For instance, we referred earlier to the famous statement by Chekhov:
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in Act 1, then that gun must be fired off by the end of Act 3.
Even audiences who have never heard Chekhov's maxim will still know it on an intuitive level, and if a play or movie violates it, people in the audience can be heard asking each other after the end, "What was the purpose of X? I didn't quite understand why that was in the play. I was expecting Y to happen, and when it didn't, I got a little confused and thought that maybe I'd misunderstood something."
Some conventions are so taken for granted, at least within our culture, that no writer (or critic) would ever feel the need to state them explicitly. For instance guns, in dramas or films, are used to shoot people. Chairs are used to sit in, but only rarely used as weapons.
If the curtain opens on a set with three chairs, and two actors sitting in these three chairs, and perhaps occasionally standing for a while and switching chairs, all but the most stupid members of the audience will anticipate that eventually a third actor will show up. Or if third actor never appears, the absence of this third character will be a significant component in the story. The unoccupied chair is a signal which the audience readily recognizes because of the theatrical convention that a chair belongs to that class of objects which is only put on stage because it has a functional purpose in the play. (This is not necessarily the case, for instance, for a vase of flowers, unless it is conspicuous.)
A convention that is common to most contemporary theatre is that the actors are alone on stage and the audience doesn't exist. If an actor after speaking an especially good line and being rewarded by laughter or applause from the audience then turns to the audience with a big smile and a bow, or even steps to the edge of the stage and says, "I think I've got him now. He'll never be able to come up with a good come-back to that one," then we are outside the conventions of traditional contemporary theatre. In this respect, we are much closer to the conventions of vaudeville, and also of Elizabethan theatre.
On the other hand, some conventions are idiosyncratic to a particular literary genre, or to a particular author, or even to a specific literary work. As any writer knows, in the beginning of a piece of fiction or drama, the writer sets up a contract with the audience, a set of rules which the audience can rely on, in fact must rely on, in order to find meaning in the work.
As an extreme example, the classic movie short cartoons (Bugs Bunny, the Roadrunner, etc.) make no sense whatsoever unless one knows and accepts the conventions of the form. Characters get blown to pieces by dynamite, and yet reappear in short time unharmed except for possible scorch marks. A character who is running away runs off a cliff, and hangs suspended in the air until he looks down and notices, at which point he falls, landing unharmed a hundred feet below. A viewer who comments, "I couldn't enjoy that cartoon, because things like that could never really happen" has missed the whole point.
No writer can possibly be held responsible for interpretations of his work that go beyond the basic ground rules that he was working within.
Critics have complained that the evidence of Desdemona's infidelity in Othello, and even more so the evidence of Hero's infidelity in Much Ado About Nothing, would never actually have convinced any reasonable person. But the plays are not intended to be realistic representations of actual actions of real people. This is especially conspicuous if one sees them performed on a Shakespearean-style stage, but in any play, events have to presented to the audience using a sort of shorthand. Otherwise, plays would go on for days, and in many cases years.
The climax of Othello is not about a handkerchief. We know that in real life, the tangible evidence of Desdemona's infidelity would be more complicated than a handkerchief. But the point that the play makes, which most people in the audience will understand, is that when one is possessed by jealousy, often rather flimsy evidence can seem totally convincing.
In the case of Hamlet, if we step away from the play and look at it objectively, it is hard not to notice, as several critics have pointed out, that the protagonist is actually a psychopath (or at least sociopath) who goes through the play killing people left and right almost frivolously. In practice, only critics notice this, because we are not intended to think about Hamlet objectively.
In As You Like It, Rosalind (as well as her friend Celia) spend most of the play disguised as men. Some critics have raised the question as to why they continue their disguise even after they have reached the safety of the forest of Arden, where it is no longer necessary. But to ask this question is to misunderstand the nature of the play. As You Like It is a play about a woman disguised as a man. (It is also, of course, a play about some other things.) In the beginning of the play, Shakespeare provides his protagonist Rosalind with a pretext, rather than a motivation, for taking on this disguise. Rosalind's disguise is part of the premise of the play. To ask whether Rosalind's reasons for the disguise or for continuing it are plausible is to confuse the play with a completely different kind of story. This might be a story, for instance, of a woman with an terrible conflict between her need to reveal herself for the person she really is, and the belief that to do so would jeopardize not only the relationships with those she cares about but her very life. That would be a powerfulful play, but it is not As You Like It. (In fact, it bears a slight ressemblance to Shakespeare's own comedy Twelfth Night.) Rosalind, in fact, fearlessly glories and delights in her disguise.
To ask why Rosalind maintains her disguise long after its justification loses its validity makes no more sense than to ask why Rosalind should fall in love with Orlando or why Jacques is melancholy.
A story more or less consists of a protagonist striving to reach an objective, in the face of obstacles. A comedy ends with the protagonist achieving his objective, and a tragedy ends with him failing and dying.
In a Shakespearean romantic comedy, the objective for a young couple is to achieve sexual intercourse. (In many cases, only one of them wants this objective and is therefore the protagonist.) The convention of Shakespearean comedy is that for major characters, especially young ones, sexual intercourse can only be achieved by marriage. (This is not necessarily a truth of the world Shakespeare lived in, only about the world of his plays.)
Now in the contemporary world, although managing to have sex with a desired partner is not always easy, it usually does not require marriage. So we today think of marriage in terms of a different paradigm. We thing of marriage as a long-term (perhaps even life-long) partnership.
When a contemporary critic looks at one of Shakespeare's comedies in terms of the contemporary paradigm of marriage, he will almost always find the resolution rather unsatisfactory. (Once again, I single out Harold Bloom as a major example. Look especially on his chapter on All's Well That Ends Well.) He will ask, "Are these two people going to be able to have a happy life together?" This is roughly as fair as asking whether they have adequate health insurance, or secure employment. This is outside the ground rules for the story as Shakespeare tells it.
The story ends when the story ends, i.e. when the protagonists achieve their objective. What happens after that is not part of the story. In fact, there is no "after that," except in the individual imaginations of readers or spectators of a play.
Providing a particular blatant example of judging a literary work by a totally a different set of ground rules than the ones its author intended, Harold Bloom (whose book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, is incidentally, despite its many sins, quite wonderful and required reading for anyone with a serious interest in Shakespeare), writes:
Shakespeare calls upon the audience to surmise just how Falstaff and Hamlet and Edmund got to be the way they are, by which I mean their gifts, their obsessions, their concerns. Shakespeare's art is as much an art of omission as it is of surpassing richness. The plays are richest where they are most elliptical. Othello loves Desdemona, yet seems not to desire her sexually, since he has no knowledge of her palpable virginity and never makes love to her. What are Anthony and Cleopatra like when they are alone together? Why are Macbeth and his fierce lady childless? What is it that so afflicts Prospero and causes him to abandon his magical powers, and to say that in his recovered realm every third thought shall be of the grave? Why does no one ever behave other than zanily in Twelfth Night or other than madly in Measure for Measure? Why must Shylock be compelled to accept Christian conversion, or Malvolio be so outrageously tormented?
In my opinion, Harold Bloom has got things completely wrong here. There are indeed many plays which confront their audience with this sort of question, where the audience leaves the theatre thinking, "I wonder how those people ever got into that situation in the first place?" or, "I wonder what's going to happen after they actually get married." But I never have questions like this come up after seeing a play by Shakespeare, except for Hamlet, and I've never heard of anyone else other than Harold Bloom who does. I will admit, though, that in the case of Hamlet there are a number of questions which one really ought to ask. The most famous one is, "Why doesn't Hamlet kill Claudius?" Then, "If Hamlet's plan is to not awaken the King's suspicions, then why does he do everything possible to draw attention to himself?" and "What does he feel he's accomplishing by treating Ophelia so completely callously?" And "Was it really necessary to cause the death of so many innocent bystanders?"
