Shakespeare

The collocation of gravity and gravy amply testifies to the mood of the play and, more importantly, the sensibility of Shakespeare. On an earlier occasion he was reading Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, in preparation for Titus Andronicus, and read the line “desyrde his presence too thentent”; the last word became transmogrified into “the Thracian Tyrant in his Tent” (138). A particular word seems to elicit from him a cluster of words, in this case alliterative; the connection is often one of sound rather than of sense. Geese are constantly associated with disease, the eagle with the weasel. There are other strange synaptic leaps. Turkeys and pistols are often associated, no doubt because of the common linkage with cock. For some reason he connects peacocks with fish and with lice in the same compound of images. On twelve occasions the word “hum” is intimately connected with death, as in Othello (2936-7):

DESDEMONA: If you say so, I hope you will not kill me.

OTHELLO: Hum.

And in Cymbeline (1760-1):

CLOTEN: Humh.

PISANIO: He write to my Lord she’s dead.

It is as if language was muttering to itself.

Yet words flew so freely from him that he distrusted them; on many occasions he revealed suspicions about their duplicity and inauthenticity. There were times, even, when fluency disgusted him. The finest poetry may be feigning; the oaths pledged on stage may be hypocritical. “Alas, I tooke greate paines to studie it,” Viola says in Twelfth Night (471-3), “and ’tis Poeticall.” “It is the more like to be feigned,” Olivia replies, “I pray you keep it in.” That is perhaps why there are many plays in which Shakespeare emphasised the artificiality and unreality of his drama; his narratives were meant to be improbable, even impossible.

It seems likely, also, that he did not know what he was writing until he had written it. He discovered his meaning only after he had conceived it in words. There is a wonderful remark of Coleridge’s in Table Talk of 7 April, 1833, that “in Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.” He explored the consequences of his words by seeing how a metaphor or an image might emerge from them and take on its own life; how one word would by assonance or alliteration suggest another; how the cadence of a sentence or a verse would curve in one direction rather than another. The most perceptive account of Shakespeare’s method occurs, perhaps surprisingly, in a late eighteenth-century treatise. In A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare, published in 1794, Walter Whiter remarks on the power of association that leads Shakespeare to link words and ideas “by a principle of union unperceived by himself, and independent of the subject to which they are applied.” He does not know what guides his hand, in other words, or what force impels him. The meaning is somehow innate within the words themselves.

There have been many studies of his imagery, from which various conclusions have been drawn – that he was fastidious, sensitive to smells and to noise, that he engaged in outdoor sports, that he knew the natural life of the countryside very well, and so on. In the interplay of his imagery, we chance upon strange conjunctions; he associates violets with stealing, and books with love. His imagination is awash with centaurs and shipwrecks and dreams, part of the magical world that always surrounded him. But it is perhaps more appropriate to note that his images are the womb or source of further images which spring forth effortlessly. Each play has a continuous stream of images or metaphors that are intrinsic to that play. They convey a unity of feeling rather than one of meaning, rather in the way that film-music works in the cinema. There is a cohesiveness, an internal harmony, within each play; it touches even the most minor character, and places all of the protagonists together in the same circle of enchantment. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the rude mechanicals are quite unlike the fairies, but they partake of the same reality. They have been touched by the same lightning.

Yet that lightning was for Shakespeare a source of perpetual novelty and surprise. He did not necessarily know what was within himself. His imagination quickened as it proceeded along its ordained course; a scene will suddenly appear that elicits a powerful response, or a character emerges who will proceed to steal the best lines. There is a precise moment in Henry IV when Pistol develops the characteristic of quoting or misquoting lines from old dramas. It must have delighted Shakespeare, since from that moment Pistol does nothing – or hardly anything – but that. The Wife of Bath came up and took Chaucer unawares; Sam Weller popped up from nowhere in The Pickwick Papers. It is the same process.