Shakespeare - writing essays about his works...
As a self- confessed Shakespeare enthusiast, and I guess a Shakespeare scholar, if that doesn't sound too pompous, there are two questions I dread more than any other, and which are guaranteed to send me running from the room with a convenient speck of dust in my eye, or pray for an urgent text to arrive.
It's not difficult to guess what the questions are, I'm asked them even more often than I'm asked if I think the Da Vinci code is true.. they're two old chestnuts which are oddly related to one another. Of course the first is whether the man from Stratford wrote the London playwright's plays – and the answer to this is a resounding yes - we know in 2012 more about Shakespeare's life and career than we'd ever have dared hope when I was a VIth former in the 70's – and the second question is just as horrifying 'How should I write essays about Shakespeare for my exam?
You might thing these are both very reasonable things to ask – so let me be provocative – if you're asking those questions, you've got a bit of growing up to do, because they're both questions about Magic. Let me be clear and perhaps a little hurtful if no-one has ever told you this – there ain't any tooth fairy, Father Christmas is your dad, the cheque is NEVER in the post, Shakespeare was not a universal genius but a man rooted in his own time and place, and there is no magic formula for writing Shakespeare essays, there is no conspiracy of English teachers keeping the answer back from you. If you don't believe me that's fine and I suggest you leave now – 9/11 and Roswell sites can be easily Googled for conspiracy theorists. But if you're prepared to give me a hearing I'd like to put forward, to begin with, the idea that we can answer both questions, who wrote 'em, and how should I write about 'em, by asking a different question – why should I bother with these badly printed Tudor texts? I'll assume that even brief exposure to the Shakespeare industry whether on school trips to Stratford or watching Leonardo di Caprio and Clare Danes not quite get their kit off in the DVD of Romeo and Juliet they made you watch for your GCSE coursework, has made you a bit cynical and jaded about the whole WS phenomenon.
I want to come at the 'why' question in a slightly roundabout manner, giving some examples and only then trying to give an answer. Recent work on Shakespeare has started to pay a lot more attention to the middle of his life, when he was not quite famous, and my attention has been held by a play rarely watched and never or hardly ever set for A level – King John. It's a rambling play but has a scene where a mother, Constance Countess of Brittany realises that the king has murdered her son, his own nephew, and she tries to put her feelings about the death of her child into words:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
I'm not a parent but through the stupendous observation of a parent's grief that Shakespeare reveals here, I find myself almost unbearably moved, as his Countess of Brittany finds images for her misery, first dwelling on the child's room, both his former physical presence and the place where he slept, then her reminiscences of him as a little toddler 'walks up and down with me,/Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words'. But then most tellingly, the intimacy of her memories is choked on that brutal word 'stuffs' – the obsessive act of looking at his 'vacant' clothes laid out, on the bed perhaps, and imagining her dead child's limbs filling them up. So powerful is this image that it has slipped into the role of cliché – in any TV cop thriller about a murdered child the grieving mother will take the stern CID inspector to the child's room and show him the room exactly as the child left it, including clothes.
So Shakespeare got there first you say – but now it's been done to death – can we get onto a play I know well, like Hamlet where I can go straight from here to my York notes or SparkNotes or whatever crib I find on the net.
Hang about – I agree that being the first to do something is not a reason to admire anyone – Prince Harry was the first English royal to wear a swastika in public but that does not make him a role model.
I agree also that being first in terms of a simple dramatic ploy means little, but I want to look harder at an aspect of this brief passage that seems to me the key to its power – and give the first of my answers to why read Shakespeare (and just touch on how to write about him.) It's that word room. In Shakespeare's time the use of the word for a part of a house was quite new – the more usual word is 'chamber'. But he runs it together with the older meaning – physical space, as in 'give me some room' to make an extraordinary pun – the boy's bed room is filled with his physical room only by 'grief'. By a linguistic trick or device, a pun, we see the horror of the mother's grief looking at the empty room and remembering the bodily room her child once filled – and then a further pun on 'stuffs' takes us to the heart of her misery. 'Stuffs' can on the one hand mean to make something material – stuff is the normal word for a material substance', as we might say in a phrase such as 'plywood is nasty stuff to work with' but it also means to force physical substance into a cavity – 'the teddy bear was stuffed with cotton'. Her grief is trying to fill out the clothes with the boy's form so she can remember him, but it is also a futile attempt to make his body solid 'stuff' again.
