Character and Motivation in Shakespeare

Lee Lady

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Fintan O'Toole, Shakespeare is Hard, But So Is Life
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary
C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy
Frank Kermode, Shakespeare's Language
Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love
Philip Brockbank (editor), Players of Shakespeare, 1
Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (editors), Players of Shakespeare, 2
G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy
Albert Bermel, Shakespeare At the Moment: Playing the Comedies
John Russell Brown (editor), Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It: A Casebook
John W. Mahon & Ellen Macleod Mahon (editors), The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays
Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective
James Wood, How Fiction Works

What does literature do and how does it do it? And what does English literature do and how does it do it? And what does it use to do what it does?
         --- Gertrude Stein, The Modes of Modern Writing.

The Illusion of Character: Information and Signals in the Text

The reader may believe that he is completely receptive and uncritical, but in fact he is performing a highly active and complex creative act.   (Joyce Cary, Art and Reality.)

The reader of a novel --- by which I mean the critical reader --- is himself a novelist.   (Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction.)

To read is to participate in the play of the text.   (Jonathan Cruller, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature.)

If one isolates a literary work from the cooperative and creative contribution made by the audience, then the work has no meaning at all. As William Gass has pointed out, the text of a work of fiction contains no characters; all it contains are words. (In the same way, isolated from its audience, a painting contains no images, merely pieces of pigment.) What these words give us is information, plus signals, which the audience responds to on the basis of established conventions, and on the basis of this information and these signals the reader's imagination creates the illusion of a real character.

The text of a play contains only lines of dialogue. We hear this dialogue, and our mind goes to work, trying to figure out, just as we do in real life, "What sorts of people are these that are saying these things?"  And in consequence, characters come to life in our imagination.

In the same way, I may see an interaction between two people on the street, in a grocery store, or in a bar. And something about the way one of these people behaves may be so striking to me that I have a strong sense of knowing who this person is, just from seeing her in this one interaction. If I in fact have the opportunity to get to know her better, I will probably discover that almost all the information my imagination created about her on that first encounter was wrong. And yet somehow in that first encounter, I have the illusion of knowing her completely.

Hamlet is an illusion created by our imagination in accordance with the information Shakespeare gives us. So when we ask, for instance, "Why is Hamlet so cruel to Ophelia?" it is important to remember that on the level of literal truth, this question is nonsense since there is no Hamlet except in our imaginations. What we can say, however, is that certain conceptions of a particular literary character are more valid than others because they are more consistent with the information and signals in the text.

The approach of a great deal of criticism of fiction and drama has been to look at the characters in the plays as if they were real people and to meticulously comb through the lines of the work as if it contained documentary evidence about these people which could be used to discover the "truth" about them.

In fact, in much contemporary drama and fiction, authors intentionally provide a number of small informational clues in the text, and audiences are trained to be attentive to such small clues. At the extreme, this process of making deductions from small clues is called "close reading." (Of course there's always the question as to whether the deductions certain readers make from apparent small clues in the text actually corresponds to something the author intended to communicate. In many cases, authors' own commentary on various critical analyses has indicated the contrary. But it's also true that there are times when we as readers reserve the right to listen to an author's statements with puzzled disbelief, and to tell the author that he apparently doesn't understand his own work.)

One must remember that even when fictional characters seem very real and alive to us, the evidence on which our conception of these characters is based is a mere fiction in the first place. The author depends on us to make certain inferences from the information given, and in fact we cannot understand the work without making inferences, but an author is not always primarily concerned with the consistency of the evidence and certainly is never able to anticipate all the possible inferences that a reader, especially a critic, may make.

Certainly one can't deny that over and over again in Shakespeare's plays, we see pieces of information of different sorts about the same character which are extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to reconcile.

For instance, Harold Bloom points out (and he was certainly not the first to notice it) that Hamlet does contain one quite blatant inconsistency on a strictly factual level, namely on the question of Hamlet's age. In the gravedigger scene at the end of the play, Shakespeare seems to go out of his way to emphatically tell us that Hamlet is thirty years old. (The gravedigger says that he has held that position for thirty years, and began it on the day Hamlet was born. A little later in the scene, he says that Yorick died twenty-three years ago, and Hamlet remembers playing with Yorick as a young child.) It is uncharacteristic of Shakespeare to be so specific in providing factual details, but what makes it especially strange is that although Hamlet does seem at least thirty years old in Act 5, he seems to be much younger (and is identified as a university student) in the first four acts of the play. We can only guess at possible reasons for Shakespeare having specified the age this way in Act 5. The only thing I can think of is that many people conjectured that the character Hamlet might have been modeled on the twenty-year-old son of some Important Personage, and Shakespeare thought it wise to make it clear that this was not the case.

Hamlet is not the only Shakespearean character whose age seems to change a little during the course of the play, although Hamlet is the most blatant example. Fiona Shaw and Juliet Stevenson, writing of the roles of Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It (Players of Shakespeare 2), say, "We always found it difficult in reheasal to pin the girls down to a specific age --- an early decision to play them in their late teens turned out to be at times, misleading, because of the sophistication and resonance of their thought, but it was always clear that their energies and preoccupations are youthful. In the end, we abandoned a firm decision on the matter, and allowed them to be older and younger as each scene demanded, a state which is generally typical, in any case, of young women poised between adolescence and adulthood."

