INTRODUCTION

Shakespeare was the most popular playwright in London.at that time. As centuries have passed, his genius eclipses all others of his age; Jonson, Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, Dekker, Heywood—none approach the craft or the humanity of character that marks William Shakespeare’s work. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, on April 23, 1564. Church records from Holy Trinity Church indicate that he was baptized there on April 26, 1564. Young William was born of John Shakespeare, a glover and leather merchant, and Mary Arden, a landed local heiress. William, according to the church register, was the third of eight children in the Shakespeare household—three of whom died in childhood. John Shakespeare had a remarkable run of success as a merchant, alderman, and high bailiff of Stratford, during William's early childhood At the age of eighteen Shakespeare got married ; Anne Hathaway, a woman of twenty-six, became his wife. Their first child, Susanna, was born five months after the wedding (baptized May 1583). Twins, Hamnet and Judith, were born in February 1585. Before he was twenty-one, Shakespeare was the father of three young children, with a wife nearing thirty. There were no more children, and, though Stratford remained his home, Shakespeare lived his professional life in London, several days' journey away (unless you were extravagant enough to hire post-horses). His presence in London in 1592 is known from an attack on him by Robert Greene (1558-92), man of letters and playwright, who deeply resented Shakespeare coming from the ranks of the actors to undertake the writing of plays. Greene, six years Shakespeare's senior, came from a background of provincial trade very similar to his, his father being a Norwich saddler. But his distinction from Shakespeare was that he had won his way to Cambridge, and was Master of Arts of that university. He considered Shakespeare as a threat to educated university men like himself as provider of plays to the young professional theatre. Shakespeare took the art of dramatic verse and brought it to perfection. He created the most vivid characters of the Elizabethan stage. His usage of language, both lofty and low, shows a remarkable wit and subtlety. Most importantly, his themes are so universal that they transcend generations to stir the imaginations of audiences everywhere to this day.His plays generally fall into four categories:

Pre-1594 - Richard III , The Comedy of Errors )

1594–1600 - Henry V , Midsummer Night's Dream )

1600–1608 - Macbeth , King Lear )

Post-1608 - Cymbeline , The Tempest )

The first period has its roots in Roman and medieval drama .The earliest Shakespeare owes a debt to Christopher Marlowe, whose writing probably gave much inspiration at the onset of the Bard's career.

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The second period showed more growth in style, and the construction becoming less labored. The histories of this period are Shakespeare's best, portraying the lives of kings and royalty in most human terms. He also begins the interweaving of comedy and tragedy, which would become one of his stylistic signatures. The third period marks the great tragedies, and the principal works which would earn the Bard his fame in later centuries. His tragic figures rival those of Sophocles, and might well have walked off the Greek stage straight onto the Elizabethan. Shakespeare is at his best in these tragedies. The comedies of this period, however, show Shakespeare at a literary crossroads—moody and without the clear comic resolution of previous comedies The fourth period encompasses romantic tragicomedy. Shakespeare at the end of his career seemed preoccupied with themes of redemption. The writing is more serious yet more lyrical, and the plays show Shakespeare at his most symbolic;Shakespeare's comedies are called romantic comedies because they typically involve lovers whose hearts are set on each other but whose lives are complicated by disapproving parents, deceptions, jealousies, illusions, confused identities, disguises, or other misunderstandings. Conflicts are present, but they are more amusing than threatening. This lightness is apparent in some of the comedies' titles: the conflict in a play such as A Midsummer Night's Dream is, in a sense, Much Ado About Nothing — As You Like It - in a comedy. Shakespeare orchestrates the problems and confusion that typify the initial plotting of a romantic comedy into harmonious wedding arrangements in the final scenes. In these comedies life is a celebration, a feast that always satisfies, because the generosity of the humor leaves us with a revived appetite for life's surprising possibilities. Discord and misunderstanding give way to concord and love. Marriage symbolizes a pledge that life itself is renewable, so we are left with a sense of new beginnings.Although a celebration of life, comedy is also frequently used as a vehicle for criticizing human affairs. Satire casts a critical eye on vices and follies by holding them up to ridicule - usually to point out an absurdity so that it can be avoided or corrected. In Twelfth Night Malvolio is satirized for his priggishness and pomposity. He thinks himself better than almost everyone around him, but Shakespeare reveals him to be comic as well as pathetic. We come to understand what Malvolio will apparently never comprehend: that no one can take him as seriously as he takes himself. Polonius is subjected to a similar kind of scrutiny in Hamlet.Malvolio's ambitious efforts to attract Olivia's affections are rendered absurd by Shakespeare's use of both high and low comedy. High comedy consists of verbal wit, while low comedy is generally associated with physical action and is less intellectual. Through puns and witty exchanges,. Shakespeare's high comedy displays Malvolio's inconsistencies of character. His self-importance is deflated by low comedy. We are treated to a farce, a form of humor based on exaggerated, improbable incongruities, when the staid Malvolio is tricked into wearing bizarre clothing and behaving like a fool to win olivia. Our laughter is Malvolio's pain, but though he has been "notoriously abus'd" and he vows in the final scene to be "reveng'd on the whole pack" of

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laughing conspirators who have tricked him, the play ends on a light note. Indeed, it concludes with a song, the last ine of which reminds us of the predominant tone of the play as well as the nature of comedy: "And we'll strive to please you every day." Shakespeare’s tragedies usually share several features. Almost all of them begin in an ordered society and move toward chaos, as the hero allows his flaws to rule him. Often, this chaotic change is reflected in the natural world, with storms and strange mists being characteristic. Most importantly, the plays feature heroes whom audiences can identify with and feel sorry for. The protagonist of Shakespeare’s tragedies are not villains or saints but generally good people destroyed by their own ego or ill fate. They do not promise peace and contentment. The tragic protagonist is portrayed as a remarkable individual whose unique qualities compel us with their power and complexity. Macbeth is not simply a murderer nor is Othello merely a jealous husband. But despite their extreme passions, behavior, and even crimes, we identify with tragic heroes in ways that we do not with comic characters. We can laugh at pretentious fools, smug hypocrites, clumsy oafs, and thwarted lovers because we see them from a distance. They are amusing precisely because their problems are not ours; we recognize them as types instead of as ourselves (or so we think). No reader of Twelfth Night worries about Sir Toby Belch's excessive drinking; he is a cheerful "sot" whose passion for ale is cause for celebration rather than concern. Shakespeare's comedy is sometimes disturbing - Malvolio's character certainly is - but is never devastating. Tragic heroes do confront devastation; they command our respect and compassion because they act in spite of terrifying risks. Their triumph is not measured by the attainment of what they seek but by the wisdom that defeat imposes on them. As for poetry , Shakespeare wrote famous sonnets .The Shakespearean sonnet is divided into four parts. The first three parts are each four lines long, and are known as quatrains, rhymed ABAB; the fourth part is called the couplet, and is rhymed CC. The Shakespearean sonnet is often used to develop a sequence of metaphors or ideas, one in each quatrain, while the couplet offers either a summary or a new take on the preceding images or ideas. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147, for instance, the speaker’s love is compared to a disease. In the first quatrain, the speaker characterizes the disease; in the second, he describes the relationship of his love-disease to its “physician,” his reason; in the third, he describes the consequences of his abandonment of reason; and in the couplet, he explains the source of his mad, diseased love—his lover’s betrayal of his faith:

My love is as a fever, longing stillFor that which longer nurseth the disease,Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,The uncertain sickly appetite to please.My reason, the physician to my love,Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,Hath left me, and I desp’rate now approveDesire is death, which physic did except.Past cure am I, now reason is past care,And frantic mad with evermore unrest,

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My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,At random from the truth vainly expressed;   For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,   Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Shakespeare used his sonnets to explore different themes – lust, love, beauty .The sonnets were addressed to stylized women and dedicated to wealthy noblemen, who supported poets with money and other gifts, usually in return for lofty praise in print. Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to “Mr. W. H.,” and the identity of this man remains unknown. He dedicated an earlier set of poems, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, to Henry Wriothesly, earl of Southampton, but it’s not known what Wriothesly gave him for this honor. In contrast to tradition, Shakespeare addressed most of his sonnets to an unnamed young man. Addressing sonnets to a young man was unique in Elizabethan England. In many ways, Shakespeare’s use of the sonnet form is richer and more complex than this relatively simple division into parts might imply. Not only is his sequence largely occupied with subverting the traditional themes of love sonnets—the traditional love poems in praise of beauty and worth, for instance, are written to a man, while the love poems to a woman are almost all as bitter and negative as Sonnet 147—he also combines formal patterns with daring and innovation . Shakespeare’s ability to summarize the range of human emotions in simple but profoundly eloquent verse or prose is perhaps the greatest reason for his popularity. Shakespeare influenced his age, the ages that passed and probably the ages to come .

CHAPTER I 4

SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDIES

Shakespeare's tragedies begin and end with Roman themes. All the tragedies contemplate loss, defeat, disappointment, failure, death.In spite of the diversity of tragic subjects, Rome remains a constant preoccupation, inspiring the two major works, Julius Caesar (1599) and Antony and Cleopatra (1607). These two plays on historical subjects underline the ready transference between 'history' and 'tragedy' and the strong political element to be found in nearly all the tragedies. Hamlet {1601), a play directing intense light on the recesses of personality, is all the same a play about the state of Denmark, its government and its relations with neighbouring states. King Lear (1605) has the political stability of England at its centre, Macbeth (1606), drawn like the histories from Holinshed's chronicles, is concerned like the histories with rebellion, civil war, foreign invasion, and usurpation. And even in Romeo and Juliet (1595) and Othello (1604), which no one could call political, the relationship between the individual and the community is organic, and is essential to the play. Timon of Athens combines the story of the hero with a major political crisis centring on Alcibiades. Revenge is a major issue in one of the greatest of the plays- Hamlet and also in Titus Andronicus. First a victim of revenge himself, Titus is next the avenger of his own abused or dead children, labouring for justice in a Rome that he calls 'a wilderness of tigers'. The play ends in an absurdity of carnage, Titus has cooked her sons' limbs. Aaron the Moor is a powerful figure, perhaps conceived in emulation of Marlowe's Barabbas, the Jew of Malta. He is an alien cynically enjoying the crumbling of Roman society-mostly as a consequence of his own devilish practical jokes. He has a disarming affection for the black love-child which the queen of the Goths has borne to him. The long life of the revenge play Hamlet cannot be explained simply by the attraction of the grotesque horrors it revelled in- hosts, skulls, insanity, poisonings, and so on. The trauma is that of trying to obtain justice in an unjust and indifferent society.

To Hamlet, totally alienated from Danish society, the voice of the Ghost asking for revenge gives meaning to a life that had lost all meaning. His conception of his mission extends beyond killing Claudius into the cleansing of Denmark, and includes what was specifically forbidden by the Ghost, the moral rescue of his mother. Disabling doubts about the authenticity of the Ghost, and about the value of any act (in the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy), alternate with the exultation of conviction, and the impulsiveness of the sword-thrust that kills the wrong man, Polonius. So Hamlet becomes the object of a counter-revenge, Laertes seeking requital for the murder of his father. By the last act of the play, after his adventures at sea, Hamlet is convinced of the tightness of his cause and the necessity of killing Claudius, whom he describes as a cancer in society. He sees himself as a humble instrument of heaven, and to fail his duty in removing that cancer would be at the peril of his own soul. But it is too late; Laertes wounds him fatally before he at last kills the king. The Denmark passes into the hands of the foreigner Fortinbras. Hamlet ends in both victory and failure. The possibility that a man has been picked out to do a deed which society condemns but which a higher, divine authority

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sanctions is balanced against the possibility that the Ghost led Hamlet into delusion and error, and (to steal Yeats's words) bewildered him till he died.

Revenge has to do with hate.Another second major theme in the tragedies is love, which is the inspiration of four plays: Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra. In each of the plays everything is staked upon a love-relationship which to a greater or lesser extent is unpalatable to society; in each play, though for vastly different reasons, the love fails to abide and ends disastrously.

Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare's love tragedy of youth as Antony and Cleopatra is his love tragedy of middle age. To Juliet, a girl of fourteen, comes the liberation of first love—which Shakespeare enshrines in a sonnet shared between Romeo and Juliet when they kiss. The plot moves forward by a simple mechanism of ironic reversals which mark the stages of a clear path for the tragic outcome. Romeo's love for a Capulet leads into his killing Juliet's cousin; the Friar's good offices for the lovers lead into the tragic mistiming at the tomb. If there is less than full tragedy at the end, it is not because of too much coincidence and bad luck, but because, for all their impetuousness, the young lovers in their desperately sad conclusion are simply victims,not of fate but of their elders . There is nothing of that fatal collaboration in one's own destruction which is so marked in the great later tragedies. Intense pity, little terror, there are present in Romeo and Juliet; the lovers, completing their union in death as they could not complete it in life, are at least seif. Such love as theirs, passionate and sexual though it was, was a dedication to a higher scale of values than obtained in the violent commerce of the worldly society they lived in.

This must surely be the case in Othello too. To the wealthy citizens of Venice, epitomized in Desdemona's father Brabantio, Othello is a totally undesirable match; it is against „ all rules of nature” for her to fall in love with a black man, and Othello must have used spells for her to do so. It is a common view that Desdemona did not really know Othello. She did; she knew the Othello who existed before Iago began to twist and corrupt him. She knew, approved, loved; and she committed herself in as definite and courageous an act as is to be found in the tragedies. For Othello, this love, after a career of soldiering, is a miracle of happiness. But Iago was born to oppose happiness. He is a cruel man, bound by the acute malevolence that is his nature to wreck and destroy. The strength of the love between Othello and Desdemona is an offence to him. He cannot corrupt Desdemona but he can corrupt Othello into misconceiving her very goodness:

So will I turn her virtue into pitch,And out of her own goodness make the netThat shall enmesh them all. (II. iii)

There is no more painful scene in drama than that in which Iago begins his work, crumbling Othello's confidence in his wife's chastity and fidelity and stirring up that jealousy which ends in his killing a totally innocent woman. Iago works on Othello's sense of inferiority, his blackness his foreignness, his ignorance of cultivated society. That Othello has not sufficient faith in Desdemona to withstand the attack is terrible; but the attack is a manifestation of evil cannot be withstood. At any rate Desdemona's dedication of herself is cruelly betrayed.

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Disowned by her family, she is brutally rejected and ceremoniously murdered by her husband. Othello is the grimmest of the tragedies, though in these days a lot of its tragic effect is lost on those who, confident in their ability to deal with such a situation as the play presents, have patronized Desdemona and despised Othello. In Antony and Cleopatra we have once again the old soldier finding a heaven in love. But the soldier is now the great sharer of Rome's imperial rule, and the woman is not the virginal daughter of a wealthy citizen. To standers-by Antony's neglect of the claims of office and empire for the seductive sensuality of Cleopatra is simply shameful.

For Antony the love of Cleopatra means the decline of his power, disorder within the empire, the abandonment of the codes of honour and responsibility by which he has lived. As he leaves Cleopatra to reassert himself in the affairs of Rome, it might seem that we have a tragedy of choice between love and honour, like the famous choice of Hercules, Antony's supposed ancestor, who came to a fork in the road, one path leading to duty and the other to pleasure. Octavius Caesar's progress towards sole rule is remorseless. Shakespeare strongly contrasts the youth and asceticism of this efficient man with the hedonistic, warmer nature of the older man, Antony. Cleopatra is Antony's only refuge. As he comes to ruin and death the basic question of the play asserts itself as what quality of refuge the love of Cleopatra provides for Antony. It is certain that in military ventures Cleopatra fails Antony again and again. But Antony fails Cleopatra again and again. Her famous question, 'Not know me yet?', after the great row over Caesar's messenger kissing her hand, echoes to the moment of Antony's death. It is often said that Shakespeare presented Cleopatra with a kind of double focus: sometimes we see nobility, sometimes we see coquetry. Cleopatra’s life is to win men and to hold them as long as she wants, to make love, to enjoy herself, to be flattered, to lie her way out of problems, to be jealous, unfair, hot-tempered, very loving, or very cool as her advantage dictates. And all this in a woman in whom regal magnificence combines with unequalled attractiveness. The mystery of Cleopatra, which Antony never quite discerns, is the way in which her royalty transcends the gold and silk of her throne. It takes an Antony to create Cleopatra fully; not to change her but to fulfil the rich complexity of her nature. But there is no possibility that the relationship can prosper, or even survive. Antony's death is a miserable confusion. He is convinced that Cleopatra has betrayed him in the last sea fight. „The witch shall die!” he vows. To cool his anger Cleopatra sends word that she has died. On hearing this Antony tries to kill himself, but fails to do it cleanly. As he dies in Cleopatra's arms he does not say one word about their love,only that she should save herself and remember him in his earlier, Roman, greatness. It is not love that is uppermost in his mind at the end, but the past. For Cleopatra, on the other hand, their love is her totality. She has no thought of outliving him, but before she dies there is a stillness in which she can contemplate their love. There is no higher hymn to love in Shakespeare than in the imagery of her adoration of the dead Antony.

There was never any future for the love of Antony and Cleopatra in worldly terms.That is because the world is what it is. 'The holy priests', however, bless her in her very sexuality, and it is Octavius of all people who utters the amazing words that even in death she looks ready to 'catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace' .

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Troilus and Cressida does not recognize the existence of love, only sex, Troilus's feeling for Cressida is a self-regarding infatuation that never properly focuses its object. If he feels himself unspeakably let down by Cressida's defection, he really has only his own injudiciousness to blame. The whole Trojan War is seen as a demonstration of the two motive-forces in human life, lust (in the seizure of Helen) and aggression (in the war which followed). Troilus and Cressida as a whole is a bitter stabbing every ideal of love or honour. It is anti-heroic in its portrayal of the famous worthies on the Greek side, and even Hector does not escape. It seems certain that if we have to include Troilus and Cressida among the tragedies because it will not go anywhere else there is nothing truly tragic about its mood. The great merits of this powerful play lie in another realm. Perhaps there should be a separate category of Shakespeare's works called 'Ironies', and this should be the one play in it.

We have been looking at tragic heroes in terms of their commitment to revenge and to love. There is another type of commitment, to a political course of action, and this brings together two very different plays in which the hero assassinates the ruler of the state: Julius Caesar and Macbeth.

Julius Caesar was an anticipation of Hamlet in exploring the problems of an intellectual, a bookish man who is something of a philosopher, who in order to purge and reorder society undertakes an act of violence against the head of the state. The texture of the plays is quite different, but each play illuminates the other. Brutus is invited to join the conspiracy against Caesar by Cassius, who has a fierce personal and ideological hatred for the autocratic behaviour of Caesar. Brutus has no 'personal cause' against Caesar but persuades himself that it is his civic duty to assassinate the man. In his high-mindedness he makes political mistake after mistake, and Shakespeare makes a strong point of contrasting his public-duty rhetoric with the physical butchery of Caesar. The old republicanism which Brutus wishes to restore is not really a political possibility for Rome but in the first place it is Brutus's great errors of judgement which allow Mark Antony to take the initiative, exploit civil disorder, and sweep the conspirators out of existence. Antony, who can afford to be generous at the moment of victory, gives Brutus a fine eulogy: 'This was the noblest Roman of them all.' He acted, he says, 'in a general honest thought' and for 'common good to all'. It is the depressing truth - Brutus is the best man we see in Rome, thoughtful, gentle, altruistic, affectionate, acting for principle and not personal advantage, It is his personal qualities which make his political career so frightening. It is not alone that he was too 'nice' to succeed in the rough and tumble of political life, but that his attempt to phrase political violence within the language of highly principled conduct turns him into a traitor and makes certain the failure of a political cause which even an Elizabethan could view with a certain sympathy.

In Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth the hero aims at the heart of existing society, intending to change that society by killing the prince or governor. In both Julius Caesar and Hamlet the goal is to restore the moral order of a past society. Macbeth's aim in assassinating Duncan seems entirely selfish. Yet curiously he is impelled by nothing like Richard III's lust for power. Royalty is a misty dream of magnificence, as vague to Macbeth as it is to us:

'the swelling act / Of the imperial theme'.

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Macbeth and his wife share in a guilty fantasy of becoming king and queen of Scotland. Macbeth is a hardened loyal soldier, capable of the bloody suppression of rebels, who is a prey to these strange imaginings, which seem to torment him as much as they give him pleasure. When the witches told him that he will be the future king, they have pierced to the secret life of his thoughts. Banquo sees him start with fear. The life of this mental world is as real to Macbeth as the tangible world around him. After the witches have spoken he almost collapses under the pressure of the 'horrible imaginings' in which he sees himself in the act of murder. Later in the play, the dagger which he sees before him in the air— what he calls 'a dagger of the mind'—is 'in form as palpable' as the dagger he then draws from its sheath. After the assassination he hears a voice crying 'Sleep no more!'

Tempted by the prophecy of the witches and taunted by his wife, Macbeth turns his vivid dream of majesty into reality by murdering the king, Duncan. He is in a state of horror before, during, and after the murder—when, unable to sleep, he says he would rather be dead

Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy.

Macbeth has to live not only without the glory he thought would come with kingship but also with entire knowledge of what it is that he has done. He cannot avoid facing it, and he cannot face it. 'To know my deed,' he says, ''were best not know myself.' His fierce wife succumbs first. The reality which the pair of them created put of their dreams reinvades her dreams, and in her sleep she is forced to re-enact the murder. Macbeth’s fate is different. When he hears 'the cry of women' within, he realizes that his interior, life has gone dead: he cannot even be afraid any more. And when he is told that Lady Macbeth has died, the terrible conviction eomes over him that the exterior world is also without life, meaningless, inert.

It is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The man whose every experience was made doubly alive by the workings of a powerful imagination now finds only deadness in both imagination and reality.

To body forth the intensity of Macbeth's inner life, Shakespeare gave him a poetry whose metaphoric richness is unsurpassed among the tragic heroes. The power of the poetry draws us in to share this inner life of Macbeth's. We may he reluctant to be so drawn but we have little chance of holding back. The play shows us how a man who is not evil brings himself or is brought to do evil. By the empathy which Macbeth's poetry forces us into, we are made to share his heart of darkness.

Every hero we have looked at makes a commitment—to love, revenge or political violence - and this commitment is seen as the key to a new existence. What commitment does King Lear make? He proposes to divide his kingdom between his three daughters and retire from a long life of ruling, looking forward in particular to finding rest in the arms of his beloved Cordelia. He does indeed commit an act - the act of disowning and banishing Cordelia for not openly professing her love for him, but for the rest of the play, though it is the consequence of his act that he suffers from. The closest resemblance is with Richard II.

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Both plays show us the painful process of the collapse of the hero's world, and of the self that fitted that world, and the equally painful process of learning a new identity. The questioning of himself, his values, the nature of society and of the meaning of existence, which adversity forces Lear to undertake, is not confined to his individual predicament. The suffering of Gloucester through the malice of his illegitimate son confirms that Lear's bitter experience is not unique ; and with the tremendous orchestration of the storm scenes challenge and protest become a universal chorus. The outcries of the mad king, the songs and snatches of the shivering Fool, the manic chatter of poor Tom combine into an extraordinary and unsatisfied interrogation. 'Is man no more than this?' The climax of evil is in Gloucester's own castle, where Gloucester is bound to a chair, cross-questioned and abused by Regan, and has his eyes put out by Regan's husband, Cornwall.

This terrifying scene is the extreme edge of cruelty and inhumanity in the tragedies, and it is balanced by another scene in which the power of love is more profoundly shown than anywhere else in Shakespeare. It is a humble Lear who emerges from his insanity to be reunited with his daughter Cordelia. They are defeated in battle and led away to prison. The prison becomes a symbol of the pressures of the social and political world from which Lear feels himself totally liberated simply by being with Cordelia.

Come, let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too- Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's aut-

And take upon-s the mystery of things As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out In a walled prision packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by the moon. (V. iii)

If the transfiguring power of love, which can only exist as an opposition to the values of worldly society; the retribution of the world is never more cruelly shown than in the ending of the play. Cordelia is hanged, and the old king makes his final entrance with the dead girl in his arms.

Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never.

The god of Shakespeare's tragedies is indeed a hidden god. Those who like Albany in King Lear expect his intervention or manifestation are disappointed. It is the devil who is in full view all the time. The witches in Macbeth, tempt and mislead the hero; Othello becomes convinced that Iago is a devil and has brought him to do an act for which he is eternally lost; Hamlet is deeply conscious of the traps waiting to ensnare the soul into hell and damnation. Although the viriousness of Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Edmund, and Iago does not exceed the documented record of human cruelty and malice, there seems no doubt that in them Shakespeare wanted to portray an operation of evil that is more than a matter of ill will and sadism.

'Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?'

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asks Lear in the crazy 'arraignment' of Goneril. The answer is no; the cause is supernatural. Evil is a presence lying in wait below the surface of human life, ready to erupt in the most unsuspected places, in one's trusted lieutenant, one's affectionate daughter, one's loyal general, one's own brother.

Shakespearian tragedy is concerned as much with displacement as with death. The conflict between the generations is a terrible warfare in King Lear; in some of the tragedies, especially Antony and Cleopatra, the tussle of the older person to hold on and assert his right to exist is fused with the movement of history. New epochs are coming into being, brashly ousting a more cultivated and humane but incompetent past. We see that Hamlet, a young man, allies himself with the older, simpler, chivalric values of his father, and tries to unseat a usurping regime. Coriolanus is supreme in the uncomplicated skill of saving Rome from attacking armies. In spite of his youth and impetuosity he is really a relie of the past thrown up and stranded on a shoal. Banished by the city which he has given his whole life to defending, he has only one solution, the military solution of destroying the city whose new configuration he cannot bring himself to accept. It is his mother, who fashioned him into his rigid shape, who has now to undo her work, and turn him aside from his vengeance. But to let the new Rome live is to let Coriolanus die, and the Volscians kill him for failing them

The 'tragic flaw', that weakness of character or fatal error of judgement which since Aristotle's time has seemed a prime constituent of tragedy, is less important than the tragic commitment. Within the hero's course there are all sorts of moral weakness, wrong decisions, and character deficiencies. But these do not initiate the tragic impetus; they accompany it and direct its course. In his or her consecration to revenge, or love, or political violence, or political resistance, each of the heroes is in some way defying society, asserting a primordial dissatisfaction with things as they are. The freedom which each hero seeks is different, leads to a different kind of disturbance, and ends in a different kind of failure. But in every single tragedy the audience is left with a balance of conflicting emotions as regards the hero, the bid for liberation, and its cost. And in that equilibrium lies much of the power of tragedy.

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CHAPTER II

SHAKESPEARE’S CHARACTERS

Shakespeare’s characters emerge in his plays as distinctive human

beings. Although some of the characters display elements of

conventional dramatic types such as the melancholy man, the braggart

soldier, the pedant, and the young lover, they are nevertheless usually

individualized rather than caricatures or exaggerated types. Hamlet,

one of the most complex characters in all literature, is partly a picture

of the ideal Renaissance man, and he also exhibits traits of the

conventional melancholic character. However, his personality as a

whole transcends these types, and he is so real that commentators have

continued for centuries to explore his fascinating mind.

The women in Shakespeare’s plays are vivid creations, each differing

from the others. It is important to remember that in Shakespeare’s time

boy actors played the female parts. Actresses did not appear in a

Shakespeare play until after the restoration of Charles II to the English

throne in 1660 and the introduction of French practices such as women

actors Shakespeare created such a rich array of fascinating women

characters. Shakespeare was fond of portraying aggressive, witty

heroines, such as Kate of The Taming of the Shrew, Rosaline of Love’s

Labour’s Lost. However, he was equally adept at creating gentle and

innocent women, such as Ophelia in Hamlet, Desdemona in Othello,

and Cordelia in King Lear. His female characters also include the

treacherous Goneril and Regan in King Lear, the iron-willed Lady

Macbeth,the witty and resourceful Portia in Merchant of Venice, the

tender and loyal Juliet, and the alluring Cleopatra.

Shakespeare’s comic figures are also highly varied. They include

bumbling rustics such as Dogberry and Verges in Much Ado About

Nothing, tireless punsters like the Dromios in The Comedy of Errors,

pompous grotesques like Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost,

elegant wits like Feste in Twelfth Night, cynical realists like Thersites

in Troilus and Cressida, and fools who utter nonsense that often

conceals wisdom, such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the Fool in

King Lear.

Shakespeare drew his characters with remarkable insight into human

character. Even the most wicked characters, such as Iago in Othello,

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have human traits that can elicit understanding if not compassion.

Thus, Macbeth’s violent end arouses pity and awe rather than scornful

triumph at a criminal’s just punishment for his deeds. The characters

achieve uniqueness through their brilliantly individualized styles of

speech..Shakespeare’s understanding of the human soul and his

mastery of language enabled him to write dialogue that makes the

characters in his plays always intelligible, vital, and memorable.

Female Characters

Ophelia, it would seem, wholly at the mercy of the male figures within her life, is certainly a victim figure. In his treatment of Ophelia, Hamlet oscillates between protests of undying love and cruelty such as his cold and accusing speech in the 'nunnery scene'. In short, Hamlet throughout the play uses Ophelia as a tool in his revenge plan. It is Queen Gertrude's behaviour that has instigated Hamlet's unforgivable treatment of Ophelia. She transgresses the patriarchal bounds of femininity by marrying so soon after her husband's death and not remaining in passive grief and obedient devotion to his memory. This provides Hamlet with a model of women's inconstancy. His bitterness leads him to believe that all women are untrustworthy. 'Frailty thy name is woman' .. However we view his culpability, Ophelia suffers as a result of Hamlet's patriarchal values of womanhood.With regard to her father and brother, the two direct ruling male forces in her life, Ophelia is also very much a victim.Unquestioningly obeying their remonstrances against pursuing a relationship with Hamlet, she rejects his advances-which of course she believes to be genuine- and thus when he pretends to be mad she believes it to be her fault. Her speech reflects her deep and genuine sorrow:

And I of ladies, most deject and wretchedThat sucked honey of his music vows ...

O woe is me.

Ophelia's feeling of guilt is reinforced by Polonius's insistence to King Claudius:

But Yet I do believeThe origin and commencement of this grief

Sprung from neglected love

Polonius's conviction, in which one can't help believing, stems from a mercenary desire to marry his daughter off to such an eligible husband as the prince of Denmark, rather than a genuine belief in his daughter's role in causing Hamlet's madness. Thus when Hamlet murders her father, Ophelia enters a double realm of guilt, believing herself to be to blame for both

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Hamlet's madness and her father's death. As a result she becomes mad. Although at one level this decline into madness sets Ophelia up indisputably as a victim figure, on a deeper level perhaps her madness itself can be seen as Ophelia's active rejection of patriarchal restraint.

In the later tragedy, Othello, it can also be argued that the tragedy occurs from adherence to patriarchal rules and stereotypes. Desdemona's very much feminised qualities of passivity, softness and obedience are no match for Othello's masculine qualities of dominance, aggression and authority. After Othello in his jealousy has struck Desdemona and spoken harshly to her, she tells Iago, 'I am a child to chiding'. Protected by a system which makes women the weaker, dependent sex, Desdemona is unequipped to deal with such aggression; she is helpless against Othello. As Desdemona thus retreats into childlike behaviour to escape from reality.

With regard to men's misunderstandings of women . Othello all-too-easily accepts a stereotypical view of his wife based on the authority of a male voice. He loses sight of the real Desdemona, allowing every action of hers, once his suspicion is stimulated, to reaffirm this stereotypical conception of her. At the close of the play Othello attempts to vindicate himself from intentional murder by claiming that he did nothing 'in malice', but is simply a man 'that loved not wisely but too well'. This speech illustrates the precarious position of love in a society submerged in stereotypes. Othello's excessive, 'unwise' love for Desdemona is tied up with his perception of her as representing perfect womanhood, and his underlying fear of her- endorsed by society - as a “guilty” wife. Like Hamlet, who tells Ophelia 'get thee to a nunnery' in order to protect her chastity and remove his fear of woman's infidelity, Othello, too, wishes to erase Desdemona's sexuality and potential for infidelity. His decision to kill her, he claims, is to prevent her from a further transgression - 'Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men'. As Iago's insinuations build, the gulf between this perception of Desdemona as angel and the fear of her as not being faithfull, leaving Othello in a void of confusion and doubt:

. . . By the world, I think my wife be honest, and think she is not.

I think thou [Iago] art just, and then think thou art not.

In Othello's refusal to hear Desdemona's own protestations of innocence, Othello is very much a tragedy in which the female is subordinated by the male.

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare again explores the idea of the victim within a patriarchal society. However, in this play the gender roles are inverted and it is Antony who is the true victim. Stifled by the rules of the patriarchal society of Rome which expects him to retain a masculine side only, and not to adopt the feminine qualities of passion, emotion, and love, Antony's control over his life diminishes. Within such patriarchal confines the role of lover must be subordinate to the male's political role. After finding an extraordinary and powerful love with Cleopatra - which Shakespeare establishes to perfection - Antony is unable to accept the 'business first' principle of the patriarchal laws. Like the typical female

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heroine of a tragedy, Antony's plight escalates when he is rushed into an arranged marriage of convenience. He cannot remain away from Cleopatra and faithful to Octavia who symbolises Caesar and the power of Patriarchal Rome. He says 'though I make this marriage for my peace,/ I'th' East my pleasure lies'. Inevitably he returns to Egypt and Cleopatra, and causes a rift which can never again be cemented between himself and Caesar, which ultimately results in war.

The first words of the play, spoken by Philo, illustrate the growing condemnation of Antony's untraditional behaviour, which is not confined within the 'measure' of patriarchy: 'Nay but this dotage of our General's / O'erflows the measure'. The patriarchal males view Antony's devotion as shameful - 'His captain's heart become the bellows and the fan / To cool a gipsy's lust'. Surprisingly, in modern-day readings of the play, this attitude still exists. Antony suffers from a disease,-his passion for Cleopatra. It is true that the play is ultimately concerned with the conflict between love and politics- Egypt and Rome.

Although Antony occasionally lapses into judging himself by the standards of the patriarchy - for example, towards the end of the play dejected and shamed by his diminished political power, he becomes jealous and irrational and claims that Cleopatra has emasculated him: 'O thy vile lady, / She has robbed me of my sword.' In the conflict between love and politics - love wins. Ultimately, Antony is not defeated by his loss of power, but rather, through his love of Cleopatra envelops a manhood of stronger parameters .The end of the play can be seen as a tribute to love; a celebration rather than a downfall. Antony does not cease to be a valiant Roman by choosing Egypt over Rome; love over politics, but becomes vanquisher of himself in his suicide. By dying simultaneously in the Roman fashion, and with Cleopatra and for Cleopatra (he kills himself when he believes she is dead), Antony combines the two polarities which have been evident and separate throughout the play: the masculine Rome and the feminine Egypt.

Cleopatra's masculine qualities counterbalance the play, so Shakespeare provides us with a relationship of surprising equality. Neither Cleopatra nor the relationship can be stifled within the confines of the patriarchy of the seventeenth century. The distinctions between masculine and feminine are blurred- in a sense Antony and Cleopatra swap roles, continually embracing both their masculine and feminine selves and thus experiencing a full bonding of souls.This swapping of gender roles is rather shockingly portrayed in the scene in which Cleopatra puts her 'tires and mantles on [Antony] whilst / [she] wore his sword Phillipan'. Shakespeare evidently recognises the existence of both masculine and feminine qualities within females and males.

Cleopatra, unlike Othello and Ophelia, is the dominating force of the play in terms of theme and also her personal presence.Through his treatment of Cleopatra, Shakespeare provides us with a 'real' woman rather than a stereotype. Cleopatra through the combination of sexual and political power is a force to be reckoned with.

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Cleopatra's sexuality, despite condemnation by the patriarchal men - she is referred to as 'strumpet' and 'whore' on various occasions throughout the play - is unhidden and unrestricted. Her sexual power over men is conveyed boldly, for example, in her descriptions of her former conquests 'great Pompey' and 'Broad-fronted Caesar'. Cleopatra's sexuality is not a thing to be locked up, as in Hamlet and Othello, but is celebrated as a positive force. Surprisingly, even Enobarbus, despite his patriarchal views, does on occasions present her as positively sexual, as his unforgettable description of her indicates:

Age cannot wither her, Nor custom stale her infinite variety. Other women cloy

The appetites they feed, but she makes hungryWhere most she satisfies. For vilest things

Become themselves in her, that the holy priestsBless she is riggish.

Refusing to adhere to the stereotypes of patriarchal society, Cleopatra transforms her natural sexuality into part of her power, rather than as a diminishing of her goodness. So too, Cleopatra insists on fulfilling a political role against the wishes of the patriarchal men.

