Villains of Shakespeare: A Research Monograph (draft)

                                                                       Chapter One

Introduction

 

William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaboration, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two

Life of William Shakespeare

 

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, allegedly on April 23, 1564. Church records from Holy Trinity Church indicate that he was baptized there on April 26, 1564. Young William was born of John Shakespeare, a glover and leather merchant, and Mary Arden, a landed local heiress. William, according to the church register, was the third of eight children in the Shakespeare household— three of whom died in

childhood. John Shakespeare had a remarkable run of success as a merchant, alderman, and high bailiff of Stratford, during William's early

childhood. His fortunes declined, however, in the late 1570s. There is great conjecture about Shakespeare's childhood years, especially regarding his education. Scholars surmise that Shakespeare attended the grammar school in Stratford.

 

While there are no records extant to prove this claim, Shakespeare's knowledge of Latin and Classical Greek would tend to support this theory. In addition, Shakespeare's first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, wrote that John Shakespeare had placed William "for some time in a free school." John Shakespeare, as a Stratford official, would have been granted a waiver of tuition for his son. As the records do not exist, we do not know how long William may have attended the school, but the literary quality of his works suggests a solid educational foundation. What is certain is

that William Shakespeare never proceeded to university schooling, which has contributed to the debate about the authorship of his works.

The next documented event in Shakespeare's life is his marriage to Anne Hathaway on November 28, 1582. William was 18 at the time, and Anne was 26—and pregnant. Their first daughter, Susanna, was born on May 26, 1583. The couple later had twins, Hamnet and Judith, born February 2, 1585 and christened at Holy Trinity. Hamnet died in childhood at the age of 11, on August 11, 1596.

 

For the seven years following the birth of his twins, William Shakespeare disappears from all records, finally turning up again in London some time in 1592. This period, known as the "Lost Years ," has sparked as much controversy about Shakespeare's life as any period. Rowe notes that young Shakespeare was quite fond of poaching, and may have had to

flee Stratford after an incident with Sir Thomas Lucy, whose deer and rabbits he allegedly poached. There is also rumor of Shakespeare working as an assistant schoolmaster in

 

Lancashire for a time, though this is circumstantial at best. It is estimated that Shakespeare arrived in London around 1588 and began to establish himself as an actor and playwright. Evidently Shakespeare garnered some

envy early on, as related by the critical attack of Robert Greene, a London playwright, in 1592:

"...an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a

blank verse as the best of you:

and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country."

 

Greene's bombast notwithstanding, Shakespeare must have shown considerable promise. By 1594, he was not only acting and writing for the

Lord Chamberlain's Men (called the King's Men after the ascension of James I in 1603), but was a managing partner in the operation as well. With Will Kempe, a master comedian, and Richard Burbage, a leading tragic actor of the day, the Lord Chamberlain's Men became a favorite London troupe, patronized by royalty and made popular by the theatre-

going public. Shakespeare's accomplishments are apparent when studied against other playwrights of this age. His company was the most successful in London in his day.

 

He had plays published and sold in octavo editions, or "penny-copies" to the more literate of his audiences. Never before had a playwright enjoyed sufficient acclaim to see his works published and sold as popular literature in the midst of his career. In addition, Shakespeare's ownership share in both the theatrical company and the Globe itself made him as much an entrepeneur as artist. While Shakespeare might not be accounted wealthy by London standards, his success allowed him to purchase New House and retire in comfort to Stratford in 1611. William Shakespeare wrote his will in 1611 , bequeathing his properties to his daughter Susanna (married in 1607 to Dr. John Hall). To his surviving

daughter Judith, he left £300, and to his wife Anne left "my second best bed." William Shakespeare allegedly died on his birthday, April 23, 1616. This is probably more of a romantic myth than reality, but Shakespeare was interred at Holy Trinity in Stratford on April 25. In 1623, two working

companions of Shakespeare from the Lord Chamberlain's Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, printed the First Folio edition of his collected plays, of which half were previously unpublished. William Shakespeare's legacy is a body of work that will never again be equaled in Western civilization. His words have endured for 400 years, and still reach across the centuries as powerfully as ever.

 

The age of Shakespeare was a great time in English history. The reign of Queen Elizabeth I saw England emerge as the leading naval and commercial power of the Western world. England consolidated its position with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and Elizabeth firmly established the Church of England begun by her father, King Henry VIII (following Henry's dispute with the Pope over having his first marriage annulled).

 

Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the world and became the most celebrated English sea captain of his generation. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh sent colonists eastward in search of profit. European wars brought an influx of continental refugees into England, exposing the Englishman to new cultures. In trade, might, and art, England established an envious preeminence.

 

Elizabethan LondonAt this time, London was the heart of England, reflecting all the vibrant qualities of the Elizabethan Age. This atmosphere made London a leading center of culture as well as commerce. Its dramatists and poets were among the leading literary artists of the day. In this heady environment, Shakespeare lived and wrote.

 

London in the 16th century underwent a transformation. Its population grew 400% during the 1500s, swelling to nearly 200,000 people in the city proper and outlying region by the time an immigrant from Stratford came to town. A rising merchant middle class carved out a productive livelihood, and the economy boomed. In the 1580s, the writings of the University Wits (Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Kyd, and Peele) defined the London theatre. Though grounded in medieval and Jacobean roots, these men produced new dramas and comedies using Marlowe's styling of blank verse. Shakespeare outdid them all; he combined the best traits of Elizabethan drama with classical sources, enriching the admixture with his imagination and wit.

 

The Elizabethan era was the epoch in English history of Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558–1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. The symbol of Britannia was first used in 1572 and often thereafter to mark the Elizabethan age as a renaissance that inspired national pride through classical ideals, international expansion, and naval triumph over the hated Spanish foe. In terms of the entire century, the historian John Guy (1988) argues that "England was economically healthier, more expansive, and more optimistic under the Tudors" than at any time in a thousand years.

 

This "golden age" represented the apogee of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering of poetry, music and literature. The era is most famous for theatre, as William Shakespeare and many others composed plays that broke free of England's past style of theatre. It was an age of exploration and expansion abroad, while back at home, the Protestant Reformation became more acceptable to the people, most certainly after the Spanish Armada was repulsed. It was also the end of the period when England was a separate realm before its royal union with Scotland.

 

The Elizabethan Age is viewed so highly because of the periods before and after. It was a brief period of largely internal peace between the English Reformation and the battles between Protestants and Catholics and the battles between parliament and the monarchy that engulfed the seventeenth century. The Protestant/Catholic divide was settled, for a time, by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, and parliament was not yet strong enough to challenge royal absolutism.

 

England was also well-off compared to the other nations of Europe. The Italian Renaissance had come to an end under the weight of foreign domination of the peninsula. France was embroiled in its own religious battles that would only be settled in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes. In part because of this, but also because the English had been expelled from their last outposts on the continent, the centuries long conflict between France and England was largely suspended for most of Elizabeth's reign.

 

The one great rival was Spain, with which England clashed both in Europe and the Americas in skirmishes that exploded into the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604. An attempt by Philip II of Spain to invade England with the Spanish Armada in 1588 was famously defeated, but the tide of war turned against England with an unsuccessful expedition to Portugal and the Azores, the Drake-Norris Expedition of 1589. Thereafter Spain provided some support for Irish Catholics in a debilitating rebellion against English rule, and Spanish naval and land forces inflicted a series of reversals against English offensives. This drained both the English Exchequer and economy that had been so carefully restored under Elizabeth's prudent guidance. English commercial and territorial expansion would be limited until the signing of the Treaty of London the year following Elizabeth's death.

 

England during this period had a centralised, well-organised, and effective government, largely a result of the reforms of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Economically, the country began to benefit greatly from the new era of trans-Atlantic trade. The Victorian era and the early 20th century idealised the Elizabethan era. The Encyclopædia Britannica maintains that "The long reign of Elizabeth I, 1558–1603, was England's Golden Age...'Merry England,' in love with life, expressed itself in music and literature, in architecture and in adventurous seafaring." This idealising tendency was shared by Britain and an Anglophilic America. In popular culture, the image of those adventurous Elizabethan seafarers was embodied in the films of Errol Flynn.

 

In response and reaction to this hyperbole, modern historians and biographers have tended to take a more dispassionate view of the Tudor period. During the reign of Elizabeth I, England enjoyed a time of prosperity and stability that led to a resurgence of learning and a new outlook of life. The Renaissance that had started in Italy some 200 years earlier had made its way to England, and brought with it new ideas and forms of expression through art (Western Civilization, 413). The works of William Shakespeare epitomize arts of the Elizabethan Epoch. No where else do we find such a concentrated view of the ideas of the time as we do in the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare and other playwrights. “Of all the forms of Elizabethan literature, none express the energy and intellectual versatility of the era better than drama.”, and Shakespeare was the master of drama in his time (Western Civilization, 523). Through his use of prose, conventions, and scholarship Shakespeare wrote stories that not only appealed to the people of Elizabethan England, but are also timeless and provide a reference for life in his time for us to view today.

 

    During the Renaissance in Europe there was a great return to science and learning, with a particular interest in the Classics (Western Civilization, 416). The Church had lost some of the great power it had once held over Europe, and people were again free to look back upon the pagan scholars and writers of Greece and Rome. Plays by playwrights such as Euripides, Plautus, and Seneca which were once banned by the Church were once again being read and performed (Living Theatre, 174). Likewise, the cultural stories of the people were once again being told in public, and playwrights, including Shakespeare, made good use of them. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a good example of this. Shakespeare used ancient Celtic and Greek mythological figures such as Puck, Oberon, Theseus, and Hermione and placed them in a different time and place than their original stories, but with their ancient characteristics. Other plays, such as Romeo and Juliet make references to popular mythological figures like Queen Mab to make the story fit better into their world. Since people of all classes attended plays, playwrights needed to use stories, characters and words that would appeal to everybody. The best way to do this was to use mythology and folklore that was sometimes, but not always, of Christian origin (Western Civilization, 523).

 

    England in the time before the reign of Elizabeth I was in a state of religious turmoil. When Elizabeth I ascended to the throne she banned the performances all religious plays and stories (except in Church) to help stop the violence over religion. Medieval cycle and mystery plays, which were quite popular, could not longer be performed, and playwrights were now free to concentrate on secular stories (Living Theatre, 171). They still contained some elements of religion, as did everyday life in Elizabethan England, but it was not the primary focus, nor did it play a particularly important part other than perhaps to serve as plot device or a place for the story to advance. Conventions from Medieval religious theatre found its way into Elizabethan Theatre, however, and Shakespeare made good use of them during their performances, such as using the trap door for the gravediggers’ scene in Hamlet (Living Theatre, 188) . The Hellmouth, and trapdoor, which had been a staple of Medieval Theatres continued to be used, and were built into the permanent theatre structures used in the performances of Elizabethan plays.

 

    Shakespeare’s histories, such as Henry V, were a tribute to the British Monarchy and to Britain herself. Many playwrights and other artists paid homage to their patrons, and Shakespeare was no exception. By writing about the glories of England and her former rulers he is paying homage to Elizabeth and England (Living Theatre, 185). By showing the glorious past Shakespeare is not only attempting to legitimize Elizabeth’s position on the throne, but also his position as a “favored” playwright. Since the arts were kept alive by patrons, it was best not to anger one and lose your support. Shakespeare sometimes, like in Hamlet, criticized the Monarchy, but in a way that would not be obvious or outwardly treasonous. In this way he spoke his mind, but also paid lip service to keep money coming from his patron.

 

    Shakespeare was a very prolific writer, which seems quite uncommon to us today, but was not so at that time. His writings are not totally original, nor are they wholly different. He had help with many of his plays, collaborating with other writers and actors, and recycled the plots and stories from his contemporaries as well as extant earlier plays and mythologies (Living Theatre, 175). King Lear is based very heavily upon a Celtic myth, down to the names of the characters and places that the story occurs in, and Hamlet is a retelling of earlier versions of the same story (Living Theatre, 180).. Elizabethan plays use stock-type characters like those found in Comedia Del’Arte and Roman plays, and actors would specialize in specific types of roles. Many of the lines in Shakespeare’s plays parallel lines in other plays by him, with only a word or two different. The stories are very much different, but the dialog and characters are not, which made writing 37 plays seem like not such a difficult task after all.

 

    People in Elizabethan England were very concerned with the humours, a very time-specific form of medicine and psychology. Shakespeare makes references to them all over in his plays. Hamlet is portrayed as being to Melancholic, with his humours out of balance, and one was dominant over the others. This, not psychology as we know it today, is why the Elizabethans believed people were the way they were: their humours were out of balance (Western Civilization, 524). Shakespeare used this belief to make his characters not only believable, but also accessible and understandable to his audience.

 

    Shakespeare’s works are the greatest representation of art from Elizabethan England. The encompass the economic, social, and educational aspects of life in a nice, neat package. No other art form, including painting, could provide so much information about life in Elizabethan England. Not only can we see and observe what goes on, but we can view the ideas, language, and thoughts as well through words and actions. The works of William Shakespeare are not the only view of life in Elizabethan England that still exist today, but they are the most complete and inclusive.

