Plays 12 through 21
I have really fallen behind in my Shakespeare schedule! At the start of the year, when I made the resolution to read 'em all in one year, I figured that a play is like a movie, a movie is usually two hours long, and therefore it'd be two hours to read each play. Instead, it seems to take me at least 5 hours to read each one. It's partly length; it turns out the average length of a Shakespeare play (if you read it 1000 words per hour) is closer to 3 hours than 2. And secondly, it's those damn footnotes. I'm an avowed reader of Shakespeare with footnotes, so that I can glean as much meaning as possible from the plays, but reading the footnotes as well nearly doubles the time it takes to read a play.
And, of course, I've taken a couple of lengthy breaks in my reading schedule, too. The first when I lost my Kindle, and the second in July when I ran out of steam midway through the Histories and read a bunch of less challenging things.
Now, I've got about 10 weeks left, and 20 plays to get through, so I've got to start reading two or three a week if I want to finish on schedule! Not that it particularly matters whether I do or not, I suppose. I could give up now and still have gained a lot of enrichment from reading Shakespeare. But still, it's something I'd like to do. I have not succeeded on my other New Year's Resolution of joining some kind of social club or activity here in Wellington, so at least I can succeed on one resolution!
I also meant to do a write-up of my impressions of each play afterwards, and I've fallen behind on that as well, as each write-up tended to take me an hour or more, and I've started to run low on time. The last one I wrote was about Richard II, when I was still in the Spring end of the histories. Now I've passed through the Winter of Richard III's discontent and come out into the comedies on the other end, so I may as well look back and write them up a little bit.
12 - 14: Henry IV parts 1 & 2, Henry V
These plays, along with "Richard II", make up the second historical tetralogy written by Shakespeare, the so-called "Henriad". They tell the story of kind Richard II being deposed, Henry IV usurping the throne, and his son Henry V passing through a rebellious youth to become a noble and well-regarded king. As my plan was to read the histories in historical order, I didn't realize that these were written after the other tetralogy, but having now been through them, looking back I can definitely see. Each of these four plays was indeed quite solid and worthy to stand on its own, although any of them would lose a lot of the impact if you weren't versed in the history of the time.
However, the problem with the histories is that their plots are based, however loosely, on actual historical events, and so they tend to lack the neatness of dramatic structure that Shakespeare's other plays have. Other Shakespeare plays work like clockwork, with each event intermeshing to drive the ones after it, and consequently if you can remember one part of it you can remember the whole. But my memories of the plots of the histories are pretty vague. As I recall off the top of my head, Henry 4.1, 4.2, and 5 are all about Henry IV, who usurped the throne with support from most of the nobles, finding that support waning and finding that nobles want to now usurp it from him as he once usurped it. Henry V continues in this vein... possibly he also conquers France.
Ah, checking synopses online, my memory is refreshed. In Henry IV part 1, Henry IV deals with a three-part alliance of nobles he has treated poorly, who want to depose him and split the kingdom three ways themselves. This play included my favorite Shakespeare character of all the histories, Harry "Hotspur" Percy. As his name implies, he's a hot-headed knight who is constantly pushing people's buttons out of a sense of contrariness that reminded me of Flip from "Little Nemo". Throughout the play he's utterly unimpressed by his fellow rebel Owen Glendower (who is also played up for laughs as a Welsh stereotype). Here's Glendower saying that there were fearful supernatural signs at his birth, and here's Hotspur mocking him over that:
GLENDOWER: At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward.
HOTSPUR: Why, so it would have done at the same season, if your mother’s cat had but kittened, though yourself had never been born.
GLENDOWER: I say the earth did shake when I was born.
HOTSPUR: And I say the earth was not of my mind,
If you suppose as fearing you it shook.
Henry 4.1 and 4.2 also introduce the main story arc of many people's favorite Shakespeare character, the fat dishonest knight Falstaff. I did find him pretty fun, and charming in his flat-out dishonesty and cowardliness, but honestly he fell a bit flat on the page for me, because so much of his dialogue was made up of inscrutable Elizabethan puns. This is a general problem with Shakespeare's comedy. Little of his wordplay has survived the shift in meanings of words through the centuries, and although I have footnotes to explain the jokes to me, they're not very funny when I have to have them explained. The comedy that survives best, of his, is the situational comedy, the irony, and the interactions between characters. Still, Falstaff does have a few good scenes. In one scene, he's meant to be drafting men from a village to fight in a war, and he goes through the process taking bribes from the able-bodied to get them out of the draft, and purposefully picking the scrawny ones who look like they'll get killed, so that he can pocket their wages. That sounds pretty grim, but it actually comes out quite funny. There's also a point where his friend, prince Henry (who will become Henry V) runs into him on the field during combat, and asks him where his musket is, and Falstaff opens up his musket-case to show he's been keeping a bottle of booze in it instead of a musket. Oh, that Falstaff!
In the end, though, Prince Henry rejects Falstaff as an immoral criminal, and he dies off-stage in poverty in Henry V. This was a bit unsatisfactory to me, since I'm used to modern comedies (like "Seinfeld" and "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") in which the immorality of the characters is played for laughs, and nothing bad ever happens to them in return (well, until the final episode of Seinfeld). In the Henriad, Falstaff's immorality is played for laughs, but he's also used as a moral object lesson. Prince Henry cavorts with him in Henry IV part 1, rejecting him at the end. Then, although Falstaff has many scenes in Henry IV part 2, he never seens Prince Henry until the very end when Henry becomes King Henry V. Falstaff then meets up with him, and expects to be showered with riches by his old friend. Instead, Henry V soundly rebukes him, assigns him a small enough pension to live on so that he won't have to steal anymore, and banishes Falstaff on pain of death from coming within a 10-mile radius of him.
Henry 4.2 begins with a prologue delivered by a personification of the concept of Rumour, which I enjoyed inasmuch as it reminded me of elementary school plays in which one child delivers a song from the point of view of the sun or a tree ("I am the sun and I shine on the trees, so now they grow up and spread their green leaves"). Here's a bit from that:
Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, [constantly] unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth:
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
And Rumour is described as "painted full of tongues", in other words wearing a suit with tongues painted all over it. That's an interesting image as well.
Checking Wikipedia to refresh my memory, I see that Henry V deals mostly with his conquest of France. I can see how I got that mixed up. The whole run of histories from Henry 4.1 through Henry 6.3 is nearly entirely composed of constant battles between various forces, nearly indistinguishable, over vague and unjustified causes, with characters shifting alliances and changing sides between them just to muddy the waters still more. In Henry VI act 1 he declares war on France, partly due to being spurred on by some greedy bishops, who want to distract him so that he doesn't proceed with a tax reform that would take land away from him. They point out to him that, if the French followed primogeniture with female heirs the same way the English do, he would be heir to the throne of France. They go on to say that the reason the French don't allow female heirs is because of the Salic law, but Salic law, if you read it closely, is only meant to apply in a geographic reason outside of France. Thus, Henry is king. Henry buys it, and after some rudeness from the French ambassadors and urging on by his nobles, he goes off and conquers France for no good reason. This takes up the rest of the play, and it is quite dramatic and satisfying while you're reading it, but in retrospect I can remember none of it. In the end, he forces the King of France to name Henry V as his heir, in favor of his won son the Dauphin.
15 - 17: Henry IV parts 1, 2, and 3
Were there really three parts in the King Henry plays? My mind reels at the thought. But if I look back on it, I think I can prise out a few details.
These plays were some of the earliest Shakespeare wrote, in fact his third through fifth plays, according to Wikipedia's chronology. Also according to Wikipedia, they're considered some of his weakest. Looking back, I certainly agree with that. The Henry 6 plays were a major speedbump in my Shakespeare reading. They're also on the long side of Shakespeare's plays, and so full of nobles shifting alliances (and many of them with 3 different names they're known by, as William de la Pole Duke of Suffolk, who might be called William, Pole, or Suffolk) that I had to keep a notepad open with all the characters names and their allegiances. In other Shakespeare plays I haven't needed to do that, because the casts are more succinct and the characterizations are vivid enough that even if I split up my reading over several days, I quickly recall who each character is and their relationships from just a little dialogue.
Henry 6.1 starts with the funeral of Henry V. The French, so recently conquered, quickly rebel and the rest of the play deals with the English trying to put their rebellion down. Henry VI is only a child (in real history he was an infant when Henry V died, but in the play we don't see him or hear about his age until he's a child come into the age of reason), so the war is mostly fought on his behalf by his representatives. In the end, they defeat the French, but by now Henry VI is a teenager able to make his own decisions, and he makes some ones that the other English don't like. A peaceful, religious-minded man (described later as being better off as a monk than a king) he agrees with the Pope's request that they make peace with France, and leave the French king Charles in charge of the country as a viceroy (a situation in which the French have way too much strength and will obviously take the country back at the first opportunity). Henry is also persuaded by the Earl of Suffolk to marry the beautiful but destitute Princess Margaret of Anjou, whose father is titular King of Jerusalem and Sicily but actually only controls a couple of small regions in France. (Everyone else would prefer him to arrange a marriage that would be more politically beneficial.) These decisions ultimately lose him France, all his political support, and his life.
The real joy of Henry 6.1 for me was Joan of Arc. Yes, the female teen warrior who had visions from God, it turns out the rebellion she aided in was the French's rebellion against the English under Henry VI. In this play, which is told from a very pro-English anti-French point of view, she's portrayed as a false prophet who claims to have God-given powers, but in the end is revealed to have obtained them by sleeping with demons. She defeats men in combat, and beguiles them with her beauty in person. I guess I always love Shakespeare's gleeful villains, and Joan is quite gleeful and villainous, not to mention salacious. When she first meets Charles the Dauphin (aka the heir to the King of France, who is also confusingly named Charles), she defeats him in single combat, and then he's so taken in by her beauty and fighting skill that he begs her to marry him even though she's a commoner. She replies with that she must remain a virgin... until they win the war.
CHARLES: Impatiently I burn with thy desire;
My heart and hands thou hast at once subdued.
Excellent Pucelle [Joan's known as "Joan la Pucelle", i.e. "Joan the girl"], if thy name be so,
Let me thy servant and not sovereign be:
'Tis the French Dauphin sueth to thee thus.
