On one point, and one alone, critics of the past twenty-five years can be said to have reached agreement about Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night: they belong to a group of plays which are Shakespeare’s finest achievement in comedy. A generation ago such an assertion would have been open to challenge by those who had rediscovered the forgotten strengths of the last plays, but in 1961 Frank Kermode, contributing to Early Shakespeare (edited by J. R. Brown and B. Harris), dared to let it be known that he thought ‘The Mature Comedies’ better plays than the Romances, and his judgment has persisted and prevailed.

Mature is not the most fortunate name. Is the chestnut spire less mature than the fruit? 'Middle', though a drab term, has the advantage of neutrality over epithets such as happy, gay, golden, festive, joyous, all of which have proved counter-productive: A. P. Rossiter (Angel with Horns, 1961) reminds us of the 'Decameron-like hardness' of Much Ado About Nothing, and Ralph Berry detects much aggression in the abrasive encounters of As You Like It, while unnumbered critics stress the underlying sadness of Twelfth Night.

Prefatory note

To judge from the continuing spate of publications on the topic, there seems to be no end to the disagreement over the nature and dramatic significance of the marriage contracts in Measure for Measure – that of Claudio and Juliet, and that between the Deputy Angelo and Mariana. The action of the play is set in motion when Claudio is sentenced to death by Angelo for the crime of fornication, even though he protests his innocence on the grounds that he and Juliet were truly man and wife by a clandestine wedding contract, and that they had kept their union secret only for fear of antagonizing the friends of Juliet, who controlled her dowry (I, ii, 145–55). The first problem is as to the validity of Claudio’s defence. Later, when his sister Isabella appeals to the Deputy to show mercy, she is told that she can save her brother’s life only by submitting to Angelo sexually. The second problem arises when the Duke assures Mariana, a lady once betrothed to Angelo and still in love with him, that she could - without sinning – take Isabella’s place at the proposed assignation with Angelo. The Duke’s assurance that she would not be guilty of fornication in doing so is based on the circumstance that she was formerly contracted to marry Angelo (III, i, 213–30). Why will Mariana be guiltless, if Juliet and Claudio are guilty?

When he created Denmark’s corrupt court, Shakespeare played fast and loose with common sixteenth-century adages which then formed the great bulk of moral philosophy. At the same time he skillfully mishandled the rules of logic then commonly used to prove the dicta of proverbial wisdom. Shakespeare did so, I think, in the confidence that his audience which was taught from childhood to speak in proverbs and act on precepts would recognize his distortions and judge accordingly. Erasmus’s Adagia, of course, was the great source for Renaissance collections of proverbs. It was thus also the principal textbook of moral philosophy, which William Baldwin defined as ‘the knowledge of precepts of al honest maners . . . necessary for the comely gouernaunce of mans lyfe’. Furthermore, said Baldwin, ‘it is the duetye of . . . Logike, to make reasons to proue and improue . . . Ethike, which is moral Philosophye’ (f. 2). In Hamlet, Shakespeare sometimes manipulated the proverbs of moral Philosophye’ (fo. 2). In Hamlet, Shakespeare cipate discoveries. More often, however, Shakespeare made the characters clustered about Claudius and Claudius himself define their being and their actions in terms of proverbs which are false either because they are somehow garbled or because they reflect moral values which clearly no longer obtain in Elsinore.

'Where the devil/should he learn our language?' (II, ii, 66—7) wonders Stephano when he finds the terrified Caliban, echoing Ferdinand's first reply to Miranda:

Insignificant as this appears at first, it is new; never before in Shakespeare’s plays have characters called such attention to the fact that they might not speak the same language. Both Mortimer in 1 Henry IV and Henry V marry women of different tongues, but these ladies actually sing or speak on stage in their native languages, and the underscored confusion provides humor and charm. Elsewhere, dramatic license circumvents the difficulty, as Sicilians and Bohemians, Danes and Norwegians, Romans and Egyptians all converse, with our assent, in standard Elizabethan English. The Tempest, though, is different, and these two remarks are only one way in which Shakespeare calls attention to characters speaking. The question of language lies at the thematic center of The Tempest - a play where drops of water ‘swear’, thunder ‘pronounces’, and billows ‘speak’; a play where the controlling pulse derives ultimately from a magician’s arcane book. Shakespeare, in his final romance, returns with uncompromising directness to a problem which concerned him in earlier plays: the inescapable inadequacies of language as a medium for expression and communication. Like its characters, The Tempest demonstrates a heightened sensitivity to words, exploring these inadequacies and searching for a way to make language an acceptable basis for social order.