 

Shakespeare's Contemporaries

 

    Shakespearean England was a treasure-trove of historical giants – Elizabeth I, Ben Jonson, the Earl of Essex, Edward Alleyn, John Lyly, William Kempe – all fascinating to be sure. It was hard to choose, but here is a list of those five contemporaries of the Bard whose lives I find most intriguing.

 

1. Christopher Marlowe

The brilliant young playwright Christopher Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl on May 30, 1593, and the events surrounding his suspicious death have chilled and captivated all those interested in Renaissance England. Known as Shakespeare's only literary peer1 until his untimely death, Marlowe is responsible for some of the finest lyrical poetry of any age, and possibly had a hand in writing four of Shakespeare's early dramas.

 

2. King James I

After the death of Elizabeth I, James the VI of Scotland became the new ruler, known in England as King James I. His fascination with the occult prompted him to write his own treatise on witchcraft, Daemonology, and many believe that James's vehement belief in the divine right of kings influenced Shakespeare's play-writing methodology. James I is probably best known for his translation of the Bible into English which became known as the Authorized King James Version. For more please see King James I: Shakespeare's Patron.

 

3. Sir Walter Raleigh

Certainly Sir Walter Raleigh, the explorer, poet, philosopher, soldier, statesman, and political pundit, had the busiest life of any Elizabethan subject. As one of Queen Elizabeth's favourite courtiers, the charming Raleigh enjoyed a life of fame, riches, and swashbuckling. However, Raleigh's arrogance and bravado made him unpopular with many, and he was eventually executed for treason against the new monarch, James I.

 

4. Dr. Simon Forman

The mysterious Dr. Forman, an English astrologer and doctor whose many scandals riveted Elizabethan England, wrote scores of papers on the subjects of medicine and astrology. He saved countless lives during the plagues of 1592 and 1594, yet was imprisoned by the Royal College of Physicians in London for use of "magical potions" to help patients. For a detailed look at Simon Forman please see Going to a Play in Shakespeare's London: Simon Forman's Diary.

 

5. Richard Burbage

Richard Burbage, the famed Elizabethan actor, artist, and theatrical entrepreneur, gained unprecedented acclaim by playing many of the major Shakespearean characters, including Othello, Hamlet, Lear, and Richard III. In 1599, Richard, with the help of his brother, built what is now the most recognizable playhouse in the Western world -- the Globe Theatre. For more information please see Richard Burbage the Legend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Three

Works of William Shakespeare

 

Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, and critics agree that Shakespeare did the same, mostly early and late in his career. Some attributions, such as Titus Andronicus and the early history plays, remain controversial, while The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio have well-attested contemporary documentation. Textual evidence also supports the view that several of the plays were revised by other writers after their original composition.

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however, and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period. His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty. The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca. The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story. Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape, the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. By William Blake, c. 1786. Tate Britain.

 

Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes. Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences. The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".

Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. Henry Fuseli, 1780–5. Kunsthaus Zürich.

 

In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays" Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies. Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins "To be or not to be; that is the question". Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement. The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him. In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty". In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies, uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn. In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.

In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.

 

It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes. After the plagues of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames. Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a room". When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark. The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.

 

After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice. After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer. The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."

 

The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters. He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony". On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.

 

Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama. The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.

 

Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays. No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles. By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.

Pity by William Blake, 1795, Tate Britain, is an illustration of two similes in Macbeth: "And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd / Upon the sightless couriers of the air".

 

Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony. Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:

 

    Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting

    That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay

    Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—

    And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know

    Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...

 

    Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8

 

After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical". In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length. In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "...pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense. The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.

 

Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre. Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed. He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama. As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.

 

All's Well That Ends Well

As You Like It

The Comedy of Errors

Cymbeline

Love's Labours Lost

Measure for Measure

The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merchant of Venice

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Much Ado About Nothing

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Taming of the Shrew

The Tempest

Troilus and Cressida

Twelfth Night

Two Gentlemen of Verona

Winter's Tale

Henry IV, part 1

Henry IV, part 2

Henry V

Henry VI, part 1

Henry VI, part 2

Henry VI, part 3

Henry VIII

King John

Richard II

Richard III

Antony and Cleopatra

Coriolanus

Hamlet

Julius Caesar

King Lear

Macbeth

Othello

Romeo and Juliet

Timon of Athens

Titus

Andronicus

The Sonnets

A Lover's Complaint

The Rape of Lucrece

Venus and Adonis

Funeral Elegy by W.S.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Four

Elizabethan Villains and Shakespearean Villains

 

 

For the Elizabethan's the villain could have many motives that would be cause for revenge: anger, jealousy, and envy. Anger is most often the motive with hatred a close second. Hatred, in the eyes of another, was defined as natural wrath which had endured too long and had turned to unnatural malice. Anger (or choler) comes from personal wrongs, it is felt for particular men as opposed to hatred which is felt for all humanity. Anger can be cured by patience, but hatred is everlasting. Anger wants the victim to recognize the revenger, whereas hatred only desires to watch the destruction of the victim without recognition. Jealousy is another prime motive of revenge, it stems from the belief that an adversary or rival is an obstacle, that this adversary may hinder or cross the design and purpose of the revenger. Envy was considered the greatest Elizabethan vice, and it

may be one of the most powerful of the passions inducing revenge. Envy's passion was so great that, in contrast to anger, no wrongs were necessary for a person to become the recipient of its malice; indeed, it was often directed against the most virtuous and peaceful of men.

 

The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare, remains as compelling today as it was four centuries ago, because it comments so eloquently on a universal theme, the drive for revenge. The Merchant of Venice is exceptional among Shakespeare's plays because it may have been inspired, at least indirectly, by a contemporary scandal. In 1594 the Queen's personal physician Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew, was tried and executed for treason. The Lopez case inspired a wave of anti-Jewish feeling, and was probably responsible for the appearance of several dramas dealing with Jewish characters, including a revival of The Jew of Malta . If the Lopez affair did serve as Shakespeare's inspiration, only a few hints of this remain in the text of The Merchant of Venice, (One of these is that the hero of the play may be named for Don Antonio, the pretender to the Portuguese throne, who was associated with Dr. Lopez). In Shakespeare's hands, the Jewish villain became a complex character whose drive for revenge many playgoers can understand and even sympathize with. The elements of treachery and suspense are balanced with light hearted romance to create a drama which many audiences find more satisfying than Shakespeare's farcical early comedies.

 

The English of the late sixteenth century believed that Christianity was the only true religion, and that the social order was ordained by God. The individual who set himself against the establishment could only be a source of disruption or, at worst, evil. Since Jews did not believe in Christianity, they were a threat to the social order. The character of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice was no doubt drawn from literature, not real life. The Jewish villain was a stock character in medieval literature. Medieval passion plays, reenactments of the story of the crucifixion of Jesus, invariably portrayed the disloyal disciple Judas, as a stereotypical Jew. (Of course, historically, Jesus and all of his disciples were Jewish, but this was ignored.) The part of Judas was usually played for comedy, by an actor wearing an outrageous red wig and a large false nose. Subsequent authors, when they portrayed Jewish characters, always cast them as villains. In all probability, Shakespeare was not even interested in Shylock's Jewishness. He used the prevailing anti-Semitic stereotypes as a handy way to characterize his play's villain. Barabas, The Jew of Malta, must have been the prototype for Shylock. What mattered to Shakespeare was that Shylock was an outsider set apart from society because of his religion, his profession of lending money for interest, and his hatred for

 

Antonio and the other Christian characters of the play. Surely Shylock wouldn't take the pound of flesh even if Antonio did fail to pay his loan, Salerio says: "What's that good for?" "If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge." Shylock answers.(3.1.47-49) Shylock has no interest in money, he wants revenge for the way he had been abused--and if the loss of a pound of flesh costs Antonio his life, so much the better. Villains were equipped with motives other than just pure revengefullness. Covetness,

misanthropy, and especially ambition, often hold the stage almost m unchallenged. The ambitious villain has a love of conquest and a thirst for power. Sometimes the ambitious villain can be thought of as a revengeful villain. In Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Barabas was by nature ambitious, but most of his actions were the result of a desire for revenge. Barabas, describes his character to the audience thus: Now will I show myself to have more of the serpent than the dove; that is, more knave

than fool. ( The Jew of Malta, 2.3.36-37)

 

His enemies blocked his ambition, so he turned to retaliation. In Marlowe's play, which was first performed in 1591, Barabas is a very wealthy Jewish merchant who lives on the Mediterranean island of Malta. Like Shylock, Barabas has an only daughter who is in love with a Christian. Barabas also has a rational motive for hating Christian society. In the play, he is angered by the passage of a law requiring all Jews to either convert to Christianity or give up one half of their wealth. Nevertheless, Barabas is a thoroughly evil character. Barabas possesses great wealth and uses it in such a manner as to make him more powerful than kings. He commits crimes for revenge, because he hates Christians as such, and hates especially the men who have taken his gold. He resorts to murder and treason to gain his revenge and enjoys watching the pain and suffering he has caused. Richard III is based of the villainy of revenge. At the very beginning of the play Richard expounds upon his defority and then proclaims his intention for revenge.

 

And therefore, since I cannot

prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-

spoken days,

I am determined to prove a

villain.

( Richard III, 1.1.32)

 

In Richard III Shakespeare pictured the dominating sins in the play as perjury and murder--sins against the moral order. He portrayed and analyzed the passion of ambition that caused Richard to sin and the passion of fear that at the same time punished him for his sins and forced him to wade still further in blood. He inserted non-historical scenes developing the Elizabethan philosophy of revenge. He used the supernatural to enhance the horror of the play, and to contribute to the impression of a divine vengeance giving punishment for sin. He showed God's revenge exacted through the agency of the evil Richard, who was nevertheless to be held to account for his evil-

doing.

 

The Elizabethan attitude toward nature, a holdover from medieval times, was as structured and formal as an organizational flow-chart is today. It was the Elizabethan concept of order which the villain threatened. Nature consisted of a universe in which there was an established hierarchy. One of the most fundamental views of order in the medieval consciousness was the concept of the Chain of Being.

 

It held that the universe was a hierarchy in which certain aspects of creation held preeminence over others. For example, the sun was the greatest among stars, the king was the greatest among men, and gold the greatest among metals. The chain extended from God at the top, down to the lowest of elements, and all of creation had some position on the chain. When the natural order was upset, the bottom moved toward the top. As a result, chaos set in.

 

In Elizabethan literature the villain performed the function of setting in motion the awesome and terrifying forces of chaos that threaten the existence of social order. With delighted candor Richard III takes the audience into his confidence, gleefully explaining his plan with which he, like Milton's Satan, intends to walk with us "hand in hand to hell" ( Richard III , 5.3.312). His opening soliloquy provides us the clues to the motivation for his wickedness, as well as the revelation by the villain that he

intends to upset the established order, or status quo. In Richard III the status quo is a well-defined system for the accession to the

throne. Amidst a fragile and precariously balanced order, the villain begins his efforts to unloose the demon chaos and disassemble, link by link, the entire Chain of Being. His ability to do so springs largely from to facets of his character.

 

First is his total alienation from God, Community and man, which convinces him that he acts as a free agent, unaccountable to any of these. Second is his indomitable and unyielding will, which closely parallels that of Milton's Satan. Estrangement from God, man, and community enables the villain to view his own acts as if performed in a moral vacuum. Consequently, there is no limit to the amount of suffering and devastation he can inflict before the prick of conscience awakens him from his

demonic trance. The reason the villain can achieve such startling

power is due in large part to the ceaseless flow of energy that is characteristic of the villains will.

 

As the villain rises in power, there is an undercurrent of fear that ripples through the plays and effects the characters of every class. We must remember that, while the government of Queen Elizabeth was one of strength and stability, there was no heir apparent to Elizabeth's throne.

 

Thus, fears of an illegitimate or weak successor loomed over England. As John Palmer states, in The Political Characters of Shakespeare :

All that the Englishman held most dear had found a satisfying

symbol in the Tudor monarch, ruling by divine right, holding a

sacred office, to question whose authority was treason,

to trouble whose peace was an impiety. But the Tudor

monarch was about to die childless. Was England to fall back into the old disorder, horror, fear and mutiny which had followed the usurpation of Bolingbroke?

(Palmer, John. The Political Characters of Shakespeare . London: Macmillan, 1961, p. 119.)

 

The memories of Bolingbroke, the Wars of the Roses, and the Tudor

Myth were not fleeting ones. Unlike many presentations of historical subjects on stage, Shakespeare's plays explored a number of concerns that reflected current interests. Foremost among these was the fear of a return to the civil disorder of the 15th century that had preceded the

accession to the throne of the Tudor monarchs. Many members of the great 15th century families were still prominent in Elizabeth's

court. As a member of an acting company that frequently performed at court, and enjoyed the financial support of the nobility, Shakespeare had direct contact with these family descendants.

 

Could their ambitions and lust for power and revenge rise up again? Would the fragile peace between domestic factions as well

as foreign enemies remain secure after the death of Elizabeth? These

were questions he had to confront when writing the drama of Richard III's rise to power and rapid downfall.

 

Many of Shakespeare's characters express the feeling that the

villain's successes will open the way to imminent doom. In Richard III , just after Clarence has been killed by agents of Richard, it has been revealed that King Edward has died, and the throne is a mere stone's throw away from Richard. Three citizens assembled on the

street reveal the fears and insecurities of the populace:

SECOND CITIZEN: Hear you the news abroad?