Although the inconsistency about the age of Hamlet presents a thorny problem for actors and critics, it is not something that most readers and audiences even notice even today, when the plays are performed in a much more realistic way than in Shakespeare's day. It apparently didn't matter to Shakespeare and it doesn't matter to his intended audience.

I think that here we have strong evidence that the concept of characterization in Shakespeare is very different from that in most contemporary fiction and drama. Heretical though it may seem for contemporary teachers of creative writing, it doesn't seem necessary for characters in Shakespeare to have a particular age. What makes a Shakespearean character real for us is not a consistent body of vital statistics.

When there are things in Shakespeare's plays that puzzle us, one can draw one of four conclusions. Either that (1) Shakespeare was incompetent as a writer, or (2) that he intended us to be puzzled, or that (3) the things that puzzle us are not things that he considered significant, or that (4) we are incompetent as critics. Alternative (1) is generally considered heresy in Shakespearean criticism (although there certainly have been critics who took this point of view). And there seems to be little that we know about the way in which the plays were originally presented or their popularity to support the hypothesis that they were originally intended as puzzles. This leaves us with alternatives (3) and (4). I consider (4) actually to be a special case of (3), inasmuch as trying to find a hidden significance in things that the original author did not consider important is, as I see it, an example of inept criticism.

There are all sorts of ways that a critic (or a teacher, who is after all merely a critic addressing a very small audience) can clarify a literary work or enable people to see it in a new and worthwhile way. But a problem that confronts critics is that in order to be considered worthwhile, criticism must say something new. And in dealing with something as old as Shakespeare's plays, it is extremely difficult to find something new to say. And to the extent that a critic puts pieces of information in the work together in a way that has previously never been thought of to make inferences which never occurred to the original author or to most members of the intended audience, the critic is in effect creating a new work which in most cases will have less artistic merit than the original.

For Harold Bloom, what is worthwhile in a play by Shakespeare has to do with the puzzles it provides us with rather than the things that are overt in the work. These puzzles, as identified by Bloom, can certainly be fascinating. But one can't help but doubt that they have much to do with the way the plays have resonated with audiences for four hundred years.

There is indeed a mystery to Shakespeare's works. One can wonder how he managed to have such a great impact on the imaginations of so many readers and audiences over a period of so many years. But when it comes to the question of what the plays "mean," I think that there can be no legitimate mystery. If what an author really intended by a work is so difficult to understand that it takes hundred of years to figure it out, one can't help but think that what one is confronted with is a failure to communicate on the part of the author. Shakespeare did not fail to communicate, and the various meanings that have been devised so creatively by various critics are never as vital as the original plays.

Signals

One of the things that makes criticism such an interesting adversarial game and often makes it impossible to come to a final agreement on what is literary character is "really" like is that literary works, especially those like Shakespeare's plays, are "overdetermined": there is more provided in the text in the way of information and signals than what is actually required to construct meaning. One is especially likely to find inconsistencies when attention is focused on things which the original author did not give much thought to .

We know that the character Polonius (in Hamlet) is one of the chief advisers to the King of Denmark. From this information it seems reasonable to conclude, as many contemporary critics, directors, and actors have, that Polonius is no fool.

But Shakespeare also provides us with a different signal, in the form of the language of Polonius. In Act II, Scene 2, addressing the King and Queen, Polonius says,

Polonius. My liege and Madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.
Mad call I it, for, to define true madness
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?

Queen. More matter, with less art.

Polonius. Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he's mad 'tis true --- a foolish figure.
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Mad let us grant him then; and now remains
To find the cause of this effect;
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause.
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus.
Perpend.

This speech contains little in the way of overt information, but in style it is the sort of comic patter characteristic of Shakespeare's foolish clowns (such as the constable Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing) and which survives in twentieth century comedy such as Abbot & Costello. The style is, in my opinion, a clear signal to the audience that Polonius is indeed a buffoon.

Nontheless, an actor has the choice to read the above speech in a non-comic manner and to play Polonius as a serious character, as Patrick Stewart, among others, has done.

Rather than being exceptional, the inconsistency here about Polonius is in fact quite typical of the choices Shakespeare's characters give to actors.

I doubt very much that Shakespeare while writing ever asked himself questions like, "What sort of person is Polonius?" Instead, I think that Shakespeare simply knew that he needed comedy at that point in Hamlet, and that he needed a straight man for Hamlet. And so he gave Polonius the sort of comic lines he was so good at writing. Then, having once had Polonius speak in this manner, he had a commitment for the sort of person Polonius would be in the rest of the play. This sort of approach will be familiar to writers of comedy skits, but is very different from the approach of dramatists whose primary concern is with the "meaning" of the overall play rather than the entertainment value of what's happening on the stage.

As another example, there is the following exchange in Hamlet, just after Hamlet has killed Polonius.

King. Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

Hamlet. At supper.

King. At supper? Where?

Hamlet. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor of diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your fat beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that is the end.

What did Shakespeare mean to tell us about Hamlet, we might wonder, by having him joke in such an offensive way just after having murdered an important and harmless old man?

