This play marks the end of my voyage through the dramas of William Shakespeare. It has taken me years, and even so I am still missing a couple of the This play marks the end of my voyage through the dramas of William Shakespeare. It has taken me years, and even so I am still missing a couple of the lesser-known works, such as the Merry Wives of Windsor and all three parts of Henry VI (which I am sure I will get to—eventually). Shakespeare completed this work in 1613, three years before his death, while he was in the process of removing himself from the London theater scene. He seems even to have been delegating the task of writing to his successor, John Fletcher, making these last plays rather uneven collaborations.
For the most part this play is based on pageantry. Known for having the most stage directions of any Shakespearean drama, there are many scenes that consists of an elaborate procession of exalted personages. The characterization is strikingly uneven. Catherine emerges as the most compelling and dramatic figure, though even she did not come fully alive for me. Cardinal Wolsey, the play’s villain, has nothing of the Iago’s cunning, and for the most part has not much of a personality at all—that is, until he is undone, at which point he becomes suddenly noble and eloquent, speaking beautiful lines out of keeping both with his character and his situation. The king has no consistent character whatsoever, being now lustful, now irate, not gullible, now generous.
If any theme emerges as dominant in this work, it is that of being on the way down—of losing one’s worldly position. This is when Catherine and Wolsey have their most convincing moments. Can we infer something about Shakespeare himself from this theme? It is tempting, especially considering that he was in the process of extricating himself from his London theater career. In any case, the result is an uneven play with an unsatisfying ending (a long prophecy about the coming greatness of Queen Elizabeth). One naturally wishes that Shakespeare's career ended with more of a bang....more
I have been slowly making my way through Shakespeare’s plays for years now. So it feels a little bittersweet to reach his final play, especially sinceI have been slowly making my way through Shakespeare’s plays for years now. So it feels a little bittersweet to reach his final play, especially since Shakespeare’s last act is more of a whimper than a bang. We see a man gradually growing uninterested in the stage and withdrawing himself from the theater, delegating work to his colleagues. Considering how little we know about Shakespeare the man, it is tempting to look for clues in these final works. But facts cannot be wrung from poetry, no matter how hard you squeeze it.
While Shakespeare at the height of his powers was a man preternaturally sympathetic—able to throw his mind into any person he pleased—this late Shakespeare seems to have grown disenchanted with his fellow men and women. Instead of deeply individual characters, we get baroque puppets, speaking sublime poetry with wooden mouths. These characters follow conventional motivations—love, jealousy, honor, glory—but the bard seems to go out of his way to make these goals appear vain and foolish. Thus, here we have two apparently noble souls driven mad with love after a single glance, who break all bonds of blood and loyalty to win the hand of a woman who, for her part, hardly seems to care for either of them.
We, thus audience, hardly care for either of them, too, since Shakespeare does not bother to differentiate their personalities. In any case, I bet that Shakespeare’s audience (who were more worldly than most of us, I am sure) would have found this love-at-first-site conceit just as ridiculous as we do; and this puts the play’s plot in a rather uncomfortable light. For Shakespeare seems to be saying, first, that love is based on self-delusion; and, second, that love destroys what is truly precious for the sake of what is really worthless. The two noble cousins begin the play with a bond so deep they seem to be twins. Likewise, Hippolyta describes Theseus’s profound friendship with a general, which may forever be deeper than their marriage, and her sister Emilia tells of her lost childhood friend who meant more than the world to her.
All of these life-defining bonds contrast sharply with the perfectly arbitrary marriages that take place in the play. Should we infer something about the bard’s own marital situation? Well, I seem to be breaking my own rule. Even so, this final play—uneven as it is, and tinged with a strange sort of world-weariness—is certainly not the weakest in the Shakespearean oeuvre. Indeed, if we judge the play based on its finest parts, we can see that Shakespeare’s edge was in no way dulled....more
When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that, move still, still so, And own no other function.
After slogg
When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that, move still, still so, And own no other function.
After slogging my way through the problem plays, the late tragedies, and the early romances, this play is a sweet relief. Shakespeare here returns to form with this delightful work. The play is easy to enjoy: winsome characters, pastoral romance, and a whimsical plot. I particularly liked Shakespeare’s depiction of sexual jealousy in the play’s beginning acts, as Leontes’ hysterical suspicion becomes a form of incurable madness. Here we can see how jealousy, once it has taken hold, can use the same warped logic as a conspiracy theory: the slightest supporting evidence is seized upon, and everything contrary is ignored or dismissed as a lie.
The enormous scene four of the fourth act is a particular jewel. Seldom has Shakespeare portrayed young love so convincingly. And, of course, the thief and song-peddlar Autolyclus is a comic delight. For my part, the seacoast of Bohemian and the living statue only add to the many charms of this work....more
After making one’s way through Shakespeare’s many histories, tragedies, and comedies, this play will no doubt seem anomalous. Neither tragic nor comicAfter making one’s way through Shakespeare’s many histories, tragedies, and comedies, this play will no doubt seem anomalous. Neither tragic nor comic, the play lacks the earthy humor (except in the brothel scene) and the psychological intensity (except in the recognition scene) that one normally expects from Shakespeare. It is even rather bereft of the bard’s verbal fecundity. But it does have one thing: imagination. This play tries to do something that I had never seen a play try to do before. Here, Shakespeare stages the epic tale of a man’s entire life—the sort of thing normally reserved for long poems or novels.
