Analyzing Shakespearean Plays

For those of you who are looking for a companion text to Shakespeare’s works but don’t want something that either

• reads like Alan Greenspan wrote it when he was feeling particularly long-winded and verbose, or
• insults your intelligence by starting off with a sentence like, “Shakespeare lived a long time ago, before television”

then I would suggest looking to the last person you’d ever think to look to: Isaac Asimov. He wrote a guide to Shakespeare that gives a play-by-play analysis (har, har) of all Will’s works. Each section, devoted to a single work, is only 10-20 pages long and written very much for someone with a solid education and an appreciation for humanities, language, classics, and history who is simply looking to get a fresh perspective on one of Shakespeare’s plays. Best of all, just when you’re getting sick of reading… the section ends. Perfect. Now you can go play Halo.

Because I know you get cranky without your daily sonnet.

Sonnet 47

Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took,
And each doth good turns now unto the other:
When that mine eye is famished for a look,
Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother,
With my love’s picture then my eye doth feast,
And to the painted banquet bids my heart;
Another time mine eye is my heart’s guest,
And in his thoughts of love doth share a part.
So either by thy picture or my love,
Thyself, away, are present still with me,
For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move,
And I am still with them, and they with thee;
Or if they sleep, thy picture in my sight
Awakes my heart to heart’s and eye’s delight.

That’s sweet.

The Question of Authorship is one of those topics that is so over-discussed I hesitate to write a post about it. But something interesting has recently been cooked up by famous Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi that I simply can’t ignore.

His new Web site, DoubtAboutWill.org, re-ignites the authorship fire, claiming that the topic should be more openly discussed in classrooms and at dinner tables across the world. Finally, we should all point out the elephant in the room and stop kidding ourselves: there’s a possibility that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.

My question for the D.J.: Since when have people stopped discussing this possibility? Have I been the only person noticing that the shelf devoted to the Question of Authorship at Barnes & Noble seems to fester and grow larger each coming month? One of the most recent additions,
Shakespeare by Another Name, triumphantly declares near-proof that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare.

Sigh.

As a fellow Bard fan observed, Shakespeare is really more like a genre than a person, these days. If I were you, I wouldn’t worry too much about the issue. Go read Measure for Measure. Bask in the tenacity of Claudio and the virtuousness of Isabella. Don’t fret about where it came from.

Or, you can go sign Darek’s petition.

PISTOL
Fortune is Bardolph’s foe, and frowns on him;
For he hath stolen a pax, and hangéd must ‘a be—
A damnéd death!
(HV.III.6.38-40)

One summer, I lived with a good friend of mine in a two-story house near the New Hampshire seacoast. I didn’t really live with him, I only rented a room in his house when he had nobody else to help him pay the rent. He’d squandered an entire inheritance on sex, drugs, and beer and now he was lonely and broke. As much as I could manage, working an hour-and-a-half away, I’d stay at the house and spend the evening drinking, smoking, and watching movies. We hit on girls, frequented the 24-hour store across the river, and made lots of noise at indecent hours of the evening. The house was a mess. And the best part: we didn’t really care that the life we were living wasn’t all that serious. I had just had a breakup with a live-in girlfriend and I hated the responsibility my job put on my shoulders. So I let go. One of my favorite life memories is smoking a cigar on the roof of that house with my friend, shirtless and probably hung-over, in the hot afternoon sun. We had stopped taking life seriously and decided to take things slowly.

When, though, does life become serious? When does maturity and a sense of duty to life’s importances catch up with such a slow-paced, carefree existence?

One of the most interesting relationships in Shakespeare’s histories is that between young Harry of Monmouth, who would one day become King Henry V of England, and Falstaff, a drunken, cowardly, crude, yet endearing knight, and his two cohorts, Bardolph and Pistol. As a young man, Harry does not take life very seriously (unlike his brother, John of Lancaster, who seems to wear his responsibility with pride at a young age), and so he frequently partakes in mischievous–and sometimes criminal–acts with Falstaff, Bardolph, and Pistol. Yet, upon his father’s death in Henry IV Part II, young Harry turns a new leaf and forsakes his former friends. With responsibility finally forced upon him, he discovers that the weight of the world is not so burdensome if carried with purpose; the duties of a king not so wearisome if carried out with grace.

