Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning

Lee Lady

In a response to a letter from an English professor (March 28, 1961) Flannery O'Connor wrote,

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable as long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

Certainly most people whose interest in literature is serious want the things they read to be meaningful.

It is not surprising that those who make it a business to look at Shakespeare's plays carefully should ask questions such as "What is Macbeth really about?"   "What is Shakespeare trying to tell us about love and humanity in the Midsummer Night's Dream?"

It is in our nature as human beings to find a meaning in anything which deeply moves us, whether it's a little boy run over in the street or the destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Center. Whether the subject is the Vietnam War, the Watergate affair, the Clinton impeachment, or even just an oil spill from a tanker off the California coast, many people will start looking for a meaning that goes beyond the actual event, and there will be no shortage of commentators in the newspaper and on television who raise questions such as, "What does this event say about us as a nation? What does it tell us about the world we live in now? What does it say about us as human beings?" What, in other words, is the "meaning" of this event?

People can find meaning in the patterns in a piece of driftwood, or in the clouds drifting across the sky, as Shakespeare reminds us in this passage from Hamlet.

Polonius:  My lord, the Queen would speak with you, and presently.

Hamlet:  Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in the shape of a camel?

Polonius:  By the mass and 'tis, like a camel indeed.

Hamlet:  Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius:  It is backed like a weasel.

Hamlet:  Or like a whale.

Polonius:  Very like a whale indeed.

Hamlet:  Then I will come to my mother by and by.
   [Aside]  They fool me to the top of my bent.---
   I will come by and by.

Is this rather oddly-placed interchange in Hamlet (Act 3 Scene 2) an attempt by Shakespeare to satirize all the critics who in the future would find so many diverse meanings in his plays? Well, that seems highly improbable. And yet this suggestion is scarcely more farfetched then some of the other critical interpretations that have been assigned to his plays.

When one reads the diversity of contradictory opinions about a particular Shakespearean play, it may start to seem that Shakespeare is like a Rorschach blot, in which the reader can only find meanings that are purely idiocyncratic. One might be excused for wondering how it is that a writer can be considered so great when there appears to be so much difficulty in understanding what he had to say.

Or perhaps he was not trying to "say" anything at all, but merely telling entertaining stories.

One can claim on the one hand that the thing that makes Shakespeare so difficult, and interesting, to discuss is that there is no actual meaning inherent in Shakespeare's plays, at least if one uses that word in a fairly general sense. Meaning, one can say, is purely something that comes from the reader or spectator of the plays.

But one can also claim, just as plausibly, that what makes Shakespearean criticism so interesting and diverse and controversial is that Shakespeare's plays are saturated with meaning --- perhaps more meaning than any play could ever have the capacity to hold.

The paradox of Shakespeare, as Norman Rabkin explains in his book Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning, is that the plays seem to convey enormously more meaning than what is actually in the text. And they convey this so convincingly that readers are often absolutely certain about the meaning of any given play, and actors and directors are absolutely certain about the "correct" way a particular character or a particular scene should be played. And yet different critics, actors, and directors will frequently have diametrically opposite interpretations, and over the four centuries since Shakespeare's time, no one has been able to conclusively convince everyone else about the truth of any one particular interpretation of any of the plays.

If commentary on the meaning of a Shakespearean play is to have any value, first of all a critic needs to clarify the issue of to what extent such meaning is in some way inherent in the work, and to what extent it is merely an individualistic response.

When a critic tells us, for instance, that Falstaff is a father figure to Prince Hal, he is making a statement based on contemporary paradigms of father-son relationships which would have been completely baffling to Shakespeare's Elizabethan audience. And in fact, what does it actually mean to say that Falstaff is a father figure to Hal? If one tries to pin down the specifics of what a glib judgement like this means, I believe that one will eventually conclude that rather than clarifying the play, it actually tells us less about the relationship between Falstaff and Hal then the play itself does.

It seems reasonable to insist that Shakespearean criticism ought to focus on those aspects of the plays that make Shakespeare special. The fact that the plays suggest philosophical questions (and there is by no means agreement among different commentators as to what these questions are) is not what makes them valuable. Because the same sorts of questions can be suggested by fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood or by mystery novels by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammet, or for that matter, by romance novels or slasher movies. Literary criticism of folk tales and fairy tales or mystery novels or slasher movies is certainly legitimate and valuable. But it seems reasonable to insist that Shakespearean criticism ought to focus on those aspects of the plays that make Shakespeare special.

And when a critic tries to explain the value of a Shakespeare play in terms that could apply equally well to Little Red Riding Hood, I think that it is fair to say that his comments are not very useful. (In my opinion, this is very true of Freudian, Marxist, feminist, and other "ist" critical approaches. These approaches tend to treat a play by Shakespeare more as an artifact than as a profound literary work.)

If we look at the famous Ernst Jones interpretation of Hamlet in terms of the Oedipus Complex, for instance, what we see is that Jones is simply using Hamlet as a case study in order to discuss certain fundamental ideas of psychoanalysis. Using Hamlet in this way may be very valuable in helping people understand psychoanlysis, despite the fact that Hamlet is a purely fictional character, but it has very little value in understanding the literary qualities of Shakespeare's play.

