A Pelican Book: This Is Shakespeare Read online

  For some analyses of the play, its governing principle has been understood as one of opposition, built on a perceived contrast between the two protagonists. Thus Richard versus Bolingbroke, poetry versus realism, metaphor versus plain-speaking, the feudal king versus the pragmatic politician, divine right versus realpolitik, chivalric jousts versus political murder, the medieval world of absolute monarchy versus the modern world of expediency. All these oppositions make regime change in the play come to stand for a historical watershed. Productions of the play such as Michael Bogdanov’s English Shakespeare Company (1986), which clothed Richard in gaudy, foppish, Regency clothes and Bolingbroke in sober Victorian black, or Rupert Goold’s 2012 depiction of a shimmering, gold-robed Richard facing the chainmail of his opponent, emphasize that there are two worldviews at stake here, not just a reshuffle of descendants of Edward III (Richard was the son of Edward’s eldest son; Bolingbroke the son of his fourth son). On the other hand, we could say that the two are in fact similar rather than distinct. A famous Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1974 directed by John Barton preceded each performance with a dumbshow in which an actor playing Shakespeare crowned, at random, either Richard Pasco or Ian Richardson, marking him as Richard and the other as Bolingbroke for that evening. It’s something that’s worked in other plays since, flipping the casting of Frankenstein and the ‘monster’, or Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I, or Dr Faustus and Mephistopheles, and in Richard II, too, the technique suggests the similarities rather than the differences between the antagonists, and the randomness of the fall of the dice (in fact box office demands often trump this apparent chance, because punters will book twice if they are guaranteed the opposite casting). Richard’s own image of the crown as ‘two buckets filling one another, / The emptier ever dancing in the air, / The other down, unseen, and full of water’ (4.1.175–7) suggests their interconnectedness in a play that uses the word ‘cousin’ more than any other except the deeply familial Much Ado About Nothing. Deborah Warner’s 1995 production with Fiona Shaw as Richard and David Threlfall as her near-twin Bolingbroke stressed the intimacy of their familial relationship and the personal grief that derives from public politics.

  And Bolingbroke’s behaviour as king emphasizes that perhaps he is a chip off the old Black Prince block, rather than a radical alternative. The clue is in the way he speaks. As in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written around the same time in Shakespeare’s career, Richard II makes extensive use of end-rhyme (our usual term for Shakespeare’s verse, ‘blank’, means that it is unrhymed, but like lots of these classroom generalizations, it’s not always true). In the early scenes of this play, rhyme is particularly associated with Richard’s own quixotic authority, and with the formalized denunciations of his lords:

  MOWBRAY: Then, dear my liege, mine honour let me try.

  In that I live, and for that will I die.

  RICHARD: Cousin, throw down your gage. Do you begin.

  BOLINGBROKE: O God defend my soul from such deep sin!

  (1.1.184–7)

  The theme of the scene here is divisive conflict and unspoken tension, but that’s lacquered over with the formal quality of rhyme, which urges towards harmony and connection. If you find it difficult to work out what’s actually happening as Richard II begins, your fog is absolutely spot-on: this is a scene about obscuring rather than communicating meaning. Basically, what can’t be said here, for obvious reasons, is that the king himself may be implicated in the death of the Duke of Gloucester. (It’s one of the ways this history play is preoccupied with what can’t be truly known about the past.) So rhyme functions in this scene to try to keep the lid on its potentially explosive energies: it’s the linguistic embodiment of Richard’s regal authority. Relatedly, Bolingbroke tends to prefer unrhymed speech as he makes his way to the throne. But we can see that along with the crown, he also takes up rhyming, with a prominent tendency towards couplets in his final scene. Here it is possible to hear the hint of insincerity that rhyme can sometimes convey to modern ears, a sense that authentic response is subordinated to mere linguistic echo. Somehow the fact that Bolingbroke’s expression of sorrow at the murder of Richard is in rhyme makes the sentiment seem sinister and phoney:

  Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe

  That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.

  Come mourn with me for what I do lament,

  And put on sullen black incontinent.

  I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land

  To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.

