Shakespearian Production V 6

G. Wilson Knight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317833710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

This part of the G. Wilson Knight collected works, Volume VI looks at his view on Shakespearian production with special reference to the Tragedies.

PART I

[1936]

CHAPTER I

The Shakespearian Play

1

I have for some time been contending that a Shakespearian play is not purely and only a good story with entertainment and dramatic value linked to profound analysis of character¹ and a heart-thrilling rhetoric; but that, over and above all this, it presents a close mesh of imaginative and intellectual suggestion demanding a more exact study and sensitive appreciation than it has so far received. The persons in the play are vital and human, none more so; but the interaction of those persons within the dramatic texture of the whole, and that texture itself, the action, movement and purpose of the whole artistic pattern, must at each instant be kept in mind. From such a comprehension many old difficulties are quickly resolved: what was inexplicable is found necessary; what suspected as spurious, seen as crucial. The Graveyard scene in Hamlet has been called irrelevant; and modern scholarship still repudiates the Vision in Cymbeline—regularly omitted from stage productions—and considers Henry VIII a chaotic play of doubtful authorship. There is no longer need or excuse for such confusion: for the powerfully dramatic Vision fits as perfectly into the pattern of Cymbeline as the Graveyard scene into that of Hamlet; and Henry VIII is a carefully constructed and fine play whose pattern I have elsewhere analysed.

Whereas from the old and limited understanding there was slight justification for the long and still living tradition of Shakespearian idolatry, from the new and comprehensive sight novel splendours of the intellect and themes of profundity and universal grandeur continually and pleasingly emerge. We ought not at all to be surprised at this; still less should we be offended. We are used to regarding great poetry as of universal importance, its meanings not limited to the partial and the ephemeral. Shakespeare has somehow stood alone, and for too long, as a solitary figure of irrelevant magnitude. True, we cannot interpret the whole of Shakespeare; nor of Dante; nor Byron.¹ But because we can never exhaust the meanings in a great poet, that gives us no authority to neglect what meanings patently are there. Faced with a plenitude of meanings, we have asserted none: it is an easy way out. We must no longer deny to Shakespeare a quality common to great literature: the quality of universal meanings in the particular event. Shakespeare has something to say to us not only about human life, but about death; not only about England, or Venice, but about the universe. Poetry is metaphoric, its essential purpose being to blend the human and the divine. So those poets who aim primarily to speak of God, do so in terms of man; and Shakespeare, speaking with the accents and intricacies of great poetry of man, speaks accordingly of God.

The Shakespearian play shows a texture of personal thinking close-inwoven with some objective and pre-existent story. Philosophy is entwined with action and event. Shakespeare’s philosophy is infinitely variable, not static, as Dante’s: King Lear may be Senecan, but Macbeth is Christian. His philosophy may vary within one play. We cannot find by abstraction Shakespeare’s ‘own’ philosophy of life: his massed statement includes many philosophies, but is subject to none. Macbeth is a solid of which the length may be a Holinshed story but the height a Christian philosophy of grace and evil, and the breadth Shakespeare’s own emotional experience. Criticism, aware of the two-dimensional nature of the philosophic intelligence, often asserts that such imaginative solids are uninterpretable. This is nevertheless an error, since a Shakespearian play, though it may be complex, is yet far less so than life itself, which the philosophic intelligence has invariably considered a fair quarry. To apply intelligence to the whole art-form is not the same as abstracting from it those elements only that seem intelligible. There is no excuse for mental inaction. What happened was really this: criticism came to an impasse. Those elements in Shakespeare it was accustomed to analyse were, certainly, all but exhausted by analysis: as when tunnel-makers come to a nasty piece of rock. A little dynamite, however, may open out new progress. So, by attending as well to imagery and symbolism as to thought and action, to the rhythmic curves of poetry as well as to ‘character’, we touch the richer dimensional quality of the Shakespearian creation. That does not mean that we now attend only to those elements passed over before; rather that we attend afresh to the whole pattern. I have not, in my own interpretations, neglected to analyse persons or events: but I have taken them together with, and in terms of, the whole.

