William Butler Yeats is indeed one of the finest poets in the English language. Rightly, his works are cited and praised again and again. He has a splendid knack of coining resonantly memorable aphorisms; and repeatedly the reader relishes his defiant rhetoric, his lapidary definitions, and his fine ability to render concepts in images and to interweave the abstract and the concrete, the sensuously rich and the conceptually challenging.

Nevertheless, even when he is producing his very best poetry, there are times when the reader should pause and say, ‘Wait a moment: this is not true. You may believe this, Yeats, but you are wrong.’ It is hard to do this. So often, the splendour of the great poem is so dazzling that we slither over the problematic passage, perhaps offering a gloss that simplifies or makes congenial what is actually uncongenial and rebarbative.

One of his most glorious successes is ‘Among School Children’. It is splendid and memorable, with cunning and subtle linkages between its parts, and mastery of euphony in its use of alliteration, rhyme and assonance. But, after many classes in which I have discussed the poem with students, I remain convinced that the penultimate stanza, stanza VII, is simply wrong, and there’s no way around it. Commentators have done their best to rescue it, but I submit that their glosses are attempts to hide what is at fault here. Furthermore, I believe that other major poems of Yeats are similarly flawed.

What prompted ‘Among School Children’ is well known, In 1926, the 60-year-old W. B. Yeats was a Senator in the parliament of the Irish Free State, and one day in February he inspected a school run by nuns of the Order of Mercy, St Otteran’s School in Waterford. The subsequent poem deals with education, love, the progress from infancy to old age, and the ideal state of being. (I assume that you have a text at hand. You can find ‘Among School Children’ on pp. 183-5 of the Wordsworth volume, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.)

I’ll concisely paraphrase the poem; then, when we reach that problematic stanza, I’ll pause to see what an eminent commentator says; and then I’ll offer my own comments on it. See which you agree with.

Stanza I tells how the ‘sixty-year-old smiling public man’, guided by a ‘kind old nun’, walks through the school where the children are assiduously studying and sewing, ‘neat in everything / In the best modern way’. Stanza II says that the poet imagines ‘a Ledaean body’ who told him of times in her childhood when some reproof or trivial event made the day seem tragic; and his sympathy with her seemed to blend their two natures together so that they resembled one sphere or the yolk and white of one egg. We know from numerous poems by Yeats that the ‘Ledaean body’ is that of Maud Gonne, the beautiful Irish nationalist whom Yeats loved: he repeatedly proposed marriage to her and was repeatedly rejected. Why ‘Ledaean’? Because in one version of the ancient Greek legend, Leda, ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan, produced two eggs, from one of which the beautiful Helen of Troy was born. Yeats associates Maud with Helen not only because she was beautiful but also because, as a militant nationalist, she was dangerous. (Helen, in Yeats’s view, caused the destruction of Troy, by eloping with the Trojan prince Paris, which brought the vengeful Greeks in pursuit.)

Prompted by the children around him, the poet imagines Maud as a child, then as she is now, old and ‘hollow of cheek’. (Stanzas III and IV.) As for himself, though he was once quite handsome, he must now behave as a smiling ‘comfortable old scarecrow’. Would any young mother, he reflects (in stanza V), think her son ample compensation for the pain of birth or the worries of his infancy if she could see him as sixty or more years old?

In stanza VI, he muses that the philosopher Aristotle was once in a position to thrash ‘a king of kings’, for he was tutor to Alexander the Great; and the poet recalls the philosophical ideas of Plato and Pythagoras – but these, he says, are merely specious: ‘old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird’: the trappings of a scarecrow. (Already the poet’s assertions may prompt in us the stirrings of dissent.)

Then comes stanza VII:

Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candle lights are not as those

That animate a mother’s reveries,

But keep a marble or a bronze repose,

And yet they too break hearts – O Presences

That passion, piety or affection knows,

And that all heavenly glory symbolise –

O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise […]

Let’s see how the eminent scholar and critic, Richard Ellmann, glosses this stanza. In his acclaimed study, The Identity of Yeats (London: Faber & Faber, 1964, p. 229), Ellmann renders it thus:

Yet there is one escape from mortality: when our eyes are blinded by affection, passion, or piety, like those of a mother, of a lover, or of a nun, we see images which are independent of life or fact. Such images… are changeless, and heaven can be nothing else but the state to which they seem to allude. Because they do not depend upon observation, and in fact flout the evidence of the senses to which decay and mortality are real, they are ‘self-born’… In such images at such moments, time and appearance are destroyed. Nevertheless, there is grief at the moment of triumph.

I submit that Richard Ellmann is fluently smoothing over, and attempting to justify, what actually is provocative and wrong.

The poet tells us that nuns and mothers worship images. Do they? A nun who worshipped an image would be an idolator, for nuns know that they should worship not an image but the transcendent entity (God, Jesus or Mary, for example) evoked by the image. A mother may well have in mind an idealised notion of what her child may eventually become, but few mothers would be so deranged as to ‘worship’ that idealised notion. The poet says that the sculpted image and the image seen in reveries can both break hearts, presumably because reality does not live up to the ideal evoked by the image. (But would any nun expect to find a counterpart to almighty God in mundane reality?) These images are now addressed by the poet as ‘Presences’ (a capitalised term which craftily seeks to give them autonomy) which, evoked by passion, piety or affection, symbolise ‘all heavenly glory’. Religious images may conceivably do that; but the image of a loved person is highly unlikely to evoke such intense religious ecstasy. Furthermore, this is a hyperbolic way of referring to a mother’s imagining of a child’s future: such imagining would be deranged. The images mock human enterprise, the poet declares; again, presumably, because all realities fall short of what they represent. But do imagined ideals really mock enterprise? The answer is surely, ‘Not necessarily: they may inspire human enterprise: charitable works or loving devotion, perhaps.’ They are ‘self-born’, says the poet. To which the honest response is, obviously, ‘No, they are not’ – how could they be? The marble or bronze statues are made by human beings. The loved person, even when idealised, is not ‘self-born’ either, but is a product of the loving person and the object of that love. Things don’t just spring into existence spontaneously out of nothing. That’s impossible. A mystical notion (perhaps Platonic in origin) of the autonomy of ideal images has prevailed, in the poet’s imagination, over the common sense which recognises human agency.

I submit that this is an honest response which reacts truthfully to what the poet offers. Stanza VII is, in short, a failure. It makes false assertions. Critics should admit the fact. ‘Test every work of intellect or faith’, says Yeats in his poem ‘Vacillation’. Very well: I’ve done so in the case of this stanza, and it fails.

All the more splendid, therefore, seems stanza VIII, the glorious conclusion to the poem, which offers two superb images to represent the ideal of education and, indeed, the ideal state of being: an image of a beautiful organic unity, the chestnut-tree, and an image which reconciles the abstract and the concrete, the dancer – for without the dance, there could be no dancer, and without the dancer, we would see no dance. I end with that magnificent stanza. This is Yeats at his best.

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Professor Cedric Watts wrote the Introduction to The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats in the Wordsworth Poetry Library (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2008).

Image: W.B. Yeats statue, created by sculptor Rowan Gillespie, outside the Ulster Bank in Sligo, Ireland Contributor: Andrea Kuipers / Alamy Stock Photo

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When writing the introduction to the Wordsworth edition of Shakespeare’s Othello, I discussed the play’s notorious ‘double time scheme’. It was Thomas Rymer who, in the 17th century, pointed out that there was something very peculiar about the chronology of Othello: so peculiar, indeed, as to render impossible the repeated adultery of which Desdemona is accused by Othello. But this is not the only case of a chronological oddity in Shakespeare’s works; and, frequently, the plays offer us cultural impossibilities too.

In Titus Andronicus, the setting is pagan Rome. Shakespeare draws on several phases in Rome’s history, but the culture is pre-Christian without a doubt. The deities invoked by characters include Enceladus and Pallas (Greek), and Mercury, Virgo, Saturn, Diana, Jupiter and Astraea (Roman). Demetrius recognises a quotation from Horace, and Lavinia displays Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But then, see what happens in Act 4, scene 4. In strolls a Clown (we may take the word ‘Clown’ to mean ‘a rural proletarian’), and when Titus asks him for a message from the god Jupiter, he says:

Alas, sir, I know not Jubiter; I never drank with him in all my life.

