David Margolies (Auth.) - Shakespeare's Irrational Endings - The Problem Plays-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2012)

Shakespeare’s Irrational Endings
Also by David Margolies
CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL: Marxism and Culture (edited with Linden Peach)

CULTURE AND CRISIS IN BRITAIN IN THE THIRTIES (edited with
Jon Clark, Margot Heinemann and Carole Snee)
THE FUNCTION OF LITERATURE: A Study of Christopher Caudwell’s
Aesthetics
GREENE IN CONCEIT by John Dickenson (edited with Donald Beecher)
HEART OF THE HEARTLESS WORLD: Essays in Cultural Resistance in
Memory of Margot Heinemann (edited with Maroula Joannou)
MONSTERS OF THE DEEP: Social Dissolution in Shakespeare’s Tragedies
NOVEL AND SOCIETY IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND
SCENES AND ACTIONS: Unpublished Manuscripts of Christopher Caudwell
(edited with Jean Duparc)
WRITING THE REVOLUTION: Cultural Criticism from Left Review
Shakespeare’s
Irrational Endings
The Problem Plays
David Margolies
Emeritus Professor of English, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Palgrave
macmillan
© David Margolies 2012
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements vi
Note on Texts vii
1 Introduction 1
2 All’s Well That Ends Well 13
3 Much Ado About Nothing 36
4 Measure for Measure 56
5 The Merchant of Venice 86
6 Troilus and Cressida 112
7 Othello 138
8 Conclusion 162
Notes 174
Bibliography 177
Index 181
v
Preface and Acknowledgements
The Problem Plays, in my years of teaching Shakespeare to English

and drama students, were always awkward. With the histories, the
comedies and the tragedies, students knew where they were and
they knew (or thought they knew) why the characters acted as they
did. But the Problem Plays had actions, the endings in particular,
where answers to questions about motive seemed unsatisfactory. This
made the plays disturbing – not hugely disturbing on nightmare pro-
portions but producing an uncertainty that lingered. Why did they
end like that? In the other plays the playworlds appeared to con-
tain the answers: we could look at the motives of the characters and
we could judge the consequences of their behaviour. But the Prob-
lem Plays seemed to lack any stable connection between cause and
effect; they had too many arbitrary elements. Arbitrariness is a result
of the author’s intentions, not those of the characters; Shakespeare
must have intended the disturbance. Naturalistic understanding of
the playworld could not explain the situation. I found myself cross-
ing into territory everybody has been warned against: we cannot
know Shakespeare’s intentions – don’t go there. Treating the plays
as structures designed to produce emotional response in an audience
I found to be a fruitful approach – the plays started to make sense.
The Problem Plays are still awkward but I now admire their enormous
skill and, not bound to naturalism, I enjoy them more than I had ever
imagined. I hope this book can also make readers’ experience of the
plays more pleasurable.
I am grateful for the tolerance of all my family in putting up with
my distraction from concerns of daily life over the last couple of
years. I also wish to thank Cushla Brennan for her helpful comments
on the Measure for Measure chapter and Leonard Goldstein for his
criticism of the chapter on The Merchant of Venice. Most of all I thank
Sandra Margolies for her continuing expert criticism and wise advice,
and for her patience in having to live with someone else’s deadlines.
This book is dedicated to her.
David Margolies
vi
Note on Texts
The editions of Shakespeare plays used in the different chapters are

as follows:
All’s Well That Ends Well (1994) ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford: Oxford
World Classics)
Much Ado About Nothing (1981) ed. A. R. Humphreys (London:
Arden)
Measure for Measure (1994) ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford: Oxford
World Classics)
The Merchant of Venice (1998) ed. Jay L. Halio (Oxford: Oxford
World Classics)
Troilus and Cressida (1984) Kenneth Muir (Oxford: Oxford
Shakespeare)
Othello (1968) ed. Kenneth Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
Hamlet (1982) ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Arden)
King Lear (1972) ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Arden)
References to other Shakespeare plays are taken from Stanley Wells

and Gary Taylor (2005) The Oxford Shakespeare, 2nd edition (Oxford:
Clarendon)
vii
1
Introduction
A few of Shakespeare’s plays – not quite tragedies, not quite comedies,

neither histories nor romances – were quarantined in the late nine-
teenth century in the category of Problem Plays.1 Troilus and Cressida,
All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, the conventional
group, were identified as Problem Comedies, but Troilus and Cressida
certainly was not a comedy and the comic quality of the other two
was constrained by their bitterness. They were not felt to have suf-
ficient similarity to constitute their own positive category and were
rather an ‘any other’ group. Changes in critical approaches that fol-
lowed major changes in social attitudes in the last century revivified
interest in the plays. New relevance and new meanings have been
found in the texts. The conventional group of three has also been
recognized as sharing significant characteristics with a number of
other plays, The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing in
particular, and to them, as I will argue, Othello should also be added.2
The environmental, economic and social problems that have reached
crisis point in this century, and the political structures that seem
inadequate to deal with them, the widespread corruption in high
places and the deluge of political spin, have had their effect on the
arts and given the Problem Plays a new attractiveness. Shakespeare
does not preach, he does not confront; he is neither an Edward
Bond nor a late Pinter, but he does pose contradictions. These con-
tradictions have always been there in the plays, but now people’s
experience of the gap between official rhetoric and social reality
makes them important. The attraction of these six plays does not lie
in any answers Shakespeare provides; it is the excitement of seeing
1
2 Shakespeare’s Irrational Endings
in the theatre a relevant and witty response to the disintegration of

society around us.
Contradiction is fundamental to the nature of drama, and all
Shakespeare’s plays could be said to deal with it. ‘Drama, by def-
inition, is dialogical, it is the meeting point of often conflicting atti-
tudes to a chosen subject’, Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova
point out. In the Problem Plays these contradictions are created in
such a way that they cannot be resolved. In the words again of
Shurbanov and Sokolova, ‘most dramas, like most artistic products
in general, strive to transcend this dialogical status and attain a con-
clusive synthesis of attitude and meaning. Shakespeare’s drama is
rather exceptional in that it does not seem to strive towards any
such final transcendence, a peculiarity defined by the tradition of
liberal humanism as the poet’s proverbial elusiveness’ (Shurbanov
and Sokolova, 2001, p. 17).3 The major Soviet Shakespeare critic
Alexander Anikst said, ‘Shakespeare’s plays are nearly always problem
plays, and not just the ones which we normally call the “problem
plays” ’ (Anikst, 1989, p. 179). All the plays necessarily have some
conflict or there would be no plot but the plays I include in the cate-
gory under discussion have contradictions that are more than simple
conflicts. They go beyond oppositions of subject matter; they are
contradictions between the form and the content and they are there-
fore impossible to resolve. They are most obvious in the endings of
plays where the form has led to audience expectations which are ful-
filled at a formal level but, in terms of the content, are frustrated.
Shakespeare’s comedies commonly end in marriages, by definition a
happy form, but the marriages of the Problem Plays are for the most
part not at all happy. Thus the happy form is filled with a dubious
content; form and content are in contradiction. The endings pro-
duce emotional responses that are positive and negative at the same
time, not the one and then the other. Part of the effectiveness of
Shakespeare’s construction is that these contradictions cannot be rea-
soned away or balanced out as a mediocre relationship. They arise
from the same event but are attached to different aspects (the form
and the content) and thus exist effectively in different dimensions.
The nearest parallel for me is optical illusions – for example, the draw-
ing of two stacks where one’s perception of the visual keeps changing,
as in the Figure opposite.
Introduction 3
The contradictions of the Problem Plays are like the visual con-
tradictions in the graphic work of M. C. Escher – his ‘Waterfall’, for
example, where the conventions of linear perspective are organized
so as to make a credible image of an impossible relationship. Audi-
ence responses to the play’s form are logical, their responses to
the content are logical, but together the two are in contradiction;
together, they are no longer logical. They are irrational – and it is
from that situation that I take the title of the book.
An audience that is responsive to a Problem Play must experience
some uneasiness from this contradiction. It is not then surprising
that the Problem Plays usually fail to produce the pleasure audiences
expect from comedies like As You Like It or the cathartic sadness they
expect from tragedies like Hamlet (although directors seem now to
favour treating Much Ado as a happy play, emphasizing the sub-plot
at the expense of the main one). But in an age of growing cynicism
and where authority is subjected to unprecedented questioning, the
plays fit the spirit of the time and can indeed provide a satisfying
experience, even though the pleasure is usually qualitatively different
from that produced by the major comedies.
The problem of the Problem Plays
Most of the obstacles that mislead understanding of Shakespeare’s

plays generally are a particular nuisance in making sense of the Prob-
lem Plays. The most common problem is the assumption that the
plays are naturalistic. Television has ingrained naturalism as the
default mode; audiences and readers tend to assume that plays mirror
external reality and too often apply that expectation to Shakespeare’s
plays. Even when the playworld contains supernatural elements such
as the witches in Macbeth, naturalism can accommodate them if the
belief in witches is attributed, not to present-day audiences, but to the
audience of Shakespeare’s day. The difficulty for the understanding of
the plays is that the chief concern of the dramatist is considered to
be the imitation of reality, rendering in detail what people do, rather
than the production of significance by the way that material is used;
hence, the audience focuses on the evidence rather than the argu-
ment. This is not stupidity or naivety; it is cultural habit. A highly
intelligent lecturer in English of my acquaintance, after seeing the
Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1969 gold-lamé-jockstrap production
of Troilus and Cressida at the Aldwych, lavished praise on the play for
what it had taught him about the Greeks.
A corollary of naturalism is that the play is reflecting part of a
continuous narrative, with the expectation that there are no gaps
in time or space. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sends
up this kind of thinking – Stoppard provides continuity of the nar-
rative of the eponymous heroes where Shakespeare has them not on
stage. The attitude can also be seen as a misapplication of novelistic
thinking, a criticism Alistair Fowler levels at current directors: ‘Nowa-
days, novelistically minded directors tend to iron out Shakespeare’s
interwoven structures into a single, rationalized sequence, with at
most a “main plot” and “sub plot” ’ (Fowler, 2003, p. 100). Pauline
Kiernan also raises objection to continuing the simplistic approach
of Bradley, treating the play as if it were a novel: ‘commentators still
discuss Shakespeare’s drama as mimetic illusion’ without consider-
ing ‘what kind of illusion he sought to create’ (Kiernan, 1996, p. 95).
Introduction 5
The ‘novelistic’ attitude can also be seen in narrowing the range of

the explanations for characters’ actions in the play to their personal
motives. When Hamlet, for example, calls Polonius a fishmonger
(2.2.176), the motive can be attributed to his character and recent
experience – his rebellious nature and his personal dislike of Polonius,
intensified by Polonius’s thwarting his courting of Ophelia; but it
is also part of a larger dramatic construction – the way Hamlet
addresses Polonius highlights the corruption of the court by empha-
sizing Polonius’s ‘procurer’ role, his eagerness to offer up his daughter
for someone else’s purposes. The appropriate question in regard to
the passage would ask what is Shakespeare’s, not Hamlet’s, purpose
in having Hamlet address Polonius in that way. The naturalistic view
is of course strengthened by seeing the play: live actors playing the
parts foster the illusion of the playworld’s reality, transferring the real-
ity of the actors to the playworld. (The presence of puppets in a play,
increasingly used in modern theatre, can be a good corrective to this
illusion.) Carol Rutter makes the useful point that ‘Elizabethan spec-
tators, understanding actors as professionals whose business was role
play, read the role played, not the player beneath the role’, adding
‘I read Cordelia as “she”, not “he” ’ (Rutter, 2001, p. xiv).
A problem of particular prominence in discussion of the Prob-
lem Plays, what could be called the Second Fallacy of Interpreting
Shakespeare, is the habitual assumption of the primacy of words.
In the novel meaning is necessarily carried by words – with a few
exceptions, such authors as Laurence Sterne and Alasdair Gray with
a taste for typographic games or their own illustrative material –
because there are no other signalling devices, whereas plays (except
those never intended for performance) have a great many ways of
making meaning. Aristotle, in his six elements of tragedy, has two
that have no verbal component. Just the fact of using actors gives
the play the possibility of a multiplicity of meanings at the same
time. Keir Elam argues that it is often assumed that writing, because
it occurs before performance, has priority, but the possibility of per-
formance of the dramatic text ‘constrains the dramatic text in its
very articulation’; the written text ‘is determined by its very need for
stage contextualization’ (Elam, 1980, pp. 208–9). Declan Donellen,
addressing the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford in
August 2002, caused much consternation when he said, ‘Shakespeare
knows that words don’t work’ (Donellen, 2002). In Shakespeare’s
plays the meaning of the words spoken is not conveyed completely

by the words themselves and may in fact be quite different from the
literal sense; they are embodied in a context of action that determines
which of their potential meanings are the active and important ones.
Paradoxically, having only the words of plays from Shakespeare’s day,
it is from the words that we must understand what the action is,
even though it is the action that determines their meaning. The play
objectifies, not in the sense of removing the subjective element, feel-
ing, but in making an ‘object’ for interpretation, a situation or set
of actions. It embodies positions and issues and becomes, as it were,
an object. The organization of the narrative, says Fowler, is not con-
tinuous action but ‘discontinuous moral stages or aspects’ (Fowler,
2003, p. 20). The ‘object’ goes through various steps of argument
that can recontextualize it and alter its significance by techniques
such as changes of register. Bakhtin was mistaken to insist that the
novel was more dialogic than the theatre, if for no other reason than
that the theatre can involve senses not available to the novel to make
meaning.
Related to the ‘fallacy of the primacy of the word’, because it min-
imizes the complexity of the dramatic interaction, is the ‘fallacy
of the play of ideas’. There is a tendency, fortunately in decline,
to regard Shakespeare primarily as an important purveyor of ideas.
This approach abstracts from the play relationships or philosoph-
ical positions, as if Shakespeare wrote essays rather than plays.
From this comes Boas’s use of the term ‘Problem Play’, by analogy
with Ibsen’s analyses of social problems. Tillyard, in his Elizabethan
World Picture, makes Odysseus’ speech on order central to Troilus
and Cressida, and Measure for Measure has until recently been pre-
sented as a play about justice and mercy. The presence of these
topics in the play is clear; but the discussion offered is by no means
straightforward and changing the context in which they occur cer-
tainly transforms their significance. The transformation is not of
abstract principles but a feeling judgement; the intellectualization
of the ‘play of ideas’ approach neglects the emotional aspects of
the plays. Emotion is not a low-grade substitute for thought or
for principle; it is a judgement that can have moral and aesthetic
components.
Similarly, verse in the plays is recognized as important but not
necessarily in terms of making significance. ‘If there is one thing
Introduction 7
certain about poetry it is that it is not addressed to the mere

intelligence,’ wrote Lawrence Binyon; ‘You cannot make an abstrac-
tion of the pattern or the rhythm’, both of which are expressive
(Binyon, 1913, pp. 41, 47).4 The verse in the plays is not just an
aesthetic extra but can create an emotional judgement important
to the meaning of the play. In Macbeth, for example, Shakespeare
makes doggerel of old Siward’s closing words in the last scene
(5.11.14–18), which undercuts his authority for the audience. This
is in no sense an intellectual judgement: it is emotional; but it is a
judgement nonetheless, and one that can have a qualifying effect
on the total message of the play. Similarly, Macbeth himself is given
some of Shakespeare’s richest lines (3.3.47–56; 5.3.22–30, for exam-
ple) which necessarily produce a more complex attitude towards the
hero-villain.5
A further difficulty of the play-of-ideas fallacy is that it assumes
the meanings of the plays must be obvious and the reality depicted
consistent. It follows that anything that is not clear is likely to have
been the result either of inattention on the part of the compositor
or a mistake on Shakespeare’s part. Othello has suffered particularly
from critics’ assuming that unclear passages may be his errors. Valerie
Wayne has clearly shown in regard to Iago’s ‘praise’ of women in
Othello (2.1) that critical doubts about the lines arise from impos-
ing on the play an unarticulated misogynist ideological framework,
in which the lines lose their significance (and hence are often cut).
By connecting them to other misogynist attitudes that run through
the play, Wayne makes them meaningful. Her argument depends not
simply on the imposition of a different ideology but on considera-
tion of the attitudinal value of the speeches, who is making them
and the emotional judgements suggested to the audience (Wayne,
1991, pp. 163–4). From a different angle, Fowler argues that criticism
of Othello’s double time-scheme misunderstands sixteenth-century
notions of spatial and temporal representation. Discontinuous visual
perspective, multiple perspectives in one work instead of a uni-
fied overall perspective, was common in painting. ‘This seemingly
piecemeal composition closely resembles the discontinuous struc-
turing of literary narratives.’ In regard to Othello, he says, ‘Per-
haps, given “fluid time”, Shakespeare may have had no thought of
tricks, but simply tried for the maximum dramatic effect’ (Fowler,
2003, pp. 8, 39).
Shakespeare and intention
Despite a Shakespeare industry that thrives on ever more speculation

about Shakespeare’s life, we have very little factual information about
him. This is used to justify the dictum that we cannot know what
Shakespeare thought or what he intended. If biographers and histo-
rians rely on letters to know what other figures of the past thought,
then surely with a collection of 37 plays, a volume of sonnets and
a couple of long narrative poems we ought to be able to make some
judgements about what Shakespeare had on his mind and what he
liked or disliked. This is quite different from picking out speeches
in the plays and presenting them as Shakespeare’s real views on
politics or women or law. Attempts to identify individual charac-
ters as speaking for Shakespeare are similarly invalid – not because
we recognize that the plays are collaborative creations or because
of potential errors in choosing which characters are his true rep-
resentatives but because the meanings of the plays come from the
interactions of characters with each other and from speeches that are
modified by context. Because the parts of the play take their mean-
ing from the whole, it is the whole play that must be the basis
of judgement. The larger context – other plays in the canon and
other contemporary works – is also important because Shakespeare
has patterns and types that run through several of his plays, and
because he uses other works as source material and sometimes what
he writes is in response to them. But to say of a man that we are
unable to tell what he thought, when his career was based on mak-
ing meaning, suggests that either he was a failure or we are quite
misguided.
Part of the problem relates to the play-of-ideas fallacy, a response
distorted by the assumption that Shakespeare’s thinking was
largely concerned with logical propositions about serious subjects.
Shakespeare’s job was as a commercial dramatist; he made his money
from successful plays – partly from writing them and partly from
owning a share in the theatre that staged them. Success required
that he please the public, but that could be done in different ways.
Clearly a static play in the Gorboduc mould would not hold audi-
ences at the Globe – its formality dried up the potential vigour and
emotion of its conflicts (mother killing son has a lot of potential)
Introduction 9
and it was too occupied with intellectual arguments more suited to

its original venue, the Inns of Court. The Elizabethans relished emo-
tional intensity, characters of heroic vision who were larger than life
and spoke a language that gave colour to its subject, not ‘jigging
veins of rhyming mother-wits’6 or legal argument. Ben Jonson’s com-
plaint that the perennial favourites of the public were The Spanish
Tragedy and Titus Andronicus indicated an enduring taste for exciting
plots and soaring rhetoric, action and verbal energy that ordinary
lives outside the theatre lacked.7 This ‘big’ drama did more than mas-
sage the emotions; the perennial favourites, despite their heroic scale,
had a relevance to ordinary life: their heroes rose to avenge injury
or humiliation and asserted their individual worth in a social con-
text that denied it. As the alternative to the Church in presenting
some coherence in the view of reality, the theatre was a purveyor of
attitudes and opinions. From the second history cycle until the late
romances, Shakespeare’s plays resonate with issues of his own day,
even though the subject matter only rarely has explicit topicality. The
effect was that the audience was presented with a complex situation
organized in the play to produce an emotional response – this was
Shakespeare’s job as dramatist. There is something perverse about the
wilful undervaluing of emotional response, attaching Shakespeare’s
importance to abstract intellectual concerns. His theatre was not a
seminar; even now, if you don’t feel any emotional response there is
little point in going to the theatre. Thus the approach to the plays
that would seem to make most sense is to look at them in terms
of the response they generate, and how Shakespeare engineers that
response.
Of course a problem of historical distance immediately arises – we
do not know how the audience of the day responded, but that does
not justify restricting the discussion to abstract ideas. There is enough
similarity of life situations between Elizabethan society and our own
to make interpretation from our own responses a good starting point,
but then we must test them against other aspects of the play and
the Elizabethan world outside the play. How does this affect inter-
pretation of the Problem Plays? The discomfort Shakespeare creates
for the audience in the Problem Plays is not a heuristic device; it
reflects irritation with corruption, hypocrisy, injustice and other evils
of his society but it is not a casual effect – it is intentional. And the
negativity of the plays that forms part of the discomfort must be seen
as Shakespeare’s own.
The order of discussion
A chronological ordering of discussion of any group of plays seems

natural and, had I intended essays on the separate plays, I probably
would have ordered the chapters that way. But when my description
of the defining characteristics of the Problem Plays met with rather
more resistance from friends and colleagues than I had anticipated,
I had to find a different way round: I had to establish clearly what
was the problem of the Problem Plays before trying to trace the way
it is embodied in the six plays. I started with the simplest and most
obvious Problem Play, All’s Well That Ends Well; because there was
already a good deal of shared attitude towards All’s Well, discussion
of that play was likely to be less contentious than discussion of the
others and I could probably gain agreement on a number of points
that would figure in the later analyses.
All’s Well, Much Ado and Measure for Measure have thematic similar-
ities: they are all built round a progress to marriages (or reunion) at
the end. Much Ado, the earliest of these three, moves in the same
direction as All’s Well but seems like a prototype for it: the orga-
nization is considerably less clear and what it is that Shakespeare
wants to do is also uncertain. Looking at it in the light of All’s Well,
the direction of its tentative moves can be interpreted with more
confidence.
Measure, on the other hand, the latest of the three, has the most
complex structure, very clever but difficult to grasp immediately
because the tensions of the play switch from one issue to another.8
Consideration of the earlier plays can make Measure comprehensible
more quickly and can make it easier to appreciate Shakespeare’s out-
standing dramaturgy. The skill of Shakespeare’s organization of the
parts can be better appreciated when one has grasped the direction
of the two earlier plays.
Many of the characteristics of the Problem Plays have been
attributed to Merchant, the earliest of the six plays. It is the first one
of the group to experiment with a contradiction between form and
content. John Drakakis points to this quality, in the introduction to
his Arden edition of the play, saying that the formally harmonious
Introduction 11
ending is in conflict with tensions that cannot be contained in the

play (Drakakis, 2010, pp. 111–12). It has a rather chaotic quality with
several narrative strands that lead in different directions, some of
them away from the central contradiction. The play’s most famous
strand, Shylock and the flesh-bond, does indeed produce frustration
of expectation but it does not occur at the end. The ending follows
the comedy convention of marriages but the marriages have a pan-
tomimic quality which succeeds in frustrating the convention but
only insofar as they mock it. To see Merchant in the light of the first
three discussions should make the ‘type’ of the prototype more rec-
ognizable. Although most discussion of the play has been drawn to
the question of whether or not it is anti-Semitic, that discussion often
says more about matters outside the play than about the play itself.
I shall touch on it only briefly.
Troilus and Cressida has always been difficult to pigeonhole; even
to classify it as a Problem Play needs the criteria to be loosened some-
what. Like the others, it combines positive and negative responses in
a manner that makes them inseparable but it does this with different
elements and in a different manner. It is the earliest play included in
the conventional group, and Shakespeare has not yet worked out the
dramaturgy; like Merchant, it is a confused proliferation of concerns.
The play is extremely negative, even hostile: Shakespeare rubbishes
two embodiments of positive value – the Trojan War and Chaucer’s
elegant romance of Troilus and Criseyde – and attacks the audience in
the epilogue. It has a strength of emotion that has not yet found its
proper form, but it is more understandable when seen in relation to
the other Problem Plays.
Finally, Othello, one of Bradley’s four great tragedies, has been seen
to have elements that make for audience discomfort and would char-
acterize it as a Problem Play but it has not been considered part of that
group. This is perhaps because ‘Problem Comedies’ is an alternative
designation of the conventional group, but also because the similarity
of the discomfort of the ending to those of the other Problem Plays
is less easy to recognize. Relying on generic expectations of tragedy
rather than comedy, Shakespeare constructs a plot that frustrates
expectations in a way that has the most enduring power to disturb
of the six plays. Like anti-Semitism in regard to Merchant, racism has
been a major issue in discussion of Othello. The play includes Iago’s
racism but does not support racist attitudes, and since it is largely
peripheral to my concern with the dramaturgy, I do not comment

on it.
In the Conclusion my concern is with the plays as a group and
with questions of development that could not be treated in the dis-
cussions of individual plays. In chronological order this time, I sketch
the increasing clarity of Shakespeare’s vision and the growing mastery
of his dramaturgy in delivering it to an audience.
2
All’s Well That Ends Well
All’s Well That Ends Well is nobody’s favourite Shakespeare play. At the
level of simple enjoyment there are too few opportunities to like the
characters, the language is less memorable than in most of the other
plays, and the plot lacks the excitement that would hold ‘children
from play, and old men from the chimney corner’ (Sidney, 1973,
p. 113). Moreover, the ending has long been regarded as unsatisfying,
even disturbing. Whatever pleasures it may offer seem to relate less
to immediate audience appreciation than to analysis; the play can-
not be parlayed into great drama. Yet All’s Well does reward critical
interest. My own enjoyment of the play comes, not from enter-
ing a charming playworld or identifying with any of the characters,
but from watching Shakespeare’s extraordinary skill in manipulating
events, character and, ultimately, audience response, and also from
appreciating the surprising relevance to our own age of the play’s cyn-
icism. Furthermore, those characteristics of the play that are probably
found most irritating, such as inconsistency and strained credibility,
are especially useful to understanding his method. In other Prob-
lem Plays the extended discussion the plays promote about character
motivation and the determinants of the action seems to encourage
naturalistic interpretation; but in All’s Well the switching between
broad dramatic type and detailed individualization of character, as
well as the dependence on fairy-tale elements, makes it very awkward
to interpret events in terms of a ‘real’ situation. The seams of the con-
struction show, and the artificiality of the play is emphasized. This
may limit emotional response, but it also draws attention to the art
itself and reveals the hand of the artificer. From a critical perspective,
13
this can have the benefit of making much more accessible to read-
ers and audiences the fact that Shakespeare is not merely imitating
actuality or reproducing history but is making choices about what
are significant issues and how these can be organized into a coherent
play. Even when plots and characters are traditional and events are
drawn from familiar sources, his expanded treatment of motive and
causation establishes the plays as original interpretations more than
simple dramatizations.
Anyone approaching All’s Well simply as the dramatization of its
popular fiction source is likely to find the play confusing because
Shakespeare introduces ways of responding that are not accounted
for in the original narrative material. He provides in effect two differ-
ent, opposed schemes of interpretation. All’s Well introduces criteria
that conflict with those that seem to be assumed in the narrative,
but the tension between these two schemes is not resolved; rather it
is developed in the course of the play. It is in this tension that the
feeling-judgement, the emotional burden of the play, is to be found.
In his comedies Shakespeare uses a conventional structure that
involves introducing an element of social disruption, the even-
tual neutralizing of the problem and the restoration of order. The
most common device is a romantic attachment that for some rea-
son is based on misunderstanding or seen as socially unacceptable.
In As You Like It, for example, the confusion of relationships that ani-
mates most of the play is joyously resolved in the final scene by the
marriage of Rosalind and Orlando – and Phoebe and Silvius, Celia and
Oliver and Touchstone and Audrey. Twelfth Night has the same cele-
bratory spirit although the resolution is less complete. Even where
the celebration must be postponed beyond the events concluded on
stage, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost, there is a sense of re-balancing social
integration through romantic love. In comedy in general, marriage is
a convention used to signal the resolution of conflict and to create
social unity. This is the form Shakespeare uses in All’s Well; the re-
uniting of the couple should wipe away the hostility that has caused
division. Helena and Bertram, apart since the end of Act 2 when
Bertram, bursting with anger at his forced marriage to Helena, ran
off to the Italian wars, are brought together in the final scene. This in
effect completes Helena’s quest for acceptance by Bertram and should
therefore give substance to the formal marriage of Act 2, Scene 3
(as Bertram himself says).
All’s Well That Ends Well 15
Yet Shakespeare has constructed the play in such a way that it also
encourages a different response. Although the logic of the plot sug-
gests a happy end, the substance of the situation suggests rather the
opposite; the form of the marriage-ending, an established signal of
happiness, is at odds with its specific content. Helena’s play-long
efforts to win Bertram have succeeded, but even though he is no
longer openly hostile, he shows neither warmth nor pleasure. The
joy of the union is hollow, and the participation in the happiness of
reunion that the audience might feel is stifled by the consciousness
that the reward for Helena’s heroic efforts is a selfish, insensitive, dis-
honest egotist. Not surprisingly, the ending has usually been found
confusing and somewhat disturbing – and more so in recent years.
But this is not a weakness or misjudgement on Shakespeare’s part; it
is the result of conscious construction. Generally in the Problem Plays
there is a tension between the expectations aroused by the form and
their frustration, their contrary realization, in the content. All’s Well
is distinguished by the openness of the artifice that produces this
tension.
Critics from a less cynical age were perhaps more inclined to see
in Shakespeare’s work their own generous view of human goodness.
They gave characters the benefit of the doubt and accepted that
Shakespeare, like themselves, had faith in personal growth and the
possibility of ultimate justice. Their readings of the plays could con-
firm for them the assumption that Shakespeare kept a moral balance
and that his distribution of punishment and reward was not arbitrary.
Thus in All’s Well they could excuse Bertram’s abominable behaviour
in the light of what they saw as his eventual ‘maturation’ – the self-
centred youth reeled back reluctantly into the social net. Likewise
Helena’s suffering, which they might assume Shakespeare thought to
be in some measure deserved, could be accepted as appropriate pun-
ishment for her being such a pushy woman. And thus all could be
said to end well. This is consistent with a traditional view of tragedy
where Aristotle’s hamartia, literally an error, is customarily translated
as ‘tragic flaw’, which has the implication that the cause of the down-
fall is a moral failing of the hero. Generalized beyond tragedy to
apply to All’s Well it suggests that Helena must have done something
to deserve her punishment. This is the ‘just world hypothesis’; its
best known critical imposition on Shakespeare’s plays is a reward for
virtue rather than punishment of vice. Nahum Tate’s 1681 rewriting
of King Lear makes the rewards of the good more appropriate to

their goodness: Cordelia survives to marry Edgar whose conclud-
ing words are ‘Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed.’1 The public’s
willingness to accept Tate’s version well into the nineteenth century
suggests a strong belief in Shakespeare’s optimistic view of the world’s
justice.
The title of All’s Well itself suggests a happy ending. Drawn from
a proverb that is still current, it implies that the course of painful
events leading up to the achievement of formal unity has been worth
it. Helena’s pursuit of Bertram, which carries most of the play’s emo-
tional energy, has succeeded and, since it is the result that counts,
the ending must therefore be happy. Furthermore, the source from
which the plot is drawn, the story of ‘Giletta of Narbona’, ‘novel’
38 in Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566), one of the most widely read
collections of stories of the period, has an unambiguously happy end-
ing: ‘and from that time forth he loved and honoured her as his
dear spouse and wife’ (Spencer, 1968, p. 50). Thus, it would not be
unreasonable, even if not strictly logical, to assume that Shakespeare
intended the end to be happy. The common view of Shakespeare as
a wise and generous spirit with a positive view of the world would
support this judgement.
The image of Shakespeare as a purveyor of serious wisdom may
also make it difficult to accept the ironic potentiality of the title.
Although the logic of the relation between ends and means – that
a good end outweighs trouble with the means – might be acceptable
in the abstract, it does not imply in this particular instance that the
ending of the play was positive; Shakespeare could have been raising
a doubt that events did not in fact end well. Irony, because it is driven
by attitude rather than logic, and because it involves a vision that
is contrary to the obvious, generally accepted perspective, does not
translate easily from age to age. Certainly for students, and often for
critics as well, Shakespeare represents authority – ideologically as well
artistically – and the fuzzy meanings of irony may seem inconsistent
with the authoritative voice.
Another critical approach takes an evolutionary view –
Shakespeare’s artistic goals remain fairly constant but his ability to
realize them increases over time. Thus he is assumed to be working
towards consistency and clarity, and the awkwardnesses of All’s Well
and the other plays of the group can be understood as Shakespeare’s
failure to articulate his ‘message’ clearly. Terence Hawkes, whose rep-

utation is very much as alternative rather than traditional critic, takes
the position in one of his early works that the Problem Plays commu-
nicate ‘only imperfectly’: they are ‘imperfect movements towards the
kind of statement which the later plays bring to perfection’ (Hawkes,
1964, p. 99). Insofar as many of the later plays echo material from the
Problem Plays (sometimes very explicitly), this statement has some
validity; but it does not follow that the Problem Plays are stepping
stones to the grand edifice of Shakespeare’s tragedies. More subtly,
G. K. Hunter comments in his introduction to the Arden edition
(1959) that the attempt to reconcile the two levels of reality that func-
tion in the play ‘is perhaps impossible without too great a sacrifice
of all that is worthwhile in the play’, the real complexity of char-
acters’ responses. Hunter points out, for example, that the bed-trick
is used in a score of other plays of the period but is offensive only
in Shakespeare’s plays – because the emotions of the characters are
made real for us (Hunter, 1983, pp. l, xlv). At the same time, Hunter
seems to be accepting an evolutionary approach; he suggests a pur-
pose of forgiveness and conciliation not yet realized in All’s Well. The
fact that Shakespeare’s maturation as a dramatist is undisputed does
not mean that the disturbing features of the play represent an early
failure of a later intention; it is equally probable that they represent
an intention that is thoroughly realized but less attractive.
Discomfort with the play and especially its ending cannot be dis-
missed simply as a change in audience attitudes, increased attention
to personal relationships or a different sensibility; Shakespeare con-
structs the play in such a way that the contradictions are made
obvious. Susan Snyder, a critic unusually sensitive to the tensions
between form and content, said:
the best way of approaching this play is not to patch over its
clashes of tone and mode with ingenious or defensive explana-
tions, but to take those very dislocations and deferrals as the point
of entry.
(Snyder, 1994, p. 52)2
I propose now to argue that Shakespeare makes those ‘dislocations
and deferrals’ central to the play.
The first scene makes clear Helena’s desire for Bertram and the
obstacle presented by their different social status. The immediate
problem for Helena and what initiates the action is that Bertram
has become the ward of the King (since the death of his father)
and is being sent to Paris. Helena follows, under the pretence of
treating the King’s ‘incurable’ illness. She makes a bargain with the
King, proposing to achieve a cure in one or two days or suffer death
if she fails.3 If she succeeds her reward is to have her choice of
husband from the eligible courtiers. The King is cured and in the
ceremony where she is to claim her reward the young lords show
themselves eager to be chosen. It seems a fairy-tale ending is unfold-
ing and clever Helena is about to achieve her goal; but it all goes
horribly wrong when she announces she chooses Bertram. He makes
strenuous objection and Helena, mortified, would simply back out.
However, it has now become a question of honour for the King and
he forces the marriage. Bertram runs off to the Tuscan wars, reject-
ing Helena with ‘impossible’ conditions for making the marriage
real: getting his heirloom ring from his finger and bearing his child
(3.2.57–60).
Helena, unwilling to stand in the way of the man she loves, leaves
France in the guise of a pilgrim but follows Bertram to Florence. There
she insinuates herself with the woman he is pursuing and organizes
the bed-trick; Bertram wins Diana’s agreement to an assignation and
Helena substitutes herself in the actual encounter. The conclusion is
that Bertram returns to France with military honour to be confronted
by a Helena pregnant from the bed-trick and possessing his heirloom
ring, having thus fulfilled the seemingly impossible conditions he
imposed on her. After some prevarication and squirming, he condi-
tionally accepts her claim and we are told that all has ended well. The
audience, however, is left uncertain.
The feeling of discomfort experienced by audience/readers at what
is designated a happy ending is in no way a casual imperfection of
the play; it is carefully constructed by Shakespeare. This can be seen
in many aspects of the play; one of them is the way he uses types –
personages displaying a combination of behavioural characteristics
that were familiar to the audience, familiar enough to make unnec-
essary the detailing of individual differences – for example, the lover,
the melancholic, the old dotard, the Italianate Englishman and so
forth. To audiences/readers of today who also are steeped in novels
and television dramas that emphasize the psychological individual-
ity of their characters, the heavy use of types by Shakespeare and
his contemporary dramatists might appear as a defect, a skimping on

the authorial task. Ben Jonson’s obvious reliance on types is probably
one of the reasons he remains in Shakespeare’s shadow, but at least
in comedy this is accepted as appropriate.
Types are of course more complex than the stark opposition of
types to individuals would suggest, and they are necessary in emo-
tionally demanding drama as well as comedy. The emotions of pity
and fear that Aristotle says are necessary for tragedy to achieve its
purpose of catharsis can be generated in the audience because they
recognize in the hero traits they themselves share, traits which could
also lead to crises. These are ‘typical’ rather than merely idiosyncratic,
common to social experience and to the age. Even the most indi-
vidualized of Shakespeare’s characters gain their power, not through
their uniqueness but through emotions and responses that relate to
an audience’s experience of living in a shared world. Thus Hamlet,
for all the interest in his psychological individuality, can be recog-
nized as a type – most famously as suffering an Oedipus complex
and more appropriately, I would say, as a man of principle enraged
and depressed by a corrupt court. The clinical problems that some
people perceive in Hamlet have less importance than the ability of
diverse audiences to recognize Hamlet’s typical positions, not only
the enragé but also a man who feels himself to be a unique individual
whom nobody understands.4
In All’s Well That Ends Well, at the simplest level, different types
present conflicting complexes of attitudes. Thus Lafeu and the
King display a generational difference of outlook from Bertram and
Parolles: the former place a high value on social integration, while the
latter are more attuned to personal advantage. The court, as described
by the clown Lavatch, values empty ceremony while characters in
Roussillon are more given to directness. Shakespeare increases the
importance of such differences by individualizing characters within
the type. The Countess saying goodbye to Bertram is a familiar and
recognizable emotional moment – the parting of mother and child.
It becomes more complex because at the same time the Countess is
made to appear as a doting-parent type, the dotage shown in the way
the older generation bestows advice on the young. It is parallel to
Polonius’s advice-giving to the departing Laertes in Hamlet – sound
yet so general as to remain abstract principles rather than practical
wisdom:
Be thou blessed, Bertram, and succeed thy father

In manners as in shape. Thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness
Share with thy birthright. Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none. Be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life’s key. Be checked for silence,
But never taxed for speech. What heaven more will,
That thee may furnish and my prayers pluck down,
Fall on thy head.
(1.1.61–70)
The Countess’s typical quality is reinforced by Lafeu who shares her

good, kindly nature and ‘older world’ view of things. His slightly
foolish nature is shown in his proverbial and patterned speech, his
outmoded euphuistic style: the King ‘hath abandoned his physi-
cians . . . under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hope,
and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of
hope by time’ (1.1.14–17). He is a good person but out of touch (he
shares typical qualities with Le Beau in the earlier As You Like It and
with Gloucester in the later King Lear).
Helena, in the same scene, is introduced as another type, the lover
who loves unhappily out of her sphere:
My imagination
Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s.
I am undone. There is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. ’Twere all one
That I should love a bright particular star
And think to wed it, he is so above me.
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.
Th’ambition in my love thus plagues itself:
The hind that would be mated by the lion
Must die for love.
(1.1.84–94)
This theme was common in the period, given one of its clear-
est and most popular images in Robert Greene’s Pandosto. Because
Shakespeare’s audience could recognize the type, they would have
had some correlated (but probably unarticulated) expectations of
how the plot could develop – either success of personal choice
over social convention or punishment for presumption, happiness
or tragedy.
The character in All’s Well who is most confined by the features of a
type is Parolles. The name itself, unlike those of the main characters,
is indicative: he is all words, or as popular English has it, all mouth
and no trouser. He is the Italianate Englishman, a type satirized across
Elizabethan culture for affecting Italian mannerisms whether or not
he has travelled there. Parolles’s attention to style over substance –
he swathes himself in numerous scarves – makes him untrustwor-
thy, even dangerous, as the contemporary cliché characterization of
the type indicates: ‘Inglese italianato è diavolo incarnato’. Bragging
is inherent in the type to which Parolles adds cowardice, lying and
servile flattery. He has a major role in seconding Bertram’s disdain for
Helena and his absconding, thus affecting both motive and action,
but beyond his limited part in dialogue that moves the action for-
ward, he is given exceptional space by Shakespeare. The type is used
by Shakespeare in other plays. In Hamlet Osric’s courtly obfuscation
gives a foretaste of Parolles’s attention to image and disregard for
substance, and the full development can be seen in King Lear’s cow-
ardly, self-serving Oswald. Lafeu anatomizes Parolles effectively and
at length in Act 2, Scene 3, a scene notable for its bitterness. It sug-
gests Kent’s attack on Oswald (King Lear, 2.2), although its threatened
violence remains entirely verbal. The generic quality of both Parolles
and Lafeu, their lack of psychological individuation, allows them
to be understood as representing a way of behaving that can be
recognized in other people and in other times.
Character typicality has a parallel in patterns of action. The events
out of which the plot is constructed have a thematic familiarity –
romance, Helena’s pursuit and winning of Bertram. However, the
complication that gives topical interest to ‘Helena loves Bertram’ and
helps shape the plot is social mobility. The relative importance of
inherited status and individual merit is an issue that runs through
much of the literature of the age, through many of Shakespeare’s
works, and is prominent and explicit in fiction. Class, rank, sta-

tus extend into complex problems of social change, old and new
attitudes, personal desire and social responsibility, family structure,
rights of the individual and many other areas that do not lend them-
selves to simple labelling. Robert Greene is not the only writer whose
success owes much to his support for the priority of individual merit;
and Shakespeare’s treatment of Greene’s Pandosto in The Winter’s Tale,
though parody, takes Greene’s point. Shakespeare’s sense of the com-
plexity of social change makes All’s Well a highly nuanced play,
although the use of types such as Parolles at the same time provides
caricature clarity of the central issues.
Inherited status becomes a matter of conflict in All’s Well when
Helena, having achieved renown and proven her merit by curing the
King, is making a choice of husband. She announces to the assembled
young gentlemen that she has neither status nor wealth:
I am a simple maid, and therein wealthiest

That I protest I simply am a maid.
(2.3.67–8)
When she would withdraw in embarrassment at her own presump-

tion, the King urges her forward and her approaches to the various
young lords are all warmly received. These interchanges, though very
brief, establish that Helena is a desirable partner. Thus when she says
to the second lord ‘Love make your fortunes twenty times above / Her
that so wishes, and her humble love’, he indicates a willingness
and even eagerness to accept her, replying, ‘No better, if you please’
(2.3.83–5). Yet when she chooses Bertram he objects with a violence
that shows no regard for place or person. Helena’s success in restoring
the health of the King, he feels, does not place him under any obli-
gation towards her: ‘But follows it, my lord, to bring me down / Must
answer for your raising?’ His elaboration makes clear that class is his
objection:
I know her well.

