The problem with Shakespeare’s place in my reading list—I promise that soon I will stop opening all my posts by complaining about Shakespeare—the problem is that his plays are short enough that I don’t have the time to write up an entry immediately after finishing one, which is my usual practice: writing up a post while reading the next book. With Shakespeare, I find myself always playing catch-up, and while I would like to spend the time meditating on these plays more, I suppose I’ll have to leave those exercises for the second time around. Today, we have a slightly less daunting task: only two plays, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Unfortunately, I remember very little about either of them, even though (or rather, because) I read them a couple weeks ago. My notes, however, will be sufficient to get us through these plays, which contain some of the best speeches in Shakespeare, all spoken by women: in the first place, by the incomparable Rosalind; then, in the love poetry between Olivia and Rosalind. As You Like It Someone I know referred to As You Like It as "that one without a plot," an assessment that doesn't become evident until the very end, when it seems as if all the conflicts that were built up throughout the play are resolved with several simultaneous deus ex machina; to give one example, Duke Frederick, who usurped Duke Senior's throne, magically repents and returns the throne to Senior, without any apparent reason. Motivation is often opaque in Shakespeare, but it usually feels more substantive than, "Surprise! War's over!" Nonetheless, the play is one of Shakespeare's most memorable (despite the fact I don't remember much about it). For one thing, it contains probably the most famous speech in Shakespeare's comedies, Jacques' "All the world's a stage" speech, which we might as well quote here because it's so great: "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players. / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, / Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. / Then, the whining school-boy with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, / Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then, a soldier, / Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, / Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel, / Seeking the bubble reputation / Even in the cannon's mouth. And then, the justice, / In fair round belly, with a good capon lined, / With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut, / Full of wise saws, and modern instances, / And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts / Into the lean and slippered pantaloon, / With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, / His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide / For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, / Turning again toward childish treble, pipes / And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." The comparison of life to a play is not too surprising, given Shakespeare's preoccupation with metadrama, and he will revisit the idea in a much more nihilistic mode in Macbeth’s final soliloquy. Jacques, though, is not a king facing his impending doom, but a young man afflicted by melancholy, who sees in life only deterioration and farce and folly. In this he serves as the counterpoint to Rosalind’s vitality. Note the way he closes his speech: sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. He is full of negation, acknowledging nothing but the meaningless shadows that plague life. Indeed, it is this emptiness that Rosalind seeks to disabuse Jacques of. Consider the following exchange between them: Jacques: Why, ‘tis good to be sad and say nothing. Rosalind: Why then, ‘tis good to be a post. Rosalind, astute as she is, immediately follows Jacques’ self-defeating argument to its logical conclusion: that one who rejects life may as well be inanimate. Jacques is nothing if not stubborn, and continues: J: I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.” R: “A traveler! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.” J: “Yes, I have gained my experience.” R: “And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad: and to travel for it too.” When Rosalind recognizes his melancholy as stemming from his itinerant lifestyle, Jacques does not get it; he dimly responds that his travels have indeed given him experience. I find it interesting that Rosalind does not respond that experience in general makes one sad, rather that Jacques’ experience in particular makes him sad. For what good, she seems to say, is experience if it does not confirm in one the great gift of life? One would be better off living as (or with) a fool and be able to travel with company, as well. Rosalind’s brilliant pragmatism leads Harold Bloom to call her one of the great educators in Shakespeare: “Hamlet diagnoses everyone he encounters, and is too impatient to teach them. Rosalind and Falstaff both augment and enhance life, but Hamlet is the gateway through which supernal powers, many of them negative, enter as intimations of mortality.” Of course, since As You Like It is a comedy, it cannot but tackle the subject of love. Once again, Rosalind brings