But if the audience in fact asks many of these questions after seeing Hamlet, then the play has been a failure. Asking these questions means that one has stepped out of the play and realized that it really doesn't make any sense.
Most people, however, do not find Hamlet a failure. And so the really interesting question becomes (and not only for Hamlet) "How does Shakespeare get away with making his audience accept so many things that are nonsensical?"
In the first half of the Twentieth Century, the attitude that works of literature should stand on their own gave rise to a movement called the New Criticism.
In his book The Shakepeare Revolution, J.L. Styan describes the New Criticism as follows:
When in 1941 the southern American poet and critic John Crowe Ransom published The New Criticism, he gave a name to a movement in literary criticism which had been gathering force since 1924, when I.A. Richards published The Principles of Literary Criticism. A "new critic" believed that a work of literature should be examined and judged as an object in itself, without reference to the personality of its author, the facts of its composition, its historical context, the audience its author intended, or its effect upon them. He attempted to arrive at critical judgments by the close analysis of language, since he held that a work communicates only in its own terms. The intense semantic scrutiny of the new critics undoubtedly worked wonders for our understanding of poetry --- it produced the apotheosis of the lyric poem --- and was surprisingly adaptable to prose fiction. It produced exciting insights into the nature of imagery and symbolism. But it stumbled badly when confronted with drama.
And in the realm of cinema, for instance, no one to my knowledge has even considered such an approach. When discussing a movie, one of the first questions a reader wants answered is, "When was this film made?" And who was it made by? (Not only the director, but the cinematographer and screenwriter. Even knowing the studio it was made for can help enormously in understanding the film for what it is.)
Certainly it is always legitimate for a reader or theatre-goer of cinema-goer to enjoy a work for what it is, without knowing anything about its background or its author or the critical opinions surrounding it. One can go watch "Birth of a Nation," and see it as simply a ripping good adventure story in which the villains all have black skins (just as in certain westerns, the villains wear black hats).
But meaning is always a synthesis between what a work offers its audience and what the audience brings to the work. So a work of literature never really "stands on its own." It's simply a question of whether one understands it through the unconscious filter of one's own cultural assumptions, or whether one also attempts to understand what it meant to its original audience and what the author was trying to achieve in writing it. I think that most people will understand and enjoy a work of literature more if they understand a little of what it meant to its original audience.
A play, in particular, especially one by Shakespeare, is not a literary work meant to stand in isolation. Its concern is to produce an effect on an audience. So the nature of the audience the playwright had in mind is extremely relevant to understanding the way in which the play works.
Certainly the same thing is true for fiction, but to a lesser extent. In writing criticism of Henry James, for instance, it undoubtedly helps to know what sort of reader James was writing for. But it's not essential. (In fact, to a large extent, this question is self-answering. The novels of Henry James were written for a reader who was like Henry James himself. Or, to put it in a different way, the novels of Henry James were written for the sort of reader who reads Henry James.)
If a reader doesn't like one of Henry James's novels, then he will put it down and not finish it and will probably not buy the next one. If very few readers like his novels, then this will be eventually reflected in the sales figures, and if this had been the case then eventually Henry James would have had to turn to another line of work.
But for a playwright, especially a producer of entertainments, such as Shakespeare was, the response of the audience is much more immediate, and it is much more essential that the playwright give a lot of thought to the nature of the audience and what this response will be.
And if we want to understand what Shakespeare was doing in his plays, it will help a lot to understand the nature of the audience he was writing for. It will help us understand the ground rules taken for granted in the play.
So is there something wrong when a person goes to see Twelfth Night and enjoys it without knowing anything about the Elizabethan period or even quite when it was? What should one answer to someone who asks, "What is the correct way to understand Shakespeare?"
If someone were to ask me that question, I would have to ask him in turn what his objective was. It seems to me that there are lots of different ways of enjoying Shakespeare and lots of different ways of understanding Shakespeare, and there's nothing wrong with any of them. (As a writer, my own impulse to start studying Shakespeare and write this series of articles was a curiosity about what Shakespeare's plays were like for their original audience. Why anyone else would want to know this is a question I can't answer.)
A critic or a teacher, though, has a greater responsibility, and I think that this includes the responsibility to put literary works in their contexts. It is common to find things in Shakespeare's plays that puzzle us. It is common for critics to disagree about the meaning of things in the play. Certainly in these cases knowing something about the audience Shakespeare was writing for should be helpful.
If one completely rejects the historical approach and takes the New Criticism to an extreme, one arrives at those contemporary critics who make no bones about the fact that they are looking at Shakespeare from their own particular cultural perspective and see no reason why anyone living in the contemporary world should do anything else.
For instance, at the end of her essay on performing Portia (in The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays) Penny Gay proclaims that this approach is the only "intellectually honest" one, writing:
The history of the Twentieth Century has forced all intellectually honest directors to reassess the role of Shylock, and some, like Barton, Nunn, and Kelly, to reexamine Portia's story. The question now remains whether directors will be able to avoid the temptation to return to a simplistic image of Portia that has no connection with the reality of women's lives in the Twenty-first Century. The performers of Portia are certainly ready to seize the power that her lines offer.
As I understand it at least, what Penny Gay is saying here is that understanding what the Merchant meant to Shakespeare and his original audience is completely irrelevant. We live in our own time, and we should reinterpret Shakespeare (rewrite him, essentially) in order to satisfy our own needs. Penny Gay seems to be interested in primarily using the Merchant as a political weapon rather than as a piece of literature.
For my part, I wonder quite why one would want to do this, rather than writing a new play of one's own. Here we are not talking about the way one person chooses to appreciate and enjoy literature, but, as I understand it, the way a teacher (or theatrical director, who is also a teacher of sorts) should teach Shakespeare to students.
Thinking of Shakespeare's plays as if they had been written for a Twenty-first Century audience can certainly result in novel and interesting performances, and probably worthwhile ones. But to me, what is intellectually dishonest is to present one's own point of view in this way and pretend that it came from Shakespeare.
I think that if the Merchant is to be presented in the way Gay recommends, then somehow the audience should be also made aware that to Elizabethans, the idea would have seemed bizarre that a woman, dressed in a man's clothing and impersonating a law student in a courtroom, could have functioned in the way Penny Gay wants Portia to. Whether or not a woman could have got away with this in Elizabethan "real life," she could certainly not have in a play on an Elizabethan stage.
And Penny Gay, would answer, I presume: "But so what? We are not Elizabethans, after all." And so we're not. But I can't see that intellectual honesty requires rejecting historical perspectives.
On the other hand, certainly a contemporary audience will indeed find meanings in the plays beyond what Shakespeare apparently intended and what his original audience understood, and this is a good thing, not a bad one. To look at Shakespeare's plays only from only through Elizabethan eyes is also to give the audience or classroom less than what it deserves. Part of the job of a critic is to look at a literary work not in isolation, but in the context of other literary works. And certainly it is legitimate for a critic to look at Shakespeare's plays in terms of all the values we have learned through the four centuries of literature since Shakespeare's time.
The critical paradigm at the opposite extreme from the New Criticism has come to be called Historicism (or, recently, the "New Historicism") Here the point of view is that the only valid way of approaching Shakespeare's plays is to try and understand them the same way that Shakespeare himself and his original Elizabethn audience did. To me, this is very interesting. My own interest in Shakespeare has been provoked by a desire to understand what his plays must have been like as originally performed and a suspicion that the Shakespearean style of theatre does to a some extent in fact survive in modern times, but is better exemplified by television sitcoms than by modern "serious" theatre.
But for most people, a little history goes a long way. Shakespeare would certainly have been bewildered by the attitude that the best method for experiencing his plays in the same way his original audience did is to bury the plays in a mass of footnotes and reference books.
In my opinion, Marjorie Garber, in her book Shakespeare After All, does things exactly right.
King Lear in particular, and Troilus and Cressida are two plays that make little sense if one reads or watches them with no knowledge of the historical context.
