“DUNĂREA DE JOS” UNIVERSITY OF GALAȚI

FACULTY OF LETTERS
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA

Associate Professor GABRIELA IULIANA

COLIPCĂ-CIOBANU, PhD

GALAȚI
2018-2019
 Table of Contents

The Rise of Secular Drama in Sixteenth-Century England ................................................. 2

Elizabethan Playhouses and Theatrical Performances ........................................................... 2
The First Comedies and Tragedies ......................................................................................... 3
The University Wits................................................................................................................ 5
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), or Elizabethan Drama at Its Best ................................ 9
An Overview of William Shakespeare’s Work ...................................................................... 9
The Shakespearean Controversy .......................................................................................... 10
Chronicle Plays ..................................................................................................................... 11
Case Study: Richard III (c. 1592-1593) ............................................................................ 13
Comedies .............................................................................................................................. 18
Case Study: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-1596) .................................................. 18
Tragedies .............................................................................................................................. 22
Case Study: Julius Caesar (1599-1600) ........................................................................... 22
Case Study: Romeo and Juliet (c. 1591-1596).................................................................. 26
Case Study: Hamlet (1600-1601)...................................................................................... 30
Romances.............................................................................................................................. 38
Case Study: The Tempest (1611) ...................................................................................... 39
Practice to Increase Understanding: Text Analysis ............................................................ 46
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 52

1
 The Rise of Secular Drama in Sixteenth-Century England

Elizabethan Playhouses and Theatrical Performances

When Elizabeth became Queen of England in 1558, there were no specially designed theatre
buildings. Companies of actors (usually small, made of 5 to 8 members) toured the country
and performed in a wide variety of temporary acting spaces, mainly in inn yards, but also in
churches, Town Halls, Town Squares, great halls of Royal Palaces or other great houses, or
anywhere else that a large crowd could be gathered to view a performance.
It is true that they continued to tour throughout Elizabeth’s reign (especially during the
Plague in London, when theatres were closed or earned but little money). Nevertheless, given
the laws passed by the Queen to control wandering beggars and vagrants – which implicitly
affected the acting companies as well – many actors were encouraged to settle down with
permanent bases in London.
The first permanent theatres in
England were old inns which had been used as
temporary acting areas when the companies
had been touring. E.g. The Cross Keys, The
Bull, The Bel Savage, The Bell – all originally
built as inns. Some of the inns that became
theatres had substantial alterations made to
their structure to allow them to be used as
playhouses.
The first purpose built theatre building in
England was simply called The Theatre,
eventually giving its name to all such building
erected in the outskirts of London and
functioning until the closing of the theatres in
1642 during the Civil War. The Theatre was
built in 1576, at Shoreditch in the northern
outskirts of London, by the Earl of Leicester’s
Men who were led by James Burbage, a
carpenter turned actor. It seems that the design
of The Theatre was based on that of bull-
baiting and bear-baiting yards (as a matter of
fact, bull baiting, bear baiting and fencing
shows were very popular by that time, and they were often organized before the plays started.).
The Theatre was followed the next year (1577) by The Curtain, in 1587 by The Rose and in
1595 by The Swan (to mention but the most famous theatres). (See in the picture on the right
The Swan Theatre in Elizabethan London, as sketched in c. 1596 by the Dutch traveller,
Johannes de Witt.)
In 1599, a dispute over the land on which The Theatre stood determined Burbage’s
sons to secretly tear down the building and carry away the timber to build a new playhouse on
the Bankside which they names The Globe. By this time, the Burbages had become members
of Lord Chamberlain’s Company, along with William Shakespeare, and The Globe is
famously remembered as the theatre in which many of Shakespeare’s plays were first
performed. (The Globe was destroyed in 1613 in a fire caused by the sparks of a cannon fired
during the performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Rebuilt, it was closed and demolished in
1644 during the Civil War. The modern reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in
London was completed in 1997.)
2
 Distinction should be made, however, between two categories of playhouses: the
public (outdoor) theatres (see the examples above) and the private (indoor) theatres. The
former were amphitheatre buildings open to the air and therefore cheaper – The Globe, for
instance, charged two pence for a seat in the galleries or a single penny to stand in the yard.
The latter (e.g. Blackfriars; The Cockpit) were built to a hall design in enclosed and usually
rectangular buildings more like the theatres we know today. They had a more exclusive
audience since they charged considerably more – the cheapest seat in a private theatre cost
sixpence. The adult companies did not start to use the private hall theatres until after
Elizabeth’s death, but they were used by the boy companies (made up entirely of child and
teenage actors) in Elizabeth’s reign and were used by Shakespeare’s Company - by this time
the King’s Men - and other adult companies in the Jacobean period.
As far as performances in the Elizabethan theatres are concerned, it must be
mentioned that there were invariably many more parts than actors. The Elizabethan theatre,
therefore, demanded that an actor be able to play numerous roles and make it obvious to the
audience by changes in his acting style and costume that he was a new person each time.
When the same character came on disguised (as, for example, many of Shakespeare’s female
characters disguise themselves as boys – e.g. The Merchant of Venice or Twelfth
Night),speeches had to be included making it very clear that this was the same character in a
new costume, and not a completely new character.
In addition, all of the actors in an Elizabethan theatre company were male (which
might explain the scarcity of female roles in Elizabethan drama). There were laws in England
against women acting onstage and English travellers abroad were amused and amazed by the
strange customs of Continental European countries that allowed women to play female roles.
Exceptions : One woman - Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse - was arrested in the
Jacobean period for singing and playing instruments onstage during a performance of a play
about her life (Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl) and some suggest that she may
actually have been illegally playing herself in the performance, and women sometimes took
part in Court Masques (a very stylised and spectacular sort of performance for the Court,
usually dominated by singing and dancing), but otherwise English women had no part in the
performance of Elizabethan plays. The male actors who played female parts have traditionally
been described as “Boy Actors” – they were actually boys whose voices had not changed.
Last but not least, one must take into account that Elizabethan audiences may have
“viewed” plays very differently from present-day ones, hence the origin of the word “audience”
itself. In other words, the Elizabethans did not speak of going to see a play, they went to hear
one; and it is possible that in the densely crowded theatre, obstructed by the pillars and the
extravagant headgear that richer members of the audience were wearing, the Elizabethan
audience was more concerned to hear the words spoken than to be able to see the action.

The First Comedies and Tragedies

Throughout the late decades of the fifteenth century and the early decades of the sixteenth
century, drama started incorporating more and more non-religious material. “The morality plays
reached a point when it is impossible to distinguish clearly between them and the early secular
interludes. After 1500 the term interlude can be used indiscriminately for any play maintaining
its character of secular humour. The term was first used as a brief play between the courses of a
banquet. Other records of the age consider the interlude as a play performed outdoors in
summer. Whatever its origin or exact meaning it is out of the interlude that the wholly secular
drama in English developed in the further years.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 94)
On the other hand, an important contribution to the creation of a new type of drama
during the Renaissance was that of the scholarly revival of interest in ancient drama that

3
encouraged vigorous playwriting in England’s schools and colleges, in the noblemen’s houses
and at the Inns of Court (Gavriliu, 2000: 94). Due mention must be made, in this respect, of
Henry Medwall’s play Fulgens and Lucres which is considered the earliest known English
secular play. “Written about 1497 and published about 1515 it shows no traces of allegory.
From its opening one can understand that it was meant for acting between the courses of a
banquet. The plot involves characters that are far from the abstractions of the typical morality
plays. (…) The play displays the appearance of the love-triangle drama for the first time in
English. (…) Scholars are unanimous in emphasising the progress towards secularity and
realism marked by Fulgens and Lucrece: ‘With love as a central theme the play is neither
Biblical, nor allegorical, but strikingly secular’.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 95)
Especially throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, drama embarked on
further development that made the favourite genre of the age. “Plays were performed at Court,
in the halls of the noblemen, at the Inns of Court and in colleges, generally but not exclusively
by professional actors. While the folk plays, moralities and interludes continued to be quite
popular, the academic drama emerged in the schools. Modelled after the classic Latin dramas
of Plautus, Terence and Seneca and performed by student actors, the academic drama was
meant as an educational device to instruct in moral lessons and literary style. It was written by
humanist scholars first in Latin than in English.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 95)
A relevant example in this respect was that of Nicholas Udall (1505-l556),
Headmaster of Eaton and of Westminster School, as well as author of a popular textbook of
style for schoolboys in Tudor times (Flowers of Latin Speaking Selected and Gathered out of
Terence) and of the first English comedy, Ralph Roister Doister (written in 1535 and
published about 1567). Written in short rhymed doggerel, “the play shows similarity to the
comedies of Plautus and Terence. It follows the five act division and observes the unities of
time, place and action. Ralph Roister Doister is modelled on the classical milles gloriosus and
Merrygreek is the classical parasite. Ralph Roister Doister, the cowardly braggart soldier is
the remote ancestor of Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV. Humour derives from the
social satire addressed at the avarice of the middle classes, from the lovely language of the
play, puns, significant names of the characters, proverbs.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 95-96)
Another good example of an early comedy drawing on the popular vein and
particularly on the classical heritage is Gammer Gurton’s Needle (written about 1555 and
published in 1575) considered the second English comedy in verse. Inspired by life in the
English countryside in the late feudal times, the play observes, nonetheless, the classical
pattern, spinning out its humour along five classical acts and observing the unities of time,
space and action. “The greatest merit of the play consists in its realism presenting the genuine
local colour of an English village in the 16th century. […] This combination of lively, vivid
native English material put into the regular form of the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence
looked forward to the comedies of Shakespeare.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 96-97)
In tragedy writing, Seneca (available in the original Latin throughout the Renaissance
and first translated into English in 1581) was the model emulated by Renaissance writers.
Seneca’s tragedies were constructed in five acts and had violent and bloody plots, rhetorical
speeches and the presence of ghosts among the characters. Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex is
often termed the first true English tragedy. Written by two young lawyers, Thomas Sackville
and Thomas Norton and inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae,
“the play is set in the legendary very early period of English history shared by Shakespeare’s
King Lear and, like Lear, king Gordoduc divides his kingdom among his children with
disastrous result. In a quarrel Porrex kills his brother Ferrex, his mother’s favourite. In
vengeance, queen Videna murders Porrex. The angry people rise in rebellion to kill both
Gorboduc and Videna. The lords put down the rebellion but they wage an indecisive civil war,
requiring a foreign king to be chosen. (…) Following Seneca, the play is divided into five

4
acts, each ending with a chorus of five old Britons. A dumb-show or pantomime preceding
each act proved highly popular to subsequent dramatists (see Hamlet). The scenes of horror
and violence so peculiar to Seneca take place off stage and are related by messengers in
lengthy discourses. The most important innovation of Gorboduc is the blank verse (i.e.
unrhymed iambic pentameter – our note) here employed in drama for the first time.”
(Gavriliu, 2000: 97)
Whereas the Renaissance comedies and tragedies had, as previously shown, deep roots
in classical drama, “the original creation of the English Renaissance dramatists was the
chronicle play, the prototype of which was King Johan (c. 1538) by John Bale, a Roman
Catholic priest converted to Protestantism. The drama represents the earliest employment of
historical material.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 97)

The University Wits

“The career of the public theatre between 1585-1595 is usually connected with the name of
the University Wits, young people fresh from the humanistic training in the universities who
moulded the medieval forms of the drama into the pattern of their classical education. Most of
them seem to have had a taste for dissolute living and encountered untimely deaths. Some of
them had a great contempt for unlettered competitors like Shakespeare. In the hands of these
wild but gifted writers, the play of human passion and action was expressed for the first time
with true dramatic effect. They paved the way for Shakespeare who was to carry the
Elizabethan drama to perfection.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 101)
Elizabethan drama owes to some of them, namely John Lyly (1554-1606) and
George Peele (1557-1596), important improvements in comedy writing. Lyly’s comedies –
chief among which the comedy of manners Mother Bombie (1594) – are innovative in their
introduction of the device of girls disguised as boys, of fairies as characters, of songs and
music as well as of the excessively ornate and extravagant euphuistic style (that had
previously made his ‘novels’ famous). George Peele’s contribution is equally significant as he
seems to have founded, with his comedy The Old Wives’ Tale, the Elizabethan romantic
comedy, full of freshness, high spirits and optimism, introducing the remote but enchanted
“never-never” land.
Others tried their hand at writing not only comedies but also tragedies and histories:
for instance, it is The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth (published in 1598), in which
Oberon, the king of the fairies, appears for the first time, that reinforced the popularity of
Robert Greene1 (1560-1592), while his George-a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (1588)
emerges as an “expression of the democratic trends in the drama of English humanists”
(Gavriliu, 2000: 101-102)
Yet, by far, the most influential figures among the University Wits were Thomas Kyd
(1588-1594) and Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593).
Thomas Kyd’s plays were published anonymously. Among them, the most successful
was The Spanish Tragedy or Hieronimo Is Mad Again! (1586). Set against the background of
the conflict between the Spanish and the Portuguese in 1580, this play focuses on the revenge
that Hieronimo, the grieving father, and Bel-Imperia, the grieving mistress, take against
Horatio’s murderers, Balthazar and Lorenzo. Significantly influenced by the Senecan model
and dominated by the first figures of an avenger (Hieronimo) and a Machiavellian villain

1
Apart from Greene’s importance as a playwright, it is worth mentioning that literary history owes Robert
Greene the first professional reference to Shakespeare: “there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,
that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse
as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the
country” (the pamphlet Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance, 1592).

5
(Lorenzo) in English Renaissance drama, it gave further complexity to the motif of revenge,
connecting it to love and justice and moulding it in a multilayered dramatic frame based on
metatheatricality (the multiplication of the play-within-a-play device that makes the
relationship between the play-world and the real world ambiguous). Two more plays were
also ascribed to Kyd: Ur-Hamlet, i.e. Old Hamlet, and Arden of Feversham. As a matter of
fact, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, the play about a father’s delayed revenge for his
murdered son, apparently finds its counterpart in the currently lost Ur-Hamlet, presenting a
son’s delayed revenge for a murdered father (which Shakespeare presumably used as a source
of inspiration for his Hamlet) and inaugurates the type of revenge tragedy to be followed by:
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Julius Caesar and Hamlet, Marston’s Antonio’s
Revenge, Chapman’s Busy d’Ambois, or Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.
Christopher Marlowe wrote for the stage the following plays: Tamburlaine the
Great, parts 1 and 2 (about 1587); The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (about 1588/
1592); The Jew of Malta (1589-1591); Edward II (about 1592); The Massacre at Paris
(1593).
Each of Marlowe’s plays is, in a sense, a tour de force, a special creation (despite the
fact that some of the plays like The Jew of Malta, Dido and The Massacre at Paris are not,
according to some scholars, as well written as the others).
Marlowe’s first and most important service to drama was the improvement of blank
verse. Unlike some of his fellow University Wits, Marlowe invented numberless variations of
the otherwise rather rigid structure of the blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) while
still keeping the satisfying rhythm within a recurring pattern. Sometimes he left a redundant
syllable, or left the line one syllable short, or moved the position of the cæsura. He grouped
his lines according to the thought and adapted his various rhythms to the ideas. Thus blank
verse became a living organism, plastic, brilliant, and finished.
Marlowe’s second best gift to drama was his conception of the heroic tragedy built on
a grand scale, with the three-fold unity of character, impression, and interest, instead of the
artificial unities of time and place. Before his time, tragedies were built either according to the
loose style of the chronicle, or within the mechanical framework of the Senecan model; but, in
either case, the dramatic unity attained by the Greeks was lacking. Marlowe, with his
disregard of the so-called classic rules, was in fact much nearer the spirit of Aeschylus and
Sophocles than the slavish followers of the pseudoclassic schools. (And so was William
Shakespeare too.) Coming to London obsessed with fantastic aspirations, Marlowe painted
gigantic ambitions, desires for impossible things, longings for a beauty beyond earthly
conception, and sovereigns destroyed by the very powers which had raised them to their
thrones. Tamburlaine, Faust, Barabas are personifications of arrogance and insatiable
ambition, lust for power and wealth. Despite the touch of the extravagant or bombastic, or
even of the puerile that sometimes characterise his plays, and his inability to portray women
(none of his plays deals with love as the main subject), or the fact that his world is not
altogether our world, but a remote field of the imagination, his plays managed to impose a
standard upon all succeeding theatrical compositions and to pave thus the way for the rise of
the greatest drama of English history.
Marlowe’s ‘trilogy’ focused on the rise and fall of powerful men starts with a story of
violence and cruelty in which Tamburlaine, turned from a mere Scythian shepherd into a
bloody tyrant whom not even Zenocrate’s love can touch, creates an empire, but dies an
inglorious death after having arrogantly defied Mahomed himself. Influences of Tamburlaine
the Great may be identified in Shakespeare’s Richard III, a play which displays similar
concentration on the unity of character. Richard, like Tamburlaine, seeks exceptional power
and is deterred by no moral or religious scruples from attaining his ends. In creating
Tamburlaine, Marlowe innovated the old pattern of the stage hero and created “the prototype

6
of the Renaissance egoist, the audacious villain, a figure as enthralling as Milton’s Satan.”
(Day in Gavriliu, 2000: 105-6)
A story of racial conflict and revenge that reflects on the consequences of the thirst for
power, The Jew of Malta resonates with themes of racial tension, religious conflict, and
political intrigue, all of which share parallels with sixteenth-century England. Although the
play is grounded on a real historical event (the 1565 Turkish invasion of Malta), its
characterization appeals to a general sense of fear that many English Protestants felt toward
those whom they considered outsiders—be these Muslims, Jews (though there were no
professed Jews in England during this time, they had been banished in 1290 and would be
readmitted in 1656 only as converts to Christianity), or Catholics. With Barabas’s sly
allusions to Biblical stories and his ironic treatment of Christian doctrine, one sees how
Marlowe raises questions about state religion that would have had deeper significance in a
country fraught by its own religious tensions.
At the same time, the play captures anti-Machiavellian feeling that was rife in
Elizabethan England. Barabas’s schemes share much with Machiavellian self-advancement
and the play elicits a deeply ambivalent response from the audience: one may admire Barabas
for his clever duplicity but at the same time, resent him for his unfeeling manipulation of
human beings. In many respects, Marlowe is similar to his protagonist in that the playwright
was also decried as a Machiavellian schemer with little loyalty towards his country. It is for
readers to determine whether The Jew of Malta is Marlowe’s attempt at discrediting
Machiavelli, or whether the playwright is satirizing Elizabethan England’s stereotyped view
of this author.
If Shakespeare wrote his Merchant of Venice to compete with Marlowe’s Jew of
Malta, the similarities between the two plays are less significant upon thorough analysis.
Unlike Barabas who is a paragon of hatred and selfishness from the outset, Shylock’s hatred
develops before our eyes and we feel sympathy for him that is never granted to Barabas.
Still, Marlowe could not ignore that power goes hand in hand not only with terror or
fortune but also with knowledge. That is precisely what The Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus demonstrates. If in Tamburlaine the Great Marlowe depicted the gigantic passion for
political power, Doctor Faustus features the gigantic passion for the power that is brought by
knowledge.
The idea of an individual selling his or her soul to the devil for knowledge is an old
motif in Christian folklore, one that had become attached to the historical persona of Johannes
Faustus, a disreputable astrologer who lived in Germany sometime in the early 1500s.
Although there had been literary representations of Faust prior to Marlowe’s play, Doctor
Faustus is the first famous version of the story. A Doctor of Divinity at the University of
Wittenberg, John Faustus makes a pact with Mephistopheles to surrender his soul to Lucifer
in exchange for twenty-four years of absolute knowledge and experience. Endowed with
superhuman powers, Faustus performs incredible deeds like calling up Alexander the Great
and Helen of Troy, but also indulges in petty tricks to entertain different royal or aristocratic
figures throughout Europe. As the hour for the surrender of his soul draws near, Faustus is
seized with repentance, but it is too late for him to be saved: when the clock strikes twelve,
his soul is borne to Hell by the devils. In creating a moment when Faustus is still alive but
incapable of being redeemed, Marlowe steps outside the Christian worldview in order to
maximize the dramatic power of the final scene. Having inhabited a Christian world for the entire
play, Faustus spends his final moments in a slightly different universe, where redemption is no
longer possible and where certain sins cannot be forgiven.
The play’s attitude toward the clash between the medieval, God-centred code and the
Renaissance, man-centred values is ambiguous. Marlowe seems hostile toward the ambitions
of Faustus and keeps his tragic hero squarely in the medieval world, where eternal damnation

7
is the price of human pride. Yet Marlowe himself was no pious traditionalist, and it is
tempting to see in Faustus—as many readers have—a hero of the new modern world, a world
free of God, religion, and the limits that these imposed on humanity. Faustus may pay a
medieval price, but his successors will go further than he and suffer less, as we have in
modern times. On the other hand, the disappointment and mediocrity that follow Faustus’s
pact with the devil, as he descends from grand ambitions to petty conjuring tricks, might
suggest a contrasting interpretation. Marlowe may be suggesting that the new, modern spirit,
though ambitious and glittering, will lead only to a Faustian dead end.
Later versions of Doctor Faustus’s story include the long and famous poem Faust by
the nineteenth-century Romantic writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as operas by
Charles Gounod and Arrigo Boito and a symphony by Hector Berlioz. Meanwhile, the phrase
“Faustian bargain” has entered the English lexicon, referring to any deal made for a short-
term gain with great costs in the long run.
Finally, Marlowe took interest in the most recent ‘invention’ of Elizabethan drama,
writing in c. 1592 The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward II, a chronicle
play derived from Holinshed, considered, for a long time, a model of how, according to
Marlowe, history could be moulded to fit the plot form of drama. Recent scholarship has
suggested that Shakespeare wrote his Henry VI trilogy before Marlowe could complete his
Edward II, but it seems that the latter had, nevertheless, a important influence on the former’s
Richard II: both plays concern kings who, because of personal weaknesses, are unable to
maintain order in the kingdom. The play displays Marlowe’s concern with order and marks a
change in his style in the sense that his “mighty line”, so fit to the superhuman characters of
the previous plays, acquires conversational ease, speech being suited to the person speaking.
All in all, the brilliant generation of the University Wits paved the way for
Shakespeare’s genius. Each of them influenced the Shakespearean universe more or less: John
Lyly supplied Shakespeare the sparkling, scholarly dialogue; Kyd introduced the tragic pathos
and sombre atmosphere; Marlowe taught him the heroes’ titanic nature and the lyrical effects
of the blank verse; Greene provided the romantic framework and the gentle, delicate feminine
characters. But for the joined efforts of the Renaissance playwrights the magnificence of
Hamlet or Lear would not have been possible.

