Returning to Shakespeare

Brian Vickers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000350388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Returning to Shakespeare addresses two broad areas of Shakespeare criticism: the unity of form and meaning, and the history of the plays' reception. Originally published in 1989, the collection represents the best of Brian Vickers' work from the previous fifteen years, in a revised and expanded form.

The first part of the book focuses on the connection between a work's structural or formal properties and our experience of it. A new study of the Sonnets shows how personal relationships are literally embodied in personal pronouns. An essay on Shakespeare's hypocrites (Richard III, Iago, Macbeth) analyses the uncomfortable intimacy established between them and the audience by means of soliloquies and asides. Another traces the interplay between politics and the family in Coriolanus, two forms of pressure which combine to push the hero outside society.

In the second part Professor Vickers examines some key episodes in the history of Shakespeare criticism. One essay reviews the persistence of drastically altered adaptations of Shakespeare on the London stage from the 1690s to the 1830s, due to the conservatism of both theatre managers and audience. Another reconstructs the debate over Hamlet's character in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in which the Romantic image of a hero lacking control of his faculties emerged for the first time.

This is an important collection by an outstanding Shakespeare critic which will interest specialists and general readers alike.

Part I
Forms and meanings

1

Rites of passage in Shakespeare’s prose

In every Shakespeare play where prose appears (as it does in all but four: Henry VI, Parts 1 and 3; King John; Richard II), characters constantly move from prose to verse, or from verse to prose, and back again. In all but five plays verse is the statistically dominant form and prose has the role of the essential but inferior complement. If we establish a hierarchy of social ranks, with kings at the top, servingmen, citizens, sailors, pirates at the bottom, then prose as the normal medium extends upwards to a given point but no further. If we establish a hierarchy of psychological normality, those characters who predominantly speak verse can fall down into prose when they lose their reason: Ophelia, Othello, Lear, Lady Macbeth. (Characters from the prose domain never go mad – their dramatic status would not warrant it.) If we think of expressiveness, or emotional seriousness, or danger to the state, these again are higher realms from which prose is largely absent. If prose is the lower medium, then the movement up to verse is a movement to a higher rank, and can be described in terms of the rituals known in anthropology as rites of passage. When boys reach puberty, in primitive societies today as in ancient Greece, a group of them will go away into the mountains, jungle, or other hostile environment to undergo hardship and trials which, if successfully endured, allow them to return to society at a higher level, as adults. In his pioneer study Les Rites de passage (1908), Arnold van Gennep defined three stages within such rituals: separation, separation from society; marge, the transitional period of testing, outside society; and agrégation, the reincorporation of the individual into society in his new status.¹ No such event occurs in Shakespeare, of course, and my use of this model is meant to stimulate thought about how we might classify the many shifts between verse and prose that take place in Shakespeare, most frequently in the middle-period plays.

One preliminary point that may still need to be made is that the switches between the two media are not arbitrary, but motivated according to a series of conventions practised by other Elizabethan dramatists.² The motivation, however, can come from a number of sources. The ones I have so far mentioned might be called mimetic, that is, the distinctions king/servant, sane man/madman, are distinctions that exist in real life, outside the theatre, and are rendered within a Shakespeare play by the distinction between verse and prose. To speak English verse is the sign of a minimum control over reason and grammar, so that, for similarly mimetic reasons, in Shakespeare drunks do not speak verse (the barge-scene in Antony and Cleopatra shows some famous men teetering on the verge of prose, and indeed relapsing into it), nor do foreigners, nor those with strong British regional accents.³ But in addition to such external mimetic motivation, where the dramatist renders distinctions from life in the appropriate stylistic medium, we must differentiate various internal motivations, internal to the play as an aesthetic unit and to the characters as autonomous individuals. As an example of the first, changes dependent on effects of atmosphere or mood within a play, I would instance the way in which, in Measure for Measure, the Duke, in his disguise as a Friar, intervenes at the point where Isabella, realizing that Claudio is not wholly willing to die so that she should retain her chastity, collapses into hysterical abuse. At this point (III.i.151) the Duke-Friar steps forward with his composed and rational prose outlining a complex plot by which Angelo can be brought to book, and the play recovers its balance. Here prose has the effect that Leo Spitzer attributed – in my view, wrongly – to verse as a whole in Racine’s drama, that of ‘Dämpfung’, muting or damping down emotions.⁴