Cleopatra thus forces her access into the male arena, where Ophelia and Desdemona do not - and cannot of course, in the same way, for in her status as a middle aged woman and Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra naturally has more freedom. She is not dependent upon anyone financially, as are Ophelia and Desdemona.

Ophelia, the dominated daughter, is completely dependent. Although a flash of her potential self-will shines through at the beginning of the play, when we learn that Ophelia has entertained Hamlet unchaperoned or without paternal consent, this is stifled very quickly by Polonius and Laertes - the double voice of the patriarchy - telling her that she is naive and that her behaviour is unsuitable. Ophelia, daunted by their claims that she has mistaken Hamlet's love, assumes that her father and brother necessarily know best and replies simply 'I will obey'. Shakespeare shows, however, that it is this obedience of Ophelia's that leads to her own destruction, and illustrates that when the guiding male is like the cynical Polonius or the unperceptive Laertes, the fate of the subordinate female is considerably threatened.

While Ophelia then, silently and obediently accepts the oppression of male power, turning her distress in upon herself in her madness, Desdemona does display some traces of a more Cleopatra-like self-assertion. In her choosing of Othello as her husband, she exercises her own desire, subverting the female role of passivity within the patriarch, and marries him without parental consent. This is a rather courageous act of will, which could have resulted in much strife. However, she handles the situation with a cleverness and a manipulation which outwits the male judges who listen to her. When her father questions her about her marriage she answers forcefully, first pacifying him and then justifying her disobedience on the very grounds of patriarchal obedience and duty:

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. . . My noble father, I do perceive here a divided duty

To you I am bound, for life and education . . . You are the lord of my duty,

I am hitherto your daughter. But here's my husband,And so much duty as my mother showedTo you preferring you before her father,So much I challenge that I may profess

Due to the Moor my lord.

Desdemona by her cleverness thus appears obedient in her disobedience. Shakespeare shows Desdemona's behaviour in her relationship with Othello before the marriage to be slightly manipulative too. For Desdemona tells Othello in a very suggestive way after she has fallen in love with him, as Othello himself relates - 'if I had a friend that loved [me]/ I should but teach him how to tell [your] story,/ And that would woo [me] '. However, when she is married she slips into the role of the submissive wife. Obedient to Othello's every command, she says to Emilia - after Othello tells her peremptorily 'Get you to bed on th'instant' - 'we must not now displease him'. At this point Desdemona becomes more of a stereotype, her identity disappearing as Othello's jealousy becomes more defined. Her identity diminishes until she fits into the stereotype of the silent woman. Othello denies her right to a voice when he soliloquises 'Was this fair paper, this most goodly book,/Made to write 'whore' upon?'

Obedience and silence were very much part of the patriarchal conception of femininity.A conception to which Cleopatra refuses to adhere. When Charmian traditionally suggests that the way to gain and retain Antony's love is to 'In each thing give him way; Cross him in nothing'. Cleopatra replies, 'Thou teachest like a fool, the way to lose him'. Far from being the silent woman, Cleopatra makes her voice heard whenever she wishes, challenging and meeting challenges. She mocks Antony and quarrels with him. Challenging him with a masculine aggression when they argue -'I would I had thine inches. Thou shouldst know/ There were a heart in Egypt'. Spirited and passionate, such displays of assertion as her physical attack on the messenger informing her of Antony's marriage to Octavia,are a far cry from the passive silent role of the feminine in patriarchal society. In passionate disbelief and anger, she draws a knife on the messenger and strikes him with her bare hands. Charmian tries to pacify her by telling her 'Good madam keep yourself within yourself', but Cleopatra escapes the bounds of self-composure and the repression of self-hood. Her reaction when she feels herself wronged is in very stark contrast to the reactions of Ophelia and Desdemona.

The relative weakness of the characters of Desdemona and Ophelia is due to artistic device, as opposed to Shakespeare's misrepresentation of womanhood.. These tragedies traditionally involve the process of marriage; 'disintegration' and then punishment and death. The conception of woman's inferiority to man in these tragedies is undercut by Shakespeare for he shows Desdemona to be the virtuous character who is finally vindicated.

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Desdemona's goodness furthermore is not simply passive or weak but an act of will. Her refusal to blame Othello for his terrible treatment of her, when he suspects her of betrayal, must not be viewed as simple subservience but as a self-willed refusal to accept a bad opinion of the husband she has chosen. When he is behaving deplorably towards her she refuses to acknowledge his identity - 'My lord is not my lord,' she says 'nor should I know him / Were he in favour as in humour altered'. She stands by her acceptance of her love for him as something sacred, with a martyr-like determination: she tells Emilia 'his unkindness may defeat my life, / But never taint my love.' She thus obeys her own heart rather than patriarchal rules, extending this determination through to death, so that with her last breath - when Emilia asks 'who hath done this deed?' she can reply 'Nobody, I myself'. Othello's conviction that even upon dying she lies by claiming this self-death bears witness to the whole tragedy of the play, Othello's inability to see beneath the surface of stereotypical conceptions of femininity. By claiming this death for herself she re-affirms her self-hood. Metaphorically then she dies for her love which cannot be tainted, not from Othello's hands. In Hamlet too, Ophelia's death can perhaps be seen as an act of assertion and escape from the confining patriarchal world.

Unsurprisingly though, it is through the character of Cleopatra that Shakespeare really depicts death as an assertion of self-hood and an act of defiance to the patriarchal laws. Cleopatra's death becomes an act of triumph over Caesar - the representative of patriarchal Rome. On finding her dead, one of his guards says, 'Caesar's beguiled'. Through death Cleopatra not only transcends the world of oppression and fate, but embraces her death as a positive act rather than as an act of negation:

My desolation does begin to make a better life. . . And it is great

To do that thing that ends all other deeds,Which shackles accidents and bolts up change

Cleopatra combines feminine and masculine qualities through her death. With her resolution to take on the masculine quality of rationality and firmness and courage she wills, 'I have nothing of woman in me. Now from head to foot/ I am marble constant'. She rejects her feminine qualities of water and the changeability of the moon and transforms herself into 'air and fire'. So she embraces Antony's masculinity and the world of Rome by dying in 'the true Roman Fashion'. Yet through her death, Shakespeare depicts her as enacting the strength of womanhood by converting death into an image of both sensuality and motherhood. The pain of death is bitter-sweet and sensual “as a lover's pinch/which hurts and is”. Through death she is reborn and even the stern patriarchal Caesar is forced to admit to her bravery, and to the undeniable nobility and royalty of the woman who 'Took her own way'. Through his representation of womanhood, especially in the character of Cleopatra, Shakespeare indeed does transcend the stereotypes of his own time.

Male Characters 18

From the opening of the play Hamlet has been marked as a melancholy man. Apparently this had not been his previous character, for the king has spoken of it as "Hamlet's transformation." This change in him was brought about by brooding on the events that had just happened, and had been not only a mental but especially a moral reaction.

Hamlet is portrayed as having a very sensitive and a very moral nature. He had been greatly shocked by the things that had happened, and the suspicions he harbored constituted a direct challenge to his moral faith. If the truth was as he feared, then there was occasion to question the righteousness and justice of the world, and to wonder if life were worth living. This, apparently, was Hamlet's first encounter with great trouble, with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and it proved a great trial to his moral nature.

When the first of these disturbing events occurred, Hamlet was at the university, and apparently he did not arrive in Denmark until they had all come to pass. The first of these was the sudden death of his father; caused as it was given out by a serpent's sting. The circumstances were suspicious and pointed to his uncle, Claudius, but there was no certain evidence.

Then followed immediately the election of Claudius as the new king, apparently before Hamlet could reach Denmark. The great popularity of Hamlet and the great love the people bore him, were doubtless known by him, and would cause him to think his uncle had tricked him in the matter of the election.

Within two months followed his mother's marriage to his uncle Claudius, which she herself afterward spoke of as their "o'erhasty marriage." To Hamlet this seemed so improper, and followed so hard upon the funeral of his father that he sarcastically spoke of it as due to

"Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked-meatsDid coldly furnish forth the marriage tables."

(I. ii. 180-1.)Hamlet was not much concerned about losing the crown but he was stirred to the depths of his moral nature by what he regarded as his mother's incestuous and o'erhasty marriage. Added to these was the further fact that under the rule of Claudius his beloved Denmark was degenerating and being given over to corruption and to pleasure. Everything seemed to him to have gone wrong:- his father is dead, his mother dishonored, and his country disgraced and weakened. The men who were left did not interest him nor the women either. He was thrown cruelly back upon himself, and obliged to weigh everything anew. His confidence in the moral government of the world was shaken and his moral faith was shattered. Everything that was most dear to him had apparently been forsaken of heaven, and he was left to struggle on alone. Under these adverse circumstances he wishes he were dead:

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"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitableSee to me all the uses of this world!"

(I. ii.133-4.)

This is Hamlet's melancholy. It is the melancholy of the philosophical mind, and it is induced by the evils into the midst of which his young life is suddenly plunged. The course of the play discloses his efforts to overcome his doubts and to regain his native faith in God and in goodness and to right the wrongs about him. The greatness of his mind and character is seen in the fact that he soon recovers from the first rude shock, and holding his faith in the ultimate victory of truth and right, he concludes that

"It is not, nor it cannot come to good." (I. ii.158.)

Never again does he allow himself to fall into the slough of despond, but through darkness and light he holds to his faith in right. There is no doubt that Hamlet from the first understood his task as more than taking the life of the king. With the rebellion of Fortinbras threatening, and on the "background of general corruption" which the rule of Claudius had induced, he saw his task to be a gigantic national undertaking. He was not called merely to the physical labour of the hangman, but to the moral task of the restorer of righteousness. To take the life of the murderer needed only the nerve of the common assassin, but to "revenge" the death of the late king called for wisdom and tact of the highest order. He well knew that he could not purge his country with an assassin's dagger, nor purify it by the king's blood. Unlike Fortinbras and Laertes, his passion was not vindictiveness, and could not be satisfied by avenging a guilty king on an innocent nation. An immediate attack upon the king, then, might have been courageous, but it would have been foolhardy, and would have frustrated Hamlet's larger designs. The king was beginning to have a wholesome fear of Hamlet, and seemed to live in dread lest he should raise up an open rebellion against him. He thought himself of bringing the issue with Hamlet to public accounting, but he was afraid of Hamlet's popularity, as he later admits to Laertes,

"Why to a public count I might not go.Is the great love the general gender bear him.

(IV. vii. 17-18.)

Nothing would have been easier than for Hamlet to make it a public issue. If it was easy for Laertes at a later time to raise up a band against the king whom he thought had killed his father, it would have been doubly easy now for Hamlet who, according to Claudius himself, was "loved of the distracted multitude." But this was the very thing Hamlet wished to avoid. He sees his nation already preparing to resist the threatened attack from Norway, and with heroic self-restraint and true patriotism he refrains from anything that might encourage the enemy. He is commissioned rather to, save his country, as well from foreign aggression, as from the internal corruption that threatens its very existence. The case is desperate and the task difficult and he would gladly pursue a more tranquil career. But he rises to the necessity, howsoever reluctantly, and steadfastly pursues his appointed task.

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In all these conditons Hamlet remembers the warning of the ghost not to taint his mind. He obeys the injunction to keep a clear conscience, and not make himself a worse criminal in revenging the crime of his uncle. This marks the higher purpose and superior nobleness of character that Shakespeare has put into his Hamlet, thereby raising the tone of his play above all other versions of the story. The spirit of some other versions of the Hamlet story is very different, as may be gathered from the German play, Fratricide Punished, where we find in the Prologue the following injunction to the prince: "Therefore be ready to sow the seeds of disunion, mingle passion with their marriage, and put jealousy in their hearts. Kindle a fire of revenge, let the sparks fly over the whole realm; entangle kinsmen in the net of crime, and give joy to hell, so that those who swim in the sea of murder may soon drown." 1

This, however, was the very thing that Hamlet made every effort to avoid. As in the version of Belleforest, Hamlet was a deliverer of his people. He tried to save his beloved country from the unjust and corrupt rule of the king, and, as Shakespeare has added to his story, he had also to ward off the threatened attack of Fortinbras. Shakespeare has, therefore, made his task doubly difficult. He must revenge his father, which means he must deliver Denmark from the corrupting rule of Claudius. And he must do this without laying the country open to an attack from Fortinbras. The dramatist has made his task more complicated and hence more difficult than in any other version of the story. But in carrying him through without complete failure in either of his purposes, he has depicted in him a true national hero.