FIRST CITIZEN: Yes, that the King is dead.

SECOND CITIZEN: Ill news, by'r lady; seldom

comes the better.

I fear, I fear 'twill prove a giddy world.

THIRD CITIZEN: Neighbours, God speed!

FIRST CITIZEN: Give you good morrow, sir.

THIRD CITIZEN: Doth the news hold of good King Edward's death?

SECOND CITIZEN: Ay, sir, it is too true; God help the while!

THIRD CITIZEN: Then, masters, look to see a troublous

world.

( Richard III,2.3.2-9)

 

The disintegration of social order is further marked by a succession of "unnatural occurrences, such as "untimely storms" (2.3.35), an

eclipse, "sudden floods" (4.4.510), and hooting owls.

It is the fear that, if the villain ultimately prevails (or goes unpunished for his deeds), chaos and disorder will reign forever; life thereafter will be rendered meaningless, and mankind will be doomed to an existence void of hope and purpose. It is this chaos, expressed by way of prophecy, soliloquy, and imagery of nature gone awry, which captures the fears of the Elizabethan audience.

Allusions to Marlowe's work are prevalent in Shakespeare's plays. Here Shakespeare quotes directly a line from Marlowe's Hero and Leander (176): "Whoever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight?" (As You Like It, 3.5.81). It is argued that Shakespeare alludes to Marlowe's murder in As You Like It, 3.3.11-12: "it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room", and apostrophizes his dead friend in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

 

    The lunatic, the lover and the poet

    Are of imagination all compact:

    One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

    That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

    Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:

    The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

    Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

    And as imagination bodies forth

    The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

    Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

    A local habitation and a name. (5.1.8-18)

 

Now, for those with lots of imagination: theory has it that, because he was about to be tried for heresy, Marlowe staged his death and fled to Italy. From there, Marlowe is supposed to have penned all the works attributed to Shakespeare and had them smuggled back to England.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Five

Villains in Shakespearean Drama

 

William Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature. Traditionally, the 38 plays are divided into the genres of tragedy, history, and comedy; they have been translated into every major living language, in addition to being continually performed all around the world.

 

Many of his plays appeared in print as a series of quartos, but approximately half of them remained unpublished until 1623, when the posthumous First Folio was published. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies and histories follows the categories used in the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labelled some of these plays "problem plays" that elude easy categorisation, or perhaps purposely break generic conventions, and has introduced the term romances for what scholars believe to be his later comedies.

 

When Shakespeare first arrived in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s, dramatists writing for London's new commercial playhouses (such as The Curtain) were combining two different strands of dramatic tradition into a new and distinctively Elizabethan synthesis. Previously, the most common forms of popular English theatre were the Tudor morality plays. These plays, celebrating piety generally, use personified moral attributes to urge or instruct the protagonist to choose the virtuous life over Evil. The characters and plot situations are largely symbolic rather than realistic. As a child, Shakespeare would likely have seen this type of play (along with, perhaps, mystery plays and miracle plays).

 

The other strand of dramatic tradition was classical aesthetic theory. This theory was derived ultimately from Aristotle; in Renaissance England, however, the theory was better known through its Roman interpreters and practitioners. At the universities, plays were staged in a more academic form as Roman closet dramas. These plays, usually performed in Latin, adhered to classical ideas of unity and decorum, but they were also more static, valuing lengthy speeches over physical action. Shakespeare would have learned this theory at grammar school, where Plautus and especially Terence were key parts of the curriculum and were taught in editions with lengthy theoretical introductions.

 

For Shakespeare as he began to write, both traditions were alive; they were, moreover, filtered through the recent success of the University Wits on the London stage. By the late 16th century, the popularity of morality and academic plays waned as the English Renaissance took hold, and playwrights like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe revolutionised theatre. Their plays blended the old morality drama with classical theory to produce a new secular form. The new drama combined the rhetorical complexity of the academic play with the bawdy energy of the moralities. However, it was more ambiguous and complex in its meanings, and less concerned with simple allegory. Inspired by this new style, Shakespeare continued these artistic strategies, creating plays that not only resonated on an emotional level with audiences but also explored and debated the basic elements of what it means to be human. What Marlowe and Kyd did for tragedy, John Lyly and George Peele, among others, did for comedy: they offered models of witty dialogue, romantic action, and exotic, often pastoral location that formed the basis of Shakespeare's comedic mode throughout his career.

 

Shakespeare's Elizabethan tragedies (including the history plays with tragic designs, such as Richard II) demonstrate his relative independence from classical models. He takes from Aristotle and Horace the notion of decorum; with few exceptions, he focuses on high-born characters and national affairs as the subject of tragedy. In most other respects, though, the early tragedies are far closer to the spirit and style of moralities. They are episodic, packed with character and incident; they are loosely unified by a theme or character. In this respect, they reflect clearly the influence of Marlowe, particularly of Tamburlaine. Even in his early work, however, Shakespeare generally shows more restraint than Marlowe; he resorts to grandiloquent rhetoric less frequently, and his attitude towards his heroes is more nuanced, and sometimes more sceptical, than Marlowe's.[8] By the turn of the century, the bombast of Titus Andronicus had vanished, replaced by the subtlety of Hamlet.

 

In comedy, Shakespeare strayed even further from classical models. The Comedy of Errors, an adaptation of Menaechmi, follows the model of new comedy closely. Shakespeare's other Elizabethan comedies are more romantic. Like Lyly, he often makes romantic intrigue (a secondary feature in Latin new comedy) the main plot element; even this romantic plot is sometimes given less attention than witty dialogue, deceit, and jests. The "reform of manners," which Horace considered the main function of comedy,  survives in such episodes as the gulling of Malvolio. Shakespeare reached maturity as a dramatist at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and in the first years of the reign of James. In these years, he responded to a deep shift in popular tastes, both in subject matter and approach. At the turn of the decade, he responded to the vogue for dramatic satire initiated by the boy players at Blackfriars and St. Paul's. At the end of the decade, he seems to have attempted to capitalise on the new fashion for tragicomedy, even collaborating with John Fletcher, the writer who had popularised the genre in England.

 

The influence of younger dramatists such as John Marston and Ben Jonson is seen not only in the problem plays, which dramatise intractable human problems of greed and lust, but also in the darker tone of the Jacobean tragedies. The Marlovian, heroic mode of the Elizabethan tragedies is gone, replaced by a darker vision of heroic natures caught in environments of pervasive corruption. As a sharer in both the Globe and in the King's Men, Shakespeare never wrote for the boys' companies; however, his early Jacobean work is markedly influenced by the techniques of the new, satiric dramatists. One play, Troilus and Cressida, may even have been inspired by the War of the Theatres.

 

Shakespeare's final plays hearken back to his Elizabethan comedies in their use of romantic situation and incident. In these plays, however, the sombre elements that are largely glossed over in the earlier plays are brought to the fore and often rendered dramatically vivid. This change is related to the success of tragicomedies such as Philaster, although the uncertainty of dates makes the nature and direction of the influence unclear. From the evidence of the title-page to The Two Noble Kinsmen and from textual analysis it is believed by some editors that Shakespeare ended his career in collaboration with Fletcher, who succeeded him as house playwright for the King's Men. These last plays resemble Fletcher's tragicomedies in their attempt to find a comedic mode capable of dramatising more serious events than had his earlier comedies.

 

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, "drama became the ideal means to capture and convey the diverse interests of the time." Stories of various genres were enacted for audiences consisting of both the wealthy and educated and the poor and illiterate. Shakespeare served his dramatic apprenticeship at the height of the Elizabethan period, in the years following the defeat of the Spanish Armada; he retired at the height of the Jacobean period, not long before the start of the Thirty Years' War. His verse style, his choice of subjects, and his stagecraft all bear the marks of both periods. His style changed not only in accordance with his own tastes and developing mastery, but also in accord with the tastes of the audiences for whom he wrote.

 

While many passages in Shakespeare's plays are written in prose, he almost always wrote a large proportion of his plays and poems in iambic pentameter. In some of his early works (like Romeo and Juliet), he even added punctuation at the end of these iambic pentameter lines to make the rhythm even stronger. He and many dramatists of this period used the form of blank verse extensively in character dialogue, thus heightening poetic effects.

 

To end many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet to give a sense of conclusion, or completion. A typical example is provided in Macbeth: as Macbeth leaves the stage to murder Duncan (to the sound of a chiming clock), he says,

“ Hear it not Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell.”

 

Shakespeare's writing (especially his plays) also feature extensive wordplay in which double entendres and clever rhetorical flourishes are repeatedly used. Humor is a key element in all of Shakespeare's plays. Although a large amount of his comical talent is evident in his comedies, some of the most entertaining scenes and characters are found in tragedies such as Hamlet and histories such as Henry IV, Part 1. Shakespeare's humour was largely influenced by Plautus.

Soliloquies in plays

 

Shakespeare's plays are also notable for their use of soliloquies, in which a character makes a speech to him- or herself so the audience can understand the character's inner motivations and conflict. In his book Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, James Hirsh defines the convention of a Shakespearean soliloquy in early modern drama. He argues that when a person on the stage speaks to himself or herself, they are characters in a fiction speaking in character; this is an occasion of self-address. Furthermore, Hirsh points out that Shakespearian soliloquies and "asides" are audible in the fiction of the play, bound to be overheard by any other character in the scene unless certain elements confirm that the speech is protected. Therefore, a Renaissance playgoer who was familiar with this dramatic convention would have been alert to Hamlet's expectation that his soliloquy be overheard by the other characters in the scene. Moreover, Hirsh asserts that in soliloquies in other Shakespearian plays, the speaker is entirely in character within the play's fiction. Saying that addressing the audience was outmoded by the time Shakespeare was alive, he "acknowledges few occasions when a Shakespearean speech might involve the audience in recognising the simultaneous reality of the stage and the world the stage is representing." Other than 29 speeches delivered by choruses or characters who revert to that condition as epilogues "Hirsh recognises only three instances of audience address in Shakespeare's plays, 'all in very early comedies, in which audience address is introduced specifically to ridicule the practice as antiquated and amateurish.'"

 

As was common in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of other playwrights and recycled older stories and historical material. His dependence on earlier sources was a natural consequence of the speed at which playwrights of his era wrote; in addition, plays based on already popular stories appear to have been seen as more likely to draw large crowds. There were also aesthetic reasons: Renaissance aesthetic theory took seriously the dictum that tragic plots should be grounded in history. This stricture did not apply to comedy, and those of Shakespeare's plays for which no clear source has been established, such as Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest, are comedies. Even these plays, however, rely heavily on generic commonplaces. For example, Hamlet (c.1601) may be a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), and King Lear is likely an adaptation of an older play, King Leir. For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North, and the English history plays are indebted to Raphael Holinshed's 1587 Chronicles.

 

While there is much dispute about the exact Chronology of Shakespeare plays, as well as the Shakespeare Authorship Question, the plays tend to fall into three main stylistic groupings. The first major grouping of his plays begins with his histories and comedies of the 1590s. Shakespeare's earliest plays tended to be adaptations of other playwright's works and employed blank verse and little variation in rhythm. However, after the plague forced Shakespeare and his company of actors to leave London for periods between 1592 and 1594, Shakespeare began to use rhymed couplets in his plays, along with more dramatic dialogue. These elements showed up in The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Almost all of the plays written after the plague hit London are comedies, perhaps reflecting the public's desire at the time for light-hearted fare. Other comedies from Shakespeare during this period include Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor and As You Like It.

 

The middle grouping of Shakespeare's plays begins in 1599 with Julius Caesar. For the next few years, Shakespeare would produce his most famous dramas, including Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear. The plays during this period are in many ways the darkest of Shakespeare's career and address issues such as betrayal, murder, lust, power and egoism.

 

 

 

 

i)               Shylock in The Merchant of Venice

 

Plot Overview

Antonio, a Venetian merchant, complains to his friends of a melancholy that he cannot explain. His friend Bassanio is desperately in need of money to court Portia, a wealthy heiress who lives in the city of Belmont. Bassanio asks Antonio for a loan in order to travel in style to Portia’s estate. Antonio agrees, but is unable to make the loan himself because his own money is all invested in a number of trade ships that are still at sea. Antonio suggests that Bassanio secure the loan from one of the city’s moneylenders and name Antonio as the loan’s guarantor. In Belmont, Portia expresses sadness over the terms of her father’s will, which stipulates that she must marry the man who correctly chooses one of three caskets. None of Portia’s current suitors are to her liking, and she and her lady-in-waiting, Nerissa, fondly remember a visit paid some time before by Bassanio.

 

In Venice, Antonio and Bassanio approach Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, for a loan. Shylock nurses a long-standing grudge against Antonio, who has made a habit of berating Shylock and other Jews for their usury, the practice of loaning money at exorbitant rates of interest, and who undermines their business by offering interest-free loans. Although Antonio refuses to apologize for his behavior, Shylock acts agreeably and offers to lend Bassanio three thousand ducats with no interest. Shylock adds, however, that should the loan go unpaid, Shylock will be entitled to a pound of Antonio’s own flesh. Despite Bassanio’s warnings, Antonio agrees. In Shylock’s own household, his servant Launcelot decides to leave Shylock’s service to work for Bassanio, and Shylock’s daughter Jessica schemes to elope with Antonio’s friend Lorenzo. That night, the streets of Venice fill up with revelers, and Jessica escapes with Lorenzo by dressing as his page. After a night of celebration, Bassanio and his friend Gratiano leave for Belmont, where Bassanio intends to win Portia’s hand.