  (5.6.45–50)

  That the play’s new king sounds rather like the old one replaces Shakespeare’s even-handedness with something rather bleaker: the impossibility of real political change. As the Polish theatre director Jan Kott put it in his visionary book Shakespeare Our Contemporary, ‘for Shakespeare history stands still. Every chapter opens and closes at the same point.’

  John Barton’s introductory casting dumbshow in his 1974 production also brought out the play’s own self-consciousness about political theatre and theatrical politics. The image of the king as an actor is a trope that recurs throughout Shakespeare’s history plays and throughout the culture that prompted them. Elizabeth I’s own much-quoted phrase, ‘We princes, I tell you, are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world duly observed’, acknowledges the theatricality intrinsic to spectacular early modern monarchy in an age in which progresses, entertainments and a spin-doctored public image all drew on the vocabulary of the stage. But here in York’s speech about Bolingbroke’s entry into London with his defeated rival, the familiar image has an interesting twist:

  As in a theatre the eyes of men,

  After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,

  Are idly bent on him that enters next,

  Thinking his prattle to be tedious,

  Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyes

  Did scowl on gentle Richard.

  (5.2.23–8)

  The difference between the old and the new kings or, more pointedly, between the legitimate and the usurping sovereign, is not the difference between the true and the copy, the real monarch and the counterfeit player, as we might expect from the simile. Rather, the contrast is between a good, ‘well-graced’ actor and the ‘tedious’ one who follows him. Both kings are likened to actors, both are pretending, and neither, according to the logic of the imagery, can fall back on authenticity to endorse their claim. Rather, Bolingbroke is just a better, more pleasing and convincing, actor.

  The logic of the theatre – that the audience prefers the better actor and is restless and contemptuous of a lesser performer – is deeply subversive when attached to the issue of monarchy, because it replaces authenticity with facility: it overlays the question of who is the rightful king with the one of who is the better king. Even to ask whether Bolingbroke’s actions in taking the throne might be justified is therefore a politically challenging question, and the play’s even-handedness becomes itself a highly charged political intervention. It’s a political act specific to the circumstances of the play’s composition, when the story of Richard II resonated through late Elizabethan culture.

  History plays have their boom in the theatre of the 1590s as exciting and vicarious articulations of concerns and cultural anxieties around the Elizabethan succession. That is to say, they are plays about late sixteenth-century politics, rather than the politics of their own period. Play after play, by Shakespeare and by others, obsesses on moments of transfer, showing weak or embattled kings challenged by rivals, a vacant throne, civil war, the intrigue of noblemen and advisers; no history play ever depicts the long and relatively settled reign of an established monarch. While Elizabeth had made discussion of her succession a crime punishable by death, plays and other texts on historical subjects enabled the asking of otherwise censored questions about what might happen at the end of her long reign. By the mid-1590s she was into her sixties: everyone was asking, in whispers, who would rule nex
t.

  Richard II plays a particular role in this story. For one thing, its publication history suggests that it may have been censored: that unequal scene in Act 4, where Richard hands over the crown, orb and sceptre to Bolingbroke before Parliament, is not present in any of the quarto texts published during Elizabeth’s lifetime. Many critics feel this was due to censorship: showing a lawful king being deposed – perhaps particularly through the quasi-legalistic instrument of Parliament – may have been thought too subversive (although on the other hand we could argue that the play is more sympathetic to Richard with the scene included, since it gives him such poignant speeches and allows him to dominate his less histrionic rival).

  We also know that the rivalry between Richard and Bolingbroke comes to have a particular connection with the fortunes of the most prominent and controversial of Elizabethan noblemen, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, an intimate of Elizabeth and a champion of more active militaristic engagement in the Protestant cause in Europe. After the failure of his military expedition to Ireland in 1599 (mentioned by Shakespeare in Henry V), Essex fell from favour, and he and his supporters mounted a disastrous attempt to persuade Elizabeth to reinstate him which became an ill-fated rebellion in February 1601. Essex was arrested and executed for treason. Richard II is on the sidelines of this story. A writer of a prose history on this particular historical period, who dedicated it to Essex as a proto-Bolingbroke, was thrown into the Tower of London for his pains, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, were paid by Essex’s supporters to perform their old play of Richard II on the eve of their abortive revolt. Presumably there was some sense that this play would help gather support for Essex’s own challenge.