What Do We Mean by Meaning?

I have borrowed (stolen, some would say) Norman Rabkin's title Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning because it seems to me that this problem of meaning, the question of what we mean by "meaning," is one of the key considerations which one stumbles against over and over when trying to make sense of the vast critical literature on Shakespeare.

As applied to literature, "meaning" is a word that functions on a variety of different levels. At the most detailed level, one can ask what the meaning is of a particular word or phrase or even a whole speech. At the most general, one can ask for the meaning of an entire play, or perhaps, if one is super-ambitious, the meaning of Shakespeare's entire oeuvre. (But why stop there? Why not ask, What is the meaning is of literature as a whole? Or what is the meaning of life? Well, such questions are very interesting when one is fairly young and in the company of good friends and drinking good wine or smoking interesting substances. But I want to restrict myself to those questions which frequently occur in the existing critical literature on Shakespeare, or at least that small portion of it that I have looked at.)

How Communication Works

There are a number of objections that can be made here. First of all, the way in which our brains process language and respond to language is much more complicated than the naive theory assumes. Person B usually in fact receives a variety of messages, only some of which he is consciously aware of. Furthermore, the various messages arrive not only by the way of the words spoken by person A, but also by such non-verbal signals as tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, body posture, as well as by actions. (If person A spits at person B, for instance, this action may convey the message much more forcefully than the words spoken.)

One of the things that makes drama interesting, in fact, is the audience's awareness (and also possibly Person B's awareness) of the subtext of the message overtly delivered: the message which Person A has unknowingly communicated without intending to.

Sometimes there are messages that go considerably beyond the overt message delivered by all these means, and which may even be in contradiction to it.

For instance, in the end of Henry IV, Part 2, when the former Prince Hal, now King Henry V, is approached by Falstaff, he rebuffs him with the comment, "I know thee not, old man." 

We know that King Henry's statement is false, since he was at one time in fact very good friends with Falstaff, so to understand the true meaning of the statement we cannot take it at face value.

We need to choose between several possible meanings:
(1) On becoming king, Prince Hal's outlook and attitudes have changed so drastically that he no longers retains the memory of his former life, and honestly does not recognize Falstaff. 
(2) He in fact recognizes Falstaff, but tells a lie because he does not want some of the others present to know that he and Falstaff have been formerly acquainted. 
(3) King Henry is giving a message to Falstaff that their former friendship is now at an end and that from now on King Henry will treat his former friends as if their relationship had never existed.

The five lines that follow Henry's statement that he does not recognize Falstaff might, if taken at face value, suggest that the first meaning is the correct one.

King: I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hair becomes a fool and jester.
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit swelled, so old and profane,
But being awaked, I do despite my dream.

But only the most naïve reader or audience member would take this remark about a dream literally. It is quite clear that when Henry says, "I do despite my dream," he means that he despises the sort of behavior he indulged in with Falstaff in the past.

Even from the words "I do not know thee, old man," alone, the intelligent member of the audience or reader realizes that it is the third meaning above that is intended. But beyond this, most readers will realize that there is still more meaning carried by Henry V's lines above. We understand that King Henry is telling us, the audience, that from now on he intends to be a very different sort of person than he was as Prince Hal, with very different attitudes and values.

A director could cut Falstaff's speech at this point, or for that matter even after the first six words, and the meaning would still be effectively conveyed. As it is though, Shakespeare indulges the naïve reader by making Henry's statement more explicit.

Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know --- so shall the world perceive ---
That I have turned away my former self;
So will I those that keep me company.

This is a very simple example, but it does illustrate something which I will discuss in more detail below, namely the fact Shakespeare's method is often impressionistic, in the same way that the paintings of Monet are impressionistic. Instead of presenting us straightforwardly with meaning, Shakespeare often presents us with ingredients which the mind of the reader or spectator will use to create meaning, just as Monet does not give us images but instead gives us bits of color and brightness which the viewer will use to create images.

Interpretation

We say that an actor interprets a role. The text of the play gives words which the actor is to say. But the interest of the audience is not merely in these words, but what the words mean in terms of motivation and emotion. Sometimes this is fairly clear from the words themselves, but in many cases it is not and so the actor must interpret the words by giving a translation in terms of movements, gesture, intonation, and facial expression. In the case of a Shakespearean character such as Shylock, Lear, or Hamlet, differences in the actor's interpretation can drastically change the audience's understanding of the character.

Likewise a critic can interpret a play by working from the assumption that what is really going on in the play, what is really important in it, has not been stated clearly by the language of the play itself, that is to say by the speeches and movements as performed by the actors. And so the critic translates the meaning of the play, as he sees it, into a more straightforward language. For instance, we may get the standard Freudian interpretation of Hamlet. The Freudian critic believes that what is happening in Hamlet can most clearly be stated in the language of psychoanalysis. Shakespeare, however, has not used this language but rather the language of drama. So the Freudian critic acts as an interpretor, translating the language of the play into psychoanalytic language.

Clues and Signals

In George N. Dove's book Suspense in the Formula Story, I find the following quotes:

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.)

As William Gass would remind us, a literary work does not contain any meaning as such, it contains only words. The reader must takes these words and extract from them information and signals which he then assembles in order to construct meaning.