 

In Belmont, Portia welcomes the prince of Morocco, who has come in an attempt to choose the right casket to marry her. The prince studies the inscriptions on the three caskets and chooses the gold one, which proves to be an incorrect choice. In Venice, Shylock is furious to find that his daughter has run away, but rejoices in the fact that Antonio’s ships are rumored to have been wrecked and that he will soon be able to claim his debt. In Belmont, the prince of Arragon also visits Portia. He, too, studies the caskets carefully, but he picks the silver one, which is also incorrect. Bassanio arrives at Portia’s estate, and they declare their love for one another. Despite Portia’s request that he wait before choosing, Bassanio immediately picks the correct casket, which is made of lead. He and Portia rejoice, and Gratiano confesses that he has fallen in love with Nerissa. The couples decide on a double wedding. Portia gives Bassanio a ring as a token of love, and makes him swear that under no circumstances will he part with it. They are joined, unexpectedly, by Lorenzo and Jessica. The celebration, however, is cut short by the news that Antonio has indeed lost his ships, and that he has forfeited his bond to Shylock. Bassanio and Gratiano immediately travel to Venice to try and save Antonio’s life. After they leave, Portia tells Nerissa that they will go to Venice disguised as men.

 

Shylock ignores the many pleas to spare Antonio’s life, and a trial is called to decide the matter. The duke of Venice, who presides over the trial, announces that he has sent for a legal expert, who turns out to be Portia disguised as a young man of law. Portia asks Shylock to show mercy, but he remains inflexible and insists the pound of flesh is rightfully his. Bassanio offers Shylock twice the money due him, but Shylock insists on collecting the bond as it is written. Portia examines the contract and, finding it legally binding, declares that Shylock is entitled to the merchant’s flesh. Shylock ecstatically praises her wisdom, but as he is on the verge of collecting his due, Portia reminds him that he must do so without causing Antonio to bleed, as the contract does not entitle him to any blood. Trapped by this logic, Shylock hastily agrees to take Bassanio’s money instead, but Portia insists that Shylock take his bond as written, or nothing at all. Portia informs Shylock that he is guilty of conspiring against the life of a Venetian citizen, which means he must turn over half of his property to the state and the other half to Antonio. The duke spares Shylock’s life and takes a fine instead of Shylock’s property. Antonio also forgoes his half of Shylock’s wealth on two conditions: first, Shylock must convert to Christianity, and second, he must will the entirety of his estate to Lorenzo and Jessica upon his death. Shylock agrees and takes his leave.

 

Bassanio, who does not see through Portia’s disguise, showers the young law clerk with thanks, and is eventually pressured into giving Portia the ring with which he promised never to part. Gratiano gives Nerissa, who is disguised as Portia’s clerk, his ring. The two women return to Belmont, where they find Lorenzo and Jessica declaring their love to each other under the moonlight. When Bassanio and Gratiano arrive the next day, their wives accuse them of faithlessly giving their rings to other women. Before the deception goes too far, however, Portia reveals that she was, in fact, the law clerk, and both she and Nerissa reconcile with their husbands. Lorenzo and Jessica are pleased to learn of their inheritance from Shylock, and the joyful news arrives that Antonio’s ships have in fact made it back safely. The group celebrates its good fortune.

 

Shylock is the most vivid and memorable character in The Merchant of Venice, and he is one of Shakespeare's greatest dramatic creations. On stage, it is Shylock who makes the play, and almost all of the great actors of the English and Continental stage have attempted the role. But the character of Shylock has also been the subject of much critical debate: How are we meant to evaluate the attitude of the Venetians in the play toward him? Or his attitude toward them? Is he a bloodthirsty villain? Or is he a man "more sinned against than sinning"? One of the reasons that such questions arise is that there are really two stage Shylocks in the play: first, there is the stage "villain" who is required for the plot; second, there is the human being who suffers the loss of his daughter, his property, and, very importantly for him, his religion.

 

Shylock's function in this play is to be the obstacle, the man who stands in the way of the love stories; such a man is a traditional figure in romantic comedies. Something or someone must impede young, romantic love; here, it is Shylock and the many and various ways that he is linked to the three sets of lovers. The fact that he is a Jew is, in a sense, accidental. Shakespeare wanted to contrast liberality against selfishness — in terms of money and in terms of love. There was such a figure available from the literature of the time, one man who could fulfill both functions: this man would be a usurer, or moneylender, with a beautiful daughter that he held onto as tightly as he did his ducats. Usury was forbidden to Christians by the church of the Middle Ages, and as a consequence, money lending was controlled by the Jews; as a rule, it was usually the only occupation which the law allowed to them. As a result, a great deal of medieval literature produced the conventional figure of the Jewish moneylender, usually as a minor character, but also too, as a major character.

 

It is from this medieval literary tradition that Shakespeare borrows the figure of Shylock, just as Marlowe did for his Jew of Malta. Some commentators have said that the character of Shylock is an example of Elizabethan (and Shakespeare's own) anti-Semitism. In contrast, many have seen the creation of Shylock as an attack on this kind of intolerance. But Shakespeare, they forget, was a dramatist. He was not concerned with either anti- nor pro-Semitism, except in the way it shaped individual characters in his plays to produce the necessary drama that he was attempting to create. The play is thus emphatically not anti-Semitic; rather, because of the nature of Shylock's involvement in the love plots, it is about anti-Semitism. Shakespeare never seriously defined or condemned a group through the presentation of an individual; he only did this for the purposes of comedy by creating caricatures in miniature for our amusement. Shylock is drawn in bold strokes; he is meant to be a "villain" in terms of the romantic comedy, but because of the multi-dimensionality which Shakespeare gives him, we are meant to sympathize with him at times, loathe him at others. Shakespeare's manipulation of our emotions regarding Shylock is a testament to his genius as a creator of character.

 

When Shylock leaves the courtroom in Act IV, Scene 1, he is stripped of all that he has. He is a defeated man. Yet we cannot feel deep sympathy for him — some, perhaps, but not much. Shakespeare's intention was not to make Shylock a tragic figure; instead, Shylock was meant to function as a man who could be vividly realized as the epitome of selfishness; he must be defeated in this romantic comedy. In a sense, it is Shakespeare's own brilliance which led him to create Shylock as almost too human. Shylock is powerfully drawn, perhaps too powerfully for this comedy, but his superb dignity is admirable, despite the fact that we must finally condemn him. Perhaps the poet W. H. Auden has given us our best clue as to how we must deal with Shylock: "Those to whom evil is done," he says, "do evil in return." This explains in a few words much of the moneylender's complexity and our complex reactions toward him.

 

 

 

Shylock on stage

 

Jacob Adler and others report that the tradition of playing Shylock sympathetically began in the first half of the 19th century with Edmund Kean, and that previously the role had been played "by a comedian as a repulsive clown or, alternatively, as a monster of unrelieved evil." Kean's Shylock established his reputation as an actor.

 

From Kean's time forward, many actors who have played the role — with the notable exception of Edwin Booth, who played him as a simple villain — have chosen a sympathetic approach to the character; even Booth's father, Junius Brutus Booth, played the role sympathetically. Henry Irving's portrayal of an aristocratic, proud Shylock (first seen at the Lyceum in 1879, with Portia played by Ellen Terry) has been called "the summit of his career". Jacob Adler was the most notable of the early 20th century, playing the role in Yiddish in an otherwise English-language production.

 

Kean and Irving presented a Shylock justified in wanting his revenge; Adler's Shylock evolved over the years he played the role, first as a stock Shakespearean villain, then as a man whose better nature was overcome by a desire for revenge, and finally as a man who operated not from revenge but from pride. In a 1902 interview with Theater magazine, Adler pointed out that Shylock is a wealthy man, "rich enough to forgo the interest on three thousand ducats" and that Antonio is "far from the chivalrous gentleman he is made to appear. He has insulted the Jew and spat on him, yet he comes with hypocritical politeness to borrow money of him." Shylock's fatal flaw is to depend on the law, but "would he not walk out of that courtroom head erect, the very apotheosis of defiant hatred and scorn?"

 

Some modern productions take further pains to show how Shylock's thirst for vengeance has some justification. For instance, in the 2004 film adaptation directed by Michael Radford and starring Al Pacino as Shylock, the film begins with text and a montage of how the Jewish community is abused by the Christian population of the city. One of the last shots of the film also brings attention to the fact that, as a convert, Shylock would have been cast out of the Jewish community in Venice, no longer allowed to live in the ghetto, and would still not be accepted by the Christians, as they would feel that Shylock was yet the Jew he once was. Another interpretation of Shylock and a vision of how "must he be acted" appears at the conclusion of the autobiography of Alexander Granach, a noted Jewish stage and film actor in Weimar Germany (and later in Hollywood and on Broadway). Granach 1945; 2010, 275-279.

 

Arnold Wesker's play The Merchant tells the same story from Shylock's point of view. In this retelling, Shylock and Antonio are friends bound by a mutual love of books and culture and a disdain for the anti-Semitism of the Christian community's laws. They make the bond in defiant mockery of the Christian establishment, never anticipating that the bond might become forfeit. When it does, the play argues, Shylock must carry through on the letter of the law or jeopardize the scant legal security of the entire Jewish community. He is, therefore, quite as grateful as Antonio when Portia, as in Shakespeare's play, shows the legal way out. The play received its American premiere on November 16, 1977 at New York's Plymouth Theatre with Joseph Leon as Shylock, Marian Seldes as Shylock's sister Rivka and Roberta Maxwell as Portia. This production had a challenging history in previews on the road, culminating (after the first night out of town in Philadelphia on September 8 1977) with the death of the Broadway star Zero Mostel, who was initially cast as Shylock. The play's author, Arnold Wesker, wrote a book chronicling the out-of-town tribulations that beset the play and Mostel's death called "The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel."

 

 

 

 

 

 

ii) Edmund in King Lear

 

Plot Overview

Lear, the aging king of Britain, decides to step down from the throne and divide his kingdom evenly among his three daughters. First, however, he puts his daughters through a test, asking each to tell him how much she loves him. Goneril and Regan, Lear’s older daughters, give their father flattering answers. But Cordelia, Lear’s youngest and favorite daughter, remains silent, saying that she has no words to describe how much she loves her father. Lear flies into a rage and disowns Cordelia. The king of France, who has courted Cordelia, says that he still wants to marry her even without her land, and she accompanies him to France without her father’s blessing.

 

Lear quickly learns that he made a bad decision. Goneril and Regan swiftly begin to undermine the little authority that Lear still holds. Unable to believe that his beloved daughters are betraying him, Lear slowly goes insane. He flees his daughters’ houses to wander on a heath during a great thunderstorm, accompanied by his Fool and by Kent, a loyal nobleman in disguise.

 

Meanwhile, an elderly nobleman named Gloucester also experiences family problems. His illegitimate son, Edmund, tricks him into believing that his legitimate son, Edgar, is trying to kill him. Fleeing the manhunt that his father has set for him, Edgar disguises himself as a crazy beggar and calls himself “Poor Tom.” Like Lear, he heads out onto the heath.

 

When the loyal Gloucester realizes that Lear’s daughters have turned against their father, he decides to help Lear in spite of the danger. Regan and her husband, Cornwall, discover him helping Lear, accuse him of treason, blind him, and turn him out to wander the countryside. He ends up being led by his disguised son, Edgar, toward the city of Dover, where Lear has also been brought.

 

In Dover, a French army lands as part of an invasion led by Cordelia in an effort to save her father. Edmund apparently becomes romantically entangled with both Regan and Goneril, whose husband, Albany, is increasingly sympathetic to Lear’s cause. Goneril and Edmund conspire to kill Albany. The despairing Gloucester tries to commit suicide, but Edgar saves him by pulling the strange trick of leading him off an imaginary cliff. Meanwhile, the English troops reach Dover, and the English, led by Edmund, defeat the Cordelia-led French. Lear and Cordelia are captured. In the climactic scene, Edgar duels with and kills Edmund; we learn of the death of Gloucester; Goneril poisons Regan out of jealousy over Edmund and then kills herself when her treachery is revealed to Albany; Edmund’s betrayal of Cordelia leads to her needless execution in prison; and Lear finally dies out of grief at Cordelia’s passing. Albany, Edgar, and the elderly Kent are left to take care of the country under a cloud of sorrow and regret.

 

Edmund

Edmund or Edmond is a fictional character and the main antagonist in William Shakespeare's King Lear. He is the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, and the younger brother of Edgar, the Earl's legitimate son. Early on in the play, Edmund resolves to get rid of his brother, then his father, and become Earl in his own right. He later flirts with both Goneril and Regan and attempts to play them off against each other.

