Shakespeare: A Life (35 page)

are well disposed to him, and when he invades old Capulet's feast
that enemy is not unkind or hostile. 'To say truth', as Capulet
admits,

Verona brags of him
To be a virtuous and well-governed youth.
I would not for the wealth of all this town
Here in my house do him disparagement.

(I. v. 66-9)

In a play about love in rival Italian families the true lovers, oddly,
have no obvious obstacles to surmount. The town's lawgiver is Escalus,
Prince of Verona, who angrily ensures that penalties for violence
will be extreme. Romeo and Juliet fall in love in an instant, and
might prosper except that they neglect moment-to-moment realities in a
drama of competing awarenesses. The tragedy occurs in four days.
Images emphasize clock time, morning and night, days of the week,
sequences, the exact lapse of time since a fatal event.

The most chilling murder in Shakespeare's plays occurs on Verona's
streets. No violence in Othello or Macbeth, even the blinding of
Gloucester in King Lear, has the chancy, terrible immediacy of
Tybalt's killing of Mercutio with a thrust under Romeo's arm. That is
untheatrical murder, of a kind known in each London parish. In keeping
with that realism, the balcony scene -- the most famous scene in any
drama -- is dependent on fleetingness, enclosure, sharp disruption, and a
defiance of locale. Town, balcony, stony courtyard, perilous walls are
inimical to sexual love, but love battens on opposition as if wished
for by the lovers, rises to the stars, drawing the terror out of
death, and defying all that mocks love's constancy. Romeo and Juliet
are right -- the world is wrong -- or they are right to defy the time
and circumstance that begrime everyone else.

Elizabethans would have seen them as ideal in honouring love, silly
in flouting parental wishes, and their tragedy as being the result of a
conflict between rationality and impulse. Yet the lovers are not
tainted. The Franciscan Friar upbraids Romeo for his ardour while
loving him the more for it. Capulet loses charity to become a testy
old cormorant who will wed his daughter Juliet to Paris willy-nilly,

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and he is one of the play's fine achievements, his wishfulness
foreshadowing Falstaff, then giving a ground-note to offset the lovers'
lyric flights. Even the obtuse are in love with words, from Lady
Capulet with her book-imagery, to the illiterate Nurse who is obsessed
with the 'R' of the hero's name: 'Doth not Rosemary and Romeo begin
both with a letter?' she asks. (For Elizabethans, R was the dog's
letter since its sound was like a growl.) But the literary images and
gorgeous lyric flights might be no more than commercial features of
Chamberlain's and Admiral's rivalry. Dekker -a prolific dramatist --
wrote of dramas good enough to tie an audience's ears with 'golden
chains' to verbal 'Melody', and so make the ignorant

clap their
Brawny hands,
T'
Applaud,
what their
charmd
soule scarce understands.
¹³

If this refers to Shakespeare, it slanders him, since his scenes are
usually clear for those of 'brawny hands' and for the refined alike. But
'Melody', or fine, well-worked verse helped such a play as Romeo to
keep its appeal so that it might stay in the repertoire for two years,
be taken off for three or four, and then put back again later. The
'high style' was profitable.

Still
his lyricism here, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Richard II, has
other causes. Shakespeare had a realistic view of himself and nobody of
discernment around 1596 would have ranked him with Sidney, Spenser,
or, perhaps, even Marlowe. In the commercial theatre he could not have
hoped to match the first two, nor need we assume that he secretly
thought of himself as Sidney's or Spenser's equal. He was in his own
view in this decade a functionary, or a minor cause of a troupe's
ability to endure; and his verbal grace, after all, was the essence of
his usefulness. In emulating the best poets he knew, in opposing the
stage's banalities and exercising lyric talents he had developed in
the plague years, he hoped to profit with his troupe, but, then, he
also kept open for himself an option to decipher and picture his own
complex, inner sense of society and behaviour.