So – why does a little example like this make it a good idea to read Shakespeare? – well, at the risk of sounding really pretentious, it is because even in a tiny example we can see Shakespeare's absolutely unparalleled ability to take us into the working of another person's mind through language itself. At a time when most people believed that words were simple analogues for objects, like a a code, Shakespeare was beginning to anticipate some of the startling insights of modern psychologists such as Lacan that language is slippery, changeable and puns are part of our unconscious. Let me give you an easy example. Our names. If your parents are unkind enough to name you, as they did my grandfather's best friend, Randy Pratt, you will I promise cease to associate your name with who you think yourself to be, a simple label, and will start to think of your name as a badge, a horrid representation of your worst fears about yourself. We can't keep the different meanings of words separate, they co-exist in our head. How we think is structured by language, and Shakespeare's gift is to show us a human mind trying desperately to find words to dramatise and explain what it is like to be inside that mind. The really sharp ones amongst you will have noticed that the words 'room' and 'stuff' are about space and material which is really all that theatre is – physical forms in a space for a given time, using words. Almost the last thing Shakespeare wrote alone and unaided was the play 'The Tempest' where we are told that we 'are such STUFF as dreams are made on'.
Enough of this stuff and none-sense – before we move on I want you to bear a date in mind 1596, the probable date of King John.
I want now to turn to a sonnet, number 33, written, according to the latest scholarly research at some time between 1596 -1600, so no earlier than, and probably a bit later than King John. Try reading it out loud and see if it sounds quite as smooth as it looks on the page:
SONNET 33
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.
Not one of the best known sonnets, and certainly not one of the most immediately exciting, but this is a poem that has intrigued me since I first read it at 18. It come from the first sequence of the sonnets, where Shakespeare talks about the relationship between the writer and his much younger high born patron. It would be very naïve to think that these poems constitute some 'Hello' type kiss and tell, and some are on well-worn renaissance themes though expressed with a new and brilliant vigour. But some of them seem to make no sense unless you imagine a scenario behind them, and difficult as this sonnet is, it seems to tell a story of a young high-born person 'the sun' stained or disgraced in some unspecified way, and therefore put beyond the reach of most friendship. Yet it is not a straightforward or easy piece, all that business of staining which seems so uncomfortable, either about staining actively or being stained passively, and then that loaded phrase 'heaven's sun' which like it or not seems to carry a religious image into the poem. And if you find the language uncomfortable, slippery and difficult to get hold of, say so – it could well be part of the poet's intentions. Great writers no more produce work of crystal clear directness than the Impressionists wanted to produce photo sharp images of Paris. It can only improve your essay if you are honest about your own reactions – poetry is MEANT to make you react. Something about the difficulty of the poem has both attracted me and worried me over the years. Often for a good essay, home in on what your instincts tell you is tough and interesting, rather than the easy bits. I guess all that stained murkiness under the talk of sunshine here, made me look twice... and if you listen to the poem rather than just read it, the beginning of the second section can mean something quite different- I spell it here as it can be heard if simply read aloud:
Even so my son one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
If you only HEAR the poem that sun in the heavens might well be heard as a real 'son' who was with the poet a very short time, and somewhere in the poem's mysterious undergrowth Heaven's Son, viz. Jesus Christ is there is at least as a shadow.
You could rightly say that I am being wilful, that this is about a metaphorical sun, and that I'm twisting the poem to find non-existent Shakespearean autobiography in it. Fair play. Except that the pun on sun/son is Shakespeare's favourite used in virtually every play, and there is another factor at play....remember 1596?
In that year Shakespeare's only son Hamnet or Hamlet (the spellings were interchangeable in Stratford where it was a common first name) died aged eleven. In the play Hamlet written 2 or 3 years later Hamlet puns exuberantly and bitterly on the son/sun theme (My lord, I am too much in the Sun, he says to his stepfather the king.)
I'm going to see if I can convince you that Shakespeare is worth studying by advancing a theory of my own about Sonnet 33. Writing a semi-fictional greatly formalised poem about his ambiguous feelings towards his young patron, the writer cannot get the sun/son idea out of his mind – the young man's brief time in the public spotlight before scandal and disgrace becomes oddly mixed up with an outpouring of grief about the loss of a child. What is most thrilling, but also I think most eerie, is that Shakespeare is using the two experiences in tandem, two griefs jostling for prominence in his poem. He has dramatised his own self into two parts, the forgiving friend and the devastated father, just as Macbeth argues with his own two roles as loyal subject and ruthless power seeker, or Brutus as loyal friend and loyal Republican.. And this is what we DO. We talk to ourselves, we play roles – we are not the same as friends, as lovers, as parents, as teachers. Or at least not as we speak – in our heads our roles get hopelessly muddled, as friendship turns towards contempt sometimes, or as public courage turns inwardly to private grief and guilt. Do we disdain or do we stain? Do we turn our backs and walk away or get tarred with the same brush as those whom we love and yet despise? And why does this feeling about losing a friend keep reminding us of our worst experience of death? I called the poem eerie because it feels as if Shakespeare is cannibalising his own experiences and dramatising them, setting his personal life at a distance, as if he were a character in one of his own plays.
