Shakespeare’s tragedies are among
the most powerful studies of human nature in all literature and appropriately
stand as the greatest achievements of his dramatic artistry. Attention
understandably has focused on his unforgettable tragic characters, such as
Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear, and Macbeth.
Yet the plays also explore and
extend the very nature of tragedy itself by discovering within it a structure
that derives meaning precisely from its refusal to offer consolation or
compensation for the suffering it traces. Shakespeare wrote his first tragedies
in 1594 and 1595. But he left the field of tragedy untouched for at least five
years after finishing Romeo and Juliet, probably in 1595, and turned to comedy
and history plays. Julius Caesar, written about 1599, served as a link between
the history plays and the mature tragedies that followed.
His major tragedies
The tragedies Shakespeare wrote
after 1600 are considered the most profound of his works and constitute the
pillars upon which his literary reputation rests. Some scholars have tied the
darkening of his dramatic imagination in this period to the death of his son in
1601. But in the absence of any compelling biographical information to support
this theory, it remains only a speculation. For whatever reason, sometime
around 1600 Shakespeare began work on a series of plays that in their power and
profundity are arguably unmatched in the achievement of any other writer.
Hamlet, written about 1601 and first printed in 1603, is perhaps Shakespeare’s
most famous play. It exceeds by far most other tragedies of revenge in the
power of its ethical and psychological imagining. The play is based on the
story of Amleth, a 9th-century Danish prince, which Shakespeare encountered in
a 16th-century French account by François Belleforest. Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells the story of the prince’s
effort to revenge the murder of his father, who has been poisoned by Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, the man who
then becomes Hamlet’s stepfather and
the king. The prince alternates between rash action and delay that disgusts
him, as he tries to enact the revenge his father’s ghost has asked from him.
The play ends in a spectacular scene of death: As Hamlet, his mother, his uncle, and Laertes (the lord chamberlain’s
son) all lie dead, the Norwegian prince Fortinbras marches in to claim the
Danish throne. Hamlet is certainly
Shakespeare’s most intellectually engaging and elusive play. Literary critics
and actors turn to it again and again, possibly succeeding only in confirming
the play’s inexhaustible richness and the inadequacy of any single attempt
finally or fully to capture it.
Othello was written about 1604, though it was not published until
1622. It portrays the growth of unjustified jealousy in the noble protagonist,
Othello, a Moor serving as a general in the Venetian army. The innocent object
of his jealousy is his wife, Desdemona. In this domestic tragedy, Othello’s
evil lieutenant Iago draws him into mistaken jealousy in order to ruin him. Othello is destroyed partly through his
gullibility and willingness to trust Iago and partly through the manipulations
of this villain, who clearly enjoys the exercise of evildoing just as he hates
the spectacle of goodness and happiness around him. At the end of the play, Othello comes to understand his terrible
error; but as always in tragedy, that knowledge comes too late and he dies by
his own hand in atonement for his error. In his final act of self-destruction,
he becomes again and for a final time the defender of Venice and Venetian
values.
King Lear was written about 1605 and first published in 1608.
Conceived on a grander emotional and philosophic scale than Othello, it deals
with the consequences of the arrogance and misjudgement of Lear, a ruler of
early Britain, and the parallel behaviour of his councillor, the Duke of
Gloucester. Each of these fathers tragically banishes the child who most has
his interests at heart and places himself in the power of the wicked child or
children. Each is finally restored to the loving child, but only after a
rending journey of suffering, and each finally dies, having learned the truth
about himself and the world, but too late to avert disaster. King Lear is arguably Shakespeare’s most
shocking play; the scenes of Lear with his dead child and of Gloucester having
his eyes struck out are horrible images of the world’s cruelty. But the play
offers moving if ineffective examples of love and compassion: Even if these
emotions are incapable of redeeming this world, they are discovered as infinitely
precious in their very defeat.