The result is clumsy and awkward. If it is staged, much of the play’s action must be showed as a kind of dumbshow, as an actor’s narration bridges the many disparate scenes of this play together. It is difficult to think of what else Shakespeare could have done, considering the huge span of space and time he tried to fit onstage; but the result is not exactly “dramatic.” Added to this, the beginning of the play seems not to have been written by Shakespeare himself—so inept is the dialogue, so mangled is the verse. Either that, or Shakespeare had drunk some very bad wine beforehand.
Despite all this, it is still possible to enjoy this play. Performance salvages what is dead on the page. For my part, I found the kind of nautical adventure an enjoyable experiment, almost as a kind of children’s tale or bedtime story for the stage (though the incest and the brothel scenes probably make it unfit for that audience). If this is the worst of Shakespeare’s late romances, then I have a lot to look forward to....more
It tutors nature: artificial strife / Lives in these touches, livelier than life.
As opposed to many of my fellow reviews, I quite liked this play.
It tutors nature: artificial strife / Lives in these touches, livelier than life.
As opposed to many of my fellow reviews, I quite liked this play. At the very least I found it far more enjoyable than the stiff and martial Coriolanus. Admittedly, on the page Timon of Athens is a fairly weak play. Timon is the only notable character to speak of—all the rest being wispy supporting roles—and he is not one of the bard’s more subtle creations. To the contrary, he is cartoonish in both phases of his character: the generous friend and the bitter enemy. Shakespeare, who could so convincingly show us the workings of our innermost souls, abandoned character development completely, letting Timon go from night to day with nary a shadow.
This play seems so rough and unfinished that many have ascribed some sections to another hand. I do not know about that. Presumably even the bard had his off days. In any case, while the dialogue is repetitive and boring to read, in the mouth of an energetic actor it can be quite fun—which is how I experienced the play. Timon’s immense bitterness must be performed to be palatable. And since I am myself prone to fits of vituperation, I was predisposed to sympathize with the foul-mouthed Timon. The misanthropy of this play, while exaggerated and farcical, is runs quite deep. One wonders what was happening in Shakespeare’s own life to attract him to such a splenetic rejection of humankind. ...more
In my review of Plutarch’s Lives, I noted the stark difference between that ancient author’s conception of personality, and our own. For Plutarch, chaIn my review of Plutarch’s Lives, I noted the stark difference between that ancient author’s conception of personality, and our own. For Plutarch, character was static and definable—an essence that is manifested in every decision and remark of a given person. Compare this with Montaigne’s or Shakespeare’s portrayal of personality: fluctuating, contradictory, infinitely deep, and ever fugitive. To borrow a metaphor from Oswald Spengler, the Plutarchian self is statuesque, while the Shakespearian self is more like a work of music. The first is a self-contained whole, while the second is abstract, fleeting, and morphs through time.
It is fascinating, therefore, to see Shakespeare handle a story right out of Plutarch. Shakespeare adapts his art to the subject-matter, and creates a character in Caius Marcius Coriolanus that is remarkably opaque. I say “remarkably” because Shakespeare had just finished with his five greatest tragedies, each of which has a character notable for its depth. Caius Marcius, by contrast, is a man almost in the Plutarchian mode: with a enumerable list of vices and virtues, who acts and speaks predictably, with little self-reflection. Next to Hamlet, Iago, or Macbeth, the Roman general seems almost childlike in his restriction.
Like Julius Caesar, this play is interesting for a certain amount of moral ambiguity. It is difficult to side with any of the major players. The plebeians of Rome are certainly not a mindless rabble, but they are somewhat vain and narrow-minded, not to mention easily influenced by empty words. Coriolanus himself is a superb soldier but ill-suited to anything else, whose capital vice is not exactly pride, but a certain smallness of mind. His mother, Volumnia, is scarcely less warlike than her son. Even if her counsels are good, it is difficult to see the mother-son relationship as perfectly healthy. She comes across, rather, as a kind of Roman helicopter mom, bringing up her son to be a killing machine for the glory of the state.
For me, the tragedy was not quite successful, simply because Coriolanus was such an unsympathetic protagonist—belligerent, scornful, reactionary, and often a great fool. It is a testament to Shakespeare’s art that he is not altogether hateful. As Harold Bloom says, this play is technically brilliant: in its pacing, language, and plotting. Shakespeare was certainly a professional. But if you come to Shakespeare seeking grand personalities, the work is a barren field....more
This is the third of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”—along with Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well—and I think certainly the greatest. TThis is the third of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”—along with Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well—and I think certainly the greatest. These three plays are given a special category because their genres have proven difficult to pin down. Measure for Measure, like All’s Well that Ends Well, is superficially a comedy; yet it takes place within a world with loose and uncertain values, and often causes us to scratch our heads rather than to laugh or smile.