From such interpretations we become aware of the dominating Shakespearian themes; of love and hate, warriorship, kingship; ideas of state-order, conflicts of life-forces and death-forces; patterns of romance-fulfilment and the tragic sacrifice, and difficult visions that go farther yet. My two most important results I take to be: (i) the discovery of tempests and music as dominant contrasted symbolic impressions throughout the whole, or nearly the whole, of Shakespeare; and (ii) my reading of the Final Plays as visions of immortality crowning Shakespeare’s work and to be given as serious attention in their peculiar quality as Macbeth and King Lear in theirs. Though general acceptance of my contentions is not as yet apparent, it will come; if not soon, then late. Critics are sometimes, quite naturally, alienated by novelty and tend to read into vividness of statement a rigidity and schematism which are not necessarily implicit. To safeguard my essay from misunderstanding I next shortly outline what I take to be the nature of a Shakespearian play, using a succession of simple headings: What it is; What it does; and How it does it. These are chosen to prepare the way directly for my ideas on production. The formulation of scientific stage principles follows logically from any understanding of Shakespeare’s positive and challenging significance.

2. WHAT IT IS

A Shakespeare play is primarily an aural time-sequence, like music: a sequence of impressions, thoughts and images, carried across mainly by audible words allotted to various fictional persons. To these we must add sound-effects such as alarums, trumpets, thunder and music. Visual details concerning the action are not emphasized, as a rule, by stage-direction, except in the latest group of plays; and then only with moderation. It is true that the text is often itself richly descriptive; but these are pictures within the spoken word. That which builds the essential Macbeth, which persists common to various readings and stage-performances, is outwardly at least aural, not visual; though the aural can be received by the ear of imagination in silent reading.

But through this medium a varied content is delivered. There are conceptual thoughts, ideas. There are also mind-pictures. Shakespeare is crammed with visual impressions, a chain of them, blending one into another. We do not visualize them at all clearly at a first performance or a first reading, but they are there nevertheless at the back of the words, semi-consciously received. From this flux of ideas and images emerge greater units: the developing persons of the drama, the action and general movement, the marshalling of forces of one sort or another. The play is expressly dynamic, not static. This is true of all Shakespeare’s plays, but of his tragedies especially. Compared with a drama of more classical tradition the Shakespearian tragedy is simply crammed with action. You get from it a sense of intense life in conflict, development, and movement. Whatever Shakespeare is doing, one thing is clear: he does it largely through the medium of action. If we grant that Shakespeare expresses profundities, then we must be prepared to see those profundities expressed in terms of intense dramatic activity. Each play is an onslaught on the mind. And action implies conflict. We watch fierce contestants, men or principles. The ‘principles’ of the middle scenes usually become opposing armies towards the end; the inner psychological disturbance tends to objectify itself as the play unfurls into open military opposition. Observe how often armies are brought on the stage, sometimes actually fighting; and how individual combats may be crucial to the plot, as in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. These are surface symptoms of what is always embedded deep in Shakespeare: the play’s significant action.

The Shakespearian movement, whether of a whole play, or a scene, or a speech, undulates: it shows a rhythmic rise and fall. There are vast waves of action, and, within each, subtler minute crests and cusps, a ceaseless rippling variation.

We may have a sense of speed-waves. The middle action of Hamlet starts with a long scene of ordinary conversation. The player’s speech whips up the action for a while; then it falls back, but not right back, towards the poignant intensity of Hamlet’s meeting with Ophelia. Then we have Hamlet’s address to the players, working up shortly to the play-scene. From now on the speed increases rapidly. The King flies, Hamlet’s answers snap back at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; the King’s agonized prayer swiftly follows, and Hamlet’s entry; and Hamlet’s interview with his mother. This interview starts with a rapid dialogue leading to Polonius’ death. There is a pause, Hamlet settles down to his purpose, the movement is deliberate, but quickly gains speed as Hamlet loses control; he grows more wild and volleys abuse, the action gathers, rises to a climax; and the Ghost enters. The Ghost’s appearance checks the whole movement that started with the Play scene. Hamlet is now limp, his bolt shot, the Queen too: the whole action is limp. The scene drags on like a wounded snake, with repetitions: an intentional anti-climax. Shakespeare’s art functions in terms of rising action followed by a fall. He never fears an anti-climax. It is all done with curves, like a line of undulating hills. After a fall there is continuation: he never cuts off his action at a precipice.

