British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие
.pdfactual events, though developed imaginatively) appeared. One of the first historical plays was John Bayle’s Kyng Johan (1540), though it still contained morality elements – some personified vices and virtues alongside with historical characters.
It is necessary to mention three more influences on Elizabethan drama. The revenge tragedy concentrated on the protagonist’s wish to avenge for some misdeeds, on his moral confusion because of the necessity to answer evil with evil. The Roman author Seneca (4BC – 45AD) was very popular in Elizabethan times.
The other influence came from Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), a famous Italian politician. His outlook was expressed in his book The Prince. Its main idea is that the only way to securing a happy and stable society is strong government. People are evil, so the ruler should play their game: to be able to cheat and lie in order to obtain power.
The Elizabethans also believed that only God was responsible for kingship. Any attempt to usurp the king’s power was a crime not only against the humans, but against God.
The plays the companies presented in the time of Elizabeth’s reign were of many kinds: chronicles, tragedies, comedies and farces.
It should be noted that Renaissance is represented not only by Elizabethan Age (1558–1603), but also by Jacobean Age (1603–1625), Caroline Age (1625–1649) and Commonwealth Period (1649–1660).
The greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors was in fact his exact contemporary, Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593). He was the son of a shoemaker, but was much better educated than Shakespeare, taking his degree at Cambridge. His life was short but riotous. He was held in the deepest suspicion in his last years by the Queen's Council, and it was possibly by a government spy that he was killed, in a tavern fight in the London suburb of Deptford.
Both his poetic talent and his dramatic flair were prodigious. He wrote
Tamburlaine, The Tragedy of Dido, Queene of Carthage, Edward II, two books of an erotic narrative poem Hero and Leander, several unfinished plays. His most famous play is Doctor Faustus (1589) – dramatically not very strong (though we cannot be sure the text as we have it is as Marlowe left it), yet the opening and closing scenes have overwhelming poetic power, and capture as powerfully as anything in Shakespeare the desperate human urge for power over one's fate, for a limitless knowledge:
O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,
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Is promised to the studious artisan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces,
Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds,
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a demi-god . . .
Marlowe created new compositional framework for his interpretation of the popular legend about Dr.Faustus. For that he used the technique of ancient Greek drama – in the Prologue the Chorus tells us about the biography of the main character, his background and success in science. The action proper starts at the moment when we see Dr.Faustus in his study, surrounded by the books. He is not satisfied by philosophy, medicine, theology or law and decides to address to the magic. At the end of the tragedy, on the last day of his life Dr.Faustus says his last monologue, frightened by all his deeds and the approaching Devil. In between these two points a reader can follow all the main events. The interpretation of these events is almost the same as in the popular legend. The events develop in the succession of epic narration. This composition was preserved in the later interpretations of the legend – in the works by Göthe and Lessing.
Marlowe based his tragedy on the English translation of the German novel The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr.John Faustus written by Johann Spies in 1587. In English there was another book – A Ballad on the Life and Deathe of Dr.Faustus, the Great Conjuror, registered in 1589. It is quite evident that Marlowe knew it.
Few of the texts of Marlowe's works are reliable indicators of how his works were played in his lifetime. Dr.Faustus was probably first staged in 1594, after the poet’s death and immediately became very popular, though there is some written evidence that when Faustus appeared on the stage it was quite a shock for some people.
In the finer pages of Doctor Faustus, in Edward II, and Tamburlaine we have an achievement of some magnitude. It is at least possible that, but for Marlowe’s early death, Elizabethan drama might have had two playwrights of equal strength. As it is, it is difficult to think of Marlowe other than as the predecessor of William Shakespeare.
What we really know about Shakespeare is almost nothing. Even the birthdate, 23 April 1564 is not exact. His father was a prosperous glover and a wool merchant in the midlands town of Stratford-on-Avon. John Shakespeare became mayor of Stratford in 1568. William Shakespeare
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attended the Stratford Grammar School, and when only eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, several years his senior, and already pregnant. By her he had a daughter, and a twin boy and girl, of whom the boy died at the age of eleven. Then we lose sight of Shakespeare for some years, but he reappears in London in 1592. He both acted (small parts) and wrote for the Lord Chamberlain's company, later known as the King's Men, and by 1598 he was hailed by Francis Meres, a well-known literary scholar of that time, as “the most excellent in both kinds (comedy and tragedy) for the stage,” as well as the author of “sugared sonnets” among his private friends. Around 1611 he seems to have gone into semi-retirement at Stratford, returning to his wife and family. He died on his supposed birthday in 1616. In his will he left his wife his “second-best bed,” a fact which has afforded more scope for fun than all the rest of his shadowy life.