JOAN: I must not yield to any rites of love,
For my profession's sacred from above:
When I have chased all thy foes from hence,
Then will I think upon a recompense.
Henry 6.2 was probably the most difficult of the histories to get through, lacking as it does any Joan. Instead, the entire play deals with the plotting and double-crossing of the English noblemen, and Henry VI's inability to notice it or stop it. Richard, the Duke of York, has learned that he's the most legitimate heir to Richard II (the king who Henry IV deposed), and he plots to weaken Henry VI's supporters by pitting them against each other, and then finally openly rebels. The most memorable scene to me is a demon-summoning by the Duke of Gloucester's wife early on. I guess another thing I like in Shakespeare is demons. There's also a fun scene where Gloucester debunks a fraudster who claims to have been miraculously cured of blindness and lameness, and a peasant rebellion (stirred up by Richard of York) with lots of bawdy puns. In fact, it's the peasant rebellion where the famous line, "First, kill all the lawyers" comes from, as Jack Cade makes his way across the land holding criminal trials against everyone who knows how to read or shows signs of nobility. Ultimately, though, this was a lengthy and forgettable play.
Strangely enough, though, I really liked Henry 6.3. To me it felt like the most cut-throat, "Game of Thrones"-esque of all the plays. It begins with York's rebels having defeated Henry VI's supporters in London, and forcing their way into Parliament, where they confront the King. Henry, who is by himself without any guard, is face to face with a small crowd of armed rebels whose weapons are practically still dripping with blood. They explain to him York's claim to the throne, and Henry has no valid comeback at all. Partly from fear, partly out of respect for the legitimacy of York's claim, and partly out of being a genuinely peace-loving man, Henry begs them to end their rebellion in exchange for Richard of York becoming his heir, if only they will let let Henry rule for the rest of his days. The Yorkists are moved by his speech and agree to it, leaving him.
And this is the part I found most delicious. Trying only to please everyone and make peace, Henry pisses off everyone and winds up with no friends at all. Shortly after the Yorkists have left, his supporters come back to Parliament and find him, and his wife and son are understandably enraged at him giving up their inheritance, and his supporters are enraged that he has so casually given away that which they were fighting and dying for. His supporters storm off in disgust, and his wife takes his son and goes off to command Henry's former supporters in fighting to take back the crown, in defiance of Henry's own wishes.
PRINCE EDWARD: Father, you cannot disinherit me:
If you be king, why should not I succeed?
KING HENRY VI: Pardon me, Margaret; pardon me, sweet son:
The Earl of Warwick and the duke enforced me.
QUEEN MARGARET: Enforced thee! Art thou king, and wilt be forced?
I shame to hear the espeak. Ah, timorous wretch!
Thou hast undone thyself, thy son and me;
And given unto the house of York such head
As thou shalt reign but by their sufferance.
To entail him and his heirs unto the crown,
What is it, but to make thy sepulchre
And creep into it far before thy time?
Warwick is chancellor and the lord of Calais;
Stern Falconbridge commands the narrow seas;
The duke is made protector of the realm;
And yet shalt thou be safe? Such safety finds
The trembling lamb environed with wolves.
Had I been there, which am a silly woman,
The soldiers should have tossed me on their pikes
Before I would have granted to that act.
But thou preferr'st thy life before thine honor:
And seeing thou dost, I her divorce myself
Both from thy table, Henry, and thy bed,
Until that act of parliament be repealed
Whereby my son is disinherited.
The northern lords that have foresworn thy colors
Will follow mine, if once they see them spread;
And spread they shall be, to thy foul disgrace
And utter ruin of the house of York.
Thus do I leave thee. Come, son, let's away;
Our army is ready; come, we'll after them.
KING HENRY VI: Stay, gentle Margaret, and hear me speak.
QUEEN MARGARET: Thou hast spoke too much already; get thee gone.
Meanwhile, as Margaret predicted, York and his supporters are not thinking kind of thoughts of protecting Henry. Instead, York's sons and supporters immediately persuade him that he can be king a lot quicker if he doesn't wait for Henry to die a natural death. Their reasoning is that Richard of York is and always has been the rightful heir, therefore it is hastening justice if he kills Henry and takes the crown right away.
RICHARD: Brother, though I be the youngest, give me elave.
EDWARD: No, I can better play the orator.
MONTAGUE: But I have reasons strong and forcible.
YORK: Why, how now, sons and brother! At a strife?
What is your quarrel? How began it first?
EDWARD: No quarrel, but a slight contention.
YORK: About what?
RICHARD: About that which concerns your grace and us;
The crown of England, father, which is yours.
YORK: Mine, boy? Not till King Henry be dead.
RICHARD: Your right depends not on his life or death.
EDWARD: Now your are heir, therefore enjoy it now:
By giving the house of Lancaster leave to breathe,
It will outrun you, father, in the end.
YORK: I took an oath that he should quietly reign.
EDWARD: But for a kingdom any oath may be broken:
I would break a thousand oaths to reign one year.
RICHARD: No; God forbid your grace should be forsworn.
Richard, the conniving hunchback who in "Richard III" goes on to kill everyone in his family on order to sieze the throne, convinces his father that his oath not to harm Henry was invalid, because "An oath is of no moment, being not took before a true and lawful magistrate, who hath authority over him that swears" and since Henry is not the rightful heir to the throne, he is not a lawful magistrate. York buys, saying "Richard, enough; I will be king, or die." and immediately sends away to re-gather the forces he has just dispersed.
Thus both sides, momentarily at peace, immediately re-gather to fight each other in a vicious war that lasts the rest of the play. King Henry VI sits sadly by the sidelines the whole time, lamenting that no one will listen to him and watching all the wartime atrocities that happen. In one scene so touching it's nearly melodramatic, he sits on the sidelines of a battle and observes as a man removes the helmet of an opposing soldier he's just killed, only to find that the soldier was his own father, who had been drafted for the opposite side of the civil war. And moments later, another soldier realizes he has killed his own son.
SOLDIER 1: Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.
This man, whom hand to hand I slew in fight,
May be possessed with some store of crowns;
And I, that haply take them from him now,
May yet ere night yield both my life and them
To some man else, as this dead man doth me.
Who's this? O God! It is my father's face,
Whom in this conflict I unawares have killed.
O heavy times, begetting such events!
From London by the king was I pressed forth;
My father, being the Earl of Warwick's man,
Came on the part of York, pressed by his master;
And I, who at his hands received my life, him
Have by my hands of life bereaved him.
Pardon me, God, I knew not what I did!
And pardon, father, for I knew not thee!
My tears shall wipe away these bloody marks;
And no more words till they have flowed their fill.
KING HENRY VI: O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!
Whiles lions war and battle for their dens,
Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity.
Weep, wretched man, I'll aid thee tear for tear;
And let our hearts and eyes, like civil war,
Be blind with tears, and break o'ercharged with grief.
SOLDIER 2: Thou that so stoutly hast resisted me,
Give me thy gold, if thou hast gold:
For I have bought it with an hundred blows.
But let me see: is this our foeman's face?
Ah, no, no, no, it is mine only son!
Ah, boy, if any life be left in thee,
Throw up thine eye! See, see what showers arise,
Blown with the windy tempest of my heart,
Upon thy words, that kill mine eye and heart!
O, pity, God, this miserable age!
What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly,
Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural,
This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!
O boy, thy father gave thee life too soon,
And haft bereft thee of thy life too [recently]!
SOLDIER 1: How will my mother for a father's death
Take on with me and never be satisfied!
SOLDIER 2: How will my wife for slaughter of my son
Shed seas of tears and never be satisfied!
KING HENRY VI: How will the country for these woeful chances
Misthink the king and not be satisfied!
SOLDIER 1: Was ever son so rued a father's death?
SOLDIER 2: Was ever father so bemoaned his son?
KING HENRY VI: Was ever king so grieved for subjects' woe?
Much is your sorrow; mine ten times so much.
That's one thing you can say about the histories, they've got some great laments in them. And Queen Margaret, who essentially takes over the King's forces while the king himself lays around more and more morosely moaning for peace, gets some great speeches full of outrage. And Richard of York's sons get increasingly bloodthirsty, ruthless, and selfish, especially Richard the hunchback, who towards the end of the play, after giving little hint of his thoughts to the audience thus far, takes it upon himself to stab to death the deposed and captive former King Henry VI just to be on the safe side, and then solilquizes to the audience about all the people he's going to have to stab before he gets to be king, since according to the rules of primogeniture he's in line behind his two older brothers and all their children and their children's children.
If any spark of life be yet remaining,
Down, down to hell; and say I sent thee thither:
Stabs Henry again
I, that have neither pity, love, nor fear.
Indeed, 'tis true that Henry told me of;
For I have often heard my mother say
I came into the world with my legs forward:
Had I not reason, think ye, to make haste,
And seek their ruin that uspurped our right?
The midwife wondered and the women cried
"O, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!"
And so I was; which plainly signified
That I should snarl and bite and play the dog.
Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,
Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word "love", which graybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me.
...
King Henry and the prince his son are gone:
Clarence [Richard's brother]; thy turn is next, and then the rest,
Counting myself but bad till I be best.
This sets the stage for "Richard III", the story of how Richard got to the throne.
On a final note, I note that some of my favorite characters in the histories are the deposed kings, Richard II and Henry VI. They both have some great speeches about the experience of going from the highest office in society (the King) to the lowest (a captive), from controlling everything to controlling nothing, and on how this is reflective of the general state of mankind and our life in this world.
18. Richard III
And lastly you've got Richard III. After Richard's villainy in Henry 6.3, where he convinced his father to renege on his oath not to kill Henry, and where he personally sought out and stabbed various of their enemies and was generally the most bloodthirsty and sly-mouthed of the York sons, and especially after his soliloquy on how awful he is and how he plans to kill his brothers and work his way to the throne, I had high expectations for this play. I suppose another part of this, was my reflection, after Richard's soliloquy in Henry 6.3, that he seems to be an influence on Tyrion from "Game of Thrones". I might add as background to that comment, that I read Shakespeare's histories at the same time as I first watched the Game of Thrones TV series, and as such I was immediately struck by how much they reminded me of each other. It's obvious that Shakespeare's histories was one of the inspirations for "Game of Thrones", down to even some of the names being similar (Lancaster = Lannister being the most obvious). However, it's only a loose inspiration, with the actual events and relationships of Game of Thrones not bearing much resemblance to the actual events in Shakespeare's plays. It's more like if you took Shakespeare's plays, put them in a bag, shook them until they crumbled apart into their component pieces, and then took those pieces out and used them in building something new, in combination with other pieces from other sources, and entirely new ones as well.
