The Language of Shakespeare's Plays

B. I. Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136560767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

First published in 1952. This volume explores the function of verse in drama and the developing way in which Shakespeare controlled the rhetorical and decorative elements of speech for the dramatic purpose. The Language of Shakespeare's Plays explores the plays chronologically and so covers all the outstanding problems of Shakespearian language in a way that makes reference easy, without any loss of a continuing narrative.

CHAPTER VI

HENRY IV, Part I and Part II

IN Henry IV, Parts I and II, Shakespeare matured his conception of the history play as a form distinct from tragedy and from the old chronicle play. At the same time he developed his use of language in a manner which separates these plays from the rest of his achievement. Verse occupies a larger and more important place in Part I, for in Part II Falstaff and the prose action is so important that in playing time on the stage it becomes the major action. In the verse passages the matter no longer dominates the style as in the Henry VI plays. Nor are we merely entertained with occasional passages of excellence as in Richard II and Richard III. At the same time the urgency of the matter will not permit a release of the style into any exercise of independent virtuosity. As so frequently there is a certain balance between the pressure of the theme and the ebullience of the medium through which it is expressed.

This sense of verbal power contained, though with difficulty, within a pattern of rhetoric, and expressed in a mounting and complicated imagery, where one motion is abandoned before it is fully developed as another comes crowding into the poet’s mind, can be seen in the first speech by the King, opening with the lines:

No more the thirsty entrance of this soil

Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood;

No more shall trenching war channel her fields,

Nor bruise her flowerets with the armed hoofs

Of hostile paces: those opposed eyes,

Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven,

All of one nature, of one substance bred,

Did lately meet in the intestine shock

And furious close of civil butchery

Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks,

March all one way and be no more opposed

Against acquaintance, kindred and allies:

The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife,

No more shall cut his master.

(i.1.5)

Samuel Johnson rejected the image of the first two lines outright: ‘that these lines are absurd is soon discovered, but how this nonsense will be made sense is not so easily told.’ He was seeking for a clear, visual image, embedded in a logical argument, where, in fact, all is mixed and excited. Yet the meaning of the whole play is illuminated by the passage; for Shakespeare pictures mother earth satiated with her children’s blood, her soil, or entrance, normally thirsty now having no blood to daub on her lips.

Throughout, a greater strength and concentration in the verse gives a compact effect, so that a sense of pressure accompanies the creation. Only occasionally does Shakespeare relax into the more leisured and descriptive imagery which has been present in the earlier plays, and in this new atmosphere the effect seems inappropriate. Such a passage is found in the soliloquy in which the Prince first reveals himself to the audience:

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world,

That, when he please again to be himself,

Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,

By breaking through the foul and ugly mists

Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

(i.2.220)

It can be argued that here, as in some other scenes, a concluding and explanatory soliloquy is deliberately separated in style from the remainder of the action.

The directness and the very strength and concentration of style result in less variety than is present in the later tragedies. It is as if a picture had been painted in the strongest available colours so that everything should be very vivid and richly emblazoned. As in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare seems to be stretching each description or each sentiment to hold all that it can possibly contain. Some of the results are most effective. As for instance Hotspur’s description to the King of how after the battle of Holmedon, when he was ‘breathless and faint’ there came

a certain lord, neat, and trimly dress’d,

Fresh as a bridegroom; and his chin new reap’d

Show’d like a stubble-land at harvest-home;

He was perfumed like a milliner;

And ‘twixt his finger and his thumb he held

A pouncet-box, which ever and anon

He gave his nose and took’t away again;

Who therewith angry, when it next came there,

Took it in snuff; and still he smiled and talk’d,

And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,

He call’d them untaught knaves, unmannerly,

To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse

Betwixt the wind and his nobility.

With many holiday and lady terms

He question’d me.

(i.3.33)

In a somewhat different way the same fullness of colour and emphasis is given to the speeches in which Glendower describes the magical quality of his birth and personality:

that at my birth

The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,

The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds

Were strangely clamorous to the frighted fields.

These signs have mark’d me extraordinary;

And all the courses of my life do show

I am not in the roll of common men.