The plot is flagrantly absurd. Vincentio, the duke of Vienna, decides to go away and leave his power in the hands of an upright judge, Angelo. Then, in secret, the duke disguises himself as a friar and sets about manipulating the other characters of the play. In this he resembles no character more than Iago; yet unlike that villain, Vincentio has no overarching goal, no consistent end. His plans are generally beneficent—arranging several marriages (including his own), and protecting a man’s life—yet still perplexing.
Surely the duke could have effected all of these goals more easily by simply remaining the duke. And, besides, the degree of deceit and trickery involved in his schemes, the blatant emotional manipulation, give us pause. He is willing, for example, to tell the woman he hopes to marry that her brother has died, just so that he can appear all the more heroic when it is revealed that it is not so. Simultaneously, he is willing to counsel the brother to prepare for death, giving him a sort of nihilistic sermon about the futility of life, even when he knows that the brother will not die. In his constant manipulation of the characters’ emotions and actions, he resembles not only Iago, but Shakespeare himself, as a kind of playwright within the play. Yet of course Vincentio’s actions, involving “real” people, are far more damnable.
The issue of morality, or the lack of it, looms large within this play. The central conflict is, apparently, whether laws should be strictly enforced, or altered by circumstances and tempered by human kindness. Yet this philosophical question is eclipsed by the play’s moral chaos—and morality itself is dissolved into a contest of trickery. Angelo tries to trick Isabella, Isabella to trick Angelo, and Vincentio to trick them all. The duke wins, not because of any moral superiority, but because of superior craftiness; and the question of whether he did as he ought becomes entirely irrelevant to the play’s implausible concluding scene.
This strange concoction of ethics and nihilism, of order and chaos, of desire and whim, makes this play genuinely absorbing, even if not wholly satisfying. It is the sort of play that makes us wonder what was happening in Shakespeare’s own life....more
Here is another of the bard’s “problem plays.” At first glance it is a straightforward comedy, with an inconvenient problem followed by a happy solutiHere is another of the bard’s “problem plays.” At first glance it is a straightforward comedy, with an inconvenient problem followed by a happy solution. But the play does not sustain such a lighthearted reading. Here, Shakespeare does his best to make the audience feel uneasy about both the means and the ends of the play’s protagonist, Helena. Her choice for a match is baffling—a man with no good qualities to speak of, who treats her with unfeeling cruelty—and her strategy to win him, though ingenious, cannot but raise some ethical reservations.
Indeed, the two partners are so mismatched—Helena, kind, good, and clever, while Bertram is arrogant, brutish, and unfaithful—that Shakespeare seems to be satirizing the very idea of love and marriage. While he is at it, Shakespeare makes sport of martial qualities, too, as he exposes the braggart Parolles as a worthless coward. In the end, there are enough lovable characters—the King, the Countess, and Helena—to balance out the knaves. Even so, it is difficult to know just what Shakespeare meant us to take away from this play....more
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
This is one of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, written when his g
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
This is one of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, written when his greatest works were still years ahead of him. Yet Love’s Labor’s Lost is notably stronger than the comedies that preceded it—in plot, in characterization, and in thematic unity. The play’s defining feature, however, is the exuberance of Shakespearean language on display. The wordplay dances on the edge of sense, sometimes straying into phrases so garbled as to be beyond comprehension. To pick just one example, here is a line from the first scene: “Light seeking light doth light of light beguile.” Now, perhaps the leisurely analyst can extract something from that; but the playgoer watching it performed has little hope.
This may be a rather cynical reading, but to me the play focuses on the theme of vanity. The King of Navarre decides to shut himself and his friends up for a period of three years in order to live in virtuous study. This is not done out of any genuine love of knowledge—indeed they ridicule the pedant—but with the hope of achieving that vanity of vanities: immortal fame. This plan is quickly scrapped when the men are confronted with women, with whom they promptly fall in love. Yet it becomes painfully clear that these lovers are really in love with their own reflections, addicted to the feeling of seeing themselves mirrored in loving eyes. As the mask scene makes evident, the identity of the woman hardly matters to them, just that the woman gaze back.
Though Lord Berowne is a winsome and witty character, I admit that I was more taken with the auxiliary comedic attractions: the melodramatic Spaniard, Amado, and his saucy page, Moth; and most of all the scholar, Holofernes, whose mode of speech is such a perfect satire of pedantry that I am sure Shakespeare was personally well-acquainted with professors.
The play is famous for breaking the defining rule of comedy. It ends, not with a happy marriage, but with the announcement of the death of the King of France and the consequent deferment of marriage. Indeed, the play leaves open whether the marriages are ever carried through, since two of the matches are conditional on elaborate forms of penance that the women demand their vain men perform in the interim. One doubts whether the King of Navarre and Berowne are up the task. The play is saved from ending on a note of disappointment by a very clever and lovely song that Shakespeare inserts: a dialogue between spring and winter, or between the Cuckoo and the Owl, whose rustic words pierce the affected, pretentious speech of much of the play, and return us from vain striving to the cycles of nature....more
And oftentimes excusing of a fault Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse
King John is normally regarded as one of Shakespeare’s earliest and w
And oftentimes excusing of a fault Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse
King John is normally regarded as one of Shakespeare’s earliest and weakest history plays. The plot mainly concerns the king’s conflict with France over his legitimacy, since John inherited the throne from his brother, Richard the Lionheart, even though the late king’s son, Arthur, was alive and well. This leads to a rather silly confrontation between the two powers, in which they try to get the town of Angiers to recognize one of them as the true king, which the townsfolk resolutely refuse to do. The warring factions finally decide to just destroy Angiers—presumably for the satisfaction—until they receive the timely recommendation to marry the prince of France to the princess of England, thus uniting their houses. This is done, and succeeds in suppressing the conflict for about five minutes, until a Cardinal stirs up the war again (which leads to some notable anti-Catholic blasts from Shakespeare).