The death of Polonius has given great difficulty, and even offense; its object should be fully comprehended, for it not only illustrates the character of Hamlet, but also is one of the leading motives of the play. No other incident shows so deep a design, or is so appropriate for its purpose. Hamlet, acting blindly through impulse, slays the wrong one; the result is- guilt. This warning, therefore, speaks from the rash act: Let no rational being give up control to impulse which cannot see, cannot distinguish, the nature of a deed. Man must, therefore, reflect before proceeding to action. But, through reflection, Hamlet is unable to slay the right one; thus he cannot perform the great injunction laid upon his soul. Such is his dilemma; if he acts, it is through impulse, and he falls into guilt; if he reflects, he cannot act — that is, he cannot do the Great Deed of his life, and so commits, at least, a sin of omission.

Through the death of Polonius, Hamlet has committed the very crime which he was seeking to punish; the son of a father murdered has himself murdered a father. Retribution will call up against him a son, at whose hands he will meet his fate. So this incident offers the profoundest illustration of Hamlet's character, and, at the same time, furnishes the motive of his death. Polonius deserved to die for his offences but Hamlet had no right to slay him.

The ghost in Hamlet no doubt performs an important dramatic function. Whatever may have been Shakespeare's belief about ghosts he utilizes the popular conception to render objective what is in the minds of his characters. The ghosts or witches that appeared to Macbeth spoke out only

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what was in his mind, and revealed his inner thoughts to the audience better than any words of his could do. In the same way, the ghost in Hamlet discloses to us the suspicions already in the minds of Hamlet and his friends. When Hamlet sees the ghost and hears its revelations, he voices this thought by saying, "Oh my prophetic soul!" (I. V. 40.) And the fact that it first appears to the friends of Hamlet suggests that they shared his suspicions and perhaps even anticipated them, though no word had been spoken. The inquiry of Marcellus about the cause of the warlike activity and his later remark about the rotten condition of Denmark seem to imply a suspicion that he is endeavoring to verify or to disprove.

The scepticism that all at first show concerning the ghost seems to indicate their unwillingness to put faith in their suspicions. They do not willingly think evil of the king, and they all want some undoubted proof, not only of the fact of the ghost's appearance, but of the truth of his words. Horatio hesitates to take ths word of Bernardo and Francisco, and is convinced only by the actual sight of the ghost. Hamlet, apparently the least suspicious of all, for he is the last to see the ghost, seems reluctant to believe that Horatio and the others have seen it. To convince him, Horatio assures him with an oath of the truth of his report, saying,

"As I do live, my honor'd lord, 'tis true."

Though we see nothing of the elder Hamlet on the stage, except his ghost, it is really he who is the main-spring of all the action of the play. It was the desire to gain his crown that had impelled Claudius to the murder, and it is the filial duty of Hamlet to his father that urges him to his revenge upon the king. This conflict, then, of the murderer and the avenger of the elder Hamlet constitutes the main plot of the play, and from this grows the entire narrative.

There are many evidences in the play that the elder Hamlet was a very different man from his brother Claudius. Not only was one the innocent victim and the other the cold-blooded fratricide, but the rule of the two kings was as different as possible. Under the elder Hamlet the kingdom of Denmark had been honourable at home and respected abroad. It seems to have been a kingdom which both citizen and alien recognized as strong and good. But under Claudius the good name of Denmark had been lost, and the wholesome fear of her just power had passed away. Corruption and debauchery now stalk through the land, and foreign powers think it weak and debased. On the confession of Claudius himself it appears that young Fortinbras thinks its weakness affords him a good opportunity to make war upon Denmark, and a fitting time to seize the lands that his father had lost to the elder Hamlet. It is for this reason that he is now threatening Denmark, and if we can judge from the condition of the land, he might reasonably look for a complete triumph.

The change that has come over the country is but an index of and the effect of the difference of the two kings. The younger Hamlet has made most striking contrasts between his father and his uncle. In the interview with his mother, when he tries to dissuade her from continuing her guilty relations with the king:

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"Look here, upon this picture, and on this.The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.See what a grace was seated on this brow;

A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his sealTo give the world assurance of a man;

This was your husband. Look you now, what follows; Here is your husband; like a mildew'd ear

Blasting his wholesome brother." (III. iv. 53-66.)

The character of the elder Hamlet is further strikingly depicted in Horatio's explanation of the war preparations to Marcellus and the others. It is evident from this speech that he was a most noble king, who ruled solely in the interests of his kingdom, and not in his personal interests. He had no ambitions, and in no way molested any of his neighbors, but kept his land in prosperity and peace. He was not, however, a weak but a very valiant king, "For so this side of our known world esteem'd him" (I. i. 85), as Horatio goes on to say. He made no wars, but did not hesitate to go to war to defend his own. He would not attempt to plunder any other kingdom, nor would he permit any other to plunder him. He was a peaceable king, but not a peace-at-any-price king.

Therefore, when Fortinbras of Norway challenged him to war, he valiantly took up the challenge, avid if we are to judge by the brevity of Shakespeare's account of the war, he very speedily overcame and slew Fortinbras. By his victory the lands that were in dispute fell to Denmark, and so long as he lived they remained his without question. Only when he was dead did Norway once more think itself able to challenge Denmark and dare it to the combat. The weakness of Claudius, the young prince Fortinbras thought, afforded him his opportunity.

It is this sort of strength and virtue that makes the elder Hamlet a real national hero. He was not the type of the aggressive and conquering hero, who made war for the sake of war and conquest. With that kind of hero

Shakespeare has no sympathy. He was, however, the dramatist's ideal king, who loved peace, and would never make war, but who would not hesitate to

go to war in defence of his right and of his nation. He would not wage an aggressive war, but was valiant enough to defend his kingdom when

attacked. This is the only kind of hero Shakespeare recognizes, and for this kind he had the most profound admiration. As the father was an ideal king, so is the son an ideal prince, and Fortinbras in the last speech of the play

says that if Hamlet had been put on the throne, there is no doubt he would: "have prov'd most royally."

In general it must be said that there is no Shakespearean tragedy in which the responsibility for the deed of the hero and the subsequent tragedy can be shifted from him to another person of the play.

It is this very conception of the consuming and destructive power of passion that marks the superiority of Shakespeare's conceptions over that of his

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contemporaries. In the case of Othello, as ,of all the other tragedies, it is the passion of the hero that is the mainspring of all the action of the play that finally and certainly destroys the hero. There are two or three types of such passion in Shakespeare, according to their moral character, but all alike give rise to the action of the play and lead the hero to his fate.

Beginning, then, with this passion, it is the art of Shakespeare to place his characters under those conditions that will show the true nature of their passion and develop it to its fullness and to its fated end. It is one of Shakespeare's supreme excellences that he realized that "every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lusts and enticed," and that every man's condemnation comes from the development of his own passions.

It was under the sway of this conception that Shakespeare brought Othello into his fatal conflict with Iago, for this drew from him all the hidden passion of his nature. To make Iago the sole cause of the tragedy that befell Othello is to seek outside the human heart for the causes of human failure. Othello, like all of Shakespeare's plays, is a drama of character, not a drama of intrigue.

In Shakespeare, as in the Bible, the misfortunes that are objective in their source are never moral in character. Romeo and Juliet were undoubtedly "the victims of the animosities of their parents," or in other words were the victims of social conditions for which they were personally in no way responsible. About their misfortunes, however, there is not the slightest suggestion of retribution. But it is very different with Othello and Desdemona, for there is an element of retribution in their misfortunes. The play explicitly depicts them as the authors of all the elements of their social conditions that give rise to their conflicts and subsequent misfortunes.

It should be remembered that Othello was not a son of Venice, but a foreigner, and moreover a foreigner of a different race and color, with all that means of divergence of mind and character. Moreover, there was no conflict between Romeo and Juliet, for their love was perfect, but the conflict was between their united and unwavering love and the hostility of their families. In the case of Othello and Desdemona he conflict becomes acute and finally fatal between husband and wife, and from this the play takes its character of a hapless mismarriage.

It must be claimed that Shakespeare's dramatic methods are not subtle and elusive, but pre-eminently artistic and open. They are indeed so artistic that they have concealed his art, and unfortunately have also concealed his mind from us. Othello, who had abandoned his native land and had taken up his residence and life in the Italian city of Venice. In doing this Othello had left his native Africa, or Spain, and undertook to live his life in Venice.

The Moors of both Africa and Spain were looked upon by Englishmen and other Europeans as barbaric or semi-barbaric while the Venetians were looked upon as the most civilized and cultured people of Europe. The change took Othello among another race of another color, one that Shakespeare and most of his countrymen of whatever time considered a

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much superior race.The entire drama is Othello's story, though from the outset Iago takes the initiative, and seems to be the protagonist. The situation, however, has been created by Othello in every particular, and from this springs all the action or rather the reaction of Iago. By his action, previous to the opening of the play, Othello furnished the motive for lago, from which springs all his intrigue. It is only under the clever manipulation of Iago that Othello is put on the defence, from which he does not escape until near the close of the play. The real conflict of the play, then, is between Othello, with whom is joined Desdemona, on the one hand, and Iago, his ancient, on the other. From the outset, Othello is struggling with a situation which he inaugurated before the opening, of the play, and which grows more complex as the movement develops.

Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence-almost as if from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn in Aleppo.

And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet; but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet:

'Her father loved me,' 'O now for ever,' 'Never, Iago,' 'Had it pleased Heaven,' 'It is the cause,' 'Behold, I have a weapon,' 'Soft you, a word or

two before you go'

and if one places side by side with these speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that Othello is the greatest poet of them all. 'These nine moons wasted,' 'Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will

rust them,' 'You chaste stars,' 'It is a sword of Spain, the ice-brook's temper,' 'It is the very error of the moon’

“If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself.I'll not believe it;”

.He has watched with a poet's eye the Arabian trees dropping their “med'cinable gum”, and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the Propontic and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt (for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.

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So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave, self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils, hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth, proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy. For there is no love, not that of Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello's.

The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of European women.

In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has greater dignity than any other of Shakespeare's men), he is by nature full of the most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasises his self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but by references to the past. Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:

Is this the noble Moor whom our full SenateCall all in all sufficient? Is this the nature

Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtueThe shot of accident nor dart of chance

Could neither graze nor pierce?

This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single line--one of Shakespeare's miracles- the words by which Othello silences in a moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of Brabantio: Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them. And the same self-control is strikingly shown where Othello endeavours to elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassio and Montano. Here, however, there occur ominous words, which make us feel how necessary was this self-control, and make us admire it the more:

Now, by heaven,My blood begins my safer guides to rule,

And passion, having my best judgment collied,Assays to lead the way.

We remember these words later, when the sun of reason is 'collied,' blackened and blotted out in total eclipse. Lastly, Othello's nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously. If stirred to indignation, as 'in Aleppo once,' he answers

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with one lightning stroke. Love, if he loves, must be to him the heaven where either he must live or bear no life. If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it will swell into a well-nigh incontrollable flood. He will press for immediate conviction or immediate relief. Convinced, he will act with the authority of a judge and the swiftness of a man in mortal pain. Undeceived, he will do like execution on himself.

This character is so noble, Othello's feelings and actions follow so inevitably from it and from the forces brought to bear on it, and his sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs in most readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other hero in Shakespeare. Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust. He put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness in the matter of the marriage. This confidence was misplaced, and we happen to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him: and that opinion was that Iago was before all things 'honest,' his very faults being those of excess in honesty.

As he listens in horror, for a moment at least the past is revealed to him in a new and dreadful light, and the ground seems to sink under his feet. These suggestions nade by Iago are followed by a tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona's rejection of acceptable suitors, and of her strange, and naturally temporary, preference for a black man.

But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed, Othello does not show jealousy. His confidence is shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy (III. iii. 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be traced; but it is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had time to dwell on the idea presented to him, and especially after statements of fact, not mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered, that the passion lays hold of him. No doubt the thought of another man's possessing the woman he loves is intolerable to him.