She had her breeding at my father’s charge.
A poor physician’s daughter my wife! Disdain
Rather corrupt me ever.
(2.3.113–17)
The older generation – the King, Lafeu and the Countess – take a
view quite different from that of Bertram’s new generation; despite
individual differences, they all believe that merit can raise a person’s
status. It is important to understand that the audience would not
have seen Helena’s union with Bertram as transgressing the bounds
of social acceptability because her father would have been accounted
a gentleman; he was a physician, not a barber surgeon, and would
have been addressed with the title ‘Master’. The references to her
in the play as the Countess’s ‘gentlewoman’ indicate an actual sta-
tus, not a courtesy title. The most significant distinction in status
was between gentlemen and commoners; Helena, though not aristoc-
racy, would still be counted as gentry and thus a union with Bertram
would have been socially possible.5 Her financial standing is another
matter but the King makes clear that if what Bertram objects to is
her poverty, he can give Helena a counterbalance to Bertram’s for-
tune: ‘Virtue and she / Is her own dower; honour and wealth from
me’ (2.3.144–5). King Lear in the first scene gives a distorted echo of
this, telling Cordelia, after Burgundy has refused to marry her with-
out the promised dowry, ‘thy truth then be thy dower’ (1.1.107).
The King in All’s Well concludes his lengthy speech stressing that
virtue is in the deeds, not the name, a theme which already had
wide currency in print and on the stage.6 Shakespeare may have
regarded it as having become merely a convention in the early seven-
teenth century, which is suggested by the superficial tone and shallow
rhymes in the King’s speech on honour deriving from deeds rather
than birth: so, go; thrive, derive; slave, grave; said, maid; she, me
(2.3.130–45).
Types and topoi are, by definition, conventional but drama has an
inherent potential for multiple perspectives because it presupposes
interaction of characters who enter the action with different purposes
and from different positions. But unlike the traditional novel, char-
acters may also be presented in what are in effect divergent ‘levels’
of reality within the same play. For example, in Macbeth the elab-
orately developed interior world of Macbeth is confronted by the
grim music hall routine of the porter. Macbeth has psychological
depth while the porter is a shallow drunkard, but this is not just a
personality or character difference; they are given different kinds of
representation, different levels of reality. A contrary instance might
make the distinction clearer. Twelfth Night’s Toby Belch has subtlety
and self-awareness while his dramatic partner, Andrew Aguecheek,

is unperceptive and charmingly dim; but they are integrated into
the same world and have the same level of reality. If one chose to
imagine an extra-play life for them it is equally possible for both,
whereas Macbeth has a complexity that can extend reflection on his
motives, actions and their consequences beyond Shakespeare’s lines,
while the porter’s being is used up entirely in his lines. However, if
we look at Banquo’s murderers in Macbeth, when the first murderer
challenges the presence of the third – ‘But who did bid thee join
with us?’ (3.3.1) – the line is not just his demand for information but
expresses the affront to his professional competence of Macbeth’s hir-
ing of a third. This suggests a character for him beyond his limited
role; Shakespeare elevates him to a higher ‘level’ of reality. The differ-
ence in ‘levels’ is never stated, of course, but it is an implicit signal to
an audience of how they are to receive a character and what kind of
response is appropriate. Slapstick pain remains only a joke; Helena’s
pain feels real.
When Shakespeare moves from interchanges of characters who are
recognizable as types (Helena and Parolles arguing the status of vir-
ginity, the clown seeking permission to marry from the Countess, the
King at court on his illness) to particularized exchange (the Countess
and Helena on her love for Bertram), he makes subtle changes in per-
spective. The Countess’s words begin constructing Helena as a type,
the distressed lover:
Even so it was with me when I was young.

. . . this thorn
Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong.
...
It is the show and seal of nature’s truth,
Where love’s strong passion is impressed in youth.
(1.3.128–33)
She then goes a long and somewhat menacing way about getting
Helena to admit to her love (it takes nearly 100 lines of dialogue).
While Helena indicates her recognition of the potential impropriety,
she does not intend to give up her pursuit:
I follow him not

By any token of presumptuous suit,
Nor would I have him, till I do deserve him –
Yet never know how that desert should be.
(1.3.197–200)
Helena is moved from type to individual by an expanded range of

motive. When the Countess inquires about Helena’s intention to go
to Paris, she explains that her father left her a remedy with which
she can cure the King. The Countess then questions, ‘This was your
motive for Paris, was it?’ She replies,
My lord your son made me to think of this.

Else Paris, and the medicine, and the King
Had from the conversation of my thoughts
Haply been absent then.
(1.3.231–5)
We are given a situation that has a range of determinants of Helena’s

behaviour; her love for Bertram, clear motive, is integrated into a
complex social situation that also determines her behaviour. This
makes her interesting and credible on a higher level than the type,
with a greater sense of reality.
The Countess gives her blessing to Helena and promises whatever
help she can give. It is a well-earned blessing – the Countess has
been testing Helena’s intentions and questioning the likelihood of
her venture succeeding for well over 100 lines. This helps give an air
of rationality and an anchor in a recognizable reality. But when she
encounters the King in the next scene Shakespeare has moved from
a sense of concrete reality of individualized character to a fairy-tale
pattern – ‘curing the king’.7 The King has a disease that has resisted all
the ministrations of the medical luminaries of France which Helena
undertakes to cure completely within a couple of days. Her offer is
bold in the folk-tale manner and her performance beyond real-world
possibility attributed explicitly to divine assistance. Shakespeare is
not given to depending on divine intervention (except perhaps King
Henry’s modest response to the Agincourt victory, ‘Praisèd be God,
and not our strength, for it’ – Henry V, 4.7.85). The cure can be
called magical, but the content of Helena’s negotiation with the King
is rational, contractual even, covering what is promised and what
will be the punishment or reward. The language becomes ‘magical’ –
incantatory:
The greatest grace lending grace,

Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring
Their fiery coacher his diurnal ring;
Ere twice in murk and occidental damp
Moist Hesperus hath quenched her sleepy lamp;
Or four and twenty times the pilot’s glass
Hath told the thievish minutes, how they pass,
What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly,
Health shall live free and sickness freely die.
(2.1.158–66)8
Shakespeare gives us some 80 lines of couplets, a change in language

that is one of the signals of a different level of reality (2.1.121–2;
128–208). The couplets have shallow rhymes – bring-ring, damp-
lamp, glass-pass – that add nothing to the significance. The triviality
of the rhyming can easily be seen if this passage is compared to
Helena’s rhymes in the previous, ‘realistic’ scene:
To her whose state is such that cannot choose

But lend and give where she is sure to lose;
That seeks not to find that her search implies,
But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies.
(1.3.214–17)
The rhymes here, like in many of the Sonnets, tie together the two
words to suggest more than the ‘sum’ of their independent meanings.
Choose-lose and implies-dies reflect on each other adding perspective
and augmenting meaning in a way that Helena’s discourse with the
King does not.
The most important interchange in Shakespeare’s individualizing
of type is in Act 2, Scene 5, where Helena and Bertram part. In plot
terms we are not offered anything significant – that is, we know
already that Bertram intends to desert Helena and leave directly

(2.3.274; 2.4.40) – but in terms of realizing the parting as something
experienced by an individual, giving human experience its emotional
density, it is one of the most important interchanges in the play.
Bertram dismisses Helena with a line that could be expected to termi-
nate an encounter: ‘My haste is very great. Farewell. Hie home.’ But
Helena contrives a pause – ‘Pray, sir, your pardon’ – to which Bertram
irritably accedes: ‘Well, what would you say?’ Helena does not ‘say’
directly; she talks round her concerns apologetically (‘I am not wor-
thy of the wealth I owe’) and approaches what she wants only by
simile: ‘like a timorous thief, most fain would steal / What law does
vouch mine own.’ Bertram does not attend to these circumlocutions
or the emotional commitment that Helena’s ‘most fain’ suggests, and
his reply is narrowly instrumental: ‘What would you have?’ Helena
talks still in circles. Her embarrassment, hesitation and, most of all,
emotional vulnerability are all made evident:
Something, and scarce so much. Nothing, indeed.

I would not tell you what I would, my lord.
Faith, yes:
Strangers and foes do sunder and not kiss.
Finally explicit, yet rather than positively request what she wants,
she indicates it in effect by a double negative: strangers do not kiss
on parting; she and Bertram are not strangers; therefore a kiss is
appropriate. Bertram ignores her request, not even validating it with
a direct refusal. With a formal politeness he sends her away: ‘I pray
you stay not, but in haste to horse.’ Helena, crushed, submits: ‘I shall
not break your bidding, good my lord’ (2.5.79–90). She recognizes in
her ‘Nothing, indeed’ that on the scale of matters of state her request
is of no importance, and in her ‘I shall not break your bidding’
that her personal demand will not be credited with any importance.
Shakespeare makes the scene exceptionally dense; a whole complex
of motive is indicated for Helena, giving her a strikingly real presence.
In the abstract, the merits of Bertram’s and Helena’s positions
might appear equal: he is resisting an imposition on his individual
choice, while it is that individual choice she pursues. However, they
are not equal in terms of how they are represented in the play. Both fit
type-definitions but Helena is made more concrete, individualized by
elaboration of response. The effect is to give her more authority in the

play; her vision of events feels trustworthy, the vision through which
audience/reader is led to see the action. In short, she becomes the
most positive character and the hero. Rational argument and logic
are not an issue here; it is the level of representation Shakespeare
chooses – her individualized character as opposed to Bertram’s type –
that gives Helena her privileged status.
Changing the levels of representation as a mode of directing audi-
ence response may seem a case of critical over-subtlety. In an age
when television is the dominant medium and naturalism has become
the default mode, viewers tend to expect that drama will imitate the
texture and detail of reality. This makes it more difficult for them to
grasp metaphorical relevance and to understand that plays (unless
they are part of the growing fashion for recreated reality, such as ver-
batim theatre) are hypothetical. In live theatre this becomes more
of a problem for audiences because they have flesh-and-blood actors
performing before them, which makes it easier to blur the difference
between actors and the characters they play. When the distinction
is lost and if different levels of reality cannot be recognized, drama
loses a powerful means of orientating audience response.
Helena, the clever woman of the fairy tale, has won her man but, in
classic tragic fashion, her success is disaster. Her rejection by Bertram
is definitive and a second attempt to make her union work would
seem hopeless. Bertram makes this clear by letter:
When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall
come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am
father to, then call me husband. But in such a ‘then’, I write a
‘never’.
(3.2.57–60)
Act 3 seems more like the beginning of a sequel than continuation

and development of the same story. It is structured by a second fairy-
tale – Bertram’s letter gives Helena a ‘magical’ task.
The sense of fairy-tale problem is made more concrete by Helena’s
lengthy soliloquy announcing her intention to leave Roussillon.
However, it is not the plot element, her departure, that is made most
prominent but her expression of guilt at being the cause of both the
dangers Bertram faces in battle and his self-imposed exile. In order
that he may return she will leave Roussillon, whatever the emotional
and material cost to herself:
I will be gone.
My being here it is that holds thee hence.
Shall I stay here to do’t? No, no, although
The air of paradise did fan the house
And angels officed all. I will be gone,
That pitiful rumour may report my flight
To consolate thine ear.
(3.2.122–8)
Helena is not resigned to failure, though shamed and humbled by

her failed attempt to capture Bertram’s love, and she treats his pro-
nouncements of eternal divorce as a challenge, a fairy-tale bargain.
She assumes the role of a pilgrim – an outward model of religious self-
abnegation – and follows Bertram to Florence where she ingratiates
herself with a widow whose daughter Bertram is lustfully pursuing.
(This is sometimes cited as justification for her suffering – false reli-
gious behaviour.) She persuades the widow of her identity and good
intentions and, with an additional promise of reward, gains her assis-
tance in the bed-trick, in which Bertram parts with his heirloom
ring to gain sexual access to Diana but actually has sex with Helena.
Helena falls pregnant from the encounter and is now able to fulfil the
conditions set by Bertram.
The scenes in Florence are dominated by the exposure of Parolles
which, despite its tangential relation to the main plot, occupies in its
planning and execution 430 lines of the 851 in the nine Florentine
scenes. The interrogation of Parolles, captured and blindfolded by
his French companions pretending to be the enemy and speaking
an incomprehensible mock language, is certainly funny yet also very
bitter. As an exposure scene it is reminiscent of Falstaff’s fantastic
defence of his cowardice in the Gadshill robbery but it lacks the good-
natured amusement Falstaff generates (1 Henry IV, 2.5.158–285). It is
also reminiscent of the gulling of Malvolio in Twelfth Night (2.5),
where, having taken Maria’s bait of a letter he thinks to have been
written by Olivia, he exposes his ridiculous self-importance, while Sir
Toby and company splutter indignation in choric fashion at his arro-
gance and presumption. Although some people object that Malvolio’s
imprisonment (4.2) exceeds the comfortable limits of comic revenge,

it takes place in a playworld fantastic enough to discourage naturalis-
tic interpretation. The consequences of Parolles’s shallow, fashionable
corruption are realized more concretely in the suffering of Helena and
the damage to the susceptible Bertram. He has no redeeming quali-
ties, and other characters make clear that he is generally scorned.
Parolles is more than an instance of corruption; he is a model of
fashionable vice, whose importance exceeds his role in the play’s
action.
Extending the exposure of Parolles over so many scenes, although
it makes a bubble in the development of the action, also serves by
association to shape attitude towards Bertram. The honour he gains
as General of Horse for the Duke of Florence is juxtaposed to his dis-
honourable personal behaviour. Diana is given explicit warning of
the danger in believing Bertram’s lust-driven promises, unnecessar-
ily because his negative personal reputation has already established
itself. She says, ‘’Tis a most gallant fellow. / I would he loved his
wife . . .Is’t not a handsome gentleman?’, and then ‘’Tis pity he is not
honest’ (3.5.78–82).
The bed-trick makes more specific his negative qualities.
Shakespeare opens the interchange leading up to the bed-trick with
Bertram giving Diana the wrong name (‘They told me that your name
was Fontybell’, 4.2.1) – he knows her only at a distance. His roman-
tic battery begins with the conventional arguments of carpe diem and
‘your mother loved’, and Diana makes fitting conventional replies
such as ‘’Tis not the many oaths that makes the truth’ (4.2.21). Her
demand for Bertram’s never-to-be-parted-with ring brings conflicting
notions of honour into the exchange, the honour of the antiquity of
his family in opposition to her sexual honour. Bertram says he has
‘no power’ to give away the ring:
It is an honour ’longing to our house,

Bequeathèd down from many ancestors,
Which were the greatest obloquy i’th’ world
In me to lose.
Diana’s reply is again conventional but makes the contrast between

external and personal honour:
Mine honour’s such a ring.

My chastity’s the jewel of our house.
(4.2.42–6)
Immediate lust outweighs the attributes of inherited honour; Bertram

gives Diana the ring and the assignation is arranged. It is known to
his fellow officers but does not meet with their approval:
He hath perverted a young gentlewoman here in Florence of a

most chaste renown, and this night he fleshes his will in the spoil
of her honour. He hath given her his monumental ring, and thinks
himself made in the unchaste composition.
(4.3.14–18)
In her summary of what has just passed Diana indicates that Bertram
has promised marriage: ‘He has sworn to marry me / When his wife’s
dead’ (4.2.71–2), which becomes important in the final scene. When
report of Helena’s death reaches Florence he also appears to worry
that he may have promised, before, more than he is prepared to
deliver afterwards (4.3.96–7). In the Florentine scenes Bertram at
least becomes enlightened as to Parolles’s character, but there is no
indication that he recognizes that his attachment to Parolles reflects
on him. Thus he enters into the denouement as a character who
may attract limited sympathy but whose lack of integrity is con-
trasted to that of his companion officers, though they remain an
unindividualized type.
The denouement takes place in Roussillon. The war is over; Helena
is ‘dead’ and passed into fond memory; Lafeu’s daughter is at an
age to marry; Bertram has just returned with military honour, is a
count, a desirable catch, and the King is willing to forgive his ear-
lier trespasses; Parolles is a beggar but humane Lafeu will not let
him starve – life is returning to normal. Marriage of Lafeu’s daugh-
ter, Maudlin, to Bertram is agreed upon. The King says to Bertram,
‘Be this sweet Helen’s knell, and now forget her’ (5.3.67). But his next
line, ‘Send forth your amorous token for fair Maudlin’, the simple and
customary direction that Bertram give Maudlin a present in recogni-
tion of their engagement, returns the scene to the riddling fairy-tale,
derailing what appeared to be turning into a positive resolution.

The token is recognized by Lafeu and the King as the ring given to
Helena by the King, which had a protective value with quasi-magical
overtones:
This ring was mine, and when I gave it Helen

I bade her if her fortunes ever stood
Necessitied to help, that by this token
I would relieve her.
(5.3.83–6)
Bertram persists in denying that the ring was Helena’s and invents a
flimsy explanation of how he came by it. Ignorant if not innocent, he
was told by Diana when she received his ring that she would give him
another. It was Helena who gave him the ring during the bed-trick,
but Diana had earlier suggested to him its quasi-mystical value:
And on your finger in the night I’ll put

Another ring, that what in time proceeds
May token to the future our past deeds.
(4.2.61–3)
Its ritual value is further emphasized when the King tells Bertram
she swore she would only take it off to give to Bertram in bed or to
send to the King in event of disaster. Bertram is suspected of mur-
dering Helena and arrested. Matters are further complicated when a
letter arrives from Diana in which she claims Bertram as her husband.
He denies this, citing his concern for his honour, already severely
debased for the audience:
Let your highness

Lay a more noble thought upon mine honour
Than for to think that I would sink it here.
(5.3.179–81)
Diana herself enters and, accused by Bertram of being ‘a common

gamester to the camp’ (5.3.188), she produces the heirloom ring,
obviously too high a price for a strumpet. Bertram’s guilt is evident; as
the Countess says, ‘That ring’s a thousand proofs’ (5.3.199). The story
becomes a folk riddle when Diana says he can have his ring back
in exchange for ‘her’ ring, which in response to the King’s inquiry
she says she did not buy or find, was not given or loaned, and did
not give to Bertram. The King, impatient of riddles, threatens her
with death and she restates events, not in the infuriating piecemeal
contradictions, but in traditional riddle form:
He knows himself my bed he hath defiled,

And at that time he got his wife with child.
Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick.
So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick.
(5.3.300–3)
The riddle’s solution, Helena, enters. Bertram, abashed, asks for

pardon. Helena produces the folk-tale ‘contract’, Bertram’s letter:
And look you, here’s your letter. This it says:

‘When from my finger you can get this ring
And are by me with child, etc.’ This is done.
Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?
(5.3.11–14)
The events have followed a folk-tale pattern where a clever wife fulfils
the tasks set by the husband who abandoned her and her achieve-
ment restores the marriage.9 Bertram’s response surprisingly departs
from the pattern. Rather than accede to Helena’s right, he says, in
effect, that the evidence has to be examined:
If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,

I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.
(5.3.315–16)
It is significant that he does not say he loves Helena; he says if certain

conditions are met, then he will love her. The folk tale has gone awry.
We don’t need Shakespeare’s ‘Love is not love / Which alters when it
alteration finds’ (sonnet 116) to tell us that love delivered only on
such conditions is not love.
Formally, the ending is happy because Helena is reborn, the mar-

riage is restored and the riddle has been solved; Lafeu, a chorus, is
moved to tears. On the other hand, the restoration of the marriage
is only technical-legal; the emotional reunion remains one-sided.
Furthermore, however intensely Helena desires Bertram, Shakespeare
goes to some lengths to show that, outside her obsession, his char-
acter is seriously flawed. He arrives discredited after his personal
behaviour in Florence, he is caught lying here before the King, is
offensive on several levels in regard to Diana and the none-too-
perceptive Lafeu rejects him for his daughter’s hand, saying, ‘I will
buy me a son-in-law in a fair’ (5.3.148). Only in the magic world,
the world of types not complicated by individual characteristics, can
the marriage be regarded as solid and the play’s ending as happy. The
matter is love: in the play’s form, its conclusion in marriage, it has
succeeded; in its substantial content, a positive relationship, it has
failed.
Twice before the final scene the ‘all’s well that ends well’ proverb is
uttered by Helena (4.4.35 and 5.1.25), perhaps sounding more hope-
ful than assured and thus raising the level of audience uneasiness.
In the couplet immediately before the epilogue, the King renders it a
third time, but with a twist:
All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,

The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.
(5.3.333–4)
‘Seems’ is a word whose ambiguous potential Shakespeare had mem-

orably exploited a very few years before in Hamlet; it has the
same slippery value in All’s Well. The court is only briefly upset by
Helena’s ‘death’ and quickly returns to normal, Bertram is forgiven
by the King, the discredit for his lies and false behaviour is of only
short duration and Lafeu is opportunistically organizing an alliance
between Bertram and his daughter. No lessons have been learned:
the King even repeats the behaviour that initiated the play’s troubles,
offering Diana, now restored to favour, the same marriage market
he had presented to Helena. The humane aspects of experience –
here mourning and love – are only paid lip service. What possibil-
ity is there of the heroine finding happiness in such a superficial
court, especially when she has herself shown such depth of character?
At this level, the naturalistic interpretations towards which most crit-
icism of the play tends will necessarily find the ending unsatisfactory
if not actually disturbing. But Shakespeare also creates a distur-
bance at a more fundamental level – the contradiction he constructs
between the form and the content. The form is early recognizable
from the first folk tale and produces expectations of a positive result
and shock at its failure. The second folk tale leads to similarly posi-
tive expectations which indeed are realized – but only in form; their
content is negative. The disturbance is emotional, not logical, and it
continues to resonate because the contradiction is unresolvable.
3
Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing (1598), written a few years before All’s Well
That Ends Well, has similar concerns yet is a much more popular play.
Claudio, the protagonist, displays a nasty egocentricity; he rejects his
bride-to-be, Hero, at the altar on a false supposition but then, dis-
abused of his belief in her promiscuity and having done brief penance
for ‘killing’ her, marries her. The ending is thus formally happy
because of the marriage, and the positive character is supported
by a second marriage, the genuinely happy union of Beatrice and
Benedick. But a nagging doubt remains: how can it be happy when
Hero marries someone who has subjected her to outrageous humilia-
tion and demonstrated a total lack of faith in her integrity? The doubt
bears a strong resemblance to the emotional balance at the end of
All’s Well; but unlike All’s Well, where the explicit doubts should make
the unpleasantness practically inescapable, Hero’s uncle, Antonio,
passes a final judgement that admits no doubt: ‘I am glad that all
things sort so well’ (5.4.7). In the assumed happiness of the mar-
riages all previous unpleasantness seems to disappear. This positive
view is attributable in large measure to the characters of the sub-plot,
Beatrice and Benedick, the most attractive and most memorable in
the play. The attention of the audience is usually focused on them
and, indeed, for much of its history, the play was known by their
names. With Beatrice and Benedick elevated to its centre, it is pos-
sible to feel the play does have a happy ending, since the most
interesting relationship of the play has a very happy conclusion and
this ensures enough general good feeling to marginalize the dubious
parts. Nevertheless, a history of reception in which the main plot is
36
Much Ado About Nothing 37
subordinated to the sub-plot suggests that something in the play is

out of kilter.
Much Ado is one of the two plays written before the conventional
three Problem Plays that display the same characteristic contra-
diction between form and content. In a sense it is a prototype,
testing material and organization that were developed in later plays.
The reification of romantic relationships most sharply illustrated in
the bed-trick of All’s Well and Measure for Measure is seen first in the
courting-by-proxy and marriage to an assumed substitute of Much
Ado. Leonato’s concern more for his honour than for his daughter’s
well-being can be seen later in Polonius’s self-conceited patriarchal
attitude towards Ophelia, Don John the bastard is an early, undevel-
oped incarnation of the later Iago, and the rebirth and re-uniting of
the much later Winter’s Tale has a crude model in Much Ado. And,
most importantly, the marriages of doubtful happiness that mark
both All’s Well and Measure first become a significant plot element
in Much Ado. The uneasiness of relationships in Much Ado was per-
haps new in form but it was also consistent with a more general
negative social view that was already beginning to manifest itself in
plays written in the years around Much Ado (1598). Earlier plays such
as Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–5), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594–6)
and Romeo and Juliet (1595) end with a resolution that has a harmony,
achieved or promised, even if it comes out of tragic action. In King
John (1596), the Henry IV plays (1596–8) and Henry V (1598–9), a
questioning of the status quo begins to appear, not yet cynical but
definitely sceptical. Social rules are shown to be observed less in prac-
tice than in theory, personal virtues such as honour and faith are
seen to have lost much of their force, and self-interest seems to dom-
inate. Falstaff’s wit may distract from his corruption, but it is he who
teaches political skills to the future king. King John, no more than a
year earlier, is much more open in the way that self-interest – ‘that
tickling gentleman commodity’ – leads to corruption. (The Merchant
of Venice, 1596–7, of the same period, is also concerned with other
aspects of the disintegration of standards and is discussed later in
its own chapter.) In short, the pleasure of the comedies of earlier
years acquires an uncertainty, a taint of corruption, in most of the
plays of the middle and late 1590s, though it is more often oblique
than direct. It is reasonable to suppose that Much Ado would partake
of the same questioning spirit. But whereas the Henry IV plays limit
themselves for the most part to a tone of scepticism (King John is more
direct), Much Ado raises the level; I believe it is designed, like the
other Problem Plays, to make the audience uncomfortable through
arousing unresolvable emotional contradictions. While many critics
of an older generation were blind to this problematic quality, many
more recent critics see unpleasantness and problems in the play, with-
out regarding the discomfort of the audience as intended. Much Ado,
I would argue, shows a definite intention to distance the audience,
but Shakespeare’s own emotional response (‘analysis’ suggests too
intellectual a judgement) is not yet clear and the dramaturgy he uses
to present it is not yet sufficiently developed to prevent readers and
directors who are so determined from seeing the ending as happy.
Much Ado is not a play for which I feel much admiration or which
gives me much pleasure, but I am very interested in it as a test bed,
an early, somewhat tentative, presentation of ideas that were devel-
oped over the next few years. It also has a particular usefulness for
understanding the development of the Problem Plays: because it dis-
plays problems in its dramaturgy that are solved in the later plays,
it is possible to see that the later solutions are not mere accidents
but conscious advances in construction. Understanding the creaky
dramaturgy of Much Ado makes it much easier to appreciate the bril-
liance of Measure for Measure’s construction and to recognize that it is
not a casual achievement or something that can be taken for granted
as part of Shakespeare’s genius. Certainly his genius was a factor but
the dramatic result was the product of experimentation and labour
as well.
The initial focus of Much Ado is on Beatrice and Benedick. The first
scene, up to line 87, is occupied mostly with Beatrice inquiring about
Benedick and making slanderous witticisms about him. When he
enters, the focus continues to be mostly on their sparring. It is only in
line 150 that the relationship of the main plot appears, when Claudio
asks Benedick, ‘didst thou note the daughter of Signior Leonato?’
(1.1.150–1). Benedick replies to this from a perspective of conven-
tional misogynist mockery, contradicting Claudio’s praises of Hero,
yet when Claudio seeks approval of his romantic interest, Benedick’s
reply makes clear that he recognizes the difference between conven-
tional and personal attitudes: he asks Claudio does he want ‘my
simple true judgement, or would you have me speak after my cus-
tom, as being a professed tyrant to their sex?’ (1.1.155–7). Although
Claudio chooses that Benedick ‘speak in sober judgement’ and a few

lines later asks again for a truthful opinion – ‘Pray thee tell me truly
how thou lik’st her’ (1.1.158, 165–6) – Benedick continues in his
witty, culturally embedded (and therefore conventional) misogyny.
Claudio, although he may regard his love as strong and personal,
also follows a courtly pattern with shallow and conventional praise
of Hero: ‘a modest young lady’, ‘a jewel’ beyond purchase, ‘the
sweetest lady’ he has ever seen (1.1.153, 168, 174–5). He is nei-
ther star-struck nor responding to passion inspired by his beloved;
rather, he has a soldier’s readjustment to peace-time attitudes: now
that ‘war-thoughts / Have left their places vacant, in their rooms /
Come thronging soft and delicate desires / All prompting me how
fair young Hero is’ (1.1.281–4). His love is no more individualized
than Touchstone’s reasons for marrying: ‘As the ox hath his bow, sir,
the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires;
and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling’ (As You Like It,
3.3.72–4). But unlike Touchstone, Claudio’s desire is accompanied by
material considerations; he makes sure that the object of his affection
will be the sole inheritor of her father’s wealth (1.1.274–5).
The impersonality of Claudio’s desire for Hero is marked by his
welcoming of Don Pedro’s offer to do his wooing for him; Don Pedro
will impersonate Claudio in the masque. This is perhaps sufficiently
conventional for the audience not to have found it repellent, but
as courtship it has a dubious quality. The problem is less a mat-
ter of dishonesty than Claudio’s treating Hero simply as an object
to be manipulated. It is like horse breeding, where the teaser horse
warms up the mare and then is replaced by the stallion that carries
the desired genes. Don Pedro will enact an image of Claudio to win
Hero and then negotiate with Hero’s father her transfer to the real
Claudio:
I will assume thy part in some disguise,

And tell fair Hero I am Claudio,
And in her bosom I’ll unclasp my heart,
And take her hearing prisoner with the force
And strong encounter of my amorous tale:
Then after to her father will I break,
And the conclusion is, she shall be thine.
(1.1.301–7)
The easy transferability of affection and desire shown in Don Pedro’s

proxy courting casts doubt on any specificity of personal attachment.
The bed-trick of All’s Well and Measure is only an elaborated version
of this use of the stand-in wooer; its intimacy is generic rather than
personal and individual – that is, it is not intimate. The window scene
organized by the villainous Don John depends on the same quality
of relationship based on externals rather than individual qualities.
Claudio’s response to seeing a staged representation of Hero bidding
goodnight to a supposed lover on the eve of her wedding is instant
rejection. Although he has watched the scene in conditions of doubt-
ful clarity, from a distance and in the dark, he is not prepared to
entertain the idea that an image may be no more than that and there-
fore misleading. The evidence is all external and there is no personal
experience, no depth of relationship, to counter it. Thus Hero, who
was for Claudio hardly anything more than a virgin bride with fam-
ily money, has her whole being instantly reduced by the illusion of
the window scene to being a sexual malefactor. Claudio rejects her
with great theatricality, without the slightest inclination to question
or the simple courtesy of seeking an explanation. A comparison of
his response to perceived betrayal by the beloved with that of Troilus
observing Cressida with Diomedes or Othello moved by Iago’s sor-
did vision should make Claudio’s shallowness very clear. Shakespeare
makes certain that Hero’s innocence is never in doubt; by elaborat-
ing the presentation of the villains’ plotting, he has ensured that the
audience/readers know Hero is innocent. The unrelieved monotone
of malice from Don John emphasizes that this is no tasteless prank
but a vicious demolition of Hero’s character.
The crisis moment of the plot is Claudio’s carefully staged rejection
of Hero at the altar. The audience is made aware that this is calculated
behaviour on Claudio’s part – he has already told Don John ‘If I see
anything tonight why I should not marry her tomorrow, in the con-
gregation, where I should wed, there will I shame her’ (3.2.112–14).
When the Friar asks a standard question, ‘You come hither, my lord,
to marry this lady?’, Claudio answers ‘No’, but Leonato thinks he
is only making a pedantic objection to the Friar’s switching subject
and object, as is usually done in popular speech (that is, he appears
to quibble that it is the Friar who does the marrying, the couple are
the objects of his officiating). Claudio invites Hero to say if there is
any impediment, leading her on as if he still intended to go through
with the ceremony. When Leonato answers the question for him,
‘I dare make his answer, None’, Claudio cryptically remarks, ‘O what
men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not know-
ing what they do!’ He stops the Friar from proceeding, engages in
what seems irrelevant question and answer with Leonato, and when
Leonato says that he does give his daughter freely, Claudio asks what
he can give to Leonato in return to ‘counterpoise this rich and pre-
cious gift’. The answer, supplied by Don Pedro, is ‘Nothing, unless
you render her again’ (4.1.4–28). Claudio then performs a long and
rhetorical rejection of Hero:
There, Leonato, take her back again.
Give not this rotten orange to your friend;
She’s but the sign and semblance of her honour.
Behold how like a maid she blushes here!
O, what authority and show of truth
Can cunning sin cover itself withal!
Comes not that blood as modest evidence
To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear,
All you that see her, that she were a maid,
By these exterior shows? But she is none:
She knows the heat of a luxurious bed:
Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.
(4.1.30–41)
Claudio says Hero’s sexual laxness is proven – she is an ‘approved
wanton’ – and Leonato starts to suggest that it is Claudio who has
seduced her. He denies this and says he always treated her like a
brother, showing ‘Bashful sincerity and comely love’. Hero’s own
voice is first heard in the scene when she says to Claudio, ‘And seem’d
I ever otherwise to you?’, which launches him into more insult and
vituperation:
Out on thee, seeming! I will write against it.
You seem to me as Dian in her orb,
As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown;
But you are more intemperate in your blood
Than Venus, or those pamper’d animals
That rage in savage sensuality.
(4.1.44–61)
Claudio’s accusations so far relate to Hero’s character; there is as

yet no specific act for her to deny. Not unreasonably, she questions
Claudio’s mental state: ‘Is my lord well that he doth speak so wide?’
(4.1.62). Claudio enlists Leonato in questioning Hero, asking that he
use his power as her father to ‘bid her answer truly’, and he sec-
onds Claudio’s demand: ‘I charge thee do so, as thou art my child’
(4.1.75–6). Claudio then asks the question on which her innocence
is made to depend:
What man was he talk’d with you yesternight,

Out at your window betwixt twelve and one?
Now if you are a maid, answer to this.
This is a self-confirming question, like the old standard, ‘Have you

stopped beating your wife?’ Hero’s denial, ‘I talk’d with no man at
that hour, my lord’, is taken to confirm her guilt, for Don Pedro
concludes, ‘Why, then you are no maiden’ (4.1.83–7). He presents
the supposed evidence at last: Hero talked at her window to a ‘ruf-
fian’ who, he claims, confessed his sexual encounters with her. Don
John, Iago-like, speaks with an air of rationality and feigned regret at
Hero’s conduct, insinuating a behaviour even worse than what has
been brought forward:
Fie, fie, they are not to be nam’d, my lord,

Not to be spoke of!
There is not chastity enough in language
Without offence to utter them. Thus, pretty lady,
I am sorry for thy much misgovernment.
(4.1.95–9)
Claudio concludes with an artificial rhetoric, blaming Hero for

destroying his possibility of future love and his capacity to appre-
ciate beauty; Leonato accepts the veracity of the accusations; Hero
swoons. Don John, with a rhetorical cunning that anticipates Iago,
offers an explanation of Hero’s fainting; it seems no more than a
matter-of-fact interpretation but cleverly assumes her guilt, making
would-be fact out of malicious fiction: ‘These things, come thus to
light, Smother her spirits up’ (4.1.111–12).
Hero is presumed to be dying, if not already dead. The Friar,

Beatrice and Benedick do not believe the slander. The Friar (reminis-
cent of Friar Lawrence’s rescue of Juliet from having to marry Paris)
suggests a plan of pretending Hero has died and carrying out appro-
priate obsequies, which should restore her reputation: ‘She dying . . . /
Upon the instant that she was accus’d, / Shall be lamented, pitied,
and excus’d / Of every hearer’). Even Claudio will ‘wish he had not
so accused her: / No, though he thought his accusation true’ (4.1.
214–17, 232–3).
Beatrice and Benedick, left alone, fall into their accustomed banter
but now it is no longer free-floating wit. Benedick says he believes
that Hero has been wronged and Beatrice, serious but still punning,
says, ‘Ah, how much might the man deserve of me that would right
her!’ (4.1.260–1). Beatrice and Benedick, in the convoluted language
of emotional embarrassment, confess their love for each other, and
Benedick, in the manner of courtly romance, says to Beatrice, ‘Come,
bid me do anything for thee’. She, in answer, delivers a coup de théâtre:
‘Kill Claudio!’ This transforms their relationship and their role in the
play. Beatrice’s demand is too much for Benedick immediately to take
in and his response suggests he does not take it seriously: ‘Ha, not for
the wide world!’ Beatrice then says, ‘You kill me to deny it. Farewell’
and turns to leave. Benedick says they should first repair their friend-
ship but she implies that his claim of friendship is hollow: ‘You dare
easier be friends with me than fight with mine enemy’ (4.1.287–98).
She answers his rather obtuse question of whether Claudio is her
enemy with a vehement speech on Claudio’s dastardly character,
providing the moment of most intense passion in the play – the
most developed character venting her rage against Claudio and his
outrageous violation of fundamental principles of social decency:
Is a not approved in the height a villain, that hath slandered,

scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman? O that I were a man! What,
bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then with
public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour – O
God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place.
(4.1.300–6)
Benedick’s reluctance to challenge Claudio produces from Beatrice

speech in which strength of feeling is shown in the disordering of
logical statement. It becomes a critique of social decline, of carpet

knights whose honour has become no more than gesture:
Princes and counties! Surely a princely testimony, a goodly count,

Count Comfect, a sweet gallant surely! O that I were a man for
his sake, or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake!
But manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into compliment, and
men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones too: he is now
valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a
man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.
(4.1.314–23)
Hero demands deeds, not gestures; when Benedick says, ‘By this
hand, I love thee’, she replies, ‘Use it for my love some other way
than swearing by it’ (4.1.324–6). Benedick, reassured that Beatrice is
really convinced that Claudio has wronged Hero, commits himself to
challenging him.
Benedick is spared any actual combat; before there can be any
action, the constables have taken Conrade and Borachio and the
plot has been exposed in Borachio’s confession. Claudio’s response
to hearing the confession is ‘I have drunk poison whiles he utter’d
it’, yet his responsibility is not a part of his regret: five lines further
on he says, ‘Sweet Hero! Now thy image doth appear / In the rare
semblance that I lov’d it first’ (5.1.240, 245–6). Hero is re-established
for him as innocent but without any mention of regret for his own
part in her ‘death’. Leonato uses Borachio’s claim to have been solely
responsible for the events leading to Hero’s death as a springboard
for an attack on Claudio and Don Pedro for their responsibility in
her death:
I thank you, Princes, for my daughter’s death;

Record it with your high and worthy deeds;
’Twas bravely done, if you bethink you of it.
(5.1.262–5)
Claudio is willing to accept whatever penance Leonato proposes for

his ‘sin’ but concludes by saying, ‘yet sinn’d I not / But in mistak-
ing’ (5.1.268–9). Claudio is not a villain like Don John but regarded
in the playworld as a respected and honourable youth. He sees no
fault of his own in the brutal rejection of Hero and the pain it has
caused; it was just a mistake, something that could have happened
to anyone, and therefore he has done no wrong. He treats this mis-
take as if it is no more than a charging error in a shop, something
that is easily corrected and where the event does not affect the rela-
tionship of the participants. The behaviour seems consistent with
the normality of the playworld, and yet Claudio’s self-acceptance
is monstrous. The Elizabethans may have been susceptible to over-
hasty crediting of false accusations (see, for example, the sub-plot of
The Spanish Tragedy), but some questioning of Hero’s supposed guilt
might have been expected of Claudio. As an injured lover, not as a
detective, he might have been expected to ask something like ‘how
could she have done this to me?’ or, as in Troilus and Cressida, ‘This
is, and is not, Cressid’ (5.2.144). Although Claudio was misled by a
vicious plot and what he called a ‘mistake’ might perhaps be seen
as youthful naivety or stupidity, his brutal and self-regarding treat-
ment of Hero is a condemnation of his character that is difficult to
overlook.
Leonato, in less than 20 lines, moves from the bitter irony of
thanking Claudio and Don Pedro for Hero’s death, beyond forgiv-
ing Claudio’s ‘mistaking’ to inviting him to marry into the family:
‘And since you could not be my son-in-law, / Be yet my nephew’
(5.1.281–2). He directs them to clear Hero’s name to the people of
Messina, and he requests a poetic tribute from Claudio: ‘if your love /
Can labour aught in sad invention’, to hang an epitaph on her tomb,
‘And sing it to her bones’. Leonato offers Claudio a near-duplicate
replacement bride for the one he has accidentally ‘killed’, his sup-
posed niece, ‘Almost the copy of my child that’s dead’ (5.1.276–7,
283), heir to both father and brother. ‘Give her the right you should
have giv’n her cousin, / And so dies my revenge’ (5.1.285–6). When
the Friar later says, ‘Did I not tell you she was innocent?’, Leonato
says, ‘so are the Prince and Claudio, who accus’d her’ (5.4.1–2). The
action now forgiven has been re-defined to ignore all emotional
aspects and this reduces everything to the material conditions of the
relationship – the overcharging has been rectified, all is restored and
forgiven.
The six-line epitaph Claudio composes for Hero lacks any sense of
his personal involvement and of Hero’s personal qualities. Fame is
the theme and takes up two of the lines, but the notion of fame is
made almost meaningless: her death from slander is rewarded with

‘fame which never dies’ and dying of shame, she ‘Lives in death with
glorious fame’ (5.3.6, 8). The effect of the scene is that Claudio ful-
fils the form and neither he nor Leonato is interested in any other
aspect. The same impersonality is evident when Claudio is presented
with the masked women, one of whom he will marry. His choice
of diction does not seem suited to a wedding ceremony and reflects
his reified attitude to women: ‘Which is the lady I must seize upon?’
(5.4.53). Had Benedick said this, it could be understood as a play-
ful expression, but Claudio is not given to wordplay or humorous
statement; said by Claudio it gives the relationship a more mechan-
ical feel. As required by Leonato, he swears to marry the woman
who is still masked, the not-dead Hero, of course, who died ‘but
whiles her slander liv’d’, as Leonato puts it (5.4.66). Benedick, when
Beatrice unmasks, enters into a playful exchange of words with her,
and they wittily evade direct professions of love, but agree to marry.
A double wedding about to take place, everyone already moving
towards the celebration, gives the play a lively end, making it seem a
proper romantic comedy, including the standard joke about horns.
Benedick and Claudio are buddies again, and the capture of Don
John is announced, which ties up the potential loose end of the
plot. The Hero–Claudio relationship has faded into the background;
and the energy of the last scene is carried by Beatrice and Benedick.
Thus the unpleasant content is eclipsed by the feel-good factor of the
happy relationship, at least until the relationships are given more
consideration.
The role of Leonato adds another perspective in which the actions
of Claudio can be seen. Leonato is of somewhat lower station than
Claudio and Don Pedro but he is the host and very welcoming. Don
Pedro is addressed by Leonato as ‘your grace’ and ‘my lord’, while he
is himself addressed as ‘Signior’. Early in the first scene Don Pedro
comments on the expense of his hospitality, warmly but also with a
touch of condescension, perhaps suggesting Leonato is entertaining
beyond his means. Although he has some authority as governor of
Messina, the higher rank of Don Pedro and Claudio makes Leonato
accept their authority and credit their accusations of his daughter –
‘Would the two princes lie?’ (4.1.152). More than that, he becomes
in effect one of the accusers himself. His distress when Hero faints at
the altar, apparently dead, is more for the loss of his honour than for
his daughter: he wishes her dead, even to a willingness to further her

death himself:
Could she here deny

The story that is printed in her blood?
Do not live, Hero, do not ope thine eyes;
For did I think thou wouldst not quickly die,
Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames,
Myself would on the rearward of reproaches
Strike at thy life.
(4.1.121–7)
He says he would rather have adopted a beggar’s child because then

the shame would not be his: ‘I might have said “No part of it is mine; /
This shame derives itself from unknown loins” ’ (4.1.134–5). He soft-
ens somewhat in regard to Hero’s guilt when Benedick suggests that
villainous Don John the bastard may have misled the others, but he
still promises far worse to Hero should she be proved guilty than to
those who traduced her should she be proven innocent:
I know not. If they speak but truth of her,