He is employed by Titus to take to Emperor Saturnine a letter demanding justice. This is how the Clown addresses the emperor:

God and Saint Stephen give you godden. I have brought you a letter and a couple of pigeons here.

In Shakespeare’s plays, clowns sometimes have the magical pilot’s licence to fly through time and space. This Clown seems to have arrived from Shakespeare’s rural England, bringing an incongruous Christian greeting to the ruler of pagan Rome. Some moments of surrealistic comedy ensue; for Saturnine, understandably infuriated, cries: ‘Go, take him [the Clown] away and hang him presently,’ The Clown responds with an exclamation (invoking the Virgin Mary) and a jest:

Hanged, by’ Lady! Then have I brought up a neck to a fair end.

Here we see that the comedy involving the Clown derives a bit of its humour from the wit (‘fair end’ meaning both ‘beautiful head’ and ‘just death sentence’) and most of its humour from its obvious breach of theatrical decorum as a clownish insouciant Christian intrudes into grim pagan Rome: anarchic fun within a gory tragedy.

If we seek cultural and chronological muddles, there is no better play than Hamlet. Just ask yourself, ‘In what time is the action set?’, and you will find numerous answers. Much of the time, the action seems contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s days. Hamlet himself often expresses a modern, sceptical sensibility. The duel is fought with rapiers. There is a discussion of the controversial success of the child actors in the city: and this clearly refers to the city of London, not a city in Denmark, for ‘The Children of the Chapel’, a company of boy actors in London’s Blackfriars Theatre, became fashionable in 1600 and 1601. On the other hand, Hamlet’s father, with his full armour including a helmet with a visor, seems to belong to an earlier period, perhaps mediaeval; and the Ghost says he comes from Purgatory (which Catholics believed in but Protestants denied). Yet Hamlet, with modern scepticism, describes death as that bourn from which no traveller returns, even though he has recently met such a traveller. In Act 4, scene 3, Claudius says that the English court will carry out his instruction that Hamlet is killed there because England has so recently been punished by Danish forces and is obliged to pay tribute. This refers to the period between the ninth and eleventh centuries when England was obliged to pay massive sums of ‘protection money’ (the ‘Danegeld’) to the powerful Danes. So, culturally, geographically and chronologically, the play contains some striking inconsistencies.

Furthermore, in 1931, the critic A. J. A. Waldock argued persuasively that Hamlet’s character is complicated because it is a palimpsest – a muddle of old and new. Part of the time, as when Hamlet says ‘Now could I drink hot blood’ and ruthlessly dispatches Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we are encountering the ruthless Amlothi or Amleth (a name meaning ‘Dimwit’) of the ancient Danish source-tale; and part of the time, in contrast, we are hearing the sophisticated, sensitive Hamlet whom Shakespeare has introduced. Our Hamlet lurches between brutal action and, in contrast, sensitive introspection and civilised humanity; and this is because the nastiness of the ancient progenitor is repeatedly infiltrating the likeable modern character.

In King Lear, the cultural and chronological references are, again, a muddle.

The legendary Lear was a pre-Christian leader, and characters invoke ‘the gods’, Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Hecate and Nature: so the action seems to be located in a post-Roman but pre-Christian Britain. Yet the characters also invoke God, Satan, Adam and Eve, St Mary, churches and holy water: so at those times, the action seems to be taking place in the Christian era. Other references, to Tom o’Bedlam, schoolmasters, spectacles, and fops who frequently visit the barber, for instance, suggest times contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s. In Act 3, scene 2, however, the Fool tells the audience that he lives before the time of Merlin (the legendary Welsh magician described by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 14th century); but, at the end of Act 1, scene 5, he is clearly contemporaneous with the actual performance in the Jacobean theatre, for he says that any virgin in the audience who dares to laugh as he goes off-stage will soon be deflowered. No wonder Samuel Johnson complained that Shakespeare ‘commonly neglects and confounds the characters of ages by mingling customs ancient and modern.’ We might also ask what becomes of Lear’s many knights, who seem to vanish as the story advances: fair-weather friends or poor map-readers? And, notoriously, the Fool disappears without explanation. (When Lear says ‘And my poor fool is hanged’, editors explain that ‘fool’ could be a term of endearment, so the reference is to Cordelia. But the phrasing naturally brings the male Fool to mind, and thus renders conspicuous his absence from Acts 4 and 5. One theory is that the actor who played the Fool also played Cordelia.)

From the time of Geoffrey Chaucer to the late 17th century, authors frequently muddled cultural allusions – often mixing, with bizarre inconsistency, the classical and the Christian. For example, at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (written circa 1385), the spirit of the slain pagan Troilus ascends to Heaven, scorns the vanity of the world which contrasts so greatly with the felicity which Heaven provides, and then goes to the place allotted to him by the Roman god Mercury. In John Milton’s elegy Lycidas (written in 1637), the mourning poet is consoled by Phoebus Apollo, the Hellenic god, before he declares that Jesus has granted Lycidas a place in Heaven, Nevertheless, given the intense religious questioning within King Lear, the muddle there becomes frustratingly prominent. As the nature and, indeed, the very existence of divine justice are fiercely debated in the play, the theological inconsistencies become tantalising.

Among the comedies, The Merry Wives of Windsor offers us remarkable chronological confusion. The play contains allusions to the Royal Order of the Garter ceremonies at Windsor in 1597, and the work’s general tone fits the 1590s. But the presence of Falstaff and his cronies Pistol, Nym and Bardolph, together with Nym and Mistress Quickly, implies the early 15th century (the fictional time of Henry IV, Part Two, in which these characters appear). Page tells us that young Fenton (who is now reformed) ‘kept company with the wild prince [Hal, later Henry V] and Poins’; and Henry lived from 1386 to 1422. The Merry Wives of Windsor thus seems to be a comedy of the 1590s in which characters from an earlier century have been incongruously resurrected. This Falstaff proves to be an inferior relative of the brilliantly subversive Falstaff of the histories, whose poignant death was reported in Henry V.

In the late Romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest), we encounter another rich mixture of allusions. A notable example of a muddle occurs in The Winter’s Tale. The very title is odd, since much of the action takes place in summer, the sheep-shearing time. In that play, the declaration by the oracle of Apollo is crucial to the plot, Perdita invokes Jove, and Hermione praises the gods; yet, early on, there is a reference to the Christian doctrine of original sin; later, Perdita speaks of ‘Whitsun pastorals’, and Autolicus (that, and not ‘Autolycus’, is how the First Folio spells his name) mentions not only the Prodigal Son but also hallowed items which ‘brought a benediction to the buyer’. Camillo mentions Jesus and Judas. We are told that a statue of Hermione has been completed by the famous Giulio Romano, and he was a real-life architect and sculptor who died as recently as 1546. Autolicus, with his songs, tricks, and thieves’ slang, belongs distinctly to Shakespeare’s day, as do the country folk at their festival. The currency of Bohemia proves to be pounds and shillings. Thus, the historical era veers to and fro between ancient and modern, while the cultural frame of reference is sometimes polytheistically classical and sometimes strongly Christian. At times we are located in ancient Sicily and at other times the location seems to be Shakespeare’s Warwickshire. Although Sicily was the traditional homeland of pastoral poetry, here Bohemia is the main provider of pastoralism. Hermione is eventually found to be alive, even though her death had been reported and believed (and she had presumably been buried, for Leontes often prayed at her grave), and her ghost had appeared to Camillo. Ghosts surely emanate from the dead, not from the living. Another oddity: in Act 4, scene 1, the character Time tells us that sixteen years elapse, but the very next scene says that fifteen years have elapsed. Thus, muddles abound. Because parts of the play are remarkably intelligent, its apparent stupidities become more noticeable. Notice that in The Tempest, Shakespeare elegantly coordinates the religious (Christian and classical) and sceptical allusions: for example, in the masque of Ceres, Iris and Juno, the deities are played by spirits at Prospero’s command. Here is no muddle but an exquisite harmony.