Any biography of Shakespeare – even so brief a summary as the above – is of necessity rich in “must have's” and “almost certainly's”. The sparse, bare facts are filled out with political, social and theatrical history. In fact, we gain from the record no sense of Shakespeare's personality, and no evidence of his opinions. We may guess from the plays that for example he was suspicious of “democracy,” contemptuous of “the mob,” in favour of strong, centralized government and in love with the mystique of monarchy. But plays are not political manifestos. Speeches in plays are expressions of the character who speaks them. Plays were written for certain audiences and to catch the ear of possible patrons. Shakespeare the man is a blank, a mystery. Our sense of the “character” of the author may fill out and complicate our response to his works (as it does in the case of Shakespeare's contemporaries Marlowe and Jonson). Not so with Shakespeare. We are left with the plays. Some famous writers including Lord Byron and Charles Dickens doubted the authorship of William Shakespeare. Among the possible authors of his plays were named such well-known people as Counts Retland, Derby, Oxford, economist Bacon and even Queen Elizabeth I. A young American journalist Calvin Hoffman ascribed the authorship to Christopher Marlowe, in spite of the fact that the latter perished in 1593 at the age of 29, when the most part of Shakespeare’s works hadn’t been written.
There are several approaches to the subdivision of Shakespeare’s work into periods. According to Ford M. Ford his literary work can be divided into four periods. The first period up to 1594 may be called the period of apprenticeship, though Richard III, written within this period, remains one of his popular and most frequently staged works. During the second period, from 1594 up to 1600, Shakespeare wrote plays belonging mainly to
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two dramatic genres – historical chronicles and tragedies. The two tragedies written during that period – Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, differ much from his mature tragedies. His comedies are not like the comedies written by his contemporaries. The scene is usually set in some imaginary country, and the action is based on the stories that are almost fairy-tales. Many comedies are built around the typical Shakespearian conflict between true and false emotion. One can notice Petrarch’s influence in the presentation of ideal passions in the comedies. But he portrayed true-to-life characters, depicted them with the deep insight into human psychology and that made him so famous. Among the “golden comedies” are Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing.
During the third period of his literary career, from 1600 to 1608, Shakespeare wrote the great tragedies that made him immortal. All the tragic characters of Shakespeare are shown in their development, and this is the first innovation introduced by Shakespeare. His other innovation is the way of explaining the evolution (or degradation) of the heroes by the social factors. Many of Shakespeare’s great tragedies are devoted to his favourite theme: State and Society, kingship, appearance and reality.
The fourth period is characterized by a considerable change in the style of drama. All the plays of that period are written around a dramatic conflict, and all of them have happy endings. On the whole one gets an impression that he is telling us fairy-tales in which he doesn’t believe himself. However, the play The Tempest is one of his most significant and profound works.
It is also possible to divide Shakespeare’s works into the early plays, comedies and histories, tragedies and problem plays (plays which explore a certain sociological problem, a mixture of comedy and cynicism, a blend of comic, historic and tragic modes), and romantic plays.
Shakespeare’s first works were fiery, uneven, grand and absurd. Within a single scene we may encounter superb rhetoric and ludicrous fustian, a brilliant dramatic stroke and a catastrophic piece of contrivance. In the past commentators have often tried to slough off the dramatic disasters by explaining that these plays were collaborations. Sometimes, perhaps, this was the case. Like any other artist he needed his apprenticeship, he needed to test his powers and the theatre that was to employ them. Thus, if Titus Andronicus is a bloodthirsty mess of a play, it was perhaps a mess necessary for a man who was eventually to achieve the controlled horror of Macbeth and King Lear. And the exaggerations of Henry VI lead us di-
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rectly to the apotheosis of the Machiavellian villain in the early and brilliant Richard III.