The tragedies often rise to a crest of action about Act III, then, with variations, descend. Or so it seems to us today, but the military conflicts that the modern producer and audience find it so hard to take seriously were probably far more important to a contemporary, and as nerve-racking as the sound effects in Sherriff’s Journey’s End to us. Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and Timon of Athens show this central crest. Othello, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra rise to a later climax but do not close till the action is completed and rounded off. We might contrast Marlowe’s technique in Doctor Faustus where, except for the very short epilogue, the play is cut off abruptly at a violent climax: Marlowe is mainly interested in his heroes as individuals, Shakespeare in the hero’s relation to life in general. We have a pattern of the turning wheel of events, the rhythm and leverage of life swinging over. We find it in individual speeches at a high moment; the words gather power, rise, maintain their height, then, wavering, sough. back, as in the King’s sleep-speech in 2 Henry IV (III. i. 18–25), where the surges pile up steadily to the word ‘clouds’, and then fall back for the line following. This is a typical unit. So is Macbeth’s ‘If it were done …’ soliloquy (I. vii. I) which rises to a climax and sinks for the last four lines. We may remember that grand moment in Richard II when lyrical Richard, brought before Bolingbroke, starts humbly, then grows swiftly in spiritual stature, takes on the tragic purple of dethroned kingship, and sears his enemies with white-hot speech.

The play’s whole development repays attention. Richard is first weak, spoilt, careless and cruel, like Marlowe’s Edward II. But this, almost the whole of Marlowe’s protagonist, is the merest beginning of Shakespeare’s. Returning from Ireland he addresses the earth of England in words that recapture some of our sympathy and, above all, create in us a new sense of Richard’s sacred office. His confidence in that blackens Bolingbroke with a single phrase. When disaster closes on him his tragic despair is so developed that he becomes before our eyes unearthly, prince of a new world, a saint in sorrow. And still he is England’s king; never more so. His words to Northumberland pile phrase on damning phrase that leave his enemies spiritually crushed before they start to win. Then again he reverts to saintly meditation. They go to London. But watch what is happening: he is not falling, but rising. Step by step he climbs his miniature Calvary. At last he is to resign his crown. He does so, humbly. Northumberland would next have him read a record of his misdeeds. Now watch how the words gather strength:

K. RICHARD: Must I do so? and must I ravel out

My weav’d-up follies? Gentle Northumberland,

If thy offences were upon record

Would it not shame thee in so fair a troop

To read a lecture of them? If thou would’st,

There should’st thou find one heinous article

Containing the deposing of a king

And cracking the strong warrant of an oath,

Mark’d with a blot, damn’d in the book of Heaven!

Nay, all of you that stand and look upon me,

Whilst that my wretchedness doth bait myself,

Though some of you with Pilate wash your hands

Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates

Have here deliver’d me to my sour cross,

And water cannot wash away your sin.

(IV. i. 228)

Observe the references to Christ. Richard towers over them all in spiritual stature, king yet, the elected of God. The scene rises to a climax at ‘Containing the deposing …’ down to ‘damned in the book of Heaven’; and then drops, but with a returning and only slightly lesser crest, soon after. It is all done by varied modulation, waves, curves. And after this scene we have Richard’s parting with his wife, deep in the luxuriating sunset of sorrow; his meditative listening to music in prison; his death. The climax comes well before the end and the movement curves over.

This spiritual rise under tragic stress we find often: as in Romeo, Hamlet, Lear, and Cleopatra. Shakespeare continually surprises: not by remarkable events alone, but by revealing a continual and growing power in his persons. Each is conceived according to the principle of growth; each tragedy is a rise. Marlowe’s Edward satisfies your expectation; Shakespeare’s Richard shatters it, revealing strength where we expected weakness. Marlowe’s tragedy gives us a study of a failure; Shakespeare’s a revelation of grandeur. Even the conclusion to Faustus presents rather a sublime wriggling than a sacrificial suffering. Marlowe’s tragic heroes are all ambitious materialists, and when they crash they end. Shakespeare’s are purgatorial pilgrims. Shakespeare is fundamentally Christian, Marlowe pagan. So a Shakespearian tragedy has always direction and a positive thrust. In developing his persons, in constructing a play, in writing a speech, Shakespeare is master of the seventh wave; crash follows crash, and when we expect exhaustion, and fear, after so much expense of power, a comparatively limp conclusion, the seventh wave towers up, something we had never guessed yet recognize as inevitable, and not till then the return, the vast retraction, and silence.

That Shakespeare’s two dominant symbols are aural effects is not therefore strange. As I have shown in The Shakespearian Tempest, the Shakespearian universe turns about the axi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION [1963]
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION [1936]
• Part I [1936]
• Part II [1949 and 1963]
• POSTSCRIPT: The Stratford Ontario Festival
• APPENDIX A. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus
• APPENDIX B. John Gabriel Borkman
• APPENDIX C. Appreciations
• INDEXES