Shakespeare

The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays: from satire to celebration

R A Foakes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136561047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

First published in 1971. This volume explains and analyses the last plays of Shakespeare as dramatic structures. Beginning from the dark comedies, the author describes the ways in which Shakespeare was affected by the new techniques and possibilities for drama opened up by the innovations of the years after 1600, notably by the rise in children's companies. The main line of development of Shakespeare's dramatic skills is shown as leading from the dark comedies, through the late tragedies, to the last plays. A major part of the book is devoted to analyses of Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest and King Henry VIII.

1
Introduction

Some years ago, when I was editing King Henry VIII, I was inclined to accept the conventional treatment of Shakespeare's last plays as ‘myths or symbolic patterns’,¹ and to assume that in spite of their acknowledged complexity as dramatic poems, they were inferior plays for the stage, ‘the most depersonalized’ of Shakespeare's plays, and ‘the most difficult to bring to life in the theatre’.² Much of the growing body of criticism of these plays has encouraged, and still fosters, such a view, for there is no doubt that its main concern has been with the ‘significance’ of the plays; so an examination of the response to these plays in the present century has shown that:³

By far the biggest and most influential school of criticism we have to consider is a school of many sects. Its members are united in the belief that the Romances are written in a form of other-speaking, and must be translated before their significance can be understood. There is little point at this stage in the waning of the century in speaking once more of the tremendous impact of anthropology and comparative religion on criticism, but it must be said that interest in the last plays would have been a shadow of what it has been in fact, if vegetation rites and royal deaths and resurrections, and the symbolic patterns in which the inner realities of human experience display themselves, had been less enthusiastically received into the small-talk of the age.

A stress on ideas and themes tends to lead our attention away from the plays as drama; and much criticism of them is written as if it were commenting on the ideas in a rather difficult novel, or describing a pattern of symbols.

Certainly the abundant commentary of recent years has taught us much about the richness and complexity of the poetry and themes in these plays, and it would be absurd to neglect such matters in discussing Cymbeline or The Tempest. At the same time, we ought to consider whether it is not equally absurd to neglect the nature of the dramatic action, and the shape these plays take in the two or three hours' traffic of the stage.

For to consider them as dramatic structures is to encounter at once a number of difficulties and problems that may be ignored or sidestepped in a consideration of the plays as vehicles of ideas. So, for example, the interchange in Act IV of The Winter's Tale between Polixenes and Perdita on art and nature looms large in most interpretations of the play, although it occupies perhaps half a minute of stage-time in a long and busy scene, full of spectacle and song, and may pass little noticed by an audience. In the theatre, by contrast, Autolycus makes an enormous impact in this scene, as elsewhere in the later part of the play, and yet in many accounts of it, ‘there has been silence about him’.¹ To consider the play in terms of its dramatic structure rather than its thematic patterns is necessarily to be concerned with the function of Autolycus at least as much as with the relation of art and nature — and a study of the role of Autolycus may prove to throw light on this relation too.

The difficulties offered by Cymbeline have seemed to many to be weaknesses in the play, and the clever attempts by D. A. Traversi and others to read the play in consistent symbolic terms have not satisfied everyone. So a recent editor, supporting a view of the play as unsatisfactory, cited as still the best account of it the essay by Harley Granville-Barker in which he complained about various faults in it, notably an inconsistency of characterization in speeches of Imogen, Posthumus and Cloten, which seem not to belong to the character and mark what he called ‘sheer lapses from dramatic integrity’.¹ These characters, he felt, simply do not always behave or speak in the way Shakespearean characters, conceived as consistent wholes, ought to speak. Granville-Barker observed accurately, but supposed that someone other than Shakespeare had a hand in the play, for he could only judge Cymbeline in terms of expectations derived from earlier plays, the central tragedies for example, and was looking for consistency of character in psychological and linguistic terms. He was trapped, that is to say, in traditional categories, conventional ways of thinking about Shakespeare, and did not see that the inconsistencies in Cymbeline could be explained as a new development in Shakespeare's technique. It is part of the argument of this book that, beginning with the dark comedies, Shakespeare learned how to liberate himself from a commitment to characters presented with psychological and linguistic consistency, in order to achieve special kinds of effects in his later plays, and particularly as one means of distancing his audience from the characters and preventing identification with them, in the way an audience identifies with Hamlet. What has seemed clumsy to many readers of Cymbeline may be merely a daring new development in Shakespeare's dramatic art.

The Winter's Tale is often presented to us as a great play in terms of its symbolic consistency, but at the expense of Autolycus; Cymbeline is usually presented to us as a failure, because it is hard to read in a consistent symbolic way and does not offer consistent characters or speech. Yet no one disputes that as Granville-Barker said, Shakespeare was, by the time he wrote these, a ‘past-master of his craft’,² who was not likely to make elementary dramatic mistakes. To see these plays in the theatre is to realize how splendidly they work on the stage, and how little connection there is between much conventional criticism and the play as experienced by an audience. For an audience, in my experience, sees Autolycus as a prominent and important figure, and finds itself little troubled by the inconsistencies and other ‘weaknesses’ noted by many critics in Cymbeline.