These hands shall tear her: if they wrong her honour,
The proudest of them shall well hear of it.
(4.1.190–2)
Social form, behaving properly, is Leonato’s prime concern; the

welfare of Hero is clearly secondary.
In Act 5, Scene 1, Leonato tells his brother that he feels Hero
has been wronged and will make it clear to ‘all of them that thus
dishonour her’ (5.1.44). When Claudio and Don Pedro arrive he
addresses them in an unfriendly tone and Don Pedro replies con-
descendingly to Leonato, ‘Nay, do not quarrel with us, good old
man’. The level is raised when Claudio is called a ‘dissembler’ and
lays his hand on his sword, which is occasion for Leonato to chal-
lenge him, in an overlong speech. Polonius-like, he does in his
speech the thing he speaks against, taking the ‘privilege of age’,
long-windedness. Claudio also addresses Leonato condescendingly
and rejects his charge of villainy – ‘You say not right, old man’ – and
rejects his challenge – ‘Away! I will not have to do with you’. A tor-
rent of insults by Antonio follows – ‘Boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks,
milksops!’ – but he also mirrors Beatrice’s critique of corrupt courtiers:
Scrambling, outfacing, fashion-monging boys,

That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave, and slander,
Go anticly, and show outward hideousness,
And speak off half a dozen dang’rous words,
How they might hurt their enemies, if they durst,
And this is all.
(5.1.50, 53, 60, 73, 77, 91, 94–9)
Don Pedro says he is sorry for Hero’s death, ‘But on my honour she
was charg’d with nothing / But what was true, and very full of proof’
(5.1.104–5). Despite Leonato’s challenging tone, as soon as Borachio’s
villainy is made public, he is not just willing but eager to accept
Claudio as his son-in-law under the guise of ‘nephew’. Insult and
condescension are forgotten.
Hero is not herself a heroic victim but is conforming in a manner
similar to that of her father, taking the same strong view of maiden
modesty. When at the disrupted wedding ceremony the Friar ques-
tions the now-conscious Hero as to whom she is accused of meeting,
she defends herself in conventional terms: ‘If I know more of any
man alive / Than that which maiden modesty doth warrant, / Let
all my sins lack mercy!’ She accepts that the act would be worthy of
severe punishment but insists that she did not do it. To her father
she says, if she is proven false, ‘Refuse me, hate me, torture me to
death!’ (4.1.178–80, 184). Aside from the match-making deception of
Beatrice in Act 3, Scene 1, most of which depends on her speaking,
but which follows a prepared theme rather than spontaneous conver-
sation, and the short courtly exchange with the disguised Don Pedro
(12 lines between them), Hero has little to say and only a couple
of her lines reveal personality. She shows no response when Antonio
says that he hopes she will be ruled by her father in marriage arrange-
ments. Beatrice, in contrast, responds characteristically, telling Hero
to make her own judgement:
Yes, faith, it is my cousin’s duty to make curtsy and say, ‘Father,

as it please you’: but yet for all that, cousin, let him be a
handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say, ‘Father, as

it please me’.
(2.1.48–52)
Hero makes no reply. She shows her conformity even where she is tak-
ing the initiative, in the staged conversation that persuades Beatrice
that Benedick loves her. She utters hierarchical commonplaces in her
opening description of the ‘pleached bowers’: ‘Where honeysuck-
les, ripen’d by the sun, / Forbid the sun to enter, like favourites, /
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride / Against that power
that bred it’ (3.1.8–11). The parallel persuading of Benedick that
Beatrice loves him has a pantomimic quality without any harsh-
ness (2.3.89–201) but Hero, in the following scene, criticizes Beatrice
for going against the grain – ‘to be so odd and from all fashions /
As Beatrice is, cannot be commendable’ (3.1.72–3) – and is willing
to propose as part of the ruse that she will dissuade Benedick from
his supposed love for Beatrice by devising ‘some honest slanders /
To stain my cousin with: one doth not know / How much an ill word
may empoison liking’ (3.1.84–6). The gulling of Benedick is good-
natured; Hero’s gulling of Beatrice has an unpleasant response to her
divergence from the social norm.
Hero’s character is formed for the audience (and more so for the
reader who is not responding to an actor’s physical presence) through
other people’s mention of her qualities. Her words before fainting
at the altar show only a little resistance – ‘ “True”? O God!’; ‘O God
defend me, how am I beset! / What kind of catechizing call you this?’;
and she suggests that Claudio may not be in his right mind (4.1.68,
77–8, 62). Compared to Ophelia under interrogation by Polonius
about her relationship with Hamlet in the third scene of the tragedy,
which seems to me the nearest structural parallel, Hero seems weak.
Ophelia manages sharp objection and argument to Polonius’s den-
igration of Hamlet’s love, not just troubled denial. When Claudio
offers to marry the masked young woman who is introduced to him
as Hero’s cousin, she, unmasking, says: ‘And when I liv’d, I was your
other wife; / And when you lov’d, you were my other husband.’
Hero’s acceptance of the penitent Claudio is also an acceptance of
her subordinate position – there is no hint of apology and the past
seems merely a distant form. In response to his ‘Another Hero!’, she
says, ‘Nothing certainer: / One Hero died defil’d, but I do live, / And
surely as I live, I am a maid’ (5.4.60–4). She is a maid – the goods

are unspoiled. Hero not only fulfils the conventional conditions for
respectable marriage but her choosing to announce her sexual purity
shows that she believes in them as well as confirming that she adheres
to them. The suggestion is that Claudio’s behaviour is not an obstacle
to a happy union because, although caused by a false perception, it
was based on acceptable patriarchal values.
The Claudio–Hero marriage is lacklustre when juxtaposed to that
of Beatrice and Benedick. Bringing together the confirmed bachelor
and the maid who will lead apes to hell demands a large portion of
the play’s energy and their marriage feels like a real achievement.
Considerable interaction leads up to it and there is obviously a pre-
history of the relationship. Moreover, Beatrice and Benedick are both
accomplished wits who delight in the elaborated use of language,
and even their earlier language of scorn for each other has a detailed
attention to and interest in each other that reveals a mutual attrac-
tion. Their match thus seems not so much an instant love as a solid
relationship. That of Claudio and Hero, on the other hand, is made
without substantial previous interaction and even their courting was
done by a third party. Furthermore, their limited relationship lacks
the colour and credible feeling displayed in that of Beatrice and
Benedick.
The emotional value of the ending of Much Ado is unclear – that is,
how is the audience supposed to feel? The marriage of Beatrice and
Benedick seems solid, despite their verbal battles. We can be confi-
dent of their mutual regard because Shakespeare has given such an
extended build-up to their marriage – long acquaintance, consider-
able interaction in the play, agreement on Hero’s innocence and,
ultimately, on retribution on Claudio. Their marriage seems natural –
probable in dramatic terms – because they are already counterparts;
their flyting is as integrated as a dance and suggests intimacy. The
audience can also make a judgement of the relationship because there
is enough to base it on – both of them have been developed as char-
acters. Claudio and Hero, on the other hand, move from a passing
acquaintance, without any suggestion that it was less than distant, to
intention of immediate marriage: there has not been sufficient inter-
action to make a judgement of their appropriateness for each other.
Moreover, Hero is given too little presence to create much interest
in her. The brutality of Claudio’s rejection is clear, and certainly that
provokes feeling in the audience, but it suffers from Hero’s lack of par-
ticularization; that is, the feeling is outrage that any person should be
so treated or a feeling of sympathy for any victim rather than a sense
of the pain felt by a specific person. In the rejection at the altar, Hero’s
few words and her fainting – in effect a dramaturgical passivity –
allow the responses of Beatrice and Benedick to become more impor-
tant and probably of greater concern to the audience. At the same
time, the unacceptable behaviour of Claudio is made clear, not by
the victim but by the reactions of Beatrice and Benedick. It leads
to Beatrice’s ‘kill Claudio’ and Benedick’s challenge which proves –
dramatically if not logically – the seriousness of Claudio’s behaviour.
Without the challenge the psychological violence to Hero would
have had less resonance because she is so thin a character. If the
same thing had happened to Beatrice her greater response would have
made it more gripping, and it is that difference in character develop-
ment that ensures that Hero herself fades into the background when
Beatrice looks to revenge her wrong.
The contrast with All’s Well That Ends Well is instructive. Helena’s
rejection by Bertram generates much more response, partly because
Helena is developed as a character but also because the scene of
Bertram leaving her, her awkward indirectness in asking for a kiss,
takes the audience/reader through the conflict of her emotions,
which makes it more real, more important and moving. The build-
up of character is what makes possible the contradictory emotions
of the ending. The significance of the flaws in the reunion – its con-
tradictory quality – is made clear to any readers and audience with a
sensitivity of response (which, of course, is not always the case, and
directors can also change the significance in production). This sharp-
ness is lacking in Much Ado and the conclusion of the play suffers
from what has the appearance of a resolution but is rather a suppres-
sion of the emotional conflict. Although the contrasting marriages
at the end of the play offer some criticism of the formality of the
court and courtiers’ hollow values, Messina is happy to forget the
outrage Claudio committed at the first ceremony, and many critics
also seem content to let the joy of Beatrice and Benedick’s union sub-
merge the unpleasantness inherent in that of Claudio and Hero. This
makes the play susceptible to a meliorist view in a way that All’s Well
is not. Much Ado can be presented as consistent with the view that
Shakespeare had faith in the inherent capacity for the good in human
nature to overcome the bad, avoiding the critical aspect of the play.
A. R. Humphreys, in his introduction to the 1981 Arden edition of
the play, provides a clear example of the meliorist attitude:
As in The Merchant of Venice, its sunlight world suffers the darkness

of a near-tragic storm, only to emerge again into the light; and, as
in The Merchant of Venice again, in the interests of happiness the
conclusion virtually forgets that the storm ever blew up.
(p. 74)
All’s Well offers readers more guidance than does Much Ado, provid-
ing choric judgements. Lafeu has pretty much a running negative
commentary on Bertram and Parolles, and Bertram’s fellow officers in
Italy are explicit about their negative qualities. The closest that Much
Ado comes to this is Beatrice, who cannot serve a choric function
because she plays an instrumental role.
All’s Well also has a much tighter dramaturgy; the material of
the play is organized around Helena’s pursuit of Bertram, whereas
Much Ado has multiple plot directions, too many to maintain a
close focus. From its opening passages Much Ado has two plot lines
which, although they necessarily have a degree of integration, direct
attention to separate lines of development. The complexity of so
much staged and reported overhearing and its consequences are
more confusing than the concealed identity in All’s Well and encour-
ages a formalistic analysis based on ‘noting’ (the critical notion that
Shakespeare was punning on ‘nothing’ and ‘noting’). The comic
scenes of Dogberry and Verges, as important as they are in providing
a plot solution, do not advance the emotional development of either
plot line but, on the contrary, distract from them; they are comic
interludes with important information which is, however, inciden-
tal to their own construction. The dialogue of the Countess’s clown
in All’s Well at least has a wit that, in explaining why he wants to
marry, offers a humorous, indirect reflection on the main action.
The malapropism of Dogberry is hardly more than a wrong word
of similar sound and opposite meaning, whereas the malapropisms
of Lancelot Gobbo in Merchant (a year or two earlier) or Elbow in
Measure provide contrary meanings that have some relevance.
The degree to which Claudio’s behaviour violates decency becomes
somewhat obscured by Shakespeare’s inclusion of a real villain in Don
John. The effect is that Claudio’s villainy, essential to constructing

a clear contradiction in the play’s conclusion, is usurped; and thus
his treatment of Hero loses its significance in the light of Don John’s
behaviour. The distraction is increased by the division of the negative
functions between Don John and Borachio. Don John is clearly the
instigator, a destroyer of order and happiness:
I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace, and

it better fits my blood to be disdained of all than to fashion a
carriage to rob love from any: in this, though I cannot be said
to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I am a
plain-dealing villain.
(1.3.25–30)
Asked early on by Conrade, ‘Can you make no use of your discon-

tent?’, he replies, ‘I make all use of it, for I use it only’ (1.3.36–7).
Borachio is Don John’s paid agent, of a spirit initially similar to his,
as is seen in his designing of the plot to destroy the marriage and
his witty reply to Don John’s question of what ‘proof’ he will be able
to present that Hero is ‘a contaminated stale’: ‘Proof enough to mis-
use the Prince, to vex Claudio, to undo Hero, and kill Leonato. Look
you for any other issue?’ (2.2.28–30). Shakespeare also finds Borachio
necessary to explain the plot, which is awkward but otherwise audi-
ence and readers might have difficulty in understanding how it will
work. Borachio’s repentance leaves Don John technically the sole vil-
lain, but even if that seems to give him some grace, it does not serve
to make Don John seem a greater villain. All’s Well restricts itself to
Bertram as villain, although he shares his negativity with Parolles
but only at a superficial level. ‘Claudio is a first sketch for Bertram’,
as Sheldon Zitner comments in the introduction to his edition of
the play (Zitner, 1998, p. 24).
Most important in leeching the emotional power out of the
Claudio–Hero plot is the prominence of Beatrice and Benedick. They
steal the show: from the moment of ‘Kill Claudio’ the outcome
of their plot-line engages attention more than that of Hero and
Claudio. Although their wit, when it is combative, has a somewhat
sophomoric and tedious quality, in romantic situations it is part of
developing the characters. At the end of Act 5, Scene 2, Ursula enters
to announce that the plot against Hero is uncovered and Don John
has fled. When Beatrice asks Benedick if he will ‘go hear this news’, he
gives a reply with a wit that is as exuberant and charming as anything
Berowne utters in Love’s Labour’s Lost:
I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes:
and moreover, I will go with thee to thy uncle’s.
(5.2.94–6)
The multiplicity of threads of action necessarily means crucial points

may seem to be made in passing and have their significance dimin-
ished or not recognized. Thus Claudio’s attempt to evade blame by
claiming a mistake is an important mark of his egocentrism – his con-
cern is less the effect his action had than how it makes him look – but
it is possible, if there is no additional signalling device, for it to pass
with readers and directors as equivalent to an apology rather than a
denial of blame. In later plays Shakespeare finds ways to highlight
significance through another character’s response. Hamlet, for exam-
ple, responds to Gertrude’s minimizing the importance of his father’s
death – ‘Why seems it so particular with thee?’ (1.2.75) – with a dia-
tribe about formal mourning supplanting genuine sorrow. Or in King
Lear Act 2, Scene 4, when Kent is stocked it is only Lear’s outrage
and questioning of Regan and Cornwall that reveals the significance
of their punishing Kent. Beatrice’s ’Kill Claudio’, where Shakespeare
attempts this underscoring of significance in Much Ado, shows her
sense of outrage at Claudio’s treatment of Hero but it is to some
extent short-circuited because some of the energy of its criticism can
seem to the audience to be part of her developing romance with
Benedick.
Despite the overloaded plot, Shakespeare manages to create in
Much Ado the sense of an environment that is complacent, con-
formist, self-seeking and hollow in its profession of values. Beatrice is
the outstanding exception – something of a rebel, with the socially
awkward status of a woman rather too old to be on the marriage mar-
ket, who has anyway different views on marriage which conflict with
the status quo. She is ‘too cursed’, says Antonio (2.1.18) – that is, she
is too independent to appeal to the typical man who wants a dowry
and a docile wife. Although she says she will love Benedick, ‘Tam-
ing my wild heart to thy loving hand’ (3.1.112), that does not mean
taming her spirit. Her outsider status gives her a different vision and
a further function; having no stake in the status quo, she is able to

make particularly valuable alternative commentary. She inherits from
Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew a combination of intelligence,
sharp articulation and powerful will, to which she adds scorn for con-
formity. She is a precursor of Rosalind, Desdemona and Cordelia, and
perhaps also of Hamlet.
Its shortcomings notwithstanding, Much Ado made a considerable
contribution as a test bed for conflicts, character types and ideas that
reach their mature form in later plays. It is important in presenting
an image of a changed society – Messina, Elsinore, Vienna or ancient
Britain, the specific society does not matter – a society increasingly
dominated by people self-serving and self-satisfied, where casual vio-
lations of social being have become acceptable. However, Much Ado’s
corruption still seems quite localized in the court, which makes it pos-
sible for an audience to feel comfortable as observers of behaviour
with no implications for themselves. All’s Well, less restricted geo-
graphically, feels somewhat more general but it is not until Measure
that the play’s attack is made on the wider society.
Equally important in hindering Much Ado’s social-mirror potential
is a dramatic structure that in effect compartmentalizes the critique –
it is lodged in the Claudio–Hero plot which attracts less interest
than the Beatrice and Benedick alternative. The behaviour subject
to critique has been played out, and Beatrice and Benedick dominate
the final 50 or so lines of the play, making a joyous end for which
‘all’s well that ends well’ seems appropriate. Yet if both images of
marriage are retained by audience/readers, the colourless patriarchal
union of Claudio and Hero, with its uncritical acceptance of the
monstrous treatment of Hero, juxtaposed against the lively mutuality
of Beatrice and Benedick may indeed be troubling. Later plays have
less dependence on post-play reflection – the critique is made within
the play.
4
Measure for Measure
Measure for Measure is the most popular of the traditional Prob-

lem Plays and has been for some time the most studied. It follows
the same pattern as All’s Well That Ends Well and the earlier Much
Ado About Nothing of a tale that concludes with marriage or accep-
tance of marriage but where there are substantial doubts about the
relationship; that is, the form is a happy ending but the content sug-
gests the opposite. Measure is more polished and more coherent but
it is also much more complex, and this has led to a greater diver-
sity of responses and sharp critical disagreement. In transforming
the source texts Shakespeare introduces a playworld with elaborated
interconnections and various ways in which sense can be made of
them, including reference to the world outside the theatre. It is often
seen as having a seriousness – such as dealing with questions of jus-
tice and mercy – which is not present in the other Problem Plays. It is
lively and entertaining, but it also makes demands on its audience; it
is as if instead of amusing the audience by simple juggling with three
balls, Shakespeare now was asking them to watch him juggle on the
high wire.
As with All’s Well and Much Ado, Shakespeare draws on the Italian
novelle for his story, using two versions of George Whetstone’s
Promos and Cassandra. The first was a two-part play – The Right Excel-
lent and Famous History of Promos and Cassandra: Divided into Two
Comical Discourses (1578) – and the second a short story in pol-
ished prose in his An Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582). This was
dedicated to Sir Christopher Hatton and appears to have addressed
a citizen audience, as can be seen from the social-improvement
56
Measure for Measure 57
approach of the subtitle: ‘The Christmas exercise of sundry well-

courted gentlemen and gentlewomen. In whose behaviours the better
sort may see a representation of their own virtues. And the infe-
rior, may learn such rules of civil government as will raze out the
blemish of their baseness.’1 Neither version of Whetstone’s work was
re-published in the period, and the play was never performed, as a
marginal note in the prose text states: ‘This history . . . is lively set
out in a comedy . . . but yet never presented upon stage’ (Whetstone,
1582, fol. N2v). The prose collection must have had greater currency
since Webster also used it as a source for The Duchess of Malfi. The lack
of performance for the play suggests that its appeal was very limited;
its verse style was already going out of fashion when it was written
(some of it is in fourteeners and it contains lines that Shakespeare
might have given the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
such as ‘what tongue can tell, what thought conceive, what pen thy
grief can show?’ I.3.2). However, the comedy has a range of mate-
rial not in the story that Shakespeare used for Pompey and Mistress
Overdone and there are some minor details that he imports into Mea-
sure with little alteration. Although much of the material he used was
provided by Whetstone, the significance he gives to events is quite
different.
Shakespeare begins Measure with the same plot set-up as
Whetstone – Promos (the Angelo figure), newly made governor of
the city of Iulio, revives a long disused anti-adultery statute, which
Andrugio (the Claudio figure) is to be executed for violating. His sis-
ter Cassandra (the Isabella figure) pleads eloquently for his life and
Promos is aroused by her skill of argument and her beauty. Although
his admiration is expressed within conventional respectable bounds –
‘Happy is the man that enjoys the love of such a wife’ (I.2.3) – his
action violates all respectability: he offers to ransom her brother in
exchange for sex. Cassandra is persuaded by Andrugio, more by logic
than emotional blackmail, to accept Promos’s offer. She thinks she
has saved her brother in submitting to Promos until a corpse she
believes to be that of Andrugio is delivered to her (he has in fact
been rescued by the good jailer). She thinks about killing herself
but decides to delay until she has sought retribution from the King.
In Part 2 she goes to the King; he believes her story and summons
Promos who, when challenged, confesses. The King marries him to a
reluctant Cassandra ‘to repair her honour’ (Spencer, 1968, p. 125) and
orders his execution. Cassandra, however, assumes a proper wifely

role; she dutifully pleads for the life of her husband but without
success. The disguised Andrugio, moved by pity of Cassandra and
mindful of her sacrifice for him, then reveals himself. Thus Promos is
no longer guilty of his death, Andrugio is pardoned by the King for
his own violation of the adultery law, and Cassandra, her attitude
altered by Promos’s genuine repentance, is pleased with her mar-
riage. The thoroughly reformed Promos is reinstated as governor. All
ends happily. This escape from potential tragedy into marriages is
for Whetstone without question happy, as he concludes in the prose
version: ‘Thus, from between the teeth of danger every party was pre-
served and in the end established in their heart’s desire’ (Spencer,
1968, p. 127). For Shakespeare the matter is more complex; as usual,
he transforms his sources and Measure builds towards the contradic-
tion between the happy form and its dubious content – three of the
four marriages have one unwilling partner (it is explicit in only two
of the marriages). As a Problem Play, Measure is not likely to be one of
Shakespeare’s most pleasurable plays but it has all the elements that
make exciting and satisfying drama, and in analysis it can be seen to
be one of his most skilful constructions.
Shakespeare changed a number of aspects of Whetstone’s narra-
tive that made it serviceable for his own complex vision. Whetstone,
in keeping with the pattern of early English short fiction, had pre-
sented a world of simple morality – clear-cut good and bad – with
character motivation at the same level of minimal development. His
narrative ends happily because the problems of individual charac-
ters are resolved, and there is no challenge to the status quo. Even
Promos, whose actions had disturbed the social order, is re-installed
as governor, ‘The King . . . holding an opinion that it was more ben-
eficial for the citizens to be ruled by their old evil governor, new
reformed, than to adventure upon a new whose behaviours were
unknown’ (Spencer, 1968, p. 127). Whetstone’s interest in the nar-
rative is the heroic action of Cassandra but not its personal aspect;
her story is an instance of a popular topos, a woman heroically
defending morality – Susannah and the Elders is probably the best-
known example. It is a model of fighting injustice that does not
generally provide for much exploration of individual motive and
character. The two major changes Shakespeare makes allow him to
develop the values and qualities that motivate and individualize
personages – that is, character. The most obvious change was split-
ting Whetstone’s Cassandra into two characters – Isabella, whose
brother is under threat of execution and for whose release a sexual
ransom is demanded, and Mariana, who pays the ransom. This facil-
itates a wider range of emotional responses because an element of
necessity (the only way for Cassandra to save Andrugio) is removed
and the interaction has become more developed.
The other major change was recreating Whetstone’s two-
dimensional King as the active, meddling ‘old fantastical Duke of
dark corners’ (4.3.154). In Promos and Cassandra the King opens the
plot by appointing Promos governor of a city and concludes it with
his final pronouncements but in between, where the emotionally
charged action takes place, he plays no role at all. He has no distin-
guishing motivations; he is merely the voice of authority and wisdom
who remains unquestioned. In Measure the Duke plays a very active
part, engaging with other characters and shaping the action. The
Duke provides a framework for the narrative – the ostensible purposes
that generate the central action, steer it and see it to a supposedly
happy conclusion. Thus Shakespeare gives us what are in effect two
levels of action: an immediate focus on the action that has the emo-
tional tensions – will Claudio be saved and will Isabella submit to
Angelo’s lust; and a second level, the frame of the Duke’s purposes
within which the immediate action occurs. Obviously, framework
and primary plot are not separate but they have different motive and
moral forces. I do not want to exaggerate the distinction; the frame
is not so defined as in works recognized as framework collections,
The Canterbury Tales, say, or Robert Greene’s Penelope’s Web (1585).
Nevertheless it allows two different ways of viewing the action: the
more philosophical – the progress of the Duke’s purposes; and the
experiential – the human consequences. The choice of focus has a
strong bearing on what is perceived as the message of the play. Thus
much of the traditional argument that identifies the mercy–justice
dichotomy as the main issue depends on giving priority to the frame-
work and focuses on the activities of the Duke, while treating the
main plot of Isabella and Angelo as an exemplar. The experiential
approach looks at what actually happens to the characters and their
responses.
A division between framework and primary narrative is not neces-
sarily complex but Shakespeare makes it so by creating uncertainty
in the frame. The Duke will test his deputy Angelo by staging his
absence and will also see whether Angelo can return dissolute Vienna
to the confines of the law, which the Duke does not want to enforce
himself since it was his laxness that allowed the law to slip in the
first place. Yet in practice his purposes often appear confused. He
explains to Friar Thomas that disorder in Vienna must be purged but
in asking for a habit to disguise himself he says, ‘Mo reasons for this
action / At our more leisure shall I render you’, and concludes with
a summary, philosophically phrased, that points rather to the exer-
cise being conducted to test Angelo: ‘Hence shall we see / If power
change purpose, what our seemers be’ (1.3.48–9, 53–4). In the fol-
lowing scene Lucio gives a sense of public perception of the Duke’s
disappearance, telling Isabella, ‘The Duke is very strangely gone from
hence’, and, having led many gentlemen to expect military action,
his stated intentions were ‘an infinite distance / From his true-meant
design’ (1.4.50–5). This could perhaps cause some slight uneasiness
about the Duke and his purposes, but convention carries the assump-
tion that as the director of events he knows what he is doing and
that his motives are good. Any audience doubts probably remain
beneath the level of articulation at this stage in the play. But doubts
begin to accumulate. The test case for re-establishing the law pro-
scribing extramarital sexual relations is Claudio and Juliet. This is the
only such case in Measure’s playworld (in Whetstone’s play more are
referred to but Andrugio is distinguished from the others by his youth
and honourable intentions). Their sexual relations have been made
obvious by Juliet’s pregnancy, but they are pledged to each other,
married in all but the formal ceremony, and their status would have
been recognized by Shakespeare’s audience as effectively married.
This was the form of marriage practised by much of the population,
especially those too poor to pay for a church ceremony. Thus they
are in no way an obvious example of the dissolute behaviour subject
to the law; Lucio, a habitual and open whore-master, would seem a
far more appropriate choice. But Claudio and Juliet’s roles as victims
is a given of the playworld, and audiences and readers are probably
unprepared at this point to dispute the ‘terms of engagement’, yet
there is a sense of an instability developing. The sense of injustice
the audience probably feels at Claudio’s death sentence – in Lucio’s
words, ‘for the rebellion of a codpiece to take away the life of a man!’
(3.1.376–7) – is in counterpoint with at least tentative acceptance of
the Duke’s purpose of restoring order. The presentation of material

at the level of experience is in conflict with what is presented at the
level of authority – what people see is different from what they are
told. This encourages questioning of assumptions; ‘objectivity’ in the
frame can no longer be taken for granted.
The conflict between experience and authority, seen in the coun-
terpoint of the Duke’s scheme and the main action, runs throughout
the play, undermining for the audience the authority of the Duke
without diminishing his playworld status as ruler. With extraor-
dinary efficiency, Shakespeare organizes all the dramatic resources
to diminish the Duke’s standing, although that is not what holds
audience attention; the attraction of the play is the events of the
tragicomedy. The threat of execution advancing towards Claudio
and Isabella’s efforts to save him provide enough tension to make
the play gripping – the audience is aware they may fail. The emo-
tional response is heightened by the realism of the situation and the
character development of Isabella and Angelo, the most important
personages of the main action. They are given extended dialogue and
both are privileged with soliloquies that reveal their conflicting feel-
ings. The sense of real character is important because it extends to
the playworld of arbitrary conditions a sense that it too is real. It is
like being in a nightmare where the fantastic action has a feeling of
reality because you know the people in it.
Initially Isabella’s action is a simple pleading for pardon for her
brother before Angelo, the deputy, who holds all judicial power.
It becomes complicated when he is more taken with Isabella her-
self than with her argument. But Angelo’s lust is not a given; it is
seen developing in extended interchange between the two (the first
interview, which arouses Angelo’s lust, takes place over some 140
lines, a very long stage time). Angelo is not a womanizer or habit-
ual abuser; he is actually surprised by his sexual response (his telling
the Provost to stay when Isabella is brought in for her first audience
makes clear he is not thinking about sexual advances). Her pleading
is highly articulate and shows a spirit of intellectual independence;
she has passion and great rhetorical energy. She does not fit the con-
ventional domestic ideal of feminine submission – that is not what
attracts Angelo; nor is he attracted, he makes clear, by display of sex-
ual charms. It is her virtue that moves him: ‘Most dangerous / Is that
temptation that doth goad us on / To sin in loving virtue’ (2.2.184–6).
Her strength of principle, eloquent but untested, mirrors the aspect of

Angelo’s image that would seem the basis for his elevation to deputy:
‘my gravity, / Wherein – let no man hear me – I take pride’ (2.4.9–10).
Although he exercises his judicial authority without hesitation, he
lacks confidence in his advances to Isabella. This becomes clear when
she says, in the second interview, ‘I am come to know your plea-
sure’ and he makes an aside: ‘That you might know it would much
better please me / Than to demand what ’tis’ (2.4.31–3). He frames
his advances to her as a roundabout hypothetical choice, gaining
Claudio’s release ‘from the manacles / Of the all-binding law’ by lay-
ing down ‘the treasures of your body’ or letting him suffer. Isabella’s
reply has an imagery of Christian martyrdom which, in this context,
is certainly sexual: ‘The impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies, /
And strip myself to death as to a bed / That longing have been sick
for, ere I’d yield / My body up to shame’ (2.4.93–104). Whetstone
presents the same material with no sexual suggestion; Cassandra,
reporting to Andrugio her interview with Promos, says she would
willingly die to save him rather than consent to the loss of honour
proposed by Promos: ‘Thy ransom is to Promos fleshly will / That
I do yield, than which I rather chose, / With torments sharp my self
he first should kill’ (I, 3.4). No bed, no stripping, no keen whips in
Whetstone; Shakespeare’s sexualization cannot be accidental. Isabella
argues well but has little practical understanding and little grasp of
things worldly; she is really a precocious adolescent. Beatrice-Joanna
in Middleton and Rowley’s Changeling, 1622, offers a parallel in her
naive recruitment of the cynical and knowing De Flores. Isabella’s
demand for tighter restrictions in the convent she is about to join at
the beginning of the play (‘wishing a more strict restraint / Upon the
sisterhood’, 1.4.4–5) is less an indication of strenuous virtue than a
naive confidence in her own power. This self-assurance can be alien-
ating for an audience because it is adolescent egocentricity as well
as naivety. Thus her conclusion, after considering Angelo’s ransom
proposition for 15 lines in soliloquy, is ‘More than our brother is
our chastity’ (2.4.186). Although this in the past has sometimes been
interpreted as Shakespeare arguing for the positive importance of
virginity, it can also be seen as very self-centred behaviour.
But the question of how an audience would or should respond
remains real. Advances in social understanding since Shakespeare’s
day of the nature of power relations, and hence also of rape, have
increased the demand for gender equality and contributed to the

fading of the notions of ownership in sexual relations and the excel-
lence of virginity. But that does not answer the question for the
audience of 1604. The relationship between Claudio and Juliet is
clearly something Shakespeare assumes will not be regarded by his
audience as a terrible sin. The characters of the playworld are shown
to find the sentence on Claudio far in excess of the crime and, if
the action following it is to be meaningful as well as comprehen-
sible for the audience, then they, too, must accept that view. The
problem Shakespeare sets up for exploration is Isabella’s choice. She
is clearly thrown into a dangerous and desperately unpleasant sit-
uation but the alternatives do not weigh equally in human terms.
Whetstone’s Cassandra (who has no Duke to introduce a Mariana to
carry out the bed-trick) at first refuses to accept Promos’s proposi-
tion but then agrees with her brother that death weighs more heavily
than sexual dishonour. She is ultimately held to have done the hon-
ourable thing, for the sacrifice of her honour is considered morally
superior to letting Andrugio be executed. More telling is Thomas
Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (played 1603–4, published
1607), almost exactly contemporary with Measure. Heywood was an
extraordinarily prolific dramatist (more than 200 plays) and highly
popular. He should therefore provide a good indication of attitudes
of the time. In the sub-plot of the play, Susan Mountford is the ran-
som offered by her brother Sir Charles to Sir Francis to settle a debt
that would otherwise wipe out the family. She makes the conven-
tional heroic-virgin response, picking up a knife to kill herself, and
her brother says admiringly, ‘Oh wonder, that will choose, / Rather
than stain her blood, her life to lose’ (5.1.91–2). Still, she is offered
up to Sir Francis, and he is so moved by the nobility of her spirit that
he decides to marry her, which at once redeems the family and saves
her honour. Her noble sacrifice, says Sir Francis to Sir Charles, over-
comes any deficiency in material wealth: ‘And where before I thought
her for her wants / Too base to be my bride, to end all strife /
I seal you my dear brother, her my wife’ (Heywood, 1969, 5.1.144–6).
Thus Isabella’s refusal should not automatically be assumed to have
the heroic resonance that has sometimes been attributed to it in
the past.
Having received Angelo’s proposition and resolved to save her
chastity, Isabella reports to Claudio that he can expect execution
the next day; she speaks indirectly, using an unpleasant tone of

ironic humour. He asks, ‘Is there no remedy?’ and cuts short her
circumlocution to ask again, ‘But is there any?’ She continues to
evade answering directly until he demands, ‘Let me know the point’.
Then she makes a case against fear of death, belittling its impor-
tance and impugning Claudio’s sense of honour and suggesting he
would be willing to sacrifice ‘perpetual honour’ for some six or seven
years more of life. He rises to the challenge: ‘Why give you me this
shame? . . . If I must die, / I will encounter darkness as a bride’, and
finally she tells him he can be freed if ‘I should do what I abhor
to name’ (3.1.61–103). The moment of his heroic posture passing,
Claudio reasons that the sin cannot be so serious if the wise deputy
is willing to commit it, and Isabella regards him as backsliding. He
makes an eloquent speech then, giving a picture of death that is con-
crete, imaginable, and more moving than Hamlet’s evocation of the
uncertain afterlife in the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world, or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling – ’tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
(3.1.121–35)
Isabella’s response is entirely unsympathetic: 15 lines of vituperation,

calling him a beast, coward, incestuous – ‘Is’t not a kind of incest to
take life / From thine own sister’s shame?’; and she concludes that
since his sin is habitual, he deserves death: ‘Thy sin’s not accidental,
but a trade. / Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd, / ’Tis best
that thou diest quickly’ (3.1.142–3, 152–4). Leonato wishing Hero’s
death in Much Ado offers a parallel condemnation but much less elo-
quent. She also echoes Angelo’s view that mercy to the law-breaker is
unmerciful to the law-abiding population.
Angelo, who has initiated the action, displays many characteristics
that overlap with those of Isabella. Like her, he is arrogant but she at
least has some excuse in her youth and inexperience, whereas Angelo
takes on the assurance of public office, assuming the fact of his high
position destroys the credibility of any accusation against him: ‘For
my authority bears so credent bulk / That no particular scandal once
can touch / But confounds the breather’ (4.4.24–6). His view would
seem to be correct when the Duke pretends to believe that he cannot
be guilty of Isabella’s accusation, that she must have been suborned.
This is completely consistent with Machiavelli’s analysis in The Prince,
in the chapter on ‘How princes should honour their word’: accusa-
tions against the Prince are not believed because the Prince is ‘backed
by the majesty of the state’ (Machiavelli, 1975, p. 101).
The emotional response of the audience to the characters is deter-
mined not only by their actions but also by their use of language.
Unlike the first history cycle, say, where rhetoric can be appreciated
simply for being Shakespeare’s verbal skill rather than specific to the
individual nature of the speaker, in Measure for Measure character itself
is displayed in the individual style. This is quite different from the
Promos and Cassandra sources; in keeping with the taste of the age,
Whetstone was concerned, especially in The Heptameron, to present
a refined rhetorical style which readers would recognize, not as the
voice of individual characters, but as the author’s literary skill. It is
easy to take for granted Shakespeare’s individualized speech, but it
was a relatively recent development and, despite its efficiency in pre-
senting information and character in the same speech, not all the
dramatists of the period accepted it.
Thus the Duke is pompous and self-important; he speaks in a con-
voluted manner, like Polonius, using too many words, and his choice
of words displays an elaborated wit that tends to obscure his meaning
and may make comprehension more difficult for the audience. The
subject he addresses in his first speech of the play is the character of
Escalus but at the same time he characterizes himself in his choice of
rhetorical style:
Of government the properties to unfold

Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse,
Since I am put to know that your own science
Exceeds in that the lists of all advice
My strength can give you. Then no more remains
But that, to your sufficiency . . .
. . . as your worth is able,
And let them work. The nature of our people,
Our city’s institutions, and the terms
For common justice, you’re as pregnant in
As art and practice hath enrichèd any
That we remember.
(1.1.3–14. The ellipses are in the text.)
There is nothing in the content of the speech that would be off-

putting for an audience, yet the style – the inversions, involutions
and word choice – cloud the issue and create a feeling of distance.
The effect is unobtrusive – a mere taint. In the beginning of the play
we are entered into a playworld whose boundaries and character have
yet to be made clear; the first lines can reasonably be expected to
provide orientation. The Duke’s lines here suggest something he is
unclear about or a deeper meaning beyond what is actually said –
it is mystification. Especially at the speed of a staged production,
such mystification may easily seem to the audience to be a result of
their own inadequacies rather than the Duke’s muddle-headedness.
The speech is not important in itself but is an element which influ-
ences audience sense of the Duke’s authority. Similarly, his farewell
to Angelo, whom he has just made his deputy, although it is not
mystification, can still be alienating in its tedious pretension and
pleonasm:
We have with a leavened and preparèd choice

Proceeded to you, therefore take your honours.
Our haste from hence is of so quick condition
That it prefers itself, and leaves unquestioned
Matters of needful value.
(1.1.52–6)
Personifying his haste and giving it its own will (‘prefers itself’ over
other matters of importance) is more self-important than speaking of
oneself in the third person. The suggestion that here he acts not from
his own will has the effect of elevating his behaviour to a position of
objective necessity. Furthermore, the verbal elaboration negates his
haste. Speeches that delay supposedly hasty parting had by the time
of Measure assumed something of a conventional character, especially
in fiction, but Shakespeare had also used them to comic effect in
Two Gentlemen of Verona and more recently in Hamlet in Polonius’s
often-quoted farewell to Laertes. The Duke’s parting words to Angelo
display the same conflict between ostensible purpose and mani-
festation of character, a literal content of modesty contradicted by
the self-regard of the rhetoric:
Give me your hand;

I’ll privily away. I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes.
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and aves vehement,
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it. Once more fare you well.
(1.1.67–73)
Thus the logical content of the speeches is consistent with the Duke
as a wise ruler, one who considers the context as well as the immedi-
ate problem, but the tone of the rhetoric works against that image at
a sub-articulate, emotional level.
Another aspect of the Duke’s language that unsettles his image in
a non-logical manner is his awkward use of metaphor. He instructs
Isabella to ‘fasten your ear on my advisings’ (3.1.200–1). ‘Ear’ as aural
attention is fine and so is the materiality of ‘fasten’ but ‘advisings’
is not material, which leaves the ear, as it were, hanging. This is not
slipshod writing; Shakespeare is orientating responses to the Duke
through giving his speech a momentary sense of materiality that
soon feels insubstantial. Compare it to Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans,
countrymen, lend me your ears’ (Julius Caesar, 3.2.74), which is mate-
rial and entirely clear. Similarly, he says of Angelo to Escalus, he has
‘Lent him our terror, dressed him with our love, / And given his
deputation all the organs / Of our own power’ (1.1.20–2). Saying
‘given his deputation’ rather than ‘given him’ undercuts the mate-
riality of the other metaphors because, although its meaning as the
state of his being made deputy may have a logical validity, its lack of
visual character makes it seem hollow. The same abstraction appears
in his explaining to Friar Thomas his plan to have strict law restored
in his absence: ‘so our decrees, / Dead to infliction, to themselves
are dead’. What he intends is not in doubt but ‘infliction’ is a very
bookish abstraction – which is not made concrete by the two vivid
commonplaces that follow it: ‘liberty plucks justice by the nose, / ‘the
baby beats the nurse’ (1.3.27–30). The effects here are not analytical
and I doubt they enter an audience’s consciousness in any articulated
way; but they taint the Duke, conditioning response without gener-
ating anything so noticeable as to be worth calling a response. The
problem is not the use of metaphors; when Lucio explains Claudio’s
arrest to Isabella he is highly metaphorical without losing the sense
of the material reality:
Your brother and his lover have embraced.

