Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

I could imagine no better end to our reading of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays than Measure for Measure, a play which two very trustworthy friends of mine call his greatest and which to me has some of the poetry that we've encountered so far. Often numbered among Shakespeare’s “problem plays”--those that appear destined for tragedy until a last-minute turn toward comedy--Measure has sparked a great number of interpretations. G. Wilson Knight considered the play a parallel to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, with the Duke as the enlightened philosopher-teacher; while Harold Bloom finds the Duke to be idiotic and locates the hero in Barnardine, the imprisoned drunk who refuses to be executed. Maybe, though, the critic Walter Pater put it best when he said that Measure contains “a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the central expression of [Shakespeare’s] moral judgments.”

Morality and Mortality

Since the play is not as well known as some of Shakespeare’s others, let’s give a quick synopsis. The Duke of Vienna suddenly leaves his post and puts in charge Angelo, a law-abiding but inexperienced man who immediately enforces all the laws that had fallen by the wayside during the Duke’s tenure. Claudio is the first man to be arrested because of the laws, as he had premarital sex with his fiancée. While he sits in prison, his sister, Isabella, pleads his case to Angelo, who ironically falls in love with her, and in exchange for her brother’s freedom, he asks her to sleep with him. Meanwhile, the Duke has inexplicably donned the robes of a friar and goes to the prison to minister to Claudio. A lot of things happen--including the friar tricking Angelo into having sex with his former lover Mariana and tricking Isabella into thinking her brother has been executed by Angelo--before the play ends with the Duke revealing himself and pairing off all the characters, taking Isabella for himself.

At issue in the play, which neither Wilson Knight nor Bloom would deny, is the chasm between “godlike aspirations and fallible human implemention,” as the introduction puts it. Angelo enforces the law to the letter and has no time for mercy or sympathy. The Duke says as much in his estimation of him: “Lord Angelo is precise, / Stands at a guard with envy, scarce confesses / That his blood flows, or that his appetite / Is more to bread than stone. Hence shall we see, / If power change purpose, what our seemers be.” Moreover, consider the way Escalus, another lord, questions his judgment:

“[I]n the working of your own affections, / Had time cohered with place or place with wishing, / Or that the resolute acting of your blood / Could have attain'd the effect of your own purpose, / Whether you had not sometime in your life / Err'd in this point which now you censure him.”

He asks, Could you not picture yourself committing the same offense under any circumstances at all? Angelo, stubborn to the end, responds simply: “Sir, he must die.” Yet even he cannot ignore the poetry of Isabella’s words, which must count as some of the most moving lines Shakespeare ever wrote:

“Alas, alas; / Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, / And he that might the vantage best have took, / Found out the remedy. How would you be, / If he, which is the top of judgment, should / But judge you as you are? O think on that, / And mercy then will breathe within your lips, / Like man new made.”  Then: “So you must be the first that gives this sentence, / And he, that suffers. O it is excellent / To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant… / Could great men thunder / As Jove himself does, Jove would never be quiet, / For every pelting petty officer / Would use his heaven for thunder, / Nothing but thunder. Merciful heaven, / Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt / Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak / Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man, / Dressed in a little brief authority, / Most ignorant of what he’s most assured – / His glassy essence – like an angry ape / Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As makes the angels weep; who with our spleens, / Would all themselves laugh mortal.”

Isabella is the symbol of purity and mercy, a woman so committed to virtue that she joins the strictest convent she can find, and as such, she seems a perfect match for Angelo, the strictest enforcer of the law. This is true in more ways than one, for when Angelo hears her speech, he is not moved to free Claudio, but rather falls in love with her: “Ever till now, / When men were fond, I smiled and wondered how.” Angelo, who has never felt his blood flow, feels it now without a shadow of a doubt. Yet this recognition does not reveal to him his errors.

Let us turn to consider Claudio. Isabella’s poor brother, unlike Angelo, understands the depravity present in all people, including himself: “As surfeit is the father of much fast, / So every scope by the immoderate use / Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane [i.e., ravenously drink poison], / A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die.” Such recognition is more than Angelo can muster, but it is cold comfort when he is about to be executed.

Even colder comfort is the visit he receives from the Duke, who has dressed as a friar for reasons which are unclear. Though his dress is saintly, he does not have the “spiritual solace” thing down quite yet: his words to Claudio sound more like a philosophical treatise than a prayer:

“Be absolute for death; either death or life / Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing / That none but fools would keep. A breath thou art, / Servile to all the skyey influences / That dost this habitation where thou keep’st / Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death’s fool, /For him thou labor’st by thy flight to shun, / And yet run’st toward him still. Thou art not noble, / For all th’ accomotations that thou bear’st /Are nursed by baseness. Thou’rt by no means valiant, /  for thou dost fear the soft and tender fork / Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep, / And that thou oft provok’st , yet grossly fear’st / Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself, / For thou exists on many a thousand grains / That issue out of dust.” We should think of Hamlet, who calls life a “quintessence of dust.”

