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Saturday
I’m writing this special Saturday post because I promised the students in my University of Ljubljana class a summation of the major ideas in my first two Shakespeare lectures. Those of you interested in Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet may also enjoy it as it manages to tie them all together.
I began the course with some observations on why Shakespeare is so admired, mentioning his
–virtuosity
Shakespeare wrote 38 or so different plays in three different genres (comedy, tragedy, and history), with unquestioned masterpieces in each. Most playwrights limit themselves to a single genre (Sophocles tragedy, Molière comedy, etc.). He also wrote astounding sonnets, reinventing the form in the process. And then there were three long narrative poems.
–linguistic inventiveness
Shakespeare added above 1000 new words to the language—there’s dispute as to the exact number—along with countless memorable expressions. Among the words are alligator, bedroom, eyeball, gossip, inaudible, lonely, puppy, assassination, gloomy, and pious. Among the expressions: “We have seen better days”; “I have not slept one wink”; “the clothes make the man”; “it’s Greek to me”; “what’s done is done”; “wild goose chase”; “tower of strength”; “the world is my oyster.”
–depth of character
He created characters that feel so real that it’s as though they actually existed. And with this in mind, here’s what I write in my book about how, in Harold Bloom’s opinion, Shakespeare “invented the human”:
Harold Bloom contends that Shakespeare “pragmatically reinvented” us, changing the way we see others and ourselves and even how we experience feelings. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Shakespeare created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Personality as we understand it, Bloom explains, is “a Shakespearean invention…Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…”
“Even if we never attend a performance or read a play,” Bloom writes, Shakespeare has “made us theatrical,” changing our ideas “as to what makes the self authentically human.” 17th century British theatergoers loved how Hamlet upended conventional expectations of what to expect from a revenge tragedy. They were so enthralled by the wild ramblings of Hamlet’s mind that the play’s revenge plot seemed almost incidental. They were similarly fascinated by Falstaff, Othello, Rosamond, Macbeth, Lear, Cleopatra, and others. For them, it was if the world had gone from black and white to color.
I concluded this early part of the first lecture with Ben Jonson’s immortal line, “He was not of an age but for all time!” And so it has proved as Shakespeare is read and performed endlessly around the world.
In the first two lectures I looked at Shakespeare’s handling of dangerous desires: gender-bending desire in Twelfth Night, sexual desire in Midsummer and Romeo and Juliet. Of the six plays that feature cross-dressing, Twelfth Night is my favorite. I advised my students to take special note of the play’s subtitle—What You Will—as Shakespeare plays with the notion of “what you will” or “what you desire” throughout.
The play is set in Italian Ilyria—I mentioned that the students wouldn’t necessarily be wrong if they imagined it being set in Slovenia—and Shakespeare plays with the Italian word for “want” (“volere”) in naming his characters. There’s Malvolio (“bad willing”), along with Viola and Oliva (near anagrams of each other). The end result in a plot in which we see
–a man fantasizing about having the qualities he associates with women (Orsino);
–a woman passing herself off as a man (Viola as Cesario);
–two women fantasizing about being able to behave like men (Viola and Olivia);
–a man in love with another man (Antonio);
–a woman in love with another woman (Olivia);
–an effeminate man who doesn’t want to fight but succumbs to male peer pressure (Sir Andrew and also, in a sense, Cesario);
–a sensitive man who, while a good fighter, is not afraid to admit that he can cry like a woman (Sebastian);
–a man desiring to rise above his station (Malvolio);
–and a wise fool who concludes, from observing all this gender confusion, that once we grow up and are slotted into fixed categories, life starts to suck.
Early in the play, I pointed out, a lightning bolt splits the ship upon which Viola and her twin brother are journeying. I speculated that this is inspired by the allegory that Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium recounts to explain sexual desire: once we were perfect creatures, with two heads and four arms and four legs, but the gods, fearing that we were so self-sufficient that we would ignore them, split us in half. Ever since, rather than contending with Mount Olympus, we have been searching for our missing half: split men are looking for other men, split women are looking for other women, and split androgynes are looking for members of the opposite sex.
In other words, Shakespeare is telling us that, at an early age, society splits us off from an integral part of ourselves, decreeing from henceforth we can only behave as a single gender. Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has, the Bard wrote a play that acknowledged that we are more complex than the gender labels and the associated behaviors that society foists on us.
I touched on the issue of homosexuality in Shakespeare’s time, noting the Buggery Act of 1533, which made it a capital offense. To be sure, the laws were not as comprehensive as they would become in Victorian times as there was a lot of gray area. It was okay, for instance, to have “masculine friendship,” which could include embraces, protestations of love, physical closeness in a common bed, and physical intimacy.
Still, there were boundaries for men and even more for women, who could not dress as men (as Viola does) or go running after men (as Olivia does). Nor could a steward marry a lady (as Malvolio desires). In short, Shakespeare is challenging rigid boundaries in his play, and if it is called Twelfth Night, it’s because the end-of-the-year twelfth night festivities were one of the few times of the year when people could pretend to be someone they weren’t.