Compared to Shakespeare’s more mature works, the characters in this play are mostly stiff and lifeless, with far less individualizing marks than we expect from the master of characterization. As Harold Bloom says, at this point Shakespeare was very much under the influence of Christophe Marlowe, and follows that playwright in his inflated, bombastic speeches. I admit that the swollen rhetoric often had me laughing, especially during the first confrontation between the English and French parties. The pathetic and spiteful King John is somewhat more interesting, if not more lovable, than the rest, but the real star is Philip Faulconbridge (later Richard Plantaganet), the bastard son of Richard the Lionheart, and the only immediately recognizable Shakespearean character. As with Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona, it is a relief and a delight whenever Philip appears onstage.
As far as notable quotes go, this play is the source of our phrase “gild the lily,” though it misquotes the play, which goes: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily.” Also notable is this description of grief for a lost child, which many surmise expressed Shakespeare’s grief for his own deceased son, Hamnet, though this is pure speculation:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form
I think Crab, my dog, be the sourest-natured dog that lives.
Two Gentlemen of Verona is usually grouped with A Comedy of Errors and The Taming of t
I think Crab, my dog, be the sourest-natured dog that lives.
Two Gentlemen of Verona is usually grouped with A Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew as one of Shakespeare’s early comedies. I am inclined to see it as the earliest, if only because it is by far the least compelling. Whereas Shakespeare is rightly known for the depth of his psychological insight and the realism of his characters, the personages of this play are shallow and implausible creatures.
The two titular gentlemen are anything but. Proteus is a cad, a lout, and finally a monster, while his friend Valentine is a nincompoop. The women who capture their hearts are rather more compelling—especially Silvia, who sees right through Proteus—and yet their attraction to these unscrupulous airheads dims their stature as well. The final scene is the culmination of everything wrong with this play: after banishing his friend and lying through his teeth, Proteus tries to rape Silvia, and is then immediately forgiven by Valentine (note: not Silvia), in an ambiguous line that, at first glance, seems to mean that Valentine is gifting him his paramour Silvia. The scene could almost be funny if it were played as a farce, but the straight version I saw was sickening
The real heroes of this play are Proteus’s servant Launce and Launce’s dog Crab—a mutt who, despite having no lines, is better-realized than any of the protagonists. Now with Launce we have the real Shakespearean magic: a living, breathing, fully human character, immediately relatable and deeply compelling. His hilarious monologues are the jewels of this play, which does not deserve him. Other than this pair, the play is only interesting for prefiguring many of the themes Shakespeare would later explore with greater clarity and depth....more
A Comedy of Errors holds a special place in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. It is believed to be his first play; it is one of two Shakespeare plays that observeA Comedy of Errors holds a special place in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. It is believed to be his first play; it is one of two Shakespeare plays that observe the “classical unities”; and it is Shakespeare’s shortest play. You can add to this list, Shakespeare’s silliest play, since A Comedy of Errors amply merits this superlative.
To enjoy this work, the viewer must be an expert in suspending disbelief. That there be two sets of twins, bestowed with the same names, who happened to be dressed in the same clothes on the same day—it does not even approach credulity. Added to this is the capstone absurdity that the mother was in the city the whole time, but did not choose to reveal herself to her son for years.
The reward for accepting this improbable premise is hilarity. The humor is low and occasionally crude, but no less brilliant for that. Shakespeare manipulates the simple device of mistaken identity like a virtuoso, squeezing out every bit of drama and every fleeting giggle from this ancient gag. Shakespeare is always witty and amusing, of course, but seldom was he such an expert conjurer of belly-laughs. The scene in which Dromio of Syracuse compares the kitchen-maid to a globe, describing where all the countries can be found on her rotund body, is a pinnacle of comedy.
If this play was, indeed, his first, it certainly augurs Shakespeare’s coming greatness. To make a slapstick farce such as this, the writer need not endow the characters with anything resembling a round personality. But Shakespeare does, and brilliantly. Antipholus of Syracuse is appealing speculative, comparing his search for his long-lost brother to “a drop of water / That in the ocean seeks another drop,” and repeatedly questioning his own identity. His twin brother of Ephesus is decidedly more bourgeois and extroverted; and his wife, Adriana, is touching in her scorned devotion. But of course the real star of the play is Dromio—played by none other than Roger Daltrey in the version I saw—who’s relentless good nature and nonstop wordplay render him irresistibly endearing.