This is a question, I think, that a writer would not ask. As someone who has written a little myself, I am quite sure that Shakespeare was not thinking about characterization at all when he wrote this interchange. Whether one likes the joke or not, it is clear to me that this is inspired writing: one of those moments when the words rush into the mind of a writer and he delights in them. And Shakespeare included them in the scene because they were too good not to use. Furthermore, they represent the sort of "philosophical" humor that Shakespeare's audiences have always appreciated. (It is also said that Shakespeare boasted that he had never crossed out a line once written, although, like all writers, he did a fair amount of revision.)

Or we can create characters on the basis of their traits. But a character trait, as an abstract quality, has no real existence. A trait is simply a pattern of behavior. What an author shows us is the behavior. But one way of writing is to start deciding on the traits a character will have, and then shape the character's behavior in accord with those traits.

If we look at the plays of George Bernard Shaw, for instance, it seems clear that Shaw, before he even started the actual writing, gave considerable thought to exactly what his characters would be like. Shaw's characters did and said exactly what he wanted them to. He did not give them the chance to come to life.

And sometimes Shakespeare does the same thing. The opening scene of Othello, for instance, serves largely to characterize Iago as a foul-mouthed sargeant (or rather ensign) with a malicious love for causing trouble and a hatred for Othello. Malvolio in Twelfth Night provides another example where Shakespeare started by deciding what a character would be like, and then wrote the scenes involving that character.

But I am convinced that most often, Shakespeare's writing process was like that of many other writers of fiction. At his best, in writing a scene Shakespeare started out with some general sense of what that scene needed to accomplish, and then waited for words to come. Basically, he listened for what his character wanted to say.

In terms of what is most often taught in contemporary creative writing courses, Shakespeare's considerations were quite superficial. He was someone who studied other human beings very closely, but not, I believe, from a point of view of trying to puzzle out their motives and innermost thoughts. He studied their mannerisms, their behavior, their opinions, but especially their manner of speaking. One can imagine that he had this in common with many traveling entertainers, for imitating the mannerisms of real people is something that comedians and other entertainers have always done.

We cannot know, of course, to what extent the lines spoken for Iago, for instance, were an accurate representation of the speech of an Elizabethan sergeant or ensign. But we can be sure that in writing Iago's lines Shakespeare was guided by what he had heard from real NCOs. Because where else could he have come up with this manner of speaking?

What made Shakespeare so innovative, in my opinion, is that he was able to produce a blend of the sort of village entertainment for which which we have are no texts (see C. L. Barber's book Shakespeare's Festive Comedies) and the quasi-literary productions of playwrights such as Ben Jonson or Thomas Kyd. (No drama, however, by any author was ever considered as a form of literature until long after Shakespeare's death.)

Getting to know a character in a work by an author like Shaw, whose writing process is to imagine a certain sort of character and then ask, "What would this character say in this sort of situation?" is a little like doing a crossword puzzle or reading a mystery novel, in that we are expected to put together the hints that the author has provided us in order to arrive at a pre-ordained answer. (Although in the case of Shaw, the hints are fairly blatant, so the amount of work required of the audience is minimal.)  But in reading or watching a play by Shakespeare, we often discover the characters along with the author, so that the characters seem very alive.

Characters Are Determined by What They Say

When Shakespeare was really, um, grooving in the process of his writing, what his imagination produced were fascinating interactions. I find it impossible to believe that he could have written the sort of interactions (the scene in King Lear with the two stools, for instance) he did if he had instead let his writing be controlled by some plan worked out prior to the writing process.

John Middleton Murray, in "Shakespeare's Method: The Merchant of Venice" (included in The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essays, edited by Thomas Wheeler) writes

The axiom, which has long been current in Shakespeare criticism, that the situation derives from the character, is, in the main, a mistaken one. But that does not mean, as some modern critics assert, that the reverse in true and the characters derive from the situations. They do not. They are largely epiphenomenal to the situations.

This is difficult to grasp, because it is so simple. There is an element in a Shakespearean character which derives from the situation, but that element is relatively small compared to the element which floats free as it were of the situation. On this element Shakespeare lavished himself, because here he was, within limits, a free agent.

First of all, I see this slightly differently from Murray. When an author's writing process has a particular plot as a starting point (as we know was at least almost always the case for Shakespeare), then, as Northrop Frye points out in his book A Natural Perspective, the nature of the characters is to a large extent already determined by the plot. Referring to a play by the Roman playwright Terrence (The Mother-In-Law), Frye writes,

Any objection to the character of Pamphilus has to be based on his dramatic function in the plot. He could not possibly act otherwise, and therefore he could not possibly be a different kind of person, if this particular story is to be told.

Shakespeare would start with a situation and, like the teller of a folk tale or fairy tale, he needed to devise a character to take part in that situation. But the plays of Shakespeare are more complex than the farces of Plautus or of Molière. Shakespeare's plays are unruly. His characters are people and they have their own concerns and their own agendas, beyond the mere needs to the situation. Shakespeare makes his characters interesting to us in their own right in a way that is, as Murray says, epiphenomenal to the situation. And then the nature of a character often tends to change the direction in which the situation develops, so that Shakespeare would find his play moving in a direction different from what he had planned. Shakespeare's plays, as I have written elsewhere, tend to "go off the rails" somewhere around Act 3.