The words which constitute a literary work deliver to the audience the ingredients from which the audience constructs meaning. One way in which this can happen is by an overt statement of the meaning, which requires very little cognitive effort from the reader.

For instance, in Act 1 Scene 1 of Othello, Iago makes speaks as follows:

We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave,
That, doting on his own obsequious bondage,
Wears out his time, much like his mater's ass,
For naught but provender, and, when he's old, cashiered;
Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are
Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty,
Yet keep their hearts attending on themselves,
And, throwing but shows of service on their lords,
Do well thrive by them and when they have lined their coats
Do themselves homage: these fellows have some soul;
And such a one do I profess myself. For, sir,
It is a sure as you are Rodrigo,
Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago:
In following him, I follow not but myself.

What makes literature interesting, though, are the cases where the words give the audience information and signals from which the meaning must be inferred.

Information tells us facts, as it were, about the characters, action, or setting of the story and such. Each piece of information may be very fragmentary and considerable cognitive effort may be required in order to assemble the various pieces in order to get a significant part of the stories. In that case, we often use the word clues.

Signals, on the other hand, give us no direct information about the characters or plot, but give us hints as to the attitude we are expected to take toward elements of the story and what our expectations should be.

The name of a character can be a very conspicuous signal. As soon as we encounter a character named Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream or one named Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, we know that these characters will be clowns.

The style and level of vocabulary of a speech are signals. The cadence of a speech, and whether a speech is in verse or prose, are very strong signals, although we today tend to be less sensitive to these then the Elizabethans apparently were.

Eloquence and, more generally, rhetoric in general is a signal. Certainly wonderful rhetoric is in itself one of the main values in the plays, and one can in fact make a case that the story in a play is simply an excuse for that provides the opportunity for wonderful speeches by the characters, in the same way that one can make a case that the story in an opera or musical comedy is simply a framework that provides the pretext for the songs.

But the poetry of the characters' speeches also functions as a signal helping us to understand the story.

For instance, certain critics with no real feeling for story telling have claimed that the audience was intended to condemn Romeo and Juliet because their behavior is not in accordance with the standard of obedience to parents that was expected of Elizabethan children. Aside from the fact that this ignores the fact that the entertainment value of drama derives in large part from its violation of conventional standards rather than in upholding them, the important thing here is that the beautiful poetry in the speeches of Romeo and Juliet, which after all is in large part what many of us value the play for, is a clear signal that puts the reader or theatre audience on the side of these two characters.

My favorite example of a signal comes from an author other than Shakespeare. Jane Austen opens her novel Pride and Prejudice with a sentence that signals the reader in a way that is complex and yet unambiguous.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

This opening sentence "sets the tone," as we say, for the rest of the novel. It contains no overt information about the plot or any of the characters. In content, it makes a general statement about the world, and at the same time it subtly but unmistakably signals us that this statement is false.

There are a number of ways that Jane Austen signals the reader with this sentence, but the most conspicuous one is the use of the word "universal." No competent novelist would begin by telling her readers something that everybody already knows, and so already the reader is suspicious about this supposed univeral truth. There is a comic incongruity in the sentence, which begins by promising the reader a profound truth and ends by expressing a mere commonplace attitude.

This sentence tells us, sardonically, something about the kind of world in which Jane Austen's novel will take place, and it also signals us as to the author's attitude to that world. The sentence, if taken at face value, expresses an attitude very commonly held among women of a certain social class. So the word "universal" tells us this novel will deal with the concerns of upper class women. To stretch a point, women of this sort make up the "universe" of the novel.

We can also notice the backwards syntax and slightly unusual choice of words. Jane Austin adds to the comic effect by using "highfalutin" language to make a statement which is banal. If one changes "truth universally acknowledged," to "universally acknowledged truth," then the effect is weakened. It is also slightly weakened if one changes "acknowledged" to "recognized."

Furthermore, although the word "must" is used in its secondary meaning, so that the sentence is saying, "Such as man will certainly be in want of a wife," there is also a slight subliminal hint of the primary meaning of must, a suggestion that, "A single man with a good fortune is required to want (or at least should be required to want) a wife."

The effect is completely destroyed if one restates the sentence in plain English, saying, "An unmarried man who has quite a bit of money needs a wife. Everyone knows that." In this case, the lack of logic becomes blatant, and therefore less comic: Why should a man who is financially well off have an especial need for a wife? In fact, clearly he would have enough money to hire servants to take care of his household and be able to pay to have his sexual needs met, if they can't be met by way of his female servants. The reader is likely to be left scratching his head in puzzlement rather than picking up the true meaning, which is that a single man with a fortune offers a very good opportunity for some unmarried young woman, and everything possible should be done to persuade him to allow some young woman to take advantage of this.

The sentence invites a complicity between the reader and author. "You and I," it says, "are superior to the sort of narrow thinking that characterizes this milieu."

And yet Pride and Prejudice is not an ironic novel, not a work of social criticism. It does not reject the values of the world it describes, but instead, in this first sentence, invites the reader to have an aloof attitude toward that world.

