This Is Shakespeare Read online

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  The Taming of the Shrew

  CHAPTER 2

  Richard III

  CHAPTER 3

  The Comedy of Errors

  CHAPTER 4

  Richard II

  CHAPTER 5

  Romeo and Juliet

  CHAPTER 6

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  CHAPTER 7

  The Merchant of Venice

  CHAPTER 8

  1 Henry IV

  CHAPTER 9

  Much Ado About Nothing

  CHAPTER 10

  Julius Caesar

  CHAPTER 11

  Hamlet

  CHAPTER 12

  Twelfth Night

  CHAPTER 13

  Measure for Measure

  CHAPTER 14

  Othello

  CHAPTER 15

  King Lear

  CHAPTER 16

  Macbeth

  CHAPTER 17

  Antony and Cleopatra

  CHAPTER 18

  Coriolanus

  CHAPTER 19

  The Winter’s Tale

  CHAPTER 20

  The Tempest

  EPILOGUE

  REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  About the Author

  Professor Emma Smith is lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, and a Fellow of Hertford College.

  For Elizabeth Macfarlane

  Introduction

  Why should you read a book about Shakespeare?

  Because he is a literary genius and prophet whose works speak to – more, they encapsulate – the human condition. Because he presents timeless values of tolerance and humanity. Because his writing is technically brilliant and endlessly verbally inventive. Because he put it all so much better than anyone else.

  Nope.

  That’s not why; not at all. Sure, that’s what we always say about Shakespeare, but it doesn’t really get to the truth about the value of these works for the twenty-first century. The Shakespeare in this book is more questioning and ambiguous, more specific to the historical circumstances of his own time, more unexpectedly relevant to ours. Lots of what we trot out about Shakespeare and iambic pentameter and the divine right of kings and ‘Merrie England’ and his enormous vocabulary blah blah blah is just not true, and just not important. They are the critical equivalent of ‘dead-catting’ in a meeting or negotiation (placing a dead cat on the table to divert attention from more tricky or substantive issues). They deflect us from investigating the artistic and ideological implications of Shakespeare’s silences, inconsistencies and, above all, the sheer and permissive gappiness of his drama.

  That gappy quality is so crucial to my approach that I want to outline it here. Shakespeare’s plays are incomplete, woven of what’s said and what’s unsaid, with holes in between. This is true at the most mundane level: what do Hamlet, or Viola, or Brutus look like? A novelist would probably tell us; Shakespeare the dramatist does not. That means that the clues to personality that we might expect from a novel, or from a film, are not there. If The Taming of the Shrew’s Katherine looks vulnerable, or ballsy, or beautiful, that makes a difference to our interpretation of this most ambiguous of plays, and if her imposed husband Petruchio is attractive, or boorish, or nervous, that too has an impact. Fantasy casting – where you imagine a particular modern actor in a role – is a very interesting game to play with Shakespeare’s plays: if you cast action-guy Mel Gibson as Hamlet (as Franco Zeffirelli did in 1990), you immediately produce a particular take on the play, which is quite different from casting Michelle Terry (at Shakespeare’s Globe in London in 2018), or Benedict Cumberbatch (directed by Lyndsey Turner, 2015). That we don’t know what characters look like is one symptom of the absence of larger narration and commentary in a play. No authorial or narrative voice tells us more than the speeches of the characters themselves. Stage directions are relatively sparse and almost never tell us how a given action was performed: does Richard II give over his crown, orb and sceptre in Act 4 of his play to Bolingbroke sadly, gleefully, manically, or in fact not at all? The play’s choreography is not spelled out for us, leaving this scene typically open to directorial and readerly imaginations. Shakespeare’s construction of his plays tends to imply rather than state; he often shows, rather than tells; most characters and encounters are susceptible to multiple interpretations. It’s because we have to fill in the gaps that Shakespeare is so vital.

  And there are larger conceptual and ethical gaps too: the intellectual climate of the late sixteenth century made some things newly thinkable (that religion is ‘but a childish toy’, as Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe had one of his characters claim), and overlaid old certainties with new doubts. Shakespeare lived and wrote in a world that was on the move, and in which new technologies transformed perceptions of that world. The microscope, for example, made a new tiny world visible, as Robert Hooke uncovered in his book Micrographia (1665), illustrated with hugely detailed pictures including fleas as big as cats. The telescope, in the work of Galileo and other astronomers, brought the in-effably distant into the span of human comprehension, and theatre tried to process the cultural implications of these changes. Sometimes, Shakespeare’s plays register the gap between older visions of a world run by divine fiat, and more contemporary ideas about the centrality of human agency to causality, or they propose adjacent worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible. These gaps are conceptual or ethical, and they open up space to think differently about the world and experience it from another point of view.