her level-headed approach to the hopeless adolescence of the men in the play. This time, the student is Orlando, who confesses his love for her and claims that without her love he will die. She is not subdued by such words, but replies with one of the most beautiful speeches in Shakespeare: “No, faith, die by attorney [by proxy]. The poor world is almost six thousand years old [checkmate, atheists], and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet [namely], in a love cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was “hero of Sestos.” But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. Even in prose, Shakespeare cannot help but write in iambs. Rosalind asserts that love is not a force that condemns but vitalizes. Though the world is a place in which death occurs, where men of power and greatness can be devoured by simple worms, which feast on idleness and indolence and decay, love does not participate in such matters. Let us turn our attention to the other main figure in the play, the fool, Touchstone. He appears when Rosalind and her cousin, Celia, are talking, and they turn their attention to him: Celia: Though Nature hath given us wit to flout at Fortune, hath not Fortune sent in this fool [Touchstone] to cut off the argument? Rosalind: Indeed, there is Fortune too hard for Nature when Fortune makes Nature’s natural [Nature’s fool] the cutter-off of Nature’s wit. C: Peradventure this is not Fortune’s work neither, but Nature’s, who perceiveth our natural wits too dull to reason of such goddesses and hath sent this natural for our whetstone, for always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.” A touchstone is something used to judge quality; a whetstone is used for sharpening tools. Celia, then, is saying that though we have the ability to turn up our noses at fortune, we are not safe from its caprices, which she then revises, saying that perhaps it is not fortune that limits our abilities, but nature itself when it recognizes that we have strayed too far off course. This literal Touchstone is provided, then, for them to sharpen their wits against; sharpen, here, in an ironic sense, since the fool would actually serve to dull one’s wits. I will confess that while this passage is very intriguing, its meaning escapes me insofar as it is relevant to the play. Perhaps it is that Touchstone exists to remind us of the foolishness of things like love and honor. Consider these passages from him: “We that are true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly.” (I.e., all lovers reveal their humanity through their foolishness, according to my edition’s gloss.) “No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning [with a pun on faining, i.e., desiring], and lovers are given to poetry, and what they swear in poetry, it may be said, as lovers, they do feign.” (I.e., what lovers promise belie how they actually behave.) “But if you swear by that that is not, you are not forsworn; no more was this knight swearing by his honor, for he never had any.” If Rosalind is similar to Falstaff in that she is an educator, Touchstone is also similar to Falstaff in that he has no patience for falsehood masquerading as truth. Recall Falstaff’s attack on honor at the end of 1H4 and you will see a reflection of it in the above quotes. One of the more vexing parts of the play is the epilogue, wherein Rosalind appears on stage and breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly to the audience. Consider these lines: “And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women--as I perceive by your simpering none of you hates them--that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not.” Rosalind, or rather the male actor playing Rosalind, says that she would kiss the men in the audience if she were a woman. This is a promise that she does not have to keep, since she is, in fact, a man: recall that Touchstone says that swearing by what you are not means you are not forsworn (i.e., perjuring yourself). The actor playing Rosalind, then, seems to be in conversation with this sentiment: though he has ceased to play a character, he continues to keep up the appearance. This is a point that deserves more attention, and though we won’t say more about it now, let us not forget it. Twelfth Night Twelfth Night is another play that I wouldn’t have found very interesting had it not contained some of Shakespeare’s most beautiful speeches. (Can I keep calling them some of the most beautiful if they’re all some of the most beautiful?) As with so many of Shakespeare’s plays, two themes are at the fore here: the instability and uncertainty of identity, and the illogical nature of love. In Midsummer we are reminded that young love is arbitrary; here, we are told that “all sexual love is arbitrary in its origins,” as Harold Bloom writes, adding that, despite this, it is “overdetermined in its teleology.” In the play, Viola masquerades as a young man named Cesario and pleads with Olivia to love her (Viola’s) master, Duke Orsino. Unfortunately, due to the arbitrariness of love, Olivia falls in love with Viola/Cesario, which leads to this beautiful exchange, in which Viola gives a vision of love unmatched in Shakespeare: Viola: If I did love you in my master’s flame, / With such a suff’ring, such a deadly life, / In your denial I would find no sense; / I would not understand it. Olivia: Why, what would you? V: Make me a willow cabin at your gate / And call upon my soul within the house; / Write loyal cantons of contemned love / And sing them loud even in the dead of night; / Hall your name to the reverberate hills/ And make the babbling gossip of the air / Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest / Between the elements of air and earth / But you should pity me.” Let us not focus on the irony that this speech causes Olivia to fall in love with Viola when its intention was to make her fall in love with Orsino. Let us instead focus on the incredible poetry of her words. Her master loves with a “deadly life,” just as Orlando did, a life whose sights are set on death. Let us focus on the “loyal cantons of contemned love,” on the “babbling gossip of the air,” and consider that there are people who exist right now who don’t believe that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language. There is also the sense, apart from the irony, of the unreason of love, that the refusal of a woman could possess no sense to Viola, an unreason that is emphasized later on when it is Olivia’s turn to confess love to Viola/Cesario: Olivia: I prithee tell me what thou think’st of me. Viola: That you do think you are not what you are. O: If I think so, I think the same of you. [You don’t say?] V: Then think you right. I am not what I am. [Oh hey, Iago, didn’t see you there.] O: I would you were as I would have you be. V: Would it be better, madam, than I am? / I wish it might, for now I am your fool. O: O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful / In the contempt and anger of his lip. / A murd’rous guilt shows not itself more soon / Than love that would seem hid: love’s night is noon. / Cesario, by the roses of the spring, / By maidhood, honor, truth, and everything, / I love thee so that, maugre [despite] all thy pride, / Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide. / Do not extort thy reasons from this clause, / For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause; / But rather reason thus with reason fetter, / Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.” Olivia is perhaps more limited in her ability than Viola, and a little more misguided, but she has her moments. The closing couplet, especially, is worth the entire play: if Viola/Cesario must have a reason for accepting Olivia’s love, she should find it in this even greater and stronger reason: that it is better to be freely offered love than to win it. (We would also do well to notice that Olivia swears by “maidhood, honor, truth,” which, if we know anything about Shakespeare, Viola probably shouldn’t put much stock in; hence why I say Olivia’s a little more misguided.) There is another love story in the play that I want to mention: that of Malvolio. But it is not his love for Olivia that I find most interesting, but rather his odd and unfortunate position in the play. Harold Bloom makes the observation that he is a character similar to Shylock, and I had the very same thought. Both are characters who seem too serious for their plays. I think especially of Malvolio’s would-be soliloquy in II.5 which is constantly interrupted by Toby, Fabian, and Maria’s derisive comments. For being such a busybody (shut up, I’m not a 50-year-old woman), one feels very bad for Malvolio, as he is not so malevolent, despite how his name sounds; rather he is just in the wrong play. Consider his exchange with Feste, the clown, who is dressed as a curate visiting Malvolio’s cell: Feste: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl? Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. [Referring to the doctrine of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls after death.] F: What think’st thou of his opinion? M: I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion. F: Fare thee well: remain thou still in darkness. Feste indicates that identity is, as Bloom contends, “hopelessly unstable,” which Malvolio cannot or will not understand. And indeed, this fact is evident throughout the play, with its constant confusion of identities. Moreover, consider this remark by Toby, Olivia’s uncle and one of Malvolio’s tormentors, regarding Olivia mourning her brother’s death: “What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus. I am sure care’s an enemy to life.” Many things, Shakespeare may agree, are enemies to life: attachment to false ideals, absolutism; but not care. I don’t believe that Toby is speaking for Shakespeare here the way Rosalind, for example, may be said to speak for him; and he is certainly not speaking for Malvolio, who, misguided though he may be, possesses great care for Olivia, though it, like Olivia’s love for Viola/Cesario is misguided. One of the subtle tragedies of the play is the unfortunate condition of Malvolio. Stray Observations Toby: “Not to be abed after midnight is to be up betimes…” Andrew: “I know to be up late is to be up late.” Toby: “A false conclusion; I hate it as an unfilled can.”
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