Seen from a Twentieth or Twenty-first Century perspective, Troilus and Cressida seems completely bizarre. Few of us are familiar with the basic story (although it was told by Chaucer, for one), but every reasonably well educated person today is at least vaguely familiar with the Trojan War. In particular, we know that the Greeks were the good guys and the Trojans the villains.
On the other hand, Shakespeare shocks us by presenting exactly the opposite view, showing the Greeks as dishonorable and treacherous and often (especially in the case of Ajax) oafs.
But Shakespeare's perspective was that of the society he lived in. Even fairly well educated Elizabethans were not very well acquainted with the Homeric account of the Trojan War, but they knew the story of Troilus and Cressida about as well as most of us know the story of Rome and Juliet.
Garber explains that in fact the English in Shakespeare's time believed that England had been initially settled by those fleeing Troy after its fall to the Greeks. In fact, in Shakespeare's time London was commonly known as "Troynovant," or New Troy.
Certainly Troilus and Cressia is an extremely cynical play. But knowing the historial context in which it was written and performed can help us understand that it was not the broad attack on contemporary values that it seems to us today.
In his book New Readings vs. Old Plays, Richard Levin states the case against interpreting Shakespeare's plays only in terms of their historical context very strongly.
Both the ironic approach and the historical approach ask us to reject our felt experience of the play and to substitute for it an interpretation which we have not experienced --- specifically, as we saw, to regard with antipathy a character who we found sympathetic. Moreover, in practice if the historical critic tries to confront the facts of the play, he almost always has to resort to methods of the ironic critics [i.e. to claim that the actual meaning of the text is the opposite of what it overtly says], since in each of the examples the facts of the play are clearly ranged against the interpretation. (If they were not, there would be no need to invoke the historical attitudes.)
Levin supports his statement by some examples which are clearly examples of abuse of the historical approach. It has been claimed by some critics that we are intended to condemn Juliet (in Romeo and Juliet) and Desdemona (in Othello), because they (along with the heroines of several other plays) are in violation of the widely accepted Elizabethan standard that young unmarried women are suppose to be obedient to the wishes of their fathers.
Clearly these examples constitute bad criticism, and perhaps even just plain stupidity on the part of the critics, because, as Levin points out, it is clear from the texts themselves that even Shakespeare's own audiences were not intended to look at Juliet and Desdemona in that way. And yet it is beyond much doubt that audiences did support the precept that daughters ought to obey their fathers.
Which points out the fact that even for contemporary plays or fiction, it is not that easy to say what prevailing attitudes actually are. A person can go to church and thoroughly agree with a sermon which states that certain values are the only correct way in which we should conduct our lives, and then go to a movie and with complete sincerity cheer for a hero whose behavior is the exact opposite of what was advocated by the preacher.
Certainly some works require more from the reader in the way of cultural background knowledge than others. One doesn't require a lot of background knowledge to make sense of Much Ado About Nothing, for instance, or Macbeth. On the other hand, to discuss The Merchant of Venice while assuming that Shakespeare's audience knew Jews in the same way we do today leads to a serious misunderstanding of the play.
What I find most objectionable, in any case, are those critics who don't make it clear what ground rules they are writing under, and indeed feel free to switch ground rules from one moment to the next. Harold Bloom, for example, writes from the perspective of the obsessions of the contemporary world and at the same time writes as if he is talking about the plays as originally understood by the author and his Elizabethan audience.
In his chapter on The Merchant of Venice. Bloom writes of Antonio's requirement that Shylock convert to Christianity, "Why did Shakespeare allow Antonio this final turn of the torturer's screw?"
The forced conversion has obviously pushed a hot button for Bloom, as it will for many in Shakespeare's modern audience, and there's certainly nothing wrong in commenting on the Merchant from that perspective. But it is bizarrely anachronistic to imagine that Shakespeare or his audience would consider a conversion to Christianity as a form of torture, any more than the missionaries in Hawaii did. And there is no indication in fact that Shakespeare or his audience regarded the required conversion as an essential component of the play. It is in fact only a single line in the play and provokes no complaint from Shylock. It is not commented on, gleefully or otherwise, by any of the other characters.
And then at the end of his chapter on the Merchant, Bloom makes a truly bizarre statement:
I end by repeating that it would have been better for the last four centuries of the Jewish people had Shakespeare never written this play. So shadowed and equivocal is The Merchant of Venice, that I cannot be certain that there is any way to perform it now and recover Shakespeare's own art of representing Shylock. Shylock is going to go on making us uncomfortable, enlightened Jew and enlightened Christian, and so I close by wondering if Shylock did not cause Shakespeare more discomfort than we now apprehend.
Here, a moment after acknowledging that Shakespeare's conception of Shylock was so remote from our own ways of thinking about Jews that it is probably impossible for us to understand, Bloom goes by by seeming to suggest that Shakespeare may have been made uncomfortable by the (presumptive) influence his play was to have in the four centuries following his death! Not only would Shakespeare have been astonished by the suggestion that his play would have a deep influence on the attitude of the world toward Jews, but everything we know suggests that he would have been astonished by the idea that anyone would still be reading, much less performing, his play four hundred years into the future.
If one visits the Drama department, one finds that here too Shakespeare is considered a god. But the reasons are completely different.
My comments on Shakespeare in this article focuses on words, the text of the play. Because the text, after all, is all that we have. If we want to discuss the aspects of a play that go beyond the text, then we have to talk about specific performances, and here we leave the realm of literary criticism and move on to the realm of dramatic criticism.
And yet when it comes to to drama and especially to Shakespeare, to see a play as consisting of words is quite misleading. Shakespeare's plays as written were never intended to be works of literature, if by that we mean stand-alone texts. The text provided the words for actors to speak as part of a performance supervised by Shakespeare. Certainly these words were a very important part of the performance, but Shakespeare never planned for them to be isolated from the performance and appreciated in isolation, any more than one would expect to get to know an Alfred Hitchcock film by reading the screenplay.
In The Shakespeare Revolution, J.L. Styan writes,
The first failure of the New Criticism's attempt to analyze a play was its inability to recognize that a play is not made up of words alone. The infinite variety of visual and aural signals in drama includes gesture and movement and visual relationships, acting style and the living character, voice and tone and pace, as well as the complexities of verbal meaning. The intentions of the author of a play and the expectations of its audience are absolutely relevant to any value judgment passed upon it.
For this reason, when it comes to Shakespeare, actors and directors also play the role of critics, by finding the meaning which they believe is inherent in the text and presenting this interpretation to the audience. Whether it was his intention or not (and I think it was not), in practice Shakespeare gives the actor choices. Over and over again, we see in his plays speeches and scenes which can be read in at least two different ways. Critics can try to settle the question of which is the "correct" reading by way of logical argument. Such arguments never come to a generally agreed conclusion, because in these cases the texts of the plays simply do not contain sufficient grounds to draw a logical conclusion. Actors have to simply cut the Gordian knot by choosing one particular interpretation and then presenting it on stage. (Of course an actor's interpretation can be complex and contain contradictions or ambiguity.)
At the same time, though, one cannot say that those who find greater meaning in Shakespeare's plays by reading them than by watching performances are "wrong." In fact, both approaches have great value. There are things in Shakespeare's plays that one simply will not get by watching performances. And I can't believe that it was otherwise even for Shakespeare's Elizabethan audiences.
Why Shakespeare put things into his plays that would go over the heads of his audiences is a puzzlement, since he seems to have had clearly no interest at all (or at least not until after he retired from the theatre) in the publication of his plays. I tend to think that in order to write, sometimes he had to just write to please himself and forget about his audience.
In any case, there's nothing wrong with reading Shakespeare's plays and one can gain a lot from it.
But in my opinion (such as it is), one will also lose a lot if one treats the plays as works of literature meant primarily for reading. Lot of things in the plays were put there in order to make performances work, and I, in any case, find that I don't become aware of a lot of these until I watch a performance.
