Renaissance Literature COLIPCA

UDJG
Facultatea de Litere
ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

(A Course in English Literature for 1st Year Students, 2nd semester)
Course tutor:
Associate Professor Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă
Galaţi
2010
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Section 1: Sixteenth-Century English Poetry 5

1. 1. The Early Sonneteers: Thomas Wyatt. Henry Howard 7
1. 2. Sir Philip Sidney 10
1. 3. Edmund Spenser 13
1. 4. William Shakespeare: The Narrative Poems. The Sonnets 17
1. 5. Practical Applications. Examination Tests 22
Section 2: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century 25

2. 1. The Rise of the Secular Drama 25
2. 1. 1. Elizabethan Playhouses and Theatrical Performances 25
2. 1. 2. The First Comedies and Tragedies 29
2. 2. The University Wits 32
2. 2. 1. Thomas Kyd. Case Study: The Spanish Tragedy 32
2. 2. 2. Christopher Marlowe. Case Study: The Tragical History of 38
the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
Section 3: William Shakespeare or Elizabethan Drama at Its Best 49

3. 1. Life and Work 49
3. 2. The Shakespearean Controversy 53
3. 3. Chronicle Plays. Case Study: Richard III 55
3. 4. Comedies. Case Study: The Taming of the Shrew 62
3. 5. Tragedies. Case Study: Hamlet 70
3. 6. Romances. Case Study: The Tempest 81
Bibliography 95
English Renaissance Literature

Section 1: Sixteenth-Century English Poetry

“As early as the 15th century a few English clerics and government officials
had journeyed to Italy and had witnessed something of the intellectual
movement flourishing there. Interest in classical learning became manifest
when private donations of ancient manuscripts to the Universities of Oxford
and Cambridge made them famous seats of humanistic learning. The
introduction of Greek studies into England initiated a permanent enthusiasm
for classical learning. William Grocyn, the first teacher of Oxford, Thomas
Linacre, who taught Greek to Erasmus and Thomas Morus, John Colet, the
founder of St-Paul’s School, the first English secondary school devoted to the
New learning, established the teaching of Greek on sound principles and
wrote grammatical works and translations.
The great humanist of the age, Desiderius Erasmus, lived in England
for a number of years and wrote his famous work Moriae Encomium (Praise
of Folly) in 1510 at the London home of Sir Thomas Morus to whom the work
is dedicated. Erasmus and Thomas More were lifelong friends and their
friendship is one of the most touching in the history of literature. Besides his
position as a statesman Thomas Morus was the great leader of the
intellectual movement known as HUMANISM. His literary fame rests upon
Utopia, the first great humanistic work by an Englishman.
The 16th century also witnessed the emergence of portrait painting as part
of the intellectual renewing of the time. When the monasteries were dissolved
during the Reformation, religious painting inevitably disappeared as an annex of
Catholicism. Painting was centralized in London and in the service of court. Henry
VIII, anxious to heighten his prestige by a brilliant art circle, took advantage of the
presence in England of Hans Holbein the Younger, who had first arrived with a
recommendation to Sir Thomas Morus from Erasmus, staying at Morus’s house
from 1526 to 1528, to appoint him official court painter in 1536.
The portrait of Henry VIII by Holbein, the same as the previous ones of
Thomas Morus and the group of Morus and his family, reveals the artist’s
superb ability of recording the accurate likeness and the stamp of character
which only a great artistic genius can give. Holbein’s influence on English
painting exerted through the individual portrait able to bring a living person
authentically before us cannot be questioned.”
Over the second half of the sixteenth century, the prosperity and
security that the English enjoyed under Queen Elizabeth I allowed for further
cultural developments as the English Renaissance reached its climax. “The
Renaissance meant literally ‘re-birth’, a return to the man-centered learning of
classical antiquity. With its spirit of inquiry and its vision of the ancient freedom
of Greek and Roman thought the Renaissance had been transplanted from
Italy to bloom afresh in England. The Renaissance attitudes manifested
themselves in humanism characterized by interest in man asserting the
intrinsic worth of human life. By placing man as an individual at the centre of
human preoccupation humanism gave him a new status in the universe. It
emphasized the study of man and regarded such study as the way to elevate
human culture and make life on earth more enjoyable.
The epoch-making astronomical discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler
and Galileo substituted for the traditional Ptolemaic cosmology the new
image of the sun-centered universe. But Elizabethan world picture was still
largely geocentric with the earth surrounded by the nine spheres beyond
English Renaissance Literature 5
which the ‘coelum empireum’ extended. The universe was hierarchically

structured, all the things constituting one Great Chain of Being that rose from
the particles of matter to the Power that had created them. Cosmic hierarchy
reflected the principle of order which in the Renaissance conception
governed the universe and prevented chaos in the society. The Great Chain
of Being would prove a perennial concept to linger on in the intellectual
mentality until late in the 18th century.
The significant works of Latin, Greek and European literatures became
available to the public at large through translation into English. Among these
mention should be made of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and
Romans, Homer’s Iliad, Vergil’s Aeneid, Seneca’s Tragedies, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses but also Montaigne’s Essays and Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
One of the chief elements in the English culture of the Renaissance was the
Bible which became the book of books for the nobility and the middle classes
alike. If at the beginning of the 16th century there were only two complete
English versions of the Bible, both of which were made by followers of John
Wyclif, an increased demand for new translations produced in successive
waves the Great Bible (1539). Cranmer’s Bible (1540), the Geneva Bible
(1560) to culminate with the Authorized Version (1611) which has ever since
influenced English literature through its perfectly balanced archaic style.
The violent attitude taken against icons and objects of cult during the
Tudor reformation that discouraged painters and sculptors to produce
religious art continued under Elizabeth. The most emotionally appealing
product of the Elizabethan Age is the art of the miniature. In its intimate
nature it was the opposite to the formalized images of the oil painters, a
development from the manuscript illumination Nicholas Milliard is remarkable
in the fresh and intimate character of his miniature portraits, and the poetic
feeling which makes him kin of the Elizabethan sonneteers. His miniatures
were small jewels, revelations of character and sentiment.
The unsurpassed achievements of the Elizabethan age were by far in
the field of poetry, drama and philosophy which reached unprecedented
originality and forwardness of expression in the works of Spenser,
Shakespeare and Bacon.” (Gavriliu, 2002: 77-8, 84-6)
The post-Chaucerian period was characterised by the long absence of

cultivated poetry. Yet, during the Renaissance, especially due to the
tremendous influence of Italian lyrical poetry (Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto,
Tasso) widely known either through translation or adaptations, significant
achievements marked the revival and rapid development of English poetry.
Their study will allow modern readers to see in a different light a number of
issues related, on the one hand, to court culture in the Renaissance times,
i.e. the relationships between humanism, chivalric values and court culture,
with the related themes of courtly and platonic love, the way in which the arts
were used by rulers to project images and political messages about
themselves, their courts, and the destiny of their countries and kingdoms, or
the role of women in court culture, both women as ornaments of the court
and women as rulers. On the other hand, however, stress will be laid on one
particular aspect which runs not only through the court culture material but
through the wider discussion of humanism, ideas and the arts, namely the
relationship between European cultural values and artistic models and the
products of the emergent national cultures. (See Griffiths, 1998) As the
further presentation attempts to demonstrate, drawing on the models of
6 English Renaissance Literature
Italian Renaissance vernacular poetry – in particular on Petrarch –, imitating

or criticizing them, the most important of the English Renaissance poets
(Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William
Shakespeare) imposed on themselves an explicit mission to regenerate
English as a literary language, to blazon English poetry forth as worthy of
comparison with the best of Italy and the best of Greece and Rome, and
shaped up their works according to their Protestant convictions and to their
opinions regarding the position and the function of the poet at court.
In the spirit of the Renaissance, most of the new poetry was
circulated, at first, in collections, in manuscript form, to be published for the
public at large only at a later date. The first significant collection of
Renaissance verse is Songes and Sonnets by the Wright Honourable Lord
Henry Howard Late Earle of Surrey, and Others, also known as Songs and
Sonnets or Tottel’s Miscellany, as it was published by the printer Henry Tottel
in 1559. It was a heterogeneous collection of 310 poems, mainly lyrics, but
also epigrams, elegies, satires, pastorals, narratives. Highly popular among
the poets and the reading public (Shakespeare himself is said to have owned
a copy of the collection and he does make reference to it, more or less
explicitly, in The Merry Wives of Windsor and even in Hamlet), Tottel’s
Miscellany was published in at least nine editions until the end of the century.
The most remarkable contributions to the collection belonged to the most
influential of the individual poets, the so-called “pioneers” of this poetic age,
namely Sir Thomas Wyatt (97 poems) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,
whose name appears on the title page, probably because of his high rank
and his close ties to the royal family (40 poems).
1. 1. The Early Sonneteers: Thomas Wyatt. Henry Howard
When English poetry re-emerged in the sixteenth century after a long period
of rather scarce poetic achievements, it turned for inspiration to the literature
of another European cultural space where the Renaissance had been
flourishing, namely Italy. Translations and adaptations played a very
important part in making the humanistic literature of Italy widely known and it
was in particular to writers like Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey, that the acculturation of one of the most popular forms of lyrical
poetry, i.e. the sonnet, was possible, thus allowing for the development of a
new tradition in poetry writing in Renaissance England.
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

Life. He lived a short, but eventful life among the aristocrats of Henry VIII’s
court, getting often involved in dangerous political relationships or love
affairs. Before he was 25, he was sent on diplomatic missions in France and
especially in Italy, where he got acquainted with Petrarch’s and Serafino dell’
Aquila’s love poetry. He was granted the rank of knight, but troubles with the
women in his life – his hatred of his wife and hopeless love for Ann Boleyn –
would soon cost him his freedom: he was imprisoned under the suspicion of
being Ann Boleyn’s lover. Regaining favour, he became an ambassador to
Spain, but he was imprisoned again under the charge of treason. Finally,
appointed commander of the English fleet, he died at the age of thirty-nine, of
a fever during one of his missions, at Falmouth.

Work. He is the first to have introduced the 14-line Italian sonnet into English.
He is the first English poet since Chaucer to make use of Italian models, in
particular Petrarch’s, combining the humanist and the vernacular modes of
expression, i.e. on the one hand, the recovery of classical literature, history,
philosophy and value systems together with the development of the linguistic
tools to accomplish this recovery, and on the other hand, the forging of a
literature in a modern European language that would be as rich and as long-
lasting as that of Greece and Rome. It is true that the adoption of the Petrarchan
sonnet, consisting of an octave, introducing the statement, and a sestet,
presenting the poet’s intellectual or emotional response, mainly dealing with the
theme of unrequited love, was in part motivated by the fact that Italy was
becoming fashionable as a source of courtly manners and accomplishments,
and it amused the king to introduce it to the English court as well. Yet,
considering Wyatt’s personality, scholars have stated that it was rather “the
emotional and formal structure of Petrarchan love poetry, its ability to express
complex emotional experience, the feelings of the lover torn between conflicting
impulses — human love and sexual gratification on the one hand, and the
rejection of the world for the divine, a conflict producing guilt, shame, anxiety,
intolerable tension and uncertainty —” which appealed to the poet and
determined him to take up sonnet writing. (Griffiths, 1998) For Wyatt, Petrarch
offered an erotic psychology useful for constructing his own erotic persona as
part of the courtly game, and especially for transposing in an artistic form an
emotional trauma to which the poetic persona lent distance. The Petrarchan
themes of erotic attraction to an idealized but cruel, alluring, hard-hearted,
frustratingly chaste mistress, fetishism – the male lover deals with the beloved
best through erotic associations with her shoes, clothing pets, portraits, locks of
hair, smells and sounds, thus “aestheticising her” – and masochistically received
rejection - the lover burns, he freezes, he enjoys the pain of denial and waiting,
and the possibility that after pain will come pleasure and gratification – are all
preserved in some of Wyatt’s best sonnets, in fact, translations/ adaptations
from Italian, e.g. The Lover Compareth His State to a Ship in Impetuous Storm
Tossed on the Sea (Petrarch’s Sonnet 156), Description of the Contrarious
Passions in a Lover (Petrarch’s Sonnet 104), The Lover for Shamefastness
Hideth His Desire Within His Faithful Heart (Petrarch’s Sonnet 109).
“Like Petrarch infatuated with Laura, but from a bleaker and more
pessimistic point of view, Wyatt was trapped by an erotic compulsion
from which he could break not himself free. What is interesting is how
Wyatt, whose attitude to his ‘beloved’ was predominantly anger and
scorn, does not simply imitate or copy Petrarch but creatively transforms
his model in a way that reflects his different perception of the beloved
and, as Day emphasises, conveys a sense of Tudor political realities
and the requirements and evasions of survival at court.” (Griffiths, 1998)
Petrarchan idealization of the beloved is thus often replaced with debased
alternatives: images of spring freshness are replaced with sordid antitheses
and obscene allusions; while Laura’s chastity meant that she belonged to
God, in the case of Wyatt’s mistress an emblem of steadfastness and
chastity is transmuted into one of cupidity; etc.
All in all, Wyatt’s poetry, and especially his original lyrics (songs or
sonnets), provide an excellent illustration of the way in which Renaissance
and humanist values enabled poets to express a “heightened of subjectivity
and individuality,” inverting the Petrarchan style, with its sophisticated
conceits, and subject matter and subjecting the persona’s assumptions about
women to a bitter interrogation. (Griffiths, 1998) Furthermore, speaking of

form, special mention should be made to the innovation displayed in Wyatt’s
last three sonnets in Tottle’s Miscellany which was later to be referred to as
the English or Shakespearean sonnet: the 14 lines of the sonnet are
distributed into three quatrains containing the statement, the amplification
and the climax, and, respectively, a concluding couplet, while the rhyming
pattern is abab cdcd efef gg.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)

Life. Described in the historical documents of the time as “the most relish
prowde boye that ys in England” (Berdan, 1920: 511), he lived a short and
excitingly eventful life. Born in a family of the highest aristocracy, he spent his
childhood and early youth in close connection with the royal families of
England and France. Politically active in overthrowing Thomas Cromwell,
Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, in defeating the Scots at Flodden Field and in
the war with France, he remained essentially a reckless young man, often
embarking, together with his friends (here including Thomas Wyatt’s son)
upon “lewde and unseemly (…) walking in the night abowght the stretes and
breaking with stonebows off certeyne wyndowes.” (Berdan, 1920: 512) It was
in fact his recklessness, all the more dangerous in the tense atmosphere of
the dying king’s court, that brought about his death: charged with treason, as
result of his getting involved in the dispute over Henry VIII’s successor, he
was beheaded, at the age of 30, just one week before the monarch’s death.
Work. From his early childhood, “the most brilliant, the most spectacular, the
most cultivated noble of England”, as some scholars call him (Berdan, 1920:
516), was encouraged to study and to translate from the classics and the
French poets. Yet, Petrarch and Wyatt seem to have most strongly
influenced him in his career as a sonneteer.
In dealing with the Petrarchan model, in his translations, he showed
technical skill and produced fluent, musical, attractive verse of genuine lyric
quality, without Petrarchan conventionality or hackneyed phrasing, though
often less vigorous and vivid than Wyatt’s. To give but some examples, his
sonnet Description of Spring, a translation of Petrach’s sonnet 43, pictures a
lovely English landscape in spring time, while Alas! so all things now do hold
their peace, an adaptation of Petrarch’s sonnet 113 (A Complaint by Night of
the Lover not Beloved), displays genuine effusion and a surer hand (to be
analysed). As far as the sonnet form cultivated is concerned, he followed in
Wyatt’s footsteps and established the English sonnet form, devoid of the
mechanical break of the Petrarchan one, “a form more consonant with the
genius of his language” to which he gave currency. (Berdan, 1920: 522-523)
Thematically, he was in fact at his best when exalting male friendship and
masculine virtues rather than the love of women.
But sonnet writing represents only a part of his activity as a humanist
writer. He also had the merit of having introduced the blank verse in English
prosody in his 1554 translation of the Aeneid (Books 2 and 4). These were as
many reasons for his contemporaries and successors (here including Sir
Philip Sidney) to consider him the representative of the age – “the age when
for the first time since Chaucer, the language had become relatively fixed in
the forms of the words, and when the poetic technique had passed beyond
the obviously experimental stage.” (Berdan, 1920: 523)

1. 2. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

After Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the literary interest in Italy and its
court poetry went in hibernation until the 1560s, and even when it was
revived, English poets remained mainly imitators of the Petrarchan sonnet.
Thus, the verse productions under Edward VI, his sister “Bloody” Mary and
the youthful Elizabeth I, were of rather poor quality. Only George Gascoigne
(1542-1577) might be worth mentioning. He was for a short while the most
important man of letters in England. His contribution to the development of
Renaissance literature might be summarised as follows:
- Remarkable translations from Italian drama (Ariosto);
- The first English “novel,” The Adventures of Master F. J. (1573);
- The earliest treatise on English prosody, Certayne Notes of Instruction
Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English, included in his
collection of writings The Poesies of George Gascoigne.
- The first English satire in blank verse, The Steele Glass (1576), exposing
the moral dissolution in every walk of society.
It was only in the 1580s and 1590s, at a time when Elizabeth had managed
to consolidate her position on the throne, that of Anglicanism/ Protestantism
in the kingdom and that of her kingdom among the European powers,
especially by the great victory over the Spanish Armada in July 1588, that the
development of poetry, in particular, moved beyond translation and technical
imitation into true creativity, a phase in which Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser
and William Shakespeare are the leading figures. The Elizabethan response
to Italian influences is different from that of the “pioneers” of the English
Renaissance and somewhat contradictory: on the one hand, Italy was seen
as a source of sensuality, rejected by Protestant austerity, as well as a
symbol of Papism and vice; on the other hand, the educated humanists of the
time found it difficult to break with the human values and sensual content of
Italian fiction and poetry. Furthermore, a very important factor influencing
artistic production in the Elizabethan England was the “desire to define an
English literary identity that enshrined visions of national, political and
religious values that they [poets] sought to identify and shape;” or, to put in
different words, poets aspired to take an active part in the
“creation of a national literary, moral and religious identity in a way that
would buttress state, Queen and church. In so doing, they sought to
integrate Renaissance literary ideals and humane values with their
Protestant beliefs and the implications of these for their souls and their
perception of the self. Tenably the imitation and transformation of Italian
writing was an effort «to construct an illuminated understanding of the
right relationship between worldly and spiritual goods». They borrowed
the themes, expressive desires and preoccupations of Italian poetry with
real human lives and loves, whether in the form of the Petrarchan sonnet
sequence — where the conflict between erotic desire and religious
prescription made the location of self problematical; — or in the form of
the epic romance pioneered by Ariosto and Tasso — where heroic
actions are performed by noble characters humanised by love and
governed by chivalric gallantry; — or in the pastoral mode — which
counterpoised the mutability of worldly troubles with the imaginative
possibility of a golden world of idealised simplicity and harmony. But they
modified the assumptions of each model to make them consistent with
the Protestant sense of human nature and spiritual responsibility; they
struggled with the English language to make it of literary worth in an age

when the less restrictive and less insular traditions suggested writing in
Latin; and they did this in a manner which sought to serve the needs of
Queen and court…” Thus, both Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser
appear as “leading examples of those who wished both to participate in
the value systems represented by Italian and classical literature at the
same as they endorsed Protestant values; they wanted (…) to celebrate
their faith and retain the aesthetic and humane appeal of Italian literary
models; their project concerned both literary and national identity and the
relationship between the cultural implications of being Protestant and
English and a wider European consciousness.” (Griffiths, 1998)
Life. Sir Philip Sidney’s contemporaries considered him the embodiment of

the Renaissance ideal: the perfect gentleman by birth and by nature. A
warrior, a statesman, a scholar and a poet, he was a favourite of the queen
and presumably at the heart of court politics in the 1570s and the early
1580s. He encouraged young Edmund Spenser to publish the Shepherd’s
Calendar (to pay homage to his patron Sidney, Spenser dedicated the work
to him as “the president of noblesse and chevalree”.) A governor in the
Netherlands, he was badly wounded on the battlefield at Zutpen, in a fight
against Catholic Spain, and he died 26 days after. The manner of his death
made him a figure of myth. They say that, while lying on the battlefield
wounded, he gave up the water he had requested in favour of another
wounded soldier with these words: “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.”
Work. Sidney – the man of letters did not seem to take the literary career
very seriously, yet his fame rests upon three major works which were
published posthumously: the novel Arcadia, the sonnet sequence Astrophel
and Stella and the essay An Apologie for Poetry.
To briefly describe his novel, reference must be made to the fact that
he wrote it for the amusement of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, while
staying at her estate to cure from his love for Penelope Devereux, and that
he introduced in it a fairy world of enchanted beauty depicted through a
masterfully exquisite language.
Yet, at this point, more stress should be laid, in particular, on his
sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, which reveals him to be one of the
greatest sonneteers in England. (Published in 1591, at first under the
editorship of Thomas Nashe, in a collection together with Samuel Daniel’s
sonnets, and then in a corrected individual edition, Sidney’s sonnet sequence
served as a source of inspiration for other sonneteers, like Edmund Spenser
and William Shakespeare.) It epitomized Sidney’s attempt to confront and
transcend his personal and public situation. The emotional attachment of
Astrophel, “the star love”, to Stella, “the star”, transposes, in fact, Sidney’s
love for Penelope Devereux whom he couldn’t marry.
“Lady Penelope, sister of the unfortunate Earl of Essex, was some nine
years younger than her distinguished lover. Her father had formed a
high opinion of Sir Philip’s promise, and on his deathbed expressed a
wish for their union: but her guardians were in favour of a wealthier
match, and two or three years after the old Earl’s death, she was
married at the age of seventeen, much against her own wishes, to an
unattractive young nobleman, Lord Rich.” (Minto, 1885)

Sidney’s revival of the Petrarchan patterns in this sonnet sequence goes much
further than mere imitation to parody and critique and displays layers of
ambiguity, contradiction and reasoning which are not necessarily resolved. In
fact, reacting to the long line of imitations between Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
and himself, Sidney prides himself on being original and claims that he will not
adopt the praises, vows, and “deploring dumps” of other amorous singers, but
use as his only source of inspiration “Stella’s kiss”. (Sonnet 1) And indeed, most
of the conceptions and conceits in Sidney’s sonnets are really his own; and they
display very exquisite subtlety and tenderness of fancy, often relting on
dialogue, colloquial tone and even puns (on the name Rich, for instance).
In the light of the impact of Protestant faith and Calvinist assumptions
about the self and the soul, his sonnets appear as a means of purging his
moral being, reconciling himself to unattainable desire and clarifying the moral
meaning of his experience. The strategy followed is to explore the ways in
which Astrophel’s experiences as a lover had been faulty. (Griffiths, 1998)
“The first fifty or sixty sonnets exhibit Astrophel’s love in what may be
called in fashionable mathematical language the statical stage: the
subsequent dynamical stage being composed of sonnets descriptive of
moods and conceits occasioned by a sequence of incidents between the
lovers--supposed encouragement, venturous liberties, discouragement,
despair, and so forth. During the statical or brooding stage, the poet-lover’s
mind is occupied with similitudes and all sorts of fanciful inventions to set
forth the incomparable charms of his mistress and the unexampled force of
his passion. During that period his love is subject to no fluctuations, no
dynamic change; it suffers neither increase nor abatement. It is chiefly in
this stage that the soft gracefulness and ethereal reach of Sidney’s fancy
are displayed.” (Minto, 1885)
Yet, having conquered but the lady’s indifference, the lover turns out guilty of
willful self-deception and immaturity. In vain does she warn him about the need
of self-restraint; Astrophel’s perception of love is distorted by his own carnality
(unlike Petrarch’s persona which, despite the confusion of the erotic and the
spiritual, is, nevertheless, aware of Laura’s pursuit of virtue and the divine).
Once Stella has finally refused Astrophel, the final part of the sequence
emphasises his self-regarding despair; he is “living through the self-punitive
consequences of remaining in an unregenerate condition.” The result is the
spiritual paralysis documented in the final sonnet. (Griffiths, 1998)
As far as the sonnet form is concerned, the fact must be mentioned
that Sidney observes the Petrarchan form of the sonnet in the sense of the
division of the stanza into two staves, the first of eight lines with two rhymes,
the second of six lines with three rhymes. Whether for ease or for variety, he
is not particular about the arrangement of the rhymes within these limits.
Furthermore, he occasionally subdivides the last stave into a quatrain
followed by a couplet, coming thus closer to the English manner.
An Apologie for Poetrie, reprinted with the title of The Defense of
Poetrie in 1595, is a treatise inaugurating modern English literary criticism.
Meant as retort to Stephen Gosson’s attack on all fiction writing in The
School of Abuse, this essay defends imaginative literature and proclaims the
poet’s superiority over the philosopher and the historian through his capacity
to imitate not merely what is, but also what might be. Enlarging upon the
function of the poet in the Elizabethan society, Sidney claims that poetry
should serve moral and religious purposes and it should offer “skills and
moral insights important to monarch, nation and mankind. And the making of
a new English poetry would demonstrate that the culture of the new
Protestant nation was as sophisticated as the cultures of the old European
order, its language, newly wrought and defined through composition, as
beautiful and expressive as Italian and the ancient tongues. Thus, for Sir
Philip Sidney, the role of the poet was not just to imitate the external world,
but to emulate God in creating one that was new. […] Astrophel and Stella
may suggest an unstable gap between the poet’s persona and the writer
himself, but Sidney’s manifesto for poetry and nation was in part a product of
the experience of his own writing as much as of his membership of a political
faction. The sonnet sequence enabled him to constitute himself as individual,
Christian and poet in a way that was a preparation for the public statements of
the Defence and the allegorical message to the nation of his pastoral romance
Arcadia. His aim was didactic, that of translating the poet’s visions into
everyday life.” (Griffiths, 1998)
Having discussed the mission of the poet, Sidney also surveys the
English literary scene and finds little to praise: Surrey’s lyrics, Spenser’s
Shepherd’s Calendar. In considering drama, he is chiefly interested in the
way in which playwrights manage to uphold the unities and attacks the
mixed forms of tragi-comedy.
Sidney concludes by a general defense of English as a language
suitable for poetry and a humorous defiance of those who will not be
converted by his work.
Although the modern reader cannot wholly agree to some of Sidney’s
definitions, he is impressed by his enthusiastic devotion to the cause of
poetry, by the sincere words used in analyzing the origin, structure and object
of poetry, by the graceful and easy manner.
1. 3. Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
“Life. Edmund Spenser, whose name is usually associated with Wyatt,

Surrey and Sidney, came from a social background which had very little in
common with his aristocratic contemporaries. His father was John Spencer
probably a textile worker in London but the boy enjoyed a first rank education
in the greatest Renaissance tradition at Merchant Taylors’ School and at
Cambridge where he received his B A and M A. In London he entered the
service of Leicester and made the acquaintance of Sidney and Ralegh. In
1580 he was appointed secretary to Lord Gray of Wilton lord deputy of
Ireland, and he resided in Ireland for most of his life. Sir Walter Ralegh visited
him at his residence at Cork and at the former’s insistence the poet went to
London to supervise the publication of the first three books of the Faerie
Queene in 1590. The pension of £ 50 granted by the Queen was far less than
the poet’s expectations who returned to Ireland the following year. Another
visit to London in 1594 with three books of the Fairie Queene again produced
no political advancement. Back to Ireland the Spenser family were forced to
flee to England by Tyrone's rebellion. A few days after their arrival to London,
Spenser died under very poor circumstances. His funeral was paid for by the
earl of Essex and he was buried in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer's
grave. No monument was erected to him until in 1620 when the Countess of
Dorset made a gesture of private generosity.
Work. The poetry of Spenser is the culmination of the allegorical verse tradition,
this old but important stream in English literature. Spenser proved to be the
poetic master English verse needed. His facility in language blended the best of
the archaic and of the new vocabulary while his fluency in versification de-
monstrated that English was at least the equal to any other language as a
vehicle of great poetry. To subsequent generations Spenser was the “Poets’
Poet”, because so many English poets have learned the art of versification from
him: Milton, Thomson, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Rossetti, Tennyson.
The Shepherd’s Calendar is a series of 12 eclogues, one for each
month, published in 1579 and dedicated to "Maister Philip Sidney" who
encouraged the poet. The eclogue was a classic form presenting a dialogue
between shepherds and praising simple life. In Spenser the eclogue
becomes didactic or satirical. Beyond the dominant theme which is the
unhappy love of Colin Clout (taken from Skelton) who is rejected by
Rosalinde, comments on political and religious disputes (between
Protestants and Catholics) or tributes paid to friends and patrons are also
inserted. The language in The Shepherd's Calendar is Spenser's own crea-
tion employing phonetic, grammatical and vocabulary elements from all the
dialects of the age (Northern, Midlands and Southern), colloquial terms,
Italian loans (e.g. stanck = weary, from the It. stanco), Latin neologisms and
obsolete grammatical forms which all result in a language that made Ben
Jonson growl that Spenser "writ no language". Spenser used this deliberately
archaic language, partly out of a homage to Chaucer, partly to get a rustic
effect. Despite the conventionality of the content the work contains beautiful
descriptions of the hilly areas of Lancashire and was the first demonstration
by a modern English poet of finished skill and authority. Spenser's skilful use
of many verse forms and his extraordinary musical effects indicate in him
"the new poet" of the Elizabethan age.
After the publication of the first three books of the Faerie Queene
which won Spenser instant fame, the poet published Complaints Containing
Sundrie Small Poems of the Worlds Vanitie (1591), a collection of lyrical
poems some of which like The Ruins of Time display Spenser's scholarly
artificiality. Mother Hubbard's Tale is a satire on the corrupt clergy, selfish of-
ficials and offending military men. Colin Clouts Come Home (1595) is an
iambic pentameter record of Spenser's return to Ireland after his visit to
London under the protection of Sir Walter Ralegh. The corruption of the
London court is contrasted with the simple life in Ireland and most of the
political and literary figures of the time appear concealed under pastoral
names: Colin (Spenser), The Shepherd of the Ocean (Ralegh), Cynthia
(Queen Elizabeth), Astrophel (Sidney).
Amorettti and Epithalamion (1595) are a sonnet sequence, Amoretti,
celebrating the poet’s courtship of Elizabeth Boyle culminating with the
wadding hymn, Epithalamion. Almost all the 88 sonnets demonstrate genuine
personal experience and the Spenserian masterful language and calm purity.
The Epithalamion is the most beautiful nuptial poem in English and perhaps
in any language. The poet's wedding to Elizabeth Boyle is symbolically
celebrated as the eternal spirit of nature and fertility. The 23 stanzas, each
ending with a unifying refrain, celebrate the wedding day from dawn to night
through traditional rites and folk practices still in use. (Gavriliu, 2000: 85-7)
Again, the point of departure for the poem is a real-life courtship,
Spenser’s relationship with Elizabeth Boyle; but, just as this courtship ended,
not in despair and dissolution, but in marriage, the Amoretti are able to
suggest how the sins of egotism and desire can be intercepted and
legitimized. In the Amoretti the male lover comes to terms with the
inadequacy of Petrarchan expectations; whereas Astrophel remains locked
up in self-hood, Spenser’s poetic persona transcends egotism and finds a

self-less and Christian love. In the process he interweaves Protestant moral
values into the poetry in a way that enable both lover and lady to be judged;
his images are those of sin and damnation, heaven and hell, virtue and
salvation. In the process, Spenser’s lover, Florinell, confronts and overcomes
the traditional, perverted, perceptions of the Petrarchan lover: idolisation and
over-valuation of the beloved, oppressive rejection and stigmatisation, self-
regarding pain, the masochistic enjoyment of absence, the possessive, and
voyeuristic categorisation of the beloved’s physical attractions Like Wyatt and
Sidney before him, there are sonnets in this sequence that draw directly on
Petrarchan originals, reworked from a fresh and critical perspective. The best
example might be Sonnet XLVII, where Spenser harks back to Wyatt’s
"Whose list to hunt" and its Petrarchan model, "Una candida cerva."
Spenser clearly knew both the original, and Wyatt’s cynical inversion
of Petrarch’s sonnet. His aim may therefore have been to show how loss can
be made into gain through the giving of self. The deliberate echoes of Wyatt
emphasise the transformative difference that a surrender of self can make.
Like Wyatt he converts Petrarch’s pursuit of a white doe into a huntsman
chasing a hind, and the lover experiences a similar weariness from this "vain
assaye". But whereas Wyatt’s deer, Anne Boleyn, is corrupted by her own
lust, Spenser’s is a gentle "deare" who returns the way she has fled and is
willing to entrust herself to her lover’s power. The lover has come to control
his desire and she has the confidence to allow her own desire to make her
responsive to him. She trusts in the vision of married love that the Amoretti
affirm. In no. 65, Spenser sets out his answer to the Petrarchan dilemma;
desire can be fulfilled only when egotism and lust are replaced by mutual
good will and loyalty within a sanctified union; at that point desire can be
gratfied in spotless pleasure enjoyed in mutual faith. Appropriately, the
Epithalamion that acts as the coda to the published Amoretti, consummates a
Protestant vision of Eros fulfilled and celebrates Spenser’s marriage to
Elizabeth Boyle in 1594. (Griffiths, 1998)
The Faerie Queene consists of 6 books published between 1590 (books
I-III and 1596 (books IV-VI) and Cantos of Mutabilite published posthumously in
1609. The modern literary tastes have regarded The Faerie Queene as a highly
artificial creation too long to be read for entertainment and boringly complicated
in its layers of allegory. While the modern reader is eager to read The Faerie
Queene purely as a poetic romance he will miss much of Spenser's intent.
Spenser made his intentions clear in a letter enclosed to the volume containing
the initial three books of the work and addressed to Sir Walter Ralegh, 'The ge-
neral end", Spenser wrote to Ralegh, "of all the books is to fashion a gentleman
or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline" by exhibiting the traits that
such a person should have. Spenser further describes his poem as “a continued
allegory or darke conceit" and allegory it is indeed but far more than that.1
1 Allegory is a form of extended metaphor in which objects and persons within a narrative
are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative. Allegory implies two levels of
meaning -- the literal (what happens in the narrative) and the symbolic (what the events
stand for, outside the narrative). It evokes a dual interest: in the events, characters and
setting presented; and in the ideas they represent or the significance they bear. Allegory may
involve the personification of abstract qualities (e.g. Pride, Beauty, Death); it can also
represent a historical personage (e.g. Gloriana = Queen Elizabeth), a category of individual
(e.g. Everyman = all mankind), or another sort of abstraction (Una = the True Church).
Characters, events and setting may be historical, fictitious, or fabulous; the key is that they
have meanings independent of the action in the surface story. On the surface, Everyman is
Spenser attempted a unified presentation of romantic ideas within a classic

structure, nationalistic feelings and idealistic expression, the spirit of the
Reformation and Renaissance humanism.
The models which must have influenced Spenser were Ariosto's
Orland Furioso and Tasso's Gerusaleme Liberata which provided the
intricate scheme and the combination of action and philosophical comment
but also such English books as Skelton's Magnificence, Elyot’s Governour or
Ascham’s Scholemaster which set forth the Renaissance concept of “the
perfyte man” (perfect man)." The same letter to Walter Ralegh reveals
Spenser's overall plan as regards the structure of the poem. The framework
was to be the 12 days Christmas celebrations at the Court of Gloriana, the
Faerie Queene. On each of these twelve days a petitioner will present at the
court his or he request for help. The Faerie Queen will assign in turn each of
the 12 knights at her court symbolizing a gentlemanly virtue each to destroy
12 vices and evils a1so allegorically presented. The different knightly figures
are summed up in the person of Arthur himself before he became a king.
Arthur typifies magnificence in the Aristotelian sense of the perfection of
all the other virtues i.e. perfect virtue. He falls in love with Gloriana, the Faerie
Queen, who reveals herself to him in a dream, Arthur goes to Gloriana’s court in
Fairy land where she is holding her annual 12 days’ festival. Gloriana stands for
the national splendour of England as embodied by Queen Elizabeth.
Presumably the entire narrative was meant to cover a whole calendar
year but the poem has been left unfinished and the 6 books that have come
down to us deal with the adventures of the Red Cross Knight, representing
the virtue of Holiness, of Sir Guyon (Temperance), of Britomart and
Belphaebe (Chastity), of Triamond and Cambell (Friendship), of Artegall
(Justice), of Calidore (Courtesy).
Spenser's poem is full of adventure and marvels, dragons, enchanted
trees, giants, jousting knights, castles. The heroes do not have the virtues
they represent at the beginning of their adventures but acquire them in the
course of the book.
The poem can be enjoyed on many levels and it may work on several
of these levels at a time.
The moral level achieves the author’s intent to form the ideal puritan
humanist in the spirit of the perfect morals, religion and philosophy.
The historical level covers the whole of Western civilization from the
outset of the Christian era throughout the 16th century, referring to
contemporary events in France, Italy, and England (the massacre on St.
Bartholomew’s Eve, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the execution of Mary
of the Scots, the revolts in Ireland). The scope of the allegory at this level has
not been agreed upon since the poet is rather cryptic and the allegory itself is
not omnipresent.
about a man about to leave on a trip and the people he meets; the Faerie Queene about a
knight killing a dragon and rescuing a princess. On the allegorical level, however, both are
about the duties of a Christian and the way to achieve salvation.
Note that the simple use of personification (e.g. talking animals or teapots) does not
constitute allegory in and of itself; in an allegory, characters and objects usually symbolize
abstract qualities, and the events recounted convey a coherent message concerning those
abstractions. Allegory is frequently, but not always, concerned with matters of great import:
life and death; damnation and salvation; social or personal morality and immorality. It can
also be used for satiric purposes.(Schwartz, http://cla.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/engl331/fq.html)

The personal level is the most disputed of all although there are many
who insist that every significant figure in the literary and political life of the
time was projected in The Faerie Queene. Spenser does not explain what
would be obvious to every contemporary reader, the many conventional
symbols and attributes which would identify his characters.
The language of the poem was still Spenser's own concoction in point
of vocabulary with less emphasis on the bizarre. Most of the archaic
borrowings are from the Northern dialect considered as more Anglo-Saxon
than London English.
The "es", "s" endings for the 3rd person singular of the verb were
preferred to the traditional Midlands "eth". The genitive singular in "es" fully
pronounced, the noun plural in "en" (e.g. foen), the "y" prefix for the past tense
and the past participle (e.g. ybuilded), the frequent omission of articles and
pronouns, the use of the infinitive for the past (e.g. "and they to fight") the
archaic Dative (e .g. "enough is him") are other instances of archaic forms
deliberately used by the poet.
Spenser invented for his poem a stanza form afterwards referred to as
the Spenserian stanza consisting of eight iambic pentameters with a
concluding Alexandrine (iambic hexametre) rhyming a b a b b c b c c. The
Spenserian stanza is the best vehicle to convey an enchanted picture of the
fairy land. Difficult as this stanza-form appears to be, English literature has
recorded memorable poetic achievements in this form as Byron's Child
Harold's Pilgrimage and Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes.
Spenser's descriptive gift displays an ornate style often overburdened
with a mass of enumerations and also a mass of sensuous imagery and of
every effect of the language. Spenser’s is a complex genius who cannot be put
into neatly labelled categories. Though strongly influenced by Renaissance
Neoplatonism, he remains firmly grounded in practicality. He remains sternly
moral though a lover and celebrator of physical beauty. His morality implies
awareness of the temptations that entrap man as he tries to act rightly.
Despite his love of Chaucer and his de1iberate archaic language,
Spenser’s links are not with the past but with the future. His closest affinity is
with Milton who recognized Spenser his great predecessor, a humanist and a
poet-citizen.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 87-90)
1. 4. William Shakespeare: The Narrative Poems. The Sonnets

The Narrative Poems. The closing of the theatres in 1592-1593 because of
the plague epidemic interrupted Shakespeare’s career as an actor-playwright
and presented him with both the opportunity and the necessity to apply his
gifts to other literary species. The two narrative poems Venus and Adonis
and The Rape of Lucrece appeared in 1593 and respectively 1594 and were
the only works whose publication was supervised by the writer himself.
Dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, they paraphrase Ovidian sources in
the rich style of the English Renaissance.
Venus and Adonis is a narrative of 1,194 lines disposed in sextains of
iambic pentameters rhyming ababcc. It relates the unrequited love of Venus for
the handsome mortal Adonis, a boar hunter. In vain does the goddess use all
her charms to conquer the cold handsome youth. She begs him to meet her the
next day early in the morning but he prefers to go hunting only to get killed by a
wild boar. In despair the goddess transforms the dead youth into anemone.