 

Shakespeare's source for the subplot of Edmund, Edgar and Gloucester was a tale from Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia of a blind Paphlagonian king and his two sons, Leonatus and Plexitrus. The name "Edmund" itself means "wealth protector" or "protector of wealth". Edmund and Edgar were also the names of the sons of Malcolm III of Scotland who killed Macbeth. Historically Edmund of Scotland had betrayed his immediate family to support his uncle Donald III. Following the death of Malcolm III, from being stabbed in the eye, they ordered the killing of Edmund's half brother Duncan II, the rightful heir, to take the Scottish throne. Edgar, Edmund's younger brother, then returned to Scotland and defeated them to become King. Edmund was then sent to an English monastery where he later died. Due to these clear parallels the choice of Edmund and Edgar as names may have been a nod by Shakespeare to the continued story of the Scottish throne following the events of Macbeth.

 

Gloucester’s younger, illegitimate son is an opportunistic, short-sighted character whose ambitions lead him to form a union with Goneril and Regan. The injustice of Edmund’s situation fails to justify his subsequent actions, although at the opening of the play when Gloucester explains Edmund's illegitimacy (in his hearing) to Kent, with coarse jokes, the audience can initially feel sympathetic towards him, until his true character is revealed. Like Shylock and his "Has not a Jew eyes...?" (Merchant of Venice, III, 1, 60), Edmund makes a speech, "Why bastard? Wherefore base?" (II, 2, 5) decrying his stereotype before conforming to it. Edmund rejects the laws of state and society in favour of the laws he sees as eminently more practical and useful: the laws of superior cunning and strength. Edmund’s desire to use any means possible to secure his own needs makes him appear initially as a villain without a conscience. But Edmund has some solid economic impetus for his actions, and he acts from a complexity of reasons, many of which are similar to those of Goneril and Regan.

 

To rid himself of his father, Edmund feigns regret and laments that his nature, which is to honour his father, must be subordinate to the loyalty he feels for his country. Thus, Edmund excuses the betrayal of his own father, having willingly and easily left his father vulnerable to Cornwall’s anger. Later, Edmund shows no hesitation, nor any concern about killing the king or Cordelia. Yet in the end, Edmund repents and tries to rescind his order to execute Cordelia and Lear, and in this small measure, he could be said to have proved himself worthy of Gloucester’s blood.

 

Because of primogeniture, Edmund will inherit nothing from his father. That, combined with Gloucester's poor treatment of Edmund in the opening lines of the play, gives Edmund motivation to betray his brother Edgar and manipulate his way into relationships with both Goneril and Regan. If Lear, Cordelia, and Kent represent the old ways of monarchy, order, and a distinct hierarchy, then Edmund is the most representative of a new order which adheres to a Machiavellian code. Edmund's determination to undo his brother and claim his father's title causes him to cut his own arm early in the play to make an imaginary fight between Edgar (his brother) and himself more convincing.

 

Late in the play, Edmund begins to adhere to the traditional values of society, and tries to repent for his sins, but he crucially delays in rescinding his order to execute Lear and Cordelia. Edmund's declaring Nature as his goddess undermines the law of primogeniture and legitimacy. Another character that Edmund is often compared to is Iago of Othello, but Edmund is seen as the better character of the pair, as he tries to repent. After his betrayal of Edgar and his father, Cornwall, Regan's husband, becomes like a new father to Edmund, as he also has an opportunistic bent. Edmund's affairs with Goneril and Regan tie the two subplots together very well, although the relationships are not presented in detail, and they do not exist in the source material for Edmund, Plexitrus. He does not appear to have as much affection for the two sisters as they do for him, and although he was effective against his father and brother, he cannot effectively play the two sisters off against each other. It is notable that when he speaks to Goneril and Regan, he does not speak well, whereas in other situations he speaks very well - this is partially due to his trying to conceal his involvement with both of them. Edmund is the sisters' lust object, rather than true love, although he himself does not realise this. His marrying the two sisters as he dies is an allusion to and parody of courtly love, in which lovers separated by circumstance could be married in death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iii) Richard II in Richard II

Plot Overview

Richard II, written around 1595, is the first play in Shakespeare's second "history tetralogy," a series of four plays that chronicles the rise of the house of Lancaster to the British throne. (Its sequel plays are Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V.) Richard II, set around the year 1398, traces the fall from power of the last king of the house of Plantagenet, Richard II, and his replacement by the first Lancaster king, Henry IV (Henry Bolingbroke). Richard II, who ascended to the throne as a young man, is a regal and stately figure, but he is wasteful in his spending habits, unwise in his choice of counselors, and detached from his country and its common people. He spends too much of his time pursuing the latest Italian fashions, spending money on his close friends, and raising taxes to fund his pet wars in Ireland and elsewhere. When he begins to "rent out" parcels of English land to certain wealthy noblemen in order to raise funds for one of his wars, and seizes the lands and money of a recently deceased and much respected uncle to help fill his coffers, both the commoners and the king's noblemen decide that Richard has gone too far.

 

Richard has a cousin, named Henry Bolingbroke, who is a great favorite among the English commoners. Early in the play, Richard exiles him from England for six years due to an unresolved dispute over an earlier political murder. The dead uncle whose lands Richard seizes was the father of Bolingbroke; when Bolingbroke learns that Richard has stolen what should have been his inheritance, it is the straw that breaks the camel's back. When Richard unwisely departs to pursue a war in Ireland, Bolingbroke assembles an army and invades the north coast of England in his absence. The commoners, fond of Bolingbroke and angry at Richard's mismanagement of the country, welcome his invasion and join his forces. One by one, Richard's allies in the nobility desert him and defect to Bolingbroke's side as Bolingbroke marches through England. By the time Richard returns from Ireland, he has already lost his grasp on his country.

 

There is never an actual battle; instead, Bolingbroke peacefully takes Richard prisoner in Wales and brings him back to London, where Bolingbroke is crowned King Henry IV. Richard is imprisoned in the remote castle of Pomfret in the north of England, where he is left to ruminate upon his downfall. There, an assassin, who both is and is not acting upon King Henry's ambivalent wishes for Richard's expedient death, murders the former king. King Henry hypocritically repudiates the murderer and vows to journey to Jerusalem to cleanse himself of his part in Richard's death. As the play concludes, we see that the reign of the new King Henry IV has started off inauspiciously.

 

King Richard

King Richard the Second is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in approximately 1595. It is based on the life of King Richard II of England (ruled 1377–1399) and is the first part of a tetralogy, referred to by some scholars as the Henriad, followed by three plays concerning Richard's successors: Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V. It may not have been written as a stand-alone work.

 

Richard II (6 January 1367 – ca. 14 February 1400) was King of England from 1377 until he was deposed in 1399. Richard, a son of Edward, the Black Prince, was born during the reign of his grandfather, Edward III. Richard was the younger brother of Edward of Angoulême; upon the death of this elder brother, Richard—at four years of age—became second in line to the throne after his father. Upon the death of Richard's father prior to the death of Edward III, Richard, by agnatic succession, became the first in line for the throne. With Edward III's death the following year, Richard succeeded to the throne at the age of ten.

 

During Richard's first years as king, government was in the hands of a series of councils. The political community preferred this to a regency led by the king's uncle, John of Gaunt, yet Gaunt remained highly influential. The first major challenge of the reign was the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. The young king played a major part in the successful suppression of this crisis. In the following years, however, the king's dependence on a small number of courtiers caused discontent in the political community, and in 1387 control of government was taken over by a group of noblemen known as the Lords Appellant. By 1389 Richard had regained control, and for the next eight years governed in relative harmony with his former opponents. Then, in 1397, he took his revenge on the appellants, many of whom were executed or exiled. The next two years have been described by historians as Richard's "tyranny". In 1399, after John of Gaunt died, the king disinherited Gaunt's son, Henry of Bolingbroke, who had previously been exiled. Henry invaded England in June 1399 with a small force that quickly grew in numbers. Claiming initially that his goal was only to reclaim his patrimony, it soon became clear that he intended to claim the throne for himself. Meeting little resistance, Bolingbroke deposed Richard and had himself crowned as King Henry IV. Richard died in captivity early the next year; he was probably murdered.

 

As an individual, Richard was said to have been tall, good-looking and intelligent. Though probably not insane, as earlier historians used to believe, he may have suffered from a personality disorder towards the end of his reign. Less of a warrior than either his father or grandfather, he sought to bring an end to the Hundred Years' War that Edward III had started. He was a firm believer in the royal prerogative, something which led him to restrain the power of his nobility, and to rely on a private retinue for military protection instead. He also cultivated a courtly atmosphere where the king was an elevated figure, and art and culture were at the centre, in contrast to the fraternal, martial court of his grandfather. Richard's posthumous reputation has to a large extent been shaped by Shakespeare, whose play Richard II portrayed Richard's misrule and his deposition by Bolingbroke as responsible for the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. Present day historians do not accept this interpretation, while not exonerating Richard from responsibility for his own deposition. Most authorities agree that, even though his policies were not unprecedented or entirely unrealistic, the way in which he carried them out was unacceptable to the political establishment, and this led to his downfall.

 

 

 

 

 

iv) Lady Macbeth in Macbeth

Plot Overview

 

The play begins with the brief appearance of a trio of witches and then moves to a military camp, where the Scottish King Duncan hears the news that his generals, Macbeth and Banquo, have defeated two separate invading armies—one from Ireland, led by the rebel Macdonwald, and one from Norway. Following their pitched battle with these enemy forces, Macbeth and Banquo encounter the witches as they cross a moor. The witches prophesy that Macbeth will be made thane (a rank of Scottish nobility) of Cawdor and eventually King of Scotland. They also prophesy that Macbeth’s companion, Banquo, will beget a line of Scottish kings, although Banquo will never be king himself.

 

The witches vanish, and Macbeth and Banquo treat their prophecies skeptically until some of King Duncan’s men come to thank the two generals for their victories in battle and to tell Macbeth that he has indeed been named thane of Cawdor. The previous thane betrayed Scotland by fighting for the Norwegians and Duncan has condemned him to death. Macbeth is intrigued by the possibility that the remainder of the witches’ prophecy—that he will be crowned king—might be true, but he is uncertain what to expect. He visits with King Duncan, and they plan to dine together at Inverness, Macbeth’s castle, that night. Macbeth writes ahead to his wife, Lady Macbeth, telling her all that has happened.

 

Lady Macbeth suffers none of her husband’s uncertainty. She desires the kingship for him and wants him to murder Duncan in order to obtain it. When Macbeth arrives at Inverness, she overrides all of her husband’s objections and persuades him to kill the king that very night. He and Lady Macbeth plan to get Duncan’s two chamberlains drunk so they will black out; the next morning they will blame the murder on the chamberlains, who will be defenseless, as they will remember nothing. While Duncan is asleep, Macbeth stabs him, despite his doubts and a number of supernatural portents, including a vision of a bloody dagger. When Duncan’s death is discovered the next morning, Macbeth kills the chamberlains—ostensibly out of rage at their crime—and easily assumes the kingship. Duncan’s sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee to England and Ireland, respectively, fearing that whoever killed Duncan desires their demise as well.

 

Fearful of the witches’ prophecy that Banquo’s heirs will seize the throne, Macbeth hires a group of murderers to kill Banquo and his son Fleance. They ambush Banquo on his way to a royal feast, but they fail to kill Fleance, who escapes into the night. Macbeth becomes furious: as long as Fleance is alive, he fears that his power remains insecure. At the feast that night, Banquo’s ghost visits Macbeth. When he sees the ghost, Macbeth raves fearfully, startling his guests, who include most of the great Scottish nobility. Lady Macbeth tries to neutralize the damage, but Macbeth’s kingship incites increasing resistance from his nobles and subjects. Frightened, Macbeth goes to visit the witches in their cavern.

 

There, they show him a sequence of demons and spirits who present him with further prophecies: he must beware of Macduff, a Scottish nobleman who opposed Macbeth’s accession to the throne; he is incapable of being harmed by any man born of woman; and he will be safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Castle. Macbeth is relieved and feels secure, because he knows that all men are born of women and that forests cannot move. When he learns that Macduff has fled to England to join Malcolm, Macbeth orders that Macduff’s castle be seized and, most cruelly, that Lady Macduff and her children be murdered.

 

When news of his family’s execution reaches Macduff in England, he is stricken with grief and vows revenge. Prince Malcolm, Duncan’s son, has succeeded in raising an army in England, and Macduff joins him as he rides to Scotland to challenge Macbeth’s forces. The invasion has the support of the Scottish nobles, who are appalled and frightened by Macbeth’s tyrannical and murderous behavior. Lady Macbeth, meanwhile, becomes plagued with fits of sleepwalking in which she bemoans what she believes to be bloodstains on her hands. Before Macbeth’s opponents arrive, Macbeth receives news that she has killed herself, causing him to sink into a deep and pessimistic despair. Nevertheless, he awaits the English and fortifies Dunsinane, to which he seems to have withdrawn in order to defend himself, certain that the witches’ prophecies guarantee his invincibility. He is struck numb with fear, however, when he learns that the English army is advancing on Dunsinane shielded with boughs cut from Birnam Wood. Birnam Wood is indeed coming to Dunsinane, fulfilling half of the witches’ prophecy.