(iii.1.37)

It may be that this strong and open effect of style leads to the absence of affectation in the language, or of any introspection about the possibilities of diction. It is as if the instrument of language were being used boldly and securely for well-defined purposes, and fed by an ample and unquestioning imagination.

The prose of the play is more self-conscious, and more experimental, than the verse. As often there is a contrast of effect between the verse and the prose and the creative elements, so far as they fore-shadow the future, seem to be announcing themselves in the prose.

Falstaff is given a passage which is a close and deliberate parody of Lyly’s Euphues¹: ‘There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch: this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile; so doth the company thou keepest: for, Harry, now I do not speak to thee in drink but in tears, not in pleasure but in passion, not in words only, but in woes also’ (ii.4.452). In the same scene Falstaff again parodies Lyly in the phrase: ‘for though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears’ (ii.4.440). Further it is Falstaff, by far the most intellectual character in the play, who makes the only comments on language: ‘for I must speak in passion, and I will do it in King Cambyses’ vein’ (ii.4.425). With the other characters words are an entry into action, but Falstaff, as Hamlet later, distrusts the instrument of words and is for ever examining it.

Not unnaturally, the word ‘honour’ dominates the action of Henry IV, Part I. For it is natural in a theme which so concerns ‘honour’ that the word should be found frequently. Yet one feels that at the back of his mind the word must have occurred as a recurrent motive, and that in writing one passage based on the theme the memory of others must have been still present. Each use of the word ‘honour’ is made closely illustrative of the temperament of the character who is speaking. Again the associations of the word in the prose passages are more subtle than in the verse.

Hotspur is the man of action to whom introspection and contemplation are unknown and in one of the more powerful and crowded groups of images he is allowed to describe his relationship to ‘honour’ in such terms:

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,

To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon,

Or dive into the bottom of the deep,

Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,

And pluck up drowned honour by the locks.

(i.3.201)

It is not surprising that after this Worcester is made to say:

He apprehends a world of figures here,

But not the form of what he should attend.

(i.3.209)

Worcester is emphasising, as Shakespeare does so frequently, the contrast between the language of imagination and direct language, or the speech necessary for action.

The most dramatic contrast to Hotspur’s lines is Falstaff’s examination of the term ‘honour’. For Falstaff is determined to explore cautiously the notion which Hotspur has so romantically embraced: ‘Well, ‘tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism’ (v.1.130).

There is an ironic appropriateness in the final use of the word in the play which occurs on the lips of Prince Hal in his last and fatal encounter with Hotspur:

I’ll make it greater ere I part from thee;

And all the budding honours on thy crest

I’ll crop, to make a garland for my head.

(v.4.71)

Such then is the bold and original verse of Henry IV, Part I, relying on an emblazoned language which is now crowded with imaginative suggestions, but not yet penetrating into the depths of the more contemplative passages such as are to be found in the later tragedies. In some ways the most typical passage, and indeed the outstanding example of the verse and of the ‘mounting’ imagery is in Vernon’s description to Hotspur of the Prince of Wales, of ‘the nimble-footed madcap Prince of Wales’ once he has converted himself into a soldier:

All furnis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Routledge Library Editions — Shakespeare
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• I The Beginning in Words: Love’s Labour’s Lost
• II From Words TO Action and From Words to People: The Comedy of Errors; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; The Taming of the Shrew
• III The Early Histories: Henry VI, Parts I, II and III; Richard II; Richard III; King John
• IV A Midsummer-Night’s Dream
• V Romeo and Juliet
• VI Henry IV, Part I and Part II
• VII The Middle Comedies:The Merry Wives of Windsor; The Merchant of Venice; Much Ado About Nothing; As You Like It; Twelfth Night
• VIII Hamlet
• IX Measure for Measure; All’s Well That Ends Well; Troilus and Cressida
• X Othello and Macbeth
• XI King Lear
• XII The Roman Plays: Julius Caesar; Antony and Cleopatra; Coriolanus
• XIII Cymbeline; The Winter’s Tale; The Tempest
• Index