Certainly those who are familiar with Shakespeare will be quite aware of the difference between the enjoyment one gets from seeing the plays performed and the kind of satisfaction one gets from reading them silently.
But even in contemporary performance, it is hard to really appreciate all those aspects of the plays which in Shakespeare's own time kept the audiences coming. We tend to pay little attention to the fact that these plays were set in Florence, or Verona, or Venice, or Spain, or Vienna. It is hard for us to realize the appeal which the mere settings of these plays, together with the corresponding costumes, exercised for a world in which there were no magazines or newspapers as we know them, much less cinema or television.
In his book, Semiotics and Interpretation, Robert Scholes points out a drastic difference between the way we experience as play in performance and the way we experience a piece of written fiction. Speaking of cinema, Robert Scholes writes,
The reader's narrative processes in dealing with printed fiction are mainly oriented toward visualization. This is what the reader must supply for a printed text. But in cinematic narrative, the reader must supply a more categorical and abstract narrativity. This is one reason why film criticism is frequently more interesting than literary criticism. A well-made film requires interpretation, while a well-made novel may only require understanding. There is a redundancy in providing a verbal gloss for a verbal object that does not apply when the object is primarily visual.
In this respect Shakespeare is much more like cinema than fiction in written form. Shakespeare often shows us what happens but does not explain it. So critics step in to provide the omitted explanation. Unfortunately, the critics are usually not in agreement with each other, since the explanations they provide are not inherent in the play.
Because it is rooted in the non-verbal part of communication, irony is preeminently the figure of narrative and dramatic texts, as metaphor is of lyric texts.
Irony is often defined as the device where the true meaning of a text is in contradiction to its overt meaning. The classic example in Shakespeare is in Marc Anthony's funeral oration, with its repeated reference to Brutus and the other conspirators who assassinated Caesar as "honoroble men." Depending on the actor's delivery, this is a case where the irony may come close to descending to the level of mere sarcasm.
Trying to distinguish between irony and sarcasm highlights the fact that in practice, irony is a rather complicated word that is used in a variety of ways and is difficult to characterize by means of definitions. Scholes, referring especially to the example of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals, characterizes irony as a communication where there is a surface to be seen through, a discrepancy "between words and realities, words and deeds."
Scholes states,
All theatrical works are built upon an ironic structure of spectation in which in which disparities of word and deed are quickly observed, so that what is enacted is privileged over what is recounted.
What Scholes is speaking of here is, roughly speaking, what is usually called "dramatic irony." It seems to me that Scholes overstates his case by making such a universal statement. There are a number of well known plays that do not, as far as I can recall, have any ironic component at all.
But certainly what Scholes says is very true of Shakespeare. What immediately comes to my mind as I read Scholes's comment is the scene in the Eastcheap tavern where Falstaff describes his allegedly valiant, but hopeless, fight against a huge gang of robbers, while Prince Hal and a pair of friends listen with amusement. Prince Hall and his friends, along with the audience, know that they themselves, in disguise, were the robbers, and that Falstaff put up no resistance at all.
Another very common case in which Shakespeare uses dramatic irony to entertain his audience is when he has characters in disguise. The character makes comments about herself (or in a few cases himself) which are perfectly true, but are interpreted by the other characters in a completely different sense. For instance, when Rosalind, in As You Like It, says, "I will marry no woman," the other characters, accepting her male disguise, naturally interpret this as meaning that (s)he will never marry, which is false. But of course Rosalind's statement is in fact true, because the person she will marry will be a man, not a woman.
A different sort of example of dramatic irony occurs in Much Ado About Nothing, where the clown constable Dogberry brings the villainous Don John's two cohorts Borachio and Conrade to Don Pedro. Dogberry has no understanding of the significance of the evil plot has has heard them speaking of. His complaints again the two are confused and mostly frivolous, and as the two are accused by Don Pedro, Dogberry keeps insisting, "And do not forget: I am an ass." By this, Dogberry means of course to complain that Conrade called him an ass, but the audience realizes with great amusement that Dogberry's statement "I am an ass" is the simple literal truth.
Comic dramatic irony of this sort is especially prevalent in modern sitcoms. Quite why audiences find it so entertaining to heard a character state a truth without realizing that it is the truth is something I have never seen explained. But it is a device that has always worked and continues to work.
Scholes has another very interesting observation which in my opinion explains a lot about why a play when performed is very different than a piece of written literature.
In watching theatre, we are always finally aware that it is all a game, a play: that beneath the surface of costume, make-up, voice, and manner, there lives another being who is not the character whose life we are following. Theatre depends on separating the actor from the character. Without this, we are participating in a ceremony, not observing a drama. This irony of double vision is what makes the drama possible, and this, in turn, depends on the development of skill in dramatic audiences.
One might note that contemporary cinema fashions in a somewhat different way. If the audience at a film gives much thought to the fact that the character being portrayed is very different from the actor doing the portrayal, then the film is a failure.
However if one looks at earlier films, especially comedies, one is quite aware of the truth of Scholes's comment. In watching the films of Charlie Chaplin, or Laurel and Hardy, or the Marx Brothers, one is quite aware that one is watching clowns performing, rather than a realistic portrayal of life. My enjoyment of the Marx Brothers films was, if anything, dimished rather than enchanced when I learned that Margaret Dumont, the matronly woman in the films, was in real life almost exactly the sort of person she portrays on the screen.
As a footnote to Scholes's observation, it is interesting to think about the complex way this applies to the female characters in Shakespeare's plays who disguise themselves as males. Shakespeare's audience was of course well aware that the supposed woman on stage was actually an attractive young boy speaking from behind a mask, and we know as a matter of historical fact that many of those in his audience were in fact attracted to such young boys. And then at a certain point in the play two different and complementary things occur: the woman character being portrayed disguises herself as a male, which was apparently something that always fascinated Shakespeare's audience. But at the same time, what really happens is that the male actor takes off his mask and reveals himself for the boy he really is, which produced a different fascination in at least a part of the audience.
It is a marvelous thing that we continue to find Shakespeare's plays interesting and worthwhile today, four hundred years later. And it is especially remarkable when we consider that when we experience a play now, especially when we read it silently, we are actually missing a big part of the by-play that held the interest of the original audience
But there is another level on which a work of literature has meaning: the total cumulative effect of the work as a whole. And certainly this is the focus of a great deal of Shakespearean criticism. It is also, in my opinion, the area where a critic's right to comment is most often abused.
This is the level, I think, where the critical industry tends to provoke the greatest scorn from ordinary people, people who read literature simply because they like it or are moved by it. The naïve response to the idea that we need criticism to tell us the meaning of a work tends to be one of annoyance. The idea of a critic "interpreting" or "explaining" a literary work seems rather presumptuous. It is as though the critic is taking onto himself something that ought to be the province of the work itself. The naïve reader tends to respond to this idea by saying, "I don't need somebody to explain a book for me."
And is it true that every literary work has to have a meaning? And that it has only one correct meaning?
There is one clarification I think needs to be made at the very beginning. There are two different meanings commonly used for the word "theme". On the one hand, when critics talk about the theme of a literary work, most often they are referring to the overall statement that the work supposedly makes, the bottom line of the whole work, as it were.
On the other hand, when we talk about one of the themes of a work, we often have in mind a general topic that the work discusses or explores. Thus jealousy is certainly one of the themes in Othello. But there are others, for instance the envy that subordinates may have toward their superiors and the ways in which they can sabotage their superiors, and the problems of a person with ability (Othello) who is alien to the society within which he tries to use that ability. Etc. etc.
I have pointed out that Shakespeare's approach to story telling is often impressionistic, in that rather than spelling out the story line explicitly, he offers us various pieces and leaves it up to us to assemble them into a coherent story. And thus there can room for quite a bit of disagreement about what actually happens in some of Shakespeare's plays.