If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;the feeling,

O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!the feeling,

But there where I have garner'd up my heart,Where either I must live, or bear no life;

He is in an agony so unbearable that he cannot endure the sight of Iago. Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the whole truth, he feels that in that case his life is over and his 'occupation gone' with all its glories. But he has not abandoned hope. The bare possibility that his friend is deliberately deceiving him--though such a deception would be a thing so monstrously wicked that he can hardly conceive it credible--is a kind of hope. He furiously demands proof, ocular proof. And when he is compelled

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to see that he is demanding an impossibility he still demands evidence. He forces it from the unwilling witness, and hears the maddening tale of Cassio's dream The 'madness of revenge' is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never knew. The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the Temptation-scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur remains almost undiminished. Even in the following scene (III. iv.), where he goes to test Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief, and receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. Iago’s insight into Othello's nature taught him that his plan was to deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed. He sees everything blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago, perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio has confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only second to Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters disjointed words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and the world; he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the horror he has just heard, and he falls senseless to the ground. When he recovers it is to watch Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over his shame. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge, contending with motions of infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths of Cassio and his wife. An instinct of justice, rather than any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation; and then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears, the interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with Emilia, and her last song.

But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio (V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the bed-chamber with the words,

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,

is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a boundless sorrow has taken its place.Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt, these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten pity. And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone remain, in the majestic

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dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close. Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his life-long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice, and now in Cyprus-seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in the power of 'love and man's unconquerable mind.'

Romeo, in Romeo and Juliet, does indeed experience a love of such purity and passion that he kills himself when he believes that the object of his love, Juliet, has died. Even Romeo’s relation to love is not so simple. At the beginning of the play, Romeo pines for Rosaline, proclaiming her the paragon of women and despairing at her indifference toward him. Taken together, Romeo’s Rosaline seem rather juvenile. Romeo is a great reader of love poetry, and the portrayal of his love for Rosaline suggests he is trying to re-create the feelings that he has read about. After first kissing Juliet, she tells him “you kiss by th’ book,” meaning that he kisses according to the rules, and implying that while proficient, his kissing lacks originality . In reference to Rosaline, it seems, Romeo loves by the book. Rosaline, of course, slips from Romeo’s mind at first sight of Juliet. But Juliet is no mere replacement. The love she shares with Romeo is far deeper, more authentic and unique than the clichéd puppy love Romeo felt for Rosaline. Romeo’s love matures over the course of the play from the shallow desire to be in love to a profound and intense passion. Juliet’s level-headed observations, such as the one about Romeo’s kissing, seem just the thing to snap Romeo from his superficial idea of love and to inspire him to begin to speak some of the most beautiful and intense love poetry ever written. Shakespeare gives us every reason to question how real Romeo’s new love is, but Romeo goes to extremes to prove the seriousness of his feelings. He secretly marries Juliet, the daughter of his father’s worst enemy; he happily takes abuse from Tybalt; and he would rather die than live without his beloved. Romeo is also an affectionate and devoted friend to his relative Benvolio, Mercutio, and Friar Lawrence.Yet Romeo’s deep capacity for love is merely a part of his larger capacity for intense feeling of all kinds. Love compels him to sneak into the garden of his enemy’s daughter, risking death simply to catch a glimpse of her. Anger compels him to kill his wife’s cousin in a reckless duel to avenge the death of his friend. Despair compels him to suicide upon hearing of Juliet’s death. Such extreme behavior dominates Romeo’s character throughout the play and contributes to the ultimate tragedy that befalls the lovers. Among his friends, especially while bantering with Mercutio, Romeo shows glimpses of his social persona. He is intelligent, quick-witted, fond of verbal jousting (particularly about sex), loyal, and unafraid of danger.

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CHAPTER III

THEMES AND SYMBOLS

Love

Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story in the English literary tradition. Love is naturally the play’s dominant and most important theme. The play focuses on romantic love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between Romeo and Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet, love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all other values, loyalties, and emotions. In the course of the play, the young lovers are driven to defy their entire social world: families (“Deny thy father and refuse thy name,” Juliet asks, “Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, / And I’ll no longer be a Capulet”); friends (Romeo abandons Mercutio and Benvolio after the feast in order to go to Juliet’s garden); and ruler (Romeo returns to Verona for Juliet’s sake after being exiled by the Prince on pain of death in 2.1.76–78).

Love is the overriding theme of the play. Love in Romeo and Juliet is a brutal, powerful emotion that captures individuals and catapults them against their world, and, at times, against themselves. Such is the simplicity, the truth, and the loveliness of Juliet's character, that is not revealed at first in its complexity, its depth, and its variety. There is in it an intensity of passion, a singleness of purpose, an entireness, a completeness of effect, which we feel as a whole; and to attempt to analyze the impression thus conveyed at once to soul and sense, is as if while hanging over a half-blown rose, and revelling in its intoxicating perfume, we should pull it asunder, leaflet by leaflet, the better to display its bloom and fragrance.

All Shakspeare's women, being essentially women, either love or have loved, or are capable of loving, but Juliet is love itself. The passion is her state of being, and out of it she has no existence. It is the soul within her soul; the pulse within her heart; the life-blood along her veins, "blending with every atom of her frame." The love that is so chaste and dignified in Portia — so airy-delicate and fearless in Miranda — so sweetly confiding in Perdita — so playfully fond in Rosalind — so constant in Imogen — so devoted in Desdemona — so fervent in Helen — so tender in Viola — is each and all of these in Juliet.

The passion which has taken possession of Juliet's whole soul has the force, the rapidity, the resistless violence of the torrent; but she is herself as "moving delicate," as fair, as soft, as flexible as the willow that bends over it, whose light leaves tremble even with the motion of the current which hurries beneath them. But at the same time that the pervading sentiment is never lost sight of, and is one and the same throughout, the individual part of the character in all its variety is developed, and marked with the nicest discrimination. The simplicity of Juliet is very different from the simplicity

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of Miranda; her innocence is not the innocence of a desert island. The energy she displays does not once remind us of the moral grandeur of Isabel, or the intellectual power of Portia; it is founded in the strength of passion, not in the strength of character; it is accidental rather than inherent, rising with the tide of feeling or temper, and with it subsiding. Her romance is not the pastoral romance of Perdita, nor the fanciful romance of Viola; it is the romance of a tender heart and a poetical imagination. Her inexperience is not ignorance; she has heard that there is such a thing as falsehood, though she can scarcely conceive it. Her mother and her nurse have perhaps warned her against flattering vows and man's inconstancy. . . .

Our impression of Juliet's loveliness and sensibility is enhanced, when we find it overcoming in the bosom of Romeo a previous love for another. His visionary passion for the cold,inaccessible Rosaline, forms but the prologue, the threshold, to the true, the real feeling which succeeds to it.

In the extreme vivacity of her imagination, and its influence upon the action, the language, the feelings Juliet resembles Portia; but with this striking difference. In Portia, the imaginative power, though developed in a high degree, is so equally blended with the other intellectual and moral faculties, that it does not give us the idea of excess. It is subject to her nobler reason; it adorns and heightens all her feelings; it does not overwhelm or mislead them. In Juliet, it is rather a part of her southern temperament, controlling and modifying the rest of her character; springing from her sensibility, hurried along by her passions, animating her joys, darkening her sorrows, exaggerating her terrors, and, in the end, overpowering her reason. With Juliet, imagination is, in the first instance, if not the source, the medium of passion; and passion again kindles her imagination. It is through the power of imagination that the eloquence of Juliet is so vividly poetical; that every feeling, every sentiment comes to her clothed in the richest imagery, and is thus reflected from her mind to ours. The poetry is not here the mere adornment, the outward garnishing of the character; but its result, or rather blended with its essence. It is indivisible from it, and interfused through it like moonlight through the summer air. To particularize is almost impossible, since the whole of the dialogue appropriated to Juliet is one rich stream of imagery.

The famous soliloquy, "Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds," teems with luxuriant imagery. The fond adjuration, "Come night I come Romeo! come thou day in night!" expresses that fulness of enthusiastic admiration for her lover, which possesses her whole soul; but expresses it as only Juliet could or would have expressed it — in a bold and beautiful metaphor. This beautiful "Hymn to the Night," breathed out by Juliet in the silence and solitude of her chamber. She is thinking aloud; it is the young heart "triumphing to itself in words." In the midst of all the vehemence with which she calls upon the night to bring Romeo to her arms, there is something so almost infantine in her perfect simplicity, so playful and fantastic in the imagery and language, that the charm and innocence is thrown over the whole; and her impatience, to use her own expression, is truly that of "a child before a festival, that hath new robes and may not wear them." It is at the very moment too that her whole heart and fancy are abandoned to blissful anticipation, that the nurse enters with the news of

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Romeo's banishment; and the immediate transition from rapture to despair has a most powerful effect. It is in truth a tale of love and sorrow, not of anguish and terror. Young, innocent, loving and beloved, they descend together into the tomb; but Shakspeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted affection consecrated for the worship of all hearts — not a dark charnel vault, haunted by spectres of pain, rage, and desperation. Romeo and Juliet are pictured lovely in death as in life; the sympathy they inspire does not oppress us with that suffocating sense of horror which in the altered tragedy makes the fall of the curtain a relief; but all pain is lost in the tenderness and poetic beauty of the picture.

Romeo was a gentleman, in heart and soul. All his habitual companions love him: Benvolio and Mercutio, who represent the young gentlemen of his house, are ready to peril their lives, and to strain all their energies, serious or gay, in his service. His father is filled with an anxiety on his account so delicate, that he will not venture to interfere with his son’s private sorrows while he desires to discover their source, and if possible to relieve them. The heart of his mother bursts in his calamity; the head of the rival house bestows upon him the warmest panegyrics; the tutor of his youth sacrifices everything to gratify his wishes; his servant, though no man is a hero to his valet de chambre, dares not remonstrate with him on his intentions, even when they are avowed to be savage-wild,

More fierce, and more inexorable far,Than empty tigers or the roaring sea

but with an eager solicitude he breaks his commands by remaining as close as he can venture, to watch over his safety. Kind he is to all. He wins the heart of the romantic Juliet by his tender gallantry: the worldly-minded nurse praises him for being as gentle as a lamb. At times love is described in the terms of religion, as in the fourteen lines when Romeo and Juliet first meet. At others it is described as a sort of magic: “Alike bewitchèd by the charm of looks” (2.Prologue.6). Juliet, perhaps, most perfectly describes her love for Romeo by refusing to describe it: “But my true love is grown to such excess / I cannot sum up some of half my wealth” (3.1.33–34). Love, in other words, resists any single metaphor because it is too powerful to be so easily contained or understood. Romeo and Juliet does not make a specific moral statement about the relationships between love and society, religion, and family; rather, it portrays the chaos and passion of being in love, combining images of love, violence, death, religion, and family in an impressionistic rush leading to the play’s tragic conclusion.

The Individual Versus Society and Fate

Much of Romeo and Juliet involves the lovers’ struggles against public and social institutions that either explicitly or implicitly oppose the existence of their love. Such structures range from the concrete to the abstract: families and the placement of familial power in the father; law and the desire for

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public order; religion; and the social importance placed on masculine honor.These institutions often come into conflict with each other. The importance of honor, for example, time and again results in brawls that disturb the public peace.Though they do not always work in concert, each of these institutions in some way present obstacles for Romeo and Juliet. The enmity between their families, coupled with the emphasis placed on loyalty and honor to kin, combine to create a profound conflict for Romeo and Juliet, who must rebel against their heritages. Further, the patriarchal power structure inherent in Renaissance families, wherein the father controls the action of all other family members, particularly women, places Juliet in an extremely vulnerable position. Her heart, in her family’s mind, is not hers to give. The law and the emphasis on social civility demands terms of conduct with which the blind passion of love cannot comply. Religion similarly demands priorities that Romeo and Juliet cannot abide by because of the intensity of their love. Though in most situations the lovers uphold the traditions of Christianity (they wait to marry before consummating their love), their love is so powerful that they begin to think of each other in blasphemous terms. For example, Juliet calls Romeo “the god of my idolatry,” elevating Romeo to level of God (2.1.156). The couple’s final act of suicide is likewise un-Christian. The maintenance of masculine honor forces Romeo to commit actions he would prefer to avoid. But the social emphasis placed on masculine honor is so profound that Romeo cannot simply ignore them.

It can see Romeo and Juliet as a battle between the responsibilities and actions demanded by social institutions and those demanded by the private desires of the individual. Romeo and Juliet’s appreciation of night, with its darkness and privacy, and their renunciation of their names, with its attendant loss of obligation, make sense in the context of individuals who wish to escape the public world. But the lovers cannot stop the night from becoming day. And Romeo cannot cease being a Montague simply because he wants to; the rest of the world will not let him. The lovers’ suicides can be understood as the ultimate night, the ultimate privacy.