I hope that with two not very familiar examples I'm showing you why Shakespeare is worth studying, because his technique as a dramatist actually takes us closer to how we function as thinking, feeling beings. 'All the world's a stage' says 'Jacques in As You Like It, 'And all the men and women merely players'. We are players in the sense that the poor bereaved mother in King John is playing a part, we are all constantly adopting postures and attitudes, desperately trying to make words represent those things we sense are happening to us in our interior emotions and which we need to make known to others. Earlier writers simply told us what characters were thinking – Shakespeare by using a process of what a literary critic might call 'linguistic slippage' - or a psychologist parapraxis, the famous Freudian slip, makes it happen for us – if we follow his words we reach those dark and profound places where very diverse thoughts and ideas run together, and the result is a different way of seeing the world where we have to follow 'indirections' to find 'directions' (Hamlet) and where the clear way of hoping that language is like a crossword puzzle may lead us to miss the glittering darkness where real emotions perhaps are situated. As the blind Gloucester says in King Lear 'I stumbled when I saw'.
I can hear the groans, I'm going all deep, perhaps even a bit spiritual, while you on the other hand were never convinced by my unkind dismissal of that 'How do I write my essay question'. You've kept up with literary terms thrown at you somewhat gracelessly, but you still won't let go of that idea, which you see as perfectly legit, how do you do the thing to get an A*?
OK, I'll meet you half way – I still refuse to believe there's a formula but there are good ways and bad ways of tackling an essay about Shakespeare or any other poet. If you're not 'blocks, stones.. worse than senseless things' to quote from Julius Caesar, and I'm sure you're not – you'll have noticed my non-too-subtle strategy of starting off a bit matey and anecdotal, and then after a ramble through two obscure pieces you'll NEVER see in an exam, suggesting that we can start to find 'profundity' or 'different ways of seeing the world'. You might think you have been conned but standing up for myself, I'd say it's a perfectly decent way of going about things, because I hope it's about HOW to answer your essay question as well.
If the writer's language inspires neither interest or thought, then there'd be no point in writing about him. And the way we write about him well is by trying to 'get into' that language, starting off with what we find familiar and easy, then using our intellect and imagination to bring as much of the text as we can into sharper focus. We don't assume that a given phrase has a given meaning, because we know that most human social language conveys usually at least a shade of further meanings. If I ask you to come to eat with me, the possible meanings are many, conditioned by the context, the time, the nature of our acquaintanceship. In fact if I try and ask you neutrally without my voice or phrasing conveying anything, I'm sure you would mistrust me.
So when we write we should base everything we say on CLOSE EXAMINATION of language, we are using our own powers of deduction and analysis. And crucially we are feeding our own experience into the mix to bring Shakespeare's character's back to life...perhaps there is magic in writing an essay after all, the magic of how we can tap into the thoughts and complex ways of looking at human life of a man who died of an unnamed illness probably mundane flu, in Stratford 400 years ago. What I've tried to show in the lines from King John and Sonnet 33 is how looking hard at metaphor and image will open up not a neat and pat formula but the very essence of all drama, conflicted human emotions.
Now I want to turn in another direction completely, I hope a bit more cheerful. It's about making Shakespeare new, and getting decent things to say in your essay, simply by being straightforward, unprejudiced and using critics, sure, and listening to everything your tutor says, definitely, but most of all using your own eyes and ears. Don't be afraid of using your insight.
Now I'm not going to pretend that what I'm about to say is particularly earth shattering, but it does have the advantage (I think) of being original. Earlier I talked about the Shakespeare industry, and that extends not only to the Disneyfication of Stratford (was there ever a more tedious tourist attraction?) but also the multi-million Shakespeare text and criticism industry. You’ll know it well, you might even have one of its glossy products on your desk. Books create more books and sometimes things which are really questionable get repeated from generation to generation. Take the famous opening lines of Twelfth Night:
ACT I
SCENE I. DUKE ORSINO's palace.