In Twelfth Night, Viola is given the seemingly impossible task of delivering a message to Olivia, who is refusing all visitors. Shakespeare needs to find a way for Viola to succeed at this task. I think one can see from the text that Shakespeare did not first of all decide what sort of person Viola was, and then ask himself what that sort of person would say in the given situation. Instead, I believe it is clear from the text that Shakespeare asked himself, "How could someone confronted with a situation like this deal with it, and do it in a way that would be entertaining to the audience?" And then he let his imagination work freely until he heard what Viola had to say. And as Shakespeare listened to Viola, he began to get some idea of her character.

So here, character has arisen from the situation. (The word "determined" is perhaps a little strong.) From this point on, Shakespeare is committed to Viola's having a boyish awkwardness, and this will in turn affect the choice of the future situations for her to be involved in.

As another example, I think that one can see clearly that Shakespeare did not start out by creating Lady Macbeth as a particular sort of person, and then ask himself, "What would this sort of person say to convince her husband to take the necessary steps to become king?"  Instead, Shakespeare was guided by his source story, and by the logic of fairy tales (for the beginning of Macbeth is very much like a fairy tale) to know that Lady Macbeth would be impatient with her husband and call him a fool. But then Shakespeare had to find words for her to use that would accomplish this and have maximal dramatic impact on his audience. And then, once those words were spoken, Lady Macbeth's character was to a large extent determined.

Character, in Shakespeare, at least for the most part (perhaps Hamlet and Lear are exceptions), is not destiny. Character (at least for major characters) tends to be more something that is born when the character is confronted with destiny.

Of course there are cases even in Shakespeare where situation does indeed derive in large part from character. I have already mentioned the case of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. The character of of Malvolio certainly in large part tends to make it almost inevitable that the play will include a situation where the other characters scheme to make him appear ridiculous. On the other hand, there can often be a chicken-and-egg puzzle to this sort of thing. Did Shakespeare first determine the character of Malvolio and consequently think of the other characters humiliating him, or did he start with a plot which included the ridicule and then ask himself what sort of character would be necessary to make such a plot work? Since we're not privy to the workings of Shakespeare's mind, and since my belief is that in large part Shakespeare did not work these things out on a conscious level, it's often in general difficult to answer questions like this. In the case of Twelfth Night, though, we can be fairly sure that the character of Malvolio came first. (It is generally believed that Malvolio was meant to be a good-hearted caricature of Ben Jonson.)

The main point is, though, first that character and situation are interdependent and probably in most cases neither element is prior to the other.

In the case of Macbeth, many tend, taking Aristotle's characterization of tragedy much too seriously, to imagine that the tragedy is an unfolding of the consequences of a fatal flaw in Macbeth, namely ambition. But this is not what the play shows at all. If Macbeth is ambitious in the beginning of the play, Shakespeare gives us no indication of it. Instead, Macbeth is like the typical protagonist in a Twilight Zone episode, or in many folk tales and fairy tales: he is an ordinary man, perhaps even a tad on the mediocre side, suddenly confronted with an extraordinary situation. And his response, I believe, is the response one might expect of an ordinary man in such a situation: he decides to take advantage of it.  (This sort of greedy ambition by a foolish protagonist is quite typical of folk tales and fairy tales.)  And in large part the point of the story, at that stage anyway, is that Macbeth has got in over his head. He is not the sort of man who was meant to acquire a kingdom by way of murder.

So Macbeth begins, in my opinion, with situation creating character. But then Macbeth's character --- his hasty and rather inept way of committing the murder and his guilt and panic afterwards --- create the situation for the remainder of the play. (Suppose it had been Iago rather than Macbeth who decided to usurp Duncan's kingdom. The play would have proceeded very differently.)

Othello's downfall is not is not because of a fatal flaw of jealousy. Othello in fact has very little jealousy, until Iago goads him into it. If Othello has a fatal flaw, it is the fact that he is an outsider in society and not a good judge of people and puts his trust in Iago, who, as the audience can see, from the very opening scene, is not worthy of it.

King Lear's downfall is, I believe, initiated by his own character defects, namely his senility, his bad judgement about people, and his tendency to fly into a rage over things that are not important enough to justify that rage. But then in Act 3, the play takes on a completely different direction. And it's really the last three acts that we read the play for.

Shakespeare he knew that he was succeeding when writing a particular scene because writing it was turning out to be a lot of fun. And when the scene was finished, he found himself a little surprised by it and discovered that the characters and the as well as direction of his play had slightly changed.

Harold Bloom has noticed this but has it backwards. Bloom says that Shakespeare's characters speak and then overhear themselves, and change as a result. But although this may be an interesting metaphorical way of expressing what happens, the simple fact is that it is Shakespeare, not the characters, who was real and it was Shakespeare who listened to what his characters said and consequently changed his notion of who they were. (But certainly Bloom is correct in that the characters, as they exist in our imagination, do change during the course of the play.)

I believe that I can usually distinguish between those times when Shakespeare was listening to his characters speak (or, to put it less metaphorically, just letting the words come) and those times when he was working out their speeches by an intellectual process. The scenes where Shakespeare listened to his characters are the ones which are more alive, whereas the ones planned in advance are more or less predictable.

As an example of the latter, in the Merchant of Venice, after Jessica leaves her father's home, she makes the following speech.

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. Oh, Lorenzo,
If thou keep promise, I will end this strife,
Become a Christian and thy loving wife!

Here I think is a case where Shakespeare knew exactly what his character needed to say and simply assigned Jessica the necessary words. And in consequence, in my opinion, Jessica never really comes to life.