  Gappiness is Shakespeare’s dominant and defining characteristic. And ambiguity is the oxygen of these works, making them alive in unpredictable and changing ways. It’s we, and our varied engagement, that makes Shakespeare: it’s not for nothing that the first collected edition of his plays in the seventeenth century addressed itself ‘to the great variety of readers’.

  His works hold our attention because they are fundamentally incomplete and unstable: they need us, in all our idiosyncratic diversity and with the perspective of our post-Shakespearean world, to make sense. ‘Shakespeare’ is here less an inert noun than an active verb: ‘to Shakespeare’ might be defined as the activity of posing questions, unsettling certainties, challenging orthodoxies, opening out endings. I wanted to write a book about Shakespeare for grown-ups who don’t want textbook or schoolroom platitudes. Not a biography (there’s nothing more to say about the facts of Shakespeare’s own life, and vitality is a property of the works, not their long-dead author); not an exam crib (Shakespeare’s works ask, rather than answer, questions, making them wonderfully unsuited to the exam system); not a Shakespeare-made-simple (Shakespeare is complex, like living, not technically and crackably difficult, like crosswords or changing the time on the cooker): I wanted to write something for readers, theatregoers, students and all those who feel they missed out on Shakespeare at some earlier point and are willing to have another pop at these extraordinary works.

  We all know Shakespeare occupies a paradoxical place in contemporary culture. On the one hand his work is revered: quoted, performed, graded, subsidized, parodied. Shakespeare! On the other hand – cue yawns and eye rolls, or fear of personal intellectual failure – Shakespeare can be an obligation, a set text, inducing a terrible and particular weariness that can strike us sitting in the theatre at around 9.30 p.m., when we are becalmed in Act 4 and there’s still an hour to go (admit it – we’ve all been there). Shakespeare is a cultural gatekeeper, politely honoured rather than robustly challenged. Does anyone actually like reading this stuff?

  Yes: and I hope this book will g
ive some indications how. It is not an attempt to cut Shakespeare down to size, but I do hope that it might open out to you a less dogmatic, less complete, more enjoyable Shakespeare. This is a Shakespeare you could have a drink and a good conversation with, rather than one you have to bow before. I don’t have a grand theory of Shakespeare to inculcate, still less do I think I have access to what Shakespeare meant. (Confession: I don’t really care what he might have meant, and nor should you.) I want to explore the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are spacious texts to think with – about agency, celebrity, economics, friendship, sex, politics, privacy, laughter, suffering, about a tonne of topics, including art itself. Each chapter in the book, on a specific play, takes a different approach. I’ve picked plays I like and find stimulating. Some of these are famous, so you’d be annoyed to buy a book on Shakespeare that didn’t mention them; some are more marginal, but I wanted to say something about how interesting they are (The Comedy of Errors anyone?). I’ve tried to give a sense of Shakespeare’s range across his career, and the plays are discussed in chronological order so that you can see how his writing moves across genres and concerns. But I’ve also tried to keep the individual chapters self-contained, so that you could read one before going to the theatre, for example, or start at the end if that’s where your interest lies.

  Together, the chapters cover aspects of performance, contemporary and original. They sometimes think about historical context and sometimes ignore it completely. They look sometimes at Shakespeare’s sources or the influences from his culture, and sometimes at the reception his works have generated in later worlds including our own. They present a Shakespeare who is an Elizabethan and Jacobean writer concerned both with classical literature and the problems of political succession, as well as with more modern themes of identity and scepticism. This Shakespeare knows about intersectionality as much as about Ovid. He is fluent in our contemporary concerns, but he is not simply a mirror for our own solipsistic age. Above all, these plays prompt questions rather than answers. This is what gives them their edge and provocation; this is what forever implicates us in their meanings; and this is why they need your attention. I’ve called the book This Is Shakespeare not to convey a monolith – quite the opposite. Shakespeare takes shape through our interpretations. It’s here, in our engagement with the works, that they take flight. This – reading, thinking, questioning, interpreting, animating – this really is Shakespeare.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Taming of the Shrew

  The Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, and one of his most controversial. Everything, from the name of its heroine to its ideology of gender relations, is contested, to the extent that it’s impossible even to begin with a neutral synopsis of the play. Here’s why it’s impossible.

