Discovering Shakespeare’s Meaning PDF
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DISCOVERING SHAKESPEARE'S MEANING Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare SHAKESPEAREAN MOTIVES Derek Cohen SHAKESPEARE'S INVENTION OF OTHELLO Martin Elliott SHAKESPEARE: THE PLAY OF HISTORY Graham Holderness, Nick Potter and John Turner SHAKESPEARE'S IT ALlAN SETTINGS AND PLAYS Murray J. Levith SHAKESPEARE THE AESTHETE Lachlan Mackinnon HAMLET AND THE ACTING OF REVENGE Peter Mercer DISCOVERING SHAKESPEARE'S MEANING Leah Scragg Further titles in preparation Series Standina Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please stat~ with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the UK we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ud, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG212XS, England. Discovering Shakespeare's Meaning Leah Scragg Lecturer in English University of Manchester M MACMILLAN PRESS © Leah Scragg 1988 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover lst edition 1988 978-0-333-41404-0 AII rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Cornpanies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Wessex Typesetters (Division of The Eastern Press Ltd) Frome, Somerset British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Scragg, Leah Discovering Shakespeare's rneaning. 1. Shakespeare, Williarn-Criticisrn and interpretation 1. Title 822.3'3 PR2976 ISBN 978-1-349-08663-4 ISBN 978-1-349-08661-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-08661-0 For Tim Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements X 1 Verse and Prose 1 2 Imagery and Spectacle 31 3 Shakespeare's Expositions 61 4 Plays within Plays 86 5 Parallel Actions 114 6 The Treatment of Character 143 7 The Use of the Soliloquy 176 8 Art and Artifice 203 9 Conclusion: Discovering Shakespeare's Meaning 229 Index 232 vii Preface No reader or theatre-goer, however limited his or her literary experience, will fail to appreciate, on encountering a Shakespearian play for the first time, that a story is being unfolded and emotional responses elicited. Some details of the plot may remain obscure, and the fate of some individuals may not be grasped, but a clear understanding will have been reached by the time the book is closed, or the theatre left behind, that a progression has been traced from an initial point of departure to a marriage or a death, the acquisition of a throne or the killing of a king. The problem that confronts the reader of Shakespeare is that the story itself, however fully comprehended, does not yield up the meaning of the play. The vast body of critical commentary on the Shakespearian corpus bears witness to the fact that the significance of the work is not co-extensive with the stories that the inexperienced reader assumes must act as a vehicle for it, and such a reader is at a loss to know whence this meaning derives. Confronted with the apparent gap between the content of the play and the products of the 'Shakespeare industry' the general reader becomes discouraged, while the student is tempted to abandon the texts altogether in favour of the collections of critical essays thought to ensure examination success. This book is an attempt to indicate some of the ways in which meaning is generated in a Shakespearian drama, and the kinds of approach that might lead the student or interested reader towards a fuller understanding of the plays. Each chapter focuses upon one aspect of the dramatic composition, and explores the ways in which it contributes to the meaning of the whole. No attempt is made to offer an exhaustive analysis of any of the plays discussed, but it is hoped that some light will have been shed on a considerable proportion of the dramatist's work by the time the closing chapter is reached. The principal aim of the book is not, however, to elucidate, but to suggest how an interpretation may be arrived at, and thus to help the interested reader to discover Shakespeare's meaning for himself. University of Manchester LEAH SCRAGG ix Acknowledgements The New Arden editions of Shakespeare's plays are quoted throughout, and I would like to thank Methuen & Co Ltd, the publishers, for their kind permission to use them. I would also like to thank Miss Deborah Reich for her invaluable assistance in the preparation of my typescript. X 1 Verse and Prose One of the major obstacles encountered by the student or inexperienced reader in studying the work of Shakespeare is the form in which it is principally composed-blank verse. Accustomed, through television, to a kind of dramatic language which appears to reflect contemporary speech, the twentieth-century reader finds it difficult to adjust to an art form which appears to have more in common with 'poetry' than with the art of the theatre. But, in fact, the distance between Renaissance and twentieth-century drama is not as great, in this respect, as at first appears. For all its seeming realism, the dialogue of a contemporary play does not reflect everyday speech-it creates an illusion of actuality by drawing upon the audience's assumptions about the kind of speech patterns the individuals concerned might be expected to employ. Stage cockneys, for example, use rhyming slang, civil servants favour long sentences and polysyllabic words, while academics deal in abstract ideas. When the dialogue assigned to such characters is analysed, however, it quickly becomes apparent how remote their language is from day-to-day usage. There are few of those long companionable silences that make up such a high proportion of human intercourse; people rarely repeat themselves or leave their sentences unfinished; while 'urn', 'er', 'y'know', 'as I say', 'I mean', etc. are used much more sparingly than in daily conversation. Moreover, the implications of a scene rarely depend solely upon what the characters say. The atmosphere or emotional tempo is dictated by background music - a convention to which the twentieth-century spectator is so wholly accustomed he is generally unaware, while the drama is in progress, of its role in determining his responses. The excitement of a car chase between cops and robbers, for example, is not created by the sparse 'Look out!', 'There he goes', 'Turn right!' which go to make up the dialogue, but by the pounding rhythm and mounting pace of the music, which the viewer accepts as unquestioningly as if his own life were conducted to unseen orchestral accompaniment. Lighting, too, plays a significant part in determining the impact of the words that are 1
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