And when it comes to identifying the theme of a play, things are even less clear cut. For a play is not a discussion or overt exploration any philosophical issue. It tells a story. I would like to tentatively suggest that in fact the very reason that we are able to find Shakespeare's plays profound is partly that there is no profundity overtly included in the text. The situations Shakespeare shows us often raise important issues for us. The reader or audience is challenged to think about the deeper implications of them. But Shakespeare does not himself address the issues that are raised, and this leaves readers, actors, teachers, and critics free to address them in whatever way they find meaningful. Thus our judgment about what themes, in this sense of the word, occur in a play is certainly the result of a great deal of cognitive effort on our part, and it's not surprising that it's often quite subjective. And yet if someone were to say, for instance, "Othello has nothing to say about jealousy," we would regard the speaker as an idiot, at least when it comes to literature.
The thematic approach to Shakespeare's plays has been very effectively attacked in the second chapter of Richard Levin's book New Readings vs. Old Plays. I would be very tempted, were it not for considerations of space and respect for copyright, to simply quote from this chapter at great length.
Consider the following critical statements, only a few of the many cited by Levin, all from the Sixties and Seventies, and all by different critics. (A few others will be quoted a little further on.)
Love's Labours Lost might be considered a prelude to the more extensive commentary on imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream.Much Ado About Nothing must take its place in Shakespeare's incessant debate about the conflict between appearance and reality.
Hamlet continues on a more sophisticated level the discussion of appearance and reality that begins in Richard II.
King Lear clearly offers an inquiry into nature --- into the nature of man and his relation to the natural order.
The great tragic exploration of the theme of man in society is in King Lear.
Stated out of context like this, most of these statements sound fairly absurd. And yet, in their own way, I am sure that each one of them, contradictory as some of them are, has a certain validity.
The thing about statements like the ones Levin quotes is that they are all profoundly true (especially after one has been smoking the appropriate substances). And because they are all profoundly true, they are also all profoundly meaningless. Statements like this really tell us nothing about the play in question. They simply shows us possible ways of looking at the play, and from a very abstract perspective.
And this is why Shakespeare supplies such a rich field for academics, in contrast to those writers who intentionally try to build meaning into their works by writing allegory or the like. This is one of the things that a comic strip like Peanuts has in common with Shakespeare. Year after year, Lucy holds up the football for Charlie Brown, and Charlie Brown races down the field to kick it, only to have Lucy pull it away at the last minute. There are so many ways one can ascribe meaning to this. One can see it as a Christian parable or a Marxist one or a Freudian one. But the pattern itself has no meaning, aside from the fact that Lucy enjoys playing this particular practical joke and that Charlie Brown allows himself to be duped over and over again despite his past experience.
This is why contradictory judgments about a Shakespeare play can both be valid. One can make judgments like this, in grandiose and abstract terms, about any story, whether it comes from Shakespeare or out of the newspaper. Some judgments may be an indication of the profundity of thought of the critic making them, but they have nothing to do with what makes the story effective in the impact it has on us.
And yet.... And yet....
What is it that seems so important about these plays, and that bothers us so much? There is something these plays seem to be saying that goes beyond the particular characters and the particular plot.
For the crux of the issue here, I believe, we can go back to Plato, who said that art functions by using the particular to represent the universal. (Plato cited this as one of the reasons that he considered art pernicious.)
In the extreme case, one has allegory, where the characters are clearly meant to be universal. The characters in Shakespeare's plays, on the other hand, are notable for their individuality, and the individuality of the characters is on of the things that makes the plays fascinating for us. Yet although the characters are very individual, the situations dealt with touch on very universal themes. For instance, for although to most of us, the thought of aspiring to royalty never crosses our minds, many of us can recognize ourselves in Macbeth as someone who is offered the opportunity to for a gain that had previously seemed almost unimaginable, but at a cost of doing something that is clearly wrong and dangerous.
Likewise in King Lear many of us will recognize ourselves in the problems of parents dealing with children and situations where the parents and children act with no concern at all for the other's needs; the parents look at the children merely as means for achieving their own interests, and the children see the parents merely as obstacles in the way of achieving the lives they are striving for.
And although most of us probably have never been locked away from any shelter and subjected to a raging storm the way Lear is, we can recognize the situation of being thrust into an unfamiliar environment where all the status we are accustomed to having in our world suddenly means nothing. This, I think, is one of the greatest terrors a civilized person can face.
I have said above that what makes a story interesting and fascinating to us is the individuality of the characters. But what makes a story compelling, so that it powerfully draws us in, is the situation the characters are confronted with. Put Shylock or Hamlet into plays where the situations are less compelling and they will become merely quirky characters who amuse us but who we quickly forget about.
Of course the power of Shakespeare's plays cannot be explained merely by the fact that they deal with such universal situations. Because these situations, just because they are so universal, occur in thousands of other literary works. Nonetheless, if Shakespeare's plays merely had fascinating characters and great poetry, but did not touch on such universal themes, they would not have the power over us that they do.
Like the authors of folk tales and fairy tales, Shakespeare has the knack of presenting his audience with the sort of situations that will really draw them in.
I am reminded of a film commentary I once read on Ingmar Bergman. The critic, who was not an admirer of Bergman, mentioned that Bergman had started out doing children's theatre, and claimed that in his films, Berman was now doing children's theatre for adults.
It seems to me that this is correct, when applied to films such as The Seventh Seal and The Magician. And to some extent this insight only increased my admiration for these films, rather than diminishing it.
Shakespeare was also, I believe, in some ways creating children's plays for adults. And I think that this is one of the sources of the power of his greatest plays.
Northrop Frye, in his wonderful book on Shakespeare A Natural Perspective has some very enlightening things to say that relate to this point. I will quote only a small part of his comments:
Literary conventions are descended from myths. The myth preserves the primitive identity of personal character and natural object in its purest form. At the same time, the myth tells a story, and the story turns back on the original magical function of the action. A character in a St. George play may announce that he is a Turkish knight or a doctor or the front end of a lion, like Snug the joiner, but what he will never say is, "We are representing the contest of summer and winter."To take a different example: Macbeth is not a play about the moral crime or murder; it is about the dramatically conventional crime of killing the lawful and anointed king. The convention gives a ritual quality to the action, and the element of reversed magic to the imagery that enables the poet to identify the actors with the powers of nature.
I would modify Frye's statement only by saying that myths and the most powerful stories Shakespeare tells, as well as many fairy tales and folk tales, are all descended from archetypical patterns that are much older than the myths we now know.
The fact that Shakespeare deals with such elemental situations is also part of the reason why his plays lend themselves so well to use by those with particular political or moral agendas.
We can argue, for instance, about whether Shakespeare had various attitudes about the way women are treated in society. It's certainly possible that he thought they were treated unfairly. But it is also true that Shakespeare was not a feminist, any more than any Elizabethan male could be. And yet he presents situations which feminists can point to as justifying their beliefs and attitudes. The situations are inherent in Shakespeare's work, but the political programs which we today use these situations to justify are not.
But even while we may acknowledge that a part of the power that Shakespeare's plays have is due to their thematic material, It's important for writers, in particular, need to understand that the theme is not what a play or piece of fiction is "about." A writer does not start out by wanting to express a certain theme --- at least not if the writer is good.
Richard Levin, in his book New Readings v. Old Plays quotes completely contradictory comments by two critics (not identified by Levin) on The Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is Shakespeare's first attempt to explore and to justify the distinctive qualities of his art as a way to knowledge.A Midsummer Night's Dream can be regarded as an extended meditation on reality and illusion.
This is comparable to a (purely hypothetical) art critic who says, "Van Gogh's Starry Night leads us to contemplate the infinite vastness of the universe." Although stupid, this comment may actually be helpful to someone knowing nothing at all about Van Gogh who looks at the painting completely baffled. Because the critic's comment suggests that the key to understanding Van Gogh's painting lies not in considering its literal content, as we might with a painting by, say, Vermeer, or analyzing its technique, but rather in paying attention to the emotional response it provokes.