I began this essay with a reference to the famous ‘double time scheme’ of Othello. You’ll recall how it operates. Iago persuades Othello that Desdemona has committed adultery with Cassio – not once but on numerous occasions. But only thirty-three hours or so elapse between Desdemona’s arrival on Cyprus and her death at Othello’s hands. No time for repeated adultery to occur. But the play also contains some inconsistent ‘long-time’ references: for example, Bianca’s reproaches to Cassio that he has neglected her for a week, and Emilia’s claim that Iago has asked her ‘a hundred times’ to steal the handkerchief. So audiences, while sensing that something is amiss, tend to accept as plausible the sequence of events. The variable clock probably makes us sympathise more with Othello; for, as he is fooled by Iago’s manipulation of evidence, we may sense subliminally that we are fooled by Shakespeare’s: our plight has analogies to Othello’s. What is subliminal to audiences in the theatre may, of course, be fully conscious to readers in their studies, for readers have the leisure to pause and look forwards and backwards to assess temporal consistency or the lack of it, and textual editors draw attention to discrepancies.

Shakespeare was indeed a maestro of the double time scheme: he uses it in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, for example. The playwright intensifies the drama by compressing the action, but that produces a chronological split. The action in the foreground is rapid, but its plausibility depends on the inconsistently longer time scale indicated by ‘long time’ allusions. In Measure for Measure, the main dramatic events concerning Angelo, Claudio and Isabella (from the time of Claudio’s arrest to the return of the Duke) seem to take only four or five days: in 1.2.59-61, Overdone says that Claudio is to be executed ‘within these three days’. The period of the Duke’s supposed absence, however, appears to take months rather than days: he is thought to have travelled as far as Poland, Rome, or even Russia; and, in his guise as ‘Friar Lodowick’, he becomes well established, paying frequent visits as an advisor to Mariana. The tribulations of Overdone and Pompey imply a longer time span than is appropriate to Claudio’s desperate plight.

Thus, suspense is maintained by our sense that the Duke must act very speedily to save Claudio and outwit Angelo, while the long-time references enable us to believe that Angelo’s rule has become fully established and its many consequences unfolded. Strangely, in this play, the anomalies seem to matter little to theatre audiences, perhaps because of the intensity of the short-time drama. Readers of the play, in contrast, as we have noted, have greater leisure to question the chronology. In the theatre, human memory becomes fallible as we concentrate on the ‘human interest’. We know that Elizabethan and Jacobean plays often lack the chronological discipline that we expect in many a modern novel, so we may stifle expectations of precision. In any case, awareness of a double time scheme may remind us that in everyday life we experience time as multiple and contradictory: the electric clock says one thing; the mental clock (varying its pace in pleasure and pain, retrospection and anticipation, dreaming and waking) says another.

The marked contrast between the untidy Winter’s Tale and the elegant Tempest, written within a year or so of each other, shows that Shakespeare was well able to curb muddles and provide orderly drama when he wished. The fact that two of his most muddled tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear, are among his greatest achievements is surely a tribute to the power of audiences, actors and directors to magnify the human drama and to veil or minimise the inconsistencies. When Polonius says that he will treat the players ‘according to their desert’, Hamlet responds:

God’s bodkin, man, much better! Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.

Such generosity of spirit must often have greeted Shakespeare’s muddles. Indeed, we (readers, and spectators) are Shakespeare’s constructive co-authors.

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My introduction to the Wordsworth Romeo and Juliet cites the famous feminist, Germaine Greer, who praised Shakespeare for taking the progressive side in a very controversial matter.

This matter concerned the basis for marriage. Should marriage be arranged by the family and its advisors, or should it be based on the free choice of loving partners? Germaine Greer says that Shakespeare influentially sided with the latter criterion, which in course of time became dominant (in many but not all countries). He does so most evidently and dramatically in Romeo and Juliet; but the case is explicitly made in The Merry Wives of Windsor, when Fenton, who has clandestinely married Anne Page (Fenton and Anne being lovers), rebukes the parents who sought an arranged marriage for her:

You would have married her most shamefully,

Where there is no proportion held in love…

Th’offence is holy that she has committed,

And this deceit loses the name of craft,

Of disobedience, or unduteous title,

Since therein she does evitate and shun

A thousand irreligious cursèd hours

Which forcèd marriage would have brought upon her.

Lawrence Stone, in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, asserted that in Shakespeare’s day, ‘the accepted wisdom of the age’ was that

marriage based on personal selection…was if anything less likely to produce lasting happiness than one arranged by more prudent and more mature heads.

But that is certainly not the impression given by Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare always presents sympathetically the young people who seek to marry for love and in defiance of parental will: we may add Valentine and Sylvia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Hermia and Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Jessica and Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice. The historian Ralph A. Houlbrooke, in The English Family 1450-1700, alleges that Lawrence Stone neglected evidence indicating ‘a widespread belief among would-be marriage partners that freedom of choice was their right’. Nevertheless, among the ruling class, predictably, arranged marriages would long remain the custom: so much prestige, wealth and property were involved. In Henry V, in a cunning compromise, Shakespeare ensures that the politically-expedient marriage of Henry to the French Princess, Katherine, is combined with Henry’s assurance that he loves her.

In addition, of course, it can be argued that Shakespeare aided the feminist cause by creating so many strong female characters. The most impressive of these is surely Cleopatra – an astonishingly full, rich, complex characterisation. She is sexy, funny, poignant, imaginative, arrogant, angry, sentimental, vicious, affectionate, cunning; she expresses ‘infinite variety’ indeed. Furthermore, she is granted the theatrical accolade, in tragedy, of the final death: her death follows Antony’s and thus gains ultimate emphasis; and a spectacular, proud and yet poignant death it is too.

A sceptic may say, ‘Wait a minute. In Shakespeare’s day, all female parts were played by males, usually boys: so doesn’t this undermine your feminist claim?’ The answer to that is that the audience’s conscious awareness that a female part is played by a boy would vary from play to play: sometimes awareness would be strong, sometimes it would be intermittent, and sometimes it would fade to zero. In The Taming of the Shrew, such awareness would be quite strong, because the play’s preamble or ‘Induction’ had made elaborately explicit the disguising of a boy as a woman. In As You Like It, there would probably be a flickering, intermittent awareness. Rosalind disguises herself as the boyish Ganymede (the name – cognate with ‘catamite’– is that of the youth loved by Zeus), who pretends to be Rosalind, urging Orlando to woo him/her; and the vertiginous sexual comedy is surely made more confusingly but delightfully complex by our intermittent remembrance that Rosalind is, in any case, a part played by a male.

In the case of Cleopatra, however, there is striking proof that the part was meant to be fully convincing – that Cleopatra would be deemed by the audience ‘all woman’. That proof comes when Cleopatra says that if she permitted herself to be taken captive by Octavius, she would be taken to Rome, and there:

The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels: Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’th’posture of a whore.

In other words, she will be mortified by seeing a squeaking boy-actor depict her not as a truly great person but as a mere prostitute. At this point, as a powerful female character, Cleopatra is so convincing that we don’t for a moment think ‘But a boy is indeed, already, representing your greatness’; what we think is ‘Yes, it would indeed be demeaning for you, Cleopatra, to see yourself vulgarly performed by a “squeaking” boy.’

Shakespeare repeatedly presents to us female characters who are intelligent, resourceful, eloquent, and even powerful: after Cleopatra, we rapidly recall Juliet, Volumnia, Portia, Hermione and Paulina, for instance. In doing so, in setting such memorable examples, he surely encouraged women in real life to become more assertive and empowered.