Experienced readers of adventure stories and thrillers will be alert to the signal given by a sentence such as, "Our defenses were now complete. We had taken precautions against every possible risk and knew that the danger was now over."  This seems like a mere summary, providing no new information at all, but it tips the reader off that soon the narrator and his friends will soon be confronted with a new threat that they hadn't even thought of, even greater than the ones before.

In the same way, it is a clear signal when Portia and Nerissa talk about their planned appearance disguised as males in the Duke's chamber in Venice, saying

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 yet no contemporary director would dare to present the courtroom scene in the Merchant as a comedy. Since in my opinion one also cannot do justice to Shakespeare's text by doing it seriously, this leaves modern directors with an irreconcileable conflict.

Foreshadowing can be seen as a type of signal. A classic example is the well known maxim by Chekhov, "If you hang a gun on the wall in Act I, then that gun had better be fired by the end of Act III."

Although one tends to think of foreshadowing as being subtle (or at least I do), it can actually be quite blatant. Portia's speech to Nerissa quoted above is foreshadowing. Another example comes from the beginning of The Merchant of Venice, in Shylock's speech,

Shylock: How like a fawning publican he looks!
I hate him for he is a Christian;
But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.
If I can catch him once upon the hip,
I will feed the ancient grudge I bear him.

Clues Are Fictional

Among Shakespearean critics, this most often takes the form of imagining that the world shown in a particular play really exists or existed, albeit its original existence was only in the imagination of Shakespeare, and that the play itself is an almost journalistic record of events in that world. The critic can then search through this pseudo-documentary record for clues to information beyond what is overtly given in the play. This can be a very entertaining game, and often provides for some quite interesting literary criticism.

A great deal of Shakespearean criticism consists in spinning fantasies starting with some character in a play, especially a minor character, almost always with the implication that the critic's fantasy represents the untold truth about what is happening with that character.

What would Lady Macbeth have been like if Macbeth had never encountered the three Weird Sisters and become fascinated with the possibility that he was destined to become king? It is common in real life to make speculations like this about people we know, sometimes even people we don't know very well. It is just as natural to make speculations about literary characters, as if the characters were real, based on the information provided about them in the text.

I am quite convinced, for instance, that if Macbeth had never encountered the Weird Sisters, he would have remained a dedicated subordinate, ambitiously but cautiously climbing the corporate ladder, as it were, in Duncan's kingdom, perhaps cheating a bit from time to time but only when he was quite sure he could get away with it.

In real life, we can often check our conjectures about people by gathering more information about the person. And my experience, at least, is that often my speculations about other persons turns out to be incorrect.

In literary criticism, when we speculate about what a character does or would do in situations not shown in the text, we are simply making a statement about what sort of person that character is, as he exists in our imaginations. When we forget this, and start arguing about our answers as if the character and the hypothetical situation actually existed, we are no longer engaged in legitimate literary criticism.

Michael W. Shurgot in his book Stages of Play: Shakespeare's Theatrical Energies in Elizabethan Performance, noting that Shylock's daughter Jessica is onstage (or at least there are no indications that she exits) and silent for a long time at the end of the Merchant, asserts that she feels alienated from the other characters.

This is a very good example of the way something in a play can act as a Rorschach blot. Shurgot's inference is not based on information that Shakespeare has provided us about the character, but is simply based on the situation shown. Shakespeare has given us less information to help us imagine Jessica's thoughts than Hamlet and Polonius get from the clouds they see in the scene quoted at the beginning of this article.

We should remember that Jessica, after all, is a servant. One can argue that the fact that Jessica has no lines during this part of the play means simply that Shakespeare forgot about her and intended us to as well. Or one could argue almost anything else, since there are no facts to contradict one's hypotheses. (In other similar situations, it is plausible to assume that the actor playing the character has actually quietly withdrawn to the attiring room to change costumes to prepare to play a different role. But this particular scene takes place at the very end of the play, so we can't resort to that explanation. There is no evidence to indicate whether Shakespeare intended us to notice Jessica's silence or not, although to me it is very implausible that he did.)

Certainly there are many times for many authors where combing the text for clues makes sense. That is because many authors often do indeed start with factual content in non-verbal or partially verbal form which they know very well, perhaps taken from their own experience or from something observed, and then find words which will express it. This was certainly true of Proust and Joyce and Thomas Wolfe and other authors whose material was in large part autobiographical. There are other authors such as Hemingway and Thomas Hardy for whom stealing from real life, as it were, was a primary method at least when it came to descriptions of the physical environment. For authors such as these, by searching the work for clues, one can possibly find information in the work which, although a legitmate indication of something the author knew, the author did not actually realize he was communicating. (Whether such information has value or not is to a large extent a question of taste.)

In many other cases, though, the clues (and cues) which a writer provides to the reader are themselves simply products of the writer's imagination. Far from being a mere utilitarian device to convey the writer's message (or story), they are are of interest in themselves and in some cases are one of the main sources of the work's appeal and in fact meaning. And furthermore, rather than starting with some overall "content" or story, and then seeking the clues that will best convey it to the reader, in many cases the writer begins with a fascination with certain images or phrases or scraps of dialogue, and then constructs his story by figuring out a story (or other content) that will tie all these together.