 

In the battle, Macbeth hews violently, but the English forces gradually overwhelm his army and castle. On the battlefield, Macbeth encounters the vengeful Macduff, who declares that he was not “of woman born” but was instead “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb (what we now call birth by cesarean section). Though he realizes that he is doomed, Macbeth continues to fight until Macduff kills and beheads him. Malcolm, now the King of Scotland, declares his benevolent intentions for the country and invites all to see him crowned at Scone.

 

Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth is a character in Shakespeare's Macbeth (c.1603–1607). She is the wife to the play's protagonist, Macbeth, a Scottish nobleman. After goading him into committing regicide, she becomes Queen of Scotland, but later suffers pangs of guilt for her part in the crime. She dies off-stage in the last act, an apparent suicide.

 

The character's origins lie in the accounts of Kings Duff and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of Britain familiar to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth appears to be a composite of two separate and distinct personages in Holinshed's work: Donwald's nagging, murderous wife in the account of King Duff, and Macbeth's ambitious wife Gruoch of Scotland in the account of King Duncan.

 

Lady Macbeth is a powerful presence in the play, most notably in the first two acts. Following the murder of King Duncan, however, her role in the plot diminishes. She becomes an uninvolved spectator to Macbeth's plotting, and a nervous hostess at a banquet dominated by her husband's hallucinations. Her fifth act sleepwalking scene is a turning point in the play, and her line, "Out, damned spot!," has become a phrase familiar to many speakers of the English language. The report of her death late in the fifth act provides the inspiration for Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech.

 

Analysts see in the character of Lady Macbeth the conflict between femininity and masculinity, as they are impressed in cultural norms. Lady Macbeth suppresses her instincts toward compassion, motherhood, and fragility — associated with femininity — in favour of ambition, ruthlessness, and the singleminded pursuit of power. This conflict colours the entire drama, and sheds light on gender-based preconceptions from Shakespearean England to the present. The role has attracted countless notable actresses over the centuries, including Sarah Siddons, Charlotte Melmoth, Helen Faucit, Ellen Terry, Vivien Leigh, Vivien Merchant, Glenda Jackson, Francesca Annis, Judith Anderson, Renée O'Connor, Judi Dench, Tabu and Keeley Hawes. Jeanette Nolan played the character in Orson Welles' 1948 film adaptation.

 

Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth appears to be a composite of two personages found in the accounts of Kings Duff and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587). In the account of King Duff, one of his captains, Donwald, suffers the deaths of his kinsmen at the orders of the King. Donwald then considers regicide at "the setting on of his wife" who "showed him the means whereby he might soonest accomplish it." Donwald abhors such an act but perseveres at the nagging of his wife. After plying the King's servants with food and drink and letting them fall asleep, the couple admit their confederates to the King's room who then commit the regicide. The murder of Duff has its motivation in revenge, rather than ambition.

 

In Holinshed's account of King Duncan, Lady Macbeth is confined to a single sentence:

 

    “The words of the three Weird Sisters also (of whom before ye have heard) greatly encouraged him hereunto; but specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she was very ambitious, burning with an unquenchable desire to bear the name of a queen."

 

Not found in Holinshed are the invocation to the "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts," the sleepwalking scene, and various details found in the drama concerning the death of Macbeth. Although Macbeth's wife can be traced to a real-world counterpart, Queen Gruoch of Scotland, Shakespeare's fictional character is tied so weakly to her that the bonds are virtually non-existent.

Lady Macbeth makes her first appearance with late in scene five of the first act when she learns in a letter from her husband that three witches have prophesied his future as King. When King Duncan becomes her overnight guest, Lady Macbeth seizes the opportunity to effect his murder. Aware her husband's temperament is "too full o' the milk of human kindness" for committing a regicide, she plots the details of the murder, then, countering her husband's arguments and reminding him that he first broached the matter, she belittles his courage and manhood, finally winning him to her designs. The King retires after a night of feasting. Lady Macbeth drugs his attendants and lays daggers ready for the commission of the crime. Macbeth kills the sleeping King while Lady Macbeth waits nearby. When he brings the daggers from the King's room, his Lady orders him to return them to the scene of the crime. He refuses. She carries the daggers to the room and smears the drugged attendants with blood. The couple retire to wash their hands.

 

Following the murder of King Duncan, Lady Macbeth's role in the plot diminishes. When Duncan's sons flee the land in fear for their own lives, Macbeth is appointed King. Without consulting his Queen, Macbeth plots other murders in order to secure his throne, and, at a royal banquet, the Queen is forced to dismiss her guests when Macbeth hallucinates. In her last appearance, she sleepwalks in profound torment. She dies off-stage, with suicide being suggested as its cause when Malcolm declares that she died by "self and violent hands."

 

In the First Folio, the only source for the play, she is never referred to as "Lady Macbeth", but variously as "Macbeth's wife", "Macbeth's lady", or just "lady".

The sleepwalking scene is one of the most celebrated scenes from Macbeth, and, indeed, in all of Shakespeare. It has no counterpart in Shakespeare's source material for the play, Holinshed's Chronicles, but is solely the Bard's invention.

 

A.C. Bradley indicates that, with the exception of the scene's few closing lines, the scene is entirely in prose with Lady Macbeth being the only major character in Shakespearean tragedy to make a last appearance "denied the dignity of verse." According to Bradley, Shakespeare generally assigned prose to characters exhibiting abnormal states of mind or abnormal conditions such as somnambulism, with the regular rhythm of verse being inappropriate to characters having lost their balance of mind or subject to images or impressions with no rational connection. Lady Macbeth's recollections – the blood on her hand, the clock striking, her husband's reluctance – are brought forth from her disordered mind in chance order with each image deepening her anguish. For Bradley, Lady Macbeth's "brief toneless sentences seem the only voice of truth" with the spare and simple construction of the character's diction expressing a "desolating misery." Lady Macbeth's compulsive washing of her hands to rid them of blood is reminiscent of hand washing common among sufferers from Obsessive-compulsive disorder.

 

Stephanie Chamberlain in her article "Fantasicing" Infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the Murdering Mother in Early Modern England" argues that though Lady Macbeth wants power, her power is “conditioned on maternity”, which was a “conflicted status in early modern England.” Chamberlain argues that the negative images of Lady Macbeth as a mother figure, such as when she discusses her ability to "bash the brain of the babe that sucks her breast", reflect controversies concerning the image of motherhood in early modern England. In early modern England, mothers were often accused of hurting the innocent lives that were placed in their hands. Lady Macbeth then personifies all mothers of early modern England who were condemned for Lady Macbeth’s fantasy of infanticide. Lady Macbeth’s fantasy, Chamberlain argues, is not struggling to be a man, but rather struggling with the condemnation of being a bad mother that was common during that time.

 

Jenijoy La Belle takes a slightly different view in her article, "A Strange Infirmity: Lady Macbeth’s Amenorrhea." La Belle states that Lady Macbeth does not wish for just a move away from femininity; she is asking the spirits to eliminate the basic biological characteristics of womanhood. The main biological characteristic that La Belle focuses on is menstruation. La Belle argues that by asking to be "unsex[ed]" and crying out to spirits to “make thick [her] blood / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,” Lady Macbeth asks for her menstrual cycle to stop. By having her menstrual cycle stop, Lady Macbeth hopes to stop any feelings of sensitivity and caring that is associated with females. She hopes to become like a man to stop any sense of remorse for the regicide.

 

La Belle furthers her argument by connecting the stopping of the menstrual cycle with the persistent infanticide motifs in the play. La Belle gives examples of "the strangled babe" whose finger is thrown into the witches’ cauldron (4.1.30); Macduff’s babes who are "savagely slaughter’d" (4.3.205); and the suckling babe with boneless gums whose brains Lady Macbeth would dash out (1.7.57–58) to argue that Lady Macbeth represents the ultimate anti-mother: not only would she smash in a baby’s brains but she would go even further to stop her means of procreation altogether.

 

Some literary critics and historians argue that not only does Lady Macbeth represent an anti-mother figure in general, she also embodies a specific type of anti-mother: the witch. Critic Joanna Levin defines a witch as a woman who succumbs to Satanic force, a lust for the devil, and who, either for this reason or the desire to obtain supernatural powers, invokes (evil) spirits. English physician Edward Jorden published Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother in 1603, in which he speculated that this force literally derived from the female sexual reproductive organs. Because no one else had published any other studies on the susceptibility of women, especially mothers, to becoming both the witch and the bewitched (i.e. demonically possessed), Jorden's findings helped create the foundation for the views popularized during the Renaissance about the relationship between women and witchcraft.

 

Levin refers to Marianne Hester's Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of Male Domination, in which Hester articulates a feminist interpretation of the witch as an empowered woman. Levin summarises the claim of feminist historians like Hester: the witch should be a figure celebrated for her nonconformity, defiance, and general sense of empowerment; witches challenged patriarchal authority and hierarchy, specifically "threatening hegemonic sex/gender systems." This view associates witchcraft — and by extension, Lady Macbeth — not with villainy and evil, but with heroism.

 

Jenijoy La Belle assesses Lady Macbeth's femininity and sexuality as they relate to motherhood, and witchhood as well. The fact that she conjures spirits likens her to a witch, and the act itself establishes a similarity in the way that both Lady Macbeth and the Weird Sisters from the play "use the metaphoric powers of language to call upon spiritual powers who in turn will influence physical events — in one case the workings of the state, in the other the workings of a woman's body." Like the witches, Lady Macbeth strives to make herself an instrument for bringing about the future She proves herself a defiant, empowered nonconformist, and an explicit threat to a patriarchal system of governance in that, through challenging his masculinity, she manipulates Macbeth into murdering King Duncan. Despite the fact that she calls him a coward, Macbeth remains reluctant, until she asks: "What beast wasn't, then, that made you break this enterprise to me? / When you durst do it, then you were a man; / And to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man." Thus Lady Macbeth enforces a masculine conception of power, yet only after pleading to be unsexed, or defeminised. The Weird Sisters are also depicted as defeminised, androgynous figures. They are bearded (1.3.46), (which may also be associated with Lady Macbeth's amenorrhea). Witches were perceived as an extreme type of anti-mother, even considered capable of cooking and eating their own children. Although Lady Macbeth may not express violence toward her child with that same degree of grotesqueness, she certainly expresses a sense of brutality when she states that she would smash the babe's head.

 

Some critics identify gender stereotyping in the play's suggestion that Lady Macbeth must suppress her female instincts in order to become ambitious and violent.

Christina León Alfar claims that even though scholars argue that Lady Macbeth's desire for spirits to "unsex" her violates gender norms, she has been falsely accused of being the source of violence in the play. Alfar contends that while it is commonly held that Lady Macbeth is the driving force of Macbeth’s "bloody desire," she also falls victim to the tendency to attack strong female characters. She argues that Lady Macbeth never asserts her own desires or ambitions; she merely encourages her husband's desire to be king.

 

Unlike Alfar, some critics claim that Lady Macbeth is, in fact, the source of violence in the play. Carolyn Asp explains in her article, "'Be bloody, bold and resolute': Tragic Action and Sexual Stereotyping in Macbeth" that Lady Macbeth openly attempts to reject her feminine traits and adopt a male mentality because she perceives that her society associates feminine qualities with weakness. Likewise, Robert Kimbrough argues in his article "Macbeth: The Prisoner of Gender" that in Elizabethan literature, especially Macbeth, there is the idea that to be "manly" is to be aggressive, daring, bold, resolute, and strong, especially in the face of death. And to be "womanly" is to be gentle, fearful, pitying, wavering, and soft, a condition signified by tears. He also argues that Lady Macbeth wants to become cruel, which she considers to be a masculine trait. However, in order for her to become cruel she must cut off the flow of blood to her heart, which is the seat of love, the source of "remorse," pity and compassion which are all attributes of human nature.

 

 

According to Asp, societal stereotypes play a major role in Lady Macbeth’s issue with gender. She is convinced that she must divest herself of her femininity if she is to have any effect on her husband’s public life. However, in spite of her constant efforts to take on male traits, her unconscious feminine traits rise to the surface just before the murder of Duncan. When addressing her husband Lady Macbeth refers to him as “thy love” (1.7.39) and challenges his self-image as a male, the foundation of his other roles. When Lady Macbeth challenges Macbeth’s manhood she is ultimately saying that in order to be king, the heroic warrior, he must take on the persona of a man, along with her. Therefore, only if Macbeth dares to kill Duncan will he be a man, in the eyes of Lady Macbeth; so much more than a man as she says "to be the same in [his] own act and valour / As [he is] in desire (1.7.40–41).

The British actress Sarah Siddons, one of the leading tragic actresses of the 18th century, wrote that in her interpretation, Lady Macbeth has at once subjugated all her femininity to ambition, and at the same time maintained her feminine attractiveness to Macbeth: "Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character so amiable, so honourable as Macbeth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

v) King Claudius in Hamlet

Plot Overview

 

On a dark winter night, a ghost walks the ramparts of Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Discovered first by a pair of watchmen, then by the scholar Horatio, the ghost resembles the recently deceased King Hamlet, whose brother Claudius has inherited the throne and married the king’s widow, Queen Gertrude. When Horatio and the watchmen bring Prince Hamlet, the son of Gertrude and the dead king, to see the ghost, it speaks to him, declaring ominously that it is indeed his father’s spirit, and that he was murdered by none other than Claudius. Ordering Hamlet to seek revenge on the man who usurped his throne and married his wife, the ghost disappears with the dawn.