Shakespeare’s source is Metamorphoses (Book X) which modern

criticism conceives of as a myth of the vegetation cycle. With Shakespeare it
has become a love story in which Adonis is shy and boyish, while Venus
embodies experienced womanhood.
Some critics explain that Venus and Adonis emphasise the contrast
between sacred and profane love. Venus represents naked passion that
destroys all that it touches, while Adonis stands for chaste love. Another view is
that Adonis represents, in fact, the inseparable union of love and beauty. As in
the sonnets, Shakespeare assumes that beauty must be forever recreated.
Venus is the stimulus for that re-creation through the propagation of offspring.
Despite the conventional poetic language, the poem displays much
personal observation and a genuine feeling of nature in superb descriptions of the
English countryside. Venus and Adonis proved Shakespeare’s most popular work
during his lifetime (10 editions by 1616, quoted in 34 contemporary writings).
The Rape of Lucrece is a much “graver” (as promised in the dedication
to Venus and Adonis) and longer poem, but its more ambitious purpose is not
fully achieved. Written in rhyme royal (a form of verse introduced into English
by Chaucer, consisting of seven-line stanzas of iambic pentameter in which
there are three rhymes, the first line rhyming with the third, the second with the
fourth and fifth, and the sixth with the seventh – ababbcc) and inspired from
Ovid’s Fasti, the poem exalts the spiritual virtues of chastity and faithfulness.
Lucrecia is violently assaulted by the debauched Sextus, the son of King
Tarquin in ancient Rome. Urging her father Lucretius and her husband
Collatinus to avenge her, Lucretia commits suicide. The deed of Sextus
causes the people to revolt against Tarquin and to establish the Republic.
The poem depicts the disastrous fall of a slave of passion. Tarquin is
of the family of tyrants. To satisfy his lust, he risks and loses everything and
gains only disgust and despair. Lucrece is the tyrant’s helpless victim, who
awakens the same sort of pity as Desdemona does. Shakespeare relates his
story in a reverent, sober tone minutely dwelling upon details. The masterful
use of lyrical language is marred by the long speeches and extended
rhetoric. (Gavriliu, 2000: 114-5)
The Sonnets. It is likely that Shakespeare composed his sonnets between

1592 and 1598 and they were circulated in manuscript by 1598 when Francis
Meres praised Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets among his private friends.”
All the 154 sonnets by Shakespeare were published only later, in 1609, by
Thomas Thorpe, apparently without the writer’s authorisation, in a collection
entitled Shakespeare’s Sonnets Never Before Imprinted. The printed text
opens with the following dedication:
TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF
THESE INSUING SONNETS
MR. W.H. ALL HAPPINESSE
AND THAT ETERNITIE
PROMISED BY
OUR EVER-LIVING POET
WISHETH
THE WELL-WISHING
ADVENTURER IN
SETTING
FORTH
T.T.
The wording of such a dedication seems so clearly to be an address from one
real person to another, especially when compared to other Shakespearean
dedications, which are far less cryptic and more aimed at thanking a patron for
support. (The dedication of Venus and Adonis clearly addresses the “Right

Honourable Henry Wriothesley” with many mentions of “honour,” “duty,” and

“noble…”) As to the signature “T.T.,” this set of initials might seem rather easy
to decode, indicating that the dedication does not belong to Shakespeare, but
to Thorpe. The other set of initials “W.H.” raises, however, more questions,
especially because of the ambiguity of the word “begetter” which, in
Elizabethan English, could also mean “transmitter”, i.e. perhaps the supplier of
the manuscript. William Hall was such a supplier of manuscripts to publishers.
Other critics even have suggested that W.H. might have meant William
Himself (i.e. Shakespeare), which is a witty solution, but perhaps not so fitting
if one takes into account a possible relation between these initials and the
identity of the fair friend who the first sonnet sequence is dedicated to. (Or
Shakespeare did not really fit the description: beautiful, single and blond.)
From the same perspective, further possible interpretations of these initials
have suggested: a) William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke – a brilliant youth, fond
of arts and protector of a literary group. b) Henry Wriothesley, Earl of
Southampton - Shakespeare’s only known protector acknowledged as such by
the poet himself; a young man of exquisite beauty, the favourite of Elizabeth’s
court and later in 1609 of James I’s, the Earl of Southampton took pride in
playing the Mecenas to the poets that surrounded him. If this be the case, the
inversion of the initials might be accounted for by the publisher’s caution who
feared the earl’s indisposition c) in the light of the more recent identification of
presumably homosexual overtones in some of the sonnets, a third variant
might be William Hughes, a homosexual ship’s cook and boy actor, who all the
physical descriptions, when applied to the image of a rather androgynous and
fair young man, seem to fit perfectly. (Johnston, 1999 and
www.nyu.edu/classes/jeffreys/gaybway/gaybard/wh.htm)
That Thorpe published the sonnets without the poet’s permission is
now a certain fact. Owing to their intimate character, the poet delayed their
publication which, had it ever been in his intention, he would have
undoubtedly selected and rearranged the sonnets, probably placing them
under an unequivocal dedication to serve his literary career. Thorpe,
however, grouped the sonnets as follows: the first 126 sonnets – dedicated to
the fair friend, sonnets 127-152 dedicated to the Dark Lady, while the last two
sonnets 153-154, representing modern variants of epigram 627 from
Marianos’ IXth book, were left for the end of the collection.
And if several suggestions have already been advanced regarding the
potential identity of the fair friend, reference should also be made to the
possible answers to the Dark Lady enigma in Shakespeare’s sonnets. As
previously mentioned, sonnets 127-152 refer to a brunette, the poet’s
beloved who brings overwhelming passion into his mature age. Some
scholars advance Mary Fitton, the Earl of Pembroke’s mistress (and one of
the sonnets makes reference to his friend taking his beloved away from him)
and lady-in-waiting for the Queen, but her surviving portraits depict her as a
blonde. Others, supporters of the Earl of Southampton theory, suggest Mrs.
Davenant, wife of an Oxford innkeeper whose son, the dramatist William
Davenant, Shakespeare’s godson, was according to some rumours fathered
by Shakespeare himself. A third solution was put forth unexpectedly in 1963
by the Oxford historian A.L.Rowse who suggested that the Dark Lady of the
sonnets might have been, in fact, Emilia Bassano, the daughter of the Italian
Baptist Bassano, a musician at Elizabeth’s court. Dark-haired, unscrupled
and ambitious, Emilia was said to have been the mistress of many noblemen
at the court. The fact that her husband was William Lanier, a court musician,

might cast a new light upon sonnets 135, 136, and 143 which include puns
based on the word will: Will – the cuckold husband; Will – the lover and will –
the common noun with an obscene meaning (= wish or desire).
Sometimes, Thorpe’s arrangement might appear unsatisfactory as
sonnets like 33-35 and 40-42 might perhaps find a better place in the Dark
Lady sonnet sequence than in the Fair Friend one. Besides, many sonnets
could be equally applied to the fair friend, the Dark Lady or to neither of them.
Later attempts at revising the order of Shakespeare’s sonnets were made by
John Benson (1620), Malone (1778) or Samuel Butler (the 19th century). Yet,
the Thorpe sequence is still conventionally accepted nowadays.
Though he used both the Italian (Petrarchan) and the English structure
in his sonnets, Shakespeare definitely preferred the latter which offered him a
wider range of possibilities: the pattern introduces an idea in the first
quatrain, complicates it in the second, complicates it still further in the third,
and resolves the issue in the final epigrammatic couplet.
As previously stated, the first sequence – sonnets 1-126 – is
addressed to or concerns a young, handsome, blond friend. Shakespeare
conceives male friendship as a feeling akin to love, submitted to the same
raptures and torments.
Summary of the first sequence:
- Sonnets 1-17 – the poet’s persona urges the young man to get married, so
that he will leave the world a copy of his beauty in his offspring, which will
therefore not suffer the ravages of time. The young man is clearly single,
very accomplished, good looking, and of noble birth.
- Sonnet 18-26 - the theme shifts slightly, as the persona claims that the
young man will achieve immortality through these very sonnets, which will
preserve his beauty for all time. Many of the terms of address/ endearment
in these sonnets (and not only) appear somewhat problematic and modern
readers are tempted to find in them the traces of homosexuality. But that is
not necessarily the only explanation as the Renaissance morals permitted,
however, such loving expressions of normal male friendship.
- But the tone of the sonnets quickly becomes much more personal as the
speaker explores his love for the young man and, at times, his despair at
absences from the young man and at the young man's unfaithfulness. For
instance, sonnets 27-32 speak at the poet’s sorrow at the enforced
separation from his friend.
- Sonnets 33-35 and 40-42 foreshadow the idea of bitter disappointment
caused by his friend having an affair with the woman loved by the speaker-
poet as well. Eventually, love for his friend is stronger than his suffering and
the poet accepts the unfaithfulness of both friend and mistress as
something natural and inexorable. (see especially, sonnet 33)
- Further conflicts are also recorded in the collection. Sonnets 78-80, 82-86,
87-93 show the poet’s concern and sorrow for being replaced by a Rival
poet – presumably George Chapman, mentioned for his translations from
Homer – who has engaged the attention and the affection of the young
man. What the poet seems to regret most is the loss of confidence rather
than that of financial patronage.
- Sonnets 94-95 suggest even venereal infection, the unfaithfulness of the
young man leading the speaker to question his moral character with very
specific images of infection and disease.
- Sonnets 111 and 121 give voice to the poet’s revolt against hostile fate or
suffering for being slandered.
- Sonnets 97-103 and 113-114 recount the absence of the poet from his
friend, while the poet had been wandering through the country with his
troupe of actors.
- Sonnets 109 -112 and 115-116 seek a restoration of the poet in his friend’s
heart. The ties of affection are strongly affirmed and misrepresentations denied.
Major themes and motifs in the first sequence:
- the perishability of beauty which declines “by chance or nature’s changing
course untrimmed” (Sonnet 18);
- the power of art to make beauty last forever. Shakespeare seems to have
found with Ovid and Horace the notion that a poet’s praise of his patron
confers upon the great man earthly immortality. It is this immortalising capacity
of art that protects him from the ravages of time.
- the obsession with the passage of time and with death. In Sonnet LXIV,
for instance, Shakespeare follows Ovid in choosing the ceaseless
encroachment of the sea upon the land as a striking example of the ruin
following in the wake of eternal change:
“When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, […]
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.”
The only comfort for the futility of man’s endeavours is art’s capacity to fix
them in eternal forms.
- criticism of the literary and social life of the age. Shakespeare opposes the
rhetorical excesses of the literary fashion (Sonnets 21 and 76) and
disapproves of his contemporaries’ extravagant clothing or wigs made of
dead people’s hair. Sonnets 66-70 and 94-96 treat of the world’s corruption
picturing contemporary life with its life for profits, its abuses and corruption.
In sonnets 127-152, the poet’s relationship with the Dark Lady becomes the
main concern. In dealing with the Dark Lady theme, Shakespeare mercifully
spares his readers the tiresome Petrarchan conventions. He does not
luxuriate in the woe of the rejected suitor. He seldom laments the agony of a
sleepless night. He avoids comparisons of the lady’s charms with objects of
natural beauty:
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red, than her lips red,
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head...”
In loving this dark-haired woman, the poet is aware of his degradation both
as husband and man and, in praising a dark beauty, he disobeys the
Elizabethan poetical standards fixed upon a blond ideal. The whole sequence
records the inner torments experienced by the poet torn between passion
and lucidity. Love appears as an almighty force that inspires both fascination
and hatred. Sonnets like 130 that extol the mistress’s beauty oppose other
sonnets like 129, 146, 147 or 152, which express, in an offending tone, the
poet’s rejection of the Dark Lady and of everything she stands for.
The metaphorical style of the sonnets is extremely rich despite the
relative simplicity of vocabulary. The structure of the sonnet frequently
reinforces the power of the metaphors: each quatrain develops an image of
approaching extinction of a season, of a day, of a fire, but also of human
existence. The three quatrains are equally and successively at work
preparing for the conclusion in the couplet.

The rhetorical strategy in the sonnets is extremely varied. Some sonnets

begin with “a remembrance of things past”; others are commanding in tone;
others introduce general statements to further illustrate them. The imagery comes
from a wide variety of sources: gardening, navigation, law, business, painting,
astrology, family life. The moods go beyond those of the Petrarchan lover. They
include delight, pride, melancholy, shame, disgust or fear.
All these qualities of the Shakespearean sonnets entitle modern
scholarship, in particular, and readership, in general, to consider them the
finest love sonnets ever written in the English language (if not in any
language.) (Gavriliu, 2000: 115-120)
1. 5. Practical Applications. Examination Tests.

1. Answer the following questions:
a. Who introduced for the first time the Italian sonnet in English literature?
b. What are the differences in structure between the Italian and the English
sonnet?
c. What was the first significant collection of Renaissance verse published in
England?
d. What is a sonnet sequence? Name the Renaissance poets who wrote
sonnet sequences.
e. What is an allegory? What allegorical elements can be identified in
Spenser’s The Fairie Queene?
f. Who are the historical characters whom William Shakespeare dedicated his
sonnets to?
g. What are the main themes of William Shakespeare’s sonnets?
2. Identify the most important innovations in poetry writing of the following
Renaissance writers: a. Sir Thomas Wyatt; b. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey;
c. Sir Philip Sidney; d. Edmund Spenser; e. William Shakespeare.
3. Read the following sonnets and compare them in terms of:
a. thematic content; b. stylistic peculiarities; c. form (sonnet type and structure,
rhyme, rhythm).
Edmund Spenser
Sonnet LXXV Sonetul LXXV

One day I wrote her name upon the strand, I-am scris alesei numele-n nisip,
But came the waves and washed it away: Dar valul năvălind, l-a şters pe dată:
Again I wrote it with a second hand, Şi iar l-am scris, întru acelaşi chip,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey. Dar marea şi-a făcut din truda-mi pradă.
"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay, Copile, spuse ea, ce-ncerci în van
A mortal thing so to immortalize; S-nveşniceşti un lucru pieritor,
For I myself shall like to this decay, Eu însămi va la fel să mă destram,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise." La fel s-o şterge numele-mi uşor.
"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise Nu, nu! strigai, ce-i calp în ţărână moară,
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame: Ci tu prin har vei dăinui în lume;
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize, Voi nemuri în vers făptura-ţi rară,
And in the heavens write your glorious name: Şi-n cer voi dăltui cerescu-ţi nume.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue, Ş-acolo, când peri-va lumea toată
Our love shall live, and later life renew." Trăi-vom cu iubire-mprospătată
William Shakespeare
Sonnet LX Sonetul LX
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, Cum valurile cresc peste prundişuri
So do our minutes hasten to their end, minute curg spre moartea-n zbor nebun,
Each changing place with that which goes before, locul şi-l lasă fără ocolişuri

In sequent toil all forwards do contend. celor din urmă, care le răpun.
Nativity once in the main of light, Te naşti într-a oceanului splendoare,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned, prin vârste curgi dar Timpul ţi-a sortit
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight, eclipse, lupte laşe şi surpare
And Time that gave, doth now his gift confound. devălmăşind tot ce ţi-a dăruit.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth, Tot ce-i vigoare Timpul încovoaie,
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow, fruntea ţi-o taie cu încreţituri
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth, cu-averi se-ndoapă, viaţa o despoaie
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow. iar coasa lungă n-ai cum să i-o furi.
And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand Doar versul meu prin vremi se mai aude,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand. slăvindu-te în ciuda mâinii crude...
4. Analyse the following sonnets:
Sir Thomas Wyatt

1
I Find No Peace Pierdută-mi este pacea
I find no peace, and all my war is done: Pierdută-mi este pacea: n-am arme să mă bat,
I fear, and hope; I burn, and freeze like ice; Şi sper, şi ard, şi-s gheaţă, şi mă cuprinde frica,
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise; Şi-n ceruri zbor, şi-n ţărnă zac pururi nemişcat;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on; La piept strâng humea-ntreagă şi n-am la piept
That locketh nor loseth holdeth me in prison, nimica.
And holdeth me not, yet can I 'scape nowise: M-a prins într-o-nchisoare făr’ de zăvor la poartă;
Nor letteth me live, nor die at my devise, Nici liber un mă lasă, nici nu mă-nchide-n ea.
And yet of death it giveth me occasion. Nu vrea să mă ucidă Amor, nici nu mă iartă,
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I 'plain; Nici viu nu mă doreşte, nici chinul nu mi-l ia.
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health; N-am ochi şi văd, şi, fără de limbă strig la cer;
I love another, and thus I hate myself; Şi mă urăsc pe mine pe cât mi-i ea de dragă.
I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain. Îmi place că mă doare şi vesel sunt plângând;
Likewise displeaseth me both death and life, De viaţă şi de moarte sunt dezgustat de rând...
And my delight is causer of this strife. Din vina ta, Madonă, mă chinui viaţa-ntreagă!
1
In imitation of Petrarch, Sonnet 104: “Description of the Contrarious Passions in a Lover”.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

1
The Soote Season Descrierea primăverii
The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings, Dulce-anotimp când muguri ies, şi flori,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale; Când văi primesc strai verde, şi muncele.
The nightingale with feathers new she sings; Când cântă nou penet, privighetori
The turtle to her make hath told her tale. Iar turtureii vin la turturele.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs, Se face cald, cresc lujerii priori ;
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; Prin strungi pierd cerbii coarne vechi şi grele ;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; Şi năpârlesc prin cătini căpriori;
The fishes flete with new repaired scale; Înoată ştiuci, în zale noi şi ele.
The adder all her slough away she slings; Vezi iuţi lăstuni de gâze vânători;
The swift swallow pursueth the flyes smale; Îşi leapădă năpârca-ntreaga-i piele;
The busy bee her honey now she mings, E dusă iarna – gâde-al florilor;
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. Strâng miere-acum albine harnicele.
And thus I see among these pleasant things Şi-n raiu-acesta orice păsuri mor –
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. Doar eu rămân aleanului dator ...
1
Tottel’s title: “Description of Spring, wherin eche thing renewes, saue onelie the louer.” Adapted from Petrarch’s
310th (269th) sonnet (in some editions the 42nd sonetto in Morte). Surrey’s spring is English rather than Italian.
Sir Philip Sidney
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies! With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face! How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it be that even in heav'nly place What, may it be that even in heav'nly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries! That busy archer his sharp arrows tries!
Sure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes Sure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case, Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case,
I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace
To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me, Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,
Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit? Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be? Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet

Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess? Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness? Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?
(Sonnet XXXI) (Sonnet XXXI)
William Shakespeare
Sonnet XVIII Sonetul XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Cu-o zi a verii poate să te semui?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Tu eşti mai plin de farmec şi mai blând!
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, Un vânt doboară creanga şi blestemu-i
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: că frunza verii moare prea curând.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, Ades e ochiul cerului fierbinte
And often is his gold complexion dimmed, şi aur îl precede-ntunecat
And every fair from fair sometime declines, precum frumosul din frumos descinde
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed: sub cerul simplei firi, netulburat.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Dar vara ta eternă nu păleşte
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, şi n-ai să pierzi ce astăzi stăpâneşti
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, în umbra morţii n-ai să plimbi caleşte
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st, când într-un vers etern ţi-e dat să creşti.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, Cât oamenii privesc şi cât respiră
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. trăieşti şi în cântu-nchis în liră.
2. Read the following fragment from Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene
and answer the following questions: a. Who is the character referred to?; b.
How is he portrayed?; c. How does the fragment anticipate the further
development of the main plot line in Book I?; d. How can the allegorical
pattern enclosed in the fragment be decoded?; e. What features of archaic
language can be identified?; f. How would you describe the text in terms of
form (stanza type, rhythm, rhyme)?
1 A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Un mândru Făt da pinteni peste plai,
2 Y cladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, Înveşmântat în fier, cu scut de-arghir
3 Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, Pe care zimţi de răni adânci vedeai
4 The cruell markes of many' a bloudy fielde; Tot semn de-ncrâncenate-mpotriviri;
5 Yet armes till that time did he never wield: Fier nu purtase încă în turnir;
6 His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, Sirep fugaci, muşca zăbala grea
7 As much disdayning to the curbe to yield: Ne-nduplecat să rabde frâul-zbir
8 Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, Frumosul Făt, ce falnic se ţinea
9 As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt. Ca unul vrednic de-ncleştări, înfiorate prea.
10 But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore, Purta pe pieptu-i cruce sângerie,
11 The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, Drag suvenir murindului Domn sfânt,
12 For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore, Şi-n dragul LUI purta el crucea vie,
13 And dead as living ever him ador'd: Drag sus în cer, precum şi pe pământ.
14 Upon his shield the like was also scor'd, Pe scut acelaşi semn şi-a fost săpând,
15 For soveraine hope, which in his helpe he had: Nădejde-naltă-n naltul ajutor:
16 Right faithfull true he was in deede and word, Cinstit era în faptă şi-n cuvânt,
17 But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad, Dar chipu-i prea înnegurat de-un nor;
18 Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad. El cel mereu temut, ci nicicând temător.
19 Upon a great adventure he was bond, Cu mare faptă se ştia dator

20 That greatest Gloriana to him gave, Domniţei Gloriana cea crăiască,
21 That greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie land, Regina-n glorii-a Ţării Zânelor –
22 To winne him worship, and her grace to have, Lui slavă şi-al ei har să-şi dobândească,
23 Which of all earthly things he most did crave; Cea mai râvnită avere pământească;
24 And ever as he rode, his hart did earne Şi tot gonind, gonind, simţea ardoare
25 To prove his puissance in battell brave Mult să străluce-n luptă voinicească
26 Upon his foe, and his new force to learne; Frângând vrăşmaş, cu braţul să-şi măsoare,
27 Upon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne. Frângând vrăşmaş, Balaur, fiară-ngrozitoare.

Section 2: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century

2. 1. The Rise of the Secular Drama
2. 1. 1. Elizabethan Playhouses and Theatrical Performances
When Elizabeth became Queen of England in 1558, there were no specially

designed theatre buildings. Companies of actors (usually small, made of 5 to
8 members) toured the country and performed in a wide variety of temporary
acting spaces, mainly in inn yards, but also in churches, Town Halls, Town
Squares, great halls of Royal Palaces or other great houses, or anywhere
else that a large crowd could be gathered to view a performance.
It is true that they continued to tour throughout Elizabeth’s reign
(especially during the Plague in London, when theatres were closed or
earned but little money). Nevertheless, given the laws passed by the Queen
to control wandering beggars and vagrants – which implicitly affected the
acting companies as well – many actors were encouraged to settle down with
permanent bases in London.
The first permanent theatres in England were old inns which had been
used as temporary acting areas when the companies had been touring. E.g.
The Cross Keys, The Bull, The Bel Savage, The Bell – all originally built as
inns. Some of the inns that became theatres had substantial alterations
made to their structure to allow them to be used as playhouses.
The first purpose built theatre building in England was simply called
The Theatre, eventually giving its name to all such building erected in the
outskirts of London and functioning until the closing of the theatres in 1642
during the Civil War.
The Theatre was built in 1576, at Shoreditch in the northern outskirts
of London, by the Earl of Leicester’s Men who were led by James Burbage, a
carpenter turned actor. It seems that the design of The Theatre was based
on that of bull-baiting and bear-baiting yards (as a matter of fact, bull baiting,
bear baiting and fencing shows were very popular by that time, and they
were often organized before the plays started.). The Theatre was followed
the next year (1577) by The Curtain, in 1587 by The Rose and in 1595 by
The Swan (to mention but the most famous theatres). In 1599, a dispute over
the land on which The Theatre stood determined Burbage’s sons to secretly
tear down the building and carry away the timber to build a new playhouse on
the Bankside which they names The Globe. By this time, the Burbages had
become members of Lord Chamberlain’s Company, along with William
Shakespeare, and The Globe is famously remembered as the theatre in
which many of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. (The Globe was
destroyed in 1613 in a fire caused by the sparks of a cannon fired during the
performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Rebuilt, it was closed and
demolished in 1644 during the Civil War. The modern reconstruction of
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London was completed in 1997.)
Before going into more details regarding the structure of the
Elizabethan theatre, distinction should be made, however, between two
categories of playhouses: the public (outdoor) theatres and the private
(indoor) theatres. The former were amphitheatre buildings open to the air and
therefore cheaper – The Globe, for instance, charged two pence for a seat in
the galleries or a single penny to stand in the yard. The latter (e.g.
Blackfriars; The Cockpit) were built to a hall design in enclosed and usually
rectangular buildings more like the theatres we know today. They had amore
exclusive audience since they charged considerably more – the cheapest
seat in a private theatre cost sixpence. The adult companies did not start to
use the private hall theatres until after Elizabeth’s death, but they were used
by the boy companies (made up entirely of child and teenage actors) in
Elizabeth’s reign and were used by Shakespeare’s Company - by this time
the King’s Men - and other adult companies in the Jacobean period.
Structure and Design of Public/ Outdoor Theatres

Public theatres were polygonal - hexagonal outside and round inside (“a
wooden O” as Shakespeare puts it in Henry V). An open-air arena – called “pit”
or “yard” – had, at one end, a wooden stage supported by large pillars, with trap
doors for special effects (to allow ghosts, devils and similar characters to be
raised up) and was surrounded by three tiers of roofed galleries (thatched, later
on tiled roofs) with balconies, overlooking the back of the stage.
The rear stage was covered by a roof – which they called “Heavens”
through which, by means of ropes, they could lower down the actors playing
the gods/ angels, etc., for flying or dramatic entrances – held up by massive
pillars and obstructing the view of audience members from various angles.
The stage wall behind these pillars was called “Frons Scenae” (taken
from the name given by Imperial Rome to the stage walls of their
amphitheatres) provided with doors to the left and to the right and a curtained
central doorway – referred to as the “discovery space” – which allowed
characters to be suddenly revealed or a play within a play to be acted. The
rear wall of this inner stage was covered by tapestry, the only usual “scenery”
used on the stage.
Immediately above the inner stage, there was the stage gallery which
could be used for multiple purposes:
- as an acting space: on either sides, there were bow-windows used for
the frequent window/ balcony scenes (e.g. Romeo and Juliet). Thus the
arrangement of a front stage and two-storeyed back stage permitted three
actions to go on simultaneously and a life-like parallelism of events.
- another part of the gallery could be used as a music-room. Music was
an extra effect added in the 1600’s. The musicians started playing an hour
before the beginning of the play and also played at appropriate moments
throughout the performance.
- when necessary, some of the boxes of the stage gallery were used for
audience seating. They were referred to as the “Lord’s rooms” and considered
the best (and hence the most expensive) seats in the ‘house’ despite the poor
view of the back of the actors. (Nevertheless, the audience at large would have
a good view of the Lords and the Lords were able to hear the actors clearly.)
There were also additional balconies on the left and right of the “Lord’s rooms”
called the “Gentlemen’s rooms”, also meant for the rich patrons of the theatres.
As previously mentioned, the stage wall structure contained two doors
(at least) leading to a small structure, back stage, called the “Tiring House”
used by actors to dress, prepare and wait offstage.
Above the stage gallery, there is a third storey connected with the
“Heavens” extending forward from the tiring-house over the rear part of the
stage, which was often used to represent the walls of a castle or a city.
Last but not least, on top of this structure, there was also what might be
called a fourth storey of the tiring-house, referred to as the “Hut” presumably

used as a storage space and housing suspension gear for flying effects, while
the third storey stage cover served as a loading room for players preparing to
‘fly’ down to the stage. On top of the “hut”, a flag (a black one, if it was a
tragedy, a white one, if it was a comedy, or a red one, if it was a history) was
erected to let the world know a play was to be performed that day.
The access to the playhouse was ensured by one main entrance, where
playgoers had to put the admission fee – i.e. 1 penny, for those who watched
the play from the yard, standing, called the “Groundlings” (shopkeepers,
craftsmen, apprentices), or more, up to 4-5 pence for the gentry and the great
lords sitting in the galleries. The galleries could be reached by the two sets of
stairs in the structure, on either side of the theatre. The first gallery would
cost another penny in the box which was held by a collector (“gatherer”) at
the front of the stairs. The second gallery would cost another penny. At the
start of the play, after collecting money from the audience, the admission
collectors put the boxes in a room backstage, called the “box office.”
The Players
There were invariably many more parts than actors. Elizabethan
Theatre, therefore, demanded that an actor be able to play numerous roles
and make it obvious to the audience by changes in his acting style and
costume that he was a new person each time. When the same character
came on disguised (as, for example, many of Shakespeare’s female
characters disguise themselves as boys – e.g. The Merchant of Venice or
Twelfth Night) speeches had to be included making it very clear that this was
the same character in a new costume, and not a completely new character.
All of the actors in an Elizabethan Theatre company were male (which
might explain the scarcity of female roles in Elizabethan drama). There were
laws in England against women acting onstage and English travellers abroad
were amused and amazed by the strange customs of Continental European
countries that allowed women to play female roles. Exceptions : One woman
- Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse - was arrested in the Jacobean
period for singing and playing instruments onstage during a performance of a
play about her life (Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl) and some
suggest that she may actually have been illegally playing herself in the
performance, and women sometimes took part in Court Masques (a very
stylised and spectacular sort of performance for the Court, usually dominated
by singing and dancing), but otherwise English women had no part in the
performance of Elizabethan plays. The male actors who played female parts
have traditionally been described as “Boy Actors” – they were actually boys
whose voices had not changed.
The rehearsal and performance schedule that Elizabethan Players
followed was intense and demanding. Unlike modern theatres, where a
successful play can run for years at a time, Elizabethan theatres normally
performed six different plays in their six day week, and a particularly
successful play might only be repeated once a month or so. For example, in a
typical season, a theatrical company could perform thirty-eight different plays.
The Elizabethan actor did not have much time, therefore, to prepare for each
new play, and must have had to learn lines and prepare his blocking largely on
his own and in his spare time – probably helped by the tendency of writers to
have particular actors in mind for each part, and to write roles which were
suited to the particular strengths and habits of individual actors. There were
few formal rehearsals for each play and no equivalent of the modern Director