In sum, though certainly not “deep,” this play is both expert and original—a piece of juvenilia that, even by itself, would have secured Shakespeare a modest place in the Western canon, if only as the most perfect example of a staged farce....more
This play is famous for being Shakespeare’s dud, not only bad by his lofty standards but by any standard. Even Harold Bloom, who worships Shakespeare This play is famous for being Shakespeare’s dud, not only bad by his lofty standards but by any standard. Even Harold Bloom, who worships Shakespeare this side of idolatry, calls Titus Andronicus “ghastly bad.” The plot is mechanical and clumsy—but admittedly that’s true of many Shakespeare plays. More important, the characters are bland and flat, with the notable exception of Aaron the Moor, who nevertheless is still leagues behind the serviceable villains Iago and Edmund. But the main problem, for audiences and critics, has been the violence. This play is a bloodbath; character are not just killed, they are hacked to bits.
True idolaters of Shakespeare have attempted to defend him from this play. The most obvious defense is that he didn’t write it, or that he collaborated with someone else and only wrote the good bits. Unfortunately the available evidence seems to support the Bard’s authorship. Given the time period, it would hardly be surprising that Shakespeare could write something so violent. Elizabethan audiences were quite fond of bloodshed; and this play was wildly successful in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Harold Bloom takes a subtler approach in Shakespeare’s defense, and asserts that Shakespeare wrote this to free himself from the influence of Christopher Marlowe, by parodying Marlowe’s style to excess. This reading does have its merits. Many passages are nearly impossible to read straight:
Come, brother, take a head, And in this hand the other will I bear And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employ’d Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth.
I agree with Bloom that these lines, the last in particular, cannot be read without a shocked chortle. And Aaron the Moor, devious plotter, is as ridiculous as Dr. Evil in his famous monologue:
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think, / Few come within the compass of my curse— / Wherein I did not some notorious ill; / As kill a man, or devise his death; / Ravish a maid, or plot a way to do it; / Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself; / Set deadly enmity between two friends; / Make poor men’s cattle break their necks; / Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night, / And bid the owners quench them with their tears. / Oft I have digg’d up dead men from their graves, / And set them upright at their friends’ door / Even when their sorrow as almost forgot, / And on their skins, as on the bark of trees, / Have with my knife carved in Roman letters / “Let not your sorrows die, though I am dead.” / Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things / As willingly as one would kill a fly; / And nothing grieves me more heartily indeed / But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
And yet the play is rarely funny, not even unintentionally funny. Indeed, some lines have a certain gravity and grandeur, though they are often marred by melodrama. Titus’s impassioned sorrow, too, does contain a faint hint of Lear’s magnificently mad grief:
If there were reason for these miseries Then into limits could I bind my woes When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’erflow? If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad, Threatening the welkin with his big-swoln face? And wilt thou have a reason for this coil?
But even the most charitable appraisal must rate Titus Andonicus far behind the other tragedies. Of all Shakespeare’s plays that I know, it is the most marked by its Elizabethan origins, the least able to transcend its epoch. The only indication that this playwright will go on to do bigger and greater things is Aaron the Moor, by far the most “Shakespearean” character in the play, whose tenderness for his newborn son adds an extra dimension to his villainy.
All this being said, I still must say I quite enjoyed Titus Andronicus. This is probably because we are nowadays swinging back around to Elizabethan sensibilities. In a world where Game of Thrones—far more bloody and gruesome than this play—is the most popular show in the world, Titus Andronicus is neither intolerably gory nor overly melodramatic. Indeed, I think if HBO did a production of it, they could make a lot of money....more
This book is not quite as absurd as its title would seem to indicate. If anybody worshipped Shakespeare enough to think that the Bard literally did inThis book is not quite as absurd as its title would seem to indicate. If anybody worshipped Shakespeare enough to think that the Bard literally did invent humanity, it would be Bloom. But Bloom’s primary thesis is the only slightly less grandiose claim that Shakespeare, by creating the most persuasively realistic mode of representing personality, shaped our ideas of what it means to be human. This at least falls within the realm of physical possibility.
I quite like the idea of approaching Shakespeare this way, since it allows us to integrate literature into intellectual history. Surely, the great innovators in poetry, prose, and drama must have contributed to our understanding of the human psyche. And Shakespeare’s works may, indeed, represent a great leap in this respect. Unfortunately, Bloom—both by background and temper—is not really up to the task of substantiating this claim. A serious inquiry into Shakespeare’s novel modes of portraying the human would require a broad overview of Shakespeare’s predecessors. There is nothing of the kind in this book; Bloom instead gives us a series of commentaries on each of Shakespeare’s plays.
For my part, I do agree with Bloom that Shakespeare’s greatest gift was his ability to endow his characters with startling depth. And if I can judge from my own reading, this was something quite new in the history of literature, though perhaps not quite as unique to Shakespeare as Bloom asserts. Montaigne and Cervantes—two near-contemporaries of Shakespeare—also portrayed shifting and unfolding characters, and by Bloom’s own admission Chaucer had encroached on this territory several hundred years earlier.