The Duke beseeches Claudio to “reason with life,” as if such a thing were possible, and goes on to remind him of how poor and depraved he is, as if he did not know. The Duke continues:

“Thou are not certain; / For thy complexion shifts to strange effects / After the moon. If thou art rich, thou’rt poor; / For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, / Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey, / And Death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none; / For thine own bowels which do call thee sire, / The mere effusion of thy proper loins, / Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum / For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth, nor age, / But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep / Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth / Becomes as aged , and doth beg the alms / Of palsied eld: and when thou art old and rich, / Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty / To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this / That bears the name of life? Yet in this life / Lie hid moe thousand deaths; yet death we fear / That makes these odds all even.”

The beauty and nuance of such a passage notwithstanding, it isn't very comforting. Before we get to Claudio’s response, let’s look at Samuel Johnson’s great comment on the after-dinner’s sleep bit: “When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening.”

Claudio, while the Duke is with him, appears to be strengthened by this speech, whether truly or falsely, but when Isabella visits him later on, it is clear that he received no solace from the friar-duke, who appealed to his intellect alone. Claudio gives his own masterful speech on the horrors of death:

“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where, /  To lie in cold obstruction and to rot, / This sensible warm motion to become / A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit / To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside / In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice, / To be imprisoned in the viewless winds / And blown with restless violence round about / The pendent world; or to be worse than worst / Of those that lawless and incertain thought / Imagine howling, ‘tis too horrible. / The weariest and most loathed worldly life / That age, ache penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature is a paradise / To what we fear of death.”

His speech is manifestly Catholic, straight out of the Inferno, and it demonstrates what the Duke does not know: that there can be no intellectual comfort from such fear. When Isabella tries to mollify him, he refuses to accept it and asks her to appease Angelo by sleeping with him, a request that she of course cannot fulfill. She, like Angelo, cannot confess that she is human, that her blood flows. Just as Angelo does not bend the law for mercy, so too can Isabella not bend her virtue for her mercy. As Angelo himself says of her ethic, “More than our brother is our chastity.”

Wilson Knight and the Gospels

G. Wilson Knight and his essay, “Measure for Measure and the Gospels,” were fun to read for the same reason that Harold Bloom is often fun to read: he proposes a concrete, unambiguous reading that is not only erudite but incredibly controversial. Here, he states without qualification the central theme, that of "the moral nature of man in relation to the crudity of man’s justice,” and goes on to explain the characters: “Isabella stands for sainted purity, Angelo for Pharisaical righteousness, the Duke for a psychologically sound and enlightened ethic.”

None of that is very strange, save for the bit about the Duke. The Duke does not often appear enlightened, as his shitty advice to Claudio seems to indicate. Certainly he functions in the play as the author and judge, and all the events between his leaving his post and returning to it could be read as a play within the play, one orchestrated by the Duke himself. What evidence do we have of his enlightenment?

Wilson Knight claims that the Duke has let Vienna's laws go unenforced (which is true from the text of the play), not because he is incompetent, but because “meditation and self-analysis, together with profound study of human nature, have shown him that all passions and sins of other men have reflected images in his own soul.” True, he does have some rather insightful things to say about some characters, as we noted with his comment on Angelo above, but profound? Meditative? That feels like he’s reaching.

Yet Wilson Knight also locates many fascinating parallels to the Gospels in the play, excluding the obvious source of the title, Matthew 7:2: “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” One example comes from Escalus’ question to Angelo about whether he would not have committed the same offense had “time cohered with place.” He sees it as analogous to this teaching of Christ: “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28) To me, this had always seemed like a harsh admonition, a command to remain pure in thought as well as deed. Wilson Knight, however, makes the argument that committing adultery in one’s heart means that the sin would have been committed had all hindrances been removed. If a man lusts after a woman, it means that he would sleep with her given the opportunity, and such lust is inexcusable. God, though, is a merciful judge, one who knows the world and the people within it and can judge them according to their hearts, whereas Angelo is simply “dressed in a little brief authority,” with no such power.

Of the strangeness readers find in the play, such as the weirdo ending, Wilson Knight has this to say: “And, if ever the thought at first sight seems strange, or the action unreasonable, it will be found to reflect the sublime strangeness and unreason of Jesus’ teaching.” Which is an interesting thought, because the gospel morality does have a sublime logic to it that resembles but is distinct from ours.