8
 William Shakespeare (1564-1616), or Elizabethan Drama at Its Best

An Overview of William Shakespeare’s Work

Shakespearean scholarship subdivided Shakespeare’s literary activity into three periods (with
an additional subdivision of the first period into the early and late first period).
 The first period of creation (1589-1600):
o Before about 1594:
 Four history plays (Henry VI, Parts One, Two, and Three– 1589-1591; Richard III –
1592-1593);
 Two narrative poems (Venus and Adonis – 1592-1593; The Rape of Lucrece – 1593-
1594);
 A comedy in the style of Plautus (The Comedy of Errors - 1589);
 A comedy in the courtly style of John Lyly (The Two Gentlemen of Verona – 1592-
1593);
 A farcical comedy which today we might call a problem comedy (The Taming of the
Shrew – 1593-1594);
 A tragedy of blood in the style of Thomas Kyd (Titus Andronicus - 1589);
 Some of the sonnets (1592-1598).
o To about 1600:
 Two profoundly original comedies (Love’s Labours Lost – 1593-1594, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream – 1595-1596) ;
 A history, not part of a group of history plays (King John – 1596-1597);
 A tragedy of youth, love and fate (Romeo and Juliet – 1591-1595);
 A comedy that seems at times more like the tragedy of its supposed villain (The
Merchant of Venice -1596-1597);
 Four histories, written over several years (Richard II -1595-1596, Henry IV, Parts
One and Two – 1596-1597, Henry V – 1597-1599);
 A tragedy set in Roman times (Julius Caesar – 1599-1600);
 A group of three great romantic comedies (Much Ado About Nothing – 1597-1599, As
You Like It, Twelfth Night – 1599-1600);
 A comedy of the fat knight, Falstaff, originally created in the history plays (The
Merry Wives of Windsor – 1597-1599).
 The second period of creation (1600-1608):
 One of Shakespeare’s finest tragedies (Hamlet - 1601-1602);
 Two dark comedies (All’s Well That Ends Well -1602-1603, Measure for Measure –
1603-1604);
 A disturbing play that defies category (Troilus and Cressida – 1601-1602);
 A tragedy of love (Othello – 1602-1603);
 A tragedy of age, of parents and children (King Lear - 1605);
 A tragedy of power, of husband and wife (Macbeth – 1605-1606);
 An odd and possibly unfinished tragedy (Timon of Athens - 1605-1609);
 A tragedy of Rome, Egypt, power and love (Antony and Cleopatra – 1607-1608);
 A tragedy of Rome and power, of mother and child (Coriolanus – 1607-1608);
 The third period of creation (to about 1614):
 A patchwork tale of adventure, shipwreck, loss and rediscovery (Pericles, Prince of
Tyre - 1606-1608);
 A romance of Britain and Rome (Cymbeline – 1609-1610);

9
  A tale of tragic jealousy and pastoral rebirth (The Winter’s Tale – 1610-1611);
 A tale of a brave new world (The Tempest - 1611);
 Two final plays written in collaboration, in each case probably with a younger
playwright, John Fletcher: a history of recent time in England (Henry VIII – 1612-
1613) and a romance of chivalry (The Two Noble Kinsmen – 1613-1614).

Prior to Shakespeare’s death, only a relatively small part of his work was published.
For instance, when the closing of the theatres during the 1592-93 plague determined
Shakespeare to try his talent on mythological subjects, he published in 1593 the epic poem
Venus and Adonis and, the next year, the epic poem The Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to
Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. From 1598, Shakespeare’s name began to appear
upon plays published in quarto: Richard III, Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost. (Titus
Andronicus had also been published but anonymously in 1594.) In 1609, Shakespeare’s
sonnets were piratically printed, apparently without their author’s knowledge or consent.
1623 is the year when the first complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays was published.
In Elizabethan England there was no copyright and rivalling theatre companies might have
used the text if a reputed playwright had published his plays in book form. That is why it was
only after a play had run its course on the stage that the acting company, the sole owner of the
drama, would have it published to obtain a bit more money. This is how some of
Shakespeare’s plays appeared in small, cheap quartos, hastily compiled for quick sale during
his life (see above 1594 and 1598). At his death, in 1616, 18 quartos of his dramas had been
printed, the text having been pirated from stage copies. But, in 1623, Shakespeare’s fellow
actors John Heminge and Henry Condell published the first complete edition – also known as
the First Folio – containing 36 plays in all. The so-called Doeshut portrait of the poet was on
the title page and Ben Jonson composed the verse accompanying it. The text of Shakespeare’s
First Folio was in double column format, totalled 908 pages and sold for £1. The versions of
the First Folio are the only source for twenty of Shakespeare’s plays, but one can never be
sure how close to Shakespeare’s own writings they are. We have at last got and intelligible
and reliable text for the works of the dramatist as the result of the painstaking textual criticism
of the scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Shakespearean Controversy

Shakespeare’s own age fully accepted him as the great dramatist and among the evidence of
his contemporaries Ben Jonson’s testimony ranks as the most unchallengeable. No report of
rumour against Shakespeare’s authorship was recorded until 1769 when Herbert Lawrence
challenged for the first time the ascription of the plays to the minor actor William
Shakespeare, the mild Stratford bourgeois.
The “authorship question” was again brought into discussion in 1857, when Delia
Bacon, an American woman, published a book arguing that Sir Francis Bacon, the great
Elizabethan philosopher, was the author. Mark Twain was also a proponent of Bacon, and his
book Is Shakespeare Dead? may be one of the most entertaining, if not the most convincing,
of contributions on the subject. Like other Baconians, Twain felt that literature of such great
learning and wisdom could not possibly have been written by a two-bit actor with a provincial
grammar school education at best, about whose life almost nothing has come down to us. The
plays are full of philosophy and reveal considerable knowledge of the law; Bacon was not
only a philosopher but the greatest legal mind of the age. Twain concluded that he could not
say for certain who wrote the plays, but said that he was “quite composedly and contentedly
sure that Shakespeare didn’t,” and strongly suspected that Bacon did.

10
 Another theory advanced by a modern group of “unorthodox” or “anti-Stratfordian”
scholars has ascribed the plays undoubtedly to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. The
Oxfordians, as they are referred to, claim that the plays of Shakespeare reveal an aristocratic
sensibility, an intimate familiarity with the life and manners of the court, and a level of
education and worldly experience that would seem beyond a barely educated commoner.
Oxford was a poet and playwright himself, but as an aristocrat he could not sully his name by
writing for the public stage, and so he wrote under a pseudonym, the theory goes, allowing
the actor from Stratford to play the part of author. The fact that Oxford died in 1604, before
such masterpieces as Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest are generally
accepted to have been written, has never been conclusively explained by Oxfordians. But a
recent doctoral dissertation, successfully defended at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, examining uncanny correspondences between de Vere’s copy of the Geneva Bible
and Biblical references in Shakespeare’s plays, has added new fuel to the Oxfordian fire.
Last but not least, Christopher Marlowe’s name has been put forward as that of the
“true author” of Shakespeare’s works. In this respect, Calvin Hoffman’s book, The Murder of
the Man Who Was “Shakespeare,” published in the United States in 1955, seems to have had a
tremendous impact. Hoffman’s theory, which is credited with launching the modern case for
Marlowe, rests on his belief that Marlowe – known by historians to have been a spy in Elizabeth
I’s secret service – did not die in 1593 in Deptford, on the banks of the Thames, but faked his
own death and fled England to escape the notorious Star Chamber, Protestant England’s
equivalent of the Inquisition. (Marlowe was said to hold “atheistic” views, a serious charge in
those days.) Hoffman believed Marlowe fled to Italy, where his artistic development accelerated
amidst the late Italian Renaissance. Indeed, it was in Italy, some Marlovians say, that Marlowe
wrote his masterpieces, which he then sent back to his patron in England, Sir Thomas
Walsingham, cousin of Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spy master. After having the works
recopied in another hand, Walsingham then passed the plays on to a convenient front man – the
actor William Shakespeare – who brought them to the stage.
As Hoffman relates at the outset of his book, he first began to suspect that Marlowe
was the author when he noticed striking similarities between Marlowe’s works and those
attributed to Shakespeare. After comparing Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s works, Hoffman
claimed to have uncovered hundreds of “parallelisms”: lines and passages from Marlowe’s
plays and poems that are echoed, if not quoted verbatim, in Shakespeare’s.
Shakespeare’s supporters, however, dismiss such similarities as proof only that the
Bard borrowed rather liberally (not to say stolen) from his contemporaries. (It was a common
practice by that time.) Furthermore, Stratfordians point out differences in the two playwrights’
styles: Shakespeare appears much slower in terms of innovation, but excels in some aspects of
playwriting (i.e. feminine characters and comedy) in which Marlowe was deficient. (Of
course, Marlovians attribute these differences to the natural maturation that would have
occurred in Marlowe’s writing had he fled England and continued his career in Italy.)
The debate on the authorship matter continues nowadays and seems still far from
reaching a unanimously acknowledged issue.

Chronicle Plays

The chronicle play/ history play is the only form of drama invented by the Elizabethans. After
having tried his hand at an imitation of Roman comedy (The Comedy of Errors) and of a
Roman tragedy (Titus Andronicus), William Shakespeare turned to the composition of this
type of drama that had no classical prototype, but which held a particular fascination for the
English public in the 1590s and helped create a sense of a collective national memory.

11
Patriotic sentiment probably ran particularly high in the years following 1588, when the
English defeated the invading Spanish Armada. The history play drew upon such sentiments.
In this context, about 1589, the 26-year old William Shakespeare began to plan and compose
his tetralogy dealing with the Wars of the Roses: the three parts of Henry VI (c. 1589-1591)
and Richard III (c. 1592-1593). Shakespeare set to write historical plays still leaning heavily
on Marlowe and probably collaborating with other dramatists as well.
“The three Henry VI plays, with which he opened his career, are of interest to those
concerned with Shakespeare’s attitude to English history as well as to those numerous
scholars who have been attracted by the bibliographical and other problems which they raise.
Uneven and sometimes crude both in dramatic movement and verse technique, they have their
‘Shakespearean’ moments and show Shakespeare seeking a way from the episodic chronicle
play to a more dramatic and fully integrated handling of historical material.” (Daiches, 1991:
260) They figure among Shakespeare’s first forays into the genre of history play, and they
were followed by plays tracing the years after Henry VI’s death and the ensuing civil wars
over succession. Only later in his career did Shakespeare look back to the events prior to
Henry VI’s kingship, including that of his father Henry V. Shakespeare probably made use of
contemporary chronicles of the 15th century and the struggles during these years between the
Yorkists and the Lancastrians in the War of the Roses. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of
England, Scotland, and Ireland seem a particularly likely source for many of his history
plays. (Edward Hall’s chronicles, in particular his Union of the Two Noble and Illustre
[Illustrious] Families of Lancaster and York (1548), might also have provided Shakespeare
with useful information especially for the last play of the trilogy. However, Shakespeare had
to conflate or alter historical events so they would fit within a dramatic context.)
Focused mainly on the events that followed Henry V’s death up to the disastrous end
of the Hundred Years’ War (the loss of Britain’s territories in France) and subtly anticipating
the Wars of the Roses, 1 Henry VI is entirely driven by conflict. On one hand, there is the
conflict between Henry’s forces, led into battle by Talbot, and the forces of the Dauphin
Charles, dominated by the charismatic Joan of Arc. Then, the argument between York and
Somerset, echoing the struggle between Winchester and the Protector of the kingdom,
Gloucester, in Henry’s court, causes the Englishmen to give inadequate support to Talbot in
the battlefield, thus, exacerbating the primary conflict. The message within these court
struggles is that petty rivalries and internal divisions among the nobility can be as dangerous
to England as French soldiers. Henry seems to recognize this truth, when he speaks about
dissention as the “worm” gnawing on his kingdom, yet he is unable to end the crisis. That
announces Henry, from the very beginning of the trilogy, as a weak king figure.
The play becomes, to some extent, the story of a warrior culture that is dying. Talbot
represents the end of a tradition of valiant knights whose sole desire is to fight for the glory of
their homeland. He is a man from a lost world where valour and honour were communally
shared masculine ideals passed from father to son. By the end of the play, both Talbot and his
son lay dead, and the future of English chivalry has died with them.
Equally threatened by the power of women as public figures (Joan of Arc, the
Countess of Auvergne, Margaret), the world of men seems to crumble. Strong kings like
Henry V do not necessarily create strong successors in their sons. The play creates heroes of a
masculine world, but it also acknowledges the potential weaknesses of men, in general, and of
kings, in particular.
2 Henry VI concerns the continued scheming in the court, first between Gloucester and
Beaufort, then between York’s faction and the other lords. The infighting between the lords
and the popular uprising by Jack Cade show what happens to the nation when the king in
power is too weak to rule effectively. The play charts the rise and fall of many lords and lesser
figures within the kingdom.

12
 3 Henry VI is a continuation of the depiction of the War of the Roses between the
Lancastrian descendants of Edward III, represented by the red rose, and his Yorkist
descendants, who wore the white rose. This third installment ambitiously depicts many
significant battles fought during that civil war, stretching between the Battle of Wakefield in
1460, when the Duke of York was killed, to the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, when Edward,
York’s eldest son, defeated the Lancastrians. The degradation of social ties, particularly those
of family, becomes even more prominent than in the previous two plays and, under the
circumstances, nothing remains but the assertion of individual will, which is best illustrated in
the case of one of the Duke of York’s sons, Richard. Near the end of the play, Richard kills
Henry and declares that he has no father or brothers, thus, villainously announcing his
separation from kinship networks that define the rest of the play.
As for Henry, he has appeared on numerous occasions throughout the play, as well as in
the previous plays of the trilogy, as a weak king. As the representative of legitimacy in a time of
social disorder, he is fated to be thwarted and disgraced at every turn of the plot. Yet Shakespeare
has not designed him only to be the object of scorn. Henry VI becomes more and more clearly a
representative of peace and its blessings. He sits upon a hill withdrawn from the battle from which
Margaret and Clifford have “chid” him and gives voice to his longing to be a shepherd. He tells
how much he wants quiet for contemplation in lines of elegiac quality that win sympathy for the
humiliated king. And when his meditation is interrupted by the dreadful scene of father killing son
and son killing father, the play definitely becomes an anti-war play.
The message of the play is clearly expressed: a weak monarch like Henry VI means
chaos in the kingdom torn apart by selfish feuding lords. The struggle between opposing
wings of the same family infects the familial tone of an entire nation.

Case Study: Richard III (c. 1592-1593)

The source is again Holinshed’s Chronicles. The play centres on the figure of Richard of
Gloucester, afterwards Richard III, physically deformed, ambitious, sanguinary, bold and subtle,
treacherous yet brave, a murderer and usurper of the crown. Bloody though he was, nevertheless,
the historical King Richard III was not necessarily more murderous than the kings who preceded or
succeeded him. Nor is it likely that he was deformed, as Shakespeare portrays him. Winners, not
losers, write history. When Shakespeare wrote this play, Queen Elizabeth I ruled England; Elizabeth
was a descendant of King Henry VII, the ruler who overthrew Richard. Thus, the official party line
of the Elizabethan era was that Richard was a monster who was not a legitimate ruler of England. It
would have been thoroughly dangerous for Shakespeare to suggest otherwise.
After a long civil war between the royal family of York and the royal family of Lancaster,
England enjoys a period of peace under King Edward IV and the victorious Yorks. But Edward’s
younger brother, Richard, resents Edward’s power and the happiness of those around him.
Malicious, power-hungry, and bitter about his physical deformity, Richard begins to aspire
secretly to the throne—and decides to kill anyone he has to in order to become king.
Using his intelligence and his skills of deception and political manipulation, Richard
begins his campaign for the throne. He manipulates a noblewoman, Lady Anne, into marrying
him—even though she knows that he murdered her first husband. He has his own older
brother, Clarence, executed, and shifts the burden of guilt onto his sick older brother King
Edward in order to accelerate Edward’s illness and death. After King Edward dies, Richard
becomes lord protector of England—the figure in charge until the elder of Edward’s two sons
grows up.
Next Richard kills the court noblemen who are loyal to the princes, most notably Lord
Hastings, the lord chamberlain of England. He then has the boys’ relatives on their mother’s
side—the powerful kinsmen of Edward’s wife, Queen Elizabeth—arrested and executed.

13
With Elizabeth and the princes now unprotected, Richard has his political allies, particularly
his right-hand man, Lord Buckingham, campaign to have Richard crowned king. Richard then
imprisons the young princes in the Tower and, in his bloodiest move yet, sends hired
murderers to kill both children.
By this time, Richard’s reign of terror has caused the common people of England to
fear and loathe him, and he has alienated nearly all the noblemen of the court—even the
power-hungry Buckingham. When rumours begin to circulate about a challenger to the throne
who is gathering forces in France, noblemen defect in droves to join his forces. The
challenger is the earl of Richmond, a descendant of a secondary arm of the Lancaster family,
and England is ready to welcome him.
Richard, in the meantime, tries to consolidate his power. He has his wife, Queen Anne,
murdered, so that he can marry young Elizabeth, the daughter of the former Queen Elizabeth
and the dead King Edward. Though young Elizabeth is his niece, the alliance would secure his
claim to the throne. Nevertheless, Richard has begun to lose control of events, and Queen
Elizabeth manages to forestall him. Meanwhile, she secretly promises to marry young
Elizabeth to Richmond.
Richmond finally invades England. The night before the battle that will decide
everything, Richard has a terrible dream in which the ghosts of all the people he has murdered
appear and curse him, telling him that he will die the next day. In the battle on the following
morning, Richard is killed, and Richmond is crowned King Henry VII. Promising a new era
of peace for England, the new king is betrothed to young Elizabeth in order to unite the
warring houses of Lancaster and York.
Although it is often viewed as a sequel to three of Shakespeare’s earlier history
plays—1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, and 3 Henry VI—Richard III is usually read and performed
on its own. The play chronicles the bloody deeds and atrocities perpetrated by its central
figure—the murderous and tyrannical King Richard III. Richard invites an eerie fascination,
and generations of readers have found themselves seduced by his brilliance with words and
his persuasive emotional manipulations even as they are repelled by his evil.
Richard is in every way the dominant character of the play that bears his name, to the
extent that he is both the protagonist of the story and its major villain. Richard III is an intense
exploration of the psychology of evil, and that exploration is centred on Richard’s mind. Critics
sometimes compare Richard to the medieval character, Vice, who was a flat and one-sided
embodiment of evil. Like the “Vice” character of medieval morality pageants, who simply
represented the evil in man, Richard does not justify his villainy—he is simply bad. Indeed,
Richard, with self-conscious theatricality, compares himself to this standard character when he
says, “Thus like the formal Vice, Iniquity, / I moralize two meanings in one word” (III.i.82–83).
We should note that the mere fact that he reflects upon his similarity to the Vice figure suggests
that there is more to him than this mere resemblance. Watching Richard’s character,
Shakespeare’s audiences also would have thought of the “Machiavel,” the archetype of the
scandalously amoral, power-hungry ruler that had been made famous by the Renaissance Italian
writer Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince (first published in 1532). Furthermore, especially in
the later scenes of the play, Richard proves to be highly self-reflective and complicated—
making his heinous acts all the more chilling. That justifies describing Richard as a
Machiavellian villain.
Perhaps more than in any other play by Shakespeare, the audience of Richard III
experiences a complex, ambiguous, and highly changeable relationship with the main
character. Richard is clearly a villain—he declares outright in his very first speech that he
intends to stop at nothing to achieve his nefarious designs. But despite his open allegiance to
evil, he is such a charismatic and fascinating figure that, for much of the play, we are likely to
sympathize with him, or at least to be impressed with him. In this way, our relationship with

14
Richard mimics the other characters’ relationships with him, conveying a powerful sense of
the force of his personality. Even characters such as Lady Anne, who have an explicit
knowledge of his wickedness, allow themselves to be seduced by his brilliant wordplay, his
skilful argumentation, and his relentless pursuit of his selfish desires.
Richard’s long, fascinating monologues, in which he outlines his plans and gleefully
confesses all his evil thoughts, are central to the audience’s experience of Richard.
Shakespeare uses these monologues brilliantly to control the audience’s impression of
Richard, enabling this manipulative protagonist to work his charms on the audience. In Act I,
scene i, for example, Richard dolefully claims that his malice toward others stems from the
fact that he is unloved, and that he is unloved because of his physical deformity. This claim,
which casts the other characters of the play as villains for punishing Richard for his
appearance, makes it easy to sympathize with Richard during the first scenes of the play.
It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Richard simply uses his deformity as a tool
to gain the sympathy of others—including us. Richard’s evil is a much more innate part of his
character than simple bitterness about his ugly body. But he uses this speech to win our trust,
and he repeats this ploy throughout his struggle to be crowned king. After he is crowned king
and Richmond begins his uprising, Richard’s monologues end. Once Richard stops exerting his
charisma on the audience, his real nature becomes much more apparent, and by the end of the
play he can be seen for the monster that he is.
In Richard III, Richard succeeds in bringing about the death or downfall of both his
brothers, and he manages to take the throne, but somehow he loses his charismatic power once he
has achieved the crown. Challenged by Henry, Earl of Richmond, Richard loses the throne and his
life, while Richmond ends the War of the Roses by uniting the red and white rose through
marriage and originating the Tudor line. Elizabeth I, the reigning sovereign when this play was
written, was an heir of Henry VII; Shakespeare’s history plays show the faults of the Lancastrians
and Yorkists, thus, indirectly championing the Tudor succession. The final political lesson is thus
that civil disorder shakes a nation into chaos and inevitably raises a tyrant to supreme power. His
tyranny, corruption and crime may be put an end to only by the united forces of those who stand
for righteousness in the word (i.e. the Tudors).