In any case, establishing a claim for intellectual priority in inventing the human is not at all what this book is about. Instead, this book is a reader‘s guide, consisting of a close reading of Shakespeare’s 39 plays. The plays are grouped both chronologically and thematically, from the early comedies to the late romances. Bloom’s attention is admittedly uneven. To some of the minor works he devotes some ten pages or so, while Hamlet gets nearly fifty. In his approach, Bloom is a self-professed follower of Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and A.C. Bradley—that is, mainly focusing on the character’s personalities and Shakespeare’s methods of representing them.
As you may know, this approach has been out of intellectual fashion for quite some time. Indeed, in many ways Bloom was a deliberate stick in the mud. He was adamantly opposed to reading any kind of social, political, religious, or other message in the plays, and was mostly uninterested in how Shakespeare’s own historical context shaped the play’s content. He was an old-school champion of the autonomy of the aesthetic, of literary excellence existing in a realm apart from the rest of life. You can imagine that this is not especially popular nowadays, to say the least; and Bloom, never one to mince words, is constantly taking swipes at his fellow academics. For the casual reader, this is mostly just a distraction, since most of us just want to enjoy and understand the plays a little better.
Any critic, however broad, will inevitably have strong and weak sections when dealing with a corpus as vast and varied as Shakespeare’s plays. Bloom is no different. I consistently found Bloom at his worst when he was at his most passionate. That is, whenever he felt called upon to rhapsodize over the Bard’s incomparable genius, the book devolved into a string of superlatives that did little to enrich my reading. Thus, ironically, this book is weakest when Shakespeare is at his strongest—particularly in the chapters on Hamlet, King Lear, and the Henry IV plays. Any attempt to analyze the brooding Prince of Denmark or the fat Sir John Falstaff—the Bard’s two greatest creations, according to Bloom—knocks him off his rocker.
By contrast, many of the shorter chapters on Shakespeare’s slightly less famous works are quite strong. Bloom is at his best when he is doing the work of an uncommonly good common reader—that is, merely picking up the play and noting which sections are strong, weak, moving, interesting, disturbing, etc., and then trying to analyze why. This is basically what all of us try to do here on Goodreads, and it just so happens that Bloom is quite good at it. What he is not good at is moving beyond this close, sympathetic reading to arrive at a more general conclusion.
Insofar as Bloom does have a general insight into Shakespeare’s mode of creating the human, it is the concept of self-overhearing. Unfortunately, Bloom does not elaborate on this idea very much, so it is difficult to know exactly what he means by it. As far as I can tell, the idea is that Shakespeare’s characters are never fully able to articulate what they think or feel, but their words always somehow one step behind their psyches. Put another way, Shakespeare’s characters experience a kind of self-alienation, forever trying and failing to fully articulate their own innermost selves. Thus, overhearing their own failed attempts at articulation cause them to change and grow, as they try to correct their own previous failures at self-revelation.
I think this is quite an insightful way of looking at Shakespeare’s characters, and it does pinpoint something novel about Shakespeare’s mode of representation. In most fiction, the characters either articulate exactly what they think, or they articulate the exact opposite (when they are lying, or when they are supposed to be self-deluded). But Shakespeare’s characters are far more subtle than simply dishonest or even self-deluded personas. What they say is never exactly right nor exactly wrong, but forever on the cusp, just missing the mark; and this inability to ever get it exactly right drives the kind of verbal excess that marks Shakespeare’s most powerful speeches—poetry pushing toward the ineffable.
And I do think that this captures something essential about us: that we can hardly ever articulate exactly what we think, how we feel, or what we want; and so there seems to be a disconnect between our innermost core and the outward selves we are able to project. Did Shakespeare first have this insight or did he just perfect its use in the theater? That is a question for a different kind of literary critic than Bloom.
I am spending too much time on this issue of character—since it fascinates me—even though the real value of this book does not consist in its philosophical insights. This book is an excellent companion for reading Shakespeare’s plays, since it allows you to read them alongside a very opinionated, highly intelligent, and fiercely individual reader—which is always valuable....more
This man was so good as disguising his feeling that we can’t ever be sure that he had any.
In many ways Shakespeare is the perfect subject for a Br
This man was so good as disguising his feeling that we can’t ever be sure that he had any.
In many ways Shakespeare is the perfect subject for a Bryson book. Shakespeare scholars have included some colorful and eccentric characters—such as Delia Bacon and J. Thomas Looney—which is one of Bryson’s specialties. Shakespeare is also sufficiently mysterious, most of his life being buried in the oblivion of history—an important thing for Bryson, who is attracted to gaps in our knowledge. Two more of Bryson’s fixations come into play: his interest in the history of the English language, and in daily life of bygone days.
