Unformatted text preview: ACCLAIM FOR MARJORIE GARBER'S Shakespeare After All
“A return to the times when the critic's primary function was as an enthusiast, to open up
the glories of the written word for the reader.”
—The New York Times
“A lifetime of learning has gone into the production of this massive volume.… Garber is
sensitive to significant details in the language … and she gives cogent accounts of historical
contexts.”
—The Boston Globe
“She lights up the plays with insights you'll kick yourself for not having had first.”
—Newsweek
“A delight…. Polished, thoughtful, eminently useful…. Not only a wonderful guide to the
plays, but just as importantly, it's a guide to the reading of the plays…. Garber writes
elegantly and insightfully…. The reader seeking an informed guide to each play simply can
not do better.”
—The Providence Journal
“Impossibly full … engagingly written…. It fills you with gratitude on virtually every
page. Here, in a book, is a Shakespearean course for our time.”
—The Buffalo News
“An absolute joy…. Extremely lively and witty…. Remarkable…. Authoritative.”
—Tucson Citizen
“Stimulating and informative.”
—The Charlotte Observer
“Garber keeps her eye on the goal, to illuminate the experience of reading and seeing the
plays, and achieves it with quiet efficiency.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“A commanding performance, not to be missed…. Garber brings the Bard into our
hearts…. Fascinating.”
—Republican-American (Waterbury, CT)
“Shakespeare After All is worth the cost for the introduction alone.”
—South Florida Sun-Sentinel
“Every page has something that will make you rethink what you've seen or read, or make
you want to read a work for the first time.”
—The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR)
“Her chapters on individual plays have the rhythm of the classroom and the voice of the
master teacher who still marvels at her subject.”
—The Bloomsbury Review Shakespeare After All
Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and American Literature and
Language and chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.
She lives in Cambridge and Nantucket, Massachusetts. ALSO BY MARJORIE GARBER A Manifesto for Literary Studies
Quotation Marks
Academic Instincts
Sex and Real Estate
Symptoms of Culture
Dog Love
Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality
Coming of Age in Shakespeare
Dream in Shakespeare For B. J., the onlie begetter Indeed all the great Masters have understood that there cannot be great art
without the little limited life of the fable, which is always the better the simpler it
is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the self-seen world beyond it.
William Butler Yeats, “Emotion of Multitude” CONTENTS
A Note on the Text
Introduction
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
Henry VI Part 1
Henry VI Part 2
Henry VI Part 3
Richard III
The Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV Part 1
Henry IV Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
Henry V
Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Hamlet
Twelfth Night
Troilus and Cressida
Measure for Measure
Othello
All's Well That Ends Well
Timon of Athens
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Pericles Coriolanus
Cymbeline
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest
Henry VIII (All Is True)
The Two Noble Kinsmen
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
Acknowledgments A NOTE ON THE TEXT
THERE ARE MANY excellent modern editions of Shakespeare's plays. In the Suggestions for
Further Reading at the end of this book I list several of the best-known, most reliable, and most
available recent editions, with the expectation that a reader of this book may already own a copy
of the collected works of Shakespeare or individual editions of the plays. The act, scene, and line
numbers cited in the chapters that follow refer to The Norton Shakespeare (1997), itself based on
the text of The Oxford Shakespeare (1986), but readers who own or have access to other editions
will be able to find the quoted passages without difficulty. Line numbers may vary slightly, since
lines of prose will be of differing lengths depending upon the width of the printed page or column.
For textual variants and alternative readings from Quarto or Folio texts, readers should consult
the textual notes in any good modern edition. When citing the names of characters in the plays, I
have occasionally departed from the choices made by the Norton editors, preferring, for example,
the more familiar “Brabantio” to “Brabanzio” in Othello, “Gratiano” to “Graziano” in The
Merchant of Venice , “Ancient” Pistol to “Ensign” Pistol in Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V, and
“Imogen” to “Innogen” in Cymbeline. I have also chosen to quote from the 1623 Folio edition of
King Lear instead of the Norton Shakespeare's conflated version. All biblical citations, unless
noted otherwise, are from the 1599 edition of the Geneva Bible.
