Shakespeare and his Comedies

John Russell Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136556005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1957. This edition reprints the second edition of 1962.The originality, vitality and variety of Shakespeare's comedies do not suggest a writer at ease with a formula which works to his own satisfaction and the pleasure of his audience; against first impressions they suggest an artist seeking to express an idea which is always eluding a completely developed presentation. The second edition of this book contains an extensive new chapter on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

CHAPTER IX

The Life of the Last Comedies

There is no lack of interpretative criticism of Shakespeare's last comedies; rather it is the rule. Perhaps someone has yet to ‘read a philosophy into Shakespeare’ in any rigorous way, but during the last thirty or so years many have found in these plays, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, a pattern of thought that is simple and constant. By outlining their plots, critics have shown that each involves birth, separation, tempest, remorse, penitence or patience, reconciliation and peace. By noting the juxtaposition of some scenes and recurrent phrases and ideas, they have argued that in all but Pericles civilization or art is contrasted with natural life or nature. Most persuasively, they have abstracted certain speeches which are straightforward in stating issues of life and death, and have drawn attention to their mutual echoes:

I am great with woe, and shall deliver weeping.

… O, come hither,

Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget;

Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus,

And found at sea again!

(Pericles, V. i. 107–99)

… did you not name a tempest,

A birth, and death?

(Ibid., V. iii. 33–4)

O, what, am I

A mother to the birth of three? Ne'er mother

Rejoiced deliverance more…

Thou hast lost by this a kingdom.

No, my lord;

I have got two worlds by't.

(Cymbeline, V. v. 368–74)

… thou mettest with things dying, I with things

new-born….

(Winter's Tale, III. iii. 116–8)

Welcome hither,

As is the spring to the earth….

(Ibid., V. i. 151–2)

… they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or

one destroyed…. (Ibid., V. ii. 16–7)

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

… O brave new world!

(Tempest, V. i. 181–3)

In one voyage

… Ferdinand… found a wife

Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom

In a poor isle and all of us ourselves

When no man was his own.

(Ibid., V. i. 208–13)

More than anything else, these recurrent phrases have led critics to believe that they can pluck, with ease, the ‘meaning’, ideas or themes from the last comedies. They write with an assurance that fails them when discussing earlier plays: a serious, hortatory tone is heard contending that the ‘Final Plays of Shakespeare must be read as myths of immortality’,¹ or that the ‘characters in these late romances are less important as persons than as symbols and what they are is much less important than what they say’.¹ In a recent book Mr Derek Traversi described the very insemination of these last plays in Shakespeare's mind and proceeded to define their meaning:

At the heart of each … lies the conception of an organic relationship between breakdown and reconciliation, between the divisions created in the most intimate human bonds … by the action of time and passion and the final healing of these divisions.

He discerned a ‘harmonizing theme’ which ‘produces a conception of drama completely removed from realism and properly definable in symbolic terms.’²

Yet, remembering the subtle interrelations of the other comedies, we may be suspicious. These critics sound both too simple and too vague. Traversi's phrase, ‘the conception of an organic relationship between breakdown and reconciliation’, is neither clear nor agile enough to seem appropriate to the mind that shaped the earlier plays and had these qualities among others. Professor Wilson Knight's ‘must’ seems too restrictive for the dramatist who finished Twelfth Night with Feste's riddling song and made the characters of Much Ado capable of several different interpretations. Such pronouncements as these have led Professor Clifford Leech to complain that ‘all the romances seem generally to inhibit thought in their readers’.³ And a few dissentient voices strengthen our doubts. Dr D. G. James, in his Scepticism and Poetry (1937), discussed the symbolic meanings of these plays but added that they do not explain everything:

the symbols are there; but they rarely liberate compulsive significancies. We hover between apprehension of momentous significances, of a luxurious imagination, and of absurdities.¹