Shakespeare returned to the profitable medium of history plays once he had been successful
with his tetralogy. He apparently thought it unwise to take up the story of English monarchs
with Henry VII’s seizure of the throne since such continuation would have carried him
dangerously close to Queen Elizabeth’s immediate ancestors. He turned to the reign of John
and Richard II, far into England’s medieval past.
The Life and Death of King John (c. 1595-1597) was adapted by Shakespeare from an
earlier work. The reason for Shakespeare’s choice of John’s reign was the opportunity to
dramatize its events in a way that would make them serve as a favourable commentary on the
political and religious struggles in which Elizabeth I was involved. The play with some
departure from historical accuracy deals with various events in King John’s reign.
In the early chronicle plays Shakespeare detailed the disaster brought on the kingdom
by a weak monarchy. Now that he belonged to the prosperous middle classes, he shared his
class’s ideal of order, authority and security. Shakespeare the humanist still condemned
absolute power and oppression but the bourgeois in him demanded a firm enlightened rule to
check up any manifestation of social chaos.
When the London theatres reopened in the spring of 1594 after the great London
plague of 1592 Shakespeare embarked upon the ambitious project of constructing a sequence
of four connected history plays: Richard II (1595-1596), 1 Henry IV (1596), 2 Henry IV
(1597) and Henry V (1597-1599).

15
 Inspired by Holinshed’s Chronicle and Daniel’s History of the Civil Wars, Richard II
was probably meant as a reply to Marlowe’s Edward II. Richard II marks a new development in
the poet’s composition of his “histories.” The catastrophe is caused neither by a villain, not by
fate, nor by the pressure of events but by a serious flaw in the protagonist’s nature. “Richard
himself, petulant, childish, emotionally self-indulgent, incapable of asserting his authority over
factious nobles but brooding and poetizing over his royal status once he is on the point of losing
it, is the most complex character that Shakespeare had so far created, and the way he
manipulates the audience’s sympathy (first against, then in favor of Richard) shows remarkable
dramatic cunning. Richard was the Lord’s anointed, the last English king to rule in virtue of his
direct and undisputed descent from William the Conqueror. His deposition was in a sense
sacrilege, and after his death his supporters built up a picture of him as saint and martyr. The
other side, the Lancastrians, who supported the claims of Henry IV and his successors, saw
Richard as a weak and foolish king who voluntarily abdicated because he recognized his own
unfitness to carry out his royal duties. Shakespeare combines both pictures with complete
dramatic consistency, and in the ritual note which pervades the play he pictures a phase of
English civilization very different from the breezy background of power politics we see in the
Henry IV plays. The deposition scene is a careful inversion of the coronation ritual, and
Bolingbroke’s impatience with Richard’s histrionics is also the modern man’s impatience with
the stylized forms of medieval life. The self-indulgent lyricism of many of Richard’s own
speeches reflects the predominantly lyrical interest that seems to have been a feature of
Shakespeare’s dramatic art in this phase of his development (we see it also in Romeo and Juliet,
written at about the same time), but it also helps to build Richard’s character and to differentiate
it from that of his more realistic and practical supplanter.” (Daiches, 1991: 260-1)
Henry IV, Part 1 (1596–1597), more commonly referred to as 1 Henry IV, forms the
second part of a tetralogy that deals with the historical rise of the English royal House of
Lancaster.
Set in the years 1402–1403, the action of 1 Henry IV takes place nearly two centuries
before Shakespeare’s own time. In general, it follows real events and uses historical figures,
although Shakespeare significantly alters or invents history where it suits him. For instance,
the historical Hotspur was not the same age as Prince Harry, and Shakespeare’s Mortimer is a
conflation of two separate individuals. The play refers back to the history covered in Richard
II (which can be considered its prequel), and a familiarity with the events of Richard II is
helpful for understanding the motivations of various characters in 1 Henry IV.
Among Shakespeare’s most famous creations is Falstaff, Prince Harry’s fat, aged, and
criminally degenerate mentor and friend. Falstaff’s irreverent wit is legendary. He has many
historical precedents: he owes much to archetypes like the figure of Vice from medieval
morality plays and Gluttony from medieval pageants about the seven deadly sins. His
character also draws on the miles gloriosus figure, an arrogant soldier from classical Greek
and Roman comedy, and the Lord of Misrule, the title given to an individual appointed to
reign over folk festivities in medieval England. Ultimately, however, Falstaff is a
Shakespearean creation, second among Shakespearean characters only to Hamlet as a subject
of critical interest.
As a matter of fact, both “Henry IV, Part I and Part II (1597-98) show Shakespeare
combining the political with the comic in a new and striking manner. The central theme is the
education of Prince Hal, Henry IV’s son and later Henry V, and this is worked out with many
echoes of the older moralities. But the figure who represents Riot is so much more than a
character in a morality play that the whole tone and character of the two plays are altered by his
presence. Falstaff is no conventional Vice, but a comic figure of immense proportions who
embodies in his speech and action an amoral gusto in living at the same time as he stands for a
way of life which the prince must repudiate before he can be king. Shakespeare uses the Percy

16
rebellion in Part I in order to put Falstaff in some degree in his proper moral place: the colossus
of the Boar’s Head tavern, so richly amusing in his comic vitality in his habitual environment,
becomes less satisfactory as a human being when he is found using his authority as an officer to
line his own pockets and impair the strength of the king’s forces or, on the battlefield against
determined rebels, faking a heroic action for himself. The way for the final and inevitable
rejection of Falstaff by his former boon companion now become king is prepared throughout
the latter section of Part I and the earlier section of Part II. Much ink has been spilt on the
rejection of Falstaff: the simple fact is that he is (and is meant to be) engaging but not
admirable, that he belongs to the amoral world of the Boar’s Head, not to the moral world of the
dedicated Christian ruler. He enters the latter world only to be ejected from it, and though we
are properly sorry for him we must realize that the amoral becomes the immoral in this new
context, and must be removed from it.
This is to consider the two Henry IV plays as a single dramatic unit, and there are
convincing arguments for and against this view. It is perhaps simplest to take the common-
sense position that Shakespeare wrote the first part as a play complete in itself, but when he
continued it in the second he adjusted his continuation to a comprehensive and consistent
view of the meaning of the whole action of both parts. In Part I the three levels of the action –
the high political, surrounding Henry IV; the low comic, surrounding Falstaff; and the
plausible, even attractive, but politically immoral world of Hotspur and his fellow rebels –
each has its appropriate language and its place in the total political-moral pattern. Hotspur’s
heroic egotism and Falstaff’s unheroic egotism are both contrasted with the attitude of heroic
unselfishness which is the implied ideal attitude for the ruler. In Part II, the country justices,
Shallow and Silence, represent yet another level, and in a sense a deeper one: they represent
the England which remains unchanged throughout all the political struggles of ambitious men
to achieve control of the state, the world of inefficient innocence, unconsciously comic
(unlike Falstaff, who is consciously so), foolish and pretentious, yet impressively and aver-
agely human. The juxtaposition of different moral and social levels in both parts helps to give
the play its richness and brilliance. Statesmen, rebels, roisterers; the King and his sons and
advisers; Falstaff with Peto and Bardolph and Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet; Percy and
his friends; Shallow and Silence – each group has its place in the unfolding action (or series
of actions), each reveals something about England, about the relation between moral character
and human behaviour, about the nature of man. The Henry IV plays can be seen as part of the
general pattern of Shakespeare’s picture of English history from Richard II to the Tudors; but
they are, much more significantly, entertaining, stimulating, and aesthetically satisfying plays
whose subject, like the subject of all great drama, is human nature. And Falstaff remains,
greater even than the plays which contain him, the richest comic creation in English literature.
Henry V (1598-99) concludes the historical series. It is narrower in scope and interest
than the Henry IV plays, concentrating, according to tradition, on Henry as ideal warrior and
man of action with a conventional piety and a gift for military rhetoric that impressed
Shakespeare’s contemporaries more than they impress us. The witty and aloof prince of the
Henry IV plays has become a copybook model for a conquering prince, a much narrower
concept than that of the Renaissance gentleman. Henry V has none of the tortured idealism of
Brutus or the intellectual and moral complexity of Hamlet; his kind of success comes to simpler
and in some respects less attractive characters. A brisk, well-constructed, happily varied play,
Henry V is good theatre and contains some admirable rhetorical verse. But it is the narrowest
and occasionally the stuffiest of all of Shakespeare’s maturer plays, and one for which the
modern reader or audience has to make a special effort to align his sensibility with that of the
Elizabethans.” (Daiches, 1991: 261-3)

17
 Comedies

Ever since his first period of creation, Shakespeare tried his hand at writing comedies. They grew
in complexity and covered a wide range of themes. Here is a list of Shakespeare’s comedies of the
(early and late) first period of creation:
- The Comedy of Errors (1589) – written in imitation of Plautus as a comedy of mistaken
identities;
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592-1593) – a romantic comedy of gentle manners and
cultivated emotion that draws on some of Lyly’s innovations (e.g. the girl in man’s disguise in
pursuit of her lover). A play about love and male friendship, it also displays Shakespeare’s first
clown, Launce.
- The Taming of the Shrew (1593-1594) – a farcical play based on the play-within-the-play
device that focuses mainly on the theme of the battle of the sexes;
- Love’s Labour’s Lost (1593-1594) – a court play occasionally written in the euphuistic style,
that rejects the idea of cloistered study of philosophy and idle contemplation and affirms
direct experience of life in the company of women. Its most prominent couple Berowne and
Rosaline anticipate by their witty exchanges further developments in Shakespeare’s comedies.
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-1596) – one of his first great romantic comedies of
amazing originality.

Case Study: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-1596)

First written to be performed as part of a wedding festivity before being adapted for
the public theatre, A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows Shakespeare moving towards an ideal
of romantic comedy.
Sources:
 Theseus, Hippolyta and the lovers: Greek mythology (Theseus, for instance, is loosely
based on the Greek hero of the same name, and the play is full of references to Greek gods
and goddesses) and Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale (1388);
 Titania, Pyramus and Thisbe: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Arthur Golding’s 1567
translation;
 Bottom: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (trans. 1566);
 Oberon: the medieval romance Huan of Bordeaux, translated by Lord Berners in the mid-1530s;
 Puck, or Robin Goodfellow: English fairy lore;
 The Mechanicals: the theatrical practices of Shakespeare’s London (The craftsmen’s play
refers to and parodies many conventions of English Renaissance theatre, such as men
playing the roles of women).
Unlike the plots of many of Shakespeare’s plays, however, the story in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream seems not to have been drawn from any particular source but rather to be the original
product of the playwright’s imagination. Lyrical in tone and masque-like in movement, it
lacks the graver undertones of the later comedies and it appears like a dream, a jest, a
presentation of the comic irresponsibility of young love whose variations are light-heartedly
attributed to the mischief-making – half deliberate, half accidental – of Puck.
Main plotlines in the play:
 the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta providing the background of the play;
 the two pairs of lovers, the women constant (Hermia in love with Lysander, Helena in
love with Demetrius), the men changing their affections as the magic herb “love in
idleness” bids them;
 the fairy world, centring on Oberon and Titania and their quarrel;

18
 the Mechanicals’ rehearsal and final performance.
Puck is the only one who moves between the human and the fairy world. The
mischievous, quick-witted sprite sets many of the play’s events in motion with his magic, by
means of both deliberate pranks on the human characters and unfortunate mistakes.
The only human being in the play who comes into direct contact with the fairy world
is one of the Mechanicals, Bottom the weaver.
“At the Athenian court, preparations are underway for the marriage of Theseus and
Hippolyta. The royal couple is discussing arrangements when an angry Egeus storms in: his
rebellious daughter Hermia refuses to marry Demetrius as arranged, but instead prefers
Lysander. Although Demetrius formerly courted Helena (who still loves him), Theseus
decrees that Hermia should obey her father, and announces that she has until the day of his
own marriage (in four days’ time) to decide. Left alone, Hermia and Lysander resolve to
elope, and arrange to meet in the forest. But they reveal as much to Helena – who reflects that
alerting Demetrius might be the way to win him back. Elsewhere, a group of workers led by
Peter Quince are making their own plans: they hope to perform their play, Pyramus and
Thisbe, at the royal wedding celebrations.
In the woods, Oberon and Titania bicker over a boy in Titania’s service, whom Oberon
wants as an attendant. When Titania refuses, Oberon plots revenge, sending Puck to find him a
magic flower, the juice of which (when dropped on the eyelids of a sleeping person) makes
them fall in love with whatever they see first. Oberon applies it to Titania’s eyes. By this time,
Demetrius and Helena have entered the forest on Hermia and Lysander’s trail, and Oberon
orders Puck to bewitch Demetrius, too, hoping that he will fall for Helena. But Puck gets the
wrong man, applying the juice of the flower to Lysander’s eyes by mistake. When he is woken
by Helena, Lysander immediately falls in love with her and abandons Hermia.
When Puck sees the artisans rehearsing their play, he mischievously changes Bottom’s
head to that of a donkey, causing his companions to flee in horror. Slumbering nearby, Titania
awakes and, as intended, immediately falls for the puzzled (but flattered) Bottom and leads
him to her bower. Puck gleefully relates this to Oberon, but when Lysander and Demetrius
appear, it becomes apparent that something has gone appallingly wrong. Attempting to
resolve the situation, Puck applies the juice to Demetrius’s eyes, but when he falls in love
with Helena too, she merely concludes that it is all a cruel joke. Matters worsen when the
women turn on each other, just as the men are deciding to duel. All eventually fall asleep,
exhausted, and Puck sets about fixing affairs.
Oberon takes pity on Titania and decides to undo the spell. She is appalled to find
Bottom in her arms, but when Oberon removes Bottom’s ass-head, the fairy couple is
reconciled. Meanwhile, Theseus and Hippolyta are out hunting with Egeus in the forest, when
they discover the sleeping lovers. Waking them, Theseus overrules Egeus and commands that
Hermia should marry Lysander and Demetrius Helena.
Following the weddings of all three couples, Theseus demands entertainment, which
the artisans provide – to the court’s mounting bemusement. The plot concerns Pyramus and
Thisbe, divided lovers, who arrange to meet and communicate through a chink in a wall.
Later, Thisbe sees a lion and flees, dropping her mantle, which Pyramus picks up, woefully
concluding that his lover has been eaten. He kills himself just before Thisbe reappears, finds
the dead Pyramus, and does likewise. The court struggles to hold back its laughter as Theseus
orders everyone to bed.” (Dickson, 2009: 254)
Themes and motifs
 the vagaries of love: Love is often shown to be at fault and out balance. The play abounds
in romantic situations in which a disparity or inequality interferes with the harmony of a
relationship. E.g. the Athenian lovers: The genre of comedy surrounding the Athenian
lovers is the farce, in which the humour stems from exaggerated characters trying to find

19
 their way out of ludicrous situations. Shakespeare portrays the lovers as overly serious, as
each is deeply and earnestly preoccupied with his or her own feelings. The plot is in many
ways based on a quest for internal balance; that is, when the lovers’ tangle resolves itself
into symmetrical pairings, the traditional happy ending will have been achieved. E.g.
Titania and Oberon.
 contrast: e.g. the rough, earthy craftsmen/the delicate, graceful fairies; the rational, mature
Theseus and Hippolyta/ the irrational and immature young lovers. Characters that
illustrate contrasts within their own nature:
o Puck is graceful but not so sugary as the other fairies; as Oberon’s jester, he is given to
a certain coarseness, which leads him to transform Bottom’s head into that of an ass
merely for the sake of enjoyment. He is good-hearted but capable of cruel tricks.
Finally, whereas most of the fairies are beautiful and ethereal, Puck is often portrayed as
somewhat bizarre looking, a “hobgoblin”.
o Nick Bottom dominates his fellow actors with an extraordinary belief in his own
abilities (he thinks he is perfect for every part in the play) and his comical incompetence
(he is a terrible actor and frequently makes rhetorical and grammatical mistakes in his
speech). He is overconfident and totally unaware of his own ridiculousness; his
speeches are overdramatic and self-aggrandizing, and he seems to believe that everyone
takes him as seriously as he does himself. This foolish self-importance reaches its
pinnacle after Puck transforms Bottom’s head into that of an ass and when Shakespeare
brings together the grossest element in the human world (the ‘translated’ Bottom) and
the loveliest element of the ethereal world of the fairies (Titania). In creating Bottom,
Shakespeare brings a new dimension into English dramatic humour. Bottom is far from
being the conventional clown of the sixteenth century, though he doubtlessly derives
from him: he is an affectionately mocking study of a kind of character that flourishes in
every society, given precise and convincing localization and individualization.
 the supernatural:
o the fairies’ magic: Shakespeare uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural
power of (imbalanced) love (symbolized by the love potion) and to create a surreal
world. The fairies, whom Shakespeare bases heavily on characters familiar from English
folklore, are among the most memorable and delightful characters in the play. They
speak in lilting rhymes infused with gorgeous poetic imagery. Although the misuse of
magic causes chaos, as when Puck mistakenly applies the love potion to Lysander’s
eyelids, magic ultimately resolves the play’s tensions by restoring love to balance
among the Athenian youths. Additionally, the ease with which Puck uses magic to his
own ends, as when he reshapes Bottom’s head into that of an ass and recreates the
voices of Lysander and Demetrius, stands in contrast to the laboriousness and
gracelessness of the craftsmen’s attempt to stage their play.
o dreams: Linked to the bizarre, magical mishaps in the forest, the theme of dreaming
recurs predominantly when characters attempt to explain bizarre events in which they
are involved. A contrast to the world of dreams that the lovers and the fairies populate is
provided mainly by Theseus and Hippolyta. Shakespeare uses the ruler of Athens and
his warrior bride to represent order and stability, to contrast with the uncertainty,
instability, and darkness of most of the play. Whereas an important element of the
dream realm is that one is not in control of one’s environment, Theseus and Hippolyta
are always entirely in control of theirs. Their reappearance in the daylight of Act IV
signifies the end of the dream state of the previous night and a return to rationality.
 the forest. As in As You Like It and King Lear, the play draws extensively on the movement
from town to country, from the control of organised society to the freedom of nature (the
wood – a symbol since ancient times of sexual freedom and fertility - offers liberation from

20
 the stifling oppressiveness at court). The forest is a heterotopian2 place of liberation, of
reassessment, leading through a stage of disorganisation to a finally increased stability. In
psychoanalytical terms, the forest, with its darkness and deeply rooted trees, could also be
looked upon as a symbolical image of the unconscious where man’s innermost fears are
stirred up. Populated by fairies that cause control to be lost, it becomes the ideal setting for
the confusions of the irrational lovers, caused by the failure of their reason to keep pace with
their emotions. Under the spell of an illusion, the lovers mistake it for reality. Puck, in
particular, is the perfect symbol of the “delusive space” of the mind, both everything and
nothing, that represents the lovers’ whole experience in the forest.
 meta-theatre: The play-within-a-play that takes up most of Act V, scene 1 is used to
represent, in condensed form, many of the important ideas and themes of the main plot. The
story of Pyramus and Thisbe is highly dramatic, with suicides and tragically wasted love
(themes that Shakespeare takes up in Romeo and Juliet as well), but Flute’s portrayal of the
maiden Thisbe as well as the melodramatic and nonsensical language of the play strips the
performance of any seriousness or profound meaning. Because the craftsmen are such
bumbling actors, their performance satirizes the melodramatic Athenian lovers and gives the
play a purely joyful, comedic ending. Pyramus and Thisbe face parental disapproval in the
play-within-a-play, just as Hermia and Lysander do; the theme of romantic confusion
enhanced by the darkness of night is rehashed, as Pyramus mistakenly believes that Thisbe
has been killed by the lion, just as the Athenian lovers experience intense misery because of
the mix-ups caused by the fairies’ (to be more specific, Puck’s) meddling. The craftsmen’s
play is, therefore, a kind of symbol for A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself: a story
involving powerful emotions that is made hilarious by its comical presentation.
The “tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisby” is at the same time a funny
parody of the cruder kinds of drama still popular in Shakespeare’s day, a vehicle for further
developing Bottom’s character and a means of establishing the relation of the different social
groups to each other.

- Much Ado about Nothing (1597-1599) – another great romantic comedy, foregrounding the
great witty couple Beatrice–Benedick (a development of the Rosaline-Berowne couple).
“Beatrice is one of Shakespeare’s great heroines: spirited, brilliant, proud, independent, yet
completely feminine. Benedick is superbly witty and masculine.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 130)
- The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597-1599) – allegedly written to satisfy Queen Elizabeth’s
desire to see Sir John Falstaff in love. Written mainly in prose, it is highly realistic owing to
the faithful manner of representation of life in the small English towns in the Elizabethan
England.
- As You Like It (1599-1600) – another great romantic comedy, inspired by Thomas Lodge’s
novel Rosalynde. Exploring gender and power relations against the background of the Arden
forest heterotopian world, it reveals one of Shakespeare’s best achieved heroines, Rosalynd
(disguised throughout most of the play as a boy under the name of Ganimede), next to his two
original creations, the clown Touchstone and the melancholy, misanthropic Jaques.
- Twelfth Night (1599-1600) – the last of Shakespeare’s great romantic comedies, a play about
the triumph of love that draws extensively on the motifs of mistaken identities and of the girl
disguised as a boy.
During the same first period of creation, Shakespeare also wrote a more problematic
comedy (more of a tragic-comedy, i.e. The Merchant of Venice (1596-1597). Though entitled “a
comedy” of romantic love and true friendship, this play of racial conflict, deceit, revenge and

2
Heterotopia = a concept introduced by Michel Foucault designating a ‘countersite’ standing in an ambivalent,
though mostly oppositional, relation to a society’s mainstream, locatable in physical space-time, but also existing
‘outside’ society insofar as it works differently from the way that society is used to.

