William or “Shakespeare”

Admittedly, I have not yet begun to read our latest play, Henry VIII, but I have just finished reading about it. That’s something, isn’t it? Before beginning each play, I like to read short introductions from the 1974 Riverside Shakespeare. It was from this edition that the professor of my college Shakespeare class taught, and he required us to read the introductions from it even if we used another version to read the plays. I greatly respected this professor – he couldn’t turn on the VCR to save his life, but he could quote from Dante’s Inferno in Italian – and thus I have adopted some of his procedures as I undertake this great project. The Riverside introductions are short but informative, providing dates, possible sources, and controversies surrounding the play in question, making them perfect for my serious-yet-casual reading.

The four-page introduction for Henry VIII, written by Herschel Baker, deals with the authorship controversy for nearly two pages. I won’t go into the details, but in short, some scholars think that Shakespeare wrote the entire play while others think that he co-authored the text, perhaps writing less than half of it. The headache I got from this discussion isn’t entirely new: we ran into the same issues when exploring Pericles, and others surely will puzzle us as well. With both of these plays, I faced not only the problem of authorship but also a problem about the problem of authorship. Part of me wanted to just throw the question aside and analyze the play on its own – I’ve always been somewhat partial to formalist criticism – but another part of me started panicking. What if Shakespeare didn’t write this? Can I really read this play the way I would another, certainly-authentic play? Does this play even matter if it isn’t Shakespeare? Does it make me snobbish if I answer that last question, “No”?

A few weeks into our club, I had a more encompassing crisis when I watched Anonymous for the first time. I struggle with historically-based movies, even those not as controversial as Anonymous, because I, like the good English major I am, suspend my disbelief and take everything as fact. Unlike ordinary movies, though, the knowledge that certain characters and places did exist makes it difficult for me to remind myself that I must end the suspension. In short, although I don’t agree with what the film proposes, it too inspired that panic in me.

This all leads into a philosophic quandary (literary philosophy, yes, but still philosophy). Suppose Shakespeare didn’t write this particular play or any of the plays that bear his name. Does it matter? Do we care at all about William Shakespeare the human being, or is he merely a handy tag? There have been times when I have forgotten that Shakespeare has a first name and think of him as a Homer or Moses, eternally singly-named. I have been to the town in which Shakespeare was born, the houses in which he and his wife lived, and the reconstructed theater at which he acted, yet none of these locations influence the way I read Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For many people, I know, these things do matter. When I took that college class, the professor asked each of us what we were most interested in, and one student replied that she really wanted to know more about Shakespeare’s life. (The best friend whose name I can’t recall in Ten Things I Hate about You, while fictional, also leads me to believe that there are people out there who adore Shakespeare on a personal level.) For me, however, I’m not sure I do care. I know and appreciate Shakespeare through the situations, characters, ideas, and poetry of his plays, none of which need any support or life other than those plays. If it turns out William of Stratford didn’t write the words, the beauty of a certain phrase and the resonance of a particular theme remain the same for me. Historically speaking, if I’m interpreting an action or turn of phrase as a way to understand the past, as long as someone from that time period wrote the words, it doesn’t much matter who specifically. “Shakespeare” is more a category than a person.

Yet the question lingers in the periphery of my thoughts: how would our reading of Shakespeare change if we discovered our idea of Shakespeare wasn’t true?

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Lions, Downton, and Madness

Hamlet is full of eerie nights.

From the day we arrive on the planet, and blinking, step into the sun . . .

Oh, wait. The Lion King is nothing like Hamlet, so I probably shouldn’t quote the music. That was one of our first discussion points, actually. If the beloved cartoon was actually anything like the play, Simba would have died, Nala would have gone crazy and committed suicide, Simba would have indirectly killed Timon and Pumbaa . . .

Sorry, I’m done destroying your Disney memories now. But stay with me here. Even though not every one of us had read Hamlet before, we all had had some sort of experience with it. (Katy even pointed out that Sir Richard subtly quotes Hamlet in season 2 of Downton Abbey.) Our culture has used themes, quotes, characters, and plot points of Hamlet so much that it’s kind of hard to approach this play blindly. That said, our discussion seemed to follow themes and purpose more so than in past conversations which covered more of the plot. We had a great conversation, and I’ll touch on a couple of the biggest points.

Is Hamlet really mad? This has been addressed countless times in articles, classrooms, and theater groups. Our verdict: no, Hamlet isn’t really insane. The first reason for our conclusion can be summed up with Polonius’s line,  “Though this be madness, yet there / is method in’t” (2.2.207-208). If you follow Hamlet’s speech patterns, you’ll notice that his lines of prose are filled with puns which make sense in an odd sort of way. He actually reminded me of the common clown character, who appears in Shakespeare’s plays with nonsensical lines which, when explored more deeply, carry more truth than many of the most beautiful lines of verse. Compare this to Ophelia, who clearly does go insane, and whose lines don’t make nearly as much sense. Hamlet’s dialogue is not that of a madman.