As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time
That from the seedness the bare fallow brings
To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb
Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry.
(1.4.40–4)
Some of the language must seem very old-fashioned to a mod-

ern audience but the visual quality is maintained and therefore
an emotional effect is achieved. The Duke’s authority is exercised
for the audience through his language, and when that language is
muddy, audience feeling about that authority must to some extent
be compromised.
In Act 4, Scene 3, having informed Isabella of Claudio’s supposed
death and told her ‘dry your eyes’, the Duke then says, ‘Com-
mand these fretting waters from your eyes / With a light heart’
(4.3.125, 144–5). The romantic metaphor for tears is an indulgence
of his metaphorical wit, not a consolation to Isabella which the
logical content of the interchange suggests. The same ineffectual
communication that fails in its intention through self-indulgent lan-

guage play is created in more extensive speech when he tells Isabella,
‘The hand that hath made you fair hath made you good. The good-
ness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness, but
grace, being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body of it
ever fair’ (3.1.183–6). Hamlet spoke similar words to Ophelia with-
out any confusion; Touchstone presented a parodic version of the
same idea to Audrey, juggling terms but never leaving the mean-
ing in doubt. Like Polonius, the Duke is guilty of less matter with
more art. Even where the action depends on the communication
being understood, the Duke uses an elaborated but indirect lan-
guage; Shakespeare makes the recipient receive it with understanding
but its abstractness probably distances the audience from the action
and suggests that the Duke has little sense of the urgency of the
situation.
The contrast that Shakespeare makes between abstract and concrete
language becomes particularly important in the Duke’s interchanges
with Lucio. While the Duke speaks in a register appropriate to offi-
cialdom and reflecting his inflated self-regard, Lucio brings matters
down to earth with material images. Thus in Act 3, Scene 1, casu-
ally criticizing Angelo’s severity, Lucio makes a fanciful description
of how Angelo was conceived:
They say this Angelo was not made by man and woman after this
downright way of creation; . . . Some report, a sea-maid spawned
him. Some, that he was begot between two stockfishes. But it is
certain that when he makes water his urine is congealed ice.
(3.1.366–72)
He then contrasts Angelo’s frigidity with the Duke’s warmer human

behaviour: ‘He had some feeling of the sport’. The Duke objects:
‘I never heard the absent Duke much detected for women, he was
not inclined that way’. His logic is not in doubt but ‘detected for
women’, vague and distant from the everyday language of sexual
relations, cannot stand up against Lucio’s materiality of counter-
evidence: ‘Yes, your beggar of fifty; and his use was to put a ducat
in her clack-dish . . . He would be drunk too’ (3.1.381–9). The Duke
is drawn into a humorous music-hall exchange when he is chal-
lenged by Lucio saying ‘the greater file of the subject held the Duke
to be wise’. He replies with a testy, ‘Wise? Why, no question but

he was.’ Lucio contradicts him directly, ‘a very superficial, ignorant,
unweighing fellow’, which leads the Duke into a rhetorical defence of
himself, overlong and heavy enough to give some credence to Lucio’s
judgement:
The very stream of his life, and the business he hath helmed, must
upon a warranted need give him a better proclamation. Let him be
but testimonied in his own bringings-forth, and he shall appear to
the envious a scholar, a statesman, and a soldier.
(3.1.397–406)
The Duke is being defensive and relying on a diction that is too

abstract (‘testimonied’, ‘bringings-forth’ and a hyperbolic use of
‘proclamation’) to weigh against Lucio’s images despite the fact that
they have no literal truth. The concrete image of the Duke kiss-
ing a beggar who smells of brown bread and garlic (3.1.440–1)
has a memorable quality that makes it more forceful than literal
truth.
The effect of this contrast in diction is first of all amusing but it
is at the expense of the Duke. The old critical tendency to reject
Lucio because he is a reprobate and a liar misses the point: Lucio
does indeed make statements that are obviously false in terms of fact,
but which are true in essence, when he characterizes Angelo’s cold
rigidity and the self-indulgent attitudes of the Duke. The clumsily
indirect diction of the Duke in opposition to Lucio’s concreteness
is ineffective as argument and, more important, makes him seem
affected and incompetent or, at best, out of touch. The result is
that he is a laughing-stock; his authority is diminished. Shakespeare
used a satirical characterization through language earlier – for exam-
ple, Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost, whose language was of more
importance to his function in the play than his actions – but in Mea-
sure it goes beyond satire to be a general technique of establishing
character.
Within the framework of the Duke’s purposes, the action is the
attempt to rescue Claudio. Claudio himself plays a minor part; it is
Isabella who drives the action forward. She appeals to Angelo, whose
response shows the legal process to be, in his hands, depersonalized,
mechanical and inhumane:
The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept.

Those many had not dared to do that evil
If the first that did the edict infringe
Had answered for his deed. Now ’tis awake,
Takes note of what is done, and like a prophet
Looks in a glass that shows what future evils
Either now, or by remissness new-conceived,
And so in progress to be hatched and born,
Are now to have no successive degrees,
But ere they live to end.
(2.2.91–9)
It proceeds logically on its premises but the premises are irrational in

relation to the reality and the agents of the law are also corruptible.
Isabella argues with a rationality equal to Angelo’s but the image she
creates is quite different. First of all, her position is petitioner, she is
the underdog. Her will counts for nothing while Angelo as the voice
of the law has an all-powerful will: ‘what I will not, that I cannot do’
(2.2.52). After Isabella’s initial lapse of engagement, where Lucio has
to spur her into making a proper argument, she argues passionately
and humanely, showing great strength and determination. Her resis-
tance is cast as heroic: ‘O, it is excellent / To have a giant’s strength,
but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant’ (2.2.108–10). Portia in The
Merchant of Venice, with whom she can reasonably be compared as
young, clever and wilful, lacks Isabella’s status as an underdog. Portia
wins her courtroom battle by sleight of hand – the magical discovery
of an obscure clause in Venetian law; she does not display Isabella’s
strength of logic. Isabella is heroic in her resistance to oppression,
and that, at this point, is what makes her a positive character for an
audience.
Until Angelo demanded a sexual ransom from Isabella, matters
were relatively straightforward – she made a vigorous appeal to
Angelo and there was no other line of action open to her. Angelo’s
proposition introduced conflict, between Isabella and Claudio as
well as with Angelo. This was resolved by the intervention of the
Duke arranging the bed-trick, supposedly satisfying both horns of the
dilemma, saving Claudio and releasing Isabella from the prospect of
a hateful liaison with Angelo. The deal done, Mariana having had
sex with Angelo, the Duke has no doubts that the plan has worked
and that Claudio will be freed. He arrives in the prison expecting
to hear of Claudio’s pardon, asking the Provost confidently, ‘Who
called here of late?’ He confidently dismisses the Provost’s ‘None
since the curfew rung’ with ‘They will then ere’t be long.’ He says
confidently in response to a knocking, ‘Now are they come.’ He asks
the Provost, somewhat less confidently, ‘Have you no countermand
for Claudio yet’ and then assures him, ‘You shall hear more ere morn-
ing.’ The Provost, reasoning on past form and the pronouncements
of Angelo, thinks there is no hope. A messenger arrives from Angelo
and the Duke says, again confidently, ‘And here comes Claudio’s par-
don.’ Despite the serious demeanour of messenger and Provost, the
Duke says aside, ‘This is his pardon’, still believing his manipulations
have been successful, asking the Provost, ‘Now, sir, what news?’ The
Provost says, ‘I told you’ and reads him the unusually strict condi-
tions for Claudio’s execution; he concludes by saying, ‘What say you
to this, sir?’ (4.2.71–127). The Duke has made clear his inability to
control, even to predict, events, which should knock audience trust
in him. Earlier in the play he had been presented in such a way as to
appear the bearer of true understanding, and the audience could feel
they shared with him a real knowledge denied the other characters;
that can now be seen to have been misleading.
A consequence of the Duke’s failure to anticipate Angelo’s
behaviour means that he must intervene directly if Claudio is to be
saved. He persuades the Provost to assist him by showing him a letter
with the Duke’s seal, proving his connection. He tells him that coun-
termanding Angelo’s order and saving Claudio will not put him in
danger: ‘Ere twice the sun hath made his journal greeting / To yon-
der generation, you shall find / Your safety manifested’ (4.3.86–8).
The Provost is a practical man; the Duke’s reassurance in incantatory
language and his past form are probably not very reassuring, yet he
agrees.
When Isabella arrives at the prison expecting that Claudio has been
pardoned, the Duke decides not to tell her of the rescue plan. Unlike
Promos and Cassandra, where the reason Cassandra is allowed to think
her brother dead is to protect his safety and that of the jailer who
assisted him, the Duke’s plan is supposed to be for Isabella’s spiritual
benefit:
she’s come to know

If yet her brother’s pardon be come hither.
But I will keep her ignorant of her good,
To make her heavenly comforts of despair
When it is least expected.
(4.3.104–8)
The Duke tells her, ‘He hath released him, Isabel, from the world. /
His head is off, and sent to Angelo’. Isabella’s reaction is angry
incredulity: ‘Nay, but it is not so!’ The Duke advises patience but she
says, ‘O, I will to him and pluck out his eyes!’ (4.3.113–17). This is like
Beatrice’s ‘Kill Claudio’; she is reacting to an outrage that goes beyond
material injury, violating the very principles of social being, an injury
that can be neither recompensed nor ameliorated. The Duke, still as
Friar, can only tell her to have patience until the next day when she
will have her revenge. The advice in practical terms is good but it is
totally insensitive, taking no account of the intensity of her pain and
her feelings of outrage.
The return of the Duke seems to promise the resolution of the
wrongs and turmoil of the playworld. Isabella and Mariana are fol-
lowing the Friar’s instructions on trust without understanding the
reasoning behind his plans; but, while Mariana shows no doubts,
Isabella voices her uneasiness: ‘To speak so indirectly I am loath. / I
would say the truth, but to accuse him so, / That is your part.
Yet I am advised to do it, / He says, to veil full purpose’ (4.6.1–4).
The reasons for the Duke’s return are as uncertain as those for his
departure – ‘Every letter he hath writ hath disvouched other’, says
Escalus (4.4.1) – but the whole playworld depends on it. Those who
govern, those who are their victims and those who move between
are all awaiting his return; the narrative makes it the focus of
attention.
The single scene of Act 5, one of Shakespeare’s longest (542 lines
in Bawcutt’s World’s Classics edition, 536 in Lever’s Arden second
edition), has a complexity that comes partly from disguised motives
and false trails in the manner of crime fiction and partly from plot
elements of farcical double roles. The complexity demands con-
centration from the audience but also offers a pleasurable sense of
participation, of managing simultaneously the conflicting realities
of the playworld, which is reminiscent of As You Like It and Twelfth

Night. The action of the plot is the uncovering of Angelo’s illegal and
treacherous behaviour. The Duke interrogates Isabella and Mariana,
as they have been led to expect, when they petition him for justice.
But, contrary to how he had earlier, in his guise of Friar, characterized
what would be his behaviour as Duke, his manner becomes hostile to
Isabella’s questioning of authority. She does not know he is also the
friar who has tutored her in this process and responds as if the Duke
spoke in earnest. We know he is supposed to be on Isabella’s side,
but his manner is very different and his motives were never clear.
The oscillation between the Duke pretending to find her accusations
incredible and his recognizing her rationality (5.1.61–4, 68–9) keeps
up the tension. The Duke believes he acts in Isabella’s favour but his
competence has already been questioned and perhaps there could
be a real danger to Isabella. The tragicomedy has not yielded to the
comedy yet.
A different tension arises from the interruptions of the narrative by
the irrepressible Lucio, a standard technique of heightening response
through delay, which here also has a comic value. The Duke tries to
put him down – ‘You were not bid to speak’ – and Lucio agrees in
a form that continues his offence: ‘No, my good lord, / Nor wished
to hold my peace’ (5.1.79–80). This pattern continues for another
ten lines, delaying the resolution the audience is expecting, irritating
the Duke and perhaps some of the audience, but also amusing in a
traditional comic use of frustrating a character.
When the Duke returns to logical argument the tension of the nar-
rative continues – Isabella’s accusation of Angelo must be false: ‘it
imports no reason / That with such vehemency he should pursue /
Faults proper to himself’ (5.1.109–11). The conclusion is obviously
false to the audience who have witnessed the reality; but the argu-
ment is logically correct and would be good were it not based on
an unstated premise of the inherent goodness of those in author-
ity, and its corollary that Angelo applies the laws equally to him-
self. To Isabella the Duke’s logic signals defeat; she turns to the
‘blessèd ministers above’ (5.1.116) and the Duke orders her arrest:
‘To prison with her. Shall we thus permit / A blasting and a scandalous
breath to fall / On him so near us? This needs must be a prac-
tice’ (5.1.122–4). This rejection seems to be going beyond pretence.
The Duke’s observation of the scene, ‘like power divine’ (5.1.370)
as Angelo later calls it, seems to be producing the wrong results.

The audience’s assurance that the narrative will work out and that
Isabella will be safe is slightly unsettled. Again, this is not a ratio-
nal doubt, but the Duke seems to be letting Isabella be moved into
an area of danger over which his control is uncertain. This vague
unease is not diminished by the comic convention of the Duke talk-
ing about his other persona as if he were really a separate person,
blaming Friar Ludowick for setting ‘this wretched woman here /
Against our substitute!’ (5.1.133–4). Friar Peter, an agent of the Duke’s
plot, defends Friar Ludowick and says he may in time come to clear
himself but at the moment he is sick with a strange fever. In what
may seem a shocking travesty of justice, the Duke then hands the
case over to Angelo for judgement – ‘be you judge / Of your own
cause’ (5.1.165–6) – and leaves the stage, allowing Friar Ludowick to
appear.
There is another identity-riddle interlude similar to that which
Shakespeare used in All’s Well and in a reduced version in Much
Ado but here its comic quality is foregrounded by the wit of Lucio,
who proposes a logical solution to Mariana being ‘neither maid,
widow, nor wife’: ‘My lord, she may be a punk, for many of them
are neither maid, widow nor wife’. Mariana continues the riddle,
saying she was never married and is no maid but ‘I have known
my husband, yet my husband / Knows not that ever he knew me’,
to which Lucio, with the same logic, suggests that the husband
was drunk at the time. As in Much Ado she unveils at the bidding
of her husband and the riddle is explained in full. Angelo con-
fesses his past, broken relationship with Mariana, who says they
consummated their marriage ‘Tuesday night last gone, in’s garden
house’. This would seem to resolve the matter but Angelo in another
cunning move says he is the victim of a conspiracy – Mariana
and Isabella are ‘instruments of some more mightier member /
That sets them on’. The Duke hands over to Angelo, saying, ‘Pun-
ish them to your height of pleasure’ (5.1.179–241). The tension is
renewed.
Shakespeare complicates audience response by giving Isabella a lan-
guage that undercuts her attractiveness. She can alienate an audience
in a manner similar to that of the Duke with a diction that is very
abstract. This can be seen in her explanation to the Duke of how
Angelo used and betrayed her:
He would not, but by gift of my chaste body

To his concupiscible intemperate lust
Release my brother; and after much debatement,
My sisterly remorse confutes mine honour,
And I did yield to him. But the next morn betimes,
His purpose surfeiting, he sends a warrant
For my poor brother’s head.
(5.1.98–104)
Her words move action into philosophical discourse: ‘concupisci-

ble intemperate lust’, ‘remorse confutes mine honour’, ‘his purpose
surfeiting’ may be used correctly but they are all of sufficient awk-
wardness to distract from the situation Isabella is describing. The
effect is to make Isabella’s case seem more a technical legal infrac-
tion than a violation of a fellow human. Her response to the Duke’s
‘This is most likely!’ is also distancing: ‘O, that it were as like as it is
true’ (5.1.104–5). Again, this is a logical statement – she wishes it were
only probable rather than actual – but it requires enough thought to
risk obstructing the emotional response. Compare it with the similar
Elizabethan conventional saying about truth, ‘it is not so common
as true that . . . ’ which has the same relationship of elements but its
point is immediately clear.
The reappearance of the Duke as Friar Ludowick gives a tone of
imminent danger to the scene. When he supports Isabella’s accusa-
tion of Angelo and impugns the court’s justice (in terms, uncharac-
teristically, of common speech – ‘to seek the lamb here of the fox’,
‘Good-night to your redress’) and says the Duke was unjust to reject
Isabella’s appeal (5.1.300–3), the stakes seem suddenly to have been
raised. Escalus, who has expressed strong feelings about the dispro-
portionate punishment faced by Claudio and has dealt intelligently
and humanely with the willing but incompetent Elbow, becomes
unsympathetic and threatens the rack:
Why, thou unreverent and unhallowed friar,

Is’t not enough thou hast suborned these women
To accuse this worthy man, but in foul mouth,
And in the witness of his proper ear,
To call him villain, and then to glance from him
To the Duke himself, to tax him with injustice?

Take him hence. To the rack with him! – We’ll touse you
Joint by joint, but we will know his purpose.
What! Unjust?
(5.1.307–15)
The anger of those in authority is always dangerous but the most

immediately threatening aspect is that Escalus’s call for the rack may
be carried out in haste. The impossibility of defence is also disturbing;
Escalus calls for the Friar to be silenced: ‘Such a fellow is not to be
talked withal. Away with him to prison! . . . let him speak no more’
(5.1.345–8). The categorical unassailability of the authorities is not
stressed in the plot but is made clearly evident here; impugning the
worthiness of the Duke’s deputy and calling the Duke himself unjust
unquestionably justifies punishment.
The first sense of resolution comes when Lucio accidentally reveals
the Duke. The Duke challenges Angelo on his guilt and Angelo, over-
come with shame and eager to punish himself, makes a cringing
speech that flatters the Duke’s power and understanding:
O my dread lord,
I should be guiltier than my guiltiness
To think I can be undiscernible,
When I perceive your grace, like power divine,
Hath looked upon my passes. Then, good prince,
No longer session hold upon my shame,
But let my trial be mine own confession.
Immediate sentence, then, and sequent death
Is all the grace I beg.
(5.1.367–75)
The Duke then has the guilty Angelo married to Mariana and the
focus moves back to the original issue of the death of Claudio and
Isabella’s response.
The Duke makes a lame and still pretentious excuse for not sav-
ing Claudio – ‘It was the swift celerity of his death, / Which I did
think with slower foot came on, / That brained my purpose’ – and
then presents a saccharine, conventionally religious, positive view
of death to Isabella (perhaps drawing on Spenser’s Despair in The

Faerie Queene, I, 9): ‘That life is better life, past fearing death, / Than
that which lives to fear. Make it your comfort, / So happy is your
brother’ (5.1.395–400). When the newly married Angelo is brought
in, the Duke makes a speech, of unusual clarity and quoted with
cliché frequency, calling for retribution for Claudio’s unjust death:
The very mercy of the law cries out

Most audible, even from his proper tongue,
‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death;
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure’.
(5.1.408–12)
This vision of justice is disturbed by Mariana putting herself into the

equation: ‘O my most gracious lord, / I hope you will not mock me
with a husband’ (5.1.417–18). He replies, in the impersonal reason-
ing of Whetstone’s King, that he is protecting her honour (her sexual
encounter is made acceptable by marriage) and she will have the
wealth to buy ‘a better husband’. But unlike Whetstone’s Cassandra,
Mariana’s attachment to Angelo is of long standing and reflects per-
sonal desire rather than duties imposed by the formal role of wife:
‘I crave no other nor no better man’ (5.1.427). This moves the terms
of the argument from the legal to the humane.
This is where the third crisis point of the play occurs (the first is
when Isabella faces Angelo’s sexual demand; the second, when she
learns of Claudio’s death): Mariana asks Isabella to join her plea for
Angelo’s life: ‘Sweet Isabel, take my part: / Lend me your knees, and
all my life to come / I’ll lend you all my life to do you service’. The
Duke makes an emotionally charged argument about the unreason-
ableness of her demand: ‘Against all sense you do importune her. /
Should she kneel down in mercy of this fact, / Her brother’s ghost his
pavèd bed would break / And take her hence in horror’ and ‘He dies
for Claudio’s death.’ Mariana urges again – Isabella has only to kneel
and need not say anything. Her argument is not of justice but of
personal relations, to be allowed to fulfil her love. Her phrasing has
the irregularity of expression under strong emotion; Isabella, does
not speak but Mariana’s words suggest that she may be wavering.
Mariana once again implores her – ‘O, Isabel, will you not lend a
knee?’ (5.1.431–43) – and Isabella joins her, yielding in fellow feel-
ing to Mariana’s personal need rather than the Duke’s argument of
retribution. There is a force in this turnaround like a spring being
compressed – Isabella has been moved to plead for the life of the
man who betrayed her and who she ‘knows’ was responsible for her
brother’s death, whose eyes she was going to pluck out. The level
of emotional energy involved makes this a moment of extraordinary
dramatic intensity.
But Shakespeare, having given Isabella a role of heroic humanity,
does not allow her to retain the full benefit of that rosy image. She
reverts to her logical-judicial mode, recognizing her brother’s de facto
guilt and Angelo’s failure of intent, but also reflecting the arrogance
and naivety that probably limits audience affection for her: ‘I partly
think / A due sincerity governed his deeds / Till he did look on me’
(5.1.446–8).
Shortly after the emotional stress of having to plead clemency
for her betrayer, Isabella sees a living Claudio revealed. The scene
has been largely occupied with the judgement of Angelo for killing
Claudio, first to establish his guilt and then to arrive at a reconcilia-
tion when Isabella pleads for his life. All of this is a consequence of
the supposed execution of Claudio; yet only some three dozen lines
after the point of reconciliation it is all shown to have been com-
pletely unnecessary, for Claudio is alive. This is no surprise for the
audience; they were witness to the arrangement between the Duke
and the Provost, but for Isabella it was necessarily a shock – the Duke
had told her in Act 4, Scene 3, that Claudio was executed and his
head sent to Angelo. In Whetstone the revelation of Andrugio is more
emotionally loaded. When he hears Cassandra plead for her new hus-
band, even though he is still subject to the sentence from which he
escaped, he reveals himself because he feels it is better that he die
than condemn the sister who saved his life to lifelong misery as a
widow (II, 5. 3). There is no Mariana to dilute the emotion and in any
case Shakespeare uses the double identity in an entirely different way.
Isabella, unlike Whetstone’s Cassandra, has no motive of her own to
plead for Angelo. She had to go through the emotional torment of
pleading for the man whom she has every reason to hate, towards
whom she had expressed feelings of violent anger, only to find that
it had all been needless and cruel. It had been done at the whim
of the Duke, ‘To make her heavenly comforts of despair / When it

is least expected’ (4.3.107–8). Her deepest feelings have been trifled
with; she has been mocked, not with a dead husband but with a live
brother. She had been humiliated and tormented over a fabricated
issue. Humiliation in other enduringly popular plays of the period,
such as The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine, met with towering rage
and vengeance; the trial Isabella endures is not an incidental aspect
of the play but fundamental to it. Shakespeare builds Measure around
the attitudes and emotions of the characters as much as around the
action. Yet when the Duke proposes to Isabella, in the same sen-
tence in which he pardons Claudio his violation of the law, she is
silent, speaking not at all after pleading for Angelo. Shakespeare has
led the audience to an emotional response but has avoided stating
a moral conclusion. He has left the contradiction without even the
appearance of resolution, such as he provided in All’s Well That Ends
Well, which is more disturbing and probably more subversive than a
definitive ending.
Measure for Measure is the paradigm Problem Play, presenting a
pattern along the lines of desire-problems-marriages seen in The Mer-
chant of Venice, Much Ado and All’s Well, and like them the happy
form has a content that could not be called happy. Measure has four
pairings, as many as in As You Like It. Angelo asked for death when
his crime was discovered; his last words in the play, after being forced
to marry Mariana, are ‘I crave death more willingly than mercy. / ’Tis
my deserving, and I do entreat it’ (5.1.479–80). Lucio, forgiven whip-
ping and hanging by the Duke but forced to marry the woman by
whom he had fathered a child, says, ‘Marrying a punk, my lord, is
pressing to death, / whipping, and hanging’ (5.1.525–6). The Duke’s
proposal to Isabella receives no answer. Claudio and Juliet’s is the
only happy marriage; they were happy together when the play began
and are formally married, happily, at the end. Thus the ending of
Measure, like those of All’s Well and Much Ado, is designed to be
uncomfortable. But Measure, because of its ‘double’ organization of
framework and action, has allowed audiences to attend to the frame-
work, the progress of the Duke’s purposes, without paying attention
to Isabella’s responses. In that perspective the Duke has tested Angelo,
rescued Claudio and saved Isabella from dishonour; a marriage to
Isabella does not seem unnatural or completely unexpected. Indeed,
W. W. Lawrence writes of the Duke’s proposal: ‘I do not think that
there is any doubt that Isabella turns to him with a heavenly and
yielding smile. And I cannot see in the least why she should not . . . .’
(Lawrence, 1931, p. 128). Although this was written in 1931, before
the rise of fascism and the Holocaust had produced a darker vision
of humanity, the view continues to have supporters. In the experien-
tial perspective the Duke does rescue Isabella and Claudio from their
respective dangers but their state of danger was caused by his plan,
and he cannot atone for his abuse of Isabella; Measure is not Much Ado
and Isabella is not Hero. But the framework remains unchanged. This
makes Isabella’s silence in regard to the Duke’s proposal much more
subtle than a direct refusal; it highlights both the expectation of a
positive response encouraged by the framework and the potential of
her refusal that reflects the sense of her actual experience. The Duke’s
restored order is order in name only, his justice is not just, and the
marriages, except for Claudio and Juliet’s, cannot be seen as happy.
As Pauline Kiernan writes, in one of the most succinct and coherent
judgements of the play:
In Measure for Measure, in one of the most subtle and disturbing

endings in the canon, Isabella gives no answer to the Duke’s offer
of marriage, and the audience is left to reflect on the nature of a
love that has allowed him to prolong her torture by allowing her
to believe her brother has been executed. The continuous assault
on the stability of our moral judgements that has been inflicted on
us throughout the play means that a simple acceptance of a happy
ending becomes an impossibility.
(Kiernan, 1996, pp. 98–9)
Unusually, Measure also has a reflection on the society outside the

playworld that is obvious and sharp. The environment of sexual
corruption spreads in significance to a sense of more general cor-
ruption. When Pompey arrives with Mistress Overdone, a madam of
some social standing, and reports the proclamation of the razing of
brothels, the focus moves to the business aspect of prostitution: ‘All
houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down’. The sub-
urbs of London, notably Southwark, were where most of the city’s
sex trade was located in Shakespeare’s day, beyond the control of the
city fathers. Mistress Overdone, with comic obtuseness, asks about
the brothels in the city; Pompey replies, ‘They shall stand for seed;
they had gone down too, but that a wise burgher put in for them’
(1.2.94–9). The law winks when it is in the interest of those who make
the laws; although prostitution is decried by the city fathers, some
of them also profit by it (as did landlords to brothels – like Philip
Henslowe, supposed to have risen through prostitution). When Mis-
tress Overdone complains, ‘what shall become of me?’, Pompey, the
realist, answers wittily, ‘Come, fear not you; good counsellors lack no
clients. Though you change your place, you need not change your
trade’ (1.2.104–7). The exchanges of wit reflect on the playworld but
also on the order of the world outside the theatre. Without any spe-
cific accusation, sexual corruption is related to corruption in political
and commercial life.
The scenes with Pompey gain credibility as realism rather than
mere clowning because of his common-sense, practical responses.
The law against adultery, outlawing sex before marriage, is in his view
contrary to nature: ‘Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the
youth of the city?’ (2.1.219–20). Even the Duke seconds Pompey’s
view that the sexual urge is inseparable from youth, is natural, when
he characterizes to Friar Thomas the unnaturalness of Angelo: he
‘scarce confesses / That his blood flows, or that his appetite / Is more
to bread than stone’ (1.3.51–3). The basis of Pompey’s argument is
the actual way things are in the world. Interrogated by Escalus about
his practising as a bawd under the guise of tapster, he says, ‘Truly, sir,
I am a poor fellow that would live.’ Escalus lectures him in the old
schoolmasterly, condescending mode of rhetorical questions about
his being a bawd: ‘What do you think of the trade, Pompey? Is it a
lawful trade?’ and Pompey answers quite rationally, ‘If the law would
allow it, sir’ (2.1.212–16). This is humorous playing with definitions
but it also suggests that it is the law that is out of step with the real
world. When he is arrested again he speaks five lines on the partiality
of justice, a moral commentary not tied in to the plot but reflecting
on the playworld and beyond:
’Twas never merry world since of two usuries the merriest was
put down, and the worser allowed by order of law a furred gown
to keep him warm – and furred with fox on lambskins too, to
signify that craft, being richer than innocency, stands for the
facing.
(3.1.274–8)
The image of the usurer is a standard one, and they were commonly
attacked in the literature of the period, in Thomas Lodge’s An Alarum
against Usurers (1584), for example. The significance of Pompey’s
free-standing attack is that the attention of the law is misdirected:
prostitution was unquestionably a destructive and corrupt trade but
usury, at least as great a social evil, was allowed to flourish. Pompey’s
‘estates satire’ in the prison highlights the widespread damage of
usury. He says the world seems to have moved inside the prison:
‘One would think it were Mistress Overdone’s own house, for here
be many of her old customers’. Their names characterize them but
the first two, Master Rash and Master Caper, have been imprisoned
for debt. Master Caper, having over-indulged his taste for fashion well
beyond his means, was imprisoned ‘at the suit of Master Three-pile
the mercer’, and Master Rash, while the object of his spending is not
specified, has been cozened by the usurer in a typical way: the loan he
received consisted of little ready money and a great deal of ‘commod-
ity’, over-valued goods given by the usurer to the borrower instead of
money that he then has to sell in order to get his cash (4.3.2–10).
Usurers are particularly objects of hatred. Marlowe’s Barabas, enu-
merating the achievements of his psychopathic career, boasts about
the damage he created as a usurer: ‘extorting, cozening, forfeiting’ he
‘fill’d the gaols with bankrupts in a year, / And with young orphans
planted hospitals’ and drove men to suicide, tormenting them with
interest (The Jew of Malta, 2.3.195–205). Robert Greene’s pseudony-
mous Cuthbert Cony-Catcher in The Defence of Cony-Catching (1592)
accuses Greene of exposing petty criminals who cheat at cards while
ignoring those like usurers who create real damage:
those caterpillars that undo the poor, ruin whole lordships, infect
the commonwealth, and delight in nothing but in wrongful
extorting and purloining of pelf . . . had you such a mote in your
eye, that you could not see those fox-furred gentlemen . . . those
miserable usurers I mean, that like vultures prey upon the spoil of
the poor . . . and feeding upon forfeits and penalties, as the ravens
do upon carrion?
(Greene, 1972, pp. 346–7)
Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607), with less bite but more humour, makes
his model of avaricious destruction also a fox. Pompey’s shifting of
social criteria occurs again when he becomes assistant hangman and

compares the legal status of his present and former trades: ‘Sir, I have
been an unlawful bawd time out of mind, but yet I will be content
to be a lawful hangman’ (4.2.14–15). The hangman, Abhorson, says
a bawd would discredit the hangman’s trade – ‘Fie upon him, he will
discredit our mystery’ – but the Provost says, ‘you weigh equally, a
feather will turn the scale’ (4.2.25–8). Social status and anti-humane
practice, it is suggested, can exist comfortably together.
The realism of Measure makes it easier for the audience to see
the humorous critique as social criticism. The mix of good and bad
characteristics is far more likely to seem real than a character of per-
fection, and although certain qualities of Isabella may be off-putting,
at the same time they make her seem more lifelike; and Angelo’s
abuse of power mixed with weakness and shame gives him a cred-
ibility that is lacking in a monotone villain like Don John. Similarly,
although the play has moral distinctions between characters, the
range is recognizably human and Angelo, as principal bad man, does
not need to have his moral turpitude emphasized by visible defor-
mity in the manner of Richard III. In the same way as the villains of
Hamlet appear normal in the court of Elsinore, Angelo is assimilated
into the normal life of the playworld. The fundamental realistic qual-
ity enables stylized scenes like Pompey’s estates satire in the prison
to have resonance in the real world because their context is real-
istic. And that realism facilitates an easy transfer of attitude from
playworld to real world. Justice is a prime example. There are several
images of bumbling justice and its inconsistent application, such as
the Duke handing over the case of Isabella to Angelo, against whom
her complaint was lodged. The entire application of the law in the
play in fact seems arbitrary, and even dangerously so, as witnessed by
the near-execution of Claudio and the speed with which Escalus, oth-
erwise a model of temperance and probity, calls for Friar Ludowick to
be put on the rack.
The social criticism is not limited to pointing out specific abuses
such as usury and one-sided justice; there is also the sense that those
in authority employ a subjective logic, assuming authority is correct
simply because it is authority. Angelo is explicit: ‘my authority bears
so credent bulk / That no particular scandal once can touch / But it
confounds the breather’ (4.4.24–6). Shakespeare dealt with an aspect
of this problem in Hamlet – the Elsinore aristocracy as ‘the better
people’ were good by definition but were bad in actuality – but the
treatment is more clear in its implications in Measure. In no other
play does Shakespeare so mock a current ruler, which must have had
specific resonance for the Jacobean audience. Similarly, the location
of corruption has moved, again as in Hamlet, from individuals to the
society. Shakespeare is only a year away from King Lear; the demi-
god authority, railed against by the mad Lear to the blind Gloucester,
has concrete demonstration in Measure. There is also an overlap of
what mad Lear and disreputable Lucio say; Lear’s speech is made more
acceptable because, spoken in madness, he does not strain the play’s
realism, whereas Lucio has a pantomimic quality that an audience
demanding consistency of realism might easily dismiss. In Measure
the returned Duke also pretends that Isabella’s charges against Angelo
indicate madness – that is, within the Duke’s understanding of the
world the behaviour of which Angelo is accused is beyond credibility
and therefore someone who insists on its actuality must be mad. The
parallel developed in King Lear is Lear finding Kent in the stocks and
being unable to take in the fact that he was put there by Cornwall and
Regan – his consciousness is structured according to different princi-
ples and cannot accommodate the reality that lies before him. In King
Lear Shakespeare makes obvious that there are more ways than one
of understanding reality; in Measure this is still only implied.
Compared to All’s Well and Much Ado, Measure is much more orga-
nized; multiple strands and levels of action are unified in a way that
can be seen both as naturalistic – the story is coherent – and repre-
sentative – the actions also have a wider reference. The dramaturgical
success is its integration of story and framework, with the effect that
emotions stirred by the narrative are brought to focus on a wider set
of issues; the points are not just intellectually coherent but are also
animated by the strength of characters’ emotions developed in the
action. In this, Measure can be seen not only as brilliant in its own
right but also as a stepping stone to King Lear.
5
The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice, as the earliest of the Problem Plays, may lack
the coherence of the later plays but it produces much the same kind
of discomfort. Like Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well
and Measure for Measure, it ends in unions the happiness of which,
if not completely in doubt, feels uncertain. Multiple marriages con-
clude the action, as in Measure, but they are not the focus of the plot,
and whatever uneasiness attends them is overshadowed by Shylock’s
downfall. Merchant follows no established form; it is experimental
and, unlike Measure, where the dramaturgy is precise, it is loose-knit;
and at times it seems to have more narratives than it can comfortably
control.
The issue that loomed large in twentieth-century discussion of Mer-
chant in the public sphere was whether or not the play is anti-Semitic.
At various times school boards in the United States have banned
the study of the play and it has been removed from libraries on
the grounds of its reputed anti-Semitism, decisions that seem usu-
ally to have been made without a close knowledge of the play or how
drama works. There has also been some scholarly attention to the
issue, more informed but still usually neglectful of how the play func-
tions as a whole. Without doubt there is considerable anti-Semitism
in the playworld of Merchant but the most explicit and sustained
voicing of anti-Semitism, Lancelot Gobbo’s debate with himself or
dubbio in Act 2, Scene 2, is a set piece, without consequence, and
folkloric in character. Moreover, Gobbo’s pantomimic malapropisms
mean his attitude cannot be given serious consideration – it is the
86
The Merchant of Venice 87
residual anti-Semitism of the culture. The hatred of Shylock is much

more important but it is attributable more to his practice as a usurer
than to his being Jewish. D. M. Cohen makes the most coherent aca-
demic argument on the subject: if the play fosters negative feelings
towards Jews, then it is anti-Semitic. He concludes on the basis of his
detailed examination that it is anti-Semitic (Cohen, 1980, pp. 53–63).
I am not persuaded; I think the contradictory quality of the play
encourages mixed feelings about Shylock but that his Jewishness is
not particularly significant among them. That does not mean that
the play cannot be distorted into anti-Semitism, as it was under the
Nazis, and literal or documentary treatments generally tend to distort
it. In any event, concentration on anti-Semitism has intensified a ten-
dency to see the play in isolation and encouraged a literal, naturalistic
interpretation, making it more difficult to understand. A naturalis-
tic approach ignores different kinds of signalling in the play and
attempts to impose rational reasons on the improbabilities of fan-
tasy. Looking at Merchant in the context of the Problem Plays should
make the play’s experimental nature much clearer and bring into
prominence issues other than the Jewish question. The play certainly
generates ambivalent responses but, in the light of the other Prob-
lem Plays, it should be clear that this is neither a fault of composition
nor an incidental feature.
Although many of the earlier plays deal with contradictory ele-
ments such as conflicting values and behaviour – Falstaff being
what is probably the clearest example – Merchant is the first of
Shakespeare’s plays to make contradiction part of the dramaturgy,
the construction of response from perspectives that are in conflict
but are inseparable. In broad outline (and following from the main
source, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s fourteenth-century story Il Pecorone,
published in Italy in 1558), the play is a romantic comedy: two
lovers, Portia and Bassanio, overcome obstacles and, after defeat-
ing Shylock’s threat to the life of Antonio, Bassanio’s benefactor,
celebrate their union. What makes the play particularly interesting
is that whereas in the source the events are presented in a rather
matter-of-fact manner and hardly any more attention is given to the
responses of the Jewish money-lender than the little required by the
plot, Shakespeare gives a depth of treatment to the same events and,
most importantly, makes the money-lender the emotional centre of
the play.
The play begins with Antonio’s melancholia but, with the arrival of
Bassanio, the theme of marriage is introduced. The second scene takes
place in the idyllic world of Belmont where, in fairy-tale conditions,
marriage is the dominant concern – Portia is being courted by noble
suitors from diverse lands. In one sense she fits the role of fairy-tale
heroine – she is young, witty and has romantic aspirations – but her
wish to make her own choice is nullified by the ‘magical’ conditions
imposed by her late father: ‘so is the will of a living daughter curbed
by the will of a dead father’ (1.2.23–4). This conflict of wills can be
comfortably contained within the fairy-tale world and romance may
thrive so long as the right noble chooses the right casket. However,
Belmont is bound inseparably to Venice, where the determinants of
the action are quite different. In Venice, when Antonio asks Bassanio
about the lady who has become the focus of his attentions, the
interchange introduces elements that seem to negate the spirit of
romance. For 35 lines Bassanio speaks about his lack of funds and
his scheme to clear his debt to Antonio, and only then does he direct
his speech to the matter originally raised by Antonio: ‘In Belmont
is a lady richly left’. Her financial position is then followed by a
brief generalization of her personal qualities: ‘And she is fair and,
fairer than that word, / Of wondrous virtues’ (1.1.161–3). Antonio
was asking about the woman and Bassanio’s answer, while not very
forthcoming is not an evasion, for he indicates her distinguishing
attraction: she is of course fair and virtuous but the prime virtue is
financial. As a Hollywood star is reported once to have said, ‘Money
is the greatest aphrodisiac’ – the concerns of Venice are clearly dis-
tinguished from those of Belmont. They may be expressed in the
same words but are fundamentally different, and the different orien-
tations of the two lovers become even clearer when they engage face
to face.
The different styles of discourse also distinguish the two locations
of the playworld. Bassanio and Antonio in Venice speak in a man-
ner that tends towards the naturalistic; they are two recognizable
types – the self-obsessed, callow adolescent and the doting, melan-
cholic middle-aged gentleman. In Belmont, however, we have music
and a hint of supernatural influences: Nerissa says to Portia,
Your father was ever virtuous, and holy men at their death have
good inspirations; therefore the lott’ry that he hath devised in
these three chests of gold, silver, and lead, whereof who chooses
his meaning chooses you, will no doubt never be chosen by any
rightly but one who you shall rightly love.
(1.2.27–32)
The character-sketches of the different suitors presented by Portia –

based largely on their national types – while not at all magical
is different from the more naturalistic style of Venice; it is a set
piece. She begins in response to Nerissa’s leading question about
whether she fancies any of the suitors: ‘I pray thee overname them;
and as thou namest them, I will describe them and, according to
my description, level at my affection’ (1.2.35–7). The Frenchman,
for example, has an unstable character – ‘If I should marry him,
I should marry twenty husbands’ (1.2.60–1). The German is a drunk-
ard. The Englishman fits the stereotype of the English traveller to
the Continent: ‘How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doub-
let in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and
his behaviour everywhere’ (1.2.70–3). The passage lasts 61 lines, a
long stage-time; it is an amusing interchange but of no plot sig-
nificance, like Jaques’s Seven Ages of Man or descriptions from a
character-book.1
In Venice Bassanio’s Belmont ambitions meet with an obstacle:
Antonio, having agreed to furnish the funds Bassanio needs to invest
in his wooing, does not have the ready cash. He says to Bassanio in
closing the first scene:
Try what my credit can in Venice do;

That shall be racked, even to the uttermost,
To furnish thee to Belmont, to fair Portia.
Go presently inquire, and so will I,
Where money is, and I not question make
To have it of my trust or for my sake.
(1.1.180–5)
Scene 3 opens with Bassanio seeking the necessary credit from

Shylock. The business is relatively simple – Shylock considers the
requested loan to Antonio of 3000 ducats for three months – but the
difference in the perspective of Shylock and Bassanio is profound.
Shylock’s style of speech gives the sense that he is dealing with a

solid world of interrelated practical considerations; Bassanio’s style
suggests a narrow focus on his own concerns and attention to image,
with little awareness of actual content. In the interchange Shylock
repeats everything Bassanio says, which slows it down until Bassanio
asks impatiently, in three different formulations, whether Shylock
will lend Antonio the money: ‘May you stead me? Will you pleasure
me? Shall I know your answer?’ (1.3.7–8). The same reiteration and
impatient response occurs in the next two lines. Then Shakespeare
makes explicit the divergence of their perspectives: ‘Antonio is a
good man’, says Shylock, and Bassanio responds ‘Have you heard
any imputation to the contrary?’. Shylock chuckles at this and
explains that he meant Antonio is good for the money, ‘sufficient’.
(1.3.12–17). Reality is simple for Bassanio, whereas for Shylock it
is complex and conditional. Similarly, when Shylock concludes his
brief catalogue of the risks faced by Antonio’s ventures with ‘The
man is, notwithstanding, sufficient. Three thousand ducats; I think
I may take his bond’, Bassanio says, ‘Be assured you may.’ Shylock
replies, ‘I will be assured I may, and that I may be assured, I will
bethink me’ (1.3.25–9). The difference is not simply a matter of
two opposed views; it is that Bassanio uses ‘assured’ in the man-
ner of a conventional affirmation, a phrase without any sense of
the material reality behind the word. Shylock uses it concretely, as
an actual financial safeguard, not just the social image. Bassanio
shows himself shallow as well as impatient; Shylock, as wise and
willing to punish him by adopting a leisurely, mock-incompetent,
style.
Shylock treats Antonio in a similar way. It is more elaborated, with
more of the respect between equals, but tries Antonio’s patience by
straying from the purpose of the conversation. The extended digres-
sion on Jacob and Laban’s sheep is not actually relevant to their
discussion but a tangent which Antonio must follow in case some-
thing of importance depends on it, even though he does not quite
comprehend it. Shylock is teasing him, wrong-footing him. Shylock’s
dialogue suggests the heightened awareness of the outsider, conscious
of the actuality as well as the image. Antonio, leading Christian mer-
chant, inhabits the official view and, with no incentive to imagine
a different perspective, he does not have the capacity to compete
in Shylock’s game. Shylock is running rings around both Antonio
and Bassanio. This is wittier than the comic scenes; it could be a

music-hall routine and it makes Shylock a source of pleasure for the
audience.
Although Shylock’s understanding is presented as superior to that
of Antonio and Bassanio, he is also established as morally inferior.
He first defines himself as different in rejecting Bassanio’s invitation
to dine. While it was not a sign of a hospitable nature on Bassanio’s
part so much as a matter of convenience, Shylock’s response is churl-
ish but also shows that he sees dining as complex, part of a wider
context (1.3.31–5). He becomes decidedly negative in his aside when
Antonio arrives. (The earlier passage, often editorially marked as an
aside, grammatically addresses the second person, Bassanio – that is,
it is not properly an aside – whereas the second passage (1.3.38–49),
speaking of Antonio in the third person, clearly is an aside.) It is
anti-Christian but also makes clear that he bears an ‘ancient grudge’
against Antonio for his attacks on him as Jewish and for his usury.
While the hostility of the aside is likely to be rather alienating for
an audience, Antonio’s arrogant tone deprives him of the superior-
ity his principles might otherwise give him. When Antonio becomes
impatient for an answer – ‘Well, Shylock, shall we be beholden to
you?’ (1.3.102) – Shylock gives his well-known ‘Hath a dog money?’
speech, making quite understandable his dislike of Antonio. At 23
lines, it is a relatively long speech and it is an intense one. More
than providing an explanation or justification for his hatred, it has
an important function for directing audience response: it establishes
Shylock as more ‘real’. He details the insults and humiliations he has
suffered at the hands of Antonio but, more than simply a narrative of
his wrongs, he makes everything particular rather than generalizing,
and he uses terms that are concrete and make the incidents he relates
very visualizable.
Signor Antonio, many a time and oft

In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances.
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat, dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gabardine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
The ‘shrug’ makes clear the patience and the sufferance, not as defini-
tion but as experience. When Antonio spits on his ‘Jewish gabardine’,
Shylock is not simply spat upon; saying where the spit lands makes
it visualized. This is even more vivid below in the parenthesis that
Antonio voids his rheum on Shylock’s beard.
Well then, it now appears you need my help.