A mystery remains. We know the names of many of Shakespeare’s fellow actors: Richard Burbage, John Heminge (or Hemmings), Augustine Phillips, William Kemp (or Kempe), Henry Condell, Robert Armin, etc. He often created a part with a particular actor in mind. We know this because sometimes, in the printed text, the given name is that of the actor, not the character: thus we learn that William Kemp played Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. His great tragic roles, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Antony, and Lear, were written originally for Richard Burbage. (The acclaimed Burbage, surprisingly, was said to be short and stout, which might explain why Hamlet is ‘fat and scant of breath’ in the duel scene.) When conceiving the immense role of Cleopatra, Shakespeare must have had in mind a young male actor of exceptional memory, intelligence and eloquence: someone capable of performing convincingly an utterly demanding rôle. But no boy-actor has ever been identified as the player of Cleopatra. The identity of the lad who enabled (and perhaps even elicited) the writing of Antony and Cleopatra is lost to posterity, lost without a trace.

Meanwhile, if you insist on being awkward, you may argue that The Taming of the Shrew, with its climactic speech in which Katherina exhorts wives to be utterly submissive to their husbands, is the most un-feminist play imaginable. But that speech has been filled with irony by a winking actress (Mary Pickford in the 1929 film version); and the whole drama can become a feminist celebration when acted by an all-female cast, as it was in the highly-praised Globe Theatre production in 2003. Although in Shakespeare’s day, females were played by males, in our times, his males are often played by females: yes, even King Lear has been performed by a woman: by Glenda Jackson (when aged 80), who earned a standing ovation.

Would Shakespeare have objected to such free adaptation? The answer is, ‘Surely, no.’ He took great liberties with the source tale (by Arthur Brooke) for Romeo and Juliet, for example, so that his version is sexier and livelier; and he even dares to present a thirteen-year-old heroine (who was sixteen in the source) who gives lessons in courtship to her lover. It is she who firmly steers his wooing towards matrimony. (In Elizabethan England, the legal ages of consent were twelve for a female and fourteen for a male.) And, like Cleopatra, Juliet is also given the accolade of the final death, signalling that dramatically she has greater significance than Romeo.

Again, Shakespeare deliberately departs from his sources to give King Lear a particularly bitter and sceptical ending. Remember Hamlet, too. He is far more sophisticated than the Amleth of the old source legend. Notice that Hamlet is happy to shorten a passage of verse: if a player’s speech seems too long, ‘It shall to the barber’s’. Furthermore, Hamlet is excited by his deed of augmenting a received text (the ‘Mouse-Trap’) so that it has greater relevance to the immediate situation.

Shakespeare could be radically experimental not only in Hamlet, with its peculiarly ambiguous ghost and its enigmatic protagonist but also in Troilus and Cressida, with its bold use of symbolically collapsing structure: its disorderly end is thematically apt. Shakespeare would surely, therefore, have looked benevolently on today’s radical experimentation, which so often has a feminist agenda.

Cedric Watts, M.A., PhD, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex is the editor of our Shakespeare Classics series

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My introduction to Wordsworth Macbeth makes the point that though Shakespeare is internationally lauded, his influence has sometimes been bad. We can’t have it both ways: if we praise him for his wise and genial humanity, we must also condemn him for furthering intolerance and for propagating lies that flatter the ruling class.

In the case of Macbeth (written probably in the period 1603-6), his depiction of the ‘Wayward Sisters’ undoubtedly added to the craze for witch-hunts. Shakespeare’s prime motive was undoubtedly flattery of King James VI of Scotland, recently James I of England, whose book Dæmonologie (1597, reissued in 1603) taught that witches, wielding infernal supernatural powers, really existed and should be ruthlessly extirpated. God Himself (according to Exodus 22:18) had stated: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ As depicted by Shakespeare, the Wayward Sisters in the play are far more vile and horrific than the ‘weird sisters’ described in his main source, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland by Raphael Holinshed and others. Subsequently, in the 17th century, many unfortunate women were accused of witchcraft, tortured and finally killed. Logically, Shakespeare should share some of the guilt for these horrors. As I pointed out, Shakespeare repeatedly departs from Holinshed in order to flatter James I, often by whitewashing Banquo.

Henry VI, Part 1, to which Shakespeare contributed, depicts Jeanne d’Arc, the patriotic French warrior, as a witch who offers her body and soul to devils. (Jeanne, who had been burnt at the stake, was declared a saint by the Pope in 1920, prompting George Bernard Shaw’s fine play, Saint Joan.) In Henry VI, Part 2, a devil, or the Devil, appears on stage to answer the call of Margery Jourdan: she is evidently another witch.

Shakespeare thus, alas, lent his eloquence to the negative side of a controversy. On the positive side stood Reginald Scot, whose Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) scorned witch-hunts and derided the notion that poor women held supernatural powers – for, if they did, they would be rich. We may add that in the play The Witch of Edmonton, by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford, a ‘deformed and ignorant’ woman is driven to witchcraft by social persecution.

I referred above to Shakespeare’s ‘lies that flatter the ruling class’. You can find plenty of examples in Richard III. There, Shakespeare was flattering the political establishment of his own day by supporting the official ‘Tudor’ view of Richard III: a thoroughly hostile view. Although the historic Richard undoubtedly committed heinous acts, he was not as culpable as the play suggests. For instance, if Henry VI was murdered, which is probable but not certain, in reality, the most likely suspect is not Richard III but Edward IV. Though Shakespeare makes Richard responsible for the murder of Clarence, Clarence had in fact been prosecuted for treason by Edward IV: hence his execution at the Tower of London.

In Richard III, Shakespeare also distorted history so as to flatter Ferdinando, Lord Strange, and Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke. Why? Before the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594, Shakespeare is believed to have worked for the company known as Lord Strange’s Men, patronised by Ferdinando, Lord Strange, a descendant of Lord Stanley so favourably portrayed in the play. Again, Henry Herbert was the patron of Lord Pembroke’s Men, another company for which Shakespeare wrote; and in Richard III Pembroke’s ancestors, Sir Walter Herbert and the Earl of Pembroke, are introduced so that they can be associated with the victorious Richmond and praised. Indeed, in Richard III, Richmond, who became King Henry VII, and the Tudor dynasty were flattered so memorably that the play would shape many people’s understanding of the history of those times.

Perhaps the most shocking example of Shakespeare’s readiness to distort history in order to exalt the ruling class is the play ludicrously called All Is True, better known as Henry VIII. (It was written partly by John Fletcher but largely by Shakespeare.) The play culminates in the fulsome celebration of the birth of Queen Anne, formerly Anne Bullen, of the Elizabeth destined to rule England. Numerous people prophesy that the baby Elizabeth will eventually become an unsurpassed monarch. In Act 5, for example, Archbishop Cranmer prophesies that she will be all-virtuous and as wise as the biblical Queen of Sheba (‘Saba’):

She shall be…

A pattern to all princes living with her,

And all that shall succeed. Saba was never

More covetous of wisdom and fair virtue

Than this pure soul shall be.

What’s more, her heir (James I)

Shall star-wise rise as great in fame as she was,

And so stand fixed. Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,

That were the servants to this chosen infant

Shall then be his.

And, of course, Henry VIII joins in the rejoicing. He declares:

This oracle of comfort has so pleased me,

That when I am in heaven I shall desire

To see what this child does, and praise my maker.

And all this jubilation is nonsense. In reality, far from being thrown into prophetic ecstasy by the birth of Elizabeth, Henry was bitterly disappointed, for – yet again – he was confronted by a female offspring instead of the longed-for male. Nothing in the play indicates that Elizabeth’s mother, Queen Anne, would soon be executed for ‘treasonable adultery’. Nor does the play indicate that in order to divorce Queen Katharine and marry Anne, Henry was obliged to initiate a vast change in the nation’s religion, a change resulting in cultural and social turmoil, despoliation and martyrdoms. Repeatedly Henry is depicted as the conscientious innocent monarch, or, later, as one who wisely intervenes to save Cranmer from trumped-up charges. At least the play shows that Henry was sexually attracted to Anne Bullen before he divorced Katharine, and Katharine is depicted at length as a long-suffering, loyal queen who, with great dignity, undergoes a contrived downfall. Indeed, it is this rôle which largely redeems the play on stage.

