Shakespeare for Students: Critical Interpretations of Shakespeare's Plays and Poetry

SHAKESPEARE

for Students

SHAKESPEARE

for Students Critical Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Plays and Poetry

SECOND EDITION: VOLUME 2 Anne Marie Hacht, Editor Foreword by Cynthia Burnstein

Julius Caesar Scholars generally agree that Julius Caesar was first written and performed in 1599 and may have been the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be presented in the newly constructed Globe theater in London. The drama was apparently quite popular among Elizabethan audiences, most of whom were familiar, from numerous other literary sources, with the historical Julius Caesar.

1599

Other aspects of this play that Shakespeare’s audiences could relate to included civil wars, which they were forced to endure, and the wide gap between the powerful, wealthy aristocracy and the working class populace. Also, neither political assassinations nor ambitious tyranny, which are topics covered in the play, were novel concepts. In other words, Shakespeare’s audiences were well experienced with the material that made up this tragic drama; even the stories of English history that they studied in school were colored by the conquests of the play’s title military genius. In writing Julius Caesar, Shakespeare chiefly drew on the events in the lives of the historical figures of Brutus, Caesar, and Antony, which he took from biographies written by Plutarch, called Parallel Lives (translated by Thomas North as The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans in 1579). Plutarch was a Greek historian and essayist whose work constitutes a record of the historical tradition, the moral views, and the ethical judgments of ancient Greek and Roman cultures. According to some academic studies, Shakespeare was not

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especially interested in the details of history addressed by Plutarch; rather, he focused on the underlying character strengths and weaknesses, as well as the motives, that Plutarch noted in many of the great ancient leaders. While the action of Julius Caesar closely follows the events described by Plutarch, Shakespeare greatly modified the significance of those events. By Elizabethan times, two sharply contrasting views of this period in Roman history had emerged. One held that Brutus and the other conspirators were ruthless murderers who unjustly killed their would-be emperor; the other interpreted their actions as the rightful deposing of a tyrant. Shakespeare carefully designed his play in such a way that it seems to support, or at least allows for, both views. As a result, critics have long debated whether Brutus or Caesar is the chief protagonist of Julius Caesar and whether either of them qualifies as a tragic hero. This fundamental ambiguity in the play is further complicated by the different political motivations of the play’s main characters. Cassius assassinates Caesar seemingly because he believes Caesar is an alleged tyrant. However, throughout the play are scattered hints that Cassius might have acted out of personal envy. Brutus has nobler ideals; he joins the conspiracy because he wants to preserve the Roman Republic. Mark Antony, on the other hand, rouses the Roman populace against the traitors out of loyalty to Caesar, but he later benefits from the leader’s death when he becomes a co-ruler of the Roman Empire. The circumstances surrounding Caesar’s assassination reveal that although the major characters strive to attain different political ends, the means by which they achieve their aims are often quite similar. Furthermore, despite the supposed good intentions of these men, they all become corrupted in some way, and their actions eventually lead to violence and civil strife. Scholars have increasingly come to regard Julius Caesar as a work of rich complexity. Whereas earlier commentators attempted to provide definitive analyses of Brutus and Caesar, more recent scholars have concluded that Shakespeare’s portraits are not necessarily explicit; rather, they feature ironic, even confusing elements. Today, critics generally agree that the uncertainties surrounding the protagonists and the political issues raised by the drama are intentional. The ambiguities in Julius Caesar,

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they maintain, serve to intensify Shakespeare’s depiction of the limitations of human understanding and the difficulty of defining absolute truths in regard to individuals and historical events.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 At the beginning of Julius Caesar, Flavius and Marullus, two Roman tribunes, appear with a group of various laborers and commoners. They berate the commoners for being in the streets, telling the men that they should be working. When the men reply that they are there to watch the parade honoring Caesar, Flavius and Marullus scorn them. Marullus attempts to belittle Caesar’s victories: ‘‘Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?’’ Then Marullus calls the laborers names: ‘‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!’’ Marullus points out the laborers’ fickleness, recalling how these same men once cheered Pompey, and now they applaud the man who defeated Pompey. Flavius then tells the crowd, ‘‘Disrobe the images / If you do find them decked with ceremonies.’’ In other words, Flavius wants all statues of Caesar to be cleared of any special decorations, a statement, or direction, that will later determine both Flavius’s and Marullus’s fate. This first scene is a foreshadowing of the attitudes that will be revealed among the conspirators who plot Caesar’s assassination, which is about to unfold in the next scene. It also foreshadows the fickleness of the crowd that will occur again after Caesar is murdered.

Act 1, Scene 2 Caesar is marching through the streets with his wife, Calpurnia, with both enemies and supporters of Caesar present. Mark Antony is preparing to take part in a ceremonial run to celebrate the holiday, the feast of Lupercal. During this exercise, runners become symbols of fertility, and Caesar reminds Antony to be sure to touch Calpurnia’s hand as he passes by, thus anointing Calpurnia with the power to become pregnant. This signals Caesar’s desire to have an heir and heightens suspicions that Caesar is also thinking about becoming king; that is, if Caesar does become king, he will want a son to inherit the

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crown. For his part, Antony, demonstrating his loyalty, says, ‘‘When Caesar says ‘do this,’ it is perform’d.’’ Soon after, the Soothsayer tries to warn Caesar of the conspiracy plot, telling him, ‘‘Beware the ides of March.’’ The Soothsayer says this twice, but still Caesar brushes the warning aside, saying, ‘‘He is a dreamer.’’ In dismissing the Soothsayer, Caesar demonstrates that he is not superstitious like many of the people around him, as well that he does not wish to show fear. Everyone leaves the stage except Cassius and Brutus. In the course of their conversation, Cassius discovers that Brutus is upset. Cassius attempts to persuade Brutus to do something about Caesar, telling Brutus that many Romans are not pleased with Caesar but are impressed with ‘‘noble Brutus.’’ When horns are heard, Brutus says that he fears the people have asked Caesar to be their king. Cassius jumps on Brutus’s statement and says that if Brutus fears this, he should do something about it. Brutus states that he loves Caesar, yet he listens to what Cassius has in mind. Brutus hints that as long as the plot that Cassius is considering is conceived in honor, he could be a part of it. After relating a story that portrays Caesar as being weak, Cassius observes, ‘‘And this man / Is now become a god,’’ insinuating that Caesar is being worshipped but is not strong enough to become king; Caesar is flawed. Brutus listens to Cassius and finally states that he thinks he understands what Cassius is alluding to. Still, he asks Cassius to say no more and to give him time to think. Caesar and Antony return, and Caesar tells Antony that he does not trust Cassius: ‘‘Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; / He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.’’ Antony tells Caesar not to worry, as Cassius is a noble man, but Caesar is not convinced. Caesar states that Cassius ‘‘reads much, / He is a great observer, and he looks / Quite through the deeds of men.’’ Meanwhile, Brutus stops Casca and asks him why the crowds roared. Casca tells him that Antony offered Caesar a crown three times, and Caesar refused it three times. Each time Caesar refused, the crowd roared. Casca says that he thinks Caesar wanted to accept the crown but could not go against the wishes of the crowd. Casca says that when the crowd cheered

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Caesar’s refusal, Caesar made a motion indicating that the crowd might as well have slit his throat. Casca also tells Brutus and Cassius that Marullus and Flavius were put to death for pulling the decorations off Caesar’s statues; this strengthens Brutus’s opinion that Caesar is beginning to act as a tyrant. Before the scene ends, Cassius, alone, plots to send anonymous letters to Brutus to further persuade him to join Cassius’s plot.

Act 1, Scene 3 One month later, Casca is out in a terrible thunderstorm, which scares him. Cicero passes by, and Casca tells him of many terrifying sights he has seen: a lion roaming the streets and people burned by the lightning signify the torment that is raging in people’s minds, as word has gotten out that some of the Roman senators are planning to offer a crown to Caesar. Cicero, who has vowed to remain politically neutral in regards to Caesar, tells Casca, ‘‘Men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.’’ In other words, omens may be interpreted in many different ways. Then Cicero leaves, and Cassius appears. Cassius is not afraid of the storm and chides Casca for being so timid. Through their talking about the storm, the men understand that beneath their words is a plan to prevent Caesar from becoming king. Casca says that he will join Cassius in whatever he is planning. Cinna next appears, and Cassius gives Cinna the anonymous letters he has written and asks Cinna to deliver them to Brutus. The three men hope that Brutus will join them in their conspiracy, for Brutus is known as a noble and honorable man, and with Brutus among them, the people will respect them no matter what they do.

Act 2, Scene 1 The conspirators, including Cassius, Casca, Decius, Cinna, Metellus Cimber, and Trebonius, meet at Brutus’s house. Cassius wants the men to take an oath, but Brutus does not, believing that their cause is powerful enough in and of itself. Then Cassius discusses the possibility of killing not only Caesar but also Antony. Cassius says, ‘‘I think it is not meet, / Mark Antony, so well beloved of Caesar, / Should outlive Caesar.’’ However, Brutus says that he thinks the plot would be considered too bloody if they were to kill more than just Caesar: ‘‘Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius, / To cut the head off

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wound on her thigh, asking, ‘‘Can I bear that with patience, / And not my husband’s secrets?’’ But someone knocks on the door, and Brutus tells Portia to leave; he will reveal his secret later. The man at the door is Ligarius, a sick man who wants to join the conspiracy, even though he does not know all the details. He follows Brutus blindly, as he trusts Brutus to be honorable in whatever he does.

Act 2, Scene 2 At Caesar’s house, the thunderstorm continues to thrash the skies. Caesar is awake and mentions that no one in his house has found peace that night. Besides the loud thunder, Calpurnia has cried out three times in her sleep, saying, ‘‘Help, ho, they murder Caesar!’’

Engraving of the bust of Julius Caesar

and then hack the limbs.’’ Also, Brutus tells the men that when they murder Caesar, they should do it properly; Brutus does not want Caesar to be butchered. Brutus says, ‘‘Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,’’ asserting that this will make them appear more as ‘‘purgers, not murderers.’’ In this way, Brutus attempts to rationalize what he is about to do. Cassius remains concerned about Antony, because of Antony’s love for Caesar, but Brutus insists that they leave Antony alone and does not believe Cassius should worry about Antony. Brutus suspects that Antony will fall into despair and become harmless. This exchange reveals a weakness of Brutus’s—his inability to properly evaluate other people. At last, the conspirators make their plan concrete, setting the time and place for the assassination. Decius promises to bring Caesar to the Senate at the appropriate time. After the men leave Brutus’s house, Portia, Brutus’s wife, appears and tells Brutus that she is worried about his not sleeping. She knows that something is bothering him and pleads with him to speak with her. Brutus lies, saying that he is sick, but Portia does not believe him, and she then challenges his definition of their marriage. She wants to know if she is his wife only to eat meals with him and share his bed but not to share in all his intimate thoughts. To prove her trustworthiness, she shows him a self-inflicted

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Calpurnia appears, and after telling Caesar of her dreams, she pleads with her husband to stay home and not go to the Senate, as she fears for his life. She tells him of all the bad omens she has either seen or heard about, but Caesar does not want to give in to his wife’s fears. If the gods have ordained his death, Caesar believes, he can do little about it. He remarks, ‘‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.’’ When a Servant reports that Caesar’s priests also predict that the coming day will not be a good day for Caesar to go out, Caesar finally succumbs to his wife’s wishes. However, Decius then appears and reinterprets Calpurnia’s dream, suggesting that the dream was not a bad omen but rather a sign of greatness to come. Caesar falls for Decius’s trap and leaves with Decius for the Senate. On the way to the Senate, the conspirators appear. Caesar believes that they have risen so early to greet him and walk with him. When Antony appears, Caesar tells him to go ahead and tell the other senators that he is coming.

Act 2, Scene 3 Artemidorus, on stage alone, reads a paper he is holding. The note tells Caesar to be aware of the conspirators, for they are not to be trusted. Artemidorus announces that he will stand there on the street and hand the note to Caesar as he passes: ‘‘If thou read this, O Caesar, though mayest live; / If not, the Fates with traitors do contrive.’’

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Act 2, Scene 4 At Brutus’s house, Portia orders the houseboy, Lucius, to run to the Senate and watch what happens. He is then supposed to report back to Portia. The boy leaves, and the Soothsayer enters. Portia tries to get information from the Soothsayer, who says he will try once again to warn Caesar before he reaches the Senate.

Act 3, Scene 1 The Soothsayer once again warns Caesar, and Artemidorus hands Caesar the warning note, but Caesar heeds neither the men nor their messages. The conspirators then gather around Caesar, pretending to plead with him to pardon the brother of Metellus Cimber; this gives the men a chance to surround Caesar without his becoming suspicious. As planned, Casca pulls out his dagger and inflicts the first wound, as followed by the others, with Brutus stabbing Caesar last. In dying, Caesar cries out, ‘‘Et tu, Brute? Then fall Caesar!’’ The word of Caesar’s death reaches the other senators and the general public, and pandemonium sets in. Under Brutus’s guidance, the conspirators wash their hands in Caesar’s blood. Brutus tells them that they will walk out, thus bloodied, and will shout, ‘‘Peace, freedom, and liberty!’’ Brutus believes that the people will support the assassination because the tyrant is dead. One of Antony’s servants enters and delivers a short speech, seemingly praising Brutus and surrendering to Brutus’s power. Brutus tells the servant to fetch his master, and Antony soon enters. He asks Brutus to allow him to speak to the crowd after Brutus has first made his appeal. Cassius does not trust Antony, but Brutus believes that his own speech will persuade the crowd to support the conspirators and that nothing Antony might say will change that.

Act 3, Scene 2 Brutus makes his speech to the crowd, proclaiming his love of Caesar. In defending the assassination, Brutus states, ‘‘Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.’’ Caesar was not good for Rome, Brutus tells them, as he would have eventually enslaved everyone; with Caesar dead, Romans are now free. The crowd supports Brutus. Antony enters carrying the body of Caesar. Antony’s speech proves deceptively clever, as he communicates what he feels without explicitly

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vocalizing it. Antony repeats some of Brutus’s assertions, such as that Caesar was ambitious; Antony then counters this claim by noting times when Caesar was not ambitious. In order to dispute Brutus’s claims about what Caesar has done without appearing to attack Brutus himself, Antony states, ‘‘Brutus is an honorable man.’’ Following this pattern throughout his speech, Antony builds doubt in the minds of the people, so that they finally question if Brutus is truly honorable: how could Brutus be honorable if what he has just said is not true? Antony sways the crowd further by showing them the bloody body of Caesar and reading Caesar’s will, which Antony says promises much good for the common people. At length, the crowd is in an uproar. They shout that Brutus and his co-conspirators are villains and murderers, and they want to burn down Brutus’s house. As they leave, Antony remarks to himself, ‘‘Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot.’’

Act 3, Scene 3 Cinna the poet is confronted by a group of people. They mistake him for Cinna, one of the conspirators and kill him. This occurrence highlights the unruliness of the crowd and foreshadows the series of deaths that will follow.

Act 4, Scene 1 With Brutus and Cassius having left Rome, Antony forms an alliance with Octavius and Lepidus to prepare for the impending war against the conspirators. The three men meet and discuss which Romans should live and which should die under the new government. Once Lepidus leaves, Antony tells Octavius that he deems Lepidus unfit to help rule the soon-to-be-established empire. Octavius does not understand why Antony led Lepidus to believe he is part of the triumvirate if Antony believes Lepidus is so unworthy. Antony asserts that Lepidus will do the hard work and help ensure their success; Lepidus will bear certain burdens just ‘‘as the ass bears gold, / To groan and sweat under the business, / Either led or driven as we point the way.’’ This exchange demonstrates Antony’s cunning, as he uses people as he sees fit, then discards them when he has accomplished his goals.

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Act 4, Scene 2 Near Sardis, Brutus receives word that Cassius is near. Brutus suspects, however, that something has come between the two men; their friendship has cooled. Cassius appears.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Act 4, Scene 3 Cassius expresses anger over Brutus’s decision to condemn one of his men for taking bribes. Brutus and Cassius then have a tremendous argument, during which Brutus accuses Cassius of also taking bribes. The fight continues to escalate until Cassius, deeply offended, bares his breast and offers Brutus his dagger. Brutus overcomes his anger, and the two men are reconciled. Brutus then reveals to Cassius that Portia is dead. Turning to a discussion of battle plans, Brutus resists Cassius’s strategy of making the enemy seek them and decides to engage Octavius and Antony at Philippi. Later, when he is alone, Brutus sees the ghost of Caesar, who tells him that they will meet again at Philippi.

Act 5, Scene 1 Brutus and Cassius meet Antony and Octavius at Philippi to confer; however, after the two sides exchange insults, they agree to face each other on the battlefield. Cassius and Brutus are concerned that they may never meet again, and so they say good-bye to one another.

Julius Caesar was adapted to film by MetroGoldwyn-Mayer in 1953. This critically acclaimed motion-picture version of the tragedy features Marlon Brando, James Mason, and John Gielgud. The film was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and produced by John Houseman.  An educational version of Julius Caesar was made into a video by BHE Education, in conjunction with Seaborne Enterprises, in 1969. The video offers performances of key scenes in the play.  In 1970, another film version of Julius Caesar was produced by Peter Snell, through Commonwealth United. This film stars Charlton Heston, John Gielgud, Jason Robards, Richard Chamberlain, Robert Vaughn, and Diana Rigg.  A televised performance of Julius Caesar was presented by the BBC and Time-Life Television in 1979 as part of a series of Shakespeare’s plays. 

Act 5, Scene 2 Brutus tells Messala, his servant, to give orders for one of his legions to attack Octavius’s group. Brutus thinks he sees a weakness and wants his men to surprise Octavius’s army and crush them.

Act 5, Scene 3 Brutus’s military decisions prove to be mistakes, with his errors giving rise to a weakness in Cassius’s army. Specifically, Brutus ordered his men to move too quickly, and now they are distracted; they begin looting the camp instead of supporting Cassius’s men. Cassius’s troops, seeing their doomed fate, are running away. Fearing that some approaching soldiers are the enemy, Cassius sends Titinius to find out who they are and orders his servant Pindarus to observe what happens. While the troops are really members of Brutus’s army who welcome Titinius into their ranks, Pindarus mistakenly reports that Titinius has been captured. Cassius, in despair, asks Pindarus to help him commit suicide.

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Act 5, Scene 4 In a battle with Antony, Lucilius pretends to be Brutus in order to keep Brutus from being captured. Antony recognizes that Lucilius is not Brutus and orders that Lucilius be kept safe, remarking, ‘‘I had rather have / Such men my friends than enemies.’’

Act 5, Scene 5 After learning of Cassius’s death, Brutus prepares to engage the enemy again. Brutus’s forces are defeated in this second battle, and Brutus does not want to be taken prisoner, so he commits suicide. Upon finding Brutus’s body, Antony delivers a brief oration, proclaiming, ‘‘This was the noblest Roman of them all.’’ The other conspirators, Antony says, committed their crimes out of envy; only Brutus believed that what he did was for the common good.

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Antony ends his speech by stating, ‘‘Nature might stand up / and say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’’’ In addition, Octavius declares that Brutus will be buried with full honors.

CHARACTERS Mark Antony Mark Antony, whose Latin name is Marcus Antonius, is a Roman general and a loyal friend of Julius Caesar’s. He is angered and sad upon learning of Caesar’s death and persuades Brutus to allow him to speak at Caesar’s funeral. Although Brutus demands that Antony support the conspirators, Antony cleverly uses the occasion to rouse the crowd against Brutus and his coconspirators. Antony displays a high level of cunning in the way he manipulates the crowd’s emotions, such as by making repeated ironic references to the conspirators as ‘‘honorable men,’’ by displaying Caesar’s cloak and corpse, and finally by reading the ruler’s will. An undercurrent of Machiavellian opportunism can also be found in Antony’s character; after he rouses the crowd with his speech, he meets with Octavius to plot how they can take advantage of the turmoil that Caesar’s death and Antony’s speech have caused. Much like the actions of Cassius and Brutus, Antony’s dealings, while initially appearing admirable, reveal a pragmatic political motivation, which has a significant bearing on the dramatic events of the play. These three characters are ultimately linked by the common bond of ambition, which precipitates, and in some respects is thwarted by, the central crisis of the play—Caesar’s assassination. Antony and Octavius defeat Brutus and Cassius at Philippi and, with Lepidus, form the triumvirate that eventually rules Rome.

Artemidorus Artemidorus is a teacher of rhetoric. He gives Caesar a letter revealing the plot to assassinate him, but Caesar does not read it.

Decius Brutus Decius is a Roman general and conspirator of Caesar’s assassination. He persuades Caesar to go to the Senate on the day Caesar is assassinated by interpreting Calpurnia’s prophetic dream as one of honor rather than one that foretells Caesar’s death.

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Marcus Brutus Marcus Brutus is a Roman senator. He joins the conspiracy because he fears that Caesar’s ambition will turn to tyranny, which will eventually destroy the Roman Republic. Brutus is often described as a noble man with high ideals; he is a character of seemingly irreproachable honor and virtue and is often regarded as the tragic hero of the play. But Brutus might also possess the tragic characteristic known as hubris—excessive pride that leads to misfortune. Brutus’s hubris derives from his arrogance, self-righteousness, and lack of self-knowledge. His involvement in the conspiracy is grounded in his earnest belief that Caesar’s death will benefit Rome, but he is blind to the potential repercussions of the assassination and to his accomplices’ lack of moral principles. He is also so sure of the virtue of Caesar’s assassination that he does not believe anyone can convince the Roman people that Caesar’s death was murder. So unaware is he that he allows Antony to speak to the crowd, convinced that not only Antony but also the people will be loyal to the cause. Brutus’s naı¨ vete´, or perhaps more accurately his blindness, catches him off guard as the masses turn against him and the conspirators. Ultimately, Brutus’s tragic flaw is his inability to realize the consequences of his actions, and this lack of self-awareness leads to his downfall at the end of the play.

Julius Caesar Caesar is a Roman general, a consul, and a would-be emperor. He is assassinated by Brutus, Cassius, and others because they fear his ambition. He appears only briefly in the play. After his assassination, his spirit haunts Brutus at Sardis and Philippi later in the play. The character of Caesar is perhaps the most difficult to interpret, since reading him one way or another can alter the perspective on the entire play. If Caesar is viewed as an overly ambitious, vain, and pompous tyrant, as Cassius and Brutus see him, then his assassination might be seen as a necessary act to purge Rome of a potentially corrupt dictatorship. On the other hand, if Caesar is regarded as a wise and benevolent leader, as Mark Antony views him, then the conspiracy appears to be an attempt to overthrow the government by a group of envious and power-hungry politicians. Perhaps the most effective way to resolve the issue of Caesar’s character is to consider that

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Shakespeare intentionally presented an enigmatic figure to emphasize the contradictory nature of the assassination and to leave undecided the question of whether the conspirators’ actions were justified. Often, critics of the play debate who is the more tragic figure in this play, Caesar or Brutus.

Octavius Caesar Octavius is Julius Caesar’s adopted son and heir. Octavius is not in Rome when Caesar is assassinated. Upon his return, he joins Antony in defeating Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. Then, with Lepidus and Antony, Octavius takes part in the triumvirate that rules Rome.

men in the play. He has traditionally been described as a villainous, self-seeking politician who helps murder Caesar out of envy and spitefulness. While acknowledging these traits in Cassius’s character, some critics have also emphasized his shrewd Machiavellianism. Machiavellianism holds that politics are amoral and that any means, however unscrupulous, are justified in achieving and retaining power. Recently, critics have credited Cassius with having more dimension than the typical Machiavellian villain has. Support for this perspective can be found in Cassius’s leadership and keen powers of judgment, his apparent enthusiasm for Brutus’s ideal of republicanism, and his great respect for and friendship with his co-conspirator.

Calpurnia Calpurnia is Caesar’s wife. After having nightmares about his murder, Calpurnia urges her husband not to go to the Senate on the ides of March, or March 15th, the day he is killed. Calpurnia is invested in omens and dreams, all of which point to Caesar’s death. Caesar is almost convinced by Calpurnia’s fears and initially stays home, but he is eventually swayed to leave, not wanting to be seen as a fearful leader. Calpurnia is chastised when Caesar ignores his wife’s anxieties and departs.

Casca Casca is a tribune and member of Caesar’s entourage. Casca reports to Cassius and Brutus that he saw the way Caesar and Antony responded to the offering of a crown in front of the crowds of people; Casca was not fooled by their public display and believes that Caesar was playing with the crowds in refusing the crown. Casca insinuates that Caesar is merely waiting for the right time to accept the crown and the power that comes with it. Casca joins Cassius’s plot and later is the first conspirator to stab Caesar.

Caius Cassius Cassius is a general and a Roman politician. He organizes the conspiracy against Caesar and recruits Brutus to his cause through flattery and by forging letters that suggest that the Roman people support Caesar’s assassination. Caesar refers to Cassius as being a lean and hungry-looking man, one who should not be trusted. Caesar, of course, turns out to be right, but he dismisses his own thoughts later in the play. Cassius appears to be one of the least trustworthy

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Cicero Cicero is a member of the Roman Senate. He is a renowned orator and is considered a noble man. The conspirators consider asking Cicero to join them, believing that his reputation would help to sway the masses in their favor. Brutus does not agree. Later, Antony and the other members of the triumvirate order Cicero’s death.

Cinna Cinna is a tribune and conspirator. He urges Cassius to recruit Brutus for their cause.

Cinna the poet Cinna the poet is mistaken for Cinna the conspirator by the mob. He explains the error, but the crowd kills him anyway for his ‘‘bad verses.’’

Flavius Flavius is a Roman tribune. He wants to protect the commoners from Caesar’s tyranny. He condemns a crowd of men for praising Caesar when not too long before that they had praised Pompey, Caesar’s enemy. During Caesar’s celebratory parade, Flavius removes decorations from Caesar’s statues and is later ‘‘put to silence.’’ Through Flavius’s character, Shakespeare foreshadows the fickleness of the masses as well as the fate of those who go against Caesar, such as Brutus and Cassius.

M. Aemilius Lepidus Lepidus is a Roman politician. He joins Antony and Octavius to rule the Roman Empire after Caesar’s assassination. Antony takes advantage of Lepidus’s weak nature, essentially ordering

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him to run errands. Octavius, however, thinks more highly of Lepidus.

Marullus Marullus is a Roman tribune. Like Flavius, Marullus wants to protect the commoners from Caesar’s tyranny and points out the crowd’s fickle political sentiments. Marullus is later ‘‘put to silence’’ for removing decorations from Caesar’s statues.

Pindarus Pindarus is a servant of Cassius’s. He mistakenly informs Cassius that Antony’s forces have captured Titinius and are about to overtake the camp, which precipitates Cassius’s decision to commit suicide.

Portia Portia is Brutus’s wife. She knows something is bothering her husband and is hurt that Brutus does not open up to her. She does not realize that Caesar’s assassination is being planned, but she know Brutus’s distractions are more than the simple illness that he claims to have. Portia attempts to persuade Brutus to confide in her by demonstrating how strong her character is by inflicting a wound on herself. After the assassination has failed to win the support of the masses, Brutus learns that Portia has died; a little later, he learns that Portia’s death was a suicide.

Soothsayer The Soothsayer is a mystic. He unsuccessfully attempts to warn Caesar twice about his impending assassination, telling him to beware the ides of March.

THEMES Politics The depiction of Roman politics is central to Julius Caesar, especially regarding whether Caesar’s assassination should be considered justifiable or not. One critical argument maintains that Shakespeare portrayed Caesar as a contemptible despot with a seemingly limitless appetite for conquest. Brutus joins the conspirators because he fears that the Roman Republic will be destroyed if Caesar is crowned king. From this perspective, Julius Caesar can be interpreted as presenting a political conflict between liberty

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and tyranny in which the conspirators’ assassination of the would-be dictator is noble and just. A contrary reading holds that Shakespeare created a benevolent, if somewhat vain, leader in Caesar, who is brutally murdered by envious traitors who manipulate Brutus’s republican ideals and rely on his political reputation to give their cause credibility. This interpretation is manifested in the character of Antony, who remains loyal to Caesar and supposedly avenges Caesar’s murder by rousing the Roman populace against the conspirators. The political implications in this interpretation are that politicians use rhetoric, as opposed to truth or facts, to gain power. The politics continue after Caesar’s assassination, with the representative factions of the two opposing views—as led by Antony and Brutus—clashing in a civil war. Although Antony presents the image of a devout friend and loyal follower of Caesar to the crowd, his actions in the war are not completely motivated by the need to avenge Caesar’s death; that is, Antony seeks political power. As Shakespeare interprets the historical events, only Brutus appears loyal to his reasons for taking part in the assassination and the political events that follow. Brutus’s motivations were political from beginning to end; he believed in political ideals that he feared Caesar was not pursuing. Brutus fought in the civil war not for the political power he might gain but for the common good of the Roman people and for the continuation of the Roman Republic.

Power of Persuasion Persuasion is used in many different ways in Julius Caesar. Simple flattery, sly deception, and the art of rhetoric are all used to help sway the minds of the Roman people as well as the minds of otherwise thoughtful and reflective leaders. The power of persuasion is most significantly demonstrated through Antony’s and Brutus’s speeches at Caesar’s funeral in act 3, scene 2. The two men present different verbal strategies, although their goals are in some ways similar. In Brutus’s oration, his principal technique is to imply that the commoners must choose between mutually exclusive alternatives—dying as slaves under Caesar’s tyrannical rule or living as free men in the republic—without proving that these are the only alternatives. For instance,

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Paul Bentall as the Cobbler, Lionel Guyett as the Soothsayer, and Christopher Benjamin as Caesar in Act I, scene ii, at the Barbican Theatre, London, 1996 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

Brutus states, ‘‘Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?’’ Of course, Brutus could not prove either of these statements to be representative of reality without living through the continuation of Caesar’s rule or waiting to see what would happen after his death. Antony’s eulogy, on the other hand, is characterized by the extensive use of irony and repetition, as well as by action words; thus, he excites the commoners’ emotions rather than appealing to their sensibilities. For instance, Antony repeats the phrase ‘‘Brutus is an honorable man’’ several times after insinuating that the evidence of Brutus’s good character is faulty. In order to sway the crowd further, Antony tells the crowd that Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar’s body was ‘‘the most unkindest cut of all,’’ because Caesar loved Brutus. Antony also makes certain claims, such as ‘‘When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept,’’ that the crowd is likely to believe but that cannot necessarily be verified. Overall, neither Brutus nor Antony offer rational proofs of their arguments regarding

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Caesar, and consequently the more eloquent rhetorician, not the truth, sways public opinion. Other uses of persuasion in the play include Cassius’s appeals to Brutus to join the conspiracy in the first and second acts. Cassius relies on flattery, constantly referring to how noble Brutus is. Cassius also persuades Brutus by telling him that Caesar is a weak man, as proven by his poor health and his acts of cowardice. Cassius attempts to cinch Brutus’s involvement through deception, writing letters to Brutus that seem to come from Roman citizens who support the idea of ridding the country of Caesar. Immediately before Caesar’s assassination in act 2, Decius persuades Caesar to go to the Senate by reinterpreting Calpurnia’s dream so that it reads as a good omen rather than as a foretelling of Caesar’s death. Decius also attempts to persuade Caesar by insinuating that he would be exposing his fears should he allow Calpurnia’s dream to keep him away from the Senate. Caesar does not want to appear a coward, a fact that is not wasted on Decius. Then, as the conspirators gather around Caesar

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to walk him to the Senate, their appearance quietly persuades Caesar to believe that they are his allies. Rather than being suspicious of their early rising and accompaniment, Caesar says, ‘‘I thank you for your pains and courtesy’’ and then refers to them as his friends. This feeling of assurance might also have led Caesar to ignore Artemidorus’s note, which warned him of the very men who were accompanying him to the Senate.

Private versus Public Personae Another theme concerns the private and public personae of Brutus and Caesar and their relationships to human endeavors and history. While the private Brutus is a sensitive man who loves Caesar and abhors violence, the public figure of Brutus is a noble idealist who puts his personal feelings aside to protect the Roman state from Caesar’s perceived ambition. The private Caesar, on the other hand, is a superstitious man plagued by illness, while the public figure of Caesar is a demigod or superman who, in the words of Cassius, ‘‘doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus.’’ In the private world of the play, characters’ interior motives are revealed, but these motives are not necessarily relevant to their actions in the public world, which, once performed, become independent of them and a part of history. More broadly speaking, then, the play demonstrates humans’ inability to control others’ perceptions of their deeds, as history ultimately neglects a person’s private intentions and records only a person’s public actions.

Ritual Ritual plays a key role in Julius Caesar, as Brutus attempts to exalt Caesar’s assassination to the level of a formal sacrifice. Brutus almost literally states this intent when he declares, ‘‘Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully; / Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.’’ Shakespeare provides added theatrical effect to the ritual motif when, after the conspirators stab Caesar to death, Brutus orders them to wash their hands in his blood. This episode emphasizes Brutus’s chief character flaw—self-deception—for he truly believes that he can purify Caesar’s assassination by regarding it as a ceremonial sacrifice.

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Fickleness of the Populace The fickle crowds play an important role in Julius Caesar. The common people are easily shamed in the opening scene, when Flavius and Marullus point out how fickle they are—first they honor Pompey, and then they honor Caesar, who defeated Pompey. Later, the masses are easily swayed, first by the arguments of Brutus, then by the rhetoric of Antony, which demonstrates the crowd’s instability and lack of direction. Shakespeare’s depiction of the populace in Julius Caesar, in fact, has often been viewed as his condemnation of rule by the people, or democracy, in favor of monarchy. In other words, the populace cannot be trusted to make good decisions.

Leadership Qualities Shakespeare’s play raises questions regarding what type of person makes a good leader. Caesar himself can be examined as a brave warrior and cunning military strategist or, as Mark Antony views Caesar, as a benevolent man who is a sensitive and protective father figure. Aside from personality, can a leader have physical weaknesses and still rule successfully? Or should a leader be at the pinnacle of his or her health and a professed athlete, such as Antony? Shakespeare does not answer any of these questions definitively; rather, he merely establishes the personal traits of the various characters in his play. As the play unfolds, the audience watches the characters face different challenges, which eventually expose both their strengths and weaknesses. Thus, the audience is left to evaluate each character’s ability or potential ability to lead. Regarding the character of Brutus, the audience might ask whether his high ideals and noble persuasion make him a good leader. Brutus may represent the most consistent and honest of all the characters in the play, but he proves too trusting—perhaps too naive—which leaves him blind to the consequences of his actions and the actions of others. Cicero, possibly the most thoughtful of all the characters, is relegated to a very minor role in this drama, almost to the point of being totally dismissed. Shakespeare did not give women any more political relevance in the play than they were allowed in actual Roman times, such that attributes ascribed to the feminine mind are rarely relevant in considerations of leadership. Antony comes the closest to rising to a position of leadership in this play. Antony behaves as a loyal friend and

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obedient servant to Caesar, but he also proves deceptively cunning, displaying some of the least virtuous characteristics of the politician. He does, however, think for himself, which Cassius, on the other hand, seems unable to do. Cassius needs support and commitment from others in order to follow through with Caesar’s murder. In essence, Cassius needs to stand behind Brutus, making Cassius more suited to the role of, say, running mate than to the role of leader.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

Ultimately, only the individual audience member or reader can decide whether Shakespeare recommends any of these characters as a model of a good leader. Shakespeare seems to be saying, in fact, that all leaders have their faults, and a good leader simply has fewer of them, such that those faults can be overshadowed by the leader’s strengths.

Ambition Ambition is discussed in this play, primarily with negative connotations. Some of the senators believe that Caesar is an overly ambitious man, making him a candidate for assassination. Even noble Brutus, a friend of Caesar’s, rationalizes his murderous behavior based on the understanding that Caesar is overly ambitious. Ambition in this regard is seen as an egocentric drive; Brutus comes to believe that Caesar wants power in and of itself, not for the benefit of the Romans. This concept of ambition is also what Cassius promotes when spurring his coconspirators to attack. However, whereas Brutus is worried about Caesar’s ambition because of the detrimental effects it might have on Romans, Cassius simply seems to be jealous of Caesar’s ambition. Cassius does not like having to help Caesar when Caesar admits weakness.

Death Whether occurring on the battlefield or by the individual characters’ own swords, a constant stream of deaths weaves through Julius Caesar. In the beginning of the play, Flavius and Marullus are put to death for removing ceremonial decorations from statues, thus setting in place a morbid motif that will repeat in every act. Cinna the poet is killed merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and having the wrong name. Other people, including Brutus, Cassius, and Portia, take their own lives to save themselves from personal disgrace.

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As a group, set up a court scene in which Brutus is being tried for the assassination of Caesar, assigning a judge, a jury, a prosecutor, and a lawyer for the defense of Brutus. The prosecutor and lawyer should each prepare a ten-minute address to the jury, proclaiming either Brutus’s innocence or his guilt. The lawyers can then interrogate Brutus. The jury should be given time to deliberate before voting on Brutus’s innocence or guilt based on the lawyers’ presentations. If the jury finds Brutus guilty, the judge must decide his punishment.

In an essay, compare Julius Caesar’s assassination to that of President John F. Kennedy, addressing the following questions: How were they similar? How did they differ? What were the political environments like during the lives of each man? How were the assassinators treated? Present your essay to your class.  Adapt the character of Portia to modern times. If she were a woman living in Washington, D.C., in 2006, how would she differ? What would she say to her husband if he were in a position similar to that of Brutus? Rewrite the lines in the play featuring these two characters and recite them with a partner.  Compare Mark Antony’s funeral speech to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech. What similarities can be found? How did King try to move his audience? What were some of King’s most dramatic phrases? Bring in a taped recording of King’s speech and play it for your class. Afterward, guide a discussion, using questions you have prepared. Then ask your classmates to judge both speeches for their ability to rouse the listeners’ emotions. 

The emphasis on death can be seen to reflect both the period in which Caesar lived and the era during which Shakespeare was writing. Civil

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wars and wars with other countries were fairly common in both eras. In addition, in England during the sixteenth and early seventeen centuries, pestilence, such as the bubonic plague, killed thousands, as did more common communicable diseases. With regard to medical treatment, antiseptics and sterilized equipment were nonexistent in doctors’ offices at the time. By some estimates, during the worst of the outbreaks of the plague, as much as one-third of England’s population died. Thus, death touched everyone in real life, just as in Shakespeare’s play. Although the number of deaths in Julius Caesar might appear excessive to the modern reader, for the audience of the sixteenth century—as well as for the people living in the first century B . C . E .—frequent deaths were to be expected.

STYLE Iambic Pentameter and Blank Verse Shakespeare wrote much of the text of Julius Caesar in iambic pentameter. With verse written in iambic pentameter, each line has ten syllables, with the second syllable in the five pairs (each pair is called a foot) usually accented. For example, take the opening line in Act 1: ‘‘Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!’’ The syllables would be broken up as follows: hence-home/youid/le-crea/tures-get/you-home. This would be read with the word ‘‘Hence!’’ unaccented; the word ‘‘Home’’ accented; the word ‘‘you’’ unaccented; and the first syllable [id] in the word ‘‘idle’’ accented, and so forth. The unstressed and stressed syllables create a rhythm similar to: ta-DUM/ta-DUM/ta-DUM/ta-DUM/ta-DUM. Iambic pentameter is said to mimic natural human speech; it is also said to match the beating of the human heart. For this reason, some people claim that the lines in Shakespeare’s plays that are written in iambic pentameter are easiest to memorize. In fact, iambic lines are the most commonly found lines in Shakespeare’s works, as well as the most predominant in much of English verse. Although not all of the lines in Julius Caesar are in iambic pentameter, the most important passages are, such as Mark Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral. Still, variations in meter can be found within iambic pentameter sections throughout the play. Without such variations, audiences might grow tired of hearing the same

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monotonous, singsong rhythm repeated throughout the play. For instance, lines 6 and 9 in act 1, scene 1 are irregular. After Flavius delivers five lines in iambic pentameter, a carpenter says ‘‘Why, sir, a carpenter’’; then, after speaking two lines in iambic pentameter, Marullus says, ‘‘You, sir, what trade are you?’’ Each of these lines has six syllables, not ten syllables. Also, some lines contain more than ten syllables. Some scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter so as to guide the actors who would dramatize his plays with regard to how to deliver the lines. On the other hand, Shakespeare likely did not mean to create steadfast rules about how to present his material but rather to offer the actors some direction. A combination of iambic pentameter and unrhymed ends of lines is referred to as blank verse. Blank verse may look like prose, or regular speech, at first, because of the lack of a rhyming pattern. However, blank verse does feature the purposeful arrangement of meter, while prose has no set meter pattern. Two other differences between blank verse and prose are visual distinctions. In the text of Julius Caesar, for example, many lines do not proceed all the way to the right margin; instead, they terminate after the appropriate number of syllables. Also, with blank verse, each line begins with a capital letter, unlike with the prose in the pages of novels. This difference can also be noted in the speeches given by Brutus and Antony at Caesar’s funeral: Brutus’s is written in prose, while Antony’s is written in blank verse. Indeed, Shakespeare uses prose in his plays for specific reasons. For example, Brutus’s speech is meant to convey a very rational execution; thus, it is written in prose. Antony’s speech, however, is emotional and is one of the most beautiful examples of blank verse in the entire play. Shakespeare also contrasts the dialogue in the beginning of the play between Flavius and Marullus with that of the common workers they come upon in the streets. Most of Flavius’s and Marullus’s lines are written in blank verse, while the common workers speak in prose. Overall, blank verse may be perceived as Shakespeare’s way of elevating conversations, calling attention to important passages, and making utterances sound more poetic without using a rhyming scheme.

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Consonance and Alliteration The sounds of words can be enhanced poetically in many different manners, two of which are consonance and alliteration. When using consonance, an author repeats the same consonant in several closely associated words. Shakespeare used this poetic device throughout Julius Caesar, such as in act 1, scene 1 when Marullus addresses the men walking in the streets by exclaiming, ‘‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!’’ These lines feature the repetition of the letter s, the sound of which carries through the line and connects the words together. Alliteration occurs when consonants are repeated at the beginnings of associated words. One example of alliteration is found in act 3, scene 1 when Antony first sees Caesar’s dead body; he uses the phrase ‘‘tide of times,’’ repeating the consonant t. Shakespeare used both consonance and alliteration in line 265, ‘‘Domestic fury and fierce civil strife,’’ in which the letter f is repeated. Consonance and alliteration not only sound pleasing to the ear but also sometimes help to emphasize the emotion behind the words’ meaning.

Metaphors A metaphor is a figure of speech used to compare two unrelated things. Authors use metaphors to provide objects with deeper meanings or connotations. For example, Shakespeare uses a metaphor in act 1, scene 2 when Cassius tells Brutus to use him as a mirror: ‘‘And since you know you cannot see yourself / So well as by reflection, I, your glass, / Will modestly discover to yourself / That of yourself which you yet know not of.’’ Thus, ‘‘I, your glass’’ is the metaphor. Cassius is not a mirror, but he wants to offer Brutus a reflection. Interestingly, unlike a real mirror, Cassius does not give an objective reflection, as a mirror might, but rather the interpretation that Cassius wants Brutus to see. Thus, Cassius uses this metaphor to entice Brutus to reveal his inner thoughts; Cassius pretends to see within Brutus what Brutus cannot see for himself. In act 4, scene 3, Shakespeare uses an extended metaphor that is developed beyond a simple phrase. Brutus compares life—or perhaps fate—to the ocean: ‘‘There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.’’ The ebb and flow of the tide is used to explain the actions that Brutus is recommending that his and Cassius’s

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armies take. Brutus is saying that timing is essential and that the time to move is now, at high tide. Unfortunately, Brutus misread the tides, so to speak, and soon faces defeat. Regardless, through Shakespeare’s use of this extended metaphor comparing life to the ocean, Cassius and the audience alike better understand the concept that Brutus is presenting. Brutus might have simply said that it was time to move; however, that assertion might not have been convincing enough for Cassius to agree with him. But Cassius understood the concept of the tides— how the ocean ebbs and flows according to its own timetable. When the tide is high, boats sail smoothly from the shore. When the tide is low, boats can become stranded on dry land.

Shakespeare’s Language Although Shakespeare’s dramas are rich in meaning and feature a deep understanding of human psychology, many people are discouraged by the form of language Shakespeare used. The English language, like all languages in use, is constantly evolving. Just as the language of the twenty-first century will sound strange to English speakers of the twenty-fourth century, so, too, does Shakespeare’s language sound strange to contemporary audiences. The language that Shakespeare uses can be referred to as early modern English. Some words in Shakespeare’s plays, such as ‘‘may’st,’’ are no longer in use. Also, the order of words in sentences was different in Shakespeare’s time than it is in contemporary times. In the twenty-first century, sentences in English are normally set with the subject first, the verb next, and the object third. An example of this order is the sentence ‘‘Shakespeare wrote plays.’’ The arrangement of many sentences in Shakespeare’s plays, on the other hand, is often different. Examples include ‘‘What means this shouting?’’ and ‘‘This by Calpurnia’s dream is signified.’’ After listening to a scene or two of a Shakespeare play, the language becomes more familiar to many modern audiences, allowing them to be less conscious of the wording and therefore more able to enjoy the play, as they become engrossed in the dramatic action.

Omens Superstition was still quite prominent in daily life in Elizabethan times. Thus, Shakespeare naturally employed omens in the plots of his plays. In Julius Caesar, he primarily uses omens to set a

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mood, mostly one of impending disaster. The play’s most well-known omen is the Soothsayer’s message, warning Caesar to beware of the ides of March. This omen is rather quickly pushed aside by Caesar, who does not want anyone to think of him as being fearful. The omen of the fierce thunderstorm in act 1, scene 3, on the other hand, causes shivers to run down the back of Casca. Although some people in modern times still look for omens, or signs regarding the future, most no longer fear thunderstorms for their foreboding nature. As with other climatic events, meteorologists on television not only explain how thunderstorms are created but also predict when the storms will appear and how powerful they might become, thus taking much of the mystery out of the weather. Such science, however, was not available in either Roman or Elizabethan times. With his mind filled with the terrible assassination plans, Casca easily becomes affected by the clashing thunder and bolts of lightning, fearing that the gods are warning him about his actions. Also, Shakespeare, through the use of this omen and through Casca’s fear, is warning the audience that disaster is indeed on its way. Shakespeare might have intended to use this particular moment both to foreshadow the assassination itself and to set the mood for all the turmoil and death to come after the assassination. Another use of omens as foreshadowing occurs with Calpurnia’s dream. In the dream, Calpurnia sees omens that she interprets as warnings of her husband’s death—an interpretation that turns out to be valid. Here, again, Shakespeare seems to have used the omen for multiple reasons. He shows how Caesar could be manipulated, first by Calpurnia’s interpretation of the dream and then by Decius’s interpretation, which ran counter to Calpurnia’s. In the course of the discussion as to whether Caesar should go to the Senate, Decius points out that the members of the Senate will think Caesar is weak if he allows an omen to keep him away from his office. Thus, in this instance, the omen exposes Caesar’s inability to make decisions on his own as well as his susceptibility to public opinion. Another omen is presented toward the end of the play, when Caesar returns as a ghost to haunt Brutus in act 4. Caesar’s ghost tells Brutus that he has come ‘‘to tell thee thou shalt see me at

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Philippi.’’ With this omen, Shakespeare foreshadows the death of Brutus. The audience cannot be certain that this will occur, but the appearance of the ghost of the man that Brutus assassinated— before Brutus goes into battle, no less—is surely not a good sign. In using the ghost, then, Shakespeare intensifies the action by instilling in his audience the fear that Brutus surely would have felt upon encountering the ghost.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Julius Caesar Gaius Julius Caesar (July 13, 100 B . C . E .–March 15, 44 B . C . E .) is considered one of the most brilliant military minds in history. One of his greatest feats was the conquering of Gaul (modern-day France and Belgium), thus extending the boundaries of the Roman Republic to the Atlantic Ocean. He was also a pivotal influence in transforming the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, as he was appointed the state’s perpetual dictator in the year of his death, 44 B . C . E . Caesar was raised in a very comfortable setting. His family was not among the wealthiest but did include a long succession of politically influential people. Caesar’s father was a military man who died when Caesar was sixteen. Shortly afterward, Caesar became a priest, a position that he did not hold for very long; had he remained a priest, the world would never have learned of his military genius, as a priest was not allowed even to look at a soldier or to touch a horse. In fact, Caesar’s military conquests were monumental, as was the death toll that his soldiers inflicted as they conquered lands far removed from the city of Rome. Some historians estimate that in Gaul alone, the casualties numbered in the millions. By virtue of his military experiences and his family’s political influence, Caesar helped to form the first governing triumvirate of the Roman Republic in 60 B . C . E ., along with Pompey and Marcus Crassus. In 53 B . C . E ., Crassus died in battle, leaving Pompey and Caesar to jointly rule the republic. These two men did not like one another, and with Crassus’s death, their differences became more evident. Caesar was not in Rome when Crassus died, and Pompey then ordered Caesar to return. Caesar, suspecting that Pompey planned to have him killed, brought his army with him, a sign to

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Pompey that Caesar was prepared to go to war against him. Caesar indeed won the final battle, and this is the point at which Shakespeare’s play begins. Caesar was assassinated in 44 B . C . E ., after he had been awarded the title of dictator for life.

The Roman Republic In the year 510 B . C . E ., the Roman monarchy was overthrown and the Roman Republic was established. At its greatest height, the Roman Republic included lands in present-day Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the Balkans and along the coastlines of Asia Minor and Africa. Social status among full citizens in the early centuries of the Roman Republic was based on birth. The two major social groups were the patricians and the plebeians. The patricians owned most of the wealth and controlled the government. Women were not granted as many rights as men—they were not allowed to vote, for example—but some women did own property. Many Roman citizens owned slaves, who were considered property rather than human beings. A slave owner could do anything to his slaves, including murder them, without having to account for his actions. The social class of the plebeians included everyone who was neither a patrician nor a slave. The government in the Roman Republic was made up of various groups called assemblies. Each assembly had specific responsibilities. The two most powerful assemblies were the Senate and the Plebeian Assembly. The highest officers, the magistrates, were appointed for a period of one year and shared rule with at least one other person. The one office that would be held by a single male was that of dictator, which was assigned only at certain times, such as in times of war; this assignment would last for only six months at most. Toward the end of the Roman Republic, discontent began setting in, as the disparities between the very rich and the common citizens were widening. Wars lasted so long that when many soldiers returned home, they found that their farms had been taken away from them owing to lack of payments on loans. Soldiers also had difficulty finding work after they resigned from the armies, as people from conquered lands were brought back to the republic to work for free as slaves. Added land was

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Mark Antony with the body of Caesar and Roman citizens, Act III, scene ii (Ó Shakespeare Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan)

quickly claimed by the wealthiest families, most of whom either were directly involved in the government or bore strong influence on those who were. As such, laws were passed to protect their wealth. In 133 B . C . E ., a series of land reforms were proposed by Tiberius Gracchus, a plebeian tribune. These reforms were popular with ordinary citizens, but the more conservative—and more wealthy—politicians were not at all pleased. Thus, they called Gracchus a tyrant and slaughtered him and his followers. When Gracchus’s brother attempted to take up the plebeian cause many years later, he, too, was murdered. A professional Roman army was established for the first time in 107 B . C . E . under the leadership of Gaius Marius. Prior to this, men were called upon to serve in the army only when wars were declared; Marius ensured that his army would consist of trained professionals. Under Marius’s newly passed laws, when new lands were conquered, soldiers received plots as part of their pay for twenty years of service. This policy rewarded soldiers for their work and

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also helped to spread Roman culture throughout what would eventually become the Roman Empire. Under Marius, land reform issues were somewhat abated because soldiers were able to earn land, thus breaking the aristocracy’s hold on land ownership. A second result of Marius’s establishment of a professional army was that Marius himself became a victorious hero, as his men often saved the republic from foreign invasions. When Marius retired from public office, however, the Roman Republic was ravaged by other calamities, such as civil wars and slave rebellions. At the end of the time of the republic, Marcus Crassus, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey), and Julius Caesar ruled as the first triumvirate. Crassus eventually died, and Pompey and Caesar, who disliked one another, clashed in yet another civil war, with Caesar winning the ultimate battle. In 44 B . C . E ., Caesar was appointed dictator for life, setting up his death by assassination, as a group of senators determined that the only way of getting rid of him would be to murder him. The second triumvirate was established after the deaths of Caesar, Brutus, and the other conspirators. Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), Octavianus (Octavian), and Marcus Aimilius Lepidus took over the rule of the Republic in 42 B . C . E . Lepidus was soon killed in battle. Mark Antony then fell in love with Cleopatra, and Octavian riled the citizens of Rome against Antony, insisting that Antony (who had three children by Cleopatra and gave them one-third of the Roman lands he governed) was not fit to rule. Another civil war then broke out, and Octavian proved the victor. Although Octavian insisted that the republic still existed, the political foundations that had marked the original republic disappeared under Octavian’s autocratic rule.

Early Modern England Shakespeare’s England was, in some ways, like Caesar’s Roman Empire. Aristocrats controlled the majority of wealth and all the power, but the situation was beginning to change. Shakespeare himself was able to gain wealth through his entrepreneurship, as were many others. Aristocrats feared this social movement, however, and eventually passed laws that made it increasingly difficult for those not born within the aristocracy to make substantial amounts of money; they

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even went so far as to decree that certain types and colors of clothes could be worn only among the aristocracy. Despite the aristocracy’s attempts to gain firm control, social change was creeping in, infiltrating almost every aspect of life. From Henry VII to the reign of Bloody Mary and then on to Queen Elizabeth I, the officially condoned religious practices in England were shifted from Catholicism to Protestantism to Catholicism and back again; during one reign, practicing Catholics were put to death, while in another, Protestants were persecuted. While Shakespeare lived and wrote during the relatively stable reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, religion remained a much debated issue. Meanwhile, much confusion was present with respect to scientific matters as well. For ages, standard beliefs about the universe had been based on the ancient Egyptian Ptolemy’s assertion that the earth was at the center of the cosmos. The sun, stars, and planets, Ptolemy believed, rotated around the earth. The astronomer Nicolas Copernicus, however, theorized in 1543 that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, and in 1610, Galileo Galilei proved Copernicus’s theory true. Regardless of that proof, many were reluctant to concede old beliefs, such that controversy about the center of the universe continued during Shakespeare’s time. During the sixteenth century, England was becoming an increasingly powerful country, in part owing to its strong naval force. British explorers were circumnavigating the globe, setting up colonies wherever possible. London, at the time, was the largest European city, increasing its population in the sixteenth century by 400 percent, to almost 200,000 people. Thus, England was on its way to becoming an empire, not much unlike that of the empire that Caesar helped to build. Shakespeare’s England was also a place of vast disparities. It has been described as a paranoid police state, with some people enjoying unparalleled wealth while others suffered through unthinkable destitution. It was a place of plagues, wars, and malnutrition. Death was ever present in the minds of its citizens, causing great fear and uncertainty, themes that Shakespeare captured in plays such as Julius Caesar.

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 



First Century B . C . E .: Julius Caesar, considered by many historians to be one of the greatest military and political leaders who ever lived, is assassinated. As a result, civil war breaks out in the Roman Republic. Sixteenth Century C . E .: William I of the Netherlands is assassinated after declaring independence from Spain. This event leads to the Eighty Years’ War, in which the countries referred to as the Netherlands go to war against Spain. Both countries were once part of the Roman Empire. Twenty-first Century: Several political assassinations occur all over the world, including those of the Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic, the Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov, and the Baghdad governor Ali al-Haidari. All of these leaders held positions in countries involved in wars related to religious or ethnic strife or to fights for independence. First Century B . C . E .: Julius Caesar conquers Gaul and extends the Roman Republic to the Atlantic Ocean. He becomes the first Roman leader to order an invasion of Britain. After his assassination, the Roman Senate declares Caesar a god. Sixteenth Century C . E .: Charles V rules over what is called the Holy Roman Empire,

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Julius Caesar, most historians agree, was first performed in 1599. The first person to record having seen the play was a Swiss traveler, Thomas Platter, who provided a positive review of a performance given on September 11 of that year. Indeed, most of the original audiences, like Platter, enjoyed the play. In 1637, the play was reportedly staged for royalty, namely, Charles I. As time passed, Julius Caesar became one of Shakespeare’s more popular plays, drawing

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which includes Spain, parts of France and Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, and Portugal, as well as lands in the New World. Twenty-first Century: During his political career, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi creates his own political party, becomes the leader of Italy’s longest serving government since World War II, and fights off repeated charges of corruption. At the time of his political defeat in 2006, he is the richest man in Italy, owning what is referred to as a business empire. 

First Century B . C . E .: Civil war erupts in the Roman Republic as Mark Antony leads a faction against Brutus’s army after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Sixteenth Century C . E .: Peasant rebellions over economic hardships and religious differences erupt in the Holy Roman Empire. Catholics and Huguenots go to war in France. Twenty-first Century: Religious, tribal, and ethnic wars result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Serbia, the Sudan, the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Afghanistan, the United States, Iraq, Israel, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Palestine, and many other countries.

audiences well into the seventeenth century in England. As the eighteenth century approached, changes were sometimes made to the play in performance. For example, Brutus’s character was adapted into a more prominent role, as critics and audiences debated the nature of Brutus’s involvement in the assassination of Caesar; those who believed the assassination to be politically warranted emphasized the nobility of Brutus, while those who considered the murder to be the work of a misdirected man portrayed Brutus as corrupt. Other changes made Caesar

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appear more ruthless and likened Antony to a leader of the common people. Also in the eighteenth century, Julius Caesar was first performed in the United States. In 1864, John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, acted with two of his brothers in a New York production of Julius Caesar, with John playing the role of Mark Antony. The politics of the play are discussed at length by Allan Bloom in an essay in his book Shakespeare’s Politics. Bloom describes some of the political sentiments at the time of Shakespeare’s writing of Julius Caesar, stating, ‘‘The political life of ancient Rome began to attract interest and admiration.’’ Bloom notes that Shakespeare’s ‘‘Roman plays present us with the essential Rome, and in them he tried to re-create those elusive qualities that made the Romans what they were.’’ Bloom adds, ‘‘In Shakespeare’s day, the remnants of the Roman Empire were still alive, and it was still remembered that Britain itself had been a part of it.’’ This situation partly explained the popularity of Shakespeare’s play, according to the critic. Toward the end of his essay, Bloom writes, ‘‘In these last scenes of the play, what was a rigid opposition between Brutus and Cassius dissolves under the pressure of Caesar’s unrelenting spirit.’’ Further, the critic asserts that Shakespeare depicts the two conspirators as ‘‘good but erring men. Shakespeare does all of this very delicately so as not to disturb the superficial and roughly true structure of his message,’’ which Bloom says ‘‘demonstrates the inadequacies of ordinary men to overcome the force of a man like Caesar.’’ In the essay ‘‘Shakespeare and Political Thought,’’ published in A Companion to Shakespeare, Martin Dzelzainis focuses on the funeral speeches of Brutus and Antony, using them to exemplify Shakespeare’s great skills in writing, especially his gift of crafting arguments about great issues. Dzelzainis writes of Shakespeare’s era that ‘‘pupils at grammar schools were expected to acquire proficiency in arguing . . . and routinely honed their dialectical skills by composing orations on controversial themes,’’ such as the assassination of Caesar. Dzelzainis concludes that Shakespeare’s ‘‘unrivalled ability to stage situations requiring the expression of opposed views is displayed to full effect in the competing funeral oration, in prose and verse, of Brutus and Mark Antony.’’

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G. K. Hunter, in his essay, ‘‘Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy,’’ published in Shakespeare Studies, focuses on Brutus and Antony, as well. Hunter writes, ‘‘In the famous scene of Caesar’s funeral Brutus’s speech has only ethos to recommend it; he more or less tells the assembled populace that, being himself, he cannot make a speech. Antony, however, has no such inhibitions. The personae he manipulates—Caesar’s friend, your friend, humble suitor, grieving follower, outraged victim, angry vindicator—each of these is calculated to have a precise effect in a calculated sequence of effects. The brilliant political orator and the tongue-tied visionary—such contrasts show the complexity with which Shakespeare has developed his basic contrast.’’ Hunter goes on to discuss the problems that arise when attempting to determine whether Brutus did the right thing for the wrong reasons or the wrong thing for the right reasons. Hunter thus classifies Julius Caesar not merely as a tragedy or as a ‘‘Roman play’’ but also as a ‘‘problem play.’’

CRITICISM M. W. MacCallum Focusing on Cassius’s intellectual preoccupations, self-sufficiency, championship of liberty and equality, and rejection of the supernatural, MacCallum contends that the character’s behavior is guided by his belief in the philosophy of Epicureanism. Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who asserted that pleasure was the highest good in life. For Epicurus, the greatest joy derived from emotional calm and serenity; he therefore considered intellectual activities superior to all others. The philosopher also extolled the virtues of freedom and denied that gods had any control over human affairs. MacCallum also discusses Cassius’s strengths and weaknesses of character, faulting his spitefulness, jealousy, and lack of fortitude but praising his enthusiasm for the cause of republicanism and his keen powers of judgment. The main lines of [Cassius’s] character are given in Caesar’s masterly delineation, which follows Plutarch in regard to his spareness, but in the other particulars freely elaborates the impression that Plutarch’s whole narrative produces. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look: He thinks too much: such men are dangerous . . .

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THEY BOTH HAVE SCHOOLED THEMSELVES IN THE DISCIPLINE OF FORTITUDE, BRUTUS IN STOIC RENUNCIATION, CASSIUS IN EPICUREAN INDEPENDENCE; BUT IN THE GREAT CRISES WHERE NATURE ASSERTS HERSELF, BRUTUS IS STRONG AND CASSIUS IS WEAK.’’

the theory which identified pleasure with virtue should be the creed of this splenetic solitary: but it is quite in character. Epicureanism appealed to some of the noblest minds of Rome, not as a cult of enjoyment, but as a doctrine that freed them from the bonds of superstition and the degrading fear of death . . . And these are the reasons that Cassius is an Epicurean. At the end, when his philosophy breaks down, he says: You know that I held Epicurus strong And his opinion: now I change my mind, And partly credit things that do presage. [V. i. 76–8] He has hitherto discredited them . . .

He reads much; He is a great observer, and he looks Quite through the deeds of men; he loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music; Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort As if he mock’d himself and scorn’d his spirit That could be moved to smile at anything. Such men as he be never at heart’s ease Whiles they behold a greater than themselves, And therefore are they very dangerous. [I. ii. 194–95, 201–10] Lean, gaunt, hungry, disinclined to sports and revelry, spending his time in reading, observation, and reflection—these are the first traits that we notice in him. He too, like Brutus, has learned the lessons of philosophy, and he finds in it the rule of life. He chides his friend for seeming to fail in the practice of it: Of your philosophy you make no use, If you give place to accidental evils. [IV. iii. 145–46] And even when he admits and admires Brutus’ self-mastery, he attributes it to nature, and claims as good a philosophic discipline for himself. There is, however, a difference between them even in this point. Brutus is a Platonist with a Stoic tinge; Cassius is an Epicurean [Platonists held that the highest reality is intellectual rather than based on sensory perception. Stoics believed that wise men should be free from passion, unmoved by joy or grief, and submissive to natural law. Epicureans considered emotional calm the highest good, held intellectual pleasures superior to others, and advocated the renunciation of momentary in favor of more permanent pleasures]. That strikes us at first as strange, that

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Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit: But life, being weary of these wordly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself. [I. iii. 93–7] Free from all superstitious scruples and all thought of superhuman interference in the affairs of men, he stands out bold and self-reliant, confiding in his own powers, his own will, his own management: Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves, that we are underlings. [I. ii. 139–41] And the same attitude of mind implies that he is rid of all illusions. He is not deceived by shows. He looks quite through the deeds of men. He is not taken in by Casca’s affectation of rudeness. He is not misled by Antony’s apparent frivolity. He is not even dazzled by the glamour of Brutus’ virtue, but notes its weak side and does not hesitate to play on it. Still less does Caesar’s prestige subdue his criticism. On the contrary, with malicious contempt he recalls his want of endurance in swimming and the complaints of his sick-bed, and he keenly notes his superstitious lapses. He seldom smiles and when he does it is in scorn. We only once hear of his laughing. It is at the interposition of the poet, which rouses Brutus to indignation; but the presumptuous absurdity of it tickles Cassius’ sardonic humour [IV. iii. 124–38]. For there is no doubt that he takes pleasure in detecting the weaknesses of his fellows. He has

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obvious relish in the thought that if he were Brutus he would not be thus cajoled, and he finds food for satisfaction in Caesar’s merely physical defects. Yet there is as little of self-complacency as of hero-worship in the man. He turns his remorseless scrutiny on his own nature and his own cause, and neither maintains that the one is noble or the other honourable, nor denies the personal alloy in his motives. This is the purport of that strange soliloquy that at first sight seems to place Cassius in the ranks of Shakespeare’s villains along with his Iagos and Richards, rather than of the mixed characters, compact of good and evil, to whom nevertheless we feel that he is akin. Well, Brutus, thou art noble: yet, I see, Thy honourable metal may be wrought From that it is disposed: therefore it is meet That noble minds keep ever with their likes: For who so firm that cannot be seduced? Caesar doth bear me hard: but he loves Brutus: If I were Brutus now and he were Cassius, He should not humour me. [I. ii. 308–15] It frequently happens that cynics view themselves as well as others in their meaner aspects. Probably Cassius is making the worst of his own case and is indulging that vein of self-mockery and scorn that Caesar observed in him. But at any rate the lurking sense of unworthiness in himself and his purpose will be apt to increase in such a man his natural impatience of alleged superiority in his fellows. He is jealous of excellence, seeks to minimise it and will not tolerate it. It is on this characteristic that Shakespeare lays stress. Yet notwithstanding this taint of enviousness and spite, Cassius is far from being a despicable or even an unattractive character. He may play the Devil’s Advocate in regard to individuals, but he is capable of a high enthusiasm for his cause, such as it is. We must share his calenture of excitement, as he strides about the streets in the tempest that fills Casca with superstitious dread and Cicero with discomfort at the nasty weather. His republicanism may be a narrow creed, but at least he is willing to be a martyr to it; when he hears that Caesar is to wear the crown, his resolution is prompt and Roman-like:

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I know where I will wear this dagger then: Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius. [I. iii. 89–90] And surely at the moment of achievement, whatever was mean and sordid in the man is consumed in his prophetic rapture that fires the soul of Brutus and prolongs itself in his response. Cassius: How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown! Brutus: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport That now on Pompey’s basis lies along No worthier than the dust! [III. i. 111–16] And even to individuals if they stand the test of his mordant criticism, he can pay homage and admiration. The perception that Brutus may be worked upon is the toll he pays to his self-love, but, that settled, he can feel deep reverence and affection for Brutus’ more ideal virtue. Perhaps the best instance of it is the scene of their dispute. Brutus . . . is practically, if not theoretically, in the wrong, and certainly he is much the more violent and bitter; but Cassius submits to receive his forgiveness and to welcome his assurance that he will bear with him in future. This implies no little deference and magnanimity in one who so ill brooks a secondary role. But he does give the lead to Brutus, and in all things, even against his better judgment, yields him the primacy. And then it is impossible not to respect his thorough efficiency. In whatsoever concerns the management of affairs and of men, he knows the right thing to do, and, when left to himself, he does it. He sees how needful Brutus is to the cause and gains him—gains him, in part by a trickery, which Shakespeare without historical warrant ascribes to him; but the trickery succeeds because he has gauged Brutus’ nature aright. He takes the correct measure of the danger from Antony, of his love for Caesar and his talents, which Brutus so contemptuously underrates. So, too, after the assassination, when Brutus says, I know that we shall have him well to friend; [III. i. 143] he answers, I wish we may: but yet I have a mind That fear him much; and my misgiving still

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Jonathan Hyde as Brutus with mob in Act III, scene ii, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratfordupon-Avon, 1991 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

Falls shrewdly to the purpose. [III. i. 144–46] Brutus seeks to win Antony with general considerations of right and justice, Cassius employs a more effective argument: Your voice shall be as strong as any man’s In the disposing of new dignities. [III. i. 177–78]

higher moral qualities are required, and the wisdom of the fox yields to the wisdom of the man . . . [however] passionate and wrong-headed Brutus may be in their contention, he has too much sense of the becoming to wrangle in public, as Cassius begins to do. Another more conspicuous example is furnished by the way in which they bear anxiety.

His plans of the campaign are better, and he has a much better notion of conducting the battle.

[When Popilius Lena speaks with Caesar at the Capitol at the beginning of Act III, scene i,] Cassius believes the worst, loses his head, now hurries on Casca, now prepares for suicide. But Brutus, the disinterested man, is less swayed by personal hopes and fears, keeps his composure, urges his friend to be constant, and can calmly judge of the situation. It is the same defect of endurance that brings about Cassius’ death. Really things are shaping well for them, but he misconstrues the signs just as he has misconstrued the words of Lena, and kills himself owing to a mistake; as Messala points out:

All such shrewd sagacity is entitled to our respect. Yet even in this department Cassius is outdone by the unpractical Brutus, so soon as

Mistrust of good success hath done this deed. [V. iii. 65]

He altogether disapproves of the permission granted to Antony to pronounce the funeral oration. He grasps the situation when the civil war breaks out much better than Brutus: In such a time as this it is not meet That every nice offence should bear his comment. [IV. iii. 7–8]

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

An account of the historic figure of Julius Caesar can be found in Michael Parenti’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome (2003). Parenti has been praised for the storytelling skills he demonstrates in this account of why a group of Roman senators plotted the death of Caesar. Parenti speculates about the motives of the conspirators, particularly regarding what they feared about Caesar that led them to murder him.

Julius Caesar, besides ruling the Roman Empire, was also a gifted writer. Caesar’s Commentaries: On the Gallic War and on the Civil War (2005), edited by James H. Ford, provides an insider’s view of the intelligence of this leader; Caesar also offers interesting insight into how he wanted to die.  Another Shakespearean play about a great leader is Henry V (c. 1599), which is set in fifteenth-century England. Henry’s father, King Henry IV, has just died, and the new king must demonstrate that he has given up his rowdy and irresponsible past and is capable of leading a war-torn England into a fruitful future. Toward this end, Henry V must face his past as he launches a war against France and must count on some of his old friends to support him in battle. 

This want of inward strength explains the ascendancy which Brutus with his more dutiful and therefore more steadfast nature exercises over him, though Cassius is in many ways the more capable man of the two. They both have schooled themselves in the discipline of fortitude, Brutus in Stoic renunciation, Cassius in Epicurean independence; but in the great crises where nature asserts herself, Brutus is strong and Cassius is weak. And as often happens with men, in the supreme trial their professed creeds no longer satisfy them, and they consciously

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Among lighter Shakespearean fare, one of the bard’s most popular comedies is A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596), a tale of love and fantasies with a bit of pixie dust thrown in for added spice. Four lovers’ lives become strangely entangled when they find themselves in a forest filled with fairies and a traveling acting troupe.

Who—or what—might compare to a figure such as Julius Caesar in the contemporary world? And how might Caesar have affected various European and U.S. cultures? These are some of the questions that are covered in the book Julius Caesar in Western Culture (2006), a collection of essays by Jane Dunnett, Oliver Hemmerle, and others, as edited by Maria Wyke. The writers in this collection offer their thoughts on Caesar’s relevance with respect to religion, art, and political history throughout the ages.  Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934) provides another view of ancient Roman civilization. Through this fictionalized autobiography, Graves tells the story of a young man who is considered an idiot because he suffers from a speech impediment. Scorned by his culture, Claudius becomes a great observer of the strengths and weaknesses of his contemporaries. Eventually, Claudius rules Rome. 

abandon them. But while Cassius in his evil fortune falls back on the superstitions which he had ridiculed Caesar for adopting on his good fortune, Brutus falls back on his feeling of moral dignity, and gives himself the death which theoretically he disapproves. Yet, when all is said and done, what a fine figure Cassius is, and how much both of love and respect he can inspire. Source: M. W. MacCallum, ‘‘Julius Caesar: The Remaining Characters,’’ in Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and Their Background, Russll & Russell, 1967, pp. 275–99.

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Maynard Mack

Shake off their sterile curse.

Mack discusses the public and private values of Brutus and Caesar in terms of what he views as the primary theme of the play: ‘‘The always ambiguous impact between man and history.’’ The private Brutus, the critic asserts, is a gentle, sensitive, and studious man who loves Caesar and deplores violence, while the public figure is a noble idealist who participates in the conspiracy because he believes he must act on behalf of the state. Mack contends that in the first half of the drama Shakespeare focuses on ‘‘human will as a force in history’’ by portraying individuals, such as Brutus, choosing courses of action and controlling events; in contrast, the second half of Julius Caesar demonstrates the inadequacies of noble intentions, rationalism, and human will, once they are displayed in action, in influencing history. Caesar’s dual nature, the crtiic continues, similarly dramatizes Shakespeare’s thesis that history is only partially responsive to human will.

ANT. I shall remember: When Caesar says, ‘‘Do this,’’ it is perform’d. [I. ii. 1–10]

I think the place we may want to begin is with I. ii; for here, as in the first witch scene in Macbeth, most of the play to come is already implicit. We have just learned from scene i of Caesar’s return in triumph from warring on Pompey’s sons, we have seen the warm though fickle adulation of the crowd and the apprehension of the tribunes; now we are to see the great man himself. The procession enters to triumphal music; with hubbub of a great press of people; with young men stripped for the ceremonial races, among them Antony; with statesmen in their togas: Decius, Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, Casca; with the two wives Calpurnia and Portia; and, in the lead, for not even Calpurnia is permitted at his side, the great man. As he starts to speak, an expectant hush settles over the gathering: what does the great man have on his mind? CAES. Calpurnia.

Then the procession takes up again. The hubbub is resumed, but once more the expectant silence settles as a voice is heard. SOOTH. Caesar! CAES. Ha! Who calls? CASCA Bid every noise be still; peace yet

again! CAES. Who is it in the press that calls on

me? I hear a tongue shriller than all the music Cry ‘‘Caesar!’’ Speak. Caesar is turn’d to hear. SOOTH. Beware the ides of March. CAES. What man is that? BRU. A soothsayer bids you beware the

ides of March. CAES. Set him before me; let me see his

face. CAS. Fellow, come from the throng;

look upon Caesar. CAES. What say’st thou to me now?

Speak once again. SOOTH. Beware the ides of March. CAES. He is a dreamer. Let us leave him.

CASCA Peace, ho! Caesar speaks.

Pass. [I. ii. 11–24]

CAES. Calpurnia. CAL. Here, my lord. CAES. Stand you directly in Antonius’

way When he does run his course. Antonius. ANT. Caesar, my lord? CAES. Forget

not, in your speed, Antonius. To touch Calpurnia; for our elders say, The barren, touched in this holy chase,

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What the great man had on his mind, it appears, was to remind his wife, in this public place, that she is sterile; that there is an old tradition about how sterility can be removed; and that while of course he is much too sophisticated to accept such a superstition himself—it is ‘‘our elders’’ who say it—still, Calpurnia had jolly well better get out there and get tagged, or else!

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It is easy to see from even these small instances, I think, how a first-rate dramatic imagination works. There is no hint of any procession in Plutarch, Shakespeare’s source. ‘‘Caesar,’’ says Plutarch, ‘‘sat to behold.’’ There is no mention of Calpurnia in Plutarch’s account of the Lupercalian race, and there is no mention anywhere of her sterility. Shakespeare, in nine lines, has given us an unforgettable picture of a man who would like to be emperor pathetically concerned that he

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awe of the marble presence, the message would falter and dissolve: how can a superman need to beware the ides of March? AND NOW THIS LITTLE GROUP OF MEN HAS ALTERED HISTORY. THE REPRESENTATIVE OF THE EVIL DIRECTION IT WAS TAKING TOWARD AUTOCRATIC POWER LIES DEAD BEFORE THEM. THE DIRECTION TO WHICH IT MUST BE RESTORED BECOMES EMPHATIC IN CASSIUS’ CRY OF ‘‘LIBERTY, FREEDOM, AND ENFRANCHISEMENT’’’’

lacks an heir, and determined, even at the cost of making his wife a public spectacle, to establish that this is owing to no lack of virility in him. The first episode thus dramatizes instantaneously the oncoming theme of the play: that a man’s will is not enough; that there are other matters to be reckoned with, like the infertility of one’s wife, or one’s own affliction of the falling sickness which spoils everything one hoped for just at the instant when one had it almost in one’s hand. Brutus will be obliged to learn this lesson too. In the second episode the theme develops. We see again the uneasy rationalism that everybody in this play affects; we hear it reverberate in the faint contempt—almost a challenge—of Brutus’ words as he turns to Caesar: ‘‘A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.’’ Yet underneath, in the soothsayer’s presence and his sober warning, Shakespeare allows us to catch a hint of something else, something far more primitive and mysterious, from which rationalism in this play keeps trying vainly to cut itself away: ‘‘He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass.’’ Only we in the audience are in a position to see that the dreamer has foretold the path down which all these reasoners will go to that fatal encounter at the Capitol. Meantime, in these same two episodes, we have learned something about the character of Caesar. In the first, it was the Caesar of human frailties who spoke to us, the husband with his hopeful superstition. In the second, it was the marble superman of state, impassive, impervious, speaking of himself in the third person: ‘‘Speak! Caesar is turn’d to hear.’’ He even has the soothsayer brought before his face to repeat the message, as if he thought that somehow, in

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We hardly have time to do more than glimpse here a man of divided selves, when he is gone. But in his absence, the words of Cassius confirm our glimpse. Cassius’ description of him exhibits the same duality that we had noticed earlier. On the one hand, an extremely ordinary man whose stamina in the swimming match was soon exhausted, who, when he had a fever once in Spain, shook and groaned like a sick girl, who even now, as we soon learn, is falling down with epilepsy in the market place. On the other hand, a being who has somehow become a god, who ‘‘bears the palm alone,’’ who ‘‘bestrides the narrow world like a colossus’’ [I. ii. 131, 135–36]. When the procession returns, no longer festive now, but angry, tense, there is the same effect once more. Our one Caesar shows a normal man’s suspicion of his enemies, voices some shrewd human observations about Cassius, says to Antony, ‘‘Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf’’ [I. ii. 213]. Our other Caesar says, as if he were suddenly reminded of something he had forgotten, ‘‘I rather tell thee what is to be fear’d / Than what I fear, for always I am Caesar’’ [I. ii. 211–12]. Whenever Caesar appears hereafter, we shall find this singular division in him, and nowhere more so than in the scene in which he receives the conspirators at his house. Some aspects of this scene seem calculated for nothing else than to fix upon our minds the superman conception, the Big Brother of Orwell’s 1984, the great resonant name echoing down the halls of time. Thus at the beginning of the scene: the things that threatened me Ne’er look’d but on my back; when they shall see The face of Caesar, they are vanished. [II. ii. 10–12] And again later: danger knows full well That Caesar is more dangerous than he: We are two lions litter’d in one day, And I the elder and more terrible. [II. ii. 44–7] And again still later: ‘‘Shall Caesar send a lie?’’ [II. ii. 65]. And again: ‘‘The cause is in my will: I will not come’’ [II. ii. 71]. Other aspects, including his concern about Calpurnia’s dream,

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his vacillation about going to the senate house, his anxiety about the portents of the night, plainly mark out his human weaknesses. Finally, as is the habit in this Rome, he puts the irrational from him that his wife’s intuitions and her dream embody; he accepts the rationalization of the irrational that Decius skillfully manufactures, and, as earlier at the Lupercalia, hides from himself his own vivid sense of forces that lie beyond the will’s control by attributing it to her: How foolish do your fears seem now, Calpurnia! I am ashamed I did yield to them. Give me my robe, for I will go. [II. ii. 105–07] So far in our consideration of the implications of I. ii. we have been looking only at Caesar, the title personage of the play, and its historical center. It is time now to turn to Brutus, the play’s tragic center, whom we also find to be a divided man—‘‘poor Brutus,’’ to use his own phrase, ‘‘with himself at war’’ [I. ii. 46]. The war, we realize as the scene progresses, is a conflict between a quiet essentially domestic and loving nature, and a powerful integrity expressing itself in a sense of honorable duty to the commonweal. This duality in Brutus seems to be what Cassius is probing at in his long disquisition about the mirror. The Brutus looking into the glass that Cassius figuratively holds up to him, the Brutus of this moment, now, in Rome, is a grave studious private man, of a wonderfully gentle temper, as we shall see again and again later on, very slow to passion, as Cassius’ ill-concealed disappointment in having failed to kindle him to immediate response reveals, a man whose sensitive nature recoils at the hint of violence lurking in some of Cassius’ speeches, just as he has already recoiled at going on with Caesar to the market place, to witness the mass hysteria of clapping hands, sweaty nightcaps, and stinking breath. This is the present self that looks into Cassius’ mirror. The image that looks back out, that Cassius wants him to see, the potential Brutus, is the man of public spirit, worried already by the question of Caesar’s intentions, the lineal descendant of an earlier Brutus who drove a would-be monarch from the city, a man whose body is visibly stiffening in our sight at each huzza from the Forum, and whose anxiety, though he makes no reply to Cassius’ inflammatory language, keeps bursting to the surface: ‘‘What means this

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shouting? I do fear the people / Choose Caesar for their king’’ [I. ii. 79–80]. The problem at the tragic center of the play, we begin to sense, is to be the tug of private versus public, the individual versus a world he never made, any citizen anywhere versus the selective service greetings that history is always mailing out to each of us. And this problem is to be traversed by that other tug this scene presents, of the irrational versus the rational, the destiny we think we can control versus the destiny that sweeps all before it. Through I. ii, Brutus’ public self, the self that responds to these selective service greetings, is no more than a reflection in a mirror, a mere anxiety in his own brain, about which he refuses to confide, even to Cassius. In II. i, we see the public self making further headway. First, there is Brutus’ argument with himself about the threat of Caesar, and in his conclusion that Caesar must be killed we note how far his private self—he is, after all, one of Caesar’s closest friends—has been invaded by the self of public spirit. From here on, the course of the invasion accelerates. The letter comes, tossed from the public world into the private world, into Brutus’ garden, and addressing, as Cassius had, that public image reflected in the mirror: ‘‘Brutus, thou sleep’st: awake and see thyself’’ [II. i. 46]. Then follows the well-known brief soliloquy . . . , showing us that Brutus’ mind has moved on now from the phase of decision to the inquietudes that follow decision: Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream. [II. i. 63–5] What is important to observe is that these lines stress once again the gulf that separates motive from action, that which is interior in man and controllable by his will from that which, once acted, becomes independent of him and moves with a life of its own. This gulf is a no man’s land, a phantasma, a hideous dream. Finally, there arrives in such a form that no audience can miss it the actual visible invasion itself, as this peaceful garden quiet is broken in on by knocking, like the knocking of fate in Beethoven’s fifth symphony, and by men with faces hidden in their cloaks. Following this, a lovely interlude with Portia serves to emphasize how much the private self, the private world has been shattered. We have something close to discord here—as much of a discord as these very

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gentle people are capable of—and though there is a reconciliation at the end and Brutus’ promise to confide in her soon, this division in the family is an omen. So is that knock of the latecomer, Caius Ligarius, which reminds us once again of the intrusions of the public life. And when Ligarius throws off his sick man’s kerchief on learning that there is an honorable exploit afoot, we may see in it an epitome of the whole scene, a graphic visual renunciation, like Brutus’, of the private good to the public; and we may see this also in Brutus’ own exit a few lines later, not into the inner house where Portia waits for him, but out into the thunder and lightning of the public life of Rome. It is perhaps significant that at our final view of Portia, two scenes later, she too stands outside the privacy of the house, her mind wholly occupied with thoughts of what is happening at the Capitol, and trying to put on a public self for Brutus’ sake: ‘‘Run, Lucius, and commend me to my Lord / Say I am merry . . . ’’ [II. iv. 44–5].

even by prayer and hence superior to the very gods. Finally, Shakespeare puts into his mouth one of those supreme arrogances that will remind us of the destroying hubris which makes men mad in order to ruin them. ‘‘Hence!’’ Caesar cries, ‘‘Wilt thou lift up Olympus?’’ [III. i. 74]. It is at just this point, when the colossus Caesar drunk with self-love is before us, that Casca strikes. Then they all strike, with a last blow that brings out for the final time the other, human side of this double Caesar: ‘‘Et tu, Brute?’’ [III. i. 77].

Meantime, up there by the Capitol, the tragic center and the historical center meet. The suspense is very great as Caesar, seeing the Soothsayer in the throng, reminds him that the ides of March are come, and receives in answer, ‘‘Ay, Caesar, but not gone’’ [III. i. 2]. Caesar is to bleed, but, as Brutus has said, they will sublimate the act into a sacrifice:

Then walk we forth, even to the market place; And waving our red weapons o’er our heads, Let’s all cry, ‘‘Peace, freedom, and liberty!’’ [III. i. 108–10]

Let’s kill him boldly but not wrathfully; Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds. [II. i. 172–74] Everything in the scene must underscore this ceremonial attitude, in order to bring out the almost fatuous cleavage between the spirit of this enterprise and its bloody purpose. The Caesar that we are permitted to see while all this ceremony is preparing is almost entirely the superman, for obvious reasons. To give a color of justice to Brutus’ act and so to preserve our sense of his nobility even if we happen to think the assassination a mistake, as an Elizabethan audience emphatically would, Caesar has to appear in a mood of superhumanity at least as fatuous as the conspirators’ mood of sacrifice. Hence Shakespeare makes him first of all insult Metellus Cimber: ‘‘If thou dost bend and pray and fawn for him, / I spurn thee like a cur’’ [III. i. 45–6]; then comment with intolerable pomposity, and, in fact, blasphemy, on his own iron resolution, for he affects to be immovable

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And now this little group of men has altered history. The representative of the evil direction it was taking toward autocratic power lies dead before them. The direction to which it must be restored becomes emphatic in Cassius’ cry of ‘‘Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement’’ [III. i. 81]. Solemnly, and again like priests who have just sacrificed a victim, they kneel together and bathe their hands and swords in Caesar’s blood. Brutus exclaims:

The leader of this assault on history is, like many another reformer, a man of high idealism, who devoutly believes that the rest of the world is like himself. It was just to kill Caesar—so he persuades himself—because he was a great threat to freedom. It would not have been just to kill Antony, and he vetoed the idea. Even now, when the consequence of that decision has come back to face him in the shape of Antony’s servant, kneeling before him, he sees no reason to reconsider it. There are good grounds for what they have done, he says; Antony will hear them, and be satisfied. With Antony, who shortly arrives in person, he takes this line again: Our reasons are so full of good regard That were you, Antony, the son of Caesar You should be satisfied. [III. i. 224–26] With equal confidence in the rationality of man, he puts by Cassius’ fears of what Antony will do if allowed to address the people: ‘‘By your pardon; I will myself into the pulpit first / And show the reason of our Caesar’s death’’ [III. i. 235–37]. Here is a man so much a friend of Caesar’s that he is still speaking of him as ‘‘our

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Caesar,’’ so capable of rising to what he takes to be his duty that he has taken on the leadership of those who intend to kill him, so trusting of common decency that he expects the populace will respond to reason, and Antony to the obligation laid on him by their permitting him to speak. At such a man, one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry. The same mixture of feelings is likely to be stirring in us as Brutus speaks to the people in III. ii. As everybody knows, this is a speech in what used to be called the great liberal tradition, the tradition that assumed, as our American founding fathers did, that men in the mass are reasonable. It has therefore been made a prose oration, spare and terse in diction, tightly patterned in syntax so that it requires close attention, and founded, with respect to its argument, on three elements: the abstract sentiment of duty to the state (because he endangered Rome, Caesar had to be slain); the abstract sentiment of political justice (because he was ambitious, Caesar deserved his fall); and the moral authority of the man Brutus. As long as that moral authority is concretely before them in Brutus’ presence, the populace is impressed. But since they are not trained minds, and only trained minds respond accurately to abstractions, they do not understand the content of his argument at all, as one of them indicates by shouting, ‘‘Let him be Caesar!’’ [III. ii. 51]. What moves them is the obvious sincerity and the known integrity of the speaker; and when he finishes, they are ready to carry him off on their shoulders on that account alone, leaving Antony a vacant Forum. The fairmindedness of Brutus is thrilling but painful to behold as he calms this triumphal surge in his favor, urges them to stay and hear Antony, and then, in a moment very impressive dramatically as well as symbolically, walks off the stage, alone. We see then, if we have not seen before, the first answer to the question why the attack on history failed. It was blinded, as it so often has been, by the very idealism that impelled it. When Antony takes the rostrum, we begin to get a second answer. It has been said by somebody that in a school for demagogues this speech should be the whole curriculum. Antony himself describes its method when he observes in the preceding scene, apropos of the effect of Caesar’s dead body on the messenger from Octavius, ‘‘Passion, I see, is catching’’ [III. i. 283].

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Antony rests his case, not, like Brutus, on abstractions centering in the state and political justice, but on emotions centering in the individual listener. The first great crescendo of the speech, which culminates in the passage on Caesar’s wounds, appeals first to pity and then to indignation. The second one, culminating in the reading of Caesar’s will, appeals first to curiosity and greed and then to gratitude. The management of the will is particularly cunning: it is an item more concrete than any words could be, an actual tantalizing document that can be flashed before the eye . . . It is described, at first vaguely, as being of such a sort that they would honor Caesar for it. Then, closer home, as something which would show ‘‘how Caesar lov’d you’’ [III. ii. 141]. Then, with an undisguised appeal to self-interest, as a testament that will make them his ‘‘heirs.’’ The emotions aroused by this news enable Antony to make a final test of his ironical refrain about the ‘‘honorable men,’’ and finding the results all that he had hoped, he can come down now among the crowd as one of them, and appeal directly to their feelings by appealing to his own: ‘‘If you have tears to shed, prepare to shed them now’’ [III. ii. 169]. The success of this direct appeal to passion can be seen at its close. Where formerly we had a populace, now we have a mob. Since it is a mob, its mind can be sealed against any later seepage of rationality back into it by the insinuation that reasoning is always false anyway—simply a surface covering up private grudges, like the ‘‘reason’’ they have heard from Brutus; whereas from Antony himself, the plain blunt friend of Caesar, they are getting the plain blunt truth and (a favorite trick of politicians) only what they already know to be the truth. At about this point, it becomes impossible not to see that a second reason for the failure of the attack on history is what it left out of account—what all these Romans from the beginning, except Antony, have been trying to leave out of account: the phenomenon of feeling, the nonrational factor in men, in the world, in history itself—of which this blind infuriated mob is one kind of exemplification. Too secure in his own fancied suppression of the subrational, Brutus has failed altogether to reckon with its power. Thus he could seriously say to Antony in the passage I quoted earlier: Antony, even if you were ‘‘the son of Caesar / You should be satisfied,’’ as if the feeling of a son for a murdered

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any sort. With all their reasons, the conspirators and Caesar only carried out what the soothsayer foreknew. There is, in short, a determination in history, whether we call it natural or providential, which at least, helps to shape our ends, ‘‘rough new them how we will’’ [Hamlet, V. ii. 11]. One of the names of that factor in this play is Caesarism. Brutus put the point, all unconsciously, in that scene when the conspirators were gathered at his house. He said: We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar: And in the spirit of men there is no blood: O that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit. And not dismember Caesar! But, alas, Caesar must bleed for it. [II. i. 167–71] Then Caesar did bleed for it; but his spirit, as Brutus’ own remark should have told him, proved to be invulnerable. It was only set free by his assassination, and now, as Antony says, ‘‘ranging for revenge . . . Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice / Cry ‘Havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war’’ [III. i. 272–73].

Jonh Nettles as Marcus Brutus with Christopher Benjamin as the ghost of Caesar, in Act IV, scene iii, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1995 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

father could ever be ‘‘satisfied’’ by reasons. And thus, too, he could walk off the stage alone, urging the crowd to hear Antony, the very figure of embodied ‘‘reason,’’ unaware that only the irrational is catching. Meantime, the scene of the mob tearing Cinna the Poet to pieces simply for having the same name as one of the conspirators (III. iii) gives us our first taste of the chaos invoked by Antony when he stood alone over Caesar’s corpse. And as we consider that prediction and this mob, we are bound to realize that there is a third reason why the attack on history failed. As we have seen already, history is only partly responsive to noble motives, only partly responsive to rationality. Now we see—what Shakespeare hinted in the beginning with those two episodes of Calpurnia and the soothsayer—that it is only partly responsive to human influence of

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The rest of the play, I think, is self-explanatory. It is clear all through Acts IV and V that Brutus and Cassius are defeated before they begin to fight. Antony knows it and says so at V. i. Cassius knows it too. Cassius, an Epicurean in philosophy, and therefore one who has never heretofore believed in omens, now mistrusts his former rationalism: he suspects there may be something after all in those ravens, crows, and kites that wheel overhead. Brutus too mistrusts his rationalism. As a Stoic, his philosophy requires him to repudiate suicide, but he admits to Cassius that if the need comes he will repudiate philosophy instead. This, like Cassius’ statement, is an unconscious admission of the force of unreason in human affairs, an unreason that makes its presence felt again and again during the great battle. Cassius, for instance, fails to realize that Octavious ‘‘Is overthrown by noble Brutus’ power’’ [V. iii. 52], becomes the victim of a mistaken report of Titinius’ death, runs on his sword crying. ‘‘Caesar, thou are reveng’d’’ [V. iii. 45], and is greeted, dead, by Brutus, in words that make still clearer their defeat by history: ‘‘O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet! / Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords / In our own proper entrails’’ [V. iii. 94–6]. In the same vein, when it is Brutus’ turn to die, we learn that the ghost of Caesar has

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reappeared, and he thrusts the sword home, saying, ‘‘Caesar, now be still’’ [V. v. 50]. To come then to a brief summary. Though I shouldn’t care to be dogmatic about it, it seems clear to me that Shakespeare’s primary theme in Julius Caesar has to do with the always ambiguous impact between man and history. During the first half of the play, what we are chiefly conscious of is the human will as a force in history—men making choices, controlling events. Our typical scenes are I. ii, where a man is trying to make up his mind; or II. i, where a man first reaches a decision and then, with his fellows, lays plans to implement it; or II. ii, where we have Decius Brutus persuading Caesar to decide to go to the senate house; or III. i and ii, where up through the assassination, and even up through Antony’s speech, men are still, so to speak, impringing on history, moulding it to their conscious will. But then comes a change. Though we still have men in action trying to mould their world (or else we would have no play at all), one senses a real shift in the direction of the impact. We begin to feel the insufficiency of noble aims, for history is also consequences; the insufficiency of reason and rational expectation, for the ultimate consequences of an act in history are unpredictable, and usually, by all human standards, illogical as well; and finally, the insufficiency of the human will itself, for there is always something to be reckoned with that is non-human and inscrutable. . . . Accordingly, in the second half of the play, our typical scenes are those like III. iii, when Antony has raised something that is no longer under his control; or like IV. i, where we see men acting as if, under the control of expediency or necessity or call it what you will, they no longer had wills of their own but prick down the names of nephews and brothers indiscriminately for slaughter; or like IV. iii and all the scenes thereafter, where we are constantly made to feel that Cassius and Brutus are in the hands of something bigger than they know. In this light, we can see readily enough why it is that Shakespeare gave Julius Caesar that double character. The human Caesar who has human ailments and is a human friend is the Caesar that can be killed. The marmoreal Caesar, the everlasting Big Brother—the Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Peron, Stalin, Kruschev, to mention only a handful of his more recent incarnations—that Caesar is the

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ANTONY’S FAMOUS REJOINDER IS A TOUR DE FORCE WHICH COMPLETES SHAKESPEARE’S PICTURE OF THE KIND OF PERSUASION MOST EFFECTIVE WITH THE CITIZENRY.’’

one who must repeatedly be killed but never dies, because he is in you, and you, and you, and me. Every classroom is a Rome, and there is no reason for any pupil, when he studies Julius Caesar, to imagine that this is ancient history. Source: Maynard Mack, ‘‘Teaching Drama: Julius Caesar,’’ in Essays on the Teaching of English: Reports of the Yale Conferences on the Teachings of English, edited by Edward J. Gordon and Edward S. Noyes, AppletonCentury-Crofts, Inc., 1960, pp. 320–36.

Brents Stirling Stirling examines the extent to which Shakespeare relied upon his source material in his presentation of the Roman populace in Julius Caesar. The critic notes that although Shakespeare’s portrait of the commoners as fickle, unreasonable, and opportunistic generally echoes Plutarch’s lives of Caesar and Brutus, the dramatist also elaborated upon Plutarch’s account, notably in Act III, scene II, when Brutus and Antony deliver their funeral orations for Caesar, and in Act III, scene III, when the citizens interrogate the poet Cinna. While the effect of the changes in the first of these scenes is to accentuate the instability of the mob, Stirling maintains, Shakespeare did not deliberately alter his source to further denigrate the populace; rather, the changes were made for dramatic effect and, moreover, were warranted by Plutarch’s descriptions of the mob in other episodes of his narratives. The critic states that the second of these scenes, not recorded by Plutarch, reveals an Elizabethan understanding of mob behavior in its emphasis on the hostility and irrationality of class conflict; similarly, Brutus and Antony’s funeral orations, only briefly outlined by Plutarch, lend political realism to the tragedy. In Julius Caesar the self-interest and sorry instability of the Roman populace turn the tide against Brutus and the other conspirators. Although their ill fortune materializes at

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Philippi, the climactic change from good to ill for the conspirators occurs in Act III with the shift against them of mob sentiment. Accordingly, it will not surprise those familiar with Shakespeare’s methods of exposition that the note of plebeian stupidity and mutability is struck powerfully in the opening scene of the play. There the disorderly citizens, who have decked themselves in their best ‘‘to make holiday, to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph’’ [I. i. 30–1], are denounced by their own tribunes for ingratitude and change of heart. After the cynical speech by Marullus on the crowd’s erstwhile devotion to Caesar’s adversary, Flavius pronounces chorally upon its exit: See, whether their basest metal be not moved; They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness. [I. i. 61–2] The next we hear of the Roman mob is from Casca who, in the well-known lines of Scene 2, reports its reception of Caesar’s refusal of the crown: . . . and still as he refus’d it, the rabblement hooted and clapp’d their chapp’d hands and threw up their sweaty nightcaps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refus’d the crown, that it had almost choked Caesar, for he swounded and fell down at it; and for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air. [I. ii. 243–50]

The next appearance of the citizenry is in the second scene of Act III. After the killing of Caesar in the previous scene, Brutus and Cassius enter with a throng of citizens who are given the first line, ‘‘We will be satisfied; let us be satisfied’’ [III. ii. 1]. The citizens divide, some to hear Cassius, others to hear Brutus. The honest and highly epigrammatic speech of Brutus quickly converts the suspicious crowd, and they clamor, ‘‘Let him be Caesar’’; ‘‘Caesar’s better parts shall be crown’d in Brutus’’ [III. ii. 51–2]. The uproar of impulsive approval is so loud that Brutus must implore silence so that Antony may speak, and as Antony goes into the pulpit there are cries, ‘‘’Twere best he speak no harm of Brutus here’’ and ‘‘This Caesar was a tyrant’’ [III. ii. 68–9]. In complete contrast with Brutus, Antony is no expounder but rather an evoker who pulls, one by one and each at the strategic moment, all the stops of the organ. Some forty lines following a self-effacing start, his nostalgic reminiscences

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of Caesar and his apparent emotional breakdown have the citizens murmuring in his favor. His mention of Caesar’s will and quick disavowal of intent to read it increase the murmur to a clamor, in the midst of which he produces Caesar’s bloody mantle; the clamor then becomes a frenzy as the citizenry cry, ‘‘About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!’’ [III. ii. 205]. Caesar’s wounds, ‘‘poor dumb mouths’’ [III. ii. 225] are given tongues as the mob is tensed to the critical pitch. In their upheaval the commoners forget the will, and Antony, with what seems cold-blooded cynicism, calls them back to hear Caesar’s bequests in their favor. After that there is no check which can be put on them as they rush through the city with firebrands; significantly enough, they accomplish only irrelevant violence in killing Cinna the poet who, for want of a better reason, is torn for his bad verses. In his chapter on the source of Julius Caesar, [in Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and Their Background], M. W. MacCallum is not specifically concerned with Shakespeare’s presentation of Rome’s unreasonable populace. At the outset, however, he does discuss the peculiar shiftiness of the mob’s bullying questions addressed to the poet Cinna. MacCallum observes that none of this is in Plutarch and that it is Shakespeare’s realistic contribution based upon intuitive understanding of the behavior of bravoes who have run down a victim. This is valuable. As a short scene in which the bland sadistic stare and the irrelevant retort are thrust upon an innocent who tries to explain himself, the episode deserves more space than MacCallum devotes to it. In its forty lines are packed such an awareness of the hostility and cogent unreason found in class conflict that the scene could be called modern in all senses, sober and ironical, of the term. For in Shakespeare’s conception there is surely none of the wistful expectation that aroused masses will act objectively; the scene rests upon a knowledge of such behavior in crisis which is hard to explain other than by the dramatist’s intuitive observation. While he comments briefly upon this bit of realism as a factor not found in Shakespeare’s source, MacCallum is silent upon a similar and far more elaborate transmutation of source material. It is well known that the speeches of Brutus and Antony in the funeral scene are Shakespeare’s own, but no discussion of altered sources would be adequate which failed to note the political realism which underlies these

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additions. From Plutarch Shakespeare certainly derived Brutus’s high-mindedness and his tactical error in allowing Antony to speak, but there is no implication, in the source, of the kind of speech Brutus made. It has the laconic and functional sparseness of the Gettysburg Address. Tragically, however, it is not delivered as a tribute to men who died in battle, but as justification of a political coup and as an appeal for mass support. Shakespeare conceives of Brutus as an idealist who believes that facts honestly and simply explained are politically adequate. Because of his concern not to sully himself and his pains to represent his opposition fairly, Brutus wins support only until Antony begins to explore crowd responses. And although Shakespeare may not have intended it, Brutus’s speech exhibits perfectly the egocentrism of those who make a religion of objectivity. The scorn of emotionality suggested by it, the conviction implied in it that orderly analysis is pre-eminent, and the perfectionistic compactness of it as a composition, all suggest a self-regard by the inward eye which may be the bliss of solitude, but which is fatal in an emergency requiring audience response. Antony’s famous rejoinder is a tour de force which completes Shakespeare’s picture of the kind of persuasion most effective with the citizenry. Plutarch does give the prescription for this speech, but only in formula. ‘‘When [Antony] saw that the people were very glad and desirous also to hear Caesar spoken of, and his praises uttered, he mingled his oration with lamentable words, and by amplifying of matters did greatly move their hearts and affections.’’ The gist of this is the essence of Antony’s oration. Antony, above all, is an analyst of audience temper; he first finds what his listeners want to hear and then wanders among the bypaths of their ‘‘hearts and affections.’’ Next comes the apparent admission against interest: ‘‘If it [Caesar’s ambition] were so, it was a grievous fault’’ [III. ii. 79]. Now occurs a hint of the common touch, ‘‘When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept’’ [III. ii. 91]. Then, just as Antony is beginning to warm to his subject, comes his first exploratory halt; apparently inarticulate with emotion, he must pause till his heart, ‘‘in the coffin there with Caesar,’’ [III. ii. 106], comes back to him. The commoners begin to mutter and Antony, sensing it, advances to the

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next strategic point: he mentions Caesar’s will but disclaims all intention of capitalizing upon material interest. Another exploratory pause, and as the citizens clamor for the will Antony knows that he can throw caution away. His subsequent move is to produce the concrete object, the evocative thing which men can touch and see, Caesar’s gown with the bloody rents in it. But first he recalls old times and old campaigns: I remember The first time ever Caesar put it on; ’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent That day he overcame the Nervii. [III. ii. 170–73] And now, in a climax of mingled sentiment and abuse, he holds the grisly thing up for the crowd to see. Next, and in clinching employment of the concrete objective device, he drives the crowd’s attention directly to the hacked body of Caesar, and there is no holding them. They even forget the will which Antony, who has saved material interest as the most telling and final point, must call them back to hear. This is not a pretty example of how to manipulate the electorate, and it is even less so when we perceive two ingredients which do not occur at any one point, but are pervasive. In contrast with the understatement of Brutus, who tells the crowd briefly why he killed his best friend, Antony’s irony, with its six-fold repetition of the ‘‘honorable men’’ phrase, evolves steadily into the most blatant kind of sarcasm. He knows the inadequacy of quiet irony; he also knows the value of repetition and how to use it climactically. In evaluating Shakespeare’s use of Plutarch in this episode, we have not only the demagoguery of Antony’s speech to consider but also a portrait of the populace itself. Concerning the latter, the evidence is conflicting. As the account in Plutarch is followed, it would seem at first that Shakespeare had made a gratuitous and major change in order to emphasize the instability of crowd responses. All readers of Shakespeare know that in his play the citizenry plumps solidly for Brutus, only to change over suddenly at Antony’s provocation. Plutarch’s account of Marcus Brutus, however, runs entirely counter to this: When the people saw him [Brutus] in the pulpit, although they were a multitude of rakehells of all sorts, and had a good will to make some stir:

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yet being ashamed to do it for the reverence they bare unto Brutus, they kept silence to hear what he would say. When Brutus began to speak, they gave him quiet audience: howbeit immediately after, they showed that they were not at all contented with the murder. For when another called Cinna [the conspirator] would have spoken, and began to accuse Caesar, they fell into a great uproar among them and marvelously reviled him.

The account of the same event in Plutarch’s life of Caesar depicts the citizenry as being moved by Brutus neither one way nor the other. There are two reasons, however, why this change taken by itself cannot be relied upon to show a transmutation by Shakespeare with intention of casting discredit upon the populace. The first of these is that there is dramatic reason for the change: it is simply more effective to show a populace swayed first one way and then the other, and the story would be flat without it. Perhaps this principle, if extended, would also account, upon a purely dramatic basis, for the cynical virtuosity exhibited in Antony’s speech . . . A second reason why little can be made of Shakespeare’s change in this episode is that although Plutarch does not exhibit a fickle citizenry first in agreement with Brutus and immediately afterward with Antony, he does elsewhere and generally give clear hints of its instability. In the life of Marcus Brutus, and but a few pages beyond the excerpt just quoted, occurs this description of the populace just after Antony’s winning of their favor: ‘‘The people growing weary now of Antonius’ pride and insolency, who ruled all things in manner with absolute power: they desired that Brutus might return again.’’ Beyond the specific data described in the last few pages, there are some general notions in Plutarch which bear upon the problem and find their way into Shakespeare’s adaptation of the episode. There is material throughout which establishes the opportunistic allegiance of the populace to Caesar. Cato, for example, feared ‘‘insurrection of the poor needy persons, which were they that put all their hope in Caesar.’’ Caesar, moreover, ‘‘began to put forth laws meeter for a seditious Tribune than for a Consul: because by them he preferred the division of lands, and the distributing of corn to every citizen, gratis, to please them withal.’’ The people are described, however, as antagonistic to the idea of Caesar as emperor, and as

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making outcries of joy when he refused the crown. And in direct line with Shakespeare’s conception of a Rome plagued with popular insurrection, we learn from Plutarch that Rome itself also was immediately filled with the flowing repair of all the people their neighbors thereabouts, which came hither from all parties like droves of cattle, that there was neither officer nor magistrate that could any more command them by authority, neither by any persuasion of reason bridle such a confused and disorderly multitude: so that Rome had in manner destroyed itself for lack of rule and order.

Plutarch, in fact, declares that ‘‘men of deep judgment and learning’’ were so concerned with the ‘‘fury and madness’’ of the people that they ‘‘thought themselves happy if the commonwealth were no worse troubled than with the absolute state of a monarchy and sovereign lord to govern them.’’ Unlike his story of Coriolanus, Plutarch’s account of Caesar, and to some extent his story of Brutus, provided Shakespeare with a ready-made aversion to the populace which amounts to contempt. Apparently unnoticed by source studies, which have been more concerned with story and characterization than with social bias, is a brief passage in the life of Marcus Brutus which probably furnished the cue for Shakespeare’s opening scene. This scene is begun by Flavius with a denunciation of the commoners, containing the line, ‘‘What! know you not, being mechanical . . . ’’ [I. i. 2–3]. In the scene, moreover, six of the seven responses from the citizenry are made by a cobbler. The suggestion for this may well have been words in Plutarch addressed by Cassius to Brutus: ‘‘What! knowest thou not that thou art Brutus? Thinkest thou that they be cobblers, tapsters, or suchlike base mechanical people, that write these bills and scrolls . . . ?’’ Whether the passage suggested part of Shakespeare’s opening scene or not, it is typical of the social point of view toward commoners which was available to Shakespeare in his source data. Finally, in a source-play comparison involving Julius Caesar it should be made plain that Plutarch supplied Shakespeare with the flagrant and literally inflammatory action of the mob which follows Antony’s oration. But when they had opened Caesar’s testament and found a liberal legacy of money bequeathed unto every citizen of Rome, and that they saw his body (which was brought into the market place) all bemangled with gashes of swords: then

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there was no order to keep the multitude and common people quiet. . . . Then . . . they took the firebrands, and went unto their houses that had slain Caesar, to set them afire. Others also ran up and down the city to see if they could meet with any of them, to cut them in pieces.

Directly after this comes Plutarch’s description of the mobbing of Cinna the poet. (pp. 27–35) Source: Brents Stirling, ‘‘The Plays: Julius Caesar,’’ in The Populace in Shakespeare, Columbia University Press, 1949, pp. 25–35.

SOURCES Bloom, Allan, ‘‘The Morality of the Pagan Hero: Julius Caesar,’’ in Shakespeare’s Politics, University of Chicago Press, 1964, pp. 75–112. Dean, Leonard F., ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Julius Caesar: A Collection of Critical Essays, PrenticeHall, 1968, p. 120. Dzelzainis, Martin, ‘‘Shakespeare and Political Thought,’’ in A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan, Blackwell Publishers, 1999, pp. 100–16. Hunter, G. K., ‘‘Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy,’’ in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 25, 1997, pp. 123–41. ‘‘Julius Caesar,’’ in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, 3rd ed., edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 229–32. Knights, L. C., ‘‘Shakespeare and Political Wisdom: A Note on the Personalism of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus,’’ in Sewanee Review, Vol. 61, No. 1, Winter 1953, pp. 43–55. Shakespeare, William, Julius Caesar, edited by David Bevington, Bantam Books, 1988.

FURTHER READING Ackroyd, Peter, Shakespeare: The Biography, Nan A. Talese, 2005. Ackroyd recounts the life of Shakespeare while weaving in details about life in the Elizabethan era and the effect of live theater on the populace. Using old information in new ways, Ackroyd brings to this telling of the bard’s life a refreshing point of view—that of an enthusiast rather than that of a scholar. Bonjour, Adrien, The Structure of ‘‘Julius Caesar,’’ Liverpool University Press, 1958. Bonjour analyzes the structure, themes, and imagery of Julius Caesar, identifying the

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play’s central issue as the ‘‘twofold theme’’ of political and personal crisis. He maintains that the drama has two heroes, Caesar and Brutus, who alternately evoke praise and blame until, at the end, the audience’s sympathies are divided. Frye, Roland Mushat, ‘‘Rhetoric and Poetry in Julius Caesar,’’ in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 37, No. 1, February 1951, pp. 41–8. Frye examines Antony’s funeral oration, outlining why it is effective both as poetry and as rhetoric. Frye also explores the continuing appeal of the speech. Goddard, Harold C., ‘‘Julius Caesar,’’ in The Meaning of Shakespeare, University of Chicago Press, 1951, pp. 307–30. Goddard asserts that the central political theme of Julius Caesar, that violent opposition to imperialism only breeds further tyranny, is dramatized through the character of Brutus. Goddard distinguishes between the ‘‘true’’ Brutus, whose innocence and wisdom are symbolized by his relationships with Lucius and Portia, and the ‘‘false’’ Brutus, who, in convincing himself of his own moral infallibility, demonstrates his kinship with the imperious Caesar. Humphreys, Arthur, ed., Introduction to Julius Caesar, Clarendon Press, 1984. This volume offers a broad overview of several issues associated with Julius Caesar. Humphreys provides sections on the play’s composition date, stage history, language, and imagery, as well as on Shakespeare’s sources, his political attitudes, and his treatment of Rome and its values. Levin, Richard A., ‘‘Brutus: ‘Noblest Roman of Them All,’’’ in Ball State University Forum, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 1982, pp. 15–25. Levin maintains that the audience’s judgment of Brutus must be based on the notions of friendship and loyalty. Levin questions whether Brutus is capable of true friendship, distinguishing him from the other conspirators through his willingness to betray a man for whom he has expressed deep affection. Brutus’s lack of knowledge about friendship is his undoing, Levin concludes, for he underestimates the depth of Antony’s loyalty to Caesar. Platt, Michael, ‘‘Rome, Empire and Aftermath: Julius Caesar,’’ in Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare, rev. ed., University Press of America, 1983, pp. 185–257. Platt focuses on a wide range of political issues associated with Julius Caesar, including the influence of Caesar’s rise to power on his Roman friends and followers, the justifiability

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of Caesar’s assassination, and Brutus’s motivation for leading the conspiracy against Caesar.

that humankind is incapable of controlling its own destiny.

Taylor, Myron, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the Irony of History,’’ in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 3, Summer 1973, pp. 301–308. Taylor contrasts Cassius’s and Caesar’s philosophical points of view and argues that Shakespeare’s purpose in the play was to show

Velz, John W., ‘‘Cassius as a ‘Great Observer,’’’ in Modern Language Review, Vol. 68, No. 2, April 1973, pp. 256–59. Velz discusses Cassius’s shrewd powers of observation in relation to his pessimism and his ability to distinguish appearance from reality.

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King Lear 1606

King Lear was first acted on December 26, 1606, St. Stephen’s Night, by Shakespeare’s acting company, The King’s Men, before King James I and the court at Whitehall; this is known because, on November 26, 1607, the play was entered along with that identifying information on the Stationers’ Register, a journal kept by the Stationers’ Company of London in which the printing rights to dramatic works were chronicled. In 1608, the First Quarto of the play was published by Nathaniel Butter who, along with John Busby, had made the entry in the Stationers’ Register. The 1608 Quarto is called the ‘‘Pied Bull’’ Quarto because Nathaniel Butter’s shop, where the Quarto was sold was in ‘‘Pauls Church-yard at the sign of the Pide Bull neere St. Austins Gate.’’ There are twelve copies of the Pied Bull Quarto extant today, but they are not uniform because of the way proofreading was done. Sheets were read as the quartos were printed, resulting in the separate volumes having different corrected and uncorrected sheets bound together. A 1619 edition of the First Quarto was printed, although falsely dated 1608, by William Jaggard for Thomas Pavier, reprinting one of the original 1608 editions. In 1623, King Lear appeared in the Folio volume of Shakespeare’s work that John Heminges and Henry Condell, his fellow actors in The King’s Men, published in tribute to him. The Folio text varies significantly from the First Quarto texts. The Folio text has an additional 300 lines that the first Quarto texts do

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not have and the Folio text is missing 100 lines found in the Quarto editions. The 1623 Folio is thought to have been printed from one of the 1608 Quartos that had been corrected and emended, probably by consultation with a manuscript quite close to an original by Shakespeare, perhaps his company’s prompt book of the play. Authoritative contemporary editions of King Lear are consolidations and emendations of the two texts, using the Folio, adding the lines from the Quarto that it lacks, and comparing readings in the two texts when there is confusion about which is better. In 1988, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor printed both Quarto and Folio texts individually in The Oxford Shakespeare, arguing that they were two substantially different plays, each by Shakespeare, with the Folio text being a revised version of the Quarto text. There are a number of sources for the story of King Lear. The primary source is an earlier play, probably dating from around 1594, with which Shakespeare was undoubtedly acquainted, called The True Chronicle History of King Leir. The story of Lear and his daughters, however, can also be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin work, History of the Kings of England (c.1136), in the collection The Mirror for Magistrates (1574), in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), in William Warner’s Albions England (1586), and in Edmund Spenser’s epic The Fairie Queene (1596). The source for the Gloucester plot is found in Book II, Chapter 10 of Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia (1590). Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures (1603) is the source for much of Edgar’s mad talk and references to demons. King Lear has a strange performance history. In 1642, the English Parliament, politically at odds with King Charles I, and Puritanical in its religious inclination, ordered the theaters closed in London. And closed they remained during the English Commonwealth which the Puritan government established in 1649 under Oliver Cromwell. It was not until 1661, a year after the restoration of the monarchy, when Charles II ordered them to be re-opened. When the theaters reopened, the theater, as well as English culture itself, was quite different from the way it had been in Shakespeare’s day. Boys no longer acted the parts of women—women did. The stage was no longer a bare stage—something like a platform at an inn yard—but a proscenium stage adapted to using, even depending upon, scenery.

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Most significantly, with the restoration of the monarchy, the grim universe of King Lear, with its plot about the defeat of a king, did not fit the official temper of the time. Although it was presented on the stage in its original form a few times, in 1681, Nahum Tate revised King Lear giving it a happy ending. Lear and Cordelia do not die; Lear is restored to the throne and Cordelia marries Edgar. The part of the Fool is excised completely. This version of King Lear held the stage in place of Shakespeare’s version for a 150 years, until 1834, when William Charles Macready at the Drury Lane in London performed Shakespeare’s unaltered original play.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 As King Lear begins, Kent and Gloucester are talking about ‘‘the division of the kingdom’’ and apparently about competing interests regarding that division. Then, pointing to a younger man, Edmund, who has been quiet, Kent asks Gloucester if he is not his son. Gloucester introduces him to Kent, saying he acknowledges him brazenly now for he was often ashamed to do so. Gloucester lets Kent know that Edmund was conceived out of wedlock, noting coarsely how enjoyable his mother had been. Gloucester adds that he does have an older son who is legitimate. Although Gloucester says he loves his sons equally, his behavior might indicate otherwise: Edmund has been away from home for nine years before now and soon will be sent away again. Their conversation is interrupted by the entrance of the court. The king, Lear, commands Gloucester to escort the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy into his presence. Lear then turns to the business of the gathering, and the first lines of the play come into focus. Lear intends to abdicate and turn over his power to his three daughters and their husbands. He wishes to keep for himself only a train of 100 knights and all the ceremonial honors due a king. Otherwise, he explains, he wishes to shake off all earthly cares and ‘‘crawl toward death.’’ His plan is to divide his kingdom in three and give a section to each of his daughters. The ceremonial part of this transfer of power, Lear explains, will entail a profession of love from each of his daughters telling the extent of her love for him. The eldest, Goneril, speaks with stilted eloquence

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Cordelia, Burgundy, Lear, Kent, Cornwall, Regan, Goneril, and Albany, Act I, scene i

about the hardly-describable depth and breadth of her love. Lear offers her her portion of his kingdom. Regan, Lear’s second daughter, speaks much as her sister had. She says, however, that her love is more concentrated and intense than her sister’s. Lear presents her, in turn, with her section of the kingdom. While her sisters are speaking, Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia, makes asides to the audience indicating that she will not be able to speak with their oiliness, that her love is not lightly to be spoken of, but that she is sure her love for her father is no less than theirs. When Lear turns his attention, in front of his entire court, to her and asks her to recite her devotion, telling her how dear she is to him, she disappoints his expectations and says that she can say nothing. Astonished he repeats the word, ‘‘nothing,’’ questioningly and she affirms it. Enraged, he banishes her from his sight and divides her portion between her sisters. When the Earl of Kent, whose conversation with Gloucester and his

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bastard son Edmund had opened the scene, intervenes, telling Lear he is making a mistake and that Cordelia does not love him less than her sisters, the enraged Lear repulses Kent’s counsel and banishes him from his kingdom upon pain of death. When the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy are led in and told that Cordelia is now dowerless, has no inheritance, Burgundy withdraws his offer for her hand in marriage, but the King of France willingly accepts her, stating that, in herself, Cordelia is a dowry. When the court withdraws, Cordelia bids farewell to her sisters, voices anxiety about how they will care for Lear, and departs for France. Goneril and Regan, in a private conversation, confirm for the audience the suspicion that they have spoken flattery to their father and have no love for him. They talk about his instability, his rashness, his lack of self-knowledge, and how they must watch out for and deal with unruly behavior from him.

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Act 1, Scene 2 Edmund, Gloucester’s bastard son, who had seemed so personable and courtly in his few words to Kent in the first scene, enters alone. In a soliloquy addressed to the goddess Nature, whom he professes to serve, he expresses his outrage at being denied all the rights and privileges that sons enjoy because he is a bastard. He takes an inventory of his attributes and proudly finds that there is nothing inferior about him in mind or body to a man conceived in wedlock. He then addresses his brother in his imagination saying that he [Edmund] must have his [Edgar’s] inheritance, and that he has a plot devised in order to accomplish his ends. Edmund’s cogitations are interrupted by his father’s entrance. Gloucester is troubled and speaks of the recent ill-occurrences at court. Seeing that Edmund is reading a letter, Gloucester asks what news it conveys. A little too openly making a show of what he wants to appear he is doing surreptitiously, Edmund pockets the letter and says over-calmly, as if trying to conceal his nervousness, that there is no news. Gloucester’s curiosity is whetted and he asks why Edmund then made such an effort to hide the letter. Finally, Edmund relents and, with seeming reluctance, gives his father the letter that looks like it has come from Edgar. Gloucester reads it. It is an invitation to Edmund from Edgar, which Edmund has forged, to join in a conspiracy to murder Gloucester and share his wealth. Questioned about the letter, Edmund confesses with apparent reluctance that Edgar has previously spoken to him about such things as are in the letter. But he advises his father not to be too hasty in judging his brother and offers to ‘‘place you where you shall hear us confer of this,’’ and hear with his own ears what Edgar’s intentions are. Gloucester leaves, disturbed and attributing the ill that seems to be settling on the court— Lear’s trouble with his daughter, his own with his son, Kent’s banishment—to recent solar and lunar eclipses. Alone, Edmund mocks his father’s superstitious attribution of human misfortune to cosmic forces. He declares that he is the architect of himself; his fate, independent of his horoscope. When he sees Edgar approaching, Edmund pretends to be in deep melancholic contemplation. Edgar asks what is preoccupying him. Edmund echoes what Gloucester had said, wondering what next the current eclipses will bring. Edgar asks good naturedly how long Edmund has been a believer

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in astrology, but rather than answering, Edmund asks him when last Edgar saw their father, if he parted from him on good terms, had he seen any indication that Gloucester was upset with him. When Edgar tells him that nothing seemed amiss, Edmund informs him that Gloucester is in a rage against him. Edgar speculates that ‘‘some villain’’ has wronged him, and Edmund with concealed irony tells him that is his fear, too. Showing great concern for his brother, Edmund instructs him to hide in his [Edmund’s] lodgings where he will bring their father so that Edgar can overhear a conversation between them. He tells Edgar, furthermore, to ‘‘go armed.’’ Alone, Edmund congratulates himself on his father’s gullibility, his brother’s noble and unsuspecting nature, and his own power to fashion his own destiny.

Act 1, Scene 3 Goneril complains to her Steward, Oswald, of her father’s behavior, claiming that he and his knights have become ‘‘riotous’’ and that Lear is contentious. She resents that Lear still wishes to exercise his authority. She orders Oswald to treat her father and his knights with disrespect, saying that it is perfectly all right, even desirable, if he provokes a quarrel. She adds that if Lear does not like how he is treated, he can go stay with Regan, who, Goneril adds, agrees with her about the treatment of their father.

Act 1, Scene 4 Determined to continue to serve Lear rather than go into exile, Kent appears in disguise. Lear enters commanding one of his attendants to make sure his dinner is ready and that he will not be kept waiting. Noticing Kent, Lear asks him who he is and what he wants. Kent tells him he is a plain, honest and loyal man, neither too young nor too old, who wishes to serve him. Lear accepts his service provisionally. As they speak, Goneril’s steward, Oswald, passes by and Lear asks him where Goneril is. Disrespectfully, Oswald ignores him and leaves the stage. One of Lear’s knights follows him and returns saying that Oswald said that Goneril was not well and adds that it seems that Lear is not being treated with the affection, kindness, or respect he has come to expect. Lear is grateful to him for giving voice to what he himself has noticed. And he calls for his jester, the Fool. The knight tells him that since Cordelia has gone to France, the Fool has been greatly dejected. Lear is pained to hear what he has noticed himself and sends the knight

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to tell Goneril that Lear wishes to speak to her. As the knight leaves the stage, Oswald, the steward who has just slighted Lear, re-enters. When Lear asks him as a reprimand if Oswald knows who he is, disrespectfully Oswald answers, ‘‘My lady’s father.’’ Lear is angered by his rudeness and strikes him. Oswald protests that he will ‘‘not be strucken,’’ at which point Kent trips him. Lear is delighted, thanks him and accepts him as his servant. At this moment, the Fool enters and says that he will hire Kent, too, and that he ought to take the Fool’s cap because he is a fool to follow one ‘‘that’s out of favor.’’ Taunting Lear and talking backwards, the Fool says Lear has banished two of his daughters and given the third a blessing. The Fool continues in bitter jests to express his own and Lear’s grief. When Lear challenges him for calling him Fool, the Fool retorts that he has given away all his other titles. When Goneril arrives, Lear asks her why she is frowning. The Fool points out Lear once did not have to worry about whether she frowned or not. Goneril rebukes the Fool and complains to Lear that his train is composed of riotous knights and demands that he reduce their number. In his astonishment at the change that has come over Goneril since her profession of love for him, Lear wonders who he is and who Goneril is, for, the way she is acting, she cannot be his daughter and the way he is being treated, he cannot possibly be the king he thought he was. In a rage, he demands his horses be saddled for him to set out for Regan’s house, where he believes he will be better treated. When Goneril’s husband, Albany, enters, he tries to placate the king and admonishes his wife when she argues that she fears Lear’s train poses a threat to their safety. She ignores her husband and is cold to her father. Lear begins to realize he was mistaken to find fault with Cordelia and banish her. In rage he curses and threatens Goneril. She maintains her composure. And Lear, in his fury, begins to feel his impotence. When Lear leaves for Regan’s castle, Goneril sends Oswald ahead with a letter informing her of what has gone on and encouraging her to adopt the same policy towards Lear that Goneril has.

Act 1, Scene 5 Lear sends Kent ahead with letters for Regan. Kent departs and Lear is alone with the Fool, who continues to tease and chide him, but Lear begins to sense the depths of his troubles. As the Fool

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banters, Lear says to himself, ‘‘I did her wrong,’’ and the audience knows he means Cordelia. As the scene ends, Lear is praying that he not go mad.

Act 2, Scene 1 At Gloucester’s castle, Edmund learns from one of Gloucester’s men that Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, will be arriving and that there is talk of war between Cornwall and Albany. Alone on stage, Edmund considers that their arrival can be used to advance his own plot against his brother, Edgar, who is hiding in Edmund’s lodging. Edmund warns Edgar that he better flee, now, undercover of night, advising him that Cornwall is on his way and questioning whether Edgar has spoken against him. Edgar is sure he has said nothing. Edmund then says that he sees Gloucester coming and that he must draw his sword against Edgar and Edgar must seem to defend himself and flee. As Edgar does flee, Edmund calls after him as if trying to catch him, ‘‘Yield! Come before my father.’’ And before Gloucester arrives, Edmund wounds himself in the arm to make it look as if Edgar had done it. Gloucester enters, demands where Edgar, ‘‘the villain,’’ he calls him, is. Edmund tells him he fled, shows the wound and says that Edgar inflicted it when Edmund refused to participate in Gloucester’s murder. Edmund adds that when he reproached Edgar for his lack of filial devotion, and threatened to inform Gloucester of his plot, Edgar called him a bastard with no possessions or rights whom no one would believe. Gloucester promises to make Edmund his heir and sends servants to find and seize Edgar. Regan and Cornwall arrive and commiserate with Gloucester over the news of Edgar’s apparent betrayal. Regan emphasizes that Edgar is Lear’s godson in an effort to discredit both of them and asks if Edgar were not in fact a ‘‘companion with the riotous knights / That tended upon my father.’’ When Gloucester answers that he does not know, Edmund intervenes to say that Edgar ‘‘was of that consort.’’ It is then that Regan notices him and understands that he is an ally. She asserts that Edgar’s companionship with her father’s knights naturally would corrupt him and complains about their behavior. Gloucester talks more of his grief and Edmund’s virtue. Cornwall praises Edmund, and Regan, once more commiserating with Gloucester, tells him they have come for his advice since there has been a quarrel

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between Lear and Goneril, and she (Regan) prefers to meet her father away from home.

Act 2, Scene 2 Kent disguised as Caius, and Oswald, messengers from Lear and from Goneril, arrive simultaneously at Gloucester’s. When Oswald asks Kent where they may put their horses, Kent begins a quarrel with him, insults him, and finally draws his sword, challenging him to fight. Oswald shrinks from the challenge and cries out for help. Kent, angered by what he sees as cowardice in Oswald, who had been so bold in his impudence to Lear, beats him. Edmund, Gloucester, Regan and Cornwall rush in. Edmund, with sword drawn, orders them parted. The company demand an account from the men Regan recognizes as the messengers from Lear and Goneril. In narrating what happened, Oswald appears the victim. Kent, still hot with anger, speaks bluntly and insults his interrogators. Cornwall orders Kent put in the stocks till noon. Regan insists it be all night. Gloucester begs them not to put the king’s messenger in the stocks, arguing that, although Kent is at fault, the punishment is an insult to Kent’s master, the king, who himself will correct him. Regan retorts that her sister, too, may take offense at her servant being ‘‘abused’’ and ‘‘assaulted’’ when he is carrying out her business. When they are alone, Gloucester commiserates with Kent (although he does not know the messenger is Kent). Kent, for his part, is calm. Alone in the stocks, he reads a letter from Cordelia, who has heard of the troubles and who knows that Kent is still serving her father in disguise. Before falling asleep, Kent addresses the goddess Fortune, who is always pictured with a wheel, and beseeches Fortune to ‘‘Smile once more, turn thy wheel’’ and bring better times.

Act 2, Scene 3 The scene changes to a place in the woods where Edgar has been hiding. He speaks to the audience saying that he has been hunted and has managed to escape. Now he will strip himself of his identity and his clothing, begrime himself with earth, wound and scratch his flesh and go about in the guise of a madman, Poor Tom.

Act 2, Scene 4 Lear arrives at Gloucester’s castle, puzzled. He has been to Regan’s castle and not found her at home. But why, he wonders, did she not send back his messenger informing him of that? And then he

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sees Kent in the stocks. It is another blow to his dignity and he cannot believe it. Kent explains what has happened, providing the audience and readers a clear sequence of the events that have been going on in the previous scenes, particularly the itinerary of the characters. Kent went to Cornwall and Regan’s castle with letters from Lear. At the same time, Oswald came with letters from Goneril. Seeing the letters, Regan set out immediately for Gloucester’s and told the messengers to follow. Oswald and Kent then met, quarreled, and Kent was put in the stocks. When Lear asks to see Regan and Cornwall, Gloucester informs him that they refuse to speak with him. Lear rages at Gloucester, thinks better of it, but rages again when he again looks at Kent in the stocks. Gloucester goes to speak with Regan and Cornwall again, and this time they do come out to meet him. Lear tries to believe that Regan is still true to him and her profession of love. Quickly he learns it is not so and that she is indeed ‘‘made of that self mettle as my sister.’’ (act 1, scene 1) As they are speaking with Lear, who demands to know who put his servant in the stocks, Goneril arrives. The sight of his two daughters confederated against him in their arguments and accusations, showing no sense of their obligation to him, or of gratitude for what he has given them, causes a rage in him of the proportions of the actual storm that is beginning outside and the sounds of the ‘‘tempest’’ play a wild counterpoint to his prayers and curses. When Lear storms out of the castle into the actual storm, despite Gloucester’s appeals, Regan orders the castle gates shut against him and declares whoever attempts to aid the king a traitor.

Act 3, Scene 1 Kent and a Gentleman encounter each other on a heath outside Gloucester’s castle as a storm gains strength. Kent asks after Lear, and the Gentleman, whom Kent recognizes and trusts tells him the king is out on the heath, ‘‘contending with the fretful elements,’’ and is accompanied by no one except the Fool. Kent tells the Gentleman that French spies in Albany’s and in Cornwall’s service report that the two dukes are possibly preparing to make war against each other. He asks the Gentleman to go to Dover, where Cordelia and a French force have landed to report to her how things are with the king. He gives the man money and a ring to show to Cordelia. The Gentleman promises to go on the mission and they both leave the stage in search of the king.

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Act 3, Scene 2 Lear is bareheaded in the middle of a barren heath, a brutal storm pelting him and the Fool. He rages, commanding the heavens to storm, defying their power, and condemning them for being like his two daughters, forces oppressing him. Shivering, the Fool cries out against the pitiless night, advises Lear to beg shelter from his daughters, but Lear, refusing that, vows to ‘‘be the pattern of all patience.’’ Kent finds Lear in this state and as Lear continues to rant and call down justice on all who have been criminal, branding himself as ‘‘more sinned against than sinning,’’ Kent leads him to a hovel on the heath for protection from the elements. As he is led, Lear becomes calm. He feels himself going crazy and he turns to the Fool and asks him how he is, if he is cold, says he is cold himself, and expresses compassion for the Fool’s suffering. As they leave, going towards the hovel, the Fool recites a comic verse essentially saying that open, virtuous, and honest relations are impossible between people and that cheating, dishonesty, and hypocrisy are in fact the rule, and confusion is the result.

Act 3, Scene 3 Inside his castle, Gloucester complains about the lack of pity Cornwall and Regan have shown Lear, and tells Edmund that when he, Gloucester, asked their permission to help Lear, they took control of his house and household away from him. Edmund expresses outrage at their ‘‘savage and unnatural’’ behavior. Gloucester tells Edmund of a growing enmity between Albany and Cornwall, that he has received letters it is dangerous to speak of regarding help for the king, and that they must side with the king. But after Gloucester exits, Edmund resolves to tell Cornwall and Regan of his father’s disloyalty to them and, thereby, advance his own interests.

Act 3, Scene 4 Guided by Kent, Lear and the Fool arrive at a hovel, and Kent invites Lear to go inside. Kent’s kindness and devotion, so different from the scornful and brutal indifference his daughters had shown him, moves Lear to pity himself. Lear tells Kent that the storm is nothing compared to the turmoil within that oppresses him, and he recalls again the ingratitude of his daughters. Kent encourages him to enter the hovel and Lear gently tells the Fool to go in first, that he will stay outside a little while and pray, and then he will sleep. In his prayer, ‘‘Poor naked

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wretches,’’ Lear confronts himself for the first time; he pities the suffering of others, identifies with it, and chastises himself for never having realized it before, or taken pains to help others by giving something of his from the excess of his possessions to those who have nothing. This human action is what makes the justice of heaven, he says. The Fool rushes out of the hovel in fear as a mad voice is heard within. It is Edgar, in the disguise of Poor Tom. Seeing the madman, Lear takes him for a kindred soul and asks, ‘‘What, has his daughters brought him to this pass?’’ Edgar and Lear exchange what seems to be deranged conversation but, in effect, each is relating his misfortunes through that distorting medium. Lear admires Poor Tom’s strange freedom, owing no one anything because he possesses nothing. Lear considers him ‘‘the thing itself, unaccommodated man,’’ and tears off his own clothes, too. The Fool tries to tell Lear to take care and not expose himself so. As he speaks, the Fool notices Gloucester coming towards them, carrying a lantern, seeking the king to give him aid despite Regan’s injunction against helping her father. Gloucester leads Lear, who insists that Poor Tom, whom Gloucester does not recognize as his son Edgar, the Fool, and Kent accompany him to where there is food and fire, telling Kent that he understands the king’s mad grief, considering how his daughters have treated him and that he himself is nearly mad with grief at the treachery of a once beloved son.

Act 3, Scene 5 Inside, the treacherous son to whom he has given his love, not Edgar but Edmund, has just informed on his father, and Cornwall, in furious response, vows to take revenge on Gloucester before he leaves his house. Edmund pretends to grieve at his betrayal of his father, calling it the victory of loyalty (to Cornwall) over nature (a son’s loyalty to his father). Cornwall confers on Edmund all of Gloucester’s titles and possessions. Then Cornwall tells Edmund he will find in him the father he has lost in Gloucester.

Act 3, Scene 6 Gloucester brings Lear and his companions to a farmhouse and leaves them with Kent. Poor Tom speaks of the demons which possess him and Lear sets up a mock trial to arraign his daughters and then he falls asleep. Gloucester returns, and tells Kent that he must carry Lear to Dover because he has discovered that Cornwall and

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Regan are plotting to kill the king and all those who aid him. Kent and the Fool leave, bearing Lear. Gloucester goes back to his castle. Alone, Edgar speaks a soliloquy in his own voice, not as the mad Tom. He meditates on the power of the mind to cause intense suffering and how seeing Lear’s suffering, despite the similarities of their situations (‘‘He childed as I fathered’’), lessens his pain because of the companionship in suffering. He prays for the king’s safety and realizes he must now wait.