21
ambiguous gender relations raises many questions and does not invite the spectator to laugh light-
heartedly (as in the case of the previously mentioned plays) but to bitterly meditate on the twists
of fortune, justice and love.
Similarly, in the early years of the second period of creation, Shakespeare’s comedies
take a gloomier turn, hence they are referred to as “problem plays.” Troilus and Cressida
(1601-1602), All’s Well That Ends Well (1602-1603) and Measure for Measure (1603-1604)
do contain elements of comedy but they “present a problem for the reader or the spectator
who is left with a sense that the author is viewing his characters from a distance and with a
pessimistically ironic eye. In all these plays the actions are motivated by love for a person
who proves to be patently unworthy of such devotion.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 139)

Tragedies

By far the most prolific period in terms of tragedy writing for Shakespeare was the second
period of creation. The first period of creation was marked indeed by a number of attempts at
writing tragedies, some of which drew on historical subjects provided by the classical Roman
antiquity. Inspired by Senecan and Ovidian sources, Titus Andronicus (1589), Shakespeare’s
first tragedy, moulded in the Senecan pattern a story of utmost atrocious violence, mutilation
and revenge. Probably meant to compete with Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, the play opposes Queen
Tamora and her villainous slave-lover Aaron the moor to the Roman general Titus Andronicus
and to his family whose members gradually get to suffer the consequences of the Gothic
queen’s revenge: Bassianus, the emperor’s brother and Titus’s son-in-law is brutally murdered,
Lavinia, his wife and Titus’s daughter, is raped and terribly mutilated by Tamora’s sons, two of
Titus’s sons are framed for the murder of Bassianus and executed despite all Titus’s attempts at
proving their innocence and saving their life (even at the expense of his own mutilation).
Suffering eventually transforms Titus into an equally bloody avenger who kills Tamora’s sons
and feeds her a pie made of their flesh before killing her as well. This play of incontestable
excessive violence actually aims at illustrating the theme of the opposition of moral and
political disorder to the unifying force of friendship and wise government in which Shakespeare
seems to have taken great interest and which is perhaps best epitomised in the image of the
raped and mutilated Lavinia, as a symbol of both moral and political disorder.
The other Roman play belonging to the same first period of creation, Julius Caesar
(1599), is, however, of a different type. A political tragedy, it focuses on the events that led to
Julius Caesar’s assassination by the Roman senators, chief among which Brutus, and on the
subsequent civil war that opposed Brutus and the senators to Marc Antony and Octavius.

Case Study: Julius Caesar (1599-1600)

Historical context: In 44 B.C., though the centre of an empire stretching from Britain to
North Africa and from Persia to Spain, Rome suffered from constant infighting between
ambitious military leaders and the far weaker senators to whom they supposedly owed
allegiance. The empire also suffered from a sharp division between citizens, who were
represented in the senate, and the increasingly underrepresented plebeian masses. A
succession of men aspired to become the absolute rulers of Rome, but only Julius Caesar
seemed likely to achieve this status. Those citizens who favoured more democratic rule feared
that Caesar’s power would lead to the enslavement of Roman citizens by one of their own.
That led to Caesar’s assassination, which, however, failed to put an end to the power struggles
dividing the empire; so, civil war broke out shortly afterwards.
Shakespeare’s contemporaries, well versed in ancient Greek and Roman history,
would very likely have detected parallels between Julius Caesar’s portrayal of the shift from
22
republican to imperial Rome and the Elizabethan era’s trend toward consolidated monarchic
power. In 1599, when the play was first performed, Queen Elizabeth I had sat on the throne
for nearly forty years, enlarging her power at the expense of the aristocracy and the House of
Commons. As she was then sixty-six years old, her reign seemed likely to end soon, yet she
lacked any heirs (as did Julius Caesar). Many feared that her death would plunge England into
the kind of chaos that had plagued England during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. In
an age when censorship would have limited direct commentary on these worries, Shakespeare
could nevertheless use the story of Caesar to comment on the political situation of his day.
Sources: Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans;
possibly, the anonymous drama The Tragedy of Caesar and Pompey (1595).
Plot: “Julius Caesar has triumphed over Pompey in the civil wars, and Rome celebrates with
him – to the annoyance of the tribunes Flavius and Murellus. Caesar prepares to address the
people, ignoring the warnings of the Soothsayer that he should beware. While Caesar speaks
offstage, Cassius and Brutus discuss his increasing power and popularity. Casca relates to
Cassius and Brutus how, during his speech, Caesar was offered the crown but felt obliged to
turn it down. That night, panic spreads as fearful portents appear. Cassius interprets the signs
as omens against Caesar, and encourages Brutus to join a conspiracy against him.
Brutus privately resolves that Caesar’s ambition means he must die. Joined by Cassius
and other conspirators, he agrees to kill Caesar, but Brutus vetoes the suggestion that Antony
should also be killed. Portia has noticed that her husband is troubled but reluctant to explain
why. Caesar is also nervous about the portents, and when a sacrifice goes wrong Calpurnia
begs him not to leave home, revealing that she has dreamt of his death. Caesar initially agrees,
but changes his mind when Decius (a conspirator) tells Caesar how the Senate wish to make
him king. Other conspirators, and Antony, arrive to escort him to the Capitol. Artemidorus,
meanwhile, plans to warn Caesar by giving him a letter as he walks by.
At the Capitol, Caesar rejects Artemidorus’s letter but instead listens to a petition
requesting that the banishment of Metellus’s brother be repealed. When he refuses, the
conspirators stab him to death. Antony arrives at the scene and mourns Caesar’s death but
promises to delay judgement until the murderers have explained themselves at Caesar’s
funeral, at which Antony intends to speak. At the funeral all goes well for the conspirators
when the popular Brutus speaks, but Antony’s address to the crowd wins them round.
Convinced of their treason, the crowd begins to bay for the conspirators’ blood, but they have
already fled. In the ensuing riot, citizens murder a poet called Cinna, mistaking him for a
conspirator of the same name.
Antony, Octavius Caesar and Lepidus have assumed the leadership of Rome.
Meanwhile Brutus and Cassius combine their forces at Sardis, but the two men quarrel when
Brutus accuses Cassius of accepting bribes. Though momentarily reconciled (just as news
arrives that Portia has killed herself), they clash again over tactics. Receiving information that
Antony and Octavius’s army is heading towards Philippi, Cassius wants to remain where they
are, while Brutus is for marching to meet them. Brutus’s decision prevails, but left alone he is
disturbed by the ghost of Caesar, who tells him that they will meet again at Philippi.
As news reaches Antony and Octavius that the enemy is approaching, the two leaders
quarrel. As battle commences, Brutus attacks Octavius’s troops but Cassius, believing that his
own forces are surrounded, commits suicide with the help of his servant Pindarus. Titinius
arrives from Brutus with news of imminent victory but when he sees Cassius’s body he too
kills himself. Brutus and Young Cato resolve to fight on, but Cato is killed and Brutus realizes
that the cause is lost. Brutus begs his colleagues to kill him and finally dies by falling on
Strato’s sword. When the victorious Antony and Octavius find his corpse, they swear to bury
him with honour.” (Dickson, 2009: 163)

23
 Brutus emerges as the most complex character in Julius Caesar and is also the play’s
tragic hero. In his soliloquies, the audience gains insight into the complexities of his motives.
He is a powerful public figure, but he also appears as a husband, a master to his servants, a
dignified military leader, and a loving friend. The conflicting value systems that battle with
each other in the play as a whole are enacted on a microcosmic level in Brutus’s mind. Even
after Brutus got involved in Caesar’s assassination with the other members of the conspiracy,
questions remain as to whether, in light of his friendship with Caesar, the murder was a noble,
decidedly selfless act or proof of a truly evil callousness, a gross indifference to the ties of
friendship and a failure to be moved by the power of a truly great man.
Brutus’s rigid idealism is both his greatest virtue and his most deadly flaw. In the
world of the play, where self-serving ambition seems to dominate all other motivations,
Brutus lives up to Antony’s elegiac description of him as “the noblest of Romans.” However,
his commitment to principle repeatedly leads him to make miscalculations: wanting to curtail
violence, he ignores Cassius’s suggestion that the conspirators kill Antony as well as Caesar.
In another moment of naïve idealism, he again ignores Cassius’s advice and allows Antony to
speak a funeral oration over Caesar’s body. As a result, Brutus forfeits the authority of having
the last word on the murder and thus allows Antony to incite the plebeians to riot against him
and the other conspirators. Brutus later endangers his good relationship with Cassius by self-
righteously condemning what he sees as dishonourable fund-raising tactics on Cassius’s part.
In all of these episodes, Brutus acts out of a desire to limit the self-serving aspects of his
actions; ironically, however, in each incident he dooms the very cause that he seeks to
promote, thus serving no one at all.
The conspirators charge Julius Caesar with ambition, and his behaviour substantiates
this judgment: he does vie for absolute power over Rome, revelling in the homage he receives
from others and in his conception of himself as a figure who will live on forever in men’s
minds. However, his faith in his own permanence—in the sense of both his loyalty to
principles and his fixture as a public institution—eventually proves his undoing. At first, he
stubbornly refuses to heed the nightmares of his wife, Calphurnia, and the supernatural omens
pervading the atmosphere. Though he is eventually persuaded not to go to the Senate, Caesar
ultimately lets his ambition get the better of him, as the prospect of being crowned king
proves too glorious to resist.
Caesar’s conflation of his public image with his private self helps bring about his
death, since he mistakenly believes that the immortal status granted to his public self
somehow protects his mortal body. Still, in many ways, Caesar’s faith that he is eternal proves
valid by the end of the play: in Act V, scene 3, Brutus attributes his and Cassius’s misfortunes
to Caesar’s power reaching from beyond the grave. Caesar’s aura seems to affect the general
outcome of events in a mystic manner, while also inspiring Octavius and Antony and
strengthening their determination. As Octavius ultimately assumes the title Caesar, Caesar’s
permanence is indeed established in some respect.
Mark Antony proves strong in all the ways in which Brutus proves weak. His
impulsive, improvisatory nature serves him perfectly, first to persuade the conspirators that he
is on their side, thus gaining their leniency, and then to persuade the plebeians of the
conspirators’ injustice, thus gaining the masses’ political support. Not too scrupulous to stoop
to deceit and duplicity, as Brutus claims to be, Antony proves himself a consummate
politician, using gestures and skilled rhetoric to his advantage. He responds to subtle cues
among both his nemeses and his allies to know exactly how he must conduct himself at each
particular moment in order to gain the most advantage. In both his eulogy for Caesar and the
play as a whole, Antony knows how to tailor his words and actions to his audiences’ desires.
Unlike Brutus, who prides himself on acting solely with respect to virtue and blinding himself
to his personal concerns, Antony never separates his private affairs from his public actions.

24
Themes and motifs
• fate versus free will. Cassius refuses to accept Caesar’s rising power and deems a belief in
fate to be nothing more than a form of passivity or cowardice. He urges a return to a more
noble, self-possessed attitude toward life, blaming his and Brutus’s submissive stance not
on a predestined plan but on their failure to assert themselves. Ultimately, the play seems
to support a philosophy in which fate and freedom maintain a delicate coexistence. Caesar
recognizes that certain events lie beyond human control; to crouch in fear of them is to
enter a paralysis equal to, if not worse than, death. It is to surrender any capacity for
freedom and agency that one might actually possess. Indeed, perhaps to face death head-
on, to die bravely and honourably, is Caesar’s best course: in the end, Brutus interprets his
and Cassius’s defeat as the work of Caesar’s ghost—not just his apparition, but also the
force of the people’s devotion to him, the strong legacy of a man who refused any fear of
fate and, in his disregard of fate, seems to have transcended it.
• public versus private. Julius Caesar is a political tragedy exploring the relation between
public and private virtue, between personal morality and political efficiency, between
innocence and action. Much of the play’s tragedy stems from the characters’ neglect of
private feelings and loyalties in favour of what they believe to be the public good.
Similarly, characters confuse their private selves with their public selves, hardening and
dehumanizing themselves or transforming themselves into ruthless political machines.
Brutus rebuffs his wife, Portia, when she pleads with him to confide in her; believing
himself to be acting on the people’s will, he continues to conspire against Caesar, despite
their close friendship. Brutus puts aside his personal loyalties and shuns thoughts of
Caesar the man, his friend; instead, he acts on what he believes to be the public’s wishes
and kills Caesar the leader, the imminent dictator.
Cassius can be seen as a man who has gone to the extreme in cultivating his public
persona. Caesar, describing his distrust of Cassius, tells Antony that the problem with
Cassius is his lack of a private life—his seeming refusal to acknowledge his own
sensibilities or to nurture his own spirit. Such a man, Caesar fears, will let nothing
interfere with his ambition. Indeed, Cassius lacks all sense of personal honour and shows
himself to be a ruthless schemer.
Ultimately, neglecting private sentiments to follow public concerns brings Caesar to
his death. Although Caesar does briefly agree to stay home in order to please Calphurnia,
who has dreamed of his murder, he gives way to ambition when Decius tells him that the
senators plan to offer him the crown. Caesar’s public self again takes precedence.
Tragically, he no longer sees the difference between his omnipotent, immortal public
image and his vulnerable human body. Just preceding his death, Caesar refuses
Artemidorus’s pleas to speak with him, saying that he gives last priority to his most
personal concerns. He thus endangers himself by believing that the strength of his public
self will protect his private self.
• inflexibility versus compromise. Both Brutus and Caesar are stubborn, rather inflexible
people who ultimately suffer fatally for this. In the play’s aggressive political landscape,
individuals succeed through adaptability, bargaining, and compromise. Brutus’s rigid
though honourable ideals leave him open for manipulation by Cassius. He believes so
thoroughly in the purpose of the assassination that he does not perceive the need for
excessive political manoeuvring to justify the murder. Equally resolute, Caesar prides
himself on his steadfastness; yet this constancy helps bring about his death, as he refuses
to heed ill omens and goes willingly to the Senate, into the hands of his murderers.
Antony proves perhaps the most adaptable of all the politicians: while his speech to
the Roman citizens centres on Caesar’s generosity towards each citizen, he later searches
for ways to turn these funds into cash in order to raise an army against Brutus and Cassius.

25
 Although he gains power by offering to honour Caesar’s will and provide the citizens their
rightful money, it becomes clear that ethical concerns will not prevent him from using the
funds in a more politically expedient manner. Antony is a successful politician—yet the
question of morality remains. There seems to be no way to reconcile firm moral principles
with success in politics in Shakespeare’s rendition of ancient Rome; thus each character
struggles towards a different solution.
• rhetoric and power. Julius Caesar gives detailed consideration to the relationship
between rhetoric and power. The ability to make things happen by words alone is the most
powerful type of authority. Early in the play, it is established that Caesar has this type of
absolute authority. Words also serve to move hearts and minds. Antony cleverly
convinces the conspirators of his desire to side with them: under the guise of a gesture of
friendship, Antony actually marks the conspirators for vengeance. In the Forum, Brutus
speaks to the crowd and appeals to its love of liberty in order to justify the killing of
Caesar. He also makes ample reference to the honour in which he is generally esteemed so
as to validate further his explanation of the deed. Antony likewise wins the crowd’s
favour, using persuasive rhetoric to whip the masses into a frenzy so great that they don’t
even realize the fickleness of their favour.
• misinterpretations and misreadings. Much of the play deals with the characters’ failures
to interpret correctly the omens that they encounter. Thus, the night preceding Caesar’s
appearance at the Senate is full of portents, but no one reads them accurately: Cassius
takes them to signify the danger that Caesar’s impending coronation would bring to the
state, when, if anything, they warn of the destruction that Cassius himself threatens. There
are calculated misreadings as well: Cassius manipulates Brutus into joining the conspiracy
by means of forged letters, knowing that Brutus’s trusting nature will cause him to accept
the letters as authentic pleas from the Roman people.
The circumstances of Cassius’s death represent another instance of misinterpretation.
Pindarus’s erroneous conclusion that Titinius has been captured by the enemy, when in fact
Titinius has reunited with friendly forces, is the piece of misinformation that prompts Cassius
to seek death. Thus, in the world of politics portrayed in Julius Caesar, the inability to read
people and events leads to downfall; conversely, the ability to do so is the key to survival.
With so much ambition and rivalry, the ability to gauge the public’s opinion as well as the
resentment or loyalty of one’s fellow politicians can guide one to success. Antony proves
masterful at recognizing his situation, and his accurate reading of the crowd’s emotions during
his funeral oration for Caesar allows him to win the masses over to his side.

The set of plays of tragic conception of the first period is rounded off by Romeo and
Juliet (c. 1591-1596) which, by its poetic decorations and impressive richness of figurative
language, announces Shakespeare’s maturation as a writer.

Case Study: Romeo and Juliet (c. 1591-1596)

Source: an Italian tale translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by
Arthur Brooke in 1562, and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1582;
quite similar in plot, theme, and dramatic ending to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, told by
Ovid in his Metamorphoses.
Plot: Verona is riven by a feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, powerful local
families. Even a minor skirmish between servants rapidly escalates into a full-scale riot, halted
only by the arrival of the Prince. After order is restored, Lord Montague asks his Benvolio to
find out why his son Romeo is so melancholy; when Romeo reveals that he’s in love with a
woman who has sworn never to marry, Benvolio, his cousin and friend, suggests he finds
another lover. The Capulets, meanwhile, have agreed to let Paris, the Prince’s kinsman, woo

26
their daughter Juliet, and invite him to a feast to be held that night. Learning of the feast from a
servant, Benvolio persuades Romeo that the two of them should attend. Despite Romeo’s
misgivings that it will end badly, they put on masks and – joining up with their friend Mercutio
(a relative of the Prince) – succeed in getting in. Romeo catches sight of Juliet while dancing,
and is immediately captivated. Though recognized by Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, Romeo succeeds
in speaking to her and they exchange kisses before Juliet is called away.
Romeo is hiding in Capulet’s orchard when Juliet appears on her balcony; the two
exchange loving words and agree to marry as soon as possible. The next morning, Romeo
rushes to Friar Laurence, who undertakes to marry them in the hope of ending the feud. After
meeting up with Mercutio and Benvolio (who are relieved to find him in good humour),
Romeo arranges with the Nurse for Juliet to join him at Friar Laurence’s cell that afternoon.
Benvolio and Mercutio are walking through the streets when they are approached by
an aggrieved Tybalt, who is looking to challenge Romeo. Arriving from his marriage, Romeo
fails to placate Tybalt, who then fights with Mercutio, fatally wounding him. Enraged by the
death of his friend, Romeo fights and kills Tybalt. When the Prince hears of the murder, he
banishes Romeo. The news reaches Juliet, but the Nurse and Friar Laurence arrange for the
lovers to spend the night together before Romeo flees to Mantua. No sooner is Romeo gone,
though, than Capulet insists that Juliet must marry Paris.
Friar Laurence outlines a solution to the desperate Juliet: she will agree to marry Paris,
but on the evening of the wedding take a drug which will put her into a death-like sleep.
When she is laid in the family tomb, Romeo will be waiting there and the two can elope.
Juliet takes the potion as planned, and Friar Laurence takes charge of the funeral
arrangements. But the message explaining the plan never reaches Romeo, and the first he
hears is that Juliet is dead. Grief-stricken, he rushes to Verona to Juliet’s tomb. Paris is lying
in wait, though, and the two fight – Paris is killed and Romeo enters the tomb. There he finds
the unconscious Juliet, kisses her one last time and takes poison. As Juliet begins to awaken,
Friar Laurence arrives, but is frightened away by the appearance of the Watch. Seeing
Romeo’s body, Juliet resolves on suicide and stabs herself. As the Capulets and Montagues
arrive, the Prince reflects that the lovers’ deaths are punishment for the feud, and the two
families finally resolve to be reconciled. (Dickson, 2009: 326)
Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet intended to make an
example of the lovers, who are punished for their selfishness, for rejecting the sensible advice
of “parents and friends”, allowing themselves to be overtaken by “unhonest desire”.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet stands out by:
 the subtlety and originality of characterisation (e.g. Romeo, Juliet, Mercurio);
 the speeding of the action (four days instead of nine months);
 thematic enrichment: The play draws its power from violent conflict: between youth and
age, life and death, fate and free will.
 the lyricism of his blank verse.
Themes and motifs:
 love: the play’s dominant theme. The play presents the various ‘faces’ of love as seen
from different characters’ perspectives: to Capulet, love is a matter of a suitable family
alliance; to the Nurse, love is a matter of physical, sexual satisfaction; to Paris, Capulet’s
chosen husband for his daughter, love is a matter of good breeding and decorum; to
Romeo and Juliet, love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all other
values, loyalties, and emotions.
Initially, Romeo is shown posing as the conventional sentimental lover of Rosaline, a
young man clearly in love with love itself. Yet, his passion for Rosaline is forgotten as soon
as he sees her Capulet kinswoman, Juliet. His love for Juliet helps him grow more mature.
Unfortunately, Romeo’s deep capacity for love is seriously affected by his incapacity for

27
moderation. Love compels him to sneak into the garden of his enemy’s daughter, risking
death simply to catch a glimpse of her. Anger compels him to kill his wife’s cousin in a
reckless duel to avenge his friend’s death. Despair compels him to commit suicide upon
hearing of Juliet’s death. Such extreme behaviour dominates Romeo’s character throughout
the play and contributes to the ultimate tragedy that befalls the lovers.
Though her father initially considers her “yet a stranger in the world” (her fourteenth
birthday is two weeks away at the play’s opening), at her breathless initial meeting with
Romeo, Juliet is more than able to hold her own, calmly parrying Romeo’s flirtatious words –
and in fact Shakespeare makes their first exchange into a fourteen-line love sonnet, as if
urging Juliet that, despite her youth, she has not a moment to lose. Juliet actually matures
faster than Romeo. For her, their love lies not in immediate vows, but is organic, ever-
growing. Juliet is able to see and criticize Romeo’s rash decisions and his tendency to
romanticize things. After Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished, Juliet does not follow him
blindly, but makes a logical and heartfelt decision that her loyalty and love for Romeo must
be her guiding priorities. Juliet willingly cuts herself loose from her Nurse, her parents, and
her social position in Verona in order to try to reunite with Romeo.
Shakespeare’s representation of love in this youthful couple is a far cry from the
courtly love that poets wrote about and that Romeo emulated in pining for Rosaline. Romeo
and Juliet’s love is a brutal, powerful emotion that captures individuals and catapults them
against their world, and, at times, against themselves.
The play does not make a specific moral statement about the relationships between
love and society, religion, and family; rather, it portrays the chaos and passion of being in
love, combining images of love, violence, death, religion, and family in an impressionistic
rush leading to the play’s tragic conclusion.
Romeo and Juliet’s relationship acquires a mythical dimension – it is another example
of the kind of “separation romance” that animates ancient tales such as those of Hero and
Leander, Troilus and Cressida, Tristan and Isolde. And the audiences are encouraged to it as a
kind of myth: the Prince’s final “Never was a story of more woe” transforms the couple into
something beyond themselves, like the “statue[s] in pure gold” that Capulet and Montague
undertake to raise in their memory. They and their story have become examples, models,
precedents.
 violence: Aggression is total in Verona: the city’s streets are war zones. Men are the
driving force behind the violence. Violence and family territory are locked inescapably
together. This is not society in any real sense of that word: it is a world in which the
masculine “name” swamps everything else. Juliet realizes this in her much-quoted lines on
the balcony: “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?/ Deny thy father and refuse
thy name,/ Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.”
(2.1.75–8) Calling upon Romeo to refuse his “name” will force him to “deny” his father
and the legacy of his family. Protesting that “‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy”, Juliet
attempts to separate the name from the object – or, rather, to restore the name to some true
sense of what it really is. “What’s in a name?”, she questions,
That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for thy name—which is no part of thee—
Take all myself. (2.1.85–91)

28
 Love seems to push the lovers closer to violence; they are plagued with thoughts of
suicide, and a willingness to experience it. The lovers’ double suicide is the highest, most
potent expression of love that they can make.
 the individual versus society: Much of Romeo and Juliet involves the lovers’ struggles
against public and social institutions that either explicitly or implicitly oppose their love.
Such structures range from the concrete to the abstract: families and the placement of
familial power in the father; law and the desire for public order; religion; and the social
importance placed on masculine honour. These institutions often come into conflict with
each other. One could see the play as a battle between the responsibilities and actions
demanded by social institutions and those demanded by the private desires of the individual.
Romeo and Juliet’s appreciation of night, with its darkness and privacy, and their
renunciation of their names, with its attendant loss of obligation, make sense in the context
of individuals who wish to escape the public world. The lovers may attempt to transcend
their fractured world, but they are in the end unable to escape it – the play at once portrays
the power of romantic ideals and their fragility in the face of crushing social forces.
 the inevitability of fate: The Chorus announces from the beginning of the play that
Romeo and Juliet are “star-crossed lovers”, in other words that that fate controls them.
This sense of fate permeates the play. The mechanism of fate works in all of the events
surrounding the lovers: the feud between their families (which is never explained); the
horrible accidents that ruin Friar Laurence’s seemingly well-intentioned plans (when he
marries Romeo and Juliet as part of a plan to end the civil strife in Verona or when he
gives Juliet the sleeping potion to help her escape an unwanted marriage and be reunited
with Romeo); and the tragic timing of Romeo’s suicide and Juliet’s awakening.
Is Romeo and Juliet a tragedy? Given the fact that the lovers do not escape their fate, some
have even wondered whether Romeo and Juliet counts as tragedy. If they are predestined by
“some consequence yet hanging in the stars” (1.4.107), if Friar Laurence is right that “these
violent delights have violent ends” (2.5.9), do they ever reach tragic greatness? Or are they, as
Capulet sadly notes, “Poor sacrifices to our enmity” – blameless, “star-crossed” victims?
Perhaps the answer is that, in this early tragedy, Shakespeare wants to have it both ways. He
constantly reminds the audience of the hastening inevitability of betrayal, while presenting us
with the couple’s growing maturity and the deepening of their love. Romeo and Juliet try to
seize control, but ultimately they cannot – and in that juxtaposition lies the tragedy.