He takes risks in Juliet's 'high style'. She speaks in rather
magnificent literary images with the cadences of a Roman goddess
rallying the

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legions, as in her frank display of sexual ardour while awaiting Romeo in Act III, after he has killed Tybalt:

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus' lodging! Such a waggoner
As Phaëton would whip you to the west
And bring in cloudy night . . .

(III, ii. 1-4)

Juliet's 'high style' divides her from the impercipient around her. The
intensity of her love infects Romeo, who is like an adolescent glad
to find the proper, inevitable role. (One forgets that he is
indirectly responsible for six deaths.) Juliet's suicide in the
Capulet tomb, at last, is saintly, and Romeo's has a touching,
histrionic grandeur: 'O, here', he says, bemoaning his 'world-wearied
flesh' as he leans with a poison vial over pale Juliet for one final
kiss,

Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace, and lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death.

(V. iii. 109, 112-15)

Finally, the dead lovers seem asleep. The Friar retells their tragic
story for the benefit of Verona, as if to underline his lesson that
grace and hatred are interrelated, always present. Pure love is brief.
Hatred or violence, in a modern city, may be expected to endure.

For all its point and great power, the play has trivial weaknesses (as
critics rightly notice). Its heaped-up coincidences, or the poor
exposition which brings the Chorus on again in Act II, or the
inexplicably sudden failure of the Nurse's sympathies, or the Friar's
awkward exit from the Capulet tomb, suggest an author troubled by
structure as he develops a new kind of romantic tragedy. However in A
Midsummer Night's Dream -- which is likely often to have been staged a
few days after Romeo, which it sends up -- he offers a funny,
self-mocking summary of what he has achieved in comedy and tragedy so
far. This play is so brightly unique it can seem to have no sources --
though it fuses much from folklore and legend, as well as from works
such as

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Plutarch Lives, Chaucer Knight's Tale and Merchant's Tale, and Lyly's plays, while being unlike any model.

Was the Dream written for a private occasion? We hear sometimes that
it amused Queen Elizabeth at the wedding of the sixth Earl of Derby
and Elizabeth Vere (on 26 January 1595), or that it was designed for
the wedding of Lord Hunsdon's granddaughter Elizabeth Carey and
Thomas, the son of Lord Berkeley (on 19 February 1596). Both brides
were god-daughters to the Queen, who had over a hundred god-daughters
and seldom went to weddings, though she did attend the Derby-Vere one;
but masques (not plays) were performed at Tudor aristocratic weddings
and we do not know of a play's being acted at a court wedding until
1614. The Dream, moreover, opens with references to a bleak, cold
virginity unflattering to a Virgin Queen. If Hermia will not wed the
man her father chooses, she must live as a nun, a 'barren sister all
your life', and Theseus warns her with ducal firmness:

earthlier happy is the rose distilled
Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.

(1. i. 72, 76-8)

It is hard to believe that these lines, vital to the plot, were deleted
if and when the play went to court, but 'barren sister' or 'virgin
thorn' may not have upset Gloriana. The play elsewhere seems to
compliment her. The author was not hostile to his Queen, but he would
have jeopardized his troupe's profitability by court-toadying, and
nearly all of his plays would have been acted first on the London
stage, before being taken to an Inn, to court, or anywhere else. Aware
of Lyly's examples he uses a free, brisk method in balancing and
combining the Dream's personae -- who include Theseus and Hippolyta, a
quartet of lovers, the fairies, and the artisans who will perform
with sublime bungling 'Pyramus and Thisbe' for Theseus's nuptial day.
Most of the mortals quickly retreat to woods where Oberon, King of the
Fairies, his Queen Titania and their fairy troupe and the spirit of
Puck live.

Do fairies cause our
misery? Puck puts Cupid's love-juice on Lysander's eyes as Oberon does
on Demetrius's -- so both men are attracted to an exasperated Helena.
But Helena had noted love's

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absurdity before entering the magic wood, and Demetrius has been
fickle beforehand. Theseus, whom critics have cited as the Tudor ideal,
has seduced or raped Ariadne, Antiopa, Perigenia, and Aegles, names
the author derives from Plutarch's 'Theseus'. In being only lightly
individuated, Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena the better
suggest in their yearning and pain that love's 'madness' is universal.