Wilson Knight’s reading has some support. Northrop Frye sees the biblical influences as well: he wites that Angelo’s legalism “really descends from what is called in the Bible the knowledge of good and evil. This was forbidden knowledge, because…it’s not a genuine knowledge at all: it can’t even tell us anything about good and evil. This kind of knowledge came into the world along with the discovery of self-conscious sex, when Adam and Eve knew that they were naked, and the thing that repressive legalism ever since has been most anxious to repress is the sexual impulse.” Put another way, Angelo possesses the trappings of power, as Kafka might say, but not power itself. Indeed many things in this play have the absurdity of Kafka or Beckett, an idea to which we will return.

Frye, however, sees in Measure not a Christian ethic, but a primitive one: it “reflects the priority of mythology to ideology," and goes on to say, 

"His later plays are more primitive than the earlier ones, not, as we might expect, less so. They get closer all the time to folk tales and myths, because those are primitive stories: they don’t depend on logic, they don’t explain things and don’t give you room to react: you have to listen or read through to the end.”

Barnardine or Bust

Bloom comes in to argue against such a positive reading of the Duke. To him, the Duke is supremely incompetent, spouting false wisdom everywhere he goes (e.g., to Claudio). But this may be influenced by his view that the play is the Bard’s “farewell to comedy,” and serves to “purge Shakespeare of whatever residual idealism” he had left. Shakespeare likely wrote Measure just before the sequence of famous, dark tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear; and like those plays, Measure “harbors a deep distrust of nature, reason, society, and revelation,” at least in Bloom’s mind.

“To be sober in this mad play is to be madder than the maddest,” he writes, and as such he spends most of his energy on Barnardine, who stays drunk in his prison cell every day. Barnardine is “the genius of [Vienna’s] disorder, and qualifies as the imaginative center (and greatest glory) of Measure for Measure.” The notion of disorder is interesting and certainly apropos, and Bloom follows with a list of examples:

“Claudio pleads in Act I that all he and Juliet lack is ‘outward order’; except for that, they truly are husband and wife. Angelo, grimly allowing the ‘fornicatress,’ Juliet, ‘needful, but not lavish means,’ adds, ‘There shall be order for’t.’ The Duke also intricately plays upon ‘order,’ as he commands the beheading of Barnardine: ‘By the vow of mine order…’ Sublimely, Barnardine refuses to cooperate: ‘I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion.’ The idea of order in Vincentio’s Vienna ultimately is an idea of death.”

Death is at the heart of order just as it is at the heart of disorder, for all things tend toward decay. In a vacuum, the orderly thing to do is to die, and in a way, death is the trivial ordering, the order of least resistance. It would be impossible, for example, for someone to evaluate each fornicating couple to see who is engaged to be married and who is just getting their rocks off, so all are condemned to death. Which is why, when Barnardine refuses to be executed, the guards order him to be beaten until he consents. Though such consent is meaningless, it has the appearance of meaning, of order. In the most Beckettian moment of the play, Pompey urges Barnardine to die, saying, “Awake till you are executed, and sleep afterwards.”

Bloom is not wrong, then, to say that order in Vienna is death; where he seems to go wrong is attributing that death-drive to the Duke. Though I would not go so far as Wilson Knight and say that the Duke has an enlightened consciousness, he is also not the idiot that Bloom makes him out to be. Rather, Vienna has a death-drive only insofar as each civilization has one forced upon it by necessity. It is easier to kill than to understand, and Vienna doesn’t have too much understanding under Angelo’s rule.

A final point on Barnardine: he is a rather interesting figure in the play, as he is the only one (apart from the Duke) who seems capable of free thought. When Isabella, for example, is confronted with a choice, sex Angelo or have a dead brother, she feels bound to those options and cannot choose, and in doing so, has a choice made for her, first by Angelo, then by the Duke. Barnardine, on the other hand, is presented with two options, consent to die or get beaten until he consents to die, and locates the third choice: to live. Bloom’s fascination with livelihood in Shakespeare’s characters easily leads him to exalt Barnardine here, and it is not totally unwarranted.

The Measure of All Things

I firmly believe that the middle way is often the right way, and here I would volunteer a middle of the road reading of the Duke, who is certainly the most important figure in the play. (Sorry, Harold Bloom.) The introduction makes the following point about the ending:

"Perhaps, however, the play’s forced and ambiguous resolution underlines the old dramatic truism that only God can write Act V. Although this duke plays God more than most stage characters do, and takes over the plotting of the play (perhaps that is one implication of being God’s deputy), the solutions he delivers are no less flawed, theatrical, and conventional than he is."