During the second period of creation, Shakespeare’s plays display a significant change
in tone to sadness and a dark outlook on life. Whether caused by personal disappointment or
illustrative for a more widely-spread depression, which seems to have affected the
Elizabethan society at the turn of the century, this change in tone has found its best expression
particularly in the plays that give the full measure of Shakespeare’s maturity as a playwright,
namely the tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Antony and
Cleopatra, Coriolanus. “In them, the world is pictured as full of evil forces and man as being
either thoughtless, in which case he blindly answers the call of elementary passions –
jealousy, ambition, irrational love – or meditative, and then his meditative turn of mind
paralyzes his will.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 138-139) In particular in his so-called “great tragedies”
(Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth), Shakespeare has endeavoured to translate his
enhanced awareness of the complexity of human nature and to contain “something of the
larger dimensions of life within the limiting formality of art” (Daiches, 1991: 271). By far, the
best case in point is his Hamlet, a play which, more than any other in the Shakespearean
creation, invites the reader/ spectator to embark on a stimulating exercise of interpretation in
order to eventually grasp its meanings (if that is really possible).

29
 Case Study: Hamlet (1600-1601)

The issue of the sources Shakespeare might have inspired from in writing his Hamlet has also
provided Shakespearean scholarship with material for speculations. As Sydney Bolt (1990: 19)
points out, the text Shakespeare most probably based his play upon is the revenge tragedy of
Hamlet, known to have been in the possession of Shakespeare’s stage company for several
years before his own tragedy was staged. Though this play, also referred to as the Ur-Hamlet, is
no longer available nowadays, there are documents which record its being performed in
different theatres outside London about 1594 and 1596. Even some of the University Wits, like
Thomas Nashe and Thomas Lodge, make reference to it and to its famous Ghost crying
“Hamlet, revenge!” Since Thomas Nashe includes his reference to the play in a piece of
criticism regarding the work of his fellow University Wit, Thomas Kyd, and, furthermore, Ur-
Hamlet basically appears as a revenge tragedy, just like Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, speculations
have been made that Kyd himself might have been the author of this play. (Muir and
Schoenbaum, 1976: 216)
As a matter of fact, the story is an ancient one, originating in Scandinavia as the tale of
Amleth, the legendary prince of Denmark. It was told, around 1200, by the Danish historian
Saxo Grammaticus in his Latin Historia Danica, and then retold, with only slight alterations, in
a collection of tragic stories by François de Belleforest. There are several important elements of
Saxo’s version which have been, roughly speaking, preserved in the dramatic works. Saxo
mentions Amleth’s feigning madness so that the usurping uncle would regard him as a
completely mindless lunatic not worth killing. (But, in the original legend, Amleth’s purpose is
sheer self-preservation, as his uncle, who is not a hypocrite at all, openly declares his intention
of doing away with anyone who would challenge his position). The usurping uncle sends agents
to try to find out whether Amleth’s idiocy is genuine: one of these agents is a girl, the original
of Ophelia, while another, presumably one of Amleth’s friends, the original of Polonius. The
latter also hides himself in the straw of Amleth’s mother’s room to overhear a conversation
between mother and son, and is discovered and killed by Amleth. There is also an attempt to
have Amleth put to death in England. And, in the end, Amleth achieves his revenge, slays his
wicked uncle with his own sword and becomes king. (See Bolt, 1990: 19-20)
The legend appears somewhat transformed in Ur-Hamlet and there are sources which
maintain that Kyd, as the ‘father of the Elizabethan revenge drama’ so popular among the
audiences of the time (despite the fact that the Elizabethan laws and religion strongly
condemned those who took revenge, especially for murder), might have successfully
incorporated in its matter some of the devices of the Senecan revenge play. One of them is the
ghost – a Senecan device – crying for revenge; here, the original murder is done secretly by
poisoning, not openly as in Saxo, so that the wicked uncle is not publicly known as wicked
and the ghost is required to reveal the truth to Hamlet. This makes it unnecessary for Hamlet
to feign madness in order to save his life, as he does in Saxo, but Kyd was a great hand at
madness and kept this element in the story (indeed he added to it by making Ophelia go mad
as well) though the motivation for it is now much less clear. True to the Senecan fashion, he
also killed off the hero and the other major characters in the end, and introduced Laertes, the
fencing match, and the poisoned rapier and drink. The device of the play-within-the-play may
have also been used. Such speculations have been made on the basis of a degraded version of
the lost Hamlet which exists in German. Actually, since direct comparison is impossible, it is
difficult to say how many alterations of the original legend were effected in the Ur-Hamlet
(those already pinpointed are considered the most probable in the light of the more general
knowledge of Thomas Kyd’s dramatic work and of the scarce documentary evidence of the
existence of the play) and how many were Shakespeare’s. What cannot be, however, denied is
that Shakespeare’s task was to rework the melodramatic Senecan revenge play Ur-Hamlet
30
and, thus, “to impose a new, tragic meaning on a traditional story, by his arrangement and
presentation of the action, by the kind of life and motivation he gave to the characters, and by
the overtones of meaning and suggestion set up by his poetic handling of the characters’
language.” (Daiches, 1991: 268)
Shakespeare’s play begins at Elsinore castle in Denmark, where the ghost of the
recently deceased King is confronted by soldiers. At court, Hamlet – in mourning for his
father’s sudden death – expresses his disgust that Gertrude, his widowed mother, has married
his uncle Claudius. Alerted by his friend Horatio, Hamlet meets his father’s ghost, who tells
of his murder by Claudius and demands revenge. Meanwhile, Laertes, the son of Polonius,
Claudius’s closest adviser, is about to leave to study in France and warns his sister Ophelia
not to trust the Prince, who has apparently tried to woo her; their father Polonius agrees.
Hamlet decides to feign madness in order to investigate his father’s death, and the
whole court is thrown into confusion – Ophelia is stunned, Polonius thinks it is because
Ophelia has rejected him, and the King and Queen hire Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
Hamlet’s former friends and colleagues at the University of Wittenberg, to spy on him. When
the news arrives that a company of actors is about to arrive at Elsinore, Hamlet sees an
opportunity. He will get them to perform a play, ‘the mousetrap’, one scene of which closely
resembles his father’s murder, and, with Horatio, he will observe Claudius’s reaction.
Listening in on a meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia – at which Hamlet seems
utterly unhinged – Claudius plots to send him to England. The court gathers to watch the
players, and at the moment where the murder is re-enacted Claudius starts up in shock and the
play is abandoned; Horatio and Hamlet agree that he must be guilty. On the way to speak with
Gertrude, Hamlet sees Claudius praying for forgiveness, and is about to kill him but changes
his mind. He angrily accuses Gertrude of unfaithfulness, and when he hears Polonius hiding
behind the screen in her room, stabs him to death.
Realizing the danger he is in, Claudius sends Hamlet away to England with
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but arranges for him to be killed on arrival. Ophelia has
meanwhile been driven mad by her father’s death, while Laertes has rushed back from Paris.
When news arrives that Hamlet has escaped his companions and is returning to Denmark,
Claudius promises to help Laertes kill the Prince. Laertes’s anger only intensifies when it
transpires that Ophelia has drowned herself.
On his way back to court, Hamlet meets two gravediggers preparing for Ophelia’s
burial. When the funeral procession arrives, Hamlet initially hides before suddenly revealing
himself, to Laertes’s fury. Claudius announces that the two should duel, but (unbeknown to
Hamlet) arranges for the tip of Laertes’s sword to be poisoned. He also prepares a backup
plan by poisoning Hamlet’s wine. The duel begins: Laertes wounds Hamlet, but they
exchange swords and Laertes is also cut. Events spiral out of control as it becomes apparent
that Gertrude has unwittingly drunk from Hamlet’s cup and has been poisoned. The dying
Laertes blames Claudius and reveals what their plan had been, and Hamlet stabs his uncle
before collapsing himself. The grisly scene closes as the invading army of Fortinbras, a
Norwegian prince who has arrived to restore rightful rule to Denmark, enters. He arranges for
Hamlet to have a full military funeral. (Dickson, 2009: 75)
From the very first act (scene 2), it becomes obvious that Hamlet, unlike the rest of the
court, is not in a joyful mood: he stands apart, all dressed in black, while the courtiers party,
merrily celebrating Queen Gertrude’s wedding with Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle and the new king
after his brother’s death. Naturally, Hamlet is still mourning his father, but this is not the only
reason for his melancholy. His first soliloquy (Act I, Scene 2) reveals, however, the fact that he
rather seems to be overwhelmed with rage against his mother who, too soon, after the old king’s
funeral, married another man – and not any man – but her former husband’s brother, Claudius. As
the soliloquy develops, the readership/ audience realize that, though a marriage presupposes

31
mutual consent of the spouses, Hamlet seems to settle the burden of the blame particularly on his
mother’s shoulders. Shakespearean scholars belonging to different critical schools have tried to
provide valid explanations in this respect.
For instance, the representatives of New Historicism have explained Hamlet’s reaction
to Gertrude’s marriage starting from two historically acknowledged aspects. On the one hand,
the marriage is unlawful by Ecclesiastical canons; on the other hand, it deprives Hamlet of his
lawful succession. Reference should thus be made to the tables of consanguinity and affinity
drawn up in England under Henry VIII. Consanguinity conforms broadly to what we might
expect: a man may not marry his mother, his father’s sister or his mother’s sister, his sister, his
daughter or the daughter of his own son or daughter. To put it otherwise, the table of
consanguinity prohibits marriages with close blood ties, in the generations in which it might
plausibly occur (parent, sibling, offspring, and grandchild). From this point of view, the
marriage to a dead brother’s widow is undoubtedly considered incest. (Of course, historians of
the family have registered a discrepancy between general kinship rules and legislation
concerning lawful and unlawful unions in particular and actual practices. The paucity of
concrete evidence suggests that these codes rarely led to legal action.) As for the table of
affinity, it reflects unions which might produce conflicting inheritance claims. Or, as the words
in which Claudius addresses Hamlet from the beginning indicate that, by marrying Gertrude, he
has caused the alienation of Hamlet’s line:
“King: But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son –
Hamlet: A little more than kin and less than kind.
King: How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
Hamlet: Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun.” (2005: 801)
In his prolonged mourning, wearing black, Hamlet insistently keeps the direct line, old
Hamlet/ young Hamlet present. If Hamlet is Claudius’s cousin (simply, kin), Hamlet should
be king; if Hamlet is Claudius’s son, then he is confirmed as line-dependent on Claudius. The
offence is Claudius’s committed against the Hamlet line. (See Jardine, 1996)
Of course, one might say that this matter of succession is, in fact, rather ambiguous,
given the fact that, according to the Scandinavian system, the Danish throne was an elective
one, with the royal council naming the next king; therefore, even after his father’s death, there
was no actual guarantee that Hamlet and not his uncle might be elected to the throne. But,
though setting the action of the play in Denmark, Shakespeare chooses to represent the matter
of succession as conceived in the English society, according to which Hamlet, as his father’s
only son, is the rightful heir, which makes his uncle a usurper. That Shakespeare’s intention
was indeed to mould the Elizabethan reality in his tragedy might further find support in the
parallelism that some scholars have identified between certain characters and, respectively,
public figures of the time: Hamlet’s figure seems to have been inspired by that of the Earl of
Essex, whose rebellion failed and brought about his execution under the charge of treason on
February 25th, 1601; Polonius – boring, meddling, given to wise old sentences and truisms,
maintaining an elaborate spying system on both friend and foe – might have been modelled
after Elizabeth’s treasurer, William Cecil. Other characters correspond to some stock
characters of those days that could be easily identified among the aristocrats such as: Osric –
the Elizabethan dandy; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – the obsequious courtiers; Laertes and
Fortinbras – the men of few words, but of great deeds; Horatio – the Roman friend; Ophelia –
the ineffectual courtly love heroine. (Muir and Schoenbaum, 1976: 168-179)
Nevertheless, for several generations of psychoanalytic scholars, the explanation for
Hamlet’s melancholy might be completely different. Most of them agree on the fact that “the
Problem of Hamlet” – to use the very terms Freud himself preferred in his examining the matter –
resides in his Oedipal feelings. According to Freud and his followers (chief among whom Ernest
Jones should be mentioned – see Hamlet and Oedipus), it is the fate of all men, perhaps, to direct

32
their first sexual impulse towards their mother and their first hatred and their first murderous wish
against their father (like Oedipus who slew his father Laïus and married his mother Jocasta).
Nevertheless, it is clear that an innate desire to kill one’s father and sleep with one’s mother runs
contrary to the very fabric of the society. The difference between this innate urge and the demands
of the civilization is then mediated by repression and sublimation. Either the inappropriate urges
are repressed (which risks manifesting itself in psychological illness) or they are transformed into
some expression which is useful to society. At a first sight, judging by the way in which Hamlet
refers to his dead father in the first soliloquy and by his decision of avenging his death, the idea
that he might suffer from an Oedipus complex might seem rather preposterous. But Freud
explains the difference between what he takes to be an innate universal psychological mechanism
and the accepted range of expression of civilization with the notion of repression. That Hamlet has
fundamental urges which are not visible in the course of the play is a tribute to the energy he has
invested in repressing them. (See Freud, 1999: 14-15 and Jones,
http://www.clicknotes.com/jones) And he is successful in repressing his jealousy for his father
and attraction to his mother until Gertrude’s remarriage with Claudius. Under the new
circumstances, repression of incestuous and parricidal drives must be carried out again, but it is
hindered by the Ghost’s injunction to kill Claudius, that is, to give vent to what he is trying to hold
back. The suffering for the initial maternal loss is painfully re-lived and this “incomplete or
unsuccessful detachment from the mother,” in Julia Kristeva’s terms, (Crunelle-Vanrigh,
http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm) leads to what the Elizabethans called
melancholy, in modern terms maniac-depressive psychosis, characterized, as it can be seen
throughout the play, by symptoms of dejection, refusal of food, insomnia, crazy behaviour, fits of
delirium, and finally raving madness. Once his father dead, the pre-oedipal dyad, the ideal state of
fusion between mother and child could have been recreated, but the new husband figure that is
Claudius interferes, superseding the son. The original parental couple Old Hamlet - Gertrude,
which, as a result of an initially successful repression of oedipal urges, was conceived as perfect,
pure is replaced by a new one, Claudius – Gertrude, which in the light of the newly reactivated
complex appears shameful, lusty and corrupted.
The surface structure of the text appears to be one in which the incestuous mother,
whose femininity emerges from underneath the maternal object escaping control, is reviled
and the dead father is idealized and mourned. Its deeper layers of imagery (here including its
mythological background – the references to Niobe and Hyperion) suggest a structure in
which the father as male principle is by-passed and the emphasis is laid on the son as begetter.
The death of old Hamlet prompts a “regressive reverie”, (Kristeva 1987: 25 in
http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm) a pre-oedipal fantasy of fusion with the
mother. The emergence of a new father explodes Hamlet’s construct, reactivating oedipal
issues. Hamlet’s first soliloquy thus juxtaposes the pre-oedipal and the oedipal pattern, the
dyad and the triad, the merger and the end of the merger. Taking further the argumentation in
Freudian terms, along Julia Kristeva’s lines, the conclusion we reach is that Hamlet’s
melancholia results from an incomplete detachment from the mother as much as from
grieving for a dead father.
In this context, the function of the ghost should also be reconsidered. The fact has already
been underlined that the appearance of the ghost does not allow for a successful repression of the
oedipal urges for a second time. The Ghost actually becomes “the place for the projection of the
missing signifier” (Stetner, http://www.columbia.edu/~fs10/garber.htm), a messenger of the “Law
of the Father” in Lacanian terms, which, by education, has been already assimilated by Hamlet.
More of a construction of Hamlet’s psyche, it is meant to constantly bring back, by transference,
the memory of the father of the Symbolic it stands for, in a context in which the Imaginary,
embodied by Gertrude, seems to be re-gaining ground. Hamlet must make a choice on which his
identity depends. “Hamlet, torn between his dead father and his all-too present mother is a man to

33
double business bound. The duty of remembering the father takes him along the paths of revenge;
the necessity of detaching himself from the mother takes him along that of Kristevan ‘matricide’,
the only alternative to asymbolia, depression and self-destruction. Such complementary demands
are registered in the play. Coextensive with the father’s ‘dread command’ to avenge him is
Hamlet’s readiness to avenge himself on his mother” (Crunelle-Vanrigh,
http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm), in spite of the Ghost’s request to “leave her
to heaven.” (Act I, Scene 5, l. 86, 2005: 805) The Closet Scene is a key moment in the play for the
understanding of Hamlet’s relationship with his mother and his striving for ‘matricide,’ which is
essential for individuation. When Hamlet responds to his mother’s summons and comes to her
closet, he intrudes where customarily a woman would only entertain her husband or lover. For an
adult son, intimations of erotic possibility are almost inevitable; the son crosses into the enclosure
of his mother’s privacy to encounter her as a sexualized object. Performing before Polonius – an
illegitimate intruder in her intimate space –, Gertrude frames her reproach formally; believing
himself alone, Hamlet responds familiarly. The upshot is that the language of public disapproval
collides with that of personal hurt, coloured by the present reminders of maternal sexuality.
Reproved for his offensive behaviour (with the familiar thou of maternal scolding), Hamlet
retaliates with the more grievous offence against his deceased natural father of his mother’s
remarriage to his brother. For once, his previously verbal assault is taken to the point of turning
into violence and he appears to be on the verge of killing Gertrude, of killing off the mother. (Act
III, Scene 3, l. 21, 2005: 817) Yet, he fails. He turns his violence towards the man behind the
curtain, presumably the king – in fact Polonius –, turning matricidal intents into pseudo-parricide.
“Hamlet the character unsuccessfully conducts (…) his battle with Symbolic collapse.” (Crunelle-
Vanrigh, http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm)
Unfortunately, his failure in definitely separating from the mother also compromises any
attempt at getting involved with another woman, i.e. Ophelia. Ernest Jones has postulated that
Hamlet’s sexual repression leads to hostile, misogynist behaviour regardless of whether the
woman is perceived to be virtuous or lascivious. This argument goes hand in hand with the
Kristevan one in the sense that, as long as ‘the mother has not been killed off,’ any woman will
only be rejected as an erotic object, “the melancholiac cannot cope with Eros,” therefore he is a
misogynist. This might be the underlying explanation of a cruel, victimizing treatment inflicted,
in the Nunnery Scene, upon Ophelia. Again, the fact must be mentioned here that this is not the
only explanation psychoanalysis has come up with as to the Hamlet – Ophelia relationship.
Some, like Jane Adelman, have seen in Ophelia, the sweet girl, who, given her obedient nature,
is easily dominated/ manipulated by the other two ruling male forces in her life, her cynical
father and her unperceptive brother, a victim of a Hamlet who projects upon her “the guilt” of
feminine power threatening masculine identity – first embodied by his mother -, breaking, by its
uncontrolled sexuality, the limits of the patriarchal values of womanhood.
(http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm)
The result of this undeniable triple victimization by the father, the brother and the
lover is that, overwhelmed with the feeling of guilt (for Hamlet’s madness and her father’s
death), Ophelia goes mad and eventually commits suicide. Her death is presented by Gertrude
in Act IV, Scene 7 (See Appendix). The Queen apparently tries to suggest that Ophelia’s
drowning “in the glassy stream” (2005: 826) was an accident, but her description –like the
entire play, as a matter of fact – is marked by unresolved ambiguity and Shakespeare’s
stylistic choices indicate voluntary drowning: Ophelia returns to ‘her element,’ i.e. water, to
satisfy her grief. (See Bachelard’s comments on what he calls “the Ophelia complex,” 1995)
If the previous analysis in psychoanalytical terms has provided us with more insight
regarding Hamlet’s relation especially with the women in his life and has led to the
conclusion that, torn apart between the two poles in his life, the mother and the father, the
Imaginary and the Symbolic, the melancholic Hamlet does not manage to clearly define his

