Public and Private Man in Shakespeare

J. M. Gregson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000350135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The potential duality of human character and its capacity for dissembling was a source of fascination to the Elizabethan dramatists. Where many of them used the Machiavellian picture to draw one fair-faced scheming villain after another, Shakespeare absorbed more deeply the problem of the tensions between the public and private face of man.

Originally published in 1983, this book examines the ways in which this psychological insight is developed and modified as a source of dramatic power throughout Shakespeare's career. In the great sequence of history plays he examines the conflicting tensions of kingship and humanity, and the destructive potential of this dilemma is exploited to the full in the 'problem plays'. In the last plays power and virtue seem altogether divorced: Prospero can retire to an old age at peace only at the abdication of all his power. This theme is central to the art of many dramatists, but in the context of Renaissance political philosophy it takes on an added resonance for Shakespeare.

1 Early Work

In the material from which Shakespeare constructed his early dramas, there is ample scope for investigation of those tensions between private thought and public behaviour which are to become such a prominent feature of his major work. However, he makes slight and intermittent use of the opportunities available: his stagecraft, like his other skills, is undeveloped, though we can see signs everywhere of the hammering out of a method in this busy forge. Had Shakespeare died after the completion of Richard III and Romeo and Juliet, he would have been accounted a major writer, and these perhaps the most interesting products of the teeming Elizabethan play-house. It is a measure of his later achievement that even these popular works are often studied, and sometimes indeed produced on stage, with an eye to the masterpieces which follow.

It is generally agreed the first tetralogy of history plays, comprising the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, is Shakespeare’s earliest work. Shakespeare entered a theatre dominated by Tarlton and the Queen’s Men in the decade 1583 to 1592, in which the chronicle history play seems to have been the dominant and most popular strain of drama. The Spanish peril and the defeat of the Armada in 1588 encouraged the taste for stirring retrospects of England’s past. Shakespeare, revealing from the outset that sure feel for the popular pulse, found material ready at hand in Holinshed and Hall’s highly coloured accounts of ‘York and Lancaster’s long jars’.

The three parts of Henry VI show Shakespeare instinct with the spirit of his age and not yet full of those insights which will enable him also to transcend it. The traditional view is that Shakespeare worked over the chronicles scene by scene in compiling Henry VI, an unambitious and patient journeyman learning his craft. He then ‘laid such models aside and followed the promptings of his own spirit upon the lurid theme of Richard III’.¹ More recent commentators have shown that the plays are more than a stringing together of episodes from the chronicles; they have stressed the author’s consistent awareness of a central theme and his subordination of every episode to this.² Recent productions of the plays, influenced by Peter Brook’s famous ‘Wars of the Roses’ Stratford production of 1964, have followed this interpretation. To emphasise the epic conception, a rather truncated version of the tetralogy is sometimes shown in three sessions of a one-day theatre marathon, with the crown as symbol passing from its highest, sacramental point on the coffin of Henry V to the degradation of its loss in a bush in the hurly-burly of Bosworth Field, as Richard reels hopelessly through the battle.

Chambers was right in noting a new quality in Richard III, but this stems rather from the author’s realisation of the dramatic possibilities of his central figure than from a switch in conception from his original design. That design, as worked out in Henry VI, had great success; Thomas Nashe records the reaction in 1592:

How it would have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times).

In all ways, Henry VI is a starting-point. The verse-form is inflexible and generally end-stopped, the variety of both image and syntax is limited, with much repetitive vituperation, much rhetoric which threatens monotony and sometimes descends into it. The dramatic construction is also crude, with a welter of retributory violence, small range of character, and little comic relief: there is no Falstaff here to add breadth of ironic commentary and bring human reaction springing out of the dusty chronicles and down the centuries.

Despite the leap in quality of many speeches and certain stage effects in Richard III, there is ample evidence that the play was conceived as the culmination of this first tetralogy of history plays. Shakespeare interrupts even the rather lumbering impetus which Henry VI generates to introduce Richard and prepare us for the part he is to play in the later play. At the end of the second part of Henry VI, Richard’s first statement proclaims his disposition:

Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill.

By the time of his abrupt entry into the third part of Henry VI, he is translating this motto into action, as he flings the Duke of Somerset’s head upon the stage with the words,

Speak thou for me and tell them what I did.

In the middle of this play, he is permitted a soliloquy which shows him conscious of the skills necessary to prosper in this harsh world:

Why, I can smile, and murder while I smile,

And cry ‘Content’ to that which grieves my heart,

And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,

And frame my face to all occasions . . .

