On Not Being Reconciled to Bertram:Alls Well That Ends Well and the Conventions of Renaissance Comedy

All's" Well That Ends Well is a "problem play". It is said to contain a much greater concern with social and moral issues than most of Shakespeare's earlier and less "serious" comedies. Yet criticism is exercised by certain peculiarities of characterization and presentation which are so contrary to its elevated atmosphere. Consequently, the play's difficulty has often been stressed; it is frequently regarded as a fascinating failure, an essay in the treatment of pressing moral and sexual problems which had, somehow, gone wrong through Shakespeare's ill-advised attempt to pour this potent stuff into the old bottle of comedy

The Promised End: Some Last Words on 'King Lear'

I find it curiously appropriate that my last academic or scholarly public lecture l should be concerned with King Lear, because more than thirty years ago my career as a literary critic began with an essay on the play published in a literary journal which has long since vanished from the face of the earth. In preparing for what is in effect a valedictory lecture on Shakespeare - for after leaving the university in July I intend to devote my time to writing and to literary journalism - I found a copy of that ancient periodical and read an essay which I had long ago forgotten yet an essay that proved curiously and embarrassingly familiar. My main reaction to it was largely one of embarrassment. The essay was very much the work of a young man: ambitious, full of self-importance and more than a little impressed with himself. In four or five thousand words I set the world right on King Lear, sweeping aside the scholarship and criticism of the past to offer my own, unique and indisputably correct version of Shakespeare's tragedy. Nowadays I am not so convinced of the inevitable rightness of my literary opinions - or perhaps I have evolved a critical style that seems less arrogant, more modest. I would no longer presume to give a definitive reading of a mysterious and self-renewing work of art in fifty thousand let alone five thousand words

An Annotated Copy of 'The Faerie Queene' (II.ix.22)

A footnote to the recent scholarly interest in the so-called "arithmological stanza" in Book II of Spenser's poem is provided by an annotated copy of the 1596 edition (that is, the first edition to contain all six books) in the library of Lincoln Minster. The text of the first volume is lightly annotated mainly by way of correcting misprints and by the underlining of certain passages. No clear purpose to this latter class of annotations may be discerned except, perhaps, an interest in sensuous, mildly erotic verse

Troubled Speech: The Representation of Madness in Renaissance Drama

Shakespeare's world believed that grief could send you mad. Its plays are filled, accordingly, with startling images of distraction. Men and women, young and old, rave, rant, and suffer, revile God, gods or the fates, at times in stately verse, at others in febrile prose. Mad-scenes became a staple item in the list of delights tragedies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offered for•their audiences. Some of the lesser, perhaps more risible tragedies of the time, such as James Shirley's The Maid's Revenge (1625/6), seem to have been designed largely to allow their central characters as many opportunities to display distraction as possible. In what is perhaps the last undisputed masterpiece of Renaissance drama, Ford's The Broken Heart (c.1630), the heroine goes mad with quiet dignity. But that was at the end of an era, a time when refinement was perhaps the only quality left to exploit in a drama which had exhausted most of its possibilities in the previous three quarters of a century. In earlier, more lively plays madness was nowhere near so reticent: it sparkled and blazed, roared and groaned. Observing the different ways in which dramatists presented their images of distraction, at different times within the tradition of drama that arose in the 1570s and came to an abrupt end in 1642, provides one perspective on the changing principles of mimesis that were brought to bear on it. Madness, because it is so vivid, and because it is at the same time an intensely personal experience and one beyond the individual's control, inevitably raises questions about how societies regard the representation of emotions and actions within the dramatic illusion. The great madscenes of Shakespeare's age provide, indeed, a topography of that large and difficult topic

Deception in 'The Winter's Tale'

Deception is the keystone of The Winter's Tale. 1 Paulina's sixteen-year torment or testing of the contrite Leontes gives shape and purpose to the play's diffuse and wayward progress. Far from being an afterthought, as many have suspected, Hermione's return in the last scene provides the necessary and inevitable conclusion to the many narrative strands brought together in this improbable tale. No other ending would satisfy, nothing else could achieve the unique effect of The Winter's Tale: the play reveals itself to be a unified artistic whole, despite its prolixity, despite the apparent lack of a central narrative thread, despite the patent absurdity of its sensational finale. Hermione's 'resurrection' fulfils more than the promise of the oracle: Hermione is chaste; Polixenes is blameless; Camillo a true subject; Leontes a jealous tyrant; his innocent babe truly begotten; and the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found. (III. ii. 132-6) It also fulfils the formal, emotional and perhaps even philosophical implications of this complex and disconcerting play