  After the failure of Essex’s rebellion, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were summoned by the Privy Council to account for their part in the affair. Their spokesman Augustine Phillips claimed they merely took a commission to perform an old play, and since they were back at Elizabeth’s court performing within a month, their participation – or perhaps the play itself – cannot have caused too much concern. But the idea of a play being co-opted for political action – however doomed that action might be – has been extremely attractive to recent historians of early modern drama. E. M. W. Tillyard saw the histories as an essentially conservative cycle of crime, expiation, punishment and then deliverance (discussed in the chapter on Richard III). By contrast, the Essex rebellion Richard II is a radical challenge to political orthodoxy. Advocates of this transgressive reading delight that the usurping actions of Bolingbroke are dangerously endorsed by the play. But my sense of Richard II is that it allows for these ideological certainties but does not underwrite them. Readers, critics and performers have tended to find confirmation of their own politics in the play’s careful impartiality: again, we make Shakespeare mean what we want him to mean.

  CHAPTER 5

  Romeo and Juliet

  A handful of Shakespeare’s plays begin with expository prologues. We’re in ancient Troy amid the war of ‘ravished Helen’ (Prologue 9), says the Prologue to Troilus and Cressida; did you see Part 1 and can you remember where we left things? asks the Prologue to 2 Henry IV; bear with us as we try to depict grand battles within the limits of the stage, says the Prologue to Henry V; welcome to olde-worlde storyland, says the Prologue to Pericles. Only in Romeo and Juliet does the Prologue summarize the entire play, deaths and all. Because of Romeo and Juliet’s extraordinary cultural reach, we all already know something about the play before we read it. But even if we don’t, or even if back in 1595 we didn’t, we soon will. ‘Two households’, ‘Verona’, ‘ancient grudge’, ‘star-crossed lovers’, ‘take their life’, ‘two-hours’ traffic of our stage’ (Prologue 1, 2, 3, 6, 12). Yada yada yada. Two minutes in, and there’s nothing to play for.

  Romeo and Juliet is distinctive in making so immediately explicit what’s coming.

  Two households, both alike in dignity

  In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

  From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

  Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

  From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

  A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,

  Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

  Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

  The fearful passage of their death-marked love

  And the continuance of their parents’ rage –

  Which but their children’s end, naught could remove –

  Is now the two-hours’ traffic of our stage;

  The which if you with patient ears attend,

  What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

  (Prologue 1–14)

  In the language of film reviews, this needs a spoiler alert; in the language of narrative theory, it is an extended prolepsis, or flash-forward. The play is thus strongly teleological, heading inexorably to a conclusion that is already written. The lovers are dead, in terms of our experience of the play, before we even meet them. They are introduced to us only to flesh out a fatalistic plot. Not only does the Chorus tell us the plot outline in a sonnet form – characterized by a fourteen-line structure and predictable rhyme scheme, heading relentlessly towards its closing couplet – it is also full of the language of determinism: the ‘fatal loins’ of the families has the idea of ‘fated’ as well as ‘fatal’ meaning deadly; the lovers are ‘star-crossed’, so astrologically fated; they are ‘misadventured’, meaning unlucky. Their love is always already ‘death-marked’, before it even begins at the Capulet’s party. The language, therefore, and the worldview of the Prologue stress the inevitability, the pre-scriptedness, the already-happenedness of the events that are still to unfold in the playhouse. It’s a clever trick of the director Baz Luhrmann, in introducing his 1996 film, to have the Prologue delivered by a newscaster: the bland, almost formulaic structure of Shakespeare’s verse here fits the reported, after-the-fact, too-late-to-be-different indifference of broadcast news. And the sonnet’s rhythmical structure also serves the same purpose. Those alternate end rhymes also produce inevitability in microcosm: once the pattern has been established, we are simply waiting for the completing rhyme. Each positive or relatively neutral term turns bad or is negated by its rhyming completion: dignity becomes mutiny; scene becomes unclean; foes, overthrows; life, strife; love, remove. Both the formal structure and the fatalistic language underline the proleptic or spoiler-like character of the opening Prologue. And this anticipatory quality is itself an anticipation of later elements in the play which turn on premonition or a doomed future, such as Romeo’s anxiety: ‘I fear too early, for my mind misgives/Some consequence yet hanging in the stars/Shall bitterly begin’ (1.4.106–8).