Act 3, Scene 7 Cornwall gives Goneril letters he tells her to take swiftly to her husband, Albany, informing him that the French army has landed at Dover. Cornwall sends Edmund along with her, telling him it is not fit for Edmund to see what Cornwall will do to Gloucester, his father, whom he calls a traitor. Before Goneril and Edmund depart, Goneril’s steward, Oswald, informs Cornwall that Gloucester has had the king conveyed to Dover for his safety. Cornwall orders servants to find Gloucester and bring him bound before him. In their presence, Gloucester begs them to consider that they are his guests. Regan and Cornwall curse and vilify him, however, order him bound to a chair, and interrogate him about what he knows and where he has sent the king. To Dover, Gloucester tells them. When they ask why, he answers he did not wish to see Regan’s ‘‘cruel nails / pluck out’’ Lear’s eyes. Gloucester adds that he will see their cruelty avenged. ‘‘See’t shalt thou never,’’ Cornwall responds; he orders servants to hold Gloucester still in his chair and gouges out one of Gloucester’s eyes. Revolted, one of Cornwall’s servants draws his sword against his master to prevent him from causing Gloucester further injury. Cornwall and the servant fight. Regan takes a sword and stabs the servant in the back, killing him. Cornwall, whose injury is fatal, gouges out Gloucester’s other eye and orders that he be thrown out of doors. Then Cornwall dies. Gloucester’s servants take him outside and decide to ask Poor Tom to be Gloucester’s guide. One of the servants goes to get egg whites to apply to Gloucester’s eye sockets.

Act 4, Scene 1 Alone, Edgar is contemplating his own misfortunes and the vanity of life. He has achieved, he thinks, a state of contentment. He is at his lowest. He does not need to be deluded by hope. Change

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in his fortune can only be for the better. But as he speaks he sees his father in the distance, being led. Gloucester tells the Old Man with him to leave him. The man is reluctant. He tells Gloucester, ‘‘You cannot see your way.’’ Gloucester responds, ‘‘I have no way and therefore want no eyes; / I stumbled when I saw.’’ It is possible that Edgar overhears these and Gloucester’s next words. It is possible he does not. There are no stage directions in the text. Directors and readers can shape the nuances of the following scenes between Edgar and Gloucester according to their own determination. What Gloucester next utters is a prayer for Edgar. He wishes he could touch Edgar again. It would be like seeing. Edgar, returning to his previous thoughts, now says to himself that it is impossible to say something is the worst, for upon seeing his father mutilated, he realizes things are worse than ever. It is arranged between the Old Man, Gloucester and Edgar, whom they take for Poor Tom, that Edgar will serve as Gloucester’s guide and lead him to Dover.

Act 4, Scene 2 Goneril and Edmund arrive at Goneril’s house. Oswald reports that Goneril’s husband, Albany, is a changed man—he is disgusted with what is being done against the king. Goneril realizes she cannot rely on him and sends Edmund back to command Cornwall’s forces while she takes her husband’s place at the head of her forces. She also takes Edmund as a lover, and he vows he is ‘‘Yours in the ranks of death.’’ He leaves. Albany greets Goneril with reproaches for her behavior. She dismisses them. He condemns her behavior, and her sister’s, towards Lear. She disdains him and his manhood. Their fight is interrupted by a messenger with news of Cornwall’s death and news of the blinding of Gloucester. Goneril considers Cornwall’s death to be an impediment to her pursuit of Edmund since her sister is now a widow. Alone with the messenger, Albany learns, too, of Edmund’s betrayal of Gloucester. In a prayer he thanks Gloucester for helping the king and vows to avenge his eyes.

Act 4, Scene 3 Kent meets the Gentleman he had dispatched with letters to Cordelia at Dover. He listens as the man describes Cordelia’s heartbreaking responses to the story of Lear’s ill-treatment. Kent tells the Gentleman that Lear is in Dover and, when he is lucid, refuses to see Cordelia because of his deep shame that he has harmed

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her. Kent takes the Gentleman to look after Lear, and then goes about some secret business for the sake of the king.

Act 4, Scene 4 Cordelia describes her father’s condition to a doctor and some soldiers; he is running around the meadows and hillsides of Dover decked with flowers. She asks the soldiers to find him and bring him to her. Of the doctor she inquires what remedies there are. He tells her of the healing power of sleep and of the herbs he has which can induce sleep. A messenger tells Cordelia the British powers are marching toward Dover. Cordelia says she knows that already, and that the French army is in England only to rescue Lear, not to conquer English territory.

Act 4, Scene 5 In conversation with Goneril’s steward, Oswald, who is carrying a letter from Goneril to Edmund, Regan tries to get him to show her the letter, but he remains loyal to his mistress and refuses. She, however, reveals her interest in Edmund and instructs him to tell Goneril of it and to deliver a message to Edmund from her, too. In closing she reminds him that if in the course of his journeys he should encounter Gloucester, there is a reward for killing him.

Act 4, Scene 6 The scene opens on a field in Dover with Edgar trying to assure his blind father that the ground they are walking upon is not flat but that they are climbing to the top of a steep cliff. Gloucester, his despair so great, wishes to fling himself from its summit. Edgar has not revealed himself to his father. He says that he ‘‘trifles’’ with his father’s despair in order ‘‘to cure it.’’ As Gloucester jumps, he calls out a blessing for Edgar. Of course he only falls to the ground at his own feet, but Edgar speaks to him now in a different voice from Poor Tom’s, tells him what a great distance he has fallen, and that he saw a fiendish figure with twisted horns and eyes like moons upon the summit of the cliff from which Gloucester has just fallen, miraculously without injury. Gloucester allows himself to believe that his own self-destructive wish was the influence of the fiend and promises his apparently new acquaintance that from now on he will ‘‘bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / ‘Enough.’’ As Edgar is telling his father to ‘‘Bear free and patient thoughts,’’ he sees Lear, decked in flowers, wandering through the

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meadows. The account of the meeting between the blind Gloucester and the mad king, which starts at line 85, continuing for some one hundred lines, does not advance the plot. Rather, with an astonishing beauty and intensity of language, it conveys the themes, the texture, the tone, and the feeling of the play. Lear discusses his mortality, condemns hypocrisy, power, and the injustices of authority. Most strikingly, he vents a rage against female sexuality and lust in general, extrapolating from the behavior of his two elder daughters. As he is speaking, Cordelia’s men find him. Lear exits running as they pursue him. Edgar questions one of Cordelia’s men, who tells him that the armies of Goneril and Regan are quickly approaching. Gloucester prays for patience and asks Edgar who he is, but Edgar only identifies himself as ‘‘a poor man made tame to fortune’s blows,’’ that he has learned pity through his own suffering. As they are speaking, Oswald enters. Seeing Gloucester, he draws his sword and goes to kill him. Gloucester blesses his effort, but Edgar intervenes, kills Oswald, and saves his father. Dying, Oswald asks Edgar to bury him and gives him his purse and a letter to give to Edmund. Edgar unseals and reads the letter. In it Goneril, proclaiming her love for him, reminds Edmund to kill Albany, her husband, so that she can be his. Edgar pockets the letter in order to show it to Albany; hearing the approaching army, Edgar conveys his father to the care of a friend and safety.

Act 4, Scene 7 Cordelia enters with Kent, commending his goodness and telling him he may cast off his disguise, but he begs her to let him remain hidden a little longer. She agrees and asks the doctor how Lear is. He suggests they wake him. Music is played and Cordelia hovers above him, speaking gently to him, pityingly, and offering her kisses as restorative medicine. Waking, Lear thinks he has come back from death and says it is wrong to bring him back to life. He is dazed and speaks gently, admitting that he is a foolish man, perhaps not in his right mind, and he thinks that Cordelia is with him. ‘‘And so I am, I am,’’ she weeps in gladness. Lear says he is ready to take poison which he expects she would want to give him since he has in fact wronged her. Whereas he has done no harm to Goneril and Regan, she has cause for anger. ‘‘No cause, no cause,’’ she whispers to him. And he repeats that he is old and

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foolish and begs her to bear with him. She leaves with him, taking him for a walk. Kent is left with the Gentleman who asks him for news, if Cornwall was killed, if Edgar is with Kent in Germany. They agree the coming war will be bloody, but Kent says to himself that the war will determine things for good or ill.

Act 5, Scene 1 Edmund is with Regan, expecting the arrival of Goneril and Albany, and concerned that Oswald has not arrived. She begins questioning Edmund jealously about the nature and extent of his relationship with Goneril. He assures Regan that he has not been unfaithful. Goneril and Albany arrive. Albany makes it clear that he is not in a war against Lear and Cordelia or any of their party, but only against the French army since it is on British territory. Edmund tells him he speaks nobly and they arrange to meet soon to make battle plans. When Albany is by himself, Edgar appears, disguised, gives him a letter, and tells him to read it before the battle. After the battle, if his side is victorious, Edgar tells him to have a trumpet sounded and he will come and, in battle with Edmund, prove the truth of the accusations against him. Edgar departs and Edmund re-enters. He and Albany discuss strategy. Alone, Edmund tries to decide which of the two sisters he ought to choose and decides that if Goneril wants him, it’s up to her to do away with her husband, but Edmund will ally himself with Albany for the battle. As for the mercy Albany intends to show Lear and Cordelia should he defeat them, Edmund says, they will never see it: they block the path of his ambition.

Act 5, Scene 2 Edgar leaves Gloucester, away from the field of battle, by a tree, and promises to bring good news if he returns. There is a battle. Lear’s supporters lose. Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner. Gloucester falls into depression. Edgar chides him for having bleak thoughts, saying that death comes at the time it ought to come. And Gloucester accepts his words.

Act 5, Scene 3 Edmund orders guards to take Lear and Cordelia to prison and wait for further orders. Cordelia comforts Lear, saying ‘‘we are not the first / Who with best meaning have incurred the worst,’’ She says, in addition, that she is not concerned about herself, that she can bear what fortune brings, but is

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‘‘The Death of Cordelia’’ (Act V, scene iii) and inset of ‘‘Lear on the Heath’’ (Act III, scene iv) (Ó Shakespeare Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan)

‘‘cast down’’ because of his suffering. But Lear responds that there is nothing to regret and says that in prison they will be like birds in a cage. They will sing, tell stories, receive each other’s blessing, and watch with detachment as others carry out the business of the world. He vows that now that they are reunited, they will never be parted. Edmund orders them to prison and sends a captain after them with orders to kill Lear and Cordelia. Albany enters, commends Edmund’s valor in battle, and asks him to turn Lear and Cordelia over to him. Edmund says he has sent them to prison. He argues that if they are freed they will rouse such sympathy that the people will turn against Albany and Edmund. Edmund adds that the question of what to do with Lear and Cordelia ought to wait until they have recovered from the battle. In anger, Albany informs Edmund that he was an ally in war but has no further authority. Regan intervenes, says Edmund led her forces, and because of Edmund’s alliance with her, may be called Albany’s brother. Goneril interrupts her and the two sisters quarrel over who shall have Edmund. In

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS 

The 1953 television film version of King Lear is a seventy-five minute film starring Orson Welles as Lear. In this severely cut version, broadcast by CBS, the Gloucester plot is entirely eliminated.

In 1970, a Russian film of King Lear was produced. The English subtitles were written by Boris Pasternak, who translated back from the Russian translation.  Peter Brook directed a 1971 production of King Lear, with Paul Scofield playing Lear. This film adaptation of Brook’s staging of King Lear was inspired by Jan Kott’s vision in the 1964 book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary of a bleak, existentially godless and meaningless world for the play. The film was produced by Athena Films.



In King Lear (1987), produced by Cannon Films, the great New Wave French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard used King Lear as the basis for a film that moves very far away from the original and includes a cameo performance by Woody Allen as an alien.



A Thousand Acres, which was released by Touchstone Pictures in 1997, is a film adaptation of Jane Smiley’s novel. This version of the story resituates King Lear on a vast American farm.



Ian Holm played the title role in a 1998 British Broadcasting Corporation re-creation of a highly acclaimed London stage production of King Lear.



My Kingdom (First Look International, 2002) is set in contemporary London. Lear becomes the head of a crime family who divides his operation among his daughters. The elder two lead unsavory lives, and Cordelia is a reformed drug addict and prostitute who is trying to go straight.



In King of Texas, (TNT, 2002) Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame plays John Lear in a television adaptation set in frontier Texas.



In King Lear, a Channel 4 television broadcast in 1983, Sir Laurence Olivier, at seventyfive, gives a deeply moving performance as Lear in his last Shakespearean role.  Ran, which premiered in 1985, is an adaptation of the story of King Lear set in sixteenthcentury Japan. Akira Kurosawa’s film tells the story of a seventy-year old warlord, Hidetora, who is toppled by his three sons. The film was distributed in the United States by Orion Classics. 

the course of their argument, Regan says she cannot give her full strength to the quarrel because she does not feel well. When Goneril asks Regan if she intends to marry Edmund, Albany intervenes and arrests Edmund on charges of treason and announces that Edmund has already engaged himself to marry Goneril. He then orders a trumpet to be sounded and says that if a champion does not step forward to do battle with Edmund, he will. Regan again complains that she feels sick. Goneril in an aside lets the audience know she has poisoned her. At the third trumpet, an unidentified champion

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steps forward, challenges Edmund. He says his ‘‘name is lost,’’ but he is noble. They fight and Edmund falls. Goneril protests. Albany silences her with her letter to Edmund plotting Albany’s murder. She leaves the stage refusing to say anything further. Albany sends a servant after her to watch her because, Albany says, ‘‘she’s desperate.’’ Edgar reveals himself and forgives Edmund, who admits his guilt. Albany embraces Edgar and says he never hated Gloucester. Edgar tells him he knows that. Then Albany asks how he has survived and how did he know about Gloucester’s

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‘‘miseries.’’ Edgar tells him the story of how he cared for his father and how, before the fight he revealed himself to him and how Gloucester died torn apart by the passions of joy and grief. He tells also that he has seen Kent, who in disguise has cared for Lear. As he speaks, a Gentleman runs in with a bloody knife and announces that Goneril has poisoned Regan and stabbed herself. Edmund confesses that he was engaged to both sisters and that in death the three of them marry. Kent enters then, saying he has come to bid farewell to Lear and is surprised not to see him among the company. ‘‘Great thing of us forgot!’’ Albany cries. Edmund confesses that he has sent someone to kill Lear and Cordelia and orders a messenger to run to the prison and prevent the killing. It is too late. Lear enters bearing Cordelia dead in his arms and howling in grief. He announces he killed the man who hanged Cordelia and remembers the days of his strength. He looks to see if Cordelia is still breathing, and as he laments for her and recalls his lost strength, he dies pointing to her lips. When Edgar attempts to revive him, Kent says to let him be; he is free of the world’s tortures. Albany proclaims that Kent and Edgar will now rule together. But Kent says that he must follow his master. Edgar becomes king and speaks a eulogy saying those living will never bear as much as Lear has ‘‘nor live so long.’’

CHARACTERS Captain The captain, Edmund’s subordinate, takes Lear and Cordelia to detention when they are captured and kills Cordelia in the prison.

Cordelia Cordelia is Lear’s youngest and most beloved daughter. When she declines to flatter him by declaring her love for him in a public ritual, Lear disowns her. She marries the King of France and, when she hears of how her sisters have mistreated her father, she leads a French army to England to rescue him. When the French forces are defeated, she is captured and imprisoned with Lear. By Edmund’s orders she is hanged in prison.

Doctor In Cordelia’s camp, the Doctor takes care of Lear.

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Duke of Albany The Duke of Albany is Goneril’s husband and Lear’s son-in-law. As he witnesses the ill-treatment of the king by his daughters, Albany becomes disgusted by it and reproaches Goneril, calling her a monster. She characterizes him as ‘‘milklivered.’’ After the defeat of Cordelia’s army and the capture of Lear and Cordelia, Albany declares Edmund guilty of high treason.

Duke of Burgundy The Duke of Burgundy is a suitor for Cordelia’s hand in marriage. When Lear rescinds her dowry, Burgundy declines to accept her as a wife.

Duke of Cornwall The Duke of Cornwall is Regan’s husband and Lear’s son-in-law. Because Gloucester has remained loyal to Lear, Cornwall gouges out his eyes. One of his servants, horrified by this act, intervenes, unsuccessfully, in order to prevent the mutilation. The servant kills Cornwall in a fight and is killed himself when Regan stabs him in the back during the fight.

Duke of Gloucester The Duke of Gloucester is the father of Edgar and Edmund. He is a good-hearted libertine who in his old age is betrayed by one son and, after he has been destroyed, is cared for by his other son. Despite Regan’s interdiction against aiding the king in the storm, Gloucester goes searching for Lear on the heath and brings him to shelter. For his support of Lear’s cause, Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out.

Edgar Edgar is Gloucester’s legitimate son and Edmund’s elder brother. When Edmund fools Gloucester into believing that Edgar desires to kill him in order to take possession of his lands and title, Gloucester proclaims Edgar a traitor. Edgar flees and takes on the identity of a bedlam beggar, a madman called Poor Tom. He and Lear meet on the heath during the storm and exchange mad conversation. After Gloucester is blinded, Edgar, as Tom, cares for him, tries to prevent Gloucester from falling into despair, and leads him to Dover, where Lear has been conveyed to meet Cordelia. After the French forces are defeated, Edgar reveals himself to his father and, without revealing his identity, challenges Edmund to single combat and kills him. After the death of all the principal characters, Edgar becomes king.

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Edmund

King Lear

Edmund is Gloucester’s younger son, born out of wedlock. He is courtly, proud, charming, handsome, cunning, and evil. He sets his father against his brother and then betrays his father. Edmund pledges himself to both Goneril and Regan, and leaves them to fight for who will get him. He is an atheist who believes that there is no law above nature and that he has the power and, consequently, the right to shape himself according to his will and to manipulate situations without regard to the welfare of others, solely for his own good.

Cornwall’s servant tries to prevent his master from blinding Gloucester. Regan stabs him in the back as he duels with Cornwall.

King Lear unleashes immense destructive forces when he resigns his throne, divides his kingdom between his two eldest daughters, and banishes his youngest after she refuses to utter her love in the ritual profession of devotion Lear demands be given him in a public ceremony. When Lear’s two elder daughters betray their professions and Lear is cast out into a storm, he is overwhelmed with grief, bitterness, and a realization of his vanity. His elder daughters say of him that he is rash and does not know himself. Kent finds that Lear embodies the authority he wishes to serve. The Fool thinks he is a fool and ought to be punished for getting old before becoming wise. Cordelia loves him. After first pitying himself when Goneril and Regan betray him, Lear comes to grieve for having wronged Cordelia.

Fool

Old Man

First Servant

The Fool is Lear’s jester. He is bitter because of Cordelia’s banishment and he chides Lear ceaselessly for it, and for being so foolish as to give his power over to Goneril and Regan. The Fool speaks in riddles and comic verse and conveys a sense of wisdom and uncanny insight.

Goneril Lear’s eldest daughter is a sharp-tongued, selfish woman of great appetite and bottomless cruelty. She betrays her father, her sister, and her husband. She goes from hypocritically proclaiming her love for Lear and devotion to him, to making war upon him in the course of the play. She dominates her husband and expresses her contempt for him when he opposes her.

Kent Kent is a true and loyal servant to Lear. He incurs Lear’s wrath when he insists on opposing Lear’s furious and hasty banishment of Cordelia; Kent is also banished. Rather than leave Lear, he disguises himself and, as Caius, becomes Lear’s servant. Kent remains in touch with Cordelia. When she lands at Dover with a French army, Kent conveys Lear to Dover, removing him from the power of his two elder daughters. Kent is the only character in the play who has contact with each one of the other significant characters.

After Gloucester is blinded, the Old Man leads him to Poor Tom.

Oswald Oswald is Goneril’s steward and serves as her messenger to Regan and to Edmund. He is selfserving, cowardly, and disrespectful to Lear. When he finds blind Gloucester, he tries to kill him for the reward, but Edgar kills Oswald instead.

Poor Tom See Edgar

Regan Regan is Lear’s second daughter and, in the ways of treachery and cruelty, she is a double of her sister Goneril. Regan is responsible for Gloucester’s brutal blinding. She dies poisoned by Goneril in their contest over Edmund.

Second Servant Cornwall’s second servant voices outrage at the violence his master has done to Gloucester after Cornwall has gouged out his eyes. The second servant leads blind Gloucester to Poor Tom.

Third Servant King of France The King of France is one of Cordelia’s suitors. After Lear disinherits her, the King of France marries her despite the absence of a dowry.

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Cornwall’s third servant takes it upon himself to aid Gloucester after Cornwall has gouged out his eyes by getting flax and the whites of eggs to apply to his eyes.

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Loyalty and Betrayal

THEMES Egoism King Lear is divided between egoist characters like Lear (at the beginning of the play), Edmund, Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Oswald, the Captain who kills Cordelia, Burgundy, and even Gloucester, in his sexual profligacy, and sacrificial characters who are motivated by love and adherence to laws above themselves. Cordelia, Edgar, Kent, the servant who defends Gloucester against Cornwall, the King of France, and Gloucester himself, in his loyalty to Lear, are such characters.

The desire for loyalty and the fear of betrayal run throughout King Lear. Lear’s demand that his daughters speak their love is a test and public exhibition of their loyalty. When she refuses, Lear sees Cordelia as betraying him. In response, he betrays himself and his love for her. Goneril betrays her father, her sister and her husband. Regan, too, betrays both father and sister. Lear goes mad because of his inability to understand their betrayals. Edmund betrays his brother and his father, but Gloucester thinks of him, at first, as a loyal son and of Edgar as treacherous. Despite how his father wronged him, Edgar remains loyal to his father, just as Cordelia and Kent remain loyal to Lear.

The Gods Set in pre-Christian Britain, King Lear is concerned with the power and the nature of the gods. Lear and Kent hurl curses at each other in the first scene, swearing by Apollo, as Kent admonishes Lear, ‘‘Thou swear’st thy gods in vain.’’ Gloucester believes in the power of planetary influence on world events, and thinks of the gods as capricious, killing us for sport the way boys kill flies. Lear sees, in his prayer on the heath, that the nature of the gods is partially defined by human action.

Madness

Varieties of Love

Ideas of Nature

King Lear examines the varieties of love. Lear begins the play by demanding of his daughters that they say how much they love him. In his mind love can be measured—it is a quantity rather than a quality. In the last scene of the play, after Goneril and Regan are both dead, Edmund says, ‘‘Yet Edmund was beloved.’’ His idea of love is not very different from Lear’s in act 1, scene 1. To Edmund, love suggests others’ recognition of his power and surrender to him. For Cordelia, love is a quality of tender recognition of the value of the Other, and it shows itself in self-sacrifice and devotion to truth outside herself. Love is also something guided by responsibility and obligation. Goneril and Regan experience love as lust, as a desire to possess. Unlike Cordelia, love for them is selflove. It is not in service to truth but to their wills and appetites. In his bleakest moments, thinking of his elder daughters, Lear sees love as vile and lust-driven rapaciousness. Edgar and Kent, like Cordelia, see love as self-sacrifice in service to truth and to others.

Edmund calls Nature his goddess. By ‘‘Nature’’ he means the impulses of life, independent of any higher power. He takes his own will to be a force of nature and he sees it as sufficient for governing his actions. Cordelia is set against him. She is governed by forces above Nature: duty and love. Speaking of her in act 4, scene 6, a Gentleman says that she ‘‘redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to.’’ The two who have corrupted nature are Goneril and Regan, who in their cruelty to their father are deemed unnatural, if nature is defined as a moral force which binds children to their parents. According to Edmund’s idea of nature, Lear’s two daughters are completely natural, impelled and guided by no force but their own will. The other two that the word ‘‘twain’’ suggests are Adam and Eve, who in falling, corrupted nature. Cordelia, by her sacrifice, suggesting Jesus’ sacrifice, undoes their damage and heals nature just as Jesus redeems mankind in Christian thought. Although King Lear is set in pre-Christian times, Christian allusions would resonate with Shakespeare’s audience.

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The idea of madness, real and feigned, in the persons of Lear and Edgar weaves through the play. Lear fears going mad and apparently does, although there is much sanity and even wisdom in his apparently mad utterances on the heath and with Gloucester in Dover. Edgar’s madness is assumed as part of his disguise, and his mad utterances are less expressive of the insights gained from extreme suffering than Lear’s. Edgar shows the cleansing effects of suffering in his same utterances.

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Seeing and Blindness ‘‘See better, Lear,’’ Kent cries out as Lear rages at him, ‘‘Out of my sight,’’ as Kent tries to prevent him from erring in the division of the kingdom. After he is blinded, Gloucester says he ‘‘stumbled when he saw.’’ Throughout King Lear Shakespeare sets vision and blindness against each other, extending the function of seeing beyond eyesight to mean perceiving truly and understanding correctly. Even Cordelia, in act 5, scene 3, confesses to a fault in vision when she says, ‘‘We are not the first / Who with best meaning have incurred the worst.’’

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

Sexual Revulsion Sexuality is portrayed as a particularly grim and dangerous force in King Lear. Edmund the villain is a bastard, and his father, Gloucester, is portrayed in the first lines of the play as an unrepentant libertine. Goneril and Regan are portrayed as being sexually rapacious as well as power-hungry. Even in the first scene, as she is pledging her love to Lear, Regan introduces the idea of sexuality with an anatomically suggestive reference: ‘‘I profess / Myself an enemy to all other joys / Which the most precious square of sense professes.’’ Both of them vie with each other for Edmund’s love, and in each case, it is an adulterous passion and a passion which leads Goneril to poison Regan and then take her own life. In the storm, Lear cries out to the raging heavens, ‘‘Hide thee thou bloody hand, / Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue / That art incestuous.’’ Poor Tom, too, speaks of sexual vice. Lear’s most severe indictment of sexuality comes in act 4, scene 6, beginning at line 112 in his speech about sexual licence, which concludes with a hellish vision of female sexuality: Behold yond simpering dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow; That minces virtue, and does shake the head To hear of pleasure’s name; The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to ‘t With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above: But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiends’; There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding, stench, consumption;

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Read The History of King Lear from the 1608 Quarto text, and The Tragedy of King Lear from the 1623 Folio text (available in Wells and Taylor’s 1988 Oxford Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Then compare and contrast both works, focusing on the differences that appear to you with regard to plot, characterization, imagery, and overall mood. There have been many filmed versions and adaptations of King Lear. Choose two different versions and compare and contrast them with each other as films, and also with the original play by Shakespeare. Choose a scene in King Lear and using, the Quarto and Folio texts (available in Wells and Taylor’s Oxford edition of Shakespeare’s plays), make your own edition of that scene. Please explain your editorial criteria and choices. Write an adaptation of King Lear set in contemporary times, in contemporary settings and with contemporary characters. Choose situations which reflect similar themes and concerns to those found in King Lear. Make up a rap song or a folk song in which the story of King Lear is told. Along with Desdemona in Othello, and Ophelia in Hamlet, Cordelia is one of Shakespeare’s heroines who is in some way sacrificed to the wishes and passions of the lead characters in those plays. Compare and contrast the three women, focusing on their relationships to their fathers and their beloveds.

STYLE Blank Verse Most of King Lear is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, which is called blank verse. Pentameter means there are five feet in a line. A foot is composed of two syllables or beats.

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Nick Fletcher as Edgar, Rachel Pickup as Cordelia, and Timothy West as King Lear in Act V, scene iii, at The Old Vic, London, 2003 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

Iambic signifies the rhythm of speech. In an iambic foot the accent pattern is unaccented/ accented. The iambic pentameter line ‘‘With reservation of an hundred knights,’’ (act 1, scene 1, line 135) for example, is scanned like this, ‘‘with RE/serVA/tion OF/an HUN/dred KNIGHTS.’’ Spoken English usually falls into an iambic pattern.

minates. At the close of act 3, the Gloucester plot becomes more prominent and begins to occupy more stage time than it had previously. As the play draws towards its end, both plots converge in the Edmund, Goneril, Regan triangle, and in Edmund’s ambition to rise as high as Lear and Edmund’s consequent need to have Lear and Cordelia killed.

Soliloquy

Spectacle

A soliloquy is a speech a character delivers when alone on stage. It is an address to the audience revealing the character’s inner thoughts and feelings. Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear contains several important soliloquies. An often-quoted one from act 1, scene 2, has Edmund proclaiming, ‘‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound.’’

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Double Plot King Lear combines and integrates two separate plots—the Lear plot and the Gloucester plot. Until the end of act 3, the Lear plot predo-

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Unlike classic Greek tragedy, in which violence is performed off-stage and only reported, tragedies in Elizabethan and Jacobean England presented violence as an on-stage spectacle. In King Lear, Shakespeare follows this practice with the on-stage crushing out of Gloucester’s eyes.

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Succession Queen Elizabeth I of England died, unmarried and without an heir, on March 24, 1603. She had

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1600s: Shakespeare’s plays appealed to a mass audience and Shakespeare was regarded as one of the foremost playwrights of his era. Today: Shakespeare’s plays still appeal to a mass audience and he is regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of all time



1600s: Shakespeare adapted older plays, tales, and historical narratives in the composition of his plays. Today: Shakespeare’s plays serve as the basis for new dramatic, cinematic, and narrative adaptations and re-workings.



1600s: James I believed in the absolute power of the king and fought against the power of Parliament.

occupied the throne of England for forty-five years and had made no provision for an heir. It is likely her motive was to prevent the growth of factions contending for power and threatening her own power during her reign. Queen Elizabeth’s reign, in fact, had been threatened from without and from within. Philip of Spain, whose marriage to England’s Queen Mary made him king of England from 1554 until Mary’s death in 1558, remained an external threat after Elizabeth ascended the throne. The internal threat was none other than Elizabeth’s cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, who had conspired with a Catholic faction to assassinate Elizabeth. Mary was imprisoned for years until finally she was executed in 1587. After Elizabeth’s death in 1603, James VI of Scotland, Mary’s son and Elizabeth’s closest relative, was chosen her successor—he became James I of England. Contention was avoided, although Philip of Spain believed that his daughter, Isabella, ought to become England’s queen. Lady Arbella Stuart, James’ cousin, as a direct descendent of Henry VII, might also have had a claim.

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Today: The English monarchy is entirely subservient to Parliament and serves only ceremonial functions. 

1600s: In 1605, political conflict set in the context of religious strife broke out between Catholic opposition to the Protestant king. On November 5, Guy Fawkes and a group of Catholic partisans planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament, but the Gunpowder Plot was discovered before it was carried out. Today: On July 7, 2005, Islamic partisans in London detonated a number of bombs on the London subway and on London buses as part of a world-wide political conflict that has taken on religious coloring and is often framed as a conflict between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

In France, the problem of succession had arisen, too, and taken a far more violent form than in England, with battles and the massacre of Protestants in August 1572. In 1589, Henri IV became king, but his ascension to the throne did not signal the end of strife. Nevertheless, Henri IV reigned until his death in 1610. It is likely that neither Shakespeare’s royal nor his popular audiences would miss the topicality of Lear’s desire to control the confusion and strife that had recently accompanied two significant monarchies at the moments of succession.

Inheritance Before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 by William the Conqueror, land in England was passed down from generation to generation in a way that was called ‘‘partible,’’ which means that the land was divided or partitioned among all of a man’s male heirs. After 1066, this practice was replaced in most of England by the French conquerors with the practice of primogeniture. Property, land particularly, under primogeniture

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is handed to the eldest son. This is the model of inheritance, to which Edmund objects, operating in the Gloucester story of King Lear. In the Kent region of England, which is located in the southeast and includes the cities of Canterbury and Dover, there is a channel crossing to France; however, primogeniture did not replace the old system. The old system was known as ‘‘Kentish gavelkind,’’ which meant that upon his death, if a man died intestate, not having made a will, his land was equally divided among all his sons rather than passing by law to the eldest. ‘‘Gavel’’ has its root in the word give. Inheritance in the case of there being no sons but several daughters, as is the case in the story of King Lear, whether under the practice of primogeniture or gavelkind, was governed by a practice called ‘‘coparcenary,’’ which resembles gavelkind. Under coparcenary, each female heir then inherits a part of the whole— this is what King Lear originally sets out to do with his kingdom.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW The great nineteenth-century novelist Leo Tolstoy was very far from the nineteenthcentury consensus when he condemned King Lear, saying he felt ‘‘a boundless tedium,’’ when reading it, and also found the work ‘‘empty and offensive.’’ His position is even further from the position of contemporary critical opinion than it was at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1904, A. C. Bradley, who found structural difficulties in the last acts of King Lear because of the double plot, bridged nineteenth and twentiethcentury Shakespeare criticism and placed King Lear at the top of the world’s literary pantheon: When I read King Lear two impressions are left on my mind. . . . King Lear seems to me Shakespeare’s greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama, it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly inferior as a whole to Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. When I am feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation of Shakespeare’s power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama, but am grouping it in my mind with works like the Prometheus Vinctus [Prometheus Bound] and the Divine Comedy, and even with the greatest symphonies of Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.

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King Lear has been considered one of Shakespeare’s greatest works at least as long ago as 1765 when Samuel Johnson wrote, The tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare. There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity. The artful involutions of distinct interests, the striking opposition of contrary characters, the sudden changes of fortune, and the quick succession of events, fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope.

Nineteenth-century critics of King Lear like W. A. Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and A. C. Swineburne all wrote of the play with awe as they considered its problems of hope, despair, evil, and suffering, and analyzed the depths of its characters. This sample from Charles Lamb can serve to illustrate the general tenor of the thoughts of the majority of nineteenth-century writers regarding King Lear: The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,—we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind.

In the twentieth century, the introduction of psychoanalytic inquiry and, especially Sigmund Freud’s own use of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of cultural symbols, including King Lear, gave new impetus and a new technique for the study of Shakespeare’s characters. For Freud, Cordelia embodied the silence of Death. Scholars in the twentieth century also sought to understand King Lear as an intellectual statement about the nature of Nature itself, as John Danby did in Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature. The drama has also been seen as a commentary about the nature of being-in-the-world, about what comprises being human, about the benevolence or malevolence or even the non-existence of providence, of goodness, of charity, and of hope. The inquiry into the play’s

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vision of the place of the gods in the motives of mankind perhaps reached its peak—it is doubtful it reached its conclusion—with William Elton’s study King Lear and the Gods, in which he argues against the position advanced by a number of Shakespeare scholars, like Kenneth Myrick, who argued that within the tragedy and bleakness of experience in King Lear, there is redemption, salvation, and marks of Christian optimism. By the last decades of the century, techniques like the New Historicism focused less on the meaning of King Lear as it might be revealed through a study of its themes, structure, images, and characters, and more on understanding the play in terms of its own time, how it fit into, interacted with, and appeared in its own original historical context. Thus Ben Ross Schneider, Jr., writing in 1995, examines the events of King Lear in ‘‘King Lear in Its Own Time: The Difference that Death Makes’’ in the context of the stoicism of Seneca and Montaigne. In 2001, Terry Reilly brought a study of inheritance laws and customs practiced in the Kent district of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bear on a reading of the play in ‘‘King Lear: The Kentish Forest and the Problem of Thirds.’’

CRITICISM Neil Heims In the following essay, Heims suggests that the source of caprice and evil in King Lear is neither the gods nor the planets and the stars, but human beings who are impelled and shaped by social and psychological forces. When Nahum Tate revised King Lear in 1681, he removed the Fool, made Cordelia and Edgar lovers, kept Lear and Cordelia alive, and restored them at the end of the play to their former stations. Samuel Johnson gave that change his critical and full-hearted imprimatur, in 1765, because he could not bear Cordelia’s dying. Ever since these two events, King Lear has been prized or avoided for the power of its depiction of an unjust world, of a world ruled by capricious gods, a world where good has no more authority than evil and less of a chance, a world in which the good experience pain and suffering randomly and needlessly. King Lear is set in the kind of world in which Gloucester can say, ‘‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport.’’ To take

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BOTH THE CHRISTIAN READING OF KING LEAR AND A READING THAT SEES THE PLAY MIRED IN HOPELESSNESS DO NOT FUNDAMENTALLY CHALLENGE EACH OTHER.’’

Gloucester’s words as representing the outlook of the play—that everything is bleak because the gods are capricious at best or downright cruel at worst—is an inadequate way of looking at King Lear, however. Making any character’s observation inside a work of the imagination serve as a gloss on the work’s full meaning significantly reduces and misconceives both the work and the observation. Some critics and commentators, trying to come to terms with the story’s bleakness, have read King Lear as a Christian tragedy, a vehicle for presenting and transcending Christian pessimism, as Kenneth Myrick did in ‘‘Christian Pessimism in King Lear.’’ Inside a Christian worldview, pessimism about life is appropriate but despair is not. Redemption comes through suffering. Triumph over the ills of the world comes by achieving bliss in adversity through the attainment of a divine vision, which results from being passed through a refiner’s fire, as Lear and Gloucester, Edgar and Kent, to varying degrees, are. In a reading that sees the play as presenting a vision of Christian pessimism, Cordelia herself represents a version of the Christ figure, the one who takes suffering, adversity, and sacrifice upon herself for Lear’s salvation. In order for this reading to work, Lear has to be seen achieving transcendence through the vision of Cordelia alive as he dies. Although it be a human mistake, when he dies, according to such a transcendental reading, Lear thinks there is the breath of life upon her lips when he points to them and says, ‘‘Look, her lips,/Look there, look there.’’ This is not, however, the only way to understand his dying words. The old king may be pointing at her lips in order to indicate that they are still, unmoving, that there is no breath upon them. Although at line 267 Lear says ‘‘This feather stirs; she lives,’’ he adds, ‘‘If it be so, / It is

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a chance which does redeem all sorrows/That ever I have felt.’’ He is grasping at hope: ‘‘If it be so.’’ But forty-five lines later, in his final utterance, right before he points to her lips, Lear cries out in protest when he realizes there is ‘‘no life’’ in Cordelia, ‘‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never.’’ Then he points to her lips, to their stillness, not to their motion, and as he perceives that stillness of death, audience and readers may recall with ironic awareness the first time those lips were still, in the first scene of the play, when he misunderstood Cordelia’s silence and unleashed the terrible human forces,—not celestial forces—which have silenced Cordelia’s lips more thoroughly. In contrast to the hopeful reading that grows out of Christian pessimism and postulates that in King Lear virtuous life and a vision of eternal salvation are achieved through the suffering that leads to the renunciation of the things of life, there is a non-Christian, although not an anti-Christian, reading. Dr. Johnson did not disagree with the portrayal of the gods as capricious and cruel. His objection to Shakespeare’s text, and support for its alteration, resulted from his belief that the death of Cordelia, no matter how true to life, nevertheless is an aesthetic error. It deprives audiences and readers of the gratification of the human sense of justice, which Johnson understood to be a natural universal craving. Both the Christian reading of King Lear and a reading that sees the play mired in hopelessness do not fundamentally challenge each other. Each chooses to focus on and to privilege certain utterances and events inside the play over others without reflecting that everything uttered in the play is uttered in the context of everything else that is said and that occurs. The essential problem for Christian and non-Christian interpretations of King Lear becomes 1) determining the nature of the gods that rule the world, 2) the nature of the world they rule, and 3) the human responses possible. This is an estimable task, but it may not actually be speaking to what is happening in King Lear. The questions to ask regarding King Lear are 1) how did these characters get into this mess? and 2) how do they think they got into it? The answer to how they think they did, repeated by several characters throughout King

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Lear, is that humanity is governed by capricious gods and subject to astrological influence. But to focus upon the gods as unjust and the arrangement of the planets as having the power to influence the currents of human events, the way the moon controls the ocean tides, is inadequate because it is very clear in the play that misery is generated not by the gods but by the persons of the play. The astrological argument seems weak when Gloucester first presents it, as Edmund rather convincingly demonstrates in a soliloquy immediately after Gloucester advances it. After Edmund hoodwinks Gloucester in act 1, scene 2, into believing that Edgar is plotting to kill him, Gloucester observes, ‘‘These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.’’ He is using astrological events in order to explain Edgar’s alleged behavior as well as Lear’s irrational banishment of Cordelia and Kent. Upon Gloucester’s exit, Edmund addresses the audience with wiser-seeming words. ‘‘This is the excellent foppery of the world,’’ he says, rather convincingly, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on.

Edmund stands opposed to this relegation of responsibility to divine forces and celestial influences. He calls it an ‘‘evasion of . . . man, to lay his . . . disposition on the charge of a star.’’ Of himself he says, ‘‘I should have been that I am,’’ no matter what stars ‘‘twinkled’’ on his birth. It seems like an idea shaped by a commendable belief in taking responsibility for your actions and desires. (But in the early seventeenth century, when astrology was less suspect than it is supposed to be today, there would have been many in Shakespeare’s audience who would be loathe to accept Edmund’s repudiation. Undoubtedly, there are many who still are.) The doctrine of individual responsibility is put in the mouth, however, of a very attractive yet terrifically evil, heartless, and base character. That does not make it less true, but it does attach a very serious warning label to the idea. It is easily corrupted. And King Lear is an anatomy of the forms that corruption can take.

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Clive Russell as Edmund and Peter Eyre as Edgar in Act IV, scene vi, at the Old Vic Theatre, London, 1989 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

With the sanction of his philosophy, Edmund betrays his brother and then his father, and rejoices in their misery. Goneril and Regan, Cornwall, Oswald, and the captain who kills Cordelia, all behave as if their actions were grounded on Edmund’s philosophy. Lear’s original self-assertion in the first scene when he sets up the love-trial is, too. But Lear changes during the course of the play; when he says, during the storm, ‘‘Take physic, pomp; / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them / And show the heavens more just,’’ he asserts the importance of human will and human action, and he defines our idea of the gods’ natures as dependent upon our behavior. Shakespeare weakens the force of Edmund’s critique, moreover, by showing that Edmund himself shifts responsibility away from himself when he is defeated, and also by showing twice that Edmund is, in fact, not as self-determining as he asserts and, consequently, Edmund’s doctrine is itself flawed. It is not the stars and the gods that have a formative influence, as Lear says in the storm, but is instead human actions.

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After Edgar has vanquished him in single combat, Edmund says, ‘‘The wheel is come full circle; I am here.’’ The wheel is the wheel turned by the goddess Fortune, the same goddess and the same wheel to which Kent refers when he waits in the stocks. As his father, Gloucester, had blamed the heavens for human treachery, now Edmund blames Fortune for his fall, rather than his own character or his own acts. One hardly supernatural source of Edmund’s attachment to evil, however, is presented in the first and in the last scenes of King Lear. In the first scene Gloucester speaks of Edmund to Kent, in Edmund’s presence—and an audience cannot help but think how his words must adversely affect and shame Edmund. When Kent asks, ‘‘Is not this your son, my lord?’’ Gloucester answers, ‘‘His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge. I have so often blushed to acknowledge him, that now I am brazed to’t.’’ When Kent responds that he does not understand what Gloucester is saying, using the expression, ‘‘I cannot conceive you,’’ Gloucester puns, using an alternate meaning of

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‘‘conceive,’’ to become pregnant, to respond to Kent jokingly, saying, ‘‘this young fellow’s mother could: whereupon she grew roundwombed, and had . . . a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed.’’ Gloucester continues to say ‘‘there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.’’ No matter how colloquially or however much in good spirits, Gloucester has just referred to his son Edmund as a whore’s son. He concludes by saying that Edmund has been away the last nine years (undoubtedly why Kent had to ask who he was) and will be sent away again after the king’s transfer of power. In the last scene, as he is dying, when Edmund learns Goneril has killed Regan and herself in their struggle over him, he says, ‘‘Yet Edmund was beloved.’’ The simple fact seems to be that he needed to be loved, and his father did not love or regard him. Despite Gloucester’s protestation to Kent in act 1, scene 1, that he loves his sons equally, he keeps Edmund at a distance. Thus, when Edmund speaks of being who he is no matter what star shone at his birth, he is ignoring the fact that by his evil plots, he is responding to a buried need created by a disdainful father, rather than initiating independent actions—the pride which impels him is a compensation for the shame that blankets him. The self Edmund thinks he is creating is a response to the identity, bastardy, imposed upon him. He says as much in his first soliloquy without realizing that the ambition he believes is fundamental to him has been constructed by his circumstances. Gloucester’s faith in astrological causation has not gained in strength when Kent restates it in act 4, scene 3, line 83, ‘‘It is the stars, / The stars above us, govern our conditions.’’ He is groping for an explanation of the difference between Cordelia and her sisters, ignoring both references in act 1, scene 1—one from Lear himself and one from Goneril—to Lear’s favoring Cordelia with greater love than he has had for her sisters. Not the gods nor the stars, but the characters themselves in King Lear make the misery that afflicts others and themselves. Albany says this quite clearly in act 4, scene 2, when he cries ‘‘Tigers,’’ at Goneril, ‘‘not daughters.’’ And he despairs that ‘‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself/Like monsters of the deep.’’ The only possible redress Lear can imagine is for ‘‘the heavens . . . to tame these vile offenses’’ by ‘‘send[ing] down’’ ‘‘their visible spirits’’ to punish

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those who have acted monstrously. Even here, Albany is not blaming the gods for mankind’s evil actions. He is calling upon them to be avengers. But vengeance in King Lear does not come from the gods. When it does come, it comes from mankind. The noble servant who opposes Cornwall as he is crushing Gloucester’s eyes can be seen as an agent of the gods, but to do that brings in matter extraneous to the play. The servant himself, as he strikes, attributes his behavior to something more humanistic than celestial, suggesting Kent’s first and equally despised service to Lear when he steps between the king and his wrath against Cordelia. ‘‘I have served you ever since I was a child,’’ the servant tells Cornwall, ‘‘But better service have I never done you / Than now bid you hold.’’ Lear avenges Cordelia’s death by killing her murderer. Edgar, however, seems to be the principal avenger. Nevertheless, his defeat of his brother in single combat and Goneril’s related suicide are not enough to save Cordelia and, consequently, Lear. But this is not because of the gods’ injustice, but because once human malice is loosed, it takes its course. When Edgar says, regarding Gloucester’s suffering, which is the result of Edmund’s treachery, ‘‘The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us: / The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes,’’ he is talking, really, less about the gods than about the lines of force that are projected by human actions, customs, and institutions. The evil characters in King Lear intend their evil. The characters who are not motivated by evil, like Lear and Gloucester and even Cordelia, herself, nevertheless without intending to do or cause evil, also unleash evil. Their fault is a certain degree of human blindness. It is Cordelia who probably comes closest to embodying Edmund’s egoistic philosophy stripped, however, of its egotism, when she acknowledges the play of unintended consequences and says, realizing, accepting, and even forgiving her own fault, ‘‘We are not the first / Who with the best meaning have incurred the worst.’’ At that time in history, when science and nature, law and philosophy, art and religion were all undergoing evolution and transformation, in King Lear Shakespeare devised a complex depiction of the variety of ways to understand the experience of life, of the world, which he has Lear call a ‘‘great stage of fools,’’ and of being human in that world to which, Lear notes, ‘‘when we are born, we cry that we are come.’’

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WE GET A SENSE OF SHAKESPEARE’S

WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

INTENTIONS BY NOTING HOW DETERMINEDLY HE SWERVES FROM THE HAPPIER ENDINGS OF HIS SOURCES. SHAKESPEARE CLEARLY WENT OUT OF HIS

Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel, A Thousand Acres, transposes the story of King Lear to a midwestern American farm and turns the Lear figure, Larry Cook, into a father who has molested his two eldest daughters. Caroline, the Cordelia figure, is able to love him better than her sisters because she was not similarly abused and is, for most of the novel, ignorant of his past behavior. The novel was made into a film in 1997 with a stellar cast including Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, and Jason Robards.



Death of A Salesman, Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, is a modern family tragedy about a patriarch who looses his power because of age and social change. The play also examines the toll his fierce personality has taken on the formation of his sons.



In Shakespeare, Our Contemporary (1964), Jan Kott compares King Lear to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1957), which presents a bleak twentieth-century view of the human condition and the absence of God.

Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation of King Lear held the stage for 150 years, although it is almost never performed today. Edgar and Cordelia become lovers. Lear is restored to his throne. The Fool’s part is entirely removed, and Shakespeare’s penetrating verse is made artificial and bombastic. Nevertheless, Tate’s adaptation is skillful and reveals something of the spirit of his time. The text is readily available on the internet.  Le Pere ` Goriot (Old Goriot or Father Goriot), written in 1835, is a novel by Honore´ de Balzac in which Old Goriot lives in poverty in order to keep his daughters, who return his kindness with scorn, living luxurious lives. 

Source: Neil Heims, Critical Essay on King Lear, in Shakespeare For Students, Second Edition, Thomson Gale, 2007.

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WAY TO MAKE KING LEAR NOT JUST TRAGIC, BUT HORRIFICALLY SO.’’

Craig Bernthal In the following excerpt, Bernthal discusses the several possible sources Shakespeare consulted for King Lear, particularly The True Chronicle History of King Leir and Arcadia. The critic examines how Shakespeare deviated from the ‘‘happier endings’’ of his sources ‘‘to make King Lear not just tragic, but horrifically so.’’ Bernthal also analyzes the elements of nihilism and justice that have occupied other critics of the play. . . . Shakespeare had several potential sources for Lear, including Holinshed and The Mirrour for Magistrates (1574), but for our purposes, two have special relevance. From an earlier dramatization of the Lear story, The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1605), he took the idea of the love contest with which King Lear begins. Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia are to compete with each other to say who loves Lear the most, and the one who makes the most impressive declaration of love will get a larger share of the kingdom for her dowry than her sisters. Cordelia, the youngest, says she cannot ‘‘heave her heart’’ into her mouth, and refuses to play the game, though she is the only daughter who truly loves her father. Her reward is banishment, after which Lear foolishly consigns himself to the care of Cordelia’s older wolfish sisters, Goneril and Regan, who bar him from their homes and force him into destitution. In Leir, the king is rescued by his youngest daughter (Cordilla) and they live to see happier days, but in Shakespeare’s Lear, Cordelia is hanged and Lear dies—apparently of heart failure—shortly thereafter. Shakespeare got his idea for the subplot involving Gloucester, Edmund, and Edgar from Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590). Edmund, as the bastard son of Gloucester, convinces his

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father that Edgar, the legitimate son, is plotting patricide. Easily duped, Gloucester seeks to capture and punish his truly faithful son Edgar, who flees for his life. For attempting to help Lear, Gloucester is later accused of treason by Regan’s husband, the duke of Cornwall. Edmund not only informs on his father, but leaves him to his fate, knowing that Cornwall has something dreadful in store. Cornwall gouges out the old man’s eyes. Later, in trial by combat, Edgar wounds Edmund mortally (Edmund is carried off stage, clinging to life). Gloucester dies, his heart bursting with passion when Edgar reveals himself as the loyal son. The major difference between Shakespeare’s version and Sidney’s is that in the latter, the two brothers are reconciled. We get a sense of Shakespeare’s intentions by noting how determinedly he swerves from the happier endings of his sources. Shakespeare clearly went out of his way to make King Lear not just tragic, but horrifically so. The blinding of Gloucester, which occurs on stage, is perhaps the most excruciating scene Shakespeare ever wrote, and the ensuing carnage tops even that of Hamlet. A servant, appalled at what his master Cornwall is doing to Gloucester, gives Cornwall his death wound, and Regan kills the servant by stabbing him in the back. Edgar kills Oswald, one of Goneril’s servants, and, finally, defeats Edmund in trial by combat. Gloucester dies offstage after his heart bursts. Goneril poisons her sister Regan out of jealousy for Edmund and then stabs herself to death when Edmund dies. The bodies of the two dead women are produced on stage. At this point, with the villains (and Gloucester) cleared from the boards, it would be easy for Shakespeare to follow his sources and give Lear and Cordelia a happy ending. Instead, Shakespeare makes a surprising move. Edmund has ordered that Cordelia and Lear be hanged, and before the order can be countermanded, Cordelia is executed. Lear carries her body on stage and dies at her side shortly afterward. ‘‘Is this the promised end?’’ asks Kent, Lear’s faithful retainer. ‘‘Or image of that horror?’’ finishes Edgar. These are questions that many in Shakespeare’s audience who were familiar with the traditional Lear stories, or the earlier Leir, might well have asked. The mirror-like double plot of King Lear is another clue that Shakespeare’s intention was to exhibit human depravity to an extent that far exceeded his previous work. Just as Lear casts

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off his loyal daughter Cordelia, Gloucester casts off his loyal son, Edgar; and just as Lear’s ungrateful daughters seek to destroy him, Edmund seeks to destroy his father Gloucester. As A.C. Bradley notes, this does not just double the pain of King Lear, but suggests that there is a ‘‘malignant influence’’ in the land, and that what is happening in the households of Lear and Gloucester is no aberration. Ending Lear with the death of Cordelia proved so distasteful to later audiences that in 1681, Nahum Tate rewrote the ending so that Lear and Cordelia survived, and Edgar married Cordelia. This played as the standard stage version of Lear until 1838. Audiences agreed with Samuel Johnson: Shakespeare’s original was just too hard to take. With the flourishing of academic criticism in the twentieth century came two versions of Lear. The first, which held sway from the beginning of the century to the mid-sixties, held that Lear was a Christian play about pre-Christian times, in which its audience, observing the play from a more informed Christian viewpoint, would have seen much dramatic irony: pre-Christians attempting to understand the world without the benefit of Christian revelation. Later readings took Lear’s nihilistic element not as a subject of irony, but as a serious statement of universal meaninglessness . . . But is the vision of King Lear really hopeless and nihilistic? Certainly, there is evidence in the play that can be marshaled in support of such an argument. A remarkably prescient Edmund seems to think the world works according to Darwinian principles. ‘‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound’’ (1.2.1–2). For Edmund, nature is the realm of dog-eat-dog, and he believes he can get Edgar’s inheritance because he is strong enough and ruthless enough to take it. To the blinded Gloucester, the gods seem different at best, and sadistic at worst. He says, ‘‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport’’ (4.1.38–39). The duke of Albany, Goneril’s decent husband, appalled by what she and Regan have done to Lear, says: If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to tame these vile offences, It will come: Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep.

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Albany calls upon divine intervention many times in the play, as do others, such as the two servants who see Gloucester blinded. Referring to Regan and Cornwall, one exclaims, ‘‘I’ll never care what wickedness I do / If this man come to good’’ (3.7.98–99); the other replies, ‘‘If she live long, / And in the end meet the old course of death, / Women will all turn monsters,’’ implying that if there is no divine sanction against the wicked, people will infer that there are no gods, and do whatever they want . . . But does the action of the drama consistently support declarations of nihilism and undercut speeches that assert the existence of justice? The deaths of Cornwall, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund might indeed be chalked up to divine justice. Albany gives the gods credit when he hears of Cornwall’s death: ‘‘This shows you are above, / You justicers, that these our nether crimes / So speedily can venge’’ (4.2.79–81). Albany’s assessment is the same when Goneril kills Regan and then herself: ‘‘This judgment of the heavens that makes us tremble / Touches us not with pity’’ (5.3.230–31). Many critics, however, feel that these apparent instances of justice are erased dramatically by the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. Kent’s line, ‘‘Is this the promised end?’’ elicits three syllables from Albany: ‘‘Fall, and cease,’’ which Foakes glosses to mean ‘‘in general terms, ‘Let everything come to ruin, and cease to be.’’’ The final damage to the body politic is incalculable. Kent refuses to be king, and neither Albany nor Edgar seems to want the job. What, they might say, is the point? The apparent absence of heavenly ‘‘justicers’’ in the final scene is paralleled by the absence, throughout the play, of any human institution for trying cases and dispensing justice. The only trial scene Shakespeare gives us is the product of Lear’s deranged mind. In act 3, scene 6, Lear, deep in madness, imagines he arraigns Goneril and Regan. As Lear, Edgar, and the fool wait out the storm in a hovel, Lear seems to see a courtroom before him in which Goneril and Regan stand as defendants. The fool and Edgar, disguised as a madman, become Lear’s co-adjudicators. As Lear gazes into this imagined scene, and begins to question ‘‘Goneril,’’ the fool, looking in the direction of Lear’s gaze, says to her, ‘‘Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint stool’’ (3.6.51). This is all that is left of institutional justice in the world of Lear— wish fulfillment. But even as wish fulfillment,

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Lear’s dream goes astray, for the imaginary Goneril escapes the court: ‘‘Stop her there!’’ Lear cries to the bailiff, ‘‘Arms, arms, sword, fire, corruption in the place! / False justicer, why hast thou let her ’scape?’’ (3.6.53–55). In the plays we have examined, Shakespeare shows how judicial decision making can go astray, but in this scene the very possibility of justice is rejected. Justice is not even viable in the imagination. But it is not only his desire to punish his daughters that motivates Lear’s trial. Lear also wants answers. How could Goneril and Regan have become what they are? How could they be so evil? How could the gods allow such evil to exist? Lear says of his fellow judges, ‘‘Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds / about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make / these hard hearts?’’ (3.6.73–75). This, of course, is another statement of the play’s central question, implied every time someone invokes divine intervention or interprets events as if such an intervention had occurred. Does God exist? Does he pay attention? Then why is there evil? Shakespeare, I believe, does suggest an answer to this question, for it is in suffering the consequences of evil and his own foolishness that Lear finally attains an understanding of himself and his obligations to the rest of mankind. It is because Lear can find no justice for himself that he begins to ask whether he has been just to others. Certainly he has not been just to Cordelia, and the knowledge of this is at the root of his madness. But Lear becomes aware of a far broader failure to the people of his kingdom. The first inklings of this dereliction occur on the heath, in the storm, where Lear commits his first unselfish act: he offers shelter to the fool and Kent before entering the hovel himself: [To Kent]

Prithee go in thyself, seek thine own ease. This tempest will not give me leave to ponder On things would hurt me more . . . [To the fool]

In boy, go first. You houseless poverty— Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray . . . (3.4.23–27) Lear’s prayer is essentially for forgiveness for ignoring the poor people of his realm, all of

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whom will shortly be given dramatic representation through Edgar, as Tom of Bedlam. For us, Tom translates as the homeless schizophrenic, wandering the streets, conversing fiercely with invisible companions. But Lear is aware of these people before Tom appears, and he now feels their poverty and their mental afflictions. [Lear kneels]

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. (3.4.28–36) When Lear meets Edgar, who is smeared with dirt and apparently mad, he attempts to give his clothing to the poor man, but the fool and Kent stop him: ‘‘Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, / bare, forked animal as thou art,’’ he tells Edgar. ‘‘Off, off, you lendings: / come, unbutton here’’ (3.4.105–07). Lear has come a long way from the infantile old man who wanted to retire as king but keep the glory of office. At the beginning of the play, when Regan comments that Lear ‘‘hath ever but / slenderly known himself’’ (1.1.294–95), she must be credited with telling the truth, but by act 4, the description is no longer accurate. In looking back at life as a king, Lear realizes that he was lied to from his earliest years, was always told what he wanted to hear, and that it warped him: They flattered me like a dog and told me I had the white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. To say ‘‘ay’’ and ‘‘no’’ to everything that I said ‘‘ay’’ and ‘‘no’’ to was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt

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’em out. Go to, they are not men o’ their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof. (4.6.96–104) Lear’s suffering is not useless. It finally makes him human. Samuel Johnson characterized King Lear as ‘‘a play in which the wicked prosper,’’ but is there really any evidence to support this view? Regan and Goneril are dead before they have a chance to enjoy their inheritance. Edmund’s prosperity runs a very brief course before his brother kills him. Cornwall is killed by his own servant just one instant after he blinds Gloucester. And against this must be matched the good that is demonstrated in the play. Cordelia and Kent remain true to Lear, despite his rejection of them, as does Edgar to Gloucester. Though Lear dies, he is forgiven by and reconciled to Cordelia first, as is Gloucester to Edgar. Through suffering, Lear is ‘‘redeemed’’ on the heath, or at least ennobled, throwing off a childish egocentricity and finally thinking of the needs of others. Denied justice himself, he comes to realize that he has been less than just to others. King Lear does not refute a Christian view of the world any more than Job does. However, the effect of Lear, appropriate to a great play, is that it arouses a complicated response. Shakespeare strongly introduces nihilism as a possibility, a shadow that haunts our best hopes. We see this in most of Shakespeare’s great tragedies. Hamlet continually doubts the meaningfulness of life. Macbeth sees life as ‘‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’’ The existence of a personal, loving God who gives meaning to life is not a foregone conclusion, and cannot be derived from the experience of daily life. If such were the case, there would be little need for injunctions to faithfulness, hope, and charity. Rather, it is because believers have doubts that these virtues are urged. King Lear honestly and openly portrays our reasons for doubt, but the steadfastness of Cordelia and the transformation of Lear give us better reasons to hope than to disbelieve. Evil is able to accomplish nothing in King Lear.The character defects of Lear and Gloucester let evil into the body politic. It exists parasitically on the good and is finally expelled, after much devastation all around. As in Shakespear’s last plays, the tragicomedies, the certainty that justice will prevail is

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Leo Wringer as the Fool at the Albery Theatre, London 2005 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

not emphasized so much as the hope and faith that it will. And although hope and faith—along with charity—are Christian virtues, certainty never has been. Source: Craig Bernthal, ‘‘Conclusion,’’ in The Trial of Man: Christianity and Judgment in the World of Shakespeare, ISI Books, 2003, pp. 262–71.

Marilyn Gaull Gaull argues that King Lear depicts two kinds of love: divine love, associated with universal order, and erotic love, associated with chaos and destruction. When Lear abdicates his royal responsibilities, the critic asserts, he plunges his kingdom into a state of spiritual and emotional disorder. Gaull suggests that Lear’s choice of corrupt, erotic love over divine love results in a transference of sexuality; the king becomes emasculated as he is gradually stripped of the symbols of his traditional role, while at the same time Goneril and Regan increasingly assume masculine attitudes. By contrast, the critic declares, Cordelia adheres to the principle of domestic and political hierarchy, and thus she becomes an agent of divine love in the play.

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Placing King Lear in the intellectual climate in which the play was conceived, one finds a conflict on the thematic level between two kinds of love: divine love, expressed in an ordered cosmic, social, and spiritual hierarchy, and erotic love, a kind of subterranean energy which is the source of chaos, disorder, and destruction. Specifically, when King Lear assumed he could divest himself of responsibility, retiring as any lesser mortal to the obscurity of an ‘‘unburdened’’ old age, he committed an offense against universal order and thereby denied divine love. Then, when he allowed himself to be seduced of his kingdom by Goneril and Regan, he exchanged his role as king for that of love goddess, suffering all the consequences of a submission, however tacit, to the illegitimate order of eros . . . [By] appropriating the privileges of position without the responsibilities, by preferring private interest to public obligation, by investing an inordinate amount of power in inferior indivduals, Lear created the conditions for rebellion by those whom he was enjoined to control. By extension, through his failure to be ruled by

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IT IS THE THREE EXILES IN THE PLAY, CORDELIA, KENT, AND EDGAR WHO, BY MAINTAINING THE THREE BASIC RELATIONSHIPS OF AN ORDERED SOCIETY, EXPRESS DIVINE LOVE.’’

reason, he alienated himself from divine love and forfeited his sovereignty over his own baser passions. His abdication of responsibility released the destructive energies of eros in the social and political sphere and delivered him and all those upon whom his life impinged into psychological and spiritual chaos. It is the three exiles in the play, Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar who, by maintaining the three basic relationships of an ordered society, express divine love. Displaced by the collapse of the social and political hierarchy, they are the most evident victims of Lear’s truancy. Nonetheless, they continue to articulate and perform the services demanded by universal order. Thus Cordelia demonstrates woman’s subordination to her husband; Kent, a subject’s subordination to his king; and Edgar, a son’s subordination to his father . . . Gloucester and Albany may also be considered victims of Lear’s truancy, more helpless than the exiles insofar as their fulfilling their roles in the universal order depends upon circumstance rather than a capacity for divine love. But because they are basically good and adapted, however passively, to their roles in the legitimate hierarchy, they cannot survive in the alternative and subversive hierarchy of eros. The gentle and ineffectual Albany allows his wife to dominate him, creating the conditions for his own cuckolding. And Gloucester, who suffers a defect of vision long before his blindness, was never able to distinguish between the legitimate and the subversive order. His acknowledgment at the opening of the play of the position he allowed Edmund, the product of an adulterous union, is an ominous concession to the order of eros which will ultimately betray him. He admits to Kent: ‘‘But I have a son, sir, by order of law, some year elder than this, who yet is no dearer in my account: though this knave came something

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saucily to the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport in the making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged’’ (I, i, 19–26). The desolating consequences of this emotional generosity are summed up by Edgar in the same speech in which he reveals his identity: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us: The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes. If the three exiles, Gloucester, and Albany are victims of Lear’s truancy, Goneril and Regan are villains for the same reason. In their mismanaged attempts to fill the vacuum created by Lear, they are simply fulfilling another principle of natural law. The chaos which surrounds them arises from the appetitive or erotic instincts by which they are dominated. But, after all, it was these very instincts to which Lear appealed when he invited his daughters’ declarations of love, declarations which he made the qualification for possessing his kingdom. A comparison between Lear’s overtures and Cleopatra’s at the opening of Antony and Cleopatra suggests rather strikingly the role Lear had assumed. Like Lear, she asks, ‘‘If it be love indeed, tell me how much’’ (I, i, 14). And this Egyptian love goddess is admonished by Antony in terms peculiarly reminiscent of Cordelia’s: ‘‘There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d’’ (I, i, 15). What I am suggesting is that not only did Lear disregard divine love in favor of the profane but also that it was a profane love which was essentially perverted. This idea seems to be enforced by a fascinating transference of sexuality which gradually emerges in the interaction of Lear and his daughters. Lear’s emasculation begins when he places himself in the custody of his daughters thereby forfeiting along with his kingdom his masculine role as superior, ruler, protector, and provider. After Goneril has abused her power over him, he begins to conceive of her as a man, calls her a ‘‘degenerate bastard,’’ claims that he is ashamed of her ‘‘power to shake [his] manhood,’’ and finally in his madness accuses both her and Regan of not being ‘‘men o’ their words’’ (i, iv, 260, 304; IV, vi, 106). Simultaneously, Goneril and Regan assume increasingly masculine attitudes, particularly in their competition for Edmund’s affection. Regan’s masculinity is most evident in the passage in which, expressing decidedly female jealousy of Goneril, she adopts the spare terms of

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the battlefront: ‘‘I am doubtful that you have been conjunct / And bosomed with her, as far as we call hers’’ (V, i, 12–13). Goneril, on the other hand, like an intriguing courtier contrives to have her husband murdered so that she might better pursue Edmund. Her attitude reveals the destructive consequences of investing the political power of a legitimate hierarchy in female figures who are adapted to rule only in the subversive hierarchy of eros: ‘‘I had rather lose the battle than that sister/Should loosen him and me’’ (V, i, 18–19). The Fool and Edmund, initially vagrants or aberrations in the official hierarchy, function as vocal adversaries in the debate between the two major opposing forces of order and chaos. The Fool with his detached and uncompromisingly literal perspective shrewdly if instinctively predicts and interprets the consequences of Lear’s action, measuring it against the norms of hierarchy. For example, when Lear asks him ‘‘When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?’’ The Fool replies: . . . e’er since thou mad’st thy daughter thy mothers; for when thou gav’st them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches, Then they for sudden joy did weep, And I for sorrow sung, That such a king should play bo-peep And go the fools among (I, iv, 175–182) The Fool’s musical association is a significant one since it is an indication of his affinity with cosmic order, his instinctive harmony with natural law and divine love. Cordelia similarly uses music to restore Lear’s rationality, to bring him back in tune with the divine principles of the universal hierarchy. Finally, Edmund, the child of eros, serves not only as the voice of the anarchical group but also as the source of its daemonic energy. His superior rationality adapts him to his role of leadership, but his abuse of this faculty for selfadvancement marks him as the most culpable. His is the only purely volitional offense against natural law. An unregenerate individual with an insight superior to Lear’s, Cordelia’s, Edgar’s, indeed to that of any of the major candidates for heroic stature, Edmund ranks among the great literary villains who before their defeat contrive to express and to expose the great sanative values of the drama. As an illegitimate son, Edmund has no position in the social and

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political hierarchy, but this same condition eminently qualifies him to lead the subversive hierarchy of eros, chaos, and destruction. Having been indiscriminately admitted to the hierarchy by Gloucester, Edmund becomes an incipient threat to it, manipulating and exploiting it with a dashing expertise . . . Ironically, it is by emulating the King that Edmund becomes the ruler of his illegitimate kingdom. He formulates his legal code on the authority of Lear’s distortion of natural law: the prerogatives of youth and private interest over age and public responsibility. By the time Edmund articulates the rationale for his treason, he is only interpreting what has been empirically demonstrated by Lear: ‘‘The younger rises when the old doth fall’’ (III, iii, 26). This statement with its Machiavellian disregard of human feeling, its frigid recognition of what the modern temper regards as the inevitable pattern of social evolution, acquires its barb from the ethos of Lear’s world. Although cosmic hierarchy illustrated and natural law proclaimed that age and the fullness of experience were the supreme virtues for wielding power, Lear voted for his own retirement, disqualified himself, relinquished the protection of a position he held by divine right. Then, he appealed to the very order which he had violated: O heavens! If you do love old men, if your sweet sway Allow obedience, if you yourselves are old, Make it your cause. Send down, and take my part. (II, iv, 188–191) The corrective, the re-assertion of natural law in the development of generations, is offered as an admonition by Edgar to his suicidal father: A man must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all. (V, ii, 9–11) The battle lines between the forces of chaos, a grotesque paradox of the legitimate hierarchy, and the forces of order, assembled in the costumes of fools, beggars, and madmen, are clearly defined when Gloucester moves from the castle, now ruled by Edmund, to the moor, the storm, and the insane court of Lear. It is a powerful confrontation, for Gloucester is appealing to the very source of chaos when, disheartened by what he thinks is Edgar’s treachery, he laments to Lear:

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Our flesh and blood, my Lord, is grown so vile That it doth hate what gets it. (III, iv, 148–149) But in this kingdom of the absurd, even this multiple truth is an untruth, or at best a half truth. Fidelity is everywhere evident—in an anonymous retainer, a mad beggar, and an oracular fool. The central and compelling truth distorted beyond recognition is flung at a raging and primordial world by the alienated and insane symbol and minister of virtue, reason, and justice: I am the King himself . . . Nature’s above art in that respect. (IV, vi, 84, 86)

Lear’s insanity involves his recognition of the emotional basis of his relationship with Goneril and Regan, a love professedly filial but essentially corrupt, profane, erotic. Thus he passes from a fixation on filial ingratitude to one on lechery and adultery. This change is initiated when he meets Edgar disguised as Tom o’Bedlam and hears his factitious autobiography. Tom attributes his madness, the ‘‘foul field’’ which pursued him, to his life as a foppish courtier seduced by his mistress and corrupted by his passions: A servingman, proud in heart and mind, that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap; served the lust of my mistress’ heart, and did the act of darkness with her; swore as many oaths as I spake words, and broke them in the sweet face of heaven. One that slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it. Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly; and in woman outparamoured the Turk . . . Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, they pen from lenders’ books, and defy the foul fiend. (III, iv, 85–99).

Lear’s response suggests the essential bestiality which he senses he shares with Tom, both exiles from the protective order of society: Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. (III, iv, 108–110).

The ‘‘foul fiends’’ for Lear are Goneril and Regan who become more explicitly identified with lust and appetitive excess in the mad scenes of Act IV. Vainly grasping the remnants of his royal position, it is with crushing pathos that he confuses the blinded Gloucester with the pagan

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god of eros: ‘‘No, do thy worst, blind Cupid; I’ll not love’’ (IV, vi, 139–140). It is divine love, the love which created and maintained the cosmic order, embodied in Cordelia, which restores Lear both to his rationality and to his royal position. ‘‘Thou has one daughter,’’ says her emissary to the nearly disabled king. Who redeems nature from the general curse Which twain have brought her to (IV, vi, 208–210) Although her success in restoring Lear will be limited, since the ‘‘curse’’ was essentially selfinflicted, Cordelia is eminently qualified for her task. She comes from a politically ordered kingdom, suggested in the text by France’s deserting her to fulfill his first obligation, the reparation of a breach in his own kingdom. (IV, iii, 3–6). Her reason for invading England, not ‘‘blown ambition’’ but ‘‘love, dear love, and our aged father’s right’’ (IV, iv, 27–29), is one of the only two motives for war sanctioned by natural law. Self-defense, the other motive, is expressed, ironically enough, by her temporary opponent, Albany, exonerating him from a violation of natural law but creating an almost insoluable conflict (V, i, 20–27). While both causes are just, because Lear is too feeble to defend his right and because in the absence of France there is no military leader qualified to defend it for him, Albany with the advantage of strength succeeds. It is a facet of natural law which modern revolutionaries have espoused: force until right is ready. Psychologically and emotionally, Cordelia exhibits the internal order of faculties which she expressed in her speech on proportion in the first act. Her response to the news of her father’s suffering is described in appropriately political terms, suggesting the correspondent hierarchies in the internal and external kingdom: It seemed she was a queen Over her passion, who most rebel-like, Sought to be king o’er her . . . There she shook The holy water from her heavenly eyes, And clamor moistened: then away she started To deal with grief alone. (IV, iii, 14–16, 30–34)

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Concomitant with this inner control, proportion, and order are Cordelia’s clear perspective, her immediate apprehension of the sources of Lear’s madness, and her unsuspected power to restore his sanity, his political identity, and his spiritual harmony with the order of the spheres. Thus she prays: O you kind gods! Cure this great breach in his abused nature. Th’ untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up Of this child-changed father. (IV, vii, 14–17) The cure is affected by three means, each symbolic of one of the major categories in the chain or order of being: sleep induced by herbs, suggesting the subjugation of nature; music, appealing to rationality and the sense of balance; and Cordelia’s kiss, symbol of transcendent love. O my dear father, restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss Repair those violent harms that my two sisters Have in thy reverence made. (IV, vii, 26–29) Considering, therefore, Cordelia as symbol of the entire range of hierarchy and order, one ought, it seems to me, to be able to interpret Lear’s awakening as a return to a proper relationship with that hierarchy and divine love. But he continues to challenge Cordelia, confessing thereby his failure to recognize the immutable cosmic bonds involved in the familial relationship. I know you do not love me; for your sisters Have, as I do remember, done me wrong. You have some cause, they have not. (IV, vii, 72–74) Cordelia’s response, ‘‘No cause, no cause,’’ is less a volitional expression of Christian charity than the acquiescence of a sane and virtuous individual to the very sources of sanity and virtue, an affirmation of what Kent had described as ‘‘the holy cords . . . / Which are too intrinse t’unloose’’ (II, ii, 76–77). But there is only a momentary stasis, a temporary suggestion of supernal peace before the violence with which the drama concludes. I would like to suggest several reasons why at the end of the drama Lear is subjected to such apparently unaccountable suffering, why he is unable to reclaim his kingdom, and why Cordelia must become the final though potentially most meaningful sacrifice.

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First, because Lear is redeemed not by the purgatorial experience of his madness but rather by Cordelia’s intervention, he acquires only a passive immunity to further suffering. Secondly, he fails to recognize that his previous suffering was selfinflicted, a miscalculation of the responsibilities of his position which allowed the betrayal of Goneril and Regan. Thirdly, his instincts remain escapist, regressive, expressed in his rationalization of their prospective imprisonment. The pastoral withdrawal, the edinic vision which he depicts so lyrically is the ideal of the courtier rather than the vision of a king; it is a return to a lower order of nature, uncorrupted but outside the pale of human achievement: . . . Come, let’s away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out, And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out, In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by th’ moon. (V, iii, 8–19) Once more Lear disregards that he is by birth and by divine ordination king, God’s minister, and executor of law and order in the secular sphere. In his sanguine willingness to adapt to his environment, to adjust to his surroundings, Lear reveals his decidedly terrestial inclinations. Since Cordelia’s existence in the political order depends upon Lear’s assuming command of himself and of his kingdom, she is for the second, and final time, a victim of his weakness. Finally, the kind of love relationships into which Lear entered and the emotional bases on which he entered them suggest a kind of constitutional defect which prevented him from entering the transcendent emotional realm which Cordelia opened to him. This defect is perhaps best formulated in a statement from Saint Augustine’s City of God, XI, in which appear many of the orthodox principles of cosmic

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order: we are ‘‘endowed with a kind of attraction for our proper place in the order of nature. The specific gravity of a body is, as it were, its love, whether it tends upward by its lightness or downward by its weight.’’ It is somewhat by natural selection that Edgar not simply survives but prevails at the end of the play. On a plane productively human he resolves the major conflict between eros and divine love, between chaos and order. If the sins of the father are truly visited upon the son, as Edgar’s suffering at the hands of Edmund would suggest, then he frees himself and his kingdom of the ‘‘foul fiend’’ when he vanquishes his bastard brother, the ruler of the illegitimate order of eros. Moreover, in his guise as Tom o’Bedlam he has been purged in a preventive fashion of both the vice and the consequences of erotic love. But unlike Cordelia he is a terrestial creature committed to a human sphere, the only sphere in which a human being to remain human may work out his salvation. This salvation, earthly perfection, ‘‘ripeness’’ if you like, is made possible by the emotional affinity he shares with Cordelia, divine or transcendent love, and is the basis for the creation of a new and more stable order. Source: Marilyn Gaull, ‘‘Love and Order in King Lear,’’ in Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. XIX, No. 3, October 1967, pp. 333–42.

John C. McCloskey McCloskey examines the association of images from the world of ‘‘animals, insects, and the more repulsive denizens’’ of the seas with the shifts in Lear’s emotions. The king’s selfishness and moral blindness, together with his inability to understand others, lead him into a world of disordered nature, the critic maintains. McCloskey notes that as Lear moves from resentment in Act I to indignation in Act II, and, finally, rage in Act III, the imagery changes to reflect the increasing intensity of his moods and to underscore the theme of unnaturalness. It has been said that we must accept the passionate, irrational King Lear, with his plan for dividing his kingdom, and the devoted yet strangely reticent Cordelia as data not to be inquired into but taken on poetic faith. Yet Lear’s ‘‘retirement’’ is a sensible thing in itself. What makes it fraught with tragedy is his misreading of human nature. Had all his children been like Cordelia, things might have turned out well. And here is the irony—that what is sensible

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FROM THE EVOCATION OF MERE RESENTMENT AND INDIGNATION THE IMAGERY BECOMES GRIMMER, MORE SERIOUS, AND MORE VIVIDLY SUGGESTIVE OF LEAR’S DESTITUTE MORAL CONDITION AND THE FRIGHTFUL EVENTUALITIES OF THE FUTURE.’’

in itself is made a foolish, senseless thing to do by the characters of those involved. Or to put it another way, imperfect, selfish human nature again wrecks ideals. Consider that Lear is a king who loves his daughters and out of his egoism expects love in return, a king who believes simply that generosity begets gratitude, that children revere and honor their parents, that obedience is of the nature of the filial relation. A king who ‘‘hath ever but slenderly known himself’’, he has not known his courtiers either, for example, Kent. A king who is curiously naive in the ways of human nature, who has no subtlety in human relations, who does not even suspect that power may corrupt and that old age rendered helpless is a thing for contempt. A king who is not wise enough to protect himself but of his own volition throws himself upon the untender mercies of the evil, whom he does not even recognize as evil. Yet Lear embodies the idealism of fatherly love as Cordelia and Edgar are emblems of filial devotion, Kent of loyal service, the Fool of conscience, and France of true love. But Lear’s idealism is tainted by evil, by the moral corruption of self-deluding egoism, while the idealism of the others is not, and the proper end for Lear is, therefore, tragic disaster. In the chaotic and hostile world into which Lear is precipitated by his acts of misjudgment, self-will, and wrath, the tragic disaster toward which he proceeds and which culminates in madness and death in a world against which he cannot contend, a world wild and ferocious, a world of negated values, moral blindness, and unnaturalness, is expressed to a remarkable degree by images from the padding, stalking, creeping, crawling, slithering world of animals, insects, and the more repulsive denizens of the waters,

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and the images are evoked to express or to intensify his anger, rejection, indignation, wrath, and vengeance.

seems to ignore it, it succeeds immediately in condensing the whole moral problem which enmeshes Lear in its inevitable consequences.

The imagery of the lower animals, which suggests the moral derangement of the world in which Lear has hitherto thought himself secure, begins with the cooling of his reception in Goneril’s home, when her servant Oswald neglects to answer Lear’s question as to the whereabouts of his daughter. This breach of decorum and respect and reverence, for authority stirs a mild resentment in Lear, the first stage of the emotional turmoil which brings him at length to madness. His resentment and, perhaps, a touch of proper contempt, the genesis of which is Lear’s instinctive awareness of the social disparity between his kingly state and the lowly status of a servant, are expressed in his epithet ‘‘mongrel’’, an image general, colorless, and uncommitted, since the offence is not at the moment identifiable with the attitude of the daughters or the moral problem of the play. When Oswald describes Lear as not the king but ‘‘My lady’s father’’, Lear’s indignation is spurred, and the imagery becomes more intense and particularized in its connotative derogation as ‘‘whoreson dog’’ and ‘‘cur’’. It is significant that Lear thinks in terms of such lowly, though commonplace images, since he has himself already entered upon his own descent, with the result that eventually his state is reduced as low, in the storm scene on the heath particularly, as that of the animal world in terms of the imagery of which his mind constitutionally reacts.

As Lear enters the incipiency of his rage, irritated by Oswald and shocked by the callousness of Goneril, who desiring to teach him what is properly conventional to age refers to his actions as pranks, thus suggesting his senility, and demands that he be shorn of his knights, the imagery changes to correspond with his emotional state—his indignation and his anger at the filial ingratitude of Goneril, this ‘‘degenerate bastard’’. Since the natural order of things is here disturbed, the expression of this state of affairs, which is quite monstrous, receives its correspondency in its figurative presentment of ingratitude as a ‘‘hideous seamonster’’. This is reinforced by an appropriate shift in the imagery, though the correspondence of destructive intent and power is maintained, to ‘‘detested kite’’. For a kite is a falcon-like bird which preys on small quarry, such as is Lear without his kingship, without his power, moving down the scale from greatness.

From the evocation of mere resentment and indignation the imagery becomes grimmer, more serious, and more vividly suggestive of Lear’s destitute moral condition and the frightful eventualities of the future. The Fool’s bitter statement, For you know, nuncle, The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, That it had it head bit off by it young. is not only a sharp and crude image of ingratitude, but it is also an image of Lear’s own foolishness, his misjudgment, his improvident helplessness, and his egoistic blindness. The imagery implied in the verb ‘‘bit off’’ is by transference an image of human decapitation and a darkly prophetic forewarning of what Lear is to experience from his children. In the image is implicit the lack of gratitude and love and even common humanity which already are Lear’s destiny. The image is so proper and so apt in its context that though Lear

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Shifting from the image of the kite, Lear intensifies his emotion of frustration and rage, which seethes in him against his unnatural daughter Goneril, whom he has just cursed unnaturally, praying nature to make her sterile, by objectifying his rising obsession of ingratitude in the figure of a serpent’s tooth. In thus juxtaposing images from the sky and from the crawling earth he suggests, perhaps, his subconscious awareness that both heaven and earth are against him. Having employed the images of sea-monster, kite, and serpent to vivify his referent, he gives further extension to the notion of Goneril’s cruelty and sly, cunning nature by additional images from the animal world, ‘‘wolvish visage’’ and ‘‘fox’’, and these images for the first time blend with anger the passion of vengeance, for Lear wrathfully states that when Regan hears of this she will ‘‘flay’’ Goneril’s wolvish visage and the Fool states that had one caught a fox like this daughter it would soon to the slaughter. Now the imagery sinks below the animal stratum to the mollusk, thus intensifying the sense of the moral depths in which Lear, not yet pessimistically, helplessly wanders. The imagery of the snail and the oyster carries to the lowest pitch of figurative expression the blindness of Lear, his lack of judgment, the low order of the

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ratiocination from which proceeded his initial error. Then the image of the foolishness of Lear is carried upward to the animal stratum once again by ‘‘assess’’. If in this connection it is recalled that the animal stratum is often referred to as ‘‘the animal kingdom’’, the irony of Lear’s position is painfully apparent. Just as Goneril has been reduced in the area of imagery to a correspondence with animals that sting, bite, and destroy, organisms which are feral and inhuman, so her servant Oswald is dehumanized as a rat, a dog, a goose, the latter image being peculiarly appropriate to Oswald, who is remarkably consistent in the traits implicit in this figure. With the momentary resurgence of Lear’s old imperious attitude in his indignation at the stocking of his messenger Kent, the scale of the animal imagery rises from the stupid and compliant goose to horses, dogs, bears, and monkeys, thus suggesting the greater degree of the culpability of Cornwall and Regan by creating imagery belonging to animals on a higher ratiocinative plane and thereby rendering their guilt less excusable. Now again irony is blended explicity with the imagery which sets forth Lear’s moral problem. His imperious indignation, in terms of the imagery, is as cogent as learning secured from an ant. His intensified anger becomes adulterated with helplessness, and his orders to Regan and Cornwall to come forth are as ineffective as the cockney crying to the eels when she put them alive in the pastry. While anger is often imaged forth in feral terms, blindness, stupidity, weakness, and helplessness are presented in images from the still lower stratum of animate things, that of the snail, the oyster, and the eel, and in the appropriateness of the imagery is apparent once again its integral relation to the total structure of the play. When Lear, having fled to his ‘‘Beloved Regan’’, reflects upon his love and generosity to his daughters which proceeded from his heart and upon the unnatural ingratitude paid him by Goneril in return, the image which externalizes his emotional state of outraged paternal affection mingled with surprise and shock appears in the form of sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture, tearing at his heart, and in his rising anger at Regan’s rejection of his claims and her injunction to ask Goneril’s forgiveness and return to her, this image is reinforced in the collateral one of being struck with a serpent’s

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tongue upon the very heart. In the psychological application of the imagery as expressive of Lear’s emotive states at various stages of his mounting tragedy, the images of the wounding of his heart by vultures and serpents mark a crisis in the rising action, for after this there occurs, eventually in the storm scene, the loss of his wits, in other words, an ironic reduction of Lear himself to that unnatural state which is so essential a theme of the entire tragedy. His estrangement from normal human relations, consonant with the above, is further marked, in passionate reaction to Regan’s rejection of him, by his refusal of her demand to dismiss fifty of his knights and by his determination, instead, to abjure all roofs and be a comrade with the wolf and the owl. Throughout the imagery runs an intensification of the theme of unnaturalness, the basis of which is, of course, filial ingratitude. Even the Gentleman discussing with Kent the storm on the heath uses imagery similar to Lear’s as an atmospheric reinforcement of the psychological mood into which Lear has been precipitated; the stormy night into which Lear has emerged from the previous rejection scene is one from which the cub-drawn bear, the lion, and the bellypinched wolf flee. Contending with the frightful elements, tearing his hair, striving to outscorn the wind, rain, and night, Lear is pursued by his heart-struck injuries. Also the unnatural cruelty of his pitiful state and the savagery of the night are figured forth, to some degree, in the aforementioned famished bear, fierce lion, and hungerdriven wolf. The lowly imagery of the louse employed by the Fool, that of a small, wingless, blood-sucking insect, is an ironic image presenting a vivid, concrete manifestation of the contrast between Lear’s impotent state and his rather imperial, though helpless, arraignment of the elements which have with his two pernicious daughters joined their battles against so old and white a head as his. The image of the louse is implicative of a descent from elevation, a contrast with the soaring evil of the vulture, and a descent from size, the massive evil of the sea-serpent; considered in its context it is also, in contrast with ‘‘head’’, indicative of a lack of intelligence and is, therefore, a further indictment of Lear’s original irrationality. The imagery of the louse is both a presentment of Lear’s impotency, the louse being on a lower level than that of the feral animals, a small wingless thing, almost insignificant though painful, and also a prefiguring of

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the pelican image which soon intensifies it, the image of a blood-sucking animate thing, implicit in the figure of the louse, having for its referent the daughters who have taken all and, draining his blood from him, seek his death. And in an extension of this idea and a logical transmutation of it, that of flesh feeding on the flesh that begot it, Lear’s emotions express themselves in the metaphor of the pelican daughters. So admirable a consistency is there in the images and so vivid a reflection of Lear’s psyche that it is evident that the imagery is of the very texture of Lear’s psyche itself. Habitually and spontaneously his mind expresses itself in imagery, and when his mind is in a disturbed state the imagery is that of the animal world, or at least the world of animate, sub-human things.

animal state with which in the climax he had identified himself. His memory, in the area of his emotions, reasserts itself and with it a reminiscent indignation and anger which bring into prominence once again his obsession of filial ingratitude: ‘‘They flattered me like a dog’’ (IV.iv.98). Blended with it, too, is a critical bitterness which is an image of his renascent awareness of his fallen state. The wren and the gilded fly, the fitchew and the soiled horse become images of copulation and adultery, and in the extension of causes into a relative complexity is suggested not only the advance of Lear’s mind in a tentative way toward humanity once again but the substitution of cynicism for the violated and outraged affection which throughout the play had so obsessed him.

The notion of descent, which inheres in the animal figures, is made explicit by Lear in his assertion that in Edgar’s case nothing could have subdued nature to such a lowness but his unkind daughters. Expressive of this and showing the partial correspondency of Edgar’s state with that of Lear on the stormy heath are the images employed by Edgar:

Lear’s reascent to reason and, therefore, to humanity is arrested by a resurgence of tragedy— the death of Cordelia. The irony of his apparent moral victory in self-recognition, in his awareness of good and evil, and in at least a rudimentary sense of equity and of the real victory of the malevolence of his enemies, carries the essential tensions of the play through to the very end. Lear’s reaction against the injustice of Cordelia’s death, the needless waste of goodness in the world, his questioning of the why of things, are expressed through his characteristic imagery which presents his skepticism in regard to the moral system of the cosmos, an act of ratiocination which is, of course, on a human rather than an animal level:

. . . hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey (III.iv.96–98) With Lear’s climactic statement: Ha! here’s three on’s us are sophisticated! Thou are the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! (III.iv. 110–14)

the descent is accomplished, and the correspondency of Lear to the animal stratum toward which his psychic tragedy has been tending and in terms of images from which he has characteristically expressed himself is complete. Bereft of reason, mad, tearing off his clothes, Lear is now little better than the beasts. He has reached the bottom of the scale which his imagery has prefigured. The climax of descent in terms of animal imagery, if this is not too paradoxical a statement, coincides with the climax of the play. When Lear appears at Dover mad, fantastically dressed with wild flowers, some of his imagery corresponds to his state of mind: crowkeeper, mouse, bird, gilded butterflies; this is the innocent, naive imagery of childhood or senility, a harmless, neutral, non-evocative imagery proper to one whose wits are gone. Yet in the subsequent imagery begins his reascent into partial rationality, his progress upward from the

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Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? (V.iii.306–07) And on the curve of his partial reascent toward reason and humanity, presented in terms of animal imagery to the last, Lear dies. Source: John C. McCloskey, ‘‘The Emotive Use of Animal Imagery in King Lear,’’ in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3, Summer 1962, pp. 321–25.

Kenneth Muir Muir discusses the theme of ‘‘reason in madness’’ in King Lear and outlines the king’s descent into insanity. Goneril’s sharp complaints, Lear’s discovery of Kent in the stocks, and Regan’s rejection progressively disorder his mind, the critic argues, and the sudden appearance of Edgar as Poor Tom pushes him over the edge. Muir maintains that Lear’s subsequent attacks on hypocrisy

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THE MADNESS OF THE ELEMENTS, THE PROFESSIONAL ‘MADNESS’ OF THE FOOL, THE FEIGNED MADNESS OF EDGAR, AND THE MADNESS OF THE KING HIMSELF TOGETHER EXEMPLIFY THE BREAK-UP OF SOCIETY AND THE THREAT TO THE UNIVERSE ITSELF UNDER THE IMPACT OF INGRATITUDE AND TREACHERY.’’

and worldly justice ‘‘show profound insight’’ into the human condition. However, the critic cautions readers against assuming that these speeches represent Shakespeare’s own point of view.

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The Heath, before a hovel with Gloucester, Fool, Lear, Kent and Edgar, Act III, scene iv (Ó Shakespeare Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan)

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Source: Kenneth Muir, ‘‘Madness in King Lear,’’ in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production, Vol. 13, 1960, pp. 30–40.

SOURCES Bevington, David, ed., ‘‘Canon, Dates, and Early Texts: Appendix 1,’’ in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Scott, Foresman and Company, 1980, pp. 1623–24. Bradley, A. C., ‘‘Lecture VII: King Lear,’’ in Shakespearean Tragedy, Fawcett Publications, 1986, p. 201. Danby, John F., Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear, Faber and Faber, 1949. Elton, William R., King Lear and the Gods, Huntington Library, 1966. Freud, Sigmund, ‘‘The Theme of the Three Caskets,’’ in On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, edited by Benjamin Nelson, Harper Torchbooks, 1958, p. 75. Johnson, Samuel, ‘‘On King Lear,’’ in Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism, Discus Books, 1965, p. 490. Lamb, Charles, ‘‘King Lear,’’ in On The Tragedies of Shakespeare, http://lambclassicauthors.net/OnThe TragediesOfShakespeare/, accessed January 25, 2007.

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Myrick, Kenneth, ‘‘Christian Pessimism in King Lear,’’ in Shakespeare, 1564–1964: A Collection of Modern Essays by Various Hands, Brown University Press, 1964, pp. 56–70. Reilly, Terry, ‘‘King Lear: The Kentish Forest and the Problem of Thirds,’’ Oklahoma City University Law Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2001. Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr., ‘‘King Lear in Its Own Time: The Difference that Death Makes,’’ in Early Modern Literary Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1995), p. 1–49. Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 909–74. Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of King Lear, edited by Russell Fraser, Signet Classics, 1963. Troyat, Henri, Tolstoy, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967, p. 605.

FURTHER READING Battenhouse, Roy W., ‘‘Moral Experience and Its Typology in King Lear,’’ in Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises, Indiana University Press, 1969. Battenhouse sees King Lear as a ‘‘medicine’’ against a fall from Christian belief by showing the grimness and pain which result from living in a world not governed by Christianity. Bloom, Harold, ‘‘King Lear,’’ in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Riverhead Books, 1998. In his reading of the play, Bloom emphasizes Edgar’s centrality. Brooke, Nicholas, ‘‘The Ending of King Lear,’’ in Shakespeare, 1564–1964: A Collection of Modern Essays by Various Hands, Brown University Press, 1964.

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Brooke argues that Lear believes Cordelia to be alive and that that is necessary self-delusion in the face of impossibly painful despair. Fraser, Russell, Shakespeare’s Poetics: In Relation to ‘‘King Lear,’’ Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Fraser discusses King Lear and its themes— among them Providence, Fortune, Anarchy and Order, Reason and Will, and Redemption—in the context of Renaissance thought. Maguire, Nancy Klein, ‘‘Nahum Tate’s King Lear: ‘the king’s blest restoration,’’’ in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, edited by Jean I. Marsden, St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Maguire interprets Tate’s adaptation and revision of King Lear as a politically proRestoration response to the regicide of Charles I. Taylor, Gary, Reinventing Shakespeare, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983. Taylor chronicles the way Shakespeare was understood, adapted, and performed beginning in his own time and extending to ours. Taylor charts the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury response to King Lear in detail. Thompson, Ann and John O., ‘‘Animal Metaphors in King Lear,’’ in Shakespeare: Meaning & Metaphor, University of Iowa Press, 1987. The Thompsons study the animal metaphors recurring in King Lear and probe their significations. Walton, J. K., ‘‘Lear’s Last Speech,’’ in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 13, edited by Allardyce Nicoll, Cambridge University Press, 1966. Walton interprets Lear’s words about Cordelia’s lips not as an indication that she is alive, but as a recognition of her death and the sacred quality of her original taciturnity.

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Lucrece Lucrece, Shakespeare’s most substantial narrative poem, was first published in 1594, during an extended period when the London theaters are understood to have been closed due to an outbreak of the plague. Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare’s second-longest poem, was published the previous year, in 1593. Both poems are addressed to—and written under the patronage of—the Earl of Southampton, with the more intimate address of Lucrece reflecting the increased familiarity between the two men at that later date. Thus, Shakespeare’s bid to secure respect among London’s courtly literary circles was proving successful.

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The title of the work is the object of some uncertainty, as the first five quartos are entitled Lucrece, but the longer title of The Rape of Lucrece is used on some of the pages within. Coppe´lia Kahn notes that an editor was actually responsible for the revision of the title of the 1616 quarto to the longer version. While some critics see The Rape of Lucrece as the fuller title, others have posited that Shakespeare ultimately preferred the shorter title because it better reflected his focus on the character of Lucrece rather than on the fact of her being raped. The tale of Lucrece has been told time and time again since its historical occurrence in 509 B . C . E ., with Lucrece often lauded as a heroine for her role in ending the reign of kings in Rome; a republic led by consuls was established by Brutus and the others who avenged her rape

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and death by exiling the royal family of Tarquin, the assailant and prince. In his introduction to the bard’s narrative poems, Jonathan Crewe points out that Lucrece has also often been painted, perhaps most notably by the Renaissance-era artist Artemisia Gentileschi, who was herself a victim of rape. Thus, one cannot doubt the universal interest in the movingly tragic— and history altering—tale. Given Lucrece’s renown, many critics have sought to more fully understand Shakespeare’s artistry and intentions by comparing his version to the literary precedents that he had undoubtedly been exposed to. Of course, comparisons with various sources—such as the Bible, Roman mythology, Livy’s history, and Ovid’s poetry— have produced various perspectives on the meaning behind Lucrece. Regardless, the modern reader cannot lose sight of the fact that much of the poem’s value lies in its psychological portrayal of both the perpetrator and the victim. Aptly, the rapist can earn himself nothing but condemnation and shame, while in her state of mental and emotional crisis the victim demonstrates that she deserves nothing but sympathy and support.

bears both the red of roses and the white of lilies, and who has no conception of Tarquin’s plot, warmly welcomes him. Tarquin praises Collatine’s deeds in war and ‘‘makes excuses for his being there’’; otherwise, he reveals nothing of his intentions.

Lines 120–280 Tarquin retires after long conversing with Lucrece. The narrator discourses about people wanting to gain something so much that they are content to lose something else in the process; such is the case with Tarquin, who will sacrifice his honor ‘‘to obtain his lust.’’ The night is still, with predators emerging to do horrors to their prey. Tarquin rises from his bed and lights a torch, to weigh his conviction with regard to his ‘‘loathsome enterprise.’’ He is well aware of the baseness of the deed he intends to commit and how it will utterly ruin him—to gain only the most fleeting ‘‘mirth.’’ He imagines Collatine returning home on instinct; he wonders whether he could possibly conceal his guilt afterward. He notes that he owes Collatinus (that is, Collatine) no ill. Eventually, he persuades himself to continue, as he claims that he is so swayed by Lucrece’s beauty that his ‘‘affection,’’ his ‘‘desire,’’ controls him.

PLOT SUMMARY Lines 281–441

‘‘The Argument’’ In the long paragraph of prose that precedes Lucrece, the narrator relates in summary not only Tarquin’s assault of Lucrece and its aftermath but also the events leading up to the assault. Discussed here, but not in the poem, is the episode wherein the Roman military men surprised their wives by returning home unannounced; only Lucrece was found to be humbly spinning with her maids rather than reveling. The Argument also relates in slightly more detail the actions of Brutus and the others after Lucrece’s suicide.

Tarquin begins creeping through the house, still somewhat uncertain—but again, he eventually thinks only of satisfying his lust. He breaks the locks on all the doors leading to Lucrece’s chamber, fearful that he will be heard, and drafts almost extinguish his torch—but he blows the flame back to life and proceeds. He happens upon a glove of Lucrece’s and picks it up only to be pricked by a needle within, but he remains undeterred. When he reaches the last door, he begins to pray but then realizes the absurdity of doing so; he declares that ‘‘love and fortune’’ will be his gods that night.

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Tarquin enters Lucrece’s chamber, where she sleeps soundly. Looking upon her, he is dazzled by her beauty, as if beholding the ‘‘fiery-pointed sun.’’ He admires various aspects of her countenance and features, such as her hands, hair, and breasts. As he gazes down, he is momentarily stilled, satisfied even by the sight of the woman—but in time he regains his initiative and lays a hand on her.

Sextus Tarquinius, referred to as Tarquin, has withdrawn from the siege at Ardea to lodge with the wife of the soldier Collatine, Lucrece. Collatine has himself boasted of his wife’s exceptional beauty and unfaltering fidelity, which inspired a certain envy in Tarquin. Tarquin now explicitly intends to satisfy his lust and ruin Lucrece’s reputation by defiling her. Lucrece, whose complexion

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such lust and of how vile he would view such an act if committed by another. In the end, she simply begs for pity—but he professes to be unmoved, as if an overbearing tide or huge fire. She offers metaphors depicting the shame he will feel, but he finally cuts her off and demands that she yield.

Lines 673–742 Tarquin extinguishes the light and covers Lucrece’s head with her nightclothes. Through the rape then committed by the ‘‘surfeit-taking’’ Tarquin, Lucrece loses ‘‘a dearer thing than life,’’ while he immediately realizes the extent to which he has disgraced himself. Afterward, he finds that the ‘‘spotted princess’’ (understood to be referring to his soul) has entered a state of ‘‘living death.’’ He flees guiltily, while she lies there in despair.

Lines 743–875 Lucrece begins a long and sad lament about her fate. She reveals that she herself feels profound guilt and shame over what Tarquin has done to her. She castigates the night, which ever abets such horrific crimes, referring to how the ‘‘rotten damps’’ of night fogs ‘‘ravish the morning air’’ and calling Tarquin himself ‘‘night’s child.’’ She rues that she has no one to share her misery with and hopes that day will never come, so that she might never reveal her shame.

Title page of Lucrece, 1594

Lines 442–672 At Tarquin’s touch, Lucrece awakens, terrified by what seems a ghost. As Tarquin does not release her, her heart beats ever quicker. When she demands to know why he is doing what he is doing, he declares that ‘‘the fault’’ is hers, as she is so beautiful that he supposedly cannot still his lust. He expects her to fight back and knows the irrevocable harm that he is doing, but he cares not. He tells her that if she struggles, he will arrange the scene so that it appears that she had been committing adultery with one of the servants—ruining the reputation of her entire family—while if she relents, he will say nothing. Lucrece pleads for mercy, leading Tarquin to pause only as if a cat toying with a mouse. Still, Lucrece speaks at length in an attempt to persuade him to cease. She reminds him of her hospitality and of his friendship with her husband and hopes that he might feel some empathy for her. She observes that he will be ruining his own honor, future king that he is, in committing such a shameful crime. She speaks of the sinfulness of

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She imagines how tales will be told of how Tarquin wronged her and how she thus also wronged Collatine. She conceives that her husband’s honor once lay in her, but that honor has been stolen away. She feels guilty for having lost that honor, even though she entertained Tarquin in the first place for the sake of Collatine’s honor, as well as out of genuine hospitality. She notes how other beautiful and virtuous things are so easily ruined.

Lines 876–1078 She places much blame on ‘‘opportunity,’’ which seems to be given always to those committing the foulest deeds and never to the poor and destitute. Truth and virtue are ever forsaken by opportunity, while sin receives opportunity’s favors at no cost. As such, she condemns opportunity itself as guilty for all crimes ever committed. She also despises ‘‘time,’’ which betrayed her and has tied her to an eternity of woe. Time does better to ‘‘unmask falsehood’’ and to generally

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right whatever wrongs are committed; to allow things to decay over time; and to contribute to life’s cycles. She then hopes that time will manage to curse Tarquin, to make his life unbearable owing to thoughts of ‘‘his committed evil’’—to leave him drowning in his own remorse. She considers how the foul deed will ever stain his character, especially in that he would be king and so examined more closely than other men. At length, she turns to cursing her own words, which can do nothing to change her situation. Her only course of action, then, she imagines, is suicide, though her hand quivers at the thought. She looks for a sharp instrument to use but finds nothing. Still, she is resolved to ‘‘clear this spot by death,’’ especially as she could not bear the thought of bearing Tarquin’s child. She intends not only to kill herself but also to reveal the truth of what happened.

Lines 1079–1211 Day breaks, leading Lucrece to now lament the sun’s mocking beams of light. The narrator describes her as utterly possessed by her grief, such that the birds’ songs, which would otherwise be pleasant, only intensify her sorrow. She speaks to a bird as if to Philomel, a mythical rape victim who metamorphosed into a nightingale. Like a ‘‘poor frighted deer’’ now, Lucrece ponders whether she should truly take her own life and thereby slay her soul, which she might otherwise save; but she feels as though her body has been ruined, and her soul, like the tree beneath the peeled bark, must likewise decay. Still, she will tell Collatine of Tarquin’s trespass, so that her husband might seek revenge. She declares a sort of last testament, bequeathing various aspects of herself and her life to the people and objects that she will be leaving behind.

Lines 1212–1365 Sadly certain, now, about committing suicide, Lucrece summons a maid, who reads Lucrece’s sorrow—though not its cause—in her face and weeps along with her. The narrator describes women’s minds as ‘‘waxen,’’ such that emotional impressions are easily made and discerned. Thus, a woman may feel shame for a foul act inflicted upon her by a man. At Lucrece’s questioning, the maid notes that Tarquin left well before sunrise that morning. The maid inquires about her sorrow, but Lucrece declines to

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announce it. Lucrece then asks for pen and paper and for a servant of her husband’s who might take his master a letter. After the maid departs, Lucrece writes a brief note relating the extent of but not the reason for her grief, as she imagines that the occurrence might be misconstrued if she were not able to show the sorrow of her person while explaining it. Collatine’s servant accepts the letter and blushes out of ‘‘bashful innocence,’’ which Lucrece distressfully interprets as his embarrassment over the knowledge of the shame that she has suffered. Once the man departs, she again sinks into her woe.

Lines 1366–1568 Lucrece finds herself distracted by a painting that depicts the famous invasion of Troy by the Greeks, which was incited by Paris’s ‘‘rape,’’ meaning ‘‘abduction,’’ of the Greek Helen. In showing the tragedy of battle, the painting contains a great number of instances of sorrow and death. The faces and bodies of the famous Greeks Ajax and Ulysses have been painted with especial precision; likewise, the depiction of the Trojan Nestor discoursing to a crowd fascinates Lucrece. On the other hand, little is revealed of the Greek Achilles. Lucrece eventually notes the presence of Hecuba, the wife of Priam, who was the king of Troy, as only Hecuba’s grief in standing over her dying husband seems comparable to Lucrece’s grief. Lucrece even wishes the painted Hecuba had the power of speech. Lucrece then imagines taking revenge on the images of the Greeks, blames the ‘‘strumpet’’ Helen, and laments that one person’s private concerns could cause so much death. At last, her gaze settles on Sinon, the Trojan who persuaded the king to admit the Trojan horse, and the Greeks within, through the city gate. She despises his peacefully content look—and the once-unthreatening image of the similarly traitorous Tarquin is brought to mind. At length, she tears Sinon’s image from the painting.

Lines 1569–1659 The distraction of the painting proves to have only temporarily assuaged Lucrece’s woe. The messenger then returns with Collatine and other men, and Lucrece’s husband immediately recognizes in her mournful face and attire that she has suffered some extreme event. She has trouble

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speaking at first—but then manages to relate what was done to her ‘‘by foul enforcement,’’ at the hands of an armed foe who threatened to murder and defame her if she resisted. She professes, yet, that while her body has been ‘‘stained,’’ her mind and soul remain pure.

Lucrece, in swearing upon her knife and her soul to avenge her death. Thus, while he had theretofore been deemed an idiot, Brutus seizes upon the opportunity to make political use of Lucrece’s suicide

Collatine Lines 1660–1806 Collatine is speechless at first, able only to breathe through the sorrow he in turn experiences. Lucrece implores him not to weep and asks only that he exact revenge on the perpetrator, whom she will not name until all the lords present agree to likewise participate in the vengeance. They all swear as much, and Lucrece then wonders aloud how she might rid herself of the stain she has incurred. The men insist that her mind remains ‘‘untainted’’—but she utters Tarquin’s name and then nevertheless buries a knife in her chest and dies. Collatine and the others are so shocked as to remain motionless, until Lucrece’s father finally falls upon his daughter, while Brutus removes the knife from her body. Pools of her ‘‘stained’’ blood then circle her body, with a watery sheen seeming to evidence its corruption. Lucretius, the father, laments that his offspring, the image of himself, has perished before him. Collatine then falls upon his deceased wife, able only to mutter incoherently. The two men then weep over Lucrece as if trying to out mourn each other.

Lines 1807–1855 At length, Brutus, who had theretofore been viewed as something of a fool, bids Collatine to rise and, instead of weeping and lamenting, to pray to the Roman gods to assist them in their quest for vengeance. Brutus vows on Lucrece’s soul and on the bloodied knife to exact that revenge, and the others all swear likewise. They then determine to bear Lucrece’s body through Rome to reveal Tarquin’s offense; the narrator states that he is indeed afterward banished.

CHARACTERS Brutus Lucius Junius Brutus (an ancient forebear of the Marcus Junius Brutus who assassinated Julius Caesar) leads the other men present in the closing scene, including the father and husband of

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Collatine’s boasting of his wife’s extraordinary chastity in the company of the other military men initially inspires Tarquin to rape her. When Collatine returns to Lucrece afterward, he is struck by her evident sorrow; when she moves to kill herself, he says and does nothing. After Lucrece’s father falls upon the body, Collatine eventually falls likewise, mumbling incoherently, then insists that his deceased wife yet belongs to him.

The Groom Before delivering Lucrece’s letter to her husband, the groom blushes innocently, leading Lucrece to imagine that he knew of the shame she felt.

Lucrece Lucrece is without doubt both the moral and literary heart of the story, as indicated by the title, her tragic suffering, and her heroic death. Philippa Berry notes that Lucrece’s rhetorical performance, which constitutes over a third of the narrative poem’s 1,855 lines, ‘‘is one of the most extended tragic utterances attributed to a woman in English Renaissance literature.’’ And perhaps no literary character merits as much opportunity for discourse about her plight than the victim of rape, who, as in the case of Lucrece, likely has no acquaintance who can truly understand the trauma of her experience. Lucrece is understood to define her identity almost exclusively as the chaste wife of Collatine. In spending her time at home spinning with her maids while other women are reveling, she proves her husband’s boasts accurate, and the narrator notes in line 85 that she is an ‘‘earthly saint’’ and in line 87 that ‘‘unstained thoughts’’ such as hers ‘‘do seldom dream on evil.’’ Indeed, as Coppe´lia Kahn has noted, in accord with the Roman patriarchal tradition, as a woman, she is defined in terms of the man that she is primarily associated with. (At the poem’s close, of course, Lucrece’s father, the first man through whom she defines her identity, vies with Collatine over the ownership of her deceased body.) Jonathan Crewe describes how since Lucrece is ‘‘well

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schooled’’ in the codes of patriarchy, the alteration of the central aspect of her identity—her chastity—essentially destroys her: ‘‘The goods she feels to have been damaged after the rape are principally her husband’s. It thus becomes extraordinarily difficult for her to process the rape subjectively—at first, she can hardly be said to have her own subjectivity—and reconcile herself to her new, damaged, and devalued condition.’’ That is, regardless of how she might be inclined to, or wish to, perceive herself, if she has been ruined in the eyes of her husband and society, then as far as she is concerned she is ruined. Thus, as Kahn notes, since ‘‘no alternative identity is possible’’ for Lucrece, she can only imagine maintaining her integrity through suicide: ‘‘The tragedy of Lucrece is that only by dying is she able to escape from marginality and regain her social and personal identity as a chaste wife.’’ Heather Dubrow notes that while some critics have denounced Lucrece’s meandering lament after her rape as so conventionally rhetorical, in literary terms, as to reduce the realism of the situation, the victim’s mindset is in fact portrayed with profound accuracy. She observes of Lucrece, ‘‘The parallels between her behavior and the responses analyzed in the extensive recent literature on rape are compelling enough to suggest that certain reactions commonly recur, at least in Western culture—and to testify that Shakespeare understood those reactions well.’’ Dubrow explicates a number of Lucrece’s reactions that are understood to be characteristic of victims of rape: she has difficulty relating the trauma to others, speaking to herself at length but to Collatine and the others only in brief terms; she blames herself for not resisting with more determination; she dwells on the fruitless question of how she might have averted the rape; she experiences abrupt shifts in mood; she demonstrates a need to regain some degree of control over the situation and herself (ultimately, through suicide); and, as discussed above, she feels a profound loss of identity. Indeed, Dubrow cites the researchers Kurt Weis and Sandra S. Borges as calling rape ‘‘a total attack against the whole person, affecting the victim’s physical, psychological, and social identity.’’ Thus, through his Lucrece, Shakespeare offers a sympathetic, informative, and sorrowful portrait of a woman who has suffered the trauma of rape.

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Lucretius Lucretius falls upon his daughter’s body before Collatine, and the two consequently engage in a sort of verbal competition over the ownership of her body.

The Maid The maid shares tears with Lucrece, empathetically understanding and feeling her sorrow, though not its cause.

Tarquin In certain respects, little need be said of Tarquin that is not communicated directly through the poem, through both the narrator’s assessment of his character and through Tarquin’s own ruminations before committing the rape. The narrator calls him a ‘‘devil’’ and a ‘‘false worshiper,’’ noting that he will be ‘‘pawning his honor to obtain his lust.’’ Meanwhile, Tarquin admits that the rape he intends to commit will be both ‘‘shameful’’ and ‘‘hateful,’’ and he realizes, ‘‘my posterity, shamed with the note, / Shall curse my bones, and hold it for no sin / To wish that I their father had not been.’’ Thus, one cannot question the rapist’s understanding of the evil nature of his crime. In fact, Roy W. Battenhouse notes that Tarquin is principally motivated by the illicitness of the act; while he cites Lucrece’s beauty as the deciding factor, he dwells far longer on the lack of morality he would be demonstrating. Battenhouse aptly notes how no more depth of character can be found in the story’s egotistical rapist than in any common criminal; ‘‘Basically what he loves is his own resoluteness, and the illusion of power which his fearlessness of consequences gives him, and in particular the satisfying sense of activity he gets from striking his falchion against flint, or in setting his foot upon the light.’’ Battenhouse also observes how Tarquin’s shallow deviance renders Lucrece’s pleas with respect to his honor utterly useless: ‘‘From the outset of the enterprise, the very blameworthiness of his design has excited his will.’’ Despite the demonstration of Tarquin’s self-conscious immorality, Jonathan Crewe acknowledges that ‘‘a certain sympathy is solicited for’’ Tarquin in the course of the poem. That is, in providing a full account of Tarquin’s thought processes before the rape, Shakespeare is effectively humanizing him; the reader recognizes him not simply as evil but as a person who

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has convinced himself through specious reasoning that he is justified in committing a horrible crime. Crewe points out that even Lucrece herself finds exclusively blaming Tarquin to be difficult, as she decries Night, Opportunity, and Time in search of the ‘‘ultimate perpetrator’’ of the rape. This shifting of blame may stem from the fact that Shakespeare was not only sympathetically portraying the plight of the rape victim but also providing a social commentary; thus, as Crewe writes, Tarquin ‘‘seems driven by destructive social dynamisms he can neither understand nor resist’’ and ‘‘is acting within larger scenarios of gendered violence.’’ That is, Tarquin is presented as a tragically misguided product of an excessively patriarchal culture.

THEMES Guilt and Innocence Shakespeare devotes a fair number of lines in Lucrece to addressing the sentiment of guilt experienced by the title character. Lucrece in fact explicitly professes to feeling guilty after being raped by Tarquin, despite having been promised death (as well as posthumous slander) if she does not allow the act. As a military man, Tarquin certainly needed no weapon to legitimate his threat of using harmful force, and any argument asserting that Lucrece should have prioritized her chastity over her life must contend with the fact that in so doing she would be deliberately deceiving her instinctively selfpreserving nature. (In fact, she later persuades herself that Collatine’s family’s honor is more important than her life and does manage to commit suicide.) Regardless of her obvious faultlessness, Lucrece’s first thoughts after Tarquin’s departure revolve around what she imagines to be her ‘‘sin,’’ ‘‘guilt,’’ and ‘‘helpless shame.’’ In line 819 she ` me, I Collatine,’’ as declares, ‘‘Tarquin wronged if she were in some way responsible for the actions of another beyond her control. Heather Dubrow relates, ‘‘Women who have been raped characteristically blame themselves for not fighting enough.’’ She then discusses how Lucrece ultimately centralizes her guilt in her hand, which she accuses of being ‘‘afeard to scratch her wicked foe’’ and then sentences it to the role of executer. Dubrow remarks, ‘‘Like so many of us, Lucrece

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attempts both to blame and defend herself: by reproaching the hand she is at once censuring herself and deflecting that censure onto only one part of her body, with the implication that the rest may be less guilty.’’ The theme of Lucrece’s guilt is made concrete throughout the poem through the metaphor of the ‘‘stain’’ that she feels. Focusing on the recurrences of words—a common practice in the study of Shakespeare—Coppe´lia Kahn notes that ‘‘the words ‘stain’ and ‘stained’ are mentioned eighteen times in the poem’s 1855 lines, and synonyms such as blot, spot, blur, blemish, attaint, scar, and pollution are frequently used.’’ She connects this association with the black-andwhite characterization of women’s sexual virtue in Shakespeare’s depiction of Rome: ‘‘Marriage makes sex, and woman as sexual object, clean; outside of marriage sex is unclean.’’ Thus, Lucrece can feel corrupted or defiled in the same way that a work of art, say, could be deemed of lesser value—if not worthless—with an accidental blotch of paint in the middle. Kahn posits that the connotations of the metaphor of the stain reveal that Lucrece may not quite feel the sense of guilt she claims to feel: ‘‘Though Lucrece uses moral terms such as sin and guilt, she actually condemns herself according to primitive, non-moral standards of pollution and uncleanness, in which only the material circumstances of an act determine its goodness or evil.’’ Jonathan Crewe draws a similar conclusion regarding Lucrece’s inability to rid herself of her guilt. He notes that her ‘‘peculiar anguish . . . is that of the innocent woman who cannot fully believe in her own innocence or escape an acute sense of shame.’’ He then likewise declares that her words inadequately correspond to her actual thoughts, highlighting ‘‘her inability to find a language in which to come to terms with her new situation: there is no fitting or expressive language for the raped Roman wife.’’ Indeed, in any era, language may have difficulty doing justice to the angst of such an emotional trauma.

Patriarchy A theme that is inherent not only in the attitudes and actions of the characters but also in the overall essence of the plot is the sociological fact of patriarchy, whereby men are given legal priority over women. In fact, as discussed

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

Research the history of painted images of Lucrece. For a number of different paintings, comment on the artist and why he or she may have been interested in Lucrece, on what the artist chose to highlight with respect to Lucrece’s story, and on any other aspect of the painting that merits attention. Also, compare the styles of the various works and their effects on the moods of the paintings. If possible, provide photocopies of the paintings you discuss.

In certain eras of history, in certain geographical locations, women have been reduced to the status of second-class citizens. Research how the role of childbearing, as held by women exclusively, has shaped women’s overall societal role throughout the history of the United States specifically. Provide extensive discussion on current cultural norms and developments with respect to the bearing and raising of children.  Suicide is viewed differently in different cultures. In an essay, provide a full discussion of hara-kiri, also known as seppuku, the form of ritual suicide viewed as honorable by Japanese samurai. Discuss Lucrece’s suicide in light of this perspective on the respectable killing of oneself.  Reflect on your life and recall a time when an artistic product of some sort gave you additional perspective on your own circumstances. The work in question may be a painting, photograph, song, play, or film. Discuss the qualities of the art work, and ideas inherent in the art work, that struck you; also discuss how the art seemed to relate to your circumstances. 

thoroughly by Coppe´lia Kahn, the prevailing patriarchal attitudes were largely responsible for Lucrece’s seeing fit to kill herself. Lucrece laments more than once that Collatine’s honor has been compromised by her being raped and

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that her remaining alive, and defiled, will ever be a stain on that honor. Particularly distressing to her is the notion that Tarquin might have impregnated her, in which case Collatine’s entire bloodline would be seen as ‘‘polluted.’’ While Heather Dubrow notes that many of Lucrece’s sentiments following the rape accurately reflect sentiments commonly expressed by victims of rape in the modern era, a twenty-first-century woman might yet be less likely to give the social consequences for her partner such overarching importance. Indeed, Lucrece expresses that the rape is impossible to deal with because through it, regardless of her guilt or innocence, she has lost the identity of chaste wife—an identity that is centered not around herself but around Collatine. Thus, giving primary consideration to Collatine, Lucrece determines that if she can no longer be the ideal of a chaste wife, she must cease to exist. Kahn makes reference to the legal system of inheritance in the Elizabethan era, whereby the production of male heirs was necessary to ensure that a family could retain its wealth. If a woman owned any property, it would belong to her husband at the time of her marriage. As such, among the propertied classes, at least, women were typically subservient to their fathers before marriage and to their husbands after. Nancy Vickers, in turn, notes that the rhetorical descriptions of Lucrece reflect the objectification of women in a patriarchal society. In sum, the story is overlaid with the various patriarchal aspects of Roman society, and these aspects play a substantial role in the unfolding of the narrative’s events.

STYLE An Oft-Told Tale As with many of his works, Shakespeare derived the story of Lucrece from existing materials, in this case largely historical. Different histories, of course, as well as fictionalized versions of history, have different perspectives, and retellings can reflect the ideological priorities of a writer or of an era. In choosing to adopt or readapt the perspectives of authors before him, Shakespeare revealed much about his personal priorities with regard to the tale. As Mercedes Maroto Camino notes, one of these priorities was certainly consideration for Queen Elizabeth, as a ‘‘myth of

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female heroism and virginity’’ could easily be construed as alluding to the chaste queen.

Vickers, have seen the poem’s reliance and emphasis on rhetoric to be highly meaningful.

Among many others, the ancient Romans Livy and Ovid and the fourteenth-century English poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower had retold the story of Lucrece. Shakespeare is understood to have gleaned his own understanding of the tale primarily from the ancient Romans, with Livy addressing the matter in his Historia, and Ovid in his poetic work Fasti. One of the most noted discrepancies between Shakespeare’s Lucrece and the ancient Roman works is the bard’s shifting the instigation of Tarquin’s rape from the sight of Lucrece’s beauty to Collatine’s boasts of her chastity. In fact, as noted by Nancy Vickers, in the ancient sources, Collatine actually advocates that the men forgo discussion so as to simply conduct a test of their wives’ chastity through a surprise return trip. Vickers highlights this alteration as reflecting ‘‘a heightened insistence on the power of description, on the dangers inherent in descriptive occasions. Here, Collatine’s rhetoric, not Lucrece’s behavior, wins over his companions; Collatine’s rhetoric, not Lucrece’s beauty, prompts Tarquin’s departure.’’

A number of critics have pointed out that Shakespeare strayed from his ancient sources in shifting the event that instigated the idea of the rape in Tarquin’s mind from the sight of Lucrece to Collatine’s boasts about her. Vickers describes the particular type of rhetoric in question as ‘‘blazon,’’ whereby an object is described so as to be given praise, often through references to the various parts of the object. Thus, the description of Lucrece provided when Tarquin first enters her chamber can be referred to as a blazon—and in that Lucrece is so blazoned, she is in a sense dehumanized; she is reduced from a whole person to the sum of her parts. Likewise, Collatine’s boasts largely objectify Lucrece. Dubrow asserts that in making Collatine’s rhetorical objectification a source of Lucrece’s tragedy, Shakespeare is in a sense condemning its use—and he highlights its effects by employing it himself: ‘‘The poem is characterized (and, one suspects, inspired) less by a pleasure in poetic adornment per se than by a preoccupation with the moral and psychological issues expressed through—or even raised by—such adornment.’’

Various other discrepancies between Shakespeare’s Lucrece and his ancient sources have been found and discussed. For example, Jane O. Newman mentions that neither Ovid nor Livy make any mention of the possibility that Lucrece was impregnated by Tarquin. Overall, perhaps most prominent is the addition of much of Shakespeare’s innovative character development. As Newman reports, ‘‘The progress of the narrative is frequently interrupted by interior monologues and rhetorical set pieces that dilate Livy’s and Ovid’s essentially political story of Lucrece’s rape and suicide into a lengthy, almost psychological investigation of the motivation for and implications of both Lucrece’s and Tarquin’s actions.’’ Thus, as he often did, Shakespeare truly rewrote a tale that had been presented by others before him.

The Relevance of Rhetoric As a narrative poem produced by Shakespeare early in his career, Lucrece contains a fair degree of rhetoric, or artful speech. While some critics believe the lack of realism behind some of this rhetoric detracts from the poem as a whole, those who have examined the poem more closely, such as Heather Dubrow and Nancy

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Vickers, meanwhile, highlights the prominence of the motif of colors in the descriptions of Lucrece. This motif primarily revolves around her complexion bearing both the red of roses and the white of ivory, reflecting her beauty and her purity. However, a subtext relates to the colors that appeared on shields and coats of arms, which were of great importance with respect to honor in Shakespeare’s time and were thus under a fair degree of regulation; only kings could display the sun on their shields, and certain permanent marks could be added to coats of arms to reveal dishonorable deeds committed by members of a family. Vickers notes the two particular objectifications represented by this emphasis on colors: ‘‘Read as a martial image, Lucrece’s body as shield stands between Tarquin and Collatine to deflect blows, to prevent direct hits; read as a heraldic image, that same body is the medium assuring the passage of Collatium [the estate held by Collatine] from father to as yet unborn son.’’ Thus, in multiple senses, the rhetoric presented by Shakespeare is emblematic of the compromising position in which Lucrece finds herself in the context of a patriarchal society.

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A Foil to Philomela In Greek mythology, Philomela was raped by her sister’s husband, Tereus, the King of Athens. Afterward, indifferent to her own shame, she vowed to reveal his crime—prompting Tereus to cut out her tongue. At length, she was transformed into a bird, alternately a sparrow or a nightingale. In Lucrece, Philomela’s name is invoked twice: first, Lucrece is referred to by the narrator as ‘‘lamenting Philomel,’’ notably, after she has asserted, ‘‘My tongue shall utter all’’; some fifty lines later, Lucrece calls a bird that ‘‘sing’st of ravishment’’ Philomel. Thus, as many critics have noted, Shakespeare makes a nominal comparison between two women who were raped. In her essay ‘‘‘And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness’: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece,’’ Jane O. Newman offers a different perspective on the references to Philomela, asserting that beneath the poem’s surface ‘‘lies an ideology of gender that represses traditions of female political agency more threatening to patriarchy than Lucrece’s.’’ Newman notes that while the aspects of the Philomela myth represented in the poem cast the victim in a subjugated light, the myth in its entirety features both Philomela and her sister, Procne, exacting revenge on Tereus through severe violence. In the course of the festival of Bacchus, the women ritually slaughter and cook Itys, the son of Tereus and Procne. Thus, the mythical women manage to discontinue Tereus’s (as well as Procne’s own) royal line of descent. Lucrece, on the other hand, ultimately accomplishes only the banishment, not the death, of Tarquin’s line, and she accomplishes this only through her own destruction. In turn, as Newman notes, the change from monarchical to consular rule brought about by the banishment of Tarquin’s kin did not remove power from the hands of men or give power to women. Assessing the relationship between the Philomela myth and Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Newman concludes, ‘‘The manifest absence, even deletion, of the revenge alternative from Lucrece’s options is figured in the truncation of the full Philomela story. Women’s responses to rape and their participation in political renewal are thereby limited, ideologically speaking, to actions that require their self-destruction.’’

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Roman Society Shakespeare’s treatment of the setting of Rome both here and in his plays often evokes the cultural relationship between that ancient culture and Elizabethan London. Coppe´lia Kahn asserts, ‘‘It is a critical commonplace that Elizabethans regarded Rome as a political mirror of their own times, finding in it a series of lessons . . . which they considered to have more than theoretical value.’’ In Lucrece, the depictions of certain societal values reflect and refract both Elizabethan and Roman cultural beliefs. Foremost, perhaps, among these societal value was patriarchy, which Kahn notes was the cultural rule in Elizabethan and ancient Roman times alike. One aspect of patriarchy found in both eras was an institution of marriage that essentially sanctioned sex—for women— only within a relationship so legally defined. Kahn notes that in ancient Rome, ‘‘the national cult of Vesta, goddess of the hearth, virtually institutionalized the virginal wife.’’ In the context of this cult, virgins were given the task of maintaining the sacred fires burning at the temple in Vesta, with these idealized women serving as prominent role models for the remainder of the population, inspiring a belief in the possibility of complete chastity. In England around 1600, meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth, known as ‘‘the Virgin Queen,’’ likewise presented to the population an influential image of a perfectly chaste woman. In addition, institutionalized Christian values frowned upon sex outside of marriage.

The Christian Perspective Certain commentators approaching Lucrece’s tale from a Christian perspective have seen fit to question her integrity. In fact, the topic of Lucrece’s conduct had long been discussed, perhaps most notably by Saint Augustine in his fifth-century work The City of God. According to Christian dogma, suicide is sinful (and thus might be interpreted as an expression of guilt), while the soul can remain pure regardless of what happens to the body. Thus, Augustine asserts, Lucrece’s killing herself must be indicative of either an unspoken consent to the rape or the fact that, as quoted by Kahn, she was ‘‘too greedy of praise’’ to cope with any ambiguous or suspicious reactions from others regarding her victimization.

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Tarquin and Lucretia (oil on panel), by Jan Massys (Tarquin and Lucretia (oil on panel), Massys or Metsys, Jan (1509-75) (circle of), photograph. Lauros Giraudon, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille, France/ The Bridgeman Art Library International)

A number of critics have noted that Shakespeare certainly had this Christian perspective in mind in retelling the tale. Indeed, the passages in which she contemplates the virtue of suicide (beginning with line 1156) and notes how ‘‘immaculate and spotless’’ her mind yet remains (line 1656) seem to indicate as much. D. C. Allen concludes that Shakespeare was perfectly aware of the story’s ‘‘tragic import, but he felt that it must be glossed in terms of Christian options. Lucrece should have defended herself to the death, or, having been forced, lived free of blame with a guiltless conscience. Her action was rare and wonderful, but a little beyond forgiveness.’’ Thus, in that Shakespeare nevertheless portrays Lucrece as a heroine, Allen attributes to him a judicious ‘‘recognition of the double understanding of the Lucrece story.’’ Notably, Roy W. Battenhouse claims that the Christian

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perspective influenced not just those isolated passages of moral questioning but the entire work; in fact, he wildly interprets certain clues scattered throughout the poem as revealing that Shakespeare was subtly portraying Lucrece as wholly complicit in the act of ‘‘adultery.’’ Kahn dismisses Battenhouse as displaying ‘‘considerable bias against Lucrece’’ in the course of his inventive argument.

The Fall of Troy Many commentators have offered unique interpretations of the significance of the section of the poem in which Lucrece ruminates on the painting of the mythological fall of the ancient city of Troy. Indeed, her various descriptions of, and reactions to, the event’s different characters seem to demand assessments from multiple perspectives, especially in light of the varied and

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

500 B . C . E .: The cult of the vestal virgins sanctifies the ideal of the chaste woman.

1600s: Christian notions prevalent throughout Western society condemn sex outside of marriage as sinful. Today: In America, Christian notions regarding sex and marriage are increasingly at odds with changing societal norms, with people often having sex before marriage, and marriages between homosexual couples gaining acceptance.  500 B . C . E .: A woman may be reluctant to admit she has been raped because of the effect the revelation will have on the honor of her husband and family. 1600s: Christian ideals allow women to preserve their own honor if they have been raped, despite the ‘‘adultery’’ that their

conflicting emotions Lucrece was herself experiencing at the time. Foremost, perhaps, is the narrator’s recurring identification of Lucrece with a besieged city like Troy. Tarquin’s hand upon her breast is called a ‘‘rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall,’’ and Tarquin is consequently described as intent to ‘‘make the breach and enter this sweet city.’’ Thus, for its connotations alone, the fall of Troy effectively highlights Lucrece’s tragic plight. Beyond the greater situation, Lucrece bears various relationships to the characters depicted in the painting. Lucrece expresses the most loathing for Sinon, who counseled Priam, the king of Troy, to admit the Trojan Horse through the gates: she ultimately tears Sinon’s image from the painting. Lucrece likens Sinon to Tarquin based on the treacheries of the two, yet, as Philippa Berry notes, with his tears and his ‘‘cheeks neither red nor pale, but mingled so,’’ Sinon seems to somewhat resemble Lucrece herself. In fact, both Lucrece and Sinon bring about the downfall of royalty through orations, as Lucrece’s speech before her suicide inspires Brutus to lead in

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bodies have technically committed, if they never consented in spirit, such that their soul remains ‘‘clean.’’ Today: While women who have suffered rape are perhaps extended more sympathy than at any time in the past, rape remains one of the most under-reported crimes, largely due to the social consequences for the victim. 

500 B . C . E .: Women are essentially excluded from the inheritance of property and estates. 1600s: In legal terms, a woman is virtually always under the guardianship of—and thus subservient to—her father, her husband, or some other male relation. Today: In most Western cultures, laws allow for no discrimination against women with regard to property ownership.

the overthrow of the Tarquins. Lucrece also denounces Helen, the exceedingly beautiful Greek woman whose abduction inspired the invasion, calling her a ‘‘strumpet.’’ Different legends depict Helen’s role differently, as she was perhaps made captive by, perhaps simply persuaded to accompany Paris, the Trojan prince (who was assisted by the goddess Aphrodite in his seduction of Helen). Regardless, Lucrece’s disdain for Helen may be interpreted as reflecting the self-loathing she feels in her ‘‘defiled’’ state. As Philippa Berry notes with regard to these crossing of character traits, ‘‘In her intense hostility to Helen and Sinon, Lucrece may imply a buried anxiety about her own ambiguous status as both member of and traitor to her society.’’

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Shakespearean scholars have approached Lucrece from various angles over the years. Coppe´lia Kahn notes that the earlier critical tradition largely

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featured discussions of Shakespeare’s developing artistry, sometimes to the exclusion of dialogue about the implications of the content. This artistry certainly merited ample discussion; D. C. Allen declares that both Lucrece and Venus and Adonis ‘‘are barns in which the young poet is storing up themes and metaphors for the future. They are virtuoso performances in which Shakespeare like a good musician is demonstrating both his repertoire and his skill with his instrument.’’ In fact, Kahn points out that the focus on the artistry of Lucrece was inspired in part by the fact that, as contrasting with the playful romance of the preceding narrative poem, in Lucrece, traditional sex roles ‘‘are taken with deadly seriousness and carried to a logical and bitter extreme, which makes it painful to confront the poem squarely.’’ Kahn notes that the rape demands attention, however, because ‘‘the poem must be understood in a psychosocial context which takes account of sex roles and cultural attitudes toward sexuality.’’ Highlighting the philosophical outlooks of commentators past and present, Jonathan Crewe notes, ‘‘Feminist attention to the poem must largely be given the credit for the intensiveness and high level of recent criticism.’’ In offering her comprehensive treatise on the use of rhetoric in the poem, Heather Dubrow notes that Shakespeare was by no means performing a literary exercise with disregard for the quality of the work. She writes, ‘‘Lucrece’s reactions to the threat of rape and to the crime itself are often cited as prime instances of what is wrong with the poem in which she figures. According to these readings, Shakespeare himself gets as carried away with rhetoric as his heroine: he employs the conventions of set speech with no regard for psychological reality or even common sense, crams in rhetorical tropes with no concern for their appropriateness to the context.’’ Having thoroughly researched the topic, however, Dubrow can astutely note, ‘‘If Lucrece’s lines could be cited as examples in a sixteenth-century textbook on rhetorical declamations, they would be no less appropriate in a twentieth-century textbook on the behavior of rape victims.’’ Thus, echoing the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, she concludes that Shakespeare ‘‘manifests an extraordinary ability to work on subjects distant from his own experience.’’