Character Consistency

In the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance, Bottom is arrogant in a rather stupid way, wanting to take complete charge of the play-within-a-play and even suggesting that it might be best if he were to play all the roles himself. Then, after Puck uses a spell to change his head into an ass's head and causes Titania to fall in love with him, Bottom becomes very mellow and good natured. One can see this inconsistency as a flaw in Shakespeare's characterization, as Albert Bermel does in his book Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing the Comedies. And yet as far as I know, audiences, who I think are often smarter than critics, never find this a problem. We are seeing two completely different aspects of Bottom that don't seem to have anything to do with each other. And yet Shakespeare makes it quite believable (in my opinion) that it's still the same character in both cases.

Imagine Al Bundy from Married With Children as Bottom. Does this work? In my opinion it does. After an amazingly beautiful woman has apparently fallen in love with him, the previously arrogant and fatuous character (Al Bundy or Bottom) becomes fatuous and pie eyed. He's still just as arrogant, in fact, but his arrogance manifests itself in a different way. Then he awakes from his dream and returns more or less to his normal personality.

Probably the most blatant example of Shakespeare's lack of concern for character consistency is the case of Portia in the Merchant of Venice. Critics and actresses has struggled to reconcile the seemingly shallow airhead who makes caustic comments about her suitors in Act 1, the "spoiled little rich girl," in Sinead Cusak's words, with the woman who, in her disguise as a law clerk in the Duke's chambers, delivers the "Quality of Mercy" speech.

I think that the incongruity here shows us quite a bit about the difference between the contemporary approach to characterization and Shakespeare's.

I have stated my belief that often Shakespeare's method of writing was often to wait to hear what his characters had to say and then write it down (with sometimes quite a bit of polishing, of course). But in this case, I believe that Shakespeare had written the speech without any thought of Portia at all. It was a good speech (although except for the first few lines, not one of his best) and he wanted to include it in the play. So he needed someone to deliver it, and Portia was the character who was in the right place at the right time. The fact that nothing previously in the play (or afterwards, for that matter) indicated that Portia was the sort of person to have the thoughts expressed in that speech was apparently not something that Shakespeare ever had any concern about. (This is the sort of thing that George Bernard Shaw often did: It was the speech that was the important thing, and the character was only secondary.)

Many modern productions of The Merchant of Venice have essentially turned Portia and the law student in the Duke's chambers into two different roles played by the same actress. Perhaps to some extent this can work because the audience is already so familiar with the story, but I believe that this significantly diminishes the role of Portia. For one thing, it takes away one of the interesting dimensions of the play if the audience is not always aware that the learned law student in the courtroom is the same as the spoiled little rich girl in Act 1.

In general, the fun of characters in disguise is largely in the audience's double vision, the simultaneous awareness, most often ironical, of two different characters in the same body. The disguise is very obvious to the audience but is unnoticed by the other characters in the play. There is an almost flickering effect as the character shifts back and forth between the true personality and the masquerade personality. This is especially interesting when a woman is impersonating a man, so that at times we see her as a woman and then there is a shift and we see her more as a man. It is clear to me that Shakespeare intended for his audience to be very constantly aware, and comically so, that the law student in the courtroom scene was actually Portia. This is because of the way he foreshadows this in Act 3 Scene 4:

Portia: I'll hold thee any wager,
When we are both accoutered like young men,
I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two,
And wear my dagger with the braver grace,
And speak between the change of man and boy
With a reed voice, and mincing steps
Into a manly stride, and speak of frays
Like a fine bragging youth, and tell quaint lies,
How honorable ladies sought my love
Which I denying, they fell sick and died ---
I could not do withal.

And for a second thing, the fact that Portia and the law student are the same is crucial to the story line in the Merchant, and if the performance downplays this, it means that a major component of the story has to be enacted in the audience's imagination rather than on stage. (It would be different, although I believe less interesting, if the play had scenes showing Portia and Nerissa changing clothes and otherwise preparing for their disguise, and then discussing the courtroom scene afterwards. In the absence of such scenes, we must be able to perceive Portia the woman and Balthazar the law student as the same person, not merely know this intellectually.)

I do not see the same thing going on with Edgar and Poor Tom, in King Lear, however. In the case of Poor Tom, Shakespeare seems to have got so caught up in the fun of portraying the disguised character that for a while he forgot about the character behind the disguise. Up to the point when he is forced to flee from his home and disguises himself for protection as Poor Tom, Edgar has simply performed a necessary function for the plot without adding any real interest to the play. But it seems clear to me that Shakespeare loved writing the character Poor Tom, and I think his audiences must have loved Poor Tom as well. And so Shakespeare simply threw character consistency to the wind and let Poor Tom become what was essentially a new character in the play. It never occurred to Shakespeare to have Edgar throw off his disguise as soon as it became unnecessary in terms of plot logic, because that would have meant replacing an entertaining character, Poor Tom, by a boring one, Edgar.

At some moments in Hamlet, it became fun for Shakespeare (and his audience) to present a character who is completely crazy, and at other moments he preferred to present Hamlet as one who is only pretending. And yet there is a continuity of personality that doesn't cause this to be a problem for an audience. It is a problem only for those who study the play rather than coming to enjoy it and who have a very different conception from Shakespeare of what a play is and what a character is.