34
identity, the next part of the lecture should try to provide another possible answer to the
question ‘why does Hamlet delay his revenge?’ A return to a few aspects related to the
tradition of revenge tragedy and, implicitly, Shakespeare deviation from it might be welcome
under the circumstances.
First of all, the point should be made that Hamlet is not the only avenger figure in the play.
As a matter of fact, Shakespeare includes three avengers: Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras. But they
are all different. In the conventional revenge tragedy, the avenger does not look for justice, but for
personal satisfaction, based on passion. Daring damnation, he sinks to the moral level of his victim
and having usurped heaven’s right to punish, is also condemned to death. (Bolt, 1990: 13-14) This is
a pattern in which Laertes seems to perfectly fit.
At the opposite pole, there is Fortinbras. He also has a slain father, a fall in fortune, and,
like Hamlet for instance, an uncle on the throne to contend with. He is ready to take action and
regain his father’s lands from Denmark. Yet, when he is recalled to order by the law, he is
obedient, gives up taking justice into his own hands and he will be eventually rewarded for that.
In between these two extremes, there is Hamlet. As a matter of fact, Hamlet’s is a case
of shifting roles. In the beginning of the play, he appears as a noble prince, unambiguously
Elizabethan. Educated at a new university (Wittenberg), he lives in a specific extant castle
(Elsinore) and is a connoisseur of modern plays and modern fencing. In this intellectual
milieu, ghosts are hard to believe in and Hamlet’s fellow-student Horatio speaks for both of
them when he says “I might not this believe/ Without the sensible and true avouch/ Of mine
own eyes.” (Act I, scene 1, 2005: 800) A man of noble principles, he passes brilliantly the test
of fidelity – while most of the others at the court, here including his own mother, fail it –
remaining faithful to the memory of his father and, at the same time, hiding his discontent
with their behaviour. Loved by his people, especially by his soldiers, he seeks their company,
understands and respects them. He tries in fact to reconcile his position of a noble prince with
the other role which he reveals only when he is alone, i.e. the malcontent.
The turning point in his life is, as already emphasized, the encounter with the ghost
which reveals him the terrible truth about his father’s death and urges him, in a rather
medieval-like fashion, to take revenge. His further development becomes puzzling, even
shocking precisely because the role that he needs to assume, that of the avenger, is
incompatible with that of the malcontent. (Bolt, 1990: 54-62)
“As a revenger, he ceases to be a noble prince and becomes a slave. It is a role in
which he cannot take even his trusty friends into his confidence.” (Bolt, 1990: 65) The aim of
his revenge should be to punish a “murder most foul” by an equally foul one. This aspect
might cast a new light on his decision not to kill Claudius when he finds him alone, on his
knees in prayer. What, for some psychoanalysts, is a proof of Hamlet acknowledging in
Claudius the very embodiment of his oedipal urges (he killed his father and married his
mother), might appear, from a different perspective, a refusal to inflict too good an end for
Claudius: “the Ghost’s detailed account of the horrors of King Hamlet’s death, which Hamlet
recalls at the moment, amounts to a demand that Claudius’s death must be no less horrible.
The revenger must sink to the same level as his victim.” (Bolt, 1990: 66)
The ghost is also responsible for the release of the malcontent – equally passionate and
alienated. When in private, he may freely express in soliloquies his inner torment resulting
from the clash between two codes of values: the morality of revenge, reminiscent of a dark,
medieval past and the dictates of his own temperament as a Renaissance philosopher and
Christian. The ‘To be or not to be’ Soliloquy (Act III, Scene 1) is by far the best instrument
for the exploration of the role of the malcontent. Its flow of thought, moulded in ‘stretched’
iambic pentameter (11 syllables instead of 10), displays the painful quest for a solution to
what Hamlet perceives as an insuperable deadlock, or aporia. Ambiguity makes the soliloquy
prone to different interpretations. What does ‘to be or not to be’ mean? Of course, one could

35
stop at the first level of meaning and take it as ‘to live or not to live’: if life is nothing but “a
sea of troubles”, a field of “heart-ache” and of “thousand natural shocks” (2005: 812), then
the only possible escape seems suicide, the deed with the “bare bodkin” that the fear of death
prevents. Yet, this is not the only valid meaning. “To really ‘be’ you must be somebody, an
active rational being – in short, a man, as Hamlet proudly reminds Horatio his father was a
man ... This meaning of ‘to be’ was common intellectual currency at the time the play was
written. (…) To be involved realizing one’s essence, which called for moral effort.” (Bolt,
1990: 50) In the Great Chain of Being of the Elizabethan times, people were free to reject
their roles, but when they did, whether they continued to live or not, they ceased to be. Thus,
the deed with the “bare bodkin,” directly related to that so much wished-for “quietus,” is cast
a new light upon. The fear of death might prevent two kinds of incompatible actions: self-
destruction or self-assertion. “Quietus” may mean then pacification or the discharge of an
obligation. “Dispassionately exploring the maze of these implications, the ironist is not
looking for the right direction. Instead he questions the very value of any sort of movement,
while accepting that immobility too is painful.” (Bolt, 1990: 51)
When in public, Hamlet the malcontent chooses to wear the mask of the fool and
consequently adapts his speech shifting from the blank verse, more appropriate for the noble
prince, to prose. That enables him to reject the society of Elsinore even while remaining within it.
As a fool, he may not be held responsible for what he says, but he can use his folly as a stalking-
horse to expose the truth. Furthermore, “because of the traditional association of his role with the
bawdy, the fool lends itself with facility to the expression of misogyny” (Bolt, 1990: 72), which,
as pointed out, characterizes the malcontent.
There is a crucial moment when, though in public, he temporarily drops his mask: when he
is in the company of the actors. The latter become instruments in his cat-and-mouse game with the
king and their play-within-the-play, the dumb-show that Hamlet asks to be performed, has been
often referred to as the “mousetrap.” To get a definite confirmation of the ghost’s story about the
murder, and thus of Claudius’s guilt or innocence, he has the Murder of Gonzago performed in front
of the royal audience. There is, however, a peculiar point where the story of Gonzago’s death differs
from Old Hamlet’s. The king is killed, the killer marries the queen, but he is not the uncle, he is the
nephew. This has raised a lot of questions again. From the Kristevan perspective, this might be the
moment of artistic triumph of the melancholiac. The mousetrap “enables him to secure the
‘sublimatory grasp of the lost Thing’ which Kristeva describes, to create a Gertrude swearing
everlasting faith” (Crunelle-Vanrigh, http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm).
Otherwise, it might be Hamlet’s way of threatening the king, letting him know that he knows. And
if its effectiveness is not to be seen in the king’s storming out of the hall where the play was
performed, then it definitely becomes obvious in the prayer scene, after the mousetrap.
Once he has accepted his role as an avenger, Hamlet regains his calm and the
readiness of the soldier to die. He returns to Elsinore as the prince ready to perform his
allotted task. He does no longer feel he must somehow manipulate the events. He just watches
out for the opportunity which, sooner or later, is sure to present itself. He dies an avenger, but
eventually redeemed by the renewal of conscience.

Second in line chronologically among the great tragedies, Othello (1603-1604) “explore[s]
again some of the paradoxes of good and evil and the irony of evil being bred out of
innocence” but it “concentrates on a domestic issue and produces the most relentless and the
saddest of [Shakespeare’s] tragedies.” (Daiches, 1991: 273) The devious scheming of
Shakespeare’s arch-Machiavellian villain Iago that turns the Moorish general Othello against
his friend and lieutenant Cassio and especially against his faithful wife Desdemona draws on
man’s darkest feelings like jealousy and hatred. A cultural and racial outsider in Venice,
Othello is a skilled soldier and leader, valuable and necessary to the Venetian state, but he

36
seems incapable of adapting to a life confined to the limited space of the isle of Cyprus and
especially of his own bedroom, and it is his uneasiness in the private space that Iago exploits
in stirring and then fuelling Othello’s jealousy that leads him to committing murder. Acting
mostly as a self-effacing, faithful wife, but also, occasionally, as a bold, independent
personality, Desdemona dies trying to lift the ‘veil’ on Othello’s eyes and to make him see the
truth, but she eventually falls a victim to Iago’s talent for understanding and manipulating the
desires of those around him as well as for abusing their trust in him.
King Lear (1605-1606) brings to the foreground an old archetypal story to illustrate
the disastrous consequences of foolish confidence in the appearances and of the violent
disruption in the family dynamics and the political authority. In disobeying his duties as a
king (he prematurely divides his kingdom to his eldest daughters, Goneril and Reagan,
causing them to fight for power) and father (he disinherits Cordelia, the only daughter who is
indeed true to him), he introduces tragic chaos into both family and state. (His story is closely
paralleled in a subplot by that of Gloucester who also misjudges reality because of his
ignorance. Hence the themes of madness – in Lear’s case – and blindness – in Gloucester’s –
converge to convey the same paradoxical relationship between fathers and loyal/disloyal
children.) “Only the Fool realizes from the beginning that, having given way his kingly
power, his artificial personality, Lear can no longer count on the artificial relationships which
it produced” (Daiches, 1991: 278): “a remarkable transformation of a stock Elizabethan
dramatic character” (Daiches, 1991: 278), the Fool is, ironically, the voice of wisdom and
truth meant to penetrate the king’s consciousness, yet unable to change anything or to oppose
the destructive collision of the rival groups and the ensuing suffering and chaos.
Inspired by historical events mentioned in Holished’s Chronicle of Scottish History,
Macbeth (1606) was Shakespeare’s shortest and bloodiest tragedy and it was probably meant
as a tribute to James I Stuart, Elizabeth’s successor to the throne. The initial impression of
Macbeth as a brave and capable warrior is complicated when he interacts with the three
witches (strikingly resembling the Fates, which lurk like dark thoughts and unconscious
temptations to evil). Bravery, ambition, and self-doubt struggle for mastery of Macbeth
throughout the play. Shakespeare uses Macbeth to show the terrible effects that ambition and
guilt can have on a man who lacks strength of character. It takes Lady Macbeth’s steely sense
of purpose to push him to commit the murder (Duncan) that would allow him access to the
throne. After the murder, however, her powerful personality begins to disintegrate, leaving
Macbeth increasingly alone. He fluctuates between fits of fevered action, in which he plots a
series of murders to secure his throne, and moments of terrible guilt (as when Banquo’s ghost
appears) and absolute pessimism (after his wife’s death, when he seems to succumb to
despair). These fluctuations reflect the tragic tension within Macbeth: he is at once too
ambitious to allow his conscience to stop him from murdering his way to the top and too
conscientious to be happy with himself as a murderer. As things fall apart for him at the end
of the play, he seems almost relieved—with the English army at his gates, he can finally
return to life as a warrior. He goes down fighting, bringing the play full circle: it begins with
Macbeth winning on the battlefield and ends with him dying in combat.
Expanding on the theme of misanthropy, Shakespeare’s probably unfinished tragedy
Timon of Athens (1605-1609) follows the stages of the main character’s transformation from a
good-natured and generous rich Athenian into a poor, deserted man who reacts violently to
human injustice and parasitism and eventually comes to detest mankind. In doing that, the
play denounces “love of money as the root of all evil.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 147)
For his last tragedies, Shakespeare turned again for inspiration to the Roman world.
Antony and Cleopatra (1607-1608) presents the events that followed Caesar’s death, focusing
on Marc Antony’s struggling between Roman loyalty (to Octavius Caesar, his former ally in
the civil war against the murderous senators and Rome’s emperor, and to his wife Octavia,

37
Octavius’s sister) and Egyptian magic embodied by Queen Cleopatra. “This is one of
Shakespeare’s longest plays which contains a tremendous historical spectacle encompassing
the whole of the Mediterranean world from Rome to Alexandria. Constant emphasis is put
upon the world-shaking importance of the events and the principal figures. Political events
account for almost the entire action of the play, yet are ultimately subordinated in importance
to the private drama of the two protagonists.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 150)
Finally, the political tragedy of Coriolanus (1607-1608) develops the subject of class
struggle between the patricians/ the rich/ the powerful and the plebeians/ the poor/ the weak,
which actually reflects on the contemporary situation in England, i.e. the popular revolt
against the enclosure of great areas of agricultural land (1607). “Coriolanus is portrayed as an
aristocratic politician professing humanitarian feelings for Man but despising the mob. He
brings disaster on his own head and on the state through his contempt for the people and his
rigidity of character. […] His failure is that of a misplaced personality, a political leader faced
with the contradiction between the ideal and its misapplication.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 151)

Romances

Apart from the last plays which Shakespeare is said to have written in collaboration with a
younger fellow-playwright John Fletcher, namely the chronicle play Henry VIII (1612-1613)
and the dramatization of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale known as The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613-
1614), all the 100% Shakespearean creations pertaining to the third period of creation may be
labelled as romances. Combining elements of both comedy and tragedy (as a matter of fact,
another term for romance is tragicomedy – Abrams, 1999: 325), these plays – namely
Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1606-1608), Cymbeline (1609-1610), The Winter’s Tale (1610-
1611) and The Tempest (1611) – share the following features:
 a redemptive plotline with a happy ending involving the re-uniting of long-separated
family members;
 magic and other fantastical elements;
 a deus-ex-machina, often manifesting as a Roman god (such as Jupiter in Cymbeline or
Diana in Pericles);
 a mixture of “civilized” and “pastoral” scenes (such as the gentry and the island residents
in The Tempest);
 “...and the poetry is a return to the lyrical style of the early plays, though more mellow and
profound.” (Halliday, 1964: 419)
Shakespeare’s first experiment in the creation of this kind of play, Pericles is simple in
plot, but at the same time crowding numerous strange and sensational events: Pericles’s
miraculous survival after the shipwreck in Pentapolis, his marriage with Thaisa, King
Simonides’s daughter, the storm in which Thaisa gives birth to their child, Marina, and is
thought to have died, Marina’s ordeals caused by Dionyza’s jealousy, her being kidnapped by
pirates and sold to a brothel in Mitylene, her wonderful love story with Lysimachus, the
governor, and her being miraculously reunited with both her father and her supposedly dead
mother Thaisa (who had become a priestess in Diana’s temple). Many motifs Shakespeare uses
in Pericles will be further developed in the next romances: the supposedly dead wife’s
resurrection theme and the discovery of the lost child which is instrumental in the reconciliation
of the parents will appear in The Winter’s Tale, while the storm causing separation and later
reunion provides the background for The Tempest. “Mask-like dancing, song and instrumental
music are other theatrical features of the romance.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 153)
Drawing, on the one hand, on a fragment from British history as adapted in Holinshed’s
Chronicles, and, on the other hand, on a story from Boccaccio’s Decameron, Cymbeline seems

38
to be build upon a fairy tale pattern: “Imogen, the princess who marries [the Roman Leonatus
Posthumus] against her parents’ wishes; Cymbeline’s Queen, the wicked stepmother; the potion
which brings apparent death but really only sends the drinker into a prolonged swoon; the
“Snow White” theme of the apparently dead girl covered with flowers by her simple
companions.” (Daiches, 1991: 298) But the main theme of the play is, as in the previously
mentioned romance, the triumph of innocence: thus, “her own banished husband turned against
her by the vile trick of Iachimo; the wicked Cloten pursuing her; misfortune and evil dogging
her footsteps wherever she goes; she yet takes her destiny into her own hands and, having
survived the shock of hearing that her husband has ordered her to be murdered and the counter
shock of seeing what she thinks is the dead body of her husband, survives to win her husband
back in the final scene of explanation and reconciliation.” (Daiches, 1991: 298)
“Notorious for flouting the ‘unity of time’ as well as of place with supreme confidence”
(Daiches, 1991: 300), The Winter’s Tale introduces, just like Othello, the theme of unjustified
jealousy that leads to the destruction of a once happy family: it is because of King Leontes’s
wicked jealousy (he thinks his wife Hermione has an affair with his friend Polixenes, King of
Bohemia) that his son Mamillius dies, that Hermione, his wife, is said to be dead in prison and
that his new-born daughter Perdita is lost to him. But, unlike Othello, this romance allows evil
to be at least partly undone: Hermione lives and is hidden by her faithful attendant Paulina
and Perdita is found and brought up by a shepherd. In the Bohemian ‘fairyland’ typical of
pastoral romances, Perdita lives a fairytale-like love story with king Polixenes’s son, Florizel,
which is nonetheless put a cruel end to by Polixenes’s being against his son’s relationship
with a poor shepherdess. So, the lovers flee to Sicily where truth is finally discovered:
Perdita’s identity is revealed and, in a climatic moment, Hermione is proven to be alive,
therefore the whole family is reunited. “The play also sounds overtones of pagan myth.
Perdita’s adventures counterpart those of Persephone and her mother, Demeter, Perdita’s
apparent death and prolonged disappearance parallel Persephone’s departure into the lower
world at the onset of winter and her joyous reunion with her mother is like the blooming of all
nature at Persephone’s return to her earth-mother.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 155)

Case Study: The Tempest (1611)

The Tempest is most likely the last play written entirely by Shakespeare, and it is remarkable for
being one of only two plays by Shakespeare (the other being Love’s Labor’s Lost) whose plot is
entirely original. The play does, however, draw on travel literature of its time. The English
colonial project seems to be on Shakespeare’s mind throughout The Tempest, as almost every
character, from the lord Gonzalo to the drunk Stefano, ponders how he would rule the island on
which the play is set if he were its king. Shakespeare seems also to have drawn on Montaigne’s
essay Of the Cannibals, which was translated into English in 1603. The name of Prospero’s
servant-monster, Caliban, seems to be an anagram or derivative of “Cannibal.”
The play opens with a storm which causes a ship to sink. The ship was carrying
Alonso, Ferdinand, Sebastian, Antonio, Gonzalo, Stefano, and Trinculo back from Africa to
Italy after the wedding of Alonso’s daughter. The second scene introduces a quieter
atmosphere with Miranda and Prospero standing on the shore of their island, looking at the
recent shipwreck. Miranda hopes her father could help the survivors and Prospero promises to
her that everything will be all right. He reveals to his daughter the truth about their past,
namely that Prospero was the Duke of Milan until his brother Antonio, conspiring with
Alonso, the King of Naples, usurped his position, that they managed to escape with the help
of Gonzalo and that they were forced, therefore, to settle, twelve-years ago, on the island with
the books that are the source of his magic and power. He tells her that he raised the tempest
that caused the ship of his enemies to wreck because he wanted to make things right with

39
them once and for all. Afterwards, he casts a spell on his daughter to make her sleep and calls
for his magical agent, the sprite Ariel, whom he had saved from the tree-trunk prison in which
the former master of the island, the witch Sycorax, imprisoned him, in exchange for his
becoming his faithful servant. Prospero orders Ariel to take the shape of a sea nymph and
make himself invisible to all but Prospero and to separate those whom he saved from the
shipwreck into small groups.
A quarrel between Prospero and Caliban, the dead Sycorax’s son, now Prospero’s
slave, reveals the bitter enmity between the ‘conqueror’ of the island (Prospero) and the
‘conquered’ (Caliban). As instructed by Propero who has made a plan to get his daughter
married, Ariel makes Miranda and Ferdinand, King Alonso’s son, to meet and the two
instantly fall in love. But the affair will not be allowed to develop too quickly so Prospero
accuses Ferdinand of merely pretending to be the Prince of Naples and, at Fernando’s violent
reaction, he charms him and leads him off to prison.
Ariel is sent then to ‘play’ with the other survivors Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio,
Gonzalo, and other miscellaneous lords. While Alonso laments his son’s tragic fate and
Gonzalo tries to maintain his spirits high, Antonio and Sebastian make sarcastic remarks. The
latter are actually the only ones to remain awake after Ariel casts a spell, so they can discuss
freely the advantages of killing Alonso and his companions. To prevent them from putting
their murderous intentions into practice, Ariel awakes Gonzalo and the rest of the party, so
Antonio and Sebastian have to make up a ridiculous story about having drawn their swords to
protect the king from lions, after which they all set out to look for Ferdinand.
Caliban also meets another group of survivors made up of Trinculo and Stefano,
whom he is first afraid of and whom he takes for spirits sent by Prospero to torment him. To
tame the frightened monster, Trinculo and Stefano give him some liquor to drink. Caliban
gets drunk and begins to sing.
Propero continues to subtly manage the issue of his daughter’s marriage: he has
Ferdinand to carry wood and pretends then to fall asleep; unseen, he is then pleased to witness
the two lovers’ flirtatious games and their making the decision to get married.
Stirred by the invisible Ariel, the drunkards – Stefano, Trinculo and Caliban – begin to
fight and Caliban even boasts about knowing how to kill Prospero. He proposes that they kill
Prospero, take his daughter, and set Stefano up as king of the island. Stefano thinks this a
good plan, and the three prepare to set off to find Prospero, but they are distracted by Ariel’s
music and follow it.
Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebastian and Antonio are secretly observed by Prospero who sees
Sebastian and Antonio plot to kill Alonso and Gonzalo and puts on, with Ariel’s help, a feast
to be set out by strangely shaped spirits, that is broken at the very last moment by a harpy
(Ariel, in fact). Ariel then accuses the men of supplanting Prospero and says that it was for
this sin that Alonso’s son, Ferdinand, has been taken. He vanishes, leaving Alonso feeling
vexed and guilty.
Finally, Ferdinand is accepted by Prospero as his daughter’s husband-to-be and a
masque is performed by the spirits in front of the soon-to-be-wed couple. Then Prospero and
Ariel prepare a trap for the three drunkards (Trinculo, Stefano, and Caliban) whom the latter
had driven near Prospero’s cell, by hanging inside it beautiful clothing. When they are caught
trying to steal the clothes, the drunkards are immediately set upon by a pack of spirits in the
shape of dogs and hounds, driven on by Prospero and Ariel.
Eventually, all survivors of the shipwreck are brought together: Prospero confronts
Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian with their treachery, but he forgives them and reveals that
Ferdinand is alive and is to marry his own daughter. At Prospero’s bidding, Ariel releases
Caliban, Trinculo and Stefano, who then enter wearing their stolen clothing. Prospero and
Alonso command them to return it and to clean up Prospero’s cell. Prospero invites Alonso and