Even calling the play Twelfth Night didn’t give Shakespeare full license, however, and he had to cast his gender exploration as a comedy, not as a melodrama. Furthermore, he framed it as what film theorist Chris Straayer calls a “temporary transvestite comedy”—which means characters cross-dress only because they are forced to, not because they want to. Famous film examples of the genre are Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Victor/Victoria, and She’s the Man (which is a modern teen version of Twelfth Night).
In a temporary transvestite comedy, characters must return to their “correct” genders by the end, and so it happens in Twelfth Night. But because Shakespeare feels that some precious part of us is denied when this happens—remember the violence of the lightning strike—he adds a sad note at the end, with the fool singing about “the wind and the rain.” Twelfth Night has been called “an autumnal comedy” as a result. After all, Antonio is thwarted in his love for Sebastian, Olivia finds herself married to a stranger, and Orsino—while seemingly happy to be marrying Viola—would like to see her dressed in male clothing for a little longer. Perhaps he is sad at losing this “masculine friendship.”
For that matter, how do we think Viola will take to wearing dresses and conforming to proper female behavior again? As the twelfth night party ends, life is about to feel a lot narrower.
And remember, I told the students—all these issues arise in a play nearly half a millenium ago.
I hadn’t fully realized, when I paired Midsummer and R&J for the second lecture, how much they reflect each other. Of course, I knew that Pyramus and Thisby, the source story for R&J, gets performed in Midsummer. But there’s more, with the same interplay between sexual drive and imagination occurring in both plays. With that in mind, it’s interesting to see what different insights emerge when one approaches the same subject through two different genres.
Comedy, I told the students (calling on theorist Northrup Frye) focuses on society, tragedy on the individual. And where comedy aims to renew and thereby restore a society that has become static and stale, tragedy acknowledges the depth of the individual. To cite a word that could have been coined by Shakespeare but instead is the invention of the immortal Lisa Simpson, one emerges from a tragedy “embiggened.”
For this genre discussion, I also quoted Charlie Chaplin, who once observed, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in long-shot.”
There’s plenty of potential for tragedy in Midsummer—Lysander and Demetrius could kill each other, leading to a double suicide on the part of their lady loves–and a slight mix-up in timing is all that keeps R&J from becoming a comedy. (Well, that and the deaths of Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris.) And there are other similarities as well.
For instance, while we watch magic fairy juice cause Lysander to rapidly switch his allegiance from Hermia to Helena, we see Romeo too turning on a dime, from Rosaline to Juliet, and there’s no Puck around to explain that. While King Theseus notes that there’s not much difference between lovers and madmen (he also throws in poets), Mercutio says something similar when he describes Queen Mab. In both speeches, our fertile imaginations, spurred by sexual desire, are seen as taking control. Here’s Theseus:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt [a gypsy]…
Mercutio says something similar as he watches Romeo lose his head over Rosaline. The difference is that he is just imagining a fairy whereas actual fairies show up in the other play. Romeo reports that he has been dreaming of his love, to which Mercutio responds by describing a malevolent fairy who visits our dreams.
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love…
When Romeo objects that “thou talkst of nothing,” his friend—comparing these dreams of love with the inconstant wind, replies,
True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger’d, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.
If Shakespeare explored socially-disruptive gender desire in Twelfth Night, he focuses on the chaos that can be caused by sexual desire in Midsummer and R&J. We see this from the very first scene when testosterone-fueled Capulets swagger through the streets looking for violence and sex:
SAMPSON: A dog of that house shall move me to stand: I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s.
GREGORY: That shows thee a weak slave; for the weakest goes to the wall.
SAMPSON: True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall.
Under the influence of sexuality’s force, women too become assertive, even when threatened with explusion (Juliet) or death (Hermia in Midsummer). Juliet knows what to expect from her father when she resists him:
An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend;
And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,
For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee,
Nor what is mine shall never do thee good:
Trust to’t, bethink you; I’ll not be forsworn…
Desire is so strong, however, that these formerly docile and obedient daughters go into full rebellion. “I know not by what power I am made bold,” Hermia tells Theseus while Juliet absolutely revels in her newly discovered sexuality. In her longing for Romeo, she speaks with a new boldness, showing herself to be as much in love with her own power as in her lover.
Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match,
Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods:
Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die [sexual pun alert],
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Whereas Midsummer is shot in long shot, however, R&J is shot in close-up. Puck can look down on the lovers as they go careening through the woods and say, “What fools these mortals be.” Likewise he and Oberon can look from afar as Queen of the Fairies Titania, under the influence of the same love potion, falls in love with an ass. Yes, desire makes us do things that, at a distance, appear funny.
But it’s not funny if you’re one of the lovers. We see, in close-up intensity, the joys and agonies of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship. We get to laugh at ourselves with the first play, but with the second–one of the world’s great love stories–we are embiggened. Sexual passion and our seething imaginations can be seen in two different ways.
We don’t know which of these two plays, both written around 1595-96, came first. Did Shakespeare step back from tragic immersion to make fun of himself? Or did he parody love in his first play and then get serious? Whatever the case, his ability to produce two masterpieces in two different genres is what I mean by genius versatility.