The girl I had left before living in that dirty house has since taught me something about patience. She taught me that an enjoyable youth need not be a flight from responsibility; that even those who decide to march forth and face life’s challenges may do so with careful thought and the benefits of a gracefulness. One must only maintain a leisurely state of mind to accomplish this. Harry, I think, does just that. Even as he rushes forth to invade France, fulfilling the wishes of his dead father, the young king seems to exude grace, patience, and good judgment. In his head, he is moving slowly: traitors are dealt with fairly, French cities are won with patience, and even the night before the Battle of Agincourt, the King can be found wandering the camp, musing upon the weight of his own responsibility.

Upon the king! Let us our lives, our souls,
Our debts, our careful wives,
Our children, and our sins, lay on the king!
We must bear all. O hard condition,
Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath
Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel
But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s ease
Must kings neglect that private men enjoy?
(HV.IV.1.223-230)

And how does he overcome the weight of those sovereign responsibilities illuminated in this lamentation? By delivering one of the greatest speeches ever written, the Saint Crispin’s Day Speech, which not only shifts the responsibility of death in battle and general hardship to the shoulders of his troops themselves, but also makes them glad of it. “Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, | But he’ll remember, with advantages, | What feats he did that day” (IV.3.50-52). By the end of the address, every man present would give his life for the chance to live many long, leisurely years wearing, with pride, the scars that symbolize the heavy burdens of the impending battle.

When you awake, one day, to find that you are glad of your responsibilities and wish to face them with grace and a healthful pride, what will you do with those who are still wasting time for a living? Even though you find them endearing, when it comes time to make a sacrifice for them, will you? Or will you be forced to leave them behind?

When Bardolph stole from a church against general orders, Henry had him hanged. What will you decide?

How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
Thou know’st we work by wit, and not by witchcraft;
And wit depends on dilatory time.
(Oth.II.3.376-379)

Maybe Shakespeare doesn’t spring to mind when you think of ways to deal with the emotional issues in your life. But, like all great works of art, Will’s works have a way of capturing the human condition in small, digestible spaces (in this case, manuscripts) that you can explore and learn from.

Take jealousy. It’s the double-edged companion to love and it affects us all. Feeling jealous is probably one of the worst emotional states to endure partially because it’s fueled and intensified by the freedom of our own imaginations. When you imagine your ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend, you imagine them holding hands and frolicking through daisy-dotted fields then winding down in front of a cozy fireplace and exchanging acts of perfect love and affection. Without us. Without needing us. And it’s maddening.

Here’s where I’d hand you a copy of Othello: The Moore of Venice. Hardly ever are our jealous imaginings founded in reality, and no better story demonstrates this than Shakespeare’s posthumously produced tragedy of love and betrayal. Iago, a soldier and confidant of Othello the general, spends most of his time onstage convincing Othello, misleadingly, that the Moore’s wife is having an affair. While the betrayal depicted in Othello is positively stomach-twisting, those of us who are suffering from jealousy can, I think, find some comfort in the idea that our worst fears about the people we love are not necessarily true, and even if those people have moved on from us or are betraying us, it’s probably not as wonderful for them (or bad for us) as we imagine.

One of the best parallels between Iago and our own personal Jealousy Demons is the fact that both of them have deep, ambiguous origins that we cannot always place. Here, Wikipedia lists several possible motivations for Iago’s character:

1. Failure to be promoted
2. Racism
3. Jealousy (of Emilia, of Desdemona or of Othello)
4. Sexual infidelity
5. Insecurity
6. Supreme intellect unregulated by emotion or conscience (sociopathy)
7. Sadism
8. Homosexuality

That’s a lot of possibilities. It could even be a combination of these reasons that drives Iago’s personal quest to fuel Othello’s jealous imagination. What’s fueling your Iago, and how can you get over those problems and move on with your life?