Macbeth was written about 1606 and first published in 1623. In the
play Shakespeare depicts the tragedy of a man torn between an amoral will and a
powerfully moral intellect. Macbeth knows
his actions are wrong but enacts his fearful deeds anyway, led on in part by
the excitement of his own wrongdoing. In securing the Scottish throne, Macbeth deadens his moral intelligence
to the point where he becomes capable of increasingly murderous (and pointless)
behaviour, although he never becomes the monster the moral world sees. At all
times he feels the pull of his humanity. Yet for Macbeth there is no redemption, only the sharp descent into a bleak
pessimism. Human existence, as he sees it (or as he has made it, at least for himself),
amounts to nothing:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from
day to day
To the last syllable of recorded
time,
And all our yesterdays have
lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out,
brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a
poor player
That struts and frets his hour
upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is
a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Act V, scene 4)
Literary qualities of his plays
Everyone loves a good story, and
Shakespeare was one of the very best storytellers. Most of Shakespeare’s
stories have an almost universal appeal, an appeal often lacking in the plays
of his contemporaries, who clung more closely to the tastes and interests of
their own day. An even greater achievement is Shakespeare’s creation of
believable characters. His people are not the exaggerated types or allegorical
abstractions found in many other Elizabethan plays. They are instead men and
women with the mingled qualities and many of the inconsistencies of life
itself. The very richness of Shakespeare’s language continues to delight, and
it is always amazing to be reminded how many common words and phrases have
their origin in Shakespeare’s art. His poetic and theatrical artistry has
created plays that continue to attract readers and theatregoers, and he
properly remains one of our own age’s most popular playwrights.
Shakespeare’s characters emerge
in his plays as distinctive human beings. Although some of the characters
display elements of conventional dramatic types such as the melancholy man, the
braggart soldier, the pedant, and the young lover, they are nevertheless
usually individualized rather than caricatures or exaggerated types. Falstaff,
for example, bears some resemblance to the braggart soldiers of 16th-century
Italian comedy and to representations of the character Vice in medieval
morality plays, but his vitality and inexhaustible wit make him unique. Hamlet, one of the most complex
characters in all literature, is partly a picture of the ideal Renaissance man,
and he also exhibits traits of the conventional melancholic character. However,
his personality as a whole transcends these types, and he is so real that
commentators have continued for centuries to explore his fascinating mind.
The women in Shakespeare’s plays
are vivid creations, each differing from the others. It is important to
remember that in Shakespeare’s time boy actors played the female parts.
Actresses did not appear in a Shakespeare play until after the restoration of
Charles II to the English throne in 1660 and the introduction of French
practices such as women actors. It says much about the talent of the boy actors
of his own day that Shakespeare could create such a rich array of fascinating
women characters. Shakespeare was fond of portraying aggressive, witty
heroines, such as Kate of The Taming of the Shrew, Rosaline of Love’s Labour’s
Lost, and Beatrice of Much Ado About Nothing. However, he was equally adept at
creating gentle and innocent women, such as Ophelia in Hamlet, Desdemona in Othello, and Cordelia in King Lear. His female
characters also include the treacherous Goneril and Regan in King Lear, the
iron-willed Lady Macbeth, the witty and resourceful Portia in Merchant of Venice,
the tender and loyal Juliet, and the alluring Cleopatra.
Shakespeare’s comic figures are
also highly varied. They include bumbling rustics such as Dogberry and Verges
in Much Ado About Nothing, tireless punsters like the Dromios in The Comedy of
Errors, pompous grotesques like Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost, elegant
wits like Feste in Twelfth Night,
cynical realists like Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and fools who utter
nonsense that often conceals wisdom, such as Touchstone in As You Like It and
the Fool in King Lear.
Shakespeare drew his characters
with remarkable insight into human character. Even the most wicked characters,
such as Iago in Othello, have human traits that can elicit understanding if not
compassion. Thus, Macbeth’s violent end arouses pity and awe rather than
scornful triumph at a criminal’s just punishment for his deeds. The characters
achieve uniqueness through their brilliantly individualized styles of speech.
Shakespeare’s understanding of the human soul and his mastery of language
enabled him to write dialogue that makes the characters in his plays always
intelligible, vital, and memorable.
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.
Shakespeare brilliantly exploited
the resources of the theatres he worked in. The Globe Theatre held an audience
of 2,000 to 3,000 people. Like other outdoor theatres, it had a covered, raised
stage thrusting out into the audience. The audience stood around the three
sides of the stage in an underfed 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:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps
upon this bank!
Here we will sit, and let the
sounds of music
Creep in our ears: stillness and
the night
Become the touches of sweet
harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor
of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patent of
bright gold. Act
V, scene 1
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.
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 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.
Conclusion
The poetic tragedies of William
Shakespeare, notably Hamlet (1601), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth
(1606), also ignored classical Greek conventions. The episodic and multiple
unfolding of time, place, and action enhanced Shakespeare’s epic storytelling
ability. The grandeur and magnitude of his dense language became the expressive
means of focusing on tragic character and complex motivation. For actors and
spectators alike, identification with the tragic fate of Shakespeare’s
protagonists allowed for a compelling feeling of cathartic release. His
tragedies are the most widely performed serious plays in the world repertoire.
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