(although presumably the writer, theatre managers, and the most important
actors - who owned shares in the theatre company - would have given some
direction to other actors). Instead of being given full scripts, each actor had a
written “part”, a long scroll with nothing more than his own lines and minimal
cue lines (the lines spoken by another actor just before his own) to tell him
when to speak - this saved on the laborious task of copying out the full play
repeatedly by hand. There was a bookholder or prompter who held a complete
script and who helped actors who had forgotten their lines.
Performance Techniques
We know very little, unfortunately, about how Elizabethan actors
actually played their roles. Performances probably ran continuously without
any sort of interval or Act Breaks. Occasionally music may have been played
between Acts or certain scenes, but scholars think this was quite unusual
except in the hall playhouses, where candles had to be trimmed and replaced
between Acts. We do not even know how long Elizabethan plays usually ran.
The law expected plays to last between two and two and a half hours, but
some plays - such as Hamlet, which in modern times runs for more than four
hours - seem much too long to have been performed in such a short time.
What props and scenery there were in the Elizabethan Theatre were
probably carried on and off while the scenes continued, while actors were
continually moving forward and backward into the midst of the surrounding
audience. All entrances and exits were through the doors at the rear of the
stage proper: one actor left through one door while a second actor would
appear through the second door to swing into the next scene. That means
that there would have been no need to wait for scene changes. The actors
were kept in constant motion and, given the design of the stage, they had to
face in as many different directions as possible during a scene.
Another aspect of Elizabethan performance that we know a little about
was the use of clowns or fools. Shakespeare complains in Hamlet about the
fact that the fool often spoke a great deal that was not included in his script,
and in the early Elizabethan period especially it seems to have been normal
for the fool to include a great deal of improvised repartee and jokes in his
performance, especially responding to hecklers in the audience. At the end of
the play the Elizabethan actors often danced, and sometimes the fool and
other comic actors would perform a jig - which could be anything from a
simple ballad to a quite complicated musical play, normally a farce involving
adultery and other bawdy topics. Some time was apparently put aside for the
fool to respond to challenges from the audience - with spectators inventing
rhymes and challenging the fool to complete them, asking riddles and
questions and demanding witty answers, or simply arguing and criticising the
fool so that he could respond.
With no modern stage lighting to enhance the actors and put the
audience into darkness, Globe audience members could see each other
exactly as well as they could see the performers and the Groundlings in
particular were near enough to the stage to be able to touch the actors if they
wanted to and the front row of the Groundlings routinely leaned their arms and
heads onto the front of the stage itself. The Groundlings were also forced to
stand for two or three hours without much movement, which encouraged short
attention spans and a desire to take action rather than remain completely
immobile. This means that the Groundlings frequently shouted up at the actors
or hissed the villains and cheered the goodies. Elizabethan audiences seem to

have been very responsive in this way - as their interactions with the Fool
suggests - and were particularly well known for hurling nut shells and fruit
when they disliked an actor or a performance. The Elizabethan audience was
still more distracted, however, since beer and food were being sold and
consumed throughout the performance, prostitutes were actively soliciting for
trade, and pickpockets were busy stealing goods as the play progressed.
Elizabethan audiences may have “viewed” plays very differently,
hence the origin of the word “audience” itself. The Elizabethans did not speak
of going to see a play, they went to hear one - and it is possible that in the
densely crowded theatre - obstructed by the pillars and the extravagant
headgear that richer members of the audience were wearing - the
Elizabethan audience was more concerned to hear the words spoken than to
be able to see the action. This idea is given extra weight by the fact that in
the public outdoor theatres, like the Globe, the most expensive seats were
not the ones with the best views (in fact the best view is to be had by the
Groundlings, standing directly in front of the stage), but those which were
most easily seen by other audience members. The most expensive seating
was in the Lord’s box or balcony behind the stage - looking at the action from
behind - and otherwise the higher the seats the more an audience member
had to pay. (Some Elizabethan documents suggest that the reason for this
range of prices was the richer patron’s desire to be as far from the stink of
the Groundlings as possible.)
Specific aspects of Elizabethan performances:
• bear-baiting: three bears in ascending size are set upon by an English
hound in a fight to the death!
• fencing: less gruesome, this civilized sport also took place before plays.
• dumb-shows/processions: parades or spectacles, these formal groups
used all the most ornate costumes they owned, including crowns and
sceptres, torches and swords. Dumb-shows appeared at the end of each
act to summarize the events of the following act. By the turn of the
century, dumb-shows were considered old-fashioned and corny.
Processions were more solemn as actors moved mannequin-like across
the stage.
• jigs: at the conclusion of a play, the actors would dance around the stage.
Separate from the plays, these were bawdy, knockabout song-and-dance
farces. Frequently resembling popular ballads, jigs were often
commentaries on politics or religion.
• masques: masques were plays put on strictly by the royals. These were
celebrations, i.e. royal weddings or winning a battle. Designed as
banquets of the senses, these celebrations spanned several days during
which each member of the party played a part in the allegorical theme of
the banquet. Masques were always held in private playhouses.
2. 1. 2. The First Comedies and Tragedies
“By the turn of the 15th century, the later moralities began to incorporate more
and more non religious material. The morality plays reached a point when it
is impossible distinguish clearly between them and the early secular
interludes. After 1500 the term "interlude" can to be used indiscriminately for
any play maintaining its character of secular humour. The term was first used
as a brief play between the courses of a banquet. Other records of the age
consider the interlude as a play performed outdoors in summer. Whatever its
origin or exact meaning it is out of the interlude that the wholly secular drama
in English developed in the further years. The scholarly revival of interest in
the ancient drama contributed to a vigorous playwriting in England's schools
and colleges, in the noblemen's houses and at the Inns of Court.
Henry Medwall (fl. 1490) was a teacher in the household of Cardinal
Morton. He is the author of a morality, Nature, written in the old allegorical
traditions, but his next play Fulgens and Lucres ranks as the earliest known
English secular play. Written about 1497 and published about 1515 it shows
no traces of allegory. From its opening one can understand that it was meant
for acting between the courses of a banquet. The plot involves characters
that are far from the abstractions of the typical morality plays. The hand of
Lucretia, daughter of the Roman senator Fulgentio is sought for by the noble
and wealthy Cornelius and the poor but honest Flaminius. In the spirit of the
advanced ideas of the Renaissance, Lucretia is allowed to make her own
choice. After the youths debate their claims Lucretia chooses Flaminius. The
play displays the appearance of the love-triangle drama for the first time in
English. Another original contribution of Medwall is the parallel humorous
subplot which introduces two servants designated A and B rivalling each
other for the hand of Lucretia's maid, "the flower of the frying pan". Scholars
are unanimous in emphasising the progress towards secularity and realism
marked by Fulgens and Lucrece "With love as a central theme the play is
neither Biblical, nor allegorical, but strikingly secular".
From 1550 on the drama embarked upon a period of tremendous
flourishing. Plays were performed at Court, in the halls of the noblemen, at
the Inns of Court and in colleges, generally but not exclusively by
professional actors. While the folk plays, moralities and interludes continued
to be quite popular, the academic drama emerged in the schools. Modelled
after the classic Latin dramas of Plautus, Terence and Seneca and
performed by student actors, the academic drama was meant as an
educational device to instruct in moral lessons and literary style. It was
written by humanist scholars first in Latin than in English.
Nicholas Udall (1505-l556). Headmaster of Eaton and of Westminster
School, Nicholas Udall was also the author of a selection of phrases from
Terence, Flowers of Latin Speaking Selected and Gathered out of Terence
which was used as a text book of style by schoolboys in Tudor times. Ralph
Roister Doister (written in 1535 and published about 1567) is usually referred
to as first English comedy. It was perhaps played by Westminster boys while
Udall was headmaster of that school.
The play in short rhymed doggerel represents the courting of the widow
Custance, who is betrothed to Gawin Goodluck, an absent merchant, by Roister,
a swaggering simpleton. Ralph Roister is instigated by the mischievous
Merrygreek and is repulsed and beaten by Custance and her maids. After being
deceived by false reports, Goodluck is reconciled with Custance.
The play shows similarity to the comedies of Plautus and Terence. It
follows the five act division and observes the unities of time, place and
action. Ralph is modelled on the classical "milles gloriosus" and Merrygreek
is the classical parasite. Ralph Roister Doister, the cowardly braggart soldier
"is the remote ancestor of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV".
Humour derives from the social satire addressed at the avarice of the middle
classes, from the lovely language of the play, puns, significant names of the
characters, proverbs.

Gammer Gurton's Needle written about 1555 and published in 1575 of

an uncertain authorship is the second English comedy in verse. A "Mr. S." of
Christ Church College, Cambridge wrote it and the play has been ascribed in
turn to John Still, William Stevenson or John Bridges. Equally classical in form
as Udall's comedy, Gammer Gurton's Needle cleverly spins out its humour
along five classical acts, observing unities of time, space and action. The
action is laid in the English countryside and the characters are typical of the
villages of the late feudal times. The characters’ speech is racy and vigorous.
The play deals farcically with the losing and finding of the needle used
to mend the garments of Hodge, Gammer Gurton's man. The concern for the
lost needle is understandable since needles, recently introduced in 1545,
were scarce and expensive.
The parasitical Diccon persuades the Gammer that Dame Chat, the
ale-house keeper has taken the needle; a quarrel ensues and Doctor Rat, the
curate, is called in only to get his head broken. Finally Hodge becomes
painfully aware that the needle is in the seat of his breaches. The greatest
merit of the play consists in its realism presenting the genuine local colour of
an English village in the 16th century. […] This combination of lively, vivid
native English material put into the regular form of the Latin comedies of
Plautus and Terence looked forward to the comedies of Shakespeare.
The tragedies of the English humanists were modelled on Seneca
whose plays were, of course, available in the original Latin throughout the
Renaissance. The first English, translations appeared in 1581. Seneca’s
tragedies ware constructed in five acts and had violent and bloody plots,
rhetorical speeches and the presence of ghosts among the characters.
Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex is often termed the first true English
tragedy. It was presented at the Christmas feast of the Inner Temple (1501-
62) where young men studied law. Later it was acted before the queen. Two
young lawyers, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, are the authors of this
tragedy. They chose a legendary tale of ancient Britain derived from Geoffrey
of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. The play is set in the legendary
very early period of English history shared by Shakespeare's King Lear and
like Lear, king Gordoduc divides his kingdom among his children with
disastrous result. In a quarrel Porrex kills his brother Ferrex, his mother's
favourite. In vengeance, queen Videna murders Porrex. The angry people
rise in rebellion to kill both Gorboduc and Videna. The lords put down the
rebellion but they wage an indecisive civil war, requiring a foreign king to be
chosen. The play voices the popular aspirations for unity and order. Some
are tempted to see in it a hint to Elizabeth that she should marry and secure
an heir to the throne thus avoiding the chaos of Gorboduc. Following Seneca,
the play is divided into five acts, each ending with a chorus of five old Britons.
A "dumb show” or pantomime preceding each act proved highly popular to
subsequent dramatists (see Hamlet). The scenes of horror and violence so
peculiar to Seneca take place off stage and are related by messengers in
lengthy discourses. The most important innovation of Gorboduc is the blank
verse here employed in drama for the first time. Sir Philip Sidney praises the
tragedy in his Defense of Poetrie.
The original creation of the English Renaissance dramatists was the
chronicle play the prototype of which was King Johan (c. 1538) by John Bale,
a Roman Catholic priest converted to Protestantism. The drama represents
the earliest employment of historical material.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 94-7)

2. 2. The University Wits

“The career of the public theatre between 1585-1595 is usually connected
with the name of the University Wits, young people fresh from the humanistic
training in the universities who moulded the medieval forms of the drama into
the pattern of their classical education. Most of them seem to have had a
taste for dissolute living and encountered untimely deaths. Some of them had
a great contempt for unlettered competitors like Shakespeare.
In the hands of these wild but gifted writers, the play of human passion
and action was expressed for the first time with true dramatic effect.
They paved the way for Shakespeare who was to carry the
Elizabethan drama to perfection.”
Elizabethan drama owes to some of them, namely John Lyly (1554-
1606) and George Peele (1557-1596), important improvements in comedy
writing. Lyly’s comedies – chief among which the comedy of manners Mother
Bombie (1594) – are innovative in their introduction of the device of girls
disguised as boys, of fairies as characters, of songs and music as well as of
the excessively ornate and extravagant euphuistic style (that had previously
made his ‘novels’ famous). George Peele’s contribution is equally significant
as he seems to have founded, with his comedy The Old Wives’ Tale, the
Elizabethan romantic comedy, full of freshness, high spirits and optimism,
introducing the remote but enchanted “never-never” land.
Others tried their hand at writing not only comedies but also tragedies
and histories: for instance, it is The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth (pb.
1598), in which Oberon – the king of the fairies appears for the first time, that
reinforced the popularity of Robert Greene (1560-1592)2, while George-a-
Greene’s mainly relied on The Pinner of Wakefield (1588) as an “expression
of the democratic trends in the drama of English humanists.”
Yet, by far, the most influential figures among the University Wits were
Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe. (Gavriliu, 2000: 101-2)
2. 2. 1. Thomas Kyd (1558-1594)
Life. Born in London in a prosperous middle-class family, Thomas Kyd

attended the Merchant Taylors’ School (Edmund Spenser also attended this
school at the same time), thus benefiting from excellent classical training
(Virgil and Seneca) providing him with the proper scholarly background that
he could later on draw on in writing his plays. After graduating the Merchant
Taylors’ School, he did not attend either Cambridge or Oxford like his fellow
University Wits, but he probably became an apprentice in his father’s trade.
He also found employment as a translator and it is believed that by 1583 he
was already writing for the stage. But his success as a playwright would not
spare him persecution by the Queen’s secret agents who searched his house
in 1593 on suspicion of his taking an active part in spreading anti-
governmental material together with his friend and former co-tenant
Christopher Marlowe. The Queen’s agents allegedly found a pamphlet which
they deemed “atheistic.” Thus Kyd ended up in prison, being tortured on
2
Literary history owes Robert Greene the first professional reference to Shakespeare: “there
is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players
hyde, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and
being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a
countrie.”
suspicion of spreading heresy and atheism. Kyd protested that the pamphlet
belonged to Marlowe, with whom he had been roommates in the summer of
1591, and that it had accidentally been shuffled in among his papers.
Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl before he could confirm Kyd’s
testimony. Kyd was eventually released, but he soon died in utter poverty.
Work. All his plays were published anonymously. Among them, the most
successful was The Spanish Tragedy or Hieronimo Is Mad Again! (1586).
Two more plays were also ascribed to Kyd: Ur-Hamlet, i.e. Old Hamlet and
Arden of Feversham. Yet, like many other aspects of Kyd’s life, this one also
remains a matter of conjecture.
Case Study: The Spanish Tragedy
The success of Kyd’s tragedy, set against the background of the conflict
between the Spanish and the Portuguese in 1580, about the revenge that
Hieronimo, the grieving father, and Bel-Imperia, the grieving mistress, take
against Horatio’s murderers, Balthazar and Lorenzo may be explained in at
least two distinct ways:
- on the one hand, the revenge theme, though very controversial, was very
popular among the Elizabethans. Actually, it is difficult to gauge the exact
state of the Elizabethan mind with regards to revenge, because much of what
survives on the subject comes from the preachers who were trying to
discourage it. But we have reason to believe that there was a conflict
between the old custom of seeking private revenge for wrongs done to one’s
family, inherited largely from the Anglo-Saxon and Danish influences on
English culture, as well as from the Christian injunction of Vindicta mihi;
“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the lord; I will repay”. In other words, for the
Christian, revenge against wrongdoers is the responsibility of God, not men.
In Elizabethan times, a third factor had entered into the debate, namely the
increasingly centralized and powerful state, which also discouraged private
revenge in favour of revenge under the auspices of the law. In such
circumstances, there was probably a great deal of confusion as to the moral
status of revenge, though some types of revenge were definitely held to be
worse than others: for example, a hot-blooded revenge committed in a fit of
passion was preferable to a cold-blooded revenge, carefully, methodically
plotted out in a Machiavellian manner. Though they abhorred
Machiavellianism in public, the Elizabethans were fascinated when it was
represented on stage, and most of the interesting avengers of Elizabethan
drama, including Hieronimo, the hero of The Spanish Tragedy, employ
deception and ruse to achieve their ends.
- on the other hand, in the context of the conflict between England and Spain,
which culminated with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Kyd seems
to have evoked in his tragedy the strong anti-Spanish sentiment prevalent
among his countrymen. An Elizabethan audience may have been somewhat
pleased at the denouement of the tragedy, where the royal lines of both
Spain and Portugal are wiped out in a frenzied orgy of violence.
The play begins with the ghost of Don Andrea, a Spanish nobleman in
love with the beautiful daughter of the Duke of Castile, Bel-Imperia, who is killed
in a recent battle against Portugal by the Portuguese prince Balthazar.
Accompanied by the spirit of Revenge, he faces the judges who are supposed
to assign him to his place in the underworld. But as they are unable to reach a
decision, they send him to the palace of Pluto and Proserpine, King and Queen
of the Underworld, where the decision is made that Revenge should accompany
him back to the world of the living to see his death revenged.
On the battlefield, the Spanish won and Balthazar was taken prisoner
shortly after Andrea's death, by the Andrea's good friend Horatio, son of
Hieronimo, the Knight Marshal of Spain. Lorenzo, the son of the Duke of
Castile and brother of Bel-Imperia also claims the royal prisoner. The King of
Spain decides to compromise between the two, letting Horatio have the
ransom money to be paid for Balthazar and Lorenzo keep the captured
prince at his home. Back in Portugal, the Viceroy is mad with grief, for he
believes his son to be dead, and is tricked by Villuppo into arresting an
innocent noble, Alexandro, for Balthazar's murder. Diplomatic negotiations
then begin between the Portuguese ambassador and the Spanish King, to
ensure Balthazar's return and a lasting peace between Spain and Portugal.
While living in Spain, Balthazar falls in love with Bel-Imperia, but he
finds out from her servant Pedringano that Bel-Imperia is in love with Horatio,
who returns her affections. So the jealous Balthazar and the spiteful Lorenzo
(who hates Horatio because of the fight over Balthazar's capture and
because, though lower-born, Horatio has won the heart of his sister) decide
to kill Horatio, which they successfully do with the help of Pedringano and of
Balthazar's servant Serberine, during an evening rendez-vous between the
two lovers. Bel-Imperia is then taken away before Hieronimo stumbles on to
the scene to discover his dead son. He is soon joined in uncontrollable grief
by his wife, Isabella.
In Portugal, Alexandro escapes death when the Portuguese ambassador
returns from Spain with news that Balthazar still lives; Villuppo is then sentenced
to death. In Spain, Hieronimo is almost driven insane by his inability to find
justice for his son. Hieronimo receives a bloody letter in Bel-Imperia's hand,
identifying the murderers as Lorenzo and Balthazar, but he is uncertain whether
or not to believe it. Worried by Hieronimo's behavior, Lorenzo acts in a
Machiavellian manner to eliminate all evidence surrounding his crime. He tells
Pedringano to kill Serberine for gold but arranges it so that Pedringano is
immediately arrested after the crime. He then leads Pedringano to believe that a
pardon for his crime is hidden in a box brought to the execution by a messenger
boy, so Pedringano will not expose Lorenzo before he is hanged.
Negotiations continue between Spain and Portugal, now centering on
a diplomatic marriage between Balthazar and Bel-Imperia to unite the royal
lines of the two countries. Ironically, a letter is found on Pedringano's body
that confirms Hieronimo's suspicion over Lorenzo and Balthazar, but Lorenzo
is able to deny Hieronimo access to the king, thus making royal justice
unavailable to the distressed father. Hieronimo then vows to revenge himself
privately on the two killers, using deception and a false show of friendship to
keep Lorenzo off his guard.
The marriage between Bel-Imperia and Balthazar is set, and the
Viceroy travels to Spain to attend the ceremony. Hieronimo is in charge of
the entertainment for the marriage ceremony, and he uses it to carry out his
revenge. He puts up a play to be performed at the wedding, and convinces
Lorenzo and Balthazar to act in it. Bel-Imperia, by now a confederate in
Hieronimo's plot for revenge, also acts in the play. Just before the play is
acted, Isabella, insane with grief, kills herself. The plot of this play-within-the-
play mirrors the plot of the play as a whole (a sultan is driven to murder a
noble friend through jealousy over a woman). Hieronimo casts himself in the
role of the hired murderer. During the performance, Hieronimo's character

stabs Lorenzo's character and Bel-Imperia's character stabs Balthazar's
character, before killing herself. After the play is over, Hieronimo reveals to
the horrified wedding guests (while standing over the corpse of his own son)
that all the stabbings in the play were done with real knives, and that
Lorenzo, Balthazar, and Bel-Imperia are now all dead. He then tries to kill
himself, but the King, the Viceroy and the Duke of Castile stop him. In order
to keep himself from talking, he bites out his own tongue. Tricking the Duke
into giving him a knife, he then stabs the Duke and himself and then dies.
Revenge and Andrea have the final words in the play. Andrea assigns
each of the play's "good" characters (Hieronimo, Bel-Imperia, Horatio, and
Isabella) to happy eternities. The rest of the characters are assigned to the
various tortures and punishments of Hell.
Main characters:
• Hieronimo: Torn apart between his violent urges of a grieving father whose
son was brutally murdered and his responsibility as the Knight-Marshal, the
top judge for any legal matters concerning the Spanish king or his estate,
Hieronimo, the avenger, links thus two of the play’s key themes, justice and
revenge. He equates the two frequently, and, indeed, the play seems to
support his equation with its various calls for revenge and retribution.
Nevertheless, he seems to face a number of problems when it comes to
revenge and this gives him the psychological complexity and verisimilitude
typically associated with the tragic protagonist, making Hieronimo a sort of
proto-tragic protagonist in English literature. Not even an important character
until the murder of his son Horatio, Hieronimo is suddenly thrust into the
centre of the action. His character then develops over a series of soliloquies,
wrestling with several key questions: whether to end his misery by suicide
instead of waiting to seek revenge, where to seek revenge against
murderers with far more influence over the king than he, how to reconcile his
duties as a judge with his inability to find justice for his son, whether to leave
revenge to God once his legal means are exhausted, and—having decided
to seek his revenge—how to do it in the face of enemies who could easily
destroy him with their vastly greater influence and power at court. And he
resolves the final questions taking the decision of seeking revenge in a
Machiavellian, deceitful manner. This is a radical shift for Hieronimo, who
effectively adopts the tactics of the murderer Lorenzo against Lorenzo
himself. And though his revenge is successful, Hieronimo’s grief is not
relieved, only death and silence manages to do this.
Hieronimo’s conversion to Machiavellianism and his violent, bloody
revenge, may raise problems for both an Elizabethan and a modern
audience. Sympathizing with someone who reveals himself to be both
deceitful and bloodthirsty is difficult. But Kyd does sow the seeds of
Hieronimo’s conversion from the very beginning, in the first Act, when
Hieronimo presents a masque to entertain the court. In direct connection with
that early moment in the play, we may see Hieronimo’s revenge less as a
violent, evil act than as a creative way to find justice in an unjust society.
• Bel-Imperia. The main feminine character in the play, she is a very
unfortunate young woman: she falls in love with both Andrea and Horatio
shortly before they die; she also has the misfortune to have an evil brother
in Lorenzo and to be the object of Balthazar’s affection, when Balthazar is
the very man who murdered her beloved Andrea and then went on to
murder her beloved Horatio; she is then forced by both her father, the Duke
of Castille, and her uncle, the King of Spain—the two most powerful men in
the country—to wed this very same Balthazar.
Despite her misfortune, she does not appear as a weak woman: she
displays her rhetorical ability in stichomythia (line-by-line exchanges)
between her, Balthazar, and Lorenzo and she also has several soliloquies,
during which we have access to a mind, an interiority, with very strong
opinions, desires, and motivations. We also have evidence that she has the
necessary strength of will to act on her desires and motivations; the
clearest example of this may be her participation in Hieronimo's revenge
playlet, Soliman and Perseda. She may indeed appear too calculating, too
cold, too focused on revenge (pushing Hieronimo forward when he appears
too lazy to pursue the revenge), but that is somewhat explainable in the
case of a woman who has suffered so much.
• Lorenzo. Lorenzo is an example of the Machiavellian villain, typical of many
Elizabethan tragedies and dramas. (E.g. Richard III of Gloucester in
Shakespeare’s Richard III, Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello; Barabas in
Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta) This character exploited the popular
disapproval of the early sixteenth-century Italian political philosopher
Niccolo Machiavelli, whose The Prince portrayed a picture of a political
ruler who used manipulation over persuasion and fear over love to ensure
the loyalty of his subjects. This character also drew heavily on the
traditional Vice figure in English literature.
The Vice figure would use verbal cleverness to lead a protagonist into
sin, using that protagonist's inherent moral weakness. Similarly, Lorenzo uses
his verbal cleverness to lead the people around him to injustice, playing on
their moral weakness as well as their lack of knowledge. And like the Vice
figure, Lorenzo has a foil. In the morality plays, the foil was usually a virtuous
old man. In this tragedy, the honest and virtuous Horatio acts as a foil. But a
key difference between the Machiavellian villain and the Vice figure is that the
villain is human, whereas Vice is supernatural (much like Revenge in this
play). So Lorenzo is weak in the same way those he manipulates are weak,
and he is as easily manipulated as those he manipulates. This ironic fact is
proven by Hieronimo when he lures Lorenzo into the playlet, manipulating the
young nobleman's love of theatre and erroneous belief that Hieronimo bears
him no hard feelings.
Themes and motifs
• Revenge and Justice. As previously stated, the official Elizabethan attitude
towards revenge is epitomised by Hieronimo’s quote from the Bible in Act III,
i.e. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, sayeth the Lord.” That implies that
Revenge should be performed by God (or the State, which derived its power
from God), but it still needs to be performed. This is the presupposition that
underlies Hieronimo’s doubts whether the Heavens (and God) are in fact
just, which are doubts he expresses after the murder of his son and the
apparent escape of his murderers. It is in the light of this link between
revenge and justice that Hieronimo decides to revenge Horatio’s death
himself and that he interprets Bel-Imperia’s offer of help as a sign that
Heaven favours his decision. Hieronimo may here consider himself the
agent of the divine vengeance that a just God must bring against his son’s
murderers, the man chosen by God to revenge Horatio’s death. His act
would thus be a service to God and not an usurpation of God’s role.
• Appearance versus Reality. Kyd uses dramatic irony throughout the play to
drive a wedge between the world as his main characters see it and the
world as it actually is. To give a significant example, Lorenzo

enthusiastically agrees to play his part in Hieronimo’s tragedy, not knowing
that Hieronimo intends not only his character to die, but for him to die as
well. But, perhaps the most concrete and dramatic example of this wedge
is Pedringano’s belief that a pardon is contained inside the box Lorenzo
has sent him. The box then comes to symbolize, in the view of many critics,
a more fundamental and general limitation on human knowledge. In other
words, the characters’ inability to get past appearances is typical of all
human beings’ inability to penetrate appearances.
• Madness. It becomes manifest in two distinct characters in the play:
Hieronimo’s turns to outward destruction and leads to bloody revenge,
Isabella’s results in inward destruction and eventually in suicide. Anyway,
in both cases, madness appears as a manifestation of the desire to
escape from a horrible reality. Furthermore, madness is rather
paradoxical in the sense that it is a kind of “sane” madness—madness in
the face of a world that has itself gone insane and to which madness is
the only possible response. This madness places the sane and happy,
such as the King, in an ironic position, especially if we understand
“madness” as a disconnected state from reality. In the world of the play, it
is the sane and happy who are truly disconnected from reality, unable to
even see the pervasive evil that surrounds them.
• Machiavellism. In Elizabethan England, Machiavelli’s name was
synonymous with evil, duplicity, use of violence and fear. Machiavelli’s
philosophy was actually intended for the rulers of cities; he maintained
(reasonably) that such rulers could not be bound by conventional morality.
The Machiavellian villain, however, applied the philosopher’s principles to
private life. Ironically, Hieronimo, the play’s protagonist, is forced to adopt
Machiavellian tactics in order to avenge his son.
• Antithesis and Irony. Both rhetorically and in terms of characterization, Kyd
loves opposites: Lorenzo is unequivocally unjust, while Hieronimo is
unequivocally just. Horatio is honourable, while Lorenzo is typically
dishonourable. This love for opposition expresses itself in the frequent
occurrence of the rhetorical device of antithesis, where the opposition of two
ideas is expressed in one sentence or in a parallel structure of sentences.
Yet, many of the initially antithetical characters at times seem very
similar to each other. At the end of the play, Hieronimo adopts Lorenzo’s
Machiavellianism, and Lorenzo plays Hieronimo’s part of the innocent
dupe. Because of Lorenzo’s plot, the just Hieronimo ends up committing
an act of injustice in the hanging of Pedringano. These resolutions and
exchanges are ironic, because they show how both meanings and
intentions are ambiguous and easily reversed: Bel-Imperia’s love is both
war and peace; Hieronimo needs to be a villain in order to be a hero and
avenge his son; Bel-Imperia’s desire to revenge herself on Balthazar by
causing him pain ends up causing her intense grief; and the commission
of justice can often turn into a commission of injustice (for example, in the
case of the hanging of Pedringano). Such ironies pervade the play and
help create the double perspective in which we view the action. We are
separated from the actions of the characters, especially Hieronimo, by the
knowledge that they act in error, but we also empathize with them
because of the uncertain situations in which they are forced to act, in
which the meaning and intentions of their actions often slip away.

• Meta-Theatre. Two aspects must be referred to in this respect. On the

one hand, the play starts with a character within the play who watches the
play’s main events and is as isolated from them as we are: Don Andrea.
There is also another character, Revenge, who—while separated from the
play—seems to be affecting it in spirit and to have knowledge of what is to
come. The existence of this meta-theatre serves to make the relationship
between the play-world and the real world ambiguous: we are still
separated from the characters by a radical divide (we exist, they do not),
but we exist in a position almost exactly identical to Andrea and Revenge.
On the other hand, this ambiguity is played further upon and heightened
by Hieronimo’s revenge play-within-the-play in Act IV.
Thomas Kyd’s tragedy about a father’s delayed revenge for his murdered
son apparently finds its counterpart in the currently lost Ur-Hamlet,
presenting a son’s delayed revenge for a murdered father (which
Shakespeare presumably used as a source of inspiration for his Hamlet) and
inaugurates the type of revenge tragedy to be followed by: Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Julius Caesar and Hamlet, Marston’s Antonio’s
Revenge, Chapman’s Busy d’Ambois, or Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.
2. 2. 2. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Life. Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564 (the same year of birth
as Shakespeare’s). Though only a shoemaker, his father supported him
financially to attend the King’s School in Canterbury, wherefrom, having gained a
scholarship, the young Christopher continued his studies at the Corpus Christi
College in Cambridge. During his years at the university, Marlowe wrote short
plays and literary works that suggested an early interest in drama. Although he
was awarded his B.A. in 1584, it was only in 1587, after Elizabeth I’s Privy Council
intervened, that he could get his M.A. degree. Even at this stage, Marlowe was
courting controversy as a result of his long absences from college; many people
believed he had fled to France in order to study at a Catholic university.
After leaving Cambridge, he moved to London where he became a
playwright and led a turbulent, scandal-plagued life. He produced seven plays,
all of which were immensely popular, in which he pioneered the use of blank
verse, which many of his contemporaries (including Shakespeare) later
adopted. Yet, in 1593, his career was cut short. Accused of maintaining beliefs
contrary to those of the approved religion, he was arrested, brought before the
Court of the Star Chamber and then put on a sort of probation. On May 30,
1593, shortly after his being released, he got involved in a tavern fight and was
stabbed to death. After his death, rumours were spread accusing him of
treason, atheism, and homosexuality, and some people speculated that the
tavern brawl might have been the work of government agents. Little evidence
to support these allegations has come to light, however.
Works. While still in Cambridge, Marlowe wrote his first play Dido, Queen of
Carthage and perhaps even outlined the first part of Tamburlaine the Great.
Marlowe also turned out an excellent translator in verse of Ovid’s Amores and
of the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia, as well as a poet (chief among his lyrical
productions, the more original poem Hero and Leander could be mentioned.)
After having settled in London, working with Lord Admiral’s Men,
Marlowe wrote for the stage the following plays:
- Tamburlaine the Great, parts 1 and 2 (about 1587);
- The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (about 1588/ 1592);

- The Jew of Malta (1589-1591);
- Edward II (about 1592);
- The Massacre at Paris (1593).
Each of Marlowe’s plays is, in a sense, a tour de force, a special creation (despite
the fact that some of the plays like The Jew of Malta, Dido and The Massacre at
Paris are not, according to some scholars, as well written as the others).
Marlowe’s first and most important service to drama was the
improvement of blank verse. Robert Greene had condemned its use as being
unscholarly; Sackville and Norton had used it, but were not able to lift it
above commonplace, confining it to isolated lines, all made after one
rhythmical pattern, with the same number of feet and the cæsura always in
place, following one another, with no grouping according to thought. Marlowe
invented numberless variations while still keeping the satisfying rhythm within
a recurring pattern. Sometimes he left a redundant syllable, or left the line
one syllable short, or moved the position of the cæsura. He grouped his lines
according to the thought and adapted his various rhythms to the ideas. Thus
blank verse became a living organism, plastic, brilliant, and finished.
Marlowe’s second best gift to drama was his conception of the heroic
tragedy built on a grand scale, with the three-fold unity of character,
impression, and interest, instead of the artificial unities of time and place.
Before his time, tragedies were built either according to the loose style of the
chronicle, or within the mechanical framework of the Senecan model; but, in
either case, the dramatic unity attained by the Greeks was lacking. Marlowe,
with his disregard of the so-called classic rules, was in fact much nearer the
spirit of Aeschylus and Sophocles than the slavish followers of the pseudo-
classic schools. (And so was William Shakespeare too.) Coming to London
obsessed with fantastic aspirations, Marlowe painted gigantic ambitions,
desires for impossible things, longings for a beauty beyond earthly
conception, and sovereigns destroyed by the very powers which had raised
them to their thrones. Tamburlaine, Faust, Barabas are personifications of
arrogance and insatiable ambition, lust for power and wealth. Despite the
touch of the extravagant or bombastic, or even of the puerile that sometimes
characterise his plays, and his inability to portray women (none of his plays
deals with love as the main subject), or the fact that his world is not
altogether our world, but a remote field of the imagination, his plays managed
to impose a standard upon all succeeding theatrical compositions and to
pave thus the way for the rise of the greatest drama of English history.
Marlowe’s ‘trilogy’ focused on the rise and fall of powerful men starts
with a story of violence and cruelty in which Tamburlaine, turned from a mere
Scythian shepherd into a bloody tyrant whom not even Zenocrate’s love can
touch, creates an empire, but dies an inglorious death after having arrogantly
defied Mahomed himself. Influences of Tamburlaine the Great may be
identified in Shakespeare’s Richard III, a play which displays similar
concentration on the unity of character. Richard, like Tamburlaine, seeks
exceptional power and is deterred by no moral or religious scruples from
attaining his ends.
In creating Tamburlaine, Marlowe innovated the old pattern of the stage
hero and created “the prototype of the Renaissance egoist, the audacious
villain, a figure as enthralling as Milton’s Satan.” (Day in Gavriliu, 2000: 105-6)
Another story of racial conflict and revenge comes to complete the
range of consequences of the thirst for power: The Jew of Malta resonates

with themes of racial tension, religious conflict, and political intrigue, all of
which share parallels with sixteenth-century England. Although the play is
grounded on a real historical event (the 1565 Turkish invasion of Malta), its
characterization appeals to a general sense of fear that many English
Protestants felt toward those whom they considered outsiders—be these
Muslims, Jews (though there were no professed Jews in England during this
time, they had been banished in 1290 and would be readmitted in 1656 only
as converts to Christianity), or Catholics. With Barabas’s sly allusions to
biblical stories and his ironic treatment of Christian doctrine, one sees how
Marlowe raises questions about state religion that would have had deeper
significance in a country fraught by its own religious tensions.
At the same time, the play captures anti-Machiavellian feeling that was
rife in Elizabethan England. Barabas’s schemes share much with
Machiavellian self-advancement and the play elicits a deeply ambivalent
response from the audience: one may admire Barabas for his clever duplicity
but at the same time, resent him for his unfeeling manipulation of human
beings. In many respects, Marlowe is similar to his protagonist in that the
playwright was also decried as a Machiavellian schemer with little loyalty
towards his country. It is for readers to determine whether The Jew of Malta
is Marlowe’s attempt at discrediting Machiavelli, or whether the playwright is
satirizing Elizabethan England’s stereotyped view of this author.
If Shakespeare wrote his Merchant of Venice to compete with
Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, the similarities between the two plays are less
significant upon thorough analysis. Unlike Barabas who is a paragon of
hatred and selfishness from the outset, Shylock’s hatred develops before our
eyes and we feel sympathy for him that is never granted to Barabas.
Still, Marlowe could not ignore that power goes hand in hand not only
with terror or fortune but also with knowledge. That is precisely what The
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus demonstrates.
Case Study: The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus (later on published as The
Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus) (c. 1588/ 1592)
The text of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has come down to us in a corrupt form
with comic fits and grotesque prose passages, which, according to some
literary historians, belonged to various menders. Yet modern scholarship has
established that they were intentionally introduced by Marlowe himself for
ironic purposes.
The idea of an individual selling his or her soul to the devil for
knowledge is an old motif in Christian folklore, one that had become attached
to the historical persona of Johannes Faustus, a disreputable astrologer who
lived in Germany sometime in the early 1500s. The immediate source of
Marlowe’s play seems to be an anonymous German work from the Volksbuch
entitled Historia von D. Iohan Fausten of 1587, which was translated into
English in 1592 as The History of the Damnable Life and Death of Dr. John
Faustus, and from which Marlowe lifted the bulk of the plot for his drama.
Although there had been literary representations of Faust prior to Marlowe’s
play, Doctor Faustus is the first famous version of the story. Later versions
include the long and famous poem Faust by the nineteenth-century Romantic
writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as operas by Charles Gounod
and Arrigo Boito and a symphony by Hector Berlioz. Meanwhile, the phrase

