Two Shakespearean Sequences: Henry VI to Richard II and Pericles to Timon of Athens

242 Pages·1977·24.919 MB·English

by  F. W. Brownlow (auth.)

TWO SHAKESPEAREAN SEQUENCES
TWO SHAKESPEAREAN
SEQUENCES
Henry VI to Richard II
and
Pericles to Timon of Athens
F. W. BROWNLOW
- WHAT IS POETRY? - THE FEELING OF A FORMER WORLD
AND FUTURE. Byron
© F. W. Brownlow 1977
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1977
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1977 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
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Associated companies in Delhi
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ISBN 978-1-349-03298-3 ISBN 978-1-349-03296-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03296-9
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Note on Quotations ix
Introduction 1
I THE WAY TO DOVER CLIFF
Part One: POSSESSION, PROPERTY AND THE
CROWN
1 I Henry VI 15
2 II Henry VI 26
3 III Henry VI 44
PartTwo: THE STATE, THE SOUL AND
LEGITIMACY
4 Richard III 63
5 King John 78
6 Richard II 95
II THE SECULAR CITY
PartOne: UNPATH'D WATERS
7 Pericles, Prince of Tyre 117
8 Cymbeline, King of Britain 134
9 The Winter's Tale 150
Part Two: LANDFALL
10 The Tempest 169
11 Henry VIII 185
12 The Two Noble Kinsmen 202
13 Conclusion: Timon of Athens 216
Epilogue 233
Notes 235
Index 243
Acknowledgements
Everyone writing about Shakespeare is under an enormous and un
assessable debt to the community of scholars, critics and readers,
past and present, each of whom has contributed his portion to the
common treasury of Shakespearean traditions. In my own case I also
feel obliged to acknowledge certain more specific if not quite tan
gible debts, especially to former teachers, colleagues and students.
My teacher Kenneth Muir has influenced my reading of Shakespeare
in ways for which I shall always be grateful, not least by sending
me off, as a graduate student, to study the life and work of the
brilliant and satirical Jacobean archbishop, Samuel Harsnett. I owe
a similar debt to R. T. Davies who first guided me through fifteenth
century poetry, and gave me a sense of the continuity of the
mediaeval and Elizabethan worlds. Philip Edwards's evocation, in
his Shakespeare and the Confines of Art, of the archaic strangeness
of the history plays, encouraged me to attempt some explanation of
the strain of mediaeval Catholic feeling in them, so much at odds
with their predominant atmosphere of rowdy, secular brutality.
I must also thank Professor Edwards for his generous criticism of
some chapters of this present book.
I would also like to thank the students of the Shakespeare seminar
at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 1970-3,
for their part in the discussion of several of the plays here considered;
I am especially mindful of the work of Miss Susan Carleton, Miss
Nanette Clinch, Miss Susan Schwarz and Miss Roye Werner.
Above all I must thank my wife, Jeanne Brownlow, for her
patience, criticism and help at every stage of the writing of this
book.
Ripon, 1976 F.W.B.
Note on Quotations
Quotations from Shakespeare's plays and poems follow the text of
The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. W. A.
Neilson and C. J. Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1942). The line-numbering
of this edition follows that of the Globe edition. In the case of The
Two Noble Kinsmen, quotations and references are from the text
prepared by Clifford Leech for The Signet Classic Shakespeare (New
York and London, 1966).
All quotations, except for those from literature written before
1500, are modernised.
Introduction
Although Hamlet is doubtful of many things, he knows exactly what
he expects of the drama. Its purpose, he says:
both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror
up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own
image, and the very age and body of the time his form and
pressure. (m. ii. 23)
It is not surprising that a well-educated sixteenth-century prince
should expect topical interest and a moral attitude in literature; but,
as the slightly difficult wording of Hamlet's last phrase shows, he is
not only saying in an elaborate way that plays ought to be about life,
praising the good and exposing the bad. His idea that 'the age and
body of the time' has a 'form and pressure' is analogous to Aristotle's
conception of a play's plot as its 'soul'.1 The times, like a play, have
an outward form answering to an inward, shaping principle; and this
suggests something else very interesting: that history is a process of
comprehensible, and therefore significant, change.
Thus a poetic dramatist is an authority showing in his work things
perhaps not otherwise knowable and, like a scientist, owing his
knowledge not to occult faculties but to observation and imitation.
This idea epitomises Renaissance humanism, and it suits Hamlet,
himself the epitome of a Renaissance ideal. Its rationality and em
piricism are in keeping with Hamlet's other views, with his taste for
a natural style of acting, and with his description of the players as
'the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time'. Not many critics,
however, associate such thinking with Shakespeare himself, who is
generally believed to have been a more modest, less conscious
artist.
Shakespeare is more tentative than the fictional prince (who has
his own reasons for believing that he understands the drift of the
times). In Sonnet 59, speaking about change in a voice more nearly