Although it is not possible to know with certainty the chronology of composition of the plays—
or even, sometimes, of their performance—the sequence given here follows the order suggested
by The Norton Shakespeare with the exception of a few minor changes. For the convenience of
the general reader Henry VI Part 1 is discussed before Part 2 and Part 3, even though it was
written after them. The Norton editors place The Merry Wives of Windsor between Henry IV
Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2, but I have elected, again for reasons of readerly convenience, to
discuss the two history plays in adjacent chapters. In this case the plays in question—Merry
Wives and 2 Henry IV-—are dated in the same years, so there is no significant disruption of
chronology. With Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, two plays thought to have
been written in the same time period, I have reversed the Norton's order, choosing to discuss
Shakespeare's love tragedy before moving on to his great comic send-up of “tragical” love.
Likewise, I discuss Cymbeline before The Winter's Tale. Modern scholars differ about which of
these two plays was written first; each was performed in 1611. But such changes are a matter of
editorial discretion and do not affect the argument for a generally historical sequence. Readers
should bear in mind that the dating of the plays is in many cases still highly speculative and
controversial, and that it is therefore difficult to draw firm conclusions about Shakespeare's
development as a playwright from this, or any, order of the plays. The presentation of plays in this
volume follows the practice of the Norton, Oxford, and other recent editions in grouping the plays
by approximate chronology rather than according to genres like comedy, history, tragedy, and
romance, with the intent of allowing the reader to observe the use of images, staging, and
language across genres in the course of Shakespeare's theatrical career. Introduction
EVERY AGE creates its own Shakespeare.
What is often described as the timelessness of Shakespeare, the transcendent qualities for
which his plays have been praised around the world and across the centuries, is perhaps better
understood as an uncanny timeliness, a capacity to speak directly to circumstances the playwright
could not have anticipated or foreseen. Like a portrait whose eyes seem to follow you around the
room, engaging your glance from every angle, the plays and their characters seem always to be
“modern,” always to be “us.”
“He was not of an age, but for all time.” This was the verdict of Shakespeare's great rival and
admirer, the poet and playwright Ben Jonson, in a memorial poem affixed to the First Folio of
Shakespeare's plays. “Thou art a monument without a tomb,” wrote Jonson,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
We might compare this passage to Shakespeare's own famous lines in Sonnet 18, the sonnet
that begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” and ends:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The sonnets have indeed endured, and given life to the beloved addressee, but it is the sonnet
that praises him, not the unnamed “fair youth” to whom the sonnet is written, that lives on in our
eyes, ears, and memory.
Both “of an age” and “for all time,” Shakespeare is the defining figure of the English
Renaissance, and the most cited and quoted author of every era since. But if we create our own
Shakespeare, it is at least as true that the Shakespeare we create is a Shakespeare that has, to a
certain extent, created us. The world in which we live and think and philosophize is, to use Ralph
Waldo Emerson's word, “Shakspearized.”
“I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I do say so,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Goethe
thought so, too, and so did Sigmund Freud. So, indeed, did the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who,
having played the role in a celebrated production in France in 1899, and again in London in 1901,
declared that she could not imagine Hamlet as a man.
But perhaps Hamlet, a play that from the Romantic era on has been established as the premier
Western performance of consciousness, is too obvious a case to make the point. The Macbeths
have become emblems of ambition, Othello a figure for jealous love, Lear a paradigm of
neglected old age and its unexpected nobilities, Cleopatra a pattern of erotic and powerful
womanhood, Prospero in The Tempesta model of the artist as philosopher and ruler. Romeo and
Juliet are ubiquitous examples of young love, its idealism and excess. But if Shakespeare seems
to us in a surprising way so “modern,” it's because in a sense his language and his characters have
created a lexicon of modernity. This is a book devoted in part to exploring the remarkable
omnipresence of Shakespeare in our lives.