So, among those bits and pieces, I was struck that Tyrion resembles Richard III. In Game of Thrones, Tyrion is a dwarf, and a younger son, from the house of Lannister. He is looked down upon by his family, but over the course of the series he proves to be clever, politically savvy, and good at persuading people to do what he wants. In these respects he is similar to Richard III, who is looked down upon for being a hunchback, but ultimately proves to be a very persuasive orator and very politically savvy. Of course, unlike Richard III, Tyrion turns out to be one of the nobler characters in the series, and is more of a hero than a villain. Conversely, Shakespeare seems to have literally felt that Richard's physical deformity was an outward manifestation of his evil (in keeping with the superstitions of the time), and Richard is pure evil, although he does give some sympathetic speeches about how he does what he does because everybody has rejected him.
Anyway, since I like Tyrion so much, and I liked Richard's gleeful villainy in Henry 6.3, I thought Richard III would be a fun-filled villainous romp. Instead, it turned out to be a bit of a downer. Still Richard does have quite a few good bon mots, as when he's plotting to kill his brother and he says to himself, "Simple, plain Clarence, I do love thee so, that I will shortly send thy soul to heaven." And his non-stop lying and plotting is impressive. Early on, he meets with the widow of King Henry VI's son, a son who had been murdered by Richard. She's accompanying the body of Henry as it is disinterred and moved from one burial site to another; and indeed, this is the body of another man personally killed by Richard. Richard stops her, and simply by talking to her, convinces her to marry him despite being a hunchback, and the murderer of her husband, and her husband's father, and her husband's father's corpse being right there with them. It's an amazing scene, the way he confounds her from hatred into confused acceptance, first by declaring his love, then declaring that he only killed her husband out of the power of his love for her, and then declaring his penitence over it, and begging her to stab him in the heart if he can't forgive her (knowing, of course, that though she wishes him dead, she, unlike him, can't kill a man in cold blood).
RICHARD: Teach not thy lips such scorn, for they were made
For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.
If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive,
Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword;
Which if thou please to hide in this true bosom.
And let the soul forth that adoreth thee,
I lay it naked to the deadly stroke,
And humbly beg the death upon my knee.
He lays his breast open: she raises the sword
Nay, do not pause; for I did kill King Henry,
But ’twas thy beauty that provoked me.
Nay, now dispatch; ’twas I that stabb’d young Edward,
But ’twas thy heavenly face that set me on.
Here she lets fall the sword
Take up the sword again, or take up me.
ANNE: Arise, dissembler: though I wish thy death,
I will not be the executioner.
RICHARD: Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.
ANNE: I have already.
RICHARD: Tush, that was in thy rage:
Speak it again, and, even with the word,
That hand, which, for thy love, did kill thy love,
Shall, for thy love, kill a far truer love;
To both their deaths thou shalt be accessary.
ANNE: I would I knew thy heart.
RICHARD: ’Tis figured in my tongue.
ANNE: I fear me both are false.
RICHARD: Then never man was true.
ANNE: Well, well, put up your sword.
You can practically hear her spirit snapping in that pause before she says "I would I knew thy heart." It's like that's the moment where all her self-certainty is destroyed by the force of his persuasion, and through the rest of the play after that she's like the walking dead, with no will or vitality. Eventually Richard kills her in order to be single so he can marry his brother Clarence's daughter (another Game of Thrones-y element).
And that's what makes this play a downer, really, is that as the body count racks up, more and more characters are filled with grief by Richard's murders, until whole scenes are full of the widows lamenting to one another their murdered husbands and children. Erstwhile Queen Margaret, Henry VI's widow, has several scenes in this play, where she is just as sharp-tongued and strong-willed as in Henry 6.3, taking glee at the suffering of all the Yorkists at the hands of Richard III. In one scene, the widow of Edward (Richard's eldest brother, who is king at the start of the play) begs Margaret to give her advice on how to lament, she's so good at it.
ELIZABETH: O thou well skilled in curses, stay awhile
And teach me how to curse mine enemies.
MARGARET: Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were
And he that slew them fouler than he is.
Bettering thy loss makes the bad causer worse
Revolving this will teach thee how to curse.
ELIZABETH: My words are dull. O, quicken them with thin!
MARGARET: Thy woes will make them sharp and pierce like mine.
Ultimately Richard obtains the throne, but briefly, as the nobles fly to support young Henry of Lancaster, an heir to Henry VI, who will win the day and become Henvry VII, marrying Clarence's daughter so that his heir will unite the houses of Lancaster and York and bring an end to the contention.
18. The Merchant of Venice
After powering through 10 history plays in a row, it was awesome being back onto a comedy! Even if it was The Merchant of Venice, one of Shakespeare's controversial plays. Though the name of the play doesn't speak controversy to the ears of the uninitiated, the name of one of the main characters, Shylock, does. Indeed, it's pratically an antisemitic slur.
As "The Taming of the Shrew" is Shakespeare's big misogynistic play, "The Merchant of Venice" is his antisemitic play. And there's a whole bunch of critical writing about there defending Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock, and trying to determine whether The Bard himself was antisemitic or not. Indeed, Shylock can be portrayed quite sympathetically. Although he is a greedy and vengeful guy, he tries to make friends with Antonio (the titular "Merchant of Venice") despite Antonio's having cursed and spit on him in the past. And he has one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches:
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
So antisemitic, or sympathetic? Ultimately, I suspect Shakespeare was trying to be both. Part of Shakespeare's ouvre, and perhaps part of why his plays have been so popular for so long, is that he imparts real human motives to his characters. Seldom is a Shakespeare character completely one-sided, instead we always get a peak inside their head and can see a bit of ourselves there, and consider whether we'd do differently in their shoes. But at the same time, I think Shakespeare's is a religiously inspired worldview, in which a person can be sympathetic but still be immoral and damned at the same time, because what his God cares about is their state of confession, not their reasons for why they've sinned. Hence Shylock is sympathetic, but it's still antisemitic.
I was actually not that impressed by The Merchant of Venice on the whole. Antisemitism aside, the play's dramatic structure is a bit weak. A subplot involves a wealthy heiress, Portia, whose father left it in his will that she should marry any man who solved a puzzle he'd left behind. The puzzle is that there are three chests, one of gold with the inscription "Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.", one of silver that reads, "Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.", and one of lead that reads, "Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath." Anyone who wants to marry Portia must pick one and open it, and it'll say inside whether they get to marry her or not. Moreover, before they're allowed to do it, they have to swear they'll never tell anyone which chest they chose, and if they don't get the right chest, they will never marry anyone. Even though Portia isn't legally bound to follow this will, she does it anyway out of love of her father. And strangely, so do two prince suitors who come to try their luck, also swear to follow through and never marry anybody, which seemed a bit unlikely to me.
The really unsatisfying part about it, though, is that first a prince picks the gold one, and that's the wrong one (with some rhyme inside about selfishness), and then another prince picks the silver one, and that's wrong (with a similar rhyme inside), and lastly Bassanio, the protagonist's friend, picks the lead chest and it is the correct one. Frankly, after the silver and the gold were incorrect, I assumed the lead one would be as well and the whole setup is a trick question, because if it were correct it would mean there was no dramatic tension at all in Bassanio's choice. When he picked the lead chest and it was correct, I was disappointed.
Likewise, the conclusion of the play was a disappointing deus ex machina. Shylock makes an interest-free loan to Antonio out of friendship, but as a formality the default price on the loan is a pound of Antonio's flesh. Then Shylock's daughter elopes with a friend of Antonio's (and a bag of Shylock's gold), destroying any good will Shylock had towards Antonio. And then, all of Antonio's trading ships (in which his fortune was invested) shipwreck and are destroyed, so Antonio has to default on the loan. The Duke of Venice agrees, for the sake of their laws, Shylock must be able to cut out a pound of Antonio's flesh. At the last minute, Portia (now Bassanio's new wife), rushes into the court disguised as a lawyer, and through legal hair-splitting convinces the court that Shylock can only get flesh, not blood, so therefore he can't take the flesh because he can't carve flesh without spilling blood; and moreover, since he was planning to kill Antonio, who is a Venetian citizen why Shylock is not, Shylock gets stripped of all his property and only gets back half of it if he agrees to become a Christian. So it's an ending both contrived and antisemitic.
19. The Merry Wives of Windsor
This is a strange little comedy, in that it's mainly a vehicle for Falstaff, the comedic fat knight from the Henriad, anachronistically transposed into Shakespeare's modern day. I actually didn't care for most of Falstaff's dialogue in this play, being again heavy with Elizabethan puns. Also, a lot of the humor in this play dealt with the accents of a Welsh priest and a French doctor, both of which I had a hard time really imagining in my head as playing out the way Shakespeare had written them.
This, though, is a play I've seen on the stage. I watched a student performance of it when I was at UNR, and at the time I remember thinking that Falstaff was incredibly funny. So, perhaps there is something to what they say about Shakespeare being better seen performed, than read.
On the whole, a fairly funny play, but with a few loose ends. There's a subplot about the Frenchman and Welshman taking revenge on an innkeeper who set out to ridicule them both, and that never really goes anywhere. But it does wind up with the whole town taking disguise to fool Falstaff out of his wits, and at the same time several of the townsfolk get in turn fooled by a double-disguise as a young woman uses the opportunity to run off and elope with the young man of her choosing. The play also has a great ornate Shakespearen ironic structure, with twists and double-twists and stupid Falstaff wronged every which way. The main plot is that Falstaff wants to seduce a couple of local housewives so that he can live off their generosity. So, he writes them both love-letters and sends them off. The wives meet up to talk about this and are amazed at his gall when they find out he has hit on both of them at the same time, then they compare the love letters and they're identical! So they decide to take revenge on him by stringing him on. This leads to him getting comedically beaten in various ways as he hides when the ladies' husbands come home. In a subplot, Falstaff's servants whom he has had to release from service due to running out of money, get revenge on him by telling the husbands about him hitting on their wives. One of the husbands then comes to Falstaff in disguise and tries to get him to seduce his wife, as a test of her fidelity, and thus is amazed each day when he hears about how, the previous day when he came back to his wife in suspicioun and found no one there, Falstaff had in fact been hiding in a laundry basket or what have you.