This sort of comment, where the critic tells us about his own particular impression of the artistic work, has traditionally been called "impressionistic criticism," a term which I prefer not to use because I want to avoid confusion with my own description of Shakespeare as an impressionistic writer. In any case, I would be wrong to suggest that this sort of criticism is always simplistic and unhelpful. In its most legitimate form, it first draws our attention to some concrete detail or details which are genuinely present in the text and then goes on to describe the effect that these details have on the particular critic (with the implication that this response would be universal for all readers). Harold Bloom's criticism falls largely in this category and if often marvelously insightful, even when (in my opinion) wrong.
William R. Morse in an essay titled "The Play's the Thing: Shakespeare's Critique of Character (and Harold Bloom)," (contained in the critical anthology Harold Bloom's Shakespeare, edited by Christy Desmet), expands on the following comment in Bloom's book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (pages 13-14; one really should read it in context). Bloom writes
The authentic Shakespearean litany chants variations upon the word "nothing," and the uncanniness of nihilism haunts almost every play, even the great, relatively mixed comedies.Morse expands on Bloom's comment in an extremely interesting way, which is unfortunately rather difficult to easily paraphrase. He writes,
Ironically, Hamlet itself, Bloom's continuing touchstone, makes clear how this "uncanniness," not character itself, is the real source of the play's fascination.Where Bloom sees Shakespeare's plays as somewhat comparable to 19th and 20th century novels, driven by the human concerns of their characters, Morse sees the plays as more analogous to the classical Greek tragedies, concerned with fate and transformative Dionysian moments of awareness of the sublime. Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to do justice to Morse's insights by means of a quick paraphrase, but here is one of the things he says, elaborating on Nietzsche's idea about tragedy:
What might it mean, as Bloom continually says, that Shakespeare's characters are "more real" than real people? In what follows, I will suggest here that what Bloom recalls here (his youthful experience of seeing Ralph Richardson performing Falstaff) was a Dionysian moment --- an experience of the otherness of life presenting itself in the theatre....Our relation to the main characters of tragedy is first encouraged by their human form, their apparent humanity. But this identification with, for instance, the hero, far from being an end in itself, draws us out of ourselves with the intent of exposing us, leaving us vulnerable to an experience of self-alienation when, inevitably, the hero falls. In the catastrophe, we discover the falsity of not only the hero's sense of limited cultural identity, but equally of ours, and the very nature of human knowledge on which we had presumed to build that identity.
In its way, this is not that much different from the statement of the hypothetical art critic about Van Gogh's painting and the infinite vastness of the universe. But I think there's certainly something to be gained by going back and thinking of Shakespeare's plays again with Morses's insight (or for that matter, Harold Bloom's insights) in mind.
Are we always wrong to attribute the emotional response that an artistic work provokes in us to something inherent in the work itself?
Not at all. But it's important, especially for a writer, to remember that Van Gogh did not set out to paint a picture of the infinite vastness of the universe, or even to paint a picture that would create a particular emotional effect.
To cite another example from the visual arts, I think that there's almost universal agreement on the thematic content of the paintings of Edward Hopper. Everyone notices that these paintings very effectively convey the feeling of loneliness (or, perhaps more accurately, of isolation). An art teacher who draws his students' attention to this is certainly giving them valuable insight. But Hopper himself never acknowledged that this was his objective in creating his paintings. His own statement (which I am perhaps misquoting slightly) was, "All I ever wanted to do was to paint a picture of sunlight shining on a wall."
I believe that most writers agree that the worst thing that a writer can do in creating a piece of fiction (or a play) is to consciously have in mind a particular theme for the work. And what's even worse than that is to try and make one's characters universal.
Richard Levin offers an imaginary dialogue Shakespeare and Ben Jonson:
Jonson: What have you been doing lately, Will?
Shakespeare: I've been working on a new play.
Jonson: Oh, what will it be about?
Shakespeare: It will be a sustained meditation on reality and illusion.
I think that we can safely say that Shakespeare would never have been able to write the plays he did is he had thought in terms like this.
George V. Higgins says (On Writing) that in large part our interest in fiction is basically the same as our interest in gossip. The reader of a novel or the audience at a play does not want to be told about Everyman. Without disagreeing with the comments of William R. Morse above, one still has to acknowledge that Shakespeare is very different from Aeschylus or Euripides. What makes Shakespeare revolutionary in English literature (and probably Western literature) and interesting and fascinating to us is the individuality, and especially the ordinariness, of the characters, who become extraordinary when faced with the situations of the drama.
And yet when we get to the end of the story, we are somehow disappointed or confused if one don't feel that some sort of universal principle (or "moral") has been exemplified.
While we would very much like to say that Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, is simply one particular Jew, taking this attitude in fact robs the play of much of its power. Somehow it's hard to avoid the impression that Shakespeare, fairly or not, is making some sort of statement about Jews in general. (What makes it more complicated. is that the play seems to both attack and defend them.)
Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's most individual characters. Certainly one any rational basis one would call him idiocyncratic. And yet when the narrator of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" says, "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be," we understand that he is saying more than just the obvious fact that he is not a prince in ancient Denmark. Many of us believe we understand what Eliot's line means, although if we started getting specific, we might find that we understand it in very different ways. To me, anyway, Eliot's line means that his protagonist is defeatist, or perhaps one might better say defeated; he has reached the point where he understands that he is not someone of siginificance, someone whose actions and decisions are important to the world in general.
We are not surprised to find that the plays of Shakespeare which are most nearly uniform in mood, such as Titus Andronicus, are not the ones that command our deepest imaginative loyalties. We are also not surprised to find that Shakespeare often goes to the opposite extreme. We may have a comedy so somber that the festive conclusion seems forced, or, as in Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy so full of wit and tenderness that the catastrophe carries with it a sense of outrage. Here, as in most forms of intensive irony, the audience may remain divided in its reactions. Hence both criticism and performance may spend a great deal of energy on emphasizing the importance of minority moods. The notion that there is one response which apprehends the whole play rightly is an illusion: correct response is always stock response, and is possible only when some kind of mental or physical reflex is appealed to.In certain types of drama the action could be a fable irresistibly suggesting a moral which would be its "real meaning," so that the criticism of such a play could go over the head of the play itself to the conception that the author "had in mind," the play's idea or form. But This quasi-Platonic approach will not work with Shakespeare; his plays are existential facts, and no understanding of them can incorporate their existence. Shakespeare's "meaning" or poetic thought can be expounded only through a structural analysis of the play which keeps the genre of the play as an essential part of the critical context.
The archetypical stories on which Shakespeare's most powerful plays are based generally have a fairly clear bottom line --- a "moral". But in the play, whether by reason of Shakespeare's genius or his incompetence, the story winds up getting skewed, so that it doesn't reach the conclusion that we naturally expect, and we wind up confused.
Some writers start with a plan and are very good at following that original plan. (Or at least that's the way it seems to us when we see their final draft.) Many mysteries, for example those of Agatha Christie, are excellent examples. So are the movies of Alfred Hitchcock.
But other writers find that their stories go where they want to, and the hell with of the writer's original game plan. And often letting the story go where the story wants to results in a much better story than what the author had in mind originally. (And with some substantial revision, especially with the help of a word processor, the reader may never realize that the writer wasn't nearly as intelligent as the story he wrote.) One can think of the films of Robert Altman or the mysteries of Raymond Chandler. (I believe that it was Chandler who famously said, "Whenever I get stuck and can't figure out what comes next, I have a man come through the door with a gun.")