Fate and fortune are closely related in this play. In the Elizabethan era people strongly believed in superstition, fate, destiny and the wheel of fortune. People believed they had no influence in their life as everything was already planned out. The play is filled with references to fate and fortune. Everything seems to fall in place and this theme appealed to Elizabethans. Events that happen later in the play link back to other events earlier on and it seem evident that Romeo and Juliet's lives are ruled by the wheel of fortune.

Romeo is a young son of the Montague's. He is dramatic and constantly in love. Juliet is the daughter of the Capulet's, the rival family of the Montague's. She is quite naïve and has always obeyed her parents wishes, until she meets Romeo. They meet by chance, fall in love and begin a

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relationship plagued with tragedy. They marry in secret but soon after Romeo is banished for killing Juliet's cousin, Tybalt and Juliet is betrothed to Paris, a family friend. However Juliet posses a potion that makes her appear dead and sends a message to Romeo telling him to be at the tomb when she wakes. However Romeo never receives the message and believes she is dead. He then kills himself so they can be reunited in death. Then Juliet awakens and realising what has happened, kills herself. Their relationship that starts in haste finishes just as fast. The two families, Capulet's and Montague's, are then re united in their grief.

Throughout the play Romeo is dramatic and constantly predicts his own death. In Act 5 before going to the Capulet's ball he predicts that his death will be soon, 'Of a despised life clos'd in my breast, by some vile forfeit of untimely death.' He is predicting that he will die before his time, which he eventually does. It's strange that a young, carefree man should be concerned about death.The reason that Romeo is attending the Capulet's ball is entirely down to fate. Entirely by chance, a servant of the Capulet's had asked him to read an invitation list for a Capulet ball (the servant could not read himself), 'But I pray, can you read any thing you see. ' He meets Juliet there and falls in love with her.

When Juliet is talking to her nurse after meeting Romeo she is desperate and dramatic. She has barley known Romeo but yet she is desperately in love with him, 'If he be married my grave be my wedding bed.' She means that she will die if she can not marry him which is a ironic anticipation of events to come. She continues to talk about how her love will kill him, 'Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing.' Romeo and Juliet constantly see omens. When Romeo believes that Juliet is dead, he cries out, “Then I defy you, stars,” completing the idea that the love between Romeo and Juliet is in opposition to the decrees of destiny (5.1.24). Of course, Romeo’s defiance itself plays into the hands of fate, and his determination to spend eternity with Juliet results in their deaths. The mechanism of fate works in all of the events surrounding the lovers: the feud between their families (it is worth noting that this hatred is never explained; rather, the reader must accept it as an undeniable aspect of the world of the play); the horrible series of accidents that ruin Friar Lawrence’s seemingly well-intentioned plans at the end of the play; and the tragic timing of Romeo’s suicide and Juliet’s awakening. These events are not mere coincidences, but rather manifestations of fate that help bring about the unavoidable outcome of the young lovers’ deaths.

Revenge, Mortality and Madness

Hamlet gears up to be a traditional bloody revenge play. The plot of the play deals not with Hamlet's ultimately successful vengeance on his father's murderer, but with Hamlet's inner struggle to take action. The play concludes with a bloodbath that's typical of revenge tragedy. Hamlet is also

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notable for the way it weaves together three revenge plots, all of which involve sons seeking vengeance for their fathers' murders. Ultimately, the play calls into question the validity and usefulness of revenge. Hamlet's quotation on suicide, especially the "to be or not to be"continue to direct discussions of the value of life and the mystery of death. But Hamlet himself never commits suicide. It is Ophelia, who never mentions the possibility of taking her own life, who drowns, seemingly as a result of some combination of madness and despair. Death threads its way through the entirety of Hamlet, from the opening scene's confrontation with a dead man's ghost to the bloodbath of the final scene, which leaves almost every main character dead. Hamlet constantly contemplates death from many angles. He is both seduced and repelled by the idea of suicide, but, in the famous gravedigger scene, he is also fascinated by the physical reality of death. In a way, Hamlet can be viewed as extended dialogue between Hamlet and death.

Madness – both real and feigned – is at the heart of the play. The complexity and sheer ambiguity of Hamlet's mental state and erratic behavior is compelling and seems to speak to the play's overall atmosphere of uncertainty and doubt. Ophelia's clear descent into madness (and subsequent drowning) is somewhat of a different issue. Ophelia seemingly cracks under the strain of Hamlet's abuse and the weight of patriarchal forces, which has important implications for the play's portrayal of "Gender" and "Sex."

Deceit and Gender

Hamlet, more than almost any character in literature, hates deception and craves honesty. It is one of the brilliant ironies of the play that Hamlet, an absolutist in his quest for truth, is trapped in a seamy political world where deception is a necessary part of life and political "spin" rules the day. This contrast, fascinating to the audience, is a torment to Hamlet. Deception is necessary for and used by every character in Hamlet, for every purpose ranging from love to parenting to regicide.Frailty, thy name is woman," so says Hamlet in his first scene (1.2.6). Hamlet's attitude toward women is notoriously sexist and stems from his disgust at his mother's sexuality and seeming unfaithfulness to his dead father. This outlook eventually include all women, especially the helpless Ophelia, who has virtually no power or control, even over her own body. To some extent, the play also considers notions of masculinity (or lack thereof). Claudius warns Hamlet that his grief is "unmanly" and Hamlet notoriously refers to himself as a promiscuous woman when he finds himself unable to avenge his father's death, which, again, circles back to Hamlet's association between women and deception. Hamlet's mother's final guilt is left ambiguous, and his lover ultimately inspires pity. Hamlet's attitude toward women reveals something about him more than it reveals women's true nature.

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Appearance versus Reality

Throughout the play, there is a blurred distinction between how things appear, and how they actually are. As the ghost warns Hamlet, a man may “smile and smile, and be a villain” (I.v.108). Consider the following: how the play begins with an illusion, the apparition of the ghost and characters wondering whether the appearance of the dead King is “real,” how Hamlet only pretends to be mad, to put on an “antic disposition,” (though he appears insane to others, the lucidity of his “aside” comments to the audience illustrate that his “madness” is only an illusion), the device of the play-within-the-play and how Hamlet tests out the dilemma of whether or not the ghost is telling the truth through this imitation of reality, how clothes reveal the surface world of illusion: as Polonius says, “the apparel oft proclaims the man” (I.iii.72), and how they reveal the discrepancy between inner and outer lives.  Part of Hamlet’s problem, as he sees it, is that his mother, recently in widow’s black dress, marries his uncle such a short time afterwards: her mourning clothes were just an appearance, Hamlet thinks, and not really how she was feeling. Hamlet’s own clothes, his “inky cloak,” function as a dramatic metaphor for his grief for his dead father, his melancholic character, and his literal and figurative presence as death, (as a reminder of a past death and an embodiment of a future death, since he must murder Claudius to get revenge.

Jealousy and Race

Othello is the most famous literary work that focuses on the dangers of jealousy. The play is a study of how jealousy can be fueled by mere circumstantial evidence and can destroy lives. In Othello, the hero succumbs to jealousy when Iago convinces him that Desdemona has been an unfaithful wife – in the end, Othello murders his wife and then kills himself. It is interesting that Iago uses jealousy against Othello, yet jealousy is likely the source of Iago's hatred in the first place. In Othello, jealousy takes many forms, from sexual suspicion to professional competition, but it is, in all cases, destructive. Othello is one of the first black heroes in English literature. A military general, he has risen to a position of power and influence. At the same time, however, his status as a black-skinned foreigner in Venice marks him as an outside and exposes him to some pretty overt racism, especially by his wife's father, who believes his daughter's interracial marriage can only be the result of Othello's trickery. It's nearly impossible to talk about race in Othello without also discussing gender and sexuality.

Hate and Marriage

Hatred is supposed to have a cause, some concrete event or insult that inspires a lasting rage. But in Othello, the play's villain is motivated by a hatred that seems to elude any reasonable definition. Iago's hatred and his determination to destroy his boss, Othello,seems out of proportion with the reasons he gives for it: anger that Othello did not promote him or jealousy

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that Othello might have slept with Iago's wife. Iago's loathing has been famously called a "motiveless malignancy" that redefines our understanding of hatred, making it seem a self-propelling passion rather than the consequence of any particular action.Shakespeare's portrayal of marriage is pretty bleak in Othello. The play begins with a conflict between Desdemona's husband and her father, who sees his daughter's elopement as a kind of theft of his personal property. The play's two wives (Desdemona and Emilia) are both unfairly accused of infidelity, and both wives are murdered by their abusive husband.It is interesting the way in which Shakespeare examines sixteenth-century anxieties about interracial couplings- in Othello, the marriage of a black man and a white woman allows Shakespeare to explore attitudes about race and gender.

Manipulation and Warfare

Othello's villain, Iago, may be literature's most impressive master of deception. Iago plots with sophistication, carefully manipulating Othello (without any real proof) into believing that Desdemona has been unfaithful. His understanding of the human psyche is phenomenal, as is his ability to orchestrate a complicated interweaving of pre-planned scenarios. Iago's deception is potent because of his patience, his cleverness, and what seems to be his intrinsic love of elegant manipulation. Since the play's protagonist is a military general, war is always hovering in the background in Othello. But the only actual battle the play promises is avoided, thanks to bad weather. The real battleground of the play, it turns out, is the mind. Othello can be read as an extended war allegory; it is possible to see Iago's machinations as the strategic planning of a general,individual victories as minor battles, and the three resulting deaths the casualties of psychological combat. The play also dwells on the relationship between masculine identity, war, and sexuality.

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CHAPTER IV

SHAKESPEAREAN LANGUAGE

Shakespeare is considered to be a genius. He wrote 37 plays in approximately 21 years and is believed to have coined over 1,000 words, many of which are still in use today. Shakespeare wrote in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter (each line equals five iambs). One iamb is called a foot. Each foot contains one unstressed and one stressed syllable.In order to maintain his meter, Shakespeare sometimes altered standard English .The real greatness of Shakespeare rests on the specificity and suggestiveness of the words in which they are written. It is through language that the plays’ full dramatic power is realized, and it is that rich and robust language, often pushed by Shakespeare to the very limits of intelligibility. Shakespeare sometimes uses words no longer current in English or with meanings that have changed. He regularly multiplies words where seemingly one might do as well . He characteristically writes sentences that are syntactically complicated and imaginatively dense; words are vivid and immediate, as well as complexly layered and psychologically suggestive. The difficulties they pose are not the “thee’s” and “thou’s” or “prithee’s” and “doth’s” that obviously mark the chronological distance between Shakespeare and us. When Gertrude says to Hamlet, “thou hast thy father much offended” (3.4.8), we have no difficulty understanding her chiding, though we might miss that her use of the “thou” form of the pronoun expresses an intimacy that Hamlet pointedly refuses with his reply: “Mother, you have my father much offended” (3.4.9; italics mine). There are many words that can mislead the readers: “his” sometimes means “its,” “an” often means “if,” “envy” means something more like “malice,” “cousin” means more generally “kinsman,” and there are others, though all are easily defined. When Macbeth wonders whether all the water in all the oceans of the world will be able to clean his bloody hands after the murder of Duncan, he concludes:“No; this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red” (2.2.64–66).Duncan’s blood staining Macbeth’s murderous hand is so offensive that, not merely does it resist being washed off in water, but it will “the multitudinous seas incarnadine”: that is, turn the sea-green oceans blood-red. Both are new words, coined from the Latin, part of a process in Shakespeare’s time where English adopted many Latinate words as a mark of its own emergence as an important vernacular language. Here they are used to express the magnitude of Macbeth’s offense, a crime not only against the civil law but also against the cosmic order, and then the simple monosyllables of turning “the green one red” provide an immediate (and needed) paraphrase and register his own, sickening awareness of the true hideousness of his deed. As with “multitudinous” in Macbeth, Shakespeare is the source of a great many words in English. Sometimes he coined them himself, or, if he didn’t invent them, he was the first person whose writing

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of them has survived. Some of these words have become part of our every day language so: for example, “assassination” (Macbeth, 1.7.2), “bedroom” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.2.51), “countless” (Titus Andronicus, 5.3.59), “fashionable” (Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.165), “frugal” (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.1.28), “laughable” (The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.56), “lonely” (Coriolanus, 4.1.30), and “useful” (King John, 5.2.81). But other words that he originated were not as, to use yet another Shakespearean coinage, “successful” (Titus Andronicus, 1.1.66). Clearly Shakespeare liked words. His working vocabulary, about 18,000 words, is staggering, larger than almost any other English writer, and he seems to be the first person to use in print about 1,000 of these. Whether he coined the new words himself or was intrigued by the new words he heard in the streets of London doesn’t really matter; the point is that he was remarkably alert to and engaged with a dynamic language that was expanding in response to England’s own expanding contact with the world around it. But it is neither new words nor old ones that are the source of the greatest difficulty of Shakespeare’s language; Shakespeare endows them with more than their denotative meanings. Macbeth say that he hopes that the “sure and firm-set earth” (2.1.56) will not hear his steps as he goes forward to murder Duncan? Here “sure” and “firm-set” mean virtually the same thing: stable, secure, fixed.Redundancy is exactly what Shakespeare wants. One word would do if the purpose were to describe the solidity of the earth, but here the redundancy points to something different. It reveals something about Macbeth’s mind, betraying through the doubling how deep is his awareness of the world of stable values that the terrible act he is about to commit must unsettle.