“Faustian bargain” has entered the English lexicon, referring to any deal made
for a short-term gain with great costs in the long run.
A Doctor of Divinity at the University of Wittenberg, John Faustus
makes a pact with Mephistopheles to surrender his soul to Lucifer in
exchange for twenty-four years of absolute knowledge and experience.
Endowed with superhuman powers, Faustus performs incredible deeds like
calling up Alexander the Great and Helen of Troy, but also indulges in petty
tricks to entertain different royal or aristocratic figures throughout Europe. As
the hour for the surrender of his soul draws near, Faustus is seized with
repentance, but it is too late for him to be saved: when the clock strikes
twelve, his soul is borne to Hell by the devils.
Main Characters
• Faustus is the protagonist and tragic hero of Marlowe’s play. He is a
contradictory character, capable of tremendous eloquence and possessing
awesome ambition, yet prone to a strange, almost wilful blindness and a
willingness to waste powers that he has gained at great cost. At the
beginning of the play, Faustus’s main feature seems to be his grandeur as
he contemplates all the marvels that his magical powers will produce, as he
imagines piling up wealth from the four corners of the globe, reshaping the
map of Europe (both politically and physically), and gaining access to every
scrap of knowledge about the universe. He is an arrogant, self-
aggrandizing man, but his ambitions are so grand that we cannot help
being impressed, and we even feel sympathetic toward him. He represents
the spirit of the Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval, God-centred
universe, and its embrace of human possibility. Faustus, at least early on in
his acquisition of magic, is the personification of possibility.
Yet, as the scenes of his bargaining with Mephistopheles show it, he also
possesses certain obtuseness. Having decided that a pact with the devil is the
only way to fulfil his ambitions, Faustus then blinds himself happily to what
such a pact actually means. Sometimes he tells himself that hell is not so bad
and that one needs only “fortitude”; at other times, he remarks that he does
not actually believe hell exists. Meanwhile, despite his lack of concern about
the prospect of eternal damnation, Faustus is also beset with doubts from the
beginning, setting a pattern for the play in which he repeatedly approaches
repentance only to pull back at the last moment. Why he fails to repent is
unclear: sometimes it seems a matter of pride and continuing ambition,
sometimes a conviction that God will not hear his plea. Other times, it seems
that Mephistopheles simply bullies him away from repenting.
After having appeared as a grandly tragic figure of sweeping visions
and immense ambitions at the beginning of the play, Faustus actually reveals
in the middle scenes his petty nature. Once he gained his long-desired
powers, he does not seem to know what to do with them or to want to do
anything with them and he travels around Europe using his incredible gifts to
play tricks to impress various heads of state, in other words, for trifling
entertainment. He is entirely swallowed up in mediocrity. Only in the final
scene, the knowledge of his impending doom restores his earlier gift of
powerful rhetoric and he regains his sweeping sense of vision. Marlowe uses
much of his finest poetry to describe Faustus’s final hours, during which
Faustus’s desire for repentance finally wins out, although too late. Still,
Faustus is restored to his earlier grandeur in his closing speech, with its
hurried rush from idea to idea and its despairing, Renaissance-renouncing

last line, “I’ll burn my books!” He becomes once again a tragic hero, a great
man undone because his ambitions have butted up against the law of God.
• Mephistopheles is one of the first in a long tradition of sympathetic literary
devils, which includes figures like John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost and
Johann von Goethe’s Mephistopheles in the nineteenth-century poem
Faust. In creating his Mephistopheles, Marlowe combined different motives.
On the one hand, from his first appearance he clearly intends to act as an
agent of Faustus’s damnation: he witnesses Faustus’s pact with Lucifer
and, throughout the play, he prevents Faustus from repenting, either by
flattery or by threats. On the other hand, there is an odd ambivalence in
him. He seeks to damn Faustus, but he himself is damned and speaks
freely of the horrors of hell. When Faustus claims he does not believe in
hell, Mephistopheles insists that hell is, indeed, real and terrible, as Faustus
comes to know soon enough. Before the pact is sealed, Mephistopheles
actually warns Faustus against making the deal with Lucifer. In an odd way,
one can almost sense that part of Mephistopheles does not want Faustus
to make the same mistakes that he made. But, of course, Faustus does so
anyway, which makes him and Mephistopheles kindred spirits. It is
appropriate that these two figures dominate Marlowe’s play, for they are
two overly proud spirits doomed to hell.
Themes and Motifs
• Sin, Redemption and Damnation. Doctor Faustus contains elements of
Christian morality. It takes place in an explicitly Christian cosmos: God sits
on high, as the judge of the world, and every soul goes either to hell or to
heaven. There are devils and angels, with the devils tempting people into
sin and the angels urging them to remain true to God. Faustus’s story is a
tragedy in Christian terms, because he gives in to temptation and is
damned to hell. Faustus’s principal sin is his great pride and ambition,
which can be contrasted with the Christian virtue of humility: not only does
he disobey God, but he consciously and even eagerly renounces
obedience to him, choosing instead to swear allegiance to Lucifer, Christian
cosmology’s prince of devils.
But, in a Christian framework, even the worst deed can be forgiven
through the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, God’s son, who, according to
Christian belief, died on the cross for humankind’s sins. Thus, however terrible
Faustus’s pact with Lucifer may be, the possibility of redemption is always
open to him. All that he needs to do, theoretically, is ask God for forgiveness.
The play offers countless moments in which Faustus considers doing just that,
urged on by the good angel on his shoulder or by the old man in scene 12—
both of whom can be seen either as emissaries of God, personifications of
Faustus’s conscience, or both. Each time, Faustus decides to remain loyal to
hell rather than seek heaven, which condemns him, according to the Christian
canon, to an eternity in hell. Only at the end of his life does Faustus desire to
repent, and, in the final scene, he cries out to Christ to redeem him. But it is
too late for him to repent. In creating this moment in which Faustus is still alive
but incapable of being redeemed, Marlowe steps outside the Christian
worldview in order to maximize the dramatic power of the final scene. Having
inhabited a Christian world for the entire play, Faustus spends his final
moments in a slightly different universe, where redemption is no longer
possible and where certain sins cannot be forgiven.
• The Conflict between Medieval and Renaissance Values. The medieval
world placed God at the centre of existence and shunted aside man and the
natural world. The Renaissance, on the contrary, laid a new emphasis on the
individual, on classical learning, and on scientific inquiry into the nature of the
world. In the medieval academy, theology was the queen of the sciences. In
the Renaissance, though, secular matters took centre stage.
Faustus, despite being a magician rather than a scientist (a blurred
distinction in the sixteenth century), explicitly rejects the medieval model. In
his opening speech in scene 1, he goes through every field of scholarship,
beginning with logic and proceeding through medicine, law, and theology,
quoting an ancient authority for each: Aristotle on logic, Galen on medicine,
the Byzantine emperor Justinian on law, and the Bible on religion. In the
medieval model, tradition and authority, not individual inquiry, were the key.
But in this soliloquy, Faustus considers and rejects this medieval way of
thinking. He resolves, in full Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits,
traditions, or authorities in his quest for knowledge, wealth, and power.
The play’s attitude toward the clash between medieval and
Renaissance values is ambiguous. Marlowe seems hostile toward the
ambitions of Faustus and keeps his tragic hero squarely in the medieval
world, where eternal damnation is the price of human pride. Yet Marlowe
himself was no pious traditionalist, and it is tempting to see in Faustus—as
many readers have—a hero of the new modern world, a world free of God,
religion, and the limits that these imposed on humanity. Faustus may pay a
medieval price, but his successors will go further than he and suffer less, as
we have in modern times. On the other hand, the disappointment and
mediocrity that follow Faustus’s pact with the devil, as he descends from
grand ambitions to petty conjuring tricks, might suggest a contrasting
interpretation. Marlowe may be suggesting that the new, modern spirit,
though ambitious and glittering, will lead only to a Faustian dead end.
• Power as a Corrupting Influence. Early in the play, before he agrees to the
pact with Lucifer, Faustus is full of ideas for how to use the power that he
seeks. He imagines piling up great wealth, but he also aspires to examine
the mysteries of the universe and to remake the map of Europe. All these
impressive, though not entirely admirable, plans lend grandeur to Faustus
and make his quest for personal power seem almost heroic, a sense that is
reinforced by the eloquence of his early soliloquies. But once Faustus
actually gains the practically limitless power that he so desires, however,
his horizons seem to narrow and, instead of the grand designs that he
contemplates early on, he contents himself with performing conjuring tricks
for kings and noblemen and takes a strange delight in using his magic to
play practical jokes on simple folks. It is not that power has corrupted
Faustus by making him evil. He is indeed wicked, but more than that, he
becomes mediocre and transforms his boundless ambition into a
meaningless delight in petty celebrity. In the Christian framework of the
play, one can argue that true greatness can be achieved only with God’s
blessing. By cutting himself off from the creator of the universe, Faustus is
condemned to mediocrity. He has gained the whole world, but he does not
know what to do with it.
• The Divided Nature of Man. Faustus is constantly undecided about whether
he should repent and return to God or continue to follow his pact with
Lucifer. His internal struggle goes on throughout the play, as part of him of
wants to do good and serve God, but part of him (the dominant part, it
seems) lusts after the power that Mephistopheles promises. The good
angel and the evil angel, both of whom appear at Faustus’s shoulder in
order to urge him in different directions, symbolize this struggle. While

these angels may be intended as an actual pair of supernatural beings,
they clearly represent Faustus’s divided will, which compels Faustus to
commit to Mephistopheles but also to question this commitment continually.
If in Tamburlaine the Great Marlowe depicted the gigantic passion for
political power, Doctor Faustus features the gigantic passion for the power
that is brought by knowledge.
Finally, Marlowe took interest in the most recent ‘invention’ of
Elizabethan drama, writing in c. 1592 The Troublesome Reign and
Lamentable Death of Edward II, a chronicle play derived from Holinshed,
considered, for a long time, a model of how, according to Marlowe, history
could be moulded to fit the plot form of drama. Recent scholarship has
suggested that Shakespeare wrote his Henry VI trilogy before Marlowe could
complete his Edward II, but it seems that the latter had, nevertheless, a
important influence on the former’s Richard II: both plays concern kings who,
because of personal weaknesses, are unable to maintain order in the
kingdom. The play displays Marlowe’s concern with order and marks a
change in his style in the sense that his “mighty line”, so fit to the
superhuman characters of the previous plays, acquires conversational ease,
speech being suited to the person speaking.
Christopher Marlowe was also a remarkable lyric poet:
- The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (1588) – a short love lyric suffused
with genuine feelings set forth in a simple language which occasioned
Walter Ralegh’s response in The Nymph’s Reply.
- Hero and Leander (1598) – about 800 lines of heroic couplets of
remarkable sensuality and musicality, completed by George Chapman.
All in all, the brilliant generation of the University Wits paved the way for
Shakespeare’s genius. Each of them influenced the Shakespearean universe
more or less: John Lyly supplied Shakespeare the sparkling, scholarly
dialogue; Kyd introduced the tragic pathos and sombre atmosphere; Marlowe
taught him the heroes’ titanic nature and the lyrical effects of the blank verse;
Greene provided the romantic framework and the gentle, delicate feminine
characters. But for the joined efforts of the Renaissance playwrights the
magnificence of Hamlet or Lear would not have been possible.
2. 3. Practical Applications. Examination Tests.

1. Define the following terms and use them in sentences of your own:
dumb-show metatheatre tiring house jig
avenger discovery space milles gloriosus Frons Scenas
Marlowe’s mighty line revenge tragedy Machiavellian villain
2. Look at the picture below representing The Swan Theatre in Elizabethan
London, as seen in c. 1596 by the Dutch traveller, Johannes de Witt. Identify
its main components and explain their function in the theatrical performance.

3. Choose the right word to complete the sentence:

- Secular drama emerged in the sixteenth century developing out of
a. moralities; b. mysteries; c. interludes.
- The first writer of an English secular play was
a. Nicholas Udall; b. William Shakespeare; c. Henry Medwall.
- The most influential classical comedies that the earliest English playwrights
imitated were written by
a. Seneca; b. Plautus; c. Ovid.
- The love triangle theme first appeared in the play
a. Fulgens and Lucrece; b. Ralph Roister Doister; c. Gorboduc.
- The ancestor of Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff was
a. Merrygreek; b. Hodge; c. Ralph Roister.
- The novelty of the play Gammer Gurton’s Needle lies to some extent in the
realistic picture of
a. the English court; b. the English village; c. the Italian town.
- One of the distinct features of the Senecan tragedy was the presence of
a. fairies; b. witches; c. ghosts.
- An important innovation in Gorboduc is the use of
a. bloody plots; b. blank verse; c. Aristotelian types.
- The original creation of the English Renaissance dramatists is represented by
a. the dumb-show; b. the comedy; c. the chronicle play.
- Lyly’s famous writing style is known as
a. Machiavellism; b. Petrarchism; c. Euphuism.
- Robert Greene is the founder of
a. comedy of manners; b. romantic comedy; c. comedy of humours.
- The avenger in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy is
a. Horatio; b. Lorenzo; c. Hieronimo.
- The Machiavellian villain in The Spanish Tragedy is
a. Lorenzo; b. Balthazar; c. Bel-Imperia.
- Dr. Faustus fulfills his dream of absolute power owing to
a. money; b. violence; c. knowledge.
- The agent of Faustus’s damnation is
a. Satan; b. Mephistopheles; c. Revenge.
4. Comment on the following excerpts so as to illustrate the most important
features of Thomas Kyd’s and Christopher Marlowe’s dramatic art:
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (Act III, Scene 12)
HIERONIMO: I pry through every crevice of each wall, HIERONIMO: Chitesc prin toate borţile din ziduri,
Look on each tree and search through every brake, Mă uit prin toţi copacii, răscolesc

Beat at the bushes, stamp our grandam earth, Mărăcinişurile, bat în tufe,
Dive in the water and stare up to heaven: ... Buşesc bătrâna glie cu piciorul,
Yet cannot I behold my son Horatio. -- M-afund în apă sau măsor tăria.
How now, who's there? Spirits, spirits? Dar nu-l găsesc pe fiul meu Horaţio.
PEDRO: We are your servants that attend you, sir. Hei, cine e pe-acolo? Duhuri? Duhuri?
HIERONIMO: What make you with your torches in PEDRO: Noi suntem slujitorii tăi, stăpâne.
the dark? HIERONIMO: De ce-aţi ieşit cu faclele în beznă?
PEDRO; You bid us light them, and attend you here. PEDRO: Aşa ne-ai poruncit chiar tu, stăpâne.
HIERONIMO: No, no, you are deceived -- not I -- HIERONIMO: Nu, nu, vă înşelaţi! Nu eu, nu eu;
you are deceived. Vă înşelaţi! Doar nu eram nebun
Was I so mad to bid you light your torches now? Să poruncesc făclii în miez de noapte!
Light me your torches at the mid of noon, Aprindeţi-le în amiaza mare
Whenas the sun-god rides in all his glory: Când zeul-soare străluceşte-n slăvi,
Light me your torches then. Atunci le-aprindeţi.
PEDRO: Then we burn daylight. ... PEDRO: Am aprinde-amiaza.
HIERONIMO: Let it be burnt; night is a murderous slut HIERONIMO: Să ardă; noaptea-i târfă ucigaşă,
That would not have her treasons to be seen; Nu vrea să-şi dea trădările-n vileag:
And yonder pale-faced Hecate there, the Moon, Şi-această palidă Hecată, luna,
Doth give consent to that is done in darkness; Ea e codoaşa faptelor din bezne;
And all those Stars that gaze upon her face Iar stelele care-i contemplă chipul
Are aeglets on her sleeve, pins on her train; Sunt fluturi pe-ai ei mâneci, şi hurmuzuri
And those that should be powerful and divine Pe trene ei; vai, cei ce s-ar cădea
Do sleep in darkness, when they most should shine. Să fie-atotputernici şi cereşti,
PEDRO: Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting Să dea lumină, iată, dorm în beznă.
words: PEDRO: Stăpâne bun, nu le stârni mânia:
The heavens are gracious, and your miseries ... Milos e cerul; marea ta durere
And sorrow makes you speak, you know not what. Te face să-ndrugi vorbe fărăr şir.
HIERONIMO: Villain, thou liest, and thou dost HIERONIMO: Minţi, ticăloase! Asta ştii să faci:
nought Îmi spui că sunt nebun: minţi, nu-s nebun!
But tell me I am mad: Thou liest, I am not mad! Ştiu că eşti Pedro, şi că el e Jacques.
I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques. Voi dovedi ce spun; de-aş fi nebun,
I'll prove it to thee; and were I mad, how could I? Cum aş putea? Ea unde-a fost în noaptea
Where was she that same night when my Horatio Când l-au ucis pe fiul meu cel drag?
Was murdered? She should have shone: Search De ce n-a luminat? Citeşte-n carte.
thou the book. O, de-ar fi fost lumină-n noaptea-aceea...
Had the moon shone in my boy's face there was a Băiatul meu avea pe chip un farmec,
kind of grace, I-l ştiu. O, de-l vedea şi ucigaşul –
That I know -- nay, I do know -- had the murderer Să nu fi fost tâlharul plămâdit
seen him, Decât din cheag de sânge şi din crimă –
His weapon would have fall'n and cut the earth, ... Şi tot ar fi scăpat cuţitul jos.
Had he been framed of naught but blood and death. Alei, când răul nu mai ştie seama,
Alack, when mischief doth it knows not what, Ce să-i mai spunem răului? (Intră ISABELLA.)
What shall we say to mischief? [Enter Isabella.] ISABELLA: Vin’, Hieronimo, dragul meu, în casă;
ISABELLA: Dear Hieronimo, come in a-doors; Nu mai căta să-ţi înteţeşti durerea.
Oh, seek not means so to increase thy sorrow. HIERONIMO: Dar n-am făcut nimica, Isabella;
HIERONIMO: Indeed, Isabella, we do nothing here; Nu plâng, întreabă-i: Pedro, Jacques, aşa-i?
I do not cry: ask Pedro, and ask Jaques; Zău nu; ba suntem veseli, foarte veseli.
Not I, indeed; we are very merry, very merry. ISABELLA: Cum? Veseli, sunteţi veseli chiar aici,
ISABELLA: How? Be merry here, be merry here? Chiar lângă pomul unde s-a sfârşit,
Is not this the place, and this the very tree, ... Unde-a murit ucis Horaţio-al meu?
Where my Horatio died, where he was murdered? HIERONIMO: Era ... nu-i spuneţi ce: să plângă-n voie.
HIERONIMO: Was -- do not say what: let her weep it out. Acesta-i pomul, eu l-am semănat,
This was the tree; I set it of a kernel: Eu i-am sădit sămânţa în pământ,
And when our hot Spain could not let it grow, Şi când înfiebântata noastră Spanie
But that the infant and the human sap Nu l-a lăsat să crească, veştejind
Began to wither, duly twice a morning Şi tânărul vlăstar şi seva lui,
Would I be sprinkling it with fountain-water. De două ori în fiecare zi
At last it grew, and grew, and bore, and bore, Îl răcoream cu apă din fântână.
Til at length Şi s-a-nălţat voinic şi a rodit,
It grew a gallows, and did bear our sonne, ... Şi-ntr-un târziu
It bore thy fruit and mine: oh wicked, wicked plant. Spânzurătoare s-a făcut, purtându-l
Pe fiul nostru, rodul tău şi-al meu...
O, pom păcătoşit, păcătoşit!
Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus (Act V)

[The clock strikes eleven.] [Orologiul bate ora unsprezece.]
Faustus Faustus:
O, Faustus, Ah, Faust,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, Un ceas îţi mai rămâne de trăit;
And then thou must be damned perpetually. Apoi te-aşteaptă veşnica osândă!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, Opriţi-vă, luminători cereşti,

That time may cease, and midnight never come. Ca vremea să stea-n loc şi miezul nopţii
Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again and make Să nu mai bată; ochi frumos al firii,
Perpetual day. Or let this hour be but a year, Răsari din nou şi-nveşniceşte ziua;
A month, a week, a natural day, De nu, prefă-te, ceasule, -ntr-un an,
That Faustus may repent, and save his soul. O lună, şapte zile, într-o zi,
O lente lente currite noctis equi. Ca Faust să se potă pocăi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike. O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned. Dar stelele se mişcă, vremea fuge,
O, I'll leap up to heaven; who pulls me down? Va bate ceasul, dracii vor veni
One drop of blood will save me. Şi Faust îşi va căpăta osânda!
Rend not my heart, for naming of my Christ. Să mă avânt spre Cel-înalt! Ah, cine
Yet will I call on him. O spare me, Lucifer. E cel care mă trage-n jos? Priviţi!
Where is it now? 'Tis gone. De sângele lui Crist e plină bolta...
And see a threatening arm, an angry brow. Un singur strop m-ar izbăvi... Isuse!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me, Nu mă zdrobi, puternic Lucifer,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of heaven. Din pricina chemării ce i-o fac!
No? Then will I headlong run into the earth. Eu am să-l strig mereu... Fii milostiv!
Gape, earth! O no, it will not harbour me. Unde-i acum? S-a dus! Ah, iată Domnul
You stars that reigned at my nativity, Şi-ntinde braţul şi tăcut se-ncruntă!
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell, Vă prăvăliţi asupră-mi, munţi şi dealuri,
Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist, Şi de urgia lui mă tăinuiţi! Nu vreţi?
Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud, Mă-nghită-atunci genunea fără fund!
That when you vomit forth into the air, Pământule, te cască! Nu mă vrea...
My limbs may issue from your smokey mouths, Voi, stele ce sclipeaţi atunci când m-am născut
But let my soul mount, and ascend to heaven. Şi mi-aţi ursit pieirea şi gheena,
[The watch strikes.] Mă soarbeţi ca pe-o ceaţă şi mă duceţi
O, half the hour is past! 'Twill all be past anon. În pântecele norilor scămoşi,
O, if my soul must suffer for my sin, Ca-n clipa când mă veţi zvârli-ndărăt,
Impose some end to my incessant pain. Prin gura lor de fum să-mi iasă trupul,
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, Iar sufletul să urce către cer!
A hundred thousand, and at last be saved. [Orologiul bate.]
No end is limited to damned souls. Din ceas a mai rămas doar jumătate!
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? O, Doamne!
Or why is this immortal that thou hast? De nu vrei să mă cruţi, atunci măcar
Oh Pitagoras' metempsychosis' were that true, Sfârşit durerii mele hotărăşte
This soul should fly from me, and I be changed În numele lui Crist, al cărui sânge
Into some brutish beast. A curs şi pentru mine, să trăiesc
All beasts are happy, for when they die, O mie, zeci de mii de ani în iad
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements, Şi-apoi să-mi aflu tihna. Însă, vai,
But mine must live still to be plagued in hell. Cei păcătoşi sunt osândiţi pe veci...
Cursed be the parents that engendered me; De ce nu-s o făptură fără suflet?
No, Faustus, curse thyself. Curse Lucifer Sau pentru ce-i nemuritor acesta?
That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven. Pitagoreica metempsihoză
[The clock strikes twelve] De-ar fi adevărată, duhul meu
It strikes, it strikes! Now body turn to air, Şi-ar căuta sălaş în dobitoace!
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell. Ah! Cât le ferices!Suflarea lor,
O soul be changed into small water drops, Când pier, o-nghit stihiile; al meu
And fall into the ocean ne'er be found. Trăieşte-n veci ca să-l muncească iadul.
[Thunder, and enter the devils.] Părinţii mei să fie blestemaţi!
O mercy, heaven! Look not so fierce on me; Ba nu, tu însuţi, Faust, şi satana
Adders and serpents let me breathe awhile. Ce de cerescul har te-a văduvit!
Ugly hell, gape not; come not Lucifer! [Orologiul bate miezul nopţii.]
I'll burn my books! Oh, Mephistophilis! [Exeunt.] E miezul nopţii! Trup, prefă-te-n aer,
Altminteri mergi cu Lucifer în iad! [Tunete şi fulgere.]
Prefă-te suflete, în stropi mărunţi
Şi-n mări te spulberă: să-ţi piară urma!
[Intră diavolii.]
Nu mă privi atât de aspru, Doamne!
Năpârci şi şerpi, lăsaţi-mă să suflu!
Iad hâd, nu te căsca! Stai, Lucifer!
Sunt gata să-mi ard cărţile! Mefisto!
[Ies diavolii cu Faust.]

Section 3: William Shakespeare or Elizabethan Drama at Its Best
Section 3: William Shakespeare

or Elizabethan Drama at Its Best
3. 1. Life and Work (1564-1616)

There are few ascertainable facts about Shakespeare’s life, which accounts for
the large number of legends and fabrications surrounding the biography of the
English bard and further debates around the question whether Shakespeare
was indeed the author of the great works nowadays ascribed to him or not.
The first documentary reference to William Shakespeare is to be found
in the parish Register for Stratford-upon-Avon recording William’s baptism on
April 26, 1564. The entry is in Latin and reads, “Guiliamus filius Johannes
Shakspere,” that is, “William son of John Shakspere.” William was the third
child of eight born to John and Mary Shakespeare, but the first son, and the
first child to survive past infancy.
Nevertheless, while the record indicates the date of Shakespeare’s
baptism, the actual date of his birth is unknown. Knowledge of the custom of
baptising children soon after birth makes April 23rd a likely date, which is,
therefore, generally accepted.
Although we cannot know for certain, the house John Shakespeare
owned on Henley Street is assumed to have been the family home in
Stratford. The house, which still stands today, has become a popular tourist
attraction, heralded as the place at which Mary Shakespeare gave birth to
William and his siblings, and where Shakespeare spent his young life.
The father, John Shakespeare, was a tanner, glove-maker and dealer
in agricultural products, who also held a number of public offices over a
twenty year period, ranging from Borough Ale-Taster to alderman to bailiff,
the highest public office in Stratford (by that time, a prosperous market centre
for the county of Warwickshire in the rural heartland of England). The mother,
Mary Shakespeare – born Mary Arden – was the daughter of a well-to-do
landowner in a lesser branch of an aristocratic family from the neighbouring
Wilmcote. (The family gave its name to the nearby Forest of Arden, which
turns up in As You Like It.)
Up to the crisis of his father’s fortune (about 1577), the young William
may have attended the Stratford Grammar School established by the
corporation of the town as early as 1553. The main business of a Grammar
School was, as its very name indicates it, teaching grammar, i.e. Latin
grammar. At this dreary task pupils laboured summer and winter from 7 to 11
in the morning and returned at one o’clock to stay until 5 in the afternoon,
constantly supervised by harsh teachers who would not hesitate to discipline
them by mercilessly beating them with a rod. They had to learn by heart
every word of such grammar books as William Lily’s Grammatica Latina. Yet,
it must have been at the grammar school that William Shakespeare learned
to look beyond the mechanics of language to the beauty of literature as well.
He would have studied Ovid (Metamorphoses), who remained a great
favourite all his life, or Vergil (Eclogues), and he would have read Plautus,
the most admired writer of Latin comedy. He would also have been
introduced to rhetoric and some logic through the writings of Cicero (Letters)
and Quintilian, as well as Latin history, philosophy and perhaps some
rudimentary Greek, as Ben Jonson suggests in the poem dedicated to

William Shakespeare’s memory (“small Latin and less Greek” in Ben Jonson,
To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He
Hath Left Us).
Although boys normally attended grammar school until the age of 15 or
16, Shakespeare may have been forced to leave school as early as 1577, at the
age of 13, because of his father’s financial difficulties, either to become an
apprentice in his father’s business or to earn an independent living. There is no
record of Shakespeare attending university. But the two years that are generally
accepted as Shakespeare’s school training may have been profitable for a man
endowed with his genius. He may have continued reading by himself the
translations of the Latin and Greek classics that abounded in England at that
time since he made free use of these books when he came to write. He also
seems to have possessed enough knowledge of foreign languages to read
French and Italian works in the original.
The next official public record on William Shakespeare is a 40 pound
marriage bond of sureties posted by two Warwickshire farmers in November
28, 1582 for the legality of the marriage between William Shakespeare
(“William Shagspere”) and Anne Hathaway (“Anne Hathwey”). He was 18
and she was 26. The next public record indicates that six months later, on
May 26, 1583, Shakespeare’s first daughter Susanna was christened.
Shakespeare and his wife lived together in Stratford long enough after the
birth of Susanna to give occasion for another entry in the parish register
recording the christening of their twin children on February 2, 1585, Hamnet
and Judith, “sonne and daughter to William Shakspeare.” Unfortunately,
Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died at the age of 11 and was buried at
Stratford in 1596.
Because nothing certain is known of Shakespeare in the years
between 1585 and 1592, the period is rife with speculation. Was
Shakespeare a sailor, a soldier, a law clerk or a country school teacher? Did
he go to one of the larger towns nearby – like Warwick – to further one of
these careers? One famous legend has Shakespeare fleeing Stratford for
London in 1587, after being caught poaching deer in the park of the
influential Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlcote; another has him beginning his
theatrical career minding horses before the playhouses. Some time during
this period Shakespeare embarked on his theatrical career. He may have
started by joining one of the five theatrical companies (among them The Earl
of Leicester’s Men, the Earl of Worchester’s Men and the Earl of Warwick’s
Men) which played in Stratford between 1586 and 1587. Eventually he
seems to have been accepted as an actor in the company of the Earl of
Leicester, as his name appears in casts of players for Ben Jonson’s dramas.
Presumably he had already achieved quite a reputation as a playwright
by 1592 when Robert Greene wrote A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million
of Repentance in which he attacked the young actor-playwright in the following
terms: “an upstart crow, beautiful with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart
wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes he is well able to Bombast out a blank
verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his
own conceit the only shake-scene in the country.”
The closing of the theatres during the 1592-93 plague may have
suggested the poet to try his talent on mythological subjects and in 1593
Shakespeare published Venus and Adonis, followed in the next year by The
Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.
Some of the sonnets may have also been composed during the same period.
By 1595, Shakespeare was certainly an important member of the Lord

Chamberlain’s Men, formed after the plague of 1593 from the remnants of
several previous companies. In October 1596, the College of Heralds granted
a coat of arms to the family patriarch, John Shakespeare. The grant was
approved on the basis of the “faithefull & approved service to H7 [Henry VII]”
performed by John’s great-grandfather, and because John himself had
“maryed the daughter & one of the heyrs of Robert Arden of Wellingcote.”
The motto reads: “NON SANS DROIT.” This fact proves Shakespeare’s
efforts to improve his fortune and better his social status.
Another proof of Shakespeare’s prosperity is that, in 1597 (after his
son’s death), when he was 33, he had enough money to invest 60 pounds in
New Place, the second largest house in Stratford, with two barns and two
orchards attached.
From 1598, Shakespeare’s name began to appear upon published
plays: Richard III, Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost. (Titus Andronicus had
also been published but anonymously in 1594.) In 1598, another
contemporary, Francis Meres, published a work which has proven most
valuable in dating Shakespeare’s plays, for he mentions many of them, and
in the most laudatory terms. In Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, Meres began
by praising Shakespeare’s poetry – the two narrative poems, Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets – and then compared
Shakespeare to Plautus in comedy and to Seneca in tragedy.
In 1601, Shakespeare’s name was related to that of the Earl of Essex’
conspirers against Queen Elizabeth I. On February 7, 1601, a day before
their failed rebellion, supporters of the Earl of Essex commissioned
Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to perform Richard II,
a play which had been published in a censored form, with the politically
sensitive deposition scene suppressed. The company was later investigated
to determine its role in the uprising, but was cleared of any complicity.
Ironically, the players performed before the queen on the eve of Essex’s
execution. (According to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s plays were admired by
Elizabeth. Indeed, during the last ten years of her reign, the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men performed at court thirty-two times, compared to thirty-
seven performances by all other companies combined. There is also a
tradition that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written because of the
Queen’s desire to see Falstaff in love.)
In 1603, the royal documents mention Shakespeare as one of the
sharers of the King’s Men (the former Lord Chamberlain’s Men) and 5 years
later, he becomes an owner of the Blackfriars Theatre with a seventh share.
In 1607, Shakespeare’s eldest daughter Susanna married Dr. John
Hall and one year later, in February 1608), her only child Elizabeth was born.
In 1609, Shakespeare’s sonnets were piratically printed, apparently
without their author’s knowledge or consent.
Having invested his money effectively, purchasing several properties
in and around Stratford (including a major investment in farm revenues), but
also in London, Shakespeare could afford to retire to Stratford about 1610-
11, perhaps because of failing health, or simply because he was tired of
London and ready to lead the life of a country gentleman, taking interest in
municipal affairs or receiving visits from his old friends Ben Jonson and his
fellow actors Heminge, Burbage and Condell.
Perhaps “semi-retirement” would be a more accurate term.
Shakespeare continued to write and contributed to two final plays in this

period (Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen). Records also indicate that
he was present at Court on several occasions, as when he and Richard
Burbage designed an impresa (an emblem accompanied by a motto) for the
Earl of Rutland, and he was in London periodically attending to business
matters. In 1611 he was one of a number of citizens who contributed to the
maintenance of highways in the Stratford area; in 1612 he was in London,
giving evidence in a civil suit brought by a London tire-maker against a
former apprentice.
An early performance of Henry VIII, on June 29, 1613, was
unintentionally the most spectacular of Shakespeare’s career; when an
artillery salute was fired in the first act to announce the entrance of King
Henry, a piece of burning material landed on the thatched roof of the Globe,
burning the entire theatre to the ground in less than an hour.
Shakespeare’s last documented appearance in London was
November 17, 1614. On March 25, 1616, he revised and signed his will.
Shakespeare’s burial is recorded in the Stratford Parish Register as occurring
on 25 April, 1616, but he died on April 23 (this is the date given on the
funerary monument erected before 1623). The cause of his death is
unknown. He was buried on April 25, 1616 in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford,
where he had been baptised just over 52 years earlier. (In 1741, a monument
was erected to his memory in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. The
house where he was born was purchased for preservation as a National
Memorial in 1847and the First Shakespeare Memorial Theatre – now the Royal
Shakespeare Theatre – was opened in 1879.)
1623 is also the year when the first complete edition of Shakespeare’s
plays was published. In Elizabethan England there was no copyright and
rivalling theatre companies might have used the text if a reputed playwright
had published his plays in book form. That is why it was only after a play had
run its course on the stage that the acting company, the sole owner of the
drama, would have it published to obtain a bit more money. This is how some
of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in small, cheap quartos, hastily complied for
quick sale during his life (see above 1594 and 1598). At his death, in 1616, 18
quartos of his dramas had been printed, the text having been pirated from
stage copies. But, in 1623, Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminge and
Henry Condell published the first complete edition – also known as the First
Folio – containing 36 plays in all. The so-called Doeshut portrait of the poet
was on the title page and Ben Jonson composed the verse accompanying it.
The text of Shakespeare’s First Folio was in double column format, totalled
908 pages and sold for £1. The versions of the First Folio are the only source
for twenty of Shakespeare’s plays, but one can never be sure how close to
Shakespeare’s own writings they are. We have at last got and intelligible and
reliable text for the works of the dramatist as the result of the painstaking
textual criticism of the scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
We also owe Shakespearean scholarship the subdivision of
Shakespeare’s literary activity into three periods (with an additional
subdivision of the first period into the early and late first period).
• The first period of creation (1589-1600):
o Before about 1594:
Four history plays (Henry VI, Parts One, Two, and Three– 1589-
1591; Richard III – 1592-1593);
Two narrative poems (Venus and Adonis – 1592-1593; The Rape of
Lucrece – 1593-1594);
A comedy in the style of Plautus (The Comedy of Errors - 1589);