The book is refreshing for Bryson’s deflating humor. More than any other author, Shakespeare attracts untold myths, legends, theories, and pure idolatry; but Bryson’s approach is cool and investigative. He is constantly reminding the reader of the limits of the available evidence. What thus emerges is a portrait of Shakespeare’s times, a bare outline of his life, and refutations of unfounded notions. You might say the book is limited to this investigative track. Bryson is no literary critic and does not attempt any serious appreciation of Shakespeare’s works. But this is just as well since so many great works of criticism already exist elsewhere. Bryson does what he’s good at, and that’s good enough for me....more
I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost Sat for a civil service post The English paper for that year Had several questions on King Lear Which Shak
I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost Sat for a civil service post The English paper for that year Had several questions on King Lear Which Shakespeare answered very badly Because he hadn’t read his Bradley
Analyzing great works of art is always fraught with danger. Whether the critic sets her sights on a portrait, a sonata, or a play, the task is always that of turning poetry into prose. The critic, in other words, must extract content from form—and making content and form inseparable is one of the goals of art. Insofar as art is great, therefore, the critic's task will prove difficult; and criticism thus reaches its most acute challenge in Shakespeare. His works have eluded minds as powerful as Coleridge and Freud, Goethe and Joyce. The man worthiest to the challenge was not anyone so famous; he was, rather, a retiring Oxford don who published a series of lectures on Shakespeare’s tragedies in 1904.
Bradley’s method has been attacked and dismissed as overly literal, treating Shakespeare's characters as real people: “How Many Children had Lady Macbeth?” was the derisive title of one critical article, implying that the question (which Bradley never asked) was ludicrous. But I am convinced that Bradley’s method is, on the whole, the right one. For Shakespeare’s tragedies are incomprehensible unless we set our sights on character—the plays' personalities. If you try the experiment suggested by Bradley himself, you will see this: attempt to narrate the plots of any of these stories without any mention of personality, merely recording the events, and the plot becomes weak and baffling.
The extreme example of this is, of course, Hamlet, whose endless ruminations and procrastinations have been a stumbling block for generations of critics. But the central importance of personality is apparent in all the tragedies. Indeed it must be, as Bradley explains, since a tragedy is tragic only insofar as the events result from a character’s personality. To fall off a building, to catch a deadly disease, to be conscripted into the army—all of these, while remarkably sad, are not tragic in the strict sense because they might happen to anyone. A tragedy may only happen to one person, because it is caused by that person. It does not result from circumstance, accident, or any overwhelming external force. To confirm this, try mentally switching the characters in these tragedies. Othello would have solved Hamlet’s problem in an hour, and Hamlet would have seen right through Iago’s trickery—the plot disappears.
The existence of tragedy, as Bradley also makes clear, seems to suggest a certain sort of universe. The characters must be capable of free action, since the consequences must flow from their personalities. Along with divine determination, the idea of a Christian afterlife is incompatible, too, since if every character ultimately receives their just desserts then the feeling of dreadful finality is lost. For tragedy, as Bradley tells us, always involves the idea of irrecoverable waste—wasted lives, wasted talents, wasted goodness. But the universe in Shakespeare’s plays is not indifferent. Indeed, although good and evil qualities are deeply mixed in all of his most memorable characters, we are never in doubt which is which. And though the hero is inevitably defeated, evil never triumphs.
Most difficult to articulate is the odd mixture of inevitability and avoidability that permeates the atmosphere in these tragedies. One is never in doubt that the characters are, in every sense, free and responsible for their destiny; and yet their unhappy fate seems certain. This feeling is caused, I think, by the way that circumstance bleeds into personality. The behavior of Shakespeare’s characters is the reaction of their personality with their environment; and in tragedy this reaction is always fateful. The events correspond exactly with our heroes’ fatal weakness—a weakness which, in any other situation, would not have doomed them. In this sense their personality becomes their prison. They cannot but act otherwise because it is who they are. The final impression is one of cosmic misfortune—by some twist of fate they have been thrown into a predicament which dooms them, and they participate in creating this situation every fateful step of the way.
To fully illustrate this view of tragedy, as springing from a character’s personality, Bradley must analyze Shakespeare’s heroes and villains. And these investigations are absolutely masterful. His dissections of Hamlet and Iago in particular—my two favorite Shakespeare characters, and the two most resistant to analysis—were spectacular. Ever since I first read those plays, I have been beating my head against them in the attempt to make sense of these bottomless personages. The plots of their respective plays are determined by the actions of these two, and yet their motivations are famously difficult to ferret out. What motivates Iago, and what prevents Hamlet from acting? They are mysterious, and yet extremely coherent; one is always sure their actions are of a piece with their nature—and yet their natures are so subtle and complex that they evade understanding. Indeed for some time I was ready to say that the challenge was impossible; but Bradley’s exegesis has convinced me that I was wrong.
This book was, in sum, a revelation: a model of literary criticism that left me thoroughly convinced. And to complete the triumph, Bradley accomplishes his analysis with brevity and charm. There is nothing stifled or academic in his approach; all technical matters are reserved for footnotes and endnotes. He is, rather, a frank and plainspoken man. Nothing could feel more natural than his tone and approach, and no guide could be more friendly and tolerant. However the intellectual winds may blow in the halls of academe, ordinary lovers of Shakespeare will always cherish Bradley, for he performs the office of the critic: to enhance our enjoyment of a work while being true to its spirit....more
This is a rather difficult Shakespeare play to evaluate. Its genre is a problem: neither a comedy, nor a tragedy, nor even a tragicomedy—it leaves an This is a rather difficult Shakespeare play to evaluate. Its genre is a problem: neither a comedy, nor a tragedy, nor even a tragicomedy—it leaves an ambiguous emotional aftertaste on the palate. Shakespeare himself seems to have felt ambivalent about the work, since he never staged it. Harold Bloom speculates that this was because the play is simply too openly nihilistic.
