be inserted after the fit had passed. He did not mark act or scene divisions. Ludwig Wittgenstein gained the impression that his verses were “dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything, so to speak.” 1Samuel Johnson remarked that the endings of his plays were sometimes written with undue haste, as if the exigencies of the moment forced him to hurry.