Enter DUKE ORSINO, CURIO, and other Lords; Musicians attending
DUKE ORSINO
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
Generally Orsino is regarded a lovable but stupid upper class twit, a Tim Nice but Dim with breeches and codpiece. Evidence: well his name means literally 'bearlike' and he uses the word 'appetite' which is all about materialism. Textual note after note confirms this, so he is normally played as a sort of Freddie Flintoff with a penchant for speaking in iambic pentameters. I've never really bought this idea, for various reasons.
The first is purely subjective – I quite like the character – in a play full of dupes and deceivers he is honest and trustworthy, he is kind, and one of Shakespeare's brightest and sparkiest female characters falls in love with him. That's pretty frail reasoning though to go against critical orthodoxy. I hope you'll think my second reason is a bit better.
For years I taught this opening scene in a trad. way, that Orsino is a bit thick but basically OK, but something was nagging me, and perhaps my experience shows just how difficult it is to shake off received Shakespeare ideas, but how rewarding it can be to do so. I love my music and I couldn't help but notice that every important English musician from Shakespeare's time to the present seemed to love these lines and to have set them, with the greatest of pleasure. With the example of the likes of Henry Purcell, Haydn, and Elgar to back me up I dared to come out of the closet as somebody with different ideas about Orsino. For a start it is no accident that song writers had gone wild about these lines – the poetry is sensational. When Orsino speaks of music that ' came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,/That breathes upon a bank of violets' it is something extraordinary, something called synaesthesia , where two senses are conflated, hear smell and hearing so sweet music smells like perfume. In the other famous place where he does this in Anthony and Cleopatra, critics go ape about Shakespeare's power and sensuality, but here they are more or less silent. And then I looked d further at the note of sadness – 'dying fall', 'bank of violets' (often associated with remembrance of the dead, as in Hamlet) and I began to see that Orsino may be lovesick, but he is also responding intensely to the music – and here's another point, he's speaking over the sounds of the music itself. The combination of sweetness and sadness in the music, the fact that speech will fit over the top of it, and that it has a dying fall ( a cadence associated often with vocal music) tells us this is a madrigal, a short often bitter-sweet vocal piece for voices and sometimes instruments. As a crude experiment I tried reading Orsino's speech over the rhythms of the most famous of all Elizabethan madrigals, John Wilbye's 'Draw on Sweet Night. Take any piece of slow soft music that you like and carefully read Orsino's music over the top of it, trying to keep in time to the music's rhythms - I think you'll agree the poetry is immediately changed.
And as for the bear...well the Orsini happened to be one of the most famous of all Italian aristocratic families, amongst ancestors of our present English royal family, and an Orsini prince was visiting England at the time the play was written – so the name is not a put-down but a compliment to Orsino's nobility.....put these few little ideas of mine together and I think the play's centre of gravity starts to change. Critics have always worried about the play's often harsh atmosphere, and if you play Orsino as a lout, then Viola seems idiotic to fall in love with him, and the play ends up a very modern looking piece about the darkness of romantic love (and it is dark indeed in places). But just give Shakespeare the simple respect of looking at his text, being honest about what you see, and a few overlooked sensual and musical words at the play's start can give you a completely different axis for your writing.
And to sum up here – can this help with 'how do I write?' Yes – put the words back into the theatre, see it as a play, not as a crossword puzzle, and it will begin to come alive for you.
Finally, just to stress that the best way to enter the play as a student is to make it live for you as an audience member, even in the imaginary theatre of your mind, I want without much comment to show you a speech from a play, The Winter's Tale, that as I get older, I begin to think may be Shakespeare’s greatest – it is his penultimate complete play.
The Prince, Florizel, is in love with Perdita, a shepherd girl, who refuses to marry him since she thinks he is too far above him (fortunately she turns out to be a lost princess so Florizel gets the girl and the crown). The words he uses to convince her that he loves her do not look so important on the page, but when he speaks them, using images of dancing and the sea, I know nothing like the pattern of spoken words on the ear – and it is here, with this pleasure in sound and meaning, that I want to leave you, the glory of the sound, guaranteeing the speaker's sincerity and love, and I hope convincing you that you should study Shakespeare because he can make words spoken in a wooden theatre enact what human love itself might be. You could find how to write about him if you use your eyes AND your ears and trust that his language will carry you along:
... What you do
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,
I'd have you do it ever. When you sing,
I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms,
Pray so, and for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that, move still, still so,
And own no other function. Each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds,
That all your acts are queens."
The Winter's Tale (4.4.135-46)