Go to, then. You come to me and you say,
‘Shylock, we would have moneys’: you say so –
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold, moneys is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say
‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’
(1.3.103–19)
Shylock’s narration is not just bald enumeration of events; he makes

a verbal enactment. He then extends his dramatization by picturing
the response that illustrates his projection of Antonio’s attitude. The
irony is intensified by visualization.
Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,

With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness,
Say this: ‘Fair sir, you spat on me on Wednesday last;
You spurned me such a day; another time
You called me dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?
(1.3.120–5)
This concrete expression of Shylock’s anger gives him a dramatic sta-

tus different from the other characters. Not only is he more colourful
and interesting; he is more real to an audience than other characters
and, most important, what he says therefore has a higher level of
credibility. Compare his six lines above with six from the middle of
Bassanio’s speech describing Portia to Antonio:
Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth,

For the four winds blow in from every coast
Renownèd suitors, and her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchis’ strand,
And many Jasons come in quest of her.
(1.1.167–72)
While ‘golden fleece’ and ‘Colchis’ strand’ are specific, they have
a classical status which is different from everyday material reality;
they are merely rhetorical. Portia is not distinguishable from any
other princess praised for her fortune. Shylock’s speech is of a dif-
ferent order from Bassanio’s; Shakespeare gives Shylock dramatic
authority.
Antonio does not soften in response to Shylock’s expression of his
grievances – he will treat him the same way again – and he suggests
that if Shylock will lend him money, he should do it in a spirit of
hostility. Shylock toys with him still with mock friendship, and thus
comes about the flesh bond, ‘in a merry sport’ (1.3.142). Although
Bassanio objects to the bond, Antonio is supremely confident, a sense
which seems to be reinforced by Shylock’s logic that he would have
nothing to gain from the forfeit.
If we recognize the authority that Shylock’s speech has acquired
from its materiality, it is clearer what Shakespeare is doing in the
play’s best-known, ‘hath not a Jew’ speech. Taken out of its context,
the speech is often misjudged as Shylock’s (or Shakespeare’s) argu-
ment for the common humanity of Jews. Shylock is no humanist and,
at this point in the plot, he is beside himself: Jessica has eloped with
Lorenzo, taking with her a casket of his jewels, and Solanio reports
him making a spectacle of himself in the streets, mocked by the boys
of Venice for his confused, distraught speech:
‘My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!

Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!
Justice! The law! My ducats and my daughter!’
(2.8.15–17)
The rumour of Antonio having lost one of his ships and Solanio’s
uneasiness about the consequent increase of the danger for him in
regard to the bond is confirmed in the next Venetian scene. Solanio
and Salarino goad Shylock about his loss and then ask him for any
more information about Antonio’s rumoured loss. Shylock calls him
‘A bankrupt, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto;
a beggar, that was used to come so smug upon the mart’, and then
brings home to them his hostile intention, saying three times in so
many lines, ‘let him look to his bond’ (3.1.41–7). Salarino, with con-
ventional, shallow judgement, asks, ‘Why, I am sure, if he forfeit,
thou wilt not take his flesh. What’s that good for?’ (3.1.48–9). The
question is rhetorical – Salarino cannot conceive of anyone wanting
to collect such a forfeit; but Shylock treats it as if it were a genuine
question and answers in pseudo-practical terms: ‘To bait fish withal’.
He then converts it into a relevant response: ‘If it will feed nothing
else, it will feed my revenge’ (3.1.50–1). Similar to the earlier detailed
rehearsal of his humiliation in negotiating terms with Antonio, he
explains in material terms his turn to vengeance:
He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed

at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted
my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies. And what’s
his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in
the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what
should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The
villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will
better the instruction.
(3.1.51–69)
The long detailing of the similarities of Jews to Christians is not

a plea for equal humanity but a justification for and commitment
to revenge. The force of the speech comes in some part from its
rhetorically structured lists and interrogatories but even more from

the concreteness of its images. His humanity is not to be found in his
bleeding, laughing and dying in common with Christians but in his
sense of his own dignity and his hatred of anyone or anything that
would take that away. It is his status as a feeling human being, not
his logic, that he confirms in his demand for revenge.
Revenge is unchristian – Jesus said, not ‘An eye for an eye, and
a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but
whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also’ (Matthew 5: 38–9). Revenge had an enormous attraction for the
Elizabethans. Bacon called it ‘a kind of wild justice; which the more
man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out’ (Bacon,
1972, p. 13), and ‘wild justice’ indicates one of its attractions. Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy, entirely concerned with the revenge of several out-
rageous wrongs, was one of the most enduringly popular plays of
the time. Greene dealt positively with revenge in a number of works
and Nashe celebrated at some length the passion and dedication
of the revenger Cutwolf in The Unfortunate Traveller. Marlowe’s Jew
of Malta, on which Shakespeare drew heavily in Merchant, makes a
strong correlation between personal dignity and revenge.
Many commentators are very shy about the attractions of revenge,
a problem that seems to come from a naturalistic confusion of
imagined with literal action and fantasy with presentation of real
behaviour. The delight Elizabethans took in the extraordinarily pop-
ular Tamburlaine does not imply that they found mass slaughter
acceptable; it indicates the pleasure of contemplating action where
they can see an image of a fantastic restorative justice when they
could not realistically hope for actual justice in real life. It is the atti-
tude embodied in the action, rather than the action itself, that should
be attended to. Shylock as a revenger fits this pattern. He offers an
image of victory over his oppressors that is satisfying as an image but
has no reality beyond the playworld. Admiration for Shylock, then,
does not indicate a moral defect on the part of the audience or reader;
rather it suggests a sensitivity to injustice and an ability to respond
to the emotions involved in the revenge: yet sympathy with revenge
is not an encouragement to imitate the action. The play is, after all,
a play.
The popular recognition of the revenger’s role gives Shylock some
emotional authority; the revenger, until the end, is a hero, and his
villainous behaviour is less an obstacle to public approbation than

it might appear. Revenge and also jealousy are the most intense
themes of the culture of the age, and audience involvement with the
theme is enhanced by the language of the heroes which conveys their
intensity and gives them colour beyond that of daily life. Marlowe
gives Tamburlaine soaring language – ‘Not Hermes, prolocutor to the
gods, / Could use persuasions more pathetical’, and in the induc-
tion to the play promises ‘high astounding terms’ (Marlowe, 1988a,
1.2.210, Prologue 5). Hieronimo, Vindice, Livia, Flamineo all share a
linguistic vividness. Shylock’s language, not so elevated as that of the
tragic heroes, has yet a specificity and material quality that convey
the intensity of his feelings and give his speech a force far beyond
that of all the other characters.
The climax of Shylock’s activity is of course the revenge crisis, the
trial scene. This also brings together the comic with the tragic and
the conventional authority of the law with Shylock’s authority of
perspective. Technically a court process would appear to be unneces-
sary for Shylock to recover his bond – Antonio has failed to meet the
terms of the bond and therefore Shylock can collect the forfeit – but
obviously it is necessary dramaturgically. In the courtroom Shylock is
unyielding, but others assume that he is making a point of principle
and will ultimately relent, which is what the Duke says in opening
the proceedings with a dull and wordy piece of conventional rhetoric:
Shylock, the world thinks – and I think so too –

That thou but leadest this fashion of thy malice
To the last hour of act, and then ’tis thought
Thou’lt show thy mercy and remorse more strange
Than is thy strange apparent cruelty.
(4.1.16–20)
Since the play is a comedy with a theme of romantic love, perhaps

the audience should anticipate a happy ending? The conventional
Venetian view shown by the Duke and others seems, however, to be
mocked by Shakespeare, reduced almost to the point of absurdity:
the Duke suggests that part of Shylock’s mercy will be that, aware
of Antonio’s losses, he will probably want to excuse him half the
principal of the debt as well as the forfeit (4.1.23–5). Shakespeare
has not made Shylock into a homicidal monster and, from a natu-
ralistic view, there is a slender basis for an expectation of a peaceful
resolution. Shylock did not immediately reveal an intention to kill
Antonio when Tubal told him of his financial failure: ‘There came
divers of Antonio’s creditors in my company to Venice that swear he
cannot choose but break’; to which Shylock responds, ‘I am very glad
of it. I’ll plague him, I’ll torture him. I am glad of it’ (3.1.106–10).
Some ten lines later he says, ‘I will have the heart of him if he for-
feit, for were he out of Venice I can make what merchandise I will’
(3.1.119–21). Even here it is possible that he is speaking metaphori-
cally, indicating attitude rather than an actual murderous intention,
wanting to see Antonio ruined and thus to be free of a business obsta-
cle. In the court, however, what might earlier have been metaphorical
has become substantial and the divergence of perspectives becomes
apparent. Shylock, in concluding a speech of 26 lines, refuses to
explain his reasons for insisting on the bond, other than his hatred
for Antonio.
In the courtroom, when he insists on the forfeit of his bond in
reply to the Duke’s appeal for generosity, Shylock re-establishes his
contract-based authority with the words, ‘If you deny it, let the dan-
ger light / Upon your charter and your city’s freedom’ (4.1.37–8).
Material reality – the commercial life of Venice – wins over injunc-
tions to gentility and gracious behaviour. He insists on the bond
because ‘it is my humour’ (4.1.42) and he will give no reason other
than ‘a lodged hate and a certain loathing / I bear Antonio’ (4.1.59–
60). Bassanio, speaking from the world of image, objects: ‘This is no
answer, thou unfeeling man, / To excuse the current of thy cruelty.’
Shylock, with an impolite truth from the world of reality, retorts,
‘I am not bound to please thee with my answers’ (4.1.62–4). The
same game is played in a different key when the Duke says, ‘How
shalt thou hope for mercy, rend’ring none?’ – a reasonable philo-
sophical question in the abstract. From his different perspective,
Shylock replies, ‘What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong?’
(4.1.87–8). His reality principle is further extended when he points
out that the Venetians have slaves and do with them as they will;
he ‘dearly bought’ the pound of flesh and will have it – ‘I stand for
judgement’ (4.1.99, 102). Shylock again makes clear that his under-
standing is different from that of the others when Graziano says, ‘Can
no prayers pierce thee?’, Shylock replies, ‘No, none that thou hast
wit enough to make’ (4.1.125–6). Although Graziano is ‘not overbur-

dened with forecast’, what Shylock indicates is more than scorn for
Graziano’s limited intelligence; Graziano clearly has no understand-
ing of Shylock’s motivation. Graziano then bursts into 11 lines of
invective against Shylock, who gives him a sharp put-down:
Till thou canst rail the seal from off my bond

Thou but offend’st thy lungs to speak so loud.
Repair thy wit, good youth, or it will fall
To cureless ruin. I stand here for law.
(4.1.138–41)
This is an attractively witty response which probably encourages pos-

itive feeling towards Shylock; and it also reflects what is (until Portia
enters) the reality of the situation.
Shakespeare reinforces Shylock’s position by continuing an oppo-
sition between material and conventional perspectives. Although
contract might be seen as part of convention, it is convention that
has legal force and thus is in effect material; Shylock uses that as
his ‘immovable object’, with no expectation of encountering any
‘irresistible force’. Shakespeare also continues to give him images
that support his authority through their concreteness, rather than
through their specific content or logical value. Thus the premises that
lead up to why he would prefer a pound of Antonio’s flesh to finan-
cial compensation give depth and credibility to the short answer that
he hates Antonio:
What if my house be troubled with a rat

And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats
To have it baned? What, are you answered yet?
Some men there are love not a gaping pig,
Some that are mad if they behold a cat,
And others when the bagpipe sings i’th’nose
Cannot contain their urine; for affection,
Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes. Now, for your answer:
As there is no firm reason to be rendered
Why he cannot abide a gaping pig,

Why he a harmless necessary cat,
Why he a woollen bagpipe, but of force
Must yield to such inevitable shame
As to offend, himself being offended;
So can I give no reason, nor I will not,
More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing
I bear Antonio, that I follow thus
A losing suit against him.
(4.1.43–61)
The instances do not impress by logic, and seem tangential in the

same way as his answer to Salerio and Solanio’s question of why he
wants Antonio’s flesh, but the detail and visualizable quality make
them powerful in establishing the speaker. Even something so simple
as Shylock saying ‘a lodged hate and a certain loathing’ rather than
a bare ‘I hate Antonio’, by its extension and the modifiers, impresses
its reality on the audience or readers – the ‘lodged’ suggests a history,
not an instant feeling, and ‘certain’ does not have the vague sense of
‘one of a number’ but of ‘definite’, ‘decided’, ‘fixed’. The most striking
image is not verbal but something actually seen by the audience –
Shylock whetting his knife on the sole of his shoe. To make sure that
its significance is inescapable, Shakespeare reinforces it with a brief
exchange between Bassanio and Shylock. When Bassanio asks, ‘Why
dost thou whet thy knife so earnestly?’, Shylock replies, ‘To cut the
forfeiture from that bankrupt there’ (4.1.120–1). The material reality
has an inescapable force; Bassanio’s question is used by Shakespeare
to draw attention to it.
Exhortation and moral force are powerless in the case. Shylock has
the authority of contract on his side, a type of relation on which
the commercial life of Venice depends, which is also stressed in the
Pecorone source, where it is a strong argument for letting the contract
stand. Thus in the court it very much looks as if Shylock is going
to get his pound of flesh. Because he still has authority, a successful
outcome for him seems dramaturgically appropriate – that is, until
Shakespeare brings in the cavalry in the person of Portia.
Portia is disguised as the young lawyer Balthasar; her power lies
in neither legal knowledge nor understanding of reality but in
something akin to divine intervention. When Bassanio, at the end

of Act 3, Scene 2, rushed off to Venice to attempt to rescue Antonio,
Portia sent to her cousin in Padua, the learned jurist Doctor Bellario
for ‘notes and garments’ (3.4.51) so that she and Nerissa could dis-
guise themselves as men of the law and intervene in the case. Portia,
the sheltered girl from pastoral Belmont, armed with no more than
the crib provided by Bellario, turns out to be a legal whizz. Her abil-
ity to turn the case round is not based on facility of argument, the
popular image of the barrister whose success is achieved through a
brilliant performance before the jury; it depends on an obscure point
of law – ‘if thou dost shed / One drop of Christian blood, thy lands
and goods / Are by the laws of Venice confiscate / Unto the state of
Venice’ (4.1.306–9). No one else in the courtroom knew the law; it is
the kind of point that perhaps could come out of long years of legal
experience and labour in obscure cases – neither of which Portia has.
Reality succumbs to fairy tale.
Shakespeare sets up the initial opposition between Shylock and
Portia in the same terms – abstract and concrete. Portia establishes
that the contract is valid and Antonio in danger. Her logic concludes
from this, ‘Then must the Jew be merciful.’ Shylock, with a different
logic, says, ‘On what compulsion must I? Tell me that’ (4.1.179–80).
This is the cue for Portia’s famous speech, that there is no compul-
sion to mercy, an extended statement of principles that have a strong
feeling of other-worldly Christian charm:
The quality of mercy is not strained.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway.
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God himself,
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this:

That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
(4.1.181–99)
As inviting to quotation as the speech may be, it lacks the particu-

larity of Shylock’s utterances and neither is it relevant. If you already
believe it, then it articulates that mercy is an excellent thing and is
persuasive through the attractiveness of the rhetoric (although some
commentators have found Portia, in this speech, prissy and unsym-
pathetic). If mercy is not central to your outlook, then it is empty
rhetoric – as Shylock’s response shows: ‘My deeds upon my head!
I crave the law, / The penalty and forfeit of my bond’ (4.1.203–4).
Even as an angel of mercy bearing a seemingly thorough know-
ledge of Venetian law, Portia cannot persuade Shylock to take money
instead of vengeance, and the scene appears to be moving inevitably
towards the cutting of the pound of flesh. Shylock warms in expan-
sive praise of the young judge. He feels still the strength of contract
and is not put off by Portia’s inquiry if there is a surgeon at hand
to stop Antonio from bleeding to death: he replies, ‘Is it so nom-
inated in the bond?’ When she suggests, ‘’Twere good you do so
much for charity’, he responds, ‘I cannot find it; ’tis not in the bond’
(4.1.256–9). The bond appears to be the highest law. With the knife
honed and the scales ready and Shylock about to collect his forfeit,
Portia, like God stopping Abraham’s knife just as he brings it to Isaac’s
throat, says, ‘Tarry a little; there is something else’ (4.1.302). As in the
Pecorone source, Portia has found the magic quibble – you can take the
flesh, but cannot shed ‘One drop of Christian blood’ (4.1.307). Magic
intervention: the tables are turned. Not only is Antonio freed but
Shylock is entitled only to his bond; he can have no financial substi-
tute or compensation or his original 3000 ducats. Furthermore, going
beyond the Pecorone source, magic Portia has found another law that
says an alien who seeks the life of a Venetian citizen will lose all
his goods and is also in danger of execution. Antonio remits Shylock
the lifetime use of his goods, on condition that he turn Christian
and wills everything to Jessica and Lorenzo. Other questions are,
of course, raised by his ‘graciousness’ but they do not enter the

playworld.
The defeat of the Shylock figure in Il Pecorone is, of course, much
simpler than Merchant’s elaboration. In the story the Jewish usurer,
warned that he will lose his head if he sheds even a drop of blood,
attempts a Dutch auction over the large monetary substitute for the
forfeit suggested by Giannetto (100,000 ducats, ten times the amount
of the debt). The lawyer, the Belmont wife in disguise, insists that the
stipulated forfeit of the bond is the only possible payment
‘At least give me my ten thousand ducats,’ the Jew continued, ‘and
accursed be the air you breathe and the place where you dwell.’
‘Do you not understand me?’ the lawyer said. ‘I will not pay you
anything at all. If you want to take your forfeit from him, take it.
If you do not, I shall make my declaration against you and cancel
your bond.’ . . . Then the Jew, seeing that he could not do what he
had wanted to do, took his bond and in fury tore it all up.
(Spencer, 1968, p. 193)
The chief personage in the story is the lawyer, not the usurer, who
is given neither character development nor sympathy. The usurer’s
motive is simplistic – to kill one of the greatest Christian merchants
of Venice – but why he should want to do this is never raised.
The trial in Merchant is one of Shakespeare’s most cleverly engin-
eered scenes. The development of the action focuses attention
increasingly on the bond and the due date, making awareness of
the forfeit ever clearer. The expectation of a bloody conclusion is
made increasingly strong, but this long build-up is turned round by
Portia, a late arrival, in 177 lines. The expectation is frustrated and,
although the humane position is victorious, the defeat of Shylock is
at the same time the destruction of the dramatic hero. Shakespeare
and the sources make clear that exacting the penalty of the flesh
bond would be inhuman, but at the same time Shylock is one of
Shakespeare’s most completely developed and human characters in
the sense that his responses are so fully realized and his motives clear,
and, most important, he is the character through whose perspective
we see events. This gives Shylock the contradictory position of being
repulsive at the level of rationality yet being the hero not only in
his role as main determinant of the play’s course of action but, also,
something functionally akin to our identifying with him, because we
are made to see the playworld through his eyes.
Although it seems unlikely that any audiences and readers would
hope for Antonio’s death, it is difficult not to feel somewhat disap-
pointed when Shylock is deprived of his pound of flesh. We have in
effect been put in the conflicted position of desiring with Shylock
something we would at the same time feel to be wrong. Shylock
assumes something equivalent to a tragic role (and has sometimes
been played that way) – he has been wronged and his defeat is
painful – but if what he pursues is wrong, then his defeat should feel
positive. The victorious character, Portia, should call forth delight in
her victory but, beside Shylock, she seems shallow and smug; the
pleasure in her victory is insufficient to overcome the disappoint-
ment in Shylock’s defeat.
There is another area of conflict that relates less to substance and
more to the form of presentation. The action in Venice in the build-
up to the trial scene has been presented in a manner that looks
towards naturalism – we experience the motivations of the charac-
ters and their encounters take place without serious violations of
probability. However, when Belmont enters Venice in the trial scene
we are presented with a conflict of representational modes – the
action in a naturalistic setting is now driven, not in accordance with
probability, but by a magic principle. Shylock loses by a trick, but a
trick that arrives from a different level of reality. This is no error on
Shakespeare’s part; it is a calculated change of ‘register’. The quasi-
naturalism that has been the dominant mode in the play up to this
point does not disappear but has been overtaken by a different set
of principles of representation. Shylock’s departure still has an air of
reality, as does the triumphalism of Graziano and Bassanio, but the
realism confusingly co-exists with Portia’s magical powers. There is an
inconsistency of representation, which is disturbing because it makes
it difficult to know what significance attaches to different actions.
Portia’s magical victory, achieved so quickly and with so little prepa-
ration of the audience, is disturbing also because it means that the
assumed consistency of relation between causes and effects no longer
applies. The flesh bond is a metaphor like ‘it cost an arm and a leg’ or
‘I’d give my right arm’ that Shakespeare treats as if it were real. At the
realistic level it is repulsively inhumane, the equivalent of judicial
punishments like amputations, pulling out tongues or cutting off

ears. Fear for Antonio’s life becomes important because he exists in
a quasi-naturalistic playworld. The dissociation of cause and effect –
magic overcoming ‘reality’ – negates the emotional significance of the
events. His rescue by an intervention from a fairy-tale world, while
welcome on the human level, is also disturbing in being so casual:
the ease of the rescue mocks the fear generated in the audience.
The last scene in Belmont, if we take the play as a tragicomedy,
seems unnecessary – Antonio has been saved – and in terms of plot
nothing in the playworld is altered by what happens in the scene.
As comedy, we may expect the celebration of the interrupted unions.
This is not needed in Il Pecorone because it was long celebration that
drove from the hero’s mind the due-date of the bond, and the story
ends on a ‘happily-ever-after’ note. But if we reflect on the play as
a whole, then the ‘meanwhile back at the ranch’ structure, alter-
nating between Venice and Belmont, needs something beyond the
conjunction of the two plots (or three, if we want to attribute semi-
independence to Lorenzo and Jessica) to guide audience response to
the unification of near-tragedy and romance and the two worlds.
The final scene is in effect a coda or envoi, ‘an epilogue or dis-
course to make plain / Some obscure precedence that hath tofore
been sain’ as Armado explains it in Love’s Labour’s Lost (3.1.79–80).
Shakespeare prepares a brief transition (19 lines) in Act 4, Scene 2,
indicating that some ‘battle of the sexes’ material must follow. The
final scene itself has a pantomimic quality that sends up the seri-
ousness of the flesh-bond main plot and also mocks the spirit of
romance.
The scene begins with a dozen of Shakespeare’s most mellifluous
lines – the first six with sighing sibilants, 10 to 12 with whispering
Ws. Lorenzo begins, ‘The moon shines bright’, a customary noc-
turnal element of romantic setting. He follows it with ‘In such a
night as this’, which also begins the next six speeches, until the
exchange is interrupted by the arrival of a messenger (5.1.1–24). The
soft and gracious atmosphere is later evoked again – ‘How sweet
the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!’ (5.1.54) – to which music, ‘the
touches of sweet harmony’, is added. Shades of the woodland magic
of Midsummer Night’s Dream. The setting is romantic, the lovers’ dis-
pute charming, the sound of the words enchanting, but the content
of the speeches themselves runs entirely in the opposite direction.
It deals with great loves that met with disaster – Troilus and Cressida,
Pyramus and Thisbe, Dido and Aeneas. Lorenzo, listening to the
music, philosophizes eloquently in a neo-Platonic vein, very quotable
but with no relevance to the rest of the play. Similarly, Portia is sen-
tentious in the same manner as in her first scene – for example, ‘How
far that little candle throws his beams – / So shines a good deed
in a naughty world’ (5.1.90–1). Portia’s string of proverbs leads eas-
ily into the folkloric exchange about the rings that she and Nerissa
in their legal disguise inveigled from Bassanio and Graziano, after
the trial.
Shakespeare brings in the ring quarrel very neatly, having Graziano
and Nerissa’s argument rise from the background while Portia is
welcoming Antonio. The subject is obviously Graziano, and then
Bassanio some 25 lines later, both having yielded to the requests of
‘Balthasar’ and his clerk for their rings; but it is also the opposition
between monetary value and sentiment that runs through the play.
When Portia asks the matter of the quarrel, Graziano dismisses
Nerissa’s complaint first on grounds of value, ‘a paltry ring / That
she did give me’ (5.1.147–8), and then on class grounds, that the
posy engraved on the ring was common: ‘For all the world like
cutler’s poetry / Upon a knife – “Love me, and leave me not” ’
(5.1.149–50). Nerissa responds that the ring’s importance is as a
symbol of their love:
What talk you of the posy or the value?

You swore to me when I did give it you
That you would wear it till your hour of death,
And that it should lie with you in your grave.
Portia supports her:
You were to blame, I must be plain with you

To part so slightly with your wife’s first gift,
A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger
And so riveted with faith unto your flesh.
(5.1.151–4, 166–9)
When Portia’s attention turns to Bassanio’s having given up his ring

as well, she refers to it as something ‘held as a ceremony’ (5.1.206).
In the Pecorone source, where the Lady of Belmont plays the same
legal role as Portia, there is also a ring incident but it is rather different
in character. She gets the ring from Giannetto and extracts a promise
from him that he will return directly to his wife, which he breaks
by spending a few days in celebration with friends in Venice. On his
return the lady is frosty with him, insisting that he met an old mis-
tress, and demands the ring. She plays the aggrieved wife longer than
Portia, tormenting Giannetto for having betrayed her. Moved by his
evident distress and his tears, she embraces him and explains that she
was herself the lawyer. She overcomes his astonishment by quoting
his words back to him. The incident has served only to increase their
mutual love. Shakespeare treats it much more lightly, as broad com-
edy. He does not dwell on the symbolic violation of relationship but
transfers the ‘ring’ reference to the traditional sexual sense, and he
concludes the play with the standard Renaissance cuckoldry trope:
Graziano says, ‘Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing / So sore
as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring’ (5.1.306–7). The effect of the flyting
over rings and the cuckoldry joking is to send up anything serious in
the play and to reinforce the Lorenzo–Jessica send-up of romance at
the beginning of the scene. The naturalistic elements have all disap-
peared after the trial scene; the playing of traditional roles in the final
scene is made very obvious and gives the whole play a pantomimic
quality.
Belmont still remains a fairy-tale world, and that is made clear
when Portia gives Antonio a letter reporting that his shipping that
was lost, seen to be lost, and a loss that almost cost him his
life, is saved: ‘There [in the letter] you shall find three of your
argosies / Are richly come to harbour suddenly’ (5.1.276–7). Magic!
And Portia’s own acquisition of the letter is not just unexplained but
it is announced as unexplained: ‘You shall not know by what strange
accident / I chancèd on this letter’ (5.1.278–9). Everything has been
nicely tied up, but the method conflicts with the logic of events; it is
sleight of hand and Shakespeare makes sure that there is enough of
it for readers and audience (if the director is willing) to recognize it
as such.
The Merchant of Venice has many aspects that should be regarded
as experimental – either used by Shakespeare for the first time or
seen in a more developed form in later plays. The later Problem
Plays, not surprisingly, have echoes of Merchant, and elements such

as cross-gender disguise become central to the action in the mature
comedies As You Like It and Twelfth Night and in the late romance
Cymbeline. The use of the ‘outsider’ perspective given to Shylock,
which offers the measure of the playworld’s reality, is also of
fundamental importance in Hamlet. The use of a pantomimic quality
in Merchant is certainly not new – it runs through the earlier come-
dies, as in the pageant of the Nine Worthies of Love’s Labour’s Lost or
the mechanicals’ play in Midsummer Night’s Dream, but Shakespeare
makes the good humour rather acid in Merchant. The effect is to desta-
bilize the serious elements with which it is juxtaposed. This is much
more primitive than the developed conflict of outlooks or world-
views that can be seen in the great tragedies or Measure for Measure
but it also succeeds in introducing a note of doubt. Thus the ‘official’
reality of the Duke, Antonio and the others, the ‘normal’ perspective,
is given only half-hearted affirmation, effectively a ‘yes, but’ reaction
which even though unarticulated creates a feeling of uncertainty in
response to the play.
A somewhat different aspect of creation of doubt through juxta-
position can be seen in the treatment of Christianity. Anti-Semitism,
despite so much discussion of the play having been hijacked by the
theme, is not an issue in itself. In the trial scene, where the behaviour
of Christians and Jews appears to be sharply distinguished, the
Christians are shown to have a gap between their practice and their
profession, which can be seen in Shylock’s speech about Venetians’
treatment of their slaves and in the blind hostility towards Jews of
the Venetian young men, especially Graziano. The punishment of
Shylock for his attempt to call in the flesh forfeit can also be seen
(and probably felt even more than seen) as injustice. Shylock says
that depriving him of his wealth – half to Antonio and half to the
state – is equivalent to taking his life:
Nay, take my life and all! Pardon not that!

You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.
(4.1.370–3)
The requirement that he turn Christian adds insult to injury. The

distinction drawn, that the Jews take interest and the Christians do
not, W. H. Auden points out, is less than it would appear:
When Antonio says:

I neither lend nor borrow
By taking or by giving of excess
he does not mean that, if he goes into partnership with another
merchant contributing, say, a thousand ducats to their venture,
and the venture makes a profit, he only asks for a thousand
ducats back. He is a merchant and the Aristotelian argument that
money is barren and cannot breed money, which he advances to
Shylock, is invalid in his own case. (Auden, 1963, pp. 225–6)
In regard to Shylock as a social enemy or a focus of hatred, it is

much more important that Shakespeare makes him a usurer than
a Jew. Usurers were perhaps the most hated figures of the period,
regarded as destroyers of homes and families through their dishonest
and cruel practices. In Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, an obvious inspiration
and model for Shakespeare’s play, Barabas makes a long speech boast-
ing of his monstrous misdeeds which provides a compact image of
the popular notion of the usurer:
Then after that was I an usurer,

And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I fill’d the gaols with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them:
I have as much coin as will buy the town.
(Marlowe, 1988b, 2.3.195–205)
This view of the usurer is supported by Thomas Lodge’s Alarum

Against Usurers (1584), which he says he wrote so that usurers, seeing
themselves in the mirror he provides, might amend themselves, and

so that those likely to fall into their hands ‘might be warned by
this caveat to shunne the Scorpion ere she devoureth’ (Lodge, 1584,
I, p. 3). One of Greene’s best cony-catching stories, from The Defence
of Cony-Catching (1592), is the tale of a witty woman who took
revenge on the usurer who cheated her young gentleman husband
out of his land and won the return of the land.
Furthermore, usurers are associated with lawyers, who practise their
trade in a language not understood by many of the people who come
to court, and who carry on the legal system that benefits the usurers.
When one of the rebels in Henry VI, Part II, says, ‘The first thing we
do, let’s kill all the Lawyers’, the reply of their leader, Jack Cade, recog-
nizes a long-standing social problem of which lawyers are the agents
(this was also raised in More’s Utopia in 1516):
Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb

should be made parchment? That parchment being scribbled o’er,
should undo a man? Some say the bee stings, but I say ’tis the bee’s
wax. For I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own
man since.
(2 Henry VI, 4.2.78–84)
Despite the pantomimic style, Cade’s lines would be likely to meet

with a positive and knowing response from Shakespeare’s audience.
The Merchant of Venice is a play that produces both pleasure and
disturbance. The energy of the play is attractive and the loose ele-
ments of its organization feel more like enthusiastic production
than a slipshod craft or conception. Yet the disturbance is also
very evident. Derek Cohen characterizes precisely the nature of the
uneasiness:
The reversal of The Merchant of Venice [the trial scene] defies a basic
premise of the normal moral logic of drama. Instead of merely
enjoying the overthrow of an unmitigated villain, we find our-
selves pitying him. The conclusion of the play is thus a triumph
of ambiguity: Shakespeare has sustained the moral argument
which dictates Shylock’s undoing while simultaneously com-
pelling us to react on an emotional level more compassionate than
intellectual.
(Cohen, 1980, p. 60)
The problem is more than the conflict of morality and sympathy or

of feeling and intellect. Like all the other Problem Plays, the play ends
with an unresolvable contradiction, between the comic form and
content that does not fit. Romantic Belmont is dependent on com-
mercial Venice; the sweetness of the romance is mocked by examples
of disaster and bawdy humour, the functional hero is ‘banished’ in a
trick reversal of fortune. It does not allow feelings to settle: any choice
of response is always challenged by its opposite. But though the force
of the conflict is clear, the clarity of definition that we can expect in
the later Problem Plays is not yet present (and that perhaps is one of
the reasons the play encourages so much argument). Shakespeare in
Merchant creates a clash of social orientations. He had touched on this
conflict lightly in the second history cycle, the rise of the new indi-
vidualism – ‘that smooth-faced gentleman, tickling commodity’ (King
John, 2.1.574) – was becoming problematic. Whereas Falstaff had at
first been amusing, even charming, in his individualistic behaviour,
negative qualities were beginning to show, making human relation-
ships more instrumental and their humanity starting to ring hollow.
This transformation is not articulated in Merchant (as it is in King
Lear or even Hamlet) but it underlies the conflicts that are part of
the structure of the play – the confrontation of commercial-financial
and romantic aspects of the same culture. This is also reflected in
Shakespeare’s mixing of his sources, drawing on tales of usury, on
Marlowe and on popular fiction of romance. Zelauto (1580) suggests
the paradoxical potential of revenge in relation to human dignity,
while Il Pecorone perhaps that romance is less a guarantor and more a
weak defender of human feeling.
Part of the energy of the play is the experimentation with different
dramatic techniques and the use of different sets of signals, not for
the information they contain but for the way a particular kind of sig-
nal characterizes what it is that is being signalled. In this Merchant is
probably Shakespeare’s most Brechtian play. The most obvious ana-
logy is film music – the soundtrack accompanying a romantic film
is (almost always) going to be very different from that which accom-
panies a horror film. The mixing of signal sets has a great potential
for irony, and Merchant is the first play where Shakespeare makes an
ironic structure – imposing a happy ending of a very different tone.
It is sufficiently stylized to make its happy quality clear, but at the
same time it is suffused with awkward qualities that undercut it – the
superficiality of the relationships and the fragility of the unions. Crit-

ical and other responses to the play suggest that the irony was not
entirely successful; but its use was better integrated in later plays and
more likely to be appreciated by audiences.
The irony suggests that the play has some kind of message but not
the sort that can be distilled Polonius-fashion into a clear moral. Like
All’s Well and Much Ado, there is no explicit message but the discom-
fort audiences are made to feel can contribute to destabilization of
the status quo. Belmont, home to romance, all sweetness and light,
is inseparable from Venice, home to hard finance. Shakespeare does
not make a logical argument or provide a lesson, but the oppositions
he creates should generate doubts and questions about the world in
which his audience live. It is a play that offers real pleasure and at the
same time shakes complacency and belief.
6
Troilus and Cressida
Troilus and Cressida is the earliest of the conventional Problem Plays.