 

Prince Hamlet devotes himself to avenging his father’s death, but, because he is contemplative and thoughtful by nature, he delays, entering into a deep melancholy and even apparent madness. Claudius and Gertrude worry about the prince’s erratic behavior and attempt to discover its cause. They employ a pair of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to watch him. When Polonius, the pompous Lord Chamberlain, suggests that Hamlet may be mad with love for his daughter, Ophelia, Claudius agrees to spy on Hamlet in conversation with the girl. But though Hamlet certainly seems mad, he does not seem to love Ophelia: he orders her to enter a nunnery and declares that he wishes to ban marriages.

 

A group of traveling actors comes to Elsinore, and Hamlet seizes upon an idea to test his uncle’s guilt. He will have the players perform a scene closely resembling the sequence by which Hamlet imagines his uncle to have murdered his father, so that if Claudius is guilty, he will surely react. When the moment of the murder arrives in the theater, Claudius leaps up and leaves the room. Hamlet and Horatio agree that this proves his guilt. Hamlet goes to kill Claudius but finds him praying. Since he believes that killing Claudius while in prayer would send Claudius’s soul to heaven, Hamlet considers that it would be an inadequate revenge and decides to wait. Claudius, now frightened of Hamlet’s madness and fearing for his own safety, orders that Hamlet be sent to England at once.

 

Hamlet goes to confront his mother, in whose bedchamber Polonius has hidden behind a tapestry. Hearing a noise from behind the tapestry, Hamlet believes the king is hiding there. He draws his sword and stabs through the fabric, killing Polonius. For this crime, he is immediately dispatched to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. However, Claudius’s plan for Hamlet includes more than banishment, as he has given Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sealed orders for the King of England demanding that Hamlet be put to death.

 

In the aftermath of her father’s death, Ophelia goes mad with grief and drowns in the river. Polonius’s son, Laertes, who has been staying in France, returns to Denmark in a rage. Claudius convinces him that Hamlet is to blame for his father’s and sister’s deaths. When Horatio and the king receive letters from Hamlet indicating that the prince has returned to Denmark after pirates attacked his ship en route to England, Claudius concocts a plan to use Laertes’ desire for revenge to secure Hamlet’s death. Laertes will fence with Hamlet in innocent sport, but Claudius will poison Laertes’ blade so that if he draws blood, Hamlet will die. As a backup plan, the king decides to poison a goblet, which he will give Hamlet to drink should Hamlet score the first or second hits of the match. Hamlet returns to the vicinity of Elsinore just as Ophelia’s funeral is taking place. Stricken with grief, he attacks Laertes and declares that he had in fact always loved Ophelia. Back at the castle, he tells Horatio that he believes one must be prepared to die, since death can come at any moment. A foolish courtier named Osric arrives on Claudius’s orders to arrange the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes.

 

The sword-fighting begins. Hamlet scores the first hit, but declines to drink from the king’s proffered goblet. Instead, Gertrude takes a drink from it and is swiftly killed by the poison. Laertes succeeds in wounding Hamlet, though Hamlet does not die of the poison immediately. First, Laertes is cut by his own sword’s blade, and, after revealing to Hamlet that Claudius is responsible for the queen’s death, he dies from the blade’s poison. Hamlet then stabs Claudius through with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink down the rest of the poisoned wine. Claudius dies, and Hamlet dies immediately after achieving his revenge.

 

At this moment, a Norwegian prince named Fortinbras, who has led an army to Denmark and attacked Poland earlier in the play, enters with ambassadors from England, who report that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Fortinbras is stunned by the gruesome sight of the entire royal family lying sprawled on the floor dead. He moves to take power of the kingdom. Horatio, fulfilling Hamlet’s last request, tells him Hamlet’s tragic story. Fortinbras orders that Hamlet be carried away in a manner befitting a fallen soldier.

 

King Claudius

 

King Claudius is a fictional character and the primary antagonist of William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. He is the brother to King Hamlet, second husband to Gertrude and uncle to Hamlet. He obtained the throne of Denmark by murdering his own brother with poison and then marrying the late king's widow. He is loosely based on the Jutish chieftain Feng who appears in Chronicon Lethrense and in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum.

 

Claudius is seen at the beginning of the play to be a capable monarch as he deals diplomatically with such issues as the military threat from Norway and Hamlet's depression. It is not until the appearance of King Hamlet's ghost that it is revealed that Claudius may have poisoned the old king in his sleep in order to usurp both his throne and his wife. During the play's progression he takes a turn for the worse by first resorting to spying, and, when that fails, murder.

 

It is in Act III scene 3, when Claudius forestalls Hamlet's revenge by confessing his sins to God in his own private chapel, that the audience can be sure of his guilt. He is shown to be discontent and unhappy with the events taking place. The young prince spies him brooding about his wrongdoings and trying to pray for forgiveness, but he knows all too well that prayer alone will not save him if he continues to benefit from his own sin. If he were to truly repent, he would have to confess his sin and give up all he achieved through it, which he chooses not to do. Despite his remorse, the King still seeks Hamlet's death in an effort to save both his throne and his life, as he believes the prince is now aware of his part in Old King Hamlet's death. Hamlet is ready to kill him, only to back down, feeling that to kill the King in such a way would contradict the revenge conditions given to him by his father, who commanded him specifically:

 

"Taint not thy mind." When Laertes seeks revenge for his father Polonius' death at Hamlet's hands, Claudius finally concocts a 'surefire' plan to deal with Hamlet once and for all. He arranges a fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes, but plots with Laertes to poison his foil and give Hamlet a poisoned drink. The king's plan fails; Queen Gertrude drinks from the poisoned chalice instead of Hamlet and dies, and Hamlet, after being struck by the poisoned foil, captures the same sword and strikes Laertes, who then finally reveals Claudius' plot. As Norway's army, led by young Prince Fortinbras, surrounds the castle, Hamlet finally exacts his revenge and slays Claudius by stabbing him with the sword and then forcing him to drink the very poison that he had intended for Hamlet.

 

Claudius is the villain of the piece, as he admits to himself: "O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven" (Act III, Scene 3, Line 40). His fratricide is the corruption permeating the play's world – that which is, in the words of Marcellus (a guard), "rotten in the state of Denmark".The poet reminds the audience of the crime several times by having characters mention the story of Cain and Abel, including Claudius himself, who admits being inflicted with "the primal eldest curse". His cruelty is reflected in his schemes to kill Hamlet – sending him to England to be killed, and setting up a rigged fencing match. Claudius is also a heavy drinker, proposing numerous toasts and presiding over a rowdy court; he appropriately succumbs to his own poisoned wine.

The king is not without redeeming virtues, though. He is seen to be an able monarch (notwithstanding the unfavourable comparison to his murdered predecessor in Hamlet's first soliloquy) as well as a quick thinker and smooth talker, who in Act IV, scene 5 converts Laertes from rebel to accomplice. In Act III, Scene 1 he fleetingly shows remorse for his crimes, and attempts to pray in Scene 3, even as he realizes that he cannot sincerely repent ("Words without thoughts never to heaven go"), and eventually continues in his evil ways. Most commentators agree that the king's evil nature is evident, and that the other aspects of his nature exemplify Shakespeare's ability to portray his villains as fully human.

 

The king is named after the Roman emperor Claudius I, who was considered the archetype of an evil ruler in Shakespeare's time. The historical Claudius' incestuous marriage to and alleged poisoning by Agrippina the Younger, who was later herself murdered by her son Nero, are mirrored in the play, as Hamlet himself appears to note in Act III, Scene 2: "Soft! now to my mother. / O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever / The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom ...".

Although the character is referred to as "Claudius, King of Denmark" in one stage direction, the name "Claudius" is never spoken by any character in the play.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vi) Iago in Othello

 

Plot Overview

 

Othello begins on a street in Venice, in the midst of an argument between Roderigo, a rich man, and Iago. Roderigo has been paying Iago to help him in his suit to Desdemona. But Roderigo has just learned that Desdemona has married Othello, a general whom Iago begrudgingly serves as ensign. Iago says he hates Othello, who recently passed him over for the position of lieutenant in favor of the inexperienced soldier Michael Cassio.

 

Unseen, Iago and Roderigo cry out to Brabanzio that his daughter Desdemona has been stolen by and married to Othello, the Moor. Brabanzio finds that his daughter is indeed missing, and he gathers some officers to find Othello. Not wanting his hatred of Othello to be known, Iago leaves Roderigo and hurries back to Othello before Brabanzio sees him. At Othello’s lodgings, Cassio arrives with an urgent message from the duke: Othello’s help is needed in the matter of the imminent Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Not long afterward, Brabanzio arrives with Roderigo and others, and accuses Othello of stealing his daughter by witchcraft. When he finds out that Othello is on his way to speak with the duke, -Brabanzio decides to go along and accuse Othello before the assembled senate.

 

Brabanzio’s plan backfires. The duke and senate are very sympathetic toward Othello. Given a chance to speak for himself, Othello explains that he wooed and won Desdemona not by witchcraft but with the stories of his adventures in travel and war. The duke finds Othello’s explanation convincing, and Desdemona herself enters at this point to defend her choice in marriage and to announce to her father that her allegiance is now to her husband. Brabanzio is frustrated, but acquiesces and allows the senate meeting to resume. The duke says that Othello must go to Cyprus to aid in the defense against the Turks, who are headed for the island. Desdemona insists that she accompany her husband on his trip, and preparations are made for them to depart that night.

 

In Cyprus the following day, two gentlemen stand on the shore with Montano, the governor of Cyprus. A third gentleman arrives and reports that the Turkish fleet has been wrecked in a storm at sea. Cassio, whose ship did not suffer the same fate, arrives soon after, followed by a second ship carrying Iago, Roderigo, Desdemona, and Emilia, Iago’s wife. Once they have landed, Othello’s ship is sighted, and the group goes to the harbor. As they wait for Othello, Cassio greets Desdemona by clasping her hand. Watching them, Iago tells the audience that he will use “as little a web as this” hand-holding to ensnare Cassio (II.i.169).

 

Othello arrives, greets his wife, and announces that there will be reveling that evening to celebrate Cyprus’s safety from the Turks. Once everyone has left, Roderigo complains to Iago that he has no chance of breaking up Othello’s marriage. Iago assures Roderigo that as soon as Desdemona’s “blood is made dull with the act of sport,” she will lose interest in Othello and seek sexual satisfaction elsewhere (II.i.222). However, Iago warns that “elsewhere” will likely be with Cassio. Iago counsels Roderigo that he should cast Cassio into disgrace by starting a fight with Cassio at the evening’s revels. In a soliloquy, Iago explains to the audience that eliminating Cassio is the first crucial step in his plan to ruin Othello. That night, Iago gets Cassio drunk and then sends Roderigo to start a fight with him. Apparently provoked by Roderigo, Cassio chases Roderigo across the stage. Governor Montano attempts to hold Cassio down, and Cassio stabs him. Iago sends Roderigo to raise alarm in the town.

 

The alarm is rung, and Othello, who had left earlier with plans to consummate his marriage, soon arrives to still the commotion. When Othello demands to know who began the fight, Iago feigns reluctance to implicate his “friend” Cassio, but he ultimately tells the whole story. Othello then strips Cassio of his rank of lieutenant. Cassio is extremely upset, and he laments to Iago, once everyone else has gone, that his reputation has been ruined forever. Iago assures Cassio that he can get back into Othello’s good graces by using Desdemona as an intermediary. In a soliloquy, Iago tells us that he will frame Cassio and Desdemona as lovers to make -Othello jealous.

 

In an attempt at reconciliation, Cassio sends some musicians to play beneath Othello’s window. Othello, however, sends his clown to tell the musicians to go away. Hoping to arrange a meeting with Desdemona, Cassio asks the clown, a peasant who serves Othello, to send Emilia to him. After the clown departs, Iago passes by and tells Cassio that he will get Othello out of the way so that Cassio can speak privately with Desdemona. Othello, Iago, and a gentleman go to examine some of the town’s fortifications. Desdemona is quite sympathetic to Cassio’s request and promises that she will do everything she can to make Othello forgive his former lieutenant. As Cassio is about to leave, Othello and Iago return. Feeling uneasy, Cassio leaves without talking to Othello. Othello inquires whether it was Cassio who just parted from his wife, and Iago, beginning to kindle Othello’s fire of jealousy, replies, “No, sure, I cannot think it, / That he would steal away so guilty-like, / Seeing your coming” (III.iii.37–39).

 

Othello becomes upset and moody, and Iago furthers his goal of removing both Cassio and Othello by suggesting that Cassio and Desdemona are involved in an affair. Desdemona’s entreaties to Othello to reinstate Cassio as lieutenant add to Othello’s almost immediate conviction that his wife is unfaithful. After Othello’s conversation with Iago, Desdemona comes to call Othello to supper and finds him feeling unwell. She offers him her handkerchief to wrap around his head, but he finds it to be “[t]oo little” and lets it drop to the floor (III.iii.291). Desdemona and Othello go to dinner, and Emilia picks up the handkerchief, mentioning to the audience that Iago has always wanted her to steal it for him.