40
the others to stay for the night so that he can tell them the tale of his life in the past twelve years.
After this, the group plans to return to Italy. Prospero, restored to his dukedom, will retire to
Milan. Prospero gives Ariel one final task—to make sure the seas are calm for the return voyage
– before setting him free. In the end, Prospero delivers an epilogue to the audience, asking them
to forgive him for his wrongdoing and set him free by applauding.
The Tempest is a very theatrical play, that is, it is obviously a wonderful vehicle for
displaying the full resources of the theatre: dramatic action, special effects, music, magic, monsters,
dancing, storms, drunken humour, and so on. The Tempest does depend for much of its
effectiveness on a wide range of special effects – sound, lighting, fantastic visions, a whole realm of
“magic” (it may well have been written in response to the changing theatrical tastes of an audience
that was requiring more theatrical effects in the presentation of dramatic productions). But there’s
more to the theatricality of the play than just its style. A central issue of the Tempest is an
exploration into the nature of theatre itself.
The Tempest seems, in some ways, to revisit many earlier Shakespearean themes and
characters, so that at times it comes across almost as a final summary look at some very
familiar material. Its story of loss and recovery and its air of wonder link it closely to
Shakespeare’s other romances (Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline), but it resonates as well
with issues that haunted Shakespeare’s imagination throughout his career: the painful necessity
for a father to let his daughter go (Othello, King Lear); the treacherous betrayal of a legitimate
ruler (Richard II, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth); the murderous hatred of one brother for
another (Richard III, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear); the passage from court society to the
wilderness and the promise of a return (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It); the
wooing of a young heiress in ignorance of her place in the social hierarchy (Twelfth Night,
Pericles, The Winter’s Tale); the dream of manipulating others by means of art, especially by
staging miniature plays-within-plays (1 Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet); the threat
of a radical loss of identity (The Comedy of Errors, Richard II, King Lear); the relation between
nature and nurture (Pericles, The Winter’s Tale); the harnessing of magical powers (2 Henry VI,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth). So, given this rich allusiveness to other plays, at the
end of a course like this there is a natural tendency to want to link the concerns of the play with
a celebration of the wonderful achievement we have been studying so far.
But there is more to the play than simply nostalgia. Two questions seem to puzzle the
readership in this respect. The first is this: If Prospero’s power is so effective against his
opponents as it appears to be, then why didn’t he use it back in Milan to avoid having to be
exiled in the first place? And the second one, which arises naturally from that first one, is this:
Given that Prospero is so keen on his magic and takes such delight in it and that it gives him
so much power, why does he abandon it before returning to Milan? The most satisfying
answer is a very obvious one: the magic does not work in Milan; it is effective only on the
island, away from the Machiavellian world of the court, where plotting against each other,
even against one’s own family, for the sake of political power is the order of the day and
where, if you take your mind off the political realities for very long, you may find yourself in
a boat with a load of books heading to an unknown exile. Prospero’s magic can only become
effective in a special place, a world of spirits, of illusion, song, and enchantment, on a magic
island, in other words, in the theatre. […]
From a different perspective, The Tempest, it is clear, features an experiment by
Prospero. He has not brought the Europeans to the vicinity of the island, but when they do
come close to it, he has, through the power of illusion, lured them into his very special realm.
The experiment first of all breaks up their social solidarity, for they land in different groups:
Ferdinand by himself, the court group, Stephano and Trinculo by themselves, and the sailors
remain asleep. The magic leads them by separate paths until they all meet in the circle drawn
by Prospero in front of his cave. There he removes the spell of the illusions; the human family

41
recognizes each other, and together they resolve to return to Italy, leaving behind the powers
of the magic associated with the island. […]
What is the purpose of Prospero’s experiment? He never gives us a clear statement, but it
seems clear that one important element in that purpose is Miranda. He wants to arrange things on
her behalf, and of all the people in the play, her situation is the most transformed: she is going
back to Europe a royal bride, filled with a sense of enthusiasm and joy at the prospect of living
among so many fine people in a society that, quite literally, thrills her imagination. It seems that
Prospero’s major intention includes a recommitment to civilized life in Milan, so that his daughter
can take up her rightful place in society. As with As You Like It, there is no sense here that any
appropriate life could be based on remaining on the island when they no longer have to.
Whether Prospero’s experiment is a success or not, it seems clear that one great
success is the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. The experiment brings them together,
awakens their sense of wonder at the world and at each other, and is sending them back to
Milan full of the finest hopes for the world. These two young people carry with them the
major weight of the optimistic comic hopes of the play’s resolution. Their love for each other,
which is presented to us as a true love firmly under the control of their moral feelings, will, in
a sense, regenerate Milan.
Another success in Prospero’s experiment is the change of heart which takes place in
his earlier enemy Alonso. Prospero’s actions bring Alonso face to face with his past evil
conduct and prompt him to repent and reconcile himself with Prospero, even to the point of
surrendering the political power he took away so long ago. Moreover, we might want to argue
that there is the beginning of a similar change in the animalistic Caliban, who at least comes
to realize something of his own foolishness in resisting Prospero in favour of two drunken
European lowlifes.
The most complex change in the play, however, takes place within Prospero himself.
In considering his motives for undertaking the experiment, we cannot escape the sense that
Prospero harbors a great deal of resentment about his treatment back in Milan and is never
very far from wanting to exact a harsh revenge. After all, he has it in his power significantly
to injure the parties that treated him so badly. What’s very interesting about this is that
Prospero learns that that is not the appropriate response. And he learns this central insight
from Ariel, the very spirit of imaginative illusion, who is not even human. […] Virtue
expressed in forgiveness is a higher human attribute than vengeance. And in the conclusion of the
play, Prospero does not even mention the list of crimes against him. He simply offers to forgive and
accept what has happened to him, in a spirit of reconciliation. Unlike earlier plays which featured
family quarrels, the ending here requires neither the death nor the punishment of any of the parties.
It makes sense to see in this Shakespeare’s sense of his own art – both what it can
achieve and what it cannot. The theatre – that magical world of poetry, song, illusion, pleasing
and threatening apparitions – can, like Prospero’s magic, educate us into a better sense of
ourselves, into a final acceptance of the world, a state in which we forgive and forget in the
interests of the greater human community. The theatre, that is, can reconcile us to the joys of
the human community so that we do not destroy our families in a search for righting past evils
in a spirit of personal revenge or as crude assertions of our own egos. It can, in a very real
sense, help us fully to understand the central Christian commitment to charity, to loving our
neighbour as ourselves. The magic here brings about a total reconciliation of all levels of
society from sophisticated rulers to semi-human brutes, momentarily holding off
Machiavellian deceit, drunken foolishness, and animalistic rebellion – each person, no matter
how he has lived, has a place in the magic circle at the end. And no one is asking any
awkward questions.
In the same way, Prospero’s world can awaken the young imagination to the wonder
and joy of the human community, can transform our perceptions of human beings into a

42
“brave new world,” full of beauty, promise, and love, and excite our imaginations with the
prospects of living life in the midst of our fellow human beings.
In the world of the Tempest, we have moved beyond tragedy. […] This play seems to be
saying that theatrical art, the magic of Prospero, can achieve what is not possible in the world of
Milan, where everyone must always be on guard, because it’s a Machiavellian world ruled by the
realities of power and injury and there is no Ariel to serve us with the power of illusions.
On this reading of the play, what would we make of Caliban, who stands in opposition to
Prospero’s power and who is its most immediate victim? This reading would probably stress (as
many productions have always done) Caliban’s dangerous, anarchic violence. He is an earth-
animal (some intermediate form perhaps) who represents a clear and present danger, because he is
not capable of being educated out of the state he was born into. Prospero’s ‘civilizing’ arts keep
him in control, though with difficulty. Caliban is at times quite sensitive to the emotional qualities
of Prospero’s magic, especially the wonderful music he hears, but is too much in the grip of his
raw instincts for rape and rebellion to respond with anything other than anger to his condition.
Caliban might well be considered in some sense a natural slave because his idea of
freedom from Prospero seems to involve becoming the slave of someone else, someone who
will kill Prospero. So Caliban throws in his lot with two drunken Europeans, not having the
wit to see them for what they are. Caliban is thus not so much interested in freedom as he is in
rebellion; his violence is natural to him and is not an outgrowth of the way he is treated.
Hence, Prospero’s control of him through his magic is not only justified but necessary.
Does Caliban undergo any sort of significant change at the ending of the play? There’s
a suggestion that he has learned something from the mistakes he has made, and his final
comment (“I’ll be wise hereafter,/ And seek for grace”) may be a cryptic acknowledgment of
some restraint. But he doesn’t go with the Europeans and remains on his island.
For all the potentially warm reconciliations at the end of the play, however, it is not
without its potentially sobering ironies. And there is a good deal of discussion of just how
unequivocal the celebration is at the end. For Prospero is no sentimentalist. He recognizes the
silence of Sebastian and Antonio at the end for what it is, an indication that they have not
changed, that they are going to return to Naples and Milan the same people as left it, political
double dealers, ambitious and potentially murderous power seekers, just as Stephano and
Trinculo are going back as stupid as when they left. Prospero’s theatrical magic has brought
them together, has forced them to see themselves, but it has had no effect on some characters
(unless the staging of the end of the play conveys in non-verbal ways that the two noble
would-be killers are as contrite as Alonso appears to be).
If we see the irony here as present but not totally corrosive, then by bringing us such a
reconciliation, theatre (Prospero’s experiment in the play and The Tempest itself) can help to
maintain our best hopes for a meaningful life, faith that in time we will work things out, that,
in spite of evil, the end of our story will manifest a pattern of moral significance. Locked into
the contingencies of history in our political and business lives, where competition and
deceitful self-interest hold sway, we may easily lose this faith. The theatre is, in a sense, a
place which can restore us. But that restoration is provisional and fragile, more of a hope than a
robust certainty. […]
The theatre metaphor also helps to explain why, in the last analysis, Prospero has to
surrender his magical powers. Life cannot be lived out in the world of illusions, delightful and
educative as they can often be. Life must be lived in the real world, in Milan or in Naples, and
Miranda cannot thus entirely fulfill herself on the island. The realities of life must be
encountered and dealt with as best we can. The world of the theatre can remind us of things
we may too easily forget; it can liberate and encourage youthful wonder and excitement at all
the diverse richness of life; it can, at times, even wake people up to more important issues
than their own Machiavellian urge to self-aggrandizement, and, most important of all, it can

43
educate us into forgiveness. But it can never finally solve the problem of evil, and it can never
provide an acceptable environment for a fully realized adult life.
Prospero doesn’t start the play fully realizing all this. He launches his experiment from
a mixture of motives, perhaps not entirely sure what he going to do (after all, one gets the
sense that there’s a good deal of improvising going on). But he learns in the play to avoid the
twin dangers to his experiment, the two main threats to the value of his theatrical magic.
The first that should be alluded to, namely, the danger of using of his powers purely for
vengeance. Prospero, like Shakespeare, is a master illusionist, and he is tempted to channel his
personal frustrations into his art, to exact vengeance against wrongs done in Milan through the
power of his art (perhaps, as some have argued, as Shakespeare is doing for unknown personal
reasons against women in Hamlet and Lear). But he learns from Ariel that to do this is to deny the
moral value of the art, whose major purpose is to reconcile us to ourselves and our community,
not to even a personal score.
The second great threat which we see in this play is that Prospero may get too
involved in his own wonderful capabilities, he may become too much the showman, too proud
of showing off his skill to attend to the final purpose of what he is doing. We see this in the
scene in which Prospero puts on a special display of his theatrical powers for Ferdinand and
Miranda--his desire to show off makes him forget that he has more important issues to attend
to, once again putting his art in the service of the social experiment. And it’s interesting to
note that it was his self-absorption in his own magic that got Prospero in trouble in the first
place in Milan (as he admits), when he neglected his responsibilities for the self-absorbing
pleasures of his books. There’s a strong sense in this play that, whatever the powers and
wonders of the illusion, one has to maintain a firm sense of what it is for, what it can and
cannot do, and where it is most appropriate. It can never substitute for or conjure away the
complexities of life in the community.
This approach helps one understand the logic behind Prospero’s surrender of his
magic. He has done all he can do. Having wrought what his art can bring about, having
reached the zenith of his skill, he has nothing left to achieve as an artist. He is going home,
back to the human community, perhaps to die, perhaps to enjoy a different life, now able to
appreciate more fully what he did not understand so long ago, the proper relationship between
the world governed by magic and illusion and the world in which most of us have to live most
of the time--the compromised world of politics, alcohol, buying and selling, family strife. So
he releases Ariel; he has no more work for him to do, and Ariel does not belong in Milan.
Of course, it is critically illegitimate and no doubt very sentimental to link Prospero’s
giving up of his art with Shakespeare’s decision to give up writing plays and to return to Stratford
to enjoy life with his grandchildren (in fact, he did not give up the theatrical life immediately after
writing this play). But it’s a very tempting connection, especially in the light of the wonderful
speech in Act V, Scene 1 one of the most frequently quoted passages in the play, a speech which
has come to be called ‘Shakespeare’s Farewell to the Stage.’ Dreams may be the stuff of life, they
may energize us, delight us, educate us, and reconcile us to each other, but we cannot live life as a
dream. We may carry what we learn in the world of illusion with us into life, and perhaps we may
be able, through art, to learn about how to deal with the evil in the world, including our own. But
art is not a substitute for life, and it cannot alter the fundamental conditions of the human
community.” (Johnston, 1999: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/eng366/lectures/tempest.htm)
Nearly every scene in the play either explicitly or implicitly portrays a relationship
between a figure that possesses power and a figure that is subject to that power. The play explores
the master-servant dynamic most harshly in cases in which the harmony of the relationship is
threatened or disrupted, as by the rebellion of a servant or the ineptitude of a master. For instance,
in the opening scene, the “servant” (the Boatswain) is dismissive and angry toward his “masters”
(the noblemen), whose ineptitude threatens to lead to a shipwreck in the storm. From then on,

44
master-servant relationships like these dominate the play: Prospero and Caliban; Prospero and
Ariel; Alonso and his nobles; the nobles and Gonzalo; Stefano, Trinculo, and Caliban; and so
forth. The play explores the psychological and social dynamics of power relationships from a
number of contrasting angles, such as the generally positive relationship between Prospero and
Ariel, the generally negative relationship between Prospero and Caliban, and the treachery in
Alonso’s relationship to his nobles.
The nearly uninhabited island presents the sense of infinite possibility to almost
everyone who lands there. Prospero has found it, in its isolation, an ideal place to school his
daughter. Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, worked her magic there after she was exiled from
Algeria. Caliban, once alone on the island, now Prospero’s slave, laments that he had been his
own king (I.2.344–345). As he attempts to comfort Alonso, Gonzalo imagines a utopian
society on the island, over which he would rule (II.1.148–156). In Act III, scene ii, Caliban
suggests that Stefano kill Prospero, and Stefano immediately envisions his own reign:
“Monster, I will kill this man. His daughter and I will be King and Queen—save our
graces!—and Trinculo and thyself shall be my viceroys” (III.2.101–103). Stefano particularly
looks forward to taking advantage of the spirits that make “noises” on the isle; they will
provide music for his kingdom for free. All these characters envision the island as a space of
freedom and unrealized potential.
The tone of the play, however, toward the hopes of the would-be colonizers is vexed at
best. Gonzalo’s utopian vision in Act II, scene 1 is undercut by a sharp retort from the usually
foolish Sebastian and Antonio. When Gonzalo says that there would be no commerce or work or
“sovereignty” in his society, Sebastian replies, “yet he would be king on’t,” and Antonio adds,
“The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning” (II.1.156–157). Gonzalo’s fantasy
thus involves him ruling the island while seeming not to rule it, and in this he becomes a kind of
parody of Prospero.
While there are many representatives of the colonial impulse in the play, the colonized
have only one representative: Caliban. We might develop sympathy for him at first, when
Prospero seeks him out merely to abuse him, and when we see him tormented by spirits.
However, this sympathy is made more difficult by his willingness to abase himself before
Stefano in Act II, scene ii. Even as Caliban plots to kill one colonial master (Prospero) in Act
III, scene 2, he sets up another (Stefano). The urge to rule and the urge to be ruled seem
inextricably intertwined.

45
 Practice to Increase Understanding: Text Analysis
1. Explain the artistic purpose of Richard III’s soliloquy (Act I, scene 1) and comment upon
Shakespeare’s arts of language as illustrated in the following lines:
GLOUCESTER. Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums chang’d to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visag’d war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front,
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I-that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass-
I-that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph-
I-that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them-
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate the one against the other;
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up-
About a prophecy which says that G
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul. Here Clarence
comes.
GLOUCESTER. Azi iarna vrajbei noastre s-a schimbat,
Prin soarele lui York, în toi de vară;
Iar norii toţi ce casa ne-o striveau
Sunt îngropaţi în sânu-adânc al mării.
Purtăm pe frunţi cununi de biruinţă;
Din ciunte arme am făcut trofeu;
Din aspre trâmbiţi, glas de voioşie,
Din marş de spaimă, paşi suavi de danţ.
Brăzdatul Marte chipul şi-l descruntă,
Şi-acum, în loc să sperie vrăjmaşii
Încălecat pe cai împlătoşaţi,
El zburdă prin iatacuri de domniţe
În freamătul molatec al lăutei.
Dar eu, ce nu-s croit pentru hârjoane
Şi nici să mă răsfăţ în dulci oglinzi;
Eu, crunt, ciuntit, ce nu pot să mă-nfoi
Pe lâng-o nimfă legănată-n şolduri;
Eu, cel necumpănit deopotrivă,
Prădat la trup de firea necinstită,
Neisprăvit şi strâmb, prea timpuriu
Zvârlit în lumea asta vie, şi-ncă
Aşa pocit, scălâmb, că pân’ şi câinii
Mă latră când şonticăiesc pe drum;
Da, eu, în piuitul slab al păcii,
Nu simt plăceri să-mi trec răgazul altfel
Decât privind-mi umbra lungă-n soare
Şi-amănunţindu-mi strâmbăciunea mea;
Deci cum nu pot să fiu un curtezan,
Nici să mă-mbii la aste dulci taifasuri,
Mi-am pus în gând să fiu un ticălos,
Urând huzurul zilelor de azi.
Urzeli am înnodat, prepusuri grele,
Prin bete profesii, scorneli şi vise,
Pe rege şi pe Clarence, fraţii mei,
La ură să-i asmut, mistuitoare.
Şi dacă Edward riga-i bun şi drept
Cât eu subţire, cutră, -ntortocheat,
Chiar astăzi Clarence intră-n colivie,
De răul profeţiei cum că G
Vlăstarii lui Edward îi va stârpi.
De-a-fundu-n suflet, gânduri: vine Clarence.
(Translation by Dan Duţescu in Shakespeare.
Antologie bilingvă, Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică,
1964, pp. 87-9)

2. Enlarge on the place of the fragment below (Act V, scene 1) in the economy of
Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, comment on the extent to which it is
illustrative for major themes of the play and discuss its stylistic peculiarities:
[Enter PYRAMUS and THISBE, WALL, MOONSHINE, and [Intră PYRAM, THISBEA, ZIDUL, LUCIU-DE-LUNĂ
LION, as in dumb show.] şi LEUL.]
PROLOGUE. PROLOGUL:
Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show; Poate această povestire să vă mire, n-am ce zice,
But wonder on, till truth make all things plain. Spectatori, pân’ ce-adevărul vine totul să explice.