The poet Willian Stafford has said

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

Does a novelist, for instance, start with an overall story he wants to tell, perhaps working from an outline, or does he primarily focus on writing interesting chapters which are almost complete in themselves? One might think that a mystery novel would certainly fall in the first category (for instance the mysteries of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr), but in a large number of mysteries each chapter provides a little episode of interest all in itself, almost a little short story, which somewhere, usually toward the end of the chapter, provides a single clue contributing to the plot of the book as a whole. In extreme cases, such as that of Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), all the separate pieces never do quite seem to fit together into a unified whole.

T.S. Eliot is a well known example of an author whose imagination customarily supplied him with lines of poetry rather than images or stories. It is known (or at least stated by Hugh Kenner) that Eliot might hang onto a really good line (or brief passage) for quite a long time until he found a poem he could use it in. With a writer like Eliot for whom the words are the starting point, combing his work for clues is likely to lead one primarily into interesting fantasies which have nothing to do with the poem Eliot was writing.

Shakespeare, I will now argue, was a writer much more like T.S. Eliot than like Proust. Shakespeare was a writer for whom words created the fictional reality, rather one for whom words were used to record an already existing imaginative reality. Being sensitive to the clues that Shakespeare provides his audience with and calling attention to them is a legitimate form of criticism that provides the audience with real insight. But we need to remember that the clues an author like Shakespeare provides his audience with are themselves pieces of fiction inserted into the work by the author. And Shakespeare was far from diligent in worrying about the possibility that other pieces of information in the plays might be inadvertently treated as clues suggesting things that never even occurred to Shakespeare himself.

Hamlet famously says,

There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

Certainly Shakespeare himself, in whatever philosophical musings he had abut writing and literature, could certainly never have dreamed of such a possibilty as Harold Bloom.

Going through a Shakespearean play and treating every little piece of information as a clue, and regarding every possible inference that can be drawn from the supposed clues as part of the meaning of the work, is purely a game of make-believe that provides no actual insight into the~play.

Shakespeare's Writing Process

We know that Shakespeare started with one or two or even three source stories. (Examples such as The Tempest, where there was no source story, show how important it was to him to have one, for all that The Tempest is a great play, in spite of not having much of a plot.) And we know that he worked within various constraints: having a pretty much fixed troupe of actors to write for, and a given length of time (about two hours) in which his play must be performed. We can also see that he often grew so absorbed in the play he was writing that he wrote a great deal more than it what could be actually used in performance. (Hamlet is a notorious example.) I believe that we can also see that he sometimes, perhaps often, wrote things into the plays that almost no one in a theatrical audience would be actually capable of figuring out.

It is clear from the texts that Shakespeare was a writer who had a lot of fun writing. And one of the main things that fascinated him was words and the way words go together. He was certainly also a very keen observer of people, but more than anything else about people, what fascinated him was the way they talk.

Surely Shakespeare would begin by making up a cast of characters, with some thought to which actors would play which roles, and which roles would be doubled, etc. And then he had to figure out a way to tell his audience about the basic premise for the play.

It often takes Shakespeare a while to get his story under way. He may as in the case of King Lear, or the Merchant of Venice, stumble a bit at the beginning. (What on earth is that business about Antonio being sad in the first scene of the Merchant supposed to be about? Whether or not it is true that we misinterpret Shakespeare's meaning of the word "sad," it seems to be a definite red herring that has led many critics astray.)  And, as in the case of the Midsummer Night's Dream, the drama may not catch fire immediately, may not come to life in Act 1 Scene 1.

Shakespeare almost always started with a story he wanted to tell, but apparently he didn't really get interested in it until he had some words written down. It was then, when he started thinking about what his characters would say to each other, that the characters began to come to life for him. It is clear from reading his plays that his imagination became engaged only after he became immersed in the project of finding the words to communicate his story. It was at this point, when he was focusing on the words, that he was able to go beyond the source story.

We can see that although Shakespeare needed a plot in order to get started, he was actually not very good at following it. We can notice scenes such as Viola's first meeting with Olivia in Twelfth Night or Shylock's first meeting with Antonio in the Merchant where Shakespeare started out with only a vague idea, or perhaps almost no idea, of how the scene would develop, but simply started writing lines and let himself be guided by the dialogue that emerged.

This habit of getting caught up in the scene being written to the extent that needs of the overall story being told were forgotten resulted in a number of what the movie people would call "continuity errors." The Merchant of Venice, for instance, is full of inconsistensies. Bassanio tells Antonio that he is sure he can win Portia's hand, if only he has enough money to equip himself to make a good impression. But it turns out that his success will depend not on impressing her, but on succeeding in what is almost a lottery, so Antonio's loan was unnecessary and Bassanio's assurance of success was completely unfounded (although luckily he does indeed prove successful). Furthermore, Shakespeare signals us (in my opinion) that Shylock is plotting Antonio's death from the beginning, and yet the information available to Shylock gives him no reason to believe that his plot has any chance of success.