Marital peace and fidelity everywhere may be slight: the Fairy King
and Queen, in coming to bless Theseus and Hippolyta, are torn by
bickering and jealousy. Suave aristocrats, in Act V, deride working
men who, with no very clear hope of profit, have come to entertain
them, and the human mind is implicitly seen to be irrational, out of
control, faithless, thankless, unkind, and viciously changeful.

At the heart of Shakespeare's comic view of life is his tragic sense,
and the Dream is evidence that the tragic sense had fairly early roots.
The play explores what must have been memories of 'midsummer
madness', magic times and features of a country boyhood such as
Midsummer Eve with its greenery decoration, divinations, and religious
connections with nature. The artisans themselves relate to Stratford
days. Snout the tinker is to animate Wall for the artisans' play of
'Pyramus and Thisbe'. 'Some man or other', says Nick Bottom, 'must
present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some
rough-cast about him, to signify "wall"; and let him hold his fingers
thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper' (III.
i. 62-6). Of similar materials 'the wall' outside Stratford's grammar
school bordering the Gild chapel's garden was busily repaired and
rebuilt in the 1570s. About 5 per cent of all official payments by
council in a year focus on it, so the Wall has an amusing life today
in the Minutes and Accounts:

Item for reparacions of the wall . . .

p
^d
to Wever for hernes ['earnest' or pre-payment for repairs] of the walle . . .

p
^d
for syx Rafters to ley vpon the Chappell garden wall . . .

p
^d
for the peare of Rafters for the wall . . .

p
^d
Thomas Tyler for his two men, iiij [4] dayes worke about the garden wall

of the Chapell

p
^d
to wever to make an ende of the wall

p
^d
to Thomas tyler for his men working at the Chappell wall . . .
¹⁴

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Endless work on a wall at Church Street, in days when the author was
going to school, puts one in mind of a Midland town's slow, puttering
normalcy in contrast to the tenor of an actor's days in London. The
funny artisans are sketched with compassion, if not with nostalgia. What
enriches the Dream is the breadth of human experience always implied
in it, and its workers in their authentic dignity do not seem to be
caricatures. Ease of style masks the Dream's profundity, but that ease
is biographically interesting as a sign of the author's long
familiarity with themes he can handle most lightly: a person of his
quality of memory gathers in time past, and may 'compose' quickly what
has been in gestation half a lifetime.

Darkness at the play's heart makes its humour the more affecting.
Changed into an ass and loved by an exquisite Fairy Queen -- another
Fairy Queen, one notes, was even more humiliated at about this time
¹⁵
-- Bottom sums up his experience in 'Bottom's Dream'. Echoing St Paul
in 1 Corinthians 2: 9 and confusing the senses, he suggests that the
mind's dominance over the eye is a means of gaining divine grace from
woodland ritual. The 'bottom of Goddes secretes' cannot be known, as
one reads, for example, in the Bishops' Bible ( 1568) or the Geneva
Bible ( 1557). 'The eye of man hath not heard', says Bottom earnestly,

the ear of man hath not
seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor
his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to
write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ' Bottom's Dream',
because it hath no bottom (IV. i. 208-13).
¹⁶

In farce, Shakespeare can allude easily to matters that involve his
own past or his present. These religious motifs have early naïve
origins, and ' Bottom's Dream' appears to reflect schoolboy lessons of
the 1570s about God's unknowability, if not a classroom's jokiness as
well. The 'Dream' as a dream within the
Dream
gets some of its
edge and comic depth from a poet's mature, pessimistic reflections on
what he had once understood simply. Significantly Bottom stars in
Peter Quince's ' Pyramus and Thisbe'. Here self-directed satire is
apparent. Peter Quince is like Shakespeare in writing a drama and
acting in it, in being versatile, assigning parts and dealing with
actors, arranging rehearsals

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