Shakespeare was the second kind of writer. Certainly he worked within a fairly strict set of constraints. (The play had to be performable by a given number of actors, allowing for considerable doubling of roles, and the play as actually performed had to be about two hours long, with no intermissions.) But within these constraints, Shakespeare often let his stories go where they wanted to rather than following his pre-planned game plan. And, at least apparently, according to his own claim, as well as the evidence of texts themselves, when he found that his story was turning out to be very different from the story he intended to tell, he never went back to revise the beginning to cover his tracks. (Fairly understandable for someone who method of processing words was a quill pen that had to be dipped back into the inkwell every two or three words!)
On the whole, Shakespeare was more interested in characters, or, more precisely, in the interactions between them, than in stories. And his characters tended to drive his stories off the rails.
This is why I believe that one can never locate the power of a Shakespearean play by looking at the story line.
I think that one reason that the plays trouble us so much more than the stories they are based on is something that Alexander Leggat has commented on in connection with The Merchant of Venice. Namely that Shakespeare takes a story which is archetypical and fable-like in terms of its content and story line, but yet puts what seem like real-world characters into that story, and otherwise tells it in a way that makes it seem real.
Look at what happens if we tell one piece of King Lear in the tone of a folk tale.
King Lear starts as the story of a king who has a very bad temper, and who lets himself be taken in by the hypocrisy of his two older daughters and rejects the sincerity of his youngest. (According to the logic of folk tales, isn't it always the youngest daughter who is the good one?) And when Lear discovers that his two older daughters are hypocrites, he over-reacts, thus sealing his own doom.
And so the King went to live with his first daughter Goneril for six months. But after he had been living with Goneril for a while, she and her husband said to the King, "The hundred knights attending you are much too expensive for us to support in our castle, and much too disruptive, as well. It is clear that you don't really need that many knights. So despite what my sister and I promised you, from now on, we will only allow you fifty."At this, the King became very angry and left Goneril's castle and went to the castle of his second daughter Regan.
But instead of welcoming the King, Regan complained to him because he had come to her too soon, before his six months with Goneril had been completed. Furthermore, she told the King that she was also not willing to be the host for a hundred knights, and that she in fact was only willing to let him have twenty-five.
And now the King became very angry, and said that he would return to Goneril's castle where he could at least have fifty knights. But now Goneril said that she also was only willing to allow the King twenty-five knights.
And as the King became more and more angry and argued with Goneril and Regan, finally the two of them told him that they would not allow him any knights at all.
And now the King was in such a total rage that he rushed out of the castle into the surrounding heath. And, as it so happened, there was an intense storm raging that night. And his daughters locked the door of the castle behind the King, leaving him alone in the storm except for his one faithful servant Kent.
Now as a folk tale, this seems to work. (The fact that Shakespeare's original source was not a folk tale is not what's at issue here. It's the tone of the story that's at issue.) I think we more or less instinctively know what the point of the story ought to be: Lear is basically a good man (he's a king, after all) who suffers from the sins of pride and anger. By the end of the story, we expect, he will learn better and take Cordelia into his heart, rewarding her for her love and sincerity, and reject her two evil sisters, and there will be a happy ending.
Or perhaps, even within a folk tale, the ending might be tragic: at the end, Lear dies, along with a lot of other people, but just before he dies he realizes and acknowledges that the disaster was the result of his being taken in by the two evil sisters and his blindness in not realizing the goodness of Cordelia. He finally realizes (as the audience is meant to) the danger of being taken in by flowery hypocrisy and rejecting plain-spoken by sincere love.
If one looks at a synopsis of the play, it seems to follow the tragic version of the folk story fairly well. But as soon as Shakespeare starts treating the characters as real human beings, the story doesn't make quite as much sense.
We start thinking about what this situation would be like in reality. And we can't help but notice that, as in many folk tales and many of Shakespeare's stories, the basic premise of the story doesn't really make much sense. It might be believable that a father could get angry because his daughter refuses to make a perfectly routine and fairly meaningless statement of her love, but what sort of father would be so carried away by his anger that he would actually disinherit his daughter for it. It's one thing to say in a folk tale, "King Lear was an old king with a very bad temper," but it becomes different when we see Lear as the asshole that he is. Lear is, say, the retired CEO of a major corporation. He's a senile old man living with his daughters, but he can't seem to get his head around the fact that he's no longer a powerful man. He keeps wanting to be treated like a CEO, but the truth of the matter is that he's just a nuisance. In the folk tale, I actually feel that Goneril and Regan are being fairly nasty to Lear in not allowing him the hundred knights which they had promised, but in Shakespeare's play I get the feeling that maybe the two daughters wouldn't have treated him so meanly if he'd behaved a little more decently. I get the feeling that probably he deserved a lot of what happened to him.
In Act 3 of Lear, Shakespeare loses interest for a while in the story he had set out to tell and gets interested in what his characters have to say to each other. At this point we start looking at a different story: the story of a king who has had his power and status taken away from him, and discovers what it's like to be an ordinary human being. After suffering quite a bit, the father finally encounters the first daughter, the rejected one, again, but she dies, and a lot of other people die as well.
There seems to be something missing here. We are expecting a bottom line to the story which Shakespeare never gives us. What is the point of the story?
What bothers us (or bothers me, at least) and makes the play seem thematically puzzling is that Shakespeare never quite makes the bottom line explicit. The main point of the folk tale version is Lear's realization at the end that he was the one at fault: that he is to blame for all the bad things that have happened. But in the play, even at the very end, Lear still seems to hang onto his belief that he is simply the innocent victim of his evil persecutors.
And Cordelia, who is central to the folk-tale plot, is almost incidental to Shakespeare's story. In fact, she actually disappears from the play in the middle three acts (the same acts that the Fool appears in). And then at the end, she says very little (although very poignantly) and then dies.
Shakespeare's play is not a play about Cordelia's virtue being rewarded. It is a story about Lear.
And Shakespeare also throws in the character of the Fool. Why does Shakespeare do this? The Fool is completely irrelevant to the original story that Shakespeare planned to tell. But Shakespeare's audiences were always entertained by jesters. And furthermore, the Fool constantly provides Lear with a reality check, which is very useful in terms of the second aspect of the story (the story of Lear discovering what it's like to be a human being).
We may have different opinions about Lear the character and King Lear the play. (God knows, there have been enough different opinions expressed). But however we make sense of it, there is something seriously disturbing about the way the play goes in a very different direction from the way we would naturally expect.
Now consider again Hamlet, of all Shakespeare's plays the one whose story makes the least sense, and yet a play that continues to fascinate people. It troubles us because its thematic direction changes as the play progresses, and by the time one gets to the end of the play, it's not at all clear what the point was.
To start with, there is a theme that has been powerful through the ages, namely the young man who discovers that his father, now dead, was the victim of evil done by a man who is now powerful and respectable and who feels the need to vindicate him. In Act 1 Hamlet is told by his father's ghost that his father was murdered by Claudius. But Hamlet can't know for sure whether the ghost is telling the truth; Elizabethan audiences were suspicious of ghosts. (But we always instinctively know that the ghost is telling the truth, because if the ghost is lying then there is no story. Unless the story is a story about the unreliability of ghosts, which is not a very powerful story for us or for Elizabethans.)
But there's more involved here than the mere human consideration of Hamlet's feeling about the wrong done to his father. William R. Morse in his essay, "The Play's the Thing: Shakespeare's Critique of Character (and of Harold Bloom)" (in Harold Bloom's Shakespeare, edited by Christie Dement) makes a very important point, namely that it is a mistake to think of the ghost as being Hamlet's father. What the ghost says (Act 1 Scene 5) is "I am thy father's spirit." And it is more than a mere quibble to point out that this is very different from saying, "I am thy dead father." The ghost is in fact a supernatural being. The message from the ghost is a message from the supernatural world and is much more serious and awe-inspiring than if Hamlet had merely, for instance, come across a letter written by his father before his death. The ghost certainly has the look of Hamlet's father, yet it is not clear that he may not be, in the words Hamlet speaks on seeing him, "A goblin damn'd."
Hamlet: Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or a goblin damn'd
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I'll call thee Hamlet.