So, quite funny in the first party, but on the whole a little sloppily but together.
20. Much Ado About Nothing
This play was awesome! Definitely my favorite of the comedies so far. It's the one that features the classic device, where the sharp-tongued Beatrice and Benedick each swear they hate each other, but then their friends tell Benedick that Beatrice loves him secretly, and they tell Beatrice that Benedick loves her secretly, and under the influence of this misdirection they swiftly fall head over heels for one another.
Interestingly, this is actually the play's B plot. The main plot is about Beatrice's cousin, Hero, who is falsely accused of infidelity and then fakes her death to convince her fiancee to change his mind. But Beatrice and Benedick steal the show, going from being wonderfully sharp-tongued and shrewd at the beginning, to stumbling and tame as kittens the moment they find out the other might love them. And then back to being clever and sharp-tongued towards one another, but in a loving way. I'll just post a bit of what they say after they've declared their love for another:
BENEDICK: And I pray thee now, tell me for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?
BEATRICE: For them all together; which maintained so politic a state of evil that they will not admit any good part to intermingle with them. But for which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?
BENEDICK: Suffer love! A good epithet, I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.
20. Julius Caesar
I just finished this one this morning. I was trepidatious about starting it, because this is another play I read in early adolescence and hated at the time. I read this play in 9th grade, at the age of 14, for Mrs Yeomanson's English class. She was a great English teacher, the one who really rekindled my love of literature after an unfortunately bad 8th grade English teacher, but even so, I have nothing but dull memories of Julius Ceasar. Picking it up now, I was amazed to find it vibrant and engaging, the characters popping off the page. Caesar was imperious and almost begging for a downfall. Brutus, truly Noble. Cassius, hot-headed and clearly self-interested. Marc Antony, duplicitous. Rather than dragging, I found the play fast-paced and was through it before I knew it.
I highlighted a lot of fun passages in Julius Caesar. I'll just post a few of those. Here's one where Caesar says he prefers to be surrounded by fat and lazy people because they're less dangerous.
CAESAR: Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep at nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Here's one where the crowd of commoners that support Caesar are described as literally stinking:
CASCA: And still as he refused [the crown], the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chopped hands, and threw up their sweaty night-caps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown, that it had, almost, choked Caesar; for he swooned, and fell down at it. And for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.
Really the whole play is about the fickle simple-mindedness of the common people. It begins with commoners gathering ot watch Caesar's triumphal procession after his return from defeating Pompey's sons in civil war. Some of Pompey's supporters note with scorn that these same commoners often used to gather to watch Pompey's triumphal processions and talk about how much they loved him. In the first four acts of the play, the commoners go back and forth in their loyalties as the elites manipulate their emotions like soft clay with speeches and shallow deceptions and outright bribes.
There is a lot of talk in this play, by the conspirators, about how dangerous Caesar is, and how much his seeming desire to be king threatens to make bondsmen of them all. I thought this was strange, from a playright writing for an audience of monarchists (and occasionally the monarch herself). But now that I think about how much there is in this play about the simplemindedness of the common people, and the selfishness of the senators, I see that in many ways it's really an anti-Democracy screed.
Here's another passage, in which we get a wonderful depiction of how bold and pugnacious Cassius, the lead conspirator, is. Come to think of it, he's just as full of hubris as Caesar himself. It's around midnight on the night before they plan to murder Caesar, and there's a violent thunderstorm on, which everyone thinks is an omen that something bad is about to happen. Cassius walks through the storm to his friend Casca's house.
CASCA: Cassius, what night is this!
CASSIUS: A very pleasing night to honest men.
CASCA: Who ever knew the heavens menace so?
CASSIUS: Those that have known the reath so full of faults.
For my part, I have walked about the streets,
Submitting me unto the perilous night,
And, thus unbraced, Casca, as you see,
Have bared my bosom to the thunderbolts;
And when the cross blue lightning seemed to open
The breast of heaven, I did present myself
Even to the aim and very flash of it.
CASCA: But wherefore did you so much tempt the heavens?
It is the part of men to fear and tremble
When the most mighty gods by tokens send
Such dreadful heralds to astonish us.
CASSIUS: You are dull, Casca, and those sparks of life
That should be in a Roman you do want,
Or else you use not.
When they talk about the possibility of Caesar becoming king, Cassius says quite dramatically that he'd rather kill himself than be another man's subject, and that indeed, a man can escape from any imprisonment by killing himself:
CASSIUS: I know where I will wear this dagger then:
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.
Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong;
Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit;
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks the power to dismiss itself.
If I know this, know all the world besides,
That part of tyranny that I do bear
I can shake off at pleasure.
This play also feature this famous line, delivered by Caesar as he prepares to leave his house on the morning of his assassination, even though his wife and several augurs beg him not to due to the omens that something bad will happen:
CAESAR: Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
He goes on to say that he's Caesar; fear is afraid of him! Remember when I talked about Caesar having as much hubris as Cassius? Here's another passage that illustrates that:
CASSIUS: Pardon, Caesar,; Caesar, pardon;
As low as to thy foot doth Cassius fall,
To beg enfranchisement for Publius Cimber.
CAESAR: I could be well moved, if I were as you;
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me;
But I am as constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks,
They are all fire, and every one doth shine;
But there's but one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world: 'tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion; and that I am he,
Let me a little show it, even in this:
That I was constant Cimber should be banished,
And constant do remain to keep him so.
Here's one of those great passages where Shakespeare talks about the stage itself. In a bit of double irony, this passage is meant to reflect how this story was 1500 years old at the time the play was written, but now it also reflects on the fact that the play itself is 400 years old.
CASSIUS: How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn, and accents yet unknown!
BRUTUS: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,
That now on Pompey's basis lies along,
No worthier than the dust!
CASSIUS: So oft as that shall be,
So often shall the knot of us be called
The men that gave their country liberty.
Ah, and of course the further irony that, no, they did not give their country liberty. They killed Julius Caesar, but Augustus Caesar became emperor soon enough after that. On an unrelated note, here's a speech with yet another famous quote in it. This is Mark Antony weeping with rage over Caesar's body:
ANTONY: A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds;
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side, come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
Of course Mark Antony goes on to give the famous "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" speech. One thing I remember about this play from high school is that he was being sarcastic when he said that Caesar's murderers were honorable, and indeed, reading it now I see that's so. It seems like a challenging monologue to deliver, because in it, Antony is trying to deceive the crowd into thinking that he thinks the conspirators are honorable, while at the same time inciting them to think that the conspirators are not honorable but that he's a nice guy for thinking that they are. This speech contains a second famous line, "This was the most unkindest cut of all", spoken when Antony points to where, on Caesar's corpse, he was stabbed by his good and noble friend Brutus. Antony wraps up his speech, which has completely turned the crowd against the conspirators, with these duplicitous words:
ANTONY: I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts;
I am no orator, as Brutus is,
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
That love my friend; that they know full well
That gave me public leave to speak of him.
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech
To stir men's blood;
When of course the truth is pretty much 180 degrees from every bit of that. He then goes on bribe the populace by telling them that, in Caesar's will, Caesar left 90 drachmas to every citizen of Rome, and left his orchards and gardens as public parks.
There's a subsequent scene where he and Octavius are preparing for war against the conspirators. They have a third partner, Lepidus, and once he has left them on an errand Antony says to Octavius, hey, we're not really going to split a third of the world with him, are we? Octavius replies, well, you picked him Antony, and he has helped us out in this time of difficulty. And Antony says,
ANTONY: Though we lay honours on this man
To ease ourselves of divers slanderous loads,
He shall but bear them as the ass bears gold,
To groan and sweat under the business,
Either led or driven, as we point the way;
And having brought our treasure where we will,
Then take we down his load, and turn him off,
Like to the empty ass, to shake his ears
And graze in commons.
OCTAVIUS: You may do as your will;
But he's a tried and valiant soldier.
ANTONY: So is my horse, Octavius, and for that
I do appoint him store of provender.
It is a creature that I teach to fight,
To wind, to stop, to run directly on,
His corporal motion governed by my spirit.
And, in some taste, Lepidus but so:
He must be taught, and trained, and bid go forth:
... Do not talk of him
But as a property.
I highlighted several passages in a later scene where Brutus, the only one of the conspirators who killed Julius Caesar out of genuine concern for the Republic rather than out of envy or malice or self-interest, chides Cassius for taking bribes now that he's in a position of power. Cassius gets angry at this, but Brutus continues to chide him:
CASSIUS: Do not presume too much upon my love;
I may do that I shall be sorry for.
BRUTUS: You have done that you should be sorry for.
There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats;
For I am armed so strong in honesty
That they pass by me as the idle wind.
Another passage I highlighted was "Good words are better than bad strokes, Octavius", which I thought was funny because taken out of context, it sounds like Shakespeare's endorsement of sexting. From the final act, when everyone dies (this is a tragedy after all), I highlighted several lamentation passeges. Here's just one, from Marc Antony lamenting the death of Brutus. Actually, I'll continue it with Octavius' passage after that, which is, in fact, the very end of the play. Just to illustrate how strangely abruptly the play ends.
ANTONY: This was the noblest Roman of them all.
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, "This was a man!"
OCTAVIUS: According to his virtue let us use him,
With all respect and rites of burial.
Within my tent his bones tonight shall lie,
Most liek a soldier, ordered honorably.
So call the field to rest, and let's away,
To part the glories of this happy day.
The end. I guess I've laid out the rest of my thoughts on this play in the course of typing up these quotes. It is, ultimately, a play about politics, about people swaying popular opinion through shallow rhetoric. It's quite an appropriate play to read during election season, and that's quite intriguing, since Shakespeare didn't live someplace where there were elections.