The Duke seems neither an enlightened intellect nor a drooling imbecile; the fact that such divergent interpretations are both possible and convincing is a testament to Shakespeare's power. Rather, he is, like everyone else in the play, a human. He starts things off by deputizing Angelo, thereby extending his political and moral authority to a subordinate. That Angelo is less effective than the Duke is debatable: more people are arrested, sure, but nowhere does that count as efficacy, except in the US (topical humor!); rather, the point that seems reinforced to me is that all authority is inherently flawed. The Duke, in theory, is a deputy of God, enforcing civil laws which mirror divine laws, but he finds himself unable to play the role of God, as his stint as friar shows all too plainly. Nor can he play the role of cupid (or Puck), as he proves in the final court scene. Yet again, he takes on the role of a deputy of God, determining who belongs with whom, and again, the results are mixed at best. Which is perhaps the best reading I can think of for the ending: it is the last decision in a chain of decisions by a chain of deputies, and given how well the other decisions have worked out, we do not have much hope for this one.

Stray Observations

• More from Pater: "The idea of justice involves the idea of rights. But at bottom rights are equivalent to that which really is, to facts; and the recognition of his rights therefore, the justice he requires of our hands, or our thoughts, is the recognition of that which the person, in his inmost nature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discover that which really is in matters of feeling and thought, true justice is in its essence a finer knowledge through love."
• More from Frye: Calls the Duke a “trickster figure” trying to turn tragedy into comedy; refers to the Duke’s “benevolent trickery,” much like Maimonides’ concept of God's gracious ruse.
• Escalus: “What news abroad i’ th’ world?" Duke, as friar: “None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness that the dissolution of it must cure it. Novelty is only in request, and it is as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth [knowledge of human nature] enough alive to make societies secure, but security [self-confident “justice”] enough to make fellowships accursed. Much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world. This news is old enough, yet it is ever y day’s news.”
• Duke: “Put not yourself into amazement how these things should be; all difficulties are but easy when they are known.” For example, justice, love, etc.
• Lucio, to encourage Isabella: “Our doubts are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft might win, / By fearing to attempt. Go to Lord Angelo / And let him learn to know, when maidens sue / Men give like gods; but when they weep and kneel, / All their petitions are as freely theirs / As they themselves would owe them.”
• From the introduction: “The social and prison worlds become increasingly interdependent, and the solution to the problems of the play depends on the mobility of characters across the supposedly dividing line.” This seems to be a common feature of Shakespeare. We should refer to it again when we come to Othello.

Shakespeare, As You Like It; Twelfth Night

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.”

John Donne, Songs and Sonnets

I’ve been reading Shakespeare at a slightly accelerated pace: not necessarily fast, but definitely not what you’d call “leisurely.” I have it in my head that I should finish him by June, when it will have been exactly three years since I first began this reading list (this blog was conceived a little later). This falls into the category of “problems I create for myself,” but it’s good to not get bogged down in the details of Shakespeare, which is very, very easy to do. I don’t, however, want to put everything on pause while I trudge through the Bard, so I’ll continue to work through the reading list while I finish him up.

Today, then, is John Donne, one of the three major metaphysical poets (the others being George Herbert and Andrew Marvell). All three are poets whom I read in school but never really “got,” and frankly I think they’re a little too much for a high school sophomore to wrap his head around. As is the case with all poets, Donne is working in conversation with poets from the past, specifically Petrarch, to whom he owes many of the tropes of love poetry that he so deftly shapes and reshapes. Moreover, Donne truly lives up to the title of “metaphysical” poet, as his poetry contains long and complex meditations on religion, spirituality, infinity, and even Neoplatonism. He often reads like a Persian Sufi poet in the way he marries romantic love with the experience of the divine, which makes his approach interpretation of traditional love poetry truly fascinating. We will focus here on his songs and sonnets; his religious poetry, which occasionally overlaps with his sonnets, feels more conventional, at least in its themes if not in its style.

Love, Revisited

We mentioned that Donne owes a lot to Petrarch for establishing the language with which to talk about love, and it’s interesting how relevant and modern many of those tropes feel, though his spin on them is always refreshing. Consider the simply titled poem, “The Broken Heart,” where he muses on the self-annihilating nature of love:

“He is stark mad, who ever says, / That he hath been in love an hour, / Yet not that love so soon decays, / But that it can ten in less space devour; / Who will believe me, if I swear / That I have had the plague a year? / Who would not laugh at me, if I should say, / I saw a flask of powder burn a day?”

Love is like a fast chemical reaction or a plague, something that destroys and decimates, with the power to metamorphose one thing into another. Who has not heard pop songs comparing love to something like fire or a drug (I’m looking at you, Ke$ha) that is swift and merciless?

