Shakespeare's Dramatic Structures

Anthony Brennan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780367239923
• eBook ISBN: 9781136558528
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1986. The focus of this book is the dramatic strategies of scenic repetition and character separation. The author traces the way in which Shakesperare often presents recurring gestures, dramatic interactions, and complex scenic structures at widely separated intervals in a play - thereby providing an internal system of cross-reference for an audience. He also examines the way in which Shakespeare increases the dramatic voltage in central relationships by limiting the access key characters have to each other on stage. These strategies, it is argued, are indelible marks of Shakespeare's craftsmanship which survive all attempts to obliterate it in many modern productions.

Part One

1 · ‘Look where it comes again’

Pattern and variation in Shakespeare’s dramas

There is a self-reflexive quality on many levels to the drama of Shakespeare’s age. Shakespeare seems to have counted on the fact that many members of his audience were long-time loyal supporters of his company. It was not merely the time-frame within an individual play which he could capitalize on, he could occasionally use the longer frame of a theatregoer’s habits. When Polonius says to Hamlet, before the play-scene, that he has been an actor and, as Julius Caesar, was killed by Brutus in the Capitol, it is possible that there is a specific reference which would have a particular impact for the original audience. The actor playing Polonius may be the same actor who had recently performed as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar talking to Hamlet/Burbage who may have played Brutus in that same production. An actor playing a character who talks about himself as an actor playing a character is not simply routine metadrama. It is especially appropriate at the moment when Hamlet is broaching his trap, trying to come at reality through illusion. The essence of Caesar’s murder was the surprise, the fact that even his closest friend Brutus was involved. The play shortly to be performed is a re-enactment of the murder of one brother by another, and its aim is for a nephew to catch his guilty uncle by surprise. A result of the performance will be that Polonius will be taken by surprise and stabbed by Hamlet through the arras. That very man who had enacted Caesar will become once again a capital calf in the brute stabbing by the man who had played Brutus. These ironies and interconnections are not simultaneously activated in the mind of the audience. The important point is that they are potentially there in the general similarity of event. Out of something seemingly innocent a violent shock emerges which proves a turning point to the action. What Caesar had anticipated as a routine ceremony in the Capitol turns out to be his assassination. What Claudius considers an innocent performance to preoccupy his wayward nephew turns out to be a horrifying revelation that his fratricide is not a buried secret. Polonius, we might eventually feel, would be rather aptly cast as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. He is something of a sententious windbag, rather addicted to his own theories about Hamlet’s antic disposition no matter what contrary evidence is available. Like Caesar he does not respond to signals of danger which pose a threat to his life.

It has often been suggested that the original audiences may have gained added insight or ironical references by the juxtaposition of plays in Shakespeare’s canon. We may suppose that Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written in the same period, could have gathered an extra frisson in the refracted lights they cast on each other in performance. There may have been a special pleasure for an audience profoundly moved by the tragic mistakes of the young lovers in Verona watching, in the same period, the mechanicals turning a very similar tragic story into hysterical farce at the Athenian court. Regular supporters of a stable repertory company have a particular insider’s pleasure. Attached to any favourite actor’s current role are the shadows of his earlier roles. An accomplished actor developing the variety of his talent can count on our knowledge of his career, our expectations that he is ready for a role, or our hopes for a fresh interpretation when he is cast in a way we had not anticipated. Nick Bottom and Francis Flute are given the most abominable verse ever spoken on a stage to express the toils of Pyramus and Thisby. But the audience finds itself distanced a little from the young courtier lovers who are so eager to make smart cracks at the mechanicals’ expense even as they forget their own recent absurd endeavours in the Athenian woods. We have no means of knowing which actors played the parts of, say, Egeus, Demetrius and Hermia. But if they had recently played in repertory Capulet, Paris and Juliet then the original audience would have a slight overlay of awareness of the range of torment, from the broadest farce to the deepest tragedy, to which love could bring the young. They can laugh at Pyramus and Thisby and yet cause the audience to remember how heartrending a tragedy can be which results from the impulsive mistakes of young lovers rushing to death on misleading evidence. That one man in his time plays many parts is a conventional habit of thought in this period, but in the patterns of repertory company performance there were always real theatrical circumstances multiplying the commonplace ironies.

There are many structural similarities between I Henry IV and 2 Henry IV. It is not enough simply to attribute this, as with so many modern movie sequels, to the reliance on the repetition of a commercially successful formula. The elements – the embattled king in his court, the Boar’s Head Tavern revellers, the truant Prince moving from one locale to the other, the disaffected Percies – all recur. There is enough parallelism in some of the scenic structures to make it seem possible that Shakespeare counted on the audience of Part 2 remembering some of the incidents of Part 1. If they were intended to be played again in sequence, as they so often are by modern repertory companies, then the patterning in scenic structures would reinforce the effect of the speeches which recall past kings and battles to create a sense of the cyclic movement of historical events. But the mood and tone of the second part are completely different from those of the first. It seems likely that Shakespeare is using a superficial repetition of pattern, as he does so often, to emphasize change.