his own, Shakespeare asks if it is true that there is 'nothing new'. If
it is, then writers fool themselves: 'Labouring for invention,' they
'bear amiss/The second burden of a former child.' It is always
possible that change is an illusion, but Shakespeare's witty metaphor
2 Two Shakespearean Sequences
turns the thought into an absurdity: events can no more repeat them
selves than the same child can be born twice. Like the prince, the
poet shows himself to have an empirical, experimenting mind. He
wishes that he could put the idea of change to a test; if he could see
an image of his friend 'in some antique book' five hundred years old,
he would be able to see what the old world made of his friend's
beauty, and he would know:
Whe'er we are mended, or whe'er better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.
These two references to time and change are themselves examples
of what Hamlet is talking about, signs of the poet's awareness of
ideas and of his ability to use them. We can easily miss the presence
of ideas in Shakespeare because his characters do not often read
the audience lectures or talk the topical stuff of the day. Like
Mozart, Shakespeare was too complete an artist to thrust unassimi
lated material upon his audience. He converts ideas and allusions to
the forms of his medium, as a few more examples will show.
Overtly topical allusions are rare in Shakespeare, and when they
occur they make their effect, like good witticisms, by suggestion and
implication. In Twelfth Night, a play about love, longing and am
bition, the comparison of Malvolio's smiling face to the new map of
the Indies (m. ii. 83) besides referring to the voyages of discovery
reflects an attitude to the New World which bears on the themes of
the play: Malvolio is a caricature of man on the make. In Hamlet a
macabre, punning reference to the Imperial Diet held at Worms in
1521, made in connection with Hamlet's equivocations about the
whereabouts of Polonius' body, brings into the play an echo of the
Reformation and the controversies about the sacrament:
- Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?
-At supper.
- At supper! Where?
- Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation
of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only
emperor for diet. (IV. iii. 17-22)
Like Lear, Hamlet is full of religious anxiety which is not explicitly
stated but, through these allusions and others like them, related to
significant public events. Such references have a conversational tone;
they are charged with nervous, intellectual energy, and they are the
kind of thing that Shakespeare might have produced in company:
they are riddling and need interpreting by a co-operative and sympa-
Introduction 3
thetic audience. More important, they are exemplars in little of
themes writ large in the design of their respective plays.
Under a censorship as autocratic and as sensitive as the Tudors',
a dramatist had to be circumspect in the way he touched upon
current events and ideas. Any kind of topical reference could be
dangerous, and religion and politics were forbidden subjects-unless
the authorities commissioned a play, or an author wanted to con
gratulate the government. Yet we know that Elizabethan plays are
full of covert, figurative allusions to events great and small, allusions
so handled that, unless a play caused a riot or otherwise drew atten
tion, author and actors were safe from prosecution. Hamlet's com
missioning of The Murder of Gonzago shows how dangerous matter
could be safely treated. This old play, performed before Claudius,
acquires an unequivocal meaning for those who suspect him of
murder; but the figurative form of the allusion secures Hamlet and his
actors from open reprisal. For the uninformed, the king's response
and Hamlet's excitement are equally mystifying. The modem reader
of Elizabethan literature is often in the position of Claudius' ignorant
courtiers, and it is a puzzle for him, used as he is to the conventions
of a free press, to know how the Elizabethan audience recognised
the presence of forbidden themes. The obvious answer is that they
must have been alert to figurative meaning, and that authors must
have had ways of signalling its presence. Hamlet no doubt intends
to supply such a signal in the 'speech of some dozen or sixteen lines'
which he requests the First Player to insert into The Murder of
Gonzago.
No real play, one might think, would be used to prove the reigning
monarch a murderer, but The Murder of Gonzago has a Shake
spearean precedent. It is well known that the Essex conspirators paid
for a performance of Richard II immediately before making their
attempt at deposing Elizabeth, and that no less a person than the
Queen recognised an allusion to herself in the character of the king.
Yet the relationship between the play, the rebellion and the Queen
is not a simple one. The treatment of the king is so sympathetic,
especially after his fall, that one cannot imagine the play inflaming
a usurper; and the real Queen and the player king seem very dif
ferent. When questioned by the authorities, the actors cleared them
selves, as Hamlet's players might have done, saying that the play was
an old one. Nevertheless the deposition scene was never printed in
Elizabeth's time.
The key to the allusiveness of Richard II probably lies in the
opening scenes. The play is about an important political change: one
kind of king falls, and another takes his place. Underlying that
change, causing and explaining it, is another brought about by