I have an idea that many of Shakespeare's greatest strengths, like those of many writers, came from his weaknesses. If Shakespeare had had the ability to tell a story in a simple straightforward manner, then his plays would not be nearly as interesting to us. But although Shakespeare did have a good overall story sense, his real talent was for writing wonderful lines, wonderful speeches, and entertaining interchanges between characters. And it seems as though sometimes he was at a loss to figure out how to write a simple scene that would go from A to B, and in the process of trying to figure out what the hell his characters would say to each other, instead wound up having them say things that took the story in a surprisingly interesting new direction. And at other times, he simply got distracted by the idea for a fascinating speech or interchange that had nothing to do with his original game plan.

In Hamlet, I believe that we can see Shakespeare fumbling around, writing extremely well, as always, but unable to figure out how to advance the story in the direction it was supposed to go. He was faced with the same problem that critics have subsequently devoted so much attention to: Why doesn't Hamlet just get on with it and kill the king? This was a traditional problem for revenge plays. Shakespeare needed to delay the action. The script we have, clearly much too long to have been performed within the two-hour time limit Shakespeare had to work with, seems full of Shakespeare's attempts to provide such delay which didn't really work out. The scenes in the beginning between Laertes, Polonius, and Ophelia, for instance, are much too long to be justified by the very small amount by which they advance the plot. And yet the scene between Polonius and Laertes contains Polonius's To-thine-own-self-be-true speech which, although mostly irrelevant to Hamlet's story, is simply too good to be left out. (And can't we argue that this speech partly establishes Polonius's character, either as a buffoon or as a wise counselor, depending on how one thinks of it?)

Shakespeare the Impressionist

If we look at the works of writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), Tolstoi, Jane Austen, Trollope, Agatha Christie, and countless other writers, we see that words can indeed be used to convey meaning in a relatively straightforward way. In the works of these authors, the process of transformation from words to meaning seems almost transparent, despite the fact that it actually involves a considerable amount of mental processing by the reader or audience.

There are a lot of places in Shakespeare where the same is true. But in many other parts of the plays, a considerably greater effort is required from the reader or audience in order to apprehend the meaning.

Consider for instance the following passage from Romeo and Juliet (Act 1 Scene 1):

Prince:  Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace,
Profaners of this neighborhood-stained steel ---
Will you not hear? What ho! You men, you beasts,
That quench the fire of your pernicious rage
With purple fountains issuing from your veins.
On pain of torture, from those bloody hands
Throw your mistempered weapons to the ground
And hear the sentence of your movèd prince.

This is not an especially difficult example. I think that there is no question whatsoever what the meaning here is. And yet notice the way in which rather than telling us outright what he has to say, Shakespeare floods us with metaphors and other figures of speech.

In his plays, Shakespeare shows us certain things that happen, certain interactions between characters. But often he does not tell us what these mean. In the few cases where he does comment about the meaning of his plays, what he says is quite superficial. (Such as the epilogue to Romeo and Juliet, in which he talks about "star-crossed lovers.")

What does Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech actually mean, for instance? Somehow, understanding the individual sentences on a literal level doesn't seem to answer this question. Most people today familiar with the play believe that the speech as a whole means that Hamlet is considering the possibility of suicide. But certainly nothing in the speech overtly states this. In fact, in the whole speech, Hamlet never actually makes any statement about himself. He simply ponders a sequence of philosophical questions, some of them involving death and the intentional seeking of death, others having apparently to do with the question of action versus passive acceptance of a situation.

In other cases, Shakespeare may present us with several small clues, which we are expected to assemble. Or instead of giving us an explicit narrative, he presents us with a number of scenes, expecting us to create the story that ties these scenes together.

By analogy, one can think of the difference in approach between a painter like Leonardo da Vinci or Degas and one like Monet. In both cases, there are no images as such on the canvas, there are merely bits of pigment. But in the case of Leonardo or Degas, there is seemingly no effort involved in our brain's process of assembling the bits of colors presented in order to see images. Whereas with Monet, we are much more aware of the process.

The process of finding the meaning in a play by Shakespeare, even when it comes to simple questions of what happens in a particular play, is not always an easy one. Assembling all the information given can require a considerable amount of cognitive labor.

In Hamlet, Ophelia approaches Hamlet, at her father's instigation, to reject his offer of love and return the love tokens he has given her. But Hamlet, pretending to be crazy, denies ever having offered his love and having given her tokens of it. He makes a number of rather vile statements about women. Although none of these complaints are about Ophelia specifically, and we in the audience can fairly easily see that they relate to Hamlet's mother Gertrude (here we have the subtext, the text that is not explicitly stated), it seems plausible under the circumstances that Ophelia might take them personally. However her only comment is to lament the fact that Hamlet, who had formerly had such a fine mind, has now gone crazy.

In a subsequent scene, we see that Ophelia herself has gone crazy. In this scene, she says nothing specifically about Hamlet, but does sing bawdy songs, quite out of character for the sort of woman she earlier seemed to be, about the way men mistreat women. And then a little later on, we get an account of Ophelia's suicide.

Now in real life, different events are not necessarily related. But in drama, we look for a narrative based on cause-effect. So from these three scenes, most people will construct a story line involving Hamlet and Ophelia. For most contemporary readers, the story goes something like this: "Hamlet has cruelly rejected Ophelia's love, and so Ophelia goes crazy and kills herself." This is a plausible meaning to infer from the scenes Shakespeare has given us.