  The Taming of the Shrew centres on the courtships of the two daughters of the Paduan merchant Baptista: Katherine and Bianca. The elder, Katherine, is apparently the shrew of the title, a woman who, depending on how you look at it, is feisty and independent, lonely and misunderstood, or strident and antisocial. Her father – who, depending on how you look at it, is either a worried widower or a patriarchal tyrant – has decreed that Bianca – who, depending on how you look at it, is either beautiful, gentle and agreeable, or exactly the kind of annoyingly insipid, simpering arm candy who you, like her sister, would want to slap – cannot marry until her older sister gets hitched. The stage is set for the entrance of Petruchio, who, depending on how you look at it, is a quirky and unorthodox guy who knows his own mind and wants a woman who knows hers, or a psychopathic bounty hunter with sadistic and misogynistic tendencies. So Katherine and Petruchio are paired off against Katherine’s will in a relationship which, depending on how you look at it, is crackling with mutual sexual tension along with a touch of shared S&M domination fantasy, or is cynical, loveless and enforced by a violently patriarchal society. He treats her in a way which – depending on how you look at it – uses distinctly unfunny torture techniques including sleep deprivation, brainwashing and starvation to bend her to his will, or is a zany courtship showing their mutual determination not to yield as an underlying equality beneath their revolutionary union. So, at the end of the play, Katherine is, depending on how you look at it, broken-spirited, parroting patriarchal ideology and utterly submissive, offering to put her hand under her husband’s foot, or ironically and unabashedly vocal, preaching the interdependence of husband and wife to earn herself half of a fat wager placed by her husband.

  What’s more, this whole story is placed as a play within a play, so that a prefatory induction scene sets up this Petruchio and Katherine plot as a play performed for a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly. Sly is being tricked into believing he is a lord, and that a page dressed up as a woman is his wife, by some Bullingdon Club types who are having their bit of cruel fun. So, depending how you look at it, the whole story is framed so as to be obviously implausible and fictional, with even the women as men in amateurish disguise, or as a play which radically aligns the lower classes and women as joint victims of a self-serving male establishment. And yes, the names are contentious as well. We used to call the play’s female lead Kate until feminist editors pointed out that this is not neutral either. When Petruchio meets for the first time the woman he has determined to marry, he greets her: ‘Good morrow, Kate, for that’s your name, I hear’ (2.1.182). Her reply is clear: ‘Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing. They call me Katherine that do talk of me’ (2.1.183–4). Calling her Kate against her will is one of Petruchio’s (depending how you look at it) lovable gestures of proprietorial intimacy or a misogynistic microaggression. So, depending how you look at it, the title The Taming of the Shrew is a plot synopsis, a how-to guide, a raised eyebrow, or a satirical joke.

  Responses to this contradictory play have themselves always been contradictory. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, the playwright George Bernard Shaw urged men and women to boycott it: ‘No man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth.’ But perhaps unexpectedly, Germaine Greer praised the play in her feminist classic The Female Eunuch, suggesting that Katherine has ‘the uncommon good fortune to find [a husband] who is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it’ and further, that ‘the submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and individuality.’ Perhaps Greer had been watching Franco Zeffirelli’s film version of 1967 which shares this interpretation. Zeffirelli drew on the well-publicized and tempestuous off-screen relationship of lovers Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as Katherine and Petruchio to imply that this was a passionate relationship in which pots and pans, but also underwear, would fly.

  But however much theatrical production and critical interpretation strive to settle the play’s ambiguities, I want to stress something different here. The Taming of the Shrew prompts questions rather than answers them. The question of how to interpret the play is hard-wired into its very structure and amplified in its ongoing reception. Shakespeare’s talent for interrogation and scepticism is on display here in this early play, and its history has exemplified one of our most persistent and inevitable recourses when reading Shakespeare. We make his work mean what we want it to mean. Whether Katherine is indeed tamed by the end of the play thus becomes a sharper interpretative parable: how to read Shakespeare?

  Crucial to Katherine’s contested role in the play is an extended speech she gives at its conclusion. It’s long, but I want to quote it in full, not least because its length is part of the point. She addresses her fellow women on stage, admonishing them for being disagreeable to their menfolk:

  Fie, fie, unknit that threat’ning, unkind brow,

  And dart not scornful glances from those eyes

  To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.

  It blots thy beauty as frosts d
o bite the meads,

  Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,

  And in no sense is meet or amiable.

  A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,

  Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty,

  And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty

  Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.

  Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

  Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,

  And for thy maintenance commits his body

  To painful labour both by sea and land,

  To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,

  Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe,

  And craves no other tribute at thy hands

  But love, fair looks, and true obedience,

  Too little payment for so great a debt.

  Such duty as the subject owes the prince,

  Even such a woman oweth to her husband,

  And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,

  And not obedient to his honest will,

  What is she but a foul contending rebel,

  And graceless traitor to her loving lord?

  I am ashamed that women are so simple

  To offer war where they should kneel for peace,

  Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway

  When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.

  Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth,

  Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,

  But that our soft conditions and our hearts

  Should well agree with our external parts?

  Come, come, you froward and unable worms,

  My mind hath been as big as one of yours,

  My heart as great, my reason haply more,

  To bandy word for word and frown for frown;

  But now I see our lances are but straws,

  Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,

  That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.