Other poems hint at more complicated assessments of love. Consider the poem “Lovers’ Infiniteness,” which deals with the familiar idea that love can be, in some sense, infinite in measure. Yet he astutely recognizes the problems inherent in this idea. First, if she did not offer him all her love, then he can never win it all, if it is indeed infinite. Nor could he have all of her if she had offered it to him at one point, for “All was but all”: there is more to her today than the day she gave him all her love. What’s more, he realizes he can never possess all of her, because that would mean his love would one day plateau, yet he says that it grows every day. Maybe it’s the mathematician in me, but it’s cool to hear a poet give the logic behind his words due consideration, and even cooler when that consideration yields a fuller understanding of the words: for he doesn’t conclude from these meditations that love is finite, QED; rather he is able to understand better what the infinitude of love truly means.

Consider also “The Dream,” wherein the poet is awoken from a dream by his lover, and he feels as if his waking life is a continuation of the dream. Certainly we’ve heard that a beautiful lover may be a dream come true, but the focus is not on the beauty of the lover, but what she represents: a force that conflates reality and fantasy, truth and fiction: “My dream thou brok’st not, but continued’st it; / Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice / To make dreams truths, and fables histories…” We will talk more about the line between dreams and reality later when we get to Descartes, but for now it’s interesting to consider the function of the lover for Donne: she is the instrument of truth the world, the dividing line between what is real and what is not.

Whence comes the metaphysical aspect of Donne’s poetry. Though the woman he loves is a person, she represents divinity and the manifestation of the perfect world in ours. And though both the poet and the lover exist in the world, they somehow transcend finitude through their love. In the poem “A Fever,” where his lover is sick and near death, he doesn’t worry that she will die because if she did, she would take the world with her: she is not only his world, but that which sustains the whole world:

“But yet thou canst not die, I know, / To leave this world behind, is death, / But when thou from this world wilt go, / The whole world vapours with thy breath. / … / Oh wrangling schools, that search what fire / Shall burn this world, had none the wit / Unto this knowledge to aspire, / That this her fever might be it?”

All and Nothing

Donne, like Shakespeare, enjoys playing with the idea of “nothing,” of negation, nonbeing, and the paradoxes those ideas engender. Love has a transformative power, as every lover since Ovid, and even before, knew. When it departs, it leaves the poet as the dried husk of a man, or even perhaps less:

“Study me then, you who shall lovers be / At the next world, that is, at the next spring: / For I am every dead thing, / In whom love wrought new alchemy. / For his art did express / A quintessence even from nothingness, / From dull privations, and lean emptiness / He ruined me, and I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.” (“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”)

Love, which sustains the world, which is the essence of truth and reality, also has the power to unmake: its absence is darkness, death, negation.

The obverse of nothingness is completeness, which, if we learned anything from the medieval philosophers, can be as inscrutable as nothingness. Just as God is unknowable, so is love. From the poem “Farewell to Love”:

“I thought there was some deity in love / So did I reverence, and gave / Worship; as atheists at their dying hour / Call, what they cannot name, an unknown power, / As ignorantly did I crave…”

Two poems I think touch on these ideas (negation and completion), and I would like to consider them a little more closely. The first is one of Donne’s more famous poems, “Negative Love”. Being good students, we instantly think of “negative theology,” the idea that God cannot be described except in terms of what He is not: He is not finite, He is not corporeal, etc; that through knowing what He is not, we get a sense of what He is. The poem is short, so let’s quote the whole thing:

“I never stoop'd so low, as they / Which on an eye, cheek, lip, can prey; / Seldom to them which soar no higher / Than virtue, or the mind to admire. / For sense and understanding may / Know what gives fuel to their fire; / My love, though silly, is more brave; / For may I miss, whene'er I crave, / If I know yet what I would have. / If that be simply perfectest, / Which can by no way be express'd / But negatives, my love is so. / To all, which all love, I say no. / If any who deciphers best, / What we know not—ourselves—can know, / Let him teach me that nothing. This / As yet my ease and comfort is, / Though I speed not, I cannot miss.”

We get a sense of Donne’s love: he doesn’t love her for her outer beauty, which many who speak of inner beauty will admire. Yet Donne doesn’t stop at inner beauty either: “virtue, or the mind” are not the object of his admiration, for he can describe what those things are, and love that has reasons is not love. Loving everything about a person is insufficient; for we have no understanding even of ourselves, so how can we expect to accurately love another person. (My edition quotes Montaigne: “And he who hath no understanding of himself, what can he have understanding of?”) Therefore, Donne loves instead what he cannot know, “that nothing,” that inexpressible, untranslatable nothing. This again gives us a sense that his love is infinite, boundless. I am reminded of a line from “John My Beloved,” off Sufjan Stevens’ new album: “I love you more than the world can contain / In its lonely and ramshackle head.” There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and to Donne, love is one of them.