The question of whether or not Claudius should see the dumb-show preceding ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ is one of the hoariest in Hamlet criticism; but it remains an essential one, because on that scene, a turning-point in the play, hangs much of the relationship between Hamlet and Claudius. There appears, as things stand, to be an inconsistency, a dramatic inelegance even, which some are tempted to explain in terms of the complexity of the texts and the possibility that this very long play contains alternative versions springing from differing conditions of performance; yet to omit the dumb-show altogether in production, as is occasionally done, might put us in danger of misinterpreting that vital scene, and that relationship. In what is still the fullest account, John Dover Wilson concludes that the dumb-show is necessary to the audience but not to the characters in the play. Indeed, he argues, Hamlet is seriously upset at the likelihood that this addition to the programme (unexpected, in Dover Wilson’s opinion) will spoil everything; but since all goes smoothly after all, ergo the King cannot have seen it. This drives producers to find something else for him to do: to have him drinking jocund healths, perhaps, or dallying with the Queen.

In the introduction to the 1966 Folio Society edition of Twelfth Night, Peter Hall claims that ‘the comedy is rich, because there is darkness and disturbance’, and his 1958–60 Stratford production with Dorothy Tutin as Viola was outstandingly good because it was so bitter-sweet, fully bringing out the sad, sombre aspects without sacrificing the gaiety and humour: it struck, in short, a balance between extremes of experience. This, it seems to me, is what true comedy always achieves. Its laughter does not exclude the darker sides of life: it is so inclusive because it is aware of the tragic, aware of heartbreak and intensity, but is able to absorb these elements and move beyond them to its reconciliations. These, in their turn, are richer, more complete, more satisfying, because the comedy has not evaded or attempted to ignore these darker elements. It is easier to feel this complexity in performance than to describe it; but the technique of another master of comedy, Mozart, especially in Così fan Tutte, helps to clarify Shakespeare’s achievement in Twelfth Night.

It is a disconcerting fact that what nowadays appear to be the main problems attaching to Loves Labour’s Lost arise out of ill-advised attempts, over the past hundred years, to attribute to Shakespeare a rather uncharacteristic preoccupation with satirical allegory whose interpretation has produced a diversity of mutually antagonistic hypotheses. Once we accept that these major problems may be nonexistent and the minor ones, though insoluble, negligible, the residue is a straightforward, intensely vigorous yet gently sardonic comedy; a tour-de-force in which Shakespeare is able, through sheer technical dexterity, to sustain a dialogue involving no less than eight characters, of whom two or three are sufficiently heightened for the initiative to shift hither and thither and from whom there emerges a comic hero, Berowne, whose vitality surpasses that of any of his successors, Benedick alone excepted.

Clarence’s dream, like Richard’s courtship of Anne, is one of the embellishments Shakespeare introduced in giving body and shape to his dramatisation of chronicle material in Richard III. For this dream he had not, as he had for the fact though not the substance of Richard’s fearful dream on the eve of Bosworth, any warrant in his historical sources. It consists of a number of distinguishable elements. First, Richard is Clarence’s dream partner in his delivery from the Tower: this repeats the irony of Richard’s promise to effect it (I, i, 114f), and the kind of delivery he has just despatched the murderers to effect (I, iii, 356). Further, the dream represents Richard (though innocently, in accord with Clarence’s belief in his friend-ship) as responsible for Clarence’s death by drowning-the fate he will suffer before the end of the present scene. Clarence tells how Gloucester (Richard) tempted him ‘to walk/Upon the hatches’ where ‘as we pac’d along’