A comedy in the courtly style of John Lyly (The Two Gentlemen of
Verona – 1592-1593);
A farcical comedy which today we might call a problem comedy
(The Taming of the Shrew – 1593-1594);
A tragedy of blood in the style of Kyd (Titus Andronicus - 1589);
Some of the sonnets (1592-1598).
o To about 1600:
Two profoundly original comedies (Love's Labours Lost – 1593-
1594, A Midsummer Night’s Dream – 1595-1596) ;
A history, not part of a group of history plays (King John – 1596-
1597);
A tragedy of youth, love and fate (Romeo and Juliet – 1591-1595);
A comedy that seems at times more like the tragedy of its supposed
villain (The Merchant of Venice -1596-1597);
Four histories, written over several years (Richard II -1595-1596,
Henry IV, Parts One and Two – 1596-1597, Henry V – 1597-1599);
A tragedy set in Roman times (Julius Caesar – 1599-1600);
A group of three great romantic comedies (Much Ado About Nothing
– 1597-1599, As You Like It, Twelfth Night – 1599-1600);
A comedy of the fat knight, Falstaff, originally created in the history
plays (The Merry Wives of Windsor – 1597-1599).
• The second period of creation (1600-1608):
One of Shakespeare’s finest tragedies (Hamlet - 1601-1602);
Two dark comedies (All's Well That Ends Well -1602-1603, Measure
for Measure – 1603-1604);
A disturbing play that defies category (Troilus and Cressida – 1601-1602);
A tragedy of love (Othello – 1602-1603);
A tragedy of age, of parents and children (King Lear - 1605);
A tragedy of power, of husband and wife (Macbeth – 1605-1606);
An odd and possibly unfinished tragedy (Timon of Athens - 1605-1609);
A tragedy of Rome, Egypt, power and love (Antony and Cleopatra –
1607-1608);
A tragedy of Rome and power, of mother and child (Coriolanus – 1607-
1608);
• The third period of creation (to about 1614):
A patchwork tale of adventure, shipwreck, loss and rediscovery
(Pericles, Prince of Tyre - 1606-1608);
A romance of Britain and Rome (Cymbeline – 1609-1610);
A tale of tragic jealousy and pastoral rebirth (The Winter's Tale –
1610-1611);
A tale of a brave new world (The Tempest - 1611);
Two final plays written in collaboration, in each case probably with
a younger playwright, John Fletcher: a history of recent time in
England (Henry VIII – 1612-1613) and a romance of chivalry (The
Two Noble Kinsmen – 1613-1614).
3. 2. The Shakespearean Controversy

Shakespeare’s own age fully accepted him as the great dramatist and among
the evidence of his contemporaries Ben Jonson’s testimony ranks as the
most unchallengeable. No report of rumour against Shakespeare’s
authorship was recorded until 1769 when Herbert Lawrence challenged for
the first time the ascription of the plays to the minor actor William
Shakespeare, the mild Stratford bourgeois.
The “Authorship Questions” was again brought into discussion in
1857, when Delia Bacon, an American woman, published a book arguing that
Sir Francis Bacon, the great Elizabethan philosopher, was the author. Mark
Twain was also a proponent of Bacon, and his book Is Shakespeare Dead?
may be one of the most entertaining, if not the most convincing, of
contributions on the subject. Like other Baconians, Twain felt that literature of
such great learning and wisdom could not possibly have been written by a
two-bit actor with a provincial grammar school education at best, about
whose life almost nothing has come down to us. The plays are full of
philosophy and reveal considerable knowledge of the law; Bacon was not
only a philosopher but the greatest legal mind of the age. Twain concluded
that he could not say for certain who wrote the plays, but said that he was
“quite composedly and contentedly sure that Shakespeare didn't,” and
strongly suspected that Bacon did.
Another theory advanced by a modern group of “unorthodox” or “anti-
Stratfordian” scholars has ascribed the plays undoubtedly to Edward de
Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. The Oxfordians, as they are referred to, claim
that the plays of Shakespeare reveal an aristocratic sensibility, an intimate
familiarity with the life and manners of the court, and a level of education and
worldly experience that would seem beyond a barely educated commoner.
Oxford was a poet and playwright himself, but as an aristocrat he could not
sully his name by writing for the public stage, and so he wrote under a
pseudonym, the theory goes, allowing the actor from Stratford to play the part
of author. The fact that Oxford died in 1604, before such masterpieces as
Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest are generally accepted to
have been written, has never been conclusively explained by Oxfordians. But
a recent doctoral dissertation, successfully defended at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, examining uncanny correspondences between
de Vere’s copy of the Geneva Bible and Biblical references in Shakespeare’s
plays, has added new fuel to the Oxfordian fire.
Last but not least, Christopher Marlowe’s name has been put forward
as that of the “true author” of Shakespeare’s works. In this respect, Calvin
Hoffman’s book, The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare," published
in the United States in 1955, seems to have had a tremendous impact.
Hoffman’s theory, which is credited with launching the modern case for
Marlowe, rests on his belief that Marlowe – known by historians to have been
a spy in Elizabeth I’s secret service – did not die in 1593 in Deptford, on the
banks of the Thames, but faked his own death and fled England to escape the
notorious Star Chamber, Protestant England’s equivalent of the Inquisition.
(Marlowe was said to hold “atheistic” views, a serious charge in those days.)
Hoffman believed Marlowe fled to Italy, where his artistic development
accelerated amidst the late Italian Renaissance. Indeed, it was in Italy, some
Marlovians say, that Marlowe wrote his masterpieces, which he then sent back
to his patron in England, Sir Thomas Walsingham, cousin of Sir Francis
Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spy master. After having the works recopied in
another hand, Walsingham then passed the plays on to a convenient front
man – the actor William Shakespeare – who brought them to the stage.
As Hoffman relates at the outset of his book, he first began to suspect
that Marlowe was the author when he noticed striking similarities between
Marlowe’s works and those attributed to Shakespeare. After comparing

Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s works, Hoffman claimed to have uncovered
hundreds of “parallelisms”: lines and passages from Marlowe’s plays and
poems that are echoed, if not quoted verbatim, in Shakespeare’s.
Shakespeare’s supporters, however, dismiss such similarities as proof
only that the Bard borrowed rather liberally (not to say stolen) from his
contemporaries. (It was a common practice by that time.) Furthermore,
Stratfordians point out differences in the two playwrights’ styles:
Shakespeare appears much slower in terms of innovation, but excels in
some aspects of playwriting (i.e. feminine characters and comedy) in which
Marlowe was deficient. (Of course, Marlovians attribute these differences to
the natural maturation that would have occurred in Marlowe’s writing had he
fled England and continued his career in Italy.)
The debate on the authorship matter continues nowadays and seems
still far from reaching a unanimously acknowledged issue.
3. 3. Chronicle Plays
The chronicle play/ history play is the only form of drama invented by the
Elizabethans. After having tried his hand at an imitation of Roman comedy
(The Comedy of Errors) and of a Roman tragedy (Titus Andronicus), William
Shakespeare turned to the composition of this type of drama that had no
classical prototype, but which held a particular fascination for the English
public in the 1590s and helped create a sense of a collective national
memory. Patriotic sentiment probably ran particularly high in the years
following 1588, when the English defeated the invading Spanish Armada.
The history play drew upon such sentiments. In this context, about 1589, the
26-year old William Shakespeare began to plan and compose his tetralogy
dealing with the Wars of the Roses: the three parts of Henry VI (c. 1589-
1591) and Richard III (c. 1592-1593). Shakespeare set to write historical
plays still leaning heavily on Marlowe and probably collaborating with other
dramatists as well.
“The three Henry VI plays, with which he opened his career, are of
interest to those concerned with Shakespeare’s attitude to English history as
well as to those numerous scholars who have been attracted by the
bibliographical and other problems which they raise. Uneven and sometimes
crude both in dramatic movement and verse technique, they have their
‘Shakespearean’ moments and show Shakespeare seeking a way from the
episodic chronicle play to a more dramatic and fully integrated handling of
historical material.” (Daiches, 1991: 260) They figure among Shakespeare’s
first forays into the genre of history play, and they were followed by plays
tracing the years after Henry VI’s death and the ensuing civil wars over
succession. Only later in his career did Shakespeare look back to the events
prior to Henry VI’s kingship, including that of his father Henry V. Shakespeare
probably made use of contemporary chronicles of the 15th century and the
struggles during these years between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians in
the War of the Roses. Raphael Holingshed’s Chronicles of England,
Scotland, and Ireland seem a particularly likely source for many of his history
plays. (Edward Hall’s chronicles, in particular his Union of the Two Noble and
Illustre [Illustrious] Families of Lancaster and York (1548), might also have
provided Shakespeare with useful information especially for the last play of

the trilogy. However, Shakespeare had to conflate or alter historical events

so they would fit within a dramatic context.)
Focused mainly on the events that followed Henry V’s death up to the
disastrous end of the Hundred Years’ War (the loss of Britain’s territories in
France) and subtly anticipating the Wars of the Roses, 1 Henry VI is entirely
driven by conflict. On one hand, there is the conflict between Henry’s forces,
led into battle by Talbot, and the forces of the Dauphin Charles, dominated
by the charismatic Joan of Arc. Then, the argument between York and
Somerset, echoing the struggle between Winchester and the Protector of the
kingdom, Gloucester, in Henry’s court, causes the Englishmen to give
inadequate support to Talbot in the battlefield, thus, exacerbating the primary
conflict. The message within these court struggles is that petty rivalries and
internal divisions among the nobility can be as dangerous to England as
French soldiers. Henry seems to recognize this truth, when he speaks about
dissention as the “worm” gnawing on his kingdom, yet he is unable to end the
crisis. That announces Henry, from the very beginning of the trilogy, as a
weak king figure.
The play becomes, to some extent, the story of a warrior culture that is
dying. Talbot represents the end of a tradition of valiant knights whose sole
desire is to fight for the glory of their homeland. He is a man from a lost world
where valour and honour were communally shared masculine ideals passed
from father to son. By the end of the play, both Talbot and his son lay dead,
and the future of English chivalry has died with them.
Equally threatened by the power of women as public figures (Joan of
Arc, the Countess of Auverge, Margaret), the world of men seems to
crumble. Strong kings like Henry V do not necessarily create strong
successors in their sons. The play creates heroes of a masculine world, but it
also acknowledges the potential weaknesses of men, in general, and of
kings, in particular.
2 Henry VI concerns the continued scheming in the court, first
between Gloucester and Beaufort, then between York’s faction and the other
lords. The infighting between the lords and the popular uprising by Jack Cade
show what happens to the nation when the king in power is too weak to rule
effectively. The play charts the rise and fall of many lords and lesser figures
within the kingdom.
3 Henry VI is a continuation of the depiction of the War of the Roses
between the Lancastrian descendants of Edward III, represented by the red
rose, and his Yorkist descendants, who wore the white rose. This third
installment ambitiously depicts many significant battles fought during that civil
war, stretching between the Battle of Wakefield in 1460, when the Duke of
York was killed, to the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, when Edward, York’s
eldest son, defeated the Lancastrians. The degradation of social ties,
particularly those of family, becomes even more prominent than in the
previous two plays and, under the circumstances, nothing remains but the
assertion of individual will, which is best illustrated in the case of one of the
Duke of York’s sons, Richard. Near the end of the play, Richard kills Henry
and declares that he has no father or brothers, thus, villainously announcing
his separation from kinship networks that define the rest of the play.
As for Henry, he has appeared on numerous occasions throughout the
play, as well as in the previous plays of the trilogy, as a weak king. As the
representative of legitimacy in a time of social disorder, he is fated to be
thwarted and disgraced at every turn of the plot. Yet Shakespeare has not
designed him only to be the object of scorn. Henry VI becomes more and more
clearly a representative of peace and its blessings. He sits upon a hill withdrawn
from the battle from which Margaret and Clifford have “chid” him and gives voice
to his longing to be a shepherd. He tells how much he wants quiet for
contemplation in lines of elegiac quality that wins sympathy for the humiliated
king. And when his meditation is interrupted by the dreadful scene of father
killing son and son killing father, the play definitely becomes an anti-war play.
The message of the play is clearly expressed: a weak monarch like
Henry VI means chaos in the kingdom torn apart by selfish feuding lords. The
struggle between opposing wings of the same family infects the familial tone
of an entire nation.
Case Study: Richard III (c. 1592-1593)
The source is again Holinshed’s Chronicles. The play centres on the figure of
Richard of Gloucester, afterwards Richard III, physically deformed, ambitious,
sanguinary, bold and subtle, treacherous yet brave, a murderer and usurper of
the crown. Bloody though he was, nevertheless, the historical King Richard III was
not necessarily more murderous than the kings who preceded or succeeded him.
Nor is it likely that he was deformed, as Shakespeare portrays him. Winners, not
losers, write history. When Shakespeare wrote this play, Queen Elizabeth I ruled
England; Elizabeth was a descendant of King Henry VII, the ruler who overthrew
Richard. Thus, the official party line of the Elizabethan era was that Richard was a
monster who was not a legitimate ruler of England. It would have been thoroughly
dangerous for Shakespeare to suggest otherwise.
After a long civil war between the royal family of York and the royal family
of Lancaster, England enjoys a period of peace under King Edward IV and the
victorious Yorks. But Edward’s younger brother, Richard, resents Edward’s
power and the happiness of those around him. Malicious, power-hungry, and
bitter about his physical deformity, Richard begins to aspire secretly to the
throne—and decides to kill anyone he has to in order to become king.
Using his intelligence and his skills of deception and political
manipulation, Richard begins his campaign for the throne. He manipulates a
noblewoman, Lady Anne, into marrying him—even though she knows that he
murdered her first husband. He has his own older brother, Clarence,
executed, and shifts the burden of guilt onto his sick older brother King
Edward in order to accelerate Edward’s illness and death. After King Edward
dies, Richard becomes lord protector of England—the figure in charge until
the elder of Edward’s two sons grows up.
Next Richard kills the court noblemen who are loyal to the princes,
most notably Lord Hastings, the lord chamberlain of England. He then has
the boys’ relatives on their mother’s side—the powerful kinsmen of Edward’s
wife, Queen Elizabeth—arrested and executed. With Elizabeth and the
princes now unprotected, Richard has his political allies, particularly his right-
hand man, Lord Buckingham, campaign to have Richard crowned king.
Richard then imprisons the young princes in the Tower and, in his bloodiest
move yet, sends hired murderers to kill both children.
By this time, Richard’s reign of terror has caused the common people
of England to fear and loathe him, and he has alienated nearly all the
noblemen of the court—even the power-hungry Buckingham. When rumours
begin to circulate about a challenger to the throne who is gathering forces in
France, noblemen defect in droves to join his forces. The challenger is the
earl of Richmond, a descendant of a secondary arm of the Lancaster family,

and England is ready to welcome him.
Richard, in the meantime, tries to consolidate his power. He has his
wife, Queen Anne, murdered, so that he can marry young Elizabeth, the
daughter of the former Queen Elizabeth and the dead King Edward. Though
young Elizabeth is his niece, the alliance would secure his claim to the
throne. Nevertheless, Richard has begun to lose control of events, and
Queen Elizabeth manages to forestall him. Meanwhile, she secretly promises
to marry young Elizabeth to Richmond.
Richmond finally invades England. The night before the battle that will
decide everything, Richard has a terrible dream in which the ghosts of all the
people he has murdered appear and curse him, telling him that he will die the
next day. In the battle on the following morning, Richard is killed, and
Richmond is crowned King Henry VII. Promising a new era of peace for
England, the new king is betrothed to young Elizabeth in order to unite the
warring houses of Lancaster and York.
Although it is often viewed as a sequel to three of Shakespeare’s
earlier history plays—1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, and 3 Henry VI—Richard III is
usually read and performed on its own. The play chronicles the bloody deeds
and atrocities perpetrated by its central figure—the murderous and tyrannical
King Richard III. Richard invites an eerie fascination, and generations of
readers have found themselves seduced by his brilliance with words and his
persuasive emotional manipulations even as they are repelled by his evil.
Richard is in every way the dominant character of the play that bears
his name, to the extent that he is both the protagonist of the story and its major
villain. Richard III is an intense exploration of the psychology of evil, and that
exploration is centred on Richard’s mind. Critics sometimes compare Richard
to the medieval character, Vice, who was a flat and one-sided embodiment of
evil. Like the “Vice” character of medieval morality pageants, who simply
represented the evil in man, Richard does not justify his villainy—he is simply
bad. Indeed, Richard, with self-conscious theatricality, compares himself to this
standard character when he says, “Thus like the formal Vice, Iniquity, / I
moralize two meanings in one word” (III.i.82–83). We should note that the
mere fact that he reflects upon his similarity to the Vice figure suggests that
there is more to him than this mere resemblance. Watching Richard’s
character, Shakespeare’s audiences also would have thought of the
“Machiavel,” the archetype of the scandalously amoral, power-hungry ruler that
had been made famous by the Renaissance Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli
in The Prince (first published in 1532). Furthermore, especially in the later
scenes of the play, Richard proves to be highly self-reflective and
complicated—making his heinous acts all the more chilling. That justifies
describing Richard as a Machiavellian villain.
Perhaps more than in any other play by Shakespeare, the audience of
Richard III experiences a complex, ambiguous, and highly changeable
relationship with the main character. Richard is clearly a villain—he declares
outright in his very first speech that he intends to stop at nothing to achieve
his nefarious designs. But despite his open allegiance to evil, he is such a
charismatic and fascinating figure that, for much of the play, we are likely to
sympathize with him, or at least to be impressed with him. In this way, our
relationship with Richard mimics the other characters’ relationships with him,
conveying a powerful sense of the force of his personality. Even characters
such as Lady Anne, who have an explicit knowledge of his wickedness, allow
themselves to be seduced by his brilliant wordplay, his skilful argumentation,

and his relentless pursuit of his selfish desires.
Richard’s long, fascinating monologues, in which he outlines his plans
and gleefully confesses all his evil thoughts, are central to the audience’s
experience of Richard. Shakespeare uses these monologues brilliantly to
control the audience’s impression of Richard, enabling this manipulative
protagonist to work his charms on the audience. In Act I, scene i, for
example, Richard dolefully claims that his malice toward others stems from
the fact that he is unloved, and that he is unloved because of his physical
deformity. This claim, which casts the other characters of the play as villains
for punishing Richard for his appearance, makes it easy to sympathize with
Richard during the first scenes of the play.
It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Richard simply uses his
deformity as a tool to gain the sympathy of others—including us. Richard’s evil
is a much more innate part of his character than simple bitterness about his
ugly body. But he uses this speech to win our trust, and he repeats this ploy
throughout his struggle to be crowned king. After he is crowned king and
Richmond begins his uprising, Richard’s monologues end. Once Richard stops
exerting his charisma on the audience, his real nature becomes much more
apparent, and by the end of the play he can be seen for the monster that he is.
In Richard III, Richard succeeds in bringing about the death or downfall of
both his brothers, and he manages to take the throne, but somehow he loses
his charismatic power once he has achieved the crown. Challenged by Henry,
Earl of Richmond, Richard loses the throne and his life, while Richmond ends
the War of the Roses by uniting the red and white rose through marriage and
originating the Tudor line. Elizabeth I, the reigning sovereign when this play was
written, was an heir of Henry VII; Shakespeare’s history plays show the faults of
the Lancastrians and Yorkists, thus, indirectly championing the Tudor
succession. The final political lesson is thus that civil disorder shakes a nation
into chaos and inevitably raises a tyrant to supreme power. His tyranny,
corruption and crime may be put an end to only by the united forces of those
who stand for righteousness in the word (i.e. the Tudors).
Shakespeare returned to the profitable medium of history plays once he had

been successful with his tetralogy. He apparently thought it unwise to take up
the story of English monarchs with Henry VII’s seizure of the throne since
such continuation would have carried him dangerously close to Queen
Elizabeth’s immediate ancestors. He turned to the reign of John and Richard
II, far into England’s medieval past.
The Life and Death of King John (c. 1595-1597) was adapted by
Shakespeare from an earlier work. The reason for Shakespeare’s choice of
John’s reign was the opportunity to dramatize its events in a way that would
make them serve as a favourable commentary on the political and religious
struggles in which Elizabeth was involved. The play with some departure
from historical accuracy deals with various events in King John’s reign.
In the early chronicle plays Shakespeare detailed the disaster brought
on the kingdom by a weak monarchy. Now that he belonged to the
prosperous middle classes, he shared his class’s ideal of order, authority and
security. Shakespeare the humanist still condemns absolute power and
oppression but the bourgeois in him demands a firm enlightened rule to
check up any manifestation of social chaos.

When the London theatres reopened in the spring of 1594 after the
great London plague of 1592 Shakespeare embarked upon the ambitious
project of constructing a sequence of 4 connected history plays: Richard II
(1595-1596), 1Henry IV (1596), 2 Henry IV (1597) and Henry V (1597-1599).
Inspired by Holinshed’s Chronicle and Daniel’s History of the Civil
Wars, Richard II was probably meant as a reply to Marlowe’s Edward II.
Richard II marks a new development in the poet’s composition of his
“histories.” The catastrophe is caused neither by a villain, not by fate, nor by
the pressure of events but by a serious flaw in the protagonist’s nature.
“Richard II (1595-96) is a more complex and interesting play,
deliberately ritualistic-even sacramental, in tone to suggest the Elizabethan
view of the Middle Ages. The deposition of the last of England's medieval
kings – for Shakespeare clearly thought of Henry IV as "modern," belonging
to Shakespeare's own world, and his succession the result of personal
ambition rather than divine right-had long acquired an aura of mystery and
pathos in the minds of those who looked back to it, and Shakespeare de-
liberately set out to render that aura dramatically, providing both adequate
psychological explanation and impressive poetic expression. Richard himself,
petulant, childish, emotionally self-indulgent, incapable of asserting his
authority over factious nobles but brooding and poetizing over his royal status
once he is on the point of losing it, is the most complex character that
Shakespeare had so far created, and the way he manipulates the audience's
sympathy (first against, then in favor of Richard) shows remarkable dramatic
cunning. Richard was the Lord's anointed, the last English king to rule in
virtue of his direct and undisputed descent from William the Conqueror. His
deposition was in a sense sacrilege, and after his death his supporters built
up a picture of him as saint and martyr. The other side, the Lancastrians, who
supported the claims of Henry IV and his successors, saw Richard as a weak
and foolish king who voluntarily abdicated because he recognized his own
unfitness to carry out his royal duties. Shakespeare combines both pictures
with complete dramatic consistency', And' in the ritual note which pervades
the play he pictures a phase of English civilization very different from the
breezy background of power politics we see in the Henry IV plays. The
deposition scene is a careful inversion of the coronation ritual, and
Bolingbroke's impatience with Richard's histrionics is also the modern man's
impatience with the stylized forms of medieval life. The self-indulgent lyricism
of many of Richard's own speeches reflects the predominantly lyrical interest
that seems to have been a feature of Shakespeare's dramatic art in this
phase of his development (we see it also in Romeo and Juliet, written at
about the same time), but it also helps to build Richard's character and to
differentiate it from that of his more realistic and practical supplanter.”
(Daiches, 1991: 260-1)
Henry IV, Part 1 (1596–1597), more commonly referred to as 1 Henry
IV, forms the second part of a tetralogy that deals with the historical rise of
the English royal House of Lancaster.
Set in the years 1402–1403, the action of 1 Henry IV takes place
nearly two centuries before Shakespeare’s own time. In general, it follows
real events and uses historical figures, although Shakespeare significantly
alters or invents history where it suits him. For instance, the historical
Hotspur was not the same age as Prince Harry, and Shakespeare’s Mortimer
is a conflation of two separate individuals. The play refers back to the history
covered in Richard II (which can be considered its prequel), and a familiarity
with the events of Richard II is helpful for understanding the motivations of

various characters in 1 Henry IV.
Among Shakespeare’s most famous creations is Falstaff, Prince
Harry’s fat, aged, and criminally degenerate mentor and friend. Falstaff’s
irreverent wit is legendary. He has many historical precedents: he owes
much to archetypes like the figure of Vice from medieval morality plays and
Gluttony from medieval pageants about the seven deadly sins. His character
also draws on the miles gloriosus figure, an arrogant soldier from classical
Greek and Roman comedy, and the Lord of Misrule, the title given to an
individual appointed to reign over folk festivities in medieval England.
Ultimately, however, Falstaff is a Shakespearean creation, second among
Shakespearean characters only to Hamlet as a subject of critical interest.
As a matter of fact, both “Henry IV Part I and Part II (1597-98) show
Shakespeare combining the political with the comic in a new and striking
manner. The central theme is the education of Prince Hal, Henry IV's son and
later Henry V, and this is worked out with many echoes of the older moralities.
But the figure who represents Riot is so much more than a character in a
morality play that the whole tone and character of the two plays are altered by
his presence. Falstaff is no conventional Vice, but a comic figure of immense
proportions who embodies in his speech and action an amoral gusto in living
at the same time as he stands for a way of life which the prince must repudiate
before he can be king. Shakespeare uses the Percy rebellion in Part I in order
to put Falstaff in some degree in his proper moral place: the colossus of the
Boar's Head tavern, so richly amusing in his comic vitality in his habitual
environment, becomes less satisfactory as a human being when he is found
using his authority as an officer to line his own pockets and impair the strength
of the king's forces or, on the battlefield against determined rebels, faking a
heroic action for himself. The way for the final and inevitable rejection of
Falstaff by his former boon companion now become king is prepared
throughout the latter section of Part I and the earlier section of Part II. Much ink
has been spilt on the rejection of Falstaff: the simple fact is that he is (and is
meant to be) engaging but not admirable, that he belongs to the amoral world
of the Boar's Head, not to the moral world of the dedicated Christian ruler. He
enters the latter world only to be ejected from it, and though we are properly
sorry for him we must realize that the amoral becomes the immoral in this new
context, and must be removed from it.
This is to consider the two Henry IV plays as a single dramatic unit,
and there are convincing arguments for and against this view. It is perhaps
simplest to take the common-sense position that Shakespeare wrote the first
part as a play complete in itself, but when he continued it in the second he
adjusted his continuation to a comprehensive and consistent view of the
meaning of the whole action of both parts. In Part I the three levels of the
action – the high political, surrounding Henry IV; the low comic, surrounding
Falstaff; and the plausible, even attractive, but politically immoral world of
Hotspur and his fellow rebels – each has its appropriate language and its
place in the~ total politjco-moral pattern. Hotspur's heroic egotism and
Falstaff’s unheroic egotism are both contrasted with the attitude of heroic
unselfishness which is the implied ideal attitude for the ruler. In Part II, the
country justices, Shallow and Silence, represent yet another level, and in a
sense a deeper one: they represent the England which remains unchanged
throughout all the political struggles of ambitious men to achieve control of
the state, the world of inefficient innocence, unconsciously comic (unlike

Falstaff, who is consciously so), foolish and pretentious, yet impressively and
averagely human. The juxtaposition of different moral and social levels in
both parts helps to give the play its richness and brilliance. Statesmen,
rebels, roisterers; the King and his sons and advisers; Falstaff with Peto and
Bardolph and Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet; Percy and his friends;
Shallow and Silence – each group has its place in the unfolding action (or
series of actions), each reveals something about England, about the relation
between moral character and human behavior, about the nature of man. The
Henry IV plays can be seen as part of the general pattern of Shakespeare's
picture of English history from Richard II to the Tudor; but they are, much
more significantly, entertaining, stimulating, and esthetically satisfying plays
whose subject, like the subject of all great drama, is human nature. And
Falstaff remains, greater even than the plays which contain him, the richest
comic creation in English literature.
Henry V (1598-99) concludes the historical series. It is narrower in
scope and interest than the Henry IV plays, concentrating, according to
tradition, on Henry as ideal warrior and man of action with a conventional piety
and a gift for military rhetoric that impressed Shakespeare's contemporaries
more than they impress us. The witty and aloof prince of the Henry IV plays
has become a copybook model for a conquering prince, a much narrower
concept than that of the Renaissance gentleman. Henry V has none of the
tortured idealism of Brutus or the intellectual and moral complexity of Hamlet;
his kind of success comes to simpler and in some respects less attractive
characters. A brisk, well-constructed, happily varied play, Henry V is good
theater and contains some admirable rhetorical verse. But it is the narrowest
and occasionally the stuffiest of all of Shakespeare's maturer plays, and one
for which the modern reader or audience has to make a special effort to align
his sensibility with that of the Elizabethans.” (Daiches, 1991: 261-3)
3. 4. Comedies
Ever since his first period of creation, Shakespeare tried his hand at writing
comedies. They grew in complexity and covered a wide range of themes. Here
is a list of Shakespeare’s comedies of the (early and late) first period of creation:
- The Comedy of Errors (1589) – written in imitation of Plautus as a comedy of
mistaken identities;
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592-1593) – a romantic comedy of gentle
manners and cultivated emotion that draws on some of Lyly’s innovations (e.g.
the girl in man’s disguise in pursuit of her lover). A play about love and male
friendship, it also displays Shakespeare’s first clown, Launce.
- The Taming of the Shrew (1593-1594) – a farcical play based on the play-
within-the-play device;
- Love's Labours Lost (1593-1594) – a court play occasionally written in the
euphuistic style, that rejects the idea of cloistered study of philosophy and
idle contemplation and affirms direct experience of life in the company of
women. Its most prominent couple Berowne and Rosaline anticipate by their
witty exchanges further developments in Shakespeare’s comedies.
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-1596) – one of his first great romantic
comedies of amazing originality. Multi-layered in structure, it brings together
the world of the fairies and that of the human beings, with its upper (the royal
pair – Theseus and Hipolyta; the aristocratic lovers) and lower (the
Mechanicals) classes. The structural complexity finds its correspondence in
the discursive variety: blank verse (the royal couple), rhymed couplets (the
lovers), trochaic tetrameter (the fairies, except Oberon and Titania), prose
(the Mechanicals, especially Bottom).
- Much Ado about Nothing (1597-1599) – another great romantic comedy,
foregrounding the great witty couple Beatrice –Benedick (a development of
the Rosaline-Berowne couple). “Beatrice is one of Shakespeare’s great
heroines: spirited, brilliant, proud, independent, yet completely feminine.
Benedick is superbly witty and masculine.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 130)
- The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597-1599) – allegedly written to satisfy
Queen Elizabeth’s desire to see Sir John Falstaff in love. Written mainly in
prose, it is highly realistic owing to the faithful manner of representation of life
in the small English towns in the Elizabethan England.
- As You Like It (1599-1600) – another great romantic comedy, inspired by
Thomas Lodge’s novel Rosalynde. Exploring gender and power relations
against the background of the Arden forest heterotopian world, it reveals one of
Shakespeare’s best achieved heroines, Rosalynd (disguised throughout most of
the play as a boy under the name of Ganimede), next to his two original
creations, the clown Touchstone and the melancholy, misanthropic Jaques.
- Twelfth Night (1599-1600) – the last of Shakespeare’s great romantic
comedies, a play about the triumph of love that draws extensively on the
motifs of mistaken identities and of the girl disguised as a boy.
During the same first period of creation, Shakespeare also wrote a more
problematic comedy (more of a tragic-comedy, i.e. The Merchant of Venice
(1596-1597). Though entitled “a comedy” of romantic love and true friendship,
this play of racial conflict, deceit, revenge and ambiguous gender relations
raises many questions and does not invite the spectator to laugh light-heartedly
(as in the case of the previously mentioned plays) but to bitterly meditate on the
twists of fortune, justice and love.
Similarly, in the early years of the second period of creation,
Shakespeare’s comedies take a gloomier turn, hence they are referred to as
“problem plays.” Troilus and Cressida (1601-1602), All's Well That Ends Well
(1602-1603) and Measure for Measure (1603-1604) do contain elements of
comedy but they “present a problem for the reader or the spectator who is left
with a sense that the author is viewing his characters from a distance and
with a pessimistically ironic eye. In all these plays the actions are motivated
by love for a person who proves to be patently unworthy of such devotion.”
(Gavriliu, 2000: 139)
Case Study: The Taming of the Shrew (1593-1594)
For the first audience to witness a performance of the play, The Taming of the
Shrew may have appeared as the most elaborate and skilfully designed
comedy that had yet been staged. Unlike the previous Comedy of Errors, this
play, drawing upon a variety of sources, combines in a far more complex
manner three distinct lines of plot:
- the Sly framework,
- the Katherina - Petruchio taming plot and
- the Bianca – Lucentio wooing plot.
According to many Shakespearean scholars, the first of them is an adaptation
of a folk tale - The Waking Man’s Dream, as it is called in one version –
circulated in a variety of forms throughout Europe and to be found even in The
Arabian Nights: a man of lower class, a poor drunkard, is found by an

aristocrat, carried to his palace and treated like a lord, so as to be persuaded

that he is really a great man who has been suffering from temporary insanity or
who has been dreaming. By Shakespeare’s time, the story seems to have
been very popular in ballads and folk poetry and hence, easily recognisable by
the audience. Of course, Shakespeare shapes it to his own purposes with
extraordinary artistry, embedding in it many details about life in the part of
England the he knew best, the rural Warwickshire of his youth. Thus, the play
opens with an Induction introducing, against a realistic setting, Christopher Sly,
a drunken tinker, born in a Warwickshire village, who is perfectly content with
his lot in life and does not want to be transformed into a lord. “Solid, earthy,
and addicted to ale, Sly is a thoroughly convincing character, and he makes
the perfect link between the world of the audience, to whom he would be a
familiar figure, and the world of the play” (Hibbard, 1968:12). He has a trick
played upon him. The Lord, who appears as an absolute monarch of his small
domain, uses Sly for his own and the audience’s amusement and commands
all his servants to take part in his game. Sly will be put in a totally alien
environment in order to laugh at his awkwardness.
But the function of the Induction is not only that of offering the play a
framework, but also of providing some interesting parallels to the Katherina –
Petruchio plot. As G.R. Hibbard put it, “the brief yet vigorous altercation
between Sly and the Hostess with which the Induction begins is a little curtain-
raiser for the struggle between Petruchio and Katherina that is to follow, while
the Lord’s instructions to his page Bartholomew as to the behaviour he is to
assume when he appears disguised as Sly’s wife adumbrate the main theme
of the play proper” (1968:13). Moreover, just like Katherina, Sly is acted upon
and imposed a new identity, transforming at least in part into what other people
would like him to be (his transformation is more then obvious when he starts
speaking in verse, leaving behind his rough prose, or he tries to behave like
the lord he thinks he is). This is the only play in which Shakespeare makes use
of this unique theatrical device –inspired by medieval narrative poetry, where it
introduced a story in the form of a dream – which was quite in fashion in
playwriting by that time (see also Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy or
George Peele’s The Old Wives’ Tale).
After having served its purpose to connect the reality of everyday life
with the imaginary world of the play, the Induction will be quietly dropped. In
another variant, known as The Taming of a Shrew, before the last scene of the
play proper begins, the Lord gives order that Sly should be dressed in his own
clothes and carried back to the side of the alehouse where he had been found;
when the play is over, Sly wakes up there, convinced that the whole
experience has been a dream and goes home to apply the newly acquired
knowledge to tame his own shrewish wife. Some scholars have believed that
neatly rounded-off play to be an earlier draft which was pirated (there is no
relevant evidence that the author of that version was Shakespeare himself;
see, for example, Anna Jameson’s study, Shakespeare’s Heroines), while the
more current view is that this text was put together from memory by an actor/
several actors who had once taken part in performances of The Taming of the
Shrew. However, irrespective of the origins of that version, most
Shakespeareans have argued that the play is better without it. “Sly’s main
function is to lead the spectator into the imaginary world of the play; and, once
he has done that, he is no longer required.” (Hibbard, 1968:44)
The play-within-a-play that the actors put on for Sly is the story of two
courtships. Lucentio, a young man from Pisa, arrives in Padua accompanied
by his servant Tranio to study at the university. The two come across the
wealthy Baptista Minola arguing with the young Hortensio and the elderly
Gremio, the suitors of his younger daughter Bianca. The old man, will not let
anyone woo his younger daughter until the elder and always bad-tempered
Katherina is married. Lucentio falls himself in love with Bianca and he and
Tranio decide to disguise so as to gain access to the forbidden Bianca.
Lucentio becomes Cambio the tutor, while Tranio will pretend to be Lucentio.
Petruchio arrives in Padua and, as he is in search for a wife, he is
interested in his friend’s Hortesio’s proposal of marrying Katherina, in spite of
his having found out of her temper. So he offers himself as a suitor to
Katherina and he introduces Hortensio, now dressed as the tutor Litio to teach
the girls music. Gremio, in his turn, will present Lucentio, dressed as Cambio,
to teach them literature. Petruchio and Baptista agree upon the former’s
marrying Katherina in exchange for a large dowry to be paid after the wedding.
Still Baptista imposes a condition: that his daughter should agree to the
marriage as well. The sparks of battle fly when the Katherina and Petruchio
first meet, but that is not reason enough for Petruchio to give the wedding up,
on the contrary, he is even delighted.
With Katherina on the verge of getting married, the competition for
Bianca’s hand becomes even fiercer. Baptista auctions his daughter off to
Tranio/ Lucentio, who offered a higher price than the old Gremio. But
Lucentio’s father, Vincentio, should also give his consent to the marriage and
Baptista insists that Vincentio should agree to the bargain in person.
On the wedding day, Petruchio’s behaviour is outrageous. He arrives
late, dressed in outlandish rags and riding a worn-out horse and humiliates
Katherina behaving worse than she does and insisting on leaving at once for
his own house without even waiting to eat the wedding dinner. That is only the
beginning of a difficult taming process at the end of which, after having been
denied decent food, sheets and pillows or new clothes, Katherina will
completely change her attitude towards her husband.
Meanwhile, Tranio, still disguised as Lucentio, has done an excellent
job for his master. He convinces Hortensio that neither of them should marry
Bianca since she prefers her tutor Cambio (the real Lucentio). Consequently,
Hortensio will marry a widow who has fallen in love with him. Moreover, he
manages to trick the Pedant, a newly arrived scholar (or merchant, in other
versions), into accepting to impersonate Vincentio. Under the circumstances,
Baptista will obviously agree to the marriage. Still, for fear that the plot should
be revealed, Cambio/ Lucentio arranges to be secretly married to Bianca.
Naturally, Petruchio and Katherina will be invited to Bianca’s wedding
and on the way to Padua, Petruchio tests Katherina’s having been definitely
tamed on the expense of the old Vincentio, who, worried about his son, goes
to Padua to find him. The stage is now set for the confrontation between the
real and the pretended Vincentio, which will take place right in front of
Lucentio’s house. The servants pretend not to know Vincentio and the latter is
even in danger of being arrested when Lucentio and Bianca, just married,
appear to put an end to the situation.
The story ends with the wedding feast for Petruchio, Lucentio,
Hortensio and their wives, Katherina, Bianca and the widow. The gamble
Petruchio proposes to the others is the best opportunity for him to prove
everybody that Katherina has changed and she lectures the other women
about the duties of women to men.