Shakespeare’s words usually work like this : in part describing what the characters see and as often betraying what they feel. Shakespeare’s words are carefully patterned. The conspicuous patterns that are created alert us to the fact that something more than the words’ lexical sense has been put into play. Words can be coupled or knit into even denser metaphorical constellations to reveal something about the speaker (which often the speaker does not know), as in Prince Hal’s promise to his father that he will outdo the rebels’ hero, Henry Percy (Hotspur):

Percy is but my factor, good my lord, To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf,

And I will call him to so strict account That he shall render every glory up,

Yea, even the slightest worship of his time, Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

(Henry IV, Part One, 3.2.147–152)

The Prince expresses his confidence that he will defeat Hotspur, but revealingly in a reiterated language of commercial exchange (“factor,” “engross,” “account,” “render,” “reckoning”) that tells us something

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important both about the Prince and the ways in which he understands his world. In a play filled with references to coins and counterfeiting, the speech demonstrates not only that Hal has committed himself to the business at hand, repudiating his earlier, irresponsible tavern self, but also that he knows it is a business rather than a glorious world of chivalric achievement; he inhabits a world in which value (political as well as economic) is determined by what people are willing to invest, and he proves himself a master of producing desire for what he has to offer. Or sometimes it is not the network of imagery but the syntax that speaks, as when Claudius announces his marriage to Hamlet’s mother:

Therefore our sometime sister, now our Queen, Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we—as ’twere with a defeated joy, With an auspicious and a dropping eye,

With mirth in funeral and with dole in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole—

Taken to wife. (Hamlet, 1.2.8–14)

This straightforward sentence gets interrupted and complicated, revealing his own discomfort with the announcement. His elaborations and intensifications of Gertrude’s role (“sometime sister,” “Queen,” “imperial jointress”), the self-conscious rhetorical balancing of the middle three lines, all declare by the all-too obvious artifice how desperate he is to hide the awkward facts behind a veneer of normality and propriety. The unnaturalness of the sentence is what alerts us that we are meant to understand more than the simple relation of fact. Always Shakespeare’s words will offer us an immediate sense of what is happening, allowing us to follow the action, but they also offer us a counterplot, pointing us to what might be behind the action, confirming or contradicting what the characters say. It is a language that shimmers with promise and possibility, opening the characters’ hearts and minds to our view—and all we have to do is learn to pay attention to what is there before us. Another distinctive feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic language is that much of it is in verse. Almost all of the plays mix poetry and prose, but the poetry dominates. The Merry Wives of Windsor has the lowest percentage (only about 13 percent verse), while Richard II and King John are written entirely in verse (the only examples, although Henry VI, Part One and Part Three have only a very few prose lines). In most of the plays, about seventy percent of the lines are written in verse.Shakespeare’s characteristic verse line is a non-rhyming iambic pentameter (“blank verse”), ten syllables with every second one stressed. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania comes to her senses after a magic potion has led her to fall in love with an ass-headed Bottom: “Methought I was enamored of an ass” (4.1.77). Similarly, in Romeo and Juliet, Romeo gazes up at Juliet’s window: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks” (2.2.2). In both these examples, the line has ten syllables organized into five regular beats (each beat consisting of the stress on the second

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syllable of a pair, as in “But soft,” the da-dum rhythm forming an “iamb”). Still, we don’t hear these lines as jingles; they seem natural enough, in large part because this dominant pattern is varied in the surrounding lines. The play of stresses indeed becomes another key to meaning, as Shakespeare alerts us to what is important. In Measure for Measure, Lucio urges Isabella to plead for her brother’s life: “Oh, to him, to him, wench! He will relent” (2.2.129). The iambic norm (unstressedstressed) tells us (and an actor) that the emphasis at the beginning of the line is on “to” not “him”-it is the action not the object that is being emphasized—and at the end of the line the stress falls on “will.” Alternatively, the line can play against the established norm. In Hamlet, Claudius corrects Polonius’s idea of what is bothering the Prince: “Love? His affections do not that way tend” (3.1.161). The iambic norm forces the emphasis onto “that” (“do not that way tend”), while the syntax forces an unexpected stress on the opening word, “Love.” In the famous line, “The course of true love never did run smooth” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.134), the iambic expectation is varied in both the middle and at the end of the line. Both “love” and the first syllable of “never” are stressed, as are both syllables at the end: “run smooth,” creating a metrical foot in which both syllables are stressed (called a “spondee”). Shakespeare sometimes writes lines with fewer or more syllables. Often there is an extra, unstressed syllable at the end of a line (a so-called “feminine ending”); sometimes there are verse lines with only nine. In Henry IV, Part One, King Henry replies incredulously to the rebel Worcester’s claim that he hadn’t “sought” the confrontation with the King: “You have not sought it? How comes it then?” (5.1.27). There are only nine syllables here (some earlier editors, seeking to “correct” the verse, added the word “sir” after the first question to regularize the line). But the pause where one expects a stressed syllable is dramatically effective, allowing the King’s anger to be powerfully present in the silence.

Shakespeare’s verse is unusually flexible, allowing a range of rhythmical effects. It should not be understood as a set of strict rules but as a flexible set of practices rooted in dramatic necessity. It is designed to highlight ideas and emotions, and it is based less upon rigid syllable counts than on an arrangement of stresses within an understood temporal norm, as one might expect from a poetry written to be heard in the theater rather than read on the page. Although the plays are dominated by verse, prose plays a significant role. Shakespeare’s prose has its own rhythms, but it lacks the formal patterning of verse, and so is printed without line breaks and without the capitals that mark the beginning of a verse line. Like many of his fellow dramatists, Shakespeare tended to use prose for comic scenes, the shift from verse serving, especially in his early plays, as a social marker. Upper-class characters speak in verse; lower-class characters speak in prose. Thus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Athenians of the court, as well as the fairies, all speak in verse, but the “rude mechanicals,” Bottom and his artisan friends, all speak in prose, except for the comic verse they speak in their performance of “Pyramis and Thisbe.” In time Shakespeare became more flexible about the shifts from verse to prose, letting it, among other things, mark genre rather than class and measure various kinds of intensity. Prose becomes in the main the medium of comedy. The great comedies, like Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It, are all more than fifty percent prose. But even in

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comedy, shifts between verse and prose may be used to measure subtle emotional changes. In Act One, scene three of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock and Bassanio begin the scene speaking of matters of business in prose, but when Antonio enters and the deep conflict between the Christian and the Jew becomes evident, the scene shifts to verse. But prose may itself serve in moments of emotional intensity. Shylock’s famous speech in Act Three, scene one, “Hath not a Jew eyes . . .” is all in prose, as is Hamlet’s expression of disgust at the world (“I have of late— but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth . . .”) at 3.1.261–276. Shakespeare comes to use prose to vary the tone of a scene, as the shift from verse subtly alerts an audience or a reader to some new emotional register. Shakespeare’s prose is no less self-conscious than his verse. The artfulness of his prose is different, of course. The seeming ordinariness of his prose is no less an effect of his artistry than is the more obvious patterning of his verse. Prose is no less serious, compressed, or indeed figurative. As with his verse, Shakespeare’s prose performs numerous tasks and displays various, subtle formal qualities; and recognizing the possibilities of what it can achieve is still another way of seeing what Shakespeare puts right before us to show us what he has hidde

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CONCLUSIONS

Shakespeare’s ability to summarize the range of human emotions in simple yet profoundly eloquent verse is perhaps the greatest reason for his enduring popularity. If you cannot find words to express how you feel about love or music or growing older, Shakespeare can speak for you. No author in the Western world has written more beloved passages. His characters and stories reveal universal truths about the human condition in a way we can all relate to; whether it is the tragic outcome of unchecked greed and ambition, an unrelenting desire for revenge, or the pursuit of love. His representation of human nature is just as real and as relevant today, as it has been through the centuries. The plot, characters and themes of his plays are cleverly and captivatingly weaved together, resulting in a tale that could be tragic, comedic, dramatic, passionate, thought-provoking – or perhaps encompassing all of these (Romeo & Juliet, In his own time, Shakespeare had to make his plays appeal to both the upper and lower classes. He accomplished this through his use of more "dirty" humor and puns on words to appeal to the lower class, and he appealed to the upper class through the carefully structured plots and the themes he used. The theater Shakespeare's plays were mainly performed in had a seat for anyone who could pay for it, the more one paid, the better the seat. Since Shakespeare's audience consisted of persons from every social class in London at the time, so he had to make his work appeal to anyone and everyone who came to see it. For such a prolific writer, it is truly amazing that Shakespeare continually produced both poetry and prose of such a high standard! Though the language itself may seem a little daunting at first glance, so you can fully appreciate and indeed marvel at their potency. In his work one can fiind hidden gems of caustic wit “What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?” (Much Ado About Nothing), villainous deceit “Though I do hate him as I do hell’s pains, yet for necessity of present life, I must show out a flag and sign of love” (Othello), and impassioned declarations of love “ My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep. The more I give thee, the more I have, for both are infinite” (Romeo & Juliet). It is genuinely memorable, moving and mesmerizing.Shakespeare knew how to craft a good story – and his collection of plays covered a wide range of themes- war, religious conflict, racial prejudice, class division, love, death, betrayal.William Shakespeare's legacy is a body of work that will never again be equaled in Western civilization. His words have endured for 400 years, and still reach across the centuries as powerfully as ever. Even in death, he leaves a final piece of verse as his epitaph:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeareTo dig the dust enclosed here.

Blessed be the man that spares these stones,And cursed be he that moves my bones.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books:

1. Crawford, Alexander, W., Shakespeare, William, Boston, R.G. Badger

2. Denton Jaques Snider, System of Shakespeare's Dramas (Paperback) Nabu Press, 2010

3. Evans, Gareth; Evans, Barbara Lloyd, Charles Scribner's Sons, The Shakespeare Companion, New York , 1978

4. E. K, A Survey,Chambers, Penguin Books, London, 1964

5. Rogers, Pat The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature,Oxford University Press, 1994, New York

6. Sarbulescu,Emil,The Elements of Drama, edit. MJM,Craiova,2000

7. Young, David, The Action to the Word: Structure and Style in Shakespearean Tragedy, YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS,LONDON,1990

8. Wayne,Valerie, The Matter of Difference: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, New York,University press, 1991

Sites:

www.bardweb.netwww.absoluteshakespeare.comwww.shakespeare-online.comwww.sparknotes.comwww.online-literature.comWWW.blog.study2u.com

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blog.study2u.com

Crawford, Alexander W., 1866-1933

BIBLIOGRAPHY :

Crawford, Alexander W., 1866-1933Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616Publisher: Boston, R.G. BadgerLanguage: EnglishCall number: ALR-3524Digitizing sponsor: University of Toronto

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Book contributor: Mississauga - University of TorontoCollection: utmississauga; toronto

System of Shakespeare's Dramas (Paperback)By: Denton Jaques Snider Author, edit. Nabu Press, 2010

The Action to the Word: Structure and Style in Shakespearean Tragedy ,Young, David,YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS,LONDON,1990

The Shakespeare Companion, Evans, Gareth; Evans, Barbara Lloyd, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York , 1978

Shakespeare: A Survey,Chambers, E. K, Penguin Books, London, 1964

www.bardweb.net

absoluteshakespeare.com

www.shakespeare-online.com

www.sparknotes.com

www.online-literature.com

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