Well, that's catch-up on all the plays I've read so far. Next up, I'm on to "As You Like It", another comedy, but one I know nothing about except the title. I look forward to finding out what it's about.
And, of course, I've taken a couple of lengthy breaks in my reading schedule, too. The first when I lost my Kindle, and the second in July when I ran out of steam midway through the Histories and read a bunch of less challenging things.
Now, I've got about 10 weeks left, and 20 plays to get through, so I've got to start reading two or three a week if I want to finish on schedule! Not that it particularly matters whether I do or not, I suppose. I could give up now and still have gained a lot of enrichment from reading Shakespeare. But still, it's something I'd like to do. I have not succeeded on my other New Year's Resolution of joining some kind of social club or activity here in Wellington, so at least I can succeed on one resolution!
I also meant to do a write-up of my impressions of each play afterwards, and I've fallen behind on that as well, as each write-up tended to take me an hour or more, and I've started to run low on time. The last one I wrote was about Richard II, when I was still in the Spring end of the histories. Now I've passed through the Winter of Richard III's discontent and come out into the comedies on the other end, so I may as well look back and write them up a little bit.
12 - 14: Henry IV parts 1 & 2, Henry V
These plays, along with "Richard II", make up the second historical tetralogy written by Shakespeare, the so-called "Henriad". They tell the story of kind Richard II being deposed, Henry IV usurping the throne, and his son Henry V passing through a rebellious youth to become a noble and well-regarded king. As my plan was to read the histories in historical order, I didn't realize that these were written after the other tetralogy, but having now been through them, looking back I can definitely see. Each of these four plays was indeed quite solid and worthy to stand on its own, although any of them would lose a lot of the impact if you weren't versed in the history of the time.
However, the problem with the histories is that their plots are based, however loosely, on actual historical events, and so they tend to lack the neatness of dramatic structure that Shakespeare's other plays have. Other Shakespeare plays work like clockwork, with each event intermeshing to drive the ones after it, and consequently if you can remember one part of it you can remember the whole. But my memories of the plots of the histories are pretty vague. As I recall off the top of my head, Henry 4.1, 4.2, and 5 are all about Henry IV, who usurped the throne with support from most of the nobles, finding that support waning and finding that nobles want to now usurp it from him as he once usurped it. Henry V continues in this vein... possibly he also conquers France.
Ah, checking synopses online, my memory is refreshed. In Henry IV part 1, Henry IV deals with a three-part alliance of nobles he has treated poorly, who want to depose him and split the kingdom three ways themselves. This play included my favorite Shakespeare character of all the histories, Harry "Hotspur" Percy. As his name implies, he's a hot-headed knight who is constantly pushing people's buttons out of a sense of contrariness that reminded me of Flip from "Little Nemo". Throughout the play he's utterly unimpressed by his fellow rebel Owen Glendower (who is also played up for laughs as a Welsh stereotype). Here's Glendower saying that there were fearful supernatural signs at his birth, and here's Hotspur mocking him over that:
GLENDOWER: At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward.
HOTSPUR: Why, so it would have done at the same season, if your mother’s cat had but kittened, though yourself had never been born.
GLENDOWER: I say the earth did shake when I was born.
HOTSPUR: And I say the earth was not of my mind,
If you suppose as fearing you it shook.
Henry 4.1 and 4.2 also introduce the main story arc of many people's favorite Shakespeare character, the fat dishonest knight Falstaff. I did find him pretty fun, and charming in his flat-out dishonesty and cowardliness, but honestly he fell a bit flat on the page for me, because so much of his dialogue was made up of inscrutable Elizabethan puns. This is a general problem with Shakespeare's comedy. Little of his wordplay has survived the shift in meanings of words through the centuries, and although I have footnotes to explain the jokes to me, they're not very funny when I have to have them explained. The comedy that survives best, of his, is the situational comedy, the irony, and the interactions between characters. Still, Falstaff does have a few good scenes. In one scene, he's meant to be drafting men from a village to fight in a war, and he goes through the process taking bribes from the able-bodied to get them out of the draft, and purposefully picking the scrawny ones who look like they'll get killed, so that he can pocket their wages. That sounds pretty grim, but it actually comes out quite funny. There's also a point where his friend, prince Henry (who will become Henry V) runs into him on the field during combat, and asks him where his musket is, and Falstaff opens up his musket-case to show he's been keeping a bottle of booze in it instead of a musket. Oh, that Falstaff!
In the end, though, Prince Henry rejects Falstaff as an immoral criminal, and he dies off-stage in poverty in Henry V. This was a bit unsatisfactory to me, since I'm used to modern comedies (like "Seinfeld" and "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") in which the immorality of the characters is played for laughs, and nothing bad ever happens to them in return (well, until the final episode of Seinfeld). In the Henriad, Falstaff's immorality is played for laughs, but he's also used as a moral object lesson. Prince Henry cavorts with him in Henry IV part 1, rejecting him at the end. Then, although Falstaff has many scenes in Henry IV part 2, he never seens Prince Henry until the very end when Henry becomes King Henry V. Falstaff then meets up with him, and expects to be showered with riches by his old friend. Instead, Henry V soundly rebukes him, assigns him a small enough pension to live on so that he won't have to steal anymore, and banishes Falstaff on pain of death from coming within a 10-mile radius of him.
Henry 4.2 begins with a prologue delivered by a personification of the concept of Rumour, which I enjoyed inasmuch as it reminded me of elementary school plays in which one child delivers a song from the point of view of the sun or a tree ("I am the sun and I shine on the trees, so now they grow up and spread their green leaves"). Here's a bit from that:
Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, [constantly] unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth:
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
And Rumour is described as "painted full of tongues", in other words wearing a suit with tongues painted all over it. That's an interesting image as well.
Checking Wikipedia to refresh my memory, I see that Henry V deals mostly with his conquest of France. I can see how I got that mixed up. The whole run of histories from Henry 4.1 through Henry 6.3 is nearly entirely composed of constant battles between various forces, nearly indistinguishable, over vague and unjustified causes, with characters shifting alliances and changing sides between them just to muddy the waters still more. In Henry VI act 1 he declares war on France, partly due to being spurred on by some greedy bishops, who want to distract him so that he doesn't proceed with a tax reform that would take land away from him. They point out to him that, if the French followed primogeniture with female heirs the same way the English do, he would be heir to the throne of France. They go on to say that the reason the French don't allow female heirs is because of the Salic law, but Salic law, if you read it closely, is only meant to apply in a geographic reason outside of France. Thus, Henry is king. Henry buys it, and after some rudeness from the French ambassadors and urging on by his nobles, he goes off and conquers France for no good reason. This takes up the rest of the play, and it is quite dramatic and satisfying while you're reading it, but in retrospect I can remember none of it. In the end, he forces the King of France to name Henry V as his heir, in favor of his won son the Dauphin.
15 - 17: Henry IV parts 1, 2, and 3
Were there really three parts in the King Henry plays? My mind reels at the thought. But if I look back on it, I think I can prise out a few details.
These plays were some of the earliest Shakespeare wrote, in fact his third through fifth plays, according to Wikipedia's chronology. Also according to Wikipedia, they're considered some of his weakest. Looking back, I certainly agree with that. The Henry 6 plays were a major speedbump in my Shakespeare reading. They're also on the long side of Shakespeare's plays, and so full of nobles shifting alliances (and many of them with 3 different names they're known by, as William de la Pole Duke of Suffolk, who might be called William, Pole, or Suffolk) that I had to keep a notepad open with all the characters names and their allegiances. In other Shakespeare plays I haven't needed to do that, because the casts are more succinct and the characterizations are vivid enough that even if I split up my reading over several days, I quickly recall who each character is and their relationships from just a little dialogue.
Henry 6.1 starts with the funeral of Henry V. The French, so recently conquered, quickly rebel and the rest of the play deals with the English trying to put their rebellion down. Henry VI is only a child (in real history he was an infant when Henry V died, but in the play we don't see him or hear about his age until he's a child come into the age of reason), so the war is mostly fought on his behalf by his representatives. In the end, they defeat the French, but by now Henry VI is a teenager able to make his own decisions, and he makes some ones that the other English don't like. A peaceful, religious-minded man (described later as being better off as a monk than a king) he agrees with the Pope's request that they make peace with France, and leave the French king Charles in charge of the country as a viceroy (a situation in which the French have way too much strength and will obviously take the country back at the first opportunity). Henry is also persuaded by the Earl of Suffolk to marry the beautiful but destitute Princess Margaret of Anjou, whose father is titular King of Jerusalem and Sicily but actually only controls a couple of small regions in France. (Everyone else would prefer him to arrange a marriage that would be more politically beneficial.) These decisions ultimately lose him France, all his political support, and his life.
The real joy of Henry 6.1 for me was Joan of Arc. Yes, the female teen warrior who had visions from God, it turns out the rebellion she aided in was the French's rebellion against the English under Henry VI. In this play, which is told from a very pro-English anti-French point of view, she's portrayed as a false prophet who claims to have God-given powers, but in the end is revealed to have obtained them by sleeping with demons. She defeats men in combat, and beguiles them with her beauty in person. I guess I always love Shakespeare's gleeful villains, and Joan is quite gleeful and villainous, not to mention salacious. When she first meets Charles the Dauphin (aka the heir to the King of France, who is also confusingly named Charles), she defeats him in single combat, and then he's so taken in by her beauty and fighting skill that he begs her to marry him even though she's a commoner. She replies with that she must remain a virgin... until they win the war.
CHARLES: Impatiently I burn with thy desire;
My heart and hands thou hast at once subdued.
Excellent Pucelle [Joan's known as "Joan la Pucelle", i.e. "Joan the girl"], if thy name be so,
Let me thy servant and not sovereign be:
'Tis the French Dauphin sueth to thee thus.
JOAN: I must not yield to any rites of love,
For my profession's sacred from above:
When I have chased all thy foes from hence,
Then will I think upon a recompense.