Decisions

We live in a world where people have an enormous number of decisions to make, and making the "correct" decision is regarded as crucial. Most contemporary works of literature, especially more "serious" ones, focus on decisions that characters are confronted with, especially decisions involving conflicting values or conflicting loyalties. Today we tend to see works of fiction as shallow, even escapist, if they focus on things characters actually do rather than on their process of making difficult choices.

But Shakespeare's stories, like most sitcoms and many movies, are almost always strongly situational. Shakespeare put his characters in a predicament, and the interest of the audience was how they got out of it, which was usually by cleverness or, more often, being saved by a convenient coincidence, and almost never by a process of soul-searching and extensive reexamination of their values. (In the case of tragedies, of course, the predicament is resolved only on the death of the protagonist and usually numerous other characters as well.)

Certainly characters in the plays are sometimes confronted with important decisions, but (with the possible exception of Hamlet), these decisions are usually made fairly quickly and are not the central issue.

For instance, Macbeth is not a play focused on the question of whether or not Macbeth should kill Duncan. For Othello, the crucial issue is whether Desdemona has actually been unfaithful to him or not. Once he is convinced that she has been unfaithful, he has very little hesitation in deciding to kill her.

Looking at Hamlet through the filter of our modern obsessions, we often imagine Hamlet agonizing over the question of whether it's right to kill the king. And yet this is never shown in the play. To the extent that the play shows Hamlet as indecisive, it shows him as merely having a hard time deciding whether the king had actually murdered his father or not.

Motivation

Stephen Greenblatt argues in his book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) that in his tragedies, Shakespeare systematically reduced the amount of "causal explanation a tragic plot needed in order of function effectively and the amount of explicit psychological rationale a character needed in order to be compelling. Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity." Why does Lear test his daughters? Why can't Hamlet effectively avenge the death of his father? Why does Iago ruin Othello's life? The sources that Shakespeare read all provided transparent answers. (Iago was in love with Desdemona. Hamlet should kill Claudius. Lear was unhappy with Cordelia's impending marriage.) But Shakespeare was not interest in such transparency.

Certainly to the extent that the characters in a play or piece of fiction seem real to us, we will naturally often attribute motivations to them or puzzle over their motivation. Where one goes astray with Shakespeare, in my opinion, is in thinking that such questions of motivation are what the play is really about (as it would be in many more modern plays) or in thinking that there is necessarily a correct answer to motivational questions.

One of the strangest sort of Shakespearean criticism, and also one of the most common, is assertion that a particular character has a definite particular motivation. Shakespeare's characters existed originally in Shakespeare's imagination, often, I am sure, in rather fragmentary form. When we read a play, or see it performed, the characters will in turn exist in our imaginations, in consequence of our response to the clues and signals provided by the text. But the character that exists in my imagination will almost certainly be at least a little different than the one that exists in yours.

To claim to be able to identify for certain the motivation of one of these characters is bizarre. The only thing we can legitimately argue about is, What motivations does the play attribute to the character?

If Shakespeare thought that a character's motivation was important, he would have the character step forward to the edge of the stage and explain his motivation to the audience. Certainly the plays allow us, and even encourage us, to make a lot of inferences beyond what is explicitly stated. But I believe it is foolish to assert that certain inferences are correct and others are incorrect, except in cases where the evidence is completely clear cut.

What is the motivation of Portia, for instance, when in her disguise as a law clerk she convinces Bassanio to give her the ring which symbolizes his love? Some critics, especially feminist ones, have asserted that by means of the ring trick, she intends to teach Bassanio a very serious lesson about love and loyalty.

This is what is generally called a "reading" of the play. That is to say, although there is no evidence in the play to indicate that Shakespeare intended his audience to perceive this motivation in Portia, if one makes this assumption and then reads the play, or performs it, accordingly, such a reading will be compatible with the text.

For a variety of reasons, though, it seems very unlikely that Shakespeare himself had a performance along these lines in mind or that such a performance would have been entertaining for his audience. To me, Shakespeare's comedies, including the very dark and troublesome Merchant, are much more in the realm of I Love Lucy than of Arthur Miller. The theme of a wife making a fool of her husband in a good-natured way is one that would naturally occur to any comedy writer. It always gets a laugh from the audience. As far as I can see, there is no evidence in the Merchant to suggest that Shakespeare had any more serious purpose in mind in introducing the ring trick into the play.

But of course I can't say for sure that I am correct and the critics I disagree with are wrong. There is in fact no right or wrong here. Since Shakespeare very often shows us interactions without explicitly telling us the meaning of these interactions or the motivations of the characters involved, there are frequently numerous readings of a play that are compatible with the text. This is one of the ways in which Shakespeare's plays sometimes seem to function as a Rorschach blot for critics. And it's certainly entertaining to watch a troupe of actors find a completely new way of looking at one of the plays. It's hard to forgive a production, however, that leaves the audience walking away and muttering, "I doubt very much that that's what Shakespeare had in mind."

I think that even most contemporary audiences and readers are seldom bothered by most of the motivational questions that critics devote so much attention to. Shakespeare focuses attention on what his characters actually do (and the way in which they express their emotions in wonderful speeches). The motivation provides only an initial justification for the behavior and is then quickly forgotten. Characters often carry on with the behavior long after the motivation for it is no longer relevant. (We see this especially in cases where characters adopt a disguise.) Even contemporary audiences rarely have any problem with this. Only critics, who study the play rather than enjoying it, notice that there is a puzzle about it.