As it can be seen, the main theme of the play is the battle of the sexes,
one of the oldest themes in the world. The Katherina–Petruchio plot in
particular is about the struggle for mastery in marriage. The question of
domination in man-woman relationships should be considered in close
connection with the Elizabethan sense of order. “The Elizabethans believed
that the world was ordered in a series of hierarchies, beginning with God at the
top of the highest one and continuing down in a series of nested pyramids. For
example, the monarch was the highest point of the political hierarchy. He or
she was supposed to be like God to nobles and common subjects alike.
Similarly, a man was supposed to be the master of his own household. He
expected obedience and submission from his inferiors – his wife, children and
servants.” (Mitchell, 1993) The Book of Homilies or The Sermon of the State of
Matrimony, which was read in the Elizabethan church, explicitly stated that the
wife owed her husband obedience, “in the respect of the commandment of
God, as St. Paul expresseth it in this form of words: Let women be subject to
their husbands, as to the Lord; for the husband is the head of the woman as
Christ is the head of the church.” (quoted by Hibbard, 1968: 16)
But the Elizabethans also knew that their world did not always conform to
these ideals and that the struggle for domination in husband-wife relationships
was a fact of existence. That explains the popularity in the English comedies or
poetry of the shrewish wife as a character-type (from the miracle plays up to
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath). What distinguishes Shakespeare from all the other
writers who had dealt with the same theme is the way he handled the taming
process, the sophistication, the subtlety and the ingenuity of methods by which
Petruchio achieves his goal. In most of the previous works focused upon the
same kind of conflict, the shrewish woman was “tamed” by the use of physical
force. Petruchio’s strategy is different. Only once is he tempted to use force,
during their first meeting when she strikes him and he replies “I swear I’ll cuff
you, if you strike again.” (Shakespeare, 1968: 94), but even then he does not
allow himself to be carried away and he sticks to the plan he had previously set
his mind to. Obviously his main line of attack is psychological.
Still, before thoroughly analysing it, some questions should be
answered first: What determines Petruchio to adopt such a different strategy?
And why is Katherina being shrewish? The opinions of the Shakespeareans
scholars vary to a great extent in this respect and that has also influenced their
interpretation of the taming. Some have considered Petruchio a symbol of
masculine confidence and strength, a typical Elizabethan suitor in pursuit of a
wealthy wife, who wants to be “master of what is mine own” (Shakespeare,
1968: 92), to take his rightful place as male and husband in the Elizabethan
scheme of things where a man is the head of his household, obeyed by his
wife. Some others, stressing the fact the he never uses violence against her,
have seen him as a firm, psychologically astute “educator”, who, convinced
after his first rough meeting with Katherina that her true nature is not shrewish,
tries to bring out the best in her.
In as far as Katherina is concerned, Shakespeare offers his readers
only some ambiguous clues with respect to the real reasons of her dreadful
temper and her unrestrained rebelliousness. Should her “shrewishness” be
interpreted as a result of her father’s showing favouritism towards her younger
sister Bianca? That she is a highly intelligent woman could be easily seen from
her first meeting with Petruchio when she keeps up with him, pun for pun and
insult for insult. Then, perhaps, she has become spoiled and bad-tempered
because she has never met a man who is her equal and capable of standing
up to her. Before meeting Katherina, Petruchio tries to diagnose the cause of

her violent behaviour and tells Baptista: “I am as peremptory as she proud-
minded; / And where two raging fires meet together, /They do consume the
thing that feeds their fury.” (1968: 91) Then, after having met her, he says:
“Now, Kate, I am a husband for your turn, / For by this light whereby I see thy
beauty/ Thy beauty that doth make me like thee well, / Thou must be married
to no man but me.” (1968: 97) and his words have been interpreted as an
evidence of his having recognized a kindred spirit in her and, hence,
welcoming the chance of meeting an antagonist who will put up a good fight.
So he appreciates her proud animal spirits and compares her with
another fierce and difficult creature, that is the wild falcon or the haggard. In
fact, he uses the metaphor of taming the falcon/ hawk to explain his strategy.
As the Elizabethan books on the subject emphasize, the taming and training of
these hunting birds requires energy, patience and dedication from the tamer; it
is a battle of wills which results, if successful, in a mutual trust between man
and bird. Petruchio announces his intention of using such traditional methods
of taming at the end of Act IV, scene 1, when Katherina has fallen asleep, tired
after having been dragged out her house without even taking part in her own
wedding feast and forced to make a cold, dirty and unpleasant journey at the
end of which she is packed off to bed without any supper.
However, two other aspects of Petruchio’s plan are much subtler and
more important. As Peter, Petruchio’s servant says, “He kills her in her own
humour” (1968: 121). Here is how G.R. Hibbard explained this line: “What
Peter means by this is that Petruchio is deliberately outdoing his wife in his
displays of perversity and bad temper.” (Hibbard, 1968: 20) This strategy is
obvious from the first meeting with Katherina, when Petruchio takes everything
she says in the reverse sense. With him, language turns into a “weapon”
deliberately exploited for effect so that “what, in a different context, might
appear cruel, offensive or outrageous, is transformed into comic exuberance
by a linguistic virtuosity that delights in the exercise of its own powers”
(Hibbard, 1968: 8). Everything Petruchio does or says is aimed at, as the critic
put it, making himself “a kind of mirror – a mirror that exaggerates - to
Katherina. His displays of temper are a caricature of hers.” (Hibbard, 1968: 21)
Thus, through her husband’s exaggerated parody of her wild behaviour,
Katherina will come to see the value of that order for which she previously had
no use and to see herself as she is. Moreover, what makes Petruchio’s
strategy even more interesting is that all his outrageous actions and speeches
are never directed at his wife and that he constantly appears as a knight-errant
who does everything “in reverend care for her”. As he himself concludes, “This
is a way to kill a wife with kindness…” (1968: 122). And he is successful for, in
the end, Katherina is completely transformed.
The way Katherina herself reacts to the taming has also been subject for
debate. Does she finally come to accept her traditional role as a wife who should
obey her husband? Could she have fallen in love with Petruchio and that makes
her really want to change? Or has she understood Petruchio’s strategy and
enjoys joining him in his game? Most feminist Shakespeareans have argued
that the play is “of the nature of a joke whose spirit has long vanished, the dead
letter of an outmoded misogynist culture” (Yachnin, 1996: 23). Scholars like
Shirley Nelson Garner (1988) or Linda Boose (1991) have fixed its meaning in
terms of the misogyny of early modern England and stated that Katherina’s
taming as well as the horrific practice of “bridling” wives contributed equally,
though in different ways, to silencing women’s voices. On the contrary, other

critics have estimated that both Petruchio and Katherina play at, rather than live
in, patriarchy. J. Dennis Huston argues that “[Katherine’s] speech is undoubtedly
proof of her pronounced debt to [Petruchio], for it takes as its model his own
harangues… Yet the very nature of Kate’s performance as performance
suggests that she is offering herself to Petruchio not as his servant, as she
claims, but as his equal in a select society which includes themselves, the
playwright, and perhaps a few members of his audience: those who, because
they know that man is an actor, freely choose and change their roles in order to
avoid the narrow, imprisoning roles society would impose upon them.” (1981:
64) Textual evidence could be given to support this approach to Katherina’s
transformation: when she and Petruchio meet the old Vincentio on their way to
Padua, she uses her husband’s methods against him; understanding his
games, she is ready to join in them, which is what she does up to the end of the
play. Moreover, her closing speech is puzzling. It is obvious that “power is over
Katherina, but she has power too.” (Yachnin, 1996: 26) and it is not clear
whether she is confessing her discovery of the “naturalness” of patriarchy. “My
mind has been as big as one of yours,/ My heart as great, my reason haply
more,/ To bandy word for word, and frown for frown;/ But now I see our lances
are but straws,/ Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,/ That
seeming to be most which we indeed least are.” (Shakespeare, 1968: 155). If, at
first, the speech implies Katherina’s recognition of her overweening
unworthiness, then it points in the opposite direction suggesting her awareness
of the value of her own moral and intellectual capacities. This view of the
complexity of Katherina’s character is also supported by the new historicism
pointing to the liberating capacity of representation, to the play unsettling its own
ending. In Louis Montrose’s opinion, “in the society in which Shakespeare lived,
wrote and acted, the practical effect of performing his plays may have been to
encourage the expansion and evaluation of options. Plays are provocations to
thought and patterns for action”. (1983: 68) Anyway the understanding of this
final speech should be consistent with the interpretation of Katherina’s motives
throughout the taming.
For the second line of plot in the play, i.e. the Bianca –Lucentio wooing
plot, Shakespeare makes use of different sources. Although it has its
forerunners in Roman and Italian comedy, it also has a specific source:
George Gascoigne’s translation into English of a comedy called I Suppositi
(The Substitutes or The Impostors) written by the great Italian poet Ludovico
Ariosto. Shakespeare preserves the main theme of the Supposes, which
presents the efforts of a young man, helped by a clever servant to outwit the
old men who stand in the way of his obtaining the girl of his choice, as well as
a number of other elements such as the change of clothes between master
and servant or the use of a casual traveller as the lover’s father. This kind of
intrigue, which obviously makes an excellent contrast to Petruchio’s direct and
open wooing of Katherina and his forward proposal to her father Baptista, has
enabled Shakespeare to treat the matter of marriage and its social implications
in a more complex manner than he could have done it otherwise.
Thus, in spite of his preserving the basic structure of the source play
based on mistaken identities, the playwright also re-shapes it by adding new
elements or suppressing the others. The first meeting of hero and heroine is
rather romantic and Lucentio, transported at the sight of Bianca, expresses his
feelings in stock terms and phrases specific to conventional Elizabethan love
poetry. Moreover, Bianca, unlike Polynesta, the heroine of The Supposes, is
given a larger share of action and more initiative. Just as Lucentio functions in
contrast with Petruchio, Bianca herself acts as a contrast to her sister,

Katherina. At the beginning, she appears to be the sweet and submissive
daughter, as her name itself suggests it: Bianca means “white” in Italian, a
colour which the Elizabethans associated with purity, beauty and other
desirable feminine qualities. But her gentleness and submissiveness prove not
to be genuine, they are part of an act put on to impress the others. People are
attracted to her for her good looks and her apparently sweet nature, but she
behaves in ways that don’t match the first impressions. In dealing with her
young suitors, the disguised Lucentio and Hortensio, she proves perfectly
capable of asserting her own will, giving them orders and being in complete
command of the situation. She manipulates them so as to encourage Lucentio
and discourage Hortensio. And she has no scruples about the deception being
practiced on her father, nor any objections to her secret marriage with
Lucentio. She gets what she wants, even while she appears to comply with
authority’s commands. In the end, as her behaviour at the marriage banquet
shows, she really has the potential to become a “shrew” indulging in bawdy
banter and disobeying her husband. Thus, what seemed to be a romantic and
exciting relationship is in fact unreliable, because in the end the husband is left
in the dark about his wife’s real nature, while, on the other hand, at the end of
a difficult road, Petruchio and Katherina have gained full knowledge of each
other and trust each other. This is also the reason why “the writing employed in
the tale of Bianca and her suitors should be comparatively tame and
conventional, for here words, like actions, are not intended to create something
new or reveal something latent, but to serve as a form of disguise for
characters who seek to hide what they are, or to take on an identity that is not
their own, in order to get what they want.” (Hibbard, 1968: 9)
There are also some other significant alterations. The motif of the lost
son who is restored to his father, which is essential in The Supposes, is this
time suppressed, for it would have been rather inappropriate in a comedy of
wooing and wedding. Then, the number of Bianca’s wooers is larger with the
appearance on the stage of Hortensio, who, in spite of having even less
individuality than the other stock characters in the play, still plays an essential
part as a link between the two plots. He is Petruchio’s friend, helping the
former woo Katherina, and at the same time, he appears, as previously
mentioned, as one of Bianca’s wooers. He contributes to the success of the
last scene of all, where three sets of husbands and wives are needed to give
the right amount of suspense and climax to the business of the wager.
All in all, the comedy of changes connected to the Bianca-Lucentio
wooing plot remains to a large extent a comedy of situation that culminates in
the riotous meeting between Lucentio’s real father and the supposed father,
the Pedant. And like any other comedy of this kind, it functions due to a
number of stock characters, type figures who remain unchanged throughout
the play and whose actions are always predictable: the Pedant (or the
Merchant, in some editions of the play), the old pantaloon who feebly pursues
the young girl and makes himself look foolish in his expressions of love
(Gremio), the father (Baptista), the lover (Lucentio) and the clever, scheming
servant, who seems superior even to his master (Tranio). The only exception
is Bianca, who develops along different lines, as pointed out above. The rest of
the characters could be subdivided into two categories: the old, who are
tricked, and the young who play tricks on the old and on one another as well.
Out of the first category, the one who knows the least is Baptista, who is
consistently mistaken about everything and everybody. He knows very little

about his daughters, makes no attempt to understand Katherina and is duped

by Bianca’s apparently submissive behaviour. Perhaps to the Elizabethan
audience, he might have appeared as a good father interested in assuring his
daughters’ economic future in a society where they had virtually no opportunity
of making a living. By that time, it was the parents’ duty to find a suitable match
for their daughters; and the best of all was the wealthiest. That explains his
promising Bianca’s hand in marriage to the one who bid more, that is Lucentio,
in case his father personally agreed to the marriage, or Gremio, should the
former default on his promise. After all, he is a wealthy businessman for whom
marrying his daughters means doing a fine business.
Next to Baptista, Gremio should be mentioned. He is equally unaware
of the extent to which he is duped and unwittingly introduces his rival Lucentio
into Baptista’s house. He is the kind of aged suitor, foolish in his pretensions
as a lover, but he is not a clown. There are instances when his character is
remarkably sustained and when, drawing on that stock of proverbial wisdom,
he proves, however, to be endowed with shrewdness in as far as other matters
than love are concerned.
The most obvious opposite of the previous two characters is Tranio, “the
arch-manipulator, who has all the strings in his hands until the moment when
Vincentio turns up, by which time Tranio’s main purpose of enabling Lucentio to
marry Bianca has been achieved”. (Hibbard, 1968: 28) Lucentio’s dependence on
him is almost complete. He is perfectly aware from the very beginning of his
master’s lack of devotion to learning and he is proved right by Lucentio’s so easily
falling in love with Bianca or with what he thinks Bianca is. It is Tranio’s idea to
change clothes and he plays excellently his part being able to quote from Ovid or
Aristotle and speaking in verse, whereas the other servants speak in prose.
3. 5. Tragedies
By far the most prolific period in terms of tragedy writing for Shakespeare was
the second period of creation. The first period of creation was marked indeed
by a number of attempts at writing tragedies, some of which drew on historical
subjects provided by the classical Roman antiquity. Inspired by Senecan and
Ovidian sources, Titus Andronicus (1589), Shakespeare’s first tragedy,
moulded in the Senecan pattern a story of utmost atrocious violence,
mutilation and revenge. Probably meant to compete with Kyd’s Spanish
Tragedy, the play opposes Queen Tamora, and her villainous slave-lover
Aaron the moor, to the Roman general Titus Andronicus and to his family
whose members gradually get to suffer the consequences of the Gothic
queen’s revenge: Bassianus, the emperor’s brother and Titus’s son-in-law is
brutally murdered, Lavinia, his wife and Titus’s daughter, is raped and terribly
mutilated by Tamora’s sons, two of Titus’s sons are framed for the murder of
Bassianus and executed despite all Titus’s attempts at proving their innocence
and saving their life (even at the expense of his own mutilation). Suffering
eventually transforms Titus into an equally bloody avenger who kills Tamora’s
sons and feeds her a pie made of their flesh before killing her as well. This
play of incontestable excessive violence actually aims at illustrating the theme
of the opposition of moral and political disorder to the unifying force of
friendship and wise government in which Shakespeare seems to have taken
great interest and which is perhaps best epitomised in the image of the raped
and mutilated Lavinia, as a symbol of both moral and political disorder.

The other Roman play belonging to the same first period of creation,
Julius Caesar (1599), is, however, of a different type. A political tragedy, it
focuses on the events that led to Julius Caesar’s assassination by the
Roman senators, chief among which Brutus, and on the subsequent civil war
that opposed Brutus and the senators to Marc Antony and Octavius. Brutus,
in particular, appears as “a tragic hero who, in spite of a noble nature and a
sense of high purpose, is brought low because he makes a wrong moral
choice” (Gavriliu, 2000: 138) and is destroyed – like Hamlet or Othello – by
his own virtues. Shakespeare’s contemporaries, well versed in ancient Greek
and Roman history, would very likely have detected parallels between Julius
Caesar’s portrayal of the shift from republican to imperial Rome and the
Elizabethan era’s trend toward consolidated monarchic power. In 1599, when
the play was first performed, Queen Elizabeth I had sat on the throne for
nearly forty years, enlarging her power at the expense of the aristocracy and
the House of Commons. As she was then sixty-six years old, her reign
seemed likely to end soon, yet she lacked any heirs (as did Julius Caesar).
Many feared that her death would plunge England into the kind of chaos that
had plagued England during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. In an
age when censorship would have limited direct commentary on these
worries, Shakespeare could nevertheless use the story of Caesar to
comment on the political situation of his day.
The set of plays of tragic conception of the first period is rounded off by
Romeo and Juliet (c. 1591-1596) which, by its poetic decorations and
impressive richness of figurative language, announces Shakespeare’s
maturation as a writer. The story of a pair of “star-crossed lovers”, it is aimed
not only at revealing the ‘faces’ of love (as each character holds her/his own
opinion about it) but also at praising man as an individual above family and
rank. Though they are driven sometimes too rashly into action by their youthful
passion (especially Romeo) and they seem mere toys in the ‘hands of fate’,
Romeo and Juliet eventually triumph over their elders who realise too late that
their enmity caused the very destruction of their offspring. But the lovers’
sacrifice turns out at least not to have been in vain since the Montagues and
the Capulets are finally reconciled. This slightly optimistic ending which
promises peace in Verona is actually one of the reasons why the play is
considered a play of tragic conception indeed, but not a tragedy proper.
During the second period of creation, Shakespeare’s plays display a
significant change in tone to sadness and a dark outlook on life. Whether
caused by personal disappointment or illustrative for a more widely-spread
depression, which seems to have affected the Elizabethan society at the turn
of the century, this change in tone has found its best expression particularly
in the plays that give the full measure of Shakespeare’s maturity as a
playwright, namely the tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth,
Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus. “In them, the world is
pictured as full of evil forces and man as being either thoughtless, in which
case he blindly answers the call of elementary passions – jealousy, ambition,
irrational love – or meditative, and then his meditative turn of mind paralyzes
his will.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 138-139) In particular in his so-called “great
tragedies” (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth), Shakespeare has
endeavoured to translate his enhanced awareness of the complexity of
human nature and to contain “something of the larger dimensions of life
within the limiting formality of art” (Daiches, 1991: 271). By far, the best case
in point is his Hamlet, a play which, more than any other in the

Shakespearean creation, invites the reader/ spectator to embark on a

stimulating exercise of interpretation in order to eventually grasp its meanings
(if that is really possible).
Case Study: Hamlet (1600-1601)
The issue of the sources Shakespeare might have inspired from in writing his
Hamlet has also provided Shakespearean scholarship with material for
speculations. As Sydney Bolt (1990: 19) points out, the text Shakespeare most
probably based his play upon is the revenge tragedy of Hamlet, known to have
been in the possession of Shakespeare’s stage company for several years
before his own tragedy was staged. Though this play, also referred to as the
Ur-Hamlet, is no longer available nowadays, there are documents which
record its being performed in different theatres outside London about 1594 and
1596. Even some of the University Wits, like Thomas Nashe and Thomas
Lodge, make reference to it and to its famous Ghost crying “Hamlet, revenge!”
Since Thomas Nashe includes his reference to the play in a piece of criticism
regarding the work of his fellow University Wit, Thomas Kyd, and, furthermore,
Ur-Hamlet basically appears as a revenge tragedy, just like Kyd’s Spanish
Tragedy, speculations have been made that Kyd himself might have been the
author of this play. (Muir and Schoenbaum, 1976: 216)
As a matter of fact, the story is an ancient one, originating in
Scandinavia as the tale of Amleth, the legendary prince of Denmark. It was
told, around 1200, by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus in his Latin
Historia Danica, and then retold, with only slight alterations, in a collection of
tragic stories by François de Belleforest. There are several important
elements of Saxo’s version which have been, roughly speaking, preserved in
the dramatic works. Saxo mentions Amleth’s feigning madness so that the
usurping uncle would regard him as a completely mindless lunatic not worth
killing. (But, in the original legend, Amleth’s purpose is sheer self-
preservation, as his uncle, who is not a hypocrite at all, openly declares his
intention of doing away with anyone who would challenge his position). The
usurping uncle sends agents to try to find out whether Amleth’s idiocy is
genuine: one of these agents is a girl, the original of Ophelia, while another,
presumably one of Amleth’s friends, the original of Polonius. The latter also
hides himself in the straw of Amleth’s mother’s room to overhear a
conversation between mother and son, and is discovered and killed by
Amleth. There is also an attempt to have Amleth put to death in England.
And, in the end, Amleth achieves his revenge, slays his wicked uncle with his
own sword and becomes king. (See Bolt, 1990: 19-20)
The legend appears somewhat transformed in Ur-Hamlet and there
are sources which maintain that Kyd, as the ‘father of the Elizabethan
revenge drama’ so popular among the audiences of the time (despite the fact
that the Elizabethan laws and religion strongly condemned those who took
revenge, especially for murder), might have successfully incorporated in its
matter some of the devices of the Senecan revenge play. One of them is the
ghost – a Senecan device – crying for revenge; here, the original murder is
done secretly by poisoning, not openly as in Saxo, so that the wicked uncle is
not publicly known as wicked and the ghost is required to reveal the truth to
Hamlet. This makes it unnecessary for Hamlet to feign madness in order to
save his life, as he does in Saxo, but Kyd was a great hand at madness and
kept this element in the story (indeed he added to it by making Ophelia go
mad as well) though the motivation for it is now much less clear. True to the
Senecan fashion, he also killed off the hero and the other major characters in
the end, and introduced Laertes, the fencing match, and the poisoned rapier
and drink. The device of the play-within-the-play may have also been used.
Such speculations have been made on the basis of a degraded version of the
lost Hamlet which exists in German. Actually, since direct comparison is
impossible, it is difficult to say how many alterations of the original legend
were effected in the Ur-Hamlet (those already pinpointed are considered the
most probable in the light of the more general knowledge of Thomas Kyd’s
dramatic work and of the scarce documentary evidence of the existence of
the play) and how many were Shakespeare’s. What cannot be, however,
denied is that Shakespeare’s task was to rework the melodramatic Senecan
revenge play Ur-Hamlet and, thus, “to impose a new, tragic meaning on a
traditional story, by his arrangement and presentation of the action, by the
kind of life and motivation he gave to the characters, and by the overtones of
meaning and suggestion set up by his poetic handling of the characters’
language.” (Daiches, 1991: 268)
From the very first act (scene 2), it becomes obvious that Hamlet, unlike
the rest of the court, is not in a joyful mood: he stands apart, all dressed in black,
while the courtiers party, merrily celebrating Queen Gertrude’s wedding with
Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle and the new king after his brother’s death. Naturally,
Hamlet is still mourning his father, but this is not the only reason for his
melancholy. His first soliloquy (Act I, Scene 2) reveals, however, the fact that he
rather seems to be overwhelmed with rage against his mother who, too soon,
after the old king’s funeral, married another man – and not any man – but her
former husband’s brother, Claudius. As the soliloquy develops, the readership/
audience realize that, though a marriage presupposes mutual consent of the
spouses, Hamlet seems to settle the burden of the blame particularly on his
mother’s shoulders. Shakespearean scholars belonging to different critical
schools have tried to provide valid explanations in this respect.
For instance, the representatives of New Historicism have explained
Hamlet’s reaction to Gertrude’s marriage starting from two historically
acknowledged aspects. On the one hand, the marriage is unlawful by
Ecclesiastical canons; on the other hand, it deprives Hamlet of his lawful
succession. Reference should thus be made to the tables of consanguinity and
affinity drawn up in England under Henry VIII. Consanguinity conforms broadly
to what we might expect: a man may not marry his mother, his father’s sister or
his mother’s sister, his sister, his daughter or the daughter of his own son or
daughter. To put it otherwise, the table of consanguinity prohibits marriages
with close blood ties, in the generations in which it might plausibly occur
(parent, sibling, offspring, and grandchild). From this point of view, the
marriage to a dead brother’s widow is undoubtedly considered incest. (Of
course, historians of the family have registered a discrepancy between general
kinship rules and legislation concerning lawful and unlawful unions in particular
and actual practices. The paucity of concrete evidence suggests that these
codes rarely led to legal action.) As for the table of affinity, it reflects unions
which might produce conflicting inheritance claims. Or, as the words in which
Claudius addresses Hamlet from the beginning indicate that, by marrying
Gertrude, he has caused the alienation of Hamlet’s line:
“King: But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son –
Hamlet: A little more than kin and less than kind.
King: How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

Hamlet: Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun.” (2005: 801)
In his prolonged mourning, wearing black, Hamlet insistently keeps the
direct line, old Hamlet/ young Hamlet present. If Hamlet is Claudius’s cousin
(simply, kin), Hamlet should be king; if Hamlet is Claudius’s son, then he is
confirmed as line-dependent on Claudius. The offence is Claudius’s
committed against the Hamlet line. (See Jardine, 1996)
Of course, one might say that this matter of succession is, in fact,
rather ambiguous, given the fact that, according to the Scandinavian system,
the Danish throne was an elective one, with the royal council naming the next
king; therefore, even after his father’s death, there was no actual guarantee
that Hamlet and not his uncle might be elected to the throne. But, though
setting the action of the play in Denmark, Shakespeare chooses to represent
the matter of succession as conceived in the English society, according to
which Hamlet, as his father’s only son, is the rightful heir, which makes his
uncle a usurper. (That Shakespeare’s intention was indeed to mould the
Elizabethan reality in his tragedy might further find support in the parallelism
that some scholars have identified between certain characters and,
respectively, public figures of the time: Hamlet’s figure seems to have been
inspired by that of the Earl of Essex, whose rebellion failed and brought
about his execution under the charge of treason on February 25th, 1601;
Polonius – boring, meddling, given to wise old sentences and truisms,
maintaining an elaborate spying system on both friend and foe – might have
been modelled after Elizabeth’s treasurer, William Cecil. Other characters
correspond to some stock characters of those days that could be easily
identified among the aristocrats such as: Osric – the Elizabethan dandy;
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – the obsequious courtiers; Laertes and
Fortinbras – the men of few words, but of great deeds; Horatio – the Roman
friend; Ophelia – the ineffectual courtly love heroine.) (Muir and
Schoenbaum, 1976: 168-179)
Nevertheless, for several generations of psychoanalytic scholars, the
explanation for Hamlet’s melancholy might be completely different. Most of
them agree on the fact that “the Problem of Hamlet” – to use the very terms
Freud himself preferred in his examining the matter – resides in his Oedipal
feelings. According to Freud and his followers (chief among whom Ernest
Jones should be mentioned – see Hamlet and Oedipus), it is the fate of all
men, perhaps, to direct their first sexual impulse towards their mother and
their first hatred and their first murderous wish against their father (like
Oedipus who slew his father Laïus and married his mother Jocasta).
Nevertheless, it is clear that an innate desire to kill one’s father and sleep
with one’s mother runs contrary to the very fabric of the society. The
difference between this innate urge and the demands of the civilization is
then mediated by repression and sublimation. Either the inappropriate urges
are repressed (which risks manifesting itself in psychological illness) or they
are transformed into some expression which is useful to society. At a first
sight, judging by the way in which Hamlet refers to his dead father in the first
soliloquy and by his decision of avenging his death, the idea that he might
suffer from an Oedipus complex might seem rather preposterous. But Freud
explains the difference between what he takes to be an innate universal
psychological mechanism and the accepted range of expression of
civilization with the notion of repression. That Hamlet has fundamental urges
which are not visible in the course of the play is a tribute to the energy he has
invested in repressing them. (See Freud, 1999: 14-15 and Jones,
http://www.clicknotes.com/jones) And he is successful in repressing his

jealousy for his father and attraction to his mother until Gertrude’s remarriage
with Claudius. Under the new circumstances, repression of incestuous and
parricidal drives must be carried out again, but it is hindered by the Ghost’s
injunction to kill Claudius, that is, to give vent to what he is trying to hold
back. The suffering for the initial maternal loss is painfully re-lived and this
“incomplete or unsuccessful detachment from the mother,” in Julia Kristeva’s
terms, (Crunelle-Vanrigh, http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm)
leads to what the Elizabethans called melancholy, in modern terms maniac-
depressive psychosis, characterized, as it can be seen throughout the play,
by symptoms of dejection, refusal of food, insomnia, crazy behaviour, fits of
delirium, and finally raving madness. Once his father dead, the pre-oedipal
dyad, the ideal state of fusion between mother and child could have been
recreated, but the new husband figure that is Claudius interferes,
superseding the son. The original parental couple Old Hamlet - Gertrude,
which, as a result of an initially successful repression of oedipal urges, was
conceived as perfect, pure is replaced by a new one, Claudius – Gertrude,
which in the light of the newly reactivated complex appears shameful, lusty
and corrupted. (See the rhetoric of disgust in the first lines of the soliloquy:
“How weary, stale [prostitute], flat [to copulate], and unprofitable
Seem [to fornicate, with additional pun on 'seam': filth] to me all the uses
[sexual enjoyment] of this world!
Fie on't, ah fie [dung], 'tis an unweeded garden [womb]
That grows [becomes pregnant] to seed [semen], things [male sex] rank [in
heat] and gross [lewd] in nature [female sex]
Possess it [sexually] merely ['merrily', lecherously]”. (Crunelle-Vanrigh,
http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm)
The surface structure of the text appears to be one in which the
incestuous mother, whose femininity emerges from underneath the maternal
object escaping control, is reviled and the dead father is idealized and
mourned. Its deeper layers of imagery (here including its mythological
background – the references to Niobe and Hyperion) suggest a structure in
which the father as male principle is by-passed and the emphasis is laid on
the son as begetter. The death of old Hamlet prompts a “regressive reverie”,
(Kristeva 1987: 25 in http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm) a
pre-oedipal fantasy of fusion with the mother. The emergence of a new father
explodes Hamlet’s construct, reactivating oedipal issues. Hamlet’s first
soliloquy thus juxtaposes the pre-oedipal and the oedipal pattern, the dyad
and the triad, the merger and the end of the merger. Taking further the
argumentation in Freudian terms, along Julia Kristeva’s lines, the conclusion
we reach is that Hamlet’s melancholia results from an incomplete
detachment from the mother as much as from grieving for a dead father.
(Observation: Not all psychoanalysts have agreed with the idea that Hamlet’s
behaviour is definitely marked by an Oedipus complex, but have argued, like
Frederic Wertham, for instance, that, the “Orestes complex” provides a more
appropriate model for the action in Hamlet, i.e. this variety of parent complex
which centres on the mother, and more specifically on hostility toward her.
“Orestes killed his mother Clytemnestra and her lover, his father’s kinsman,
Aegisthus. The legend of Orestes, which historically marks a turning point in
the social position of the mother, has far more similarity to the story of Hamlet
than has the story of Oedipus.” – F. Wertham, “Critique of Freud’s