Professor Kermode, while claiming that in The Tempest ‘Shakespeare offers an exposition of the themes of Fall and Redemption by means of analogous narrative’, expressed a fear that his criticism had not done justice to the ‘complex’ in which the ‘elements of the pattern of ideas … occur’; ‘they derive from each other meanings’, he declared, ‘which are beyond the last analysis of criticism’.² If this play is viewed against the wide pastoral tradition, as Professor Kermode has helped us to do, it suggests precise subtleties which do not accord with the statement of a simple theme. And The Tempest has yet another aspect, for many playgoers might feel some agreement with Professor Parrott roundly declaring that it was ‘primarily meant to be a good show; it would be absurd to call it great drama’.³

Each of the last comedies offers a simple ‘meaning’ to the critics, who seize upon it and seldom wait to look a second time at the whole play. Yet even some of those key passages which are resonant with great issues, when they are scrutinized afresh, may reveal qualities which a 'symbolic’ reading does not explain or appreciate:

did you not name a tempest,

A birth, and death?

has a movement—a hesitation and, perhaps, a final ease —which portrays embarrassment, courage and renewed confidence; and clearly this effect does not depend on symbols but on the imitation of the pulse of actual human speech. Or, again, the interplay of syntactical and metrical units in:

…found a wife

Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom

In a poor isle and all of us ourselves

When no man was his own

suggests a tension and, perhaps, a delicacy in the mind of the speaker which is at odds with its reception as a choric comment voicing a clear, central truth. We should beware of judging too hastily: such individualized qualities may not be impertinent to an imaginative acceptance of the dramatic life of these plays.

Because of our doubts and those of some earlier interpretative critics, our task is to recognize the patterns, statements and meanings which are obvious enough once they are looked for, and then proceed to detailed re-examination. So we may discover the same ‘meanings’ in other particulars, or further ‘meanings’ developed contrapuntally, or a judgement that is implicit in the whole but never developed towards a clear statement. Against immediate appearances, these comedies may be as difficult to interpret as the earlier ones.

* * *

Since the last comedies present narratives of personal relationships, we may approach them by using the terminology developed for the other comedies. The Winter's Tale is the most consistently concerned with love and friendship and will therefore be discussed in greatest detail. It was written in 1610, the third in order of composition but the first which is widely considered to be a complete artistic success.

The opening is talk between two courtiers. Giving information about Leontes King of Sicilia and Polixenes King of Bohemia, its obvious purpose is exposition. And interpretative critics have drawn attention to words like 'separation’, a ‘vast– or ‘opposed winds’, and claimed that these serve to herald symbolic action. But this is only one of several possible readings: after a study of the earlier comedies we shall hear other matters. Camillo's reply to praise of Sicilian hospitality—‘You pay a great deal too dear for what's given freely' (I. i. 18–9)¹—is a reminder of love's wealth, of mutual, unprompted giving in friendship. Or, again,

We will give you sleepy drinks, thatyour senses, unintelligent of our insufficience, may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse us. (ll. 14–7)

speaks of a friend's response to free granting (‘And for that riches where is my deserving?’²), and shows an awareness of different degrees of truth. This second theme is again echoed in 'Sicilia cannot show himself over-kind to Bohemia’ (ll. 23–4) and ‘Wherein our entertainment shall shame us we will be justified in our loves’ (ll. 8–9). The description of the two friends:

they have seemed to be together, though absent, shook hands, as over a vast, and embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds. (ll. 31–4)

speaks of more than tempests; it is also a reminder that love has its own order and that ‘true’ hearts never know complete separation. (So Claudio, in Much Ado, had rediscovered Hero in ‘his study of imagination’³ or Valentine, in The Two Gentlemen, had found that Silvia ‘inhabited in his breast’ (V. iv. 7) when he was banished by her tyrant father to a 'shadowy desert’ and ‘unfrequented woods’.) In the opening scene of The Winter's Tale all these ideas crowd upon each other: the imagination and judgement that had informed the earlier comedies were at work in writing this complex duologue about personal relations.

B...