Dated 1602, it closely follows Hamlet and presents a view of human
society that could well be regarded as continuing Hamlet’s negativ-
ity but, unlike Hamlet, its relation to the world outside the play is
almost inescapable. The play has gained little affection from read-
ers and audiences. At first this was probably because it smashes two
icons of Elizabethan society – the Trojan War and Chaucer’s romance;
later audiences, though less committed to the specific cultural values
under attack, are likely to have found its hostility difficult to accept
in the absence of other attractions such as character development,
action-filled plot and poetic richness. The images of bodily and social
corruption can also be disturbing and, for anyone coming to the play
since the changes in public consciousness wrought by feminism, the
misogyny of both Greeks and Trojans is likely to be uncomfortable
at the very least. Yet, even if not really liked, it is a play that is
respected. The extended speeches, taken out of context, won admi-
ration for their philosophical content from earlier twentieth-century
critics, and Ulysses’ council speech on the necessity of hierarchical
order (1.3), celebrated by Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture, defined
it as a play of ideas and made it important for at least a generation
of English students. While that did not make the play more pleasur-
able, it served to validate it as a serious work and gave Shakespeare
an intellectual status that could not be achieved through his light-
ning wit in the comedies. The feelings of disgust that are produced
throughout most of the play cannot be separated from the elevated
issues of state and they cannot be explained away as reflecting the
112
Troilus and Cressida 113
coarser sensibilities of a different age or to any exaggerated respect

for his sources on Shakespeare’s part; they are fundamental to the
play and how it functions.
The shocks to public consciousness of the First World War and
the Russian Revolution may have facilitated understanding Troilus
and Cressida in terms of a larger context in the years that followed.
The magisterial Tucker Brooke in 1928 called it ‘one of Shakespeare’s
subtlest studies of the effect of environment on character’ and ‘his
most definite realization of the social forces operative in England
at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign’. Yet in introducing his state-
ment he labelled the play ‘That colossal and magnificent failure’
(Brooke, 1928, p. 572). Why failure? The play does not have the
coherence of form that could guide audience response, and it is con-
fusing in terms of genre. Is it a biting comedy? Or is it a tragedy?
Is Shakespeare being serious or ironic? Without clarity of genre it
is difficult for an audience or readers to orientate themselves. The
clear indications of comic structure in All’s Well That Ends Well, for
example, make it possible for the audience to be frustrated by the
contradiction of the ending. The expectation of a happy ending
that accompanies recognition of the comic structure is confronted
with a contrary content. Similarly, responses to Othello are largely
dependent on expectations associated with it being a tragedy. The
contradiction between the expectation and the actual result produces
the disturbance that is characteristic of the Problem Plays. Troilus and
Cressida, lacking formal clarity, depends on a contradiction of a dif-
ferent order: Shakespeare presents a content that introduces major
values of the Elizabethan age and shows that in practice they are hol-
low. The play demonstrates that these characters’ adherence to the
values is merely formal; the actuality of behaviour, the content, con-
tradicts them. The play may be a failure as a play, as Brooke said, but
at the same time, in the scope and depth of its social critique, it is
indeed ‘colossal and magnificent’.
Although the play may not be immediately attractive to audi-
ences or readers, Shakespeare’s wit is caustic and scalpel-sharp, and
his skilful display of stripping the gilt from a monument of British
pride can make the play satisfying. Its emotional energy envelops
the audience and makes for an intense dramatic experience, even
if not an entirely pleasant one. He takes the romantic narrative
of the title from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and sets it against
events drawn from well-known narratives of the Trojan War, severely

testing the values of romance, honour and military virtue. The dra-
maturgical problems are complicated: Shakespeare has not simply to
reveal actions that an audience would themselves recognize as vio-
lating their social codes; he must also, and at the same time, call
into question the criteria by which the actions are judged. This is
a complexity of a different order from, say, exposing the villainy
of Richard III, who announces himself as a bad man and behaves
in a thoroughly villainous manner. Although he violates the codes
of behaviour, he never challenges the codes themselves: he con-
firms rather than questions conventional views of good and bad.
In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare takes a quasi-mythical event that
embodies positive value, the Trojan War, and transforms it bit by
bit into something thoroughly negative. He also debases romance
through travestying Chaucer’s elegant and courtly Troilus and
Criseyde.
Contemporary interest in the Trojan War and writing about Troy
was so widespread that it would be easy to assume that Shakespeare
was merely dramatizing current material. ‘The matter of Troy’ was
one of the popular themes of the age and there was no shortage
of source material: some of Chapman’s translation of Homer had
already appeared, there were detailed accounts of the war by Caxton
and by Lydgate, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde was still current and
had recently been dramatized by the Lord Admiral’s Men, and Robert
Greene’s Euphues His Censure to Philautus was composed of dialogues
spoken by four of the war’s heroes. Shakespeare made use of this
material and invented little; his imaginative power is shown in visu-
alizing it in an alternative perspective and producing a significance
contrary to received interpretations.
It is important to recognize that ‘the matter of Troy’ was common
beyond a literary elite. If Shakespeare’s own reflecting of popular con-
sciousness can be accepted as reasonably accurate, characters from
the Troy tale frequently entered ordinary conversation. In Twelfth
Night, for example, Feste wheedles a second coin from Viola say-
ing, ‘I would play Lord Pandarus of Phrygia, sir, to bring a Cressida
to this Troilus’ (3.1.49–50); and Doll Tearsheet, in Henry IV, Part 2,
comically confuses Hector and Agamemnon with the native Nine
Worthies (2.4.210–12); and in the last act of The Merchant of Venice
Lorenzo tells Jessica, ‘in such a night / Troilus methinks mounted
the Trojan walls / And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents, /
Where Cressid lay that night’ (5.1.3–6). The use of a Trojan War set-
ting by the highly popular and commercially astute Robert Greene
would also suggest the general currency of the theme.
More than just a familiar reference and a source of images, the
Trojan War was also a focus of value for Elizabethans. Marlowe
emphasizes this in crowning Doctor Faustus’s life with Helen of
Troy as his paramour: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand
ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ (Marlowe, 1988b,
5.1.7–8). Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his twelfth-century Historia
Regium Britanniae, traced the origins of Britain back to the fall of Troy.
Aeneas left the burning city with his old father Anchises and his
young son Ascanius and, after Dido’s romantic and tragic interrup-
tion of the historic ‘project’ imposed on him by the gods and Virgil,
went on to found Rome. His great-grandson Brute, having shot an
arrow that accidentally killed his father, fled Italy, eventually land-
ing at Totnes in Devon, where he founded the kingdom of Brutayne
or Britain. This founding tale became popular, in effect supported
by a regime for which it provided an image of deep roots: because
the Tudors were new aristocracy, regarded as upstarts by many who
traced their families back to the Norman conquest, even a mytholog-
ical long history could lend a useful patina of age and establishment.
The technique was not new, of course; the Emperor Augustus, with
the assistance of Virgil whose Aeneid presented Rome and its rulers
as the natural and divine heirs of Troy, gave his rule an aura of long-
standing legitimacy. The myth of Trojan origins was also paralleled in
the currency of the Arthurian legend – the short-lived Tudor Prince,
Henry VIII’s elder brother, was named Arthur. Brute founded New
Troy, later called London, and which was often referred to as Troy
Novant, and William Dunbar (c.1460–c.1520), in his ‘In Honour of
the City of London’, calls it ‘thou lusty Troynovaunt . . . Citie that
some tyme cleped was New Troy’. There was, naturally, a bias in
favour of the Trojans; they were represented as being more civi-
lized and more honourable, and it was only the treachery of the
Greeks that caused them to lose the war. In the popular Elizabethan
attribution of traits to different nationalities, Greeks were often char-
acterized as liars, while ‘Trojan’ was modified by ‘true’ or ‘trusty’.
In the show of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Costard uses
‘honest Troyan’ (5.2.667).
Of the many sources used by Shakespeare, three have particular

importance. Two he drew on directly for plot. The war material comes
largely from Caxton’s Thirde Booke of the destruccion of Troye of The
Recuile of the Histories of Troie, which has a chronicle style of unvar-
nished narrative. Shakespeare’s intention was clearly not a chronicle
play, and he used the events Caxton narrates (sometimes supple-
mented from Lydgate’s Troye Book) as raw material, a framework of
events that he could expand to include character and motive, and
which he could change significantly when it suited his purpose. The
plot of the romance he took from Chaucer but again gave the charac-
ters rather different qualities. Chaucer was regarded as the founding
father of English poetry, very much respected as the English Homer,
even if changes in the English language meant he was not read
as widely as his reputation would suggest. His Troilus and Criseyde
was a sophisticated courtly poem – coherently structured, elegant,
charming, witty and also touching. Shakespeare makes a bitter par-
ody of it: he keeps the personages but makes a negative elaboration of
their character, transforming Chaucer’s social refinement into naked
individualism.
The third source, Greene’s Euphues His Censure to Philautus (1587),
could perhaps be more accurately described as a ‘stimulus’. Greene
was arguably the most popular writer of the late sixteenth century
and certainly the most prolific producer of fiction; he must be reck-
oned an excellent judge of the market and the appeal of the matter of
Troy. The work is set in an interlude in the fighting, a truce of 30 days,
where the most important personages of the two sides meet to ban-
quet and discourse. This seems to have suggested to Shakespeare the
debates of the Greek council and of the Trojan court and the visit
of Hector and his entourage to the Greek camp. Thus the fiction
is of some structural importance to the play but, of greater signif-
icance, it expresses a simplistic, idealized view of the war against
which Shakespeare reacted. Greene in his address to the reader
offers ‘sophomachia’, ‘a philosophicall combat betweene Hector and
Achilles, wherein in the persons of the Troians and Gretian Lords,
are in foure discourses inriched with foure delightfull Hystories, the
vertuous minds of true nobilities and gentilitie pleasantly discovered’
(Grosart, 1881–6, vol. 6, p. 155). Shakespeare does not allude to it but
systematically dismembers what Greene held up for value. For exam-
ple, he makes a material transformation of Greene’s atmosphere of
graciousness in the behaviour of Hector and Achilles towards each

other. In Greene they express admiration on seeing each other free
of concealing armour for the first time – courtesy outweighs conflict.
Shakespeare allows no such pleasant ceremony; their mutual exami-
nation is entirely hostile and threatening, as in Achilles’ elaboration
of his remark that he would examine Hector ‘As I would buy thee,
view thee limb by limb’:
. . . in which part of his body

Shall I destroy him? – whether there, or there, or there? –
That I may give the local wound a name,
And make distinct the very breach whereout
Hector’s great spirit flew.
(4.5.237, 241–5)
Greene could offer significant social critique when he chose to do so

(for instance, in Pandosto, 1588, and Ciceronis Amor, 1589), and that
is an important element of his popularity, but it is entirely absent in
his fiction of the Trojan War and there is none of Shakespeare’s ref-
erence to the human cost of the war and ever-present death. Greene
constructs a stage-set of pseudo-courtliness with honour and nobility
as mere labels; it is shallow and meretricious. Shakespeare takes what
is nominally the same material and re-contextualizes it to show that
the chivalry of both Trojans and Greeks is hollow.
Discussions of Troilus and Cressida’s’ sources recognize, in
Bullough’s words, that Shakespeare ‘modified both the tone and inci-
dents he found in his classical and medieval sources’ (Bullough, 1966,
p. 100). Some of the changes can be seen as no more than responses
to the dramaturgical need for a smaller canvas or a tighter plot, as
when he changes Diomedes’ attachment from Caxton’s Breseida to
Cressida (fol. 29r) or transfers Caxton’s description of the death of
Troilus to that of Hector. The changes that are of importance, how-
ever, are not simple alterations of event so much as transformations
of their emotional value. These take place on three sorts of material:
politics, combat and romance.
The Prologue of Troilus and Cressida opens the play on a singu-
larly flat tone. It serves the introductory function of letting you know
where you are in the playworld and what the play is about but the
Prologue speaker announces he is no more than a messenger with

limited knowledge and that the play begins in medias res. He is indif-
ferent to audience response: ‘Like or find fault; do as your pleasures
are’ (Prologue: 30). We have seen such verbal neutrality before, for
example, in ‘applaud his fortunes as you please’ of the Prologue to
Tamburlaine, but Marlowe’s posture of apparent indifference is in fact
a challenge to received morality. Shakespeare, although he is as capa-
ble of Marlovian rhetoric as Marlowe himself, gives us a speaker in
the Prologue with the conviction and language of an estate agent:
‘orgulous’, ‘immures’, ‘fraughtage’, gates ‘with massy staples / And
corresponsive and fulfilling bolts’.
The Prologue leads us to no ‘stately tent of war’ but to the music-
hall atmosphere of the first scene where the young lover makes the
conventional complaint and is frustrated by Pandarus teasing him,
whetting his desires while delaying any move towards their fulfil-
ment. The war does not intrude until Aeneas arrives to announce that
Paris has been wounded by Menelaus, which is immediately made
subject for wit when Troilus quips ‘Paris is gored with Menelaus’
horn’ (1.1.108). The air of triviality continues in the second scene
with Cressida’s witty replies to her servant and then to Pandarus,
whom she sends up with her literal responses to his rather abstractly
phrased praise as he tries to persuade her of Troilus’ excellence. Thus
to Pandarus’ citing of Troilus’ intelligence, ‘Hector shall not have his
wit this year’, she replies, ‘He shall not need it, if he have his own’
(1.2.81–3). This is a pun-type conventional humour, taking an unin-
tended but more material or literal meaning. Shakespeare does not
pursue the potential charm of such interchanges, as he does in some
of the comedies; he uses the dialogue here to undermine the serious-
ness of both war and romance, and he distances the romantic aspects
further when he turns the banter to sexual innuendo. The scene con-
cludes with Cressida’s sonnet that every woman knows that men’s
desire to please them dissipates with the satisfaction of their sexual
urge. It is the complement of the perspective presented in sonnet 129
(‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’) where pursuit of sex is
‘perjur’d’, ‘not to trust’. This gives Cressida a rather knowing charac-
ter, witty but with somewhat sluttish overtones. Chaucer’s Cressida
is genteel and has a reserve that would have been considered most
appropriate, but Chaucer also indicates that she is a widow, who
would therefore be accepted as sexually knowledgeable.
The tone of the first two scenes conditions the reception of the next
one in the Greek camp. The setting is serious (a council), the issue is
serious (the failure to make progress in the war), but the opening
speech by Agamemnon does not match that seriousness; it avoids
engaging with the problem by blaming the failure of the Greeks on
the gods:
Why then, you princes,
Do you with cheeks abashed behold our works,
And call them shames, which are indeed nought else
But the protractive trials of great Jove
To find persistive constancy in men?
(1.3.16–20)
Aged Nestor reiterates Agamemnon’s points in proverbial style and
Ulysses, with excessive praise of Agamemnon’s speech, prepares
to provide his own analysis, one of the most quoted speeches of
Shakespeare. It is a late-medieval view of the interdependence of
all the elements of the universe, vigorously presented but conven-
tional. Tillyard uses it to introduce the Great Chain of Being in
The Elizabethan World Picture. It was taken for granted by Cornelius
Agrippa in Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1531) and by François
Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1965 [1546]) – he parodies it at
length but sympathetically in Panurge’s praise of debtors and bor-
rowers (Book III, chapters 3 and 4). This view of order as totally
comprehensive was necessarily wide – encompassing the cosmos,
nature, human society and the biological individual – and it was
accompanied by a sense that the world was a beneficent and welcom-
ing place. Although the universe presented in Ulysses’ speech may
have the same scope, the principle of order is narrowed to degree –
‘degree . . . is the ladder of all high designs’ (1.3.100–1). Absence of
respect for degree leads to both natural and social disorder because
nature, unlike earlier views, is not beneficent, especially human
nature; it depends on force, and moral right yields to force:
Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf.
(1.3.118–20)
The principle that channels ambition usefully, that holds together

this world that is threatening to devour itself, is degree or hierarchy.
Through Ulysses’ speech Shakespeare has transformed the character
of the traditional view of the world: interrelations are still the struc-
tural principle but the affective aspects of mutuality, fellow-feeling,
what Lady Macbeth scornfully called ‘the milk of human kindness’,
disappear; what is left is a hostile perspective of a human nature
moved only by selfish individualism. Tillyard said Ulysses’ speeches
‘convey the principle of order which is essential for judging the play’s
emotional turbulence’ (Tillyard, 1965, p. 17). He is right about the
centrality of Ulysses’ perspective, but that perspective is the disorder
of the ‘universal wolf’ rather than the order of a beneficent hierarchy.
Obviously an audience is unlikely to make such an analysis dur-
ing the play (dramatic pace does not facilitate this kind of reflection)
but they may well be sensitive to the tone. Ulysses’ speech is clearly
very clever and he provides an analysis that can bring Achilles back
into the war. Yet as philosophical as it may be, the audience is not
asked for an intellectual response; the point of the speech is the feel-
ing it encourages. This is probably no more than a slight uneasiness,
a sense that the brilliant argument has just a whiff of something rot-
ten. Because the Elizabethan audience were so attuned to rhetoric,
overtone probably had considerable force. Tone and colour were very
important to Shakespeare’s contemporaries and rhetoric was more
than sugar on the pill of argument. Sackville and Norton delighted
in long, highly structured speeches in Gorboduc. Marlowe, in the
Prologue of Tamburlaine, promised not everyday language but ‘high
astounding terms’, and Tamburlaine wins his first victory not with
swords and spears but with a rhetoric which is equal to that of
‘Hermes, prolocutor to the gods’ (1.2.210). Shakespeare had shown
himself Marlowe’s rhetorical equal in the first history cycle and the
early tragedies but in Troilus and Cressida Agamemnon’s language is
colourless and convoluted. It fails to please the ear or trip off the
tongue, yet neither is it immediately understandable. For example:
Sith every action that hath gone before,

Whereof we have record, trial did draw
Bias and thwart, not answering the aim,
And that unbodied figure of the thought
That gave’t surmisèd shape.
(1.3.12–16)
The point is not that the passage is incomprehensible; it yields its

meaning to closer study but such close consideration is not really pos-
sible while watching a performance. This is perhaps not obvious to
critics whose familiarity with the play is sufficient to cancel the alien-
ation of opaque rhetoric. In Hamlet Osric’s exchange with the Prince
(5.2) is similar in that its most important function is, not to convey
information, but to satirize ridiculous courtly speech where sense is
lost to style and incomprehensibility results. (Horatio’s remarks from
the side serve to indicate that the speech cannot be readily under-
stood.) While a close reading can make Agamemnon’s speech entirely
clear in detail as well as general import, full comprehensibility in
performance would negate its dramatic function.
The style of Agamemnon’s speech is bureaucratic in the sense that
it fulfils the form of providing information while actually deny-
ing the function. The words ‘tortive’, ‘persistive’, ‘protractive’ and
‘conflux’ would appear to Shakespeare’s audience, not as simple neol-
ogisms but as ‘inkhorn terms’, words the writer had fetched from
the bottom of his inkwell rather than taken from the living lan-
guage. Inkhorn terms were often employed to display the author’s
learning and, although they may have shown skill in Latin, they
were certainly not an aid to public communication. Shakespeare
gives Nestor the opposite approach; he will restate Agamemnon’s
message comprehensibly – ‘Nestor shall apply / Thy latest words’
(1.3.31–2) – which he does in two epic similes. He speaks a lan-
guage of proverb, offering images that can be visualized and therefore
are comprehensible. The rhetorical style he chooses also charac-
terizes him (the use of proverbs, says Aristotle, is appropriate for
older speakers) and his phrasing is also in an old-fashioned style,
slightly euphuistic in its balanced phrases, alliteration and repetition
of words (‘valour’s show and valour’s worth’, ‘Rechides to chiding for-
tune’) (1.3.45, 53). Nestor is old and he is old-fashioned. Ulysses is a
bit condescending in calling him ‘most reverend for thy stretched-out
life’ (1.3.60), paying the requisite regard to his advanced years with
the slight suggestion at the same time that he has more experience
than present wit.
Are the Trojans then the ‘good guys’? British civilization was traced
from a people who were not inherently losers, who were honest
and civilized. They had lost the Trojan War only because the Greeks
were liars and cheats. The Trojans had a great city in contrast to
the Greeks’ mere encampment. In Euphues His Censure, in the third
and fourth discourses, Greene has the Greeks visit Troy and they are
amazed at its majesty: ‘Achilles as a man in a traunce, confessed in his
thoughts, that this citty was Microcosmos, a little Worlde, in respect of
the Cytties of Greece’ (p. 235). Shakespeare reflects the Trojans’ supe-
rior refinement in the way Aeneas delivers Hector’s challenge; he is
courtly in the superfluity of gracious phrases but also in the wit of the
mocking respect he shows to Agamemnon. Asking how ‘A stranger to
those most imperial looks’ can tell them ‘from eyes of other mortals’,
he explains in an over-elaborated style:
I ask, that I might waken reverence,

And bid the cheek be ready with a blush
Modest as morning, when she coldly eyes
The youthful Phoebus.
Which is that god in office, guiding men?
Which is the high and mighty Agamemnon?
(1.3.222–9)
Hector’s challenge itself is courtly, a love-trial in single combat, an

idealized courtly behaviour of the sort mocked in both Sidney’s
Arcadia and Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller but quite consistent with
the gracious atmosphere Greene tries to create in Euphues His Censure
and its peripheral romantic interest.
The test of the civilized character of Troy would appear to be the
policy debate in Priam’s court over the Greek offer to cease hostil-
ities in exchange for the return of Helen. Consistent with Greene’s
parallel construction of the debates in the Greek camp and Troy,
Shakespeare also provides for a comparison. The structure suggests
that Shakespeare intends to distinguish the values the Trojans hold
from those of the Greeks, and it is often assumed that their debate
shows them in a more positive light. Rather, what it does show is not
that they are the opposite of the Greeks but that they have a com-
parable lack of integrity: Trojans as well as Greeks voice principles
that are mere words. Hector, the senior prince, reputed for wisdom as
well as valour, has weak and changeable principles which he voices
in a muddled way and with confused imagery. He says that Helen’s
cost in lives makes it reasonable to accept the Greek offer. Troilus, a
committed hawk, moves the argument from the substantive issue of
Trojan deaths to ‘the worth and honour’ of Priam but without giving
these criteria any substance. His attack is all image:
Fie, fie, my brother!

Weigh you the worth and honour of a king,
So great as our dread father’s, in a scale
Of common ounces? Will you with counters sum
The past-proportion of his infinite,
And buckle in a waist most fathomless
With spans and inches so diminutive
As fears and reasons?
(2.2.24–31)
The speech in itself presents a clearly felt but logically null position
with standard metaphors that obscure the material reality – ‘infinite’
(what? ‘worth and honour’?) contained (‘buckled’) in metaphorical
inches that are in fact ‘fears and reasons’. Is the ‘most fathomless’
waist the same as ‘his infinite’? We know that Troilus wants to
keep Helen, is vehement about it, but the terms of the argument
are overcome in emotion. In Troilus’ conclusion of his argument
against reason, Shakespeare echoes imagery from Hamlet’s solilo-
quy occasioned by his observing Fortinbras’s expedition (4.4.32–66),
but in Hamlet the images of rationalized inaction are accompa-
nied by presentation of genuine cause for action, whereas Troilus
merely rants:
Nay, if we talk of reason,

Let’s shut our gates and sleep. Manhood and honour
Should have hare hearts, would they but fat their thoughts
With this crammed reason. Reason and respect
Make livers pale and lustihood deject.
(2.2.45–9)
The objectless ‘infinite’ to be summed with counters of the speech

may also be Shakespeare giving a degraded echo of Marlowe’s famous
line from The Jew of Malta about enclosing ‘Infinite riches in a little
room’ (1.1.37). Troilus is not expressing big ideas; he is only making
a loud noise. Helenus’ riposte to Troilus’ outburst is a more specific
echo of the second discourse of Euphues His Censure, where Greene

has Helenus argue that wisdom is the chief part of the perfect soldier.
In the rest of the long debate various rational principles are intro-
duced, such as Hector’s adducing the laws of nature and nations in
regard to the bond between husband and wife. He makes an apt and
logical riposte to Troilus’ principle of valuation, ‘What’s aught but as
’tis valued?’, by pointing out its subjectivity: ‘But value dwells not in
particular will’ (2.2.51–2). Despite his making rational arguments and
asserting rational principles, Hector casually reverses his conclusion
about keeping Helen:
I propend to you
In resolution to keep Helen still:
For ’tis a cause that hath no mean dependence
Upon our joint and several dignities.
(2.2.189–92)
Reason is not valued and ‘dignities’ are mere image. Helen as a person
is lost in the debate; she is objectified and reduced to an abstrac-
tion for the Trojan lords – ‘a theme of honour and renown’ (2.2.198).
Shakespeare emphasizes that the honour is illusory, reiterating the
gap between the desired image and the actuality. Five scenes later, in
answering Paris’ demand, ‘Who, in your thoughts, deserves fair Helen
best, / Myself or Menelaus?’, Diomedes encapsulates the substance of
the Trojan dialogue in a few cynical lines:
Both alike.
He merits well to have her that doth seek her,
Not making any scruple of her soil,
With such a hell of pain and world of charge;
And you as well to keep her that defend her,
Not palating the taste of her dishonour,
With such a costly loss of wealth and friends.
He, like a puling cuckold, would drink up
The lees and dregs of a flat tamed piece;
You, like a lecher, out of whorish loins
Are pleased to breed out your inheritors.
Both merits poised, each weighs nor less nor more;
But he as he, the heavier for a whore.
(4.1.55–67)
Paris says, ‘You are too bitter to your countrywoman’ (4.1.68), to

which Diomedes responds by pointing out the toll of death for
which he holds her responsible (4.1.69–75). The Trojans are not really
different from the Greeks.
The death of Hector is the material where Shakespeare makes
the most telling changes in his sources. He does not alter signifi-
cantly the events themselves but the transformation of the character
of the action is striking. The Iliad devotes considerable space to
Hector’s fatal combat with Achilles. The actual fighting does not take
many lines but Hector’s fear, his attempt to escape the combat, and
his response to the false reassurance Pallas Athene provides suffuse
the scene with a human richness; it feels both sad and inevitable.
Humane being is shattered by brute rage. Yet the fight was very clearly
a single combat, even though Achilles’ victory was orchestrated by
the goddess. Achilles made clear to his men that he wanted them
to refrain from assisting him because any injury they gave to Hector
would detract from his own glory (Homer, 2003, Book 22, ll. 200–10).
Caxton’s account of the events is brief and he presents the action
without any psychological analysis. Hector, having slain the warrior
whose armour he coveted,
caste hys sheelde behinde him at his backe, & had lefte his breste
discouerte and as he was in thys poynte & tooke none hede of
Achilles that came pryuelye vnto hym and put thys spere with in
his body, and Hector fell downe dead, to the grounde.
(fol. XXXr)
Shakespeare elaborates the human side. When Achilles and Hector

first engage, Hector chivalrously offers a pause to Achilles. Achilles
replies:
I do disdain thy courtesy, proud Trojan,

...
My rest and negligence befriends thee now,
But thou anon shalt hear of me again.
(5.6.15–18)
Hector then turns his energies to pursuing and killing a Greek for his
attractive armour.
Most putrefièd core, so fair without,

Thy goodly armour thus hath cost thy life.
He has finished his fighting for the day, the armies are both with-
drawing for the night, and he disarms:
Now is my day’s work done. I’ll take good breath.

Rest, sword; thou hast thy fill of blood and death.
(5.8.1–4)
Achilles enters with his Myrmidons, having prepared them for the
encounter in the previous scene (5.7), but whereas Homer’s Achilles
imposed restraint on his men to maximize his personal glory,
Shakespeare’s Achilles directs them to save all their strength for the
destruction of Hector (yet later claims all the glory for himself):
Strike not a stroke, but keep yourselves in breath,
And when I have the bloody Hector found,
Empale him with your weapons round about;
In fellest manner execute your arms.
(5.7.3–6)
Having found Hector, Achilles addresses him in lines filled with evil
menace:
Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set,
How ugly night comes breathing at his heels;
Even with the vail and dark’ning of the sun,
To close the day up, Hector’s life is done.
(5.8.5–8)
This seems to be echoed in Macbeth’s vision of hostile nature: ‘Light

thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to th’rooky wood. / Good things
of day begin to droop and drowse, / Whiles night’s black agents
to their preys do rouse’ (3.2.52–5). The action is concluded in only
two lines:
HECTOR: I am unarmed; forgo this vantage, Greek.

ACHILLES: Strike, fellows, strike; this is the man I seek.
(5.8.9–10)
Achilles converts the slaughter to a personal triumph:
On, Myrmidons, and cry you all amain:

‘Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain.’
(5.8.13–14)
Shakespeare took the action for the death of Hector from Caxton’s
narration of how Achilles kills Troilus; Caxton’s description of the
death of Hector himself (see above) is much simpler; Achilles sneaks
up on Hector and kills him with his spear. Shakespeare’s purpose
is clearly different from the chronicles. In Caxton Achilles has his
‘mirondones’ surround Troilus after a half-day of battle in which
Troilus has slain many of them but then his horse is killed, his helm,
his ‘coyffe of yron’, is cut off and he is hurt in many places. Then
Achilles arrived, saw Troilus ‘al naked’ and ran at him and cut off his
head. He bound Troilus’ body to the tail of his horse and dragged it
through the host: ‘O, what villonnye was it to drawe so the sone of so
noble a kynge, that was so worthy and so hardye?’ (Caxton, fol. 35v).
Shakespeare had previously touched on repulsive and dishon-
ourable Greek behaviour – in Hamlet, the lines the player king recites
in response to the Prince’s request: ‘The rugged Pyrrhus . . . horridly
trick’d / With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons / . . . With
eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus / Old grandsire Priam
seeks’ (2.2.446–60). The sense of massacre and the tone come from
Book 2 of the Aeneid. In Caxton the description of Hector’s and
Troilus’ deaths are neutral despite his subsequent outrage that Troilus’
regal status should be so violated in the abuse of his corpse. For
Shakespeare the slaying of Hector is more than violence; it is an anti-
human disregard for the rules of engagement. Hector is unarmed and
in a chivalric code Achilles is obliged to him for being allowed to exit
the earlier combat when he was losing; most importantly, Achilles
does not even strike the blows himself. It is gangster slaughter, not
honourable combat. Furthermore, Achilles claims it as a personal vic-
tory, as if it were in fact an honour. The context is not just losing a
war but destruction of civilization; Shakespeare is showing the audi-
ence the ‘universal wolf’. Troy, the fount of honour for Troy Novant,
not only fails to live up to expectations but is transformed into its
opposite.
Romance
The story of the lovers – their courtship, delayed union and sud-
den separation – is provided by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. It is
a courtly poem – elegant, highly stylized and emphasizing gracious
behaviour. Throughout it has a delicacy of tone that, without dimin-
ishing the erotic quality of the relationship, gives more prominence
to the emotional than the sexual urgency. Shakespeare uses the same
events but transforms their character in the same spirit of negation
that he brings to bear on the wider conflict. These distortions would
have been more evident than those made to Caxton’s work because
public admiration of Troilus and Criseyde as a work of art involved
more attention to its feeling quality, whereas Caxton focused on
information – he did not pretend to literary art and said he wrote
his narrative so that knowledge of the Trojan War could be avail-
able ‘in the realme of Englande as in other landes’ (Caxton, 1553,
fol. A2).
The romantic element is undercut from the beginning of the play
by the music-hall atmosphere of the first two scenes, which are
composed mainly of banter with frequent sexual double entendres.
Troilus’ first action is to disarm rather than go into battle; he is dis-
abled as a warrior by his passion for Cressida: ‘Why should I war
without the walls of Troy / That find such cruel battle here within?’
(1.1.2–3). Pandarus responds to his rather courtly complaint with
sexually suggestive images of the bread-baking process, the kind of
game with a series of objects or actions often found in children’s sto-
ries: Troilus ‘must tarry the grinding’, then the boulting, leavening,
kneading, heating of the oven and the baking; ‘Nay, you must stay
the cooling too, or you may chance to burn your lips’ (1.1.14–26).
In the second scene Cressida establishes herself as independent and
witty. She displays a humour that relies on wilful misunderstanding
and literalness. For example, when her man Alexander comments
on Ajax’s uniqueness, saying he is a man who ‘stands alone’, she
replies, ‘So do all men unless they are drunk, sick, or have no legs’
(1.2.16–18).
Far from Chaucer’s courtly lover, Shakespeare’s Troilus has a
crudeness that is signalled, among other things, by his choice of
metaphors. When he imagines sex with Cressida he reveals the
emotional limitations of his desire: casting Pandarus in the role of
Charon, he asks for ‘swift transportance to those fields / Where I may

wallow in the lily beds’ (3.2.10–11). He says that in his excitement
he fears ‘That I shall lose distinction in my joys, / As doth a battle,
when they charge on heaps / The enemy flying’ (3.2.25–7). Love priv-
ileges particularity; this is like Bassanio’s ‘In Belmont is a lady richly
left’. The image conveys sexual urgency but negates the quality of
love. He gives Cressida superficial assurance that their relationship
need cause her no fear – ‘in all Cupid’s pageant there is presented
no monster’, and when she quips, ‘Nor nothing monstrous neither?’,
he responds, casting himself in the mould of a conventional courtly
lover, ‘Nothing but our undertakings . . . thinking it harder for our
mistress to devise imposition enough than for us to undergo any dif-
ficulty imposed’ (3.2.69–75). He concludes with the one monstrosity,
which is focused on sexual performance and is more a quantitative
than a qualitative concern: ‘This is the monstruosity in love, lady –
that the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire
is boundless and the act a slave to limit’ (3.2.75–9). This fits per-
fectly with his applying Aeneas’ metaphor for battlefield action –
sport – to sex with Cressida. In itself the metaphor of sport need
not be negative but the context makes an equivalency of fighting
and sex:
AENEAS Hark what good sport is out of town today!

TROILUS Better at home, if ‘would I might’ were ‘may’.
But to the sport abroad: are you bound thither?
(1.1.111–13)
The metaphor excludes mutuality and suggests objectification of the

sexual partner.
Cressida is open: ‘Prince Troilus, I have loved you night and day /
For many weary months’ (3.2.107–8) and she expands on her emo-
tional state. Yet she is uneasy that in her openness she has exposed
herself too much and given voice to feelings that are not recipro-
cated. She says to Troilus, ‘ . . . but you are wise, / Or else you love not’
(3.2.145–6). The difference in their outlooks is also made clear just
before the end of the scene in their professions of enduring truth to
each other. Troilus says he will be the ultimate image of truth when
lovers have exhausted other images in their poetry:
True swains in love shall in the world to come

Approve their truth by Troilus. When their rhymes,
Full of protest, of oath, and big compare,
Want similes, truth tired with iteration –
‘As true as steel, as plantage to the moon,
As sun to day, as turtle to her mate,
As iron to adamant, as earth to th’centre’ –
Yet, after all comparisons of truth,
As truth’s authentic author to be cited,
‘As true as Troilus’ shall crown up the verse
And sanctify the numbers.
(3.2.163–73)
Cressida’s response is much stronger than Troilus’ mere assertion,

partly because it takes the form of an ‘if–then’ logical conditional:
Prophet may you be!

If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing, yet let memory,
From false to false, among false maids in love,
Upbraid my falsehood! When they’ve said, ‘as false
As air, as water, wind or sandy earth,
As fox to lamb, as wolf to heifer’s calf,
Pard to the hind or stepdame to her son’,
Yea, let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood,
‘As false as Cressid’.
(3.2.173–86)
The power of Cressida’s speech does not come from the audience’s
intellectual recognition of her superior argumentation and the logic
that Troilus lacks; rather it comes from the oath-like feeling and, cer-
tainly as important, the superior poetry. Troilus speaks cliché without
verbal or rhythmical interest, whereas Cressida’s truth is confirmed
in feeling by some striking images that echo Sonnet 55 and its sense
of the individual passion having its own permanence that survives

time’s extended destruction.
The story of Troilus and Cressida is appropriate material for
tragedy, and Chaucer did in fact call his poem a tragedy, saying
in the epilogue, ‘Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye’ (V. 1786).
Chaucer makes it clear that it is circumstances rather than lack
of character that destroy the relationship, political manipulations
that the protagonists cannot escape. In the play the separation is
also caused by circumstances but both Troilus and Cressida them-
selves succumb to the corrupting influences already seen in both the
camps.
At the handover of Cressida Troilus takes a possessive attitude, seen
in the way he tells Diomedes how to treat her and then threatens
him when he announces that she will be his mistress (4.4.107–27).
But it is also evident in Troilus’ repeated injunctions to Cressida to
be true, despite her being offended by the suggestion that she might
not be, and his lame excuses that he does not actually doubt her.
Cressida here has the status of an object, and Troilus’ own status
is partly dependent on his possession, a status of which Diomedes
robs him.
Chaucer’s Diomedes is manipulative but he is a courteous knight
who first wins Cressida’s acceptance of his protection and then
her favour by his courtly behaviour. In the play Diomedes is
powerful and self-serving. His character is succinctly given by
Thersites:
That same Diomed’s a false-hearted rogue, a most unjust knave;

I will no more trust him when he leers than I will a serpent when
he hisses; he will spend his mouth and promise, like Babbler the
hound; but when he performs, astronomers foretell it: it is prodi-
gious, there will come some change; the sun borrows of the moon
when Diomed keeps his word.
(5.1.85–91)
Cressida is not won through courtesy; she is denied exercise of her

own will and must yield to his power. When she arrived at the Greek
camp she was kissed by Agamemnon, and in response to Ulysses say-
ing, ‘Yet is the kindness but particular; / ’Twere better she were kissed
in general’ (4.5.20–1), she was kissed by all the other princes as well.
Her self-preservation depends on her sexual availability. When Nestor

comments that she is simply very sexy – ‘A woman of quick sense’ –
Ulysses contradicts him and describes her in bitter terms, conflating
her with the general character of prostitutes:
There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,

Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give accosting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every tickling reader! Set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity
And daughters of the game.
(4.5.55–63)
Ulysses shows no recognition of any part he plays in determining her

position.
The last straw for Troilus is observing the meeting between the
rude, brutal Diomedes and the now coy and sluttish Cressida. Ulysses
says, ‘She will sing any man at first sight,’ to which Thersites adds,
‘And any man may sing her, if he can take her clef’ (5.2.9–10). Troilus
rages and must constantly be restrained by Ulysses; ‘Will a swagger
himself out on’s own eyes?’(5.2.134), Thersites asks. ‘Cressid is mine’,
Troilus says, and cannot accept loss of possession:
The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,

The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics
Of her o’er-eaten faith are given to Diomed.
(5.3.152, 156–8)
Troilus has lost possession, and his adolescent and egotistical love for
Cressida has turned into an emotionally equal hatred of Diomedes:
‘As much as I do Cressid love, / So much by weight hate I her Diomed’
(5.2.165–6).
Analyses of Shakespeare’s plays often seem clearer than what audi-
ences/readers have themselves experienced, but sometimes the clarity
is misleading, steered by considerations outside the plays. The binary
habits of mind to which people are usually conditioned and which

they bring to the play suggest that if there are bad guys in the
Trojan War there must also be good guys and critical choice favours
the Trojans. Yet Shakespeare provides enough that is off-putting
about the Trojans that there must be some uneasiness for anyone
who wants to cast them as the good guys. Shakespeare alleviates
this uncertainty by providing a choric figure who guides audience
judgement – Thersites. Yet too often he is dismissed because of his
repulsiveness and ‘scurrility’, but these qualities conveniently alien-
ate him from the Greeks and set him apart from the audience so
that he speaks from an ‘outsider’ position, able to observe the action
without being in any way involved in its direction. Clearly he is
different from Shakespeare’s explicit choruses but he is still both a
part of the playworld and at the same time an audience within it.
Thus, like a traditional chorus, he is able to comment knowledge-
ably on the action and make fairly objective judgements about it.
His commentary when he speaks to other characters rather than to
the audience is protected by the other aspect of his role, the fool.
This gives him a ‘licensed’ status – ‘He is a privileged man’ (2.3.54),
says Achilles, when he stops Patroclus from striking him for a sharp
remark.
The particular value of Thersites’ commentary is that he sees
through the obfuscations of other characters and sees them, not
in their self-image, but as they really are. He provides a succinct
articulation of the issues for an audience; this is likely to be clearer
than significances they can themselves draw from the events in their
immediacy. He ‘objectifies’ the action, and even though his focus
is mostly on the Greeks, he makes clear the universal corruption of
the playworld. That makes it more difficult for audiences/readers to
maintain a view of the Trojans as morally superior.
He is obviously different from happy fools such as Touchstone
in As You Like It but he also has an important difference from
Lear’s fool in the scope of his comments: whereas in King Lear the
fool’s remarks and riddles for the most part address deficiencies in
Lear’s recognition of his personal position, Thersites’ commentary
usually reflects the nature of the wider world. Lear’s fool empha-
sizes for the audience what they already know about Lear’s fam-
ily relations, what they can see before them; Thersites’ character
sketches and remarks on the action make clear the significance the
actions have for the play – he gives the ‘executive summary’, as

it were.
When Thersites appears in Act 2, Scene 1, making bad jokes in
the manner of comedy servants such as Grumio in The Taming of the
Shrew, he seems an unlikely figure for the choric role. Ulysses’ scheme
to goad Achilles back to fighting is unfolding; a proclamation has
been made of a lottery to select the opponent to Hector’s challenge;
the moronic Ajax is beating Thersites to get him to explain the procla-
mation, when Achilles intervenes. Thersites insults Achilles as well as
Ajax for stupidity (‘a great deal of your wit too lies in your sinews’;
2.1.96–7) and then gives a metaphor that explains exactly the real
significance of the proclamation:
There’s Ulysses and old Nestor, whose wit was mouldy ere your
grandsires had nails on their toes, yoke you like draught-oxen, and
make you plough up the wars.
(2.1.101–4)
Achilles and Ajax do not see that they are being manipulated, the one
by jealousy and the other by flattery, to serve purposes not their own.
The long and complex speech of Agamemnon in the Greek council
and Ulysses’ much-praised speech on degree are recognized as spin,
rhetorical manipulation, by Thersites. His joking at the beginning of
the scene that probably seemed like mindless offensiveness may now
be seen as a more substantial response to Agamemnon’s speech in the
previous scene:
Agamemnon – how if he had boils, full, all over, generally?

...
And those boils did run? Say so, did not the general run then?
Were not that a botchy core?
...
Then would come some matter from him; I see none now.
(2.1.2–9)
In the next scene in the Greek camp, Thersites summarizes clearly the
complex action in a similar fashion. After a comic set piece where he
calls Agamemnon, Achilles, Patroclus and himself ‘fool’, he replies
to Patroclus’ question ‘Why am I a fool?’ with a conventional comic
twist: ‘Make that demand of thy Creator’ (2.3.62–3). Then he makes

the general judgement:
Here is such patchery, such juggling and such knavery! All the
argument is a whore and a cuckold – a good quarrel to draw
emulous factions and bleed to death upon!
(2.3.67–70)
However much the audience is predisposed to see the Trojan War as

heroic, they are likely to find their sense of heroism undermined by
Thersites’ speeches, even if they reject him at logical and emotional
levels.
The issue of the war is trivial and the leaders are corrupt. When
Patroclus mocks Menelaus about Helen at the arrival of Cressida in
the Greek camp, Ulysses speaks of the origin of the war in similar
terms: ‘For which we lose our heads to gild his horns’ (4.5.31). In
Act 5, Scene 2, Thersites, having observed Troilus’ heroically irra-
tional response to Cressida switching her affections to Diomedes,
concludes the scene with another generalization of the corruption
of public purpose into issues of personal pride: ‘Lechery, lechery! Still
wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion’ (5.2.192–3).
Shakespeare’s final use of Thersites is a short scene where he is
challenged by the Trojan Margarelon:
MARGARELON Turn, slave, and fight.