King Lear as written and performed in its original historical context was concerned with
pressing questions for the seventeenth century, like absolute monarchy, and royal succession and the obligations of vassals. For most citizens of the twenty-first century, “king” is an archaic title,
as it emphatically was not for the subjects of James I, under whose patronage Shakespeare's
company, the King's Men, performed and prospered. Mid-twentieth-century readers often
translated “king” into “father,” seeing the drama as one centered on the family rather than the
realm. Lear's railing against the heavens has often been understood as existential. At various
moments Lear became a sign of male power, of the pathos of aging, even of the end of an actor's
career. “King Lear” is a cultural icon, cited by philosophers, legislators, and politicians, as well
as literary scholars—and gerontologists and therapists. The character has a cultural life derived
from, but also distinct from, the play.
The Merchant of Venice is another powerful example of the translatability of these plays. The
first Shylock was a comic butt, who may have appeared in a red fright wig and a false nose, the
standard signs of Jewishness on the Elizabethan stage. Shylock was played as a comic figure until
the mid-eighteenth century, when the actor Charles Macklin transformed him into a villain. Only
in the nineteenth century did Shylock become a sympathetic or a tragic figure, masterfully
portrayed by Edmund Kean in a performance that impressed Romantic authors like Coleridge and
William Hazlitt. (It was Coleridge who said that Kean had the gift of revealing Shakespeare by
flashes of lightning.) The early twentieth century saw empathetic productions of the play in the
Yiddish theater, as well as a monstrous Shylock performed in Weimar under the aegis of Nazi
Germany. After the Holocaust an anti-Jewish portrayal of this figure seems almost unimaginable
—which is not to say that it will not be attempted. The point is that the play has changed, along
with the times. The Merchant of Venice itself has a history, a kind of cultural biography that has
transformed it from its moment of origination. Although we can revisit and understand the context
of production and of belief, from the sixteenth century and indeed from the sources that preceded
Shakespeare, this play, like all the others, is a living, growing, changing work of art. The role it
plays for contemporary readers, audiences, and cultural observers is to a certain extent a
reflection of its own history.
The same is true with Othello. The question of Othello's particularity as a black man and a
Moor has been balanced against a certain desire to see him as a figure of universal humanity. This
tendency toward generalization was in part an homage to Shakespeare, seen as a portrayer of
universal types, and also a liberal shift away from racial stigmatizing, an attempt to dissociate the
play from any tinct of bias. Earlier eras saw all too vividly the hero's color, especially in places,
like the United States, where race and inequality had for a long time been issues of national
concern. In the later twentieth century, critics have emphasized the context of cultural oppression
in the play, while others have wrestled with Othello's tendency to acquiesce with assumptions of
his inferiority. Black actors like James Earl Jones and Laurence Fishburne have displaced the
blackface portrayals of the past. Productions still sometimes depict the character as consumed
with self-doubt, but the heroic Othello has returned to the stage and screen—an Othello often
portrayed as culturally identified with blackness and with his titular role as “the Moor of
Venice.”
One more familiar example, that of The Tempest , may serve to reinforce this general
observation about the changing and growing nature of the plays, and their place as cultural
“shifters,” expanding their meanings as they intersect with new audiences and new circumstances in the world. After years as the premier art fable of Shakespearean drama, The Tempest, the story
of an artist/creator often movingly described as “Shakespeare's farewell to the stage” (although at
least one more play would be written and staged by his company before what scholars think may
have been his retirement to Stratford), The Tempest was reconsidered, in the later twentieth
century, as a reflection upon English colonial explorations and “first encounter” narratives of the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This reconsideration was framed in part by responses to
colonial and postcolonial issues in the twentieth century, the century in which, and from which,
critics and performers now regarded the play. Caliban's otherness was now celebrated as
difference rather than as cultural immaturity. Pros-pero's famous concession, “This thing of
darkness I / Acknowledge mine,” is addressed apparently to Caliban, but—as we will see—the
“thing of darkness” is also something Prospero encounters in his own mind and soul. It is
important to underscore the fact that postcolonial readings did not render the earlier
understandings and resonances of The Tempest obsolete. Rather, they augmented, added nuance,
questioned verities, such as Prospero's wisdom and ideal mastery, and even toyed with the idea
of reversals of power, giving Caliban and his co-conspirators an alternative voice in the play.
Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête and Roberto Fernández Retamar's Calibán both give Shakespeare's
Tempest full-fledged postcolonial rewritings. The hallmark of a complex work of art is that it can
not only endure but also benefit from any number of such strong rereadings. This, indeed, is one
appropriate instrumental test of what we have come to call “greatness” in art and literature.
But where did “Shakespeare” stand on these questions? As I will suggest throughout the
chapters that follow, the brilliant formal capacities of drama are such that the playwright's voice
is many voices. Shakespeare is Prospero, Caliban, Ariel, and the wondering Miranda. He is
Othello, Desdemona and Iago, Shylock, Portia and Antonio. One of the tremendous achievements
of these remarkable plays is the way one view will always answer another. Desdemona and
Emilia debate women's virtue from the “ideal” and “realist” viewpoints. Neither is definitively
right. Both are “Shakespeare.” No sooner does Ulysses laud the universal value of “degree” and
hierarchy than, in the next moment, he argues that the inferior Ajax be substituted for the
incomparable Achilles. What is Shakespeare's own view of such political questions? The answer
—which is not an answer—lies in his plays. Yet so powerful has been the cultural effect of these
plays that readers, critics, actors, and audiences often seek to align their meanings with
Shakespeare's biography.
In some eras, including our own, there has been a tendency, indeed a desire, to read the plays
as indicators of Shakespeare's mood, life crises, and frame of mind. Thus Thomas Carlyle asked
rhetorically, “[H]ow could a man delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth … if his own
heroic heart had never suffered?”1 Certain passages in Hamlet, King Lear, and Troilus and
Cressida were once taken as evidence of a certain “sex horror” on the part of the author, and
were traced to his ambivalent relationship to his wife. The “last plays,” including the sublimely
beautiful Winter's Tale and The Tempest —not to mention Pericles, the most popular of
Shakespeare's plays in his lifetime—were dismissed out of hand by certain early-twentiethcentury commentators like Lytton Strachey as infallible indications of the sad decline of a oncegreat writer who turned to the genre of romance out of boredom. The political, cultural, and
social views of our own era are likewise grafted onto our Shakespeare, who has been, or has become, a keen analyst of power and gender. In essence, and in effect, we cannot resist creating
our own Shakespeare. Again, I want to insist that this is a sign of strength in both playwright and
critic, not a condition to be deplored or seen through.
The conditions of the stage in Shakespeare's lifetime unquestionably shaped the kinds of plays
and characters he produced. No women were permitted to perform on the English public stage.
All the female roles in his plays were written for and performed by boy players, skilled
adolescent apprentices with high voices that had not yet “cracked,” or changed. And yet
Shakespeare created classic female characters who have become models of speech and conduct
across the centuries, from the “shrew” Katherine to the loving daughters Cordelia and Miranda to
Juliet, the modern paradigm of romantic love and longing.
The many cross-dressed roles in the plays took advantage of this material and historical fact,
allowing both maleness and femaleness to be bodied forth in performance, and leading, in
subsequent centuries, to a particular admiration for the liveliness and initiative of these
Shakespearean women. Rosalind, played by a boy actor, cross-dresses as the boy “Ganymede” to
enter the Forest of Arden; Portia, played by a boy actor, cross-dresses as the young doctor of
laws to enter the courtroom in Venice; Viola, played by a boy actor, cross-dresses as the young
man “Cesario” in Illyria; Imogen, played by a boy actor, cross-dresses as the boy “Fidele” in the
Welsh hills.
The theaters were closed after 1642 during the Puritan Revolution, and when they reopened,
after the restoration of the monarchy with the accession of Charles II in 1660, actresses did
appear in female roles. Thomas Coryate, an English traveler in Venice, reported in 1608 that he
“saw women acte, a thing that I never saw before—though I have heard that it hath been
sometimes used in London—, and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and
whatsoever convenient for a Player, as ever I saw any masculine Actor.” 2 Some traditionalists of
the time decried the change, claiming that the boys had done a better job of playing women.
Female identity on the stage had become...
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