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CRITICISM Peter J. Smith In the following essay, Peter J. Smith examines Shakespeare’s Lucrece in light of the political, social, and cultural structures that could allow rape to occur. The critic argues that Shakespeare’s focus on the ‘‘political aspects of the crime’’ does not constitute a denial of the importance of the rape itself, as some scholars have argued, but rather reveals his interest in highlighting the larger social systems that make rape possible. W.B. Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ is probably the most famous literary rape of the twentieth century: A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? In the original edition, published in The Dial in June 1924, Yeats noted: ‘I wrote Leda and the Swan because the editor of a political review asked me for a poem . . . My fancy began to play with Leda and the Swan for metaphor, and I began this poem; but as I wrote, bird and lady took such possession of the scene that all politics went out of it.’ That Yeats views politics and rape as mutually exclusive is hardly surprising. On the one hand, an offence so clearly directed at the person and so intimately executed seems worlds away from the larger social structures that constitute the political. Even though Jove’s rape of Leda is shown to unleash the violence of the Trojan war—as the reference to ‘the burning roof and tower’ makes plain—the painful focus on the ‘terrified vague fingers’, the seized nape, breast and thighs implants the poem with a physicality which has the effect of evoking the sadistic act rather than exploring the ideological implications of the moment. Moreover,

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LUCRECE IS BOTH A COLONISED LANDMASS AND A BESIEGED CITY AND HER ATTACK IS, IN PLACES, INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM THE LARGER POLITICAL STRIFE—THE SIEGE OF ARDEA . . . ’’

the final lines ask a dangerously leading question—was Leda in some way empowered by her forcible coupling with a god? Did she, in other words, profit by the act? In 1968 William Empson infamously made the same suggestion of Lucrece: ‘She was no virgin, having several children; and it is a basic fact about the young Shakespeare that he considers young men in general overwhelmingly desirable to women, let alone brave young lords. Thus she took an involuntary pleasure in the rape, though she would have resisted it in any way possible; that is why she felt guilty, and why some of her blood turned black’. The fact that Yeats could have seen such questions as apolitical or that Empson could have viewed the episode in terms of personal blame is a sign of the shift in sensibility between 1924/1968 and the present day. For contemporary feminist critics, rape is an act of the most profoundly political nature and it would seem that this view of rape is shared by Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece. As Sara E. Quay has argued, ‘Lucrece is not able to be raped because she is a woman, but because she is constructed as a woman who is able to be raped.’ The feminist rationale is not difficult to see. In cultures in which rape is accepted as an albeit abnormal part of sexual behaviour, it is naturalised and the circumstances that produce it remain unquestioned and therefore dangerously unchallenged. If, on the other hand, rape is viewed as a social or political construction, the reasons for its acceptance and perhaps even its existence are available for interrogation. It is my contention that Shakespeare’s poem sets out to display the ‘constructedness’ of rape and that its concentration on the political aspects of the crime are not due to a shying away from the horror of the act itself, but rather reveal the social and cultural organisations

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that allow rape to occur in the first place. In such a way this essay takes issue with Coppe´lia Kahn’s assertion that criticism of The Rape of Lucrece ‘has so far failed to confront’ the rape in the poem. While she may be right that it is ‘painful to confront the poem squarely’, the poem’s stress on the political consequences of the crime and the political circumstances that led to it, constitutes an empowering rather than a disempowering reading for a feminist agenda in that it makes manifest not the physical details of the assault but rather the patriarchal structures that permit and even sponsor the activity. Rape in Renaissance literature was often set in directly political circumstances. In a horrible instance, Tamburlaine defies the supplications of the Damascan virgins who plead with him to spare the marital security of the city’s population: Pitie the marriage bed, where many a Lord In prime and glorie of his loving joy, Embraceth now with teares of ruth and blood, The jealous bodie of his fearfull wife, Whose cheekes and hearts so punisht with conceit, To thinke thy puisant never staied arme Will part their bodies, and prevent their soules From heavens of comfort, yet their age might beare, Now waxe all pale and withered to the death— [I Tamburlaine, V. i., Christopher Marlowe] The husbands’ ‘jealous’ embrace is to be ruptured by Tamburlaine’s soldiers so that the defilement of the marriage bed is seen to be an act of war. In a moment of thinly veiled phallic aggression, Tamburlaine mocks the virgins by introducing them to Death, who sits on the end of his sword: ‘there sits Death, there sits imperious Death, / Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge’ (V. i. 111–12). Tamburlaine voices his determination to defile the city in terms that suggest the sexual nature of his invasion: ‘I will not spare these proud Egyptians, / . . . for the love of Venus, would she leave / The angrie God of Armes, and lie with me’ (V. i. 121–5); the violation of the city will be even more sexually charged than sleeping with the goddess of love. Even Zenocrate, the woman Tamburlaine claims to love, has been subjected to his sexual assault. Agydas asks her why she appears so

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troubled given that she has had so long to get over her abduction by Tamburlaine: ’Tis more then pitty such a heavenly face / Should by hearts sorrow wax so wan and pale, / When your offensive rape by Tamburlaine / . . . Hath seem’d to be digested long agoe’ (III. ii. 4–8). These instances exemplify the essentially political nature of the sexual crime as well as its ineluctable contiguity with martial conflict. A decade later, this tyrannical sexuality reappears in another fearful example, this time in Shakespeare’s Henry V. Before the siege of Harfleur, the romanticised warrior spits out threats of sexual violation designed to terrorise the Governor into submission: If I begin the batt’ry once again ` Harfleur I will not leave the half-achieved ` Till in her ashes she lie buried. The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass You fresh fair virgins and your flow ’ring infants . . . What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause, If your pure maidens fall into the hand Of hot and forcing violation? What rein can hold licentious wickedness When down the hill he holds his fierce career? . . . why in a moment look to see The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters. Not only will the female inhabitants be sexually assaulted but, as my emphases demonstrate, the city itself will be laid waste as if it were a female victim of a perverted attack. As Heather Dubrow has pointed out, ‘given the common association of gates with the vagina, the notion of rape is latent in the image of the attacked city.’ Towards the end of the same play the French King describes the hitherto peaceful cities in terms of anthropomorphic landscapes. Their intact walls make them politically virginal: ‘you see them perspectively, the cities turned into a maid—for they are all girdled with maiden walls that war hath never entered.’ (V. ii. 317).

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In his oration to his troops on the eve of Bosworth, King Richard galvanises his men with the threat that if they lose the battle, their lands and wives will pay the price: You having lands and blessed with beauteous wives, They would distrain the one, distain the other. ... Shall these enjoy our lands? Lie with our wives? Ravish our daughters? (V. vi. 51–67) Moreover, this sexually charged intimidation is not merely the warped and twisted oratory of the play’s villain; even the political saviour, Richmond, attempts to arouse his soldiers with threats to their womenfolk: ‘If you do fight in safeguard of your wives, / Your wives shall welcome home the conquerors.’ (V. v. 213–14) Though less blunt and offensive than Richard’s rhetoric, the threat is the same—if you lose this battle, you will be cuckolded. In The Rape of Lucrece the rampaging army appears as a version of Tarquin’s engorged veins which, let loose, run away in a riot of impetuous rape and murder, levelling all in front of them, including the rhyme scheme: And they like straggling slaves for pillage fighting, Obdurate vassals fell exploits effecting, In bloody death and ravishment delighting, Nor children’s tears nor mothers’ groans respecting, Swell in their pride, the onset still expecting. Anon his beating heart, alarum striking, Gives the hot charge, and bids them do their liking. (428–34) This concatenation between urban devastation and rape is figured most clearly in the poem during Lucrece’s contemplation of the picture of the Trojan war. As she summons up her memory of the whereabouts of the picture, the immediacy of the two events is reinforced: At last she calls to mind where hangs a piece Of skilful painting made for Priam’s Troy, Before the which is drawn the power of Greece, For Helen’s rape the city to destroy. (1366–9) Urban and female ravishment are fused.

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In The Rape of Lucrece, as has often been noted, the act itself occupies only a tiny fragment—lines 673–83, that is ten lines out of the poem’s 1855 lines or 0.54 percent. This is a startling statistic and firmly gives the lie to the suggestion that (as far as this poem is concerned) ‘rape is a strangely pleasurable topic to read about because it draws us to what is perceived as a ‘‘closed’’ topic, a taboo’. In fact this poem is quite the opposite of Yeats’s since it lacks any close attention to the process of forced intercourse. Instead the poem dwells on the larger political context that surrounds the attack. In the ‘Argument’, the rape occupies only a single perfunctory sentence: ‘The same night he treacherously stealeth into her chamber, violently ravished her, and early in the morning speedeth away.’ It then goes on to spell out, in much greater detail, the political consequences of the action: with one consent they [Lucrece’s relatives and friends] all vowed to root out the whole hated family of the Tarquins, and, bearing the dead body to Rome, Brutus acquainted the people with the doer and the manner of the vile deed, with a bitter invective against the tyranny of the King; wherewith the people were so moved that with one consent and a general acclamation the Tarquins were all exiled and the state government changed from kings to consuls.

The rape, then, is first and foremost a political action with grave political consequences. It is the moment that transforms the Kingdom of Rome into a republic and the poem is thus much more a narrative of cultural formation than an account of a gross act of violence. Its very setting—the siege of Ardea—frames the action, much as the Trojan war frames the action of Troilus and Cressida; the feuding of Verona frames the central affair of Romeo and Juliet; and the civil disorder between the triumvirate defines the world of Antony and Cleopatra. But in addition to the setting, the poem’s metaphorical treatment of its heroine and her violation is quite explicitly and deliberately politicised. As Peter Stallybrass, Georgianna Zeigler and Linda Woodbridge have shown, the female body is frequently a site of masculine occupation and colonial struggle. Examples are legion, the most famous of which are [John] Donne’s ‘Oh my America, my new found lande, / My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man’d, / My myne of precious stones, my Empiree, / How

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blest am I in this discovering thee’ (27–30), as well as Ralegh’s naming of his newly founded colony: Virginia, and his evocative description of Guiana in 1595 as ‘a country that hath yet her maydenhead’. Petruchio’s definition of his new wife as ‘[m]y household-stuff, my field, my barn’ (The Taming of the Shrew, III. iii. 103–4) and Valentine’s description of his love as a ‘principality’ (Two Gentlemen of Verona, II. iv. 150) are further examples. This Renaissance geo-eroticism dramatises the inherent violence as well as the facelessness of masculine desire. These landscaped women are generally supine, still and anonymous from the neck up. In Thomas Carew’s ‘A Rapture’ the female body is itemised, dissected and fragmented as it melts mysteriously into a fervently eroticised landscape: I’le seize the Rose-buds in their perfum’d bed, The Violet knots, like curious Mazes spread O’re all the Garden, taste the ripned Cherry, The warme, firme Apple, tipt with corall berry: Then will I visit, with a wandring kisse, The vale of Lillies, and the Bower of blisse: And where the beauteous Region doth divide Into two milkie wayes, my lips shall slide Downe those smooth Allies, wearing as I goe A tract for lovers on the printed snow; Thence climbing o’re the swelling Appenine, Retire into thy grove of Eglantine. (63–74) Like Donne’s intrepid explorer, Carew’s persona is also a cartographer leaving his trail for others to follow as they certainly will, for in this poem and the female landscape of the Renaissance, woman is sexually available for anyone. The poet of ‘A Rapture’ despises those ‘greedy men that seek to enclose the common, / And within private armes empale free woman’ (19–20), but she is not free herself, rather she is freely available to everyone else, just like Johnson’s Doll Common who speaks of herself as a commonwealth, ‘Haue yet, some care of me, o’ your republique’ (The Alchemist, I. i. 110). Land held in common and women commonly used lose their value. Robert Tofte insists on the consequences of trespassing:

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And so puissant and potent is this our desire, which wee haue to enioy that Party (which wee loue) soly and alone, without the societie and company of any other whatsoeuer, as that (many times) when this our high-pris’d Commoditie chanceth to light into some other merchants hands, and that this our private Inclosure proueth to be a Common for others, we care no more for it, but giue it altogether ouer.

Woman comes to be an object for man’s libidinal pleasure rather than a presence in her own right in these sexually charged pastorals. As Mercedes Maroto Camino writes, ‘woman is nothing other than the unlucky terrain where political struggles are fought and her sexuality the liminal space where a culture establishes its coordinates and fixes its boundaries.’ It is trenchantly significant that the Latin verb rapere, ‘to take by force’, gives us both rapture and rape.

such an ivory wall—’ (463–4); the movement of her breathing ‘moves in him more rage and lesser pity / To make the breach and enter this sweet city’ (468–9); ‘Under that colour am I come to scale / Thy never-conquered fort’ (481–2). Lucrece is both a colonised landmass and a besieged city and her attack is, in places, indistinguishable from the larger political strife—the siege of Ardea—with which the poem opens: Tarquin’s assault is described as a ‘siege that hath engirt his [Collatine’s] marriage’ (221) while Lucrece herself images the violation of her soul in terms of a routed castle: Her house is sacked, her quiet interrupted, Her mansion battered by the enemy, Her sacred temple spotted, spoiled, corrupted, Grossly engirt with daring infamy. Then let it not be called impiety If in this blemished fort I make some hole Through which I may convey this troubled soul. (1170–6)

This vocabulary of geo-sexual assault is employed during Shakespearean rapes. Titus Andronicus addresses the raped Lavinia as ‘[t]hou map of woe’ (III. ii. 12) while the sleeping Lucrece is described, immediately prior to her rape, as a ‘map of death’ (402). Her breasts are ‘like ivory globes circled with blue, / A pair of ` maiden worlds unconquered’ (407–8). As her male relatives attempt to console her she turns from them: ‘with a joyless smile she turns away / The face, that map which deep impression bears / Of hard misfortune, carved in it with tears’ (1711–13). Lucrece is landscaped in such a way as to reify her as an object of masculine ownership or occupation—as Collatine pronounces ‘she was my wife. / I owed her, and ’tis mine that she hath killed’ (1802–3). The poem articulates the rape as a kind of trespass just as Tofte describes it: Tarquin’s hand rests ‘[o]n her bare breast, the heart of all her land’ (439) and the final image of the dead and bleeding body is of ‘a late-sacked island [which] vastly stood, / Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood’ (1740–1).

Lucrece appears as yet another spoiled manmade structure: a muddied fountain. She appeals to Tarquin to ‘[m]ud not the fountain that gave drink to thee’ (577), the rape is likened to the poisonous toads that ‘infect fair founts with venom mud’ (850); and as she addresses the possibility of her own redemption she notes that ‘[t]he poisoned fountain clears itself again’ (1707). Lavinia too appears as a polluted fountain. Titus tells her attackers, ‘[h]ere stands the spring whom you have stained with mud’ (Titus Adronicus, V. ii. 169) and he proposes to his daughter that they should ‘sit round about some fountain’ and cry into it: ‘in the fountain shall we gaze so long / Till the fresh taste be taken from that clearness, / And made a brine pit with our bitter tears’ (III. i. 123, 127–9). Clearly, in a society predicated on primogeniture, rape muddies the line of descent so that the clarity of legitimate lineage is mired in dynastic confusion.

In addition, this imagery of physical geography, that is of natural scenery, is overlaid with the discourse of urban invasion I have already documented. Repeatedly and in a way that emphasises the political rather than the physical, the body of Lucrece is transmogrified into the features of a cityscape—Tarquin’s ‘hand did scale / Left their [her breasts’] round turrets destitute and pale’ (440–1); ‘His hand that yet remains upon her breast— / Rude ram, to batter

In addition to the employment of these ideologically loaded images of country, city and fountain, the outcome of Lucrece’s rape is publicly staged. Just as we witness the aftermath of Lavinia’s ordeal at the hands of Demetrius and Chiron—the actual rape takes place offstage (Titus Andronicus, II. iii. 187)—so the audience that witnesses Lucrece’s ‘confession’ and the procession of her body ensures that her suffering is publicly acknowledged. In this way her

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wounds, like those of Julius Caesar, are displayed to political ends: ‘They did conclude to bear dead Lucrece thence, / To show her bleeding body thorough Rome, / And so to publish Tarquin’s foul offence’ (1850–2, my emphases). Virtue is conspicuous: ‘Poor grooms are sightless night, kings glorious day. / Gnats are unnoted wheresoe’er they fly, / But eagles gazed upon with every eye’ (1013–15). Moreover, while men seem to be able to cover their tracks with machiavellian cunning, women have no choice but to reveal their inner corruption: ‘Though men can cover crimes with bold stern looks, / Poor women’s faces are their own faults’ books’ (1252–3). Little wonder then that while Tarquin exits subtly (1280–1), Lucrece’s grief and funeral are public, even state occasions. Lucrece’s account of the previous night is an explicit and civic event. The poem is insistent that the account takes place in front of an assembled audience: ‘Collatine and his consorted lords / With sad attention long to hear her words’ (1609–10); ‘‘‘But ere I name him, you fair lords,’’ quoth she, / Speaking to those that came with Collatine’ (1688–9); ‘Each present lord began to promise aid’ (1696). Also, the vocabulary associated with her description of the rape is drawn from that of the public court: My bloody judge forbade my tongue to speak; No rightful plea might plead for justice there. His scarlet lust came evidence to swear That my poor beauty had purloined his eyes; And when the judge is robbed, the prisoner dies. (1648–52, my emphases) Injustice is not only done, but it is seen to be done and the reason this is important is because chastity is as much about public—that is political— reputation as personal virtue. As Hamlet instructs his mother, repute is all: ‘Assume a virtue if you have it not’ (III. iv. 151). In The Duchess of Malfi [by John Webster], Ferdinand’s apocalyptic vision links sexual licence with fading reputation: Upon a time, Reputation, Love, and Death Would travell ore the world: and ’twas concluded That they should part, and take three severall wayes: Death told them, they should find him in great Battailes,

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Or Cities plagu’d with plagues: Love gives them councell To enquire for him ’mongst unambitious shepheards, Where dowries were not talk’d of: and sometimes ’Mongst quiet kindred, that had nothing left By their dead Parents: stay (quoth Reputation) Doe not forsake me; for it is my nature If once I part from any man I meete I am never found againe. And so, for you: You have shooke hands with Reputation, And made him invisible: So fare you well. I will never see you more. (III. ii. 123–37) Sexuality (especially female sexuality) is public property, an index of the civilisation of the society in which it resides. Brutus is adamant that the rape of Lucrece is just as much (if not more so) a crime against the state as against her person. Collatinus is not considered to be the wronged ` husband of Lucrece but rather ‘[t]hou wronged lord of Rome’ (1818) and Brutus’ call to action is peppered with conspicuous references to the city: Courageous Roman, do not steep thy heart In such relenting dew of lamentations, But kneel with me, and help to bear thy part To rouse our Roman gods with invocations That they will suffer these abominations— Since Rome herself in them doth stand disgraced— By our strong arms from forth her fair streets chased. Now by the Capitol that we adore, And by this chaste blood so unjustly stained, By heaven’s fair sun that breeds the fat earth’s store, By all our country rights in Rome maintained, And by chaste Lucrece’ soulthat late complained Her wrongs to us, and by this bloody knife, We will revenge the death of this true wife. (1828–41) It is ‘Rome herself [which] doth stand disgraced’—Lucrece hardly figures. At the climax of the poem then, the personal is configured as the political in a way that underlines the cultural significance of the moment, for rape is seen to be not a crime against an individual, but an offence against a civilisation. Diana Fuss questions the ‘tendency to psychologize and to personalize questions of oppression, at the expense of strong materialist analyses

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TO WHAT EXTENT MIGHT BRUTUS’S FAMOUS

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

COMMITMENT PROCEED FROM COMPASSION OR MORAL OUTRAGE, AND TO WHAT EXTENT FROM PLAIN OPPORTUNISM, WHETHER PATRIOTIC OR SELF-

Shakespeare placed rape in the dramatic context of a tragedy in Titus Andronicus (c. 1593).  Cymbeline (c. 1609), one of Shakespeare’s latest plays, also features a man boasting about the chastity of his wife, in this case leading another man to desire to seduce her into committing adultery. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky provides one of the most highly regarded psychological studies of a criminal in all of literature in Crime and Punishment (1866), offering much insight into the manner in which the criminal copes with his guilt.  In Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (1989), Stephanie H. Jed discusses the progression of the various versions of the myth of Lucrece, and relates them to societal changes. 

of the structural bases of exploitation.’ While Shakespeare’s poem acts in the opposite direction, it is a brave critic who will argue that their depersonalised readings of rape must be recognised to be more progressive or radical than those that focus on the victim. Rape is after all not a literary event, but a terrible reality with real-life casualties. Source: Peter J. Smith, ‘‘Rome’s Disgrace: The Politics of Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece,’’ in Critical Survey, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2005, pp. 15–26.

G. W. Majors In his excerpt, Majors focuses attention not on the major characters of Tarquin and Lucrece but on the minor character of L. Junius Brutus. Majors contends that only Brutus provides the poem with any amount of ‘‘moral enigma’’ and ambiguity.

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SEEKING?’’

Moral ambiguities scarcely abound in The Rape of Lucrece. For all the attention given their ‘‘psychological aspects,’’ Tarquin and Lucrece are characters no more elusive, ethically, than Lust and Chastity in a morality play. They are humanized, to be sure, racked by doubt, and possessed of a self-scrutiny totally foreign to their allegorical forebears. But their aching hearts still beat in clean sight. However searching the analysis, the essential goodness of Shakespeare’s heroine remains invulnerable to argument. Nor can the evil embodied in the rapist be extenuated, either by his awareness of pain or by our awareness of Freud. If there is a moral enigma in the poem, it waits in the last seven stanzas, those dominated by L. Junius Brutus. Coming where it does, Brutus’s share of the poem would seem to court notice, and his character appears mysterious enough to warrant this attempt to pluck it out. Admittedly, the conclusion always excites more attention as source evidence than as poetry. It concerns the major characters only incidentally and exhibits none of the self-conscious artfulness manifest in the passages most remembered and discussed. Hasty, derivative, these uninspired stanzas have evoked almost nothing from critics, save an occasional remark about Shakespeare’s desire to tie up loose ends before concluding. Of the few who have bothered to comment, Esther C. Dunn is typically sketchy: The end of the poem like the end of many Elizabethan plays carries the story beyond what the modern audiences would call ‘‘the final curtain.’’ After Lucrece has confessed, charged her husband to revenge her upon Tarquin, after the embroidered grief in the speeches by her father and Collatine, we should cry for an end. But Shakespeare carries the

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story on. Neither he nor his public could forego the tidying up of the events.

She does right to assume that the Brutus segment, anticlimactic, invites apology in view of its apparent superfluousness. But to pretend that the purpose of these verses lies in ‘‘the tidying up of the events’’ requires exception of all but the final stanza. Taken as they stand, the last fortynine lines argue strongly to the contrary. Shakespeare, whatever his purposes, was not content to put a hem on the work until he had spun a final thread—one which dangles in the reader’s face long before it is used in stitching the poem to a tidy conclusion. Probably I am not the only reader who has been puzzled by the intrusive stanza that cuts us off from the lamentations of Collatine and Lucretius. With slight regard for continuity, the poet shifts our attention to a character who has been named (line 1734) but hardly noticed: Brutus, who pluck’d the knife from Lucrece’ side, Seeing such emulation in their woe, Began to clothe his wit in state and pride, Burying in Lucrece’ wound his folly’s show. He with the Romans was esteemed so As silly jeering idiots are with kings, For sportive words and utt’ring foolish things. (1807–13) Here, Lucrece having already run more than ninety-seven per cent of its lengthy course, we suddenly encounter the only ethically indistinct figure in the poem. To the reader uninitiated in Roman legendary history, the lines at first suggest another villain in our midst. The reader will soon change his mind, however; and by the end of the poem, unless he is more chary than most, he will err again by supposing Brutus a right champion of unambiguous virtue. L. Junius Brutus doubtless belongs with the innocent inasmuch as he opposes the wicked. Yet to view Shakespeare’s Roman hero with so easy an eye is to misunderstand both the character and his function in the poem. From the outset it is evident that Brutus is not the simple instrument we find, for example, in Chaucer’s version of the story. An avenger still, and a means for concluding, Shakespeare’s handy vindicator nevertheless raises as many problems as he solves. When he ‘‘throws that shallow habit by, / Wherein deep policy did him disguise’’ (1814–15), Brutus tempts us to

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Frontispiece to the Rowe edition of Lucrece, 1714 (Ó Shakespeare Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan)

fancy that he reveals nothing less than naked heroism. As it happens, we have already been told of another garment which will replace the shallow habit of foolery, this one woven of ‘‘state and pride’’ (1809) and the rich connotations that attend them. Hero or none, Brutus has put off one role only to put on another. And the rightness of his cause should not blind us to the chance that he may be pursuing his ‘‘deep policy’’ still. After his metaphorical change of costume, Brutus sets about to persuade Collatine to stop sobbing and join with him in seeking revenge— revenge not against the rapist alone, but against Tarquin’s father the King, against the whole government (cf. Lucrece’s insistence [1478–84] that private sins ought to be punished without

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public consequences). For in Lucrece’s rape, Brutus casually alleges, ‘‘‘Rome herself . . . doth stand disgraced’’’ (1833). This point made, he can now tender his dramatic pledge of revenge: ‘‘Now by that Capitol that we adore, And by this chaste blood so unjustly stained, By heaven’s fair sun that breeds the fat earth’s store, By all our country rights in Rome maintained, And by chaste Lucrece’ soul that late complained Her wrongs to us, and by this bloody knife, We will revenge the death of this true wife.’’ (1835–41) Even allowing for the rhetorical flavor of the entire poem. Brutus’s sumptuous avowal smacks vaguely of humbug, especially when we are told (847–48) that he will recite the whole thing over again for those who agree to join him. More striking than the oratory is the curiously indecorous gesture that follows: ‘‘This said, he strook his hand upon his breast, / And kiss’d the fatal knife to end his vow.’’ (1842–43). Probably not since Judas’s was a kiss so sticky with ambiguity. Even Seneca’s revengers had taste enough to avoid this kind of grotesquerie, so we cannot help remarking the incongruousness of the gesture. Though we seek in Brutus such selflessness as befits a proper champion, we are obliged to concede the possibility that his kiss conveys a note of private thanks. The same knife which destroyed Lucrece will, after all, serve as the weapon with which this shrewd republican deposes his enemies and becomes first consul of Rome. Nor is it impertinent to recall Brutus’s political rise. The story being a popular one. Shakespeare likely assumes his audience will know the result of Brutus’s conquest, just as he earlier found it unnecessary to tell us why Brutus had been posing as a fool. He can assume that the educated reader will be familiar with at least the broad outline of the ‘‘history’’ he recounts. Now, before confessing that I have overvalued the argument against Brutus, I should put the case in its simplest form. The poem ends with the banishment of the offender, a direct result of Brutus and his pledgers’ having paraded the martyred Lucrece from spot to spot. ‘‘To show her bleeding body thorough Rome, / And so to publish Tarquin’s foul offence.’’ (1851–52) Careful readers at this point will think back to Brutus’s abrupt transformation and ask a question which

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seemed only secondary at the time: what exactly was it that moved him to put aside his show of folly for the sobriety of a determined avenger? From convenience and romantic impulses, we want to reply that it was simple indignation born of the pitiful spectacle he had just witnessed. But Shakespeare tells us only that it was because Brutus saw ‘‘such emulation’’ (1808) in the plaints of Collatine and Lucretius. We are invited to wonder, then, whether Brutus aims to assuage their woe or to capitalize on it. Although a case could be made both ways, surely the final stanza italicizes the less Christly objective. Earlier, in one of several dozen gnomic precepts contained in the poem, Shakespeare teaches a theatrical lesson now implicit in the conclusion: ‘‘To see sad sights moves more than hear them told.’’ (1324). Pointedly commonsensical, this Horatian dictum might just as well have come from an ambitious Machiavel when he spied, in the blood-spattered Lucrece, a ‘‘sad sight’’ that could move the people to join in supplanting a regime which he hated and feared. Though I have reckoned one-sidedly in this preliminary account of Lucius Brutus, it is not because I am keen to insist upon his self-interestedness. The point is that one cannot tell. We watch and applaud the sudden emergence of a leader, and like the Roman onlookers, we are left ‘‘wond’ring at him.’’ (1845). Because the unromantic possibilities loom conspicuous, our ‘‘wonder’’ holds less of admiration. less still of astonishment, as compared to plain doubt. Brutus wears a fog on his heart. Shakespeare gives him an obscurity that prevents us from making the categorical moral judgment we automatically make with respect to the other characters. By recognizing the obscurity we move a step nearer to Brutus’s role in the poem and the way Shakespeare’s character differs from Brutuses who marched before. But other obstacles remain. If the distinctions between Chaucer’s Brutus and Shakespeare’s ask no rehearsing, not so with the versions of Ovid and Livy. The conclusion of Shakespeare’s poem is noisy with source echoes, most of them traceable to one or both of the Augustans. Hence, even long before T. W. Baldwin’s meticulous research, editors were posting quick footnotes to account for the end of Lucrece as a virtual translation of its sources. Over those

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footnotes, however, one hears testimony to a slightly different effect. Traditionally, the most idealistic accounts of the Roman liberator find in his disguise a mere ‘‘protection’’ against the Tarquins, in his uprising an indignant response to the spectacle of innocence wronged. Modified interpretations had been advanced long before Shakespeare. For example: And although Titus Livy assigns but one cause as the ground which induced [Brutus] to practise this dissimulation, namely, that he might live in greater security and preserve his estates, none the less, in view of his conduct, one can well believe that he practised it also in order to escape observation and that he might get a better opportunity of downing the kings and liberating his country, whenever they gave him a chance.

The voice is Machiavelli’s; he is teaching the political lesson ‘‘That it is a Very Good Notion at Times to pretend to be a Fool.’’ Though the Florentine Secretary may have read his Livy a bit too hastily, his point is indicative. Neither Livy nor Ovid does much to encourage speculation about the motives of the giant-killer destined to liberate Rome. Both deal with the shrewd Brutus as well as the valiant one. Both treat the clever pretender, ingenious interpreter of the Delphic oracle, kisser of his mother earth. Yet neither offers to draw motivational connections between the disguised strategist and the avenger who reacts with such heartful determination to the tragedy of Lucrece. From all appearances, they are simply not concerned to qualify the famous patriot’s heroics. Practically, therefore, the vindicator who champions Rome’s cause and Lucrece’s seems as unambiguous as in Chaucer or Painter, where his duplicitous side is completely omitted. Seems, perhaps, but is not so. To readers like Machiavelli or Shakespeare, heroes—even Roman ones—were made of human stuff. Certain questions were bound to arise. Machiavelli could not read Livy’s account without probing for unspoken motives behind Brutus’s dissemblance. As to his shedding of the disguise at a crucial moment later on, Machiavelli confidently assumes that Brutus seized upon Lucrece’s affliction as a political pretext, else why should he have been the one to pull the dagger from Lucrece’s wound in the presence of her relatives and to exact from bystanders a pledge to abolish monarchy

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(Discourses, I, 464)? In Lucrece the same assumption is writ, if not large, at least legibly in the space between the lines. Like other Elizabethans, Shakespeare grew up with the Lucrese story and probably read it or heard it in a dozen versions. But unlike so many of his contemporaries, he was enough a realist to recognize and publicize the fact that the men who slay dragons are as often bounty hunters as chevaliers. To what extent might Brutus’s famous commitment proceed from compassion or moral outrage, and to what extent from plain opportunism, whether patriotic or self-seeking? With a few deft touches, Shakespeare hints at this motivational riddle in the last forty-nine lines of Lucrece. He asks us to be bothered by the same questions that Ovid and Livy seemingly contrived to suppress. Editors are right when they tell us that Shakespeare followed his sources closely in the poem’s final stanzas. Indeed, he followed so closely that he stepped on them. Then he moved ahead, unemphatically, without breaking stride. He did not alter the course taken by his Latin references; he merely went farther than they did. He went farther by insisting on the equivocality that was always there. In the broad outline of the event, and in a number of grammatical and incidental particulars, the last stanzas of Lucrece correspond to the probable sources. But more essential to the total effect are the bits and pieces the Elizabethan poet added on his own. Brutus’s kissing of the bloody knife, the clothing of his wit in ‘‘state and pride,’’ the explicit contradiction between his and Lucrece’s notions of private justice in a political world—these and other such nagging details appear, so far as I am aware, in no previous treatment of the story. At least in the limited way that I have suggested, Shakespeare’s is an original, carefully ambivalent treatment of L. Junius Brutus. If not yet the seriocomic egomaniac that Heywood was to make him, Lucrece’s revenger now shows a dubious side scarcely thinkable in earlier Elizabethan versions. He becomes the second Shakespearean character to be called ‘‘unsounded’’ (1819) and the first who truly deserves the name. We are left faintly suspicious that chastity’s paladin may be polity’s Machiavel, a sly aspirer who, less playfully than Touchstone, ‘‘uses his folly like a stalking horse’’ (As You Like It V.iv.100). He reminds us, possibly, of a certain canny prince who awaits a

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seasonable moment for throwing off his loose behavior, so that ‘‘he may be more wond’red at’’ (1 Henry IV I.ii.189). However minor his role, Brutus emerges as an intriguing character who earns a position in the Shakespearean assembly of politic inscrutables. In this respect, he likely merits notice in an appendix to Harold R. Walley’s provocative study of the connections between Shakespeare’s poem and his later dramatic habits. As plot opportunity and plotting opportunist, Brutus anticipates other minor characters such as Fortinbras. In a more general way, he is kin to those major characters—Bolingbroke, for example, or Octavius Caesar—who would be shown by Shakespeare to combine villainous proficiency with a bland refusal to be villains. But while Brutus’s place in the canon invites consideration, it does not, of course, explain his place in Lucrece. The poet no doubt needed Brutus for the tidying up of the events, but why did he draw the avenger with such riddling lines? Whether he studied Ovid or Livy or both, Shakespeare seems to have found thematic potential in the queer, equivocal genius who presides over the finish and over Rome thereafter. From the moralistic viewpoint that predominates in the poem. Shakespeare’s Brutus is a composite figure, spotty enough to recall both the goodness of Lucrese and the villainy of Tarquin. Outside that perspective, he models a paradox typically Shakespearean: morally indeterminate, he is nevertheless publicly and existentially perfect. By handling his revenger as he did, Shakespeare made a narrative convenience something more. In a poem dominated by two characters not perplexing but perplexed, Brutus comes as a disturbing antithesis. Ethically unfixed, this slippery character nearly slides off the page. The poem that has relied so largely on painstaking exploration of motive, and on the assumption of a normative ethic, can only barely accommodate him. But precisely this difficulty accounts for Brutus’s important, extradramatic role in the poem. His true moral worth matters nothing. Shakespeare encourages us to ask unanswerable questions about Brutus’s intentions and then to recognize that whatever his real motives and whatever his ethical stature, Brutus is self-contained, passionless, unerring. Or to borrow terms from the riskiest of contemporary texts, he embodies what it takes to ‘‘inherit heaven’s

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graces / And husband nature’s riches from expense’’ (Sonnet 94). As such, he stands out like a marginal gloss when set beside the other figures in the story. Structurally, he looks the part of an epilogue. He occupies center stage in the last seven stanzas, outside the boundaries of the main action. From this vantage point Brutus oversees the conclusion while offering an informal review of the other characters. Of course, only three characters really count in the poem: Tarquin, Lucrece, and Collatine. Their vices and virtues have been studied throughout, but their means and strategies remain secondary, their practical failings largely untallied, until the coming of Brutus. In the anticlimactic last stanzas dedicated to a sturdy realist, efficiency supplants morality as the prevailing standard. Here, in other words, Shakespeare finally provides the norm by which to measure his characters on an other than ethical basis. First consider Lucrece, whose tragedy comes in two parts. Responsibility for the rape rests, as always, most immediately with the rapist. But the poet has implied—and now, I would suggest, demonstrates—that the innocent victim owns a share of the blame. Open and unsuspicious, Lucrece flounders for lack of the same skills by which Brutus succeeds. She is beguiled by Tarquin because she trusts appearances (89– 91, 99–105) and because her public sensibility makes her overly dainty about etiquette (841– 44). The suspiciousness that might prompt faux pas she avoids by a gullibility that prompts deadly missteps. The tracks of these missteps show up tellingly when the disguised Brutus shows up at the end. His mere appearance reminds us that Lucrece’s tragedy was avoidable, that not everybody plays gull to a dissembling tyrant. For here, more inscrutable than ever, comes the famous Roman Brutus, Covering discretion with a coat of folly; As gardeners do with ordure hide those roots That shall first spring and be most delicate. (Henry V II.iv.37–40) Lucrece misses such discretion and such a covering. Her trustfulness and openhanded hospitality reflect proper social conduct, but not the conduct needed to survive in a world inhabited by the likes of Tarquin.

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Lucrece’s suicide is another matter. Hers alone is the burden of direct responsibility, yet she seems to have the not too reluctant admiration of Shakespeare (and of most readers) when she makes her fatal decision—a decision which, as Hallett Smith has remarked, ‘‘is a heroically simple one.’’ With the entrance of Brutus, however, the scene shifts to the real world. In this setting passion wants splendor, and heroic virtues appear absurd. With a single stroke, the cool realist would destroy our illusions about the beauty and aptness of Lucrece’s tragic end: ‘‘‘Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so. / To slay herself that should have slain her foe.’’’ (1826–27). He is right. Seen outside a romantic context (and not in Battenhouse’s Christian one), Lucrece’s self-destruction reflects only the fact that she ‘‘mistook the matter,’’ since it neither restored what she lost nor punished the thief who took it. Brutus is a practical man urging practical action. In his Rome goodness and heroism, when they prove ineffectual, translate as folly. Lucrece’s needless suicide issues from a motive to which Brutus, once again, provides the potent counterstatement. Although shame weighs immoderately on such saints, the decisive factor in Lucrece’s tragic choice is not that she herself doubts her innocence: ‘‘Though my gross blood be stain’d with this abuse. Immaculate and spotless is my mind: That was not forc’d, that never was inclin’d To accessory yieldings, but still pure Doth in her poison’d closet yet endure.’’ (1655–59) Instead, it is her fear of what others will think (e.g., 810–19, 1314–23). That the wiser, self-contained Brutus pays tiny regard to such rumor appears plain enough by his willingness to act the public fool in order to further his private strategy. Simply because she makes inexpedient ado about her public standing, Lucrece is obliged to destroy both the ‘‘poison’d closet’’ and the pure mind that hurts within it, rather than risk that the world infer the guilt of the one from the outward shame of the other. Her tragedy, in one important respect, is that no matter how convinced of her indwelling taintlessness, she knows she cannot hide from her countenance the shame that would argue guilt. Unhappily, she lacks Brutus’s aptitude for making outward appearance subject to inner command. While he

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is among those who, lords and owners of their faces, do not do the thing they most do show, Lucrece desponds untutored in such ways of the wise: ‘‘‘And my true eyes have never practis’d how / To cloak offences with a cunning brow.’’’ (748–49). All considered, Lucrece perishes because she is too good, too trusting, too idealistic, too artless for survival in a post-Saturnian world. And that is exactly what Brutus tells us— with his disguise, his actions, his words—when he makes his belated appearance, a realist epilogue in an idealistic fable. Brutus’s commentary on Lucrece’s husband and on Tarquin can be more speedily summarized. Shakespeare has told us that Collatine’s boasting was the spark that ignited lustful flames in Tarquin’s heart. The didactic poet advises, along the way, that some treasures are best kept hidden, that the beauty and virtue of Lucrece ought to have remained the secret blessing of the one man fortunate enough to enjoy them (33–35). And now, in the closing section of the poem, he introduces a character more studious than Collatine of this prudent individualism. By maintaining his show of folly, Brutus has managed to keep his own dearest possession ‘‘long-hid’’ (1816) and thus safe from the envy of tyrants. Far from boasting, as Collatine did, Brutus committed himself to the most self-deprecatory course available. Pretending idiocy and subjecting himself to the reputation that goes with it, the ‘‘unsounded’’ tactician was satisfied to be thought capable of nothing more than ‘‘sportive words and utt’ring foolish things.’’ He belongs with those who husband nature’s riches from expense, just as Collatine joins the lesser group, those but stewards of their excellence. Shakespeare makes his enigmatic revenger the most efficient character in Lucrece, not just for the ways he contrasts with Collatine and his virtuous lady, but also for his superiority over the creature on the other end of the moral spectrum. As already noticed, Brutus shares with his enemy the ability to pretend to be other than he is. In design and execution, however, he reverses the pattern established by Tarquin. When he arrived at Lucrece’s, Tarquin succeeded in masking his ‘‘inward ill’’ by feigning dignity and propriety: For that he colour’d with his high estate, Hiding base sin in pleats of majesty, That nothing in him seem’d inordinate. (92–94)

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Now, when we meet Brutus in the final section of the poem, has he not been turning the same trick in another direction—coloring his true worth with his low estate, hiding his natural majesty in pleats of baseness, so that all about him (since he was playing the fool) seemed more than a little inordinate? Brutus is every bit as furtive as Tarquin, else he had not managed to survive. The signal distinction, with or without the moral overtones, is that the dissimulation in the one springs from wit, in the other from mindless passion. Tarquin makes a somewhat palliative confession in this regard: ‘‘‘My will is strong past reason’s weak removing.’’’ (243). Palliative, that is, because the weakness he attributes to ‘‘reason’’ belongs, more particularly, elsewhere. Although Brutus’s later words are directed against a very different outburst of passion, his commentary, granted the choric privilege it deserves, pronounces judgment on Tarquin as well: ‘‘‘Such childish humour from weak minds proceeds.’’’ (1825). Whether victim or villain, those who err suffer exposure beside the mysterious pragmatist who gets the last word and the last seven stanzas. More than a narrative expedient, Shakespeare’s Brutus earns significance as a community foil. In his role in the poem, however late and slight, he behaves in such a way as to provide a practical assessment of the main characters. Hence, if he comes from Shakespeare’s pen a more blotched and problematic figure than before, he does so to a purpose. The moralizing poet supplies neat ethical determinations but stops short, cannily, when he reaches the last stanzas. Relieved of obligation to the idealistic schema, Brutus affords the means for understanding this sentimental, moral tale on a basis unsentimental and unmoral. Source: G. W. Majors, ‘‘Shakespeare’s First Brutus: His Role in Lucrece,’’ in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 4, December 1974, pp. 339–51.

SOURCES

Berry, Philippa, ‘‘Woman, Language, and History in The Rape of Lucrece,’’ in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 44, 1992, pp. 33–9. Camino, Mercedes Maroto, ‘‘‘That Map Which Deep Impression Bears’: The Politics of Conquest in Shakespeare’s Lucrece,’’ in Shakespeare: World Views, edited by Heather Kerr, Robin Eaden, and Madge Mitton, University of Delaware Press, 1996, pp. 124–45. Crewe, Jonathan, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Narrative Poems, by William Shakespeare, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. xxix–lii. Dubrow, Heather, ‘‘‘Full of Forged Lies’: The Rape of Lucrece,’’ in Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets, Cornell University Press, 1987, pp. 80–168. Kahn, Coppe´lia, ‘‘The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece,’’ in Shakespeare and Gender: A History, edited by Deborah E. Barker and Ivo Kamps, Verso, 1995, pp. 22–46. MacCallum, Mungo W., Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and Their Background, Macmillan, 1910. Newman, Jane, ‘‘‘And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness’: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece,’’ in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3, Autumn 1994, pp. 304–26. Shakespeare, William, Lucrece, in The Narrative Poems, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 50–120. Stimpson, Catharine R., ‘‘Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape,’’ in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, University of Illinois Press, 1980, pp 56–64. Sylvester, Bickford, ‘‘Natural Mutability and Human Responsibility: Form in Shakespeare’s Lucrece,’’ in College English, Vol. 26, 1965, pp. 505–11. Vickers, Nancy, ‘‘‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece,’’ in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, Methuen, 1985, pp. 95–115. Weis, Kurt, and Sandra S. Borges, ‘‘Victimology and Rape: The Case of the Legitimate Victim,’’ in Rape Victimology, edited by Leroy G. Schultz, Charles C. Thomas, 1975.

FURTHER READING

Allen, D. C., ‘‘Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece,’’ in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 15, 1962, pp. 89–98. Augustine, Saint, The City of God, translated by George E. McCracken et al., 7 vols., Harvard University Press and Heinemann, 1957, p. 72.

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Battenhouse, Roy W., ‘‘Shakespeare’s Re-Vision of Lucrece,’’ in Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises, Indiana University Press, 1969, pp. 3–41.

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Boardman, John, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray, eds., The Oxford History of the Roman World, Oxford University Press, 2001. This comprehensive volume provides a variety of essays on the evolution of Roman society.

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Burgess, Ann Wolbert, and Holmstrom, Lynda Lytle, Rape: Victims of Crisis, Robert J. Brady, 1974. Among other aspects of the topic, Burgess and Holmstrom discuss reactions to rape such as the blaming of the self by the victim. Donaldson, Ian, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations, Oxford University Press, 1982. In this scholarly work, Donaldson addresses how historical conceptions of sexual morality

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are reflected in the various re-iterations of the myth in question. Lynd, Helen Merrell, On Shame and the Search for Identity, Harcourt Brace, 1958. In the context of a larger discussion revolving around the notion that certain cultures can be classified as ‘‘shame cultures’’ or ‘‘guilt cultures,’’ Lynd provides various reactions to the cultures reflected in versions of the Lucrece myth.

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Macbeth At about 2100 lines, Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy and among the briefest of his plays. Scholars generally agree that the drama was written around 1606 because various references in the play correspond to events that occurred in that year. Many also believe that it was composed for a performance before King James I, who had a deep interest in witchcraft. Quite possibly the play was one of the court entertainments offered to King Christian IV of Denmark during his visit to London in 1606. In addition, researchers suggest that Shakespeare may have written Macbeth to glorify King James’s ancestry by associating him, through the historical Banquo, to the first Scottish king, Kenneth MacAlpin. The principal historical source for Macbeth is Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and lrelande (1577). However, Shakespeare took great liberties with this source, adapting various historical events to increase the dramatic effect of his tragedy.

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Four hundred years later, students and actors continue to explore and embrace Macbeth for its intriguing portrayal of madness, ambition, and the supernatural. The play has remarkable depth, as it also encourages discussion about gender roles, human motivation, and what makes a good king. For students new to Shakespeare, Macbeth is fairly engrossing, and it is easy to determine early who the protagonists and antagonists are, and what their primary motivations are. Shakespeare displays a sensitive understanding of the human condition by dramatizing not only the way in

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which evil enters Macbeth’s world, but also the devastating effect it has on those who yield to temptation and sin. Shakespeare concludes the tragedy on a hopeful note, however, for as awesome and corruptive as the evil is that pervades Macbeth, it is only temporary. Ultimately, time and order are restored through the actions of the defenders of goodness.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 Macbeth begins in an indistinct ‘‘open place,’’ where three witches are speaking in chants and planning to meet again to speak to Macbeth. The eerie scene is brief, and the witches depart. Scotland is at war, and in the next scene, Scotland’s King Duncan receives news from the battlefield. Duncan has had Scottish rebels to fight, along with an army of Norwegians. Duncan learns that Macdonwald, a traitor, and his army have been defeated, thanks in part to the violent heroics of Banquo and Macbeth. In fact, Macbeth himself killed Macdonwald. Duncan also learns that the Thane of Cawdor, another traitor, has been captured and the Norwegian army has been driven back. Duncan sentences the traitor to death and names Macbeth as the new Thane of Cawdor. In the third scene, Macbeth and Banquo are journeying to the king’s castle when they are surprised by the appearance of three witches. The hags predict that Macbeth, who holds the title of Thane of Glamis, will also become Thane of Cawdor and then King of Scotland. They also predict that, although Banquo will never rule, his descendants will be monarchs. After the witches vanish, Ross and Angus (Scottish noblemen) appear with word from King Duncan. Macbeth learns that Duncan has condemned the Thane of Cawdor for treason and that the king will bestow the title on Macbeth. Macbeth and Banquo arrive at Duncan’s castle, where the king thanks them for their valor. Duncan also announces that his son, Malcolm, will be heir to the throne. Privately, Macbeth notes that Malcolm now stands between him and the fulfillment of his prophecy to become king. Because Duncan is going to have dinner at Macbeth’s castle (Inverness), Macbeth leaves to talk to Lady Macbeth. Having read a letter from her husband about the prophecies, Lady

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Macbeth receives the news of Duncan’s arrival with a sense of opportunity. She determines that Macbeth will seize this chance to kill the king, thus moving him closer to the throne. Seeing her husband as weak, she pushes him to do it. When the king arrives, Lady Macbeth is the picture of hospitality. Meanwhile, Macbeth has talked himself out of murdering the king, realizing that there is no unselfish reason to do so. After all, Duncan is not an evil man or a bad king. Killing him would be purely an act of ambition. Lady Macbeth chides Macbeth and shares her plan with him on how to carry out the murder. Impressed by her guile, Macbeth agrees to go through with it that very night.

Act 2 Banquo and his son, Fleance, are staying at Inverness. Banquo is having difficulty sleeping and is surprised to find Macbeth also awake. Banquo tells Macbeth that his sleep has been restless, and that he has been thinking about the witches’ prophecies. Banquo is anxious to talk to Macbeth about the matter, but they decide to discuss it later. Alone again, Macbeth sees a floating dagger that does not seem to be real. It seems to be pointing the way to Duncan, with the handle pointing toward Macbeth. Despite the eerie talk of the witches and the hallucination, Macbeth shores up his courage to murder Duncan. Once Lady Macbeth indicates that the attendants are asleep (she has made them drunk with wine), Macbeth proceeds to Duncan’s room. Waiting for her husband, Lady Macbeth reflects on what is happening. She amazes even herself, and says that she would have killed Duncan herself if he had not reminded her of her father. Macbeth enters, covered in Duncan’s blood. He becomes so unnerved by the deed, however, that he forgets to leave the daggers in Duncan’s chamber, and Lady Macbeth must finish the task. She returns to the murder scene, smears the attendants with blood and places their knives with them to make it appear that they are guilty. Just then, there is a knock at the door of the castle. The porter is hung over and has fun pretending he is the porter to hell, as he wonders which sinners he will let pass through the door. The visitors are Lennox and Macduff, who are supposed to meet Duncan early. When Macbeth takes him to Duncan, Macduff makes the grisly discovery. In the ensuing chaos, Duncan’s sons,

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Peter Lindford as Macbeth, Gerald Logan as Banquo and the witches in Act I, scene iii, at the Ludlow Festival, 2001 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

Malcolm and Donalbain, arrive. They are given the news of their father, followed by Macbeth’s announcement that he has killed the apparent killers, the attendants. He explains that Duncan’s death caused him to lose his temper, so he flew into a rage and killed the murderous attendants. Lady Macbeth faints, and the others attend to her. Malcolm and Donalbain do not feel safe, and decide it is best if they escape to Ireland and England. Scene 4 takes place outside Inverness where Ross and another man discuss the strange things that have been happening lately. Macduff comes out and tells them that since Malcolm and Donalbain both fled, Macbeth has been crowned King of Scotland. Macduff adds that although the attendants appear to be the guilty parties, there is suspicion that someone may have paid them to kill Duncan. Because Malcolm and Donalbain left so quickly, many think they are involved.

Act 3 Although Macbeth has fulfilled the witches’ prophecy that he will become king, he still feels

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threatened by the prediction that Banquo’s heirs will one day rule Scotland. Banquo sees that the two prophecies given to Macbeth have come true, so he also wonders about the one concerning his lineage. Macbeth enters in king’s robes and invites Banquo to a feast. Macbeth delivers a soliloquy in which he confesses that he fears his friend Banquo. Based on the prophecies, Macbeth’s reign would lead nowhere. Now that he is king, he fears that he will be targeted by Banquo’s family. A servant returns with two men Macbeth has enlisted to kill Banquo. He provokes their sense of manliness by asking if they have what it takes to carry out the murder. When they assure him that they can do it, he adds that they must also kill Banquo’s son, Fleance. Before the feast, Macbeth meets with Lady Macbeth, and they briefly discuss the anxiety about their actions. Although Lady Macbeth intends to calm her husband, she is plagued by many of the same feelings. When Macbeth tells her he has arranged for the murders of Banquo and Fleance, she is surprised.

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The two murderers, joined by a third man, succeed in killing Banquo as he returns to his castle for the feast, but Fleance escapes. At the banquet, Macbeth expresses his regret at the absence of his friend; but as he approaches his seat at the table, he is horrified to find Banquo’s ghost sitting in his chair. Macbeth’s fearful cries startle the other guests, who cannot see the spirit. Lady Macbeth tries to explain away his behavior to the guests by telling them that he has had such visions before, and there is no need for alarm. Once the ghost vanishes, Macbeth recovers until the ghost reappears. Macbeth becomes hysterical, and Lady Macbeth sends the guests away. Once Macbeth calms down, he decides to seek out the witches to receive their assurance about his future as King of Scotland. The paranoia that dominates his thought patterns leads him to believe he will find the comfort he desperately needs by learning more about the prophecies. The witches meet with Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. She is irate that the witches have involved themselves in Macbeth’s life, and tells them that when he comes to talk to them, they are to conjure up apparitions and visions to confuse him further. Elsewhere, Lennox and another lord discuss Banquo’s murder and reveal that, although they suspect the tyrannous Macbeth, others blame Fleance because he fled. Macduff has gone to join Malcolm in England, where they will ask for help from King Edward in overthrowing Macbeth. Having caught wind of these schemes, Macbeth is preparing for a war that many hope he loses.

Act 4 The witches meet with Macbeth and conjure up three apparitions. The first is a severed head that warns him to beware Macduff; the next is a bloody child that assures him that no man born of woman can harm him; and last is a crowned child telling him that he will not be conquered until Birnam Wood comes to his castle at Dunsinane. Macbeth is disturbed, however, when he asks about the prophecy concerning Banquo and is shown an apparition of a succession of eight kings led by Banquo’s ghost—an indication that Banquo’s heirs will indeed rule Scotland. Later, when Macbeth learns that Macduff has fled Scotland to join forces with Malcolm, he sends assassins to murder Lady Macduff and her children. Meanwhile in England, Malcolm tests Macduff’s loyalty by pretending to be a lascivious and immoral man

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incapable of ruling a kingdom. When Macduff expresses his indignation at Malcolm’s supposed exploits, the prince is satisfied that Macduff is truly loyal to Scotland. Fully trusting Macduff, Malcolm invites him to join his army. While talking with Malcolm, Macduff receives word that Macbeth has slaughtered his family and he vows to avenge their deaths.

Act 5 Driven insane by fear and guilt over Duncan’s murder, Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep and tries to rub out imaginary bloodstains on her hands. Outside, several lords talk about the approaching English army led by Malcolm. A Scottish army will meet them at Birnam Wood to join their effort to bring down Macbeth. Meanwhile, Macbeth confidently clings to the witches’ assurances that he is invulnerable as he prepares to engage Malcolm’s army at Dunsinane castle. He receives word that the army is approaching the castle, and he prepares to don his battle armor. When a doctor tells him that Lady Macbeth is suffering greatly from delusions, Macbeth merely tells the doctor to cure her. He experiences increasing fear and nervousness as a result of his past actions, but when he learns that his wife has committed suicide, his reaction is impassive. Macbeth is initially disconcerted when he hears reports that his enemies approach Dunsinane camouflaged by tree branches from Birnam Wood, but reassures himself that no man born of woman can harm him. He feels invincible as he places all of his trust in the apparent message from the witches. Still, he cannot help but recall the strange prophecy about the woods, and he begins to resign himself to what may be his doom. Outside, Malcolm commands his troops to drop their boughs and prepare to fight. Macbeth fights vigorously, certain that no one can kill him. Macduff seeks Macbeth out personally, as Malcolm enters the castle. When Macbeth encounters Macduff on the battlefield, he learns that his opponent was ‘‘untimely ripp’d’’ from his mother’s womb (meaning he was born by Caesarean section). Realizing that his fate is sealed, Macbeth nevertheless battles on until he is killed by Macduff. Upon defeating his enemy, Macduff triumphantly holds Macbeth’s severed head aloft to Malcolm, who is proclaimed King of Scotland.

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS Macbeth has been adapted for numerous film productions all over the world. A 1948 film featuring Orson Welles (who also directed), Jeanette Nolan, Dan O’Herlihy, and Roddy McDowell, was released by Republic and was distributed by Republic Pictures Home Video.  In 1971, Roman Polanski wrote a controversial adaptation, which featured realistic design, graphic violence, and a fatalistic atmosphere. It was produced by Andrew Draunsberg and Hugh Hefner, and was distributed by RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video. 

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Miami Dade Community College produced a 1978 film adaptation narrated by Jose´ Ferrer and distributed by Films, Inc.  Numerous television adaptations of Macbeth have also been produced worldwide. The BBC and Time Life Television produced a television adaptation in 1976; it was distributed by TimeLife Video.  In 1979, Trevor Nunn wrote a television adaptation that starred Ian McKellan and Judi Dench; it was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Thames Television. 



In addition, audio adaptations include releases by Caedmon (1995); Cambridge University Press (unabridged, 1998); Canadian Broadcasting Company (2003); and Audio Partners (unabridged, 2005).

CHARACTERS Banquo Banquo is a nobleman and a general in Duncan’s army. With Macbeth, he encounters the witches, and from their prophecies, he learns that his descendants will be kings. Although Banquo savors the thought of his heirs becoming kings,

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he never considers speeding the process along with evil-doing as Macbeth does; he remains loyal to King Duncan. Banquo believes Macbeth is still his friend, despite knowing what the prophecies say. This trust leaves him vulnerable. Macbeth arranges the murder of Banquo, and his son Fleance, to thwart the witches’ prediction. Banquo’s ghost later haunts Macbeth at a banquet. While much of the action of Macbeth revolves around the protagonist and his wife, Banquo is also an important figure. One critical perspective views Banquo’s function as essentially symbolic: he is portrayed as a man who, like Macbeth, has the capacity for both God’s grace and sin; but unlike Macbeth, he puts little stock in the Weird Sisters’ prophecies and does not succumb to their temptations. Banquo’s reluctance to dwell on the witches’ predictions therefore underscores, by contrast, the nature of Macbeth’s descent into evil. Another critical viewpoint, however, suggests that Banquo is just as guilty as Macbeth of succumbing to the witches’ temptations. By complying with Macbeth’s accession to the throne and not raising suspicions about his role in Duncan’s murder, Banquo reveals a secret hope that the Weird Sisters’ prophecy for him will also come true.

Donalbain Donalbain is Duncan’s son and Malcolm’s brother. After the king’s murder, he flees to Ireland in fear of his life, while his brother flees to England.

Duncan Duncan is the King of Scotland when the play begins. He is depicted as a good and just king with a sense of honor toward his men and his subjects. He seems to be a man of wisdom, grace, and order. But he is perhaps too trusting, as he allows himself to be vulnerable in Macbeth’s home, even though he just endowed Macbeth with the promoted position of thane. Having just been betrayed by the Thane of Cawdor, one might expect him to be more cautious in his assessments of those near him, but he is not. While a guest at Macbeth’s castle, Duncan is murdered by his host. Shakespeare contrasts Duncan and Macbeth. Through his benevolence, graciousness, and almost naive trust, Duncan embodies a sense of harmony which generally inspires loyalty among his followers. These attributes become inverted in Macbeth,

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who introduces tumult and disorder into the kingdom when he murders the king and assumes his place on the throne. The sense of order inherent in Duncan’s reign is thus displaced. His assassination sets into motion a series of evil actions and unnatural disturbances that are not corrected until Malcolm and Macduff restore order at the end of the play.

Fleance Fleance is Banquo’s son. Macbeth attempts to assassinate him along with his father in order to thwart the witches’ prophecy that Banquo’s descendants will become kings. Fleance escapes, however, thus assuring the survival of the family line.

Macbeth At the beginning of the play, Macbeth is the Thane of Glamis and a general in Duncan’s army. He is fierce and heroic on the battlefield, and his valor wins him the admiration and gratitude of his king. The play begins with Macbeth on the battlefield, and it ends with him on the battlefield, although the two situations are markedly different and clearly demonstrate the degree to which Macbeth has fallen. Yet for all his leadership and courage in the face of battle at the beginning of the play, Macbeth is easily manipulated by the witches and Lady Macbeth. Macbeth encounters three witches who predict that he will become King of Scotland; these prophecies begin the process of awakening his personal ambition for power. Influenced by this ambition and Lady Macbeth’s urgings, Macbeth plots to murder Duncan and take the throne. His evil deed introduces corruption and unnatural disturbances into the kingdom. As quickly as he rose to power, he begins to unravel and descend into paranoia and madness. He is the epitome of a tyrannical king, abusing power and wielding it for his own personal agenda without regard for the kingdom. Macbeth is ultimately conquered by Malcolm and Macduff. One of the most significant reasons for the enduring critical interest in Macbeth’s character is that he represents humankind’s universal propensity to temptation and sin. Macbeth’s excessive ambition motivates him to murder Duncan, and once the evil act is accomplished, he sets into motion a series of sinister events that ultimately lead to his downfall. But Macbeth is not merely a cold-blooded, calculating murderer; even before he kills the king, he is greatly troubled by his

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conscience. While plotting Duncan’s murder, his better nature warns him that the act is wrong; he nearly persuades himself to reject the plan, but his wife forces him to reaffirm his determination. The fact that Macbeth possesses a conscience seems to be established from the beginning of the play, and it is this conscience that fuels such anxiety and madness. He finds himself caught in a tug-of-war between his hubris compelling him to push past his conscience and commit violent crimes, and his conscience that punishes him for ignoring it. In addition, Macbeth possesses a powerful imagination—demonstrated by his excessive philosophizing over his condition—that sways his actions. In fact, the hero’s imagination contributes greatly to his decision to murder Duncan: after his first meeting with the Weird Sisters, Macbeth acknowledges that he can wait to see if their prediction of his imminent kingship will come true, but his imagination persuades him to fulfill the prophecy with his own hands. Later, Macbeth’s overworked imagination produces feelings of guilt and betrayal that throw his mind into disorder, gradually eroding his bravery and replacing it with inexplicable fear and paranoia. Several critics remark that although Macbeth fully embraces evil, his philosophizing over the hopelessness of his situation results in some of the greatest poetry ever written on the human condition. Others argue, however, that the hero’s rhetoric becomes less sincere as his actions become more ruthless. Macbeth is the character who reveals the most about himself throughout the play, although the audience likely never develops much sympathy for him. His psychological workings (rise of ambition, hallucinations, belief in prophecy, madness) provide the development necessary for the themes of ambition, evil, and kingship. Through his soliloquies, the audience learns the truth about Macbeth’s thoughts, feelings, and ambitions.

Lady Macbeth Lady Macbeth is Macbeth’s wife. She is cold, scheming, and ruthless. She coerces her husband into murdering Duncan, first chiding Macbeth for his reluctance. Shakespeare shows the audience from the beginning that this is a woman who knows her husband very well; she anticipates his reluctance to kill Duncan, and she plans for how she will pressure him into doing

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it anyway. She challenges his manliness so she can manipulate him, and unfortunately, she is his only advisor throughout the play. It is she who devises the plan to kill Duncan and frame the chamberlains for the regicide, all the while keeping up her appearance as the lady of the castle. After the murder, however, Lady Macbeth is driven insane with guilt and commits suicide. She is ultimately unable to handle the horror she has set into motion. While initially she seemed to know herself, by the end of the play it is clear that she had an exaggerated perception of how much evil her psyche could handle. Her descent into madness ends where it began—with killing. Although it is not explicit, the play strongly suggests that she commits suicide. She wanted nothing more than to be queen, yet the means by which she attained it would not allow her to have any peace or enjoyment of it. Most critics contend that Lady Macbeth’s principal dramatic function in Macbeth is to persuade her husband to commit evil. Some critics further suggest that Lady Macbeth embodies a feminine malevolence in the play that corresponds to a masculine fear of domination by women. This antagonism is particularly evident in the unusual level of control Lady Macbeth exerts over her husband. Further, she serves much the same role as the witches do in manipulating Macbeth to murder Duncan, but her influence is of a more frightening nature. As supernatural beings, the witches represent a remote, abstract evil, and their mode of exploitation exists only on a cosmic level. Lady Macbeth’s coercion of her husband is more terrifying because she brings the full magnitude of the witches’ evil influence to the domestic level by calling on demonic forces to suppress her femininity and give her the power to make Macbeth murder Duncan. This unholy contract does not endure, for, after she actively participates in covering up Duncan’s murder, Lady Macbeth’s feminine nature reasserts itself, and she is driven insane. Many commentators assert that Lady Macbeth’s mental breakdown manifests itself in the sleepwalking episode (act 5, scene 1), in which she is not so much distracted by the guilt over her role in Duncan’s murder as she is by the inability to escape the memory of it.

Macduff Macduff is the Thane of Fife, and one of Duncan’s generals. He is depicted as honorable,

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loyal, and level-headed, even in crisis. Macduff is the one who discovers Duncan’s murdered body. As he sees the destruction wrought by Macbeth and harbors suspicions toward him, Macduff becomes an avenger. He sees not just revenge or power, but peace and order for the Scotland he so loves. He flees to England to join forces with Malcolm, who is seeking military assistance to bring down Macbeth. Upon learning that Macbeth has killed his family, Macduff swears revenge. When Macduff returns to Scotland with Malcolm’s invading army, he meets Macbeth on the battlefield. He kills his enemy after informing him that he was ‘‘untimely ripp’d’’ from his mother’s womb, thus fulfilling the witches’ prophesy that no man born of woman can harm Macbeth.

Lady Macduff Lady Macduff is Macduff’s wife. Macbeth sends assassins to murder Lady Macduff and her family when he learns that her husband has fled to England.

Malcolm Malcolm is Duncan’s son, Donalbain’s brother, and heir to the Scottish throne. He is a loyal, determined, brave, and careful young man. He seems to have a good idea of whom he can trust (as when he goes to King Edward for help), and he knows how to test those he is not sure he can trust (as when he tests Macduff). After his father’s murder, Malcolm flees to England in fear of his life. There, he recruits an army to invade Scotland and conquers Macbeth’s forces at Dunsinane. Malcolm ultimately regains his rightful place on Scotland’s throne. Because he was originally the rightful heir to the throne through his father, he reinforces the theme of divine right of kingship that was so important to King James. Unlike Macbeth, who stole the throne, Malcolm has a right to the throne.

The Witches The Witches, or the Weird Sisters, are three hags who practice black magic under the authority of the goddess of witchcraft, Hecate. They speak in chants and riddles, and they are both mischievous and sinister. While they may seem nonsensical, the text proves that they are cruel and violent. They talk about what they have done prior to their meetings, and their actions include killing a hog and setting about revenge because a woman would not give one of them a chestnut.

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The witches’ prophecies to Macbeth and Banquo suggest that Macbeth will rule Scotland and that Banquo’s descendants will be kings. These prophecies effectively set the action of the play in motion. Later, the witches conjure up three apparitions who warn Macbeth against Macduff, assure him that no man born of woman will harm him, and declare that he will not be conquered until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Readers are never quite sure how much of the prophecies delivered by the witches are merely their relaying information from the future and how much is their direct doing. Regardless, their malevolent intentions are clear in their delight in deception and destruction of Macbeth. In act 1, scene 3, the witches refer to themselves as the ‘‘weird sisters,’’ which is a significant word choice. In Shakespeare’s first folio, he spelled it ‘‘weyward,’’ and most scholars point to the origins of these words as the Old English ‘‘wyrd’’ and the Middle English ‘‘werde.’’ Both words have to do with fate, destined, or becoming. The Norse had the three Norns, goddesses of destiny, and the Greeks had the three Fates (one who spun the thread of a person’s life, one who measured it, and one who cut it.) By aligning the witches with these past mythological women, Shakespeare invokes a powerful and serious role for the witches.

THEMES

Macbeth’s ambition is within him from the beginning, but without the encouragement of the witches and Lady Macbeth, it might have been restrained. But had it not been in him at all, the women would never have been able to awaken such a cruel and violent force. This insight into Macbeth’s character forces the audience to wonder what the outcome would be if their ambitions were fully awakened. What is also interesting about Macbeth’s ambition is that there seems to be no objective beyond sitting on the throne. Macbeth does not have lofty plans of becoming a great king, expanding Scotland’s holdings, or building a thriving economy. His thoughts are only for himself, so once he ascends to the throne, his ambition turns to paranoia and madness in his resolve to keep his place on the throne. Shakespeare demonstrates that ambition does not reside only alongside evil. After all, Banquo is taken with the prophecy that his heirs will sit on the throne one day, even though he never will. Anyone would be proud to hear such a thing, and Banquo is no exception. Unlike Macbeth, however, Banquo’s ambition is perfectly content in the future of his family. He has no aspirations of his own to overthrow Macbeth, even though he sees no way that his own heirs could become royalty. Banquo is also different from Macbeth in that he wants to discuss the prophecies with the man he thinks is still his friend, Macbeth. Just as anyone would talk about important matters like this with confidants, Banquo wants to talk to his friend about it. Macbeth, however, now sees Banquo as a threat that must be eliminated.

Ambition The predominant theme in Macbeth is ambition unchecked by morality. Initially, Lady Macbeth is the character who personifies this theme. It is she who first considers killing Duncan in her own home so that Macbeth might become king, and it is she who pressures her reluctant husband into committing the crime. She has no thought for right and wrong, only a lust for power. As the play progresses, however, Macbeth becomes the one who is unyielding in his determination to protect his claim to the throne. Once he wears the crown, his ambition takes flight. He readily has his friend Banquo killed, and even tries to have Banquo’s son killed to ensure that there is no threat to him from Banquo’s family. Carried to its conclusion in Macbeth, ambition without moral boundaries is utterly destructive.

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Kingship Macbeth explores the theme of kingship—good and bad, legitimate and illegitimate. In Macbeth, the audience sees what happens to a country when it falls under the reign of a self-centered, immoral, and evil king. Not only are the means to his ends evil, he rapidly descends into cruel immorality to the point that he uses monarchical means (his power and his men) to carry out purely personal revenge (the murder of Macduff’s family for no other reason than spite). Where a good king places his personal interests below the good of the kingdom, a bad king makes the kingdom subservient to his own personal whims. In a short period of time, Macbeth’s court becomes afraid for the future of the country, and hopes that Malcolm and

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Sean Bean as Macbeth and Samantha Bond as Lady Macbeth in Act I, scene vii, at the Albery Theatre, London, 2002 (ÓDonald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

England’s army will defeat their king. Macbeth is also an example of a king who appears to have legitimate authority, but the audience knows that the only reason he has been crowned is because he got away with murdering the rightful king. So, Macbeth represents a monarchy of bad kingship and an ultimately illegitimate claim to authority. In contrast to Macbeth are the characters Duncan, Malcolm, and King Edward. Before his death, Duncan appears to have been a noble, kind, and just king. Malcolm is the rightful heir to the throne and is, by all indications, a man who will be a good king to Scotland. He is perceptive, bold, moral, shrewd, militarily gifted, and deeply loyal to Scotland. His only apparent weakness seems to be his youth, but Shakespeare proves to the audience that he is discerning enough to learn from the wisdom of older, honorable men like Macduff. When he is crowned king at the end, the play seems to have achieved a happy ending. Although less obvious, King Edward is also presented as an example of a good king. Not

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only is he characterized as a compassionate man who uses his healing powers to help his people, but he also hears Malcolm and Macduff and agrees to help them oust the unjust King Macbeth. He seems to be free of personal ambition, yet discerning enough to know to whom he can trust his army.

Evil Macbeth is a complex study of evil and its corrupting influence on individuals. Some critics argue that Shakespeare adapted historical accounts of Macbeth to illustrate his larger view of evil’s operation in the world. The particular evil that the protagonist commits has widespread consequences, causing a series of further evils. As a result, the tragedy is not fully resolved through the fallen hero’s death, but through the forces of good that ultimately correct all the evil Macbeth has unleashed. The witches, through their ambiguous prophecies, represent a supernatural power that introduces evil into Macbeth. Their equivocations—the intentional stating of half-truths—conceal the sinister nature of their

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY There is an intriguing bit of theater lore surrounding Macbeth called ‘‘the curse of Macbeth.’’ Do some research on this curse to see what supposedly triggers the curse, and what supposedly happens as a result of the curse. Are there are any countermeasures for the curse? How seriously do actors and producers take this legend, and how do you think it began? Prepare a multimedia presentation explaining the origins and specifics of the curse, and how you explain it. Your presentation should be persuasive in tone.  Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth seem overwhelmed by their guilt. Consider these two characters from a psychological standpoint by first researching the effect of guilt and conscience on the psyche. You may read conflicting reports based on different research or theories, so you will have to determine which you think are the most reliable. Write up a report as if you were the psychotherapist for the Macbeths, and you have been assigned to assess their psychological states. Assuming they are both still alive, what course of action do you recommend for them?  Banquo is based on a historical figure from whom James I descended. See what you can find out about the real Banquo, and write a speech for James I about him. To the best of your ability, write in language of the time.  Macbeth is thematically rich and relevant to today’s world. What theme do you find most closely parallels something you see in the world around you? It might be a person, a cultural tendency, an event, or anything else that appears parallel to you. Using quotes from the play, prepare a five- to ten-minute speech about the relevance of Macbeth to today’s readers. Your speech should be memorized and delivered to your class or another small audience.

years. Find photos from various productions of the play and choose the ones you think are especially evocative of the play. Make copies of the pictures and put them in order as a slideshow or some other visual presentation to show scenes from the play from start to finish. You will not have a picture for every scene, which is fine. If you are able, choose music and set your presentation to a score.





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Because of the popularity of Macbeth among actors and theater-goers, there have been many major productions over the

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Shakespeare penned some of the great soliloquies and speeches of dramatic literature. Among them is the one in act 4, scene 5, beginning, ‘‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.’’ Memorize this speech and practice delivering it in a way that conveys Macbeth’s feelings at this moment in the play. Deliver it to a beginning acting class, explaining why you made some of the choices you made regarding delivery. Does this exercise give you a greater appreciation for Shakespearean actors?



Malcolm goes to England to seek help from the king to overthrow Macbeth. How common a practice was this in Britain’s past? Why would one country help another country become stronger? Read about Britain’s past with special attention to military endeavors. Look for patterns or themes explaining the relations between these countries. Using maps and diagrams, put together a lesson to illuminate this issue for your class. Be sure to leave time for questions.



Although the audience does not have the chance to know Duncan very well before his murder, he is presented as an example of a good king. Drawing from the text of the play and your imagination, write a character sketch of Duncan as we might have known him if given the chance. Write one scene from a play that takes place in his court to show what kind of man and king he was, according to your sketch.

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predictions, and Macbeth does not consider the possibility that they are trying to deceive him. In fact, the witches’ attempts at misinformation succeed not only because they favorably interpret the hero’s future, but also because their revelations seem to come true almost immediately. Although inherently malevolent, the witches’ prophecies do not necessarily signify the actual existence of evil, but suggest instead the potential for evil in the world. The witches themselves do not have the power to enact a diabolic course of events such as those seen in Macbeth; rather, their power lies in tempting humans like Macbeth to sin. When Macbeth succumbs to the temptation to commit murder, he himself is the catalyst that unleashes evil upon the world. The evil that initially manifests itself in Duncan’s murder not only disintegrates Macbeth’s personal world, but also expands until it corrupts all levels of creation, contaminating the family, the state, and the physical universe. For example, Macduff’s family is murdered, Scotland is embroiled in a civil war, and during Duncan’s assassination ‘‘the earth was feverous, and did shake’’ (act 2, scene 3).

Gender Roles Another important issue in Macbeth is Shakespeare’s ambiguous treatment of gender and sex roles. In many instances, the playwright either inverts a character’s conventional gender characteristics or divests the figure of them altogether. For example, Shakespeare makes the witches less human by taking away their femininity. Macbeth and Banquo find them repulsive and comment on their beards. Lady Macbeth is perhaps the most obvious example of this dispossession. In act 1, scene 5, she prepares to confront her husband by resolving to ‘‘unsex’’ herself, to suppress any supposed weakness associated with her feminine nature, so that she can give Macbeth the strength and determination to carry out Duncan’s murder. After the king is killed, however, her feelings of guilt gradually erode her resolve and she goes insane. Macbeth is perhaps the character most affected by the question of gender in the tragedy. From the beginning of the play, he is plagued by feelings of doubt and insecurity which his wife attributes to ‘‘effeminate’’ weakness. Fearing that her husband does not have the resolve to murder Duncan, Lady Macbeth cruelly manipulates his lack of self-confidence by questioning his manhood. Some critics maintain that as a

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result of his wife’s machinations, Macbeth develops a warped perspective of manliness, equating it with the less humanistic attribute of self-seeking aggression. When he talks to Banquo’s hired assassins, he incites their anger by challenging their manliness, just as his wife had done to him. The more Macbeth pursues his ideal understanding of manliness—first by murdering Duncan, then Banquo, and finally Macduff’s family—the less humane he becomes. Commentators who subscribe to this reading of Macbeth’s character argue that the ruthlessness with which he strives to obtain this perverted version of manhood ultimately separates him from the rest of humankind. Through his diminishing humanity, Macbeth essentially forfeits all claims on humanity itself—a degeneration, he ultimately realizes, that renders meaningless his ideal of manliness.

STYLE Symbolism Shakespeare infuses Macbeth with symbolism, giving the play a greater sense of drama and foreboding. The weather in the play symbolizes Macbeth’s—and, later, Scotland’s—condition. Upon the play’s opening, with the witches’ first appearance, and also on the night Macbeth kills Duncan, there are thunderstorms, symbolizing the violence and chaos being stirred up in Scotland. When Duncan is killed, there is even an earthquake, symbolizing Scotland’s throes of grief for its king. Blood is used to symbolize two elements: the ascension to the throne, and also the guilt from which the Macbeths can never escape. Duncan’s blood on Macbeth and Macbeth’s blood on Macduff represent changes in the monarchy; this is a fitting symbol, as kingship is usually based on bloodlines. But the blood Macbeth must clean from his hands, and that which Lady Macbeth seems never able to clean from hers, symbolizes the guilt of their heinous acts. Blood is a stain on their conscience that cannot be removed.

Oxymoron The witches speak extensively in oxymoron. From the very beginning, in the first scene of the play, the audience hears them say, ‘‘When the battle’s lost and won,’’ and ‘‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair.’’ In act 1 scene 3, they say such inscrutable and contradictory things as, ‘‘Lesser

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than Macbeth, and greater,’’ ‘‘Not so happy, yet much happier,’’ and ‘‘Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.’’ The things the witches say, coupled with their incantation-like delivery, create an atmosphere of mystery and eeriness. They seem to speak truth, but they do it in riddles. This makes Macbeth and Banquo believe that what they are saying is extremely important and fateful. Macbeth never seems to consider that at least some of the prophetic statements made were self-fulfilling, and so the witches and their oxymoron become the very voice of fate. The witches are not the only ones to speak in contradictions. The first words out of Macbeth’s mouth in the play are, ‘‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen.’’ This indicates a divided nature and a sense of disorder about him that acts simultaneously as oxymoron and foreshadowing.

Depiction of Time Shakespeare’s depiction of time is another central concern in Macbeth. Macbeth dislocates the passage of time—a process fundamental to humankind’s existence—when he succumbs to evil and murders Duncan. Shakespeare uses this displacement as a key symbol in dramatizing the steady disintegration of the hero’s world. Macbeth’s evil actions initially interrupt the normal flow of time, but order gradually regains its proper shape and overpowers the new king, as demonstrated by his increasing guilt and sleeplessness. Ironically, the witches can be seen as an element that contributes to the restoration of order. Although Macbeth disrupts the natural course of events by acting on the witches’ early prophecies, their later predictions suggest that his power will shortly end. This premonition is apparent in the Birnam wood revelation; while Macbeth believes that the prediction insures his invulnerability, it really implies that his rule will soon expire. Some critics observe that different kinds of time interact in Macbeth. The most apparent form of time can be described as chronological. Chronological time establishes the sense of physical passage in the play, focusing on the succession of events that can be measured by clock and calendar, as well as the movement of the sun, moon, and stars. Another aspect of time, identified as providential, overarches the action of the entire play. Providential time is the divine ordering of events that is initially displaced by Macbeth’s evil

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actions, but which gradually overpowers him and re-establishes harmony in the world. Macbeth conceives of another kind of time that seems to defy cause and effect when he unsuccessfully attempts to reconcile his anticipation of the future with the memory of his ignoble actions. This dilemma initiates a period of inaction in the protagonist’s life that culminates in his resigned acceptance of death as the inexorable passage of time. This confused displacement of time pervades the action of Macbeth until Malcolm and Macduff restore a proper sense of order at the end of the play.

Imagery Various image patterns support the sense of corruption and deterioration that pervades the dramatic action of Macbeth. Perhaps one of the most dominant groups of images is that of babies and breast-feeding. Infants symbolize pity throughout the play, and breast-milk represents humanity, tenderness, sympathy, and natural human feelings, all of which have been debased by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s evil actions. Another set of images focuses on sickness and medicine, all of which occur, significantly, in the last three acts of the play, after Macbeth has ascended the Scottish throne. These patterns are given greater depth through Shakespeare’s graphic depiction of blood in the tragedy. The numerous references to blood not only provide Macbeth’s ruthless actions with a visual dimension, they also underscore Scotland’s degeneration after Macbeth murders Duncan and usurps the crown. Ironically, blood also symbolizes the purifying process by which Malcolm and Macduff—the restorers of goodness—purge the weakened country of Macbeth’s villainy. Other major image patterns include sleep and sleeplessness, order versus disorder, and the contrast between light and darkness.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Reign of King James I England’s James I (also James VI of Scotland) was born in 1566 in Edinburgh. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign in England, she had produced no heir. The ascension of her cousin James (the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots) to the throne brought much-needed dynastic stability to the throne of England. James had been careful in

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his rule of Scotland not to do anything to jeopardize his claim to the English throne. He had an eye toward England, and Elizabeth’s chief minister, Robert Cecil, had corresponded with James for two years before Elizabeth’s death. These letters prepared James for the daunting task of ruling England. Upon first taking the throne in England, James’s insensitivity to English ways made waves with Parliament, and the English people found him a very disappointing successor to Elizabeth. Where she had been a grand people-pleaser, James was frumpy and lacking in social graces or respect for tradition. James found that Elizabeth had left a sizeable debt, but he only grew it over his first five years. Further, many people in England had high hopes that James would be able to solve the long-standing problem of unity with Scotland. But James’s move to London kept him apart from his native Scotland, and the chasm between the two nations remained. Still, James’s reign is remembered as one of peace and security that brought stability to the issue of religion, although political conflicts burdened his rule. Shakespeare’s career was in full force from Elizabeth’s reign when James came to power, and James embraced the playwright as fully as his predecessor had. Not only was Shakespeare a favorite of James, but it was he who gave Shakespeare’s company the title of King’s Men. Macbeth reflects James’s kingship and court in several ways. First, James descended from the historical Banquo, so Shakespeare’s inclusion of Banquo as a sort of father of the English monarchy is a nod to James’s heritage. Second, the apparition Macbeth sees of the procession of kings includes, in the original stage directions, a king holding a mirror. This is interpreted by some scholars to be a way of including England’s current king (James, who did not allow references in plays to living monarchs) at the time in the lineup. Third, the theme of kingship was one of special interest to James, who was working out his version of the theory of the divine right of kings over their people and land. In 1598, he had written a treatise titled Trew Law of Free Monarchies. Fourth, James had a particular interest in the power of witchcraft, an interest shared by many people in his day.

Shakespeare’s English Theater A prolific writer of comedies, tragedies, and histories, Shakespeare is credited with authorship of thirty-seven plays, many of which are frequently

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performed in today’s theater. As a playwright, Shakespeare’s achievement is considered by many to be unparalleled and his era is considered a pivotal time in Western literature. Historians frequently observe that Shakespeare’s arrival on the London theater scene was well-timed. The theater was coming into its own as a serious literary venue, and plays were diverse in subject matter. The theaters in London were also wellattended and patronized. Shakespeare’s unique ability to write about universal human experiences and truths brought depth and accessibility to his dramas as well as his comedies. By also writing histories, he reinforced the popular interest in national, classical, and monarchical history, while paying homage to the monarchs on whose support he depended. Shakespeare wrote during the reigns of Elizabeth and James, and he found different preferences between the two monarchs. Jacobean drama, in particular, tended to feature the royal court and London, although King James forbade overt references to living monarchs. Where Elizabethan drama had encouraged justice-seekers, Jacobean drama was drawn to pathetic, manipulated characters. Also common in Jacobean drama were conniving women, which is certainly a prominent feature in Macbeth. Macbeth also typifies Jacobean drama in its elements of violence, terror, and darkness. Even Jacobean comedy was often satiric and biting. Although Shakespeare may have been less productive under James’s patronage, many scholars believe that his works in these years were more refined and intense.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Not surprisingly, Macbeth has received volumes of critical commentary over the years. Not only is the play an audience favorite, but its complex characterization, deeply woven themes, and characteristic Shakespearean style make it rich ground for scholarly inquiry. Critics such as Harold Bloom have remarked on the importance of Macbeth in the context of Shakespeare’s works. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom writes, ‘‘The rough magic in Macbeth is wholly Shakespeare’s; he indulges his own imagination as never before, seeking to find its moral limits (if any).’’ Bloom also remarks, ‘‘Macbeth is an uncanny unity of

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1000s: Scotland has a monarchy. During the 1000s, three different dynasties ruled Scotland. 1600s: Scotland has a monarchy. During the 1600s, the House of Stuart maintains authority on the throne.

Today: Scotland has its own parliament, established in 1998. This is the first time Scotland has had an independent parliament since 1707, when the Scottish Parliament and the English Parliament united into the British Parliament under the Treaty of the Union.  1000s: Drama in the eleventh century is often religious, and is born out of the tradition of retelling biblical stories in Latin. But a trend toward performing plays outdoors, in native languages, and with secular subjects is growing. Acting troupes rely on trade guilds to sponsor their productions. Mystery plays became popular; in these plays, the biblical account of salvation was presented. Mystery plays focused on Old Testament subjects such as the Fall or the prophets, or on New Testament subjects such as Christ’s birth, or on Christ’s death and resurrection. Together, these were known as cycle dramas. Eventually, these would become secularized to the point that the church raised serious objections. 1600s: London theater is thriving as the English language is considered a major vehicle for literary expression. By combining English interests and culture with conventions of classical drama, the English theater is full of potential. Besides portraying stories about relationships, history, and politics, the London theater has become a vital instrument in the passionate religious debates of the day. Today: Theater must compete with television and film for audience interest. Although many theaters still attract large audiences, the most popular plays tend to be well-known plays or musicals, or those by already-established playwrights. While there is room in the theater

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world for experimental and modern drama, audiences for these types of plays tend to be niche theater-goers. 

1000s: With respect to marriage in common households, keeping up the home is the priority for families. In the early Middle Ages, only the eldest sons marry, so that the others can stay and help the family. Men perform the labor necessary to work a farm or bring in income, while the women perform domestic duties. Men are considered the leaders of the home, and they generally exercise authority over money and other major decisions. 1600s: It is common for families to arrange marriages, and they can be arranged while the bride and groom are young teenagers. The parents make these deals with one another to try to improve the social or financial standing of their families. Gender roles in marriage remain traditional, with the man working to support his family and the woman overseeing domestic responsibilities. Women possess no political power (with the obvious exception of monarchs) and they are not empowered to own land. Submission to their husbands is important for the family to run smoothly and for the family to be respected in society. Today: Not just in England, but throughout the Western world, gender roles in marriage are more fluid than ever. Men and women decide whether they will both work, and if not, which will stay home. Men and women share an abundance of work opportunities, based on their education and experience rather than gender. This gives married couples a greater degree of flexibility than in the past to make decisions about how their work will factor into their marriage. At home, gender roles are no longer assigned or assumed. Either the husband or the wife may perform domestic duties, manage the family finances, or make social plans. The norm is for the couple to make major decisions together in equal partnership.

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setting, plot, and characters, fused together beyond comparison with any other play of Shakespeare’s.’’ Bloom is not alone in his admiration for this enduring play. In his article ‘‘Macbeth: The Pattern of Idea and Action’’ for Shakespeare Quarterly, Irving Ribner states, ‘‘Macbeth is a closely knit, unified construction, every element of which is designed to support an intellectual statement, to which action, character, and poetry all contribute.’’ Critics continue to debate the characterization of Macbeth as a tragic hero. There is no consensus as to whether Macbeth is technically tragic or whether he is to be considered a hero. In drama, a tragedy traditionally recounts the significant events or actions in a protagonist’s life which, taken together, bring about the catastrophe. Classical rules of tragedy also require that the hero’s ruin evokes pity and fear in the audience. Some critics assert that since Macbeth’s actions throughout the play are inherently evil, he gets what he deserves in the end and therefore his downfall is not catastrophic in a tragic sense. Critic Mary McCarthy takes the position that Macbeth is actually an average man who is easily duped by superstition and the will of others. In ‘‘The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays,’’ McCarthy describes Macbeth as gullible because he never question the witches’ predictions. Knowing that they are witches, he still does not consider that they may be trying to confuse and mislead him. She writes, ‘‘Macbeth is not clever; he is taken in by surfaces, by appearance. He cannot think beyond the usual course of things.’’ Although he is bold and takes initiative in battle, at home he is submissive to the will of his wife. This facet of his personality, however, compels other commentators to argue that his feelings of guilt, combined with the coercion of the witches and his wife, generate pity and fear among readers and spectators at his ruin, a feeling identified in classical tragedy as catharsis. In College English, J. Lyndon Shanley contributes an article titled, ‘‘Macbeth: The Tragedy of Evil.’’ In this essay, Shanley writes that Macbeth’s downfall is caused by his decision to sin willingly and knowingly. He adds: Macbeth is terrified by the warnings of his conscience, but he cannot surrender. That he acts with full knowledge of the evil only increases the pity and fear aroused by his deed. For this knowledge causes much of his suffering; it makes his condition far worse than

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it would have been had he acted with less than complete knowledge.

Shanley is not the only critic to find something sympathetic in Macbeth, despite his ruthless and violent ways. In his article ‘‘Macbeth as Tragic Hero,’’ Wayne C. Booth claims that Macbeth’s failing was less about having deplorable character and moral fiber, and more about lack of perception. He maintains that Macbeth does not understand the external forces working so hard to manipulate him (namely, the witches and Lady Macbeth); he does not understand the distinction between killing on a battlefield and killing in civilian life; and ‘‘he does not understand his own character—he does not know what will be the effects of the evil act on his own future happiness.’’ Still, there is a difference between pitying a character and relating to him. Bloom maintains that readers and audience members have difficulty not relating to Macbeth. He answers the question of why this is so by explaining that Macbeth ‘‘so dominates [Shakespeare’s] play that we have nowhere else to turn.’’ As evidence, he notes how, although she is a strong character, Lady Macbeth is onstage very little; and readers do not have the chance to get to know other characters, such as Duncan, Malcolm, Banquo, and Macduff very well. Although the minor characters appear only briefly (usually because they are murdered) and their personas are not fully developed, readers and critics are drawn to them. Duncan, for example, is held up as an example of a good king in contrast to Macbeth’s figure as a bad king. Van Doren remarks, ‘‘Duncan was everything that Macbeth is not. We saw him briefly, but the brilliance of his contrast with the thane he trusted has kept his memory beautiful throughout a play whose every other feature has been hideous.’’ Similarly, Lady Macduff and her son appear fleetingly, but their fate evokes the pity of the audience and rouses more indignation toward Macbeth. A substantial body of criticism addresses Lady Macbeth. Her importance in the play and her position as a dominant woman in Western literature have prompted lengthy discussion and character evaluation. Ribner juxtaposes Lady Macbeth with Banquo in her role in Macbeth’s psychological makeup. He maintains that while Banquo represents the part of Macbeth’s divided nature that would ‘‘accept nature and reject

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evil,’’ Lady Macbeth represents the other side. Numerous critics believe that left to his own devices, Macbeth would not have murdered Duncan and set into motion the tragic events of the play. Shanley explains that Lady Macbeth ‘‘could sway him because she understood him and loved him, and because he loved her and depended on her love and good thoughts of him.’’ While most commentary centers on the sheer strength and determination of Lady Macbeth, there are critics who find her less powerful than she seems, and even less powerful than her husband. Mark van Doren in Shakespeare asserts: When the crisis comes she will break sooner than her husband does, but her brittleness then will mean the same thing that her melodrama means now: she is a slighter person than Macbeth, has a poorer imagination, and holds in her mind less of that power which enables it to stand up under torture.

Aligned with Lady Macbeth are the witches, who are also female figures who seem in control of themselves and of Macbeth. He is easily manipulated by them, intellectually and emotionally. Critics often note that the witches and Lady Macbeth work in tandem (although not intentionally) to undo Macbeth. Commenting on the witches’ influence on Macbeth’s will, Bloom explains, ‘‘Between what Macbeth imagines and what he does, there is only a temporal gap, in which he himself seems devoid of will. The Weird Sisters, Macbeth’s Muses, take the place of that will.’’ In her article ‘‘‘Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth,’’ Janet Adelman describes the dual influence of the witches and Lady Macbeth. She writes, ‘‘Lady Macbeth brings the witches’ power home: they get the cosmic apparatus, she gets the psychic force.’’ The themes in Macbeth, including evil, guilt and conscience, ambition, time, and the supernatural have garnered a great deal of critical attention. In his article for Shakespeare Quarterly, Ribner explores the theme of evil in depth. He boldly writes: Macbeth is in many ways Shakespeare’s maturest and most daring experiment in tragedy, for in this play he set himself to describe the operation of evil in all its manifestations: to define its very nature, to depict its seduction of man, and to show its effect upon all the planes of creation once it has been unleashed by one man’s sinful moral choice.

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Ribner applauds Shakespeare’s use of blood imagery and darkness to reinforce his theme of evil, and he notes that Macbeth carries out evil in every aspect of his life. His personal relationships are destroyed by evil, as is his selfperception. An because he sought only the power of the crown and not the responsibilities, he invited evil into Scotland. Ribner explains, ‘‘On the level of the state Macbeth unleashes the greatest evils of which Shakespeare’s audience could conceive, tyranny, civil war, and an invading foreign army.’’ One of the more subtle themes running through Macbeth is time. The introduction of prophecy and the rush to fulfill it makes time seem to Macbeth and his wife something that can be controlled and manipulated by temporal beings. They see in the present signs of the future, and they look to the past for the same reason. Perhaps because of its subtlety, scholars often find the theme of time extremely pervasive and influential. Bloom comments, ‘‘What notoriously dominates this play, more than any other in Shakespeare, is time, time that is not the Christian mercy of eternity, but devouring time, death nihilistically regarded as finality.’’ Tom F. Driver in The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama states plainly, ‘‘Much as he would like, Macbeth cannot separate the present from the past and the future. By the act of murder he has made his own history, and the rest of the play is the account of the fulfillment of that history, ultimately self-defeating.’’ Few playwrights have demonstrated the kind of enduring popularity as Shakespeare has. As for Macbeth, its relevance is still upheld by scholars, students, professors, readers, and audience members. To some, the play’s relevance is topical. In The Penguin New Writing, contributor Stephen Spender points to Macbeth as an obvious choice when seeking Shakespearean drama relevant to today’s world. He explains, for example, ‘‘It is impossible to read the lines beginning, ‘Our country sinks beneath the yoke; it weeps, it bleeds’ [act 4, scene 3, lines 38–39], without thinking of half a dozen countries under the yoke of a tyrant.’’ Although Spender’s comment was made in 1941, the observation is equally true today. To others, Macbeth endures for its universal appeal to the human spirit, even at its darkest. As Bloom suggests, ‘‘We are to journey inward to Macbeth’s heart of darkness, and there we will find ourselves

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more truly and more strange, murderers in and of the spirit.’’ Ribner suggests a more positive, if surprising, reading of Macbeth when he points out that Macbeth’s ultimate downfall is the result of his own choices. He concludes, ‘‘We may thus, viewing the play in its totality, see good, through divine grace, inevitably emerging from evil and triumphant at the play’s end with a promise of rebirth.’’

A CLEARLY INTELLIGENT AND AMBITIOUS WOMAN, LADY MACBETH’S ROLE IS COMPLETELY DETERMINED BY HER HUSBAND’S. WITHOUT EVEN A NAME OF HER OWN, THE ONLY WAY SHE CAN ACHIEVE POWER IS IF HER HUSBAND FIRST ATTAINS IT.’’

CRITICISM Mary Ives Thompson and Francesco Aristide Ancona Thompson and Ancona analyze how the characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth undergo such dramatic transformations from the beginning of the play to the end. The critics contend that these transformations are rooted in the issue of gender roles, and specifically in the characters’ desire to escape from the rigidly defined roles that society has created for them. In Macbeth, both the title character and Lady Macbeth undergo a role reversal of sorts by the end of the play. In a world where fair is soul and the natural order is completely subverted, Macbeth becomes completely confident in his grab for power, while Lady Macbeth wanders the castle corridors at night bemoaning her unclean hands following the murder of Duncan and his guards. The question, then, is why these two characters change so much in their attitudes in the relatively short space of the drama. What could cause Macbeth, referred to by his own wife as ‘‘too full o’ the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way’’ (1.5.17–18), to become completely remorseless in his bid for the crown, even to the point at which he eliminates not only his competitors for the throne but their progeny as well? And why has Lady Macbeth, who was so bent on ambition and power in the opening acts that she begged whatever spirits might be listening to ‘‘unsex me here / and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / of direst cruelty!’’ (1.5.41–43), become a guilt-ridden somnambulist? Clearly, this role reversal revolves around the question of gender, specifically, the attempt to break out of rigidly defined roles for which persons might be unsuited. Lady Macbeth has several problems, the most notable of which are as follows: She is intelligent, she craves power, she is strong enough to determine what action

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she must take to achieve her goals, and she is willing to turn to unsavory means to achieve her ends. Oh, yes, and she happens to be a female living in medieval Scotland. In short, Lady Macbeth’s dramatic role reversal and subsequent demise at her own hand can be traced back to one source: her own desire for some sort of power and the attempted overthrow or altering of the patriarchal order of her society that dictates a passive role for which she was completely unsuited. Tellingly, Macbeth opens with an initial act and scene populated entirely by female characters, the only Shakespeare play to do so. Immediately, by the very presence of the weird sisters, the audience is given to understand something unnatural is afoot. While clearly women, the witches display androgynous characteristics, leading Macbeth and Banquo to question their gender: ‘‘You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so’’ (1.3.53–47). The difficulty of gender characterization and the attempt on the part of the male characters to neatly file other people into a clear, gender-specific role (the witches should be women) foreshadows Lady Macbeth’s plea two scenes later—she too wishes for sex to be taken away or at least fundamentally changed, so she will not display the weaknesses inherent in all females: compassion and tender-heartedness. The reason for her desire for this change is apparent when the audience beholds her ambition. Macbeth refers to her as his ‘‘dearest partner of greatness’’ (1.5.11), something unheard of in the paternalistic and bloodyminded society in which she lives. How else can Lady Macbeth hope to live up to the faith that Macbeth has placed in her unless she rids herself of her female imperfections of kindness and mercy? In a society that rewards bloody murder if done in the service of

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and then covered with blood and gore. While most characters in the play cling to this warlike and vengeful ideal of the masculine, one character displays what more modern readers might determine to be a ‘‘real man,’’ one who exemplifies the often conflicting characteristics of physical strength and emotional depth. When Macduff discovers his wife and children are slaughtered, he is understandably moved. Malcolm, however, advises him to ‘‘Dispute it like a man’’ (4.3.221), or take up arms against Macbeth and bring him down. In this masculine world, the only acceptable reaction to treachery and murder is vengeance. Macduff acknowledges action is important and that he will soon seek revenge, but emotions also must play a role: I shall do so; But I must also feel it as a man. I cannot but remember such things were, That were most precious to me.

Brid Brennan as Lady Macbeth in Act V, scene I, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1996 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

the state (three scenes earlier, the captain is heard praising Macbeth for dispatching the traitorous Macdonwald when he ‘‘unseamed him from the nave to the chops / And fixed his head upon our battlements’’ (1.2.22–23)), how can a mere woman hope to achieve any power if not through her husband? And if that husband is too plagued by conscience or kindness to commit murder without cause, how can Lady Macbeth not pray to have her feminity revoked, so she may be the one to do the deed herself? The only way for a man to be successful in Macbeth’s world is to take arms and end the life of another. Macbeth’s early success against the traitorous Macdonwald paves the way for other bloody acts that will allow him to gain greater glory and fame. At first unsure of his course toward what he views as greatness, he progresses nevertheless toward his destiny. The speech in which he speaks of his hallucination of the bloody dagger indicates the only tools of his creativity: an unsheathed weapon, first clean

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This brief interlude into acknowledgment and even valuing of emotion is short lived, for in the next few lines Macduff ‘‘pulls himself together’’ and steels himself for what he must do as a man: Oh, I could play the woman with mine eyes And braggart with my tongue! But, gentle heavens, Cut short this intermission. Front to front Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself; Within my sword’s length set him. The only male character willing to recognize his ‘‘feminine side’’ is quickly pulled back into the world of brutality and vengeance, and it is in this world and against this backdrop of violent tendencies that Lady Macbeth exists. A clearly intelligent and ambitious woman, Lady Macbeth’s role is completely determined by her husband’s. Without even a name of her own, the only way she can achieve power is if her husband first attains it. Only with Macbeth as king can Lady Macbeth be queen. How frustrating it must be for such a strong woman to be forced to rely on such a weak vessel! Following the lead of all the successful males of whom she knows, Lady Macbeth plans a quick succession to the throne for her husband and taunts him into participation with what she views as his own weakness and lightness of affection towards her. When Macbeth’s conscience torments him to the

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point at which he decides he cannot go through with the planned murder, she responds: . . . Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself?. Hath it slept since? And wakes it now, to look so green and pale At what it did so freely? From this time Such I account thy love. (1.7.36–40) This response to her husband’s qualms makes her seem cruel and manipulative, a shrew who must use her sexuality to twist her husband’s love to her own selfish ends, and to a certain extent this is true. On the other hand, what other options were available to her? If she wanted power for her husband (and, by extension, for herself) she must force Macbeth back on the bloody path to regicide. And when Macbeth responds he cannot kill Duncan because, ‘‘I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none,’’ (1.7.46–48) Lady Macbeth rightly points out what manly behavior means in her experience: . . . What beast was’t, then, That made you break this enterprise to me? When you durst do it, then you were a man; And, to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man. The idea for the murder was her husband’s—Lady Macbeth has simply determined a practical course of action to help fulfill the weird sisters’ prophecy and now that the time for completion is nearing, Macbeth is having pangs of conscience that are disrupting the scheme. How intolerably infuriating this must be to the ‘‘dearest partner of greatness,’’ to see everything she had been allowed to hope for slipping away through the perceived weakness of one man! In one sense, Lady Macbeth fulfills her role as helpmate of her husband, although in an admittedly gruesome fashion. She attends her husband at the murder, eggs him on, and completes the task of incriminating the grooms by smearing them with blood, all of which is completely outside the guidelines of acceptable female behavior but is done to assist her husband. Had she been a stereotypical Scottish wife of the period, she would have known nothing of her husband’s business dealings and would have been content to wait for Macbeth to bring home guests for her to entertain. Instead, when

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Duncan is admitted to her home, she plans and participates in the murder, and she shows much self-awareness of prospective guild as she does so, informing Macbeth, ‘‘These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so, it will make us mad’’ (2.2.37–38). The realization of wrongdoing is upon her; nevertheless, she knows that her own mind might turn on her if she dwells too heavily on what she has done. Macbeth’s mind already displays some misgivings, but as the play progresses, he will follow the second counsel of the witches and rush headlong toward his doom in the surety of his invincibility. The strong female in this case is the one whose mental capacities will degrade as the drama moves to its end, since the idea of a thinking woman in a position of power was still viewed as unnatural and could not be allowed. It would not be possible to have Macbeth killed and Lady Macbeth left alive—what would the male-governed society do with her? Would Malcolm or any of the others hold her guilty for her actions? Could they even conceive of the idea of a woman so filled with cunning and treachery? After all, Macduff speaks of Malcolm’s mother in 4.3 as an ideal woman who was ‘‘Oft’ner upon her knees than on her feet.’’ (111) In this society, all women are fit to do is watch, wait, and pray. Would Malcolm have been able to execute a woman, even one he knows to be a ‘‘fiendlike queen’’? No, leaving Lady Macbeth alive and having the question of punishment appropriate for a female would have been a loose end in an otherwise tight drama, and so Lady Macbeth must punish and quietly remove herself from the reach of male justice by taking her own life. She operates completely in her own sphere, untouched by interaction with any character other than her husband. Even in her dealings with him, Lady Macbeth is the stronger of the two, taking the lead and pushing for her goals. Only in her sleep does her femininity of her conscience have free reign, and even then the physician recognizes she is the only one who can minister to herself. Throughout the drama, no man can truly assist Lady Macbeth. Perhaps this isolation occurs because, through much of the play, Lady Macbeth is viewed as an outsider even by herself. The laws of nature do not apply to her in the same way they do to everyone else in the play. When the grooms are lulled to sleep by alcohol, Lady M notes, ‘‘That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold; / What hath quenched them that

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given me fire’’ (2.2.1–2). Even strong drink acts differently in her system, making her appear an aberration indeed. When Macbeth realizes the extent of his villainy immediately after Duncan’s murder and begins to fear he hears knocking, Lady Macbeth responds to his qualms: My hands are of your color, but I shame To wear a heart so white. (Knock.) I hear a knocking At the south entry. Retire we to our chamber. A little water clears us of this deed. How easy is it, then! Your constancy Hath left you unattended. Lady Macbeth hears the same sounds as Macbeth, but they raise no feelings of guilt or panic; rather, they bring out her practical nature, and she supports her husband as he falters in his purpose. She will continue fulfilling at lease one role of the attentive wife and will be at Macbeth’s side to assist him when his hallucinations worsen, and he sees the ghost of Banquo. It is Lady Macbeth who again subverts the natural order by allowing all the guests to leave the chamber quickly and without regard for rank as she directs them to, ‘‘Stand not upon the order of your going, / But go at once.’’’ (3.4.120–121) Attempting to function in male society while still outwardly appearing to be a dutiful wife, she throws aside the masculine rules of order, perhaps out of ignorance or perhaps out of desperation. None of this is meant to excuse the reprehensible actions of either character, however. It is merely an explanation of why one woman could act with such a stony heard and dauntless purpose to kill an old man of whom she was admittedly fond. (Indeed, the only reason Lady Macbeth cannot bring herself to kill Duncan when Macbeth falters is Duncan’s passing resemblance to her own father. The primitive ban against patricide still exists in her psyche, even if regicide is an acceptable course of action in her desperation and ambition.) Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are acting in unnatural ways, or at least in ways in which a perversion of the ‘‘might makes right’’ principle is in play. They have departed from violence in service of the State and moved to violence for personal gain, something which the playwright has a duty to condemn. The messages of the drama resonates: Unnatural behavior on the part of both sexes can only lead to calamity as Nature itself rebels and rises up to restore accepted order. In this,

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one of the only Shakespeare plays in which the protagonist can be classified as evil rather than simply flawed, Shakespeare seems to be indicating that a woman as unnatural as Lady Macbeth cannot be allowed to live or flourish. The only acceptable outcome for this rebel against her sex is for her to take her own life. Lady Macbeth is not the first unruly woman in the drama to be constrained or returned to her acceptable role. We see the three witches have overstepped their bounds when Hecate appears in 3.5 and chides them for their support of Macbeth, ‘‘ . . . a wayward son, / Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do, / Loves for his own ends, not for you’’ (11–13). Even the witches have an established hierarchy, and their prophecies can only be used for the benefit of an acceptable subject. Macbeth is not a good choice for the hearing of the prophecy, and the three sisters must now restore the balance they had disturbed. Their last prophecy to Macbeth, of course, leads him to the false sense of security when he believes he can never be harmed. When he listens to and heeds this prophecy, he and Lady Macbeth begin to switch roles in the drama. He becomes completely blind to any danger to himself, and Lady Macbeth changes from a murderer who philosophically states, ‘‘Things without all remedy / Should be without regard. What’s done is done’’ (3.2.13–14) to a disturbed sleepwalker who paces futilely every night in search of enough water to cleanse her of her sins. Macbeth is stepping up to the role he wanted but was afraid to kill for, and Lady Macbeth’s strength is no longer needed. A displaced person, she has no further role in the support of her husband and will revert to the more traditional feminine role. As he becomes stronger, she weakens, for two such blindly driven characters are not needed to rule. Finally, with her suicide, she removes herself from the stage completely, leaving her husband not to mourn her passing but to simply comment, ‘‘She should have died hereafter.’’ Lady M’s downfall comes more quickly than Macbeth’s, for she has rebelled more against her femininity than he has against his masculinity. Macbeth has taken society’s approval of state-sanctioned murder too far, to the extent of killing and supplanting the head of state, but his behavior is an extension of appropriate masculine action for his military-minded world. Lady Macbeth, however, has stepped

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? Clarence Valentine Boyer’s chapter on Macbeth in The Villain as Tragic Hero in Elizabethan Tragedy (1914; reprint, 1964) presents a detailed examination of Macbeth’s character, tracing the development of his thought throughout the play’s action.  Edited by John Russell Brown, 1982’s Focus on ‘‘Macbeth’’ contains eleven essays on the play by prominent critics. The subjects of these essays range from thematic concerns and language to theatrical considerations of the play.  Herbert R. Coursen provides a reliable and informative guide to Macbeth in Macbeth: A Guide to the Play (1997). Chapters cover the background of the play, general thematic considerations, and comments on various productions.

apparent in its language and imagery. Foakes argues that the drama’s simplicity of action and character belies the fact that Shakespeare was attempting to develop a new kind of tragedy distinct from Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello.





In a chapter about Macbeth in Arnold Kettle’s 1964 work, Shakespeare in a Changing World, J. K Walton analyzes Macbeth’s individualism and associates it with the play’s imagery of isolation and sterility. Walton also notes that opposed to this individualism is a combination of forces that challenge Macbeth; he states that the play’s optimism is partly suggested by ‘‘the fact that a unified people overcome the tyrant.’’



L. C. Knights provides a general overview of Macbeth’s major themes and images in Some Shakespearean Themes (1959), noting that ‘‘the essential structure of Macbeth . . . is to be sought in the poetry.’’



Editor Edwin Quinn analyzes the world of Macbeth in 1978’s How to Read Shakespearean Tragedy. He divides Shakespeare’s world into four parts: the physical, the psychological, the political, and the moral. Leary considers each of these aspects separately, but maintains that they are ‘‘all parts of a unified whole.’’



In Stratford Papers on Shakespeare (1963), editor B. W. Jackson demonstrates the overall intensity of Macbeth, which is chiefly

In an article for Shakespeare Quarterly, (October 1953) titled ‘‘The Unity of Macbeth,’’ Brent Stirling proposes that the poetic and dramatic structures of Macbeth are unified in four traditionally Elizabethan themes: darkness, sleep, raptness, and contradiction.

completely outside the bounds of femininity and must be punished, even if it is by her own hand. More self-aware than Macbeth to the end, she does not wait for anyone else to end her unnatural existence—she does it willingly to herself,

quietly and offstage. Macbeth, on the other hand, determines not to surrender and not to fall upon his sword, for at the end his overconfidence blinds him to any possible danger, and he only completely understands his own doom







In James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (1990), Jonathan Goldberg provides important historical and cultural information about the context in which Shakespeare and his peers (and rivals) penned classic and enduring works of literature. Anthony Holden’s 2002 book, William Shakespeare: An Illustrated Biography, offers readers an honest attempt to present the facts of Shakespeare’s life, separate from the legends that surround the playwright. The book is brought to life by the inclusion of illustrations and ephemera related to the Bard’s life.

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when nature itself, in the form of a mobile Birnam Wood, and another man outside of nature yet willing to restore order, Macduff, takes his life away from him. Of final interest in this commentary on gender psyche in the drama, one last area of symbolism exists and is particularly important in the context of Lady Macbeth’s suicide. If nature is personified as a female presence, it is interesting to note the male use of the feminine boughs of the Wood as a shield until subterfuge is no longer needed, at which time nature is cast away and steel swords again become the most important implements. Likewise, Macduff was once sheltered by a woman who was later discarded as unnecessary in the birth process—after all, ‘‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.’’ (5.8.16) Even the witches who opened the play are displaced, and it is a male figure who will offer the final words to sum up the moral and message of the work. The drama ends with the natural (and, what else? patriarchal) order of society and rank being restored, as is evidenced by Malcolm’s final statement, ‘‘ . . . what needful else / we will perform in measure, time, and place’’ (5.8.73–73). However, try as Malcolm might, the audience knows that his reign will end with or shortly after his own death, for according to the prophecy it is the murdered Banquo whose children will gain the throne. If the weird sisters’ prophecy is correct, how long can it be until nature is again in upheaval? While Shakespeare himself must stress the return of the genders to their rightful places, it seems only a matter of time until the feminine intrudes once again in this masculine world, no matter how carefully kings attempt to structure their legacy.

THE MURDER OF A SLEEPING GUEST, THE MURDER OF A SLEEPING KING, THE MURDER OF A SAINTLY OLD MAN, THE MURDER, AS IT WERE, OF SLEEP ITSELF, CARRIES WITH IT THE APPROPRIATE RETRIBUTION OF INSOMNIA.’’

Images of sickness, the critic contends, signify the ‘‘disease of tyranny’’ which has infected Scotland, and which can only be cured by ‘‘bleeding or purgation.’’ Muir also observes a contrast between the powers of light and darkness in Macbeth. Darkness pervades all the action in Macbeth’s world, whereas light manifest itself in the scenes in England and those in which Malcolm and Macduff restore order at the end of the play. Other dualities related to the light/dark motif include contrasts between angel and devil, heaven and hell, and truth and falsehood.

Source: Mary Ives Thompson and Francesco Aristide Ancona, ‘‘He Says/She Says: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (a Gender/Personality Study),’’ in Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 3–4, October 2005, pp. 59–69.

Kenneth Muir Muir analyzes various image patterns in Macbeth. The first pattern the critic examines is that of babies and breast-feeding. According to Muir, infants symbolize pity throughout the play, and breast-milk represents ‘‘humanity, tenderness, sympathy, natural human feelings, [and] the sense of kinship, all of which have been outraged by the murderers.’’ Another group of images focuses on sickness and medicine, all of which occur, significantly, in the last three acts of the play, after Macbeth has ascended the throne.

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Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, and Banquo’s Ghost, Act III, scene iv

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Source: Kenneth Muir, ‘‘Image and Symbol in Macbeth,’’ in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakesperian Study and Production, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 19, 1966, pp. 45–54.

J. Lyndon Shanley Shanley considers the tragic context of Macbeth’s evil actions in an attempt to determine whether or not his downfall warrants sympathy or arouses

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fear at the end of the play. The critic maintains that Macbeth has a fundamentally different experience from Shakespeare’s other great tragic heroes: he does not achieve a great recovery in the end because his actions throughout the play were ignoble. Shanley suggests, however, that Macbeth’s end is perhaps more tragic than that of the other heroes because he ultimately loses himself to a degree that none of them does. According to the critic, our pity for Macbeth might therefore lie in the fact that by declaring that life signifies nothing, he acknowledges ‘‘the almost complete destruction of the human spirit.’’ Shanley also observes that our ability to pass judgment on the hero’s ruin is further complicated by several factors. Nowhere can we see the essential humanity of Shakespeare more clearly than in Macbeth, as he shows that the darkest evil may well be human, and so, though horrible, understandable in terms of our own lives and therefore pitiable and terrible. Yet nowhere apparently are we so likely to miss the center of Shakespeare’s view of the action; for Macbeth, while less complex than Shakespeare’s other major tragedies, frequently raises the crucial question: Is Macbeth’s fall really tragic? Many who are deeply moved by the action of the play cannot satisfactorily explain their feelings. The doctrine of Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner [if all is understood then all is pardoned] leads them to think (most of the time) that there is no guilt, that there should be no punishment. When faced with unpardonable evil and inescapable punishment for the guilty, and when moved at the same time to pity and fear by the suffering of the evil-doer, they are confused. Since they confound the understanding of an act with the excusing of it, they are prevented from understanding acts (and their reactions to them) for which excuse is impossible. Some, of course, find an excuse for Macbeth in the witches. But those who do not see him as the victim of agents of destiny appear to wonder if they have not been tricked into sympathy by Shakespeare’s art. How, they ask, in view of Macbeth’s monstrous career and sorry end, so different from those of Hamlet, Lear, or Othello, how can his fortunes win our pity and arouse our fear? Macbeth is defeated as is no other of Shakespeare’s great tragic figures. No pity and reverent awe attend his death. Dying off-stage, he

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MACBETH IS DEFEATED AS IS NO OTHER OF SHAKESPEARE’S GREAT TRAGIC FIGURES. NO PITY AND REVERENT AWE ATTEND HIS DEATH. DYING OFF-STAGE, HE IS, AS IT WERE, SHUFFLED OFF, IN KEEPING WITH HIS DREADFUL STATE AND THE DESIRE OF ALL IN HIS WORLD TO BE RID OF HIM.’’

is, as it were, shuffled off, in keeping with his dreadful state and the desire of all in his world to be rid of him. The sight of his ‘‘cursed head’’ is the signal for glad hailing of Malcolm as king; all thought of him is dismissed with ‘‘this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen’’ [V. ix. 35]. The phrase is dramatically fitting, but it does not express the whole truth that Shakespeare shows us of Macbeth’s story. Seldom do we feel so strongly both the justice of the judgment and the retribution and at the same time pity for him on whom they fall; for behind this last scene lies the revelation of Macbeth’s almost total destruction. Hamlet, Lear, and Othello lose much that is wonderful in human life; their fortunes are sad and terrible. So near, their stories seem to say, is man’s enjoyment of the world’s best gifts—and yet so far, because his own errors and weakness leave him unable to control his world. To lose Hamlet’s delight in man and his powers, and the glory of life; to have Cordelia’s love and tender care snatched away, after such suffering as Lear’s; or to have thrown away the jewel of one’s life as did Othello—this is painful. But their fortunes might have been worse. At one time they were: when the losers thought that what they had served and believed in were mere shows that made a mockery of their noblest love; when life and all their efforts seemed to have been utterly without meaning. But before the end they learned that their love had value and that life had meaning. On this knowledge depends the twofold effect of the heroes’ deaths: death at once seals, without hope of restitution, the loss of the world and its gifts, but at the same time it brings relief from the pain of loss. Furthermore, this knowledge restores the courage and nobility of soul that

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Macbeth with the witches and apparitions, Act IV, scene I, at the Young Vic Theatre, London 1975 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

raise them far above their enemies and the ruins of their world. Without this knowledge, Hamlet and Lear and Othello were far less than themselves, and life but a fevered madness. With it, there is tragedy but not defeat, for the value of what is best in them is confirmed beyond question. But in the end of Macbeth we have something fundamentally different. Macbeth’s spirit, as well as his world, is all but destroyed; no great recovery is possible for him. He does not, for he cannot, see that what he sought and valued most was good and worthy of his efforts. He is aware that he has missed much; shortly before Lady Macbeth dies, he broods over the ‘‘honour, love, obedience, troops of friends’’ [V. iii. 25] he has lost and cannot hope to regain. But this knowledge wins no ease for his heart. It does not raise him above the conditions that have ruined him. Macbeth, it is true, is no longer tortured as he once was, but freedom from torture has led only to the peace of despair in which he looks at life and denounces it as ‘‘a tale told by an idiot’’ [V. v. 26–7].

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Bitter as life was for Hamlet, Lear, and Othello, it was not empty. But all Macbeth’s efforts, all his hopes and dreams were in vain, because of the way he went; and when he discovers that they were, he concludes that nothing can be realized in life. Hence his terrible indictment of life—terrible because it reveals him to be all but hopelessly lost in the world of Shakesperean tragedy, as he desperately and ironically blasphemes against a basic tenet of that world, to the truth of which his own state bears overwhelming evidence: that man’s life signifies everything. It is the despair and irony in this blasphemy that makes Macbeth’s lot so awful and pitiful. We see the paralyzing, the almost complete destruction of a human spirit. The threat of hostile action galvanizes Macbeth into action to protect himself, but the action is little more than an instinctive move toward self-preservation and the last gesture of despair. He has not even the bitter satisfaction of rebelling and saying, ‘‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods’’ [King Lear, IV. i. 36]. Only

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sheer animal courage remains to flash out and remind us of a Macbeth once courageous in an honorable cause. This reminder is pitiful, for Macbeth has not even the slim hope of a trapped animal which, if it fights loose, has something to escape to. All Macbeth did resulted in nothing; whatever he does now will result in nothing but the anguish of meaningless action. It is hard enough to realize that one has been on the wrong track for part of life; to be convinced that there is no right track to get on because there is no place for any track to go—this is to be lost with no hope at all. At the very end we see some saving touches of humanity in Macbeth: he has not lost all human virtue; he would have no more of Macduff’s blood on his soul; and even with the collapse of his last security, his bravery does not falter. These touches show him a man still, and not a fiend, but they by no means reestablish him in his former self. There is no greatness in death for him. Rather than the human spirit’s capacity for greatness in adversity, we see its possible ruin in evil. Because we never see Macbeth enjoying the possession of the great prize he sought, and because from the beginning of his temptation we have no hope that he will be able to enjoy it, his loss of the world’s gifts is not so poignant as that of Hamlet, Lear, or Othello. But to a degree that none of them does, Macbeth loses himself, and this is most tragic of all.

Shakespeare presents Macbeth as one who had hardly any chance to escape guilt. The concatenation of circumstances which make Macbeth’s temptation is such as to seem a trap. At the very moment when he is returning victorious from a battle in which he has played a chief part in saving his country from disaster, there comes to him a suggestion—touching old dreams and desires—that he may be king. Shakespeare uses the witches to convey the danger of the suggestion. The witches and their prophecies are poetic symbols of the bafflingly indeterminate character of the events that surround men. The witches force nothing; they advise nothing; they simply present facts. But they confound fair and foul; just so, events may be good or ill. The witches will not stay to explain their greetings any more than events will interpret themselves. The witches’ prophecies and the events that forever surround men are dangerous because they may appear simple and are not, because they may be so alluring as to stultify prudence, and because their true significance may be very hard to come at. Depending on conditions, they may be harmless, or they may be delusive, insidious, and all but impossible to read correctly.

It may be objected, however, that Macbeth alone of Shakespeare’s great tragic figures is fully aware of the evil of the act by which he sets in motion the train of events leading to his ruin. His culpability seriously weakens the sympathy of many. In the face of this difficulty, some interpreters justify sympathy for Macbeth by seeing him as the victim of the witches, the agents of destiny. This point of view, however, seems to cut through the complex knot of human life as Shakespeare saw it, instead of following the various strands which make it up. We cannot dodge Macbeth’s responsibility and guilt—he never does.

Macbeth is in no condition to read them aright. He had restrained his desire for greatness in the past since he would not do the wrong which was needed to win greatness. The hunger of his ambitious mind had not died, however; it had only been denied satisfaction. Now, when the sense of his own power and his taste of it are high indeed, the old hunger is more than reawakened; it is nourished with hope, as immediate events seem to establish the soundness of the suggestion. Enough hope to lead him to ponder the suggestion seriously, and then, in spite of an attempt to put it out of his mind since he recognizes the evil of his thoughts, to retail the wonderful news of possible greatness to his wife.

His ruin is caused by the fact that he sins: he wilfully commits an act which he knows to be wrong. This ruin and sin are seen to be tragic, as Shakespeare, like Dante, reveals the pity and fear in a man’s succumbing to grievous temptation, and in the effects of sin on his subsequent thoughts and deeds. Macbeth’s guilt and the circumstances upon which it depends do not decrease our pity and fear; they produce it; for

There follow immediately two events which press the matter on most hastily. The king proclaims his eldest son as his heir, and in the next breath announces his visit to Macbeth’s castle. Thus, while desire and hope are fresh, Macbeth sees put before him, first, an obstacle which time will only make greater, and then an opportunity for him to prevent time from working against him. ‘‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere

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well it were done quickly’’ [I. vii. 1–2]. In fact, it must be done quickly if it is to be done at all. Desire, apparent promise of fulfillment, need for speedy action, and immediate opportunity fall together so rapidly as to create an all but inescapable force. Yet Macbeth would have resisted temptation had he been left to himself. Great though his hunger for power and glory, especially when whetted by such circumstances, it would not have completely overcome his fears and scruples. Even if he were to jump the life to come, he knew that if he could and would kill Duncan, another might well do the same for him. On a higher plane, the double loyalty he owed to the king held him back. Finally, a point that reveals the virtue that was in him, he felt the goodness of Duncan so strongly that killing him seemed too terrible a thing to do. Worldly prudence, loyalty, reverence for what is good—these turned Macbeth back. Lady Macbeth’s fears were well founded; his nature was not such as to let him ‘‘catch the nearest way.’’ But that nature could, as she felt, be worked. It was good, but not firm in its goodness. Macbeth is a moderately good man, no better, but also no worse, than the next one. The point is (and it is a grim one) that the virtue of the ordinarily good man is not enough to keep him from disaster under all possible circumstances— especially when some of them are such as may be for good or evil. This was the nature of Lady Macbeth’s influence on Macbeth. She could sway him because she understood him and loved him, and because he loved her and depended on her love and good thoughts of him. She could and would have urged him to noble deeds had occasion arisen. To prevent her from urging him on to evil ones, he needed more than the ordinary firmness to act as he saw right. But to cut clear of such a source of strength and comfort is difficult; too difficult for Macbeth. It is the old story of the perversion of the potentially good, and of the problem of getting only the good from the baffling mixture of good and evil in all things. Just after Macbeth has decided to give up his murderous plot, but before intention can harden to resolve, Lady Macbeth adds the force of her appeals to that of Macbeth’s desires and the press of circumstances. She sees his chance to win the prize of life; she knows he wants it, as she does not know in their full strength his

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reasons for renouncing it. She beats down, at least long enough for her immediate purpose, the fears and scruples which would otherwise have kept him from the crown, and murder and ruin. She does not answer Macbeth’s scruples; her attack is personal. Whether she knows or simply feels his need of her admiration and support, she strikes at the right point. The spur of ambition did not drive Macbeth too hard toward his great opportunity, but her goading taunts he could not withstand, though they drove him on to horrors. All this does not excuse Macbeth; no excuse is possible for one who, with full knowledge of the nature of the act, murders a good man to whom he owes hospitality, loyalty, and gratitude. Shakespeare makes us realize, however, how dangerous the battle, how practically irresistible may be the forces arrayed against a man. Some men are saved from evil because they marry a Cordelia or a Viola [in Twelfth Night]; others because opportunity never favors their desires; and still others because the stakes do not justify the risk of being caught in evil doing. For Macbeth, the stakes are the highest, the opportunity golden, and the encouragement to evil from a wife whom he loves and needs. Macbeth is terrified by the warnings of his conscience, but he cannot surrender. That he acts with full knowledge of the evil only increases the pity and fear aroused by his deed. For this knowlege causes much of his suffering; it makes his condition far worse than it would have been had he acted with less than complete knowledge; and, finally, it emphasizes the power of the trickery, the lure, and the urging to which he was subjected. We pity his suffering even as he does evil because we understand why he could not hold on to the chance which he ought to have taken to save himself; and we are moved to fear when we see his suffering and understand how slight may be the chance to escape it. Once that chance is lost greater suffering and evil follow inescapably. The bloody career on which Macbeth now embarks can no more be excused than could his first crime, but it increases rather than detracts from our pity and fear. The trap of temptation having been sprung, there is no escape for Macbeth, and his struggles to escape the consequences of his sin serve only to ensnare him more deeply. As we witness that struggle, our pity and fear increase because we

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feel how incompetent he is to do anything but struggle as he does. Evil brings its own suffering with it, but Macbeth cannot learn from it. The unknown fifteenth-century author of The Book of the Poor in Spirit wrote of evil and suffering: ‘‘One’s own proper suffering comes from one’s own sins and he suffers quite rightly who lives in sins, and each sin fosters a special spiritual suffering . . . This kind of suffering is similar to the suffering in hell, for the more one suffers there the worse one becomes. This happens to sinners; the more they suffer through sin the more wicked they become and they fall more and more into sufferings in their effort to escape.’’ Just so did Shakespeare conceive of Macbeth’s state. Macbeth has no enemy he can see, such as Iago or one of Lear’s savage daughters; he is within himself. In first overriding the warnings of his conscience, he brings on the blindness which makes it impossible for him to perceive his own state and things outside him as they really are, and which therefore sends him in pursuit of a wholly illusory safety. When he puts away all thought of going back on his first evil deed, he deals the last blow to his conscience which once urged him to the right, and he blinds himself entirely. No sooner does he gain what he wanted than he is beset by fears worse than those he overrode in murdering Duncan. But having overridden the proper fears, he cannot deal rightly with the new ones. His horror of murder is lost in the fear of discovery and revenge, and the fear of losing what he has sacrificed so much to gain. Briefly at least he wishes the murder undone and Duncan waking to the knocking at the gate. But just as earlier he thought, but failed, to put the witches’ prophecies and his evil thoughts out of mind, so now his better thoughts die. By the time he appears in answer to the knocking at the gate, he is firmly set on a course to make good the murder of Duncan and to keep himself safe.

I had liv’d a blessed time; for from this instant There’s nothing serious in mortality; All is but toys; renown and grace is dead; The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of. [II. iii. 91–6] Irony could not be sharper. At the very moment when he seems to himself to be complete master of the situation, Macbeth, all unknowingly, utters the bitter truth about his state. He is still to be troubled by thoughts of evil, but the drive of his desire for peace from fear is greater; and to win security he is hurrying on the way in which he thinks it lies, but it is the way to the utter, empty loneliness he describes for us here. Macbeth finds that the death of the grooms was not enough; Banquo and Fleance must go if he is to be free from torment. Through Macbeth’s conversation first with Banquo about his journey, then with the murderers, and finally with Lady Macbeth, we comprehend to its full extent the disastrous change in him; he now contemplates murder with hope rather than horror. He still sees it as something to be hidden: ‘‘Come, seeling night, scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day’’ [III. ii. 46–7]. But he is willing to do more evil since he believes it will insure his safety: ‘‘Things bad begun make good themselves by ill’’ [III. ii. 55]. With the appearance of Banquo’s ghost comes the last flicker of conscience, but also an increasing terror of discovery and revenge which drives Macbeth further than ever: ‘‘For mine own good all causes shall give way’’ [III. iv. 134–35].

All is terrible irony from this point on. With a new decisiveness Macbeth kills the grooms in Duncan’s chamber; alive, they were potential witnesses; dead, they can serve as plausible criminals. Then he plays brilliantly the part of a griefstricken host and loyal subject:

The only thing he can gain in his blinded state is the very worst for him. He now seeks out the witches to get that reassurance in his course which he cannot find in himself. Although they will not stay for all his questions, he unhesitatingly accepts their equivocations; since they do reassure him, his doubts of them are gone. With their answers, and having lost ‘‘the initiate fear that wants hard use’’ and being no longer ‘‘young in deed’’ [III. iv. 142–43]. Macbeth enjoys the sense of security of any gangster or tyrant who has the unshrinking will to crush any possible opponents, and who thinks he has power to do so with impunity. All that he has gained, however, is the freedom to commit ‘‘every sin that has a name to it’’ [IV. iii. 59–60].

Had I but died an hour before this chance,

His delusion is complete; his ruin inevitable. Not until he experiences the bitter fruition of his

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earthly crown does he discover what has happened to him. Even then, however, he sees only in part; the blindness he suffered when he succumbed to temptation was never to be lightened; and hence the final irony of a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. [V. v. 26–8] The action of Macbeth evokes a somber ‘‘there but for the grace of God.’’ We understand but we do not therefore pardon all. Rather we acknowledge the evil and the guilt and so acquiesce in the inevitable retribution, but at the same time we are deeply moved by Macbeth’s suffering and ruin because we are acutely aware of the dangerous forces before which he falls, and because we recognize their power over one like ourselves—a moderately good man who succumbs to temptation and who, having succumbed, is led to more evil to make good the first misstep, until there is no chance of withdrawal or escape. As we watch him, we know that he should not have fallen; he might have resisted; but Shakespeare’s vision here is of a world in which men can hardly do better amid the forces of circumstance; and in which, if men do no better, they must suffer, and lose not only the world but themselves as well. Of such suffering and loss is tragedy made. Source: J. Lyndon Shanley, ‘‘Macbeth: The Tragedy of Evil,’’ in College English, Vol. 22, No. 5, February 1961, pp. 305–11.

SOURCES Adelman, Janet, ‘‘‘Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth,’’ in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, edited by Marjorie Gruber, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 90–121. Bloom, Harold, ‘‘Macbeth,’’ in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Riverhead Books, 1998, pp. 516–45. Booth, Wayne C., ‘‘Macbeth as Tragic Hero,’’ in The Journal of General Education, Vol. 6, No. 1, October 1951, pp. 17–25. Driver, Tom F., ‘‘The Uses of Time: The Oedipus Tyrannus and Macbeth,’’ in The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama, Columbia University Press, 1960, pp. 143–67.

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McCarthy, Mary, ‘‘General Macbeth,’’ in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, pp. 3–14. Ribner, Irving, ‘‘Macbeth: The Pattern of Idea and Action,’’ in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring 1959, pp. 147–59. Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, 2nd Series, edited by Kenneth Muir, Arden Shakespeare, 1997. Shanley, J. Lyndon, ‘‘Macbeth: The Tragedy of Evil,’’ in College English, Vol. 22, No. 5, February 1961, pp. 305–11. Spender, Stephen, ‘‘Books and the War—II,’’ in The Penguin New Writing, No. 3, February 1941, pp. 115–26. Van Doren, Mark, ‘‘Macbeth,’’ in Shakespeare, Henry Holt & Company, 1939, pp. 252–66

FURTHER READING Asp, Caroline, ‘‘‘Be bloody, bold and resolute’: Tragic Action and Sexual Stereotyping in Macbeth,’’ in Studies in Philology, Vol. 78, No. 2, Spring 1981, pp. 153–69. Asp discusses the effect that stereotyping sexual roles has on the major characters in Macbeth. Fosse, Jean, ‘‘The Lord’s Anointed Temple: A Study of Some Symbolic Patterns in Macbeth,’’ in Cahiers E´lisabe´thains, No. 6, October 1974, pp. 15–22. Fosse studies a group of images in Macbeth concerned with the human body to demonstrate that they are closely related and that they form an important symbolic pattern. Heilman, Robert B., ‘‘The Criminal as Tragic Hero: Dramatic Methods,’’ in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 19, 1966, pp. 12–24. This article focuses on Shakespeare’s attempts to evoke sympathy for Macbeth despite the character’s increasing villainy. Heilman asserts that the playwright ‘‘so manages the situation that we become Macbeth or at least assent to complicity with him.’’ Jaarsma, Richard J., ‘‘The Tragedy of Banquo,’’ in Literature and Psychology, Vol. 17, Nos. 2–3, 1967, pp. 87–94. Jaarsma maintains that Banquo undergoes a radical change as a result of the witches’ prophesies and becomes Macbeth’s ‘‘silent accomplice’’ to Duncan’s murder. Jaarsma argues that by illustrating how evil affects a man ‘‘who is more realistic and less susceptible to it than Macbeth,’’ Shakespeare generalizes the tragedy of yielding to temptation. Kimbrough, Robert, ‘‘Macbeth: The Prisoner of Gender,’’ in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 16, 1983, pp. 175–90.

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Kimbrough examines the role of gender in Macbeth, asserting that the protagonist’s ‘‘failure to allow the tender aspects of his character to check those tough characteristics which are celebrated by the chauvinistic war ethic of his culture [and] championed by his wife’’ results first in his emotional, then his physical death. Moorthy, P. Rama, ‘‘Fear in Macbeth,’’ in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 1973, pp. 154–66. Moorthy asserts that fear is a unifying theme in Macbeth. Moorthy examines how fear affects Macbeth in particular, noting that it is his peculiar fate to be continually exposed to its horrifying consequences.

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Rackin, Phyllis, ‘‘Macbeth,’’ in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1978. Rackin Offers a general discussion of Macbeth. Rackin’s book, which she states is ‘‘written for amateurs,’’ includes photographs from numerous theatrical productions. Sadler, Lynn Veach, ‘‘The Three Guises of Lady Macbeth,’’ CLA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1, September 1975, pp. 10–9. Sadler declares that Lady Macbeth is more imaginative than her husband and that she projects three guises in the play: the public Lady Macbeth, the woman who plays to the audience of her husband only, and the private Lady Macbeth.

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Measure for Measure The first record of performance indicates that Measure for Measure was acted before King James I on December 26, 1604, in the banqueting hall at Whitehall, by Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men, referred to in the Revels Account as ‘‘his Maiesties plaiers.’’ In the account, authorship of the play is attributed to ‘‘Shaxberd.’’ The play was not published until 1623 when it was included in the First Folio, the commemorative volume of his collected plays issued by John Hemminges and Henry Conddell two fellow members of Shakespeare’s acting company. The play was probably set from a copy of Shakespeare’s own manuscript made by Ralph Crane, scrivener, or secretary–copyist for the King’s Men.