Shakespeare makes sport of all of the illusions of his day (and ours). Achilles, the glorious soldier, is a coward; Hector, the honorable leader, is a vain fool; Troilus, the ardent lover, is merely lustful; Cressida, the lovesick heroine, is inconstant; Ulysses, the quintessential politician, is completely without scruple. The only sane person in the play is the “fool” Thersites, who is full of intense bitterness towards everyone around him.
Shakespeare, perhaps in an attempt to emulate the mood of antique literature, is very sparring of his immense talent for creating deep characters. None of the characters in the play is particularly interesting or memorable; they wear their personalities on the surface, like their armor. The dialogue, too, is not scrupulously “in character,” but rather a kind of elevated poetry that everybody speaks. Consequently, as Bloom points out, there are many excellent lines scattered about, but it is difficult to see any of them as the emanation of a fictional personality.
The fifth act strikes me as having been written in a kind of deflated haste, perhaps after Shakespeare realized that the play would not “work” on the stage. It is rushed off in a flash of combat, none of which has much emotional import. As it stands, then, this play is primarily interesting for being evidence of Shakespeare’s own nihilism regarding love, glory, and power....more
Compared with Part 1, this sequel is significantly weaker as a stand-alone play. There is no antagonist to c
Presume not that I am the thing I was.
Compared with Part 1, this sequel is significantly weaker as a stand-alone play. There is no antagonist to compare with Hotspur. Falstaff wanders about in pointless merrymaking, mostly separated from Hal; and unfortunately his wit is not nearly so sharp outside of his young companion’s company. The same can be said for Hal, whose youthful liveliness fades into a chilling uprightness. And the plot can be frustratingly meandering and abrupt.
The main drama of this play is the progression of Hal from prodigal son to the ideal young king. This transformation is apt to cause some misgivings. On the one hand, I found it genuinely admirable when Hal commends the Justice and bids him to do his work. And even if one loves Falstaff, it is difficult to wish that the King of England would keep such a lawless fellow around, much less lend him influence. On the other hand, the newly-ascended king’s rejection of his former friend and mentor is deeply sad. Perhaps he should have turned Falstaff away, but it need not have been with such cold scorn.
Again, there is a moral conflict here. Falstaff may best be described as amoral: uninhibited, pleasure-loving, devoid of both cruelty and rectitude. He feels no scruples whatsoever at dishonesty and robbery, and acknowledges no ideal as worth pursuing or even respecting. Hal, by contrast, is a moral creature: he wishes to uphold the moral order, but for him this may mean murder or bloody conquest. So one must ask: Which is better, to be a drunken pickpocket or to lead your country on an invasion? Neither the socially subversive nor the socially upstanding can be fully embraced, which is why Hal’s rejection of Falstaff causes such complex reactions....more
Food for powder, food for powder. They’ll fill a pit as well as better.
This is undoubtedly one of Shakespeare’s strongest plays. In tone and atmos
Food for powder, food for powder. They’ll fill a pit as well as better.
This is undoubtedly one of Shakespeare’s strongest plays. In tone and atmosphere it is far more varied and naturalistic than its predecessor, Richard II. The scenes with Hal amid the low-life of London are fetching, and do much to alleviate the stiff and stuffy courtly atmosphere of some of Shakespeare’s histories. The comedy also helps; and this play contains some of Shakespeare’s highest and lowest comedy, both of which are embodied in the corpulent Falstaff.
Most readers will, I suspect, concur with Harold Bloom in deeming Falstaff one of the bard’s great creations—though we may not go so far as to put him on a level with Hamlet. Bloom is correct, however, in seeing one’s opinion of Falstaff as a defining fact in one’s interpretation of the play. There are those who see in Falstaff the spirit of carnival—the ecstatic embrace of all the pleasures of life and the total rejection of all the hypocrisies of society. Others see Falstaff as a corrupter and a lout—a lazy and selfish fool.
For my part I vacillate between these two attitudes. There is no denying Falstaff’s wit; and his soliloquy on the futility of honor is wonderfully refreshing, puncturing through all of the political nonsense that motivates the bloody clashes. Still, I cannot help thinking that, if the Falstaffian attitude were embraced too widely, society itself would be impossible. Some social restraint on our pleasure-loving instincts is necessary if we are not to end up fat drunken thieves. On the other hand, a generous dose of the Falstaffian attitude can be a great antidote to the self-righteous nonsense that leads us into war.
In any case, Falstaff is not the only great character in this play. Hotspur is a mass of furious energy, an electrifying presence every time he is on stage. Prince Hal, though less charismatic, is more complex. From the start, he already has an ambivalent relationship with Falstaff, a kind of icy affection or warm disregard. Indeed, Hal holds everyone at a distance, and one senses a skeptical intelligence that is wary of committing until the circumstances are just right. It is hard to read his character’s evolution as that of a wayward youth who learns to embrace his identity. His actions seem far too deliberate, his timing too perfect. Was he hoping to learn something by keeping company with Falstaff and his lot?...more
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