Why does Hamlet keep behaving in a way that calls attention to himself and alarms Claudius? Because he's pretending to be crazy. Why is he pretending to be crazy? In order to divert suspicion away from himself. When we try to think about Hamlet in the way we think about a real person, this makes no sense at all. It only makes sense when we realize that Hamlet pretends to be crazy because this is what he did in the drama by Belleforest that Shakespeare was stealing from, and he continues to pretend to be crazy because that situation was interesting to Shakespeare and enabled him to write a number of scenes which were entertaining to his audience.

In his book Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom asks,

Why does no one ever behave other than zanily in Twelfth Night or other than madly in Measure for Measure?

None of this is to say that everything in a play is purely random or that motivation plays no role at all. In the tragedies, especially, there is an overall story where the motivation of the characters is of primary concern. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, for instance, cannot start behaving in a random and unmotivated behavior without destroying the play. But at the same time, there is usually a flurry of little incidental by-play that defies explanation if we seek motivation for everything.

For valid critical analysis, I believe that the true question is whether Hamlet's actions, for instance, are believable as the actions of a supposedly real person, despite the lack of complete information as to their motivation, or whether we are seeing an author pulling the strings of a puppet. Do we believe that Hamlet does the things he does because of the person he is, or do we believe that his actions are merely serving the needs of a pre-planned author's plot?

And the strange thing is that because we know Shakespeare's sources, it is quite clear that Hamlet's actions were pre-planned to fit an existing plot. And yet subjectively, Hamlet, like so many of Shakespeare's characters, seems very alive, so that we completely believe in what he does even when we don't understand it. And we find it hard to resist arguing about the real reasons for his behavior, even when we know that such questions are nonsense.

A critic who engages in mind-reading of the characters, attributing to them thought processes and motivations which cannot be corroborated by what is actually in the text, is actually engaged in a creative effort, using the actual play as a starting point in order to create a new imaginative work. (Harold Bloom, for instance, is a marvelously creative critic.) This is certainly a valid endeavor, as long as the critic refrains from claiming that his speculations represent the "truth" about what is "really" in the play. But the interesting thing is that although this new creative work, comprising the original play plus the critic's explanations, obviously ought to be richer and deeper than the original, in practice it is almost always less powerful than the original.

But, in fact, what about people who are in fact real? In real life, we also speculate about people's motives and but often have no way of really knowing them. In fact (as those who have been through therapy know), even our ideas about our own motives are often mere self-justification which cannot withstand critical challenge. How often can we in fact say with complete accuracy that we know why we did a particular thing?

I would like to tentatively suggest the hypothesis that the difference between characters who are really alive in fiction and characters who are merely credible is that the author provides motivations for second class of characters, whereas characters who are really alive simply do what they do and it's up to us to puzzle about why. This is somewhat like what E. M. Forster said about round characters versus flat characters. The characteristic feature of round characters, according to Forster, is that they have the ability to surprise us. And if a character acts from a fixed set of motivations (even if we are not explicitly told what they are), then nothing he does is likely to surprise us.

In a way, one might see this as like the comparison between Vermeer and Norman Rockwell. In one respect, the most fascinating paintings by Vermeer are like those of Rockwell, in that both tell a story. The difference, aside from the differences in craftsmanship, is that Norman Rockwell tells the whole story, leaving nothing for the viewer to speculate about. Stretching a point, we might say that Norman Rockwell's paintings provide complete motivation for the characters shown. Whereas on the other hand, Vermeer shows us what the characters are doing, but doesn't explain their actions. Norman Rockwell will undoubtedly come to be appreciated in the future much more than he is today, but there is a genuine life in Vermeer's paintings that Rockwell never achieves.

Characters or Roles?

And yet the text of the plays alone does not provide enough information to enable a reader to easily bring these characters to life. And the text is not adequate to definitely determine the characters. (Critics who try always wind up disagreeing.) When I first read a play by Shakespeare, the characters seem very flat, very abstract to me.

It seems to me that one can get to know Shaw or Ibsen or many other plays fairly well through reading alone. Seeing the play performed is then a pleasure (and sometimes an annoyance, when the choices made by an actor are very different from the way one has imagined a character) but doesn't add much to one's understanding of the play.

To get to know Shakespeare, on the other hand, is seems essential to see performances. When one then goes back to the text the characters can be brought to life. It is possible that when one goes back to reading, one may be able to imagine the characters differently from the way one saw them performed. (While I'm watching a performance, in fact, I am often aware of alternative choices the actor might have made and I often think, "No, that's not the way that line should have been spoken.") But it seems that one needs the performance in order to teach one's imagination how to add the ingredients which are missing in the text and required to bring the characters to life. (A classroom discussion can also be helpful, but in a slightly different way.)

My experience is that Shakespearean comedy, in particular, tends to lie flat on the page when read silently. The first time I first read Shakespeare (which was when I was in high school), his clowns seemed to me to be possibly clever, although in a rather simple-minded way, but definitely not funny.

In comedy, delivery is everything. In order for Shakespeare's comic lines to come alive, they need adequate delivery by a good comedian. Once I saw some performances where these comic lines were spoken by an actor with a talent for comedy, I realized that I could bring them to life when reading them by imagining them delivered by one of the classic vaudeville/radio comedians --- Groucho Marx, Abbot & Costello, Jack Benny (there's a definite touch of Jack Benny in Falstaff), George Burns.