Henry 6.2 was probably the most difficult of the histories to get through, lacking as it does any Joan. Instead, the entire play deals with the plotting and double-crossing of the English noblemen, and Henry VI's inability to notice it or stop it. Richard, the Duke of York, has learned that he's the most legitimate heir to Richard II (the king who Henry IV deposed), and he plots to weaken Henry VI's supporters by pitting them against each other, and then finally openly rebels. The most memorable scene to me is a demon-summoning by the Duke of Gloucester's wife early on. I guess another thing I like in Shakespeare is demons. There's also a fun scene where Gloucester debunks a fraudster who claims to have been miraculously cured of blindness and lameness, and a peasant rebellion (stirred up by Richard of York) with lots of bawdy puns. In fact, it's the peasant rebellion where the famous line, "First, kill all the lawyers" comes from, as Jack Cade makes his way across the land holding criminal trials against everyone who knows how to read or shows signs of nobility. Ultimately, though, this was a lengthy and forgettable play.
Strangely enough, though, I really liked Henry 6.3. To me it felt like the most cut-throat, "Game of Thrones"-esque of all the plays. It begins with York's rebels having defeated Henry VI's supporters in London, and forcing their way into Parliament, where they confront the King. Henry, who is by himself without any guard, is face to face with a small crowd of armed rebels whose weapons are practically still dripping with blood. They explain to him York's claim to the throne, and Henry has no valid comeback at all. Partly from fear, partly out of respect for the legitimacy of York's claim, and partly out of being a genuinely peace-loving man, Henry begs them to end their rebellion in exchange for Richard of York becoming his heir, if only they will let let Henry rule for the rest of his days. The Yorkists are moved by his speech and agree to it, leaving him.
And this is the part I found most delicious. Trying only to please everyone and make peace, Henry pisses off everyone and winds up with no friends at all. Shortly after the Yorkists have left, his supporters come back to Parliament and find him, and his wife and son are understandably enraged at him giving up their inheritance, and his supporters are enraged that he has so casually given away that which they were fighting and dying for. His supporters storm off in disgust, and his wife takes his son and goes off to command Henry's former supporters in fighting to take back the crown, in defiance of Henry's own wishes.
PRINCE EDWARD: Father, you cannot disinherit me:
If you be king, why should not I succeed?
KING HENRY VI: Pardon me, Margaret; pardon me, sweet son:
The Earl of Warwick and the duke enforced me.
QUEEN MARGARET: Enforced thee! Art thou king, and wilt be forced?
I shame to hear the espeak. Ah, timorous wretch!
Thou hast undone thyself, thy son and me;
And given unto the house of York such head
As thou shalt reign but by their sufferance.
To entail him and his heirs unto the crown,
What is it, but to make thy sepulchre
And creep into it far before thy time?
Warwick is chancellor and the lord of Calais;
Stern Falconbridge commands the narrow seas;
The duke is made protector of the realm;
And yet shalt thou be safe? Such safety finds
The trembling lamb environed with wolves.
Had I been there, which am a silly woman,
The soldiers should have tossed me on their pikes
Before I would have granted to that act.
But thou preferr'st thy life before thine honor:
And seeing thou dost, I her divorce myself
Both from thy table, Henry, and thy bed,
Until that act of parliament be repealed
Whereby my son is disinherited.
The northern lords that have foresworn thy colors
Will follow mine, if once they see them spread;
And spread they shall be, to thy foul disgrace
And utter ruin of the house of York.
Thus do I leave thee. Come, son, let's away;
Our army is ready; come, we'll after them.
KING HENRY VI: Stay, gentle Margaret, and hear me speak.
QUEEN MARGARET: Thou hast spoke too much already; get thee gone.
Meanwhile, as Margaret predicted, York and his supporters are not thinking kind of thoughts of protecting Henry. Instead, York's sons and supporters immediately persuade him that he can be king a lot quicker if he doesn't wait for Henry to die a natural death. Their reasoning is that Richard of York is and always has been the rightful heir, therefore it is hastening justice if he kills Henry and takes the crown right away.
RICHARD: Brother, though I be the youngest, give me elave.
EDWARD: No, I can better play the orator.
MONTAGUE: But I have reasons strong and forcible.
YORK: Why, how now, sons and brother! At a strife?
What is your quarrel? How began it first?
EDWARD: No quarrel, but a slight contention.
YORK: About what?
RICHARD: About that which concerns your grace and us;
The crown of England, father, which is yours.
YORK: Mine, boy? Not till King Henry be dead.
RICHARD: Your right depends not on his life or death.
EDWARD: Now your are heir, therefore enjoy it now:
By giving the house of Lancaster leave to breathe,
It will outrun you, father, in the end.
YORK: I took an oath that he should quietly reign.
EDWARD: But for a kingdom any oath may be broken:
I would break a thousand oaths to reign one year.
RICHARD: No; God forbid your grace should be forsworn.
Richard, the conniving hunchback who in "Richard III" goes on to kill everyone in his family on order to sieze the throne, convinces his father that his oath not to harm Henry was invalid, because "An oath is of no moment, being not took before a true and lawful magistrate, who hath authority over him that swears" and since Henry is not the rightful heir to the throne, he is not a lawful magistrate. York buys, saying "Richard, enough; I will be king, or die." and immediately sends away to re-gather the forces he has just dispersed.
Thus both sides, momentarily at peace, immediately re-gather to fight each other in a vicious war that lasts the rest of the play. King Henry VI sits sadly by the sidelines the whole time, lamenting that no one will listen to him and watching all the wartime atrocities that happen. In one scene so touching it's nearly melodramatic, he sits on the sidelines of a battle and observes as a man removes the helmet of an opposing soldier he's just killed, only to find that the soldier was his own father, who had been drafted for the opposite side of the civil war. And moments later, another soldier realizes he has killed his own son.
SOLDIER 1: Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.
This man, whom hand to hand I slew in fight,
May be possessed with some store of crowns;
And I, that haply take them from him now,
May yet ere night yield both my life and them
To some man else, as this dead man doth me.
Who's this? O God! It is my father's face,
Whom in this conflict I unawares have killed.
O heavy times, begetting such events!
From London by the king was I pressed forth;
My father, being the Earl of Warwick's man,
Came on the part of York, pressed by his master;
And I, who at his hands received my life, him
Have by my hands of life bereaved him.
Pardon me, God, I knew not what I did!
And pardon, father, for I knew not thee!
My tears shall wipe away these bloody marks;
And no more words till they have flowed their fill.
KING HENRY VI: O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!
Whiles lions war and battle for their dens,
Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity.
Weep, wretched man, I'll aid thee tear for tear;
And let our hearts and eyes, like civil war,
Be blind with tears, and break o'ercharged with grief.
SOLDIER 2: Thou that so stoutly hast resisted me,
Give me thy gold, if thou hast gold:
For I have bought it with an hundred blows.
But let me see: is this our foeman's face?
Ah, no, no, no, it is mine only son!
Ah, boy, if any life be left in thee,
Throw up thine eye! See, see what showers arise,
Blown with the windy tempest of my heart,
Upon thy words, that kill mine eye and heart!
O, pity, God, this miserable age!
What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly,
Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural,
This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!
O boy, thy father gave thee life too soon,
And haft bereft thee of thy life too [recently]!
SOLDIER 1: How will my mother for a father's death
Take on with me and never be satisfied!
SOLDIER 2: How will my wife for slaughter of my son
Shed seas of tears and never be satisfied!
KING HENRY VI: How will the country for these woeful chances
Misthink the king and not be satisfied!
SOLDIER 1: Was ever son so rued a father's death?
SOLDIER 2: Was ever father so bemoaned his son?
KING HENRY VI: Was ever king so grieved for subjects' woe?
Much is your sorrow; mine ten times so much.
That's one thing you can say about the histories, they've got some great laments in them. And Queen Margaret, who essentially takes over the King's forces while the king himself lays around more and more morosely moaning for peace, gets some great speeches full of outrage. And Richard of York's sons get increasingly bloodthirsty, ruthless, and selfish, especially Richard the hunchback, who towards the end of the play, after giving little hint of his thoughts to the audience thus far, takes it upon himself to stab to death the deposed and captive former King Henry VI just to be on the safe side, and then solilquizes to the audience about all the people he's going to have to stab before he gets to be king, since according to the rules of primogeniture he's in line behind his two older brothers and all their children and their children's children.
If any spark of life be yet remaining,
Down, down to hell; and say I sent thee thither:
Stabs Henry again
I, that have neither pity, love, nor fear.
Indeed, 'tis true that Henry told me of;
For I have often heard my mother say
I came into the world with my legs forward:
Had I not reason, think ye, to make haste,
And seek their ruin that uspurped our right?
The midwife wondered and the women cried
"O, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!"
And so I was; which plainly signified
That I should snarl and bite and play the dog.
Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,
Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word "love", which graybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me.
...
King Henry and the prince his son are gone:
Clarence [Richard's brother]; thy turn is next, and then the rest,
Counting myself but bad till I be best.
This sets the stage for "Richard III", the story of how Richard got to the throne.
On a final note, I note that some of my favorite characters in the histories are the deposed kings, Richard II and Henry VI. They both have some great speeches about the experience of going from the highest office in society (the King) to the lowest (a captive), from controlling everything to controlling nothing, and on how this is reflective of the general state of mankind and our life in this world.
18. Richard III
And lastly you've got Richard III. After Richard's villainy in Henry 6.3, where he convinced his father to renege on his oath not to kill Henry, and where he personally sought out and stabbed various of their enemies and was generally the most bloodthirsty and sly-mouthed of the York sons, and especially after his soliloquy on how awful he is and how he plans to kill his brothers and work his way to the throne, I had high expectations for this play. I suppose another part of this, was my reflection, after Richard's soliloquy in Henry 6.3, that he seems to be an influence on Tyrion from "Game of Thrones". I might add as background to that comment, that I read Shakespeare's histories at the same time as I first watched the Game of Thrones TV series, and as such I was immediately struck by how much they reminded me of each other. It's obvious that Shakespeare's histories was one of the inspirations for "Game of Thrones", down to even some of the names being similar (Lancaster = Lannister being the most obvious). However, it's only a loose inspiration, with the actual events and relationships of Game of Thrones not bearing much resemblance to the actual events in Shakespeare's plays. It's more like if you took Shakespeare's plays, put them in a bag, shook them until they crumbled apart into their component pieces, and then took those pieces out and used them in building something new, in combination with other pieces from other sources, and entirely new ones as well.