In this play Shakespeare took the figure of Richard III as he was presented in Tudor times and created a dramatic figure of unsurpassed vitality and fascination: crooked of body, crafty of mind, delighted with his own villainy, he magnetizes everybody around to give up their will to his and wades through slaughter to his throne, assuring of his friendship while plunging in the knife. Shakespeare's verse technique suddenly takes on a new variety and eloquence, and, most important, it gains individuality and becomes the means of presenting a very vivid character. Richard's verse, with its subtle changes of mood, its spurts of outrageous cheek, its misanthropy, its sudden mockery, its self-love, is the man, and could be spoken by no other. This outrageous tone is already caught in Richard's initial selfanalysis:
“But I, – that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton, ambling nymph;
I that am currail'd of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deform'd, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionably
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them . . .
I am determined to prove the villain.”
Richard III is a triumph of bravura style; in the later histories we find greater depth in his human as well as his social understanding. Richard II certainly resembles Marlowe's Edward II, but – more notably – it paves the way for Shakespeare's own great tragedies. Already Shakespeare is expert at conveying the business of government, the political cross-currents, the constant intrigue behind the professions of loyalty, the ebb and flow of fortunes. Such a play is no celebration of patriotic wishful-thinking, but an investigation into the foundations of English nationhood.
The comedies (a plays of amusing character, in which either wit or good humour prevails), which are most frequently staged today are As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing – all written within two or three years, each one subtly different from the others in its exploitation of comic modes.
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Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy of manners (the emphasis is laid upon the portrayal of social life rather than on the humour of the plot or situation). The action is set in everyday world and the language of the comedy is colloquial. The main themes are the nature of love and selfknowledge. The love between Hero and Claudio is romantic and conventional. The love of Beatrice and Benedick is eccentric and unconventional: they argue and fight, do not behave themselves. The main idea is that love is always a precious emotion, it helps to develop personal qualities, must lead to marriage, which is the symbol of harmony. The theme of selfknowledge, appearance and reality is very important for almost all works of Shakespeare: it is very dangerous to overor underestimate oneself. It is necessary to learn the truth about oneself in order to know the truth about other people.
As You Like It is more a pastoral (a form of escape literature concerned with the idealization of country life); The Twelfth Night is most subtle of all in its interweaving of different modes of comedy and farce.
The first years of the seventeenth century were the crowning ones in Shakespeare's career – above all the period of the great tragedies. Shakespeare's first mature tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, was written around 1596. This is less a tragedy of character -passionate and pathetic as the two lovers are – than one of fate and social circumstance. In later tragedies Shakespeare prefers to trace the effect of a particular character's involvement in a particular situation, the interaction leading to catastrophe. Romeo and Juliet is the first tragedy, in which Shakespeare speaks about contemporary time, reflects the very atmosphere of Renaissance. There are two expositions: positive – the Verona of young friends, and negative – the Verona of the Capulet-Montague feud. Then he introduces his heroes. At first Romeo is in love with the idea of being in love (again the theme of appearance and reality), but then he meets Juliet, his first (and last) real love. Landscape plays an important part in rendering the characters’ mood and outlook: for Romeo and Juliet the night in the garden is beautiful, for Mercutio – damp and cold. It is interesting that the whole action takes place within four days whereas in the original source (Arthur Brooke’s poem) it takes over five months. This method may be used to emphasize the shortness of happiness, the depth of the young lovers’ tragedy. Father Lorenzo is a contradictory character. On the one hand he is eager to help the young lovers. He imitates death, but it is unforgivable: no one has the right to play with death. In popular legends it is always punished. So Romeo and Juliet die. The Nurse is the embodiment of patriarchal views. As we know, all women parts were played by male actors in Shakespeare’s
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time. This fact strengthens the comic effect of the Nurse’s character as if symbolizing the end of old days. The tragedy has two endings: the death of the heroes and the end of the feud. It is a kind of equilibrium, which can be found in the end of ancient Greek tragedies.