The distinction between appearance and reality is articulated as a theme in Shakespeare’s comedies in two distinct ways: (1) fortune, or some other external force, imposes on the characters some incorrect perception of reality, and, as the plot proceeds, that misperception rectifies itself (e.g. Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream); or (2) some characters voluntarily create deceptions that impel the plot, initially by deceiving other characters about reality and ultimately by demonstrating the necessity of distinguishing appearance from and achieving useful knowledge about reality (e.g. Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Tempest). Much Ado About Nothing fits neither pattern, for the series of deceptions that compose the plot, although created by the characters, are lived through en route to other deceptions, and are not overcome; false perception characterizes rather than disrupts the norm of the society depicted in the play. The characters adopt superficial attitudes toward what, in other dramas, might have been metaphysical crises; their overt considerations never become epistemological, as will those of Hamlet, Troilus, and Othello-the latter two at least involved in similar plots but in radically different societies.

In the stage production of Much Ado About Nothing the subtle interplay of emotions, and the delicate tonal balance in the dialogue between Benedick and Beatrice at the end of the church scene, have always proved testing to the players. An examination of a range of English productions of Much Ado between Garrick and the mid–1950s highlights some of the principles of the dramatic organisation of this sequence, illustrating both the variety of legitimate interpretation which it admits, and the extent to which it has sometimes been falsified in the theatre.

The first point to emerge in the study is that the plausibility of the sequence depends to a large extent on the players' success in establishing a sense of continuity between the emotions aroused in the first part of the church scene, and the reactions of Benedick and Beatrice in their concluding dialogue. In the more sensitive performances, Beatrice and Benedick have shown in their solicitude for Hero at the altar1 a depth of sympathy sufficient to give their later confessions of love the degree of inevitability and seriousness which the text (despite its latent comic undertones) demands.

Several recent studies range widely over the canon analysing various aspects of Shakespeare’s technique and creative process, the most original but also questionable thesis being advanced by Joan Rees. She argues that the plays are not careful intellectual constructions but the result of a generative creative process in which Shakespeare’s imagination responds to developments of the story line as they take place in the course of writing. Some part of the material may stimulate a burst of creative power and consequently distort the story line; again, where the story line fails to provide adequate imaginative stimulus, or where the narrative materials prove insufficient, his energy makes splendid way through new outlets. It is an attractive theory but highly speculative. It is asserted, for example, that Shakespeare realised the limitations of his material in the characters of Hero and Claudio, and that the plan of All’s Well That Ends Well made Helena’s role in the second half of the play unrewarding; the consequence was a compensatory flow of energy into the characters of Beatrice, Benedick, and Parolles. But are the situations of these characters inherently limited? The argument is available that they only appear so because Shakespeare chose to develop them in the way he has, and that the weight and interest attaching to Beatrice, Benedick, and Parolles were part of his primary conception of the plays.

Apart from Peter Brook’s production of Antony and Cleopatra (opening too late for review), the 1978 season at Stratford-upon-Avon consisted entirely of comedies, ranging over the entire spectrum: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (revived from 1977, when it was enthusiastically reviewed here), The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and (at the Other Place, the RSC’s Stratford studio) The Merchant of Venice. It presented an interesting mixture of old and new in that two RSC directors of long standing, Clifford Williams and John Barton, had directed The Tempest and Love’s Labour’s Lost before at Stratford, during the Peter Hall regime, whereas Michael Bogdanov and Barry Kyle were in sole charge of plays in the main house for the first time.

The opening of Michael Bogdanov's Taming of the Shrew exploited the current fashion for blurring the distinctions between theatrical 'realism' and 'artifice', presumably to emphasise enduring 'relevance'. After being unexpectedly faced with old-fashioned painted scenery, the audience was suddenly startled by a deceptively genuine squabble between an usherette and a drunk member of the audience without a ticket. 'No bloody woman is going to tell me what to do!' he cried, thus making the play's relevance plain. Leaping on to the stage, he tore apart all the illusory scenery, revealing a respectably contemporary series of rusty metal frames, staircases, and cat-walks.