As a side note, the idea of misguided or poorly aimed love recurs in Donne’s poems. In the poem “Love’s Alchemy,” he compares the love that people claim to find to compounds created in alchemy that are thought to be precursors of gold, but not gold itself: alchemists glorify “some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,” even though what they seek is (a) not that odoriferous thing, and (b) impossible through the means of alchemy. (This second point may not have been in Donne’s mind, but it certainly adds a dimension to our understanding.)

The other poem that I wanted to take a closer look at is “Air and Angels,” which is a portrayal of “realized” love, one that transcends a woman’s physical beauty and arrives at an abstract vision of “beauty.” Though he professes in “Negative Love” to not love because of outward appearances, he contends in A&A that he could not love without it: for although physical beauty is not an end in itself, one would not be able to recognize transcendent beauty without first understanding physical beauty:

“But since my soul, whose child love is, / Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, / More subtle than the parent is / Love must not be, but take a body too…”

If love were so subtle as to completely disregard beauty, the soul, which, like a child, can only understand by example, would not be able to comprehend love.

The connection between love, which is “some lovely glorious nothing,” and reality is explored also in the poem “The Ecstasy,” which has the line: “On man heaven’s influence works not so, / But that it first imprints the air, / So soul into the soul may flow, / Though it to the body first repair.” Heaven cannot work through men except through an intermediary, and so in order for two souls to be joined, first two bodies must be joined.

Stray Observations

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•       Penguin editions are usually very solid, but this one was especially good. AJ Smith carefully annotated the poems so that probably half the book is made up of notes; these aren’t simple glosses either, but often are interpretive, a rarity in Penguin books nowadays. Highly recommended if you plan to pick up a copy.
•       Another theme common to Donne is our personal responsibility for our own misery. From “Song”: “But come bad chance, / And we join to it our strength, / And we teach it art and length, / Itself o’er us to advance.” It reminds me of that great line from High Fidelity, paraphrased here: which came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
•       From “The Sun Rising”, which plays on the common theme of young lovers separating at sunrise: “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. / She is all states, and all princes, I, / Nothing else is. / Princes do but play us; compared to this, / All honour’s mimic; all wealth alchemy.” And a final command: “Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; / This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.”

Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew; A Midsummer Night's Dream; The Merchant of Venice

To paraphrase a statement made about K. in The Trial, I make it a point not to learn from experience: this time, we will again combine three plays into one post, not to preserve any sort of continuity but more simply to hide the fact that I don’t have much to say about them. These plays constitute some of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies (i.e., not the "big four"), and while I might have interesting observations if I were more of a poet, as this was the time when he really honed his technique, there isn’t as much philosophical heft to these plays, at least in the way that interests me. Of today’s plays, Midsummer has the most of what I would consider “Shakespearean”: long passages pregnant with meaning, characters who seem out of place in their world, metafictional aspects. Taming lacks most of these features, as does Merchant.

Additionally, discussions around Taming and Merchant usually focus on political rather than literary or philosophical matters. Critics make attempts to save Shakespeare from being a sexist or an anti-Semite, hoping that he was as forward-thinking in his politics as he was in his art. Whether or not they are right, the discussions are pretty uninteresting (although we will touch briefly on that discussion in relation to Taming).

In the sections below, we’ll take the plays one at a time, an approach that will hopefully prove more fruitful than our Henriad hodgepodge.

Taming of the Shrew

One undeniably “Shakespearean” feature of Taming is the play-within-a-play, which turns out to essentially be the entire play. In the opening, the vagrant Christopher Sly is duped into thinking he is an aristocrat, and the story of Katherine’s taming is told for his entertainment. We notice that this framing device is very similar to Arabian nights, and not only because of the story-within-a-story: one of the people duping him is a page pretending to be his wife, and Sly tries to have sex with him; the page convinces him to watch a play instead. Interestingly, we never return to Sly’s story. He gets a couple lines after the story begins, in act I, but then he’s gone. As far as I can tell, there’s no good explanation for his disappearance, and I'd rather not waste time speculating.  