In the first chapter of PrinceHamlet.com’s Hamlet: The Undiscovered Country, Stephen F. Roth examines the idea that the character of the Danish Prince was originally meant to be a teenager, not a man of thirty years, as the accepted version of the play states.

So there’s all sorts of evidence in and surrounding the play showing that Hamlet is a teen. But beyond all this “hard” evidence, there’s Hamlet’s character. In addition to being brilliant, noble, acceptably eloquent, and all those other things we love about him, at least until the final act he’s naïve (”meet it is I set it down/That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!” 1.5.115), peevish, petulant, wildly changeable from moment to moment, maddeningly and intransigently judgemental, a know-it-all theater critic, and a shallow philosopher who actually believes he can solve the eternal human problems that nobody else has succeeded at. If that’s not a teenager, what is?

If you read Stephen’s paper in its entirety, you will find many good bits of evidence suggesting that Hamlet’s character was originally meant to be younger than twenty. Why is this important to Stephen? “The play,” he writes, “doesn’t make sense if Hamlet is thirty.”

I agree that the question of age is important, but the significance of Hamlet’s age, for me, means something different. I’m a huge fan of the Kenneth Branagh interpretation of Hamlet, and after seeing it I believe the play can and does make sense emotionally with Hamlet as a thirty-year-old if the character’s motivations are properly portrayed. Notice that Branagh’s Hamlet stares at a reflection of himself as he recites the infamous Act III, Scene 1 soliloquy.

To be, or not to be–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
(III.1.56-60)

This mirror-talking is brilliant and appropriate to the thirty-year-old-Hamlet because the character is testing his own resolution to perform a horrible act of vengeance, not naively stating the obvious as Stephen Roth’s interpretation of Hamlet might suggest. Here, Hamlet is reciting previously understood knowledge back at himself, not discovering the knowledge for the first time. Contrast Branagh’s delivery with this woefully-low-production-value Darek Jakobi interpretation, in which Hamlet asks the above lines of monologue to the audience as if it were a question. Here, Hamlet does sound naive; he’s thirty years old and only just discovering that the choice between action and inaction in the face of adversity is a difficult one. If I had never seen Branagh’s Hamlet, I might agree with Stephen Roth.

The Hamlet who forsakes the carefree ideals of his youth and struggles to give rebirth to his passion as an individual capable of great deeds would probably resonate more with thirty-year-olds of the modern era than with teenagers. This Hamlet, who is not experiencing first-time discovery, but rather is applying his old ideas to an important rebirth of purpose, feels more like a man whose midlife crisis looms on the horizon; whose mortal clock suddenly strikes noon and calls for action. (For Hamlet, his father’s murder and ghostly visitation are simply the catalysts to his rebirth of self-purpose.) Indeed, we all assume when we are young that we will do something great in our lives. So when, in the course of our lives, do we find that we have not yet done anything great by our own standards? When do we panic and attach ourselves to a single cause and fervently fight to gain a sense of self-worth? The big three-oh, I think. The bridge between old and young. What passionate youth could possibly have enough life experience to declare his previous existence frivolous and to forsake the memory of his former days to make room for a single cause? On the contrary, today’s youths are expected to live their first twenty years in a childlike state, following the rules of school and parents, easing into responsibility, before they are expected to do anything great. And those youths who do something great in their early years are expected to incorporate that experience into their blossoming lives, not to replace their minds entirely with the idea now and forever. So when I read Hamlet’s vow to his father’s ghost,

Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!
(I.5.95-104)

I hear the words of a man who, having lost his way, has just rediscovered that he is alive and willing to use up his life in the name of something great. Only a man who has already lived, already passed through the material pleasures and trivial pains of youth and has begun to question the importance of his own existence could possibly forget those “baser” youthful pursuits for the sake of something great–something as single-minded as the struggle to achieve total vengeance.

Perhaps, once, the character of Hamlet was written as a teenager. But I’m glad it was changed. Because people grow up slower nowadays and Hamlet’s personal quest–his motivation–will be accepted more readily by an audience of modern thirty-somethings who know what it’s like to wake up in the face of change and yearn for a reason to rekindle the battle against inaction and inadequacy.