1604

The incidents in the story recounted in Measure for Measure are thought to be taken from what might have been an actual historical event. Joseph Macarius, a Hungarian student living in Vienna in the sixteenth century, tells in a letter written to an acquaintance, the story of a wife who submitted to the demands of an Italian magistrate in return for his promise to spare her husband, who was charged with murder. The magistrate, having failed to keep his promise and, having executed her husband nonetheless, the wife complained to the duke, Don Ferdinando de Gonzago. The duke ordered the magistrate to give the widow a dowry and to marry her. That being done, the magistrate was executed.

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In 1556, using this incident, Claude Rouillet wrote a bloody, Senecan tragedy, in Latin, called Philanira, which was translated into French in 1563. Three years later, Giraldi Cinthio turned the play into a novella, which he included in his collection of tales called the Hecathommithi. Cinthio also used it as the basis for a play, Epitia, published posthumously in 1583. Cinthio’s account was the basis for a play written in English by George Whetstone, in 1578, called Promos and Cassandra, which, along with Whetstone’s prose version of this story which appeared in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582), probably served as the chief source for Shakespeare in the composition of Measure for Measure. Measure for Measure has often troubled critics either because of what seemed like its strange, hybrid structure or because of its often disturbing theme of the conflict between sexual license and sexual puritanism. Audiences, during the eighteenth century, apparently were not similarly put off by the play. Despite adaptations like Sir William Davenant’s The Law against Lovers (1673), and Charles Gildon’s 1700 adaptation, David Stevenson reports in The Achievement of Shakespeare’s ‘‘Measure for Measure’’ that the play was staged forty-six times between 1720 and 1800. In the Victorian era, the play nearly vanished from the London stage, largely because of its content. In the twentieth-century, Measure for Measure became classified, along with All’s Well That Ends Well, with which it shares the bed trick, the surreptitious substitution of one woman for another in a guilty assignation, and Troilus and Cressida as a ‘‘dark comedy’’ or ‘‘problem play.’’ By the end of the twentieth century, however, Measure for Measure had become a favorite among Shakespeare’s plays and one that was frequently staged.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 Measure for Measure opens with Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, announcing to Angelo and Escalus that he must leave the city and that in his place he is appointing Angelo his deputy and Escalus, Angelo’s second. Escalus is the more learned in the law but Angelo is reputed for his virtue. Angelo protests that he ought to be put to a test before being given such great responsibility, but the duke assures him that he has chosen

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him for the office after careful consideration and leaves him with the charge to enforce the laws of the city according to his wisdom. Angelo offers to see the duke a little on his way out of the city. The duke demurs, saying he must leave hastily and does not wish to be seen by the people. After they wish him farewell and he leaves, Angelo and Escalus agree to meet and determine just what is the extent of their powers.

Act 1, Scene 2 Lucio and two Gentlemen are lounging in a public square discussing politics, the possibility of war with Hungary, and trading barbed insults and sexual innuendos. Mistress Overdone, a brothel keeper, enters and informs them that Claudio has been arrested at Angelo’s orders for getting Julietta pregnant. Lucio fears that what she says is true because he was supposed to meet Claudio two hours ago and Claudio has not shown up. Lucio leaves to find out what has happened. As Mistress Overdone is complaining about how bad business is, her servant, Pompey, enters repeating her news that Claudio is being taken to prison for getting Julietta pregnant. Following in that vein, Pompey asks her if she has not heard the new proclamation ordering the closing of all the brothels. Mistress Overdone is alarmed because she will be put out of business. Pompey advises her not to worry, that she will always have customers and he will help procure them for her under the guise of a tapster working in what she can present as an ale-house. As they are speaking, they see Claudio being led through the street by the provost, on his way to prison, followed by Julietta. The provost explains to Claudio that Angelo has ordered this public display of their shame. Lucio is also with them and Claudio explains to him that he and Julietta are legally contracted to marry and that all but the final ceremonies had taken place because they have been waiting to make arrangements with Julietta’s relatives regarding the amount of her dowry. Angelo has revived old laws that have for years lain dormant and used them to prosecute Claudio. Moreover, Angelo has rejected Claudio’s appeals for clemency. There is one last hope, Claudio tells Lucio. His sister, Isabella, is about to enter a convent. Claudio implores Lucio to acquaint her with the news of his imprisonment and forthcoming execution and to persuade her to petition Angelo for mercy. Lucio agrees to see her, and Claudio is led off to prison.

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Act 1, Scene 3 The duke confides to Friar Thomas that he wishes him to shelter him in secret, not because he is carrying out a secret amour but because he has turned his power over to Angelo and let it be known that he has gone to Poland. He explains to Friar Thomas that he has let a number of strict laws go unenforced over the past fourteen years and, consequently, Vienna has become morally corrupt. However, he fears that if he himself were to reinstitute them, it would seem too much like capricious tyranny, since it was he who, by neglecting to enforce the laws, has given the people permission in their moral laxity. Therefore he has deputed Angelo to use his power, yet he will be protecting his own good reputation among the people. Now Duke Vincentio wishes to disguise himself as a friar and go among the people to see the effects of Angelo’s use of power and also to see how Angelo uses power and what effect the command of power has on Angelo. Vincentio’s final words to Friar Thomas suggest that everything he has said to him up until then was only a pretext for something he is not saying. He ends by pointing out that Angelo is reputed for his purity, that he has a stern and icy bearing and seems to be the highest model of absolute virtue. Vincentio says he wishes to ‘‘see / If power change purpose, what our seemers be,’’ if Angelo truly is what he seems to be.

Title page of Measure for Measure from the First Folio (1623) (By permission of The Folger Shakespeare Library)

Act 1, Scene 4 Inside a convent, Isabella is preparing to enter into her novitiate and is inquiring of a nun about the restrictions to be imposed, suggesting that she wishes to submit herself to the strictest possible discipline. Their conference is interrupted by Lucio’s shouts from outside the walls of the convent. Francisca, the nun with whom Isabella has been speaking, informs her that she [Francisca] is forbidden to speak with men except in the presence of the Prioress and asks Isabella to see what the man’s business is while she withdraws. Lucio enters the convent with the same gaiety, flirtatiousness, and irreverence of spirit that he displays in all situations, addressing the nun playfully and speaking suggestively. He asks to see Isabella regarding her ‘‘unhappy brother.’’ She tells him she is Isabella and asks why Claudio is unhappy. Lucio tells her he has been taken to prison for getting Julietta with child. She thinks he is mocking her, but when he

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repeats the story, she asks why Claudio does not marry Julietta. Lucio explains that Angelo has been deputized, will not permit the marriage, but instead insists on Claudio’s execution. The only hope, he tells her is for her to go to Angelo herself and plead for her brother’s life. Isabella promises to notify the Mother Superior of her business and to go to Angelo immediately.

Act 2, Scene 1 Discussing Claudio’s case, Escalus attempts to reason with Angelo and convince him to show mercy, first arguing that Claudio’s father was a good man of the nobility, and then asking Angelo if he could not think of a situation in which he himself might not have been tempted to act as Claudio had. Angelo responds that it is one thing to be tempted, quite another to fall,

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that just because a juror or judge has faults does not mean that the juror or judge cannot pass judgment on one caught at fault. Finally, Angelo asserts that should he, one day, be guilty as Claudio is, then he too ought to be condemned to die. Escalus, although not in agreement, makes no further objection. The provost enters. Angelo orders the beheading of Claudio ‘‘by nine tomorrow morning.’’ There is a swift shift in tone from serious to comic as Elbow, a constable, directs some officers to bring Pompey and Froth before the magistrates. The issue is not entirely clear, especially since Elbow ‘‘misplaces,’’ using the word ‘‘respected,’’ for example, when he means to say suspected, and Pompey is a fast-talking con artist. Essentially, however, Elbow brings Pompey before the magistrates accusing him of being a bawd and working in a brothel, which seems to be doing business as a bath house. In irritation, Angelo leaves the adjudication to Escalus. Escalus releases Pompey for lack of evidence, with a warning not to appear again before him and suggests that Elbow has been too long in office and asks him to bring him the names of some of his neighbors who might take over his job. Escalus then invites a fellow justice home to dinner with him, expressing his regrets regarding Claudio’s execution and lamenting that ‘‘there is no remedy.’’

Act 2, Scene 2 The provost, pitying Claudio and regretting that he will be executed for a simple human failing, visits Angelo at home in the evening inquiring once again if he ought to go through with the execution and advising him that sometimes, afterwards, one has regrets for having passed a severe sentence when it is too late to change it. Angelo is irritated with him, saying he has already given the order for the death and that if the provost is uncomfortable carrying them out, he is welcome to resign his office and spare himself. The provost apologizes and asks what ought to be done with Julietta in her present condition. Angelo orders her removed to a fitting place for her lying in, saying, ‘‘Let her have needful, but not lavish means.’’ A servant announces that Claudio’s sister has come to see Angelo. Isabella enters, accompanied by Lucio, and explains to Angelo that she is torn because while she wishes to ask for mercy for her brother, she deeply condemns his fault and begs Angelo to

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condemn his fault but to spare him. Angelo responds that the fault has already been condemned, and that it would be absurd to condemn a fault but pardon the man who committed it. Isabella agrees that, severe though it is, the law is just, and prepares to withdraw. Lucio, however, whispers to her that she is ‘‘too cold,’’ not to give up, and to try again. She does and engages Angelo with strong arguments about mercy, power, authority, the redemption Jesus offered mankind, whose lives had been forfeited through sin, by the sacrifice of his own life, and even asks Angelo to consider if he can find in himself any fault similar to her brother’s. To himself, Angelo says that as Isabella speaks he is almost convinced by her and that he is aroused to desire her. But he turns away from her to leave, and she asks him to turn back. He tells her he will think about what she has said and asks her to return tomorrow. She says she will tell him how she will bribe him. He becomes severe, but she catches him by saying she will bribe him not with gold, etc., but with prayers to heaven. He tells her again to come back tomorrow. As she leaves she offers a standard farewell, ‘‘Save your honor.’’ When she and Lucio and the provost are gone, in a soliloquy Angelo says, ‘‘From thee, even from thy virtue,’’ suggesting what will become central—that he lusts for her.

Act 2, Scene 3 Visiting the prison in his disguise as a friar, Duke Vincentio meets Julietta and questions her. She says she repents her action, bears her shame patiently, loves Claudio, and is as culpable in the act for which he will be executed as he is.

Act 2, Scene 4 Angelo appears, distraught, complaining that he is unable to pray and can only think lustfully of Isabella. A servant announces her and he receives her. Innocently, she says, ‘‘I am come to know your pleasure,’’ which as it applies to Angelo’s tormented musings has a secondary meaning she does not intend. He tells her Claudio must die. But then he equivocates and suggests that, although Claudio must die, it may be only in the way that everyone must die, but not immediately. Through a series of twists and turns Angelo finally tells Isabella that he loves her and that if she yields her body to his pleasure, he will release her brother from his sentence. Astonished, Isabella retorts that she will proclaim Angelo publicly for this outrage. He

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assures her that no one will believe her. Her word against his will seem like the trick of a hysterical woman slandering a just judge. His lie, he asserts, will have more weight than her truth. As he leaves her, he tells her to return tomorrow to give him her answer. Alone, she despairs, realizing that it is true: she has no one to tell what has happened. She decides she must live chaste and Claudio must die, that her chastity is more precious than his life.

Act 3, Scene 1 The duke, in his role as the friar, visits Claudio in prison to offer consolation and prepare him for death. In his famous speech, ‘‘Be absolute for death,’’ the duke/Friar enumerates the reasons that life is a contemptible thing. When he finishes, Claudio thanks him saying that he sees that life only makes him wish for death and that it is in death that he will find life. Isabella now comes to visit her brother in the prison, and the duke/Friar takes his leave of Claudio. As Isabella begins to speak with Claudio, the duke asks the provost to conceal him in a place where he may overhear their conversation. Claudio asks Isabella what comfort she brings. She tells him she brings the comfort of heaven, for that is where Angelo intends to send him. He asks if there is nothing to be done. She tells him there is one chance of life for him. When he shows eagerness to know what it is, she says she is fearful that his desire for life may overwhelm his ability to condemn the cost. He says that if he must die, he will. She says with joy she hears their dead father’s voice in his virtue and tells him then that Angelo will let her brother live if she surrenders her virginity to him. He is shocked and says, ‘‘Thou shalt not do’t.’’ She says if it were her life, she would sacrifice that without thought for him and she tells him to be ready for death tomorrow. Then Claudio begins to think: first, how terrible that Angelo would do the thing he sets the law against Claudio for having done! And then he wonders whether it is so terrible a sin if Angelo himself is willing to perform it. And then he cries to Isabella that ‘‘Death is a fearful thing.’’ She responds that a life of shame is a fearful thing. But he reminds her of the terrors and torments of death and suggests that the worst of life is better than death and begs her to let him live, that a sin performed for charity’s sake will become a virtue.

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Isabella responds fiercely to him, calls him a beast, a ‘‘faithless coward,’’ a man who would take his life from his sister’s shame. She wonders if her mother had not betrayed her father at his conception and assures Claudio she will only pray for his death, that she would not make the slightest effort to save his life. He begs her to hear him, but she rages against him. The duke in his friar’s robe at this moment steps forward from his hiding place and tells Isabella he wishes to speak with her. She steps aside and waits for him as he says a few words to Claudio outside of her hearing. Angelo, he tells Claudio, never meant what he said, was only testing Isabella’s virtue, and Claudio must remain steadfast for death. Claudio says he wishes to beg Isabella’s pardon, that he is ‘‘out of love with life,’’ and wishes only for death. The duke then asks the provost to leave him alone with Isabella, that they may talk privately. Alone with her, the duke commends her virtue and tells her that it is her virtue gives value to her beauty. He tells her, too, that he has heard what she told Claudio about Angelo and asks her what she intends to do. She repeats that she will resist Angelo and let Claudio die. She also says that the duke ought to be informed about his deputy and that if the duke returns she will tell him of his perfidy. Although that is the right thing to do, the duke agrees, he warns her it will be ineffective, that Angelo will deny her accusation and say he was only testing her. But Vincentio tells her there is a way she can remedy the situation and do a good deed for ‘‘a poor wronged lady,’’ save her brother, and do herself no dishonor. Isabella asks him to tell her more and assures him she is ready to do anything as long as it ‘‘appears not foul in the truth of my spirit.’’ The duke now proceeds to tell Isabella Angelo’s story. It reveals him to be quite different from how he seemed at the start of the play and it shows that the duke’s purpose was more focused when he left Vienna and put Angelo in charge than the audience was apprised of at the play’s inception. His purpose, however, was hinted at when he spoke of finding out what ‘‘seemers be.’’ The duke tells Isabella that Angelo had been contracted to a woman named Mariana by the same sort of legal contract that bound Claudio and Julietta. Before the final ceremony was performed, Mariana’s brother was drowned at sea when the ship carrying his fortune, and her dowry, sank. In consequence, since she could bring no

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dowry with her, Angelo abandoned Mariana and proclaimed his reason to be that he had found out dishonorable things about her. Despite his bad treatment of her, Mariana continued to love him. Moved by this tale of Angelo’s perfidy, Isabella asks the friar what relation it has to her situation. He explains that she may save her brother if she tells Angelo she will consent to give herself to him sexually, but it must be in a place where she designates, in total darkness, only for a brief span of time, and with no words spoken. Mariana, however, he explains, will be substituted for Isabella. Consequently, Claudio will be saved, Isabella’s chastity will not be violated, and, should the assignation become publicly known in the future, Mariana may gain advantage, for then Angelo will be compelled to marry her. Isabella agrees to the plan enthusiastically.

Act 3, Scene 2 Upon leaving the prison, Vincentio comes upon Elbow once more leading Pompey before Angelo for being a bawd and a thief. The duke in his role as the friar castigates Pompey for the vileness of his profession. At the approach of Lucio, Pompey takes heart, hoping Lucio will be able to provide his bail, but Lucio only taunts and teases him and refuses to help him. As Pompey is being led away, Lucio notices the friar, greets him and asks him if he has any news from abroad and especially, if he has heard anything of the duke. Vincentio, saying he has none, turns the question back on Lucio. Lucio, who has already shown himself to enjoy a fanciful use of language and to delight in wild improvisations that are careless of the truth and full of sexual innuendo, says he has heard the duke is with the Emperor of Russia or in Rome. Vincentio says, with equivocation, that wherever the duke is he wishes him well. Lucio then begins a fanciful account of the duke’s personality. Contrasting it with Angelo’s iciness, he describes the duke as a madcap lecher who savored immorality. The duke in his role of Friar protests that Lucio speaks falsely of the duke, but Lucio assures him that he knew the duke well and speaks truth of him. The duke asks Lucio his name and asks him to be prepared publicly to defend what he has said when the duke returns. Lucio boasts that he has no fear of doing so and repeats before he leaves the friar that the duke was a man of loose morals and certainly rather than punishing Claudio would delight in his pleasure.

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As the duke meditates on the power of slander that even a king cannot defeat, Escalus and the provost pass him as they take Mistress Overdone to prison for keeping a bawdy house. Mistress Overdone complains that she is being framed, that Lucio informed on her while she has kept his secret—that he had a child with Kate Keepdown while the duke was still governing Vienna and has reneged on his promise to marry her. Escalus acknowledges that Lucio is known for his licentiousness and orders that he be brought before him. He also informs the provost that Angelo will not be shaken in his judgment against Claudio and that the provost see, therefore, that Claudio be made ready for death. Escalus, having finished his business, greets the friar as he is leaving, and asks him where he comes from. Vincentio says he has come from Rome. Escalus asks him what news he brings and Vincentio tells him that vice is rampant in the world and that there is a scarcity of truth. He asks Escalus what kind of man the duke was. Escalus paints a picture quite contrary to Lucio’s, describing the duke as virtuous, generous, and temperate. They then speak of Claudio. Escalus once again regrets that he cannot persuade Angelo to temper his justice with mercy. Vincentio reports that he has given Claudio spiritual guidance in preparation for death. Escalus leaves the friar and goes to visit Claudio. The third act ends with Vincentio alone. He speaks a soliloquy in which Shakespeare alters the verse to rhymed couplets; when the actors speak in verse in the rest of this play, they are speaking in blank verse, which is called that because it does not rhyme although it has meter. This change in verse signals a strong conclusion to the first part of the play and prepares audiences and readers for the change in tone, from intractably tragic to providentially comic, which is about to take place. Vincentio says that those who would represent justice must be virtuous, not merely severe. He denounces Angelo for ignoring his own offenses when judging Claudio’s; Vincentio explains that he will meet vice with craft, and he reviews the plot of substituting Mariana for Isabella—the bed trick, which he will use later that night.

Act 4, Scene 1 As the last scene of the third act has ended with rhymed couplets, so the first scene of the fourth begins with a song sung by a newly introduced

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character, Mariana, the woman whom Angelo has wronged. The song, in six lines, tells of her unhappy love for Angelo. It ends with a wish for a return of kisses and with a lament for a love sealed in vain. The duke enters, still disguised as a friar. She excuses herself for singing, saying it is not for mirth but to console her sadness. He tells her it is not amiss even though the power of music is such that it can make bad seem good. But his purpose for his visit is to know if anyone has come to her seeking him. No, she answers. But someone soon will, he tells her, and asks her to leave him for awhile, for he has something in mind that will be for her good and he will summon her to return soon. She leaves. Isabella enters. She tells him Angelo has agreed to meet her in his garden, shown her the way to it, and given her the keys to its several gates. The duke then calls for Mariana, introduces Isabella to Mariana, and tells her to walk apart with her so that Isabella can tell her of his plan, which he assures her does not compromise her virtue. Mariana agrees to the plan, and the duke reassures her, explaining that by the pre–contract, the legal betrothal agreement (the same as the one Claudio and Julietta had signed) Angelo is her husband and to engage in sexual intercourse with him is not a sin.

Act 4, Scene 2 In the prison, the provost makes Pompey, incarcerated for being a bawd, assistant to Abhorson, the executioner, telling him that Claudio and Barnardine, a convicted murderer, are both to be executed that day. But when he summons the prisoners, only Claudio presents himself, reporting that Barnardine is deep in peaceful slumber. There is a knocking at the prison gates and the duke, still disguised as a friar, enters inquiring if Isabella or a messenger has come to the prison. When the answer is negative, he assures the provost that a messenger will be arriving soon. The duke then asks directly if there has not been an order countermanding Claudio’s execution, and when the provost says there has not been, the duke assures him it will come. Just then there is knocking at the gate. A message arrives from Angelo. The duke presumes it is an order to spare Claudio and, mistakenly, apostrophizes about the irony of how vice in authority makes authority merciful. It is a command, however, to proceed with Claudio’s execution that morning and have his head sent to Angelo. In the same

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message Angelo orders the execution of Barnardine later in the day. Questioning the provost, the duke learns that Barnardine has been imprisoned nine years on a murder charge which has only been conclusively proven since the duke’s departure and to which Barnardine has confessed. Barnardine, however, is unprepared for death, gets drunk every day and, even when given the opportunity, has not attempted to escape the prison. Learning of this, the duke asks the provost if he will postpone the execution of Claudio, execute Barnardine and send Angelo his head in place of Claudio’s. When the provost hesitates, not because he is unsympathetic to Claudio, but because of his fear of disobeying Angelo, his superior, the friar shows him letters with the duke’s seal and in the duke’s handwriting, which the provost recognizes. The friar tells the provost that the duke will be returning in a few days, unbeknownst to Angelo, who received letters from the duke, which informed him he would not be back and perhaps was entering a monastery. The friar assures the provost all will be well and goes to Barnardine to prepare him for death.

Act 4, Scene 3 Pompey begins the scene with a comical account of all the small time crooks he recognizes in the prison. Abhorson, the executioner, enters and orders him to bring in Barnardine for beheading. Barnardine, annoyed by their yelling, curses at them and tells them to go away, that he is sleepy. Pompey tells him he can sleep after he is executed. The duke as Friar comes to attend his death, but Barnardine says he’s been drinking and he simply will not consent to die today and that’s that—he’ll be in his cell if they have anything more to say to him. The duke says that he’s fit neither to live nor to die. To execute him while his soul is so unprepared, the duke tells the provost, would be a damnable act on their part. The provost tells him of another prisoner, Ragozine, a pirate, the same age as Claudio, who has just died that morning in the prison. He suggests they send his head to Angelo instead of Claudio’s. The duke approves, saying it is an accident provided by heaven. The duke then writes a letter to Angelo, which he gives to the provost to deliver. In it he informs him that he will be returning to the city, that he wants his entrance to be public, and that he wishes Angelo to meet him at a fountain a little way from the city.

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As the provost leaves, Isabella enters the prison. The duke in an aside says he will keep her ignorant of what has happened so that he can bring her comfort from her despair. He tells her that Claudio has been executed. She is furious and says she will pluck out Angelo’s eyes. The duke advises her to be calm and patient, that the duke will be back in Vienna tomorrow and she may present her case to him. Meanwhile, he gives her a letter to give to Friar Peter, asking Peter to meet him at Mariana’s house that evening, where he will tell him of Isabella and Mariana, and arrange for him to bring them before the duke when he enters the city. He himself, he says, because of a vow, must be absent. Lucio meets them in the prison. He expresses his sadness at Claudio’s death, yet his language is too light for the occasion. He calls Isabella ‘‘pretty Isabella,’’ and says if the ‘‘fantastical Duke of dark corners’’ had been in Vienna, Claudio would not have been executed. Isabella departs, but the duke, as the friar, tells Lucio that the duke would not appreciate being described as he has described him. Lucio persists, says the friar does not know the duke as well as he does, that the duke is a ladies man. The duke advises him that he will have to ‘‘answer this one day,’’ and bids him farewell, but Lucio says he will accompany him saying he can tell him stories about the duke. The duke tells him he has said too much already, but Lucio continues. He tells the friar that he was once brought before the duke for getting a prostitute pregnant, that in fact, it was true although he denied it because he would have been forced to marry her.

Act 4, Scene 4 Escalus and Angelo are reviewing the letters they have received from the duke and express concern about how erratic his behavior appears. Essentially, the duke commands them to meet him at the city gates and proclaim an hour before he enters that if any subjects have complaints or grievances for which they wish redress, they should come forward then in the street. They arrange to carry out his orders, and Escalus says good night. Alone, Angelo expresses his torment over what he has done, especially the anxiety that he will be discovered. He also feels guilty about Claudio’s death but reasons that, had he lived, Claudio might have taken revenge on him.

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Act 4, Scene 5 The duke appears as himself, gives Friar Peter various letters to deliver and reviews what they will do when he enters the city.

Act 4, Scene 6 Isabella and Mariana at the city gates are going over what they will say and imagining what Angelo will counter with. Friar Peter arrives and takes them to a place to stand as the trumpets sound and the duke begins his entrance into the city.

Act 5, Scene 1 With ceremony and celebration, the duke returns, giving especial welcome to Angelo and praising his virtue in oratorical phrases until Isabella rushes towards him crying out for justice. The duke asks her to speak and, as if assuring her, points to Angelo and says that he will give her justice. She begs the duke to hear her himself, for to ask Angelo for justice is like seeking redemption from the Devil. Angelo interrupts and says that Isabella is crazy, out of her mind because her brother has been executed in the course of carrying out justice. He says she will speak bitterly and strangely. She says indeed she will say strange things but true things, that Angelo is a liar, a murderer, an adulterer, a hypocrite, and a violator of virgins. The duke, after hearing her orders her taken away saying she is deranged. But she begs with eloquence, and the duke says, although she must be mad, nevertheless, her speech is coherent. He asks her to tell her story. She begins to tell of Claudio and how Lucio came to her in the convent. Lucio interrupts her and introduces himself. The duke tells him he was not bid to speak. Lucio retorts that he did not wish to remain silent. The duke silences him. Throughout the scene, Lucio will interject himself and the duke will silence him until he chooses to deal with him regarding his own case of getting the prostitute Kate Keepdown with child. Isabella continues to tell her story as Angelo thinks it happened, not the plot that the friar concocted. The duke dismisses her charge, suggesting that she has been set up by people wishing to slander Angelo, arguing particularly that Angelo would never do something for which he would punish someone else. Isabella despairs of relief and starts to leave, but the duke stops her and orders her taken to prison on charges of slander. He asks her who knew she would come

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before him to make these charges. She answers Friar Lodowick (the duke in the guise of the friar). The duke asks if any of the assembled know Lodowick. Lucio responds that he does and says that Lodowick had spoken to him against the duke, which is, of course, precisely the opposite of what had occurred. Lucio had spoken against the duke to the friar. The duke orders the friar be found and brought before him. At this point in the proceedings, Friar Peter interrupts, saying he has stood by to listen to Isabella accuse Angelo falsely, since he did not touch her. The duke says it is just as he thought. He asks Peter if he knows Lodowick and Peter answers he does and that Lodowick is not at all as Lucio reports but a holy man. Peter says, in addition, that he has come in place of Lodowick who is ill, to tell what Lodowick told him. Isabella is removed by guards and Mariana is brought in. She is veiled and her face is hidden. The duke demands she show her face, but she says she will only show it when her husband asks her to. When he asks her if she is married, however, she says she is not, nor is she a maid, nor a widow. She offers a riddle that she is not married but she has had sexual intercourse with her husband but her husband does not know that he has had sexual intercourse with her. The duke asks how she is a witness in defense of Angelo against Isabella’s accusation. Mariana says she is such a witness because Angelo thinks he never had sexual intercourse with her but knows he thinks that he did have sexual intercourse with Isabella. Saying that her accusation is strange, Angelo demands to see her face. Now, Mariana says, that her husband bids her to, she removes her veil, proclaims herself, and recounts the history of their contract and his betrayal. The duke asks Angelo if he knows her. Angelo confesses that he does and that there had been some possibility of marriage five years before but that he broke it off in part because the dowry fell short of what had been promised but more because he found her character faulty. Mariana then proclaims that Angelo has known her as his wife, in other words has had sexual intercourse with her. Angelo then asserts that this is becoming too much and asks the duke’s permission to deal with Isabella and Mariana. Vincentio gives his blessing to Angelo’s inquiry and recommends he punish the women severely. He appoints Escalus to sit as judge with Angelo, sends the provost to find Friar Lodowick, and, excusing himself, leaves them to sit in judgment.

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Escalus and Angelo recall Isabella as they await Lodowick’s appearance, and they order Lucio to remain in their presence so that he can testify against Lodowick when the friar does appear. As they discuss the case, Lucio continuously interjects scurrilous jokes based on double entendres. The duke, once again disguised as a friar, the provost and Isabella reenter. Escalus asks the friar if he connived to have Mariana and Isabella testify falsely against Angelo. He denies it. Escalus asks him to consider that he is testifying before magistrates and not to lie. The friar says, although he respects them, it is the duke who should be hearing the case. Escalus retorts that the duke’s power is invested in them and he ought to speak justly. The friar responds that he will speak boldly and says that if the duke cannot hear the women, their cause is lost since they are coming to seek justice from the very man, Angelo, who has caused them injury. Lucio interrupts saying the friar is the ‘‘rascal’’ he spoke of, and Escalus condemns him to be tortured for setting the women on and for contempt, since he has called Angelo a ‘‘villain’’ and the proceedings ‘‘unjust.’’ The friar tells those who would seize him to hold off, that the duke would no more do harm to him than to himself. Moreover, the friar continues, while he has been in Vienna he has seen great corruption. Escalus orders him to prison for slandering the state. Angelo intervenes, asking if there are any present who can testify against the friar. As usual, Lucio comes forward and attributes to the friar words against the duke which he actually spoke himself. Escalus again orders the provost to take the friar to prison. When he resists there is a scuffle and Lucio, declaring that he ought to show himself and not hide under his monk’s robe, pulls the cowl from his head only to reveal the duke. When Lucio, realizing what he is in for, tries to make himself scarce, the duke orders that Lucio ‘‘sneak not away.’’ The duke immediately pardons Escalus for unknowingly having spoken and acted with disrespect towards him. Turning to Angelo, however, he challenges him to say anything in his own defense. Angelo with a sweep of selfdebasing language confesses his ‘‘guiltiness.’’ He admits he was contracted to Mariana. The duke orders them to go with Friar Peter and the provost to be married immediately and then to return.

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Turning to Isabella, the duke tells her that although he is her Prince rather than her friar, he is still her servant. She begs his pardon for having troubled so important a man with her business. He pardons her and excuses himself for her brother’s death, explaining that he had thought to prevent it, but the speed of events overtook him. Mariana and Angelo are brought back to the duke, married. The duke asks Isabella for Mariana’s sake to forgive Angelo for having assaulted her virgin honor, but he adds that for having executed Claudio, there can be no forgiveness and Angelo must die. Mariana protests that the duke cannot so mock her as to give her a husband and then take him away from her and begs him to forgive Angelo. The duke refuses, saying he had them married to insure that she would not have been dishonored by having it thought that she had unmarried sexual intercourse and he says all of Angelo’s wealth, which belongs to the state at his death, he confers upon her. Still she begs for mercy for Angelo and asks Isabella to join in her petition. The duke says that she asks an impossible thing, for how could Isabella possibly seek mercy for the man who murdered her brother. But as he speaks, Isabella kneels and joins Mariana in begging for Angelo. The duke still refuses to grant Angelo mercy, and Angelo himself, still the rigid Puritan, says he prefers death to mercy. The duke abruptly shifts focus and asks the provost why Claudio was executed so early in the morning. The provost answers it was commanded, but the duke, establishing there was not a special warrant for it, relieves the provost of his authority and takes the keys of the prison from him. The provost says he had suspected something was not right and kept one of those ordered executed, Barnardine, alive. The duke regrets he had not done so with Claudio, too, and the provost says there is another one he spared. Claudio then appears, first muffled in his cloak and then revealing himself. At this, the duke releases Angelo from his punishment and tells him to love Mariana, and he instructs Claudio to marry Julietta. He then turns to Lucio, whom he first condemns to marry Kate Keepdown and then be whipped and hanged for slandering him. But he relents and only enforces the marriage, which Lucio says is worse than whipping and hanging. The duke thanks the provost for his service and promotes him to a

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS Measure for Measure was reinterpreted in a 1994 contemporary film version in modern dress. Made for British television, the film was directed by David Thacker and stars Tom Wilkinson as Duke Vincentio, Corin Redgrave as Angelo, and Juliet Aubrey as Isabella. It is available on DVD.  In 1979, as part of the Complete Dramatic Works of Shakespeare series presented on British television, an orthodox production of Measure for Measure was filmed starring Kenneth Colley as Duke Vincentio, Kate Nelligan as Isabella, and Tim Pigott-Smith as Angelo. The film was directed by Desmond Davis and is available on DVD. 

higher office, instructs all who have been wronged to forgive their wrongers and proposes marriage to Isabella. The text itself does not indicate whether she accepts or not.

CHARACTERS Abhorson Abhorson is an executioner in the prison in Vienna.

Angelo Angelo is the apparently virtuous deputy the duke commissions to fill his place as ruler of Vienna during his absence. Angelo condemns Claudio to death for having had premarital sexual relations with his fiance´e. But Angelo succumbs to temptation when Claudio’s sister comes to beg for his life; he propositions her, saying he will show Claudio mercy if she yields herself to him. In the course of the play, it is revealed that Angelo has been engaged and has abandoned his fiance´e when the size of her dowry did not meet his expectations.

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Barnardine

Friar Lodowick

Barnardine is an unrepentant prisoner who refuses to be executed.

See Vincentio, Duke of Vienna

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Lucio Claudio Claudio is a young man whom Angelo sentences to death for having had sexual intercourse with his fiance´e, Juliet, before all the legalities of their marriage were completed. He is Isabella’s brother.

Elbow Elbow is a comic constable who appears before Angelo when he brings Pompey before him on the charge of being a bawd.

Escalus Escalus is a learned magistrate in Vienna who advises the duke and Angelo on matters of law. He is inclined to favor mercy over severity in legal matters.

Lucio tells Isabella about her brother Claudio’s plight and encourages her to petition Angelo for mercy. Lucio is a loquacious, bawdy and comical character who boasts to the duke, when the duke is disguised as a friar, that, like Claudio, he has gotten a woman with child but had denied it when he had been brought before the duke on the charge. In the last act of the play, he is forced to marry the mother of his child.

Mariana Mariana is a woman whom Angelo had been contracted to marry and whom he jilted after her fortune was lost at sea and her brother drowned. She, nevertheless, continues to love Angelo. The duke arranges for Isabella to agree to Angelo’s proposition to save her brother but to have Mariana take her place for their tryst.

Froth Froth is a tapster who works in a bawdy house run by Mistress Overdone and Pompey.

Mistress Overdone Mistress Overdone runs a bawdy house, which Angelo has ordered shut down.

Isabella Isabella is Claudio’s sister. At the beginning of the play, she is about to enter a convent known for the strictness of its discipline. A summons from Lucio to help Claudio when he is condemned to death, leads her to postpone entering the convent. When she petitions Angelo for Claudio’s life, Angelo tells her he will have mercy on her brother if she surrenders herself sexually to him (Angelo). She refuses, but is saved from exercising such severity against her brother as her stance demands when the duke, disguised as a friar enlists her in a plot to expose Angelo’s perfidy. At the end of the play, when she thinks that Angelo has betrayed his part in the agreement and has had Claudio killed, she nevertheless begs for mercy for him when his crimes are exposed.

Friar Peter Peter is a friar whom the duke takes into his confidence while he himself is disguised as a friar.

Pompey Pompey is a bawd who works for Mistress Overdone. After he is arrested for his profession, he is sent to jail and becomes the assistant to Abhorson, the executioner.

Provost The provost runs the prison and cooperates with the duke, whom he thinks is only a friar, in his attempt to save Claudio. He is a kind and virtuous man.

Ragozine Julietta Julietta is Claudio’s fiance´e. When she becomes pregnant, it becomes known that the two of them have engaged in pre–marital sexual intercourse.

Ragozine is another prisoner, a pirate, who dies in prison the morning Claudio is supposed to be executed. The provost suggests sending Ragozine’s head to Angelo as proof that Claudio has been executed.

Kate Keepdown Kate Keepdown is the woman whom Lucio has gotten pregnant and whom he is forced to marry at the end of the play.

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Friar Thomas Thomas is a friar whom the duke makes his confidant when he himself is in disguise.

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Vincentio, Duke of Vienna Vincentio is the Duke of Vienna. Saying that he must leave the city, he deputizes Angelo to take his place because he hopes, he says, Angelo will enforce laws he has neglected, which it would seem tyrannous for him (the duke) to enforce. The real reason is to test Angelo. He knows of faults in Angelo that Angelo thinks are hidden. Disguised as Friar Lodowick, the duke remains in Vienna and directs the action of the play. At the conclusion of the play, he asks Isabella to marry him.

THEMES Chastity and Lewdness Angelo and Isabella both represent chastity. Lucio, Pompey, and Mistress Overdone all represent lewdness. Both chastity and lewdness are thus presented as flawed. Chastity is presented as too icily inhuman. Lewdness is presented as too debased. In Measure for Measure, the institution of marriage, threatened by both the chaste and the lewd characters, is presented as the instrument of moderation between chastity and lust, allowing for a chaste expression of sexual passion.

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Justice and Mercy In its opening scenes, Measure for Measure presents justice and mercy as being antithetical to, and in conflict with, each other. Although both are strict puritans, Angelo stands for justice and Isabella stands for mercy. In her pleas, she does not deny that Angelo’s condemnation of her brother is just, she only begs for mercy, which he claims would subvert justice. The duke attempts to show, by his manipulation of the plot and by his adjudications in the final act, that justice and mercy are actually aspects of each other. Justice without mercy is unjust. Mercy which does not take justice into account, as the mercy the duke shows to Angelo for Mariana’s sake does, violates humanity.

The Conflict between Liberty and Restraint When Isabella first appears, in act 1, scene 4, her first utterance is the question, ‘‘have you nuns no farther privileges?’’ She seeks to know the limits of the restraint she is undertaking. When a nun responds with an implicit reproach, ‘‘are not

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Emma Fielding as Isabella and Daniel Evans as Angelo in Act II, scene iv at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 2003 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage.

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these large enough?’’ Isabella makes it clear that she does ‘‘speak not as desiring more, / But rather wishing a more strict restraint.’’ Somewhat more than a hundred lines before this, at act 1, scene 2, line 127, when Claudio, her brother, first appears, as he is being led to jail, Lucio questions him, ‘‘Whence comes this restraint?’’ Claudio replies, ‘‘From too much liberty.’’ It seems then, that the opening hypothesis of Measure for Measure is that there can never be enough restraint, but there can always be too much liberty. There is a corollary, too. Liberty when it is excessive, leads to restraint. Restraint, similarly, leads to an eruption of liberty, or license, as it is called when restraint breaks its fetters. Despite Isabella’s desire for as much restraint as possible in the convent, she herself will see, as Angelo will show her, that too much restraint is not a good thing. The duke himself has set up the opposition as a governing theme of

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

Write a short story set in the present which uses the plot, conflicts, and themes of Measure for Measure.



Write a detailed psychological profile of four of the characters in Measure for Measure as you have come to understand them from your reading of the play.

Write an essay in which you explore the conflict between justice and mercy.  Choose a particular practice or behavior which is commonly considered immoral and discuss whether it ought or ought not to be so considered. The subject you choose may concern sexual behavior or practices, but it does not have to.  Choose a case of hypocrisy in high places (such as in government, business, or academia) from your reading of current events and compare it to the story of Measure for Measure. 

the play when he explains that he has been lax in the enforcement of laws that he wants Angelo to resurrect.

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tragedies. As You Like It and You Can’t Take It With You are comedies. There are particular characteristics that define the genre of a play. Tragedies usually end in the death of the hero, or in his downfall and exile from the community, as in Oedipus Rex. Comedies end in marriage and the re-integration of the outsider into the community, as in The Merry Wives of Windsor or The Taming of the Shrew. However, genres can be mixed within one play. Many plays are not only comedies but musicals, too. Musical comedies usually integrate music and comedy, hence the genre name. Measure for Measure is a mixed genre play with elements of tragedy and comedy. Occasionally, a play will be called a tragi-comedy or a comi-tragedy, but that is a more modern term. These plays are not as well integrated as music and comedy are in, for example, Kiss Me Kate, which is a modern musical comedy version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. In Measure for Measure, tragedy gives way to comedy at the end of the third act. As a signal for the change, the concluding soliloquy of act 3, scene 2 is composed in rhyming couplets, a verse pattern not otherwise found in Measure for Measure (except in the play’s last two couplets). By its aa, bb, cc rhyme scheme, these couplets indicate closure and resolution rather than openendedness or irresolution, which is often the mark of unrhymed verse. Immediately following the duke’s speech in rhymed couplets at the end of act 3, act 4 opens with a song, further signaling that there has been a genre shift.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT STYLE

King James I

The Embedded Author The duke in Measure for Measure is not only a character in the play. He frequently functions as the author of the play, as he manipulates the characters and the plot, and determines both the action and the play’s outcome.

Mixed Genre Genre is a means of literary classification. Tragedy, comedy, musical, thriller, western, etc.—are of these are genres. Usually, but not always, a play can be classified according to one genre. Hamlet and Death of a Salesman are

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Much scholarly opinion and research has indicated that in Measure for Measure, which was performed before the new king during the Christmas season in 1604, Shakespeare intended to celebrate various traits and beliefs of the king in the character of the duke and in the themes of the play. James I became king of England in March 1603, after the death of Queen Elizabeth I. He was the author of several books, one on witchcraft and another on the role of the king. In Basilikon Doron, James asserted the divine right of kings and argued for the king’s unitary power against Parliament. He also condemned sexual ‘‘immorality’’ and homosexuality in

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1603: In London, the Black Plague is responsible for over thirty thousand deaths. Today: While the AIDS epidemic in England, Western Europe, and the United States may not be as virulent as it was twenty years ago, and the disease is often managed with medication, it still is an epidemic and has the characteristics of a plague on the African continent.



1603: King James I and ecclesiastical leaders condemn sexual immorality, and especially homosexuality, and homosexuals are executed. Today: There has been a great reduction among the mass of people, and inside many religious denominations, in the condemnation of homosexuality and the vilification of gay people. Strict laws punishing homosexuality have been rescinded in many countries, and some legal protections have been granted to gay people and to same-sex unions. Still, there remains a strong condemnatory

particular. He was known to be an intellectual and, despite his belief in his absolute power, he was also known for shunning great public displays. Although raised a Protestant and governing as a Protestant, James, who was also King James VI of Scotland, was born of a Catholic mother, Mary I, Queen of Scots. Queen Elizabeth had had Mary, who was her first cousin, executed in 1587 for plotting to overthrow her.

The Plague References are made in Measure for Measure to the negative effects of a plague on Mistress Overdone’s business. In 1603, the bubonic plague, also called the Black Death, was responsible for the deaths of over 30,000 people in London alone. (Measure for Measure was written in 1604.) During the time of the plague, the London theaters were forced to be closed to stop the spread of this virulent disease. The plague

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current among national leaders, large segments of the population, and high-ranking religious leaders against homosexuality; and in some countries, homosexuality remains a punishable offense. 

1603: In a debate between Angelo and Escalus (act 2, scene 1), Shakespeare focuses on the problem of which kind of law is more effective and just, severe punishment or merciful restraint in punishment. Today: The argument is hardly resolved. Advocates of draconian punishment, harsh sentences and the death penalty argue that ‘‘being tough’’ works and makes people ‘‘think twice’’ before committing an offense. Advocates of less harsh measures want punishment to incorporate rehabilitation, offenders to be given a sense of their own humanity, and argue that there are social causes for criminal behavior and that root social problems must be addressed.

first struck Europe in the 1340s, having begun in south-western Asia; some seventy-five million people are reported to have died from it, worldwide, at that time. From then on, until the 1770s, the plague recurred at irregular intervals throughout Europe. A year after Shakespeare’s death, in 1617, there was an epidemic of smallpox (another disease caused by a virus), and then the Black Death returned to London in 1625, killing somewhere in the range of 60,000 people. In 1636, it took another 10,000 souls in London, and in 1641, some thirty thousand more. But the plague was not confined to London. Throughout many of the years between its attacks in London, during the seventeenth century, it raged in places as distant from London and from each other as Venice, Holland, France, and Egypt, killing people in the millions. The cause of the plague was a bacteria that is believed to have been transferred from rats to humans by fleas bearing the illness.

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These fleas lived on rats, which also carried the disease far and wide as they rode with trade goods on merchants ships. It was presumed that the rats were the culprits, as they were visible, whereas fleas were not as noticeable. The spread of disease by germs was not understood at that time. It was not until the 1890s that scientists discovered the bacteria responsible and traced the spread of the plague to fleas that lived on infected rats.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW In 1922, Sir Arthur Quiller–Couch, in the preface to his edition of Measure for Measure, asked, ‘‘What is wrong with this play?’’ summing up a centuries–old attitude. In 1765, in his ‘‘Prefaces to Shakespeare,’’ Dr. Johnson declared that ‘‘[t]here is perhaps not one of Shakespeare’s plays more darkened than this by the peculiarities of its Author.’’ He wrote that ‘‘the light or comick part is very natural and pleasing, but the graver scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have more labour than elegance.’’ And ‘‘the plot,’’ he wrote, was ‘‘rather intricate than artful.’’ In 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his Lectures and Notes on Shakspere that Measure for Measure was a ‘‘hateful work, although Shakspere’s throughout,’’ that it was ‘‘painful’’ because ‘‘the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of justice—(for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of); but it is likewise degrading to the character of woman.’’ The year before, in 1817, in Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, William Hazlitt gave a more thorough account than Coleridge of what many throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries would continue to find unsettling about Measure for Measure. Granting that the play is ‘‘full of genius as it is of wisdom,’’ Hazlitt found, ‘‘[y]et there is an original sin in the nature of the subject, which prevents us from taking a cordial interest in it. . . . our sympathies are repulsed and defeated in all directions.’’ There is something repulsive in ‘‘Isabella’s rigid chastity.’’ The duke ‘‘is more absorbed in his own plots and gravity than anxious for the welfare of the state.’’ Claudio’s transgression is of a nature, despite his amiability, ‘‘which almost preclude[s] the wish for his deliverance. Mariana is also

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in love with Angelo, whom we hate.’’ And the ‘‘principle of repugnance seems to have reached its height in the character of . . . Barnardine.’’ Twentieth-century critical responses to nineteenth-century subjectivity tried to explain away the difficulties which offended critics, who had objected to the licentious aspects of the play and to what was considered its too liberal acts of forgiveness. Critics also felt called upon to defend the play against the sort of repugnance Hazlitt expressed for the rigidity of its presentation of virtue, as represented by Isabella and Angelo. Angelo’s failing, critics like George L. Geckle have asserted, is not his austere puritanism but a combination of faults. He is ‘‘a man sadly lacking in self-knowledge’’ who is guilty of an ‘‘assault against ‘sacred chastity’’’ and of breaking a ‘‘promise to Isabella to spare Claudio’s life in return for her favors.’’ In place of subjective readings, twentiethcentury critics marshaled historical, religious, and philosophical scholarship in hopes of understanding the play by understanding its historical, religious, and philosophical contexts. Often the play was seen as an allegory. In 1931, W. W. Lawrence, in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies argued that ‘‘The duke in Measure for Measure combines the functions both of State and Church in his person. As Duke, he is supreme ruler . . . as Friar, he represents the wisdom and adroitness of the Church . . . advising stratagems so that good may come out of evil.’’ In his essay ‘‘Theological Exegesis’’ (1966), however, David Stevenson argued the ideologically imposed interpretations of Christian critics: ‘‘ . . . all attempts to make Measure for Measure into an analogue of religious doctrine, or into some kind of religious allegory or parable, heavily restrict and contain its inferential power and thereby diminish its ability to communicate.’’ Stevenson’s book marks a return by writers on Measure for Measure to character analysis and structural analysis, to consideration of how characters represent human beings and confront human problems and how the parts of a play interact with each other to form a central set of meanings. Rather than seeing characters representing particular humors, aspects, or ideas, Stevenson sees them as complex persons with living, conflicting characteristics, faults, virtues, confusions, and vacillations. In 1972, in ‘‘Theatrical ‘Trompe L’Oeil’ in Measure for Measure,’’ Jocelyn Powell argues that ‘‘the variety of the play’s structure is held

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together by a pattern of images which move between word and action.’’ In ‘‘Isabella’s Choice,’’ (1994), Karl F. Zender considers Measure for Measure in terms of the interplay of Isabella’s character and the genre of Romanic Comedy, weighing the effect each has on the other, and arguing that Measure for Measure is the culmination of Shakespeare’s attempts to write in that genre. He sees Isabella as a transitional figure who tends towards such tragic figures as Cordelia, in King Lear, who, he argues, openly asserts female independence over male authority. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1998, Harold Bloom offers a reading of Measure for Measure that can appeal to lay readers by concentrating on the complexities and contradictions of the characters themselves as persons with the same depths as actual human beings. The return to humanist criticism, did not, however, preclude a return to historical and contextual criticism. Rather than the early and midtwentieth-century focus on conforming the figures in the play to ideas and beliefs found in the Renaissance, the new historical readings attempt to see how historical influences affected the way Shakespeare used historical events and beliefs to think about history and character. Rather than making Measure for Measure conform to Jacobean or Christian doctrine, Stephen Cohen, in ‘‘From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and Formal Conflict in Measure for Measure,’’ for example, argues that the play represents, and comments upon, the transition from the rule of the virgin queen, Elizabeth, to the patriarchal King James, who represented himself as divinely appointed. Also focusing on the historical context, Maurice Hunt, in ‘‘Being Precise in Measure for Measure, ‘‘considers the connotations of the word ‘‘precise’’ during the years preceding the composition of Measure for Measure—its positive, its negative, and its puritanical echoes, and the meanings constituted by its various uses in the play, as well as how the varying use of the word reflects on the characters who use it or about whom it is used.

CRITICISM Neil Heims In the following essay, Heims argues that the ambiguity of the central conflict of Measure for Measure pervades the play’s action and characterizations.

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AMBIGUITY GIVES CREATIVE LICENSE TO DIRECTORS, ACTORS, AND READERS. THEY BECOME COLLABORATORS WITH THE AUTHOR IN THE CREATION OF THE PLAY.’’

The text of a play is like the score of a symphony. It exists as a blueprint. It comes to life when performers construct it. Both musical scores and texts of plays, of course, can be read by those who know how to read them. And, there have always been and still are people who argue that their own reading, in the study, is more satisfying than any actual performance. But readers, whether of scores or scripts, are actually mounting productions in their heads and making interpretive choices regarding how to see and how to hear the scripts or scores which they are reading as surely as actors or musicians are when they prepare to present them. Most people, however, prefer or, more especially in the case of music—since a great majority of us are barely literate when it comes to reading music—need to have performers construct the work for them. The work that performers do in realizing a script or a score is primarily interpretive. How ought this phrase to sound? At what tempo ought that passage to be played? How ought the actor’s voice to be inflected? Ought a particular scene to be played for its comic potential, or ought some, perhaps underlying, sinister element to be emphasized? How does actor A respond as actor B is speaking? In a musical score, there are the composer’s markings directing the players to play loud or soft, slow or fast, to accelerate or to play with feeling, but not always. Scores by Johann Sebastian Bach often do not even indicate which instrument or instruments ought to be used. Play scripts, too, have markings called stage directions. But not always! Shakespeare’s plays, as they have been passed down to us, have hardly any. If one looks at the beginning of a play by George Bernard Shaw, for example, before there is a line of dialogue there may be pages of directions in italic type describing in intricate detail the stage set, the characters, the

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Stephen Kennedy as Claudio and Penny Layden as Juliet, in Act 1, scene ii at the Swan Theatre, 1998 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

weather outside. So with most modern plays! These directions help directors and performers in their production of the play, just as they help readers. But they can also constrain and restrict, narrowly specifying voice tones, emotional attitudes, and physical gestures. In the plays of Shakespeare, there are hardly any stage directions. (In Measure for Measure there are almost none; a quick leafing through the text will show that the few there are, are nearly all in brackets: they have been introduced by an editor.) The absence of stage directions allows directors and performers and readers a freedom that heavily annotated scripts do not, unless, of course, one chooses to ignore or defy the author’s indicated intentions. Absence of annotation also forces the script of the play to carry a great degree of ambiguity. Is the speaker open, guarded, sly, ironic, distracted? Ambiguity gives creative license to directors, actors, and readers. They become collaborators with the author in the creation of the play. But with license comes responsibility, the responsibility to make sense of the play as a coherent whole,

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to bring its characters to life, to decide how they say what they say and what they are doing as they are saying it. There often are some indications in the words themselves, but not always, and seldom definitively. Measure for Measure offers particular challenges to those who would mount the play, whether in their minds or on the stage. It is a play full of ambiguities with regard to the ideas, possible beliefs, and conflicts it presents; is full of ambiguities with regard to the motivations of its characters, and even with regard to what they do or how they behave. When a character speaks, the interpreter of that character, whether reader or actor, has at least some sense of what the character thinks and feels and what he or she is doing. Claudio, for example, when he first appears, is being led to prison. His exchanges, first with the Provost and then with Lucio, convey a great deal about him beside the essential fact that he has made love with his contracted fiance´e before the final marriage ceremony and she has become pregnant. But much of what is conveyed about him, regarding the person he is, is not fixed and

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definitive. Here is the dialogue between Claudio and the Provost: CLAUDIO: Fellow, why dost thou show me thus to th‘ world? Bear me to prison, where I am committed. PROVOST: I do it not in evil disposition, But from Lord Angelo by special charge. CLAUDIO: Thus can the demigod Authority Make us pay down for our offence by weight. The words of heaven: on whom it will, it will; On whom it will not, so. Yet still ’tis just. Much is revealed in these mere eight lines, but what, exactly? How ought Claudio’s first words to be read or spoken: with an emphasis on Claudio’s anger at being put on display as a criminal, or on his shame at being shown, or how much of each if a blending of both? Is he pleading or demanding or defiant when he says ‘‘Bear me to prison.’’? As for the Provost, when he responds, is he defensive, or compassionate, or simply indifferent? And when Claudio meditates on his situation and the power that has him in its grip, what exactly is his attitude? When he concludes, ‘‘Yet still ’tis just,’’ does he really mean that? Does he accept the fact that the act which he committed is and ought to be an offense to the law and deserves the punishment of death? (His sister does.) Or is he speaking with bitter irony, suggesting something like, ‘‘that’s what is taken for justice; that sort of abusive treatment is called just.’’ Both readings are possible, but each makes a very different man. They are varying interpretations, differing stances that a reader, actor, or director may take towards the outlook of the play. And it begs the question to think that there is one proper interpretation of Claudio’s speech which can be ascertained from a reading of the whole play, for nearly every line can be read in such a variety of ways as to validate any number of interpretations of other lines. When Claudio responds to Lucio’s question, ‘‘Whence comes this restraint?’’ by saying ‘‘From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty,’’ is he speaking like a well–chastened choir–boy or is he bitter and ironic, or has he resigned himself to the strange and risky fluctuations and interactions of our biological and social economies? An example of a perhaps even more ambiguous situation comes when the duke counsels Claudio, beginning at act 3, scene 1, line 5 to ‘‘Be absolute for death.’’ Is this speech to be read

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or recited as a sermon, as if it were an infusion of real truth, easily extractable from its context in the play and ready for framing and posting on the wall? Is the audience supposed to accept the contempt for life the duke is counseling or hear it with a great degree of suspicion? Both are perfectly reasonable responses, and both can find authorization from human experience. Both, like John Milton’s paired poems, L’Allegro and Il Pensoroso reflect authentic, even if opposing, human attitudes towards life. Perhaps a less ambiguous moment comes in Isabella’s outburst against Claudio beginning at line 136 of act 3, scene 1, after he has shown himself less than absolute for death. He wonders if her sacrifice of virginity in order to save his life would really taint her with an eternally damning stain. She rages, calls him ‘‘beast,’’ ‘‘faithless coward,’’ and ‘‘dishonest wretch.’’ She wonders if their mother had not cheated on her father when she conceived Claudio. She wishes death upon him and says she will pray for it. Isabella seems to be drawn unambiguously here. Still, a good actress can imbue her rage with a range of motivations which can bleed into and shape her performance. Is she moved by Christian anger? Or does his desire for life stir a similar desire, deeply repressed and unacknowledged, in her, and therefore provoke her to fury? And what of the audience? Accepting, for example, that this speech reveals Isabella’s true Christian belief, and even assuming (although there is no warrant to do so and doing so would make for slipshod reading, in any event) that Shakespeare believed it, too, response to her will vary according to the reader’s or the spectator’s own evaluation of and attitude toward that belief. What for some may appear righteous saintliness may to others appear vile and ghastly. In addition, how then is this Isabella to be reconciled with the Nancy– Drew–like figure of act 4, scene 1, who eagerly lays out for the duke the midnight route to Angelo’s garden and explains which key fits which door’s keyhole? These problems of interpretation are challenging. But far more challenging is the problem of staging, in the mind or in the theater, what happens, what meaning is to be derived, when a character says nothing, as Isabella, Angelo, and Claudio all do for the last hundred or so lines of Measure for Measure. Then, interpreters must impose upon those characters an understanding

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of them entirely unguided by any present utterance. For a reader, because it is the nature of reading to focus only on what is being read, and for what is not being read to fade into the background of consciousness, the problem of what to do with the silence of these characters is not as pronounced as it is for a director who has actual actors on a stage, in view of the audience, who must, even if silent, remain in character and actively participate, somehow, in the scene. After Isabella completes her plea for Angelo, at line 453 of the act 5, arguing that Angelo’s ‘‘act did not o’ertake his bad intent, / And must be buried but as an intent / That perished by the way. Thoughts are no subjects,[to law] / Intents but merely thoughts,’’ she remains silent. When Claudio is brought on and shown to be alive, the duke says, ‘‘If he be like your brother, for his sake / Is he pardoned.’’ This ought to be a climactic moment in the play. But as far as the script is concerned, it is not. Not one word do brother and sister say to each other, nor to anyone else. Nor are there any stage directions which indicate their responses. Presumably they embrace, but maybe not. No matter, it is not a moment for any lingering reaction or emotion. Before the line in which ‘‘Is he pardoned’’ appears is ended, at the caesura, the break in the middle of the line, the duke shifts the focus, seemingly onto Isabella, but actually onto himself: ‘‘and for your lovely sake,’’ he continues, ‘‘Give me your hand, and say you will be mine.’’ To this second startling event, as momentous as her brother’s re-emergence from apparent death, Isabella, once again, says nothing. Nor is there a stage direction indicating what her response is. Perhaps she does, perhaps she does not extend her hand. Presumably, for that is what happens conventionally, Isabella is overcome with happiness at the proposal of her Duke Charming. All the writers who see the play as a Christian allegory assume they marry. Bertrand Evans, in ‘‘Like Power Divine: Measure for Measure suggests Isabella is ‘‘speechless at the sensation of blood flowing in her veins.’’ But, really, there is no textual indication that this is or ought to be the case, nor any reason to assume that Shakespeare is writing conventionally. The sacrifice of her own self-interest or desire for vengeance which led her to kneel for Angelo’s pardon might well suggest that she is even more prepared for the self-abnegation of the life in the Franciscan

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Sisterhood which first she sought. Her silence may even remind us that she was entering the cloister to find and practice silence. But there is no time to consider this, either. The duke continues unfolding his plot. The duke concludes his marriage proposal decorously adding that now, Claudio ‘‘is my brother too,’’ and adds—why? because he sees no enthusiastic reaction on Isabella’s part? or because he thinks that the public space they are in is not the proper place for the overflow of the joy he sees on her face?— ‘‘but fitter time for that.’’ Turning his attention and ours to Angelo, then, the duke does give a kind of stage direction in his speech. ‘‘By this Lord Angelo perceives he’s safe,’’ the duke says: ‘‘I see a quick‘ning in his eye.’’ But Angelo, like Isabella, now says nothing. And the description of him is only the duke’s response—not an omniscient stage direction—perhaps even only what he wishes to see. Angelo’s last words had not indicated a great softening in his icy righteousness or a desire for safety. Directly before Isabella’s intervention, Angelo had professed himself penitent, but added, ‘‘I crave death more willingly than mercy; / ’Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it.’’ If he is sincere, he is perfectly in accord with the self he was at the start of the play. And if this is merely rhetoric, he also is. For he has been both a righteous man and a hypocrite. The conclusion of Measure for Measure is not definite. It is not the unambiguously happy resolution that Puck suggests in the little rhyme ending act 3, scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream where ‘‘Jack shall have Jill’’ and ‘‘Nought shall go ill.’’ The only coupling that approaches Puck’s ideal is Claudio and Julietta’s, but their love is not the matter of the play, only the instrument that sets the central human and philosophical conflicts in motion. That the young lovers remain in the background at the conclusion is of no consequence. In the script, it is not clear how Angelo feels about his restoration to the world, and there is no direct indication of how he feels about Mariana or marriage to her. And Isabella seems ironically to have found that she may exercise her silence in marriage rather than in a convent, ‘‘if’’ she accepts the duke’s proposal, an ‘‘if’’ which remains unanswered when the play ends. As for the duke, may it be in her thoughts that by saving her brother’s life, he hoped to gain possession of what Angelo sought to have, Isabella herself, and by the same strategy?

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Source: Neil Heims, Critical Essay on Measure for Measure, in Shakespeare For Students, Second Edition, Thomson Gale, 2007.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Allan Bloom

‘‘Abu Hassan, or The Sleeper Awakened,’’, in The Arabian Nights (850 C . E .), is one of the tales in which the caliph Haroon al Rashid goes among his people disguised as a common man. In this tale, the caliph tricks Abu Hassan into believing that he himself is the caliph.  The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal’s 1839 novel of romance and political intrigue set principally in the court of Parma after the fall of Napoleon, introduces a sexual–political conflict when the Duchess Sanseverina consents to yield herself to the Prince of Parma for the sake of her beloved nephew’s safety. 



In Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, the principal character, who actually is unaware of his true identity, counterfeits an identity different from the one he thinks is his. This most well-known play by Wilde was written in 1894, was first produced in 1895, but did not appear in print until 1899.



Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic American novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850) pits the forces of Puritanism against the forces of desire and has as its focus a minister tormented by a sexual lapse that he simultaneously struggles to conceal and to confess.

Indeed, when the duke proposes marriage to Isabella a second time—does that indicate that she failed to respond to his first offer?—in the couplet preceding the final couplet, there seems to be some significance resonant in the fact that instead of echoing something like Puck’s pastoral ditty, he somewhat recalls Angelo with the suggestive turn embedded in his risque´ rhyme: . . . if you’ll a willing ear incline, What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.

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In the following essay, Bloom examines the sexual mores on display in Measure for Measure. Specifically, the critic analyzes Duke Vincentio’s efforts to restore the laws governing sexual conduct in Vienna, which Shakespeare portrays as ‘‘a sexual mess.’’ The duke’s decision to disguise himself as a priest while studying the city’s habits ultimately leads to his reinforcement of the institution of marriage. Bloom contends that the play treat marriage as somewhat unnatural but nevertheless politically important. Measure for Measure is another play that is dominated by a priest’s plot, but, unlike the plot in Romeo and Juliet, this equally contrived solution to a problem works. The happy result makes us laugh. The solution to sexual problems is comic both because it is so improbable and because coping reasonably with these desires somehow makes them look ridiculous. Perhaps the plot works because the priest is not really a priest but a genuine political ruler who uses the cloak of religion to hide himself and his designs. Political wisdom seems to require some such religious coloring in order to make itself acceptable to the unwise subjects. Certainly this false friar escapes the law’s narrow concentration on men’s deeds by using the Church’s capacity to get inside men’s thoughts. The explicit intention of Duke Vincentio’s ruse is to restore the force of law, which has for either fourteen or nineteen years been allowed to fall into desuetude. The laws in question are perhaps the most decisive of laws, those concerning sexual conduct. They appear to be the most necessary and the harshest, those that go most against nature’s grain. Precisely why the Duke has neglected to enforce the laws is difficult to understand. Either he was, like Prospero, too involved with his own thought to pay attention to the unpleasant business of governing, as Escalus suggests, or, as a bachelor, he himself profited from the laxness in the city. There is a hint of this latter interpretation when Friar Thomas takes the Duke’s petition for haven to be a request to carry on an affair in his monastic abode (I.iii.1–6). This immediate supposition on Friar Thomas’ part would seem to be based on prior experience. And as we shall see, the Duke is

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THE PUNISHMENT OF ANGELO IS RENDERED MORE MORAL THAN WAS REMIRRO’S, BECAUSE ANGELO IS ACTUALLY DISLOYAL TO HIS MASTER, WHEREAS REMIRRO WAS NOT.’’

too honest a man to be simply a hypocrite in condemning practices in which he participates. The Duke knows the legislator is beyond the law, but the law requires his conviction and support. There may be need for terror in order to put law in the seat usurped by lust, but the Duke respects nature and will not lend himself to the dishonesty required simply to deny it. The mercy that tempers the harshness of the newly reapplied law stems from the reflection that ‘‘there but for the grace of God go I,’’ that is, both you and I have the same desires and perhaps the same experiences as those who are condemned. The law that condemns erotic activity is made by erotic men. This leads to the heart of the play’s ambiguity. Vienna is the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Church, in both its purity and its corruption, is highly visible there. The Duke effects a kind of Reformation in Vienna, and the astounding fact of the play is that throughout it untamed sexual desire is accepted as a fact of life. Those who do not admit it are as much reformed as those who do. Vienna is a sexual mess. Bawdy houses are the accepted way to get sexual satisfaction. People talk of them as they do about food markets, and take it for granted that they can be no more easily suppressed than are the food markets, which are necessary. If the proprietors and clients of the bawdy houses, or, in general, all the loose individuals, are something less than admirable, they are either merely comic, which means harmless, or pleasant persons of good company. They are not like criminals who knew they were breaking the law and got caught; they are really surprised that there can be such laws and that they are to blame. Nobody, but nobody, is married in this town. There is no family, and marriage is not understood to be necessary for procreation. Natural children are hardly thought to be

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bastards, and the Christian’s insistence that a child not born in holy wedlock is a counterfeit has no weight in Vienna. Escalus, a remnant of the old regime, asks Pompey whether Mistress Overdone had more than one husband. He responds, ‘‘Nine, sir; Overdone by the last’’ (II.i.198–199). People once had fathers and mothers, but they are gone. The extreme expression of what is sexually wrong in Vienna is that there is a great deal of venereal disease, the result of promiscuity. The Duke apparently finds this situation intolerable. His response, as we shall see, is not ‘‘get thee to a nunnery,’’ in either sense. He wishes to reestablish the institution of marriage, which is a mode of sexual expression, although one constrained by law. He apparently is ready to do so because he is now at the point where he is himself willing to marry. It should not be forgotten that his plot culminates in his own marriage, which would have been impossible if the reform had not taken place. What appears to be an extremely severe reform turns out to be actually a gentle one, with license given even to the houses of ill fame for the sowing of wild, that is, unlawful, oats, on the condition that they be less open and be ashamed before respectable institutions. But getting a lot of people married is the central intention of this political deed. The naturalness of marriage is questioned by the action of the play while its political necessity is affirmed. The Duke’s withdrawal from Vienna is an assumption of a god-like behavior. He is an absent god for whom a human deputy acts. This deputy is watched by another branch of the god’s presence in absence, the Church and its priests. The Duke, disguised as a friar, spies out what the law would never see or take into account. This actually reveals a weakness in the written law itself and in its executors. The priest acts deceptively, dishonestly, and abuses the Church’s doctrines in order to attain his ends. His behavior is innocuous in Measure for Measure because the priest is actually the ruler. The supplement to the law provided by the Duke’s prudence, his exceptions of persons, and his privately gained knowledge of the inner life of souls would be requisite for full justice. However, its political institutionalization by means of the Church would be as fraught with difficulties as is the appointment of a deputy. Shakespeare, following [fifteenth-century author and political theorist Niccolo] Machiavelli as well as the whole classic tradition, is disapproving

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Flora Robson as Isabella in a 1933 production of Measure for Measure (Ó Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

of the rule of priests. In this case, however, the real ruler in the guise of priest is able to make Angelo, his deputy, assume that his position is

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invulnerable because nobody other than Isabella knows what he has done, whereas the false priest knows it all. Here the Duke’s disguise permits

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him to be omniscient, as is a god, and to manipulate and to mitigate the omnipotence of the political ruler. In extreme cases, such as the basic reform the Duke is effecting, what Machiavelli calls unusual modes are necessary and just. The Duke’s withdrawal and the appointment of an efficient and severe deputy to do the nasty business is a tactic Machiavelli applauds. He gives as an example for imitation Cesare Borgia’s appointment of Remirro de Orco as his deputy when he wanted to reduce the Romagna to peace and obedience. When de Orco had successfully completed the tasks given him by Cesare, the latter, because he knew that past rigors had generated some hatred for Remirro, to purge the spirits of that people and to gain them entirely to himself, . . . wished to show that if any cruelty had been committed, this had not come from him but from the harsh nature of his minister. And having seized this opportunity, he had him placed one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces, with a piece of wood and a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of this spectacle left the people at once satisfied and stupefied.

Shakespeare, in his sweeter way, actually imitates Machiavelli’s example with his play. The punishment of Angelo is rendered more moral than was Remirro’s, because Angelo is actually disloyal to his master, whereas Remirro was not. One gradually becomes aware that the Duke’s purpose is as much to humiliate Angelo as to punish fornicators. As a matter of fact, the person who most suffers punishment and humiliation in the play is Angelo, a strange way to go about restoring sexual morals. Rather than being cut in half, Angelo suffers an equally fearsome fate—he must marry. The populace is impressed by both the Duke’s harshness and his mercifulness. The Duke, on the one hand, acts like the Moral Majority in the sanctifying of the family. On the other, he acts like the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] in impugning the motives of the Moral Majority. He obviously thinks that neither is quite the right thing. The Duke tells Claudio, ‘‘Be absolute for death’’ (III.i.5), whereas the play is absolute for life. Aside from the hapless Claudio, the only person other than Angelo to suffer greatly in the play, in which such severe punishment threatens and in which executioners are so visible, is Isabella. And Isabella is also the only other person with high moral pretensions.

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Much of Measure for Measure’s message is conveyed when Pompey the pimp is appointed deputy executioner. This play illustrates the humanizing of the law by making sure that it is not made by beings who have never felt the human movements of soul and body. A godlike law applied to humans rather than angels results in a perversity that is worse than lechery. The Duke surely knows what Angelo is prior to appointing him and suggests to the more humane Escalus, more humane in that he remembers in his old age the desires he had when he was young, that he wants to see what Angelo will do. He also knew prior to the action of the play that Angelo had abandoned Mariana in spite of his pledges to her. Angelo is much worse than Claudio, who merely put off marriage until the dowry came through but remained faithful, if that is the word, to Juliet, whereas at the loss of the dowry, Angelo jilted Mariana. Still, he appears honestly tormented when he becomes attracted to Isabella. A sophistry of the heart could have allowed him to forget his bad behavior to Mariana, and there seems to have been no sexual relationship with her. There money seems to have been the theme. Whether the Duke could have counted on Isabella’s attracting the attention of Angelo or not, the Duke did expect some such abuse of power. It would seem likely that her brother, Claudio, the first and only real sufferer from the reawakened law, was pointed out to Angelo by the Duke. It is not necessary to assume that Angelo is a Tartuffe [the hypocritical priest in Jean Baptiste Moliere’s seventeenth-century play of the same title], self-consciously using his reputation for piety to gain access to women. What we see in the great scene with the lecherous Lucio, urging Isabella to heights of rhetoric, is the welling up in Angelo of an erotic attraction to the notion of corrupting virtue (II.ii.26–187). This is a perversity beyond any that might be attributed to the low persons in the play who have frank sexual attractions to good-looking persons or merely have a need for sexual release. There is a refinement in Angelo that sets his senses in motion in the presence of innocence and virginity. It is eroticism heightened and refined by its being forbidden. He confesses to himself that this is infinitely more attractive than natural sexual appeals. Angelo’s imperious need for Isabella is inconcievable without the attraction of its being a sin.

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The two encounters between Angelo and Isabella are the highlights of this play. He moves, in his own self-understanding, from god to sinner. Before our eyes we see the genesis of guilt. He wills and he does not will. Before, he thought that will and deed are identical in him. He elevates sexual desire into the realm of the forbidden, forbidden by his own standards and his position, and then hates himself for his sexual desire. He becomes disgusted by sexual desire in others, because he attributes to them the same criminality he finds in himself. This makes him into a criminal: he forces Isabella to have sexual intercourse with him and murders Claudio to cover up the rape. At least he thinks he commits these terrible deeds and is foiled only by the Duke’s manipulation of appearances. He begins as the cold instrument of the law and metamorphoses into the only malevolent person in the play. This means he delights in doing harm while struggling with his conscience. Sinning and repenting become a way of life for him. Presenting himself as the enforcer of law on fallen man, he actually reenacts the harshness of God at the fist Fall. Shakespeare has very little sympathy for this kind of moralistic sexuality. He has a particular need to humiliate men who make claims like Angelo’s. Henry V, in his typically cold fashion, uses the severe Chief Justice to punish the inhabitants of the Boar’s Head Inn, especially Falstaff, with whom he has spent his youth and for whom Shakespeare has a great deal of sympathy. He does so for the sake of public morals, as opposed to private satisfaction, now that he is king. He does so also to satisfy the puritanical passions that are rife among the people and which Shakespeare rightly saw would threaten civil peace. These were not the simple moral demands that frighten liberals so, but real puritanical passions of the sort that are today making parts of the Islamic world ungovernable. Something like this is what the Duke is after, though he accomplishes it much more nicely than does Hal. Not only does he wish to channel the sexual affections more or less into family attachments, but he also wants to fend off the threat of extreme reactions by Puritans, whose souls have been prepared for extremism by their religion. The sense of sin grafted on to sexual desire, not a thing to be found in Mistress Overdone’s house, accounts for the distortions of Angelo’s soul, and Shakespeare’s dislike of Puritans is subjected here to profound and fundamental analysis. [Nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche said, ‘‘Christianity gave Eros

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poison to drink. He did not die, but became vice.’’ Most of the others in the play are indulgent of dirty-minded but not perverse. It is imagination, not the body, which causes Angelo to be attracted to the conquest of purity. Source: Allan Bloom, ‘‘Measure for Measure’’, in Shakespeare on Love and Friendship, University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp. 59–64.

Linda Anderson In this excerpt from her study of the pervasiveness of revenge ‘‘as a useful social instrument in Shakespeare’s comedies,’’ Anderson reminds us that the duke temporarily leaves Vienna in Angelo’s hands not only to correct the city’s excessive vices but also to test Angelo’s ability to wield power fairly. Further, Anderson observes that as Isabella is forced to make decisions regarding her chastity, her brother’s life, and Angelo’s hypocrisy—and as the duke himself steps in to draw the play to a close—the concept of revenge is intermingled with the concepts of justice and mercy to the extent that the three become ‘‘almost indistinguishable’’ from one another. None of Shakespeare’s titles is more suggestive of revenge than Measure for Measure. Although the phrase itself may mean no more than strict justice, it recalls the Old Testament law often cited as vengeful: . . . thou shalt paye life for life, Eie for eie, tothe for tothe, hand for hand, fote for fote, Burning for burning, wonde for wonde, stripe for stripe.(Exod. 21:23–25) This is the spirit in which the Duke uses the phrase: The very mercy of the law cries out Most audible, even from his proper tongue, ‘‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!’’ Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure. (5.1.407–11) Yet the phrase itself is from quite another context: Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shal be judged, and with what measure ye mette, it shal be measured to you againe. (Matt. 7:1–2; see also Luke 6:37–38)

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the Duke has made it clear that he has no respect for a fugitive and cloistered virtue: ALTHOUGH MERCY IS CERTAINLY A THEME IN THE PLAY, IT IS NOT PRESENTED IN ISOLATION OR IN OPPOSITION TO JUSTICE OR REVENGE.’’

That the Duke in judging Angelo for judging Claudio should condemn him with a paraphrase of a biblical injunction condemning judging suggests a more complex irony than merely that ‘‘the ending of the play, then, really contradicts the title.’’ Although a traditional objection to the play is that Angelo escapes any real revenge, revenge is not absent from the play but is so intertwined with justice and mercy that what are elsewhere separate and even opposing qualities become, in Measure for Measure, almost indistinguishable. The standard reading of the play, based on the Duke’s explanation to Friar Thomas (1.3.19–43), is that Vincentio intends Angelo to (re)enforce the ‘‘strict statutes and most biting laws’’ of Vienna ‘‘to strike and gall’’ the citizens. But this is not what the Duke says to Angelo; rather, he links severity and leniency: Mortality and mercy in Vienna Live in thy tongue and heart. (1.1.44–45) Your scope is as mine own, So to enforce or qualify the laws As to your soul seems good. (1.1.64–66) Since the Duke does not tell Angelo to be severe, but tells Friar Thomas that this severity is his aim in temporarily abdicating, if we take his words at their face value we can only assume that his knowledge of Angelo’s character leads him to believe that Angelo will not err on the side of mercy. Although he is certainly correct in that belief, it has been asserted that the Duke fails to understand his deputy’s character and is thus responsible for Angelo’s actions. Not only does it seem rather harsh to condemn the Duke for accepting Angelo’s character as Angelo presents it, but such a reading ignores another of Vincentio’s purposes. In deputizing Angelo,

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Angelo: There is a kind of character in thy life, That to th’ observer doth thy history Fully unfold. Thyself and thy belongings Are not thine own so proper as to waste Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee. Heaven doth us as we with torches do, Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, ‘twere all alike As if we had them not. (1.1.26–35) Not only does the Duke wish to make use of Angelo’s virtue for the good of the state, he wishes to observe how Angelo’s professed character is affected by power: . . . Lord Angelo is precise; Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows; or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see If power change purpose: what our seemers be. (1.3.50–54) Angelo’s trial begins with his judgment on Claudio, who enters not merely arrested but exhibited publicly through the streets at Lord Angelo’s ‘‘special charge.’’ Claudio at first seems resigned to a just punishment for an admitted crime: Claudio: Thus can the demigod, Authority, Make us pay down for our offense by weight The words of heaven: on whom it will, it will; On whom it will not, so; yet still ‘tis just. Lucio: Why, how now, Claudio? whence comes this restraint? Claudio: From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty: As surfeit is the father of much fast, So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die. (1.2.119–30) But having explained the extenuating circumstances of his offense (1.2.145–55), Claudio’s tone changes. Although still admitting that he broke the law, he expresses feelings of persecution:

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And the new deputy now for the Duke— Whether it be the fault and glimpse of newness, Or whether that the body public be A horse whereon the governor doth ride, Who, newly in the seat, that it may know He can command, lets it straight feel the spur; Whether the tyranny be in his place, Or in his eminence that fills it up, I stagger in—but this new governor Awakes me all the enrolled penalties Which have, like unscour’d armor, hung by th’ wall So long that nineteen zodiacs have gone round And none of them been worn; and for a name Now puts the drowsy and neglected act Freshly on me—’tis surely for a name. (1.2.157–71) Our next glimpse of Angelo is likely to incline us to Claudio’s latter view. Angelo’s first argument in favor of executing Claudio is not that the punishment fits the crime but that the ultimate penalty is needed pour encourager les autres. When Escalus argues for mercy and suggests that in a similar situation Angelo himself might have acted similarly, Angelo rejects the argument (2.1.1–31). Not until later in the play does the irony of this rejection become clear: ‘‘Moreover—and it is one of the dramatist’s most subtle and original uses of parallelism—Claudio’s relation to Juliet had been almost of a piece with that of Angelo to Mariana. But where the one for worldly reasons left his already affianced bride in the lurch, the other with generous impetuosity had preferred disregard of an outward form to heartless desertion. Thus Claudio’s transgression is in itself most venial, and Angelo is the last man justified in visiting it with condign penalties’’ (Boas 1896, 362). Whether or not Angelo would equate his situation with Claudio’s, he calls down vengeance upon his own head if he ever commits Claudio’s offense: When I, that censure him, do so offend, Let mine own judgment pattern out my death, And nothing come in partial. (2.1.29–31) Our opinion of Angelo’s severity is influenced by that of the other characters who enforce

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the laws in Vienna. Not only does Escalus plead for and pity Claudio, but the Justice remarks that ‘‘Lord Angelo is severe’’ (2.1.282) and the Provost risks Angelo’s anger by questioning the order for execution (2.2.7–14) and comments to himself on Claudio’s state: Alas, He hath but as offended in a dream! All sects, all ages smack of this vice, and he To die for’t! (2.2.3–6) These characters serve to support the opinion that ‘‘Angelo (the name is patently ironical: he puns on it himself) is law or legalism, rather than justice. His hard, prim, precise ruling by the book is not felt to be just, because his rule makes all offences the same size; and to think of incontinence or fornication as if it were murder does violence to all normal human feelings’’ (Rossiter 1961, 121). In a minor key, however, Angelo’s severity triumphs over his legalism when he expresses his hope for punishment in the case against Pompey and Froth, which he does not bother to hear: I’ll take my leave, And leave you to the hearing of the cause, Hoping you’ll find good cause to whip them all.(2.1.135–37) Isabella, at first, seems to find it difficult to argue with Angelo. Admitting that Claudio’s offense is a vice that most I do abhor, And most desire should meet the blow of justice (2.2.29–30) she is easily swayed by Angelo’s statement that his function is to punish criminals; declaring it a ‘‘just, but severe law’’ (2.2.41), she would abandon Claudio to his fate, if it were not for Lucio. Her succeeding (though unsuccessful) arguments are rather an odd mixture. She first suggests that Angelo might pardon Claudio ‘‘and neither heaven nor man grieve at the mercy’’ (2.2.50); to this, Angelo replies that he will not. She then argues that mercy is the greatest ornament of authority, and that if their positions were reversed Angelo would have sinned as did Claudio, but Claudio would not have condemned him for it; Angelo asks her to leave. She then pleads as a Christian:

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Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. How would you be If He, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are? O, think on that, And mercy then will breathe within your lips, Like man new made. (2.2.73–79) Angelo replies that ‘‘It is the law, not I, condemn your brother’’ (2.2.80), and Isabella again shifts her ground, first requesting a reprieve and then asking ‘‘Who is it that hath died for this offense?’’ (2.2.88). Angelo responds that the reawakened law, enforced, will prevent future evils. When Isabella asks him to ‘‘show some pity’’ (2.2.99), he equates that quality with justice: I show it most of all when I show justice; For then I pity those I do not know, Which a dismiss’d offense would after gall, And do him right that, answering one foul wrong, Lives not to act another. (2.2.100–104) But Isabella replies to this with another equation, asserting that what Angelo calls justice is in fact tyranny (2.2.106–9, 110–23, 126–28, 130–31, 134–36), adding, Go to your bosom, Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know That’s like my brother’s fault. If it confess A natural guiltiness such as is his, Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue Against my brother’s life. (2.2.136–41) This argument now seems to affect Angelo, although he has already heard it from Escalus and rejected it (2.1.8–31). But we soon learn that it is not Isabella’s varied pleas that justice be tempered with mercy that have affected Angelo’s professed conviction that harsh justice for Claudio is mercy for Vienna. Angelo’s final speech in this scene reveals how her arguments have touched him: ‘‘Isabella has insisted that there is a natural, sexual man hidden below Angelo’s exterior of virtue. And at her bidding the sexual man steps forth with a ve[n]geance’’ (Stevenson 1966, 42). Realizing this, Angelo (in soliloquy) completely reverses his previous argument:

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O, let her brother live! Thieves for their robbery have authority When judges steal themselves. (2.2.174–76) Finally, he sounds the first note of vengeance in the play with his invocation of the tempter who seeks to avenge his fall on mankind: O cunning enemy, that to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook! (2.2.179–80) With these lines Angelo, the villain of the piece, reveals that he feels himself a victim of diabolical revenge. But since he attributes the revenge to his righteousness, it is difficult to feel much sympathy for him even before he begins plotting his crimes. At their second meeting, Angelo and Isabella continue to debate justice and mercy even though the subject of the argument has widened to include Isabella’s chastity as well as Claudio’s life. Isabella, however, is concerned now with divine justice, rather than the divine mercy she invoked in their previous argument, while Angelo concentrates on earthly concerns: Angelo: Which had you rather, that the most just law Now took your brother’s life, [or,] to redeem him, Give up your body to such sweet uncleanness As she that he hath stain’d? Isabella: Sir, believe this, I had rather give my body than my soul. Angelo: I talk not of your soul. . . . (2.4.52–57) Angelo insists that divine justice is earthly cruelty, that there might be ‘‘a charity in sin’’ (2.4.63), but Isabella insists on maintaining distinctions: Isabella: Better it were a brother died at once, Than that a sister, by redeeming him, Should die for ever. Angelo: Were not you then as cruel as the sentence That you have slander’d so? Isabella: Ignomy in ransom and free pardon Are of two houses; lawful mercy Is nothing kin to foul redemption. (2.4.106–13) Ultimately, their debate results in threats of revenge:

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Isabella: Ha? little honor to be much believ’d, And most pernicious purpose! Seeming, seeming! I will proclaim thee, Angelo, look for’t! Sign me a present pardon for my brother, Or with an outstretch’d throat I’ll tell the world aloud What man thou art. (2.4.149–54) Angelo: Redeem thy brother By yielding up thy body to my will, Or else he must not only die the death, But thy unkindness shall his death draw out To ling’ring sufferance. (2.4.163–67) While Angelo’s righteousness crumbles, we see the disguised Duke combining justice and mercy by trying Juliet’s repentance (2.3.21–36) and counseling Claudio to be absolute for a death that the Duke’s presence insures he will not suffer (3.1.5–41). Moreover, this presence, and in particular the Duke’s eavesdropping on Claudio and Isabella, may direct our opinion of her passionate outburst against her brother’s plea that she yield to Angelo. Various critics have found repugnant Isabella’s conviction that ‘‘more than our brother is our chastity’’ (2.4.185). But the Duke, our principal standard of ethics in the play, expresses no such repugnance; on the contrary, he describes Isabella as ‘‘having the truth of honor in her’’ and tells her ‘‘the hand that hath made you fair hath made you good’’ (3.1.164, 180–81). As for the possibility that she is affected by ‘‘her recoil from her rage at Claudio’’ (Stevenson 1966, 46), there is no evidence of it; not only has she previously threatened to expose Angelo, but before the Duke proposes his plot and assuming that Claudio will already have been executed, she tells Vincentio ‘‘But O, how much is the good Duke deceiv’d in Angelo! If ever he return, and I can speak to him, I will open my lips in vain, or discover his government’’ (3.1.191–94). If Isabella suffers any loss of innocence, it is due to the discovery of evil in Angelo and cowardice in Claudio; both discoveries make her justifiably angry, but they do not affect her virtue, which, as the Duke says, is bold (3.1.208). As for the ‘‘duplicity’’ of the plot, the Duke has answered the question before it was asked: ‘‘the doubleness of the benefit defends the deceit from reproof’’ (3.1.257–58).

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The deceit is particularly interesting for the multiplicity of purposes it serves, as the Duke suggests more than once (3.1.199–204, 251–55). It allows the Duke to provide justice for Mariana and Angelo, mercy for Claudio, and pleasure for himself, in addition to allowing Isabella revenge on Angelo by turning his own scheme against him. The rightness of the plot is reinforced by the various episodes in the remainder of act 3, in which we see the Duke act justly toward various transgressors. After attempting in vain to persuade Pompey of the error of his ways, he concludes Correction and instruction must both work Ere this rude beast will profit. (3.2.32–33) Similarly, he tries to dissuade Lucio from slandering the Duke and, failing that, challenges him to stand by his slanders when the Duke returns (3.2.116–57). Finally, he comments on Angelo and on his own plans: If his own life answer the straitness of his proceeding, it shall become him well; wherein if he chance to fail, he hath sentenc’d himself. (3.2.255–57)

Craft against vice I must apply. With Angelo to-night shall lie His old betrothed (but despised); So disguise shall by th’ disguised Pay with falsehood false exacting, And perform an old contracting. (3.2.277–82) The Duke’s use of craft is further justified when Angelo compounds his tyranny with treachery, refusing to pardon Claudio after all (4.2.120–26). Driven to further shifts to save Claudio, the Duke also tries to deal both justly and mercifully with ‘‘the magnificent and horrible Barnardine’’ (Rossiter 1961, 166), seeking to advise, comfort, and pray with him before his deserved execution (4.3.50–52). But being unwilling to damn Barnardine’s soul, he is compelled to spare him. But though Barnardine is spared, Isabella is not, for the Duke tells her that Claudio has been executed. His excuse for this cruel lie— But I will keep her ignorant of her good, To make her heavenly comforts of despair, When it is least expected (4.3.109–11)

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—is hardly convincing. A more likely explanation for such behavior from a character who throughout the play tests and interrogates others is that he is preparing to test Isabella. The actual test, however, will not take place until the last act. Although Isabella’s reaction to the news of her brother’s death—‘‘O, I will to him [Angelo], and pluck out his eyes!’’ (4.3.119)—is that of a stage revenger rather than a novice nun, it meets, in tenor if not in immediate action, with the Duke’s full approbation: If you can pace your wisdom In that good path that I would wish it go, And you shall have your bosom on this wretch, Grace of the Duke, revenges to your heart, And general honor. (4.3.132–36) Revenge is likewise on Angelo’s mind. Apprised of the Duke’s return and of his proclamation that citizens craving redress of injustice may petition him upon his arrival, he is forced to consider, although he rejects, the possibility that Isabella may avail herself of this opportunity. Further, he explains his reason for proceeding (as he thinks) with Claudio’s execution: He should have liv’d, Save that his riotous youth with dangerous sense Might in the times to come have ta’en revenge, By so receiving a dishonor’d life With ransom of such shame. (4.4.28–32) Just as the Duke administers to Isabella a physic That’s bitter to sweet end (4.6.7–8) so to Angelo he administers praise that will make the blame to come more bitter (5.1.4–8, 9–16). After Isabella has made her accusation, he twists the knife further, pretending to disbelieve what he knows—in intent, at least—to be true and expressing an opinion of Angelo’s character that—though popularly thought true—he knows to be false: By heaven, fond wretch, thou know’st not what thou speak’st, Or else thou art suborn’d against his honor In hateful practice. First, his integrity Stands without blemish; next, it imports no reason

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That with such vehemency he should pursue Faults proper to himself. If he had so offended, He would have weigh’d thy brother by himself, And not have cut him off. (5.1.105–12) The Duke’s behavior toward Angelo is compounded of justice, mercy, and revenge. It is just to make him suffer the mental anguish that he has inflicted on Claudio, Isabella, and Mariana. Like the criminals the Duke advised in his role as a friar, Angelo can receive mercy only after he has been made to feel true remorse. Finally, the entire plot against Angelo, with its disguises, accomplices, and presentation to him first of Isabella’s false charge (which he believes to be true) and Mariana’s true charge (which he believes to be false), is a classic revenge. Angelo is hoist with his own petard—caught doing what he condemned Claudio for doing, although he thought he was doing something much worse. Although the Duke is entrapping Angelo, and allowing Lucio to entrap himself, we can feel little sympathy for them because of their shameless persistence in their evil ways. Angelo, still believing he can bluff his way out of the case against him, calls down the law’s vengeance on his own head, even though he is perceptive enough to see that his secret is out and that several people are plotting against him: I did but smile till now. Now, good my lord, give me the scope of justice, My patience here is touch’d. I do perceive These poor informal women are no more But instruments of some more mightier member That sets them on. Let me have way, my lord, To find this practice out. (5.1.233–39) Similarly, Lucio attempts to cover his own guilt by slandering an innocent friar (and thereby, although he doesn’t know it, again slandering his prince). It is therefore appropriate that, urged on by Angelo, ‘‘when Lucio plucks off the Friar’s hood and discovers the Duke, the impudent buffoon also accomplishes his own exposure’’ (Oscar James Campbell 1943, 130)— and Angelo’s. Although both Angelo and Lucio recognize that they are caught, they react very differently to the knowledge. Lucio merely remarks ‘‘This

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may prove worse than hanging’’ (5.1.360), while Angelo begs to be punished: O my dread lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness, To think I can be undiscernible, When I perceive your Grace, like pow’r divine, Hath look’d upon my passes. Then, good Prince, No longer session hold upon my shame, But let my trial be mine own confession. Immediate sentence then, and sequent death, Is all the grace I beg. (5.1.366–74) The Duke, having given Mariana justice by marrying her to Angelo, seems willing to grant Angelo’s request for immediate execution, but he phrases the sentence in such a way as to reassure the audience that death will not be allowed to mar the ending of this comedy. ‘‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!’’ (5.1.409) would be strict justice; but in fact no death has occurred, and it would therefore be unjust to execute Angelo. As Isabella says, in another context: His act did not o’ertake his bad intent, And must be buried but as an intent That perish’d by the way. Thoughts are no subjects, Intents but merely thoughts. (5.1.451–54) But at this point in the play, neither Angelo nor Isabella knows that Claudio is still alive. In addition to drawing out Angelo’s punishment, the Duke seems to be testing Isabella’s reaction to her brother’s ‘‘murderer,’’ although he is subtle about it. When Mariana asks Isabella to join her in pleading for Angelo’s life, the Duke maintains that for her to do so would be so unnatural as to call down (or, in this case, up) supernatural vengeance: Against all sense you do importune her. Should she kneel down in mercy of this fact, Her brother’s ghost his paved bed would break, And take her hence in horror. (5.1.433–36) Isabella nevertheless does join Mariana in her pleading, but her charity changes nothing, since the Duke continues to uphold Angelo’s death sentence and Angelo himself professes to

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prefer death to mercy (5.1.455, 474–77). It is not until Claudio is revealed to be alive that the Duke pardons Angelo, and the ‘‘quickening’’ in the latter’s eye indicates, presumably, that he has resigned himself to life (5.1.494–95). Yet even as he forgives Angelo, Claudio, and Barnardine, the Duke declares I find an apt remission in myself; And yet here’s one in place I cannot pardon. (5.1.498–99) Since Lucio’s crime seems to us far less serious (and far more amusing) than Angelo’s, this statement and the Duke’s later speeches concerning Lucio have been taken by some critics as indications that Vincentio is vengeful rather than just in this case. In fact, however, the Duke behaves toward Lucio very much as he has toward Angelo, allowing him to suffer the apprehension of justice for his crimes and then extending mercy. Even the punishment that Lucio suffers is merely justice to the woman he has wronged. If the Duke is more vindictive in his threats to Lucio than in those to Angelo, it may be excused on a number of counts. Angelo has, up to the point of his ‘‘temptation’’ by Isabella (and excluding his treatment of Mariana), been reputed a righteous man; even his condemnation of Claudio, although harsh, is within the law. It is difficult to imagine Lucio being able to plead a previous good character, and his victim, the Duke, is apparently entirely innocent of the accusations Lucio makes against him. Angelo’s wicked designs remain merely ‘‘intents’’; Lucio, on the other hand, actually commits the crime of ‘‘slandering a prince.’’ Finally, Angelo professes remorse and craves punishment; Lucio makes excuses and seeks to avoid punishment. At the end of the play, there is hope that Angelo may truly reform; Lucio, like Barnardine, is forgiven because of the virtue of the Duke, not because he has deserved forgiveness or because we can even imagine him deserving it. The play as a whole, and particularly the ending, have provoked a variety of critical responses. Oscar James Campbell, who sees the play as a satire on hypocrisy—as embodied by Angelo—and libertinism—as embodied by Lucio—finds the ending false: ‘‘the play does not end as a satire should. Angelo is exposed but not ejected from the play with a final burst of derision. . . . Angelo deserves not a wife, but

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scornful ridicule’’ (1943, 125). If we assume that the ‘‘darker’’ aspects of the play do, in fact, indicate a satirical intention, this may be a valid criticism, but not every critic is willing to make such an assumption: ‘‘however much incidental gloom or bitterness may be there, the themes of mercy and forgiveness are sincerely and not ironically presented’’ (Tillyard 1950, 139). Knight takes an entirely different angle, viewing Angelo and Lucio as neither satiric figures nor objects of mercy but, in some degree, the heroes of the piece: ‘‘The punishment of both is this only: to know, and to be, themselves. This is both their punishment and at the same time their highest reward for their sufferings: self-knowledge being the supreme, perhaps the only, good’’ ([1930] 1949, 94–95). Finally, Chakravorty sees the play as a statement that mercy is superior to justice: ‘‘Punishment is the function of justice and belongs to the State which is an impersonal machinery; mercy or forgiveness, on the other hand, is the function of a superior ethic and belongs only to the individual’’ (1969, 259). None of these positions seems to me to be completely accurate. Measure for Measure does not appear to be any kind of sustained satire. Angelo is not, at least at the beginning, entirely without merit, and even Lucio behaves well in trying to help his friend Claudio and urging Isabella on against Angelo. Although there are elements of the puritan in Angelo and of the swaggerer in Lucio, neither character is merely a conventional type; they are too individual to be the straw men of satire. On the other hand, there is no direct evidence that either character attains self-knowledge, except insofar as Angelo learns that he is not proof against temptation; Lucio merely attains self-pity. Although mercy is certainly a theme in the play, it is not presented in isolation or in opposition to justice or revenge. Rather, what the Duke achieves at the end of the play is a balanced combination of these three qualities, in which malefactors are lured by the devices of the stage revenger into betraying themselves, threatened with the force of justice, and finally pardoned. Angelo and Lucio do not get off without suffering or without making at least some restitution; Isabella does not declare that she loves Angelo, nor the Duke that he loves Lucio. The Duke alone is able to extend mercy (though others can ask for it), but he does not do so by nullifying justice. Rather, by applying ‘‘craft against vice,’’ he takes revenge against

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wrongdoers, establishes justice for everyone, and at last extends a limited forgiveness to Angelo and Lucio not because they deserve it, but because his power, wisdom, and magnanimity allow him to be generous. Source: Linda Anderson, ‘‘Problem Comedies,’’ in A Kind of Wild Justice: Revenge in Shakespeare’s Comedies, University of Delaware Press, 1987, pp. 156–68.

Northrop Frye Frye uses the title of Measure for Measure to organize his essay around some fundamental components of the play: characterization, theme, and genre. He demonstrates, for example, how the play measures one character against another (such as Angelo versus Claudio) and one theme against another (such as justice versus mercy, or ‘‘a justice that includes equity and a justice that’s a narrow legalism’’). Frye also looks at the duke’s role as stage manager in the drama that occurs between Isabella, Angelo, and Mariana, and concludes by remarking on the ways in which Measure for Measure ‘‘proceeds upward’’ from potential tragedy to fulfill the requirements of comedy through marriage, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Most critics link the title of this play with a verse from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘‘Judge not, that ye be not judged: for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.’’ The phrase is a common one, and was used by Shakespeare in an earlier play, but the link with this quoted passage seems to be clearly there, and suggests that this play is concerned, like much of The Merchant of Venice, with the contrast between justice and mercy. Only it doesn’t talk about Christians and Jews; it talks about the contrast between large-minded and small-minded authority, between a justice that includes equity and a justice that’s a narrow legalism. The title also suggests the figure of the scales or balance that’s the traditional emblem of justice. The play seems to me very closely related to the late romances, and that’s why I’m dealing with it here, although it’s earlier than King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. The story used in the play has many variants, but the kernel of it is a situation where a woman comes to a judge to plead for the life of a man close to her, husband or brother, who’s been condemned to death. The judge tells her that he’ll spare the man’s life at the price of her

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I THINK SHAKESPEARE USES CONCEPTIONS TAKEN FROM THE IDEOLOGY OF HIS TIME INCIDENTALLY, AND THAT WE ALWAYS HAVE TO LOOK AT THE STRUCTURE OF THE STORY HE’S TELLING US, NOT AT WHAT GETS SAID ON THE WAY.’’

sexual surrender to him. In some versions she agrees and the judge double-crosses her, having the man executed anyway. She then appeals to a higher judge, king or emperor, who (in stories where it’s a husband she’d pleaded for) orders the judge to marry her and then has him executed. All these elements of the story are in Shakespeare’s play, but he’s redistributed them with his usual infallible instinct for what fits where. The versions closest to his play are a long (two-part), crowded, rather cumbersome play called Promos and Cassandra, by George Whetstone, which goes back to 1578, and a story in a collection by an Italian writer who used the name Cinthio, a collection that also seems to have provided, whether in the original or in a French translation, the source of Othello. Shakespeare used such collections of stories a good deal: one reason, and we’ll see in a moment why it is a reason, is that a lot of the stories are very close to being folk tales; in fact a lot of them are folk tales that the author has picked up somewhere and written out. This play, as most critics recognize, has three well-known folk-tale themes in it: the disguised ruler, the corrupt judge and the bed trick. If we look at the first of these themes, the disguised ruler, we run into a difficulty that’s central to this play. The Duke of Vienna, Vincentio, feels that his town is getting morally out of hand, especially in its sexual permissiveness, so he disappears, leaving a subordinate named Angelo to administer a law very strictly providing the death penalty for adultery. Our reactions to this may be very unfavourable to the Duke. Surely he’s being a coward when he runs away from his responsibilities, leaving someone else to administer an unpopular and perhaps sick law because he’s afraid of spoiling his nice-guy image (at least, that’s more or less

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the explanation he gives); he’s being incompetent in putting Angelo in charge instead of his more conscientious and humane colleague Escalus; and he’s a sneak to come back disguised as a friar to eavesdrop on the consequences of what he’s done. But whether our reactions are right or wrong, they clearly seem to be irrelevant to the play. Why are they irrelevant? We can see that Lear is being foolish when he abdicates, and our knowledge of that fact is highly relevant: what’s different here? I haven’t any answer to this right now, except to say that this is a different kind of play: I have first to explain what I think is going on. We saw in King Lear that when the king abdicates, his kingdom is plunged into a lower level of nature, and when Lear has reached the bottom of that, on the heath with the Fool and Poor Tom, he starts to acquire a new kind of relation to his kingdom, where he feels his affinity with the ‘‘poor naked wretches’’ he prays to. Because King Lear is a tragedy, this doesn’t get far before Lear is involved with other things, like madness and capture. In Measure for Measure what happens as a result of the Duke’s leaving the scene is not that we descend to a lower order of nature, but that we’re plunged into a lower level of law and social organization. The Elizabethans, like us, attached great importance to the principle in law called equity, the principle that takes account of certain human factors. Angelo is out simply to administer the law, or rather a law against fornication, according to legalistic rules. Authority is essential to society, but what we called in King Lear ‘‘transcendental’’ authority, with an executive ruler on top, depends on the ruler’s understanding of equity. If he hasn’t enough of such understanding, authority becomes a repressive legalism. Legalism of this sort really descends from what is called in the Bible the knowledge of good and evil. This was forbidden knowledge, because, as we’ll see, it’s not a genuine knowledge at all: it can’t even tell us anything about good and evil. This kind of knowledge came into the world along with the discovery of self-conscious sex, when Adam and Eve knew that they were naked, and the thing that repressive legalism ever since has been most anxious to repress is the sexual impulse. That’s why a law making fornication a capital offence is the only law the abdicating Duke seems to be interested in.

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for Measure, I suggested, deals with the same target of narrow-minded legalism, but without the very dubious attachments to assumed Christian and Jewish attitudes. What Jesus attacked in the Pharisees is as common in Christianity as it is anywhere else, and Angelo’s breakdown illustrates the fact that no one can observe the law perfectly. Portia’s point is repeated by Isabella when she says to Angelo: ‘‘Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once’’ (II.ii. 73).

Engraving from Galerie des Personnage de Shakespeare, 1844 (Ó Shakespeare Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan)

In the framework of assumptions of Shakespeare’s day, one was the doctrine in the New Testament that the law, as given in the Old Testament, was primarily a symbol of the spiritual life. The law in itself can’t make people virtuous or even better: It can only define the lawbreaker. You’re free of what Paul calls the bondage of the law when you absorb the law internally, as part of your nature rather than as a set of objective rules to be obeyed. Under the ‘‘law’’ man is already a criminal, condemned by his disobedience to God, so if God weren’t inclined to mercy, charity and equity as well as justice, nobody would get to heaven. This is what Portia tells Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock symbolizes the clinging to the ‘‘bond’’ of the literal law that was the generally accepted view of Judaism in England at the time. It’s a very skewed notion of Judaism, naturally, but there were no Jews legally in England then, and so no one to speak for another point of view. Measure

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I’ve often referred to the ideology of Shakespeare’s day, the set of assumptions his audience brought into the theatre with them. Every society has an ideology, and its literature reflects the fact. But I don’t think any culture is really founded on an ideology: I think people first of all make up stories, and then extract ideas and assumptions from them. The Christian ideology of Shakespeare’s day, as of ours, was a derivation from Christian mythology; that is, the story that Christianity is based on. Our word ‘‘myth’’ comes from the Greek mythos, meaning plot, story, narrative. The Christian myth, the complex of stories it tells, is, we said, structurally closest to comedy. Critics a hundred years ago said that Measure for Measure was a play in which Shakespeare was trying to discuss serious issues like prostitution and the theory of government, but couldn’t get far because of censorship and other obstacles. Of course he couldn’t have got far with such themes: the assumption is that he wanted to discuss them, and that’s an assumption I very much distrust. Other critics think the play is a kind of dramatic exposition of Christian doctrines and principles. I distrust the assumption in that even more. I think Shakespeare uses conceptions taken from the ideology of his time incidentally, and that we always have to look at the structure of the story he’s telling us, not at what gets said on the way. That is, as a dramatist, he reflects the priority of mythology to ideology that I’ve just spoken of. Further, he reflects it increasingly as he goes on. Because of this, his later plays are more primitive than the earlier ones, not, as we might expect, less so. They get closer all the time to folk tales and myths, because those are primitive stories: they don’t depend on logic, they don’t explain things and don’t give you room to react: you have to listen or read through to the end. That’s what brings Measure for Measure so close to the romances at the end of Shakespeare’s productive period, both in its action and in its mood.

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Well, it’s time we got to the second theme, the crooked judge. We saw from A Midsummer Night’s Dream how often a comedy begins with some kind of irrational law—irrational in the sense that it blocks up the main thrust of the comic story, which somehow manages to evade or ignore it. Usually such a law is set up to block the sexual desires of the hero and heroine, and sometimes it isn’t really a law, but simply the will of a crotchety parent who lays down his law. Sometimes, instead of the law, we start with a mood of deep gloom or melancholy, and that’s the main obstacle the comic action has to scramble over. Twelfth Night, for example, begins with Duke Orsino overcome with love melancholy— at least he thinks he is—and Olivia in deep mourning for a dead brother. These elements in comedy are those connected with the corrupt judge theme in Measure for Measure. The ugly law is scowling at us from the beginning, and Angelo’s temperament, in both his incorruptible and his later phases, ensures that there will be enough gloom.

therefore one of the people the newly enforced law is aimed at. The scene seems to be pure comic relief, but it establishes three important points. First, Angelo walks out on the proceedings before long and leaves Escalus to it: his speech on doing so ends with the line ‘‘Hoping you’ll have good cause to whip them all’’ (II.i. 136). Angelo despises the people before him so much that he can’t bother to listen to their meanderings. The phrase from the Sermon on the Mount, ‘‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’’ comes to mind. What it surely means, among other things, is: If you despise other people for their moral inferiority to yourself, your own superiority won’t last long; in fact, it’s effectively disappeared already. Second, even Escalus can hardly figure out who did what to whom, so we wonder about the ability of law ever to get hold of the right people, or understand what is really going on about anything. Third, while Claudio, who is a decent man, is going to be beheaded, Pompey, who at least is an avowed pimp (and incidentally quite proud of it), is let off with a warning.

Angelo, to do him justice (we can’t seem to get away from that word), expresses strong doubts about his fitness for the post. Nonetheless he’s put in charge of Vienna, ready to strike wherever sex rears its ugly head. He has a test case immediately: Claudio is betrothed to Julietta (I call her that for clarity), and betrothal in Shakespeare’s time could sometimes be a fully marital relation, complete with sexual intercourse. Claudio and Julietta have got together on this basis, but have failed to comply with all the provisions of the law about publicizing the marriage. So he’s guilty of adultery, and has to have his head cut off. Lucio, a man about town, is horrified by this, not because he’s a person of any depth of human feeling, but because he sees how enforcing such a law would interfere with his own sex life, which is spent in brothels. So he goes (at Claudio’s urging, it is true) to Claudio’s sister, Isabella, who is almost on the point of becoming a novice in an order of nuns, to get her to plead with Angelo for her brother’s life. Isabella is not very willing, but Lucio finally persuades her to visit Angelo, and accompanies her there.

We may notice another feature of the scenes with the bawds: very little is said about the relatively new and then terrifying disease of syphilis; it’s clearly in the background, but it stays in the background. ‘‘Thou art always figuring diseases in me,’’ says a fellow patron to Lucio, ‘‘but . . . I am sound’’ (I.ii. 49). That isn’t because Shakespeare felt reticent about the subject: if you think he did, take a look at the brothel scenes in Pericles. But to pull down houses of prostitution because of the danger of syphilis would give the law in this play a more rational motive than Shakespeare wants to assign to it. He’s no more out to justify the law than to attack it: he merely presents the kind of hold that such law has on society, in all its fumbling uncertainty and lack of direction.

Before this happens, though, there’s a broadly farcical scene in which a dimwitted constable named Elbow comes into the magistrate’s court presided over by Angelo and Escalus, with a charge against Pompey, who is a pimp and

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We’re ready now for the big scene with Angelo and Isabella. I’ve suggested to you that when you’re reading Shakespeare you might think of yourself as directing a performance, which includes choosing the kind of actors and actresses that seem right for their assigned parts. If I were casting Angelo, I’d look for an actor who could give the impression, not merely of someone morally very uptight, but possessing the kind of powerful sexual appeal that many uptight people have, as though they were leading a tiger on a leash. If I were casting Isabella, I’d want an actress who could suggest an attractive,

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intelligent, strongly opinionated girl of about seventeen or eighteen, who is practically drunk on the notion of becoming a nun, but who’s really possessed by adolescent introversion rather than spiritual vocation. That’s why she seems nearly asleep in the first half of the play. If the setting of the interview weren’t so sombre, with a man’s life depending on the outcome, the dialogue would be as riotously funny as the strange case of Elbow’s wife. Let’s resort to paraphrase. Isabella: ‘‘I understand you’re going to cut my brother’s head off.’’ Angelo: ‘‘Yes, that is the idea.’’ Isabella: ‘‘Well, I just thought I’d ask. I have to go now; I have a date with a prayer.’’ Lucio: ‘‘Hey, you can’t do that! Make a production of it; weep, scream, fall on your knees, make as big a fuss as you can!’’ So Angelo and Isabella start manoeuvring around each other like a couple of knights who are in such heavy plate armour that they can’t bend a joint. The effect is that of a sombre Jonsonian comedy of humours. The humours in this case are two forms of predictable virtue, in people paralyzed by moral rigidity. We’ve already heard Isabella telling a senior nun that she would like her convent to be as strict and rigid as possible; we’ve heard Angelo saying out of his shell of righteousness: ’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, Another thing to fall. Isabella goes into general maxims about the beauty of combining strength with gentleness, and Angelo, genuinely bewildered, says: ‘‘Why do you put these sayings on me?’’ (II.ii. 134). But something keeps them going; Isabella gets increasingly interested in her role, another meeting without Lucio is arranged, and eventually the serpent of Eden thrusts itself up between Justice in his black robes and Purity in her white robes, and tells them both that they’re naked. At least, I’m pretty sure that the serpent speaks to them both, although of course it doesn’t get through to Isabella’s consciousness. Her overt reaction, when she finally understands what Angelo is proposing, is simply horror and outrage. But I wonder if she isn’t suppressing the awareness that she’s much more attracted to Angelo than she would consciously think possible, and that in her gradual warming-up process Angelo has done more warming than Claudio. However that may be, she goes off to visit Claudio in the prison and tells him that he will

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now have to die, not to fulfil the demands of the law, but to save his sister’s honour, which naturally he will do with the greatest willingness. She’s utterly demoralized to discover that Claudio is very unwilling to die, and quite willing to have her go along with Angelo to preserve his life. To paraphrase once again: ‘‘But it’s my chastity,’’ screams Isabella. ‘‘Yes, but it’s my head,’’ says Claudio. Isabella then explodes in a furious tirade (in which, incidentally, a Freudian listener would hear a strong father fixation, even though the father does not exist in the play). She pours all the contempt on Claudio that her very considerable articulateness can formulate, tells him that the sooner he dies the better, and even that ‘‘I’ll pray a thousand prayers for thy death’’ (III.i. 145). She’s awakened out of all her dreams, and the world around her that her awakened eyes see is a prison. A real prison, not the dream prison she’d like her convent to be. So far the action has been fairly unrelieved tragedy for the major characters. The Duke has disappeared. The Friar, not generally known to be the Duke, is a prison chaplain, or seems to be functioning as one. His opening gambit as Friar doesn’t seem to have much promise: it’s a speech addressed to Claudio, telling him to ‘‘be absolute for death,’’ that he should welcome death because if he lives he may get a lot of uncomfortable diseases. It is doubtful that any young man was ever reconciled to immediate death by such arguments: certainly Claudio isn’t. The terror of death he expresses to Isabella, in the wonderful speech beginning ‘‘Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,’’ shows that the Friar’s consolations have left him untouched. Angelo has betrayed his trust; Claudio is about to die; Isabella’s dreams of a contemplative spiritual life, free of the corruptions of the world, are shattered forever. We notice that as we go on we feel less and less like condemning people, because of the steady increase of a sense of irony. We can’t condemn Claudio for his fear of what he feels to be, despite Isabella and the Friar, a totally undeserved death; we can’t condemn Isabella for turning shrewish when she feels betrayed by both Angelo and Claudio. As for Angelo, he now knows what it’s like to fall as well as to be tempted. As almost an incarnation of the knowledge of good and evil, he’s in a state of schizophrenic war with himself, the newly born impulse to evil determined on its satisfaction,

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the repudiated impulse to good despising, hating, and being miserably humiliated by its rival. This sense of a dramatic irony replacing an impulse to make moral judgments again points to the limitations of law, or at least of this kind of law. It was generally accepted in Shakespeare’s day that the writing of a play was a moral act, and that the cause of morality was best served by making virtue attractive and vice ugly. Whetstone’s play, mentioned earlier, says this in its preface, and Hamlet endorses the same view. No doubt Measure for Measure accomplishes this feat too in the long run, but in the meantime we wonder about the dramatic pictures of virtue and vice that we’ve had. Angelo is certainly not more likable as a hypocritical fraud than he was in his days of incorruptibility, but he seems somehow more accessible, even more understandable. Perhaps we can see, if we like, that what finally broke him down was not Isabella’s beauty, and not even his own powerfully repressed sexuality, but the combining of the two in a sadistic position of authority over a supplicating girl. But Isabella, in her invulnerable virtue, would not be anyone’s favourite heroine, and, at the other extreme, there’s Lucio, who retains something about him that’s obstinately likable, though he’s clearly a basket case morally, and Barnardine, whose vitality makes it pleasant that he gets away with his refusal to be beheaded. In any case, the action in the prison scene reaches a complete deadlock, with Claudio still begging Isabella to do something to help him, and Isabella telling him in effect, in every possible sense, to go to hell. Then the disguised Duke steps forward to speak to Isabella, and the rhythm abruptly switches from blank verse to prose (III.i. 150). This is the most clearly marked indication of structure, I think, that we’ve yet reached in any of the plays we’ve talked about. The play breaks in two here: the first half is the dismal ironic tragedy we’ve been summarizing, but from now on we’re in a different kind of play. One of the differences is that the Duke in disguise is producing and directing it, working out the plot, casting the characters, and arranging even such details as positioning and lighting. So it’s really a play within a play, except for its immense size, a half play that eventually swallows and digests the other half. Within the Duke’s own conventions,

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he’s playing with real-life people, like those nobles who used to play chess games using their own servants for pieces. In anything like a real-life situation, such a procedure would almost certainly meet with disaster very quickly, like Lear staging his love test. But in Measure for Measure, where we’re in the atmosphere of folk tale, our only reaction is to see what comes next. It’ll all work out just fine, so don’t you worry. The first element in this new play that the Duke produces is the story of Mariana, who provides a close parallel and contrast to the Claudio situation, and one which involves Angelo. Angelo had previously been engaged to a lady named Mariana, who still loves him, but the engagement fell through because the financial arrangements weren’t satisfactory. According to the way the law works things out, Angelo’s uncompleted engagement leaves him a person of the highest social eminence, whereas Claudio’s uncompleted betrothal leaves him a condemned criminal. So much for the kind of vision the knowledge of good and evil gives us: even if Angelo had remained as pure as the driven snow, the contrast in their fates would still be monstrous. The way the Duke proposes to resolve this situation is the device of the bed trick, where Isabella pretends to go along with Angelo’s proposal and assign a meeting, but substitutes Mariana in her place. It sounds like a very dubious scheme for a pious friar to talk a pious novice into, but something in Isabella seems to have accepted the fact that she’s in a new ball game, and that the convent has vanished from her horizon. I’ve talked about the affinity of this play with folk tales, and we can’t go far in the study of folk tale without coming across the figure of the trickster. The trickster may be simply mischievous or malicious, and may be associated with certain tricky animals, like the fox or the coyote. But in some religions the trickster figure is sublimated into a hidden force for good whose workings are mysterious but eventually reveal a deep benevolence. There are traces of this conception in Christianity, where a ‘‘providence’’ is spoken of that brings events about in unlikely and unexpected ways. I don’t want to labour the religious analogies, because they’re structural analogies only: if we try to make them more than that, they get very misleading. I think the Duke in this play is a trickster figure who is trying to turn a tragic situation into a comic

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one, and that this operation involves the regenerating of his society: that is, of course, the dramatic society, the cast of characters. A trickster, because, while tragedy normally rolls ahead to an inevitable crash, comedy usually keeps something hidden that’s produced when it’s time to reverse the movement. Let’s go back to King Lear and his abdication. I said that when he’s reached the bottom of his journey through nature, he discovers a new awareness of the ‘‘poor naked wretches’’ of his kingdom. He abdicates as ‘‘transcendental’’ ruler and takes on another identity in an ‘‘immanent’’ relation to his people, especially the suffering and exploited part of his people. As I said, this theme can’t be completed in a tragedy, but a comedy like Measure for Measure can take it a bit further. Duke Vincentio opens up, by leaving his place in society, a train of events headed for the bleakest and blackest tragedy. By his actions in disguise, he brings the main characters together in a new kind of social order, based on trust instead of threats. I’m not talking about the moral of the play, but about the action of the play, where something tragic gradually turns inside out into something comic. The trickster element in him comes out in the fact that his schemes involve a quite bewildering amount of lying, although he assures Isabella that there’s no real deception in what he does. He starts by telling Claudio privately, in the prison, that Angelo is only making trial of Isabella’s virtue. He gets Isabella to agree to the bed trick scheme, which necessitates lying on her part; Isbella is told the brutal lie that Claudio has been executed after all; he gives such strange and contradictory orders to Angelo and Escalus about his return that they wonder if he’s gone off his head; his treatment of that very decent official, the provost of the prison, would have a modern civil servant heading for the next town to find a less erratic boss. Whenever he remembers to talk like a friar, he sounds sanctimonious rather than saintly. We have only to put him beside Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet to see the difference between a merely professional piety and the real thing. There are two or three references in the play to frightening images that turn out to be harmless: an induglent father’s whip, a row of extracted teeth in a barber shop, and, on the other side, Angelo’s ‘‘We must not make a scarecrow of the law’’ (II.i. 1). In this play most of the

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major male characters are threatened with death in some form; the two women are threatened with the deaths of others. Yet in the long run nobody really gets hurt: even the condemned criminal Barnardine is set free, except that he has another friar attached to him. A pirate in the prison who died of natural causes has his head employed for some of the deceptions, that’s all. It’s an ancient doctrine in comic theory that one of the standard features of comedy is what’s called in Greek the basanos, which means both ordeal and touchstone: the unpleasant experience that’s a test of character. This seems to be why the Duke starts off with his ‘‘Be absolute for death’’ speech to Claudio in the prison. He doesn’t seriously expect Claudio to be reconciled to death by hearing it, but it leaves him with a vision of seriousness and responsibility for the whole of his life that will make him a proper husband for Julietta and ensure that he doesn’t drift off into being another Lucio. Sounds farfetched, but you won’t think that an objection by now. Angelo, of course, gets the bed trick deal, which is a popular device in literature. Shakespeare used it again in a comedy that’s usually thought of as a companion piece to this one, All’s Well that Ends Well. Even the Bible has such a story, when Jacob, who wanted and expected Rachel, woke up to find Leah in his bed instead. Jacob’s society being polygamous, he got them both in the long run, but in Shakespeare’s bed trick plays the device is used to hook a man to a woman he ought to be married to anyway. It’s one of the devices for the middle part of a comedy, the period of confused identity in which characters run around in the dark, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or the heroine puts on a boy’s clothes. One thing it represents in the two comedies where it occurs is the illusory nature of lust, in contrast to genuine love. Angelo’s lust tells him that he wants Isabella and doesn’t want Mariana, but in the dark any partner of female construction will do, and on that basis his wakened consciousness can distinguish between what he wants and what he thinks he wants. For Angelo the bed trick is the agent both of his condemnation and of his redemption. When his deceptions are uncovered in the final scene, he welcomes the death sentence as the only thing appropriate for him: he’s still a man of the law, even if his conception of law has matured. Mariana is the spark plug of the second half of the play: without her steady love for Angelo,

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no redeeming force could have got started. It nearly always happens in Shakespearean comedy that one of the female characters is responsible for the final resolution. Her importance, I think, is marked by the fact that when we meet her we hear a song, no less, and a very lovely song, in this grim clanking play. But of course Isabella is the Duke’s staged masterpiece. After being instructed how to act, she brings her accusation against Angelo, and there follows a great to-do about not believing her and a stretching of tension to the limit. Eventually Angelo is publicly humiliated, ordered to marry Mariana, and condemned to death immediately afterward. Mariana’s pleas for his life are rejected, so she turns to Isabella. Isabella’s speech corresponds dramatically to Portia’s speech on mercy in The Merchant of Venice, but the latter is a rhetorical set speech: Portia after all is a lawyer, or pretending to be one. Isabella’s speech is short, thoughtful, painfully improvised, as the rhythm shows, and full of obvious fallacies as a legal argument. She is also making it at a time when she believes that Angelo has swindled her and had her brother executed after all. The essential thing is that the woman who earlier had told her brother that she would pray a thousand prayers for his death is now pleading for the life of the man who, as she thinks, murdered him, besides attempting the most shameful treatment of herself. People can’t live continuously on that sort of level, but if one’s essential humanity can be made to speak, even once in one’s life, one has a centre to revolve around ever after. The Duke is so pleased that he announces that he is going to marry her, though later he speaks of proposing to her in a private conference. The final confrontation is with Lucio, and that one is perhaps the strangest of all. Lucio was the spark plug of the first half, as Mariana is of the second: without his efforts on Isabella, all the Duke’s schemes would, so far as we can see, have ended in nothing but a dead Claudio. Yet he is the only one of the Duke’s characters (apart from Barnardine, whose inner attitude is unknown to us) on whom the Duke’s benevolent trickery makes no impression whatever. The Duke transfers to him the penalty he assigned to Angelo: Lucio is to marry the whore he has made pregnant, then executed. The threats of whipping and hanging are ignored by Lucio, and he doesn’t seem to notice that they are

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remitted, but he protests strongly against the violation of his comfortable double standard. He seems to be possessed by a peculiarly shabby version of the knowledge of good and evil. What is ‘‘good,’’ or at any rate all right, is what other fashionable young men do. Slandering a prince is all right because it’s only the ‘‘trick,’’ the fashion; visiting whorehouses likewise. But of course the whores are ‘‘bad’’ women. And yet the final scene would be much poorer without him: he gets all the laughs, and the Duke’s rebukes of him are simply ineffective bluster. He represents in part the sense of vestigial realism that we still have, the part of ourselves that recognizes how unspeakably horrible such snooping and disguised Dukes would be in anything resembling actual life. His slanders are forgiven, perhaps because he was describing the kind of person he would admire more than he does the actual Duke. And while the bulk of what he says is nonsense, one phrase, ‘‘the old fantastical Duke of dark corners’’ (IV.iii. 156) is the most accurate description of him that the play affords. The title of the play is quoted by the Duke when he speaks of the retribution in the law: ‘‘An Angelo for a Claudio, life for life’’ (V.i. 407). This is the axiom of tragedy, especially revenge tragedy, with its assumption that two corpses are better than one. From there, the action proceeds upward from this ‘‘measure for measure’’ situation to the final scene with which Shakespearean comedy usually ends: the vision of a renewed and regenerated society, with forgiveness, reconciliation and the pursuit of happiness all over the place. Forgiveness and reconciliation come at the end of a comedy because they belong at the end of a comedy, not because Shakespeare ‘‘believed’’ in them. And so the play ends: it doesn’t discuss any issues, solve any problems, expound any theories or illustrate any doctrines. What it does is show us why comedies exist and why Shakespeare wrote so many of them. And writing comedies may be more valuable to us than all the other activities together, as we may come to realize after the hindsight of three or four hundred years. Source: Northrop Frye, ‘‘Measure for Measure,’’ in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, edited by Robert Sandler, Yale University Press, 1986, pp. 140–53.

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Shakespeare, William, Measure for Measure, edited by S. Nagarajan, Signet Classics, 1964.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ’’Measure for Measure’’ in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Riverhead Press, 1998.

———, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Wolfgang Clemen, Signet Classic, 1963, p. 96.

Cohen, Stephen, ‘‘From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and Formal Conflict in Measure for Measure,’’ in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Vol. 41, No. 4, Fall 1999, pp. 431–64.

Stevenson, David L., The Achievement of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Cornell University Press, 1966, pp. 65, 73, 111.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere, edited by T. Ashe, 1818.

Zender, Karl F., ‘‘Isabella’s Choice,’’ in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 1, Winter 1994, pp. 77–94.

Evans, Bertrand, ‘‘Like Power Divine: Measure for Measure,’’ in Shakespeare’s Comedies, Clarendon Press, p. 219. Geckle, George L., ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘‘Measure for Measure,’’ edited by George L. Geckle, Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 6, 9. Hazlitt, William, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, 1817. Hunt, Maurice, ‘‘Being Precise in Measure for Measure,’’ in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, Vol. 58, No. 4, Summer 2006, pp. 243–67. Johnson, Samuel, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 1765. Knight, G. Wilson, ‘‘Measure for Measure and the Gospels,’’ 1930, revised, 1949, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘‘Measure for Measure,’’ edited by George L. Geckle, Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp, 36, 49. Lawrence, W. W., ‘‘The Duke from Measure for Measure,’’ in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies, 1931, reprinted in Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘‘Measure for Measure,’’ edited by George L. Geckle, Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 103–104. Pope, Elizabeth M., ‘‘The Renaissance Background of Measure for Measure,’’ 1949, reprinted in Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘‘Measure for Measure,’’ edited by George L. Geckle, Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 50–72. Powell, Jocelyn, ‘‘Theatrical ‘Trompe L’Oeil’ in Measure for Measure,‘‘ in Shakespearean Comedy, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, Edward Arnold, 1972, p. 183. Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, and J. Dover Wilson, eds., Measure for Measure, in The Achievement of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, edited by David Lloyd Stevenson, Cornell University Press, 1966, p. 65.

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FURTHER READING Bennett, Josephine Waters, Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment, Columbia University Press, 1966. In the context of providing a close reading of the play and an analysis of its characters, Bennett discusses the resemblance of the duke to King James I, for whom the play was written, especially with regard to James’s love of diplomacy and manipulating actions from behind the scenes. Fly, Richard, ‘‘Ragozine’s Head,’’ in Shakespeare’s Mediated World, University of Massachusetts Press, 1976. Fly sees Shakespeare as having created in Measure for Measure a play which attempts a ‘‘valid harmonization of opposites’’ which remain, nevertheless, ‘‘unbridgeable differences.’’ McGinn, Colin, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays HarperCollins, 2006. McGinn attempts to discover Shakespeare’s philosophy by investigating the themes and philosophical ideas that can be found in the bard’ plays. Rosenbaum, Ron, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups Random House, 2006. Rosenblum provides a synopsis of the views of leading Shakespeare scholars and directors, and also discusses how an ‘‘authoritative’’ Shakespearean text is constructed.

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The Merchant of Venice 1596

The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–1597) ranks with Hamlet as one of William Shakespeare’s most frequently performed dramas. It is a puzzling play. Many critics debate if the play is antiSemitic in and of itself or if it is a play about antiSemitism. There are several lines in the play that are hard to listen to because of the hatred, the Christian and Jewish mistrust and dislike of one another, that is portrayed on both sides of the issue. The plot line, as well as the complexity of some of the major characters, draws producers and audiences alike to this drama. Rather than creating stock characters that are easily mocked, Shakespeare has positioned his characters so that empathy is aroused. His characters have flaws; but that is what makes them human. Although Antonio, the Christian shipping merchant whose flesh is at stake in this drama, is often referred to as the title character of the play, it is Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who is the source of much of the critical discussion. Some of Shylock’s speeches point out the same prejudices that were alive in Elizabethan times and are still alive today in any culture that creates stereotypes of a particular race or religion and then establishes laws that discriminate against them. This is one of the elements that makes this play not only controversial but timeless. The date that Shakespeare wrote this play is not certain. Scholars generally try to place it somewhere between 1596 and 1597, after Shakespeare

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wrote Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet, but before he wrote Hamlet. This play is said to have been based, in part, on Il PecoTone (1378), a collection of tales and anecdotes by the fourteenth-century Italian writer Giovanni Fiorentino. One of the stories in this Italian collection focuses on a rich heiress who is living at Belmont. She marries a man who has a friend who owes money to a Jewish man, who demands a pound of flesh in payment. The young woman saves the day in court. The plot is the backbone of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. There is another story contained in this play, that of a riddle that suitors of the beautiful heiress Portia must solve in order to win her hand. This part of the play might have come from another collection of fairy-tale type stories—a book, whose author is unknown, called Gesta Romanorum. The English translation of this book was very popular in Shakespeare’s England. Another possible influence might have come from one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the popular play The Jew of Malta (1589) by Christopher Marlowe. Critics are quick to point out, however, that Marlowe’s Jewish character was more ruthless and much less human than Shakespeare’s Shylock. In spite of the controversies caused by The Merchant of Venice, it continues to fascinate its audiences. The characters are complex, leading to several interpretations of their personalities and actions. The play is harsh but fascinating, exposing some of humanity’s greatest shortcomings.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 The first act of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice opens in Venice. Antonio, a merchant who owns several cargo ships, is talking about a sadness that he feels but cannot explain. Bassanio, a dear friend of Antonio’s, arrives; they greet one another, and shortly afterward, Bassanio asks Antonio if he can borrow some money. Bassanio has devised a plan, he says, by which he can pay back all his debts. There is a beautiful woman in Belmont, Bassanio tells Antonio, whose father was a king. The father has died, leaving all his wealth to his daughter, Portia. Suitors, wishing to become Portia’s wife, are lining up at her door, hoping to win her hand. However, they first must guess a riddle that Portia’s father has devised. Bassanio needs

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the money to buy new clothes in order to make a good impression and to sail to Belmont and try his luck in figuring out the puzzle and thus winning the beautiful (and rich) Portia. Antonio replies that he would do anything for Bassanio. However, all Antonio’s money is tied up in his ships. He gives Bassanio a signed slip of paper and tells him to go out and see if he can gain credit in Antonio’s name. This scene establishes the close relationship between Antonio and Bassanio and also sets up the events that will occur as a consequence of Antonio’s and Bassanio’s actions.

Act 1, Scene 2 Scene 2 is set in Belmont, where Portia lives. Here the audience hears Portia complaining about her father’s will that commands her to stand passively by, watching suitors try to win her by guessing which out of three chests contains her picture. She feels helpless, unable to choose her own husband and unable to deny a suitor to whom she is not attracted. Portia’s servant maid, Nerissa, teases Portia, telling her that the whole world should have the problems of Portia—a woman who does not want for any material goods. Nerissa also reminds Portia that Portia’s father was a wise and virtuous man and must have known what he was doing. By having suitors challenged by the test, her father knew that the one who figured the puzzle out would be the man best suited for his daughter and would provide Portia with a man she could truly love. Portia and Nerissa look out at the suitors who have lined up to test their luck. The two women privately judge them by their appearances and manners and make fun of them. Then Nerissa remembers a handsome man who once visited Portia’s father at Belmont and asks Portia if she remembers the man called Bassanio. Portia does recall Bassanio as having been very attractive and intelligent. Nerissa states that of all the men who have come to Belmont, she believes Bassanio is the most deserving of Portia.

Act 1, Scene 3 In Venice, Bassanio meets with Shylock to ask him if he will lend him money. Bassanio mentions Antonio’s name when he asks to borrow money. Shylock tells Bassanio that he is well acquainted with Antonio and knows Antonio is a good businessman. Shylock also mentions that shipping can be a tricky business because a ship

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Launcelot, Shylock, and Jessica from Act II, scene v (Ó Shakespeare Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan)

can go down in a storm. However, he suggests that he is willing to consider the loan. Bassanio asks Shylock to dine with him and Antonio, but Shylock points out the disparity between Christians and Jews. Shylock tells Bassanio that he will walk, talk, sell, and buy with them, but he will not eat or pray with him. Antonio enters the scene. In an aside (as if Shylock is talking to himself or directly to the audience), Shylock states that he hates Antonio because he is a Christian. Then Shylock discusses the interest rate that he will charge, how long he will hold the loan, and other terms of lending money. Shylock chides Antonio, reminding him that Antonio used to say he would neither lend nor borrow money. Shylock also reminds Antonio how he has, in the past, insulted Shylock in the Rialto, the meeting place of businessmen in Venice. Antonio, in the past, has called Shylock

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names and has also spit on him. Shylock finds humor in the fact that Antonio must now come to him to borrow money. Antonio makes it clear to Shylock that this loan in no way should be interpreted that he wants to be friends with Shylock. He tells Shylock that it is best that they remain enemies. Then, if Antonio should fail to pay back the loan, Shylock can gain great happiness in the forfeiture. Shylock pretends to be offended by this. He mockingly tells Antonio that to prove he lends this money to Antonio in friendship, he will not charge him any interest. Instead, Shylock will write up a bond that Antonio must sign, a contract that states if Antonio does not pay the money back in three months, Shylock can take his payment in the form of one pound of Antonio’s flesh from any part of Antonio’s body that Shylock determines.

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Bassanio is shocked. He does not want this heavy weight on his conscious and tells Antonio not to sign the contract. Antonio waves Bassanio off. Antonio is sure that he will have ten-fold the money he owes Shylock in three months. Shylock again contends that he loans this money in friendship. What profit would he gain from a pound of flesh, he asks Antonio?

Act 2, Scene 1 Back at Belmont, Morocco, a king from northern Africa, arrives to try his hand at solving the puzzle of the chests.

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to stay away from the windows and to lock the doors. Launcelot whispers to Jessica that she should look out for a masked Christian who will come calling for her.

Act 2, Scene 6 Gratiano and Salerio arrive at Shylock’s house later that evening. They wait for Lorenzo to appear. Lorenzo calls out for Jessica, who is dressed like a boy. She goes with Lorenzo, stealing a large portion of her father’s money as a dowry. The two young people profess their love for one another.

Act 2, Scene 2 In Venice, Launcelot Gobbo, a servant to Shylock, decides to leave Shylock’s service and prepares to ask Bassanio to employ him. Launcelot meets with his old father, whom he has not seen in many years and asks him to go with him to Bassanio’s. There, the father offers some of his wares to Bassanio, enticing him to hire his son. Bassanio agrees to do so. Next, Gratiano appears. He is a friend of Bassanio’s. Gratiano begs Bassanio to take him to Belmont. Antonio tells Gratiano that he is too wild, rude, and bold. Bassanio, who enjoys Gratiano at Venice’s parties, is concerned that Gratiano will not make a good impression on Portia in Belmont. Gratiano promises to behave; and Bassanio agrees to take Gratiano with him.

Act 2, Scene 7 At Belmont, Morocco, the prince from northern Africa, is with Portia and is about to take the test. He must choose one chest among three. The first chest is made of gold. It has a note attached to it that reads: ‘‘Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.’’ Morocco then reads the note on the silver chest. ‘‘Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.’’ The chest made out of dull lead also has a note. It reads: ‘‘Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.’’ Morocco analyzes the three notes. Then he chooses the gold chest, the only chest worthy of Portia’s beauty, he assumes. However, Morocco has chosen the wrong one.