In I Henry IV Falstaff is on stage in eight scenes of the play and in all of those scenes he shares the stage at some point with Hal. Hal appears in ten scenes of the play. Falstaff is on stage without Hal for less than 200 lines of the play. Hal is on stage without Falstaff for a little less than 500 lines. They are on stage together for almost 1000 lines, a third of the play, and for nearly all of them they are engaged in direct interaction . In 2 Henry IV there is a very significant alteration made in the weight given to direct exchanges between the two. Falstaff appears in eight of the play’s scenes but in only two of those scenes does he share the stage with Hal. Hal is on stage in only five scenes. Falstaff is on stage in events in which Hal takes no part for over 1200 lines of the play. Hal is on stage in scenes without Falstaff for a little less than 500 lines. But the two characters engage in direct interaction for only around 150 lines, less than one-twentieth of the play. Thus we see Hal and Falstaff together in Part 1 for over six times more lines than in Part 2 and we see Falstaff without Hal for six times more lines in Part 2 than in Part 1. In spite of so much repetition in the elements of the action we notice the separation of Hal and Falstaff and the way in which the plays drive towards totally different conclusions. On the surface the last scenes in each play have a broadly similar event as a focus – the search by Falstaff for reward. The chaos of the battle at Shrewsbury in Part 1 with raging rebels, counterfeit kings and the grinning honour of death provide a patchwork of events in which Falstaff can act the coward, lie down, resurrect himself and claim a reward he has not earned. He is still close enough to Hal for the young Prince to wink at his outrageous effrontery. Though the fat man does not know it, Shrewsbury is the pinnacle of his success with Hal. In writing a second play about Henry IV’s reign Shakespeare varies a familiar pattern of events to make it clear that Falstaff is soon going to be edged into the tiring house. He may still have a good deal to say ‘in behalf of that Falstaff but remarkably little of it is to Hal. By the end of Part 2 the realm has long been secured from the rebels at Gaultree. Hal has gone through the trial of his father’s death and the awesome burden of assuming the crown. Falstaff has been at his roguish exploits in the countryside far from his Jove. He rushes to London for his reward on hearing of Hal’s coronation. He can only do so because he, unlike the audience, notices no change in the pattern of events and the nature of his relationship to Hal. At Shrewsbury he could pretend to have earned a reward; now he expects a reward merely for being himself, a boon companion. Falstaff is unaware that the only remaining action in the play, which will complete Hal’s long-promised transformation, is the cold rejection which awaits him. In the darkening mood of Part 2, in the sourness which has crept into the Boar’s Head antics, in the sense we have of Hal leaving his pranks behind, everything leads us to this conclusion. We expect it because it completes a pattern worked through the play, but the ruthlessness of the rejection still shocks us. That is partly caused by our awareness that there is enough of the old pattern of events remaining, a pattern in which Falstaff thrived, to sustain his conviction that all the world always has been, is and ever will be ‘playing holidays’. I think the effect of the final scene in 2 Henry IV always gains an added impact for an audience that has recently seen I Henry IV. We remember the promise of banishment (‘I do, I will’) which Hal made at the Boar’s Head when he anticipated the time that his house would have to be put in order. Percy was a factor being fattened up for sacrifice. What Falstaff never understands is that he, too, is merely a factor and he is the first roasted Manningtree ox to be offered up on the altar of responsible kingship.

If it can be accepted from these scattered and diverse examples that Shakespeare used pattern and variation, echoes, contrasts and back references from play to play, then it seems probable that he would take advantage of such structural devices within his plays. It is possible to find precisely balanced parts within the symmetrical structure of individual scenes. There are throughout his work several basic techniques of scene building, but whether a scene achieves a symmetry in two, three, five or more segments, a rising crescendo in one unbroken interaction or the intercutting of several diverse elements of character and plot, the design will always serve the larger rhythms which are individually developed within each play. An audience in a theatre is not counting lines, nor does it usually focus on the nature of symmetrical segments as a purely formal pleasure. The director must combine all of the verbal and visual elements of the production so that the audience feels the sure sense of the play’s movement.

One of the most obvious ways in which Shakespeare exploits the structural pattern in his scenes is to make us conscious of how events seem to repeat themselves in different parts of a play. The repetition can serve to demonstrate the way in which different characters can respond to events in a similar fashion. A repeated pattern of action can give us a sense of the cyclic nature of events, a technique exploited with ingenious variety in the history plays. At other times Shakespeare can underline deliberate contrasts within a recognizably repeated pattern of events so that the audience can focus on the change in fortunes or absorb more fully the shock of realizing how many things have changed since the characters first appeared. I will start out with some simple incidents within widely separated scenes used as echoes, then move on to the repetition of action in scenes of complex organization, and indicate finally how such repeating patterns can be used as the key elements in the total framework on which the action of the play is based. My argument starts with gestures or brief flashes of action which a good director uses to make an audience attend to continuity and change within the lives of the characters. It proceeds to scenes in which the repeating pattern is so obvious that the audience cannot avoid considering the significance of the connection. There are, however, deeper and broader parallels in the structural organization of events which do not depend for their effect on the audience’s awareness of the echo of a specific incident or interaction. The director can use such patterns not for a momentary effect but as a way of orchestrating the tempo and rhythm of the action of the whole play. It is of crucial importance that all of these elements which reveal the grain of a play’s structure be given their appropriate emphasis to provide an audience with a coherent production.

In a straightforward example from King Lear we can see the way one scene links back to another and illuminates for us the process of change in character. In II. iv Lear is involved, to his own surprise, in the repetition of an earlier action. The Fool knew, of course, that the humiliating lesson Goneril had taught Lear would be given again: ‘Shalt see thy other daughter will use thee kindly; for though she’s as like this as a crab’s like an apple, yet I can tell what I can tell’ (I. v. 12–14). Before Lear arrives the audience already knows that Regan intends to strip him further of his illusions of power. Why, we may ask, does Shakespeare devote so much stage time to Regan’s reprise of Goneril’s lesson to Lear about the new facts of life regarding the disposition of power in his kingdom? Shakespeare made a fundamental alteration of his source-story when he decided that Lear must be driven to madness by his misfortunes. Lear must, therefore, be exposed to unrelenting pressure as both of his daughters attempt to wrestle his power from him. The confrontation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Index