This book springs from an attempt to understand and explain the last plays as structures designed for performance. In order to do this, it has proved necessary to start from the dark comedies, and to say something about the innovations in the theatre in the early years of the seventeenth century, in particular the growth of satiric drama at that time, for in his development as a dramatist after 1600, Shakespeare seems to have been much influenced by, and to have developed in his own way, new techniques and possibilities for drama that arose particularly in connection with the revival of the children's companies. In relation to the plays John Marston, Ben Jonson, Chapman, Middleton and others were writing for the Children at St Paul's and Blackfriars, Shakespeare's heroic tragedies, like Hamlet and Othello, look almost old-fashioned in their conventional assumptions. Shakespeare's most experimental plays at this time were the dark comedies, and the main line of development of his dramatic skills lay from these through the late tragedies like Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra to the last plays.

In presenting this argument I have tried to pare it down to essentials in the interests of clarity and to resist the inevitable temptation in discussing Shakespeare's plays to comment on all aspects of them. At the same time, it leads necessarily into a consideration of the meanings of the plays, those meanings shaped and revealed by the unfolding dramatic action. In this way, the argument tends to return to themes and ideas, especially in relation to The Tempest, which is in some ways the most complex of Shakespeare's dramas. However, this is to arrive at, or put stress on, a rather different body of meanings from those commonly emphasized in treatments of the plays as literary texts, and with reference to their mythic, symbolic, philosophical or doctrinal implications. Studies of this kind tend to lose sight of the life of the drama and to deal in abstractions; and they need to be supplemented, modified and, in their wilder extravagances, corrected or rejected by another kind of approach, which begins from the dramatic action and which takes this as a controlling perspective, however far the discussion may be led from time to time into other areas of exploration.

In what follows I try to develop such an approach,¹ and my starting-point is the dramatic shaping of the action, or what I sometimes call the tonality of the play, the pattern of expectations established by the sum of relations existing between the parts of the action at any given point. I say ‘at any given point’, because to consider the dramatic shape of a play is necessarily to emphasize its nature as a process taking place in time. The relation of the parts of the action to one another, the reasons for the presentation of events in a particular sequence or for the introduction of a particular character, can be crucial for an understanding of the way a play works as drama. These things may seem simple enough, but they raise complicated and difficult questions, questions often ignored in critical commentaries, or left, so to speak, asleep. So, for example, in Measure for Measure, it is easy to dwell on the powerfully realized scenes involving Angelo and Isabella, and their mutual ‘temptation’ of one another:

Is this her fault or mine?
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?

(II.ii.162)

The urgency and richness of the verse in this scene, which are of course appropriate to its mood, attract commentary, and the relation of Angelo and Isabella is very important; but it is important also to observe that the tonality of the action here is established in part by the long scene we have just witnessed of the trial of Pompey Bum and Froth, with its bawdy good humour and vitality. We need to ask why Shakespeare displayed at length this comic trial, but not that of Claudio, and what effect it has on the subsequent action.

This study is much concerned with questions of this kind, such as why Barnardine was introduced into this play or what the function is of the long masque in The Tempest (that ‘vanity’, as Prospero calls it). For problems such as these are continually raised by a study of dramatic structure and tonality in the plays. Most attention here is given to the last plays, except for Pericles. I have not dealt with this play for several reasons. It survives only in a bad text, which alone makes it a difficult play to assess. Technically, the use of Gower as a chorus to frame and distance the action is an innovation, and the play has some brilliant episodes, which have produced sympathetic accounts of its occasional power and a notable poem in T. S. Eliot's ‘Marina’. At the same time, regarded from the viewpoint of dramatic artistry, it remains a simple play, lacking a clear structure beyond its portrayal of a sequence of events illustrating, for the most part, the truth of Pericles' words:

… I see that Time's the King of men;
He's both their parent, and he is their grave,
And gives them what he will, not what they crave.

(II.iii.45)

It is true that Pericles is united with Marina in a moving scene at the end of the play, when ‘the holy gods’ seem to intervene, but this union does not arise in any necessary way out of the action we have witnessed; it appears rather as the latest of Time's whims, and in this, the first of the ‘romances’, Shakespeare did not, as far as we can tell, succeed in solving what was a problem for him in other late plays, how to create simultaneously a sense of dramatic necessity in the action and a sense that the characters are not in control of their affairs, which are governed rather by chance or providence. However, this needs to be argued, and the argument begins in the following pages, from the dark comedies.

¹ The phrase is from Philip Edwards, ‘Shakespeare's Romances: 1900–1957’, Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958), p. 14.

² See my Introduction to the New Arden edition of King Henry VIII (1957), p. xli.

³ Edwards, loc. cit., p. 6.

¹ Charles R. Crow, ‘Chiding the Plays: Then till Now’, Shakespeare Survey, 18 (1965), p. 8. See below, p. 137, n. 3.

¹ Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series (1930), pp. 237–8, 290. The recent editor is J. C. Maxwell, in the New Cambridge edition (1960), p. xxxii.

² Ibid., p. 238.

¹ I do not claim that the argument I present is entirely new; indeed, the ground for it has been prepared by a number of critics, most notably by Anne Righter in a general way; by O. J. Campbell in relation to the dark comedies; by A. Caputi and G. K. Hunter in relation to satire and the plays of Marston; by Harley Granville-Barker; by S. L. Bethell in the brilliant early chapters of his book on The Winter's Tale (1947), and F. R. Leavis in his essay in Scrutiny, X (1941–2), all in relation to the last plays. More recently, Norman Rabkin, in Shakespeare and the Common Understanding 1967, a book that became available to me only after I had completed my own, has taken account of the ‘ostentatious theatricality’ of the last plays in a fine essay that nevertheless moves towards abstract ideas and is not, in the end, much concerned with the dramatic shaping of the plays. (See my note below, p. 98.) All these and more h...