Julius Caesar (1599) is a tragedy that never received its due praise. The play catches the spirit of the classical world, it shows the positive virtues of restraint, order, self-control, and also sees the reverse side of the coin – the coldness, the ruthlessness of power-seeking. Such breadth of understanding is remarkable in the author who, as the legend says, enjoyed only a primary classical education. The tragic hero of the play is not Caesar himself, but Brutus, the reluctant conspirator who sees Caesar, with his desire to be crowned Emperor, as so grave a threat to Roman “democracy” – the rule of his own class – that only assassination can restore the purity and ideals of the state. Brutus is indeed selfless, noble, inspired by the highest motives. As he half realizes, he is a survival from a greater age, surrounded by lesser men. But Brutus is also rigid, unable to see points of view other than his own, unable to compromise. Cassius, a major source of evil in the play, is capable of deep love and strong friendship. So Shakespeare shows his characters in their complexity. Some critics consider Julius Caesar a history play.
The first of the great tragedies was Hamlet, probably written around 1601. It is generally agreed to be the peak of modern tragedy. The play is still living, controversial, and open to fresh insight. It is tragedy of revenge. Hamlet's problem is the appallingly difficult one of finding actions commensurate with his new vision of what “is“, what the world he lives in is actually like. Again the author raises the problem of appearance and reality. Hamlet is not afraid of action as such. He has been, we are told more than once, a capable and popular prince. All through the play he acts boldly and decisively whenever he needs to: in following the ghost, in organizing the play, in facing his mother with the brutal facts, in killing the old man behind the curtain, in coping effectively with the situation on the ship bound for England: and about none of these actions does his conscience bother him particularly, though his enigmatic display immediately after the death of Polonius shows his awareness of the moral complexities of that act. But it is really only over the killing of the King that he hesitates and that is certainly not because he dare not do it or looks on the killing as in some absolute way “wrong”. The “Now might I do it pat” speech (III.3.73) expresses as clearly as any of his utterances his sense of the inadequacy of merely killing the King, of achieving nothing but the minimal formalities of revenge.
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It is not good enough to describe Hamlet as a man who “cannot make up his mind”. More adequately one might say that he is faced with a situation that it is almost impossible for him to resolve satisfactorily in action. Critics explain Hamlet’s reasons for the delay to murder Claudius by various reasons. Some say that it is rooted in Oedipus complex, while others attribute it to shock: much has happened to Hamlet within such a short period of time that needs some time to recover before acting.
It seems essential to see Hamlet's problem historically. To do so helps resolve one of the issues that has always worried actors who tackle the part: how can Hamlet be at the same time – what almost everyone feels instinctively he must be – a hero, yet also ineffective? It is this problem that has led to the tendency to sympathize with Hamlet because he is ineffective. This tendency, though wrong, is a tribute to the significance of the situation described by Shakespeare, a situation of great general interest in the modern world and the one that makes everyone recognize the typicality as well as the uniqueness of Hamlet. Hamlet is not merely a Renaissance prince. Along with Marlowe's Faustus he is the first modern intellectual in English literature and he is, of course, far more modern as well as much more intelligent than Faustus. And his dilemma is essentially the dilemma of the modern European intellectual: his ideas and values are in a deep way at odds with his actions. Thinking and doing have got separated, he substitutes thought for action. Power and effectiveness tend therefore to be suspected by the intelligentsia who retreat physically into a world removed from vital power-decisions, and mentally into a realm of ideas and art which they value above the world of action and try to defend from the corrupting inroads of cynical expediency.
In Hamlet all these tendencies and temptations are to be found, though, being a sixteenth-century prince, the practical possibilities of an escape from the world of action are not, for him, very great. But the lost young man of the opening acts, acutely conscious of “not belonging”, contemptuous, sardonic, even a bit exhibitionist, talking a language different from those around him, speaks directly to the experience of the modern intellectual who proceeds to idealize this unhappy young man.
Shakespeare does not permit this idealization. Hamlet, having stood on the brink of despair, comes back to the court of Denmark, refusing to continue to contemplate the possibility of a separation of thought from action. From the moment at which, recalled to actuality in the graveyard by the death of Ophelia, he leaps into the grave with a cry “This is I, Hamlet the Dane!” he puts behind him the most desperate of his haunting doubts. The atmosphere of the fifth act, with its tense, controlled, unemphatic prose
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statements, is one of sad, almost (but not quite) passive acceptance of the need to act. The readiness is all. Hamlet is not taken in, nor has he become cynical: in his heart there remains a kind of fighting that will not let him sleep. Although all is ill about his heart he will meet the challenges that come bravely without cynicism and without humbug.