  What, then, is the purpose and effect of so completely pre-empting the play’s outcome in its opening lines? First, it’s worth recalling that early modern audiences and readers were less interested in shock endings or surprise fictions than we are – or think we are. Ideas of originality have a high status in twenty-first-century ideas of art, but that’s not the case for the sixteenth century. A humanist education system suspicious of novelty, sometimes judging invention or fiction as morally compromised because untrue, taught generations of playwrights and poets that translating, reworking and rewriting existing texts was the sign of the artist. For readers and audiences, this intellectual method known as imitatio also offered the particular in-crowd pleasure of spotting those sources and appreciating the craft and invention worked on them. When the law student John Manningham saw Twelfth Night at Middle Temple in 1602, for example, he noted its similarity to The Comedy of Errors and to Plautus’ Menaechmi: not by way of complaint about a tired or hackneyed plot, but rather with the enjoyment of narrative familiarity and pride at his own ability to recognize precedents. Long narratives in the period often had intermediate plot summaries – short precis verses precede the long cantos of Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590), for instance. Such ex
amples suggest that the pleasure of reading was not in the surprise and fulfilment of seeing how things turned out in an uncertain plot, but rather in enjoying the variations on an established theme.

  Perhaps we are not in fact so far from this in the modern world: watch any movie trailer and it’s pretty self-evident what’s going to happen. I’m a particular fan of those internet lists of movie clichés which reveal how much of our mass entertainment is enjoyable precisely because it operates within existing narrative paradigms. You may know the sort of thing. If the movie hero has a sidekick who mentions his family in the first two minutes of the film, the sidekick will surely be killed, especially if he has a photo of them on his desk, and even more especially if that includes a dog, which will also be killed. Our hero will fight one man in the gang at a time while the others dance around menacingly with their fists up, will show no pain even during the most terrific beating, yet will wince prettily when a woman attempts to clean a wound just over his right eyebrow, etc. etc. So Romeo and Juliet operates within a cultural world in which originality and surprise are not high entertainment values, but we might wonder whether ours is any different.

  A second point about spoilers is more specifically generic. Can tragedy even have a spoiler? If we know the play is called ‘The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet’, are we really ever in any doubt about how things will turn out? Some evidence suggests that Renaissance tragedies were performed on a stage draped with black, which would have the same giveaway quality. The French playwright Jean Anouilh, who wrote a version of the Greek tragedy Antigone in the mid-twentieth century, introduced into his play a description of the nature of tragedy that has no precedent in Sophocles’ original. Anouilh’s Chorus argues that tragedy is ‘restful’ because there is ‘no need to do anything. It does itself. Like clockwork set going since the beginning of time.’ I am always rapt by watching those unfurling patterns of dominoes set off by a single tap: like these, Anouilh suggests, tragedy just needs the ‘flick of a finger’. One related observation that’s commonly made about tragedy is that human agency is reduced so as to be non-existent. The critic Susan Snyder had a great take on this, arguing that Shakespeare’s tragic world is governed by the inevitability of the conflict between human and cosmic law, the contradictions inherent in the individual or his or her circumstances. There’s no turning back, no alternative. Against this inevitability, Snyder offers the useful contrasting principle of ‘evitability’ as the governing condition of Shakespearean comedy, which rewards opportunism and pragmatism as it twists and turns to avoid obstacles and come to its redemptive or procreative conclusion. Inexorability, therefore, that already-known-ness that is such a significant function of Romeo and Juliet’s Prologue, is the hallmark of tragedy itself.