Troilus and Cressida exemplifies the palimpsest of conflicting and incompatible texts possible to Shakespeare through remembrance, allusion, and revision of earlier sources. On every level, the play undercuts itself. As contemporary history, it recalls the endless, brutal war in the Netherlands pursued by England even as the Greeks waged for a decade their ‘just’ crusade against Troy. Shakespeare assumes the audience’s knowledge of traditional authorities on that ancient war – Homer, Euripides, Caxton, Chaucer – even as he takes for granted acquaintance with Tudor policies of support for Continental allies. But when Hector proves less valorous than naive, and Achilles a thug; when Pandarus inverts the stately Greek chorus into a provoker of Winchester geese; when Ulysses’s banalities on ‘degree, priority, and place’ (mimicking the principles of Elizabethan hierarchy that social change was already reducing to nostalgia) demonstrate how any sophistry will do if it can move a listener; and when a betrayed lover cannot even (like conventional Romeo) die of his passion, but abandons soft Venus for bellowing Mars – then it is a struggle of simultaneous texts (some held in the spectator’s memory, another being enacted on stage) that is occurring before the audience and which establishes the drama’s singular effect, the clash of literary conventions with their ironic reversals.

Central to any reading of 1 Henry IV is the dramatic opposition of the Prince of Wales with his arch-rival Henry Percy: the seriousness, energy, and courage of Hotspur are held up against the frivolous, bored, and irresponsible behavior of Hal. In large measure, the two young men, whom Shakespeare has intentionally portrayed as comparable in age, behave differently because they value differing codes of conduct. For Hotspur honor is of over-riding concern; by contrast, Hal acts as chief spokesman of another virtue, one especially appropriate for a Renaissance prince: courtesy. By analyzing the actions of both men according to the two most influential Elizabethan handbooks on courtly manners, we may arrive at a more precise evaluation of these two virtues and of those qualities that, it seems, ultimately mark Hal superior to Hotspur.

The importance of the ‘Choice of Hercules’ in the art of the Renaissance has been made clear by the work of Erwin Panofsky and its role in the culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been illustrated by Edgar Wind. From a simple story in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, which coalesced with Scipio’s dream in the Punica of Silius Italicus, neo-Platonist philosophy fashioned a richly-textured, highly sophisticated allegory. This allegory touched on the most vital moral question of the time: the attainment of human wholeness, perhaps the central concern of the Renaissance. My object is to explore the connection of the ‘Choice of Hercules’ with Antony and Cleopatra and to define the effect which this well-known allegory may have on the meaning of the play.

In 1593, Shakespeare promised Southampton ‘some graver labour’ to follow Venus and Adonis. Indeed, Muriel Bradbrook has persuasively argued that Venus itself was an attempt by Shakespeare to silence the slanders uttered by Greene in 1592 and establish himself as a respectable poet. In the elaborate description of a tapestry or painting of Troy which takes up over two hundred lines in Lucrece, Shakespeare draws on Virgil and Classical art theorists to create for his poem a proper epic ecphrasis, comparable to the shield of Achilles, to the bronze doors at Carthage where Aeneas sees written the fate of his people, or to the ‘clothes of Arras and of Toure’ which decorate Malacasta’s castle in the Faerie Queene. When he describes the painter’s wondrous skill, Shakespeare invokes the ancient paragone of poet and painter, asserting his own mastery of his craft and equality to the ancient masters of the arts. When he describes the response of Lucrece to the ‘well-painted piece’, Shakespeare defines her stature as a woman and as the hero of his poem.

An appropriate book with which to begin is one concerned with Shakespeare’s origins, Emrys Jones’s challenging study of Titus Andronicus and the early histories, which provides rich pickings for critical discussion. It may claim originality in several respects, proposing that the significance of the mystery cycles for Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is far greater than has hitherto been acknowledged, that Shakespeare’s learning, product of Erasmian humanism, is still under-estimated, in particular his knowledge, via Latin translations, of Greek tragedy, and that formative influences may exert themselves not only through specific and readily identifiable debts, but also through broad situational features and even tone. Although presumptively likely, these positions are not easily susceptible of proof. The case for the possible influence of Euripides’s Hecuba on Titus Andronicus rests upon circumstantial evidence and similarity of ‘fundamental structure’, but the similarity is so broad as to be inconclusive. Much the same may be said of the alleged influence of deep-seated memories of the passion sequence of the mystery cycles, particularly on episodes in the Henry VI plays, although here the detail is more persuasive. To speak more generally, while the creative imagination draws both arcanely and manifestly upon its store of experienced art, it also draws upon direct experience.