Many other writers would have explicitly given us links tying these scenes together. For instance, while Ophelia is committing suicide, she might have said something like, "If Prince Hamlet doesn't want me, then it's not worth living at all." (And there are many cases where Shakespeare does this sort of thing himself.) Instead, Shakespeare here leaves it up to us to make the inference that the reason for Ophelia's madness and subsequent suicide is Hamlet's behavior toward her. Not only has he in no way explicitly told us this, in fact in some respects, it is actually in contradiction to the details he has given us. Ophelia is the one who rejected Hamlet, not the other way around.

In fact, there is no logically consistent way in which these three scenes can be fit together to make a consistent story. But the reader or audience will do it anyway, finding ways to reconcile the dissonances, even to the point of inventing additional information which is not given in the play.

My guess is that many of those in Shakespeare's original audience, and even some in today's audiences, will say of Ophelia, "Oh, of course, she's pregnant."  The play does not explicitly tell us this (except that drowning was the traditional means of suicide for unmarried pregnant girls), but some people will believe that the play all but gives us this information, because only with the added information that Ophelia was pregnant does the sequence of three scenes makes sense.

But for this to make sense, we have to suppose that Ophelia discovers she's pregnant after her first conversation with Hamlet, for otherwise she would certainly not have tried to return his love tokens. And if Hamlet is actually rejecting a woman who is pregnant by him, and a daughter of the nobility at that, then what does this say about Hamlet? Doesn't this make him even more of an egocentric psychopath than he is as it is?

It seems to me that the method of giving us pieces and leaving us to assemble them, filling in gaps when necessary, is much more like the technique of screenwriting than that of most contemporary fiction and literary drama. (Compare, for instance, the narrative structure of Breathless to that of Shakespeare's plays. Admittedly, Shakespeare's plays are more complicated, but in seems to me that Goddard and Shakespeare have the same interest in presenting interesting scenes and lack of concern about dotting the i's and crossing the t's when it comes to the links between scenes and maintaining a coherent story line.) Shakespeare's use of this technique has been one of the main reasons for arguments among Shakespearean critics, especially since Shakespeare, like some screenwriters, often does not provide the kind of logic which critics are used to looking for.

In the Merchant of Venice, the main plot has the evil usurer Shylock setting a trap for the merchant Antonio, with the result that Antonio almost loses his life.

What are the pieces that show that Shylock sets a trap?

1) Shylock states that he hates Antonio.

2) Shylock proposes as "a merry sport" that Antonio wager his life as security for the loan he needs.

3) When the loan comes due and Antonio is unable to pay, Shylock insists that Antonio forfeit his life.

The process of fitting these pieces together into a simple narrative thread is much easier than in the case of the scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia.

What causes a problem for critics is that first that Shakespeare throws in another piece, another story actually, that is emotionally incompatible with this one. And second of all, the necessary logic to make the first story work is missing and cannot easily be supplied. Namely, how could Shylock have been setting a trap for Antonio, when he could not have known that Antonio's ships would all (apparently) encounter disasters, and when in fact there was every reason to think that the opposite would be the case and Antonio would easily be able to repay the money borrowed.

This is what one notices when one steps out of the story and looks at it objectively in one's study. But as long as one stays in the story, one will be carried along by the fundamental storytelling signals which Shakespeare gives the audience. Namely, when a character hates the hero and is a villain (in addition to being a usurer, Shylock hates Christians; from that alone, Shakespeare's audience would recognize him as a villain), then he will attempt to harm the hero and will come close to succeeding. (No good storyteller would offer his audience a story where it didn't seem like the villain was going to succeed.) And when a villain who has evil intentions toward the hero suggests that the hero put his life at risk, and terms this a "merry sport," then we know that the villain is setting a trap.

No writers workshop would have let Shakespeare get a way with the lack of logical structure in his plot. That's because in a workshop, the participants set aside their emotional response to the work and look at it critically, analytically. But Shakespeare wasn't writing for a workshop, and apparently his audiences had no trouble following the story. (Modern audiences rarely do.)

The scenes with Hamlet and Ophelia are an example of the fact that a play by Shakespeare does not merely tell a single story. The main plot and subplot tend to be laid out in a fairly straightforward manner, sometimes with actors stepping up to the edge of the stage to explain the point to the audience in case it was missed. This often makes critics fairly uninterested in the main plots. But in addition, the play is made up of lots of little stories, which often seem like the real important parts of the play, and which are given much less explicitly. As in the case of the story of Hamlet and Ophelia, Shakespeare presents us with various interactions and leaves us the problem of assembling the pieces in a meaningful way, finding a way to connect the dots, as it were. Critics are often unable to agree on what actually happens in these little subsidiary stories, or on which of them constitute the real point of the play.

If you take everything out of Hamlet except the main plot --- the story of Hamlet, the ghost, and Claudius --- then you have a very short play indeed, and a rather trite one at that. Surely that's not what the play is really about.

But what is Hamlet really about? Read a dozen critics and get a dozen answers. And as Lawrence Olivier unfortunately discovered ("A play about a man who is unable to make up his mind") as soon as you put yourself on the record with any definite answer, everyone will immediately notice all the reasons why that answer is wrong.