But Hamlet, the prince who has tried to become a man, becomes a prince again and does what a sixteenth-century prince ought to do – killing the murderer of his father, forgiving the stupid Laertes, expressing (for the first time) direct concern about his own claims to the throne but giving his dying voice to young Fortinbras, the kind of delicate and tender prince that Hamlet himself could never again have been.
This tragedy has also been so fascinating for successive generations because it is about adolescence. All young people go through terrible realization that world is not that simple and secure as it seemed to be in childhood, the humanity is corrupt. Hamlet rebels against the cruel world. So he appeals to young people because of the hero’s rebellious spirit. Older people recognize the process of their own growing up.
In King Lear the story, put in its simplest terms, is the story of Lear from being a king to being a man. It is a story so fearful and yet so wonderful that the whole human society is shaken by the terrible beauty of it and at its supreme moments Man and the Universe are seen in relationship which it is scarcely possible for words other than Shakespeare's own to describe.
Shakespeare does not work in abstractions. He is a supremely realistic writer who presents us all the time with actual situations, actual relationships, and what general conclusions he offers are always based on particular observations and insights. He is not, of course, a naturalistic dramatist, attempting a “slice of life” kind of realism and he uses every resource of his teeming imagination to create means of penetrating, through words and fantasy, to the inner processes of the situations and people he presents. The storm in Lear “works” artistically on a number of levels: the elemental storm, the social storm which shakes the divided kingdom, the inner storm that drives Lear mad, all are interconnected and reinforce one another to achieve what is the most extraordinary representation of crisis in the whole of art. But every device of art is used to produce, not some effect above or beyond reality, but the deepest, most complex exploration of the actual nature of reality, its texture and its implications, its movement and its interconnectedness.
There are several approaches to interpret this tragedy. Some critics regard it from religious point of view. Lear commits many sins and is pun-
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ished for them – he looses everything and dies. But death for him is a kind of release. He looses his world but saves his soul. Other critics consider King Lear to be Shakespeare’s most pessimistic play. They say that the play states there is no Divinity, Providence, or guiding hand in the world. King Lear is destroyed just after he has gained knowledge, so his death is meaningless.
The power of Othello is of a very different kind. The tragedy is based on a novella written by the Italian writer, scientist and philosopher Giraldi Chintino, in 1565. In this novella the author tells us a story of a young virtuous Venetian lady who married a black warrior who served for Venice. The lady was killed by her jealous husband. The novella is a kind of a morality novella directed against unequal marriage. Shakespeare managed to create one of his best masterpieces using quite an ordinary subjectmatter. Far from being a scholar or philosopher Othello is a man of action – a Negro in the service of the state of Venice, a man foreign to this sophisticated environment, yet accustomed to command on land and at sea. It is when he marries the white, aristocratic Desdemona that he both achieves the summit of his happiness and puts himself in a position of unusual peril. Iago, one of his military subordinates, has been passed over for promotion, and bears a grudge against him. On the surface Iago is a typical middle-rank soldier – bluff, hearty, open. “Honest Iago” he is called, over and over. Beneath that companionable surface there lurks one of the vilest natures in all Shakespeare: jealous, cynical, corrupt, and sexually obsessed. Against such a type Othello has no chance, not when he is off the field of battle, in the strange. His nature is simple, open, selfconfident – he has none of the sophisticated man's false modesty, insincere evasions, civilized shows. In the first part of the play Othello's language is like himself – grand, confident, wide-ranging.
О my soul's joy!
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have waken'd death!
Iago, on the other hand, is brutal, obsessed, littered with images of low animals. In one of the scenes he calls Othello “an old black ram”.
Even in Shakespeare's day, the language of racialist abuse was beginning to establish itself. Shakespeare widely uses the linguistic means to characterize his heroes.
The tragedy is full of symbols. One can say that Othello is a kind of morality that depicts allegorical wandering between Heaven and Hell. On
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