Act 2, Scene 3

Act 2, Scene 8

At Shylock’s home in Venice, Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, says good-bye to Launcelot. But before the servant leaves, Jessica asks him to deliver a letter to Lorenzo, a friend of Bassanio’s. Later, while Jessica is thinking out loud, she claims that if Lorenzo truly loves her and comes for her, she will become a Christian.

In Venice, Salerio and Solanio relate the events of the past night. The audience learns that Bassanio has set sail for Belmont and has taken Gratiano with him. Shylock has discovered that Jessica is missing. He went to the duke to try to have Bassanio’s shipped searched. Antonio swears to the duke that Jessica is not with Bassanio.

Act 2, Scene 4 Lorenzo and Gratiano plan a small entertaining skit and a party for Bassanio that night. But when Launcelot delivers Jessica’s letter, small revisions in their plans must be made. Lorenzo and Gratiano plan how they will go into the Jewish quarters that night and steal away Jessica from her father.

Solanio then states that he heard Shylock wailing in a very strange way in the streets that night. First Shylock cried for his daughter; then he cried for the loss of his money. Shylock moans that if he finds his daughter, he is sure he will also find his money. Salerio says that he heard a rumor that a ship from Venice has capsized. He hopes it is not one of Antonio’s.

Act 2, Scene 5

Act 2, Scene 9

At Shylock’s house, Launcelot returns to invite Shylock to eat with Bassanio. Shylock agrees, this time. Before Shylock leaves, he tells Jessica

In Belmont, the prince of Arragon arrives to try his luck in winning fair Portia. He chooses the silver chest; and he chooses wrong.

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Act 3, Scene 1 At the Rialto in Venice, news is out that one of Antonio’s ships has indeed sunk. Shylock is still lost in his misery of having lost his money and his daughter. He is seen wandering around, asking Solanio and Salerio if they knew Jessica was planning her escape or if they had seen her in the town. They are able to tell him nothing. They do mention, though, that one of Antonio’s ships has gone down and wonder if Shylock knows this. Saleria, who is worried about Antonio, asks what good a pound of flesh would be to Shylock. Shylock answers: ‘‘It will feed my revenge.’’ Shylock then relates how Antonio has disgraced him, over and over again. He says Antonio has laughed at him, mocked him, and spit on him. It is at this point that Shylock makes his famous speech, noted by some as one of the more impelling speeches against prejudice ever written. Shylock begins with the statement that Antonio has done all these hateful things against him merely because Shylock is a Jew. Then he continues: ‘‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands?’’ Shylock’s point is that a Jew is the same as a Christian. He uses his speech, however, to also justify his own revenge against Antonio because Shylock is doing only what has been done to him. He has learned about revenge, he claims, from the Christians. Tubal, a friend of Shylock’s, then appears. He tells Shylock that he has heard news of Jessica. She has been spending a lot of money. Tubal also tells Shylock that Antonio has lost another ship. Then Tubal switches back to the topic of Jessica. She has sold a family ring in order to buy a monkey. Then he talks of Antonio again, pushing Shylock back and forth emotionally, from feeling sad about his daughter to feeling glad that Antonio is failing. Tubal assures Shylock that Antonio is sure to fail. Shylock tells Tubal that if Antonio cannot pay back the loan on time, he plans to take Antonio’s heart, the pound of flesh, in payment.

Act 3, Scene 2 In Belmont, Bassanio arrives. Portia sees him and debates in her mind whether she should help him choose the correct chest. She knows she cannot really do this without breaking her vow to her father, but she wishes that she could. Bassanio and Portia talk, hinting at one another’s love. Portia tells Bassanio that she is locked inside one of the chests. As Bassanio stands in front of the chests, he thinks out loud, trying to

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figure out the scheme behind the notes accompanying each one. ‘‘The world is still deceiv’d with ornament,’’ Bassanio tells himself as he looks over the silver and gold chests. Then, as he stands in front of the lead chest, he claims: ‘‘Thy plainness moves me more than eloquence.’’ He chooses the lead chest and is right. He finds a picture of Portia inside. Bassanio and Portia celebrate. In the midst of this, Gratiano and Nerissa announce that they too want to be married. A messenger from Venice arrives with a letter for Bassanio from Antonio. Portia notices the changes in Bassanio’s expression and wants to know the news. Bassanio confesses that he came to Portia not only a man without money, but a man who is in debt. He owes everything to Antonio. And now Antonio is in jail and must pay off that debt with his flesh. Portia says the amount of money is small. She will double it and give it to Shylock. Jessica warns them that her father has sworn that if Antonio, himself, does not pay back the money, he will have Antonio’s flesh. Portia believes she can solve this problem, but first she wants to become Bassanio’s wife.

Act 3, Scene 3 Antonio is in prison. Shylock insists on having Antonio’s flesh, no matter how much Antonio and his friends beg for mercy. When Shylock refuses, Antonio is resigned to his death. He knows that Shylock has the law on his side. There is nothing anyone can do. Antonio signed the bond, which is binding.

Act 3, Scene 4 Lorenzo praises Portia for coming to the aid of Antonio. Portia tells him that if Antonio is Bassanio’s friend, then he must be as good as Bassanio and is worth anything she can do. She tells Lorenzo that he must look after her estate as she and Nerissa are going to a monastery to pray until this ordeal is over. Portia then turns to a servant and gives him a letter to take to Padua to her cousin Doctor Bellario. Then he is to bring the things that Bellario will give him and deliver them to Portia in Venice. Portia tells Nerissa that their husbands will see them sooner than they think but they will not recognize them because the wives will be disguised as men.

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Act 3, Scene 5 Launcelot teases Jessica that she is like her father but then says maybe Shylock is not really Jessica’s father. Jessica comes back by saying that would be no better, since that would make her tainted by the sins of her mother. Jessica then says that she is not concerned about her relationship to Shylock because by marrying Lorenzo, a Christian, she has been saved. Lorenzo comes in and upon finding out what they have been talking about, Lorenzo further develops the topic of racism, chiding Launcelot that the black servant he has been sleeping with is pregnant with Launcelot’s baby.

Act 4, Scenes 1–2 In the courtroom in Venice, Antonio is brought in. The crowd, which now includes Bassanio and Gratiano, jeers when Shylock appears and when he denies Antonio any mercy. Even when Bassanio presents a chest filled with money, Shylock says that Bassanio could have brought multiple chests similar to the one there and he still would refuse to release Antonio from the bond. Shylock wants his pound of flesh and will not settle for anything less. He points out to the court that this is his legal right. The court tries to persuade him, asking for mercy. Shylock absolutely will not give in Antonio finally tells everyone that it is senseless to try to reason with ‘‘the Jew.’’ ‘‘You may as well go stand upon the beach, / And bid the main flood bate his usual height; / You may as well use question with the wolf, / Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb.’’ In other words, Antonio is saying that it is against Shylock’s nature, because he is a Jew, to grant mercy. The duke asks how Shylock could ever hope for mercy from the court if he is unwilling to provide mercy to Antonio. Shylock claims he has done no wrong, so why should he worry about the court granting him any mercy. Shylock then points out that there are people in the courtroom who own slaves. He asks if he should tell them to let the slaves go. If he does, Shylock claims, the owners would say that the slaves are theirs. So too does Shylock say that Antonio is his. ‘‘The pound of flesh which I demand of him / Is dearly bought; ‘tis mine, and I will have it.’’ At this point a messenger enters the court, delivering a letter from Dr. Bellario to the duke, telling the duke that he is ill but in his place, he has sent two young men (which is in fact Portia, disguised and referred to as Balthazar, and Nerissa). Portia/Balthazar gives Shylock a short lecture on

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the benefit of mercy; but Shylock still does not give in. Bassanio and Gratiano call Shylock a dog, a devil, and other names. Portia continues to dicker with Shylock, offering him three times what is owed him. Shylock refuses all offers. Antonio prepares to die. He says good-bye to Bassanio. Bassanio tells Antonio that nothing is greater than Antonio’s life, not his own life, his new wife, or anything in the whole world. Portia hears this and comments: ‘‘Your wife would give you little thanks for that, / If she were by to hear you make the offer.’’ Then Portia tells Shylock to go forward and collect his pound of flesh from Antonio. He proceeds; but Portia suddenly stops him. She says that he is lawful in taking the pound of flesh, but if he extracts one drop of blood in the process it will be considered a crime. ‘‘One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods / Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate / Unto the state of Venice.’’ Shylock could lose everything that he owns. Shylock abruptly changes his mind. He tells the court that he will now take thrice the amount of the contract and will let Antonio go. Portia denies him this. All he is entitled to is the pound of flesh. Shylock then turns to leave, but Portia tells him to stay. She says the court will take everything from him. Antonio protests, telling the court that he will take half of what Shylock has, but the other half should go to Lorenzo and Jessica upon Shylock’s death. In the meantime, Shylock must give up his faith and become a Christian. The courtroom empties. Bassanio and Gratiano approach Portia and Nerissa, still in disguise and ask what payment they might request for their having saved the life of Antonio. Portia says she needs nothing, except for the ring on Bassanio’s finger. It is the ring that Portia gave to Bassanio before they were wed, telling him that if he ever takes it off his finger, it would mean that his love for her has ended. Bassanio gives the young lawyer the ring. In this way, Portia appears to test Bassanio’s love for her. Some critics believe that there is a tug of war going on between Antonio and Portia to see whom Bassanio loves more. Portia intends to teach Bassanio a lesson. Acting as if Portia’s shadow, Nerissa also asks for Gratiano’s ring and receives it.

Act 5, Scene 1 Back in Belmont, Portia welcomes her husband and shortly after, asks to see his ring. When he cannot produce it, Portia brings the ring forth,

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS A classic version of this play starred noted British actor Lawrence Olivier, in a 1973 production by Universal/Artisan. The play is set in Venice, but it is set in the 1880s rather than the 1500s. Olivier plays Shylock. It is available on video.  In 1981, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) recorded The Merchant of Venice as part of the broadcaster’s series The Shakespeare Plays. This video stars Warren Mitchell, Gemma Jones, and John Franklyn-Robbins.  Henry Goodman played Shylock in a 2000 DVD formatted version of the play, directed by Trevor Nunn. Goodman’s Shylock is said to be a soft-spoken and less spiteful version of this character. 



In 2001, the Royal National Theatre produced an award-winning version of The Merchant of Venice for the BBC, starring David Bamber and Peter De Jersey.



Michael Radford’s 2004 film production of The Merchant of Venice starred Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, and Lynn Collins. Containing beautiful photography and great acting performances, this version is available on DVD.

confessing that she was the young lawyer. She berates Bassanio for having given it away. He promises never to do that again. Nerissa does the same to Gratiano. Some critics have complained that the rest of this act is used to merely tie up loose ends, especially the part in which Antonio finds out through a letter, which Portia mysteriously produces, that all of Antonio’s ships are safe.

CHARACTERS Antonio Antonio is a successful Venetian merchant and the title character of this play. He owns several

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ships that travel all over the world. Antonio’s best friend is Bassanio. Antonio’s situation is that he would do almost anything for Bassanio, but in the beginning of the play, when Bassanio asks for a loan, Antonio is short of cash. Bassanio, who has been frivolous with his money in the past, promises that he has a plan that will allow him to pay back Antonio everything he owes him. Because of his love of his friend, Antonio seems unable to refuse him. Since Antonio has no cash, he does the next best thing, he offers his credit to Bassanio. Whether Bassanio knows it or not, he ends up borrowing money from a man Antonio detests, Shylock. Antonio, who is a proud and confident man when it comes to money, signs a bond authorizing Bassanio to borrow 3,000 ducats (gold coins) from Shylock. The bond with Shylock states that Antonio will owe no interest; but in its place, Antonio must give Shylock a pound of his flesh if he cannot pay the debt back in the stipulated time period. Antonio barely squirms, so sure is he of having triple that amount in three months. He signs the agreement without a shrug. Antonio’s emotions lie elsewhere—not in business dealings. In the first lines of the play, Antonio admits to sadness. It appears that he does not know the reason for this sadness. It is possible, he says, that it is his fate to be melancholy. People around him find no reason for Antonio to be depressed. He is one of the most successful businessmen in the city. If it is not money, then it must be a lack of love or maybe it is too much love. The curious circumstances surrounding Antonio’s melancholy at the beginning of the play have generated some debate among critics. Some commentators interpret the merchant’s sadness as an indication of his inability to reconcile the accumulation of wealth with his Christian faith; others read Antonio’s sorrow as a manifestation of his unconscious homosexual love for Bassanio. In some productions of this play, Antonio appears to be in love with Bassanio, not necessarily in a sexual way, but nonetheless he is very affected by Bassanio. He feels a strong friendship and bond with Antonio. He will do anything for him. Toward the end of the play, Portia questions just how deep that love is between Bassanio and Antonio, and whether it might be threatening to her love affair with Bassanio. There is no specific reason given for Antonio’s sadness, unless one might read into the play that he could sense the

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impending fate that would fall upon him, the threat against his life. Of all the characters in the play, Antonio is the most outspoken in terms of his hatred of Jews. He is disgusted at the thought of Shylock, calls Shylock names, and continually makes prejudicial statements about him. To some degree, due to Antonio’s hatred, audiences might be persuaded to accept, or at least understand, Shylock’s lack of mercy toward the man. Critics generally agree that while the merchant Antonio is generally overshadowed by both Shylock and Portia, he nonetheless remains crucial to the interweaving of the Belmont and Venice plots. Commentators note that while Antonio is depicted as the consummate Christian because of his humility and charity, his treatment of Shylock conforms to conventional attitudes toward Jews rather than the unconditional love advocated in the New Testament. Is Antonio a hypocrite? Or is he a man fashioned by his times? These are some of the questions that are raised by this play in reference to Antonio.

Balthazar Balthazar is one of Portia’s servants. However, when Portia goes to Venice, this is the name she uses when she is disguised as a young lawyer in the courtroom—the young lawyer who eventually saves Antonio’s life.

Bassanio Bassanio is a Venetian gentleman and Antonio’s close friend. He borrows money from Shylock and therefore commits Antonio, who signs the bond, to a loan with a heavy payment should Antonio forfeit payment. Bassanio appears young and irresponsible in the beginning of the play, spending money without much care on meaningless things like parties, and then borrowing more. However, once Bassanio solves the riddle of the caskets by choosing the lead chest and thus winning Portia for his bride, Bassanio seems to take a turn toward maturity. He realizes the heavy cost of his frivolity of the past, putting Antonio’s life on the line, and does his best to try to save his friend. However, Bassanio makes one more mistake when he gives his ring to Balthazar after the trial, failing to live up to his promise to his wife. By the end of the play, however, there appears to be hope that Bassanio has learned his lesson and has matured.

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Shakespeare invented Bassanio by exploiting a popular dramatic convention of the time in which a hero of a play wins the hand of a maiden by solving a perplexing riddle. Because of the significance Bassanio places on Portia’s wealth early in the play, his character has been interpreted in two conflicting ways. Some commentators maintain that Bassanio is a scheming opportunist, drawn only to Portia’s wealth and position. By contrast, others view the character as a portrait of the ideal Elizabethan lover, arguing that Shakespeare’s audience probably considered Bassanio’s actions perfectly acceptable. Women of that time were supposed to offer their husbands a dowry. Bassanio merely follows with the fashion of the day.

Launcelot Gobbo Launcelot was, at one time, Shylock’s servant. He convinces Bassanio to employ him because Shylock does not treat him well. Shakespeare uses Launcelot in this play mostly as comic relief. Launcelot is witty at times, but quickly dismissed when not needed, which is for most of the play.

Gratiano Gratiano is a Venetian gentleman and a companion of Bassanio’s. He is mostly a party boy, and is less practical than Bassanio. He follows Bassanio around, mimicking many of Bassanio’s moves, such as marrying Nerissa, Portia’s handmaiden, in a double wedding with Bassanio and Portia. Gratiano also gives away the ring that Nerissa has given him, thus further mirroring Bassanio. Whereas, at the end, Bassanio seems to have matured, Gratiano ends his appearance on the stage with a crude joke, exhibiting his attachment to—and reluctance to give up—his youth.

Jessica Jessica is Shylock’s daughter. She elopes with Lorenzo, stealing a portion of her father’s wealth for her dowry. She leaves her home without noticeable regret, portraying her father as the enemy. She feels she is saved from her father’s reputation because she has married a Christian, as if this has absolved her from some nonexistent crime, that of being a Jew. Her role is a minor one, used mostly to further deepen the hatred of Shylock that is exposed elsewhere.

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Lorenzo

Prince of Arragon

Lorenzo is Antonio and Bassanio’s friend. He falls in love and elopes with Jessica. His role is used to set up another facet of the relationship between Christians and Jews. His Christianity is seen as a way for Jessica to cleanse her soul from being a Jew, at least that is what Jessica believes. She is saved because she will now become a Christian. This reflects the sentiment in Elizabethan England. Queen Elizabeth I was willing to kill anyone who professed a faith other than that of the Protestant Church of England. People, in that time, were truly saved when they either converted to Christianity or at least pretended to.

A suitor to Portia, he incorrectly selects the silver box during the casket test.

Nerissa Portia’s lady-in-waiting, Nerissa marries Gratiano and later accompanies Portia to Venice disguised as a law clerk Nerissa’s character is not fully developed. She appears to be in this play mostly to help Portia reflect on her thoughts. Nerissa, if she acts on her own, merely mimics what Portia does.

Portia Portia is a rich heiress living in Belmont. She marries Bassanio, who successfully passes the casket test. Determined to help her husband save Antonio from Shylock’s bond, Portia travels to Venice disguised as a lawyer named Balthazar to represent the merchant at the trial. Many commentators assert that Portia is one of Shakespeare’s finest dramatic creations. Highly intelligent and resourceful, she is viewed as a paragon of femininity, with much more complexity of character than the fairy-tale princesses found in the literary sources available to the playwright. Some critics view Portia as an initially disruptive force in the play because, as an unmarried and wealthy young woman, she poses a threat to the male-dominated Elizabethan worldview—her situation is similar to the unmarried Queen Elizabeth I’s problem. This dramatic tension is relieved, however, when Portia conforms to societal conventions through her marriage to Bassanio. On a more symbolic level, Portia represents the influence of Christian mercy and forgiveness. Perhaps the two most notable instances of Portia’s benevolence occur when she attempts to persuade Shylock to have compassion on Antonio during the trial scene, and when she pardons Bassanio for forfeiting her ring.

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Prince of Morocco A suitor to Portia, he incorrectly chooses the golden box during the casket test.

Shylock Shylock is a Jewish moneylender living in Venice. He is also Jessica’s father. He loans Bassanio 3,000 ducats on Antonio’s behalf, stipulating that he will take a pound of Antonio’s flesh if the sum is not repaid on time. Shylock suffers a lot of abuse in this play, representing the treatment of Jews in Venice during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although Venice was a fairly religious-tolerant city, Jews were still not considered equal to Christian citizens. This play clearly demonstrates the demeaning attitudes toward Jews through the attitudes and actions of Antonio. This is not to say that Shylock is a virtuous man who suffers without any cause. For example, when Jessica runs away, it is unclear if Shylock misses her or merely misses his money. In anger, he also says that he would see his daughter dead. In addition, Shylock does not hide his hatred of Antonio. But despite his poor treatment at Antonio’s hands, it is hard to forgive Shylock for wanting to kill Antonio merely because he was late in paying his loan. Of course, this is not the only reason for his anger. It is merely an excuse for Shylock to get his revenge for the abuse that Antonio has given him in the past. The Merchant of Venice is often considered to be Shylock’s play, for the reading of his character generally influences the interpretation of the drama as a whole. If Shylock is perceived as a comic villain, with all the stock characteristics associated with such a role, then he receives his due in the trial scene, and the work is truly a comedy. However, if Shylock is seen as the hero of the drama, then his humiliation indicates that the work is a tragedy. Both views can be argued based on the ambiguous content of the play. Numerous commentators have discussed the extent to which Shakespeare was influenced by the anti-Semitic sentiment of his day. While it might be true that the playwright began writing his play with the stereotypical Elizabethan conception of a Jewish usurer in mind—a figure that was quite common in drama at that time— Shakespeare created in Shylock a complex and

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memorable figure who defies those conventional attributes and who overshadows the rest of the work. By giving Shylock sympathetic human traits—most notably his feelings of persecution at the hands of the Venetians—Shakespeare raises the question of whether Shylock’s villainous behavior toward Antonio is purely malicious, or whether his actions reflect the desperate attempts of an outsider attempting to secure justice and revenge against the enemies who have wronged him

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that even though Bassanio is virtually penniless because of his extravagant spending prior to marrying Portia, his open desire to marry her for her money—in addition to her charm and beauty— should not be construed by modern readers as the shrewd enterprise of an unscrupulous fortune hunter. In fact, an Elizabethan audience probably would have interpreted Bassanio’s suit of love as an ordinary and perfectly acceptable arrangement. A similar situation occurs when Jessica steals her father’s money before eloping with Lorenzo; in a sense, she is helping herself to her dowry.

Love

Economics Economics is a prime concern in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and critical perspectives often treat the play as a clash between emerging mercantile sensibilities of the times and religious traditions. During Shakespeare’s era, usury (lending money for interest) grew to be an accepted business practice as profits became increasingly more important than religious principles. Usury was one of the few ways that Jews were allowed to make a living in Elizabethan England. Pressure was mounted on this profession when Christian moneylenders lent funds without charging interest. This made it more difficult for Jewish people to make a profit. The rivalry between Antonio and Shylock, in this play, is often viewed as an example of two conflicting business ethics. Although Shylock represents usury as a pragmatic and legitimate business practice, Antonio embodies a more idealistic perspective of the practice of lending money. Following Christian precepts, merchants were to generously lend their money interest-free because their wealth was such that they could afford to do so. This fundamental economic contention, in addition to the two characters’ religious differences, establishes their enmity toward one another and creates a rivalry that reaches its climax in the trial sequence in act 4. Bassanio’s marriage to Portia demonstrates another economic dimension of the play. Because of rising costs during the Renaissance, aristocrats, in many cases, had to concern themselves with obtaining more wealth to maintain their expected lifestyle, and a generous dowry (from a woman to her future husband) was considered a respectable means of achieving this end. Many critics contend

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Different types of love and rivalry are other important topics in The Merchant of Venice. The suitors who vie for Portia’s hand all represent different types of love. The Princes of Arragon and Morocco—the two unsuccessful petitioners—symbolize a shallow and limited form of love. Arragon, by selecting the silver casket on the basis of its inscription (‘‘Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves’’), in act 2, scene 7, reveals that his concept of love is selfserving and vain. Morocco’s choice of the gold casket indicates that his notion of love is based on superficiality or physicality (‘‘Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire’’). However, when Bassanio correctly identifies the lead casket, he demonstrates a superior understanding of love, as he judges the box on the inner qualities it may possess rather than on its dull, outer appearance. This represents a deeper and more spiritual type of love. The issue of rivalry in love is evident in the association between Antonio, Portia, and Bassanio. Some critics argue that the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio may be a homosexual one, citing the merchant’s unexplained melancholy at the beginning of the play as the result of Portia displacing him as the object of Bassanio’s affection, as well as Antonio’s desire to keep Bassanio happy by continually supplying him with money, despite the consequences. In addition, the two couples—Bassanio and Portia and Jessica and Lorenzo—represent two antithetical kinds of love in this play. Bassanio and Portia demonstrate a socially acceptable courtship; not only do they obey her father’s request that Portia’s suitor successfully pass the casket test, but they also uphold the legal provisions of the test as mandated in the father’s will. Jessica and Lorenzo’s courtship, however, illustrates a romantic love linked to the great

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immediately redressed with legal action. In other words, usury, which supposedly goes against Christian principles, is sanctioned by Venetian civil laws. Hypocrisy is also exposed in the Christian attitude toward Jewish people in the city. Although accepted by the Venetians on an economic level, Shylock and his fellow Jewish families remain outsiders in the city. They are cursed by the Christians, who profess love and acceptance for all mankind.

‘‘Bassanio’s Choice,’’ Act I, scene i (Ó Shakespeare Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan)

lovers of myth, particularly in the illicitness of their elopement. Unlike Portia and Bassanio’s union, Jessica and Lorenzo’s defies social traditions because their aspiration to get married causes them to step out of the bounds of the accepted rules of society as well as the rules of the father.

Portia and Belmont represent the ideal, the counterpoint to Venice, by embodying the qualities of an idealistic world that markedly contrasts with the hypocrisy, revenge, and commercial exploitation that dominate affairs in Venice. In essence, Belmont represents a fairy-tale realm where happiness and love flourish and Christian charity and forgiveness are actually upheld. These benevolent qualities manifest themselves in Portia, whose confrontation with Shylock in the courtroom can be interpreted as a direct clash between the retributive justice ordained in the Old Testament (which Shylock represents) and the mercy and charity advocated in the New Testament. Shakespeare provides The Merchant of Venice with a happy ending by emphasizing the love, joy, and forgiveness that thrives in Belmont. Nevertheless, the reader is left with the unsettling impression that hypocrisy and hatred persist just down the road in Venice.

Religious Prejudice Real vs. Ideal Shakespeare’s delicate balancing of the worlds of Venice (the real) and Belmont (the ideal) is another central issue in The Merchant of Venice. On one side is the city of Venice, which reflects a complex reality that includes many different principles but also many contradictions. Venice is supposedly governed by Christian values. However, the Christians are shown to be hypocritical. Christian values advocate charity, mercy, and virtue, and yet Antonio discriminates against Shylock and further denigrates him by ultimately forcing Shylock to renounce Judaism completely and embrace Christianity. In addition, although Christian values support the idea of loaning money without charging interest, Shylock and other Jewish businessmen contribute a mercenary dimension to the affairs of the city, in which lending money for interest is considered a legitimate business practice. Further confirming this practice, breaches of lending contracts are

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Religious prejudices prevail in this drama. From the opening act to the courtroom scene toward the end of this play, debilitating, prejudicial insults are thrown from one character to another. Shylock is the target for many of these hurtful remarks, but he demonstrates that he is also capable of delivering them. Prejudice makes a person see a group of people as stereotypical stick figures, contaminated with negative characteristics. These impressions are based merely on the fact that a group of people may look different, embrace different principles, or act in different manners. A prejudiced person does not consider that individuals in that group might differ from one another. Nor does he or she allow that there is a common core that runs through all human beings—a place where everyone can relate to one another. For example, Shylock confesses in the beginning of this play that he hates Antonio because Antonio is a Christian. Shylock does this in spite

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of the fact that he makes a magnificent speech in act 3, scene 1, in which he attempts to make Christians understand how hurtful prejudice can be. Shylock states that just because he is a Jew does not mean that he is not human. Conversely, Antonio spits on, mocks, and rails against Shylock, because Shylock is a Jew. When Antonio suspects that Shylock is doing something good, such as when Shylock insists on not charging interest on his loan to Antonio, Antonio tells Bassanio, ‘‘This Hebrew will turn Christian: he grows kind,’’ as if only Christians practice charity. Also, in the courtroom scene, Antonio states that trying to change Shylock’s ‘‘Jewish heart’’ would be as impossible as changing nature.

Mercy and Hypocrisy The concept of mercy comes to a head in the courtroom scene. It begins earlier, once rumors are spread that Antonio might have lost one or more of his ships. As the tension grows toward the date that Antonio’s loan to Shylock is due, the cries for mercy begin to rise among the Christian citizenry. Mercy implies the ability of one person to forgive another, a strong Christian principle that is advocated in many Christian pulpits on Sunday morning. Though this virtue of mercy is often preached, Shakespeare shows that his Christian characters in this play do not always practice it, thus demonstrating their hypocrisy. Shakespeare allows his Christian characters in this play to cry out for mercy when one of their own is in trouble. Portia even increases the value of mercy in her courtroom speech, when she equates mercy to godly power. Mercy, Portia states, ‘‘is an attribute to God himself, / And earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice.’’ This is how Portia attempts to get Shylock to show mercy for Antonio and therefore to spare Antonio’s life. However, when it is time for Portia to show mercy on Shylock, what does she do? What does the court do? And especially, what does Antonio do? These are all Christians, the same Christians who asked Shylock for mercy. Though, when it is their turn to practice mercy, they strip Shylock of all his goods and worldly wealth. Antonio amends this verdict and, claiming he is being merciful, says he only wants half of Shylock’s wealth. The other half is to be handed over to the Christian man who stole Shylock’s daughter. To top it all, Antonio also demands that Shylock forsake his religion and

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become that which he hates, a Christian. Had Antonio been on trial, would he have thought it merciful if he had been forced to become a Jew? Shylock, on the other hand, does not see why he is being asked to show mercy. His mind is set on revenge, which he believes he deserves. He also knows that he has done nothing wrong, so he does not have to worry about receiving mercy from the court. It is not until the court turns on him, making him realize that he cannot have his pound of flesh—that he cannot eke out his revenge on Antonio—that Shylock begins to see the power of mercy. He tells the court he will now take the money Bassanio has offered. The court, of course, refuses him. Shakespeare points out the hypocrisy in this fictitious Venetian society. The principle of mercy might be deeply imbedded in the Christian religion but it is not so deeply set in the actions of the people who cry out for it.

Daughter and Father Relationship There are two daughter-and-father relationships in this play. First, there is the heiress of Belmont, Portia, and her relationship with her deceased father. Then, there is the relationship between Jessica and Shylock. Although Portia sounds depressed because she is tied to her vow with her father not to become involved in the selection of her husband, she is a devoted daughter. She honors her father, though she could easily break her vow and technically he could do nothing about it. She respects her father’s integrity, intelligence, and wisdom. She does not, for instance, give Bassanio any hints as to which chest holds her picture, though the thought of his not finding it tears at her heart. She goes against her own instinct, in this case, and puts her future in her father’s hands. On the other end of the spectrum is Jessica, who not only runs away from her father and steals a large sum of his money, she also has little respect for him. She lavishly throws her money away. She gives away a precious family heirloom, having not sentiment attached to it though her father’s memory of the ring is so imbued with emotions. She does not in so many words claim that her father is wrong for his beliefs, but she feels saved having married a Christian and thus rids herself of being Jewish. She exhibits no emotions toward her father except for happiness in getting away from him.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 



With a friend or classmate, discuss the similarities and differences between Antonio and Shylock. What traits do they have in common? How do they act differently? How do their beliefs differ? Keep track of the details that you generate. Then, each of you take on one of those characters, remembering the traits about their personalities that you have uncovered. Prepare a speech, in character, as if you were running for president. Present your speeches to your class. Invite them to ask you questions and then, at the end, ask them to guess whether you are playing Antonio or Shylock. The Merchant of Venice is classified as a comedy. What, if anything, did you find funny about this play? Choose a scene or a particular dialogue between two or more characters and act it out with a partner. Do whatever you must to emphasize the humor and record your audience’s reaction. Did you make them laugh?

Shakespeare does not condemn Jessica for her lack of feelings for her father, so the theme is, in some ways, incidental. He uses Jessica’s actions more as a contrast between Jews and Christians than as an example of a daughter’s dislike of a father. Portia, on the other hand, represents an ideal—what an ideal daughter would feel for an ideal father.

STYLE Structure: Comedy or Tragedy? The Merchant of Venice is often listed under the category of Shakespearean comedy. Keep in mind that comedy, in Elizabethan times, did not mean the same thing it does today. If someone were to tell you there was a comedy playing at one of your local movie theatres today, you

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Research the history of the Jewish people. Why have they been discriminated against throughout the centuries? Where were some of the larger populations of Jews located in the Renaissance? How did they come to claim Israel as their home? Write a paper about your findings.



Interview an economics professor. Make sure you choose someone who is familiar with the history of usury. Find out if there are any differences between the interest rates and the policies of the Renaissance period and the twenty-first century in terms of how loans are made. How do interest rates compare to current mortgage loans, for instance. What about the interest rates on credit cards today; are they higher or lower than those charged in the fifteenth and sixteen centuries? Create a chart demonstrating the facts and figures that you have collected and explain it to your class.

would expect to see a movie that makes you laugh a lot. In Shakespeare’s time, a person going to the theatre to see a comedy would expect to see a play about love. A Shakespearean comedy often includes the trials and tribulations of a young man and woman who have fallen in love at first sight and then must contend with a variety of challenges to realize that love. By the end of the play, they are married. In The Merchant of Venice, audiences find these elements in the structure of the play. There are three marriages, actually: Portia and Bassanio; Nerissa and Gratiano; and Jessica and Lorenzo. Bassanio must face the challenge of money and the guessing of the correct casket in order to win the hand of Portia. Lorenzo must secretly steal Jessica from her father’s house at night. Gratiano appears to have little or no challenge, except for winning permission from Bassanio to go to Belmont.

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However, it is the stories of these three couples that makes this play a comedy. Shakespeare appears to mix the elements of comedy and tragedy in this play, therefore leading some critics to classify The Merchant of Venice as a problem play. In other words, it is a combination of tragedy and comedy, and therefore, there is difficulty in placing it completely in one category or the other. Certainly, if you look at this play through the eyes of Shylock, there would be no comedy seen at all. Shylock loses everything by the end of the drama, including his right to maintain his own identity as a Jew. Shakespearean tragedies involve death; and even though there is no actual death in The Merchant of Venice, Shylock tells the court that if they take away everything he has, they might as well kill him. In Shylock’s case, life after the courtroom scene might be more tragic than death.

Divided Setting Reflecting the division that is inherent in this play between comedy and tragedy is the division in the setting between Venice and Belmont. Venice is the place of business, where money is made, lent, and lost; where cultures clash; where fathers and daughters do not get along; and where courts decide who will live and who will die. Venice is the world of challenges, unhappy people, and prejudice. In Venice, Antonio is filled with sadness, though he has much wealth. Likewise Shylock is embittered because his wealth does not earn him respect. The people of Venice, as portrayed in this play, center their lives on money instead of on love. Belmont, the other half of the setting in The Merchant of Venice, represents the opposite of Venice. It is separated from Venice in many ways. Belmont is the fairy-tale city of music and love. Although there is much money there, fortunes are secondary to love. Whereas Venice is portrayed in darker tones, Belmont is light and colorful. People are happy, festive, and generous in Belmont. The play itself is divided in form and themes; so the setting of the two varied places helps to emphasize the double visions of the underlying currents of the play.

Use of the Fable Portia’s father was determined to find a good husband for his loving daughter even after his death. So he set up a challenge, as any good

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fairy-tale father would do. He makes his daughter’s suitors face an interesting puzzle, which they must solve to prove their worth. He does so in a set of three chests, three being a somewhat magical number in most traditional fairy tales. The riddles that are presented are very simple on the surface, but the analyses of these riddles will identify what each suitor contains in the depth of his heart and soul. Will the suitor be fooled by the luster of the gold chest, thus demonstrating his lust for surface beauty? Will he go for the silver, arrogantly believing that he deserves Portia? Or will he rightly choose the leaden chest, as Bassanio does, realizing that true beauty lies within. This part of the play is didactic in the sense that it teaches the audience that, as Shakespeare writes on the note inside the golden casket, ‘‘All that glisters is not gold.’’ Like a fable, the play teaches a lesson.

Plot: Four Separate but Intertwined Stories There are four different stories going on in this play. First there is the most serious one, that of Antonio, Bassanio, and Shylock’s connection with the borrowed money and the bond. This story gives the play its tragic structure. The scenes involved in this story are tense because of the anti-Semitism that is portrayed and because of the threat to Antonio’s loss of money and the threat to his life, as well as Shylock’s losses. Many critics view this as the major plot of the drama. The next story of importance is that of the three caskets. This story has a little tension but it is light-hearted and often quite humorous, especially when the extravagant suitors, Arragon and Morocco, try to decipher the messages and choose the correct casket. This story reflects some of the elements in the bond story in that it involves the glitter of gold and the weight of making decisions. A third story is that of Lorenzo and Jessica’s love, deception, and elopement. This story is used to compare the two daughter’s relationships with their fathers: Jessica and Shylock; and Portia and her deceased father. By Jessica leaving and taking her father’s money, this story adds tension and depth to Shylock’s losses at the trial in the bond story. Finally, this story demonstrates a reconciliation between Jews and Christians that is lacking in the bond story. Finally, as if tacked on to the end of the play to lighten the tension of the courtroom scene,

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there is the story of the rings. Portia and Nerissa trick their husbands, testing their husbands’ loyalty by asking for their rings (while disguised as young male lawyers). Bassanio and Gratiano, indebted to the young lawyers for saving Antonio’s lives, give the rings away. In the final scene, the husbands are shamed and ask forgiveness. They are given a second chance, thus ending the play on a happy note, rather than ending with the trial scene, which would make this play resonate with tragedy.

accused of steeling Christian children at Easter time and using them in bloody rituals. In Elizabethan times, although still banished, some Jews lived in England. If they practiced Judaism, they did so secretly. Outwardly, they tried to conform to Christian ways, even professing conversion to the Christian faith. Even so, Jews were still restricted to two main professions: usury and peddling.

Jewish Ghetto HISTORICAL CONTEXT Jews in England One of the first documented statements of Jews in England was recorded in 1075 in Oxford. At this time, and for another hundred years or so, Jews, unlike their counterparts in other European countries, were not forced to live in a ghetto— especially designated sections of a town or city. Jewish people in England were banned from certain professions, though, with most taking up jobs peddling wares and moneylending. They also could not own land. In the twelfth century, sentiments against Jews were on the rise. The Christian Crusades were in full force and heretics were being burned to death in nearby Spain. Christians called Jews heretics because Jews did not believe that Jesus was the true Messiah. During the twelfth century, Jews suffered through two massive massacres in England, one in 1189 and another in the following year. Things did not improve in the next century. Laws were passed stating that Jewish people could no longer make a living lending money; Jewish families also suffered through having to pay unusually heavy taxes. Then in 1290, King Edward I decreed that Jewish people were a threat to England and banished them from the country. In the sixteenth century, in Shakespeare’s time, most English people would have been familiar with Jewish people not from acquaintance but from the stories told about them, most of which would have been prejudicial. Some of these stories included such false statements as Jewish people were spreading the dreaded Bubonic Plague. Other false beliefs included that Jewish people worshipped the devil and had been granted magical powers because of a pact they made with Satan. Jews were also

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Although there were no Jewish ghettoes in England in Shakespeare’s time, there were ghettoes in Venice. The absence of ghettoes in England were a result of Jewish people having been technically banned from England. Those Jews who did live there were supposedly assimilated into the Christian faith and lived as Christians, scattered throughout the cities’ neighborhoods. Ironically, it is from the Venetians, from a city that was at that time known for its tolerance of different religions, that the word ghetto is derived. Venice was not the first city to create a ghetto for Jews. It was, however, the city that first devised the term ghetto, in 1516, when it established a special section in the northern part of the city. This was not the most pleasant part of the city. It was a place of industry, in particular iron foundries were located there with their polluting exhausts and smells. This was also an isolated part of the city, cut off by water from the main section of Venice. In order to gain access to the city proper, people had to cross one of two bridges. At night, these bridges were barred, forcing the Jewish people who lived in the ghettoes to remain at home until the gates were re-opened. The land area in the Venetian Ghetto was not large enough to house the Jewish population, so homes built in that area tended to have five or more stories, unlike the typical houses in other parts of the cities. As the population continued to expand, additional lands were dedicated to the ghettoes. In 1630, there were about 4000 Jewish people living in the Venetian Ghetto, in what would amount today to about two and a half city squares. When Napoleon took control of Venice in the eighteenth century, he ordered the gates on the bridges to the city to be torn down. Jewish people gained some rights after this but not the right to citizenry.

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Allan Corduner as Tubal and Al Pacino as Shylock in the 2004 film The Merchant of Venice (Reproduced by permission of The Picture Desk, Inc.)

Charging interest on loans was for a long time prohibited by many different religions and declaimed as a poor practice by many philosophers in ancient times. Religions that preached against usury included the Moslem faith and the Christian faith. There was even a precept in Judaism that forbade usury; but it was limited. Jewish people could not charge interest on loans to other Jews. However, they could collect interest from non-Jews. There are passages in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur’an that speak out against usury.

Authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400, the English author and poet who wrote The Canterbury Tales, written over the course of a decade from 1380 to 1390), John Gower (1330–1408, poet and friend of Chaucer, whose most famous work was Lover’s Confession, tales of courtly love written around 1390), as well as Shakespeare, were known for borrowing some of the stories from Gesta Romanorum. It was a very popular book in England over a period of decades, and English authors used the collection to enhance their own tales and dramas. It is believed that originally the stories in the Gesta Romanorum were thought to have been put together for church ministers and priests.

Gesta Romanorum

Italian Renaissance

Usury

The portion of The Merchant of Venice that includes the challenge of the three caskets to win the hand of Portia was taken from a story in the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of short didactic stories, such as fables and anecdotes, originally written in Latin. It has been estimated that the stories in this collection were written either in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century.

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The Italian Renaissance was a period of time roughly between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries (although there are arguments for even earlier and later Renaissance movements in other parts of the world) when scholars, philosophers, and other students of history and culture examined the past, evaluated it, took the knowledge they collected, and slowly began to create a new

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 



1500s: Jews are forced to live inside the walls of a ghetto in Venice. In Berlin, thirty-eight Jews are deemed heretics and are burned at the stake. A Catholic priest, who converts to Judaism, is burned at the stake in Rome. 1800s: Many European countries grant right of citizenship to Jews. Ghettoes in Italy are abolished. However, in Germany, the antiSemitic political party called the German Christian Social Party demands that all German Jews convert to Christianity. Moses Haim Montefiore is the first Jewish person knighted by Britain’s Queen Victoria. Today: A United States senator from Connecticut, Joseph Liebermann, is the first Jewish person to run for the vice presidency of the United States, backed by a major political party (Democrats). Jewish people are forced to evacuate the Gaza Strip as the Israeli government makes an amendment to stop suicide bomber attacks by Palestinians who demand the return of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian people. 1500s: The Reformation, led by Martin Luther, sweeps across Europe. Queen Eliza-

society based on new scientific and artistic ideas. Often, the Renaissance is used to mark the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern age in Europe, although the changes happened gradually and the dates of one era beginning and another one ending are rather arbitrary. In Italy, however, approximately during this time span, scientific and artistic discoveries enjoyed new, exciting, and dramatic changes. Some of the earliest of the Renaissance writers in Italy were the poet Dante (1265–1321, known for his poem The Divine Comedy, written somewhere between 1310 and 1314) and the poet Petrarch (1304–1374, known for his series of love poems, written about a woman called Laura,

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beth I demands a unified England, outlawing all religions except for Protestantism, under the Church of England. 1800s: The development of Orthodox Judaism is begun in an attempt to counteract the move toward modernization in the Jewish faith that is spreading across Europe. Today: Radical Muslims engage in gorilla warfare against what some of them refer to as infidels—Christians in the Western world. 

1500s: Venetians make fortunes as their city is the greatest shipping port in Europe. Typical cargo ships improved over the Middle Age models and now have as many as four masts with two sails each. 1800s: Using steam for power, and iron to replace wood for the body of cargo ships, the modern shipping industry is born. The time it takes a steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean is cut in half. Today: Although cargo is still shipped in boats, packages can be delivered around the world overnight via jetliners.

begun somewhere around 1327). Both of these writers’ works would seriously affect authors in other parts of Europe, especially in England, as the changes of the Renaissance swept through Europe. The Elizabethan Age in England is said to represent the height of the Renaissance in England. Authors such as dramatists William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe (1564– 1593, who wrote The Jew of Malta), as well as poet John Milton (1608–74, who is known for his poem ‘‘Paradise Lost’’), and many others wrote enduring works which are still studied today.

Venetian Economy in the Renaissance The city of Venice is built on marshy islands, with many so-called streets actually comprised

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of water canals. Boats and ships were a part of most every Venetian’s life because water was everywhere in the city. Because of its strategic position on the Adriatic Sea, Venice became a major shipping port, controlling most of the trade between Europe and the Far East up until the end of the Renaissance. Shipping was a very important part of the city’s economy, and money flowed into the hands of the many families involved in the trade. In past ages, the money had been controlled by the nobility, whose wealth was invested in the land. With the large shipping industry in Venice, though, the power of money moved into the merchant class. People in the banking industry also gained wealth, as aristocrats began a trend of borrowing money for frivolous things, such as gambling and partying, and then failed to repay their loans. Bankers often took portions of the nobility’s landholdings in payment, thus increasing the bankers’ profits. The business class of merchants grew drastically during the Renaissance. Many merchants invested large amounts of money into the building of great mansions and churches during this time. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the Venetian Renaissance are considered the golden age of Venetian wealth.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Maurice Charney, writing in his book All of Shakespeare, begins his chapter on The Merchant of Venice by stating that this is ‘‘an odd sort of comedy.’’ He goes on to say that despite the fact that many critics try to argue that this play is not anti-Semitic, ‘‘it is no good to try to discard the hate that energizes the play.’’ Charney adds that ‘‘Once you admit that The Merchant of Venice is blatantly anti-Semitic, you also have to admit that it has the most sympathetic defense of Jews in all of Shakespeare and probably in all of Renaissance literature.’’ Charney also points out that it is through this play that audiences can see ‘‘Shakespeare’s skill in controlling the sympathies of the audience.’’ Shakespeare does this to provide the audience with multiple points of view of his characters. Norrie Epstein, writing in the book The Friendly Shakespeare, calls The Merchant of Venice a troubling play, for the same reason

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that other critics have come to this conclusion. It is difficult to say, after you have seen it, if it is ‘‘a tragedy or a comedy, a love story or a tale of hate.’’ Epstein’s conclusion, however, is that in the end, ‘‘in its infinite ambiguity, it is quintessential Shakespeare. No sooner have you reached one conclusion about the play than it’s immediately contradicted in the next scene—or line.’’ Despite the fact that Shakespeare’s audiences in Elizabethan times enjoyed coming to the theater and ridiculing stock, stereotypical Jewish characters, as was a routine at that time, Epstein states that ‘‘yet embedded within this caricature there’s a real human being [in Shylock’s character], and every so often Shakespeare lets him out.’’ Shylock shows sadness, and he respects his own culture, Epstein writes. And he displays many other emotions in this play. ‘‘He’s like a survivor of the Great Depression who grows up valuing money more than love.’’ Shakespeare’s talent is demonstrated in that he is able to go beyond his ‘‘age’s prejudices’’ and present ‘‘the world from the alien’s perspective.’’ Like almost everyone else, Andrew Dickson, writing in his The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, found that audiences can view The Merchant of Venice from two different perspectives: Antonio’s and Shylock’s. ‘‘Both sides of the story are there in this brilliant and troubling play, and it’s easy to feel that they’re irreconcilable.’’ But Dickson continues: ‘‘It is impossible to sit on the fence when watching The Merchant, and the issues it raises about religious intolerance and conflict seem more pressing now than ever before.’’ David Daniell, in his essay, ‘‘Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy,’’ praises the ambiguities in this play. He writes how various characters can be seen in two different lights: Bassanio as an adventurer or as a ‘‘self-seeking’’ bully; Shylock as a victim or ‘‘as a villainous stage ‘Jew’.’’ Then Daniell states that this is a sign of Shakespeare’s maturity as a writer. ‘‘We are seeing clearly, now, one of the principles of mature Shakespeare, that of indeterminacy. The plays are more open, more patient of interpretation, than is comfortable.’’ In Allan Bloom’s book Shakespeare’s Politics, the author writes that Shakespeare did ‘‘not understand Judaism, for he saw it from the outside.’’ But that was not the point of the play, Bloom contends. Shakespeare was interested in ‘‘man’s attempt to become man and man alone. He was of the conviction that it was of the nature

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of man to have varying opinions about the highest things and that such opinions become invested in doctrine and law and bound up with established interests. When confronted with one another, these opinions must quarrel.’’ And that is what happens between Shylock and Antonio. They were men who believed in different things. They would never understand one another. ‘‘The consequences of this must be either conflict or a bastardization of all that is noble and true in each of the separate points of view.’’ Shakespeare was not willing to smooth the conflict over just to make a few people in his audience happy, Bloom writes.

CRITICISM Anne Crow Crow examines how Shakespeare’s decision to name The Merchant of Venice after a minor character serves to increase attention on the true hero of the play, Portia. Throughout the play, Portia proves herself to be more knowledeable and clever than any of the male characters. Given how Portia dominates the action of the play, Crow contends, ‘‘Shakespeare must surely have intended the title of the play to be ironic.’’ In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare has woven together two stories. One is a revenge drama, set in Venice and based on the tensions between two business practices. Antonio represents the Christian merchants, who make their living trading with other nations, running risks posed by storms and pirates. Shylock represents the Jews, a marginalised group, locked into the ‘ghetto’ at night, who, because of restrictions imposed by the ruling Christians, can only make a living by lending money at fixed rates of interest. Antonio’s contempt for Shylock is not just because he is a ‘misbeliever’ (I.iii.103), but also because he is a ‘cut-throat dog’, taking no risks and making profit out of the merchants. The other story is a romantic comedy, set in the fictional world of Belmont, and based on the fairy tale device of a wealthy woman bound by her father’s will to marry the first man to choose the correct casket from gold, silver and lead. The eponymous hero of the play, Antonio, has a relatively small part, appearing in only six scenes and speaking fewer than 200 lines. However, he, or at least a pound of his flesh, is central to the Venetian story once he has contracted to give this

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PORTIA’S STRENGTH IS NOT THE ONLY ATTRIBUTE WHICH MAKES HER A MEMORABLE CHARACTER; SHE IS ALSO REALISTICALLY FLAWED.’’

forfeit if he fails to repay a loan within 3 months. Having signed the bond, the character has nothing more to do except await the return of his ships and then, when they are apparently lost, his fate at the hands of the moneylender. Apart from financing Bassanio with the money he borrowed, he is marginal to the romantic comedy, although he can be blamed for Bassanio giving away a ring which has symbolic significance for the two lovers. So why has Shakespeare named the play after a relatively minor character? Throughout the history of theatre, the part of the villainous Shylock has attracted the best actors of the day, and Portia, the heiress, is arguably the best female part for an actor that Shakespeare ever wrote. The obvious hero of this play is Portia. She is not only central to the romantic comedy, she is also the one who saves Venice from the predicament it finds itself in when its apparently impartial legal system is twisted into an instrument of revenge and used to threaten a barbaric act of cruelty. However, no Shakespearean play features a woman as the sole eponymous heroine; three of his women share the title with their partners, but the men are always named first (for example, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet). The playwright could have sidestepped the issue with another abstract title such as Measure for Measure, but it is much more effective to draw attention to the strong female lead by promoting a minor character as title-bearer. Portia’s strength is not the only attribute which makes her a memorable character; she is also realistically flawed. The audience does not always like her—she makes racist remarks about the Prince of Morocco and leaves Antonio suffering in the courtroom while she enjoys her 15 minutes of fame—but it is always possible to understand and empathise with her. Shakespeare reveals his genius at what Keats called ‘Negative Capability’ as he loses his own

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identity in the portrayal of an intelligent, independent-minded woman trapped in a man’s world. How frustrating it would have been for a woman like Portia that her cousin, Bellario, was able to go to the university at Padua and become a ‘learned doctor’ of law, while she had to stay at home and learn to be a good wife to the man her father chose to inherit his estates. If she had been born a man, she would have been able to follow a profession and exercise her undoubted intelligence. In Portia’s first scene, when she bemoans her fate, Shakespeare captures the exact tones of female conversation as she admits to a ‘hot temper’ and the ‘madness’ of youth (I.ii.16–17) which wants to break out from the constraints imposed on her. She mocks her prospective suitors to her friend Nerissa in an irreverent way. Her chatter, littered with words from the semantic field of law— ‘decree’, ‘counsel’, ‘come into court’, ‘became his surety and sealed under for another’—hints that Portia might dream of becoming a barrister. She soon creates an opportunity for herself to go to Venice and take Bellario’s place when the court judges Shylock’s claim to a pound of Antonio’s flesh. Her cousin risks his reputation so readily in recommending her erudition, ‘the greatness whereof I cannot enough commend’ (IV.i.156–57), that he must surely have helped her to become as knowledgeable as himself. The implication is that they have even planned such an escapade together, because, as soon as he receives her message, he sends books, notes and appropriate clothes without question. It is interesting to compare Portia with another frustrated Shakespearean character, Katherina Minola, in The Taming of the Shrew. Kate has had only a very rudimentary education and therefore has no resources to call on in her angry battle against male oppression. Portia is much more subtle. As Bassanio prepares to choose a casket in the lottery devised by her father, Portia plays the submissive woman to perfection. She pretends to be so much in love with Bassanio that she is flustered and confused: ‘One half of me is yours, the other half yours— / Mine own I would say: but if mine then yours— / And so all yours’ (III.ii.16–18). She continues to act the model daughter and wife, delivering a carefully prepared and formal speech of dedication. She tells him ‘But now I was the lord / Of this fair mansion, master of my servants, / Queen o’er myself’ (III.ii.167–69). The fact that she has to use two masculine forms in ‘lord’ and ‘master’

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‘‘A Plea for Mercy,’’ Act IV, scene I (Ó Shakespeare Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan)

to suggest supremacy but can use the feminine ‘Queen’ is a reminder to the audience that there was a similarly strong, intelligent and independent woman on the throne of England at the time of writing. Elizabeth may have been well pleased to see her sex valued so highly in this play. Portia subjects herself entirely to ‘her lord, her governor, her king’. This is almost a direct echo of Katherina’s final speech in The Taming of the Shrew in which she similarly refers to a husband as ‘thy lord, thy king, thy governor’. In The Merchant of Venice, however, Shakespeare clearly demonstrates that, though a woman may say this, it is probably merely to allay the suspicions of her husband while she follows her own agenda. Portia meekly pretends to be ‘an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpractised’ (III.ii.159), although the audience heard her reminding Nerissa that she speaks three languages, including Latin. However, Portia creates an escape clause. When she hands Bassanio a ring which symbolises everything she has given him, she reserves the right to ‘exclaim on’ him if he loses it or gives it away. Even as she dedicates herself to her husband, she is planning to trick him into giving the ring away so that she can embarrass him into accepting her dominance.

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Portia sets up the ploy with the ring before she hears about Antonio’s bond, so she is obviously prepared to take whatever opportunity is offered to her. When the letter arrives from Antonio, Bassanio is forced to admit that he deceived her and is, in fact, heavily in debt. Jessica warns that her father, Shylock, ‘would rather have Antonio’s flesh / Than twenty times the value of the sum / That he did owe him’ (III.ii.285–87). Portia plays the naive little rich girl, apparently thinking that, if she throws enough money at Shylock, he will retract his claim, but secretly she is hatching a plan. She humours Bassanio, telling him confidently that everything is going to be fine, and declares that she and Nerissa ‘Will live as maids and widows’ (III.ii.308–09) until their husbands return. The playwright has created a character who is obviously used to hoodwinking her father, playing the obedient daughter to allay his suspicions, and now she smoothly lies to her new lord and master. Perhaps she fears that he would forbid her adventure, or that, just as she could not trust him to choose the right casket, begging him to delay his decision and contemplating teaching him ‘how to choose right,’ she cannot now trust him to keep her secret. It could be that the deceit adds to the excitement, but it seems more likely that we should deduce that she is already planning how to trick Bassanio out of the ring. Two scenes later, the audience is permitted to see through her act as she tells Nerissa of the ‘device’ through which they will see their husbands ‘before they think of us’ (III.iv.58–59). She has planned the adventure with consummate efficiency, presumably perfected through similar tricks played on her father, and demonstrates the ease with which she will adopt the persona of a ‘fine, bragging youth’ (III.iv.69). When she arrives in the courtroom, the audience is in the privileged position of sharing the joke at Bassanio’s expense. Whether Bellario told her about the two ancient laws which had apparently lain dormant for so long that all the Venetians had forgotten about them, or whether she found them herself in the books lent by her cousin, she plays her part most skilfully. On entering, she takes centre stage and controls the action, leading Shylock to believe he has won, the audience and the courtroom to brace themselves for a bloody end to the trial, and taking poor Antonio to the brink of death with chest bared

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and sentence pronounced. At the last second, she says the words which stop Shylock short, ‘Tarry a little’ (IV.i.301), and reveals the existence of those two racist laws which save Antonio. The playwright has written a play in which a woman proves herself conclusively to be more astute, more shrewd and, indeed, more knowledgeable than the men, beating them at their own game. In the final scene, she makes a fool out of her husband through her trickery with the ring and also has the key role of tying up all the loose ends. She basks in the role of Lady Bountiful, giving Antonio news of the safe return of his ships (revealing her extensive network of contacts) and giving Lorenzo and Jessica a deed of gift from Shylock even though Antonio had negotiated it. Once more she takes control of her own inheritance, declaring, in front of Bassanio, ‘I have not yet entered my house’ (V.i.272–73). The Merchant of Venice features not one strong woman but three. Nerissa, having looked after her own financial interests by stipulating that she will only marry Gratiano if Bassanio wins Portia, takes the lead in the final stage of the ring game. Similarly, Jessica provides her own dowry by stealing from her father not one but two caskets of jewels and ducats, and, as Lorenzo tells Gratiano, she devised the plan for their elopement: ‘She hath directed / How I shall take her from her father’s house.’ Shakespeare gives Jessica the speech which proves conclusively that Portia is the hero of the play. Having told Lorenzo that Bassanio does not deserve the lady in whom he finds ‘the joys of heaven here on earth’ (III.v.64), she concludes that ‘the poor rude world / Hath not her fellow’ (III.v.70–71). With such a character dominating the action of the play, central to both the romantic comedy and to the climax of the revenge drama, Shakespeare must surely have intended the title of the play to be ironic. Source: Anne Crow, ‘‘The Poor Rude World Hath Not Her Fellow’: Anne Crow Explores the Possible Irony in the Title of The Merchant of Venice,’’ in The English Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, November 2004, pp. 33–36.

William Leigh Godshalk Godshalk discusses the unity of The Merchant of Venice in terms of the Pound of Flesh story and the Story of the Three Caskets, emphasizing in particular the elements of ‘‘bond’’ and ‘‘choice.’’ According to the critic, the characters are bound

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METAPHORICALLY, FROM THIS BOND BETWEEN ANTONIO AND BASSANIO, THE SOCIAL BONDAGE SPREADS AND GROWS, AND IS EMPHASIZED IN THE PATTERN OF ALLUSIONS TO EATING.’’

to each other and to different courses of action in many ways. Godshalk also examines ‘‘choice’’ as an extension of the ‘‘bond’’ issues, noting that even though the characters are bound by legal constraints, religious vows, and social obligations, they are free to determine into which bonds they enter. The critic concludes with a discussion of the ring scene (Act V, scene i) in which Shakespeare ironically dramatizes the issues of ‘‘choice’’ and ‘‘bond.’’ [Graham Midgley states in his ‘‘The Merchant of Venice: A Reconsideration,’’ Essays in Criticism X (1960)]: ‘‘The problem of The Merchant of Venice has always been its unity, and most critical discussions take this as the centre of their argument, asking what is the relative importance of its two plots and how Shakespeare contrives to interweave them into a unity.’’ The two plots are, of course, the Pound of Flesh Story and the Story of the Three Caskets, and the successful critic must account for Shakespeare’s success in molding the two divergent stories into one whole. The strategy of the present study will be to examine both plots to ascertain their basic elements—what these two stories at bottom involve—and then to show how these elements interpenetrate the play as a whole. The Pound of Flesh Story is found in The Merchant’s Italian source, Il Pecorone, and in outline it is the same in both. In the source and the play, an older man is bound to a Jew so that a younger can obtain enough money to seek an heiress. Shakespeare, however, emphasizes two points not found or emphasized in Ser Giovani’s tale. First, Shylock and Antonio are known to each other, and their relationship as financial enemies seems to be an old one. Their enmity stems from an ideological conflict over the morality of usury. Shylock, if you will, is a capitalist, Antonio a socialist; and both claim religious sanction for their economic positions. Second, the bond is emphasized.

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In the first minutes of his negotiations with Shylock, Bassanio says, ‘‘Antonio shall be bound’’ [I. iii. 4–5]. Throughout the scene, ‘‘bound’’ is used three times and ‘‘bond’’ seven. As Shylock prepares to exit, Antonio assures him, ‘‘I will seal unto this bond’’ [I. iii. 171]. Apparently Shakespeare is at pains to underline the concept of the bond here, and the words ‘‘bound’’ and ‘‘bond’’ echo through the play. Thus, it may be suggested that the Pound of Flesh Story as it is presented in The Merchant embodies two basic ideas: personal relationship (enemy to enemy as well as friend to friend) and bondage. And further, uniting the two ideas, we may see that the story is, at very bottom, about the binding of one man to another, with a consequent limitation on complete freedom of action. ‘‘And Antonio bound.’’ The Caskets are not found in Il Pecorone and may well have been taken from Robinson’s translation of the Gesta Romanorum. Here the Emperor asks a young maiden to prove herself worthy of marrying his son by choosing among three caskets of gold, silver, and lead. The same procedure is, of course, used in The Merchant, where to prove himself worthy of Portia, the lover must make, under the influence of his love, the proper choice. Both in the source story and in the play, ‘choice’ is the basic idea in the Casket Story. If one would have that which one desires, one must choose, and in so choosing, one reveals something of one’s true self. In the two basic stories out of which the play grows, there are, then, two underlying ideas: bondage and choice. The theme of the bond in various manifestations proliferates throughout the play and even penetrates the Story of the Caskets. For the characters are bound to each other and to different courses of action in many ways. Most apparent in the play is the legal bond, the bond that gives Antonio to Shylock. But if Antonio is legally bound to the evil will of Shylock, Portia is also legally bound, bound by the last will and testament of a perceptive and loving father. She may complain that ‘‘the will of a living daughter’’ is ‘‘curb’d by the will of a dead father’’ [I. ii. 24–5], but Nerissa is quick to remind her that her ‘‘father was ever virtuous, and holy men at their death have good inspirations’’ [I. ii. 27–8]. Later Portia’s words, that her father ‘‘hedg’d’’ her ‘‘by his wit’’ [II. i. 18], suggest that she acknowledges the protection implicit in

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her bondage. She is protected from her own fancy as well as from external coercion to marry. Portia’s suitors are also bound. She tells Morocco that he must swear before you choose, if you choose wrong Never to speak to lady afterward In way of marriage. [II. i. 40-2] And they go ‘‘forward to the temple’’ [II. i. 44] so that Morocco may take his oath, and later Arragon takes the same oath [II. ix. 2] before he too comes to make his choice of caskets. In the oaths of the suitors, the legal bond modulates into the religious bond. Again the bondage is formal and the terms are clearly set forth [II. ix. 9–16]. And moreover, the oaths of the suitors adumbrate the self-imposed religious oath of Shylock. He tells Antonio: ‘‘I have sworn an oath, that I will have my bond’’ [III. iii. 5]; and in the trial scene, when Portia asks him to accept ‘‘thrice thy money’’ [IV. i. 227], he replies: ‘‘An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven,— / Shall I lay perjury upon my soul?’’ [IV. i. 228–29]. The juxtaposition and inversion of values is ironic, and the point is that Shylock has bound himself religiously to a course of irreligious action. In contrast, the lovers are bound by their religion in the rites and oaths of marriage. Jessica and Lorenzo are presumably married sometime between their elopement [II. vi] and their arrival in Belmont with Salerio [III. ii]. After choosing the right casket, Bassanio marries Portia. Speaking of herself in the third person, she says to Bassanio: ‘‘her gentle spirit / Commits itself to yours to be directed, / As from her lord, her governor, her king’’ [III. ii. 163–65]. ‘‘Go with me to church, and call me wife’’ [III. i. 303], and Gratiano and Nerissa accompany them. The bonds of marriage are symbolized by the rings which the ladies present to their respective spouses and of which we shall hear more later. For the moment, however, we may marvel how many people in the play are bound by law or by religion. At the same time, it should be realized that the bondage extends in The Merchant beyond the formal limits of oath and legal contract. With Cicero, the Renaissance playgoer would have felt that there are ‘‘the bonds of human society’’, a ‘‘principle which knits together human society and cements our common interests’’ [De Officiis I. 5, 7; Cicero was a first-century B.C. Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher]. The principle

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may be called the bond of humanity, and within the play it assumes many forms. On one level, it is the close bond of friendship between Antonio and Bassanio. In our post-Freudian, sexually-oriented era, this friendship becomes latently homosexual—and possibly in many minds, worse. But rather than invoking Sigmund Freud, we may better look at Sir Thomas Elyot, who, in his Boke Named the Gouernour discusses ‘‘amitie or frendeshyp’’. Elyot feels that ‘‘Sens frendeshyp can not be but in good men, ne may not be without vertue, we may be assured, that therof none euyll may procede, or therwith any euyl thyng may participate’’. Purity or virtue rather than sexual attraction is the keynote of a Renaissance friendship . . . It is because of this spiritual bond of friends that Antonio is willing to bind himself legally to his enemy Shylock for the sake of his friend Bassanio. Bondage begets bondage. Metaphorically, from this bond between Antonio and Bassanio, the social bondage spreads and grows, and is emphasized in the pattern of allusions to eating. When Lorenzo and Gratiano leave Bassanio in the first scene, they promise three times to meet him again at ‘‘dinner-time’’ [I. i. 70, 109, 105]. Trying to gain the financial services of Shylock, Bassanio naturally asks him ‘‘to dine with us’’ [I. iii. 32]. Later, Gratiano promises Bassanio that his friends will be with him ‘‘at supper-time’’ [II. ii. 206]. As Jessica prepares to leave her home, Lorenzo urges her to hurry, for they ‘‘are stay’d for at Bassanio’s feast’’ [II. vi. 48]; and while they are the master and mistress of Belmont, they playfully ‘‘go to dinner’’ [III. v. 86]. Having saved Antonio’s life at the trial, Portia is entreated by Gratiano to give Bassanio and Antonio the pleasure of her ‘‘company at dinner’’ [IV. ii. 8]. To survive, all men must eat, but the pattern seems to suggest more than common necessity. It points to a stronger bond of love and good fellowship—‘‘for we have friends / That purpose merriment’’ [II. ii. 202–03]. On the social level, it is equivalent to the Communion Table. In contrast, Shylock denies the social bond implied in the convivial dinner . . . Answering Bassanio’s request that he eat with the Venetians, Shylock replies: Yes, to smell pork, to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into: I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following: but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you. [I. iii. 33–8]

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The denial seems absolute, and the linking of eating with praying is perhaps to be taken as an indication of the spiritual separation which Shylock feels. However, his denial is only apparent, for he later tells Jessica: I am bid forth to supper Jessica, . . . I am not bid for love, they flatter me, But yet I’ll go in hate, to feed upon The prodigal Christian. [II. v. 11, 13–15] Thus Shylock subverts the whole idea of social unity implicit in the supper and introduces the rather grotesque element of cannibalism, which again appears in his assurance to Salerio that Antonio’s flesh ‘‘will feed my revenge’’ [III. i. 54]. In his outrageous hints at eating human flesh, in his disgust at dining with his neighbors, Shylock demonstrates his lack of the essential feeling of unity which ties one man to another. In effect, he refuses to take part in the communal aspect of the social feast; he does not recognize the social bond. And one may well think back to the denial of humanity underlying the cannibalistic feast which ends Titus Andronicus. Nevertheless, in the same scene in which he promises to feed his revenge with a pound of human flesh, Shylock makes what has been interpreted as a meaningful plea to the Christians for the acknowledgement of his common humanity: I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food . . . as a Christian is? . . . if you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us shall we not revenge? [III. i. 58–67]

Shylock appeals to the bodily feelings and appendages which all normal humans have in common; but his final appeal, unfortunately, is not to a universal bond of mercy or justice, but to a universal inhumanity: revenge. His whole plea for inclusion is vitiated by the final, ironic twist. Through his own will and desire, he excludes himself from the general bond of brotherhood which holds society together. (pp. 89–94) Discussing the bonds of human society, Cicero notes [in Nicholas Grimald’s 1596 translation, Marcvs Tullius Ciceroes Three Bookes of Duties] that the principle which knits us together has ‘‘two parts: Justice is one, in the which is the greatest brightnesse of vertue, whereof good men beare theyr name, and to this is ioyned bountyfulnesse, which same we may tearme eyther gentlenesse, or liberalytye.’’ It may be suggested

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without straining the point unduly that the bonds in The Merchant follow the same dichotomy, though it is restated in basically Christian terms: Justice and Mercy, Law and Charity. The bondage of the play, broadly viewed, falls into these categories. Though the basic intentions are different, the bonds which tie Antonio and Portia to certain agreements are strictly legal. The bonds of marriage and of religious oath seem to form a middle ground in which legality and charity (or, at least, religious emotion) coexist. And finally, there are the extra-legal bonds which hold society together, and these are firmly based on charity. Thus the pattern of bondage embodies the play’s chief thematic dichotomy. Of course, the bonds may be categorized in various ways, and possibly from the most general point of view, they may be seen as the bonds of love and the bonds of hate. Although most of the characters are bound together in what may be called ‘love’, the initial relationship between Antonio and Shylock must be described in different terms. It becomes immediately apparent that hate, dislike, and repugnance are as binding in their way as charity, though the negative bond is ultimately destructive, and must either be dissolved or replaced. One may compare Portia’s initial reaction to her many suitors, or Jessica’s reaction to her father’s manners. Again, this broad categorization of the bonds fits neatly with what E. K. Chambers feels is central in the play. ‘‘The theme of The Merchant of Venice’’, he writes [in his Shakespeare: A Survey], ‘‘ . . . is readily to be formulated as a conflict. It is a conflict in the moral order, between the opposing principles of Love and Hate.’’ Opposition of principles in the moral world presupposes the element of moral choice; for the concept of moral action is closely related to the idea of free will. To be truly moral, one must have the opportunity of being otherwise. Thus, at this point in our discussion of The Merchant, it will be expedient to return to the basic element in the Casket Story: choice. If the characters of the play are bound and their actions are determined by certain legal contracts, religious vows, and social obligations, they are also free, as all moral beings must be, to determine the bonds into which they will enter. It may be objected, of course, that all drama, to have any dramatic force, must be based on the idea that its protagonists have freedom of action, that choice is essential to drama. Without arguing

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against this possible objection, I would like to suggest that in The Merchant the element of choice is emphasized far beyond the point needed to maintain the requisite tension. It is doubly underlined in the Story of the Caskets. Portia introduces the idea rather forcefully, ‘‘O me the word ‘choose’!’’ [I. ii. 22–3], and goes on to explain, in a passage we have examined before, that her choice has been curbed by her father’s will. In turn, Nerissa explains that the suitor ‘‘who chooses’’ her father’s meaning and thus the right casket ‘‘chooses’’ Portia also [I. ii. 30–1]. The word echoes throughout the scene. Later, as the several caskets are revealed to Morocco, Portia commands him: ‘‘Now make your choice’’ [II. vii. 3], and he and Portia discuss how he will know if his choice is correct. When Arragon stands facing the caskets, he notes that the word ‘‘many’’ may suggest ‘‘the fool multitude that choose by show’’ [II. ix. 26], and decides that he ‘‘will not choose what many men desire’’ [II. ix. 31]. After Bassanio arrives, Portia tells him that she could teach him ‘‘How to choose right’’ [III. ii. 11]. But to continue with illustrations at this point is a work of supererogation. By the mere repetition of the words ‘‘choose’’ and ‘‘choice’’, Shakespeare forces the idea on the playgoer’s consciousness. Out of this central myth of choosing, the idea of choice radiates through the play. Presented with Shylock’s alternatives, either signing the note with a pound of flesh as forfeiture or getting no money, Antonio chooses to ‘‘seal unto this bond’’ [I. iii. 171], even though Bassanio is suspicious. More agonizing is the choice of Jessica: Alack, what heinous sin is it in me To be ashamed to be my father’s child! But though I am a daughter to his blood I am not to his manners. [II. iii. 16–19] To end her inner strife, she chooses to elope with Lorenzo, becoming a Christian. Her situation and choice form an effective contrast to Portia’s. Portia, bound by her father’s will, freely chooses to abide by its rules. When Nerissa asks her if she will marry the drunken young German should he choose the correct casket, her answer—‘‘I will do anything Nerissa ere I will be married to a sponge’’ [I. ii. 98–9]—seems to bar the natural solution of refusing to obey her father’s will. Later, drawn by her love of Bassanio to show him the proper choice, she decides that she cannot betray her father’s trust. Jessica,

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given a similar choice between father and lover, chooses Lorenzo. (pp. 94–6) Although we have seen that ‘the bond’ and ‘the choice’ are basic elements in The Merchant, we must now examine how they fit into the play’s larger patterns of action. There is a parallel, we have noted, between Antonio bound to the ‘‘will’’ of Shylock [IV. i. 83] and Portia bound to the will of her father; and from this starting point, we may distinguish two major movements in the play (movements which have some correspondence to the source stories). We may call them the suit of love—Bassanio’s winning of Portia—and the suit of revenge—Shylock’s pursuit of Antonio. Both suits culminate in a trial centering upon a choice which is, indeed, a test of the moral fiber of the chooser. The first movement, the suit of love, is the least complex of the two. The audience watches the wrong choice of Morocco, who, making an equation between human worth and physical wealth, takes the golden casket [II. vii. 59–60]. He is followed by Arragon whose choice is governed by his own price: ‘‘I will not jump with common spirits’’ [II. ix. 32], and he picks silver. Thus by the time Bassanio comes to choose, the playgoer is fully aware of the correct choice, and Bassanio, not ‘‘deceiv’d with ornament’’ [III. ii. 74], makes the proper choice of lead, and by hazarding all (as his friend Antonio has done for him), he gains his heart’s desire. In the realm of love and personal attachment, to gain everything one must hazard just as much. The second movement, which we have called the suit of revenge, and which actually runs concurrently with the first, grows out of the suit of love; for Antonio binds himself to Shylock so that Bassanio may have the necessary wealth to court Portia. And in the end, love dominates and destroys revenge, though the victory is not an easy one. Through a series of mishaps, Antonio’s several fleets do not arrive in Venice, and the bond is forfeit. Shylock thereupon demands that the pound of human flesh be paid, and a day of trial is set. Shylock, it appears, must have his will of Antonio, just as, in a wholly different context, Bassanio has won Portia. The trial scene, at first, seems not to offer a direct parallel, since ostensibly the trial is not of the suitor, Shylock, but of Antonio, and therefore cannot mirror Bassanio’s trial at the choice of caskets. However, if we can take advantage of our knowledge of the outcome, we see that the

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trial of Antonio has, in one way, a foregone conclusion; for Portia is already armed with the quibble that will cause Shylock to break off the suit, and she already knows the forgotten law which will put Shylock in Antonio’s place, in danger of his life. It is not then the trial of Antonio; he readily admits that the bond is forfeit; but it is the trial of Shylock, who is presented by Portia with a series of moral choices. First she comments: Of a strange nature is the suit you follow, Yet in such rule, that the Venetian law Cannot impugn you as you do proceed, [IV. i. 177–79] suggesting that Shylock has complete freedom of will to act as he wishes. After finding that Antonio confesses the bond, however, she insists: ‘‘Then must the Jew be merciful’’ [IV. i. 182]. Mistaking the moral imperative for the physical Shylock asks, ‘‘On what compulsion must I?’’ [IV. i. 183], and Portia launches into her eloquent speech on the quality of mercy. Shylock is given the free choice between Justice and Mercy—with a strong incentive in Portia’s speech to be merciful— and the choice seems quickly and confidently made: ‘‘My deeds upon my head! I crave the law’’ [IV. i. 206]. Nevertheless, Portia does not give up her testing and shifts her examination to different grounds. The next choice Shylock must make is between ‘‘thrice thy money’’ [IV. i. 227] and the pound of flesh. But even material wealth will not divert his suit of revenge, and his choice suggests the quality of the man. Since his choices are not in accord with the play’s scheme of values, he does not gain the object of his desires—which is, rather grotesquely, Antonio’s heart. The latter part of the trial scene gives both Antonio and the Duke of Venice a chance to make the proper choice, and they are merciful. Thus both the suit of love and the suit of revenge follow the pattern of ‘bond’ and ‘choice’. Ironically and comically, both elements are used again at the play’s end. The comedy of rings, which are begged from Bassanio and Gratiano by their disguised wives, runs through the end of Act IV and into Act V, recapitulating and mirroring Antonio’s bondage to Shylock; for the rings, which the husbands swear so faithfully to wear, are the symbols of the marital bond. The point of the comedy lies beneath Antonio’s words to Bassanio: My Lord Bassanio, let him [i.e., Portia as Balthazar] have the ring,

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Let his deservings and my love withal Be valued ’gainst your wife’s commandement. [IV. i. 449–51] In different terms, Bassanio is presented with the same choice as Shylock: shall he follow the spirit of charity or the letter of the law? His choice is doubly hard because the ring is the physical symbol of the bond between Portia and himself, but charity wins, and Gratiano is sent after the disguised Portia with Bassanio’s ring. The comedy of Bassanio’s aside: ‘‘Why I were best to cut my left hand off, / And swear I lost the ring defending it’’ [V. i. 177–78], at the discovery of his ring’s loss sets the tone of the final trial; and the bawdy lightness of the accusation levelled against the recreant husbands by their apparently indignant wives suggests that Portia and Nerissa have interpreted the loss in the proper spirit. The rings are merely physical signs of a bond which is, of necessity, spiritual. Perhaps the suggestion is that all bonds between man and man—or man and woman—are of this nature. But the final binding of the play is Antonio’s: I once did lend my body for his wealth, Which but for him that had your husband’s ring Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again, My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord Will never more break faith advisedly. [V. i. 249–53] Portia accepts the new bond and seals her renewed faith by returning Bassanio’s ring. The episode ends in laughter—with Gratiano’s quip concerning Nerissa’s ring—though the words of Antonio fall more seriously on the ear. Once more he binds himself for his friend, with his soul this time, not a pound of flesh, in the balance. The flesh has given way to the spirit, and, though in a higher key, the play ends on the same note upon which it began: ‘I dare be bound again’ [V. i. 251]. (pp. 97–100) Source: William Leigh Godshalk, ‘‘The Merchant of Venice: Bond or Free?,’’ in Patterning in Shakesperean Drama: Essays in Criticism, Mouton, 1973, pp. 87–100.

Frank Kermode Kermode presents a concise overview of The Merchant of Venice, initially examining Shakespeare’s punning of the term ‘‘gentle’’ and discussing the word’s various meanings throughout the play. The critic identifies two readings of ‘‘gentle’’ which have a significant bearing on the drama: the sense of ‘‘gentleness’’ as in civility or an improved nature;

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and the notion of ‘‘Gentile,’’ or Christian, which stands in contrast to Shylock and Judaism. In addition, Kermode asserts that justice is a primary theme of the drama, noting that while the Christians stress mercy, love, and charity, Shylock advocates the letter (rather than the spirit) of the law, hate, and vengeance. The Merchant of Venice, the critic concludes, is about ‘‘judgement, redemption, and mercy; the supersession in human history of the grim four thousand years of unalleviated justice by the era of love and mercy.’’ We are not likely, whether or no we share his high opinion of Shakespeare as a comic writer, to fall into Johnson’s error when he dismissed the reiteration of the word ‘gentle’ in [The Merchant of Venice] as only another example of Shakespeare’s weakness for this ‘fatal Cleopatra’, the pun. ‘Gentleness’ in this play means civility in its old full sense, nature improved; but it also means ‘Gentile’, in the sense of Christian, which amounts, in a way, to the same thing. Here are some of the passages in which it occurs: Hie thee, gentle Jew. The Hebrew will turn Christian: he grows kind. [I. iii. 177–78] If e’er the Jew her father come to heaven, It will be for his gentle daughter’s sake. [II. iv. 33–4] (Jessica is also called ‘gentle’ in l. 19) Now, by my hood, a Gentile [gentle] and no Jew [II. iv. 51] . . . to leave a rich Jew’s service and become The follower of so poor a gentleman [II. ii. 147–48] The Duke urges Shylock to be merciful; asking him not only to loose the forfeiture, But, touch’d with human gentleness and love. Forgive a moiety of the principal . . . We all expect a gentle answer, Jew. [IV. i. 24–33] Other ‘gentle’ objects are Antonio’s ships, and Portia, many times over; and Portia speaks of mercy as a ‘gentle rain’. There is a straightforward contrast between gentleness, the ‘mind of love’, and its opposite, for which Shylock stands. He lends money at interest, which is not only unchristian, but an obvious misdirection of love; Antonio ventures with his

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THERE IS A STRAIGHTFORWARD CONTRAST BETWEEN GENTLENESS, THE ‘MIND OF LOVE’, AND ITS OPPOSITE, FOR WHICH SHYLOCK STANDS.’’

ships, trusts his wealth to the hand of God (and so they are ‘gentle’ ships). It is true that a Jew hath eyes etc.; this does not reduce the difference between man and man, when one is gentle and the other not. To make all this clear, Shakespeare twice inserts the kind of passage he later learned to do without; the kind which tells the audience how to interpret the action. It is normal to cut these scenes in acting texts, but only because these plays are so grossly misunderstood. The first such is the debate on Genesis, xxxi. 37 ff. (Jacob’s device to produce ringstraked, speckled and spotted lambs) which occurs when Antonio first asks for the loan [I. iii. 61 ff.]. The correct interpretation of this passage, as given by Christian commentators on Genesis (see A. Williams, The Common Expositor, 1950), is that Jacob was making a venture (‘A thing not in his power to bring to pass, / but sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of heaven’; compare Faerie Queene, V. iv). But Shylock sees no difference between the breeding of metal and the breeding of sheep—a constant charge against usurers . . . Later, in II. viii, we have a pair of almost Spenserian exampla [examples] to make this point clear. First Solanio describes Shylock’s grief at the loss of daughter and ducats; he cannot distinguish properly between them, or lament the one more than the other. Then Solario describes the parting of Antonio and Bassanio; Antonio urges Bassanio not even to consider money; the loss of Bassanio is serious, but he urges him to be merry and not to think of Shylock’s bond. When love is measured out, confused by the ‘spirit of calculation’ (R. B. Heilman’s phrase in his discussion of the errors of Lear [II. ix. 21]), the result is moral chaos. Bassanio’s visit to Belmont is frankly presented as a venture, like Jason’s for the Golden Fleece; and the theme of gentle venturing is deepened in the scenes of the choice of caskets. The breeding metals, gold and silver, are to be rejected; the good lead requires that the chooser should ‘give and hazard all he hath’ [II. ix. 21].

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Morocco (II. vii) supposes that Portia cannot be got by any casket save the golden one, tacitly confusing her living worth with that of gold, the value of gentleness with that of the best breeding metal. Arragon (II. ix—the intervening scene contains the lamentation of Shylock over his daughter-ducats) rejects gold out of pride only, ironically giving the right reasons for despising the choice of the ‘many’, that they are swayed not by Truth but by Opinion, a mere false appearance of Truth, not Truth itself. (In this sense the Jews are enslaved to Opinion.) He chooses silver because he ‘assumes desert’, another matter from trusting to the hand of God; and his reward is ‘a shadow’s bliss’ [II. ix. 67]. After another scene in which Shylock rejoices over Antonio’s losses and again laments Jessica’s treachery, there follows (III. ii) the central scene of choice, in which Bassanio comes to ‘hazard’ and ‘venture’ for Portia. The point of the little song is certainly that in matters of love the eye is a treacherous agent, and can mistake substance for shadow. Bassanio, rejecting the barren metals which appear to breed, avoids the curse of barrenness on himself (for that is the punishment of failure); and he finds in the leaden casket Portia’s true image. The scroll speaks of the ‘fortune’ which has fallen to him. Portia, in her happiness, speaks of Bassanio’s prize as not rich enough, deploring the poorness of her ‘full sum’; and Gratiano speaks of the forthcoming marriage as the solemnization of ‘the bargain of your faith’ [III. ii. 193]. Bassanio the merchant has ‘won the fleece’ [III. ii. 241]; but at the same moment Antonio has lost his. Bassanio is ‘dear bought’, as Portia says; but Antonio will not have him return for any reason save love: ‘if your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter’ [III. ii. 321–22]. At this point the conflict between gentleness (Antonio’s laying down his life for his friend) and a harsh ungentle legalism becomes the main burden of the plot. Shylock demands his bond; this is just, like Angelo’s strict application of the law against fornication in the hard case of Claudio [in Measure for Measure]. It is, in a way, characteristic of Shakespeare’s inspired luck with his themes that Shylock in the old stories will take flesh for money. There is no substantial difference: he lacks the power to distinguish gold, goat’s flesh, man’s flesh, and thinks of Antonio’s body as carrion.

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The difference between this and a ‘gentle’ attitude reflects a greater difference: DUKE: How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none? SHYLOCK: What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong?

[IV. i. 88–9] There is no need to sentimentalize this; as Shakespeare is careful to show in Measure for Measure the arguments for justice are strong, and in the course of Christian doctrine it is necessarily satisfied before mercy operates . . . Shylock has legally bought his pound of flesh; if he does not get it there is no force in the decrees of Venice’ [IV. i. 102]. But as heavenly mercy is never deserved, it is an adornment of human authority to exercise it with the same grace: . . . earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That, in the course of justice, none of us Should see salvation. [IV. i. 196–200] But this plea does not work on the stony unregenerate heart; Shylock persists in the demand for justice, and gets it. Like any other human being, he must lose all by such a demand. In offering to meet the demands of strict justice (in accordance with the Old Law) Antonio will pay in blood the price of his friend’s happiness; and it cannot be extravagant to argue that he is here a type of the divine Redeemer, as Shylock is of the unredeemed. Shakespeare’s last act, another ‘thematic’ appendix to the dramatic action, is motivated by the device of the rings. It begins with a most remarkable passage, Lorenzo’s famous ‘praise of music’. In this are treated ‘topics’ which, as James Hutton shows in an extremely important study [‘Some English Poems in Praise of Music’, English Miscellany II (1951)], are all evidently the regular parts of a coherent and familiar theme—so familiar indeed, that Shakespeare permits himself to treat it ‘in a kind of shorthand’. The implications of this ‘theme’ are vast; but behind it lies the notion, very explicit in Milton’s ‘Ode at a Solemn Musick’, of the universal harmony impaired by sin and restored by the Redemption. The lovers, in the restored harmony of Belmont, have a debt to Antonio:

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Norbert Kentrup as Shylock, Mark Rylance as Bassanio, Jack Sheperd as Antonio and Kathryn Pogson as Portia in Act I, scene iii at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 1998 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

You should in all sense be much bound to him, For, as I hear, he was much bound for you. [V. i. 136–37] In such an atmosphere the amorous sufferings of Troilus, Thisbe, Dido and Medea are only shadows of possible disaster [cf. V.i.1–14], like the mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Antonio on his arrival is allowed, by the contretemps [inopportune and embarrassing occurence] of the ring-plot, to affirm once more the nature of his love, standing guarantor for Bassanio in perpetuity, ‘my soul upon the forfeit’ [V. i. 252]. The Merchant of Venice, then, is ‘about’ judgment, redemption and mercy; the supersession in human history of the grim four thousand years of unalleviated justice by the era of love and mercy. It begins with usury and corrupt love; it ends with harmony and perfect love. And all the time it tells its audience that this is its subject; only by a determined effort to avoid the obvious can one mistake the theme of The Merchant of Venice.

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Source: Frank Kermode, ‘‘The Mature Comedies,’’ in Early Shakespeare, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., 1961, pp. 211–27.

John W. Draper Draper provides historical background on English Jews and the practice of usury (moneylending for interest) as they existed in Shakespeare’s time to prove that the chief concern of The Merchant of Venice is conflicting economic ideals rather than race or religion. The critic argues that Shylock hates Antonio not only because he lends money interest-free, but also because he denigrates Shylock’s profession and thwarts his business. According to Draper, Shakespeare is merely representative of his age when he idealistically compares Antonio’s Christian business ethic with Shylock’s more rigid and unforgiving value system. This fundamental distinction, the critic concludes, reflects ‘‘the difficult transition from the medieval economic system to modern capitalism’’ which was occurring in Elizabethan England.

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The character portrayal of Shakespeare shows the widest human sympathy, but Shylock is an exception. He is an object of loathing and contempt; he is depicted as unprincipled in business and unfeeling in his home. In the end he pays a terrible penalty, even more severe than does his prototype in Il Pecorone, the probable source of the play, or indeed in any of the other versions of the old folk tale; and no one, not even the kindly Antonio, says a single word in his favor: the dramatist apparently expected his audience to be even more unsympathetic toward Shylock than toward the notorious Richard III, whose overthrow had brought to the throne the glorious House of Tudor. This unwonted saeva indignatio [furious indignation] of Shakespeare is usually attributed to an anti-Semiticism inherited from the Middle Ages and kept alive by the illegal presence of Jews in London and especially aroused at the time by the alleged attempt in 1594 of Lopez, the court physician, to poison the Queen. As a matter of fact, however, the prejudice of the Middle Ages must have been dying out, even in clerical circles, for under Cromwell the Jews were permitted to return; moreover, such few Spaniards of Jewish descent as lived in London had long since been converted to at least outward Catholic conformity, and so were indistinguishable from other Spaniards; ` and the cause ce´lebre [celebrated case] of Lopez, though perhaps the occasion for one or two anti-Jewish plays, is too far removed both from Shakespeare’s character and from his plot to have furnished the chief motive for either. Shylock, the Machiavellian Jew, would seem, indeed, to have been a study not in Elizabethan realism but in Italian local color; for Italy, especially Venice where the Jews were go-betweens in the Turkish trade, had become, since their expulsion from Spain, their chief refuge in Western Europe. Merely as a Jew, therefore, Shylock could hardly call forth the contemptuous abhorrence manifest in the play, for that side of his character was the stuff of exotic romance; and, furthermore, Shakespeare’s one appeal to the sympathy of the audience for Shylock is the latter’s defense of his race and religion: ‘‘Hath not Iew eyes? hath not Iew hands, organs, dementions . . . ?’’ [cf. III. i. 58–60]. The conflict between Shylock and Antonio is not so much a matter of religion but rather of mercantile ideals, as Shylock declares in an aside at the entrance of Antonio:

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NOT ONLY DOES THE MERCHANT OF VENICE REFLECT THE ELIZABETHAN ATTITUDE TOWARD INTEREST, BUT THE DETAILS OF THE PLAY CONSTANTLY REFER TO CURRENT BUSINESS CUSTOMS.’’

I hate him for he is a Christian: But more, for that in low simplicitie He lends out money gratis, and brings downe The rate of usance here with us in Venice. [I. iii. 42–5] The audience is amply informed that Shylock hates Antonio because the latter has called him ‘‘Usurer,’’ and spat upon him, and ‘‘thwarted’’ his ‘‘bargaines’’; and Antonio openly glories in having cast such slurs. Upon the Rialto he has railed at Shylock, not for religion but for usury—as Shylock puts it, ‘‘all for use of that which is mine owne’’ [I. iii. 113]. In the crucial third act, Shylock twice reiterates this theme; and Antonio himself assures the audience: He seekes my life, his reason well I know; I oft deliuered from his forfeitures Many that haue at times made mone to me, Therefore he hates me. [III. i. 21–4] Race and religion, then, are not the main theme of the play; it is rather conflicting economic ideals. In Elizabethan parlance, ‘‘usurer’’ meant anyone who took even the lowest interest on money. Antonio follows the medieval ideal, and, like Chaucer’s Merchant [in The Canterbury Tales], is supposed ‘‘neither to lend nor borrow’’ [cf. I. iii. 61] at interest; and Shylock, like the modern capitalist, makes interest the very basis of his business. Again and again, in Shakespeare, this allusion to usury recurs, and commonly with a fling at its un-Christian ethics and its bitter consequences. It is ‘‘forbidden’’; and the usurer is a simile of shame; the citizens in Coriolanus are outraged that the senators pass ‘‘edicts for usury to support usurers’’ [Coriolonus, I. i. 82]; and Timon is full of attacks upon the system as undermining the Christian virtues and the state. In other Elizabethan dramatists also the usurer is a common object of hatred shading into

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contemptuous ridicule. Partly classical, partly medieval in origin, he is often, like Vice in the old Morality plays, both wicked and comic: Shylock is clearly in this tradition, and follows directly upon Marlowe’s Barabas [in The Jew of Malta] who also combines moneylender and Italianate Jew. The widespread currency of this theme and the intensity of emotion that it aroused suggest that it could not have been purely a dramatic convention, and that it struck closer home to the Elizabethans than a mere medieval tradition or a bit of Venetian local color. Like the miles gloriosus [boastful soldier], the Elizabethan usurer owes something to Latin comedy; but, like Falstaff, Shylock is more than a classical survival: if not a characteristic London type, he at least exemplified an immediate and crying problem, the iniquity of English usurers and the interest that they charged; and this theme in The Merchant of Venice can hardly be the accidental petrified remains of Shakespeare’s ‘‘clerical predecessor,’’ the author of the lost play The Jew; for it is too prominent both in this and in other plays by Shakespeare. Indeed, the question of the moral and the legal justification of interest came close home to every Elizabethan, and was crucial in the transition from feudal society to modern capitalism. The hardships of this transition appear in the ‘‘misery and squalor’’ of the age. Gold was pouring into Europe from America; prices were rising, and merchants grew rich, but classes with fixed incomes suffered intensely. The rural aristocracy, whom political life was drawing to London, could no longer live directly off the produce of their estates, but required ample supplies of ready money, which they had to borrow at an interest inflated by competition with the merchants who could afford to pay exorbitant rates. Even miners, weavers, and other classes of artisans worked on small loans often at ruinous interest. The increasing need for large capital, both in industry and in commerce, required similar large-scale organization of finance; and the devolution of the medieval guilds, begun by the exactions of Henry VII and continued during the sixteenth century, put much of this business into the hands of almost unregulated individuals or of new organizations. The players themselves sometimes had reason to be bitter at the demands of [Rose Theatre manager Philip] Henslowe and others who supplied them with buildings and

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furnishings; and thus both audience and actors had personal motives for hating the usurer . . . Shakespeare . . . took the regular attitude of the 1590’s. Indeed, most revelatory of the dramatist’s point of view are the excuses that Shylock gives for his trade . . . Like the devil, he quotes Scripture to his purpose, though the audience doubtless had by memory more than one text that forbade it. He parodies Aristotle’s attack on usury as if it were an argument in favor [cf. I. iii. 76–90]. He declares that he is unjustly hated ‘‘all for use of that which is mine owne’’ [I. iii. 113]; and anyone would have told him that since a usurer’s goods were got by a sort of theft, they were not his own. Of course, it was this feeling on the part of the audience that justified the treatment of Shylock at the de´nouement. He calls Antonio a ‘‘prodigall,’’ though the term is clearly misapplied; for usurers preyed on the youthful heirs of noble families, and so, to the horror of the age, brought ruin on ancient houses. He hates Antonio for reducing the rate of interest ‘‘here with us in Venice’’ [I. iii. 45], and so upholds the extortionate charges of the day. With a callous presumption, he publicly demands ‘‘justice’’ for his compounded iniquities; he calls upon his oath in a ‘‘heaven’’ whose law he flouts; and he claims the support of the Venetian commonwealth, whose well-being his practices were supposed to undermine. To the Elizabethans all this was mordant casuistry; and, by making Shylock himself call up almost every argument against his own way of life, Shakespeare, with keen dramatic irony, implies that not one honest word can be said in his favor. For Shylock the Jew, there is no such rationale of bitterness; and so utter and thorough a philippie [tirade] must surely have been intentional. Not only does The Merchant of Venice reflect the Elizabethan attitude toward interest, but the details of the play constantly refer to current business customs. Such a ‘‘merry bond,’’ signed under pretense of friendliness, was not without precedent in actual fact. Bassanio, to seal the bargain, follows the usual etiquette of asking the lender to dine; and later Shylock actually goes to a feast, like a true usurer, to help use up the borrowed sum and so insure a forfeiture . . . Shylock, moreover, carefully avoids the term ‘‘usury,’’ is insulted at being called a ‘‘usurer,’’ and, with an exquisite delicacy, objects even to having his ‘‘well won thrift’’ [I. iii. 50] described as ‘‘interest’’—though this euphemism was commonly allowed by contemporary

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moneylenders. London usurers—perhaps because they had risen from poverty by extreme penuriousness—were supposed to run their households in a stingy, not to say starvling, expenditure; and Shylock and Gobbo mutually complain of each other in this regard. Usurers regularly wished the forfeiture rather than the repayment of the loan; and in [Thomas] Lodge’s [Lookin-glasse for London and England ], the young gentleman, like Bassanio, offers much more than the nominated sum; but the moneylender, like Shylock, refuses and demands the forfeiture. Contemporary London, therefore, would seem to have supplied both the commercial decorum and the business trickery of Shakespeare’s Venice; and this suggests that the dramatist intended to bring before his audience with immediate realism his economic theme. Even the idealized Antonio reflects Elizabethan London. He ‘‘was wont to lend out money for a Christian curtsie’’ [III. i. 49], according to the highest ethics of the age . . . The comparison of Antonio to a ‘‘royal Merchant’’ suggests England as well as Venice; for the London merchants had grown rich, and in their ‘‘comely entertainment’’ were not to be ‘‘matched by any foreign opposition.’’ Hunter, on Shylock’s word, declared that Antonio condemned interest ‘‘through simplicity,’’ and that, as Shylock says, he was a ‘‘prodigal’’ wasting an ample patrimony [in The Merchant of Venice, ed. H. H. Furness]; but the dramatist clearly expects us to admire his probity rather than condemn his ignorance and waste . . . As a matter of fact, Antonio knew well the exactions of usurers, and realized that if he would accommodate his friend, he must accept hard terms. Elsewhere he appears as a skilful merchant who does not risk his ‘‘whole estate Upon the fortune of this present yeere’’ [I. i. 43–4]; and, like a shrewd man of affairs, he does not seem overanxious early in the play to divulge his business secrets. He is, indeed, the ideal merchant, very much as Othello and Henry V are the ideal of army life; and, just as Shakespeare heightened his effect by contrasting Hotspur and Prince Hal with the poltroonery of Falstaff [in 1 Henry IV ], so, in The Merchant of Venice, he put Shylock and Antonio side by side as comparative studies in business ethics. Shylock the Jew was merely exotic local color; Shylock the usurer was a commentary on London life. The moneylender had been hated for centuries; and, in Shakespeare’s day,

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the difficult transition from the medieval economic system to modern capitalism especially subjected both rich and poor to his exactions. Efforts to find realism in Shylock have generally looked to Venice or the Orient—regions of which Shakespeare knew none too much and the groundlings even less: the crux of the play is nearer home; and it reflects the current uses of commercial life and the current attitude toward them. Nevertheless, The Merchant of Venice is not strictly a problem play like All’s Well, or even mainly one as is Othello, for it is written ex parte [from a one-sided point of view]; to Shakespeare there is but one answer, and so there is no problem; and, moreover, the old stories upon which it is founded dictated a happy ending that forbade the logical conclusion of the theme and kept the play a romantic comedy; but, to the Elizabethans, it had a verve and realism that is lost upon the present reader. Just as the stories of the romances were changed and reinterpreted century by century, so Shakespeare gave timely significance and telling vividness to his borrowed origins; and this intensified reality is perhaps his chief contribution to Elizabethan drama. Usually the matrix from which his play developed was a plot, as in King Lear; sometimes both plot and character, as in Henry V; and, on this matrix, he built a drama that, almost certainly in details of setting and style and often in motivation and theme, shows the immediate impress of his age. Julius Caesar is full of English setting; the background and motives of Desdemona [in Othello] are thoroughly Elizabethan; in Twelfth Night he transplanted an English household and staff of servants to the confines of Illyria; the character of Falstaff is a realistic foil to the romantic wars of chivalry; and, in Merry Wives, even the plot would seem to have been borrowed from common contemporary situations. The Merchant of Venice is a romantic comedy built of old folk material, to which has been added a realistic theme and motivation; and this theme, although Shakespeare has not yet learned to make it entirely implicit in his plot, obviously portrays the downfall of hated usury and the triumph of Christian charity in the person of a princely merchant. Source: John W. Draper, ‘‘Usury in The Merchant of Venice,’’ in Modern Philology, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, August 1935, pp. 37–47.

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SOURCES Bloom, Allan, with Harry V. Jaffa, ‘‘On Christian and Jew: The Merchant of Venice,’’ in Shakespeare’s Politics, University of Chicago Press, 1964, pp. 13–34. Charney, Maurice, ‘‘The Merchant of Venice,’’ in All of Shakespeare, Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 41–9. Daniell, David, ‘‘Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, edited by Stanley Wells, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1997, pp. 101–21. Dickson, Andrew, ‘‘The Merchant of Venice,’’ in The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, Rough Guides, 2005, pp. 217–27. Epstein, Norrie, ‘‘The Merchant of Venice,’’ in The Friendly Shakespeare, Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 97–109. Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice, edited by William Lyon Phelps, Yale University Press, 1957.

FURTHER READING Barnet, Sylvan, ed., Twentieth-Century Interpretations of ‘‘The Merchant of Venice’’: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1970. This is a collection of essays by prominent critics writing on various topics concerning Shakespeare’s play. Grebanier, Bernard, The Truth about Shylock, Random House,1962. Grebanier reconstructs Elizabethan attitudes toward Jews and the practice of usury, determining how much this climate of opinion affected

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Shakespeare’s writing of The Merchant of Venice. Grebanier also offers a critical analysis of the play, which he interprets as an allegorical dramatization of the triumph of love and mercy over justice and hate. Gross, Kenneth, Shylock is Shakespeare, University of Chicago Press, 2006 Professor Gross contends that Shylock, one of Shakespeare’s most complex characters is actually Shakespeare himself, revealing himself through his character. Hadfield, Andrew, The English Renaissance, 1500–1620 (Blackwell Guides to Literature), Blackwell Publishing, 2000. Professor Hadfield helps students to understand the times, culture, and literature of the Renaissance, through short biographical sketches of some of England’s best authors of this time period and analyses of their works. Shapiro, James, A Year in the Life of Shakespeare, Harper Perennial, 2006. Shapiro recreates the year 1599, showing how the political and cultural life around him shaped Shakespeare’s work, moving him into a more mature stage as playwright, one that would eventually mark him as one of the greatest writers ever. Tovey, Barbara, ‘‘The Golden Casket: An Interpretation of The Merchant of Venice,’’ in Shakespeare as a Political Thinker, edited by John Alvis and Thomas G. West, Carolina Academic Press, 1981, pp. 215–38. Tovey interprets the play symbolically, arguing that Shakespeare criticizes Christianity through his dramatization of Bassanio’s relationship with Antonio.

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The Merry Wives of Windsor A story that has never been proven states that William Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1597 because Queen Elizabeth I asked him to do so. According to the story, the queen had enjoyed the character Sir John Falstaff in another of Shakespeare’s plays (Henry IV) and wanted to see a play about Falstaff in love. The story goes on that Shakespeare had only fourteen days to write this comedy.

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Whether or not that story is true, The Merry Wives of Windsor is not really about Falstaff in love but rather about Falstaff in trouble. The good knight, who is so full of himself as to believe that any woman he looks at will swoon at his feet and do anything he suggests, fails miserably in this play to seduce two married women. He wants to seduce them not just for the physical pleasure of doing so, but mostly to win their confidence and he then hopes they will open their purses to him. Falstaff may have won a title of nobility, but he is seriously low on cash. The wives he woos are very close friends who readily reveal their secrets to one another. They soon discover Falstaff’s plans, and most of this play involves their schemes to bring Falstaff down. One of those wives, Mistress Ford, is doubly rewarded for her efforts, as she not only humiliates Falstaff, she also brings her own husband down on his knees. Ford is an extremely jealous husband, and his wife teaches him a serious lesson.

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For Shakespeare’s audiences, at the time of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, the plot and characters would have made this a familiar play. The characters and themes, particularly that of the cuckold (or betrayed) husband, were common in plays of that time, referred to as a citizen comedy. However, Shakespeare does not go along with the established rules of this form of comedy. In his play, although there is a threat of betrayal—that is, if Falstaff gets his wish—Shakespeare turns the theme on its head. That is how he created much of the humor of this play. The local knight does not get his way; and the husbands (and wives) prevail. The play is unusual in reference to the other plays of Shakespeare’s. For example, the language, although filled with purposefully construed comical misinterpretations, is written mostly in prose rather than in a combination of blank verse and sonnet, as are many of his other plays. In addition, Falstaff is not the only character that has been borrowed from another play. Bardolph, Shallow, Pistol, Nym, and Mistress Quickly also come from Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Although The Merry Wives of Windsor has not received as much critical analysis as other Shakespearean plays, it was very popular in its time, maybe not just because it made its audiences laugh but also because it was one of the few plays that felt at home with the Elizabethan patrons. This play remains the only comedy that is completely set in the England of Shakespeare’s time and depicts the family lifestyle of ordinary citizens.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor begins outside Page’s house in Windsor. Justice Shallow, an old and whiney man, is talking with his cousin Slender and Hugh Evans, a local Welch pastor. Pastor Evans discloses that he has a plan to help Slender win the hand of Page’s daughter, Anne. When Page comes outside to welcome the men into his house for some food, Shallow asks if Falstaff is in the house. Page tells him that Falstaff is there. Shallow states that he will not go in because Falstaff has offended him. Falstaff comes out with his men and boldly confronts Shallow, confessing that he did indeed hunt on Shallow’s land and killed a deer. Falstaff does not apologize or see anything wrong with this. Shallow is beside himself with indignation, so Evans and

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Page attempt to help mitigate the grievance. In the meantime, Slender, a weak and silly man, also confronts Falstaff, accusing Falstaff or his men— Slender is not sure who—of picking his pockets after they got him drunk the night before. Nothing is resolved, but Page asks everyone to come into his house to eat and to forget about these petty grievances. Mistress Ford shows up, and Falstaff pays extra special attention to her, praising her, telling her he wants to get to know her better. When Mistress Page enters, she invites everyone into the house. Everyone but Slender goes into the house. Then Shallow and Evans come back out to get Slender. First they ask him if he could love Anne Page. Slender is very nervous about this idea and says all the wrong things, though the men know that his intentions are well meant. When Anne comes out to get Slender, he becomes even more agitated, making a fool of himself. Page finally comes out and makes everyone go to dinner.

Act 1, Scene 2 Evans gives a letter to Simple, Slender’s servant, and tells him to deliver the letter to Mistress Quickly, who is the town gossip and a friend of Anne’s. Mistress Quickly knows Anne well. The purpose of the letter is to convince Mistress Quickly to help Slender win Anne’s hand.

Act 1, Scene 3 Falstaff and his men are at the Garter Inn. Falstaff is low on money and first makes a deal with Host, the innkeeper, to take on one of Falstaff’s men, Bardolph, in exchange for a cut in the cost of his room. Then Falstaff reveals to Nym and Pistol his plan to have a sexual affair with both Mistress Page and Mistress Ford. He hopes to woo them, then take some of their money. Falstaff has written two letters, and he asks Pistol and Nym to deliver them. They will have nothing to do with Falstaff’s schemes. Falstaff leaves in a huff. Nym tells Pistol that he has a way to get revenge on Falstaff. Nym will go to Page and tell him what Falstaff is up to. Pistol will do the same with Ford.

Act 1, Scene 4 Simple arrives at Dr. Caius’s house. Mistress Quickly greets him. Simple has brought a letter from Parson Evans, asking Mistress Quickly to help him gain the hand of Anne Page for Slender. Dr. Caius, who also wishes to woo Anne, comes home and finds Simple there. When he discovers why Simple has come, he writes a letter, challenging

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Pistol enters with Ford. Pistol is trying to convince Ford that Falstaff has made a proposal to Ford’s wife. Ford is a very jealous man and becomes upset at the news. Meanwhile, Nym tells Page that Falstaff is after his wife, too. Page is very confident in his relationship with his wife and makes a joke of it. He does not believe Nym, thinking that these men were fired by Falstaff and now want to do Falstaff harm. Ford, on the other hand, is mean toward his wife, believing that she is up to something. Shallow and Host tell Ford and Page that there is to be a duel between Dr. Caius and Evans. Shallow asks that Page act as witness. Ford takes Host to the side and tells him that he is going to pay a little joke on Falstaff and asks Host to introduce him as Brook, when he comes to the inn. In another aside, Ford calls Page a fool for trusting his wife. He, on the other hand, will get to the bottom of it.

Illustration of Sir John Falstaff and Mistress Ford in Act III, scene iii, by Hugh Thompson, 1910 (Ó Blue Lantern Studio/Corbis)

Evans to a duel for trying to interfere with Dr. Caius’s attempts to win Anne. He wants Anne because he believes he deserves her. Dr. Caius is rather pompous. He rules his house through loud and demanding commands. His workers are afraid of him. Dr. Caius leaves and Fenton appears at a side window. Mistress Quickly goes to greet him. Fenton, of the three suitors of Anne, is the one who is genuinely in love with her. Mistress Quickly tells Fenton that she is working on making a success of Fenton gaining Anne’s hand. After Fenton leaves, Mistress Quickly, in an aside to the audience, states that Anne does not love Fenton. Mistress Quickly does not say whom Anne loves, but she does say that only she knows the mind of Anne.

Act 2, Scene 1 Mistress Page reads the letter from Falstaff, in which he proposes that they meet for an affair. Upon finishing, Mistress Ford appears. The women compare letters and find that Falstaff has written exactly the same letters, word for word, to both women. They make fun of his fat size and his opinion of them. Then they decide to seek their revenge. They leave to conceive of a plot.

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Act 2, Scene 2 Mistress Quickly comes to see Falstaff at the inn. She tells him that Mistress Ford sends a message that her husband will not be at home between ten and eleven, and she wishes him to visit her. Mistress Quickly also tells Falstaff that Mistress Page is also flattered by his letter; but her husband does not plan to be away, so she is sorry that they cannot meet. However, she hopes that a time will come in the future. Falstaff is impressed with his abilities to capture these women. He tells Mistress Quickly he will be at Mistress Ford’s place at the recommended time. Mistress Quickly leaves and Ford (disguised as Brook) enters. He makes a deal with Falstaff, offering him money to seduce Mistress Ford. The reason behind this, as Brook/Ford tells Falstaff, is that he wants to seduce Mistress Ford too. But so far, she will not give in to him. Brook/Ford flatters Falstaff, telling him how great his reputation with women is. If Falstaff uses his skills on Mistress Ford and wins, then Brook/Ford contends that his task will be that much easier. Before Brook/Ford leaves, Falstaff tells him that as coincidence will have it, he has been invited to the Ford home by Mistress Ford herself. Falstaff will be there, he tells Brook/Ford, between ten and eleven o’clock. Brook/Ford leaves partly excited because he has fooled Falstaff and partly disgusted that he is about to prove that his wife is unfaithful.

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Act 2, Scene 3 Dr. Caius waits in a field for Evans to show up for the duel. Host, Shallow, Slender, and Page appear. Shallow tries to argue that it is a shame for Caius and Evans to be fighting. Caius is a doctor, a mender of bodies, and Evans is a mender of souls. Host, in the meantime, makes fun of Caius, using English words that the French doctor does not understand. While Host is actually insulting Caius, Host tells the doctor that he is flattering him.

Act 3, Scene 1 Evans is in another field, waiting for Caius to appear. Simple has gotten the directions mixed up and has taken Evans to the wrong field. Caius eventually appears with Page, Host, Shallow, and Slender. Evans and Caius start to fight but the men break them up. They start to fight again but in the midst of it they talk to one another, suspecting that Host has set up this duel just so he can make the doctor and the pastor look like fools. Caius and Evans stop fighting. After everyone leaves, they decide to get revenge on Host.

Act 3, Scene 2 Ford bumps into Mistress Page on the street. When she tells him that she is on her way to his house to meet with his wife, Ford quietly scorns Page for being such a fool as to trust his wife, who is on her way to meet Falstaff at Ford’s house. Enter Page, Shallow, Slender, Host, Evans, Caius, and Caius’s servant Rugby. Ford explains that he is supporting Slender’s attempt to win his daughter; but he says that his wife is promoting Dr. Caius. Host asks about Fenton. Host suggests that he thinks Fenton is the better match. Page is very much against it. Ford asks that some of the men come home with him to dinner. He tells them that besides eating, he will show them some excitement. He promises them ‘‘a monster.’’

Act 3, Scene 3 At Ford’s house, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford set up their plan to fool Falstaff. They have a large basket of dirty clothes sitting in the living room and have told two servants what to do with it when they call. Robin, the young boy page of Falstaff’s arrives to tell the women that Falstaff is almost at the door. Robin has been brought into the wives’ secret. The young boy is tricking his master and has not divulged that Mistress Page is there at the house.

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Falstaff appears and woos Mistress Ford, telling her that he loves her and her alone. He wishes her husband dead. He will make her a lady of the court. Suddenly Robin, the young boy, rushes in, telling them that Mistress Page is running toward the house. Falstaff hides behind a curtain, while Mistress Page tells Mistress Ford that her husband is coming this way, with several men with him. Ford has heard that Mistress Ford may be having an affair with a gentleman and is on his way home to check. The wives made up this story beforehand to fool Falstaff. They did not know that Ford really was on his way home to catch his cheating wife. Mistress Page comes up with the idea of stuffing Falstaff in the laundry basket. Two servants appear and carry Falstaff out of the house while inside the basket. Just then Ford, Page, and the other men appear. Ford asks what is in the basket. The wives say it is only laundry, and Ford allows the servants carrying the basket to pass by. Then he and the other men go through a mad search of the house. Ford is crazy to find Falstaff. The other men just go along with him, only half believing they will find anyone. They know how jealous Ford is and believe his jealousy has gotten the better of him. The wives scheme to set up Falstaff again. While their husbands are hunting in the morning, they will invite Falstaff to the house again.

Act 3, Scene 4 Anne is with Fenton. Fenton professes his love for her, although he is not sure how he will win favor with her father. Anne presses him to continue to try. Then Shallow and Slender appear with Mistress Quickly. Mistress Quickly pulls Fenton to the side while Anne meets with Shallow and Slender. Shallow has to do most of the talking for Slender, who is all tongue-tied. Anne tells Shallow to allow Slender to woo for himself. But when Slender is alone with Anne, he is even worse. Anne’s father appears and greets Slender wholeheartedly. When Page sees Fenton, he becomes angry and wants to know what Fenton is doing there. He tells Fenton to stay away from his daughter and he leaves, taking Shallow and Slender with him. Mistress Quickly tells Fenton to appeal to Mistress Page, who is sitting with Anne. Fenton asks Mistress Page to accept him. She tells him that she will neither accept him nor deny him. She needs to talk to Anne about whom she loves

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and then may consider him. Fenton leaves a ring with Mistress Quickly and tells her to give it to Anne. Mistress Quickly then leaves to meet with Falstaff.

Act 3, Scene 5 Ford, again disguised as Brook, is with Falstaff at the inn. Falstaff is telling Brook/Ford what happened with Mistress Ford. He says that in the middle of kissing her, Mistress Page arrives telling Mistress Ford that her husband is coming. Falstaff says he was there when the husband arrived, but the wives hid him in a laundry basket and he was carried out of the house. Brook/ Ford can hardly stand what he is hearing. He sees how he was fooled. Falstaff goes on and on about how much he has suffered, having been dumped out of the laundry basket by the servant men into the river. Brook/Ford then asks if Falstaff will have nothing more to do with Mistress Ford. Falstaff answers that he will visit her one more time, that morning, while her husband is hunting. Falstaff leaves. Ford cannot contain himself. He will not be fooled again, he claims. He will catch Falstaff in his house with his wife if it is the last thing he will do.

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Falstaff is so portly, he will look like a maid that Ford hates and swears is a witch. Falstaff goes upstairs while Mistress Page tells Mistress Ford that her husband really is on his way and really knows about Falstaff having been hidden in the basket. Mistress Ford decides to trick her husband by having her servants standing at the door with the basket again, so her husband will think Falstaff is in it. Ford enters his house and is crazed when he sees the men with the basket. He opens it up to find it empty. Then Mistress Ford asks the old woman (who is Falstaff in disguise) to come downstairs to leave. Ford cannot stand the sight of her and chases her around the house, beating her with a stick. Falstaff, in disguise, finally leaves. Ford leads the other men around the house, still searching for Falstaff. The wives decide to confess what has happened, in the hopes that men will work with them in a public disgrace of Falstaff.

Act 4, Scene 3 At the Garter Inn, Bardolph, Falstaff’s manservant, is with Host. Bardolph tells Host that there are Germans with the duke who are in need of three of Host’s horses. This is part of a scheme that Evans and Dr. Caius have created to get revenge on Host.

This scene opens in the street, with Mistress Quickly, Mistress Page, and her son William. Evans, who is also the schoolteacher, passes by. Mistress Page says that her husband believes William has not been studying hard enough. Mistress Page asks Evans to quiz her son. Evans asks the boys for declensions of several Latin verbs. Mistress Quickly, who is uneducated, thinks the words have sexual undertones and is shocked that a child is learning such words. Evans, in his Welsh accent, makes the words hard to understand. This scene does not fit into the plot of the story and is used as a comedy routine to entertain the audience.

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At Ford’s house, Falstaff is wooing Mistress Ford again. Mistress Page bursts in and Falstaff tries to hide. Mistress Page tells Mistress Ford that her husband is coming with a group of men again and that he knows how Falstaff escaped last time in a basket. Mistress Ford confesses that Falstaff is there and the women suggest that he hide in the basket again, but Falstaff refuses. Instead, they decide to disguise him as a woman. Because

Mistress Quickly arrives to tell Falstaff that both Mistress Page and Mistress Ford would like

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At Ford’s house, the wives have shown their husbands the letters that Falstaff sent them that began this caper. The men are drawn into the plot of publicly disgracing Falstaff. Ford apologizes to his wife and swears he will never be jealous again. Everyone works on the plot, using an old superstition about fairies. In the meanwhile, Page turns to Evans and says that he will, on the night they trick Falstaff, steal Anne away with Slender and have them married. On the other side of the room, Mistress Page schemes to have Anne steal away with Dr. Caius.

At the Garter Inn, Bardolph enters to tell Host the Germans have run off with his horses. Evans arrives and tells Host to be aware of some Germans who have stolen from other people in other towns. Then Dr. Caius arrives and tells Host that there is no such duke. This is the revenge they have been planning.

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to meet with him one more time. They depart to Falstaff’s room so that Mistress Quickly can divulge the wives’ plan.

Act 4, Scene 6 Fenton arrives and asks Host to help him to marry Anne. Ford has told Anne to wear a white dress and leave the fairy plot to marry Slender. Mistress Ford has told Anne to wear a green dress and leave to marry Dr. Caius. Fenton wants Host to provide a minister so he and Anne can be married. Fenton promises Host money if he can do this for him.

Act 5, Scene 1 Mistress Quickly convinces Falstaff to meet both women in the park that night. Falstaff believes there might be magic in the number three and agrees to meet the women one more time. Ford as Brook, again, appears and Falstaff says he will tell him about all the strange things that have happened. Falstaff says that he will have his revenge tonight.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS In 1982, The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) produced a televised version of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. Stealing the most attention in this adaptation was the actor Ben Kingsley, who created a very comical, if not pathetic, portrayal of the jealous husband Ford. Kingsley’s performance alone is well worth the effort of seeing this film, which is now available on DVD.  The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff (1893), was based on The Merry Wives of Windsor. A slightly later operatic adaptation was created by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, called Sir John in Love (1929). 

Act 5, Scene 2 At the Windsor Park at night, Page, Shallow, and Slender enter in costumes, with children dressed as fairies. Slender confirms that Anne told him that he is to look for her dressed in a white dress. They will greet one another with a password, and then they will go off to be married.

Act 5, Scene 3 Mistress Page, Mistress Ford and Dr. Caius enter next. Mistress Page tells the doctor to look for Anne in a green dress. Dr. Caius is happy and leaves. The wives prepare to meet Falstaff for their final stage of revenge on him.

Act 5, Scene 4 Evans, dressed in costume, enters with more children in fairy costumes.

Act 5, Scene 5 Falstaff enters, disguised as Herne (the focus of an old story, a great hunter and keeper of the Forest of Windsor), with large horns on his head. Mistresses Page and Ford arrive but soon hear a noise and are frightened away. Evans and Mistress Quickly, along with a group of children, appear. Falstaff falls onto the ground, covering his face. Mistress Quickly talks of magic and fairies. Evans says he smells a man, and Mistress Quickly tries to burn him while she

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sets the children to pinching him, testing to see if he is honest. Finally, everyone comes forward. Ford tells Falstaff that he was Brook. The wives let him know that they had played with him all along. Falstaff realizes that he has been made the fool. Slender comes running into the group; he has by the hand, a costumed youth, dressed in a white dress. He has been tricked. It is a young boy under the dress, where it should have been Anne. Then Dr. Caius comes running with another youth in hand, one dressed in a green costume. It is another young boy, not Anne. Finally Fenton and Anne come forth and confess that they have been married. Their parents are angry but Fenton says that they should be ashamed of themselves for trying to marry Anne to someone she does not love. Then everyone, including Falstaff, is invited to a feast at Page’s house. The play ends with a statement by Ford, who says that Brook shall finally have his wish, ‘‘For Brook this night, shall lie with Mistress Ford.’’

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CHARACTERS Bardolph Bardolph is one of Falstaff’s men. His is a minor role, often found waiting on Falstaff rather than taking part in the action of the play. In the beginning of the play, when Falstaff admits that he is short of cash, he asks Host to take the service of Bardolph in exchange for Falstaff’s room and board. Bardolph is one of the borrowed characters that Shakespeare took from his play Henry IV.

Brook Brook (sometimes spelled Brooke) is the disguise that Ford makes for himself when he meets with Falstaff at the Garter Inn. Ford takes on this alterpersona so that he can make a deal with Falstaff. He asks Falstaff to seduce Mistress Ford, so that she will then have broken her vows to be faithful to her husband, an excuse she has allegedly used to avoid having an affair with Brook. Once Mistress Ford has given herself to Falstaff, however, Brook tells Falstaff, it will be easier for him to also seduce her. Brook claims he loves Mistress Ford. It is through this gimmick that Ford hopes to prove that his wife is cheating on him.

Dr. Caius Dr. Caius is a local doctor. He is French and speaks with a thick accent. He also misuses some English words. Because of this, he is often made fun of. Dr. Caius wants to marry Anne Page, not necessarily out of love but rather as one might run a race to win a trophy. Caius believes he deserves Anne. Caius is Mistress Page’s choice for Anne to marry, presumably for the position that Caius holds in the community. As an outsider, Caius relates to Evans, the Welsh parson. They put their heads together and come to realize that the local people mock them; and so they work together to seek revenge, particularly on Host, who at one time sets Caius and Evans up in a duel against one another. Caius is used to show the sentiments, in Shakespeare’s time, against foreigners. He also represents an older form of suitor, one who can promise money but not necessarily love.

Sir Hugh Evans Evans is a Welsh parson. He helps to open the play with Shadow and Slender, who are scheming on how to win Anne’s hand for Slender. Evans eventually befriends Dr. Caius, the other outsider in this play. Together they scheme to

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get revenge on Host, who often mocks them. Evans is used as comic relief in the first scene of act 4, when he tests Mistress Page’s young son, William, in Latin. Evans mispronounces words and some of his logic is faulty—things that modern audiences might have missed but would have proven funny for Shakespeare’s audiences.

Sir John Falstaff Falstaff is a borrowed knight from Shakespeare’s earlier play Henry IV. He is fat, conceited, and very sure of himself. He believes women will fall for him if he pays attention to them, which he does not just to seduce them but also to steal some of their money. He is married, but no mention of his wife is made in the play. He pursues married women because they are the controllers of their husbands’ finances, or at least this is what Falstaff believes. Falstaff may have a haughty title but he is all but destitute. His men steal, and share their bounty with him. He hunts in other people’s woods and steals their sources of food. He is eloquent, especially in the art of wooing, but he is also rather naı¨ ve when it comes to women. Because he believes himself to be smarter than women, he does not suspect the wives in this play are capable of uncovering his plot. In Shakespeare’s time, country wives were often seduced by gentlemen of noble rank, so Falstaff’s ideas are not very creative. What is new in this play is the cleverness of the women to unmask Falstaff for what he is—a conniving womanizer and a thief. Page is the only person in this play who seems to enjoy Falstaff, or at least to forgive Falstaff for his weaknesses. Page invites Falstaff to dinner several times, even after Page discovers that Falstaff has been trying to take his wife to bed. In the end, Falstaff is forced to face his errors as the people in the community publicly humiliate him. Falstaff never apologizes, but he does say, ‘‘I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.’’ However, in one of his last lines in the play, he is still very pompous, as he ridicules Evans’s Welsh accent, referring to Evans’s speech as ‘‘one that makes fritters of English.’’ It is bad enough that Falstaff has been the center of a public ridicule, but according to Falstaff, having to take insults from Evans was the worst part of it.

Fenton Fenton is a noble gentleman, mistrusted by Page to be a proper suitor for his daughter. There were a

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Brewster Mason as Sir John Falstaff, Richard Moore as Master Ford, Ben Kingsley as Slender, Tim Wylton as Bardolph and Emrys James as Evans in Act I, scene I at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1975 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

lot of noblemen in Shakespeare’s time that owned titles and land but had little cash. Even Fenton admits to Anne that the idea of marrying her was at first determined because he knew her father had wealth. However, Fenton tells Anne that after he came to know her, he fell in love with her. Fenton represents a more modern look at love and marriage, at least for Shakespeare’s time, when marrying for love was not a common practice. Fenton and Anne, in disobeying her parents, tricking the other suitors, and finding a minister who would marry them in secret, display strength for theatre-goers in the Elizabethan era. Anne could have been disowned by her father, and then the couple would have no money to sustain them. Their love, however, was so strong they were willing to take the chance. Anne admits her love for Fenton, and at the end of they play, they do marry.

Ford Ford is a very well-off country man, one of the prime characters of this play, and the very

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jealous husband of Mistress Ford. He appears to be a fool, as jealousy jerks him around by the nose; he loves his wife one minute and curses her the next for his perceived notions that she is cheating on him. Although Mistress Ford sets up her scheme of trickery to catch Falstaff in her net, she soon realizes that she can also bring her own husband to his knees. The harder Ford tries to catch his wife under the seductive spell of Falstaff, the sillier he looks. He disguises himself as Brook and offers Falstaff money to woo Ford’s wife. In this way, Ford will know when Falstaff is with her and will be able to expose them, or at least this is what Ford believes. But his jealousy blinds him. When he has the chance to uncover Falstaff’s plan, he ignores blatant clues that are set before him. Toward the end of the play, Ford admits his foolishness and begs forgiveness. His wife, who truly loves him in spite of his crazy jealousy, takes him into her arms. When Ford confronts Falstaff at the end, he claims victory over him

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when he states that Brook (Ford’s disguise) has won Mistress Ford and will spend the night with her. This is a sign that Ford has healed. He admits his mistakes and then pokes fun at himself.

Mistress Ford Mistress Ford is one of the merry wives and a prime character of this play. She is married to Ford, the jealous husband. She is a close friend of Mistress Page’s, who confides in her that she has received an almost perfect duplication of the letter Mistress Ford was given from Falstaff. Mistress Ford has a delightful sense of humor when it comes to Falstaff. Instead of being disgusted by his advances, she makes fun of his gestures and then schemes with Mistress Page to ridicule the knight. Mistress Ford, although hurt by her husband’s jealousy, is willing to accept him after he learns his lesson and apologizes to her, demonstrating not only a clever wit but an open heart. She is confident in herself, able to lure Falstaff into her web and is undistracted by the chances she takes to make a fool of her husband and his jealous antics.

Host Host runs the Garter Inn, where Falstaff stays during the play. He is a secondary character, involved in the subplot of mocking Evans and Dr. Caius. He is the victim in Evans’s and Caius’s scheme of stealing Host’s horses. Host also takes on Bardolph, one of Falstaff’s men, in exchange for Falstaff’s room and board. In the end, Host is all but bankrupt. However, Fenton offers him money to help Fenton wed Anne.

Nym Nym is one of Falstaff’s men, a minor character in this play. He is involved in some of the thievery that exists around Falstaff, such as stealing pocket money from one character or another and sharing it with Falstaff. However, Nym will not become involved in Falstaff’s scheme to woo the wives of Page and Ford. Instead, Nym goes to the husbands and tells them of Falstaff’s plans.

Page Page is a country gentleman, living comfortably well. He is one of the main characters, the husband of Mistress Page, and the father of Anne and William. In comparison to Ford, Page is an ideal husband. He scoffs at Falstaff’s men when

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they tell him that Falstaff is scheming to seduce his wife. Page has complete faith in his wife’s love and completely trusts her. Page is a very forgiving man and a peacemaker. When other villagers complain of Falstaff’s manners and lack of virtue, Page invites everyone to forget their petty grievances and come to dinner. Even at the end of the play, when Falstaff’s plans of seduction are exposed, Page invites the old knight to join them in a feast. Page also forgives his daughter and Fenton, her new husband, although he was totally against their marriage. Page did not trust Fenton because he suspected the nobleman was marrying his daughter for Page’s money. His anger is quieted rather quickly, though, and the play ends with Page not only forgiving Fenton and his daughter but asking everyone else to pardon any offenses that were incurred throughout the course of this make-believe expanse of time

Anne Page Anne is the young girl of marriage age who has three suitors in this play. Although she does not appear often on stage, she is the center of the largest subplot. Three men, one of them a simple fool, the other an old arrogant man, and the third a gentle nobleman, all vie for her hand. Anne is bored with the fool and repulsed by the old arrogant man. Her heart is saved for the nobleman. She pleads with her father to accept her choice, but her father does not like him. Anne turns to her mother, who refuses to hear her pleas of love. Anne decides that the only way to true happiness is to trust her own instincts. So she tricks her parents and the two suitors and marries Fenton at the end of the play. Anne represents an emerging model of womanhood in Shakespeare’s time, a woman with a voice of her own and the courage to stand up to her parents and to tradition.

Mistress Page Mistress Page is the other merry wife in this play, married to Page and mother to Anne and William. She is very comfortable in her marriage and confident in her love of her husband. She is also a very close friend of Mistress Ford’s and feels sorry for her because of Mistress Ford’s jealous husband. She comforts Mistress Ford when Ford belittles his wife and mistrusts her. Mistress Page receives a letter from Falstaff, a duplicate of the one that Mistress Ford shows her. She laughs at Falstaff’s arrogance and then immediately works on a plot

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for revenge. Mistress Page pretends to not know of Falstaff’s wooing Mistress Ford and walks in on them, warning Mistress Ford that her husband is coming home. Falstaff falls for this scheme twice, which amuses both Mistress Page and Mistress Ford. Their merriment culminates when Ford beats Falstaff while Falstaff is disguised in woman’s clothing, a befitting conclusion to the trouble he tried to make for the wives. Although witty and charming, Mistress Page is very controlling in relationship to her daughter’s future. She wants her daughter to marry Dr. Caius and does not listen to her daughter’s confession of love for Fenton. Mistress Page schemes against her husband, trying to trick him when his back is turned, and tries to marry Anne to Dr. Caius in secret. However, her daughter, who must have inherited her mother’s wittiness and ability to scheme, runs off with her own heart’s choice, Fenton. Mistress Page is not one to hold anger in her heart though. In the end, she forgives Anne quite quickly and, after ridiculing Falstaff, she suggests that her husband invite the old knight to dinner.

of Page and his wife, so Fenton can marry Anne. Mistress Quickly also helps the Mistresses Ford and Page deceive Falstaff. She tells Falstaff that the wives are very interested in him and also relays their messages as to when to meet. Mistress Quickly’s observations are not always true. She often believes she is the only one who understands everything that is happening in the community. Due to her lack of education, though, her interpretations are often misguided by her own emphasis on sexuality.

Robin Robin is the young boy who works as Falstaff’s page. When the Mistresses Ford and Page are tricking Falstaff, Robin vows himself to help the wives and becomes involved in their scheme.

Rugby Rugby is Dr. Caius’s servant. His role is very minor, used mostly just to show how pompous Caius is as he orders Rugby to follow him around.

Shallow William Page William is the son of Page and Mistress Page. His only scene is a very short one. He appears with his mother, Mistress Quickly, and the pastor Evans. Evans quizzes William on different Latin words and word meanings. The young boy does well, proving that he has been studying, despite his father’s notions to the contrary. William is like the straight man in a comedy routine as Evans and Mistress Quickly make the audience laugh in this scene.

Pistol Pistol is another of Falstaff’s men. Like Nym, Pistol is involved in thievery but refuses to take part in the scheme that Falstaff devises to woo Mistresses Page and Ford. Pistol goes with Nym to tell the husbands of Falstaff’s plans.

Mistress Quickly Mistress Quickly is one of the borrowed characters from Shakespeare’s earlier plays Henry IV and Henry V. Mistress Quickly is not well educated and her misinterpretations of language cause many moments of laughter. She is the busybody of the community, involved in everyone’s affairs. People come to her to find out details of other people’s lives, such as Fenton, who asks Mistress Quickly to help him gain the approval

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Shallow is the local justice and cousin to Slender. He is an old, somewhat whiney man who promotes Slender as a suitor for Anne Page.

Simple Simple, as his name implies, is the very simpleminded servant to Slender. He delivers messages, sometimes quite incorrectly.

Slender Slender is cousin to Shallow and one of Anne Page’s suitors. He is very awkward around Anne, becoming tongue-tied in her presence. He talks of foolish things and is extremely nervous and unsure of himself. He wants Anne’s hand mostly because his cousin Shallow suggests it. For some unexplained reason, Slender is Page’s choice for his daughter’s husband. The only credit Slender demonstrates in front of Page is that he is easily ordered around, doing whatever he is told.

THEMES Jealousy In Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor, the character Ford is an extremely suspicious man, making him an easy target for

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jealousy. Although his wife gives him no cause to be so jealous, Ford is rude with his wife, accusing her at every turn, of betraying him. When Mistress Ford is approached by Falstaff, who states that he wants to have an affair with her, she realizes that this is a great opportunity to get back at her husband. So she hatches a plan not only to humiliate Falstaff but also to teach her husband a lessons. Jealousy, which Shakespeare also demonstrates in the tragedy of Othello in a more serious vein, can completely distort one’s perceptions. This green-eyed monster, as Shakespeare coined the phrase, can debilitate a person’s rational mind and drive that person crazy. Ford has the potential to be such a man. He loves his wife but does not trust her. So he hatches his own scheme to try to prove that his wife is cheating on him. It is interesting to note that in some ways, Ford almost derives pleasure in his search. One side of him wants to prove that his wife is betraying him but another side wants to show his friends that he was right all along, that he has had good reason for his runaway emotions. As if to demonstrate just how insane his jealousy has made him, Shakespeare has Ford continually berate Page for being so stupid in trusting his wife. Not only does Ford relish being right in proving his wife’s infidelity with Falstaff, he also is excited about exposing Page for the fool he is for not seeing how Page is also being made a cuckold. Ford says in the second scene of act 2: ‘‘Cuckold? the devil himself hath not such a name. Page is an ass, a secure ass.’’ Then Ford says: ‘‘God be prais’d for my jealousy!’’ In other words, he believes himself a better man for his jealous emotions. Anyone who is not, such as Page, is less blessed. Ford finds a comfort in his outlandish emotions. He believes his jealousy is more true to him than Page’s faith in his wife. Then Ford reveals himself even further when he says that he will discover his wife with Falstaff and be avenged. And when he does this, he will be able to ‘‘laugh at Page,’’ which appears to be just as enticing as exposing his wife and Falstaff. Ford’s jealousy, at this point, has reached such a high pitch that it has completely consumed his life. It is the source of his energy. Nothing will stop him, except the truth. When Ford eventually discovers the truth and that his wife is indeed faithful—he is humbled by it.

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Through Ford, Shakespeare demonstrates how blind jealousy can make a person. Ford has a devoted wife, whom he might have lost through his jealousy. His wife is strong, although in the beginning of the play, the audience can see her frustration. Had she been less in love with her husband, the jealousy might have ruined them both.

A Cuckold In Shakespeare’s time, a cuckold was a term used to describe a man who did not know that his wife was having a sexual affair with another man. To be called a cuckold was demeaning in many ways. First, it was humiliating that the wife went to bed with another man. Second, it insinuated that the man could not control his wife. A cuckold was also ridiculed because he could not satisfy his wife due to her seemingly unnatural sexual appetite. Shakespeare often used the cuckolded husband, or at least the idea of such betrayal, in both his comedies and in his tragedies, such as Othello. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ford, in disguise as Brook, has trouble swallowing the term when Falstaff continues to refer to Mistress Ford’s husband as being a cuckold. The word cuckold seems more discomforting to Ford than the actual possibility of the affair between Ford’s wife and Falstaff. The references to a cuckold are often accompanied with the idea that the husband grows horns on his head because of his blindness, or ignorance, of his wife’s illicit affairs. Later, at the end of the play, when Falstaff is wearing horns in the last scene, Ford is able to throw the term back at Falstaff, asking ‘‘Now, sir, who’s a cuckold now?’’