Some critics would say, "Ah, but you can't leave out Gertrude. Hamlet's sense of repulsion at his mother's sexuality is what the play is really about, much more important than the ghost."  And then another would say, "Ah, but the scenes with Polonius are crucial, not at all mere fluff. Without the interactions with Polonius (and with Ophelia, many would say), we wouldn't understand what sort of person Hamlet is at all."

In The Merchant of Venice, the main plot is about the way the good and generous merchant Antonio is trapped by the evil Jewish usurer Shylock, but is saved from death by Portia, who outwits the Jew. And the subplot is about how Bassanio manages, almost by blind luck, to choose the correct casket and thus win Portia in marriage. Neither of these two stories is very substantial. The main plot ends with a bit of a whimper rather than the expected bang. By the logic of storytelling, an evil villain who threatens the life of a good hero should wind up dying himself. But Shakespeare pulls his punches at the end and Shylock escapes with somewhat light punishment (although Harold Bloom would disagree).

What makes the Merchant fascinating to us, though, is that Shakespeare has inserted another story which is in direct contradiction to the main plot and which is told fairly explicitly but which somehow winds up not being quite a real story at all. This is the story of how the unfortunate Jew Shylock protests against the discrimination which he is subjected to in Venice and specifically by Antonio.

The reason this never really turns into a story is that none of the Christian characters in the play ever respond to Shylock's complaints, and for the most part don't even seem to notice them. To a contemporary audience, Shylock's complaints seem substantially correct, and I think that even most Elizabethans would have been somewhat sympathetic to them. By the logic of storytelling, at the end of the play these complaints should be either validated or refuted. But instead, Shakespeare simply ignores them, thus leaving us the audience to bring whatever closure we can to this, the most important story in the play.

In Henry IV there is the story of King Henry himself, who as Bolingbroke overthrew Richard II, and thus began his reign as a usurper. Surely there is an interesting story in this, and yet except for a brief line or two, Shakespeare does not tell us this story. At least not directly. But the story can be found in the play. The only trouble is, since it is not overtly given, there is not one several different stories one can assemble from the apparent clues.

But for most of us, I believe, Bolingbroke/Henry IV is not a very interesting person. The reason we read or attend performances of Henry IV is the story of Prince Hal and Falstaff. And yet here again, there is no story overtly told; there are simply a number of very entertaining scenes. But surely, we say, all these scenes are meant to add up to a story. For instance we can, as Harold Bloom does, see Falstaff as a father figure to Prince Hal. And then Hal has to choose between this father, emotionally a much more real father to him, and his actual father the king. It makes good sense. But this is a story we assemble from pieces that are in the play. The pieces can be assembled in a different way to make a different story.

And then there is the story inherent in the fact that Henry V, in the play of that name, is the same person as Prince Hal in Henry IV. This is a fascinating story, which we can scarcely be expected to ignore. And yet Shakespeare scarcely makes any explicit reference to it. And we should remember that although we think of the two parts of Henry IV, plus Henry V (and perhaps also Richard II) as constituting one continuous story, Shakespeare presented them to his audience as distinct plays, and never presented them on consecutive nights. (There would have been little point in it, since very few of the members of Tuesday afternoon's performance would have been present the afternoon before.)

Often when we read Shakespeare or see him performed, we go through the process of assembling the pieces Shakespeare has given us so easily that we are not even aware of how much creative work our own mind has done is understanding the meaning.

In other cases though, we are puzzled. What is the meaning of the interchange about clouds quoted from Hamlet above? Is it a mere gratuitous bit of entertainment? One more instance of Hamlet's tweaking Polonius for his rather obtuse mind? Or is Shakespeare taking the opportunity to tell us that meaning is always subjective.

Since Shakespeare's method is to often give us little pieces that we are expected to assemble and make meaning of, we are always tempted to assume that any little piece we come across has some meaning beyond the overt one, if only we examine it hard enough.

Today, at least, understanding this sort of thing requires a lot of deep thought from the reader, or resorting to the notes in the particular edition one is reading from. And yet it is important to remember that Shakespeare intended his plays to be understood in the instant by an audience which was also at the same time dealing with a number of distractions (sellers coming through the audience with food, for instance).

In Hamlet, for instance, we now tend to focus on the problem of why Hamlet does not kill Claudius. In Hamlet's soliloquy "Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I," Shakespeare in fact seems to directly draw our attention to this aspect of the story. And yet it is a story he doesn't tell, except to indicate that until the play-within-a-play episode, there is a legitimate doubt about Claudius's guilt. (And why doesn't Shakespeare have Hamlet resolve this by confronting Claudius instead of using the play-within-a-play device?) Shakespeare could easily have had Hamlet step forward and, an in another soliloquy, tells us all the considerations that make him hesitate. But instead, he shows us various interactions that are not on the surface obviously relevant to this question. But since we assume that the story of why Hamlet fails to act is an important part of the play, we assume that these various interactions must be clues. And from them we construct our own story (or at least critics do).

There is also the story of Hamlet and his mother, and the story of Hamlet and Ophelia. To us, these seem like very interesting and important stories. Surely, we think, Shakespeare must have intended to tell them. And since he doesn't tell them directly, we sort through the plays looking for things we can interpret as clues which we are meant to assemble.