THERSITES What art thou?
MARGARELON A bastard son of Priam’s.
THERSITES I am a bastard too; I love bastards. I am bastard
begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in
valour, in everything illegitimate. One bear will not bite
another, and wherefore should one bastard? Take heed; the
quarrel’s most ominous to us; if the son of a whore fight for a
whore, he tempts judgement. Farewell, bastard.
(5.7a.13–23)
The scene is a parody of chivalric encounter. Shakespeare may be

recollecting a similar humorous encounter in Sidney’s Arcadia, the
‘Combat of Cowards’ (Sidney, 1977, pp. 509–16). It gains significance
here because of its placing in regard to the action, between Achilles

preparing his Myrmidons for the killing of Hector (5.7) and the scene
in which the slaughter takes place (5.8). Thersites’ scene mocks the
serious action; it presents the war in microcosm, depriving it of dig-
nity and value. Such a perspective, sustained over many scenes, must
have tarnished the shining image of the Trojan War for Shakespeare’s
audience; it may even have infected their thinking about Elizabethan
society.
Troilus and Cressida is the most iconoclastic of Shakespeare’s plays,
attacking a source of Elizabethan pride with devastating thorough-
ness. That alone may have been sufficient to prevent it succeeding
with its original audience, but it also has some dramaturgical faults
that inhibit an audience’s ability to respond to the play. The generic
inconsistency confuses the audience but the same problem is present
in The Merchant of Venice without seeming to be discouraging. More
seriously, it develops along a double axis, which can make it diffi-
cult for an audience to feel they know where Shakespeare is heading:
is it a play of thwarted romance? or a dramatization of the defeat
of Hector? or even a pageant of the Trojan War? We are not given
a completion of either narrative. The title story does not reach a
conclusion so much as simply stop; there is no crisis point and no
resolution. If the failure of the promises of enduring love and Troilus’
turning from love to hate is proposed as a resolution, it is incomplete
in that the characters do not come together, and the fact that the
play carries on regardless makes it irrelevant. If the military axis is to
provide the resolution, the play ends before the military narrative is
completed. Coherence is strained further by the arbitrary quality of
some of the events – where although the action is consistent emo-
tionally with the rest of the play, it does not seem a logical result of
the preceding actions. The slaughter of Hector, for example, seems
less determined by the preceding plot than, say, the Duke in Measure
for Measure making Isabella plead for the life of Angelo.
The cap on the iconoclasm of Troilus and Cressida is the epilogue,
although it is not labelled as such. In As You Like It and Twelfth Night,
Shakespeare uses epilogues to round off the performance in a manner
that confirms the attitude of the play – in As You Like It affirmation
of mutuality and good will, in Twelfth Night, bittersweet melancholy.
In Troilus and Cressida it is used to confirm the play’s thoroughgoing
negativity. Pandarus, alone on the stage, addresses the audience, with
a singular hostility much in keeping with the rest of the play. First, he
addresses the audience as whoremongers: ‘Good traders in the flesh’
and pandars. Then he mocks their syphilitic symptoms: ‘Your eyes,
half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall; / Or if you cannot weep, yet give
some groans, / Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.’ Finally,
he will shortly make his will: ‘Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for
eases, / And at that time bequeath you my diseases’ (5.10.45–55).
Nowhere else does Shakespeare identify the audience by their
engagement with prostitution and symptoms of venereal disease. It is
a fitting end but probably one that makes it more comfortable to be a
reader than a spectator of the play. Awkwardly organized, often diffi-
cult to grasp at first go, and attacking its audience, Troilus and Cressida
yet has an intensity and precision in its social demolition that makes
it an exciting, important and even potentially pleasurable play.
7
Othello
Othello is often regarded as one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies: it

has some of his most intense emotional displays, it has some of his
best plotting and it develops a tension worthy of a Hitchcock film.
It may seem surprising that I class it as a Problem Play. The generic
quality that distinguishes the Problem Plays is the form–content
contradiction which makes the emotional response awkward and
uncomfortable. In the Problem Comedies this is seen most clearly in
the plays that end in the happy form of marriage but where the form
is contradicted by the specific negative content. Othello presents the
same sort of difficulty in terms of tragedy: it has events that provoke
a sadness appropriate to tragedy but also the sense that the downfall
was avoidable. Aristotle recognized that what he called ‘necessity’ –
the feeling that the course of events was inevitable – was fundamental
to the success of tragedy. Without it there could be no catharsis and
no catharsis meant that the emotions aroused in the play (pity and
fear, for Aristotle) had no release and ended up disturbing the audi-
ence. If there is necessity, then the tragic events, as sad as they may
be, are accepted because it is recognized that they had to be; with-
out necessity the unresolved emotions are an irritation. Hamlet and
Macbeth both produce intense emotion but also a sense of relief at the
end of the play. Hamlet is attractive to an audience because he has a
youthful integrity and will not give up his fight against the corrup-
tion of Elsinore, focused in the plot on revenging his father’s murder.
Yet it is clear that the court at Elsinore is a murderous place and that if
Hamlet continues to confront it he will not survive. If he went back
to Wittenberg he would be safe, but then he would no longer be a
138
Othello 139
hero. When he dies there is a strong feeling of loss but it is clear that
it was going to happen and the pain is moderated by the sense of its
inevitability. Macbeth ultimately realizes that the love and honour
bestowed on Duncan, which he had hoped to gain by his murder,
has been made impossible for him by the means he chose. The sense
of tragic loss is not about a dead tyrant; it is about the waste of the
man who had learned too late that rampant individualism destroys
the very things that make success desirable; but this is moderated by
the awareness that there could be no other result. Othello certainly
produces a strong sense of loss: Othello and Desdemona have been
cast in a heroic mould and their deaths are the destruction of two out-
standing, attractive models of humane values. The play is painfully
moving but, unlike Hamlet or Macbeth, there is also a lingering feeling
of ‘How could you be so stupid?’, that with a little more awareness
on the part of Othello or Desdemona the disaster could have been
averted – it did not have to be. The sadness is not transmuted into
the catharsis that tragedy is supposed to produce and it is accompa-
nied by irritation. The two opposed feelings, because they arise from
the same events, are inseparable. That contradiction is the essence of
a Problem Play; and that is why I include Othello in the category – a
‘Problem Tragedy’, if you like.
There is an entrenched approach to tragedy that distorts under-
standing of Othello, defining it as being only about an individual.
Some of this can be traced back to Aristotle and his identification
of hamartia as an important element in tragedy (hamartia, derived
from the Greek verb that means to miss the mark, meaning an error
in Greek, is unhelpfully rendered usually as ‘tragic flaw’, suggesting a
moral fault). The error obviously is that of an individual, and it seems
to follow that the individual should be the tragedy’s focus. In Oedipus
Rex, Aristotle’s main source of examples in the Poetics, Oedipus sets
the tragedy in motion by proclaiming the banishment of the killer of
Laius who is, he finds out in the course of the play, himself – here the
focus on an individual seems appropriate. This orientation has prob-
ably been reinforced by the status of outstanding actors who were a
more important factor in attracting audiences to the theatre than the
characters they played. One of the effects of prioritizing the individ-
ual was to narrow the sense of the subject of plays from social models
to the experience of an individual. For Marlowe’s extraordinarily pop-
ular Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, both built around the aspirations
of a single individual, the focus on the hero is quite understandable,

and it is easy to ignore the representative nature of their attitudes
and behaviour. But the same approach is often taken in discussing
Shakespeare’s plays where it has much less justification. Even if Ham-
let is generally treated as if its subject were the psychological torment
of Shakespeare’s supreme individual, Prince Hamlet, King Lear clearly
deals with social attitudes, and a concentration on the downfall of
the King himself will ignore major aspects of the tragedy. Othello is
similarly approached in terms of individual downfall. While this may
highlight the intensity of passions, it constricts the play to a story
of jealousy and ‘motiveless malignity’; it ignores wider implications
(except perhaps racism) and does not recognize, let alone explain, the
disturbing quality that accompanies the sadness of the ending. Mea-
sure for Measure was written at the same point in Shakespeare’s career
as Othello, and the two are usually dated in the same year, which
might suggest that Othello should have some wider concerns and that
there is a possibility of looking at it from a different perspective.
Measure advanced Shakespeare’s dramaturgy with the development
of a double perspective – events could be judged from the purposes of
the Duke or from the experience of the other characters. In the earlier
Problem Plays – The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing and
All’s Well That Ends Well (but not Troilus and Cressida) – an alternative
to the received view of events was usually signalled by the contradic-
tory endings of a happy form with an unhappy content. In Othello
Shakespeare provides something that is like the frame-plus-narrative
of Measure but it is thoroughly woven into the plot and less distinct.
Othello has more control over the responses of the audience than Mea-
sure, where readers, directors and critics are able to attribute truth
to the Duke and judge the action from his perspective. In Othello,
Shakespeare offers a gripping crime-thriller with one clearly articu-
lated counter-perspective, seen in its most obvious form when Iago
responds to Brabantio’s insult, ‘Thou art a villain’, with ‘You are a Sen-
ator’ (1.1.119). The insult-function of the two statements is the same
but Iago reverses standards of social respect – equating villains and
senators – thereby undermining the established authority. Iago’s crit-
icism of conventional values may often be trenchant but, because he
is constructed as the Other, the audience is discouraged from identi-
fying with his views. Unlike Measure, where the Duke can for most of
the play be seen above the narrative, in Othello Iago is a constant and
Othello 141
active part of it, which, coupled with the fact that its ending is tragic,
makes it more disturbing than Measure. Yet compelling narrative and
the theme of proven attraction – jealousy – make it easy for audi-
ences to follow the action without responding to Iago’s representative
nature and the play’s social implications.
The play begins strikingly in medias res. Iago’s argument with
Roderigo has already begun when the scene opens, which gives the
play the immediate charge of a vigorous dispute in full swing. After
only seven lines the matter switches to the main emotional focus,
Iago’s hatred of Othello. His argument is largely rational, although
the language makes it seem more like a diatribe, and the points he
makes define his character. He speaks with intense scorn for people
who dutifully serve their masters without providing for themselves,
and identifies himself with those ‘Who, trimmed in forms and vis-
ages of duty, / Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves’ and line
their pockets: ‘these fellows have some soul’ (1.1.50–1, 54). Thus, like
Richard III or Edmund in King Lear, Iago has announced himself as
villain, one whose practice is concealed at least for a time under a
guise of virtue.
The first practical step of Iago’s manipulations is rousing Brabantio
in the night to pursue his daughter, who has eloped with Othello.
The language and demonstration of character considerably exceed
the plot function. Iago’s crude imagery is both witty and gross, reduc-
ing romantic relationships and sex to mere physical function: ‘you’ll
have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your
nephews neigh to you, you’ll have coursers for cousins, and jennets
for germans . . . your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast
with two backs’ (1.1.111–18). The picture of aggrieved father con-
fronted by crude asocial man is moderated two scenes later when
Brabantio makes his case against Desdemona and Othello before the
other members of the Signory and shows himself to be blinded by
conventional attitudes, saying that Desdemona must have been ‘cor-
rupted / By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks; / For nature
so preposterously to err’, ‘To fall in love with what she feared to
look on’, must be ‘Against all rules of nature’ (1.3.60–2, 98, 101).
His understanding of the order of nature is that it follows the social
rules he has been taught to accept. Gloucester’s mindless astrolog-
ical view of the world offers a parallel, which Shakespeare subjects
to Edmund’s cutting mockery (King Lear, 1.2.115–30). Iago’s extreme
hostility probably alienates the audience, and he has nothing like

the attraction of Edmund’s soaring rhetoric to modify it, but he also
reveals an understanding of the world of far greater depth than that
shown by Brabantio.
Othello’s heroic character is displayed in the second scene:
Brabantio comes with an armed troop to arrest him and he says, ‘Keep
up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them. / Good signor,
you shall more command with years / Than with your weapons’
(1.2.59–61). In the next scene, answering Brabantio’s charge in
the Signory, he confirms that character with a rhetoric worthy of
Marlowe in its flow and sonority. He then describes the course of
his wooing, not heroic in content but with a rhythmical pattern that
gives it a spacious feeling:
But still the house affairs would draw her thence,

Which ever as she could with haste dispatch
She’d come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse; which I observing
Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively.
(1.3.146–54)
The content of the sentence is simple everyday matter but the

extended sentence and the rhythm give it a sense of something large-
scale and therefore important. Thus, even on a domestic subject,
Othello’s speaking has a heroic quality.
Desdemona, saying that she owes obedience to her husband more
than to her father, is dismissed by Brabantio with a sentiment very
like that of Leonato in Much Ado: ‘I had rather to adopt a child than
get it. / . . . I am glad at soul I have no other child’ (1.3.189, 194).
Brabantio’s view of the role of women is conventional, shared by
Shylock and Leonato and Lear. They assume that women are properly
controlled by men and it follows as a corollary that their education
should prepare them to be gracious company but not to be indepen-
dent. Iago indicates this view when Othello displays his emotional
turmoil over his intended murder of Desdemona. Othello says, ‘the
Othello 143
world hath not a sweeter creature’, and starts to praise her skills: ‘I do
but say what she is: so delicate with her needle, an admirable musi-
cian! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear! Of so high and
plenteous wit and invention!’ Iago’s reply echoes the commonplace:
‘She’s the worse for all this’ (4.1.182–3, 186–90).1 Desdemona’s insis-
tence on making her own choices distinguishes her as independent,
but unlike Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, whose resistance to
being controlled was treated as fractious, ‘froward’, she defends her
choices rationally and begins to gain a heroic image.
At this stage Shakespeare also validates her by differentiating her
style of speech from that of the Duke and Brabantio. Her defence of
marrying Othello follows speeches where the Duke (again like Much
Ado) advises patience to Brabantio –
What cannot be preserved when fortune takes,

Patience her injury a mockery makes
and Brabantio in reply mocks the advice –
But words are words; I never yet did hear

That the bruised heart was piecèd through the ear.
(1.3. 204–5, 216–17)
Both speeches, a total of 18 lines, are almost entirely in rhymed cou-

plets, which in the context and stylistically gives them a sense of
triviality. This is in marked contrast to the dignity of Desdemona’s
expression of her desire to accompany Othello to Cyprus:
That I did love the Moor to live with him,

My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world. . . .
So that, dear lords, if I be left behind
A moth of peace, and he go to the war,
The rites for which I love him are bereft me.
(1.3.245–7, 252–4)
This is no conventional marriage; Desdemona is independent,

rational and wilful. Marriage to Othello is a radical departure from
the standard role assigned to young women of the upper class and
is clearly her own choice; Othello, in effect, had proposed at her

invitation. Although her status as his wife is inferior to Othello’s,
she regards herself very much his equal as a person. Othello in two
lines encapsulates his reason for marrying her: ‘She loved me for the
dangers I had passed, / And I loved her, that she did pity them’
(1.3.166–7). Her ‘pity’ is not a matter of feeling sorry for Othello’s
injuries; it is sympathy (that is, sharing the same feeling), which is
another mark of their equality. Seeing them as equal runs counter to
the tradition of presenting them as opposites, Desdemona as ‘sweet,
compliant, defenceless’ and of course white. ‘Warrior’ is the word she
uses later to describe herself: ‘unhandsome warrior as I am’ (3.4.147).
She stands up for herself: when Othello strikes her, in front of
Ludovico, she does not accept it meekly but says, ‘I have not deserved
this’ (4.1.241). The equality and mutuality of the relationship makes
its ultimate destruction more moving for the audience.
The engine of destruction is Iago, who, after the exit of Othello,
Desdemona and the members of the Signory, presents to Roderigo
what is effectively a manifesto on the nature of the world. He begins
by discouraging Roderigo from suicide over disappointment at his
failure to win Desdemona. His manner is light and witty – ‘If thou
dost, I shall never love thee after’ – but it also carries a critical per-
spective: ‘Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a
guinea-hen, I would change my humanity with a baboon’ (1.3.303,
311–13). At the level of logic Iago is saying one should not drown
oneself for love but his choice of diction indicates a more fundamen-
tal attitude: he dehumanizes and objectifies women. In the previous
scene, when Cassio comes to tell Othello that the Duke urgently
requires his presence, he asks Iago why Othello was not at his lodg-
ings and Iago replies: ‘Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carack: /
If it prove lawful prize, he’s made for ever’ (1.2.50–1). When Cassio
says he does not understand, Iago tells him he is married. Desdemona
for Iago is not a person in her own right; he sees her as an object, a
counter that represents something else, which in this case is mate-
rial wealth. Love, he makes clear in his discussion with Roderigo, is
no more than a bodily function: ‘we have reason to cool our raging
motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts: whereof I take this,
that you call love, to be a sect or scion’ (1.3.326–9). But his remarks
on love are only a manifestation of a more fundamental principle:
‘’Tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus’ (1.3.316–17) and power
Othello 145
lies in our individual wills. The emphasis of the passage is not ‘on
yer bike’ but individualism as opposed to social integration. It has
a striking parallel in the words of a former British prime minister,
‘There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their fam-
ilies.’ Iago, with no evidence of family concern, is limited to the
individual. The next part of his speech moves into a more stylized
rhetoric, almost poetic in its structure of repetition, and there is no
other speech like it in the play. In 26 lines of uninterrupted speaking
he says ‘put money in thy purse’ or the equivalent eight times (‘put
money in thy purse’ four times, ‘put but money in thy purse, ‘fill
thy purse with money’, ‘Make all the money thou canst’ and ‘there-
fore make money’). In the following lines he repeats it twice more
(‘Go make money’, ‘provide thy money’) (1.3.331–66). This is not
the same order of advice as that Polonius gives to Laertes – ‘Neither
a borrower nor a lender be’ (Hamlet 1.3.75) – it is Iago’s reduction
of everything to the material. He has already reduced love to sex for
Roderigo; in Act 2, Scene 1, he addresses another long speech to him
keeping alive his hope of Desdemona, that she will tire of Othello
and seek ‘some second choice’:
When the blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should
be, again to inflame it and give satiety a fresh appetite, loveliness
in favour, sympathy in years, manners and beauties: all which the
Moor is defective in. Now for want of these required conveniences,
her delicate tenderness will find itself abused, begin to heave the
gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor. Very nature will instruct her
in it and compel her to some second choice.
(2.1.220–8)
Iago labels things like ‘manners’ – not just formal politeness but
socialized behaviour – as ‘conveniences’, depriving them of their
social character and reducing them to material status, a means to
some advantage. Seeking one’s own advantage, he announces in the
money speech, is the principle by which he directs his life. He estab-
lishes the fundamental opposition of the play – Man vs beast, human-
ity vs animality, socialized individual vs unalloyed individualism.
This never becomes a subject of discussion in the play; however, it
is an ongoing concern of Shakespeare from Hamlet through Timon of
Athens – the plot and characters of Othello are a specific embodiment.
Despite a complexity of interaction and deceit in the specific

action, at the more general level of representation Othello is quite sim-
ple because the conflicting attitudes function in the same confined
universe and are polar opposites. Othello is a model of Renaissance
excellence, having achieved his status not through inheritance or
patronage but through his own merits. He has an impressive mag-
nanimity (what Cassio refers to in the last scene as being ‘great of
heart’), eloquence, bravery but also socialization; he is responsive to
other people and to social forms. Iago, on the other hand, although
he is aware of the qualities that distinguish Othello, places no value
on them; he is rational but believes only in material things and
himself. When he manoeuvres Othello further into his trap with a
seemingly random hypothetical instance of a handkerchief, saying
that his wife may give it to any man because it is hers, Othello raises
an objection: ‘She is protectress of her honour too. / May she give
that?’ Iago replies, ‘Her honour is an essence that’s not seen: / They
have it very oft that have it not’ (4.1.10–17). Thus for Iago there is
no real thing that is honour; only the material is real and all the rest
is image, which can be manipulated. He is not materialistic in the
avaricious sense, showing no delight in possessions or luxury, despite
milking Roderigo:
Thus do I ever make my fool my purse:

For I mine own gained knowledge should profane
If I would time expend with such a snipe
But for my sport and profit.
(1.3.377–80)
Not distracted by any social feeling, he is exceptionally efficient in

his purpose, systematically destroying anyone in his way who has
the weakness of social values. He is a precursor of Edmund, but
more primitive, pure, more generalized (Edmund expresses a specific
intention to take his brother’s land – King Lear; 1.2.16). The com-
mon question ‘what is Iago’s motive?’ is beside the point. It can be
answered formally in regard to the specific action – he provides a
number of inadequate reasons – but what he represents includes its
own motive: his materialist individualism, by its very nature, is com-
petitive and destructive. The motive, in that sense, is not peculiar to
Othello 147
individuals; it is lodged in society at large, which Shakespeare makes

clear a year later in King Lear.
Paradoxically, Iago, who does not believe in emotional relation-
ships, understands them better than anyone else in the playworld
and constructs fantasy images of them to manipulate Othello. He has
the paranoid’s facility not only of transforming innocuous comment
and behaviour into slights to himself but also of projecting them
for others. Thus he begins his twisting of Othello by saying, ‘Ha!
I like not that’, when they see Cassio leaving Desdemona. Othello
asks, ‘What dost thou say?’ and he replies, ‘Nothing, my lord; or
if – I know not what.’ The hesitation and uttering an empty alter-
native attract attention so that when Othello next asks, ‘Was not
that Cassio parted from my wife?’, Iago’s reply sows its poison seed
on an already prepared field of doubt: ‘Cassio, my lord? No, sure,
I cannot think it / That he would sneak away so guilty-like, / See-
ing you coming’ (3.3.35–40). The false answer to Othello’s question
is made to seem part of Iago’s concern for Othello, and separating the
‘guilty’ behaviour from Cassio by saying it could not be him seems
to be protecting him. After Desdemona has badgered Othello into
agreeing that he will see Cassio (‘let him come when he will’; 3.3.75),
Iago asks about Cassio’s connection with Othello’s wooing. Othello
says, ‘Why dost thou ask?’, and Iago replies, ‘But for a satisfaction of
my thought – / No further harm.’ His responses, half-answers, stim-
ulate Othello’s doubt – there is something that Iago is not saying.
Othello confronts the negative implication of Iago’s saying ‘indeed!’:
‘Indeed? Ay, indeed. Discern’st thou aught in that? / Is he not hon-
est?’ Iago then repeats questioningly ‘honest?’ and then ‘think?’,
until Othello says, ‘he echoes me, / As if there were some monster
in his thought / Too hideous to be shown’ (3.3.92–107). Othello
has taken the bait and swallowed the hook. Iago presents himself
as reluctant to say anything negative about Cassio. He says, ‘I dare be
sworn I think that he is honest’, and Othello replies, ‘I think so too’.
At this point Iago makes a comment not logically connected that,
while it does not contradict the positive response in logic, undercuts
it by the suggestion that there is something more not being said:
‘Men should be what they seem’ (3.3.124–5). Othello urges elabora-
tion but Iago refuses on the basis of principle: his thoughts are his
own, he says, giving a negative suggestion – no one ‘has a breast so
pure’ but he has ‘some uncleanly apprehensions’. He resists further
urging by belittling his observation of abuses and Othello should

not trouble himself with notions ‘From one that so imperfectly con-
jects / . . . It were not for your quiet nor your good, / Nor for my
manhood, honesty, and wisdom, / To let you know my thoughts’
(3.3.137–8, 148–53). With every seeming relaxation of his critical
posture, Iago is in fact further winding up Othello. His now clichéd
speech on good name – ‘Who steals my purse, steals trash . . . But he
that filches from me my good name . . . makes me poor indeed’ – is
as conventional as Polonius’s advice to Laertes; it has no specific
application but it has a powerful resonance when he delivers the
punch-line of the interchange: ‘O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!’
(3.3.156–60, 164). This is followed by another half-dozen lines of
conventional wisdom that provide no relief for Othello.
Iago has woven very adroitly his web of general statement with
specific implication, but this is only the build-up to his masterstroke
of entrapment. Othello rejects the notion that he is subject to jeal-
ousy: ‘Think’st thou I’d make a life of jealousy, / To follow still the
changes of the moon / With fresh suspicions? No, to be once in
doubt / Is once to be resolved’ (3.3.175–8). He is confident in his
relationship and the admiration of others for Desdemona does not
worry him. He will not sully his love with entertaining petty suspi-
cions, but he will act where there is proof – ‘Away at once with love
or jealousy!’ (3.3.190). Jealousy was just a stepping stone for Iago;
he says, ‘I am glad of this: for now I shall have reason / To show
the love and duty that I bear you / With franker spirit. . . . I speak
not yet of proof. / Look to your wife; observe her well with Cassio’
(3.3.191–5). There is no evidence – yet; however, Iago’s statement
about Venetian women touches Desdemona in the general casting of
suspicion: ‘In Venice they do let God see the pranks / They dare not
show their husbands; their best conscience / Is not to leave’t undone,
but keep’t unknown.’ He makes the same point again some 30 lines
later (3.3.200–2, 233–5). The general statement then is given a spe-
cific focus: Desdemona deceived Brabantio, and her pretended fear of
Othello’s looks disguised her love. Using a standard move of verbal
fencing, claiming a palpable hit, Iago pretends to worry that he has
upset Othello: ‘I see this hath a little dashed your spirits’, and a few
lines later, ‘My lord, I see you’re moved.’ Othello denies being upset,
answering Iago’s first statement with ‘Not a jot, not a jot’ but the sec-
ond with less assurance: ‘No, not much moved’ (3.3.212, 213, 222).
Othello 149
Iago leaves but immediately returns to tell Othello ‘To scan this thing
no farther’ (3.3.243), designed, of course, to achieve the opposite
effect. Othello himself enhances the working of Iago’s poison, repeat-
ing the commonplace that men are born to be cuckolds. But he wills
not to believe it in regard to himself: ‘If she be false, O, then heaven
mocks itself! / I’ll not believe’t’ (3.3.275–6). This affirmation is only
a single two-line leap that follows a step-by-step climb of 35 lines
(3.3.240–74) in which he entertains considerations of Desdemona’s
guilt. The two-line rejection is powerful in its reasoning but it cannot
have the same psychological weight as 35 lines contemplating her
guilt. The action that immediately follows this speech is the dropped
handkerchief, the beginning of the move from suspicion to proof.
Iago’s demolition resumes after an interval of some 55 lines, but
Othello attacks him for destroying his peace of mind: ‘What sense
had I of her stolen hours of lust? / I saw’t not, thought it not, it
harmed not me’ (3.3.335–6). At the same time he raises the stakes,
demanding proof while threatening Iago: ‘Make me see’t: or, at the
least, so prove it / That the probation bear no hinge nor loop /
To hang a doubt on – or woe upon thy life!’ (3.3.361–3). Iago excuses
himself with a stage-villain speech: ‘O monstrous world! Take note,
take note, O world! / To be direct and honest is not safe. / I thank you
for this profit, and from hence / I’ll love no friend, sith love breeds
such offence’ (3.3.374–7). Othello is still in two minds: ‘I think my
wife be honest, and think she is not; / I think that thou art just, and
think thou art not. / I’ll have some proof’ (3.3.381–3). Iago has moved
on from playing at being open-minded in regard to Desdemona’s
guilt, no longer simply raising suspicion but more focused on how
to secure proof. He asks Othello,
Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on?

Behold her topped?
...
It were a tedious difficulty, I think,
To bring them to that prospect. Damn them then
If ever mortal eyes do see them bolster
More than their own!
He says, ‘It is impossible you should see this’ (3.3.392–9) but it is

impossible only in reality; the fantasy can be visualized ‘in the mind’s
eye’. Constructing another hypothetical situation, Iago’s words make

Othello picture Desdemona and Cassio in the terms of the simile:
Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys,

As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross
As ignorance made drunk.
(3.3.400–2)
To comprehend what Iago is saying demands a picture in the head.

This is neither an abstract factual report nor a picture of a goat,
a monkey and a wolf, as in a children’s book; what Iago creates
for Othello is an image conveying ‘prime’, ‘hot’ and ‘salt’, qualities
that have their meaning in action, and that action is transferred to
Desdemona and Cassio. It is not precise or detailed but it is a sub-
ject with intense emotional colouring. In effect, Iago makes Othello
see what he has said would be impossible to witness. Iago’s ‘report’
of sharing a bed with Cassio enhances the ‘factual’ element; his ‘evi-
dence’ appears more credible by giving the supposed circumstances
of his access to it:
I lay with Cassio lately,

And being troubled with a raging tooth
I could not sleep.
...
In sleep I heard him say: ‘Sweet Desdemona,
Let us be wary, let us hide our loves’;
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry ‘O sweet creature!’ and then kiss me hard,
As if he plucked up kisses by the roots,
That grew upon my lips; then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sighed and kissed, and then
Cried ‘Cursèd fate that gave thee to the Moor!’
(3.3.410–23)
The images need not be an actual part of an external reality to have

an emotional effect. In the same way as dreams have real emotions,
imagined scenes produce a response, and in their concreteness they
are very memorable. Othello concludes his greeting to Ludovico in
Othello 151
Act 4, Scene 1, by saying, ‘You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats

and monkeys!’ (4.1.265). Shakespeare is signalling that these images
of disgust are deeply embedded in Othello’s consciousness. Iago has
succeeded in degrading Othello’s image of a heroic and loving rela-
tionship to a mechanical-biological sexual function. The humane
element has been obliterated, leaving only the animalistic, and even
the animals chosen have a low status in Shakespeare’s world, not
naturalized into human society like dogs and horses but regarded
as displaying an unmodified lechery. Iago has achieved for Othello
a vision like that he constructed for Roderigo of how Desdemona
would tire of Othello and ‘begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and
abhor’ him (2.1.226–7). The image of plucking kisses up by the roots
is striking, with its sense of violence and destruction as in uproot-
ing flowers. This is not the way Othello would like to think of sex
with Desdemona (in fact he displays a great sensual appreciation of
her which practically stops him from murdering her) but her sexu-
ality is reduced to goats and monkeys, and goats and monkeys with
Cassio. The nearest thing we have to this is Troilus’ disgust at seeing
Cressida with Diomedes, but even he does not reduce them to goats
and monkeys, and Troilus never had the kind of heroic vision with
which Shakespeare endows Othello.
Two more steps remain in Iago’s plot – a ‘report’ of what Cassio
said about his relationship with Desdemona, a fabrication much like
his story of Cassio talking in his sleep, and arranging that Cassio
himself appear supposedly discussing the affair. Thus when Iago
affirms that Cassio has talked of his affair, Othello of course wants
to know what he said. Iago is vague but suggestive: ‘Faith, that he
did – I know not what he did.’ After Othello’s ‘What? What?’ he
makes a one-word response, ‘Lie’, and Othello supplies, ‘With her?’.
Iago casually responds, ‘With her, on her, what you will’ (4.1.32–5),
which drives Othello into incoherence and then an epileptic fit. The
final blow follows the fit when Othello is set by Iago to observe his
conversation with Cassio. Iago will question him about Bianca and
Othello will think they are talking about Desdemona. Cassio will
laugh about Bianca; ‘As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad; / And
his unbookish jealousy must construe / Poor Cassio’s smiles, gestures,
and light behaviour / Quite in the wrong’ (4.1.100–3). Othello, able
only to observe but not to hear the conversation, must follow the
dumb-show of gestures, which he misinterprets. When Bianca herself
appears, Othello recognizes the missing handkerchief and decides to

kill Desdemona. But almost in the same breath he speaks regretfully
and lovingly of her excellent qualities; he can summon no resolve.
He says, ‘but yet the pity of it, Iago! O, Iago, the pity of it, Iago!’ Iago
mocks Othello’s softness: ‘If you are so fond over her iniquity, give
her patent to offend, for if it touch not you, it comes near nobody’
(4.1.194–8). This pushes Othello into a murderous commitment. Iago
has achieved the conditions for Othello’s destruction.
Although Othello has decided to murder Desdemona, that does
not clear his mind; he is still overcome by jealousy, distracted from
the business he is supposed to attend to. He cannot treat the newly
arrived Venetians with appropriate formality and before them he
behaves outrageously towards Desdemona, striking her, insulting her
and sending her away. She retreats with dignity – ‘I will not stay to
offend you’ – but Ludovico is shocked by his behaviour and encour-
ages reconciliation: ‘I do beseech your lordship call her back.’ Othello
fulfils the form of Ludovico’s request and asks, ‘What would you
with her, sir?’; he has himself no reason to call her back. Quite the
contrary; he insults her again in bitter terms for another nine lines
(4.1.247, 249, 252).
From Act 3, Scene 3, the play has been a slow progress towards
Desdemona’s death but Iago has had to work hard. It was not dif-
ficult for him to bring Othello into doubt about Desdemona but
to push him into becoming a killer has been rather more taxing.
As Othello approaches Desdemona in the bed-chamber his speech
expresses regret rather than any murderous sentiment. He focuses his
emotion through talking about the candle:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,

I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.
He then moves to the more sensual rose: ‘When I have plucked thy
rose / I cannot give it vital growth again, / It needs must wither’
(5.2.8–15). Desdemona is not simply the wife he is going to kill; she is
a part of nature that he will destroy. But, unlike nature, she is specific,
unique, and impossible of regeneration. His sensual awareness almost
Othello 153
overcomes his murderous intent – ‘O balmy breath, that dost almost

persuade / Justice to break her sword’ (5.2.16–17) – yet he finds a
sophistic spiritual comfort: ‘this sorrow’s heavenly – / It strikes where
it doth love’ (5.2.21–2). However, Desdemona is not a willing victim;
she questions Othello when he tells her to pray for any unreconciled
crime: ‘Alack, my lord, what may you mean by that?’; she reasons
with him: ‘That death’s unnatural that kills for loving’; and finally,
asking what is the matter, is told, ‘That handkerchief which I so loved
and gave thee, / Thou gav’st to Cassio’ (5.2.29, 42, 48–9). They dis-
pute the issue, denial followed by mistaken certainty, for some two
dozen lines. Desdemona pleads first for her life, struggles (Othello
says, ‘Down, strumpet!’ and ‘Nay, if you strive’; 5.2.80–2), asks just
for more time, and then Othello smothers her.
The murder is not the usual crime passionnel or a ‘My Last Duchess’
case of patriarchal justice. Othello says ‘she must die, else she’ll
betray more men’ (5.2.6). What ‘more men’? Othello is the only man
who could possibly claim betrayal and Cassio is the only other man
believed by Othello to have had sexual relations with Desdemona.
It seems unlikely to be Othello’s confusion because he seems quite
coherent throughout the exchange, though somewhat poetic. The
issue, I think, lies in what he feels to be the betrayal. The point at
which Othello turns irrevocably against Desdemona is when Iago
makes him see her sexual relations with Cassio in repulsive animalis-
tic character. The visualization, concretization in pictures rather than
euphemistic or legalistic abstraction, is important for him, yet he
himself constructs negative images: ‘What sense had I of her stolen
hours of lust . . . I found not Cassio’s kisses on her lips.’ Although not
as striking as goats and monkeys, the vision is clear enough to be
disturbing, and it seems unlikely that he would have constructed it
if his concern were exclusive possession of her body. (Even if ‘kisses’
rather than kissing is not a clear picture in itself, ‘her lips’ makes the
whole very much a visualizable image.) If he were a Mafia don he
might feel he could not tolerate that anyone else alive had known
his wife sexually and therefore try to kill any lover before himself,
but Othello says, ‘I had been happy if the general camp, / Pioners and
all, had tasted her sweet body, / So I had nothing known’ (3.3.335,
338, 342–4). His concern is not possession; rather, it is the charac-
ter of their relationship, their mutuality, their rising above the petty
world – their transcendental love. The response Antony makes to
Cleopatra’s demand that he quantify his love offers a parallel: ‘There’s
beggary in the love that can be reckoned’ (Antony and Cleopatra,

1.1.15). Othello and Desdemona have a love that is beyond conven-
tional reckoning; if Desdemona were to have an adulterous liaison,
that would destroy the special quality of the relationship; for Othello
it would mean that ‘Chaos is come again’ (3.3.92). Such destruction
is thus not simply an act against Othello himself; it is against what
keeps chaos at bay, against social integrity. If he ‘sacrifices’ her, her
action will not open the world to chaos, ‘betray more men’. Her
denial of giving the handkerchief to Cassio further damages the char-
acter of the relationship; ‘O perjured woman! Thou dost stone my
heart, / And mak’st me call what I intend to do / A murder, which
I thought a sacrifice’ (5.2.63–5). It is not a logical statement that
Othello is making; the whole speech is very poetical, an expression
of his emotions, and cannot be reduced to purely logical equivalents.
Othello’s evidence seems even to him unstable against firm denials
by Desdemona. She is dead, then not dead, he smothers her again;
Emilia calls urgently; does Desdemona move again? should Emilia
come in? Othello is at this point desperately confused. He feels it
is a cataclysmic moment – ‘th’affrighted globe / Should yawn at
alteration’ (5.2.101–2) – but still believes things are going according
to Iago’s plan. When he finally opens the door to Emilia and she
announces a murder he assumes it to be that of Cassio. She says it is
Roderigo and he questions, ‘and Cassio killed?’ She says, ‘No, Cassio
is not killed.’ He is slow to take it in: ‘Not Cassio killed? / Then mur-
der’s out of tune, and sweet revenge / Grows harsh’ (5.2.113–15).2
Desdemona, still alive, cries out that Cassio was falsely murdered
and that she dies guiltless. Emilia asks her, ‘O, who hath done /
This deed?’ Desdemona answers, ‘Nobody. I myself. Farewell. / Com-
mend me to my kind lord – O, farewell!’ and dies (5.2.121–4). Her
claim of responsibility for her death is not made to protect Othello
but to preserve the image she shares with him of their perfect rela-
tionship. Neither she nor Othello could question the relationship
because questions, especially of trust, would craze its crystal per-
fection. In Antony and Cleopatra the claims of absolute love were
an expression of feeling, not an analysis of reality; Othello’s and
Desdemona’s image was built on idealism about the nature of each
other and of mankind – but they believed in its reality.
For Othello chaos has come again; he loses his direction and
his concern with truth. He fastens on Desdemona’s self-murder
Othello 155
statement as an escape, ‘You heard her say herself it was not I.’ Emilia
responds: ‘She said so; I must needs report the truth.’ Then Othello
reverses his position, blaming Desdemona rather than trying to save
himself: ‘She’s like a liar gone to burning hell: / ’Twas I that killed
her’ (5.2.128–31). This might be the proper endpoint for the tragedy:
the heroine is dead, killed by the hero, who realizes his tragic error.
It is sad, it is a waste, it is tragic. But Shakespeare continues the play
for nearly another 250 lines.
The lines that follow Othello’s realization make a change in the
feel of the play. There is the excitement of all the action being tied
up, a rapid denouement in the Agatha Christie mode where all the
characters still alive are brought together in the drawing room and
the who, how and why of the crime are made clear. Shakespeare does
it in smaller bites and with rather more art but it involves the same
clever and dramatic tying up of the several strands. Othello’s mis-
taken apprehensions are exposed and Iago is shown to be the one
who misled him, and that it was calculated, a plot. This is no rev-
elation for the audience but it is new to Emilia and her realization
is presented dramatically, as she moves from incredulity to gradual
realization and bitter condemnation. She resists Othello’s threaten-
ing manner in a brave and humane response: ‘Do thy worst: / This
deed of thine is no more worthy heaven / Than thou wast worthy
her’ and ‘Thou has not half that power to do me harm / As I have to
be hurt. O gull, O dolt! / As ignorant as dirt’ (5.2.158–60, 161–3). Yet
Othello’s belief that Desdemona was having an affair with Cassio is
still unshaken – he speaks, torn between grief and anger:
’Tis pitiful: but yet Iago knows

That she with Cassio hath the act of shame
A thousand times committed. Cassio confessed it,
And she did gratify his amorous works
With that recognizance and pledge of love
Which I first gave her. I saw it in his hand:
It was a handkerchief, an antique token
My father gave my mother.
(5.2.209–16)
Emilia reveals that Iago had begged her to steal the handkerchief,
which she ‘found by fortune’ and gave to him, and he stabs her
fatally. She dies on the bed next to the body of Desdemona. Othello’s
complicity in the plot to kill Cassio is exposed, to which Cassio
responds with a dullness that does not distract from the exposition
of events: ‘Dear General, I never gave you cause’ (5.2.296). Letters
that were discovered in the pocket of the late, unfortunate Roderigo
explain how Iago had engaged him to kill Cassio and had arranged
the incident through which Cassio lost his lieutenancy.
When Othello wounds Iago, Iago boasts, ‘I bleed, sir, but not killed’
and Othello replies, ‘I am not sorry neither; I’d have thee live, / For
in my sense ’tis happiness to die’ (5.2.285–7). Othello wants to be
disappeared from his present torment and the sight of Desdemona
to something out of the present world: ‘Whip me, ye devils, / From
the possession of this heavenly sight! / Blow me about in winds!
Roast me in sulphur! / Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!’
(5.2.275–8). Yet he still insists ‘nought did I in hate, but all in honour’
(5.2.292).3 The appropriateness of Emilia’s judgement of him – ‘O
murderous coxcomb, what should such a fool / Do with so good a
wife?’ (5.2.231–2) – seems by now entirely appropriate; and it throws
into question the validity of Othello’s protestation of honour. The
suggestion is not that he is marked by the opposite – dishonour –
but that the category of honour itself is doubtful. What does it mean
when he says he acted on the basis of honour? As a killer he was mis-
taken but did it for a good reason? Sir Philip Sidney, in the Arcadia,
had moving presentations of honour where its demands could be
tragic but the concerns still had contemporary relevance.4 But what
is the meaning of honour in Othello’s post-chivalric world? Social
rank? Patriarchal ownership? Honour begins to look hollow, and the
same problem arises in Othello’s ‘good-night’:
I pray you, in your letters

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate
Speak of me as I am: nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
Of one, not easily jealous but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand
Like the base Indian threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe . . .
(5.2.336–44)
Othello 157
He stabs himself and dies ‘upon a kiss’. What does he mean by his
claim of loving too well but not wisely? His slow but then intense
jealousy seems an accurate description, but in what sense is he like
the base Indian throwing away a pearl? Not recognizing value? Igno-
rant waste? Desdemona as a pearl is understandable, but what is the
meaning of richer than all his tribe? The words are poetic, evocative,
but what are they supposed to evoke? The speech seems to serve as
excuse. Othello is self-dramatizing here, a tendency he has shown
throughout the play in his rhetoric. This is his final disintegration.
A problem tragedy? Shakespeare opens the play with a nasty mate-
rialistic view of the world presented by Iago. Although the problem
at first appears to be its grossness, gradually its narrowness, the lim-
ited view of human life, becomes clearer and more important. The
opposition to this view is Othello and then Desdemona – both of
them before the Signory in defence of their marriage are heroic and
display developed humane values. Othello is steadily undermined by
Iago, deceived by negativity wrapped up as comradely concern and
honour, until the heroic couple in effect self-destruct. Since humane
values are generally attractive to audiences for the play, they tend to
like Othello and Desdemona. They may be impressed by Iago’s para-
noid cunning and persistence, which make him fascinating but not
sympathetic. Thus Iago’s destruction of Othello and Desdemona is
painful – tragic.
The pace at which the plot moves feels faster than in other
Shakespeare plays. This is partly due to the central action, the turn-
ing round of Othello, taking place in two scenes (admittedly long)
and another in which the consequences unfold. Despite the num-
ber of lines of dialogue, the transformation seems sudden; there are
not the scenes in between that might mature the development. Mea-
sure, in contrast, has a playworld time-period that is actually shorter
than that of Othello but it has enough minor focal points to make
the time feel more extended – that is, we see something of the pro-
cess of development. Hence the ‘double time’ idea of Othello, which
is needed to fill out the details of the narrative in order to satisfy
a more literal, novelistic reading. This is not necessary in the last
scene because the speed at which the events take place changes to
almost real time; in the Hercule Poirot moment of explication that
follows Emilia’s entry (after 5.2.106) this change of pace gives the
action a different feel from the idealized world of heroes and villain.
It subtly makes a practical perspective on the heroic characteristics of

preceding events seem more appropriate and to some extent opens
rhetorical postures to real-world question. Othello’s speech when he
is about to kill Desdemona is heroic in its poetic quality – the cos-
mic scope of his reflections seems bigger and more meaningful than
real life; however, when the deed is done, the heroic glow disappears,
and his pose before Emilia disintegrates with the arrest of Iago and
the unfolding of the plot. Othello has not made an error from intel-
lectual deficiency but because he is a fool: he makes stupid choices
from twisted values in regard to honour. Desdemona’s heroism sur-
vives somewhat better insofar as she made a successful escape from
patriarchy but, like Othello, her belief in transcendent love meant
that the relationship could not be questioned and she, too, through
her idealistic attitude, allowed it to proceed to its tragic end. Her late-
onset naivety when she talks to Emilia about adultery (see 4.3.57–77)
also detracts somewhat from her heroic image.
The destruction of the heroic and elevated humanism by a base,
aggressive materialism is painful for the audience, but at the same
time the unravelling of the plot brings the realization that it could
not have happened without Othello’s stupidity. Not only have the
admired good guys been destroyed; their goodness was not quite
so good as it was supposed to be. The tragic fall is thus accompa-
nied by irritation as well as pain – it depended on foolish credulity.
As Stephen Orgel said, ‘frustration constitutes a good part of Othello’s
dramatic force’ (Orgel, 2002).5 The two feelings exist at the same time
and they contradict each other. The one does not neutralize the other
and they cannot be averaged out but, like an optical illusion where
the lines suggest two different pictures that keep switching, the feel-
ing of tragic loss alternates with irritation. Shakespeare moves the
audience but perhaps also mocks them for being moved by a down-
fall that could have been avoided, that happened because the hero
was a fool. The audience is wrong-footed and made uncomfortable:
Othello is a Problem Play.
Some of the qualities of Othello become clearer when it is viewed
in relation to the other plays near to it in time. Othello’s dramaturgy
shows development. The ‘double time scheme’ serves to increase the
play’s intensity by compacting the action into little time. This is not
actually two time schemes; it is a condensed present with references
to other happenings that could not possibly fit the same time-scale.
Othello 159
It is a way of heightening emotion and keeping attention focused

on the central issue without worrying about whether consistency is
maintained between events in the main narrative and supporting ele-
ments. It is a temporal organization parallel to late medieval painting,
using psychological perspective for spatial organization. It is subjec-
tive time, like dream time: a sequencing of events that is emotional,
not modelled on a clock. The handkerchief, for example, is important
as an emotional focus for Othello. Desdemona dropping it, Emilia
picking it up, her giving it to Iago and telling him Desdemona will
go mad without it; Iago expressing in soliloquy his intention to put
it in Cassio’s room and telling Othello that he saw Cassio wipe his
beard with it, Desdemona telling Emilia of her great anguish that it
is missing and Emilia denying knowledge of it, Othello demanding
it of Desdemona and telling her at length of its magical properties,
the two of them arguing over it, Cassio giving it to Bianca to copy,
Bianca bringing it back to him, at which point Othello sees it and
it becomes evidence, all occurs in a very short time. It was dropped
before dinner one day and by the next dinner it has been through
this extended cycle. From the first mention of the handkerchief to
the last is some 550 lines. This is a considerable stage time but not
necessarily much in the calendar-time of the playworld. The density
of the action makes it exciting. Aristotle’s dictum that the tragedy
should occur within a single day relates to more than probability; if
the time is dragged out the emotional energy is diminished.
The short time in which Iago succeeds in his objective to turn
Othello around also has another aspect that is important to the play’s
Problem quality. Iago works with the speed, intensity and probably
some of the methods of the used-car salesman and the double-glazing
merchant: Othello ‘buys’ Desdemona’s guilt and kills her before he
really has time to think about it. Her murder is not quite done in
the heat of the moment but it has some of that quality. If you com-
pare the pace at which villains work in other plays – Richard III or
Cymbeline or Titus Andronicus, for example – where the accomplish-
ment of the villainy takes considerable time, Othello’s destruction
then seems really like a gull being caught in an instant. A corol-
lary of the con-artist’s speed is that the picture of reality offered
leaves questions that probably do not have any articulation until
after the con, when ‘wait a minute’ comes too late. Othello realizes
his mistake very quickly, which makes it feel even more like he was
being manipulated. There are certain drawbacks to speed. Iago has