King, father, royal Dane: Oh, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the seprulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly urn'd,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel,
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Seeking night hideous; and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?
Hamlet's words here are not generally listed among Shakespeare's great memorable speeches, but there is the same grandstanding exuberance of language that characterizes the great Shakespearean soliloquies and other set speeches. Clearly this encounter with the ghost was something that something that really seized Shakespeare's imagination. One can see that in writing this, he was intoxicated by the words pouring out of him.
The message from the ghost makes the objective for the protagonist clear: to verify the guilt of Claudius and then revenge it. The tradition of revenge plays (and tragedy in general) is that murder can only be avenged by death. Another part of the convention is that the protagonist will no be deterred from accomplishing his objective by the knowledge that it will probably involve the deaths of various other parties, including some innocent bystanders.
We can accept the convention of the revenge killing, because that's the premise of the play, and because we can accept the seriousness of Hamlet's obligation to his father's memory. But what makes Hamlet such an interesting and difficult play is that in Acts 2, 3, and 4, Shakespeare digresses from the indicated story line.
In Acts 2 through 4, Shakespeare essentially forgets the ghost story which he had started to tell so powerfully in Act 1 and starts telling the very human story of an extremely intelligent young man who is outraged by the fact that he is surrounded by mediocrities and who realizes that the society around him is based on lies and hypocrisy. Hamlet starts acting less like a man with a sacred cause and more like a young man rebelling against authority simply because it is authority. (More Jack Nicholson, in Five Easy Pieces, than James Dean or the young Marlon Brando.)
By the time the ghost reappears at the end of Act 1, Shakespeare no longer treats him as a solemn and sacred messenger from the dead, but actually makes fun of him. Hamlet refers to him as "Truepenny," and "This fellow in the cellarage" and "Old mole." (Presumably Shakespeare found that audiences were laughing at the ghost's voice from beneath the stage.)
In Shakespeare's source story, Hamlet was an underdog who fights for justice despite the strong opposition of almost everyone around him. But in the play Shakespeare wrote, Hamlet is a privileged and spoiled favored son with a grandiose conception of his own self-importance.
The time is out of joint: Oh, cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
And, without getting overly Freudian about it, we might notice that Hamlet's motivation seems to have more to do with his discomfort about his mother's sexuality than with the depth of his feeling for his father. (Hamlet's father, he tells us, was "As Hyperion to a satyr." But otherwise, we never get to know more about him. He seems rather schematic, rather than a real person one would care about.)
The standard question to ask about Hamlet is, "Why doesn't Hamlet get on with it and kill the king?" But this is not really a question to ask of Hamlet, who exists after all only in our imaginations, but rather one to ask of Shakespeare. Why doesn't Shakespeare get on with it and give us scenes of Hamlet diligently pursuing his mission instead of all the fluff we get in the middle three acts?
One possible answer here is that Shakespeare has simply made one of the most basic mistakes a storyteller can make: He has given his protagonist an objective, but has failed to provide him with sufficiently difficult obstacles.
A less superficial answer is that Shakespeare becomes interested in the characters who in the original play were Hamlet's deadly enemies --- Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, and Laertes --- as real human beings and loses interest in the straightforward revenge plot he set out to write. (Certainly the interactions I have above referred to as "fluff" are much more interesting and worthwhile than the revenge story.) And in the process of making Hamlet's antagonists human, Shakespeare extracts their fangs: in Shakespeare's version of the story, these characters are guilty of, at most, only venal sins. And yet in Acts 3 and 4, Shakespeare continues with the original story-line and has Hamlet kill all these essentially harmless characters.
It's little wonder that we have so much trouble figuring out the meaning of all this.
Perhaps only critics can find anything regretable about the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or even Polonius (who is never a very sympathetic character and therefore, according to the conventions of story telling, is not one whose death we will much care about). But Ophelia's death must, in Hamlet's phrase, give us pause. Shakespeare doesn't paint us a very detailed portrait of Ophelia, but the few things he tells us make us respond powerfully to her. (Despite the sketchiness of the picture Shakespeare provides us with, Ophelia is one of Shakespeare's best known and most iconic characters.) She is about fourteen or at most sixteen years old, very pretty, innocent, and submissive. (Hamlet ends his "To be or not to be" speech by saying, "Soft you now! The fair Ophelia.") To mistreat her, and to provoke her death, is a bit like kicking a little puppy. (Yes, Shakespeare gives the actress the choice of playing her differently. Some directors and actresses have even portrayed her as a young feminist. But that's not the natural choice.)
And Hamlet's mother.... Well, we don't know the whole story there, but Shakespeare makes it pretty clear that she wasn't involved in the murder of Claudius, or even aware of it.
It is too simple to say merely that Shakespeare loses interest the story he starts out to tell part way through the play and starts telling another. In fact, just as in The Merchant of Venice, he has no qualms about telling one story and another completely contradictory story at the same time.
As the play goes on, its thematic focus keeps changing. Especially with the advent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we move on to the theme of the man who is surrounded by enemies and has almost nobody he can trust. This is a powerful theme for us today. (It has often been used very effectively, for instance, by Alfred Hitchcock as well as Philip K. Dick.) I think that in fact one measure of whether the play is actually working for a particular reader or member of the audience is the extent to which the person does not wonder whether maybe the truth is that Hamlet is a paranoiac.
Shakespeare tells us exactly what his characters say and do, but what bothers us so often is that he doesn't make it clear what judgments we are to make on these characters. Apparently this was not something that Shakespeare cared very much about, and I believe that if one really understands what the performances he put on were like, one will realize that apparently it did not concern his audiences very much either.
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 writer. 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.
And beyond this --- and this is one of the points Norman Rabkin makes in his book Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning --- even when critics disagree about something in a literary work, this doesn't always mean that one is wrong and the other is right. It is possible for even completely contradictory interpretations to both be valid.
Tolstoy finds that Shakespeare has a certain technical skill which is partly traceable to his having been an actor, but otherwise has no merits whatever. He has no power of delineating character or of making words and actions spring naturally out of situations, his language is uniformly exaggerated and ridiculous, he constantly thrusts his own random thoughts into the mouth of any character who happens to be handy, he displays, 'A complete absence of aesthetic feeling,' and his words 'have nothing whatever in common with art and poetry.' Moreover, his opinions are not original or interesting, and his tendency is 'of the lowest and most immoral.'
According to Orwell, Tolstoy's judgment was based on the statements of two critics, Gervinius and Brandes.
I don't think we have to worry too much about who Gervinius and Brandes were. (I certainly don't know!) The point is, in my opinion, that although Tolstoy's comments seem at first like those of a total idiot, he is, in my opinion, correct on almost every point. And yet he has missed the whole point.
Tolstoy and Shakespeare are, I believe, at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to their presentation of meaning in their works. Tolstoy, at least in his later years, believed that literature ought to have a moral purpose. And from his perspective, one could certainly see how Shakespeare's plays would seem "of the lowest tendency and immoral." Tolstoy was very clear about the meaning his stories and novels were intended to communicate, and did everything possible to be sure that this would be understood by the reader.
Shakespeare's primary purpose, on the other hand, was to entertain. He did not seem to have any interest in changing people's minds and attitudes and it seems to have never occurred to him that plays could serve that purpose. And, considering the nature of his audience, I think we need to acknowledge that he showed good sense in this respect. (Except for rare special performances, most of Shakespeare's audience consisted of craftsmen, small shopkeepers, and the like living in the neighborhood of the theatre. They arrived at the theatre on foot.)
Likewise, Tolstoy is correct that Shakespeare's plays do not delineate characters. Instead, Shakespeare's plays show us characters saying certain things, and tell us various isolated details about these characters. Shakespeare does not tell us what these speeches and details mean about the character. And yet, from the information Shakespeare gives, our imaginations generate incredibly alive characters. We are sure that we know these characters well.