In Shakespeare’s works, one of the oddest pieces of flattery is that found in the First Folio (1623) text of Henry V. Remember that the Earl of Essex was a friend of the Earl of Southampton, and it was to Southampton that Shakespeare dedicated his long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. In the Prologue to Act 5 of Henry V, we are told that the people of London welcomed King Henry on his return from France, and the speech continues:

As, by a lower but loving likelihood,

Were now the General of our gracious Empress –

As in good time he may – from Ireland coming,

Bringing rebellion broachèd on his sword,

How many would the peaceful city quit

To welcome him! Much more, and much more cause,

Did they this Harry.

There’s a scholarly consensus that ‘the General of our gracious Empress’ is Robert Devereux, the illustrious Earl of Essex. On 27 March 1599, he had set out from London to suppress the Earl of Tyrone’s ‘rebellion’ in Ireland. He failed, incurring the enmity of Queen Elizabeth, and arrived back in London on 28 September 1599. It follows that this passage must have been written after 27 March but before the news of Essex’s failure reached London, around midsummer.

The implications of the allusion to Essex are considerable. First, it shows that Shakespeare’s history plays, even when dealing with the past, had clear relevance to contemporaneous events. In this case, audiences were encouraged to relate Henry’s successful French campaign of 1415 to Essex’s rôle in the colonial struggle in Ireland. Shakespeare here supports that costly struggle to maintain English dominance abroad.

In hindsight, the tribute to Essex is highly ironic. Essex, having failed in his Irish mission, became a discredited malcontent. On 8 February 1601, with Southampton at his side, he led a band of supporters through London, hoping to stage a coup d’état against Elizabeth’s counsellors. The attempted coup was a failure, and Essex was executed on February 25th. (Southampton was also sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to imprisonment, and he was eventually released by King James I.)

Another remarkable aspect is that the once-topical allusion to Essex remained in the text of Henry V when it was published in that 1623 Folio. You would think that it was, by then, clearly out of date, overtaken by events, and politically embarrassing to Shakespeare’s company. Yet it remained. It would surely have been omitted from actual stage productions after the summer of 1599. What its survival in the book suggests is that even the relatively good text of the play published in the First Folio does not represent any ‘final’ version of the play and that the compilers of that Folio were not particularly attentive to details of the material that they assembled. Evidently, performances not only of Henry V but also of other Shakespearian plays were augmented by topical details as opportunities arose and were pruned of them as circumstances changed. The Folio text represents an out-of-date unpruned version of the play.

We have seen that Shakespeare could lick the boots of the ruling class when he thought that by doing so he could advance himself and his company of players. But there is another side to him, of course: some of his works can be regarded as subversive of authority. On the eve of Essex’s rebellion, his supporters paid Shakespeare’s company for a special production of Richard II: they believed that that play about the overthrow and murder of a monarch could help their cause. Queen Elizabeth is reported to have said: ‘I am Richard II[:] know ye, not that?’ The company was lucky not to be punished.

In Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of history plays, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V, royal authority is repeatedly questioned; and, if the eventual success of Henry V seems triumphant, that triumph is incisively undercut by the Epilogue of Henry V, the concluding Chorus, which says that all his achievements came to nothing in the following reign. The notion that divine providence governs royal rule is assailed in King Lear, and there Shakespeare departs from his sources in order to emphasise the uselessness of invoking supernatural aid. Epic warfare is thoroughly stripped of glamour in Troilus and Cressida, a brilliantly subversive anti-war play which derides the theological paraphernalia of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. Yes, Troilus and Cressida even mock the concept of a divinely-ordained cosmic hierarchy, a concept which used to be deemed (by E. M. W. Tillyard and his followers) an essential part of ‘the Elizabethan world-picture’. So perhaps Shakespeare is his own best critic. In spite of the immense pressure of censorship in his day, he could at times challenge his era’s orthodoxies. He knew that heretical Christopher Marlowe had been lethally silenced in 1593. The radical, progressive Shakespeare is to be found in that second tetralogy, in many of the sonnets, and in Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra.

Thanks to his phenomenally articulate intelligence and imagination, Shakespeare remains our finest dramatist, even if some of the plays disgust us with their craven sycophancy. Of course, he had his faults. After all, that makes him more like us.

Cedric Watts, M.A., PhD, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex is the editor of our Shakespeare series

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Should we save Innogen, the mother of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing? For centuries, editors have answered that question with a ruthless ‘No’. I say ‘Yes’, and, when editing the play for Wordsworth, I restored her to the play. (People who buy other editions may well be buying incomplete texts.) The main puzzle is: why was she ever suppressed? This is not a trivial matter. You’ll soon see that it has big implications for editors, directors and theatre-goers.

Everyone knows about Imogen, who has an important role in Cymbeline, and whose name should be ‘Innogen’, according to some scholars. But hardly anyone has heard of Innogen in Much Ado About Nothing. She is the wife of Leonato and the mother of Hero, and she’s supposed to appear in at least two scenes. Nevertheless, for centuries, editors – they always seem to be male editors – have excised her: they’ve killed the unfortunate woman! You won’t find her in such standard editions of the Complete Works as Peter Alexander’s, or the Riverside, or the Norton, or the Wells and Taylor volume for Oxford. A. R. Humphreys’ Arden edition of the play excludes her, and so do the editions by David Stevenson (Signet), Sheldon P. Zitner (Oxford), and John F. Cox (Cambridge). And the list could be extended for many lines. It looks like the perfect crime: nobody can be found.

What makes this habitual exclusion so strange is that Innogen is clearly specified in the earliest texts from which all subsequent texts derive. They are the First Quarto and the First Folio. In the First Quarto (Q1), the stage direction for the opening of Act 1, scene 1, says: ‘Enter Leonato governor of Messina, Innogen his wife, Hero his daughter, and Beatrice his niece, with a messenger.’ In the First Folio (F1) the stage direction is almost identical, again specifying ‘Innogen his wife’. At the opening of Act 2, in both Q1 and F1, the entry of Innogen is yet again specified: ‘Leonato, his brother, his wife…’.

So why do editors delete her? One reason is that she does not say anything. Various editors, therefore, believe that although Shakespeare introduced her with the intention of giving her a speaking rôle, he found no use for her. Therefore, these editors presume, they are helping Shakespeare by doing what he should have done: they are tidying the text (and perhaps reducing the wage bill) by removing a redundant character. They think they know better than Heminge and Condell, Shakespeare’s colleagues, who prepared the First Folio, who must have seen how the play worked in the theatre, and who retained Innogen.

What these male editors fail to see is a glaring irony. Much Ado About Nothing is a bitter-sweet comedy which strikingly displays the operations of male chauvinism. It shows that women may be treated as adjuncts to the men, to be variously used, abused, manipulated, slandered, discredited or marginalised. By their ruthless dispatch of Innogen, the male editors emulate the cruelty of Claudio. He, totally misled, denounces his fiancée at the altar, so that she, instead of joining him in holy wedlock, is proclaimed a whore, swoons away, and is left by him for dead. When Claudio realises his error, he is (to make amends) quite willing to accept from Leonato a bride – supposedly Leonato’s niece – whom, he believes, he has never met! Meanwhile, Beatrice, who has displayed plenty of independent spirit in her bouts of wit with Benedick, eventually agrees to marry him: but will her independence survive years of marriage and, presumably, motherhood?

Part of the answer is provided by the silence of Innogen. In an ironic master-stroke, Shakespeare has, from the very start of the play, established that in this male-dominated world, a wife and mother may be a mute witnesses of events; a person ignored, not consulted; a person whose later absence from the action expresses eloquently the ways in which some women may be utterly marginalised. She, bearing a name which seems to mean ‘innocent from birth’, is an appropriately passive mother to the much-manipulated and much-demeaned Hero. In Act 1, scene 1, when Don Pedro says to Leonato, about Hero, ‘I think this is your daughter’, Leonato replies: ‘Her mother hath many times told me so.’ This proves that Shakespeare regards this mother as a continuing presence, for Leonato says ‘hath…told’, not ‘told’. What’s more, if she is on stage, as the directions specify, we may imagine her expression (perhaps good-humoured, resigned, or disgusted) as she hears that ironic exchange of dialogue and its bawdy continuation. That continuation jocularly implies that if Benedick had been older, he might well have copulated with Innogen, thus casting subsequent doubt on Hero’s legitimacy. ‘Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?’, enquires Benedick; and Leonato coarsely responds: ‘Signor Benedick, no, for then you were a child.’