So, among those bits and pieces, I was struck that Tyrion resembles Richard III. In Game of Thrones, Tyrion is a dwarf, and a younger son, from the house of Lannister. He is looked down upon by his family, but over the course of the series he proves to be clever, politically savvy, and good at persuading people to do what he wants. In these respects he is similar to Richard III, who is looked down upon for being a hunchback, but ultimately proves to be a very persuasive orator and very politically savvy. Of course, unlike Richard III, Tyrion turns out to be one of the nobler characters in the series, and is more of a hero than a villain. Conversely, Shakespeare seems to have literally felt that Richard's physical deformity was an outward manifestation of his evil (in keeping with the superstitions of the time), and Richard is pure evil, although he does give some sympathetic speeches about how he does what he does because everybody has rejected him.
Anyway, since I like Tyrion so much, and I liked Richard's gleeful villainy in Henry 6.3, I thought Richard III would be a fun-filled villainous romp. Instead, it turned out to be a bit of a downer. Still Richard does have quite a few good bon mots, as when he's plotting to kill his brother and he says to himself, "Simple, plain Clarence, I do love thee so, that I will shortly send thy soul to heaven." And his non-stop lying and plotting is impressive. Early on, he meets with the widow of King Henry VI's son, a son who had been murdered by Richard. She's accompanying the body of Henry as it is disinterred and moved from one burial site to another; and indeed, this is the body of another man personally killed by Richard. Richard stops her, and simply by talking to her, convinces her to marry him despite being a hunchback, and the murderer of her husband, and her husband's father, and her husband's father's corpse being right there with them. It's an amazing scene, the way he confounds her from hatred into confused acceptance, first by declaring his love, then declaring that he only killed her husband out of the power of his love for her, and then declaring his penitence over it, and begging her to stab him in the heart if he can't forgive her (knowing, of course, that though she wishes him dead, she, unlike him, can't kill a man in cold blood).
RICHARD: Teach not thy lips such scorn, for they were made
For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.
If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive,
Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword;
Which if thou please to hide in this true bosom.
And let the soul forth that adoreth thee,
I lay it naked to the deadly stroke,
And humbly beg the death upon my knee.
He lays his breast open: she raises the sword
Nay, do not pause; for I did kill King Henry,
But ’twas thy beauty that provoked me.
Nay, now dispatch; ’twas I that stabb’d young Edward,
But ’twas thy heavenly face that set me on.
Here she lets fall the sword
Take up the sword again, or take up me.
ANNE: Arise, dissembler: though I wish thy death,
I will not be the executioner.
RICHARD: Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.
ANNE: I have already.
RICHARD: Tush, that was in thy rage:
Speak it again, and, even with the word,
That hand, which, for thy love, did kill thy love,
Shall, for thy love, kill a far truer love;
To both their deaths thou shalt be accessary.
ANNE: I would I knew thy heart.
RICHARD: ’Tis figured in my tongue.
ANNE: I fear me both are false.
RICHARD: Then never man was true.
ANNE: Well, well, put up your sword.
You can practically hear her spirit snapping in that pause before she says "I would I knew thy heart." It's like that's the moment where all her self-certainty is destroyed by the force of his persuasion, and through the rest of the play after that she's like the walking dead, with no will or vitality. Eventually Richard kills her in order to be single so he can marry his brother Clarence's daughter (another Game of Thrones-y element).
And that's what makes this play a downer, really, is that as the body count racks up, more and more characters are filled with grief by Richard's murders, until whole scenes are full of the widows lamenting to one another their murdered husbands and children. Erstwhile Queen Margaret, Henry VI's widow, has several scenes in this play, where she is just as sharp-tongued and strong-willed as in Henry 6.3, taking glee at the suffering of all the Yorkists at the hands of Richard III. In one scene, the widow of Edward (Richard's eldest brother, who is king at the start of the play) begs Margaret to give her advice on how to lament, she's so good at it.
ELIZABETH: O thou well skilled in curses, stay awhile
And teach me how to curse mine enemies.
MARGARET: Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were
And he that slew them fouler than he is.
Bettering thy loss makes the bad causer worse
Revolving this will teach thee how to curse.
ELIZABETH: My words are dull. O, quicken them with thin!
MARGARET: Thy woes will make them sharp and pierce like mine.
Ultimately Richard obtains the throne, but briefly, as the nobles fly to support young Henry of Lancaster, an heir to Henry VI, who will win the day and become Henvry VII, marrying Clarence's daughter so that his heir will unite the houses of Lancaster and York and bring an end to the contention.
18. The Merchant of Venice
After powering through 10 history plays in a row, it was awesome being back onto a comedy! Even if it was The Merchant of Venice, one of Shakespeare's controversial plays. Though the name of the play doesn't speak controversy to the ears of the uninitiated, the name of one of the main characters, Shylock, does. Indeed, it's pratically an antisemitic slur.
As "The Taming of the Shrew" is Shakespeare's big misogynistic play, "The Merchant of Venice" is his antisemitic play. And there's a whole bunch of critical writing about there defending Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock, and trying to determine whether The Bard himself was antisemitic or not. Indeed, Shylock can be portrayed quite sympathetically. Although he is a greedy and vengeful guy, he tries to make friends with Antonio (the titular "Merchant of Venice") despite Antonio's having cursed and spit on him in the past. And he has one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches:
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
So antisemitic, or sympathetic? Ultimately, I suspect Shakespeare was trying to be both. Part of Shakespeare's ouvre, and perhaps part of why his plays have been so popular for so long, is that he imparts real human motives to his characters. Seldom is a Shakespeare character completely one-sided, instead we always get a peak inside their head and can see a bit of ourselves there, and consider whether we'd do differently in their shoes. But at the same time, I think Shakespeare's is a religiously inspired worldview, in which a person can be sympathetic but still be immoral and damned at the same time, because what his God cares about is their state of confession, not their reasons for why they've sinned. Hence Shylock is sympathetic, but it's still antisemitic.
I was actually not that impressed by The Merchant of Venice on the whole. Antisemitism aside, the play's dramatic structure is a bit weak. A subplot involves a wealthy heiress, Portia, whose father left it in his will that she should marry any man who solved a puzzle he'd left behind. The puzzle is that there are three chests, one of gold with the inscription "Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.", one of silver that reads, "Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.", and one of lead that reads, "Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath." Anyone who wants to marry Portia must pick one and open it, and it'll say inside whether they get to marry her or not. Moreover, before they're allowed to do it, they have to swear they'll never tell anyone which chest they chose, and if they don't get the right chest, they will never marry anyone. Even though Portia isn't legally bound to follow this will, she does it anyway out of love of her father. And strangely, so do two prince suitors who come to try their luck, also swear to follow through and never marry anybody, which seemed a bit unlikely to me.
The really unsatisfying part about it, though, is that first a prince picks the gold one, and that's the wrong one (with some rhyme inside about selfishness), and then another prince picks the silver one, and that's wrong (with a similar rhyme inside), and lastly Bassanio, the protagonist's friend, picks the lead chest and it is the correct one. Frankly, after the silver and the gold were incorrect, I assumed the lead one would be as well and the whole setup is a trick question, because if it were correct it would mean there was no dramatic tension at all in Bassanio's choice. When he picked the lead chest and it was correct, I was disappointed.
Likewise, the conclusion of the play was a disappointing deus ex machina. Shylock makes an interest-free loan to Antonio out of friendship, but as a formality the default price on the loan is a pound of Antonio's flesh. Then Shylock's daughter elopes with a friend of Antonio's (and a bag of Shylock's gold), destroying any good will Shylock had towards Antonio. And then, all of Antonio's trading ships (in which his fortune was invested) shipwreck and are destroyed, so Antonio has to default on the loan. The Duke of Venice agrees, for the sake of their laws, Shylock must be able to cut out a pound of Antonio's flesh. At the last minute, Portia (now Bassanio's new wife), rushes into the court disguised as a lawyer, and through legal hair-splitting convinces the court that Shylock can only get flesh, not blood, so therefore he can't take the flesh because he can't carve flesh without spilling blood; and moreover, since he was planning to kill Antonio, who is a Venetian citizen why Shylock is not, Shylock gets stripped of all his property and only gets back half of it if he agrees to become a Christian. So it's an ending both contrived and antisemitic.
19. The Merry Wives of Windsor
This is a strange little comedy, in that it's mainly a vehicle for Falstaff, the comedic fat knight from the Henriad, anachronistically transposed into Shakespeare's modern day. I actually didn't care for most of Falstaff's dialogue in this play, being again heavy with Elizabethan puns. Also, a lot of the humor in this play dealt with the accents of a Welsh priest and a French doctor, both of which I had a hard time really imagining in my head as playing out the way Shakespeare had written them.
This, though, is a play I've seen on the stage. I watched a student performance of it when I was at UNR, and at the time I remember thinking that Falstaff was incredibly funny. So, perhaps there is something to what they say about Shakespeare being better seen performed, than read.
On the whole, a fairly funny play, but with a few loose ends. There's a subplot about the Frenchman and Welshman taking revenge on an innkeeper who set out to ridicule them both, and that never really goes anywhere. But it does wind up with the whole town taking disguise to fool Falstaff out of his wits, and at the same time several of the townsfolk get in turn fooled by a double-disguise as a young woman uses the opportunity to run off and elope with the young man of her choosing. The play also has a great ornate Shakespearen ironic structure, with twists and double-twists and stupid Falstaff wronged every which way. The main plot is that Falstaff wants to seduce a couple of local housewives so that he can live off their generosity. So, he writes them both love-letters and sends them off. The wives meet up to talk about this and are amazed at his gall when they find out he has hit on both of them at the same time, then they compare the love letters and they're identical! So they decide to take revenge on him by stringing him on. This leads to him getting comedically beaten in various ways as he hides when the ladies' husbands come home. In a subplot, Falstaff's servants whom he has had to release from service due to running out of money, get revenge on him by telling the husbands about him hitting on their wives. One of the husbands then comes to Falstaff in disguise and tries to get him to seduce his wife, as a test of her fidelity, and thus is amazed each day when he hears about how, the previous day when he came back to his wife in suspicioun and found no one there, Falstaff had in fact been hiding in a laundry basket or what have you.