As for character-inspired motivations for the change of media, to which the rest of this essay will be devoted, some of these can be described as socially induced, reflecting the social hierarchy within the play. Nobles and gentry speak verse among themselves, but when a servant enters speaking prose it is presumably a sign of good breeding, or adaptation, to descend to prose with them. It constitutes a gesture of respect not to make social inferiors conscious of their inferiority. Examples of this category of adaptation would be the entry of Constable Dull and Costard (Love’s Labour’s Lost, I.i.181), which reduces the assembled company to prose, or the more serious cross-examination performed by Angelo and Escalus (Measure for Measure, II.i.45). When the judges speak to their fellows on the bench, they do so in verse (Love’s Labour’s Lost, I.i.304ff.; Measure for Measure, II.i.134ff.). The fact that Olivia speaks prose to Malvolio underlines his status as a domestic servant (Twelfth Night, I.v.etc.), and that she does so when he appears cross-gartered may be an instance of humouring a madman by descending to his level (III.iv.16ff.). Yet when Malvolio, much abused, enters in the final scene (V.i.328ff.) Shakespeare permits him the dignity of verse, showing that the gulled and cured vain man nevertheless deserves some sympathy. Two prose characters for whom sympathy has wholly evaporated by the final scene are Parolles (All’s Well) and Lucio (Measure for Measure). Parolles, who has had his moments of verse during the play, enters the final scene wholly discredited, and speaking prose. The King addresses him in verse to start with, but then comes down to Parolles’ level in prose, the medium in which Lafeu and Diana also address him, recognizing his inferior ethos (All’s Well that Ends Well, V.iii.238ff.). The parallel pretender and deceiver, Lucio, who has occasionally aspired to verse, begins the last scene, indeed, speaking verse, his more respectable front still intact (Measure for Measure, V.i.134ff.). But as the Duke cross-examines Mariana, Lucio’s natural licentiousness comes out in bawdy jokes (179ff.), for which he is silenced. When Escalus cross-examines him, this is done in prose, as befits his true status (260ff.), and when Angelo invites Lucio to state what he can witness against the Friar-Duke, the medium drops to prose for all four speakers (327-33), to be catapulted back to verse as Lucio pulls off the hood and reveals the Duke’s identity. Yet when the Duke addresses Lucio and sentences him, he replies in suitably chastened prose (500ff.), relegated to the medium where he belongs.

A special class of prose-speakers for whom verse-speakers descend to the lower level are clowns, who may sing lyrics or speak verse for satiric purposes, but who are almost invariably addressed in prose the moment they appear. Clowns seem to have a lower centre of gravity, or a magnetic field that converts everything to prose. This convention, so standard in the comedies that it escapes notice (especially in modern theatre-productions, where it is very rare to be able to hear any difference between prose and verse), stands out in the tragedies, where the clown’s reduction of the medium imposes an often uneasy mood of relaxation or verbal indulgence, outside the time of the tragic action, frustrating its rhythm. In the comedies prose appears with Speed and Launce in Two Gentlemen, Biondello in The Taming of the Shrew, Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, not to mention Lavatch (All’s Well), Feste, Touchstone, Thersites, Falstaff, and Autolycus.

Internal social considerations can govern the converse shift, from prose to verse. When the servant or clown for whom the medium had descended leaves the stage, discourse can revert to its normal level. This phenomenon can be seen in the rather similar clown-scenes in Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra, on which Jonas Barish has commented,⁵ as in the comedies in general. On the exit of a servant, Malvolio, Viola reverts to verse, ending the scene with a soliloquy (Twelfth Night, II.ii.), as she does again after the exit of a clown, Feste (III.i.). In both cases the soliloquy conveys important self-reflection, a move from light-hearted banter to serious self-revelation that is made with even more significance by Cressida, after the exit of Pandarus – the spirit of prose at its most banal (Troilus and Cressida, I.ii.281) – and by Hal, after the exit of Falstaff (1 Henry IV, I.ii.195).

In these cases verse takes on another dimension of seriousness by its juxtaposition with the prose of jest and the evasion of responsibilities. The problem that Hal faces with Falstaff is in part a problem of media. When he and Poins scatter Falstaff and his robber ban...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication Page
• Acknowledgements
• Returning to Shakespeare: an autobiographical preface
• Part I Forms and meanings
• Part II Shakespeare and his critics
• Index