By erasing Innogen from Much Ado About Nothing, the male editors of the work have both weakened it and verified it. They have weakened the play by removing a telling example of the subordinated female, but they have verified it unwittingly by extending into the real world the play’s thematic concern with the ruthless manipulation of women by men.

When I had the opportunity to edit Much Ado about Nothing, I, therefore, took great pleasure in restoring Innogen to the text. Just as the apparently dead Hero is eventually resurrected in the play, the silent Innogen (her long-suffering mother) has been deliberately resurrected for this edition. ‘The empty vessel makes the greatest sound’, says the intelligent Boy in Henry V, and, conversely, good acting can accord a character’s silence the most eloquent expressiveness. Still, waters run deep. I’ve never forgotten Vivien Leigh’s poignant performance as the tongueless Lavinia in Peter Brook’s Titus Andronicus at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955. Her eyes, gestures and postures silently uttered resounding eloquence.

An obvious conclusion follows. I say to Shakespeare’s editors: ‘Let’s bring back to the light of day not only Innogen but all the rest of the editorially-buried humanity in Shakespeare. Believe me, there’s plenty of it!’

The post Cedric Watts looks at Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

When I was fourteen, the English master at my school told me to write an essay on the character of Hamlet. I read A. C. Bradley’s two chapters on Hamlet in Shakespearean Tragedy. Bradley seemed to have sorted the character out: the key was melancholy. Pushed into melancholy by his father’s death and his mother’s hasty remarriage to Claudius, Hamlet broods, and for a long time is unable to act decisively against Claudius. So I summarised Bradley and thought I had done a good job.

The English master, Mr Gerrard, gave me a vigorous telling-off. ‘You’ve simply paraphrased Bradley! You should have found a critic who disagreed with Bradley and then you could have adjudicated between them. Then your essay might have some element of originality. As it is, you’ve just taken a lazy option.’

I felt ashamed and resentful. He told me to read A. J. A. Waldock’s ‘Hamlet’: A Study in Critical Method, and I found that Waldock denounces Bradley’s interpretation for being all too tidy. In Waldock’s view, the character is divided. He is partly sophisticated modern sceptical Hamlet, and he is partly the ancient revenger of the old sagas, who commit violent actions. The murder of the eavesdropper in the Queen’s bedchamber, the killing of the men who accompany the prince to England, the switching of swords in a duel: all these features were in the ancient legend. Some of Hamlet’s motives are psychological, but others are literary: he does certain things because those are what the character traditionally did.

Well, time passed, and in 1987 the publisher called Harvester invited me to write a critical book on the play. The book had to be concise but comprehensive, offering its own distinctive critical argument. I signed the contract. Then I began to worry. Hamlet is probably the most problematic drama ever written. So how could I deal with the problems and offer my own interpretation in a concise format? I brooded nervously. Then the solution appeared.

Instead of offering a solution to the play’s mysteries, I would offer an explanation of the play’s evident tendency to solicit and frustrate explanations.. You need: 1: commentators committed to maximising the intelligibility of the play, particularly the play treated as written text. 2, Evidence within much of the text of a high level of intelligent coordination. 3. Evidence within parts of the text of an absence of intelligent coordination, indeed signs of apparent confusion or contradiction. 4. Textual material which has an uncertain status, so commentators will argue about whether it belongs to 2 or 3.

So Chapter 1 offered evidence of a lack of coordination. For example, the Ghost is variously a soul from purgatory, a devil from hell, and an actor ‘in the cellarage’ under the stage. Again, Hamlet has not once but twice the bright idea of using a play to test Claudius; Horatio is both an insider and an outsider, and Fortinbras is both a reckless adventurer and a statesman worthy of Hamlet’s vote. Chapter 2 offered evidence of intelligent coordination. For example, we have in the play four sons seeking revenge for a slain father, even though the source-tale had only one son seeking revenge so the ethics of revenge receive in the play thorough analysis. Then there was the fact that in the soliloquy ‘How all occasions do inform against me’, Hamlet voices at the conscious level admiration for the Fortinbras who rapidly resorts to violent action, and, at the unconscious level, scorn for the Fortinbras who kills people ‘even for an eggshell’. And Chapter 3 offered a summing-up. There I emphasised that in the theatre, problems become opportunities. What may be troublesome for the textual analyst may be splendidly challenging for a director. Hamlet is protean partly by design (clever Shakespeare) and partly by accident (hasty Shakespeare). There is no master Hamlet to be discovered by poring over the text, and we don’t need such a discovery; yet we can hardly shrug our shoulders in resignation, for the pleasure of this display derives largely from our quest to solve its mysteries; and if we fail to seek what it never surrenders, we fail to enjoy what it renders. The value is that in our search for answers, our searching of the play is simultaneously a searching for life.

So I finished the book, and it was duly published by Harvester. Later, I had the honour of editing the play for Wordsworth. I sometimes wished that Mr Gerrard was still alive, for then I would have thrust both books at him and said, ‘How’s that then, for a student who once could only paraphrase Bradley?’

But if I had done so, Mr Gerrard would probably have replied: ‘Instead of reproaching me in your self-pitying manner, you should thank me for showing you the way forward. Can’t you see? In the critical book, you’ve used the very method I taught you: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.’

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I first read Measure for Measure a long time ago: March 1955, in my last year at school. Reading Shakespeare’s earlier comedies had sometimes been a chore; reading this one was a pleasure. (I read and noted it on a Saturday morning and afternoon; after which I spent the evening with a pretty and voluptuous girlfriend.)

Like many other school kids, I had long harboured a suspicion that Shakespeare might not be as good as he was always made out to be. At Measure for Measure, the suspicion vanished, even if the Shakespeare who spoke from the page wasn’t exactly the Shakespeare I’d been led to expect. The play offered realism, cynicism, bawdry, and a tough searching quality; it seemed odd, strange, jarring and aggressively intelligent, as though assailing conventional notions of comedy.

For example, there was the startling power of Claudio’s outburst to his sister in Act 3, scene 3:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bath in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice…

What made it seem startling was not only the vivid intensity of the utterance but also the stark contrast that this speech made to the recent homiletic advice of the Friar-Duke. I was reading the play in a cheap one-volume Complete Shakespeare with small type, so that those two speeches, though separated by about a hundred lines, were there in front of me, side by side, the Duke’s on the left-hand page, Claudio’s on the right. The Duke had eloquently and apparently authoritatively urged Claudio to a stoical acceptance of death:

Be absolute for death: either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep. A breath thou art…

It had seemed authoritative, that long speech, as it proceeded. And now, within a page, was a starkly conflicting view of life and death, death as a location of fantastic horror and surrealistic torment, life as a paradise in contrast. The Duke had seemed wise and conscientious, and he had spoken as a Friar, which surely gave hallowed authority to his homily. Yet Claudio was evidently the young hero of the plot, someone to regard sympathetically, and his eloquence had its own distinctive power, an impetuous force of image and tone. And there the two speeches were before me, side by side, saying totally opposed things. Who was right? One of them, neither, or in some elusive way both? What was certain was the deliberateness of the juxtaposition.

Thus, what dawned on me was that normal conventions of comedy were far less important in Measure for Measure than Shakespeare’s determination to challenge ethical thought and feeling together; to search deeply into big problems; to let the structure of the play be determined more by the intelligence of embodied argument than by the exigencies of orthodox structure and expected entertainment.