So, quite funny in the first party, but on the whole a little sloppily but together.
20. Much Ado About Nothing
This play was awesome! Definitely my favorite of the comedies so far. It's the one that features the classic device, where the sharp-tongued Beatrice and Benedick each swear they hate each other, but then their friends tell Benedick that Beatrice loves him secretly, and they tell Beatrice that Benedick loves her secretly, and under the influence of this misdirection they swiftly fall head over heels for one another.
Interestingly, this is actually the play's B plot. The main plot is about Beatrice's cousin, Hero, who is falsely accused of infidelity and then fakes her death to convince her fiancee to change his mind. But Beatrice and Benedick steal the show, going from being wonderfully sharp-tongued and shrewd at the beginning, to stumbling and tame as kittens the moment they find out the other might love them. And then back to being clever and sharp-tongued towards one another, but in a loving way. I'll just post a bit of what they say after they've declared their love for another:
BENEDICK: And I pray thee now, tell me for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?
BEATRICE: For them all together; which maintained so politic a state of evil that they will not admit any good part to intermingle with them. But for which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?
BENEDICK: Suffer love! A good epithet, I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.
20. Julius Caesar
I just finished this one this morning. I was trepidatious about starting it, because this is another play I read in early adolescence and hated at the time. I read this play in 9th grade, at the age of 14, for Mrs Yeomanson's English class. She was a great English teacher, the one who really rekindled my love of literature after an unfortunately bad 8th grade English teacher, but even so, I have nothing but dull memories of Julius Ceasar. Picking it up now, I was amazed to find it vibrant and engaging, the characters popping off the page. Caesar was imperious and almost begging for a downfall. Brutus, truly Noble. Cassius, hot-headed and clearly self-interested. Marc Antony, duplicitous. Rather than dragging, I found the play fast-paced and was through it before I knew it.
I highlighted a lot of fun passages in Julius Caesar. I'll just post a few of those. Here's one where Caesar says he prefers to be surrounded by fat and lazy people because they're less dangerous.
CAESAR: Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep at nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Here's one where the crowd of commoners that support Caesar are described as literally stinking:
CASCA: And still as he refused [the crown], the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chopped hands, and threw up their sweaty night-caps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown, that it had, almost, choked Caesar; for he swooned, and fell down at it. And for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.
Really the whole play is about the fickle simple-mindedness of the common people. It begins with commoners gathering ot watch Caesar's triumphal procession after his return from defeating Pompey's sons in civil war. Some of Pompey's supporters note with scorn that these same commoners often used to gather to watch Pompey's triumphal processions and talk about how much they loved him. In the first four acts of the play, the commoners go back and forth in their loyalties as the elites manipulate their emotions like soft clay with speeches and shallow deceptions and outright bribes.
There is a lot of talk in this play, by the conspirators, about how dangerous Caesar is, and how much his seeming desire to be king threatens to make bondsmen of them all. I thought this was strange, from a playright writing for an audience of monarchists (and occasionally the monarch herself). But now that I think about how much there is in this play about the simplemindedness of the common people, and the selfishness of the senators, I see that in many ways it's really an anti-Democracy screed.
Here's another passage, in which we get a wonderful depiction of how bold and pugnacious Cassius, the lead conspirator, is. Come to think of it, he's just as full of hubris as Caesar himself. It's around midnight on the night before they plan to murder Caesar, and there's a violent thunderstorm on, which everyone thinks is an omen that something bad is about to happen. Cassius walks through the storm to his friend Casca's house.
CASCA: Cassius, what night is this!
CASSIUS: A very pleasing night to honest men.
CASCA: Who ever knew the heavens menace so?
CASSIUS: Those that have known the reath so full of faults.
For my part, I have walked about the streets,
Submitting me unto the perilous night,
And, thus unbraced, Casca, as you see,
Have bared my bosom to the thunderbolts;
And when the cross blue lightning seemed to open
The breast of heaven, I did present myself
Even to the aim and very flash of it.
CASCA: But wherefore did you so much tempt the heavens?
It is the part of men to fear and tremble
When the most mighty gods by tokens send
Such dreadful heralds to astonish us.
CASSIUS: You are dull, Casca, and those sparks of life
That should be in a Roman you do want,
Or else you use not.
When they talk about the possibility of Caesar becoming king, Cassius says quite dramatically that he'd rather kill himself than be another man's subject, and that indeed, a man can escape from any imprisonment by killing himself:
CASSIUS: I know where I will wear this dagger then:
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.
Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong;
Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit;
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks the power to dismiss itself.
If I know this, know all the world besides,
That part of tyranny that I do bear
I can shake off at pleasure.
This play also feature this famous line, delivered by Caesar as he prepares to leave his house on the morning of his assassination, even though his wife and several augurs beg him not to due to the omens that something bad will happen:
CAESAR: Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
He goes on to say that he's Caesar; fear is afraid of him! Remember when I talked about Caesar having as much hubris as Cassius? Here's another passage that illustrates that:
CASSIUS: Pardon, Caesar,; Caesar, pardon;
As low as to thy foot doth Cassius fall,
To beg enfranchisement for Publius Cimber.
CAESAR: I could be well moved, if I were as you;
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me;
But I am as constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks,
They are all fire, and every one doth shine;
But there's but one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world: 'tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion; and that I am he,
Let me a little show it, even in this:
That I was constant Cimber should be banished,
And constant do remain to keep him so.
Here's one of those great passages where Shakespeare talks about the stage itself. In a bit of double irony, this passage is meant to reflect how this story was 1500 years old at the time the play was written, but now it also reflects on the fact that the play itself is 400 years old.
CASSIUS: How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn, and accents yet unknown!
BRUTUS: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,
That now on Pompey's basis lies along,
No worthier than the dust!
CASSIUS: So oft as that shall be,
So often shall the knot of us be called
The men that gave their country liberty.
Ah, and of course the further irony that, no, they did not give their country liberty. They killed Julius Caesar, but Augustus Caesar became emperor soon enough after that. On an unrelated note, here's a speech with yet another famous quote in it. This is Mark Antony weeping with rage over Caesar's body:
ANTONY: A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds;
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side, come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
Of course Mark Antony goes on to give the famous "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" speech. One thing I remember about this play from high school is that he was being sarcastic when he said that Caesar's murderers were honorable, and indeed, reading it now I see that's so. It seems like a challenging monologue to deliver, because in it, Antony is trying to deceive the crowd into thinking that he thinks the conspirators are honorable, while at the same time inciting them to think that the conspirators are not honorable but that he's a nice guy for thinking that they are. This speech contains a second famous line, "This was the most unkindest cut of all", spoken when Antony points to where, on Caesar's corpse, he was stabbed by his good and noble friend Brutus. Antony wraps up his speech, which has completely turned the crowd against the conspirators, with these duplicitous words:
ANTONY: I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts;
I am no orator, as Brutus is,
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
That love my friend; that they know full well
That gave me public leave to speak of him.
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech
To stir men's blood;
When of course the truth is pretty much 180 degrees from every bit of that. He then goes on bribe the populace by telling them that, in Caesar's will, Caesar left 90 drachmas to every citizen of Rome, and left his orchards and gardens as public parks.
There's a subsequent scene where he and Octavius are preparing for war against the conspirators. They have a third partner, Lepidus, and once he has left them on an errand Antony says to Octavius, hey, we're not really going to split a third of the world with him, are we? Octavius replies, well, you picked him Antony, and he has helped us out in this time of difficulty. And Antony says,
ANTONY: Though we lay honours on this man
To ease ourselves of divers slanderous loads,
He shall but bear them as the ass bears gold,
To groan and sweat under the business,
Either led or driven, as we point the way;
And having brought our treasure where we will,
Then take we down his load, and turn him off,
Like to the empty ass, to shake his ears
And graze in commons.
OCTAVIUS: You may do as your will;
But he's a tried and valiant soldier.
ANTONY: So is my horse, Octavius, and for that
I do appoint him store of provender.
It is a creature that I teach to fight,
To wind, to stop, to run directly on,
His corporal motion governed by my spirit.
And, in some taste, Lepidus but so:
He must be taught, and trained, and bid go forth:
... Do not talk of him
But as a property.
I highlighted several passages in a later scene where Brutus, the only one of the conspirators who killed Julius Caesar out of genuine concern for the Republic rather than out of envy or malice or self-interest, chides Cassius for taking bribes now that he's in a position of power. Cassius gets angry at this, but Brutus continues to chide him:
CASSIUS: Do not presume too much upon my love;
I may do that I shall be sorry for.
BRUTUS: You have done that you should be sorry for.
There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats;
For I am armed so strong in honesty
That they pass by me as the idle wind.
Another passage I highlighted was "Good words are better than bad strokes, Octavius", which I thought was funny because taken out of context, it sounds like Shakespeare's endorsement of sexting. From the final act, when everyone dies (this is a tragedy after all), I highlighted several lamentation passeges. Here's just one, from Marc Antony lamenting the death of Brutus. Actually, I'll continue it with Octavius' passage after that, which is, in fact, the very end of the play. Just to illustrate how strangely abruptly the play ends.
ANTONY: This was the noblest Roman of them all.
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, "This was a man!"
OCTAVIUS: According to his virtue let us use him,
With all respect and rites of burial.
Within my tent his bones tonight shall lie,
Most liek a soldier, ordered honorably.
So call the field to rest, and let's away,
To part the glories of this happy day.
The end. I guess I've laid out the rest of my thoughts on this play in the course of typing up these quotes. It is, ultimately, a play about politics, about people swaying popular opinion through shallow rhetoric. It's quite an appropriate play to read during election season, and that's quite intriguing, since Shakespeare didn't live someplace where there were elections.
Well, that's catch-up on all the plays I've read so far. Next up, I'm on to "As You Like It", another comedy, but one I know nothing about except the title. I look forward to finding out what it's about.