The story itself is well-known in the sense that everyone remembers what the title promises: a shrew, Katherine, is tamed by a man, Petruchio. What’s so great about Shakespeare, though, is that the story is considerably more complicated than this. I’m not going to try to save him from charges of sexism, because that seems even more useless than speculating about Sly, but it is worth noting that his presentation of the “taming” is more subversive than it seems at first blush. As the introduction notes, for all Katherine’s famous temper, “She turns out to be remarkably pliable, doing exactly as her father… wish[es] her to do. Her younger sister, Bianca, on the surface all sweetness and good nature, is in fact the willful one, getting what she wants by pretending to be pliable. In a sense the taming of Katherine consists of turning her into Bianca—revealing to Katherine that she can get what she wants out of her husband by simply telling him what he wants to hear.”

And indeed she does, proving herself to be a "better" wife than Bianca and the weird prostitute or whatever that Hortensio brings, and along the way convincing Petruchio that she has been tamed.

Speaking of the taming, the descriptions of Katherine’s ordeal at Petruchio’s hands vary in intensity. The introduction says that Katherine “is wooed by bullying, invective, and physical mistreatment” and elsewhere accusations of starvation and torture are levied as well. In a way, these characterizations are true—Katherine does complain at one point about Petruchio not letting her eat—but that doesn’t stop them from being misleading. In casting Katherine as traumatized and helpless, we miss two key points. The first is that Petruchio, for all his torments, is giving her a taste of her own medicine: Petruchio “kills her in her own humour.”

Of course the notions of taming and domestication are abhorrent to us now, but viewing them simply as despicable distracts us from the second point, namely that Katherine’s wooing is the complement of Bianca’s. The introduction notes that while Katherine is wooed through mistreatment, Bianca is wooed “by impersonation, rhetoric, and charm,” and that “the two suitors’ methods have more in common than appears on the surface” as both depend on “misrepresentation, costume, and playacting.” Though the content is disturbing, the doubling, the shifting of offices, the subversion of expectations, is all very poetic. In that regard, Taming is a nice play. (Besides, the “physical mistreatment” seems funnier than critics make it out to be; there are worse atrocities in Married… with Children.)

Stray Observations

• Tranio to Lucentio on why to study: “Only, good master, while we do admire / This virtue and this moral discipline, / Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray, / Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks / As Ovid be an outcast quite adjured. / Balk logic with acquaintance that you have / And practice rhetoric in your common talk. / Music and poesy use to quicken you. / The mathematics and metaphysics, / Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you. / No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en. / In brief, sir, study what you must affect [like].”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Midsummer, one of Shakespeare’s few original creations, was written around the time of Richard II, and to me, the two plays bear a good deal of resemblance to one another. For one thing, they both deal with big questions: Richard, about the relationship between power and mortality, Midsummer, about the boundary between reality and fantasy. Moreover, they address these questions with an intellectual seriousness that adds great enjoyment to the plays. As the introduction puts it, the play “marks the beginning of [Shakespeare’s] artistic maturity.”

At issue in the play, as we noted, is the relationship between reality and fantasy: “The Athenian court, where the action begins, is associated with the law, with reason…the wood outside Athens…is the realm of magic.” Yet thinking in such terms is detrimental to an understanding of the play, which emphasizes the fluidity and interdependency of the two: for all the incursions the fairy-world makes on the “real” world, the fairies are not all-powerful guardians of another realm, but fallible beings that have close cousins in Athens. Think of the domestic squabbling between Titania and Oberon vs Theseus and Hippolyta; think of the way Titania falls for Puck’s spell just as Lysander does.

Where the relationship between of reality and fantasy figures in is rather in the stubbornness of the humans, who, save for Bottom, have no knowledge of the fairy world; though we get the feeling that some characters—Hippolyta, notably—are amenable to the existence of such a world, others, like Theseus, are far too dull for such knowledge. In addition, the young lovers are just as guilty of privileging reality over fantasy. When Lysander wakes up loving Helena instead of Hermia, he says, “The will of man is by his reason swayed / And reason says you are the worthier maid.” Though the fairies are the cause of “those twists that the lovers attribute to logic[,] their efforts to rationalize their changing affections ironically expose the inadequacy of reason to explain much human perplexity.”

The mortals are not the only dull ones. Oberon, who literally has a means of making people fall in love, rebukes Puck after he makes a mistake, saying he “laid the love juice on some true love’s sight.” Bloom notes, though, that the youths lack such personality that they must be “a Shakespearean irony that suggests the arbitrariness of young love, from the perspective of everyone except the lover.” Though Oberon's sentiment is heartwarming, we haven't seen much to suggest that the love between any of these crazy kids is "true." Puck, by the way, sounds an awful lot like Theseus when he says, “What fools these mortals be!" Both men (well, sort of "men") think little of the other's world, though neither has had any meaningful interaction with it.