Wine Women and Song: 'Anthony and Cleopatra' Revisited

Almost a quarter of a century ago I published a short book entitled A Reading o fShakespeare's 'Antony and Cleopatra'. It was very much a product of its time, engaged with questions that would seem entirely irrelevant to the changed priorities of the 1990s. Its emphasis was intentionalist: that is to say, it assumed that the play was an intricate network of theatrical, rlletorical and conceptual strategies executed and transmitted by William Shakespeare, the dramatist, the creator of the theatrical illusion, despite the inevitable likelihood that the text had been imperfectly transmitted, as well as the possibility-obvious to anyone writing in a post-Freudian cultural context-that Shakespeare himself had but scant recognition of the motives behind his writing much of what he wrote. The book's bias was ethical: it assumed that the play concerned itself with the question of conduct, that its interest was engaged by an attempt to make discriminations among its various characters, and that it assumed that human actions must be judged according to one or another moral criterion---even though the subtlety and complexity of the dramatist rejected easy or conventional formulations. And lastly the book assumed that the play engaged with these issues in terms of the literary, philosophical, moral and sexual preoccupations ofthe early seventeenth century. Since that time, there have been a number of developments

"A World of Figures:" Language and Character in 'Henry IV Part I'

In Dr Johnson's opinion, the dialogue of Shakespeare's plays exhibits "so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction." The legend of Shakespeare's "naturalness" has persisted so strongly since Johnson's time that it may seem impertinent even now to enquire into the means by which this illusion of spontaneity in speech and lifelikeness in character is sustained. But a Shakespeare play is a carefully fashioned linguistic structure, and Henry IV Part I, with all its abundant life, remains a "fiction" in which the semblance of "ease and simplicity" owes as much to "art" as to "nature.

A Pattern for Love - The Structure of Donne's 'The Canonization'

The witty brilliance of "The Canonization" has ensured it a place among the most widely admired of Donne's Songs and Sonets. It seems to illustrate supremely well the modern belief that the best poetry of the Renaissance engages "in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling". But, as Rosemond Tuve warned many years ago, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would not have found quite so admirable poetry which describes "single moments of consciousness, single mental experiences seized and carefully represented for their own interestingness, inducing extremely delicate and precise recording of sensuous impressions involved in the experience". Such criteria, we are now beginning to realize, would have aroused suspicions of intellectual incoherence in Donne's lifetime

Some Shakespearean Boxes ('Troilus and Cressida' V. i. 15-6)

Although the Quarto version of Troilus and Cressida is preferred by most editors as copy-text for the play, they depart from it at V. i. 15-6 in favour of the Folio. Thersites addresses Patroclus thus in the Quarto: "Prithee be silent box I profit not by thy talke, Thou art said to be Achilles male varlot". The Folio substitutes "boy" for "box". and editors accept this on the grounds that x and y were easily confused in secretary hand. Nevertheless, it can be argued that "box" is the correct reading, as several contemporary analogies make clear

The Poetry of Religious Paradox - T.S. Eliot and the Metaphysicals

It is well known that Eliot was deeply impressed by the poetry and by the dramatic verse of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; it is also well known that he came to experience a growing allegiance to the doctrines and rituals of the Church of England, an institution which flowered at the time when those much admired poets were producing their best work. It is reasonable, therefore, that Eliot's verse should demonstrate signs of both influences, the literary and the spiritual, the cultural and the religious, to such an extent, indeed, that it is frequently impossible to determine whether a particular poem or passage relies on the works of those poets or on the rituals and teachings of religion. In all probability, the best of Eliot's overtly or implicitly religious verse relies on both, and fuses their elements into an independent, individual and harmonious whole. That the fourth section of "Little Gidding" recalls the poetry of Herbert and Vaughan may be less important than its clear dedication to the doctrinal stand of High Anglicanism: Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove That intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire. Occasionally, nevertheless, we come upon certain poems which represent something other than the rich fusion of cultural and ecclesiastical traditions. In those poems, and there are not many in the canon, we may discern imitations (in the respectable sense of that term) of the old masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One such poem is "The Journey of the Magi", not one of Eliot's best, perhaps, but notable because it allows us to glimpse the manner in which he employed the models provided by Donne and Herbert, to whom, in different ways, this poem might have been dedicated