Another reason why we think Hamlet isn’t insane is that his soliloquies are all in verse. Would it make sense for a madman to speak beautiful, well-structured lines of verse when by himself but not while around others? The most reasonable answer is that he’s trying to keep up a persona of a madman in the company of others to help him achieve his goal of murder. Whether this was effective or not is another discussion altogether. (As Whitney Tweeted, “Hamlet could learn from a TNT Law & Order marathon: making everyone talk about your strange behavior does NOT help you get away with murder.”)

Even though we didn’t see Hamlet as literally insane, we recognized that he underwent more and more psychological pressure as the play developed. While this isn’t insanity, it does play a role in Hamlet’s behavior, just as it would with any 3o-year-old whose father is murdered by his uncle. Yet this brings up another issue, which is the topic of insanity in general. In our modern day, we consider insanity  a reasonable excuse for behavior. If you’re not in your right mind when you commit a crime, you’re not liable to the same punishment as if you committed a premeditated crime. While Hamlet alludes to this idea when apologizing to Laertes (5.2.234-240), it’s never used as an argument anywhere else in this play, even when madness drives Ophelia to her death. It makes little sense to us, but we surmised that Shakespeare’s audience didn’t hold the same understanding of mental illness that we do today, and therefore their point of view on this subject would have been much different from ours. Perhaps Shakespeare was commenting on this in Hamlet’s apology; yet, if he was, he was doing a weak job of it, since Hamlet’s excuse doesn’t sound very believable in my opinion.

Whether or not Hamlet is mad, is he justified in his actions? I don’t think we ever came to an agreement on this topic. One theory is that we should consider him a hero (albeit tragic), since the play ends with Hamlet being glorified very much like Brutus in Julius Caesar. Not everyone in our group agreed with this view, however. Someone pointed out that Horatio was Hamlet’s version of a BFF, even an accomplice by the end of the play; in such a role, he would naturally tell a Hamlet-flattering tale. Therefore, in reality, it wasn’t so much Shakespeare telling us to justify Hamlet as much as it was a good friend remembering a not-so-good person. Rather than celebrating Hamlet’s accomplishment, the audience simply breathes a sigh of relief as Denmark is given a fresh start and the world becomes balanced again.

One interesting side thought I just have to bring up before closing: Fortinbras is an interesting parallel to Hamlet. Both princes haven’t been crowned king and instead see their uncles take the throne, with no real explanation for those of us who are interested in Scandinavian monarchy. Yet while Fortinbras becomes impatient and decides to go to battle with little thought of the consequences, Hamlet does the opposite and overthinks every action. Yet in the end, we know that it’s the impetuous Fortinbras who will be the next king of Denmark. Perhaps Hamlet admires Fortinbras’s drive and bravery, or maybe he simply wants to save the people from another struggle for the throne. We didn’t really have time to develop this thought fully, but it was an interesting line of discussion nonetheless.

And that’s how Hamlet leaves us: thinking. This play is so complex, full of action, and overflowing with themes, that I don’t believe we could have gotten anywhere near fully covering it in only one discussion. No wonder our culture so liberally borrows from Hamlet.

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Love’s Labor’s Lost, along with the need for those handy plot-mapping worksheets we had in elementary school

Due to the travails of the holiday season, the four of us met a little late to talk about this play. We were due to finish reading the play on Christmas Eve. Typically, we discuss by the end of the week, but what with visiting families, road trips, and New Year’s Eve parties, we couldn’t find a time until three weeks after we supposedly finished. As it was, I read up to Act IV, Scene 3 before Christmas… and then read the rest the day before we met. Thus, I had a difficult time picking out particularly interesting bits from this one, but I’ll do my best.

During that last reading session—amidst the seemingly endless dialogue about who loves whom, my sidelined pondering about how I should feel about the treatment of women in the play, and the realization that very few significant events have taken place and I’m nearly to the end of the play—a frightening thought crossed my mind.  I hope that this play wasn’t the Twilight of the early seventeenth century. Wouldn’t that be terrible? That we revere as a father of the English language a man who produced something akin to poorly-written, misogynistic teenage vampire literature? And we think it’s great now merely because he uses words like “sirrah” and “i'” (short for “in,” of course)?