Interpretation of Hamlet” in M.D. Faber: 120 available on

http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/bierman/Elsinore/Freud/freudFirst.html).
In this context, the function of the ghost should also be reconsidered. The
fact has already been underlined that the appearance of the ghost does not
allow for a successful repression of the oedipal urges for a second time. The
Ghost actually becomes “the place for the projection of the missing signifier”
(Stetner, http://www.columbia.edu/~fs10/garber.htm), a messenger of the “Law
of the Father” in Lacanian terms, which, by education, has been already
assimilated by Hamlet. More of a construction of Hamlet’s psyche, it is meant to
constantly bring back, by transference, the memory of the father of the Symbolic
it stands for, in a context in which the Imaginary, embodied by Gertrude, seems
to be re-gaining ground. Hamlet must make a choice on which his identity
depends. “Hamlet, torn between his dead father and his all-too present mother
is a man to double business bound. The duty of remembering the father takes
him along the paths of revenge; the necessity of detaching himself from the
mother takes him along that of Kristevan ‘matricide’, the only alternative to
asymbolia, depression and self-destruction. Such complementary demands are
registered in the play. Coextensive with the father’s ‘dread command’ to avenge
him is Hamlet’s readiness to avenge himself on his mother” (Crunelle-Vanrigh,
http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm), in spite of the Ghost’s
request to “leave her to heaven.” (Act I, Scene 5, l. 86, 2005: 805) The Closet
Scene is a key moment in the play for the understanding of Hamlet’s
relationship with his mother and his striving for ‘matricide,’ which is essential for
individuation. When Hamlet responds to his mother’s summons and comes to
her closet, he intrudes where customarily a woman would only entertain her
husband or lover. For an adult son, intimations of erotic possibility are almost
inevitable; the son crosses into the enclosure of his mother’s privacy to
encounter her as a sexualized object. Performing before Polonius – an
illegitimate intruder in her intimate space –, Gertrude frames her reproach
formally; believing himself alone, Hamlet responds familiarly. The upshot is that
the language of public disapproval collides with that of personal hurt, coloured
by the present reminders of maternal sexuality. Reproved for his offensive
behaviour (with the familiar thou of maternal scolding), Hamlet retaliates with the
more grievous offence against his deceased natural father of his mother’s
remarriage to his brother. For once, his previously verbal assault is taken to the
point of turning into violence and he appears to be on the verge of killing
Gertrude, of killing off the mother. (Act III, Scene 3, l. 21, 2005: 817) Yet, he
fails. He turns his violence towards the man behind the curtain, presumably the
king – in fact Polonius –, turning matricidal intents into pseudo-parricide. “Hamlet
the character unsuccessfully conducts (…) his battle with Symbolic collapse.”
(Crunelle-Vanrigh, http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm)
Unfortunately, his failure in definitely separating from the mother also
compromises any attempt at getting involved with another woman, i.e.
Ophelia. Ernest Jones has postulated that Hamlet’s sexual repression leads to
hostile, misogynist behaviour regardless of whether the woman is perceived to
be virtuous or lascivious. This argument goes hand in hand with the Kristevan
one in the sense that, as long as ‘the mother has not been killed off,’ any
woman will only be rejected as an erotic object, “the melancholiac cannot cope
with Eros,” therefore he is a misogynist. This might be the underlying
explanation of a cruel, victimizing treatment inflicted, in the Nunnery Scene,
upon Ophelia. Again, the fact must be mentioned here that this is not the only
explanation psychoanalysis has come up with as to the Hamlet – Ophelia
relationship. Some, like Jane Adelman, have seen in Ophelia, the sweet girl,
who, given her obedient nature, is easily dominated/ manipulated by the other
two ruling male forces in her life, her cynical father and her unperceptive
brother, a victim of a Hamlet who projects upon her “the guilt” of feminine
power threatening masculine identity – first embodied by his mother -,
breaking, by its uncontrolled sexuality, the limits of the patriarchal values of
womanhood. (http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm)
The result of this undeniable triple victimization by the father, the
brother and the lover is that, overwhelmed with the feeling of guilt (for
Hamlet’s madness and her father’s death), Ophelia goes mad and eventually
commits suicide. Her death is presented by Gertrude in Act IV, Scene 7 (See
Appendix). The Queen apparently tries to suggest that Ophelia’s drowning “in
the glassy stream” (2005: 826) was an accident, but her description –like the
entire play, as a matter of fact – is marked by unresolved ambiguity and
Shakespeare’s stylistic choices indicate voluntary drowning: Ophelia returns
to ‘her element,’ i.e. water, to satisfy her grief. (For further details, see
Bachelard’s comments on what he calls “the Ophelia complex,” 1995)
If the previous analysis in psychoanalytical terms has provided us with
more insight regarding Hamlet’s relation especially with the women in his life
and has led to the conclusion that, torn apart between the two poles in his
life, the mother and the father, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the
melancholic Hamlet does not manage to clearly define his identity, the next
part of the lecture should try to provide another possible answer to the
question ‘why does Hamlet delay his revenge?’ A return to a few aspects
related to the tradition of revenge tragedy and, implicitly, Shakespeare
deviation from it might be welcome under the circumstances.
First of all, the point should be made that Hamlet is not the only avenger
figure in the play. As a matter of fact, Shakespeare includes three avengers:
Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras. But they are all different. In the conventional
revenge tragedy, the avenger does not look for justice, but for personal
satisfaction, based on passion. Daring damnation, he sinks to the moral level of
his victim and having usurped heaven’s right to punish, is also condemned to
death. (Bolt, 1990: 13-14) This is a pattern in which Laertes seems to perfectly fit.
At the opposite pole, there is Fortinbras. He also has a slain father, a
fall in fortune, and, like Hamlet for instance, an uncle on the throne to contend
with. He is ready to take action and regain his father’s lands from Denmark.
Yet, when he is recalled to order by the law, he is obedient, gives up taking
justice into his own hands and he will be eventually rewarded for that.
In between these two extremes, there is Hamlet. As a matter of fact,
Hamlet’s is a case of shifting roles. In the beginning of the play, he appears
as a noble prince, unambiguously Elizabethan. Educated at a new university
(Wittenberg), he lives in a specific extant castle (Elsinore) and is a
connoisseur of modern plays and modern fencing. In this intellectual milieu,
ghosts are hard to believe in and Hamlet’s fellow-student Horatio speaks for
both of them when he says “I might not this believe/ Without the sensible and
true avouch/ Of mine own eyes.” (Act I, scene 1, 2005: 800) A man of noble
principles, he passes brilliantly the test of fidelity – while most of the others at
the court, here including his own mother, fail it – remaining faithful to the
memory of his father and, at the same time, hiding his discontent with their
behaviour. Loved by his people, especially by his soldiers, he seeks their
company, understands and respects them. He tries in fact to reconcile his

position of a noble prince with the other role which he reveals only when he is
alone, i.e. the malcontent.
The turning point in his life is, as already emphasized, the encounter
with the ghost which reveals him the terrible truth about his father’s death
and urges him, in a rather medieval-like fashion, to take revenge. His further
development becomes puzzling, even shocking precisely because the role
that he needs to assume, that of the avenger, is incompatible with that of the
malcontent. (Bolt, 1990: 54-62)
“As a revenger, he ceases to be a noble prince and becomes a slave.
It is a role in which he cannot take even his trusty friends into his confidence.”
(Bolt, 1990: 65) The aim of his revenge should be to punish a “murder most
foul” by an equally foul one. This aspect might cast a new light on his
decision not to kill Claudius when he finds him alone, on his knees in prayer.
What, for some psychoanalysts, is a proof of Hamlet acknowledging in
Claudius the very embodiment of his oedipal urges (he killed his father and
married his mother), might appear, from a different perspective, a refusal to
inflict too good an end for Claudius: “the Ghost’s detailed account of the
horrors of King Hamlet’s death, which Hamlet recalls at the moment,
amounts to a demand that Claudius’s death must be no less horrible. The
revenger must sink to the same level as his victim.” (Bolt, 1990: 66)
The ghost is also responsible for the release of the malcontent –
equally passionate and alienated. When in private, he may freely express in
soliloquies his inner torment resulting from the clash between two codes of
values: the morality of revenge, reminiscent of a dark, medieval past and the
dictates of his own temperament as a Renaissance philosopher and
Christian. The ‘To be or not to be’ Soliloquy (Act III, Scene 1) is by far the
best instrument for the exploration of the role of the malcontent. Its flow of
thought, moulded in ‘stretched’ iambic pentameter (11 syllables instead of
10), displays the painful quest for a solution to what Hamlet perceives as an
insuperable deadlock, or aporia. Ambiguity makes the soliloquy prone to
different interpretations. What does ‘to be or not to be’ mean? Of course, one
could stop at the first level of meaning and take it as ‘to live or not to live’: if
life is nothing but “a sea of troubles”, a field of “heart-ache” and of “thousand
natural shocks” (2005: 812), then the only possible escape seems suicide,
the deed with the “bare bodkin” that the fear of death prevents. Yet, this is not
the only valid meaning. “To really ‘be’ you must be somebody, an active
rational being – in short, a man, as Hamlet proudly reminds Horatio his father
was a man ... This meaning of ‘to be’ was common intellectual currency at
the time the play was written. (…) To be involved realizing one’s essence,
which called for moral effort.” (Bolt, 1990: 50) In the Great Chain of Being of
the Elizabethan times, people were free to reject their roles, but when they
did, whether they continued to live or not, they ceased to be. Thus, the deed
with the “bare bodkin,” directly related to that so much wished-for “quietus,” is
cast a new light upon. The fear of death might prevent two kinds of
incompatible actions: self-destruction or self-assertion. “Quietus” may mean
then pacification or the discharge of an obligation. “Dispassionately exploring
the maze of these implications, the ironist is not looking for the right direction.
Instead he questions the very value of any sort of movement, while accepting
that immobility too is painful.” (Bolt, 1990: 51)
When in public, Hamlet the malcontent chooses to wear the mask of the
fool and consequently adapts his speech shifting from the blank verse, more
appropriate for the noble prince, to prose. That enables him to reject the society
of Elsinore even while remaining within it. As a fool, he may not be held
responsible for what he says, but he can use his folly as a stalking-horse to
expose the truth. Furthermore, “because of the traditional association of his role
with the bawdy, the fool lends itself with facility to the expression of misogyny”
(Bolt, 1990: 72), which, as pointed out, characterizes the malcontent.
There is a crucial moment when, though in public, he temporarily drops
his mask: when he is in the company of the actors. The latter become
instruments in his cat-and-mouse game with the king and their play-within-the-
play, the dumb-show that Hamlet asks to be performed, has been often referred
to as the “mousetrap.” To get a definite confirmation of the ghost’s story about
the murder, and thus of Claudius’s guilt or innocence, he has the Murder of
Gonzago performed in front of the royal audience. There is, however, a peculiar
point where the story of Gonzago’s death differs from Old Hamlet’s. The king is
killed, the killer marries the queen, but he is not the uncle, he is the nephew.
This has raised a lot of questions again. From the Kristevan perspective, this
might be the moment of artistic triumph of the melancholiac. The mousetrap
“enables him to secure the ‘sublimatory grasp of the lost Thing’ which Kristeva
describes, to create a Gertrude swearing everlasting faith” (Crunelle-Vanrigh,
http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm). Otherwise, it might be
Hamlet’s way of threatening the king, letting him know that he knows. And if its
effectiveness is not to be seen in the king’s storming out of the hall where the
play was performed, then it definitely becomes obvious in the prayer scene,
after the mousetrap.
Once he has accepted his role as an avenger, Hamlet regains his
calm and the readiness of the soldier to die. He returns to Elsinore as the
prince ready to perform his allotted task. He does no longer feel he must
somehow manipulate the events. He just watches out for the opportunity
which, sooner or later, is sure to present itself. He dies an avenger, but
eventually redeemed by the renewal of conscience.
Second in line chronologically among the great tragedies, Othello (1603-

1604) “explore[s] again some of the paradoxes of good and evil and the irony
of evil being bred out of innocence” but it “concentrates on a domestic issue
and produces the most relentless and the saddest of [Shakespeare’s]
tragedies.” (Daiches, 1991: 273) The devious scheming of Shakespeare’s
arch-Machiavellian villain Iago that turns the Moorish general Othello against
his friend and lieutenant Cassio and especially against his faithful wife
Desdemona draws on man’s darkest feelings like jealousy and hatred. A
cultural and racial outsider in Venice, Othello is a skilled soldier and leader,
valuable and necessary to the Venetian state, but he seems incapable of
adapting to a life confined to the limited space of the isle of Cyprus and
especially of his own bedroom, and it is his uneasiness in the private space
that Iago exploits in stirring and then fuelling Othello’s jealousy that leads him
to committing murder. Acting mostly as a self-effacing, faithful wife, but also,
occasionally, as a bold, independent personality, Desdemona dies trying to
lift the ‘veil’ on Othello’s eyes and to make him see the truth, but she
eventually falls a victim to Iago’s talent for understanding and manipulating
the desires of those around him as well as for abusing their trust in him.
King Lear (1605-1606) brings to the foreground an old archetypal story
to illustrate the disastrous consequences of foolish confidence in the
appearances and of the violent disruption in the family dynamics and the
political authority. In disobeying his duties as a king (he prematurely divides

his kingdom to his eldest daughters, Goneril and Reagan, causing them to
fight for power) and father (he disinherits Cordelia, the only daughter who is
indeed true to him), he introduces tragic chaos into both family and state.
(His story is closely paralleled in a subplot by that of Gloucester who also
misjudges reality because of his ignorance. Hence the themes of madness –
in Lear’s case – and blindness – in Gloucester’s – converge to convey the
same paradoxical relationship between fathers and loyal/disloyal children.)
“Only the Fool realizes from the beginning that, having given way his kingly
power, his artificial personality, Lear can no longer count on the artificial
relationships which it produced” (Daiches, 1991: 278): “a remarkable
transformation of a stock Elizabethan dramatic character” (Daiches, 1991:
278), the Fool is, ironically, the voice of wisdom and truth meant to penetrate
the king’s consciousness, yet unable to change anything or to oppose the
destructive collision of the rival groups and the ensuing suffering and chaos.
Inspired by historical events mentioned in Holished’s Chronicle of
Scottish History, Macbeth (1606) was Shakespeare’s shortest and bloodiest
tragedy and it was probably meant as a tribute to James I Stuart, Elizabeth’s
successor to the throne. The initial impression of Macbeth as a brave and
capable warrior is complicated when he interacts with the three witches
(strikingly resembling the Fates, which lurk like dark thoughts and
unconscious temptations to evil). Bravery, ambition, and self-doubt struggle
for mastery of Macbeth throughout the play. Shakespeare uses Macbeth to
show the terrible effects that ambition and guilt can have on a man who lacks
strength of character. It takes Lady Macbeth’s steely sense of purpose to
push him to commit the murder (Duncan) that would allow him access to the
throne. After the murder, however, her powerful personality begins to
disintegrate, leaving Macbeth increasingly alone. He fluctuates between fits
of fevered action, in which he plots a series of murders to secure his throne,
and moments of terrible guilt (as when Banquo’s ghost appears) and
absolute pessimism (after his wife’s death, when he seems to succumb to
despair). These fluctuations reflect the tragic tension within Macbeth: he is at
once too ambitious to allow his conscience to stop him from murdering his
way to the top and too conscientious to be happy with himself as a murderer.
As things fall apart for him at the end of the play, he seems almost relieved—
with the English army at his gates, he can finally return to life as a warrior. He
goes down fighting, bringing the play full circle: it begins with Macbeth
winning on the battlefield and ends with him dying in combat.
Expanding on the theme of misanthropy, Shakespeare’s probably
unfinished tragedy Timon of Athens (1605-1609) follows the stages of the
main character’s transformation from a good-natured and generous rich
Athenian into a poor, deserted man who reacts violently to human injustice
and parasitism and eventually comes to detest mankind. In doing that, the
play denounces “love of money as the root of all evil.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 147)
For his last tragedies, Shakespeare turned again for inspiration to the
Roman world. Antony and Cleopatra (1607-1608) presents the events that
followed Caesar’s death, focusing on Marc Antony’s struggling between
Roman loyalty (to Octavius Caesar, his former ally in the civil war against the
murderous senators and Rome’s emperor, and to his wife Octavia,
Octavius’s sister) and Egyptian magic embodied by Queen Cleopatra. “This
is one of Shakespeare’s longest plays which contains a tremendous historical
spectacle encompassing the whole of the Mediterranean world from Rome to
Alexandria. Constant emphasis is put upon the world-shaking importance of
the events and the principal figures. Political events account for almost the
entire action of the play, yet are ultimately subordinated in importance to the
private drama of the two protagonists.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 150)
Finally, the political tragedy of Coriolanus (1607-1608) develops the
subject of class struggle between the patricians/ the rich/ the powerful and
the plebeians/ the poor/ the weak, which actually reflects on the
contemporary situation in England, i.e. the popular revolt against the
enclosure of great areas of agricultural land (1607). “Coriolanus is portrayed
as an aristocratic politician professing humanitarian feelings for Man but
despising the mob. He brings disaster on his own head and on the state
through his contempt for the people and his rigidity of character. […] His
failure is that of a misplaced personality, a political leader faced with the
contradiction between the ideal and its misapplication.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 151)
3. 6. Romances
Apart from the last plays which Shakespeare is said to have written in
collaboration with a younger fellow-playwright John Fletcher, namely the
chronicle play Henry VIII (1612-1613) and the dramatization of Chaucer’s
Knight’s Tale known as The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613-1614), all the 100%
Shakespearean creations pertaining to the third period of creation may be
labelled as romances. Combining elements of both comedy and tragedy (as
a matter of fact, another term for romance is tragicomedy – Abrams, 1999:
325), these plays – namely Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1606-1608), Cymbeline
(1609-1610), The Winter’s Tale (1610-1611) and The Tempest (1611) –
share the following features:
• a redemptive plotline with a happy ending involving the re-uniting of
long-separated family members;
• magic and other fantastical elements;
• a deus-ex-machina, often manifesting as a Roman god (such as
Jupiter in Cymbeline or Diana in Pericles);
• a mixture of "civilized" and "pastoral" scenes (such as the gentry and
the island residents in The Tempest);
• "...and the poetry is a return to the lyrical style of the early plays,
though more mellow and profound." (Halliday, 1964: 419)
Shakespeare’s first experiment in the creation of this kind of play,
Pericles is simple in plot, but at the same time crowding numerous strange
and sensational events: Pericles’s miraculous survival after the shipwreck in
Pentapolis, his marriage with Thaisa, King Simonides’s daughter, the storm
in which Thaisa gives birth to their child, Marina, and is thought to have died,
Marina’s ordeals caused by Dionyza’s jealousy, her being kidnapped by
pirates and sold to a brothel in Mitylene, her wonderful love story with
Lysimachus, the governor, and her being miraculously reunited with both her
father and her supposedly dead mother Thaisa (who had become a priestess
in Diana’s temple). Many motifs Shakespeare uses in Pericles will be further
developed in the next romances: the supposedly dead wife’s resurrection
theme and the discovery of the lost child which is instrumental in the
reconciliation of the parents will appear in The Winter’s Tale, while the storm
causing separation and later reunion provides the background for The
Tempest. “Mask-like dancing, song and instrumental music are other
theatrical features of the romance.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 153)

Drawing, on the one hand, on a fragment from British history as

adapted in Holinshed’s Chronicles, and, on the other hand, on a story from
Boccaccio’s Decameron, Cymbeline seems to be build upon a fairy tale
pattern: “Imogen, the princess who marries [the Roman Leonatus Posthumus]
against her parents’ wishes; Cymbeline’s Queen, the wicked stepmother; the
potion which brings apparent death but really only sends the drinker into a
prolonged swoon; the “Snow White” theme of the apparently dead girl covered
with flowers by her simple companions.” (Daiches, 1991: 298) But the main
theme of the play is, as in the previously mentioned romance, the triumph of
innocence: thus, “her own banished husband turned against her by the vile
trick of Iachimo; the wicked Cloten pursuing her; misfortune and evil dogging
her footsteps wherever she goes; she yet takes her destiny into her own hands
and, having survived the shock of hearing that her husband has ordered her to
be murdered and the counter shock of seeing what she thinks is the dead
body of her husband, survives to win her husband back in the final scene of
explanation and reconciliation.” (Daiches, 1991: 298)
“Notorious for flouting the ‘unity of time’ as well as of place with
supreme confidence” (Daiches, 1991: 300), The Winter’s Tale introduces, just
like Othello, the theme of unjustified jealousy that leads to the destruction of
a once happy family: it is because of King Leontes’s wicked jealousy (he
thinks his wife Hermione has an affair with his friend Polixenes, King of
Bohemia) that his son Mamillius dies, that Hermione, his wife, is said to be
dead in prison and that his new-born daughter Perdita is lost to him. But,
unlike Othello, this romance allows evil to be at least partly undone:
Hermione lives and is hidden by her faithful attendant Paulina and Perdita is
found and brought up by a shepherd. In the Bohemian ‘fairyland’ typical of
pastoral romances, Perdita lives a fairytale-like love story with king
Polixenes’s son, Florizel, which is nonetheless put a cruel end to by
Polixenes’s being against his son’s relationship with a poor shepherdess. So,
the lovers flee to Sicily where truth is finally discovered: Perdita’s identity is
revealed and, in a climatic moment, Hermione is proven to be alive, therefore
the whole family is reunited. “The play also sounds overtones of pagan myth.
Perdita’s adventures counterpart those of Persephone and her mother,
Demeter, Perdita’s apparent death and prolonged disappearance parallel
Persephone’s departure into the lower world at the onset of winter and her
joyous reunion with her mother is like the blooming of all nature at
Persephone’s return to her earth-mother.” (Gavriliu, 2000: 155)
Case Study: The Tempest (1611)
The Tempest is most likely the last play written entirely by Shakespeare, and
it is remarkable for being one of only two plays by Shakespeare (the other
being Love’s Labor’s Lost) whose plot is entirely original. The play does,
however, draw on travel literature of its time. The English colonial project
seems to be on Shakespeare’s mind throughout The Tempest, as almost
every character, from the lord Gonzalo to the drunk Stefano, ponders how he
would rule the island on which the play is set if he were its king. Shakespeare
seems also to have drawn on Montaigne’s essay Of the Cannibals, which
was translated into English in 1603. The name of Prospero’s servant-
monster, Caliban, seems to be an anagram or derivative of “Cannibal.”
The play opens with a storm which causes a ship to sink. The ship
was carrying Alonso, Ferdinand, Sebastian, Antonio, Gonzalo, Stefano, and
Trinculo back from Africa to Italy after the wedding of Alonso’s daughter. The
second scene introduces a quieter atmosphere with Miranda and Prospero
standing on the shore of their island, looking at the recent shipwreck.
Miranda hopes her father could help the survivors and Prospero promises to
her that everything will be all right. He reveals to his daughter the truth about
their past, namely that Prospero was the Duke of Milan until his brother
Antonio, conspiring with Alonso, the King of Naples, usurped his position,
that they managed to escape with the help of Gonzalo and that they were
forced, therefore, to settle, twelve-years ago, on the island with the books
that are the source of his magic and power. He tells her that he raised the
tempest that caused the ship of his enemies to wreck because he wanted to
make things right with them once and for all. Afterwards, he casts a spell on
his daughter to make her sleep and calls for his magical agent, the sprite
Ariel, whom he had saved from the tree-trunk prison in which the former
master of the island, the witch Sycorax, imprisoned him, in exchange for his
becoming his faithful servant. Prospero orders Ariel to take the shape of a
sea nymph and make himself invisible to all but Prospero and to separate
those whom he saved from the shipwreck into small groups.
A quarrel between Prospero and Caliban, the dead Sycorax’s son,
now Prospero’s slave, reveals the bitter enmity between the ‘conqueror’ of
the island (Prospero) and the ‘conquered’ (Caliban). As instructed by Propero
who has made a plan to get his daughter married, Ariel makes Miranda and
Ferdinand, King Alonso’s son, to meet and the two instantly fall in love. But
the affair will not be allowed to develop too quickly so Prospero accuses
Ferdinand of merely pretending to be the Prince of Naples and, at
Fernando’s violent reaction, he charms him and leads him off to prison.
Ariel is sent then to ‘play’ with the other survivors Alonso, Sebastian,
Antonio, Gonzalo, and other miscellaneous lords. While Alonso laments his
son’s tragic fate and Gonzalo tries to maintain his spirits high, Antonio and
Sebastian make sarcastic remarks. The latter are actually the only ones to
remain awake after Ariel casts a spell, so they can discuss freely the
advantages of killing Alonso and his companions. To prevent them from
putting their murderous intentions into practice, Ariel awakes Gonzalo and
the rest of the party, so Antonio and Sebastian have to make up a ridiculous
story about having drawn their swords to protect the king from lions, after
which they all set out to look for Ferdinand.
Caliban also meets another group of survivors made up of Trinculo
and Stefano, whom he is first afraid of and whom he takes for spirits sent by
Prospero to torment him. To tame the frightened monster, Trinculo and
Stefano give him some liquor to drink. Caliban gets drunk and begins to sing.
Propero continues to subtly manage the issue of his daughter’s
marriage: he has Ferdinand to carry wood and pretends then to fall asleep;
unseen, he is then pleased to witness the two lovers’ flirtatious games and
their making the decision to get married.
Stirred by the invisible Ariel, the drunkards – Stefano, Trinculo and
Caliban – begin to fight and Caliban even boasts about knowing how to kill
Prospero. He proposes that they kill Prospero, take his daughter, and set
Stefano up as king of the island. Stefano thinks this a good plan, and the
three prepare to set off to find Prospero, but they are distracted by Ariel’s
music and follow it.
Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebastian and Antonio are secretly observed by
Prospero who sees Sebastian and Antonio plot to kill Alonso and Gonzalo

and puts on, with Ariel’s help, a feast to be set out by strangely shaped
spirits, that is broken at the very last moment by a harpy (Ariel, in fact). Ariel
then accuses the men of supplanting Prospero and says that it was for this
sin that Alonso’s son, Ferdinand, has been taken. He vanishes, leaving
Alonso feeling vexed and guilty.
Finally, Ferdinand is accepted by Prospero as his daughter’s husband-
to-be and a masque is performed by the spirits in front of the soon-to-be-wed
couple. Then Prospero and Ariel prepare a trap for the three drunkards
(Trinculo, Stefano, and Caliban) whom the latter had driven near Prospero’s
cell, by hanging inside it beautiful clothing. When they are caught trying to
steal the clothes, the drunkards are immediately set upon by a pack of spirits
in the shape of dogs and hounds, driven on by Prospero and Ariel.
Eventually, all survivors of the shipwreck are brought together: Prospero
confronts Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian with their treachery, but he forgives
them and reveals that Ferdinand is alive and is to marry his own daughter. At
Prospero’s bidding, Ariel releases Caliban, Trinculo and Stefano, who then
enter wearing their stolen clothing. Prospero and Alonso command them to
return it and to clean up Prospero’s cell. Prospero invites Alonso and the
others to stay for the night so that he can tell them the tale of his life in the past
twelve years. After this, the group plans to return to Italy. Prospero, restored to
his dukedom, will retire to Milan. Prospero gives Ariel one final task—to make
sure the seas are calm for the return voyage – before setting him free. In the
end, Prospero delivers an epilogue to the audience, asking them to forgive him
for his wrongdoing and set him free by applauding.
“The Exploration of the Nature of Art
The Tempest is a very theatrical play, that is, it is obviously a wonderful
vehicle for displaying the full resources of the theatre: dramatic action, special
effects, music, magic, monsters, dancing, storms, drunken humour, and so on.
The Tempest does depend for much of its effectiveness on a wide range of
special effects – sound, lighting, fantastic visions, a whole realm of "magic" (it may
well have been written in response to the changing theatrical tastes of an
audience that was requiring more theatrical effects in the presentation of dramatic
productions). But there's more to the theatricality of the play than just its style. A
central issue of the Tempest is an exploration into the nature of theatre itself.
The Tempest seems, in some ways, to revisit many earlier
Shakespearean themes and characters, so that at times it comes across
almost as a final summary look at some very familiar material, something
Stephen Greenblatt calls "a kind of echo chamber of Shakespearean motifs":
Its story of loss and recovery and its air of wonder link it closely to the
group of late plays that modern editors generally call "romances" (Pericles,
The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline), but it resonates as well with issues that
haunted Shakespeare's imagination throughout his career: the painful
necessity for a father to let his daughter go (Othello, King Lear); the
treacherous betrayal of a legitimate ruler (Richard II, Julius Caesar, Hamlet,
Macbeth); the murderous hatred of one brother for another (Richard III, As You
Like It, Hamlet, King Lear); the passage from court society to the wilderness
and the promise of a return (A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It); the
wooing of a young heiress in ignorance of her place in the social hierarchy
(Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Winter's Tale); the dream of manipulating others
by means of art, especially by staging miniature plays-within-plays (1 Henry IV,
Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet); the threat of a radical loss of identity (The
Comedy of Errors, Richard II, King Lear); the relation between nature and
nurture (Pericles, The Winter's Tale); the harnessing of magical powers (2

Henry VI, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth).
So, given this rich allusiveness to other plays, at the end of a course like
this there is a natural tendency to want to link the concerns of the play with a
celebration of the wonderful achievement we have been studying so far.
But there is more to this approach to the play than simply nostalgia.
Two questions seem to puzzle the readership in this respect. The first is this:
If Prospero's power is so effective against his opponents as it appears to be,
then why didn't he use it back in Milan to avoid having to be exiled in the first
place? And the second one, which arises naturally from that first one, is this:
Given that Prospero is so keen on his magic and takes such delight in it and
that it gives him so much power, why does he abandon it before returning to
Milan? The most satisfying answer is a very obvious one: the magic does not
work in Milan; it is effective only on the island, away from the Machiavellian
world of the court, where plotting against each other, even against one's own
family, for the sake of political power is the order of the day and where, if you
take your mind off the political realities for very long, you may find yourself in
a boat with a load of books heading to an unknown exile. Prospero's magic
can only become effective in a special place, a world of spirits, of illusion,
song, and enchantment, on a magic island, in other words, in the theatre. […]
Prospero's Experiment
The Tempest, it is clear, features an experiment by Prospero. He has
not brought the Europeans to the vicinity of the island, but when they do
come close to it, he has, through the power of illusion, lured them into his
very special realm. The experiment first of all breaks up their social solidarity,
for they land in different groups: Ferdinand by himself, the court group,
Stephano and Trinculo by themselves, and the sailors remain asleep. The
magic leads them by separate paths until they all meet in the circle drawn by
Prospero in front of his cave. There he removes the spell of the illusions; the
human family recognizes each other, and together they resolve to return to
Italy, leaving behind the powers of the magic associated with the island.
Before considering the purpose of Prospero's experiment, we should
note how central to all his magic Ariel is. And Ariel is not human but a
magical spirit who has been released from natural bondage (being riven up in
a tree) by Prospero's book learning. The earlier inhabitants of the island,
Sycorax and Caliban, had no sense of how to use Ariel, and so they simply
imprisoned him in the world which governs them, raw nature. Prospero's
power depends, in large part, on Ariel's release and willing service. In that
sense, Ariel can be seen as some imaginative power which makes the
effects of the theatre (like lightning in the masts of the boat) possible. One of
the great attractions of this view of the play as a celebration of the powers of
theatre is that it makes the best sense of Ariel's character, something which,
as we shall see, is not quite so straightforward in other approaches.
What is the purpose of Prospero's experiment? He never gives us a clear
statement, but it seems clear that one important element in that purpose is
Miranda. He wants to arrange things on her behalf, and of all the people in the
play, her situation is the most transformed: she is going back to Europe a royal
bride, filled with a sense of enthusiasm and joy at the prospect of living among
so many fine people in a society that, quite literally, thrills her imagination. It
seems that Prospero's major intention includes a recommitment to civilized life
in Milan, so that his daughter can take up her rightful place in society. As with As

You Like It, there is no sense here that any appropriate life could be based on
remaining on the island when they no longer have to.
Whether Prospero's experiment is a success or not, it seems clear that
one great success is the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. The experiment
brings them together, awakens their sense of wonder at the world and at
each other, and is sending them back to Milan full of the finest hopes for the
world. These two young people carry with them the major weight of the
optimistic comic hopes of the play's resolution. Their love for each other,
which is presented to us as a true love firmly under the control of their moral
feelings, will, in a sense, regenerate Milan.
Another success in Prospero's experiment is the change of heart
which takes place in his earlier enemy Alonso. Prospero's actions bring
Alonso face to face with his past evil conduct and prompt him to repent and
reconcile himself with Prospero, even to the point of surrendering the political
power he took away so long ago. Moreover, we might want to argue that
there's is the beginning of a similar change in the animalistic Caliban, who at
least comes to realize something of his own foolishness in resisting Prospero
in favour of two drunken European low-lifes.
The most complex change in the play, however, takes place within
Prospero himself. In considering his motives for undertaking the experiment,
we cannot escape the sense that Prospero harbors a great deal of
resentment about his treatment back in Milan and is never very far from
wanting to exact a harsh revenge. After all, he has it in his power significantly
to injure the parties that treated him so badly. What's very interesting about
this is that Prospero learns that that is not the appropriate response. And he
learns this central insight from Ariel, the very spirit of imaginative illusion, who
is not even human. […] Virtue expressed in forgiveness is a higher human
attribute than vengeance. And in the conclusion of the play, Prospero does not
even mention the list of crimes against him. He simply offers to forgive and accept
what has happened to him, in a spirit of reconciliation. Unlike earlier plays which
featured family quarrels, the ending here requires neither the death nor the
punishment of any of the parties. Here that change is initiated by Ariel's remarks.
Prospero's Magic as the World of the Theatre
It makes sense to see in this Shakespeare's sense of his own art –
both what it can achieve and what it cannot. The theatre – that magical world
of poetry, song, illusion, pleasing and threatening apparitions – can, like
Prospero's magic, educate us into a better sense of ourselves, into a final
acceptance of the world, a state in which we forgive and forget in the
interests of the greater human community. The theatre, that is, can reconcile
us to the joys of the human community so that we do not destroy our families
in a search for righting past evils in a spirit of personal revenge or as crude
assertions of our own egos. It can, in a very real sense, help us fully to
understand the central Christian commitment to charity, to loving our
neighbour as ourselves. The magic here brings about a total reconciliation of
all levels of society from sophisticated rulers to semi-human brutes,
momentarily holding off Machiavellian deceit, drunken foolishness, and
animalistic rebellion--each person, no matter how he has lived, has a place in
the magic circle at the end. And no one is asking any awkward questions.
In the same way, Prospero's world can awaken the young imagination
to the wonder and joy of the human community, can transform our
perceptions of human beings into a "brave new world," full of beauty,

promise, and love, and excite our imaginations with the prospects of living life
in the midst of our fellow human beings.
In the world of the Tempest, we have moved beyond tragedy. […] This
play seems to be saying that theatrical art, the magic of Prospero, can achieve
what is not possible in the world of Milan, where everyone must always be on
guard, because it's a Machiavellian world ruled by the realities of power and
injury and there is no Ariel to serve us with the power of illusions.
On this reading of the play, what would we make of Caliban, who stands
in opposition to Prospero's power and who is its most immediate victim? This
reading would probably stress (as many productions have always done)
Caliban's dangerous, anarchic violence. He is an earth-animal (some
intermediate form perhaps) who represents a clear and present danger,
because he is not capable of being educated out of the state he was born into.
Prospero's "civilizing" arts keep him in control, though with difficulty. Caliban is at
times quite sensitive to the emotional qualities of Prospero's magic, especially
the wonderful music he hears, but is too much in the grip of his raw instincts for
rape and rebellion to respond with anything other than anger to his condition.
Caliban might well be considered in some sense a natural slave (as D.
H. Lawrence pointed out) because his idea of freedom from Prospero seems
to involve becoming the slave of someone else, someone who will kill
Prospero. So Caliban throws in his lot with two drunken Europeans, not
having the wit to see them for what they are. Caliban is thus not so much
interested in freedom as he is in rebellion; his violence is natural to him and
is not an outgrowth of the way he is treated. Hence, Prospero's control of him
through his magic is not only justified but necessary.
Does Caliban undergo any sort of significant change at the ending of
the play? There's a suggestion that he has learned something from the
mistakes he has made, and his final comment ("I'll be wise hereafter,/ And
seek for grace") may be a cryptic acknowledgment of some restraint. But he
doesn't go with the Europeans and remains on his island. Caliban's future life
has always sparked interest among certain writers, for there is a tradition of
sequels to the Tempest in which Caliban is the central character (notably
Browning's long dramatic monologue "Caliban on Setebos").
For all the potentially warm reconciliations at the end of the play,
however, it is not without its potentially sobering ironies. And there is a good
deal of discussion of just how unequivocal the celebration is at the end. For
Prospero is no sentimentalist. He recognizes the silence of Sebastian and
Antonio at the end for what it is, an indication that they have not changed,
that they are going to return to Naples and Milan the same people as left it,
political double dealers, ambitious and potentially murderous power seekers,
just as Stephano and Trinculo are going back as stupid as when they left.
Prospero's theatrical magic has brought them together, has forced them to
see themselves, but it has had no effect on some characters (unless the
staging of the end of the play conveys in non-verbal ways that the two noble
would-be killers are as contrite as Alonso appears to be).
If we see the irony here as present but not totally corrosive, then by
bringing us such a reconciliation, theatre (Prospero's experiment in the play
and The Tempest itself) can help to maintain our best hopes for a meaningful
life, faith that in time we will work things out, that, in spite of evil, the end of
our story will manifest a pattern of moral significance. Locked into the
contingencies of history in our political and business lives, where competition