Arguments about life and death, sex and marriage, justice and authority: repeatedly the play dramatised extremes of viewpoint, making matters vividly problematic – and also contemporary. It seemed to reach into the 1950s and beyond them; for its boldness and incisiveness mocked the inhibitions and respectabilities which prevailed in the provincial England (particularly in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) of 1955. I inwardly cheered both Pompey’s ‘Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?’ and Lucio’s ‘A little more lenity to lechery would do no harm’; and, as a proleptic rebuke to England in which capital punishment – the death sentence – was still operative, the presentation of Barnardine seemed to be one of the glories of the text.

You’ll remember how Barnardine is introduced. The Duke has been out-witted by Angelo, who, instead of waiving Claudio’s death sentence, orders the hastening of the execution; and the Duke seeks someone to be killed in Claudio’s stead. Barnardine seems designed by the plot to be the surrogate victim. But when the Duke encounters Barnardine, he encounters a distinctively living individual, stubbornly hung-over humanity; and the Duke can’t go through with his plan. He just can’t, when he meets the man, actually muster the determination to say ‘Off with his head!’. And eventually, the plot emits one Ragozine, a pirate who has conveniently died of fever, just in time for his head to be used as a substitute for Claudio’s.

As part of the plot, then, Barnardine seems to be redundant. Surely, a dramatist aiming for the narrative economy would have omitted him and proceeded directly to the news of Ragozine’s death. Therefore, the function of Barnardine is thematic and ethical. He is there to challenge the Duke, and thereby to challenge the very principle of capital punishment, of state-sanctioned judicial slaughter. Thus Shakespeare (as in Troilus and Cressida) was more than three hundred years ‘ahead of his times’.

So Measure for Measure seemed, in the 1950s, not ‘dark’, ‘morbid’, and full of ‘gloom and dejection’, as it had been termed, but healthily cogent. In the following decades grew the so-called ‘permissive society’ and its controversies: and they were the Measure for Measure controversies: about liberty versus licence, spontaneity versus control, old religion and new scepticism. These arguments continue. George Bernard Shaw was right when he said that in this play we find Shakespeare ‘ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him’. And its arguments continue forcefully into the twenty-first century.

Measure for Measure was long neglected and much disparaged. Yes, it has its oddities and its flaws. But nowadays, to students and theatregoers, to amateurs and specialists, its cogent eloquence is loud and clear. In 2005, precisely half a century after I first read the play, it was an honour for me to be able to further that eloquence by editing Measure for Measure the Wordsworth Shakespeare Series. Still revised from time to time, that edition remains in print, making Shakespeare’s fiercely intelligent drama accessible to new generations.

By Cedric Watts, M.A. PhD Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex and Editor of Wordsworth Classics’ Shakespeare series

The post Discovering the pleasure of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

If we ask ‘Is Shakespeare still relevant to us today?’, there is an element of naive arrogance about the question. Given that Shakespeare, at his best, is more articulately intelligent than any of us are, it might be more appropriate to ask ‘Are we still relevant to Shakespeare?’. If we are not, the fault may lie in us, not in him.

In general the ‘relevance’ of a play is generated by the combination of its contents and the receptiveness of the cultural climate. Early in 1945, I queued to see the Laurence Olivier film of Henry V. The audience cheered the British victory over the French and applauded the screen at the end. Shakespeare, even to an eight-year-old, was clearly exciting, prophetic and topical. We had beaten the French at Agincourt long ago; and now, in continental Europe, British troops were once again defeating the French (because the French Vichy army fought for Hitler) in the course of defeating the Nazis.

Consider this, too: between 1681 and 1838, Shakespeare’s King Lear disappeared from the British stage. Audiences (and critics as astute as Samuel Johnson) preferred Nahum Tate’s version, which gave the play a happy ending. Tate’s version was relevant, Shakespeare’s was not: and today we may well regard that as a failing of that cultural period rather than of Shakespeare. Today, we are much more receptive to the violence, cruelty, tempestuous power and bitter-sweet poignancy of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Again, although Troilus and Cressida were probably performed in Shakespeare’s day, the first British production of which we have documentary proof did not take place until 1907; but since then it has been performed with steadily increasing recognition and success. For centuries, it lacked ‘relevance’: audiences didn’t know what to make of it. Yet, today, it seems remarkably topical in its scepticism about martial glory and chivalrous love; and it is cunningly contemporary in its metaphorical form, as the disorder within the fictional word is reflected in the structural disorder of the play, with its daringly unconventional ending. Cultural changes have liberated its cogency.

Obviously, the bawdry and brutality which alienated past audiences gratify today’s audiences. Titus Andronicus, with its rape, mutilation and cannibal banquet, once seemed unperformable; in recent decades it has been staged repeatedly and filmed, harmonizing with our era’s somewhat decadent enjoyment of the shocking and depraved. (In contrast, when I saw the Peter Brook production at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955, a number of patrons fainted or had to be helped to leave.)  In a witty linkage, Anthony Hopkins, who played the cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), played Titus, smacking his lips as he presided over the cannibal banquet, in the film of Titus Andronicus (1999) directed by Julie Taymor.

Shakespeare was ‘ahead of his times’ in the sonnets, too. Most of the sonnets express the poet’s love for a beautiful young man. For centuries, this caused embarrassment and dismay to readers. Sodomy was long punishable by death. As late as 1964, W. H. Auden, though a homosexual, deplored the eagerness of the homosexual reader ‘to secure our Top-Bard as the patron saint of the Homintern [i.e. international homosexuality resembling the Soviet-based Comintern]’; in fact, explained Auden, ‘men and women whose sexual tastes are perfectly normal’ can enjoy the sonnets as expressions of love ‘without finding the masculine pronoun an obstacle’. Today, however, the sonnets can be appreciated as a very frank depiction of the emotional varieties of bisexual experience. Quoted in films, novels, songs and other poems, the sonnets have exerted pervasive power. In formulating emotions so memorably, they have helped to focus and even to generate those emotions in readers. The plays, we find, offer not only memorable characters who may change subtly from actor to actor but also verbal epitomes of our emotional states: joy, sorrow, love, wrath, depression, jealousy: somewhere Shakespeare has put them into words that resonate in memory. Consider, for example, Macbeth’s despair on hearing of his wife’s death:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The words sum up Macbeth’s feelings, but they may voice the feelings of many people who have known depression, severe loss, or disillusion.

Some of Shakespeare’s plays seem of immediate relevance today. One is Troilus and Cressida, for the reasons given. Another is Romeo and Juliet, a much stronger play than we may at first think, and superbly cogent when dealing with love which breaches tradition and convention. It’s still highly topical, whether we are thinking of arranged marriage versus marriage for love, or of love relationships which transgress religious and cultural boundaries. And repeatedly the play asks: ‘Which is truer: the enhancive definition of love which is implicit in the relationship of Romeo and Juliet themselves, or the reductive definition of love which is implicit and explicit in the bawdry of Mercutio, the Nurse, Sampson, Gregory and Peter?’ This debate is still cogent. And consider the diverse ways in which this play has pervaded our culture. The first ‘balcony’ scene has appeared on the British twenty-pound-note, and the lovers have been commemorated in ballets, operas, films, comic parodies (in one of which, Frank Bruno, the heavyweight boxer, played Juliet), and popular songs (as in the Peggy Lee classic, ‘Fever’). Germaine Greer, the eminent feminist, has declared that in this play, Shakespeare influentially opposed the Church’s disparagement of marital love. Indeed, he projected the idea of the monogamous heterosexual couple so luminously … that they irradiate our notions of compatibility and cooperation between spouses to this day.

In Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare submits the world of politics to a multiple scansion. Henry V, for example, is craftily ambiguous. Part of the time, it says: ‘Here was the greatest political leader that England has known: who would not be stirred by his patriotic rhetoric?’. And part of the time, it says: ‘But who would wish to be Henry? Did he have a legitimate claim to France? And weren’t all his achievements short-lived?’. In those plays deriving from history, Shakespeare lets criterion battle with criterion. In Antony and Cleopatra, for example, Octavia is morally better than Cleopatra, and Octavius is more astute than Antony; but ontologically, that is, in sheer fullness of being, Antony and Cleopatra, for all their flaws, are the victors.