Love and Marriage Shakespeare presents various forms of love in this play, setting them against one another for comparison and evaluation. First, there is the love of Mistress Page and her husband. This is a very healthy type of love and marriage. The two people trust one another and for the length of the play, treat one another as equals. Page laughs at Falstaff’s approach to his wife, knowing that his wife’s love for him is secure. Page also demonstrates a more general love, a love of mankind, as he does his best to bring together the different opponents in the many arguments that occur in the course of this play. Standing opposite this pair, is the marriage of Ford and Mistress Ford. They also have love of one

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another but it is very different from the Pages’s love. Mistress Ford is completely frustrated about her husband’s lack of trust in her. Ford is extremely jealous and insecure both in himself and in his wife. That mistrust could eventually destroy their marriage. However, Mistress Ford’s love is strong, so she patiently waits for her husband to rid himself of his negative emotions. When given the opportunity to help Ford see the light, Mistress Ford decides to take matters into her own hands and give her husband a lesson, demonstrating just how faithful she is. A foil for both of these married couples is Sir John Falstaff. He is married, but his wife never appears. Falstaff lives as a bachelor throughout the play, wooing other married women with no thought of his wife. He is the worst example of a husband that is involved in this play. He shows no emotions for anyone, except for himself. Whereas Ford is overly invested in his emotions, to the point that they begin to drive him crazy, Falstaff seems incapable of any feeling, not even remorse after he has been caught and exposed. Of the three main husbands, Page is the most rational in his love. It flows freely for his wife but he is not obsessed with it. Then there is the subplot, which revolves around Anne Page. Her three suitors exemplify three different concepts of marriage, with or without love. Slender does not appear to know what he wants in marriage, love, or even life. He is a bit of a buffoon, doing what he is told and rarely questioning his own emotions. His cousin Shallow tells Slender that he should woo Anne. Then Shallow tells him when to woo Anne. When Anne appears, it is Shallow who does the wooing for Slender. Anne sees that Slender is a fool and has no interest in him. Even this does not seem to bother Slender. Page wants Anne to marry Slender, though it is hard to determine why Slender is Page’s choice, except that maybe Slender is safe, has his own money, and will do as he is told. This, Shakespeare is saying, would not be a good choice for Anne. The second suitor is Dr. Caius, who appears to have a better idea of what he wants in life. He has, after all, gone through college, studying medicine, and obtaining his credentials to practice his skills. However, Caius shows very little emotion, except when he is bossing people around. His manner shows that he expects everyone around him to do what he decides is best for him. People are just pawns in Caius’s life. Those who are not

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make fun of him, most of which goes over Caius’s head. Caius is never shown wooing Anne. Rather, Caius goes through Mistress Quickly and Mistress Page when he talks of marriage. The idea of a wife for Caius appears to be like a commodity, something to be bought and brought home. Anne is aware of the lack of affection on Caius’s part, and she, likewise, has no feelings for the older man. Fenton, on the other hand, is so honest about his feelings that he even confesses that at first, before he got to know Anne, he considered marrying her for her father’s money. He tells Anne that this changed when he realized that her value was greater than any amount of gold. This is the love of Shakespeare’s choice, as well as Anne’s. Ironically, the marriage between Anne and Fenton, despite the fact that both Page and his wife are against it, is the one most likely to be as fresh, healthy, and invigorating as the marriage of Anne’s parents. This is because the marriage is based on love.

Money There is a lot of discussion of money in this play. First, there is the mention of the money that Page has, thus making the marriage of Anne such a reward. Shallow talks Slender into wooing Anne because of the money he would receive in exchange. There is likewise the issue of a lack of money, represented by Falstaff and his crew of men. They are all accused of some sort of theft, whether it is from picking Slender’s pockets or Falstaff killing deer on Shallow’s land, also called poaching; in Elizabethan England, poaching was a crime akin to stealing money or other goods. Later, Falstaff must give away the services of one of his men in order to pay Host for his room and board at the inn. And when Nym and Pistol ask to borrow money from Falstaff, they are turned away. They are all broke. Brook comes to Falstaff and offers him money to woo Mistress Ford. Fenton gives Mistress Quickly money so that she will help him marry Anne. And finally, there is Dr. Caius, whom Mistress Page chooses as a husband for her daughter because he has money. There is also Page, who dislikes Fenton as a choice of husband for Anne because Fenton does not have money. Money, in this play, does not determine class. Falstaff and Fenton are actually in a social class that outranks that of Page and Ford. And yet Page and Ford live more comfortably because

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they both have money. This portrayal shows the rise of the middle class, the merchants and businessmen, who may not own a lot of land or live in castles but who, nonetheless, control much of the action in the play based on many factors, the most dominant of which is money. Falstaff, the major representative of the impoverished nobility, on the other hand, is made to look like a fool. Fenton escapes Falstaff’s fate, but only because he marries into the moneyed merchant class and thus wins its favor.

The wives are playful in their revenge at first, dumping Falstaff in the river for his deceit. But as the play continues, the wives heap more punishment upon him because they find him such an easy target. The wives’ scheming becomes more complicated when Mistress Ford realizes that she can also seek revenge on her husband who has hurt her with his unending jealousy. The wives’ second plot against Falstaff is probably more dependent on Mistress Ford’s revenge on her husband than anything to do with Falstaff. Falstaff just happens to be the character through which Mistress Ford can teach her husband a lesson. At the successful completion of the second scheme, Falstaff is beaten, to the enjoyment of the wives, who laugh as Ford chases Falstaff through the house, hitting him with sticks and pokers.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

Research the role of women in Elizabethan times. List their duties and responsibilities, the jobs they held, the variations between women of different classes, their education, their dress, etc. Once this list is compiled, present it to your class to stimulate a discussion of women and their lives in the United States in various periods. Possibilities are Western pioneer women, women in the early colonies, women in the 1920s, 1950s, or women of today. How does each era differ? Are there any similarities?



Find definitions of jealousy as described by psychologists. What are the effects of jealousy? What remedies are suggested? What defects are found in a personality who succumbs to jealousy? What different levels are there of jealousy? Are any of these levels actually healthy in any way? Present your findings to your class.

Revenge The act of revenge is played out in many different ways in this comedy. The main plot is filled with it as the wives seek their revenge on Falstaff for his having been so arrogant as to send duplicate letters to each of them. It was not bad enough that he thought he could woo them away from their husbands, but Falstaff added the insult of not even caring enough to compose separate letters for each woman. They therefore decide that Falstaff must be punished for his conceit.

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The husbands want to become involved in the revenge once they learn of the mischievous actions of Falstaff. And so Falstaff is punished once again.

What were the highest qualities that knights in the Middle Ages were supposed to uphold? What were their primary duties? How were they viewed in their communities? How does Sir John Falstaff, as he is rendered in this play, compare to those standards? Present a chart to your class, not only listing the optimal traits of medieval knights, along with Falstaff’s strengths or weaknesses, but also drawing caricatures of both the best possible knight and what Falstaff might have represented.  Mistress Page sets up Falstaff’s last public humiliation of this play by referring to the story of Herne the Hunter. Research this fable, focusing on modern adaptations of the story, and create a short play about Herne which shows what he stands for today in some cultures.

Shakespeare encourages revenge, it appears, or at least that was the convention of comedy in his time. With revenge comes laughter and enjoyment, at least for those who successfully seek revenge and win it. The play does soften the edges a little at the end, however. Page encourages everyone who has

either sought revenge, or been the victim of it, to come together, forget everything that has been done, and find some way to get along.

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in that word is stressed. Then, continue reading through the line with the same rhythm or beat.

STYLE Shakespearean Citizen Comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor is classified as a comedy and fits into the mold of what was referred to, in Shakespeare’s time, as a citizen comedy. The basic elements of this play, such as the jealous husbands, the merry wives, the practical jokes, and the leering knights, were common and therefore familiar to theater-goers of the late 1500s and continuing into the seventeenth century. Most of the humor is based on the differences in the various classes, either between the lower and middle classes or the middle and higher classes. This is the basic structure of Shakespeare’s play, however, he created his own unique changes to the form. In the end, the merry wives, who were often lured away from their husbands by the knights in other plays, were more faithful to their vows of marriage and more clever in their duping of the knight. The husbands, therefore, did not become cuckolds, as they would have in other plays. In Shakespeare’s hands, instead of the husband becoming the fool, the knight was made into one.

Shakespeare’s Blank Verse Shakespeare typically writes his plays in blank verse, a metered form of poetry without any rhyming scheme. In his play The Merry Wives of Windsor he continues to use blank verse but only infrequently. In many of his plays, Shakespeare used blank verse to set off the language of members of the upper classes from that of the common citizens. In some ways, he does the same in this play. Fenton, for example, most often speaks in blank verse. One can recognize this form just by looking at the way the words and phrases are set on the page. For example, in act 3, scene 4, Fenton is professing his love to Anne Page. The ends of the sentences do not reach the right-hand side of the page, and each new phrase, beginning on the left side of the page begins with a capital letter. The lines are metered, and one can count the syllables in each line. They will add up to ten. This is called iambic pentameter, which is five sets of two syllables, with the first syllable unstressed and the second one stressed. See the first line of iambic pentameter in Fenton’s speech: ‘‘He doth object, I am too great of birth.’’ The word he is unstressed. The word doth is stressed. The first syllable in the word object is unstressed. And the second syllable

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Fenton is not the only character that speaks in blank verse. Falstaff does it occasionally too. What is surprising is that Mistress Quickly also is provided with blank verse. She is one of the least likely characters to speak in this way, especially because it is obvious, according to her misunderstanding or misinterpretation of language in other parts of the play. However, the only time Mistress Quickly is given lines in blank verse is when she is pretending to be the Fairy Queen in act 5. So for this occasion, she has been promoted to the noble class, in a way, and therefore her language is also elevated. The majority of the lines in this play are written in prose, as if the characters were making general conversation as they would if the were not on a stage.

Puns In act 4, in particular, Shakespeare has fun playing with words. This is another way that he can make his audience laugh. A pun is created when one word that sounds just like or similar to another word is used to either make another person laugh or to confuse that person, or to make some other rhetorical point. In order to create a pun, a language must have homonyms, or words that sound the same but are spelled differently. English has a lot of these words. One example of a homonym would be the set of words see and sea. In act 4, scene 1, William Page, the young son of Mistress Page, is being tested by Evans in Latin. Evans asks William to give him the word fair in Latin. William answers ‘‘Pulcher.’’ Mistress Quickly, however, hears the word ‘‘Polecat’’ come out of William’s mouth and declares that there must be something else that is much more fair than a polecat. The educated members of the audience would have gotten this joke, as most of them would have studied Latin. The confusion continues through the scene, as Mistress Quickly confuses the Latin word ‘‘caret’’ for the vegetable carrot; and when William produces the genitive case plural of the pronoun he (horum, harum, horum), Mistress Quickly thinks that the young boy is calling someone a whore, and berates Parson Evans for teaching the boy such words.

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Queen Elizabeth To understand the culture surrounding Shakespeare’s plays, it is important to understand the reigning monarch. Queen Elizabeth I, the only surviving child of the infamous King Henry VIII (1491–1547) and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, was the ruling power in England from 1558, when she was just twenty-four-years old, until 1603. She ruled for forty-five years, providing a strong influence on her people, the economy, and the political power that the country would enjoy. It was also during her reign that England enjoyed a cultural, scientific, and artistic renaissance. In 1554, four years before her coronation, Elizabeth spent two months as a prisoner in the Tower of London for her alleged involvement in trying to stop her half-sister, Queen Mary I, from marrying the king of Spain—an alliance that would have strengthened Mary’s bid to return England to Catholicism. There was even a consideration to put Elizabeth to death, though no one wanted to be responsible for killing a member of the then-powerful Tudor family, of which Elizabeth was a part. Upon Mary’s death in 1558, Elizabeth ascended the throne. Queen Elizabeth was a very popular queen. Part of this might have been due to the fact that her predecessor was relentless in her pursuit of controlling the lives of her people, persecuting them for their religious beliefs if they did not return to Catholicism. For the many deaths that were accredited to her reign, Queen Mary came to be called Bloody Mary. Queen Elizabeth, in contrast, was well liked for her varied interests in science, the arts, and even for her tastes in fashion. Elizabeth is often referred to as the Virgin Queen because she never married. She was in love though, with Robert Dudley, a man who was socially beneath her, which did not matter to her but did affect her council, who refused to sanction a marriage between them. Some historians contend that Elizabeth did not want to marry for fear of losing her independence and control of her wealth. Another theory associates her unwillingness to marry to the experience that her mother suffered under Henry VIII. Elizabeth’s mother was accused of treason, was imprisoned in the Tower of London and was eventually beheaded.

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Portrait of of Queen Elizabeth I in her coronation robes, circa 1590 (Ó Fine Art Photographic Library/Corbis)

In 2002, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) conducted a poll to find out who were the top one hundred greatest Britons ever. Queen Elizabeth I ranked seventh, the highest rating for a monarch in that poll. Queen Elizabeth died on March 24, 1602, at the age of sixtynine, the oldest age for a reigning monarch up until that time.

Elizabethan Marriage Typically, in Elizabethan times, upper-class women (and many young men also) had very little say about whom they would marry. Many weddings were arranged, most often for the benefit of the family, either in social prestige, land, or wealth. Many women of the Elizabethan Age were raised to believe that they were inferior in intellect and virtue and therefore subservient to men. (This caused some havoc for Queen Elizabeth I, of course.) For a young woman to obey her father was not only a sign of compliance with society but also with the church. The woman was also expected to bring a dowry consisting of money or valuable objects, with her for her husband. Husbands ruled the finances, but women who were entitled to an

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inheritance were able to manage their own affairs. The legal age for marriage was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, though rarely did boys and girls of this young age get married. In the nobility, future husbands and wives may not have met their mates until the day of the wedding. Although arranged marriages were common in the upper classes, there also was an attitude, even in the church, that parents should also listen to the desires of their children in making marriage partner choices.

Windsor, Berkshire, England Windsor is the setting for Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor and is known for the royal castle that is built there, the largest, inhabited castle in the world. Windsor is located in southeast England on the River Thames. The British town was established around 1066 when William the Conqueror chose the site for a fort. The castle that now stands in Windsor has been used as a royal residence since the eleventh century. Prisoners have also, involuntarily, made the castle their home, when the castle was used to imprison foreign royalty, such as King John II of France from 1356–1360. It has been said that the first performance of Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor was held inside Windsor Castle. The Garter Inn, where Falstaff stays in the play, is based on a real establishment in Windsor, now called the Hart and Garter on High Street.

Knights of the Order of the Garter The Garter Inn was named after the Royal Order of the Garter, a somewhat elitist fraternity of knights. There were several different orders, but the Order of the Garter was considered the most pre-eminent. King Edward III (1327–1377) is said to have established the Order of the Garter some time around 1348, possibly as an attempt to create a virtual Knights of the Round Table from the myths surrounding the tales of King Arthur and Sir Galahad. The Order of the Garter always contained twenty-four knights, the current monarch and the Prince of Wales. The home base was Windsor Castle. The origin of the symbol of the garter is obscure. Some believe it might have been the garter of one of the king’s lovers. Others believe that the garter was a special emblem of chivalry, given to knights on special occasions and worn just below the knee.

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Legend of Herne the Hunter In The Merry Wives of Windsor Mistress Page tells of the myth of Herne, a local story passed down probably from Celtic mythology. Herne was a godlike creature who was said to lead a procession of spirits through the countryside, hunting, killing, and feasting on everything in their sight. In pre-Christian times, Herne was associated with the god of fertility and imagined to be a stag, or male deer. The figure of Herne was both erotic and frightening, the ultimate wild man of the forest. Whenever the alarm was sounded that Herne was in the woods, people would lock up their animals in the barn and then hide themselves in their houses so they would not be chased, molested, or eaten. There are many such stories in Europe about a wild man or wild woman of the forest. Each country has its own list of names associated with these godlike characters. Herne is specifically linked to Windsor and was said to haunt Windsor Great Park at night. In the play, Mistress Page suggests that Falstaff be costumed as Herne, including wearing the head and horns of a stag. In the Middle Ages, the wild man or woman of the forest was connected to witchcraft and sometimes referred to as Satan. In contemporary times, pagan religions are turning to the Great Hunter as a positive symbol of the masculine element of God.

Elizabethan Class Structure In Elizabethan England, life was changing away from an emphasis on community and toward the individual. There was a definite social structure with nobility and the knights at the top of the ladder, as it had been in the Middle Ages, but change was in the air. The merchant class was growing fast both in numbers and influence, but also in wealth. The nobility had privileges that the other classes did not enjoy. Nobles, for the most part, were divided into two sections, the old nobles, whose titles had been handed down from generation to generation, and the new nobles, with titles recently granted by a monarch. Most of the old nobles were Catholic, and, for the most part, new nobles were Protestant. Nobles did not have to vow an allegiance to the Church of England and therefore, the old nobles were not persecuted when Henry VIII or Elizabeth I was in power. At the head of a noble family was a duke, baron, or an earl. Queen Elizabeth was known, as

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1600s: Windsor is a small town on the Thames River. It is a community of merchants and their servants and surrounds the focal point, Windsor Castle, which is an active center of nobility and gathering place for the Knights of the Garter.

Kingdom, most of them elected by British citizens, rule the country. 

Today: Over 100,000 people live in Windsor, which has become a popular tourist attraction, known for its history and a huge Legoland, which includes amusement park rides, interactive building projects, and a simulation of the city of London built out of Lego building blocks. 

1600s: Queen Elizabeth I rules England, proclaiming which religion her citizens should follow as well as exemplifying contemporary fashion. Her interest in the arts helps to promote the burgeoning renaissance, especially in literature.

1600s: Besides new titles being given to individuals by the current monarch, titles such as baron, earl, and duke are inherited from one generation to the next, through the male line, thus guaranteeing that a noble family will remain in this social class until the family completely dies out. Today: There are no more inherited noble titles. Titles are given by the monarch, through the advice of parliament, and last only until that person dies.

Today: Queen Elizabeth II is the figurehead monarch in the United Kingdom. Her family is often mocked in the local tabloids. Members of the Parliament of the United

1600s: Knights are warriors and are considered part of the aristocracy of England. They were the ranking officers in the military. Today: The title of knight is only an honorary one, often given to people who accomplished great feats in areas such as sports, entertainment, the arts, and science. For instance, the singer Elton John was knighted, as was the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee.

was her father, as a monarch not very willing to grant new titles, as they saw the nobility as a threat to their power. Elizabeth’s council, however, was made up of people from the noble class.

be taken care of as she went from one noble house to another. Fenton was a member of the noble class, while Sir John Falstaff was a member of the gentry, a slightly lower ranking class.

Being a member of the noble class did not guarantee wealth. Some nobles were rich in land but poor in cash. Money did not necessarily come with the title—quite the opposite, in some cases. Nobles were often responsible for housing, feeding, and entertaining foreign dignitaries and paying all the expenses they incurred. They also had their reputations as lavish entertainers to keep up, especially when it came to the monarchs. Queen Elizabeth was known for her travels around the country. She would stay with noble families rather than staying in inns, bringing part of her court with her, and expecting to

Below Fenton’s and Falstaff’s social class came that of Ford and Page. This was the merchant class. The rise of the merchant class was due to several changes in English society. The increase in trade with other countries as England’s explorers traveled around the world increased the wealth in the merchant class. Traders sold woolen products from England and brought back new commodities from other exotic locations from which to make a profit at home. Young boys were receiving formal educations, and literacy rates were rising, giving men wider opportunities in the job market. The Black

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Plague had killed thousands of people, which produced a labor shortage. This gave laborers an advantage, and wages were rising as a result. There were also professional guilds to which a boy could apprentice himself, learn a trade, and eventually go out and open his own shop. These are some of the circumstances that helped men accumulate wealth, and in some instances, provide a means of climbing up from a poor class to a merchant class. Most members of the merchant class owned their own homes and were beginning to vie with nobility in the ownership of land. Political power for the merchant class was also on the rise, providing its members a voice in government. Such was the case for Nicholas Mosley, a member of the merchant class who became mayor of London in 1599. Page and Ford fit the profile of the merchant class. The lower class members rarely received an education, owned property, or had any say in their government. They worked for the lowest wages, taking on jobs as servants and maids to members of the other classes. Mistress Quickly, as well as Simple and Rugby, are representative of the lower class.

Food Eaten in Elizabethan Windsor There is much mention of food in the this play. Page and Ford ask people to eat with them at the end of many of the scenes. Many people still raised their own domestic animals, which included cows, lambs, chickens, ducks, geese, and goats, which would be slaughtered for the noontime meal, the biggest meal of the day. Also swans, peacocks, pigeons, and doves might have been included. On the wild side, animals such as deer, wild boar, rabbits, hedgehogs, herons, cranes, and pheasants might have been added to the table. There were also many different types of fish caught and cooked for the meal, including shellfish such as oysters, mussels, and cockles. As for vegetables, tomatoes were considered suspicious, maybe even poisonous, and were seldom eaten. In place of potatoes, which had not yet become very popular or easy to find, people ate turnips. There were also greens like spinach, carrots, cabbage, and beets, vegetables that are still common today. However, eating raw vegetables, as might be found in a salad, was not considered healthy. Apples, figs, and grapes were often served. These and other fruits were cooked with the meats to make the main course sweeter. For dessert, fruits were baked into pies and cakes, but there was no sweet chocolate

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yet. The only taste of chocolate in Elizabethan times was a thin, bitter drink with no sugar added. Tea had not yet been introduced from India, so there was no tea time, as is popular in England today.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW The Merry Wives of Windsor is not one of Shakespeare’s most critically analyzed plays. Although audiences in Shakespeare’s times have been described as enjoying this comedy, critics over the years have tended to ignore it for the most part, calling it inferior to Shakespeare’s other comedies. However, this comedy is unique in that it is the only one of Shakespeare’s comedies set in England from the first scene to the last. Andrew Dickson, writing in his book The Rough Guide to Shakespeare calls The Merry Wives of Windsor a ‘‘subtly crafted and often genuinely funny play.’’ He goes on to describe the play as one that ‘‘portrays a bustling, vivid tapestry of small-town life’’ in Shakespeare’s time. Dickson states that Shakespeare avoided the ‘‘hard-bitten, satirical genre’’ of comedy that focused on a more cynical slice of life in the bigger city, such as London, and instead exposed a softer tone in this play, one that Dickson refers to ‘‘as suburban in tone.’’ Of the wives in this play, Dickson describes them in this way: ‘‘They are as well equipped to deal with Ford’s jealousy as they are to neutralize Sir John.’’ Dickson continues: ‘‘While allowing Ford’s ludicrous suspicions to build, they [the wives] engineer a scene in which both men are shown up to be the fools they really are.’’ In conclusion, Dickson analyzes the plot by stating that ‘‘if the comic community of The Merry Wives is to heal its wounds, Shakespeare suggests, Falstaff needs not just to be thrown out but to be utterly humiliated.’’ In other words, ‘‘if the wives are to prove themselves’’ as true merry wives, then ‘‘the duper needs to be duped.’’ Maurice Charney, writing in his All of Shakespeare states that this play is ‘‘more convincingly redolent of town life in Elizabethan England than anything else that Shakespeare wrote.’’ As evidence of this, Charney points out how Page invites everyone in for a meal at the beginning of the play, and Mistress Page invites everyone in to a feast at the end of the play, demonstrating the

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genuine sense of community at the time this play was written, especially in small town locations such as Windsor was then. However, Charney chides the wives in this play, stating that they ‘‘are not so merry as we expect them to be, in fact, they are distinctly smug, moralistic, and self-satisfied. Their animus against Falstaff is excessive and they are constantly asserting their virtue in a priggish fashion.’’ Norrie Epstein, writing in her book, The Friendly Shakespeare, likens The Merry Wives of Windsor to an episode of I Love Lucy for its comedic routine. Then Epstein writes: ‘‘There’s nothing heavy-handed about this play; it celebrates the solid domestic virtues of thrift, marital fidelity, and good humor. It’s one of those plays that work better in performance than on the page, since it’s filled with sight gags and spoken humor, including outrageous accents and bawdy malapropisms, that are hilarious on stage.’’ In an attempt to demonstrate how comical this play is, as Epstein writes, Terry Hands, a director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, in a 1985 production of the play, decided to set the play in more modern circumstances, bringing it up to a 1950s suburban location. ‘‘Hands wasn’t simply trying to jazz up an old play. His interpretation, as critics pointed out, is closer to Shakespeare’s intention.’’ In doing this, Hands gave his audience a chance to ‘‘immediately comprehend Shakespeare’s jibes at middle-class snobbery and the characters’ provincialism, and experience what an Elizabethan viewer might have felt when he saw the play. In this case Hands didn’t modernize the play in order to shock, humor, or patronize the audience, but to make it comprehensible—and funny.’’

CRITICISM Joyce Hart Hart, a freelance writer and published author, examines the emotional state of the character Ford as he frets about the play, lost in a contorted world of jealousy. Although the title characters of Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor are Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, most of the critical attention is often placed on the old, misogynist knight, Sir John Falstaff. Still, it is the character of Ford, the jealous husband, who is the most complex. The paramount emotion,

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IN ORDER TO DEFINE HIS CHARACTERS, SHAKESPEARE PITS ONE WITH ANOTHER, EXPOSING THEM BY SHOWING HOW THEY DIFFER.’’

the one that is most obvious in the character of Ford, is his jealousy. But behind this emotion, or maybe entwined in this character’s psychological torment, are many other, sometimes contradictory, feelings that direct his actions and his communications. Yes, the wives’ tricks are motivated by the obnoxious foolery of Falstaff, but the women’s rewards from their pranks against Falstaff are minor and short lived. The real and more gratifying gain from their mischief is the lifting of the veil of jealousy from Ford’s eyes, allowing him to see his wife as the faithful and loving woman that she is. So it is not Falstaff that turns this play around but rather the foolish husband Ford. In order to define his characters, Shakespeare pits one with another, exposing them by showing how they differ. So it is with Ford, who first appears in act 2, scene 1, with the other husband, Page. With them are Pistol and Nym, who have just told the husbands that Falstaff has sent letters to their wives in attempts to woo them. The first thing to notice is the difference in the reactions of the husbands. Right off the bat, Page does not believe the messenger and makes fun of Nym’s language, making light of the message Nym has brought. ‘‘I never heard such a drawling, affecting rogue,’’ Page says of Nym. It is almost as if Page has not even heard the news that Nym has brought, that Falstaff is making a play for Page’s wife. Page is not distracted by what Nym has told him—not one bit. In stark contrast to Page is Ford, who is already on edge and about to fall into the deep abyss of his jealousy. Ford does not come right out, as Page did, and say that the news that Pistol has brought him is false. Rather, Ford, who already mistrusts his wife, says: ‘‘Well, I hope it be not so.’’ This is a weak statement, one that insinuates that Ford has doubts about his wife. Ford’s second statement is even worse. He demeans his wife. Ford cannot believe that anyone could be in love with, or make a play for,

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Peter De Jersey as Fenton, Catherine Mears as Anne Page, and Gemma Jones as Mistress Meg Page, in Act III, scene iv, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1992 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

her. ‘‘Why, sir, my wife is not young,’’ he says, as if he is surprised that someone else might find her attractive enough to want to have an affair with her. And then when Page calls Nym a ‘‘Cataian,’’ a reference to a person who is an untrustworthy boaster, Ford’s response is that he thought Nym ‘‘twas a good sensible fellow.’’ So Ford trusts Nym more than he trusts his wife; while Page does just the opposite. When Shakespeare puts Ford alongside of Page, one might wonder how more different two men could be. Next, Shakespeare pairs Ford with his wife in the same scene. She addresses him with ‘‘sweet Frank,’’ and questions why he appears to be in pain. Ford brushes her off, announcing abruptly that there is nothing wrong with him and then he tells her to get home. He is lying, on one hand, and rude and insensitive on the other. All Ford can think about is himself and his fast growing insecurities. Before this scene ends, Ford and Page address one another again, discussing the messages they have just received. Ford is obviously

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riled, even more so when he learns that Nym and Pistol are Falstaff’s men. Page, on the other hand, is humored by what he has just heard. Page tells Ford that he does not believe Falstaff would do such a thing as woo his wife, and if Falstaff did, then he would deserve what he would get—a good tongue lashing from Page’s wife. That is how confident Page is in himself, his wife, and his marriage. On the other side of the issue is Ford, who is already thinking he will become a cuckold, as Pistol has suggested by mentioning the ‘‘odious’’ name and the reference to ‘‘the horn.’’ Ford’s thoughts are running wildly through his head; he is afraid of being publicly humiliated. It is uncertain which thought weighs more heavily in Ford’s mind: losing his wife or being mocked by his neighbors. Then Ford once again warns Page, telling him to be careful about being so confident. Ford, unlike Page, cannot imagine turning his wife over to Falstaff, which is ironic, because shortly after this scene, that is exactly what Ford does. So far Ford has displayed jealousy at the thought that his wife might betray him and, at

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the same time, disbelief that any other man would want her. He has also demonstrated his insecurities, which he tries to cover up by demeaning his wife and practicing self-deception, while feeling superior to Page by insinuating that Page is a fool to trust his wife. The main difference between Ford and Page, at this point, is that Page has his feet firmly rooted to the ground while Ford has jettisoned himself into outer space, where he floats around in a field of emotional meteors that bombard him, knocking him first in one direction and then another. As soon as Ford learns that Falstaff is staying at the Garter Inn, he begins to hatch a scheme, just as devious as Falstaff’s. In the next scene, the audience finds Ford, disguised as Brook, at the Garter Inn, looking for Falstaff. Ford believes himself to be superior to Falstaff, although he spends the first half of his visit praising Falstaff for his intelligence, his prowess with women, his breeding, his authenticity, his bravery and his vast courtly experience. The only advantage that Ford admits is his money, which he throws at Falstaff to win him over to his own scheme. But of course, Ford is not being quite honest. If he believes he can trick Falstaff, then Ford has to believe that he is smarter than Falstaff; and he obviously does not believe that Falstaff is authentic, or else he would not even be there. As far as Falstaff’s breeding and his prowess, Ford is more than likely being honest. Falstaff comes from a class superior to Ford’s, and Ford’s greatest insecurity is his dealings with women. It is interesting to note that Ford is asking Falstaff to woo his wife, something that Ford seems unable to do. When Ford is with his wife, his insecurities turn him into a brute. As Brook, Ford says if Falstaff can woo Mistress Ford, than Brook will have a better chance of wooing her too. Here is irony again. It is through Brook’s scheme to woo Mistress Ford that Ford himself will come to know of his wife’s love. So, in essence, Brook’s plan works. It just does not work in the same way that Ford had thought it would. After he leaves Falstaff, Ford talks in an aside to the audience. He can barely contain his emotions. Falstaff, while talking to Brook, referred to Ford as a cuckold, a ‘‘mechanical salt-butter rogue,’’ and a ‘‘knave.’’ None of these are flattering, and it is difficult, in Falstaff’s presence, for Ford to pretend (as Brook) to be unaffected by what

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Falstaff is saying. But once he is out of Falstaff’s company, Ford is bursting with contradictory emotions. He has been insulted and humiliated, but because he is in disguise, he is split—laughing with Falstaff at the foolish husband Ford, while steaming under his mask. In his aside to the audience, Ford proves himself to be confused. ‘‘Who says this is improvident jealousy?’’ He asks. His jealousy is not careless, in other words, but rather it is right on target, Ford is saying. He completely discounts the fact that jealousy is in and of itself careless and then tries to convince himself that this negative emotion is beneficial. He is not only going to prove that he is right in mistrusting his wife, he assumes, he is going to also ensure that the circumstances are set in place so that his wife can barely refuse the onset of Falstaff’s amorous attack. Instead of protecting his wife from the knight, Ford feels more accomplished in proving the negative, proving that his wife is unfaithful and that jealousy is good. What does he hope to gain? Is being right more important than keeping his wife? Obviously so. This is one way that Ford proves to the audience that he is a fool. Ford admits other things in his aside to the audience. The first emotion he reflects on is not anger but rather impatience. He says he is bursting with it, anxious to see his scheme through to the end. He can barely stand waiting to disgrace his wife in front of the community. Better her than him. Ford rants on about how he will soon have another man in his bed with his wife, his house will be ransacked, and he will lose much of his money. He tells the audience: ‘‘See the hell of having a false woman!’’ Ford wants sympathy here. He wants the audience to feel sorry for him, just as he feels sorry for himself. He is playing out the old cliche´ of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, although he says he does not really want to do this. He wants to prove his wife’s guilt so that he can prove himself more sophisticated, more confident, than he really is. He does not really want to give his wife away to Falstaff, not so much because he wants to keep her (or at least he does not yet admit this) but because he fears, above all else, being called a cuckold. This would be worse than losing his wife. Worse than being called a jealous husband. He mentions negative names that people could call him, such as terms used for the devil. None of them are as bad. Not even ‘‘the devil himself hath’’ such a name as cuckold, he says. There is nothing worse than that.

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Though the audience knows by now that Ford is a fool, Ford does not see this. It is Page who is the fool in Ford’s eyes. Actually, Ford calls Page an ‘‘ass’’ because ‘‘he will trust his wife; he will not be jealous.’’ Such a twisted mind Ford has, as he calls out valiantly, as if he were holding a sword in hand and were about to charge at an enemy: ‘‘God be prais’d for my jealousy!’’ Ford will use his weapon of jealousy to expose his wife, seek revenge on Falstaff, and make Page look like a fool. Well, he will get two out of three, and that is not so bad. He will get his revenge on Falstaff, in spite of himself. Ford will do so, not by his merits but rather by the wits of his merry and faithful wife. Ford is so blinded by his jealousy that he misjudges almost everyone he encounters. He is so wrapped up in a world of his own misguided imagination that what he thinks he sees in everyone else is exactly what is most apparent about himself. For instance, in act 3, scene 2, Ford runs into Mistress Page, who is walking down the street with Falstaff’s servant boy. Ford questions if Page has any eyes, allowing his wife to be in the company of Falstaff’s boy. Page must be blind and his thoughts asleep, Ford concludes. As Ford watches Mistress Page walk to Ford’s house, he decides to add a new victim to his plot. When he is the victor in his scheme, he imagines, he will ‘‘pluck the borrow’d veil of modesty from the so-seeming Mistress Page.’’ His list of rewards is mounting. He will expose everyone’s sins. He can barely stand still with the thought of all the accolades he will receive. The audience can almost read Ford’s mind. Ford is going to pull the cover off everyone’s eyes as he exposes Page’s folly, Falstaff’s deceit and thievery, and the merry wives’ untrustworthiness. This is proof that Ford is enjoying his own misery. He is so absorbed in his thoughts of victory that he has completely lost sight of the pain of disclosure. If he is victorious, he is going to realize his two worst fears—the loss of his wife and the community’s right to call him cuckold. He is working against himself and, in a strange way, enjoying it. Before this second scene ends, Ford is seen with some of the men. He entices them to come to his house, where he promises they will see a monster. Shakespeare is being ironic again. In his play Othello, Shakespeare coined the phrase the Green-eyed Monster, to refer to the wild emotion of jealousy. When Ford promises a

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monster, he is thinking of Falstaff, of course. But when the men get to Ford’s house, the only monster they will see is the green-eyed one as portrayed by the jealous husband Ford. Once again, Ford projects his own image out into the world rather than seeing it inside himself. In act 3, scene 5, Shakespeare has Ford slapping himself in the face, saying, ‘‘is this a dream: do I sleep? Master Ford, awake! awake, Master Ford!’’ Surely, Ford needs to wake up; and as Brook, he is trying to do just that. But Ford remains asleep, although he thinks he has awakened. ‘‘I will proclaim myself what I am,’’ he says. Ford makes this statement although he does not fully understand the depth of its meaning. This is a true statement. Ford will definitely proclaim who he is. This is because Ford will finally see himself as the fool. Finally the veils are pulled from Ford’s eyes. His wife shows him the letter she received from Falstaff, tells her of her plans of revenge on the knight. This brings Ford to his knees, asking his wife for forgiveness. With the veils lifted, Ford regains strength and becomes involved in yet another scheme to further humiliate Falstaff in front of the whole community. This last degree of humiliation is not so much for the wives, for they have had their fun with him. This is for the men, and Ford relishes it. He will disguise himself once more as Brook and entice Falstaff to make another appearance, this time in the park at midnight. The money that Ford extends this time is to buy costumes for the children. Falstaff’s shame for having put Ford through his torturous journey is well worth it, at least in Ford’s way of looking at it. In the end, literally the very last lines of the play, Ford enjoys a final jab at Falstaff’s expense. Ford says everyone should go to a feast, laugh at Slender and Caius, who have lost their chances to marry Ann. But most of all, they should all enjoy the joke that Ford most enjoys. ‘‘And, Sir John Falstaff, now shall you keep your word, / For Brook this night shall lie with Mistress Ford.’’ Ford does not mention, although it would have proven that he truly had learned his lesson, that everyone should join him in a good laugh at the foolish husband that Ford had once been. Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on The Merry Wives of Windsor, in Shakespeare For Students, Second Edition, Thomson Gale, 2007.

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undeserved. The critic explains the historical and cultural background of the play, which was likely commissioned to honor Queen Elizabeth I on St. George’s Day in 1597.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

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Falstaff: A Novel, published in the United States in 2003 (in England in 1976) is Robert Nye’s fictionalized version of one of Shakespeare’s naughtiest characters. In Nye’s version, Falstaff is eighty-one-years old and is dictating his memoirs. He recalls incidents in both of Shakespeare’s plays in which he appeared: Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor

Shakespeare’s other early comedies include Love’s Labor’s Lost (1598), which is about three noblemen who promise to devote the next three years to their studies without any distractions from women, when three beautiful, courtly women appear. The other famous comedy is Two Gentlemen from Verona (1594– 1595) which is a play about two men falling in love with the same woman and their challenges in trying to win her favor.  Myron Stagman’s Shakespeare-In-Essence: The Adventures of Falstaff (2002) illuminates the humorous character of Falstaff through an analysis of this fictional man, providing the reader with a better understanding of how and why Shakespeare created him.  For a more contemporary British playwright, read one of Tom Stoppard’s comedies, such as Jumpers (1972) or Arcadia (1993). Jumpers focuses on a philosophical professor who studies morality while immorality spreads throughout his household. In the latter play, Arcadia, Stoppard weaves elements of science into his characters’ actions, specifically the concept of chaos. If the world is, in effect, like a machine that will eventually break down, the play suggests that people should therefore learn to enjoy themselves. 

Leslie S. Katz Katz provides a general overview and analysis of The Merry Wives of Windsor, arguing that its status as a ‘‘minor’’ play in Shakespeare’s canon is

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THE SEQUENCE OF FORD’S EMOTIONS SUGGESTS THAT THE WITCH-BEATING IS, INDEED, A SYMBOLIC WIFE-BEATING.’’

Source: Leslie S. Katz, ‘‘The Merry Wives of Windsor: Sharing the Queen’s Holiday,’’ in Representations, No. 51, Summer 1995, pp. 77–93.

Nancy Cotton In the following essay, Cotton analyzes the historical belief that witchcraft could cause impotence, a belief widely held in medieval Europe and one that persisted into Shakespeare’s time. The critic examines those characters in The Merry Wives of Windsor who are rendered impotent by ‘‘magical female power.’’ That sorcery could cause impotence was widely believed in medieval Europe. ‘‘By the middle of the twelfth century,’’ according to G. L. Kittredge’s history of English witchcraft, ‘‘such a condition, thus caused, was an accepted ground for divorce, and for the next three hundred years these cases were so numerous that this species of sorcery became an everyday matter.’’ The belief persisted into Shakespeare’s day. King James I in the preface to his Daemonologie in 1597 asserts the power of witches to weaken ‘‘the nature of some men, to make them unable for women.’’ Reginald Scot in

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The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) ridicules the Malleus Maleficarum for affirming ‘‘that the vertue of generation is impeached by witches, both inwardlie, and outwardlie: for intrinsecallie they represse the courage, and they stop the passage of the mans seed, so as it may not descend to the vessels of generation: also they hurt extrinsecallie, with images, hearbs, &c.’’ In spite of his skepticism, Scot retails several racy stories about young men whose ‘‘instruments of venerie’’ were stolen from their bodies by witches. One young man in particular ‘‘went to a witch for the restitution thereof, who brought him to a tree, where she shewed him a nest, and bad him clime up and take [his] toole.’’ Such a hiding place is common, Scot continues, for ‘‘some have found 20. and some 30. of them in one nest, being there preserved with provender, as it were at the racke and manger.’’ The image of the nest in the tree where the witch hides the stolen ‘‘toole’’ indicates that the witch’s power to castrate lies in her genitals; that is, her power as a witch is her power as a woman. Just this masculine association of impotence with female magic is dramatized by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The main plot of Merry Wives turns on Ford’s fear of being cuckolded, which, according to psychoanalytically oriented criticism, is equivalent to ‘‘psychosocial castration.’’ Ford, the character obsessed with cuckoldry, is also the character obsessed with witchcraft. His phobia provides the wives an opportunity to play a rough practical joke on Falstaff by disguising him in the clothes of Mother Prat, Mrs. Ford’s maid’s aunt, the fat woman of Brainford. Ford, according to his wife, ‘‘cannot abide the old woman of Brainford. He swears she’s a witch, forbade her my house, and hath threat’ned to beat her’’ (IV.ii.85–87). As she expects, Ford accuses the supposed old woman of witchcraft and gives her a cudgelling. His violence is striking because among the crowd of villagers present only Evans, the Welsh parson, agrees that ‘‘the

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oman is a witch indeed’’ (IV.ii.192–93) and also because the stage image shows a man beating a woman, the solitary example in Shakespeare. We laugh because we are interpreting the visual image: like Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page we know that the ‘‘old woman’’ is really the scoundrelly Falstaff, and we laugh because Merry Wives is a farce, a genre in which blows provide merriment rather than pain. If we shift our perspective to that of the Windsorites, however, we see that every character on stage accepts Ford’s right to beat the old woman of Brainford solely because ‘‘he cannot abide’’ her. The men he has brought with him do not interfere, and their lack of action rests on the unspoken premise that it is acceptable to beat, not just a witch, but a woman. In fact, Elizabethan moralists condoned and sometimes encouraged beating a woman when that woman was one’s wife. The acceptability of wife-beating is clear when, in the course of tricking Falstaff yet again, Mrs. Quickly mollifies his anger at having been beaten by telling him that the wives have also suffered, ‘‘speciously one of them. Mistress Ford, good heart, is beaten black and blue, that you cannot see a white spot about her’’ (IV.v.111–13). The sequence of Ford’s emotions suggests that the witch-beating is, indeed, a symbolic wife-beating. Just prior to this scene Ford, having discovered that his wife has tricked him about Falstaff, has worked himself into a rage that looks like lunacy to his neighbors. He addresses his wife with Othello-like sarcasm: ‘‘Come hither, Mistress Ford, Mistress Ford, the honest woman, the modest wife, the virtuous creature, that hath the jealious fool to her husband! I suspect without cause, mistress, do I?’’ (IV.ii.129–32). When again Ford does not find Falstaff, his rage explodes in violence against the ‘‘witch.’’ Because the real target of his rage is not Falstaff but his wife, the ‘‘witch’’ becomes a surrogate for the woman he really wishes to beat. The surrogate wife-beating abruptly deflates his rage to penance, and at his next appearance his first words—‘‘Pardon me, wife’’ (IV.iv.6)—are precisely those he might say had he actually beaten Mrs. Ford. There is, then, psychological truth in Mrs. Quickly’s report in the next scene that Mrs. Ford is ‘‘beaten black and blue.’’ Shakespeare indicates the symbolic substitution of witch for wife by naming his witch for the place of her origin in Ford’s mind: ‘‘Brainford.’’ The names Ford calls the woman as he cudgels

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her—‘‘quean’’ and ‘‘polecat’’ (IV.ii.172,185)—are both slang terms for a whore, indicating that he projects on to her the infidelity he supposes in his wife. Moreover, he uses to her the same sarcasm he has just used to his wife and with the same motive, his anxiety to demonstrate that he is not deceived by the woman: She comes of errands, does she? We are simple men, we do not know what’s brought to pass under the profession of fortune-telling. She works by charms, by spells, by th’ figure, and such daub’ry as this is, beyond our element; we know nothing. (IV.ii.173–78)

As he pursues the witch out of his house, Ford urges his neighbors to follow, just as he insisted that they come to his house to witness his exposure of his wife. The reason he gives the men—‘‘I beseech you follow; see but the issue of my jealousy’’ (IV.ii.195–96)—is a peculiar reason for pursuing a witch. Ford’s unconscious identification of wife and witch suggests that he equates the witch’s spells with the wife’s power to cuckold or ‘‘unman’’ him. Magical spells might unman anatomically, or, as King James says, they might unman functionally, causing impotence or failure of offspring. Indications that Ford, before Falstaff appears in Windsor, feels unmanned in these ways would account for both his chronic jealousy and his witch phobia. For example, his feeling of impotence is suggested in the tale he tells Falstaff when he disguises as ‘‘Mr. Brook,’’ a failed suitor to Mrs. Ford: I have long lov’d her, and . . . bestow’d much on her; follow’d her with a doting observance . . . But whatsoever I have merited, either in my mind or in my means, meed I am sure I have receiv’d none . . . so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it. (II.ii.194–217)

Perhaps Ford’s story tells more than he intends, an idea reinforced by the other jokes in the play about failed erections. Brook’s fiction of failure with Mrs. Ford may reveal some truth about Ford’s marriage, just as the alias he invents suggests his real name. Ford might feel impotent (¼ bewitched) because he has no children. In this regard, the Fords are noticeably contrasted with the Pages, their contemporaries and closest friends, who have both a daughter and a son. Ford has no heir and is not likely to have one because, as he says, ‘‘my wife is not young’’ (II.i.111). If Ford feels inadequate because he lacks a son, he would be reminded every day of the inadequacy by his close association with Page, and a sense of inferiority

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Benjamin Luxon as Sir John Falstaff disguised as Herne and being attacked by fairies and spirits, in Act V, scene V, English National Opera, London Coliseum, 1994 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

would account for a peculiar feature of his jealousy, that his desire to outsmart Page concerns him more than his feelings for his wife. He nurses plans for revenge against his enemy as a means of triumphing over his friend: ‘‘I will prevent this, detect my wife, be reveng’d on Falstaff, and laugh at Page’’ (II.ii.310–11). The climactic item in the series is not ‘‘detect my wife’’ but ‘‘laugh at Page.’’ Similarly, in the next Act, he gloats, ‘‘I will take him [i.e., Falstaff], then torture my wife, pluck the borrow’d veil of modesty from the so-seeming Mistress Page, divulge Page himself for a secure and willful Actaeon; and to these violent proceedings all my neighbors shall cry aim’’ (III.ii.40–44). Again the syntactical sequence shows that Ford’s most pleasurable anticipation is in exposing Page. Ford’s unconscious sense of failure as husband and father turns into paranoia about female power, a fear that appears in his language about both his wife and the witch: I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter, Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an

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Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself. Then she plots, then she ruminates, then she devises; and what they think in their hearts they may effect, they will break their hearts but they will effect. (II.ii.302–8)

His transition from ‘‘she’’ to ‘‘they,’’ from ‘‘may effect’’ to ‘‘will effect,’’ shows an irrational fear of women as ‘‘they.’’ The same irrationality and the same linguistic pattern appear in his sarcastic outburst to the supposed Mother Prat: Have I not forbid her my house? She comes of errands, does she? We are simple [i.e., innocent] men; we do not know what’s brought to pass under the profession of fortune-telling. (IV.ii.173–76)

The same shift from singular to plural, from ‘‘I’’ to ‘‘we,’’ shows Ford’s mind pitting deceitful ‘‘them’’ (women/witches) against innocent ‘‘us’’ (men). Ford is not the only male in Merry Wives to experience impotence in the face of magical female power. Falstaff is symbolically castrated by ‘‘witches’’ in the finale when Mrs. Ford and

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Mrs. Page ‘‘dis-horn’’ (IV.iv.64) him of his disguise as Herne the Hunter after summoning up the assistance of a band of supposed fairies. The identification of witches and fairies is an ancient, though not universal, folklore tradition that came into prominence at this time because of the witch persecutions. It should be added that Falstaff’s two previous humiliations at the hands of the wives have also been associated with impotence. First, after he is dumped out of the buck-basket into the Thames, Falstaff compares himself to Mrs. Ford’s servingmen who, in Mrs. Quickly’s inimitable malapropism, ‘‘mistook their erection’’ (III.v.39–40). Second, having been dressed in women’s clothing, an age-old sign of effeminacy, he says, ‘‘If it should come to the ear of the court, how I have been transform’d . . . they would whip me with their fine wits till I were as crestfall’n as a dried pear’’ (IV.v.93–99). The fallen crest, like the mistaken erection, is another image of impotence such as that which Jeanne Addison Roberts sees embodied in his name: Fall staff. In short, the language designates all three tricks that Mrs. Ford plays on Falstaff as forms of emasculation. As he says to the disguised Ford, ‘‘I went to her, Master [Brook], as you see, like a poor old man, but I came from her, Master [Brook], like a poor old woman’’ (V.i.15–17). The wives have schooled him in what he should have realized from the beginning, that he is too old for courtship. His first advances astonish Mrs. Ford: ‘‘One that is well-nigh worn to pieces with age to show himself a young gallant!’’ (II.i.21–22); and at the end of the play Page taunts him as ‘‘old, cold, wither’d’’ (V.v.153–54). Even in his diminished avatar in Merry Wives, however, Falstaff is irrepressible: the old knight transfers the impotence of age to the young, scorning youthful lovers as ‘‘lisping hawthorn buds, that come like women in men’s apparel, and smell like Bucklersbury in simple time’’ (III.iii.71–73). In fact, the other failed suitors, although youthful, are also emasculated when the courtship plot repeats the pattern of the marital plot. Slender and Caius are symbolically castrated when Anne Page, disguised as a fairy, elopes with Fenton, tricking them into marrying disguised boys, thus metaphorically transforming them to women, like Falstaff’s ‘‘hawthorn buds.’’ The last scene of the play not only provides the most dramatic of these symbolic castrations

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of the failed suitors in both plots but also the most vivid of the stage images of the women as witches. The wives, by tricking Falstaff into entering Windsor Park at midnight ‘‘with a buck’s head upon him’’ (V.v.s.d.), transform him into a deer, which, as he realizes, makes him an ‘‘ass’’ (V.v.119). This suggests the power of witches to ‘‘transubstantiate . . . them whom they bewitch into asses,’’ the subject of numerous medieval tales. Much has been written about the image suggested here of Falstaff as Actaeon, man transformed into stag, as a Renaissance emblem of lust. It should be emphasized, however, that the agency of Actaeon’s supernatural transformation, as here, was female, the goddess Diana. By Shakespeare’s time Diana was often named as the queen of the fairies and sometimes of witches; Titania—the name chosen by Shakespeare for Oberon’s queen—is another name for Diana. Thus the Actaeon allusions in the play underline not only male lust but also female magic. Witch images appear in another way in that the stage picture shows a horned man in the woods at midnight. ‘‘No man means evil but the devil,’’ says Page on his way to Windsor Park, ‘‘and we shall know him by his horns’’ (V.ii.12– 14). Page and the other characters hiding, in their plan to humiliate Falstaff, intend justice. Falstaff is the only man in this scene who intends harm—in cuckolding Ford—and the comic parallel with the devil is underlined by Falstaff’s joking reference to his disguised self as ‘‘a true spirit’’ (V.v.29). With the entry of Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page, we see the wives of the town going into the woods at night to meet a horned man, a devil: the central stage action images a witches’ sabbath. According to tradition, the witches’ sabbath included devil worship and sexual orgies. The devil, appearing in the form of a monster, or horned man or beast, was adored, as King James puts it, by ‘‘the kissing of his hinder partes.’’ The language as well as the stage image of Falstaff’s meeting with the wives strongly suggest these ceremonies when Mrs. Ford enters in the dark asking, ‘‘art thou there, my deer? my male deer?’’ and he responds obscenely, ‘‘My doe with the black scut?’’ (V.v.16–18). When Mrs. Ford reveals that Mrs. Page is with her, Falstaff offers to make love to them both: ‘‘Divide me like a brib’d buck, each a haunch’’ (V.v.24). The ‘‘haunch’’ of the man in horns is rather like the ‘‘hinder part’’ of a devil. If, in fact, Evans is also disguised in horns, his arrival with Mrs. Quickly dressed as queen of the fairies doubles the image of the witches’ revels.

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Submerged in the final scene, then, is a sinister stage image of women consorting with the devil. The image embodies and recapitulates both Ford’s worst imaginings and Falstaff’s heady Act I fantasy of making love to two Windsor wives at once. If Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page were, in fact, having a joint assignation in the woods with Falstaff, they would indeed be the ‘‘queans’’ and ‘‘witches’’ that Ford jealously supposes. Like the witch of Brainford, however, these evil and lustful wives exist only in masculine imagination. Symbolically castrating Falstaff, they do to the knight what Ford feared cuckoldry would do to him. Thus it is appropriate that Falstaff rather than Ford wear the horns in the final scene—a matter much debated—because he is the man rendered impotent by female betrayal and left without a woman.

like the power of the merry wives, tamed to the uses of marriage.

The finale also associates the other two female characters in the play with magical power: Mistress Quickly and Anne Page are disguised as fairies. Because the four women manipulate and control the action, the last scene makes the same connection between female power and magic that Ford made earlier when he beat the supposed witch, Mother Prat. The name of the witch can now be seen as generic. Earlier in the play, ‘‘prat’’ in its slang meaning of ‘‘buttocks’’ was laughably appropriate for the fat knight. The older meaning of ‘‘prat,’’ according to the OED [Oxford English Dictionary], is ‘‘a trick; a piece of trickery or fraud; a prank; a frolic.’’ The fifth-act tricks of the women, with their supernatural aura, make them all Mother Prats, that is, tricky women.

Barbara Freedman

The comic ending, when it destroys the men’s fantasies of adultery and betrayal, cancels the sinister associations of female magic. The wives’ trick on the would-be cuckolder restores potency to the husband, Ford, who, in the last lines of the play boasts to Falstaff, ‘‘To Master [Brook] you yet shall hold your word, / For he to-night shall lie with Mistress Ford’’ (V.v.244–45). Like the merry wives, Anne Page uses her magical power of feminine deceit to render the unworthy suitors impotent and to ratify the power of her husband, Fenton, who defends her because her trickery serves marriage: ‘‘Th’ offense is holy that she hath committed, / And this deceit loses the name of craft’’ (V.v.225–26). The word ‘‘craft’’ combines both the meaning of ‘‘trick’’ and its older meaning of ‘‘witchcraft’’ to emphasize the magical quality of Anne’s female power, now,

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Images of impotence and magic thus pervade Merry Wives to a greater extent than previously realized. They also display a causal connection. The play projects a masculine vision of any woman as a potential witch, or Mother Prat, because of her power to reject and/or deceive a man who desires her. This vision is dispelled when the wives use their female ‘‘craft’’ to support their husbands’ power, metamorphosing deceit into merriment. Source: Nancy Cotton, ‘‘Castrating (W)itches: Impotence and Magic in The Merry Wives of Windsor,’’ in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3, Autumn 1987, pp. 320–26.

In this essay, Freedman examines the character of Falstaff both within The Merry Wives of Windsor and among Shakespeare’s history plays. The critic discusses the buffoonery of Falstaff in The Merry Wives, commenting on the previous critical response to the character and offering her own opinion on the character’s importance and meaning. We can understand the nature and the history of the criticism on The Merry Wives as a series of attempts to come to terms with the disturbing response that the buffoon, and the punishment he requests, evokes. Critics are unanimous in their annoyance at Falstaff’s buffoonery, in their disgust at his cruel punishment at Windsor Forest, and in their desire to look outside the text to explain away both these responses. The apocryphal accounts of the play’s origin offer critics one solution. If, as John Dennis asserted in 1702, the play was written in fourteen days at the Queen’s command—or if, as Nicholas Rowe reported, these demands were further qualified by the Queen’s request that Shakespeare write a play which portrayed Falstaff in love—it becomes easy to blame critical dissatisfaction on external grounds: the play was hastily written, was probably highly derivative, and could not, given such constraints, adequately reflect Shakespeare’s creative genius. A second, more popular critical response has been literally to disown the play’s main character, Falstaff. Such critics direct our attention to the discrepancies between the more vital Falstaff of the history plays and the ‘‘old, cold, withered’’ buffoon before them, concluding that this is neither Shakepeare’s Falstaff nor our

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PUNISHING FALSTAFF COULD HAVE BEEN A GOOD DEAL MORE FUN IF THE MERRY WIVES WERE WRITTEN AS TRADITIONAL FARCE.’’

own. A. C. Bradley’s response is indicative of this critical trend: [Falstaff is] baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked, mocked, insulted, and, worst of all, repentant and didactic. It is horrible. It is almost enough to convince one that Shakespeare himself could sanction the parody of Ophelia in the Two Noble Kinsmen. But it no more touches the real Falstaff than Ophelia is degraded by that parody.

A third means of avoiding the problem of Falstaff’s buffoonery has been to moralize the issue. Either the community is to be blamed for unfair behavior, or Falstaff is to be blamed for his villainy in order for these critics to accept the play’s action. Jeanne Addison Roberts’ article, ‘‘Falstaff in Windsor Forest: Villain or Victim?’’ bluntly states the moralizers’ dilemma: ‘‘Is Falstaff . . . a social menace who brings on himself a well-deserved punishment? Or is he a nearlyinnocent victim, entrapped by the scheming wives and used by society for its own rather devious ends?’’ Roberts concludes that he is both and turns to historical parallels of scapegoating to explain the ambiguity of Falstaff’s criminal status. The view of Falstaff as scapegoat eludes the moralizers’ dilemma in enabling us to see him as guilty and innocent at once, but it demands an identification with the wives, with their community, and with certain professed social aims that is problematic, if not impossible, given the way in which the play is written. The result is a fourth means of evading our response to the play: focusing on historical situations which inform the play’s pattern of events but which fail to explain Shakespeare’s use of them. While vestiges of a primitive scapegoat ritual certainly loom large in The Merry Wives, the fact remains that the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is not a ritual scapegoat but a realistically drawn dramatic character with psychological validity. The wives who punish him are not ‘‘defenders of the social order’’ but offended women with

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minds and plans of their own—both of which they refuse to share with the other members of their community. Even when the entire community is involved in Falstaff’s punishment, and that is only one action in a much larger sequence of events, the punishment is not a ritual scapegoating but a self-conscious and playful parody of that ritual. Furthermore, Falstaff’s humiliation in Windsor Forest is neither necessary nor successful in ‘‘purging’’ the Windsor community. The crisis of a manipulative view of others and of reality which plagues Windsor society is only ‘‘mythically’’ solved by the symbol of Fenton and Anne Page’s freely willed marriage at the play’s end; a tragicomic awareness of our inability to control the outcome of events, and our inability to stop trying to control events, is tellingly underlined by the fact of that wedding as well. On the surface, the play reads as a citizen comedy: Falstaff is a threat to the community, and his punishment at the hands of the Windsor wives is merry, moral, and survival-oriented. Yet if we consider our emotional response to the play or attempt to understand what desires the author may be fulfilling through creating and sharing its core fantasy, there is a second possible view of the action. We don’t—or I don’t—always feel as if the wives simply represent the interests of a sane society. And Shakespeare apparently didn’t either, for he has these wives doubt their own intentions and then protest far too much: ‘‘What think you?’’ Mrs. Ford asks Mrs. Page, ‘‘May we, with the warrant of womanhood and the witness of a good conscience, pursue him [Falstaff] with any further revenge?’’ (IV.ii.179–81). Mrs. Page’s reply is a confident one: ‘‘The spirit of wantonness is, sure, scared out of him. If the devil have him not in fee simple . . . he will never, I think . . . attempt us again’’ (IV.ii.182–85) The wives then blithely forge ahead with a new plan to ‘‘still be the ministers’’ of Falstaff’s punishment, rationalizing their action with such pithy couplets as ‘‘Against such lewdsters and their lechery / Those that betray them do no treachery’’ (V.iii.20–21) Their vindictive reaction to Falstaff’s ‘‘love letter’’ is understandable the first time, but they feed his flattery and egg him on to future sexual transgressions most cruelly—and unnecessarily. Quite simply, the wives and their ‘‘sane community’’ do not provide ample motivation for this fantasy, and if we identify with them, we won’t fully understand why Shakespeare was writing this play. Facts are facts. Shakespeare was interested, for some strange

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reason, in writing about clownish male sexual humiliation and punishment, in making us laugh at something essentially disturbing: an aggressive and yet guilty sense of sexuality. The play expresses an obvious pleasure in being caught, in being humiliated, in being punished for sexual transgressions. Perhaps if we consider the play as Falstaff’s fantasy—a self-directed farce of repeated selfhumiliations—we will be closer to the true spirit of the play. Punishing Falstaff could have been a good deal more fun if The Merry Wives were written as traditional farce. Central to that genre is a pattern of sexual transgression and punishment for that transgression which is usually well disguised. Insofar as farce, by definition, derives humor from absurd plot aggression directed against flat characters, it characteristically enables us to enjoy aggression whose cause and effect is denied. In The Merry Wives, however, we have a self-conscious use of farce for didactic aims: a self-conscious punishment for sexuality which is disturbing as much as it is humorous. Surely Shakespeare knew he would be losing a few laughs by having us chant, along with the Windsor community, Fie on sinful fantasy! Fie on lust and luxury! Lust is but a bloody fire, Kindled with unchaste desire, ... Pinch him, fairies, mutually; Pinch him for his villainy; Pinch him, and burn him, and turn him about, Till candles and starlight and moonshine be out. (V.v.91–100) Punishing Falstaff may be fun at first, but without the disguises of traditional farce, it becomes serious business. By the second and third times around, as critics have noted, it becomes downright humiliating. To understand the highly self-conscious, punitive view of sexuality in Merry Wives, it is useful to examine the play in the larger context of the plays Shakespeare wrote around the same time. It is enlightening, for example, to see how the play anticipates, and gives comic expression to, the same sexual conflicts that characterize such tragedies as Othello and King Lear. Common to Shakespeare’s plays of this period is a focus on an aging male protagonist facing, or

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attempting to evade, a decrease in mental and physical agility, and facing, or attempting to evade, accompanying fantasies of emasculation and humiliation by women. Since there are two Lears and two Othellos, that there are two Falstaffs should not, perhaps, be so confusing; a play about Falstaff in love is a play about male sexuality in middle age, which for Shakespeare seems to connote a definite falling off from what one was before, a sense of impending impotence of mind and body. Shakespeare emphasizes Falstaff’s decline by choosing to depict the comic defeat of a character with an established reputation for vitality, and by forcing him to acknowledge, early on in the play, a disturbing shift in the state of affairs and a need to adjust accordingly: ‘‘Well, sirs, I am almost out at heels,’’ he complains to his men, adding: ‘‘There is no remedy— I must cony-catch, I must shift’’ (I.iii.28–31). Shakespeare focuses on the onset of intellectual inadequacy when he has Falstaff repeatedly forget and need to be reminded of times and dates after demonstrating remarkable mental agility in the play’s opening scene. But the comedy’s major concern is with a sense of sexual inadequacy, a loss of manliness; hence, the majority of its plots concern impotent old men trying to prove their masculinity through foolishly conceived duels and even more foolishly conceived sexual liaisons, none of which comes to fruition. One defense against this crisis is narcissistic self-aggrandizement, achieved through a costly dependence on external proofs of one’s grandeur; this is most evident in the heroics of an Othello or a King Lear. The Merry Wives also begins with old men foolishly parading their official titles in a pathetic attempt to restore their shattered selfesteem. Falstaff’s overblown self-image and subsequent downfall merely anticipate, in comic fashion, the hubris and destruction of the tragic heroes who are to follow. Unlike Lear, Falstaff manages to retain his preposterously grandiose self-image despite numerous humiliations, yet he does so only to be set up for repeated comic pratfalls. A second defense characteristic of this crisis is a premature adjustment to declining powers in the form of a regression to an infantile posture of dependency upon woman. Lear would draw from Cordelia an absolute declaration of love so that he might comfortably fulfill his plans ‘‘to set my rest On her kind nursery’’ (I.i.123–24); without Desdemona, Othello’s occupation is gone. Falstaff

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The Fair on St George’s Day, c 1559-1560 (etching and engraving), by Pieter Brueghel, the Elder (The Fair on St George’s Day, c1559-60 (etching and engraving, 1st state), Brueghel, Pieter the Elder (c1515-69) (after), photograph. Museum purchase with funds from The Brown Foundation, Inc, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA/ The Bridgeman Art Library International)

mirrors Lear in his wholly unrealistic plans to make a living off disinterested Windsor wives: ‘‘They shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both’’ (I.iii.64–66). Ford, like Othello and Lear, is plagued with unrealistic fantasies of possessiveness and fears of abandonment. In sum, The Merry Wives is a world of impotent old men wholly dependent upon asexual maternal figures for financial and emotional well-being—so much so that the primary action of the play is the devising of crafty plots whereby one can draw from these women one’s sustenance. As taking from woman in this play is imagined in terms of an infantile dependency on maternal figures, it is not surprising that sexuality is described in oral images. Eating seems to be the major preoccupation of Windsor society; everyone is always coming from or going to a dinner. And close analysis reveals that the Windsor characters’ attitudes towards dining parallel their attitudes towards coupling in the play. Basically, there are two dominant attitudes towards eating and sexuality in The Merry Wives. The creed of comedy, and its ideal of sexuality, is the

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benevolent oral merger, based on trust in the other, and represented by Master Page. For Page, eating is sharing, being a Host is not losing oneself but finding oneself, creating harmony. Page speaks of ‘‘drink[ing] down all unkindness’’ (I.i.175) and of making amends at the table; eating, for him, is a creative, restorative process. Correspondingly, Page is patient, trustful, and giving in his relationships with others, most obviously with his wife. The opposing creed of farce, and its view of sexuality, is the destructive oral merger, based on a distrustful compulsion greedily to devour or prey upon others, and a fear of like retribution for that sin. For Falstaff, eating is stealing, a sign of transgression which brings on punishment, a devouring which leads to being devoured. His monstrous size is our first clue to his greedy intent. In this play we first meet him eating stolen deer at Page’s house; he soon attempts to steal Page’s ‘‘dear,’’ his wife, as well. Yet her desire appears to Falstaff to be as destructive and devouring as his own. He tells us that ‘‘she did so course o’er my exteriors with such a greedy intention that the appetite of her

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eye did seem to scorch me up like a burningglass’’ (I.iii.59–61). Falstaff’s burning by the Windsor fairies at the play’s conclusion records the triumph of this maternal devouring. His hungry preying is similar to Ford’s jealous possessiveness. The stealing and possessiveness are simply two sides of one coin, resulting from a sense of not having enough inside, and so being unable to give to others, and from a feeling that one must take in order to counteract what others take from one, in turn. Ford fears that everyone will steal from him, and yet so does Falstaff; they simply defend against that threat differently. In sum, if Page is the perfect host, Falstaff is the perfect parasite; their attitudes towards eating and sexuality correspond to these roles. Hostile fantasies of hurting, preying upon, and devouring that which sustains one naturally call forth guilty fantasies of retribution. The parasitical Windsor males who would prey upon women are punished through sexual frustration, sexual humiliation, symbolic castration, and symbolic devouring. Quickly cruelly leads on Anne Page’s suitors in the subplot, as the merry wives entice and frustrate Falstaff in the main plot. Anne’s suitors are publicly humiliated by being led into abortive duels and, even worse, abortive marriages (being wed to ‘‘great lubberly boys’’); Falstaff is humiliated by having his sexual desires and desirability mocked by the community. Falstaff’s symbolic castration is discussed by Jeanne Roberts who notes that the community’s aim, as described by Mrs. Page, is to ‘‘dis-horne the spirit’’ (IV.iv.62); Roberts also points out that the dialogue concerning the horns strongly suggests that Falstaff’s horns are removed from his head by the community immediately. The symbolic devouring of Falstaff occurs in the greasy knight’s public burning. The traditional association of fire with a destructive devouring is already made by the community, who notes that ‘‘lust is but a bloody fire’’ (V.v.93) and then burns Falstaff accordingly for it. Yet farce provides a partial solution to this guilty attack on the self for destructive sexuality—a particular, defensive mode of dealing with guilty self-punishment. Unlike Lear, who is the passive victim of his daughter’s cruel attacks, Falstaff unmans and humiliates himself. He is not only foolish to begin with, thereby already collaborating in the Windsor women’s plot to punish him, but he plays the fool repeatedly, thereby helping it along. Whereas the tragic mode of heroic challenge and attack is followed by a martyred

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submission to persecutory fantasies, the farcical mode moves from mock transgression and selfemasculation through punishment to laughing forgiveness: the pattern of the buffoon. Falstaff dismisses his own train before the wives deceptively win away his page; Falstaff allows himself to be fooled without an Iago, although the women do egg him on in his self-flattery. Falstaff willingly dons Mother Prat’s clothes in an attempt to avoid punishment, whereas Lear agonizes over the woman’s tears that threaten his masculine self-image. As if to avoid punishment for womanish dependency, for an aggressive taking from woman, Falstaff becomes foolish woman, emasculates himself, and asks for ridicule and humiliation. In a sense, Falstaff takes the option that Lear couldn’t and willingly plays the fool. It is this active role in the pattern of transgression and punishment that keeps the play a comedy and enables us to understand it in terms of the tragic works that follow. In an article on the psychodynamics of clowning, Richard Simons presents a case study of a typical buffoon. The man’s obsessive clowning is analyzed as a complex mode of enacting the same transgressions and simultaneously defending against the same fears, as those typical of circus clowning, of farce in general, and of The Merry Wives of Windsor in particular. The patient, about fifty years of age, described as ‘‘old, balding, toothless, obese, hard of hearing, and impotent.’’ He enjoyed telling the other patients of the one time a doctor had considered placing him in a nursing home. He lived with his mother and sister and felt deeply ambivalent toward them, bound in dependency upon them and yet despising their control. From childhood on, he recounted, he had played the fool; he was the student clown who was always caught drawing ugly pictures of the teacher on the blackboard just as she walked in the room. The patient expressed displeasure about being mocked by the other patients but seemed to derive a great deal of secret pleasure from it. For he would continually place himself in situations where he would be caught attacking someone, ideally female authority figures, and would then give his peers due information and cause to join in his reprimand and yet simultaneously laugh at his foolishness. Simons explains this patient’s clowning as a means of enabling an acceptable release of aggression. First, joking provides a socially acceptable means of releasing hostility, a means of projecting

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one’s fears and one’s deficiencies onto others and then mocking them for it. Second, the clown is a fool, so his self-abasement takes the sting out of his attacks. Yet insofar as clowning depends upon ‘‘being caught,’’ it is particularly safe, for it provides the clown with a means of escaping the anxiety, guilt, and self-punishment arising from his hostile thoughts and acts. In being found out and punished, the clown can disown and project the role of superego onto an audience whom he can in turn bribe through humor and self-abasement. The typical student clown, then, manages to vent hostility against the teacher, and the pleasure in getting caught is a means of acting out and disowning superego aggression; he can then bribe the superego through his humorous self-abasement before teachers and peers. The defense mechanism of clowning may also be understood as an effective means of mastering oral anxieties. The oral tendency is to preserve an attachment to the introjected object at all costs, yet maintaining that relationship is problematic, given the conflicts which characterize the disturbed oral personality’s primary relationship. The first accessible defense mechanism for maintaining a frustrating object relationship is the splitting of the maternal image into idealized and malevolent components. Yet insofar as the oral personality has characteristically failed to master primary ambivalence towards the object, it is unable to neutralize destructive feelings towards the self and the other which derive from the split maternal image. Ridden with guilt over destructive feelings towards both the object and the self, the subject seeks a means of controlling the attacks of its irrationally harsh superego. Seeking punishment is a means of controlling inner hostility; through manipulative harassment, an external, regulatory process for doling out aggression is set up. Finally, insofar as seeking punishment is also a means of seeking attention, it provides a means of maintaining a relationship, however unsatisfactory the quality of that relationship may be. Clowning as a technique provides the professional and literary buffoons with the same defensive means of expressing aggression that it affords the amateur. While clownish hostility is invariably directed against authority figures, both male and female, it is interesting to note that the clown is traditionally a male figure and serves the function, in our society, of playing on fears of and hostility toward women. The clown’s traditional

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garb is itself an attack on women, a hideous caricature of her made-up face, stiff hairdo, and flimsy clothing. Like the typical buffon and comedian, Falstaff projects his own deficiencies onto others and then laughs at them for it; in this case, the Windsor elders are ridiculed for their impotence and parasitic behavior. But Falstaff seems especially concerned with attacking powertul maternal figures and then being discovered and humiliated by them. His dependence on and aggression toward women have been analyzed, but we may add that they are given expression through costume as well as through action. In a memorable scene between Falstaff and his alter ego, Master Ford, Falstaff dresses up as Mother Prat—by name a punitive maternal figure. Ford vents his anger at the old woman because of her fortune-telling, her alleged control over situations ‘‘beyond our element’’ about which ‘‘we know nothing’’ (IV.ii.154). Aggression against a punitive maternal figure is thus released by both men in this scene. But Falstaff’s aggression toward women upon whom he is dependent and his curious desire to be punished for it are most obvious in his ridiculous plan of writing degrading love letters to a number of maternal figures in the community who are sure to see through him and make him suffer for his advances. The traditional clown and Falstaff set themselves up to be caught; being chased and beaten is the essence of farce action, and Falstaff’s role is to be continually found out and humiliated for the same sin. In both cases, we can understand this degrading clowning as a means of safely transgressing against authority figures and then safely being punished for it, by innocently playing out and disowning punishment. Or, to return to the familiar classroom paradigm, Falstaff is the class clown, the merry wives are the teacher, and we are his peers who both punish and laugh at this foolish figure. To place the play in a larger context, I pose the following conundrum: Why is this image of man, with his aggressive and yet guilty sense of sexuality, his focus on humiliation and abuse at the hands of woman, preoccupying Shakespeare between the writing of a Twelfth Night and a Hamlet? Or ‘‘why,’’ as William Green asks us in his introduction to the Signet edition of the play, ‘‘when engrossed in writing romantic comedy . . . does [Shakespeare] suddenly backtrack to the farcical treatment of love that he successfully presented in The Taming of the Shrew?’’ The most prevalent philosophical concern in Shakespeare’s

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plays of the time period is not with the potential, ever renewing accommodations and adjustments to life which comedy celebrates but with a tragic awareness of man’s limitations. Throughout the plays is a disturbing sense of the impossibility of purposive language and action in a world of flux, created by man and sustained by his frail faith in himself and in others. This conflict is commonly expressed in the form of a triad. One term is an ideal world order, received from one’s fathers, and often represented by them: a world that in each subsequent incarnation, is increasingly revealed to be less viable and less self-aware. This is the ideal world of a Friar Laurence, a Richard II, an old Hamlet; it is Hector’s ideal of intrinsic value, Othello’s dream, and Lear’s fantasy. A recognition of its flaws is necessary but, ultimately, neither comforting nor useful; threatening to take its place is a world of chaos. As Ulysses reminds us, Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy . . . ... Then everything include itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite. And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey And last eat up himself. (I.iii.109–24) This is our second term, the chaotic world which Bolingbroke opened up like a Pandora’s box: a world peopled by Ajax and Pompey Bum, Falstaff and his crew, Goneril and Regan, and Othello’s Anthropophagi who eat each other up. In between the ideal and the real, the private and the public, the past and the present, is a mediator attempting to join the two; after Hamlet, that mediator simply represents a makeshift, manmade order subject to constant attack from without and within, sustained only by human imagination, faith, and respect. The problem of maintaining a makeshift, imaginative, communal order in the face of external attack and a loss of faith in a previous order is given comic expression in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Representing the old order in the form of its restitutions of law and religion are the farcical Windsor elders. Threatening to replace them are the chaotic forces of power, will, and appetite, represented by the ridiculous buffoon Falstaff and his farcically swaggering

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crew. Shakespeare reenacts his tragic dilemma on the familiar testing ground of English soil, Windsor community—and on the familiar testing ground of English comedy as well. What sustains Windsor society is its commitment to the opposite of the manipulative, predatory, capitalistic behavior in which both parties engage—its commitment to a creed of communal trust, faith, and harmony, as represented by Master Page. The possibility of tragedy threatens, however, when Shakespeare rests an order, as he must, on imaginative grounds; trust implies mistrust, and every Page has its counterpart Ford in Shakespeare’s works. Yet Ford is here linked with Falstaff; the miser becomes the thief’s alterego, and through this identification, the threat that Ford presents can be safely overcome. After all, this is a comedy. What makes the play humorous is Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Windsor elders in such a way that their impotence is comic rather than tragic, and his portrayal of the forces of chaos in terms of comic weaknesses as well. What makes the play comedy, rather than farce, is the addition of an alternative which has all the trappings of success, a mediating term with which we can identify and which will save the community. This triad has its psychological coordinates as well, and these are well brought out in Shakespeare’s post-1600 plays. For the old world, the sanctioned order now revealed as hollow, we have an old, narrowly defined, heroic masculine persona which is no longer viable or appropriate. For the new, predatory ‘‘order,’’ we have an identity based on dependency on others (particularly women) in time: a tragic sense of being as subject to continual redefinition by untrustworthy mirrors. In the post-1600 plays, these two options are often presented in the characters of the omnipotent superhero and the emasculated cuckold. The ideal mean, a secure masculine sexual identity dependent upon the possibility of intimacy without self-destruction, a successful sense of being with and through others, is depicted in The Merry Wives in the confident relationship of the Pages. In the tragedies, Shakespeare becomes fascinated with attacking and exposing the world of the fathers, and exploring and resolving this sense of relationship with woman as dependent and devouring. There is a growing identification with heroic transgression, on the one hand, and with an ultimately passive submission to these

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destructive powers, be they the forces of evil without or within, glorified in the form of heavenly ministers, on the other. The comedies equally deal with transgressions against fathers and mothers, but they provide a defensive means of dealing with the accompanying guilt—in this case, through a manipulative, humorous baiting of others into an attack which enables regulation of hostile feelings, and through humorous selfabasement which mitigates that attack. Simons notes, ‘‘Clowning is thus an adaptive effort on the part of the ego to deal with . . . castrative fears, a defense against and a partial punishment for incestuous and aggressive impulses, an abandonment of the oedipal struggle with regression to more infantile levels, and a communication to the therapist: ‘Don’t be frightened of me. I’m no rival. I’m only a clown—a fool—old and weak— fat—bald—impotent.’’’ How does clowning alleviate the punishment accompanying the transgressions enacted in the tragedies of the time period? ‘‘If,’’ as Simons argues, ‘‘he [the clown] can actively play at these fears, perhaps they will not come true. If he can confess and expose them to ridicule, perhaps no further punishment will be exacted. If he can get his friends to laugh at them, perhaps they are not so terrifying as they seem.’’ In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare’s friends agree to laugh with him once more, and to stall off the terrors that are to come. Source: Barbara Freedman, ‘‘Falstaff ’s Punishment: Bufoonery as Defensive Posture in The Merry Wives of Windsor,’’ in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 14, 1981, pp. 163–74.

SOURCES Charney, Maurice, All of Shakespeare, Columbia University Press, 1993. Dickson, Andrew, The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, Rough Guides, 2005.

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Epstein, Norrie, The Friendly Shakespeare, Penguin Books, 1993. Shakespeare, William, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Gramercy Books, 1995.

FURTHER READING Bernit, Bill, Writing the Romantic Comedy, Collins, 2001. Bernit is a story analyst who has read over 4000 movies scripts in the past decade. He has written this book to help writers who are interested in writing contemporary stories of love and humor. Bloom, Harold, ed., Sir John Falstaff (Bloom’s Major Literary Characters), Chelsea House Publications, 2003. This collection of critical essays focuses on one of Shakespeare’s most notorious characters, Sir John Falstaff. Gurr, Andrew, William Shakespeare: The Extraordinary Life of The Most Successful Writer of All Time, Book Sales, 1996. Through biography and photographs, Gurr provides a look at the life of Shakespeare and his times. Levi, Peter, Life and Times of William Shakespeare, Random House, 1995. Levi provides the facts but also speculates on details of the Bard’s life for which there is no factual evidence, making this an interesting read. McDonald, Russ, ed., Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, Blackwell Publishing, 2004. This book is a collection of critical essays and interpretations of all of Shakespeare’s works. Mittelstaedt, Walt, A Student’s Guide to William Shakespeare, Enslow Publishers, 2005. Mittelstaedt offers interpretations and explanations of some of Shakespeare’s works. Weir, Alison, The Life of Elizabeth I, Ballantine Books, 1999. To understand the times, readers must also understand the queen. Weir gives her readers a well researched and interesting view of a woman whose affect upon England has been deep and long lasting.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1595

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of William Shakespeare’s earliest romantic comedies, and it has been considered one of his most successful and best-loved works throughout the centuries. It has spawned some of his most memorable and imitated characters, such as Puck, the fairy sprite with a penchant for mischief; and Bottom, a weaver who becomes such a ham when rehearsing with the local theater group that a magical spell is cast to give him the head of a donkey. Ever since the play was written in approximately 1595, there have been versions for the stage that have adapted Shakespeare’s multiple plot lines, emphasizing one or another character or putting a minor theme out in front of the play. Shakespeare combined elements of stories that were well-known in his time, drawing from Roman poets and folk tales; it is a sign of his skill as a writer that echoes of this play can be heard in works throughout modern culture. In writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare diverted from his custom of retelling a familiar story, instead weaving together diverse elements into a coherent and satisfying whole. There are two sets of lovers, two royal couples, tradesmen (or ‘‘Mechanicals’’) who are actors, and fairies who cannot be seen by any humans but one. A father disapproves of his daughter’s romance, two men are put under magic spells to love the same woman, and a queen humbles herself by falling in love with a man who has the head of an ass. And the whole

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show ends with one of Shakespeare’s funniest scenes, as the inept but well-meaning actors struggle to put on a serious play, in the process showing everything that Shakespeare thought was wrong with the theater. A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains a thought-provoking meditation on love and perception, as well as a wonder for audiences worldwide.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins in the palace of Theseus, Duke of Athens, who is making arrangements to marry Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons. As they plan their wedding with Philostrate, who will be in charge of the ceremony, Egeus enters. He is an old man and has a petition to ask of the duke: Egeus has promised his daughter Hermia to a young man, Demetrius, but she wants to go against her father’s wishes and marry Lysander, another young gentleman. In the ensuing discussion, Hermia points out that Demetrius can marry Helena, who is in love with him. Theseus hears the case and determines that Hermia must follow her father’s order and marry Demetrius. Hermia is given a choice: in four days, which happens to be the date of Theseus and Hippolyta’s own wedding, she can either marry Demetrius, or she will have to go and live in a convent for the rest of her life, and remain a virgin forever. She chooses the convent but is given the following days to think about it. When all of the others leave, Hermia and Lysander concoct a plan: they will sneak away from Athens the next night, to the house of Lysander’s aunt out into the woods—beyond the duke’s legal jurisdiction—and be married. They see Helena passing and tell her of their plans, to help her quit worrying about losing Demetrius. When they leave, Helena decides that she can use this information to capture Demetrius’s loyalty, thinking that he will lose his interest in Hermia once he finds out how devious she is.

Act 1, Scene 2 In the cottage of Peter Quince, a group of local laborers is making plans to present a play called The Most Lamentable Comedy, and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby, which they intend

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to perform for the duke’s marriage. As Quince assigns the roles to the workers and explains their basic functions in the play, he is frequently interrupted by Nick Bottom, the lead actor, who suggests ways to expand his part or ways that he can take over other parts in addition to his own: his enthusiasm is so great that at one point he suggests that he could play both Pyramus and Thisby, the two lovers of the play’s title. Once the parts are assigned, Quince tells the company to meet him the next night in the woods, about a mile out of town, so that they can rehearse without anyone watching them and stealing their secrets.

Act 2, Scene 1 The second act takes place in the woods outside of Athens. Puck and an unnamed fairy exchange gossip about Oberon, the king of the fairies, and his wife, Titania. Puck explains that Oberon is jealous because Titania is infatuated with her new attendant, a young man whom she stole from an Indian king. Oberon has tried to take the young orphan boy from her, but so far Titania has resisted. Oberon and Titania, along with a throng of fairies, enter the clearing. She accuses him of having been unfaithful and having traveled to seduce women in foreign lands. She points out that Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, was his lover, and he counters that Titania was in love with Theseus. Titania points out how their ongoing arguments and mutual jealousy have brought ill weather to the world for months, and Oberon counters that things might be settled if she would just give him the young attendant to be his servant. After she leaves, Oberon summons Puck and gives him an assignment. Oberon remembers once having seen Cupid, the god of love, shoot an arrow that fell on a flower, and he knows that that flower, the ‘‘love-in-idleness,’’ can be used to make people fall in love. He plans to use this love spell on Titania when she is asleep; it will cause her to fall in love with the first person she sees upon waking up, thus helping her to lose interest in her young servant. Demetrius and Helena enter the clearing, but Oberon, being a fairy, is invisible to them. Helena insists that Demetrius owes his love to her because she has revealed Hermia’s scheme to marry Lysander instead of him, but Demetrius

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Dominic West as Lysander and Calista Flockhart as Helena in a scene from the 1999 film A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Ó Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection)

strides ahead of her, insisting that Helena makes him sick. As he keeps telling her to leave him alone, she keeps insisting that she will never stop loving him. As they walk offstage, Oberon notes that Helena will have Demetrius asking for her love in the end.

Act 2, Scene 2 In another part of the woods, Titania sits on her couch, surrounded by doting fairies. They sing her to sleep with a lullaby, and Oberon applies the flower petal to her eyes. Lysander and Hermia pass by this spot, discussing their upcoming marriage. Hermia insists that they must not sleep together until after they are married, so Lysander moves away from her before lying down. Puck, having been instructed to apply the flower to a man in the woods dressed in typical Athenian clothes, thinks the sleeping Lysander is Demetrius. Oberon wanted Puck to apply the love spell to Demetrius while he slept, so that

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he would love Helena as much as she loves him; instead, Puck applies it to Lysander. Demetrius arrives, with Helena still chasing him. When he breaks away from her, Helena stands and bemoans her inability to attract him. She finds Lysander on the ground and wakes him up, and the spell makes him fall instantly in love with her. As Lysander emphatically declares his love for her, Helena becomes suspicious, fearing that he is making fun of her. Hermia awakens from a nightmare in which Lysander watched with a smile while a serpent ate her heart. She calls for him and finds him gone.

Act 3, Scene 1 Nearby, the artisans have found a clearing to rehearse their play. Bottom complains that the script has his character committing suicide with a sword, which, he says, the ladies in the audience will never accept: rather than omitting the suicide, his solution is to include a prologue to the play explaining that the character Pyramus, and

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not Bottom himself, will be killed. Quince agrees to write the prologue. They settle their concern over worrying the audience with the lion’s appearance in a similar way, with a short speech to the audience explaining that it is not a real lion, but only Snug, the joiner, playing a part. To settle the problem of having to have moonlight and a brick wall on the stage, they decide to have actors play moonlight and the wall. Puck shows up, unseen, feeling that the artisans are too close to the Fairy Queen’s sleeping place. When Bottom goes offstage, Puck follows him and casts a spell on him. Bottom returns when his cue is spoken, but his head has been transformed into an ass’s head. The other tradesmen run away in fear when they see him, but Bottom has no idea what is scaring them. Titania wakes up and, seeing Bottom, immediately falls in love with him. She praises his beauty and his wisdom and refuses to allow him to leave the forest. She assigns a coterie of her fairies—Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed—to follow him and grant his every wish.

Act 3, Scene 2 Puck goes to Oberon and explains that he made Titania fall in love with the ass-headed monster, Bottom. Oberon is pleased, but then they see Demetrius and Hermia walk by. Puck recognizes Hermia as the woman from the couple he saw, but he warns that Demetrius is not the man he touched with the flower petal. Hermia, having found Lysander gone when she awoke, is afraid that Demetrius might have injured him, while he continues to proclaim his love for her until she runs away from him; then, he lays down on the ground to sleep.

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her, Helena thinks that they are working together to make fun of her. When Hermia returns, she goes to Lysander, having not seen him since the love spell affected him. He rejects her to focus his attention on Helena and tells Hermia that he hates her. Seeing how distressed Hermia looks, Helena concludes that she is a part of the conspiracy to mock her. The insults become so severe that Hermia moves toward Helena in a threatening gesture, and Helena, frightened, asks that they all just let her go. Demetrius and Lysander decide to fight for Helena. They go off into the woods to find a clearing where there is enough room for their swords. Helena, afraid to be left alone with Hermia, goes off after them, and Hermia follows. Oberon and Puck, who have been present but unseen all along, discuss how to rectify this situation. Oberon tells Puck to magically create a fog, so that he can lead the two men away from each other. When they fall asleep, he will have the opportunity to undo the spell that has been cast on Lysander, so that he will love Hermia again, though he plans to leave the spell on Demetrius. Puck notes that this has to be done quickly, before the sun comes up. Puck carries out Oberon’s plan: in the fog, he calls to Lysander in Demetrius’s voice, and he calls to Demetrius in Lysander’s voice, to keep them from finding each other and doing harm, until they fall asleep. Helena enters and falls asleep near Demetrius. Hermia enters and falls asleep near Lysander, and Puck puts the potion on Lysander’s eyes that will free him from the love spell when he awakes.

Act 4, Scene 1

Oberon, seeing that Demetrius has not fallen in love with Helena, concludes that the spell has made someone fall in love with the wrong person. He sends Puck off to bring Helena back to him. When Puck is gone, Oberon rubs the petal of the love-in-idleness on Demetrius, so that he will fall in love with Helena when she comes.

This scene opens with Titania still enthralled by donkey-headed Bottom. Because of the attention that the Fairy Queen is giving him, Bottom acts and speaks in ways that he believes are refined. He gives the fairies chores to do to please his whims. In general, Bottom is being an annoyance, but Titania continues to pronounce her love for him as they drop off to sleep.

Helena approaches, followed by Lysander. He continues to proclaim his love for her, and she still thinks that he is mocking her. Demetrius awakens, sees Helena, and he proclaims his love for her too. With both men saying that they love

Oberon and Puck enter, and Oberon, having been given the young attendant that he wanted from Titania, removes the love spell from her. She wakes, remembering her love for an ass as if it had been a dream. Oberon points out that the

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creature that she remembered was indeed real and then commands Puck to remove the ass head from Bottom. Oberon and Titania dance together and make plans to attend Theseus’s wedding. Theseus, Hippolyta, Egeus, and others of the court arrive in the woods on a hunting trip. They come across Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena, who are still sleeping. As they wake, Demetrius and Lysander realize that there is no rivalry between them anymore because each has the woman that he loves. They recount the events of the following night, as far as they understand them, to Theseus and Hippolyta. All four are uncertain of the details of what happened—and in fact are uncertain about whether they are even fully awake yet. When everybody leaves, Bottom wakes up, reciting his lines from the play. He too is uncertain about whether the events that he remembers are a dream. Because he has such an inflated ego, he plans to have Peter Quince write down the details of his dream as a ballad, which he can sing at the end of their play.

Act 4, Scene 2 Back at Quince’s cottage, the tradesmen are assembled, and Snug enters with the news that the duke’s wedding is over and that several other couples have been married at the same time. They are ready to begin but for their lead actor, Bottom, who has not been seen since the night before. When he does show up, it is to rush them along: the wedding feast has started, and the entertainment will be expected soon.

Act 5, Scene 1 Theseus and Hippolyta enter his palace as man and wife, followed by various lords and attendants. They talk to each other about the strange tales that the young lovers brought back from the forest before Lysander and Hermia and then Demetrius and Helena arrive, all newly married. Theseus asks Philostrate what entertainment there is for them to watch between dinner and bedtime. He gives Theseus a paper with singers and dancers and comic acts on it, but Theseus chooses the drama of Pyramus and Thisby first. Philostrate says that he saw the tradesmen rehearsing, and that, though it is a sad story, he never laughed so hard. Quince enters to give the Prologue to the play. His words are doubletalk, a jumble of

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rhymes and repetition, as Theseus, Lysander, and Hippolyta point out when he leaves the stage. The play begins, telling the story of Pyramus and Thisby, two young lovers who talk to each other through a hole in a garden wall until the time when they arrange to meet by moonlight at a tomb. When Thisby arrives at the tomb, a lion jumps out and frightens her: she runs away, dropping her cloak. When Pyramus arrives, he finds her bloody cloak, chewed by a lion, and assumes that she has been killed. In grief, he kills himself. She returns, finds him dead, and picks up his sword and kills herself. As Philostrate predicted, the performance is awful, and yet somewhat touching in the way that the tradesmen are willing to attempt to do something that is so far beyond their competence. They have followed Bottom’s suggestions, so that the wall that the young lovers speak through is played by a person, as is the moonlight, because they feel that the fact that the young lovers meet by moonlight is an important detail that must be rendered on the stage. When Snug comes on stage as the lion, he announces to the audience that he is not a real lion. Throughout the play, the members of the audience make wry comments to each other about the awkward dialog and the overacting. When the play is done, the court is given a choice between an epilogue and a dance, and Theseus chooses the dance. All of the members of the audience—Theseus and Hippolyta, Lysander and Hermia, and Demetrius and Helena—join them in dancing. As they dance, the scene lights dim, implying that they have all left and gone to bed. Puck shows up, and then Oberon, Titania, and a host of fairies, all dancing. Oberon leads the supernatural creatures in dance and instructs his fairies to fan out throughout the duke’s castle, spreading enchantment on the three couples, so that they will be fortunate and their eventual children will be born perfect and free of any physical imperfections. Puck gives the Epilogue to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, apologizing to anyone who might have been offended by the play and reminding those who did take offense that they might wake up and find that the play was just a dream.

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS 

Felix Mendelssohn’s 1826 score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream is considered one of the noted composer’s greatest triumphs, evoking the magical mood of Shakespeare’s play. There are many versions available, as this music has been used for numerous productions of the play over the past two hundred years. A contemporary favorite is the 1995 recording by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Seiji Ozawa and narrated by Dame Judi Dench. It is available on compact disc from Deutsche Grammophon.



A Midsummer Night’s Dream was adapted as a film by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle in 1935. It stars James Cagney as Bottom, Mickey Rooney as Puck, Olivia de Havilland as Hermia, and Dick Powell as Lysander. It won two Academy Awards and was nominated for two more. The film, by Warner Bros., is available on videocassette.



Archival footage of the Beatles acting out the tradesmen’s presentation of the ‘‘Pyramus and Thisby’’ play on a 1964 program for the British Broadcasting System program called ‘‘Around the Beatles’’ captures the amateurish fun that Shakespeare intended. The scene lasts about seven minutes and can be downloaded from a number of Web sites, including Google Video, where it is found under the keywords

CHARACTERS Nick Bottom Bottom is one of the most significant characters in the play and is widely considered to be one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations. He is a weaver by trade but struggles to be the star player in the small theater company that he works with. As the play they are to perform, Pyramus and Thisby, is rehearsed, for instance, he is hyperactive in his

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‘‘Midsummer Parody.’’ It is also available on a 2003 DVD from Goodtimes Video called Fun with the Fab Four. 

A 1968 film of the play was done with the Royal Shakespeare Company. It included Diana Rigg as Helena, Helen Mirren as Hermia, Ian Holm as Puck, and Judi Dench as Titania. Water Bearer Films released a VHS version in 1998.



Another Royal Shakespeare Company version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was filmed by the Arts Council of England and released into theaters in 1996. It has subsequently been released on VHS and DVD by Miramax Films. Alex Jennings played Oberon and Theseus, Lindsey Duncan played Hippolyta and Titania, and Finbar (Barry) Lynch played Puck. This version alters the original, with a role written for the young Indian changeling and modern elements such as light bulbs, bicycles, and umbrellas used in the set design.



A star-studded cast led James Kerwin’s 1999 film of the play: Kevin Klein plays Bottom, Stanley Tucci is Puck, Michelle Pfeiffer is Titania, Sophie Marceau is Hippolyta, and Christian Bale is Demetrius. This version transfers the action to Italy in the late nineteenth century. It is available on DVD and VHS from 20th Century Fox.

involvement. He suggests that the solution to each of the problems that comes up would be for he himself to take on the various parts, in addition to the lead: this reaches its ridiculous extreme when he offers to play both lead parts. Bottom’s self-importance earns him Puck’s attention, which is why Puck decides that it would be appropriate to replace his head with the head of an ass. By the time Bottom realizes that he has been physically altered, the queen of

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the fairies, Titania, is madly in love with him, and she has ordered that her minions fulfill his every desire. Bottom takes advantage of the situation, so that even after he becomes aware of the change that has come to him, he does not mind how he looks. Bottom is the one mortal character in the play who can see and hear the fairies. Because of this, and because of his enthusiasm about being involved in the play, critics have speculated that he might be Shakespeare’s comment on the act of playwriting, with the writer visualizing imaginary creatures in the same way that Bottom does.

Francis Flute Flute is a bellows-mender. He is one of the laborers who is planning a play in honor of Theseus’s wedding. The role that he is assigned is Thisby, the female lead. He has delicate features and has just started to grow a beard, which he vainly thinks could inhibit his credibility in playing a woman’s part.

Robin Goodfellow

Cobweb Cobweb is one of the fairies that Titania assigns to attend to Bottom after she has fallen in love with him.

Demetrius At the beginning of the play, Demetrius, a young Athenian nobleman, is in love with Hermia, and he has her father’s consent to marry her. However, Hermia loves Lysander instead. Demetrius once courted Helena but no longer favors her, despite her love for him. When she tries to help him by leading him to where Hermia and Lysander have run off together, she expects Demetrius to be grateful: instead, he tries to run from her, lose her in the woods, and leave her for the wild beasts to attack her. As much as he threatens to run away, she promises to follow. Oberon, the king of the fairies, seeing how stubborn Demetrius is about Helena, arranges to have a love spell cast on him. From that point on, the love between Demetrius and Helena is presented as true love, right up to the point where they marry at the play’s end.

Egeus Egeus is an old man of Athens. At the beginning of the play, he shows up at the court of Theseus to ask the duke to force his daughter Hermia to obey him and marry Demetrius. His point is that, as her father, he is entitled to select her husband. He suggests that her punishment, if she should refuse, should be death. Near the end of the play, Egeus is with the hunting party, led by Theseus and Hippolyta, that finds the two young couples sleeping in the forest. He is outraged that Hermia attempted to run away with Lysander, despite the duke’s earlier edict, but the duke makes Egeus realize that,

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since Demetrius is no longer interested in marrying her, there would be no harm done with a marriage between Hermia and Lysander.

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See Puck

Helena Helena is a friend of Hermia, the daughter of ‘‘old Nedar,’’ who is mentioned in the play but does not appear. She is described by the character notes as ‘‘tall and fair.’’ She is often bitter throughout the play. At first, her bitterness is caused by the fact that Demetrius, who once courted her, is in love with Hermia and is engaged to marry her. He treats Helena with disregard and is cruel in his attempts to avoid her. To curry his favor, she tells Demetrius about Hermia’s plan to run away with Lysander; instead of making him turn to her, however, this revelation makes Demetrius run away from her in pursuit of the fleeing couple. When, under the power of a love spell, Lysander declares his love for her, Helena feels that she is the object of a practical joke. Her suspicion is intensified when the same love spell makes Demetrius fall in love with her too. When Hermia is angered about losing Lysander, Helena thinks that her anger is a part of the larger conspiracy to mock her. Her argument with Hermia becomes so bitter that she shies away, afraid that Hermia will hit her; in doing so, she makes remarks about Hermia’s diminutive height that further enrage the latter woman. After all four of the lovers have fallen asleep, Oberon undoes the love spell on Lysander but leaves the spell on Demetrius, so that he continues to love Helena, and they are married.

Hermia Hermia is a noblewoman of Athens. She is described as ‘‘short and dark.’’ It is later revealed by Helena, who has been her friend since

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childhood, that Hermia had a violent temper when they were in school. Her father has promised Hermia to Demetrius in marriage, but she is in love with Lysander. When her father, Egeus, asks the court to sentence her to death if she will not marry Demetrius, she is given the option of going into a convent and never marrying: resigned to her fate, she accepts, and is ready to enter the convent until Lysander offers to run away with her. In the forest, a magic spell makes first Lysander and then Demetrius fall in love with Helena. Finding that both men who once doted on her have now abandoned her, Hermia becomes furious and accuses Helena of trickery, while Helena, surprised by the change in them, assumes that Hermia and the others are making fun of her. Afraid that Hermia will hit her, Helena notes that, although she is little, Hermia has always had a terrible temper. Hermia is even more enraged by the remark about her height. At the end of the play, when the love spell has been lifted from Lysander, he restates his love for Hermia, and the two marry.

Hippolyta Hippolyta is the queen of the Amazons, and she is engaged to marry Theseus, the Duke of Athens. In her first scene, she does not speak. Later, when she is in the forest with Theseus and a hunting party, she recalls a time that she was hunting with Hercules, the hero of Greek legend, in the woods of Crete. She remembers the baying of hunting hounds mixed with the roaring of the bear they had captured as one of the sweetest sounds she ever heard.

Lysander Lysander is a young nobleman of Athens. He is in love with Hermia, who is also in love with him. The problem is that her father is insisting that she marry Demetrius. After the duke requires Hermia to either marry Demetrius or go away into a convent, Lysander proposes that she run away with him to the forest, where, at the home of a maiden aunt, they can be married outside of the jurisdiction of Athenian law. In the forest, Lysander tries to persuade Hermia to sleep with him, but she refuses to do so until they are married. While they are asleep some distance from one another, a spell is put on him, so that he wakes up in love with Hermia’s friend Helena. When the two women argue,

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Lysander takes Helena’s side in insulting his lover’s diminutive height, telling Hermia, ‘‘Get you gone, you dwarf; / You minumus, of hind’ring knot-grass made; / You bead, you acorn.’’ Later, after the spell is lifted from him, he and Hermia are married.

Moth Moth is one of the fairies that Titania assigns to attend to Bottom after she has fallen in love with him.

Mustardseed Mustardseed is one of the fairies that Titania assigns to attend to Bottom after she has fallen in love with him.

Oberon Oberon is the king of the fairies and a driving force for the plot of this play. He is angry with his wife, Titania, because she is unwilling to turn over her young Indian servant boy to him, so he devises a scheme to punish her: he has Puck fetch a flower, the love-in-idleness, that has the power to make her fall in love with the first person, animal, or thing that she sees upon awakening. While executing this plan, he sees Helena following Demetrius, who refuses to return her love. Taking pity on her, he arranges to have the same love potion applied to Demetrius. His plan against Titania goes even better than he had hoped, as she is humiliated by falling in love with a mortal, Bottom, who has magically been given the head of an ass: distracted, she gives Oberon the changeling boy with no quarrel. When he finds out that the plan to help Helena has gone awry because the wrong suitor was enchanted, he quickly thinks through further plots to set things aright. First, he has the correct suitor, Demetrius, fall in love with Helena, then he arranges to have the two men who are fighting for her love to be lured apart from each other, using a complex plot involving conjured fog and false voices, so that he can undo the spell on Lysander. His plan works perfectly, and everyone is happy in the end. After the three mortal couples marry, Oberon dispatches his fairies through their castle to put spells of good fortune on all of them.

Peaseblossom Peaseblossom is one of the fairies that Titania assigns to attend to Bottom after she has fallen in love with him.

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Philostrate Philostrate is the master of revels. It is his job to arrange the marriage festivities when Theseus and Hippolyta are married. In act 5, when Theseus is trying to decide on some after-dinner entertainment, Philostrate tells him how hilarious the Pyramus and Thisby play is, even though the actors are trying to be serious, and his explanation convinces Theseus to call for the players.

Puck Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, is a fairy who enjoys trickery. He travels by night, changing his appearance: sometimes he might appear as a crab showing up unexpectedly in someone’s drink, for instance, or a stool that jumps out of the way when someone is sitting down. Whatever he does, he does with mischief. When Oberon tells Puck to put the love spell on Titania, he does so. On his way toward accomplishing his mission, however, he runs into Bottom and, finding him to be foolish, magically turns his head into an ass’s head. He does seem to take his mission to enchant the man that Helena loves seriously, but he botches the job by applying the love potion to the wrong man, making Lysander, and not Demetrius, fall in love with her. Later, Oberon’s scheme to correct the situation between the lovers plays right to Puck’s strengths. He conjures up a fog that makes everyone wander around without knowing where they are going, and then he tricks both Lysander and Demetrius, imitating first one voice and then the other, so that they will be lured in opposite directions and not harm each other by fighting over Helena. Puck is a troublemaker with no conscience, but Oberon knows how to use his particular skills for the cause of good. Puck has the play’s last speech, addressing the audience, telling them that if they found offense at anything they have seen then they can look at the whole experience as being nothing more than a dream.

Dylan Brown as Puck and Lee Boardman as Bottom in Act III, scene I, at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, England, 2003 (Ó Donald Cooper/ Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

Tom Snout Snout is a tinker, a mender of household utensils such as pots and pans. He is one of the band of tradesmen planning the play for the duke’s wedding. He is assigned the part of Pyramus’s father.

Snug A joiner by trade, Snug is one of the tradesmen planning the Pyramus and Thisby play. When he is assigned the part of a lion, he asks for a copy of the script early, admitting that he is a slow learner. He learns that the lion’s part entails nothing but roaring.

Peter Quince Quince is the leader of the tradesmen who are planning to perform the play Pyramus and Thisby for Theseus’s wedding. He has written the play and will be directing it, as well as playing the part of Thisby’s father.

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Robin Starveling Starveling, a tailor, is one of the tradesmen who is planning to take part in the play being planned for the duke’s wedding. He is assigned to play Thisby’s mother.

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Theseus Theseus is the Duke of Athens, a powerful military and political figure. He is engaged to marry Hippolyta within four days. He won Hippolyta in battle but promises to make her love him. When Egeus, a nobleman of Athens, comes to Theseus to ask that his daughter be sentenced to death if she does not obey his command and marry Demetrius, Theseus listens to the case being made by both sides before passing judgment. He lightens Hermia’s sentence for disobedience by offering her the option of a lifetime in a convent. At the end of the play, when he finds that Demetrius is no longer interested in Hermia, he pronounces that everything is fine the way it is, and invites the two young couples to be married along with him. .After the wedding, Theseus decides to watch the tradesmen’s play, having been told by Philostrate that they are funny without meaning to be. During the play, he jokes with the young noblemen and their wives about the performance.

Titania Titania, the queen of the fairies, is married to Oberon. She is strong-headed, resisting his demand for a young servant whom she likes. She knows that he is unfaithful to her and brings that fact up against him in argument. To soften her up, Oberon uses a potion to make Titania fall in love with the first person or animal she sees after waking up. She falls for Bottom, an overbearing, conceited weaver who is part of the company of tradesmen rehearsing a play in the forest. Earlier, Puck had used a magic spell to give Bottom the head of an ass. The tough, steely queen is gentle with the man she loves, giving him servants to attend to his every wish and expressing her concern for his slightest comfort, until the spell is removed. After the events of the evening, harmony is restored to Titania and Oberon’s relationship. She has given him the servant he wanted, and her gentle and loving ways toward Bottom appear to be transferred to her husband.

THEMES True Love This play uses several different kinds of relationships to examine the nature of love and to raise

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questions of when love can be considered to be true. The most stable relationship in the play is between the couple whose wedding anchors the plot: Theseus and Hippolyta. They are identified as having at one time been foes who are, when the play begins, headed toward marriage. Nothing in the course of the play offers any reason for distraction from their plan, and at the end they are indeed married and happy with each other. The relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta is mirrored by that of another royal couple, Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies. At the beginning of the play, they have been married for some indeterminate amount of time, and their marriage seems to have run its course. They are locked in a bitter opposition, apparently over the possession of the young changeling boy, though that appears to be only the latest in a long string of battles throughout their marriage. Each is willing to do whatever is necessary to annoy and subvert the other: Titania refuses to sleep with Oberon, pointing out his past affairs, while he accuses her of being infatuated with Theseus (which she denies) and then puts a spell on her to make her fall in love with a monstrous fool. At the end of the play, her infatuation with Bottom has been lifted. Just as importantly, she is once more in love with Oberon, and he with her: the spell of the love-in-idleness flower has stirred in Titania the capacity for love in a way that keeps it going on its own even after the magic is removed. Seeing Titania able to love makes Oberon love her all over again. Shakespeare uses the two young couples to show love as a much more volatile thing. Audiences are asked to accept the idea that the flower’s magic could change Demetrius’s affections so severely that he would abandon his interest in Hermia and fall completely in love with Helena. This is a reasonable proposition, given that Demetrius’s infatuation with Hermia is unrequited and that he and Helena have a romantic history together. The play also proposes that Lysander would shift his affection from Hermia to Helena as well; this is a bit less likely, given the strong declarations of love that Lysander and Hermia make to each other, a commitment that sends them on the run from the law in order to stay together. The strangest result of the flower’s magic is that Demetrius and

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Helena, drawn together by enchantment, stay together after the spell is removed from Demetrius. As part of the triple wedding at the end of the play, they are apparently as happy as other couples that came together through more organic means and stayed together despite adversity. In this, the play makes a statement about the capricious nature of true love: couples that once had little in common with each other can be bound together for life once they are smitten by love, while couples that have nothing to do with each other, like Bottom and Titania, can also find themselves brought together by love.

Chance As with most of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream relies on a clever, credible interplay between the intentions of the characters and blind chance. When Hermia and Lysander’s plan to escape to the forest is complicated by the appearance of Demetrius, for example, it is the natural outcome of Helena’s own plan to show Demetrius how little Hermia cares for him; the plot is therefore moved forward by her intent. When Lysander subsequently falls in love with Helena, however, it is the result of sheer coincidence: Oberon did not know that there were two Athenian couples in the forest and therefore did not give Puck a detailed description of the man he wanted to receive the love spell, and Puck happened to spot Lysander first. Similarly, when Puck casts the love spell over Titania, he is enacting Oberon’s plot, but the fact that she would happen to fall in love with the vain, boorish Bottom, whose features Puck has recently altered, is simply a matter of chance. Since A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy, the chance occurrences that complicate the plot lead to better results than anyone could have orchestrated. As Oberon notes after learning that his wife is in love with a man with the head of an ass, ‘‘This falls out better than I could devise.’’ In the end, the chance events serve to make their victims more appreciative of ordinary, stable reality. Demetrius is far less likely to take Helena for granted after having nearly fought for her affection, and Titania is clearly better off with a king than with an ass.

those under them in the social order, which is a common theme in comedy. The first instance of undermined authority occurs in the first scene, when Egeus comes to the court of Theseus to complain that his daughter refuses to obey him: this slight to his ego is so great that he would rather see Hermia put to death than allow her to claim her independence. ‘‘As she is mine, I may dispose of her,’’ he explains. Theseus, the highest authority figure in the mortal world in this play, is more familiar with the idea of distributing justice to those beneath him, and so his suggested punishment is less extreme. He offers Hermia a choice: if she does not want to marry Demetrius and does not want to be executed, she can go to the convent and remain a virgin for the rest of her life. Egeus’s offense at having his authority challenged is mirrored by Oberon. Whatever differences Oberon and Titania have had throughout their long marriage, the event that makes him move against her in this play is her refusal to obey him and give up her changeling boy. Shakespeare never even shows the boy onstage, indicating that he is not very important to the story. The true point of the grievance is that Oberon believes Titania should be obedient to him. In the end, the disputes between those in authority and those they should control are settled with good humor. Theseus is willing to forget about Hermia’s disobedience as soon as he sees that Demetrius is no longer interested in her anyway. Egeus, who from the start was more interested in obedience than in the reason for disobeying, is more hesitant about forgiving her, but he gives in. Oberon receives his changeling boy and is happy that Titania has come around to his thinking. The Duke of Athens has lower nobles married alongside of him, and commoners provide the wedding entertainment. Finally, Oberon dances both with his wife and with his subjects.

Hubris

Authority

Hubris is the sense that one is more important and powerful than one is. It is a key element in many dramas, whether they are tragedies or comedies: a character who oversteps his or her own abilities is likely to set uncontrollable events into motion.

This play is centered around authority figures and their struggles to impose their authority on

In this play, Bottom is more than just a braggart. He actually believes that he, a weaver,

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

Oberon uses a flower that he calls the ‘‘lovein-idleness’’ to cast a love spell on Titania: the flower is currently known as the pansy. Research other folk methods used to create a love spell and write a cookbook for people who wish to bewitch others.



As a class, rewrite the story of Pyramus and Thisby so that you can present it to another class without looking as foolish as the players in this play are made to seem. Use details fromOvid’sMetamorphosis,which Shakespeare may have used as a source for his version of the story, if you need to.

Demetrius courted and abandoned Helena, and she pursued him. When he falls in love with her, she thinks he is joking and tries to escape him. Write a letter from either Demetrius or Helena to an advice column, explaining one of these romantic predicaments, and then write a response explaining whether it is an exercise in futility or a sign of true understanding to stick to a lover once one has been rejected.  The 1999 movie Shakespeare in Love provides a fictionalized version of the playwright’s life around the time that he wrote this play. Watch it and make a list of elements from this movie that might have been inspired by reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream; explain the reasons for your choices.  In their version of Pyramus and Thisby, the tradesmen assign actors to play the parts that are usually just represented by inanimate objects. Choose a play that has a prominent prop and give that prop dialogue. Perform a staged reading for the class.  Listen to a recording of composer Felix Mendelssohn’s orchestra music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Keep a running tally, judging each track in terms of whether or not the music made you think differently about the scene it depicts. 

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can act each part of the play out—several at once if necessary—and that audiences will be delighted. He feels that the death of his character onstage would drive the women in the audience into despair, because they would think that he died, not just his character. Even the royal figures in the play do not think as much of their own importance as Bottom thinks of his. His reward for such insolence is supposed to be the humiliation of having his head turned into the head of an ass, but Shakespeare reverses that embarrassment. Instead of being penalized for his pride, as foolish, hubristic characters often are, Bottom is seduced by a beautiful woman and given a court of beings with supernatural powers to do his bidding.

STYLE Wedding Play In this play, Bottom and the other tradesmen prepare and perform a play for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. This sort of short play, called an ‘‘interlude,’’ was traditionally performed between the acts of a longer play and was sometimes performed, along with other forms of entertainment, at a royal wedding, as Pyramus and Thisby is in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This has led critics over the centuries to speculate that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream for private performance at the wedding of some noble. This conclusion is supported by the way that the play shows its bridegroom, Theseus, as a wise and beloved ruler; the placement of characters from antiquity, Theseus and Hippolyta, as the play’s center; and the way that it invokes the world of fairies, which were associated with weddings by the Elizabethans— the people, like Shakespeare, who lived during the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Other critics have countered this theory, though, by pointing out several details that one would never associate with the wedding ceremony. For one thing, Shakespeare’s play, at three hours long, is no interlude: it would require more concentration than revelers at a ceremony generally care to exert. For another, the bridal characters—Hippolyta, Hermia, and Helena—are not the sorts of flattering portraits that one would want to present to a bride on the day of her wedding. In general, critics have pointed out that the tone of the play

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relies on parody and ridicule, which are bound to offend someone at an occasion that can be both joyous and solemn. Most contemporary scholars do agree that the play was commissioned for some royal occasion, but their inability to specify the occasion has left open the possibility to explore alternate explanations for Shakespeare’s particular blend of romance, magic, and farce.

Levels of Reality One of the elements that has kept audiences captivated by A Midsummer Night’s Dream over the centuries is its deft way of mixing together different levels of reality. Not only is the real world combined with the supernatural, but the pending wedding ceremony provides the opportunity to mix different social strata together in a way that would never occur in real life. The fairies in this play live in the real world but are invisible to the eyes of mortals, with the exception of Nick Bottom. This is useful as a stage technique, allowing characters to stand onstage and talk to each other without the awareness of others, and it helps as a narrative technique, because believing it helps audiences believe in the wide-spanning reality of the play. Usually, the fairies are played by actors costumed with wings, an innovation that helped establish the common image of fairies that rules the popular imagination today. The real, social world of Athens is divided into three levels: the court, the nobles, and the tradesmen. Each level can be considered a different form of reality because the characters who inhabit it view the world in different ways. The worldview of Theseus and Hippolyta, for example, is marked by benevolence. Hippolyta does not want to take part in mocking the tradesmen; Theseus feels that honor could be done to their poor effort by paying them attention. The two couples of nobles in this play view the world as young lovers do: as changing from one day to the next. The tradesmen are boisterous and yet serious about trying to do something for which they are seriously underqualified. Any one of these social views would set a distinct tone for a play, but Shakespeare has them interact, bringing the nobles into Theseus’s court, then the tradesmen into the lovers’ unsupervised wood, then the tradesmen into the court. Tying the varieties of styles together is the romance of

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Titania and Bottom, the most elegant and the most base of characters: if Shakespeare can make their coupling believable, then the rest of the varied tones in the play can easily exist together.

Mixed Audience Historians often point out that audiences of Shakespeare’s time were socially mixed: while theaters had padded seats, where well-heeled patrons could relax comfortably during the performance, they also allowed in a standing-room crowd referred to as the ‘‘groundlings.’’ The groundlings would have paid a penny, which was a considerable amount in the sixteenth century, almost a day’s wages, for the opportunity to stand at the front of the room. There were other areas, galleries that were less crowded, where one could sit or stand, but they cost a penny more. The audiences in these areas of the crowd would have been laborers, much like those who make up the acting company in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: weavers, tailors, tinkers, carpenters, and so forth. In the comfortable seats situated on the main floor would have been the rich patrons who could afford to pay a half a crown. The diversity of the Elizabethan crowd thus was reflected on the stage during A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which presents workers and nobles living their separate lives but then brought together for a night of theater. This diversity is also reflected in the play’s varied tones, which range from the coarse joke of having a queen fall for a man with an ass’s head to the compassion of the wise ruler to the gentleness of young lovers trying to hold onto each other while circumstances pull them apart.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Theseus and Hippolyta Shakespeare based the royal couple at the center of this drama on a couple that had already existed for centuries by the time Shakespeare used it, in the legends handed down from the ancient Greeks. The Theseus of Greek legend was the son of one of the first kings of Athens, Aegeus. He was also supposed to have had the blood of Poseidon, the god of the seas, in his parentage, making him half god and half mortal. Aegeus fathered him with Aethra, his mother, at the

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Daniel Evans as Francis Flute/Thisby, Howard Crossley as Tom Snout/Wall, and Desmond Barrit as Bottom/Pyramus in Act V, scene i, at the Barbican Theatre, 1995 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

town of Troezen, south of Athens, and then returned to Athens before the child was born. When he reached adulthood, Theseus went to find his father, proving himself to be a brave hero in the process. Among his adventures were the slaying of the Minotaur in the maze where the youth of Athens had been trapped, and being trapped himself in the underworld by Hades until he was rescued by Hercules, who was there on the last of the twelve labors he had to do as penance for having killed his wife and children. Hippolyta was the queen of the Amazons, a mythical nation of female warriors located in what is now Turkey. In some versions of Greek mythology, Hercules was assigned, as one of his twelve labors, to steal the girdle from Hippolyta, but she fell in love with him and gave it to him instead. A battle between the Amazons and the Athenians ensued when rumor spread that Hercules was trying to kidnap Hippolyta. The Amazons were defeated. Hercules raped Hippolyta, but then he gave her to his friend Theseus to marry. Some versions have this

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marriage ending with Hippolyta dying during childbirth, while others simply say that Theseus left her; most of the stories go on from there to talk about Theseus and his life with his second wife, Phaedra. Most scholars conclude that the Theseus and Hippolyta of Shakespeare’s play have more to do with the characters of the same name in ‘‘The Knight’s Tale,’’ the first of the stories in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written around the 1384–85. Chaucer’s story has Theseus, Duke of ancient Athens, marrying Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, after defeating her in battle. He then attacks the neighboring kingdom of Thebes because the ruler there, Creon, has refused to allow those who died in the battle to be properly buried. Most of the story centers on two cousins who have been imprisoned by Theseus who fall in love with Hippolyta’s sister, Emily. When they are free, the two friends fight each other in the woods until Theseus comes upon them and decrees that they should fight formally in a

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1595: Shakespeare is the first playwright to present fairies onstage as small people with wings.

Today: In part influenced by illustrations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that have appeared in different published versions throughout the years, there is a standard fantasy concept of what fairies look like; even as iconic an image as Disney’s Tinkerbell (from Peter Pan) owes its origin to this play.  1595: Shakespeare can count on his audience to be familiar with a story from the Roman poet Ovid, and so can utilize background references to the story of Pyramus and Thisby to shade his viewers’ interpretation of the play’s main story. Today: Few contemporary viewers are familiar with Ovid, but many do recognize allusions to Shakespearean characters, such as Puck or Bottom, when they occur in modern books and movies.  1595: A company of local tradesmen can band together to put on an amateur production to celebrate the wedding of the duke they serve. Today: A formal event would certainly hire professional entertainers; still, there are many amateur and community companies

tournament for the woman’s hand. Although the royal decree is similar in style to the way that Theseus pronounces judgment on Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the outcome in The Canterbury Tales is more bittersweet: the victor of the fight is crushed by his own horse and with his dying breath wishes his cousin to have the woman for whom they have both been fighting. In Chaucer’s version, one of the young knights, Arcita, is freed from prison first, but he returns to the palace as a courtesan, using the name

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around to give nonprofessional actors and directors a place to be involved in the theater. 

1595: Bottom is a humorous character because he brags about his abilities, even though audiences can see that he is not a very talented actor. Today: The same standards of humor and humility hold today: a character in a comedy who is boastful is likely to prove to be incompetent.



1595: All roles on the Elizabethan stage are played by men, an obstacle that actors have to overcome with stylized performances when portraying starry-eyed lovers. Today: The uses of women for women’s roles allows a performance of this play to be acted out more naturally, with more nuances implied and understated.



1595: Theater is attended by people of all social strata, so plays are written to appeal to the widest possible demographic segment. Today: Theater is mostly attended by members of the upper class. Movies, which are a more accessible form of entertainment, are increasingly made for international audiences and therefore rely on sight gags and spectacle over dialog and characterization.

‘‘Philostrate,’’ which Shakespeare used for the master of the revels to Theseus.

Ovid Shakespeare’s fondness for using classical sources is even more apparent in his reworking of the material of the ancient story of Pyramus and Thisby, the young lovers who are the subject of the short play presented at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The source that he is most likely to have used for this tale is Ovid’s

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Metamorphosis, which would have been a standard text of Elizabethan England and therefore well familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences. Ovid was a Roman poet who lived from 43 B . C . E . to approximately 17 C . E . His works generally centered on the subject of love. The Metamorphosis, however, was his masterwork: an attempt to cover all of history, from creation to the reign of Julius Caesar, in one long narrative spanning fifteen books. Also from Ovid came the name of the fairy queen, Titania. In traditional fairy tales, the queen of the fairies had no name. Shakespeare gave her the name that the Metamorphosis gave to Diana, the goddess of the hunt and childbirth. The connection between Shakespeare’s and Ovid’s uses of the name is that both characters are creatures of nature, residing in the forest.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW From the very start, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been difficult for literary critics to evaluate. A great part of this difficulty stems from the fact that Shakespeare has brought together such distinct styles, which various productions over the centuries have freely edited or simplified. For example, the first known review of the play was actually of a production done on New Year’s day, 1604, featuring Puck and called A Play of Robin Goodfellow. Other variations focused on the land of the fairies, or else put Bottom, a crowd pleaser, at the front. With so many versions around, even in the early years when the play was newly written, it is difficult for literary critics to know exactly what a writer saw on stage. Variations were not only edited from Shakespeare’s original work but added songs and characters to round out the main story that each production chose as the feature. This play is mentioned by Samuel Pepys, a civil servant whose diary is so thorough and descriptive of its times that it is studied in schools to this day. Pepys attended a performance on September 29, 1662, noting in his diary that this was a play that he had never seen before: ‘‘nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.’’ Pepys scholars note that he found the clowning, love, and fairy stories to be too simple for his sophisticated tastes.

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Other writers, of course, understood and appreciated what Shakespeare had accomplished with this play. In 1817, William Hazlitt noted his regret that Shakespeare was often considered by foreigners to be a dour, serious writer, when in fact his fanciful side was plainly evident. ‘‘In the Midsummer Night’s Dream alone, we should imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole range of French poetry put together.’’ By using this particular play as an example, Hazlitt demonstrated an appreciation of Shakespeare’s comedies that had grown throughout the eighteenth century and reached fullest blossom in the late 1800s, in the Victorian Era. The music that Felix Mendelssohn wrote for the play in 1843 has frequently been used since as a soundtrack, giving a light, airy mood that befits the story of love and magical forest dwellers. Throughout its history, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been as interesting to audiences for the elaborate production values as for Shakespeare’s dialogue and structure, with each production raising the bar on how to cut from royal pageantry to woods to invisible fairies. By the latter half of the twentieth century, critics, applying more psychological interpretations, found that the play hinted at darker things. One of the most influential readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the one done in 1964 by Polish critic Jan Kott, who is often referred to as having given the play more depth than was previously thought. James L. Calderwood explained Kott’s emphasis on the romance between Bottom and Titania, in which Kott found ‘‘brutality and eroticism beneath the veneer of romantic love. Thus Titania’s drug-induced infatuation with Bottom becomes for Kott a rapacious but liberating desire for animal love, mirrored less obviously by the other lovers.’’ Since Kott’s criticism, productions of the play have focused more heavily on its sensuality and its theme of liberation from repression. Of these, one particular modern production—the one staged by Peter Brook in London in 1970—stands out as a presentation that changed the way that critics and audiences alike viewed the play. While previous productions were lavish, they also tended to be reverent and sterile, appealing to audiences’ intellects as much as to their emotions. Brook’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, by contrast,

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used no background but a white wall, but it added such unexpected and unconventional interpretations as acrobatics and trapeze artists to reinvigorate audiences’ expectations. Since that groundbreaking production, which is still discussed to this day for its audacity, theater companies have felt free to offer a wide variety of interpretations, using any number of modern devices that have become available to explore the play’s contemporary relevance.

AS WITH THE FLOWER’S SPELL, SHAKESPEARE SHOWS THAT MOODS ALTER AFTER SLEEP, BECAUSE EMOTIONS ARE ONLY AS REAL AS DREAMS AND HAVE JUST AS MUCH LASTING EFFECT. CHARACTERS THROUGHOUT THE PLAY CONSTANTLY AWAKEN TO FIND A WHOLE NEW WORLD.’’

CRITICISM David Kelly Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at two colleges. In this essay, he explains how the defining moment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one that occurred before the first act, when Demetrius wooed Helena and then abandoned her. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins with Theseus, Duke of Athens, making plans with his fiance´e, Hippolyta, for their upcoming wedding. It ends when that wedding is over, having gone off without a hitch, when the happy couple and two other contented couples have gone off to bed and a legion of fairies dances across their deserted wedding hall. Critics often point to the Theseus-Hippolyta relationship as the play’s moral anchor, the thematic base that keeps audiences mindful of the bliss and stability that love can represent. It is seen as a reference point for comparing the other stories in the play too, even the stories that spin between anger, heartache, farce, and sex. The fact that Theseus and Hippolyta spend so little time onstage is taken to be proof that they serve a higher function than the rest of the characters. They are kept pure in a way that the others are not: audiences spend less time wondering about their motivations than they do wondering about all of the play’s other lovers. Being more abstract than the other major characters, they are better suited to serve a symbolic function. On his own, Theseus serves an integral function in the play’s plot, acting as the wise ruler who sentences Hermia for disobeying her father. Together, Theseus and Hippolyta are often taken to stand for the grandeur of the royal wedding that ends the play.

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Still, there are other elements that drive the plot and that give the play its overall identity. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about love, in the end, but throughout its presentation, it concerns itself with the opposite idea, exploring ways in which the concept of true and lasting love is just an illusion. In this sense, it isn’t the steady relationship of Theseus and Hippolyta that signifies all that the play is about. Rather, its essence is captured in an event that occurred before the first act: Demetrius’s rejection of Helena. This is a shadowy event, merely alluded to in just five lines in the play’s opening scene, as Lysander gives his defense for courting Hermia: Demetrius, I’ll avouch it to his head, Made love to Nedar’s daughter, Helena, And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry, Upon this spotted and inconstant man.

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This important point is mentioned almost in passing, and as soon as it has been mentioned, Shakespeare moves to push it back into the past where it came from. He diminishes its significance by having Theseus point out that he had heard of this and had meant to speak with Demetrius about it, but it had slipped his mind. There is not much more a playwright could do to trivialize an event than to say that it was not compelling enough to hold a character’s attention until he could bring it up. Audiences are therefore left to infer what the relationship between Demetrius and Helena was once like, and how it ended. Presumably, it ended when Demetrius took a liking to Helena’s friend Hermia, but that much is never made explicit in the story. What is known, however, is quite enough to drive the play along, both structurally and thematically: without this past

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event that is only obliquely referred to, there would be no story. It certainly is crucial to the plot. If Demetrius had not wooed Helena, she would not be as powerfully attracted to him as she is. She would not tell him of Hermia and Lysander’s plan to steal off to the woods together, and she would not be dogging his heels when he goes off to find them. There are other elements in the play that exist independently of Helena and Demetrius and that could make up a play independent of those two young lovers, as playwrights over the centuries have proven when they have trimmed A Midsummer Night’s Dream down by focusing on one of the other plot lines. Without them, Oberon would still want to take revenge on his wife Titania by having a love spell cast on her; the Mechanicals could still decide to go into the forest to rehearse their play in privacy; and Theseus and Hippolyta could still stumble upon the others when they come to the woods to hunt. Shakespeare could even have written a different process for Demetrius to find out that his fiance´e is running away with another man, driving him off to the forest to find them. But the story of the young lovers would then end up as a love triangle, not a love rectangle. Their emotions and the results would have been more desperate and certainly less funny; it would be more appropriate to tragedy than to comedy. Someone would end up alone in the end. The previous relationship between Demetrius and Helena is a mystery, but it is also all too obvious, the sort of thing that happens among young lovers a thousand times a day, in every corner of the globe. By withholding the details, Shakespeare turns what could have been, and probably was, a trivial event into something greater than itself. Because the details are unknown, audiences have to make assumptions about what happened to their former relationship. Whether the answer is that Demetrius was never serious about Helena to begin with, or that he loved her at first but decided that he loved Hermia even more, or that he just drifted away from her on his own, the root cause of their breakup is always the same: love is fickle, always in motion, and ready to form or dissolve without much notice. This, in fact, is what makes Demetrius and Helena the ideal symbol for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Peter G. Phialas characterizes as a play about ‘‘inconstancy in love.’’

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In the course of the story, Shakespeare parodies love’s inconsistencies with the plot device of the love-in-idleness flower, which is supposed to make those under its spell fall in love immediately and indiscriminately upon waking up. It is a silly, impractical conceit, something that would only have meaning or value for a person in a romantic comedy. How many uses can there be, after all, for a spell that would make someone fall in love with just anyone? Its effectiveness hinges upon being there while someone sleeps, and especially when that person wakes. Puck and Oberon actually do an outstanding job of directing the flower’s random power in the play. They intend Lysander to fall in love with Helena, and it happens; they then direct the flower at Demetrius, and he falls in love with Helena, as planned. Titania’s sudden affection for Bottom actually works out even better than planned: any of the common mortals would have served Oberon’s purpose of humiliating her, and the fact that she falls for the most annoying boor of the bunch adds to her humiliation. Audiences, while aware of how well the application of the love spell worked out, are also aware that there was slim chance that things would work out as they did. Love can strike anyone, anywhere, a point that is illustrated by Demetrius’s change of heart toward Helena, which is given as an original premise of this tale. Helena’s response to hearing Lysander, her rival’s lover, declare his love for her, is outrage: she thinks that he is making this claim to mock her. When Demetrius claims that he loves her too, one might expect that she would be happy at last, given that she has been pursuing him for just this reason since that moment before the play began when he abandoned her. Her experience with Lysander has prepared her for defensiveness more than love, however. Her desperate need for Demetrius’s affection is overshadowed by her fear of being made a fool, showing that even as strong a love as the one that propels her throughout the play can easily lose its momentum when greater concerns about self-image become involved. Her defensiveness comes from the same place in her as the anger that has Oberon and Titania at odds: nominally, they are fighting over the changeling boy, but the real problem is Oberon’s insecurity because his wife will not obey his command. And, just as Oberon and Titania’s anger with each other has dissipated by the end of the

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

Soon before or after completing A Midsummer Night’s Dream—some sources say the same year—Shakespeare finished one of his greatest and most popular works, Romeo and Juliet. Rather than using Pyramus and Thisby within this work, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare used it this time as a source and inspiration for tragedy: the lovers are kept apart, meeting a fate similar to the one that befalls them in Ovid’s version. Romeo and Juliet is considered one of the greatest tragedies in the English language.



Ovid was considered one of Shakespeare’s favorite authors. His Metamorphosis was translated into English in 1567 by Arthur Golding. The story of Pyramus and Thisby can be read in part 4 of that book, currently available in a Penguin Classics edition.



Readers who have trouble understanding Shakespeare’s language might want to read A. L. Rowse’s 1984 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written for University Press of America’s ‘‘Contemporary Shakespeare’’ series. Rowse, a leading Shakespeare scholar, has rewritten the play: the scenes and characters are still the same, and the play is still in verse, but the archaic language has been updated and obscure references clarified, making it easier to read for the modern student.



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Sir Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queen was published in segments between 1590 and 1609: too late to be considered an influence on the writing of this play, it still reflects the Elizabethan preoccupation with the world of fairies and the chivalric ideals of knighthood. It is an extended political allegory about the bitter struggle between Catholics and Protestants. Currently, it is available from Penguin Classics.

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In his best-selling book The Shakespeare Wars, published by Random House in 2006, Ron Rosenbaum brings together all of the various controversies that are being argued about Shakespeare, his sources, and his times to this day.  W. H. Auden was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. He was also an acclaimed literary scholar. His analysis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be found in Lectures on Shakespeare, a collection of his lectures published in 2000.  Shakespeare was undoubtedly influenced in writing the story of Bottom by reading The Golden Ass, a classic novel written in the second century C . E . by Roman writer Lucius Apuleius. The story concerns a young student of magic who has a spell cast upon him, transforming him into a donkey. A Penguin Classics edition, translated by E. J. J. Kennedy, is currently in print. 

The great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw reviewed an 1895 performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, finding fault with many of the staging decisions and explaining them with wit and clarity. His review can be found in Shaw On Shakespeare, a compilation published by E.P. Dutton & Co. in 1961.  Peter Brook’s 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company was considered innovative at the time by its supporters, while its detractors characterized it an example of all that is wrong with modern theater. Decades later, its influence is still felt. David Selbourne’s The Making of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, published in Methuen in 1982, is a detailed account of how Brook worked out his concept, from the first rehearsal to the opening curtain. 

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play, so too has Helena’s anger. As with the flower’s spell, Shakespeare shows that moods alter after sleep, because emotions are only as real as dreams and have just as much lasting effect. Characters throughout the play constantly awaken to find a whole new world. In spite of this, though, the play ends up being a paean to consistency: Helena’s pursuit of Demetrius turns out to be rewarded. Her love was not a foolish infatuation after all; her determination is a sign of her wisdom. The play’s happy ending implies that Demetrius and Helena actually were meant to be together after all, despite the mistake he made before the first characters appeared onstage. Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Shakespeare For Students, Second Edition, Thomson Gale, 2007.

