Shakespeare

The dispassionate nature of his genius, the almost impersonal intensity of his art, persuaded many eighteenth-century critics that he was kin to nature itself; he had the same indifference to the life of his creations. There is no reason to believe that he was deeply disturbed or troubled by the death of Desdemona, for example – deeply excited, of course, because he was involved in all the power and momentum of his expressiveness. But not deeply moved. It may have been remarked that he was particularly cheerful that day.

CHAPTER 46 So Musicall a Discord, Such Sweete Thunder

It is in the spirit of change and difference, too, that the plays are best understood. They seem positively to invite conflicting notions of their meaning so that Henry V, for example, can be played as heroic epic or as cruel bombast. Shakespeare’s art is open to both interpretations equally. The nature of Hamlet is eternally in question. The ending of King Lear is endlessly debated. The purpose of Troilus and Cressida is now all but lost in the fog of conflicting critical commentaries. In that play he establishes a code of value, through the speeches of Ulysses, which is then undermined or ignored by all of the characters in the play.

Shakespeare grew up with a profound sense of ambiguity. It is one of the informing principles both of his life and of his art. In the plays themselves the themes and situations are endlessly mirrored in the plots and sub-plots, so that the reader or spectator is presented with a series of variations on the same subject without any one of them given pre-eminence. Shakespeare will begin two or three stories at once, all of which share the same trajectory. The bond between Hamlet and his father, for example, is echoed both in the relations between Laertes and Polonius and in the kinship between Fortinbras and his father. Certain characters, generally one from a high and one from a low estate, seem deliberately to parallel or parody one another; they are paired visually and scenically.

Shakespeare uses all the tricks of Elizabethan stagecraft, including simultaneous staging, in order to show that the dramatic world is mixed and uncertain. Entire plays seem to be made up of parallels and contrasts and echoes. All of his characters have mixed natures. Despite the apparently orchestrated harmony of his endings, there are in fact very few genuine resolutions of the action. The closing scenes are deliberately rendered ambiguous, with one character generally excluded from the happy picture of reconciliation. That is why some critics have agreed with Tolstoy that Shakespeare really had “nothing to say.” He simply showed action and rhetoric upon the stage for the purposes of spectacle and entertainment. Yet generations of readers have also been affected by his apparent profundity. There has never been a great English dramatist whose art has remained fundamentally so mysterious. That is why he retains all of his power.

The stuff of Shakespeare is endlessly variable, but the connections or associations become darker. The comic servants of the first dramas become Iago or Malvolio; the clown of the early comedies becomes the Fool of King Lear or the gravedigger of Hamlet; the sexual jealousies within The Merry Wives of Windsor turn murderous in Othello; the joyous misrule of Falstaff becomes rancid and acrimonious in Thersites or in Timon. His imagination was drawn to the same patterns again and again. The same rushing power, the same imaginative furia, is evident in all of them. You can often tell, in little asides or allusions, that Shakespeare is thinking of the next play even as he is completing the one to hand. In Macbeth, for example, there is a clear signal of Antony and Cleopatra. The language of Henry V anticipates that of Julius Caesar. The plays are all of a piece and are best seen in relation to each other.

The majority of the plays open in medias res, as if a conversation had already been taking place which the audience has just joined. It is part of Shakespeare’s fluency that he creates a world already in process. The art of Elizabethan stagecraft is the art of the entrance, since there are no formal divisions into acts, and in Shakespeare the players enter from an ongoing world which is fully alive in some enchanted space elsewhere. The action is conceived as a sequence of intense episodes; but his pacing, his sense of variety and change, are so fluent that this action proceeds without impediment or hesitation. It is a continuous stream, mimicking the process and activity of life itself.