English Theater in the Mid-Sixteenth Century
When its greatest playwright was
born, in 1564, the English theater hardly existed at all as an
organized commercial or artistic institution. Troupes of actors
roamed the countryside, performing in courtyards or in the great
halls of noble houses; little better than vagrants in the eyes of
the law, they lived precariously by presenting crude native
tragedies, bawdy interludes, or adaptations of the classics, in
exchange for a meal, a bed, or a few coins. By the beginning of the
seventeenth century, however, the stage was one of London's
thriving industries, supporting at least three successful repertory
companies of which one--the Lord Chamberlain's Men--boasted the
services of William Shakespeare as a resident actor, playwright,
and shareholder.
The Chamberlain's
Men (who changed
their name to the King's Men after James I took the throne in
1603), performed most of their plays on the multi-leveled spaces of
the Globe Theater. Many of us are familiar with a different kind of
theater altogether; the "modern" stage consists of a single flat
playing surface separated from the audience by a proscenium arch,
artificially lighted, furnished with sets and props and peopled by
actors whose costumes, gestures and speech suggest a world that
corresponds closely with our own. Shakespeare's stage also held, as
Hamlet put it, a mirror up to nature, but it did not do so by the
same means, and its reflection tended to be less realistically
detailed. Perhaps the greatest difference is that what contemporary
plays often accomplish through sets, props and costumes,
Shakespeare gave his audiences almost entirely through language. We
know that we are in the Forest of Arden, for example, or on the
battlements of a Danish castle, or on the seacoast of Bohemia,
because the characters tell us so, not because we can see or hear
for ourselves that we are; there are no trees or battlements or
roaring surf but only a bare stage jutting out among the
spectators, flanked by galleries and balconies and backed by an
inner recess into which the action might move. Visual spectacle,
though not unimportant, was secondary to dialogue; we speak of
going to "see" a play where audiences up to the nineteenth century
spoke of "hearing" one.
We must not
think of Shakespeare's
stage as impoverished because it lacked the technical resources of
our own, for the richness of his dramatic speech more than
compensates us. Shakespeare did not invent those unrhymed lines of
iambic pentameter known as blank verse, but he perfected it; he
shaped the stiff, stilted, and oratorical meter that he inherited
into a rhetorical instrument that could range from the most
colloquial and realistic dialogue to discourse of an almost
operatic grandeur and eloquence. And perfectly complementing and
counterpointing Shakespeare's verse was his prose, a vehicle
capable of distinguishing the commoners from the noble characters,
the subplots from the main plot, the comic from the tragic.
The distinction
between tragedy and
comedy, still useful in our age, was particularly important in
Shakespeare's time. Elizabethan tragedy was the still familiar tale
of a great man or woman brought low through hubris or fate (though
some of Shakespeare's tragic heroes--Romeo, say, or Timon, or
Macbeth--do not easily accomodate Aristotle's definition of the
type). Shakespearean comedy, like much of our own, was descended
from the Roman "New Comedy" of Plautus and Terence (an influence
seen most clearly in The Comedy of Errors), crossbred with
fairy tale and Italian romance and sometimes undercut by bitingly
ironic satire. Tragedies and comedies are two of the genres into
which the First Folio of Shakespeare divides the plays; the third
category is Histories, comprising plays that chronicled the lives
of English Kings, but these plays themselves often tended toward
the tragic (Richard II or Richard III, for instance)
or the comic (the Falstaff subplots of both parts of Henry
IV and the Pistol-Fluellen encounters of Henry V). Thus
almost from the start, Shakespeare's method was to mingle the
heretofore antagonistic visions of comedy and tragedy in ways that
still seem novel and startling. There is more to laugh at in the
tragedy of Hamlet than there is in a comedy like The Merchant of
Venice, and some modern critics go so far as to consider King
Lear at once the pinnacle of Shakespeare's tragic
achievement and a kind of divine comedy or even absurdist farce. Romeo
and Juliet is a tragedy assembled from comic
materials
(a story of young lovers struggling to overcome the obstacle of
parental disapproval), and in Shakespeare's later tragedy of
romantic love, Antony and Cleopatra, there is much poignant
humor at the expense of middle-aged lovers attempting with
difficulty to sustain the passion usually associated with
adolescence. Indeed, some of Shakespeare's comedies--Measure for
Measure and All's Well That Ends Well are the most
notable--seem so far removed from the optimism usually associated
with that genre that they have acquired the qualifying title of
"problem comedies."
In other
ways besides the generic,
Shakespeare's theater presents to us a mixed, even a contradictory
aspect. The Aristotelian tradition demanded of serious playwrights
that their plays be unified in the continuity of their action. But
instead of telling us a single coherent story, Shakespeare
sometimes tells us two or even three, alternating among them or
even (through his favorite device of the play-within-a-play)
placing one inside the other. Instead of limiting his casts to a
few characters, he gives us so many that his actors are forced to
"double," racing offstage as a page or messenger to reappear the
next moment as an old man or a flattering courtier. The plays do
not hold a single mirror up to nature, then, but many mirrors at
once--like the characters whose function it is to parallel and
reflect each other, and so comment upon each other; thus, in King
Lear, we are given not a single father mistreated by his children
but two, and in Hamlet, not one son of a slain father but
three.
Multiple perspectives, actions, and characters looked at from
different and even contradictory points of view, abound in the
plays, which themselves, by setting the subjective beside the
objective and the real beside the illusory, become instruments for
investigating the nature of reality itself.
The above may make
Shakespeare sound
like a philosopher or a scientist, and many people have thought of
him in this way: as a writer whose most valuable contributions are
to the history of ideas, to psychology, to theology, to sociology.
But this is a way to misread Shakespeare and to ignore what he did
best; it has even been the basis for those now largely discredited
claims that not Shakespeare but some better-educated or more
aristocratic writer must have written his plays. Shakespeare is not
so much a "thinker" as a writer capable of bringing thoughts to
life. Every one of his plays, like those of his contemporaries, is
an adaptation of some story, history, or other play; many of the
"ideas" for which Shakespeare is now given credit are part of the
intellectual commonplace of his age. We should not read or attend
his plays to find out how people lived in Elizabethan London, or
what true love is, or whether God exists, though such matters are
debated in them. The nineteenth century, in particular, tended to
regard the plays as slices of life and to remove characters from
their dramatic context to argue their motives, speculate upon their
childhoods, or predict their futures. But they are not real people
who live in our world; each of the plays is its own world in
miniature: the happy-go-lucky farcical world of The Comedy of
Errors or The Taming of the Shrew, the romantic,
fairy-tale world of Cymbeline and The Tempest, the
darkly ironic world of Troilus and Cressida and the tragic
world of Lear or Othello are all places different
from each other and from our own. The thirty-seven plays of
Shakespeare are not moral sermons, not handbooks of etiquette, not
philosophical treatises, not documentaries of English life in the
Renaissance. They are exercises in dramatic imagination,
demonstrations of mimetic magic, celebrations of the power of
illusion over reality; and, if we come to them in the right spirit,
they will move and entertain us as the works of few other writers
can hope to do.
Adapted from A Guide to the
Study of
Literature: A Companion Text for Core Studies 6, Landmarks of
Literature, ©English Department, Brooklyn College.
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