a large amount of soliloquy, necessary information to explain what
he is about to do; at a slower pace it could be delivered in dialogue,
in the way that Hamlet has time to explain his actions and inten-
tions to Horatio. There are also details that remain unclear, such as
Emilia’s complicity in giving Iago the handkerchief. Although her
initial action may be understandable (the Cinthio source makes her
afraid of her husband), her positive relationship with Desdemona
raises questions about why she remains silent when Othello’s inter-
rogation of Desdemona makes clear it is causing serious problems.
Such details are of importance only if the narrative is approached
in a literal way, as a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces have to fit
together. If it is treated as representational, where the characters are
understood as types embodying certain attitudes or behaviour, then
it is the larger picture of their interaction that is of primary impor-
tance, overshadowing inconsistencies of detail. What the play may
lose in narrative precision it gains in emotional power.
The emotional power of the play is of course not free-floating but
can in part be attributed to resonances it may have beyond the play-
world. Measure offered an image of corruption that any audience
would recognize – hypocrisy, abuse of authority, corrupt justice –
but for the original audience it would also have had more spe-
cific echoes of Jacobean society. Othello does not have so specific a
sense of obvious corruption – the Signory seems to function intel-
ligently and Venetian society seems to be generally orderly. Thus
the play is not directed towards specific abuses but to an outlook
which is shown to have great destructive power. Iago is not simply
a brilliant criminal; he represents a growing force of change in the
society that threatens to make redundant the traditional principles
of order. He is interested only in his own advantage; social values –
honour specifically – are for him merely images: ‘Virtue? A fig! ’Tis in
ourselves that we are thus, or thus’ (1.1.316–17). Other people are
for him objects to be manipulated; he displays what Hugh Grady
calls ‘the logic of instrumentality’. Othello and Desdemona, Iago’s
principal victims, are not representatives of the old order (which is
seen most obviously in their marriage which runs against tradition),
but their lives are still organized on the basis of social values: they
trust and are trusted, love and are loved, are responsible to others
and share in the virtue of social respect – honour. Othello shows
Othello 161
Brabantio respect for age when he comes with armed men to retrieve
Desdemona, even though he is a confirmed adherent of the old order
(as his arguments against Desdemona’s marriage in the next scene
show): ‘Good signor, you shall more command with years / Than
with your weapons’ (1.2.60–1). While the valued principles of social
interchange all have a basis in material practice, they are not them-
selves material; they are based on general acceptance and, at least
for a time, are defenceless against the individual predator. Othello has
one of Shakespeare’s best plots, so it is easy for audiences and readers
to attend only to the action, but it is also a representation, a sharp
and bitter picture of the aggressive individualism of the age. Iago is
not timeless, and to categorize him simply as ‘evil’ is to mystify him
unnecessarily – he is a socially specific type, the new man Shakespeare
attacks, with much greater clarity but without loss of emotional force,
in the next play, King Lear.
8
Conclusion
The characteristics of the Problem Plays did not develop all at once
and did not develop in isolation. In both the second history cycle
and the Problem Plays, conventional moralizing and obvious vil-
lains were being supplanted by less straightforward predators and
problems that concerned society as a whole. ‘Official’ images of the
world that might once have offered the comfort of a proper place for
every being no longer seemed valid in a society that was changing
markedly. Irony became ever more appropriate, growing from inci-
dental occurrences to the point where it characterized the structure
of the whole play and developed into social critique. Shakespeare’s
increasing use of material, such as the underside of the court, that did
not fit comfortably in the dominant ideology required different tech-
niques and a more advanced dramaturgy. The Problem Plays were the
result. They introduced dramaturgical techniques that could do more
than present a negative picture; they could wrong-foot the audience
and by disturbing them enforce the negative view.
Scepticism became increasingly evident in the wit of the second
history cycle, making royal history somewhat problematic. Falstaff is
the most notable embodiment of the contradictions between offi-
cial values and actual behaviour. His linguistic virtuosity includes
notions of public value but his concerns are reduced to self-interest.
His negative characteristics, insofar as they largely affected his own
lifestyle, did not greatly damage his charming image; however, when
he touched wider issues, such as military affairs, the negative aspects
became serious. His cowardice was not a problem, for it was to be
expected as a part of his human weakness but his ‘catechism’ on
162
Conclusion 163
honour raised some deep questions. The human destruction that

results from his corrupt recruiting has a sharper note but it is made
marginal by the positive tone of the play and the focus on the prince.
Henry V raises similar issues – it was Falstaff after all who was the men-
tor from whom the King had learned the art of spin – but the scale is
now much larger, although the contradictions displayed by the King
are ambiguous enough to allow opposed interpretations. Richard II
has some of the same ‘yes, but’ situations as Henry V. The dissolute
Richard is lectured by old John of Gaunt in one of Shakespeare’s most-
quoted speeches (but only in very short sections) – ‘This happy breed
of men, . . . / This precious stone set in the silver sea’ (2.1.45–6).
Gaunt’s characterization of Richard’s individualistic and new com-
mercially orientated behaviour is appropriate: England is now leased
out, shamed, ‘With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds’ (2.1.64);
however, his rhetoric, though it is rich and splendid, suggests in its
very old-fashioned style a touch of senility, so that Richard’s mockery
may be seen as not entirely without foundation. In King John self-
interest as the dominant motive is made explicit. Richard II, Falstaff,
Philip the Bastard do not overthrow the old order but there is a clear
sense in the plays that they are part of a change and the old values
are losing out to a new individualism.
During the same brief period as the second history cycle, The
Merchant of Venice also played with an opposition between image
and reality that went beyond conventional comic misunderstand-
ing. Shakespeare found a different method to present it: as well as
offering a rhetorical posture followed by exposure, as with Falstaff,
to show or suggest a reality that was different from the image, Mer-
chant presented what was in effect a conflict between elements that
existed on different levels, a contradiction between the form and the
content. The innovation seems minor but is important in relation
to its effect on an audience: Merchant is designed to disturb. It was
experimental and somewhat crude but audiences still find it unset-
tling. In the court scene, the chief instance, the result was morally
pleasing – audiences are not usually eager to see Shylock cut the
pound of flesh from Antonio – but at the same time it violated all
logical expectations. In naturalistic terms, Shakespeare had built up
the likelihood of Shylock collecting his flesh-bond – it feels like a
certainty – but then provided a reversal that feels unlikely, pulled
out of (almost) thin air. The reality was wrong, which the audience
should find distressing. Antonio’s vessels being ‘un-wrecked’ is good

news that makes a pleasant coda to the narrative, but at the same
time it disturbs because there is no explicable way it could have hap-
pened. The marriages that dominate the last scene are, at a more
playful level, similarly troubled by suggestions that their content is
at odds with the romance. The violation of naturalistic consistency,
the feeling of something inappropriate or wrong, causes the disturb-
ing uncertainty of the play. By association, not by logic, that feeling
attaches to the official structures, to authority; and that non-rational
function makes Merchant the prototype Problem Play.
Much Ado About focuses on some of the same issues in a less exotic
environment and without any magical intervention. That makes
its criticism of the shallow values of the court in Messina appear
more relevant to England. The elevation of a conventional notion
of honour as the highest value, above those that directly concern the
well-being of individuals, produces an apparent tragedy; and that is
recognizable as a social criticism. The problem quality of the play,
however, lies not in the cause of the ‘disaster’ but in its solution: the
fact that Hero’s union with Claudio is welcomed by the playworld
at the conclusion of the play has often been recognized as disturb-
ing. In offering two unions that will inevitably be compared by
the audience, Shakespeare has found a smoother way of organizing
the contradiction, but a less effective one: because of the genuinely
happy marriage of Beatrice and Benedick, it is possible for the audi-
ence to accept that Hero and Claudio’s marriage is also joyous – it is a
double wedding, after all – and thereby the problem disappears. Much
Ado is a less interesting play than Merchant and, despite the banter of
Beatrice and Benedick, it is not so witty, but even if ultimately less
successful, it does succeed in providing a structure that focuses the
disturbance more sharply.
Troilus and Cressida, the first of the three conventional Prob-
lem Plays, is the one that has been most resistant to classification.
Regarded as a tragedy by some, as a bitter satire by others, it lacks a
definite generic character. Nevertheless, it is not formless, although
the form is unusual, if not unique, and it marks a new departure
in tone. The two plot lines are both drawn from focal points of
English cultural value, the Trojan War and Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde, and both are rubbished. The bitterness is inescapable and of
such intensity that it alone can make for uncomfortable engagement
Conclusion 165
with the play. Furthermore, the audience itself is made a target by

Pandarus’s Epilogue; as is customary, he addresses them directly but
as fellow panders and, in a gesture uniquely hostile for Shakespeare,
he bequeaths them his diseases. Dramaturgically, the play alternates
between the two sides, at first making Troy appear more humane: it
is a city, civilized by definition, not a tent colony, and it has a love
interest. Yet the values of the Trojans are soon shown to be as hollow
as those of the Greeks, and the love affair becomes a casualty of the
war, unlamented except by the lovers themselves. The dramaturgical
twist that provides the unresolvable contradiction is that Shakespeare
is presenting a subject matter accepted as an embodiment of good-
ness but he is offering it in a form that reverses its moral status. The
sharpest example is the combat of Hector and Achilles; cultural atti-
tudes would lead the audience to anticipate a noble and chivalric
encounter but it is denigrated in a grossly unchivalric slaughter. The
play is shocking, not because of any one violation of accepted images
but because of the sustained violence of the attack on embodiments
of Elizabethan ideals.
The anger and hostility in Troilus raise questions that do not apply
to any other of the Problem Plays or to any others in the canon
about the reason for Shakespeare’s negative intensity. Biographical
speculation, postulating an incident or loss that produced the bitter-
ness is, I think, a misleading approach. My speculation – which is
entirely speculative – would focus on Shakespeare’s artistic produc-
tion. Although Troilus is unique, it was written in a period when
a pattern was emerging, as seen in Merchant and Much Ado, of a
tightening focus on problems of deteriorating social values and the
development of a dramaturgy designed to wrong-foot the audience.
Henry V, and also Julius Caesar, reflects some of the same concerns
but without the dramaturgical innovation; however, the play that
first makes central the issues of deteriorating social standards is Ham-
let. Hamlet elaborates the situation of a court that willingly conforms
to a self-interested mode of behaviour (Claudius’s murder of Hamlet
senior is only the most extreme instance), seen first in the milder
Much Ado. Although Shakespeare keeps the social problem in evi-
dence throughout the play, its articulation comes through the hero,
with the result that it is possible to see Hamlet’s disillusionment as
his own psychological problem. The corrupt behaviour of Polonius,
of Laertes, of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of Osric, is all presented
directly for the audience, independent of Hamlet’s interpretation,

but it comes to be overshadowed in criticism by interest in the psy-
chology of the Prince – his melancholy, his guilt, his indecision, his
Oedipus complex and so forth. The enumeration of society’s injus-
tices in the scene with the gravediggers (5.1) – standard folkloric
material, but articulated at a crucial point – might be expected to
raise awareness of the play’s critical bite but it seems generally to
be ignored. Shakespeare’s own audience probably ignored it as well.
This is partly Shakespeare’s own fault for using material that would
encourage assumptions of action as the chief concern – a recent
tragedy of revenge (the lost Ur-Hamlet, probably by Kyd); this would
be likely to make the more general problem of social disintegration
seem boringly anaemic to an audience expecting a play of major
crimes. Because Hamlet has been incorporated into the wider culture
as the play about Hamlet, audiences are accustomed to neglect the
problems to which Hamlet was trying to draw attention. If that is the
case, then the play does not succeed in getting across its fundamen-
tal point. Despite its brilliance in all other respects, it must then be
considered to be a failure in that aspect. A year or two later Troilus
reverses the balance between character and critique. It cannot match
the pleasure audiences continue to take in Hamlet but its smashing
of Elizabethan icons is unmistakable and it allows the audience no
escape from its critique.
The First Player’s speech on Pyrrhus, the small area of overlap of
material in Hamlet and Troilus, makes the destruction of Troy a focus
of high emotion, which is emphasized by Hamlet’s soliloquy that fol-
lows it (2.2). Its emotional value could have had the same intensity
for Shakespeare when he chose to write Troilus, and it is a sign of his
anger in Troilus that he destroys violently something about which
he had a strong positive feeling. King Lear, in contrast, has displays
of rage at behaviour similar to that which troubles Hamlet but it is
objectified, independent of any one viewpoint. The anger of Troilus
that makes it rather over the top has a quality of frustration, of ‘cut-
ting off your nose to spite your face’. It overbalances in the attack,
and probably its very vehemence was an obstacle to making a point –
it was more diatribe than critique. It seems not to have pleased the
public and could not be considered to have been a success.
All’s Well That Ends Well, following Troilus, is more friendly to the
audience. With a less complex narrative, it is also easier to follow
Conclusion 167
and was more amenable to a naturalistic view. Like Much Ado, it

displays the superficiality of the court and its view of honour. The
shallow Bertram is contrasted with courtiers who are critical of his
bad behaviour, and Shakespeare underscores his moral deficiencies
just before he is reunited with Helena, displaying fresh examples of
his dishonesty and egocentricity. The match, so laboriously achieved
and with so unsatisfactory a partner, is designed to make the audience
uncomfortable. However, expectations of what the ending should be,
especially given the play’s title, interfere with response and the irony
often misses its target. Too many people, even when they find the
ending disconcerting, accept that the title indicates that Shakespeare
intends that the play be seen as ending well.
The mastery of dramaturgy combined with social perspective is
achieved in Measure for Measure. The narrative is clear, it permits
a naturalistic reading, and yet it also builds in some elements of
shock that can serve the ideological function of undercutting will-
ingness to accept authority. The play incorporates detail closer to
ordinary life, notably through the character of Pompey, without turn-
ing it into clowning, as happens in Merchant and Much Ado; rather,
its reference to local corruption suggests a picture relevant to the
world experienced by Shakespeare’s audience. The functional dis-
tance Shakespeare creates between the perspective held by authority
and that arising from the lived experience of the playworld allows
for action that at the same time fulfils the logic of the Duke’s plan
and provides a basis for a human response. Thus Claudio’s arrest
is an instance of punishing law-breaking which in the playworld is
popularly regarded as a severe injustice. The emotion aroused by the
threat to Claudio makes the state – his persecutor – into an oppressor
without any explicit critique. A consideration of Claudio’s case in nat-
uralistic terms strengthens the emotional perspective, since his arrest
and sentencing seem at best illogical and, more seriously, contrary to
the law. Similarly, the denouement can produce intense sympathetic
emotion at Isabella’s torment, which should be a condemnation of
her tormentor. Her acceding to Mariana’s plea to join in seeking
clemency for Angelo is a choice of fellow feeling over legal retribu-
tion. The tension around that choice makes Isabella into a moral
exemplar.
Shakespeare has constructed in Measure a playworld where there is
a sense of the immediacy of a local situation with the reverberations
of something on a much greater scale. All’s Well, with its larger geog-
raphy, feels like a narrower universe; Merchant somewhat less so,
Much Ado more so. Measure’s conclusion follows the same comedic
patterns of marriages but makes the negative aspect much clearer,
insisting on its negativity by being explicit. Angelo’s preference for
death over marriage validates a negative attitude as one possible
for the audience to hold, thus avoiding the problem of All’s Well
and Much Ado, which requires independent judgement. With three
other possible marriages under scrutiny (Lucio makes comic rejec-
tion possible, Claudio and Juliet are already married in all but the
license), the Duke’s proposal to Isabella should stimulate the audi-
ence’s awareness of the reasons she has to reject it. The Duke’s
proposal is in effect his statement that everything is all right, that all
has ended well. Feminist criticism has had some success in popular-
izing this contradiction, that Isabella would not want to accept her
tormentor as husband, but unfortunately the antiquated view that
she is delighted to marry the Duke still has considerable currency.
Shakespeare achieves a unity of the intellectual and the emotional,
social critique that is effective because it is animated by feeling: even
for an audience who still believe in the Duke, the play succeeds in
straining faith in authority. Measure is one of Shakespeare’s finest
constructions.
Othello, as a tragedy, obviously works in a different way from the
other five Problem Plays, but its effect is quite similar in terms of the
form–content contradiction. It produces a comparable uneasiness:
expectations which are aroused in the course of the play are fulfilled
in the conclusion, but they are realized in a manner that denies the
expected content; the tragic sadness is compromised by the arbitrari-
ness of the ending. This conflict is probably more emotionally intense
than that of the other plays and the oscillation continues between
the responses of sadness and irritation like an unavoidable optical
illusion. This is attributable to the excellent construction of the final
scenes, the sense of impending doom coupled with the immediacy of
recognition of error. The conclusion, in the long view, privileges the
tragic response, while the immediate perspective recognizes the stu-
pidity of the act. In terms of social critique, Othello seems to offer
much less than the challenges made by Merchant, Hamlet, Troilus
and Measure and especially by King Lear, which followed the next
year. Yet it is critical at a level that is less immediate but perhaps
Conclusion 169
more fundamental – not the effects so much as a sense of problems

inherent in the social structure. The agent of destruction, Iago, has a
complete disregard for human values, which is commonly mystified
with the label ‘evil’. He serves his own advantage, whatever destruc-
tion it may cause for others, but he is distinguished by the ‘purity’ of
that motive, not deflected by attractions of sensuality or social inter-
action. Those who hold social values they assume to be general but
do not constrain Iago are thus an easy prey for him – they trust, they
love, they are responsible. More than just the individual villain, Iago
is representative of the new perspective, sensed but not yet defined in
Othello. Iago thinks in terms of commodity, not simply the ‘tickling
gentleman’ of self-interest but the reduction of everything to equiva-
lences. The sharpest indication of this can be seen in his ‘put money
in thy purse’ speech to Roderigo; money becomes the only thing
that counts and individual qualities in things and people are irrel-
evant. This is more than Shakespeare’s complaint about the power of
money; it is also a protest at the destruction of social integrity and
marginalization of humane qualities. It is this destruction that Iago
represents, the ultimate problem underlying the Problem Plays.
The social criticism that Shakespeare displayed in Othello was of
course part of a growing awareness, and it became increasingly evi-
dent in the plays. In the first history cycle the paradigmatic bad man
like Richard III had no illusions about his badness; he recognized the
same value-schemes as his fellows – it was just that he did not follow
them. Falstaff consciously transfers images of feudal service to cover
his own disorder: ‘Let us be “Diana’s foresters”, “gentlemen of the
shade”, “minions of the moon”, and let men say we be men of good
government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste
mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal’ (1.2.25–9).
Shakespeare signals a social change but his rhetoric is still playful;
when Hal is called before the King to justify himself, the new con-
tent becomes more defined. Excusing his bohemian lifestyle with
promises of military glory to come, blood scouring away his shame,
he also describes his military ambition in terms drawn from com-
merce: ‘Percy is but my factor, good my lord, / To engross up glorious
deeds on my behalf’ (3.2.137, 147–8).
In Merchant the social change is signalled not only by the emphasis
on Antonio’s bond to Shylock but also by the setting in Venice, in
an environment where commerce is ‘natural’. The substance of the
bond is medieval and folkloric but the emphasis on details of the

contract in the trial scene indicates a different kind of culture. When
Portia tells Shylock, ‘Then must the Jew be merciful’, her sense of
‘must’ is equivalent to ‘our culture requires’; Shylock’s response is
to ask ‘On what compulsion’ (4.1.179), insisting on the authority of
contract. This is a model of the social change – contract is replacing
custom – but the viciousness of Shylock’s insistence on his bond is
seen, in the playworld and usually in criticism, as his personal hatred
of Antonio, not as a characteristic of a new system.
Contract and exchange are not significant in Much Ado but they
become important in Hamlet. Hamlet looks back to a period when
motives were less self-interested, as can be seen in his soliloquy
stimulated by the sight of Fortinbras’s troops: ‘Rightly to be great /
Is not to stir without great argument, / But greatly to find quarrel
in a straw / When honour’s at the stake’ (4.4, 53–6). The point of
Hamlet’s admiration is endorsement of things done without consid-
eration of personal gain, not of medieval chivalric pursuits. Similarly,
Hamlet’s review of skulls in the graveyard scene may have a dance-
of-death medieval character, but the imagining of the corrupt lives
the dead once led has a more contemporary feel of contract cul-
ture: ‘This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with
his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his
recoveries’ (5.1.104–5).
Troilus is concerned with honour but, as in Hamlet, its meaning
has changed. At one level, Falstaff is right – honour is only a word,
air, insubstantial – but in terms of the society it is (or was) a mat-
ter of social regard, public esteem, how people are valued by their
society. Where there are only individuals, there can be no honour.
Hector’s downfall is partly his belief that honour is still alive in the
wars, but Shakespeare shows, in bitter terms, that in the Trojan War it
has largely been replaced by self-interest, seeking only the image, like
Achilles, or merely the exercise of power without regard for others,
like Diomedes.
Honour is also an issue in All’s Well. The view of the King and
the older members of his court is that honour depends on achieve-
ments of social import; virtue is fundamental and rank can follow.
This is in keeping with their age and tendency to nostalgia, but it
is also an attitude held widely enough that both Robert Greene and
Thomas Deloney voiced it in popular literature.1 Bertram, the new
Conclusion 171
man concerned only with himself, sees rank as equal to honour, but
in the eyes of his fellow officers he is regarded as having behaved dis-
honourably in his conduct off the field. In the discussion he has with
Diana when he is attempting to seduce her, the notion of honour is
specific – her virginity, the honour of her family, is to be traded for
his ring, representing the honour of his house. Measure, of course,
has the same limited sense of sexual honour, the sacrifice of which is
supposed to save Claudio’s life. Financial matters make only a limited
appearance, in the practical viewpoint of someone of a lower station –
Pompey needs employment. The play’s concern with corruption nec-
essarily deals with self-interested action and its consequential damage
but the corruption is not financial.
At the naturalistic level Othello has little concern with social
organization, aside from a brief picture of the Venetian Signory. Iago’s
destruction of the heroic romance at the centre of the narrative is ren-
dered in considerable detail which makes it credible, but naturalism
does not provide a motive (the subject of much critical discussion).
Beyond naturalism, Iago functions at the level of a fable, suggested
by Othello’s saying, at the end, that he had expected Iago to appear
as a creature with hooves – that is, a devil (5.2.283).2 At the sym-
bolic level, Iago is a demon of the commodity principle, reducing
all qualities to equivalences and thus destroying the character of
human interchange. Honour, a theme he exploits with success, no
more exists for Iago than it does for Falstaff. Honour is an image;
it can be an image of actuality or merely an image, without sub-
stance. The operative word here is ‘seems’ which, from Much Ado
on, has considerable importance. Much Ado, in both the main and
sub-plots, plays on ‘seeming’ of different sorts: that which serves to
unite Beatrice and Benedick is acceptable but the seeming that causes
the ‘disaster’ is not, since it is a pretence of honour. The same hol-
low use of honour is treated humorously, but still with relevance, in
As You Like It. Touchstone, explaining a tale, says, ‘if you swear by that
that is not, you are not forsworn. No more was this knight, swearing
by his honour, for he never had any’ (1.2.72–4). Hamlet makes the
point in the second scene: ‘Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not
“seems” ’ (1.2.76). Almost all of Troilus and Cressida, except Thersites’
commentary, is touched by ‘seems’.
The analysis of individualism reaches its greatest clarity in King
Lear. The attitudes of Iago which Shakespeare made emotionally
powerful but did not clearly articulate were given a more natural-
istic and understandable rendering in Edmund. In terms of critical
analysis, Iago can be viewed as an isolated villain and often as some-
one incomprehensible, whereas Edmund’s representative character is
reinforced by Goneril and Regan, Cornwall and Oswald. Shakespeare
makes the critical point by demonstration rather than suggestion,
showing the motives, the behaviour and the consequences. King Lear
presents coherently ideas that the Problem Plays were beginning
to articulate, and it also incorporates or echoes dramatic elements
used earlier. Ideas that were floated in Measure, authority, for exam-
ple, are anchored in King Lear. Claudio complains briefly about the
arbitrariness of ‘the demi-god, authority’ (1.2.119) – and Isabella,
in her long first plea before Angelo, builds up to ‘But man, proud
man, / Dressed in a little brief authority, / Most ignorant of what
he’s most assured’ (2.2.119–21). Protected by having Lear speak out
of his madness, Shakespeare has him utter a more trenchant image
of authority: ‘Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar? . . . And
the creature run from the cur? There thou might’st behold / The great
image of Authority: / A dog’s obey’d in office’ (4.6.152–7). Its greater
power comes from an experiential content coupled with the succinct-
ness of a proverb. Techniques of dramaturgy developed in the earlier
plays are further enhanced in King Lear: for example, the use of a
thoroughly unlikable hero, as in Merchant, which helps Shakespeare
make clear the meaning in King Lear. That is, the audience has no
urge to accept Lear’s ideas on any basis of affection for him; rather,
Shakespeare takes us through the process of Lear’s blinkered grasp
moving towards understanding through demonstrated experience.
The learning of the audience is thus made more objective. King Lear
is an angry play, but unlike the wasted rage of Troilus, Shakespeare
has learned to objectify its cause, and thereby construct a play that is
at once exciting, intensely moving and has a clear message.
Shakespeare is not a revolutionary, nor is he an agent of social
containment. He found material that could be used to convey the
uneasiness of a society in the process of change and to reflect the
pain experienced by those disadvantaged by it. He was a commer-
cial dramatist and very aware of heavy censorship. His critiques did
not have the directness of Marlowe’s; he relied on metaphors. He
learned to make plays with flexible signifiers, and could question
authority under a guise of innocence. He found what Alison Findlay
Conclusion 173
called ‘ “pressure points” that “created opportunities for resistance” ’

(Findlay, 1994, p. 7).
In Shakespeare’s day plays had yet to become a respectable activity.
There were those who railed against the immorality of the theatre;
at best, plays were accepted as lightweight entertainment. Of course,
they did not have to be heavy to be effective. ‘Wordplay is always
subversive, since it undermines both linguistic and social norms’
(Hilsky, 1994, p. 157). Plays offered alternative images of social
being. Undoubtedly many theatre-goers suffered – and accepted –
oppression, having assimilated their experience through the received
ideological patterns. Plays could reconfigure that experience, inte-
grating it into alternative patterns, and they could thus change
attitudes. A critical perspective does not require a realistic, natural-
istic theatre; any audience that attends a heavily censored theatre in
a single-ideology state – in Elizabethan London or in Eastern Europe –
learns to appreciate argument by nuance. Shakespeare’s audiences
were used to nuance, they were used to multiple perspectives, they
were used to rhetoric and they were dead sharp. When Shakespeare
offered them an image of a transformed reality, it was a model that
made questioning seem more possible. If they show anything, the
Problem Plays show that.
Notes
1 Introduction
1. Frederick Boas, Shakspere and His Predecessors (1896). Boas included Hamlet.
The term was entrenched by E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s Problem Plays
(first published 1950). He also included Hamlet in the category, along
with Troilus and Cressida, because ‘they deal with and display interesting
problems’ (p. 10).
2. The Merchant of Venice has long been recognized as having ‘problem’ char-
acteristics: for example, Leo Salingar’s essay ‘Is The Merchant of Venice a
problem play?’ in his Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans (1986),
and Frank Kermode, in Shakespeare’s Language (2001, p. 71). John Drakakis,
in the introduction to his Arden 3 edition of the play, states the problem
quality very clearly in discussing the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo
in the final scene: ‘The “types” of lovers they invoke qualify all that fol-
lows, disclosing the potential for disruption that rests beneath the surface
of the play’s authorizing narrative that these two characters have, in their
way, already subverted. . . . Whichever way we view the formal harmony of
the ending of the play, its investments are social and political, domestic
and public, and the discomfort that these tensions generate exceeds the
capacity of the genre to contain them’ (pp. 111–12).
Declan Donellen seems to regard Much Ado also as straining the comic
genre, saying it has ‘such a bitter heart in it’, ‘Directing Shakespeare’s
Comedies’, lecture, International Shakespeare Conference, 2002). Holger
Klein, who edited the Salzburg Studies in English Literature edition of the
play (Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), expressed similar doubts about its comic
structure in conversation with me.
3. Kiernan Ryan, who probably would not wish to be numbered among
the liberal humanists, speaks of the plays’ ‘unfathomable strangeness’ in
‘A Blank Page for the Myth Makers’, The Times Higher, 26 August 2005,
pp. 20–1.
4. I am grateful to Paola Spinozzi for directing me to this text.
5. For a discussion of emotion as judgement, which has shaped my thinking
on the subject, see Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study in
the Sources of Poetry (first published 1937), especially Chapter 10, ‘Poetry’s
Dream-Work’.
6. Prologue from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine:
174
Notes 175
From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.
(Marlowe, 1988a)
7. The ‘contract’ between the author and the gentlemen audience,

Bartholomew Fair: ‘He that will swear Jeronimo or Andronicus are the best
plays yet, shall pass unexcepted at here as a man whose judgement shows
it is constant, and hath stood still these five and twenty, or thirty years.
Though it be an ignorance, it is a virtuous and staid ignorance; and next
to truth, a confirmed error does well; such a one the author knows where
to find him’ (p. 334).
8. Most of the chronologies I have looked at place Measure in 1604, later
than All’s Well. Although there is no external evidence for dating All’s Well,
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, in William Shakespeare: A Textual Compan-
ion (1987), place it later than Measure on the basis of stylistic indices. These
indices show quite improbable results from time to time, and they offer at
most probability, not proof. In terms of the dramatic development in the
following discussion, All’s Well seems to me to be definitely earlier than
Measure.
2 All’s Well That Ends Well

1. Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear, Reviv’d with Alterations (1681), in
Montague Summers, ed., Shakespeare Adaptations (London: Jonathan Cape,
1922).
2. See also Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (1979).
3. ‘Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring / Their fiery coacher his diurnal
ring’ indicates time within two days is intended; ‘Or four and twenty times
the pilot’s glass / Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass’ suggests
one day, 2.1.160–1, 164–5.
4. I dealt with this perspective on Hamlet at some length in Monsters of the
Deep: Social Dissolution in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (1992).
5. See William Harrison’s An Historicall Description of the Islande of Britayne
(1577).
6. See, for example, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and George a Green,
the Pinner of Wakefield as well as much of his fiction and the fiction of
Thomas Deloney, especially Jack of Newbury.
7. See Stith Thompson, prince as reward for cure, T67.2.
8. cf. Macbeth 1.3.18–25. The witches are given a different level of reality
from the main actors in the drama. They speak in tetrameter, whereas the
magical verse in All’s Well remains pentameter.
9. See Stith Thompson H1187 where the task left by the departing husband
for the virgin wife is to have a son whose real mother she is and whose real
father he is. See also H900, H961, 891 and K1843.2 which offer variations
on the same relationship problems.
176 Notes
4 Measure for Measure

1. I have modernized the quotations from both Whetstone’s play and from
the 1582 prose text, from which dedicatory material is taken. Quotations
from the story itself are from Spencer’s text.
5 The Merchant of Venice

1. Character books became very popular in the early seventeenth century.
Nashe’s excursions into national types in Pierce Penilesse (1592) is less
extended but of the same sort, and estates satire, such as Greene’s Quip for
an Upstart Courtier (1592), had similar cataloguing and descriptive features.
7 Othello
1. For the typicality of this view see, for example, John Dickenson’s Greene
in Conceit (2008 [1598]). Valeria, the heroine, has been led to her life as a
libertine by too much liberty, starting with her liberal education.
2. I have used E. A. J. Honigmann’s Arden edition here and in the next
quotation because his lineation makes more sense than that of Kenneth
Muir.
3. I follow Honigmann’s ‘nought’ here, as a better reading than Muir’s
‘naught’.
4. See Arcadia, Book 3, Chapter 12. Argalus must leave his beloved new wife
Parthenia, most reluctantly, to fight a single combat as requested by the
King. Argalus is ‘carried away by the tyranny of honour’. Philip Sidney
(1977), The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, p. 503.
5. ‘Othello and the End of Comedy’, lecture, International Shakespeare
Conference, 2002.
8 Conclusion
1. See Robert Greene, George a Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield and Friar Bacon
and Friar Bungay, and Thomas Deloney, Jack of Newbury. With varying
degrees of explicitness, both writers express the view that great deeds per-
formed by a commoner are greater than those performed by someone
high born.
2. Alastair Fowler’s Renaissance Realism is probably the most helpful text in
making Iago comprehensible in that he explains the Renaissance willing-
ness to use different perspectives in an otherwise unified work. It is his first
four chapters that are particularly helpful, rather than his specific judge-
ments on Shakespeare’s plays, which are ingenious but more redolent of
the study than the stage.
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Index
Note: The letter “n” followed by the locator refers to notes in the text.
Aeneid, 127 Cinthio (Giovanni Giraldi), 160

Agrippa, Cornelius, 119 class vs merit, see social mobility
Alarum Against Usurers, An, see Cohen, D. M., 87, 109
Lodge, Thomas Cordelia, 55
Aldwych Theatre, 4 Cymbeline, 107, 159
All’s Well That Ends Well, 1, 10,
13–35, 36, 37, 40, 51, 52, 53, 55, Defence of Cony-Catching, The, 83,
56, 75, 80, 86, 113, 140, 166–7, 108–9
170–1 Deloney, Thomas, 170, 176n
Anikst, Alexander, 2 Desdemona, 55, 139, 141, 142–5,
Antony and Cleopatra, 153–4 148–56, 157–60
Arcadia, 122, 135, 156, 176n Doctor Faustus, 115, 139–40
Aristotle, 5, 15, 19, 121, 138–9, 159 Donellen, Declan, 5, 174n
As You Like It, 3, 14, 20, 39, 69, 74, Drakakis, John, 10–11, 174n
89, 106, 133, 136 Duchess of Malfi, The, 57
Auden, W. H., 107–8 Dunbar, William, 115
Elam, Keir, 5
Bacon, Francis, 95
Elizabethan World Picture, The, 6, 112,
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6
119, 174n
bed trick, 17, 30, 37
Escher, M. C., 3
Binyon, Lawrence, 7
Euphues His Censure to Philautus, 114,
Boas, Frederick S., 6, 174n
116–17, 121–2, 124
Bond, Edward, 1
evolutionary view of Shakespeare’s
Bradley, A. C., 4 development, 17
Brooke, Tucker, 113
Browning, Robert, ‘My Last Faerie Queene, The, 78
Duchess’, 153 fairy tale, 25, 28, 29, 88, 100, 104,
106
Canterbury Tales, The, 59 curing the king, 25
catharsis, 138–9 fulfilment of tasks, 33
Caudwell, Christopher, 174n ‘fallacies of interpreting Shakespeare’
Caxton, William, 114, 116, 125, naturalism, 4–5, 35, 87
127, 128 the play of ideas, 6
Changeling, The, 62 primacy of the word, 5–6
character types, 8, 13, 18–21, 24–5, Falstaff, 37, 87, 162–3, 169
34, 55, 88, 95–6, 106, 160 Findlay, Alison, 172–3
Chaucer, 11 Fiorentino, see Giovanni (Ser
Ciceronis Amor, 117 Giovanni Fiorentino)
181
182 Index
Fowler, Alistair, 4, 6, 7, Jew of Malta, The, 83, 95, 108, 123

171, 176n Jonson, Ben, 9, 19, 175n
Friar Lawrence, 43 Julius Caesar, 67, 165
Gargantua and Pantagruel, 119 Kermode, Frank, 174n

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 115 Kiernan, Pauline, 4
‘Giletta of Narbona’, 16 King John, 37
Giovanni (Ser Giovanni King Lear, 16, 20, 21, 23, 54, 85, 133,
Fiorentino), 87 140, 141–2, 146–7, 161, 166,
Gorboduc, 8, 120 171–2
Grady, Hugh, 160 Klein, Holger, 174n
Gray, Alasdair, 5
Greene, Robert, 21, 22, 59, 95, 115, Lawrence, W. W., 80–1
116, 170, 176n Lodge, Thomas, 83, 108
‘logic of instrumentality’, 160
Love’s Labour’s Lost, 14, 37, 70, 104,
hamartia, 15, 139
107, 115
Hamlet, 19, 34, 54, 55, 64
Lydgate, John, 114
Hamlet, 3, 21, 67, 84–5, 107, 112,
121, 123, 127, 138–9, 140, 145,
Macbeth, 4, 7, 23–4, 126, 138–9
160, 165–6, 170
Machiavelli, Nicolo, The Prince, 65
Ur-Hamlet, 166
malapropism, 52, 86
Hawkes, Terence, 17
Matthew (Gospel according to), 95
1 Henry IV, 29, 169
Measure for Measure, 1, 6, 10, 37,
2 Henry IV, 114
38, 40, 52, 55, 56–85, 86, 107,
Henry IV plays, 37
136, 140–1, 157, 160, 167–8,
Henry V, 25–6, 37, 163, 165
171, 172
see also second history cycle meliorist view of Shakespeare,
2 Henry VI, 109 15–17, 51–2
Henslowe, Philip, 82 Merchant of Venice, The, 1, 10–11, 52,
Heptameron of Civil Discourses, An, see 71, 86–111, 114–15, 129, 136,
Whetstone, George 140, 163–4, 165, 167, 169–70
Heywood, Thomas, 63 Middleton, Thomas, 62
hierarchy/degree, 119–20 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 37, 57,
Hilsky, Martin, 173 104, 107
Humphreys, A. R., 52 Much Ado About Nothing, 1, 3, 10,
Hunter, G. K., 17 36–55, 56, 65, 75, 84, 86, 140,
164, 165, 167, 171
Ibsen, Henrik, 6
Iliad, 125–6 Nashe, Thomas, 95, 176n
inkhorn terms, 121 naturalism, see ‘fallacies of
International Shakespeare interpreting Shakespeare’
Conference ‘noting’, 52
(Stratford-upon-Avon), 5
irony, 16, 110–11, 162, 167 Oedipus the King, 139
Italianate Englishman, 21 Oedipus complex, 19
Index 183
Ophelia, 49 Tamburlaine, 80, 95–6, 118, 120,

Orgel, Stephen, 158, 176n 139–40, 174–5n
Othello, 1, 7, 11, 113, 138–61, 168–9, Taming of the Shrew, The, 55, 134,
171 143
Tate, Nahum, 15–16, 175n
Painter, William, 16 Taylor, Gary, 175n
Palace of Pleasure, 16 Thompson, Stith, 175n
Pandosto, 21, 22 Tillyard, E. M. W., see Elizabethan
Pecorone, Il, 87, 99, 101–2, 104, World Picture, The
105–6, 110 Titus Andronicus, 9, 159
Penelope’s Web, 59 Touchstone, see As You Like It
Pinter, Harold, 1 tragic flaw, see hamartia
Polonius, 19, 37, 47, 148 Troilus and Cressida, 1, 4, 6, 11,
‘Problem Comedies’, 11 112–37, 151, 164–6, 170, 171
Promos and Cassandra, see Troilus and Criseyde, 11, 113, 114,
Whetstone, George 116, 128, 131, 164
Troy Novant, 115
Richard II, 163
Twelfth Night, 14, 23–4, 29–30, 74,
Richard III, 114, 141, 159, 169
106, 114, 136
Romeo and Juliet, 37
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 67
Rosalind, 55
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead, 4 Unfortunate Traveller, The, 95, 122
Royal Shakespeare Company, 4
Rutter, Carol, 5 verbatim theatre, 33
Ryan, Kiernan, 174n Virgil, 115, see also Aeneid
Volpone, 83
Salingar, Leo, 174n
second history cycle, 162
Wayne, Valerie, 7
Shakespeare and intention, 8
Webster, John, 57
Shurbanov, Alexander, 2
Wells, Stanley, 175n
Sidney, Sir Philip, 13
Whetstone, George
Snyder, Susan, 17
Promos and Cassandra, 56–9, 60,
social mobility, 21–3
62, 63, 65, 72, 78, 79
Sokolova, Boika, 2
Sonnets, 26, 33, 118, 130–1 Heptameron of Civil Discourses,
Spanish Tragedy, The, 9, 45, 80, 95 An, 56
Spencer, T. J. B., 16 Winter’s Tale, The, 22, 37
Spenser, Edmund, 78 Woman Killed with Kindness, A, 63
Spinozzi, Paula, 174n
Sterne, Laurence, 5 Zelauto, 110
Stoppard, Tom, 4 Zitner, Sheldon, 53

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Shakespeare’s Irrational Endings

Also by David Margolies

CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL: Marxism and Culture (edited with Linden Peach)

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

Preface and Acknowledgements vi

Note on Texts vii

2 All’s Well That Ends Well 13

3 Much Ado About Nothing 36

4 Measure for Measure 56

5 The Merchant of Venice 86

6 Troilus and Cressida 112

The Problem Plays, in my years of teaching Shakespeare to English

The editions of Shakespeare plays used in the different chapters are

References to other Shakespeare plays are taken from Stanley Wells

A few of Shakespeare’s plays – not quite tragedies, not quite comedies,

in the theatre a relevant and witty response to the disintegration of

The problem of the Problem Plays

Most of the obstacles that mislead understanding of Shakespeare’s

The ‘novelistic’ attitude can also be seen in narrowing the range of

plays the meaning of the words spoken is not conveyed completely

certain about poetry it is that it is not addressed to the mere

Shakespeare and intention

Despite a Shakespeare industry that thrives on ever more speculation

and it was too occupied with intellectual arguments more suited to

The order of discussion

A chronological ordering of discussion of any group of plays seems

ending is in conﬂict with tensions that cannot be contained in the

peripheral to my concern with the dramaturgy, I do not comment

of King Lear makes the rewards of the good more appropriate to

failure to articulate his ‘message’ clearly. Terence Hawkes, whose rep-

his contemporary dramatists might appear as a defect, a skimping on

Be thou blessed, Bertram, and succeed thy father

The Countess’s typical quality is reinforced by Lafeu who shares her

works, and is prominent and explicit in ﬁction. Class, rank, sta-

I am a simple maid, and therein wealthiest

When she would withdraw in embarrassment at her own presump-

I know her well.

and self-awareness while his dramatic partner, Andrew Aguecheek,

Even so it was with me when I was young.

I follow him not

Helena is moved from type to individual by an expanded range of

My lord your son made me to think of this.

We are given a situation that has a range of determinants of Helena’s

The greatest grace lending grace,

Shakespeare gives us some 80 lines of couplets, a change in language

To her whose state is such that cannot choose

already that Bertram intends to desert Helena and leave directly

Something, and scarce so much. Nothing, indeed.

elaboration of response. The effect is to give her more authority in the

Act 3 seems more like the beginning of a sequel than continuation

Helena is not resigned to failure, though shamed and humbled by

imprisonment (4.2) exceeds the comfortable limits of comic revenge,

It is an honour ’longing to our house,

Diana’s reply is again conventional but makes the contrast between

Mine honour’s such a ring.

Immediate lust outweighs the attributes of inherited honour; Bertram

He hath perverted a young gentlewoman here in Florence of a

derailing what appeared to be turning into a positive resolution.

This ring was mine, and when I gave it Helen

And on your ﬁnger in the night I’ll put

Let your highness

Diana herself enters and, accused by Bertram of being ‘a common

He knows himself my bed he hath deﬁled,