In order to say and write something sensible about this work, I’ll just have to suspend my doubts. All four of us agreed that there isn’t much plot. We could summarize what actually happens somewhat like this:

1. King and three buddies take rather unreasonable oath not to do anything fun, including sleep, and just study for three years.
2. Uh-oh! Princess and her three friends arrive to see king (sadly, must camp outside as they aren’t allowed in the court due to oath).
3. All four men fall in love with all four women but are embarrassed about it in front of each other and also (very slightly) perturbed that they took an oath not to have anything to do with women for four years.
4. Men say, “Tough!” to oath and decide to woo women.
5. Women will have nothing to do with it, but men keep trying.
6. Princess’s father dies and her whole party must go back to France. Women tell men that if they’re good for a year, they have a chance.

I’m not leaving a lot out. Here is much the same thing written into a plot diagram. Note that I didn’t run out of boxes.

I just realized that I left the “conflict” box (oval, rather) empty. I won’t fix it now, though, because it is difficult to get words to fit right in Paint. Use your intelligence, or, if that fails, your imagination.

The point is: if we decide that Shakespeare is actually an at least passable writer, why would he write an entire play that could be told in the space of  a children’s board book? The key to answering this question lies in all that stuff that makes the play look like it’s substantive: all those words.

Language is a huge part of this play. Liz remarked that we might have gotten more out of it had we seen rather than read it, and I think that’s true. Of course, as twenty-first-century readers, we understand more when we read out of our annotated editions, but it seems that the vast majority of the play consists of witty banter that is best perceived and appreciated when spoken. Almost every character is full of words, insults, and retorts, with the exception of some very minor characters like Dull and Mote; even Costard the clown has a surprising store of puns and euphemisms. This constant play with words gives the illusion that something is actually happening in the play, which, as we reviewed, isn’t true. There are some categories of banter according to who is providing it. The men are often insensitive; Holofernes and Nathaniel use it to exclude; and the women tend to be encouraging but will bite back when necessary. Especially visible in the women’s use, Shakespeare implies that language, no matter how brilliant or flourishing, isn’t always good. Biron (as spelled in my edition but more commonly as “Berowne”), the most vicious of the men with his words, has a special penance to pay in order to win Rosaline: while the others must merely wait a year in solitude, Biron must spend his year with hospital patients—clearly not an appropriate venue for his degrading sort of wit. When he learns to use his speech with conscience and kindness, he will make a suitable groom.

The case of Holofernes and Nathaniel provides another angle of the language/action issue. Until the end, these two literally don’t do anything. Biron can at least say that he’s written some poems, spied on his friends, etc., but the pedants do nothing but talk (and, for the most part, I can’t remember anything they talk about). Anne Barton, in her introduction to the play in the Riverside edition of Shakespeare’s works, points out that Holofernes is the end result of what the king wants to do at the beginning of the play, that is, study almost without ceasing. Holofernes has a great deal of knowledge, certainly, but he can hardly relate to anyone but the almost-as-learned curate and seems to have no hobbies or, for that matter, joy. I can’t imagine what sort of woman would want to marry him, either. With this example, the play suggests that loving learning and especially loving language so much that it excludes everything else reaps the reward of a life void of many very important things: family, true friendship, and charity, to name a few.

To get back to the original point—why hardly anything happens in Love’s Labor’s Lost—if we consider the relationship between the lack of the plot and the proliferation of dialogue, we see that it comments on our tendency to cover up voids, especially voids of our own making. There are a few voids that I see in this play, the least of which is the very real space between the king’s court and the princess’s tent. We can infer a void in the original oath: surely if the king and his men had something better to do—say, spend time with their wives and children—they wouldn’t want to give all that up for three years. The men’s love also reveals itself as empty when they go to court the women. None realize that the women have switched favors and are talking to the wrong man, and I would suspect a person genuinely in love to recognize the voice of his or her paramour and to have some idea of what he or she looks like even without the face. But they think they’re doing okay in part because they have fancy speeches and declarations of love to win the ladies; never mind which lady, as such words should work equally well on each of them. Shakespeare invites us to compare these interchangeable vows with the women’s descriptions of what each of the men is like at the beginning of Act II. When substance is lacking, humans often talk to fill up the space and make it look real. The whole play, in a sense, has been lacking, and that is perhaps the reason that this comedy ends with an unusually marriage-free resolution.

Next week we will take a look at Hamlet, a play so full of everything that we may not know where to start.

As an item of interest related only loosely to this post, I searched in vain for a plot diagram of Twilight. How can no one have done that yet? (I am not going to; sorry.) But I did find a diagram on someone’s blog that includes the binary of comedy/tragedy (pertinent to Shakespeare and thus pertinent to this blog). Clicking on it goes to the blog from whence it came. I did not read more than two paragraphs of the “essay” because it seemed to take Twilight as literature.

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