46
This man is Pyramus, if you would know;
This beauteous lady Thisby is certain.
This man, with lime and rough-cast, doth present
Wall, that vile Wall which did these lovers sunder;
And through Wall’s chink, poor souls, they are
content
To whisper, at the which let no man wonder.
This man, with lanthorn, dog, and bush of thorn,
Presenteth Moonshine: for, if you will know,
By moonshine did these lovers think no scorn
To meet at Ninus’ tomb, there, there to woo.
This grisly beast, which by name Lion hight,
The trusty Thisby, coming first by night,
Did scare away, or rather did affright;
And as she fled, her mantle she did fall;
Which Lion vile with bloody mouth did stain:
Anon comes Pyramus, sweet youth, and tall,
And finds his trusty Thisby’s mantle slain;
Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast;
And Thisby, tarrying in mulberry shade,
His dagger drew, and died. For all the rest,
Let Lion, Moonshine, Wall, and lovers twain,
At large discourse while here they do remain.
[Exeunt PROLOGUE, THISBE, LION, and
MOONSHINE.]
THESEUS: I wonder if the lion be to speak.
DEMETRIUS: No wonder, my lord: one lion may,
when many asses do.
WALL: In this same interlude it doth befall
That I, one Snout by name, present a wall:
And such a wall as I would have you think
That had in it a crannied hole or chink,
Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisby,
Did whisper often very secretly.
This loam, this rough-cast, and this stone, doth show
That I am that same wall; the truth is so:
And this the cranny is, right and sinister,
Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper.
THESEUS: Would you desire lime and hair to speak
better?
DEMETRIUS: It is the wittiest partition that ever I
heard discourse, my lord.
THESEUS: Pyramus draws near the wall; silence.
[Enter PYRAMUS.]
PYRAMUS: O grim-look’d night! O night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not!
O night, O night, alack, alack, alack,
I fear my Thisby’s promise is forgot!--
And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall,
That stand’st between her father’s ground and mine;
Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall,
Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine
eyne.
[WALL holds up his fingers.]
Thanks, courteous wall: Jove shield thee well for this!
But what see what see I? No Thisby do I see.
O wicked wall, through whom I see no bliss,
Curs’d be thy stones for thus deceiving me!
Omul ăsta e Pyramus, dacă vreţi cumva să ştiţi,
Thisbea e-această fată prea frumosă ce-o priviţi.
Omul plin de tencuială şi cu var mânjit pe-o parte
Este Zidul, urâciosul zid ce pe amanţi desparte.
Fericiţi când pot, sărmanii, prin a zidului spărtură
Pe furiş şi-n mare taină să-şi şoptească gură-n gură.
Omul ăsta cu fanarul, cu căţel şi mărăcine,
Reprezintă luciul lunei: căci, notaţi aceasta bine,
Noaptea numai când din ceruri luna lumina de sus,
Se-ntâlneau Pyram şi Thisbea la mormântul lui Ninus.
Fiara asta cruntă, căreia leu îi place să se cheme,
Într-o noapte, când venise dulcea Thisbe prea devreme
A făcut-o ca să fugă şi-n acea sperietură
Ea, fugind, lăsă să-i cadă-n drum mantaua ei pe care
Leul o mânji pe urmă cu însângerata-i gură.
Tot atunci, Pyram, un tânăr blând la chip, roz-alb apare;
El găsi mantaua Thisbei credincioase sângerată
Şi pe loc înfipse vârful blestemat al spadei sale
Drept în inima-i în care sângele fierbea de jale.
Thisbea ce s-oprise-n umbra unor mure, scoate-ndată
Junghiul şi muri. Şi-acuma Leul, Zidul, Luciu-de-lună
Şi-amanţii-n mândre stihuri ce-a urmat au să vă spună.
[PROLOGUL, THISBEA, ZIDUL, LUCIU-DE-LUNĂ
ies prin dreapta.]
THESEU: Nu-mi vine-a crede că un leu vorbeşte.
DEMETRIUS: Nu-i de mirare prea mărite: vorbească şi
leul unde vorbesc atâţia măgari.
ZIDUL: În acest poem se-ntâmplă, că şi eu numitul Snout,
Reprezint un zid, dar zidul ăsta, rog să fiu crezut,
Are crăpături şi găuri multe care pot lăsa
Să şoptească-ades în taină pe Pyram cu Thisbea sa.
Tencuiala, piatra, varul ce-l vedeţi, vădesc curat,
Că sunt un zid în toată legea, că sunt zid adevărat.
Iar la dreapta şi la stânga prin spărturile aceste
Îşi şoptesc fricos amanţii amoroasa lor poveste.
THESEU: Se poate cere de la var şi tencuială şi o perucă
să se exprime mai frumos.
DEMETRIUS: N-am mai ascutat niciodată, stăpâne, zid
aşa de duhliu!
THESEU: Pyram s-apropie de Zid. Tăcere!
[Intră din nou PYRAMUS.]
PYRAM: Noapte neagră la culoare, noapte groaznică ce vii,
Noapte care totdeauna eşti pe loc ce nu e zi!
Noapte ! noapte ! noapte tristă! Noapte! Noapte!
Vai! Mă tem
C-a uita să vină Thisbea la-ntâlnirea ce-o avem;
Iar tu, Zidule, o dulce Zid drăguţ, care te ţii
Între casele bătrâne şi desparţi pe-ai lor copii,
Zidule! O, Zid simpatic! Dulce Zid frumos, mi-arată
O spărtură-a ta prin care ochii mei pot să răzbată.
[ZIDUL îşi răsfiră degetele.]
Mulţumesc, o, Zid prieten! Jupiter te aibă-n pază!
Dar ce văd? Nu văd pe Thisbea mea iubită!
Ce-nsemnează?
O, Zid afurisit, tu-mi ascunzi comoara mea.
Blestemată-ţi fie piatra, dacă mă tratezi aşa!
47
THESEUS: The wall, methinks, being sensible,
should curse again.
PYRAMUS
No, in truth, sir, he should not. ‘Deceiving me’ is
Thisby’s cue: she is to enter now, and I am to spy her
through the wall. You shall see it will fall pat as I told
you.—Yonder she comes.
[Enter THISBE.]
THISBE: O wall, full often hast thou heard my moans,
For parting my fair Pyramus and me:
My cherry lips have often kiss’d thy stones:
Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee.
PYRAMUS: I see a voice; now will I to the chink,
To spy an I can hear my Thisby’s face.
Thisby!
THISBE: My love! thou art my love, I think.
PYRAMUS: Think what thou wilt, I am thy lover’s grace;
And like Limander am I trusty still.
THISBE: And I like Helen, till the fates me kill.
PYRAMUS: Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true.
THISBE: As Shafalus to Procrus, I to you.
PYRAMUS: O, kiss me through the hole of this vile
wall.
THISBE: I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all.
PYRAMUS: Wilt thou at Ninny’s tomb meet me
straightway?
THISBE: ‘Tide life, ‘tide death, I come without delay.
WALL: Thus have I, wall, my part discharged so;
And, being done, thus Wall away doth go.
[Exeunt WALL, PYRAMUS and THISBE.]
THESEUS Now is the mural down between the two
neighbours.
DEMETRIUS: No remedy, my lord, when walls are
so wilful to hear without warning.
HIPPOLYTA: This is the silliest stuff that ever I
heard.
THESEUS: The best in this kind are but shadows;
and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend
them.
HIPPOLYTA: It must be your imagination then, and
not theirs.
THESEUS: If we imagine no worse of them than
they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men.
Here come two noble beasts in, a moon and a lion.
3. Demonstrate the power of the Shakespearean rhetoric exploring the following excerpt from
Julius Caesar (Act III, scene 2):
ANTONY
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest –
THESEU: Îmi pare că şi Zidul s-ar cădea
Să blesteme, căci, chipurile, simte.
PYRAM: Nu, asta nu, mărite Doamne! “Dacă mă tratezi
aşa” e replica Thisbei. Ea va intra în scenă şi eu voi
pândi-o prin zid. Veţi vedea că e tocmai aşa cum zic. Iat-
o că vine.
[Intră THISBEA.]
THISBEA: Zidule, ce-atât de-adesea în amara clipă când
Mă despart de mândrul Pyram,
Tu m-auzi cum gem plângând,
Gura-mi de cireaşă-adesea se apleacă să-ţi sărute
Pietrele cu tencuială şi cu var şi-n veci tăcute!
PYRAM: Pare că zăresc o voce... În spărtură mă reped
Să aud figura Thisbei...
THISBEA: Ah, tu eşti, Pyrame, cred.
PYRAM: Crede ce pofteşti, iubito: sunt iubitul tău fidel
Ca Lysandru către Hera, ba chiar şi mai mult ca el!
THISBEA: Eu-ţi voi fi ca şi Helena de fidelă, până mor.
PYRAM: Ceea ce era Saphala pentru Procrus, tu îmi eşti!
THISBEA: Eu, cum adora Saphala pe-al ei Procrus, te ador!
PYRAM: Dă-mi prin acest zid o gură, Thisbeo, dacă mă
iubeşti.
THISBEA: Vai, sărut doar zidul numai, gura ta nu.
PYRAM: Vreai să vii azi la a lui Ninus groapă?
THISBEA: Pyram, viu de-oi fi-ntre vii!
ZIDUL: Care va să zică, eu m-am achitat de rol,
Neavând deci ce mai face, zidul lasă locul gol.
[Ies ZIDUL, PYRAM şi THISBEA.]
THESEU: Care va să zică nu mai e nici un zid între cei
doi vecini.
DEMETRIUS: Nici că se poate altfel, stăpâne, de vreme
ce zidurile au urechi.
HIPPOLYTA: E cea mai desăvârşită prostie pe care am
auzit-o vreodată.
THESEU: Ce-i mai bun în genul acesta este jocul
umbrelor şi tot ce-i rău nu mai este rău când se amestecă
fantazia.
HIPPOLYTA: Atunci fantazia dumitale lucrează, nu a
lor.
THESEU: Dacă nu ne facem despre ei o idee mai rea ca
ei înşişi, pot trece drept oameni de toată cinstea. Iată că
vin două nobile dobitoace: o lună şi un leu.
ANTONY
Romani, prieteni, daţi-mi ascultare:
Vin să-l îngrop pe Cezar, nu să-l laud.
Ce facem rău trăieşte după noi
Iar binele ades cu noi se-ngroapă;
Aşa-i cu Cezar. Brutus cel cinstit
V-a spus de Cezar că râvnea mărire:
De este-aşa, i-a fost păcatul greu,
Şi greu plătit-a Cezar pentru el.
Cu voie de la Brutus şi ceilalţi –
48
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men –
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
4. Consider the following excerpt from Romeo and Juliet (Act II, scene 2) in order to explain
how the ‘balcony scene’ foregrounds important traits of the main characters and to give
textual evidence sustaining the description of the play as a lyrical tragedy:
ROMEO
He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
JULIET appears above at a window
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.
It is my lady, O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!
She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.
I am too bold, ‘tis not to me she speaks:
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!
Căci Brutus este, da, un om cinstit,
Şi toţi la fel, sunt oameni prea cinstiţi –
Vin să vorbesc la-ngropăciunea lui.
Mi-a fost prieten drept şi credincios:
Dar Brutus spune că râvnea mărire;
Şi Brutus este, da, un om cinstit.
Adus-a mulţi captivi la Roma, -n ţară
Umplând cu-al lor răscumpăr visteria:
Se cheamă-aceasta râvnă de mărire?
Sărmanii când gemeau, a plâns şi Cezar:
Din lut mai aspru-i plămădită râvna.
Dar Brutus spune că râvnea mărire
Şi Brutus este, da, un om cinstit.
De Lupercalii aţi văzut: de trei ori
Coroana i-au întins, şi de trei ori
N-a vrut-o: asta-i râvnă de mărire?
Dar Brutus spune că râvnea mărire;
Şi, fără greş, el este om cinstit.
Eu nu vorbesc ca să-l dezic pe Brutus,
Dar sunt aici ca să vorbesc ce ştiu.
Cu toţii l-am iubit, şi nu degeaba:
Ce vă opreşte, dară, să-l jeliţi?
O, judecată! ai fugit la fiare,
Şi oamenii mi te-au pierdut. Iertaţi:
Mi-e inima în lacră, lângă Cezar,
Şi trebuie s-aştept să mi se-ntoarcă.
(Traducere de Dan Duţescu în Shakespeare. Antologie
bilingvă, Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1964, pp. 338-9)
ROMEO
De răni fac haz cei nerăniți cândva.
Julieta se ivește la o fereastră de sus.
Dar ce lumină-acolo-n geam răsare?
Sunt zorii, da, și Julieta-i soare!
Te-nalță, soare, și răpune luna
Pizmașa, care-i lâncedă de ciudă
Că tu, fecioara ei, o-ntreci în nuri:
N-o mai sluji, de vreme ce-i pizmașă;
Verzui și stins e straiu-i de vestală,
Și-l poartă doar nătângii; tu aruncă-l.
E ea, domnița mea, iubirea mea!
O, dacă-ar ști că este!
Vorbește, totuți, fără glas: ce dacă-i
Cuvântă ochii, eu le voi răspunde.
Dar prea cutez, ea nu-mi vorbește mie.
Doi aștri de pe cer, din cei mai limpezi,
Chemați aiurea, roagă ochii ei
Să scapere-n tării pân’ s-or întoarce.
Pe boltă-s ochii? Stelele-s la ea?
Nu, aștrii s-ar sfii de strălucirea-i
Ca un opaiț ziua! Ei văzduhul
Atât l-ar lumina ăncât, uitând
Că-i noapte, păsări s-or porni cântând.
Obrazul, vezi, și-l sprijină în mână …
O, cum de nu-s pe mâna ei mănușă,
Să-i mângâi eu obrazul !
49
 JULIET: Ay me!
ROMEO: She speaks:
O, speak again, bright angel! for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o’er my head
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned wondering eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air.
JULIET
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
ROMEO
[Aside] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?
JULIET
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.
5. Comment upon the malcontent’s dilemma and inner conflict, exploring the following lines
from Hamlet’s soliloquy (Act III, scene 1):
HAMLET:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, that law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
JULIETA: Ah !
ROMEO: Cuvântă:
O, mai cuvântă, îngere! căci tu
Ești slava astei nopți, plutind de-asupră-mi
Precum un crainic aripat din cer
Spre care lumea ochii mari deschide,
Cu capul dat pe spate, ațintindu-l
Cum trece călărind trândavii nori,
Și până-n miezul bolții lopătează.
JULIETA
Romeo, ah! De ce ești tu Romeo?
Te leapădă de nume și de tată.
De nu te-nduri, iubire jură-mi doar
Și-am să mă rup de-ai mei, de Capuleți.
ROMEO
[Aparte] Să mai ascult, sau să-i răspund acum?
JULIETA
Doar numele ce-l porți îmi e dușman.
Și chiar de n-ai fi Montague, tu ești
Tot tu. Ce-nseamnă Montague? Nici braț,
Nici mână, nici picior, nici chip, nici altă
Bucată dintr-un om. Alt nume ia-ți!
Ce-i numele? Ce noi numim răsuri
Tot dulce-ar miresma, oricum le-am zice;
La fel și el: de nu-l mai chem Romeo,
Tot fără cusur și drag rămâne
Și-atunci. Romeo, leapădă-al tău nume
Căci nu-i crâmpei din tine, și în schimb
Pe mine ia-mă toată.
(Traducere de Dan Duţescu în Shakespeare. Antologie
bilingvă, Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1964, pp. 171-173)
HAMLET:
Fiinţă – nefiinţă: ce s-alegi?
Mai vrednic oare e să rabzi în cuget
A’ vitregiei praştii şi săgeţi,
Sau fierul să-l ridici asupra mării
De griji – şi să le curmi ? Să mori : să dormi ;
Atât : şi printr-un somn să curmi durerea
Din inimă şi droaia de izbelişti
Ce-s date cărnii, este-o încheiere
Cucernic de râvnit. Să mori, să dormi,
Să dormi – visând, mai ştii ? Aici e greu.
Căci se cuvine-a cugeta : ce vise
Pot răsări în somnu- aceasta-al morţii
Când hoitu-i lepădat? De-aceea-i lungă
Năpasta. Altfel cine-ar mai răbda
A lumii bice şi ocări, călcâiul
Tiran, dispreţul omului trufaş,
Chinul iubirii-n van, zăbava legii,
Neobrăzarea cârmuirii, scârba
Ce-o svârlu cei nevrednici celor vrednici,
Când însuşi ar putea să-şi facă seama
Doar cu-n pumnal ? Cine-ar răbda poverii,
Gemând şi asudând sub greul vieţii,
Cât teama în ceva de după moarte,
Tărâmul neaflat, de unde nimeni
50
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
6. Use the excerpt below (Act I, scene 2) to comment on the relationship between Prospero
and Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
PROSPERO. Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have us’d thee,
Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodg’d thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.
CALIBAN. Oh ho! Oh ho! Would it had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopl’d else
This isle with Calibans.
PROSPERO. Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words that made them known: but thy vile race,
Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good
natures
Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou
Deservedly confin’d into this rock, who hadst
Deserv’d more than a prison.
CALIBAN. You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you,
For learning me your language!
PROSPERO. Hag-seed, hence!
Fetch us in fuel; and be quick, thou ‘rt best,
To answer other business. Shrug’st thou, malice?
If thou neglect’st, or dost unwillingly
What I command, I’ll rack thee with old cramps,
Fill all thy bones with aches; make thee roar,
That beasts shall tremble at thy din.
CALIBAN. No, pray thee.--
[Aside] I must obey. His art is of such power,
It would control my dam’s god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.
Nu se întoarce ne-ncâlceşte vrerea
Şi mai degrab’ răbdăm aceste rele
Decât zburăm spre alte neştiute.
Astfel mişei pe toţi ne face gândul:
Şi-astfel al hotărârii proaspăt chip
Se gălbejeşte-n umbra cugetării,
Iar marile, înaltele avânturi
De-aceea îşi întoarnă strâmb şuvoiul
Şi numele de faptă-l pierd.
(Translation by Dan Duţescu, Shakespeare.
Antologie bilingvă, Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică,
1964, pp. 397-9)
PROSPERO. Sclav mincinos, ce-asculţi de bici, iar nu
De vorbă bună, eu te-am omenit
Deşi eşti un gunoi, te-am găzduit
La mine-n peşteră şi, drept răsplată,
Ai vrut să-mi pângăreşti copila.
CALIBAN. Ha - ha!
Măcar de i-o puneam! Tu m-ai oprit,
Altminteri, insula o populam
Cu Calibani.
PROSPERO. Slugoi spurcat, lipsit
De-un dram de omenie, mă, ‘ntrupare
A răutăţii ! Te-am compătimit,
Cu graiul te-am deprins şi zi de zi
Te-am învăţat de toate. La-nceput
Habar n-aveai ce vrei, bolboroseai
Aiurea, ca o fiară, pănă când
Cu rostul vorbei te-am deprins ; şi chiar
Şcolită, firea-ţi hâdă are-ntr-însa
Sămânţă rea ; şi te-am gonit pe drept
Pe stâncă, deşi meritai mai mult
Decât o temniţă.
CALIBAN. M-ai învăţat
Vorbirea şi-am acuma avantajul
Că ştiu să blestem. Dare-ar ciuma-n tine,
În limba şi-n învăţătura ta!
PROSPERO. Piei, pui de cotoroanţă! Adu lemne,
Da’ repede, că ai şi-o altă treabă –
Măi, lepră, dai din umeri? De nu faci
Sau faci în silă ce ţi-am poruncit,
Te chinui cu cârcei, dureri de oase
Şi ai să urli de-o să se-nspăimânte
Până şi fiarele.
CALIBAN. Nu, te implor.
[Aparte] N-am încotro. E-aşa de tare-n vrăji
Că l-ar învinge şi pe Setebos,
Pe zeul maică-mii.
(Traducere de George Volceanov în William
Shakespeare, Opere I. Sonete. Furtuna, Piteşti:
Paralela 45, 2010, pp. 293-4)
51
 Bibliography

 *** (1987) “Some Ado about Who was or Was Not, Shakespeare”, Smithsonian (September), The
Shakespeare Mystery, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shakespeare/debates/reedarticle.html
 *** “‘Now, Mother, what’s the matter?’ Dr. Freud’s Hamlet”,
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/bierman/Elsinore/Freud/freudFirst.html
 Bachelard, Gaston. (1995). Apa şi visele. Bucureşti: Editura Univers.
 Barber, Holly A. Shakespearean Performance. 1574-1642,
http://www.comm.unt.edu/histofperf/Final%20Page%20wo%20bib.htm
 Bethell, Tom (1991) “The Case for Oxford”, The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 268, No. 4
(October), 45-61, http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/shakes/beth.htm
 Bloom, Harold. (1998) Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, New York: Riverhead
Books
 Bolt, Sydney. (1990). Shakespeare - Hamlet. London: Penguin Books
 Bowers, Fredson (1940) Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, Princeton: Princeton University Press
 Callaghan, Dympna (2000) Shakespeare without Women. Representing Gender and Race on
the Renaissance Stage, London and New York: Routledge
 Cartianu, Ana (ed.) (1964) Teatrul Renaşterii engleze. Vol. I. Bucureşti: Editura pentru
Literatură Universală
 Cheney, Patrick (ed.) (2007) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press
 Crunelle-Vanrigh, Anny. (1997) “ ‘Too Much in the (Black) Sun’: Hamlet’s First Soliloquy,
A Kristevan View” in Renaissance Forum, Volume 2, Number 2, Autumn,
http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm
 Daiches, David. (1975, 1991). A Critical History of English Literature. Vol 2. Shakespeare to
Milton. London: Secker & Warburg
 Delaney, Denis, Ward, Ciaran and Carla Rho Fiorina (2005) Fields of Vision. Vol. I, Pearson
Education Limited
 Dickson, Andrew (2009) The Rough Guide to Shakespeare. The Plays – The Poems – The
Life, Rough Guides
 Edwards, Philip (ed.) (1993) Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Cambridge University Press
 Englert, Robert (1999) “Why I reject the Shakespearean ‘heresies’“, The University
Concourse, Volume V, Issue 1 (September 22), www.theuniversityconcourse.com/ V,1,9-22-
1999/Englert.htm
 Freud, Sigmund (1965) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey,
New York: W. W. Norton
 Freud, Sigmund. (1999). Opere. Vol 1. Eseuri de psihanaliză aplicată. Iaşi: Editura Trei
 Gavriliu, Eugenia (2000) Lectures in English Literature I, Galaţi: Universitatea “Dunărea de
Jos”
 Gavriliu, Eugenia (2004) English Literature through Texts. From Anglo-Saxon to Early
Modern, Galaţi: Editura Fundaţiei Universitare “Dunărea de Jos”
 Halliday, F. E. (1964) A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore: Penguin
 Honan, Park (1999) Shakespeare. A Life, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press
 Jardine, Lisa. (1996). Reading Shakespeare Historically. London and New York: Routledge.
 Johnston, Ian (1999) “You Can Go Home Again, Can’t You? An Introduction to The
Tempest”, Malaspina-University College, Nanaimo, BC,
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/eng366/lectures/tempest.htm

52
 Jones, Ernest. (1910) “The Oedipus-Complex as An Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A
Study in Motive” in The American Journal of Psychology 21.1 (January), 72-113 in
Shakespeare Navigators. 7 Jan. 2006 http://www.clicknotes.com/jones
 Jump, John D. (ed.) (1962) Christopher Marlowe – Doctor Faustus, London: Methuen & Co.
Ltd.
 Larque, Thomas (2001, 2005) A Lecture on Elizabethan Theatre,
http://shakespearean.org.uk/elizthea1.htm
 Leithart, Peter J. (1994) “The Serpent Now Wears the Crown: A Typological Reading of
Hamlet”, http://www.visi.com/~contra_m//cm/features/cm11_hamlet.html
 McDonald, Russ (2003) Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000,
London and New York: Blackwell
 Montrose, Louis Adrian (1983) “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in
Elizabethan Culture”, Representations 1, 61-93
 Moseley, C.W.R.D (1988) Shakespeare’s History Plays, London: Penguin Books
 Muir, Kenneth and S. Schoenbaum (1976) A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies,
London: Cambridge University Press
 Roston, Murray (1982, 1988) Sixteenth-century English Literature, London: Macmillan
 Shakespeare, William (1964) Antologie biligvă, volum alcătuit de Dan Duţescu şi Leon
Leviţchi, Bucureşti: Ed. Ştiinţifică
 Shakespeare, William (1999) Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ediţie bilingvă.. Trad. Vladimir
Streinu, Târgovişte: Pandora –M
 Shakespeare, William (2005) The Complete Illustrated Works of William Shakespeare,
London: Bounty Books
 Shakespeare, William; Volceanov, George (coord.) (2010) Opere I. Sonete. Furtuna,
translated by Violeta Popa and George Volceanov, Piteşti: Paralela 45
 Spear, Hilda D. (1999) The Elizabethan Theatre, www.uni-koeln.de/phil-
fak/englisch/shakespeare/
 Stetner, Clifford, “Deconstructing Hamlet”, http://www.columbia.edu/~fs10/garber.htm
 van Schaijik, Kathleen (1999) “The ‘Stratford man’ and the Shakespearean canon: no match
at all”, The University Concourse, Volume V, Issue 3 (November 10),
http://www.theuniversityconcourse.com/V,3,11-10-1999/vanSchaijik.htm
 Young, Arthur M. (1987) “The Shakespeare/ Bacon Controversy”. Interview by Faustin Bray,
www.arthuryoung.com/shakexc.HTML

53