James L. Calderwood In this brief excerpt, Calderwood examines the meaning of the forest in the play, specifically as it serves as a site of animalism, bestiality, and death. Only by confronting these dark elements, argues the critic, ‘‘can the lovers come to recognize the rough impulses that underlie and influence mature love.’’ In some respects A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems a dramatization of Plato’s statement about the Beast Within quoted in the last chapter—that when Reason sleeps the Wild Beast rouses itself and ‘‘in phantasy it will not shrink from intercourse with a mother or anyone else, man, god, or brute.’’ The consummation of Bottom’s assish courtship of the faery queen Titania is a fair representation of the wild beast fantasy: intercourse involving man, god[dess], and brute simultaneously. In view of the horror aroused by the crime of bestiality discussed earlier, this monstrous union should have released in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience feelings of alarm and titillation. But it would take a sensitive soul indeed to run in fear from Bottom and Titania. Even so, the bestializing of sex in Bottom serves as a paradigm for the forest experience of the young lovers; he literalizes what is for them metaphoric. That is to say, once the lovers enter the forest they are repeatedly characterized by animal imagery that reflects and culminates in the Bottom-Titania episode. Helena pursues Demetrius like a ‘‘spaniel,’’ a ‘‘dove,’’ and a ‘‘hind,’’ while he flees like ‘‘griffin’’ and a ‘‘tiger’’ (2.1); and she later

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THE REPRESSED BEAST WITHIN, RAPACIOUS AND MURDEROUS, THE EMBODIMENT OF ALL THAT DEPRIVES MAN OF ANGELIC STATUS, EMERGES IN THIS DELIGHTFUL COMEDY AS A BOTTOM MARVELOUS HAIRY ABOUT THE FACE, AND A LION VERY GENTLE, OF GOOD CONSCIENCE, AND MOST ANXIOUS NOT TO FRIGHTEN THE LADIES.’’

becomes ‘‘ugly as a bear,’’ a ‘‘monster’’ he runs from (2.2). Lysander shifts his affections from the ‘‘raven’’ Hermia to the ‘‘dove’’ Helena (2.2), later calling Hermia a ‘‘cat’’ and a ‘‘serpent’’ he will shake himself free of (3.2). No wonder Hermia awakens from a dream in which a ‘‘crawling serpent’’ was eating her heart away (2.2)—at which point she cries ‘‘Either death or [Lysander] I’ll find immediately.’’ This animalizing of the lovers’ experience seems a direct result of Oberon’s humiliation of Titania: What thou seest when thou dost wake, Do it for thy true-love take, Love and languish for his sake. Be it ounce or cat or bear, Pard or boar with bristled hair, In thy eye that shall appear When thou wak’st, it is thy dear. Wake when some vile thing is near. (2.2) Then Enter Lysander and Hermia talking in Petrarchan accents and lying, not with one another, but chastely apart. Nevertheless, their experience is shadowed by that of Titania and Bottom. The lovers’ comings and goings in various animalistic forms are the surface sublimations of the bestial intercourse between the faery queen and her liminal lover. While reason sleeps in Athens, Plato’s Wild Beast wakes in the forest, with monstrous appetites. In what sense is this a denial of death? In no sense: in fact it is just the reverse, a comic movement toward a loss of identity in the forests of death. The descent to animalism is merely one rung short of the descent to death. As such, the

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Alex Jennings as Oberon, Kevin Doyle as Demetrius, Toby Stephens as Lysander, Barry Lynch as Puck, Emma Fielding as Hermia, and Emily Raymond as Helena in Act IV, scene i at the Barbican Theatre, 1995 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

lovers’ arboreal experience bears out Lysander’s early remarks about the affinities of love and death. Love, he said, is always subject to ‘‘war, death, and sickness,’’ always one blithe step away from devouring ‘‘jaws of darkness’’ and the ‘‘confusion [into which] quick bright things come’’ (1.1). From this standpoint we might argue that the confusions of the forest are a comic version of Lear’s storm: both represent all that reason and the court world repress. So, for that matter, does the play of Pyramus and Thisbe. What it depicts is the course of true love, which leads the unhappy pair to a bestial and ferocious Lion and thence through confusion to death: ‘‘Tongue, lose thy light; / Moon, take try flight. / Now die, die, die, die, die’’ (5.1). There but for the grace of genre goes Lear’s ‘‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill’’ (4.6). But of course no one will confuse this play with King Lear or take Snug the joiner’s Lion for Richard III’s wild boar. That is precisely the

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point. The repressed Beast Within, rapacious and murderous, the embodiment of all that deprives man of angelic status, emerges in this delightful comedy as a Bottom marvelous hairy about the face, and a Lion very gentle, of good conscience, and most anxious not to frighten the ladies. The Beast Within is allowed only a small roar and a little rage, and in the end must be sacrificed altogether. Thus it is almost allegorically appropriate that Theseus should come upon the lovers while hunting with Spartan hounds like those that once ‘‘bayed the bear’’ in Crete (4.1). Theseus’s hounds bay the bear of ungoverned impulse in the lovers, their harmonious cries reflecting the harmony of love finally fashioned out of the cacophany of ‘‘derision’’: ‘‘When they next wake, all this derision / Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision’’ (3.2). Thus as if by a wave of Plato’s wand, the bearish beast fades into dream at the moment the lovers waken into the world of Theseus’s reason. Only by repressing the beast of the forest can the

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lovers aspire to marriage in the palace. But only by unshackling and confronting the beast in the first place—by escaping from the harsh rational law of Athens and from the milder decorum of courtship—can the lovers come to recognize the rough impulses that underlie and influence mature love. Or as we would say now, the Ego must confront the Freudian Id or the Jungian shadow for the psyche to be maturely married. The price of this marriage, however, is a sacrificial repression of animalism and death, the banishment of the forest experience into a mere ‘‘dream past the wit of [either lovers or Bottom] to say what dream it was.’’ But repression is not extinction; the realignments of love that took place in the forest are sustained and ratified in Athens. Moreover, as part of a sacrificial quid pro quo between reason and impulse, if the beast that represents impulse at its worst is suppressed, so is the harsh Athenian law that represents reason at its worst. Through such sacrificial negotiations humans may sometimes find their way to the rational life without entirely forfeiting the liberating virtues of the imaginative vision. Source: James L. Calderwood, ‘‘Sacrifice,’’ in Shakespare and the Denial of Death, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987, pp. 65–67.

Northrop Frye In his discussion of the fairy world, Frye identifies the poet’s sources in Classical, Celtic, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon folklore and mythology. The dream world of the forest, Frye suggests, ‘‘has affinities with what we call the unconscious or subconscious part of the mind.’’ And only this part of our mind, Frye concludes, holds the key to this wonderful and mysterious play. Why is this play called A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Apparently the main action in the fairy wood takes place on the eve of May Day; at any rate, when Theseus and Hippolyta enter with the rising sun, they discover the four lovers, and Theseus says: No doubt they rose up early to observe The rite of May. [IV. i. 132–33] We call the time of the summer solstice, in the third week of June, ‘‘midsummer,’’ although in our calendars it’s the beginning of summer. That’s because originally there were only three seasons, summer, autumn and winter: summer then included spring and began in March. A thirteenth-century song begins ‘‘sumer is

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ACCORDING TO THE INDICATIONS IN THE TEXT, THE NIGHT IN THE WOOD SHOULD BE A MOONLESS NIGHT, BUT IN FACT THERE ARE SO MANY REFERENCES TO THE MOON THAT IT SEEMS TO BE STILL THERE, EVEN THOUGH OBSCURED BY CLOUDS.’’

i-cumen in,’’ generally modernized, to keep the metre, as ‘‘summer is a-coming in,’’ but it doesn’t mean that: it means ‘‘spring is here.’’ The Christian calendar finally established the celebration of the birth of Christ at the winter solstice, and made a summer solstice date (June 24) the feast day of John the Baptist. This arrangement, according to the Fathers, symbolized John’s remark in the Gospels on beholding Christ: ‘‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’’ Christmas Eve was a beneficent time, when evil spirits had no power; St. John’s Eve was perhaps more ambiguous, and there was a common phrase, ‘‘midsummer madness,’’ used by Olivia in Twelfth Night, a play named after the opposite end of the year. Still, it was a time when spirits of nature, whether benevolent or malignant, might be supposed to be abroad. There were also two other haunted ‘‘eves,’’ of the first of November and of the first of May. These take us back to a still earlier time, when animals were brought in from the pasture at the beginning of winter, with a slaughter of those that couldn’t be kept to feed, and when they were let out again at the beginning of spring. The first of these survives in our Hallowe’en, but May Day eve is no longer thought of much as a spooky time, although in Germany, where it was called ‘‘Walpurgis night,’’ the tradition that witches held an assembly on a mountain at that time lasted much longer, and comes into Goethe’s Faust. In Faust the scene with the witches is followed by something called ‘‘The Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania,’’ which has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s play, but perhaps indicates a connection in Goethe’s mind between it and the first of May. In Shakespeare’s time, as Theseus’s remark indicates, the main emphasis on the first of May fell on a sunrise service greeting the day with

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songs. All the emphasis was on hope and cheerfulness. Shakespeare evidently doesn’t want to force a specific date on us: it may be May Day eve, but all we can be sure of is that it’s later than St. Valentine’s Day in mid-February, the day when traditionally the birds start copulating, and we could have guessed that anyway. The general idea is that we have gone through the kind of night when spirits are powerful but not necessarily malevolent. Evil spirits, as we learn from the opening scene of Hamlet, are forced to disappear at dawn, and the fact that this is also true of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father sows a terrible doubt in Hamlet’s mind. Here we have Puck, or more accurately Robin Goodfellow the puck. Pucks were a category of spirits who were often sinister, and the Puck of this play is clearly mischievous. But we are expressly told by Oberon that the fairies of whom he’s the king are ‘‘spirits of another sort’’ [III. ii. 388], not evil and not restricted to darkness. So the title of the play simply emphasizes the difference between the two worlds of the action, the waking world of Theseus’s court and the fairy world of Oberon. Let’s go back to the three parts of the comic action: the opening situation hostile to true love, the middle part of dissolving identities, and the final resolution. The first part contains a threat of possible death to Hermia. Similar threats are found in other Shakespeare comedies: in The Comedy of Errors a death sentence hangs over a central character until nearly the end of the play. This comic structure fits inside a pattern of death, disappearance and return that’s far wider in scope than theatrical comedy. We find it even in the central story of Christianity, with its Friday of death, Saturday of disappearance and Sunday of return. Scholars who have studied this pattern in religion, mythology and legend think it derives from observing the moon waning, then disappearing, then reappearing as a new moon. At the opening Theseus and Hippolyta have agreed to hold their wedding at the next new moon, now four days off. They speak of four days, although the rhetorical structure runs in threes: Hippolyta is wooed, won and wed ‘‘With pomp, with triumph and with revelling’’ [I. i. 19]. (This reading depends also on a reasonable, if not certain, emendation: ‘‘new’’ for ‘‘now’’ in the tenth line.) Theseus compares his impatience to the comedy situation of a young man waiting for

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someone older to die and leave him money. The Quince company discover from an almanac that there will be moonshine on the night that they will be performing, but apparently there is not enough, and so they introduce a character called Moonshine. His appearance touches off a very curious reprise of the opening dialogue. Hippolyta says ‘‘I am aweary of this moon: would he would change!’’ [V. i. 251], and Theseus answers that he seems to be on the wane, ‘‘but yet, in courtesy . . . we must stay the time’’ [V. i. 254–55]. It’s as though this ghastly play contains in miniature, and caricature, the themes of separation, postponement, and confusions of reality and fantasy that have organized the play surrounding it. According to the indications in the text, the night in the wood should be a moonless night, but in fact there are so many references to the moon that it seems to be still there, even though obscured by clouds. It seems that this wood is a fairyland with its own laws of time and space, a world where Oberon has just blown in from India and where Puck can put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. So it’s not hard to accept such a world as an antipodal one, like the world of dreams itself, which, although we make it fit into our waking-time schedules, still keeps to its own quite different rhythms. A curious image of Hermia’s involving the moon has echoes of this; she’s protesting that she will never believe Lysander unfaithful: I’ll believe as soon This whole earth may be bored, and that the moon May through the centre creep, and so displease Her brother’s noontide with th’Antipodes. [III. ii. 52–5] A modern reader might think of the opening of ‘‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’’ The moon, in any case, seems to have a good deal to do with both worlds. In the opening scene Lysander speaks of Demetrius as ‘‘this spotted and inconstant man’’ [I. i. 110], using two common epithets for the moon, and in the last act Theseus speaks of ‘‘the lunatic, the lover and the poet’’ [V. i. 7], where ‘‘lunatic’’ has its full Elizabethan force of ‘‘moonstruck.’’ The inhabitants of the wood-world are the creatures of legend and folk tale and mythology and abandoned belief. Theseus regards them as projections of the human imagination, and as

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Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania and Rupert Everett as Oberon in a scene from the 1999 film A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Ó Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection)

having a purely subjective existence. The trouble is that we don’t know the extent of our own minds, or what’s in that mental world that we half create and half perceive . . . The tiny fairies that wait on Bottom—Mustardseed and Peaseblossom and the rest—come from Celtic fairy lore, as does the Queen Mab of Mercutio’s speech [in Romeo and Juliet], who also had tiny fairies in her train. Robin Goodfellow is more Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic. His propitiatory name, ‘‘Goodfellow,’’ indicates that he could be dangerous, and his fairy friend says that one of his amusements is to ‘‘Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm’’ [II. i. 39]. A famous book a little later than Shakespeare, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, mentions fire spirits who mislead travellers with illusions, and says ‘‘We commonly call them pucks.’’ The fairy world clearly would not do as a democracy: there has to be a king in charge like Oberon, who will see that Puck’s rather primitive sense of humour doesn’t get too far out of line.

famous Classical metamorphosis is the story of Apuleius about a man turned into an ass by enchantment, and of course this theme enters the present play when Bottom is, as Quince says, ‘‘translated.’’ In Classical mythology one central figure was the goddess that Robert Graves, . . . calls the ‘‘white goddess’’ or the ‘‘triple will.’’ This goddess had three forms: one in heaven, where she was the goddess of the moon and was called Phoebe or Cynthia or Luna; one on earth, where she was Diana, the virgin huntress of the forest, called Titania once in Ovid; and one below the earth, where she was the witch-goddess Hecate. Puck speaks of ‘‘Hecate’s triple team’’ at the end of the play. References to Diana and Cynthia by the poets of the time usually involved some allusion to the virgin queen Elizabeth (they always ignored Hecate in such contexts). As I said, the Queen seems to be alluded to here, but in a way that kicks her upstairs, so to speak: she’s on a level far above all the ‘‘lunatic’’ goings-on below.

The gods and other beings of Classical mythology belong in the same half-subjective, half-autonomous world. I’ve spoken of the popularity of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for poets: this, in Ovid’s opening words, is a collection of stories of ‘‘bodies changed to new forms.’’ Another

Titania in this play is not Diana: Diana and her moon are in Theseus’s world, and stand for the sterility that awaits Hermia if she disobeys her father, when she will have to become Diana’s nun, ‘‘Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon’’ [I. i. 73]. The wood of this play is erotic, not

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virginal: Puck is contemptuous of Lysander’s lying so far away from Hermia, not realizing that this was just Hermia being maidenly. According to Oberon, Cupid was an inhabitant of this wood, and had shot his erotic arrow at the ‘‘imperial votaress,’’ but it glanced off her and fell on a white flower, turning it red. The parabola taken by this arrow outlines the play’s world, so to speak: the action takes place under this red and white arch. One common type of Classical myth deals with a ‘‘dying god,’’ as he’s called now, a male figure who is killed when still a youth, and whose blood stains a white flower and turns it red or purple. Shakespeare had written the story of one of these gods in his narrative poem ‘‘Venus and Adonis,’’ where he makes a good deal of the stained flower: No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf, or weed, But stole his blood and seem’d with him to bleed. [1055–56] The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is another such story: Pyramus’s blood stains the mulberry and turns it red. In Ovid’s account, when Pyramus stabs himself the blood spurts out in an arc on the flower. This may be where Shakespeare got the image that he puts to such very different use. Early in the play we come upon Oberon and Titania quarrelling over the custody of a human boy, and we are told that because of their quarrel the weather has been unusually foul. The implication is that the fairies are spirits of the elements, and that nature and human life are related in many ways that are hidden from ordinary consciousness. But it seems clear that Titania does not have the authority that she thinks she has: Oberon puts her under the spell of having to fall in love with Bottom with his ass’s head, and rescues the boy for his own male entourage. There are other signs that Titania is a possessive and entangling spirit—she says to Bottom: Out of this wood do not desire to go; Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no. [III. i. 152–53] The relationship of Oberon and Titania forms a counterpoint with that of Theseus and Hippolyta in the other world. It appears that Titania has been a kind of guardian spirit to Hippolyta and Oberon to Theseus. Theseus

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gives every sign of settling down into a solidly married man, now that he has subdued the most formidable woman in the world, the Queen of the Amazons. But his record before that was a very bad one, with rapes and desertions in it: even as late as T.S. Eliot we read about his ‘‘perjured sails.’’ Oberon blames his waywardness on Titania’s influence, and Titania’s denial does not sound very convincing. Oberon’s ascendancy over Titania, and Theseus’s over Hippolyta, seem to symbolize some aspect of the emerging comic resolution. Each world has a kind of music, or perhaps rather ‘‘harmony,’’ that is characteristic of it. That of the fairy wood is represented by the song of the mermaid described by Oberon to Puck. This is a music that commands the elements of the ‘‘sublunary’’ world below the moon; it quiets the sea, but there is a hint of a lurking danger in it, a siren’s magic call that draws some of the stars out of their proper spheres in heaven, as witches according to tradition can call down the moon. There is danger everywhere in that world for mortals who stay there too long and listen to too much of its music. When the sun rises and Theseus and Hippolyta enter the wood, they talk about the noise of hounds in this and other huntings. Hippolyta says: never did I hear Such gallant chiding; for, besides the groves, The Skies, the fountains, every region near Seem’d all one mutual cry; I never heard So musical a discord, such sweet thunder. [IV. i. 114–18] It would not occur to us to describe a cry of hounds as a kind of symphony orchestra, but then we do not have the mystique of a Renaissance prince about hunting. Both forms of music fall far short of the supreme harmony of the spheres described in the fifth act of The Merchant of Venice : Oberon might know something about that, but not Puck, who can’t see the ‘‘imperial votaress.’’ Neither, probably, could Theseus. So the wood-world has affinities with what we call the unconscious or subconscious part of the mind: a part below the reason’s encounter with objective reality, and yet connected with the hidden creative powers of the mind. Left to Puck or even Titania, it’s a world of illusion, random desires and shifting identities. With Oberon in charge, it becomes the world in which those

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profound choices are made that decide the course of life, and also . . . the world from which inspiration comes to the poet. The lovers wake up still dazed with metamorphosis; as Demetrius says: These things seem small and undistinguishable, Like far-off mountains turned into clouds. [IV. i. 186–87] But the comic crystallization has taken place, and for the fifth act we go back to Theseus’s court to sort out the various things that have come out of the wood. Theseus takes a very rational and commonsense view of the lovers’ story, but he makes it clear that the world of the wood is the world of the poet as well as the lover and the lunatic. His very remarkable speech uses the words ‘‘apprehend’’ and ‘‘comprehend’’ each twice. In the ordinary world we apprehend with our senses and comprehend with our reason; what the poet apprehends are moods or emotions, like joy, and what he uses for comprehension is some story or character to account for the emotion: Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy [V. i. 18–20] Theseus is here using the word ‘‘imagination’’ in its common Elizabethan meaning, which we express by the word ‘‘imaginary,’’ something alleged to be that isn’t. In spite of himself, though, the word is taking on the more positive sense of our ‘‘imaginative,’’ the sense of the creative power developed centuries later by [William] Blake and [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge. So far as I can make out from the OED [Oxford English Dictionary], this more positive sense of the word in English practically begins here. Hippolyta is shrewder and less defensive than Theseus, and what she says takes us a great deal further: But all the story of the night, told over, And all their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. [V. i. 23–7] Theseus doesn’t believe their story, but Hippolyta sees that something has happened to them, whatever their story. The word ‘‘transfigured’’

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means that there can be metamorphosis upward as well as downward, a creative transforming into a higher consciousness as well as the reduction from the conscious to the unconscious that we read about in Ovid. Besides, the story has a consistency to it that doesn’t sound like the disjointed snatches of incoherent minds. If you want disjointing and incoherence, just listen to the play that’s coming up. And yet the Quince play is a triumph of sanity in its way: it tells you that the roaring lion is only Snug the joiner, for example. It’s practically a parody of Theseus’s view of reality, with its ‘‘imagination’’ that takes a bush for a bear in the dark. There’s a later exchange when Hippolyta complains that the play is silly, and Theseus says: The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them [V. i. 211–12]

Hippolyta retorts: ‘‘It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs.’’ Here ‘‘imagination’’ has definitely swung over to meaning something positive and creative. What Hippolyta says implies that the audience has a creative role in every play; that’s one reason why Puck, coming out for the Epilogue when the audience is supposed to applaud, repeats two of Theseus’s words: If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended. [V. i. 423–24] Theseus’s imagination has ‘‘amended’’ the Quince play by accepting it, listening to it, and not making fun of the actors to their faces. Its merit as a play consists in dramatizing his own social position and improving what we’d now call his ‘‘image’’ as a gracious prince. In itself the play has no merit, except in being unintentionally funny. And if it has no merit, it has no authority. A play that did have authority, and depended on a poet’s imagination as well, would raise the question that Theseus’s remark seems to deny: the question of the difference between plays by Peter Quince and plays by William Shakespeare. Theseus would recognize the difference, of course, but in its social context, as an offering for his attention and applause, a Shakespeare play would be in the same position as the Quince play. That indicates how limited Theseus’s world is, in the long run, a fact symbolized by his not knowing how much of his behaviour is guided by Oberon.

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Which brings me to Bottom, the only mortal in the play who actually sees any of the fairies. One of the last things Bottom says in the play is rather puzzling: ‘‘the wall is down that parted their fathers’’ [V. i. 351]. Apparently he means the wall separating the hostile families of Pyramus and Thisbe. This wall seems to have attracted attention: after Snout the tinker, taking the part of Wall, leaves the stage, Theseus says, according to the Folio: ‘‘Now is the morall downe between the two neighbours’’ [cf. V. i. 207]. The New Arden editor reads ‘‘mural down,’’ and other editors simply change to ‘‘wall down.’’ The Quarto, just to be helpful, reads ‘‘moon used.’’ Wall and Moonshine between them certainly confuse an already confused play. One wonders if the wall between the two worlds of Theseus and Oberon, the wall that Theseus is so sure is firmly in place, doesn’t throw a shadow on these remarks. Anyway, Bottom wakes up along with the lovers and makes one of the most extraordinary speeches in Shakespeare, which includes a very scrambled but still recognizable echo from the New Testament, and finally says he will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of his dream, and ‘‘it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom’’ [IV. i. 215–16]. Like most of what Bottom says, this is absurd; like many absurdities in Shakespeare, it makes a lot of sense. Bottom does not know that he is anticipating by three centuries a remark of Freud: ‘‘every dream has a point at which it is unfathomable; a link, as it were, with the unknown.’’ When we come to King Lear, we shall suspect that it takes a madman to see into the heart of tragedy, and perhaps it takes a fool or clown, who habitually breathes the atmosphere of absurdity and paradox, to see into the heart of comedy. ‘‘Man,’’ says Bottom, ‘‘is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream’’ [IV. i. 206–07]. But it was Bottom the ass who had the dream, not Bottom the weaver, who is already forgetting it. He will never see his Titania again, nor even remember that she had once loved him, or doted on him, to use Friar Laurence’s distinction [in Romeo and Juliet]. But he has been closer to the centre of this wonderful and mysterious play than any other of its characters, and it no longer matters that Puck thinks him a fool or that Titania loathes his asinine face.

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Source: Northrop Frye, ‘‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’’ in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, edited by Robert Sandler, Yale University Press, 1986, pp. 34–50.

Frances A. Yates Yates discusses the origins of Shakespeare’s fairy world, arguing that the ‘‘Elizabethan fairies are not . . . manifestations of folk or popular tradition.’’ According to this critic, the characters inhabiting the dream world of Shakespeare’s play stem from either Arthurian legend or the Christian variant of Cabala, a Jewish interpretation of the Scriptures based on the mystical value of words. Shakespearean fairies are related to the Fairy Queen [in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen] through their loyalty and through their fervent defence of chastity . . . They are defenders of chastity, of a chaste queen and her pure knighthood. They are enjoined to perform a white magic to safeguard her and her order of knighthood from evil influences. These Elizabethan fairies are not, I believe, manifestations of folk or popular tradition. Their origins are literary and religious, in Arthurian legend and in the white magic of Christian Cabala. The use of fairy imagery in the queen cult was begun in the Accession Day Tilts [jousts], and relates to the chivalric imagery of the Tilts. As taken up by Spenser in The Faerie Queene, the fairy imagery was Arthurian and chivalric, and also an expression of pure white magic, a Christian Cabalist magic. The Shakespearean fairies emanate from a similar atmosphere; they glorify a pure knighthood serving the queen and her imperial reform. To read Shakespeare’s fairy scenes without reference to the contemporary build-up of the Virgin Queen as the representative of pure religion is to miss their purpose as an affirmation of adherence to the Spenserian point of view, a very serious purpose disguised in fantasy. The supreme expression of the Shakespearean fairyland is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This play was first printed in 1600; it was probably written for a private performance at a wedding, perhaps in 1595 or thereabouts. This magical play about enchanted lovers is set in a world of night and moonlight, where fairies serve a fairy king and queen. Into the magic texture is woven a significant portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. Oberon, the fairy king, describes how he once saw Cupid, all armed, flying between the cold moon and the earth:

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A certain aim he took At a fair vestal, throned by the West And loos’d his love shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quench’d in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon, And the imperial votaress passed on, In maiden meditation, fancy free. [II. i. 157–64] Shakespeare’s picture of Elizabeth as a Vestal Virgin, a chaste Moon who defeats the assaults of Cupid, an ‘imperial votaress’, is a brilliant summing up of the cult of Elizabeth as the representative of imperial reform. A wellknown portrait of Elizabeth presents the imagery in visual form. Elizabeth holds a sieve, emblem of the chastity of a Vestal Virgin; behind her rises the column of empire; the globe beside her shows the British Isles surrounded by shipping, alluding to her enthronement ‘in the West’. It is a portrait of the Virgin of imperial reform, of which Shakespeare gives a verbal picture in the lines just quoted, using the same imagery. [Both] the ‘Sieve’ portrait and Shakespeare’s word-picture in the Dream are Triumphs of Chastity . . . and the triumph refers both to purity in public life and in private life, to Elizabeth both in her public role as the representative of pure imperial reform, and in her private role as a chaste lady. It is exactly in such a role that Spenser presents Elizabeth, so he tells Raleigh in the letter to him published with The Faerie Queene. As Gloriana she is a most royal queen or empress, as Belphoebe she is a most chaste and beautiful lady. Shakespeare’s wordpicture presents Gloriana-Belphoebe, the Virgin of pure Empire, enthroned by the West, the chaste lady who triumphs over Cupid. The appearance in the sky of the Dream of this Spenserian vision strikes the key-note of the magical-musical moonlight of the play. The moon is Cynthia, the Virgin Queen, and the words ‘the chaste beams of the watery moon’ might also allude to Walter Raleigh’s cult of her as Cynthia. Puns on ‘Walter’, pronounced ‘Water’, were usual in referring to Raleigh. Spenser was following Raleigh, so he says, in the ‘Luna’ book of The Faerie Queene. Hence the allusions of the Shakespearean lines would be both to Elizabeth as Spenser’s

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Gloriana-Belphoebe, and also to Raleigh’s cult of her as Cynthia, adopted by Spenser. Thus the complex phenomenon which floats in the night sky of the Dream relates the play to the Spenserian dream-world, the Spenserian magical cult of the Imperial Virgin, with its undercurrent of Christian Cabala. Source: Frances A. Yates, ‘‘Shakespearean Fairies, Witches, Melancholy: King Lear and the Demons,’’ in The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, Ark Paperbacks, 1983, pp. 147–57.

J. B. Priestley Priestley identifies Bottom as ‘‘the most substantial figure’’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, describing him as earthy, quick-witted, and emphasizing his ability to laugh at the inhabitants of the fairy world. Bottom’s humor, Priestley asserts, is not fully consious; rather, he symbolizes a peculiarly English variety of a man of the people: ignorant, uncouth, but a brilliantly perceptive and profound humorist, ever ready to castigate the foibles of his fellow human beings, or, for that matter, supernatural creatures. Bottom is easily the most substantial figure in the piece. This is not saying a great deal, because A Midsummer Night’s Dream has all the character of a dream; its action is ruled by caprice and moonlit madness; its personages appear to be under the spell of visions or to walk and talk in their sleep; its background is shadowy and shifting, sometimes breaking into absolute loveliness, purple and dark green and heavy with the night scent of flowers, but always something broken, inconsequent, suddenly glimpsed as the moon’s radiance frees itself for a little space from cloud and foliage; and the whole play, with its frequent talk of visions, dreams, imagination, antique fables and fairy toys, glides past like some lovely hallucination, a masque of strange shadows and voices heard in the night. The characters are on three different levels. There are first the immortals, who have nothing earthy in their composition and are hardly to be distinguished from the quivering leaves and the mist of hyacinths, tiny creatures spun out of cobwebs and moonshine. Then there are the wandering lovers, all poetry and imagination, driven hither and thither by their passionate moods. Lastly there is Bottom (and with him, of course, his companions), who is neither a flickering elf nor a bewildered passionate lover, but a man of this world, comfortably housed in

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flesh, a personage of some note among the artisans of Athens and, we have no doubt, in spite of certain unmistakable signs of temperament in him, a worthy dependable householder. We suspect that he has, somewhere in the background, a shrewish wife who spends her time alternately seeing through her husband and being taken in by him, for he is essentially one of those large, heavy-faced, somewhat vain and patronising men, not without either humour or imagination, who always induce in women alternating moods of irritation and adoration. Among his fellow artisans, Bottom is clearly the ladies’ man, the gallant. He it is who shows himself sensitive to the delicacy of the sex in the matter of the killing and the lion, and we feel that his insistence upon a prologue, ‘‘a device to make all well’’ [III. i. 16], is only the result of his delicacy and chivalry. Snout and Starveling, who hasten to agree with him, are simply a pair of whimpering poltroons, who have really no stomach for swords and killing and raging melodrama and are afraid of the consequences if they should startle the audience. But Bottom, we feel, has true sensibility and in his own company is the champion of the sex; he knows that it is a most dreadful thing to bring in the lion, that most fearful wild-fowl, among ladies, and his sketch of the prologue has in it the true note of artful entreaty: ‘‘Ladies, or, Fair Ladies,—I would wish you,—or, I would request you,—or, I would entreat you,—not to fear, not to tremble: my life for yours [III. i. 39–42]’’. Such a speech points to both knowledge of the sex and long practice, and given friendly circumstances, the speaker might be a very dangerous man. We should like to see Bottom making love among his own kind; the result would have startled some of his critics. As it is, we only see him, crowned with an ass’s head, suddenly transformed into the paramour of the queen of the fairies, and even in a situation so unexpected, so remote from his previous experience, he acquits himself, as we shall see, very creditably. What would happen if one of the gentlemen who call friend Bottom ‘‘gross, stupid, and ignorant,’’ let us say the average professor of English literature, suddenly found himself in the arms of a very beautiful and very amorous fairy, even if his head were not discoverable by immediate sight but only by long acquaintance to be that of an ass? He would probably acquit himself no better than would Snout or Starveling in similar circumstances, and Shakespeare took care to wave away his Snouts and Starvelings and called the one man

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AMONG HIS FELLOW ARTISANS, BOTTOM IS CLEARLY THE LADIES’ MAN, THE GALLANT.’’

to that strange destiny, that ‘‘most rare vision’’ [IV. i. 205], who was worthy of the occasion. Bottom, as [William] Hazlitt said, is a character that has not had justice done him: he is ‘‘the most romantic of mechanics.’’ Against the background of the whole play, which is only so much gossamer and moonlight, the honest weaver appears anything but romantic, a piece of humorous, bewildered flesh, gross, earthy. He is a trades-unionist among butterflies, a ratepayer in Elfland. Seen thus, he is droll precisely because he is a most prosaic soul called to a most romantic destiny. But if we view him first among his own associates, we shall see that he is the only one of them who was fit to be ‘‘translated.’’ Puck, who was responsible for the transformation, described him as ‘‘the shallowest thickskin of that barren sort’’ [III. ii. 13], the biggest fool in a company of fools; but Puck was no judge of character. Bottom, though he may be the biggest fool (and a big fool is no common person), is really the least shallow and thickskinned of his group, in which he shows up as the romantic, the poetical, the imaginative man, who naturally takes command. We admit that he is conceited, but he is, in some measure, an artist, and artists are notoriously conceited. The company of such tailoring and bellows-mending souls would make any man of spirit conceited. Old Quince, who obviously owes his promotion to seniority and to nothing else, is nominally in charge of the revels, but the players have scarcely met together and Quince has scarcely had time to speak a word before it is clear that Bottom, and Bottom alone, is the leader. Quince (‘‘Good Peter Quince’’ [I. ii. 8], as Bottom, with easy contempt and patronage, calls him) is nothing but a tool in the hands of the masterful weaver, who directs the whole proceedings, the calling of the roll of players, the description of the piece, the casting of the parts, and so forth, step by step. The other members of the company not having a glimmer of imagination, the artist among them, the man of temperament, takes charge. And he alone shows

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Oberon, Puck, Titania, Bottom, and fairies, Act IV, scene i (Ó Shakespeare Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan)

any enthusiasm for the drama itself, for the others are only concerned with pleasing the Duke; if they do badly, if they should, for example, frighten the ladies, they may be hanged, whereas if they do well, they may receive a little pension. Once Bottom is metamorphosed, we no longer see him against the background of his fellow artisans but see him firmly set in the lovely moonlit world of the elves and fairies, a world so delicate that honeybags stolen from the bees serve for sweetmeats and the wings of painted butterflies pass for fans, and here among such airy creatures, Bottom, of course, is first glimpsed as something monstrous, gross, earthy. It would be bad enough even if he were there in his own proper person, but he is wearing an ass’s head and presents to us the figure of a kind of comic monster. Moreover, he is loved at first sight by the beautiful Titania, who, with the frankness of an immortal, does not scruple to tell him so as soon as her eyes, peering through enchantments,

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are open. A man may have the best wit and the best person of any handicraftsman in Athens and yet shrink from the wizardries of such a night, being compelled to wear the head of an ass, deserted by his companions, conjured into fairyland, bewilderingly promoted into the paramour of the fairy queen and made the master of such elvish and microscopic attendants as Peasblossom and Cobweb and Moth. But Bottom, as we have said, rises to the occasion, ass’s head and all; not only does he not shrink and turn tail, not only does he accept the situation, he contrives to carry it off with an air; he not only rises to the occasion, he improves it. Now that all the whimsies under the midsummer moon are let loose and wild imagination has life dancing to its tune, this is not the time for the Bottom we have already seen, the imaginative, temperamental man, to come forward and dominate the scene, or else all hold upon reality is lost; that former Bottom must be kept in check, left to

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wonder and perhaps to play over to himself the lover and the lion; this is the moment for that other, honest Nick Bottom the weaver, the plain man who is something of a humorist, good solid flesh among all such flimsies and whimsies, madness and moonshine. Does the newly awakened lovely creature immediately confess that she is enamoured of him, then he carries it off bravely, with a mingled touch of wit, philosophy, and masculine complacency: ‘‘Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that: and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days; the more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends. Nay, I can gleek upon occasion’’ [III. i. 142–46]. And we can see the ass’s head tilted towards the overhanging branches, as he gives a guffaw at his ‘‘gleeking’’ and takes a strutting turn or two before this astonishing new mistress. But nothing takes him by surprise in this sudden advancement. His tone is humorous and condescending, that of a solid complacent male among feminine fripperies. When his strange little servitors are introduced to him, the Duke himself could not carry it off better: ‘‘I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb: if I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you’’—then turning regally to the next: ‘‘Your name, honest gentleman?’’ Good Master Mustard-seed is commiserated with because ‘‘that same cowardly, giantlike ox-beef hath devoured many a gentleman of your House’’ [III. i. 182–93]: all are noticed and dispatched with the appropriate word; it is like a parody of an official reception. In the next scene, we discover him even more at his ease than before, lolling magnificently, embraced by his lady and surrounded by his devoted attendants, who are being given their various duties. ‘‘Monsieur Cobweb, good monsieur’’—and indeed there was probably something very Gallic about this Cobweb— ‘‘get your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipp’d humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good monsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, monsieur; and, good monsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not. I would be loth to have you overflown with a honey-bag, signior’’ [IV. i. 10–16]. Bottom is clearly making himself at home in Elfland; he is beginning to display a certain fastidiousness, making delicate choice of a ‘‘red-hipp’d humble-bee on the top of a thistle.’’ And if Puck won the first trick with the love philtre and the ass’s head, we are not sure

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that Bottom is not now winning the second, for every time he addresses one of his attendants he is scoring off Elfland and is proving himself a very waggish ass indeed. Even his remarks on the subject of music (‘‘I have a reasonable good ear in music: let us have the tongs and the bones’’ [IV. i. 28–9]) and provender (‘‘I could munch your good dry oats. Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay: good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow’’ [IV. i. 31–4]) have to our ears a certain consciously humorous smack, as if the speaker were not quite such an ass as he seems but were enjoying the situation in his own way, carrying the inimitable, if somewhat vulgar, manner of the great Bottom, pride of handicraftsmen, even into the heart of Faerie. If he shows no surprise, however, and almost contrives to carry off the situation in the grand manner, we must remember that he, like Titania, is only dreaming beneath the mooncoloured honeysuckle and musk roses; the enamoured fairy and all her attendant sprites are to him only phantoms, bright from the playbox of the mind, there to be huddled away when a sudden puff of wind or a falling leaf brings the little drama to an end; and so he acts as we all act in dreams, who may ourselves be ‘‘translated’’ nightly by Puck and sent on the wildest adventures in elfin woods for all we know to the contrary. When Bottom awakes, yawning and stiff in the long grass, his sense of wonder blossoms gigantically, and the artist in him, he who would play the tyrant, the lover, the damsel, and the lion, leaps to life: ‘‘I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream,—past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream’’ [IV. i. 204–07]. So fiery and eager is that wonder and poetry in him which all the long hours at Athenian looms have not been able to wither away, as he stands crying in ecstasy in the greenwood, that we cannot be surprised that his style, which he very rightly endeavours to heighten for the occasion, should break down under the stress of it: ‘‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’’ [IV. i. 211–14]. But no matter; the dramatic enthuasiast in him now takes command: Peter Quince (whom we did not suspect of authorship) shall write a ballad of this dream, to be called Bottom’s Dream, and it shall be sung, by a newly resurrected Pyramus, at the end of the coming play; and off he goes, his

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head humming with plans, back to the town to put heart into his lads. There he plays Pyramus as Pyramus was never played before; takes charge of the whole company, does not scruple to answer a frivolous remark of the Duke’s, and finally speaks the last word we hear from the handicraftsmen. We learn nothing more of him, but perhaps when the lovers were turning to their beds and the fairies were dancing in the glimmering light, Bottom, masterful, triumphant, was at Peter Quince’s with the rest, sitting over a jug or two and setting his fellow players agape with his tale of the rare vision. There was a poet somewhere in this droll weaver and so he came to a poet’s destiny, finding himself wearing the head of an ass (as we all must do at such moments), the beloved of an exquisite immortal, the master of Cobwebs and Peas-blossoms, coming to an hour’s enchantment while the moon climbs a hand’s-breadth up the sky—and then, all ‘‘stolen hence,’’ the dream done and the dreamer left to wonder. Such is the destiny of poets, who are themselves also weavers. It is a critical commonplace that these Athenian clowns are very English, just as the setting that frames them is exquisitely English; and it follows very naturally that the greatest of them is the most English. There is indeed no more insular figure in all Shakespeare’s wide gallery than Bottom. A superficial examination of him will reveal all those traits that unfriendly critics of England and Englishmen have remarked for centuries. Thus, he is ignorant, conceited, domineering; he takes himself and his ridiculous concerns seriously and shows no lightness of touch; knowing perhaps the least, he yet talks the most, of all his company; he cannot understand that his strutting figure is the drollest sight under the sky, never for one instant realises that he is nothing but an ignorant buffoon; the soulless vulgarity of his conduct among the fairies smells rank in the nostrils of men of taste and delicacy of mind; in short, he is indeed the ‘‘shallowest thickskin of that barren sort’’ [III. ii. 13], lout-in-chief of a company of louts. But something more than a superficial examination will, as we have partly seen, dispose of much of this criticism, and will lead to the discovery in Bottom of traits that our friendly critics have remarked in us and that we ourselves know to be there. Bottom is very English in this, that he is something of a puzzle and an apparent contradiction. We have already marked the poetry and the artist in him, and we have only to stare at him a little longer to be in

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doubt about certain characteristics we took for granted. Is he entirely our butt or is he for at least part of the time solemnly taking us in and secretly laughing at us? Which of us has not visited some rural tap-room and found there, wedged in a corner, a large, round-faced, wide-mouthed fellow, the local oracle; and, having listened to some of his pronouncements, have laughed in our sleeves at his ignorance, dogmatism, and conceit; and yet, after staying a little longer and staring at the creature’s large, solemn face, a face perilously close to vacuity, have noticed in it certain momentary twinkles and creases that have suddenly left us a little dubious about our hasty conclusions? And then it has dawned upon us that the fellow is, in his own way, which is not ours nor one to which we are accustomed, a humorist, and that somewhere behind that immobile and almost vacuous front, he has been enjoying us, laughing at us, just as we have been enjoying him and laughing at him. It is an experience that should make us pause before we pass judgment upon Bottom, who is the first cousin of all such queer characters, rich and ripe personages who are to be found, chiefly in hostelries but now and then carrying a bag of tools or flourishing a paint-brush, in almost every corner of this England, which is itself brimmed with puzzling contradictions, a strange mixture of the heavy butt and the conscious humorist. Bottom is worlds away from the fully conscious humour of a Falstaff, but we cannot have followed him from Peter Quince’s house to the arms of Titania and seen him in Bank Holiday humour with his Cobwebs and Mustardseeds, without noticing that he is something more than a rustic target. He is English, and he is conceited, ignorant, dogmatic, and asinine, but there stirs within him, as there does within his fellow workmen even now, a poet and humorist, waiting for the midsummer moon. And lastly, he is not dead, he has not left us, for I saw him myself, some years ago, and he had the rank of corporal and was gloriously at ease in a tumbledown estaminet near Amiens [in As You Like It], and there he was playing the tyrant, the lover, and the lion all at once, and Sergeant Quince and Privates Snug and Starveling were there with him. They were paying for his beer and I suspect that they were waiting, though obviously waiting in vain, to hear him cry once more: ‘‘Enough; hold or cut bow-strings’’ [I. ii. 111]. Source: J. B. Priestley, ‘‘Bully Bottom,’’ in The English Comic Characters, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1931, pp. 1–19.

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Frederick S. Boas Boas considers the various groups of lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, arguing that Shakespeare’s characterization of the couples is more whimsical than serious. The critic first examines Theseus and Hippolyta’s relationship, maintaining that although the playwright illustrates Theseus as a brave soldier who wins Hippolyta with his sword, the Greek ruler ultimately displays a practicality that exhibits no grasp of aesthetic beauty. In addition, Boas notes that in contrast to the generally serene fortunes of Theseus and Hippolyta, the young lovers— Lysander, Hermia, Helena, and Demetrius—are ‘‘a troubled lot’’ due to their ‘‘purely human failings.’’

THE JINGLING METRES, THE MANIA FOR ALLITERATION, THE FARFETCHED AND FANTASTIC EPITHETS, . . . ARE ALL RIDICULED WITH A BOISTEROUS GLEE, WHICH WAS AN IMPLICIT WARRANT THAT . . . [SHAKESPEARE’S] OWN WORK WOULD BE FREE FROM SUCH DISFIGURING AFFECTATIONS, OR, AT WORST, WOULD TAKE FROM THEM ONLY A SUPERFICIAL TAINT.’’

In its main plot [A Midsummer Night’s Dream] is akin to The Comedy of Errors, for in both cases a humorous entanglement is created out of mistakes. Already, however, Shakespere shows his extraordinary skill in devising variations upon a given theme, for here the mistakes are those of a night and not of a day, and instead of being external to the mind are internal . . . As in The Comedy of Errors, also, the scene is nominally laid amid classical surroundings, but the whole atmosphere of the play is essentially English and Elizabethan.

discharged’ [V. I. 360–61]. But it has been urged that Theseus shows the limitations of nature which are found in Shakespere’s men of action. Though dramatic performances serve to while away the time, even at their best they are to him ‘but shadows,’ and it is he who dismisses the tale of what the lovers have experienced in the wood as ‘fairy toys,’ and is thus led on to the famous declaration that

Thus Theseus, whose marriage with Hippolyta forms the setting of the story, is no Athenian ‘duke,’ but a great Tudor noble. He is a brave soldier, who has wooed his bride with his sword, and, strenuous even in his pleasures, he is up with the dawn on May-morning, and out in the woods, that his love may hear the music of his hounds, ‘matched in mouth like bells’ [IV. i. 123], as they are uncoupled for the hunt. He is a true Tudor lord also in his taste for the drama, as shown in his request for masques and dances wherewith to celebrate his marriage. He exhibits the gracious spirit common to all Shakespeare’s leaders of men in choosing, against the advice of his Master of the Revels, the entertainment prepared by Bottom and his fellows:

Only the practical common-sense Theseus, it has been said, would think of comparing the poet or lover to the lunatic, and Shakespere, by putting such words into his mouth, shows by a side-stroke that the man of action fails to appreciate the idealist nature. But such an inference from the passage is hazardous: there is a sense in which Theseus’ statement is true, for the artist and the lover do collide, like the madman, with what ‘cool reason’ chooses to term the realities of life. The eloquent ring of the words is scarcely suggestive of dramatic irony, while the description of the poet’s pen as giving to ‘airy nothing a local habitation and a name’ [V. i. 16–17], applies with curious exactness to Shakespere’s own method in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I will hear that play For never anything can be amiss When simpleness and duty tender it; [V. i. 81–3] and though tickled by the absurdities of the performance, he checks more than once the petulant criticisms of Hippolyta, and assures the actors at the close, with a courteous doubleentendre, that their play has been ‘very notably

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The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. [V. i. 7–8]

Contrasted with the serene fortunes of Theseus and Hippolyta is the troubled lot of humbler lovers, due, in its origin, to purely human failings. The fickle Demetrius has shifted his affections from Helena to Hermia, whose father Egeus favours the match, but Hermia is constant to Lysander, while Helena still ‘dotes in idolatry’ [I. i. 109] upon her inconstant wooer. The Athenian law as expounded by Theseus . . .

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enforces upon Hermia obedience to her father’s wishes on pain of death or perpetual maidenhood. But Lysander suggests escape to a classical ‘Gretna Green,’ seven leagues from the town, where the sharp Athenian law does not run, and fixes a trysting-place for the following night within the neighbouring wood. That Hermia should reveal the secret to Helena, and that she in her turn should put Demetrius on the fugitive’s track, merely to ‘have his sight thither and back again’ [I. i. 251], is a transparently clumsy device for concentrating the four lovers on a single spot, which betrays the hand of the immature playwright. Within the wood the power of human motive is suspended for that of enchantment, and at a touch of Puck’s magic herb, Lysander and Demetrius are ‘translated,’ and ready to cross swords for the love of the erewhile flouted Helena. Thus all things befall preposterously, and reason holds as little sway over action as in a dream, though it is surely overstrained to find . . . a definitely allegorical significance in the comic entanglement, the more so that the dramatic execution is at this point somewhat crude. Lysander and Demetrius are little more than lay figures, and the only difference between Helena and Hermia is that the latter is shorter of stature, and has a vixenish temper, of which she gives a violent display in the unseemly quarrel scene. But at last, by Oberon’s command Dian’s bud undoes on the eyes of Lysander the work of Cupid’s flower, and the close of the period of enchantment is broadly and effectively marked by the inrush at dawn of exuberant, palpable life in the shape of Theseus’ hunting party, whose horns and ‘halloes’ reawaken the sleepers to everyday realities. But, as in The Errors, out of the confusions of the moment is born an abiding result. Demetrius is henceforward true to Helena: the caprice of magic has redressed the caprice of passion, and the lovers return to Athens ‘with league whose date till death shall never end’ [III. ii. 373]. Deep reflective power and subtle insight into character came slowly to Shakespere, as to lesser men, but fancy has its flowering season in youth, and never has it shimmered with a more delicate and iridescent bloom than the fairy-world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Through woodland vistas, where the Maymoon struggles with the dusk, elf-land opens into sight, ethereal, impalpable, spun out of gossamer and dew, and yet strangely consistent and credible. For this kingdom of shadows reproduces in miniature the

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structure of human society. Here, as on earth, there are royal rulers, with courts, ministers, warriors, jesters, and, in fine, all the pomp and circumstance of mortal sovereignty. And what plausibility there is in every detail, worked out with an unfaltering instinct for just and delicate gradation! In this realm of the microscopic an acorn-cup is a place of shelter, and a cast snakeskin, or the leathern wing of a rear-mouse, an ample coat: the night tapers are honey-bags of humble-bees lit at the glow-worm’s eyes, and the fairy chorus, to whom the third part of a moment is a measurable portion of time, charm from the side of their sleeping mistress such terrible monsters as blindworms, spiders, and beetles black. Over these tiny creatures morality has no sway: theirs is a delicious sense life, a revel of epicurean joy in nature’s sweets and beauties. To dance ‘by paved fountain or by rushy brook’ [II. i. 84], to rest on banks canopied with flowers, to feed on apricoks and grapes, and mulberries, to tread the groves till the ‘eastern gate all firey red’ [III. ii. 391] turns the green sea into gold—such are the delights which make up their round of existence. In Puck, ‘the lob of spirits,’ this merry temper takes a more roguish form, a gusto in the topsy-turvy, in the things that befall preposterously, and an elfin glee in gulling mortals according to their folly. With his zest for knavish pranks, for mocking practical jokes upon ‘gossips’ and ‘wisest aunts,’ this merry wanderer of the night is indeed a spirit different in sort from the ethereal dream fairies, and it is natural that Oberon’s vision of Cupid all armed should be hid from his gross sight. Moonlight and woodland have for him no spell of beauty, but they form a congenial sphere in which to play the game of mystification and cross-purposes. Thus his very unlikeness to the other shadows marks him out as the ally and henchman of Oberon in his quarrel with the fairy queen and her court. For the love troubles of mortals have their miniature counterpart in the jealousy of the elfin royal pair, springing in the main, as befits their nature, from an aesthetic rivalry for the possession of a lovely Indian boy, though by an ingenious touch, which unites the natural and supernatural realms, a further incitement is the undue favour with which Oberon regards the ‘bouncing Amazon’ Hippolyta, balanced by Titania’s attachment to Theseus. And as the human wooers are beguiled by the power of Cupid’s magic herb, the fairy queen is in like manner victimized. But with correct instinct

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Shakespere makes her deception far the more extravagant. Fairyland is the world of perennial surprise, and it must be a glaringly fantastic incongruity that arrests attention there. But the most exciting canons of improbability are satisfied when Titania, whose very being is spun out of light and air and dew, fastens her affections upon the unpurged ‘mortal grossness’ of Bottom, upon humanity with its asinine attributes focused and gathered to a head. To attack his queen in her essential nature, to make her whose only food is beauty lavish her endearments upon a misshapen monster, is a masterpiece of revenge on Oberon’s part. And so persuasive is the art of the dramatist that our pity is challenged for Titania’s infatuation, with its pathetically reckless squandering of pearls before swine, and thus we hail with joy her release from her dotage, her reconciliation with Oberon, and the end of jars in fairyland, celebrated with elfin ritual of dance and song. In designedly aggressive contrast to the dwellers in the shadow world is the crew of hempen homespuns headed by sweet bully Bottom. Among the many forms of genius there is to be reckoned the asinine variety, which wins for a man the cordial recognition of his supremacy among fools, and of this Bottom is a choice type. In the preparation of the Interlude in honour of the Duke’s marriage, though Quince is nominally the manager, Bottom, through the force of his commanding personality, is throughout the directing spirit. His brother craftsmen have some doubts about their qualifications for heroic roles, but this protean actor and critic is ready for any and every part, from lion to lady, and is by universal consent selected as jeune premier [lead player] of the company in the character of Pyramus, ‘a most lovely gentleman-like man.’ Bereft of his services, the comedy, it is admitted on all hands, cannot go forward: ‘it is not possible: you have not a man in all Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he’ [IV. ii. 7–8]. Fostered by such heroworship, Bottom’s egregious self-complacency develops to the point where his metamorphosis at the hands of Puck seems merely an exquisitely fitting climax to a natural process of evolution. And even when thus ‘translated,’ he retains his versatile faculty of adapting himself to any part; the amorous advances of Titania in no wise disturb his equanimity, and he is quite at ease with Peaseblossom and Cobweb. A sublime self-satisfaction may triumph in situations where

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the most delicate tact or the most sympathetic intelligence would be nonplussed. But Shakespere, in introducing his crew of patches into his fairy drama, had an aim beyond satirizing fussy egotism or securing an effect of broad comic relief. It is a peculiarity of his dramatic method to produce variations upon a single theme in the different portions of a play. Love’s Labour’s Lost is an instance of this, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is further illustration, though of a less obvious kind. For in the rehearsal and setting forth of their comedy, Bottom and his friends enter a debateable domain, which, like that of the fairies, hovers round the solid work-a-day world, and yet is not of it. There is a point of view from which life may be regarded as the reality of which art, and in especial dramatic art, is the ‘shadow,’ the very word used by Theseus in relation to the workmen’s play. Thus in their grotesque devices and makeshifts these rude mechanicals are really facing the question of the relation of shadow to substance, the immemorial question of realism in art and on the stage. The classical maxim that ‘Medea shall not kill her children in sight of the audience’ [Horace, in his Ars Poetica] lest the feelings of the spectators should be harrowed beyond endurance, finds a burlesque echo in Bottom’s solicitude lest the ladies should be terrified by the drawing of Pyramus’ sword, or the entrance of so fearful a wildfowl as your lion. Hence the necessity for a prologue to say that Pyramus is not killed indeed, and for the apparition of half Snug the joiner’s face through the lion’s neck, and his announcement that he is not come hither as a lion, but is ‘a man as other men are’ [III. i. 44]. Scenery presents further difficulties, but here, as there is no risk of wounding delicate susceptibilities, realism is given full rein. The moon herself is pressed into the service, but owing to her capricious nature, she is given an understudy in the person of Starveling carrying a bush of thorns and a lanthorn. It is only the hypercriticism of the Philistine Theseus that finds fault with this arrangement on the score that the man should be put into the lanthorn. ‘How is it else the man in the moon?’ [V. i. 247–48]. The ‘tedious belief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe,’ [V. i. 56–7], is more elaborated specimen of those plays within plays, of which Shakespere had already given a sketch in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and for which he retained a fondness in all stages of his career. It is a

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burlesque upon the dramas of the day, in which classical subjects were handled with utter want of dignity, and with incongruous extravagance of style. The jingling metres, the mania for alliteration, the farfetched and fantastic epithets, the meaningless invocations, the wearisome repetition of emphatic words, are all ridiculed with a boisterous glee, which was an implicit warrant that, when the young dramatist should hereafter turn to tragic or classical themes, his own work would be free from such disfiguring affectations, or, at worst, would take from them only a superficial taint. And, indeed, what potency of future triumphs on the very summits of dramatic art lay already revealed in the genius which out of an incidental entertainment could frame the complex and gorgeous pagentry of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and which, when denied, by the necessities of the occasion, an ethical motive, could fail back for inspiration on an enchanting metaphysic, not of the schools but of the stage, whose contrasts of shadow and reality are shot, now in threads of gossamer lightness, now in homelier and coarser fibre, into the web and woof of this unique hymeneal masque. Source: Frederick S. Boas, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Poems: The Early Period of Comedy,’’ in Shakespeare and His Predecessors, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902, pp. 158–96.

SOURCES Calderwood, James L., A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twayne, 1992, p. xxii. Hazlitt, William, in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; A Casebook, edited by Antony Price, Macmillan, 1983, p. 32, originally published in Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, 1817. Pepys, Samuel, in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; A Casebook, edited by Antony Price, Macmillan, 1983, p. 25, originally published in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, Penguin, 1970. Phialas, Peter G., Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies: The Development of Their Form and Meaning, University of North Carolina Press, 1966, p. 105. Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Cambridge University Press, 1964.

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FURTHER READING Barber, C. L., ‘‘May Games and Metamorphoses on a Midsummer Night,’’ in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies, Princeton University Press, 1959, pp. 119–62. The pageantry that an Elizabethan audience would have been familiar with is explained in Barber’s essay, with concentration on the magic that a festival situation evoked in such audiences and the ways in which various characters symbolize the epochs in normal life. Bryant, J. A., Jr., ‘‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’’ in Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy, University of Kentucky Press, 1986, pp. 57–80. Bryant’s explanation of the play centers around the historical context of Roman comedies and social oppositions. Girard, Rene´ ‘‘Myth and Ritual in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’’ in William Shakespeare: Comedies and Romances, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, pp. 227–46. This essay looks at the play from social and psychological perspectives, with a strong focus on the two pairs of young lovers at the center of the action. Halio, Jay L., A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Manchester University Press, 1994. Halio’s book is part of Manchester University’s ‘‘Shakespeare in Performance’’ series. It follows the history of performances of this play, from their very earliest in Shakespeare’s time to the controversial reimaginings that took place at the end of the twentieth century. Rudd, Niall, ‘‘Pyramus and Thisby in Shakespeare and Ovid,’’ in Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphosis in the Plays and Poems, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 113–25. Rudd gives a detailed dissection of the similarities and differences between Shakespeare’s telling of the classic story in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the version by Ovid that it was based upon. Scragg, Leah, ‘‘Plays within Plays,’’ in Discovering Shakespeare’s Meaning: An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Structures, Longman Press, 1994, pp. 86–113. This chapter from Scragg’s book looks at the ‘‘Pyramus and Thisby’’ play, comparing it to examples from other Shakespeare works and showing how the playwright controlled the audience’s sense of reality throughout the performance.

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Much Ado about Nothing 1598

Shakespeare’s play Much Ado about Nothing has been described as a comedy which, despite its surface gaiety and occasional slapstick comedy, is also serious and even profound in its implications. It has also been considered an enjoyable but problematic play. Assessments of it have varied, but most commentators agree that Much Ado about Nothing is a comedy of manners—a play that gently pokes fun at the manners and conventions of an aristocratic, highly sophisticated society. True to this form, Much Ado about Nothing features the war of the sexes, instances of eavesdropping, mistaken identities, misunderstood communications, and a tangle of subplots all ending in the pairing off of marriageable couples, the downfall of a scheming villain, and the happiness of a wedding dance. Many readers of Shakespeare’s works today would probably agree that Much Ado about Nothing is one of the foremost comedies of manners in Western literature, one that speaks with wisdom about humanity. Scholars agree that Much Ado about Nothing was written and first performed sometime between late 1598 and 1599. An entry in the Stationer’s Register, dated August 4, 1600, includes a reference to the play, ordering that it not be published. Critics have offered several explanations for this entry in the Register, with some maintaining that it reflects official censorship or Puritan pressure, and others stating that it was merely an attempt on the part of the Lord

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Chamberlain’s Men (an acting company with which Shakespeare was associated) to prevent a pirated edition of Much Ado about Nothing from being published. In any case, evidence indicates that Much Ado about Nothing enjoyed considerable popularity during Shakespeare’s day and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it was not until late in the seventeenth century and early into the next century that true critical assessments first appeared. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, critics identified Ludovico Ariosto’s Italian Renaissance epic poem Orlando Furioso (1516) as one of Much Ado about Nothing’s principal sources. These early critics also introduced several thematic and technical issues—questions regarding how true to life the characters’ words and actions are, as well as examinations of Shakespeare’s use of language—that were to become very important in later studies of the comedy. As for other sources for Much Ado about Nothing, the dramatist borrowed from a story in Matteo Bandello’s collection of tales, La prima parte de le novella (1554), which Shakespeare knew both in Italian and in French. In Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare tightened the action for dramatic effect, drawing in elements from Ariosto’s version of the tale, along with some hints from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), a major influence on Elizabethan writers. The language of Much Ado about Nothing is accessible even for modern audiences, except for that of Dogberry, the comical Constable. But then, Dogberry probably was hard to understand even in his times. Dogberry lives in a world of his own, while the topic of conversation among the other characters focuses on various aspects of love and relationships, which translates well into any culture of any century. Shakespeare’s genius is the understanding of human psychology which, despite all the advances in other fields, remains fairly constant throughout the years, making Much Ado about Nothing as relevant today as it will be tomorrow.

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with his daughter Hero, and Beatrice, his niece. A messenger arrives, telling Leonato that Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, an old friend of the governor’s, is coming back from an unnamed war. With Don Pedro is Count Claudio, a young lord from Florence. Signior Benedick of Padua is also in the group of returning soldiers. When Beatrice hears the name of Benedick, she mocks him and everything the messenger says about Benedick. Leonato explains that there is a war of wits between his niece and Benedick. The prince enters with his men and greets Leonato. Benedick and Beatrice exchange witty barbs, not wasting any time with niceties. Leonato invites the men to spend the month at his estate. As the men enter the grounds, Don John the Bastard, an illegitimate brother of the prince, appears. There is tension between Don John and Don Pedro, the prince, but Leonato invites Don John to stay with him, hoping to resolve the strained feelings between the brothers. Claudio mentions to Benedick that he is attracted to Hero, Leonato’s daughter. Benedick makes fun of Claudio for falling in love and considering marriage. Benedick claims that marriage is to be disdained. Women are for entertainment, not love. When Don Pedro, the prince, learns that Claudio is in love, he offers to woo Hero for Claudio and then gain permission from Leonato for Hero’s hand.

Act 1, Scene 2 Leonato’s brother has overheard the conversation between Don Pedro and Claudio and tells Leonato to prepare to answer the prince and agree to give Claudio Hero’s hand. Leonato goes to Hero and prepares her for the proposal, telling her to accept it.

Act 1, Scene 3 Don John, the prince’s illegitimate brother, also hears of this plan. He decides to set up a deception that will wreak havoc with Claudio’s intentions. Don John is jealous of Don Pedro’s attention to Claudio. Don John schemes with Borachio and Conrade, two men who arrived at Leonato’s place with Don John.

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Much Ado about Nothing opens in Messina, Italy. Leonato, the governor of the town, is

Beatrice tries to imagine the best man who could possibly exist on earth. She takes part of one

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Dan Stevens as Claudio, Olivia Darnley as Hero, Janie Dee as Beatrice and Philip Voss as Leonato in Act V, scene iv, at the Theatre Royal, Bath, England, 2005 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

man and places it on another, trying to conjure someone she might be interested in marrying. Then she drops the subject, stating that she will never marry. Meanwhile, Leonato counsels his daughter, telling her to listen carefully to what the prince is about to say to her. Don Pedro approaches Hero, and they leave the scene, taking a walk so they can talk to one another. While they walk, the other characters in the play dance, their faces masked. Beatrice ends up dancing with Benedick. It is not clear if she knows it is he, but she tells him that Benedick is a fool. Benedick is offended, but he does not unmask himself or reveal his identity. Don John approaches Claudio and pretends he does not recognize him. Instead, he asks if Claudio is Benedick. Claudio tells him that he is. Don John then tells Claudio/Benedick that he is concerned that Don Pedro has fallen in love with Hero and is, at that moment, asking for her hand in marriage. Don John says that if the prince goes through with it, he will be marrying beneath his social status. Of course, Claudio is furiously

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jealous, believing that Don Pedro has tricked him. Instead of wooing Hero for Claudio, he believes the prince is wooing her for himself. Claudio asks Don John how he knows Don Pedro is doing this. Don John says that the prince confessed his love of Hero to him. After Don John leaves, Claudio runs away. Beatrice finds Claudio and brings him to Don Pedro, who tells Claudio that Hero has been won and Leonato has agreed to marriage. Hero will marry Claudio. Then the prince and Beatrice talk. Don Pedro tells Beatrice that she has a merry heart. He then asks if she would marry him. But Beatrice turns the prince down, stating that he is too fancy for her. Beatrice and Benedick once again turn on each other, Benedick declaring that he wishes the prince would send him far away so that he will not have to deal with Beatrice any longer. Then Benedick and Beatrice leave, and the prince suggests that Leonato, Hero, and Claudio help him put together a plan to bring Benedick and Beatrice together.

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Act 2, Scene 2

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Don John and Borachio hatch another scheme to thwart the marriage of Hero and Claudio. Borachio, who has been having an affair with Margaret, one of Hero’s ladies-in-waiting, says that he can be in Hero’s bedroom at any time at night. He tells Don John to be at the window of Hero’s bedroom that night and all Don John has to do is to make sure that Don Pedro and Claudio see what is happening at that window.

Don Pedro, Claudio, and Leonato observe changes in Benedick. Benedick says it is because he has a toothache, but the other men say it is because he has fallen in love. They tease him about how he now brushes his hair and is concerned about his looks. Benedick, they say, is now even taking baths and wearing perfume. Benedick tires of the teasing and asks Leonato to walk with him, because Benedick has something to tell him.

Act 2, Scene 3 Still in the afternoon, Benedick is sitting in the garden when he sees Don Pedro, Leonato, and Claudio approach. Benedick decides to hide. He wants nothing to do with any talk of love from Claudio. In an aside, Benedick states that he will never have anything to do with marriage. The prince and the other men have seen Benedick and know that he is hiding from them. They call for a troubadour to sing a song about love. Then they talk about how they have heard Beatrice declare her love of Benedick. Benedick, of course, is caught completely off guard. But the more he hears, the better he likes it, however, he is not sure they are telling the truth. He listens to more and decides that if Leonato is saying that Beatrice loves him, then it must be true. Of course, Beatrice is in love with him, Benedick finally realizes. How could she not be? The men leave and send Beatrice to fetch Benedick for dinner.

Act 3, Scene 1 While Benedick waits, he tries to rationalize having changed his mind about marriage. When Beatrice appears, she is her usual self, but Benedick has changed. He does not argue with her. Instead, he keeps turning some of her barbs to his advantage, reading into them something pleasant, finding signs of love hidden inside them. On her way back to the house, Beatrice overhears Hero and her other lady-in-waiting, Ursula, talking about how they have heard Benedick saying that he loves Beatrice. It does not take long for Beatrice to admit to herself that, in fact, she does love Benedick.

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Don John appears and asks to speak to the prince. Claudio is standing there, but Don John says he can stay as what he is about to say involves Claudio’s future. Don John then tells them both that he has proof that Hero has been unfaithful to Claudio. She has been having an affair with another man. Don Pedro and Claudio cannot believe this. So Don John tells them that he can prove it to them. They are to meet him that night, under the window to Hero’s bedroom. They will see for themselves that Hero is not worthy of marriage.

Act 3, Scene 3 The town’s constable, Dogberry, a man of words that never quite make sense, appears. Dogberry is coming to Leonato’s house to check on the watchmen, who are standing guard outside. Dogberry gives them orders, asks them questions, and corrects their answers, but none of his orders, questions, or corrections are rational. He tells them, for example, that they are to remain silent, which the watchmen interpret to mean that they can go to sleep, and which Dogberry appears to confirm. He also tells them to make sure that any drunkards are told to go home—unless they do not respond to the orders. In that case the guards are to leave them lie where they find them. Before leaving, Dogberry warns the men to keep a close watch on Leonato’s house because there is to be a big wedding in the morning. While the watchmen stand guard and are about to fall asleep, Borachio and Conrade appear. The guards hide and listen, sensing that they are about to hear the details of a scheme. Borachio, unaware that anyone is listening, brags about how he has deceived Don Pedro and Claudio. Borachio has wooed Margaret, Hero’s lady-in-waiting, in front of Hero’s bedroom window, pretending he was wooing Hero.

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Don Pedro and Claudio fell for the trick, believing that Hero was unfaithful. When the guards hear this, they arrest Borachio and Conrade

Act 3, Scene 4 Hero, Margaret, and Beatrice get ready for Hero’s wedding. When Beatrice says that she feels ill, Margaret teases Beatrice about being in love. Ursula, Hero’s other lady-in-waiting, comes in and calls them out to the wedding. Everyone is waiting for them.

Act 3, Scene 5 Dogberry comes to Leonato to tell him about Borachio and Conrade’s scheme. But Dogberry is not very clear about what has happened, and Leonato loses all patience with him. Dogberry says that he has captured two scoundrels, but he fails to tell him what the scoundrels are accused of. Leonato tells Dogberry that he is very busy right then because of the wedding and that Dogberry should examine the men’s story himself. A messenger then appears and tells Leonato that it is time to get to the church for his daughter’s wedding.

Act 4, Scene 1 Everyone is standing before the friar, who is prepared to marry Claudio and Hero. When he asks Claudio: ‘‘You come hither, my lord, to marry this lady?,’’ Claudio surprises everyone by responding, ‘‘no.’’ Leonato tries to clarify the situation, insinuating that the friar has asked the question incorrectly. Leonato says: ‘‘To be married to her.’’ In other words, the friar is marrying them. But Claudio is being married to Hero. The friar then turns his question to Hero, who responds with the appropriate answer, ‘‘I do.’’ The tension is released for a few seconds, until the friar asks if either of them knows any reason why they should not be wed. Instead of answering, Claudio turns to Hero and asks her directly if she knows any reason they should not be wed. No one understands why Claudio is acting so strangely, except, of course, Don Pedro. When Leonato asks why Claudio is acting the way he is, Claudio says that he will not ` wanton.’’ be wed to an ‘‘approved At first, Leonato thinks that it was Claudio himself who was responsible for Hero’s losing her virginity, if that is, in fact, what has happened. Claudio denies this. Then he turns on

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Hero, saying that she is like ‘‘pampered animals / That rage in savage sensuality.’’ Leonato turns to Don Pedro for help, but the prince stands by Claudio, declining to allow Claudio to be linked to ‘‘a common stale,’’ a reference to a low-class prostitute. Claudio then bids farewell to Hero, calling her ‘‘most foul, most fair,’’ exposing what he thinks of her now compared to what he used to think of her. Upon hearing this, Hero collapses. Beatrice calls for help, but Leonato says that, for her shame, Hero is best left dead. If she does wake up from the faint, Leonato swears he will kill her. The friar asks for their patience, stating that he thinks there is a scheme in all this. He suggests that they all pretend that Hero has, indeed, died. In this way, her shame will die with her, the truth will be found out, and then Hero can be reborn. Everyone leaves but Benedick and Beatrice. Benedick professes his love of Beatrice. However, Beatrice is so overwrought about Hero that she has trouble returning Benedick’s love. Eventually she reveals that she too loves Benedick, but she wants him to swear his love to her not in words but in actions. When Benedick asks how he might do this, Beatrice tells him to kill Claudio. Benedick refuses. Beatrice says that Benedick’s refusal to do this kills her. She proclaims: ‘‘O, that I were a man!’’ (a line that is often quoted from this play). She goes on to say that if she were a man, she ‘‘would eat his [Claudio’s] heart in the marketplace.’’ Benedick pleads with Beatrice to be reasonable. Beatrice says that Hero is ‘‘wronged, she is slandered, she is undone.’’ Benedick asks Beatrice to think deeply about this. Does she really believe that Count Claudio has done this to Hero? Beatrice replies, yes. If that is so, Benedick says, then he will challenge Claudio to a duel.

Act 4, Scene 2 In a courtroom-like scene, Dogberry and his assistant Verges appear before the town sexton. The watchmen, as well as Conrade and Borachio, are there. Dogberry stumbles through his accusation of crime against Conrade and Borachio, as the sexton tries to assist Dogberry in the examination procedures. Eventually the truth comes out. Then the sexton tells Dogberry and everyone else in the room that he has just heard

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that Don John has run away and that the marriage between Hero and Claudio has been called off, and Hero, lost in her grief, has died.

Act 5, Scene 1 Leonato is overwhelmed by grief and confusion. His brother tries to comfort him, but Leonato states that it is easy, when you are not the one that is stricken, to tell another to ease up on his pain. Then the two brothers see Don Pedro and Claudio and pursue them. Leonato accuses them of ruining Hero’s good name. He tells them that he is not too old or lacking in energy to challenge them. Before leaving, the brothers say they will have their revenge. Benedick appears. Don Pedro and Claudio are happy to see him. The prince is planning to leave with Claudio and assumes Benedick will be coming with them. Benedick says that because of what they have done to Hero, Benedick will no longer be traveling with them. He tells them that Hero has died and Don John has run away. Then Benedick accuses Claudio of slandering Hero and thus killing her. For this, Benedick says, he challenges Claudio to a duel. Benedick leaves, saying he will wait for Claudio’s answer. Dogberry then appears with Verges, the watchmen, and Borachio and Conrade. Borachio admits what he has done. Don Pedro and Claudio realize their mistake and the consequences it has caused. When Leonato and his brother reappear, the prince and Claudio beg for forgiveness. Claudio says he is willing to accept any punishment from Leonato for having been the cause of Hero’s death. Leonato tells Claudio to go throughout the city and claim Hero’s innocence. Then Claudio needs to write a poem about Hero and sing it in front of her grave. Finally, Leonato tells Claudio that his brother has a daughter, almost the image of Hero. Leonato asks that Claudio marry his niece in place of Hero. Claudio consents to all that Leonato has demanded. Leonato then has Borachio and Conrade taken away.

Act 5, Scene 2 Benedick is seen, attempting to write love poetry to his Beatrice. He fails miserably, deciding that he is not a writer. Beatrice appears and the two admit their love, once again, and flirt with one another. Ursula enters, announcing that Borachio has admitted his scheme. After once again admitting their love to one another, Beatrice and

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS 

There is a DVD of Joseph Papp’s 1973 New York Shakespeare Festival Broadway stage production of Much Ado about Nothing set in a summery ‘‘America’’ just after the Spanish-American War, with Dogberry (Barnard Hughes) as a Keystone cop. Sam Waterston plays Benedick with Kathleen Widdoes as Beatrice. The DVD was produced by Kultur Studio.

The BBC (British Broadcasting Company) produced a television adaptation of Much Ado about Nothing as part of the series The Shakespeare Plays. BBC, 1984.  In 1993, Columbia Tristar produced the movie Much Ado about Nothing (1993) under the direction of Kenneth Branagh, who also played the part of Benedick. Other actors include Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, Michael Keaton, and Keanu Reeves. The film was shot on location in Tuscany, Italy. It is available on DVD. 



The BBC also produced a modernized version of Much Ado about Nothing for television in 2005, setting much of the action in a television studio of the twenty-first century.

Benedick leave to find all the other members of the household.

Act 5, Scene 3 Claudio is at Hero’s tomb. He reads the poem that he has written about Hero’s innocence and the ‘‘slanderous tongues’’ that have caused her death. A song is sung that reflects these same sentiments. Then Claudio promises to visit her tomb each year.

Act 5, Scene 4 Everyone has gathered for the second wedding of Claudio and Hero—everyone but Don Pedro and Claudio. Margaret has been questioned about

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her part in the scheme and is believed when she says that she did not realize that Claudio and the prince were being tricked by her actions with Borachio. Benedick is happy with the turn of events, because now he does not have to kill his friend Claudio. Benedick then takes Leonato to the side and asks for Leonato’s permission to marry his niece, Beatrice. Leonato approves. Leonato tells Hero, Beatrice, Margaret, and Ursula to leave and when he calls for them, they are to return with their faces masked. After the prince and Claudio appear, Leonato calls for the women. Hero steps forward when asked to. Claudio wants to see her face but Leonato says not until Claudio vows to marry her. Then Hero lifts the mask and Claudio realizes it is Hero. As they all prepare to leave for the party to celebrate the marriage, Benedick asks them all to stop. He then calls out for Beatrice and asks her to profess her love for him. Beatrice denies loving him more than as just a friend. So Benedick denies loving Beatrice. But Claudio and Hero display copies of the love poems that both Benedick and Beatrice had tried to write to one another. Benedick and Beatrice realize that they can no longer deny their love and promise to marry. When Benedick is teased about all those things he had previously said against love and marriage, he says he does not care about how he felt in the past. A messenger appears with the news that Don John has been found and captured. Benedick tells the prince to put off thinking about his brother’s punishment. Benedick will help him think up something appropriate tomorrow. Then they all leave to enjoy the music and dance.

CHARACTERS Antonio Antonio is Leonato’s brother. He is present throughout the play but becomes most prominent after Claudio accuses Hero of being unfaithful to him at the wedding. Antonio tries to calm his brother but nonetheless joins his brother in confronting the prince and Claudio, willing to fight them for Hero’s honor. Leonato later tells Claudio that his brother Antonio has a daughter who looks just like Hero and asks Claudio to marry her. Antonio gives Hero (who is masked) to Claudio at the final wedding

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scene, with Claudio believing she is Antonio’s daughter.

Balthasar Balthasar is an attendant to Don Pedro, the prince. It is Balthasar who sings the melancholy love song, ‘‘Sigh No More, Ladies, Sigh No More,’’ in act 2, scene 3, as the prince, Leonato, and Claudio trick Benedick into believing that Beatrice is in love with him.

Beatrice Beatrice is Leonato’s niece and Hero’s cousin. She is a strong-willed woman who knows her mind and is not afraid to speak it. She is content, or so she says, to remain unmarried, suggesting a Shakespearean link, as some scholars have theorized, to Queen Elizabeth I, who never married. Beatrice demonstrates her intelligence through witty barbs that she uses against Benedick from the beginning to the end of the play. Although she uses these barbs to prove that she has no feelings for Benedick, it becomes clear that her feelings for him are strong. She is merely afraid of showing them for what they are, so she masks them with her wit. Even after Benedick confesses his love for her, Beatrice, unlike Hero, does not immediately give in. She wants proof of Benedick’s love and issues Benedick a big challenge. She asks him to kill his friend Claudio, for having shamed Hero. Beatrice tests the love that Benedick claims, rather than just accepting his words. Benedick passes the text by accepting the challenge, because he does truly love Beatrice. Even at the end of the play, when Benedick asks Beatrice to tell everyone that she loves him, she refuses to go first. She does not want to be humiliated, in the event that Benedick is setting her up. Once Benedick has been exposed publicly, however, Beatrice gives in.

Benedick Benedick is a young lord of Padua. One of Don Pedro’s soldiers, he is a confirmed bachelor who initially sees in Beatrice only a verbal sparring partner; each tries to outdo the other in expressing mutual disdain, though they eventually agree to marry. One of Don Pedro’s trusted comrades-inarms, Benedick possesses a brisk, bouncing nature and ready wit. He is a self-confessed bachelor who would prefer to enjoy life while keeping women at

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arm’s length—especially Beatrice, for whom he has a particular, antagonistic regard. His disdain for women, it has been suggested, masks his wary respect for Beatrice, with whom he might have been once involved romantically. As evidence of this, critics note the giddy, schoolboyish behavior Benedick exhibits upon being tricked into believing that Beatrice loves him, rationalizing that Beatrice’s scorn is really a fac¸ade that covers her deep affection for Benedick. Benedick’s newfound passion is put to the test severely after Hero’s humiliation by Claudio. Beatrice commands Benedick to kill Claudio. Benedick is torn between his love for Beatrice and his loyalty to his army comrade. Ultimately, love for Beatrice wins out, and Benedick coldly and insistently challenges Claudio to single combat. All seems headed for a sad and violent parting between the two friends, until Borachio and Conrade confess their guilt in shaming Hero. In the end, Benedick is reconciled with Claudio and engaged to Beatrice, with whom he has a final, friendly skirmish of wit. Critics note that when all of the principal characters are on stage together, the major interest of the audience is not the love-at-first-sight relationship that develops between Hero and Claudio, but rather the merry war between Beatrice and Benedick.

Borachio Borachio is a follower of Don John, the prince’s illegitimate brother. Borachio is having an affair with Margaret, one of the ladies-in-waiting to Hero. It is Borachio who comes up with the plan to trick the prince and Claudio into believing that Hero is unfaithful. Borachio purposely places Margaret at Hero’s window and then calls out Hero’s name, making it look like Borachio is having an affair with Hero. Later Borachio is arrested and tried for his crime. It is his admission that makes Claudio and the prince realize that they have misjudged Hero.

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Pedro, the prince, is after Hero for himself. Although this deeply hurts Claudio, he says nothing of it to Don Pedro, willing, like Hero, to accept whatever is dealt him. Claudio, who claims to be head-over-heels in love with Hero, nonetheless falls for another trick by Don John. The only time Claudio shows any gumption is when he accuses Hero (mistakenly) of cheating on him. He shames her in front of everyone, calling her horrible names and wanting to have nothing to do with her. Even when he hears that she has died, he shows no feelings. Upon learning that he has been set up by Don John and that Hero was innocent, Claudio displays not so much emotion or regret but rather conforms to the role that a count should play. He asks for forgiveness and accepts his punishment, which includes marrying another woman, or so he thinks. When Claudio discovers that the other woman is Hero, he immediately falls back in love with her, forgetting all the negative feelings he so easily succumbed to before. Claudio is one of the military heroes of Don Pedro’s victory over Don John’s forces. He is an impressionable, unimaginative young man who is somewhat out of place in the lively, witty society of Messina. He falls in love with Hero upon first laying eyes on her, believes immediately in her unfaithfulness upon witnessing Borachio’s deception, immediately agrees to marry another woman sight unseen, and then unapologetically enters into marriage with the so-called resurrected Hero. Not surprisingly, critics have described Claudio as one of the least likable lovers in Shakespeare.

Conrade Conrade is a follower of Don John, the prince’s brother. Conrade is with Borachio when the watchmen hear Borachio boasting of how he has fooled the prince and Claudio. Conrade is arrested with Borachio.

Count Claudio

Dogberry

Claudio is a count from Florence who has been fighting at the side of Don Pedro, the prince. He has fallen in love with Hero upon seeing her at Leonato’s. Claudio is shy and unsure of himself and allows Don Pedro to woo Hero for him. Hero also gains permission to marry Claudio from Leonato. However, Claudio is easily tricked by Don John, who informs Claudio that Don

Dogberry is the local constable who has trouble speaking clearly. Dogberry is in charge of the watchmen who overhear Borachio confess that he has tricked the prince and Claudio into believing that Hero is having an affair. Dogberry becomes flustered when he approaches Leonato with the news that he has caught Borachio. Leonato, who becomes impatient with Dogberry,

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shoos the constable away, thus setting into motion the catastrophe at Hero’s wedding. Later, Dogberry returns to Leonato’s and tells everyone what Borachio has done.

Friar Francis Friar Francis represents the church and officiates at the wedding of Claudio and Hero, both times. It is also Friar Francis who tries to calm Leonato, when Hero is accused of being unfaithful, telling Leonato that he suspects that someone is scheming. Friar Francis also suggests that Hero pretend that she is dead.

Hero Hero is Leonato’s daughter. She is young and innocent and falls in love with Claudio. After her marriage is arranged, Hero focuses on her cousin, Beatrice, tricking Beatrice into admitting that she is in love with Benedick. On the day of her wedding to Claudio, Hero enters the church as innocent and pure as ever. However, Claudio has changed and Hero is at a loss as to why this has happened. When Claudio accuses Hero of being unfaithful to him, Hero faints. She is shamed in front of her community and can not handle it. She complies with the friar, then, and fakes her death. After the scheme to slander her has been revealed and Claudio makes amends, Hero is willing to take Claudio back and marries him without much being said between them, as if nothing had happened. In comparison to Beatrice, Hero is weak and too willing to get married. This makes her love appear thin and shallow, and makes it appear that she is marrying in order to be married instead of because she loves Claudio. It has been said often that Hero is, for the most part, a sweet but colorless young woman who is not so much a three-dimensional character as an entity existing to fill a place in the drama. She and Claudio mechanically go through the motions of betrothal, with no development of interest, no initial conflict, nor even any wooing of Hero on Claudio’s part.

Don John Don John is listed as Don Pedro’s bastard brother. Don John is the villain of the play, an undeveloped character who causes trouble, sometimes with little result, and by the end of the play is caught. His presence in the play is felt in his absence almost as much as when he is on stage, which is not often. He has no redeeming values and does not change throughout the play.

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Considered one of the more problematic figures in the play, Don John is a snake-in-the-grass. The bastard half-brother of Don Pedro, he is a rebel and presumably a traitor whose armed uprising results not in his deserved death but in an attempted reconciliation between himself and the perhaps overly kind Don Pedro. The latter fails to see that Don John has a deep-seated grudge that leads him to try to destroy the happiness of the principal figures who defeated him: Don Pedro and Claudio. Don John is thus allowed enough freedom by his captors that he nearly wrecks several lives. Don John is considered, by many critics, to be a cardboard villain, not a well-drawn character.

Leonato Leonato is the governor of Messina, the father of Hero, the uncle of Beatrice, and the brother of Antonio. It is at Leonato’s house that most of this play takes place. He is a loving father and uncle, who wants to see both women married. He is also a gracious and generous host, inviting the group of soldiers with the prince to stay with him for the month. Leonato changes, however, when his daughter is publicly shamed at her wedding to Claudio. He takes the side of the accusers, at first claiming, when Hero faints, that he hopes she dies. If she does not die, Leonato says he is willing to kill her. Once his rage subsides, however, he goes after her accusers, telling them that he will get to the bottom of their accusations. If they had any hand in setting this scheme against her, he is willing to challenge them to a duel. When the mystery is solved, Leonato then returns to his loving self and instantly forgives the prince and Claudio.

Margaret Margaret is a lady-in-waiting to Hero. Margaret is having an affair with Borachio but she is innocent of the scheme that Borachio hatches to make the prince and Claudio believe that Margaret is Hero. Later, Leonato questions Margaret to make sure that she did not know what Borachio was up to. Margaret is quickly cleared and is brought back into the fold of the family.

Don Pedro Don Pedro is the prince of Aragon, the brother of Don John. The prince has led his soldiers in a battle and comes to Leonato’s house at the

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beginning of the play. The prince is a friend of Leonato’s. It is because of this relationship that Leonato invites all the soldiers to stay at his house for the month. Don Pedro is very much involved in the lives of his soldiers, especially Claudio’s and Benedick’s. First the prince woos Hero in Claudio’s name and gains permission from Leonato for Claudio to marry Hero. After the prince asks Beatrice if she will marry him and Beatrice refuses, the prince schemes to bring Benedick and Beatrice together. The prince gathers several of the people at Leonato’s house and has them plant little tidbits of information in the minds of Benedick and Beatrice, pretending that they have heard both of them expressing their love for one another. The trick works, and Benedick and Beatrice finally admit their love Despite the fact that there are bad feelings between Don Pedro and his brother Don John, the prince is easily fooled by his brother. He does not question the actions of Don John when he is brought to the window of Hero the night before Claudio’s marriage to her. Instead, he joins in accusing Hero of being equal to a prostitute. The prince is forgiven by the finale of the play, which Benedick ends on a cute note by telling the prince to get himself a wife.

Ursula Ursula is another of Hero’s ladies-in-waiting. Ursula helps Hero trick Beatrice into believing that Benedick is in love with her.

Verges Verges is the inept assistant to the constable, Dogberry. He and Dogberry represent comic relief in the midst of the more tense parts of the play.

THEMES War of the Sexes The differences between men and women—how they relate to each other, how they misunderstand each other, how they love and repel each other—is a common theme in motion pictures, comics, television shows, and world literature. It also appears throughout Shakespeare’s comedies as well, and Much Ado about Nothing is no exception to the pattern. In this play, much of the conflict between the sexes concerns

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Beatrice and Benedick, with their relentless disdain for each other. Each tries to outdo and outduel the other in crafting the cleverest and most deflating remarks, and the impression is given that their sparring has a long history, one that precedes the action of the play. The goal of each is not to deliver the most crushing, hot-blooded blast but to offer the most coolly disdainful and witty remarks possible. After Benedick and Beatrice actually admit the love they have been hiding under their masks of disdain for one another, the tragedy of Claudio and Hero’s separation causes a different type of war between Benedick and Beatrice. The sudden and newfound tenderness that Benedick and Beatrice have shared reverts to a heated, near-frantic rage on the part of Beatrice, after Benedick hesitates at her command to kill Claudio. Here she turns from employing wit to questioning Benedick’s manhood. In one of the most-often quoted sections of Much Ado about Nothing, she declares, ‘‘O that I were a man for his sake! Or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into curtsies, valor into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones, too. He is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man with wishing: therefore I will die a woman with grieving.’’ This sentiment is one with the words of Balthasar’s song, from act 2, scene 3: ‘‘Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, / Men were deceivers ever / One foot in sea, and one on shore, / To one thing constant never.’’ This song, one of the loveliest in all of Shakespeare’s plays, describes the war between the sexes, set to poetic phrases.

Appearance versus Reality The theme of appearance versus reality has long been considered central to this play’s structure and tone. All of the main characters deceive or are deceived by others at some point during the play. There is the masked ball, during which Beatrice reveals her feelings to Benedick, not knowing that she is speaking directly to him because he wears a mask. There is also the masked bride at the second wedding at the end of the play, so that Claudio does not know what woman he is marrying until Hero reveals herself. There are many other forms of deception, such as the schemes of Don John as he tries to

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Richard Clifford, Keanu Reeves, and Gerard Horan in a scene from the 1993 film Much Ado About Nothing (Ó Samuel Goldwyn/Everett Collection)

trick Claudio, first, into believing that the prince is wooing Hero for himself, and then that Borachio is making love to Hero. When Friar Francis has Hero pretend to be dead, he enters into deception as well. On this theme of deception, many critics have observed that the title of the play contains an Elizabethan pun on the word nothing, with Shakespeare playing off the word noting, which means ‘‘eavesdropping.’’ However, other critics believe that the key to the play’s unity lies in equating the word noting with the meaning ‘‘to observe.’’ In this view, the title suggests that one take note of a situation and make judgments based on observation. In Much Ado about Nothing, there is a failure, some critics argue, to observe and to act sensibly. This is very true in the case of the prince and Claudio failing to grasp the lack of integrity in Don John, who had tried to deceive them before his ultimate trick of making both men believe that Hero was unfaithful. Why do the prince and Claudio not see Don John’s true nature? Why are they so easily duped by Don John?

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Love and Marriage There are grand discussions of love and marriage throughout much of this play, especially by Beatrice and Benedick who swear against both love and marriage, at least at first. They claim they do not believe in such foolishness. For example, when Claudio admits that he has fallen for Hero, Benedick cannot believe him. Benedick tells Claudio if it is love and marriage that Claudio wants, he should go do it. However, Benedick warns Claudio that love and marriage are like putting one’s ‘‘neck into a yoke,’’ and then wearing that yoke for the rest of one’s life. If Benedick ever makes the mistake of falling in love, Benedick tells the prince to ‘‘hang me in a bottle like a cat and shoot at me.’’ Later, in act 2, Beatrice has her own way of explaining that she will never marry, until ‘‘God make men of some other metal than earth.’’ In other words, there is no man on earth that attracts Beatrice enough to cause her ever to think about marriage. Although these two characters make their gestures against love and marriage, Shakespeare’s play does not turn in that

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direction. Shakespeare does, however, create the opposite type of couple, one that falls madly in love without knowing much about one another and not really caring about that detail. Claudio and Hero are infatuated and that is enough to lead them to the altar. Of course, Shakespeare makes it quite clear that Beatrice and Benedick are not as hardened in their commitments to stave off love as they sound, but quite the contrary. They just do not believe they can ever find someone who will meet their standards, which are very high. On a subconscious level, both Beatrice and Benedick know that they have met someone whom they could fall in love with—namely one another— but they can not admit this to their rational minds. They have to be tricked into it. They both want the other person to admit it first. Once Benedick believes that Beatrice has admitted loving him, Benedick gets just as mushy inside with infatuation as Claudio did earlier. Likewise, Beatrice has a similar reaction. Before the end of the play, a double wedding is in order, thus bringing the play’s theme of love and marriage to its fulfillment. However, Shakespeare is a master of representing opposites. And this play is no exception. Don John represents the other side of the loveand-marriage issue. Don John is completely void of love. Having him called the bastard brother immediately puts Don John at a disadvantage, insinuating that lust replaced love and marriage at his conception. It is because of this lack of love that he attacks the prince and tries to destroy the love Claudio has for Hero. However, Shakespeare does not allow his play to turn on Don John’s misery. Love and marriage, rather, are what hold this play together.

Loss of Honor A woman’s loss of honor has significant consequences in this play; even the thought or suspicion of it is devastating for Hero. A woman must be married a virgin, or if that cannot be attained, it is her soon-to-be husband who must have taken her to bed, an act, which Leonato suggests, can be pardoned. As Leonato tries to understand why Claudio is hesitating in the first marriage scene in act 4, he implies that maybe Claudio has been with Hero, and Shakespeare insinuates that Leonato is about to forgive Claudio for this. ‘‘Dear my lord,’’ Leonato says, ‘‘if you in your own proof / Have vanquished the resistance of

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her youth, / And made defeat of her virginity—.’’ But Claudio denies this, saying quickly that he knows what Leonato is about to say, but this is nowhere near the truth of the matter. ‘‘I know what you would say: if I have known her, You will say she did embrace me as a husband,’’ Claudio says. This would be approved, in other words. But the fact that Hero might have had sexual relations with a man other than Claudio is unthinkable. One of the reasons for this is that inheritance was passed down from the father to the firstborn son. In order to prove that the firstborn son was indeed a creation of the husband’s, the newlywed wife had to be a virgin. No matter how much Claudio might have been in love with Hero prior to this knowledge, he can no longer love her, cannot marry her. And not only this, Hero is so publicly shamed by this accusation that her own father is willing to kill her. One could almost forgive Claudio for no longer wanting Hero, at least back in the sixteenth century; but for her own father to want to murder his daughter after obviously loving her from the time of her birth is unforgivable by twenty-first century audiences. It is from these attitudes of Leonato’s that modern audiences can sense how important a woman’s virginity was in Shakespeare’s time. The loss of virginity appears to be a worse crime than murder. There is no mention of a similar pressure on men. Benedick mentions brothels, which implies that he has visited them; and Borachio mentions having an affair with Margaret, Hero’s lady-in-waiting. So the standard of chastity seems to apply only to women of the upper classes. Although the character of Beatrice could easily be likened to a modern women in that she speaks her mind, she is not concerned about having a husband to make her whole and challenges Benedick to prove his love instead of just taking him at his word, there still remains in this play the double standard for men and women, as seen in the emphasis put on a woman’s loss of honor.

Villainy Shakespeare has created much better villains in plays other than Much Ado about Nothing. For example, the character Iago in Othello is probably the best villain Shakespeare ever created. It is not only the level of villainy that makes a character like Iago different from Don John, the villain in this play, it is the development of

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY Neither Beatrice nor Benedick were able to write the courtly poetry popular in Elizabethan England. Look for examples of courtly love poetry, either in Shakespeare’s plays or from some other writer and write two poems: one declaring your love for Beatrice; the other your love for Benedick, as if they had written them to one another. Keep in mind the kind of relationship that Benedick and Beatrice shared in this play. Then read your poems to your class.  Research a typical courtship between two twenty-year-olds who lived in the upper class of Elizabethan England. Gather statistics about such details as how long the courtship might have lasted and how the man and woman might have met. What were the typical traditions in terms of dowries? What would a typical wedding ceremony have been like? Who would have paid for the wedding? Did the father give the bride away? Then present your findings to your class, using your historical details to compare them to contemporary relationships in the United States. 

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If you had an opportunity to talk to Hero, what would you tell her in terms of her marriage to Claudio, knowing what you have learned in the twenty-first century about women and their relationships with men. Ask a friend or classmate to help you present a dialogue in front of your class between Hero (representing a sixteenth-century woman) and you.



Watch a video version of Much Ado about Nothing. Present a report to your class on how seeing the play performed helped you to better understand it. Pay attention to the body language, the action, and the intonation of the actors’ voices so that you can report how these visual and audio aids helped make Shakespeare’s language more cleare.

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the role. Don John is villainous, but his character is very thin. The audience knows very little about him. Things like hints about what drives him, where his anger is coming from, and what pleasure he derives from his misdeeds are all missing from this play. Audiences can assume some things, such as jealousy because he is illegitimate and therefore unable to ever rise to the level of the prince. He may not be as good as Claudio in warfare and maybe that is why he lost his battle against the prince. He may even wish that he could woo Hero for himself; but none of these motives are provided by Shakespeare. The audience, at best, has to speculate. The only thing interesting about Don John is that he is able to pull the wool over the prince’s and Claudio’s eyes two times in a row. However, that makes Don John less believable, not more so. Don John’s character therefore stays on the surface. Don John represents villainy but only through two meager tricks, which are quickly uncovered and, in the end, cause no long-lasting harm.

STYLE Song Some critics claim that the song sung in act 2, scene 3 in Much Ado about Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful. The title of the song is ‘‘Sigh No More, Ladies, Sigh No More,’’ and its words tell of the inconstancy of men. The song is written in rhyming verse, of an ac / bd / eg / fh pattern, meaning that alternating lines rhyme. There are two verses, and the last two lines of the first stanza are repeated in the last two lines of the second stanza. Each line is written in what is termed heptameter, or seven beats to a line, with each line containing an end rhyme. Each stanza contains eight lines, which means that each stanza is called an octave. The song is rather lighthearted, especially in its refrain of ‘‘Into Hey, nonny nonny,’’ which suggests that women should make light of their sighs and not get lost in the gloom of their emotions, which are aroused by men being difficult, and which cause women pain.

Witty Linguistic Competition People in the upper classes of Elizabethan England displayed their education and intelligence through witty conversations. In this play,

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Beatrice and Benedick are champions at this type of wit as they banter back and forth, each one trying to outwit the other. The wittiness of their dialogue does two things, besides showing off their intelligence: it helps them to keep their true feelings hidden and acts almost like a competition between them, as if one of them can win it and then walk away from the other, claiming victory. Beatrice even comments on this in act 1, scene 1, when she says: ‘‘You always end with a jade’s trick. I know you of old.’’ She says this to Benedick, when he ends the witty dialogue too abruptly. A jade is an untrustworthy horse that tricks its rider, possibly by pulling up short when the rider least suspects it, thus throwing the rider from its back. Beatrice is in the throes of her conversation with Benedick and wants it to continue because she wants to outsmart Benedick. However, he silences her with a remark that leaves her nowhere to go. Thus, Benedick claims victory for having delivered the last witty line.

Tragicomedy Technically, Much Ado about Nothing has all the elements of a Shakespearean comedy: It contains at least one journey of a young woman from the virginal state to that of matrimony, or the journey of a young woman out of her family’s control into marriage. The trip is seldom smooth: obstacles are presented as the young lovers attempt to reach the day of their wedding. A comedy also requires some form of deception or the wearing of masks. And a comedy ends with a wedding. This play meets those criteria, but there is more. There is, for instance, the villainy of Don John to consider, as well as the shame of Hero and her supposed death. Because of these elements some scholars have labeled this play a tragicomedy, a cross between a tragedy and a comedy. By adding the tragic elements, in some ways hinting at Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, especially in the parallels between the friars and the mock deaths of Juliet and Hero, Shakespeare adds depth and tension to his comedy. Likewise, the addition of Don John and his tricks makes the audience question whether Hero and Claudio will ever really wed. Another tragic element is Beatrice’s request that Benedick prove his love to her by killing Claudio and thus avenging the awful shame and ruin of Hero’s reputation.

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Animal Imagery Shakespeare uses a lot of animal imagery in this play, making references to animals to more fully define a person or a person’s actions. For example, in the opening lines of the play, the messenger, who announces to Leonato that the prince and some of his men are coming, describes Claudio as ‘‘doing in the figure of a lamb the feats of a lion.’’ In just a few words, the messenger describes Claudio’s character, his psychology, and his actions. Shakespeare uses animal imagery here to give his audiences a mental picture to help them immediately grasp the significance of Claudio and what he has done. Claudio seems like a very mild-mannered young man, meek, and a good follower. However, when Claudio had to face battle, he must have surprised his fellow soldiers with his fierce attitude, slaughtering his enemies as fiercely as a lion. Animal imagery works because everyone knows the general traits of certain animals, such as the sheep and the lion. The contrast between these two animals is dramatic. In addition, Shakespeare’s audience would have been familiar with Biblical references to the lamb and the lion. By using the lamb and the lion to describe Claudio, Shakespeare has told a significant background story about Claudio in just a few words.

Plot and Subplot—Which Is Which? It is not clear, and this is unusual for Shakespeare’ plays, which is the plot and which is the subplot. There are two sets of lovers, not unusual in Shakespeare’s comedies, but what appears to be the main focus of the play, the relationship between Hero and Claudio, is easily overshadowed by the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick. Since Hero is the daughter of Leonato, whereas Beatrice is only his niece, it would seem that Hero’s love affair would take center stage. However, Hero’s and Claudio’s lines are less entertaining, and some critics have even come right out and said they were dull. This is far from the praise that the dialogue between Beatrice and Benedick has received, going back as far as when the play was first introduced. At one point, the play was even retitled Beatrice and Benedick. However, it is Hero’s and Claudio’s relationship, dull though it may be, that drives the plot forward. Most of the action is dependent on

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what develops between them. Don John, for example, does not plot against Benedick but rather against Claudio. Benedick does not defile Beatrice’s reputation as Claudio does Hero’s, thus leading to the challenge against Claudio, the faked death of Hero, and finally, the wedding that closes the play. But if Beatrice and Benedick were removed from the play, chances are the play would completely disintegrate. Claudio and Hero’s affair is not enough to carry the play on its own. First of all, they are not very funny; and since this is a comedy, they should at least be entertaining. There is little passion behind their words; and they take what is given to them and barely question it. On the other hand, the meat of the story, the part that draws audiences in and keeps them awake, is the sparring, and finally the coming together, of Beatrice and Benedick, the true heroes of the play.

Wordplay to Create Laughter Shakespeare uses wordplay to make his audience laugh. His characters take turns playing on one another’s words, such as Beatrice does in the opening scene of the play when the messenger arrives, announcing the approach of the prince and his soldiers. For example, when the messenger says of Benedick: ‘‘And a good soldier too, lady.’’ Beatrice turns the messenger’s words around so that rather than meaning that Benedick was good in war, it sounds like Benedick was good in bed. Beatrice takes the word too that the messenger has spoken and replaces it with the word to. Beatrice says: ‘‘And a good soldier to a lady, but what is he to a lord?’’ By making this play on words, Beatrice has wiped out all of Benedick’s military conquests and brings the conversation down a few notches, wrapping the message in sexuality. When the conversation continues, Beatrice turns the messenger’s words again. ‘‘A lord to a lord, a man to a man, stuffed with all honorable virtues,’’ the messenger says. In other words, he is saying that Benedick can stand as an equal to any lord or any man. However, Beatrice focuses on the word stuffed and changes the whole perception. ‘‘He is no less than a stuffed man,’’ she says, implying that either Benedick is full of himself or is a replica of a human being but not completely real.

Italy as Setting There is no real significance to having this play set in Italy. There are wars in England as well as Italy. Likewise, the villainy of Don John could

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easily be found in Shakespeare’s country. So why is this play set in Italy? One reason might be to give the audience a distance from their English reality. It is so much easier to laugh at people of another culture. So in placing this play and all the deception, misunderstanding, and social behaviors in a foreign country, the English audience members of Shakespeare’s time could enjoy a good laugh without feeling self-conscious or defensive. These are someone else’s problems, they could say. These are someone else’s foibles. No self-examination is necessary because the playwright is depicting someone else.

Prose instead of Poetry Many of Shakespeare’s plays are written in blank verse, a type of poetry that is characterized by measured lines of five pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables with no end rhymes. However, Much Ado about Nothing is written mostly in prose, which means there is no ordered form but rather normal conversational patterns. Often, Shakespeare uses blank verse to elevate a character’s lines, such as a military leader, like King Henry V, talking to his troops before a war; or Marc Antony delivering a speech upon the death of Julius Caesar. Much Ado about Nothing has no grand speeches such as those. Most of the dialogue is among peers, in the form of couples or very small groups. The atmosphere is relaxed and, for the most part, very lighthearted. There are exceptions though. When Shakespeare writes in prose for the majority of the lines then switches to verse, it is done to call attention to whatever is being said. An example occurs in act 1, scene 1, when Claudio talks about his feelings for Hero. This is an important part of the play. Claudio’s speech touches on the main theme of the play, which is love and the relationship between a man and a woman. Claudio’s lines, as well as those of Don Pedro’s, are written in verse. The verse is set off from the regular prose dialogue in several ways. First, the right hand of the text does not reach the full right-hand margin. This is because each line contains only ten syllables. Second, each line starts with a capital letter even when that word does not begin a new sentence. If the verse is read out loud, the meter or beat of the line becomes noticeable, with each line’s beat matching the others. From line 284 in act 1, scene 1, to line 323, Don Pedro and Claudio speak in verse, as if their combined conversation were one poem.

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Messina, Italy Located at the northeast corner of Sicily, Messina, Italy, with its population of almost one-half million is the third-largest city in Sicily. Sicily sits at the so-called toe of the boot that is the mainland of Italy. Greeks, Romans, Goths, Arabs, Normans, Spaniards, and the English have all, at one time or another, claimed Messina as their own. In the seventeenth century, Messina was considered one of the greatest of European cities. The city has a great port, used for merchant ships as well as for the military. In 1908, the city was hit with a double catastrophe, a large earthquake and a devastating tsunami, which destroyed most of the city’s structures and took 60,000 lives.

The Italian Wars A series of wars were fought on Italian soil between 1494 and 1559 and were referred to as the Italian Wars. It is unclear what year Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing is set in, but it is possible that the prince and his soldiers were coming home from fighting in one of the latter battles of these wars. The wars were over the control of land and an extended power among the monarchs of several countries including Spain, France, England, and Austria. Where city-states such as Florence and Rome were once home to mighty navies as well as to the leaders in the renewed interest in history and art known as the Renaissance, at the end of the wars, all the power in what is now Italy was at best second-rate in comparison to countries such as Spain.

Role of Women in England in Shakespeare’s Time Not only were women not allowed to act in Shakespeare’s plays (all parts were played by men or boys in Elizabethan England), women also had very little to do in any role outside of the home. Typically, women were the creators and nursemaids of the future generations, staying at home either pregnant or taking care of small children. A typical woman, if her physical condition allowed, gave birth every two years. Bearing and raising children was considered an honorable occupation at that time, so in some ways, men and women held equal status within different roles. This equality did not run through every aspect of their lives, though. Women could not attend school (although they could be

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educated at home), could not vote, could not serve in the military, nor hold a political office. Except for the monarchy, women did not inherit their father’s titles (duke, earl, baron, etc.). It is rather ironic that some of the female characters in Shakespeare’s plays are very strong-willed, sharp-tongued, and independent, while, at the same time, women were not allowed to play these roles on the stage during Shakespeare’s time. Acting was not considered an honorable occupation for women.

Female Roles in Shakespeare’s Plays Until 1660, only men could act on stage. The profession of acting was not very credible, with many of the early plays presented in inns by acting troupes that traveled around the countryside in large wagons. It was considered immoral for there to be women in the group of actors. In addition, there were laws against woman playing any of the female roles. Instead the female roles were acted by young teenage boys, who trained with older actors, learning feminine mannerisms, makeup, and such, as best as they could. The young boys received the lowest wages of the acting troupe. The law against women acting on stage was relevant only in England. Other European countries allowed women actors.

Contemporary Playwrights of Shakespeare’s Time Literature during the reign of Queen Elizabeth was blossoming. This was the time of the Renaissance in England, and the queen was a great supporter of the arts. The Renaissance, literally a rebirth, brought with it new ways of thinking and creating. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are considered the Golden Age of English literature. A contemporary of Shakespeare during this Golden Age was the playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), named by some as the father of English tragedy. Marlowe was also considered a master of blank verse, with his play Tamburlaine the Great (1587) being the first popular drama to use blank verse in English. Marlowe’s Jew Of Malta (first performed c. 1589) was probably one of Shakespeare’s sources for The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596). There is a speculative notion, since Marlowe died so young, that he faked his own death, then took on the identity of William Shakespeare because he was in trouble under his

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1600s: In the early 1600s in England it is considered immoral, and, more to the point, it is against the law for women to appear on stage. Today: Today there are many women involved in acting careers on stage, in television, and on film. However, most leading female roles, especially in film, are written for younger women, leaving most actresses over forty with only minor roles to play.



1600s: Messina, with its large port in the Mediterranean Sea, is a thriving city of merchants and noble families. Trade from all over the world passes through its ports as do vast fleets of military ships. Today: Messina is the doorway to Sicily, which has become a great tourist destination because of Sicily’s mild weather, great historic sites, and good Italian food. The area is also known as the birthplace of the Mafia.



1600s: Shakespeare’s plays are performed in front of enthusiastic audiences at the Globe Theatre in London.

own identity. There is no proof of this; but it is an interesting concept. Thomas Kyd was another English playwright who was very instrumental in legitimizing Elizabethan drama. Like Marlowe, Kyd also has controversy surrounding his name. Some eighteenth-century scholars believed they found a play called Hamlet, written by Kyd, that predates Shakespeare’s play of the same name, possibly making it the source of Shakespeare’s work. Kyd’s best known work was The Spanish Tragedie (c. 1589), possibly the most popular and influential tragedy of his time. Kyd was in a company of actors sponsored by Lord Strange, the same company that Christopher Marlowe belonged to. Kyd and Marlowe were roommates and were arrested for what was called heretical material, possibly dealing with atheism. Kyd was

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Today: Shakespeare’s plays are performed all over the world. Many scholars focus all their attention on the works of Shakespeare. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has the world’s largest collection of Shakespearean material and is entirely dedicated to providing studies of Shakespeare’s works and presenting his plays. 

1600s: Queen Elizabeth holds a tight rein on the material presented in plays. The dramatists who criticize the government or go against the religious views of the crown are questioned and sometimes punished. Today: British drama is experiencing a burst of creativity by young playwrights such as Mark Ravenhill and Moira Buffini, who are pushing the boundaries of what British audiences have grown used to seeing on stage. New works are filled with sex, violence, and what is called street poetry. These plays focus on topics such as consumerism and problems of violence.

tortured and released. Marlowe was questioned and the next day killed. After this, Kyd was not allowed back into the theater company. He died the next year. Ben Jonson (c. 1572–1637) wrote his first popular hit, Every Man in His Humour in 1598 and William Shakespeare played one of the characters when it was performed. Comedies were in vogue at that time, and attempting to take advantage of his success, the next year, Jonson wrote Every Man out of His Humour, which is said to have been almost as successful. In 1601, Jonson was asked to revise Kyd’s successful play, The Spanish Tragedie, which he did. Jonson wrote plays that had political themes, which often got him into trouble. However, when King James I came to the throne in 1603, Jonson fared better. It was during the beginning of King James’s rule that

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Jonson wrote his best plays. These included the dramas that he is most well known for: Volpone (1606), a comedy about greed and lust, and The Alchemist (1610), a comedy that revolves around a swindle. Jonson was considered the intellectual writer of the times. In contrast, Jonson saw Shakespeare as a crowd pleaser. They knew each other and often included remarks (actually jibes or digs) in their work that reflected any disagreements they were having between them.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Many scholars classify Much Ado about Nothing as one of Shakespeare’s more popular comedies, one, at least since the eighteenth century, that is most often staged. As the critic Andrew Dickson, in his book The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, describes the play, Much Ado about Nothing ‘‘fizzes with holiday spirit.’’ It is lighthearted, at least on the surface. Harold C. Goddard, in his The Meaning of Shakespeare, refers to this play as ‘‘a study in the egotism of youth, its sentimental and romantic egotism in Claudio, its antiromantic and intellectual egotism in Beatrice and Benedick.’’ The play depicts this egotism but then allows the characters involved to escape from it and to learn through a series of lessons that help the characters to mature and realize that love can be an enriching experience. In Maurice Charney’s book All of Shakespeare, the author comments on various characters. On Benedick, Charney writes, ‘‘Like other reluctant males in Shakespearean comedy, Benedick is carried away against his conscious will to love Beatrice, and Beatrice too loves him in spite of herself. The witty war in the play turns on the conflict between powerful impulse and equally powerful commitment to gender pursuits.’’ Charney continues, ‘‘The comedy is designed to show that neither Benedick nor Beatrice can get away with such sacrilegious protests against love.’’ Although Charney praises the part of the play that features the verbal sparring between Beatrice and Benedick, he is not so pleased with the subplot that involves Don John, which Charney states, ‘‘leaves something to be desired in the way of psychological credibility, especially in a play where Beatrice and Benedick are such believable characters.’’ There are too many holes in the character of Don John. Shakespeare does not explain why Don John is so vengeful, for one.

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Then Charney points out that much of the villainy in this play is ‘‘set in a comic context of the bumbling watch, incomparably played by Dogberry, Verges, and their officers.’’ Charney describes Dogberry as one who ‘‘is always earnest and sincere and never overtly comic, which is the secret of his success.’’ It is through Dogberry, Charney claims, that the villainy in this play is undercut and therefore ‘‘renders it harmless. It is as if Don John and his malicious companions are not allowed to appear in their true colors in a comedy. They are rendered impotent by the context.’’ This might be what makes Don John a thin character, placing him in a position that ‘‘is only peripherally related to the villains of tragedy. He is isolated in Much Ado about Nothing and deliberately separated from the main action, except as a plot catalyst.’’ In the Essential Shakespeare Handbook, coauthored by Leslie Dunton-Downer and Alan Riding, the authors write that ‘‘No Shakespearean lovers enjoy quarrelling more than Beatrice and Benedick.’’ They continue: ‘‘Shakespeare is especially careful to balance serious and light layers of action [in this play], preventing the false death of Hero and the rage of her father Leonato from turning the comedy into a more disturbing kind of play.’’ Instead, the play is ‘‘skillfully built as characters overhear conversations, often laden with misinformation to trick the eavesdropper.’’ Then the authors state: ‘‘Throughout, comical prose exchanges advance the action while keeping it light.’’ As they list the attributes of the various characters, Dunton-Downer and Riding write: ‘‘Don John and Borachio are deliciously transparent villains who enjoy spinning their dastardly plot; and Dogberry and Verges are among Shakespeare’s most charmingly comical law enforcement officers.’’ Despite the fact that some of the wordplay has ‘‘worn so thin as to be incomprehensible in current English,’’ the authors believe that most audience members will ‘‘readily understand that Beatrice and Benedick mock one another because they are too tough-minded to speak comfortably about love.’’ Frank Kermode, in his The Age of Shakespeare, describes the plot of Much Ado about Nothing as an old one. ‘‘It will appear to modern audiences that the wicked plotter succeeds in disgracing not the innocent Hero but Claudio, for his condemnation of his bride is coarse and public, and even when he knows her to have been innocent he is apparently unmoved by the report of her death.’’ This might be one of the many reasons why the

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subplot, the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick is so appealing. ‘‘The wit combats of these characters were apparently what always pleased most [audiences].’’ Kermode then explains that ‘‘verbal wit, considered an index of intelligence, was highly valued in all the aristocracies of Europe.’’ Kermode then adds: ‘‘We need not suppose that Elizabeth’s courtiers’’ were all as witty ‘‘as Beatrice and Benedick; but they doubtless spoke in lithe and resourceful prose, not altogether remote from what Shakespeare made of it in writing Much Ado About Nothing. In The Friendly Shakespeare, Norrie Epstein describes this play as one that is ‘‘best known for its brilliant lovers, the dazzling Beatrice and Benedick.’’ Epstein then states that ‘‘Beatrice is one of Shakespeare’s most loquacious—and engaging—heroines.’’ Epstein continues: Throughout the play she and Benedick exchange insults when it’s obvious to everyone but themselves that they are drawn to each other. As in The Taming of the Shrew [another of Shakespeare’s comedies], Shakespeare reveals that those who love deepest are usually those who are most guarded against it. Coolness and witty detachment are the best defense against the confusions of the heart.

CRITICISM Steve Cassal Cassal focuses on the minor character of Dogberry, and specifically the slander directed his way by Conrade. However, the slander—in which Conrade calls Dogberry an ‘‘ass’’—‘‘happens to be true and . . . represents its subject accurately,’’ notes Cassal. In Much Ado About Nothing, the slander of Hero has attracted a great deal of critical attention. Harry Berger, S. P. Cerasano, Barbara Everett, and A. R. Humphreys, among others, have commented on the slander and its effects on the young heroine. When Claudio describes Hero as a ‘‘stale,’’ ‘‘an approved wanton,’’ and a ‘‘rotten orange’’ during the church scene (4.1), his remarks constitute slander as defined by the English secular courts during Shakespeare’s lifetime—they are false, malicious misrepresentations that attempt to defame or injure (Helmholz xvii, xl, lxxii–lxxxvi, and the OED). However, there is another type of slander in Much Ado, one that tends to be overlooked by critics: that of Dogberry, whom Conrade calls an ‘‘ass.’’ Conrade’s description of

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DOGBERRY’S DEFAMATION MAY BE CONTRASTED WITH HERO’S IN THAT THE COMIC CHARACTER, UNLIKE THE HEROINE, NEVER SEEMS TO GRASP FULLY THE NATURE OF THE SLANDER THAT IS LEVELED AGAINST HIM.’’

Dogberry is malicious (as well as exasperated), but it is neither false nor a misrepresentation. It is slander that happens to be true and that represents its subject accurately. The labeling of Dogberry as an ass is presented comically. Part of the joke is that Dogberry publicizes his own slander, bringing it to much wider report than it would otherwise attain, as he proclaims, ‘‘remember that I am an ass’’ and ‘‘forget not that I am an ass’’ (4.2.73–74, 75). Whereas Hero wanted her slander to be erased as soon as possible, Dogberry shouts it to the heavens, or rather to the authorities, urging that the slur against him be written down to inscribe it permanently in Messina’s official record: ‘‘O, that I had been writ down an ass!’’ (4.2.84–85). While Hero was painfully aware of the effects of slander on her reputation, her place in society, and her marriage prospects, Dogberry seems clueless not only of the impact of being publicly labeled an ass, but of the meaning of the word. This may be one of many instances where the relation between language and meaning escape him, and it may be the one that displays his comprehension problems at their most basic level. Whereas in other cases he confuses relatively sophisticated terms—‘‘damnation’’ and ‘‘redemption,’’ for instance—here he does not seem to understand the meaning of ‘‘ass.’’ However, there is also a sense that, despite his cluelessness, he does somehow grasp the meaning of the slander and wants society to note the damage that has been done to him. In this respect, ‘‘Oh, that I had been writ down an ass!’’ becomes a lament over lost evidence, an expression of regret that there is no official documentation of his slander, and thus no way to recover his reputation. Dogberry implicitly believes that the written word has more power, more authority, than the spoken one, and he

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Janie Dee as Beatrice and Aden Gillett as Benedick in Act II, scene i, at the Theatre Royal, Bath, England, 2005 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

mourns the loss of written evidence to support his contention that he has been defamed. Dogberry’s defamation may be contrasted with Hero’s in that the comic character, unlike the heroine, never seems to grasp fully the nature of the slander that is leveled against him. But the constable’s defamation also resembles Hero’s. Dogberry, like Hero, is a vulnerable figure within Messina society, and both characters rely on the good offices of powerful males. Indeed, Dogberry is feminized and has the marginalized status of a woman throughout the play. He even describes himself as ‘‘as pretty a piece of flesh in all of Messina’’ (4.2.79), a line that probably evoked a great deal of laughter in Shakespeare’s time when uttered by the comic actor Will Kemp, for whom Shakespeare created the character of Dogberry (in the 1600 quarto the name ‘‘Will Kemp’’ is one of the speech tags for Dogberry). But beneath the comedy one notices that Dogberry sees himself much as the men of Messina see Hero: as a pretty piece of flesh, an object, a piece of property. Dogberry parodies this kind of male gaze directed at women. Like Hero, Dogberry lacks the verbal

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facility to defend himself, though his problem is not a lack of words, as we see in the heroine, but rather a mangling of language. He, like Hero, cannot use words effectively enough to mount a defense against slander. His cries for justice, like Hero’s, fall on deaf ears, but like Hero he is vindicated at the end. He may be an ass, but he is instrumental in catching the villains of the piece. Like Hero, Dogberry ‘‘hath had losses’’ (4.2.82). Usually these are interpreted as being losses of money, property or possessions, but one wonders if Dogberry has not also suffered the loss of his reputation, if his ‘‘years’’ and his ‘‘place’’ were disrespected even before his encounter with Conrade and Boracchio. The men of the watch serve many functions in the play. One, of course, is comic relief. They provide a counterpoint to—and perhaps a parody of—the macho posturing of Don Pedro and the other manly men of the Messina Men’s Club. With their malaprops and non sequiturs the watch also offer a comic use of language that counterbalances the witty, intelligent and sophisticated banter of Beatrice and Benedick. Not all

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written sometime between 1594 and 1596, is one of the most often produced Shakespearean comedies in contemporary times. It is a story of four young people, a troupe of amateur actors, and their adventures when they encounter fairies in the woods.



Another interesting comedy is Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597). In this play a foolish, jealous husband tries to prove that his wife is having an affair with a royal knight. The tables are turned when the wife becomes wise to her husband’s attempts to catch her in the arms of the knight.



Joan Silsby’s The Devil’s Bride: A Sequel to William Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing takes the reader deeper into the play, filling out details that go unanswered in Shakespeare’s version. This fictional work begins where Shakespeare left off, one week after the young Hero and Claudio have married. Much attention is given to Don John, creating another side to this somewhat flat character in Shakespeare’s version.

of the watch’s functions are comic, however. In Much Ado, as Jean Howard has suggested, Dogberry and Verges demonstrate that ‘‘beneath the world of unstable appearance there is a world of essences to which man has access if he has, parodoxically, either careful noting skill or strong powers of intuition’’ (108). Dogberry and Verges ‘‘intuitively know a thief despite misunderstanding his language’’ (108). And Dogberry uses his intuition to sense when he is slandered even when he cannot fully grasp the meaning of what is said against him. One should also note that the church scene—the nastiest scene in the play, and the one that Much Ado must struggle to accommodate within its comic framework—is sandwiched

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In the mood for a modern romance? Try Susan Andersen’s All Shook Up (2001). This book is filled with some of the same elements as Shakespeare’s play, such as two characters who think they hate each other to begin with, then fall in love; and a villain who is out to get them both. Set in eastern Washington, this is a fun read.



For a more elegant love story, but still a funny one, read E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908). Lucy Honeychurch, a young British woman, leaves one suitor at home and finds another in Italy. She must make a choice. Will it be the practical one or the one with heart? This book is a classic.



The Shakespearean scholar Alexander Leggatt looks at the comedies of sixteenth-century England in his work, Introduction to English Renaissance Comedy (1999). Comedy was flourishing in this period. It was also changing form. Leggatt provides a comprehensive examination of how comedy was used to analyze Renaissance relationships in the English court as well as in the countryside.

in between two scenes that feature Dogberry and the watch. These comic scenes are meant to cushion the negative impact of the church scene, and it is primarily through this cushioning that the ugliness of that scene is absorbed within the comic spirit of Much Ado. Structurally, the scenes of the watch distract the audience from the vile activities of the nuptial that goes wrong. Conrade’s slander of Dogberry, following on the heels of Claudio’s slander of Hero, fuses the tragic with the comic, lessening the impact of Hero’s plight. Indeed, through comedy, Hero’s debacle is linked to that of Dogberry, and so the play accommodates the sordid business of the church scene and maintains its comic trajectory.

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IN MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, CLAUDIO IS THE PRIME EXAMPLE OF A CHARACTER WHO TASTES ONLY TEA ONCE TOLD THAT IS WHAT HE IS DRINKING.’’

Source: Steve Cassal, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing,’’ in The Explicator, Vol. 64, No. 3, Spring 2006, pp. 138–141.

Jackie Shead In this essay, Shead explores the ‘‘power of report’’—how ‘‘what we are told profoundly influences our perceptions and judgements.’’ The critic focuses on the character of Claudio, who is particularly susceptible to misreporting, while contrasting him with other characters such as Beatrice who are more immune to bad reports. It’s a strange thing—the power of report. I was once handed a hot drink with the decisive information: ‘Here’s your coffee.’ It took me nearly half the cup to trust my taste buds and tell my host he had given me tea (while he was coming to the conclusion that his tea ‘tasted funny’). This, of course, is a major idea of Much Ado About Nothing—that what we are told profoundly influences our perceptions and judgements. In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio is the prime example of a character who tastes only tea once told that is what he is drinking. In preparation for Don John’s major deception, the audience is shown Claudio’s susceptibility in the masked ball scene. Although he should expect to see Don Pedro’s proxy wooing, Claudio is quickly ready to see what Don John tells him: that he has been double-crossed and the Prince ‘woos for himself’. Later, faced with Don John’s more damaging misreporting, Claudio does not believe in Hero’s infidelity on hearsay alone. But it is clear that, even before he sees the scene staged on her balcony, he is inclined to do so. He promises: If I see anything tonight why I should not marry her tomorrow, in the congregation, where I should wed, there will I shame her. (III.ii.112–14)

A decent lover might threaten Don John with a duel if he failed to support his accusations;

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but Claudio is already planning revenge on Hero for her possible misdeeds, not on her accuser for possible slander. None of this is surprising. To Claudio ‘beauty is a witch’ and as early as Act 1 Scene i he needs reassurance that Hero is worthy and that Don Pedro is not praising her simply to ‘fetch him in’. In Claudio, Don John can draw from a well of latent mistrust and he seems to know this. Instead of labelling Hero explicitly, he tells Claudio to ‘think you of a worse title’, and lets suspicion and insecurity do the rest. Shakespeare intends irony, then, when he has Claudio ask the wedding party ‘Are our eyes our own?’ as if the reply, like Hero’s guilt, is self-evident. Clearly the answer is ‘Not in your case’. Claudio is constantly ‘borrowing’ the vision of others. A more comic treatment of the same idea occurs in the Beatrice-Benedick relationship. Once convinced she loves him, Benedick is sure he spies signs of love in Beatrice, though her behaviour at that moment (end of Act II Scene iii) is as spiky and combative as ever. In fact, most characters in the play are subject to such misnoting under the influence of misreport. One possible exception is Beatrice. The play avoids any serious challenge to her claim to ‘have a good eye’. For example, Shakespeare arranges his scenes so that Beatrice never encounters Benedick supposing him in love with her while he shows no sign of it. Though tricked into love with Benedick, she believes what she hears about him in the orchard ‘better than reportingly’. Therefore, Beatrice, like Claudio, can be made to swallow the bait, but not if it runs counter to her judgement of character. Claudio lacks such judgement, leaving him prone to scandalmongers. With the possible exception of Beatrice, the audience of Much Ado About Nothing has the luxury of being better informed than any of the characters (even Don John, who will learn that his accomplice has been arrested later than we do), and therefore feeling much cleverer than those on stage. This is necessary for Shakespeare’s purpose: he needs an alerted audience, fully apprised of the facts, to appreciate the haste, folly and alarming consequences of on-stage errors. In fact, we are kept so well informed that there is a danger we might get complacent. Is the audience intended to feel exempt from the influence of misreport? Or does the play set any bait for its watchers? My belief is it does, and one such instance comes from an unlikely source: the benign and perceptive Friar.

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Like Beatrice, Friar Francis seems to have a good eye and manages to detect the truth about Hero simply by noting her carefully. Impressed by this, some critics . . . have been inclined to accept other things the Friar says which are well intentioned but actually unreliable. The Friar’s plan connects to the power of report in two ways. First, he makes claims for the effects of report on another character, saying when Claudio hears of Hero’s death: then shall he mourn— If ever love had interest in his liver— And wish he had not so accused her: (IV.i.230–32) Second, the Friar’s plan is itself a report of what we can expect to see, just as Don John indicated to Claudio what he would see on Hero’s balcony. Both these claims prove false. The report of Hero’s death does not have the expected impact, and so we do not see the behaviour from Claudio that the Friar predicts—or certainly not when the Friar predicts we will see it. The morning after the wedding (Act V Scene i) a grieving Leonato and his brother encounter Don Pedro and Claudio in the streets and there is an ugly fracas. If Hero’s ‘death’ has not reached their ears before, it certainly does when Leonato tells Claudio that his daughter lies buried with her ancestors. The only textual sign of Claudio’s reaction is an indignant response to the charge that his villainy has killed Hero. This encounter over, Benedick immediately enters (to deliver his challenge) and is informed by Claudio ‘We had like to have had our two noses snapped off with two old men without teeth’ (V.i.115–16). There is not only little sign of mourning Hero here, but mockery of her relatives’ enraged grief. It is possible to perform this line with bluff humour, suggesting it hides discomfort and misery (Claudio does welcome Benedick’s entrance saying he and Don Pedro are ‘high-proof melancholy’). But if Claudio and Don Pedro proceed to tease Benedick chiefly to cheer themselves up, then it is unpleasant to watch how successful they are. Don Pedro reports in humorous vein Beatrice’s feelings for Benedick and concludes ‘the old man’s daughter told us all’, which Claudio confirms with ‘All, all’ (V.i.175–76). The ‘old man’s daughter’ is, of course, Hero. Not only is there no sign of remorse at Hero’s death; there is no tact or discretion in referring to her. When Benedick, his challenge delivered,

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departs with ‘you have killed a sweet and innocent lady’ (v.i.188–89), the remark does not strike home either. Any gravity in his charge is brushed aside, and Claudio and Don Pedro discuss the challenge as the kind of utter foolishness a man commits once he is in love. In short, Claudio makes too good a job of hiding grief to be feeling much of it. But the playwright does not leave the matter there. Later in the scene Borachio confesses, and Claudio says: Sweet Hero, now thy image doth appear In the rare semblance that I loved it first. (V.i.245–46) The ‘now’ is telling—not before, but only now. The Friar suggested Claudio would mourn for Hero even ‘though he thought his accusation true’ (IV.i.233). The opposite is shown to be the case. There is no sign of remorse until Claudio is sure his accusation is false. The Friar’s benign supposition that loved ones lost will be grieved, despite their faults, is contradicted by much bleaker facts: Claudio recognises the value of Hero’s life only when she is a dead maid, not a lost bride, nor a bereft father’s child. Uncomfortable though this is in a comedy swiftly heading for a happy ending, it is clearly so. Most misreport in the play is fairly easy for the audience to identify. This miscalculation by the Friar of how a man will behave ‘if ever love had interest in his liver’ is left for us to detect. How much attention we give it probably affects how easily we are steered towards an ending that restores Hero to Claudio and ejects Don John, as if society has thus been purged. And if we track the apportioning of blame through the final stages of the play, it is something of a slalom course— which perhaps shows Shakespeare’s own consciousness that Much Ado About Nothing’s patriarchal society has played the part of Macbeth while Don John simply stirred the cauldron. In his confession Borachio describes Don John as having incensed him to slander, though this very much underplays Borachio’s active role in the balcony plot, and his virtual coaching of Don John in Act II Scene ii. At character level, this can be interpreted as ‘passing the buck’. At the level of dramatic handling, it prepares us for Don John’s role as scapegoat. It is interesting that only a few lines later, when questioned by Leonato, Borachio asserts he is the villain ‘even I alone’ (V.i.258). Surely this is to provide an opportunity for Leonato to comment acidly on

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Claudio and Don Pedro’s roles in Hero’s mistreatment: Here stand a pair of honourable men— A third is fled—that had a hand in it. (V.i.260–61) Claudio’s own repentance is deftly handled. He first accepts punishment and offers to fulfil any penance Leonato devises, but adds ‘yet sinn’d I not, / But in mistaking’ (V.i.268–69). This is careful wording. At first glance it sounds like I sinned, but only by mistake, which is fair enough; no one would accuse Claudio of setting out to ruin his own marriage and harm a much-desired bride. But on closer scrutiny, it looks remarkably like: The only sin I committed was in making a mistake. This is dubious, given the calculated spite in his public humiliation of Hero and his callous response to her ‘death’. Shakespeare provides time and opportunity for audiences to reconcile themselves to a Claudio forgiven and rewarded at the end of the play. First, there is the bantering courtship between Beatrice and Benedick in Act V Scene ii to lift our spirits. Next, we see Claudio mourn for Hero and declare himself one of those responsible for her death. In the last scene he obediently accepts his new bride ‘on trust’. Finally, the malcontent is captured and imprisoned, giving a sense that evil has been located and its growth stemmed. Despite all this, many spectators down the ages have found it difficult to forgive Hero’s treatment and accept Claudio. Perhaps this is not so surprising. In Much Ado About Nothing one character is finally labelled as the villain, but there is plenty of evidence during the course of the play to suggest this is a gross simplification. If members of the audience note a discrepancy between what is reported by those on stage and what they actually witness, they must make their own judgements. Our eyes, after all, are our own. Source: Jackie Shead,‘‘Are Our Eyes Our Own?’ Jackie Shead Explores the Power of Report in Much Ado About Nothing,’’ in The English Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, September 2004, pp. 28–31.

Kenneth Muir In the following excerpt, Muir offers a general historical and literary assessment of Much Ado about Nothing. The date of Much Ado about Nothing can be fixed with unusual accuracy. It was performed while Kemp (who played Dogberry) was still a

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THE CHARACTERS IN THIS PLAY RANGE FROM THE PURELY CONVENTIONAL TO THE PURELY HUMAN.’’

member of Shakespeare’s company, but too late for Francis Meres to know of its existence when he listed Shakespeare’s plays in Palladis Tamia. So 1598 was the date of its first performance; and it was printed, probably from Shakespeare’s manuscript, two years later. It is hardly anyone’s favourite comedy and it is not so frequently performed as As You Like It or Twelfth Night, doubtless because the main plot is so much less interesting than the underplot. The Hero-Claudio plot, written mainly in verse, is combined with the Beatrice-Benedick plot, written mainly in prose. In our degenerate days it is natural for audiences to prefer prose to verse, but it is possible that Shakespeare, towards the end of the sixteenth century, went through a phase when he thought that the increasing subtlety of his actors demanded a style nearer to colloquial speech— some of Shylock’s best speeches, all of Falstaff’s, most of Beatrice, Benedick and Rosalind are in prose. The plots are linked together in various ways. The bringing together of Beatrice and Benedick is a means of passing the time between the day of Hero’s betrothal and her marriage; Benedick is chosen by Beatrice to avenge her cousin’s honour; and Benedick is a close friend of Claudio’s, so that Beatrice’s demand poses a favourite problem— posed earlier in The Two Gentlemen of Verona— of Love versus Friendship. The play is also unified by imagery. As in Macbeth, the dominating image is one of clothes, and the most frequent figure of speech is antithesis. Clothes are used as a symbol of the difference between appearance and reality, and hence of hypocrisy. In the first scene, for example, Beatrice says that Benedick ‘wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat’; Benedick calls courtesy a turncoat; in the second act Benedick says that Beatrice is the infernal Ate in good apparel; and Beatrice asks if Pedro has a brother since ‘Your Grace is too costly to wear every day’. Benedick contrasts the amorous Claudio with the man as he used to be:

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I have known when he would have walk’d ten mile afoot to see a good armour, and now will he lie ten nights awake carving the fashion of a new doublet. (II.iii.I8ff.)

Pedro has a speech in Act III on Benedick’s fancy for strange disguises. Borachio has a long dialogue with Conrade, apparently irrelevant to the matter in hand, on the subject of fashion: Bor. Thou knowest that the fashion of a doublet, or a hat, or a cloak is nothing to a man. Con. Yes, it is apparel. Bor. I mean the fashion. Con. Yes, the fashion is the fashion. Bor. Tush, I may as well say the fool’s the fool. But seest thou not what a deformed thief this fashion is . . . Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is, how giddily ‘a turns about all the hot bloods between fourteen and five and thirty, sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoh’s soldiers in the reechy painting, sometime like god Bel’s priests in the old church window, sometime like the shaven Hercules in the smirched worm-eaten tapestry, where his codpiece seems as massy as his club? Con. All this I see; and I see that the fashion wears out more apparel than the man. But art not thou thyself giddy with the fashion too, that thou hast shifted out of thy tale into telling me of the fashion? Bor. Not so neither. (III.iii. 108ff.)

The climax of the many references to appearance and reality is the scene in church, when Claudio repudiates his bride. Hero is compared to a rotten orange, ‘but the sign and semblance of her honour’, blushing like a maid, although she is immodest: O, what authority and show of truth Can cunning sin cover itself withal! Comes not that blood as modest evidence To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear, All you that see her, that she were a maid By these exterior shows? But she is none. Out on thee! Seeming! I will write against it: You seem to me as Dian in her orb, As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown; But you are more intemperate in your blood Than Venus, or those pamp’red animals That rage in savage sensuality. (IV.i.34–9, 55–60) In a later speech Claudio drops into the favourite figure of antithesis, a figure most apt for the contrast between appearance and reality:

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O Hero, what a Hero hadst thou been, If half thy outward graces had been placed About thy thoughts and counsels of thy heart! But fare thee well, most foul, most fair! Farewell, Thou pure impiety and impious purity! (IV.i.99–103) The two plots are linked together in another way. It has often been observed that the over-all theme of the play (as Masefield put it) is ‘the power of report, of the thing overhead, to alter human destiny’. It is true that the complications of the play are all due to overhearing, although it could be argued that Claudio might, even without the detective work by the watch, have learnt his mistake, and Beatrice and Benedick might have allowed their unconscious love for each other to rise into consciousness. But there are at least seven examples of rumour in the course of the play: 1. In the second scene Antonio tells Leonato: The Prince and Count Claudio, walking in a thick-pleached orchard, were thus much overheard by a man of mine: the Prince discovered to Claudio that he loved my niece your daughter, and meant to acknowledge it this night in a dance.