I can add colours to the chameleon,

Change shapes with Proteus with advantages,

And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

Can I do this and cannot get a crown?

This is the note on which he will open Richard III. After he murders saintly, ineffective Henry, he refers again to the physical deformity with which Shakespeare will make such play in the later work, and puts himself unequivocally before the audience as the Machiavellian figure:

Then since the heavens have shaped my body so,

Let hell make crook’d my mind to answer it.

I have no brother, I am like no brother;

And this word ‘love’, which greybeards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another,

And not in me. I am myself alone.

All this is evidence that Richard III is conceived as the culmination of an epic tetralogy, as the final piece of a grand design rather than as a self-contained unit. Yet we have centuries of evidence that this fourth play is immeasurably more effective than the first three in the scheme, especially on stage. Shakespeare’s imagination, his excitement in the exploration of his own developing powers, take wing when he comes to the figure of Richard, the first of his creations which he builds around exploitations of the contrast between private thought and public bearing.

The contrast is crude and straightforward: the concept of the Machiavellian villain which Shakespeare found ready-made in his theatre depends for interest entirely upon this kind of deceit. Such villains do not need to show the conscience which would shade villainy. They are expected to hug themselves with delight in their own villainy and to encourage their audiences to share the amoral thrills, like Marlowe’s Barabbas in The Jew of Malta:

Now tell me, worldlings, underneath the sun

If greater falsehood ever has been done?

For the Elizabethan dramatist the Machiavellian villain is as conveniently uncomplicated a figure as the hired gunman is for the maker of Hollywood westerns; the convention means that his amorality does not need explanation. He is a more flexible and individual development of the Vice of the old moralities, so that Shakespeare can make his Aaron in Titus Andronicus say:

If one good deed in all my life I did,

I do repent it from my very soul.

Marlowe will build his Edward II around such a villain in Mortimer; later Shakespeare will develop the concept with his full powers of language and psychological insight in Iago.

In theatrical terms, the most effective use made of the stage concept of the Machiavellian villain is Richard III. And, as usual when Shakespeare picks up something which lies conveniently to hand, he makes more of it than anyone before him. The most remarkable evidence comes in the first speech of the play, which is easily Shakespeare’s greatest achievement to date. W. Clemen shows how Shakespeare constantly discovers new possibilities inherent in the soliloquy.³ Before and even well after Shakespeare, the soliloquy is most commonly used for primitive self-explanations and movements of plot. Even in his great plays, Shakespeare sometimes finds it useful for such purposes: in the most intellectually sinuous of all of them, Hamlet will take eighteen lines to whet the appetite of his audience and explain to them why

the play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

The opening of Richard III shows Shakespeare at once bringing his psychological insights to bear upon his Machiavellian villain and embodying those insights in a soliloquy which conveys them with incomparable verve: he takes two instruments ready to hand and familiar to the meanest of his audience, the soliloquy and the Machiavellian villain, and exploits them with a subtlety which heralds a new master.

The soliloquy begins conventionally enough with a chorus-like introduction to the point where the action is taken up from Henry VI:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings;

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;

And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

So far the verse, like the material, is measured, incantatory: if the actor cares to suggest an irony in adjectives such as ‘glorious’, ‘dreadful’, ‘delightful’, or to suggest a flash of envious hate as he savours the hissing of the last phrase, that will be because of what he knows of the rest of the play.

It is in the lines which follow, couched in form and language as well as theme as a deliberate antithesis to the opening passage, that the speech turns abruptly away from the general and into the intensely personal, as Shakespeare sets about giving convincing life to his Machiavellian villain:

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

I, that am rudely stamp’d and want love’s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;

I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.

After the elaborate formality of the speech’s first section, the verse springs away as Richard comes forward to reveal to the audience the full venom of that private face that he will keep continually before them, even as he continually dissimulates to those on stage. The pace of the verse, the piling of adjective upon adjective in a convulsion of hate, shows a new grasp of the blank-verse medium. Richard collects himself, slows the pace again, and moves through the chilling image of the shadow of his deformity to an announcement of his intentions:

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain.

The conception of Richard here embodied is even more remarkable than it first appears. We are familiar in the twentieth century with the idea of a warped mind produced by a warped body. Yet psychology is a word which has entered our vocabulary only in the last hundred years. The most learned of Shakesp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Early Work
• 2. The Major Histories: Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V
• 3. The Problem Plays: Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure
• 4. Hamlet
• 5. Othello
• 6. King Lear
• 7. Macbeth
• 8. The Roman Plays: Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus
• 9. The Late Romances
• Bibliography
• Index