and deceitful self-interest hold sway, we may easily lose this faith. The
theatre is, in a sense, a place which can restore us.
But that restoration is provisional and fragile, more of a hope than a
robust certainty. That's why in acknowledging the most famous single line
quotation from the play, one needs also to examines the four words which
immediately follow: Miranda, overwhelmed with the wonder and delight of
seeing so many finely dressed civilized Europeans cries out, "O brave new
world/ That has such people in't!" to which the more sober minded and mature
Prospero comments only, "'Tis new to thee." Those four words of Prospero are
wonderfully pregnant. In them he acknowledges his earned awareness into the
nature of human beings, into the complexity of human life, which does not
always (or usually) answer to Miranda's joyous affirmation.
But he is not about to deliver Miranda another sermon, for he knows
that the sense of joyful and optimistic wonder which she, as a young woman,
is carrying back to Italy is the world's best hope. It may be, as he well knows,
naive, for Miranda has, as yet, no sense of the evils that lurk back in the
political world of the city. She sees only the attractive exterior of her human
surroundings with no sense yet of the potential deceptions within. But she is
as well equipped as he can make her, and it is not up to him to sour her
youthful enthusiasm with a more complex and less affirming mature
reflection. That is something she will have to discover in her turn.
One might argue that if Prospero's experiment is designed to make
everyone better, then it's a failure in large part. And it may be, as mentioned
above, that Prospero recognizes that fact. It is not unusual to stage this play
in such a way that the conventional comic structure of the ending is seriously
undercut by the sense of sadness in Prospero, who is returning to Milan to
die. The ending of this play may not be the unalloyed triumph of the comic
spirit that we are tempted to see there. Prospero's sober awareness of what
the silence of Sebastian and Antonio means qualifies our sense of joy by
indicating that the eternal problem of human evil has not been solved or
dismissed. One major interpretative decision any director of the play has to
make concerns this ending. Just how evident and serious should those
ironies be: non-existent, a light shadow under the communal joy, or a heavy
reminder of what is in store back in Italy?
The strength of this sobering irony at the end will determine the particular
tone which governs the return. In some productions, the irony is hardly noticeable
and the celebration is thus dominant. In others, the irony is sufficiently strong to
introduce an ominous note into the whole proceedings, even to the point of
suggesting that Prospero's experiment has, in a sense, failed. Yes, Miranda and
Ferdinand will be happily married, but the political world they are returning to
(where Prospero will soon die) is unchanged and will remain much the same.
Prospero's Farewell to the Stage
The theatre metaphor also helps to explain why, in the last analysis,
Prospero has to surrender his magical powers. Life cannot be lived out in the
world of illusions, delightful and educative as they can often be. Life must be
lived in the real world, in Milan or in Naples, and Miranda cannot thus entirely
fulfill herself on the island. The realities of life must be encountered and dealt
with as best we can. The world of the theatre can remind us of things we may
too easily forget; it can liberate and encourage youthful wonder and
excitement at all the diverse richness of life; it can, at times, even wake
people up to more important issues than their own Machiavellian urge to self-
aggrandizement, and, most important of all, it can educate us into
forgiveness. But it can never finally solve the problem of evil, and it can never
provide an acceptable environment for a fully realized adult life.
Prospero doesn't start the play fully realizing all this. He launches his
experiment from a mixture of motives, perhaps not entirely sure what he
going to do (after all, one gets the sense that there's a good deal of
improvising going on). But he learns in the play to avoid the twin dangers to
his experiment, the two main threats to the value of his theatrical magic.
The first that should be alluded to, namely, the danger of using of his
powers purely for vengeance. Prospero, like Shakespeare, is a master
illusionist, and he is tempted to channel his personal frustrations into his art, to
exact vengeance against wrongs done in Milan through the power of his art
(perhaps, as some have argued, as Shakespeare is doing for unknown personal
reasons against women in Hamlet and Lear). But he learns from Ariel that to do
this is to deny the moral value of the art, whose major purpose is to reconcile us
to ourselves and our community, not to even a personal score.
The second great threat which we see in this play is that Prospero
may get too involved in his own wonderful capabilities, he may become too
much the showman, too proud of showing off his skill to attend to the final
purpose of what he is doing. We see this in the scene in which Prospero puts
on a special display of his theatrical powers for Ferdinand and Miranda--his
desire to show off makes him forget that he has more important issues to
attend to, once again putting his art in the service of the social experiment.
And it's interesting to note that it was his self-absorption in his own magic
that got Prospero in trouble in the first place in Milan (as he admits), when he
neglected his responsibilities for the self-absorbing pleasures of his books.
There's a strong sense in this play that, whatever the powers and wonders of
the illusion, one has to maintain a firm sense of what it is for, what it can and
cannot do, and where it is most appropriate. It can never substitute for or
conjure away the complexities of life in the community.
This approach helps me to understand, too, the logic behind
Prospero's surrender of his magic. He has done all he can do. Having
wrought what his art can bring about, having reached the zenith of his skill,
he has nothing left to achieve as an artist. He is going home, back to the
human community, perhaps to die, perhaps to enjoy a different life, now able
to appreciate more fully what he did not understand so long ago, the proper
relationship between the world governed by magic and illusion and the world
in which most of us have to live most of the time--the compromised world of
politics, alcohol, buying and selling, family strife. So he releases Ariel; he has
no more work for him to do, and Ariel does not belong in Milan.
Of course, it is critically illegitimate and no doubt very sentimental to link
Prospero's giving up of his art with Shakespeare's decision to give up writing
plays and to return to Stratford to enjoy life with his grandchildren (in fact, he did
not give up the theatrical life immediately after writing this play). But it's a very
tempting connection, especially in the light of the wonderful speech in Act V,
Scene 1 one of the most frequently quoted passages in the play, a speech
which has come to be called "Shakespeare's Farewell to the Stage." Dreams
may be the stuff of life, they may energize us, delight us, educate us, and
reconcile us to each other, but we cannot live life as a dream. We may carry
what we learn in the world of illusion with us into life, and perhaps we may be
able, through art, to learn about how to deal with the evil in the world, including
our own. But art is not a substitute for life, and it cannot alter the fundamental
conditions of the human community. The magic island is not Milan, and human

beings belong in Milan with all its dangers, if they are to be fully human. Life
must be lived historically, not aesthetically.” (Johnston, 1999:
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/eng366/lectures/tempest.htm)
Masters and Servants
Nearly every scene in the play either explicitly or implicitly portrays a
relationship between a figure that possesses power and a figure that is subject
to that power. The play explores the master-servant dynamic most harshly in
cases in which the harmony of the relationship is threatened or disrupted, as by
the rebellion of a servant or the ineptitude of a master. For instance, in the
opening scene, the “servant” (the Boatswain) is dismissive and angry toward his
“masters” (the noblemen), whose ineptitude threatens to lead to a shipwreck in
the storm. From then on, master-servant relationships like these dominate the
play: Prospero and Caliban; Prospero and Ariel; Alonso and his nobles; the
nobles and Gonzalo; Stefano, Trinculo, and Caliban; and so forth. The play
explores the psychological and social dynamics of power relationships from a
number of contrasting angles, such as the generally positive relationship
between Prospero and Ariel, the generally negative relationship between
Prospero and Caliban, and the treachery in Alonso’s relationship to his nobles.
The colonizers and the colonized
The nearly uninhabited island presents the sense of infinite possibility
to almost everyone who lands there. Prospero has found it, in its isolation, an
ideal place to school his daughter. Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, worked her
magic there after she was exiled from Algeria. Caliban, once alone on the
island, now Prospero’s slave, laments that he had been his own king
(I.ii.344–345). As he attempts to comfort Alonso, Gonzalo imagines a utopian
society on the island, over which he would rule (II.i.148–156). In Act III, scene
ii, Caliban suggests that Stefano kill Prospero, and Stefano immediately
envisions his own reign: “Monster, I will kill this man. His daughter and I will
be King and Queen—save our graces!—and Trinculo and thyself shall be my
viceroys” (III.ii.101–103). Stefano particularly looks forward to taking
advantage of the spirits that make “noises” on the isle; they will provide music
for his kingdom for free. All these characters envision the island as a space
of freedom and unrealized potential.
The tone of the play, however, toward the hopes of the would-be
colonizers is vexed at best. Gonzalo’s utopian vision in Act II, scene i is undercut
by a sharp retort from the usually foolish Sebastian and Antonio. When Gonzalo
says that there would be no commerce or work or “sovereignty” in his society,
Sebastian replies, “yet he would be king on’t,” and Antonio adds, “The latter end
of his commonwealth forgets the beginning” (II.i.156–157). Gonzalo’s fantasy
thus involves him ruling the island while seeming not to rule it, and in this he
becomes a kind of parody of Prospero.
While there are many representatives of the colonial impulse in the
play, the colonized have only one representative: Caliban. We might develop
sympathy for him at first, when Prospero seeks him out merely to abuse him,
and when we see him tormented by spirits. However, this sympathy is made
more difficult by his willingness to abase himself before Stefano in Act II,
scene ii. Even as Caliban plots to kill one colonial master (Prospero) in Act
III, scene ii, he sets up another (Stefano). The urge to rule and the urge to be
ruled seem inextricably intertwined.

3.7. Practical Applications. Examination Tests.

1. Give examples of a) three chronicle plays, b) three comedies, c) three
tragedies, and d) three romances by William Shakespeare and indicate their
most prominent features (e.g. types of characters, themes, motifs, type of
discourse, etc).
2. Explain the artistic purpose of Richard III’s soliloquy (Act I, Scene 1) and
comment upon Shakespeare’s arts of language as illustrated in the following lines:
GLOUCESTER. Now is the winter of our discontent GLOUCESTER. Azi iarna vrajbei noastre s-a
Made glorious summer by this sun of York; schimbat,
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house Prin soarele lui York, în toi de vară;
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Iar norii toţi ce casa ne-o striveau
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths; Sunt îngropaţi în sânu-adânc al mării.
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments; Purtăm pe frunţi cununi de biruinţă;
Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings, Din ciunte arme am făcut trofeu;
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Din aspre trâmbiţi, glas de voioşie,
Grim-visag'd war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front, Din marş de spaimă, paşi suavi de danţ.
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds Brăzdatul Marte chipul şi-l descruntă,
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, Şi-acum, în loc să sperie vrăjmaşii
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber Încălecat pe cai împlătoşaţi,
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. El zburdă prin iatacuri de domniţe
But I-that am not shap'd for sportive tricks, În freamătul molatec al lăutei.
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass- Dar eu, ce nu-s croit pentru hârjoane
I-that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty Şi nici să mă răsfăţ în dulci oglinzi;
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph- Eu, crunt, ciuntit, ce nu pot să mă-nfoi
I-that am curtail'd of this fair proportion, Pe lâng-o nimfă legănată-n şolduri;
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Eu, cel necumpănit deopotrivă,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time Prădat la trup de firea necinstită,
Into this breathing world scarce half made up, Neisprăvit şi strâmb, prea timpuriu
And that so lamely and unfashionable Zvârlit în lumea asta vie, şi-ncă
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them- Aşa pocit, scălâmb, că pân’ şi câinii
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Mă latră când şonticăiesc pe drum;
Have no delight to pass away the time, Da, eu, în piuitul slab al păcii,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun Nu simt plăceri să-mi trec răgazul altfel
And descant on mine own deformity. Decât privind-mi umbra lungă-n soare
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover Şi-amănunţindu-mi strâmbăciunea mea;
To entertain these fair well-spoken days, Deci cum nu pot să fiu un curtezan,
I am determined to prove a villain Nici să mă-mbii la aste dulci taifasuri,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Mi-am pus în gând să fiu un ticălos,
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, Urând huzurul zilelor de azi.
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams, Urzeli am înnodat, prepusuri grele,
To set my brother Clarence and the King Prin bete profesii, scorneli şi vise,
In deadly hate the one against the other; Pe rege şi pe Clarence, fraţii mei,
And if King Edward be as true and just La ură să-i asmut, mistuitoare.
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous, Şi dacă Edward riga-i bun şi drept
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up- Cât eu subţire, cutră, -ntortocheat,
About a prophecy which says that G Chiar astăzi Clarence intră-n colivie,
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be. De răul profeţiei cum că G
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul. Here Clarence Vlăstarii lui Edward îi va stârpi.
comes. De-a-fundu-n suflet, gânduri: vine Clarence.
3. Describe Petruchio’s original method of subduing the shrewish Katherina,

emphasising how language is deliberately exploited for effect in the lines
below (Act II, Scene 1). Make then more general comments on Petruchio’s
strategy of ‘taming’ Katherina and on the different illustrations of gender
relations in Shakespeare’s comedy.
PETRUCHIO. Good morrow, Kate- for that's your PETRUCHIO. Kate! ‘neaţa, Kate – aud c-aş îţi spune.
name, I hear. KATHERINA. Şi bine auzi, dar eşti cam surd. Cei cari
KATHERINA. Well have you heard, but something Vorbesc de mine Katherina-mi zic.
hard of hearing: PETRUCHIO. Minţi, zău; căci ţi se spune Kate şi-atât;
They call me Katherine that do talk of me. Voioasa Kate, şi Kate afurisita;
PETRUCHIO. You lie, in faith, for you are call'd plain Dar, Kate, cea mai frumoasă Kate din lume,
Kate, Kate din Kate-Hall, Kate fără de pereche,

And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst; Căci tot ce-i bun e Kate, deci, Kate, m-ascultă,
But, Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom, Kate, mângâierea mea; ţi-am auzit
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate, Blândeţea lăudată în tot oraşul,
For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate, Virtuţile-amintite, frumuseţea
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation- Cântată, chiar de nu pe-atât cât meriţi,
Hearing thy mildness prais'd in every town, Şi-am fost mişcat şi ... vreau să te peţesc.
Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded, KATHERINA. Mişcat! Halal! Cin’ te-a mişcat încoace
Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs, Te mişte de aici. Cum te-am văzut,
Myself am mov'd to woo thee for my wife. Cum te-am ghicit. Eşti mişcător.
KATHERINA. Mov'd! in good time! Let him that mov'd PETRUCHIO. Adică?
you hither KATHERINA. Un scaun.
Remove you hence. I knew you at the first PETRUCHIO. Bun. Aşează-te pe mine.
You were a moveable. KATHERINA. Măgarul e pentru cărat – ca tine.
PETRUCHIO. Why, what's a moveable? PETRUCHIO. Femeia e pentru purtat – ca tine.
KATHERINA. A join'd-stool. KATHERINA. ‘ţi închipui c-am să port un bou ca tine?
PETRUCHIO. Thou hast hit it. Come, sit on me. PETRUCHIO. Vai, Kate, nu vreau să te împovărez!
KATHERINA. Asses are made to bear, and so are Ştiindu-te eu tânără, uşoară …
you. KATHERINA. Mult prea uşoară spre-a mă prinde-un
PETRUCHIO. Women are made to bear, and so are urs,
you. Şi totuşi, grea atât cât se cuvine.
KATHERINA. No such jade as you, if me you mean. PETRUCHIO. Cât se cuvine – bâzz!
PETRUCHIO. Alas, good Kate, I will not burden thee! KATHERINA. Grozav bondar!
For, knowing thee to be but young and light- PETRUCHIO. Ce dropie! O să te ia bondarul!
KATHERINA. Too light for such a swain as you to KATHERINA. Drept dropie… Şi ea va lua bondarul!
catch; PETRUCHIO. Ei, haide, haide, viespe, prea eşti rea.
And yet as heavy as my weight should be. KATHERINA. Fereşte-te de ac, dacă sun viespe.
PETRUCHIO. Should be! should- buzz! PETRUCHIO. Atunci să-l scoatem – ăsta-i leacul
KATHERINA. Well ta'en, and like a buzzard. meu.
PETRUCHIO. O, slow-wing'd turtle, shall a buzzard KATHERINA. Da, dacă prostul află unde este.
take thee? PETRUCHIO. Nu ştie cine unde-l poartă viespea?
KATHERINA. Ay, for a turtle, as he takes a buzzard. În coadă.
PETRUCHIO. Come, come, you wasp; i' faith, you KATHERINA. În limbă.
are too angry. PETRUCHIO. Limba cui?
KATHERINA. If I be waspish, best beware my sting. KATHERINA. A ta, dacă pălăvrăgeşti, cu bine.
PETRUCHIO. My remedy is then to pluck it out. PETRUCHIO. Cu limba mea în coada ta? Nu, Kate.
KATHERINA. Ay, if the fool could find it where it lies. Te-ntoarce; sunt un gentilom.
PETRUCHIO. Who knows not where a wasp does KATHERINA. Să văd. [Îl pălmuieşte.]
wear his sting? PETRUCHIO. Dacă mai dai, mă jur, că-ţi trag un
In his tail. pumn.
KATHERINA. In his tongue. KATHERINA. Vezi să nu-ţi pierzi blazonul.
PETRUCHIO. Whose tongue? Dacă mă loveşti, nu mai eşti gentilom;
KATHERINA. Yours, if you talk of tales; and so De nu eşti gentilom, n-ai nici blazon. [...]
farewell.
PETRUCHIO. What, with my tongue in your tail? Nay,
come again,
Good Kate; I am a gentleman.
KATHERINA. That I'll try. [She strikes him]
PETRUCHIO. I swear I'll cuff you, if you strike again.
KATHERINA. So may you lose your arms.
If you strike me, you are no gentleman;
And if no gentleman, why then no arms. […]
PETRUCHIO. Nay, hear you, Kate- in sooth, you PETRUCHIO. Ascultă-n felul astă n-ai să scapi.
scape not so. KATHERINA. Mai bine plec; căci dacă stau te supăr.
KATHERINA. I chafe you, if I tarry; let me go. PETRUCHIO. Aşi, Kate! Ce dulce-mi pari! Ştii, mi s-a
PETRUCHIO. No, not a whit; I find you passing spus
gentle. C-ai fi mojică, uricioasă, rea...
'Twas told me you were rough, and coy, and sullen, Cum minte gura lumii! Eşti plăcută,
And now I find report a very liar; Voioasă, sprintenă, la vorbă-nceată,
For thou art pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous, Dar gingaşă ca o floare-a primăverii;
But slow in speech, yet sweet as springtime flowers. Tu nu te-ncrunţi, nu caţi ponciş, nu faci
Thou canst not frown, thou canst not look askance, Ca bosumflatele ce-şi muşcă buza
Nor bite the lip, as angry wenches will, Şi nici nu-ţi place vorba s-o întorci.
Nor hast thou pleasure to be cross in talk; Primeşti frumos pe cei ce te peţesc,
But thou with mildness entertain'st thy wooers; Cu vorbe blânde, dulci, prieteneşti.
With gentle conference, soft and affable. De unde-au scos că şchiopătezi? O, lume,
Why does the world report that Kate doth limp? De bârfitori ! Tu eşti smicea de-alun,
O sland'rous world! Kate like the hazel-twig Înaltă, zveltă, oacheşă la chip
Is straight and slender, and as brown in hue Precum aluna, dulce miezul ei.
As hazel-nuts, and sweeter than the kernels. Ia să te văd cum mergi – nu şchipătezi.
O, let me see thee walk. Thou dost not halt. KATHERINA. Poruncă, tontule, să dai la slugi!
KATHERINA. Go, fool, and whom thou keep'st PETRUCHIO. A-mpodobit cândva Diana crângul
command. Ca tu ăst loc, cu mersu-ţi de prinţesă?
PETRUCHIO. Did ever Dian so become a grove O, fie Kate Diana şi ea Kate,
As Kate this chamber with her princely gait? Kate castă şi Diana jucăuşă!
O, be thou Dian, and let her be Kate; KATHERINA. Măiastre vorbe! Unde le-ai deprins?
And then let Kate be chaste, and Dian sportful! PETRUCHIO. Păi, mi-au venit – de la măicuţa
KATHERINA. Where did you study all this goodly minte…
speech? KATHERINA. Deşteaptă mamă! Ce noroc pe fiu!
PETRUCHIO. It is extempore, from my mother wit. PETRUCHIO. Nu-s înţelept?
KATHERINA. A witty mother! witless else her son. KATHERINA. Ba! Du-te şi te culcă.
PETRUCHIO. Am I not wise? PETRUCHIO. Da, Kate, în patul tău – chiar asta
KATHERINA. Yes, keep you warm. vreau.
PETRUCHIO. Marry, so I mean, sweet Katherine, in Dar, ce mai tura vura – spun deschis:
thy bed. Iubito, tatăl tău s-a învoit
And therefore, setting all this chat aside, Să-mi fii nevastă; zestrea-i hotărâtă;
Thus in plain terms: your father hath consented Aşa că, vrei nu vrei, eu tot te iau.
That you shall be my wife your dowry greed on;
And will you, nill you, I will marry you.
Now, Kate, I am a husband for your turn;
For, by this light, whereby I see thy beauty,
Thy beauty that doth make me like thee well,
Thou must be married to no man but me;
For I am he am born to tame you, Kate,
And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate
Conformable as other household Kates.
4. Comment upon the malcontent’s dilemma and inner conflict, exploring the
following lines from Hamlet’s soliloquy (Act III, Scena 1):
HAMLET: HAMLET:
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Fiinţă – nefiinţă: ce s-alegi?
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer Mai vrednic oare e să rabzi în cuget
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, A’ vitregiei praştii şi săgeţi,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, Sau fierul să-l ridici asupra mării
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; De griji – şi să le curmi ? Să mori : să dormi ;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end Atât : şi printr-un somn să curmi durerea
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks Din inimă şi droaia de izbelişti
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation Ce-s date cărnii, este-o încheiere
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; Cucernic de râvnit. Să mori, să dormi,
To sleep: perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub; Să dormi – visând, mai ştii ? Aici e greu.
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, Căci se cuvine-a cugeta : ce vise
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Pot răsări în somnu- aceasta-al morţii
Must give us pause: there’s the respect Când hoitu-i lepădat? De-aceea-i lungă
That makes calamity of so long life; Năpasta. Altfel cine-ar mai răbda
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, A’lumii bice şi ocări, călcâiul
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, Tiran, dispreţul omului trufaş,
The pangs of despised love, that law’s delay, Chinul iubirii-n van, zăbava legii,
The insolence of office and the spurns Neobrăzarea cârmuirii, scârba
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, Ce-o svârlu cei nevrednici celor vrednici,
When he himself might his quietus make Când însuşi ar putea să-şi facă seama
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, Doar cu-n pumnal ? Cine-ar răbda poverii,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, Gemând şi asudând sub gruel vieţii,
But that the dread of something after death, Cât teama în ceva de după moarte,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn Tărâmul neaflat, de unde nimeni
No traveler returns, puzzles the will Nu se întoarce ne-ncâlceşte vrerea
And makes us rather bear those ills we have Şi mai degrab’ răbdăm aceste rele
Than fly to others that we know not of? Decât zburăm spre alte neştiute.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; Astfel mişei pe toţi ne face gândul:
And thus the native hue of resolution Şi-astfel al hotărârii proaspăt chip
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, Se gălbejeşte-n umbra cugetării,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment Iar marile, înaltele avânturi
With this regard their currents turn awry, De-aceea îşi întoarnă strâmb şuvoiul
And lose the name of action. Şi numele de faptă-l pierd.
5. Comment on the following excerpt from The Tempest (Act V, Scene 1),
showing how Prospero functions as an ‘instrument’ in exploring the nature of

dramatic art, in revealing the beauty of the world of the stage, while also
voicing Shakespeare’s farewell to it:
PROSPERO: PROSPERO:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, Voi, silfi din măguri, râuri, bălţi şi crânguri,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot Şi voi, cari, fără urme de nisip,
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him Goniţi după Neptun când e-n reflux
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that Şi o zbughiţi din faţa-i; voi, păpuşi
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, Sădind, pe lună, brazde verzi şi acre
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime Din cari nu pasc mioare; voi, ce-n joacă,
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice În crucea nopţii scoateţi hribi, râzând
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid, Când sună-a nopţii stingere; prin voi,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm’d Puteri plăpânde, soarele de-amiază
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds, L-am stins, am slobozit turbatul vânt
And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault Şi marea verde-am încleştat cu-azurul.
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder Aprins-am tunetul temut şi surd,
Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak Crăpând stejarul mândru a lui Joe
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory Chiar cu săgeata lui; din temelii
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up Clintit-am promontorii; pini şi cedri
The pine and cedar: graves at my command Am smuls din rădăcini; la glasul meu,
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth Mormintele i-au deşteptat pe morţi
By my so potent art. But this rough magic Şi s-au căscat şi i-au lăsat să iasă
I here abjure, and, when I have required Prin arta-mi şi vârtutea ei. Ci, iată,
Some heavenly music, which even now I do, Mă lepăd de magia asta aspră;
To work mine end upon their senses that Iar dupa ce-am să cer un cânt din slăvi –
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Şi-l cer acum – ca să-mi sfârşesc lucrarea
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, Asupra simţurilor lor, căci vraja
And deeper than did ever plummet sound E pentru ei, bagheta am s-o frâng,
I’ll drown my book. S-o-ngrop la câţiva stânjeni în pământ,
Iar cartea mai afund am s-o înec
Decât s-a-ncumetat vreodată plumbul.

Bibliography
Bibliography
• *** (1987) “Some Ado about Who was or Was Not, Shakespeare”,
Smithsonian (September), The Shakespeare Mystery,
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shakespeare/debates/reedarticle.html
• *** (2001) “The W. H. Controversy. Sonnet 20”, The New York University,
www.nyu.edu/classes/jeffreys/gaybway/gaybard/wh.htm
• *** “ ‘Now, Mother, what’s the matter?’ Dr. Freud’s Hamlet”,
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/bierman/Elsinore/Freud/freudFirst.html
• Bachelard, Gaston. (1995). Apa şi visele. Bucureşti: Editura Univers.
• Barber, Holly A. Shakespearean Performance. 1574-1642,
http://www.comm.unt.edu/histofperf/Final%20Page%20wo%20bib.htm
• Bercovitch, Sacvan (1969) "Love and Strife in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy,"
SEL. 9, 215–229
• Berdan, John M. (1920) Early Tudor Poetry, 1485-1547, New York: The
Macmillan Company
• Bethell, Tom (1991) “The Case for Oxford”, The Atlantic Monthly, Volume
268, No. 4 (October), 45-61,
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/shakes/beth.htm
• Bloom, Harold. (1998) Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, New
York: Riverhead Books
• Bolt, Sydney. (1990). Shakespeare - Hamlet. London: Penguin Books
• Bowers, Fredson (1940) Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, Princeton:
Princeton University Press
• Callaghan, Dympna (2000) Shakespeare without Women. Representing
Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, London and New York:
Routledge
• Cheney, Patrick (ed.) (2007) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s
Poetry, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press
• Crunelle-Vanrigh, Anny. (1997) “ ‘Too Much in the (Black) Sun’: Hamlet’s
First Soliloquy, A Kristevan View” in Renaissance Forum, Volume 2,
Number 2, Autumn, http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no2/crunelle.htm
• Daiches, David. (1975, 1991). A Critical History of English Literature. Vol
2. Shakespeare to Milton. London: Secker & Warburg
• Delaney, Denis, Ward, Ciaran and Carla Rho Fiorina (2005) Fields of
Vision. Vol. I, Pearson Education Limited
• Edwards, Philip (1966) Thomas Kyd and Early Elizabethan Tragedy,
London: Longmans, Green & Co.
• Edwards, Philip (ed.) (1993) Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Cambridge
University Press
• Englert, Robert (1999) “Why I reject the Shakespearean 'heresies'”, The
University Concourse, Volume V, Issue 1 (September 22),
www.theuniversityconcourse.com/ V,1,9-22-1999/Englert.htm
• Freud, Sigmund (1965) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
trans. James Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton
• Freud, Sigmund. (1999). Opere. Vol 1. Eseuri de psihanaliză aplicată.
Iaşi: Editura Trei
• Gavriliu, Eugenia (2000) Lectures in English Literature I, Galaţi:
Universitatea “Dunărea de Jos”

Bibliography
• Gavriliu, Eugenia (2002) British History and Civilisation. A Student-

Friendly Approach through Guided Practice, Galaţi: Universitatea
“Dunărea de Jos” Galaţi
• Gavriliu, Eugenia (2004) English Literature through Texts. From Anglo-
Saxon to Early Modern, Galaţi: Editura Fundaţiei Universitare “Dunărea
de Jos”
• Griffiths, Matthew (1998) “English Court Poets and Petrarchism: Wyatt,
Sidney and Spenser”, Day School talk (October), in Luminarium,
http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/essays.htm
• Halliday, F. E. (1964) A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore:
Penguin
• Hibbard, G. R. (ed.) (1968) The Taming of the Shrew, London: Penguin
Books
• Honan, Park (1999) Shakespeare. A Life, Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press
• Honan, Park (2005) Christopher Marlowe – Poet and Spy, Oxford:
Oxford University Press
• Hunter, G.K. (1965) "Ironies of Justice in The Spanish Tragedy,"
Renaissance Drama 8, 89–104
• Huston, Dennis J. (1981) "Enter the Hero: The Power of Play in The
Taming of the Shrew", Shakespeare's Comedies of Play, London:
Macmillan, 58-93
• Jardine, Lisa. (1996). Reading Shakespeare Historically. London and
New York: Routledge.
• Johnston, Ian (1999) “You Can Go Home Again, Can't You? An
Introduction to The Tempest”, Malaspina-University College, Nanaimo,
BC, http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/eng366/lectures/tempest.htm
• Johnston, Ian (1999) A Note on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Malaspina
University-College, Nanaimo, BC,
www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/eng366/sonnets.htm
• Jones, Ernest. (1910) “The Oedipus-Complex as An Explanation of
Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive” in The American Journal of
Psychology 21.1 (January), 72-113 in Shakespeare Navigators.
7 Jan. 2006 http://www.clicknotes.com/jones
• Jump, John D. (ed.) (1962) Christopher Marlowe – Doctor Faustus,
London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.
• Larque, Thomas (2001, 2005) A Lecture on Elizabethan Theatre,
http://shakespearean.org.uk/elizthea1.htm
• Leithart, Peter J. (1994) “The Serpent Now Wears the Crown: A
Typological Reading of Hamlet”,
http://www.visi.com/~contra_m//cm/features/cm11_hamlet.html
• Leviţchi, Leon and Tudor Dorin (eds.) Antologie de poezie engleză de la
începuturi pînă azi. Vol. I, Bucureşti: Editura Minerva
• McDonald, Russ (2003) Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and
Theory 1945-2000, London and New York: Blackwell
• Minto, William (1885) “Elizabethan Sonneteers”, Sonnet Central (1997-
1999-2007), http://www.sonnets.org/minto1.htm
• Mitchell, Ruth (1993) “The Taming of the Shrew. William Shakespeare”,
Barron’s Booknotes, World Library Inc.,
http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/barrons/tamings.asp

Bibliography
• Montrose, Louis Adrian (1983) "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of

Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture", Representations 1, 61-93
• Moseley, C.W.R.D (1988) Shakespeare’s History Plays, London:
Penguin Books
• Muir, Kenneth and S. Schoenbaum (1976) A New Companion to
Shakespeare Studies, London: Cambridge University Press
• Muir, Kenneth; Schoenbaum, S. (1976) A New Companion to
Shakespeare Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Roston, Murray (1982, 1988) Sixteenth-century English Literature,
London: Macmillan
• Schwartz, Debora B. (1997-2005) “Spenser's The Faerie Queene. ENGL
204 / 331: Renaissance Literature. English Department, California
Polytechnic State University”, Dr. Debora B. Schwartz--Teaching Page,
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/engl331/fq.html
• Shakespeare, William (1964) Antologie biligvă, volum alcătuit de Dan
Duţescu şi Leon Leviţchi, Bucureşti: Ed. Ştiinţifică
• Shakespeare, William (1998) Sonnets – Sonete. Trad. Gheorghe
Tomozei, Târgovişte: Pandora
• Shakespeare, William (1999) Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ediţie bilingvă..
Trad. Vladimir Streinu, Târgovişte: Pandora –M
• Shakespeare, William (2002) The Taming of the Shrew – Îmblânzirea
scorpiei. Trad. Dan Amedeu Lăzărescu, Târgovişte: Pandora –M
• Shakespeare, William (2005) The Complete Illustrated Works of William
Shakespeare, London: Bounty Books
• Spear, Hilda D. (1999) The Elizabethan Theatre, www.uni-koeln.de/phil-
fak/englisch/shakespeare/
• Stetner, Clifford (2005) “Breaking the Cycle. Shakespeare and the
Deconstruction of the Sonnets”, SHINE: Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
http://phoenixandturtle.net/excerptmill/breakingcycle.htm
• Stetner, Clifford, “Deconstructing Hamlet”,
http://www.columbia.edu/~fs10/garber.htm
• van Schaijik, Kathleen (1999) “The 'Stratford man' and the
Shakespearean canon: no match at all”, The University Concourse,
Volume V, Issue 3 (November 10),
http://www.theuniversityconcourse.com/V,3,11-10-1999/vanSchaijik.htm
• Yachnin, Paul (1996) "Personations: The Taming of the Shrew and the
Limits of Theoretical Criticism." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1, 1-31,
http://purl.oclc.org/emls/02-1/yachshak.html
• Young, Arthur M. (1987) “The Shakespeare/ Bacon Controversy”.
Interview by Faustin Bray, www.arthuryoung.com/shakexc.HTML

Renaissance Literature COLIPCA

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Descrizione originale:

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Renaissance Literature COLIPCA

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

UDJG

ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

Section 1: Sixteenth-Century English Poetry 5

Section 2: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century 25

Section 3: William Shakespeare or Elizabethan Drama at Its Best 49

English Renaissance Literature

Section 1: Sixteenth-Century English Poetry

which the ‘coelum empireum’ extended. The universe was hierarchically

The post-Chaucerian period was characterised by the long absence of

Italian Renaissance vernacular poetry – in particular on Petrarch –, imitating

1. 1. The Early Sonneteers: Thomas Wyatt. Henry Howard

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

English Renaissance Literature 7

women to a bitter interrogation. (Griffiths, 1998) Furthermore, speaking of

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)

English Renaissance Literature 9

1. 2. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

struggled with the English language to make it of literary worth in an age

Life. Sir Philip Sidney’s contemporaries considered him the embodiment of

English Renaissance Literature 11

1. 3. Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

“Life. Edmund Spenser, whose name is usually associated with Wyatt,

up in self-hood, Spenser’s poetic persona transcends egotism and finds a

Spenser attempted a unified presentation of romantic ideas within a classic

16 English Renaissance Literature

1. 4. William Shakespeare: The Narrative Poems. The Sonnets

English Renaissance Literature 17

Shakespeare’s source is Metamorphoses (Book X) which modern

The Sonnets. It is likely that Shakespeare composed his sonnets between

18 English Renaissance Literature

Honourable Henry Wriothesley” with many mentions of “honour,” “duty,” and

English Renaissance Literature 19

English Renaissance Literature 21

The rhetorical strategy in the sonnets is extremely varied. Some sonnets

1. 5. Practical Applications. Examination Tests.

Sonnet LXXV Sonetul LXXV

22 English Renaissance Literature

4. Analyse the following sonnets:

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Sir Philip Sidney

English Renaissance Literature 23

Sonnet XVIII Sonetul XVIII

19 Upon a great adventure he was bond, Cu mare faptă se ştia dator

24 English Renaissance Literature

Section 2: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century

2. 1. 1. Elizabethan Playhouses and Theatrical Performances

When Elizabeth became Queen of England in 1558, there were no specially

Structure and Design of Public/ Outdoor Theatres

26 English Renaissance Literature

English Renaissance Literature 27

28 English Renaissance Literature

2. 1. 2. The First Comedies and Tragedies

30 English Renaissance Literature

Gammer Gurton's Needle written about 1555 and published in 1575 of

English Renaissance Literature 31

2. 2. The University Wits

2. 2. 1. Thomas Kyd (1558-1594)

Life. Born in London in a prosperous middle-class family, Thomas Kyd

Case Study: The Spanish Tragedy

role of the hired murderer. During the performance, Hieronimo's character

world as it actually is. To give a significant example, Lorenzo

English Renaissance Literature 37

A comedy in the style of Plautus (The Comedy of Errors - 1589);