In this case, the servant had misheard, for Pedro had offered to pretend to be Claudio, to woo Hero for him. 2. In the next scene Borachio has overheard, correctly, that Claudio hoped to marry Hero, and that Pedro was going to woo for him. 3. In the scene of the dance there are a whole series of misunderstandings, partly owing to the fact that the characters are masked: (a) Hero, instructed by her father, apparently thinks that Pedro is wooing for himself, but it is not explained what her reactions are when he pretends to be Claudio, as this takes place off stage. (b) Don John, for reasons which are never explained, thinks that Pedro woos for himself. (c) Benedick thinks that Beatrice does not recognise him, and she calls him the Prince’s Fool. (d) Borachio pretends that Claudio is Benedick, and tells him that Pedro is wooing Hero for himself; and this, in spite of their previous arrangement, is forthwith believed by Claudio.

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(e) Benedick, who is not aware of the arrangement between Pedro and Claudio, naturally believes that Pedro has wooed for himself. The purpose of all these confusions—and their improbability is not so apparent in performance, is to soften up the audience, so that they are willing to accept as plausible Don John’s deception of Pedro and Claudio. 4. In the third scene of Act II, Benedick overhears that Beatrice is dying of love for him, and he promptly decides that her love must be requited. 5. In the first scene of Act III, Beatrice hidden by the woodbine coverture, overhears that Benedick is in love with her. She forthwith decides to return his love: What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true? Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much? Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride adieu! No glory lives behind the back of such. And Benedick, love on; I will require thee, Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand; If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee To bind our loves up in a holy band; For others say thou dost deserve, and I Believe it better than reportingly. (III.i.107–16) She uses, as Petruchio does, the image of the tamed hawk. 6. Borachio is overheard making love to Margaret, whom the watchers think is Hero; and Borachio, telling the tale of his deception of Pedro and Claudio to Conrade, is overheard by the Watch. This leads to his arrest, and the acquittal of Hero. 7. On the Friar’s advice, a report is circulated that Hero is dead, so as to cause Claudio to feel remorse. This remorse becomes overwhelming when it is proved that she was falsely accused. But it is typical of Claudio’s self-centredness that when he hears that Hero was innocent he is more concerned about his own feelings than about her supposed death. And when he agrees to marry her cousin he has the significant lines: I do embrace your offer; and dispose For henceforth of poor Claudio. The plots, then, are linked together structurally, imagistically and thematically, so that complaints

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about lack of unity have little justification. There remains the feeling of many readers that the two plots don’t really harmonise since the main plot is largely conventional—depending on the convention employed by Shakespeare in Othello and Cymbeline that the calumniator of female chastity is always believed, though in real life he would not be—and the sub-plot is much more realistic. Moreover, Hero is a nonentity and Claudio is a cad; whereas Beatrice and Benedick (though absurd) are attractive figures to whom an audience warms. There are several possible answers to these complaints. The first answer is one that has to be made over and over again to Shakespeare’s armchair critics: that his plays were meant to be acted, not read, and that the test we should apply should be a theatrical one—Does it work in the theatre? The convention of the calumniator believed always does seem to work. We may think Claudio is a credulous fool, but Pedro’s equal credulity prevents us from having too harsh an opinion of him. Nor is it unusual in Shakespeare’s plays for him to present his characters on different levels of reality. It has often been noticed that Katherine and the scenes in which she appears are much more vital than those relating to the wooing of Binaca. Just as in painting, an artist will relegate some figures to the background, and just as a photographer will keep his central theme in sharp focus, while the rest of his composition may be comparatively blurred, so the dramatist can vary his treatment of characters in the same play. The characters in this play range from the purely conventional to the purely human. Don John (for example) announces himself as a villain, a true example of motiveless malignity, who does evil for the sake of evil. Although we could (I suppose) ascribe his villainy to the results of his bastardy, it is not really possible to regard him as anything but a conventional stage villain. Or consider Margaret. At one point in the play she is apparently the mistress of the debauched Borachio, who for some unexplained reason is willing to pretend she is Hero, and call Borachio Claudio (unless this is a textual error). At another point in the play, she is a witty lady-in-waiting, on almost equal terms with Beatrice and Hero. She cannot be present in the church scene—if she had been she would have exposed Borachio’s plot— though it is quite unnatural that she should not be

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present. When Leonato says that Margaret was hired to the deed by Don John, Borachio protests that she is completely innocent: No, by my soul, she was not; Nor knew not what she did when she spoke to me, But always hath been just and virtuous In anything that I do know by her. (V.i.286–9) In the next scene, she engages in a witty exchange with Benedick; and at the end Leonato says (in relation to the slander of Hero) But Margaret was in some fault for this, Although against her will, as it appears. Leo Kirschbaum, in Character and Characterisation in Shakespeare, argues that psychologically the two Margarets are completely incompatible. She is a flat character; but in the course of performance we do not notice the discrepancies, and Shakespeare was not troubled by the difficulties his readers might encounter. Hero and Claudio are more realistically presented, but they are still conventional figures, and this prevents us from being too involved emotionally at Hero’s distresses. Indeed, the audience is never in doubt that things will come right in the end. The very title of the play Much Ado about Nothing tells them as much. The chief song has as its refrain, Converting all your sounds of woe Into hey nonny-nonny. Borachio, moreover, has been arrested by the watch before the church scene; and it is only the loquaciousness of Dogberry which prevents the slander from being exposed before the marriage scene. So the audience knows that Hero’s name will eventually be cleared. Dogberry is, indeed, a masterly character, one which is beautifully functional, but which is much more than functional. He has to be pompous, loquacious, fond of long words, very much on his dignity, semi-literate, and a bungler; otherwise he would get at the truth much sooner, and Leonato would not hasten to get rid of him on the morning of the marriage. On the other hand, he has to have some glimmerings of intelligence, or he would not have eventually arrived at the truth. On this functional basis, Shakespeare creates a wonderful portrait of a Jack-in-office, much less competent than Verges, whom he bullies and despises. He is the true ancestor of Mrs Malaprop, but much more plausible than her, who

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having been brought up as a lady would not be likely to make such absurd mistakes. All Dogberry’s mistakes, taken individually, are the sort of mistakes one still hears from local politicians in England. Dogberry uses desartless for deserving, senseless for sensible, decerns for concerns, odorous for odious, aspicious for suspicious, comprehended for apprehended. Shakespeare may have known such a man; but he had probably read a book by his acquaintance William Lambard, on the duties of constables, so that one gets a curious mixture of Elizabethan practice with the wildest fantasy. Funny as the Dogberry scenes are, they are best played without too much farcical business; for as with all the best comic characters, there is an element of pathos about Dogberry, as when he is called an ass by one of his prisoners: Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? O that he were here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an ass; though it not be written down, yet forget not that I am an ass. No, thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness. I am a wise fellow; and, which is more, an officer; and, which is more, a householder; and, which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina; and one that knows the law, go to; and a rich fellow enough, go to; and a fellow that hath had losses; and one that hath two gowns, and everything handsome about him. Bring him away. O that I had been writ down an ass! (IV.ii.69ff.)

For a modern audience, the rejection of Hero in church makes it difficult to retain any sympathy for Claudio. Prouty seeks to defend him by suggesting that it was merely a marriage of convenience. Since Hero was not a virgin, her father had broken a contract, and a public exposure was therefore permissible. This is all very well. But there is one line only in Claudio’s part to suggest that he was thinking of Hero’s dowry. His first question to Pedro, when he reveals that he is thinking of the marriage is ‘Hath Leonato any son, my lord?’ Otherwise Claudio is presented as an abnormally shy, sentimental lover. Shakespeare had to have a public repudiation. There were theatrical necessities for it—one has only to think what the play would be like without this climactic scene. There were also perfectly good dramatic reasons for a public repudiation. Claudio’s action has to seem so atrocious that Benedick—his bosom friend—is willing to challenge him to a duel. The repudiation, and the following scene between Beatrice

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and Benedick, are a means of showing the innate good sense of Beatrice, her warm-heartedness and intuitive understanding; and they are a means of precipitating the confession of love. The Mueschkes make the good point that the theme of the play is Honour: ‘Honour is the warp of the three hoaxes [perpetrated in the course of the play], hearsay is the weft, and illusion spins the web.’ They go on to suggest that The repudiation scene, examined with the courtly code of honour in mind, is much more ˆ than a coup de theatre. In terms of Renaissance mores, it is a scene of poignant disillusionment and despair. In the conflict between appearance and reality, between emotion and reason, tension increases when lover turns inquisitor and father turns executioner. Here, in a conflict between good and evil, truth clashes with error in a charged atmosphere of contradictory moods and shifting relationships while the outraged moral sense oscillates between absolute praise and absolute blame. Here, when malice triumphs, shame so submerges compassion and slander, mirage, and perjury are accepted as ocular and auditory proof. Incensed by defiled honour, men argue in absolutes shorn from any rational mean, and under the aegis of the courtly code act and react with prescribed cruelty.

In other words, Shakespeare’s aim is to criticise the accepted code of honour; and (it may be argued) when Beatrice demands that Benedick should challenge Claudio she also is enslaved by the conventional code. For if Benedick kills Claudio, it will prove only that he is a more accomplished swordsman; and if Claudio kills Benedick it will do nothing to prove the guilt of Hero. It is the dim-witted watch, and the pompous self-important Dogberry who restore Hero’s reputation. As St Paul says: ‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.’ The behaviour of Claudio—and, indeed, of Pedro—in the scene of the challenge exhibits once again the limitations of the code. Their treatment of Leonato is bad enough, but their lighthearted ragging of Benedick shows a callousness to the memory of Hero, and cannot quite be expiated by the ritual mourning which follows the revelation of her innocence.

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Beatrice and Benedick are obviously the two characters who are most vital and real—the ones who are the least conventional. Least conventional in a double sense: in the way they are drawn, and in their reacting against the romantic conventions of the society in which they live. They alone, of the characters in the play, are three-dimensional. Superficially, it might seem that Beatrice and Benedick who detest each other are tricked into loving each other by overhearing that each is dying for love of the other. But it is fairly obvious that they are in love with each other from the start: that is the reason why they are continually attacking each other. Beatrice and Benedick have several reasons for not admitting to their love. Both (it is clear) are unwilling to make themselves ridiculous, and they are too intelligent and unsentimental to indulge in the gestures of conventional romantic love. It is possible (as Prouty suggests) that they are equally in revolt against marriages of convenience. Beatrice, moreover, thinks of Benedick as a philanderer. When Pedro says ‘you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick’, Beatrice replies: Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one; marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your Grace may well say I have lost it.

The speech is rather obscure; but it seems to imply that Benedick at one time had made love to Beatrice, and she felt his intentions were not serious. Both are proud and apparently self-sufficient. Benedick boasts, not very seriously, of the way women fall in love with him; but he declares to others that he will die a bachelor, and to himself: One woman is fair, yet I am well, another is wise, yet I am well; another virtuous, yet I am well; but till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace. (II.iii.31 ff.)

Beatrice similarly says: He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man I am not for him. Therefore I will even take sixpence in earnest of the berrord, and lead his apes into hell. Leon. Well, then go you into hell? Beat. No; but to the gate, and there will the devil meet me, like an old cuckold, with horns on his head, and say ‘Get you to heaven

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Denzel Washington, Kenneth Branagh, and Emma Thompson from the wedding scene of the 1993 film Much Ado About Nothing (Ó Samuel Goldwyn/Everett Collection) Beatrice, get you to heaven; here’s no place for you maids’. So deliver I up my apes and away to Saint Peter for the heavens; he shows me where the bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long. (II.i.31–41)

It was speeches like this that so shocked Gerard Manley Hopkins that he called Beatrice vain and unchaste. Beatrice does not talk like a mid-Victorian lady, but there is not the faintest suggestion in the play that she is unchaste, and few will agree with Hopkins’s epithet ‘vile’. Nor, I think, is Beatrice vain; but she is proud. It has been suggested that Hero’s lines describing her cousin— Nature never framed a woman’s heart Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice. Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, Misprising what they look on; and her wit Values itself so highly that to her All matter else seems weak. She cannot love, Nor take no shape nor project of affection, She is so self-endeared— (III.i.49–56) are based on a character representing pride in The Faerie Queene. But we must remember that

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Hero is deliberately exaggerating, as she knows that Beatrice is overhearing her. The lines cannot be taken as an accurate portrait. Yet both Beatrice and Benedick are absurd in their selfsufficiency. Much Ado about Nothing may be regarded as a subtler version of The Taming of the Shrew, transposed from farce to high comedy—and, of course, Benedick needs to be tamed as well as Beatrice. As we have seen, Katherina’s violence is at least partly due to the fact that she hates equally the artificialities of romantic love and the humiliations of marriages of convenience, in which she is bound to suspect that the suitor is after her fortune—as indeed Petruchio admits from the start. But the struggle between the Shrew and her tamer is carried out in terms of farce. In Much Ado, Beatrice, instead of being physically violent, is aggressive with her tongue, and she chooses as her victim the man she really loves. She is cured and tamed, not by physical violence and semistarvation, but by hearing the truth about herself, and about Benedick. The irony is that Hero and the others who talk about Benedick’s love for her think they are lying, although they are

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telling the truth; and Pedro and Claudio think they are lying when they speak of Beatrice’s love for Benedick.

Mozart and Shakespeare; and by a curious irony his own plays are being performed now, not for their ideas, but for their style.

By the end of the play we realise that all the characters in the play, except the Friar, have been laughed at: the watch for their stupidity, Dogberry for his self-important illiteracy, Leonato for being more concerned with his own honour than with his daughter’s life, Claudio and Pedro for their credulity in being deceived by an obvious villain, for the cruelty of their code of honour, and for their failure to recognise that Beatrice and Benedick are in love; Beatrice and Benedick for their pride and self-sufficiency. It is not only Dogberry who should ask to be writ down as an ass.

In all love comedies the union of the hero and heroine must be delayed by obstacles of one kind or another.—‘The course of true love never did run smooth.’ The obstacles can be external, as for example the opposition of parents who have other plans for their children. Or they may be psychological, the unwillingness of one or other to marry. In Congreve’s masterpiece, The Way of the World, Millamant is afraid that (as so often in her society) marriage will destroy his love for her. And when she is finally cornered, she tells her lover:

Bernard Shaw has pointed out how much the witty repartee depends on style. The passage occurs in a review of a performance of the play in 1898:

I shall expect you shall solicit me, as though I were wavering at the gate of a monastery, with one foot over the threshold . . . I should think I was poor if I were deprived of the agreeable fatigues of solicitation.

Shakespear shews himself in it (sc. Much Ado) a commonplace librettist working on a stolen plot, but a great musician. No matter how poor, coarse, cheap, and obvious the thought may be, the mood is charming, and the music of the words expresses the mood. Paraphrase the encounters of Benedick and Beatrice in the style of a bluebook, carefully preserving every idea they present, and it will become apparent to the most infatuated Shakespearean that they contain at best nothing out of the common in thought or wit, and at worst a good deal of vulgar naughtiness . . . Not until the Shakespearean music is added by replacing the paraphrase with the original lines does the enchantment begin. Then you are in another world at once. When a flower-girl tells a coster to hold his jaw, for nobody is listening to him, and he retorts, ‘Oh, youre there, are you, you beauty?’ they reproduce the wit of Beatrice and Benedick exactly. But put it this way. ‘I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks you.’ ‘What! my dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living?’ You are miles away from costerland at once. When I tell you that Benedick and the coster are equally poor in thought, Beatrice and the flower-girl equally vulgar in repartee, you reply that I might as well tell you that a nightingale’s love is no higher than a cat’s. Which is exactly what I do tell you, though the nightingale is the better musician.

Shaw, of course, exaggerates, because he was campaigning for Ibsen. It was only in his later years, after all his plays had been written, that he confessed that his own masters were Verdi,

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Then she lays down an elaborate list of conditions for her surrender, including the provisos that she shall not be called such names as ‘wife, joy, jewel, spouse, sweetheart, and the rest of that nauseous cant in which men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar . . . Let us be very strange and well bred, as strange as if we had been married a great while, and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.’ Millamant, like Beatrice, uses her wit as a shield, because she is in fact very vulnerable and sensitive. In a great modern comedy, Shaw’s Man and Superman, it is the woman who chases the man, chases him halfway across Europe in a motorcar; in Much Ado both the hero and the heroine apparently wish to remain single, and the marriage at the end is a satisfactory one because it fulfils their unconscious wishes. A modern dramatist has written a sequel to Much Ado in which Beatrice and Benedick, after their marriage, continue to fight each other as they had done before. But the continuation of the merry war (as Shakespeare calls it) does not mean that their marriage would not be a success. They will enjoy the wise-cracks, and use them as a private method of courtship, long after Claudio and Hero have exhausted the pleasures of romantic hyperbole. (Indeed, if one were to treat the matter realistically—and it would be perverse to do so—one could imagine Hero reminding Claudio too often of the way he repudiated her in church.) . . .

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The climactic scene in the play is the one in which Benedick and Beatrice first confess their love for each other. Hero has been repudiated in church by the man she was to marry. Hero faints. In this situation the behaviour of Beatrice and Benedick is contrasted with that of the other characters. Whereas Leonato behaves like an hysterical old fool, first believing that Hero is guilty and wishing that she would die, and later uttering threats against the Prince and Claudio, Beatrice and Benedick are concerned for Hero. Beatrice knows instinctively that she is innocent, and Benedick asks some of the questions which the audience are waiting to be asked. (No one, however, seems to realise that Don John’s story of a thousand secret encounters can scarcely be true, since Beatrice and Hero, until this last night, have shared a bed.) The Friar puts forward his plan of pretending that Hero has died, and suggests that the wedding-day is but postponed. Benedick naturally suspects that Don John is at the bottom of the plot to defame Hero, since Claudio and Pedro are honourable men. Everyone leaves the church, except Benedick and Beatrice, who is still weeping for her cousin. Since they learned that they were loved by the other, Beatrice and Benedick have not met in private, and the audience have been waiting for their meeting for about half an hour of playingtime. In the scene which follows, Benedick is forced to choose between love and friendship. After he has promised to do anything in the world for Beatrice, and she asks him to kill Claudio, he first exclaims ‘Not for the wide world’. When John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft appeared on Broadway, one of the critics regarded the production as a failure—though it was the best I have ever seen—because the audience laughed at this point. The critic thought the audience laughed because it was obvious that Gielgud’s Benedick would not hurt a fly, let alone his friend. But although the scene as a whole is a poignant and dramatic one, there are several lines which are intended to be funny, and this is surely one of them. It is right that the audience should laugh when Benedick offers to do anything that Beatrice wants and refuses the very first thing she asks. Source: Kenneth Muir, ‘‘Maturity: Much Ado About Nothing,’’ in Shakespeare’s Comic Sequence, Barnes & Noble Books, 1979, pp. 68–81.

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ESSENTIALLY, THE PLAY IS, I BELIEVE, ABOUT THE POWER FOR EVIL THAT EXISTS IN PEOPLE WHO HAVE BECOME SELF-REGARDING BY LIVING IN A SOCIETY THAT IS CLOSELY-KNIT AND TURNED IN ON ITSELF.’’

John Crick In the following excerpt, Crick offers a general discussion of Much Ado about Nothing, focusing upon the characters, theme, and language of the play. He depicts the play as one concerned primarily about the potential for evil existing in people who have become self-absorbed in a society that reflects and supports that self-absorption. ‘The fable is absurd’, wrote Charles Gildon in 1710, and most of us would agree. Yet there is the effervescent presence of Beatrice and Benedick and the engaging stupidity of Dogberry and Verges to assure us that all is not dross. Coleridge was convinced that this central interest was Shakespeare’s own, his motive in writing the play, and the ‘fable’ was merely a means of exhibiting the characters he was interested in. This may have been the attitude of audiences in Shakespeare’s time: as early as 1613, the play was referred to as ‘Benedicte and Betteris’. Can we summarise the play in this way: a few good acting parts standing out against the unsatisfactory background of a preposterous Italian romance? I think not. Most of the play’s critics have seized on the apparent absence of any unifying dramatic conception: the play fluctuates uneasily, it is said, between tragedy, romance, and comedy and never establishes a convincing dramatic form for itself. In these circumstances there are too many inconsistencies of plot and character and, in particular, in the presentation of Claudio and Hero: they begin as the hero and heroine of a typical italianate romance and, under the growing dominance of Beatrice and Benedick in the play, become—rather unconvincingly—the perpetrator and victim respectively of a nearcriminal act. Beatrice and Benedick throw the play off its balance.

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It is a truism criticism should be concerned with what a work of art is, and not with what it ought to be. In the case of Much Ado, however, it is one worth remembering, for preconceptions about form, plot, and character, and the other components of a play, have so often obscured what is unmistakably there, and shows itself in the very first scene of the play: the precise delineation of an aristocratic and metropolitan society. This is done with a thoroughness and depth which is beyond any requirement of a romantic fable in the tradition of Ariosto and Bandello, and beyond the demands of a plot merely intended to exhibit the characters of Beatrice, Benedick, Dogberry and Verges, in the way that Coleridge suggested. The opening scene of the play establishes for us the characteristic tone of Messina society. Don John’s rebellion has been successfully put down and the victors are returning to Messina with their newly-won honours. It is significant that, in spite of the fact that Don John still exists to cause trouble, there is no serious discussion of the reasons for or consequencies of the rebellion. War is regarded as something that might deprive society of some of its leading lights—Leonato asks the messenger ‘How many gentlemen have you lost in this action?’—and enhance the status of others. The messenger informs us that no gentlemen ‘of name’ have been lost, and Claudio and Benedick have fought valiantly and achieved honour. War is a gentlemanly pursuit, a game of fortune—nothing more. This first conversation of the play has a studied artificiality which seems to bear out this reading of the situation. The language is sophisticated and over-elaborate, as if it has been cultivated as an end in itself, and not as a vehicle for the discussion of serious matters. Leonato’s sententiousness may be that of an old man; yet it fits naturally into the play’s elaboration of words: ‘A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers.’ ‘A kind overflow of kindness: there are no faces truer than those that are so washed. How much better is it to weep at joy at weeping!’

Even the messenger—a person of humble origin, we presume—has caught the infection and uses euphuistic phraseology: ‘He hath borne himself beyond the promise of his age, doing, in the figure of a lamb, the feats of a lion: he hath indeed better bettered expectation than you must expect of me to tell you how.’

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‘I have already delivered him letters, and there appears much joy in him; even so much that joy could not show itself modest enough without a badge of bitterness.’

This initial impression—of ornate language as the normal conversational mode in upperclass Messina society—is confirmed by the rest of the play: there is an abundance of antitheses, alliterations, puns, euphuisms, repetitions and word-patterns. The imagery has a similar artificiality and tends to consist of the prosaic and the conventional, rather than the striking. Prose, rather than verse, is the natural medium for conventional talk and ideas, and it is therefore not surprising that there is far more prose in Much Ado than is normal in a Shakespearean comedy. In such a society, Beatrice and Benedick are naturally regarded as prize assets. They, too, relish talking for effect—although they do it with far more wit and vigour than the others, whose speeches are usually lifeless and insipid. If Don John’s rebellion has not been taken seriously, as we suspect, it is probably because the ‘merry war’ between Beatrice and Benedick is of far more interest to a fashionable society which, as such societies do, regards a war between the sexes as a subject of perennial fascination. Beatrice, as Benedick says, ‘speaks poniards’ and ‘every word stabs; and yet no harm is done. No Messina gentleman is likely to be deprived of his life by ‘paper bullets of the brain’. Yet, one of the play’s ironies is that it leads us to doubt this: considerable damage is done by the mere power of words. (It is another of the play’s ironies that Beatrice’s ‘Kill Claudio’—an unusually straightforward command—is motivated by charitable feelings.) Hero—the main victim—comments on this power: ‘one doth not know How much an ill word may empoison liking’ . . . Where Messina conventions are fallible— and Beatrice as a woman, in a predominantly masculine ethos of courtship, games and war, is particularly qualified to speak here—is in questions of love, marriage, and the relationship between the sexes. Beneath her raillery, Beatrice shows a realistic and discriminating attitude to the subjects. She won’t accept the choice of others for a husband, ironically remarking, ‘Yes, faith; it is my cousin’s duty to make curtsy and say, ‘‘Father, as it please you.’’ But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy, and say ‘‘Father, as it pleases me’’’; she rejects romantic notions of the opposite sex—‘Lord, I could not endure a

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husband with a beard on his face’; and, by implication, she won’t accept a business marriage. (Benedick’s attitude to marriage is similarly realistic—‘the world must be peopled’). Hers is a sane perspective on events, an application of generosity and sympathy in a society dominated by ultimately inhumane standards. Her feminine charity triumphs, as Portia’s mercy does in The Merchant of Venice. Benedick becomes acceptable to her when he symbolically joins his masculine qualities to her feminine principles by taking up, however reluctantly, her attitude to Claudio, and thus shows himself to be, in her eyes, of a finer ‘metal’ than the average Messina male. Ironically, the plotting which separated Claudio and Hero brings them together, their true feelings breaking through their conventional jesters’ roles, and it is Beatrice’s clear-sightedness which triumphs over all the pattern of misunderstandings, deceptions, and self-deceptions which make up the play. (This patterned and stylised aspect of the play is very marked in the plot, characterisation, and language: consider, for example, the balancing of the two scenes in the church; the characterisation in pairs: the artificiality of the masque and the mourning scene; and the rhetorical devices of most of the language.)

does.) A moral blindness is generated that, if not evil itself, is capable of evil consequences. The agency of evil in this play is not outside, but within. The ostensible villain of the piece— Don John—is a mere cardboard figure who, excluded from a world of flatteries and courtesies, has resorted to ‘plain-dealing’ villainy. He may be an early sketch for Iago and Edmund but he lacks their intelligence and flair, and Shakespeare has wisely kept him within the narrow bounds appropriate for comedy. The real orgin of the crime is not jealousy, sexual or otherwise, but blind, consuming egotism which expresses itself in a studied artificiality, and at times flippancy, of both language and attitude. Later, Shakespeare was to take the same theme and mould it into tragedy. In the world of Othello, Lear, and Gloucester, the consequences of pride and self-centredness are catastrophic. The ultimate is perhaps King Lear—another ‘much ado about nothing’—where Lear, like Claudio, could say ‘Yet sinned I not but in mistaking’.

The incapacity of Messina society is also exposed, at another level, by Dogberry and Verges. Dogberry, like his superiors, adopts the mode of language and behaviour he conceives to be fitting to his position. When it comes to a reallife drama, he is as patently useless as Claudio. He displays condescension towards Verges and all the pompousness of authority: ‘I am a wise fellow, and, which is more, an officer, and, which is more, a householder . . . ’ Claudio, too, has ‘every thing handsome about him’. Dogberry has caught the Messina infection of pride and self-centredness, that self-centredness which makes Leonato—the perfect host at the beginning of the play—wish Hero dead because of the way in which she has shamed him. (Isn’t there something more than just a resemblance of name between him and Leontes and Lear?)

In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in Encounter in 1957, Auden (a major twentieth-century poet) demonstrates how Balthasar’s song in Act II, Scene iii of Much Ado about Nothing contributes to the dramatic structure of this work in two ways; by marking the moment when Claudio’s ‘‘pleasant illusions about himself as a lover are at their highest’’; and by suggesting to Benedick, through the song’s message, an image of Beatrice as well as a dark sense of ‘‘mischief’’ ahead.

Source: John Crick, ‘‘Much Ado About Nothing,’’ in The Use of English, Vol. XVII, No. 3, Spring 1966, pp. 223– 27.

W. H. Auden

Essentially, the play is, I believe, about the power for evil that exists in people who have become self-regarding by living in a society that is closely-knit and turned in on itself. The corruption is usually that of town and city life. (Significantly, Shakespeare’s story does not fluctuate between town and country as Bandello’s

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Source: W. H. Auden, ‘‘Music in Shakespeare,’’ in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, Random House, Inc., 1962, pp. 500–27.

SOURCES Charney, Maurice, All of Shakespeare, Columbia University Press, 1993. Dickson, Andrew, The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, Rough Guides, 2005. Dunton-Downer, Leslie, and Alan Riding, Essential Shakespeare Handbook, DK Publishing, 2004. Epstein, Norrie, The Friendly Shakespeare, Penguin Books, 1993. Goddard, Harold C., The Meaning of Shakespeare, University of Chicago Press, 1951. Kermode, Frank, The Age of Shakespeare, The Modern Library, 2004.

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Shakespeare, William, Much Ado about Nothing, Folger Shakespeare Library edition, Washington Square Press, 1995.

FURTHER READING Branagh, Kenneth, Introduction to Much Ado about Nothing, W. W. Norton & Co., 1993. This book by the British Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh concerns the question, why film Much Ado about Nothing? Branagh replies that the play is about love, one of humankind’s obsessions. Hays, Janice, ‘‘Those ‘Soft and Delicate Desires’: Much Ado and the Distrust of Women,’’ in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, University of Illinois Press, 1980. Hays examines Much Ado for its treatment of what Hays calls a theme addressed several times in Shakespeare’s plays: the sexual distrust of women and their subsequent testing and vindication. Honigmann, E. A. J., Myriad-Minded Shakespeare, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. A Shakespearean scholar, Honigmann studies all of Shakespeare and helps readers understand the man as well as his tragedies and comedies. He explores everything from the sexist insinuations in the plays to the political comments and environments. Leggatt, Alexander, ‘‘Much Ado about Nothing,’’ in his Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, Methuen and Co., 1974. Leggatt notes that many of the characters in this comedy are highly stylized, and he emphasizes the ceremonial aspects of the church

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scenes, the patterning of the tricks played on Beatrice and Benedick, and the image of order signified in the final dance sequence. Against these he balances the realism and spontaneity of Beatrice and Benedick. Maslen, Robert, Shakespeare and Comedy, Arden, 2005. Maslen looks at Shakespeare’s works, tragedies as well as comedies, and concludes that Shakespeare’s comedies are not always funny. But, Maslen concludes, that is what makes them so compelling. McDonald, Russ, ed., Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000, Blackwell Publishing, 2004. A rewarding collection of essays that help the reader to better understand Shakespeare’s plays. Themes, construction, and modes are fully explored by some of the best Shakespearean critics and scholars. Pettet, E. C., ‘‘Shakespeare’s Detachment from Romance,’’ in his Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition, Haskell House Publishers, 1976. Pettet argues that Much Ado reflects Shakespeare’s growing dissatisfaction with the traditional formulas for romantic comedy. Pettet regards the dominance of the Beatrice-Benedick entanglement over the Hero-Claudio story as the most telling sign of Shakespeare’s shift in interest away from the love romance. Rowse, A. L., ‘‘Much Ado about Nothing, 1599,’’ in his Prefaces to Shakespeare’s Plays, Orbis, 1984. Rowse focuses primarily upon the main characters, Beatrice and Benedick, Hero and Claudio, Dogberry and Verges, and Don John, as well as on Shakespeare’s use of source material. Rowse deems Much Ado to be a prime example of Shakespeare’s comedy. The play has romance as well as comedy that cuts across classes.

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Othello Othello (1604) has often been considered the most painful of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The fall of a proud, dignified man, the murder of a graceful, loving woman, and the unreasoning hatred of a villain, have all evoked fear and pity in audiences throughout the centuries. If it lacks the cosmic grandeur of some of Shakespeare’s other well-respected dramas, Othello nevertheless possesses a power that is perhaps more immediate and more strongly felt than that of his other plays.

1604

Othello is also unique among Shakespeare’s great tragedies in that it is set in a private world. The drama focuses on the passions and personal lives of its major figures. Othello has often been described as a tragedy of character, as the play’s protagonist swiftly descends into a rage of jealousy that completely destroys his life. With his dazzling display of villainy, the character Iago, the play’s antagonist, has long fascinated students and critics of the drama. The relationship between Othello and Iago is another unusual feature of this work. With two such prominent characters so closely associated, audiences have trouble determining which of the two characters is the central figure in the play and, therefore, which one bears the greater responsibility for the tragedy. Othello is believed to have first been performed in 1604 or perhaps in 1605. It is one of Shakespeare’s most highly concentrated and

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tightly constructed tragedies. The play was written with no subplots and little humor to relieve the tension. Although Shakespeare adapted the plot of his play from the sixteenth-century Italian dramatist and novelist Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, the English playwright focused his attention only on certain parts of Cinthio’s story. The Italian’s creation includes a series of ten interconnected short stories. Shakespeare’s Othello is taken from just one of them, the one concerned with marital infidelity and a husband’s revenge on his wife. Because of this tightly constructed structure, the play’s ominous mood is heightened, and the threat to both Desdemona’s innocence and to the love she and Othello share is made more terrifying Although narrow in scope, Othello is widely regarded as the most moving of all of Shakespeare’s great tragedies. As a matter of fact, rumors abound that during some of the earliest productions of this play, audiences shouted out warnings to the actor playing Othello and threatened to bring harm to Iago. Although Othello is described as a Moor, a citizen of northern Africa, the play is not overtly about race. In Shakespeare’s time, black actors were not used in the role. However, critics continue to debate if race is crucial to the play or if it is merely incidental. Some have stated that the color of the skin makes no difference when it comes to human psychology. What is important in this play is that Othello is a man of high esteem, a victorious hero, who succumbs to the manipulations of a shrewd and devious man. The results are devastating, horrifying, and, of course, very dramatic.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 Othello opens in Venice, with Iago (a low ranking officer in the Venetian army) and Roderigo (a weak man who is in love with Desdemona) discussing their bitterness toward Othello. Roderigo is angry because of Othello’s marriage to Desdemona. Iago is distraught because Othello has promoted Cassio to the rank of lieutenant instead of promoting Iago. In the first few lines of this scene, Iago is already scheming a plan of revenge. Iago encourages Roderigo to rouse Brabantio, a senator and the father of Desdemona, to tell

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him that Desdemona has eloped with Othello. Upon hearing this, the outraged Brabantio has his house searched, and when it is confirmed that Desdemona is gone, Brabantio is at his wits’ end. Several of the play’s themes are introduced in this first scene. First, there is the theme of jealously. Iago has been passed over for a promotion and is jealous of Cassio, the man who has won Othello’s favor. Roderigo is jealous because another man has won the hand of Desdemona. A second theme that is introduced is that of the socalled Other—the foreigner, the outsider, or the one who lives on the edges of society. Othello’s character is most involved in this theme. To emphasize Othello’s ‘‘otherness,’’ just in the first scene alone, he is called the ‘‘lascivious Moor,’’ ‘‘thicklips,’’ ‘‘an old black ram,’’ and ‘‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger.’’ The theme of deception is also brought out in this opening scene. First, Roderigo feels deceived by Iago because Roderigo has been paying Iago to put him in good favor with Desdemona. It is obvious that Iago has failed to do this. Desdemona’s father feels his daughter, who has run away with Othello without asking his consent, has deceived him. Another act of deceit occurs when Iago confesses that he only pretends to love Othello.

Act 1, Scene 2 Othello makes his first appearance in act 1, scene 2. Iago is telling Othello that he has heard people talking badly about him. He warns Othello of possible trouble; all the while he is conning Othello, trying to convince Othello of his devotion and thus winning his way into Othello’s trust. Cassio appears and tells Othello that the duke is looking for him. There is a military threat against Cyprus. When Brabantio appears, Iago warns Othello to beware. Othello faces everyone without fear, demonstrating his confidence, his willingness to stand up to the enemy or the accuser, whichever must be met. Brabantio curses Othello, claiming that Othello has cast a spell on his daughter. Othello asks Brabantio what he wants him to do. Brabantio says he wants Othello put in prison. Othello suggests that if he did so, the duke would be upset. Brabantio realizes that the affairs of state are quite serious and must be attended to. So he concludes that the duke can decide what to do with Othello.

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Othello preparing to kill Desdemona, Act V, scene ii (Ó Shakespeare Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan)

By now, the audience is quite aware of Iago’s character. He is a manipulator and out for no one’s benefit but his own. Othello has demonstrated, on the other hand, that he fits none of the negative descriptions that have been used to portray him.

Act 1, Scene 3 The next scene is at the duke’s council chamber. The council members are discussing reports of a Turkish fleet heading for Cyprus, which is a Venetian colony. Messengers are bringing word of how many Turkish ships approach. When the duke acknowledges Othello as ‘‘Valiant Othello,’’ it is obvious that Othello is seen quite differently by these people than he was seen previously through the eyes of Iago, Roderigo, or Brabantio. Brabantio wastes no time in explaining that his daughter has been stolen from him. The duke is shocked and promises to punish the thief. The duke says Brabantio can ‘‘read in the bitter letter /

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After your own sense,’’ meaning that Brabantio can set the punishment. The duke is, of course, surprised to discover that the so-called thief is Othello. Very graciously and humbly, Othello pleads his case. He provides a brief background of his life and how he fell in love with Desdemona and she with him. The duke, wanting Othello vindicated because the country needs him to fight the Turks, determines that the council needs more proof that Desdemona has indeed been stolen. Desdemona is called to stand before the council. Desdemona arrives and acknowledges that she is divided between her devotion to her father and her love of her husband, Othello. She tells her father, ‘‘And so much duty as my mother showed / To you, preferring you before her father, / So much I challenge that I may profess / Due to the Moor, my lord.’’ The duke needs to hear no more. Desdemona has settled the case. The duke appoints Othello as governor of Cyprus and tells him to prepare to leave.

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Desdemona asks to go to Cyprus with Othello, which the duke allows. Before the scene ends, Brabantio scoffs at Othello one more time, telling him, ‘‘Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see. / She has deceived her father, and may thee.’’ This is a warning that will later haunt Othello. The scene ends with Iago manipulating Roderigo. Roderigo is ready to drown himself for he sees no hope in winning the hand of Desdemona. Iago, however, needs Roderigo for his scheme, so he challenges Roderigo to be a man and hang in there. Desdemona and Othello will tire of one another, Iago predicts and asks Roderigo to stay with him so they can both enjoy their revenge on Othello. After Roderigo leaves, Iago talks to himself (in aside to the audience), relating how he thinks Roderigo a fool. He also reiterates how he hates Othello. Iago has heard rumors that Othello has slept with his wife, Emilia. This gives Iago all the more reason to hurt Othello. He will make Othello believe that Desdemona is having an affair with Cassio. Iago believes this will be easy to do because ‘‘The Moor is of a free and open nature, That thinks men honest that but seem to be so, / And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are.’’

Act 2, Scene 1 Act 2 begins in Cyprus where a violent storm is raging out at sea. Montano, the former governor of Cyprus, is concerned that all of Othello’s ships might have capsized. Shortly afterward, Montano is informed that the storm has scattered the Turkish forces, thus ending the war. Cassio enters and demonstrates, through his conversation with Montano, that he is truly devoted to Othello. The audience learns that Cassio is very approving of Othello’s marriage to Desdemona. This makes it clear that Cassio is not in any way involved in Iago’s plan. Desdemona, Emilia, Iago, and Roderigo arrive in Cyprus. Desdemona is worried about Othello, who has not yet made an appearance on the island. Whereas Cassio has been displayed as a gentlemen, with his concern for Othello’s safety and his compliments toward Desdemona, Iago appears crude. Iago belittles his wife and then criticizes all of womanhood, stating that women ‘‘are pictures out of doors, / Bells in your parlors, wildcats in your kitchens, / Saints in your injuries, devils being offended, / Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds.’’

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In other words, women are deceitful, noisy, and undomesticated and are good only for sex. Othello finally arrives and makes a public display of his love for Desdemona. ‘‘I cannot speak enough of this content. / It stops me here; it is too much of joy,’’ Othello says. This spurs Iago to mention in an aside to the audience, ‘‘O, you are well tuned now! / But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music.’’ Iago is determined to ruin this love. He reaffirms his desire to arouse Othello’s jealousy and enlists Roderigo in the plot to discredit Cassio. He furthers his plan, telling Roderigo that he believes Desdemona has fallen for Cassio. Roderigo cannot believe this, but Iago changes Roderigo’s mind. He churns Roderigo’s anger so that Roderigo wants to challenge Cassio in a fight. If Roderigo can do this, Iago tells him, ‘‘So shall you have a shorter journey to your desires by the means I shall then have to prefer them.’’

Act 2, Scene 2 Othello decrees a night of revelry to celebrate his marriage and Cyprus’s escape from the Turkish attack. This is a very brief scene.

Act 2, Scene 3 Othello sends Cassio out to guard his house, and Othello and Desdemona go to bed. Cassio says that Iago will keep watch with him. Othello replies: ‘‘Iago is most honest.’’ Of course, the audience is fully aware that this is far from the truth and this statement makes Othello look very vulnerable. When Cassio goes out and meets with Iago, Iago describes how enticing Desdemona is. Whereas Iago describes Desdemona in terms of sexuality, Cassio talks of her as being modest, exquisite, and delicate. When Iago invites Cassio to drink with him, Cassio says he becomes easily intoxicated. Iago uses this to get Cassio drunk and to involve him in a public brawl. When Othello arrives, he turns to Iago to find who is responsible for the brawl. Iago, feigning reluctance, nonetheless insinuates Cassio. Othello punishes the lieutenant by taking away his recently won promotion. The audience knows, once again, that Othello has made a serious mistake.

Act 3, Scene 1 Standing in front of Othello’s castle is sad Cassio, who is trying to beg Emilia to plead his

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case to Desdemona. Iago tells Cassio that he will make sure Othello is not in the castle so Cassio can meet with Desdemona alone.

Act 3, Scene 2 Another brief scene in which Othello gives papers to Iago to post, then the audience sees Othello leave the castle, setting up the scene to follow, in which Desdemona is left in the castle without Othello.

Act 3, Scene 3 In the garden of the castle, Desdemona greets Cassio. Cassio wins Desdemona’s attention. Desdemona agrees to plead his case with Othello. As Cassio leaves, Iago and Othello approach. Iago takes advantage of Cassio’s being seen slipping out of the garden where Desdemona stands. Iago says, pretending to be talking mostly to himself: ‘‘Ha! I like not that.’’ When Othello asks what Iago is referring to, Iago pretends to dismiss his own words. But when Othello asks if that was Cassio, Iago launches full-heartedly into his scheme. Othello greets his wife, and she asks Othello to forgive Cassio. Othello does not commit to it but also does not deny he will. Desdemona leaves, and Iago digs deeper, planting more suspicions in Othello’s mind, asking him questions about Cassio, such as: ‘‘Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, / Know of your love?’’ When Othello asks why Iago wants to know, Iago downplays the question, ‘‘But for a satisfaction of my thought; / No further harm.’’ Of course, harm is exactly what Iago is after. And so the conversation continues. Iago’s villainy begins to work on Othello in two ways. First, Iago feeds Othello insinuations that Desdemona has been unfaithful, creating emotional havoc for Othello. And second, Iago feeds Othello lies concerning his own faithful service as a friend to Othello, when in fact Iago hates Othello. On both accounts, Othello believes Iago. Iago is very good in what he does. He even warns Othello not to be jealous. ‘‘It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.’’ Iago then tells Othello to not succumb to his thoughts but rather to seek proof of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness before Othello believes it. Iago also reminds Othello that Desdemona did once deceive her father. By the time Iago and Othello part, Othello

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believes he is indebted to Iago for being so honest with him. Briefly, Desdemona appears with Othello. She wipes his brow with her handkerchief when he complains of a headache. The handkerchief drops when the couple leaves for dinner. Emilia picks the handkerchief up and mentions that her husband has asked her to steal it. After Emilia leaves, Iago tells the audience that he will plant the handkerchief in Cassio’s house. Othello talks with Iago, telling him that he has lost all tranquility. He says: ‘‘Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore!’’ Othello tells Iago that if he has done this just to slander Desdemona, Iago had better beware. Iago pretends to be offended. ‘‘O monstrous world! Take note, take note, O world, / To be direct and honest is not safe.’’ In other words, he is attempting to make Othello feel that he has hurt Iago by insinuating Iago might be lying. Othello is tortured by the uncertainty of his own thoughts, not knowing if he should trust his wife or trust Iago’s insinuations. Iago tells Othello that he overheard Cassio talking in his sleep. Iago says Cassio called out, ‘‘Let us be wary, let us hide our love.’’ Iago continues to embellish his story, stating that Cassio then began kissing Iago, thinking he was a woman. Iago reports that Cassio said: ‘‘Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!’’ This is the undoing of Othello. He cannot stand the thought of Desdemona and Cassio kissing. He wants Cassio to be dead. When Iago says that he will see to this, Othello makes Iago his new lieutenant.

Act 3, Scene 4 Although Desdemona does not know what is going on, she and Emilia discuss the jealousy that can sometimes be aroused. Desdemona tells Emilia that she cannot imagine Othello ever being jealous. This is Shakespeare’s use of irony, as the audience knows full well that Othello is in a jealous rage. Othello enters and says he is not feeling well. He asks for the handkerchief that he once gave to Desdemona. Desdemona says she has misplaced it. Othello tells her the handkerchief is imbued with magical powers. The loss of it could mean bad luck. Tempers flair, as Desdemona and Othello clash. Othello storms out of the room.

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Shortly after, Cassio is with Bianca, a woman he has slept with but does not love. She asks where Cassio has been. Cassio shows Bianca Desdemona’s handkerchief. Bianca becomes jealous at the sight of it, thinking Cassio has slept with another woman. Cassio says he merely found it and asks Bianca to replicate it.

Act 4, Scene 1 Iago continues to provoke Othello, who falls into an epileptic fit. Iago revels in his handiwork. When Othello revives, Iago suggests that Othello hide and watch while Iago engages Cassio in a discussion about Desdemona. What Othello does not know is that Iago is actually discussing Bianca with Cassio. Othello cannot hear what the two men are saying and believes the object of Cassio’s laughter is Desdemona. When Bianca appears and returns the handkerchief to Cassio, Othello is shocked by the sight of it. When Cassio leaves, Othello asks: ‘‘How shall I murder him, Iago?’’ Iago places emphasis on the handkerchief, continuing his torture of Othello. Now Othello wants to kill Desdemona. He talks about chopping her into pieces. Iago tells Othello to strangle her. Lodovico, Desdemona’s uncle, arrives from Venice with letters for Othello, commanding him to return to Venice and to leave Cassio as his deputy in Cyprus. When Othello is with Desdemona, she expresses her hopes that Othello and Cassio can be reconciled. This infuriates Othello, and he strikes her and calls her ‘‘devil.’’ Lodovico witnesses this and wonders what is wrong with Othello. When Lodovico confronts Othello, Othello calls Desdemona a whore. Later Iago talks to Lodovico and implies there is something wrong with Othello. Iago adds: ‘‘It is not honesty in me to speak / What I have seen and known.’’ In other words, Iago makes Othello look weak and possibly mad. But of course, Iago claims no part in Othello’s misery and psychological collapse.

Act 4, Scene 2 Othello questions Emilia about Desdemona’s faithfulness. Emilia stands up for Desdemona. If Desdemona is not chaste, Emilia says: ‘‘There’s no man happy; the purest of their wives / Is foul as slander.’’ Roderigo enters and accuses Iago of doing nothing to help him. Iago placates Roderigo by saying Othello will soon be leaving Cyprus

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without his wife and that, if Roderigo kills Cassio, no one will stand between him and Desdemona.

Act 4, Scene 3 This is another short scene, with Emilia helping Desdemona prepare for bed. Desdemona asks Emilia if there are women who ‘‘abuse’’ their husbands. Emilia says there are. Desdemona asks Emilia if she could do so to her husband. Emilia responds by asking if Desdemona could. Desdemona answers: ‘‘No, by this heavenly light!’’ Shakespeare shows, through this dialogue between Desdemona and Emilia, that no matter what Othello has done to Desdemona, she remains faithful to him.

Act 5, Scene 1 Roderigo tries to murder Cassio, but is himself wounded. Iago then wounds Cassio from behind and flees. Returning a short while later, Iago kills Roderigo to prevent his plan from being exposed.

Act 5, Scene 2 Othello finds Desdemona asleep. He awakens her with a kiss and tells her to prepare to die. Desdemona pleads for mercy. Othello mentions the handkerchief. Desdemona denies everything. She tells Othello to ask Cassio about it. Othello believes that Cassio is dead, so he tells her it is too late. Othello smothers her. Hearing Emilia’s calls at the door, Othello lets her in. Emilia tells Othello that it is Roderigo who is dead, not Cassio. Emilia hears Desdemona cry out: ‘‘O, falsely, falsely murdered!’’ Emilia asks Desdemona who has done this to her. Desdemona says it was only herself. Then she dies. Othello denies murdering her when Emilia asks. But then Othello confesses and tells Emilia that he learned of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness through Iago. Emilia cries out for help. When Iago, Cassio, Montano, and others appear in response, she confronts her husband and exposes his treachery. Othello lunges at Iago, who has fatally wounded Emilia, and Iago flees. He is soon captured, however, and Othello stabs him. Cassio explains how he found the handkerchief. Papers discovered on Roderigo further reveal the extent of Iago’s villainy. Lodovico tells Othello that his power as governor of Cyprus is over. Cassio has been assigned in his place.

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS Othello was adapted as a silent film in 1922. It starred Emil Jannings, Lya de Putti, and Werner Krauss. It is distributed by Video Yesteryear and Discount Video Tapes.  In 1952, Othello was produced by United Artists and directed by Orson Welles. The cast featured Welles as Othello, Michael Mac Liammoir as Iago, and Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona. It is available on DVD from MCVI.

Branagh playing Iago, and Irene Jacob acting in Desdemona’s role. It is available on DVD from Turner Home Entertainment.





BHE Films of the United Kingdom produced a film version of Othello in 1965. This version starred Laurence Olivier as Othello, Maggie Smith as Desdemona, and Frank Finlay as Iago. This version is available on DVD (at http://www.amazon.com) from the studio Ruscico.



In 1982, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London produced a television adaptation of Othello. In this version, Anthony Hopkins starred as Othello, Bob Hoskins played Iago, and Penelope Wilton was Desdemona.



A more recent version, filmed in 1995, starred Laurence Fishburne as Othello, with the great Shakespearian actor Kenneth

Othello stabs himself and dies kissing Desdemona. Iago is remanded into Cassio’s custody.

CHARACTERS Bianca Bianca is a courtesan, or prostitute, in Cyprus. She flirts with Cassio, who falls for her affections, at least physically. Bianca finds the handkerchief that Othello gave to Desdemona in Cassio’s bed and believes that Cassio has been cheating on her. Iago has planted the handkerchief, as his false

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In 1997, the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., decided to put a different twist on this play, choosing Patrick Stewart (a white actor) to play Othello and Patrice Johnson (a black actress) to play Desdemona, with Ron Canada (a black actor) playing Iago. Most of the actors in this play were black except for a few servants, guards, and the prostitute Bianca.



Besides stage and movie productions, Othello has also been adapted into an opera by Giuseppe Verdi (first produced in 1887) and called Otello. A 1982 production featured Kiri Te Kanawa, Vladimir Atlantov, and Piero Cappuccilli. This production is available through HBO Home Video. Another version of the same opera features Placido Domingo, Katia Ricciarelli, and Justino Diaz. It was originally performed in 1976 and can be purchased from Music and Arts Programs online (at http:// musicandarts.com).

proof that Desdemona and Cassio are having an affair. Bianca exhibits jealousy though Cassio dismisses her as not a serious part of his life. Bianca represents the Other, living outside the accepted society. She satisfies Cassio’s physicals needs, but he appears to have no further attachment to her. It is Bianca, however, whom Cassio is talking about with Iago, when Othello believes Cassio is talking about Desdemona.

Brabantio Brabantio is a Venetian senator and Desdemona’s father. He charges Othello with bewitching his daughter. He wants Othello to go to jail, as if Othello has committed a crime. He reluctantly

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backs down in front of the duke, when the duke makes it clear that he thinks highly of Othello and needs Othello to defend Cyprus. Brabantio dies after Desdemona leaves for Cyprus with Othello. Brabantio is a somewhat blustering and self-important Venetian senator. At first he believes Othello is a friend, but when Othello marries Desdemona, Brabantio feels betrayed. He warns Othello that Desdemona has betrayed her father and could just as well betray her husband, foreshadowing further development in the play.

Michael Cassio Cassio is Othello’s lieutenant, who is promoted to that rank over Iago. Cassio is a young and inexperienced soldier, whose high position is much resented by Iago. This resentment sets off Iago’s plan of deception and revenge. Truly devoted to Othello, Cassio is extremely ashamed after being implicated in a drunken brawl during Othello’s wedding celebration on Cyprus. This causes Othello to dismiss him, stripping him of his newly won promotion. Iago tells Cassio to go to Desdemona to plead his case to Othello. Iago uses Cassio to set up a fictitious love affair between Cassio and Desdemona, which only really occurs in Iago’s mind. However, Iago is able to trick Othello, making him believe that Cassio is going to bed with Desdemona. In comparison to Iago, who is very sinister and rather crude, Cassio is a gentleman who truly loves Othello and is devoted to Othello’s wife. Cassio is also very honest. Cassio is caught in Iago’s deceptive web and is almost killed by Roderigo and Iago. In the end, Cassio is the victor, winning the governor’s position in Cyprus when Othello’s murder of Desdemona is discovered.

is unfaithful and is having an illicit affair with Cassio. Desdemona has traditionally been seen as the fair and gentle maiden full of innocence, commitment, and love. She stands in contrast with Iago’s villainy. Desdemona’s role is rather straightforward and uncomplicated. She does stand up to her father, but she is more passive with her husband. She cannot imagine ever having an illicit affair, though her maid Emilia tells Desdemona that many women do. Desdemona is fascinated with Othello, maybe to the point of blindness, as she does not understand his jealousy nor does she fight very hard for her own life. Rather, she almost completely gives in to Othello’s decree that she must die. She merely begs for one more day.

Duke of Venice The duke represents the head of the Venetian Council, the official authority in Venice. He has great respect for Othello as a public and military servant. His primary role within the play is to reconcile Othello and Brabantio. In doing this, the audience gains a glimpse of Othello, the noble and valiant general. The duke’s opinion of Othello counters Brabantio’s description of Othello as well as Iago’s. It is through the confrontation with the duke in front of his court that Othello delivers his finest speech in the play.

Emilia

The clown is one of Othello’s servants. Although the clown appears only in two short scenes, his appearances reflect and distort the action and words of the main plots: his puns on the word ‘‘lie’’ in act 3, scene 4, for example, anticipate Othello’s confusion of two meanings of that word in the next act

Emilia is Iago’s wife and Desdemona’s attendant. She gives Iago Desdemona’s handkerchief, which he had asked her to steal. After Othello murders his wife, Emilia reveals Desdemona’s fidelity and is mortally wounded by Iago for exposing the truth. A cynical, worldly woman, she is deeply attached to her mistress and distrustful of her husband. It is through Emilia that Desdemona receives another view of the world. Emilia’s and Iago’s marriage is used as a contrast to Desdemona’s and Othello’s. Iago berates Emilia in the play, never showing any positive emotions; whereas Desdemona and Othello reflect a sincere and deeply felt love, at least until Iago destroys that.

Desdemona

Graziano

Desdemona is the daughter of Brabantio. She elopes with Othello and accompanies him to Cyprus. After Cassio is discredited, she pleads for his reinstatement, an act that her husband interprets as proof of Iago’s insinuations that she

Graziano is Brabantio’s kinsman who accompanies Lodovico (Desdemona’s uncle) to Cyprus to deliver a letter to Othello. Amidst the chaos of the final scene, Graziano mentions that Desdemona’s father has died.

Clown

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Iago Iago is a soldier under Othello’s rule. When Othello promotes Cassio to lieutenant, overlooking Iago, Iago feels slighted and plots revenge against both men. Iago is a master manipulator, feeding ideas to people who eagerly follow them as if they were their own. He enlists Cassio in a drunken melee, even though Cassio knows that he should not be drinking on duty. Iago strings Roderigo along, having the man pay him for services never rendered. These minor characters are the playthings of Iago. Iago’s biggest feat, however, is when he brings the great warrior, Othello, down. Iago is one of Shakespeare’s most villainous creations. He is the closest character to a devil in Shakespeare’s repertoire. Much of this is due to Iago’s intelligence, his craftiness, and his confidence. He is quick-witted, unafraid of putting his ideas into motion, and unconcerned with the consequences. He has no morals. Iago lets it be known that he is doing everything he does for no one’s benefit but his own. He belittles his wife and still manages to get her to steal for him. He lies so much throughout the play, it is a wonder he remembers what story he has told to which character. Critics often debate Iago’s motives. What drives him to act as he does? Is it merely to attain the rank of lieutenant? Is he jealous of Othello? Does he lust for Desdemona? Or is he just hungry for power. Does he admire his own ability to manipulate, and then enjoy watching the consequences? Some people believe Iago is simply, but purely, evil, doing immoral things merely to be bad. There was a time when actors wanted to play Othello more than they did Iago. But over time, the character of Iago has been looked at in more depth, and actors crave both roles, some taking turns, switching from Othello to Iago. Some critics have even said that Iago is more complex than Othello.

Lodovico Lodovico is Desdemona’s uncle. He acts as a messenger from Venice to Cyprus. He arrives in Cyprus in act 4 with letters announcing that Othello has been replaced by Cassio as governor. He is shocked when he sees Othello slap Desdemona and questions Iago about Othello’s mental state.

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Laurence Fishburne as Othello in a scene from the 1995 film Othello (Reproduced by permission of The Picture Desk, Inc.)

Montano Montano is the governor of Cyprus before Othello arrives. He appears in the beginning of act 3 and is fearful for Othello’s life as a storm rages off the shores of Cyprus. He is also fearful that Othello’s boats might have sunk, thus leaving the island vulnerable to the Turks’ attack.

Othello Othello is the protagonist of the play. He is referred to as the Moor, the commander of Venice’s armed forces. His victories at war give him hero status, making him a favorite of many of the Venetians, including Brabantio and Desdemona. He secretly weds Desdemona, provoking Brabantio’s anger. He also inflames Iago’s anger by promoting Cassio to the rank of lieutenant, a position that Iago covets. Both Iago and Roderigo despise Othello, though Othello is not aware of this. Othello believes that Iago is an honest man and easily becomes entrapped in Iago’s treacherous schemes.

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Othello is awarded the governorship of Cyprus when he (and a big storm) squelch the Turkish navy’s attempts to land in Cyprus and take over. It is while in Cyprus that Iago infects Othello with suspicions that Desdemona is unfaithful. Jealousy overtakes Othello’s logic. He almost goes mad with the thought of Desdemona going to bed with Cassio. The only way out of his jealous fits, Othello believes, is murder. He orders Cassio’s murder and then takes Desdemona’s life. Upon hearing that Desdemona was actually innocent, Othello kills himself. Critics have argued for many years about whether Othello is truly a heroic figure with a tragic flaw or simply an egotistical, self-serving man. Is Othello blinded by his emotional fury or by his myopic vision of the people around him because he is so engrossed in images of himself. How did he fall so far, so quickly? This play is filled with contrasts, especially between the various characters. Othello, however, presents a drastic contrast in and of himself. He is a hero on the battlefield—that is apparent. He has also proven himself a great leader. His love for Desdemona has been defined as one of the best ever dramatized. And yet he is so easily manipulated by Iago. His love gave him strength but it also made him vulnerable.

Roderigo Roderigo is the rejected suitor of Desdemona. He becomes Iago’s pawn, wounds and is wounded by Cassio in an unsuccessful attempt to murder the lieutenant, and then is finally killed by Iago to stop Roderigo from revealing Iago’s deceptions. Roderigo is paying Iago to help him win Desdemona. He appears unable to think for himself and is easily controlled by Iago. Roderigo is either frustrated or inspired by Iago, and a few times he is so desperate he wants to kill himself. In the end he agrees to help Iago kill Cassio after Iago points out that Cassio is another potential rival for Desdemona.

THEMES Jealousy and Mistrust Perhaps the predominant impression created by Shakespeare’s play Othello is that of the terrible destructiveness of jealousy. Although the main focus of the play is on the protagonist, Othello, many characters are infected with this

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destructive emotion, making jealousy the major theme that runs through this drama. Through watching this play, audiences also come to realize the relationship between jealousy and a lack of trust. Jealousy destroys Othello, a once proud and honored military and political leader. Suspicions that his wife, Desdemona, is having an affair racks Othello’s brain to the point of epileptic fits, to a complete distortion of reality, and, ultimately, to murder and suicide. Shakespeare demonstrates how powerless a person can become when a series of distorted thoughts is allowed to infect the mind. Although tremendously misguided into his jealous fit through the efforts of the villainous Iago, Othello is unable to trust in his love for Desdemona and to defy the insinuations of Iago. There is a weakness in Othello, Shakespeare contends, that allows the jealousy to first show its ugly head and then to take over Othello’s mind. It is that weakness that makes Othello so easy for Iago to manipulate. Othello does not trust Desdemona, maybe does not trust any woman who makes him feel so vulnerable because of his love. Or maybe Othello does not trust himself. Foolishly, Othello trusts Iago more than any one, despite the fact that Iago is the least trustworthy character in this play. Jealousy makes a person blind to the truth, this play announces. Othello questions Emilia and Desdemona but refuses to listen to their words—he refuses to trust them. He does not think to confront Cassio, who could tell Othello how he came upon Desdemona’s handkerchief, the only so-called proof that Iago presents to confirm Desdemona and Cassio are having an illicit affair. It is not until Desdemona tells Othello to ask Cassio for his side of the story that the thought enters Othello’s mind. By then it is too late because Othello believes that Cassio has been killed. All of this demonstrates that Othello has forgotten how to think rationally. His emotions have created a mental storm that tosses him about from one wild thought to another, none of which are logical. The greeneyed monster, as Shakespeare has portrayed jealousy, has invaded Othello’s mind just as assuredly as an alien might invade a human body in some modern science fiction tale. Similarly, jealousy has turned Othello into a murderous beast. Othello berates Desdemona, slaps her in front of dignitaries visiting from

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Venice, and then after a last kiss, Othello watches Desdemona take her final breath. It is jealousy and nothing else that topples Othello from the high pedestal upon which he once stood and strips him of his ultimate pleasure in life, his dignity, his reputation, and, finally, his life. The antagonist, Iago, is also infected with jealousy. However, Iago seems to use the greeneyed monster to his benefit. Jealousy spurs Iago to think more clearly, and to scheme more clever—though devilish—plots. Jealousy inspires Iago’s ambition. Iago is jealous of Cassio, not so much for Cassio himself but for Cassio’s position. Iago wants to be the right-hand man to Othello, though he has little respect or fondness for the general. Shakespeare demonstrates, however, that jealousy is not to be trusted. By the end of the play, Iago begins to realize this. He has forgotten that jealousy can make a person blind. In Iago’s case, he forgets that people who are aware of his scheme can talk and can expose him. Iago’s jealousy also leads him to murder. He tries to kill Cassio, first, but fails. Then he kills Roderigo to silence him. Finally, Iago kills Emilia, his wife, for confessing that she was the one who gave Desdemona’s handkerchief to him, implicating Iago in the plot to smear both Desdemona’s and Cassio’s reputations. Iago is also blinded by jealousy in that he forgets to calculate the consequences of his actions, including his own imprisonment. In many ways Iago trusts no one. He is smart enough to manipulate everyone, turning their minds to thoughts he wants them to have. The only person he comes close to trusting is Roderigo, one of the biggest fools in this play. Iago tells Roderigo parts of his scheme. This makes Iago vulnerable to Roderigo. The only person that Iago appears to fully trust is himself, which turns out to be his downfall. Roderigo is also driven by jealousy. He follows along with Iago’s plan because he wants to satisfy his jealousy through revenge. He wants Desdemona and will have her one way or the other as if she were a fruit he could pick from a tree. He will put her within his grasp by any means. But Roderigo’s only means available is money, which he gives to Iago, trusting Iago is smart enough to buy the tasty Desdemona. Roderigo has no trust in himself and would rather kill himself than not have Desdemona. Roderigo both trusts and mistrusts Iago. But

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he has no choice but to do whatever Iago tells him; at least until the end of the play.

Manipulation Iago’s manipulation of Othello, if it were not so evil, could be seen as a magnificent accomplishment. Iago is so clever, quick, and thorough in his scheme one cannot help but admit his intelligence. He is the only one who recognizes Othello’s weakness and single-handedly brings the great Othello down. Othello is not the only one who comes under Iago’s manipulative spell. Emilia, Iago’s wife, obeys him because he taunts her with promised favors. Until the end, Emilia never suspects the harm her husband is brewing. Iago also manipulates Brabantio, twisting Desdemona’s father’s emotions until Brabantio is ready to kill Othello, or at least send Othello to jail. In addition, Iago manipulates Roderigo, who plays a very needy simpleton that almost anyone could persuade. Through Iago’s manipulation, Shakespeare points out how vulnerable people can be. By stirring their emotions, a wickedly smart person can manipulate other people to do almost anything he or she wants them to do. The play might be said to serve as a warning to guard one’s heart and head against the manipulations of a person like Iago, a man with a brilliant mind gone bad.

The Other and Racism The term referred to as the Other is often used in sociological studies to indicate people in a particular society who do not belong to the predominant majority. An example of the Other in the United States would be women, as well as all people of color, since Caucasian men with European roots make up the dominant ruling group. In Shakespeare’s drama Othello, the protagonist, is considered the Other. Othello is neither a Venetian nor a member of the dominant group living in Cyprus. In both cultures, Othello is an outsider. Othello is a Moor, originally from North Africa. He is possibly (though Shakespeare does not make this completely clear) a black man, a Muslim, or maybe an Arab. What is known is that Othello comes from somewhere other than where he is currently living and is, therefore, a foreigner, a member of a very small minority. Attitudes of local citizens toward people who might be classified as the Other often fall

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into a range of emotions. Some people, such as Iago in Shakespeare’s play, do not like outsiders. This could be due to fear of the unknown traits that a stranger might possess. The dominant class of a society might also be jealous of an outsider because that person might exhibit strengths that come across as unusual and unattainable by the local majority group. The dominant class might also feel threatened by people who belong in a minority group because they do not understand them. On the other end of emotions, people in the dominant class might be in awe of someone whom they consider the Other. They may venerate someone who is not like them, believing this so-called Other to be exotic and maybe even godlike. This has happened in Native American and Polynesian cultures when they first encountered white people arriving in ships, brandishing guns, bringing modes of transportation and weapons that the local culture had never before imagined. In Othello, the duke looks upon Othello as the great warrior, the valiant man who will protect Venice and Cyprus. The duke is impressed with Othello’s battle victories. It is possible that because the duke is so taken by Othello (and his qualities of Otherness), that he appoints Othello to govern Cyprus. The duke might have seen Othello as a symbol of strength and been blind to Othello’s weaknesses because the duke was not looking at Othello as a man or a contemporary but rather as an exotic entity who lived in a realm somewhat elevated above the common Venetian. Because Othello was later so overcome by jealousy, he must have had a serious character flaw—one that the duke might have noticed in someone of his own kind but either overlooked or failed to see in Othello because the duke only noticed Othello’s differences. Desdemona also seems to be taken by Othello; she might not have been so influenced by another man of her own culture. She is impressed with Othello’s stories about his victories, which help her to create an image of the man, rather than seeing the man himself. Had she probed deeper into Othello’s personality, she might have gotten to know him better and been forewarned of his insecurities. Because she was so enthralled by Othello’s Otherness, Desdemona could not imagine, for example, that Othello could ever be so weak as to become jealous. She might have saved her marriage, or at least her life, if she had seen Othello more realistically.

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Iago and Roderigo, however, are not so blinded. Their impressions take another route. They curse Othello and call him names. Their opinions of the Other lead them to embrace racism, a negative reaction to people who do not belong to the dominant culture. Iago, in particular, demeans Othello, referring to him as an animal, a ‘‘black ram.’’ He also calls Othello a devil. Brabantio also stoops to racist reactions. There was a time when Brabantio was in awe of Othello, like the duke was. But this was before Brabantio discovers that his daughter, Desdemona, is involved with Othello. Brabantio goes from being impressed with Othello to believing that Othello has drugged and bewitched Desdemona. Brabantio cannot think of another reason why Desdemona would fall for someone who belongs outside the class of people to which they belong. Once Othello touches Desdemona, Brabantio looks upon Othello as a wild, bewitching Other and no longer as a great warrior. Othello is not the only one who is cast as the Other. Women are also placed in this realm. Iago makes insulting comments to Desdemona and Emilia, describing, first his wife and then women in general, as being noisy and worthless except in bed. There is no way that Iago can look upon women as equals. Even Othello, in the throes of his jealous rage, curses women as if they did not belong to the same human race as he does. And often gentle Cassio relegates Bianca to a position not only beneath him but below other women, using her to satisfy his needs then casting her aside when he tires of her, treating her as a servant more than as a lover. One could read into Bianca’s role the summation of Shakespeare’s theme of the Other. Bianca will never be accepted into the society because she does not play by the accepted society’s rules. She will remain forever on the fringes, the outsider. She is used to benefit that society and is quickly forgotten or ignored at the first sign of weakness or exposure, and then told that she is no longer needed because she does not fit in.

Deception Honesty is mentioned several times in this play. One character states that another character is honest, thus establishing a high standard for that character and creating trust in the relationships that are developed. Othello believes that Iago is an honest man, for instance, and

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Despite the many allusions to honesty, deception runs rampant in Othello. It is the contrast between the higher principle of honesty and the lower practice of deception that furthers the drama in this play. The clash between the two concepts drives the plot and adds tension.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

Research the history of the relationship between the Turkish Empire and the Republic of Venice. Create a timeline of their clashes and prepare a presentation for your class of the wars, the territory fought over, and the results. Also provide a background, from both points of view (Turkish and Venetian), of the two cultures and the motivations behind those conflicts.



Venice was once the richest city in Europe. How did Venice gather its wealth? How did the city spend it? Who were the wealthiest families? And where did this wealth come from? Look into the economy of Venice in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries. Write out a report, supported by statistics, about Venice at the height of its prosperity.



Write a poem to Desdemona from Othello. The setting is after Desdemona’s death and after Othello has discovered Iago’s scheme. Pretend that Othello is in jail, awaiting his own death sentence. What would Othello want to tell Desdemona before he dies?



Critics have argued that, although Iago had some reasons for his dastardly deeds, there is nothing to explain why he was so evil. Pretend you are Iago’s defense lawyer. Come up with reasons why he should not be hanged, even if you can find no proof from the lines in the play and have to manufacture your reasons. Pretend your class is the jury and present your case.

therefore listens to everything that Iago tells him without making much effort to evaluate what he hears. Iago states that Cassio is honest, but he does so for an entirely different reason. By mentioning honesty, Iago is really trying to plant a doubt in Othello’s mind, hinting that maybe this evaluation of Cassio might not be quite true. Desdemona’s uncle, Lodovico, claims that Desdemona is an honest woman, thus throwing suspicion on Othello’s state of mind.

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It is interesting to note that if the audience was not aware of the deception going on in the play, if the audience were kept in the dark as are Desdemona and Othello (and most of the other characters), the play would not be quite as interesting or exciting. Shakespeare allows the audience to hear Iago’s thoughts, so they can see how deceptive Iago is. When Iago tells Othello that he loves him, for example, the audience knows, without a doubt, that Iago is lying. This makes Iago appear more treacherous and makes the audience become involved in the play to the point of wanting to warn Othello to beware. In contrast, by the time most of the characters become aware of all the deception in this play, it is too late. They have all become pawns and have fallen victim to the most deceptive man, Iago. Although Iago is a master of deception, he does not get away with it in the end. Shakespeare’s play demonstrates that, although deception might further a person’s plan to a certain point, lying to gain what a person wants is evil and carries with it serious punishment.

STYLE Imagery Shakespeare often uses imagery in Othello to explain a character’s emotion without describing that emotion in detail. In this play, the author uses animal imagery, in particular, as well as other elements occurring in the natural world. For example, in act 1, Iago describes Othello as a black ram, providing the audience not only with a color but the notion of Othello being the odd man out, such as the black sheep in the midst of a white woolly flock. The word ram also carries sexual overtones; and this is very apparent in the complete statement of Iago’s when he says: ‘‘an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe.’’ Here Iago is insinuating that Othello is having sex with Desdemona. In other words, if Othello is the black ram, then Desdemona must be the white ewe (a female sheep). The use of animal imagery in this instance also brings out the banality of the sex act, as if the two (Othello

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and Desdemona) were merely having sex without any feelings of love attached to it. They, and especially Othello, are like animals, given over to the base instincts of the body. Also in act 1, Iago refers to a ‘‘knee-crooking knave,’’ who ‘‘Wears out his time, much like his master’s ass.’’ Everyone knows (at least in Shakespeare’s time they did) that an ass (a donkey) is a work animal without much esteem or intelligence. Iago uses this image to explain that he does not want to be at the beck and call of Othello, merely because Othello is his superior. If Iago were to give in to all of Othello’s orders, then Iago would be no better than an ‘‘ass,’’ a dumb animal that does what it is told with little or no reward. Without having to put this all into words, Shakespeare allows the imagery to speak for him. Later in the same act, Iago compares Othello to a horse. Iago is trying to impress on Brabantio that someone unworthy of his daughter is trying to impregnate her. Iago demeans Othello through several lines of imagery, referring not only to Othello as a ‘‘Barbary horse,’’ but taking the imagery even further: ‘‘you’ll have your nephews neigh to you, you’ll / have coursers for cousins and gennets for germans.’’ Shakespeare’s audiences would have recognized all these images. A Barbary horse is a horse that comes from the Barbary Coast, which is the north coast of Africa, thus the audience would have known this was an allusion to Othello. A courser is a race horse; and gennets are Spanish horses, with the word ‘‘germans’’ standing for ‘‘family.’’ In other words, if Brabantio allows Othello to get Desdemona pregnant, Brabantio will end up with a family of offspring that are less than human. This image would certainly make a deep impression on Brabantio. The image of Brabantio’s daughter giving birth to horses would turn any father’s stomach. It is through images such as these that Shakespeare excites his audiences. To have Iago merely state that Othello is a bad man or an unfit husband is too vague a statement. These words are too abstract. Shakespeare does not want his audience to be free to create their own impressions. Instead he gives them very specific pictures, imbued with emotions, with which to fill their minds.

of actions that occur in a play (or novel) that are interlinked with the main plot but are not as important. For example, in the movie Superman, the relationship that develops between Superman and Lois Lane would be considered a subplot. Many of Shakespeare’s plays have subplots. But Shakespeare did not include one in Othello. This makes the scheming of Iago and the emotional turmoil of Othello incredibly focused. The audience has little more to think about except how evil is Iago and how vulnerable is Othello. Subplots are often used to add complexity to a drama. Shakespeare must have realized that the emotional turmoil in Othello added as much complexity as this drama could stand.

Asides Shakespeare uses asides in his plays to allow the audience a glimpse into the mind or thoughts of his characters. By using an aside, it is as if a character is talking to him- or herself out loud. Sometimes actors reciting asides look at the audience, as if the actor is aware that the audience is watching and wants to share some information with them. Asides are usually said when only one character is on the stage, or when a character has moved to the side of the stage away from the other characters, thus keeping whatever is said a secret. Less often, asides are shared between two characters, with the audience, of course, listening in. In Othello, Iago uses asides a lot, almost as if he cannot keep his own mischief secretly locked up inside of him. He must tell someone and let someone know how clever he is. For example, in act 1, scene 3, right after Roderigo leaves, Iago calls Roderigo a fool in an aside. Iago says: ‘‘Thus do I ever make my fool my purse.’’ It is during this aside that Iago confesses his hatred for Othello. In some ways, asides can be used as a narrator is used in a novel. Asides can fill in information that the author wants the audience to know, details that are not included in dialog. Asides are also very important in drawing the audience into the drama. If the audience shares a secret, they feel a part of the scheme that is being hatched on stage.

Lack of Subplot

Symbol

Othello is unique among Shakespeare’s plays because it lacks a subplot. A subplot is a series

The handkerchief used in Othello is a symbol, standing for different things at various times in

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this play. For Othello, the handkerchief is a symbol of his love. When he was given it, he was told it was charged with magic. In some ways, the handkerchief is something like a wedding ring, given to Othello’s bride as a sign of his commitment. When Desdemona misplaces the handkerchief, it becomes a prop that Iago will use to cement his insinuations that Desdemona and Cassio are having an affair. When Cassio discovers it, the handkerchief becomes a special trinket that he wants duplicated. He uses the handkerchief to belittle Bianca. However, when Othello sees Cassio with the handkerchief, the small piece of cloth becomes the proof that Desdemona has been unfaithful. The handkerchief then becomes the symbol of the mortal seal of Desdemona’s fate. The handkerchief also seals Iago’s fate when Emilia sees it and exposes her husband’s scheme. The power of this symbol is that it raises the audience’s attention as well as the tension in the play. The audience does not want Emilia to give the handkerchief to Iago. They do not want Cassio to find it. They do not want Othello to see it in Cassio’s hands. When the audience watches Othello react to the presence of the handkerchief after it has been lost, they know that Othello will not stop until he has done harm to Desdemona. The symbol, in this case, almost takes on a role of another character. It grabs the audience’s imagination and keeps their eyes glued to the stage. When will the handkerchief next appear, the audience wonders. Symbols, such as the blue feather in the cartoon story of Dumbo, which gives the baby circus elephant the extra confidence it needs to fly, is a tool that authors use to emphasize the emotional content of the play (movie, novel, etc.). A symbol stands for something else. In the case of the handkerchief, it stands for several things, things that cannot be seen. Love, fidelity, and commitment are abstractions. They are concepts that can only be expressed in words. Shakespeare uses the handkerchief because it is visible, something tangible. The audience can watch as the handkerchief changes hands, changes meaning, and finally changes the directions of the characters’ lives.

Conflict Every good writer knows that conflict is what makes the story interesting. Readers become bored with a story if there is no conflict. It is

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through conflict that characters either are bolstered in their confidence, or they completely fall apart. Shakespeare is a master at creating conflict in his plays. Conflict requires a character to struggle with something. If it is an external conflict, than the protagonist might struggle with another character or some other external element such as nature. If the conflict is internal, than the protagonist is challenged by something inside of him- or herself. In this play, although there are brief bouts of external conflict—the unseen battle between Turkish and Venetian ships; the sword fights or brawls in the streets among Othello’s men—most of the conflict is internal, or psychological. The major conflict is the battle that goes on inside Othello’s head. Othello must come to terms with his jealousy, which pulls him away from another strong emotion, his love for Desdemona. The plot and the action of the play revolve around how Iago is going to create that conflict and then how Othello is going to deal with it. When Othello confronts Desdemona, the conflict is said to be interpersonal. Othello must struggle with Desdemona as he tries to understand what has happened and then decide whom he is going to believe, Desdemona or Iago. Othello’s brief conflict with Brabantio in the beginning of the play is also interpersonal. That conflict is used to define Othello’s character for the good, demonstrating how eloquent Othello is and how well he is accepted and honored in the Venetian council. Othello faces this conflict quite eloquently. His conflict with Desdemona, however, points out Othello’s weaknesses. At the end of the play, Othello has a different kind of conflict, this time a conflict with his own actions. He has murdered the woman he loves and learns that he did so through a haze of misinformation and hate. It is too late to change his actions. Just as he succumbs in the conflict with his jealousy, Othello also loses this final conflict.

Prose versus Poetry Shakespeare’s plays are written both in prose and in poetry. He uses both forms to express different feelings in his plays. For example, when Othello stands before the Venetian council to explain his love for Desdemona and rebut Brabantio’s claims that he has stolen Desdemona, Shakespeare writes Othello’s monologue

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in a poetic form. That form is blank verse— unrhymed lines of ten syllables set in the pattern of iambic pentameter, a series of unstressed and stressed syllables. However, as Othello’s jealousy takes over his mind, he does not always speak through poetic language and patterns. He begins talking in prose. It is as if Shakespeare is signaling through the use of prose, in these instances, that Othello is losing his composure, his elegance, as well as his rational state of mind. For example, in act 4, scene 1, Othello is desperately trying to grasp the facts. He is talking with Iago, who is implying that Desdemona has been unfaithful. The news hits Othello hard, and just before he falls into an epileptic fit, Othello speaks lines that have no poetry. He almost babbles.

Venice

Shakespeare also uses prose when Cassio speaks to Bianca, probably pointing out the ignoble nature of their relationship. Roderigo often talks in prose. This might be used to suggest his lack of intelligence. Whereas Desdemona almost always speaks lines written like poems.

By the fourteenth century, Venice dominated the trade of the Adriatic Sea and had many colonies in the Middle East. During the fifteenth century, the Venetians went to battle with the Ottoman Turks several times, as well as with several republics that today make up modern-day Italy, such as Milan and Florence. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, Venice lost a great battle to the Turks and had to concede much of its previously conquered territories. In 1489, Venice received the island of Cyprus from Caterina Cornaro, who was born in Venice and was the queen of Cyprus due to the untimely death of her husband and son. She was forced by the Republic of Venice to abdicate her throne; that was how Venice came to rule Cyprus.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Moors Historians have trouble pinpointing exactly who the Moors were. What is suspected is that the Moors were a people, possibly of Berber and Arab descent, living in northern Africa. What is known is that in the eight century, people called Moors conquered the Iberian Peninsula, which today contains both Spain and Portugal. The Moors brought the Islamic religion to the Iberian Peninsula, which until then had been a Christianized area. The Moors ruled most, and later only parts, of the peninsula for seven centuries. They were eventually driven out of their last stronghold in southern Spain in the year 1492, a date that corresponds to Columbus’s sailing to the New World. The origin of the word Moor has been traced to Greek as well as Latin words that translate as ‘‘black’’ or ‘‘very dark.’’ Some sources refer to Moors as being Berbers, who, for the most part, were light skinned and blue-eyed. Other sources state that the term Moor was used to designate people of the Muslim faith. The names Morocco and Mauritania are said to be derivatives of the word Moor.

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Venice sits in the middle of the Venetian Lagoon, surrounded by water and marshes in northeast Italy at the head of the Adriatic Sea. This was an ancient, strategic naval position; by the twelfth century, Venice had a strong navy and enjoyed its status as a major trade center between Europe, the Byzantine Empire and Muslim countries to the east. By the thirteenth century, Venice was the richest city in Europe. The most prosperous Venetian families ruled the Great Council, which was the political body that governed the city, with a duke as its head. Although the republics that flanked Venice were vehemently Christian, often persecuting those who did not practice this religion, Venice was known for its religious tolerance.

Cyprus Cyprus is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and lies off the southern coast of Turkey. The history of the island is very bloody, with battles fought for centuries to determine who would rule this island country. The island had long been occupied by Greeks, but through the centuries was conquered by other countries, including the Venetian Republic and, in the sixteenth century, Turkey. Today Cyprus is divided into a Turkish portion and a Greek portion. In between these two parts is a sort of no-man’s-land, administered by the United Nations to keep the peace. Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Romans took their turns governing this island in the first thousands years B . C . E . In the first centuries C . E ., Cyprus was controlled by the Byzantine

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Aidan McArdle as Roderigo and Richard McCabe as Iago in Act I, scene i at the Barbican Theatre, London, 2000 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

Empire, the Islamic Empire, British, and German conquerors, until Venetian officials took over for almost one hundred years beginning in 1489. The Venetian rule ended when the Ottoman Empire, after several attempts, defeated Venice’s armies in 1571. The Turks maintained control for several hundred years until they were forced to sign over the island to the British. Cyprus won its independence in 1960. However, since that time until the present day, the Greek communities on the island have not gotten along with their neighbors, the Cyprus citizens of Turkish descent. That is why, today, the island is still divided.

Aspects of the Elizabethan Theatre The development of theatres in England captured the imagination of the country’s citizens and grew rapidly during Shakespeare’s life. Companies of actors were often sponsored by noblemen and sometimes played out of their estates. Smaller troupes traveled throughout the countryside,

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sometimes performing on a wheeled platform that was pulled from one small township to another. Other groups of actors performed in inns, as the innkeepers were well aware of the money they could make from the audience’s needs for drink and food. Other troupes acted out their dramas at local festivals. There was often great dispute concerning the presence of actors and their audiences. Officials complained that the gathering of these people to perform or to watch plays was a good way to spread disease, as many actors were called vagabonds (or tramps) who went from town to town begging for money and were considered likely to carry communicable diseases. Many of the plays that were performed contained what the upper classes of people defined as lewd material, such as dramas that alluded to sexual intercourse. Plays written by Shakespeare also included this material; critics believe these scenes were written for the common folk, to keep them entertained. Drunken brawls were also a

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1400s: The Republic of Venice takes control of Cyprus, the third largest of the islands in the Mediterranean Sea.

Today: Some scientists classify people as Moors based on language. They claim that people who speak the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic and live mainly in the western Sahara Desert and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania are Moors. In the Spanish language, the term Moors corresponds to any one of the Muslim faith. Derivatives of the word Moor in Latin mean ‘‘black.’’

1600s: The Ottoman Empire (also called the Empire of Turkey) governs the island of Cyprus. Today: After years under British control, Cyprus demands independence. However, Cyprus is made up of Greek and Turkish residents, who continue to fight for control. Today, the island is divided into four main sections: in the south, the Republic of Cyprus; the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus; the United Nations controlled Green Line Section dividing the north from the south; and the British Base Areas.



1400s: Venice maintains a naval prominence in the Mediterranean waters, capturing Corfu, the Dalmatian Coast, Zante, and finally Cyprus. Then Venice begins to acquire more land on the mainland of the Adriatic Sea.

1400s: After 700 years of ruling the Iberian Peninsula, the Moors are forced to leave.

1600s: Its political and maritime powers decline, but Venice retains its reputation as a haven for and promoter of the arts.

1600s: As Spanish ships claim lands farther to the east, they come upon Muslim people in the Philippines and refer to them as Moors.

Today: Despite the corrosion of the ancient buildings by the polluted waters that stream through the city, Venice has become one of Italy’s most popular tourist destinations.

frequent occurrence among the audience members, and merchants often complained that their workers too often played hooky so they could watch the plays, thus costing the merchants money. Such complaints were the basis for having playhouses banned from being built inside the city limits of London. So acting troupes displayed their art along the boundaries of the town, across the River Thames, away from the reach of the Corporation of London (the municipal government of the city) but within easy reach of the audiences.

London was built in Shoreditch in 1576, called simply, The Theatre. Other theaters followed. The best known of these early theaters were: The Curtain, built in 1577; The Rose, built in 1587; the theater that Shakespeare made so popular, The Globe, built in 1599; and The Hope, built in 1613. Many of these theaters were built in the rougher parts of town. For example, The Rose Theatre was built next to a prison, with brothels and bear-baiting arenas all around. Some of these theaters were big enough to hold as many as three thousand people.

In 1572, strolling acting groups were banned completely. Queen Elizabeth I, however, eventually permitted four noblemen to establish and support their own theater companies. For the most part, the noblemen financed plays that were held on permanent stages that were built in inns. The first proper theater in the area of

Most of these early theaters did not have roofs, except for over small portions of the stage and a tiered group of expensive seats. People who could not afford a seat stood in an open-air amphitheater called a pit, which was found at the front of the stage. The Globe, which housed Shakespeare’s company of actors,



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called The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, or later, The King’s Men, was built to these typical specifications. An example of a completely roofed theater, popular with the gentry and more expensive to attend, was the Blackfriars Theatre. The land on which the Blackfriars Theatre was built was once owned by a group of Catholic, Dominican monks (hence the name), thus the land was considered exempt from city governance. Shakespeare’s plays were often played on this stage; Othello was one of the plays that was performed here. Although no effort or money was typically put into scenery during Shakespeare’s time, a lot of attention and investment did go into the costumes and became an acting group’s most important possessions. Through costume and makeup, young boys were able to conceal their masculinity and play the roles of women, such as Desdemona.

Elizabethan Women Why is the character of Desdemona so passive about losing her life? Why is Emilia so compliant with her husband? Part of the reason for this might have had something to do with the role of women in Elizabethan England. Elizabethan women were not allowed to go to school, for one thing, although they were allowed to study under a private tutor. Neither did Elizabethan women have the right to vote. For the most part, these sixteenth-century women stayed home, had children, and helped to raise them. The only professions open to women were domestic ones, such as cooks, housekeepers, and maids. A few women worked in the arts, but they were not allowed on stage. The husband was seen as the head of the family, but this did not give him the right to abuse his wife. A husband could rebuke his wife, but hitting her was considered socially improper, with extensive abuse being illegal. But the general overall consensus of the time was that women were to obey their husbands at all times because men knew more than women. This, of course, caused a bit of a controversy with the strong Queen Elizabeth I at the helm. Still, members of the royal families were allowed more leeway in their behavior than ordinary women.

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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Othello was first produced in 1604. Throughout the next twenty years or so, the play was staged on an almost continual basis. By some historic accounts, it was in the 1630s, that one of the first roles played by a female on England’s professional stage was that of Othello’s Desdemona. The first real African-American person to play the title role of Othello was Ira Aldridge. Prior to this, white actors used ‘‘blackface,’’ a type of makeup, when playing African-American roles. For almost forty years, from 1826 until 1865, Aldridge continued to act out this role all over Europe but not in the United States, the country of his birth. In 1865, while playing Othello and in the midst of the fourth act of the play, Aldridge died on stage. It would not be until 1943 that an African-American man, Paul Robeson, played Othello in the United States. Although the play was a Broadway success, it displeased segregationists. However, according to Michael Neill, in his essay ‘‘Othello and Race,’’ one critic was so moved by the power of Robeson’s performance that after seeing Robeson play the role of Othello, he stated ‘‘that ‘no white man should ever dare play the part again.’’’ Although Othello has been a major hit with audiences, mostly due to the dramatic plot, some critics have not responded well to the play. For example, George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), himself a dramatist, wrote in 1907 that he thought Othello was ‘‘pure melodrama.’’ As recorded in A Casebook on Othello, Shaw’s essay, ‘‘Othello: Pure Melodrama,’’ goes on to state that ‘‘There is not a touch of character in it that goes below the skin; and the fitful attempts to make Iago something better than a melodramatic villain only make a hopeless mess of him and his motives.’’ However, even Shaw could not help but praise Shakespeare’s gift of words. Shaw continued by stating that despite these flaws, the play ‘‘remains magnificent by the volume of its passion and the splendor of its word-music, which sweep the scenes up to a plane on which sense is drowned in sound. The words do not convey ideas: they are streaming ensigns and tossing branches to make the tempest of passion visible.’’ Over the production history of this play, critics have argued which role, Othello’s or Iago’s, was the most dramatic. Actors have switched from one role to the other, trying the

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character’s voice on, trying to decide the same thing. Probably in no other play of Shakespeare’s is it so difficult to decide which role dominates the other. In his essay, ‘‘The Noble Othello,’’ A. C. Bradley chose to focus on Othello, whom he calls the ‘‘greatest poet of them all,’’ referring to the strong lines that Shakespeare wrote for this character. Despite Othello’s linguistic abilities and his confidence in his speech, Othello has many dangers to face. He is noble but vulnerable. Bradley wrote. ‘‘Othello’s mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect.’’ Other reasons for Othello’s vulnerability, according to Bradley, are that ‘‘his trust, where he trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible in him. He is extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously.’’

Othello is an underling not because he fails to be a ‘master of his fate’ but because he is human. Faced by the intensity of total commitment, absolute love, men must be underlings because they are not gods, because they are vulnerable, they mistake, rage, fall down, become comic grotesques, as Othello does when he tries to listen in on Cassio and Iago talking about Bianca. Under such circumstances love for the best of men can be no more than a commitment to the fallible. However heroic the commitment, however true the perception of an ineffaceable goodness, the rot cannot be stopped nor the wrong step redirected. For the quality of faith in another, which is the highest expression of love, is necessarily tragic when the faith is fastened to a frail and changeable object, alias a human being. Othello is simultaneously the most glamorous of Shakespeare’s heroes and the most vulnerable; and the simultaneous presence of these two opposed qualities is not used to mark a division in Othello’s nature . . . but rather a necessary condition of the heroic presence.

Elmer Edgar Stoll, writing in his essay ‘‘Othello: Tragedy of Effect,’’ praises Shakespeare for his creation of the protagonist Othello. Stoll states that Othello is made the grandest and noblest of Shakespeare’s lovers; and it is only through Iago’s overwhelming reputation for honesty and sagacity, the impenetrableness of his mask together with the potency of his seductive acts, that he [Othello] is led astray and succumbs. ‘‘For the highest tragic effect it is the great and good man that succumbs.’’ T. S. Eliot in his essay, ‘‘The Hero Cheering Himself Up,’’ also praises Shakespeare by examining Othello’s last speech of the play. The speech, Eliot states, exposes Othello’s lack of humility, through Shakespeare’s great ability to understand human nature. ‘‘What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself. Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.’’ Eliot then concludes: ‘‘I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.’’

Anthony Davies, writing a historic background of the play for the book The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, wrote that ‘‘Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt alike praised the rich contrasts between its [the play’s] characters and the skill of its design.’’ Davies continued: ‘‘Although some 19th-century Americans . . . found the play’s depiction of interracial marriage objectionable . . . most 19th-century critics found Othello convincingly noble.’’

G. K. Hunter found the character of Othello very interesting and Shakespeare’s creation very dramatic and true to life. In his essay ‘‘Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy,’’ Hunter described Othello in this way:

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David Bevington, writing in his essay ‘‘Shakespeare the Man,’’ used the play to reflect on Shakespeare himself. Bevington wrote, We are safe in saying only that a play like Othello must reveal his [Shakespeare’s] own intense feelings about jealousy and his humane view of it: the emotional devastation, the self-blindness, the sorrow experienced for failing in this way, the self-accusation, the willingness finally to acknowledge with generosity of spirit that the fault was the man’s alone, the need for remorse, and the unwillingness to forgive oneself.

And finally, Bernard Spivack, as quoted in Arthur M. Eastman’s A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism, wrote: ‘‘The feeling between [Othello and Desdemona] scales love’s loftiest romance and expresses more acutely than anywhere else in the English drama, the refinement of sexual love in the sentiment and literature of Renaissance Europe, the evolution of l’amour curtois to its richest spiritual possibilities.’’ Shakespeare was able to do this, Spivack

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wrote, because of the contrasts that the poet set up in his play. In a sense their [Desdemona’s and Othello’s] union is a proposition and the play their battlefield, testing whether love so conceived and dedicated can long endure. But poetry is at work upon the proposition to transform it into sensation, and commentary at its best can only hint at the immediate experience the play gives us of gentle Desdemona and the noble Moor.

ONLY AS WE RECOGNISE THE FAMILIARITY OF THE FIGURE OF THE BLACK MAN AS VILLAIN IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA CAN WE APPRECIATE WHAT MUST HAVE BEEN THE STARTLING IMPACT ON SHAKESPEARE’S AUDIENCE OF A BLACK HERO OF OUTSTANDING QUALITIES IN HIS PLAY OTHELLO.’’

CRITICISM Ruth Cowhig Cowhig provides background on blacks in England during Shakespeare’s time, stressing the use of racial stereotypes in the dramas of the period. Observing that black people were typically depicted as stock villains, she suggests that Shakespeare’s presentation of the noble, dignified Othello as the hero of a tragedy must have been startling to Elizabethan audiences. Cowhig also examines how several characters in the play, especially Iago, are racially prejudiced. Iago’s racism is the source of his hatred of Othello, she claims, and he plays on the prejudices of other characters to turn them against the Moor. Importantly, Cowhig emphasizes that, although Shakespeare consistently challenges stereotypes with his depiction of Othello, he also demonstrates that, in a white society, the Moor’s color isolates him and makes him vulnerable. It is difficult to assess the reactions and attitudes of people in sixteenth-century Britain to the relatively few blacks living amongst them. Their feelings would certainly be very mixed: strangeness and mystery producing a certain fascination and fostering a taste for the exotic: on the other hand prejudice and fear, always easily aroused by people different from ourselves, causing distrust and hostility. This hostility would be encouraged by the widespread belief in the legend that blacks were descendants of Ham in the Genesis story, punished for sexual excess by their blackness. Sexual potency was therefore one of the attributes of the prototype black. Other qualities associated with black people were courage, pride, guilelessness, credulity and easily aroused passions—the list found in John Leo’s The Geographical History of Africa, a book written in Arabic early in the sixteenth century and translated into English in 1600.

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Contemporary attitudes may have been more influenced by literary works such as this than by direct experience; but recently the part played by such direct contacts has been rediscovered. The scholarly and original study [Othello’s Countrymen] by Eldred Jones of these contacts and their effects on Renaissance drama has transformed contemporary attitudes. Black people were introduced into plays and folk dancing in mediaeval England and later, during the sixteenth century, they often appeared in the more sophisticated court masques. In these, the blackness was at first suggested by a very fine lawn [linen fabric] covering the faces, necks, arms and hands of the actors. Then black stockings, masks and wigs were used; such items are mentioned in surviving lists of properties [theater ‘‘props’’]. These characters were mainly valued for the exotic aesthetic effects which their contrasting colour provided. The culmination of this tradition can be seen in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness in 1605, which he produced in answer to Queen Anne’s request that the masquers should be ‘black-mores at first’. The theme is based upon the longing of the black daughters of Niger to gain whiteness and beauty. This surely contradicts the idea that Elizabethans and Jacobeans were not conscious of colour and had no prejudice: the desirability of whiteness is taken for granted! Elizabethan drama also used Moorish characters for visual effects and for their association with strange and remote countries. In [Christopher] Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, for instance, the three Moorish kings play little part in the plot, and have no individual character. Their main contribution to the play is in adding to the impression of power and conquest

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Julia Stiles and Mekhi Phifer in a scene from the movie O (Reproduced by permission of The Picture Desk, Inc.)

by emphasising the extent of Tamburlaine’s victories. Their blackness also provides a variety of visual effects in the masques. Marlowe’s plays reflect the curiosity of his contemporaries about distant countries, and must have whetted the appetites of his audiences for war and conquest; but the black characters are seen from the outside and have no human complexity . . . Only as we recognise the familiarity of the figure of the black man as villain in Elizabethan drama can we appreciate what must have been the startling impact on Shakespeare’s audience of a black hero of outstanding qualities in his play Othello. Inevitably we are forced to ask questions which we cannot satisfactorily answer. Why did Shakespeare choose a black man as the hero of one of his great tragedies? What experience led the dramatist who had portrayed the conventional stereotype in Aaron [in Titus Andronicus] in 1590 to break completely with tradition ten years later? Had Shakespeare any direct contact with black people? Why did he select the tale of Othello from the large number of Italian stories available to him?

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We cannot answer such questions with certainty, but we may speculate. Until the publication of Eldred Jones’ study, Othello’s Countrymen, in 1965, it was generally assumed that Shakespeare depended only on literary sources for his black characters. Although the presence of black people in England is well documented, it went unrecognised. There are two main sources of information. One is [Richard] Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, the huge collection of narratives of Elizabethan sailors and traders which Hakluyt collected and published in twelve volumes. Volumes VI and XI describe voyages during which black men from West Africa were taken aboard, brought back to England, and afterwards used as interpreters on subsequent voyages. Later, between 1562 and 1568, [John] Hawkins had the unhappy distinction of being the first of the English gentleman slavetraders; as well as bringing ‘blackamoores’ to England, he sold hundreds of black slaves to Spain. The other evidence is in the series of royal proclamations and state papers which call attention to the ‘great number of Negroes and blackamoors’ in the realm, ‘of which kinde of people there are all-ready here too manye’. They were

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regarded by Queen Elizabeth as a threat to her own subjects ‘in these hard times of dearth’. Negotiations were carried on between the Queen and Casper van Senden, merchant of Lubeck, to cancel her debt to him for transporting between two and three hundred English prisoners from Spain and Portugal back to England by allowing him to take up a similar number of unwanted black aliens—presumably to sell them as slaves. Although the correspondence shows that the deal never materialised, since the ‘owners’ of these ‘blackamoors’ refused to give them up, it is clear that there were several hundreds of black people living in the households of the aristocracy and landed gentry, or working in London taverns . . . Thus the sight of black people must have been familiar to Londoners. London was a very busy port, but still a relatively small and overcrowded city, so Shakespeare could hardly have avoided seeing them. What thoughts did he have as he watched their faces, men uprooted from their country, their homes and families? I cannot help thinking of Rembrandt’s moving study of The Two Negroes painted some sixty years later, which expresses their situation poignantly. The encounter with real blacks on the streets of London would have yielded a sense of their common humanity, which would have conflicted with the myths about their cultural, sexual and religious ‘otherness’ found in the travel books. The play between reality and myth informs Titus Andronicus: Shakespeare presents Aaron as a demon, but at the end of the play suddenly shatters the illusion of myth by showing Aaron to be a black person with common feelings of compassion and fatherly care for his child. In Othello too there is conscious manipulation of reality and myth: Othello is presented initially (through the eyes of Iago and Roderigo) as a dangerous beast, before he reveals himself to be of noble, human status, only to degenerate later to the condition of bloodthirsty and irrational animalism. It is surely not surprising that Shakespeare, the dramatist whose sympathy for the despised alien upsets the balance of the otherwise ‘unrealistic’ The Merchant of Venice should want to create a play about a kind of black man not yet seen on the English stage; a black man whose humanity is eroded by the cunning and racism of whites.

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Shakespeare’s choice of a black hero for his tragedy must have been deliberate. His direct source was an Italian tale from [Geraldi] Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565); he followed this tale in using the love between a Moor and a young Venetian girl of high birth as the basis of his plot, but in little else. The original story is crude and lacking in subtlety. Cinthio, in accordance with the demands of the time, expresses concern that his tale should have a moral purpose. He gives it as recommending that young people should not marry against the family’s wishes, and especially not with someone separated from them by nature, heaven and mode of life. Such a moral has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s play, except in so far as he uses it ironically, so his choice of the tale remains obscure. Perhaps he regretted his creation of the cruel and malevolent Aaron, and found himself imagining the feelings of proud men, possibly of royal descent in their own countries, humiliated and degraded as slaves. Whatever his intentions may have been, we have to take seriously the significance of Othello’s race in our interpretation of the play. This is all the more important because teachers will find it largely ignored by critical commentaries. The first effect of Othello’s blackness is immediately grasped by the audience, but not always by the reader. It is that he is placed in isolation from the other characters from the very beginning of the play. This isolation is an integral part of Othello’s experience constantly operative even if not necessarily at a conscious level; anyone black will readily appreciate that Othello’s colour is important for our understanding of his character. Even before his first entry we are forced to focus our attention on his race: the speeches of Iago and Roderigo in the first scene are full of racial antipathy. Othello is ‘the thick lips’ [I. i. 66], ‘an old black ram’ [I. i. 88], ‘a lascivious Moor’ [I. i. 126] and ‘a Barbary horse’ [I. i. 111–12], and ‘he is making the beast with two backs’ [cf. I. i. 116–17] with Desdemona. The language is purposely offensive and sexually coarse, and the animal images convey, as they always do, the idea of someone less than human. Iago calculates on arousing in Brabantio all the latent prejudice of Venetian society, and he succeeds. To Brabantio the union is ‘a treason of the blood’ [I. i. 169], and he feels that its acceptance will reduce Venetian statesmen to ‘bondslaves and pagans’ [I. ii. 99].

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Brabantio occupies a strong position in society. He is much beloved And hath in his effect a voice potential As double as the Duke’s [I. ii. 12–14] according to Iago. Although he represents a more liberal attitude than Iago’s, at least on the surface, his attitude is equally prejudiced. He makes Othello’s meetings with Desdemona possible by entertaining him in his own home, but his reaction to the news of the elopement is predictable. He is outraged that this black man should presume so far, and concludes that he must have used charms and witchcraft since otherwise his daughter could never ‘fall in love with what she feared to look on’ [I. iii. 98]. To him the match is ‘against all rules of nature’ [I. iii. 101], and when he confronts Othello his abuse is as bitter as Iago’s. But before this confrontation, the audience has seen Othello and we have been impressed by two characteristics. First his pride:

and secondly, his confidence in his own achievements and position: My services which I have done the Signiory Shall out-tongue his complaints. [I. ii. 18–19] It is hard to overestimate the reactions of a Renaissance audience to this unfamiliar black man, so noble in bearing and so obviously master of the situation. But however great Othello’s confidence, his colour makes his vulnerability plain. If the state had not been in danger, and Othello essential to its defence, Brabantio’s expectation of support from the Duke and senate would surely have been realised. He is disappointed; the Duke treats Othello as befits his position as commander-in-chief, addressing him as ‘valiant Othello’. The only support Brabantio receives is from the first senator, whose parting words, ‘Adieu, brave Moor, Use Desdemona well’ [I. iii. 291], while not unfriendly, reveal a superior attitude. Would a senator have so advised a newly married general if he had been white and equal? Desdemona’s stature in the play springs directly from Othello’s colour. Beneath a quiet

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It is made clear that the marriage between Othello and Desdemona is fully consummated. Desdemona is as explicit as decorum allows: If I be left behind A moth of peace, and he go to the war, The rites for why I love him are bereft me. [I. iii. 255–57] Othello, on the other hand, disclaims the heat of physical desire when asking that she should go with him to Cyprus:

I fetch my life and being From men of royal siege. [I. ii. 21–2]

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exterior lay the spirited independence which comes out in her defence of her marriage before the Senate. She has resisted the pressures of society to make an approved marriage, shunning ‘The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation’ [I. ii. 68]. Clearly, Brabantio had exerted no force: he was no Capulet [in Romeo and Juliet]. But Desdemona was well aware of the seriousness of her decision to marry Othello: ‘my downright violence and storm of fortune’ [I. iii. 249] she calls it. Finally she says that she ‘saw Othello’s visage in his mind’ [I. iii. 252]: obviously the audience, conditioned by prejudice, had to make the effort to overcome, with her, the tendency to associate Othello’s black face with evil, or at least with inferiority.

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I therefore beg it not To please the palate of my appetite, Nor to comply with heat—the young affects In me defunct. [I. iii. 261–64] These speeches relate directly to Othello’s colour. Desdemona has to make it clear that his ‘sooty bosom’ (her father’s phrase) is no obstacle to desire; while Othello must defend himself against the unspoken accusations, of the audience as well as of the senators, because of the association of sexual lust with blackness. In Act III Scene iii, often referred to as the temptation scene, Othello’s faith in Desdemona is gradually undermined by Iago’s insinuations, and he is eventually reduced by jealousy to an irrational madness. Iago’s cynical cunning plays upon Othello’s trustfulness: The Moor is of a free and open nature That thinks men honest that but seem to be so. [I. iii. 399–400] The spectacle of Othello’s disintegration is perhaps the most painful in the whole Shakespeare canon: and Iago’s destructive cruelty has seemed to many critics to be inadequately

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motivated. They have spoken of ‘motiveless malignity’ and ‘diabolic intellect’, sometimes considering Iago’s to be the most interesting character in the play. I think this is an unbalanced view, resulting from the failure to recognise racial issues. Iago’s contempt for Othello, despite his grudging recognition of his qualities, his jealousy over Cassio’s ‘preferment’, and the gnawing hatred which drives him on are based upon an arrogant racism. He harps mercilessly upon the unnaturalness of the marriage between Othello and Desdemona: Not to affect many proposed matches, Of her own clime, complexion and degree, Whereto we see in all things nature tends— Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportions, thoughts unnatural. [III. iii. 229–33] The exclamation of disgust and the words ‘smell’ and ‘foul’ reveal a phobia so obvious that it is strange that it is often passed over. The attack demolishes Othello’s defences because this kind of racial contempt exposes his basic insecurity as an alien in a white society. His confidence in Desdemona expressed in ‘For she had eyes, and chose me’ [I. iii. 189], changes to the misery of Haply for I am black And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have . . . [III. iii. 263–65] This is one of the most moving moments in the play. Given Iago’s hatred and astuteness in exploiting other people’s weaknesses, which we see in the plot he sets for Cassio, the black Othello is easy game. We are watching the baiting of an alien who cannot fight back on equal terms. Othello’s jealous madness is the more terrifying because of the noble figure he presented in the early scenes, when he is addressed as ‘brave Othello’ and ‘our noble and valiant general’ [II. ii. 1], and when proud self-control is his essential quality; he refuses to be roused to anger by Brabantio and Roderigo: ‘Keep up your bright swords for the dew will rust them’ [I. ii. 58]. After his breakdown we are reminded by Ludovico of his previous moral strengths and self-control: ‘Is this the nature / Whom passion could not shake?’ [IV. ii. 265–66]. Thus the portrait is of a man who totally contradicts the contemporary conception of the black man as one easily swayed by passion. He is the most attractive of

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all Shakespeare’s soldier heroes: one who has achieved high rank entirely on merit. His early history given in Desdemona’s account of his wooing is typical of the bitter experience of an African of his times ‘Taken by the insolent foe / And sold to slavery’ [I. iii. 137–38]. Othello’s military career is everything to him, and the famous ‘farewell’ speech of Act IV, with its aura of romatic nostalgia, expresses the despair of a man whose achievements have been reduced to nothing: ‘Othello’s occupation gone’ [III. iii. 357]. Spoken by a black Othello, the words ‘The big wars / That make ambition virtue’ [III. iii. 349–350], have a meaning beyond more rhetoric. Ambition was still reckoned as a sin in Shakespeare’s time; but in Othello’s case it has been purified by his courage and endurance and by the fact that only ambition could enable him to escape the humiliations of his early life. When he realises that his career is irrevocably over, he looks back at the trappings of war—the ‘pride, pomp and circumstance’ [III. iii. 354], the ‘spiritstirring drum’ [III. iii. 352] and the rest—as a dying man looks back on life. The sympathies of the audience for Othello are never completely destroyed. The Russian actor, Ostuzhev who set himself to study the character of Othello throughout his career, saw the problem of the final scene as ‘acting the part so as to make people love Othello and forget he is a murderer’. When Othello answers Ludovico’s rhetorical question ‘What shall be said of thee?’ [V. ii. 293] with the words, ‘An honourable murderer, if you will’ [V. ii. 294], we are not outraged by such a statement: instead we see in it a terrible pathos. What we are waiting for is the unmasking of Iago. When this comes, Othello looks down at Iago’s feet for the mythical cloven hoofs and demands an explanation from that ‘demi-devil’, reminding us that blackness of soul in this play belongs to the white villain rather than to his black victim. The fact that Othello was a baptised Christian had considerable importance for Shakespeare’s audience. This is made explicit from the beginning when he quells the drunken broil with the words: ‘For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl’ [II. iii. 172]. In the war he was seen to be leading the forces of Christendom against the Turks. But once Othello becomes subservient to Iago and vows his terrible revenge he seems to revert to superstitious beliefs. How else can we interpret his behaviour

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scene it becomes merely, ‘An antique token / My father gave my mother’ [V. ii. 216–17]. This irrational inconsistency is dramatically credible and suggests that when reason is overthrown, Othello’s Christian beliefs give way to the superstitions he has rejected. The Christian veneer is thin . . .

WHAT DO I READ NEXT? Romeo and Juliet, written by Shakespeare in 1595, is another form of a tragic love story. Two young people fall in love but are prohibited by their families from marrying. Their distraught emotions lead them to suicide.  Othello: A Novel, published in 1995, is Julius Lester’s fictional form of the story told by Shakespeare. In Lester’s work, the plot is similar, as are most of the characters. The story takes place in England and revolves around the theme of jealousy.  Dr. Kenneth C. Ruge and Barry Lenson have written a book to help explain the syndrome they call the Othello Response, a jealous rage such as the one that Othello succumbs to. The Othello Response: Dealing with Jealousy, Suspicion, and Rage in Your Relationship was published in 2003 and through this book, the authors help readers recognize the signs of jealousy. Through case studies, they show how jealousy can ruin relationships and how readers can get a grip on this pervasive and destructive emotional reaction.  In the same year that Shakespeare wrote Othello, he looked at love in another way, writing Measure for Measure (1604). This play has been classified as one of his problem plays, meaning it is hard to tell if this is a romance or a tragedy. In a storyline that twists and turns with disguises and deceptions used to spice the drama, Shakespeare examines sexuality outside of marriage and its repercussions. 

over the handkerchief? He seems under the spell of its long history—woven by an old sibyl out of silkworms strangely ‘hallowed’, given to his mother by an Egyptian with thought-reading powers, and linked with the dire prophecy of loss of love should it be lost. Yet in the final

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Shakespeare raises these and other questions about blackness and whiteness without fully resolving them. It rested upon the Elizabethan audience to consider them, this very act of deliberation involving a disturbance of racial complacency. If his purpose was to unsettle or perplex his audience, then he succeeded beyond expectation, for the question of Othello’s blackness, and his relation with the white Desdemona, is one that provoked contradictory and heated responses in subsequent centuries. Source: Ruth Cowhig, ‘‘Blacks in English Renaissance Drama and the Role of Shakespeare’s Othello,’’ in The Black Presence in English Literature, Manchester University Press, 1985, pp. 1–25.

Wolfgang Clemen In the essay below, Clemen analyzes the relationship between character and imagery in Othello. He focuses on the characters of Othello and Iago, contrasting the way in which Shakespeare uses language to illustrate their actions and motivations. Othello’s language is characterized by selfobsession and an extensive use of imagery; Iago’s by a focus on others and a deficit of imagery. Furthermore, argues Clemen, Othello’s imagery is dynamic, containing a ‘‘swelling opulence and poetic force, while Iago’s is static and dry. In this chapter we shall try to show Shakespeare’s art of adapting imagery to the character using it, so that imagery becomes a means of characterizing the dramatis personae. Othello furnishes a particularly good example for a study of this kind, in that it turns upon the relation between two opposite and contrasted characters, Iago and Othello. The growing connection between imagery and character is a particularly important aspect of the process by which the images become more closely related to the drama. It is part of the more comprehensive development, traceable throughout Shakespeare, whereby each character is eventually given his own language. In the early comedies, as we have seen, the language used by the characters is suited to the atmosphere of the play, but does not grow directly out of their own

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OTHELLO AND IAGO HAVE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT ATTITUDES TOWARDS THEIR IMAGES. IAGO IS CONSCIOUSLY LOOKING FOR THOSE WHICH BEST SUIT HIS PURPOSE. WITH OTHELLO, HOWEVER, THE IMAGES RISE NATURALLY OUT OF HIS EMOTIONS.’’

individual nature. We only find, here and there, an adaptation of the language to the various groups of characters: servants speak a language different from that of courtiers, etc. In Shakespeare’s ‘‘middle period’’ we discover the beginning of a more subtle differentiation. But this differentiation is as yet restricted to certain outstanding types such as Falstaff and Parolles, the Nurse and Shylock, Mrs. Quickly and Doll Tearsheet. Furthermore it is modified, as in Romeo and Juliet or in the Merchant of Venice, by Shakespeare’s tendency to give to whole scenes a certain stylistic pattern which often overrides the consistent individualization of single characters through language. The individualization of characters through language in the above-mentioned cases, moreover, mostly consists in the regular and recurrent use of certain obvious features of style and syntax, easy to comprehend and usually few in number. Compared to later plays, Shakespeare uses in general rather simple devices and does not avail himself of all the resources offered by language and style for differentiation. A more subtle and complex characterization through language and imagery could be seen in Richard II. Here, however, it was only the dominant figure of the king who was thus individualized. In the great tragedies we find Shakespeare’s technique of characterizing his persons through imagery fully developed. In Hamlet, each character was given his own mode of speech, and from Hamlet to Antony and Cleopatra this discrimination of language applies to all tragedies until, in the romances, we find a notable modification of this technique—indeed, to a certain extent, a decline. There are several ways of studying imagery as a revelation of character. One is to consider the subject matter of the images, and to ask whether the objects and themes occurring in the

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imagery stand in a significant relation to the character of the person using the image. Another method of approach is to inquire into the form in which the images appear, and to ask whether the syntax, the context and similar factors might give us a hint of the nature of that relationship. It may also be illuminating to examine the frequency or recurrence of images in the speech of the several persons and the occasions on which they use imagery. The investigation of whether a character adjusts his imagery to his partner in the dialogue may also yield revealing results. Finally, the question whether the imagery of a character runs on the same lines up to the end of the play or undergoes a noticeable change in the course of the drama, may throw some light upon the function of the imagery in indicating a spiritual change in the character. Othello and Iago have entirely different attitudes towards their images. Iago is consciously looking for those which best suit his purpose. With Othello, however, the images rise naturally out of his emotions. They come to him easily and unconsciously whenever he is talking. He is a character endowed with a rich imagination; it is part of his very nature to use imagery. Iago, on the contrary, is not a person with an imaginative mind; his attitude towards the world is rational and speculative. We find fewer images in his language than in Othello’s. When he is alone, he uses scarcely any imagery, a fact which proves that the use of imagery is not natural to him, but rather a conscious and studied device by which he wishes to influence those to whom he is speaking. Iago selects his images with deliberate intent, he ‘‘constructs’’ them in the very same manner as he constructs his whole language. It is not without significance that Iago introduces many of his images with as and like, which we rarely find in Othello’s language. The particles as and like show that the speaker is fully conscious of the act of comparing; the comparison is added to the object to be compared as something special. In metaphorical language, however, both elements melt into one; the object itself appears as an image, as a metaphor. This differentiation should not be carried too far, but in this case the preference for comparisons is suited to Iago’s conscious and studied manner of speech. Furthermore, Iago’s images scarcely ever refer to himself, whereas Othello in his images continually has himself in mind. Iago likes the form of general statement; he places a distance between

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Laurence Fishburne as Othello and Kenneth Branagh as Iago from the 1995 film Othello (Everett Collection)

himself and his images. He does not care to identify himself with what he says; he would rather have his utterances understood as being as objective, neutral and general as possible. In Othello’s language, however, the personal pronoun I is predominant; he is almost always talking of himself, his life and his feelings. And thus his imagery serves also to express his own emotions and his own nature. This becomes increasingly clear from the very beginning: for instance, in the third scene of the first act, when Othello relates his life to the Duke; in II. i., deeply moved at seeing Desdemona again when he cries out, ‘‘O my soul’s joy!’’ and finds that magnificent image; (quoted on p. 123); when he compares his own thoughts to the ‘‘Pontic sea’’ (III. iii. 453); when, finally, he speaks of his love for Desdemona and of his disillusionment in terms of immeasurable passion (v. ii.). In these cases, as in others, with the innocence and frankness characteristic of strong natures who live within themselves, he always takes himself as the point of departure. In contrast to this, Iago seeks to achieve an effect upon the other characters with his similes and images. He measures his words with calculating guile, attuning them to the person he has to

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deal with. Consider, for instance, the images which he employs with Roderigo and Cassio in I. iii. or II. i. from this point of view; we find that they are devised to kindle in the brain of the other man a notion that will further his own plans; they are a means of influencing, or they may also be a means of dissimulation. The whole diction then appears attuned to the mood and sphere of the other character. Iago seeks to poison the others with his images; he aims to implant in the minds of his victims a conceit which will gradually assume gigantic proportions. The fact that Iago speaks so much in prose is likewise characteristic of him. Let us look at his imagery in the following passages: If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions: but we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion. (I. iii. 330) the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. (I. iii. 354)

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you are bud now cast in his mood, a punishment more in policy than in malice; even so as one would beat his offenceless dog to affright an imperious lion: (II. iii. 274)

Shakespeare lets Iago clothe his comparisons here in euphuistic style. This shows how conventional stylistic patterns are employed in the tragedies as a means of individual characterization. For precisely this euphuistic style, with its combination of antithesis, consonance and parallelism, corresponds to the cool, and at the same time hypocritical nature of Iago. It would be wholly foreign to the spontaneous and unconscious Othello to force imagery into such an artificial mould of parallelisms and symmetrically constructed periods. The euphuistic pattern of style presupposes that the sentences are carefully prepared, and that they are balanced one against the other, before their utterance. The euphuistic style is an intellectual, hyperconscious child of the brain, combining skilful ingenuity with calculation. All these elements are typical of Iago himself. The difference between Othello’s and Iago’s imagery—like everything else in Shakespeare— cannot be reduced to a simple formula. But of all the contradistinctions which might at least give us a hint of this difference, that existing between the concept of the static and of the dynamic comes closest to the real heart of the matter. Iago’s images are static, because they are incapable of further inner growth, because the objects appear in a dry and lifeless manner, because—as in those euphuistic passages we have spoken of—a narrow pattern of stylistic construction hinders the further development of the image. The prosaic brevity of Iago’s images stands in contrast with the swelling opulence and poetic force of Othello’s imagery. This is Iago’s way of speaking: IAGO. but indeed my invention Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frize; (II. i. 126)

He’ll be as full of quarrel and offence As my young mistress’ dog. (II. iii. 52) Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; (I. iii. 323) And this is Othello’s language:

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OTHELLO. O my soul’s joy! If after every tempest come such calms, May the winds blow till they have waken’d death! And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas Olympus-high and duck again as low As hell’s from heaven! (II. i. 187)

Like to the Pontic sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont, Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love, Till that a capable and wide revenge Swallow them up. (III. iii. 453) Iago would be wholly incapable of the moving poetic language uttered by Othello; and, likewise, Othello could never be the author of Iago’s cold and cynical utterances. In Othello’s imagery everything is in movement, because everything springs from his own emotion. His images always appear at crucial points of his inner experience; the forcefulness and agitation of his images are an expression of his own passionate nature. Iago, on the other hand, stands not in an emotional, but in a rational relationship to his images. Through the imagery Othello’s emotional nature is revealed to us as highly sensuous, easily kindled and interpreting everything through the senses. Othello’s metaphors show us this peculiar activity of all his senses, his tendency to sense all abstract matters as palpable, tastable, audible and visible things. He can only think, even of his retaliation, in terms of extraordinary physical pain: Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulphur! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! (V. ii. 279) This last passage may also once again reveal the heightened poetical nature of Othello’s imagery, his preference for bright, colourful, intense pictures. This feature can, of course, also be related to Othello’s race, and these images thus link up with another group of metaphors, to be discussed later, which reproduce the peculiar colour and atmosphere of Othello’s sphere of life.

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A closer examination of the content of Othello’s and Iago’s imagery reveals further characteristic differences. The objects named by Iago belong to a lower and purely material world, whereas the things alive in Othello’s imagination generally belong to a higher sphere. Iago’s imagery teems with repulsive animals of a low order; with references to eating and drinking and bodily functions and with technical and commercial terms. In Othello’s language, however, the elements prevail—the heavens, the celestial bodies, the wind and the sea—the forces of nature, everything light and moving that corresponds best to his nature. At moments of intense emotion his imagery links heaven and hell together, bearing out his inner relation to the cosmic powers, and revealing the enormous dimensions and power of his imaginative conceptions. Hyperbole is therefore more often found in Othello’s imagery than in that used by other Shakespearian heroes. Othello’s already quoted welcoming words to Desdemona in Act II may again serve as an example for the breadth of his imaginative world: And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas Olympus-high, and duck again as low As hell’s from heaven! (II. i. 189) But the contrast between Othello’s and Iago’s imagery will perhaps become most clear by comparing how differently the same theme is expressed in the language of each. Miss Spurgeon has already pointed out how differently the sea appears in Othello’s and Iago’s speech. Iago employs technical maritime terms, and colours some of his images with sailor’s jargon. But the sea as a whole does not appear in his imagery. He looks at the sea only from a professional point of view. He is at home on the sea, but only in a practical way. In Othello’s imagination, on the other hand, the sea lives in its whole breadth and adventurous power. In his language it appears as a force of nature and as scenery. Again and again it occurs to Othello for the expression of his inner emotions through vivid, connected images. We may compare, too, the different ways in which Othello and Iago speak of war and martial life. Iago speaks of the ‘‘trade of war’’ (I. ii. 1) whereas Othello thinks of the ‘‘Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war’’ (III. iii. 354). The life of a soldier is for Iago not an ideal, but a sort

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of business, in which everything is weighed according to material advantage and recompense. This mercenary attitude betrays itself when he introduces expressions taken from the language of commerce, as in the following passage: And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof At Rhodes, at Cyprus and on other grounds Christian and heathen, must be be-lee’d and calm’d By debitor and creditor. (I. i. 28) Othello’s conception of war is worlds apart. He won Desdemona with the simple telling of his adventures and brave deeds as a soldier: Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach, (I. iii. 135) and when, at the climax of the action, he loses his inner balance, it is the life of the soldier, it is war, which appears in his mind. In moving words he takes leave of his beloved element: Farewell the plumed troop; and the big wars, That make ambition virtue! O, farewell! Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war! (III. iii. 349) Thus in Othello the imagery has the function of making visible to us the contrasting lifesphere and background of the chief characters. In the tragedies Shakespeare treads new paths in order to bring home to us the nature of a character. The sources from which our conception of a character in the drama was formed and fed, were, apart from the action of the play, the character’s behaviour in different situations and the words, through which he informs us of his plans, thoughts and feelings, and finally how the other characters react to him and what they say of him. These means of characterization naturally remain effective up to the last plays. But in the great tragedies Shakespeare creates with a greater fullness and differentiation the atmosphere typical of each central character. Othello brings with him the magic spell of distant lands and exotic things;

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his language is tinged with the lustre and strangeness of this other world out of which he comes. Shakespeare will have him understood from the very beginning as the ‘‘wheeling and extravagant stranger’’ (as Roderigo terms Othello in the first scene, I. i. 137). Already Othello’s first long speech before the Venetian Senate is suffused with such touches. In the dramatic structure, this speech not only gives us the immediate proof of Othello’s innocence, but it also presents us with a colourful picture of the world of Othello’s origin. Othello tells of ‘‘Cannibals’’ and ‘‘Anthropophagi’’ and of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven, (I. iii. 140) In his images we hear further of the ‘‘Pontic sea’’, of the ‘‘Propontic’’, ‘‘Hellespont’’, Ottomites, of Sibyls and strange myths, of a ‘‘sword of Spain’’, the ‘‘icebrooks’ temper’’ (V. ii. 253), and of ‘‘Arabian trees’’ (V. ii. 351). Iago, too, betrays his nature in his language, and this not only when he sets forth his base plans and intentions, or when he tries to entangle and to deceive the other characters. Even those words which at first glance seem to have no bearing upon the immediate issue, can reveal his personality to us. We need only examine what Iago thinks about other people, about love and general human values, in order to know what kind of man he is. If he is thinking of love, the image of rutting animals always makes its appearance in his imagination (I. i. 89; I. i. 112; III. iii. 403). He drags all higher values down to his low level. Whereas Othello characteristically never discusses general human values, Iago delights in defining them in a derogatory way. Love—according to his definition— is only ‘‘a sect, or scion’’ of ‘‘our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts’’ (I. iii. 336). ‘‘Virtue! a fig!’’ he cries, shortly before (I. iii. 322), ‘‘honesty’s a fool and loses what it works for’’ (III. iii. 382), and ‘‘Reputation is an idle and most false imposition’’, we read in another passage (II. iii. 268). Iago betrays to us his own cunning method towards his victims in two characteristic images. He views his action against Othello, Desdemona and Cassio as an ensnaring with the net and as a poisoning: . . . with as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio . . . (II. i. 169)

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And out of her own goodness make the net That shall enmesh them all. (II. iii. 368) This image is echoed in Othello’s desperate question at the end of his life: ‘‘Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?’’ (V. ii. 302). The idea of poisoning is quite conscious in Iago, when he seeks to awaken that false suspicion in Othello: I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear, That she repeals him for her body’s lust; (II. iii. 362) The Moor already changes with my poison: Dangerous conceits are, in their natures, poisons, Which at the first are scarce found to distaste, But with a little act upon the blood Burn like the mines of sulphur. (III. iii. 325) Almost everything Iago says—not only his imagery—is marked by this conscious and purposeful quality. Iago always adapts himself to his partner in conversation, he uses his language as a chief means of influence and ensnarement. He is no stranger in this life, like Othello, but is indeed well informed about the abilities and the behaviour of men of the most various states and classes. This already becomes clear in the first sixty-five lines. Here he contrasts types of men and characterizes them with biting comparisons: You shall mark Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave, That, doting on his own obsequious bondage, Wears out his time, much like his master’s ass, For nought but provender, and when he’s old, cashier’d: (I. i. 44) Such passages show how much he is accustomed to observe others and how he goes through life with critical and open eyes. In fact, the best and most appropriate judgement of Othello is uttered by him: The Moor is of a free and open nature, (I. iii. 405)

The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not, Is of a constant, loving, noble nature, (II. i. 297)

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It is precisely this very ‘‘open nature’’ which is revealed in Othello’s imagery and causes it to differ so decidedly from Iago’s imagery. Othello does not measure his imagery by the effect which it is to have upon others; he speaks what is in his heart. Iago, on the other hand, speaks as it seems expedient to him. Othello’s images can therefore be looked upon as a genuine self-revelation, and we quote again the famous passage from the third act: Like to the Pontic sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont, Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love, Till that a capable and wide revenge Swallow them up. (III. iii. 453) This image appears at the critical turning-point of the play: Iago has supplied him with the evidence of the handkerchief, Othello’s suspicion is now hardened. The image is a marvel of language in this scene; at the same time, it is premonitory, casting light upon the following, often hardly comprehensible events. Here, in a simile, the tempestuousness and boundlessness of Othello’s character find clear expression, a nature, which, when once seized by a real suspicion, rushes violently along this new path, incapable of every halfheartedness, of a return, or of any compromise. To this absoluteness of his character Othello gives metaphorical expression once again in a later passage, when he faces Desdemona in the hour of final decision. The images by which he here reveals to us the fundamental law of his nature no longer have anything in common with ‘‘poetic diction’’; no language other than the language of imagery could express what is moving Othello at this moment in terms more poignant, more forceful or more convincing. But there, where I have garner’d up my heart, Where either I must live, or bear no life; The fountain from the which my current runs, Or else dries up; to be discarded thence! Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there,

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Patience, thou young and rose-lipp’d cherubim,— Ay, there, look grim as hell! (IV. ii. 58) The repulsive image of the ‘‘cistern for foul toads’’ is followed by the magnificent vision of ‘‘Patience, thou young and rose-lipp’d cherubim’’—this bold sequence symbolizes the tremendous tension in Othello’s soul and points to the abrupt change which is taking place within him. It is indeed imagery which announces and accompanies the change that is taking place in Othello. In the third act Othello suffers the first great shock to his feeling of security and—like all of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes in such moments— he, too, now calls upon the heavenly powers. He swears ‘‘by yond marble heaven’’ (III. iii. 460) and exclaims: Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell! (III. iii. 446)

From this point on the heavens, the stars and the elements appear again and again in his language. He calls upon all the elements as witnesses and accusers of Desdemona’s supposed unfaithfulness: Heaven stops the nose at it and the moon winks, The bawdy wind that kisses all it meets Is hush’d within the hollow mine of earth, And will not hear it. (IV. ii. 77) It is not merely chance that in the final scene (v. ii.) the words heaven and heavenly occur seventeen times and that this scene is particularly rich in mighty adjurations of heaven. Himself nearing the end, Othello’s imagination seems to be spellbound with the idea of heaven: Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe, Should yawn at alteration. (V. ii. 99) If heaven would make me such another world Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, I’ld not have sold her for it. (V. iii. 144) . . . Are there no stones in heaven But what serve for the thunder? (V. ii. 234) when we shall meet at compt,

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This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, And fiends will snatch at it. (V. ii. 273) It is furthermore characteristic of the way in which the imagery portrays Othello’s inner alteration, that from that third scene of the third act on, Othello’s fantasy is filled with images of repulsive animals such as were up to that point peculiar to Iago. Iago’s endeavour to undermine and poison Othello’s imagination by his own gloomy and low conceptions has been successful. Thus an examination of the imagery in Othello has been able to reveal the connection existing between the content of the image and the time of its appearance. Source: Wolfgang Clemen, ‘‘Othello,’’ in The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery, Methuan and Co. Ltd., 1977, pp. 119–32.

Harley Granville-Barker Granville-Barker examines the dramatic structure of Othello and explicates the relation between Shakespeare’s manipulation of time and the theme of sexual jealousy. He maintains that time in Act I passes naturally so that the audience can become familiar with the characters. Act II, however, introduces contractions and ambiguities of time that are sustained until Act V, scene ii, when ‘‘natural’’ time resumes, presenting a comprehensive view of the ruined Moor. The critic contends that the precipitous action is both dramatically convincing, since it hurries the audience along, and consistent with the recklessness of Iago and the pathological sexual jealousy that flaws the character of Othello.

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Ray Fearon as Othello and Zoe Waites as Desdemona in Act V, scene ii, at the Barbican Theatre, London, 2000 (Ó Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission)

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FURTHER READING Auden, W. H., ‘‘The Joker in the Pack,’’ in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, Random House, 1948, pp. 246–72. Auden compares Iago to a practical joker who has no personal feelings or values but contemptuously uses the very real desires of other people to gull and manipulate them. Auden also claims that Othello prizes his marriage to Desdemona not for any great love he holds for her, but rather because it signals to him, mistakenly, that he has fully integrated into Venetian society. Source: Harley Granville-Barker, ‘‘Excerpt,’’ in Prefaces to Shakespeare: Othello, Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1945, pp. 1–35.

SOURCES Bevington, David, ‘‘Shakespeare the Man,’’ in A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan, Blackwell Publishers, 1999, pp. 9–21. Bradley, A. C., ‘‘The Noble Othello,’’ in A Casebook on Othello, edited by Leonard F. Dean, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961, pp. 139–46. Davies, Anthony, ‘‘Othello,’’ in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 330–33. Eastman, Arthur M., A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism, Random House, 1968, pp. 350–51. Eliot, T. S., ‘‘The Hero Cheering Himself Up,’’ in A Casebook on Othello, edited by Leonard F. Dean, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961, pp. 153–55. Hunter, G. K., ‘‘Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, edited by Stanley Wells, Cambridge University Press, 1997 pp. 123–41. Neill, Michael, ‘‘Othello and Race,’’ in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello, edited by Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt, The Modern Language Association of America, 2005, pp. 37–52. Shakespeare, William, Othello, edited by Marie Macaisa and Dominique Raccah, Sourcebooks, Inc, 2005. Shaw, G. B., ‘‘Othello: Pure Melodrama,’’ in A Casebook on Othello, edited by Leonard F. Dean, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961, pp. 135–38. Stoll, Elmer Edgar, ‘‘Othello: Tragedy of Effect,’’ in A Casebook on Othello, edited by Leonard F. Dean, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961, pp. 147–52.

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Dash, Irene G., ‘‘A Woman Tamed: Othello,’’ in Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare’s Plays, Columbia University Press, 1981. pp. 103–30. Dash writes that Othello demonstrates ‘‘the cost to husband and wife . . . of attempting to conform to stereotyped ideals of marriage.’’ Gregson, J. M., ‘‘Othello,’’ in Public and Private Man in Shakespeare, Croom Helm, 1983, pp. 156–76. Gregson maintains that the characters Othello and Hamlet are opposites, and argues that the true tragedy of Othello is the Moor’s inability to separate his public conduct as military leader from his private judgments as husband. Greenblatt, Stephen, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, W. W. Norton and Company, 2004. Shakespeare’s life is recounted not just through the bard’s writing but also through the social, religious, and economic culture that he lived in. Grudin, Robert, ‘‘Contrariety as Structure: The Later Tragedies,’’ Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety, University of California Press, 1979, pp. 119–79. Grudin finds that Desdemona’s ‘‘type of lamblike femininity’’ is compelling to Othello but not to Shakespeare and thus, the dramatist demonstrates that her passive helplessness is implicitly ironic, for it ‘‘sharpens the impulse to aggression in others.’’ The ambiguities of her virtue are comparable, Grudin maintains, to the complexities of Iago’s wickedness. Hyman, Stanley Edgar, Iago: Some Approaches to the Illusion of His Motivation, Atheneum, 1970. Hyman assesses Iago’s motives from five different critical perspectives, alternately questioning whether the ensign should be viewed as ‘‘a stage villain, or Satan, or an artist, or a latent homosexual, or a Machiavel.’’ A pluralistic approach to this issue, Hyman argues, demonstrates the ‘‘tension, paradox, and irony’’ in Shakespeare’s portrayal of Iago, while a single line of inquiry can only produce one perspective that is ‘‘inevitably reductive and partial.’’

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Neely, Carol Thomas, ‘‘Women and Men in Othello: ‘What should such a fool / Do with so good a woman?’’’ in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare , edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, University of Illinois Press, 1980, pp. 21–39. Analysis of the kinship of the women in Othello and the heroines in Shakespeare’s comedies which emphasizes their similar capacities to initiate courtship, tolerate men’s fancies, and balance romantic idealism with a realistic view of sexuality. Nicolle, David, The Moors: The Islamic West 7th–15th Centuries A.D., Osprey Publishing, 2001.

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A history of battles and religious differences, as well as a richly diverse culture is presented in this history of the Moors in Europe. Shapiro, James, A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599, Harper Perennial, 2006. Shapiro focuses on one year of the playwright’s life, a year filled with special events in drama as well as in politics and the influences of these events on Shakespeare. Vaughn, Virginia Mason, Othello: A Contextual History, Cambridge University, 1997. Vaughn follows the production of Othello through the centuries, analyzing its effect on various cultures.

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