And once I realized this, I started wondering why the comedy in Shakespeare in downplayed in so many performances. One could wonder, for instance, about the performance by Joan Plowright of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, which completely ignores the many comic lines Shakespeare gives her. Perhaps, I thought, many actors and directors prefer to ignore the comedy which often seems inherent in Shakespeare because they find the vaudeville humor which Shakespeare often presented infra dig: unworthy of their conception of Shakespeare as "high culture." Perhaps the director of the Olivier-Plowright television production of the Merchant, in common with many critics and directors, was simply unwilling to think of it as a comedy at all.

But later on, in reading some of the comments in the Players of Shakespeare series, I discovered that some Shakespearean actors have so little familiarity with comedy that they simply can't recognize the comedy in the plays.

The thing that makes Shakespeare such a gift to actors is that so much is left to the actor (or to the reader's imagination). The characters are not well determined by the text. Shakespeare gives the actor choices. This is apparently what is meant by the currently fashionable point of view that Shakespeare's plays contain roles, not characters. (I have to admit that I am familiar with this point of view only through Harold Bloom's complaints about it. I have yet to find a book which actually asserts it.)

What is the difference between a character and a role? A role is a set of lines, dialogue, which an actor can make come to life. But a character has a life of his own, independent of a particular actor's interpretation (but not independent of the reader's interpretation).

When one reads Dickens or John Irving or Faulkner or any decent novelist, one finds full blown characters. One has no need of a dramatic interpretation to bring them to life. This is to say that a novelist provides sufficient information for the reader's imagination to create the illusion of a character, although different readers will process this information in at least slightly different ways and hence have difference conceptions of the character. One the other hand, a screenplay or a play by Shakespeare provides much sketchier information and bringing the character to life in the imagination requires much more effort than many readers are capable of.

The whole history of Shakespearean criticism and performance would be very different if Shakespeare had written, in the way of novelists, things like, "Portia listened to this quietly for a moment and then suddenly her face became very angry and she strode over to Shylock and shouted, `The quality of mercy is not strained.'"

It is not merely a question of the personality or coloring tone which an actor may choose. A change in performance often completely changes the meaning of a particular line, and in fact the nature of the character, and the meaning of the play as a whole.

It is on this level, the level of the individual line, that decisions about the motivation of a character become crucial. Because Shakespeare tells us the words that a character says at a given moment, but does not explain what these words are supposed to mean, or why a particular character is saying them. To a certain extent, this is true of any play or screenplay. But it seems to be true of Shakespeare to a much great extent than most other playwrights.

My own opinion is that this was seldom a problem for Shakespeare's original performers and audience. But now, in a culture separated from Shakespeare's by four hundred years, there are often a diversity of opinions, bizarre though some of them seem, to me at least. And even choices that seem bizarre, that seem to be clearly a matter of playing against the text, can be made to work.

And somehow I suspect that it is the very fact that Shakespeare requires so much from the reader's (or the actor's) imagination that has made him so meaningful in so many ways for so many years.

I think that the purest examples of roles as opposed to characters are found in screenplays. When I read a screenplay (admittedly not something I do a lot), there is something very abstract about it. I don't have any real sense of living characters. The character in the actual movie is a combination of what's in the screenplay and the contribution of the particular actor who plays that role. If you take a film with Jack Nicholson or Robert De Niro or Humphrey Bogart or Clint Eastwood or Katherine Hepburn or Susan Sarandon or Rita Hayworth and remake that film with different actors, the characters in the new film are no longer the same as the ones in the original. In fact, I believe that if a screenplay delineates its characters so thoroughly that there is little room for the actor's interpretation, then it will be a bad script and one cannot make a good movie from it.

And yet there is no doubt that inherent in the script itself is a certain sense of identity for the characters. If you look at James Bond as played by Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton, George Lazenby. Roger Moore, and Pierre Brosnian, they are certainly not the same character. (Of course the screenplays are different too, but anyone who knows movies can see the difference due to the particular actors.) And yet there is beyond a doubt a certain James Bond-ness that persists and is really more important than each actor's interpretation.

Likewise, whether Shylock is performed as a villain or a victim, as a comic figure or as a tragic one, there is a certain way in which he still remains Shylock. There is a certain core to a Shakespearean character which somehow persists, no matter what personality a particular actor endows that character with. And no matter how Shylock, or Macbeth, or Portia are performed, once one gets to knows them one will never forget them.

And where else does on find characters who are completely unforgettable? In movies, for one thing. Dirty Harry, as played by Clint Eastwood. Travis Bickel, as played by Robert De Niro. Dr. Strangelove, as played by Peter Sellers. Jack Nicholson's roles in Five Easy Pieces or the Shining. One could go on and on. Everybody has their favorites.

But also, perhaps even more than in movies: in sitcoms! It may be fashionable to despise sitcoms and consider the characters in them shallow (which they often are), but it's hard to argue with the fact that the characters in I Love Lucy, or Cheers, or Gilligan's Island, or MASH, or Upstairs Downstairs are vividly real and memorable. (One might also mention other television shows such as Star Trek or Columbo.)

To me as a writer, this suggests something important about the process of characterization.