That play reminds us, too, that Shakespeare’s prose and poetry, at their best, offer rich pleasures to linguistic sensualists. They engage us in a subtle and durable kind of oral and aural intercourse. When Enobarbus describes Cleopatra’s arrival by water, we have this:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Burnt on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that

The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes…

You’d have to be tone-deaf not to enjoy the language here; it’s delicious to utter, the patterns of alliteration and assonance being so fluently integrated that it’s only when we pause to analyse that we see how densely they are meshed.

Shakespeare’s relevance is aided by editors, translators, directors, actors, musicians, artists, dancers, composers (Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Duke Ellington, Elvis Costello, for instance) and singers (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Ella Fitzgerald, Cleo Laine, Stacey Kent, notably): they vie with each other in ‘making Shakespeare new’: Romeo and Juliet generated Bernstein’s West Side Story, The Comedy of Errors prompted The Boys from Syracuse, and Henry IV haunted My Own Private Idaho. By now, Shakespeare has a seemingly unstoppable cultural momentum. Each play-script is the raw material of a diversity of productions, and each character becomes protean: Hamlet becomes Hamlets, bearing the features of Olivier or Smoktunovksy, Williamson or Mel Gibson, Branagh or  Cumberbatch. The earliest texts of Hamlet differ so greatly from each other that Shakespeare seems to be offering us ‘the Hamlet-stuff to be diversely exploited by actors and directors’.

But don’t be worried if at first some of the material seems alien. To be frank, there are several of Shakespeare’s plays which I dislike. These include the three parts of Henry VI, a jingoistic trilogy in which Joan of Arc is depicted as a witch eager to give her body and soul to devils. Another disaster, in my view, is Henry VIII. With immense hypocrisy, it is sub-titled All Is True, even though the play proves to be a cynical whitewash of the brutal monarch. Another is Timon of Athens, which has a boringly naive plot. But experience has taught me that any of these works may be redeemed by some resourceful director. Indeed, a 1979 BBC production of Henry VIII, directed by Kevin Billington, gained high praise from critics. So did Jane Howell’s 1983 treatment of the Henry VI trilogy for BBC/Time-Life. And a 2012 version of Timon of Athens directed by

Nicholas Hytner, with Simon Russell Beale as Timon, was widely applauded. ‘Hytner

…  hurls Timon into the 21st century and finds it lands there almost perfectly’, said a critic in the Daily Telegraph. ‘A powerful comment on the insulating effect of wealth’, said the Guardian. ‘A lacerating parable for our troubled times’, added the Evening Standard. Generally, commentators found that this production made the problematic play an astute denunciation of today’s materialism.

Therefore, if Shakespeare seems ‘irrelevant’ to us, that may be because we have failed to be sufficiently imaginative in our responsiveness, or sufficiently diligent. Of course, Shakespeare requires some work on our part; for pleasure is often a consequence of toil. To become really good at football, the guitar, ballet or darts, we have to work; but the reward is pleasure.

With Shakespeare, a useful starting place is a good video, for instance, the video of Othello starring Laurence Fishburne. Follow the Wordsworth text at the same time, and notice the changes that the director (Oliver Parker) makes to the Shakespearian script: do the cuts improve or mar it? At the same time, relish the continuing topicality of this study of the tragic consequences of racial prejudice. Remember that Queen Elizabeth I was so worried about the number of black immigrants (‘Negars and Blackamoors’) in England that she hired a merchant, Caspar van Zeuden, to take them away in ships. Then ask yourself why Iago, who is Italian, has a Spanish name instead of being called Giacomo. (The most famous Iago is Santiago Matamoros: Saint James the Moor-Slayer, as cunning Shakespeare must have known.)

By some obvious tests, Shakespeare has never been so ‘relevant’ as he is today. His plays are performed around the world, in numerous languages. They are studied at schools and universities internationally. Tourists flock to Stratford-upon-Avon, to the Globe Theatre in Southwark, and even to ‘Juliet’s balcony’ in Verona. His influence seems to be ubiquitous: when I served in the Royal Navy, I found that the Naval Rating’s Handbook quoted with approval Polonius’s advice, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’. We quote him without recognising the fact: ‘mum’s the word’, ‘with bated breath’, ‘dead as a doornail’, for instance. Shakespeare prospered greatly in his lifetime, and today ‘Shakespeare’ is a multi-million-pound industry. If you wish to buy an edition of Hamlet in England today, you have an abundance of choice: there are editions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, the Wordsworth Classics Shakespeare Series, and umpteen other firms.

In Julius Caesar, Cassius says:

             How many ages hence

            Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,

            In states unborn and accents yet unknown?

His question has become a prophecy which history has amply fulfilled. In the sonnets, Shakespeare declares:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Originally, that sounded like an arrogant boast. As the centuries have passed, the boast has turned into a superb statement of fact.

When the critics and commentators have completed their explanatory work, we are left with the stubbornly simple fact that Shakespeare was, in the main, more articulately intelligent, sensitive and imaginative than the vast majority of people. A civilisation in which Shakespeare was not relevant would be a contradiction in terms: the popularity of Shakespeare is a gauge of the health of a civilisation.

Cedric Watts, M.A., PhD, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex is the editor of Wordsworth’s acclaimed Shakespeare series.

The post Shakespeare: Still Relevant? appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

The pleasures include:

1. Finding that the tales of Dubliners are not difficult except in their subtlety, and that, if some make you think ‘So what?’, most offer mundane reality transfigured or a memorably melancholy lyricism.

2. Learning that though critics have adopted its key-term ‘epiphany’ as literary-critical jargon, Stephen Hero (via Cranly) mocks such usage.

3. Relishing the big irony of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: part of the time, Stephen Dedalus is indeed a sympathetic version of the young James Joyce; but part of the time, Stephen Dedalus is an arrogant egotist who, like the Icarus to whom he likens himself, will fail: his derivative villanelle suggests that, and Ulysses proves that.

4. When reading Ulysses, discovering:

(a) that though parts are excruciatingly difficult, other parts abound in human interest;

(b) that the early 21st century is an excellent time to be reading it, because so much free explanatory help is available online;

(c) that unlike other famous Modernist texts, this one is not anti-Semitic but pro-Semitic; not elitist but democratic; not anti-urban but appreciative of the city; and not misogynistic but (eventually) pro-feminist;

(d) that the bawdry, once deemed so shocking, now seems a reasonable consequence of Joyce’s quest to be more fully realistic than other novelists;

(e) that it’s full of fun and games, of gags that still work, of puns that still make you cheer or groan appreciatively;

(f) that it’s heroic in being so frank about so many aspects of living, from defecation and masturbation to menstruation and voyeurism;

(g) that we get to know Leopold, Molly and Stephen better than we know our own relatives;

(h) that repeatedly its use of language offers rich sensual pleasures, subtle forms of oral and aural intercourse;

(i) that we learn much about much;

(j) that we learn humility, for Joyce’s linguistic intelligence is far greater than ours, and greater than that of almost all his commentators, whom he anticipates and mocks;

(k) that in contrast to the relatively flaccid and inert prose of many novelists, Joyce’s prose is multivocally energetic;

(l) that intelligence is the art of seeing connections between apparently unconnected entities, and Joyce teaches us this art;

(m) that this novel is fully political because it exceeds the political;

(n) that it generates Ulysses 2 in our imaginations: there Stephen gains Molly as a sexual partner and Leopold as a surrogate father; Stephen replaces Rudy, the son whom Leopold lost and laments; and together, Stephen, Leopold and Molly write Ulysses [1].

5. When we attempt to read Finnegans Wake, learning (before we give up in despair, anger or humiliation) that Ulysses seems, in contrast, accessible, congenial and moving.

6. Attempting again to read Finnegans Wake and finding that if we take it a little bit at a time, no hurry, we start to enjoy its wildly fantastic prose-poetry: our normal everyday prose then seems to resemble the language not of the sane but of the zombified.

Cedric Watts is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Sussex.

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