Returning to the idea of love, what are we to make of this play's attitude toward love? We have noted the seeming randomness of it. When Demetrius says he “will not know what all but he do know,” namely that he loves Hermia over Helena, we scoff a little; when Lysander says to Helena “when I vow, I weep; and vows so born, / In their nativity all truth appears. / How can these things in me seem scorn to you, / Bearing the barge of faith to prove them true?” we may pause before we dismiss it; yet when Demetrius says to Lysander “disparage not the faith thou dost not know,” who can laugh? For all the arbitrariness that love seems to take on, we must not dismiss as Theseus does its importance and reality. Hermia says to Theseus, “I would [Theseus] looked but with [Hermia’s] eyes,” to which her father responds, “rather your eyes must with his judgment look.” 

Shakespeare convinces us easily that there is little factual basis to any of the claims of love in the play; he could’ve accomplished it even just by depicting Titania in love with Bottom as an Ass (there are so many double entendres there). Yet having been guided away from Scylla, we must not content ourselves in sailing into Charybdis, for to dismiss claims of love because we see no basis for them is to be dull like Theseus. The love we see on display may not be true, and it may be as random as Bloom says. But who can deny the reality of a love that speaks these words: “Things base and vile, holding not quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity. / Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged cupid painted blind. / Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste: / Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste. / And therefore is Love said to be a child, / Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.” You can thank plain, boring Helena for that number.

We haven’t spoken yet of Bottom and the players. Much is made of Bottom being the only character who communicates with the fairies as well as the mortals, and indeed, his part is symbolic: I mean, he literally says “the wall is down that parted their fathers.” He might as well have ripped the curtain in the temple.  

He and the players worry about the line between fantasy and reality, whether fair ladies will take the clothes of a lion to be an actual lion, which, by the way, is another paradox the play presents: the lion is both real and fake, just like love. In its fantasy, it exists in the world of fairies; in its admission of playacting, it is “practically a parody of Theseus’s view of reality,” as Northrop Frye puts it, and indeed, Theseus does enjoy it: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.”

The lighthearted fancies of Midsummer are not to last, though. Frye continues: “When we come to King Lear, we shall suspect that it takes a madman to see into the heart of tragedy, and perhaps it takes a fool or clown, who habitually breathes the atmosphere of absurdity and paradox, to see into the heart of comedy.” Indeed, another critic, Meredith Skura, argues similarly: “The affection and indulgence with which Shakespeare depicts Bottom will turn to self-loathing in the tragedies, where the player merely struts and frets his hour upon the stage, where imagination is self-annihilating, and where the world is so dark that illusion is always deceptive and usually fatal.”

Stray Observations

• Theseus’s great pedantry: “More strange than true. I never may believe / These antique fables nor these fairy toys. / Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends. / The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact. / One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: / That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic / Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. / The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, / And as imagination bodies forth / The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name. / Such tricks hath strong imagination / That, if it would but apprehend some joy, / It comprehends some bringer of that joy; / Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear.”  
• A thought from Northrop Frye related to the above quote: “What the poet apprehends are moods or emotions, like joy, and what he uses for comprehension is some story of character to account for the emotion.”

Merchant of Venice

Merchant was a very weird play to me. In some ways, it has rather traditional features of Shakespeare: play-acting, a brilliant female lead, anti-Semitism (wait, nevermind). In other ways, however, it feels so little like what we expect of Shakespeare. For example, Harold Bloom notes that Shakespeare generally dislikes plots in which young people get the better of old people, which was a common theme in his day (as in ours); yet that is what happens here. For another, the plot is extremely conventional. There are few twists, few subplots, few hidden motives; everyone seems to act exactly the way they are expected to. Which doesn’t make the play bad by any means, but it does make it a little boring.

Which is unfortunate, because it had a very promising opening. Portia and Nerissa are two fantastic characters, and their banter at the beginning is wonderful. Consider this speech of Portia’s:

“If to do were easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions; I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree; such a hare is madness the youth—to skip o’er the meshes of good counsel the cripple. But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband.”

Bloom puts a high premium on the “liveliness” of Shakespeare’s characters, and he gives Rosalind the highest place among the heroines. If I had a vote, it would be for Portia, but perhaps only the Portia of the first act.

And… yeah. That’s about all I have to say for Merchant. It was a pretty entertaining play, with some reprehensible anti-Semitism, but like I said for Taming, there’s no reason to either condemn Shakespeare or save him from our 21^st century maligning. (Plus, everyone addressing Shylock as “Jew” made me think of Borat, so that’s pretty funny.) 

Stray Observations

• Gratiano: “You have too much respect upon the world; / They lose it that do buy it with much care.”
• Gratiano: “All things that are / Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.”
• Antonio: “You cannot better be employed, Bassanio, / Than to live still, and write mine epitaph.”