 

Iago is ecstatic when Emilia gives him the handkerchief, which he plants in Cassio’s room as “evidence” of his affair with Desdemona. When Othello demands “ocular proof” (III.iii.365) that his wife is unfaithful, Iago says that he has seen Cassio “wipe his beard” (III.iii.444) with Desdemona’s handkerchief—the first gift Othello ever gave her. Othello vows to take vengeance on his wife and on Cassio, and Iago vows that he will help him. When Othello sees Desdemona later that evening, he demands the handkerchief of her, but she tells him that she does not have it with her and attempts to change the subject by continuing her suit on Cassio’s behalf. This drives Othello into a further rage, and he storms out. Later, Cassio comes onstage, wondering about the handkerchief he has just found in his chamber. He is greeted by Bianca, a prostitute, whom he asks to take the handkerchief and copy its embroidery for him. Through Iago’s machinations, Othello becomes so consumed by jealousy that he falls into a trance and has a fit of epilepsy. As he writhes on the ground, Cassio comes by, and Iago tells him to come back in a few minutes to talk. Once Othello recovers, Iago tells him of the meeting he has planned with Cassio. He instructs Othello to hide nearby and watch as Iago extracts from Cassio the story of his affair with Desdemona. While Othello stands out of earshot, Iago pumps Cassio for information about Bianca, causing Cassio to laugh and confirm Othello’s suspicions. Bianca herself then enters with Desdemona’s handkerchief, reprimanding Cassio for making her copy out the embroidery of a love token given to him by another woman. When Desdemona enters with Lodovico and Lodovico subsequently gives Othello a letter from Venice calling him home and instating Cassio as his replacement, Othello goes over the edge, striking Desdemona and then storming out.

 

That night, Othello accuses Desdemona of being a whore. He ignores her protestations, seconded by Emilia, that she is innocent. Iago assures Desdemona that Othello is simply upset about matters of state. Later that night, however, Othello ominously tells Desdemona to wait for him in bed and to send Emilia away. Meanwhile, Iago assures the still-complaining Roderigo that everything is going as planned: in order to prevent Desdemona and Othello from leaving, Roderigo must kill Cassio. Then he will have a clear avenue to his love.

 

Iago instructs Roderigo to ambush Cassio, but Roderigo misses his mark and Cassio wounds him instead. Iago wounds Cassio and runs away. When Othello hears Cassio’s cry, he assumes that Iago has killed Cassio as he said he would. Lodovico and Graziano enter to see what the commotion is about. Iago enters shortly thereafter and flies into a pretend rage as he “discovers” Cassio’s assailant Roderigo, whom he murders. Cassio is taken to have his wound dressed.

 

Meanwhile, Othello stands over his sleeping wife in their bedchamber, preparing to kill her. Desdemona wakes and attempts to plead with Othello. She asserts her innocence, but Othello smothers her. Emilia enters with the news that Roderigo is dead. Othello asks if Cassio is dead too and is mortified when Emilia says he is not. After crying out that she has been murdered, Desdemona changes her story before she dies, claiming that she has committed suicide. Emilia asks Othello what happened, and Othello tells her that he has killed Desdemona for her infidelity, which Iago brought to his attention. Montano, Graziano, and Iago come into the room. Iago attempts to silence Emilia, who realizes what Iago has done. At first, Othello insists that Iago has told the truth, citing the handkerchief as evidence. Once Emilia tells him how she found the handkerchief and gave it to Iago, Othello is crushed and begins to weep. He tries to kill Iago but is disarmed. Iago kills Emilia and flees, but he is caught by Lodovico and Montano, who return holding Iago captive. They also bring Cassio, who is now in a chair because of his wound. Othello wounds Iago and is disarmed. Lodovico tells Othello that he must come with them back to Venice to be tried. Othello makes a speech about how he would like to be remembered, then kills himself with a sword he had hidden on his person. The play closes with a speech by Lodovico. He gives Othello’s house and goods to Graziano and orders that Iago be executed.

 

Iago

Iago is a fictional character in Shakespeare's Othello (c. 1601–04). The play's main antagonist, Iago is the 'Ancient' (standard bearer) of General Othello as well as being husband of Emilia, who is in turn the attendant of Othello's wife Desdemona. Iago hates Othello (who is also known as "The Moor") and devises a plan to destroy him by making him believe that his wife is having an affair with his lieutenant, Michael Cassio. The role is thought to have been first played by Robert Armin, who typically played intelligent clown roles like Touchstone in As You Like It or Feste in Twelfth Night.

 

The character's source is traced to Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio's tale "Un Capitano Moro" in Gli Hecatommithi (1565). There, the character is simply "the ensign". Iago is a soldier and Othello's ancient (ensign or standard bearer).

 

Othello has its source in the 1565 tale, "Un Capitano Moro" from Gli Hecatommithi by Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio. While no English translation of Cinthio was available in Shakespeare's lifetime, it is possible Shakespeare knew the Italian original, Gabriel Chappuy's 1584 French translation, or an English translation in manuscript. Cinthio's tale may have been based on an actual incident occurring in Venice about 1508. In Cinthio, Iago's counterpart is simply "the ensign." While Shakespeare closely followed Cinthio's tale in composing Othello, he departed from it in some details. In Cinthio's tale, for example, the ensign suffers an unrequited lust for the Moor's wife, Desdemona, which then drives his vengeance. Desdemona dies in an entirely different manner in Cinthio's tale; the Moor commissions his ensign to bludgeon her to death with a sand-filled stocking.

In gruesome detail, Cinthio follows each blow, and, when she is dead, the Moor and his ensign place her lifeless body upon her bed, smash her skull, and then cause the cracked ceiling above the bed to collapse upon her, giving the impression the falling rafters caused her death. The two murderers escape detection. The Moor misses his wife greatly, however, and comes to loathe the sight of his ensign. He demotes him, and refuses to have him in his company. The ensign then seeks revenge by disclosing to "the squadron leader" (the tale's Cassio counterpart), the Moor's involvement in Desdemona's death. The two men denounce the Moor to the Venetian Seignory. The Moor is arrested, transported from Cyprus to Venice, and tortured, but refuses to admit his guilt. He is condemned to exile; Desdemona's relatives eventually execute him. The ensign escapes any prosecution in Desdemona's death, but engages in other crimes and dies after being tortured.

 

Iago is a soldier who has fought beside Othello for several years, and has become his trusted advisor. At the beginning of the play, Iago claims to have been unfairly passed over for promotion to the rank of Othello's lieutenant in favour of Michael Cassio. Iago plots to manipulate Othello into demoting Cassio, and thereafter to bring about the downfall of Othello himself. He has an ally, Roderigo, who assists him in his plans in the mistaken belief that after Othello is gone, Iago will help Roderigo earn the affection of Othello's wife, Desdemona. After Iago engineers a drunken brawl to ensure Cassio’s demotion (in Act 2), he sets to work on his second scheme: leading Othello to believe that Desdemona is having an affair with Cassio. This plan occupies the final three acts of the play.

Othello and Iago

He manipulates his wife Emilia, Desdemona's lady-in-waiting, into taking from Desdemona a handkerchief that Othello had given her; he then tells Othello that he had seen it in Cassio's possession. Once Othello flies into a jealous rage, Iago tells him to hide while he (Iago) talks to Cassio. Iago then leads Othello to believe that a bawdy conversation about Cassio's mistress, Bianca, is in fact about Desdemona. Mad with jealousy, Othello orders Iago to kill Cassio, promising to make him lieutenant in return. Iago then engineers a fight between Cassio and Roderigo in which the latter is killed (by Iago himself, double-crossing his ally), but the former merely wounded.

 

In the final scene, Iago’s plan appears to succeed when Othello kills Desdemona, who is innocent of Iago's charges. Soon afterwards, however, Iago’s treachery is brought to light by Emilia, who is later killed by Iago himself before he is captured. He remains famously reticent when pressed for an explanation of his actions before he is arrested: "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word." Following Othello's suicide, Cassio, now in charge, condemns Iago to lifetime of prison and torture as punishment for his crimes.

 

Iago is one of Shakespeare's most sinister villains, often considered such because of the unique trust that Othello places in him, which he betrays while maintaining his reputation of honesty and dedication. Shakespeare contrasts Iago with Othello's nobility and integrity. With 1097 lines, Iago has more lines in the play than Othello himself. Iago is a Machiavellian schemer and manipulator, as he is often referred to as "honest Iago", displaying his skill at deceiving other characters so that not only do they not suspect him, but they count on him as the person most likely to be truthful. Shakespearean critic A. C. Bradley said that "evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the evil character of Iago." The mystery surrounding Iago’s actual motives continues to intrigue readers and fuel scholarly debate.

 

Iago has been described as a "motiveless malignity" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This reading would seem to suggest that Iago, much like Don John in Much Ado About Nothing or Aaron in Titus Andronicus, wreaks havoc on the other characters' lives for no ulterior purpose. In the exposition in Act 1, scene 1, Iago himself states that his prime motivation is bitterness at having been passed for promotion to the top post. His racist disgust at seeing "a black ram tupping" a "white ewe", and his supreme confidence in his ability to destroy Othello and escape detection, all present potential motives. In a later soliloquy, it is revealed that Iago suspects his wife of infidelity with both Othello and Cassio.

 

Andy Serkis, who in 2002 portrayed Iago at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, wrote in his memoir Gollum: How We Made Movie Magic, that:

 

    There are a million theories to Iago's motivations, but I believed that Iago was once a good soldier, a great man's man to have around, a bit of a laugh, who feels betrayed, gets jealous of his friend, wants to mess it up for him, enjoys causing him pain, makes a choice to channel all his creative energy into the destruction of this human being, and becomes completely addicted to the power he wields over him. I didn't want to play him as initially malevolent. He's not the Devil. He's you or me feeling jealous and not being able to control our feelings.

 

Iago only reveals his true nature in his soliloquies, and in occasional asides. Elsewhere, he is charismatic and friendly, and the advice he offers to both Cassio and Othello is superficially sound; as Iago himself remarks: "And what's he then, that says I play the villain, when this advice is free I give, and honest...?" It is this dramatic irony that drives the play. Some critics thought Kenneth Branagh portrayed Iago as a homosexual, thus giving a possible motive of sexual desire for Othello, jealousy of Desdemona, and rage at the impossibility of his love for Othello being requited. In an interview, Branagh stated "Well, you know, a rather distinguished critic said he was annoyed with my performance because I'd clearly played Iago gay. I had no consciousness of doing that at all, but I did play as though he loved Othello. But I don't mean in a sexual sense. I just meant that he absolutely loved him.

 

Chapter-VI : Conclusion

 

A great literary villain is not any one thing; some are moustache-twirlers or evil geniuses, some are darkly complex, tortured souls, while others are amoral crazies who act wholly on impulse. There are many ways to write a literary villain, but a unique characteristic often binds the truly memorable anti-heroes together: they are at least as complex as the heroes. Some of the earliest and greatest literary villains come from William Shakespeare. While literature certainly featured villainous characters before, Shakespeare had a talent and interest in developing their characters and the motivations behind their evil actions. In Othello, Shakespeare gives us possibly the most iconic literary villain of all time: Iago. The play revolves entirely around his schemes, and Iago frequently speaks to the audience, explaining himself and his plans. This tradition of a “thinking villain” has influenced many writers throughout history, and led to the creation of dozens of famous literary evildoers. Other villains are complex in their seeming amorality. These characters are particularly frightening as they seem to live chaotically, choosing actions by impulse or for their own highest good at any cost. Sometimes, these characters are described as gray- or anti-villains. They will occasionally do good, if necessary, but can very suddenly decide to do evil or actions that are detrimental to the hero. The random-seeming pathos of these villains is unnerving and memorable, as the challenge the concepts of ordered systems by their very existence. A good literary villain can also be one with motivations or characteristics that are both easy to identify with, and to a certain extent, universal. Creating a villain that is sympathetic gives readers a powerful contradiction of emotions. While they do not want the character to succeed in their dastardly plans, they feel true remorse for the pain or fatal flaws causing the villain to react with evil. In Macbeth, the villain arguably does a good thing, by ridding the kingdom of a weak and frail king and replacing him as a hero of the nation. Yet Macbeth is twisted by his own love of power, and, almost against his own will, falls into darkness. For the most part, the best literary villains remind us that they, too, are human. No matter how twisted or dark they might be, they are not so different than you or I. The paths that separate the hero from the villain are complex and uncertain, and great writers are often able to accurately depict not only the evil done, but the humanity abandoned. Thus William Shakespeare successfully skached his villains in his dramas.

 

 

Bibliography

 

· Mabillard, Amanda. Top Shakespeare Villains. Shakespeare Online. 2 Aug. 2013. < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/shakespearevillains.html" >.

·      Boyce, Charles (2005). Critical Companion to William Shakespeare: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Facts On File, Inc. p. 147. ISBN 0-8160-5373-1.

·      Boyce, Charles (2005). Critical Companion to William Shakespeare: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Facts On File, Inc. p. 148. ISBN 0-8160-5373-1.

·    Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, page 34.

·   Baldwin, T. W. Shakspere's Small Latine and Less Greek, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944),

·      Doran, Madeleine, Endeavors of Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954),

·  Bevington, David, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1965, passim.

·     Shakespeare's Marlowe by Robert A. Logan, Ashgate Publishing, 2006

Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957